Chapter XII: Part III: I (2)

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 woman with 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 vision or 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, dammed up 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....

III

Quincy sat 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. His cheeks 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.

And his prayer broke away in the middle, to a waking dream. Clarice walked by his side along a path of poplars and silver-birch that was familiar.

“Quincy,” she said, “why don’t you tell me that you love me?”

“Why--do you love me, Clarice?”

He recalled the day when the sun had been a tiny golden pool in a grey firmament and he had kissed her. Now, he kissed her again. He was very happy, somehow, to recall the earlier occasion. And this angered him. His prayer had broken. Now, also, broke his waking dream. He recalled that he had been praying. It seemed strangely significant that he could never sustain his prayers and dreams. Always, always, they straggled into sleep--or into something else. They were the realest of things to Quincy. Naturally, then, his other ways fared little better.

Once more, the two years, outweighing all within them.

Why, just two years? He remembered. Of course, it was an approximation. But with that last summer spent with the family in their unfitting home, the great disgust had been born. It had been the great disgust, not because it was intrinsically greater than all the others marking his life, but because it was the first that he had met--the first that he had grasped--the first that he had dared! He had remained until the fall, marshalling his resolution, throwing away his garret-full of insincerities. And then, clean, light, glistening with spiritual sinew, he had come away to the little room in Murray Hill. Here, his fight had begun. What made him think it was ended? Only two years.

He could find nothing to hate or to deny in those two years. That was a signal reason for recalling them and no other term of his ill-fitting life. He could find nothing to alter or undo. And this also, was brilliantly unique. Yet no more. What pregnancy in these two years? What achievement? What hope gained? Quincy asked himself.... He had bought a pistol.

Then two years, virgin of misdeed, free of dross, forged in a true fire, gave no more than the muddy, lazing, treacherous years before them! Gave no more? Gave less! For those years in which he had stultified himself and which, in turn, he had repudiated, offered memories. He could pasture among them. Filthy and false as he had branded them, they had borne something. Their sin had had a fruit that was sweet. Their wrongness had been pregnant with something that endured. These last two years had been chaste--and sterile. Here was an encouraging observation. It was wrong! He would fight for the true, two years of his life! He would deny the rest--deny Garsted and Deering, deny the woods, deny Rhoda and his mother, deny his dreams. He would deny Julia most of all! All of these things had been wrong, yet they lived! All of these last two years were dead, yet they were right! Here was a new thing to ponder.

The City came into the lists. He had been awaiting this. It threw the balance into a solution. He began to understand.

Two years again--wearying to have lived, wearying to think of. The two years in which he had been alone with the City.

A little squirming thread came out of the welter and ran to an open place. This place was cold and barren and utterly disagreeable. The welter had been fretted with sweet things, streaked with warmth, bathed with perfume. But it had no dimension, no perspective. And the cold place that was open had both of these! The thread was crimson like the fire-car that he had seen in the cold City lights. _That_ rushed to a place which presumably was hot. This thread of his shivered its way to a place that was cold. It was unfortunate. The City had given him a comparison that made him yearn. There was a seed in this!

What was unhappiness? He had been thinking about the City. Now, he pondered this? Well--let his mind reel like a drunken man. It is as good a gait, when one has no place to go, as straight ahead. And that is why drunkards reel. The liquor gives sway to their unconscious self. They do not care to go where they are going. So they go reelingly. So his mind, perhaps. Here it was vainly philosophizing? Let it go.

With relaxation, magically, came an answer.

He had said to himself: “I am unhappy.”

And he had followed it with: “I am glad.”

He would never understand the complete depth of this sincere reaction: that unhappiness is the energy of life, its purest facet, its semen of progression: that to be swept with it is therefore to be alive: and that youth’s glorying in unhappiness is not a fancy, not a form, but an immortal intuition whereby youth renders its account of the world’s essence. Not to be unhappy is not to be destined to create. And every fiber of youth’s soul is drenched with just that destiny, fashioned toward just that consummation--to create. Wherefore, youth’s eternal syllogism: “I am unhappy. I am glad.”

All of this was not conscious to Quincy, lying between night and day under his sheets with the sleepy glow of the transom full in his eyes. But he knew that with his double cry something flew free in him, hovered in the air and beat its wings. He was no longer in a welter now, nor in an open place that froze. He was in New York. And he understood that the barrenness of the two years wherein he had been _himself_ accrued from the inexorable bar between that which he had been and the City which should have mothered his desire. Two of a different form may couple. But they will not bear fruit. He and the City had been together. He had remained himself and so had it. They had been barren of each other. There was the solution.

A good fight it had been. And yet, a hopeless one. Quincy lay in his bed, a-quiver as never before with the sense of the inevitable, with the sense of tragedy. Why had he not made the City molten to his ends? Why, barring this, had he himself been rigid, untransformable? Oh, he had tried! He had twisted himself enough, tortured himself, cut off parts that protruded, warped away parts that differed. But that had been in vain. Here was no task for carpenters. He had tried every means save the two means that were achievement--the two means of mastery. For it requires mastery to mould the City to one’s own end, in one’s own fire. But it requires mastery no less to give all of oneself, wholly, freely, bravely, to be reshaped and recreated. This which he might have done, he had failed to do.

The old fault--the old weakness. Was it the crux of all his interminable misdirections? That he could never give himself entirely--was this why he had not received. That he could never lose himself utterly--was this why he had not found?

Julia flashed on his mind and he did not spurn her. And the point of this association--it flashed also on his mind. The old story--the crux--the kernel of his misadventures.

Was it too late? He was unhappy. That was a sign of hope. But no. It was a token merely that the end was not yet there. He would go on fighting, struggling. But he would not win. Already he knew that he could not hope. He still wished to win; he still wished to hope. This proved only that the end was not yet there.

Quincy lay cold within his sheets, awed by the beauty of his vision.

* * * * *

Like a dank breath, morning blew into the open window. The world shivered; the air was streaked and tremorous with chill. A piercing gleam, splintered into myriad tiny weakling emanations, came stirring upon him with the burdened air. A faint murmur lay hesitant above the damp-drenched streets. The smell of a fresh round to life was shrill in the blue glow. The murmur broke into sharp noises, desperate, marvelously clear. The color of the whole was an unclean reluctance. Here was not morning’s birth, but the night’s grave; the winding sheet of rest; a pall upon the City.

Quincy fell asleep.

* * * * *

The summer was hot and clinging. It sucked the moisture and fruitfulness of men. Quincy suffered along. But he suffered more. For most, the City had its compensations. There were the beaches, the garish playgrounds of Coney Island, the dirty rocks and rotten wharves of East River, studded with naked bodies of boys, draped, crouching forms of girls, who swam and dived and reveled despite the City ordinance forbidding it and the pestiferous state of the sewer-soaked river. None of these means of wringing pleasure from the heat attracted Quincy. The last summer, when it had been far more a bearable proposal, he had declined his mother’s offer that he commute to them. This summer it was out of thought. His mother did not even make the suggestion. So he was alone. Clarice, the one girl he really cared to be with, was away. And he avoided Lamory, ranking him now with half a dozen other uncongenial friends.

He worked hard. He took an occasional harbor sail in the evening. But the fragor of the beaches was foretasted by the packed, chattering masses on the boats. So that there was very little harbor and much intimate association with nursing mothers, with romping boys, with clamorous, obtrusive minstrels, with beery men. The water lay below all this, a satined stretch, ruffled by rude craft, faintly musical and faintly blue and faintly perfumed with the salt. But the irrepressible boat shut it out for the most part. About it, there was naught faint or vague. Quincy would sit in the stern and watch the huddled buildings of lower Manhattan draw together as he drew away. What an eloquent memorial they were--these unkempt buildings--to a vast energy run wild, arrogant, lacking a soul to guide it. He knew the scene’s repute for beauty. But he did little more than shrug his shoulders. New York’s aesthetic he had long since recognized as an uncritical sentimentalism. A mass of ill-related, misshapen, meaningless structures prodding the air with imitation cathedral towers or Egyptian pyramids or fortress battlements could not be beautiful. Yet, as they died away and the blue mist of the harbor thickened and the myriad gold lights came out, shooting their gleam into an overtone, and the water’s murmur turned to a sheen of silver, and the whistles of the water-craft thridded the vagueness with their sharp reports, Quincy changed his mind. The City was now a ghost looming away, a thing of uncanny life, vibrant and portentous;--a thing of beauty. Quincy went back to that first visit of discovery when he had come down, thrilled with adventure, from his college and walked Brooklyn Bridge. The City then had not needed the veil of night and the garlands of the water to make it beautiful. It had not changed. He had. Was it for the better?

It was a heavy summer. Quincy declined his two weeks’ vacation, earning by this display of his heart’s emptiness, the praise of his employer. Week-ends, he spent at home. But they did not rest him. And the little copse in the rear of the house where he had once made revel, was a mockery. The willow tree through whose fingers the sun fell each day became a burden upon Quincy’s sight. It hurt him. He avoided it. He remained with his family. He bathed with them, motored with them, sat on the veranda, doing naught with them. Adelaide had never found him so pliant, so agreeable, so heart-wrenchingly sad. But it was too late to alter the course of this petty tragedy. They were side by side, needing each other, as they had always done, starving and wasting away. They had no hands to clasp each other with, no arms to hold with. But they had breasts, hearts--vainly, since their lips were silent and their words did not concord.

* * * * *

And so, came the fall.

There was naught very new with Quincy. He was unhappy. He was conscious that some day that unhappiness must cease. And that day would be auspicious of what already he felt mistily impending.

Meantime, however, he doubled his visits to Clarice. And Clarice was glad. She had played badly her game of straddling two mounts. Disgust for the one direction, yearning to leave it, grew. And her respect, her need of the new, old Quincy, the brave Quincy that called things by their thrillingly right names, grew also. They were intimate friends. But Quincy never forgot the philosophy that she had given him as hers--her stern determination to mark her life along pragmatic measures. He did not venture to change this; he was not sure that he really cared to. He was fond of Clarice. Encouraged, this fondness might have been easily transfigured. But although Clarice came to look on him as the one fresh part of her living, she also still persisted in the false routine of traveling the desert. So she helped him in no aggressive way to love her, to win her. And no less a way could have swerved Quincy. He had no fuel for passion. Clarice had plenty. But the old creed in her prevented her from giving it. Thus matters stood.

So far, he had been well. But with this fall, he felt an ebb in his physical reserve. He needed more sleep; he ate less food; he drowsed over his work. Often, he came to the office with limbs like lead.

In November came an early snow-storm. Quincy caught cold. He failed to shake it off as he had other colds. He drove himself each morning out of bed, with his head aching and his eyes hot. The office-manager who prized him said to him:

“Quincy--you’re not well. Business is slack. Why not take two weeks off?”

But the boy demurred. What should he do with “two weeks off”? Was not the hard régime of business his salvation, his redemption from the barrenness that parched him, bit into him, when his mind turned toward it? He grew worse. But he persevered. And the office-manager, meeting Josiah Burt one day by chance, mentioned his boy’s condition. Josiah spoke to Sarah. Quincy’s mother took a six o’clock train the following morning to New York. At seven-thirty she was in Quincy’s room. He lay there awake, in bed, parched with fever, his brain sweating with effort, looking at her.

Too disconsolate to demur long, the boy agreed to accompany his mother to Atlantic City.

* * * * *

Thanksgiving time. A vast sea, flashing in the sun. A golden beach standing upon the sea. A squadron of miserable shops and huge hotels, loudly awry in line and decoration, standing upon the beach. A number of garish piers, muddy, shapeless, plastered with advertisements, reaching over the purled waters like the fingers of a lecherous man upon a woman’s breast.

From the far corner of the pier Quincy could sit and hold the ocean in his soul. If he turned, the city sprawled out before him, defiling the sun that shone on it. Innumerable little creatures crawled upon the gleaming board-walk, a black line spotted with the blare of women’s colors. Also, on the beach they pranced like sand-fleas, or rode horses that caught the sun’s spark on their flanks along the combers.

But to turn was not necessary. He sat there, his mother chattering beside him, and essayed not to listen. For hours he would sit and watch the symphony of light within the waves, for hours play at the game of trying to tell the water’s colors. If only his mother had had less to ask him! How he longed for a more humble mother, one to respect his silence, to be mute before his ecstasy. How he would have cherished such a one! But she who was there meant just as well, albeit her deed was different. He must endeavor to bear this in mind.

Sarah’s chief theme was scolding him because he had allowed himself to sicken; and, granting that, because he had not at once called on her. There were many variations--rather similar--to this. But at times, the plethora of words would cease, and then, despite the ugly charm she could cast on him when he silenced her, with her injured mien, the sea came up and spoke to him.

“How wondrous this beach would be,” he cried--a flash of his old self, “if only there were no hotels, no piers, no board-walk!”

“Nonsense!” Sarah, like all good Americans, felt personally hurt at the suggestion that her race had not improved on Nature’s America. “Where could you sleep?--or have your chair rolled?”

There were too many people about; there was too much of this fond mother, who knew so well about Quincy’s body, so little of Quincy’s soul. At least, on these, Quincy blamed the failure of his ironic journey. The passionate sea had beckoned so beautifully to him--to him that once might have known its accent.

He stood alone on the longest pier; his mother left at the hotel. His eyes went out to the horizon and his ears met the plash of the cool, deep waves against the slimed concrete posts. It seemed to him that he must jump--and die. It was a real impulse--one to be squarely met.

No! There was enjoyment in this coolth, hope in the waves’ music, health in the easy, limbered kiss of the sky and the water. The waves slumbered in their bronze rings, topped with sapphire. Beyond was a streak of opal--about a mass of murmurous emerald slaked with fire. How unutterably beautiful was this! He did not wish to be below the waves. It could not be so beautiful when one failed to catch the changes of the sun on the waves’ surfaces. He thought of life. Were its beauties also the sun’s and the sky’s gleam on it? Was it also an opaque mass--smothering, colorless, eyeless--below its surface? The ocean was dead without the wind and the air, the elemental fires and their tides. It was really separate from these. Was this true of life? Was this true of him?

No!--the sun had been a part of him. And if the wind had not, why had he understood its words so well? Desperately, he would cling to his conviction, that though the sea was a subtle, mighty mirror, he was a part of the far things of beauty that swept and flamed and trilled above them both. Unto the last, he would cling to this. And a man clinging lives.

* * * * *

Sarah was back in her home. Quincy was back in the City.

The first evening which the much-affaired young lady found for him, he went to see Clarice. She had to break a dance engagement in order to fit him in, at all. This gladdened Quincy. But the evening was none the less a failure. Clarice seemed mostly the self she showed to the world. Her talk was practical and hard. Within, the cause of this was solely her irritation at Quincy’s supine acceptance of just that self. She longed to have him crush it away--in his arms if need be. So she flaunted it in his face. She meant to goad Quincy on. But she succeeded merely in dejecting him. He was past fighting the van-guards of the City. Its body had annihilated him. He needed help, revivement--not taunting. But Clarice was not yet inclined, even had she felt this, to go so far. Wherefore, Quincy went away, resolved not to come back too soon again.

Meantime, December crept along on its frozen feet--crept along half of its ironic passage. Frost and the blare of lights, frost and the heat of music, frost and the fluency of crowds. A month of paradox is December in Manhattan. Quincy was in no mood for it, even as for its offshoot, the methods of Clarice.

And now, the New Year shook out the wrinkles from its frills and made announcement of its hilarious advent.

Quincy decided to stay alone--not to go home, not to make an engagement. To stay really alone among the millions.

But as the day drew near, something old and clamorous and yearning stirred once more within him. A swan song perhaps, but it amazed him with its lilt and fervor. He feared that lonely night as any lad, brimming with vitality. He wished to live, to joy, to share. Life bubbled. He threw over his diseased resolve--for so he termed it--to stay alone. He was unhappy. He would be glad. His mind swam to Clarice in a bath of colored feeling. He saw her differently. He saw that he wanted her. He saw that she wanted him. He looked upon his place of business as one of promise. He counted his prospects--his income in one year, in two, in ten! He knew that he wished to share the New Year’s Eve with her, with no one else,--and with no one else, his life!

Throbbing with expectancy, half parched in his fever, he dashed off a note to her, inviting her to dine with him alone on the year’s last day--to revel with him alone, into the New. He put a special delivery stamp upon his note and mailed it, fatefully. Then he waited. New Year’s Eve was four days beyond. Would she come? Would he live? Was there a difference between these questions?

That night, her answer came. It read:

_Dear, dear Quincy_:

Why did you not ask me before? Why do you ask me an impossible
thing? You know how I long to spend New Year’s Eve with you. But
how can I leave the family party? Please understand! I am
broken-hearted. And come soon--_soon_. I have a date on January 2
that I will break for you. Oh, I would have broken any other date!
You will come then. Come to dinner. The family are going out. We
will be alone. Oh! how miserable you have made me by holding out
this promise of a joyous time that I can not have.

Until January 2--

CLARICE.

A blow in the face would have shattered Quincy less than this girlish, forward promise of sympathy and love.

On the last day of the year--late afternoon--Quincy lay on his couch, on his stomach, supporting his head in his two hands, re-reading that letter.

The promise was precisely what he could not bear. The widening train of cherished things possessed, of things to do, was what he could not bear. Quincy was weary. All of him that was still flushed with life he had raised in his invitation for that night--no other--to a point. He had hoped his highest hope, fixed his highest joy, named his highest holding. He had missed--or Clarice had missed. He wanted nothing more. He wanted no longer any hope or joy or holding. He was done.

So, at least, it seemed to Quincy. Once more he laid his trouble upon one place and thought thereby to make it no longer his.

He thought little of Clarice as he went out, that last night of the year, to eat alone.

* * * * *

New Year’s Eve. Carnival time in the City. Carnival in the Latin lands makes one forget poverty. Carnival in New York makes one remember it.

It was late when Quincy had done dining. The restaurant had been nearly empty. He alone sat without a neighbor. A huge woman in a red waist that made her lips look blue fed her lover--a wisp of a man--with a spoon; fed him soup. All of the restaurant laughed at this. In a corner were two slack-chinned Jewish men talking business. They also stopped and laughed. Quincy felt nothing.

He faced uptown. He had dined at a well-known eating place on Grand Street. His idea was to run the gamut of the City. Now, he was on the Bowery.

The night was bitterly, humidly cold. It ate into his face and hands like innumerable pointed icicles. Clotted throngs of revelers--pale boys, daubed girls--shouting, pushing, scrambling past him. Pied horns at their mouths, feather mops to tickle with in their unsavory hands. A crass atmosphere of roughness, ugly and strained and starved. The dingy Bowery rolled ahead with its sepulchral lodging-houses, its crashing elevated structure, its glint of drink. Squalid eating shops in a pathetic holiday regalia: American flags, red ruching, vari-colored placards bidding “Happy New Year!” enflamed the dirty windows like paint on a grey visage. Turkeys, apples, meat-pies swelled the decoration. Prices and meretricious welcomes were iced together on the panes. All of it laughed gutturally.

A mob before the theater, sweating within, frozen without--pushing, cursing, empty. Clouds of boys, dark like flies in the glitter of an arc-lamp before the lurid posters of the “movies.” A cry with a laugh encased. Quincy felt nothing.

Then a dismal stretch of darkness--Broadway below the section of it that is aflame with life. Huge dead buildings here, cars echoing back from the grey walls as lambent metal would fall if thrown against them. Sparse passers-by, hurrying, freezing, absent. The cold air seemed to shiver, to splinter like powdered glass. A derelict, coatless and gloveless, shuffled uptown as an injured moth sways toward a lamp.

And then, beyond, between the gaping walls of the chill orifice, the gleam of fire, the light-limned towers, the flaring incandescence--Broadway that lives.

In the open square was a vast Christmas tree, gawdy and colorless with varicolored electric lamps. Deep about it lay the shadow of humanity. Under its paltry dazzle of illumination that the chill air crushed inward was an open stand. A band spluttered religious music. Upon a wide sheet aloft, the words of an old hymn were lanterned. Beyond, stood a great tower, dim and frigid, topped by a clock and an electric star. The sheltered volunteers cried out the song after the band. Their voices were hard, laggard, frozen also. A stray voice rose in scanty concord from the crowd. But for the most part, the crowd was silent--murmurously, sullenly watchful. A leader exhorted the mass to sing. The arc-lamps crashed against the cold. The police shredded the thick maze of humans into shape. The band blared. Quincy felt nothing.

He stood and watched the heavy silence that sank below the music like a fearful shadow beneath a troubled boat in a deep lake. He watched the dumb buildings and the clamorous lights and the cut of the air and the spiritless, sordid mass--a swarm of insects pressed against a window that shut them out.

The exhorter bullied for voices that did not exist.

Then Quincy heard some one speak beside him:

“For some folk, religion seems to be simply this: put off till tomorrow what you can’t have to-day.”

“I like that!” cried Quincy with spontaneous pleasure. His mood broke in an instant.

“Do you?” asked the woman.

They looked at each other.

She was young and dark, with hot grey eyes.

They turned uptown together. They fell in line with the regimented revelers, whipped into form by the mounted police. Confetti flooded them. Ticklers threatened their eyes. The lurching mob pressed them together. He felt her, hot and lithe beneath her drab, stiff coat. They entered a café. Quincy paid a dollar for a little table tucked away under a stair. Only wine was served that night. And “wine” in America means champagne. They began to drink, and to crumble burning chestnuts on the gleaming, clothless table.

Outside, the crowds seethed, torn with voices, undulant and angular, hot and cold, deliberate and head-long. The stuffy room with its blinking light mellowed with the wine. Women grew loose of arm and breast, slack of mouth, heedless of word. Men grew hard, savage, wet-lipped.

Quincy and she leaned over the table, drinking and looking at each other. For the most part, they were silent. Each of them was still alone. It was easier so. Each of them fended the other from the hectic floods of light and life. Each of them shut the other in.

Quincy melted with the wine. He grew warm. He poured offerings unto this woman, saying no word. He made her an altar, not knowing her name; a goddess, not knowing her will. She was beautiful with the wine fretting her grey cheeks and the fire fanning in her eyes. She said no thing that spoiled his incantation. She, before him at his table, drinking his bought wine, loomed nearer and higher. She was greater than the madness out-of-doors; sharper than the frenzy in the blinking room where they sat. She was greater than his memories.

Soon there were no memories. Then she was greater than everything. She was a mighty ocean wherein to pour the sun and wherein to let dance the winds.

The night wore away. The crimson tide ebbed on the avenue. It grew more savage, more snarling, sharper. Within, the spirits simmered, turned yellow, acid. A woman wished to tear off her waist. Two men fought to stay her. Another woman they carried out. She was asleep. A man stood on a chair and made ribald eloquence. The waiters yawned, knowing there would be no more wine bought--only wine spilt.

Quincy and she began to speak.

He listened with rapt and equal interest to her words and his, quavering between them, over their glasses. They were indifferent words. It mattered little what they meant. These words, also, were part of the great, rhythmic flow wherein the sun could pour and the winds could play.

A bitter lust steeped up through his veins, stiffening his body, tightening the clasp of his fingers about her hand. He leaned over, and she leaned over, and they kissed. He caught no scent of her hair. But the feel of her lips was sharp and clinging. They drew him. They heated the liquor in his veins. They made his veins burst.

“Come!” he said, crushing her hands.

Her arms were stiff.

“Where?”

“Home.”

She wrenched away her hands.

“No,” she said, in a new sharp voice.

Quincy stood up, towering over her.

“Come, I say. Come, I say,” he cried.

“No!” She held her seat.

“Why not?” He swayed in his arrested energy.

“Sit down, boy.” She seemed frightened. “Sit down. Sit down, first.”

He sank stiffly to his seat. She leaned back rigidly in hers. Their eyes met.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t.”

“Why not--” He put his fist out on the table, as if to crush her reason as she gave it.

“Can’t you guess?” she almost pleaded.

He waited until her words came, like a bath of melted ice.

“There’s something wrong, boy,--with me. I don’t want you to--just because we’ve been good pals,--not _that_!”

A man began to sing “America.” Outside, an ambulance crashed past. A dull tussle in the street lay below a screen of piercing voices.

A pause.

Quincy was sober.

He watched her with a tender interest that was almost whimsical. She glittered in anger and defiance, now she had given away her secret. With that act of humiliation, her pride had risen. She was sober also.

“Do you think,” she spoke piercingly, leaning back still in her chair, “do you think, if it hadn’t been for somethin’ wrong, I’d ’a’ been out to-night, alone?”

He nodded. Over and over again, he nodded. That was his answer to her. His eyes were watching inward a mute, innumerable procession where little huddled things, grey, warped, stunted, slid away.

She spoke again. “Tell me, boy. You’re alone, too, ain’t you. _What’s wrong with you?_”

The last grey thing slid out.

Quincy followed it.

In the street was dawn! Dawn with confetti and mud and ice. The street was yellow and hollow and disillusioned. It was a painted harlot after an orgy--a creature of streaked rouge and clotted sweat and bedraggled hair. Quincy left it behind.

* * * * *

On his desk was the letter of Clarice.

Hope. Love. Life. Which was the most unbearable, the most impossible to face--they or their opposite? Which was wrong--they or their denial? Hope, love, life danced and beckoned. Quincy knew he must escape them. Hope, love, life--these were the nadirs of pain, these were the ecstasies to be annihilated. How?

He was weary. He was weary of all things. Most, he was weary of good things--things one dreams of, things one spins out one’s life in fashioning. And now, with Clarice’s letter in his hand, these things threatened to be born--to be born again? Hope and love and life, they might really be, with him so weary? All of his years had been the travail of their first stirring, of their first impulse for the sun. He must begin afresh? He must mother them again? The answer to that seared his soul. What he must do was to escape--escape the fire and the ineffable anguish of just these things.

How?

His hands were cool as was that he held within them--that which might be the way. He flung his mind beyond the act which stood there ready, beyond the flash and then the passing. His eyes and all the world within them would become as two blank, black spaces. He would be lifted beyond his eyes. But was he sure? Was this the way? Could he know that? How?

* * * * *

A dawn came to Quincy. Was this not another climax, another ecstasy to be shunned? What led him always and again to the steep scaling of some height, to the bitter plunge of some depth? This was not the way. This was merely a last variant of the old painful yearning. The weapon in his hand blandished him also to a pinnacle that was sharp and throbbing, imperious and mighty. How then, if not this way?

Quincy stood in his room and his weighted hand dropped to his side and the pistol within his hand thudded upon the floor.

What a fearful temptation it had been, like all the others, beckoning and dancing. Travail and ecstasy--could he not escape them? And if the letter of Clarice and _this_--the height and the depth--were one, with a hair holding them apart in chaos, was there no middle space, unmovemented, between?

Quincy’s head dropped a little, and his shoulders fell forward. And a tuft of black hair crowded his eyes that were half closed. So he remained. Did he feel? He tried to feel if he was feeling. Did he live? He tried to feel if he was living. And so standing, the simple way came, like a magic garment, and possessed him.

A tendril of his consciousness, faint yet infinitely fine, went out to the world of people. All of a sudden, he knew that they were dead. He knew that they had long been dead. They ate and laughed and danced--the dead. They builded cities on the murmurous landsides and haunted the free waters of the sea--the dead. They had sonorous names for the rhythm of their rotting--the dead. He--had been alive. He had not been one of them. He had suffered. He had been unwelcome. But now? What was the easeful languor through him? the warmth that swathed him, the fellowship that buoyed him? He no longer suffered. He was one of them. He was dead also! He had found the way!

All that remained to seal his brotherhood was to forget even that he had found it, to forget even that he was dead, to walk the way blankly, blindly. All of his dead life remained for doing that. The battle had been waged!...

* * * * *

It was the New Year--the New Year, and Quincy welcome in it.

The rising sun flamed into his room.

He pulled down the blind, shutting out the sun.

Then he went to bed in the made, swart shadows, and fell asleep.

* * * * *