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ON THE STAIRS
by
Henry B. Fuller
Author of _Lines Long and Short_
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1918
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY HENRY B. FULLER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published March 1918_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This volume may seem less a Novel than a Sketch of a Novel or a Study
for a Novel. It might easily be amplified; but, like other recent work
of mine, it was written in the conviction that story-telling, whatever
form it take, can be done within limits narrower than those now
generally employed.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ON THE STAIRS
PART I
I
In the year 1873--
No, do not turn away from such an opening; I shall reach our own day
within a paragraph or so.
In the year 1873, then, Johnny McComas was perfectly willing to stand to
one side while Raymond Prince, surrounded by several of the fellows,
came down, in his own negligent and self-assured way, the main stairway
of Grant's Private Academy. For Johnny was newer there; Johnny was
younger in this world by a year or two, at an age when a year or two
makes a difference; and Johnny had but lately left behind what might be
described as a condition of servitude. So Johnny yielded the right of
way. He lowered his little snub nose by a few degrees, took some of the
gay smile out of his twinkling blue eyes, and waited with an upward
glance of friendly yet deferential sobriety until Raymond should have
passed.
"How are you, Johnny?" asked Raymond carelessly.
"I'm pretty well," replied Johnny, in all modesty.
In the year 1916--
Yes, I told you we should reach our own times presently.
In the year 1916, then, Raymond Prince was standing to one side, whether
willing or not, while John W. McComas, attended by several men who would
make their cares his own, came down the big marble stairway of the
Mid-Continent National Bank. Raymond, who had his cares too, would
gladly have been included in the company (or, rather, have replaced it
altogether); but he saw clearly that the time was not propitious.
McComas looked out through this swarm of lesser people, half-saw Prince
as in a mist, and gave him unsmilingly an abstracted half-bow.
"How do you do?" he mumbled impersonally.
"I'm pretty well," returned Prince, in a toneless voice. But he was far
from that, whether in mind or estate.
Between these two dates and these two incidents lies most of my story.
Be quite sure that I shall tell it in my own fashion.
II
First, however, this: I do not intend to magnify the Academy and its
stairway. The Academy did very well in its day, and it happened to be
within easy distance of James Prince's residence. If its big green doors
were flanked on one side by a grocery and on the other by a laundry, and
if its stairway was worn untidily by other feet than those of Dr.
Grant's boys, I shall simply point out that this was all in the day of
small things and that Fastidiousness was still upon her way. Should this
not satisfy you, I will state that, in the year following, the Academy
moved into other quarters: it lodged itself in a near-by private
residence whose owner, in real estate, sensed down-heeled Decadence
stealing that way a few years before any of his neighbors felt it, and
who made his shifts accordingly. If even this does not satisfy you, I
might sketch the entrance and stairway, somewhere in Massachusetts,
which are to know the footfalls of Lawrence D. McComas, aged ten,
grandson of Johnny; but such a step would perhaps take us too far afield
as well as slightly into the future. One does not pass a lad through
_that_ gateway on the spur of the moment.
Nor ought I to magnify, on the other hand, the marble stairway of the
Mid-Continent. This was not one of the town's greater banks; and the
stairway was at the disposal not only of the bank's clientèle, but at
that of sixteen tiers of tenants. However, it represented some advanced
architect's ideal of grandeur, and it served to make the bank's
president seem haughty when in truth he was only preoccupied.
As you may now surmise, this story, even at its highest, will not throw
millions on the habituated and indifferent air; nor, at its most
distended, will it push the pride of life too far. That has been done
already in sufficing measure by many others. Let us ride here an even
keel and keep well within rule and reason.
I am simply to tell you how, as the years moved on, John McComas climbed
the stairs of life from the bottom to the top--or so, at least, he was
commonly considered to have done; and how, through the same years,
Raymond Prince passed slowly and reluctantly along the same stairs from
top to bottom--or so his critics usually regarded his course. Nor
without some color of justice, I presume that they will pass each other
somewhere near the middle of my volume.
III
In 1873 James Prince was living in a small, choice residential district
near the Lake. Its choiceness was great, but was not duly guarded. The
very smallness of the neighborhood--a triumphant record of early
fortunes--put it upon a precarious basis: there was all too slight a
margin against encroachments. And, besides, the discovery came to be
made, some years later, that it was upon the wrong side of the river
altogether. But it held up well in 1873; and it continued to do so
through the eighties. Perhaps it was not until the middle or later
nineties that the real exodus began. Some of the early magnates had
died; some had evaporated financially; others had come to perceive,
either for themselves or through their children, that the road to social
consideration now ran another way. In due course a congeries of bulky
and grandiose edifices, built lavishly in the best taste of their own
day, remained to stare vacantly at the infrequent passer-by, or to
tremble before the imminent prospect of sinking to unworthy uses: odd,
old-time megatheriums stranded ineptly in their mortgage-mud. But
through the seventies the neighborhood held up its head and people came
from far to see it.
James Prince lived in one of these houses; and, around the corner, old
Jehiel Prince lingered on in another.
James was, of course, Raymond's father. Jehiel was his grandfather.
Raymond, when we take him up, was at the age of thirteen. And Johnny
McComas, if you care to know, was close on twelve.
Jehiel Prince was of remote New England origin, and had come West by way
of York State. He had been born somewhere between Utica and Rochester.
He put up his house on no basis of domestic sociability; it was designed
as a sort of monument to his personal success. He had not left the East
to be a failure, or to remain inconspicuous. His contractor--or his
architect, if one had been employed--had imagined a heavy, square affair
of dull-red brick, with brown-stone trimmings in heavy courses. Items: a
high basement, an undecorated mansard in slate; a big, clumsy pair of
doors, set in the middle of all, at the top of a heavily balustraded
flight of brown-stone steps; one vast window on the right of the doors
to light the "parlor," and another like it, on the left, to light the
"library": a façade reared before any allegiance to "periods," and in a
style best denominated local or indigenous. Jehiel was called a
capitalist and had a supplementary office in the high front basement;
and here he was fretting by himself, off and on, in 1873; and here he
continued to fret by himself, off and on, until 1880, when he fretted
himself from earth. He was an unhappy man, with no essential mastery of
life. His wife existed somewhere upstairs. They seldom spoke--indeed
seldom met--unless papers to shift the units of a perplexed estate were
up for consideration. Sometimes her relatives stole into the house to
see her and hoped, with fearfulness, not to meet her husband in some
passageway. He himself had plenty of relatives, by blood as well as by
marriage; too many of these were rascals, and they kept him busy. The
town, in the seventies, was at the adventurous, formative stage; almost
everybody was leaving the gravel walks of Probity to take a short cut
across the fair lawns of Success, and the social landscape was a good
deal cut up and disfigured.
"Poor relations!"--such was Jehiel's brief, scornful rating of the less
capable among these supernumeraries. A poor relation represented, to
him, the lowest form of animal life.
And when the chicane and intrigue of the more clever among them roused
his indignation he would exclaim: "They're putting me through the
smut-machine!"--an ignominious, exasperating treatment which he refused
to undergo without loud protests. These protests often reduced his wife
to trembling and to tears. At such times she might hide an elder
sister--one on the pursuit of some slight dole--in a small back bedroom,
far from sight and hearing.
An ugly house, inhabited by unhappy people. Perhaps I should brighten
things by bringing forward, just here, Elsie, Jehiel's beautiful
granddaughter. But he had no granddaughter. We must let Elsie pass.
Yet a fresh young shoot budding from a gnarled old trunk would afford a
piquant contrast--has done so hundreds of times. Jehiel Prince
undoubtedly _was_ gnarled and old and tough; a charming granddaughter to
cajole or wheedle him in the library, or to relax his indignant tension
over young men during their summer attendance on swing or hammock, would
have her uses. Yet a swing or a hammock would suggest, rather than the
bleak stateliness of Jehiel's urban environment, some fair, remote
domain with lawns and gardens; and Jehiel was far from possessing--or
from wanting to possess--a country-house. Elsie may be revived, if
necessary; but I can promise nothing. I rather think you have heard the
last of her.
James lived a few hundred yards from his father; his house bulked to
much the same effect. It was another symmetrical, indigenous box--in
stone, however, and not in brick. It had its mortgage. If this mortgage
was ever paid up, another came later--a mortgage which passed through
various renewals and which, as values were falling, was always renewed
for a lesser amount and was always demanding ready money to meet the
difference. In later years Raymond, with this formidable weight still
pressing upon him, received finally an offer of relief and liberation;
some prosperous upstart, with plans of his own, said he would chance the
property, mortgage and all, if paid a substantial bonus for doing so.
The premises included a stable. I mention the stable on account of
Johnny McComas. He lived in it. Downstairs, the landau and the two
horses, and another horse, and a buggy and phaeton, and sometimes a cow;
upstairs, Johnny and his father and mother. Johnny could look out
through a crumpled dimity curtain across the back yard and could see his
father freezing ice-cream on a Sunday forenoon on the back kitchen
porch; and he could also look into one of Raymond's windows on the floor
above.
Every so often he would beg:--
"Oh, father, let me do it,--please!"
Then he would lose the double prospect and get, instead, a plate of
vanilla with a tin spoon in it.
Raymond, who had no mastering passion for games, sat a good deal in his
room, sometimes at one of the side windows; occasionally at the back
one, in which case Johnny was quite welcome to look. Raymond had more
desks than one, and books everywhere on the walls between them. He had a
strong bent toward study, and was even beginning to dip into literary
composition. He studied when he might better have been at play, and he
kept up his diary under a student lamp into all hours of the night. He
had been reading lately about Paris, and he was piecing out the
elementary instruction of the Academy by getting together a collection
of French grammars and dictionaries. He had about decided that sometime
he would go to live on that island in the Seine near Notre Dame.
His father told him he was working too hard and too late--that it would
hurt his health and probably injure his eyes. His mother made no comment
and gave no advice. She was an invalid and thus had absorbing interests
of her own. Raymond kept on reading and writing.
Perhaps I should begin to sketch, just about here, his awakening regard
for some Gertrude or Adele, and his young rivalry with Johnny McComas
for her favor; telling how Johnny won over Raymond the privilege of
carrying her books to school, and how, in the end, he won Gertrude or
Adele herself from Raymond, and married her. Fiddlesticks! Please put
all such conventional procedures out of your head, and take what I am
prepared to give you. The school was a boys' school. There was no
Gertrude or Adele--as yet--any more than there was an Elsie. Raymond
kept to his books and indulged in no juvenile philanderings. Forget all
such foolish stereotypings of fancy.
As for the romance and the rivalry: when that came, it came with a vast
difference.
IV
Jehiel Prince was a capitalist. So was James: a capitalist, and the son
of a capitalist. They had some interests in common, and others apart.
There was a bank, and there were several large downtown business-blocks
whose tenants required a lot of bookkeeping, and there was a horse-car
line. There was a bus-line, too, between the railroad depots and the
hotels. James destined Raymond for the bank. He would hardly go to
college, but at seventeen or so would begin on the collection-register
or some such matter; later he might come to be a receiving-teller;
pretty soon he might rise to an apprehension of banking as a science
and have a line as an official in the _Bankers' Gazette_. Beyond that he
might go as far as he was able. James thought that, thus favored in
early years, the boy might go far.
But Raymond had just taken on Rome, and was finding it even more
interesting than Paris. The Academy's professor of ancient history began
to regard him as a prodigy. Then, somehow or other, Raymond got hold of
Gregorovius, with his "City of Rome in the Middle Ages"--though his
teacher did not know of this, and would have been sure to consider it an
undesirable deviation from the straight and necessary path; and
thenceforth the dozens of ordinary boys about him counted, I feel sure,
for less than ever.
Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to put myself into the story
as one of the characters. Then the many I's will no longer refer to the
author named on the title-page, but will represent the direct
participation--direct, even though inconspicuous--of a person whose
name, status, and general nature will be made manifest, incidentally
and gradually, as we proceed. You object that though one's status and
general nature may be revealed "gradually," such can scarcely be the
case as regards one's name? But if I tell you that my Christian name is,
let us say, Oliver, and then intimate in some succeeding section that my
surname is Ormsby, and then do not disclose my middle initial--which may
be W--until the middle of the book (in some documentary connection,
perhaps), shall I not be doing the thing "gradually"?
Oliver W. Ormsby. H'm! I'm not so sure that I like it. Well, my name may
turn out, after all, to be something quite different. And possibly I may
be found to be without any middle initial whatever.
But to return to the method itself. You will find it pursued in many
good novels and in many bad ones; with admirable discretion--to make an
instance--in "The Way of All Flesh"; and the procedure may be humbly
copied here. It will involve, of course, a rather close attendance on
both Raymond and Johnny through a long term of years; but perhaps the
difficulties involved--or, rather, the awkwardnesses--can be got round
in one way or another.
At the Academy we like Raymond well enough, on the whole--
You see at once how the method applies: I make myself an attendant
there, and I place my age midway between the ages of the other two.
As I say, we liked Raymond well enough, yet did not quite feel that he
coalesced. "Coalesced" was hardly the word we used--such verbal
grandeurs were reserved for our "compositions"; but you know what I
mean. Another point to be made clear without delay is this: that when
Johnny appeared at the Academy, he had lately left behind him the
previous condition of servitude involved in a lodgment above the landau,
the phaeton, and sometimes the cow. His father and mother, as I saw them
and remember them, appeared to be rather nice people. Perhaps they had
lately come from some small country town and had not been able, at
first, to realize themselves and their abilities to the best advantage
in the city. Assuredly his father knew how to drive horses and to care
for them; and he had an intuitive knack for safeguarding his
self-respect. And Johnny's mother was perfectly competent to cook and to
keep house--even above a stable--most neatly. If Johnny's curtain was
rumpled, that was Johnny's own incorrigible fault. The window-sill was a
wide one, and Johnny, I found, used it as a catch-all. He kept there a
few boxes of "bugs," as we called his pinned-down specimens, and an
album of postage-stamps that was always in a state of metamorphosis. He
had some loose stamps too, and sometimes, late in the afternoon or on
Saturdays, we "traded." Johnny's mother was likely to caution us about
her freshly scrubbed floors, and sometimes gave me a cooky on my
leaving. I never heard of Raymond's having been there.
But presently the trading stopped, and the "bugs," however firmly pinned
down, took their flight. Johnny's father and mother "moved"--that was
the brief, unadorned, sufficing formula. It was all accepted as
inevitable; hardly for a boy a little past twelve, like myself, to
question the movements of Olympian elders; nor even, in fact, to feel an
abiding interest in them when I had seen them but three or four times in
all. I never speculated--never asked where they had come from; never
considered the nature of their tenure (not wondering how much Johnny's
father may have been paid for driving the two bays and washing the
parlor and bedroom windows and milking the cow, when there was one, and
not figuring the reduction in wages due to the renting value of the
three or four small rooms they occupied); nor did I much concern myself
as to whither they might have gone. Probably opportunity had opened up a
more promising path. However, the path did not lead far; for Johnny, a
month or two later, made his first appearance at the Academy, on the
opening of the fall term. During the preceding year he had been going to
a public school "across the tracks" and had played with a boisterous
crowd in a big cindered yard.
Therefore, when Raymond, surrounded by half a dozen other boys, took
occasion, on the stairs, to say:--
"How are you, Johnny?"--
And Johnny, with his back to the wall of the landing, replied:--
"I'm pretty well,"--
Johnny may have meant that, despite the novelty and the strangeness of
his situation, he was very well, indeed; feeling, doubtless, that he was
finally where he had a right to be and that his alert face was turned
the proper way.
The boys about Raymond were asking him to take part in a football game.
It was not that Raymond was especially popular; but he could run. In
that simple day football was football--principally a matter of running
and of straightforward kicking; and Raymond could do both better than
any other boy in the school. He could also outjump any of us--when he
would take the trouble to try. In fact, his physical faculties were in
his legs; his arms were nowhere. He was never able to throw either far
or straight. Some of his early attempts at throwing were met with
shouts of ridicule, and he never tried the thing further. If he fell
upon the ill luck of finding a ball in his hands, he would toss it to
somebody else with an air of facetious negligence. To stand, as Johnny
McComas could stand, and throw a ball straight up for seventy-five feet
and then catch it without stirring a foot from the spot where he was
planted, would have been an utter impossibility for him. In fact,
Raymond simply cultivated his obviously natural gifts; he never exerted
himself systematically to make good any of his deficiencies. He was so
as a boy; and he remained so always.
In those early days we had no special playgrounds. We commonly used the
streets. There was little traffic. Pedestrians took their chances on the
sidewalks with leapfrog and the like, and we took ours, in turn, in the
wide roadway with "pom-pom-peel-away" and similar games. Football,
however, would take us to a vacant corner lot, some two streets away.
Some absentee owner in the East was doubtless paying taxes on it with
hopes of finally recouping himself through the unearned increment.
Meanwhile it ran somewhat to rubbish and tin cans, to bare spots from
which adjoining homemakers had removed irregular squares of turf, and to
holes in the dry, brown earth where potatoes had been baked with a
minimum of success and a maximum of wood ashes and acrid smoke. It was
on the way to this frequented tract that Raymond carelessly let fall a
word about Johnny McComas. Perhaps he need not have said that Johnny had
lately been living above his father's stable--but he spoke without
special animus. A few of the boys thought Johnny's intrusion odd, even
cheeky; but most of them, employing the social assimilability of
youth,--especially that of youth in the Middle West,--laid little stress
upon it. Johnny made his place, in due time and on his own merits. Or
shall I say, rather, by his own powers?
V
You are not to suppose that while I was free to visit Johnny in the
stable, I was not free to visit Raymond in the house. Though my people
lived rather modestly on a side street, the interior of the Prince
residence was not unknown to me. On one occasion Raymond took me up to
his room so that I might hear some of his writings. He had been to
Milwaukee or to Indianapolis, and had found himself moved to set down an
account of his three days away from home. He led me through several big
rooms downstairs before we got to his own particular quarters above. The
furnishing of these rooms impressed me at the time; but I know, now,
that they were heavy and clumsy when they were meant to be rich and
massive, and were meretricious when they were meant to be elegant. It
was all of the Second Empire, qualified by an erratic, exaggerated touch
that was natively American. I am afraid I found it rather superb and was
made uncomfortable--was even intimidated by it; all the more so that
Raymond took it completely for granted. One room contained a big
orchestrion with many pipes in tiers, like an organ's. On one occasion I
heard it play the overture to "William Tell," and it managed the
"Storm" very handily. There was a large, three-cornered piano in the
same room--one of the sort I never could feel at home with; and this
instrument, more than the other, I suppose, gave Raymond his futile and
disadvantageous start toward music. Travel; art; anything but the bank.
I have no idea at what time of day he introduced me into the house, but
it was an hour at which the men, as well as the women, were at home. In
one part or another of the hall I met his mother. She was dark and lean;
without being tall, she looked gaunt. She seemed occupied with herself,
as she moved out of one shadow into another, and she gave scant
attention to a casual boy. Raymond was really no more hospitable than
any young and growing organism must be; but perhaps she was thankful
that it was only one boy, instead of three or four.
In another room, somewhere on the first floor, I had a glimpse of his
father. I remember him as a sedate man who did not insist. If he set a
boy right, it was done but verbally; the boy was left to see the
justness of the point and to act on it for himself. I gathered, later,
that James Prince had done little, unaided, for himself; whatever he had
accomplished had been in conjunction with other men--with his father,
particularly; and when his father died, a few years later, he was the
chief heir--and he never added much to what he had received. To him fell
the property--and its worries. The worries, I surmise, were the greater
part of it all. Everything has to be paid for, and James Prince's easily
gained success was paid for, through the ensuing years, with
considerable anxieties and perturbations.
It was his father, I presume, who was with him as I passed the library
door: a bent, gray man, with a square head and a yellow face. A third
man was between them; a tall, dry, cold fellow with iron-gray beard and
no mustache--a face in the old New England tradition. This man was, of
course, their lawyer, and I judge that he gave them little comfort. I
felt him as chill and slow, as enjoying the tying and untying of
legalities with a stiff, clammy hand, and as unlikely to be hurried on
account of any temperament possessed by himself or manifested by his
clients. Fire, in a wide sweep, had overtaken the town a year or two
before--a community owned by the Eastern seaboard and mortgaged to its
eyebrows; and the Princes, as I learned years later, had been building
extensively on borrowed capital just before the fire-doom came. Probably
too great a part of the funds employed came from their own bank.
Raymond, once the second floor was reached, showed me his desks and
bookcases; also a new sort of pen which he had thought to be able to
use, but which he had cast aside. And he offered to read me his account
of the three days in Milwaukee, or wherever.
"If you would like to hear...?" he said, with a sort of bashful
determination.
"Just as you please," I replied, patient then, as ever after, in the
face of the arts.
Nothing much seemed to have happened--nothing that I, at least, should
have taken the trouble to set down; but a good part of his fifteen
pages, as he read them, seemed interesting and even important. I suppose
this came from the way he did it. As early as thirteen he had the
knack; then, and always after, he enjoyed writing for its own sake. I
feel sure that his father did not quite approve this taste. His
grandfather, who had had a lesser education and felt an exaggerated
respect for learning, may have had more patience. He talked for years
about endowing some college, but never did it; when the time finally
came, he was far too deep in his financial worries.
James Prince, as I have noted, occasionally mentioned to Raymond his
conviction that he was wasting his time with all this scribbling, and
that so much work by artificial light was imperiling his eyesight.
"What good is it all going to do you?" I once heard him ask. His tone
was resigned, as if he had put the question several times before. "I
don't think I'd write quite so much, if I were you."
Raymond looked at him in silence. "Not write?" he seemed to say. "You
might as well ask me not to breathe."
"At least do it by daylight," his father suggested, or
counseled,--scarcely urged. "You won't have any eyes at all by the time
you're thirty."
But Raymond liked his double student-lamp with green shades. He liked
the quiet and retirement of late hours. I believe he liked even the
smell and smear of the oil.
His father spoke, as I have reported; but he never took away the pen or
put the light out. The boy seemingly had too strong a "slant": a
misfortune--or, at least, a disadvantage--which a concerned parent must
somehow endure. But he did take a more decided tack later on: he never
said a word about Raymond's going to college, and Raymond, as a fact,
never went. He fed his own intellectual furnace, and fed it in his own
way. He learned an immense number of useless and unrelated things. In
time they came to cumber him. Perhaps college would have been better,
after all.
I never knew Raymond to show any affection for either of his parents;
and he had no brothers and sisters. His father was an essentially kind,
just man, and might have welcomed an occasional little manifestation of
feeling. One day he told Raymond he had no heart. That was as far as
emotion and the expression of emotion could carry him. Raymond's mother
might have been kindly too, if she had not had herself. But a new
doctor, a new remedy, a new draught from a new quarter--and her boy was
instantly nowhere. Raymond's own position seemed to be that life in
families was the ordained thing and was to be accepted. Well, this was
the family ordained for him, and he would put up with it as best he
might. But I kept on developing my own impression of him; and I see now
just what that impression was going to be. Raymond, almost from the
start, felt himself as an independent, detached, isolated individual,
and he must have his little zone of quiet round him. Why in the world he
should ever have married...!
I never knew him to show gratitude for anything given him by his
parents. On the other hand, I never heard him ask them for anything. He
possessed none of the little ingenuities by which boys sometimes secure
a bit of pocket-money. If he wanted anything, he went without it until
it was offered. Frankly, he seldom had to wait long.
Not that what came was always the right thing. He showed me his
fountain-pen--one of the early half-failures--with some disdain. He
always carried a number of things in his pocket, but never the pen. I
myself tried it one day, and it went well enough; I should have been
glad to have it for my own. But steel pens sufficed him; save once, when
I saw him, in a high mood, experimenting fantastically with a quill one.
He cared no more about his clothes than any of the rest of us. He never
laid any real stress on them at any time of life. He developed early a
notion of the sufficiency of interior furnishings; mere external
upholstery never quite secured his interest. I heard his father once or
twice complain of his looking careless and shabby. He waited with
equanimity until his father could take him to the clothier's. He asked
but one thing; that there should be no indulgence in sartorial
novelties at his expense. And I never met a sedater taste in neckties.
Three or four were hanging over the gas-jet, close to the window; they
were all dark blues or grays, and most of them frayed. He expected a new
one about Christmas; no hurry.
From that window, across the back yard, we saw Johnny McComas, in a
bright new red tie, busy at his own window. I waved my hand, and he
waved back. Raymond looked at him, but made no special sign. Johnny was
packing up his specimens and his postage-stamps, preparatory to the
family hegira, though neither of us knew.
VI
Raymond, who might have asked for almost anything, asked for nothing.
Johnny, who was in position to ask for next to nothing, asked for almost
everything. He was constantly teasing his parents, so far as my
observation went; and his teasing was a form of criticism. "You are not
doing the right thing by me"--such might have seemed his plaint. He was
beginning to spread, to reach out: acquisitiveness and assimilativeness
were to be his two watchwords. He hankered after the externalities; he
wanted "things." If it was only a new stamp-album, he wanted it hard,
and he said so. I shall not go so far as to say that he hectored his
parents into sending him to our school. They were probably feeling, on
their own account, that they had come to town for better things than
they had been getting; and likely enough they met his demands halfway.
There was usually a certain element of cheeriness in his nagging; but
the cheeriness was quite secondary to the insistence.
"Oh, come, mother!" or, "Oh, father, now!" was commonly Johnny's opening
formula, employed with a smile, wheedling or protesting, as the occasion
seemed to require.
And, "Oh, well...!" was commonly the opening formula for the
response--meaning, in completed form, "Well, if we must, we must."
However, his parents were probably ready to meet with an open mind the
scorings of their young, sole critic, thinking that his urgency might
advance themselves no less than him. Well, in the autumn Johnny turned
up at the Academy with an equipment that included everything approved
and needed; and he was not long in letting us know that his father was
manager in the supply-yard of a large firm of contractors and builders.
His father had spent his earlier married years, it transpired, about the
grounds of a small-town "depot," and knew a good deal in regard to
lumber and cement.
To most of us fathers were fathers and businesses were
businesses--things to be accepted without comment or criticism. Our own
youthfulness, and the social tone of the day and region, discouraged
either. If I thought anything about it, I must have thought, as I think
still, that it was a manly and satisfying matter to come to grips with
the serviceable actualities of the building trades. Construction, in its
various phases, still seems to me a more useful and more tonic concern
than brokerage, for example, and similar forms of office life.
Johnny soon suggested that I go with him, some Saturday afternoon, to
the "yard." I asked Raymond to join us. Raymond had just come on Gothic
architecture and was studying its historical phases. He was picking up
points about the English cathedrals and was making drawings to
illustrate the development of buttresses and of window tracery. The yard
was only a mile and a half away and the three of us frolicked loosely
along the streets until we got there. Johnny's father was going about
the place in an admirable pair of new blue overalls, and carried a
thick, blunt pencil behind one ear. He showed an independent, breezy
manner that had not been very marked before. He was loud and clear and
authoritative, and kept a dozen or more stout fellows pretty busy. Once
an elderly man in a high silk hat passed through the yard on his way to
its little office. He stopped, and he and Johnny's father had some talk
together. "Yes, sir!" said Johnny's father, with considerable emphasis
and momentum. I enjoyed his "Yes, sir!" It was pleasant to find him so
hearty and so well-mannered. He seemed to have escaped from something
and to be glad of it. The man in the high hat hardly tried to stand up
against him. As he turned away he smiled in a curious fashion; and I
thought I heard him say to himself, as he moved back toward the door of
the shed that had the sign "Office" on it: "I wonder whether I'm going
to run him, or whether he's going to run me?"
Johnny was all eyes for a tall stack of lathing in bundles and for a
pile of sacks filled with hair from cows' hides, which last was to go
into plaster. Raymond looked at these objects of interest--and at
several others--with some degree of abstractedness. The English
cathedrals, as I was told later, had not been plastered. Raymond had
already developed some faculty for entertaining a concept freed from
clogging and qualifying detail; and this faculty grew as he grew. He
liked his ideal _net_; facts, practical facts, never had much charm for
him. I remember his once saying, when about twenty-three, that he should
have liked to be an architect, but that plumbing and speaking-tubes had
turned him away. If he could have drawn façades and stopped there, I
think he might have been quite happy and successful in the profession.
Johnny pulled a lath for each of us out of one of the bundles, and we
used them in our tour of the yard as alpenstocks. We found a glacier in
the shape of a mortar bed and were using the laths to sound its depths,
when Johnny's father appeared from round the corner of a lumber pile. He
clapped his hands with a loud report.
"Here! that won't do!" he said; and none of us thought it remotely
possible to withstand him. "Enough for one morning," he added, and he
waved both arms with a broad scoop to motion us toward the street gate.
"Oh, father, now!" began Johnny (with no smile at all), conscious of his
position as host.
"No more, to-day," said his father. "School six days a week would be
about my idea."
Raymond said nothing, but drew up his mouth to one side and himself led
us toward the street.
VII
I would not seem to stress either the saliency or the significance of
these incidents. I simply put them down, after many years, just as they
return to my memory. Memory is sporadic; memory is capricious; memory is
inconsequent, sometimes forgetting the large thing to record the little.
And memory may again prove itself all these, and more, if I attempt to
rescue from the past a children's party.
It was my young sister who "gave" it, as our expression was; parents in
the background, providing the funds and engineering the mechanism, were
not allowed greatly to count. The party was given for my sister's
visitor, a little girl from some small interior town whose name (whether
child's or town's) I have long since forgotten. Raymond was invited, of
course;--"though he isn't very nice to us," as my sister ruefully
observed; and some prompting toward fair play (as I vaguely termed it to
myself) made me suggest Johnny McComas. He came.
There must have been some twenty-five of us--all that our small house
would hold. There were more games than dances; and the games were
largely "kissing" games: "post-office," "clap-in, clap-out," "drop the
handkerchief," and such-like innocent infantilities. Some of us thought
ourselves too old for this sort of thing, and would willingly have left
it to the younger children; but the eager lady from next door, who was
"helping," insisted that we all take part. This is the place for the
Gertrudes and the Adeles, and they were there in good measure, be-bowed
and be-sashed and fluttering about (or romping about) flushed and happy.
And this would be pre-eminently the place for Elsie, Jehiel's
granddaughter and Raymond's cousin. Elsie would naturally be, in the
general scheme, my childhood sweetheart; later, my fiancée; and
ultimately my wife. Such a relationship would help me, of course, to
keep tab more easily on Raymond during the long course of his life. For
instance, at this very party I see her doing a polka with Johnny
McComas, while Raymond (who had been sent to dancing-school, but had
steadfastly refused to "learn") views Johnny with a mixture of envy and
contempt. A year or two later, I see Elsie seated in the twilight at the
head of her grandfather's grandiose front steps, surrounded by boys of
seventeen or eighteen, while Raymond, sent on some errand to his
grandfather's house, picks his way through the crowd to say to himself,
censoriously, in the vestibule: "Well, if I can't talk any better at
that age than they do...!" Yes, Elsie would undeniably have been an
aid; but she never existed, and we must dispense with her for once and
for all.
Raymond could always make himself difficult, and he usually did so at
parties. To be difficult was to be choice, and to be choice was to be
desirable. Therefore he got more of the kisses than he might have got
otherwise--many more, in fact, than he cared for. But on this occasion a
good part of his talent for making himself difficult was reserved until
refreshment time. Most of the boys and girls had paired instinctively to
make a prompt raid on the dining-room table, with Johnny McComas
unabashedly to the fore; but Raymond lingered behind. My mother
presently found him moping alone in the parlor, where he was looking
with an over-emphatic care at the pictures.
"Why, Raymond dear! Why aren't you out with the others? Don't you want
anything to eat?"
No; Raymond didn't want anything.
"But you do--of course you do. Come."
Then Raymond, thus urged and escorted,--and, above all,
individualized,--allowed himself to be led out to the refreshments; and,
to do him justice, he ate as much and as happily as any one else. Johnny
McComas, with his mouth full, and with Gertrudes and Adeles all around
him, welcomed him with the high sign of jovial _camaraderie_.
Yes, Johnny took his full share of the ice-cream and macaroons; he got
his full quota of letters from the "post-office"; the handkerchief was
dropped behind him every third or fourth time, and he always caught the
attentive little girl who was whisking away--if he wanted to. He even
took a manful part in the dancing.
"What a good schottische!" exclaimed one of the Adeles, as the
industrious lady from next door, after a final bang, withdrew her hands
from the keyboard. "And how well you dance!"
"Gee!" exclaimed Johnny, with his most open-faced smile; "is that what
you call it--a schottische? I never tried it before in my life!"
"Learn by doing"--such might have been the motto of the town in those
early, untutored days. And Johnny McComas emphatically made this motto
his own.