The unwelcome man

by Waldo David Frank

Quincy walked, then, beneath this naked breast with its empurpled shreds of green. And his mind slept—slept perhaps in the same cadence wherein he had slept once, tight in a woman’s arms. And meantime, his feet beat on their way, even as had then his heart. And his lips were moist, taking in life.

Quincy was tired, so he sat on a bench. His fingers dug in the damp paint. He brought them before his eyes. They were stained slightly green. This was a jarring note. It disturbed him. It caused a separate vibrating. A tendril of his mind quivered, as if in warning that he was to begin to think. The motion projected by this faint jarring upon himself had to be absorbed. It had to be absorbed either in mind or body. If in the former, he would think; if in the latter, he would walk. He walked.

He was always in the Park. His veerings minimized the distance he had come. As he proceeded now, a tinge of questioning traversed him. He had been too close within himself to poise even an outline of his experience. Now he seemed somehow to fall apart from himself. This did not gain him vision; it did inspire a question. What was he about? Quincy’s eyes were no longer dry, and his mouth moist. The ecstasy of the night went before a shrinking sense of its strangeness. And now, his eyes were moist and his lips parched. He breathed heavily. He was, after all, only a boy, young for his years in those external sophistries men call experience. And so, fear filtered in with the chill. He walked fast. He was man enough to strive not to escape his situation but to escape the fright it brought him. He was animal enough not to entertain a mental quandary,—to go on, as his will drove him. He was child enough to blink up at the transformed heavens and find fault with them. This fear was a thing, after all, scarce distinguishable from the chill he felt through having failed to bring an overcoat. He knew this. And so, in speeding on, he found dual relief.

He went up a steep path. And then, on the brow of a promontory he came to a halt. He was in that section of the Park known as the Rambles—a maze of diverse traceries on uneven ground, upon one spur of which stands a Belvedere, curiously heroic viewed in the spirit of its purpose and environs.

Quincy faced south. A tuft of cool wind filled his eyes. This was a balm. Below him fell a rock-buttressed gulch, filled with the night. From a rustic bridge that spanned it, softly separate from the air, he could see a black opening in purple haze—a cavern. Water dripped luridly on the rock. The coarse, trim shrubs behind him seemed the flourish of a filigree mocking the romantic mood before him. From the south came a cold glow, the upshot of myriad downtown lights swelling like an aureole above the sunken Park. And beneath this, against the mass of trees, gleamed the City’s fires, fitful and fantastic, some set in rigid form, some straggled, some leading deep, some flaming forth.

The boy found a bench. Now he faced west. Manhattan’s murmur came on him. A shiver seemed to rise from the far-spun houses. Here was more regularity—a frigid diapason of lights, serried, unfriendly, looming. And spaced upon it, deep cuts of black, the gloomy westward streets—one of which was his! Quincy cupped his chin in his hands and gazed. A tiny thread of train swept between two darknesses on far Columbus Avenue.

And then the hollow tread of feet below him on the walk. Quincy straightened up. There was a musical note in their pad. They were leisurely. There was a long mounting of suspense. At last, over the brow, was a man.

He was tall and thin. A derby hat that seemed too small for him disclosed a height of forehead. He walked on, his head turned westward. He had but glimpsed the figure on the bench. And as he spoke now, he did not face the boy.

“A splendid night!” The man’s remark, for some reason, had a ring far deeper than the banal usage of his words.

“New York’s at her best, when she’s bathed in a blue gloom. Ever notice that?—Blue’s her color.”