The Unwelcome Man

It threatened a Christmas of wet winds and heavy moods. The air was sluggish. Winter had died to a tepid dampness. Snowdrifts were mire; and where had been clear skies was now a dull and lowering shroud. It was as if, at its last effort, the year had lost heart and purpose. There was a note of spiritual sagging in this turn from the exuberance of cold to a siege of muddy rivulets and stagnant vapors and grey trees. The brilliant storm that had swept the country white was now a scourge of swamp upon the land-side. And through the minor harmony of dripping leafage and fulsome roads and drench-stained houses came a fret of chill, too slight to retrieve the season from its languor, yet real enough to stultify the warmth. This was the setting of Quincy's birth. In from Main Street and away from the salt air that fluttered toward it like a curtain's fringe, a paltry, sordid stretch of lights; a road much rutted by last summer's traffic; a straggling array of shops, saloons, dim and bedraggled with the rainthe heart of Harriet, Long Island. And then, a narrow street, loomed over by great oaks and screening cedars alien in this regardless majesty of Nature to the pot-like, worried houses that lay back in it, making their presence known with faint streaks of lights that fretted the calm gloom like human breath in a black dungeon. Beyond, scarce glimpsed, a rising motley of blue snow and rock,a meadow. And just before this termination, where a sharp street-lamp ceased to blink against the vapors and the trees stopped,the House. Irregular flagstones as a path to it through oozing sod that would be unkempt grass in June. A leak of orange lamp-light through the porch; another, faint from the upper story; a stocky shadow of façade, thrust in the more minor darkness.

Dettagli