"Think it over as much as you like, Randolph, my boy. But it's a go.
Nothing you can say against it will hold a candle to the reasons in
favor. The firm name alone is worth a hundred thousand dollars.
Consider it settled. Never felt so sure of anything in all my life. So
long, my boy. You'll hear from me."
He did not even turn his head when he heard my burst of almost
hysterical laughter as he was closing the door. Always heretofore I had
counted myself, how humble and insignificant soever, as of the
priesthood in the temple of fine things. It was abasing to think that
Fred had claimed me for the money-changers.
Never again do I wish to experience the martyred minutes of anguish that
I have passed through during the last twenty-four hours.
For some reason that none can explain Jimmie suddenly came down with a
fever. That bright little whorl of life all at once looked white,
refused his food with the pallid pitiful smile of an octogenarian and,
in a twinkling it seemed, his cheeks were burning, his eyes glittered
dryly and his lips were parched. Called to his bedside, I leaned over
him and the air about me seemed to darken. Laura's child was, I
believed, dangerously ill. The heart within me turned leaden and even
Griselda displayed alarm. Then and there I vowed inwardly that no
strangers should have the care of this child if he recovered, so long as
I could care for him myself.
The nearest doctor, who occupies a ground-floor apartment below, a brute
of a man of thirty-five or so, elected, when he came up, to look wise
and inscrutable. Calm and grave, he prescribed oil and with a murmured,
"We shall see in the morning" he left me in an agony of doubt and
anxiety.
The only person who exhibited any degree of calm was Alicia. And though
she is still a child herself I confess to a feeling of resentment
against what seemed to me callousness in the face of our perturbation.
I saw visions of any number of diseases, of being quarantined, of
Jimmie's possible death, of my bearing forevermore a feeling of nameless
guilt before Laura's memory. I told them I should sit up the night.
"Oh, no, Mr. Byrd," insisted the girl with sudden vehemence. "Don't do
that. I'll make up a place in the dining room and leave the door of
their room open. I'll hear him if he wakes."
"I'm afraid, Alicia, you don't take this seriously enough," I told her
sternly. She looked at me wistfully for a moment and then faintly
smiled.
"Yes, sir, I do," she answered. "But it's no use our all wearing
ourselves out at once if it's real sickness. But I don't think it's
anything much."
"How can you know?" I demanded suspiciously.
"I just think so," she asserted. "At the Home children were always
coming down like this. The next day they were as well as ever again."
"But this is not the Home," I retorted severely. The girl flushed. I
saw I had hurt her.
"But he's a child," she insisted doggedly, in a low voice. I shook my
head.
"I shall sit up in the study," I told her, "with the door open. I shall
hear him if he calls. You'd better go to bed."
Her great haunting eyes looked at me for an instant and she left me. In
the study I lighted a fire, drew up the large chair, lighted a cigarette
and in dressing gown and slippers composed myself for the night,
determined to spend it waking.
In my mind were revolving many things. Fred Salmon's absurd proposal,
the strange trick of circumstances that had suddenly made me responsible
for a houseful of children, the whereabouts of Dibdin, the amazing
multiplicity of bills, the little lad's burning fever. Drowsiness began
to assault my eyelids before the glowing fire. To combat it, I took
down that sonata in words, Conrad's "The Nigger of the Narcissus", and
reread the description of the Cape storm, which is not a description so
much as the expression of the storm itself. As always in reading that
book, I was overawed to the point of pain by what language can do. And
pondering upon that, I allowed myself to doze off for a few seconds.
Suddenly I awoke with a tremor and looked at my watch. To my amazement
it was half-past six in the morning.
Abjectly guilty, I stole out and tiptoed into the dining room. The
light was burning. I saw three chairs with a crumpled pillow upon them
and Alicia, smiling drowsily, was gliding out of the children's room.
"How is he now?" I asked in a muffled tone, thinking basely to give her
the idea that I had watched the night through.
"Sleeping quietly," was the reply. "His fever is mostly gone."
"That's splendid," I murmured sheepishly. "You are up--er--early,
aren't you?"
"I just lay here on these chairs," she answered quietly. "I looked in at
Jimmie about every half hour. He had a very good night." With a sharp
pang of annoyance mingled with relief, I felt myself stark and unmasked.
We gazed at each other in silence for a moment, and then I broke into
muffled laughter, in which she softly joined. And though I felt myself a
fool, I vow I could have hugged that child to my heart of hearts for her
sense of humor no less than for her silent unfailing constancy.
Like sunlight after storm, Jimmie's recovery is making the apartment
ring again, and when it rings too much I close my door.
I close my door, but not upon the bills. These keep pouring in with the
insistent buzzing of a swarm of hornets, and every day I see them with a
more helpless dismay. I figure and I add and I calculate, but I seem
unable to subtract. I cannot see how we could do without the things
that are bought. Already my modest current account is near the point of
exhaustion and nothing can possibly come in before April.
To-day, in my perplexity, I took an elevated train and journeyed
southward into the region of money. What I should do there I hardly
knew, but a nameless inner necessity seemed to be driving me to do
something. I had a vague notion of consulting with Carmichael. But
when I came into lower Broadway and was actually at Carmichael's door, I
fled in disgust with myself for the sufficiently transparent reason that
I really had nothing to say to him. I felt like a debutant pickpocket
who turns back abruptly from the threshold of his calling because he
realizes the absence of a vocation or is overcome by cowardice.
In the street I looked upon the driving masses of people, swarming,
streaming, with strained faces, urged on by invisible whips of need, of
desire, driven like the souls in Dante's hell by demoniac powers who
ever cry, "Pay your way! pay your way!" They did not hear the cry now,
the continual snapping of the infernal whips, but I heard them and I
quaked inwardly. To myself I fancied the most of these surging figures
upon a level of life that has few problems, that is always "happy" with
the dull unexultant happiness of the slave or the captive, coming
briskly to the office of a morning with a sort of tarnished metallic
gayety, lunching at Childs' or at a counter unprovided with stools,
clinging to a strap in a car jammed with their kind, visiting a
motion-picture "palace" in the evening and living within their incomes
because they must. And though all the rest was abhorrent, that last
detail made me envy them.
Pay your way! Pay your way! The cry was beating in my pulses as I came
away, droning in the car wheels as I traveled northward, dully insistent
in the very noises of the streets about me.
Once within my own door the warmth enveloped me like summer air and with
the warmth came the joyous laughter of the children playing in the
dining room. In a bubbling of happy turbulence they came rushing toward
me as I looked in upon them, demanding that I judge between them on the
rules of their game.
"Just because she's a girl," complained Randolph loudly, indicating
Laura, "she always wants to be queen."
"It isn't because I'm a girl," broke in Laura, panting. "It's because
it's fair. Boys never want to be fair, Uncle Ranny, that's what's the
matter. He's been king for half an hour and he always wants us to do
impossible things so he can be king forever."
"And I want to be king, too," loudly proclaimed Jimmie.
I suppressed the nascent revolt as best I could and soothed the passions
of pretenders. I reminded them that this was a democracy and that
royalty in our land could count only upon a visitor's welcome.
"Aw, don't I know?" said Randolph fiercely. "I wouldn't be really truly
king for anything."
It was a pleasure to me to enter from the turmoil of the outer world to
this playing fountain of affectionate young life. Jimmie, Laura,
Randolph, little glimmers of spark-like personality were fitfully
flickering over their childish heads and it was my task to turn them
into steady flames. That was what I owed to my sister Laura and that
was the course upon which I was irrevocably embarked. But now, alone in
my study, I still hear in the hum and rumor of the streets the insistent
imperative cry, Pay your way! Pay your way!
*CHAPTER VIII*
The incredible has happened. No, not the incredible. The incredible is
always happening. It is the impossible that has taken place.
I, Randolph Byrd, am now a business man--no priest of the temple, but a
brazen money-changer as ever was.
The hum and the noise and rattle of it are perpetually in my ears like
the whirr of machinery in the brain of the factory hand. I cannot think
or put myself in the moods of thought. The sound of the ticker is
constantly in my head, and my nerves crave movement.
Fred Salmon has accomplished his will.
"You must stir it and stump it and blow your own trumpet," is his motto,
and he is teaching me to blow. The firm of Salmon and Byrd is an
actuality and clownishly Fred is making the most of the humor of the
name and doing his best to make me abet him. I say Fred has
accomplished it all. But at the bottom it is Laura's children who are
innocently the primal cause of my debacle.
"D'you know what you are?" Fred shot at me to-day in a flash of
inspiration--he is dowered with a fecundity of flashes these days. "You
are the original Old Man Who Lived in a Shoe! It's the kids that made
you get into the game. Gosh! I wish we could get that fact on our
letterhead!"
With Fred to think of an idiotic notion is to utter and commit it. And
I live in constant dread lest some of our customers and clients, a
sporadic body as yet, should inquire as to the children with which I
know not what to do. Fred is an Elizabethan. In the spacious days he
would have ruffed and strutted and wenched and taken chances with
careless slashing humor among the best or the worst of them. He is a
buccaneer who can throw the dice with jovial laughter when things loom
blackest under the very guns of disaster. He is an enigma. He is, in
short, my exact opposite.
Yet he has made me his partner and accomplice. I used to think myself
adamant, but in his hands I am clay.
It is now late in March. The cold blasts are often succeeded by genial
days of brilliant sunshine that already promise the birth of a new
spring. How much I should delight in the flower market near the
Laurentian or in walking up the hill toward Fiesole past the fairy-like
Florentine villas, or strolling in the Lungarno and across the Ponte
Vecchio to San Miniato--to the Pitti--the Uffizi--the gentle air of Fra
Angelico's cloisters--what absurd fancies! ... I am in wintry New York,
yoked to a broker, or as the letterhead styles us--Investment Bankers.
And though we have received no cables as yet, we are equipped with a
fascinating code cable address, which is "Sambyrd!" There is no end to
our grandeur.
Sambyrd! How it all came about is still swathed in a sort of
semi-transparent mystery for me--semi-transparent, for even now I do see
one thing clearly: My income was hopelessly inadequate to the rearing of
three children and my capital was already invaded. With the capital
gone what was there left for me but addressing envelopes, the children
in a Home like that which Alicia came from and general collapse and
catastrophe!
And then there was Fred's enthusiasm.
"Money," said he sententiously, "is a very simple matter. It won't come
rolling to you of its own accord, but you can get it. Every one must
find his own way. This is my way--Salmon and Byrd. Will you join me and
make it your way, too?"
And I, struggling like a fish in a net, like a bird in a snare, like any
beast caught in a trap, could discern no way of my own.
"But what," I demanded in a sort of despairing indignation, "can I do at
that business?"
"You can learn," said Fred. "And you'll be making something before you
know it. And as we grow you'll make more."
And then I made the startling discovery that there are no parallels in
life. Writers may babble of types and statisticians of means and
averages and populations of facts, but I realized with pain that with
all my books I knew of no guide or inspiration. The case of every
blessed one of us is unique. I could think of no one in precisely my
own circumstances. A pathetic, dejected melancholy overcame me at my
fatal tardiness in learning that the world, like a hungry beast, was
clamoring for decisions. "Decide! Decide! Decide!" it seems to roar
with slavering jaws, "or I devour you! And if you don't decide I shall
still devour you." The drifters perish without a struggle. I had
drifted heretofore but now I must flagellate the will for a choice.
And so I yielded.
The half of my capital has already gone into our offices, and if chairs,
desks and tables will make for success we shall both be millionaires.
There are magnificent leather sofas such as I never dreamed of lolling
on, but discussions and transactions of money, it seems, must be done
within walls padded with luxury. Money breeds money, Fred is ever
telling me, and even as bees are attracted by honey, so the opulent
investors will flock to our richly fitted hive. The droning of the
ticker and the sound of a typewriter are the only noises permissible,
and the smoke of cigars must be the most fragrant.
I hardly know why I should be ironic. Never before have I derived so
much amusement in a short space of time. There was the entrance of our
first customer, Signor Visconti. He came, this enterprising Milanese,
in response to one of the hundreds of individual circular letters we
sent out to small banks and investors, on magnificent stationery,
announcing our rare bargains in securities so safe that the rock of
Gibraltar was pasteboard by comparison, so gilt-edged that only the best
of government paper could dare to crackle in their presence; so
remunerative that--anyway, Mr. Visconti, admirably dressed, came in.
The young woman who brought in his name had been drilled not to seem
flustered. Fred flushed purple with pleasure and executed a brief but
exquisite war dance on the rug.
"Tell him I shall see him directly," he murmured to the young woman and
sprawled on the leather chair beside me in his triumph.
"Why don't you see him then?" I could not help asking.
"Wouldn't do," Fred wagged his head mysteriously. "Must keep him waiting
at least a minute or two--though I'm burning up to get my talons into
him."