The unwelcome man

by Waldo David Frank

The summer was hot and clinging. It sucked the moisture and fruitfulness of men. Quincy suffered along. But he suffered more. For most, the City had its compensations. There were the beaches, the garish playgrounds of Coney Island, the dirty rocks and rotten wharves of East River, studded with naked bodies of boys, draped, crouching forms of girls, who swam and dived and reveled despite the City ordinance forbidding it and the pestiferous state of the sewer-soaked river. None of these means of wringing pleasure from the heat attracted Quincy. The last summer, when it had been far more a bearable proposal, he had declined his mother’s offer that he commute to them. This summer it was out of thought. His mother did not even make the suggestion. So he was alone. Clarice, the one girl he really cared to be with, was away. And he avoided Lamory, ranking him now with half a dozen other uncongenial friends.

He worked hard. He took an occasional harbor sail in the evening. But the fragor of the beaches was foretasted by the packed, chattering masses on the boats. So that there was very little harbor and much intimate association with nursing mothers, with romping boys, with clamorous, obtrusive minstrels, with beery men. The water lay below all this, a satined stretch, ruffled by rude craft, faintly musical and faintly blue and faintly perfumed with the salt. But the irrepressible boat shut it out for the most part. About it, there was naught faint or vague. Quincy would sit in the stern and watch the huddled buildings of lower Manhattan draw together as he drew away. What an eloquent memorial they were—these unkempt buildings—to a vast energy run wild, arrogant, lacking a soul to guide it. He knew the scene’s repute for beauty. But he did little more than shrug his shoulders. New York’s aesthetic he had long since recognized as an uncritical sentimentalism. A mass of ill-related, misshapen, meaningless structures prodding the air with imitation cathedral towers or Egyptian pyramids or fortress battlements could not be beautiful. Yet, as they died away and the blue mist of the harbor thickened and the myriad gold lights came out, shooting their gleam into an overtone, and the water’s murmur turned to a sheen of silver, and the whistles of the water-craft thridded the vagueness with their sharp reports, Quincy changed his mind. The City was now a ghost looming away, a thing of uncanny life, vibrant and portentous;—a thing of beauty. Quincy went back to that first visit of discovery when he had come down, thrilled with adventure, from his college and walked Brooklyn Bridge. The City then had not needed the veil of night and the garlands of the water to make it beautiful. It had not changed. He had. Was it for the better?

It was a heavy summer. Quincy declined his two weeks’ vacation, earning by this display of his heart’s emptiness, the praise of his employer. Week-ends, he spent at home. But they did not rest him. And the little copse in the rear of the house where he had once made revel, was a mockery. The willow tree through whose fingers the sun fell each day became a burden upon Quincy’s sight. It hurt him. He avoided it. He remained with his family. He bathed with them, motored with them, sat on the veranda, doing naught with them. Adelaide had never found him so pliant, so agreeable, so heart-wrenchingly sad. But it was too late to alter the course of this petty tragedy. They were side by side, needing each other, as they had always done, starving and wasting away. They had no hands to clasp each other with, no arms to hold with. But they had breasts, hearts—vainly, since their lips were silent and their words did not concord.

And so, came the fall.

There was naught very new with Quincy. He was unhappy. He was conscious that some day that unhappiness must cease. And that day would be auspicious of what already he felt mistily impending.

Meantime, however, he doubled his visits to Clarice. And Clarice was glad. She had played badly her game of straddling two mounts. Disgust for the one direction, yearning to leave it, grew. And her respect, her need of the new, old Quincy, the brave Quincy that called things by their thrillingly right names, grew also. They were intimate friends. But Quincy never forgot the philosophy that she had given him as hers—her stern determination to mark her life along pragmatic measures. He did not venture to change this; he was not sure that he really cared to. He was fond of Clarice. Encouraged, this fondness might have been easily transfigured. But although Clarice came to look on him as the one fresh part of her living, she also still persisted in the false routine of traveling the desert. So she helped him in no aggressive way to love her, to win her. And no less a way could have swerved Quincy. He had no fuel for passion. Clarice had plenty. But the old creed in her prevented her from giving it. Thus matters stood.

So far, he had been well. But with this fall, he felt an ebb in his physical reserve. He needed more sleep; he ate less food; he drowsed over his work. Often, he came to the office with limbs like lead.

In November came an early snow-storm. Quincy caught cold. He failed to shake it off as he had other colds. He drove himself each morning out of bed, with his head aching and his eyes hot. The office-manager who prized him said to him:

“Quincy—you’re not well. Business is slack. Why not take two weeks off?”

But the boy demurred. What should he do with “two weeks off”? Was not the hard régime of business his salvation, his redemption from the barrenness that parched him, bit into him, when his mind turned toward it? He grew worse. But he persevered. And the office-manager, meeting Josiah Burt one day by chance, mentioned his boy’s condition. Josiah spoke to Sarah. Quincy’s mother took a six o’clock train the following morning to New York. At seven-thirty she was in Quincy’s room. He lay there awake, in bed, parched with fever, his brain sweating with effort, looking at her.