I
Raymond went into the bank; not in due course, but rather more than a
year later. After seeing some of his more advanced schoolfellows depart
for Eastern colleges, after indulging a year of desultory study at home,
and after passing a summer and autumn among the Wisconsin lakes, he was
formally claimed by Finance. There was no Franciscan ardor to clasp her
close, as others have clasped Poverty and Obedience. He began his
business career, as men have been recommended to begin their matrimonial
career, with a slight aversion. However, his aversion never brought him
any future good.
His year at home, so far as I could make out, was taken up largely with
æsthetics and music. He read the "Seven Lamps of Architecture" and they
lighted him along a road that led far, far from the constructional
practicalities of the yard where we had spent a Saturday forenoon, some
five years before. He had begun to collect books on the brickwork of
Piacenza and Cremona, and these too led him farther along the general
path of æstheticism. During our years at the Academy the town, after an
unprecedentedly thorough sweep by fire, had been rebuilding itself; and
on more than one Saturday forenoon of that period we had tramped
together through the devastated district, rejoicing in the restorative
activities on every hand and honestly admiring the fantasies and
ingenuities of the "architects" of the day. But Raymond had now emerged
from that innocent stage; summoning forth from some interior reservoir
of taste an inspirational code of his own, he condemned these crudities
and aberrations as severely as they probably deserved, and cultivated a
confident belief that somewhere or other he was to find things which
should square better with his likings and should respond more kindly to
his mounting sensibilities.
"Not going to cut us?" I once asked. "Just as we're picking up, too?"
But Raymond looked abstractedly into the distance and undertook no
definite reply. Possibly he had responded to Ruskin; more probably to
some divine young sense of truth and fitness such as forms the natural
endowment, by no means uncommon, of right-minded youth. Or it may be
that he had simply reached the "critical" age, when Idealism calls the
Daily Practicalities to its bar and delivers its harsh, imperious
judgments; when it puts the world, if but for a few brief months, "where
it belongs." His natural tendency toward generalization helped him
here--helped, perhaps, too much. He passed judgment not only on his
parents, whom he had been finding very unsatisfactory, and on most of
his associates (myself, for example, whenever I happened to speak an
appreciative word for his essentially admirable father), but on the
community as such. A filmy visitant from Elsewhere had grazed his
forehead and whispered in his ear that the town allotted to him by
destiny was crude, alike in its deficiencies and in its affirmations,
and that complete satisfaction for him lay altogether in another and
riper quarter.
Perhaps it was some such discontent as this that led him in the
direction of musical composition--or toward attempts at it. He had no
adequate preparation for it, nor, so far as I could perceive, any
justificatory call. He had once taken a few terms on the piano; and he
had on his shelves a few elementary works on harmony; and he had in his
fingertips a certain limited knack for improvisation; and he had once
sketched out, rather haltingly, a few simple songs. Yet, all the same,
another reservoir, one of uncertain depth and capacity, was opening up
for him at an age when opening-up was the continuing and dominating
feature of one's days--a muse was stirring the vibrant air about him;
and I gathered, after two or three certain visits to his house, that he
had embarked on some composition or other of an ambitious and
comprehensive nature: a cantata, possibly, or even some higher flight.
As he had never domesticated musical theory and musical notation in his
brain, most of his composing had to be carried on at the keyboard
itself. The big piano in the big open drawing-room resounded with his
strumming experiments in melody and harmony--sounds intelligible, often
enough, to no ears but his own, and not always agreeable to them. I am
sure he tried his parents' patience cruelly. His reiterated phrases and
harmonizings were audible throughout a good part of the house. They did
nothing toward relieving his mother's headaches, nothing toward raising
his father's hopes that, pretty soon, he would come to grips with the
elements of Loans and Discounts. Even the servants, setting the table,
now and again closed the dining-room door.
"Oh, Raymond, Raymond; _not_ to-day!" his mother would sometimes plead.
I presume that, during this period, the diary was still going on; and no
one with such a gift for writing will stop short at a diary. In fact,
Raymond tried his hand at a few short stories--still another muse was
fluttering about his temples. Most of these stories came back; but a few
of them got printed obscurely in mangled form, and the failure of the
venturesome periodicals sometimes deprived him of the honorarium (as
pay was then pompously called) which would have given the last
convincing touch to his claims on authorship. He spoke of these stories
freely enough to me, but disclaimed all attempts at poetry: short of
that field, I believe, he really did stay his hand.
Well, perhaps too many good fairies--good only to the pitch of
velleity--buzzed and brushed, like muses, or pseudo-muses, about his
brows. All this unsettled him--and sometimes annoyed his daily
associates. But how, without these instinctive young passes at Art,
could the unceasing, glamorous and needful rebirth of the world get
itself accomplished?
II
As for Johnny McComas, he found one year of our Academy enough. It was
the getting in, not the staying in, that provoked his young powers. Our
school, moreover, was explicitly classical in a day when the old
classical ideal still ruled respected everywhere; and Johnny, much as he
liked being with us and of us, could not see the world in terms of
Latin paradigms. He wanted to be "doing something"; he wanted to be "in
business." During the summer following his year at Dr. Grant's I heard
of him as somebody's office-boy somewhere downtown, and then quite lost
sight of him for the five years that succeeded.
It occurred to me that Johnny must be doing just the right thing for
himself; he would make the sort of office-boy that "business men" would
contend for: easy to imagine the manoeuvres, even the feuds, that
would enliven business blocks in the downtown district for the
possession of Johnny's confident smile and dashing, forthright way. I
learned, in due season, that Johnny had cast in his lot with a
real-estate operator, and had been cherished, through periods harried by
competition, as a pearl of price.
The city was emphatically still in the "real-estate" stage. Anybody
arriving without profession or training straightway began to sell lots.
Nothing lay more openly abundant than land; the town had but to
propagate itself automatically over the wide prairies. The wild flowers
waved only to welcome the surveyor's gang; and new home-seekers--in the
jargon of the trade--were ever hurrying to rasp themselves upon the
ragged edges of the outskirts.
One Sunday morning in May, Raymond and I determined on an excursion to
the country--or, at all events, to some of the remoter suburbs. The bank
would not claim his thoughts for twenty-four hours, nor the law-school
mine. We left the train at a promising point and prepared to scuffle
over a half-mile splotched with vervain and yarrow, yet to bloom, toward
a long, thin range of trees that seemed to mark the course of some small
stream. But between us and that possible stream there soon developed
much besides the sprinkling of prairie flowers. We began to notice
rough-ploughed strips of land that seemed to mean streets for some new
subdivision; piles of lumber, here and there, which should serve to
realize the ideals of the "home-seekers"; and presently a gay,
improvised little shack with a disproportionate sign to blazon the
hopes and ambitions of a well-known firm back in town. And in the
doorway of the shack stood Johnny McComas.
He was as ruddy as ever, and his blue eyes were a bit sharper. He was
slightly heavier than either of us, but no taller. He knew us as quickly
as we knew him. For some reason he did not seem particularly glad to see
us. He made the reason clear at once.
"They had me out here last Sunday," he said, looking about his chaotic
domain disparagingly, "and they say they may have to have me out here
next Sunday--somebody's sick or missing. But they won't," he continued
darkly. It was a threat, we felt--a threat that would make some
presumptuous superior cower and conform. "I really belong at our branch
in Dellwood Park, where there _is_ something; not out here, beyond the
last of everything." And he said more to indicate that his energies and
abilities were temporarily going to waste.
But having put himself right in his own eyes and in ours, he began to
give rein to his fundamental good nature. Emerging from the cloud that
was just now darkening his merits and his future, he asked, interestedly
enough, what we ourselves were doing.
I had to confess that I was still a student. Raymond mentioned briefly
and reluctantly the bank. It was nothing to him that he, no less than
Johnny, was now a man on a salary.
"Bank, eh?" said Johnny. "That's good. We're thinking of starting a bank
next year at our Dellwood branch. It's far enough in, and it's far
enough out. Plenty of good little businesses all around there. And I'm
going to make them let me have a hand in managing it."
This warm ray of hope from the immediate future quite illumined Johnny.
He told us genially about the prospects of the venture in the midst of
which he was encamped, and ended by feigning us as a young bridal couple
that had come out to look for a "home."
"There may be one or two along pretty soon, if the day holds fair; so I
might as well keep myself in practice." Then he jocularly let himself
loose on transportation, and part payments down, and street
improvements "in," and healthful country air for young children. He was
very fluent and somewhat cynical, and turned the seamy side of his trade
a little too clearly to view.
He explained how the spring had been exceptionally wet in that
region,--"which, after all, _is_ low," he acknowledged,--and how his
firm, by digging a few trenches in well-considered directions, had
drained all its standing water to adjoining acres still lower, the
property of a prospective rival. Recalling this smart trick made Johnny
think better of the people who would maroon him for a succession of
Sundays, and he became more genially communicative still.
"That gray streak off to the west--if you can see it--is our water
drying up. Better be drying there than here. You can put a solid foot on
every yard of our ground to-day. Come along with me and I'll show you
your cottage--_domus, a, um_. Not quite right? Well, no great matter."
He pointed toward a yellow pile of two-by-fours, siding, and shingles.
"Be sure you make your last payment before you find yourselves warped
out of shape."
We followed. Johnny seemed much more expert and worldly-wise than either
of us. We held our innocent excursion in abeyance and bowed with a
certain embarrassed awe to Johnny's demonstration of his aptitude for
taking the world as it was and to his light-handed, care-free way of
handling so serious a matter, to most men, as the founding of a home. As
we continued our jaunt, I began to feel that I now liked Johnny a little
less than I could have wished.
III
At about this time Raymond and I found ourselves members of a little
circle that expressed itself chiefly through choral music. It was almost
a neighborhood circle, and almost a self-made circle--it gradually
evolved itself, with no special guidance or intention, until, finally,
there it was. I, at that period, may have felt that it would verge on
the presumptuous to pick and choose--to attempt consciously the
fabrication of a social environment--and so I adopted with docility the
one which presented itself. Raymond, on the other hand, may have felt
that even the best which was available was unlikely to be good enough
and have accepted fatalistically anything which could possibly be made
to do.
Just why our little group of a dozen or so should have united on a
musical basis and have expressed itself in a weekly "sing" I might find
it hard to explain. None of us fellows was especially blessed with a
voice; and the various Gertrudes and Adeles that met with us were
assuredly without any marked sanction to vocalize. Possibly the "sing"
was the mere outcome of youthful exuberance and of the tendency of young
and eager molecules to crystallize into what came, later, to be termed a
"bunch."
As for Raymond himself, he never sang at all. "Oh, come, Rayme; join
in!" the other fellows would suggest--and suggest in vain.
"I'm doing _my_ part," he would return, giving the piano-stool a nearer
hitch to the keyboard.
In fact, it was his specific function to preside at the Chickering, the
Weber, the Steinway, according to the facilities offered by the
particular home--for we moved about in rotation. This service, which we
presently came to consider sufficient in itself, dispensed him from
exhibiting his nature in so articulate a thing as actual vocal
utterance. This he was quite opposed to: he would never even try a hymn
in church. But he could accompany; he could improvise; he could
modulate; he could transpose any simple air. The ease and readiness with
which he did all this made less obvious--indeed, almost
imperceptible--his fundamental unwillingness to abandon himself before
others (especially if members of his own circle) to any manifestation
that might be taxed with even a remote emotionalism. And yet, at that
very time, he was laying the foundations of a claim to be that broad and
vague thing called an "artist." Even as early as this, apparently, he
was troubled by two contradictory impulses: he wanted to be an artist
and give himself out; and he wanted to be a gentleman and hold himself
in. An entangling, ruinous paradox.
This comment on Raymond's musical inclinations and musical services may
require a bit of shading: I believe that, after all, he never quite
cared for music unless he had, in all literalness, his "hand" in it. He
never liked to hear any one else play the piano, still less the violin;
concerts of all sorts were likely to bore him; and he never really rose
to an understanding of the more recondite and elaborate musical forms:
to have his fingers on the keyboard--especially when improvising in a
secure inarticulateness--was his great desideratum.
In our little group we ran from seventeen to nineteen; some of us just
finishing high school, others just on the edge of college, others (like
myself) engaged in professional studies, and still others making a début
in business as clerks. We sang mostly the innocent old songs, American
or English, of an earlier day, and sometimes the decorous numbers from
the self-respecting operetta recently established in London. No
contributions from a new and dubious foreign element had yet come to
cheapen our taste, to disturb our nervous systems, or to throw upon the
negro, the Hawaiian, or the Argentine the onus of a crass passion that
one was more desirous of expressing than of acknowledging. No; there was
assuredly no excess of emotional life--whether good or bad--in the body
of music we favored. Perhaps what our little circle really desired was
simply good-fellowship and a high degree of harmonious clamor. Certainly
all our doings, whether on Friday evening, or on the other forenoons,
afternoons, and evenings of the week, were quite devoid of an
embarrassing sex-consciousness. We "trained together," as the expression
went--all the fellows and all the Gertrudes and Adeles--with no sense of
_malaise_, and postponing, or setting aside, in the miraculous American
fashion, all sexual considerations whatsoever.
I hardly know just why I should have thought that Johnny McComas could
be introduced successfully into this circle. Johnny, as he had told us
in his suburb, had cut loose from his parents. He was now living on his
own, in a neighborhood not far from ours--from his, as it had once been.
One evening I ventured to bring him round. He developed an obstreperous
baritone--it was the same voice, now more specifically in action, that I
had first heard on the devastated prairie; and he made himself rather
preponderant, whether he happened to know the song or not.
"Why, you're quite an addition!" commented one of the girls, in
surprise--almost in consternation.
"He is, indeed,--if he doesn't drown us all out!" muttered one of the
fellows, behind his back.
Yes, Johnny was vociferous--so long as the singing went on. But he
developed, besides an obstreperous voice, an obstreperous interest in
one of our Adeles--a piercing soprano who was our mainstay; and he
showed some tendency to defeat the occasion by segregating her in a bay
window. Segregation was the last of our aims, and Johnny did not quite
please. Furthermore, Johnny seemed to feel himself among a lot of boys
who were yet to make their "start," overlooking the fact that Raymond
was in the bank, and ignorant of the further fact that one of our
fellows was just beginning to be a salesman in a bond house. Johnny
became violently communicative about the attractions of Dellwood Park
and seemed to want to figure demonstratively in the eyes of Gertrude and
Adele as an up-and-coming paladin of the business world. To most of us
he seemed too self-assertive, too self-assured. He knew too clearly what
he wanted, and showed it too clearly. Indeed it became apparent to me
that while a boy of twelve may be accepted easily (at least in an early,
simple society), a youth of eighteen cannot altogether escape the issues
of caste. It was borne in on me presently that Johnny might as well have
remained away. In fact--
"We shan't need him again," said the brother of the soprano to me, as
the evening broke up.
And Raymond himself remarked to me a day later:--
"Don't push him; he'll get along without your help."
IV
While the rankness of new elements in a new era had not penetrated our
homes, it had begun to make itself manifest in public places. The town,
within sixty years, had risen from a population of nearly _nil_ to a
population of some five or six hundred thousand; and it was only in due
course, perhaps, that "vice" now raised its head and that a "criminal
class" came into effective, unabashed functioning. It was to be many
years before the better elements learned how to combine for an efficient
opposition to impudent evils. A heterogeneous populace, newly arrived,
was still willing to elect mayors of native blood; but one of these,
elected and reëlected to the town's lasting harm, might as well have
been of the newer, and wholly exterior, tradition: a genial,
loose-lipped demagogue who saw an opportunity to weld the miscellany of
discrepant elements into a compact engine for the furtherance of his own
coarse ambitions, and who allowed his supporters such a measure of
license as was needed to make their support continuing. A shameless new
quarter suddenly obtruded itself with an ugly emphasis; unclassifiables,
male and female, began to assert and disport themselves more daringly
than dreamt of heretofore; and many good citizens who would crowd the
town forward to a population of a million and to a status undeniably
metropolitan came to stroll these tawdry, noisy new streets with a
curiosity of mind at once disturbed, titillated, and somehow gratified.
Said some: "This is a new thing; do we quite like it?" Said others: "The
town is certainly moving ahead; we don't know but that we do."
Yes, a good many social observers set forth to see for themselves the
new phenomena and to appraise the value of them in the coming political
and social life of the community. Of course, many of these observers
were too young and heedless to draw inferences from the sudden flood of
new bars and bright lights and crass tunes and youthful creatures in
short skirts who seemed not quite to know whether their proper element
was the stage above or the range of tables below; in fact, these
observers waived all attempt at speculative thought and became
participants.
Raymond and I had heard comments on the new developments from our
elders; we were not without our own curiosity (though we had enough
fastidiousness not to graze things very close, still less to wade into
them very deep), and we decided one evening that we would look into two
or three of these new and notable places of public entertainment.
The first of them offered little. The second of them developed Johnny
McComas. He sat at a table, talking too familiarly, or at least too
forbearingly, with a rubicund, hard-faced man in shirt-sleeves standing
at his elbow--probably the head of the place, or his first aide; and he
was buying obviously unnecessary glasses of things for two of the young
creatures in short skirts--Gertrudes and Adeles of that particular
stratum, or Katies and Maggies, if preferred. Johnny sat there happy
enough: an early example of the young business warrior diverting himself
after the fray. Years afterward the scene came back to me when I met
with a showy painting in the resonant new lobby of one of the greater
hotels. It showed a terrace overlooking some placid Greek sea; the happy
warrior standing ungirt and uncasqued, with a beautiful maiden of
indeterminate status seated beside him; a graceful attendant holding a
wreath above each happy and prosperous head, and a group of sandaled
dancing-girls lightly footing it for the pleasure of the fortunate pair;
the whole scene illuminated by the supreme, smiling self-satisfaction of
the relaxed soldier amid the pipings of peace. So Johnny; he had earned
the money and won the right to spend it in pleasure; his, too, the duty
of refreshing himself for the strenuous morrow.
He saw us and nodded. "Life!"--that was what he seemed to say. He made a
feint to interest us in his companions; but they were poor things, as we
knew, and as he must have known too. He left them without much regret
and without much ceremony, and took us on to the next place.
"It's life, isn't it?" he said in so many words.
Raymond's nose went up disdainfully. "Life!" Some such manifestations,
if properly handled and framed, might be life in Paris, perhaps; but he
could not accept them as life here at home, within a mile or two of his
own study. What this evening offered him seemed to require a
considerable touch of refining before it could reach acceptance. It was
all only an imperfectly specious substitute for life, only a coarse
parody on life. The town, he told me the next day, made him think of a
pumpkin: it was big and sudden and coarse-textured. "I've had enough of
it," he added; "I want something different, and something a lot better."
Johnny, as I say, took us to the next place; we might not have known how
to take ourselves there. Johnny honestly liked the glare, the noise, the
uproarious music, and the human press both on the sidewalks and in the
packed, panting interiors. I liked it all, too,--for once in a way; but
I soon saw that, for Raymond, even once in a way was once too often. In
this last place a girl with a hand too familiarly laid on his arm gave
the finishing touch; it was a coarse, dingy little hand, with some
tawdry rings. Raymond never liked close quarters; neither in those days,
nor ever after, did he care to come decisively to grips with actual
life. "Keep off!" was what his look said to the offender. The poor,
puzzled little débutante quickly stepped back, and we all regained the
street. Raymond was trembling with embarrassment and vexation.
"Why, you were making a hit," said Johnny.
"Let's get home," said Raymond to me, ignoring Johnny. "This is enough,
and more than enough. What a hole this town is coming to be!"
V
Raymond stayed on at the bank, though--if one might judge by his words
and actions--with no enthusiasm in the present and no hopefulness for
the future. He did what he had to do, and did it fairly well; but there
was no sign that he was looking forward, and there remained scant
likelihood that he would meet the expectations of his father and
grandfather by mastering the business. On the contrary, I think he
actually set his face against it: he seemed as resolute not to learn
banking as he had been resolute not to learn dancing. Professor Baltique
and the little girls in light-soled shoes and bright-colored sashes had
given him up in the waltz; and it looked as if James B. Prince must
presently renounce all hope of his ever learning how to turn the
collective spare cash of many depositors to profit. I recall the day
when the chief little light of the dancing-class, after some moments of
completely static tramplings by Raymond in the midst of the floor,
suddenly began to pout and to frown, and then left him in the midst of
the dance and of the company and came to tears before she could reach an
elder sister by the side wall. Raymond accepted the incident without
comment. If his demeanor expressed anything, it expressed his
satisfaction at carrying a point.
But he did not wait until a vexed and disappointed bank left him high
and dry. Though he must have known that many young clerks in the office
envied him his billet and that many young fellows outside it would have
been glad to get in on any terms whatever, he never gave a sign that he
valued his opportunity; and when he finally pulled out it was with no
regard to any possible successor.
The younger men in the bank were a rather trim lot, and were expected to
be. They did wonders, in the way of dressing, on their sixty or
seventy-five dollars a month. Raymond's own dressing, for some little
time past, had grown somewhat slack and careless. I did him the
injustice of supposing that he felt himself to be himself, and _hors
concours_ so far as the general body of clerklings was concerned; but he
had other reasons.
He had given up buying books and periodicals; no new volumes to be seen
in his room except works of travel (preferably guide-books) and grammars
and dictionaries of foreign languages. For all such works of general
uplift and inspiration as the intending tourist in Europe might expect
to profit by, he depended on circulating libraries or the shelves of
friends. I myself lent him a book of travels in the Dolomites, and
scarcely know, now, whether I did well or ill. Raymond, in short, was
silently, doggedly saving, with the intention of taking a trip--or of
making a sojourn--abroad.
The cleavage came in James Prince's front parlor, one Sunday afternoon,
and I happened to be present. A very few words sufficed. Raymond's
father had picked up a thick little book from the centre-table, the only
book in the room, and was looking back and forth between this work--an
Italian dictionary--and Raymond himself.
"What do you expect to get out of this?" he asked.
"I expect to learn some Italian," Raymond replied.
"Wouldn't French be more useful?"
"I know all the French I need."
"Where do you expect to use your Italian?"
"In Italy. I didn't go to college."
Impossible to depict the quality of Raymond's tone in speaking these
five words. There was no color, no emphasis, no seeming presentation of
a case. It was the cool, level statement of a fact; nor did he try to
make the fact too pertinent, too cogent. An hour-long oration would not
have been more effective. He had calmly taken off a lid and had
permitted a look within. His father saw--saw that whatever Raymond, by
plus or by minus, might be, he was no longer a boy.
"I know," said James Prince, slowly. He was looking past us both and was
opening and shutting the covers of the book unconsciously.
A day or two later, Raymond gave me the rest. His father had asked him
how much money he had. Out of his sixty or seventy-five a month Raymond
had set aside several hundreds; "and I said I could make the rest by
corresponding for some newspaper," he continued. This was in the simple
day when travel-letters from Europe were still printed and read in the
newspapers, and even "remunerated" by editors. Incredible, perhaps, in
this day; yet true for that.
His father had asked him how long he intended to be away. Raymond was
non-committal. He might travel for a year, or he might try "living" there
for a while--a long while. A matter of funds and of luck, it seemed. His
father, without pressing him closely, offered to double whatever sum he
had saved up. He appeared neither pleased nor displeased by Raymond's
course. He felt I suppose, that the bank would hardly suffer, and that
Raymond (whom he did not understand) might get some profit. Fathers have
their own opinions of sons, which opinions range, I dare say, all the
way from charitableness to desperation. In the case of my own son, I am
glad to say, a very slight degree of charitableness was all the tax laid
upon me. There were some distressing months of angularity, both in
physique and in manners, at seventeen; then a quick and miraculous
escape into trimness and grace. And my grandson, now at nine, promises
to be, I am glad to state, even more of a success and a pleasure. As for
Raymond, he had developed unevenly: his growth had gone athwart.
Possibly the "world," that vast, vague entity of which his father's
knowledge was restricted almost to one narrow field, might aid in
straightening the boy out.
"Well, try it for a year," his father said, not unkindly, and almost
wistfully.
VI
When Johnny McComas heard of Raymond's resolve, he drew up his round
face into a grimace. He thought the step queer, and he said so. But,
"Oh, well, if a fellow can afford it!" he added. And he did not explain
just what meaning he attached to the word "afford."
But Johnny could see no valid reason for a fellow's giving the town the
go-by at nineteen and at just that stage of the town's development.
Johnny was so made that the community which housed him was necessarily
the centre of the cosmos; he himself, howsoever placed, was necessarily
at the centre of the circle--so why leave the central dot for some vague
situation on the circumference? And take this particular town: what a
present! what a future! what a wide extension over the limitless prairie
with every passing month!--a prairie which merely needed to be cut up
into small checkers and sold to hopeful newcomers; a prairie which
produced profits as freely as it produced goldenrod and asters; a
prairie upon which home-seekers might settle down under agents whose
wide range, running from helpful coöperation to absolute flimflam, need
leave no competent "operator" other than rich.
"What are you going to get out of it?" asked Johnny earnestly.
Raymond attempted no set reply. Johnny, he recognized, was out for
positive results, for tangible returns; his idea was to get on in the
world by definite and unmistakable stages. Raymond never welcomed the
idea of "getting on"--not at least in the sense in which his own day and
place used the expression. To do so was but to acknowledge some early
inferiority. Raymond was not conscious of any inferiority to be
overcome. Johnny might, of course, on this particular point, feel as he
chose.
About this time old Jehiel Prince began to come more frequently to his
son's house. He was yellower and grayer, and he was getting testy and
irascible. He sometimes brought his lawyer with him, and the pair made
James Prince an active participant in their concerns. However, Jehiel
was perhaps less unhappy here than in his own home. When there, he sat
moodily alone, of evenings, in his basement office; and Raymond, who was
sometimes sent over with documents or with messages, impatiently
reported him to me as "glum."
"Poor old fellow! he doesn't know how to live!" said Raymond in
complacent pity. He himself, of course, had but to assemble all the
bright-hued elements that awaited him a few months ahead to make his own
life a poem, a song.
"I can do that," he once said, in a moment when exaltation had briefly
made him confidential.
Raymond never saw his grandmother--at least he never cared to see her.
Here, if nowhere else, he was willing to take a cue, and he took it from
the head of the family. He thought that so many years of town life might
have made her a little less rustic in the end: the York State of 1835 or
of 1840 need not have remained York State so immitigably. And if there
was a domestic blight on the house he was willing to believe that she
was two thirds to blame: behind the old soul was a pack of poor
relations. Particularly a brother-in-law--a bilious, cadaverous fellow,
whom I saw once, and once was enough. He had been an itinerant preacher
farther East, and he lived in a woeful little cottage along one of
Jehiel's horse-car routes. His mournful-eyed wife was always asking
help. He too had "gone into real-estate," and unsuccessfully. He was the
dull reverse of that victorious obverse upon which Johnny McComas was
beginning to shine.
Another of her relatives, a niece, had married a small-town sharper. He
had brought her to the larger town, and his sharpness had taken on a
keener edge. He, too, had gone into real-estate--a lean, wiry little
man, incredibly arid and energetic, and carrying a preposterously large
mustache. There was trouble with him after Jehiel's death. It developed
that one of the documents which old Beulah Prince had been cajoled or
hectored into signing had deeded to him--temporarily and for a specific
purpose--some forty acres of purple and yellow prairie flowers,
delightful blossoms nodding and swaying in the wind, and that he had
refused to deed more than half of them back: his services at that
particular juncture were "worth something," he said. Well, life (as may
have been remarked previously) would be quite tolerable without one's
relatives. Meanwhile the summer flowers bloomed and nodded on, under the
windy blue sky, all unaware of their disgrace.
A month after Raymond's decision, flowers (of the sort favored in
cemeteries) were trying to bloom over old Jehiel. Some stroke, some
lesion, had put a period to the unhappy career of this grim old man.
Raymond set to one side, for a few weeks, his new trunk and portmanteau;
for a few weeks only--he had no notion of making, ultimately, any great
change in his plans. It was obvious that James Prince was looking
forward to a year or two of harassing procedure in the courts, for old
Jehiel's estate was unlikely to smooth out with celerity; but Raymond
was clearly of no use at home, even as a mere source of sympathy. A
fortnight after his grandfather's funeral he was off.
The singing-class would have given him good-bye in a special session;
but his eyes were now on brighter matters and the vocalizing Gertrudes
and Adeles were dim. He got out of it. Besides, the affair might come to
involve something like ceremony; and he was always desirous of avoiding
(save in the arts) the ceremonial side of life. When he came back from
his first sojourn on the Continent he was a young man of mark, as things
went in our particular town and time; or, rather, he might have been
such, had he but chosen. The family fortunes were then merely at the
stage of worry and still far from that of impending disaster. Raymond
came back with money, position, and a certain aureole of personal
distinction--just the sort of young man who would be asked to act as
usher at a wedding. He _was_ asked repeatedly; but he never acted, and
his excuses and subterfuges for avoiding such a service almost became
one of the comedies of the day. He had no relish for seeing himself
walking ceremonially up a church aisle under the eyes of hundreds, and
I knew better than to ask him to walk up any aisle for me. He never did
the thing but once, and that was under the inescapable compulsion of his
fiancée--who, for her part, insisted on eyes and plenty of them. A man
may never cease to be astonished at the workings of feminine preferences
on such an occasion, but can hardly escape accommodating himself to
them. Gertrudes are Gertrudes.
But the wedding is years ahead, while the departure for Europe is
imminent. Raymond had a tepid, awkward parting with his mother, whose
headaches would not allow her to go to the train; and he shook hands
rather coldly and constrainedly with his father, who would have
welcomed, as I guess, some slight show of filial warmth, and he threw an
embarrassedly facetious word to me about the weight of his portmanteau,
and so was off. And it was years, rather than months, before he came
back.