The unwelcome man

by Waldo David Frank

It was, then, chiefly charged with the Professor, that Quincy began his period of effervescence. He now denied all troubles by fitting them into the scheme of “inevitable good.” He denied all evils by stalking so far beyond the mass as to catch its “inevitable harmony.” He overlooked all barriers by soaring so high as to see only the globe’s “inevitable curves.” He was radiant with the same vigor grown extensive which, while intensive, had made him gloomy. He was perfectly able, in these days, to argue the rightness of injustice—viewed in its propulsion of virtue; or the beauty of ugliness—as a part of nature’s composition. These were the days when he was consciously “vibrant to the whole” and when a deed was pragmatic instead of practical. Sex, moreover, was a germ that might “push upward into a flower”; there was an ideal conduit leading from “mortal brain to infinite mind”; matter was a “badge”; Christ’s import was not in his ethics but in his “substantiation of the spiritual,”—and before the advent of Deering the greatest men of the world had been merely steps in the preparation.

Innumerable concepts taken from the Professor and studdings of amplification and conclusion—his own part, mostly,—stood on the surface of Quincy’s soul and made faces at reality. Family became a cot he had left, finding it narrow and moist and over-rich in covers. College was a big emptiness in which a few true accents rang the more truly because of the acoustic of that emptiness. Quincy himself, it was plain, was a man of sensitive depths.

There then, were all these trappings and borrowings and mind-absorptions upon the surface of his soul, grimacing at the world and hiding what lay behind from the world’s onslaught. But the world had already shot its shaft and made a piercing with its seed. It might stay out now—shooed off effectually by all these grimaces—and laugh. For it was destined to laugh last. It had done its part. Quincy’s soul, in its too late seclusion, would unassisted perform the rest. It could only guard—it could not undo—the future.

So the boy went blandly on, with his ideals and his sublimations,—nurturing, the while, the fruit of his past intercourse with life.

XI

There were sublime moments in that period—moments that were sparks for later fires and that abided with him until the end.

Professor Deering had said to him: “The atheist is a man in whom a sense is lacking.”

Armed with this, Quincy went forth into the night to be alone with it. He sought a terrain that he already knew. The road crawled out of the town at a low incline. And then, abrupt from it, rose a path over a hill that was clad thick in summer. Now, it lay naked above the squatting road—a vast blue grey, a round of briar stalks and matted underbrush that sang with his racing feet. Upon the summit was a rock that Quincy loved. From one approach it was sheer and rugged. Beyond, a cleft in it, deepened with soil, curved gently down to a copse of elder bushes. From its sheer corner rose an oak tree. Several new tufts sprang from its foot. Above twined ivy and at the top a blaze of quartz, set in the granite, made a seat so that the hill’s declivity rolled away from the eyes to a distant murmurous valley. Here, flashing in sun or moonlight, one caught the river—agleam through its thick marge of summer, or swift and sleek without hindrance for the eye when the gaunt trees of winter basketed its flow.

Upon the rock, now, Quincy sat and shivered a bit and looked up at the frozen stars and the steely pool of heaven and asked to sense God.

Everything stood in silence. The voice of the forest was in the silence like the grain in a smooth surface,—perceptible but without harm to it. And such a surface, so fretted by innumerable stirrings, was the silence. Quincy huddled low, head forward, and let the silence enter and pervade him. At last he was drenched with it. And now, it frightened him no longer. He felt free, now, to career in it; since he was part of it, he could go forth beyond it and hear the voice it scabbarded. While his heart had beat against it, he had sat there, strangely afraid and alien to it all. But now, his heart rhythmed to its measure so that he heard it beat no longer. Now, his soul was swathed and soaked to its color, so that he could mount upon the silence and traverse it without sinking, and attain beyond. He and the silence were one. He, then, could know what it knew; feel the purple flame that gave it forth; and sense the slow-moving pulse of which its undulant shadows were a shroud.