The unwelcome man

by Waldo David Frank

At once, Quincy veered back to the couple he had left—and however he approached himself, there were they, also.

The evening had been auspicious. Since he had ruled—an aboriginal residue in him—that an ill evening should augur ill, surely it was right to read a happy omen from a happy time. Quincy did not hesitate. As he walked home down the silent avenue where the black trees murmurously bent upon the lights, he was convinced. His firmness and grip had not gone from him! He was elated—yet certain of himself. And all of that last spring and summer, he had been a fool.

The three had talked together. And it had been natural to remain till late. There had been no sign of fire or haze or friction. As he sat there, he had seemed lifted up. The supple, blue steel of the Professor’s mind had seemed the girders of a firmament whose life-invigorating breath was Julia. There had seemed no crass way of differentiating them. Of course, one was star-metal; the other was æther. But together, they had made the firmament. And within this, he had taken breath and heart. Quincy saved himself from angry laughter at his early qualms and worries and presentiments by promptly forgetting most of them. This is a common function of forgetting—to save from angry laughter. He had blithely become unaware of the intangible misgiving which like a cancer, for all its formlessness, had gnawed into the marrow of the months preceding. He had launched upon an era of confidence and dreaming. He had no inkling of the sheer dogged resolution it had required to swing his rumbling energies from their near concrete pasture into those hinterlands of fantasy and rationalization. He did not guess that this sudden melting of past worries was caused by the laborious effort of his spirit to transform itself from the true state in which such worries could be prompted—that his fresh certainty of life was due to a quick leap from the realities which must be doubtful, to dreams fashioned at will to exclude doubt. The realities were to have their revenge. The dreams, formed as an escape from them, were to be found fitless and wanting. Meantime, however, Quincy tramped bravely down the shadowed street.

Of course, much truth lay in this fresh construed idealism; much health was in this sublimation of his energies. No long process in human nature can omit any part of human nature. A pondered crime has, in its texture, whatever of good or truth the criminal conceal. A deed of service hides all the infirmities and selfishness of the noble man. So, this long grown flower in Quincy, blossoming now in a period of exultant confidence, had come not only from his need of harbor for himself and of translating a truth to fancy, but as well from his rich fund of spirit and his deep strain of nature. His dream as he nursed it, now, was in good sooth extravagant. But the wildest dream has its root in the truth; and the most mendacious is a mere branching out from a confession.

Quincy, then, with his second year at college, revelled in a philosophy. Like all personal things at nineteen years, it was very concise and pointed, left to its own ways; and very vague when he endeavored to articulate it. Quincy of course could not admit this to himself. So when Garsted was dubious or unconvinced, he blamed Garsted’s obtuseness to spiritual things and withdrew farther from the realities.

The authorship of Deering in most of his ideas was manifest. The Professor was welcome in this capacity. Quincy did not object to a descent from such. Of course, Julia had no conscious part. He was the steel; she at best was color. He knew her now as a splendid woman, as a fit mate for a great man. That he had ever doubted this fitness or this harmony or this completeness was as far from Quincy as the once real days when he had lain as a center-presence in his crib. Yet, all of these truths remained. He was, of course, like all of us, still a center-presence to himself; he was of course, like all of us, a doubter of the otherness in a thing desired. But for the moment these truths were latent.

There had been real fire beneath the smoke that had blurred his past spring and summer. But Quincy was in a state where fire is denied and the smoke blown off by a new draught of energy that gains its intensity through a clear heat. All misgivings, then, about the Deerings went. And went as well, his misgivings about himself, his misgivings about life.

“A new accomplishment of Quincy,” said Rhoda that Christmas; “he’s become conceited.”

The creed of Professor Deering was unmistakable. Nor did Quincy mistake it. He mistook merely himself in believing he had adopted it, because a corner of his being—his intellect—had managed to nod “Yes” to it.

The creed was big and simple like the man that lived it. It was a thoroughfaring, militant idealism, a sublimation indeed throughout the sensory gamut of fact to truth. In it, Lawrence Deering careered, and toward it loved to tender by the hand those about him who were willing. It transfigured the smallest things of life; thereby the smaller souls grew aware of it. It flowed over everything like a fine mist at sunrise, yet protruded nowheres against force; thereby the small souls were made tolerant. The Professor was not molested at college. He was not molested at home. When a barrier came against the spirit’s flow, it wafted over. It had filled Quincy like a meadow, rough with low shrubs to hold it. He was already known in his class as one of the inevitable Deering disciples. A few each year—from the class standpoint—“went wrong” this way, even as a few each year “went wrong” with women. To the busy, humming majority who never took his courses, Deering was an endemic problem. Like the poets—Browning or Francis Thompson—who write nonsense, he had a national renown. But these were their inner confessions. To the world, these very philistines, in boasting of their Alma Mater, would have made much of Professor Deering.