PART III (continued 2)

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

“Do you?” asked the woman.

They looked at each other.

She was young and dark, with hot grey eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quincy and she began to speak.

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

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

“Come!” he said, crushing her hands.

Her arms were stiff.

“Where?”

“Home.”

She wrenched away her hands.

“No,” she said, in a new sharp voice.

Quincy stood up, towering over her.

“Come, I say. Come, I say,” he cried.

“No!” She held her seat.

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

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

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

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

A pause.

Quincy was sober.

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

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

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

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

The last grey thing slid out.

Quincy followed it.

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

On his desk was the letter of Clarice.

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

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

How?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rising sun flamed into his room.

He pulled down the blind, shutting out the sun.

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

EPILOGUE

There was no sequel with Clarice. She had expressed her will and pleasure, concerning him; together with her fears. She had gone out with the old. For Quincy’s senses understood what his relation with her called for; and all of that was abdicated; and that alone was needed. Had he gone to her now, it must have been with knowledge of the dead burden she had no power to bear, and no heart to quicken. To this conclusion, over and again, she had expressed herself. And to this end, Quincy honored her word. For within his state lay the bar to a more active course and to a clearer vision.

They did meet, however.

The adverse currents of a great street—relentless and cold and varicolored—threw them upon each other. The impact stopped them, while the flood went on. And the obtrusive instinct of their first glance lighted in each the farce of their words, the irony even of their stopping. The tearing shuffle of the crowd was the true note. Athwart it, their attempts to reach each other were refracted, shredded, lost. He held her gloved hand a moment, he looked into her eyes; and then he dropped both hold and gaze. It was the final act of letting-go. She joined her current; his swept him on....

The City is a maze of channels. Through them moves everlastingly a turbid Stream. Its weight eats downward; deepens the channels; heightens their walls. And as the City tilts, so runs the Stream.

The history of Quincy is lost in the Stream’s clotted pressure. He is one more molecule, replenishing its substance. Alone in its blind level of mass and flow, of clinging death and leaping restlessness, has he a true reality.

The Stream is a solution of what had been the flaring, eager things of life. The Stream’s source is Quincy. Quincy’s epilogue is the Stream.

THE END

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

to tranfigure it=> to transfigure it {pg 71}

the mental outfit=> the mental oufit {pg 80}

Accross the dismal=> Across the dismal {pg 173}

He was unscious=> He was unconscious {pg 262}

felt embarassed=> felt embarrassed {pg 328}

But the frangor=> But the fragor {pg 353}