Chapter VI: Part TWO: I (2)

It was not yet four o’clock. And the sparse stream of early hurriers about him was as nothing against his feeling of solitude. He recalled almost vaguely now the packed recesses whence he had emerged--the delirium of cars churning the crowds, the hammer of the outlying city.

Before him swept the bridge. He felt that every cable of the web-like maze was vibrant with stress and strain. With these things he was alone. Yet he felt no insecurity, such as the crowds inspired. Beyond, through the net-work of steel, huddled Brooklyn. And below his very feet, tumbled together as if some giant had tipped the city eastward and sent all the houses pell-mell toward the down-tilted corner, lay the wharves and slums of Manhattan. It seemed to Quincy that he was being caught upon a monstrous swing and swept with its pulsed lilt above the grovelling life of the metropolis. Suddenly, the fancy flashed upon him that from his perch of shivering steel the power should indeed come to poise and judge the swarm above which he rocked. The bridge that reeled beyond him seemed an arbiter. It bound the city. It must know the city’s soul since it was so close to the city’s breath. In its throbbing cables there must be a message. In its lacings and filigrees of steel, there must be subtle words!...

He was already above the river. The sun was cold. The waters of the harbor cut out like sapphire fretted with gleam. Beyond, Brooklyn was in shadow--shadow that sprang rather from its nature than the sun’s lack. Quincy turned north where the great East Side crowded out under two bridges, stifling the river to an inlet. The city rose in a blue haze. Quincy recalled the words of the man in the Park: “Blue’s her color.” It was all like the piled ascent of some brobdingnagian ant-hill. He scrutinized it carefully,--from the stall-like wharves to the tower, turreted and carved in ice at the hill’s crest. It seemed ugly. And yet, as his eyes went back over the mazy whole, down from the notched skyline to the turmoiled streets that fell brown and grey into the water, it seemed beautiful as well. Quincy was puzzled. He did not know that in this flaunting grandeur, building from myriad misery and ugliness, lay the nature of New York.

Quincy too was cold. Instinctively, he turned south. The sun was very ineffectual against the lower city with its escarpments of wrought stone. There was a cruelty about these that laughed at the falling sun. The tall buildings were ugly--fearfully so. They lacked grace and color. One of them was a titanic telescope done in cake and sugar. A huge structure farther north--ridiculous with a flounce as a flank and its tiny turrets--reminded him of building-blocks. And this brought to Quincy the idea of giant babies, sportively responsible for it all. But there was tragedy as well as farce. The vaster buildings rose all white and impervious and cool from the wallow of unlit mediocrity below. Monsters indeed, they seemed to have sucked the strength for rising from the nondescript ruck that they submerged. Ferocious, sapping prodigies they seemed, now, to Quincy--the sort to which men are sacrificed and that make slaves of their creators.

All of this was like the blow of a mailed fist to the boy. It made him turn toward Brooklyn. The borough of homes appeared shabby and foul, a neglected step-sister unworthy the name of Cinderella. For here was no virtue under the spell of persecution. Brooklyn also was sinister enough. Merely, she had been less successful. Homes, evidently, counted little.

Suddenly, Quincy found that he had left the bridge and was standing upon a street in Brooklyn. He struck down its dingy length. He wondered if the wealth that had raised all the glories he had just observed was in some manner parent to this squalor. For not more than fifteen minutes, he searched the swart, hovelled depths below the Bridge. He saw a ferry-boat at the foot of a street, relieved with plants and romping boys, which had been turned into a consumptives’ home. He was not used to stinking court-ways, houses that leered, rank saloons advertising rum and sidewalks crumbling with neglect. He looked up at the span of bridge. It seemed an unattainable pathway. His nerves told him he would be better looking down at Brooklyn. So he returned.

The whole world had become another world in half an hour. Quincy surveyed the sky, the river, distant Manhattan. It came to him with a thrill that nothing was the same--that everything was radically something else. It was night--boldly, suddenly, entirely. If New York had a tongue of its own, would there be a word in it for evening?

What impressed Quincy at once was that night was not falling, as poetry books would have it, but ascending; and ascending, not in a steady advance like the shadows on a mountain, but in sudden starts, in impulsive sallies, like clouds of guerilla warriors pressing up, free of each other, repulsed here, there held at bay, and here again triumphant.

In the north, Manhattan was already dark. It loomed up, loftier yet more subdued in mist that was forever turning thicker and more sombre. Not a light pierced the haze to Quincy’s eye. He seemed now to be looking down upon an illimitable graveyard. Each house was become a tomb-stone, each towering building, in the light of day a sentinel of progress, appeared now a monument to some great death. Below the liquid green of the two uptown bridges, the East River was opaque amethyst, streaked here and there where some boat had cut a swathe. The moiling tenements glowed forth like coral. Poverty, catching a deflected ray, turned lurid.

Now, as he marched on, Quincy observed the south. The arm of Liberty, wisp-like in the mist, pointed to a blood-orange ball of sun. The nearer island lay in a deeper purple; its trees waved through a thicker film. But the waters were in shadow as if night had been an emanation from them, pushing the sun relentlessly back across the rim of the world. Above the harbor, was a deep pall, night’s advance guard in its grey, the sun’s resistance in its orange fretting. The pall fell and the waters grew more brackish. The sun plunged down against the mists, pouring a frenzy of disparted color that shot about the buildings of South Manhattan. And now, a sheet of gold cloud came underneath it. Slowly, yet visibly, the gold turned to yellow, to lemon, to silver--and went grey. Steeped as if in its own blood, the sun sank through the mists, and disappeared.

Quincy shuddered as if he had been witness to a tragedy. Then, huddled in his coat, he pressed on toward Manhattan.

The lower buildings had receded into shadow. The upper turrets were still shooting white against a shrill blue sky. Below, Manhattan was retreating; in the higher line, it still advanced. Quincy thought that the tall buildings slanted forward, that they must topple into the river. And throughout the long expanse, came streaks of smoke, all pointing north, all twining with harmonious measure into the sky.

But now, was the most startling change of all. The phalanx of white smoke seemed to hesitate, broke and scattered. With the sun had gone the wind; and with it, given up to the play of a thousand lesser currents, the smoke eddied forth, curled back and reverted in formless disarray.

Then, with a flash, Quincy was aware of a glitter of lights along the precipice. They were everywhere--huge bars of them in the north, clusters of them in the south. The lights of a city do not come out, one by one. A moment before, he had not noticed any. This, however, Quincy did remark: at first the lights appeared faint, almost fancied within the clear eminence of buildings. But by degrees, the lights, thickening in numbers, grew as well in strength, became more real and more brilliant. In measure, the cold outline of stone against the blue melted and merged; the two values--sky and building--fell back into one wash of grey. And the lights took firmer form in their dimming casements, and gleamed forth like a new city of flame in place of the city of stone. Manhattan of the day, with its sharp, cruel outlines and its clumsy angles, hostile to subtlety and to suggestion, was fading utterly before this faëry Manhattan with its swarms of color and its deep store of fancy.

Quincy fought his way to the street through the frantic turbulence of clattering cars and thronging home-goers. He felt as if he had been dropped down the muddy vortex of a whirlpool. Night was thick above him. Great clouds of people swirled toward the bridge and subway, amid the clangor of traffic and the cacophony of newsboys.

Bruised, frightened, Quincy turned away, eager only to escape. Suddenly, amazement stopped him. Across the dismal mouth of the street was the bridge--a giant causeway. One arc-light underneath broke off a circlet of yellow-white from the surrounding gloom. Above shone a ragged strip of sky. The air was rank. The solitary light tumbled and flashed in the vapors.

Panic clutched the boy. There seemed a half uttered charm about this place. He pressed on. And now, he slipped along the wet walks of Fulton Market where the fish of a thousand pushcarts had dropped blood and ooze during the day. Facing the low, red houses with the hectic, gas-burning shops, Quincy observed Broadway beyond--a long, high gauze of flame. Ponderous trucks rattled past. And a thin stream of drab humanity shuffled toward the ancient ferry that plies to Brooklyn.

Quincy went north on South Street, past the swinging doors of saloons and shops where marling-spikes and flag-trucks made display. Under the Bridge itself he went--looming above him like a curse; and into the rookeries of Cherry Hill.

Quincy had had enough. He was frightened, horrified.

He pushed up Water Street and westward, eager above all to escape the omnipresent Bridge. He passed through fetid piles of tenement, pouring their produce into the street. Crowds jostled him; cars clashed; machines went braying, shuttling. The taste of New York was bitter on his lips. Through its sheer bulk, it threatened to submerge him. He wished to run, in order to be rid of it. But he held himself back. He must be calm, courageous. All of this delirium, this lurid show of filth and vice and an inexplicable beauty--was it not life? Would he avoid life, would he be rid of it? Was he not of it? was he not also life?

And so, aching in his soul, for his experience, yet aware deeply that he had somehow been visiting himself, Quincy reached the station and journeyed back to college.

The depth of the impression of this trip on Quincy was such that he did not begin really to know it until somewhat later. Great shocks often compound a spiritual bath which takes a long time to soak upon the nerves. Quincy’s experience, as he looked back on it, was in the nature of a shock--a physical one. It grew blurred, dimensionless within his mind. And in proportion, grew the mental reflex. It seemed now, to Quincy, that the vagueness of what he had encountered was his own subjective vagueness; as if indeed he had pried into the arcana of existence. Of course, such a venture into truth could not have the petty clarity of fact. He learned that a glance within himself gave just such dim results. Yet here, dimness did not detract from poignancy. And so, with New York. There was a firm analogy between these delvings; and between their consequences, at first elusive, physical, and finally outspreading into an aura of deep importance.

He spoke freely of all this to Garsted.

“Why,” asked Garsted, “do you fail to divorce the sense of beauty from even the vilest thing you saw?”

“That I can’t understand,” said Quincy.

“You don’t seem to know what the sense of beauty means.”

“Let me see if I can figure it out.” Quincy knit his brow, and his blue eyes softened. It was as if he had spiritually relaxed, instinctively aware that in this way one can receive.

“Perhaps,” he groped on, “perhaps, when I feel beauty, I am really feeling a sense of welcome. A welcome of the spirit.”

“Good!” cried Garsted. “And when do we welcome? Now, look out for your answer! No sentimentalism. Hypothetically, we welcome when we are charitable, altruistic, Christian. But actually--”

“When we want, I guess.”

“We feel a sense of welcome, when we feel a sense of one-ness. Is that not so? Well--now we’re at the kernel. Beauty is nothing but a sense of welcome within, that we transfer onto an object, because the impulse of life is to transfer. A sense of harmony, in other words.”

“A sense of harmony with filthy hovels and cruel skyscrapers!”

“Absolutely. Something in them is in you,--is truth. You feel that vaguely, through the filth and the stolen decoration. And you call all of it beautiful.”

“Why,” laughed Quincy, “you make me think I was paying a visit to myself, in extension.”

“Well, what else gripped you? Was it the architecture?”

They laughed together. And then, in the silence, the boy pondered.

“You’re right,” he said at last. “I felt it also,--that I had been looking into myself. Now, I can do more than feel it--thanks to you; I can express it.” He paused.

“The devil! Then all these brutalities and contrasts and flauntings are truth? And they’re in me, also--at least, what makes them be!”

“Don’t you also belong to the world?”

Quincy looked sharply at his friend. This question moved him. He thought of his life, so far. He thought of the havoc which even this little glimpse of the world had played with him. He grew sombre and his eyes lost their liquid glow of relaxation.

“Something’s wrong,” he said solemnly. “If I belong to the world, there’s that within me objects to it. It cries out, objecting. It felt the beauty, that day. And, as you say, that meant that it recognized a fellowship, a harmony. But it hurt, Garsted,--it hurt like being crushed!”

Garsted laughed--alone. He could go only a certain way with Quincy. This seemed jejune sensitiveness.

From the moment of that laughter, the boy discovered that there were things and states about which it was unwise to talk, even in the rare circumstance of being able to.

VI

One day, on the street, Quincy saw Professor Deering. Quincy was hurt at the Professor. He was in a mood for a cold bow that would leave its mark. But the big man stopped him and talked the mood away in cordiality.

“Mr. Burt--I am ashamed of myself,” he smiled wanly. “There have been worries and they have made me rude. Walk me home, now, will you?”

Quincy followed tacitly at his side.

“I was very grateful for that paper,” went on the Professor. “I gave Snowdon of the _Monthly_ a piece of my mind for rejecting it. But tell me, how are you?”

“I am getting on, thank you, Professor Deering.”

“That is as it should be. I am glad to hear it. I wasn’t so sure of you, you see.”

Quincy’s heart sank. It was as if he had been found out, as if a guilt had been fixed on him. Yet, he knew that the Professor’s words tokened merely respect and an unusual interest.

The Professor went on: “You evidently have qualities of rebellion, Mr. Burt. If you have the strength to support what these qualities will always bring you, I have no fear for you. But it is more common to revolt than to support what revolt sets up.”

“I’m all right, Mr. Deering,” Quincy replied; “I am not in the least worried. I am having a bully time.”

“Will you come in just a few minutes? It is tea hour.”

Quincy hesitated clumsily; grew aware of his awkwardness, and agreed, in order to conceal it.

They were before the Deering House. It looked very like a big, paste-board box, dropped directly upon the street by some careless errand-boy. There was no lawn before it. Two low steps led to a tiny porch, scarcely wider than the door, yet big enough for two banks of flower-pots. These were now barren and frozen. The house was of white frame and square. The two windows of the façade seemed to have been punched upon it as an afterthought.

Mr. Deering unlocked the door and Quincy was led across a narrow hall into the library. The room was spacious and bare. The center table had no cover; the three windows had no curtains; the walls were entirely occupied with plain book-racks, the height of the ceiling. A wood fire burned in the hearth, before which lay a tiger skin. This touch of Oriental glamor in the room’s prim contour stood out. With the exception of one upholstered arm-chair, the furniture was plain. Domestic rugs pieced out the soft-wood floor. There was a small gas stove in the corner of two book shelves. On it were a pewter kettle, several cups and a decanter of spirits.

“Sit down, and let me brew you some tea,” said Mr. Deering.

Quincy complied. “This is where you work?”

“Yes. When I close the doors, I am in an inviolable castle.”

The boy remarked that on the center table lay a low pile of unused papers, a single pen and, in the corner, a small rack containing half a dozen books. Even the table seemed impoverished and empty. No artistic wealth of abandon was about it. Meantime, Professor Deering was boiling water.

“You must come here often, Mr. Burt,” he spoke as he leaned over the little table.

Quincy liked the massive stretch of his back, the wide, high head poised gracefully upon a short, thick neck and closely covered, like a cap, with hair.

During the process of tea-soaking there was no further talk. The host seemed absorbed. The guest had naught to say. But now, after the perfunctory questions relative to sugar and brandy and lemon, Mr. Deering came forward with two cups. He made Quincy move to the hearth and sat down beside him.

“Mr. Burt,” he said, stirring his tea, into which Quincy observed that he had poured a plentiful quantity of cognac, “I am anxious to get to know you. I want to hear if you have any plans.”

He questioned the boy about his courses; he asked for candid views of text-books and instructors. He got them. It never occurred to Quincy that the chance of their meeting might seem in contradiction to Professor Deering’s interest. There was about the man an impressionistic note that made harmonious this chance renewal of their acquaintance. Everything about the room, from the kettle to the curtainless windows, suggested a free, airy impressionism. The tidy desk with its bare batch of papers, also. Professor Deering appeared to need about him a liberal space, unhampered and untrammeled by pre-conceptions or too much furniture whatsoever, be it in the physical or the ideal world. Thus only, his creative mind was able to career. So it was natural that a very real result should come of a quite impromptu meeting. Wherefore, Quincy did not restrain himself.

Of a sudden there was a knock. Mr. Deering clattered his tea-cup nervously and arose. A woman had made open the door without waiting for a signal.

“Oh, excuse me, Lawrence,” she said. But at the same time, she stepped inside. And Quincy heard her excuse as if it had been ironical.

Mr. Deering stood strangely embarrassed, his weight thrown back so as to give him an air of difficult balance.

“Julia--this is Mr. Burt. My wife--” he added.

“May I speak to you, one moment, Lawrence? I am sure Mr. Burt will excuse you.”

The big man hesitated again, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Then, he went forward without turning to Quincy and the door shut behind the pair. Quincy had remarked that the embarrassment was all with Mr. Deering. His wife had scarce deigned to nod to him. But now that he was alone for a few moments, he had the chance to bring to consciousness the impression he had had of her.

He recalled her as a slender, supple figure, framed in the doorway. Her eyes were very bright and dark, her chin was long and seemed to point protrusively. She wore a waist of dull blue silk that draped loose from her shoulders. These were narrow and high. Above the dull blue gleamed in his vision that black mass of her hair. Two great coils of it stood out, disordered, above her ears. A curve was low over the flat, cool forehead. He remembered that she was pale and that just below her eyes the blood shone strangely in two flecks through her delicate, hard skin. Also, her hands were large. And tight sleeves drew out the thinness of her arms. She seemed to have the bosom of a boy.

Now, the door opened. The silence of the hall whence Mr. Deering stepped back beside him, taking up his tea-cup, brought out a memory of her voice. It had been low and vibrant. Quincy thought, without too great awareness why, of a velvet casing over a silver knife. Then, Mr. Deering continued the conversation.

In a few minutes, Quincy, with a poise that himself was stranger to, arose and left.

He admired Professor Deering for having so beautiful a wife. Then, she was beautiful--this Julia Deering, whose first name he had not lost? It occurred to him that she had been very beautiful indeed, framed there, in the doorway....

VII

Now came the Christmas vacation.

A time of ill-suppressed anticipation in a college town. Spirits soar and marks descend. Men laugh more readily; kindness comes to the surface of expression. Charity and self-indulgence, disguised as a fine denial conscious of its temporary being, give life a buoyancy. Energy juts into the future, leaving the swamp of deserted channels for the present. Eyes and mind and above all, the softer sense, wait upon the morrow. There is an abstinence about, as of guests before a feast not quite ready to begin.

And then, the last day, the last hour. The swift march of feet bedecking the frozen station road like flowers. The ring of voices in prospect and good wish, fretting the grey air like tendrils of warm sun. The mad largess to drivers; the luxury of lugging fat valises; the display of bright neckwear and urban suits. There may be slush and ice on the station road-way, but there is spring in the feet that tread it.

Quincy, also, went home for his Christmas vacation. He was one of the few that felt these things about him. Most were in these things, making their sum. He was outside, so he felt and understood. The glitter and ring grew and transformed in him, as he forsook them. Things spiritual too, however fair, have shadows, when they stand within the flood of some subjective sun. So stood these bright things to Quincy’s spirit. Their shadows broadened upon him. And they made him gloomy; for the shadow, even of a painted picture, will be dark.

When he reached New York, with home before him, he smiled ironically to himself. The grey loom from the past brightness was wide across him. He bethought himself that he was going jerkily, obtusely, through a set of motions meaning nothing to him. He was partaking of a ceremony without its spirit. It was a deep and pregnant ritual for these others--home turned host, home in a roseate smile and at attention. So much the hollower did its successive rhythms sound in his own emptiness. For without the promise of felicity, what is baptism but an untimely wetting? Yet, he was caught within this process and with one speed, one exterior, he had been lifted up and hurried homeward. If he lacked knowledge of his own direction, he saw the pomp of promise of the others. And in this combination, his spirits fell and his eyes and lips grew subtly vagrant, as if they had desired to escape from the pain whereof his face was symbol.

A home of prophets would have understood this boy’s distress, launched on them at the set, rigid hour of vacation. But in his home if he came upon it as he was now, journeying uptown, the sullen silence would be received as if the mark were already known, shrugged at with the sole possible comment that one had hoped for college to have bettered him. All this, as well, Quincy understood.

So, as he rang the bell, he feared already his reception. And knowing what its consequence must be, he shut down his mood. He found a smile, inspired by his fear. It was perhaps a meagre smile. But its source was not a common one for cheerfulness. And at this moment, he had no other source.

In this way, he entered.

* * * * *

Many things in the Christmas fortnight served to move Quincy out of himself upon a vantage-point where self might be envisaged.

All of it was a Pattern to him, once it was behind. And in the process of its unfolding, he was the unit that recurred persistently within it. He was the dark part of the design: richly, suavely black. About him fell burstings of color, scatteredly composed and half drawn toward him, as if a slightly stronger force prevailed against the colors’ impulse to fly clear. The whole was restless. The dark center-part--himself--seemed strangely unmoved. It was Quincy’s first intensive lesson in the design of spirit--that mad craftsman who hurls strident clashings into a harmony so fluent that all the world, if one step back and look, falls to a monochrome.

There was no distinguishable episode, at first. His strollings in New York, lit by his own fluttering lights far more than by the city’s screaming incandescence, made no chapter apart. His family was there, all-swerving in its crowd-way: Rhoda with her flagrant and acid beauty; Marsden the oracle; Adelaide the unformidable sphinx; his mother, lacking a motor to her sentiments, beyond the power to clap her hands painfully about his ears; his father with his language of greed; the city with its tongue of brass. But the two weeks were one. And the shadow of college was within them,--indivisible like any shadow, so that our minds alone and not our senses know it for a projection.

The Pattern’s early form was allied with the city....

There was a great tongue of metal that had sharp, cutting edges. It struck against tooth and palate with ironic clangor. The teeth were cold buildings, and the lips about which the metal tongue drew blood were the pervasive helpless passions of the city’s life. In reality, the soft and suffering things were hidden and the metal shone. In his impression, the agony stood out and the element which cut and punished seemed insidiously hid. This inversion his own wish explained. He yearned for optimism. He still had strong within him the essential touch of a gay nature, made for a gay God. Perhaps, since such inversions are a part of wit, the gay God was the merrier for this.

Out of the mouth came speech. Rhoda had Julia Deering as a refrain. There was a rhyming sequence between his father and the Professor. Adelaide was at once a low refrain and an epigram that bit under a soft semblance. Strangely, his mother figured little by herself. But her part was never lacking. She had the ubiquity of intonation.

His impressions crystallized, drew back into actual events. But these events from which logically his impressions had gained life seemed a tracing not to a former, but to a later thing. The Pattern was clear in Quincy’s mind before the events were clear, that caused it.

* * * * *

Above all, there was an afternoon, spent in her room with Adelaide.

“If you have time, Quint,” she had said to him on the first evening after his arrival, “I hope we’ll see something of each other.”

“I have no engagements, Adelaide.”

So, when the time came: “Shall we just talk, this once?” she asked him.

They went up to her room.

It had been “Rhoda’s room” when the two sisters shared it. But Rhoda had been married nearly a year. Yet, the old name and the old association clung to Quincy as they arose from luncheon--Marsden, Adelaide, his mother and himself.

“Well, children, I must run.” Sarah looked at her daughter. “It wouldn’t hurt you, Adelaide, to come along and help your mother.” It was a case of belated Christmas shopping--gifts Sarah had overlooked.

“Mother, Quint and I have planned a cozy afternoon upstairs in my room.”

Sarah gazed tragically at the window. The sleet pounded against it like a snare-drum. She had discovered lately that Adelaide was very prone to make a sanctuary in her room. She had to say something. This inspired her.

“And what would you have done, if Rhoda were still here with you?” she asked.

“But she isn’t, Mother.”

“Perhaps,” judged Marsden, opening a book, “it is only fair Adelaide should have some benefit out of her loss of Rhoda.”

“Oh, very well, I’ll go alone,” Sarah shifted her point, with unconscious agility. And once more she observed the storm, as if she had been called upon to brave it. “Let your Mother go alone in the snow.”

“I’ll help you into the machine, Mama,” said Quincy. This irritated Sarah. The mention of the car lessened the woman’s heroism in braving such a storm to gladden a few more forgotten hearts. And what right had a son to deprive a woman of her heroism, whom wealth had deprived already of her less far-fetched qualities?

But at last, Sarah got off. As Marsden settled in his splendid chair, he smiled quizzically at Adelaide, left alone with him for a minute.

“What are you going to talk about?” he asked.

The girl looked at her brother. He was nearly twenty-seven. His grey eyes lay light and remote in the dark, unhealthy folds of his skin. She looked at them. And they seemed unrelated to her brother. Her brother was the cripple. The curl of his lips, the morbid delicacy of his greying hair, the eternal pain that pinched his brow--these were her brother; and the words that the curled lips had spoken. But those remote, grey eyes! They were fair and bright and beckoned eerily. Adelaide could not understand them. She could understand and answer only her brother, the cripple. And at him, for his words, she was angry.

“What do you think?” she retorted.

“It’s beyond thought,” his mouth said. “To know what you will have to say to Quincy would require inspiration.”

“Speak out,” his eyes asked her.

“Pooh!” She scowled and was silent.

But in the silence, this mystery of one to whom she lived so close came uncomfortably nigh. She preferred the cynic-cripple, though his tongue did sear her. He, at least, might be answered or escaped. She went upstairs wondering why the ties of family were so strangely false, why they solved so little and why, since they gave so little, they should demand so much. It did not occur to her that the ties of family were ties of least effort, glutton ties, carnal ties. It did not occur to her that the tuft of white soul within her must revolt, by its very nature, against a law that hallowed such! Adelaide was not strong enough to let things like that occur to her. She merely wondered and went upstairs.

Quincy examined the books on the table, though they had not changed in four months; nor in six. He scrutinized the pictures on the walls; he examined a cheap photograph, in an elaborate ivory frame, of Sylvia who had died the winter he was born. He resented, unconsciously, his sister’s perpetuation of this traditional child. His mother could be forgiven for dwelling on Sylvia and Josiah junior. But Adelaide had no excuse. Somewhere within the boy, a recollection must have smouldered of how his father had reckoned up his own unwelcome birth with the death of his two favorites. But this childish embryon of memory had grown, from the boy’s own rationalization, into a distrust of so sheerly sentimental an attachment as must be Adelaide’s for a sister who had died when she was three.

While Quincy moved about to hide his deep discomfiture at this set occasion, and to submerge in casualness his qualms as to meeting expectations, Adelaide sat calmly in an armless chair and waited for her brother to subside. She ventured no word. She did not appear to dislike this silence which was so patently wracking him. The truth was that she was forcing herself to bear it. It hurt. But it was the one way, she thought, of testing Quincy’s willingness to be a friend and to be loved. That she might hazard a first step toward a desired consequence with equal right, simply did not occur to Adelaide. She was the sort of girl to whom social initiative was as repugnant as nakedness--and for the self-same reason. The obscure channelings of sex in girls spread it at times so widely from its normal moorings that the remotest mental regions become colored, with the result that some amenities of social life are as impossible for them as a crude, physical aggression. Most girls of this girl’s age and background would have been just so silent and so passive before a man from whom they awaited a proposal. Adelaide hoped for a mere sisterly relation--the privilege of friendship with a brother. Yet, with this seemingly humble dream, her way was that of a girl aroused and wooed. And the reason, although she might never know it, was that within, her condition also was the same.

Of course, Quincy did not understand. He saw merely that Adelaide was at her ancient trick of silence and of resenting his--as if the right of silence lay all with her, the need of speaking entirely with him. This, with the set formality of their retiring to her room, and the portrait of Sylvia and an indescribable something that was Adelaide herself, conjoined to complete his mood. It was a mood pathetically different from what Adelaide had hoped for. And this also dawned on Quincy:--that it would have been easier for him had she succeeded.

In this mood, silence grew too oppressive and he began to speak. Wonder was small that the girl’s first confession at his words was pain. But from the discord of these two unrhythmed ones--a discord ashamed of itself--came a great pity; and from this at length, a sort of rhythm between them. So talk grew possible, and there was born, slow and unheeded, the boy’s intuition:--that Adelaide was in the ruck and base of life, and that, with her at life’s pinnacle, there had been room there, too, for him.

She showed her wish to know about his friends. Quincy spoke of Garsted.

“Next time you come to town, why not bring him with you?”

“If I knew--” he stopped.

“If you knew what?” she asked. She could easily have completed his remark. It had to do with his insecurity at home. He would not care to bring a friend--granted it was allowed--and have himself humiliated before a guest. Garsted had never seemed to understand his rank at home. Garsted told him, in a year college would respect him. And his family had had seventeen years.

Now, Quincy was silent. Adelaide blushed for him, in his emotion.

“I--I’ll see to it, he has a nice time. You know, we can take him to the theatres. Dad isn’t stingy about the money.”

“No, but Mama is.”

“We’ll get the money from Dad.”

Quincy had found a stiff position in a chair--across the room from Adelaide. Now he arose.

“Adelaide! That isn’t everything,” he rebuked her.

At least, Adelaide felt rebuked;--as if she had not known! as if it had not been delicacy that made her also waive the issue!

“Quincy--don’t get angry with me.”

“I’m not!”

Once more, he picked up a book from the table near which, as if unconsciously for help, he had found his seat. It was a folio volume with colored pictures. They really interested him. So he turned them over, one by one.

“If you’re not going to talk with me, Quincy--”

He placed away the book at once. And they began afresh.

Another remark opened the problem of the track-team. By now, something was tiring deep down in them. Each of these failures in rapport made the new effort wearier. But on they struggled, with a heroism that was the more poignant for its hopeless inarticulation.

Quincy’s attempt to explain about the track-team suffered from an earlier behavior of the others. This subject had come up, the first evening at dinner. Suddenly, he had seen the expression about the soft mouth of Jonas that had been there in the old days when his one-time idol placed a captured fly in a spider-web. And Jonas had said, knowing already:

“You did not make a fraternity, did you?”

The expression had stung. “I would have, if I’d wanted to stay on the track-team.”

This was beyond Jonas’ comprehension. “If you’d _wanted_ to?” he sneered. And the conversation changed before a saving word from Adelaide. For Adelaide had noticed. And now, in Quincy’s rigid manner, she knew that she was suffering for Jonas. Adelaide knew much. But her mind lacked a motor. And so hampered, it could not reach those increments which are the flower of knowledge.

Quincy recalled her saving him. He deemed her act the result of mercy, of pity--as if she shared Jonas’ incredulity but lacked his wish to make him suffer.

“I just didn’t wish to bind myself. Lots of men in college thought I was right. That’s how I got to know Garsted.” He began gropingly and ended in a hurry.

“Don’t you think, perhaps, it was wrong to antagonize your class?”

“I do not. Damn the class.”

“Well, then you were right, if you think that way about it. But then--but then, you can scarcely blame the fraternities.”

“And who blamed ’em?” cried Quincy.

Of course, it was Adelaide who blamed them. She was about to say so. But evidently, from his outburst, her next step must be to concur in his refusal to.

“Of course,” she smiled, “I don’t blame them. Who cares?”

There was a pause. Adelaide got up, came to his side:

“Well, _I_ love you, Quincy dear.”

Audiences laugh when clumsy acrobats fall over tables. So it is fair to assume that the gods laughed at Adelaide.

The conversation died once more. And when it was renewed with a last painful effort, it was far less personal. At once, now, Quincy threw himself in it. He careered freely, happily. And in this abandon, his remarks seemed brutal to his sister. It was her turn to be hurt in this pitiful ricochet.

Garsted had told him he had a mistress. Quincy gloried in this. He knew all of Garsted’s arguments against Puritan morality. Here was another case of sex gratified in purely psychic channels. The boy launched upon a eulogy of his friend’s free life.

“Isn’t he going to marry her?” asked Adelaide. She was gripping herself. She did not mind this open talk with Quincy. Her bringing-up forbade it. And the discrepancy between the tingling pleasure that she felt and the horror that she should have felt, made her insecure. So she gripped herself and gave Quincy rein. Adelaide rode horseback--now that they were rich. A vision flashed across her of her latest mount, galloping in Central Park. She had always felt a similar strange discord between the prim Park and her joy in galloping. But the vision went, without a challenge.

“Oh,” her brother was saying, “when he has money enough, if he still loves her, I guess he’ll marry her.”

“But suppose, Quincy, suppose he stops loving her!”

“Well?”

“Don’t you see, how terrible it would be? What could the poor girl do?”

The boy looked at his sister. She seemed actually suffering. But the wealth of feeling that flowered in her pain had, as usual, gone wrong. He did not care to have his friend’s course criticized. So he attacked his sister, by extolling his friend’s mistress.

“She’s the sort of girl, I suppose,” he answered sharply, “who has other qualifications to recommend her, besides virginity.”

Tears came to Adelaide’s eyes. Quincy was contrite. He jumped up and kissed her. But her tears had made her ugly. Her tender little lids were red. Her hair seemed a trifle colorless. She was three years older than he. Why should he be able to make her weep? He despised her for it. This rôle, he disliked more heartily than being bullied. Could he not find a balance somewhere? or a pleasurable subjection? He thought of Rhoda and of Mrs. Deering. And the tenderness of Adelaide seemed cloying....

Soon, Rhoda came in for tea. And there was Adelaide--perversely at the bottom.

“Well, have you had a nice long chat?” were her first words.

Quincy could not help thinking of her as Mrs. Theodore Cram. Her husband was so important a man. Quincy disliked him so much. And he was so serenely above any feeling, even of dislike, for Quincy. All this hurt. Rhoda was fresh and cool and full as compared to Adelaide, who now looked moist and warm and straggly.

The sisters embraced heartily. Quincy got Rhoda’s hand.

“You’re getting too old to kiss,” she smiled at him. Previously, perhaps, he had not been old enough?

“I am not,” cried Quincy. It was one of those quick flashes of effrontery that mark the strain of deprivation in timid boys.

He came forward and held Rhoda’s head, vise-like in his hands. Quincy was of full height. His tall, nervous figure bent over the voluptuous lined woman in striking contrast. While she was everywhere firmly composed, his form was uncertain and angular and loose.

“Behave yourself, Quincy!” Rhoda struggled.

The boy laughed feverishly. His hands held her head. But her body was writhing away. He meant to kiss her cheek. But Rhoda flashed back her head and his mouth skimmed her lips. His heart melted with the flame of that instant. And then, she broke away altogether. Quincy stood where the event had happened, arms still out, hands still before him, feeling the floor gratefully beneath his feet.

“Why, you impudent boy!” Rhoda sneered at him; “how dared you?”

“You talk as if a brother hasn’t a right to kiss his sister,” said Adelaide.

Rhoda turned upon her in a white fury: “You--shut up!”

And Quincy felt Adelaide melt into a corner. He was still looking at Rhoda.

“I am sorry if I hurt you,” he said.

“You did hurt me, you little fool,” the woman’s instinct for giving pain was unerring; “why else do you think I’m angry? You hurt me--here.” She placed a hand above her waist. “If that’s the sort of nonsense you learn at college, my dear Quincy--”

Then she had not even been angry at the kiss? This submerged the boy’s spirits altogether.

And now, with a quick change of mood and a sweet word, she drew Adelaide out of her repentant corner. The two sisters seated themselves for a quiet chat. The servant brought tea on a mahogany platter, based with glass. With a few healing smiles, there was Adelaide, once more glad to bask in Rhoda’s sunshine. Quincy drew up a chair in order to have a place in the sun. But he fared ill. Rhoda’s resentment took the direction of ignoring him. And Adelaide was feeble at bringing him within the conversation. Rhoda feinted her attempts with phrases that recalled the hand-twist of a clever fencer. The boy was being ruthlessly punished. He had had hopes of Rhoda, now he was a college man. And here he was in disgrace with her! What a clumsy, inopportune brute he had been!

Soon, he gave up his desperate attempts--they made him bleed, although she ignored them--to play an integral rôle, at least for the moment, in her consciousness. He retired spiritually. He would have gone away altogether, but he was afraid that his going would not be noticed; this would hurt too much. So he sat there, gloomily, brooding. And again, without restraint or question, his mind fell upon that unknown quality in his experience, Julia Deering. Were all women like either Adelaide or Rhoda? He feared, then, Mrs. Deering must be like the latter. She was splendid, also. And splendid women despised men. How came it, they ever married? What curious streak of humility and mercy made them do this? He knew women were incomprehensible by general consent. This must be the crux of their enigma: that, despite their splendor, suddenly they gave themselves to man! And then, some of them grew to be like his own mother. He was sure she had been like Rhoda, also. Adelaide resembled Jonas and his father. Marsden and Rhoda and he had the grey colorings of his mother.

Yet, where spiritually did he fit in? He was alone. He used to think he was only an adopted child, in the early days of familial agony. Then, he had allowed of his mother, excluding still his father. For some secret reason, it was decided that his father call Quincy “son.” But he knew his lack of authorship. That was why he despised Quincy. Also, he was jealous. For Quincy’s real father had not been so fat, so gruff, so stupid, with breath so foul smelling and hands crusted with little stains. But now, he failed to feel the link even with his mother. For if there was a link with her, surely it must extend to Marsden and to Rhoda. And this was palpably untrue. Oh! it was all a grim play of nature. Doubtless, this fat, crushing, vulgar man was really the only father he had ever had; doubtless this woman with a submerged soul like violets under stagnant waters--was it not patent in her eyes?--had justice in calling him her son. Doubtless, the young woman who had wounded him and the girl who spoke an irritating language he could not respond to, were really sisters. It was a grim jest of nature. He might as well crunch cookies that were good and look forward to the less sneering world of which college was the gate. And yet, at college also--

The door opened and his mother was there.

“Quincy, don’t spoil your appetite for dinner.”

She had first busily kissed Rhoda, maternally kissed Adelaide, and inquiringly kissed him. He had held a half-eaten cookie during all this cycle.

It was now night. The snow had subsided. Most of it had melted as it fell. An odor of moist discomfort came from the streets with Sarah--the odor of the city shopping for Christmas gifts. It was warm and cozy in Adelaide’s room. But as Quincy stood against the window and looked out, this petty ease lay in the back of his brain like a sucking plaster. The street was grey and brown. The lamp-light stumbled through the mists and vapors. A motor car went swaying, snorting; its reeking tires seemed to cut swaths in the thick gutter, like hot irons.

His mother was reciting her adventures in half-a-dozen stores. Also, she was repeating for Rhoda a series of petty household troubles which already he and Adelaide had heard four times. But Adelaide never seemed to grow impatient. And the majestic Rhoda was at attention. Quincy found in this no virtue.

Little huddled figures were sprayed through the street. They moved slowly, but laboriously. They were wet and irritated by the weather. Soon they would enter homes, like his, and recite to those they found there, eager to listen, the same round of petty trouble and smug adventure and fallacious sentiment. Would they find one among their various audiences who, like himself, objected? like himself was there through a grim jest of Nature? like himself, longed to be elsewhere? And if so, why could not he, Quincy, discover him? Why could not they be given one to another? A delivery wagon came splashing to their house and stopped. The horse shook his drenched hide. A boy leaped out, laden with packages. He saw the quick crunch of his feet, the stamp of the horse’s hoofs. And then, the bell rang loud and long. Everything outside, this sound reminded him, was muffled. It and he were inexorably separate. Yet, the house and the interminably repeated talk in the back of his brain--was it a solace for this isolation? The wagon churned its way from sight. Vaguely, he heard the rattle of the wheels. After it was gone, an elevated train mounted uptown with a slow rhythm. A car’s clear clang came to him, draped in fog. Two men trudged on the farther sidewalk. One of them laughed and slapped his comrade’s shoulder. The other pulled his hat low and turned up the collar of his coat. They disappeared--for ever. The lamps glared in the darkness that kept away from them. And his mother’s voice crushed on the melody of all these vagrant notes, bathed in the minor harmony of the night.

“Quincy--father’s just come. Suppose you go down and greet him and tell him we’re all up here.”

* * * * *

Then, there was the day--a Sunday--when his mother was ill and Quincy stayed with her, in her bedroom.

Adelaide had gone on an excursion. Jonas and Marsden never bothered. In the afternoon, for a while, his father came as if to perform a duty. On the mandate of his mother that he needed air, Quincy strolled out alone. This too, fell into the Pattern, as he traced back for it.

After the departure of the others, Quincy’s visit had begun with the reading aloud of two columns in the paper and of five pages in a magazine. This effort tired the good Sarah who, in the Harriet days, with an equal illness would not have deemed it worthy of mention to her husband. When Sarah was tired, she grew nervous. And like so many nervous women, she balanced herself with talk. The effect that women force by dint of words is a stimulant for them as insidious as liquor. The volume of words is a mere subsidiary, like the number of glasses. The effect, in either instance, is the heart of the habit. In the drinker the effect is immediate; in the talker, it rebounds from the attention of the victims talked to. In this way, it will be seen that of the two vices, talking is the worse. Drinking may confine its ravages to the drinker. At most, it will aggrieve only his close relations. The talker, however, is a curse-carrier with no conscience and no limit. Unfortunately, Quincy’s mother had lapsed into this weakness. She had been repressed, silent, really noble for so long a term! She had the right to wreak vengeance on society. Moreover, she loved her son. This called for an intense reparation.

She lectured him, that morning. For three hours, she trod on his soul, harassed his spirit and crucified his secret self for being secret--here lay the real reason of her irritation. And then, she said:

“Dearie, would you like to have your dinner brought up, so you can eat with your mother and keep her company?”

Of course, Quincy was delighted. So Quincy’s food was brought to him on the same mahogany platter with glass base. And meanwhile, the maternal service flowed. The misunderstanding boy writhed in the quandary of two necessities--loving this woman and being hurt by her. The hand of the gay God was still too strong on him; he did not know that these two elements--love and pain--must be rejoicingly accepted. Often, his mother spoke of how her children had made her suffer.

“You can never know, my boy, what a mother goes through, for a child.”

Such remarks also, were designed to instil love and veneration. But again, the gay God intervened. The idea of pain still horrified the boy. Its perversion into a boast still filled him with disgust. He would fain have had it that motherhood be joyous; that the best things be the happy things of life. His mother’s lugubrity in speaking of her works of love struck him as sacrilege. And to a gay God, it was.

Quincy was simply not grown-up. But it seemed to Sarah that in matters of sympathy and feeling, he was strangely backward.

“I should like to be able to talk to you like a man, my dear. You are no longer a child.”

And through divers thrusts, Quincy learned what she meant by this. To be like a man was to be moved by ugly things--like business and money and machinery. To be like a man was to be edified by things not only ugly but wrong,--like pain, and that murder of self called sacrifice. To be like a man was to agree, in everything, with a battered, complaining woman whose drowned violet eyes had always been a mother’s. He looked at her. He tried to understand and to consent. But it was revolting work.