The unwelcome man

by Waldo David Frank

And the old, weary canons of a herd-race, hedging in its deformities and greed against the flaming grandeur of a nature it has denied, were vented to make this child conform, in whom a tinge of the old gaieties and loves still dared to linger. A mother’s advice! How stubborn is the strength of man, that through these generations man’s tender sprouts should have outlived a mother’s advice! By the old laws, she bears her child—the old laws of nature and of joy, of fertility and courage and abandon. And by the new laws, she rears him—the laws of compromise and pain, of soul-oppression and cowardice and cover. And by the fair love of the first law, she presses her advantage for the law of the herd that claims her creature as a slave. A queen, conceiving in her regal bed, enslaved and giving birth to a slave-child. Here is the cycle of most women.

Quincy held his head low as his mother admonished and advised him. It was all still dim and uncertain in his mind, why these things seemed wrong to him; why they revolted him; why the common wisdom and love of his mother should be despised. Quincy did not understand, as she went on, how apt it was that his head should be held low.

A glimmer there was, in the Pattern—he saw that, later—of the truth: that he had been so moved that day, only because the woman who spoke was his mother. Quincy knew that she was stupid; that she parroted her moralities and arguments; that mentally, she was a slave of the herd-leaders who cared no whit for either of them. He saw, then, the fallacy in this: that by reason of a mother’s love, he should have hearkened to a plea voiced for a vast, impersonal machine to which he mattered nothing save as a conforming cog. Of course, that part of his mother was also such a cog. It had no right to exploit the bonds of the real mother who knew and cared for no machine.

All this bred resentment. And there began for Quincy the period in which he despised his mother, judged her ruthlessly and had little thought for her when she was not about.

His father came in at four. So Quincy left for a walk.

That walk was in the Pattern. But when he traced back his feelings for his father, he could not fix, as in the other cases, upon some event of this fortnight that lodged within him as a form. Thought and emotion about his father rushed back with an indefeasible momentum to the days of Harriet, to his running away or to the nights when he was sent up, a-tremble, through the hollow house, to bed or on an errand. As he traced back, now, for signs of his father that were alive, all he caught up was that his entering on that afternoon had spread a surface of great toleration upon his mother’s words. He had gone forth in peace with her. Perhaps, he recalled enough of the old days to feel that she might need his sympathy, being alone with her husband. There had been such times.

Quincy had cold crisp hours for his walk. He went northward in the Park. At first he had had a qualm. He had told his mother New York was ugly. He had escaped to sophistry and metaphysics in order to prove with Garsted that it was beautiful. It did not occur to the boy that since in both cases he had been sincere, he had no cause for worry. He racked his brain in order to find out in which instance he had said the truth. And to his mother, he felt the debt of an apology. But it occurred to him how ludicrous it would be to beg his mother’s pardon on such a subject. She would think him wilder and more scatter-brained than ever. Doubtless, she had long since forgotten his remark. At least, she attached no importance to it. This aggrieved Quincy. And in his new-born resentment, he forgot about inconsistencies and pardons. Soon, he was engrossed in the City.

This was at the point where the Park ends and Eighth Avenue begins afresh, with a new acquisition in the clatter and grime and darkness of the elevated structure. During his swift walk in the Park, it had been simple to cogitate upon himself. The Park did not hold Quincy. It was a rough, varied and knotted expanse of dirty snow and gaunt, dwarfed trees. It had none of the mystery, none of the tonic, of a winter woodland. It was a large back-yard of the City. Through it, cut wide, cleared swathes for City vehicles and narrow ones, less cleared, more tortuous, for those inhabitants that went on foot. There were few people, though the day had been bright. It was too cold. New Yorkers suffer such inclemency of life that the least inclemency of weather rids them of spirit. So Quincy had advanced through the Park without a thrill of nature. Though he was a messenger of her spirit—he who ran bare-headed through the woods—this cut-in mass of rocks and trees had no voice for him. The girders of steel and stone that on all sides bound the Park have smothered the soul which that fragment of forest must once have had. Central Park is a half-dead thing, at best. Its winter snows are grey; its summer trees are grey; its autumn fever is a wasting chill without the flame. Some day, inevitably, this must be true also of the great Park in the Bronx.

But now, on the noisy Avenue, matters were different.

Quincy recalled his feeling that the City’s life spoke to him. Night was there. Most of the shops were closed. But beneath the blinds of the saloons, lights shone and a welcome winked. In the tall dun buildings, all enterprise seemed choked like the space, into a rigid ever-recurrent form. The movement on the Avenue was dogged, outcast, heavy. But its dullness did not penetrate behind the brick and plaster. The trains crashed past angrily as if they had preferred to linger, and also watch. Beneath the structure, the lights seemed badly nourished. Those in the houses were of a yellow that suggested malady and poison. It was the life throbbing in these that spoke to Quincy. What did it say?