I
Johnny McComas was still carrying on his business life and his home life
in the suburb where he had married, when I came, finally, to make my
first call on the domestic group of which he was the nub. Still in the
future was the day when he was to move into town, and to have also a
summer home on the North Shore, and to make some of his father-in-law's
spare funds yield profitable results, and to arouse among wistful clerks
and unsuccessful "operators" an admiring wonder as the youngest
bank-president in the "Loop."
I looked in on him one evening in late November. I found a house too
emphatically furnished and a wife too concerned about making an
impression. I did not consider myself a young man of prime consequence
and did not relish the expenditure of so much effort: after all,
Johnny's standing, Johnny's wife, Johnny's domestic _entourage_ were
not before a judgment-bar. It was plain to see that for Mrs. John W.
McComas complete social comfort had not yet been reached, and I wondered
if the next move might not show it as farther away than ever.
Johnny himself was bluff and direct, and took things as a matter of
course. Much had been done, but more remained to be done; meanwhile all
was well and good. After a little, his wife was content to leave us
alone together, and we drifted to Johnny's "den"--a word new at that
time, and descriptive of the only feature of his home on which he laid
the slightest self-conscious emphasis.
I had heard that there were twins--boys; and soon, as the evening was
still young, I heard the twins themselves. They had reached the age of
ten months, and consequently had developed wants, but no articulate
means for making those wants known. Therefore they howled, and they
began howling in unison now. Perhaps it was for them that a foresighted
mother had left us alone together.
"Great little hollerers!" said Johnny placidly, pulling at his pipe.
I was still a bachelor. "Might shut the door?" I proposed.
"If you like," said Johnny, without enthusiasm. "They wake me every
morning at five," he added.
Yes, I was still a bachelor--and probably a tactless, even a brutal,
one.
"Might move them to another bedroom, farther away?" I suggested. The
house seemed big enough for such an arrangement.
"Don't want to," declared Johnny. He began pulling at his pipe again,
and there was a little silence during which I might meditate on the curt
nobility of his remark.
The fact was, of course, that Johnny loved life; he embraced it with
gusto, with both arms outspread. No sidestepping its advances; no
dodging its sharp angles; no feeble mitigating of a situation for which
he was himself responsible; no paltry deadening of domestic uproar
merely because he himself happened to be within the domestic
environment. "If Adele stands it, I will too--they're mine as well as
hers,"--such I conceive to have been his attitude. Johnny had no nerves,
and only a minimum of sensibility. The sound-waves broke on his
sensorium as ripples break on a granite coast. Perhaps they pleased him;
perhaps they even soothed him. Why, bless you! these children were
_his_! They were facts as great and as unescapable as the ebb and flow
of the tides, as dawn and twilight, as the morning and evening stars.
And the evening stars were singing together. Great may have been the
jubilation for Johnny's ears, boundless the content in Johnny's heart.
I really think that Johnny felt through the din some of the exhilaration
that often came to him with a good brisk scrap in his office--or in the
other man's office. In fact, home and business were Johnny's two sources
of interest and pleasure--the warp and woof of his life--and he was
determined on getting the utmost out of each. His interest in his home
circle may somewhat have declined--or at least have moderated--with
advancing years, but it was incandescent now. His interest in the
outside world--that oyster-bin awaiting his knife--never slackened, not
even when the futility of piling up the empty shells became
daylight-clear, and when higher things strove perseveringly, even
unmistakably, to beckon him on. Never, in fact, throughout his life did
he exhibit more than two essential concerns: one for his family and
clan; and one for the great outside mass of mediocre individuals through
whose ineptitudes he justly expected to profit.
Well, the door of the den remained open, and our talk went on to the
rising and falling of infant voices. At last, thinking that my good-bye
must be to Johnny only, I rose to go. You might reasonably ask for a
clearer impression of his home and a more definite account of his wife.
But what can I say when the primary address was so disconcertingly to
the ear? Of his wife--who came down, during a lull, at the last
moment--I can only say that she seemed too _empressée_ at the beginning
and too casual at the end. Perhaps she had decided that, after all, I
was no more than I myself claimed to be. Perhaps the infant hurricane
was still ruffling the surface of her mind, or even disturbing its
depths.
"I won't ask you to call again," she said, as we shook hands for a
good-night: "we shall be moving in the spring." She spoke with a
satisfied air of self-recognized _finesse_, and as in the confident hope
of completing very promptly some well-planned little programme; but--
"Visit us there," said Johnny, with a quick cordiality which prevented
his wife from redeeming herself.
"There" had been the chief topic in the den. Many neighborhoods had been
brought forward, with their attendant advantages and disadvantages.
Johnny told me what he thought, and let me say what I thought. When I
listened, it was as a man who might soon have a similar problem to
consider. When I spoke it was to utter banalities sedately; any
neighborhood might do, I said, that had good air; yes, and good
schools--looking toward the future. And any house, I felt, would serve,
if it had a nursery that was sealed, sound proof, remote....
"Well, best luck in your search for your roof-tree," I said earnestly to
them both.
"'Roof-tree'!" echoed Johnny. And, in fact, my observation did seem
rather artificial and insincere.
II
By the time Raymond reached home, Johnny McComas had turned his informal
suburban enterprise into a "state" bank, with his father-in-law as
president and himself as cashier. The father-in-law lent his name and
furnished most of the capital; Johnny himself provided the driving
power. And by the time Raymond had become, through his father's death,
the head of the family and the controller of the family funds, Johnny
had turned his state bank into a national bank, with its offices in the
city and with himself as president; and he had bought--at a bargain--a
satisfactory house on the edge of the neighborhood where we first met
him. The street was marked for business advance more promptly and more
unmistakably than the precise quarter of the Princes. It would do as a
home for a few years. The transaction appealed both to McComas's thrift
and his pride. The coming of his new little bank, with its modest
capital, made no particular stir in the "street"; and the great group of
houses to the eastward were so apprehensive of open outrage, in one form
or another, that his approach, in a guise still social, provoked but
scant concern.
James Prince died when Raymond was about thirty. A careful, plodding man
who had never brought any direct difficulties upon himself, but who had
been worried--and worried out--through troubles left him by others. On
the whole, he had found life an unrewarding thing; and he passed along,
at fifty-five, with no great regrets. The tangle of family affairs had
finally been straightened out in considerable measure, though Raymond
found enough detail still left to make him realize what a five years his
father had passed through; and when, the year following, his mother
died, with the settlement of her estate almost overlapping the
settlement of his father's, he acquired a new sense of the grinding,
taxing possibilities of business. I speak from his own viewpoint; he was
susceptible--unduly, abnormally so--to the grind and the tax. After a
few months of clammy old Brand and his methods, he suddenly cut loose
from him (without waiting for him to die, as he did a little later); and
he told me that I was the man to wind up these tedious affairs. They
were not nearly so difficult and complicated as they seemed to him--they
were now largely routine matters, in fact; and I hope I carried things
along at a tempo which satisfied him. This is not to deny that Raymond
seemed to have days when he found even me dilatory and exasperating; but
old Brand would probably have driven him mad.
Well, the prospects of his estate were not too brilliant. The lawsuits
had been expensive and sometimes unsuccessful; the bank had passed a
dividend, and the old houses, which had meant a lot of money in their
day, meant less now and even loss in a near future. The time was fast
coming when this circumscribed and unprotected neighborhood was to
admit other--and prejudicial--interests: boarding-houses, of course; and
refined homes for inebriates; and correspondence-schools for engineers;
and one of the Prince houses became eventually the seat of a
publishing-firm which needed a little distinction more than it needed a
wide spread of glass close to the sidewalk.
Whatever the state of Raymond's fortunes, it was easy to see that they
were not likely to improve in his hands. He detested business, both _en
gros_ and _en détail_. Despite his ancestry, he seemed to have been born
with no faculty for money-making, and he never tried to make up his
deficiency. It was all of a piece with the stone-throwing of his boyhood
days--he never attempted to improve himself: it was enough to follow the
gifts with which he had been natively endowed. Precept, example,
opportunity--all these went for naught. To the end of his days he viewed
the American "business man" as a portentous and inexplicable
phenomenon--one to be regarded with distaste and wonder. He persisted
in thinking of the type as a juvenile one--an energetic and clever boy,
who was immensely active and immensely productive of results (in an
immensely limited field), but who was incapable of anything like an
_aperçu_ or a _Weltanschauung_ (oh, he had plenty of words for it!), and
who was essentially booked to lose much more than he gained. He disliked
"offices" and abominated "hours." I think that even my own modest
professional applications sometimes became a puzzle to him....
And here I stand--convicted of having perpetrated another section
without one short paragraph and without a single line of conversation.
Let me hasten to bring Raymond to my suite and my desk-side, and make
him speak.
He came down one morning, as administrator of his mother's estate, to
consider the appraisal of the personal property--many familiar items,
and some discouraging ones.
"Do you _have_ to do this?" he asked me, with the paper in his hand. "Do
you _like_ to do it?"
"The world's work," I rejoined temperately. "It's got to be done."
"H'm!" he returned. "The world's a varied place. And its work is varied
too. This blessed town must be taught that."
Was he girding himself to be one of its teachers?
From that time on I resolved to take him patiently and good-humoredly: a
friend must bear a friend's infirmities.
III
I did not know, with precision, what phases of the world's work were
engaging Raymond's attention. I suppose he was adventuring, rather
vaguely, among the "liberal arts," though he probably saw, by this time,
that a full professional exercise of any of them was beyond his reach.
He was heard of as writing short essays and reviews for one or two
genteel publications, as making water-color tours through the none too
alluring suburbs, as composing minor pieces for a little musical society
which he had joined and which he wished to advance, and so on.
Acquaintances reported him at architectural exhibits and at
book-auctions--occasions neither numerous nor important. He lived on
alone in his father's house--expensively; too expensively, of course,
for it was an exacting place to keep up.
He was coming to be known in a small circle--but an influential one--as
a young man of wealth, culture, and good-will. But his wealth was less
than supposed, his culture was self-centred, and his good-will was
neither broad nor zealous.
However, the new day was coming when he could be turned to account--or
when, at least, people made the attempt.
This, however, does not mean philanthropy. That was barely dawning as a
social necessity. The few who were supporting charitable institutions
and were working in the recently evolved slums were neither conspicuous
nor fashionable. Nor does it mean political betterment. No efforts had
yet been successful in substituting for the city's executive incubus a
man of worthier type, nor was there yet any effective organization
founded on the assumption--which would have seemed remote and fantastic
indeed--that a city council could be improved. Parlor lectures on civics
were of course still farther in the future. Poor government was simply a
permanent disability, like weather, or lameness, or the fashions; folk
must get along as best they could in spite of it. The town remained a
chaos of maladministration and of non-administration; but when the
decencies are, for the time being, despaired of, one may still try for
the luxuries. So the city girded itself for a great festival; the nation
approved and coöperated, and a vast congeries of white palaces began to
rise on our far edge.
The detailed execution of this immense undertaking was largely local, of
course. Though the work was initiated by older heads (some of them were
too old and were dropped), there were places on the innumerable
committees for younger ones--for men in their early thirties; their
vigor, enthusiasm, and even initiative (within understood limits) would
greatly further the cause. There were (among others) committees on
entertainment to engage the services of young men of position, leisure,
and social experience. There were many foreign dignitaries to be
received and guided; there must be lively and presentable youths to help
manoeuvre them. Raymond, who was supposed to have mingled in European
society (instead of having viewed it from afar, in detachment), was
asked to serve in this field.
There were equally good opportunities for brisk, aggressive young men on
finance committees and such-like bodies, wherein prominent sexagenarians
did the heavily ornamental and allowed good scope for younger men who
had begun to get a record and who wished to confirm ability in
influential eyes. This opened a road for John W. McComas, who made a
record, indeed, in the matter of gathering local subscriptions. He
dented the consciousness of several important men in his own field, and
got praised in the press for his indefatigability and his powers of
persuasion. Before the six months of festivity were half over, our
Johnny had become a "prominent citizen" and his new bank almost a
household word.
Raymond did less well. The great organization was an executive
hierarchy: ranks and rows of officials, with due heed not only to
coördination but to subordination. Some men do their best under such
conditions; others, their worst. Raymond, a strong individualist, a
pronounced egoist, could not "fall in." Even in his simple field--one
concerned chiefly with but the outward flourishes--the big machine irked
and embarrassed him. He withdrew. When an imperial prince was publicly
"received," with ceremonies that mingled old-world formalities (however
lamely followed) and local inspirations (however poorly disciplined),
the moving event went off with no help of his: I believe he even smiled
at it all from a balcony.
It was here that Raymond began to make clear his true type. He was
Goethe's "bad citizen"--the man who is unable to command and unwilling
to obey.
After a particularly flamboyant appreciation of McComas's services in a
Sunday newspaper, I ventured to touch on our Johnny's rise in Raymond's
hearing. The two had not met for years; and Johnny had probably no
greater place in Raymond's mind than Raymond, as I remembered once
finding, had in Johnny's. But Raymond did not yet pretend to overlook or
to forget or to ignore him; nor did he yet allow himself to mention
Johnny as a one-time dweller in his father's stable.
"Why, yes," said Raymond; "he seems to be coming on fast. Climbing like
anything."
This, I felt, was disapproval, slightly tinctured with contempt. But
there are two kinds of progress on a ladder or a stairway. There is the
climbing up, and there is (as we sometimes let ourselves say) the
climbing down.
It was at the imperial reception that Raymond and Johnny finally met.
Let us figure Raymond as descending from his satirical balcony, and
Johnny, with his wife, as earnestly working his way up the great
stairway--the _scalone_, as Italy had taught Raymond to call it. This
was an ample affair with an elaborate handrail, whose function was
nullified by potted plants, and with a commodious landing, whose corners
contained many thickset palms. A crowd swarmed up; a crowd swarmed down;
the hundreds were congested among the palms. Johnny, with his wife on
his arm, was robust and hearty, and smiled on things in general as he
fought their way up. He took the occasion as he took any other occasion:
much for granted, but with a certain air of richly belonging and of
worthily fitting in. His wife--"I suppose it was his wife," said
Raymond--was elaborately gowned and in high feather: a successful
delegate of luxury. Obviously an occasion of this sort was precisely
what she had long been waiting for. Despite the press about her, she
made her costume and her carriage tell for all they might. A triumphing
couple, even Raymond was obliged to concede. The acme of team work....
"There we were--stuck in the crowd," said Raymond, whose one desire
seemed to have been to gain the street. "Not too close, fortunately. I
had to bow, but I didn't have to speak; and I didn't have to be
'presented.' He gave me quite a nod."
And no great exercise of imagination was required for me to see how
distant and reserved was Raymond's bow in return.
IV
That autumn, after the festal flags had ceased their flaunting and fire
had made a wide sweep over the white palaces, Raymond suddenly went
abroad. It was to be a stay of three or four months. He first wrote me
from Paris.
He wrote again in December, also from Paris, and told me _tout court_
that he was engaged to be married. I give this news to you as suddenly
as he gave it to me.
You can supply motives as easily as I. His parents were gone and his
family life was _nil_. The old house was large and lonely. You may
believe him influenced, if you like, by his last view of Johnny McComas
and by Johnny's amazing effect of completeness and content. You may
fancy him as visited by compunctions and mortifications due to his
consciousness of his own futility. Or you may fall back upon the simple
and general promptings that are smoothly current in the minds of us all.
My own notion, however, is this: he never would have married at home;
only an insidious whiff of romance, encountered in France or Italy,
could have accomplished his undoing.
Raymond's own advices were meagre. "Your emotional participation not
particularly desired"--such seemed to be the message that lay invisible
between his few lines. But other correspondents supplied the _lacunæ_.
He was to marry a girl whose family formed part of the American colony
in the French capital. At least, the feminine members of the family were
there: the mother, and an elder sister. The father, according to a
custom that still provoked Gallic comment, was elsewhere: he was
following the markets in America. The bride-to-be was between nineteen
and twenty. Raymond himself was thirty-three.
He advised me, later, that the wedding would take place at the end of
February and requested me to obtain and forward some of the quaint
documents demanded at such a juncture by the French authorities. He
added that he hoped for a honeymoon in Italy, but that his fiancée
favored Biarritz and Pau.
The wedding came off at one of the American churches in Paris. It was a
sumptuous ceremonial, aided by a bishop (who was on his travels, but who
had not forgotten to bring along his vestments) and by the attendance of
half the colony. Raymond was obliged to put up with all this pomp and
show, much as it ran counter to his tastes and inclinations. But
fortunately he was made even less of than most young men on such an
occasion; he had few connections on either side of the water, so the
bride's connections dominated the day and made her the chief figure
still more completely than is commonly the case. And the honeymoon was
spent, not in the north of Italy, but in the south of France.
There are times when a young girl must have her way. And there are times
when a young husband (but not so young) will determine to have his. I
knew Raymond.
The couple were in no haste to get home. The four months ran to almost a
year. I first met the new wife at a reception in the early autumn.
"Gertrude," said Raymond, "let me present to you my old friend--" H'm!
let me see: what _is_ my name?--Oh, yes: "Gertrude, let me present to
you my old friend, George Waite."
Can a young bride, dressed in black, and dressed rather simply too, look
almost wicked? Well, this one contrived to.
The effect was not due to her face, which had an expression of naïve
sophistication, or of sophisticated naïveté, not at all likely to
mislead the mature; nor to her carriage, which, though slightly
self-conscious, was modest enough, and not a bit too demure. It was due
to her dress, which, after all, was not quite so simple, either in
intention or in execution, as it seemed. It was black, and black only;
and it was trimmed with black jet or spangles or passementerie or
whatever--let some one else find the name. It was cut close, and it was
cut low; too close and too low--she was the young married woman with a
vengeance. It took a tone and bespoke a tradition to which most of us
were as yet strangers, and our initiation into a new and equivocal realm
had been too sudden for our powers of adjustment. It was Paris in its
essence--the thing in itself--and it had all come unedited through the
hands of a mother and a sister who were so rapt or so subservient as to
be incapable of offering opposition to the full pungency of the Parisian
evangel, and of hushing down an emphatic text for acceptance in a more
quiet environment. I can only say that several nice young chaps looked
once and then looked away. Raymond himself was inconvenienced. Nor did
matters mend when, within a week or so, Mrs. Raymond Prince began to
rate the women of her new circle as "homespun."
Her little hand fell most heavily on these poor aborigines when two or
three members of Raymond's singing-class loyally came to one of her own
receptions. These Adeles and Gertrudes of the earlier day were now wives
and mothers, with the interests proper to such. They had shepherded
babies through croup and diphtheria, and were now seeing husky,
wholesome boys and girls of twelve and thirteen through the primary
schools. When among themselves, they talked of servants and husbands.
They had not married and gone West or East; they had married at home,
and they had stayed at home. They had had too many things on their hands
and minds to catch up much of the recent exoticism stirring about them
here in town, and they were far from able to cope with this recent
importation of exoticism from the Rue de la Paix.
Raymond came home, one afternoon, in time for the last half-hour of his
wife's last reception. Her dress, on this occasion, was quite as daring,
in its way, as on the other, and original to the point of the bizarre.
One of the early Adeles was leaving, but she stopped for a moment and
attempted speech. She was the particular Adele with the piercing soprano
voice--a voice which had since lowered itself to sing lullabies to three
successive infants.
"Well, Raymond--" she began hopefully, and stopped. She tried again, but
failed; and she passed on and out with her words unsaid.
"Well, Raymond--" Yes, I am afraid that that was the impression of more
early friends than one.
V
Raymond had expected, of course, to give his wife her own way at the
beginning--at the very beginning, that is; and he had expected, equally,
to have her make a definite impression on the circle awaiting her. But--
Well, he had intended to "take her in hand," and to do it soon. She was
to be formed, or re-formed; she was to be adjusted, both to things in
general and to himself especially. Besides being her husband, he was to
be her kindly elder brother, her monitor, patient but firm; she was to
enter upon a state of tutelage. He was pretty certain to be right in all
his views, opinions and practices; and she, if her views, opinions and
practices were at variance with his, was pretty certain to be in the
wrong. He assumed that, during those few years in Paris, she had learned
it all in one big lesson only. The time had been too short to confirm
all this sudden instruction into a reasoned and assimilated way of life;
by no means had that superficial miscellany been rubbed into the warp
and woof of her being. The Parisian top-dressing would be removed and
the essential subsoil be exposed and tilled....
H'm!
One of the strongest of her early impressions was naturally that of the
house in which she was to live. It was big and roomy; it was detached,
and thus open to light and air. But its elephantine woodwork repelled
her, for she had grown up amid the rococo exuberances of Paris
apartments. The heavy honesty of black-walnut depressed her after the
gilded stucco of her mother's salon. And that huge, portentous
orchestrion took up such an immensity of room!
I doubt if the neighborhood itself pleased her much better, though it
was homogeneous (in its way), and dignified, and enjoyed an exceptional
measure of quietude. Perhaps it was too quiet, after some years of a
balcony on a boulevard. And it is true that some of the big houses were
vacant, and that some of the families roundabout went away too often and
stayed away too long. An empty house is a dead house, and when doors and
windows are boarded up you may say the dead house is laid out. Things
were sometimes _triste_--the French for final condemnation. The exodus
so long foreshadowed seemed appreciably under way. This Gertrude became
increasingly conscious, as the months went on, that most of the people
she wanted to see and most of the houses she was prompted to frequent
were miles away, and that the flood-tide of business rolled between.
Of her reaction to the circle in which she first found herself I have
given you one or two indications. It would be easy, as it would be
customary, to give some other of her early social experiences in detail
and her reactions to them; but my interest is frankly in her husband and
in his reactions. It was of him, too, that I saw the most; and I have
never gone greatly into society.
At the end of a long and possibly somewhat dull winter his wife began to
hint the advantageousness of transferring themselves to that other part
of town. Raymond was not precisely in the position where he cared to pay
high rent for a small house, while a big house was standing empty and
unrealizable. Pouts; frowns.... But nature came to his aid. With a new
young life soon to appear above the horizon, now was no time to shift.
His son should be born in the house in which he ought to be born. A
reasonable view, on the whole; and it prevailed.
Raymond had said "son," and son it was. The baby was not named Raymond:
his father, however much of an egoist, was not willing to put himself
forward as such so obviously, nor for a period that promised to be
indefinitely long. Nor was the baby called Bartholomew, after his
maternal grandfather in the East: for who cared to inflict such an
old-fashioned, four-syllable name on such a small morsel of flesh? He
entered the battle under the neutral and not over-colorful pennon of
Albert: his mother could thus call him "Bertie," and think, not too
remotely, of her parent on the stock exchange.
Raymond was not long in discovering, after reaching home, what
sacrifices the new life was to involve. On the Continent, in the midst
of change and stir, these had not foretold themselves. Back in his own
house, his interests--"intellectual interests" he called them--began to
assert themselves in the old way. But he was no longer free to range the
fields of the mind and take shots at the arts as they rose. Least of all
was he to read in the evening. That was to neglect, to affront. However,
the arrival of little Albert--poor tad!--changed the current of his
wife's own interests and helped to place one more rather vital matter
in abeyance. He was to live--for a while, anyway--in his present home;
and he was to pursue--for a while, anyway--some of the accustomed
interests of his bachelor days. He expected that, before long, his wife
would accept his environment and the practices he had always followed
within it. She needed enlightenment on many points. He had already
communicated some of his views on dress, for example; and he had
readjusted her notions on the preparation of salads. He gave her, pretty
constantly, corrective glances through, or over, his eyeglasses,--for
his sight had begun to weaken early, as his father had foreseen,--and he
meant that such glances should count. She required to be edited; well,
the new manuscript was worth his pains, and would be highly creditable
in its revised version.
VI
If one advantage showed forth from a situation that seemed, in general,
not altogether promising, it was this: Raymond, hearing his native town
commented upon unfavorably by his wife,--who was keen and constant in
her criticisms,--began to defend it. It was one thing for the
native-born to pick flaws; it was another when that ungracious work was
attempted by a newcomer. And he meant not only to defend it, but to
remain in it, though his wife had married him partly on the strength of
his European predilections, and largely on the assumption that a good
part of their married life would be spent abroad. He even began to
wonder if he might not join in and help improve things. Like most of his
fellow-townsmen, he regarded the city's participation in the late
national festival as a great step in advance,--the first of many like
steps soon to follow. The day after the Fair was late; but better to be
late than never. Really, there was hope for the Big Black Botch. More
and more he felt inclined to lessen still further its lessening
enormity. After all, this town was the town of his birth: and a
fundamental egoism cried out that it should be more worthy of him. He
recalled a group of American women--Easterners--whom, during his first
trip abroad, he had caught poring over the guest-book of a hotel in
Sorrento. He was the last male arrival in a slow season; he seemed
interesting and promising; evidently they had had hopes. "But," asked
one of them, "how is it you are willing to register openly from such a
town as that?"--and Raymond had felt the sting. "Such nerve, such
bumptiousness!" he said to me in recalling that query some years later.
But he did not add that he had tried to deliver any _riposte_. Instead
he was now to make a belated return at home, where effort most counted.
The years immediately to come were to be full of new openings and
opportunities; in his own way, and under his peculiar handicaps, he was
to try to take some advantage of them.