Waldo David Frank

“ No, he is wholly alive: life is not good to him, nor does he love it: fatefully and wholly he accepts it. For he thinks not of death. Life may be anger and agony and hunger, but it is everything.—Why then does life seem marvelous to me, save that death must be near? Mildred...? What if she is death and wooing her, life wooes its end? and this be the reason why in love life seems so marvelous good? O Mildred, if this is death, let death enfold me. If you are death, hurry me to your flame-nothing beside which life—green hills and creatures swarming in the sun—is a gray sleep. ”

“ Spain, like Isabel, is turbulent and complex.
What pouring of flesh and spirit upon Spain, since the Phœnician, the Berber and the Celt first made the Iberian fecund! A subtle chaos. For Spain is a diapason of hostile forces, needing each other to survive: the embattled parts have long since found their balance, and each is in love with itself.
Isabel works like an artist. She has her vision. Her instinct and experience evolve for it a form and for herself a method. She takes her material ruthlessly and transfigures it with a cold passion. But for a deeper reason, Isabel is an artist. ”

“ 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. ”

“ His forgetting all else brought him inevitably to Tom. He was warm and alive with Tom. He felt that in Tom’s friendship more than in all else—more than in his work downtown or the slow reading of good books—he was growing up. He glowed with Tom as one might smile at the accomplishment before one’s eyes of a good prophecy.
All his life he had known that he was destined to become a man. An ecstasy, this, of wonderment and terror which ran, in a kaleidoscope of color, back to his childhood and to the time when his little arms had clasped his mother’s knees. Some day he would grow up and be a man. ”

“ Evening, a dance. The electric lamps drive a stiff flood of light through the gold-paneled room. No air—this atmosphere is a harsh painted substance. Men and women are brittle or are cloying: their spirit is dark as if no air had ever entered them. The music is a weave of stuffs contorted, writhed, a hypocritical plea for gayety: its sinuous lies move through the hall and through the bodies of the dancers with a false laughter, with a macabre rhythm. Cynic music, substitute in this world for breath; as are the lamps for light.... And the coupled forms jerking slow in its rugose waves. ”

“ But even as tragedy invades the brightest fado of Portugal, so here a tripping flexible gait overbears the pathos. The music bespeaks a clever, winning people. It has mobility, but it is not plastic. It has the nature of sun splintered on cloud or running upon water, of the patter of rain on house-tops, of waves pelting the hull of a sail-boat. It is a music of light, of surface-patterns of light. On all the earth, there is no music stranger to that of Spain—to the plastic, sculptural, soul-deep song of Spain. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How could one be sure of a hand clasped at one’s side? Which were the fields and which the mountains and which the torrents? In their delirious tangle, where was the road?
Tom had poisoned him. Tom had lied to him. Tom led him into ugly places. Tom had a laughter that did not mean joy and tears that bespoke sorrow of a sort he could not give his heart to. A merry world. A horrible world! He needed to blot it out. It was so packed a frenzy of maze and quicksand, that, if he did not draw himself away, he must become a part of its frenzy—a mere whirling molecule in its tortuous falsehood. ”

“ Now she is there—fulfilling all my world whose unfulfillment I had sensed, not consciously, but as a larva longs for its own birth. I have loved my work, like a woman, because I knew that there should come a woman worthy of my work. I have been faithful to my work, in faith of this woman who was to come to crown it; who was to come, in spirit and in flesh, to equal its high dream. Unwitting I have labored in a dream: and behold, it is fecund of this fleshed perfection: Mildred chaste as thought, Mildred deep as discovery, Mildred remote and imminent as truth! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Burden heavy with ages of flesh, bright with ages of dream. Plaint of spirit, rush of blood miraculously woven. A body in dance, rigid as a column; a voice in song, light and swift as a bird. Many Orients are here. In the form, a slender mystic draughtsmanship—Byzantine; a clamor of soul, a submissiveness of body with all its sweetness and its joys merged in the ecstasy of an ideal—Jewish; an intensive thrust, lean, fierce, hunting—Arab. Rising like revelation from the Córdoban Plaza, this Andalusian song of many wills becomes the drama of Spain. ”

“ Mildred stood helpless like a goddess: no man dared take her without the fullest raiment and the richest music, and a fair temple built to flesh her spirit. Such were the exalted symbols of my sense, but my thoughts were shrewd. This perfect child was of the modern world. To snatch her away would be to blemish her. What the world could bring to make an harmonious matrix for her life with me, in no way changing her, was the instant need. Marriage ... a home. All else had been violence rather than fruition: a gesture like that of a crazed man who mars his love in the impotence of desire. ”

“ Never, even in her sleep, did she sink to some quiet haven of dream with David: have him there to talk to gently, to be with gladly. Something surging within her took this great Wish and cut it up into bloody fragments and strewed her night with them. All of David was never there: nor all of a single moment with her holding his head on her breast. David’s laughter or David’s troubled frown or David’s voice: or merely David’s name—David, David, David—falling down her night like drippings of blood. And she, lost in this welter of struggle between wish and the real, unable to take sides. ”

“ All about is the night, for the house stands on the very mountain crest. Night has invaded even the hall, even the other room. And all about is silence. The mountain sinks in silence beyond our senses. And our senses like prisoned birds live in this shut room where alone there is not blackness and silence.
We are I and Mildred, lovely in a gown of green that shimmers on her body like an emerald molten by the white flame of her flesh. We are I and Mildred and Mildred’s father, and both my parents, and Philip LaMotte and Doctor Isaac Stein. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In this new stir of Spain, it is not wonderful that the land which created Córdoba, Cádiz, Seville, which perfected the Dance and the cante hondo, which gave birth to Gabírol, to Góngora, should lead in the fresh emergence of Spain’s perennial spirit. For Andalús achieved the Spanish Balance without the Castilian rigor; obeyed like every part of Spain the will of Castile to make Spain’s chaos into One and yet contrived to keep that Oneness green. A painter and a poet of modern Andalusia voice so clearly the spirit of the land, that they speak again for the world. ”

“ Marcia stood swaying with the need of burning. Would he not help? Then she would help herself. Delicious fool that he was!
He was perfume and flame: each pore of her was big with him.
Tom watched the firm, still whiteness of her self emerge from the lie of her clothes. No woman. She was a god. She was a pillar of purity and strength. No lascivious rondures and flauntings of flesh, no softnesses. A human form stripped to essential grace. An instrument of living, spare and direct like a command, flaying like a rod, swift like his passion. ”

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

“ It was the form, translucent and still with a vaporous glow about it, of a youth.
He moves up toward us. The amorphous maze from which he has condensed is now an aura. He moves up from the right, he crosses the front vision of our eyes. He is very near, bearing leftward toward the house, yet slantwise so that he will not touch our room.
A youth, straight, rhythmic, with his profile sharp and his mouth a shadow in the white of his face, and his eye an impalpable fire. His hair is a tangle of shadows like the last embers in a hearth. ”

“ When all of life floods all my senses like a corybantic passion: a perpetual sea of infinite elements each of which is attached to my nerves and to my heart. I cannot help loving people, so I hate them. For they are not what I would have them be: they are deaf and they do not love me. And children—whose lives go before me out of my hands and my sight like the horizon and the skies—is it a wonder my hands are stretched after them and that I suffer at my impotence? But, Davie, I am not cruel. I love—and I cannot reach what I love. ”

“ What thunders is the Castilian silence. And the heroic is the Spanish sleep. And the enduring is the Spanish drama of which the Catalans, even in their apartness, must be part. Spain has a dawning will to break from the unity which its will created: her atoms, anarchic but pregnant, stir to be loosed and to begin again. Despite its denial, Catalonia shares in this unborn Spain. Once the resistance of the Catalans helped to rouse Aragon and Castile with greater energy and clearer mind: helped to create Spain. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From hour to hour I dwelt within my work: finding it a realm so various that no mood of my waking and no dream of my sleep were quite outside it. The delights of leisure are those of wandering and surprise and repetition. In my work I had them. Easy love and comradeship bring ecstasy, because in their otherness we lose ourselves, with passion or with service. My work possessed these qualities as well. I was as full in its embrace as any woman in a happy love. And beyond all fulfillment, I had the joy of tempering my desire. ”