On the Stairs Part 11

Prepotent Johnny! No doubt it was a drain on vitality to live abreast of such a man, to keep step with his robustious stride.

On the forenoon of the day we left, Johnny was walking with Gertrude and her mother along the accepted promenade. His excess of vitality and of action gave him an air of gallantry not altogether pleasing to see. His wife sat at her window, looking down and waving her hand rather languidly. The Johnny of her belief had come, in part, a.s.suredly, for a bit of enjoyment. She smiled unconcernedly.

III

Raymond waited back home for Albert, and Albert did not return. We gathered from a newspaper published near the sh.o.r.es of Narragansett Bay that Albert, as his mother's triumphant possession, was now being shown at another resort--and a more important one, judging by his grandmother's social affiliations; also, that Mrs. McComas, who had not done any too well on the Jersey sh.o.r.e, was appearing at the new _plage_--doubtless as the just and sympathetic friend (of social prominence in her own community) who had stood stanch through difficulties unjustly endured. Her husband himself had, of course, returned to the West.

His business called him, even in mid-summer. He had his bank, but he had more than his bank. There are banks and banks--you can divide them up in several different ways. There are, of course,--as we have seen,--the banks that fail, and the banks that do not. And there are the banks that exist as an end in themselves, and the banks that exist as a means to other things: those that function along methodically, without taking on any extraneous features; and those that serve as a nucleus for acc.u.mulating interests, as a fulcrum to move affairs through a wide and varied range. Of this kind was McComas's. Johnny was not the man to stand still and let routine take its way--not the man to mark time, even through the vacation season. Nor could he have done so even if he had wanted to. But all I need say, just here, is that he came back home again after three or four days, all told, and that any threatened embara.s.sment was nullified, or at least postponed.

Raymond heard in silence my account of the doings on the Atlantic sh.o.r.e: only a wry twist of the mouth and a flare of the nostrils. But as the weeks went on, and still no Albert, his anger became articulate.

"I shall teach her that an agreement is an agreement," he declared. "She will never try this again."

Albert finally came home, three weeks late; his mother brought him herself. The governess transferred him from the hands of one parent to those of the other; and Raymond had asked my presence for that moment, as a sort of moral urge.

"Who knows," he asked, "what delay she may try for next?"

He gave one look at the picturesque, if not fantastic, toggery of his restored child.

"Did you ever see anything like that?" he said scornfully; and I foresaw a sacrificial bonfire--or its equivalent--with Albert presently clothed in sane autumn garb.

Albert was followed, within a week, by a letter from his mother. This was diffuse and circ.u.mlocutory, like the first. But its general sense was clear. If Raymond was thinking of putting Albert into a boarding-school....

"There she goes again!" exclaimed the exacerbated father. "A matter with which, by hard-and-fast agreement, she has absolutely nothing to do!"

However, if he was thinking of a boarding-school....

"A child barely seven!" cried Raymond. "Why, half of them will hardly consider one of eight!"

Still, if he was thinking--well, Mrs. McComas knew of a charming one, an old-established one, one in which the head-master's wife, a delightful, motherly soul.... And it was just within the Wisconsin line, not forty miles from town....

"I see her camping at the gate!" said Raymond bitterly. "Or taking a house there. Or spending months at a hotel near by. Constantly fussing round the edge of things. Running in on every visitors' day...."

"Likely enough," I said. "A mother's a mother."

"Well," rejoined Raymond, "the boy _shall_ go to school--in another year. But the school will be a good deal more than forty miles from here--no continual week-end trips. And it will not be in a town that has an endurable hotel--that ought to be easy to arrange, in this part of the world. No, it won't be near any town at all. I don't suppose she would take a--tent?" he queried sardonically.

"To some mothers the blue tent of heaven would alone suffice," I said--perhaps unworthily.

"Rubbis.h.!.+" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed; and I felt that a word fitly spoken--or perhaps unfittingly--was rebuked.

IV

In due season, Albert went off to school, according to his father's plans; and it was not the school which Adele McComas had hoped to see Albert enter a little before her own boys should leave it. Raymond, after another year of daily attentions to Albert's small daily concerns, was glad to have him away. He did not see his boy's mother a frequent visitor at this school, nor did he purpose being a frequent visitor himself. The establishment was approved, well-recommended: let it do its work unaided, unhindered.

No, Adele McComas never saw Albert at the school of her predilection; indeed, it was not long after the choice had been made that she lost all opportunity of seeing anything at all. She withered out, like a high-colored, hardy-seeming flower that belies all promise, and died when her little girl was months short of four.

Her name was on the new monument within six weeks. It was the third name. That of Johnny's father had lately been placed above that of his mother, and that of his wife was now clearly legible upon the opposite side of the shaft's base. Some of Johnny's friends saw in this prompt.i.tude a high mark of respect and affection; others felt a haste, almost undue, to turn the new erection into a bulletin of "actualities"; and a few surmised that had the work not been done with prompt.i.tude it might have come to be done in a leisurely fas.h.i.+on that spelled neglect: if it were to be done, 't were well it were done quickly--a formal token of regard checked off and disposed of.

During Albert's first year at his school his mother made two or three appearances. She was exigent, and she showed herself to the school authorities as fertile in blandishments. The last of her visits was made in a high-powered touring-car. Raymond heard of this, and warned the school head against a possible attempt at abduction.

The second year opened more quietly. One visit--a visit without eagerness and obviously lacking in any fell intent, and that was all.

It was fair to surmise that this once-urgent, once-vehement mother had developed a newer and more compelling interest.

She had made herself a figure at Adele McComas's funeral--or, at least, others had made her a figure at it. She began to be seen here and there in the company of the widower, and it was reported privately to me that she had been perceived standing side by side with him in decorous contemplation, as it were in a sort of transient, elegiac revery _a deux_, before the monument. It was no surprise, therefore, when we heard, two months later, that they had married.

"That stable-boy!" said Raymond. "After--me!"

The expression was strong, and I did not care to a.s.sent.

Instead, I began:--

"And now, whatever may or may not have been, everything is--"

"Everything is right, at last!" he concluded for me.

"And if they--those two--are put in the right," he went on, "I suppose I am put in the wrong--and more in the wrong than ever!"

He stared forward, across his littered table, beyond his bookcases, through his thick-lensed gla.s.ses, as if confronting the stiffening legend of a husband too old, too dry, too unpliable; the victim, finally, of a sudden turn that was peculiarly malapropos and disrelis.h.i.+ng, the head of a household tricked rather ridiculously before the world.

Reserve now began to grow on him. He simplified relations.h.i.+ps and saw fewer people. Before these, and before the many at a greater remove, he would maintain a cautious dignity as a detached and individual human creature, as a man,--however much, in the world's eyes, he might have seemed to fail as a husband.

V

John W. McComas, at forty-five, was in apogee. His bank, as I have said, was coming to be more than a mere bank; it was now the focus of many miscellaneous enterprises. Several of these were industrial companies; prospectuses bearing his name and that of his inst.i.tution constantly came my way. Some of these undertakings were novel and daring, but most of them went through; and he was more likely to use his a.s.sociates than they were to use him. As I have said, he possessed but two interests in the world: his business--now his businesses--and his family; and he concentrated on both. It might be said that he insisted on the most which each would yield.

He concentrated on his new domestic life with peculiar intensity. His boys were away at a preparatory school and were looking forward to college. He centred on his daughter, a future hope, and on his wife, a present reality and triumph. Over her, in particular, he bent like a flame, a bright flame that dazzled and did not yet sear. He was able, by this time, to coalesce with the general tradition in which she had been brought up--or at least with the newer tradition to which she had adjusted herself; and he was able to bring to bear a personal power the application of which she had never experienced. She found herself handled with decision. She almost liked it--at least it simplified some teasing problems. He employed a direct, bluff, hearty kindness; but strength underlay the kindness, and came first--came uppermost--if occasion seriously required. Life with Raymond had been a laxative, when not an irritant; life with Johnny McComas became a tonic. She had felt somewhat loose and demoralized; now she felt braced.

Johnny was rich, and was getting richer yet. He was richer, much, than he had been but a few years before; richer than Raymond Prince, whose worldly fortunes seemed rather to dip. Johnny could give his wife whatever she fancied; when she hesitated, things were urged upon her, forced upon her. She, in her turn, was now a delegate of luxury. He approved--and insisted upon--a showy, emphatic way of life, and a more than liberal scale of expenditure. He wanted to show the world what he could do for a fine woman; and I believe he wanted to show Raymond Prince.

Gossip had long since faded away to nothingness. If anybody had wondered at Johnny's course--a course that had run through possible dubiousness to hard-and-fast finality--the wonder was now inaudible. If anybody felt in him a lack of fastidiousness, the point was not pressed. The marriage seemed a happy solution, on the whole; and the people most concerned--those who met the new pair--appeared to feel that a problem was off the board and glad to have it so.

Raymond, on the eve of the marriage, had softened things for himself by leaving for a few months in Rome. Back, he began to cast about for some means of occupation and some way of making a careful a.s.sertion of his dignity. At this time "society" was beginning to sail more noticeably about the edge of the arts, and an important coterie was feeling that something might well be done to lift the drama from its state of degradation. Why not build--or remodel--a theatre, they asked, form a stock company, compose a repertory, and see together a series of such performances as might be viewed without a total departure from taste and intelligence?

The experiment ran its own quaint course. The remodeling of the hall chosen introduced the sponsors of the movement to the fire-laws and resulted in a vast, unlooked-for expense. A good company--though less stress was laid on its roster than on the list of guarantors--went astray in the hands of a succession of directors, not always competent.

The subscribers refused to occupy their boxes more than one night a week, and, later on, not even that: the s.p.a.ce was filled for a while with servitors and domestic dependents, and presently by n.o.body....

Raymond went into the enterprise. He put in a goodly sum of money that never came back to him; and if he cooperated but indifferently, or worse, he was not more inept than some of his a.s.sociates. He was displeased to learn that the McComases had given enough to the guarantee-fund to insure them a box. And it offended him that, on the opening night, his former wife, one of a large and a.s.sertive party, should make her voice heard during intermissions (and at some other times too) quite across the small auditorium. The situation was generally felt to be piquant, and at the end of the performance people in the lobby were amused (save the few who had the affair greatly at heart) to hear Johnny McComas's comment on the play. It was a far-fetched problem-play from the German, and Raymond had been one of those who favored it for an opening.

"Did you ever see such a play in your life?" queried Johnny. "What was it all about? And wasn't _he_ the fool!"

McComas--really caring nothing for the evening's entertainment either way--could easily afford a large amount for social prestige, and his wife for general social consolidation. It was little to Johnny that his thousands went up in exacting systems of ventilation and in salaries for an expensive staff; but it was awkward for Raymond to lose a sum which, while absolutely less, was relatively much greater. After a few months the scheme was dropped; the expensive installation went to the advantage of a vaudeville manager; Raymond felt poorer, even slightly crippled, and the voice of the present Mrs. Johnny McComas ran till the end across that tiny _salle_.

This, I am glad to say, was the last of Raymond's endeavors to patronize the arts.