The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve before the
passive mind as one unexplained, confusing merry-go-round. True, they
are a merry-go-round of ill-gaited and wind-broken horses, painted
first in pastel colors, then in dull grays and browns, but perplexing
and intolerably dizzy the thing is, as never were the merry-go-rounds
of childhood or adolescence; as never, surely, were the
certain-coursed, dynamic roller-coasters of youth. For most men and
women these thirty years are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from
life, a retreat first from a front with many shelters, those myriad
amusements and curiosities of youth, to a line with less, when we peel
down our ambitions to one ambition, our recreations to one recreation,
our friends to a few to whom we are anaesthetic; ending up at last in
a solitary, desolate strong point that is not strong, where the shells
now whistle abominably, now are but half-heard as, by turns frightened
and tired, we sit waiting for death.
At forty, then, Merlin was no different from himself at thirty-five; a
larger paunch, a gray twinkling near his ears, a more certain lack of
vivacity in his walk. His forty-five differed from his forty by a like
margin, unless one mention a slight deafness in his left ear. But at
fifty-five the process had become a chemical change of immense
rapidity. Yearly he was more and more an “old man” to his
family--senile almost, so far as his wife was concerned. He was by
this time complete owner of the bookshop. The mysterious Mr. Moonlight
Quill, dead some five years and not survived by his wife, had deeded
the whole stock and store to him, and there he still spent his days,
conversant now by name with almost all that man has recorded for three
thousand years, a human catalogue, an authority upon tooling and
binding, upon folios and first editions, an accurate inventory of a
thousand authors whom he could never have understood and had certainly
never read.
At sixty-five he distinctly doddered. He had assumed the melancholy
habits of the aged so often portrayed by the second old man in
standard Victorian comedies. He consumed vast warehouses of time
searching for mislaid spectacles. He “nagged” his wife and was nagged
in turn. He told the same jokes three or four times a year at the
family table, and gave his son weird, impossible directions as to his
conduct in life. Mentally and materially he was so entirely different
from the Merlin Grainger of twenty-five that it seemed incongruous
that he should bear the same name.
He worked still in the bookshop with the assistance of a youth, whom,
of course, he considered very idle, indeed, and a new young woman,
Miss Gaffney. Miss McCracken, ancient and unvenerable as himself,
still kept the accounts. Young Arthur was gone into Wall Street to
sell bonds, as all the young men seemed to be doing in that day. This,
of course, was as it should be. Let old Merlin get what magic he could
from his books--the place of young King Arthur was in the
counting-house.
One afternoon at four when he had slipped noiselessly up to the front
of the store on his soft-soled slippers, led by a newly formed habit,
of which, to be fair, he was rather ashamed, of spying upon the young
man clerk, he looked casually out of the front window, straining his
faded eyesight to reach the street. A limousine, large, portentous,
impressive, had drawn to the curb, and the chauffeur, after
dismounting and holding some sort of conversation with persons in the
interior of the car, turned about and advanced in a bewildered fashion
toward the entrance of the Moonlight Quill. He opened the door,
shuffled in, and, glancing uncertainly at the old man in the
skull-cap, addressed him in a thick, murky voice, as though his words
came through a fog.
“Do you--do you sell additions?”
Merlin nodded.
“The arithmetic books are in the back of the store.”
The chauffeur took off his cap and scratched a close-cropped, fuzzy
head.
“Oh, naw. This I want’s a detecatif story.” He jerked a thumb back
toward the limousine. “She seen it in the paper. Firs’ addition.”
Merlin’s interest quickened. Here was possibly a big sale.
“Oh, editions. Yes, we’ve advertised some firsts, but--detective
stories, I--don’t--believe--What was the title?”
“I forget. About a crime.”
“About a crime. I have--well, I have ‘The Crimes of the Borgias’--full
morocco, London 1769, beautifully--”
“Naw,” interrupted the chauffeur, “this was one fella did this crime.
She seen you had it for sale in the paper.” He rejected several
possible titles with the air of connoisseur.
“‘Silver Bones,’” he announced suddenly out of a slight pause.
“What?” demanded Merlin, suspecting that the stiffness of his sinews
were being commented on.
“Silver Bones. That was the guy that done the crime.”
“Silver Bones?”
“Silver Bones. Indian, maybe.”
Merlin, stroked his grizzly cheeks. “Gees, Mister,” went on the
prospective purchaser, “if you wanna save me an awful bawln’ out jes’
try an’ think. The old lady goes wile if everything don’t run smooth.”
But Merlin’s musings on the subject of Silver Bones were as futile as
his obliging search through the shelves, and five minutes later a very
dejected charioteer wound his way back to his mistress. Through the
glass Merlin could see the visible symbols of a tremendous uproar
going on in the interior of the limousine. The chauffeur made wild,
appealing gestures of his innocence, evidently to no avail, for when
he turned around and climbed back into the driver’s seat his
expression was not a little dejected.
Then the door of the limousine opened and gave forth a pale and
slender young man of about twenty, dressed in the attenuation of
fashion and carrying a wisp of a cane. He entered the shop, walked
past Merlin, and proceeded to take out a cigarette and light it.
Merlin approached him.
“Anything I can do for you, sir?”
“Old boy,” said the youth coolly, “there are seveereal things. You can
first let me smoke my ciggy in here out of sight of that old lady in
the limousine, who happens to be my grandmother. Her knowledge as to
whether I smoke it or not before my majority happens to be a matter of
five thousand dollars to me. The second thing is that you should look
up your first edition of the ‘Crime of Sylvester Bonnard’ that you
advertised in last Sunday’s _Times_. My grandmother there happens
to want to take it off your hands.”
Detecatif story! Crime of somebody! Silver Bones! All was explained.
With a faint deprecatory chuckle, as if to say that he would have
enjoyed this had life put him in the habit of enjoying anything,
Merlin doddered away to the back of his shop where his treasures were
kept, to get this latest investment which he had picked up rather
cheaply at the sale of a big collection.
When he returned with it the young man was drawing on his cigarette
and blowing out quantities of smoke with immense satisfaction.
“My God!” he said, “She keeps me so close to her the entire day
running idiotic errands that this happens to be my first puff in six
hours. What’s the world coming to, I ask you, when a feeble old lady
in the milk-toast era can dictate to a man as to his personal vices. I
happen to be unwilling to be so dictated to. Let’s see the book.”
Merlin passed it to him tenderly and the young man, after opening it
with a carelessness that gave a momentary jump to the book-dealer’s
heart, ran through the pages with his thumb.
“No illustrations, eh?” he commented. “Well, old boy, what’s it worth?
Speak up! We’re willing to give you a fair price, though why I don’t
know.”
“One hundred dollars,” said Merlin with a frown.
The young man gave a startled whistle.
“Whew! Come on. You’re not dealing with somebody from the cornbelt. I
happen to be a city-bred man and my grandmother happens to be a
city-bred woman, though I’ll admit it’d take a special tax
appropriation to keep her in repair. We’ll give you twenty-five
dollars, and let me tell you that’s liberal. We’ve got books in our
attic, up in our attic with my old play-things, that were written
before the old boy that wrote this was born.”
Merlin stiffened, expressing a rigid and meticulous horror.
“Did your grandmother give you twenty-five dollars to buy this with?”
“She did not. She gave me fifty, but she expects change. I know that
old lady.”
“You tell her,” said Merlin with dignity, “that she has missed a very
great bargain.”
“Give you forty,” urged the young man. “Come on now--be reasonable and
don’t try to hold us up----”
Merlin had wheeled around with the precious volume under his arm and
was about to return it to its special drawer in his office when there
was a sudden interruption. With unheard-of magnificence the front door
burst rather than swung open, and admitted in the dark interior a
regal apparition in black silk and fur which bore rapidly down upon
him. The cigarette leaped from the fingers of the urban young man and
he gave breath to an inadvertent “Damn!”--but it was upon Merlin that
the entrance seemed to have the most remarkable and incongruous
effect--so strong an effect that the greatest treasure of his shop
slipped from his hand and joined the cigarette on the floor. Before
him stood Caroline.
She was an old woman, an old woman remarkably preserved, unusually
handsome, unusually erect, but still an old woman. Her hair was a
soft, beautiful white, elaborately dressed and jewelled; her face,
faintly rouged à la grande dame, showed webs of wrinkles at the edges
of her eyes and two deeper lines in the form of stanchions connected
her nose with the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were dim, ill
natured, and querulous.
But it was Caroline without a doubt: Caroline’s features though in
decay; Caroline’s figure, if brittle and stiff in movement; Caroline’s
manner, unmistakably compounded of a delightful insolence and an
enviable self assurance; and, most of all, Caroline’s voice, broken
and shaky, yet with a ring in it that still could and did make
chauffeurs want to drive laundry wagons and cause cigarettes to fall
from the fingers of urban grandsons.
She stood and sniffed. Her eyes found the cigarette upon the floor.
“What’s that?” she cried. The words were not a question--they were an
entire litany of suspicion, accusation, confirmation, and decision.
She tarried over them scarcely an instant. “Stand up!” she said to her
grandson, “stand up and blow that nicotine out of your lungs!”
The young man looked at her in trepidation.
“Blow!” she commanded.
He pursed his lips feebly and blew into the air.
“Blow!” she repeated, more peremptorily than before.
He blew again, helplessly, ridiculously.
“Do you realize,” she went on briskly, “that you’ve forfeited five
thousand dollars in five minutes?”
Merlin momentarily expected the young man to fall pleading upon his
knees, but such is the nobility of human nature that he remained
standing--even blew again into the air, partly from nervousness,
partly, no doubt, with some vague hope of reingratiating himself.
“Young ass!” cried Caroline. “Once more, just once more and you leave
college and go to work.”
This threat had such an overwhelming effect upon the young man that he
took on an even paler pallor than was natural to him. But Caroline was
not through.
“Do you think I don’t know what you and your brothers, yes, and your
asinine father too, think of me? Well, I do. You think I’m senile. You
think I’m soft. I’m not!” She struck herself with her fist as though
to prove that she was a mass of muscle and sinew. “And I’ll have more
brains left when you’ve got me laid out in the drawing-room some sunny
day than you and the rest of them were born with.”
“But Grandmother----”
“Be quiet. You, a thin little stick of a boy, who if it weren’t for my
money might have risen to be a journeyman barber out in the Bronx--Let
me see your hands. Ugh! The hands of a barber--_you_ presume to
be smart with _me_, who once had three counts and a bona-fide
duke, not to mention half a dozen papal titles pursue me from the city
of Rome to the city of New York.” She paused, took breath. “Stand up!
Blow’!”
The young man obediently blew. Simultaneously the door opened and an
excited gentleman of middle age who wore a coat and hat trimmed with
fur, and seemed, moreover, to be trimmed with the same sort of fur
himself on upper lip and chin, rushed into the store and up to
Caroline.
“Found you at last,” he cried. “Been looking for you all over town.
Tried your house on the ’phone and your secretary told me he thought
you’d gone to a bookshop called the Moonlight--”
Caroline turned to him irritably.
“Do I employ you for your reminiscences?” she snapped. “Are you my
tutor or my broker?”
“Your broker,” confessed the fur-trimmed man, taken somewhat aback. “I
beg your pardon. I came about that phonograph stock. I can sell for a
hundred and five.”
“Then do it.”
“Very well. I thought I’d better--”
“Go sell it. I’m talking to my grandson.”
“Very well. I--”
“Good-by.”
“Good-by, Madame.” The fur-trimmed man made a slight bow and hurried
in some confusion from the shop.
“As for you,” said Caroline, turning to her grandson, “you stay just
where you are and be quiet.”
She turned to Merlin and included his entire length in a not
unfriendly survey. Then she smiled and he found himself smiling too.
In an instant they had both broken into a cracked but none the less
spontaneous chuckle. She seized his arm and hurried him to the other
side of the store. There they stopped, faced each other, and gave vent
to another long fit of senile glee.
“It’s the only way,” she gasped in a sort of triumphant malignity.
“The only thing that keeps old folks like me happy is the sense that
they can make other people step around. To be old and rich and have
poor descendants is almost as much fun as to be young and beautiful
and have ugly sisters.”
“Oh, yes,” chuckled Merlin. “I know. I envy you.”
She nodded, blinking.
“The last time I was in here, forty years ago,” she said, “you were a
young man very anxious to kick up your heels.”
“I was,” he confessed.
“My visit must have meant a good deal to you.”
“You have all along,” he exclaimed. “I thought--I used to think at
first that you were a real person--human, I mean.”
She laughed.
“Many men have thought me inhuman.”
“But now,” continued Merlin excitedly, “I understand. Understanding is
allowed to us old people--after nothing much matters. I see now that
on a certain night when you danced upon a table-top you were nothing
but my romantic yearning for a beautiful and perverse woman.”
Her old eyes were far away, her voice no more than the echo of a
forgotten dream.
“How I danced that night! I remember.”
“You were making an attempt at me. Olive’s arms were closing about me
and you warned me to be free and keep my measure of youth and
irresponsibility. But it seemed like an effect gotten up at the last
moment. It came too late.”
“You are very old,” she said inscrutably. “I did not realize.”
“Also I have not forgotten what you did to me when I was thirty-five.
You shook me with that traffic tie-up. It was a magnificent effort.
The beauty and power you radiated! You became personified even to my
wife, and she feared you. For weeks I wanted to slip out of the house
at dark and forget the stuffiness of life with music and cocktails and
a girl to make me young. But then--I no longer knew how.”
“And now you are so very old.”
With a sort of awe she moved back and away from him.
“Yes, leave me!” he cried. “You are old also; the spirit withers with
the skin. Have you come here only to tell me something I had best
forget: that to be old and poor is perhaps more wretched than to be
old and rich; to remind me that _my_ son hurls my gray failure in
my face?”
“Give me my book,” she commanded harshly. “Be quick, old man!”
Merlin looked at her once more and then patiently obeyed. He picked up
the book and handed it to her, shaking his head when she offered him a
bill.
“Why go through the farce of paying me? Once you made me wreck these
very premises.”
“I did,” she said in anger, “and I’m glad. Perhaps there had been
enough done to ruin _me_.”
She gave him a glance, half disdain, half ill-concealed uneasiness,
and with a brisk word to her urban grandson moved toward the door.
Then she was gone--out of his shop--out of his life. The door clicked.
With a sigh he turned and walked brokenly back toward the glass
partition that enclosed the yellowed accounts of many years as well as
the mellowed, wrinkled Miss McCracken.
Merlin regarded her parched, cobwebbed face with an odd sort of pity.
She, at any rate, had had less from life than he. No rebellious,
romantic spirit popping out unbidden had, in its memorable moments,
given her life a zest and a glory.
Then Miss McCracken looked up and spoke to him:
“Still a spunky old piece, isn’t she?”
Merlin started.
“Who?”
“Old Alicia Dare. Mrs. Thomas Allerdyce she is now, of course; has
been, these thirty years.”
“What? I don’t understand you.” Merlin sat down suddenly in his swivel
chair; his eyes were wide.
“Why, surely, Mr. Grainger, you can’t tell me that you’ve forgotten
her, when for ten years she was the most notorious character in New
York. Why, one time when she was the correspondent in the Throckmorton
divorce case she attracted so much attention on Fifth Avenue that
there was a traffic tie-up. Didn’t you read about it in the papers.”
“I never used to read the papers.” His ancient brain was whirring.
“Well, you can’t have forgotten the time she came in here and ruined
the business. Let me tell you I came near asking Mr. Moonlight Quill
for my salary, and clearing out.”
“Do you mean, that--that you _saw_ her?”
“Saw her! How could I help it with the racket that went on. Heaven
knows Mr. Moonlight Quill didn’t like it either but of course _he_
didn’t say anything. He was daffy about her and she could twist him
around her little finger. The second he opposed one of her whims she’d
threaten to tell his wife on him. Served him right. The idea of that
man falling for a pretty adventuress! Of course he was never rich
enough for _her_ even though the shop paid well in those days.”
“But when I saw her,” stammered Merlin, “that is, when I
_thought_ saw her, she lived with her mother.”
“Mother, trash!” said Miss McCracken indignantly. “She had a woman
there she called ‘Aunty’, who was no more related to her than I am.
Oh, she was a bad one--but clever. Right after the Throckmorton
divorce case she married Thomas Allerdyce, and made herself secure for
life.”
“Who was she?” cried Merlin. “For God’s sake what was she--a witch?”
“Why, she was Alicia Dare, the dancer, of course. In those days you
couldn’t pick up a paper without finding her picture.”
Merlin sat very quiet, his brain suddenly fatigued and stilled. He was
an old man now indeed, so old that it was impossible for him to dream
of ever having been young, so old that the glamour was gone out of the
world, passing not into the faces of children and into the persistent
comforts of warmth and life, but passing out of the range of sight and
feeling. He was never to smile again or to sit in a long reverie when
spring evenings wafted the cries of children in at his window until
gradually they became the friends of his boyhood out there, urging him
to come and play before the last dark came down. He was too old now
even for memories.
That night he sat at supper with his wife and son, who had used him
for their blind purposes. Olive said:
“Don’t sit there like a death’s-head. Say something.”
“Let him sit quiet,” growled Arthur. “If you encourage him he’ll tell
us a story we’ve heard a hundred times before.”
Merlin went up-stairs very quietly at nine o’clock. When he was in his
room and had closed the door tight he stood by it for a moment, his
thin limbs trembling. He knew now that he had always been a fool.
“O Russet Witch!”
But it was too late. He had angered Providence by resisting too many
temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet
only those who, like him, had wasted earth.
_UNCLASSIFIED MASTERPIECES_