Meanwhile make your father as comfortable as you can. What you see going
on in him is just what begins to go on in every human being from the
moment of birth: Old Age. Here, of course, it is specialised and
malignantly accelerated. It is senility; that is to say, it is, though
here abnormally magnified, an essentially normal phenomenon. Old age, my
boy; old age.'"
Stainton wet his lips with wine.
"I can see the specialist yet as he said it," he presently went on, "and
I am not likely to forget what it made me feel. There must have been
some neighbour about at the time, or the housekeeper, but it remains in
my memory as an interview between him and me alone. I did the only thing
to be done: I bore it. I hated to have my father sent to an
institution--which shows that I was very young indeed,--and so I simply
nursed him along, the housekeeper and I doing the best we could.
"It was ugly, and it got worse every day. We could see it get worse. It
was--it was Hell. There are things, lots of them, about it that I just
couldn't tell you. I lived in a fascinated terror, and all the time I
kept saying to myself:
"'This is the same thing that's going on in everyone I see. It's going
on in me. It's getting farther and farther along in me with every tick
of my watch. It's what is crawling toward me out of the dark corners of
the years to come.'"
Stainton stopped again, barely to sip his champagne.
"That," he said, "is how I came to be afraid of Old Age."
Holt shuffled his feet.
"A horse-kick isn't hereditary," he said.
"Wait," said Stainton. He put aside his extinguished cigar and resumed:
"One by one I saw my father's powers fade. I could check them off as
they went; powers we are all so used to that we don't know how dependent
we are on them: niceties of the palate, differentiation between pleasant
odours and unpleasant, delicacies of sight, distinctness of hearing,
steadiness, the control of muscles that we are normally unconscious of
controlling. These things go, slowly--very slowly--in each of us, and
when they are gone, even when they are partly gone, when we never guess
that they are gone, but when people about us detect our condition and
comment on it, without our so much as dreaming of it----"
He stopped again, and again went on:
"Then there's Death," he said, with an abrupt change. "Did you ever see
anybody die, Holt?"
Holt shook his bald head. He did not like this sort of thing.
"No," he admitted.
"Not your parents?"
"No; my father died when I was away at school, and my mother during my
first trip abroad."
"Well," continued Stainton, "it is not pretty. We hear a lot of talk
about the dignity and serenity and nobility of death. Nothing to that.
Absolutely nothing. Every doctor and nurse I've ever questioned agrees:
it is always a horrible wrench accompanied by details that are
disgusting. There are subsidiary manifestations.--There is no dignity in
terror; there is no serenity in pain. My father----I was looking towards
him through the garden window. The window was open. He had found a
razor. A dull razor. He may have had some idea that he was shaving. He
cut his throat from ear to ear. Jugular; carotid; pneumogastric nerve. I
remember the queer gurgle and the----
"Do you wonder that I came to be as much afraid of death as I was of old
age? I lay awake nights, I tell you--nights and nights--interminable
nights, thinking, shaking.
"It all ended only after years of fighting and one horrid failure. There
was a girl--it was a good many years ago, and I had just graduated from
Harvard. I fell in love with her. Her people wanted her to marry a
cousin, but I think she really wanted to marry me. At any rate, one day,
when we were skating together, the ice broke beneath her feet, and into
the cold black water we both went.
"It seemed to me that I was hours going down--down, and that I was still
longer coming up. The old fears got me. I went through all the agonies
of realisation. When my head rose above water I grabbed at the ice, and
it cracked to little bits between my fingers. I felt myself sinking
again, and just then she--the girl I was in love with--flung an arm
toward me. I shoved her away.
"We were both rescued. There were lots of people about, the water wasn't
very deep, and there had been only a small percentage of risk. It would
have been, had I not known what death really meant, the chance of a
lifetime for a rogue to play the hero. But, you see, I was too much
afraid of death. I had flung her off to save my own skin, and she
neither forgot nor forgave.
"She wouldn't, of course, have anything more to do with me. She threw me
over, as she had every good reason to. I cleared out and went West. She
married the cousin and eighteen years ago--so I heard long after her
marriage--she died as my mother had died--in childbirth."
Stainton slowly refilled his glass.
Holt shook from him the gloom of the earlier portion of Stainton's
narrative. He became once more interested in the manner in which he was
accustomed to be interested.
"You certainly cured yourself out West," he said.
"Of my twin horrors?" enquired Stainton. "I tried to. That is why people
thought me brave, when they didn't think me rash. I took myself by the
shoulders. I said to myself: 'There are two things that you must do.
First, you must get over showing your fear of death. Next, you must live
in such a way as to postpone old age to the farthest possible limit. In
order to accomplish this postponement, in order to approach old age
gently and in sound condition, you must make enough money to guarantee
you a quiet, unworried life from the age of forty-five or fifty.'"
"Well," said Holt, "you've done it."
"You know what psychologists tell you about apparitions?" said Stainton.
"Not me. I don't go in for spooks."
"They say, George, that if you think you see a ghost and at once run
away from it, you will be seeing ghosts forever after; but that if, at
the first glimpse of your first ghost, you will only grip your nerves,
walk up to him and touch him, you will find that he is only your
yesterday's suit flung on a chair and forgotten, or a sheet flapping
from a clothesline, or something else commonplace seen only in a
different light, and that thereafter you will never again see a ghost."
"Oh!" said Holt, "do they?"
"That principle," said Stainton, "I tried in regard to my fear of death.
I couldn't do it with old age, but I could do it with death, and I did.
I began by taking small risks. Then I took greater ones, and at last I
would deliberately court destruction--or appear to. The outcome was
that, by the time you came to know me, I could do the sort of things you
admired me for."
"Without turning a hair," Holt added. "You'd got your nerve back. You'd
become a brave man."
"No," defined Stainton, "I had become only a man that could conceal his
cowardice. I am still, in my heart, as much afraid of death as I ever
was."
"I don't believe you," said Holt, more warmly; "and I'll bet you did
even better with the other scarecrow."
"Old age?" Stainton's clear eyes snapped. "I had to go at that in
another way, but there at least I have succeeded. George, I have trained
like a Spartan. I have lived like a monk----"
"Don't I know it, Jim? Remember that night I tried to lure you into the
dance-hall at Durango?"
"I have kept hard and keen and clean," said Stainton. "I have got
myself--you can guess by what denials and sacrifice and fights--into the
shape where the fear of senility, of loss or depreciation of my powers,
is reduced to the irreducible minimum." He spoke a little boastfully,
but so earnestly that there was, in tone or words, no hint of the prig.
"Tap that," he said.
He expanded his wide chest. He offered his biceps to Holt's
congratulatory fingers. He filled his glass to the brim and balanced it,
at arm's length, on the palm of his hand without spilling a drop of the
wine.
"I went this morning," he said joyously, "to the best doctor in this New
York of yours. That fellow went over me with all the latest
disease-detecting and age-detecting machinery known to science."
"Well?" asked Holt.
"He said that I was to all intents and purposes not a day over
twenty-five."
Holt nodded approval.
"And you've kept your heart and mind as young as you've kept your body;
that's a cinch," said he.
"Younger," declared Stainton. "I have had to fight there harder than
anywhere else, but I have won. In spite of that first love
disappointment, in spite of friends that have gone back on me now and
then, in spite of rough work in rough places and among rough men, in
spite of money lost and money won, I have kept on believing. I was
saying to someone else this evening that there was comfort in the
philosophy of the sour-grapes, but I didn't really mean it. At any rate,
I never followed the sour-grape school. I have just believed. That is
the whole secret of it, George; all that you have to do is to say to
yourself; 'I don't care; I won't doubt. I _believe_ in the world; I
believe in Man.'"
Holt smiled.
"Wait till you know New York," said he.
"I am doubt-proof," answered Stainton. "I am immune."
"And so----" urged Holt, dropping this phase of the subject and
reverting to Preston Newberry's niece.
"And so," Stainton took him up, "I decided to marry, sell my mine as
soon as a good offer comes and be easy. I came to New York. I went
to-night to the opera." His voice grew unaffectedly softer. "And at the
opera," he said, "I saw the girl that I had loved all those years ago;
that dead girl come to life again; not a curve altered, not a tint
faded; not a day older. I knew, in a flash, that it must be my old
sweetheart's daughter. And it was."
"What? Muriel Stannard?"
"Whose mother was Muriel Benson. Precisely."
Holt whistled softly.
"Well?" asked he.
"Well," said Stainton, "I intend to marry her."
For a moment Holt made no comment. Then he coughed and finally, as his
dry cough produced no visible effect, he broke forth:
"But, Jim----"
There he stopped.
Stainton looked at him enquiringly.
"Yes?"
"But, Jim, you--you----Oh, what's the use!"
"Of course it sounds unusual, to you," admitted Stainton, "but to me it
is all simple enough."
Holt took a deep pull at his glass.
"Oh, it's simple, all right," said he. "It's so simple it's artless."
Stainton's iron-grey brows drew together. "I don't understand."
"Of course it sounds unusual to you," admitted Holt. "If you did
understand, you wouldn't do this thing. You don't understand; you can't,
and that's just the pity of the whole business." Like all men of his
stripe, he gathered both conviction and courage from the sound of his
own voice. "You've lived in the desert and such places like a
what-do-y'-call-it--anchorite--and had opium-dreams without the fun of a
smoke."
Stainton stiffened.
"I didn't ask your advice," said he.
"You wanted it," Holt ventured.
"I don't mind your giving it if it amuses you," said Stainton, shrugging
his shoulders; "but I am quite clear on one point: you are what most
city-bred men are: you have looked so hard after happiness that, when
you see it, you can't enjoy it."
"Am I?" The liquor was burning in Holt's eyes. "Perhaps I am, but that
rule works two ways. Some fellows don't look hard enough. I don't know,
but I imagine if a man never uses his eyes he goes blind."
Stainton, who had carried a few of his books to the West with him,
wanted to quote Cicero: "_Sis a veneris amoribus aversus; quibus si te
dedideris, non aliud quidquam possis cogitare quam illud quod diligis._"
All that he said, however, was:
"I have tried to live in such a way that I may be fit to look a good
woman in the face."
"What man alive is fit to do that?" Holt answered.
Stainton did not directly reply, and Holt, somewhat put out by the
merely silent opposition, found himself a little at a loss.
"You don't want to tie up with a kid," he nevertheless endeavoured to
proceed. "That's what it really amounts to. What you want is a woman, a
ripe one. If you're going to live in the swim, you need somebody that
can teach you the stroke. You want somebody with the _entree_, somebody
that can run your house in the Avenue or the Drive and isn't afraid of a
man in livery."
"Put my servants in livery?" Stainton was indulgent, but he added: "To
make clowns of your fellow men--really I think that's a sin against
God."
"All right," said Holt; "but you're in love with an idea. Not even a
girl, mind you: an idea. Well, you mark my words: it's a cinch that two
people who haven't anything to do but tell each other how much they
love each other are bound, soon enough, to exhaust the subject and begin
to want something else to talk about."
"Now it is you who don't understand." Stainton did not know why he
should argue with this city waster, unless it was because he had for so
long had no chance to speak of these things to anyone. But he went on:
"There ought to be love in every marriage, but marriage wasn't ordained
for love only."
"Lucky for it," said Holt, "for if it were it would be a worse swindle
than it is now, and that's going some. What _was_ it ordained for?
Babies?"
"Yes."
"What? There are fifty of 'em born outside of marriage right here in New
York every day in the year. When Romeo makes eyes at Juliet, he isn't
thinking babies."
"He only doesn't know that he is, that's all."
"Suppose you're right," said Holt; "that's all the more reason why a
fellow should want to beget a baby instead of marrying one. Look here,
Jim: I'm not butting in on your affairs because I like to; but I know
what I'm talking about when I say you can't play this lead without
spoiling the game."
"Do you mean," asked Stainton, "that Miss Stannard's guardians will
object?"
"Hardly. Her guardians are the Newberrys."
"Then what do you mean?"
Holt interpreted.
"I mean," he said, "that you won't be happy with a child for a wife, and
that a child won't be happy with you for a husband."
Stainton started to rise from the table. Then he seemed to think better,
seemed to recall his old and brief, but firm, friendship with the Holt
of Holt's western days, and sat back in his chair.
"Jim," continued Holt, "you're actually in earnest about all this
marrying-talk, aren't you?"
"So much so," replied Stainton, frowning, "that I don't care to have you
refer to it in that way."
"Oh, all right. I beg pardon. I didn't intend to make you sore. Only it
won't do, you know. Really."
"Why not?"
"I've just been telling you why not. Difference in ages. Too great."
Stainton's face became graver. He leaned forward toward Holt, pushed his
glass aside and, with his heavy forefinger, tapped for emphasis upon the
board.
"I told you," he said, "that your best New York doctor has pronounced me
to all intents and purposes only twenty-five years old."
"O, Hell!" said Holt.
Stainton's brows drew close together.
"I mean what I say," he declared.
"Of course you do. But did the doctor-fellow mean what _he_ said?"
"Why shouldn't he? I paid him to tell the truth. He probably thought I
suspected some illness, so that, from his point of view, there would
have seemed more money in it for him if he had said I needed
treatment--his treatment."
"Perhaps. But medicine isn't an exact science yet--not by several
thousand graveyards full."
"What of that? I didn't need the doctor's assurances--really. I have my
own feelings to go by."
"Yes, I know. I've heard all that before. Many a time. A woman's as old
as she looks, but a man's as young as he feels--per_haps_."
"A man is as old as his arteries--and a few other units of his physical
economy."
"And a girl," said Holt, significantly, "is no older than the--what is
it?--units of _her_ physical economy."
Stainton bit his under lip.
"A girl is mature at eighteen--mature enough. I won't talk of that,
George. We are discussing my age, and I tell you that I have something
better than even the specialist's word to stand on: I have the knowledge
of my own careful, healthy, abstemious life. I am sounder in body than
hundreds and hundreds of what you would call average New Yorkers of
twenty-one. I am sounder than their average. More than that, I have done
something that most of them have not done: I have kept fresh and
unimpaired the tastes, the appetites, the spirit of that age."
"You mean you believe you have."
"I know it."
"How can you know it until you try? And you won't try till you've
committed yourself, Jim."
Stainton shook his great head.
"At this moment," he said, "I'm in twice better health--mental, moral,
physical and every other way--understand me: _every other way_--than you
were ten years ago."
"Certainly," Holt cheerfully admitted, "I'm past salvation; everybody
knows that; but you----"
"I have never been a waster."
"That's just it. It'd be better for you if you had."
"You don't mean that."
"In this mix-up, yes I do. Not much, you know. Just a little picnic now
and then."
"Modern medicine has knocked that theory into a cocked hat."
"Has it, Jim? All right. But a man that's been a long time in a close
room can stand the close room a bit longer than a fellow that's just
come in from the open air. You've formed habits. Fine habits, I grant
you that, but you've formed 'em; they're fixed, just as fixed as my bad
ones are. You've come to depend on 'em, even if you don't know it. Your
brain is used to 'em. So's your body--only more so. Well, what's going
to happen when you change 'em all of a sudden--habits of a lifetime,
mind you? That's what I want to know: what's going to happen?"
"You talk," said Stainton, "as if every man that married, married under
the age of forty-five."
"I talk," Holt retorted, "as if no man of fifty married for his own good
a girl of eighteen."
Stainton's fist clenched. His face flushed crimson. His steel-grey eyes
narrowed. He raised a tight hand. Then, with the fist in mid-air, his
mood changed. He mastered himself. The fist opened. The hand descended
gently. Stainton chuckled.
"You don't know what you're talking about," he said. "I forgive you
because I know you are speaking only out of your friendship for me." He
hesitated. "That is, unless----" He frowned again, but only
slightly--"unless you yourself," he interrogatively concluded, "happen
to feel toward Miss Stannard as I do?"
Holt relieved him there. It was his turn to laugh, and he laughed
heartily.
"O, Lord, no!" said he. "Make yourself easy about that, old man. I've
got just enough to live on comfortably by myself without exercising too
much economy, and if I ever marry it will have to be a woman that can
give me the luxuries I can't get otherwise."
"Then," smiled Stainton, "I hope you will soon need many luxuries and
will soon find a good woman to supply them. I thank you for your
interest, George," he went on; "but you have been arguing about me, and,
in spite of our ages, you are old and I am young. I am young, I tell
you, and even if I were not, I could see nothing wrong in a marriage
between a man of my years and a girl of Miss Stannard's."
"Between fifty and eighteen?"
"Between fifty and eighteen. Exactly. It happens every day."
"It does. But do you think because it's plenty, it's right? Do you think
that whatever happens often, happens for the best?"
"I do not think; I know. I know that a girl of eighteen is better off
with a man steady enough to protect and guide her than she is with an
irresponsible boy of her own years."
"How about the irresponsible girl? Why should the boy be more
irresponsible than the girl?"
"The girl will have a mature man to protect and guide her."
"A man of twenty-five? Or a man of fifty? Protect and guide!" echoed
Holt. "Is _that_ marriage?"
"An important part of it."
"Pff!" George sniffed. "You must think that guiding and protecting is an
easy business."
"I think," said Stainton, good-humouredly, "that you are a good deal of
a fool."
"So you've got it all arranged in your own mind?" Holt, who had ordered
his sixth whiskey-and-soda, poured it down his throat. The fifth was
already thickening his speech.
"All," said Stainton.
"I see. You've counted on everything but God. Don't you think you'd
better reckon a little on God, Jim?"
Stainton bore with him. After all, Holt had now reached that stage of
drunkenness at which most drinkers invite the Deity to a part in their
libations.
"What I do," Stainton said, "I do without blaming God for my success or
failure. I am not one of those persons who, when anything unusually
unpleasant comes to them, refer to it as 'God's will.'"
Holt hiccoughed. Religion had never bothered him and so he, in his sober
moments, religiously refrained from bothering religion. His cups,
however, were sometimes theological.
"Still, He's there, you know," said Holt.
"Your God?" asked Stainton. "Why, your god is only your own prejudices
made infinite."
"You know what I mean," Holt laboriously explained. "In the really
'portant things of life, what's fellow do, and what makes him do it?"
"Reason," suggested Stainton.
"The really 'portant things generally come too quick for--for--lemme
see: for reason."
"Philosophy?"
"To quick for that, too."
"Instinct, perhaps."
"'Nd don't say 'nstinct. Fellow's 'nstincts are low, but he does
something--high. Sort of surroundings 's been brought up in--partly. Not
altogether. Partly's something else; something from--from----" Holt
groped for the word. "From outside," he concluded triumphantly and waved
an explanatory hand. "Well," he added, "that's God."
Stainton rose.
"Yes, yes," he replied. "I dare say. But it's getting late, and I'm an
early riser." He beckoned to a waiter for his bill.
"What's hurry?" enquired Holt.
"It is late," repeated Stainton.
Holt shook his head.
"Never late in New York," said he, and then rising uncertainly to his
feet, he pointed a warning finger. "Or you may call it Nature. Perhaps's
Nature's a better word. Nature. Beautiful nature. Trees and things.
Birds mating in--in May. Mustn't go 'gainst beautiful nature, Jim."
"Come on," said Stainton.
But in the street, Holt flung his arms about his unwilling companion's
neck.
"I'm--I'm fond of you, Jim," he said. "You save' my life 'n'--an' God
knows I love you." Easy tears were running down his puffed cheeks.
"Only you _are_ old, Jim. You know you are."
Stainton disguised his disgust. He disengaged himself gently.
"No, I'm young, George," he said, "and young blood will have its way,
you know."
Holt faced him, swaying on the curb.
"So you really mean--mean to do--to do----? You know what I mean?"
"If she will have me, I do," said Stainton, for the third time that
night: "I intend to marry her."
IV
THE APPLE OF THEIR EYE
Mrs. Preston Newberry had risen to the distinction of that name several
months before Stainton, as a young Harvard undergraduate, came to know
and love her sister. Very likely she had never heard of Jim until his
triumphal march to New York, and certainly, if she had ever heard of
him, she had long ago forgotten his name. Her early married life had
completely occupied itself in an endeavour to live up to her new title,
and, since this effort was not crowned with a success so secure as to
dispense with the necessity of careful watching (for eternal vigilance
is the price of more things than liberty), her present existence was
sufficiently employed to make her regard the care of her niece with
resignation rather than with joy.
Muriel's father had not survived his wife beyond a decade. In that
period he managed to spend all the money that the previous portion of
his mature career had been devoted to acquiring, and Muriel's
grandparents on both sides had long since passed to the sphere of
celestial compensations; the girl had, therefore, in some measure, been
forced upon her aunt. A timid little girl with long dark hair that
nearly concealed her face, she was brought to New York.
"And now," Mrs. Newberry had remarked to her husband, "the question is:
what are we to do with her?"
It may be that she had entertained from her early reading of the novels
of Mrs. Humphry Ward a vague hope that Preston would propose to make
Muriel the child-light of their otherwise now definitely childless home.
If, however, such an expectation had formed, it was speedily shattered:
Preston, like many another husband, inclined to the opinion that one
member of his wife's family was enough in his house. He expressed this
opinion in his usual manner: briefly, but not directly.
"How the hell do I know?" he asked.
When Ethel--Ethel was really the stout Mrs. Newberry's Christian
name--when Ethel had evinced a disposition to discuss in further detail
the question of Muriel's future, Newberry had done what he usually did
when Ethel began any discussion: he recalled an engagement at one of the
three of New York's most difficult clubs.