PART TWO (continued 2)

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.

“Think of the privilege your father has given you,” she said, “in letting you grow up in New York.”

“Mama—New York is ugly!”

“It is the center of the greatest country of the world,” Sarah replied. “Isn’t that of importance?”

Quincy was moved by her eloquence. Perhaps, that was of importance. Yet something in him mutely stirred negation. He was impressed. But he could not agree. And this conflict fevered him.

“An ugly metropolis is less important than a wild-flower!” he cried, stung to inspiration by his failure to express himself calmly.

Sarah smiled. She had lived among wild-flowers; she knew. She had drudged among them; sweated among them; wanted among them. She was angered by such dangerous illusions in a son of hers.

“My dear—you are talking nonsense. You’d do far better to grasp your opportunities, than to go wool-gathering—like a poet.”

“I am not a poet,” Quincy defended himself.

“That’s precisely it, my dear.” Sarah rose on her pillows and leaned toward him, taking his hand. Her skin was very grey and rough beside the whiteness of her night-gown and the smoothness of her bed-clothes. Brown streaks robbed the grey in her hair of dignity. It was drawn close over her scalp and a single, poorly braid was caught up and fastened at the back. Her arms were bone and her throat was a rugose mass of folds that lacked even the pomp of fat. Sarah was an old wreck for her fifty years. And Quincy looked at her. He was no physiognomist. But it pierced him that his mother was an ill argument for her own ways of living.

“That’s just it, my dear,” Sarah repeated. “You’re not a poet. You’re an ordinary person like the rest of us. We’ve got to get our beauty—not in wild flowers, but in all this—” she waved her tortured hand about the room and let it fall on the rich linen.

“If your skin were more white and smooth, little mother,” Quincy thought silently, “I wouldn’t care if the bed-clothes were of coarse cotton.”

His mother was still speaking. “You must work hard, dear. You must prepare yourself to get along in the world. You know—you mustn’t expect too much from your father. He will give you an education. But remember, there are five of you. And, of course, Marsden and the girls will deserve most of what little there is. Only by working now, my dear, can you earn the comfort and time to do your day dreaming later.”

“And when my skin is yellow, I also will have white linen,” the boy thought to himself.

Oh! he demanded so little. And all the plenty that was forced on him contained not that little. Everywhere, about him, above him, that little was. Yet, he could not reach it. He did not know how; he did not dare, even if he had known! For it seemed to him that all the world of men was a conspiracy against his having this mite he needed, this mite that had once been strewn through all the world and that now, only the despised were left to revel in. And he did not dare. For, vague as his knowledge was, he saw that the arch-conspirators against his having it were those he loved. To gain his little would be to wound these loved ones. With the thought, his heart broke in two.

So Quincy merely sat there. And finally, he allowed his mussed head with its flood of delicate black hair to fall on his mother’s faultless linen, where her old hand could stroke it. And in this posture of strain and of devotion, the woman that gripped his soul as once her womb had gripped his body, gave forth the poison-nourishment that he drank in. When was he to be born of her, again?

“Quincy, my boy,” she said, “there are so many ways for you to change, that it gives your mother a big pain to think of them. You must be thankful for these pains, my dear. A mother’s suffering should be a treasure and a reminder of duty, that you should never forget.”

And the old, weary canons of a herd-race, hedging in its deformities and greed against the flaming grandeur of a nature it has denied, were vented to make this child conform, in whom a tinge of the old gaieties and loves still dared to linger. A mother’s advice! How stubborn is the strength of man, that through these generations man’s tender sprouts should have outlived a mother’s advice! By the old laws, she bears her child—the old laws of nature and of joy, of fertility and courage and abandon. And by the new laws, she rears him—the laws of compromise and pain, of soul-oppression and cowardice and cover. And by the fair love of the first law, she presses her advantage for the law of the herd that claims her creature as a slave. A queen, conceiving in her regal bed, enslaved and giving birth to a slave-child. Here is the cycle of most women.

Quincy held his head low as his mother admonished and advised him. It was all still dim and uncertain in his mind, why these things seemed wrong to him; why they revolted him; why the common wisdom and love of his mother should be despised. Quincy did not understand, as she went on, how apt it was that his head should be held low.

A glimmer there was, in the Pattern—he saw that, later—of the truth: that he had been so moved that day, only because the woman who spoke was his mother. Quincy knew that she was stupid; that she parroted her moralities and arguments; that mentally, she was a slave of the herd-leaders who cared no whit for either of them. He saw, then, the fallacy in this: that by reason of a mother’s love, he should have hearkened to a plea voiced for a vast, impersonal machine to which he mattered nothing save as a conforming cog. Of course, that part of his mother was also such a cog. It had no right to exploit the bonds of the real mother who knew and cared for no machine.

All this bred resentment. And there began for Quincy the period in which he despised his mother, judged her ruthlessly and had little thought for her when she was not about.

His father came in at four. So Quincy left for a walk.

That walk was in the Pattern. But when he traced back his feelings for his father, he could not fix, as in the other cases, upon some event of this fortnight that lodged within him as a form. Thought and emotion about his father rushed back with an indefeasible momentum to the days of Harriet, to his running away or to the nights when he was sent up, a-tremble, through the hollow house, to bed or on an errand. As he traced back, now, for signs of his father that were alive, all he caught up was that his entering on that afternoon had spread a surface of great toleration upon his mother’s words. He had gone forth in peace with her. Perhaps, he recalled enough of the old days to feel that she might need his sympathy, being alone with her husband. There had been such times.

Quincy had cold crisp hours for his walk. He went northward in the Park. At first he had had a qualm. He had told his mother New York was ugly. He had escaped to sophistry and metaphysics in order to prove with Garsted that it was beautiful. It did not occur to the boy that since in both cases he had been sincere, he had no cause for worry. He racked his brain in order to find out in which instance he had said the truth. And to his mother, he felt the debt of an apology. But it occurred to him how ludicrous it would be to beg his mother’s pardon on such a subject. She would think him wilder and more scatter-brained than ever. Doubtless, she had long since forgotten his remark. At least, she attached no importance to it. This aggrieved Quincy. And in his new-born resentment, he forgot about inconsistencies and pardons. Soon, he was engrossed in the City.

This was at the point where the Park ends and Eighth Avenue begins afresh, with a new acquisition in the clatter and grime and darkness of the elevated structure. During his swift walk in the Park, it had been simple to cogitate upon himself. The Park did not hold Quincy. It was a rough, varied and knotted expanse of dirty snow and gaunt, dwarfed trees. It had none of the mystery, none of the tonic, of a winter woodland. It was a large back-yard of the City. Through it, cut wide, cleared swathes for City vehicles and narrow ones, less cleared, more tortuous, for those inhabitants that went on foot. There were few people, though the day had been bright. It was too cold. New Yorkers suffer such inclemency of life that the least inclemency of weather rids them of spirit. So Quincy had advanced through the Park without a thrill of nature. Though he was a messenger of her spirit—he who ran bare-headed through the woods—this cut-in mass of rocks and trees had no voice for him. The girders of steel and stone that on all sides bound the Park have smothered the soul which that fragment of forest must once have had. Central Park is a half-dead thing, at best. Its winter snows are grey; its summer trees are grey; its autumn fever is a wasting chill without the flame. Some day, inevitably, this must be true also of the great Park in the Bronx.

But now, on the noisy Avenue, matters were different.

Quincy recalled his feeling that the City’s life spoke to him. Night was there. Most of the shops were closed. But beneath the blinds of the saloons, lights shone and a welcome winked. In the tall dun buildings, all enterprise seemed choked like the space, into a rigid ever-recurrent form. The movement on the Avenue was dogged, outcast, heavy. But its dullness did not penetrate behind the brick and plaster. The trains crashed past angrily as if they had preferred to linger, and also watch. Beneath the structure, the lights seemed badly nourished. Those in the houses were of a yellow that suggested malady and poison. It was the life throbbing in these that spoke to Quincy. What did it say?

Something he had heard before: something he had already suffered. Again, there was the strident tongue of metal and the lips that bled. Again, the lips lay quiveringly forward, piteous and eloquent, while the tongue lurked back and darted forth in the swings of pain. And behind the mouth were words; below the rhythm was a music, as fire is beneath the smoke.

It was his own experience; it was his family; it was his life. All of the City spoke it—sang it—the obscure, muffled rooms, and the frangent traffic; the glimmer of breath in the dark hallways and the flash of commerce on the elevated structure, as a train met ice with its current. The entire symphony of twisted, agonizing life, bent upon false errands, hungering with false lusts, deforming the red heart of nature, spoke out to Quincy. And that which he heard was that which he already knew, that whence he had come bleeding and whither he must return to bleed some more.

And so, with subtle intertwinings, this vast impersonal life and his own narrow living became one, as the Pattern whirled.

There were many other salient parts of it; many other clarified events, as he traced back. And the veins and curvings were to dispart and spread and multiply. But even the tight seed was a weighty form, lodged in his mind....

Greatly increased with the new year, Quincy had returned to college.

VIII

At this point, Fortune resumed a hand. She had been singularly absent in Quincy’s life since her intrusive visit of his first two years when the fate of the two eldest children, the accident to Marsden and the Burt finances had so obliquely glanced against his own. From then, his life had been pure enough of hazard to be in that regard exceptional. For hazard is the term we apply to striking moments; and each life by its own testimony, is replete with such. But now, upon his return to college, after that purging and clarifying fortnight, an apt facilitation came to his affairs. The Deerings gave a party. There were about a score of guests. And Quincy was among them.

He was the one member of his class to be invited. Garsted was his sole haven from the social waves. And Garsted, having other friendships there, had other responsibilities. In consequence, the boy was somewhat lost. The gathering had the proclivity of breaking up into small groups, discussing in hushed and exclusive tones. Over these fragmentary units, the clear loud laughter of Professor Deering rolled at times, himself the heart of the largest fragment. Quincy was afraid to make himself one of this, since his relation with Professor Deering might be so easily abused. He did not know how to join with any of the others. So not long after the onset of the evening, there he was dangling, miserable at first, then conscious of his misery and at length fearful lest this consciousness in him project to those about him and so crystallize his discord with them. In this state his hostess rescued him.

He had scarce noticed her before. She was a much used pigment in the bright picture’s pallet. But she had scarcely been a figure. Her general affability with her reserve kept her from distinctness. But now he saw her coming, directly toward him. Her air was not that of a rescuer. She seemed to be saying: “I know you are having a splendid time without me. But I’m greedy. I’m not having a splendid time without you.” This was half the battle. She began casually and soon they were seated together. Fitfully, others joined her. But he alone remained. She left him to persuade an eminent pianist to perform. But she returned to listen to the music. The artist played several complex pieces—modern—that stirred Quincy potently.

“I can’t understand that music,” said Mrs. Deering.

“I’m not trying to,” he said, “I get all relaxed and then it comes in and—understands me.”

This answer seemed to impress her hugely.

“That was an infinite answer, Mr. Burt,” she said. And, then, the pianist joined them. He was introduced to Mr. Carvalho. And his remark about the music was repeated, as a gem, word for word. In her mouth, it rang profound. Mr. Carvalho, also, was impressed.

“Probably, you compose?” he asked.

The bringing in of the pianist meant the loss of Mrs. Deering, who left now, and did not return. There had been fully half-an-hour of her company. And the energy which she had aroused propelled him happily through the remainder of the evening. As soon as he was free of Mr. Carvalho, to whom he had absolutely naught to say, and who forsook him as soon as he politely could in order to trail after Mrs. Deering, Quincy crossed into the study where the Professor held an intent group.

At the rear of his room which Quincy, of course, knew, the door had been thrown open into a smaller chamber in which stood the piano. This was Mrs. Deering’s. It was rather closely furnished and fully ornamented. It contrasted strikingly with the naked, larger room. Here they had sat—close to the music. Quincy did not catch many details on this occasion. He recalled a languid couch, littered with barbaric cushions—the modern German school—and bowered by a canopy of orange silk that turned the blue base below it into a liquid marine color. He recalled several cozy arm-chairs wherein guests were ensconced deeply, a tea-table of Japanese wood upon which was a case of cloisonné. Out of it, the guests took cigarettes. This was essentially a setting for the hostess. Her figure, thin and tense and simply draped in a dull violet dress, stood out nobly in this rather lavish mass. Even so, the generous and ample form of the Professor was well marked against the scant rigor of his study.

Quincy found him sprawling in a Windsor fan-backed chair—an old spindle of oak. One heavy leg was thrown over the side, the other curled up on the seat. His evening clothes, which were a bit too tight, had the semblance of broadcloth in the soft haze of the candles. The Professor puffed on a rich, red briar pipe.

“Bring a chair up—right here. There’s room,” he hailed him from a distance.

As he came, Quincy felt a strained pressure about him. These half-dozen men had banded themselves into a unit, designed for the momentary purpose of enjoying the big man that sat among them. Tacitly, unconsciously they had grown together; they felt together; they gave out a voice together. Their vibrance murmured adversely at this intrusion. They were a crowd, conservative, greedy like all crowds. A primitive mist came from them. Behind, in the other room, such groups were also—fashioned for their own delectation, to enjoy their hostess or some other person who had something to give out. Everywhere, Quincy felt these subtle bands, these correlated breathings, these intense concentrations of many energies upon some little temporary point. He was unused to gatherings. He could still understand them. But he could not understand himself. There was no hint in him of why, alone after his half hour with the Professor’s wife, he had gone straight toward the Professor.

In Quincy’s mind remained the print of these two rooms, undulant in their candle-glow, where many persons sat, restrained, vital, softened only by the tremor of the lights, subdued by skin-deep custom; yet eager, all, for acquisition and enjoyment to a degree that rubbed menacingly close to the frailties that hemmed them in. In his mind was the great, sanguine figure of the Professor, dominating, laughing at this little crowded drama; was the sharp, nervous body of Julia Deering, a-field in it, like some splendid animal that furrows. That was all.

But Garsted told him that he had acquitted himself with honor. And that Fairfax and Littleton had asked about him....

During the rest of freshman year, the boy was at the Deering home perhaps six times. Outside, he saw the Professor seldom. But no more was needed to establish him as idol in that youthful sanctuary. Garsted, of course, was the high priest. And though the ultimate presence was but briefly, and then scantily, approached, Garsted was always there. The junior had constant recourse to Mr. Deering in his work. Also, he was a friend of Julia Deering. This was an added bond for Quincy.

“I knew her when she was Julia Cairn,” he told him. “She is of old New England stock, but her parents had so little sense of fitness as to permit her to be born in Omaha, where they had settled. She’s been married only three years, you know. From private school in New York, she went to Paris. No—she did not study there. She has never studied, that I know of. After Paris, she returned to Omaha! Actually! And stood it two years. By then, she had been made president of so many women’s clubs and circles, forcibly—you know her opinion of such truck—that she escaped to an aunt in Bangor, Maine. From cellar to refrigerator. Next, she came to New York and began to work.”

“I thought you said she had never studied.”

“She never did. But she worked. She got a job as teacher of English in the private school which she had graduated from, five years before. Without a degree, without anything very much, except her power to get anything she desires. Her knowledge in English literature is rather rudimentary. But she had read tremendously in French and Spanish and Italian.”

“Why, then, didn’t she get a job in one of these languages?” asked Quincy.

“I don’t know. Except that Julia Cairn never did what was expected, any more than does Julia Deering now. It was down there I heard of her and met her—at a silly tea, which she veined with gold. A friend of mine, Betty Robinson, used to tell me about their amazing lectures in English literature, delivered by a Miss Cairn. It seems her course was devoted to a systematic proof of the inferiority of English letters to the French. Think of it! In a respectable private school. And her adoring principal never minded. While the girls in their French course were reading Erckmann-Chatrian, Halèvy, Ohnet and other fourth-rate writers, she, in the English department, made them acquainted with Flaubert and Balzac, Zola and Stendhal, so that they might see for themselves how unutterably second-rate were Eliot and Thackeray. She made them read the Englishmen. But she made them love the real European literatures. In that way, she justified teaching what she had often told me she deemed a language that has been ‘decadent since the time of Swift.’ Lead up to these things, yourself. She’ll tell you.”

“And what happened then?” Quincy was not interested in a decadent literature.

“She taught in that one school until the principal, Doctor Tomley, went and died. She was twenty-six, then, at least. Although I’m not sure of her age.”

“Did she lose her job or leave it?”

“She says she was told to go, by the new man who had been assistant master and who probably, in that menial position, had learned to hate her. I am convinced she could never have found another school to tolerate her original ideas of the duties of an English teacher. But she did not try. She insists she could have won over another principal, had she been forced to. It is highly probable. Certainly, Dr. Tomley had agreed with none of her views. And yet, he kept her there. At all events, the boast never went to the proof.”

“Well?” Quincy was impatient.

“Well, one fine day, she married Deering—bless his great soul. That’s all. And came up here.”

Here, somehow, with the entrance of the Professor upon the scene, Quincy’s real interest began. But his friend’s news ended.

“I know nothing about that, Quint,” he smiled. “One never really asks Julia Deering anything. One inclines toward a subject. And if she inclines back, one gets something. On the subject of her personal life, she has always declined, with a firm sweetness. I have no idea, even of where they met or how. No one else has, either. I suppose,” the upperclassman threw a cigarette out of the window and reached for a pipe, “I suppose they were married and will live happily ever after. Julia Deering is so damned exceptional that it will be just like her to do that most commonplace of things.”

“Is living happily ever after really commonplace?”

“Well,” Garsted laughed, “if it is rare, she is all the more sure to do it. So I’ve got you, either way.”

On the campus, however, there was a legend about this pair. College men have myths for their distinguished teachers. But like all myths, this one expressed exclusively the myth-makers; and it was Garsted’s conviction that there was no truth in it save as a commentary on the undergraduate state of mind.

It was this: that the big, gentle man who was over forty when the marriage happened, had been proposed to by correspondence. The letter was so brilliantly couched, its choice of phrases was so concise, so just, so Greek, that the scholar wired to the writer to appear at once. Julia Cairn came on the following train and they were married that afternoon by the college president, who was a minister of the gospel. The legend went on to relate that the writer of the happy letter was not Mrs. Deering at all, but one of her girl pupils. This beautiful but anonymous victim had been caught by her teacher writing in class. Her letter was detected and confiscated; later on employed with slight corrections, to fit the purpose of Miss Cairn. Since the Professor’s discovery of his wife’s plagiarism, the myth concluded, the pair’s lot had been a miserable one. But Mrs. Deering was too dominant to be got rid of.

Of course, Quincy laughed at this legend. But its conclusion—that the marriage was unhappy, that the great man had been betrayed, that he needed sympathy and rescue—stuck attractively in his mind. For this very reason, perhaps, he failed to see how the myth reflected the student body’s general emotional condition. As Garsted told him, since his state also was reflected by the myth, there was no mystery in his failure to psychologize it.

It was plain, all of that freshman year, however, that strange conflicts raged in the boy about the Deering household.

“She always comes in and bothers him,” he remarked. “And the minute she comes in, he tells her just what we’ve been talking about.”

“He knows you don’t mind,” said Garsted.

“But I do!”

“Will you stop confiding in him? Doesn’t that prove you don’t object?”

At length came an hour alone with her.

“Come in to see me, some afternoon,” she called to him from the stairs, as the Professor and he sat in the study. Later, as he was leaving, he found her watering the flowers. She was dressed in a frock of faint rose. A bonnet hid all of her black hair. Her hands were covered with sod.

“Come next Monday, Mr. Burt,” she said, scarce looking up from her work, and not in the least anxious as to an answer. Quincy found it awkward to accept to the back of her head. So he went on, without a word, perfectly aware that he would be expected.

His anticipation of the visit was perturbed. He was fearful of what it would entail. He was unwilling to leave it to hazard. He improvised their dialogue; he edited his inventions and kept constantly transforming them. All of his fancies were delightful. In them, he impressed Mrs. Deering greatly. And in the later ones, when he gained courage, she told him that she liked him more than any other of the students. She confided in him what she had kept hidden from Garsted—the secrets of her life. Quincy did not go into details with this. He thought he might best leave that to her. But at the end, he went completely disgusted with himself. He knew that the reality and his imaginings would not agree. In his own fancies, he had exhausted the pleasant possibilities. Infallibly, therefore, that which was going to take place could not be pleasant. As he rang the bell, he felt that he had injured the prospect of a happy time by imagining that happy time. And then, as she opened the door for him, he forgot his speculations. He began living in the present.

Before the summer, there were two more tea hours with her. Each of them stood alone. No word uttered at one could ever have been confused with any word uttered at the others. Yet, despite their clearness, they were indissoluble. They lay together in Quincy’s mind as the boundary to a great and vague impression. The vague impression was first; behind, remoter, were these clear visits. As the boy envisaged them, it was as if, before them, Julia Deering had not existed. Instinctively, he accepted this: that before them, she had not existed, although his reason told him otherwise. And of course, his reason did not count. In like fashion, does a primitive people accept a day and an event when the world began. Its reason also, had it been consulted, would have judged otherwise.

“Why am I interested in the household life of a philosopher? Why do I resent his wife yet dream of her? Why, when I dwell on his perfections, does she seem to mar them? Why, when I let her vision come does his seem to dim? What business are all these things to me? I am a protégé of Professor Deering. Each year, out of the incoming mass, he selects a few like me. I have interested a woman happening to be his wife, who, being an interesting woman, is naturally capable of interest in another. There is nothing more. Yet my mind goes—like fingers picking rags—hoping for a fabulous jewel; tremulously. What is wrong with me?”

These questions Quincy put to himself, as the sun mellowed and the spring burst forth from the brown earth and the haggard trees. Quincy took them with him on his country runs. The ground was damp with moisture. Maple buttons stood on the long twigs. And as he ran or sauntered or reclined on a dry rock, garlanded in the shoots of little elms and oaks, the question rounded like a fist, hardened and struck him silent.

All of that spring this phenomenon was repeated. There would sprawl the questions, pricking or stroking him—no more. Suddenly, a vital force would encompass, then compress them. They would become a fist and strike him. He would startle, resist, give way. And then, as suddenly, the fist would once more disintegrate. Again, there would be relaxation until the following blow. All of that spring, moreover, there was no conclusion.

Certain things were plain enough.

Professor Deering was the greatest man in the world. His friendship was priceless. But Julia Deering was the first woman in the world willing to consort with him. Was that less a treasure? And why should it be? Why did some sickly sense within him tell him of a conflict between these two possessions? He had a mind; he had a soul. Did these two possessions menace one another? Perhaps that explained the mist about the two new human elements. But with all this, the boy’s head hurt. And his mind helped him out, through some centrifugal tangent.

There was nothing really personal in the relation of Quincy and Julia Deering. There was nothing really personal in the relation of Quincy and Lawrence Deering. The personal, in either instance, was the boy’s contribution. The man believed to have discovered in him a mind; he had not gone far enough yet with him to view this, save as a specimen, as a relief, perhaps, in his work. The woman thought to have found in him a spirit. She also had not gone far enough to adventure there, preferring to bring it up within the scope of her own play. Quincy, quite with an equal egoism, had subjected these to his own lights. But his lights were feebler than their medium. So it was he who was refracted, rather than they who were transfigured. Quincy was the suffering one; for Quincy was the changing one.

All this was a whirling in the dark for him. He understood so little. His year at college seemed so sounding a failure. What had it got him?

He sat on a rock, panting for breath, from his run up-hill. Columbine and azalias flourished about him. The fresh hum of insects deepened the glow of last autumn’s leaves, heightened the clear tenderness of the anemones. A great oak twisted above him on its tortuous way to the sun-flushed sky. Numerous little oak trees with fresh red leaves, most of them doomed to perish, ran riot with the other foliage in the cleft where he sat. Solomon’s seal and chestnut sprouts, liquid patches of wild violets, geranium and slender sprays of the wild grape with its leaves ruddy red and velvet green, shared his nook with him. Below swept the valley, splashed with dogwood, an infinity of greens and rose-bathed white. Through all the woodland, the wind raced daintily. A copse of aspen swayed in a complex unison, while the sun danced counterpoint on the leaves. Blossoming fragrance and a humid acrid strain of fecund life waved over him. The sky came down, its blue burning upon him. And beyond, the sun slanted westward, bursting well up in a haze that consumed its less gentle fires.

So garrisoned, Quincy met himself, and sought an accounting of his year in college. The boy frowned. And the day’s grandeur went over him like a rich garment over a soiled body. He shivered for it. He was ashamed. He understood nothing save his own impotence. He felt nothing save his suffering. He was nothing, before a universe of splendor. Family and friendship, fellowship and duty—in all relations, he seemed slipping, tottering. There was no name for what he was, since there was no name to describe anything within his life. He was unsure of qualities at home. In the house of college as in the house of Deering, he was uncertain. He was a nameless thing. And all the nameless things that touched him, for want of appellation, faded to naught or turned against him; all things save this one thing that grew greater without a title: his unhappiness.

The sun sent a spear of flame through the haze. It gleamed on his face, as he sat there, gazing with steady eyes. His eyes were in shadow. Deep purple they were, a pathetic counterpart of black. The lashes lay long about them. On his mouth were myriad little nervous frets, such as make up a pathetic counterpart of smiling. Quincy turned his eyes toward the falling sun. They glowed now, a limpid blue. And the black lashes were bronze. And the moist mouth opened and grew strong.

Meanwhile, however, the sun was falling.

IX

Quincy was not very well, that summer. He had always been hardy. His supple muscles, which he could trace ridging beneath the white skin of his arms and shoulders, had seemed a barrier to trouble, despite the delicate tension of his nerves. Even on this occasion, he was not really ill.

He had caught cold in the woods. Often, although he did not tell the doctor this, he would throw himself prone on the moist soil and fling his head into a tuft of verdure, where he could absorb the incense of new-born things. Often he would clamber on a tree—an apple tree groaning with blossoms was his predilection—and lie there, across a branch, arms balancing his weight, until his eyes grew heavy and he had to go, lest sleep tumble him down. Or—this was a new discovery of that spring—he would find a sudden cleft on a high bench above a brook, made smooth and sweet with the last season’s underbrush. Seating himself at its head, he would slide down through brambles of blackberry and over clumps of moss, arms waving, head bare. Running hatless in the rain was an ecstasy that even he was wary of. But more than once that spring, with the rain pouring, his head grew waterlogged with lessons and meditations—neither of which he seemed able to bring to a conclusion. He would throw himself from his desk, board a trolley to the outskirts of the town and trudge forth on the muddy road until there came a space where there was no one in sight. Then, off would come his hat, and like a wild thing vaguely aware of trespass, he would cut into the drenching fields, bare-headed, ardent, until his body glowed and his feet weighed like lead. Then, with his face down he would return and silently change his clothes.

But about this spirit of a faun was after all the body of a man. Congestion and inflammation fastened on Quincy. The doctor made a long face, gave him a diet and told him to stay as much as possible on the porch.

Needless to say, the Burt household moved from the sweating city every June. Summer torridity in New York is an unnatural thing. It does not come gently like the fires of France or Italy. It is as if the monstrous city had been rushing, rushing, rushing—all of the winter. At last it got overheated. That was the summer. Only a very young and healthy person can rush himself into a sweat and husband his good nature. New York’s overheatedness is angry. So those that can, leave her alone, until she is cool again and ready for another rushing.

The summer house of the Burts on this occasion was an old splendid mansion hidden in three acres of uncultivated woodland. It was but an hour from New York. From the macadam highway where the motors flashed continually by, a rustic road led past a fence and a tiny wooden bridge. The bridge was over a thread of brooklet. Thick shrubs smothered it from sight. And all of the gentle green things here were stained with dust and matted with gasoline. The road ran a hundred yards, between great oaks and willows. Here, shielded splendidly, was the house. There were great white pillars. The forward wall was brick. The porch was broad and open. And within, the high-ceilinged, ample rooms were perpetually cool. Rambler roses, petunias and canna surrounded the porch, above which on either side were frames for wistaria and grape-vines. From the porch one could hear the crash of the motors, glimpse their dust. And in the evenings, their lamps shot into view, flooded a space of foliage and then clapped away. This did not interest Quincy—although it was Marsden’s chief delight. But at the house’s rear lay a thick, brambled bit of forest—a complete miniature of nature. Within a few acres, the boy discovered rocks and hills, valleys and rivers, a settlement of birds that made symphony each night over a sunken pond where the frogs croaked, and a dingle utterly enclosed in elder-bushes where a space of grass lay sweet and gentle, in contrast to the riot of rough foliage without. Here he could steal away and be as well secluded from alien sight and sound as if home were in another State—save when the wind brought him his mother’s voice, scolding the servants in the kitchen.

“Look here, little East Wind,” he would scold in turn, “are you turned traitor, to bring me that?” And straightway, the wind would curl about the willow tree, and giggle a bit and stop.

He had been gazing at that tree a long time—and many times. His dingle sloped somewhat so that, for comfort, he had always to lie facing one way. That way was nearly west. And it brought the willow full into his vision. Of a sudden, this struck him as a portent.

“Oh, great willow tree,” he asked, “is it on purpose that I must always gaze on you and see the sun fall through your fingers?”

A bright red bug with purple stripes, round and fatherly, had climbed on his cuff. Presently, it jumped off in his palm. He held it up and as it trudged toward his finger tips, it too faced westward.

“Admire the sun, little bourgeois!” Quincy commanded.

Of a sudden, the bug hopped away. There had been no food on his palm, for it.

“You refuse to admire the sun?” said the boy, thoroughly serious. “Well, you’re a lucky little bourgeois not to have to.”

In ways like this, Quincy managed to forget himself. He was alert always, for a dialogue in the woods. But a few hundred yards beyond, in the old house, he was forever still and eaten-up with moods.

Despite the real simplicity of their house, the Burts liked it. Rhoda and her husband consented to spend a month there with them. Later, during her husband’s vacation, they were going to the mountains. Rhoda’s close presence that July was of import to Quincy. His family had several more acute impressions to inject in him before its full task was done. And what with his undigested year at college still upon him, and the vague threats of a second year to impose upon a first which had not yet retired into a spiritual composition, Quincy was in a sensitive state for new shocks and for new colors. His self-constituted idylls back of the house were not all of his summer. Life in the raw came to the country with him. Nor was it ashamed, it seemed, to grate and pound and give ruthless exhibitions, even if the flowers and trees and birds did sing outside the windows.

There was an excursion into new land. And of course, all of these things, new and old, while they seemed at first merely to make more mud of his problems, were really a solvent to help clear them. The new excursion came in the form of a girl—a friend of Adelaide—Clarice Lodge.

The Lodge family had a house, half a mile away, not nearly so splendid as the one which the Burts rented. But Mr. Lodge owned his house and they lived in it, all of the year. He was a lawyer, in New York—a real commuter. Adelaide had met Clarice in the city. They were not very close friends, at the summer’s outset. Nor were they any closer at the summer’s end. Adelaide, who was twenty-one, explained that she could never possibly grow intimate with a girl who was only seventeen. Withal, Clarice looked up to her and vigorously sought her out, when she learned that the Burts had leased the Frondham mansion.

That was the title of the house. It was owned by Miss Juliet Frondham, an ancient lady of an ancient stock. She was too poor to live in this mocking relic of her whilom glory. But she was too proud to sell it and too fond of it to live far away. So Miss Frondham with her maid lived in a suite of rooms in the more built-up section of the township. She kept her own house immaculate and rented it for as long periods as she could.

Two years later, this proud, poor lady—the last of her line—died, leaving a fortune of three hundred thousand dollars to her maid. Three brothers came like a storm out of Illinois. The will was contested and eventually broken. The faithful maid proved to be a villain who with fiendish cunning had turned her mistress against her entire kin. She ended in the penitentiary. And Josiah Burt bought the Frondham mansion.

Into the press, then, of Quincy’s summer went these three new ingredients: a feeling of Rhoda’s married life, the tide-like load upon him of all the first year’s happenings at college, and Clarice.

The awful inconsequentiality of life, the absoluteness of each moment and the doom of never-more that lurks in each moment’s easy, gliding pace, the state of death to which inexorably each new state of life is born—these are the things of which youth happily is unaware. He plunges on like a swift runner upon a path pied with sweet flowers. He does not really know that these flowers are everything and the goal, a mere place for dropping off. He says: “These flowers are as naught, to the flowers yonder.” So he suffers them to escape past him in a blurred line of recollection. Their intimate detail he sacrifices to a distant vagueness. He refrains from fingering the down on their petals, from breathing their live perfume in order to be possessed by a monster builded of his own energy. If the truth flashed his way, he would stand still and the world would stand still. He would fear to venture and to desire. Or his steps would become the groping of a blind man in a wilderness. He would make a universe out of a single flower at his foot; not make a flower at his foot out of the universe. But the greater truth is doubtless that he should not know the truth; that he should press on unheeding. For courage is an ignorant and fresh-born thing that is wiser and older than wisdom.

July was the month of Rhoda, August the month of Clarice. Julia Deering, of course, was always present. There was a strange bitterness to see the un-ideal intercourse of Rhoda and her husband. Since their marriage, Quincy had seen less of them than one does of a good acquaintance. He had not accepted Theodore Cram. But in his capacity of mate to Rhoda, he had idealized him. He did not consciously idealize his brilliant sister, but in his own quality of younger brother, he had accepted her as, of course, winningly adjusted. Now, came this sordid revelation. Rhoda and her husband could quarrel with each other, sneer at each other, remain indifferent to each other’s presence, and make a pleasure of each other’s irritations! These were all little things, of course. Sarah would smile in her rocker, folding her hands and declaring that such insignificant disagreements were inevitable. Josiah did not pay heed enough even to pass them over. To Marsden, they furnished amusement. Jonas, like his father, seemed temperamentally impervious, and Adelaide, as with most things that happened in the household, would be quickly aggrieved and as quickly her unruffled self again. To Quincy, these little quarrels—that Rhoda or Theodore were the last to take seriously or to remember—were soilings of dirt on a work of art. The analogy was perfect, since the thing soiled was indeed his handicraft. But they were more: they were a source of stirring the old waters. They led to speculations about Julia Deering and her husband; they compelled painful efforts to seek conclusions and to avoid conclusions, about the generality of men and women.

It was unbearable to think of Professor Deering as so haggled and so upset. Yet, could one have guessed from the calm brow of Theodore Cram, from the smooth bosom of his magnificent sister, that such things could be? Was all of the world a hypocrite? Could there be worms beneath the surface of his marble masterpiece, before even the soil marred it to the eyes?

It was a droll commentary upon justice that Quincy, at whom this couple snapped their fingers, should have been hurt by their delinquencies. Of course, in the old days, there had been murmurings at home about Rhoda. He recalled her as a child, screaming and scratching, carrying war upon Adelaide and Jonas. But always, it had been successful war—war with a quick and unqualified decision. Adelaide was always surrendering, Jonas was always being overwhelmed. That justified Rhoda. There had been a sweep of power in her place at home. She had dominated; she had wielded her sway. When she sneered at Adelaide or him, her sneer cut true. When she shot angry words at her mother, or Jonas, or her father, these words stood trembling, like an arrow, in the heart of the target. And with Marsden, there had been always a deference and a calm—like two great Powers at balance on a continent between their mutual dependencies.

Here, however, it was different. Theodore Cram did not bleed at her sneers, nor lie transfixed with her angry words. Theodore Cram could cut back and shoot back. And tears came more readily in Rhoda’s eyes than the flash of pain on her husband’s mouth. Rhoda had her match. And in the poise of this even combat, Quincy learned its pettiness and sordidness. From this conclusion, came the inevitable step: that her warfare of old must have been similarly petty, and that the woman who waged such, with such incessance, must be of a measure with her battles. The boy’s brain receded before it would take on this lesson. Was Rhoda narrow and petty and mean of spirit? Had her cause of battle against them all been sordid? and her victims, the result not of her own excellence but of their own mediocrity? Here were two strong and striking observations to make lie together: that in their marital irritations, Rhoda was no more generous or ideal than her hard-hearted husband—and that, in her appearance and her charm, Rhoda was as enfevering and inspiring as ever. Could these two knowledges couple and give birth to strength in Quincy? At least the struggle of conception and the ensuing labor were painful interludes. A woman, then, could be beautiful, dominant, entrancing, yet have a soul of flint? a woman could hold one, yet by qualities that one despised? a woman could forge sovereignty at home, yet abdicate to the level of those she ruled at her maturity? What was this creature, woman? And how came it that he, Quincy, full with his eighteen years, could compute and reckon his superiority all of a forenoon in the woods, yet be a mute, inglorious thing before her glance, at lunch?

In Theodore Cram there was no longer any glamor. The man was without vision or ideals or beauty. Yet Rhoda loved him! gave herself to him! And an hour after those dark mystic hours they must have spent together, she could despise him or ignore him—he could despise her or ignore her! Was there not this ugly identity between them? And then how, viewing her husband’s pettiness, could Rhoda be deemed better? How, with these things established, could she still have power and charm for Quincy? It had sufficed merely to glimpse them to cause Theodore Cram to lose his glamor. Oh! the perplexities were myriad and infinitely intertwining.

Perhaps he might have solved—or at least met them—had they led no farther than these two. But irrevocably, the perplexities flowed out to Julia Deering, to his mother, to himself. Until the whole whirled like a dizzy dream, where arms, outstretched for a firm hold, turned into gyres and spun along.

Though the act was unconscious, Quincy fixed on Clarice Lodge to solve these problems, answer these questions. She had no part in his emotions. She seemed solid and dependable to Quincy. He did not know that when she also had been drawn into the furnace of his feeling, she also would swirl with the fire and fumes. Childishly confident, he fixed on her, being unaware that at his age to attach upon another is really to absorb that other and burn that other up. Even so does flame fix on a twig. But Quincy was sure that he would learn everything from her and that his interest was scientific.

She was known as a pretty girl. And until one time when he really saw her, this had seemed the right term to Quincy. Thereafter, it appeared to him to be injustice.

It was at their house. Adelaide was below the porch, trimming the roses that had drooped too low. Clarice leaned over the porch railing. Quincy was to one side and unobserved. He had stepped out through the door. The two girls chatted brightly. Clarice led the conversation. She was coaxing her friend to admit that red was far more beautiful than blue. In a prim, white jumper, with Dutch neck, she bent her alert body downward. The pressure of the rail below her waist drew the frail cloth tight against her breasts. She was bending toward the left. When she laughed—which was half the time—a tremor went through her body as if it too were laughing. When she talked, she swayed gently, her whole form together, to and fro against the railing that first ate hard upon her and then gave her up. In this way the fluted railing spokes marked out their pattern against her body. Her right knee was forward and her right foot dangled. This gave accent to her rhythm. The discovered leg with its black silk stockings, pointed with tiny, white-canvas slippers, was straight and strong and fleshless. It cut like a tangent movement to the misty sway of her body. And here, Quincy kept his eyes enchanted. In the slow, steady rhythm of her body, to and fro against the railing, while her words sparked brightly, there seemed a faint, voluptuous deliberation. Her voice was a moist crystal. The nape of her neck was a nook with tiny and bronzed ringlets. He did not see her face. But now, in the pause, the girl’s subtle sense came into play. She felt him there; she straightened and turned toward him. And their eyes met.

Both of them felt the burn of their blushing. With a soft hand, Clarice smoothed her skirt in front from the waist down—slowly. It had been very faintly ruffled. But the fact that her consciousness was there, drove Quincy’s eyes to her face, though in his quandary they had once more fallen. He did not know how to take them entirely away.

At that moment, it came about that he discovered it unjust to call Clarice merely pretty.

With a sudden fervor, he had said to her: “Will you go walking with me, tomorrow?”

She had given one peal of laughter, grown serious and between the two states, replied: “Why—of course, I will!”

But if their walks, that summer, through the woods were so many wild-flowers, they were of the sort that onrushing youth could not stop to contemplate. Quincy deemed commendably mature the dispassionate way in which he set out to take Clarice. They were to be simply friends, and perhaps they might bring good to one another. The boy was sure that, had she known, his mother would have approved his conduct. But the doubting Sarah had no insight into his calm. Her eyes grew cloudy and troubled when his walks with Clarice became engrossingly frequent. On one occasion she said to him:

“Are there no young men about for you to play with?”

Quincy had seen the young men in the town’s post-office, and at the soda fountains. They were a typical group—shallow-eyed, and narrow-headed, with the manners of fox-terriers and the souls also—probably. They were the sort of boys who instinctively stiffened their necks when Quincy was about. There were no other boys—Clarice’s brother was fourteen. So Quincy’s mother should have been less fearful of this new friendship.

Adelaide found a way to express her view of it.

“Clarice is a child—a dear child,” she fell into repeating. She seemed to believe that childhood was a race. One who was once a child would remain one always. Never could the chance be admitted that there exist in Clarice at seventeen, things which would one day grow like Adelaide at twenty-one. Perhaps, Adelaide was right Perhaps, childhood is a generic quality. But, howsoever, from the days of Quincy’s absorption, there was a barrier between the girls.

Clarice felt this. And being with Quincy was a way of resenting it. She was a fresh, unspoiled sprout at seventeen. Her body was tall. But her head was little and rounded and her face was rather soft in contrast to the firm, narrow lines of the rest of her. Quincy called her “Buttercup.” For her hair was gold and her cheeks were tanned and her eyes were green in the sun rather than blue.

But the unfortunate thing was that, although Quincy enjoyed all this, he seemed to be learning very little about the ultimate qualities of woman. He caught himself up at times, in his enjoyment. He seemed of the opinion that if he enjoyed himself, he could not profit. In this treasurable thought, a stain of schooling had indeed fixed on his else impervious nature.

With the heavy heat of August, when the trees turn purple and a translucent flame waves over nature and sears her gentle freshness, Quincy learned that in his rigid purpose he had failed altogether. He learned also that his mother had been silently right—just as often she had been volubly wrong. Clarice was become a part of the fire and fumes. He could not help this. But he could keep from seeing her so often. He resented her attraction. And with set teeth and a stern eye, he put a censorship upon their walks.

A few days later than Rhoda—in the height of August—Clarice also was leaving for the mountains. Rhoda and her husband approved of the Lodges.

“He is a big lawyer,” said he.

“She was a Querelton,” said she. And always, she had smiled when Quincy’s attention to a Querelton’s daughter came up to her notice.

“See her as much as you can;” she advised him once. “When she makes her début next season, you’ll not be looked at—I assure you. You know,” Rhoda turned to her mother, “the Lodges are coming to live in town next winter, just so that Clarice has a chance.”

This speech rankled Quincy and amazed him. He pondered it for some time, after the Crams had gone. When his wild flower “had a chance” to become a wired thing of wax, she would, then, welcome it? and he who must stand in her spirit for the scent of the moist fern and the dancing of the brook would not be noticed?

There were a few days left of Clarice when these words, spoken at random, crystallized their effect on Quincy. It was well in the period of holding off from Clarice—and of resentment that she should have given him so little knowledge, yet occupied so fiery a part within him. At once, his ardor and his curiosity re-kindled. He sought her out for a last walk in the woods.

Clarice told him that she was very busy packing. But she would take an afternoon from her important duty.

If she was reluctant, as he called her downstairs, so was the sun that came through the pervasive grey like a little shot of fire. They went forth, and the sun gave way, altogether, before the clouds.

It was evident to Quincy that Clarice was angry at his sudden lessening of attention. He did not know that this anger might have been adduced from the fact that his behavior left a void in her heart. He thought only her pride was injured. That was why he said, by way of buttress to it:

“I understand—Rhoda told me—you were going to live in New York next winter and have society.”

“I guess that’s true.”

“Are you glad about dances and parties?”

Clarice puckered her pale-red lips. “No! I shall hate them.”

“Then,” Quincy went on, gladdened, “why are you going to do it?”

“You have to—of course. Everybody does.” Clarice talked as to one who could not possibly understand. And Quincy, acquiescent in the import of her tone, grew silent.

They wandered along a neglected road, half green with grass. A barbed wire fence straggled through the opaque bushes, laden with berries. They were walking rather more rapidly than their wont. It was as if the unconscious impulse of their limbs was to free each from the other. Quincy wore a grey, soft shirt. He had flared it at the throat, allowing his blue tie to fall low over his chest. Instinctively, his fingers groped to his neck, buttoned the collar close and drew up the tie.

“I’ve packed all my rompy clothes, Quint,” said Clarice, suggesting thereby that their ancient habit of striking across fence and meadow must be abandoned for want of a fit dress.

“Well, at least don’t let us rush so,” the boy said. “This is a bully road. Remember where it goes to? Three miles of rolling country and then that farm-house where they have the buttermilk.”

“Oh, my!” said Clarice, “I can’t go that far! There’s not time.”

All of the things she said were true enough—and pardonable. Yet in her manner, she seemed making stock of these unfortunate contingencies. It was this that hurt Quincy. He resolved to try again.

“Clarice dear,” he began, “if you knew why I’ve not seen you so much of late, you’d not be mad at me.”

“Who said I was mad at you?”

“Well—I meant—”

“Sometimes, you’re too funny for words, Quincy Burt,” said the girl, serious as a sermon.

“Oh—be quiet!” The boy rebelled at this suggestion of being laughed at, despite the lack of a particle of smile in her. “I’m glad you’re not mad. All I wanted to say was—was that—well—the reason I’ve seen you less is not that I like you less.”

Clarice took this in silence.

“Look here!” The boy turned to her roughly almost—and stopped walking. The girl, of course, stopped also. He was turned so that she faced him. And still, she was quiet.

“Clarice, don’t you like me, too?”

She met his face. It was very still and solemn. And the mouth quivered a bit, though he drew it close in order to control it. And the eyes were a very deep, piercing blue, indeed. It was the inevitable moment for seventeen girlish years to laugh.

“What do you think—you silly? Would I have seen you so much—?”

“Then, Clarice,” Quincy put his hands forward and broke in, so eager was he, “you will see me, next winter?”

Of course, Clarice drew back, bodily, from his onrush. And of course, her words symbolized her action. It was nothing more.

“I shall be awful busy, Quint.”

They stood in the middle of the road. It was long and green and silent. A great elm, its trunk choking in poison-ivy, leaned over them. The boy grasped her shoulders and drew her toward him.

“Promise me, Clarice dear,—you’ll see me when I come to New York, next Christmas. Even with all the parties. Give me a kiss in promise.”

Her face was directly under his. And her lips were smiling. With no effort, he kissed them. They were cool and soft and pricking. It was as if he had kissed a smile. How different from this granted kiss had been the stolen one, of Rhoda! But now, her face was a little flushed and the smile was gone—as if he had kissed it away. Clarice fell back a step. And Quincy spoke though a bubble of warmth kept rising in his throat.

“That was a promise, Clarice?”

The girl frowned. “It was nothing of the sort!”

“Clarice!” he cried, in amazement.

But still she was angry. Her face was first red, then almost grey. “I’m going home,” she said and turned away.

Quincy reached for her fleeing waist and threw her back into his arms.

“You shan’t behave that way, toward me!”

“Shan’t I, though? Good-bye! You needn’t come along.” And once more she made a start.

The boy stopped her. He took her angrily and bent her backward, until her face was under his.

“If you behave like that, I’ll kiss you again!”

He kissed her—savagely. And Clarice, as before, lay there in his arms, almost unheeding. He kissed her again—tenderly. And then, he looked at her. The lips were parted and moist. Her spirit seemed slumbering beneath a covert. Only her mouth was a taste of it. Her eyes were meaningless. She was not beautiful after all.

He set her up once more upon her balance.

“You have promised me now—to let me see you next Christmas?”

Clarice straightened herself. “I have done nothing of the sort.”

She spoke with a wrinkle of her forehead and her kissed mouth dryly puckered. “Next Christmas—” she paused and tilted her head vaguely up with a distant look, “Next Christmas—who knows?”

“Then why,” said the angry boy, as he followed after her, “then why did you let me kiss you?”

This time, Clarice stopped.

“Are you sorry?” she asked.

“I most certainly am!” burst from him.

Unscathed, Clarice shrugged her shoulders.

They walked to her home, in silence.

“Good-bye,” said she.

“Good-bye,” said Quincy.

X

College once more.

It had the busy serenity of a bee hive. Its murmurous exclusiveness went against the vision of an outer world as a rebuke and a rebuff. But within the compact regions of honey and smug larvæ and pompous leaders, for those who were not really of it, however deeply in it, there was the quality of the sting.

Quincy came back, moved and settled within new chambers, and looked about him. A sophomore. The heir, that meant, of the hum and the comb and the autonomy—laden with the equally strict traditions to enjoy these and to perpetuate them. A generation of larvæ lay, already, cuddled underneath him. And without, there was the world to which no visit must be dreamed of, no glance directed, save as a place of furnishing and fodder for the hive. All of it stretched out, a mere subsidiary. Its flowers were servants, its fertility was impost to the hive. In it, as in his home, were cloying and shutting-out and a sting. These were the first impressions. They came without bidding. But Quincy was resolved not to be satisfied with such. He went forth, therefore, to look about him.

Perhaps his new instructor in English helped him as much as anything to bearings. His name was Egbert Simson. He was a graduate of the college. He had won honors in all the possible fields of it. He had won his letter in track; he had served on the college monthly; he had led his class in scholarship and presided over the college branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association, He was a perfect man. And now, he was a member of the faculty. In a year, he would have his doctor’s thesis. In five years, he would be grappling toward a professorship. In ten years, he would publish an edition of the Poems of Suckling. All his life he would continue humming and honey-gathering for the hive.

Quincy came to know him, sophomore year, in his capacity of preceptor. For each student had such a one. Early in the fall term, was the time when he had to see the estimable Simson—twice in two weeks. This served greatly, together with the general impression of the class.

Mr. Simson was tall and inclined to fullness of figure. His face had once had lines, hard and aplenty. But general happiness would soon abolish them to roundness. His little clear blue eyes shone forth from their soft frames with an easy prospect, as if they knew beforehand what they were going to see—and should somewhat else be there, they would simply refuse to see it. His nose was still straight, nor had the incipient rising fleshliness of his cheeks yet undermined its shallow impertinence. His lips were of the general blown-ness that smacked often, smiled at will and were not employed when a guttural throat-sound announced laughter. Mr. Simson’s forehead was narrow and smooth and round below his sleek brown hair. His hands were fat but the soft fingers tapered gently. In all of his being there glamored fluency, serenity and an inviolable blindness. This man was one of the favorite figures in the hive. His hum was forever marked and forever sought. If he had not been a male, one might readily have called him “Queen.” But even his maleness was unobtrusive, since the hive worshipped the more passive sort. Mr. Simson’s voice was soft and high. He was easily shocked and when he was, he wiggled his lissom form and threw back his perfectly rounded head. He was staid and Christian. It was meant to be quite evident that when he married the daughter of some affluent trustee, he would go to her in a state of virginity that would save her blushes. It was quite evident as well that he would never marry the daughter of any one less trustful and less affluent than a trustee. Mr. Simson lacked money. But it was known that several of his relations were financial kings. All of his friends, moreover, were as well chosen as his relations. And since he had not chosen his own father, one never heard of him. Mr. Simson, however, was far too proper not to be untiringly devoted to his mother. One heard often of that. Moreover, she had an infallible eye for trustfulness and affluence. Frequently she went along on a friend’s yachting tour with him.

On Mr. Simson’s more specific qualifications for teaching English literature, it would be sheer pedantry to dwell.

“You should see,” Quincy explained to Garsted, “with what scruples Simson discharges his duties as preceptor, toward me.” The boy laughed. “He can’t stand me.”

“I go into the study. Simson is at the desk—typing a sonnet for the Lit. ‘Oh, good day, Mr. Burt,’ without getting up, ‘and what is there this morning?’ I give him the papers. Without looking at them he signs them. ‘I am convinced, Mr. Burt, they are as they should be.’ There is at least one ‘Mr. Burt’ in every sentence. I am about to leave and a qualm catches him. He smiles and when he smiles his round face breaks into two triangles with the nose as the common base. ‘Does my class satisfy you, Mr. Burt?’ he asks. As the result of that question, he tells the others at the Graduates’ Club how frankly he takes each student into his confidence—asks their advice.”

“Yes,” interrupted Garsted, “they despise Deering, but they all imitate him. Well?”

“Well—I answer: ‘Mr. Simson, why did we skip The Miller’s Tale? I think it is one of the best Chaucer wrote.’ ‘It is good,’ he answers, tapping a finger on his mahogany desk—yes, there’s a huge seal ring on the tapping finger—‘It is good, Mr. Burt, but it’s unpleasant; it is coarse. We must remember that sometimes Chaucer’s surroundings,’ I was sure he was going to say Mr. Chaucer, since he despised him too, ‘sometimes Chaucer’s surroundings got the upper hand of his good taste. Despite its matter, that tale is good. For Chaucer was a genius. He could not help making even a licentious story interesting and human.’”

Here Garsted roared: “Even a licentious story! The old hypocrite! You know Simson, my dear Quint. You saw his human little eyes and his round lips and his belly—at twenty-seven! Do you think that is his real opinion of a licentious story?”

“I know it isn’t,” answered Quincy. “Several of the boys whom he cares for—Society brothers of course—were repeating some of his own jokes. I heard them.”

“Ugh—let’s have lunch,” said Garsted.

Not alone diffidence held Quincy from calling on the Deerings until late October. His own turmoiled spring and summer had indeed made him unsure of himself toward them and hence unsure of them toward him. It is hard for the man whose sleep has been wracked with dreams to understand the serenity of sleep of the one beside him. So Quincy restrained his impulse to seek out the great man and his wife. He wished, moreover, to adventure a trifle more in the atmosphere of college. He seemed seriously firm and set and steady there. He enjoyed this new sensation. He was afraid lest the Deerings show up its superficial strength. This, of course, was a fear he did not avow to himself. His affairs, his reluctance to seem too pressing in his return sufficed for the admitted reasons. And meanwhile he was able to bask in his new sense of self-dominion.

Garsted had grown aware of this.

“You’re a different man,” he remarked to him; “you must have had a successful love affair this summer.”

“You’re wrong, Simon,” replied Quincy, who was so well over the skirmish with Clarice as not to resent allusion to it.

“Then there was a girl. And didn’t you kiss her?”

“I did.”

“What did I tell you?”

“Is that success?” asked Quincy.

“Rake!” Garsted misunderstood him. And Quincy blushed. Here again, it was impossible to go farther even with his dearest friend.

But at length, one evening, the need of going to the little box-frame house came over Quincy. It was at dinner. There had been six weeks in which to go; yet he had not gone. And now, it seemed imperative that he must go—and that he must, at once. He rushed through his meal, half eating it. He ate his slice of beef, neglected the vegetables and then, when it was too late, found himself still hungry and gulped two cups of coffee whose heat displeased him. A great worry gripped him—lest they be out—or the evening inopportune. He might telephone; no, he did not dare to. He might wait until a surer time; no, he was not able to. He must go, this night. And if the evening was ill, so would be the omen. Was it that of a sudden, his new impression of college was digested and fresh food craved,—that, psychically, he had been released once more for living, now that the state of dormancy (called strength) was over?

Howbeit, Quincy went. He found the Professor and his wife alone and ready to receive him. And when, at eleven, he returned campus-ward through the crisp shadows, the impression of the six fresh weeks came at length to a formed consciousness within him.

In this way was that evening a peak whence he was able to look back upon the path he had just come, and forward upon the path ahead. And from its relative height, both paths were new and clear before him. Even so, as the climber stands upon an eminence does he descry for the first time the way that he has taken and view that past with the same eye of interest wherewith he peers into the future.

It was as if the boys, his classmates, stepped outward from their general hum, disintegrated and took on a clear dimension. He saw them now as a seed that the wind would scatter. He felt them as plants that a varied, self-sufficient soil would wrench to its own uses. He knew the blindness of the seed and the planned frailty of this little circled harbor holding it up for the air’s sowing. He respected everything save the boys’ pretensions, save the false eternity of the fragile harbor. He saw the bloomless death that there would be, were these pretensions even tinged with the truth. He wondered at the need of these pretensions. He despised the powers—the faculty—that bred them in order to slough over their own crass sterility.

He could not hold to this sudden and veracious vision. Himself intruded. His strong impressions, so flecked and bulged, were of less value and a greater interest. Here then, was he, among the disintegrated boys—among the seed. But with that instant, he could not go on. The boys faded back into the general hum. He did not seem to stand among them, to have an independent contact with them, to be even clearly outside of them. His mind failed to view simply him and them alone. It gave no response to this relation, it left no mark to fix on, no ring to hear as a tonality.

At once, Quincy veered back to the couple he had left—and however he approached himself, there were they, also.

The evening had been auspicious. Since he had ruled—an aboriginal residue in him—that an ill evening should augur ill, surely it was right to read a happy omen from a happy time. Quincy did not hesitate. As he walked home down the silent avenue where the black trees murmurously bent upon the lights, he was convinced. His firmness and grip had not gone from him! He was elated—yet certain of himself. And all of that last spring and summer, he had been a fool.

The three had talked together. And it had been natural to remain till late. There had been no sign of fire or haze or friction. As he sat there, he had seemed lifted up. The supple, blue steel of the Professor’s mind had seemed the girders of a firmament whose life-invigorating breath was Julia. There had seemed no crass way of differentiating them. Of course, one was star-metal; the other was æther. But together, they had made the firmament. And within this, he had taken breath and heart. Quincy saved himself from angry laughter at his early qualms and worries and presentiments by promptly forgetting most of them. This is a common function of forgetting—to save from angry laughter. He had blithely become unaware of the intangible misgiving which like a cancer, for all its formlessness, had gnawed into the marrow of the months preceding. He had launched upon an era of confidence and dreaming. He had no inkling of the sheer dogged resolution it had required to swing his rumbling energies from their near concrete pasture into those hinterlands of fantasy and rationalization. He did not guess that this sudden melting of past worries was caused by the laborious effort of his spirit to transform itself from the true state in which such worries could be prompted—that his fresh certainty of life was due to a quick leap from the realities which must be doubtful, to dreams fashioned at will to exclude doubt. The realities were to have their revenge. The dreams, formed as an escape from them, were to be found fitless and wanting. Meantime, however, Quincy tramped bravely down the shadowed street.

Of course, much truth lay in this fresh construed idealism; much health was in this sublimation of his energies. No long process in human nature can omit any part of human nature. A pondered crime has, in its texture, whatever of good or truth the criminal conceal. A deed of service hides all the infirmities and selfishness of the noble man. So, this long grown flower in Quincy, blossoming now in a period of exultant confidence, had come not only from his need of harbor for himself and of translating a truth to fancy, but as well from his rich fund of spirit and his deep strain of nature. His dream as he nursed it, now, was in good sooth extravagant. But the wildest dream has its root in the truth; and the most mendacious is a mere branching out from a confession.

Quincy, then, with his second year at college, revelled in a philosophy. Like all personal things at nineteen years, it was very concise and pointed, left to its own ways; and very vague when he endeavored to articulate it. Quincy of course could not admit this to himself. So when Garsted was dubious or unconvinced, he blamed Garsted’s obtuseness to spiritual things and withdrew farther from the realities.

The authorship of Deering in most of his ideas was manifest. The Professor was welcome in this capacity. Quincy did not object to a descent from such. Of course, Julia had no conscious part. He was the steel; she at best was color. He knew her now as a splendid woman, as a fit mate for a great man. That he had ever doubted this fitness or this harmony or this completeness was as far from Quincy as the once real days when he had lain as a center-presence in his crib. Yet, all of these truths remained. He was, of course, like all of us, still a center-presence to himself; he was of course, like all of us, a doubter of the otherness in a thing desired. But for the moment these truths were latent.

There had been real fire beneath the smoke that had blurred his past spring and summer. But Quincy was in a state where fire is denied and the smoke blown off by a new draught of energy that gains its intensity through a clear heat. All misgivings, then, about the Deerings went. And went as well, his misgivings about himself, his misgivings about life.

“A new accomplishment of Quincy,” said Rhoda that Christmas; “he’s become conceited.”

The creed of Professor Deering was unmistakable. Nor did Quincy mistake it. He mistook merely himself in believing he had adopted it, because a corner of his being—his intellect—had managed to nod “Yes” to it.

The creed was big and simple like the man that lived it. It was a thoroughfaring, militant idealism, a sublimation indeed throughout the sensory gamut of fact to truth. In it, Lawrence Deering careered, and toward it loved to tender by the hand those about him who were willing. It transfigured the smallest things of life; thereby the smaller souls grew aware of it. It flowed over everything like a fine mist at sunrise, yet protruded nowheres against force; thereby the small souls were made tolerant. The Professor was not molested at college. He was not molested at home. When a barrier came against the spirit’s flow, it wafted over. It had filled Quincy like a meadow, rough with low shrubs to hold it. He was already known in his class as one of the inevitable Deering disciples. A few each year—from the class standpoint—“went wrong” this way, even as a few each year “went wrong” with women. To the busy, humming majority who never took his courses, Deering was an endemic problem. Like the poets—Browning or Francis Thompson—who write nonsense, he had a national renown. But these were their inner confessions. To the world, these very philistines, in boasting of their Alma Mater, would have made much of Professor Deering.

It was, then, chiefly charged with the Professor, that Quincy began his period of effervescence. He now denied all troubles by fitting them into the scheme of “inevitable good.” He denied all evils by stalking so far beyond the mass as to catch its “inevitable harmony.” He overlooked all barriers by soaring so high as to see only the globe’s “inevitable curves.” He was radiant with the same vigor grown extensive which, while intensive, had made him gloomy. He was perfectly able, in these days, to argue the rightness of injustice—viewed in its propulsion of virtue; or the beauty of ugliness—as a part of nature’s composition. These were the days when he was consciously “vibrant to the whole” and when a deed was pragmatic instead of practical. Sex, moreover, was a germ that might “push upward into a flower”; there was an ideal conduit leading from “mortal brain to infinite mind”; matter was a “badge”; Christ’s import was not in his ethics but in his “substantiation of the spiritual,”—and before the advent of Deering the greatest men of the world had been merely steps in the preparation.

Innumerable concepts taken from the Professor and studdings of amplification and conclusion—his own part, mostly,—stood on the surface of Quincy’s soul and made faces at reality. Family became a cot he had left, finding it narrow and moist and over-rich in covers. College was a big emptiness in which a few true accents rang the more truly because of the acoustic of that emptiness. Quincy himself, it was plain, was a man of sensitive depths.

There then, were all these trappings and borrowings and mind-absorptions upon the surface of his soul, grimacing at the world and hiding what lay behind from the world’s onslaught. But the world had already shot its shaft and made a piercing with its seed. It might stay out now—shooed off effectually by all these grimaces—and laugh. For it was destined to laugh last. It had done its part. Quincy’s soul, in its too late seclusion, would unassisted perform the rest. It could only guard—it could not undo—the future.

So the boy went blandly on, with his ideals and his sublimations,—nurturing, the while, the fruit of his past intercourse with life.

XI

There were sublime moments in that period—moments that were sparks for later fires and that abided with him until the end.

Professor Deering had said to him: “The atheist is a man in whom a sense is lacking.”

Armed with this, Quincy went forth into the night to be alone with it. He sought a terrain that he already knew. The road crawled out of the town at a low incline. And then, abrupt from it, rose a path over a hill that was clad thick in summer. Now, it lay naked above the squatting road—a vast blue grey, a round of briar stalks and matted underbrush that sang with his racing feet. Upon the summit was a rock that Quincy loved. From one approach it was sheer and rugged. Beyond, a cleft in it, deepened with soil, curved gently down to a copse of elder bushes. From its sheer corner rose an oak tree. Several new tufts sprang from its foot. Above twined ivy and at the top a blaze of quartz, set in the granite, made a seat so that the hill’s declivity rolled away from the eyes to a distant murmurous valley. Here, flashing in sun or moonlight, one caught the river—agleam through its thick marge of summer, or swift and sleek without hindrance for the eye when the gaunt trees of winter basketed its flow.