On the Stairs Part 7

"Might move them to another bedroom, farther away?" I suggested. The house seemed big enough for such an arrangement.

"Don't want to," declared Johnny. He began pulling at his pipe again, and there was a little silence during which I might meditate on the curt n.o.bility of his remark.

The fact was, of course, that Johnny loved life; he embraced it with gusto, with both arms outspread. No sidestepping its advances; no dodging its sharp angles; no feeble mitigating of a situation for which he was himself responsible; no paltry deadening of domestic uproar merely because he himself happened to be within the domestic environment. "If Adele stands it, I will too--they're mine as well as hers,"--such I conceive to have been his att.i.tude. Johnny had no nerves, and only a minimum of sensibility. The sound-waves broke on his sensorium as ripples break on a granite coast. Perhaps they pleased him; perhaps they even soothed him. Why, bless you! these children were _his_! They were facts as great and as unescapable as the ebb and flow of the tides, as dawn and twilight, as the morning and evening stars.

And the evening stars were singing together. Great may have been the jubilation for Johnny's ears, boundless the content in Johnny's heart.

I really think that Johnny felt through the din some of the exhilaration that often came to him with a good brisk sc.r.a.p in his office--or in the other man's office. In fact, home and business were Johnny's two sources of interest and pleasure--the warp and woof of his life--and he was determined on getting the utmost out of each. His interest in his home circle may somewhat have declined--or at least have moderated--with advancing years, but it was incandescent now. His interest in the outside world--that oyster-bin awaiting his knife--never slackened, not even when the futility of piling up the empty sh.e.l.ls became daylight-clear, and when higher things strove perseveringly, even unmistakably, to beckon him on. Never, in fact, throughout his life did he exhibit more than two essential concerns: one for his family and clan; and one for the great outside ma.s.s of mediocre individuals through whose inept.i.tudes he justly expected to profit.

Well, the door of the den remained open, and our talk went on to the rising and falling of infant voices. At last, thinking that my good-bye must be to Johnny only, I rose to go. You might reasonably ask for a clearer impression of his home and a more definite account of his wife.

But what can I say when the primary address was so disconcertingly to the ear? Of his wife--who came down, during a lull, at the last moment--I can only say that she seemed too _empressee_ at the beginning and too casual at the end. Perhaps she had decided that, after all, I was no more than I myself claimed to be. Perhaps the infant hurricane was still ruffling the surface of her mind, or even disturbing its depths.

"I won't ask you to call again," she said, as we shook hands for a good-night: "we shall be moving in the spring." She spoke with a satisfied air of self-recognized _finesse_, and as in the confident hope of completing very promptly some well-planned little programme; but--

"Visit us there," said Johnny, with a quick cordiality which prevented his wife from redeeming herself.

"There" had been the chief topic in the den. Many neighborhoods had been brought forward, with their attendant advantages and disadvantages.

Johnny told me what he thought, and let me say what I thought. When I listened, it was as a man who might soon have a similar problem to consider. When I spoke it was to utter ba.n.a.lities sedately; any neighborhood might do, I said, that had good air; yes, and good schools--looking toward the future. And any house, I felt, would serve, if it had a nursery that was sealed, sound proof, remote....

"Well, best luck in your search for your roof-tree," I said earnestly to them both.

"'Roof-tree'!" echoed Johnny. And, in fact, my observation did seem rather artificial and insincere.

II

By the time Raymond reached home, Johnny McComas had turned his informal suburban enterprise into a "state" bank, with his father-in-law as president and himself as cas.h.i.+er. The father-in-law lent his name and furnished most of the capital; Johnny himself provided the driving power. And by the time Raymond had become, through his father's death, the head of the family and the controller of the family funds, Johnny had turned his state bank into a national bank, with its offices in the city and with himself as president; and he had bought--at a bargain--a satisfactory house on the edge of the neighborhood where we first met him. The street was marked for business advance more promptly and more unmistakably than the precise quarter of the Princes. It would do as a home for a few years. The transaction appealed both to McComas's thrift and his pride. The coming of his new little bank, with its modest capital, made no particular stir in the "street"; and the great group of houses to the eastward were so apprehensive of open outrage, in one form or another, that his approach, in a guise still social, provoked but scant concern.

James Prince died when Raymond was about thirty. A careful, plodding man who had never brought any direct difficulties upon himself, but who had been worried--and worried out--through troubles left him by others. On the whole, he had found life an unrewarding thing; and he pa.s.sed along, at fifty-five, with no great regrets. The tangle of family affairs had finally been straightened out in considerable measure, though Raymond found enough detail still left to make him realize what a five years his father had pa.s.sed through; and when, the year following, his mother died, with the settlement of her estate almost overlapping the settlement of his father's, he acquired a new sense of the grinding, taxing possibilities of business. I speak from his own viewpoint; he was susceptible--unduly, abnormally so--to the grind and the tax. After a few months of clammy old Brand and his methods, he suddenly cut loose from him (without waiting for him to die, as he did a little later); and he told me that I was the man to wind up these tedious affairs. They were not nearly so difficult and complicated as they seemed to him--they were now largely routine matters, in fact; and I hope I carried things along at a tempo which satisfied him. This is not to deny that Raymond seemed to have days when he found even me dilatory and exasperating; but old Brand would probably have driven him mad.

Well, the prospects of his estate were not too brilliant. The lawsuits had been expensive and sometimes unsuccessful; the bank had pa.s.sed a dividend, and the old houses, which had meant a lot of money in their day, meant less now and even loss in a near future. The time was fast coming when this circ.u.mscribed and unprotected neighborhood was to admit other--and prejudicial--interests: boarding-houses, of course; and refined homes for inebriates; and correspondence-schools for engineers; and one of the Prince houses became eventually the seat of a publis.h.i.+ng-firm which needed a little distinction more than it needed a wide spread of gla.s.s close to the sidewalk.

Whatever the state of Raymond's fortunes, it was easy to see that they were not likely to improve in his hands. He detested business, both _en gros_ and _en detail_. Despite his ancestry, he seemed to have been born with no faculty for money-making, and he never tried to make up his deficiency. It was all of a piece with the stone-throwing of his boyhood days--he never attempted to improve himself: it was enough to follow the gifts with which he had been natively endowed. Precept, example, opportunity--all these went for naught. To the end of his days he viewed the American "business man" as a portentous and inexplicable phenomenon--one to be regarded with distaste and wonder. He persisted in thinking of the type as a juvenile one--an energetic and clever boy, who was immensely active and immensely productive of results (in an immensely limited field), but who was incapable of anything like an _apercu_ or a _Weltanschauung_ (oh, he had plenty of words for it!), and who was essentially booked to lose much more than he gained. He disliked "offices" and abominated "hours." I think that even my own modest professional applications sometimes became a puzzle to him....

And here I stand--convicted of having perpetrated another section without one short paragraph and without a single line of conversation.

Let me hasten to bring Raymond to my suite and my desk-side, and make him speak.

He came down one morning, as administrator of his mother's estate, to consider the appraisal of the personal property--many familiar items, and some discouraging ones.

"Do you _have_ to do this?" he asked me, with the paper in his hand. "Do you _like_ to do it?"

"The world's work," I rejoined temperately. "It's got to be done."

"H'm!" he returned. "The world's a varied place. And its work is varied too. This blessed town must be taught that."

Was he girding himself to be one of its teachers?

From that time on I resolved to take him patiently and good-humoredly: a friend must bear a friend's infirmities.

III

I did not know, with precision, what phases of the world's work were engaging Raymond's attention. I suppose he was adventuring, rather vaguely, among the "liberal arts," though he probably saw, by this time, that a full professional exercise of any of them was beyond his reach.

He was heard of as writing short essays and reviews for one or two genteel publications, as making water-color tours through the none too alluring suburbs, as composing minor pieces for a little musical society which he had joined and which he wished to advance, and so on.

Acquaintances reported him at architectural exhibits and at book-auctions--occasions neither numerous nor important. He lived on alone in his father's house--expensively; too expensively, of course, for it was an exacting place to keep up.

He was coming to be known in a small circle--but an influential one--as a young man of wealth, culture, and good-will. But his wealth was less than supposed, his culture was self-centred, and his good-will was neither broad nor zealous.

However, the new day was coming when he could be turned to account--or when, at least, people made the attempt.

This, however, does not mean philanthropy. That was barely dawning as a social necessity. The few who were supporting charitable inst.i.tutions and were working in the recently evolved slums were neither conspicuous nor fas.h.i.+onable. Nor does it mean political betterment. No efforts had yet been successful in subst.i.tuting for the city's executive incubus a man of worthier type, nor was there yet any effective organization founded on the a.s.sumption--which would have seemed remote and fantastic indeed--that a city council could be improved. Parlor lectures on civics were of course still farther in the future. Poor government was simply a permanent disability, like weather, or lameness, or the fas.h.i.+ons; folk must get along as best they could in spite of it. The town remained a chaos of maladministration and of non-administration; but when the decencies are, for the time being, despaired of, one may still try for the luxuries. So the city girded itself for a great festival; the nation approved and cooperated, and a vast congeries of white palaces began to rise on our far edge.

The detailed execution of this immense undertaking was largely local, of course. Though the work was initiated by older heads (some of them were too old and were dropped), there were places on the innumerable committees for younger ones--for men in their early thirties; their vigor, enthusiasm, and even initiative (within understood limits) would greatly further the cause. There were (among others) committees on entertainment to engage the services of young men of position, leisure, and social experience. There were many foreign dignitaries to be received and guided; there must be lively and presentable youths to help manoeuvre them. Raymond, who was supposed to have mingled in European society (instead of having viewed it from afar, in detachment), was asked to serve in this field.

There were equally good opportunities for brisk, aggressive young men on finance committees and such-like bodies, wherein prominent s.e.xagenarians did the heavily ornamental and allowed good scope for younger men who had begun to get a record and who wished to confirm ability in influential eyes. This opened a road for John W. McComas, who made a record, indeed, in the matter of gathering local subscriptions. He dented the consciousness of several important men in his own field, and got praised in the press for his indefatigability and his powers of persuasion. Before the six months of festivity were half over, our Johnny had become a "prominent citizen" and his new bank almost a household word.

Raymond did less well. The great organization was an executive hierarchy: ranks and rows of officials, with due heed not only to coordination but to subordination. Some men do their best under such conditions; others, their worst. Raymond, a strong individualist, a p.r.o.nounced egoist, could not "fall in." Even in his simple field--one concerned chiefly with but the outward flourishes--the big machine irked and embarra.s.sed him. He withdrew. When an imperial prince was publicly "received," with ceremonies that mingled old-world formalities (however lamely followed) and local inspirations (however poorly disciplined), the moving event went off with no help of his: I believe he even smiled at it all from a balcony.

It was here that Raymond began to make clear his true type. He was Goethe's "bad citizen"--the man who is unable to command and unwilling to obey.

After a particularly flamboyant appreciation of McComas's services in a Sunday newspaper, I ventured to touch on our Johnny's rise in Raymond's hearing. The two had not met for years; and Johnny had probably no greater place in Raymond's mind than Raymond, as I remembered once finding, had in Johnny's. But Raymond did not yet pretend to overlook or to forget or to ignore him; nor did he yet allow himself to mention Johnny as a one-time dweller in his father's stable.

"Why, yes," said Raymond; "he seems to be coming on fast. Climbing like anything."

This, I felt, was disapproval, slightly tinctured with contempt. But there are two kinds of progress on a ladder or a stairway. There is the climbing up, and there is (as we sometimes let ourselves say) the climbing down.

It was at the imperial reception that Raymond and Johnny finally met.

Let us figure Raymond as descending from his satirical balcony, and Johnny, with his wife, as earnestly working his way up the great stairway--the _scalone_, as Italy had taught Raymond to call it. This was an ample affair with an elaborate handrail, whose function was nullified by potted plants, and with a commodious landing, whose corners contained many thickset palms. A crowd swarmed up; a crowd swarmed down; the hundreds were congested among the palms. Johnny, with his wife on his arm, was robust and hearty, and smiled on things in general as he fought their way up. He took the occasion as he took any other occasion: much for granted, but with a certain air of richly belonging and of worthily fitting in. His wife--"I suppose it was his wife," said Raymond--was elaborately gowned and in high feather: a successful delegate of luxury. Obviously an occasion of this sort was precisely what she had long been waiting for. Despite the press about her, she made her costume and her carriage tell for all they might. A triumphing couple, even Raymond was obliged to concede. The acme of team work....

"There we were--stuck in the crowd," said Raymond, whose one desire seemed to have been to gain the street. "Not too close, fortunately. I had to bow, but I didn't have to speak; and I didn't have to be 'presented.' He gave me quite a nod."

And no great exercise of imagination was required for me to see how distant and reserved was Raymond's bow in return.

IV

That autumn, after the festal flags had ceased their flaunting and fire had made a wide sweep over the white palaces, Raymond suddenly went abroad. It was to be a stay of three or four months. He first wrote me from Paris.

He wrote again in December, also from Paris, and told me _tout court_ that he was engaged to be married. I give this news to you as suddenly as he gave it to me.

You can supply motives as easily as I. His parents were gone and his family life was _nil_. The old house was large and lonely. You may believe him influenced, if you like, by his last view of Johnny McComas and by Johnny's amazing effect of completeness and content. You may fancy him as visited by compunctions and mortifications due to his consciousness of his own futility. Or you may fall back upon the simple and general promptings that are smoothly current in the minds of us all.

My own notion, however, is this: he never would have married at home; only an insidious whiff of romance, encountered in France or Italy, could have accomplished his undoing.

Raymond's own advices were meagre. "Your emotional partic.i.p.ation not particularly desired"--such seemed to be the message that lay invisible between his few lines. But other correspondents supplied the _lacunae_.

He was to marry a girl whose family formed part of the American colony in the French capital. At least, the feminine members of the family were there: the mother, and an elder sister. The father, according to a custom that still provoked Gallic comment, was elsewhere: he was following the markets in America. The bride-to-be was between nineteen and twenty. Raymond himself was thirty-three.

He advised me, later, that the wedding would take place at the end of February and requested me to obtain and forward some of the quaint doc.u.ments demanded at such a juncture by the French authorities. He added that he hoped for a honeymoon in Italy, but that his fiancee favored Biarritz and Pau.

The wedding came off at one of the American churches in Paris. It was a sumptuous ceremonial, aided by a bishop (who was on his travels, but who had not forgotten to bring along his vestments) and by the attendance of half the colony. Raymond was obliged to put up with all this pomp and show, much as it ran counter to his tastes and inclinations. But fortunately he was made even less of than most young men on such an occasion; he had few connections on either side of the water, so the bride's connections dominated the day and made her the chief figure still more completely than is commonly the case. And the honeymoon was spent, not in the north of Italy, but in the south of France.