The unwelcome man

by Waldo David Frank

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!