[PART ONE.] [ I, ] [II, ] [III, ] [IV, ] [V, ] [VI, ] [VII, ] [VIII, ] [IX, ] [X, ] [XI, ] [XII. ]
[PART TWO.] [I, ] [II, ] [III, ] [IV, ] [V, ] [VI, ] [VII, ] [VIII, ] [IX, ] [X, ] [XI, ] [XII, ] [XIII, ] [XIV, ] [XV, ] [XVI.]
[PART III. ] [I, ] [II, ] [III, ] [EPILOGUE.]
[TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE].

THE UNWELCOME MAN

THE
UNWELCOME MAN

A NOVEL
BY
WALDO FRANK
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1917
Copyright, 1917,
By Little, Brown, and Company.
All rights reserved
Published, January, 1917
Printers
B. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, U.S.A.
TO MY
MOTHER AND FATHER

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.