On the Stairs Part 9

"You're gummed up, I expect," said I. In those days n.o.body knew much about the new creature and its habits, and one man's guess was as good as another's. Two or three bystanders eyed me deferentially, as a probable expert.

"Likely enough," he agreed--and that made me an expert beyond doubt.

"But this will do for to-day. We've been here twenty minutes."

He had the car pushed to a near-by stable, amidst the mixed emotions of the little crowd, and next day he had it hauled home.

"You were right," he said, when I met him out again in it, a week later.

"It _was_ gummed up, so to speak; but it's working like a charm to-day.

Get in and I'll take you a few miles. That other fellow got an awful grouch."

It may have been by this machine, or by some more familiar mode of locomotion, that the two women reached the country club and its tennis tournament. Gertrude Prince strolled through its grounds and galleries with the aloof and amused air of one touring through a foreign town--a town never seen before and likely to be left behind altogether within an hour or two. It was at once semi-smart and semi-simple. She took it lightly, even condescendingly; and when Johnny McComas himself appeared somewhat later and set them down at a little marble table near a fountain-jet and offered c.o.c.ktails as a preliminary to a variety of sandwiches, she decided, after looking about and seeing a few other ladies with gla.s.ses before them on other little marble tables, to accept. It was a lark in some town of the provinces--Meaux or Melun; what difference did it make?

They formed a little group altogether to Johnny's liking. His wife was dressed das.h.i.+ngly; his wife's guest made a very fair second; he himself, although he never lifted a racquet, was in the tennis garb of that day.

"You both look ripping," he declared with hearty satisfaction. To look thus, before competing items in the throng, was the object of the place, the reason for its developing _mise en scene_.

Johnny himself looked ripping--cool, confident, content, and at the top of his days.

"It was amusing...." said Gertrude to me, with an upward inflection, a week later.

And she asked me for more about Johnny McComas.

II

If those were days when people began to combine for the pursuit of pleasure, they were also days when people began to gather at the call of public duty. If clubs were forming on the borders, other clubs, leagues, societies were forming nearer the centre--organizations to make effective the scattered good-will of the well-disposed and to gain some betterment in the local political life. To initiate and conduct such movements only a few were needed; but the many were expected to contribute, if not their zeal and their time, at least their dollars. It was patriotic righteousness made easy: a man had only to give his fifty dollars or his five hundred to feel, without further personal exertion, that he was a good citizen and was forwarding, as all good citizens should, a worthy cause. This way of doing it fell in wonderfully well with Raymond's temperament and abilities (or lack of them): the liberality of his contributions did not remain unknown, and he was sometimes held up as a favorable specimen of the American citizen.

Another movement was soon to engage his attention. If the prosperous were to have their playgrounds beyond the city's outskirts, the less prosperous should have theirs within the city's limits. The scheme of a system of small parks and playgrounds quite took Raymond's fancy. It contained, besides the idea of social amelioration, the even more grateful idea of munic.i.p.al beautification. In time, indeed, might not this same notion, fortified by experience and given a wider application, end by redeeming the town not merely in spots but in its entirety?--a saved and graced whole, not only as to its heart, but as to its liberal and varied borders of water, woodland and prairie.

"I should be proud of that," said Raymond heartily. The name of such a city, following one's own name on any hotel-register, would indeed be a matter for pride.

He attended several of the early meetings that were designed to get some such project, in its simpler form, under way. He had friends among professional men in the arts, and some acquaintances among newly formed bodies of social workers. He was not slow in perceiving that the way was likely to be tedious and hard. It called for organization--the organization of hope, of patience, of hot, untiring zeal, of _finesse_ against political chicane, of persistence in the face of indifference and selfishness. "It will take years of organized endeavor," he confessed. He recognized his own ineffectiveness beyond the narrow pale of hopeful suggestion, and wished that here too the giving of a substantial sum--a large penny-in-the-slot--might produce quick and facile results.

His wife, it is to be feared, looked upon these activities of his, however slight, with a lack-l.u.s.tre eye. She knew nothing of local problems and local needs. She was conscious of a hortatory manner in small matters and of indifference, which she almost made neglect, in matters that appeared to her to be larger. If she asked for a fairer share in his evenings--he belonged to a literary club, a musical society, and so on--it was scant consolation to be told that he objected to some of her own activities and a.s.sociations. He did not much care, for example, to have her "run" with the McComases and others of that type or to have her dawdle over gla.s.ses, tall, broad, or short, in places of general democratic a.s.semblage; and he told her so. I believe it was about here that she began to find him something of a prig and a doctrinaire; and she was not incapable, under provocation, of mentioning her impressions. It was about here, I suspect, that he told her something of Johnny McComas and his origins--at least he once or twice spoke of Johnny with a certain sharp scorn to me. He a.s.suredly spoke of other country clubs on the other side of town which were more desirable for her and equally accessible, save in the material sense of mere miles. Though he took no interest in athletics, nor even in the lighter out-of-door sports, he was willing to join one of those clubs, if it was required of him.

His reference to Johnny McComas was designed, no doubt, to repel her; but the effect, as became perfectly apparent, was quite the contrary.

She was interested, even fascinated, by the rise of a man from so little to so much. She found words and words to express her admiration of Johnny's type, and when English words ran short she found words in French. He was _gaillard_; he had _elan_. What wasn't he? What hadn't he? Bits of bravado, I still incline to think.

No, the McComases were not to be left behind all of a sudden. One day she made another excursion to the outskirts with them; and she reported it to Raymond, with a little air of suppressed mockery, as a perfectly un.o.bjectionable jaunt. She had gone with them to the cemetery. Johnny's mother had died the year before, and he had been putting up a monument in Roselands. This structure, it developed, was no mere memorial to an individual. It was a tall shaft, set in the middle of a large lot. I saw it later myself: a lavish erection (with all its accessory features taken into account)--one designed, as I felt, to show Johnny himself to posterity as an ancestor, as the founder of a family line. a.s.suredly his own name, aside from the tall obelisk itself, was the largest thing in view.

Raymond took this account of Johnny's latest phase with an admirable seriousness; he thought the better of him for it. He himself was inclined to divide human-kind into two cla.s.ses, those who had cemetery-lots (with monuments), and those who had not. The latter, of course, are in a majority everywhere. One thinks of Naples and of the sad road that winds up past the Alhambra to--Well, yes; in a majority, of course; and inevitably so in a large town suddenly thrown together by a heaping up of fortuitous and miscellaneous elements. In later years, when things were going rather badly with Raymond, and when consideration seemed to fail, he could always comfort himself with thoughts of the Princes' own monument in that same cemetery. This was another tall shaft in a gray granite now no longer to be found, and had been set up by old Jehiel on the occasion of the reinterment of some infants by his first wife--a transaction carried out years before Raymond was born. Some of the dates on the base of the monument went back to the early thirties. Well, there it stood, with the subordinated headstones of Jehiel and old Beulah, of his own parents, and of the half-mythical babes who, if they had given nothing else to the world, had furnished a future nephew with a social perspective. Raymond, reconsidering Johnny's recent effort, now began to disparage that improvised background, and led his wife to view his own lot--theirs, hers--only a hundred yards from the other. But she could not respond to old Jehiel and Beulah--though she tried to be properly sympathetic over their son and his wife. Still less could she vitalize the infants who had encountered an epidemic on the prairie frontier and had succ.u.mbed more than three score years ago. If she thought of any child at all, she thought doubtless of little Albert (now romping about in his first tweed knickerbockers), who would not die for many years, perhaps, and who was like enough to be buried in quite another spot.

But I think she thought, most of all, of the manly, cheerful sorrow of Johnny McComas before the new monument in the other lot.

III

These were also days of panic. Banks went down and bank officials threw themselves after. The city was thrilled, even charmed, to find that its financial perturbations touched, however slightly, the nerves of London and Paris. I myself was in Algeria that winter: my Elsie and I had decided on three months along the Mediterranean. It was on the white, glaring walls of the casino at Biskra that the news was first bulletined for our eyes. It had a glare of its own, I a.s.sure you: for a few days we knew little enough how we ourselves might be standing.

I thought of the Mid-Continent, with its c.u.mbersome counters and part.i.tions done in walnut veneer and its old-fas.h.i.+oned pavement in squares of black and white. I thought too of Johnny McComas's new inst.i.tution, with so many bright bra.s.s handrails and such a spread of tasteful mosaics underfoot. How had they fared? Well, they had fared quite differently. Why should a big, old bank go under, while a new, little bank continues to float. I cannot tell you. I was far away at the time. Perhaps I could not tell you even if I had been on the spot. And to other questions, more important still, I may be unable to give, when the pinch comes, a clearer answer. The Mid-Continent dashed, or drifted, into the rocky hands of a receiver; and McComas's bank, after a fortnight of wobbling, righted itself and kept on its way.

I saw Raymond again in March. The receivers.h.i.+p was going on languidly.

Prospects were bright for n.o.body.

"All this puts an end to _one_ of my plans, anyhow," he said.

"What plan is that?" I asked.

I was reminded that these were also the days of a quickened interest in education. This interest was expressing itself in large new inst.i.tutions, and these inst.i.tutions were generously embodying themselves in solid stone--in mullions, groins, gargoyles, finials, and the whole volume of approved scholastic detail. Donors were grouping themselves in "halls" and dormitories round a certain inchoate campus, and were putting on the fronts of their buildings their own names, or the names of deceased husbands or wives, fathers or mothers--so many bids for a monumental immortality.

"I had hoped for a Prince Hall," said Raymond. And he explained that it would have been in memory of his parents.

I must pause for a moment on this matter. I do not believe that Raymond had ever thought, in seriousness, of any such gift. It must have been at best an errant fancy, and if concerned with commemorating anybody concerned with commemorating himself. But I will say this for him: he never was disposed to try getting things out of people, for he hated attempts at trickery almost as much as he detested the exercise of the shrewdness involved in bargaining and d.i.c.kering. Per contra, he often showed himself not averse to giving things to other people; but the basis for that giving must be clearly understood all round. He would not compete; he would not struggle; he would not descend to a war of wits.

His to bestow, from some serene height; his the role, in fact, of the kindly patron. Let but his own superiority be recognized--let him only be regarded as _hors concours_--and he would sometimes deign to do the most generous acts. These acts embraced, now and again, the entertainment of writers and artists, either at his home or elsewhere: his fellows--for he was a writer and an artist too. But it was all done with the understanding that there was a difference: he was a writer and an artist--but he was something more. Those who failed to feel the difference were not always bidden a second time.

And his fancy for patronage was developing just at a time when patronage was becoming more difficult, awkward, impracticable! But though "Prince Hall" never saw the light, other and humbler forms of patronage came to be accepted by him.

Toward the end of April Raymond and his wife joined one of the clubs which he had brought to her notice. Though in a formative stage, like others, it was good (we ourselves joined it some few years later); and she made it her concern, through the summer, to give it some of those shaping pats which--for a new club, as for a new vase--have the greater value the earlier they are bestowed. She was active about the place, and she became conspicuous.

It was soon seen that she was "gay"--or was inclined to be, under favoring conditions. The conditions were most favoring, it began to be felt, when her husband was not about. A good many thought him stiff, and a few who used obsolete dictionary words p.r.o.nounced him proud--a term stately enough to const.i.tute somehow a tribute, though a d.a.m.natory one.

It was soon seen, too, that just as he irked her, so she disparaged him--an open road to others.

One day she gave a lunch at the club--places for a dozen. Johnny McComas appeared there for the first time. It was a plainer place than his own, but I credit him with perceiving that it was much more worth while.

Adele McComas did not appear--for a good reason. Those obstreperous twins now had a little sister two weeks old. The wife was doubtless better at home, but was the husband better at the club? If I had been a member at that time, and present, I should have felt like following him to some corner of the veranda and saying: "Oh, come, now, Johnny, will this quite do?" Well, I know what his look would have been--it came later. He would have turned that wide, round face on me, with the curly hair about the temples which gave him somehow an expression of abiding youth and frankness; and he would have directed those hard, bright blue eyes of his to look straight ahead at me--eyes that seemed to hold back nothing, yet really told nothing at all; and would have disclaimed any wrong-doing or any intention of wrong-doing. And I should have felt myself a foolish meddler.

Well, the innocent informalities of the summer were resumed by the same set in town next winter. The memories and the methods of one season were tided over to another. Gertrude was still "gay"--perhaps gayer--and a little more openly impatient with her husband, and a little more openly disdainful of him. Young men swarmed and fluttered, and those who had "never tried it on" before seemed inclined to try it on now.

I take, on the whole, a tempered view--by which I mean, a favorable view--of our society and its moral tone. I am a.s.sured, and I believe from my own observations, that this is higher than in some other of our large cities. I dislike scandal, and I have no desire to bear tales.

Either is far from being the object of these present pages. Nothing that I present need be taken as typical, as tyrannously representative.

Raymond criticized, expostulated. Friends began to come to him with impressions and reports. I--whether for good or ill--was not one of these. They named names--names which I shall not record here. But it was one of Raymond's own impressions, and a vivid one, which finally prompted him to make a move.

IV

January found the social life of the town in full swing. We had recovered from last year's financial jolt, and entertaining was constant. Raymond and his wife were invited out a good deal. He was bored by it all; but his wife remained interested and indefatigable.

Finally came a dance at one of the great houses. Raymond rebelled, and refused point-blank to go: an evening in his library was his mood. His wife protested, cajoled, and he finally found a reason for giving in.

As I say, they were bidden to one of the great houses--one of the few that possessed an actual facade, a central court, and a big staircase: it had too its galleries of paintings and of Oriental curios before Oriental curios became too common. Its owner was also, with the rest, a musical amateur. He was a man of forty-five, and like Raymond had a wife too many years younger than himself for his own comfort. This lively lady lived on fiddles and horns--dancing was an inexhaustible pleasure.

At her dancing-parties, of which she gave three or four a season, her husband would show himself below for a few moments for civility's sake, and then retire to a remote den on an upper floor, well shut out from the sounds of his wife's frivolous measures, but accessible to a few habitues of age and tastes approximating his own.

The question of music of another quality and to another purpose was in the air--it was a matter of endowing and housing an orchestra. Informal _pour-parlers_ were under way in various quarters, and Raymond felt disposed, and even able, to contribute in a modest measure. It was his pride to have been asked, and it was his pride, despite untoward conditions, to put up a good front and do as much as he could. An hour's confab over cigarettes in that retired little den might clarify one atmosphere, if not another.

The court and its staircase were set with palms, as is the ineluctable wont on such occasions and for such places; and people, between the dances, or during them, were brus.h.i.+ng the fronds aside as they thronged the galleries round the court to see the Barbizon masters then in vogue and the Chinese jades. As Raymond pa.s.sed down the stairway, he met his wife coming up on the arm of Johnny McComas.

"She looked self-conscious," Raymond said to me, a few days after. I told him that he had seen only what he was expecting to see.

"And he looked too beastly self-satisfied." I told him that of late I had seldom seen Johnny look any other way.