The unwelcome man

by Waldo David Frank

And he had followed it with: “I am glad.”

He would never understand the complete depth of this sincere reaction: that unhappiness is the energy of life, its purest facet, its semen of progression: that to be swept with it is therefore to be alive: and that youth’s glorying in unhappiness is not a fancy, not a form, but an immortal intuition whereby youth renders its account of the world’s essence. Not to be unhappy is not to be destined to create. And every fiber of youth’s soul is drenched with just that destiny, fashioned toward just that consummation—to create. Wherefore, youth’s eternal syllogism: “I am unhappy. I am glad.”

All of this was not conscious to Quincy, lying between night and day under his sheets with the sleepy glow of the transom full in his eyes. But he knew that with his double cry something flew free in him, hovered in the air and beat its wings. He was no longer in a welter now, nor in an open place that froze. He was in New York. And he understood that the barrenness of the two years wherein he had been himself accrued from the inexorable bar between that which he had been and the City which should have mothered his desire. Two of a different form may couple. But they will not bear fruit. He and the City had been together. He had remained himself and so had it. They had been barren of each other. There was the solution.

A good fight it had been. And yet, a hopeless one. Quincy lay in his bed, a-quiver as never before with the sense of the inevitable, with the sense of tragedy. Why had he not made the City molten to his ends? Why, barring this, had he himself been rigid, untransformable? Oh, he had tried! He had twisted himself enough, tortured himself, cut off parts that protruded, warped away parts that differed. But that had been in vain. Here was no task for carpenters. He had tried every means save the two means that were achievement—the two means of mastery. For it requires mastery to mould the City to one’s own end, in one’s own fire. But it requires mastery no less to give all of oneself, wholly, freely, bravely, to be reshaped and recreated. This which he might have done, he had failed to do.

The old fault—the old weakness. Was it the crux of all his interminable misdirections? That he could never give himself entirely—was this why he had not received. That he could never lose himself utterly—was this why he had not found?

Julia flashed on his mind and he did not spurn her. And the point of this association—it flashed also on his mind. The old story—the crux—the kernel of his misadventures.

Was it too late? He was unhappy. That was a sign of hope. But no. It was a token merely that the end was not yet there. He would go on fighting, struggling. But he would not win. Already he knew that he could not hope. He still wished to win; he still wished to hope. This proved only that the end was not yet there.

Quincy lay cold within his sheets, awed by the beauty of his vision.

Like a dank breath, morning blew into the open window. The world shivered; the air was streaked and tremorous with chill. A piercing gleam, splintered into myriad tiny weakling emanations, came stirring upon him with the burdened air. A faint murmur lay hesitant above the damp-drenched streets. The smell of a fresh round to life was shrill in the blue glow. The murmur broke into sharp noises, desperate, marvelously clear. The color of the whole was an unclean reluctance. Here was not morning’s birth, but the night’s grave; the winding sheet of rest; a pall upon the City.

Quincy fell asleep.