Running Sands Part 7

Holt slapped him on the back.

"Good old Jim!" said Holt.

The careless words turned Stainton to matters more personal.

"Confound it," he said, only half-good-naturedly, "I wish you wouldn't call me old. I'm not."

"Of course," said Holt, "not old. Did I say old? Why, you're younger than ever, and a grand slam younger than I'll ever be again."

Stainton regarded this man of thirty-odd with whom, for a short time, he had been once so fast a friend and whom New York had so speedily converted into a corpulent, smug, bald-headed dandy. It would, indeed, be a pity if Stainton at fifty were not younger than Holt at thirty-five. And yet Holt had referred to the prematurely withered Newberry as "Old Newberry" much as he had now spoken of the miner as "Old Stainton"!

"Oh, you," said Stainton: "you have reached the age at which a man doesn't object to being called old."

The cheerful Holt snorted. "All right," he said. "Now we're just off the Lobster Coast. Let's look about for a harbour and a likely place to eat and hear the sad story of your life."

They found it, although it is always a difficult task for a New Yorker to decide which of a hundred anxious restaurants he will at any given time pay to poison him; and, while Stainton's eyes went wide with wonder at the place, Holt, amid the muddy mill-race of his customary talk where bobbed only an occasional chip of clean English, piloted the way into the selected eating and drinking place. It was one of those gilded khans, each more gilded than the last, which, in the neighbourhood of Broadway and Forty-Second Street, spring up like gra.s.s beside a country road, last about as long as the gra.s.s, and, once gone, are about as long remembered. Here, at a corner table, Holt, within a few minutes, was drinking rapid gla.s.ses of Irish whiskey and soda, while Stainton slowly sipped at a gla.s.s filled from a half-bottle of champagne.

"Now, then," said Holt: "your story. For Heaven's sake have pity on a suffering fellow-creature!"

Stainton considered.

"Of course," he said, "this is confidential."

"Of course."

"I shouldn't tell it, George, if it weren't that I had betrayed part of it in a moment of excitement----"

"Excitement? Well, I suppose that's what some call it."

"And so," pursued Stainton, "made such an a.s.s of myself----"

"Now you're getting down to facts," Holt agreed.

"In the first place," said Stainton, "I repeat that I am not crazy."

"Then I am," said Holt with conviction.

"You are the best judge of that, George."

Holt smiled.

"Wait a bit," said Stainton. "I wouldn't be surprised, George, if you were a trifle mad; as for me, just make up your mind that J. G. Stainton is sane."

"That's what they all say," Holt interposed. "Bellevue's full of men that are sane. Still, anything to get on with your story: sane you are."

"No, you mustn't grant it that way. I want you to draw your conclusions from what I am going to tell you."

Holt groaned.

"All right; all right," he said, "but for Heaven's sake _tell_ it!"

Stainton settled himself in his chair. He lit a cigar.

"I have to begin," he said, "at the beginning. The average man's biography is the story of an internecine war, a war between his heart and his head, and the heart generally wins. What has won with me, you may, as I said, judge for yourself. My father was a doctor in one of those little towns that are scattered about Boston in the way that the smaller drops of ink are scattered about the big splash on a blotter. My mother died when I was born. The governor didn't have a big practice, but it was a steady one, and, if he was the sort that would never be rich, at least he promised to be the sort that would never starve. What he mostly wanted was to send me to Harvard, and then to make a surgeon of me."

"I knew you must have had a good coach in bandaging," said Holt.

Stainton disregarded this reference to the grizzly.

"I could never make out," he resumed, "why so many parents think they have a right to determine their children's tastes and trades. That tendency is one of our several modern forms of slavery. Most men seem to a.s.sume that Fate, by making them fathers through no will of their own, has played them a low trick, and that they are therefore right in revenging themselves on Fate by training their sons into being exactly the sort of men that they themselves have been, so that Fate will thus be forced, you see, to do the same thing all over again."

"I don't see," said Holt. "But don't mind me."

"Very well. I am not condemning my father. He was without conscious malice, and he did his best, poor man. I dare say, after all, that he was like most of us: so thoroughly pleased with his own life that he couldn't imagine doing any better for the world than giving it another life of precisely the same kind. Anyhow, I never was intended by nature for a doctor, still less for a surgeon, as you will see. The truth is, I was afraid."

"Afraid? _You!_" Holt laughed at the idea. "I don't believe it," he said.

"I was. I was afraid of two things: old age and death. They were the twin horrors of my boyhood. They are still my twin horrors."

"Then, considering how you have run after death and sidestepped old age, it looks to me as if----"

"Thank you, George; but, if you will only listen a little longer, I think you will understand. While I was still very small, my father--he drove about on his professional calls in a buggy: the old-fas.h.i.+oned way--was kicked in the head by his horse. He never really recovered, and yet, for a long time, he was not in a condition that peremptorily demanded treatment. What actually resulted was a disease rare enough, I dare say, but quite well known: he developed premature and rapid senility. It all happened, once it got under way, in six months. In that time I saw him--I, a mere boy--become, day by day, a doting idiot.

"Young as I was, I called in, of my own initiative, a Boston specialist.

"'There is nothing to do, my boy,' he told me, 'except wait for the end.

Meanwhile make your father as comfortable as you can. What you see going on in him is just what begins to go on in every human being from the moment of birth: Old Age. Here, of course, it is specialised and malignantly accelerated. It is senility; that is to say, it is, though here abnormally magnified, an essentially normal phenomenon. Old age, my boy; old age.'"

Stainton wet his lips with wine.

"I can see the specialist yet as he said it," he presently went on, "and I am not likely to forget what it made me feel. There must have been some neighbour about at the time, or the housekeeper, but it remains in my memory as an interview between him and me alone. I did the only thing to be done: I bore it. I hated to have my father sent to an inst.i.tution--which shows that I was very young indeed,--and so I simply nursed him along, the housekeeper and I doing the best we could.

"It was ugly, and it got worse every day. We could see it get worse. It was--it was h.e.l.l. There are things, lots of them, about it that I just couldn't tell you. I lived in a fascinated terror, and all the time I kept saying to myself:

"'This is the same thing that's going on in everyone I see. It's going on in me. It's getting farther and farther along in me with every tick of my watch. It's what is crawling toward me out of the dark corners of the years to come.'"

Stainton stopped again, barely to sip his champagne.

"That," he said, "is how I came to be afraid of Old Age."

Holt shuffled his feet.

"A horse-kick isn't hereditary," he said.

"Wait," said Stainton. He put aside his extinguished cigar and resumed: "One by one I saw my father's powers fade. I could check them off as they went; powers we are all so used to that we don't know how dependent we are on them: niceties of the palate, differentiation between pleasant odours and unpleasant, delicacies of sight, distinctness of hearing, steadiness, the control of muscles that we are normally unconscious of controlling. These things go, slowly--very slowly--in each of us, and when they are gone, even when they are partly gone, when we never guess that they are gone, but when people about us detect our condition and comment on it, without our so much as dreaming of it----"

He stopped again, and again went on: