WithQuincy’s fifteenth year came a flare of recognition. But it was brief. By it, he saw his sister, Jonas, his parents, as they were. But the light had no fuel to subsist on. His untutored, indomitable needs flushed forth and drowned the momentary blaze of disillusion. And once again he was unable to see the futility of wishing and of striving in these barred directions. Wherefore, despite his sense of the sequel, the story of Rhoda, and Adelaide, and his mother was scarce begun.
For a long time it had hurt the boy to be forced witness to Marsden’s pampering and his sister’s demonstrations. It had hurt him to see the pointed, exclusivecamaraderiebetween Jonas and his father, to feel the apologetic pitying note in his mother’s love for him. But during this long time, all these proofs of his want had not made him bitter. Gradually, he had poised and judged the value of these things he lacked. But his first impulse had not been to cry out, not to turn inward in dismay. A natural sense of justice is born in most of us. It is a part of our natal logic. One of our greatest blows comes from the late experience that that sense which we have transferred from our own heart to the heart of the world really does not obtain there. So with Quincy. Viewing these favors that were showered upon others, that seemed so strangely always to escape himself, his impulse was to believe the others right, to fix the fault within himself. Much of the impulse that had driven him toward Jonas and toward Rhoda was the desire to gain these things he lacked—or thought he lacked; was his wish to qualify within the circle where favors were dispensed. He had accepted that the fault was his. He had made his mute endeavor to correct it.
Now, however, came the grey, shivering spectre of defeat. And then, for the first time, Quincy was disposed to spare himself and to blame those who denied him what they seemed so lavishly able to give elsewhere.
This was the year of Quincy’s warfare—a scantguerilla. And its result? Consider the pre-conceptions of those within the house, and it must be clear that they seized on this new hard Quincy to justify the feelings they had already nurtured for the old. Their attitude, their lack of sympathy, by dint of an incessant effort through the years, had brought about this show of sullen animosity within him. So now they quoted this show of animosity as cause of their longstanding attitude and lack of sympathy. It is a common habit of mankind—an infinitely common.
It had its unhindered fling with Quincy. His family were not loth of the chance he offered them to justify their feelings. And it was to be a long time ere the effect of that short year would leave them, however poignant in reality and more true to type were the years that followed or preceded.
His father’s old resentments flared. Finding Quincy unresponsive, silent, disagreeable, he turned to Sarah and asked what, after all,herchild was likely to be good for. Rhoda came to feel in him a deep,glowing animosity that showed in the curl of his lips when she appeared in a ball gown, or in his refusal to look and join the chorus of admiration, when she received a present or a compliment. She tossed her head and decided that Quincy was an ugly little fellow with no respect for beauty or superiority—a little fellow whom she must in consequence ignore. Jonas discovered that when he wished to tell his brother some loathsome, funny story, Quincy declined to be dazzled or bewildered or amused. He learned to dislike heartily the cold aloofness with which, during that year, Quincy received his visits from college and rebuffed his chance efforts at attention. So Jonas also resolved to ignore his brother. It did not occur to him that he had already killed the boy’s love of fellowship with him; it did not occur to Rhoda that he needed protection from the anguish which her ways had brought to his rapt admiration. To the family, it was plain that a discordant element was within it. And that was all.
Sarah did not understand. She was almost won over by the very prevalence of the opinion that Quincy’s manner was a natural weed and the sole cause of his own tribulation. But although she was not mind-proof to this insidious crowd-psychology, her heart had power against it; and it bled at the breach which, at last, she had been brought to see. However she might feel called on to remonstrate with him, she was intuitively on Quincy’s side.
Of course, in the very fact of her remonstrance, she defeated the good her sympathy might have done. Quincy wished for no pity. He demanded full understanding. Her way was not whole-hearted enough; was too finite; was too eloquent of the influence ofthe “other side.” Deprived of most, Quincy had become more exacting than ever. Feeling his mother’s sense of his own fault, a tendency in her to see a shred of right against him, he rejected her. And this he did cruelly, coldly,—without explanation; so that the bewildered Sarah wrung her hands and ate out her heart. In the boy’s breast smouldered not agony alone; but with it a need of vindication. The family were so far from him that he knew well the futility of reaching them. Even his resentment, he was aware, could not attain them. And so it was that not only his instinct for affection had been starved; even his sense of injury, since it was unblazoned, had been injured also.
Here, Quincy’s mother was an opportunity of Nature. In her lack of a splendid giving, she was inadequate. At least, she offered a chance for him to retrieve his sense of injury. She was near enough to be hurt. So a sad satisfaction came of injuring his mother, who alone would receive his injury. The boy was cruel, cold to her. He knew it. He could not help it. But the knowledge that he was making miserable the one whom he loved most, brought Quincy’s cup to overflowing.
Sarah took his attacks in disarray. She did not understand them. And Quincy raged that she did not understand. He yearned for her help against himself. He received merely tears and lamentations which, far from softening him, gave satisfaction to the appetite which had called them forth.
Had he been able to cry: “Mother, mother! Don’t you understand? It is because I am near to you whom I love that I can hurt you. It is because I am far away from those who hurt me, that I cannothurt them. My ugly passions are not meant for you. Understand them. Then, they will cease. Come unreservedly, my mother. Come, and take me!”—had he been able to cry out thus, his problem would have been less vexed. But he was only a child.
Or had Sarah been able to say to him: “Darling, I understand your cruelty to me. It has no effect. I love you. There is nothing else!”—she would have found a truer Quincy, tearful but happy against her breast. But Sarah had other loves. And Sarah had little understanding.
And so, the year swerved on, miraculously void of light, shot through with pities. And Quincy grew less friendly, less boyish, almost less alive. He was become almost an inhabitant of the house, rather than a member of the household. Of course, only a severe observer could have caught this truth. For in a child of fourteen the difference is anuance. And if its subtle tragedy were open to the casual observer, man would be more horrified at the thing’s prevalence.
Quincy sought solitude. But he found no real comfort in his loneliness. Simply, he had reached a stage in his life’s struggle, where he did not care for comfort. He felt that there was merely a choice of pains. He had lost the sheer idealism that admits of a pure happiness. And of the choice of pains that he envisaged, he preferred the rarefied, controllable sort that solitude fermented to the sharp improvisations of other people. So he remained alone as long as possible. He nursed and refined his misery. He grew used to it. He came almost to cherish it.
He had simply transferred upon his family the rôle that they had seemed intent on giving him. Though he had combatted consciousness of it through the yearsof his naïve endeavors, they had forced him to see himself as an intruder. Instinctively, he reversed the order. He made of himself a world, and a society. And they who came upon him were the intruders! He had gone out with love and been refused. Here, in his world-reversal, was his mother’s part. She came to him with love. She was rejected.
The machinery of his mood worked now despite himself. Though he longed for tenderness, he could not be tender; though he longed for his mother, he could not be gently passive for her advance. Something within him that was wounded turned his tenderness to spite; his inarticulate love into an expressed rebuff. The old way he had tried—of giving in the faith that he would receive, of going forward in the faith that he would be taken up. The sprouting sunward was turned in. The perfume was crushed. The tendrils were thorns.
Yet what a flimsy farce was this new, lonely world of Quincy! Its very nature was the proof of his enduring need still to go forth, to love, to harmonize with others. The pith of every condition is a ground common with its opposite.
Thus came the summer.
His mother’s strict surveillance over him was lifted. He was getting old, now! He was allowed to go alone on walks. And summer meant country. So far, however much he loved the wide fresh sky and the sense of cheer that country meant, it had served rather to sharpen the boy’s moods than to assuage them. For he had been hindered from meeting it alone. The tantalizing charm within the fields and woods which, left to himself, he must have grasped, evaded him, surrounded as he was by the ties of home. And these ties were strict. Had Quincy been chief in the affections of his parents, his mother could not have been more nervous, more loth to set him free. Freedom had not come as recompense for solitude.
But now, at last, one day, when the mood seized him to stroll, he was not prevented. He followed the road out of the village. And then, as if a long restraint on a long hunger had suddenly been lifted, he dashed into the thick woods.
At first, his strongest sense was one of fright, of discomfort, almost of embarrassment. His soul did not know what to do. His mind was conscious, dominantly, that he had not expected this reaction ofmalaise. What had his mind expected? Whence had it been prompted to expect anything? What could be rational in a sense of disappointment, sprung from nothing?
Vaguely, Quincy came to feel that he had set hopes upon the woods, that he had built upon these murmurous companions, fondly, unconsciously, a hope of solace and of haven. What a strange feeling it was, as he trudged on, over the uneven path of rock and root, to know that this deep heart of Nature with its accent of green had dwelt, unknown, within his own heart and there persevered, a bulwark of promise against the blast of his reality! Yet, poignantly, was this true. A great urge in the lad’s soul had swept back from life in the city to the rural setting that preceded it. Man will have his happiness, though he distort childhood, fabricate history, to attain it. The usual happy conception, in man’s mind, of childhood is an example. Quincy, miserable with the present, had been forced back in his search of that mystic Edenwhich each man and each race must cherish, to make of it a goal and pattern for the future. And in his innocent regression, what could he fix on better than this fringe of his life, vague and therefore easily idealized? He could not fix, for this purpose, on any member of his family. They were still with him; they had already fought—as if with all their powers—against this zealous effort. The one great distinction between the unhappy present and the past that he willed to serve as contrast, was this same gentle, all-pervasive thing—the woods, the meadows. Here was an element which had disappeared with his fictitious happiness.
Yet, doubtless, a something deeper than these reasonings gave Nature her deep place in Quincy’s heart; doubtless, the sole fact of herself, of her still depths and her mystic penetrations, of her transcendent eloquence and her calm, stately love. No child could live within the murmur of her breath, within the perfume of her energies, and utterly escape her. For the swaying of trees is a blessing; and the wind in their laced branches is a prayer; and the stirring of life packed with myriad simpleness throughout the reaches of the wood is an unforgettable music. And to sleep where the air comes brushing, be it only from the dryest grass or the lowest shrub, is to have slept in an embrace that neither mortal love nor hatred can abolish.
And now, Quincy was walking in the woods, dazed and abashed, as might be a man in sudden presence before the woman of his forgotten dreams. He felt nothing deeply. He and the woods seemed very separate. And curiously, of them the woods seemed the more personal and alive. He took in, with his undiscerning eyes, the intricate recurrence of design, thesumptuous harmony of sky and ground and forest, the minor notes, as of universe in universe, traced by moss and vine and flower within the sweeping whole. But, though he strove to feel his measure in this whole, a sense of nervous fear prevented him. He walked on, against his instinct to turn back and keep the road. Something within him seemed to know that it took time to grow used to one’s divinity. And even so, as he marched on, he came to unlimber. A lump within him thawed and he was bathed in a glow that had still a tang of frost. But, yet, his mind had never been so vacant.
And then, a new thing happened.
It was as if the trees had bent down, of a sudden, and possessed him; as if their acrid juices had been shot within him; as if their leaves were brushing upon his face like amorous fingers. The woods were a vibrant, sinuous form against his body, pressing it to a sweet numbness like a mother’s breast. Quincy’s blood tingled. A madness gripped him, mounted him, spurred him into flight. He ran. There was nothing else. The woods were in him. And they were an ecstasy. So, sustaining it, he ran.
And then, breathless, capless, he stopped. All of it seemed not over-strange. He knew it would be useless to seek his cap. Besides, he did not care. He turned instinctively toward where he thought the road must lie. He rejoined it. And then, he made for home. Half way, he grew conscious of a slight pain in his left foot. He looked down and was impressed to find that the shoe was torn and that blood lay thick-matted with the dust upon the stocking that showed through. Immediately, he was aware that the pain had been with him long; that it stung frightfully. Hebegan straightway to limp. And as the pain grew stronger, the charm that had made his visitation in the woods seem natural and calm, wore gradually out. He looked back, now, with wonder upon his frenzied running. What had happened? how long and why had he done as he had done? But at best, amazement was feeble. He accepted the corybantic mystery. It filled him now with a strange satiety. Even the foot that made him limp did not deter his startling consciousness of being happy. And the cottagers he passed, who gazed at this strange apparition of the Burt boy, hatless, dishevelled, limping, failed to arouse him from his reverie. In this manner, he reached his home.
Adelaide was knitting on the porch, alone. She looked up and saw her brother, dirty, torn, wounded—lost in a glamor of recollection which she at first mistook for the daze after an accident. She threw her work aside, rushed down to him, and though he was nearly as tall as she, carried him bodily to the porch.
“Why, Quincy!” she exclaimed, “what has happened?”
The lad was still too far away for an answer. But Adelaide had seen the wound. In a flash, she had brought water and cotton. Tenderly so that it scarcely hurt, she drew off his stocking and cleaned his wound. There was considerable blood, much dirt, no depth. A sharp twig had torn a gash between the toes. Silently, she set to work, rinsing the cut and disinfecting it. While this was to be done, after all, there was no need in asking her brother questions. He was sitting quietly enough.
At last, in her task, Quincy grew aware of her, kneeling at his feet, caring for him. He watched hersilently, as she worked. The pain was there, but it was dull, now, and quite unobtrusive. What a strange sweet afternoon it was! And why, a pain with it?
He looked down at his sister. And now, she glanced up at him. Their eyes met and held. With one hand upon the bandage, the other clasped about and bracing his bared leg, she paused.
“Thank you, Adelaide.” The boy spoke with an accent of maturity that may come at any age, with a real emotion.
“Don’t be silly, dear,” Adelaide replied. And then she added: “How did it happen, brother?”
“I don’t know.”
The girl smiled, actually as if she understood.
“Perhaps you were running too fast, eh?”
Quincy looked sharp.
“Did you ever run in the woods?” he asked with ill-concealed excitement.
“Yes, indeed,” she confessed.
Quincy was silent. Adelaide drew a clean stocking over the bandaged foot, and then, a hand-knitted, crimson slipper.
“See if that’s comfy, now,” she said.
“Whose slipper is that?”
“Mine. You don’t care ...?” She spoke with a strange respect.
Quincy got up and walked. “It’s all right.” And then, facing Adelaide, he stopped. Once more, he was embarrassed. He wished he had been elsewhere.
“Thank you, sister,” he said with effort.
The girl looked at him lingeringly. It was a curious, beautiful look. It came through tears—at least, so it seemed to Quincy—like the sky through thin clouds.And this made him grope vaguely back within his soul for something he had forgotten.
And then, again, came an unaccountable impulse. Adelaide had put out her arms. His impulse was to rush within them. It was as if he would cover many wounds, if he did that. He thought of this. And in the instant of thinking, doubt slipped within—doubt and the looming presence of the house, the memory of those within it, of what they were to him and of that which they had done. He must guard himself against a fresher wound—one of a sort different from this which Adelaide had bandaged. He must beware. He must consider the tribe of Adelaide, with her seeming love and her eyes that feigned a plea. He must remember the impossibility of this which appeared to be before him—the impossibility of love, of understanding; the reality of disillusion. He must cut through this day-dream....
There was a cloud of resolution. With it, the boy’s face hardened. He turned about and limped upstairs—like a wounded wild thing, afraid with returned vigor, of the good Samaritan that had succored it.
And Adelaide sank back to her chair. She forgot to remove the signs of Quincy’s accident. She forgot to knit. She remembered her father and Rhoda. And then, her breast rose stertorously, and she began to sob. For what she had felt, she understood.
The family returned early in September to New York. For Josiah and Rhoda had strong within them a country family’s lust for the City. And with the first burning of the leaves in autumn, they missed the streets and the traffic and the theatres and the hotel-lobbies. Nor was Marsden loth. He was able tomove about New York, in their motor; he was able even to visit Broadway since the Burt finances made feasible the purchase of a theatre-box. But Marsden did not care really for these. He preferred New York to the country, with the first burning of the leaves in autumn, merely because he had just been in the country. By Christmas, he would welcome a visit to Atlantic City or Bermuda; by April, he would again be longing for the mountains. The Burt family never summered at the sea-shore. It was too like Long Island. And so, the big house near Central Park, where the leaves die greyly instead of burning out, was made ready. And Quincy was hurried back—so it seemed to him—to live the year’s most passionate season in the City.
All of the summer, the mark had remained of the strange encounter with Adelaide and with the woods. He had avoided the woods, he had been shy with Adelaide. Several times, they walked forth together. But the girl’s efforts to make a breach in his world had been avail-less. They had marched on, silent for the most part; helpless utterly. And Nature was very far away.
She had ached for inspiration and she had failed. She blamed herself. Adelaide was no tactician. When she forced activity on her desire, she was even less expressive than when it lay painfully quiescent within her heart.
Yet there was an issue to her inspiration, even if she was not to be the one who gained. With the fall came a new spurt of hope and confidence to Quincy. It was still Rhoda. The boy ignored, of course, that the fuel for this new hope had come from Adelaide; that hisélantoward Rhoda was due to Adelaide’s encouragement. He had never looked on his younger sister in a warm light. The fire with which Rhoda touched him had never ceased to burn. And it was the season of lost passions—the season of burning leaves. Adelaide saw the event with conscious eyes—its irony, its hopelessness. It was she who had yearned and who had planned; it was Rhoda who ignored and who received.
And then, of course, came the same result. Quincy made ready for a still surer, harder state of disillusion.
The climax of sullen naughtiness was over.
After all, his condition had been chiefly due to his own sense of weakness, to his lack of pride. There had been so little impetus to pride! It was not that he was an unremarkable boy. He was. But most such feel distinction at least within their family. The illustriousness that the world will, of course, deny them, they receive at the hand of a parent, or a sister—a little world. And this little world they coax into sufficiency so that the basic need of holding up one’s head is answered; and, often to tragic consequence, the cold outer world comes to be ignored.
This was not Quincy’s case. He had succeeded poorly in judging his family’s view of him to be a blind one. Now, however, matters changed to a degree.
Quincy was at an age to sound the springs of manhood, and to glean childish joy therefrom. Above his poverty of gifts, there arose now a sense of power and of promise that thrilled him the more for its bare setting. Quincy was to be a man—a tall, strong master endowed with all the honors of his sex! This was something to one who had been an unpetted childin a large family. And the new feeling brought revolution to his ways and views. The new element that entered in was one of confidence—potential self-assertion. It was a sickly, scarce noticeable thing. It was not strong enough to appear in its own light. But it gave to Quincy a sense of a reserve, a flair of a future. And however vague, this was a vital thing in one whose soul had been so constantly flung back upon a fancy-builded past.
A laborious task is the nurturing of pride in one who has lived long without it. Its growth is an imperceptible evolving. No member of the household—not Marsden who saw through idleness, not Adelaide who saw through love—was well aware of it in Quincy. To them, he was merely “behaving better.” His moroseness was less militant. His silence had less of a sneer and a scowl. But silence it was still. Quincy scarce knew of it himself, until the climax that with one shock bared his transfiguration. But until that climax, it seemed none the less to Quincy that life’s pain had subsided; that his surroundings were more bearable. He still felt the selfish attitude of Rhoda; his father’s stretches of ignoring him and sudden spurts of tyranny still wracked him; his mother was no less inadequate; Marsden was still the mordant sphinx. But now, a new element within him told him to abide his time—bade him grow and hope.
It was not until the spring that he learned how pervasively this new and hidden sense had fretted all of his being; how strongly it had attuned the fibres of his soul to its own message.
It was April and late afternoon. All of the Burt children were in the sitting room, on the second floor.Jonas was in town for the Easter holidays. And Rhoda had just returned from a visit to Savannah where, incidentally, she had become engaged. So there was a general human glow about the place.
It was a conventionally furnished room, eloquent of the overpaid house-decorator. The walls were a thick, red silk above high panellings in oak. Two sets of curtains, red-plush and cream-colored net, shut out the gleam of the low sun that fell athwart the street. The chairs were lavishly upholstered, in light green with silvered wood. In the right corner of the room was Adelaide’s piano—Rhoda did not play. The center table was covered in brocade, bronze tinged. Upon it were ornaments—sculptured book-racks in mahogany, sumptuous paper cutters, a fan of ivory lace, a leather sécrétaire embossed in gold—all of it curiously travestied with a litter of cheap magazines. Against the left wall was a sofa and on it sat Adelaide, and Jonas puffing a pipe. At his left was a great settle with collapsible back, book-rest and foot-guard—the throne of Marsden. Rhoda had drawn her chair beside him. They were looking together at a comic weekly, and munching from a box of candy conveniently between them. On the room’s other side, near the piano, was Quincy,—relaxed far back in a high arm-chair, his legs dangling.
Marsden and Rhoda were seriously at their jokes, enjoying the candies together. Jonas pulled at his pipe, a smirk of ruddy satisfaction on his face. Adelaide was drowsy. She had set aside her book. There was little general conversation. And yet, an atmosphere of contentment pervaded the heavy, over-furnished room.
Quincy, also, was drowsy. He had just stepped in for a magazine. An impulse that came seldom had prompted him to stay. No attention had been paid to him. So he had seated himself, half resolved to read. And now, he was contemplatively taking in the scene. The hour was between day and evening—in happier climes, the twilight. But New York has no stomach fornuances. With her greatness, the Metropolis has driven out the gentle hour wherein night’s mystery comes to meet the day’s assertiveness. It was already evening in the room. In the street, it was still day. The City’s life came muffled, as from another world.
Quincy’s mood made him observant. A touch of comradeship was in the motive that made him stay. He was hoping someone would talk to him. And in his wish, he studied the shadowed features of those from whom he seemed almost to be desiring a grace.
Quincy remarked how scant Marsden’s hair had become. Marsden was twenty-four. But he looked immeasurably old. Quincy observed that there was a discomforting presence in Rhoda. Her eyes were big and soft, yet what came from them was hard and—it came almost in its true terms to Quincy—mean. Her mouth had a fire about it; yet the broad lips did not suggest that the fire was contained. In looking at Rhoda, Quincy was minded of an iceberg swimming in a sea of flame. It was a fascinating thought. And he could not keep from thinking that if one were in the flame the ice would smart deliciously; whereas, if one were on the ice, the flame would be a balm. He did not understand very clearly about Rhoda. He knew that it was rather disconcerting to look long at her. He knew that her pale, dark face was beautiful. Just now, a stray gleam of the sun stood orange on herhair. And her body, tight beneath its dress of silken crêpe, seemed strangely sweet and secret. He remembered then what he had seen on that one occasion. And then, he grew ashamed.
Beside her, Marsden was almost fearfully grotesque. His forehead bulged and his hair had a streak of grey. His eyes were now dull, now glistening. And his fingers were very long and made an irritating sound as he clicked them against his chair.
Jonas was a man of a dead mystery to Quincy. His ruddy, flashing face had been fully fathomed. He was a stranger whom once Quincy had been eager to know. The eagerness had died. The rather stout mass of his body, the weak puffiness of his lips, his nasal slang and his coarse straight hair were to Quincy an impersonal assortment.
With Adelaide he felt curiously unaroused. If this girl moved him at all, it was unpleasantly. There was a cloying, humble atmosphere about her. Quincy did not care for her. Frequently, he would forget that she was in the room.
And now, it had grown too dark, even for comic pictures. Marsden and Rhoda whispered together; his raucous chuckle chimed well with the cold ring of her laughter. And the night rose above them. Quincy’s mind went leaping through it as if light were a barrier at last effaced. He was comfortable in his chair. He wondered whether, perhaps, he was not face to face with a more comfortable future. His heart went out to his brothers and sisters, so eager was he to prove his dream’s verisimilitude. One so beautiful as Rhoda could not be hard of heart; nor one so rubicund as Jonas, nor so suffering as Marsden, nor so meek as Adelaide. Oh! if they but gave hima chance—how good and kind and loving he would be! He was getting old now. He was fifteen. He could find ways to be of use. He could make his new happiness efficient. He could read to Marsden when he was tired; he could try to learn jokes to tell to Jonas; he could run errands for his sisters. He would use his body and his mind to show his gratitude, to prove his worth. Quincy went swimming through the element of his desire. The hum of the Elevated trains, the croon of the cars past the street, the rattle of a wagon merged into a varied harmony, all pliant to his gentle mood. The little fellow clasped the arm of his chair as if to hold on to this fleet state of happiness and so sustain it....
Marsden’s voice cut into him, like a knife.
“Quincy,” it said, “turn on the lights.”
The lad jumped up and complied. The cold glare of the electric beat out the gentle color of the dusk. But already, his brother’s tone had dispersed the dream which that dusk had nurtured. Quincy went back to his chair. But he was very wide-awake, now; and his thoughts were pragmatic. How he did spin nonsense to himself! A double resentment was on foot: against reality purely as such, and also as the disturber of his fancies. He looked at Marsden in the cruel light and found that he despised him. Rhoda was smugly smiling over a magazine she had now resumed. He hated her, for that. She had not felt the sting in Marsden’s order, or, if she had, it was with a feeling of approval. It required no more than this to turn the edge of Quincy’s mood. Jonas began to talk. He was boasting of a college celebration; of his friends. He alluded slyly to a girl. Rhoda, in her new magnanimous contentment, nodded her sympathy for his crass pranks. To Quincy it was as if all of his brother’s triumphs had been related to draw attention to his own social poverty. So he resented Jonas. And since even Marsden’s fastidious attention had been drawn, he blanketed in his bitter sense of exclusion all of those whom but a minute before he had been glowing to embrace. Adelaide, meantime, had actually fallen asleep. Her head was thrown back on the upholstered couch. Her lips were parted. Quincy observed how small and white her teeth were. He found her stupid.
There was a step in the hall. Josiah brushed into the room. He wore a wide-brimmed, black, slouch hat—such a hat as the owner of a Western mine, born in Long Island, is likely to deem appropriate.
“Good evening, my dears,” he said. And then, he met the sharp gaze of Rhoda.
“Can’t you remember the hat-rack, downstairs?” she reprimanded him.
Josiah swept the hat from his head, with a big, red hand. His hair was streaked with grey. But still, his face had retained freshness and vitality despite its bulk and the ponderous chin that sagged over the low collar. Josiah was fifty-eight. He winced slightly at his daughter’s just remark. And then, he espied Quincy, still ensconced in his big chair. In the boy, was an outlet for his irritation caused by the episode of the hat. To display it toward Rhoda was unthought of.
“Here,” he pointed with his hand toward Quincy, “bring my hat downstairs.” And then, having thrown out his remark, as to a lackey, he turned toward Marsden. “Well, my boy—and what sort of a day did you have?”
A general conversation sprang up. Quincy stepped up to the table where his father had flung his slouch and went on his errand. He did not mind the errand. But his father’s tone fitted too painfully well within his growing mood.
It was out of a sense of pride that he returned to the room, the hat deposited. Every instinct in his body drove him to go upstairs to his own floor,—every instinct save this new one that led him back into the overbearing presence.
As he resumed his seat, Josiah asked:
“Where’s your Ma?”
Marsden thought he knew: “She’s shopping with the machine.”
“She is not!” replied Josiah, emphatic through his own importance, rather than by virtue of the subject. “I had the car. Farrel said she’d dismissed him at four o’clock until the time to call for me.”
“Well, then I don’t know.” Marsden raised his brow to show that also he did not care.
Josiah stood pondering. “That’s funny,” he said. And once more, he espied Quincy, unobtrusively lost in his great chair.
The thought of not knowing his wife’s whereabouts distressed him; again, out of his need of knowing everything, rather than by virtue of any warm solicitude. He felt strongly ill-at-ease, there in his own room, before his children, who paid no attention to him. He had already been reprimanded by his daughter. And now, it seemed that he was generally misinformed. Sarah’s absence was of no significance. It was not late. But the smug posture of his children, seated, while he stood—first scolded, then found ignorant—heightened his sense of umbrage. It hadbeen a close, busy day. And his head had ached. Moreover, there was Quincy, snug in his chair—on his face a look of supreme unconcern.
“Quincy,” he called out in a voice unnecessarily loud, “suppose you go down and asked Farrel where your Ma is. I think he’s waitin’.”
Quincy jumped up again. Fatally, he caught the spirit behind his father’s words and his father’s tone. Unmistakably, he knew that he was being used, that moment, as a release for his father’s mood, for his father’s aches and for his father’s uncomfortable, silly sense of humiliation. All this hurt—this seeing clear. But none the less, he moved stiffly to the door in order to comply. His legs moved laggardly. Something within him repelled this motion of obedience. It was not fair to be exploited as a release for an old man’s aches and tempers and sense of limitation! And in addition, he felt the cold eyes of the company upon him, indifferently watching him on his way, ignorant of his misery, careless of its cause. But now, he was at the door. He opened it. And then, the impulse that said “Nay!” moved something in him, something perverse, ineffectual, foolish, so that he spoke. He knew the folly of this compromise between his sense of duty and of justice. But it was too late. The words came:—
“Suppose the chauffeur doesn’t know?”
For the moment, there was a pause. Marsden, Jonas and Rhoda turned in gleeful expectation toward their glowering father. They knew the outburst such inanity must occasion. And Adelaide, who alone felt fear and pain in this lull of fever, broke into a nervous giggle which Quincy totally misunderstood.
Josiah’s face was scarlet. He had need of just thisoutburst for a bath of temper wherein to wash away the day’s accumulated irritations.
“Suppose the chauffeur doesn’t know, eh?” he half-sneered, half-shouted. “Then—find out!”
The door shut behind the boy....
The shower of temper had had the wished-for result. At once, Josiah was in an excellent mood. He dropped into the chair that had held Quincy, spread himself amply and began to talk—convivially, cleverly, cheerfully, as was his way when he desired to overcome an earlier impression. The others joined him, now, with truer participation. And so, half an hour sped.
Then once more, there was a step in the hall.
The door opened, and Sarah entered. She wore furs, despite the season. A bewildering creation of flowers and feathers, rimmed in black velvet, sat square upon her head. As she stepped in, Josiah jumped with unwonted speed from his comfortable place. This, in itself, was enough to cause Sarah to stand still and look.
“Adelaide,” said Josiah, without greeting his wife, “go upstairs and see if Quincy’s in his room.”
He spoke nervously, quickly, sweetly withal. Rhoda and Jonas rose, seeking his eyes, impelled also by a sudden thought. Even Marsden smiled uncomfortably.
Adelaide flew out, on her mission. And Sarah, flinging her furs aside, stepped forward, as if to ease some necessary action. The ominous, knowing concert of all these eyes brought panic to her ignorance.
“Josiah!” she began. “Where’s Quincy—? What—”
“Shut up!” cut in her husband. “Don’t get excited!”
“What have you—” Sarah’s heart had read the uncommon fear on her husband’s face.
Just then, Adelaide returned.
“Quincy’s not there,” she said in a high voice that came out above her angry breathing. Instinctively, she ranged herself beside her mother.
For a moment, Sarah stood swaying, before her husband. And then, in a burst of passion she rushed upon him.
“Oh! Oh!” she cried. “So at last you’ve done it! So at last, you’ve driven him away! You’ve driven him away!”
Quincyfound himself on the street. The machine stood before him. Beyond two obstructing tires and a net-work of gleaming steel sat Farrel, the chauffeur. His peaked cap was over his brow. A cigarette lay on his lips, the smoke a perpendicular thread in composition with his square-massed face. A newspaper was below his nose. Quincy stood beyond the barriers and called.
“Farrel!”
There was no response.
“Farrel!”
The man turned his head. The look in his eye was grey and filmed and sluggish like the thread of smoke. The mind was gone.
“Where’s mother, Farrel?”
“I don’t know. I left her shopping.”
Farrel rustled his pink paper ostentatiously. Then, folding it, he slapped it into a receptive shape with his bulky hand and plunged to a new page of screaming nullities. He had forgotten Quincy. He was piqued at having to remain there, he knew not how long. He wished to go home to his wife. He had learned that the Burts were very careless about discharging him at the end of a day’s long work. He was not minded to be polite to Quincy. For Quincy was a Burt, so that he resented him; yet an insignificant Burt, so that he could show it.
Quincy turned toward the house.
It was evening. A gentle, blue haze was on the street. The lights came out suddenly, in periodic spurts, as if separate from the mist that lulled about them. There was in the air a languid note, such as may follow a siege of fever. The traffic pounded heavily by, as if in token of its weary passengers. And now, Quincy looked toward the house.
What he saw there drove his hands cup-like to his head. A flash of fire shot through his mind. Then, motively, he connected his sensations. On his head was a cap. The great red door was shut. Something within Quincy had worked deliberately through his body, yet told his consciousness no word. Still it worked; still Quincy bowed to it, unknowing. His hands fell from their momentary, cup-like grasp. They clenched at his side. And then, rhythmically, he struck out in the direction of Central Park.
The electric light over Farrel’s head threw a concentrated glow of yellow on his page. A car on the Avenue crashed past, wheels groaning, bell a-jangle. Then, Quincy crossed. With huddled shoulder he mounted the sloping asphalt whose lights shot shadows of black and floods of blue against its marge of trees. A distant symphony of whistles and of fog-horns rose dimly from the Hudson over his back. Beyond him, the Park traced out its purple monotone, flecked with the cut of lights.
People were walking here. Their foot-fall was like a noise heard in a dream and doubted. Their words were like the impact of water falling on stone. Their forms were comets flashing from nowhere into nowhere through a sombre and thick infinitude. They left a wake of drab. They were innumerable. Andthe sum of all their wakes made almost an atmosphere. This cloyed and choked and somehow had a sneer in it. So Quincy walked fast. And as he did so, the forms blocked in upon the flow of being with less frequence, less consistency. The Park itself had become the undertone. The curving of the paths gave to his motion a tonality. The bushes lay deep in their beds of grass. Above was a lacing of trees, a shameless cover for the naked night. For so the trees seemed to Quincy. The bright sky that shone through and above them was like the hot skin of some empassioned creature—a thing consumed in sex. And the short trees and ruffled bushes that lay before it were like shreds of lace on a vast nudity. They pricked it, they heightened it; even they adorned it. They did not hide it. And somehow, it was suggested to Quincy that they meant to hide it. Quincy’s lips were parted as he walked. And there was moisture on them. Also, there was a veil of dryness on his eyes. And the sky reclined before him like a woman’s breast—like Rhoda’s. Its slope was infinitely slight, delicate yet vast. He recalled the time when he had seen his sister. So he knew! And knowing, so he enjoyed. But in this overwhelming symbol entered more than that experience of sight. This mighty, pulsing sweep of sky gave him a glow, half-memory and half-eternal. For what are instincts but unconscious recollections? So, perhaps, it was natural that of a sudden, his mother came to him, stayed there, pervaded him; and in the spreading grew so vague that his mind caught no glimpse of her.
Quincy walked, then, beneath this naked breast with its empurpled shreds of green. And his mind slept—slept perhaps in the same cadence wherein he had sleptonce, tight in a woman’s arms. And meantime, his feet beat on their way, even as had then his heart. And his lips were moist, taking in life.
Quincy was tired, so he sat on a bench. His fingers dug in the damp paint. He brought them before his eyes. They were stained slightly green. This was a jarring note. It disturbed him. It caused a separate vibrating. A tendril of his mind quivered, as if in warning that he was to begin to think. The motion projected by this faint jarring upon himself had to be absorbed. It had to be absorbed either in mind or body. If in the former, he would think; if in the latter, he would walk. He walked.
He was always in the Park. His veerings minimized the distance he had come. As he proceeded now, a tinge of questioning traversed him. He had been too close within himself to poise even an outline of his experience. Now he seemed somehow to fall apart from himself. This did not gain him vision; it did inspire a question. What was he about? Quincy’s eyes were no longer dry, and his mouth moist. The ecstasy of the night went before a shrinking sense of its strangeness. And now, his eyes were moist and his lips parched. He breathed heavily. He was, after all, only a boy, young for his years in those external sophistries men call experience. And so, fear filtered in with the chill. He walked fast. He was man enough to strive not to escape his situation but to escape the fright it brought him. He was animal enough not to entertain a mental quandary,—to go on, as his will drove him. He was child enough to blink up at the transformed heavens and find fault with them. This fear was a thing, after all, scarce distinguishable from the chill he felt through having failedto bring an overcoat. He knew this. And so, in speeding on, he found dual relief.
He went up a steep path. And then, on the brow of a promontory he came to a halt. He was in that section of the Park known as the Rambles—a maze of diverse traceries on uneven ground, upon one spur of which stands a Belvedere, curiously heroic viewed in the spirit of its purpose and environs.
Quincy faced south. A tuft of cool wind filled his eyes. This was a balm. Below him fell a rock-buttressed gulch, filled with the night. From a rustic bridge that spanned it, softly separate from the air, he could see a black opening in purple haze—a cavern. Water dripped luridly on the rock. The coarse, trim shrubs behind him seemed the flourish of a filigree mocking the romantic mood before him. From the south came a cold glow, the upshot of myriad downtown lights swelling like an aureole above the sunken Park. And beneath this, against the mass of trees, gleamed the City’s fires, fitful and fantastic, some set in rigid form, some straggled, some leading deep, some flaming forth.
The boy found a bench. Now he faced west. Manhattan’s murmur came on him. A shiver seemed to rise from the far-spun houses. Here was more regularity—a frigid diapason of lights, serried, unfriendly, looming. And spaced upon it, deep cuts of black, the gloomy westward streets—one of which was his! Quincy cupped his chin in his hands and gazed. A tiny thread of train swept between two darknesses on far Columbus Avenue.
And then the hollow tread of feet below him on the walk. Quincy straightened up. There was a musical note in their pad. They were leisurely. Therewas a long mounting of suspense. At last, over the brow, was a man.
He was tall and thin. A derby hat that seemed too small for him disclosed a height of forehead. He walked on, his head turned westward. He had but glimpsed the figure on the bench. And as he spoke now, he did not face the boy.
“A splendid night!” The man’s remark, for some reason, had a ring far deeper than the banal usage of his words.
“New York’s at her best, when she’s bathed in a blue gloom. Ever notice that?—Blue’s her color.”
He stopped, still gazing, his back full on Quincy.
The night seemed, for a moment, hushed. It was as if, before this subtle audience, it wished to show its best. The mists gyred before the battlements of light. And the Park breathed deeply. Quincy wished to get up and leave. Somehow, he failed. And an impression of his discomfort must have struck his anonymous companion. The man turned. Then, he stepped forward.
“Why,” he exclaimed, “you’re only a lad!” He came closer. “Tall, though, for your age.”
Quincy clasped the bench with his two hands. The man stood before him, calmly observant.
“What’s wrong?” he said. His voice was cool but interested. It had in it the poise of a physician who is concerned yet unharassed. Quincy could not speak.
“Have you run away?” the man went on. And then, he began to laugh—quietly, to himself, as if in retrospect upon some joke. “Good for you,” he continued. “Good for you.... Tell me, can’t stand your father?”
“That’s not so!” Quincy choked out, indignant yet ignoring exactly why.
“Oh, I see! Father can’t stand you.”
The boy had craned forward. This stroke thrust him back, almost huddled on his bench. And the man thought he had guessed true.
“I ran away once,” he began, musingly aloof.
There was a pause while he thought. And then, as if for the first time, he seemed to espy the boy. He stepped still farther forward and grasped his shoulder with a wiry hand. Of a sudden, he was serious and intense. And he uttered his words as a man speaks an order in a quick emergency.
“Good for you,” he said. “Good for you, to have come away! And now—no weakening! No getting sentimental! Ah—I see it. Don’t start thinking about mother—about how mother’ll carry on. Every man for himself. Mothers keep you for themselves. Give you a penny-worth of love for the privilege of sucking your soul. Keep you, but don’t sustain you. Keep you, but don’t protect you. I know. Tears—that’s their weapon. A coward’s—as you’d know in any one save a mother. You must be sixteen. Am I right?”
“Fifteen—” Quincy was awed into response.
“Good! Now, heart of steel; thin lips curled slightly downward—that’s armor to hold you tight. I went back. I thought that was more heroic, harder, nobler. Well, perhaps it was. Also, it was damn-foolishness!”
He stopped and released Quincy’s shoulder. And again, in a flash, his mood transformed.
“Good-bye, sonny,” he said, once more aloof and without trace of the intensity which had cut sharphis former words. “I guess I’ll go below. The stars may be visible through the mist from the cave’s mouth.” He turned into the path.
“Blue’s certainly her color—Don’t think of family!” he mused aloud, as he went down.
Quincy sat, dazed for a while. And then, quite as if the power to do so had not before been utterly away, he glided rapid and easy into thinking. Consciousness of where he was—that whose myriad colors had obsessed him—now went entirely. He had been whirled in a maelstrom of sensation. Now, he flew along a track of thought. So at least, however wrong, it appeared to Quincy.
For a while longer he sat. And then, he got up and walked.
He had turned in the direction of his house. Already, he was gone a considerable distance ere he learned this. He stopped. He did not change his route. He merely stood stock still, while his future should be born within him. This also, was how it appeared to Quincy.
He was near a lamp-post. The path he had descended fell abruptly upon a wider walk that sloped down from it at a right angle, A rustic railing ran along it. Great clusters of rhododendron filled the sides. Opposite, on the wider walk, was a sheer rock, ensconced in shrubbery, crowned with a tree. Beside this, was the lamp. And here stood Quincy. A policeman, rounding his beat from above, caught sight of him. He also stopped.
He saw a boy, already tall, fixed and intent—but upon what, he could not discover. The boy stood as if charmed, his face full toward the lamp. The officertook in his long, dark face over which the tweed cap lay low. He felt the delicate, firm fibre of his body, disclosed through his tight sack suit. The boy’s arms were held straight at his sides. He was faintly swaying in his balance.
Curiosity is a duty if one happen to wear an official uniform. So the officer drew nearer. He saw now that the boy was slightly shivering and that his eyes were intent upon no thing other than the lamp itself! His face was brought out clearly in the sheet of light. The man gleaned the impression of a tender, nervous, high-wrought mood, such as Park-suicides were supposed to have. Clearly, here was a case to be investigated.
Marching up close, he spoke: “A bit chilly, young feller?”
Quincy looked sharply. In his eyes were irritation and alarm. Then, turning his back on the patrolman, he started down the hill.
“Hold on!” cried the Law.
Quincy stopped without turning back. This required of the policeman to catch up to him. Abreast, they faced each other.
“What you doin’ here?” he demanded. The boy’s demeanor had dispersed the sympathy which his good clothes aroused.
“What I’m doing?” Quincy got the question by repeating it. “I’m walking, of course.”
“Is that what you call standin’ in front of a lamp-post fer half an hour, starin’ like a madman?”
Quincy straightened perceptibly. And then, an angry look came into his eyes.
“Look here,” he said, “you leave me alone!”
He marched down the walk. And the policemanmounted back to the height of the hill. For once, Law had been chastened and the individual not crushed, in their perpetual encounter.
What the man in the Rambles had not done, this last completed.
The boy walked now, sturdily, though slowly, toward the Park gate by which he had flung in. An acute observer might have remarked, as he walked on, a curious asymmetry between the force that he seemed to be requiring as he went and the little speed that he attained. A portion of the boy’s energies appeared to load his heels and to impede him. The full swing of his legs was evidently not impressed upon the business of walking. The jerky, heavy gait that he maintained, despite his efforts, proved a divorce of purpose. Quincy’s upper body, his head, his arms were in the rhythm of a steady stride. His legs, somehow, were recalcitrant. And in consequence of this, the boy moved slowly, veered perceptibly in a way that to a tyro might have seemed the signal of intoxication.
Doubtless, the strange sermon of the man in the Rambles had let loose the flow of argument that surged in Quincy. And the rational conclusion to which his thinking brought him was all of a harmony with that strange sermon. Yet, Quincy was going home!
Indeed, in this seeming contradiction, lay the crux of his experience. Quincy was sounding, vividly, the paltriness of logic, the bland imperviousness to it, of truth. His mind swirled in and out of the channels of his resentment, his miseries, his hopes. His mind measured, of course, in flood or ebb, exactly with these channels which it could not escape. And yet, thoughtheir course lay outward, he was going home! Before, while he thought his mind submerged and gone, he had yet acted by it. His going forth had been a mental sally though his mind slept. His going-home was an irrepressible emotion, though his mind clamored against it. What a strange paradox for fifteen years to glimpse, though the way of sight was only a pervasive sense of helpless pain, an almost cosmic irritation. Quincy walked on. And his thoughts surged against his walking. And gradually, as he walked, he grappled with his thoughts, grimly determined to deflect them, to turn them back, in stride with his own steps. All of his power went into this battle. His mind must be convinced, won over! He, long since, and ere he had so much as guessed it, had been won over. But even now, Quincy did not know. While he strove to force his intellect into compliance, he believed himself merely in process of thinking out his problem. The struggle to bend his mind to the way of his soul came to him merely as the mechanics of deliberation. Long ago, Quincy was decided. There remained, now, only to propitiate his mind. And this paltry afterlude assumed within him the dimensions of the whole. He would perhaps have called it “making up his mind.” He did not dream that this was an act of kindly reconciliation—the winning over of an un-needed minority in whose dissent lay, at the worst, a source of irritation.
But mind holds the channels of our consciousness—controls the self’s publicity. And from this not inconsiderable power, it has built up a prestige for itself. It delays the announcement of any state until it has been approached; and then, it so gives out the newsthat its consent seems necessary, not for the mere announcement through its channels, but for the state itself. And so, the mind’s acknowledgment—often a hard-wrung effort to make it face a long accomplished fact—seems a protagonist where it is naught but a chorus, commissioned to explain and to chime in.
The real decision, then, impelling Quincy homeward, was not an affair of words or of deliberation. It had been born in that deep land of him that is never heard save through its far remote ambassadors. It had been born of that will which does not argue, which makes its indomitable revelation and then subsides, while its deed runs subtly through innumerable channels to the outer lands. Here then, takes place the clash of denial and of argument. Within, there is the serenity of fate. But if Quincy’s recognition was to come only within the shadow of his goal, it was none the less acute for the delay. However wrong was his belief that, in this struggle of deliberation which held him now, lay the finality of what he was to do, by means of it he at least came to understand.
As he walked, he thought of life as it would be, if he did not return. At once, he had the picture of it, uncensored by the least knowledge of reality. He saw himself living in a miraculous family, a group of persons who would respect him, leave him alone, and welcome with attentive eagerness his least advance. Of course, out of his graciousness, he did advance, at times. This family knew his worth and felt his tragedy. Under their roof he grew and his powers spread. And his life became one of great service. But of pleasure, there was little. He kept to himself, nursing his delicious sorrow, a beneficent knight-errant, with the bleeding soul of a recluse. But gradually, the edifice of his good deeds rose into view. And at last, it came within the ken of those that had driven him away. Partly through age, his parents’ hair would by now be white; mostly, however, through remorse. All of his old family, in heroic resolution, had shouldered the guilt for his departure. And now, he returned to them, magnanimous, loving, and forgave them. He kissed his father’s wrinkled face down which tears of contrition fell. Rhoda also was there—husbandless, somehow, chastened, eyes soft with the wish to be accepted. And he went up to her, and took first her hands and then, her head, and gave forgiveness. With her came the others—respectful, humbled, yearning toward him. (His mother was not in the picture. But he was unaware of this.) He exacted no punishment; he said no word of sorrowful reminder. He threw open his arms for all and took them in. And there was happiness.
Here was a roseate arrangement; and yet, to Quincy, one certain of accomplishment, if only he would face about. But he walked on. Why?
He saw his family, coldly, clearly, in the event of his return. He read the added sneer of their lips, the arching of brows that meant indulgence for one who was hopelessly foolish and incompetent. He saw the wrath of his father at this new turn on his dignity which he had played him; the knowing whistle of Marsden, discounting childish weakness; the sharp unconcern of Rhoda, not honoring his adventure even with contempt. And he dramatized for himself the sensations of his mother. She would be glad to have him back—oh, yes! But how little she would understand! To her, his going would seem an escapadeluckily done with—a spurt of temper, subsiding fortunately. She would think thus:
“Quincy was naughty. But thank God, he thought better of it. Thank God, he was too weak to turn naughtiness into badness. Quincy was too much of a child to do real injury to me. Thank God, for Quincy’s childishness!”
In her regard, as in that of all the others, he would have lost. His return would mean the sacrifice of those few considerations which he had somehow won. It would mark a new depth for his inferiority, forge a new weapon for tyranny and contempt and misconstruction. To stay away meant a path of glory. To return meant skulking back into a cell made dingier and poorer for him in his absence. And in his act, no single one of them would see aught but a lack of will, a dearth of spirit, a sickly fall. And yet, in this direction went his feet!
No tinge of cowardice was there. Quincy knew too little of the world to be afraid of it, to hesitate in choice between his home that he did know, and it. His going-out had been the irresistible plunge of a long propped-up weight, rushing toward the goal of its momentum. In his return—if return he did—there was no falling; rather, a laborious, painful urging back against the sweep of that momentum. The one way, craned his thoughts and his ambition. The way he went, a voice he did not recognize or know of, had sent a syllable.
But now, he came to feel its nature. The words of the man had been wise words indeed. That was perhaps a reason for defeating them. They had singled out the fact of mother, and there dwelt. And though Quincy was inclined to think him right, these verywords had inspired within him a protest of antithesis. His mother! Was the man wrong in his uncanny penetration? What had she helped him? How sustained him? how really served to protect him? Her love was real enough. But was it not a sickly, swaying plant—roots spread too wide for clinging, leaves thrust too close within the shadow of others, to have the sun? What did he owe her? Was her love not in its essence selfish, weakly? Did it not subsist on tears and sterile moments? Could he conceive of living on such sustenance, of mounting with such feeble help?
The man had been right. Quincy’s mind agreed. But Quincy in each step proved that both man and mind were wrong. For Quincy was going back to this discredited mother. Mentally, he nullified her and discarded her. Always, she stood there, with outstretched arms, as he rushed toward her. He thought he knew the formula of her tears, yet they ate deep in him. He thought he knew the grammar of her words; yet they commanded him. Quincy was learning.
And now, the Park was behind him. The adventure stood at its climax. And if there be gods who cease at times their celestial indifference, when the gleam of a real heroism smarts in their dull eyes from earth, they were now watching Quincy. Learn the book of life and the nature of the heroic becomes plain. It is the deliberate negation of what is sense and rote, of that which the interminable average makes life; it is the disavowal of all laws, the compliance with what is but a shadow, a shred, and a suggestion. It is the leaning on an instant and the despising of all time. It is the paradoxical resolve to prove a spot of star greater and wider and more important thanthe mass of earth. It is the truth. And it is even more, for it is the acting on it.
Quincy knew to what he was returning. He knew that no soul within the house would feel the power of his temptation to stay away, though it meant starving. He knew that she for whom he walked back into the shambles would translate his deed to fit in her own petty scope and wishes and perturbations. He knew the utter vainness of his act for his own self; the bitter fruit that it must bear; the insufferable slur that it would cast upon his fine rush for freedom.
For a moment, he paused, lost in a cloud almost of extinction. And then, something put force upon his finger. And his finger pressed the bell....
Itmay have been his mother, the net of impulse which she spun, that swept Quincy home. But in his act, spontaneously sprang to knowledge a new state—the sense of challenge. Indeed, the smouldering, grim awareness deep within him that he had a right to home, a right there to remain and make demands, had lain upon his mind since the beginning. It had been co-ordinate there with the sentiments that drove him back. It had, at that outset, been a sentiment itself, rather than a conviction shot through with thought. It had been leaven to his strong emotions and had made active the unarguing voice which ordered his return. But in that period of germination and later, carrying-out, this sense of challenge was at best subliminal. He could not have quoted a program by it; he could not have numbered his rights or his capacities for claiming them. This was a later birth—the coming into consciousness of this. But as his finger pressed the bell, and the moment stood before him in all its painful nudity, a great shock went through Quincy. And with it, Quincy’s sense of challenge grew articulate. All of his powers needed at such a moment to be summoned. All of his weapons he needed in his hands. And what was more, he needed not merely to find them there, but a conscious grasping them and a sharp perfection. Else, he had foundered. And so, in this general calling forth toarms, to service, of whatever lay within him, this sense emerged. He felt a state of right; he knew an order of demands. The door opening for him, there was Challenge in place of Sacrifice, as he stepped inside.
The door was opened by his father. He was in his vest. By this sure sign, Quincy learned that he had been anxious. For Josiah always gave way to worry by taking off his coat. But Quincy did not guess the nature of his concern. It would not have flattered him. He saw his father’s face, cold, solemn, bitterly relieved, who stood there, slightly to one side, waiting for words. Quincy met his arrogant gaze an instant. He felt that he had given answer, in his own expression. Spontaneously, he stepped past and went up the stairs.
The door to the sitting room was open. He felt behind him the astounded figure of his father still near the door, too outraged to act. Within the sitting room, ere he was on a level to look in, he felt the congregated presence of the others. Their mood seemed one with the cold gleam they sat in, and which reached him from above as he marched up the stairs. He turned down the hall. It was darkened. It gave accent to the light of the room where now he saw the others. There was a piercing note to his walking through that narrow, darkened passage, braving the glare where they were, in order to pass them and mount higher. His mother stood in the threshold. She called forth his name. And then, rushing into the hall, she caught him up.
He gave way to her warm, silent arms. He allowed himself gladly to be pressed and kissed andstrained against her. For a moment, challenge went down.
And then, holding him at arm’s length, she looked at him with questioning eyes. Within, the others sat, mutely, coldly, interested.
“Why did you run away, Quincy?” his mother asked.
The boy was hurled back upon himself.
He felt the curious attention of those others within the room. Their almost perceptible craning forward to catch his answer ate like acid into his heart. Below, he heard his father’s steps approaching;—approaching, it seemed to Quincy, in order to complete the audience. And he the spectacle—he the victim, while his mother served to show him through his paces! Why was she so cruelly stupid? Why must she have asked that searing question? Why could she not have understood how he yearned really to answer it for her, how her asking it now—under such conditions, before these!—made that answer vain, and his desire a mockery? Her embraces given without calculation, had been better. Then, for the moment, she had been on his side—been as he wanted her. But now, she had fallen over. She might not have meant it. But did her ignorance allay his pain—bring back to life the sweet impulse she had killed? She was serving them, siding with them; and through her hold and his expectancy of better, proving the worst of them all!
He hated her for it. He hated her for her stupidity; and for the love he bore her. He hated her for the hope she had, one moment gone, inspired in him....
He shoved her aside and rushed upstairs—all ofthe scene, she, they of the sitting room, his father, like a wide burn upon his brain.
As he reached his room, he heard her sob. And for her suffering, as he flung himself upon his bed, he hated her the more.