Too disconsolate to demur long, the boy agreed to accompany his mother to Atlantic City.
Thanksgiving time. A vast sea, flashing in the sun. A golden beach standing upon the sea. A squadron of miserable shops and huge hotels, loudly awry in line and decoration, standing upon the beach. A number of garish piers, muddy, shapeless, plastered with advertisements, reaching over the purled waters like the fingers of a lecherous man upon a woman’s breast.
From the far corner of the pier Quincy could sit and hold the ocean in his soul. If he turned, the city sprawled out before him, defiling the sun that shone on it. Innumerable little creatures crawled upon the gleaming board-walk, a black line spotted with the blare of women’s colors. Also, on the beach they pranced like sand-fleas, or rode horses that caught the sun’s spark on their flanks along the combers.
But to turn was not necessary. He sat there, his mother chattering beside him, and essayed not to listen. For hours he would sit and watch the symphony of light within the waves, for hours play at the game of trying to tell the water’s colors. If only his mother had had less to ask him! How he longed for a more humble mother, one to respect his silence, to be mute before his ecstasy. How he would have cherished such a one! But she who was there meant just as well, albeit her deed was different. He must endeavor to bear this in mind.
Sarah’s chief theme was scolding him because he had allowed himself to sicken; and, granting that, because he had not at once called on her. There were many variations—rather similar—to this. But at times, the plethora of words would cease, and then, despite the ugly charm she could cast on him when he silenced her, with her injured mien, the sea came up and spoke to him.
“How wondrous this beach would be,” he cried—a flash of his old self, “if only there were no hotels, no piers, no board-walk!”
“Nonsense!” Sarah, like all good Americans, felt personally hurt at the suggestion that her race had not improved on Nature’s America. “Where could you sleep?—or have your chair rolled?”
There were too many people about; there was too much of this fond mother, who knew so well about Quincy’s body, so little of Quincy’s soul. At least, on these, Quincy blamed the failure of his ironic journey. The passionate sea had beckoned so beautifully to him—to him that once might have known its accent.
He stood alone on the longest pier; his mother left at the hotel. His eyes went out to the horizon and his ears met the plash of the cool, deep waves against the slimed concrete posts. It seemed to him that he must jump—and die. It was a real impulse—one to be squarely met.
No! There was enjoyment in this coolth, hope in the waves’ music, health in the easy, limbered kiss of the sky and the water. The waves slumbered in their bronze rings, topped with sapphire. Beyond was a streak of opal—about a mass of murmurous emerald slaked with fire. How unutterably beautiful was this! He did not wish to be below the waves. It could not be so beautiful when one failed to catch the changes of the sun on the waves’ surfaces. He thought of life. Were its beauties also the sun’s and the sky’s gleam on it? Was it also an opaque mass—smothering, colorless, eyeless—below its surface? The ocean was dead without the wind and the air, the elemental fires and their tides. It was really separate from these. Was this true of life? Was this true of him?