What she told him was nothing. What she made him know was fraught with fever. It was as if a burning rod had struck clear through his pretty treasury of cobwebs and scalded them away. Where they had been—gleaming in the sun of his conceit like a fine lacework—remained an emptiness that ached.
Quincy said little in response. The woman smiled at his silence and his lack of judgment.
“I must go now.” He suddenly jumped up.
She also rose. She came beside him. And the mist of her bodice came over him afresh.
“Do—if you wish to,” she said, quite close to him.
He moved toward the door.
“Good-bye,” she stopped him. Her tone had the lilt of two rhythms intertwined—a conversational happiness and a pathetic fatalism forcing it. She held out her hand.
Quincy grasped it. It was soft at the first touch, and then, in the ensuing instant, fearfully strong and masterful.
After that, he was in his rooms. He was unconscious of having walked there.
Here, then, was Quincy face to face with a problem.
For what Julia Deering, saying no thing, had given him to know was that her married life had been an endless failure and that, within the great man, was a limited creature—not cruelly so, not deliberately so, of course—but yet a creature who could deny and crush and misunderstand another!
His room, waiting for him, as he entered it, had the air and nature of a mighty list. There was naught to do but to step up and prepare for battle. The pictures on the walls, the books he loved in their racks, the letter he had just received from Adelaide, the bed in the alcove—everything alive there, seemed tense and expectant, concentrated on him. He had read of ancient tournaments. Here was his gallery, looming about him, with intricate weavings of smile and scowl, a mass of emotional tangents; yet unisoned all in the word it spoke:
“We watch you, now. It is your turn.”
The first phase of the conflict lasted two weeks. It began largely with cautious measurings of mount and lance. And of course, these gained nothing. They were signs of a deep reluctance for a clash—finger-feelings and toe-feelings where the truth called for blood and body. They measured nothing.
Out of this phase, Quincy emerged, equally undoubting of Julia’s truthfulness and of Professor Deering’s greatness. And a new discretion was born in him. Why should he endeavor to solve this problem? What was it to him? He could not help. He would be broad—and ignore both sides. In this serene state, he went back to the box-frame house.
“I am afraid,” she said to him, “from the way youacted, you may have misunderstood my words. I was mistaken to talk to you at all. Some of you is so old—but the conscious part of you is so very young!”
Quincy protested that he was inimitably broad—broad enough to ignore both sides. These were of course not his words. But Julia also was receiving, now, not what he spoke but what he gave her to know. They changed the subject. They talked of books and of music. She was her old commanding self. He understood what this meant: that she once more despised him.
The Professor entered.
“Hello! Hello!” he cried. “Stay to supper, Mr. Burt. Can he, Julia?”
“Why, Lawrence,—we’re going out.”
Professor Deering was caught up by this rebuke. For he knew that they were not going out. Soon, he left them.
“That was a lie—about our going out,” she said, at once, “But I am not sure, Quincy, that you quite deserve to dine, at present, at the Professor’s table.”
With this twist of her two-edged sword, she let him go.
It was all plain enough to Quincy now. His ignoring both sides had been ignorance. And ignorance meant weakness. The finger-feeling stage was dead.
Down this new slope, events continued until March. He did not return to her. He saw the Professor only casually. But the sight of either was unnecessary. There was progress without them. The conflict was really on. The boy lumbered out his musty weapons of ideals, groaningly shouldered them and so fell to, against the seething, searing inroads of the enemy.
Of course, of all this there could be no word withGarsted. Quincy was inarticulate enough by nature, of his realities. But to talk of a deep thing that was still chaos in him was impossible. For silence, he did not have to lean on an ideal of chivalry. The stoppage caused by his other ideals sufficed for that. So the boy withdrew utterly. He was alone. And this he felt with a twinge of self-commiseration. His friend, also, felt something.
“My dear Quint,” he said, “you are become like a sounding cave—which gives forth from its mouth only a lugubrious counterpart of what is spoken to it.”
“Talk sense, Simon.”
Quincy was at his desk, doing a page of Cicero’s immortal tractOn Friendship. His coat was on the floor near a chair where he had meant to throw it. He wore a plain white shirt with a soft collar. His chest and shoulders ridged fluently. He looked strong and at ease. Garsted sprawled, head up, mouth open, on the window seat. One leg lay high over the other knee. He was smoking a pipe.
“All right,” he said; “—what the devil’s wrong?”
“Nothing, old man.”
“Now you’ve delivered yourself of the conventional denial, dispense with the conventional ten pages of hesitation and come to the avowal.”
“I am not a character in a novel.” Quincy was incensed.
“You don’t talk enough to be a character in a play.”
“I’ll say anything you want. Only you’ve got to tell me what it is you want.” Quincy went ahead gingerly, for he felt his guilt.
Garsted rolled over to face him, on his cushioned window-seat.
“Very well,” he said, “first of all—close your book.” The boy complied. “Now listen. We are going to reverse the order of examination. I shall tell you your symptoms. And you shall tellmewhat they mean.”
They were quite ordinary things, Garsted had found in Quincy. But they flattered him. That his eyes were given over to sudden reveries, that he spoke strangely cynical doubts about humanity, that he seemed only partially present in discussions which formerly he had entered with a whole spirit—these qualities, seen in him by a friend, resolved themselves to Quincy into an aura of mystic and romantic import. He was very happy to be so enigmatic. He began to feel that his was a beautiful dilemma. These were of course the days before that dilemma really gripped him. So he beamed on Garsted who had just accused him of being emotional in his statements and shoddy in his observations—as if he had been flattered.
“I am sure, Simon,” he said, “I can’t help you. Since you’ve done the symptoms, you’ll have to do the diagnosis also.”
“Well!” Garsted stretched, yawned and jumped up, “I guess perhaps it is nothing after all but the spring fever a month too early. Good-bye.”
And Quincy despised him for being so easily satisfied, so lightly affected at the end, in this outward mystery of his soul. Had he known Garsted would drop his inquiry so soon, he would have made his reticence more savory with a few gleams of the great truth.
Here then, he was—alone with himself, and the rustiness of his armor beginning to scratch and shriek.
He had a month of this. And when, at the end of it, a note from Julia marked still another phase, matterswere at least more clearly before him, even if he had not resolved them. It was a step to have reconnoitred his position,—however far he was from having fathomed it.
Plainly, his ideals and aspirations lined out before him, with the Professor as their captain and their priest. And as flatly on the other side, stood Julia with her deep heart and her still soul and her cherished charm, reaching within him also. Within these antipodes was all of him, needing, in order to embrace them all, to reconcile them and make them one. Did they really destroy each other? Did they deny each other? Did they drive home the wrongness to some part of him who craved them all? Why did the whole of him seem shaken, if any part of his possession in these two threatened to disappear? What lay beneath his grim resolve to save them both, prove them both right, prove them both one—these antipodes? If the meat of his convictions lay really in him, why this desperate need of saving them? Were they merely a treasure he loved, or a prop of all his structure? And if a prop, why should they not be steadfast, unified, as a prop must be? Why was recognizing one needfully a blow to the other? Why could he not take his treasures blindly, like the rest of the world, and forget about them?
Pathetic little gained him his unceasing questions. There in his soul, the insidious, beautiful woman and the man who embodied the one program of happiness he had ever known, seemed grimacing and threatening. In the man, he had learned a technique of happiness; in the woman found a field for exercising his new, life-giving powers. By all the laws of justice, these twoshould smile upon each other, be supplements in an eternal concord. Yet here they were, plotting mutual destruction! And in his need of saving them both, Quincy was fighting for the one strain of happiness he had ever had. Without the way, what was the means? Without the means, how empty was the way! And more. How could he place his faith in the one, if by so doing, it destroyed the necessary other?
Quincy sensed his quandary. He must be faithful endlessly to him, in order to have faith in her. Yet, in receiving her with what she gave him, where went the faith in him? It was as if the moon, which has her light from the sun, should say:
“If you would have my light, first you must destroy the sun.”
In Quincy’s ideal world, the problem was just so unreal and just so reasonless. Yet—though he argued it away into non-existence—there it was! A sun that would not shine, save he denied the moon; and a moon that left dark the night, save he destroyed the sun through which not alone the day but herself had come to life! The petty wisdom of the savage, Quincy did not possess. For the young race, in its tactful henotheism, says by day: “O sun, thou art the one God”—and by night: “O moon, thou alone reignest.” But Quincy had gone beyond such paltry compromise. Morality and faith and an inflexible law buoyed him up. By all means and forever, his sun and moonshouldshine at once—and side by side—in the astonished heavens. He would have it so! With commendable courage, he set about his task.
Any little human spark may strike clear to heaven. And it is probable that heaven linked up the immemorial conflicts of the stars and of the races of men, withthis infinitely small yet infinitely old attempt of Quincy’s to wed what he wanted, with what he had.
Like a somnambulist, he had tasted a balm in his walking-sleep. His waking had ever been so painful! And now, again, his eyes were being opened. Surely, he would fight well for his dreams!
In March, came the note from Julia.
Professor Deering had gone to Chicago. Here, for two weeks, he was to represent his college at a conference. Quincy was bidden to dinner. He was told that they would be alone.
He went, armed with his resolution to beat down as superficial and untrue, any discrepancy between his ideal and his reality. He was eager to go, yet fearful. Knowledge had pricked him that this woman could do with him, according to her will; and that her will might disagree with his.
She received him, in a simple, straight-cut, black gown—caught up close, like all her garments, below her breast—a soft and singing thing. Quincy was in a dinner coat which he had had two years and had outgrown. The padded shoulder and artificial box effect made his slenderness seem gaunt. But he was really pale.
It was a plain meal and took little time. There was no wine. And, with academic grace, Julia Deering carved the chicken and served the fruit, herself. But when Quincy arose from the table, he was flushed and exalted as if the little supper had been a feast. A glow fretted the green pallor of his cheeks.
He followed Julia into her room and sank upon the primmest chair, holding his knees. When she went to light a lamp, he did not offer to assist her. He watched her supple figure bend over the table. He sawthe gap caused by her posture, between her breast and the garment. The glow gave a red note to her hair. Then, she passed him, her dress forever singing, and composed herself upon the couch—cushions supporting her back and one of gleaming copper, which she had carefully smoothed, before her to rest her hand. The other arm was flung behind her head. She faced him, erect from her waist, with her gown lost in the shadow.
“What have you done, this last month?” she suddenly asked. “Have you been thinking of me?”
“Yes,” he replied.
“And what have you been thinking?”
“I’ve been wondering why you liked me.”
“Should I tell you?” She questioned him with her eyes also. “I like you because you are all in the future. When women get to be my age, they love to feel that they have a hold on the future. I am thirty-two,” she laughed.
“I don’t understand,” he stammered.
“You are a bit of my future,” she went on, “you shan’t ever lose the trace of me that I shall put in you. In that way, some of me has its youth still before it.”
Quincy had no impulse to break his silence. She continued. The lamp burned against her face, for him; against his face, for her. The room rolled away from it in a warm shadow.
“Can you deny that a trace of me will be indelible in you? I understand you so. Tell me, my boy—am I not the first woman who was ever kind to you?”
All of his manful air died out. There were tears in his eyes. He had thought of mentioning the girl he had kissed—and Adelaide, and mother. But he was afraid she might laugh.
“Do not think less of my kindness, Quincy, because I mentioned it.”
These words came low, and that which followed fitted almost into the shadows, so warm and still was it.
“You have been kind to me. You have helped me also—more than I ever can help you. I need you to be kind to, Quincy.”
He gazed at her. Her eyes came straight and true to him. There was no doubting them. And in the vibrance of their aim, they rang upon the flint of his old challenge. Thus it was that his words came sudden, unpremeditated, hard.
“And your husband—?” he asked.
Her face did not move, save for her mouth which closed as if it had been stung. Then, again, it parted.
“Lawrence lives entirely in his ideas. A woman is no idea. Neither is a child.”
“A child—” he cried. At once, she caught him up, crystallizing his presentiment of what she meant into a certainty.
“Yes, Quincy—” she spoke in a biting tone, “I have no child.”
But even his certainty required propping, so vast was the weight of dream and fancy which tumbled on it. He raked at her heart with a clumsy savagery.
“Did you—did you want—?”
“It would have been something,” she broke in, “to have been kind to. Do you understand? It would have been kind to give me that.”
Again, the silence, while she sat looking at him, gently poised, one hand pressed sensuously down within its copper setting, the other dull behind her hair, and all of her body a vague rhythm within the shadows.
Quincy was looking within himself. His task, inthat tense moment, was there to find himself and to give her what he found. He felt that his word must be the next. He felt that it must be sincere. Surely, she would judge him by it. He was resolved that it should serve them well.
Within the brief space of stillness, what did he find? A great pain for himself, in this tearing predicament, that faded utterly before the pain of her who had bared it for him. A great gratitude born of this offering. A blind rush of resolution searing his mind like lightning, that she should receive what she desired, though his life and his dreams tottered for his gift! A vague thrill of the need of risk and of its beauty.
He knew that he must accept ere he could give. And though, within the press of that brief pause, no mind or thought could turn about, he must elect—must place the treasures of his life upon a pin-point altar, and give her all—or the smoke—incense—of that All’s destruction.
His word was this:
“You may be kind to me.”
She took it in. “Come here,” she said.
He came beside her—awkward.
“Give me a kiss,” she commanded. And her lips waited.
He bent over and kissed her. An agony flashed through the back of his neck—an agony for more.
“That kiss was a promise?” she asked.
His heart faltered. “A promise—of what?”
“Kiss me again!”
This time, his knees sank upon the couch. His arms went out and he clasped her, cool and piercing, to himself. His breathing allowed no word.
“Was that kiss a promise?” she repeated.
“Everything—” he stopped himself.
There she was, still poised in her throne, unruffled, unmoved. But no! He looked at her bosom. She, also, was breathing hard. But she was trying to laugh. She was denying this, to herself.
“You are kind, boy,” she said, her voice raised high, with her struggle to constrain it. “You are kind to let me be kind to you.”
He stepped back toward his chair.
“No!” She stopped him.
The hand that had been behind her hair pressed low against her throat. That word had been almost a cry. She went on, composedly:
“I am afraid it is time for you to go.”
She released her throat and held out her hand. Quincy grasped it. It was warm and masterful altogether. Then he went.
Julia Deering heard the door softly shut. She flung herself face-down upon the couch and began tearlessly to sob. Behind her back, her two arms went out, straining and rigid. The fists were clenched.
Fromthat day, life was a battleground for Quincy.
The next time that he saw Julia Deering, he was swept clear of strong emotions. And this made his countenance easier to uphold. She wished no more, it seemed, than to have him docile at her feet, avid for whatever she might say. So it was needless for her to give much. And in his swept condition, it was easy for him to receive little. The kiss had been forgotten. The promise was being only tacitly lived up to.
No remorse had gripped him, after that evening. Remorse requires a consciousness of what has been, to cause it. And this, he lacked. He had kissed her. But what was in that kiss? Had it indeed been more than a promise of their fellowship? He had no way of knowing how it had seemed to Julia, and how much of her had gone out with her lips, or been there, when for a brief moment he had clasped her body.
Quincy envisaged dimly the wide variations that spirit makes in human action. In his dreams no more than such a kiss had made him drunk with joy; a fancied embrace no longer than this real one which had been, had made him faint with the need of giving. But these realities were far less sharply limned, their contents and their meanings were infinitely more complex than the willed dramas of his dreams. So Quincy felt no remorse. He was far too wildly drained by puzzlement.
The way of his soul was like a lake, wide and clearand full, at one end of which was a lock. And at times, the bolt in the lock slipped out and the waters rushed away with marvellous swiftness and there remained but a hollow basin, reeking and vaporous. So had been the week after that night. He had seen her again. But she had seemed content with his empty self. It did not occur to Quincy that this might have been, because she also had been swept of her fullness.
And then, gradually, came a healing. There had been no other sequel. The Professor had returned. He had not dared speculate upon the meeting him and facing him. But when, one day, the great man stopped him on the Campus, all of the torture he had imagined for this moment seemed strangely fanciful. He talked with him, calmly, and mentioned the dinner with his wife, and smiled at an apt remark and responded with another. Beyond, behind, he glimpsed in his brain another Quincy, spotted with red, writhing in his quandary. But this was upon the plane of his imagined tortures, a remote plane. He went away, wondering if he was a hypocrite, questioning which Quincy was the false one, hating his adaptability with life. For in his thoughts, a situation half so hard would have made his head whirl, and his heart bleed and his breath smother. Yet here he was, coolly at his lessons, chatting, digesting normally! He grew to be a wonder to himself greater than Julia was, or the Professor.
And all of the remainder of the year, there was no sequel. His calm was the calm of a great battle. But since Quincy had accepted the traditional idea of conflict, he did not know how deeply he was fighting. Yet he who has fought knows well that there is no calm so vast and so profound as the calm of conflict. Above it, the clouds may writhe and the air clash withthunder. Before it, the soul may quake and after it, the heart may bleed. But in the conflict, there is no energy at leisure to make a storm within. All of man’s power to stir has been projected outward. Within, there can be only peace. And then, little by little, as the struggle flags, the mind begins to move—the mind which is the herald of the soul. And as the inner forces put about and return homeward, they bring the turmoil and the stirring with them. And the mind catches these. And the mind speaks of bleeding or of winning, of dying or of living. And this is the consciousness of conflict—when the conflict flags.
So came it, that at that time which his jejune imaginings had pictured as unbearably upsetting, Quincy moved quietly about. And where he had dreamed of a decision in an open lists, behold! in the glamor, there was only the announcement of what had been done in secret from himself.
Julia allowed him to be alone. She demanded nothing. He saw her scarce more often than before. And when they were together, he found her reserved and smiling, with a deep suggestion of confidence and seriousness. All this helped him to a decision. And his decision was: that a great responsibility had come to him. His task must be to add Julia to her husband’s conscious treasures—to his ideals. In all ways, he must help herself to give herself to him. For he was sure that it was his failure to go out toward her, and hers to go out toward him—no more—which caused this state of famine. He did not seek a word for his emotion toward Julia. He admired her intensely; and she was a woman. That sufficed. As a woman, she did not see her husband as fully as did he. And her husband had limitations—in his capacity for living.But fortunately, he was there—he, Quincy, with his mission. He thanked God for it.
One night, after long pondering upon his ideal and strong bond with Julia, a strange lust devoured Quincy. In the hands of it he went and spent several hours with a woman whom he had met, liked, but not dreamed before of visiting. The adventure was an empty, dismal failure. And Quincy found more joy in telling Julia about it, than he had felt all of those set, uncomfortable hours.
Julia listened with her old, deep smile.
“You’re not the sort to do things like that,” she said.
And Quincy agreed. He was hungry no more—until the lust next possessed him.
Three times, that spring, he went forth that way, joyless, hopeless, brutal all at once after a roseate revery about his friend. And each time, he returned, smiling bitterly at his folly, cured of his possession, yet filled with an acrid will for something which that visit, somehow, had not come near supplying. But after the first occasion, he spoke no more of such things, to Julia. A shame had caught him, which he had not felt at first. There seemed less innocence, now, in talking to her, than there had been. He was beginning—a part of him—to understand.
Then, also, there were other storms,—sudden lusts of another stamp that swung him elsewhere away for satisfaction. At such times, he seemed a fool himself, and his task a mockery.
“Take her for what she is,” he cried then. “You’ve spun her all over with your ideals. These blind you to her and keep you off from her. What has she to do with the greatness of her husband’s brain? That is one thing. If he, the man, is so sated that he doesn’t need her, the woman—well—” and he would sit there, late at night, in his chair, and strip her lusciously of these ideals he had spun about her; strip her with trembling hands as if it had been her clothes that fell away. And he would strip also himself of his ideals and his aspirations. Until, there they two would stand—naked and shivering, needful of each other’s bodies to be warm.
But Quincy had not abandoned his brisk daily runs. He learned that when he missed his exercise, these lusts were best able to overwhelm him. So he sought his woods and the throb of his ridging muscles as a storm-threatened ship seeks harbor.
One day, they walked together. It seemed to Quincy as if he had never been less near to the meaning of the swaying woodland. All of him was shut to it. And most of him was shut as well to her. He did not know, of course, that here his customary tension against her had given him an outward signal. For this same effort to shut out her, although it might pass unnoticed in his room, had brought as its effect to shut out nature. In her wan smile, he felt however, that she knew something of which he was not aware.
It was a sterile hour that stung. But after she had left him and he was home, the memory of it seemed to blossom forth into a thing of a rare beauty and a lingering perfume, so that he soon forgot that it had been a sterile hour. If his own walks in the woods had been wild-flowers, this walk had been a rose. But the rose was as yet a small, tight bud. The thorns had grown more quickly.
And now, without clash of decision, or glamor of sequel, the summer holidays were near.
He sat in his room, one night. It had been a sultry day. All of the cloying afternoon, he had lain on his windowseat and given himself to reveries so nebulous that the humid air about seemed thicker to him. Below his window a forever changing crowd of boys laughed and gamboled and played at simple games. The music of their mingled feet and voices came up from underneath and seemed to shove him farther from them. He had neglected his lessons. So now he sat at his desk with an electric lamp beside him. The windows were wide open. The night breathed heavily, as if it were unwell. Then it began to rain and thunder.
At first, the water fell in clouds, drenching his window cushions. He spread a mackintosh to cover them. He did not wish to shut out the storm. He felt that he must choke without the fresh, panting vigor of the rain. Here was something elemental, simple, clear. Although he did not understand, he yearned for this, he with his mist-clogged soul, as a parched throat yearns for water. And then the downfall subsided partly and the lightning drew near. Flash after flash submerged the glow of his electric lamp. The thunder shot about him like a whirling battery in the air.
It came to Quincy that with the bolts so thick and near, it was dangerous to sit beside his lamp. He was impelled to shut his window, put out the threatened light and luxuriate in the storm from the safe haven of his bed. And then, a stronger impulse stopped him.
“I want to test God!” he said, placing his hand about the supple steel of the student’s lamp.
Doubtless the danger was not great. But with his challenge he had heightened it. He sat thrilled, expectant, ready to be struck. And with the fiercenessof his imagining and his fancied gauntlet flung to fate, it was a brave thing he did.
As the last flash had bared the sky, careening with its black clouds above his window, so his test came to illumine the cluttered mystery of his soul. He did not know if he was guilty, if he was weak, if he was wrong. Let the lightning tell!
In the breathless pauses of the storm, he heard his heart leaping against his throat. He felt the weight of his body vibrant in the atmosphere. And so he stayed—awaiting his doom, if it cared to meet him, purified by this arbitrary danger and the dread contact it afforded with the illimitable, groaning heavens. It was a game; and in it, he for the nonce, seemed the opponent of an infinitude.
The fires swept past him. And he remained unscathed. He felt this and smiled at his recklessness. For even if there had been no danger, he had created one and braved it. Now, in the lull, his reveries grew less inchoate, his sense of fear and danger crystallized and fixed upon a less fancied, sweeping thing. He began to think of Julia.
He realized that he had done nothing; and solved nothing.
He realized that he loved her—as a woman.
The thought that at his age, he had earned this eternal, mystic guerdon—love—went through him like the bolt he had invited. And then, subtly, sweetly almost, came the bolt’s aftermath: like the crumbled, gutted charring of a tree that has sung high its song of death as the storm embraced it. And that aftermath for him was all that seemed left of his proud structure of ideals:—Professor Deering, a ruined tree with its leaves piteously seared!
Before this menace of fire, Quincy at last jumped from his seat, which the storm had not made him quit. He paced his room, to and fro, delirious with this new birth, hands tremulously open, and head bowed. It could not be! It must not be! He would save his ideals; he would not be a Judas to his Christ. She who stood burning now, in the corner of his brain, must be cast out like a brand, ere her fearful conflagration caught.
He went to bed; and still the flame of her danced and still the leaves of his tree trembled piteously and fell away. Here he felt conflict; here he felt tempest. For the battle was over.
All of the night, he lay wakeful and rocked in the fever of decision which had been now so glamorously announced to him,—and so treacherously made without him, since in truth, within him.
He awoke aching and broken and inflamed. His serenity was gone. The mask, in which he had careered all of these months so featly and so gracefully through life, was burned away. He stumbled now against the meanest barrier. The least of his duties reared itself into a crucifix. He suffered. And he struggled. Even so, struggles the beast after the trap has inexorably set.
In his pain, he ran about seeking solace. Yet, wherever he turned, he rejected help. He was afraid of Julia. In fact, she seemed scarcely at all in his mind. It was an effort to think of her. He had to force his brain to grasp the fact of her reality; and a concrete vision of what and how she was, became impossible. In his dreams, there was a looming, aching mass of agony which menaced him, or turned into a bath of luscious poison. This, he termed “Julia.” But it was not really she. It was an inchoate Thing—a thing untinged with the fixed meaning of a woman, a thing at most that a woman had engendered.
So, fearing her, ignoring her, hoping for balm from her, not recking of her really, he at last sought her out.
At once, before her, his storm subsided and became unreal; the swollen waves rolled languorously without aim or meaning.
Even now, he scarcely saw her—and knew her not at all. The time of consciousness was passed.
But it was sweet still, to be before her—helpless, mute,—while her smile glanced on him and her little, intimate movements,—the touch of her hand on her hair or the quiver of her eyelid,—cut through him like steel and played upon him like soft fingers upon a harp.
In this way, pent-up, giving nothing out, came June.
Quincy’s life rushed into summer, as a swift stream falls over a smooth precipice....
Thefirst agile months left him a vision of her. He believed it was herself. He remained motionless and the warm days glided over him. But this they left. And since the vision, too, was soft and warm and murmurous and madding, it seemed indeed a part of themselves that the first agile months had left.
He could see her now; and fix his yearnings upon her; and recognize in the void a place where she was not. He could hear her. He could feel her. It mattered little that, as ever, he could not understand her.
A slender, vibrant form she was, standing alone upon his consciousness, as the strip of ocean stands upon the beach. Beyond the horizon, it wanders infinitely. This was his sense of her. She had eyes that felt rather than saw; and fingers that played rather than touched; and the sharp, firm lines of her body bounded him, rather than herself.
There was nothing after all, to this time, save the vision. Nature was not. Family was not. And then came the note.
It was like the dawn—a haze of disparted color heralding the sun, formless, beingless save in this, that it was drenched in the sun’s coming. And then, from beneath the clouds of blue and green and orange, a spur of fire. This is without color. But it has all that the dawn lacked, for it has form and being. It is not the dawn; it is the sun. And before its flash of flame, the deep mists of radiance fade away—orangeto red and red to green and blue to the low sky. Meantime, the sun has mounted.
In this way came the note. It read:
Dear kind boy:I am in New York at the Hotel, you see. In a week, I must join Lawrence in Maine. But I got weary of the little house and closed it behind me. I don’t know what I hoped to find in the burning city. But will you ride one hour to spend another hour with me?Julia Deering.
Dear kind boy:
I am in New York at the Hotel, you see. In a week, I must join Lawrence in Maine. But I got weary of the little house and closed it behind me. I don’t know what I hoped to find in the burning city. But will you ride one hour to spend another hour with me?
Julia Deering.
He went.
The city burned indeed. But as he traversed it—slowly to preserve his neatness—he knew that he was proof against such fire. As he approached the hotel, his thoughts veered altogether backward. His thoughts were a feeble countercurrent to the great part of him that propelled so swiftly forward as to encumber his feet and place a straining awkwardness upon his effort to go slowly. Thought of what lay before him was altogether wanting. He was thinking of what he had said to his mother. He had lied to her. All of his life he could recall no lie to teach him how to utter this one. Yet he had lied glibly—and with success. He was almost proud of this—that little part of him which could pay heed, at such a moment, to any past. He had spoken of a college friend in town for a few days—one his mother knew nothing of.
“You will be back to-night?” she had said.
And then, strangely, so callous did this one falsehood seem to have made him, that he had answered: “I can’t be sure. Better not expect me.”
Why this gratuitous blow to his mother’s faith? Heknew he would be back. What could keep him in New York? Surely, not a summer “show”? Only his desire to fend off his mother, a perverse consequence of lying to her, could explain his answer. Well: that was settled. A falsehood did not wait long ere it sowed its poison seed.
But now, he found his heart beating hard and painfully against his throat. It knew, before his eyes, that the hotel was there!
A dark, cool lobby, after the street’s glare—a monster with many eyes, that he must pass. It was filled with moving, mumbling creatures—each one an eye. And an eye upon a pivot that touched him and soiled him and then brushed on. It seemed to stir nervously at his intrusion, to demand his secret as indemnity for its disturbance. It was cynical and real. It must be warded off without a contact. For a contact would leave him spotted. An elevator hurled him up, from its vaporous presence.
The hall, also, lived. The soft carpet held back his feet perversely. The dark doors set in the bright grey walls marked a mocking rhythm to his interminable progress. Each turn in the passage was a mute thrust against his carefully reckoned gait. The silence of two chambermaids who had been chatting was a badge on him, and the thud of his feet also was a comment. Then, the door opened before he had to knock.
She did not smile—any more than had the vision. Such visions are serious. So was she, now, in reality. Her hand meant nothing. She took this hat. And her voice caressed him with all the firmness and mastery of her hand, that last evening of the kiss.
“You were kind to come. Take your coat off.Look—I have a cool drink ready for you. You like orange, don’t you?”
He sat at a little table, near the window, and sipped the beverage. Opposite, was she. Heavy blinds warded away the heat and the sharp clamor of the city. The room was cool and shaded. Julia sat watching him. She wore a housegown of pongee—the color of parched violets. Her hair stood in coils over her ears.
“I am not warm,” she said. “I have stayed in, during the heat.”
His eyes had questioned if she, too, was thirsty.
“It is deliciously comfortable here.”
Her head tossingly measured the room. Quincy did not see it. But he felt its cool, fresh walls and the white wood and the cane furniture. It was a sitting room. Two heavy doors in a dark varnish gave accent to its breezy tidiness.
She chatted gaily. Allusions to his abstention from her while he was still at college shafted to him and inflamed him. But she laughed at his excuses.
“I am not exacting,” she declared.
And then, once more, she was serious. It had been so long, she was not sure now, that she still knew him. What, all this time, had happened to him? His answers showed his discomfort. Julia arose and stood over him.
“What is wrong?” she said. Her hand went to his brow. “Why is that ruffled?” And then, with the other hand beneath his chin, she turned his head upward.
A veil went over Quincy’s eyes.
“Is it my turn,” she spoke softly, “to be kind to you?”
And in reply, he wrenched his head from her grasp and bent it so low that she could not see his face. He felt her hands lifting his shoulders. And in this way, he came to his feet.
“Big boy, why do you hang your head?”
He raised it. In a flash, she lay in his arms. But he did not touch her.
“I want you,” he cried and then was silent.
Julia stepped away from him. A joy was in her face that he could not mistake.
And then, she took his hand. And she seated herself. And somehow, Quincy was at her feet with his head upon her lap. This seemed exquisitely right. Yet, though he thrilled with joy and the near warmth of her body intoxicated him, he sobbed. She held his head and his shoulders as if he needed sustenance until this ecstasy of relief was over. And so he remained, until his eyes were dry and his heart spoke dear within him, like a bell.
She held him until the morrow. She nursed him and cherished him as if he had been sick. She hid him while the unknowing waiter brought food into the sitting-room. And then, laughing with her joke, she shut out the world once more, which had been permitted to intrude with the staid dress and visage of the lackey, and served him herself.
Avid for sleep, the big boy slumbered in her arms all of the night—a sleep broken with jewel-like gleams of consciousness wherein, waking from dreamless rest to a dream-like reality, he could clasp his fantasy and breathe her breath and feel the murmurous rhythm of her body against his and, twining his fingers through her vagrant hair, slumber afresh.
When she let him go, she took his hand and held it under her heart.
“Will your mother have worried at your absence?” She felt the worry, as if she had been the mother she had never met.
“Why, no!” he cried. “That’s funny. I told her I should not be back!”
But there was no need of fearing lest Julia misunderstand. For a brief moment, perhaps, the doubt pricked her about the boy’s sincerity. And then, she saw. Women understand these mystic intuitions, for women reap the harvest of them. She was elated at the chance impulse that made Quincy warn his mother, lest her worrying bring a flaw to their true holiday.
And then, she sent him back.
Oneweek before its opening, Quincy returned to college.
It was a brisk and cloudless September day. But already, though work had not yet begun and behind him were months of ostensible recreation, his angular gait showed that the boy was tired. Indeed, what was directly past had been a hostile, clumsy way for him. With an intensity that made his other struggles pale, the conflict in him had been renewed. And there among his family, he had lived on, bearing his secret and constrained to keep it from them. It had not seemed particularly hard for him. It was natural to be silent and secretive and to furrow himself with stubborn questionings. But the heat of it had over-wearied him, although he knew so little of it.
He was aware that none of the eager spring of a new year was in his body as he marched up the main street of the college town. He was aware that he was apathetic and dull of eye. But the full force of what had caused this, he had not gauged. As he looked back upon the element of his family, it seemed to him, even, that it had helped. It had supplied the tang of sweet retribution in this fact, that he, so generally of no account, nourished a life within him more marvelous than anything his family had dreamed. As ever, Adelaide sought him and groped for him and failed. As ever Quincy felt the need of what she had to give yet ignored the conduit to her. For Adelaide knew there was something. She saw him bowed down with anew suffering and dazed with some still more perilous splendor. But her incessant efforts to share and help merely heightened his distress. With his mother, it was different. Sarah saw nothing, understood nothing. And now, when she lectured him upon his need of growing up and of preparing for responsibilities which, luckily, he did not as yet possess, it was delicious for him to smile and know and in silence suffer her misapprehension. For now, at last, he seemed to have a proof which he had always craved—of her injustice. What had hurt before was the insidious fear that she was right. Now, in his great secret, did he not know her wrong? So, the mixed element of family had not seemed unbearable. For Quincy could not know that his perverse delight in watching his mother, by her words, tear down her hold in him was far more ruinous to his composure than the pain of failure to help Adelaide build up hers. By permitting his mother to act counter to her primal place in his emotions, he was merely tangling and maiming them. This rational proof of her disharmony could distress him. But it could not touch her hold. It could serve merely to make it a less bearable, but not less real thing.
Here then, was college, once more—the callous theater in which he would enact his scene.
There had been no word or letter between him and Julia. He was glad of this. It made his march across the Campus toward the Professor’s office a less fearful effort. It justified the conviction which he willed, that she had loosed her hold on him, bade him follow his conscience. But was he following his conscience?
He stood before the silent, yellow door of the office. He straightened visibly as if he had meant to measurehimself against it—against what it signified. What was he following? What was it, while he pondered, that had driven him here; and now—had driven his list in signal against the yellow door?
Silence, again. And in this lack of substance in response, something fell away from him. It was as if he had leaned all his soul against an answer and found only emptiness. He was glad. He would go away. He would never come back. He feared lest perhaps the Professor should be there. He tried to retreat. And the door opened. There he was—big and undiminished, smiling invulnerably at him. His outstretched hand drew Quincy back.
“Will you wait—just five minutes? I am busy with another man.”
There was no way of escape. Quincy sat down on the step and waited. His mind was empty. He felt the grey stone stair about him. He saw a break in the plastered ceiling. He put his fingers against his eyes and asked how it was that what these round things saw, he also seemed to see. He tried to rehearse the ordeal that impended—to ascertain what it was to be. He got no farther than: “How do you do, Mr. Deering?” He repeated this, over and over and over. It became a drone and a sing-song and a mockery.... And then, he was actually within—alone with him. And he had forgotten to say the one thing he had rehearsed: “How do you do, Mr. Deering?”
The Professor looked at him searchingly, made him sit down at the big desk, stood, himself, between him and the window, his generous hands clasped behind his back.
“Well, Mr. Burt—what brings you here?” A pause. “You are in trouble?”
“Yes, Mr. Deering.”
The big man’s face softened. He moved away beneath a high rack of books, in order that the boy should not need to stare into the light.
“Would you rather have me sit down, also?”
Quincy felt his consideration. “No,” he said.
“Very well, then—” The Professor’s face was gently serious, as if he could not brook the weakness of a delay in starting.
“Professor Deering—Professor Deering—” But Quincy could not go on. He arose to his feet. That helped. But what he said amazed him as deeply as the other. “Professor Deering—tell me about you and your wife.”
Mr. Deering took the remark without a tremor. His face darkened and his brow brooded. His clasped hands fell forward to his side. He did not mistake the nature of the boy.
“You have a right to know?” he asked, softly.
“I love her, Professor Deering.”
They stood, not far apart, facing each other, firmly. And in the pause, neither of them breathed. It seemed to Quincy at that moment impossible that all this should be true. He watched the scene with a fiendish interest, as if waiting for an inevitable ruin.
The Professor swallowed hard. And then, he spoke.
“You love her. So do I. That gives you a right to ask what you have asked. Sit down.”
He gestured the boy back into his seat.
“We are in strangely similar positions, Mr. Burt. We both love her. Neither of us has her. There is no more to say.”
“Neither of us—?”
“Yes. She is my wife; but she is not mine. At first, of course, I believed she was. But she withdrew.”
“She accuses you of withdrawing, Mr. Deering!” The boy cried this out, as if in pain.
The other bit his lip, savagely. “Then you have heard both sides, Mr. Burt? What more can you demand?”
And again, there was a pause.
“Did you come here,” the big man’s voice was low and vibrant with his question, “did you come here to judge me?”
Quincy hid his face in his hands. “To judge you? To judge you? Good God! I came here to ask you to judge me!”
A jet of understanding shivered through the man. Quincy was not looking. And in that moment, his face broke. He righted himself, mastered himself and strode toward the boy. He wrenched his hands from his face.
“Look up!” he cried.
And Quincy met his clear, deep brown eyes—met them unflinchingly, his head strained up to do so, his body still huddled in his chair, his wrists hotly clenched in the hands of the Professor.
The Professor dropped his hold.
“We cannot judge each other, Quincy. That would be as unfair, one way as the other. I do not understand. But I have stopped questioning. We can spare one another that. And without tangling one another further, we can go on, solving our lives.”
He stopped; and stepping back, surveyed the boy. “You will not misunderstand the spirit in which I have received you. Do not turn your back onanything—on me, for instance, or on her. Be a man. Now go.”
He spoke with a gigantic effort. And now, he held out his hand.
Quincy looked at it. He leaned back rigidly against the easy path of taking it.
“Professor,” he said, “I cannot take your hand.”
The hand dropped back to the Professor’s side. A flash of anger went before a cloud of pain. Both of these Quincy saw on his face. And then, after a silence, Mr. Deering spoke:
“Mr. Burt,” he said, “your impulse in being unwilling to take my hand, since you were willing to come to me—I confess—I cannot understand it. It is due either to weakness or to a worse thing. You have disappointed me,—for the first time.... Think it over. And come back to me, when you can take my hand.” He walked toward the door, and, flinging it open—: “Good-bye,” he said.
So Quincy went away.
Such were the auspices of junior year.
Everything seemed gone which he had so bravely builded up. Eighteen years it had taken him to gain a vantage point in life, to breathe life’s air without pain and meet life’s onslaught with a kind of joy. And then, after one brief excursion, everything had collapsed, everything had died; and only he remained—he, the eternal constant, but bruised and shrunken and stripped of even the glimmer of understanding. What had been wrong with him? What false fire had this been, making his warmth and his vision?
Quincy trudged through the campus, bound for his room, as a wounded beast seeks his lair. Several of his mates passed him. He was forced to stop andshake their hands and meet their perfunctory questions as to his summer. And all of them felt the coldness of this fellow, Burt; and Quincy knew that all of them felt this. So he avoided stopping when he could. And he shut the door of his room behind him—it was as if to blot out the serene self-satisfaction of the college buildings under whose stony eyes he had had to pass. And he rejoiced at the emptiness of his room. And so, he sank into a chair and began feeling for his wound.
But it was utterly hopeless.
The room had not yet been placed in order. A trunk stood on the floor; a carpet was rolled away in the corner; chiffonière and book-box and divan huddled together, giving an air of disarray. He could not find his wound, in such a clutter. He knew merely that its pain submerged him, flooded its position, made him feel that all of him was drenched with blood. Vacantly, like this, he sat for an hour. And then, an idea drew him from the room.
He boarded a car. And now, he was in the open; hatless, panting, seeking nature as a solace. The gentle woods flared away in their autumnal dress. The wind tarried in the branches, shaking the red leaves downward with the fresh force of its news. Quincy marched on, over the full-blown grass. A copse of locust trilling before him, a harsh space where malignant-colored sumachs mingled with the thickspread blackberry briars that caught and stung him—and then, he reached a grove of fir. Here, he sat down. The ground was moist and green. And a great spruce spread out its balmful verdure. Beyond lay the parched woods. But he was free and cut off from them. Here, he should be able to fix his wound.
From the clouds of feeling that swirled up in him, the clear-cut figure of Julia Deering came forth. He resented her. There was no love in his beholding her. This hurt. For it was an emptiness that ached. And then, a strange sensation filtered through. Why did he resent her? Despise her almost? He had hurt her; that was why. He had been unfair to her; that was why. He had betrayed her and she lay silent in his mind throughout, unstirring, unprotesting. This was the unforgivable thing. This was why. How could he love a creature himself had maimed?
For a brief moment, Quincy veered upon the truth. Had he but dared to alight there, to go no farther, to drive his standard and hold firm! Quincy began to see how weak and straddling it had been to go to him, to remain silent toward her; began to see what a fund of cowardly uncertainty his virtue hid, that prompted him to feel a guilt toward him, instead of a right for her; began to see that in his action lay a hedging, a shallowness of feeling, a failure to build up his own morale and his own measure, as a force which was life-saving should! He had maimed everything. He had not stood by him, not stood by her. From each, he had been willing to receive; and his response in each case had been a blow in the back, once that back was turned. Oh! there was health in this hatred, this detestation of himself which gripped him now like a storm! It was torture. But from such torture he could arise and still create. All that he needed was not to escape the storm; to invite, rather, the heart of it; to remain drowned in it, till it had swept him clean.
But though he had veered so nigh, he was too unstable not to fly on and past. The vision of the truth died out behind him in the spray-dashed horizon.Quincy began to defend himself, to rationalize, to seek a way of self-forgiveness. And of course, that which he sought, he found. He did not know what Julia had meant. He had been mad with Julia; and his madness was over, as madness should be. Perhaps, she also had been mad and her madness, also, had disappeared. His scruple, driving him to Professor Deering, was a clean and brave one. He had a conscience. What could a conscience be, but good and strong? Who ever had dared suggest that conscience was a coward and a traitor? Professor Deering simply had not understood. He would not lose him, he would make him understand. And the great man, regretting his injustice, would cry him welcome and crave his pardon. As to Julia—he felt with strong effort, he might still be able to look upon her as a friend. His infatuation was gone. But so might go, also, his new repulsion.
Many times, Quincy had alighted in this false haven. He should have known its meretriciousness. He should have known that it would as surely fail him as it had failed before. So now, a moment after, the smooth way receded, the storm swept back and he was no better off than he had been. But far beyond the passed horizon, the shore of truth had died away. Ahead might be illimitable seas, lashed with his fury. But the truth was gone.
And so, unsuccored even by this last resort, Quincy abandoned his fir grove and went back, unheeding, through the magnificence of autumn.
College resumed its mechanical paces; Quincy went through them poorly. His marks fell to dangerously near the point of failing. But he sustained them, barely, as he sustained the business of taking food andsleep. Garsted was gone. He had graduated and Quincy rejoiced in his absence. It would have been impossible to talk with him. It would have been more difficult with him about, to remain hedged in his solitude, as he desired.
And so, through the fall, his feelings fought each other. There was no giving out. The conflict was within, mute, targetless, internecine. At times, his repulsion for Julia paled before mad lapses into passion. These turned upon him, smote him and sent him shuddering back into repulsion. There had been no word of her, no glimpse of her. He knew with clearness, only that this was his own doing. The Professor he saw twice weekly, in his class. But he was so easily aloof on his high platform, fronting a score of boys, that this habitual sight was nothing.
There had been months of his silence.
And then, one day—without preamble—Quincy went out to see Julia Deering. It was not his old passion; nor his still older love. It was a need—all of his energies centered upon seeing her—no more. He rang the bell. And while the maid left him waiting in the hall, he stood consumed by his fears of disgrace and by a miserable effort to hold up his head. The maid returned with word that she was out. He walked away, every fiber of him straining against the direction of his walking, reiterant that she was there and that, with a little force, he might have seen her. Next day, he returned. And upon his fourth attempt, the maid with a bland smile of sympathy showed him into the little over-decorated room.
And now, she stepped within. Deliberately, her back toward him, she shut the door. Then, she faced about.
“I decided after all,” she said, “to let you see me. The first time you came I was here. The other two times, I was really out. How are you?”
He did not answer, so full he was of looking at her. She seemed older. The drawn skin below her eyes was flushed and feverish. Her eyes were immeasurably deep and soft—as if some psychic lance had pierced them. Her body was strained forward. It seemed to tremble as does a delicate blade of steel when it resounds. Surely, this was an ineffably lovely thing that he had lost! For he had lost her. Her lips showed that, in their quivering strength; ere she had spoken. And her hands showed that, in their calm mastery,—and the backward jerk of her shoulders and the cold fullness of her hair. This was no lover; this was a creature without his ken, whom he had wounded. For every vibrance of her voice and form seemed a response, not to his need, not to his love, not even to his weakness, but to his hurt.
He stood there, forgetful of himself. And all of the words that were spoken came from her.
“I thought,” she said, “after your so plainly-speaking silence, that you would understand, without inflicting this upon us both.”
Then, she smiled. There was no rancor. But she could not keep her hurt from speaking.
“Dear, poor, Quincy,” she went on, almost as if he had been the messenger of the dead boy, her lover, “don’t you see, that after what you have done, after what you have failed to do, the one thing left that will not be altogether horrible, is to have an end? There are times in life, boy, when an end is the one salvation.” She smiled again, as if at her idea. “Of course, the final one of these times is death. But wehave had no difficulty, have we, to put an end to this—without that?”
Quincy shuddered. He wished to ask her if she loved him, had ever loved him. But he could say nothing. She went on:
“I idealized you, Quincy. I do not regret it. As long as I dared hope—as long, that is, as I could keep from seeing you as you really are, I was so happy! I needed you. You were kind—for a little while. And then, you, also, could not bear my kindness. So it was, was it not? That was the reason why you stayed away? Well—there are women like me, whose kindness is unbearable. I often think—it is a little game of mine that brings me solace—that men who yearn have a better chance. The poet can create a universe to serve. This is wide enough to stem his aching. But a woman—all she can have is a mate and a child, to cover up her wound. Her intensity is equal to the poet’s. I am sure of that. But what she has is not equal to what he has. That is unfair, is it not?”
Quincy was hushed before the spectacle of his loss. Why could he not still throw himself at her feet? Did his unworthiness at length shame him from even hoping? How rich and full was this living beauty before the bloodless, craven things in his mind—ideals, conscience, aspirations—for which he had cast her out!
Again, respecting his silence, she spoke to him:
“There is one thing, Quincy, I still hope for. One thing I am still so humble as to ask of you. You remember what I once said to you:—that what I needed was the feeling that I would live on, in some way, in your own life. Quincy dear, do not let that part of me that stays in you turn bitter! Keep it pure, dearboy. Let it make you happy, once in a while. Cherish it! Oh, I beg this of you!” She stopped and her hands clenched before her.
“I ask this, not selfishly. I know you so well! If you can keep this part of me happy and clean within you, it may save you some day. I know that—and I fear, I fear what may come, if you do not.”
Now tears were there, glistening down her cheeks.
She seemed to be waiting for his promise—waiting for him to give her the hope she had been humble enough to ask. But Quincy stood there silent; full of, and measuring, his loss. And as her glance sought out his eyes, it came back from them, unrefreshed and undiminished.
Slowly, she closed her eyes as if thereby shutting in the last effort of her soul to venture forth.
And then, with a faint tremble, she turned away.
“Good-bye,” she said softly, and so left the room.