The unwelcome man

by Waldo David Frank

Just then, a man came up and placed his hand on the Professor’s shoulder.

“I’ve been all through the train, looking for you, Deering,” he said. “Didn’t you know we had an extra seat for you in the Pullman? Will you come?”

The Professor smiled as a man does who is found out, once again, in an old foible. Then, he turned politely to his neighbor.

“If you’ll excuse me, Mr. Burt?”

Quincy wished to speak graciously. “Thank you,” he said, with what seemed irrelevance.

The big man nodded seriously—embarrassed at such embarrassment.

He gathered up his coat and his portfolio and trudged away, supporting himself with his massive hands down the corridor of the swinging train.

The time that remained—though the long part of the journey—was brief to Quincy. He now had his seat to himself—and he was doubly glad. For he could have thought of no substitute for Professor Deering who would not have been sacrilege.

What an amazing adventure this had been! Quincy had found strange opinions in books; but to meet them vitally, poignantly in life, to hear them imparted, not to the world, but to him, and to him, not as the humble listener he would willingly have been, but as the equal, the critic, the fellow-thinker! In these things that had actually come to pass should have lain almost ecstasy to Quincy. Yet, he was bewildered at not being more bewildered by them. He could not understand how he was managing, in their light, to contain himself. For it dawned on him that he was taking all these wonders quite calmly, almost as matters-of-course; as if their like had occurred even in fancy, many times before. It seemed they should have dazzled him, flung him into some land where such things belong. And instead, here he was solidly in his seat, while the train rushed on, in full possession of his nature, sturdily, serenely eased with life.

Quincy found himself watching the shoulders, the necks, the heads of two young men who were several seats in front of him. From the tilt of their hats, the cool assurance of their nods, he knew them as upperclassmen. They fascinated him, somehow. They seemed very remote from Professor Deering. They seemed more the expected thing. And always, the expected thing tended to unnerve him, even as the sudden flash of wonder gave him a grip on the realities.