The Man Who Lived in a Shoe
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Title: The Man Who Lived in a Shoe
Creator: Henry James Forman
Release date: August 21, 2015 [eBook #49757]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN WHO LIVED IN A SHOE ***
Produced by Al Haines.
*THE MAN WHO LIVED
IN A SHOE*
BY
*HENRY JAMES FORMAN*
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1922
_Copyright, 1922,_
By LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
_All rights reserved_
Published September, 1922
Reprinted September, 1922
Reprinted October, 1922
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
MY WIFE
*BOOK ONE*
*THE MAN WHO LIVED
IN A SHOE*
*CHAPTER I*
Are there any women today, I wonder, like the girl wife of Jacopone da
Todi, who are found in the midst of worldly brilliance wearing the hair
shirt of piety and devotion over their spotless hearts?
I doubt it.
It is no wonder that Jacopone, that "smart" thirteenth-century Italian
lawyer, became a great saint when he made that discovery, after his
beautiful young wife's accidental death. It would make a saint of
anybody.
I am quite sure Gertrude is not like that. But then Gertrude is not my
wife--as yet. Nor am I Jacopone. I am nothing more, I fear, than a
contented voluptuary of a bookworm. Like King James, I feel that were
it my fate to be a captive, I should wish to be shut up in a great
library consuming my days among my fellow-prisoners, the blessed books.
To distil the reading of a lifetime into a little wisdom for my poor
wits, that has been all my aim and my ambition, if by any name so
dynamic as ambition I may call it. An old young man is what I have been
called, and Gertrude seems propelled by some potent urge to change
me--God knows why.
I have just been talking with--I mean listening to--Gertrude.
We are to be married, she says, in three weeks.
Time out of mind we have been friends, Gertrude and I, as our mothers
had been before us. She, the highly modern spinster and I, such as I
am, have been linked for years by an engagement which is not an
engagement in the old sense at all. It is a sort of _entente cordiale_.
An engagement in the conventional meaning of the word would be as
abhorrent to Gertrude as the old-fashioned marriage. As soon would she
think of "being given in marriage" with bell, book and orange blossoms
as of calling herself "Mrs. Randolph Byrd"--or anything but Miss Bayard.
That is what we have been discussing this gloomy afternoon in my snug
little apartment before a garrulous fire. For Gertrude is not so absurd
as to hesitate to call on me at my apartment any more than I would
hesitate to call on her in Gramercy Park.
"But won't it be awkward," I ventured in mild speculation, "if after we
are married we have to stay at an hotel together, or share a cabin on a
ship--to be Miss Bayard and Mr. Byrd?"
"Don't be absurd, Ranny," retorted Gertrude, with her usual introductory
phrase. "Awkward or not, do you think I should give up my name that I
have lived under all my life, fought for and established?"
"Of course not," I hastily apologized. "I hadn't thought of that." I
could not help wondering what she meant by having established her name.
Except as regards one or two committees and vacation funds Gertrude's
name is unknown to celebrity.
"You with your H.H.," she ran on briskly, with the triumph of having
scored. "Surely you don't want to cling to the musty old formulas?"
"No, certainly not," I answered her readily. I am no match for Gertrude
in argument. Of a sudden I became aware that despite the hissing fire
in the grate there was no sparkle in the air this chill November
afternoon. The H.H. to which Gertrude had alluded was the only thing
resembling an emotion that betrayed any sign of smoldering life within
me in that discussion of ours touching matrimony.
The H.H., I would better explain, stands for Horror of Home--for my
profound repugnance toward anything resembling the fettering bonds of
domesticity. A man, I feel, should be as free to do what he pleases and
to go where he likes when and if married as when single. Otherwise who
would assume the chains and slavery of that shadowed prison-house?
To-morrow, my heart suddenly tells me, I must be off upon a journey of
unknown duration.
Once again I would see the estraded gardens of the Riviera, the olive
groves of Italy, the sacred parchments and incunabula of the Laurentian
Library in Florence. I would wander anew in the wilderness of the
Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris and on the left bank of the Seine, where
once I collected the lore of Balzac and of Sainte-Beuve. And who dare
prevent my setting off at a moment's notice for the ill-lighted rotunda
of the British Museum or the cloister precincts of the Bodleian at
Oxford? Even as Gertrude was speaking, I experienced an irresistible
longing for all those places, for the turf walks and pleached alleys of
Oxford and the beautiful "Backs" of the Cambridge Colleges. There is a
manuscript at Trinity that I must see again, and I have long promised
myself a month in Pepys's old library at Magdelene in Cambridge.
But Gertrude is not like other women.
"What I like about you, Ranny," she remarked, flicking the ash from her
cigarette with unerring aim into the hearth, "is your reasonableness.
You hate as I do to see two people handcuffed together like a pair of
convicts for life. Might as well go back to the Stone Age or to the
times of a dozen children in the house and the mother grilling herself
all day before the kitchen fire. Ugh!" and she gave a shudder.
"No fear of that with you," I laughed.
"No, I should hope not," she puffed energetically.
"Well, anyway," I found myself reassuring her quickly, "even as it is,
you have three weeks to think it over--to back out in. Three weeks is a
good long time, Gertrude. Much can happen in three weeks."
On the table before me lay a new life of Leonardo da Vinci, just arrived
from Paris that day. My fingers itched to open it and turn the pages.
But that would have been rude, so I forebore.
"I am not like that," Gertrude murmured reflectively, "and you know it,
Ranny."
"Of course not," I guiltily assented.
"I know," she tapped my cheek with a playful finger--Gertrude can be
very charming if she thinks of it--"I know perfectly what I want to do.
And when I make up my mind to do a thing I stick to it."
And so she does, the clever girl!
"I wish I were like you," I muttered. "I am a sort of drifter, I'm
afraid."
"That's why you need a manager," laughed Gertrude. "Wait till you've got
me. Then you won't be just running after books and telling yourself
what you're going to do some day. You'll be doing, publishing,
lecturing; you'll be known--famous."
"Oh my heavens!" I cried out in a terror, throwing up a defensive hand.
"I think I'll run away."
"Too late," she smiled, with a cool archness. When Gertrude smiles she
is exceedingly handsome. "I've ordered my trousseau. You wouldn't
leave me waiting at the City Hall, would you?"
"I might," I answered, smiling back at her. "If there should happen to
be a book auction that morning. And it's only a subway fare back to your
flat."
"Now, this is the program," she announced, assuming her magisterial
tone, which instantaneously reduces me to a spineless worm before her.
"You will come to my flat on the twenty-fourth at ten o'clock. Then we
shall drive down in a taxi to the City Hall and get the license--or
whatever they call it--"
"Lucky you'll be there," I could not help murmuring. "I should probably
get a dog license or a motor-car license instead of the correct one--"
"Then," went on Gertrude, very properly ignoring me, "we can have the
alderman of the day sing the necessary song."
"He may want to sing an encore--or kiss the bride," I warned her.
"He won't want to kiss me when I look at him," answered Gertrude
imperturbably. Nor will he! "Then," she added, "we can stop here at
your place and pick up your hand luggage, and mine on the way to the
Grand Central Station. You can send your trunk the day before and I'll
send mine. No time lost, you see, no waste, no foolishness."
"Perfect efficiency, in short--"
"Yes," said Gertrude, "you'll probably forget some important detail in
the arrangement, but there's time enough to drill you into it the next
three weeks."
"Forget," I repeated, somewhat dazedly, I admit. "What is there to
forget--except possibly my name, age or color?"
"You needn't worry," flashed Gertrude. "I'll remember those for
you--when you need them. I meant," she explained, "about your trunk or
railway tickets and so on. But anyway, it doesn't matter. I'll remind
you of everything the day before."
I promised to tie a knot in my handkerchief.
"And may I ask," I ventured, "where we are going?"
"I haven't decided yet," Gertrude informed me. "I'll let you know
later, Ranny dear."
There is something very wholesome and complete about Gertrude. That is
the reason, I suppose, I have so long been fond of her. How she can put
up with a dreamer like me is more than I can grasp. Without any
picturesque or romantic significance to the phrase, I am a sort of beach
comber, sunning myself in her cloudless energy on the indolent sands of
life. Every one either tells me or implies that Gertrude is far too
good for me. Nor do I doubt it. But I wish we could go on as we are
without exposing her to the inconvenience of being married to me. But
Gertrude knows best.
"Won't you stay and share my humble crust this evening?" I asked her as
she rose to go.
"No, thanks, Ranny," she smiled, somewhat enigmatically, I thought. "We
shall often dine together--afterwards."
"Of course," I agreed flippantly. "We may even meet at the races."
"I promised," said Gertrude, "to dine at the Club with Stella
Blackwelder--to settle some committee matters before I go away. Shall
you be alone, poor thing?"
"Yes--but that doesn't matter. I am often alone. I prop up a book
against a glass candlestick and the dinner is gone before I am aware of
it."
"It might as well be sawdust, for all you know," laughed Gertrude.
"So it might," I told her, "except that Griselda can do better than
sawdust. I might, of course," I added, "call up Dibdin and have him
feast with me."
"Your trampy friend," commented Gertrude. "Yes, better do it. I don't
like to think of you so much alone."
"Now, that is very sweet of you, my dear. I'll do exactly that."
Her cool lips touched mine for an instant and she was gone.
*CHAPTER II*
To my shame I must record that, once I was alone, the appalling fact of
marriage overwhelmed me like a landslide. With a sense of suffocation
and wild struggle I longed to do in earnest what I had threatened to do
in jest, to run away, blindly, madly, anywhere, to freedom, as far as
ever I could go.
When I should have been rejoicing, I desired, in a manner, to sit upon
the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings. I thought upon
Lincoln, a brave man if ever one there was, who had paled before the
thought of marriage and wrote consoling letters to another in similar
case. When I ought to have been feeling at my most virile, I felt
unmanned.
Yet, was I a boy to be a prey to these emotions? At twenty-nine surely
a man should know his own mind and be in possession of himself. Never
before had I doubted my way in life. In a world where every one who has
no money proceeds with energy to make it, and every one who has a little
tirelessly labors to acquire more, I had wittingly and of full purpose
turned my life away from the market place and toward a studious devotion
to books. On my compact income of less than two hundred and fifty
dollars monthly left me by generous parents, I was able to maintain my
modest apartment in Twelfth Street and to live a life, purposeless in
the eyes of some, no doubt, but which to me is priceless.
That slender income and the old Scotchwoman, Griselda Dow, with her
Biblical austerity and North British economy, surround my existence with
the comfort of a cushion. Because two sparrows sold for one farthing,
was to Griselda a reason and an incentive for miracles of thrift. To
change all this in three weeks--and I have not yet informed Griselda!
In a welter of agitation I began to pace the room.
Perhaps I am a fool to harbor such emotions, but I confess that the
sight of my pleasant study, covered to the ceiling with the books that I
love, and so many of which I have gathered, fills me with a poignant
melancholy. To uproot all this or to change it violently seems like a
sin I cannot bring myself to commit. How had I come to think of
committing it?
Gertrude is, of course, a splendid girl. With all her energy, she can
yet sympathize with the mild successes of a poor bookworm and listen
with patience to the tales of his triumphs as though he had captured an
army corps. My first edition of the "Religio Medici" can mean nothing to
her, who has never read it, but she seemed gladdened by my victory when
I acquired it under the very nose of a wily bookseller.
When was it that I had first asked Gertrude to marry me? It is odd that
I cannot remember, for our friendship could have continued on the same
pleasant basis for the rest of our lives.
I was dining alone with her one evening at her apartment in Gramercy
Park, I remember, and there was sparkling Moselle. I am not one of your
experienced topers, and that sparkling Moselle entered my blood like a
Caxton in a Zaehnsdorf binding or a First Folio of Shakespeare. A
golden haze had seemed to emanate from every object in the region of
that Moselle. Then, I recollect, Gertrude and I were on a new plane of
being. We were speaking of marriage. Without being "engaged", we were,
in Gertrude's phrase, talking of "marrying each other." It was on that
evening I must have asked her, though, oddly enough, I have no
recollection of the fact. And now, it seems, three pleasant years have
passed and the time has come.
Again it occurred to me abruptly that I had not yet informed Griselda.
What if Gertrude should insist upon my removing myself to her apartment;
would she accept Griselda? And how would my precious books be
domiciled? How human they are, those books, even though silent! Always
I have found them waiting whenever I returned from journeys, from summer
visits, from the country, from anywhere. Their backs and bindings seem
to shimmer and flash forth a stately greeting, to exhale that subtle
fragrance of leather, ink, and paper that none but book-lovers know.
They have developed a sense in me to perceive these things as no one
else can perceive them. How delightful it has been to find them in
their peaceful legions, arrayed and changeless, retaining the very marks
and slips I have left in them, faithful servitors and friends!
I take down the "Antigone" in the Cambridge Sophocles that faces me as I
stand and open at random to the chorus: "Love, invincible love! who
makest havoc of wealth, who keepest vigil on the soft cheek of the
maiden;--no immortal can escape thee, nor any among men whose life is
for a day; and he to whom thou hast come is mad." It is clear that
Sophocles was no modern.
Ah, me! I must tell Griselda at once, lest her Scotch probity should
charge me with disingenuousness or evasion. I pressed a bell. I could
not face Griselda in the kitchen which is her stronghold. I must summon
her to mine.
Griselda, with a heather-blue cap awry on her coarse gray hair, appeared
at the door.
"You called?" she demanded.
"Yes, Griselda, I called. Come in; I wish to speak to you."
Griselda has known me since I was seven and all my gravity counts for
ever so little with her. So redolent is she of rich encrusted
personality that she gives to my poor small apartment the air of an
establishment.
"You always call me, Mr. Randolph," she somewhat testily informed me,
"just when I have my hands in the dough pan or when the pot is boiling
over."
"Which is it now?" I asked her, laughing somewhat ruefully.
"Both," was her laconic answer.
"Hurry back then," I told her. "What I wanted to say will keep."
"Just like a man," muttered Griselda and left me without ceremony.
The relief I felt was shameful. To face Griselda with news of a
possible derangement of our lives required a courage, a girding up of
one's resolution to which at the moment I felt myself woefully unequal.
There was Dibdin and his blessed archeological expedition. He had told
me that there might be a berth for me as a sort of keeper of records and
archives. If only he had started last week. In a mist of vision well
known to daydreamers, I suddenly saw the trim shipshape steamer with
holystoned decks, the glinting metal work, the opulent South-Pacific sun
pouring down on lightly clad passengers lounging in deck chairs; girls
in white lazily flirting with indolent men. What oceans of joy and ease
were to be found in the world for those who knew how to take them!
Ah, well! Gertrude would make no opposition to my going, since absolute
individual liberty is the very keystone in the arch of our coming
marriage.
I decided to ring up Dibdin.
"Our line is out of order," the switchboard below informed me. "They'll
have a man up here as soon as possible."
Frustration! I did not wish the colored door boy below to hear what I
said. He has a notion of my dignity.
With a restless agitation new to me I again fell to pacing the room, a
room not contrived for exercise. It occurred to me that I must go to see
my sister, my only near relative. She was sure to be at home, for she,
poor girl, is always at home,--what with her three children and her
broken health.
If it were not that the damnable telephone is out of order, I would ring
her up immediately. What with her three young children and an income
the exact equivalent of my own, she has little diversion unless I take
her to the theater or the opera. How does the poor girl manage, I
wonder? I dread to ask her and she never complains. I ought to see her
oftener; if only she lived nearer than the depths of Brooklyn.
There is the result of romantic marriage for you! Poor Laura committed
the error of falling in love with a man on a steamer when she was barely
nineteen and marrying him secretly; after seven years and three babies,
the scoundrel Pendleton, with his smooth ways and unsteady eye, deserted
her, disappeared into the blue. The poor girl's health has never been
good since then.
It is irritating to think that I might have done more than an occasional
gift for Laura and the children. But I am so wretchedly poor myself.
I still cannot comprehend how Laura could have been so inconceivably
foolish as to marry that ruffian Pendleton before she had known him
three months--and then to acquire three babies!
Gertrude, at all events, could not be guilty of anything so perverse.
Marriage--children--chains--slavery--how sordid it all is and how
disturbing! Good enough perhaps for the hopeless middle class,
semi-animal types, who have nothing else to expect of life, or to absorb
them. But for folk with ambitions and ideals!
What are my ambitions and ideals, I cannot at times help wondering?
Useless to analyze. Freedom to have them is the first of all.
How eager I used to be to discuss them with Laura during those long
summers at our cottage in Westchester when life seemed endless and the
future infinite. Between sets at tennis I poured out to her the things I
was going to do in the world. Laura is only two years older than I, but
how well she had understood and how sympathetic she was! It was the
motherhood within her, I suppose, that drove her to the marriage and the
kiddies.
The scent of those summers comes to my nostrils now, the fragrance of
lilac and honeysuckle, that brought ideas to one's head, dreams of
achievement, of perfection and happiness. Who has that cottage now, I
wonder? Poor Laura's dreams have been distorted into a very dismal sort
of reality. And what of my own? But here is Griselda and she is
announcing Dibdin.
That grizzled priest of what he is pleased to call science growled in a
way he meant to be pleasant as he shouldered into my comfortable study
and sank sprawling into my best chair. He never seems quite at home in
a civilized room.
"Couldn't get you on the telephone," he remarked. "Thought I'd drop over
and see what iniquities you're up to."
"As you see," I told him, "I'm deep in crime."
"Will you feed me?" he demanded with a gruffness that is part of his
charm.
"Certainly. What else can I do when you come at this hour?"
"All right; then I'll listen to you," he said.
"But how," I wondered, "do you know I want to say anything?"
"You look charged to the nozzle," he answered elegantly. "What is it--a
rare edition of somebody or other?" Amazing devil, Dibdin. I always
resent his ability to read me in this manner. But he tells me that in
his archeological expeditions he has had so often to watch faces of
Indians, Chinese, negroes, Turks and others whose language he did not
speak, that to see the desires of men in their eyes amounts with him to
an added sense.
"Well, if you must know," I sat down facing him, "I am nonplussed,
baffled, perplexed, at sea, on the horns of a dilemma--all of those
things. I am to be married in three weeks."
"Eager swain!" was his only comment.
"Is that all you can say?"
"Well, feeling about it the way you seem to feel, I might add that
you're a damn fool."
"Tell me something novel!" I retorted irritably.
"Can't," he said. "That's the only thing I know."
"Comprehensive," I sneered.
"Complete," was his succinct rejoinder.
"What a comfort you are!" I cried with a harassed laugh.
"What the devil made you get into it?" he growled.
"Fate," I told him.
"It's a poor fate that doesn't work both ways," he observed.
"I suppose I sound to you like either a brute or a cad or both," I
pursued. "But the fact is, Dibdin, I am not a marrying man. The girl
in question has nothing to do with it. She's an admirable, a splendid
girl, far too good for the likes of me. But I simply hate the thought
of marriage--of owing duties to anybody. I want to be free to do
absolutely as I please, to go off with you to the Solomon Islands, or
China or Popocatepetl if I want to, or to run after some first edition
if I feel inclined. In short, I don't want to bother about wives or
children or whooping cough or measles, or have them bother about me.
Would you call that selfish?"
"Damnably," said Dibdin without emotion.
"Well, then, that is what I am," I retorted warmly, "and it is no use
trying to change. It takes myriad kinds to make a world. I am one
kind--that kind."
"No," said Dibdin gravely, "no--I think you're some other kind."
"This eternal, beautiful, boundless freedom," I went on, ignoring
him--"surely it is good that some mortals should have it, Dibdin--and I
am losing it."
"Three weeks off, did you say--the obsequies?" he queried.
"Yes," I answered sadly.
"Then maybe it won't happen," he remarked to the ceiling.
"What makes you say that?" I caught him up.
"Don't know," he replied in his carefully lazy tone that he assumed when
he wished to sound oracular. "Just a feeling--that you deserve
something, a good deal--worse than marriage." Then abruptly sitting up
in his chair and pulling a thin volume out of his pocket, "Look at
this," he muttered.
I took the vellum-bound book and opened it.
"An Elzevir 'Horace'!" I exclaimed. "Where did you get it?" All the
rest of the world and all my cares thinned to insignificance before this
treasure.
"A plutocratic book collector living in a mausoleum on Fifth Avenue has
just given it to me," he replied. "It's a duplicate. He has another and
a better one of the same date. D'you value it any at all?"
"Value it!" I cried, as my fingers caressed it. "Why, certainly I value
it. It is a perfectly genuine Elzevir--the great Louis himself printed
this at Leyden. It is not what you would call a tall copy, and binders
have sacrilegiously spoiled an originally fine broad margin. It's not
perfect. But it's a splendid specimen of early printing, with title
page and colophon intact. It's a beauty!"
"You beat the devil," murmured Dibdin in his beard. "You can be
enthusiastic about some things, that's clear. Anyway, the book is
yours," he concluded. "I have no use for it."
"You don't mean it!" I exulted incredulously. "I am simply delighted,
Dibdin, tickled pink, as you would say! I have long wanted the Elzevir
'Horace.' I haven't a single Elzevir to compare with this. Think of
this coming out of the blue!" And in my foolish way I fell to gloating
over the thin, musty little volume, examining the worm drills, holding
it up to the light for watermarks in the gray paper and, in general, I
suppose, behaving like an imbecile.
"Illustrates my point," muttered Dibdin, fumbling with a malodorous corn
cob and a tobacco pouch.
"Point? What point?" I looked up at him abstractedly.
"Out of the blue--this book you say you yearned for--anything may
happen."
"And you call yourself a scientist," I marveled, leaning back in the
chair. "Things like this happen--yes. But in the serious business of
life you're ground between the millstones of the gods--a victim of
events you cannot control. Look at Rabelais and Montaigne, two free
spirits if ever there were any. Yet one was a victim of priestcraft so
that he cried out until he roared with orgiastic laughter, and the other
a victim of property,--took a wife that disgusted him. (I have
beautiful editions of both of them, by the way, which you ought to look
at.) But each of them was a victim."
"A victim if you're victimized." Dibdin puffed at his foul pipe. (I
cannot make him smoke a decent cigarette.) "But if you know how to play
with circumstances, you use them as I saw a cowboy in Arizona ride a
bucking broncho. You ride them till you break them. Look at me, my
boy," he went on, with a grin of mingled modesty and bravado. "I knew I
was a tramp at heart. But my people would have been broken with
humiliation if I had turned out a 'hobo' on their hands. So I took to
ruins and buried cities in out-of-the-way places, and politely speaking
I'm an archeologist. But I tramp about the world to my heart's
content."
That, I admit, presented Dibdin and the whole matter in a new light to
me.
"Why," I finally asked, "didn't I do that?"
"Because you're not a tramp at heart," puffed Dibdin.
"Yes, I am!" I almost shouted at him. "That is exactly what I must be,
since I have such a horror of home, of domesticity."
"You with all this comfort--a flat, a housekeeper, all the truck in this
room? No, no, my boy! You're cast for something else. Hanged if I
know for what, though. These things are too deep to generalize about.
Time will tell."
I rose and circled the room, inanely surveying "this comfort" that seems
to offend Dibdin, though he likes well enough to sprawl in my best
arm-chair. The books, the rugs, the fire, the alluring chairs, the
happy hours that I have spent here seemed to crowd about me like the
ghosts of familiars, praying to be not driven from their haunts.
"Then why the devil," I demanded accusingly, pausing before him, "did
you encourage me and praise my little papers and bits of work in college
when you were teaching me?"
"Trying to teach you," he corrected placidly. "You've never been a
teacher in a large fashionable college, my boy. When most of your
so-called students are taking your course because it is reported to be a
snap, so they can spend their evenings at billiards, musical comedies,
or the like, any young devil with a ray of intellectual interest becomes
the teacher's golden-haired boy. Even teachers are human. You'll admit
you haven't set even so much as your own ink-well on fire as yet."
"All that is beside the point," I returned irritably. "Here I am in the
devil of a fix and you are talking like Job's comforters."
"Yes," he agreed, "I suppose I am. But in the end it was not the
comforters but events that pulled Job up. Await events with resignation
and expectancy, Randolph, my lad, and play the game. Stake your coin
and wait until the wheel stops and see what happens."
"A fine teacher you are!" I laughed at him, albeit mirthlessly.
"No good at all," he assented cheerfully, knocking his pipe against the
ash tray and pocketing the noisome thing. "And didn't I chuck teaching
the minute events made it possible? Events, my boy; they are the
teacher and the deities to tie to. Set up a little altar to the great
god Event--right here in your perfumed little temple. That's what I
should do," he concluded, muttering into his beard.
"Incidentally," he added, "I'm getting extraordinarily hungry."
"Oh, sorry," I murmured. "Glad you're here to eat with me, anyway. It
enables me to put off breaking the news of my coming marriage to
Griselda."
"What--you haven't told her yet?" shouted Dibdin, sitting up in his
chair. "That fine, upright Highland lassie? Then you're no disciple of
mine! Face things with courage and face 'em fairly, Randolph. Go and
tell her now! I'll wait here with my highly moral support."
"I--I can't," I blurted miserably.
"Yes, you can," he insisted with obstinacy. "Go and do it now."
With a gesture of desperation I pressed the bell.
"If I am going to tell her anything," I mumbled between my teeth, "I'll
say it right here." Dibdin laughed ghoulishly.
"This cowardice--this shrinking from life," he philosophized
detestably--"that's what our kind of education brings about."
Griselda appeared at the door.
"You rang, Mr. Randolph."
"Yes--er--yes, Griselda," and I felt myself idiotically hot and flushed.
"I wanted to say--" and beads of perspiration prickled my forehead.
Then in desperation, I stammered out,
"Mr. Dibdin, Griselda--he is dining here to-night--that's all,
Griselda!"
Dibdin's laugh rattled throatily in the room. How I hated him at that
moment! Griselda swept us with an impenetrable glance.
"There is a place laid for him," she uttered in the tone of one whose
patience is a sternly acquired virtue. And she left us.
"Better strip, my lad," chuckled Dibdin, "and put on your wrestling
trunks."
"What d'you mean?" I demanded sulkily.
"The tussle that life is going to give you will be a caution."
"A lot you know about life!"
"Not much, that's a fact," Dibdin observed more soberly. "But I've had
to face some things, Randolph. I've had to grin at a lot of greasy Arabs
in the desert who thought they would hold me for ransom. I've had to
laugh out of their dull ambition a pack of villainous Chinese thugs in
Gobi, who felt it would profit them to cut my throat. I've had to make
my way alone through a jungle in Central America for days when the
beastly natives absconded with the supplies and left me in the middle of
a job of excavation. I've had other little episodes. But never, son, I
may say truthfully, have I shown such blue funk as you did just then
before the patient Griselda."
"Rot!" was my only answer. "Let's go in to dinner."
It is after ten. Old Dibdin is gone and I have been putting down these
foolish notes.
It must be by some odd law of balance or compensation, I suppose, that
those whose lives are least important keep the fullest record of them.
It is a weakness of mine to wish to read in the future the things I
failed to do in the past. It is really for you, O Randolph Byrd, aged
seventy, that I am writing these notes.
If only Gertrude had made up her masterful mind to three months hence,
instead of three weeks, I should have taken my last fling and gone by
the next boat to Italy.
Biagi, that courteous scholar and humanist, writes me from the
Laurentian at Florence that he has discovered some new material
concerning Brunetto Latini--the teacher of Dante. Among the few
ambitions that I dally with there has always been the one to write a
life of Brunetto, who taught Dante how a man may become immortal. I
have a fine copy of Ser Brunetto's works, the "Tesoro" and the
"Tesoretto", and it seems a shabby enough little encyclopedia in verse
of knowledge now somewhat out of date. There must have been, therefore,
something in the man himself that enabled Dante to attribute his own
greatness to the teacher.
But I cannot go to Florence and return in three weeks.
Gertrude, I know, will tell me I can do it after we're married. But she
will expect me to "clean up the job" in two weeks.
There is nothing about Gertrude that terrifies me so much as her
efficiency. I shall never dare to mention the subject to her, and so I
shall never attempt it and never know the mystery of Dante's
immortality. It is all one, however; what have I to do with greatness?
No more than with marriage.
Bur-r-r! The room is cold. _Sparge ligna super foco_, as cheerful old
Horace advises. I have just complied and put another log on the fire.
My nerves must be a shade off color to-night. I could have sworn a
moment ago, as the room grew chilly, that my sister Laura was standing
before me. It is my guilty conscience, I suppose. Too late to call her
now. Besides, the telephone is no doubt still "out of order." Poor
Laura! I saw her, white as death, with tears running down her drawn
cheeks. What things are human nerves when a bit unstrung! I shall go
and see Laura to-morrow.
I have had my conversation with Griselda and it came off not amiss.
"Griselda," I began carelessly, after Dibdin had gone, "did I mention to
you that I am to be married in three weeks?"
Griselda is not one to waste breath in futile and flamboyant feminine
exclamations. She turned somewhat pale, I thought.
"You know very well you did not," she answered in level tones, polishing
a spoon the while.
"Well, I meant to," I told her truthfully enough. "Didn't you expect
it?"
"No, sir," was her blunt reply.
"Neither did I," I blurted out before I knew it.
A wry, unaccustomed smile for a moment illumined her dark, gypsy-like
features.
"You needn't tell me that," she retorted, and I wonder what she meant by
it. It is not like her to waste words. "Am I," she continued, "to take
this as notice to find a new place?"
"God forbid!" I cried in horror. "Whatever happens, Griselda, you
remain with me--let that be understood."
"And suppose Miss Bayard shouldn't want me?" she demanded with quiet
intensity.
"Then she will probably not want me," I told her. "That question won't
arise. Besides, Griselda," I went on, "we haven't decided yet how we
are going to manage. Miss Bayard will probably want to keep her
apartment and I mine. She would hardly wish to be bothered with me all
the time."
"And you would call that marriage!" exclaimed Griselda aghast.
"Why not?" I queried mildly. "I don't know much about it, Griselda, but
marriage is determined by the kind of license you get at the City Hall
and what the alderman says to you. The leases of apartments have
nothing to do with it, I'm quite sure--though I might inquire."
Griselda's face was blank for a moment. Then on a sudden she was bent
double in a gale of wild, hysterical laughter. Never have I known her
so shaken by meaningless cachinnation. Perhaps her own nerves are no
better than mine. Even now I still hear her rattling deeply from time
to time like muffled thunder. But I don't care now. What a relief to
get it over!
It is nearly bedtime. Casting over the events of the day, I cannot but
conclude that my own will has played too small a part in the whole
matter.
I must see Gertrude to-morrow in good time and acquaint her with my
desire to run over to Florence before we are married and look up Biagi's
new material bearing upon the blessed old heathen, Brunetto Latini.
Since Gertrude desires me to be great and famous, she cannot deny me the
opportunity to discover how a great and famous man accomplished the
trick. Besides, what has been delayed three years can surely support a
further delay of three months.
But, good heavens! What is this? Voices--the scuffling of feet in the
hallway--what army is invading me at this hour! I believe I hear
children's voices--and a scream from Griselda, who has never screamed in
her life!
*CHAPTER III*
Laura--my dear sister Laura--is dead! Her children are with me!
Without warning she dropped suddenly under her burdens and with her
dying breath confided her children to me--me!
That one cataclysmic fact has taken its abode in my brain and numbed it
as well as all my nerves to a chill and deadly paralysis that excludes
everything else. It still seems wholly unbelievable--some nightmare
from which I shall awake with a vast sickly sort of relief to the old
custom of my tranquil life.
The turbulence and the pain of the last three days, however, are still
lashing about me like the angry waves after a tempest, in a manner too
realistic for any dream. I am broad awake now, I know, and for hours I
have been blankly staring into a very abyss of darkness.
What will happen or what I shall do next, I haven't the shadow of an
idea.
Laura is dead and her children are with me, and I am their guardian and
sole reliance. Who could have forecast such a fate or such a role for
me? Three days! It is incredible! Only three days ago, I was
languidly protesting because I could not take ship forthwith for Italy
to examine some manuscript at the Laurentian in Florence!
No, by heavens! It was not I. It was some one else--some one I knew
vaguely, in a past age, a man to be envied, serene and cheerful, blest
of life, whom I shall never meet again.
The last three days! I cannot banish them and yet I cannot meet the
memory of them. Was it I who faced the tragedy, or was it some one
else? Nothing surely is more tragic than a young mother's death--and
that young mother my own sister! Who was it that stonily passed through
the ordeal of the "arrangements" and the black pantomime of the
sepulture? I cannot record it even for myself, for never, I know, shall
I desire to be reminded of it. At the death of my mother, I still had
Laura with her practical woman's sense. But now I was alone. I say now
because however remote it seems, this tragedy will always be present.
My life must forever remain under its stupefying spell.
It is not credible that only three days ago I sat here in my study
revolving trifles, those many shining trifles that went to make up my
former life.
Three days ago the silence of this house was disturbed by the voices of
children, the clatter of their feet, and for the first time in my life I
heard Griselda scream.
"Oh, Mr. Randolph," she rushed in, sobbing, with the dry tearless sobs
of those much acquainted with grief, "Miss Laura--she--the children are
here!"
I knew. Though inwardly I sank all but lifeless under the blow, I knew
clearly that Laura was dead.
"Is she very ill?" I heard myself asking faintly, with a clutching
desire to shrink still from the appalling truth.
"She--oh, Mr. Randolph,'" she lamented, "don't you understand--ye know
very well!" she suddenly added with a harshness that surprised me. "We
shall have to put the children to bed in your bedroom."
It was as though she had suddenly revolted at the softness of the
atmosphere in my environment, at any artificiality or evasion. She
seemed abruptly determined to face the stark facts in the open.
"The girl will sleep with me," she concluded tonelessly and turned to
go.
"Which girl?" I queried dazedly.
"Her that brought the bairns," she replied and left me.
"Send her in here--I want to speak to her!" I shouted after Griselda. I
could not face the thought of going out there. I was held to my chair
by a sheer pitiful lack of courage to move into the dreadful gulf before
me.
I closed my eyes and endeavored to still the tumult in my brain into
silence. I wanted to think. But only those can achieve silence who do
not need it. I could not. I opened my eyes.
A thin little girl of perhaps twelve or thirteen stood before me. This
surely could not be the girl Griselda had referred to in charge of the
children. She was herself a child. Were my disordered senses tricking
me? I experienced the thrill Poe's hero must have felt at sight of the
raven on the bust of Pallas.
"Who are you?" I whispered.
"I am Alicia, sir," she answered with large, frightened gray eyes
fastened upon mine.
"What--what is it?" I stammered.
"The lady said you wanted to see me."
"Did you bring the children?" I breathed, incredulous.
"Yes, sir."
I was awestruck. Her eyes, were the eyes of a child yet they were
filled with sorrow and a searching fear old as the world.
"How old are you?" I could not help asking, with an irrelevance foolish
enough in the circumstances.
"Going on fourteen, sir."
"And you--you are the nurse?"
"I helped Mrs. Pendleton with the children before school and after
school," she answered with more assurance now, but still uneasy. "I am
a mother's helper, sir." There was no mirth in my soul, but the muscles
contorted my features into a sickly grin.
"I see," I murmured mendaciously. But I saw only my own confused
turpitude at my blindness and neglect in face of the shifts and needs
poor Laura had been compelled to suffer.
"Where do you come from?" I inquired with a dry throat, ashamed to ask
anything of importance.
"From--the Home for--Dependent Children--in Sullivan County," she
murmured hesitatingly, with a tinge of color in her cheeks. On a sudden
I saw her pale lips tremble and guiltily I realized that, thoughtless,
after my wont, I was subjecting her to an ordeal merely because I was in
torment.
"Sit down," I forced myself to speak evenly, "and tell me exactly what
happened."
She sidled to the big chair, her gaze still fixed upon me, as though to
watch me was henceforth her first anxiety. She gripped the arm of the
chair and hung undecided for a moment as though fearful of making
herself so much at home as to sit down in this room.
"Sit down," I reiterated more encouragingly, "and tell me what happened
to my sister."
"Yes, sir," she murmured obediently, perching on the edge of the great
chair. "Well," she began, "when I came home from school in the
afternoon Mrs. Pendleton was lying down. The children were hanging
about her bed and she looked very pale."
"Yes, yes," I urged her on impatiently.
"Then I took them downstairs and gave them their bread and milk and
tried to read to them so as to keep them quiet. But only the littlest
one, Jimmie, wanted to listen. Randolph and Laura wanted to play Kings
and Queens." I realized that I must hear the story in the girl's own
way.
"Then," she continued, with an effort at exactitude, "I thought that
Jimmie and I had better join them, because then I could keep them from
making so much noise. We played until supper time. But Mrs. Pendleton
didn't feel well enough to come down. So the children and I had supper
downstairs and Hattie--that's the cook--took Mrs. Pendleton's supper up
on a tray."
That must have been while I was lamenting to Dibdin over the hardness of
my lot.
"Then what happened?" I muttered, turning away from her gaze.
"I went up to see if Mrs. Pendleton wanted anything," she resumed
nervously, frightened by my movement, "and she said no, but that she'd
get up later when it was time for them to go to bed. So I helped them
with their lessons until bedtime and Mrs. Pendleton came down. She said
she felt a little better, but she looked very sad and white. And when
she began to walk up the stairs--" her lips grew tremulous again and the
tears dashed out of her eyes, but she finally controlled herself
bravely.
"--She fell--and--" she began to weep bitterly, "she just said, 'The
children--my brother--telephone--' and that was all--" and that piteous
child who was no kindred to my poor sister sobbed convulsively.
That must have been about the time when I was at table with Dibdin and,
over the sauterne, complaining to him of the narrowness of my income in
view of the lacunae and wants of my library.
"We couldn't--get you--on the telephone," she found breath to utter at
last. "So I brought the children here--Hattie told me how to
go--Hattie's over there alone."
Nothing in this world can ever stab me again as the poignancy of her
recital stabbed me. My life seemed shattered, irreparable. All my
dreams were at an end. Laura was gone and here were her children thrust
by destiny upon my hands--unless their scoundrel of a father should ever
return to relieve me of them. I had lived peacefully and harmlessly in
my way, but for some inscrutable reason Fate had selected me for her
heaviest blow.
"Very well," I told her as kindly as I could in the conditions, "now you
go back to Griselda and go to bed. I'll have to think things out."
"Oh--but the house!" exclaimed the little girl--and never again do I
wish to see such horror on a childish countenance as at that instant
froze the features of little Alicia. "All alone," she added, her thin
shoulders heaving. "Aren't you going over now, sir?"
"Now!" I exclaimed, looking automatically at my watch. "Why--yes--in a
few minutes, child."
"But--Hattie is there alone--" she stammered. "There's nobody else--then
I'd better go back."
It was obvious, of course, that I must go at once. But why should a
child see spontaneously that to which I am obtuse?
"Oh, well, you are right, of course--I must go immediately--I hadn't
thought--I'll go over now"--and I turned away from her, lifted the
curtain and gazed out into the wet, murky street below. Life had
collapsed and the ruins of it were tumbled about my hot ears. I hardly
know how long I stood there, completely oblivious of the girl Alicia.
"Please, Mr. Byrd," I was startled to hear a tearful, childish voice
behind me--"won't you see the children before you go, sir?"
I wheeled about sharply.
"The children? Oh, yes--no!" The horror of the situation fell about me
like an avalanche that had hung suspended for a moment and then crashed
smotheringly over me. "No," I whispered huskily, "I can't--not now--not
now!" A kind of chill darkness numbed my senses.
Like a pistol shot I suddenly heard the harsh voice of Griselda in the
doorway.
"The cab is at the door, Mr. Randolph. Don't forget your rubbers."
And like an automaton galvanized into life I found myself whirling to
the house of death.
*CHAPTER IV*
For a week the children have been with me and nothing has yet been done
about them. Another week, I think, will drive me mad with indecision.
I seem unable to emerge from the shadow of mystery and terror into which
my serene world has been so suddenly plunged. The book-lined study is
my solitary refuge; and like a schoolgirl I can do no more than unpack
my heart with words.
I have seen Gertrude.
It is astonishing how resourceless are even one's nearest and dearest
friends in face of anything really capital.
"Poor Ranny! How ghastly!" Gertrude cried, when she first heard of it,
wringing my hand. "But buck up, dear boy. You know how I feel. There
is a way out for everything." She spoke, I thought, as though I were in
need of ready money.
She was here this afternoon to see the children. Gertrude is no hand
with children. They seemed strangely shy of her, a woman, though they
literally fell upon the neck of growling, grizzled old Dibdin. They are
still subdued by the suddenness of their tragedy, though real sorrow
Gertrude tells me, is, thank Heaven, beyond them.
"We'll have to think up a way of disposing of the dear things," she
remarked briskly. And though I am myself completely at a loss what to
do with them, I cannot say I relished her way of putting it.
"What, for instance, could you suggest?" I inquired dully.
"Schools, Ranny dear, schools," she impatiently answered. "There are
homelike places run by splendid women--just made for such cases. Why,
even the little one--Jimmie, is it?--How old is he; four?--There are
places even for kiddies as young as that."
A heavy confusion, the reverse of enthusiasm, oppressed me.
"You forget, Gertrude," I endeavored as gently as possible to remind
her, "Laura confided those children to me with her dying breath--to
me--her only relative. Do you think I ought to fling them out at once,
God knows where!"
"Good Lord, Ranny!" she cried, flushing with a smile of anger peculiar
to Gertrude when she is annoyed. "What a sentimentalist you are at
bottom--after all!"
"A sentimentalist--I?" I felt hurt. "Just put yourself in my place,
Gertrude, and see how easy such a decision would be for you."
"I do, Ranny; that is just what I am doing," she insisted impatiently.
"But don't you see that if there is any one thing you cannot do, it is
to keep them here--or in my apartment?"
"Yes," I said, "I see that. But I also see that I can't pitch them out
among total strangers, a week after their mother's--" I could not trust
my foolish voice to finish.
"Do you forget," demanded Gertrude with her smile that brands me
imbecile, "do you forget, Ranny, that we are to be married in two
weeks?"
"No, Gertrude--far from it. But that is why we are discussing this
problem--because it is perplexing. Besides, schools of the right sort
are bound to be pretty expensive things."
"Oh," said Gertrude, "of course. But poor Laura's income ought to be
enough--"
"My dear Gertrude, that is what I don't know. Carmichael is to give me
an accounting of it to-day or to-morrow. Laura never spoke of her money
matters to me. But, as you say, there will probably be enough. Only, it
isn't altogether that--you see, Gertrude--" I floundered.
"Yes, I see, Ranny, I see," she hammered at me in the maddening way
women have. "You simply can't get up enough will power to do something.
It's the old story. But you'll have to, my dear," and she smiled
sweetly. "You have all my sympathy and all the cooeperation you'll take.
But the one thing we can't do is stand still. You understand that--don't
you, Ranny?"
"Yes. I understand that. But my brain is as fertile of plans as a
glass door knob."
"I'll tell you what I'll do, Ranny," Gertrude summarized. "I know all
this has been a great shock to you. I'll let you alone for a couple of
days to turn things over. And think of what I've said. But then we
must come to some definite decision. I'd give anything if this terrible
thing had not happened now--but it can't be helped, can it?"
Now, that was very sweet and reasonable of Gertrude. And it is a
thousand pities that she feels distressed. But it would have been ten
thousand more if poor Laura had died just after we had been married
instead of before. As it is, the problem before me is largely mine.
Were we now married, Gertrude must have had to bear an undue share of
it.
Shall I ever win back to the old tranquillity and the peace that was
mine? That was the first thought that came to me when I parted from
Gertrude, a selfish thought as I immediately realized, in view of what
is facing me. I can no longer think as I have thought and new feelings
are struggling for birth within me, commensurate with the new
responsibility. The world, as I walk through it, seems to present an
aspect strangely different from what it did a week ago. It is so chill
and alien and hollow!
As I was reentering my study I heard a crash in the dining room, which
is now the children's room, and when I glanced in upon them the girl
Alicia was gathering up smithereens of glass and Ranny, the eldest boy,
quietly announced, "It broke" in a manner that so obviously gave him
away, all the others could not help laughing; and they laughed the
louder when I joined them. Confused and angry, the boy ran out of the
room.
It is a world apart, the world of children, into which parents, I
suppose, grow gradually. Not being the parent of these children, I fear
I shall never penetrate it.
Sooner or later they must be sent away, even as Gertrude maintains. And
I must face that event forthwith.
I was interrupted at this point by the irruption into the room of
Jimmie, the youngest, inimitably, grotesquely shapeless in his
nightgear, pattering toward me and taking refuge between my knees. He
was being pursued by the girl Alicia who stood shyly and distressfully
smiling in the doorway, as though all explanation were futile.
"Well, old boy, what is it?" I demanded with mock severity, though in
truth I was more afraid of him than he evidently was of me.
"Iwantsayprayerstoyoulikeamummy," he uttered in one excited breath, as
though it were one single word.
"You want what?"
"He says he wants to say his prayers to you, sir," spoke up the girl
clearly. "I am sorry--he broke away. Shall I take him away, sir?"
"Wanto say my prayers to you like to mummy," insisted Laura's child,
scrambling upon my knees. And with a pang of sadness that set all my
senses aching I saw the picture of the past--poor Laura with her sweet,
resigned face, living when she lived only in her children, listening to
the prayers of this sprite with the silken sunshine in his hair.
"All right, Jimmie," I murmured faintly, as he clung to me; "go ahead."
Tightly clutching me about the neck and nestling his face against mine,
he brought forth with childish throaty sweetness the few words to the
creative Spirit that mankind the world over, in one form or another,
addresses as Our Father. "And God," he concluded with brilliant triumph
in his eyes, "bless Mummy and Uncle Ranny."
Nothing that I can remember has ever moved me as that child moved me.
Like St. Catherine of Genoa at her decisive confessional I seemed to
receive a profound inner wound by that child's act, tender and bitter
and sweet, that I never desire to heal. For the moment Laura and I were
nearer to being one than ever we had been in her lifetime. Nevermore
shall I forget the sweetness and fragrance of that little child and his
warm nestling faith in me. And I am planning to cast him off.
"Come, now," interposed Alicia, as though breaking a spell.
"One more hug," cried Jimmie, with the arrogance of righteousness. And
suiting his action to his words, he clambered down with engaging
clumsiness from my knees and padded toward Alicia. Once more I was
alone with my thoughts.
Can it be that some instinct in the child whose heart is still imbedded
in his mother's had made him seek the one person who had been nearest
his mother?
I cannot say, I cannot say.
Oh, God--and I must send him and the others, Laura's children, away,
away among strangers!
There seems to be no other way out.
I have been turning idly the pages of books in a way bookish people
have, seeking for inspiration, for some word of guidance. Brunetto
tells me on the word of St. Bernard, that tarnished gold is better than
shining copper; and that the wild ass brays once every hour and thus
makes an excellent timepiece for his savage neighborhood. But nothing
of this casts a glimmer of light upon my dilemma. Rabelais keeps
shouting from his yellow page, "_fais ce que vondras_." But what is it
that I desire to do?
Ah, I know what I desire to do! There is counsel in the old books,
after all.
I will have in the girl Alicia, and see what I can glean. She was
brought up without kith or kin of her own. And though an institution is
more of a machine than a good school, still those who had the rearing of
her were total strangers. There might be some gleam of suggestion in
that.
Alicia has been here.
"Come, child, sit down," I invited her, observing that she still
displayed a tendency to stand in awe of me. "I wish to ask you some
questions." But her tense little face was still haunted by a vague
fear. "It's about the children," I added, and she seemed somewhat more
at ease on the edge of her chair.
"How long were you at that Home--in Sullivan County?" I began, grinning
by way of ingratiating myself.
"Ever since I can remember, sir," she answered.
"Were they kind to you?"
"Oh, yes, sir."
"How kind?--What did they do for you?"
"They gave us food and--and medicine when we were sick. And on
Christmas we had a tree. Only nobody ever came to see me. I always
looked out of the window for somebody to come. But no one came."
"Yes, yes, I know," I pursued. "But did they show you
affection--sympathy?"
Alicia was silent.
"Don't you know what I mean?" I pressed.
"Yes, sir, I think I do."
"Then why don't you answer?"
"I--it's hard to explain," and she laughed a frightened little laugh.
"There is no one there to--to do those things you said. There were five
hundred of us there. If you're not sick you just go on like all the
rest. If you're sick they give you oil or something. Sometimes a child
pretends it's sick just so the matron or a nurse might take it in her
lap and make a fuss over it. And some are naughty--for the same reason."
I nodded gravely, but my heart was gripped by a poignant aching. I saw
Laura's children compelled to feign illness or delinquency in order to
receive a touch of individual attention which, I suppose, every child
spontaneously craves.
"Were you glad to leave there?" I asked.
"Oh, yes, sir!" she answered eagerly.
"Tragic, my poor sister dying," I said, half to myself. "She was an
ideal mother. Now--I hardly know what to do."
Alicia leaped from her chair and came yearning toward me. Her little
face tremulous and working, she cried out:
"Oh, Mr. Byrd, you won't send us away--to a Home--will you?"
"No, no!--Not to a Home," I replied defensively. "But schools--there
must be good places for children--"
"They'd feel terribly," she stifled a sob. "They love it so here--Even
here Laura cries for her mother every night--and little Jimmie--"
"Never mind," I took her up hastily, "nothing is decided yet, my dear
child. I'm glad I spoke to you. You see," I ran on, "there's so little
room here, and I--I know nothing about children--"
"But there's nothing to do," she protested, sobbing.
"Nothing?" I smiled vaguely in an effort to cheer her and laid my hand
upon her thin shoulder.
"Nothing except just love them," she said. "I'll take care of them--all
I can." How simple!
"Well, well, we shall see," I aimed to be reassuring.
"Do I have to go--back to the Home?" she asked brokenly, with an arm
hiding her face.
"Oh, no, certainly not," I answered hastily. "We'll find a better way
than that. Now," I added, "be a good girl, dry your eyes; run along and
don't say a word about--our conversation."
"No, sir," she murmured obediently. And still gulping, she left me.
It is obvious that the girl Alicia has been of decisive help to me!
Yet it is equally obvious that I cannot keep the children here.
Dibdin has been here and he has left me in a state of distraction, worse
if possible than that I had been in before.
The good fellow endeavored to be vastly and solidly cheering.
"All nonsense," he growled, "about children being hostages to fortune.
They are the only contribution a human being really makes to the world.
All the digging that burrowing animals such as I do in the four corners
of the earth, all the fuss that fellows in laboratories make over test
tubes and microscopes and metals and germs, all the stuff that people
sat up nights to put into those damned books of yours--all of that is
done for them--for the next generation and the generations they will
beget."
"Eloquent!" I flippantly mocked him; "but how is it you've elected to be
what you call a tramp?"
"Elected?" he grunted disdainfully. "I didn't elect. It elected me.
Besides," he continued, lowering his voice, "I would have given it up
like a shot--given up anything, changed my life inside out, done
anything if I had been able to marry the one woman I wanted. I'm one of
those strange beasts for whom there is only one woman in the world--no
other:
'If heaven would make me such another world
Of one entire and perfect chrysolite,
I'd not have sold her for it,'
he quoted, and added with a hoarse laugh, "you ought to know your
Othello."
"Then why on earth didn't you marry her?" I could not help marveling.
"Too late," he murmured, with a whimsical smiling twitch to his head,
that is very engaging. "She was already married to somebody else when I
first saw her. Too late," he repeated with ruminative sadness. "But
don't let us talk about that," he broke off abruptly. "Have the kids
begun to go to school yet?"
"What is the use?" I answered him gloomily. "I haven't formed any plans
for them yet."
"Plans? What do you mean?" he inquired, puzzled. Like the girl Alicia
he seemed to think there was nothing to do that required any thought.
And I wondered if the simple souls in life are only the improvident or
the very young.
"Do you see this place," I demanded irritably, "as a home for a family
with three children, to say nothing of a fourth in attendance upon
them?"
"Have to have a larger place--farther out--of course," he answered
glibly, puffing at his pipe.
"And am I a person to take care of and bring up three or four children?"
"Why the devil not?" he demanded.
"Why the devil yes?" I retorted fiercely. "What do I know about
children? What experience have I had? Do you see me as a wet nurse to
a lot of babies?"
"Wet nurse be hanged," he responded gruffly. "Here's your first chance
to be of use in the world and--you talk like that--"
"Easy to talk," ruefully from me.
"Well, what the blazes do you mean to do?"
"That is what I am trying to work out," I fell upon him bitterly.
"D'you think it's easy? I've got to work out some plan--find homes for
them--the right kind of schools--with a home environment. Oh, it's
easy, I assure you! Besides," I ran on savagely, "you seem to forget
I'm to be married in two weeks."
"I did forget that," growled Dibdin, with a semblance of contrition.
"What does the lady say?"
"Well, what should she say? Could you expect a girl on her wedding day
to become the harassed mother of three children not her own?"
Dibdin jumped from his chair, ground an oath between his teeth and his
forehead was a file of wrinkles.
"Listen, Randolph," he began in another voice. "It's damnably tough,
and I know it. But you can't, you simply can't disperse your sister's
children to God knows where. You are the only relation they've got.
Put yourself in their place. It would be damnation. If you need--more
money," he stammered in confusion, "why, dash it--I'm an old enough
friend of yours to--to advance you some, eh?"
And he laughed raucously, wiping the perspiration from his forehead.
"You are a good sort--of tramp," I grinned sheepishly, seizing his hand.
"But it isn't that. I don't know as yet what Laura left them. But it
isn't that. I feel like--like hell about it--but what can I do--what
with Gertrude and--and everything else. Oh, it's the easiest thing in
the world, I assure you.--But I wish to God I could see my way to
keeping them!"
"Easy or not," said Dibdin huskily, "if you send those children away,
I'll break every bone in your body."
I laughed almost hysterically. I know Dibdin. When he is most moved
and most sympathetic, he is at his most violent.
"Don't go," I clung to him as with sunken head he shouldered toward the
door.
"Must," he growled. "I've got to think, too."
"I wish you had married, Dibdin, and had children of your own," I all
but whispered with my hand on his shoulder. "And I'm sorry for the
woman. You're a good devil, Dibdin. I wish I knew who the woman is."
"I'll tell you," murmured Dibdin, with a queer throatiness of tone.
"I'll tell you who she was. It can't matter now. She was--No, by God!
I can't--not now!"
And he shuffled out, leaving me gazing after him speechless and
open-mouthed.
*CHAPTER V*
The girl Alicia keeps watching me like some bewildered household animal
dimly aware of the breaking up of its household. Always I am conscious
of her great eyes upon me. To her, I presume, I am a Setebos who can
inflict pain and torture, like Death himself; who can disrupt her little
world of clinging affections by the merest movement of my hand.
I am in that process of turning things over to which Gertrude has
indulgently consigned me and I am if anything farther away from a
decision than I was twenty-four hours ago. I finger my books and open
at random a volume of Florio's "Montaigne" in an edition that is as
fragrant of good ink and paper as the Tudor English is rich, and the
first line that falls under my eye is that of Seneca, "_He that lives
not somewhat to others, liveth little to himself._" Does this mean that
my long absorption in my own small concerns has made me incapable of
decision in anything of importance--that I live too little?
I stole into the bedroom last night where the children were sleeping,
while Griselda was making up my couch in the study.
With their flushed faces they lay there almost visibly glowing before my
eyes with that perfect faith that children seem to have in the grown-up
world about them. Heine somewhere speaks of angels guarding the child's
couch, and it is not sheer poetry. Their faith and trust, still
illusioned, brevets, I suppose, to angelic rank every one about them.
Randolph, with a slight frown and moving lips, dreaming seemingly of
something active and strenuous, as befits his ripe age of eleven; Laura,
serene with her mother's countenance and straying curls, and little
Jimmie with his tumbled hair like that of some child by Praxiteles or
Phidias--they slept--secure in their trust, despite their recent
shattering bereavement.
No one can really know anything about children until he has seen them
sleeping. Like fortune, they are always trustfully in the lap of the
gods. Never before had they touched me as they seemed to touch the
hidden springs in me at that moment. It was so, I pictured, that Laura
was wont to steal into their dormitory of nights before going to bed;
and that vision, no doubt, was a potent help to her courage to continue
uncomplainingly and brave in the face of sorrow, humiliation and her
self-effacing loneliness. Would I had been able to picture such things
more clearly while she was living.
Griselda surprised me emerging from the room and she smiled, the
austere, inscrutable Griselda, with such a smile as Michelangelo might
have depicted on the face of one of his Sistine Sybils, those weird
sisters who seem to know all things because they have suffered all.
I muttered a casual good night to Griselda and brushed by her
nonchalantly, as a boy whistles with apparent carelessness when he feels
most awkward or uneasy.
I slept upon my problem in the way old wives advise you, but to-day I am
no nearer the solution.
I keep trying coolly to imagine them in appropriately chosen schools and
homes, and yet some tugging at my heart strings, some strange alchemy of
the brain, wipes out those images before they are formed and replaces
them with the vision I saw last night in my invaded bedroom.
Who is to help me make a choice? And before I have put down these words
I realize that no one will help me. My dining room is at this moment
vocal with their laughter--but something within me is more loudly
clamorous yet against the treachery I am planning them. Treachery! That
is nonsense, of course. I have a perfect right to decide what I choose.
But already that word keeps recurring in my brain whenever I envisage
their dispersal.
My decision is taken.
I can hardly say who made it. In reality, I suppose it has made itself.
But however it came about, there--heaven help me!--it is.
Gertrude telephoned that she was coming this afternoon. I offered to go
to her, but she would drop in, she graciously insisted, now that I was a
family man, after lunching with a friend at the Brevoort.
Gertrude's entry is always breezy and cheerful.
"Hello, Ranny," she murmured lightly, sinking on the sofa and holding
out both hands. I took them, kissed them and held them in mine. I was
well aware that for her these were days of tension.
"That's nice," said Gertrude with a laugh. "But what I want is a
cigarette, a match and an ash tray."
"Of course, how stupid of me!" I mumbled and supplied her with her
wants.
"Those books, Ranny," she puffed, scanning my laden shelves, "they
terrify me afresh every time I see them--when I think you've read them
all."
"They needn't alarm you," I deprecated quite sincerely. "The more I read
them the less I seem to know--as you will agree." And I sat facing her.
"No room for the brains to turn round in?" she laughed. "Oh, come, dear
boy, it's not so bad as that. I really think," she added more soberly,
"you have a very wise old bean on your shoulders."
"What sudden and startling discovery leads you to words so rash?" I
inquired.
"I've made the discovery all right," she nodded with emphasis. "Anybody
who can handle a situation like this the way you're handling it is no
piker."
Gertrude often affects the slang of the day as a humorous protest
against what she terms my purism. But the truth is, I like the
vernacular myself.
"Impart it," I urged her, whereat she smiled.
"Regular street Arab you are," she declared with arch satire, "but what
I mean is this. I am always one for quick action--and I don't know much
about children. I urged you to send them away at once. But I realize
now that so soon after poor Laura's passing away that would have been
cruel--and it wouldn't have looked well, besides. Now I see it more
your way, Ranny."
"You do!" I could not help exclaiming.
"Yes," she continued firmly. "I see your way is best. I see that we can
be quietly married and have our little trip just the same. Then, when
we come back, in the natural course of events and rearrangement, we can
look up places for them and settle it all right as rain. That's what
you had in your clever old head, Ranny, I'm quite sure--and I admire you
for it."
"I see," I gasped, wondering what words or acts of mine had conveyed
this elaborate strategy to Gertrude. For the space of a minute perhaps I
was sunk in thought. The vision of the children asleep in their innocent
faith in me suddenly arose vividly and smote me to the heart. The
nestling image of Jimmie--the girl Alicia with her great, wistful eyes
telling me that there was nothing to do "but just love them"--all this
was throbbing in my brain with every heartbeat. And had I in reality
schemed out the intricate design with which Gertrude now credited me?
By no cudgeling of my poor brains could I recall any such devising. It
was impossible. It was new to me. Then something in me that is either
better or worse than myself took the reins of the occasion and, like the
auditor of another's speech, I heard myself saying with solemn firmness:
"No, Gertrude--you must have mistaken me. I had no such plan. We shall
be married, of course, but our marriage can make no difference. I
cannot turn these children, Laura's children, out of the house. Not
now, at all events, not until they're older. They have no one in the
world but me and I mean to keep them."
"Mean to keep them! You mean that?" she gasped. And it pained me to be
the cause of a deep flush on Gertrude's face and neck.
"I've never meant anything more certainly in my life," I told her.
"Then we can't marry," said Gertrude in a low tone, still scrutinizing
me as though she were wondering whether she had ever met me before.
"Why not?" I cried. "Why should they make so great a difference? In
any case, didn't you have an idea that we would each keep our separate
flats?"
"Don't talk rot," flared Gertrude in an exasperation which I still
deplore, for the steely glitter in her eyes was not pleasant. "I am not
going to make myself ridiculous by marrying a houseful of kids for whom
my husband is the nurse. Do you really stick to that, Ranny?"
"Yes, Gertrude," I nodded. "I must."
Gertrude gazed at me searchingly for a moment, then to my amazement she
laughed in my face, a trifle louder than her wont. Laughter was at that
instant far from my thoughts.
"Oh, well," she resumed her earlier lightness of tone, "then we'll
simply postpone our marriage a while. You'll get tired of this maternity
game, Ranny, depend on it. We've postponed it three years--a few months
more can't make much difference, can it?"
Then she approached me and took my hand.
"Little boy's tender conscience must be given its fling, mustn't it?"
she began mockingly, in imitation of a child's speech, in which she does
not excel. "Never mind, give its little whim its head."
A remarkable woman, is Gertrude.
"Perhaps it's only proper," she concluded more seriously, "that we
should postpone it, since you are just now in mourning."
"Nonsense," I answered her. "Laura would certainly never have desired
any such thing. Our marriage will not be a thing of pomp and orange
blossoms. We could just as well get married now as any other time."
"No, Ranny," she replied decisively. "Now it's my turn to be firm. I
think I am right."
I should honestly have preferred, in spite of the conditions that
surrounded me, to have married Gertrude then and there without further
delay. We are neither of us young things full of ineffable inanities on
the subject of romance and I experienced a sober desire for all possible
finality in the midst of the jumbled and painful confusion into which
Fate had seen fit to cast me. But Gertrude was obdurate.
Just as she was about to go there was a gentle tap on the door.
Gertrude, whose hand was already on the knob, opened it. It was the
girl Alicia.
With a downward quizzical glance Gertrude fixed the girl so that for a
moment she stood fascinated, unable to detach her eyes from Gertrude's.
She turned them in my direction finally and they were troubled and
imploring.
"Please, Mr. Byrd," she said, "the children want to go for a walk now,
instead of lessons. The sun is out. Can I take them?"
"Yes, yes," I said hastily. "By all means."
"Wait a minute," commanded Gertrude, smiling mechanically. "What is
your name, child?"
"Alicia, ma'am."
"Alicia what?"
"Alicia Palmer," and the child's voice was tremulous with trepidation.
"And do you give the children lessons?"
"Yes, ma'am," she answered, lowering her eyes as though a crime had
found her out.
"And how old are you?" asked Gertrude not unkindly.
"Going on fourteen, ma'am." The girl looked up at once, responsive to
the gentler tone. But wishing to relieve her of the interrogatory, I
lamely put in a word urging that she take the children out at once
before the sun had disappeared. The girl glided away like a shadow.
"Why, she's quite attractive--the little thing," murmured Gertrude.
"You'll have quite a menagerie." Then, laughingly turning to me, she
cried, "Oh, Ranny, Efficiency ought to be your middle name."
"Perhaps I'd better adopt it?" I murmured.
"Do," said Gertrude. "Well, so long, old boy, I must be running." And
in her haste she even forgot to let me kiss her good-by.
So after all the alderman at the City Hall was not to sing his song over
us yet. For no reason that I can help I seem to be in disgrace with
fortune, Gertrude and aldermen's eyes.
A nameless melancholy, a kind of humorous sadness, has taken possession
of me.
It is not my lost tranquillity that I regret now, nor does Gertrude's
taunt of inefficiency disturb me. But at bottom I have always realized
the type of man that I am not. The type of man who stands four-square
in face of all the shocks and emergencies of life, who can meet all
changes and events with equal courage, who can take any situation
smilingly by the hand as though he were its indisputable and indulgent
master, that is the sort of man I should wish to be. But all my own
defects clamorously accuse me of embodying the exact opposite of such an
ideal. I have shrunk away from life until it fits me like a coarse
ill-cut garment rather than a glove. It takes a vast deal of living to
be alive, and the dread obsession haunts me that I have become as one
mummified in this dim catacomb of books.
I have been to Carmichael's office at his request and the blow that he
has dealt me is heavier than any since Laura's death.
Laura, it appears, in her desperate desire to increase her income, had
been speculating in the lying promises of oil and mining stocks which
offered fabulous returns. One after another her substantial railway and
steel bonds went to her brokers for "margins" and some were sold for
current livelihood. No wonder she was compelled to resort to an
orphanage for a "mother's helper", who is herself a child. The result
is that something less than two thousand dollars of Laura's capital
remains for her three motherless and fatherless children, the oldest of
whom is eleven.
I have no doubt but that her tortured and silent anxiety on this score
hastened my poor sister's death. Carmichael himself, her lawyer and
adviser, was ignorant of her acts until it was too late. The dread
goddess Fortune plainly does nothing by halves. If it were not for my
grief over the suffering that poor Laura must have endured so
uncomplainingly, I should be moved to uproarious laughter. Job, I feel
sure, must have had his moments when the comforters were not there, when
he laughed until the tears bedewed his dejected old beard.
And I, incompetent recluse that I am, have undertaken the care and the
rearing of three children! I should at least admire the completeness
with which Fate plays her hands or produces her situations, were I not
at this moment utterly and stonily impervious to all thought and all
emotion--unless an inert and deadly sense of disaster be an emotion.
No, that was not enough. What a glutton is that same Fate! Dibdin has
been here to say a hasty good-by.
He has heard of a ship that sails from San Francisco in a week and that
will touch at his particular group of islands, so that he will not have
to trans-ship at Papeete, as had been his earlier plan. I have never
before in my life felt so utterly alone!
He laughed a curious laugh, that seemed foolish yet exulting, when I
told him I had decided to keep the children. His eyes glittered and he
turned away for an instant to hide them.
"Look here," he muttered hoarsely, with the assumption of his most
matter-of-fact manner, "let me advance you a thousand dollars or so--in
case you should have a use for it. Be an investment for me," he added,
with a short laugh. "What use is it to me in the Marquesas or Solomon
Islands, eh?"
"No, thanks, Dibdin," I told him. "I can mention one or two good banks
on the Island of Manhattan--if you don't know of any."
"Don't be an ass, Randolph," he came back with severity. "I'll write
you a cheque."
"No, you won't," I replied with equal obstinacy. "I won't take it. If
I need it, I'll cable you."
"Devil you will," he growled irritably. "Cables don't run where I'll
be. You're an ass, after all."
"Thanks. Would you like to see the children before you go?"
"H'm, yes," he answered meditatively. "No, by gosh!" he added in sudden
confusion. "No, I can't. Got to run. Slews of things still to do."
Inscrutable devil, Dibdin! Who would have supposed him such a bundle of
oddly-assorted emotions?
"By the way," he said abruptly, as he was starting, "Carmichael--heard
from him--everything all right?"
Inwardly I felt a tug as though some one had pulled violently upon some
cord inside me.
"Oh, yes," I lied as urbanely as I was able, "everything quite all
right. You'll keep me in addresses, I suppose?"
He scrutinized me for an instant so searchingly that with a tremor I
feared he would see through me.
"Oh, yes, of course," he finally answered. "The Hotel de France,
Papeete, is a good address until you hear of another. They know me
there."
"Good," I tapped him on the back. "Write a fellow a word whenever you
can. Pretty lonely here after you're gone."
"Lonely!" he repeated. "And you--oh, by George, and I'd almost
forgotten--and you to be married in a few days--lonely!"
"That's--off," I faltered--"for the present."
"Off!" he exclaimed aghast. "Did she break it off?"
"Put it off," I corrected.
"When you told her of keeping the kids?"
I nodded my head slowly, watching the odd play of his features.
He opened his arms quickly as though he were about to hug me like some
grizzly old bear--then as quickly he dropped them, shamefaced.
"By God!" he uttered solemnly. "This--this gets me--the way things came
about. You--you are a man, Randolph, my lad. Courage--that wins
everything in the end. Even when it loses, it wins. Yes, sir."
I have not the remotest idea what he meant by those words.
"Broken up about it?" he demanded abruptly.
What my gesture proclaimed to Dibdin I don't know. For me it expressed
all that I had passed through during the last ten days.
"No, you're right. No use," he said, clapping me on the shoulder. "Sit
tight, my boy. Courage--the only thing! Now, good-by," he wrung my
hand, "and God bless you."
"Same to you, old boy, and best of luck."
And now the only intimate friend I possess has gone and left a hole in
the atmosphere as large as Central Park.
*CHAPTER VI*
An odd look of overt approval I have surprised of late in Griselda's
eyes causes me a peculiar twinge of regret. It shows that new
conditions have overwhelmingly ousted the old. Griselda never troubled
to approve of me before. I have no desire for any change in Griselda,
even for the better.
I have been successful, however, I am bound to record. I have found an
outdoor school for Ranny and Laura in Macdougal Street near Washington
Square, and a nearby kindergarten for Jimmie. The girl Alicia is able
to take Ranny and Laura to Macdougal Street on the way to her own public
school. Jimmie, who does not go until later in the morning, is a
problem. Thus far I have been conducting him to his kindergarten
myself. But obviously that cannot continue, despite the fact that
Jimmie, seeing his elder brother depart with two girls, turns to me with
a look of inimitable superiority and observes:
"We men must stick together, mustn't we, Uncle Ranny."
I gravely agree with him on the general policy, though I aim to
forestall future trouble by indicating that expediency often governs
these things.
The term bills paid in advance to the schools have left a gap in my
exchequer. For the first time I have been compelled to decline a
genuine bargain. Andrews, the bookseller, called me up with the
announcement that he had something I could not resist. Laughing, I
asked him to name it.
"It is nothing less than Boswell's 'Johnson'," he told me with
particular solemnity, "first edition, with the misprint on page 135--a
beautiful copy."
"Dated April 10, 1791?"
"Dated April 10, 1791," he repeated with impressive triumph. My heart
sank, though it was beating loudly. For many years I have had an order
for that Boswell.
"And the price?" I murmured faintly.
"For you," he said, "four hundred dollars."
Griselda would approve of me blatantly did she know the courage it
required to answer Andrews.
"No, friend, I am sorry but I cannot afford it at present."
Andrews was incredulous. "Do I hear you correctly?" he queried.
"Accurately," I told him, "if you hear that I can't take it."
"Then I refuse to accept the evidence of my ears," he retorted with
spirit. "I shall send it down to you." I told him it was useless.
"Oh, you needn't buy it," he shouted. "But I insist on giving an old
customer the pleasure of seeing it at his leisure, in his own library."
A shrewd, good devil is Andrews, even though he is a good salesman. I
have been feasting my senses on the Boswell, but it will have to go
back.
Dibdin's going so abruptly has left me very heavy at times upon my own
hands. He had a way of dropping in unannounced when you least expected
him, so that I came to count upon him at unexpected moments. There is
no one to take his place. Now on clear evenings I ramble aimlessly
northward and often turn in at the club, though so little have I been a
frequenter of it I hardly know a soul in the place. Last night I ran
into my classmate, Fred Salmon, for the first time in months.
Fred is, I should say, my exact antithesis. He is full of laughter and
noise and exuberance. Riches are his goal in life, and if he expended
one half the vitality on the acquisition of riches that he devotes to
the collection of humorous anecdotes, he would be a wealthy man to-day.
"Hello, Ranny," he shouted when he saw me, "you're just in time to join
me in a little refreshment. What you doing now?" Luckily he seldom
waits for an answer. With trained rapidity he gave his order to a
waiter and continued, "Come across any rare editions lately, any fine
copies, such as 'Skeezicks' or 'Toodlums' by Gazook?"
"No," I told him, "my collection is lacking in those masterpieces."
"Tell you what you ought to be, Ranny," he boomed, as the waiter put
down the glasses. "You ought to be (here's how!)--a bond salesman!" he
decided after a pause and gulped down his liquor;--"or else a dog
fancier."
"Why those exalted callings?" I asked with only the mildest curiosity.
"You are such a simp and you look so damn honest," he elucidated, "that
anybody would believe anything you say."
"Then will you believe me if I say I don't want to be either of those
things--or anything else?"
"Oh, sure!" he responded heartily. "I know that all right. You haven't
got anything on me. I'd rather own a few good horses and follow the
races round the tracks of the world, if I had my choice. Instead of
which I've got to separate the world from enough dollars to keep me
going. If ever you get hard up, Ran," he concluded reflectively, "let
me know. I'll set you up in the right game. Never make a mistake. I
took a course in character reading for five dollars--by
correspondence--that's how I know so much."
Dollars! Dollars! Dollars! Must every one then become merely a
dollar-amassing machine? I remember Fred in college, ruddy with the
freshness of youth, when he was making jokes for the _Lampoon_ and, so
abundant was his energy, everybody expected him to do Great Things. And
now he can talk of nothing but dollars--and he doesn't seem to be
oversupplied with those. I am nothing myself, but at least no one
expected anything of me.
Fred proposed that we play a game of poker, bridge, checkers or
cribbage. But as none of those manly sports tempted me at the moment we
parted and he cordially informed me that he would look me up one day.
Nevertheless, with all his noise and emptiness, Fred was glowing, or
seemed to be glowing to me. His ideas are puerile. His talk is cast in
one mold, upon one design, that of evoking laughter. But he is alive.
He is not apathetic. That is what I deplore in myself, the apathy that
has saturated me after the recent events, that are like a dark liquid
which has entered my mind at one point and then by natural action
unchecked has stained every fiber of my being. It is not thus I shall
acquit myself of the task I have assumed. I must become alive!
The children, I am beginning to think, are the only creatures really
alive in this world. They don't hanker after musty-smelling first
editions, after knowledge of bygone old worthies like Ser Brunetto some
seven centuries dead, nor yet after the eternal conversion of life into
dollars.
To-day I witnessed a curious excrescence of their bubbling imaginations.
My door standing open, I was able to observe a ceremony that transformed
my dining room into a church and the four infants with solemn faces into
the vivid celebrants of the sacrament of marriage. They are evidently
ignorant of the "alderman" method. To the delight of Jimmie and Laura,
Ranny, my oldest nephew, with hieratic pomp, was being married to the
girl Alicia. Even she knew better than to laugh as the boy was slipping
a ring upon her finger, murmuring some gibberish which he had either
learned or invented, and endowing her with all his worldly goods. The
goods consisted first of all in the number of a hundred kisses, which
the boy proceeded to administer with savage realism to the crowing
delight of Jimmie and the uncontrollable giggling of Laura. This part
of the endowment being finally completed, he brought forth from his
pocket a small toy pistol and gravely placed it in her hand. I nearly
jumped from my chair when I saw that. A pistol of all things! What
could have made the little apes think of that? What a text for a cynic!
Perhaps every bride ought to receive a pistol as part of her wedding
dower? They then proceeded merrily to eat bits of cake and to laugh and
chatter like any other wedding guests. I closed my door softly and for
a space I was lost in reflection. For it suddenly came to me that to
approach life with anything less than the playful zest of children was a
grim, a fatal error.
It was odd that Gertrude should have chosen that hour to evince the only
sign since her decision that she had any memory of me. When she came
in, preceded by the knock and laconic announcement of Griselda, the
first words she spoke were:
"Well, Ranny, and how is domesticity?"
"Highly educative," I told her, as I ministered to her usual wants. "I
have just learned the proper way of marrying a woman."
"Indeed?" murmured Gertrude, somewhat sourly, I thought, "and how is
that?"
"It's not the alderman that is important," I informed her. "It's done
with a hundred kisses and a pistol." In reply to her look of
incomprehension, I described to her the episode of the dining room. To
my surprise Gertrude could see no humor in that.
"What a child you are, Ranny," she shook her head sadly. "And I thought
that with all your faults you were a serious person."
"That must have been your fundamental mistake about me," I answered
somewhat sheepishly and yet nettled. "I fear I am not half as serious
as the children are."
"No," said Gertrude. Then after a brief pause,
"Have you decided yet that the children ought to be sent away to
schools?"
"Why, no, Gertrude! Such a thing has not entered my head since--since
we talked of it," I told her.
"Ranny," she solemnly leaned forward, "I think I know what's troubling
you. You needn't be so foolishly proud with me. It's a question of
money, I take it. Well, I'm ready to help out with their bills. I know
these things are expensive. I am willing to set aside part of my income
for their bills. We could arrange that part of it somehow. Why, you
foolish boy, won't you take me into your confidence?"
"It isn't that--at all," I stammered. "Why won't you understand--it's
the children themselves. How can I throw them over?"
"You don't think you're doing anything for them here--you and this
foundling-asylum girl, who comes from goodness knows what parents?
Better let me manage this--"
Curiously, I felt offended at her speaking thus of the girl Alicia who
seems as integrally a part of my charge and household as any of the
rest.
"It's very good of you, Gertrude," I muttered, "to offer so much. But
to take money from you for my sister's children is--out of the
question." This put her more than ever out of temper.
"I never knew any one quite so idiotic," she retorted caustically. "You
can do nothing yourself and you won't let anybody who can, help you."
And after smoking in silence for a few minutes, Gertrude turned from me
in disgust. Very smartly dressed she was, too, with a most becoming
winter hat and handsome furs. I should like to please Gertrude. But
she seems unable to grasp my point of view, namely, that touching those
children I feel my responsibility to be personal.
"If only some one nearer to them than myself turned up," I murmured
abjectly, "you'd see me bundling them out so quick it would make their
little heads buzz."
"Nearer," she repeated vaguely, "when you know there is no such person."
"Their father, for instance," I explained. "I have no reason to think
him dead. Laura had always felt certain he was alive. There are all
sorts of explanations possible for his absence. He may come back, you
know."
Gertrude laughed at me bitterly.
"The only likely explanation," she retorted, "is that he was tired of
his wife and children. He is probably having a good time somewhere with
some one who knows how to hold him."
That was a phrase that stung me. Why must she slur my poor sister now
in her grave? I bowed my head but I could not reply even though I admit
to a feeling of gloomy certainty that Jim Pendleton will never return.
"Good-by," said Gertrude, smiling grimly at me.
"Au revoir," I answered, letting her out. But she paid no further heed
to me.
Why I should vent my undeniable irritation upon Alicia I do not know.
But I called her into my study as soon as Gertrude had gone and she
entered smiling brightly. The child, I believe, looks considerably
happier than she did when first she came here and her eyes are less
wistful. I was conscious of the sternness of a hanging judge upon my
visage. But Alicia ignored my mood. Possibly she has found me out and
knows that I am least to be feared when in appearance most despotic.
"Alicia," I began severely, "how are the children getting on? Are they
all right?" (What an imbecile query!)
"Oh, yes, sir," she wonderingly answered.
"I mean--are they happy here?" I scowled at her.
"Yes, sir--they think it's lovely."
"Are they--are they afraid of me?" I demanded austerely, looking grimly
at my finger nails.
"No-o, sir," she stammered, "they--they are not."
I was terrifying the child, I realized with a pang. But when I looked
up suddenly the little vixen seemed to be struggling with
laughter--though that can hardly be. She had the manners to turn away.
An attaching little baggage is this child, but I'll have no nonsense.
"And you--" I pulled her up sharply, too sharply perhaps, whereat I
grinned in mitigation--
"Do you feel competent to go on taking care of them?"
"Oh," she gasped--no suspicion of laughter now--"I just love it--Oh,
you're not thinking of--of sending me away, after all, Mr. Byrd?"
There was a catch in the poor girl's voice and I felt stupid and brutal.
"No--no," I growled judicially. "Not at all. I merely wanted to make
sure that there is no trouble of any sort. I suggest that you report to
me every day or two upon anything that occurs to you--that you think I
ought to know."
"Yes, sir," she faltered, "I will, sir."
"Have they clothes and shoes and things--warm enough for this weather?"
"Oh, yes, sir--heaps," she answered, smiling again.
"And you, have you everything you need?"
"Why, yes, sir--I think I have." Her shoes seemed thin and worn. I was
in no mood to be superficial or evasive.
"Are those the best shoes you have?"
"Yes, sir," she answered faintly. Her calico frock also seemed
extremely thin.
"That is all," I dismissed her curtly. "Ask Griselda to come to me,
please."
"Griselda," I began, genial enough to one that is not in awe of me, "I
wish you would look over the girl Alicia's wardrobe and get her whatever
she needs in the way of shoes and things. Would you mind doing that?"
"Ay, I'll do it, Mr. Randolph. I know some cheap places in Fourteenth
Street--"
"Heaven forbid, Griselda," I interrupted her. "I won't have that.
There is enough inequality and heart-burning in the world without
putting it among children. No, no. Buy the things where you bought the
others--for Miss Laura's children."
Griselda laughed hoarsely.
"You'll not begin ruining the lassie with gaudy clothes!" she exclaimed.
"No, Griselda, I'll not. Good clothes have never yet ruined anybody," I
gave her as my genuine conviction. "It's the other way about. It's poor
clothes eat at the vitals of your self-respect like the fox in the tale
of the Spartan lad."
"Have ye gone into the bills for the clothes for the bairns?" she flung
at me.
"Not yet," I answered mildly. "But I'll make a walking tour through
them one of these days."
"You'll walk backwards when you do, I'm thinking," flung out Griselda,
and disappeared, muttering. In Griselda's lexicon extravagance is
synonymous with crime and even outtops it. But she is certain to do as
I ask.
There was a book auction to-day. And two days having elapsed since my
interview with Gertrude I was sufficiently myself, when I lay down the
paper announcing it, to think of going. The news of an auction still
has the effect upon me that a bugle might exert upon some battered,
superannuated cavalry horse. Despite the rise of the plutocratic
collector, despite the shoals of dealers who have made of book-buying
almost an exact science, I still dream of encountering one day the
fortune of Edward Malone, who, late in the eighteenth century, bought
Shakespeare's sonnets in the edition of 1609 and a first printing of the
"Rape of Lucrece", all for two guineas.
I had already conducted Jimmie to his kindergarten. On the way, as he
nestled his hand more firmly in mine, he looked up at me with a humorous
smile and informed me that "we men have won'erful times together." It
gave me a curious thrill and I felt grateful even for this companionship
in my solitary life which Gertrude and so many others find foolish and
despicable.
I was letting myself out at the front door when a plain, large-mouthed
young woman of perhaps thirty, austerely garbed in black, stood facing
me. I remained for a moment bereft of speech and then, of course, I
foolishly apologized, I don't know why--perhaps for encumbering the
earth.
"You wish to see Griselda?" I mumbled, with my hat in my hand.
"No," she declared, scrutinizing me in the murky hallway. "I want to
see Mr. Randolph Byrd."
"I am he," I told her.
"I should like to talk to you," she said in a low voice. Mentally I
waved a sad farewell to the book auction and to any bargains it might
hold and led the way to my study.
"I am at your service," I told her, grinning, and all but offered her a
cigarette.
"It's about the little girl, Alicia Palmer," she began hesitantly as
though she had something dreadful to impart.
"Are you her teacher?" I wonderingly asked.
"No, Mr. Byrd, I am from the Home for Dependent Children--I am one of
the inspectors."
"Ah, I see. You wish to--to inspect her," I blundered on stupidly,
whereat she laughed.
"No--not exactly," she smiled. "To tell the truth, Mr. Byrd, I wish to
inspect you--"
"Well, this is all there is of me," I broke in.
"And I want," she added, "to take her back to the Home."
"Take her back!" I cried, stung by something in her tone. "But--but
why?"
"We don't allow our girls to live in the homes of bachelors," she
murmured, lowering her eyes for an instant.
"Oh!" I gasped feebly. It is my eternal wrongness that seems to be at
the bottom of everything. The picture of the children upon my hands
without the girl Alicia swept me with a chill dismay.
"It ought to have been reported to us," she said reprovingly. "It
really ought."
"What ought to have been reported?" I groped in bewilderment.
"The change--the transfer. We sent Alicia to Mrs. Pendleton," she
explained. "When Mrs. Pendleton--er--died, we ought to have been
notified--so we could look after her."
"I understand," I murmured weakly. "You see, my sister's death was so
sudden that nobody thought of such things. I didn't even know she had
taken this girl from your Home."
In my blundering way I then explained to her how the children came here,
of their attachment to Alicia and of my own absurd dependence upon
her--which I abruptly realized. I told her quite truthfully, I believe,
that now the children could not get on without her. And the bitter
thought assailed me that nothing in this world that is pleasant or
fitting or agreeable can long be left unshattered; that everything human
and sweet and tranquil must be by some human hands undone. What a
miserably destructive race we are!
"Well," I concluded sadly, "I suppose now you'll take her away--and what
I shall do with these three children is beyond me."
To my surprise, as I looked up, I distinctly saw a tear glisten in her
eye. She looked away.
"You have a great many books," she observed with nervous irrelevance.
"The result of a misspent life," I sighed.
"Well, I don't know what to do or say," she said, rising awkwardly.
"I'd like to see Alicia and--the other children. And I'll have to
report--I shall call up the matron of the Home on the telephone."
"Won't you do it now?" I eagerly prompted.
"I'd better see Alicia first, I think--when will she be in?"
"At lunch time," I said; "won't you stay, or come to lunch?"
She seemed to recall that this was that obscene environment, the home of
a bachelor.
"No, thank you," she murmured primly. "I'd better come again in the
afternoon. Would three-thirty do all right?"
"Admirably," I told her.
"I'll do the very best I can," she reassured me.
"That's very good of you," I answered from a grateful heart.
Farewell, auctions! Farewell, peace! Once again I am in troubled
waters, predestined like a bit of flotsam to bob about only in storm.
Obscurely, deep within me, I long for power to do everything, to arrange
everything, to make my world swing about me rhythmically instead of my
lurching about it drunkenly. Even on this secret page, meant for no
eyes but mine, I would pour out my grief and tragedy, the eternal
underlying sadness of life--and then rise up a man of will and energy to
manage my affairs. Instead, I can only weakly scribble ineptitudes to
while away the time until a poor underpaid girl inspectress returns to
pronounce sentence upon me. Am I, or am I not, to be allowed to live
within hailing of tranquillity? Gertrude, I am wretchedly afraid, was
right after all. What business has a manikin like myself to look with
bold eyes upon duty, or to grapple with responsibility which an ordinary
man would assume as if adding another key to his key-ring--to pocket and
forget?
Falstaff could not have been more genial or hilarious than I feel at
this moment, nor yet the ancient Pistol. When I left the dining room a
few minutes ago, my dignity would have suffered permanent eclipse had
the children espied me after I closed my door. I capered about the room
like some rheumatic goat lilting a wild melody _sotto voce_.
The inspectress has pointed her thumbs upward. I hardly know whether
Alicia, the children or Griselda decided the issue favorably.
"Do you wish to see Alicia alone?" I asked the inspectress when she
returned. She will never know, that nice plain girl, with what tension
I had awaited her. No lover she may have had has ever kept a tryst for
her more tremulously--or she would not now be Miss Smith.
"No," was her reply, "she is only a child. I want to see her with the
children." Alicia was already prepared and, I am bound to admit,
partially primed.
"Here is Miss Smith, come to see you, Alicia," I announced with assumed
lightness, as I ushered the lady in. Oh, it was very distinctly
"ushered."
"How do you do, Alicia," Miss Smith held out her hand, melting at the
sight of the children in the midst of play. "How are you--well and
happy?"
"Oh, so happy!" answered Alicia, coming forward with flushed cheeks. "I
am so glad you came."
"But why didn't you write us, child?" was the gentle remonstrance.
"I am awfully sorry, Miss Smith," from contrite Alicia. "But the time
passed so quickly--I was just going to--and I had to get new
clothes--and there are so many things to do."
Miss Smith looked down at Alicia's clothes dubiously. Perhaps she
thought their quality too ruinously good for one of the inmates of her
Home. She then glanced at the silent, wondering children.
"Hello, Miss Smith!" they cried in broken chorus, catching her eye. It
was she who had originally brought Alicia to them. "You won't take
Alicia away, will you?" Laura spoke up bravely.
"Why, dear?--Wouldn't you like to have her go away?" she returned,
smiling uncertainly.
"No! We wouldn't!" replied all the children actually in one voice, with
little Jimmie loudest, whereat we both laughed.
"Who," demanded Randolph sternly, "will sew our buttons on?"
"And who'll give me my baf?" cried Jimmie.
"Or help us with our lessons?" put in Laura.
"Well, we'll see!" Miss Smith came back brightly. I believe that young
woman is genuinely fond of children. "What are you playing just now?"
They all began to explain at once.
"Shall I leave you with them?" I murmured.
"Yes--I'll stay a minute or two," she nodded--and I tiptoed out to await
doom.
When I returned a few minutes later, I heard to my surprise Griselda's
voice, just before I opened the door, rising to the full height of her
indignation:
"If this is no fitting, then nothing is fitting--" whereupon I opened
the door.
The children had disappeared. Griselda with flashing eyes was literally
towering over poor Miss Smith. Evidently Griselda had been bearing
testimony. Most excellent witness, Griselda! What chance had any Miss
Smith against a rock of sheer personality like Griselda?
"It's all right," Miss Smith announced, smiling faintly as I entered.
"I called up the matron this noon and she left it in my hands. This is
an exception--the first of its kind in our institution--but I mean to
let Alicia stay. She--she seems so happy here," she added, faltering.
"That's very gracious of you," I bowed. "I thank you. Shall we--tell
them your decision?"
Griselda opened the door of the bedroom where they all had been cooped
up like so many frightened little hares, and Randolph, unable to contain
himself, demanded eagerly:
"Can she stay?"
"Yes," nodded Miss Smith, and wild shouts must have shattered the nerves
of the other tenants. Jimmie, as a mark of highest favor, ran to Miss
Smith and held forth his arms to be taken up into hers. He could not
bestow a greater confidence. Alicia dabbed some happy tears from her
cheeks. I begged Miss Smith to stay to tea with them, and unobtrusively
escaped. Now my mind is agog with triumphant imaginings. If ever I
become President, Griselda of a certainty shall be my Secretary of
State.
*CHAPTER VII*
Now that the Christmas holidays have passed and I have been casting up
accounts, the uneasy knowledge has come to me that I am no longer living
on my income. The freshet of bills is surging about me yet. Perhaps I
have been improvident, but I have not bought a book in ages. Andrews,
the bookseller, informed me the other day, with an expression more of
sorrow than of anger, that though he couldn't comprehend my
unaccountable refusal of the Boswell, he had not the heart to offer it
to any one else. He was holding it still, he declared, in order to
spare a friend regrets.
"Sell it, Andrews, for God's sake--sell it," I told him.
"But you've had your order in for three years," he protested, "and never
canceled it. Now suddenly you refuse it. That must mean something!"
"It means--I'll tell you what it means, Andrews: I have acquired a young
family." I then briefly explained to him my situation.
"You don't tell me, Mr. Byrd--you don't tell me!" he repeated over and
over. "Then this is what I do," he announced with a sudden ferocity of
decision. "I hold that work, if I have to hold it for ten years, until
such a time as you feel you can take it. Only I am so short of room
here," he added blandly, "will you not store it for me on your shelves?"
"Why, you--you Samaritan!" I laughed in my embarrassment, clapping him
on the shoulder. "What are you trying to do--make a bankrupt of me?"
"If you will include it under your insurance--" he answered--"but never
mind: I'll insure it myself." And then he talked of something else. He
was as good as his word. Before I reached home that Boswell was here
and is now on my shelves. I have been gloating over that epic of
personality and it occurs to me that Johnson and Griselda are kindred of
the spirit.
Two months! It is incredible. Years must have passed since the
children have come here. My past life seems remote as ancient Egypt.
This morning came a letter from Biagi of the Laurentian, asking why he
did not hear from me, when was I coming to Florence, and adding that at
Oxford also some Brunetto Latini material has been recently unearthed
and that I might stop on the way and examine it. I laughed. Gone are
those days, never, I fear, to return. If only I could smell a good old
parchment once again! I still remember the thrill I felt when Biagi
first showed me the vellum script of Sophocles at the Laurentian. I
could actually see the scribe in the Byzantium of the eleventh century
reverently copying the lofty beautiful words, in a spirit of high
worship, his pale cheeks flushed with his pious task. I _was_ that
scribe! Why, I ask, was that strange and eager feeling implanted in my
particular bosom? Could it be that in some past age, I was myself the
scholarly Greek?--But that is nonsense.
If only I could pay my bills. Yet I dare not touch the trifle Laura
left to her children. That must remain for emergency.
And on May first we must change our quarters. The renting agent, a
decent enough little person, was very apologetic.
"I have kids myself," he informed me deprecatingly, "and I know what it
is. But you understand. A bachelor is one thing and four children is
quite another. Makes a difference." I told him that I was more or less
aware of the difference it made.
"And these people here, in this here, now, building," he explained,
"they're so nasty nice--they can't stand the sight of a kid, let alone
the sound." I made no comment, for too recently had I been just so
nasty-nice.
We shall have to seek some pastures new.
Fred Salmon, as good as his word, has actually looked me up.
I don't know why the mere entry of that breezy Mohock into the room
brought my unwilling fatherhood into a relief ten times sharper than I
had felt it before. I suddenly felt myself a gawk and a failure before a
man of the world--even though I did not wholly respect the man of the
world. Once more I was acutely aware of lost freedom. Abstract
Freedom, out of which I had stepped as a man steps from life into death.
Luckily Fred is not one to beat about the bush.
"You remember," he began, skillfully rotating the mutilated end of a
cigar between his teeth, "my telling you at the club the kind of
business you'd be suited for?"
"A bond salesman or a dog fancier," I answered promptly.
"Have you gone into anything?"
I replied in the negative.
"Well, I'm thinking of starting something," he announced solemnly.
"A dog kennel?" I queried.
"No--a bond business, Ran."
"I wish you luck, my boy," I told him.
"None of that--" he grinned, "I want you to go in with me."
I gazed at him in speechless astonishment.
"Have I said a bellyful?" he demanded, removing his vile cigar.
"A--yes," I gasped, "and more."
"Ha! That's the way I am," he laughed. "Ideas come to me and I act
upon them."
"But--what have I done--" I began, stammering, "to deserve this--"
"You're the man for my money," he erupted boisterously, "I sometimes
make a mistake in picking a horse, but never in picking a man, Ranny, my
boy, never!"
When Henry the Fowler was tranquilly snaring finches and news was
suddenly brought him that he had been elected Emperor, I doubt whether
he had felt more completely graveled than did I at that moment. But to
be serious with Fred Salmon was just then beyond me.
"You have come to the right man, this time, Fred," I gave him back a
parody of his own tone, "not a doubt of it!"
"You bet I have, old Hoss," he cried, "don't I know it?"
"That is," I went on, "if fitness, training, experience, capacity,
predilection and abundance of capital are factors, you have selected the
one man--"
"Yah!" broke in Fred, "I know all about that. Don't try the sarcastic
with me, old boy. I know all you can say and a darn sight more. But I
told you it's the cut of your mug I want. What good is the best trained
two-year old if he's a hammer-head? It's with a man as with a horse.
You've got the right look to you--and that's what counts!"
The mockery of my thanks and all further attempts at clumsy satire were
utterly ignored by Fred.
"You're comfortably fixed, I know," he said, ruminatively scanning my
books, which curiously suggest wealth to every one. "But dash it all,
man, you must want more money for something or other--more books, maybe.
Everybody wants more something. I know," he ran on, "it isn't every
fellah makes up his mind on the dot the way I do. You've got to turn it
over in your so-called bean, I suppose. All right. But remember--I
don't take no for answer."
"With that trifling limitation, I assume, I have a wide liberty of
choice?" I ventured.
"Oh, yes," he grinned. "Outside the fact that you're coming in, you can
go as far as you like. Salmon and Byrd!" he exclaimed suddenly. "How's
that for a firm name? By gosh!--There's genius in it! May have been
that which was driving me to you. I never go wrong. Salmon and
Byrd--Gad! It's so good it scares me!"
"Salmon and Byrd," I repeated after him mechanically. "The _menu_
strikes me as incomplete for a _viveur_ like you. Add a little shrimp
salad--or at least an artichoke."
He grinned but he would none of my flippancy.
"No, no," he wagged his head. "None of that. Don't spoil a fine thing.
It's--what do they call it--sacrilege. A good firm name--it's half the
battle. By George! This has been a day's work for me. I didn't know
it was going to be so rich. We ought to have a dinner on it at the
Knickerbocker--or Claridge's. What d'you say?"
In a flash I saw the vista of Fred's life spread out before me--noise
and laughter, ventripotent bouts with costly dishes in expensive places,
tinkling glasses--the world of money-making which consists as much in
riotous expenditure as in half-jocund half-fanatical getting. It was to
this world that Fred was inviting me.
"There will be supper at six o'clock, if you care to stay," I suggested
mildly.
"No-no, thanks," said Fred reflectively. "I'd like to. But somehow not
to-night. I couldn't. Better come along with me. And we'll work out
details."
I resisted his urging, however, and he left me with this Parthian arrow:
"Think it over as much as you like, Randolph, my boy. But it's a go.
Nothing you can say against it will hold a candle to the reasons in
favor. The firm name alone is worth a hundred thousand dollars.
Consider it settled. Never felt so sure of anything in all my life. So
long, my boy. You'll hear from me."
He did not even turn his head when he heard my burst of almost
hysterical laughter as he was closing the door. Always heretofore I had
counted myself, how humble and insignificant soever, as of the
priesthood in the temple of fine things. It was abasing to think that
Fred had claimed me for the money-changers.
Never again do I wish to experience the martyred minutes of anguish that
I have passed through during the last twenty-four hours.
For some reason that none can explain Jimmie suddenly came down with a
fever. That bright little whorl of life all at once looked white,
refused his food with the pallid pitiful smile of an octogenarian and,
in a twinkling it seemed, his cheeks were burning, his eyes glittered
dryly and his lips were parched. Called to his bedside, I leaned over
him and the air about me seemed to darken. Laura's child was, I
believed, dangerously ill. The heart within me turned leaden and even
Griselda displayed alarm. Then and there I vowed inwardly that no
strangers should have the care of this child if he recovered, so long as
I could care for him myself.
The nearest doctor, who occupies a ground-floor apartment below, a brute
of a man of thirty-five or so, elected, when he came up, to look wise
and inscrutable. Calm and grave, he prescribed oil and with a murmured,
"We shall see in the morning" he left me in an agony of doubt and
anxiety.
The only person who exhibited any degree of calm was Alicia. And though
she is still a child herself I confess to a feeling of resentment
against what seemed to me callousness in the face of our perturbation.
I saw visions of any number of diseases, of being quarantined, of
Jimmie's possible death, of my bearing forevermore a feeling of nameless
guilt before Laura's memory. I told them I should sit up the night.
"Oh, no, Mr. Byrd," insisted the girl with sudden vehemence. "Don't do
that. I'll make up a place in the dining room and leave the door of
their room open. I'll hear him if he wakes."
"I'm afraid, Alicia, you don't take this seriously enough," I told her
sternly. She looked at me wistfully for a moment and then faintly
smiled.
"Yes, sir, I do," she answered. "But it's no use our all wearing
ourselves out at once if it's real sickness. But I don't think it's
anything much."
"How can you know?" I demanded suspiciously.
"I just think so," she asserted. "At the Home children were always
coming down like this. The next day they were as well as ever again."
"But this is not the Home," I retorted severely. The girl flushed. I
saw I had hurt her.
"But he's a child," she insisted doggedly, in a low voice. I shook my
head.
"I shall sit up in the study," I told her, "with the door open. I shall
hear him if he calls. You'd better go to bed."
Her great haunting eyes looked at me for an instant and she left me. In
the study I lighted a fire, drew up the large chair, lighted a cigarette
and in dressing gown and slippers composed myself for the night,
determined to spend it waking.
In my mind were revolving many things. Fred Salmon's absurd proposal,
the strange trick of circumstances that had suddenly made me responsible
for a houseful of children, the whereabouts of Dibdin, the amazing
multiplicity of bills, the little lad's burning fever. Drowsiness began
to assault my eyelids before the glowing fire. To combat it, I took
down that sonata in words, Conrad's "The Nigger of the Narcissus", and
reread the description of the Cape storm, which is not a description so
much as the expression of the storm itself. As always in reading that
book, I was overawed to the point of pain by what language can do. And
pondering upon that, I allowed myself to doze off for a few seconds.
Suddenly I awoke with a tremor and looked at my watch. To my amazement
it was half-past six in the morning.
Abjectly guilty, I stole out and tiptoed into the dining room. The
light was burning. I saw three chairs with a crumpled pillow upon them
and Alicia, smiling drowsily, was gliding out of the children's room.
"How is he now?" I asked in a muffled tone, thinking basely to give her
the idea that I had watched the night through.
"Sleeping quietly," was the reply. "His fever is mostly gone."
"That's splendid," I murmured sheepishly. "You are up--er--early,
aren't you?"
"I just lay here on these chairs," she answered quietly. "I looked in at
Jimmie about every half hour. He had a very good night." With a sharp
pang of annoyance mingled with relief, I felt myself stark and unmasked.
We gazed at each other in silence for a moment, and then I broke into
muffled laughter, in which she softly joined. And though I felt myself a
fool, I vow I could have hugged that child to my heart of hearts for her
sense of humor no less than for her silent unfailing constancy.
Like sunlight after storm, Jimmie's recovery is making the apartment
ring again, and when it rings too much I close my door.
I close my door, but not upon the bills. These keep pouring in with the
insistent buzzing of a swarm of hornets, and every day I see them with a
more helpless dismay. I figure and I add and I calculate, but I seem
unable to subtract. I cannot see how we could do without the things
that are bought. Already my modest current account is near the point of
exhaustion and nothing can possibly come in before April.
To-day, in my perplexity, I took an elevated train and journeyed
southward into the region of money. What I should do there I hardly
knew, but a nameless inner necessity seemed to be driving me to do
something. I had a vague notion of consulting with Carmichael. But
when I came into lower Broadway and was actually at Carmichael's door, I
fled in disgust with myself for the sufficiently transparent reason that
I really had nothing to say to him. I felt like a debutant pickpocket
who turns back abruptly from the threshold of his calling because he
realizes the absence of a vocation or is overcome by cowardice.
In the street I looked upon the driving masses of people, swarming,
streaming, with strained faces, urged on by invisible whips of need, of
desire, driven like the souls in Dante's hell by demoniac powers who
ever cry, "Pay your way! pay your way!" They did not hear the cry now,
the continual snapping of the infernal whips, but I heard them and I
quaked inwardly. To myself I fancied the most of these surging figures
upon a level of life that has few problems, that is always "happy" with
the dull unexultant happiness of the slave or the captive, coming
briskly to the office of a morning with a sort of tarnished metallic
gayety, lunching at Childs' or at a counter unprovided with stools,
clinging to a strap in a car jammed with their kind, visiting a
motion-picture "palace" in the evening and living within their incomes
because they must. And though all the rest was abhorrent, that last
detail made me envy them.
Pay your way! Pay your way! The cry was beating in my pulses as I came
away, droning in the car wheels as I traveled northward, dully insistent
in the very noises of the streets about me.
Once within my own door the warmth enveloped me like summer air and with
the warmth came the joyous laughter of the children playing in the
dining room. In a bubbling of happy turbulence they came rushing toward
me as I looked in upon them, demanding that I judge between them on the
rules of their game.
"Just because she's a girl," complained Randolph loudly, indicating
Laura, "she always wants to be queen."
"It isn't because I'm a girl," broke in Laura, panting. "It's because
it's fair. Boys never want to be fair, Uncle Ranny, that's what's the
matter. He's been king for half an hour and he always wants us to do
impossible things so he can be king forever."
"And I want to be king, too," loudly proclaimed Jimmie.
I suppressed the nascent revolt as best I could and soothed the passions
of pretenders. I reminded them that this was a democracy and that
royalty in our land could count only upon a visitor's welcome.
"Aw, don't I know?" said Randolph fiercely. "I wouldn't be really truly
king for anything."
It was a pleasure to me to enter from the turmoil of the outer world to
this playing fountain of affectionate young life. Jimmie, Laura,
Randolph, little glimmers of spark-like personality were fitfully
flickering over their childish heads and it was my task to turn them
into steady flames. That was what I owed to my sister Laura and that
was the course upon which I was irrevocably embarked. But now, alone in
my study, I still hear in the hum and rumor of the streets the insistent
imperative cry, Pay your way! Pay your way!
*CHAPTER VIII*
The incredible has happened. No, not the incredible. The incredible is
always happening. It is the impossible that has taken place.
I, Randolph Byrd, am now a business man--no priest of the temple, but a
brazen money-changer as ever was.
The hum and the noise and rattle of it are perpetually in my ears like
the whirr of machinery in the brain of the factory hand. I cannot think
or put myself in the moods of thought. The sound of the ticker is
constantly in my head, and my nerves crave movement.
Fred Salmon has accomplished his will.
"You must stir it and stump it and blow your own trumpet," is his motto,
and he is teaching me to blow. The firm of Salmon and Byrd is an
actuality and clownishly Fred is making the most of the humor of the
name and doing his best to make me abet him. I say Fred has
accomplished it all. But at the bottom it is Laura's children who are
innocently the primal cause of my debacle.
"D'you know what you are?" Fred shot at me to-day in a flash of
inspiration--he is dowered with a fecundity of flashes these days. "You
are the original Old Man Who Lived in a Shoe! It's the kids that made
you get into the game. Gosh! I wish we could get that fact on our
letterhead!"
With Fred to think of an idiotic notion is to utter and commit it. And
I live in constant dread lest some of our customers and clients, a
sporadic body as yet, should inquire as to the children with which I
know not what to do. Fred is an Elizabethan. In the spacious days he
would have ruffed and strutted and wenched and taken chances with
careless slashing humor among the best or the worst of them. He is a
buccaneer who can throw the dice with jovial laughter when things loom
blackest under the very guns of disaster. He is an enigma. He is, in
short, my exact opposite.
Yet he has made me his partner and accomplice. I used to think myself
adamant, but in his hands I am clay.
It is now late in March. The cold blasts are often succeeded by genial
days of brilliant sunshine that already promise the birth of a new
spring. How much I should delight in the flower market near the
Laurentian or in walking up the hill toward Fiesole past the fairy-like
Florentine villas, or strolling in the Lungarno and across the Ponte
Vecchio to San Miniato--to the Pitti--the Uffizi--the gentle air of Fra
Angelico's cloisters--what absurd fancies! ... I am in wintry New York,
yoked to a broker, or as the letterhead styles us--Investment Bankers.
And though we have received no cables as yet, we are equipped with a
fascinating code cable address, which is "Sambyrd!" There is no end to
our grandeur.
Sambyrd! How it all came about is still swathed in a sort of
semi-transparent mystery for me--semi-transparent, for even now I do see
one thing clearly: My income was hopelessly inadequate to the rearing of
three children and my capital was already invaded. With the capital
gone what was there left for me but addressing envelopes, the children
in a Home like that which Alicia came from and general collapse and
catastrophe!
And then there was Fred's enthusiasm.
"Money," said he sententiously, "is a very simple matter. It won't come
rolling to you of its own accord, but you can get it. Every one must
find his own way. This is my way--Salmon and Byrd. Will you join me and
make it your way, too?"
And I, struggling like a fish in a net, like a bird in a snare, like any
beast caught in a trap, could discern no way of my own.
"But what," I demanded in a sort of despairing indignation, "can I do at
that business?"
"You can learn," said Fred. "And you'll be making something before you
know it. And as we grow you'll make more."
And then I made the startling discovery that there are no parallels in
life. Writers may babble of types and statisticians of means and
averages and populations of facts, but I realized with pain that with
all my books I knew of no guide or inspiration. The case of every
blessed one of us is unique. I could think of no one in precisely my
own circumstances. A pathetic, dejected melancholy overcame me at my
fatal tardiness in learning that the world, like a hungry beast, was
clamoring for decisions. "Decide! Decide! Decide!" it seems to roar
with slavering jaws, "or I devour you! And if you don't decide I shall
still devour you." The drifters perish without a struggle. I had
drifted heretofore but now I must flagellate the will for a choice.
And so I yielded.
The half of my capital has already gone into our offices, and if chairs,
desks and tables will make for success we shall both be millionaires.
There are magnificent leather sofas such as I never dreamed of lolling
on, but discussions and transactions of money, it seems, must be done
within walls padded with luxury. Money breeds money, Fred is ever
telling me, and even as bees are attracted by honey, so the opulent
investors will flock to our richly fitted hive. The droning of the
ticker and the sound of a typewriter are the only noises permissible,
and the smoke of cigars must be the most fragrant.
I hardly know why I should be ironic. Never before have I derived so
much amusement in a short space of time. There was the entrance of our
first customer, Signor Visconti. He came, this enterprising Milanese,
in response to one of the hundreds of individual circular letters we
sent out to small banks and investors, on magnificent stationery,
announcing our rare bargains in securities so safe that the rock of
Gibraltar was pasteboard by comparison, so gilt-edged that only the best
of government paper could dare to crackle in their presence; so
remunerative that--anyway, Mr. Visconti, admirably dressed, came in.
The young woman who brought in his name had been drilled not to seem
flustered. Fred flushed purple with pleasure and executed a brief but
exquisite war dance on the rug.
"Tell him I shall see him directly," he murmured to the young woman and
sprawled on the leather chair beside me in his triumph.
"Why don't you see him then?" I could not help asking.
"Wouldn't do," Fred wagged his head mysteriously. "Must keep him waiting
at least a minute or two--though I'm burning up to get my talons into
him."
I laughed at him.
"Now this is what you do, my boy," Fred gave me quick instruction in the
hushed voice of a conspirator. "A minute or so after I leave you, you
take your hat and coat and pass through the room where I'm talking to
him. I won't notice you. When you're nearly at the door, I'll call you
back. You'll be in a hurry, but you'll come back. I'll introduce you
to Mr. Visconti, then I'll say confidential-like, but loud enough for
him to hear, 'You going out about those bonds?' 'Yes,' you answer, 'but
I'll be back soon.' 'While you're about it,' I'll say, 'you can tell
Spifkins we can let him have that two-hundred thousand on call at four
and three quarters.' You just nod quickly, like a busy man, salute Mr.
Visconti and out you go."
"Where--do I go?" I stammered in a daze.
"You go to a telephone booth downstairs in the lobby and you call me up
on the wire. And don't be surprised at anything I say until I hang up.
Then you can walk round the block and come back. Is that clear?"
"Clear as an asphalt pavement," I answered in my bewilderment.
"That's all right then," he grinned and left me.
Complying with his absurd charge, nevertheless, I was duly introduced to
the well-dressed, well-fed, deep-hued Italian banker from Macdougal
Street and made my way to the telephone booth in the lobby of the
building below. And this is what I heard in Fred's most suave and
ingratiating tone.
"Oh, not at all, Mr. Ferris--always glad to hear from a customer.
Ah--yes, Mr. Ferris. We can still let you have those bonds. Though in
reality they are sold to another client. But I think we can give him
something just as good that will suit him equally well. Yes, that will
be all right. A hundred thousand, wasn't it? Well, well--ha! ha!
Better late than never. Don't let that bother you. Yes, yes, Mr.
Ferris. Send them over to your office as soon as my partner comes back.
I am a little busy now with a customer. Oh, don't mention it, don't
mention it! Eh? Why, yes--thanks. At the Waldorf about five, then.
Ta-ta." And he hung up the receiver.
For a moment I stood speechless in the steaming booth with the telephone
receiver in my hands and then I staggered out, shaken by helpless
laughter.
When I returned, Visconti, smiling broadly, was in the process of being
ushered out by Fred with warm exchanges of amiabilities. We all shook
hands on the threshold in a cordial flurry of busy enthusiasm and a
moment later Fred and I were alone.
"Just sold that fine peach of a Guinea ten thousand dollars' worth of
Hesperus Power bonds," chuckled Fred in irrepressible glee.
"But where," I demanded, "did you get the bonds to sell?"
"Haven't got them yet," he paced the room in nervous jubilation. "But
we'll get them in a jiffy--at the National City Bank. They've got lots
of 'em over there."
Something dark and heavy and cold seemed to have dropped inside of me
upon the vital parts, and chilled me for an instant.
"So this is this kind of a business?" I muttered.
"This is the way this kind of a business begins," he replied composedly.
That interlude of actual business after the ferocious activity of
renting, equipping and furnishing an office, getting stationery printed
and engraved, installing a ticker, making that mysterious body of
connections that was Fred's province, was sufficiently exhilarating to
make me accept it without much scrutiny. After all, what could I do?
This was the furrow in which my plow was set and this, I suppose, is the
custom of the country.
"How," I could not help wonderingly asking, "did you land the effulgent
Visconti?"
"Oh, he's a good scout," explained Fred. "He runs a banking house for
his fellow dagoes in Macdougal Street. He saw we were new and he likes
to give young fellows a chance. He was quite frank. You see, it's
nothing for the big houses to sell ten bonds or so. But he knows that
to us just opening up it means a lot more than the commission. It means
a Sale. Oh, he's a sport, all right."
"That surprises me more than I can say," I told him.
"There are some good-hearted brutes even in this business," growled
Fred, "and don't you forget it."
"Do you think," I asked with a twinge of shame, "he saw through your
telephoning business and that rigmarole of yours to me in the booth?"
"Damn if I don't think he did!" roared Fred. "But never mind. He's a
sport. And some day, when we're big guns, we'll show him that we
appreciate his hand-out by putting him on to something good--see if we
don't!"
I felt as shamefaced as though we had committed a felony. Yet I suppose
that this is the ordinary comparatively innocent chicane of even honest
business, remnants of oriental chaffering and huckstering that still
survive. I am hoping we shall grow out of it. Though at times I suspect
a certain flamboyancy of temperament in Fred that makes him resort to
such shifts rather than not.
A man who had purchased some bonds called up and inquired whether we
would take them back. There was no reason for Fred's offering anything
but an endeavor to dispose of them. But instead his grandiose reply
was:
"Why, certainly we shall take those bonds back, Mr. Smith--and as many
more of them as you've got. Yes, bring them down by all means."
Once he had hung up the receiver he turned toward me with blank dismay,
muttering:
"Now what the hell shall we do with those things?"
I own to a flash of genuine anger at his imbecile untruthfulness.
"You don't know what to do?" I spluttered. "Then why on earth did you
speak as though you had a dozen buyers waiting in a row?"
"Because that's business," he tried to shout me down. "That devil will
have more confidence in us if we let him go back on his bargain than if
he made a lot of money on it. Don't you know human nature?"
"Not human nature like that," I retorted bitterly. "Tell me what you are
going to do about it."
"Let's get on the telephone, both of us," he spoke cheerfully, "and each
call up as many people as we can and offer them those bonds before that
weak sister gets here."
"A desperate remedy," I growled irritably. "Let me see you do it."
Fred lighted a cigar and gazed out of the window. When he turned his
face was suave and benignant. He looked like nothing so much as a man
about to fill a row of Christmas stockings. Then he betook himself to
the telephone. In a cheerful, friendly, lingering voice he began to
offer his gift to one after another of his list as though an inward and
spiritual grace were moving him irresistibly to benefaction. His face
was on a broad grin even under a series of repeated refusals, and I
confess to experiencing a sort of truculent joy at what I believed to be
his discomfiture. His accents, however, never lost their velvety
quality nor did he betray by a single note any trace of disappointment.
On the contrary he was warming to his work with a keen gusto. On a
sudden the young woman at the telephone outside informed him that he was
being called. He listened.
"Mr. Smith?" he answered mildly. "Hello! Bringing us those bonds?
What? Decided to keep them, after all? Well, well," with a laugh, "the
Lord be with you then, Mr. Smith. We could have sold them ten times
over since you first called me. No, no. It doesn't matter. I'll find
something else for the others. You're mighty wise, Mr. Smith--I'll hand
that to you. No, it's all right. Come and see us. Good-by--good-by,
sir!"
When he turned away from the telephone the perspiration beaded his
forehead and puffy cheeks and he grinned genially.
"Whew," he whistled, passing a handkerchief over his face. "That was
great fun. But why do they want to break in on the innocent morning
with things like that! Well, that's how it is, Randolph, my boy," he
added lightly and turned away to other things. In his way Fred compels
my admiration. For this is only one instance of many, one thread in the
texture of our daily life. How I long to read a few pages of "Urn
Burial" in order to forget it all!
It is too soon to know whether or not we are a success. But we are each
of us drawing a small salary and to me that is an immediate help.
What a curious jumble is our life! Forces strange and awe-inspiring,
the very stars in their courses seem to be defending Laura's children,
lest I should do them an injury. But in order to keep them and rear
them I must resort to a kind of olla-podrida of backstairs shifts and
devices, such as I have described, that make my cheek burn. But I
suppose it is as Dibdin says: We are all the ministers and retinue, be
it in court dress or in tinsel and livery, of that exalted prince of the
world, the child. For me, however, it is still a struggle to grasp that
ineluctable truth. Perhaps as a reward for this, as a sort of pourboire
of Fate, I shall become gruesomely rich, a kind of Maecenas, an orgulous
figure among scholars, and finance some new Tudor or early English texts
or latter-day collections of the classics?
My pipe has gone out. I have taken to puffing a pipe in a manner that
would delight the soul of Dibdin. Dibdin! Every day I expect to hear
from him, but still my expectation is vain. The children are all abed
and I sit here filled with a sense that I am responsible for all of
them, sleeping and waking, for their nourishment and existence, for all
this machinery that keeps the six of us going, and the thought fills me
with awe--and yet there is a kind of pleasant sense of pride in it, too.
Dibdin would say that I reminded him of a broody hen, and Dibdin would
be right. A broody hen is a model of responsibility for all mankind.
Yet though I cannot look with young-eyed confidence upon all of this, or
upon my enterprise with Fred, I can hardly resist a feeling that
something of the youth and manhood I have spent as a solitary among
books, something stirring and effervescent that I have suppressed, is
struggling for an outlet. Fred's methods of business, though I wince at
some of them, fill me with gusts of irresistible laughter. His constant
horseplay and good humor are infectious.
To-day he came to me with a grave countenance and informed me that
Sampson and Company, a house from which we sometimes buy a few bonds,
desired to know whether we would join them in underwriting the Roumanian
loan.
"And what did you say?" I inquired with equal gravity.
"Naturally I told him I must consult my partner."
"What did they say to that?"
"'Oh, sure,' he said, 'but it isn't a large loan--only fifteen millions.
All we want you to take is about three millions.'"
I looked at him quizzically.
"Well, what d'you say, partner, shall we take it?"
I scrutinized his baffling expression and roared with laughter. He
joined me, laughing, until the tears trickled down his cheeks.
"But look here," he began, the flamboyancy of his manner persisting even
in private, "three millions isn't so much--and the profit would be
large."
So long as it was horseplay I enjoyed the joke. But with Fred the
barrier between jest and earnest is very thin, often indistinguishable.
"Don't talk rot," I told him. "Do you want a short cut to bankruptcy?"
"Well, it would be in a great cause," he grinned. "Got to help dear old
Roumania!" And humming a musical-comedy tune, he left me. But I am
still conscious of a dread lest Fred, in some moment of irresistible
magnificence, should commit poor little Salmon and Byrd to the devil or
the deep.
*CHAPTER IX*
To-day is a red-letter day for me. The red letter came from Dibdin. As
a matter of fact his brief scrawl in the peculiar, heavy, unadorned
script which I love is written on the minutely ruled paper and in the
violet ink of the Hotel de France at Papeete. But it was so
delightfully cheering to see his dear old fist again--almost like seeing
the man himself. The sheet is dated more than two months ago, and
postmarked San Francisco six days ago. I wonder what brute intrusted
with mailing it has carried it about in his pocket.
Without a word of preamble it begins in Dibdin's abrupt manner.
"I've got you on my mind. How are the kids prospering--and you, old
bookworm? I've picked up something for you even out here--a first
edition of Balzac's 'Pere Goriot', somewhat fly-blown and the worse for
wear, but intact all the same. I won't intrust it to the mails. I'll
bring it to you.
"I am enclosing a check for a thousand dollars. Now don't be an idiot,
however difficult that may prove. I know all you can say, and believe
me it isn't worth a damn. Use it in some way for the kids and make me
feel happy out here among the wrecks and loafers of white humanity. I
wish you could come out here some day and see to what creatures that
once were white men will stoop just to avoid a little work. However,
that's by the way. I count on you to do as I ask or you'll make me
sore.
"The blessed old tub I came out in sails for Suva in three days. And
from Suva I go to the Marquesas. You'll hear from me again before long.
If you want to take a chance and write me, the Hotel de France, Papeete,
is still the best address I can offer you. Yours, Dibdin."
That was all--after months of waiting. I wish the old fellow enjoyed
writing letters a little more than he seems to. Nevertheless I was
delighted. The irrepressible tramp! He speaks of the Marquesas as if
they were around the corner.
As to his check, my first impulse was to destroy it immediately. I
shall keep it, however, as a memento of Dibdin's absurd generosity of
spirit. It would have to be some desperate need that would ever compel
me to use it. Dibdin little dreams of Salmon and Byrd.
I called in the children to show them the letter. And though they were
less excited about it than I was, they seemed delighted at the fact that
after a day in the office I should appear gay and cheerful instead of
weary and careworn. Care is the badge of incomplete lives. And what I
needed was a letter from Dibdin.
A breath of the wide world has come to me with that pleasant burly note,
of other-worldliness, of freedom, of rovings and wanderings, something
of the zest I used to feel. I used to feel myself (or so I think)
strung like a lute, sensitive to every breath and sign of beauty, to all
the subtle tunes of life. My nerves are duller now, responsive only to
the obvious. In the inverted world of business I suppose that is
progress. Dibdin's letter has brought back something of my old self, at
least a nostalgia of other days.
And here my conscience smites me. It is long since I have seen
Gertrude. I must rectify that omission at once. After all, Gertrude
has been patience itself with my vagaries. And the thought of the old
freedom is struck through with the years of her friendship. Gertrude
never interfered.
I have seen Gertrude and she was indulgently amiable when I read her
Dibdin's letter.
"I believe, Ranny," she was pleased to say, "you are developing. Do you
know, I think business experience very good for you?" It was very
agreeable to see Gertrude curled up on a sofa in a very pretty tea gown
comfortably smoking her cigarette. I felt suddenly that the neglect of
feminine society is a mistake for any man, most of all for myself.
"I'm glad my partner isn't here," I told her. "He might give me away."
"I don't care," she answered. "You are a stronger man to-day than you
were a few months and even a few weeks ago. Here you are attracting
money. A thousand dollars is always a thousand dollars."
"Yes, indeed! Let Morgan look to his laurels," I relied. "His days are
numbered."
"Don't be absurd," she laughed. "You'll be rich before you know it.
But that isn't the point. Lots of other things you'll see in a new way.
You've been a sentimentalist, Ranny," she went on explaining. "Business
gives a man judgment instead of sentimentality. You'll come to
understand that my advice to you in a number of things, including the
children, had more sense to it then you guessed. You will recognize
that even children can be cared for better by efficient people trained
for it than by an inexperienced bachelor and a little foundling girl.
Don't worry about that now," she added hastily, "but you'll find out."
My answering grin must have been of a sickly pallid hue, for I own I
felt myself chilling at her words.
"I thought," I put in, "that that was all over and settled between us."
"So it is, Ranny dear," she answered quickly. "Don't misunderstand. I
am not advising now. I am merely prophesying."
"Oh, in that case," I endeavored to be conciliatory, "it will be a
pleasant game to watch how true your prophecy comes."
"Yes," she spoke more eagerly. "Now tell me about your business. It
must be horribly interesting."
"It horribly is," I agreed, "and fearfully done." And I went on to
describe to her amusement some of the ways and means of the ingenious
Fred Salmon.
"How delightful," was her laughing comment. "Do you know, Ranny, when
we're married I mean to come down to your office quite often?"
"Better come now," I suggested. "Who knows--whether there'll be an
office by then?"
"Oh, it isn't so long to wait--perhaps in--June--or when you take your
holiday."
"The sooner the better," I told her quite sincerely. "I see no object in
any further delay--" whereat Gertrude seemed pleased.
"Oh, I'll spring it on you one of these days," she smiled gayly. "Now
will you have some tea or something to drink?"
A very companionable person is Gertrude. Since, as a great man has
said, a grand passion is as rare as a grand opera, I presume that
notwithstanding novelists and romancers to the contrary, companionship
is what virtually all successful marriages are based on. One thing my
business experience has taught me thus far is a disgust with vague and
indefinite conditions. The sooner Gertrude and I are married, the
better I shall like it.
Barely had I written down the last words above than something occurred
to give them the lie. I am still shaken with anger at what I have
learned.
Alicia, whom I had thought to be in bed, rapped gently on my door and
came in, her sweet candid face so charged with pain and alarm that I
jumped from my chair at sight of her. I have seemed scarcely to notice
her these months, yet I realize she has grown as dear to me as any of
the other children. To see her suffering seemed poignantly intolerable.
"What on earth," I gasped, "is the matter, Alicia?" She could scarcely
speak for the tears that were choking her. "Is it any of the children?"
"N-no, sir," she sobbed. "They--are--all right."
"What on earth can it be then?" I demanded, putting my arm about this
little Niobe and gently seating her in the big chair. "Come, my dear,
tell me about it." She made an effort to control her sobs.
"You are--going to--send me away," she wept. The same old story. That,
I thought, must be this child's obsession.
"Am I?" I spoke as gently as I knew how, taking her little cold hand in
mine, "and why am I going to do that?"
"I don't know," she sobbed bitterly. "I suppose because I am no use
here--because you don't want me." I laughed at her boisterously in an
endeavor to shake her out of that notion.
"And who," I asked, "has said anything of the kind?" She did not
answer. "Was it Griselda?"
"No, sir," she breathed.
"Was it any of the children?"
"Oh, no, Uncle Ranny--I mean Mr. Byrd. They like me."
"What was it then?" I insisted gayly. "Come, out with it. I never
heard such bosh. Come, tell me the whole story, Alicia."
"I--I was in the square this afternoon," she began, drying her eyes with
a very wet and crumpled little handkerchief, "playing with Jimmie while
Laura and Ranny were roller-skating--" and she paused.
"Yes, yes," I urged, "and then?"
"A lady stopped to talk to me--it was Miss--Miss Bayard."
"Miss Bayard?" I repeated wonderingly. It was strange Gertrude had not
mentioned it. She must, I thought, have forgotten the incident. "And
what," I prompted, "did Miss Bayard say?"
"She said," and Alicia's lips quivered pitifully, "'are you still here,
child?'"
"Yes--go on!" I could hardly trust myself to speak for the premonitory
anger that was rising within me.
"I told her, yes, ma'am." Alicia spoke somewhat more easily, feeling,
evidently, that I was not against her. "And Miss Bayard said," she went
on, "that she thought I had gone away weeks ago. I didn't understand
what she meant, and I asked her where she thought I had gone. 'Didn't
anybody from the Home come to look you up?' she asked me. And I told
her that Miss Smith had come. And she asked me whether Miss Smith hadn't
done anything about me. And I told her that Miss Smith had--that she
said I could stay."
"And what did she say to that?" I gasped, by this time livid with anger.
"She said it was very strange--that she did not understand it. She
didn't say it to me. She seemed to be speaking to herself. And then
she just gave a little nod and walked away."
"Just gave a little nod and walked away," I repeated after her
mechanically. "And because of that you thought I was planning to send
you away?"
"Yes, Mr. Byrd," she murmured with a dejection that in the young is so
profoundly touching it makes one's heart ache.
"Well," and I hope my sickly laugh was as reassuring as it was meant to
be, "and if I tell you that I knew nothing at all about it--will that
make you feel better?" She nodded. "And if I tell you that so far from
planning to send you away, I couldn't do without you; that you are
necessary in this house, that you are just the same to me as any of the
other children; that I make no distinction between you; that, in
short--this house is your home until--until you grow up and get
married--as long as you want to be here--" and I sat on the side of the
chair, drew her to me and patted her as I might have patted little
Laura. "Is that all right?"
"Yes, Uncle--Mr. Ranny," she whispered, her head sinking toward me like
a child's, and a sigh of deep content escaped her. "I don't want
anything else in this world!"
How beautifully affection sits upon a child!
"Now go to bed, Alicia," I urged her gently, "and don't bother your
innocent little head about anything of that sort. Miss Bayard was
probably joking, but--she won't do that again--when she knows how badly
it made you feel."
She stirred as from a trance and slowly rose. "How is the school work
going?" I asked her. "All right?"
"Yes, Mr. Byrd," she murmured, "except the Latin--I don't put in enough
time on it, the teacher says, especially the Latin composition."
"Ah, we'll have to remedy that. You must come and let me help you.
What are you reading in Latin?"
"Caesar's Commentaries," she smiled, shamefacedly, like a troubled child
that has been restored to happiness.
"Ah, then you _must_ get it right. For what would happen, Alicia, if
you were to face the world ignorant of how Caesar conquered the
Belgians! And if you should go out into life without an intimate
knowledge of the equipment of Caesar's light-armed infantry, of the
habits of the Gauls and the right use of the catapult or the proper
employment of the chariot, the consequences might be little short of
ignominious! Better come to me and let me set you straight. I know you
understand indirect discourse from the way you told me your story
to-night. But the subjunctive, my dear--ah, the subjunctive must be
closer to you than a brother and nearer than hands and feet!"
She laughed a merry, delicious peal of laughter and when she said good
night I put my hand upon her soft silken hair and sent from the room a
very radiant, happy little girl.
But now, as my thought wanders back to Gertrude's surprising _demarche_,
uncontrollable indignation again possesses me. To think that it was she
who had instigated the visit of that little inspectress, Miss Smith,
weeks ago! It is unbelievable. Underhand methods in Gertrude are new
to me.
I have called up Gertrude on the telephone. And in spite of the
lateness of the hour she insisted in a somewhat wintry voice that I had
better come up at once and see her, as she put it, settle it once for
all. _Je m'y rend_. To settle it once for all is precisely what I
desire.
My desire has been stormily satisfied. Though inwardly indignant, I
returned to Gertrude with every intention of being very bland and very
reasonable, hoping against hope to have the unlovely fact somehow
cleared away. But Gertrude, it seems, had decided that the indignation
properly belonged to her.
"Hello, Ranny," she greeted me easily, in the gray tone that precedes a
tempest. "What do you mean by speaking to me as you did over the
telephone?"
"I--I mean this," I faltered, but that was the last time I faltered in
speaking to her. "Did you or did you not report the case of Alicia to
the Home and send an inspectress to me?"
She watched me with narrowed eyelids for a moment and then, deciding
evidently, that a little truculence would reduce me to my normal state
of pulp, she answered coolly:
"And suppose I did--what of it?"
"I merely want to know the truth," I answered her quietly enough. "Lies
are so detestable to me." She flinched perceptibly, but drew herself up
with hauteur.
"Well, then I didn't!" she returned loftily. "But what if I had?
Somebody ought to have reported it," she ran on with gathering temper by
which she thought to crush me. "I think it's indecent for you to have
in the house a girl of that age who's no relation to you. The fact that
you are a fool doesn't make it any less indecent. I'm the only woman
friend you have and somebody has to see you don't make a worse idiot of
yourself than nature made you to start with. Now do you understand, my
excellent friend?"
And having discharged this volley she stood panting lividly, as if
viewing my ruins. At the moment however I could not consider her. I
knew only that flashes of red appeared before my eyes, that I spoke the
literal truth when I told her:
"To me such an action and the person guilty of it would be equally
contemptible."
"You say that to me?" she gasped, taking a step forward, with a
colorable imitation of incredulity, strange in view of her denial.
"To you--yes," I told her, quietly enough, for now I was more master of
myself. "And contemptible is only a mild euphemism for what I should
really think." She stared at me speechless for a moment.
"_You_ think!" she uttered in mocking scorn. "You've posed as a sort of
God's fool--but what you are is the devil's tool."
"Take care, Gertrude," I warned her. "You might say something that you
will regret even more."
She waved me contemptuously away.
"I'll say this," she returned in level tones, seating herself and
clenching her hands in an effort at control--but in reality she was
beginning a new offensive. "You'd better go home, Ranny, and make up
your mind to send that girl away. All men are rotten. But it's because
I thought you were different that--that--" she did not finish, but
added: "And to have you gathering in girls from the gutter--"
"Stop!" I cried, "I won't hear another word," and turned away as if to
go, not trusting myself to say more.
"Come back!" she called, jumping from the sofa. "Come back and listen:
Either you send that girl away or I'll have nothing more to do with you.
Is that understood?"
I laughed at her mirthlessly.
"Choose between her and me," she uttered with the touch of melodrama
that few women seem to escape.
"Don't be theatrical," I told her, now more in control of myself. "That
girl makes it possible for me to bring up Laura's children. She is no
more to me than any of the others. But however that may be, she
stays--understand that, please, Gertrude: she stays!"
"Then you've chosen?" she demanded in livid stupefaction.
"I've announced no choice. But the girl stays."
"Thank God!" she lifted her hands upwards, and I hope her prayer was
acceptable. "I knew I was tied to a fool," she added, as though I had
been holding her enchained, "but I did not know he was a knave as well.
I'm free at last!"
I walked out without trusting myself to make reply.
I sincerely hope Gertrude will enjoy her freedom more than she did her
bondage. Anyway, I am glad she has entered a denial.
As I walked home under a starry sky, however, I was amazed to feel my
anger cooling rapidly; the sense of defeat, of disappointment with human
nature, giving way to a new feeling of freedom, to an elation I had not
experienced in years. I definitely felt a leap of exhilaration in the
wake of the other mingled emotions. It took me by surprise.
Matrimony is obviously not for such shameful villains as myself. If
Gertrude expects me to return on bended marrow bones and sue for
forgiveness, I am certain she is mistaken. Matrimony is not for me.
That at least is clear.
*CHAPTER X*
The dancing flamboyancy in his veins has proved too much for my revered,
partner, Fred Salmon.
With a glimmer hall bravado, half amusement in his eyes, he announced to
me this morning that he has "signed on for a piece of the Roumanian
loan."
I was stupefied.
"How much?" I gasped faintly, watching him closely, for I could not
believe it.
"Only a measly million," he replied with deprecating cockiness. "It was
as much as I could do to make them let us come in at all. If it weren't
for your cold feet I would have taken the three millions." And his
chuckle irritated me beyond words.
He was in earnest. He was not joking.
"And where the devil," I spluttered, "will you get the money for even
the initial payment?"
"Raise it, my boy, raise it," he bent, beetling over me. "If we want to
amount to anything we've got to take chances. One syndicate
participation like that and perhaps another with the newspaper
publicity, and we're made men in the Street. Got to do it. Want to be
a piker all your life? I don't!"
"You're--mad--" I stammered limply. "Stark, raving mad. And how do you
propose to raise the money?"
"By selling the bonds, fellow!" he announced with aloof superiority.
"Have you got the bonds?"
"No. They are not even in this country. We give them _ad interim_
certificates until the bonds arrive."
"Have you got the certificates?"
"No," was the astounding reply. "We'll sell 'em first, get the money
for 'em, turn it over to Sampson & Company, the syndicate managers, and
draw our certificates. That's how it works. Of course if we were a
bigger house, better known, it would be easier. But we'll do it--don't
you worry--we'll do it!"
"You mean," I groped, "we have to sell something we haven't even in hand
and get money for it?"
"That's what it amounts to," he grinned, though less jauntily than
before.
I felt myself crumbling to dust.
"Don't sit there like that!" he cried, regarding me as one looks down
from the side of a great liner upon a drifting derelict. "Get busy!
Get on the telephone and sell some Roumanian bonds!" And he chuckled in
his absurd triumphant manner that will one day drive me to desperation.
"Begin with your friend Visconti," he suggested. "He seems to have
taken a shine to you. Talk to him in Dago."
Many and many a time had I asked myself what I was doing in that
particular galley. To enter a new occupation without enthusiasm, for a
cloistered monk like myself to go out into the market place as a
chafferer and a huckster, among a race I had not even cared to
understand, and to embrace their ideals and their career, concerning
which I had not even curiosity, had been difficult enough. With the
lash of my need I had whipped myself like a flagellant to the daily
grind until custom had given it the ungrateful familiarity that the
treadmill must have for the mule.
But to embark upon this murky enterprise of Fred's, charged for me with
the dread of a hundred lurking pitfalls, into which I should infallibly
stumble, charged with the fear of certain failure, all my instincts
revolted against it. Nevertheless, like a lost soul, I suffered myself
to be driven because I must.
It is to the glory of human nature that there is more of the milk and
marrow of human kindness in it than pessimists give it credit for. The
excellent Visconti, after listening to me in silence while I lamely and
guiltily explained my offer to him, courteously replied in Italian.
"If you recommend them, Signor, I will take them. I cannot take many,
but I will take five."
I thanked him as best I could, but I shrank back as under a blow. This
man was buying not Roumanian bonds so much as my Word. Besides, though
the bonds were right enough, I had nothing to give him and yet I wanted
his money. I could not face it, and so I informed my egregious Fred.
"That's so," said Fred reflectively and for a moment he was lost in
thought. Then, as is his wont, he suddenly began to radiate the heat of
a new inspiration. "I've got it!" he cried. "Listen here. You've only
put half your capital into this business. You've got in the vault--how
much is it? Twenty-five thousand in securities?"
I gaped at him in terror.
"Well," he ran on, "suppose you bring them over, deposit them with
Sampson and Company against that much in _ad interim_ certificates--or
else borrow money on 'em. Don't you see?" he slapped his knee
gleefully, "then we have those certificates on hand. We can pass 'em
right out to fellows like Visconti, who come straight across, and so go
on with the game. When we're through, all you've done is to lend
yourself--the firm--twenty-five thousand in securities, given us a big
lift and you put your securities back in the vault. Don't you see
that?"
"No."
"Isn't that clear?" he asked in an injured tone.
"Clear as pitch," I answered truthfully.
"Never mind," he clapped me smartly on the shoulder. "You go bring your
securities over. I'll make it clear. Of course you'll draw interest on
the loan you're making the firm."
And like the mule I am, I dully complied. And now we are laboring on
with the sale of the million in foreign bonds to people the majority of
whom have not a notion whether Roumania is the capital of Rome or a
Central American republic. "_L'insuccess_," declares Balzac, "_nous
accuse toujours la puissance de nos pretentious_." But as I had no
pretensions in this business, loss and failure would be doubly
humiliating. What then, I ask myself again, am I doing in that galley?
Meantime what remains of my slender possessions is hypothecated to the
pretensions I had never entertained.
I have been house-hunting in the suburbs. It is idle for me to try to
find either a house or an apartment in any region that would be suitable
for both my means and the children in New York. So for two Saturdays
and two Sundays I have been trudging the dreariness of the less
expensive suburbs in quest of a house.
"What!" exclaimed Fred, when he heard of it, "not going to leave the
Shoe?"
"Yes," I told him. "The Shoe pinches, I must find another."
"Well, you're a funny old geezer," was his laughing comment. I could do
better than that in describing him.
When I come home depressed and weary I find a shower of little
attentions awaiting me, very winning and touchingly agreeable. Little
Jimmie, with great serious eyes, ostentatiously brings me my slippers
and dressing gown and watches my face intently for the reward of
commendation. When I murmur, "Thanks, old man, very good of you," I can
virtually see his little pulses pounding with exultation in his veins.
"Are you vewy tired, Uncle Ranny?" he inquires, keeping up the high
drama of profound concern.
"So, so, old chap," I tell him, kissing his serious little face.
"Nothing to worry about." A moment later I hear him dashing about the
dining room very properly and completely oblivious of my fatigue.
Laura in the role of Hebe, gravely brings me tea on a small tray, and
asks whether there is any book I desire or anything else that she might
bring me.
But behind all these attentions I discern the directing hand of Alicia.
Can it be that the child has instinctively divined that I have actually
broken with Gertrude on her account, that the little woman's soul in her
secretly exults in a feeling of victory? Since she cannot know all the
conditions, she can feel, at most, I suppose, only a vague primitive
sense of triumph in defeating the will of another woman. Perhaps I am
attributing too much to her young intelligence, but at times I seem to
perceive in her eyes, in her bearing, a touch of the protective
instinct, of almost the maternal toward me, that I had never observed in
her before. Possibly it is merely a sense of gratitude. At all events,
those attentions of the little people are very soothing and grateful,
notably now, since Griselda's have declined perforce, in view of her
greatly increased work in the kitchen. Yet it staggers me at times when
I realize the number of souls for whose shelter and livelihood I am
responsible, for the complex machinery that I must keep revolving.
Experience like that should be acquired young. Like Mr. Roosevelt, I
would advocate early marriages.
I have found a house.
In Crestlands (thrilling are the names of suburbs!) thirty-five minutes
from Grand Central Station, in Westchester County. I came upon a
chalet-like cottage built largely upon a rock that I believe will answer
our purpose. The rent is moderate and there is said to be an asparagus
bed somewhere in the "grounds." I know there are two trees with gnarled
roots grasping their way downward among the stones, in a business-like
struggle for existence, and there are a few inches of lawn for the
children. With a veritable terrain like that as dower, it will surprise
no one that I took the cottage.
"The latitude's rather uncertain, and the longitude also is vague," as
vague, almost, as that of Roumania; nevertheless I shall be henceforth a
dweller of Suburbia.
This being Sunday, I took the children out there in the afternoon to
examine their new demesne. With the air of a castellan exhibiting an
old castle, I showed them through the rooms and in the phrases of the
real-estate dealer I enumerated their advantages--with a heavy heart.
But the children cared nothing about that. Randolph saw visions of a
tent or an Indian tepee under one of the gnarled old trees and Jimmie
illustrated how he would "woll down" the slope; all our "grounds" are
slope _et praeterea nihil_. But Laura, detecting a neglected rose bush
near one of the windows, clapped her hands for joy.
"This is like the house in 'Peter Pan', Uncle Ranny," she cried
delightedly. "There will be roses peeping in, and babies peeping out."
I looked at her in poignant surprise. It was so absolutely the voice of
her mother when she was a girl, the spirit and the expression. It is
exactly that feature that my poor sister would have first taken into
account; it might have been Laura herself. I turned away in order not
to cloud their delight. The poetry of life is the only thing worth
living for, yet what a toll the world exacts on that commodity!
Griselda, in spite of all temptation, had declined to come.
"Is there a good kitchen?" she demanded. I told her I thought there
was.
"Then I will not waste my time looking for the birdies in the trees or
the paint on the roof," she retorted stoutly. She even demurred at
Alicia's coming. "There's over much to do," she protested darkly.
Of discomfort and wretchedness let none speak. I have sounded both and
so much else that is unpleasant to the abysmal depths that I shall never
again look with the same eyes upon the impassive faces of the men in the
moving express train. They have all no doubt lived and suffered even as
I, these, my brothers!
I have moved the household to my suburb, and this is a lament _de
profundis_.
The legendary mandrake is a gurgling infant to the way my books cried
upon removing. They not only screamed; they sobbed and quivered like
broken souls to be dislodged from their place that has known and loved
them so well and so long. Every object in the flat was a whole
plantation of mandrakes. Their wailing and ululation resounds yet in
their new and changed surroundings. Roses peeping in, indeed! To my
books this is a house of sorrow. Forlorn and jumbled and still unsorted
they stand and lie in heaps so that their fallen state wrings my
lacerated heart. Alicia, to whom I sadly complained of this condition,
consolingly answered:
"But my English teacher in school would say that that was a 'pathetic
fallacy', Mr. Ranny. Books and things don't really feel, do they?"
"Don't they!" I bitterly exclaimed. "Let unemotional pedants speak as
they stupidly will, Alicia. Nothing can be more poignantly pathetic
than a fallacy!"
"Yes, sir," murmured Alicia and with reverent fingers she silently
helped me to place some of those books. She has a tender touch for the
objects of other people's love, a charming attribute in a woman.
And from the physical chaos in the chalet at Crestlands I am whirled
madly every morning in a crowded express train, then in a convulsively
serried subway car, to the more subtle chaos in the office of Salmon and
Byrd--to sell Roumanian bonds. Roumanian bonds are overrunning those
offices like the rats in the town of Hamelin. Ah, will not some piper,
pied or otherwise, come and pipe them all into the sea? The answer, I
grieve to say, is no! The impossibility of shifting one's burdens is
the fundamental mistake of Creation.
Nothing irritates me more after a morning's fruitless telephoning or
ineffectual running about than to have Fred Salmon smile sleekly, clap
me on the back and mumble mechanically:
"Great work, old boy! You're doing fine!"
What is the use of these false inanities? On Saturday he came to me
with the gratifying intelligence that Imber and Smith, who took two
millions of the bonds, have already sold out their allotment.
"Damn them!" was the only answer I could find.
"That's what I say," he answered in his perfect role of being all things
to all men, then reflectively, "I think Smith's a liar, though." I'll
wager nevertheless that he congratulated Smith as heartily as he bruises
my back. To be all things to all men is surely one of the most
disgusting traits in a human biped. Fitfully ever and again I wish
myself out of the ruck and rabble of all that. But sadly and heavily it
comes to me that it is better perhaps to bear the ills one has than to
fly to others that are a mere sinister blank. I seem like a man on a
raft with the storm-lashed waves washing over me the while I gasp for
breath and hope for rescue.
I wonder what this life would be like if upon coming home to Crestlands
there were not those eager little retrievers to fetch and to carry and
to wait upon me, to surround me with their glad young freshness. But in
candor I must admit that but for them I should be leading my old
secluded life, undisturbed among books, that now seems remote as a past
incarnation.
The weeks go by and, toiling under our burden, we are desperately trying
to stem the rush of time. In certain hard-pressed moments I have a
sickly feeling that time will win--and crush us. A revoltingly new
discovery I made yesterday, that Fred has taken to drinking during
business hours, suddenly drew the life out of me like a suction pump.
Then, realizing the meaning and the enormity of the fact, I was
frightened out of fear and talked to him in as friendly and kindly a
vein as the circumstances would permit, in an effort to show him our
position and where it might lead us.
His first snarl of defiance gave way to contrition. He wept maudlin
tears and made promises so robust that they ought to outlive him, but--I
feel shaken as never before.
Meanwhile Sampson and Company are calling for the payments due on our
allotment of bonds, and Fred, the smiler and the diplomat, is shirking
interviews with them.
"What we need, Ranny," he said to me to-day in chastened mood, "is
capital, more capital. We went into this business on a shoe
string--sometimes it will hold till you can get a rope and sometimes--"
--"Even a life line is too late," I supplied.
He did not answer. But after a pause he began afresh:
"Couldn't you get round and see some of your rich friends--see whether
they could tide us over for a spell?"
"Rich friends!" I writhed as one in torment. "Who are my rich friends?
I have none, as you ought to know. I have now put in every cent of
capital that I own--against your business experience, Fred. And this is
where we've arrived. If my sister's children weren't dependent upon
me--but then," I ended bitterly, "I shouldn't be here, as I think you
know."
He bowed his head.
"Didn't your sister--wasn't there anything--?" But to his credit, he
did not finish. If, as I suppose, he meant to ask whether Laura left
any money that I could use, he evidently thought better of it and walked
away in a somber silence. And that is where we stand.
That is where we stand in our business, and the needs of my household
are expanding. Griselda knows nothing of my affairs and yet I surprise
her dark eyes, singularly lustrous for one of her years, watching me at
times out of her swarthy wrinkled face, as if divining the Jehannum I am
experiencing. More than ever she lays herself out to perform incredible
feats of economy, whilst I hypocritically pretend to be unaware of it.
The children, having prospered and grown during the winter, are in need
of new summer wardrobes, which I have ordered bought. If it is to be
disaster, then shabbiness shall not betray us. Like the man who donned
evening clothes in which to sink with the _Titanic_, I have always
entertained a stubborn faith in the policy of good clothes. Policy,
policy--the trail of policy is over me like a fetid odor--and how clean
and unsmirched I have always felt in my stupid transparency! Gertrude,
if she knew it, would now rejoice that she had thrown me over.
I envy our clerks and typists who banish all cares at five in the
afternoon and do not resume them until the following morning. What a
gay life is theirs--if they but knew it. They jest and fool and hurl
picturesque slang at one another and draw their pay on Saturdays,
unconscious of how near to perdition we totter. If we go to the wall
they will soon find other places. But I--shall find the wall. I wish I
knew what the emotions of Fred are as, rucking his forehead heavily, he
strides about our rugs. I only know, however, that mine are emotions of
doom.
The black doom is upon us.
After days of haggling and lying and shuffling and paltering we have, as
a firm, expired.
Our vain and concentrated efforts to sell something that we had not the
necessary means and connections to sell led us to neglect the things we
could have done.
I shall not soon forget the vile outburst of the heavy-jowled Sampson
when as by a Sultan's firman, he imperiously summoned us to his office
and told us in his language what he thought of us.
"People like you don't belong in the Street--they belong in jail.
Assign!" he snarled, "Better assign at once and clear out!"
And not the least of the bitterness of that moment was the acrid
realization that I could not charge him with having flattered and
hounded Fred into the vanity of the enterprise, because at that moment
Fred and I were one--with this distinction: What Fred was suffering
would roll from his back like water from a rhinoceros, whereas I would
remain obscenely branded by his words forevermore.
It was useless to argue, futile to protest. There was no time or place
for extenuating circumstances. I was too full of shame and humiliation
to offer any conciliatory suggestions, and I still had enough of mulish
pride not to truckle to that fish-eyed bully. We walked out of that
man's office bankrupts.
I still marvel how I found my way back to our own office through the
lurid darkness that encompassed me. The world about me--the palpitating,
pressing eager world, of which in a measure I had been a part--was
suddenly strange and phantasmal and alien, the ghostly city of a dream.
The people were shadows and their hurrying steps and errands as
mysterious and as unrelated to my life as those of a colony of ants.
The only actuality I did not envisage in that dark moment which was
coextensive with eternity, was that _I_ was the anemic ghost stalking at
noonday and the others were the reality.
"If only you had not taken the balance of my capital--" was the thought
throbbing under my overwhelming misery--"if only you had left me that!"
But I could not bring myself to whine to Fred. I kept stonily silent.
A burning resentment swelled my heart so that I could not speak. The
newspaper publicity Fred had craved would come to him now with a
vengeance.
Now they are busy dismembering the corpse and colporting the remains,
whilst I sit darkly at home in Crestlands like one disembodied, dead.
*CHAPTER XI*
I have had time to grow dulled to the shabby peripety of my career as a
business man. The sickening details and legal forms of our failure are
over, and I am wretchedly surviving on the loan made upon an insurance
policy, but still I have evolved no plans for the future.
I sit in the shadow of the chalet watching Jimmie rolling down the slope
and endeavoring to roll up again. The early August sun is hot in the
heavens and the air even of Crestlands is muggy. And my pulses keep
insistently repeating, repeating, "What is to become of us?" My
pulses--but not my mind. That useless functionary has quite simply
suspended operations.
I used to feel wise in reading Montaigne and Buckle, humorous with
Rabelais and Cervantes, acute and a man of the world with Balzac or
Sainte-Beuve. But none of these erstwhile comforters, it appears, seems
able to lift up my spirit. Modern young critics talk of escape in
literature, but it seems one can only escape when there is nothing very
serious to escape from. Like a debauchee who had killed his palate or
one who has swallowed an unwholesome dish overnight, the zestful taste
for an essay of Elia, the gustatory rolling under the tongue of
sentences in "Religio Medici", the keen pleasure in a Dryden preface,
all these are now impossible. The savor of them has died for me. My
dreams of Maecenasship for Tudor Texts have gone a-glimmering.
For joy in books the tranquil heart is needed. The world has been too
much with me and neither poppy nor mandragora can banish the effects of
it. There is no balm to sane me.
There was escape after all, though--if not in reading, then in writing.
I can quite understand now the persistence of diarists in the world. I
had no sooner written down the words above than a tremor of resolution
shook me and I went into the baking city in quest of livelihood. I
found nothing save exhaustion, but it is certain that in Crestlands I
shall find even less.
I looked upon the teeming streets wide-eyed like a gawk, surprised anew
that so many should find a foothold and sustenance where I had failed.
The mystery of that will always baffle me. The deepening gloom gave
way, however, when I entered Andrews' bookshop. His welcome was warm.
"Stranger," he greeted me cordially, "come into your own."
"I don't deny I have felt it calling," I admitted.
"'Course you did--there is nothing else in the world."
"Ah, how much else, Andrews!" I told him sadly.
Whether he has heard of my failure or not I cannot tell. If he has, he
was tact itself.
"Here are some beautiful things for you to see," he announced, bustling
as he led me to a table in the rear of the shop. I looked at his
beautiful things and was able to give him some useful points about one
or two of them. He has actually come upon a Caxton, the lucky devil!
This was indeed "my own", as Andrews was shrewd enough to divine. _Ca
me connait_. And his courtesy and his deference were strangely
consoling in the light of my recent experiences. Courtesy and deference
cost others so little, but what refreshing manna they are to one's
self-respect!
I go on tramping the pavements of New York and I wish there were more
point in my trampings.
Every morning I go forth with a faint glow of hope, and the dim basis of
my hope, when I come to think it out, is something like this: In the
haunts of men I may meet somebody, an old acquaintance who may know or
hear of something whereby a broken reed like myself, a pronounced
failure, may get the chance of earning a livelihood. A desperate enough
situation when reduced to the glaring light of plain speech--but that is
the best that I am able to do. If only Dibdin were here! Despairingly I
am in need of a friend. But my past life has separated and insulated
me, so that when I think of friends and my thought convulsively darts
out this way and that, it encounters nothing but vacancy, empty air.
Fred Salmon is avoiding the Club. He is the only one who had reached to
me from the past, and the result I have already recorded. I am not
eager to meet him, though I have worn out any hostility I may have felt
toward him. _C'est un mauvais metier que celui de medire_. I find my
inward man the better for thinking of Fred neutrally, when I think of
him at all.
Illness was the one thing lacking to my ineffable Pilgrim's Progress, so
infallibly illness has appeared.
Jimmie came down with measles on Saturday and yesterday Alicia followed
his example. The crumpling of Alicia under illness has proved like the
shattering of a column in the edifice of my household. The whole
insecure structure is tottering. And though she is burning with fever,
the unhappy girl is murmuring with anxiety that stockings go unmended
and buttons unsewn.
"Don't you worry about that, little girl," I keep telling her.
"Griselda will do those things."
"Griselda has too much to do as it is," she gulps and the tears start to
her hot eyes. I have isolated her and Jimmie in my room, and Randolph
and Laura are cautioned to keep as far as possible away from them. I
remember the time when I would have flown from the fear of infection as
from the plague, but now my anxieties are of a wholly different nature.
Jimmie is mending now, but Alicia is far more ill than she knows.
Griselda has undertaken the stockings and at night, when I sit watching
and waiting for sounds from either of my invalids, I operate upon the
buttons. It is curious how much art enters into the sewing of a button.
A dog of a bachelor though I have ever been, I have never been compelled
to learn that handicraft before. But I have learned from Griselda, who
smiled crookedly when she imparted the law, that if you twist the thread
around several times after you have sewn it, the whole thing acquires,
relatively, the strength of a cable. To your punctured fingers you
attend afterwards.
Alicia, awakening at midnight, sat up in bed and caught me at my task;
she moaned most dolefully. I hastily put Jimmie's little "undies"
behind me, but too late.
"You'll never want me--or need me again--what's the use of getting
well?" she wailed weakly.
"Oh, yes, I shall, Alicia--more than ever," I hastened to assure her.
"You do everything now that I ought to do," she pressed with febrile
insistence. "I shall be no use any more."
"But don't you see, Alicia," I argued, touching her hot forehead, "that
I shall have to be earning money while you are doing the buttons? I
ought to be earning it now, so get well as quickly as you can. Jimmie
sees it; he's much better already." That logic seemed to soothe her
more than I had expected. She caught my hand impulsively and pressed it
to her cheek. The tremendous part played by affection in the lives of
children is a never-ceasing wonder to me.
Alicia is convalescent again, _laus Domini_, and Jimmie is now running
about the little house filling it with noise--which is music to my ears.
Laura and Randolph have fortunately thus far escaped infection. Jimmie
is wanting to resume "wolling up and down" the slope again, but this is
still _verboten_.
I can now take up my journeys into town again and I note with a pang
that I am growing shabby. The yearly purchases of clothes had been as
regular with me as my meals, but I have ordered no clothes for the
spring or summer. Odd, what a deleterious effect the shabbiness of
clothes has upon one's consciousness! The tinge of inferiority it
brings touches some very tender places in one's spirit, almost like a
shabby conscience. But the doctor of the neighborhood, a contemplative
fellow who obviously knows his business, though he talks of his
laboratory and his experiments like an alchemist, has earned the clothes
that I must do without. And of the two I needed them more.
My search is ended. There is jubilation in my heart again. I have
fallen into a livelihood; like the bricklayer who used to fare forth,
dinner pail in hand, I have found work.
And the way of it was an odd little stroke of Fate, a whimsicality that
would have pleased the ironic soul of Thomas Hardy.
An old college friend of mine, Minot Blackden, whom I used to call
Leonardo da Vinci because he was so full of ideas and inventions, had
rediscovered, he said, the art of glass-staining. After a five years'
residence in Italy, on a modest patrimony, most of which had gone into
glass or into stain, he had returned to his native land and set up a
shop _a la_ William Morris somewhere in the region of Bleecker Street,
and proceeded to stain glass. He had had some newspaper publicity
recently, and there were cuts of his work.
While passing a church in my hot and dusty peregrinations, it occurred
to me that here might be a chance of serving him and also myself. By
writing an interesting booklet about his craft, illustrating it
profusely and sending it with personal letters to all the vestries in
the country, I might bring a flood of custom to his shop. It is with
this forlorn proposal that I was blundering about to discover Minot
Blackden. I failed to find his shop, but I came face to face with my
old Salmon and Byrd acquaintance, Signor Visconti.
In his palm beach suit and Panama hat, Visconti made a splendent and
impressive figure in the purlieus of Bleecker Street.
"Ah-h, Signor Byrd," he cried with Latin cordiality, seizing my hand in
both his own, "you are what you call a sight for sick eyes. I have
often wonder about you--you must come into my banca--we must have leetla
refreshment!"
Refreshment appealed to me at the moment and gladly I accompanied him to
his private office in the bank, that stands between a junk warehouse and
a delicatessen emporium. With a charming tact he touched upon the hard
luck of Salmon and Byrd and dismissed the subject for good.
Briefly--for him--that is, with a wealth of gesture and illustration, he
informed me that he was looking for a man for his enlarging bank, and
asked me to recommend one.
"I want a fina man--" he explained. "American gentleman--who speeks a
leetla da Italian--who put up what you call a fina fronta--understand
me?"
"A fine front," I mused aloud, "and speaks Italian--no, Signor Visconti,
we had no such young man in our office. I can think of no one I could
recommend."
He was obviously nonplused.
"I thinka," he said, with, a gesture of final resolution, "if I could
finda some gentleman lika you, Mr. Byrd, he would be _precisamente_ what
I look for. I know," he added hastily with an apologetic laugh, "man
lika you, Signor, be hard to find!" And again he laughed heartily,
though watching me between narrowed eyelids. His drift was now obvious.
I was silent for a moment.
"Well, if it comes to that, Signor Visconti," I answered slowly, "I am
doing nothing in particular just now. I may be utterly no good for you,
but--but if--"
"Ah, you would try old Visconti, Signor!" And up flew his arms like
windmills. "You no ashamed to work in vot you Americans call da Guinea
colony!--no, no!" He noted the deprecating shadow on my face. "Ah, you
understanda--you know the granda history of the Italiana people.
You--but, Mr. Byrd--" and with an admirable histrionic transition he
suddenly turned grave and sad--"Mr. Byrd, you are the very man I looka
for," and he gripped both my hands. "But, Meester Byrd--I fear I cannot
afford to pay what you would expect. Ah, _sacra_--if I could! You, the
very man--_Dio_--" and he clapped a hand dramatically to his
forehead--"the very man, but!--" and his full smile of sad and wistful
regret seemed genuine for all its histrionic value.
"What do you propose to pay, Signor Visconti?" I inquired.
"I can only pay to start," he whispered hoarsely, with the round eyes of
a man facing the inevitable, "thirty-fiva, maybe forty dollars week.
Too leetla, I know," he added slowly, letting his hands fall on his
knees with resignation.
"Very well, Signor Visconti," I said. "If you will try me, I shall be
glad to come at forty dollars."
Visconti fairly leaped at my hand and the bargain was struck.
I am to begin earning a livelihood on Monday.
Who said that adversity is the best teacher? Possibly it is, but
gladness is the ablest cocktail. There is no stimulant like a little
success.
I am an august personage.
I shall choke with pride, so august am I become in the Banca e Casa
Commerciale Visconti.
I call up the National City Bank concerning the price of bonds, or the
rate of exchange, in English so presumably impeccable that Signor
Visconti visibly puffs out his magnificent chest as he listens. There
is a divinity that shapes our "frontas", rough-hew them how we will.
"Visconti's speaking," I say with firmness and the head of Visconti's
curls his fine dyed mustache and turns away, glowing with ill-concealed
pleasure. This is seemingly what the head of Visconti's has been
waiting for. Mentally I offer a fervent prayer that he may never be
disillusioned as to my capacity.
I toil as I have never toiled before. I come early and go late and
frequently have my lunch sent in from the adjoining delicatessen,
powdered no doubt by the contiguous junk house, and the "boss", as the
others call him, smiles with a rare unction that spells approval.
With difficulty we are actually living on my income. If I had the half
of my capital back that I had no business to put into Salmon and
Byrd--but ifs inaugurate depressing trains of thoughts. My library
alone stands between me and disaster, so like a prudent man of business
I have begun a catalogue of it and I am training Alicia to help me. I
must not again be caught by so desperate a prospect as recently faced
me.
How my little household had been affected by my late slough of despond I
realize only now that I have passed it. Laughter and high spirits seem
to have been uncorked again. We play and we rollic and chatter, more
than in the early days of our _vie de famille_--how long ago is
it?--something less than a year, no longer!
It is now the end of September and the schools have reopened. We are
all sanely and industriously busy, like a normal American family, and as
though its so-called head were an adequately competent being, and not
the bungling masquerading amateur that he is. "Who never ate in tears
his bread"--well, we have made intimate acquaintance of poverty and we
fear it less than of yore--though we hate it more. It may be an
impostor, but who maintains that all impostors are harmless? I
certainly would deny that premise, so--we are cataloguing the library.
"Here is 'The Anatomy of Melancholy' by Burton," announces Alicia,
taking down a volume.
"Small quarto, printed at Oxford, 1621," I finish for her.
"Yes," she breathes, marveling wide-eyed. "How can you remember such
things, Uncle Ranny?" for so I have asked her to call me.
"How can I remember?" I ask in surprise. "How can I remember that you
are Alicia Palmer, close to the towering age of fifteen, or that Jimmie
Pendleton is five?"
"But we--are people," avers Alicia, "and we are--yours." I own to a
slight thrill at this sweet investiture, implicit in her words, but I
seem obtuse to it.
"But so is a great book a person," I sententiously inform her, "and
'Oxford, 1621', means a first edition, Alicia--not merely a person but a
personage. That book is as proud an aristocrat as though it were
plastered with coronets and simply throbbing with Norman blood. There
is a whole heraldry about it--it is a prince among books. And all,
Alicia, because it aroused men's interest and has given them delight
from about the time the Pilgrims first landed at Plymouth. It's a book
that could take Doctor Johnson out of bed two hours sooner than he
wished to rise. Also, if the worst came to the worst, it could feed us
for a time, and that is very important, isn't it, Alicia?"
"Yes," she breathes in awe which for some reason delights me. "What a
wonderful thing it must be to write a great book." And she fingers the
next volume with even greater reverence.
"The 'Life of Edward Malone', by Sir James Prior," reads Alicia. "Is
that a prince among books, too?"
"No," I answer. "That is just a friend. Malone, you see, was crossed
in love in the days of Doctor Johnson, and by way of consolation became
a book-collector and a Shakesperian commentator. They say the Irish are
fickle. But here is one who could never love again. So whenever I read
his life, I think I see through a sort of mist the lovely lady whom he
lost and all about him is curiously dear to me. He wouldn't feed us for
very long, Alicia, but he has given me many hours of pleasure."
"Are book-collectors people--crossed in love?" she inquires with gentle
subtlety, and I am surprised that one of her youthfulness should be
arrested by that particular point.
"If you mean me," I answer quietly, "then I can tell you that I wasn't.
No one ever loved me enough to cross me. I am a collector by a sort
of--spontaneous degeneration."
Alicia throws her fine young head back and peals with delicious
laughter. Afterwards I catch her smiling to herself as she copies down
the titles.
I am amazed to note how lovely that child has become since she has been
here. Her thin, frightened expression has given way to one of happy
confidence. All too soon she will be enriching some young man's life
with happiness. Her interest in my musty old books has given her a
value of companionship in my eyes that I trust I shall not exaggerate at
the expense of my niece and nephews--though Alicia is hardly one to take
advantage of such a situation. Nevertheless, I must be on my guard.
After all, though she is the chartered, custodian of the others, and
_quis custodiet ipsos_--who shall watch over Alicia? Obviously, it is
my task to improve her mind in order to make her the better guardian for
them.
And Alicia's mind is improving apace.
"Uncle Ranny," she inquired the other day, "may I ask what that first
edition of Boswell's 'Johnson', cost you?"
"It costs me nothing but a sleepless hour now and then," I told her.
"It is not paid for. But I owe Andrews four hundred dollars for it.
God knows when I shall pay it. But why do you ask, Alicia?"
"I have just read in _Book Prices Current_ that a copy was sold by
Sotheby's in London for one hundred pounds."
"Already!" I murmured and I was lost in admiration not of the accretion
in value--I am used to that--but of the girl's facility in acquiring the
interest and the jargon of my hobby.
"Oh, Mr. Andrews must have a wonderful place!" she exclaimed. "That
must be a splendid business. Where is he? How I'd love to see it!"
"You shall some day, Alicia," I told her. "He is in Twenty-ninth
Street, and an excellent fellow he is."
I then explained to her how Andrews had insisted upon planting the book
on my shelves.
Alicia gazed at me in silence for a moment, then suddenly tears
glittered in her eyes.
"It's because of us," she said, with a quivering lip, "because we came
that you couldn't buy it!"
"Don't talk rubbish, Alicia," I flared at her. "A collector gets almost
as much pleasure in thinking of books he can't get as in those he buys.
Don't you think you alone are worth more to me than an old Boswell?"
"No," she murmured gloomily, "but I'm going to try to be."
*BOOK TWO*
*CHAPTER XII*
Many months have passed since I last made an entry in this, which I mean
to be a record of my life for later years, when I am grown old and white
and memory gives back vividly only the days of childhood.
It must be that the stoking of the furnace below all winter, or else my
absorption in Visconti's, has banished reflection upon events from out
of my mind. It is not reflection that was banished, however, but only
the energy to record it. The folk who work the treadmill leave few
records behind them. And I am of the treadmill, occupant of an office
chair, one of the gray mass of dwellers in the suburbs of life.
The office of Visconti's, that was at first like a queer old wharf in
some foreign city to a ship from distant parts, has grown familiar and
almost homelike, so that I feel the barnacles gathering about my hulk at
the mooring place.
It is ever the same. I come and I labor and I go. The chair and the
desk await me of a morning and by ten o'
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