The unwelcome man

by Waldo David Frank

At a subscription dance to which Herbert took him, Quincy again met Clarice Lodge.

The lit cold room seemed to glance off from the slender heads and the throats of the men and women, so that it was they who were really lit and cold. The figures pressed down below the rigid walls smothered in gilt and fluting and brocade—a mass of colorless detail despite the gowns, a cluttering of motionless undeviation despite the dancing. And of a sudden, all of it was a unit addressing Quincy with a strained air—like some beplastered woman between the times of desire and seed, who talks to an indifferent neighbor, glancing beyond him. Yes: it was old, it was rouged and, if one watched beneath the dazzle of lace, even a trifle knock-kneed and a trifle lame! Yet its voice as it addressed him was high and piercing. What troubled Quincy was that there should be no way of answer. He went through the gesture of understanding and of being part. He also talked to an indifferent neighbor, yearning beyond.

The dance and rigid music gave way to innumerable little eddies physical and murmurous, of conversation. The long hall shrunk in this more intricate design. The crowd turned upon itself with false gestures of ease, deeply aware of its own stiffness. All of this life moved as if embarrassed by what neighbored it. So its impulse became broken also, its voice became a sum of flinty, too small mosaics, its movements lignified. Here and there was the gleam of an eye lit by a mind. And where that was, there was a note dissenting, a line out of all composition with the rest. Quincy was learning balance. He held himself erect in this disharmony of currents, joined so compactly because the place and the purpose formed a like disharmony. He was swirled about here, like a canoeist amid mild breakers, where the ocean meets the land and it is neither land nor ocean. There was no sense here of direction so that his swirling to and fro was proper. All that was needed was not to be submerged. And this prowess, Quincy had attained. By being aware of the unit of all this, the surface grew hard beneath him so as to support him. In this consciousness, he was sustained from pressing upon one point, from sinking with a weight of interest below the convention-outlined waves. So long as he could survive in this impersonality, he was safe.

And then, he espied Clarice Lodge.

With this stress, the dance grew tenuous; the crowd turned from hard, choked material to vapor; the music which had been obtrusive, separate, was a mere rhythm of accompaniment. All of it in a trice became an incense to him. It had been external, alien—copable. Now, it was no case of balancing above it nor of falling in. All of it was an atmosphere. And all of him was a maze of pores, aching and yearning to receive.

He pressed his way toward her through shreds and fragments of life that gesticulated, gyred, sent up and over him their acrid wafts of perfume. A silk gown swished against him; a bare arm touched his hand; a pointed slipper scarred the surface of his own. The couples stood close together, clapped their hands metallically for an encore. The band turned back into the nearly naked rhythm it had just torn to scraps—repiecing it. The couples swayed and slid away. He lost his quarry in the once more thickening, knotted turmoil—half substance and half atmosphere. He was whiffed to the margin of it. He stood now, flanked by a long straggled row of men, until once more the music gave him respite to resume his search.

The crowds streaked off with the last chord—veering from the center maëlstrom in tangents of silk and strutting black, subsiding once more in little puddles of voice and posture. As Quincy passed, he felt about him the heat of barely mastered sex slakishly a-stir beneath its gossamer guards of dress and of convention; he caught the shrill flush of the repressed and the unconscious, fretting the smooth lines of talk and rendering cramped the lissome carriage of these bodies. Though his eyes saw no soil, no awkwardness, it was as if he felt the presence of a creamy silk smutted with sweat, or of a gentle drapery tortured from shape by some protrusion. Then he almost ran into Clarice.

She was far more surprised as their hands clasped, than he. For she had changed more. And this was her domain. He had kissed her, so of course she recalled everything about him. He who had been, remained like a crystal in her memory. This Quincy, she knew. Of no other Quincy had she the slightest cognizance. So she was really amazed, finding him in this new strange milieu that was her own, who in her mind could never change from the wild boy of nearly four years past. This flash from her old self had an effect almost as intimate as if his embrace and talk had actually been repeated, there in the glitter of the ball. And as she must have rebuffed any advance at such a time, so now she turned cold and hot for Quincy, from no reason more real than the reality of her recollections.

But if Clarice was disturbed by the old spirit—all she caught,—Quincy was dazed by the new, outer form. And this was the more unwieldly, so that, in a trice, she was the master. Close on her impulse to fend him off for having ventured an old impression in so unapt and new a place, came a desire to attach to him, a nostalgia for her old self whom he had known. In him, she could enjoy this glint of herself at seventeen. For there was the lad she had played with! Her proper partners would not see her metamorphosis. She could be the old Clarice, as this stiff young man was the old Quincy. Her technique of delusion—her need of it—was sharp enough for far harder, less true games.

And so it was that in the blare of a waltz on a crowded floor, Quincy was seen more truly than he would see himself that night, at home, surrounded by the pretensions that he dared not give up.