I
Little Albert's babyhood kept his mother a good deal at home--and by
"home" I mean the house in which he had been born. His father's lessened
interest in Europe (and his diminished deference for it) kept his mother
at home completely--and by "home" I now mean the town in which Albert
had been born. Father, mother, and offspring filled the big house as
well as they could--the big, _old_ house as it was sometimes called by
those who cherished a chronology that was purely American; and Albert
was more than a year and a half along in life before his grandmother
came across to see him and to inspect the distant _ménage_. She brought
her water-waves and her sharpened critical sense, and went back leaving
the impression that she was artificial and exacting.
"She missed her Paris," said Raymond, "and her drive in the Bois."
"H'm!" said I, recalling that the town's recent chief executive had
pronounced us, not many years back, the equal of Paris in civic beauty.
"We have no Bois, as yet," he added, thoughtfully. "Do you think we ever
shall have one?"
He was revolving the Bois, not as a definite tract of park land, but as
a social institution.
"I think," said I, "that we had better be satisfied with developing
according to our own nature and needs."
"Yes," he returned; "there was the Frenchman at the fox-hunt: 'No band,
no promenade, no nossing.' Well, we must go on our own tack, as soon as
we discover it."
It need not be imagined that his mother-in-law's look-in of a month made
his wife more contented. She kept on wishing for her new friends in
another quarter, and (more strongly) for the familiar scenes of the
other side. Raymond did not wish the expense involved in either move.
His affairs were now going but tolerably. So far as the bank was
concerned--a bank that had once been almost a "family" institution--his
influence was naught. He was only a stockholder, and a smaller
stockholder than once. His interest, in any sense, was but a brief,
periodical interest in dividends. These were coming with a commendable
regularity still. His rentals came in fairly too; but most of them were
now derived from properties on the edge of the business
district--properties with no special future and likely only to hold
their own however favorable general conditions might continue. Travel?
No. A man travels best in his youth, when he is foot-free, care-free,
fancy-free. Go traveling too late, or once too often, and there is a
difference. The final checking-off of something one has "always meant to
see" may result in the most ashen disappointment of all: even intuition,
without the pains of actual experience, should suffice to warn. Besides,
as Raymond said,--
"We've both had a good deal of it. Let's stay at home."
His wife cast about her. There is a mood in which a deprivation of high
comedy may drive one to low-down farce. To-day people are even going
farther. A worthy stage is dead, they say; and they patronize, somewhat
willfully and contemptuously (or with a loose, slack tolerance that is
worse), the moving pictures. Perhaps it was in some such mood that
Raymond's wife took up with Mrs. Johnny McComas. They were but three
streets apart. Mrs. McComas was lively, energetic, determined to drive
on; and her ability to assimilate rapidly and light-handedly her growing
opulence made it seem by no means a mere vulgar external adornment. She
knew how to move among the remarkable furnishings with which she had
surrounded herself in that old-new house, and how to make the momentum
gained there serve her ends in the world outside.
"It will be a short life here," her husband had told her on their taking
possession; "then, a quick sale--at a good figure--to some manufacturing
concern, and on we go."
"If it's to be short, let's make it merry," she had rejoined; and
nothing had been spared that could give liveliness to their stately old
interiors, while those interiors lasted.
Mrs. Raymond Prince vaguely pronounced their house "amusing." It had,
like Adele McComas herself, a provocative dash which fell in with her
present mood, and it pleased her that its châtelaine was inclined to
dress up to its wayward sofas and hangings. She even went with Mrs.
Johnny on shopping tours and abetted her as her fancies, desires and
expenditures ran riot. It was a mood of irresponsibility--almost of
defiant irresponsibility.
Now was the nascent day of the country club. Several of these welcome
institutions had lately set themselves up in a modest, tentative way.
Acceptance was complete, and all they had to do was to grow. With one of
these McComas cast his lot. At the start it was a simple enough affair;
but Johnny must have sensed its potentialities and savored its
affinities, its coming congruity with himself. It was to become,
shortly, a club for the suddenly, violently rich, the flushed with
dollars, the congested with prosperity--for newcomers who had met
Success and beaten her at her own game. Stir on all hands, the reek of
sudden felicity in the air. In later years people with access to better
things of similar sort were known to become indignant when asked to
associate themselves with it. "Why should _I_ want to join _that_?" was
the question they put. But it pleased Johnny McComas, both by its
present manifestations and its latent possibilities. It was richly in
unison with his own nature, and I believe he had a ravishing vision of
its magnificent futurities.
Last year my wife and I were taken to a Sunday afternoon concert out
there. We found a place of towers and arcades, of endless corridors
planted with columns and numberless chairs in numberless varieties, of
fountained courts, of ball-rooms, of concert-halls, of gay apparel and
cool drinks. We heard of fairs, horse-shows, tournaments in golf and
tennis. The restaurant, with its acre of tables, glassed and naperied;
the ranges of telephone booths, all going it together; the cellars, a
vast subterrene, with dusky avenues of lockers, each cluttered with
beverages of individual predilection--though I suppose that, after all,
they were a good deal alike....
Well, it was too much for us; and my Elsie, who is essentially the lady,
if woman ever was, came away feeling a little dowdy and a good deal out
of date.
At that earlier period, however, it was still simple; the germ was
there, but the development of its possibilities had only begun. When
Mrs. McComas invited Mrs. Prince to drive out with her and see some
tennis, Mrs. Prince was quite ready to accept.
I do not know just what mode of locomotion they employed. It was in the
early days of the automobile and Johnny McComas was one of the first men
in town to have one. I recall, in fact, some of his initial experiences
with it. On a Sunday afternoon I encountered him in one of these still
relatively unstudied contraptions on a frequented driveway. Another man
was sitting beside him patiently. The conveyance was making no progress
at all. Fortunately it had stopped close enough to the curb not to
interfere with the progress of other and more familiar equipages.
"We're stuck," said Johnny, jovially, as he caught sight of me. "Ran for
three or four miles slick as a whistle--and look at us now!" It
entertained him--a kink in a new toy. And he enjoyed the interest of the
people collected about.
"You're gummed up, I expect," said I. In those days nobody knew much
about the new creature and its habits, and one man's guess was as good
as another's. Two or three bystanders eyed me deferentially, as a
probable expert.
"Likely enough," he agreed--and that made me an expert beyond doubt.
"But this will do for to-day. We've been here twenty minutes."
He had the car pushed to a near-by stable, amidst the mixed emotions of
the little crowd, and next day he had it hauled home.
"You were right," he said, when I met him out again in it, a week later.
"It _was_ gummed up, so to speak; but it's working like a charm to-day.
Get in and I'll take you a few miles. That other fellow got an awful
grouch."
It may have been by this machine, or by some more familiar mode of
locomotion, that the two women reached the country club and its tennis
tournament. Gertrude Prince strolled through its grounds and galleries
with the aloof and amused air of one touring through a foreign town--a
town never seen before and likely to be left behind altogether within an
hour or two. It was at once semi-smart and semi-simple. She took it
lightly, even condescendingly; and when Johnny McComas himself appeared
somewhat later and set them down at a little marble table near a
fountain-jet and offered cocktails as a preliminary to a variety of
sandwiches, she decided, after looking about and seeing a few other
ladies with glasses before them on other little marble tables, to
accept. It was a lark in some town of the provinces--Meaux or Melun;
what difference did it make?
They formed a little group altogether to Johnny's liking. His wife was
dressed dashingly; his wife's guest made a very fair second; he
himself, although he never lifted a racquet, was in the tennis garb of
that day.
"You both look ripping," he declared with hearty satisfaction. To look
thus, before competing items in the throng, was the object of the place,
the reason for its developing _mise en scène_.
Johnny himself looked ripping--cool, confident, content, and at the top
of his days.
"It was amusing...." said Gertrude to me, with an upward inflection, a
week later.
And she asked me for more about Johnny McComas.
II
If those were days when people began to combine for the pursuit of
pleasure, they were also days when people began to gather at the call of
public duty. If clubs were forming on the borders, other clubs, leagues,
societies were forming nearer the centre--organizations to make
effective the scattered good-will of the well-disposed and to gain some
betterment in the local political life. To initiate and conduct such
movements only a few were needed; but the many were expected to
contribute, if not their zeal and their time, at least their dollars. It
was patriotic righteousness made easy: a man had only to give his fifty
dollars or his five hundred to feel, without further personal exertion,
that he was a good citizen and was forwarding, as all good citizens
should, a worthy cause. This way of doing it fell in wonderfully well
with Raymond's temperament and abilities (or lack of them): the
liberality of his contributions did not remain unknown, and he was
sometimes held up as a favorable specimen of the American citizen.
Another movement was soon to engage his attention. If the prosperous
were to have their playgrounds beyond the city's outskirts, the less
prosperous should have theirs within the city's limits. The scheme of a
system of small parks and playgrounds quite took Raymond's fancy. It
contained, besides the idea of social amelioration, the even more
grateful idea of municipal beautification. In time, indeed, might not
this same notion, fortified by experience and given a wider
application, end by redeeming the town not merely in spots but in its
entirety?--a saved and graced whole, not only as to its heart, but as to
its liberal and varied borders of water, woodland and prairie.
"I should be proud of that," said Raymond heartily. The name of such a
city, following one's own name on any hotel-register, would indeed be a
matter for pride.
He attended several of the early meetings that were designed to get some
such project, in its simpler form, under way. He had friends among
professional men in the arts, and some acquaintances among newly formed
bodies of social workers. He was not slow in perceiving that the way was
likely to be tedious and hard. It called for organization--the
organization of hope, of patience, of hot, untiring zeal, of _finesse_
against political chicane, of persistence in the face of indifference
and selfishness. "It will take years of organized endeavor," he
confessed. He recognized his own ineffectiveness beyond the narrow pale
of hopeful suggestion, and wished that here too the giving of a
substantial sum--a large penny-in-the-slot--might produce quick and
facile results.
His wife, it is to be feared, looked upon these activities of his,
however slight, with a lack-lustre eye. She knew nothing of local
problems and local needs. She was conscious of a hortatory manner in
small matters and of indifference, which she almost made neglect, in
matters that appeared to her to be larger. If she asked for a fairer
share in his evenings--he belonged to a literary club, a musical
society, and so on--it was scant consolation to be told that he objected
to some of her own activities and associations. He did not much care,
for example, to have her "run" with the McComases and others of that
type or to have her dawdle over glasses, tall, broad, or short, in
places of general democratic assemblage; and he told her so. I believe
it was about here that she began to find him something of a prig and a
doctrinaire; and she was not incapable, under provocation, of mentioning
her impressions. It was about here, I suspect, that he told her
something of Johnny McComas and his origins--at least he once or twice
spoke of Johnny with a certain sharp scorn to me. He assuredly spoke of
other country clubs on the other side of town which were more desirable
for her and equally accessible, save in the material sense of mere
miles. Though he took no interest in athletics, nor even in the lighter
out-of-door sports, he was willing to join one of those clubs, if it was
required of him.
His reference to Johnny McComas was designed, no doubt, to repel her;
but the effect, as became perfectly apparent, was quite the contrary.
She was interested, even fascinated, by the rise of a man from so little
to so much. She found words and words to express her admiration of
Johnny's type, and when English words ran short she found words in
French. He was _gaillard_; he had _élan_. What wasn't he? What hadn't
he? Bits of bravado, I still incline to think.
No, the McComases were not to be left behind all of a sudden. One day
she made another excursion to the outskirts with them; and she reported
it to Raymond, with a little air of suppressed mockery, as a perfectly
unobjectionable jaunt. She had gone with them to the cemetery. Johnny's
mother had died the year before, and he had been putting up a monument
in Roselands. This structure, it developed, was no mere memorial to an
individual. It was a tall shaft, set in the middle of a large lot. I saw
it later myself: a lavish erection (with all its accessory features
taken into account)--one designed, as I felt, to show Johnny himself to
posterity as an ancestor, as the founder of a family line. Assuredly his
own name, aside from the tall obelisk itself, was the largest thing in
view.
Raymond took this account of Johnny's latest phase with an admirable
seriousness; he thought the better of him for it. He himself was
inclined to divide human-kind into two classes, those who had
cemetery-lots (with monuments), and those who had not. The latter, of
course, are in a majority everywhere. One thinks of Naples and of the
sad road that winds up past the Alhambra to--Well, yes; in a majority,
of course; and inevitably so in a large town suddenly thrown together
by a heaping up of fortuitous and miscellaneous elements. In later
years, when things were going rather badly with Raymond, and when
consideration seemed to fail, he could always comfort himself with
thoughts of the Princes' own monument in that same cemetery. This was
another tall shaft in a gray granite now no longer to be found, and had
been set up by old Jehiel on the occasion of the reinterment of some
infants by his first wife--a transaction carried out years before
Raymond was born. Some of the dates on the base of the monument went
back to the early thirties. Well, there it stood, with the subordinated
headstones of Jehiel and old Beulah, of his own parents, and of the
half-mythical babes who, if they had given nothing else to the world,
had furnished a future nephew with a social perspective. Raymond,
reconsidering Johnny's recent effort, now began to disparage that
improvised background, and led his wife to view his own lot--theirs,
hers--only a hundred yards from the other. But she could not respond to
old Jehiel and Beulah--though she tried to be properly sympathetic over
their son and his wife. Still less could she vitalize the infants who
had encountered an epidemic on the prairie frontier and had succumbed
more than three score years ago. If she thought of any child at all, she
thought doubtless of little Albert (now romping about in his first tweed
knickerbockers), who would not die for many years, perhaps, and who was
like enough to be buried in quite another spot.
But I think she thought, most of all, of the manly, cheerful sorrow of
Johnny McComas before the new monument in the other lot.
III
These were also days of panic. Banks went down and bank officials threw
themselves after. The city was thrilled, even charmed, to find that its
financial perturbations touched, however slightly, the nerves of London
and Paris. I myself was in Algeria that winter: my Elsie and I had
decided on three months along the Mediterranean. It was on the white,
glaring walls of the casino at Biskra that the news was first bulletined
for our eyes. It had a glare of its own, I assure you: for a few days
we knew little enough how we ourselves might be standing.
I thought of the Mid-Continent, with its cumbersome counters and
partitions done in walnut veneer and its old-fashioned pavement in
squares of black and white. I thought too of Johnny McComas's new
institution, with so many bright brass handrails and such a spread of
tasteful mosaics underfoot. How had they fared? Well, they had fared
quite differently. Why should a big, old bank go under, while a new,
little bank continues to float. I cannot tell you. I was far away at the
time. Perhaps I could not tell you even if I had been on the spot. And
to other questions, more important still, I may be unable to give, when
the pinch comes, a clearer answer. The Mid-Continent dashed, or drifted,
into the rocky hands of a receiver; and McComas's bank, after a
fortnight of wobbling, righted itself and kept on its way.
I saw Raymond again in March. The receivership was going on languidly.
Prospects were bright for nobody.
"All this puts an end to _one_ of my plans, anyhow," he said.
"What plan is that?" I asked.
I was reminded that these were also the days of a quickened interest in
education. This interest was expressing itself in large new
institutions, and these institutions were generously embodying
themselves in solid stone--in mullions, groins, gargoyles, finials, and
the whole volume of approved scholastic detail. Donors were grouping
themselves in "halls" and dormitories round a certain inchoate campus,
and were putting on the fronts of their buildings their own names, or
the names of deceased husbands or wives, fathers or mothers--so many
bids for a monumental immortality.
"I had hoped for a Prince Hall," said Raymond. And he explained that it
would have been in memory of his parents.
I must pause for a moment on this matter. I do not believe that Raymond
had ever thought, in seriousness, of any such gift. It must have been at
best an errant fancy, and if concerned with commemorating anybody
concerned with commemorating himself. But I will say this for him: he
never was disposed to try getting things out of people, for he hated
attempts at trickery almost as much as he detested the exercise of the
shrewdness involved in bargaining and dickering. Per contra, he often
showed himself not averse to giving things to other people; but the
basis for that giving must be clearly understood all round. He would not
compete; he would not struggle; he would not descend to a war of wits.
His to bestow, from some serene height; his the rôle, in fact, of the
kindly patron. Let but his own superiority be recognized--let him only
be regarded as _hors concours_--and he would sometimes deign to do the
most generous acts. These acts embraced, now and again, the
entertainment of writers and artists, either at his home or elsewhere:
his fellows--for he was a writer and an artist too. But it was all done
with the understanding that there was a difference: he was a writer and
an artist--but he was something more. Those who failed to feel the
difference were not always bidden a second time.
And his fancy for patronage was developing just at a time when patronage
was becoming more difficult, awkward, impracticable! But though "Prince
Hall" never saw the light, other and humbler forms of patronage came to
be accepted by him.
Toward the end of April Raymond and his wife joined one of the clubs
which he had brought to her notice. Though in a formative stage, like
others, it was good (we ourselves joined it some few years later); and
she made it her concern, through the summer, to give it some of those
shaping pats which--for a new club, as for a new vase--have the greater
value the earlier they are bestowed. She was active about the place, and
she became conspicuous.
It was soon seen that she was "gay"--or was inclined to be, under
favoring conditions. The conditions were most favoring, it began to be
felt, when her husband was not about. A good many thought him stiff, and
a few who used obsolete dictionary words pronounced him proud--a term
stately enough to constitute somehow a tribute, though a damnatory one.
It was soon seen, too, that just as he irked her, so she disparaged
him--an open road to others.
One day she gave a lunch at the club--places for a dozen. Johnny McComas
appeared there for the first time. It was a plainer place than his own,
but I credit him with perceiving that it was much more worth while.
Adele McComas did not appear--for a good reason. Those obstreperous
twins now had a little sister two weeks old. The wife was doubtless
better at home, but was the husband better at the club? If I had been a
member at that time, and present, I should have felt like following him
to some corner of the veranda and saying: "Oh, come, now, Johnny, will
this quite do?" Well, I know what his look would have been--it came
later. He would have turned that wide, round face on me, with the curly
hair about the temples which gave him somehow an expression of abiding
youth and frankness; and he would have directed those hard, bright blue
eyes of his to look straight ahead at me--eyes that seemed to hold back
nothing, yet really told nothing at all; and would have disclaimed any
wrong-doing or any intention of wrong-doing. And I should have felt
myself a foolish meddler.
Well, the innocent informalities of the summer were resumed by the same
set in town next winter. The memories and the methods of one season were
tided over to another. Gertrude was still "gay"--perhaps gayer--and a
little more openly impatient with her husband, and a little more openly
disdainful of him. Young men swarmed and fluttered, and those who had
"never tried it on" before seemed inclined to try it on now.
I take, on the whole, a tempered view--by which I mean, a favorable
view--of our society and its moral tone. I am assured, and I believe
from my own observations, that this is higher than in some other of our
large cities. I dislike scandal, and I have no desire to bear tales.
Either is far from being the object of these present pages. Nothing that
I present need be taken as typical, as tyrannously representative.
Raymond criticized, expostulated. Friends began to come to him with
impressions and reports. I--whether for good or ill--was not one of
these. They named names--names which I shall not record here. But it was
one of Raymond's own impressions, and a vivid one, which finally
prompted him to make a move.
IV
January found the social life of the town in full swing. We had
recovered from last year's financial jolt, and entertaining was
constant. Raymond and his wife were invited out a good deal. He was
bored by it all; but his wife remained interested and indefatigable.
Finally came a dance at one of the great houses. Raymond rebelled, and
refused point-blank to go: an evening in his library was his mood. His
wife protested, cajoled, and he finally found a reason for giving in.
As I say, they were bidden to one of the great houses--one of the few
that possessed an actual façade, a central court, and a big staircase:
it had too its galleries of paintings and of Oriental curios before
Oriental curios became too common. Its owner was also, with the rest, a
musical amateur. He was a man of forty-five, and like Raymond had a wife
too many years younger than himself for his own comfort. This lively
lady lived on fiddles and horns--dancing was an inexhaustible pleasure.
At her dancing-parties, of which she gave three or four a season, her
husband would show himself below for a few moments for civility's sake,
and then retire to a remote den on an upper floor, well shut out from
the sounds of his wife's frivolous measures, but accessible to a few
habitués of age and tastes approximating his own.
The question of music of another quality and to another purpose was in
the air--it was a matter of endowing and housing an orchestra. Informal
_pour-parlers_ were under way in various quarters, and Raymond felt
disposed, and even able, to contribute in a modest measure. It was his
pride to have been asked, and it was his pride, despite untoward
conditions, to put up a good front and do as much as he could. An hour's
confab over cigarettes in that retired little den might clarify one
atmosphere, if not another.
The court and its staircase were set with palms, as is the ineluctable
wont on such occasions and for such places; and people, between the
dances, or during them, were brushing the fronds aside as they thronged
the galleries round the court to see the Barbizon masters then in vogue
and the Chinese jades. As Raymond passed down the stairway, he met his
wife coming up on the arm of Johnny McComas.
"She looked self-conscious," Raymond said to me, a few days after. I
told him that he had seen only what he was expecting to see.
"And he looked too beastly self-satisfied." I told him that of late I
had seldom seen Johnny look any other way.
"Where was his wife?" he asked. I told him she might easily be in the
crowd on some other man's arm.
"Why were they there at all?" he demanded. And I did not tell him that
probably they were there through his own wife's good offices.
That meeting on the stairs!--he made a grievance of it, an injury. The
earlier meeting, with Johnny's own wife on his arm, had annoyed him as a
general assertion of prosperity. This present meeting, with Raymond
Prince's wife on Johnny's arm, exasperated him as a challenging
assertion of power and predominance.
"I shall act," Raymond declared.
"Nothing rash," said I. "Nothing unconsidered, I hope."
"I shall act," he repeated. And he set his jaw more decisively than a
strong man always finds necessary.
V
Raymond's mind was turning more and more to a set scene with McComas;
some meeting between them was, to his notion, a _scène à faire_. It
seemed demanded by a Gallic sense of form: it must be gone through with
as a requisite to his rôle of offended husband.
One difficulty was that Raymond fluctuated daily, almost hourly, in his
view of his wife--of _the_ wife, I may say. To-day he took the old
view: the wife was her husband's property and any attempt on her was a
deadly injury to him. To-morrow he took the newer view: the wife was an
individual human being and a free moral agent; therefore a lapse, while
it meant disgrace for her, was, for him, but an affront which he must
endure with dignified composure.
Meanwhile the pair saw little of each other, and Albert, puzzled, began
to enter upon his opportunity (a wide and lingering one it became) for
learning adjustment to awkward and disconcerting conditions.
Well, Raymond had his meeting. Imagine whether it was agreeable. Imagine
whether it was agreeable to me, in whose office it was held. Raymond had
the difficult part of one who must act because he has deliberately
committed himself to action, yet has no sure ground to act upon, and
therefore no line to take with real effect. It was here and now that
McComas turned his round face foursquare to his uncertain accuser, and
let loose a steady, unspeaking stare from those hard blue eyes, and
declared that nothing had occurred upon which an accusation could justly
be based. He was emphatic; and he was blunt; the son and grandson of a
rustic.
Nothing, he said. Had there really been nothing? You are entitled to
ask. And I might be inclined to answer, if I knew. I simply don't. I was
in position to know something, to know much; but everything?--no.
Think, if you please, of the many domestic situations which must pass
without the full light of detailed knowledge--knowledge that comes too
late, or never comes at all. Consider the simple, willful girl who
marries impulsively on the assumption that the new acquaintance is a
bachelor. Cases have been known where it developed that he was not.
Consider the phrase of the marriage service, "if any of you know just
cause or impediment": who can declare that, in a given instance, some
impediment, moral if not legal, might not be brought against either
contracting party, however trustful the other? Consider the story of the
anxious American mother who, alarmed by reports about a fascinating
scoundrel under whom her daughter was studying music somewhere in
mid-Europe, went abroad alone to investigate. Her letter to the awaiting
father, back home, ran for page after page on non-essentials and dealt
with the real point only in a brief, embarrassed, bewildered postscript
of one line: "Oh, William, _I don't know_!" Neither do I "know." But my
account of later events may help you to decide the question for
yourselves.
Raymond had set his mind on a divorce. If grounds could not be found in
one quarter, they must be found in another. If McComas, that prime
figure, was unable to bring aid, then there must be coöperation among
the other and lesser figures. Raymond revived and reviewed the tales
that had involved several younger men. The more he dwelt on them, the
more inflamed he became, and the more certain that he had been wronged.
I did not accompany him through his proceedings--such advice as I had
given him near the beginning was the advice simply of a friend. My own
part of the great field of the law is a relatively unimpassioned
one--office-work involving real-estate, conveyancing, loans, and the
like. I suggested to Raymond the proper counsel for the particular case,
and there, for a while, I left him.
His wife's parents came on from the East. The mother, after some years
abroad, had lately resumed her domestic duties in the land of her birth.
The father, who knew all of one subject, and nothing of any other,
detached himself for a week or two from the one worthy interest in life
and accompanied her. The "street" was still there when he returned. They
seemed experienced and worldly-wise in their respective fields and their
respective aspects, but they entered upon this new matter with a poor
grace. Here was another mother who did not quite "know," and another
father who waited, at a second remove, for definite knowledge that did
not quite come. First there were maladroit attempts to bring a
reconciliation; and afterwards, and more shrewdly, endeavors to gain as
much as possible for their daughter from the wreck.
Raymond was determined to keep possession of Albert. Mrs. McComas,
mother of three, stoutly declared that the mother should have her child.
Other women said the same, and maintained the point regardless of the
mother's course or conduct. Many women have said the same in many cases,
and perhaps they are right. Perhaps they are completely right in the
case of a boy of six, who surely needs a woman's care. But it is not
difficult, even when material is more abundant than definite, to throw
an atmosphere of dubiousness about a woman and to make it appear that
she is not a "proper person...." So it appeared to the judge in this
case, and so he ruled--with a shading, however. Albert might spend with
his mother one month every summer--and some financial concession on
Raymond's part helped make the time brief. However, she was to have
nothing to say about Albert's mode of life through the rest of the year,
and nothing (more specifically) about his education.
"That makes him mine," said Raymond.
And he set his lips firmly. He was one of those who set their lips
firmly after the event is determined.
I do not know whether Raymond had any real affection for Albert. I do
not know whether he realized what it was for a father to undertake,
single handed, the charge of a boy of six. I think that what moved him
chiefly was his determination to carry a point. However all this may be,
I remember what he said as, after the decree, he walked out with
Albert's hand in his.
"Well, it's over!"
Over!--as if a separation involving a child is ever "over"!