The unwelcome man

by Waldo David Frank

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.