Chapter II: Part ONE: The Unwelcome Man (2)

He knelt on the cot, his head against her breast. And though the words he spoke were cold, fearless, high-sounding words, the prayer he really uttered was an appeal for comradeship in the vast night. From this standpoint, God could be of use to him and real. He did not need him for daily bread, nor for guidance from unheard-of evils and unguessed temptations. But with all energy, his mind fixed on Deity as a presence that would remain with him in the black, murmurous horror which would clap in upon him, when lamp and mother went out together. And with this spirit, there was fervor in his voice, though it gave forth unapt words; there was religious passion in the clutch of his little hands and the pressure of his head, although they touched not God at all, but a still older, more eternal Mother. For her going out--with the lamp--was of the color of life itself, inevitable. And already, his eight years had taught Quincy to submit.

It happened. He lay straining beneath his covers. A dormer window had been opened. And from it came a ghostly stir of trees, a frozen glow of refracted light, a sibilance of brooding and foreboding. In the house itself, were the night’s innumerable voices--those that dared make themselves heard only when no soul but Quincy was about. Below, with Adelaide, they had been quiet; but a moment before, with mother, they were hushed. Now, they were at their occult revels. They chuckled and laughed and hissed; the forms that owned them creaked upon floors, made the walls to groan and bend, shuffled through the somehow resisting air. The child stared before him. Blackness. Was he blind? He turned his head and saw that he was not. For there, in the window was the soft blur of light, and beside it stood one of the night’s forms. It was a strange, half-real thing--a streak of gold and green with orange eyes and ears that swayed, and a mouth that came in the wrong place but gaped none the less. Quincy accepted it with difficulty. It did not somehow transmit to him its own frozen heart of horror. The child was even able to look away from it, into the impenetrable shadows where his feet, his cot, everything was swallowed up. He feared these more. A sense of engulfment crept over him. He closed his eyes. He slept.

And then, he was awake. The obsession of the early evening was still foremost in his mind: that he must stay awake for Jonas--to greet Jonas as he came to the big bed. He was unconscious utterly that he had slept. The one cessation of which he was aware was of the horrors--of the voices and the forms and the green light. He lay quite still, half-expecting their return. They seemed so essential and fateful a part of a life alone. But a strange peace filled the room. It contained no fears, no visions. It seemed to be shaping calmly, rhythmically. It became a personality. And it was resting. What was that?--yes, the room was even breathing. Surely, softly, continuously it came--the breathing. Quincy lay wonder-struck in bed. How was this? It had not the stuff of a dream, nor of such forms as the gold-green monster he had discovered by the window. This was _real_!

He sat up in his cot. The breathing came and came. If only Jonas--. A thought flashed, and the child looked toward the bed. There it stood, huge, looming above the shadows. And in it, a lack of precision, then a sense of form, a concrete sense of breathing. Jonas was there. The mystery of how, did not distress him. Quincy accepted the glad wonder without question. For a long time, he sat up, drinking it in, basking in his new sure dominion of the room. And then, he sank back upon his pillow into sleep....

* * * * *

Still, there were disquieting things to be observed in Jonas. His attitude toward the family was in one case at least radically wrong. He and father seemed on the point of becoming chums! That autumn, already, Jonas had been allowed to follow on a snipe-shooting expedition. He was full, even now, of his father’s prowess--big, burly, muscular man that he was--in laying low the little sand-skipping creatures that seemed less bird than insect. And now, not long after Quincy’s eighth birthday, when the weather was still a grumbling discord of cold and ice and when still, one went to bed in the dark, Jonas was taken on a trip to New York. He was away an interminable time--from early breakfast until bed-time. And he returned inarticulately stuffed with wonder and importance. What had transpired and in what respect New York was dissimilar to Harriet, Long Island, Quincy could not ascertain.

“Oh, you wouldn’t understand,” said Jonas. “It’s all a holler and a racket and a lot o’ stone towers where people live and you’re jigged up and down in elevators.”

For his superiority, Quincy forgave him. But when he observed: “Dad and me ’tended to business together,” Quincy disliked the association. Nor could his remark, couched in a prophetic voice: “We are goin’ to be rich, we are. Dad tol’ me,” wipe out the evil taste. The announcement indeed meant far less than the promise of half an orange.

With the spring, Josiah’s interest in the boy that resembled him grew ostentatiously. One Sunday afternoon, Jonas was accorded a puff of the paternal pipe. Gloatingly, he came over to Quincy, who sat sulking on the sofa, and blew into his face. Quincy observed that now Jonas’ breath was like his father’s. It hurt him. A favorite place for Jonas came to be his father’s knee. He would sit there and they would have long, mumbled converse together. Quincy would seek out his mother if she was present, and talk to her. Or if she was busy, he would press his face against the back of his chair and hold rival conversation with himself, biting the upholstery or punching it with emphatic fists--eager above all to appear indifferent. But all that he would be really conscious of was his father’s low chuckle and the shrill peal of Jonas’ laughter.

“Do you like Dad?” the child asked his brother one evening, as Jonas stumbled noisily into their room.

“He’s great!” came the answer.

“I like mother,” said Quincy.

“Do you, molly-boy?”

And Quincy turned away his head in a flood of shame, tempered with pride.

Toward their sisters also, there came to be a gulf in policy. Jonas was actively adverse to both Adelaide and Rhoda. Quincy, who also did not love them, feared them and was anxious above all to be left alone. But if they addressed him with kindness, or some slight show of interest, his enmity subsided. He became glad, eager to respond. This inclination brought him the criticism of his brother. Jonas was for warfare and a perpetual offensive. He criticized Quincy’s amiable bent. And his way of criticism was a sneer that cut.

In Marsden, however, they had a common ground and a true grievance binding them against their sisters. For Rhoda curried favor with this sinister vicegerent of their parents’ will. And Adelaide always followed Rhoda. Both of them were forcibly inclined toward him, by reason of his unfortunate rut of life. And for these causes, Jonas and Quincy were impelled against them.

* * * * *

With his nine years, Quincy was admitted to dinner with the remainder of the family. And although this privilege might have been expected to prove welcome, it marked a new cycle of suffering for Quincy. The two major instances were these: that it necessitated his climbing up alone to bed through the dark and terrible house, and that it brought out poignantly at last to the child how his own place therein differed from what he wished and from that occupied by all the others.

Marsden’s throne was a much pillowed chair, with broad arms and wheels. In this, he was rolled to his place at dinner. And dinner was the one time of congregation for the entire family. Josiah was almost invariably away at lunch--he was of that strange variety of men who prefer saloon fare with beer, to home cooking without it. Adelaide and Rhoda came home late from school. And Jonas preferred a box of sandwiches and cookies to be consumed away among his school-mates. In consequence, lunch as a rule was a scattered and unceremonious affair.

The order of seating at dinner was inflexible. At the end of the oblong table, nearest the red portières, sat father, leaning close over his plate, his elbows flat against the white cloth. At the other end, in strategic proximity to the kitchen, was the straight, stiff figure of mother, who jumped up from time to time, disappeared, and then returned motionless, creaseless to her fixed posture. On her left was brought the chair of Marsden, and beside him sat Rhoda, a tall girl of fourteen, with a red mouth that curled and great black eyes tokening a somnolent fire and an acerb spirit. On his mother’s right hand was Quincy’s place. Next to him came Adelaide with her ingratiating manner and her busily agitating curls of a sun-shot brown. And on his father’s right, Jonas had place for his noisy, passionate consumption of all the food within his reach or not beyond his power.

From mother came a word of grace. During this tense moment, when the soup lay steaming with irresistible flavor before them, the children were supposed to bow their heads and cast their thoughts on high. But Quincy’s devotion was not so rapt as to preclude observance of his father, who sat stock-still, face up, during the prayer, and trimmed his nails or grimaced his open deprecation. Inspired so, Jonas, while not daring not to bow his head, frequently gave vent to a giggle or to an inward gesture of disrespect. The two girls were in earnest. Marsden simply continued the smirk and sullen countenance that were his wont. And over little Quincy, reverently inclined, stole a strange sense of a thing amiss, of a rift in the sacrificial rhythm.

“Amen,” was the signal for a reaction of noise. Father would cut a piece of bread-crust with a knife--a tooth splitting process. The girls would giggle; Jonas would empty his plate and then thrum the table with impatience. And Marsden would order his mother up to re-arrange his cushions.

And while the first sharp edge of appetite wore down, came a space of muffled sounds, with scanty words. Mother would rise noiselessly with that miraculous manner which forbade even the creaking of her chair. Silently, she would gather in the soup plates and pass out into the kitchen.

With regularity, this act was a sign for father. His heavy face would crease in smiles; his heavy hand would fetch down upon the table, upon his knee, upon the back of Jonas.

“Well, lad--what’s new?”

And a gay parley would take place between them.

Here was one invulnerable nucleus; another, three-fold, centered upon Marsden, whose sisters found confession and admiration good, at his indifferent shrine. Rhoda had noticed Marsden intent upon a book that she knew nothing of. But his intentness augured well to a curious impulse in herself. She desired to read a book provocative of such.

“I guess not,” says Marsden.

“Please!”

“Mother would never forgive me, if I let you,” he smiles maliciously.

“Oh--you will--” she pleads, tittering a bit at the point of his cajolery.

“Well, I can’t stop you.”

And Rhoda, titillated strangely by her prospect, jumps half out of her seat to embrace her brother.

“Here,” cries father, looking up in mock anger from his colloquy with Jonas. “Back in your place there! Mother’ll be here.”

And as if with one accord, a faint, vague sneer,--a parting of lips, a twinkle of eyes--steals over the entire company. Quincy alone is excepted. He does not understand. But again there presses upon him the sense of a piteous discord crying against life’s rhythm. Jonas tells an amusing incident from school. Father laughs broadly; Marsden laughs to the best of his ability, his flavor of acid for the nonce repressed; Rhoda laughs, feeling the fellowship of Marsden, and Adelaide giggles, following the lead of Rhoda. And then, the door opens and mother re-appears with the stew. It is as if a hushing pall had fallen. Quincy does not understand--once more. But the dinner nears completion.

With the dessert, there is a shifting of places. The meal’s decorum breaks. Natural tendencies evolve still further. Jonas jumps to his father’s knee. He is busy stealing whiffs of smoke as it shoots past his nose. Rhoda and Adelaide flock to Marsden. He is their god, and in this fact their parents find delight and no small measure of solace for their son’s misfortune. Marsden’s hair is fine and black and long. Rhoda discovers with a shriek of delight that it is getting thin. Yet Marsden is not nineteen. The two girls pass their fingers over his head. Marsden growls and utters sharp words, basking, the while, in their devotion. Mother moves back and forth in the business of clearing the table. And Quincy sits alone, desolate, ignored, while father talks fishing with Jonas and his two sisters vie with each other at their new sport of making braids in Marsden’s hair.

The minutes pass. Quincy cannot hide his interest in this shared spectacle of love wherein he has no part. A dull regret, as for something he has never had, yet something perpetually desired and observed, weighs on him. And through the shroud of this deep, yet inchoate want upon his soul, darts now and then a flare of anger, a cut of pain. But the anger shoots off into a formless gloom. So Quincy remains still, doing nothing, mindful of little, articulate not even in resentment. And his mother passes to and fro, clearing the table, too busy to see.

At last, however, she stops before him. He feels the doom of her words, ere she can utter them.

“Quincy,” she says, “it’s bed-time. Say good-night.”

For a moment, he sits motionless. It is as if he were lost in an incongruous atmosphere, shutting in his body. But his mind has gone out before him, from the room. Vaguely, yet poignantly, he is rehearsing in his little brain the dreadful drama that lies out there--the ordeal of going up to bed. In his mind, he feels already the black loom of the house, the fitful shiver of light in the long halls, the numerous attendance, in a thousand shadows, in a thousand forms, of night’s dire beings. And although he sits there in the light-flooded room, filled as it is with those whom he knows best, he is alone already, abandoned already to mystery and terror. And those who are about him serve not at all to attenuate the presence of what acts in his mind, or to protect him from it. For this is very real. And those about him are very lifeless in their care, very vague in their reality.

“Did you hear what your mother said?”

These are the sole words his father has for him, all of the dinner hour. They serve to throw Quincy to his feet. He stands and looks about him. He would draw strength from these faces to meet his trial, light from them to brave the darkness. But, though his mind grasp it not and his mouth have no word for it, he knows that he has failed. Almost, escape from here is good. But there is so little choice! And his untutored heart has no law to make decision between the shadows that threaten and this light that mocks.

It is the rule that he must bid “good-night” individually, to each of these persons--his family--who now direct their gaze on him with a certain prying interest, as if to gain a sensation from his antics. He feels this. He feels that to cry out or misbehave in some wild fashion as his panic prompts, would merely furnish a cordial to their repast. He feels that to rush out, branding these salutes the mockery they are, would provide a pretext for dragging out his agony. And then, it comes back to him--the prospect beyond the door--! It is an odd impulse, indeed, that would impel rushing upon _that_. For _that_ is one of those recurrent ills which his life’s reason teaches him to take, slowly, hushedly, with gritted teeth--the passage to his room.

So he moves doggedly from father to Marsden, from Marsden to Marsden’s two adoring sisters, and thence to Jonas, who revels in his place beside his father.

Last comes his mother. She takes him in her two hands, lifts him from his feet, embraces him sturdily, once, twice, again, as he dangles in the air. And then, turning him about, she sets him toward the door. The fervor of her message sends the child almost exultant to the stairs. It required so little to enspirit him! But at the landing, the maternal warmth wears weak and the chill gloom of the hall breaks through.

Clenching his fists, humming a tune that has in it the fever of true inspiration, he stumbles toward his goal. The creak of his little feet affrights him; the dull glare of the hall lamp, swept low an instant by some occult draught, the deep-breathing shadow of the rooms he passes--everything conjoins in a stifled symphony of shock and fear.

He reaches his attic. The door is shut. With a dexterity that he cannot understand, he opens. It is as if he were being driven in by the fantasies that press on behind, about, and threaten to attain him. All of the dimensionless way, he has felt them, creeping and clinging at his back.

And now the door’s healthy slam has shut them out. A lamp is burning. Almost gaily, he watches the comb of its yellow flame spurting and receding. For the ordeal is over. And in his joy at this, he has no thought or fear of the morrow.

VI

A prospector in Wyoming and a Directors’ Board on the fifteenth floor of a great office-building in Chicago, brought by the benign twinkle of a star into an angle of conjunction, marked out an event in Harriet, Long Island. It was with the haphazard veer, the cold fatality of a compass. First, came the discovery of rich veins of metal on Josiah’s land and then, scarce with a breathing space, the plan of a railroad that gives currency to wealth in the great West, to nose its way through canyon and frozen lake into that very valley. No more than these two rods of fate were needed to mark fate’s point in Harriet, Long Island.

The first twenty-thousand dollars went to the prospector. Had he placed a claim or made contest to one-tenth of that amount, he would have found an antagonist in Josiah Burt. As it was, he remained silent and found a benefactor. The new magnate prepared to move his family to New York.

For Quincy, who was eleven, this trick of life had its own color and dimension.

It was a balmy day in early spring. He and Jonas had been across country on a jaunt, looking for rabbits. The elder boy had led his brother a breathless pace, with which Quincy only by sheer, desperate will managed to keep up. They had gone inland where a thick wood of birch and firs seemed to rise abrupt from the broad waste of sand-ground and dwarfed shrubs. Quincy’s going at all had been a matter of tolerance on the part of Jonas. In order to drive home this detail, significant as it was to a man of sixteen, Jonas struck a gait that was severe even for him and ignored his brother as best he could. He was resolved, if they should meet any of the “fellows” or, worse still, any of the “girls,” that they should read the truth of his sublime forbearance in the rapidity of his walk and the fixed, impersonal air on his face. But Jonas loved the sport of a cross-country run. And as they sallied on, leaping over brambled rock and pattering stream, enough of the open’s generosity of spirit entered his soul to make him half admire the little fellow that labored doggedly on, beside him.

They did not see any rabbits. But they found a carpet of myrtle and some half-ripe strawberries which they consumed with gusto. Their chief discovery, however, was a beaver’s dam. The stream widened sluggishly beneath an almost veiling margin of thick bushes--aspen and willow and oak. The leafage, turned silver and deep blue in the sun, lay over the strolling water. Perhaps, Quincy’s chief delight in this unearthing was the chance it gave him to get back his breath. But he feigned well a more direct enthusiasm--no hard thing. And then, facing about, they trudged home at a more comfortable gait. For Jonas was appeased, soaked through, perhaps, with the gentle afflatus of the woods before the tread of evening.

As they entered the little stone path that led in from the street, Quincy observed his father standing on the porch and looking down toward them. It was early for him to be at home. They were still twenty steps away, when the man spoke. He was addressing Jonas.

“Well, sonnie. It’s through. Went through, to-day. It’s panned out great!”

Jonas leaped forward. With a bound, he was on the porch, beside his father.

“O Dad,” he cried, “I _am_ glad!”

Quincy, left behind, looked at the tall, portly man and the boy beside him. Jonas was slightly shorter and a good deal less stout. But the resemblance between the two was striking. And in the thrust-forward of their heads, the almost perpetual shrug of their shoulders, the movements of their hands, were the unmistakable gestures of accord. The consequence of these details, Quincy was well aware of, although he ignored the physical features. With instinctive logic he felt that friendship or love for one so like his father must be a meretricious and illusory thing. The first conscious articles of his revolt from Jonas were stirring in him.

Meantime, the pair had passed in together. Quincy mounted to the porch with a pang in his heart. They had gone in, rejoicing, oblivious of him. So whatever this new thing was, which had succeeded, which had made them happy, to Quincy it could bring no pleasure, for he had no share in it and it had served merely to give an accent to the old want and the old yearning.

In this spirit, he opened the door and stepped inside. The entire family was assembled in the parlor. And the glow of excitement that they gave out seemed to pervade the dingy room. The portières and other hangings took on a higher key of color. A vibrancy had shot through everything. Everything was rhythmed to this new joyous theme which he did not understand--everything save himself. He looked more sharply. There were other exceptions. He went over to his mother. Sarah took his hand and held it tightly. For at that moment, Marsden was talking, and it was forever necessary to attend him.

“One thing let’s do:” he was saying, “--get out of Harriet.”

“But summer’s coming, dear,” replied Josiah, “It would be sort of foolish to go to New York just when every New Yorker that can afford it, is coming to Long Island.”

“Well, let’s get out of this house just the same,” spoke Rhoda, and rose to her feet as if to emphasize her hurry. By now, she was a tall, slender beauty. She knew it. She was clad in a pale pink frock, loosely hung from over her candid breasts. The skirt fell awkwardly. The color was too dull not to detract from the dusky splendor of her hair and eyes and soft-grey skin. It was an unbecoming frock, indeed. And this also, Rhoda knew.

“I want to go to New York and help Rhoda buy some dresses.” It was Adelaide who spoke. In her round, bright, golden face there shone another passion than that of altruism. A not uncommon trait in girls before they reach sixteen,--Adelaide was merely transferring her love of mature decoration to her sister against the time when she could glut it on herself.

Josiah was pacing the room, his hands clasped behind him. He had made a flying journey to New York and he was arrayed in his best finery--a capacious Prince Albert coat that flared below the waist like a rubber cylinder about to burst. His trousers were too tight. The knees were crinkled, puffy and turned-in, an anatomical detail which stout men share with women. He wore an upstanding collar and in the wide frontal gap his heavy chin thrust down in amiable meditation.

“Well,” he said, as he paced, “I’ll tell you: choose for yourselves where you want to go, and I’ll foot the bill. Your mother can take you. I got to stay near Town, this summer.”

The panorama of promise overwhelmed them. They were silent. All of them, save Rhoda, were without a thought. After a pause, she uttered one word:

“Europe!”

And with the comfortable way of crowds, all who were present fell upon her suggestion as if it had been the exact articulation of their desire.

“Good!” said Josiah. “Just make your plans,” and with a true sense of the dramatic, left the room. Jonas ran after him, noisily humming, half skipping. Rhoda and Adelaide clasped waists and danced away. There was the tramp of their feet, the sharp cadence of their voices. And then, came silence.

Marsden and Sarah and Quincy were left. And, as if by magic, the parlor’s mood had changed. Heavier than ever were the portières and other hangings; narrower and lower than before, the greyish cut of ceiling, the impress of walls. The cripple lay back in his cushions. His eyes were upturned. And he was musing. He did not philosophize his meditation. It was hurting too much for that.

But his looking up and within himself made it as if Sarah and her last-born had been alone.

She was seated on her favorite cane chair. At her knees stood Quincy, half leaning against them, his hands in hers, his head on a level with her eyes. And so, facing each other, they remained. There was a pathetic similarity between this aging woman and this growing boy. Their faces were long and drawn; their heads were generously moulded. The eyes of both were a deep blue-grey that reminded one in her of faded violets, in him of violets that were fresh but in a shadow. Even their mouths were alike--large, tender-pointed, mobile. And at this moment, there played upon them a tremor like the echo of a single pain.

Sarah shifted her gaze. To her, this searching intercourse between them had become almost unbearable. It was as if, in this deep sympathy that had annealed them, lay infidelity toward the others to whom she was attached. For Quincy could not be the only one. In the rapt intensity which drove his spirit toward her, and in her impulse to respond just so intensely, just so wholeheartedly, it was as if, easily, it might be brought about that there should be no others. But such a blessed gift was not ordained for Quincy. Sarah repulsed her passionate inner gesture of bestowal; she beat down this mother in her which threatened to clasp Quincy to the exclusion of all else. She summoned her sense of duty, her social sense, her common sense. She looked toward Marsden for aid in her resolve. And deliberately, coldly, though she knew not the full nature of her act, she broke this blinding, seething current that threatened to submerge the pair, one with the other. She felt the presence in her eyes, in the expression of her face, of just this feeling of exclusion, of hopelessness, of irony that she found in his. She wiped all this away, forcing her mind and smiling. Within herself, she knew that this wealth was mockery for her--the gilding of a death’s-head. It would not return her husband to her, after eleven years of tolerant estrangement.

But, somehow, it was wrong that her child should feel such things within his mother. It was wrong that he should understand. So she turned hypocrite and smiled.

“Well, dearie,” she said, clapping his hands together within hers, “you’re goin’ to have fine clothes now, and--”

She stopped.

Quincy was withdrawing his hands. With a tremor of his eyelids, he turned silently and marched out of the room.

Sarah remained as she had been--half forward in her chair. Her smile was frozen on her face. And all of her was similarly frozen.

There had been something Quincy was not to understand. Here, then, was something beyond the understanding of Quincy’s mother.

VII

The European project had to be abandoned. Josiah could not leave his affairs for so prolonged a journey. And Sarah declined to leave Marsden. Beside, Rhoda and Jonas who were its instigators, had their doubts as to the pleasure of a jaunt in Europe with their mother as guide. And they were right. Sarah’s training and life in Harriet were scarce such as to have fitted her for Paris and Berlin, even if the comfortable aid of Cook’s had been invoked--as Josiah had suggested. So a short run out West with a peep-in on Yellowstone Park was arranged by way of compensation.

Sarah and Marsden remained behind in Harriet for the last months. Workmen and decorators had full swing in a broad, brown-stone house near Central Park on the West side of Manhattan. And meantime, Josiah, who needed at any rate to visit his property near Red Bear and to confer with his promoters in Helena, Butte and Billings, made ready to take his two daughters and two sons along. The preparation on his part consisted in the booking of two compartments to Chicago and thence West. For the children, it meant the buying of clothes, valises, toilet articles, and descriptive literature. There was much bustle, much serious discussion, less anticipation than sheer worry. And in all this, Quincy’s part was passive, disaffected. He knew that he was going along because his mother had insisted that he was not too young to enjoy geysers. He should greatly have preferred to remain at home, considering the trip’s company and the air of fevered preparation that made it from the outset ominous. But Sarah had nursed the fond illusion that by including him in the arrangement he would become automatically one, in all its myriad, impromptu reckonings, with the family life whence she was wise enough to feel his past exclusion. Sarah, then, was sponsor of the child’s forced participation in the trip. Sarah, as so often before, was clumsily in error. But the serious element of this lay not in her mistake, not in the needless discomfort that her mistake brought on Quincy. It lay in the circumstance of Quincy’s knowing just these things, of his knowing how they and their like bore on his life. For Quincy was coming fatalistically, stoically, to adjudge his mother, to recognize her failures and to accept her in their shadow.

The trip was interminable. Chiefly, it consisted of long, stiflingly hot days in a cramped car that lurched and groaned and pounded and halted, getting nowhere in a scorch of wheat-fields. Nights, Quincy was perched far up under the chandelier, with no window through which to reaffirm, by looking out, his hold on the realities. This was insufferable. To be shuffled along through endless flatlands was bad enough if one could see. But to be thrust through the black with no sense of direction or of space, while one’s limbs ached with the unceasing murmurs of the train, bordered on nightmare. The cities, moreover, were an unmeaning jangle of lights and muddy, topless houses and clamoring traffic.

The gem of their journey--Yellowstone Park--proved to be the height of his torture. It lasted, by count, four days. But by this period, Quincy’s sense of time had gone the way of his other senses. He was packed stiffly, hotly, into a high, swaying stagecoach. Before being swung to his position he always saw the horses that drew the wagon. He loved horses. And the fiery sinew of these Western beasts gave his heart a turn. He wished to pet them and feed them sugar and talk with them. But always, he was swung up between Josiah and Jonas where the horses were invisible. Their rhythmic patter he still heard, and it was bitter music to him, since he could not fix this one suggested joy by seeing. And now, as they swayed on, Quincy observed that the Park’s chief quality was not geysers at all, but dust. True, it was a peculiar sort of dust. Never had he tasted dust so thick, so bitter, so plentiful, so blinding. It rolled and plunged over the coach, over the crouched, packed creatures that hung upon its scruff, over the very skies. It came in great clouds. It cut into his eyes and ears and mouth. It made him itch and ache. And yet, so carefully had he been wedged against his father and his brother that he could not scratch where the dust itched, nor stretch where the ride stiffened him. At noontime, the coach creaked to a stand-still and there was a hotel, instead of dust, upon the map of living. He was fed at a long table where waitresses hurled thick crockery and men smelled of sweat. Before or after coach-time, he saw geysers.

Unpleasant, ill-natured, evil-tempered things they were to Quincy--freaks without form or beauty, uninspiring and meaningless. To any lad of vision, a brook with a bass sunning in its bed, a flower upon a ledge of rock, must mean immeasurably more. But for the vague impression of this truth, Quincy was upbraided. He could not buttress it with clarifying questions, such, for instance, as whether a man with three noses would be deemed worshipful or a woman ten feet high entrancing. And if not, then why these freaks styled geysers? Quincy knew deeply that he would be more comfortable and more inspired in a copse of saplings. But to a continent with no imagination, these miserable spurts of water and hot mud are a property of pride. So, of course, the boy riled his father and the gaping girls by his indifference, the few times they turned to sound him.

And then, after the nightmare of dusty roads and advertised monstrosities which one was ordered to admire, as one is ordered to brush one’s teeth (and which seemed equally aside the point of living), came another scourge of trains. And between them, cities that deafened and terrified and bullied. And then, one blessed day, after the most abysmal and thundering of all the cities, there was Harriet at the end of the day’s journey!

With a real sense of joy, Quincy took in the modest, crumbled-wood station, the box-like freight house on the siding. And when the platform slid in beneath his staring eyes that seemed glued to the car-window, and there, in a grey dress and a black shawl over her head, was mother, he could not restrain himself from a demonstration. Here at last was something got to by trains that he could rejoice in and wonder at! For there, despite the ceaseless purgatory he had been hurled or pushed through, stood the old bulwark, the old love--as serenely unchanged as if all of it had been an angry dream. And so perchance it had been! Yet, Quincy did not on that account elect to linger in it. Dream or actuality, it was to be got behind! And the one efficacious way of that was to storm from the train, to fling into the arms of the dear past--and to lie there, huddled, tearful, aglow, while the great iron monster with snort and scream pulled the horror--dream or actuality--forever after it, out of the station.

So, it was needful that Quincy act. And so, he acted. Oblivious of hat or coat, he rushed frantic down the aisle of the lugubrious car--his hands out, his mouth open. A trainman guarded the door. He passed him, nor could the car platform hold him. Down he flew, and stumbled upon the whirling walk of the station. His mother picked him up, bruised but happy.

He looked up at her. He had seen her first; he had reached her first. And now, here she was touching him, clasping his shoulders, smoothing his hair, brushing his coat. What mattered an abrasion on the knee or a burning on the forehead? He looked up, then, speechless, taking in his delight.

And his mother said, in the old voice which was somehow not quite the voice that he had so often summoned to him on his journey:

“You silly boy! You silly boy! Why couldn’t you wait until the train stops? It’s a wonder you weren’t killed.”

Whereupon, the train did stop--and the scolding, while Sarah went to greet the others.

For a moment, Quincy stood alone on the platform, next to a very sharp old man that seemed to be looking through him with steel eyes, so that he was ashamed. And the abrasion on his knee hurt very much; and the burning on his forehead seemed somehow to have scorched his heart.

VIII

In early September, the workmen and the decorators left the big brown-stone house in a condition of coldness known as “modern” and a state of deadness known as “beautiful.” And then, the family of Burt moved in. At this time, Quincy was approaching his twelfth birthday.

Not as long as he lived did he forget the feeling that came over him, that first time, as he mounted the stoop and went through the ponderous carved door into the house that was now to be his home.

The _coupé_ came to a stand-still. The horses had made a strange and muffled sing-song on the pavement. From time to time, this changed to a metallic patter in syncopation--a sound symbol, it seemed to Quincy, of affright. At these intervals, the carriage jolted, one wheel rolled high, the other was in a trough. Then again, all righted itself and the sing-song was resumed. In the coach, was gloom of blue upholstery and leather. His father and his sisters sat tight, thrilled, their eyes intent upon the passing city. It was a maelstrom of half impressions. Cars clanged, other horses sloughed off the view, a swaying coachman shouted, an insatiate tide of men and women ebbed and flowed. Marsden, mother, Jonas and the servant had gone before in another carriage. And now, the frenzy of Manhattan seemed to abate. It was like leaving the wind behind one on the water. They swung up the border of a Park. There were trees and shrubs and grass! It was a wood, by all conventions. And yet it depressed Quincy who yearned for just such balm. The trees were grey; the grass was dull. Here was not life, but a show of artifice. Hard walks girded the green stretches like belts of steel. None of the free tang and give and sunniness, none of the lilt and smiling, none of the purple murmur of the woods was here. Central Park did not fool Quincy--could not have fooled him, even if cars had not swept back and forth between him and it; even if a depressing monotone of houses had not filled the other flank.

And now, the carriage rolled up. A crowded tramp of the horses and it came to a halt.

Rhoda and Adelaide seemed to emerge from a trance.

“Here we are!” they sighed, with a hollow note that bespoke the nervous feel in their stomachs. The carriage door flung open. They bounded out and ran up the stoop. Josiah half-lifted, half-pushed Quincy to the pavement. He stood there, balanced by his bewilderments, while his father paid the coachman.

“Come on, sir,” the big man tapped his shoulder. The carriage had disappeared. Quincy looked up.

Before him was an unbroken but uneven battlement of houses. Some were brown, some were red, some were grey. At their feet ran the wide, flagstoned pavement. Some were straight-stepped, some were curved, some were curiously decorated boxes. A few had no feet at all--with doorways punched abruptly in the wall. Before Quincy’s eyes it was brown; the protuberance with stairs was straight. Red doors were flung wide open--held so for passage of the trunks--and within was darkness. Above, it was all very vague and high. Quincy felt this, though he did not look. He went up mechanically, with his father. As he stepped in, he felt a quick sensation of the sky--shrill blue, inexorably far away, yet good. It seemed like a short draught of water when one has been long athirst. It was but a momentary glimpse. And then, his body carried him beyond, within, where the sky was not. He saw the long hall, shadowed, and the wide stairs. It seemed clear to him now why it had been as if the sky was snuffed away. Everything loomed forward and smothered Quincy; filled up the crystal space within him that cared for the blue above and seemed somehow related to it. Everything loaded down upon him, occupied him, stayed there. As he trudged up, it was as if a mighty burden had come suddenly. Quincy observed no more, felt nothing more explicit. But for an instant a perspective flashed on him, though he deemed it merely a natural panic like a score of others he had undergone. In it, he saw himself, slight, small, stooped, his head strained back with his disordered tension, his legs careering stiffly with untrained, superfluous energy. In it, he saw about him a weight of gloom--the stuff and color of this house which was to be his home. And then, once more, he was a child. His mother stood at the head of the stairs. She was very busy, and rather dirty-looking.

“You had better go up to your room, dear, where you won’t be in the way.” She turned to Jonas who sat sprawling within vision, upon a great chair in green satin. “Jonas, will you take Quincy up?”

“Sure,” replied the boy. “Come along, Kid.”

It was easy to tell that what interested Jonas was the chance of showing.

So they were still to share a room? Quincy learned this, as he took in the two white-enameled beds and the valise with “J.B.” upon it that he stumbled over as he entered. The sight of his mother and this new event which scarcely he had dared to hope for, seemed to enliven Quincy. He had not given up Jonas. He had had his pangs from him, as from his mother.

“Oh, Jonas,” he exclaimed, “aren’t you glad we’re here?”

“You bet,” said Jonas.

“No--I mean _we_--”

The elder boy looked down, first quizzically, then with a withering wrinkle upon his eyes and nose and mouth.

“For God’s sake, Quincy--what a sis you are!” Then,--“Ma says for you to stay up here,” and left the room.

So Quincy was alone.

* * * * *

The end of that first month was the beginning of the time when Quincy began once more to breathe in a normal fashion. For long, everything had been so new, all the old ceremonies had been so suddenly replaced, all the comfortable nooks of life which with difficulty he had carved for himself in Harriet were so miserably absent, that life had become a breathless trick like trying to ride bareback (as he had once essayed), or endeavoring not to irritate his sisters. There was, for instance, the problem of eating in the ominous, overbearing dining room, the problem of sleeping in a bed which shone like the exhibition motor in the shop on Main Street, the problem of being comfortable in blouses that had to be kept clean and with thin new stockings that had to be kept whole. Also, there was the problem of loving his mother in a dazzling housegown of blue satin. These were like enemies, besetting the routes of life. And at first they had seemed insuperable. And at last they had faded quite away, and wonder about them, as well as memory, had died in the fresh, general glamor. But now, with his recovery, came a new shock.

Something of adoration had persisted in Quincy toward his room-mate despite constantly recurring disillusions, rational promptings, and rebuffs. In the fixations of childish fantasy and love there is the doggedness of plant-life which persists where it has grown, though all nature conspire to prove the folly of its position. Such plants will die, or they must be uprooted. They are such stubborn things precisely because of the logic of their existence--to rise from their roots. A similar instinct was in Quincy concerning Jonas. All the persuasions of deed or mind could prevail little against his intuitive attachment, because they were in different planes. He would hold to his sentiment for Jonas until the roots of energy which had thus grown were pointedly grasped and torn away. For a seed of his life instinct was there. And where it had fallen, it had remained. In Jonas, Quincy saw a future of his own growth--a boy, happy, cherished, of importance. What aided this admiration perhaps most of all was the sense of imperviousness to life’s problems which permeated Jonas. This, in particular, was a desideratum. But, after all, these were but rationalizations. The heart of the young boy’s attachment, no young boy could understand.

Quincy was in his room. It was but half an hour before dinner. The boy sat at his desk solving a knotty problem in arithmetic with a facility beyond the power of his six-years-older brother. Quincy was very apt at mathematics. But also, he was good at literature. This double accomplishment militated against his being singled out for any talent. It is a way of people, to mark a virtue only when it is one-sided.

So Quincy sat at his little desk and worked. It was a slanting, box-shaped affair. Its top lifted upon a hinge, disclosing within a maze of paper, school-books, pencils, twine. In one corner, half hidden under a pad, were two unframed pictures--cheap photographs which he had clandestinely collected of the Farnese Hercules and the Venus de Milo. Quincy’s instinct told him that it would be well not to make show of these treasures. His mother would have found them naughty, Jonas would have seared them with the laughter of Philistia. So he hid them and, like forbidden fruit, enjoyed them. Of all the pictures he had ever seen, these meant the most to him. The huge, power-ridged torso of the Hercules filled him with fellowship to so much might and in some way seemed to make him share the giant’s merciless efficiency. He could repeat the Labors. The genius of this overweening man who had penetrated to all the corners of the earth and forever forced for himself acceptance and a welcome was dazzling to Quincy. He enjoyed gazing at a plastic wish fulfillment. But for the sentiment of the divine, he turned toward the Venus. Hercules was to him a successful man; Venus was a goddess. He loved to look at her. The subdued rhythm of her body, the gentle poise of her head and breasts justified Quincy in his own nature, whereas the brawny giant served to mitigate that nature’s realness and to exalt its opposite. So also, since the Venus reached him not by antithesis, but by a direct appeal to a deep, primal part of him, his love for her was more rapt, more pointless, sweeter. He spent more time with her than with the giant. But she made him think less. And he knew less about the instinct which drew him toward her.

Above Quincy’s head, as he worked, was an electric bracket. To his left were the two beds. In the direction that he faced were the windows, curtained in dainty, dun-colored mesh. To his right was a mahogany bureau. This was no ideal setting for his work. But Quincy had learned--it was one of the gifts of the poor days--to concentrate.

The door opened and Jonas slammed in. There was no formality between them. So Quincy went on working. But in the pause that followed, the child felt something which disturbed him. Still holding his pencil, he turned about. There, near the door, stood Jonas, looking at him. On his face was a gleam of triumph.

“What’s happened, Jonas?”

Jonas chuckled. “Time to get ready for supper, Quint.”

The child jumped up, to obey. “What has happened?”

“Oh, if you only knew!”

“Tell me.”

Jonas laughed tantalizingly. The little lad looked at him with a hopeless rebuke. And then, tossing his head, he moved to the bureau and began to brush his hair. His hair seemed to grow awry, to shoot out in a dozen directions from his scalp. So Quincy’s task was always a fairly hard one since his mother insisted on a part; and since, when he did not succeed, she would brush it for him and invariably hurt him. So Quincy fell to. Jonas stood smiling at him still. Suddenly, he began to speak.

“I guess I will tell you. I’m going away to school--right off.”

The child leaped around. “Jonas!”

“Next week. To Exeter.”

Quincy’s head worked fast. Then, with effort: “Can’t I go, too?”

It was a fatal question. Jonas took it sneering. He was nearly seventeen and he had the sense of age and independence that ordinary boys are prone to.

“You? I guess not. I don’t want _you_ ’round any more. You stay at home, where you belong--if you belong anywhere.” He smiled.

He would have said more in this great need of establishing his power and independence through attack on some one immeasurably weaker, in these things, than himself. But just then a flying brush hurled against his forehead. He looked up, not understanding. And then, he smiled through his pain. For it was not to be admitted that this infuriated child could hurt him.

“You little sinner!--” he stepped back instinctively. Then, again, he smiled.

And at this last smile, Quincy became an unaccountable demon. He saw what he had done. It moved him strangely. A need swept over him to rush up to Jonas, to fling arms about his neck, to kiss him, to implore him, to cry out: “Take me too. Please, please stop despising me!” This was all his need. And yet, out of the fullness of his love he had flung his brush. And out of his love again, there he was, leaping upon his brother, biting him, scratching him, tearing his face. And all that became articulate of his beseechment was a liquid “Oh! Oh! Oh!”

Jonas grasped at his frenzied, writhing assailant. At length, he caught him comprehensively within his arms. And then, Quincy went flying through the air. He fell, safely, stomach downward, on the bed. And there he lay, tearless, motionless, overwhelmed with the bitterness of life.

The door opened. He did not budge. But he understood. The alarm had brought his father. And there in the door he felt the cold, looming figure of the man whose presence alone was needed to brim his misery. Stark, stiffly, he lay now--one nerve of agony. And when his father’s voice came, it was like the sharp touch of steel upon a nerve that is exposed.

“What is this?”

“Oh, nothing,” replied Jonas, moved again by the need of minimizing the damage done by a child not yet turned twelve. But his father could see the two bloody scratches on his cheek, the slight swelling on his forehead. And Quincy could hear the nervous clutch in his voice.

Josiah looked long, saying nothing. And then:

“It’s supper time, Jonas.... Come down.... And as to you, my lad,--” Quincy held his breath with his galled anguish,--“you’d better stay up here--and cool off.”

Quincy had felt the smile in this voice also. He felt the two, their eyes meeting and smiling together. Then the door slammed and they were gone.

Smiles, smiles--what a curse smiles seemed to him! There was so much laughter in the house. But when they looked at him, it became a smile. Never, never did they laugh with him. Surely, then, he too must learn to smile. Rigid as ever, he turned on his back. And through his scarce-started tears, he looked up at the blurred electric lamp. And then, as he lay there, his mouth trembled and he learned to smile. It was an evil moment.