Therest of the year was a shadow under which he walked.
He abandoned himself completely. He let his life slip utterly from his hands. It was as if it had been a thing so strange and so repugnant, that it was useless, even as it was loathsome, to keep it with him. So he allowed himself, without effort or regret, to slip away.
He did not go back to the Deering house, nor did he ever again shake Professor Deering’s hand. These were things that had gone from him with his dreams. He did his work. He spoke more affably than before, to his comrades. He even joined them a little in their activities. But it was vacant intercourse.
The woods were redolent of bitter memories, so he avoided them. When he walked through them their rebuke prompted him to run. And when he ran, as of old, their rich suggestion held him back. So he abandoned both.
He joined the track-team in the spring. But he ran badly, now that he strained so to win his race. The students had not forgiven him. They saw him come, and when he failed to prove his worth, they dropped him without a glimmer of regret.
His dreams he turned savagely against, and against all that nurtured them, or harbored them or swung in tune with them. He gave up reading. He proved to himself that art was a mockery, and culture a delusion. He turned toward science, about which—knowingnothing of it—he could find no ancient landmark of himself to hate. He came to disapprove of college. He decided to lead a useful life and to obey his mother. He believed that at last he had found a way to gain his family’s respect and that their past evaluation of his merits had come very near the truth. But now, he was done with the clouds of fancy. He knew he had a good mind. He would set it to some concrete plow and make, at last, a concrete furrow for his life.
He told his father that he had had enough of college. He asked him, after a short vacation, to find a place for him in business—that he might enter in the fall. His father agreed, looking at him queerly, asking no question. His mother said: “Well, you lasted longer than Jonas.” Rhoda congratulated him and Adelaide seemed hurt. But none of these typical reactions worried Quincy. He had known what to expect.
He decided that he must cultivate his brother, Marsden. He sensed the cripple’s flinty empiricism, and this seemed to him the proper weapon to beat away, once and for all time, the residue of dream that clogged his life.
And so, the year came to an end.
He had turned away his face from it—from all that it contained—from Julia. He thought that by so doing, he was turning his face forward.
Beautyis a rose that needs tears to keep it fresh. Sensing the purport of this, Quincy resolved that there be no more crying.
He was in an office—a huge, dinning, polished office of which the remote head was an acquaintance of his father, a man avid, according to Josiah’s warning, for youths who were alert, and relentless against youths with any but “serious” ideas. He was a capitalist. And since, by circumstance and lack of soul, all of his life had been expended in leash to a grindstone, he was convinced that just this fact, and it alone, contained the essence of good and right. The business wherein he had lived he made to be a temple wherein he might worship himself. And there was no temple but his temple, no success but his success. His obtuseness was the cornerstone, his narrowness the nave, his greed the altar, his purblind word the choir of that temple. His limitations were its creed, and his life’s chanceful directions were its law. He moreover, taken in form, was apotheosis. He was the sentimental sort of business man, the type known by America as “hard-headed and conservative.” No sex-bound woman could have been more moved by a romance than he, by a failure. Indeed, to his feeling, dabbling in stocks was as gross a sin as, to the feeling of the priest, adultery. His name was Amos Cugeller. And Josiah Burt was rather surprised at himself for having done Quincy so good a turn. But Quincy was convincedthat his “serious” days were come, his worthless period over. He believed himself now capable of putting Marsden and his father to blush with his materialism. He had screwed himself tight and rigid, calling this confidence.
With Mr. Cugeller, of course, the archetype of “seriousness” was the cog of a machine; the nadir of “worthlessness” was to stand alone, making no money—like a wild-flower.
The first year of his new life, Quincy was at home. It was the family’s last year in town. The Frondham mansion had been purchased and was in process of redecoration. Upon the following fall, with Jonas comfortably married, Quincy’s parents and Adelaide and Marsden were to move back to the land. New York had never really welcomed them. The period of dazzlement was over. The period of sheer discomfort had long since set in. And it had been enhanced by their ignoring that New York never really welcomed anyone. They moved away then, with a feeling of resentment. And thereby, Quincy came to live alone. So this new year of sharing life at home was to become a vivid one, when, later, it was seen to be the last.
What confronted the boy most immediately was, of course, the city. All the rest was new perhaps. But its newness was a growth, and that which had gone before had subliminally taught him what such growth must be. New York, however, as he now received it, was unheralded and unanticipated. Mornings, as he went downtown, its acerb qualities entered him most forcibly. This was due perhaps to the night’s influence upon himself in opening his spiritual pores, making himmore sensitive, since more alien, to the city’s nature. But also, doubtless, the early drubbing itself awake from the miasma of its sleep calls to the surface in the morning the City’s essences.
Quincy’s heart misgave him in these first trials. He hung on a strap in the elevated train. The shaken condiment of sluggish bodies and drowned voices and falsetto-screaming newspapers was like a plaster for drawing out his strength. As they lurched on, the cadenced rise and fall of the train’s pace grew to be a hammer on his consciousness. The streets hurled by in a drab monotone whose single, ugly accent could be no other than that of a fierce indifference. The crowd congealed within itself, a maze of cluttered energies, having no mind. And as the mournful streets struck past, a tithe of the crowd leaked out, mute, sullen, while those remaining gave no flash of interest. None of the murmurous expectancy of a crowd turned to adventure, none of the resilient interplay of personality transfigured the dull mass. A community this was! The iron car and the vile brick houses moved.Itseemed to rot! Quincy felt lonely unto pain in it. So cruel the silences of the woods had never been, as this inert cacophony of union.
And then, the sequel, as the train swung on, leaving him behind at the place which irony called his “destination.” The huddled, nervous, slack-eyed flow churned by some unknown design between the dizzy walls of offices and there absorbed as if to add by their own crushed spirit to the towers of brick and mortar. The poisonous sense of innumerable little cells—like the one to which he went—where all this half-quick matter was laid out, agitant yet fixed like flies in the shifting scum of stagnant waters. A pulp it was for theincreasing of the City. Quincy thought of the innumerable living things of the sea whose rotted bones made up the chalk cliffs of England. So, it appeared to him, had the City come to be. For what other than some such passion, inexorable and perverse, could explain the blind din of traffic merging into the barriers of buildings—monuments all to work’s travesty, where the pride of labor was shrunk to an interminable lamentation?
Each morning, at first, these things gripped Quincy while his heart forsook him. So that he found it hard to go, hard to bear, easy to fall away.
And in the office, the dread rhythm was continued. Here, men, boys, girls were drawn together, the secret of their lives apart forever a little dimmer in their eyes. And here, unendingly, they stayed with no hope more bright than that fortune hold them there, since that hold was living, and with no intercourse more high than that of wolves sharing a carcass, through want of strength, not will, to drive each other off. How poor a thing it was for which each day, they shook off their souls, trampled those flowers, their thoughts, to conjoin and fit in here! And yet, little as they accomplished, that little was not theirs. Theirs was merely the naked hold on living, the taste of the shared carcass,—life. But was this living? Decomposition rather—the blind, inglorious making of chalk cliffs! Quincy could almost see the process. Soon the spirit they were forever starving would die, and the flowers they were forever trampling would cease to bloom. And if the rotting carcass grew not noisome to them, it must inexorably be that their senses were rotting also. And lo! a higher city, from their miserable contribution.
Quincy was alert to the danger of these feelings. He sensed in them a recrudescence of the life he had determined to shut out. He resolved not to see these things since to do so was to have eyes and to have eyes was to have tears. He elected to look upon these things as a treachery to the new self which he believed was born—strong and rebellious—from his past mistakes. His effort to shake off such thoughts, trample such moods, he chose to know as will. And his savage muting of the least vibrance in him toward his surroundings, he chose to know as strength. He had not yet learned of the power and the efficiency of weakness.
And so, from the first loathing, grew a system of defenses; from the first bewilderment, a hedge of rationalization—the world’s course, miniatured....
It had been a common way with Quincy to bear about with him an undigested load of his past experiences. So it had been in childhood, in love; so it was still. The pitiful unknitting of his life at college had been no analysis at all. Even as the pattern of the effect of home upon him had been the later consequence of tracing back from its felt stamp, so now, away from it, Quincy was to attempt a reason of his abandoning college.
The conscious mind is an interpreter, a journal. It does not create; neither does it impartially report. Rather does it deflect, refract and so transform what is, into a thing acceptable to the mind’s ego—the journal’s reader. And what it gives, with the nature of its versions, the demand brings about. So now, with Quincy—the call had gone forth for an accounting. It was as if he had sent in his query: “I am here. How did it come about that I am here? Andabove all, let there be nothing in the report that I can not endure!” For this is the way of all men. And until each man has sharpened his instrument for vision within himself, there is no need in his decrying, or attempting to reform, the frauds and mockeries of government and church and public utterance. The amount of misconception swells with the mass. He who clears the eyes of one child toward itself does more for the truth than the leader of a national rebellion. And until there be a nation made up of men who were just such children, all reform and all revolt must be a romantic variant upon some theme of falsehood.
It pleased Quincy, then, to look upon the calamities of college as the result of foolish conduct and false direction. His idealizing, his dream-gathering, his emotion had been at fault. Manifestly, then, the turn to make was away from ideals and dreams and feeling. These things upon which he had leaned had given way. They must therefore have been fictions. For if one leans upon Reality, one finds support. All that Professor Deering and his wife and his attitudes at college seemed to imply must have been fictions. Reality must lie at the outset, in the antipodal direction—away, that is, from culture, truth-seeking, love and the qualities of self. He had been sleeping with stars, creating flowers, parleying with extramundane fires. He had made great mistakes. He could now make reparation. So, in this way of finding superficial fault, Quincy escaped a scrutiny of his more basic weaknesses—escaped the truth.
Here he was, then, launched upon a rushing tide of complete reaction—an adverse avalanche. He did not know that he was again rushing from himself, that falsehood is an easing drug, and that it was the truthwhich had hurt him. Long, long since, the flash of it which he had entertained that autumn day in the woods after his talk with the Professor, had fallen beyond the rim of his world. He did not know how cowardice had betrayed him in the guise of loyalty and virtue, and how the very subtle plea of the herd had filled his ears, edging him on to serve it and deny himself, give up to it his treasures, in hope of some vague interest which the herd proclaimed as duty and morality and good. He did not suspect a weakness rotting far deeper than his attempt to bridge from Julia’s love to the Professor’s friendship, menacing far more than was implied in his failure to hold either. In the tingling rebuke of his dismissal upon both sides, he did not see a measure of his deserts, nor in Julia’s fears for him did he understand the possibility of reason. The real truth must have swelled that love, meeting the other friendship; the real good must have nurtured both. But Quincy missed wider than these. He had defiled the separate gifts of a man and a woman, with his crude effort to bind and compass them in a view imposed and a standard borrowed. But Quincy had erred deeper than this. For he did not guess that, behind it all, lay the fear of venturing alone, the fear of being a measure to himself and of wielding his life as his life’s measure. He did not dare to dream that there was in him, glorying itself, the ancient, leprous fear of the herd’s children to graze outside of the herd’s shadow. All of these truths had trembled in him; he had rejected them as unendurable; they had died away. And now, worst of all, he was content! His failure was breeding a self-satisfaction—failure’s way. For in that breeding lies failure’s secret—its birth and its recurrence. The eternal slave lauds his cell and hisshackles, calling them home and law. The rare master ignores his freedom, looking beyond it.
This year was the one when he was least at odds with his family. He sensed a truce in his father, as if the old man had held off, stepped back and were scrutinizing him. One day, toward Christmas, his father spoke to him, before they went in to the paneled dining room:
“I saw your boss, Mr. Cugeller, to-day.”
Sarah was at once intent, laying aside her knitting—for Rhoda’s expected baby.
“He seems satisfied with you, my boy.”
There was a stroke of tender respect in the appellation. His mother smiled with surprise and sighed with relief.
“Come, dear—dinner.”
Here was a new atmosphere indeed. Quincy sat down with a sense of mastership that goes with a sense of having been accepted. He judged that his parents were good, homely folk. He judged their respect a worthy thing. He felt arms go out and draw him within the circle. And it seemed to him that this was what he had longed for, fought for, always. He judged his past revolts as misapplied. He judged himself, if anything, more harshly than had they.
That evening, Adelaide found him in his room. He had brought home some sales-slips which by rights belonged to office hours.
“Do you really care for business, Quint?” she asked, seating herself on his bed.
The boy had not changed for his sister. He resented her lack of vision into his revolution. Something unconscious within him must have told him thatif Adelaide failed to see it, it could not, after all, be so very deep. This made him strike an imperious and patronizing air.
“Of course I do!”
“You never seemed to be turning in that direction.”
“I had no direction at all, my dear. Now, I have one.”
Adelaide leaned forward, her hands supporting her head.
“Why, Quint!” she said, “You talk as if business were the one direction possible.”
“Well—” he combatted her in this easy way of combatting himself, “what other direction is there?”
“You ask me? I—I—thought you might study—something.”
Her vagueness pleased him. It made her easier to confound. “Study something! That just about expresses it.”
She knew that the Deerings were forbidden ground. She was untaught in leading up to such without an immediate trespass. So she was silent. But here was a chance for Quincy to deal a blow at that self of him which he had buried partially alive. He went on, with eloquence.
“Adelaide—I was a fool. I’m surprised you didn’t see it, for yourself. I made a mess of things. I was a dreamer. I’ve stopped now!” He brandished his pile of yellow papers. “America has no place for men who make a profession of what fills leisure moments. What do philosophizing and book-reading get you? What earning capacity have they? It’s been my experience—and I’ve had enough to speak—that these professional fillers of leisure moments fall flat as dough when real life strikes them.”
Adelaide was looking at him intently. It seemed to Quincy that she was heeding with so serious an air not so much his words as a part of him that had been silent.
“Why don’t you speak frankly with me, ever?” she said at last.
“What do you want to know?”
“I want to know aboutyou, Quincy—not about all these ideas with which you keep on fighting yourself!”
He sneered at her. “Aren’t they worth anything, then?”
“Not in your mouth, Quincy,” was her quick rejoinder.
It was his turn to look intent. He felt somewhat ashamed to meet her little, soft eyes. He saw the crinkly flesh about them. He felt guilty in so scrutinizing her. But to hide his shame and guilt he had to keep on looking. And as he did so, Adelaide grew fearful of her boldness, regretful lest she had wounded him. Truth, after all, was less important than his well-being. If truth made him uncomfortable, it was a thing to be slain! With a real victory in her hands, she gave it up. She rose and went toward the door.
“You’re busy. I’ll not disturb you now”—and she left.
Quincy looked where she had gone. And then, he looked at his work.
“Damn!” he said. “I’m too tired to-night”
He put on his hat and coat and went to a nearby vaudeville. He had an empty evening. Thereby, he managed to escape his sister, himself, the suddenly obnoxious sales-slips. For the sales-slips, he hated Adelaide; for Adelaide, he hated the sales-slips;—for entertaining either feeling, he hated himself. It was alittle case of general annihilation—a first, subtle, unconscious taste of the delights of emptiness....
This taste was nourished in talk with Marsden.
Marsden was thirty. Without aid or consultation, there he was—a mature man! This seemed wonderful to Quincy who had never dared or cared to watch him grow, It seemed right to him that a cripple should be a child—or a young man. But to be thirty and have to be wheeled about; to have grey hair and no salary; to be very wise, yet very helpless! Quincy felt the samemalaisein Marsden’s presence that might have been expected of a stranger. He was resolved that this must change. And it was interesting, now they talked together, to watch this gnarled being gather itself tight and close from the mists which in Quincy’s former thoughts had constituted Marsden. As Quincy now listened to his words, he watched his head. And he was minded of a shell, full of the murmur of some vastness which it derided through its own emptiness. Here also, was a sense to be submerged like his first taste of the City.
Said Marsden: “I never had much use for you, Quincy, for I always took you for a ninny.”
“Why?”
As the boy asked, he heard his voice, rather high and tremulous against the resonance of Marsden’s. This contrast made him conscious that he was being swayed, in the very accusation, to agree with it.
Marsden answered him. His willingness to talk to Quincy was a new thing—a compliment. So, at least, the boy took it. He was being noticed, he was being taken into consideration. The boy allowed no doubt of the value of all this. He allowed no memory of other notice, of other consideration which had beengiven him, and in the light of which all this was mockery. That way lay hating his new self. And self-satisfaction had to win.
Marsden had been aware of his desire, exerted through all his youth, to erect idealities against life’s barrenness and to feed on these. Marsden seemed to assume that, of course, such a behavior was both bad and foolish; that life’s barrenness was the sole thing to acknowledge, that feeding on any ideality, or any ideality on which to feed, was adjunct to the name of “ninny.” The boy bowed—asserting that he had changed.
“I think you have,” said Marsden. And Quincy was gratified once more.
It was now, that the sensation and the delight of emptiness were furthered.
“What is the use,” Marsden rhetorically asked, “what is the use of blinking the facts?—Here we are, having to feed ourselves and get some pleasure out of the world. If you deny the world it will deny you, and that means—wipe you out. If you please it, it will give you a little something. Of course, even then, it will cheat you and finally run you through the shoulder-blades. But if you don’t please it, it won’t give you even the little that cheating you implies. It won’t give you even the breathing-space before the dagger-thrust. It will not let you come to life, at all. And then, what have you got? Dreams;—a handful of shoddy, aged make-believes that will poison you with their mold and rust.”
All this—and more of the sort—proved Marsden’s new friendship for his brother. Quincy was very glad to have it. It occurred to him that here was a cripple happier than he had been! a cripple, therefore,to be emulated! He wanted to be happy. He had not been happy long on the old path. If dry bones and a bent back pointed an easier way than the glad promptings of his own rhythmic body, then manifestly the impellings of free muscles and of eyes that danced in the sun must be denied. It might seem natural to find gaiety through them and the old plays that he had undertaken. But it was not so. Wiser it was, then, to incline before the successful mandate of dry bones and a bent back. Moreover, in this new atmosphere of business, Marsden seemed to fit in as less of an anomaly, more of a norm. There was a somewhat all about him kindred to this cripple with his aging head and his brittle, tottering body and his cavernous hot eyes. Marsden appeared to him almost as a symbol and a prophet. If he accepted the City, it was an apt step to accept him. And if he went about in the City extolling its nature, denying its deformities, then Marsden also ceased to be a sickly monster. To this Quincy had brought himself—to this brink of assimilation. In his old world, the sun’s slant through the trees had been the morning’s journalistic headline, a tender man’s word the affair of state, his own surviving spirit the season’s crop;—there, Marsden had indeed been a poor, pitiable outcast, a grotesque denial of the world’s lilt, to be avoided and to be feared. But now it was different. Marsden’s limbs seemed no longer an exception to the world’s meaning—which had grown also lame and palsied. His malignant power, smouldering in the gloom of his infirmities, seemed of a note with the world’s might, smothered as deep in its rotting malady. Marsden’s philosophy sat on his helplessness and healthlessness, making them power and a grim enjoyment. And even so, Quincy’s new world builded itsprestige from its barriers, mined its pride from the innumerable things—its wealth and laws—that cluttered it, gleaned pleasure from a poverty of vision making real freedom and real adventure undesirable.
Marsden and the City—how one they were! Marsden in his cripple’s chair that was the seat of his dominion, Marsden who had builded his state and founded his pleasure in the sick senses of his being. And the City which gained its eminence and reason also from its shackles, from its myopia, from its deformities. Eloquently, these two, shut off alike from nature’s rhythm, thriving alike in the shelter of their moribund condition, fitted together.
And now, won by the hard glamor of their perfection within their morbid limits, Quincy elected to join their company. Marsden the cripple must be his captain. For no wild flower, standing alone, was shielded in such permanence and might as he.
This extremity of choice tokened the violence of effort which Quincy put to his so-called adjustment; and this violence of effort proved the strength of what still held him back. Needless to say, in all this time, Quincy did not grow fond of Marsden; he never reached the stage of even being comfortable in his presence. But in so far as he had not grown fond of work, nor of the City either—not grown comfortable in them, the analogy of resolution to abide with them and with his brother suffered no shock. If aught gave way in this factitious structure, it must be the base. All had been builded logically. And logic in a superstructure is a good thing; logic in a foundation is a lie. And the first gust of feeling, the first tremor of the unconscious, may make it totter.
Meantime, Quincy furrowed a rut for himself inMr. Cugeller’s office. He went about with Adelaide and with her friends. He struck up an acquaintance with a young man called Herbert Lamory, who worked beside him.
Lamory was a cousin of Mr. Cugeller—a handsome boy who spent money handsomely even though he did not have it. He took Quincy about—introduced him to his acquaintances—undertook his education. He was bright and charmful, shallow and content. Quincy grew very fond of him.
And so, the year went. Work progressed admirably. Its new intricate developments from the stupid beginnings captivated Quincy in a sense. So he applied himself. And he had a mind that could have mastered far more difficult tasks than those of business. That is, he had a real mind, whereas business requires chiefly an applied and unvarying intuition. This same mind, intent on business, must have made him prosper. But mind has a way of varying and wandering. And if this takes place, it is worse in business—infinitely worse—than no mind at all. However, that time was not yet.
Herbert Lamory became a help to Marsden. By this friendship was assuaged in Quincy the lingering discomfort of being a disciple. Herbert seemed pleasant practice to what his brother had so miserably marked in theory. Herbert also was warped, eyeless, deformed. Yet, with all this, he had contrived to found a really pleasurable Helicon. Quincy liked Herbert. And the spirit within him of his Protestant forefathers was glad at having so amiable a pasture wherein to let out his brother’s and the City’s perverted dogmas.
At a subscription dance to which Herbert took him, Quincy again met Clarice Lodge.
The lit cold room seemed to glance off from the slender heads and the throats of the men and women, so that it was they who were really lit and cold. The figures pressed down below the rigid walls smothered in gilt and fluting and brocade—a mass of colorless detail despite the gowns, a cluttering of motionless undeviation despite the dancing. And of a sudden, all of it was a unit addressing Quincy with a strained air—like some beplastered woman between the times of desire and seed, who talks to an indifferent neighbor, glancing beyond him. Yes: it was old, it was rouged and, if one watched beneath the dazzle of lace, even a trifle knock-kneed and a trifle lame! Yet its voice as it addressed him was high and piercing. What troubled Quincy was that there should be no way of answer. He went through the gesture of understanding and of being part. He also talked to an indifferent neighbor, yearning beyond.
The dance and rigid music gave way to innumerable little eddies physical and murmurous, of conversation. The long hall shrunk in this more intricate design. The crowd turned upon itself with false gestures of ease, deeply aware of its own stiffness. All of this life moved as if embarrassed by what neighbored it. So its impulse became broken also, its voice became a sum of flinty, too small mosaics, its movements lignified. Here and there was the gleam of an eye lit by a mind. And where that was, there was a note dissenting, a line out of all composition with the rest. Quincy was learning balance. He held himself erect in this disharmony of currents, joined so compactly because the place and the purpose formed a likedisharmony. He was swirled about here, like a canoeist amid mild breakers, where the ocean meets the land and it is neither land nor ocean. There was no sense here of direction so that his swirling to and fro was proper. All that was needed was not to be submerged. And this prowess, Quincy had attained. By being aware of the unit of all this, the surface grew hard beneath him so as to support him. In this consciousness, he was sustained from pressing upon one point, from sinking with a weight of interest below the convention-outlined waves. So long as he could survive in this impersonality, he was safe.
And then, he espied Clarice Lodge.
With this stress, the dance grew tenuous; the crowd turned from hard, choked material to vapor; the music which had been obtrusive, separate, was a mere rhythm of accompaniment. All of it in a trice became an incense to him. It had been external, alien—copable. Now, it was no case of balancing above it nor of falling in. All of it was an atmosphere. And all of him was a maze of pores, aching and yearning to receive.
He pressed his way toward her through shreds and fragments of life that gesticulated, gyred, sent up and over him their acrid wafts of perfume. A silk gown swished against him; a bare arm touched his hand; a pointed slipper scarred the surface of his own. The couples stood close together, clapped their hands metallically for an encore. The band turned back into the nearly naked rhythm it had just torn to scraps—repiecing it. The couples swayed and slid away. He lost his quarry in the once more thickening, knotted turmoil—half substance and half atmosphere. He was whiffed to the margin of it. He stood now, flanked by a long straggled row of men, until once morethe music gave him respite to resume his search.
The crowds streaked off with the last chord—veering from the center maëlstrom in tangents of silk and strutting black, subsiding once more in little puddles of voice and posture. As Quincy passed, he felt about him the heat of barely mastered sex slakishly a-stir beneath its gossamer guards of dress and of convention; he caught the shrill flush of the repressed and the unconscious, fretting the smooth lines of talk and rendering cramped the lissome carriage of these bodies. Though his eyes saw no soil, no awkwardness, it was as if he felt the presence of a creamy silk smutted with sweat, or of a gentle drapery tortured from shape by some protrusion. Then he almost ran into Clarice.
She was far more surprised as their hands clasped, than he. For she had changed more. And this was her domain. He had kissed her, so of course she recalled everything about him. He who had been, remained like a crystal in her memory. This Quincy, she knew. Of no other Quincy had she the slightest cognizance. So she was really amazed, finding him in this new strange milieu that was her own, who in her mind could never change from the wild boy of nearly four years past. This flash from her old self had an effect almost as intimate as if his embrace and talk had actually been repeated, there in the glitter of the ball. And as she must have rebuffed any advance at such a time, so now she turned cold and hot for Quincy, from no reason more real than the reality of her recollections.
But if Clarice was disturbed by the old spirit—all she caught,—Quincy was dazed by the new, outer form. And this was the more unwieldly, so that, in a trice, she was the master. Close on her impulse tofend him off for having ventured an old impression in so unapt and new a place, came a desire to attach to him, a nostalgia for her old self whom he had known. In him, she could enjoy this glint of herself at seventeen. For there was the lad she had played with! Her proper partners would not see her metamorphosis. She could be the old Clarice, as this stiff young man was the old Quincy. Her technique of delusion—her need of it—was sharp enough for far harder, less true games.
And so it was that in the blare of a waltz on a crowded floor, Quincy was seen more truly than he would see himself that night, at home, surrounded by the pretensions that he dared not give up.
Clarice cut back to their last talk, once they were alone. Quincy tried bravely to show in the words he spoke that he had changed. And Clarice laughed him out quite as she had laughed out his older pretensions. Thus, they fared well together. And with another dance, filched like the first from one of the proper partners, she invited him to call.
The City’s intricate machinery for bringing about what is already there—an engine for making paper leaves grow on real trees—creates a pathetic dualism even in its girls. It provides well that the gulf of after-marriage between their natures and their positions may be sure to have had time to widen. Already in their choice of friends, girls know the limitations of the laws that bind them, develop a technique of evasion, straddle two mounts in order to ride two ways. And if later, as a clear due of this, they are torn limb from limb, man with his insect vision blames their desire to ride, instead of the false direction in which they have been placed.
It was with some such canny calculation that Clarice welcomed Quincy. She knew well the sort of man whom she must wed. She was able to judge how his capacity for filling certain major needs of a conventionalized life must unfit him for many pleasant matters. She was well prepared to split herself in two, dally with Quincy—while she went on hunting for a husband. And having already classified his assets and her demands on him, she was little prone to tolerate Quincy’s offering aught else. She was well able to cope with the boy’s set resolve to be one of the City’s crowd in his relations. She had plenty of such. And besides, his very desperate wish, now, to show his right within those ranks was proof that she knew, far better than he, what Quincy really was.
And so it came about that the first evening in which he called at her home was the onset of a new consciousness in Quincy. He found it difficult even to mention what at home, or with Herbert, was almost a matter of boast:—that he had abandoned college after three years in order to enter business. He found it hard to air his new born materialism; then hard not to conceal it. He found it hard to take pride in his new contentment; and finally, to be content! Doubtless he felt already that these elements, wherewith he had won recognition since his return, were not the ones that Clarice sought in him. But the significance of this was a slow-dawning thing. First it was imperative that he somewhat understand the qualities of her who was to cherish those self-stultified qualities of himself.
He found a fund of disillusion in Clarice. Bravely and openly she despised the atmosphere she lived in. He was afraid to. For with him, to despise it, was to stop breathing it. For her, this did not seem tofollow. Clarice was not alone quite sure that she would persevere in this land whose mockeries she knew; she was willing to. And she gleaned a constructive aim for her energies in knocking down as she ran along. Here was a mystery for Quincy. The strange admixture of tenderness and flint, joy and detachment, which Clarice displayed, was unknown to him. Willingly, he would have stated that such a girl could not in reality exist. Yet there she was—intellectually radical, emotionally set and conserved—more than existing, living with a clear efficiency and a firm conscience! Nothing she gave him, Adelaide could not have given him to know. But his spirit’s pores were open here. With his unfortunate sister all of him was shut and rigid. That was why these talks counted more.
Clarice knew Herbert Lamory slightly. She had never asked him to call.
“He is pretty empty, I think,” she said. “When I talk with him, it is as if I were talking with a glazed terra-cotta brick on the wall of some one of a million buildings in New York. He fits in just so unobtrusively.”
Quincy realized that this was true, and that, because of this very fitness and his desire to emulate it, he had aligned himself with Herbert.
She went on: “I really can’t understand your devotion to him. You say you’re chums? It reminds me a bit—” she smiled, “of the devotion of a man in the sea for a piece of sea-weed that happens to be floating.”
“A man in the sea is out of his element,” protested Quincy.
“Precisely,” she was content with saying. And as he pondered, there came a pause.
Clarice had something to say upon the subject of failure. Quincy had broached it.
“Think of all those young fellows in our office,” he exclaimed, “and as many more in any other office. How few of them could ever, by reason of actual physical conditions rise from the menial places they now hold! After all, each office has only a few heads. And twenty years from now there won’t be enough new offices to give high places to all these men.”
“No,” said Clarice. “But don’t you think very probably, that only those who reallyfitwill get ahead? I don’t think it is brains or hard work or even luck that makes men succeed in New York. It’sfitting-in.”
“Well, can’t that be learned?”
“I know something about dogs,” said Clarice. “That’s what I’m really talking about, only I’m substituting offices for kennels. Well, blue ribbons aren’t earned, you know. The quality that wins them is there from the beginning. Your other puppies get the same food and the same care. But they don’t earn the ribbon even though they are twice as clever and as strong as the dog that does. Isn’t there an artificial standard for getting ahead in an artificial city? Well—diligence and mind are natural things, the result of natural energies. And what have natural energies to do with artificial standards? I tell you, you must fit in from the beginning. If you don’t, you’ll be like the vast majority of dogs in a kennel—an underdog.”
Quincy felt embarassed. He avoided Clarice’s eyes. But she smiled into him.
“Why did you come and join the kennel, my faun friend?”
“Why did you?” he flashed back at her.
“I am happy here.”
“Well, so am I.”
“It’s the happiness of a bravado. Wait till it wears off. But no, Quincy—don’t wait! You’ll be used to life here, by then. Used to it, that is, enough not to be able to get used to any other. Used to nothing—in other words.”
“You are a very wise girl, Clarice.”
“I was wiser than you, even that summer. That was why I was willing to like you—willing to like you, Quincy, as much as you cared to ask for;—but not willing to see you in New York! In fact,youwere exceedingly foolish.”
The young man leaned back in his chair (a posture denoting ease) and looked at her. Four years had at once subdued and strengthened her. Her hair was a duller gold and her eyes looked grey in the shaded light, whereas the gleam of the summer sun had then brought out the spring in them—the green. Her body was no less slender, no taller. But her mastership had calmed it, given it a composure in unison with the firm cut of her dainty mouth and the regular line of her small nose. Quincy had not liked her hands, since they had been both short and soft. Now they seemed lighter, freer, longer. They seemed to have the power now to poise and balance. They had been the paws of a rather destructive savage; they and her eyes had altered most. Quincy was awed, not by herself but by the feeling of aloofness that stood between them, making their past of comradeship unreal. Yet the dash and spice of this made her all the more desirable, despite the accent of mentorship and of superiority that now seemed natural to her.
And then, from this easeful figure so composed before him, his mind glanced back—she was still too hard for piercing—and fell upon himself. Again, it seemed to Quincy that he had made a mistake. Again, it became easier to turn against himself, plough there, rend there, than give calm heed to the force that did this and make his venture elsewhere.
Clarice seemed so intact, so right! Quincy felt disgust at his own lack of measure before this girl. She was younger than himself in years; he had branded her, and, he was sure, once turned her down as a hard flirt. Yet, despite her lack of mind and of experience, how ably she had mastered her environment compared to him; how well turned all the swirling things about her to her advantage, to her own channels, in contrast to his floundering and illusions and utterly unformed bravado! For what could he think of his new armor and his new creeds when a few talks with Clarice disintegrated them, sent them pell-mell, haphazard like the little evil live things seen through a microscope in a glass of dirty water?
He thought of Adelaide and his behavior there came to him more nearly in its proper light. He had never faced her, either. But since she was tender and soft and inefficient, he had been able to fend her off. That was not prowess. He felt sorry for her ineptitude; angry at her for not being able better to present her case since it was worthy and since he had need of it. Adelaide, self-asserting, might have saved him from these pitiful, merciless results of a few encounters outside the Rut. He blamed her for it. And once again the old vision of Marsden came to him—as if it had been new—of Marsden the unclean thing, and of the City that was his temple.
But all of these things were uncomfortable and fleeting as yet. For both reasons they must not seem important; they must not seem to last.
Here, before him was Clarice, looking at him, delving within him doubtless, for the causes of his silence.
What if she were to find them!
Quincy clasped his hands, and let them fall cavalierly to his knees. He was in danger—that part of him that was the City’s thing. So the City came to his rescue. It supplied him with a smile, a fund of evasive talk, an armor for fencing himself away. And so, with sick foreknowledge how, he made his slippery escape.
The rest of the evening was a duel—her knowing thrusts, his parryings that grew forever more self-conscious, more defensive, more half-hearted.
Quincywas in his new room, alone. Just back of and above his head burned a naked gas-jet for which he had not yet bought a globe. To his right was an open window and within it, the street; within the street were autumn and the city. It was a quiet street. Its smooth pavements answered the beat of traffic as a windless lake responds to the tossing of pebbles. From each liquid impact went forth a wreath of murmurs to an impassive marge, like ripples on the water. He was that marge. Yet, from another point he was that stone, weighted and insignificant, dropped on the surface murmur now turned lake, and wrinkling for the brief span of passage—to the bottom. Car-bells and human voices lay upon the undertone like false jewels on a rich garment. Their movement trembled, cutting through the haze of evening sound as a jewel’s gleam might fall on satin. Quincy stood silently receptive, while the light dozed about him and the violet evening grew purple night through the window. Before his eyes was a mirror. He was examining himself.
He saw his face. He saw his sinewed neck drawn down within the flaring collar of his open shirt. He saw the muscles move on his haired forearm; he saw the knotted twist and the lean length of his hand. He met his eyes. From the reflected yellow flame, they glowed almost bronze beneath their blue. It was as if violets were blooming among autumn stubble—an impossibility. Just so, there was the hectic flush beside the spring freshness of their mien. He was young. Yet, his way of gazing in the glass was the way of one who had been a journey. He left his eyes and saw his mouth. The lips were brown. Vertical, faint lines broke their roundness as the parch cracks the earth. And then, his eyes’ focus wandered, receiving all of him. He saw himself.
As he looked, the form of his long head and of his flaring forehead fallen over with black hair was within his gaze like a clear thing in a mist. As he looked, he could not but watch his mouth part, his upper teeth bite down upon his lower lip, his jaw thrust gradually forward, the lines of his throat straighten and hollow with strain. At the same time, his eyes grew more reflective of the glow above him, less tinged with the blue that came from within. His eyes also were rigid. His hands were on his hips. And his arms fell, relaxed as his face rose, stiffened. But gradually there was less of this; always less. For it was not this at which he looked.
As the picture on the glass grew dimmer, he began to think—another way of looking. The mental picture waxed, until it was no less clear, no less striking. But it was bitterly at variance with the other. He had not escaped the charm of strength and rhythm in this portrait of himself. But all of it was irony, as he turned inward. And thus inclined, the outer semblance hung upon his thoughts as does a gay refrain pinned, for its recurrent mockery, to a sad song.
There had been this scene at home—the new home—the Frondham mansion, as they let their guests know.
“If your father commutes, I don’t see why you can’t.”
“But Mother, Father doesn’t have to be in town until so much later.”
“Well,—you’re so much younger. That evens matters.”
“Perhaps Quincy doesn’t want to live at home any more,” Adelaide suggested.
“I guess that’s it,” from Quincy. “It’s a good chance to strike out alone.”
“Very well, my son.” Josiah whipped himself into a state of being injured. “Go, by all means. But if you leave the house—you pay your own way.”
“I can afford to. I’m making twenty dollars a week.”
“Go, then,” said the old man. “It’ll do you good.”
Sarah sighed. Adelaide, who suffered most, was the one who did not cast a dart by way of godspeed.
“You’ll come out week-ends, dear?” she said, placing her hands about his face.
But Quincy was angry at the ease with which his father seemed to shake him off.
“If I have nothing better to do,” he exclaimed, stepping away from Adelaide. His mother clasped her hands at this. And his father shook his head angrily, thinking thus to token his indifference.
“You may come when you like—or stay away!” he said.
“So this is how I am repaid! This is how I am repaid!” cried Sarah.
“Why, Mama—”
“Don’t talk to me! I’m beginning to see how right your father used to be. Come, Josiah.”
She was the more severe, because, that season,Quincy had been the more amenable. Only parents who are not fond are not bullies.
Meantime, Marsden, knowing long ere this that he had lost his short-lived disciple, whistled a tune.
For there had been many things prior to this brief and trenchant consummation. But this was the immediate way that Quincy came to live alone, that autumn, in a boarding house in Murray Hill.
It was a natural step to take with his family an hour from the City. And this, his family knew. He had even mentioned contemplating it, that summer. There had been no talk then. But it would have been unseemly to their particular etiquette not to have protested at the moment of action. Had Quincy succumbed to their formal outburst and remained, he would have won for it no praise or grateful comment. Nor, in the stand he made, did he incur a serious blame. The family was sure to forget the strained discomfort which, by tradition bound, it was required to inject on any move, any decision whatsoever. Quincy would not be harshly judged. Quincy would not be less welcome. He knew that this being disagreeable merely eased a family, that the throwing its weight to “Nay” and tarnishing a normal impulse with its inertia’d hue and cry went always, by its nature, before accepting.
That first evening, he had seen Clarice.
He had taken her to dine at one of the French restaurants that garnish the side-streets of Broadway. He was aglow in the momentum of his self-freeing step. He had found his friend at first remarkably atune to the glad impulse in him.
They faced each other over the narrow little table. The unusual surroundings, the packed clamor of the guests, sharpened in each a sense of intimacy withthe other. They drank the red wine that had been brought without their asking for it. Quincy was proud of the fresh firm girl that marked him off from the other men with their faded or drab or hectic women. And Clarice was proud, seeing in Quincy a man strong enough to run the race when its rhythm pleased him, without the engulfment that degraded all these other men—their slavish dress, and their inelastic hands and their stamped features.
She lifted her glass; its scarlet made her wrist a mere shred of white.
“Here’s to the new, old unbroken Quincy. May he have the strength he needs!”
The boy did not understand. As they clinked glasses:
“What do you mean?” he said.
“Are you so confident that you don’t feel the need even of a toast to hearten you?”
“What do you mean?” he could do no better than repeat.
She laughed and leaned back in her chair and poised him so.
“There is only one side of you—or is it depth?—that means anything to me, at all. One side only, that I will tolerate. I drank to that.”
And then, seeing his quandary in his eyes, she went on.
“Can you imagine yourself, Quincy dear, as just a lost note in this ugly din?—here it is all about us. Of course you can’t! But I can. Because I know so many such—because most of me is just that sort—and dedicated to it. Well, if you shrink ever to be just part of the din, you’ll be lost to me; you’ll be worse, even worse than I am. You’ll be utterly anddismally negligible. I shan’t be able to notice you at all.” She paused. “Quincy—I’m straining with you with all my might, so that shan’t be.”
Why would she not accept him, whatever he might be, or turn to? Why was she always a taskmaster before she would be friend? Why did she demand that heworkfor her smile?
At last, he spoke this out.
“You don’t care for me a bit, just for myself.”
“That’s sentimental! Of course, it is what you can give me, what differentiates you, that I can care for. Otherwise, why am I dining just with you?”
He shook his head. He had come there swinging in his momentum. And Clarice was standing still. She had a philosophy against moving with him. It occurred to him that this rational friendship was the antipode of love. And this troubled him—unreasonably, since he felt no love for her.
There was a dear light in Clarice’s eyes—while all his mind grew blurred.
“You don’t despise—just being,” she rebuked him. “Just being has eaten into you a bit. Whenever I look at you, I feel the danger that you are going to melt away; and that in your place where I was so glad to know you, I shall some day find a ghost, an echo, an empty shell—like the rest.”
“And what do you give me, to help keep me real? A set of rules!”
Clarice sobered. He had touched her, there. She wanted him to be strong, to be true. But out of her own weakness yearning for all this in him, there came no strength to help him. She shrugged. But she could not deny his accusation.
Gradually their talk sagged into a minor key. Itwas clear to Quincy that if he failed—even if he complied with the life about him—he would simply, automatically fade from Clarice’s consciousness; it would be as if he were not, and as if—passing him on a crowded street—her eyes looked through him and did not warm. It was clear to him that this was not right. And it was clear to her that this could not be different.
But to neither of them was it known that perhaps her need was as great, in all this, as his....
So they had parted. Here also, there was no mischance, no real clash.
If he stood that night before his mirror, fearful and harassed, it was entirely what Quincy found within himself—or failed to find—that tortured him.
He thought, then.
Another year laden to his accounts. And no doubt of how to qualify that year—a year, another year of treachery! By it the latter episodes of college had not been erased. Rather they had served as easy slopes leading down to that which followed. A nadiral year!
But Quincy’s jaw thrust out. He knew it. He was alone. He stood against a blank, grey wall, facing the truth. There was no praise of self, no pride, no confidence in his position. There was no alternative. There were merely the nausea of the past, the grim facing of the present, the not caring for the future.
Quincy was about to enact, simply, clumsily, the Word that his heart spoke; to become sincere; to become chastened of all things save that Word’s simplicity and the co-ordination with it, of his deed. Quincy was about to be a man.
He was become eased of worldly irritations. They seemed to have left him permanently. They had been a help to his false self, what time he shut his senses to the hurts of spirit. In dwelling upon them, he had been better able to persevere without a consciousness of deeper pains. All of that had belonged to the first year. He had chafed, then writhed, then railed against the City....
The hammering monotony of huge buildings that were neither beautiful to look upon nor useful to be dwelt in—monuments of vanity and folly, hideous with stolen decoration no one understood, or lavished with detail, intricate, costly, stupid that no one ever saw, sheathed in insincerities whose one successful purpose was to hide the structures,—and these, twice as tall as conditions warranted, built with money that was needed—sorely needed—elsewhere; the fetid subways, packed with humanity as no humane company would pack a poultry car, cesspools that stunk in summer and were a stain upon the community that used them, always; the crass, nasty, lying theaters of Broadway, expressive of a mudworm’s aspirations; the spiritless cafés that interspersed them, ruled and erected to glorify the souls of lackeys, serving bad food no one would eat elsewhere at the expense of entertainments no one would sit through elsewhere: the unending blight of magazines and journals—made from the crushing of fair forests into wood-pulp!—one built upon the sweaty, fatuous dimensions of a traveling salesman, one leveled at the rouged, frilled creature that lazes in a cheap flat, mothers a puppy and dreams of motors, a third aimed to titillate the womanwith less sex, more children, a wider hallway but no more brains—littered all and innumerably, with false optimism, false advice, false pictures and false plots: the blatancy of the ensemble—its utter uselessness—journals screaming above the houses, traffic screaming above the public halls, clubs glittering above the shops, theaters and restaurants exhibiting above the brothels—all of it shutting out the blue of heaven, the glance of the sun on the Hudson, the murmur of the few surviving trees, the spirit of the few surviving souls. And the mad misery of the dwellers!—proud to be smothered in the biggest subway, proud to be cheated in the biggest stores, proud to be lied to by the biggest journals, proud to be sheep in the biggest pen!...
But all this was behind Quincy. All this was behind him, as is the surface when a man has burrowed deep. All this was. But it was unimportant. And none of it would be, if each man so burrowed beneath it to the poisoned ego of which all of it, in cumulation, was a putrescent outer deposit. It interested Quincy no longer. He had no time to dwell on it, or to inveigh against it. He was engaged upon himself.
Here was a new sort of serenity—the sort that accepts a certain thing as an economy of strength for fighting elsewhere; the economy, not of blinking the truth, but of indifference to superficial falsehood. This is the economy of the artist toward what is evil, and of the priest toward what is contradictory to his faith. Quincy applied it to what had so far engrossed and maddened him.
Dwelling upon the City’s faults—by feeling them, combatting them—he had no time or muscle for himself. Now, he plowed deeper.
But all of this was, after all, no wondrous visionor wondrous might coming to Quincy. So it did not seem even to him, although in contrast to the darkness and debility of his former states, he might well have been pardoned if it had. Quincy was not, of a sudden, over his stammering and his stumbling.
He had exhausted two extremes of error. He was bound—he was sure—to be, this time, less wrong than he had been. As the wise East has said: All progress is through a series of disgusts.
Here he was, then, twenty-two, earning his living, living alone—unhampered by too great devotion either for any man or for any woman. He had the feeling, now that the City no longer troubled him, that family was gone, and business ran smooth, of being able to swing his arms and legs without obstruction. This was his start. Here was his race. During it, his sense of progress was in the things he passed. Until the end, he would not know in his weariness how fast and hard he had gone; in his position how far and whither he had come. The rest of the consciousness of Quincy was to be the consciousness of motion.
He had himself now, to traverse, to judge, to reckon with. His freedom of external bars did not give him freedom, did not make him light. But it loosed him upon the realler things. It gave him a movement wherein, for the first time, really to know. And a dark thing known is a dark thing made light. A heavy thing in motion is a heavy thing to stop.
Here, then, was Quincy’s start within himself. At last, he was flowing forward—all of him, from depth to surface. He had bent back reality to fit childish loves of mother or of dream; he had warped the natural offshoot of these loves to make them fit reality; he had denied one or the other, twisted them, dammedup his life’s current in order to have a smooth lake for lolling or a dry place for forgetting. This was over. He was flowing forward. Stormily, muddily, cramped. But yet, a passage....
Quincysat on a rock that formed part of a stone fence. About him were briars of blackberry in bloom. It was May. Before him, the brow of the hill rose gently a half hundred feet. And above that was the falling sun. Its golden glow flushed the green stretch; little innumerable shadows, greyish purple, were in those depths of the grass where the sun could not enter. A single tree—an elm—stood between the skyline and Quincy’s fence, just to the left of the sun. The wind skimmed up the hill and turned the elm-leaves silver. Below Quincy’s back, through a thick fringe of elder and maple bushes, was a collaret of locust trees. And in the valley was a little town. Its murmurs rose and mingled with the trill of the trees. A subtle counterpoint met Quincy’s ears—a fugue of leaf and whistle and children’s voices; of a motor-horn and a girl’s laugh and a raven’s crow; of an infant’s cry and a wagon’s crunch and a cricket....
Meantime, the sun went down for Quincy. In the village, it was still day,—and on the hill-top.
Quincy descended to the railroad station. But by that time, of course, it was evening everywhere.
He took a train back to the City. He had been in country only for the day. He wore a smart straw hat. A faint moustache composed the tremorous length of his mouth. His eyes gleamed like pale lights in a hollow. Under them were rings of grey. Hischeeks were drawn. His head seemed longer than it had been. He had a gaunt and dry look for one who had been in converse with the May sun. There seemed little fire in him. Even his eyes appeared to catch their color from the dark grey that went about them.
Quincy preferred these little lonely trips to the duty-calls on Frondham mansion. He preferred them always. And when, like this day, his mood was strong, even a monthly visit home would have been unbearable.
He left the train, swept toward the exit like a half-floating thing among light jetsam upon a rapid current. This occurred to him. For, though he did not associate the thought, he said to himself:
“Most people succeed in America, not because they have brains or shrewdness or luck, but because the current is too strong to let them sink.”
Then, he struck across town toward his little flat. As he passed Sixth Avenue, the conjoined noises of the cars, the elevated trains, the trucks, the motors, the newsboys and the surging, shuffling crowds rose, of a sudden, to a terrifying climax—thundered, trembled, crashed. Quincy clenched his fists.
“Good God!” he cried aloud. But the woman with a shawl over her greasy hair, who passed so near as to brush his hand, heard not a word.
Quincy’s head had been empty of thought. He reached the sidewalk. He needed some cigarettes. There was a store at that corner. A fire automobile, painted red, added the clangor of its bell to the general din. Quincy watched it swerve and swing and dodge through the maze of traffic. With his eyes on its twisting thread of crimson, he walked toward the shop and passed the threshold. Next to the tobacco-store there was a pawn-shop. He had entered this, by error.
The wickered counter was before him. Behind it stood a little, swarthy man in a skull cap. At either side was a litter of jewelry, gold watches, ticking alarm-clocks, resplendent canes and pictures. He and the man were in the shop alone.
“What can I do for you, sir?”
Quincy was sure he was going to explain, apologize and leave. His eyes were on a gun-metal object hanging below a gleaming samovar. He lifted his arm.
“How much is that?” he asked.
“The revolver—?”
Quincy trembled. He saw the little man’s sharp eyes stand on his thoughts like beads.
He went home, taking his purchase. He tucked it away beneath some winter underwear that he had camphored for the summer. Then he took off his clothes and calmly went to bed.
He slept well—three hours—until midnight. And then, all of a sudden, he awoke, clear-headed and sleep-less; his state as distinct from that of an earlier instant as is a bright cliff from the sea that slumbers at its foot.
And now, he ceased being the automaton that had gone forth that morning and come back that evening, laden, it is true, with new experience and new possession, but until then unconscious save of the reality of having moved.
He lay in his bed, high up above himself, as if he had stood indeed upon a cliff above the sleepy sea. It was a clear, white cliff. Before him, the sun lay on the opalescent waters. It shot a ray of flame below his feet. It struck the stone and fell back gleaming to the little waves that lapped it in. Above the sun was a purple cloud. In the cloud was orange lightning! There was the sun, farthest away from all, faintly receding toward the cliff, falling short and tumbling away into the water. There was the orange storm, lurid and encompassing, a little nearer—also beyond. And all about him, despite the sun, despite the glinted sea, was night. Upon it, these many things were visitations.
Was he awake after all? Yes. For there, with all the rest, was his room. He faced a door—a very black door. Its transom was thrown open. And through it came the yellow vagueness of the hall. Other doors were also on that hall. And within them, other people. The little transom let them in and let him out. His watch sang away on a chair, next to his pillow. The vague light of the hall drifted to one side and met the vague light of the window at his head. In this conflict, he saw the meagre gleam of the glass in his bureau. In the morning, he could turn upon one side and see himself reflected there. Now it was a mere ghost of light—a grey pall hung over the darkness. He thought: “I can not see myself, now.” Then, he began to think of himself. The glass in the bureau had helped.
Two years passed through his mind—passed many times; muddled pell-mell, grotesquely stressed, fancifully slurred, parts of them repeated with endless variance until his nerves shrieked for respite, other parts lurking away in the Hinterland, lurid yet ashamed. No reason for this disorder; no rule for the unimaginable gaps, the huddled over-determinations. And yet, withal, a rhythm and a lilt that held him there,gently receptive as one who listens to a well-studied symphony, finding it new.
Rather a dream than a recapitulation. The one measured thing was the little watch, singing away that monotone, the time. Yet, since all the rest lay like a mighty matrix for that beat, it too must have had measure. Perhaps the master of this symphony was a complex composer—too complex to be measured, yet too great not to be enjoyed.
Two years.
What must two years be, in which is nothing that outweighs their number. Not failure. For failure is infinite. Not achievement. For though that be limited, it too transcends counting. What then? Weariness, perhaps? Or a clutter of details signifying the same thing? Or a mass of grey without that spot of gleam which makes parts brighter, greater, than the whole? Or somewhat of all these?
He could rehearse the parts, if he desired. But it seemed more real to let them gyre about at will—as they were doing. Clarice, business, Adelaide and home—a friend looked for, an acquaintance had but not cherished. The indefatigable past, limed with indifference lest it bring nausea. Mother who clamped his ears when she was ineffectually fond. A raise and praise from his employer. Two weeks in the mountains with Lamory whom he had long since detested.... Whom else to go with? Two weeks with himself was no vacation.... Here was such an hour—with himself. And only the lying on his back, so that the two years slid over him, made that hour possible! Two weeks—a thousand such hours? They would have been unlivable! Lamory prevented the woods from speaking to him. At least, since Lamory was there, he blamed Lamory. He was glad, therefore, that Lamory had been there. Suppose he had been alone and the woods had not spoken! Yet, there had been this very afternoon. Well—the village had made noises behind his back. Can a pagan make love with a Christian boy peeping through the curtains? Small wonder, the elm trees and the clambering grass had remained silent. By the mercy of God, let it not be that really, really, the woods were always, now, to be silent to him! Quincy shivered in bed and prayed for that.