Waldo David Frank

“ And Josiah Burt bought the Frondham mansion.
Into the press, then, of Quincy’s summer went these three new ingredients: a feeling of Rhoda’s married life, the tide-like load upon him of all the first year’s happenings at college, and Clarice.
The awful inconsequentiality of life, the absoluteness of each moment and the doom of never-more that lurks in each moment’s easy, gliding pace, the state of death to which inexorably each new state of life is born—these are the things of which youth happily is unaware. He plunges on like a swift runner upon a path pied with sweet flowers. ”

“ Men grew hard, savage, wet-lipped.
Quincy and she leaned over the table, drinking and looking at each other. For the most part, they were silent. Each of them was still alone. It was easier so. Each of them fended the other from the hectic floods of light and life. Each of them shut the other in.
Quincy melted with the wine. He grew warm. He poured offerings unto this woman, saying no word. He made her an altar, not knowing her name; a goddess, not knowing her will. She was beautiful with the wine fretting her grey cheeks and the fire fanning in her eyes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Her brother was the cripple. The curl of his lips, the morbid delicacy of his greying hair, the eternal pain that pinched his brow—these were her brother; and the words that the curled lips had spoken. But those remote, grey eyes! They were fair and bright and beckoned eerily. Adelaide could not understand them. She could understand and answer only her brother, the cripple. And at him, for his words, she was angry.
“What do you think?” she retorted.
“It’s beyond thought,” his mouth said. “To know what you will have to say to Quincy would require inspiration.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It bound the city. It must know the city’s soul since it was so close to the city’s breath. In its throbbing cables there must be a message. In its lacings and filigrees of steel, there must be subtle words!...
He was already above the river. The sun was cold. The waters of the harbor cut out like sapphire fretted with gleam. Beyond, Brooklyn was in shadow—shadow that sprang rather from its nature than the sun’s lack. Quincy turned north where the great East Side crowded out under two bridges, stifling the river to an inlet. The city rose in a blue haze. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

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

“ And through divers thrusts, Quincy learned what she meant by this. To be like a man was to be moved by ugly things—like business and money and machinery. To be like a man was to be edified by things not only ugly but wrong,—like pain, and that murder of self called sacrifice. To be like a man was to agree, in everything, with a battered, complaining woman whose drowned violet eyes had always been a mother’s. He looked at her. He tried to understand and to consent. But it was revolting work.
“Think of the privilege your father has given you,” she said, “in letting you grow up in New York.” ”

“ It is hard to withstand this feeling—when one is dizzy with being straight—of a great, free depth to fall in. It is the sensation of the weary man before the brink of the precipice—of one whose muscles ache from holding him so long erect. Below, there lies a patch of cool waters and fanning trees. Upon the rock, the sun sears and the shadows cannot live.
A remark of his started her upon that inevitable forward lurch—the giving way to self-confession. And for an hour, Quincy heard, his eyes steadfast, as if he feared that the least movement would break the charm. ”

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

“ The pulsing rhythm of so much youth centered about a point gave college a lilt that did not fail to whirl Quincy with it. For a time, the mere sense of motion suffused his consciousness. He was content.
And then, he understood. A windstorm in a desert is engrossing. But while one dashed off the onslaught of hot sand, sweeping one’s senses, there might still come stirring through the monotone of sting and color the thought of other action, the doubt of this fight’s good. So, now, with Quincy. Life as he knew it had been largely desert. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Quincy preferred these little lonely trips to the duty-calls on Frondham mansion. He preferred them always. And when, like this day, his mood was strong, even a monthly visit home would have been unbearable.
He left the train, swept toward the exit like a half-floating thing among light jetsam upon a rapid current. This occurred to him. For, though he did not associate the thought, he said to himself:
“Most people succeed in America, not because they have brains or shrewdness or luck, but because the current is too strong to let them sink.” ”

“ What was unbearable in the future was the struggle, the exertion. Whatever the fruit of it, with struggle the price seemed vain. Whatever the bitter emptiness he left behind, since he could lie still and without deeds, seemed welcome. While the world shrieked about him, horrible in its clangor of steel and its dull delirium of feet, Quincy was filled with the desire to share nothing with it, to cut loose, aloof, to cast out whatever element he might conceal in common.
He was weary because this crowd seemed tireless; he craved peace because it breathed out conflict ”

“ For failure is infinite. Not achievement. For though that be limited, it too transcends counting. What then? Weariness, perhaps? Or a clutter of details signifying the same thing? Or a mass of grey without that spot of gleam which makes parts brighter, greater, than the whole? Or somewhat of all these?
He could rehearse the parts, if he desired. But it seemed more real to let them gyre about at will—as they were doing. Clarice, business, Adelaide and home—a friend looked for, an acquaintance had but not cherished. The indefatigable past, limed with indifference lest it bring nausea. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He felt that every cable of the web-like maze was vibrant with stress and strain. With these things he was alone. Yet he felt no insecurity, such as the crowds inspired. Beyond, through the net-work of steel, huddled Brooklyn. And below his very feet, tumbled together as if some giant had tipped the city eastward and sent all the houses{169} pell-mell toward the down-tilted corner, lay the wharves and slums of Manhattan. It seemed to Quincy that he was being caught upon a monstrous swing and swept with its pulsed lilt above the grovelling life of the metropolis. ”

“ Yet, as they died away and the blue mist of the harbor thickened and the myriad gold lights came out, shooting their gleam into an overtone, and the water’s murmur turned to a sheen of silver, and the whistles of the water-craft thridded the vagueness with their sharp reports, Quincy changed his mind. The City was now a ghost looming away, a thing of uncanny life, vibrant and portentous;—a thing of beauty. Quincy went back to that first visit of discovery when he had come down, thrilled with adventure, from his college and walked Brooklyn Bridge. ”

“ Each morning, at first, these things gripped Quincy while his heart forsook him. So that he found it hard to go, hard to bear, easy to fall away.
And in the office, the dread rhythm was continued. Here, men, boys, girls were drawn together, the secret of their lives apart forever a little dimmer in their eyes. And here, unendingly, they stayed with no hope more bright than that fortune hold them there, since that hold was living, and with no intercourse more high than that of wolves sharing a carcass, through want of strength, not will, to drive each other off. ”

“ Not to be unhappy is not to be destined to create. And every fiber of youth’s soul is drenched with just that destiny, fashioned toward just that consummation—to create. Wherefore, youth’s eternal syllogism: “I am unhappy. I am glad.”
All of this was not conscious to Quincy, lying between night and day under his sheets with the sleepy glow of the transom full in his eyes. But he knew that with his double cry something flew free in him, hovered in the air and beat its wings. He was no longer in a welter now, nor in an open place that froze. He was in New York. ”

“ The streets hurled by in a drab monotone whose single, ugly accent could be no other than that of a fierce indifference. The crowd congealed within itself, a maze of cluttered energies, having no mind. And as the mournful streets struck past, a tithe of the crowd leaked out, mute, sullen, while those remaining gave no flash of interest. None of the murmurous expectancy of a crowd turned to adventure, none of the resilient interplay of personality transfigured the dull mass. A community this was! The iron car and the vile brick houses moved. It seemed to rot! Quincy felt lonely unto pain in it. ”

“ 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. ”