PART ONE

THE UNWELCOME MAN

THE UNWELCOME MAN

I

It threatened a Christmas of wet winds and heavy moods. The air was sluggish. Winter had died to a tepid dampness. Snowdrifts were mire; and where had been clear skies was now a dull and lowering shroud. It was as if, at its last effort, the year had lost heart and purpose. There was a note of spiritual sagging in this turn from the exuberance of cold to a siege of muddy rivulets and stagnant vapors and grey trees. The brilliant storm that had swept the country white was now a scourge of swamp upon the land-side. And through the minor harmony of dripping leafage and fulsome roads and drench-stained houses came a fret of chill, too slight to retrieve the season from its languor, yet real enough to stultify the warmth.

This was the setting of Quincy’s birth.

* * * * *

In from Main Street and away from the salt air that fluttered toward it like a curtain’s fringe, a paltry, sordid stretch of lights; a road much rutted by last summer’s traffic; a straggling array of shops, saloons, dim and bedraggled with the rain--the heart of Harriet, Long Island. And then, a narrow street, loomed over by great oaks and screening cedars alien in this regardless majesty of Nature to the pot-like, worried houses that lay back in it, making their presence known with faint streaks of lights that fretted the calm gloom like human breath in a black dungeon. Beyond, scarce glimpsed, a rising motley of blue snow and rock,--a meadow. And just before this termination, where a sharp street-lamp ceased to blink against the vapors and the trees stopped,--the House. Irregular flagstones as a path to it through oozing sod that would be unkempt grass in June. A leak of orange lamp-light through the porch; another, faint from the upper story; a stocky shadow of façade, thrust in the more minor darkness.

This was the spot upon which Quincy was born.

* * * * *

A horse plodded down the street, the elastic beat of hoofs against the slough of mud. A lamp in revolt against the drizzling night, which it seemed somehow to fend off from its scant radiance, threw a glimpse upon the horse’s steaming form. He dragged a buggy sealed in rubber coverings; the reins passed over the drenched flap whence came the gleam in the swift lamp-light of two heavy hands. Without guidance, the horse turned up the carriage path at the side of the House, eagerly, while his load, rattling over the slight break from the street, mounted after. The stable door was open and they drew in--the snort of horse, the crush of wheels, the damp pungence of it all, a note of comfort against the weather. Josiah Burt unknit the rubber flap and emerged laboriously. He was a huge, heavy man with eyes that shone bright even by the dim glamor of two smoking lamps. Tenderly, he unharnessed his horse, rubbed him down, prodded his soft nose with a gesture of affection and let him trot clanking and neighing to his stall, with a slap on his haunch. And then, while the brute settled with crunch and snort and hoof-tramp to his meal, Josiah Burt swung a blurred lantern from its hook. Where had been a sharp interplay of orange fields and shooting shadows, blackness now rushed in as the man went out. He slid the door shut, bolted it and made his way, humming a tune.

The dining room was a low, long apartment muffled with portières faded brown from red, and with coarse grey curtains that had been white. At the table, sat five children. There were two empty places, one for the father, one for Mrs. Cripper, who always took charge of the Burt household while Sarah was upstairs adding another to it or recuperating from the drain of the effort. Before this place steamed a broad dish of corn beef, and over it was the plentiful figure of a woman whose prim, dark blue dress seemed in curious contrast to her beefy arms, her round florid face and the little ringlets of hair that stood awry like relics of coquetry after a long dousing. Josiah thrust through the portières and silently sat down.

Then, “How’s everything, Christine?” he asked.

“Why don’t you go upstairs first to Sarah and find out?”

“After’ll do,” the man grunted.

The children agreed. They were waiting for their dinner.

Mrs. Cripper dished out a plate-full and called Sylvia, the eldest, with a smile: “Here.”

The girl was fourteen, angular, blond, nervously put up. She left the room. Beside her place was a lad but a year younger--Josiah junior--with a dark face that wore a scowl of pathetic disillusion. And on the table’s farther flank sat three others: Marsden who was nine, Jonas who was six, Rhoda whose five years required her chair to be buttressed up by cushions. One mood joined them all--intentness upon dinner, indifference to all else. Mrs. Cripper doled out and sank into her chair. The prim dress was too tight, but it held. Sylvia returned, seated herself demurely and began to eat. Potatoes, doughnuts, tea were on the table. Mrs. Cripper helped the two youngest of those present; the others reached out for themselves. All ate what pleased them. No one spoke. And no one seemed adverse or uncomfortable, in the silence.

Mrs. Cripper, at length, had news to impart:

“Sarah’ll be gettin’ up, tomorrow.”

Josiah took the news, as if stoically. Then, his eyes twinkled and he looked up.

“So you’ll be goin’?” he observed.

“Yes, thank you.” Mrs. Cripper was offended.

“Oh, it probably’ll not be for long,” he appeased her.

“I think this is all, Josiah.”

“Thank God for that!” Bitter humor had precedence, in his tone, before the real hope.

“Don’t take on that way.”

The man examined the woman. A boiled potato stood on his fork. The brightness of his heavy-jowled face came out, as his lips curled.

“I can understand why you’re against race-suicide. It’s your livin’.”

Mrs. Cripper dropped her knife in protest. The rattling unleashed a repressed impulse in the man. A great fist fell on the flimsy table. “As for me--I’m sick and tired of the whole thing! I’m--” he changed his mood and added, “I’m a joke, I am!” And, as if with relentless logic, his face wreathed in a smile that was actually merry.

Mrs. Cripper did not understand. She observed that Josiah was smiling. She did not like that. So she spoke to Sylvia:

“Did you look in and see if Adelaide and Thomas was all right?”

“They’re asleep--” said the young girl.

“And Mama too?”

“Guess so.”

Once more came the more comfortable silence.

This was the household into which Quincy was born.

* * * * *

The upper light, visible from the street through a pall of fog and a green shade and a drapery of curtain, came from a bedroom. Sarah lay propped up with pillows, her hair black and bronze against them. A lamp, shielded by a hand-embroidered guard--green on cream yellow--was on a table in the center of the room. The light fell on a faded carpet, the dun upholstered chairs, the wall papered in white with crimson flowers. In the shadows were the cabinet, the mantel littered with china ornament, and an old crib with its new burden of a much older story.

The door creaked open and Sylvia, carrying food, came in. She looked at her mother and saw a rather worn-out, emaciated woman with big eyes that seemed somehow hot. The spectacle displeased her. It went ill with her desire to eat her dinner. The room was musty, close, clinging. The woman in bed seemed similar in color, in mood, in nature. And even to Sylvia, the new old thing in the Family cradle was an irritating repetition. She looked on her mother as in some pitiful way responsible, yet helpless; a sort of fated carrier for some objectionable germ.

“Thank you, Sylvia,” said Mrs. Burt as the child placed the dish before her. And then, she waited--as if for a greeting more desired than food.

Sylvia stepped to the door. She hesitated.

“Anything else, Mama?” she asked, miserable in this dull chamber of life.

“Nothing, thank you.”

The child closed the door gingerly behind her. And Sarah Burt, inured to a great want beyond the luxury of denying herself a lesser one, began her meal.

There was a long silent wait. The woman heard the burr of the fine rain on her window, the plash of a horse, the pierce of a passing voice. She heard her jaws, the faint crack in her ears as she swallowed. Ceasing, she heard her own breath. Holding it, she heard the breath of her child. Once, a fragment of crude rumble came from below--a shattering remark of her husband. She placed the empty plate on the floor beside her bed. Now, she heard the glow of the lamp; she heard the interminable rotting of the curtains, the ancient cabinet--the slow, measured swing of inanimate life. And then, rocked in the stifled rhythm of her room, she fell asleep.

When she awoke, her husband was standing beside her bed.

“Hello, Josiah,” she exclaimed in a high voice. “I must have dozed off.” What she feared was that he might think he had awakened her. That would irritate him. She must appear at once to have been expecting him, yet not to have been painfully expecting him; to be ill yet not to be unpleasantly ill; to fear him yet not to be afraid of him. So subtle a permutation is commonplace in the arithmetic of woman.

“How are you?” asked Josiah.

“I’m much better, dear. I’ll be up, tomorrow. I’ve told Christine. Do you want to come to bed?” Her pleasure at his interest had made her voluble.

Josiah looked at her a moment. His eyes travelled to the cradle. Then, he spoke.

“That’s what I wanted to speak to you about. I ain’t got much money, these days. But I’ve bought two single beds. They’ll be here tomorrow. They cost me twenty dollars. But they’ll be a good investment, even if I don’t get a cent for this one. Go to sleep now. I’m going to spend the night at the Inn.”

He left the room.

This was the mother of Quincy.

II

Dr. Gresham joined Mr. and Mrs. Burt in the parlor. There they sat cowed by fear. Something was wrong with Sylvia and Josiah junior who lay upstairs in bed. The physician, with a broad glance, took in his audience before he spoke. The couple sat in opposite corners of the room--a square, colorless arrangement in false brocade, knick-knacks and musty varnish. Sarah was on a cane stool which enabled her long back to be as stiff and angular as possible. Her black hair was stringy over her sallow face. She was only thirty-three. But her eyes, deep, grey blue eyes with a wash of timidity and a fret of fever forever in them, showed that once she must have been passionate and responsive. Josiah lay half back in an armchair. Between his vest and his trousers was an hiatus of blue shirt. His thread tie looked comical against the expansive bulk of his body. His eyes were small, sheer, energetic. His mouth, also, was small. But its regressive curl bespoke inertia. A day’s beard stood in purple ridges upon his florid cheeks. He tapped the chair with stout fingers--whose nails he invariably bit. Sarah tapped the carpet with her house-slippers. Her feet had lost their shape.

“It’s as I feared: both of them have scarlet fever.”

Sarah caught her breath and passed a long hand over her forehead, brushing back the hair. Her eyes half closed. Then, she looked at her husband. He jumped up, his face tortured.

“We’ll spare no expense, Doctor! Tell Sarah jest what to do. I’ll harness the buggy for the medicine.” He went toward the door.

“There’s one thing got to be done right off,” Dr. Gresham intercepted him. “Your wife can’t nurse these patients and her baby too. You’d better ride right over to Codgel’s Farm in North Harriet and take the infant with you. Mary’s just good, I happen to know. She can wet-nurse him till this is over. I’ll give you a short note. Mrs. Burt can stay here then,--and attend to things.”

“Right away?” At last came Sarah’s stifled voice.

The doctor nodded. “This thing is nearly a week old.”

The danger to the other children rushed into the woman’s mind. She held her panic. “I’ll get him ready.”

And husband and wife went together into the hall.

“I knew that kid meant bad luck,” growled Josiah as he marched toward the kitchen. And as Sarah mounted the laborious stairs, he might have heard, had he waited, lost in the slow thud of her feet on the steps, a tiny sob--the stolen luxury of womanhood for Sarah, behind his back.

* * * * *

These were hard days for Josiah Burt.

Nature seemed to have given him a fixed capacity of love. Upon Sylvia, his first-born, an overflowing measure had been showered. And to Josiah junior went an equal quantity, held so perhaps by the impetus of his name, which thereby singled out this son to be the recipient of his own hopes and dreams. With Marsden, enough of his natural bent remained to make an honorable showing. And the girls that followed, Rhoda and Adelaide, were babies of such charm and irresistible persuasion that they received a share of quite esthetic love in place of the now low-running father’s instinct. With Thomas had come indifference; with Quincy Octavus, so named for the fifth son and the eighth child,--since Josiah nursed the belief that Quincy was a Yankee form of Quintus,--had come revolt. All of the man’s paternity was lodged in his two eldest children. And now, they lay in fever. All of the artist in him, which once had gone to a fresh and gracious wife, centered now upon the two baby girls whose hair and gleaming eyes made them famed in Harriet. And when he thought at all of Quincy, it was as a harbinger of greater want and worry, or as an eloquent reason for keeping henceforth aloof from Sarah.

Josiah had the heart of a child--primitively brave and tender, cowardly, and subtly, progressively savage. His children’s illness daunted him. So he protected his lack-courage and his pained affection by added coldness to his wife, whom he blamed explicitly for everything except the weather, and by a really Gargantuan animosity for the infant who had been sent sucking his father’s substance in North Harriet. Either the bad turn of his affairs was responsible for Quincy, or he for them. It mattered little. The dislike was engrained. Once that, it could easily branch out with catholic perseverance to the woman that had borne him and to all miseries that might happen after.

The upshot of the scarlet-fever was that both Sylvia and Josiah junior died. And now, in this bitter respite, Sarah remembered her last-born and brought him home.

His profession of surveyor was the sole source of income to Josiah’s household. It was a steady, reasonable prop. But it made no provision for unintermittent doctor’s bills, two funerals and the wet-nursing of an eighth child. In most walks of life, it is more costly to bury a child than to support it. The family was in debt. Josiah had sold his horse and carriage; he had tried to sell an anonymous land lot near Red Bear, Wyoming, which hope of minerals had tempted him to purchase ten years before. At that time, he had been the prosperous, sanguine father of two children, the husband of a wife with an amiable figure. Stubbornness alone now kept him from letting the land lapse through failure of tax payment. He had lost hope of it. But a bitter strain in the man took pleasure in the irony of his remote, draining possession. It served him as a reminder of past projects, as a quite literally dry yet eloquent allusion to the downward grade which he fancied he had traversed by a route measured with the coming of new babies and the going of old hopes. Humor had a lodging in Josiah’s heart. And so it was that, mortgaging his cottage, he paid his tax on the Wyoming plot, all with a pinch of perverse amusement.

“We’ll save it as a burial ground for you and me, Sarah,” he remarked. And when his wife did not smile at the jest, wincing only with the gall beneath it, he was logical enough to know his pleasantry successful.

They sat in the parlor, that night of Quincy’s home-coming. The past year of Sarah’s life was stamped upon her face; or rather it seemed to have possessed it, to have wrung and tortured it into the very symbol of that past year’s spirit. The final trial had begun with the first stirrings of Quincy. Indeed, this mute yet shattering oracle within a woman’s body is often a mark of agony upon her soul. At the end, is the travail of the flesh. But often, that anguish comes almost as a balm, when the soul’s misery and the mind’s labor have made her faint, to revive in the pain of birth a quickened mother from what was an almost lifeless woman, numbed with her foreboding. Such was the case with Sarah. While Nature worked in her, she had loathed her function. The long shadow of labor held her torpid, spiritless. The act of bearing flung her once more into the light, into the living. It was as if she, also, had been born. But the new throb in her breast, like that in her child, was frail and hazardous.

And then had come the fever; the bearing off of Quincy beyond sight and helping, almost beyond thought; the double loss; the sudden loom once more into reality of this infant whom a cloud of fate had shut off from the mother’s vision.

There, upstairs, he slept--isolated still. And Sarah, her elbows on the table, gazed wonderingly across to the brooding figure of her husband. The lamp-light reached out despairingly against the shadowed gloom. Its yellow fingers touched scantly on Josiah’s face. Sarah followed it. The folds of flesh were heavy and moist. The eyes were lost in their lids. It was a sorrowful face. The lamp-light was of no avail save to display it. And then,--the strangeness of her thought shocked Sarah: how should lamp-light affect a heart? what was light? what was anything? why was the dark uncomfortable, after all? Her mind groped upward toward her baby. But she could not find him. When her mind went groping, always it stumbled down upon Sylvia and Josiah junior. She would think of the living; there came the dead. Why was this? Why did thinking of the two who were buried seem like the warm glow of the lamp, and thought of her last born appear like a vague depth lost in a shadow? It should have been reversed--this figure. Yet so it was. And Sarah did not care for shadows.

A half knitted garment was in Sarah’s hands. Listlessly she let it fall in her lap.

In the table drawer were letters from Sylvia and “Jo”--scrawls to her from the mountains, where last summer her husband had taken them, while she remained in Harriet with the other children--and Quincy under her heart. She took the letters, held them long and read them swiftly, again and again, as if each time, in her too cursory way (the product of inner conflict), she had lost a phrase....

The sweater for upstairs must be done, however.

III

In the room of Sarah and Josiah stood two beds, in place of the one. It was to that one they had come, when they were married. Sarah was eighteen then, ten years the younger of the two. Josiah had begun by thriving in his affairs. He had taken on flesh in token of his natural love of living; he had taken on bitterness in token of Sarah’s rôle. So at least, it seemed to Sarah. She was thirty-three, and already she had outlived her husband.

At times, with this thought, a flood of anger came as she looked at the two prim, sneering beds that marked her punishment. For punishment it was--humiliating, permanent. But more often than anger and more lasting, came the sense of failure, the taste of ashes in her mouth, the waste of desert before her eyes. But Sarah had taken on no flesh. And she was not clever enough to take on bitterness.

With March had come a revival of winter, and of misfortune. The country had been frozen ruggedly. Marsden, the eldest now of the Burt children, had been playing Indian. He had scuffled to the low roof of the porch, where lay a thin, insidious scale of ice. He had slipped and fallen. Once more, the Mother was flung helpless, mindless, into the shadows. Marsden had been brought back from the Hospital in Brooklyn. His life was saved. It was to be the life of a cripple.

This afternoon in the late spring, Sarah stood alone in the room, before the oval mirror of her bureau. She was examining herself.

Marsden lay muffled up on the porch. Quincy was asleep in the room that had been Marsden’s. The two windows facing forward to the street were open; but Sarah had thrown-to the shutters. The cries of the other children came up from the lawn--joyous, sharp, petulant variations on the theme of youth. Sarah could hear them well, and love them. A portion of her senses was forever fixed on them, interpreting their moods, primed to detect a signal of distress or danger as they romped on, and to rush down in help. Since the accident to Marsden, even in sleep she was a half-cocked trigger of anxieties, a wrack of nerves singing with strain.

But this was spring. And Sarah was only thirty-three. However her mind might bend to the deep business of her children, the eyes that looked at her from the mirror were not so much a mother’s as a woman’s.

She had come up to change her waist. She lingered, undressed, trying to understand. For Sarah knew that the reason given by Josiah was a pretext. There was but one truth, though there were a thousand reasons. That truth was--coldness. To Josiah, Sarah was no longer a woman to be loved.

So, with the spring sun splintering through the shutters, Sarah looked at herself and tried to understand. The room was in shadow. It appeared cramped and painful with its low ceiling and its dash of red flowers on the wall, its heavy draperies, and its unhappy beds. The bureau was between the shuttered windows. And where stood Sarah, a sun’s ray fell on her breast, one lighted a spray from her dull mass of hair, another shot aslant her arm, pointing its poverty of curve, its pathos of angle and declivity where the flesh fell in and the bone ridged out. Yes:--she looked old enough. And yet, all that had once been lovable was still somehow there.

In Sarah was the contradiction of a woman given over to a conscious, self-fashioned life, in whom once had reigned the unconscious and wild fervors of girlhood. Her mouth was long, sensitive at its points, although the lips had flattened and grown less tender. There was a responsive fire in her eyes although some chill had curtailed it, even as the smoulder of her lips seemed dying out. Her expression--the gentle gradation of all her face together--had weathered best. Here was warmth, even strength. But as Sarah’s examining gaze fell, it found worse fortune. Her throat had lost its tightness; its vague bagginess beneath the chin was grey against the sun on her breast. And here too was failure. Her bosom was no longer fresh, elastic. It bespoke weariness. It lacked the quality that had always made her charming in Dutch neck. So Sarah covered it quickly with her waist, ere a too poignant recognition of her defeat here bore in upon her. For here, wishing could not defeat her eyes. Her efforts might cast a glamor on her face making her see afresh what once was there; but the drab dullness of her body was beyond the scope of her illusion.

It was all obvious: the stiff angle of her brown petticoat, the long rigidity of her back, the narrowness above her waist, the dry impoverishment of her shoulders, the fleshless nape of her neck, the unlit mass of her hair. And yet, a glimpse of her eyes as they went out, half suppliant, half proud, to prove her worth, destroyed this obviousness. For beneath the blur of sadness in which their glance was bathed, there was a power of spirit, pregnant of miracles, if only the man she loved had cared to call them forth. But after all, it was inexorably true--the acknowledgment beat against what she chose to see:--dismissed from the fair office to which she had been originally called, thrown back upon a maze of service without the gift which had transfigured it, she was still really young! In the tremor of her mouth, the frightened passion of her eyes, flashed somehow forth a vision as of one being buried alive.

Rapidly, now, Sarah completed her dressing. With a care strange to her, she tidied her hair, making a ribbon serve as fillet for it. And then, she threw open the shutters. The golden light swept in upon her face. Two heavy lines within each cheek, a furrow hinting on the forehead came out, as her mood faded before the day’s more real brilliancy. So Sarah tore off the ribbon. With a last effort, she returned to her hair. With her brush, she tried to bring back to it a show of wave and of resiliency. But her touch was heavy; and the opaque mass failed to respond. The woman who can feel no decoration in her hair is miserable. For here, in most women, lurks the aura of their desire to please. The sense of beauty there lifts the plain woman above a too stifling consciousness. The sense of failure, there, will weigh on the fairest woman like a pall. Sarah’s next move was the gesture of a housewife, stubbornly resolved not to become a dowd. Sighing, she smoothed out her skirt over her hips. And then, she went to look after Quincy.

As she entered the little room which had been Marsden’s, a flood of vague longing swept over her. She caught up the infant and strained him against her breast. Seated on his cot, she swayed widely to and fro, her child’s body warm upon her own. There was a bitter satisfaction in her embrace. With it, she had almost forgotten Quincy. He was, for the nonce, a mere luscious symbol of her dreary untempered life. He was to be hugged, to be felt, to be experienced.

She was holding him too tight. And he began to cry. In an instant, Sarah recalled the fact of her son. She held him now, carefully, tenderly. And the child’s crying ceased. She looked down upon his rosy, wrinkled face. She kissed his eyes--bright blue they were. She drew delight in cradling his dimpled fists in her own outdrawn hands. And then, she began to speak to him.

“Excuse me, dearest,” she said, “excuse me for everything. Excuse me, not only for having squeezed you so hard, but also for having given you birth.”

As she was silent, she wept. A deep sense of pain seemed to envelop them together. And in that sense, they became almost one, again.

“Quincy, my baby,--forgive me,” she whispered. She placed her wet face against his and held it there, waiting for his response. And so she remained--swayed in her uncharted feelings--agony and a sweet joy of life. And the strange conflict that swayed her rocked her child to sleep.

She placed him back between his covers and closed the door gently behind her. The spring in her heart was hurting her. She knew not what to do, where to go, in order to dispel this subtle restlessness. The children below were content without her. It was almost time to be cooking supper. But she felt nauseous at the prompting. In her own house, in her own hall, she stood, hesitant, palpitant, unnerved and ill-at-ease. What was come over her? She sought refuge, back in her room. She flung herself face down, upon her bed--as a girl might, and as no woman should need to. And there she lay, not thinking, scarcely feeling, luxuriously adrift in an element that was both hot and cold. But this could not last. She must start supper going; she must put Thomas and Adelaide to bed. She did.

* * * * *

Sarah went to her husband in the parlor. He sat at the table, roughly fingering a batch of papers. Business had gone better this spring. But it had failed to pace the stride of outlay. The drain of the Brooklyn Hospital had sunk Josiah deeper than ever into debt. And he was brooding. No word of kindness or of fellowship came from him, those days. The seeming purpose of fate to meet him and the rise in his affairs with always another blow appealed to the man’s instinct for irony. It was to him as if he were playing a game, playing it well, yet destined to go down before stacked cards. Everything seemed to point to an invidious combination. The very fact of his increasing business, with the gall it added, seemed proof to him that an Intelligence was at work against him. His strokes of fortune made him suffer, since they did no good. His wife’s serene behavior made him suffer, since his emotions balked at acknowledging or rewarding it. The fact of his power always to stem a tide, always to go on barely, made him suffer, since it prevented what in his mood had seemed a luxury--the final breaking-up, the sureness of an End.

As Sarah came in and took a rocker across the table, he lifted his head from his papers, glanced at her impatiently, and then plunged back into his scrutiny. And his behavior also made him suffer. For he craved to regain warmth for his wife; in hurting her he hurt himself with concomitant misgivings. He struggled hard against the new, indomitable habit of his heart, to couple Sarah with Quincy, and him with all the misery and sorrow that his coming had seemed to unleash upon them. But it was in vain. He could not battle against his growing nausea for all that was nearest to him. His mind might dilate with keenness upon the tribulations of Sarah, upon her strong humility, upon the puerile unfairness of his attitude. He could not mend that part of him which ruled him. He could not reach it, with all his reason. Always, this part within him flung him back upon the loss of his two favorite children, upon the accident to Marsden, upon the link between these misfortunes and his wife. And with his heart so turned, he could not divorce the association,--could not but regard Sarah with insuperable reproach.

Sarah was darning stockings. And when Josiah broke the silence her hands knocked nervously together. For she had been inured to his silence as the more bearable of evils. She gulped. Then she mastered her curious fright, set aside her work and looked up.

“Sarah,” her husband began, “I’ve found a way of gettin’ rid of the Wyoming land. And though it’s robbery and a loss, I’m goin’ to take it.”

“But Josiah--”

“The Shinone Land Company of Billings, Montana, offers me two thousand dollars. The fact that they offer me anything at all makes me suspicious. But even a dollar of tax--well, I can’t feel I have a right to. So there’s an end of _that_ fond story.”

He threw the letter over into her lap.

Sarah took it. But she did not read it. She was dwelling on his tone and on the breaking that it seemed to cover. She knew for what this land was symbol, in Josiah’s mind. She had no hope of it. But she feared to have its going added to the long list of other things now gone. As a property, it might be a worthless drain. As an idea, it still meant much to him. Her spirit faltered at the thought of this last mark of his enthusiastic youth erased by the present. Turning to look at him, Sarah was seconded in her conviction. Josiah was resting his head in his two hands, elbows upon the table. And his gaze went past her--far beyond. It seemed to be following the swift passage of a hope. This investment had not been the dearest portion of his hopes. Josiah was no materialist. Simply, it was the last. And now it was going--vanishing--to join the other ghosts.

Sarah rose and came to his side. She placed her hands on his two shoulders.

“Josiah,” she said.

The man gazed on.

“Josiah!”

“Well?”

It was not easy to talk to a man’s shoulders, particularly since she loved his face. But Sarah mustered courage.

“I have a feeling about that property, Josiah. Let’s hold on to it. For good luck, dear.”

“I can’t afford to.”

“But, Josiah--listen. You seem to have forgotten. That money of mine. It ain’t much. And it’s true--we was always going to let it lie, collecting interest for the children. But it’s not enough to count, that way. And it will pay that tax, for some time to come. Let’s take a chance, Josiah. Let’s be daring--and--and take a chance. Let’s hold on to the land.”

She stopped, because somehow--despite the trifling subject--there were too many tears.

Her husband jumped up and faced her. “I’ve got no hold on your money,” he said sharply.

“Josiah!”

He felt the pain expressed in her reproach. The knowledge of it made him uncomfortable. He saw that the one decent thing which he could do was to accept.

“All right, Sarah,” he spoke stiffly,--“if you’re fool enough to want it,” and left the room.

IV

Quincy lies on his back. He is at the age when one feels most completely, and yet when one’s world is most completely logical. Soon, his first birthday will be celebrated and the campaign of dwarfing his emotions, battering down the one sufficient Rationale of life that he will ever have, will be on foot. Innumerable projections from an indigestible world will come to trouble him. But now, everything that he absorbs, he absorbs literally. All of it becomes the stuff of himself, as surely as the milk he sucks. In his own world, he is omniscient and omnipresent.

None the less, he lies sprawling on his back. He is alone in the room. He is crying. His mother enters.

By now, he can distinguish her. The first state of his life is already buried; the woman that first gave him milk is a mere quality that he has transferred into this other woman. So, they are one in his sense and in his heart. For the most active portion of Quincy’s mind is still the portion that forgets. Each new event brings its deposit of sensation, departs, and leaves no trace. He is still All. And no thing is sensed by him except in its deposit. The wealth of sensation mounts. The causes flash up, die out. But his mother is a comforting exception. Somehow, she has a being of her own, constant, separate from what she does for him. She is Quincy’s first lesson in objectivity. And so, he places out his little hands to grasp her. For the idea of Self is still unshakable within him. And in what follows, it is forever proven to be right....

His hands go up. And his hands receive. He is lifted from his cradle. He is pressed full and hard against this Quantity--his mother. It is all his doing, since his little hands went up. A feeling of infinite rightness floods him, crinkling his body. He gives up all his being to this sense, as he lies there embraced. A compact of fellowship and intercourse is signed in the imprint of his fingers upon her breast, her hair, her curiously protruding nose and eyes and mouth. He is wafted back upon a past which his mind militantly denies. All life begins with just this surging backward--synchronous with all life’s struggle, the command to wrench desire forward. But in his mother’s arms, the struggle dies and the primordial impulse swells to the full. Quincy is unabashed by this joy that holds him, when his mother holds him, making him warm and needless; making him happy to revert to a complete dark dependence. For Quincy has no morality. He has only logic. He is in the hand of love. And he is willing.

His world broadens vastly. His power to embrace his world soon meets its limit. It seems, then, that his world has shrunk. The cruel process of unfolding is incessant with its burden of surprises. All of life, then, assumes surprise as its tonal color. All of life becomes a swelling forth from self into new shadows. These harden to a part of substance. And the act begins afresh. New shadows. New crystallizings. New flooding-forth. Yet, through it all resounds still a chord of harmony,--himself. But already, the chord is minor. Already, Quincy grows aware of a bewildering congeries of other things. He still persists throughout, but in a note that lessens. And this is why the minor chord is sorrowful.

* * * * *

Gradually, then, life was resolving itself in its full force to Quincy. He knew need and space and limitation. He was to know hostility and hate. In his world, came from time to time a massive creature with a face that stayed very far away. Generally, this occurred before a flood of darkness. At first the sense aroused was one of immateriality. This person was of no consequence. He loomed up, noised about, and then the gentle time stole over the great world. But Quincy learned ere long, now he was growing wise, that matters are not always what they seem. It was a great blow to Quincy. From his father, indeed, the infant came to feel a new quality of apartness. If his mother’s independence had been established, it was still always within the bounds of a strong empire--that empire, himself. Beyond this, her separateness had no impulse to break. But with his father it was different. He was not only apart in his movements and effects; he seemed connected by no bond whatever to the dominion that was Quincy! Indeed, his being, thrust ever within Quincy’s world, seemed an affair entirely fortuitous.

Here was a great, new truth to knead into his heart. His father came; his father _was_; and yet no even tenuous chord connected them. From this amazing seed of recognition sprang many varied, new impressions. And it was not long ere infantile wisdom had sensed the truth.

There was a reason for his father’s being there, with his rough distant body, and his cold eyes, and his voluminous voice. All else in the world was a note in his own harmony, a weave of his own texture. His father alone--like him--lived with no deeper source. And between them, needed by them both, claimed by them both, was this delicious creature of sweet embrace and warm bestowal! There lay the kernel of all bitterness. For Quincy felt with the fibre of his being, that his mother was not completely, not exclusively his own. She served another.

Quincy rolled in the heavy lull that broods before a tempest. He could not grope unassisted across the floor of his world, but the daze of his blue eyes, the clench of his fists betokened already a sense of failure, a sense of loss. The vista-sneer of fatality and disillusion was already smiting its message upon his brow. For could one mistake the things that happened when his father came in upon them? At once, his mother’s touch lost its magic; her face in some way grew clouded. With tense arms she would hurt him; with tense arms lay him away.

Fully and splendidly, he came to hate his father. Every nerve of his body melted in fire-fretted agony when he was there. And in reaction, he strained more piteously toward his mother.

And so was fashioned above Quincy’s world, a universe.

To the bland, simple scheme of self, there now succeeded a period of conflict in which life and pain were grown more close together. The child careered mutely, sullenly, through an intricate design of needs and denials. His soul was become a field of warring colors and discordant forms. The passion rose to a fine _crescendo_. It was therefore destined to subside.

Rather than this, however, it was suddenly to disappear. The lifting of the fever pall was in no way gradual. The new calm flung upon him with the placid lilt of a swift bird, sailing downward on wide wings. His first world had been simply himself. On this had followed a universe of struggle and dumb passion. Now, there was born a vision in which Nature and society took smiling order. What had preceded was whirled off, leaving no trace save in the unlabelled deposits of thought and feeling that had foregathered upon Quincy, like heaps of the world’s scattered contents in huddled disarray after the passage of a cyclone.

* * * * *

Quincy forgot to hate his father. He forgot to love his mother with any intense personal desire, save when she was there, or some concrete demand of help--a fall or a fright--drove him back into the cosmos he had left.

Things beyond his father had the color of fear and struggle. Things beyond his mother possessed the qualities of joy. When his mind was centered, his father still could serve as symbol for life’s obstructions; his mother, of life’s happy possibilities. But Quincy was too concerned in the glad discovery of a far-flung world, in the adventuring forth upon its surprises and delights. He had in balance little energy for intensive feeling. His passions subsided--spread forth into a maze of sentiment. Where had been hate was now a mere sense of objection; where had been love remained a sense of comfort and attachment. His soul was unfolding itself among objective fields. The clash of pent-in conflict had died away.

His brothers and sisters now stepped within his world.

There was Adelaide, for instance, just three years older than himself. (By this time Thomas, the seventh child, had gone with some mute regret and very little comment.) Adelaide was an admirable person to lead in adventure. She was courageous and passing wise. Upon one occasion, she had eaten grass to Quincy’s ecstasy. Her teeth and lips had turned a convincing green. And if she could steal a cookie with hardihood, she was not above sharing it with mercy. Her two blond braids, moreover, had a delightful way of tossing when one desired to catch hold of them and her cheeks were good to delve one’s nose in. The pair held the butterflies in equal fellowship. The great trees filled them both with the same wonder. And since, by the new dispensation, they slept side by side in two separate little cots, they exchanged secrets and dreams, giggles and deep sympathies for life’s sudden flares of sorrow, with mutual satisfaction.

Rhoda, who was quite tall and had black hair, was a formidable creature. Her little sister hated her, called her a “pig.” So Quincy joined in the compact of hostility. And since it comprehended chiefly the making of faces, the harassing of Rhoda’s dolls, the acquisition, separate from her, of pennies and cookies and the hoarding, to Rhoda’s green chagrin, of visionary secrets and a very real toad, Quincy enjoyed this passion hugely.

Farther aloof in the hierarchy stood Jonas, and dimly beyond, the ominous, still figure of Marsden. Marsden was unable to play and could not even hobble without a crutch. He was, hence, despicable,--to be clandestinely made fun of. But he was by no means to be pitied. He might perhaps have elicited this feeling, had he not been so powerful, and had not mother and father so tiringly harped upon the need of it. Deep in the weave of Quincy’s life was this order of his parents to respect Marsden, to do his bidding, to look out for him. And in addition, there were his sharp, piercing eyes, the ugly curl of his thin lips, the hautain raise of his brow and, worst of all, his utter contempt and disregard for everything of Quincy’s. Against these elements, no natural affections could have prevailed. So Marsden was disliked, envied and as far as possible avoided.

Matters were different with Jonas. Approach to him was also difficult, as with Marsden or Rhoda. The distinction lay in the fact that it was a desirable, almost a dreamed-of thing. And in the active aloofness of this young, boisterous god, through the logic of his affection, Quincy read not a fault, but an added splendor. Jonas was apart, in his six more years. But he was justly, fitly so, in Quincy’s mind. And the fond hope was born in him that perhaps, some time, if only Jonas did not increase too rapidly and he could accelerate _his_ rate, he might catch up, and a roseate fellowship be brought about.

Meantime, however, there was Adelaide, in whose seniority he felt a gentle guidance toward the elusive source of pleasure and away from the forever lurking shadow of misfortune. But this alliance was short-lived. Nor was this entirely without fault in Quincy. Doubtless, a moving factor in Adelaide’s defection was the longing she nursed to be of the company of Rhoda. Herein, her state was like that of Quincy toward his brother. But whereas the boy had felt a justice, fashioned almost a glory in his brother’s pointed superiority, Adelaide had resented this in Rhoda. Having resented it, she turned to Quincy, with, however, a tinge of spite upon her feeling. And when, at length, Rhoda opened the way toward comradeship, her real desire to join her ranks, to exercise her smouldering sex-patriotism, was bound to show.

The nature of Quincy, however, made all this easier for Adelaide. These were perhaps the blandest years, the most harmonious, of his life. But even here there was within him a source of conflict, a rift, destined to debar him from gracious or facile living. Adelaide found him slow to follow up a game or play into which, with the best impulse, he had entered. Always, there lay in him the instinct to retire, to grow cool, to wander off lack-spirited before her own climax of enthusiasm. Suddenly, she would find that his mood was changed, that he was spiritually alone and aloof, while they pursued together the sequence of some sport. And, once thus removed from their common-ground of interest, there was no retrieving him. He would sit a-dream on the grass, cold before the sand pile which their mutual eagerness was to have transformed into a castle. If one addressed him then, he would not hear. If one tried to shake him from his reverie, he would scratch and bite and scream.

This was all Adelaide knew. But behind his failure, even as a child, to sustain his interest, it mattered little in what end, there lurked a serious cause. Quincy lacked soul-endurance. The part of him that should have fired his acts seemed scant of fuel. And from this want had come a timidness of purpose, a tendency to veer and flutter and give way. Not only in the face of opposition was this true, but in the effort of accomplishment, in the very fact of nearing what he had desired. The imminence of approach to that toward which he had set out with heart a-gleam, served to slacken his pace and to disaffect his will.

Adelaide had suffered from this, in their serious business of play. Quincy’s own suffering, here as forever after, was to be indissolubly set in the suffering he helped to cause in others.

And at the time of this first instance, with its result of a tragic disaffection, he was not yet eight.

V

There was but a short interim between the alliance with Adelaide and the beginning of the reign of Jonas.

These were dull days of autumn. And during them, Quincy was put to school. This new event, however, appeared to involve him slightly. It taxed a surface of his attention. Its influence was neither encompassing nor deep. For Quincy was the kind of child who always precedes, in that he is an individual, the class in which his years cause him arbitrarily to be placed. With such, the average drone-exercise of school is an ugly filler of what might elsewhere have been golden hours. But if the business of reading and addition meant little to him, the new will of Jonas to acknowledge him as vassal meant relatively much.

Prior to his eighth birthday came a shift in the house. Rhoda and Adelaide were brought together into one room--it had been their request. Quincy was ousted from his bed--he regarded it as a promotion; and his room was given over to the crippled Marsden who was old and crabbed even for his hoary seventeen years. Jonas was removed from his spacious quarters to a wide, transformed attic under the eaves where the ceiling sloped and an air of solitude pervaded. A cot was placed beside his wooden bed for Quincy. The room left vacant on the second floor was made ready to receive a lodger; for the Burt finances were, as ever, ragged. It was written that no lodger should come. But there, at least, stood the empty room, in token of the family’s scrupulous intentions.

In this sharing of a room, apart from the ruck of life, with his life’s ideal, began an era in Quincy’s progress. The lad rejoiced in its marked position, under the roof. He rejoiced in the extra flight of stairs to be pattered up to reach it. He rejoiced in the singularity of the ceiling, in the lack of a conventional wall-paper,--the room was roughly wainscoted in pine, and plastered. But most of all, he rejoiced in the symbolism of his little white cot alongside the majestic bed. And so, since his happiness required precisely the meed of haughty tolerance, the stressed superiority of Jonas,--Quincy was happy.

Jonas was fourteen. In coloring and contour, he derived from his father. He was blond of hair and his eyes were brown. Already, an incipient fleshliness was there. His head was small--dull and indelicate in its square mass; his nose was short and thick and his mouth was heavy. He was an ordinary boy. But he was playful, arrogant, world-wise and fourteen. So, for the present, he suited the demands of the slight, dark, wiry child who was his brother.

Quincy lay wide-eyed in his cot, waiting for his brother, with rapt expectancy.

Since it was winter, he had retired after dark. His mother had taken him upstairs, while Jonas and the others remained below for their later supper.

“Well, dear,--I hope you won’t mind your new room.”

As she struck a match and lit the lamp, Quincy felt her presence as a rather hazardous protection from the dark which he had mind enough, now, to fear. He clung to her skirts. This was a great event--this first night with Jonas. But like all such, it was fraught with peril, touched with the dizziness of enterprise. Below, in the old room, were less thrills, less promise; but also there was less fright, less mystery. The child forgot the exalted meaning of this new phase--a room with Jonas. He saw the scared gleam of the lamp against the shadows. He saw the loom of the great bed, marked off in what seemed an infinitude of space, an infinitude of ground for visions. And almost, his heart misgave him and he regretted the smug past with Adelaide when there had been steadfast company in the vast gloom of night.

“Come,” his mother put him off tenderly, “you aren’t afraid, are you?”

And so, a-tremble, he was put to bed. His mother moved about him in a glow of certainty, half merged in the uncertain darkness. And then came the last rite, before the lamp and mother went out together--the prayer.

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s great!” came the answer.

“I like mother,” said Quincy.

“Do you, molly-boy?”

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, lad--what’s new?”

And a gay parley would take place between them.

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

“I guess not,” says Marsden.

“Please!”

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

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

“Well, I can’t stop you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you hear what your mother said?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“O Dad,” he cried, “I _am_ glad!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Europe!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She stopped.

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

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

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

VII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIII

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

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

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

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

Rhoda and Adelaide seemed to emerge from a trance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You bet,” said Jonas.

“No--I mean _we_--”

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

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

So Quincy was alone.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s happened, Jonas?”

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

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

“Oh, if you only knew!”

“Tell me.”

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

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

The child leaped around. “Jonas!”

“Next week. To Exeter.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is this?”

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

Josiah looked long, saying nothing. And then:

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

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

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

Never had there been so deep a silence. With outstretched body, it was to Quincy as if he had been swept beyond the bed. He seemed afloat, astride two worlds, strangely apart from the one in which he had been incontinently dropped. And then a thought of what had happened--a whispered thought like a dim memory--brushed him back into the actual living. With his face hot in fever, his mind seething in visions that burst out and vanished ere they had been caught, all of his life came to him in a clear, ghostly light. He saw the household, below stairs, joyously seated at the gleaming table, eating good things. He felt hungry. He wished to go out and steal some food. He wished to crash through the floor and fall, dead and mangled, upon that board of mocking plenty. But through it all, he managed still to smile.

And then, he looked up. His mother had come in, holding a tray.

“You were very naughty, Quincy,” she said in a voice that went up and down, “but I have brought you some dinner.”

Quincy was still smiling. He reached out his arm for a pillow and flung it at his mother. It fell short, doing no harm. Sarah placed the tray precipitately on a chair and rushed to the bed.

“Darling, darling!” she cried, “why are you like this? Tell mother, won’t you? What is it? Why? Why?”

She kissed his face. She pressed his hands. She clamped his ears so that they hurt deliciously. And Quincy lay silent, happy; his smile lost at last in the sweet tears.

Then, something came over his mother. She stopped.

“I must go now,” she said hurriedly. “Father was angry even at this. He said for Bridget to bring it up. He’ll be mad, dearest, if I stay.”

She leaned over and kissed her son, once more. He lay now, stiffly again and sternly. Then the door closed behind her.

For some time Quincy remained upon the bed. His face was a screen to a bitter battle. Bitterness had the victory. He jumped up and uncovered the dishes on the tray. Roast-beef soaking in gravy, peas and sweet-potatoes, apple-sauce and angel cake. Calmly and slowly he took a dish, moved to the low casement window, opened it, and threw out the contents. And in this gesture he continued, going back and forth, eyes bright with fever, mouth parted with passion,--until all of the food he craved had disappeared into the grey, deep night.

* * * * *

So Jonas went away to school, and the agony of this period in Quincy’s life set in--the end of the Reign of Jonas.

For the most part, it was the feeling of a void; to fill it, the creating of a fancied Jonas. And this, being in its essence art, Quincy discovered to be painful. In his relations with his school-mates, with his sisters, with Marsden, he missed him most. And the Jonas whom he regretted was a bland, kind brother, not reasoned-out but clear through the pleasing memory that he inspired. In brief, Quincy was longing for a brother he himself had invented. And to this creation went little fact beyond the name of Jonas. If this new brother’s face was one with the old, at least his expression was so different as to transfigure it. If his voice was one, the words he spoke had varied even that. Besides, Quincy was happy with his creation. Had Jonas never returned, never shown his real face, his real spirit, doubtless Quincy would have prospered with his auspicious figment. And though life had turmoiled him in a dozen other ways, he would still have clung close to his dream, derived from it sustenance and so hewn out an indomitable faith. For no actual occurrence could have attained to splinter it. Jonas alone was so empowered.

Quincy had troubled his mother enough to know on what day Jonas was coming for his Christmas holidays. At first, knowledge of the day had sufficed. He had aimed his existence at that day. It had seemed a small enough target. But when the day came, Quincy realized his error. He learned of the vague, broad desert that a day can be. He felt the irony of implacable dimension when one’s heart strains toward a pin-point. He awoke in the morning with a bound of fear. What if Jonas was already there! He lay in bed and listened. No stirring. It was not too late. For Jonas always made a noise. And then, as a sense of gratitude came over him, it was dispelled at once by a succeeding sickish thought. His vacation did not begin until the morrow. He would, then, have to spend the morning--half of the day--out of sight and beyond watch. During that time, Jonas might walk in! The idea froze him. He thought of playing sick--just so sick as to be able to remain at home. He did not care even if it did mean doctoring him. His fervor laughed at castor-oil. Once more, a glow of satisfaction, such as one feels after a great invention. But this also, was short-lived. The mournful countenance of duty had thrust in at the door. The school, that morning, was giving a Christmas Exercise. He had his rôle in the festivities. There was to be a masque of the nations, assembled to wish America a happy new year. In this great ceremony, Quincy was to take the part of Mexico. Leggins, sombrero, tasseled vest and practice in rolling out “carramba” had gone toward the occasion. He could not shirk this austere duty. The vision of staying luxuriously at home, of waiting in the warm house for Jonas, had disappeared.

And so, since he must run risks, he faced them. He jumped out of bed although it was a full hour before breakfast. He dressed and went downstairs. Perhaps Jonas might come in early--and he be there, alone, to greet him! He was disappointed. And then his mother appeared.

“You down so early?” she asked, looking for something wrong.

“Mama, when does Jonas come?”

“Today.” She went toward the pantry to signal the cook.

“Yes, Mama. But _when_ to-day?”

Sarah looked at her little son as he stood there, all serious and expectant.

“I don’t know. Don’t bother me. By suppertime, I guess,” and she went out.

Breakfast went fast, since the threat of school was at its termination. And then, he and Adelaide were shuttled off in the brand-new limousine.

Before he had gauged the event, he was on his feet. The thought of Jonas had lurked in a strategic corner of his consciousness. And it had gathered to it the energy which might have gone to stage-fright.

Before him lay countless amorphous rows of children, with stern sprinklings of teachers. He began. It was as if his voice went on of itself--uncontrolled, aloof from him, so that he heard it from afar. He had studied his rôle too well. It left no fear of his forgetting it. And in the relief, back stole the thought of Jonas, the possible catastrophe if he returned, while Quincy stood there droning out his duty. If his duty was to be done, at least it could be gone through quickly. The words flowed. He hurried them, as if pursuing from behind. It was a way of getting back. And then, suddenly, his words stopped. He realized that there were no others. He sat down.

He received little praise for his performance. His teacher, a stout, florid creature, came up to him showing her teeth, as she did always when she was irritated. She found fault with his rendition. But what bothered Quincy was the thought that his hurrying had not brought nearer his return. It had been useless.

He did not hate the woman only because of his indifference. About him was a bustle of holiday excitement. Children laughed and ran about. Teachers relaxed and Quincy noticed that when they became smirkingly human they were still more disagreeable than when they had been teachers. It was as if they had taken off their clothes. Greetings of “Merry Christmas” interspersed the general murmur of voices and light feet. It was all like a great, dim wave on the edge of Quincy’s consciousness.

At last, however, the wave broke; the voices scattered; the eddies lessened. And then, Quincy came home.

Jonas was not there. So he ate his lunch, tossed between gladness at not having missed him and hollow perturbation at the deep-shadowed future. For in this state, the coming home of Jonas was Quincy’s future.

His mother had said to Rhoda:

“Dear, if you have nothing to do, will you take the children for a short walk in the Park?”

Rhoda had consented. The remainder of the meal was torture to Quincy. But out of his new anguish was born a device. For he was resolved not to go out, that afternoon.

As soon as the company had gotten up from the table, Quincy went bravely up to Rhoda who stood alone in a corner. Rhoda was seventeen--a remote, resplendent creature. She was dark and tall and very cold and very occupied in her own mysterious affairs. Quincy looked up at her with admiration, but with distance. He felt that she was beautiful. He felt that he would not have minded had she kissed him--which she never did; that he would have been glad, had she noticed him--which occurred scarce more often. Now, however, he was inspired. So he went up to her unhesitant, reached for her wrists, clasped them, and spoke.

“Sister.”

“Well?”

“Please, sister--make Mama not make you take me out, to-day.”

“What’s wrong?” She looked down, interested.

“Please, sister--I want to be here when Jonas is coming.”

He looked up piteously. And Rhoda laughed.

“All right. I don’t care, I’m sure. I’ll see to it.”

So Quincy went up to his room. He did not take out his toy engine or his soldiers. He knew he should not be able to do his vacation homework. For some strange reason, he was prompted to look at Hercules and Venus. But mostly, he waited. Waiting was by now the atmosphere he lived in. His mood had grown so wide, he scarcely noticed it, for want of something to contrast it with. His strain toward Jonas had grown so intense, he scarce saw him, felt him, thought of him any longer. His subconscious mind seemed to be the active one. So he merely waited, doing few external things, aware of few external qualities. And among those that went were time and Jonas. All that remained was the abstract waiting for him.

And then, a noise below. For a moment, it meant nothing. Then it flashed on him palpably that Jonas had arrived! He rushed to the door. He was downstairs. Jonas was before him.

“Brother!” he cried, aching to be caught up.

Jonas looked down at the intrusion.

“Oh, hello, Kid. How are you?” He had outgrown kissing. He threw his coat on a chair, lounged into another, lighted a cigarette and then went on: “Say, Ma--I’m hungry.”

* * * * *

If there was a shred of hope left, it went that evening.

The scene took place directly after supper. It took place before Quincy. And, most horrible of all, Quincy was its cause. Jonas objected to sharing a room during his vacation with a twelve year old child. That was the crux. He explained amply what he meant. He had had a different sort of a room-mate at school. He was sorry now, that he had not accepted his invitation to go with him to Chicago. He’d not have been placed in the nursery, _there_. When fellows came home from “work” at Christmas, their families were expected to be a little considerate of them. Some had their breakfasts served in bed. He didn’t demand that. He wasn’t selfish. But there were certain indignities one had to draw the line at! He was not proposing to spend his vacation by going to bed with the chickens--or the babies. He expected to have “late dates” every night; “late sleeps” every morning. He did not wish to be disturbed. He was used to smoking in his bedroom, before sleep, before arising. This also, was a habit dear to his manhood. But, most important of all arguments, he simply _would not have it_! If the Kid stayed where he was, he, Jonas, would wire to his chum and take the sleeper to Chicago. Just watch and see if he didn’t! Didn’t he have cash enough in his pocket?

All this, Quincy heard, sitting quiet and alone in a corner, while his hero paced the floor, using his name, ignoring his presence, soiling his soul. And now, Rhoda chimed in, agreeing. And now they all agreed!

The broad sofa in the parental room was to be improvised at once into a bed. This would do for Quincy, during the vacation.

The servant was summoned, the deadly order given. Jonas called out a general “good-bye” that somehow did not include his brother in the corner, since he had not turned in that direction. He left the house to meet a friend, downtown.

IX

Two days Quincy had been going about with a soiled handkerchief. At last his mother noticed it, lost patience and sent him upstairs for a fresh one. Quincy grit his teeth and went. But the philosophy behind that handkerchief no one in the family was near to reckoning.

The truth was, he avoided his old room. Throughout the holidays, he stepped within it as little as was possible. And there his handkerchiefs were kept. Had he been wise, once there, he would have taken more than a day’s supplies. But Quincy did not have that manner of shrewdness. And even if he had, it would have been a costly risk to hide his linen in the room below. So, at times, a hurried visit was inevitable. In the old days, he had spent long hours there. And still, he might have, since Jonas generally was gone with lunch, not to return until vague hours after. But the charm and the glow of the room were dead. Enough of it remained to have turned into a sneer and mockery. For this room had been an altar to Quincy’s faith. In it, he had performed his services; here he had dwelt as a priest, in the abode of his faith. And he had been driven out and all of the temple had been sullied. And now, there was no god at all. So that the room served merely as a cold record of present miseries and lost illusions.

Meantime, for two weeks, he slept in a broad couch placed at the foot of his parents’ beds. And here was a steadfast torture not to be avoided like the room above. A dilemma confronted Quincy. He was, for some reason, uneasy about lapsing into unconsciousness ere his parents came to retire; and yet, to be awake when they came in was a miserable trial. So between the two uncomfortable states, the child built up a fever of resentments. Although he could not so have worded it, his was a feeling more than all else of humiliation, of shame at this promiscuous arrangement. He went to bed with a weighing smart on his soul, like the mark of a blow that one can not avenge. And then, with gloomy prospect, he drew the covers high over his face and lay there, staring out, gripping his blanket, stiff with a sense of deep discomfort. And all manner of wild, ugly thoughts raced through his half somnolent mind--thoughts of vindication against Jonas, against his sisters, against his parents; lurid sweeps of chastisement in which there was neither mercy nor discrimination. Fairly, his blood boiled with his resentment at this cavalier disposal of him and the malignant token--his lying there!--of how well Fortune could distort his hopes. And then, generally, his body would prevail and he would fall asleep.

But with such rivalry, sleep could not be firm. Too much passion and reflection, thrown up by his unconscious self like the lava of a volcano, flooded the black slopes of Quincy’s night. And in his sleep came hectic, vivid dreams--dreams in which a burst of repressed wishes stormed to realization. Nor were the wishes good or gentle or composed....

In the midst of some fantasy, painting his sleep, Quincy slides across the faint border into consciousness. There are his parents. A light sears through his closed eyes. He will keep them closed, though it meant never to be able again to open them. For solely by feigning sleep can he be sure his mother and father will not address him. And the idea of that is unbearable. How can he speak to these two tyrants about whom his thoughts contain so many guilty reservations? He lies still, strained, listening for all the little noises that will upset him, waiting for the light to go and rest to come. His parents never make mention of his name. They talk sparingly, and then of things that he does not understand. But every sound they make seems to him a monstrous thing. They are trying to be quiet. But of what avail, when the drop of a shoe on the floor twinges through him like a dart? when the creak of a bed plays on his nerves as on a jangled harp? when the repressed sound of their voices, whispering, becomes a source of suffering worse through the very quality of stillness and of effort?

And with the morning, the shame of getting up when they do; the grim refusal (though the price be their completer feeling of his “badness”) in such naked intimacy to share their life, as if he shared as well their cruelty and their dull perceptions. The agonized last minutes waiting under covers, though the dregs of sleep be turned into a bitter wide-awake, until they are dressed. And then, to spring up with a sick relief, to rush into clothes and go!... Above all, with the morning, the consciousness of the next night.

* * * * *

So came the New Year, while the City revelled. And then, at last this holiday of suffering was over. Jonas was gone. Quincy returned to his room. And it had no positive reaction upon him. Simply, he was glad that certain things were gone. Passively, he accepted the present. He entered upon a period of calm, of seeming apathy. But this welcome state was destined to prove meretricious. Quincy had not really attained serenity or resignation, after his turbulent experience. His soul, rebuffed and bruised, was not yet content to retire within itself and glut its own demands. There was a long road, ere this, for Quincy. For the present, unconsciously of course, he delighted in his breathing space and with great readiness forgot the past with its poignant measure of prophetic warning. But, in truth, his soul was merely crouching ere it leaped out once more. It had not been discouraged. Within it, was too much vitality for that. It was lying low, only to attempt a higher flight, once a new object had been scented.

When Quincy was thirteen, he discovered Rhoda.

Jonas was still away--at college. Rhoda had done with school and the idea of college for a girl was not part of the mental outfit which the Burt family had brought along from Harriet, Long Island. Adelaide approached sixteen. Her educational trials were not yet over. Marsden was now literally a man. A certain surface of his mind had grown hard and polished, so that he was clever and ingenious; able to make bearable the largely mental life to which his body had condemned him. The depths of his mind had died, so that he was bitter in spirit, visionless, and well nigh content. He derived the same satisfaction from his dominion in the household that a normal man might glean from his part in a community. He drew joy from his ability to judge aloof; he created a sort of life from the business of poising the lives of others.

Some time, he had been watching Quincy. But the period of their talks was not yet ripe. For the present, he was a cold, hard, cynical obstruction upon Quincy’s path--a creature that could sear and wither with a word, an intimate that exploited his foreknowledge with the evil unconcern of an outsider. Quincy hated him, feared him. For he was powerful beyond his parents when it became his listless fancy to ordain. And his mother loved him with a warmth that was thrice cursed, since it withdrew a part of her from Quincy, since it served as a common interest to veer her toward his father and since in the last fact, the love she did bestow upon him seemed somehow tainted and imperfect. Marsden had not yet been _created_ in Quincy’s life. He stood there as a bitter, impersonal condition--an element, a natural detail. In this way, a pagan peasant might regard a mountain that stood north above his land--the womb of storms, the treasury of frosts, a thing under no circumstance to be explored.

Marsden’s time would come. But now, the child’s senses opened miraculously wide to Rhoda. With Rhoda, a new Adelaide was as well created. But in the counterpoint played by these sisters upon Quincy, the elder had the upper hand.

It was the common mistake of most people to call Rhoda the prettier of the two. Such are the triumphs of an aggressive spirit. For although the younger girl was essentially the finer girl, her subdued nature shone forth badly beside the obvious brilliance of her sister. Rhoda was tall and dark; Adelaide was short and blonde. Rhoda’s eyes were large, brown, pent-up always with whatever mood possessed her. Adelaide’s eyes were small and their blue was unobtrusive; their spirit was diffident; their suggestion of an Oriental tilt seemed somehow to conceal itself. They were set deep and soft, seclusively almost. And the angle of their position with the faint thickness of their lids, the short fringe of golden lash above them (a sign of delicacy for who understood), served with most persons as an excuse for not noticing her at all. Rhoda’s eyes, on the other hand, squarely, unimaginatively set, came forward to command. At eighteen, it was obvious to her mother that she was to be what she herself termed a “belle.”

To Quincy, Rhoda became now, by degrees, a dominant and estimable figure. The evolution of this from early hatred and mistrust, through the period of apathy when Jonas had foregathered his affections, was of course not a conscious one. But gradually, Rhoda entered his dreams, later his thoughts--came in some way to merge with them and to be welcome there. The sporadic walks which she took in Central Park with Adelaide and him grew to be hours of anticipation. During them, this tall glamorous creature that lived so near seemed to relax from her haughty state and to be willing to consort with him.

Upon one occasion, he had chanced to see her as she was dressing. Rhoda had seemed unconcerned enough at this momentous incident. She had crossed her hands quickly upon her breasts, cried: “Go away!”--and been otherwise unmoved. In the shock of his amazement and swift retreat, he had seen little. Yet that little remained long, branded within the texture of his mind. He had not forgotten the event,--although he had no idea of what, exactly, he remembered.

For his thirteenth birthday, Quincy received a bicycle. With the spring, he determined to learn to ride it. And Rhoda volunteered to teach him. They went to Central Park, to the circular abandoned road-way where once, ere Quincy’s memory, had stood a statue of Bolivar and which later great quantities of stone and sand turned into a manner of Park dump. With the strangely sweet presence of Rhoda beside him, he had learned rapidly. And having learned, he found that he had learned too rapidly, since now this presence would be no longer there, beside him, as he pedalled. Having stooped from her cold estate in the excitement of teaching her brother how to ride, Rhoda lost no time in clambering back again. And so, Quincy found a new want in his heart.

In his own way, he began to pay court to Rhoda. He was fully aware that he had rivals. Rhoda went to parties on many evenings. And on many others, she remained alone in the parlor with some caller whom Quincy never saw. A great curiosity came over him to see these men who were his rivals. Once, he slipped downstairs at the time when he was supposed to go up to bed, and hid in the portières. He knew that a caller was coming. But he became frightened and ran away even before the bell had rung. It was decidedly too dangerous an experiment. Quincy knew that his discovery in such flagrant badness before his sister’s caller would reflect on her. It would plunge them together into shame. Had not his mother told him that when he was bad, she always lost a bit of her prestige before her God? He did not wish that kind of sharing, with his sister. So he never stole downstairs again, to hide, when he had been sent to bed.

Quincy’s way of courting Rhoda gave little promise of his subsequent success with women. Quincy did not understand his sister. It did not occur to him to psychologize beforehand the effect which his efforts would be likely to attain. It did not occur to him to find what she most wished by studying her nature, to suppress what was conflicting in himself and to feign what was harmonious. Gallantry is a sense in men capable of being tutored into art. At thirteen, it was already patent that Quincy’s sense of hearing did not promise the musician, nor his sense of sight the artist--nor his sense of pleasing, the diplomat or gallant. He was an ordinary boy. The most that one had ever said about him was that he was bright at school.

Now, when Quincy received a piece of chocolate or a box of soldiers or a flower, he was very happy. Also, in his new state, he needed--though he ignored the reason--to make Rhoda happy. His way was that of a miserable logic. When he received a cake of chocolate, in lieu of devouring it as his lust urged, a greater love restrained him. He saved it. And when, in the late afternoon, Rhoda came home from a tea, he rushed up to her, held out his offering before her, and said: “Here!”

In his accent, Quincy put neither a suggestion of his sacrifice nor a hint of the motive behind his gift. So perhaps Rhoda must be excused. She looked at the chocolate:

“I don’t want it.” The fact was that she had eaten too much pastry at the tea.

Quincy withdrew his offering and ate it, that night, before retiring.

On another occasion, it was a daisy that his mother gave him. It was the evening of the great dance to which Rhoda was going and for which preparations were on foot with the early afternoon. Now Quincy had learned much of the mundane way. And one of the things he knew was that when his sister went to a dance, she always wanted flowers.

So he took his daisy and held it up to her.

“Will you wear this to-night?” he asked proudly.

Rhoda laughed. “Here,” she said, “--wear it yourself,--” and pinned it upon his blouse.

Quincy left it there. But he felt the condescension in her retort. Had he seen the bower of roses that one of the callers brought with him, after he had gone to bed, he might have understood. But also, he might not have gained much solace from his added wisdom, since roses were so pathetically far beyond his reach.

And so, time and again, Quincy’s assiduous courtship failed, not only of impression but of notice. Gradually, Quincy began to realize that his desire to be an entity in Rhoda’s life was for some reason quite as monstrous and preposterous as had been his kindred wish with Jonas. His mute attempts to share in the lives of those whom he was so apt to love, his efforts to inspire them to share in his, seemed, for some cause, to partake of the nature of a jest--of an extravagance.

Once more, his vital energies swirled and stormed and veered within him, hopeless of goal or outlet. His affection for his sister had at best been vague. Quincy had no conception of the deep ties and firm hold which a response in her would have called forth. He had no idea of the undirected force which this thwarting had thrown wildly back upon himself. All that he knew, was that life, somehow, hurt; and that his mother was indubitably right when she called him “bad” and constantly “growing worse.”

And meantime, near Rhoda, in whose cold, perverse, spoiled beauty his ironic instinct had caused him to seek a haven, there was another sister, yearning for his companionship.

But Adelaide’s eyes were diffident, and her way was quiet. Quincy knew about her only that she was in Rhoda’s graces, and therefore to be tacitly envied and resented.

X

With Quincy’s fifteenth year came a flare of recognition. But it was brief. By it, he saw his sister, Jonas, his parents, as they were. But the light had no fuel to subsist on. His untutored, indomitable needs flushed forth and drowned the momentary blaze of disillusion. And once again he was unable to see the futility of wishing and of striving in these barred directions. Wherefore, despite his sense of the sequel, the story of Rhoda, and Adelaide, and his mother was scarce begun.

For a long time it had hurt the boy to be forced witness to Marsden’s pampering and his sister’s demonstrations. It had hurt him to see the pointed, exclusive _camaraderie_ between Jonas and his father, to feel the apologetic pitying note in his mother’s love for him. But during this long time, all these proofs of his want had not made him bitter. Gradually, he had poised and judged the value of these things he lacked. But his first impulse had not been to cry out, not to turn inward in dismay. A natural sense of justice is born in most of us. It is a part of our natal logic. One of our greatest blows comes from the late experience that that sense which we have transferred from our own heart to the heart of the world really does not obtain there. So with Quincy. Viewing these favors that were showered upon others, that seemed so strangely always to escape himself, his impulse was to believe the others right, to fix the fault within himself. Much of the impulse that had driven him toward Jonas and toward Rhoda was the desire to gain these things he lacked--or thought he lacked; was his wish to qualify within the circle where favors were dispensed. He had accepted that the fault was his. He had made his mute endeavor to correct it.

Now, however, came the grey, shivering spectre of defeat. And then, for the first time, Quincy was disposed to spare himself and to blame those who denied him what they seemed so lavishly able to give elsewhere.

* * * * *

This was the year of Quincy’s warfare--a scant _guerilla_. And its result? Consider the pre-conceptions of those within the house, and it must be clear that they seized on this new hard Quincy to justify the feelings they had already nurtured for the old. Their attitude, their lack of sympathy, by dint of an incessant effort through the years, had brought about this show of sullen animosity within him. So now they quoted this show of animosity as cause of their longstanding attitude and lack of sympathy. It is a common habit of mankind--an infinitely common.

It had its unhindered fling with Quincy. His family were not loth of the chance he offered them to justify their feelings. And it was to be a long time ere the effect of that short year would leave them, however poignant in reality and more true to type were the years that followed or preceded.

His father’s old resentments flared. Finding Quincy unresponsive, silent, disagreeable, he turned to Sarah and asked what, after all, _her_ child was likely to be good for. Rhoda came to feel in him a deep, glowing animosity that showed in the curl of his lips when she appeared in a ball gown, or in his refusal to look and join the chorus of admiration, when she received a present or a compliment. She tossed her head and decided that Quincy was an ugly little fellow with no respect for beauty or superiority--a little fellow whom she must in consequence ignore. Jonas discovered that when he wished to tell his brother some loathsome, funny story, Quincy declined to be dazzled or bewildered or amused. He learned to dislike heartily the cold aloofness with which, during that year, Quincy received his visits from college and rebuffed his chance efforts at attention. So Jonas also resolved to ignore his brother. It did not occur to him that he had already killed the boy’s love of fellowship with him; it did not occur to Rhoda that he needed protection from the anguish which her ways had brought to his rapt admiration. To the family, it was plain that a discordant element was within it. And that was all.

Sarah did not understand. She was almost won over by the very prevalence of the opinion that Quincy’s manner was a natural weed and the sole cause of his own tribulation. But although she was not mind-proof to this insidious crowd-psychology, her heart had power against it; and it bled at the breach which, at last, she had been brought to see. However she might feel called on to remonstrate with him, she was intuitively on Quincy’s side.

Of course, in the very fact of her remonstrance, she defeated the good her sympathy might have done. Quincy wished for no pity. He demanded full understanding. Her way was not whole-hearted enough; was too finite; was too eloquent of the influence of the “other side.” Deprived of most, Quincy had become more exacting than ever. Feeling his mother’s sense of his own fault, a tendency in her to see a shred of right against him, he rejected her. And this he did cruelly, coldly,--without explanation; so that the bewildered Sarah wrung her hands and ate out her heart. In the boy’s breast smouldered not agony alone; but with it a need of vindication. The family were so far from him that he knew well the futility of reaching them. Even his resentment, he was aware, could not attain them. And so it was that not only his instinct for affection had been starved; even his sense of injury, since it was unblazoned, had been injured also.

Here, Quincy’s mother was an opportunity of Nature. In her lack of a splendid giving, she was inadequate. At least, she offered a chance for him to retrieve his sense of injury. She was near enough to be hurt. So a sad satisfaction came of injuring his mother, who alone would receive his injury. The boy was cruel, cold to her. He knew it. He could not help it. But the knowledge that he was making miserable the one whom he loved most, brought Quincy’s cup to overflowing.

Sarah took his attacks in disarray. She did not understand them. And Quincy raged that she did not understand. He yearned for her help against himself. He received merely tears and lamentations which, far from softening him, gave satisfaction to the appetite which had called them forth.

Had he been able to cry: “Mother, mother! Don’t you understand? It is because I am near to you whom I love that I can hurt you. It is because I am far away from those who hurt me, that I cannot hurt them. My ugly passions are not meant for you. Understand them. Then, they will cease. Come unreservedly, my mother. Come, and take me!”--had he been able to cry out thus, his problem would have been less vexed. But he was only a child.

Or had Sarah been able to say to him: “Darling, I understand your cruelty to me. It has no effect. I love you. There is nothing else!”--she would have found a truer Quincy, tearful but happy against her breast. But Sarah had other loves. And Sarah had little understanding.

And so, the year swerved on, miraculously void of light, shot through with pities. And Quincy grew less friendly, less boyish, almost less alive. He was become almost an inhabitant of the house, rather than a member of the household. Of course, only a severe observer could have caught this truth. For in a child of fourteen the difference is a _nuance_. And if its subtle tragedy were open to the casual observer, man would be more horrified at the thing’s prevalence.

Quincy sought solitude. But he found no real comfort in his loneliness. Simply, he had reached a stage in his life’s struggle, where he did not care for comfort. He felt that there was merely a choice of pains. He had lost the sheer idealism that admits of a pure happiness. And of the choice of pains that he envisaged, he preferred the rarefied, controllable sort that solitude fermented to the sharp improvisations of other people. So he remained alone as long as possible. He nursed and refined his misery. He grew used to it. He came almost to cherish it.

He had simply transferred upon his family the rôle that they had seemed intent on giving him. Though he had combatted consciousness of it through the years of his naïve endeavors, they had forced him to see himself as an intruder. Instinctively, he reversed the order. He made of himself a world, and a society. And they who came upon him were the intruders! He had gone out with love and been refused. Here, in his world-reversal, was his mother’s part. She came to him with love. She was rejected.

The machinery of his mood worked now despite himself. Though he longed for tenderness, he could not be tender; though he longed for his mother, he could not be gently passive for her advance. Something within him that was wounded turned his tenderness to spite; his inarticulate love into an expressed rebuff. The old way he had tried--of giving in the faith that he would receive, of going forward in the faith that he would be taken up. The sprouting sunward was turned in. The perfume was crushed. The tendrils were thorns.

Yet what a flimsy farce was this new, lonely world of Quincy! Its very nature was the proof of his enduring need still to go forth, to love, to harmonize with others. The pith of every condition is a ground common with its opposite.

* * * * *

Thus came the summer.

His mother’s strict surveillance over him was lifted. He was getting old, now! He was allowed to go alone on walks. And summer meant country. So far, however much he loved the wide fresh sky and the sense of cheer that country meant, it had served rather to sharpen the boy’s moods than to assuage them. For he had been hindered from meeting it alone. The tantalizing charm within the fields and woods which, left to himself, he must have grasped, evaded him, surrounded as he was by the ties of home. And these ties were strict. Had Quincy been chief in the affections of his parents, his mother could not have been more nervous, more loth to set him free. Freedom had not come as recompense for solitude.

But now, at last, one day, when the mood seized him to stroll, he was not prevented. He followed the road out of the village. And then, as if a long restraint on a long hunger had suddenly been lifted, he dashed into the thick woods.

At first, his strongest sense was one of fright, of discomfort, almost of embarrassment. His soul did not know what to do. His mind was conscious, dominantly, that he had not expected this reaction of _malaise_. What had his mind expected? Whence had it been prompted to expect anything? What could be rational in a sense of disappointment, sprung from nothing?

Vaguely, Quincy came to feel that he had set hopes upon the woods, that he had built upon these murmurous companions, fondly, unconsciously, a hope of solace and of haven. What a strange feeling it was, as he trudged on, over the uneven path of rock and root, to know that this deep heart of Nature with its accent of green had dwelt, unknown, within his own heart and there persevered, a bulwark of promise against the blast of his reality! Yet, poignantly, was this true. A great urge in the lad’s soul had swept back from life in the city to the rural setting that preceded it. Man will have his happiness, though he distort childhood, fabricate history, to attain it. The usual happy conception, in man’s mind, of childhood is an example. Quincy, miserable with the present, had been forced back in his search of that mystic Eden which each man and each race must cherish, to make of it a goal and pattern for the future. And in his innocent regression, what could he fix on better than this fringe of his life, vague and therefore easily idealized? He could not fix, for this purpose, on any member of his family. They were still with him; they had already fought--as if with all their powers--against this zealous effort. The one great distinction between the unhappy present and the past that he willed to serve as contrast, was this same gentle, all-pervasive thing--the woods, the meadows. Here was an element which had disappeared with his fictitious happiness.

Yet, doubtless, a something deeper than these reasonings gave Nature her deep place in Quincy’s heart; doubtless, the sole fact of herself, of her still depths and her mystic penetrations, of her transcendent eloquence and her calm, stately love. No child could live within the murmur of her breath, within the perfume of her energies, and utterly escape her. For the swaying of trees is a blessing; and the wind in their laced branches is a prayer; and the stirring of life packed with myriad simpleness throughout the reaches of the wood is an unforgettable music. And to sleep where the air comes brushing, be it only from the dryest grass or the lowest shrub, is to have slept in an embrace that neither mortal love nor hatred can abolish.

And now, Quincy was walking in the woods, dazed and abashed, as might be a man in sudden presence before the woman of his forgotten dreams. He felt nothing deeply. He and the woods seemed very separate. And curiously, of them the woods seemed the more personal and alive. He took in, with his undiscerning eyes, the intricate recurrence of design, the sumptuous harmony of sky and ground and forest, the minor notes, as of universe in universe, traced by moss and vine and flower within the sweeping whole. But, though he strove to feel his measure in this whole, a sense of nervous fear prevented him. He walked on, against his instinct to turn back and keep the road. Something within him seemed to know that it took time to grow used to one’s divinity. And even so, as he marched on, he came to unlimber. A lump within him thawed and he was bathed in a glow that had still a tang of frost. But, yet, his mind had never been so vacant.

And then, a new thing happened.

It was as if the trees had bent down, of a sudden, and possessed him; as if their acrid juices had been shot within him; as if their leaves were brushing upon his face like amorous fingers. The woods were a vibrant, sinuous form against his body, pressing it to a sweet numbness like a mother’s breast. Quincy’s blood tingled. A madness gripped him, mounted him, spurred him into flight. He ran. There was nothing else. The woods were in him. And they were an ecstasy. So, sustaining it, he ran.

And then, breathless, capless, he stopped. All of it seemed not over-strange. He knew it would be useless to seek his cap. Besides, he did not care. He turned instinctively toward where he thought the road must lie. He rejoined it. And then, he made for home. Half way, he grew conscious of a slight pain in his left foot. He looked down and was impressed to find that the shoe was torn and that blood lay thick-matted with the dust upon the stocking that showed through. Immediately, he was aware that the pain had been with him long; that it stung frightfully. He began straightway to limp. And as the pain grew stronger, the charm that had made his visitation in the woods seem natural and calm, wore gradually out. He looked back, now, with wonder upon his frenzied running. What had happened? how long and why had he done as he had done? But at best, amazement was feeble. He accepted the corybantic mystery. It filled him now with a strange satiety. Even the foot that made him limp did not deter his startling consciousness of being happy. And the cottagers he passed, who gazed at this strange apparition of the Burt boy, hatless, dishevelled, limping, failed to arouse him from his reverie. In this manner, he reached his home.

Adelaide was knitting on the porch, alone. She looked up and saw her brother, dirty, torn, wounded--lost in a glamor of recollection which she at first mistook for the daze after an accident. She threw her work aside, rushed down to him, and though he was nearly as tall as she, carried him bodily to the porch.

“Why, Quincy!” she exclaimed, “what has happened?”

The lad was still too far away for an answer. But Adelaide had seen the wound. In a flash, she had brought water and cotton. Tenderly so that it scarcely hurt, she drew off his stocking and cleaned his wound. There was considerable blood, much dirt, no depth. A sharp twig had torn a gash between the toes. Silently, she set to work, rinsing the cut and disinfecting it. While this was to be done, after all, there was no need in asking her brother questions. He was sitting quietly enough.

At last, in her task, Quincy grew aware of her, kneeling at his feet, caring for him. He watched her silently, as she worked. The pain was there, but it was dull, now, and quite unobtrusive. What a strange sweet afternoon it was! And why, a pain with it?

He looked down at his sister. And now, she glanced up at him. Their eyes met and held. With one hand upon the bandage, the other clasped about and bracing his bared leg, she paused.

“Thank you, Adelaide.” The boy spoke with an accent of maturity that may come at any age, with a real emotion.

“Don’t be silly, dear,” Adelaide replied. And then she added: “How did it happen, brother?”

“I don’t know.”

The girl smiled, actually as if she understood.

“Perhaps you were running too fast, eh?”

Quincy looked sharp.

“Did you ever run in the woods?” he asked with ill-concealed excitement.

“Yes, indeed,” she confessed.

Quincy was silent. Adelaide drew a clean stocking over the bandaged foot, and then, a hand-knitted, crimson slipper.

“See if that’s comfy, now,” she said.

“Whose slipper is that?”

“Mine. You don’t care ...?” She spoke with a strange respect.

Quincy got up and walked. “It’s all right.” And then, facing Adelaide, he stopped. Once more, he was embarrassed. He wished he had been elsewhere.

“Thank you, sister,” he said with effort.

The girl looked at him lingeringly. It was a curious, beautiful look. It came through tears--at least, so it seemed to Quincy--like the sky through thin clouds. And this made him grope vaguely back within his soul for something he had forgotten.

And then, again, came an unaccountable impulse. Adelaide had put out her arms. His impulse was to rush within them. It was as if he would cover many wounds, if he did that. He thought of this. And in the instant of thinking, doubt slipped within--doubt and the looming presence of the house, the memory of those within it, of what they were to him and of that which they had done. He must guard himself against a fresher wound--one of a sort different from this which Adelaide had bandaged. He must beware. He must consider the tribe of Adelaide, with her seeming love and her eyes that feigned a plea. He must remember the impossibility of this which appeared to be before him--the impossibility of love, of understanding; the reality of disillusion. He must cut through this day-dream....

There was a cloud of resolution. With it, the boy’s face hardened. He turned about and limped upstairs--like a wounded wild thing, afraid with returned vigor, of the good Samaritan that had succored it.

And Adelaide sank back to her chair. She forgot to remove the signs of Quincy’s accident. She forgot to knit. She remembered her father and Rhoda. And then, her breast rose stertorously, and she began to sob. For what she had felt, she understood.

* * * * *

The family returned early in September to New York. For Josiah and Rhoda had strong within them a country family’s lust for the City. And with the first burning of the leaves in autumn, they missed the streets and the traffic and the theatres and the hotel-lobbies. Nor was Marsden loth. He was able to move about New York, in their motor; he was able even to visit Broadway since the Burt finances made feasible the purchase of a theatre-box. But Marsden did not care really for these. He preferred New York to the country, with the first burning of the leaves in autumn, merely because he had just been in the country. By Christmas, he would welcome a visit to Atlantic City or Bermuda; by April, he would again be longing for the mountains. The Burt family never summered at the sea-shore. It was too like Long Island. And so, the big house near Central Park, where the leaves die greyly instead of burning out, was made ready. And Quincy was hurried back--so it seemed to him--to live the year’s most passionate season in the City.

All of the summer, the mark had remained of the strange encounter with Adelaide and with the woods. He had avoided the woods, he had been shy with Adelaide. Several times, they walked forth together. But the girl’s efforts to make a breach in his world had been avail-less. They had marched on, silent for the most part; helpless utterly. And Nature was very far away.

She had ached for inspiration and she had failed. She blamed herself. Adelaide was no tactician. When she forced activity on her desire, she was even less expressive than when it lay painfully quiescent within her heart.

Yet there was an issue to her inspiration, even if she was not to be the one who gained. With the fall came a new spurt of hope and confidence to Quincy. It was still Rhoda. The boy ignored, of course, that the fuel for this new hope had come from Adelaide; that his _élan_ toward Rhoda was due to Adelaide’s encouragement. He had never looked on his younger sister in a warm light. The fire with which Rhoda touched him had never ceased to burn. And it was the season of lost passions--the season of burning leaves. Adelaide saw the event with conscious eyes--its irony, its hopelessness. It was she who had yearned and who had planned; it was Rhoda who ignored and who received.

And then, of course, came the same result. Quincy made ready for a still surer, harder state of disillusion.

* * * * *

The climax of sullen naughtiness was over.

After all, his condition had been chiefly due to his own sense of weakness, to his lack of pride. There had been so little impetus to pride! It was not that he was an unremarkable boy. He was. But most such feel distinction at least within their family. The illustriousness that the world will, of course, deny them, they receive at the hand of a parent, or a sister--a little world. And this little world they coax into sufficiency so that the basic need of holding up one’s head is answered; and, often to tragic consequence, the cold outer world comes to be ignored.

This was not Quincy’s case. He had succeeded poorly in judging his family’s view of him to be a blind one. Now, however, matters changed to a degree.

Quincy was at an age to sound the springs of manhood, and to glean childish joy therefrom. Above his poverty of gifts, there arose now a sense of power and of promise that thrilled him the more for its bare setting. Quincy was to be a man--a tall, strong master endowed with all the honors of his sex! This was something to one who had been an unpetted child in a large family. And the new feeling brought revolution to his ways and views. The new element that entered in was one of confidence--potential self-assertion. It was a sickly, scarce noticeable thing. It was not strong enough to appear in its own light. But it gave to Quincy a sense of a reserve, a flair of a future. And however vague, this was a vital thing in one whose soul had been so constantly flung back upon a fancy-builded past.

A laborious task is the nurturing of pride in one who has lived long without it. Its growth is an imperceptible evolving. No member of the household--not Marsden who saw through idleness, not Adelaide who saw through love--was well aware of it in Quincy. To them, he was merely “behaving better.” His moroseness was less militant. His silence had less of a sneer and a scowl. But silence it was still. Quincy scarce knew of it himself, until the climax that with one shock bared his transfiguration. But until that climax, it seemed none the less to Quincy that life’s pain had subsided; that his surroundings were more bearable. He still felt the selfish attitude of Rhoda; his father’s stretches of ignoring him and sudden spurts of tyranny still wracked him; his mother was no less inadequate; Marsden was still the mordant sphinx. But now, a new element within him told him to abide his time--bade him grow and hope.

It was not until the spring that he learned how pervasively this new and hidden sense had fretted all of his being; how strongly it had attuned the fibres of his soul to its own message.

* * * * *

It was April and late afternoon. All of the Burt children were in the sitting room, on the second floor. Jonas was in town for the Easter holidays. And Rhoda had just returned from a visit to Savannah where, incidentally, she had become engaged. So there was a general human glow about the place.

It was a conventionally furnished room, eloquent of the overpaid house-decorator. The walls were a thick, red silk above high panellings in oak. Two sets of curtains, red-plush and cream-colored net, shut out the gleam of the low sun that fell athwart the street. The chairs were lavishly upholstered, in light green with silvered wood. In the right corner of the room was Adelaide’s piano--Rhoda did not play. The center table was covered in brocade, bronze tinged. Upon it were ornaments--sculptured book-racks in mahogany, sumptuous paper cutters, a fan of ivory lace, a leather sécrétaire embossed in gold--all of it curiously travestied with a litter of cheap magazines. Against the left wall was a sofa and on it sat Adelaide, and Jonas puffing a pipe. At his left was a great settle with collapsible back, book-rest and foot-guard--the throne of Marsden. Rhoda had drawn her chair beside him. They were looking together at a comic weekly, and munching from a box of candy conveniently between them. On the room’s other side, near the piano, was Quincy,--relaxed far back in a high arm-chair, his legs dangling.

* * * * *

Marsden and Rhoda were seriously at their jokes, enjoying the candies together. Jonas pulled at his pipe, a smirk of ruddy satisfaction on his face. Adelaide was drowsy. She had set aside her book. There was little general conversation. And yet, an atmosphere of contentment pervaded the heavy, over-furnished room.

Quincy, also, was drowsy. He had just stepped in for a magazine. An impulse that came seldom had prompted him to stay. No attention had been paid to him. So he had seated himself, half resolved to read. And now, he was contemplatively taking in the scene. The hour was between day and evening--in happier climes, the twilight. But New York has no stomach for _nuances_. With her greatness, the Metropolis has driven out the gentle hour wherein night’s mystery comes to meet the day’s assertiveness. It was already evening in the room. In the street, it was still day. The City’s life came muffled, as from another world.

Quincy’s mood made him observant. A touch of comradeship was in the motive that made him stay. He was hoping someone would talk to him. And in his wish, he studied the shadowed features of those from whom he seemed almost to be desiring a grace.

Quincy remarked how scant Marsden’s hair had become. Marsden was twenty-four. But he looked immeasurably old. Quincy observed that there was a discomforting presence in Rhoda. Her eyes were big and soft, yet what came from them was hard and--it came almost in its true terms to Quincy--mean. Her mouth had a fire about it; yet the broad lips did not suggest that the fire was contained. In looking at Rhoda, Quincy was minded of an iceberg swimming in a sea of flame. It was a fascinating thought. And he could not keep from thinking that if one were in the flame the ice would smart deliciously; whereas, if one were on the ice, the flame would be a balm. He did not understand very clearly about Rhoda. He knew that it was rather disconcerting to look long at her. He knew that her pale, dark face was beautiful. Just now, a stray gleam of the sun stood orange on her hair. And her body, tight beneath its dress of silken crêpe, seemed strangely sweet and secret. He remembered then what he had seen on that one occasion. And then, he grew ashamed.

Beside her, Marsden was almost fearfully grotesque. His forehead bulged and his hair had a streak of grey. His eyes were now dull, now glistening. And his fingers were very long and made an irritating sound as he clicked them against his chair.

Jonas was a man of a dead mystery to Quincy. His ruddy, flashing face had been fully fathomed. He was a stranger whom once Quincy had been eager to know. The eagerness had died. The rather stout mass of his body, the weak puffiness of his lips, his nasal slang and his coarse straight hair were to Quincy an impersonal assortment.

With Adelaide he felt curiously unaroused. If this girl moved him at all, it was unpleasantly. There was a cloying, humble atmosphere about her. Quincy did not care for her. Frequently, he would forget that she was in the room.

And now, it had grown too dark, even for comic pictures. Marsden and Rhoda whispered together; his raucous chuckle chimed well with the cold ring of her laughter. And the night rose above them. Quincy’s mind went leaping through it as if light were a barrier at last effaced. He was comfortable in his chair. He wondered whether, perhaps, he was not face to face with a more comfortable future. His heart went out to his brothers and sisters, so eager was he to prove his dream’s verisimilitude. One so beautiful as Rhoda could not be hard of heart; nor one so rubicund as Jonas, nor so suffering as Marsden, nor so meek as Adelaide. Oh! if they but gave him a chance--how good and kind and loving he would be! He was getting old now. He was fifteen. He could find ways to be of use. He could make his new happiness efficient. He could read to Marsden when he was tired; he could try to learn jokes to tell to Jonas; he could run errands for his sisters. He would use his body and his mind to show his gratitude, to prove his worth. Quincy went swimming through the element of his desire. The hum of the Elevated trains, the croon of the cars past the street, the rattle of a wagon merged into a varied harmony, all pliant to his gentle mood. The little fellow clasped the arm of his chair as if to hold on to this fleet state of happiness and so sustain it....

Marsden’s voice cut into him, like a knife.

“Quincy,” it said, “turn on the lights.”

The lad jumped up and complied. The cold glare of the electric beat out the gentle color of the dusk. But already, his brother’s tone had dispersed the dream which that dusk had nurtured. Quincy went back to his chair. But he was very wide-awake, now; and his thoughts were pragmatic. How he did spin nonsense to himself! A double resentment was on foot: against reality purely as such, and also as the disturber of his fancies. He looked at Marsden in the cruel light and found that he despised him. Rhoda was smugly smiling over a magazine she had now resumed. He hated her, for that. She had not felt the sting in Marsden’s order, or, if she had, it was with a feeling of approval. It required no more than this to turn the edge of Quincy’s mood. Jonas began to talk. He was boasting of a college celebration; of his friends. He alluded slyly to a girl. Rhoda, in her new magnanimous contentment, nodded her sympathy for his crass pranks. To Quincy it was as if all of his brother’s triumphs had been related to draw attention to his own social poverty. So he resented Jonas. And since even Marsden’s fastidious attention had been drawn, he blanketed in his bitter sense of exclusion all of those whom but a minute before he had been glowing to embrace. Adelaide, meantime, had actually fallen asleep. Her head was thrown back on the upholstered couch. Her lips were parted. Quincy observed how small and white her teeth were. He found her stupid.

There was a step in the hall. Josiah brushed into the room. He wore a wide-brimmed, black, slouch hat--such a hat as the owner of a Western mine, born in Long Island, is likely to deem appropriate.

“Good evening, my dears,” he said. And then, he met the sharp gaze of Rhoda.

“Can’t you remember the hat-rack, downstairs?” she reprimanded him.

Josiah swept the hat from his head, with a big, red hand. His hair was streaked with grey. But still, his face had retained freshness and vitality despite its bulk and the ponderous chin that sagged over the low collar. Josiah was fifty-eight. He winced slightly at his daughter’s just remark. And then, he espied Quincy, still ensconced in his big chair. In the boy, was an outlet for his irritation caused by the episode of the hat. To display it toward Rhoda was unthought of.

“Here,” he pointed with his hand toward Quincy, “bring my hat downstairs.” And then, having thrown out his remark, as to a lackey, he turned toward Marsden. “Well, my boy--and what sort of a day did you have?”

A general conversation sprang up. Quincy stepped up to the table where his father had flung his slouch and went on his errand. He did not mind the errand. But his father’s tone fitted too painfully well within his growing mood.

It was out of a sense of pride that he returned to the room, the hat deposited. Every instinct in his body drove him to go upstairs to his own floor,--every instinct save this new one that led him back into the overbearing presence.

As he resumed his seat, Josiah asked:

“Where’s your Ma?”

Marsden thought he knew: “She’s shopping with the machine.”

“She is not!” replied Josiah, emphatic through his own importance, rather than by virtue of the subject. “I had the car. Farrel said she’d dismissed him at four o’clock until the time to call for me.”

“Well, then I don’t know.” Marsden raised his brow to show that also he did not care.

Josiah stood pondering. “That’s funny,” he said. And once more, he espied Quincy, unobtrusively lost in his great chair.

The thought of not knowing his wife’s whereabouts distressed him; again, out of his need of knowing everything, rather than by virtue of any warm solicitude. He felt strongly ill-at-ease, there in his own room, before his children, who paid no attention to him. He had already been reprimanded by his daughter. And now, it seemed that he was generally misinformed. Sarah’s absence was of no significance. It was not late. But the smug posture of his children, seated, while he stood--first scolded, then found ignorant--heightened his sense of umbrage. It had been a close, busy day. And his head had ached. Moreover, there was Quincy, snug in his chair--on his face a look of supreme unconcern.

“Quincy,” he called out in a voice unnecessarily loud, “suppose you go down and asked Farrel where your Ma is. I think he’s waitin’.”

Quincy jumped up again. Fatally, he caught the spirit behind his father’s words and his father’s tone. Unmistakably, he knew that he was being used, that moment, as a release for his father’s mood, for his father’s aches and for his father’s uncomfortable, silly sense of humiliation. All this hurt--this seeing clear. But none the less, he moved stiffly to the door in order to comply. His legs moved laggardly. Something within him repelled this motion of obedience. It was not fair to be exploited as a release for an old man’s aches and tempers and sense of limitation! And in addition, he felt the cold eyes of the company upon him, indifferently watching him on his way, ignorant of his misery, careless of its cause. But now, he was at the door. He opened it. And then, the impulse that said “Nay!” moved something in him, something perverse, ineffectual, foolish, so that he spoke. He knew the folly of this compromise between his sense of duty and of justice. But it was too late. The words came:--

“Suppose the chauffeur doesn’t know?”

For the moment, there was a pause. Marsden, Jonas and Rhoda turned in gleeful expectation toward their glowering father. They knew the outburst such inanity must occasion. And Adelaide, who alone felt fear and pain in this lull of fever, broke into a nervous giggle which Quincy totally misunderstood.

Josiah’s face was scarlet. He had need of just this outburst for a bath of temper wherein to wash away the day’s accumulated irritations.

“Suppose the chauffeur doesn’t know, eh?” he half-sneered, half-shouted. “Then--find out!”

The door shut behind the boy....

The shower of temper had had the wished-for result. At once, Josiah was in an excellent mood. He dropped into the chair that had held Quincy, spread himself amply and began to talk--convivially, cleverly, cheerfully, as was his way when he desired to overcome an earlier impression. The others joined him, now, with truer participation. And so, half an hour sped.

Then once more, there was a step in the hall.

The door opened, and Sarah entered. She wore furs, despite the season. A bewildering creation of flowers and feathers, rimmed in black velvet, sat square upon her head. As she stepped in, Josiah jumped with unwonted speed from his comfortable place. This, in itself, was enough to cause Sarah to stand still and look.

“Adelaide,” said Josiah, without greeting his wife, “go upstairs and see if Quincy’s in his room.”

He spoke nervously, quickly, sweetly withal. Rhoda and Jonas rose, seeking his eyes, impelled also by a sudden thought. Even Marsden smiled uncomfortably.

Adelaide flew out, on her mission. And Sarah, flinging her furs aside, stepped forward, as if to ease some necessary action. The ominous, knowing concert of all these eyes brought panic to her ignorance.

“Josiah!” she began. “Where’s Quincy--? What--”

“Shut up!” cut in her husband. “Don’t get excited!”

“What have you--” Sarah’s heart had read the uncommon fear on her husband’s face.

Just then, Adelaide returned.

“Quincy’s not there,” she said in a high voice that came out above her angry breathing. Instinctively, she ranged herself beside her mother.

For a moment, Sarah stood swaying, before her husband. And then, in a burst of passion she rushed upon him.

“Oh! Oh!” she cried. “So at last you’ve done it! So at last, you’ve driven him away! You’ve driven him away!”

XI

Quincy found himself on the street. The machine stood before him. Beyond two obstructing tires and a net-work of gleaming steel sat Farrel, the chauffeur. His peaked cap was over his brow. A cigarette lay on his lips, the smoke a perpendicular thread in composition with his square-massed face. A newspaper was below his nose. Quincy stood beyond the barriers and called.

“Farrel!”

There was no response.

“Farrel!”

The man turned his head. The look in his eye was grey and filmed and sluggish like the thread of smoke. The mind was gone.

“Where’s mother, Farrel?”

“I don’t know. I left her shopping.”

Farrel rustled his pink paper ostentatiously. Then, folding it, he slapped it into a receptive shape with his bulky hand and plunged to a new page of screaming nullities. He had forgotten Quincy. He was piqued at having to remain there, he knew not how long. He wished to go home to his wife. He had learned that the Burts were very careless about discharging him at the end of a day’s long work. He was not minded to be polite to Quincy. For Quincy was a Burt, so that he resented him; yet an insignificant Burt, so that he could show it.

Quincy turned toward the house.

It was evening. A gentle, blue haze was on the street. The lights came out suddenly, in periodic spurts, as if separate from the mist that lulled about them. There was in the air a languid note, such as may follow a siege of fever. The traffic pounded heavily by, as if in token of its weary passengers. And now, Quincy looked toward the house.

What he saw there drove his hands cup-like to his head. A flash of fire shot through his mind. Then, motively, he connected his sensations. On his head was a cap. The great red door was shut. Something within Quincy had worked deliberately through his body, yet told his consciousness no word. Still it worked; still Quincy bowed to it, unknowing. His hands fell from their momentary, cup-like grasp. They clenched at his side. And then, rhythmically, he struck out in the direction of Central Park.

The electric light over Farrel’s head threw a concentrated glow of yellow on his page. A car on the Avenue crashed past, wheels groaning, bell a-jangle. Then, Quincy crossed. With huddled shoulder he mounted the sloping asphalt whose lights shot shadows of black and floods of blue against its marge of trees. A distant symphony of whistles and of fog-horns rose dimly from the Hudson over his back. Beyond him, the Park traced out its purple monotone, flecked with the cut of lights.

People were walking here. Their foot-fall was like a noise heard in a dream and doubted. Their words were like the impact of water falling on stone. Their forms were comets flashing from nowhere into nowhere through a sombre and thick infinitude. They left a wake of drab. They were innumerable. And the sum of all their wakes made almost an atmosphere. This cloyed and choked and somehow had a sneer in it. So Quincy walked fast. And as he did so, the forms blocked in upon the flow of being with less frequence, less consistency. The Park itself had become the undertone. The curving of the paths gave to his motion a tonality. The bushes lay deep in their beds of grass. Above was a lacing of trees, a shameless cover for the naked night. For so the trees seemed to Quincy. The bright sky that shone through and above them was like the hot skin of some empassioned creature--a thing consumed in sex. And the short trees and ruffled bushes that lay before it were like shreds of lace on a vast nudity. They pricked it, they heightened it; even they adorned it. They did not hide it. And somehow, it was suggested to Quincy that they meant to hide it. Quincy’s lips were parted as he walked. And there was moisture on them. Also, there was a veil of dryness on his eyes. And the sky reclined before him like a woman’s breast--like Rhoda’s. Its slope was infinitely slight, delicate yet vast. He recalled the time when he had seen his sister. So he knew! And knowing, so he enjoyed. But in this overwhelming symbol entered more than that experience of sight. This mighty, pulsing sweep of sky gave him a glow, half-memory and half-eternal. For what are instincts but unconscious recollections? So, perhaps, it was natural that of a sudden, his mother came to him, stayed there, pervaded him; and in the spreading grew so vague that his mind caught no glimpse of her.

Quincy walked, then, beneath this naked breast with its empurpled shreds of green. And his mind slept--slept perhaps in the same cadence wherein he had slept once, tight in a woman’s arms. And meantime, his feet beat on their way, even as had then his heart. And his lips were moist, taking in life.

Quincy was tired, so he sat on a bench. His fingers dug in the damp paint. He brought them before his eyes. They were stained slightly green. This was a jarring note. It disturbed him. It caused a separate vibrating. A tendril of his mind quivered, as if in warning that he was to begin to think. The motion projected by this faint jarring upon himself had to be absorbed. It had to be absorbed either in mind or body. If in the former, he would think; if in the latter, he would walk. He walked.

He was always in the Park. His veerings minimized the distance he had come. As he proceeded now, a tinge of questioning traversed him. He had been too close within himself to poise even an outline of his experience. Now he seemed somehow to fall apart from himself. This did not gain him vision; it did inspire a question. What was he about? Quincy’s eyes were no longer dry, and his mouth moist. The ecstasy of the night went before a shrinking sense of its strangeness. And now, his eyes were moist and his lips parched. He breathed heavily. He was, after all, only a boy, young for his years in those external sophistries men call experience. And so, fear filtered in with the chill. He walked fast. He was man enough to strive not to escape his situation but to escape the fright it brought him. He was animal enough not to entertain a mental quandary,--to go on, as his will drove him. He was child enough to blink up at the transformed heavens and find fault with them. This fear was a thing, after all, scarce distinguishable from the chill he felt through having failed to bring an overcoat. He knew this. And so, in speeding on, he found dual relief.

He went up a steep path. And then, on the brow of a promontory he came to a halt. He was in that section of the Park known as the Rambles--a maze of diverse traceries on uneven ground, upon one spur of which stands a Belvedere, curiously heroic viewed in the spirit of its purpose and environs.

Quincy faced south. A tuft of cool wind filled his eyes. This was a balm. Below him fell a rock-buttressed gulch, filled with the night. From a rustic bridge that spanned it, softly separate from the air, he could see a black opening in purple haze--a cavern. Water dripped luridly on the rock. The coarse, trim shrubs behind him seemed the flourish of a filigree mocking the romantic mood before him. From the south came a cold glow, the upshot of myriad downtown lights swelling like an aureole above the sunken Park. And beneath this, against the mass of trees, gleamed the City’s fires, fitful and fantastic, some set in rigid form, some straggled, some leading deep, some flaming forth.

The boy found a bench. Now he faced west. Manhattan’s murmur came on him. A shiver seemed to rise from the far-spun houses. Here was more regularity--a frigid diapason of lights, serried, unfriendly, looming. And spaced upon it, deep cuts of black, the gloomy westward streets--one of which was his! Quincy cupped his chin in his hands and gazed. A tiny thread of train swept between two darknesses on far Columbus Avenue.

And then the hollow tread of feet below him on the walk. Quincy straightened up. There was a musical note in their pad. They were leisurely. There was a long mounting of suspense. At last, over the brow, was a man.

He was tall and thin. A derby hat that seemed too small for him disclosed a height of forehead. He walked on, his head turned westward. He had but glimpsed the figure on the bench. And as he spoke now, he did not face the boy.

“A splendid night!” The man’s remark, for some reason, had a ring far deeper than the banal usage of his words.

“New York’s at her best, when she’s bathed in a blue gloom. Ever notice that?--Blue’s her color.”

He stopped, still gazing, his back full on Quincy.

The night seemed, for a moment, hushed. It was as if, before this subtle audience, it wished to show its best. The mists gyred before the battlements of light. And the Park breathed deeply. Quincy wished to get up and leave. Somehow, he failed. And an impression of his discomfort must have struck his anonymous companion. The man turned. Then, he stepped forward.

“Why,” he exclaimed, “you’re only a lad!” He came closer. “Tall, though, for your age.”

Quincy clasped the bench with his two hands. The man stood before him, calmly observant.

“What’s wrong?” he said. His voice was cool but interested. It had in it the poise of a physician who is concerned yet unharassed. Quincy could not speak.

“Have you run away?” the man went on. And then, he began to laugh--quietly, to himself, as if in retrospect upon some joke. “Good for you,” he continued. “Good for you.... Tell me, can’t stand your father?”

“That’s not so!” Quincy choked out, indignant yet ignoring exactly why.

“Oh, I see! Father can’t stand you.”

The boy had craned forward. This stroke thrust him back, almost huddled on his bench. And the man thought he had guessed true.

“I ran away once,” he began, musingly aloof.

There was a pause while he thought. And then, as if for the first time, he seemed to espy the boy. He stepped still farther forward and grasped his shoulder with a wiry hand. Of a sudden, he was serious and intense. And he uttered his words as a man speaks an order in a quick emergency.

“Good for you,” he said. “Good for you, to have come away! And now--no weakening! No getting sentimental! Ah--I see it. Don’t start thinking about mother--about how mother’ll carry on. Every man for himself. Mothers keep you for themselves. Give you a penny-worth of love for the privilege of sucking your soul. Keep you, but don’t sustain you. Keep you, but don’t protect you. I know. Tears--that’s their weapon. A coward’s--as you’d know in any one save a mother. You must be sixteen. Am I right?”

“Fifteen--” Quincy was awed into response.

“Good! Now, heart of steel; thin lips curled slightly downward--that’s armor to hold you tight. I went back. I thought that was more heroic, harder, nobler. Well, perhaps it was. Also, it was damn-foolishness!”

He stopped and released Quincy’s shoulder. And again, in a flash, his mood transformed.

“Good-bye, sonny,” he said, once more aloof and without trace of the intensity which had cut sharp his former words. “I guess I’ll go below. The stars may be visible through the mist from the cave’s mouth.” He turned into the path.

“Blue’s certainly her color--Don’t think of family!” he mused aloud, as he went down.

* * * * *

Quincy sat, dazed for a while. And then, quite as if the power to do so had not before been utterly away, he glided rapid and easy into thinking. Consciousness of where he was--that whose myriad colors had obsessed him--now went entirely. He had been whirled in a maelstrom of sensation. Now, he flew along a track of thought. So at least, however wrong, it appeared to Quincy.

For a while longer he sat. And then, he got up and walked.

He had turned in the direction of his house. Already, he was gone a considerable distance ere he learned this. He stopped. He did not change his route. He merely stood stock still, while his future should be born within him. This also, was how it appeared to Quincy.

He was near a lamp-post. The path he had descended fell abruptly upon a wider walk that sloped down from it at a right angle, A rustic railing ran along it. Great clusters of rhododendron filled the sides. Opposite, on the wider walk, was a sheer rock, ensconced in shrubbery, crowned with a tree. Beside this, was the lamp. And here stood Quincy. A policeman, rounding his beat from above, caught sight of him. He also stopped.

He saw a boy, already tall, fixed and intent--but upon what, he could not discover. The boy stood as if charmed, his face full toward the lamp. The officer took in his long, dark face over which the tweed cap lay low. He felt the delicate, firm fibre of his body, disclosed through his tight sack suit. The boy’s arms were held straight at his sides. He was faintly swaying in his balance.

Curiosity is a duty if one happen to wear an official uniform. So the officer drew nearer. He saw now that the boy was slightly shivering and that his eyes were intent upon no thing other than the lamp itself! His face was brought out clearly in the sheet of light. The man gleaned the impression of a tender, nervous, high-wrought mood, such as Park-suicides were supposed to have. Clearly, here was a case to be investigated.

Marching up close, he spoke: “A bit chilly, young feller?”

Quincy looked sharply. In his eyes were irritation and alarm. Then, turning his back on the patrolman, he started down the hill.

“Hold on!” cried the Law.

Quincy stopped without turning back. This required of the policeman to catch up to him. Abreast, they faced each other.

“What you doin’ here?” he demanded. The boy’s demeanor had dispersed the sympathy which his good clothes aroused.

“What I’m doing?” Quincy got the question by repeating it. “I’m walking, of course.”

“Is that what you call standin’ in front of a lamp-post fer half an hour, starin’ like a madman?”

Quincy straightened perceptibly. And then, an angry look came into his eyes.

“Look here,” he said, “you leave me alone!”

He marched down the walk. And the policeman mounted back to the height of the hill. For once, Law had been chastened and the individual not crushed, in their perpetual encounter.

* * * * *

What the man in the Rambles had not done, this last completed.

The boy walked now, sturdily, though slowly, toward the Park gate by which he had flung in. An acute observer might have remarked, as he walked on, a curious asymmetry between the force that he seemed to be requiring as he went and the little speed that he attained. A portion of the boy’s energies appeared to load his heels and to impede him. The full swing of his legs was evidently not impressed upon the business of walking. The jerky, heavy gait that he maintained, despite his efforts, proved a divorce of purpose. Quincy’s upper body, his head, his arms were in the rhythm of a steady stride. His legs, somehow, were recalcitrant. And in consequence of this, the boy moved slowly, veered perceptibly in a way that to a tyro might have seemed the signal of intoxication.

Doubtless, the strange sermon of the man in the Rambles had let loose the flow of argument that surged in Quincy. And the rational conclusion to which his thinking brought him was all of a harmony with that strange sermon. Yet, Quincy was going home!

Indeed, in this seeming contradiction, lay the crux of his experience. Quincy was sounding, vividly, the paltriness of logic, the bland imperviousness to it, of truth. His mind swirled in and out of the channels of his resentment, his miseries, his hopes. His mind measured, of course, in flood or ebb, exactly with these channels which it could not escape. And yet, though their course lay outward, he was going home! Before, while he thought his mind submerged and gone, he had yet acted by it. His going forth had been a mental sally though his mind slept. His going-home was an irrepressible emotion, though his mind clamored against it. What a strange paradox for fifteen years to glimpse, though the way of sight was only a pervasive sense of helpless pain, an almost cosmic irritation. Quincy walked on. And his thoughts surged against his walking. And gradually, as he walked, he grappled with his thoughts, grimly determined to deflect them, to turn them back, in stride with his own steps. All of his power went into this battle. His mind must be convinced, won over! He, long since, and ere he had so much as guessed it, had been won over. But even now, Quincy did not know. While he strove to force his intellect into compliance, he believed himself merely in process of thinking out his problem. The struggle to bend his mind to the way of his soul came to him merely as the mechanics of deliberation. Long ago, Quincy was decided. There remained, now, only to propitiate his mind. And this paltry afterlude assumed within him the dimensions of the whole. He would perhaps have called it “making up his mind.” He did not dream that this was an act of kindly reconciliation--the winning over of an un-needed minority in whose dissent lay, at the worst, a source of irritation.

But mind holds the channels of our consciousness--controls the self’s publicity. And from this not inconsiderable power, it has built up a prestige for itself. It delays the announcement of any state until it has been approached; and then, it so gives out the news that its consent seems necessary, not for the mere announcement through its channels, but for the state itself. And so, the mind’s acknowledgment--often a hard-wrung effort to make it face a long accomplished fact--seems a protagonist where it is naught but a chorus, commissioned to explain and to chime in.

The real decision, then, impelling Quincy homeward, was not an affair of words or of deliberation. It had been born in that deep land of him that is never heard save through its far remote ambassadors. It had been born of that will which does not argue, which makes its indomitable revelation and then subsides, while its deed runs subtly through innumerable channels to the outer lands. Here then, takes place the clash of denial and of argument. Within, there is the serenity of fate. But if Quincy’s recognition was to come only within the shadow of his goal, it was none the less acute for the delay. However wrong was his belief that, in this struggle of deliberation which held him now, lay the finality of what he was to do, by means of it he at least came to understand.

As he walked, he thought of life as it would be, if he did not return. At once, he had the picture of it, uncensored by the least knowledge of reality. He saw himself living in a miraculous family, a group of persons who would respect him, leave him alone, and welcome with attentive eagerness his least advance. Of course, out of his graciousness, he did advance, at times. This family knew his worth and felt his tragedy. Under their roof he grew and his powers spread. And his life became one of great service. But of pleasure, there was little. He kept to himself, nursing his delicious sorrow, a beneficent knight-errant, with the bleeding soul of a recluse. But gradually, the edifice of his good deeds rose into view. And at last, it came within the ken of those that had driven him away. Partly through age, his parents’ hair would by now be white; mostly, however, through remorse. All of his old family, in heroic resolution, had shouldered the guilt for his departure. And now, he returned to them, magnanimous, loving, and forgave them. He kissed his father’s wrinkled face down which tears of contrition fell. Rhoda also was there--husbandless, somehow, chastened, eyes soft with the wish to be accepted. And he went up to her, and took first her hands and then, her head, and gave forgiveness. With her came the others--respectful, humbled, yearning toward him. (His mother was not in the picture. But he was unaware of this.) He exacted no punishment; he said no word of sorrowful reminder. He threw open his arms for all and took them in. And there was happiness.

Here was a roseate arrangement; and yet, to Quincy, one certain of accomplishment, if only he would face about. But he walked on. Why?

He saw his family, coldly, clearly, in the event of his return. He read the added sneer of their lips, the arching of brows that meant indulgence for one who was hopelessly foolish and incompetent. He saw the wrath of his father at this new turn on his dignity which he had played him; the knowing whistle of Marsden, discounting childish weakness; the sharp unconcern of Rhoda, not honoring his adventure even with contempt. And he dramatized for himself the sensations of his mother. She would be glad to have him back--oh, yes! But how little she would understand! To her, his going would seem an escapade luckily done with--a spurt of temper, subsiding fortunately. She would think thus:

“Quincy was naughty. But thank God, he thought better of it. Thank God, he was too weak to turn naughtiness into badness. Quincy was too much of a child to do real injury to me. Thank God, for Quincy’s childishness!”

In her regard, as in that of all the others, he would have lost. His return would mean the sacrifice of those few considerations which he had somehow won. It would mark a new depth for his inferiority, forge a new weapon for tyranny and contempt and misconstruction. To stay away meant a path of glory. To return meant skulking back into a cell made dingier and poorer for him in his absence. And in his act, no single one of them would see aught but a lack of will, a dearth of spirit, a sickly fall. And yet, in this direction went his feet!

No tinge of cowardice was there. Quincy knew too little of the world to be afraid of it, to hesitate in choice between his home that he did know, and it. His going-out had been the irresistible plunge of a long propped-up weight, rushing toward the goal of its momentum. In his return--if return he did--there was no falling; rather, a laborious, painful urging back against the sweep of that momentum. The one way, craned his thoughts and his ambition. The way he went, a voice he did not recognize or know of, had sent a syllable.

But now, he came to feel its nature. The words of the man had been wise words indeed. That was perhaps a reason for defeating them. They had singled out the fact of mother, and there dwelt. And though Quincy was inclined to think him right, these very words had inspired within him a protest of antithesis. His mother! Was the man wrong in his uncanny penetration? What had she helped him? How sustained him? how really served to protect him? Her love was real enough. But was it not a sickly, swaying plant--roots spread too wide for clinging, leaves thrust too close within the shadow of others, to have the sun? What did he owe her? Was her love not in its essence selfish, weakly? Did it not subsist on tears and sterile moments? Could he conceive of living on such sustenance, of mounting with such feeble help?

The man had been right. Quincy’s mind agreed. But Quincy in each step proved that both man and mind were wrong. For Quincy was going back to this discredited mother. Mentally, he nullified her and discarded her. Always, she stood there, with outstretched arms, as he rushed toward her. He thought he knew the formula of her tears, yet they ate deep in him. He thought he knew the grammar of her words; yet they commanded him. Quincy was learning.

And now, the Park was behind him. The adventure stood at its climax. And if there be gods who cease at times their celestial indifference, when the gleam of a real heroism smarts in their dull eyes from earth, they were now watching Quincy. Learn the book of life and the nature of the heroic becomes plain. It is the deliberate negation of what is sense and rote, of that which the interminable average makes life; it is the disavowal of all laws, the compliance with what is but a shadow, a shred, and a suggestion. It is the leaning on an instant and the despising of all time. It is the paradoxical resolve to prove a spot of star greater and wider and more important than the mass of earth. It is the truth. And it is even more, for it is the acting on it.

Quincy knew to what he was returning. He knew that no soul within the house would feel the power of his temptation to stay away, though it meant starving. He knew that she for whom he walked back into the shambles would translate his deed to fit in her own petty scope and wishes and perturbations. He knew the utter vainness of his act for his own self; the bitter fruit that it must bear; the insufferable slur that it would cast upon his fine rush for freedom.

For a moment, he paused, lost in a cloud almost of extinction. And then, something put force upon his finger. And his finger pressed the bell....

XII

It may have been his mother, the net of impulse which she spun, that swept Quincy home. But in his act, spontaneously sprang to knowledge a new state--the sense of challenge. Indeed, the smouldering, grim awareness deep within him that he had a right to home, a right there to remain and make demands, had lain upon his mind since the beginning. It had been co-ordinate there with the sentiments that drove him back. It had, at that outset, been a sentiment itself, rather than a conviction shot through with thought. It had been leaven to his strong emotions and had made active the unarguing voice which ordered his return. But in that period of germination and later, carrying-out, this sense of challenge was at best subliminal. He could not have quoted a program by it; he could not have numbered his rights or his capacities for claiming them. This was a later birth--the coming into consciousness of this. But as his finger pressed the bell, and the moment stood before him in all its painful nudity, a great shock went through Quincy. And with it, Quincy’s sense of challenge grew articulate. All of his powers needed at such a moment to be summoned. All of his weapons he needed in his hands. And what was more, he needed not merely to find them there, but a conscious grasping them and a sharp perfection. Else, he had foundered. And so, in this general calling forth to arms, to service, of whatever lay within him, this sense emerged. He felt a state of right; he knew an order of demands. The door opening for him, there was Challenge in place of Sacrifice, as he stepped inside.

* * * * *

The door was opened by his father. He was in his vest. By this sure sign, Quincy learned that he had been anxious. For Josiah always gave way to worry by taking off his coat. But Quincy did not guess the nature of his concern. It would not have flattered him. He saw his father’s face, cold, solemn, bitterly relieved, who stood there, slightly to one side, waiting for words. Quincy met his arrogant gaze an instant. He felt that he had given answer, in his own expression. Spontaneously, he stepped past and went up the stairs.

The door to the sitting room was open. He felt behind him the astounded figure of his father still near the door, too outraged to act. Within the sitting room, ere he was on a level to look in, he felt the congregated presence of the others. Their mood seemed one with the cold gleam they sat in, and which reached him from above as he marched up the stairs. He turned down the hall. It was darkened. It gave accent to the light of the room where now he saw the others. There was a piercing note to his walking through that narrow, darkened passage, braving the glare where they were, in order to pass them and mount higher. His mother stood in the threshold. She called forth his name. And then, rushing into the hall, she caught him up.

He gave way to her warm, silent arms. He allowed himself gladly to be pressed and kissed and strained against her. For a moment, challenge went down.

And then, holding him at arm’s length, she looked at him with questioning eyes. Within, the others sat, mutely, coldly, interested.

“Why did you run away, Quincy?” his mother asked.

The boy was hurled back upon himself.

He felt the curious attention of those others within the room. Their almost perceptible craning forward to catch his answer ate like acid into his heart. Below, he heard his father’s steps approaching;--approaching, it seemed to Quincy, in order to complete the audience. And he the spectacle--he the victim, while his mother served to show him through his paces! Why was she so cruelly stupid? Why must she have asked that searing question? Why could she not have understood how he yearned really to answer it for her, how her asking it now--under such conditions, before these!--made that answer vain, and his desire a mockery? Her embraces given without calculation, had been better. Then, for the moment, she had been on his side--been as he wanted her. But now, she had fallen over. She might not have meant it. But did her ignorance allay his pain--bring back to life the sweet impulse she had killed? She was serving them, siding with them; and through her hold and his expectancy of better, proving the worst of them all!

He hated her for it. He hated her for her stupidity; and for the love he bore her. He hated her for the hope she had, one moment gone, inspired in him....

He shoved her aside and rushed upstairs--all of the scene, she, they of the sitting room, his father, like a wide burn upon his brain.

As he reached his room, he heard her sob. And for her suffering, as he flung himself upon his bed, he hated her the more.