The unwelcome man

by Waldo David Frank

Clarice sobered. He had touched her, there. She wanted him to be strong, to be true. But out of her own weakness yearning for all this in him, there came no strength to help him. She shrugged. But she could not deny his accusation.

Gradually their talk sagged into a minor key. It was clear to Quincy that if he failed—even if he complied with the life about him—he would simply, automatically fade from Clarice’s consciousness; it would be as if he were not, and as if—passing him on a crowded street—her eyes looked through him and did not warm. It was clear to him that this was not right. And it was clear to her that this could not be different.

But to neither of them was it known that perhaps her need was as great, in all this, as his....

So they had parted. Here also, there was no mischance, no real clash.

If he stood that night before his mirror, fearful and harassed, it was entirely what Quincy found within himself—or failed to find—that tortured him.

He thought, then.

Another year laden to his accounts. And no doubt of how to qualify that year—a year, another year of treachery! By it the latter episodes of college had not been erased. Rather they had served as easy slopes leading down to that which followed. A nadiral year!

But Quincy’s jaw thrust out. He knew it. He was alone. He stood against a blank, grey wall, facing the truth. There was no praise of self, no pride, no confidence in his position. There was no alternative. There were merely the nausea of the past, the grim facing of the present, the not caring for the future.

Quincy was about to enact, simply, clumsily, the Word that his heart spoke; to become sincere; to become chastened of all things save that Word’s simplicity and the co-ordination with it, of his deed. Quincy was about to be a man.

He was become eased of worldly irritations. They seemed to have left him permanently. They had been a help to his false self, what time he shut his senses to the hurts of spirit. In dwelling upon them, he had been better able to persevere without a consciousness of deeper pains. All of that had belonged to the first year. He had chafed, then writhed, then railed against the City....