The unwelcome man

by Waldo David Frank

Clarice cut back to their last talk, once they were alone. Quincy tried bravely to show in the words he spoke that he had changed. And Clarice laughed him out quite as she had laughed out his older pretensions. Thus, they fared well together. And with another dance, filched like the first from one of the proper partners, she invited him to call.

The City’s intricate machinery for bringing about what is already there—an engine for making paper leaves grow on real trees—creates a pathetic dualism even in its girls. It provides well that the gulf of after-marriage between their natures and their positions may be sure to have had time to widen. Already in their choice of friends, girls know the limitations of the laws that bind them, develop a technique of evasion, straddle two mounts in order to ride two ways. And if later, as a clear due of this, they are torn limb from limb, man with his insect vision blames their desire to ride, instead of the false direction in which they have been placed.

It was with some such canny calculation that Clarice welcomed Quincy. She knew well the sort of man whom she must wed. She was able to judge how his capacity for filling certain major needs of a conventionalized life must unfit him for many pleasant matters. She was well prepared to split herself in two, dally with Quincy—while she went on hunting for a husband. And having already classified his assets and her demands on him, she was little prone to tolerate Quincy’s offering aught else. She was well able to cope with the boy’s set resolve to be one of the City’s crowd in his relations. She had plenty of such. And besides, his very desperate wish, now, to show his right within those ranks was proof that she knew, far better than he, what Quincy really was.

And so it came about that the first evening in which he called at her home was the onset of a new consciousness in Quincy. He found it difficult even to mention what at home, or with Herbert, was almost a matter of boast:—that he had abandoned college after three years in order to enter business. He found it hard to air his new born materialism; then hard not to conceal it. He found it hard to take pride in his new contentment; and finally, to be content! Doubtless he felt already that these elements, wherewith he had won recognition since his return, were not the ones that Clarice sought in him. But the significance of this was a slow-dawning thing. First it was imperative that he somewhat understand the qualities of her who was to cherish those self-stultified qualities of himself.

He found a fund of disillusion in Clarice. Bravely and openly she despised the atmosphere she lived in. He was afraid to. For with him, to despise it, was to stop breathing it. For her, this did not seem to follow. Clarice was not alone quite sure that she would persevere in this land whose mockeries she knew; she was willing to. And she gleaned a constructive aim for her energies in knocking down as she ran along. Here was a mystery for Quincy. The strange admixture of tenderness and flint, joy and detachment, which Clarice displayed, was unknown to him. Willingly, he would have stated that such a girl could not in reality exist. Yet there she was—intellectually radical, emotionally set and conserved—more than existing, living with a clear efficiency and a firm conscience! Nothing she gave him, Adelaide could not have given him to know. But his spirit’s pores were open here. With his unfortunate sister all of him was shut and rigid. That was why these talks counted more.

Clarice knew Herbert Lamory slightly. She had never asked him to call.

“He is pretty empty, I think,” she said. “When I talk with him, it is as if I were talking with a glazed terra-cotta brick on the wall of some one of a million buildings in New York. He fits in just so unobtrusively.”

Quincy realized that this was true, and that, because of this very fitness and his desire to emulate it, he had aligned himself with Herbert.

She went on: “I really can’t understand your devotion to him. You say you’re chums? It reminds me a bit—” she smiled, “of the devotion of a man in the sea for a piece of sea-weed that happens to be floating.”

“A man in the sea is out of his element,” protested Quincy.