Clenching his fists, humming a tune that has in it the fever of true inspiration, he stumbles toward his goal. The creak of his little feet affrights him; the dull glare of the hall lamp, swept low an instant by some occult draught, the deep-breathing shadow of the rooms he passes—everything conjoins in a stifled symphony of shock and fear.
He reaches his attic. The door is shut. With a dexterity that he cannot understand, he opens. It is as if he were being driven in by the fantasies that press on behind, about, and threaten to attain him. All of the dimensionless way, he has felt them, creeping and clinging at his back.
And now the door’s healthy slam has shut them out. A lamp is burning. Almost gaily, he watches the comb of its yellow flame spurting and receding. For the ordeal is over. And in his joy at this, he has no thought or fear of the morrow.
VI
A prospector in Wyoming and a Directors’ Board on the fifteenth floor of a great office-building in Chicago, brought by the benign twinkle of a star into an angle of conjunction, marked out an event in Harriet, Long Island. It was with the haphazard veer, the cold fatality of a compass. First, came the discovery of rich veins of metal on Josiah’s land and then, scarce with a breathing space, the plan of a railroad that gives currency to wealth in the great West, to nose its way through canyon and frozen lake into that very valley. No more than these two rods of fate were needed to mark fate’s point in Harriet, Long Island.
The first twenty-thousand dollars went to the prospector. Had he placed a claim or made contest to one-tenth of that amount, he would have found an antagonist in Josiah Burt. As it was, he remained silent and found a benefactor. The new magnate prepared to move his family to New York.
For Quincy, who was eleven, this trick of life had its own color and dimension.
It was a balmy day in early spring. He and Jonas had been across country on a jaunt, looking for rabbits. The elder boy had led his brother a breathless pace, with which Quincy only by sheer, desperate will managed to keep up. They had gone inland where a thick wood of birch and firs seemed to rise abrupt from the broad waste of sand-ground and dwarfed shrubs. Quincy’s going at all had been a matter of tolerance on the part of Jonas. In order to drive home this detail, significant as it was to a man of sixteen, Jonas struck a gait that was severe even for him and ignored his brother as best he could. He was resolved, if they should meet any of the “fellows” or, worse still, any of the “girls,” that they should read the truth of his sublime forbearance in the rapidity of his walk and the fixed, impersonal air on his face. But Jonas loved the sport of a cross-country run. And as they sallied on, leaping over brambled rock and pattering stream, enough of the open’s generosity of spirit entered his soul to make him half admire the little fellow that labored doggedly on, beside him.
They did not see any rabbits. But they found a carpet of myrtle and some half-ripe strawberries which they consumed with gusto. Their chief discovery, however, was a beaver’s dam. The stream widened sluggishly beneath an almost veiling margin of thick bushes—aspen and willow and oak. The leafage, turned silver and deep blue in the sun, lay over the strolling water. Perhaps, Quincy’s chief delight in this unearthing was the chance it gave him to get back his breath. But he feigned well a more direct enthusiasm—no hard thing. And then, facing about, they trudged home at a more comfortable gait. For Jonas was appeased, soaked through, perhaps, with the gentle afflatus of the woods before the tread of evening.
As they entered the little stone path that led in from the street, Quincy observed his father standing on the porch and looking down toward them. It was early for him to be at home. They were still twenty steps away, when the man spoke. He was addressing Jonas.