The unwelcome man

by Waldo David Frank

“Farrel!”

The man turned his head. The look in his eye was grey and filmed and sluggish like the thread of smoke. The mind was gone.

“Where’s mother, Farrel?”

“I don’t know. I left her shopping.”

Farrel rustled his pink paper ostentatiously. Then, folding it, he slapped it into a receptive shape with his bulky hand and plunged to a new page of screaming nullities. He had forgotten Quincy. He was piqued at having to remain there, he knew not how long. He wished to go home to his wife. He had learned that the Burts were very careless about discharging him at the end of a day’s long work. He was not minded to be polite to Quincy. For Quincy was a Burt, so that he resented him; yet an insignificant Burt, so that he could show it.

Quincy turned toward the house.

It was evening. A gentle, blue haze was on the street. The lights came out suddenly, in periodic spurts, as if separate from the mist that lulled about them. There was in the air a languid note, such as may follow a siege of fever. The traffic pounded heavily by, as if in token of its weary passengers. And now, Quincy looked toward the house.

What he saw there drove his hands cup-like to his head. A flash of fire shot through his mind. Then, motively, he connected his sensations. On his head was a cap. The great red door was shut. Something within Quincy had worked deliberately through his body, yet told his consciousness no word. Still it worked; still Quincy bowed to it, unknowing. His hands fell from their momentary, cup-like grasp. They clenched at his side. And then, rhythmically, he struck out in the direction of Central Park.

The electric light over Farrel’s head threw a concentrated glow of yellow on his page. A car on the Avenue crashed past, wheels groaning, bell a-jangle. Then, Quincy crossed. With huddled shoulder he mounted the sloping asphalt whose lights shot shadows of black and floods of blue against its marge of trees. A distant symphony of whistles and of fog-horns rose dimly from the Hudson over his back. Beyond him, the Park traced out its purple monotone, flecked with the cut of lights.

People were walking here. Their foot-fall was like a noise heard in a dream and doubted. Their words were like the impact of water falling on stone. Their forms were comets flashing from nowhere into nowhere through a sombre and thick infinitude. They left a wake of drab. They were innumerable. And the sum of all their wakes made almost an atmosphere. This cloyed and choked and somehow had a sneer in it. So Quincy walked fast. And as he did so, the forms blocked in upon the flow of being with less frequence, less consistency. The Park itself had become the undertone. The curving of the paths gave to his motion a tonality. The bushes lay deep in their beds of grass. Above was a lacing of trees, a shameless cover for the naked night. For so the trees seemed to Quincy. The bright sky that shone through and above them was like the hot skin of some empassioned creature—a thing consumed in sex. And the short trees and ruffled bushes that lay before it were like shreds of lace on a vast nudity. They pricked it, they heightened it; even they adorned it. They did not hide it. And somehow, it was suggested to Quincy that they meant to hide it. Quincy’s lips were parted as he walked. And there was moisture on them. Also, there was a veil of dryness on his eyes. And the sky reclined before him like a woman’s breast—like Rhoda’s. Its slope was infinitely slight, delicate yet vast. He recalled the time when he had seen his sister. So he knew! And knowing, so he enjoyed. But in this overwhelming symbol entered more than that experience of sight. This mighty, pulsing sweep of sky gave him a glow, half-memory and half-eternal. For what are instincts but unconscious recollections? So, perhaps, it was natural that of a sudden, his mother came to him, stayed there, pervaded him; and in the spreading grew so vague that his mind caught no glimpse of her.