In Crestlands (thrilling are the names of suburbs!) thirty-five minutes
from Grand Central Station, in Westchester County. I came upon a
chalet-like cottage built largely upon a rock that I believe will answer
our purpose. The rent is moderate and there is said to be an asparagus
bed somewhere in the "grounds." I know there are two trees with gnarled
roots grasping their way downward among the stones, in a business-like
struggle for existence, and there are a few inches of lawn for the
children. With a veritable terrain like that as dower, it will surprise
no one that I took the cottage.
"The latitude's rather uncertain, and the longitude also is vague," as
vague, almost, as that of Roumania; nevertheless I shall be henceforth a
dweller of Suburbia.
This being Sunday, I took the children out there in the afternoon to
examine their new demesne. With the air of a castellan exhibiting an
old castle, I showed them through the rooms and in the phrases of the
real-estate dealer I enumerated their advantages--with a heavy heart.
But the children cared nothing about that. Randolph saw visions of a
tent or an Indian tepee under one of the gnarled old trees and Jimmie
illustrated how he would "woll down" the slope; all our "grounds" are
slope _et praeterea nihil_. But Laura, detecting a neglected rose bush
near one of the windows, clapped her hands for joy.
"This is like the house in 'Peter Pan', Uncle Ranny," she cried
delightedly. "There will be roses peeping in, and babies peeping out."
I looked at her in poignant surprise. It was so absolutely the voice of
her mother when she was a girl, the spirit and the expression. It is
exactly that feature that my poor sister would have first taken into
account; it might have been Laura herself. I turned away in order not
to cloud their delight. The poetry of life is the only thing worth
living for, yet what a toll the world exacts on that commodity!
Griselda, in spite of all temptation, had declined to come.
"Is there a good kitchen?" she demanded. I told her I thought there
was.
"Then I will not waste my time looking for the birdies in the trees or
the paint on the roof," she retorted stoutly. She even demurred at
Alicia's coming. "There's over much to do," she protested darkly.
Of discomfort and wretchedness let none speak. I have sounded both and
so much else that is unpleasant to the abysmal depths that I shall never
again look with the same eyes upon the impassive faces of the men in the
moving express train. They have all no doubt lived and suffered even as
I, these, my brothers!
I have moved the household to my suburb, and this is a lament _de
profundis_.
The legendary mandrake is a gurgling infant to the way my books cried
upon removing. They not only screamed; they sobbed and quivered like
broken souls to be dislodged from their place that has known and loved
them so well and so long. Every object in the flat was a whole
plantation of mandrakes. Their wailing and ululation resounds yet in
their new and changed surroundings. Roses peeping in, indeed! To my
books this is a house of sorrow. Forlorn and jumbled and still unsorted
they stand and lie in heaps so that their fallen state wrings my
lacerated heart. Alicia, to whom I sadly complained of this condition,
consolingly answered:
"But my English teacher in school would say that that was a 'pathetic
fallacy', Mr. Ranny. Books and things don't really feel, do they?"
"Don't they!" I bitterly exclaimed. "Let unemotional pedants speak as
they stupidly will, Alicia. Nothing can be more poignantly pathetic
than a fallacy!"
"Yes, sir," murmured Alicia and with reverent fingers she silently
helped me to place some of those books. She has a tender touch for the
objects of other people's love, a charming attribute in a woman.
And from the physical chaos in the chalet at Crestlands I am whirled
madly every morning in a crowded express train, then in a convulsively
serried subway car, to the more subtle chaos in the office of Salmon and
Byrd--to sell Roumanian bonds. Roumanian bonds are overrunning those
offices like the rats in the town of Hamelin. Ah, will not some piper,
pied or otherwise, come and pipe them all into the sea? The answer, I
grieve to say, is no! The impossibility of shifting one's burdens is
the fundamental mistake of Creation.
Nothing irritates me more after a morning's fruitless telephoning or
ineffectual running about than to have Fred Salmon smile sleekly, clap
me on the back and mumble mechanically:
"Great work, old boy! You're doing fine!"
What is the use of these false inanities? On Saturday he came to me
with the gratifying intelligence that Imber and Smith, who took two
millions of the bonds, have already sold out their allotment.
"Damn them!" was the only answer I could find.
"That's what I say," he answered in his perfect role of being all things
to all men, then reflectively, "I think Smith's a liar, though." I'll
wager nevertheless that he congratulated Smith as heartily as he bruises
my back. To be all things to all men is surely one of the most
disgusting traits in a human biped. Fitfully ever and again I wish
myself out of the ruck and rabble of all that. But sadly and heavily it
comes to me that it is better perhaps to bear the ills one has than to
fly to others that are a mere sinister blank. I seem like a man on a
raft with the storm-lashed waves washing over me the while I gasp for
breath and hope for rescue.
I wonder what this life would be like if upon coming home to Crestlands
there were not those eager little retrievers to fetch and to carry and
to wait upon me, to surround me with their glad young freshness. But in
candor I must admit that but for them I should be leading my old
secluded life, undisturbed among books, that now seems remote as a past
incarnation.
The weeks go by and, toiling under our burden, we are desperately trying
to stem the rush of time. In certain hard-pressed moments I have a
sickly feeling that time will win--and crush us. A revoltingly new
discovery I made yesterday, that Fred has taken to drinking during
business hours, suddenly drew the life out of me like a suction pump.
Then, realizing the meaning and the enormity of the fact, I was
frightened out of fear and talked to him in as friendly and kindly a
vein as the circumstances would permit, in an effort to show him our
position and where it might lead us.
His first snarl of defiance gave way to contrition. He wept maudlin
tears and made promises so robust that they ought to outlive him, but--I
feel shaken as never before.
Meanwhile Sampson and Company are calling for the payments due on our
allotment of bonds, and Fred, the smiler and the diplomat, is shirking
interviews with them.
"What we need, Ranny," he said to me to-day in chastened mood, "is
capital, more capital. We went into this business on a shoe
string--sometimes it will hold till you can get a rope and sometimes--"
--"Even a life line is too late," I supplied.
He did not answer. But after a pause he began afresh:
"Couldn't you get round and see some of your rich friends--see whether
they could tide us over for a spell?"
"Rich friends!" I writhed as one in torment. "Who are my rich friends?
I have none, as you ought to know. I have now put in every cent of
capital that I own--against your business experience, Fred. And this is
where we've arrived. If my sister's children weren't dependent upon
me--but then," I ended bitterly, "I shouldn't be here, as I think you
know."
He bowed his head.
"Didn't your sister--wasn't there anything--?" But to his credit, he
did not finish. If, as I suppose, he meant to ask whether Laura left
any money that I could use, he evidently thought better of it and walked
away in a somber silence. And that is where we stand.
That is where we stand in our business, and the needs of my household
are expanding. Griselda knows nothing of my affairs and yet I surprise
her dark eyes, singularly lustrous for one of her years, watching me at
times out of her swarthy wrinkled face, as if divining the Jehannum I am
experiencing. More than ever she lays herself out to perform incredible
feats of economy, whilst I hypocritically pretend to be unaware of it.
The children, having prospered and grown during the winter, are in need
of new summer wardrobes, which I have ordered bought. If it is to be
disaster, then shabbiness shall not betray us. Like the man who donned
evening clothes in which to sink with the _Titanic_, I have always
entertained a stubborn faith in the policy of good clothes. Policy,
policy--the trail of policy is over me like a fetid odor--and how clean
and unsmirched I have always felt in my stupid transparency! Gertrude,
if she knew it, would now rejoice that she had thrown me over.
I envy our clerks and typists who banish all cares at five in the
afternoon and do not resume them until the following morning. What a
gay life is theirs--if they but knew it. They jest and fool and hurl
picturesque slang at one another and draw their pay on Saturdays,
unconscious of how near to perdition we totter. If we go to the wall
they will soon find other places. But I--shall find the wall. I wish I
knew what the emotions of Fred are as, rucking his forehead heavily, he
strides about our rugs. I only know, however, that mine are emotions of
doom.
The black doom is upon us.
After days of haggling and lying and shuffling and paltering we have, as
a firm, expired.
Our vain and concentrated efforts to sell something that we had not the
necessary means and connections to sell led us to neglect the things we
could have done.
I shall not soon forget the vile outburst of the heavy-jowled Sampson
when as by a Sultan's firman, he imperiously summoned us to his office
and told us in his language what he thought of us.
"People like you don't belong in the Street--they belong in jail.
Assign!" he snarled, "Better assign at once and clear out!"
And not the least of the bitterness of that moment was the acrid
realization that I could not charge him with having flattered and
hounded Fred into the vanity of the enterprise, because at that moment
Fred and I were one--with this distinction: What Fred was suffering
would roll from his back like water from a rhinoceros, whereas I would
remain obscenely branded by his words forevermore.
It was useless to argue, futile to protest. There was no time or place
for extenuating circumstances. I was too full of shame and humiliation
to offer any conciliatory suggestions, and I still had enough of mulish
pride not to truckle to that fish-eyed bully. We walked out of that
man's office bankrupts.
I still marvel how I found my way back to our own office through the
lurid darkness that encompassed me. The world about me--the palpitating,
pressing eager world, of which in a measure I had been a part--was
suddenly strange and phantasmal and alien, the ghostly city of a dream.
The people were shadows and their hurrying steps and errands as
mysterious and as unrelated to my life as those of a colony of ants.
The only actuality I did not envisage in that dark moment which was
coextensive with eternity, was that _I_ was the anemic ghost stalking at
noonday and the others were the reality.
"If only you had not taken the balance of my capital--" was the thought
throbbing under my overwhelming misery--"if only you had left me that!"
But I could not bring myself to whine to Fred. I kept stonily silent.
A burning resentment swelled my heart so that I could not speak. The
newspaper publicity Fred had craved would come to him now with a
vengeance.
Now they are busy dismembering the corpse and colporting the remains,
whilst I sit darkly at home in Crestlands like one disembodied, dead.
*CHAPTER XI*
I have had time to grow dulled to the shabby peripety of my career as a
business man. The sickening details and legal forms of our failure are
over, and I am wretchedly surviving on the loan made upon an insurance
policy, but still I have evolved no plans for the future.
I sit in the shadow of the chalet watching Jimmie rolling down the slope
and endeavoring to roll up again. The early August sun is hot in the
heavens and the air even of Crestlands is muggy. And my pulses keep
insistently repeating, repeating, "What is to become of us?" My
pulses--but not my mind. That useless functionary has quite simply
suspended operations.
I used to feel wise in reading Montaigne and Buckle, humorous with
Rabelais and Cervantes, acute and a man of the world with Balzac or
Sainte-Beuve. But none of these erstwhile comforters, it appears, seems
able to lift up my spirit. Modern young critics talk of escape in
literature, but it seems one can only escape when there is nothing very
serious to escape from. Like a debauchee who had killed his palate or
one who has swallowed an unwholesome dish overnight, the zestful taste
for an essay of Elia, the gustatory rolling under the tongue of
sentences in "Religio Medici", the keen pleasure in a Dryden preface,
all these are now impossible. The savor of them has died for me. My
dreams of Maecenasship for Tudor Texts have gone a-glimmering.
For joy in books the tranquil heart is needed. The world has been too
much with me and neither poppy nor mandragora can banish the effects of
it. There is no balm to sane me.
There was escape after all, though--if not in reading, then in writing.
I can quite understand now the persistence of diarists in the world. I
had no sooner written down the words above than a tremor of resolution
shook me and I went into the baking city in quest of livelihood. I
found nothing save exhaustion, but it is certain that in Crestlands I
shall find even less.
I looked upon the teeming streets wide-eyed like a gawk, surprised anew
that so many should find a foothold and sustenance where I had failed.
The mystery of that will always baffle me. The deepening gloom gave
way, however, when I entered Andrews' bookshop. His welcome was warm.
"Stranger," he greeted me cordially, "come into your own."
"I don't deny I have felt it calling," I admitted.
"'Course you did--there is nothing else in the world."
"Ah, how much else, Andrews!" I told him sadly.
Whether he has heard of my failure or not I cannot tell. If he has, he
was tact itself.
"Here are some beautiful things for you to see," he announced, bustling
as he led me to a table in the rear of the shop. I looked at his
beautiful things and was able to give him some useful points about one
or two of them. He has actually come upon a Caxton, the lucky devil!
This was indeed "my own", as Andrews was shrewd enough to divine. _Ca
me connait_. And his courtesy and his deference were strangely
consoling in the light of my recent experiences. Courtesy and deference
cost others so little, but what refreshing manna they are to one's
self-respect!
I go on tramping the pavements of New York and I wish there were more
point in my trampings.
Every morning I go forth with a faint glow of hope, and the dim basis of
my hope, when I come to think it out, is something like this: In the
haunts of men I may meet somebody, an old acquaintance who may know or
hear of something whereby a broken reed like myself, a pronounced
failure, may get the chance of earning a livelihood. A desperate enough
situation when reduced to the glaring light of plain speech--but that is
the best that I am able to do. If only Dibdin were here! Despairingly I
am in need of a friend. But my past life has separated and insulated
me, so that when I think of friends and my thought convulsively darts
out this way and that, it encounters nothing but vacancy, empty air.
Fred Salmon is avoiding the Club. He is the only one who had reached to
me from the past, and the result I have already recorded. I am not
eager to meet him, though I have worn out any hostility I may have felt
toward him. _C'est un mauvais metier que celui de medire_. I find my
inward man the better for thinking of Fred neutrally, when I think of
him at all.
Illness was the one thing lacking to my ineffable Pilgrim's Progress, so
infallibly illness has appeared.
Jimmie came down with measles on Saturday and yesterday Alicia followed
his example. The crumpling of Alicia under illness has proved like the
shattering of a column in the edifice of my household. The whole
insecure structure is tottering. And though she is burning with fever,
the unhappy girl is murmuring with anxiety that stockings go unmended
and buttons unsewn.
"Don't you worry about that, little girl," I keep telling her.
"Griselda will do those things."
"Griselda has too much to do as it is," she gulps and the tears start to
her hot eyes. I have isolated her and Jimmie in my room, and Randolph
and Laura are cautioned to keep as far as possible away from them. I
remember the time when I would have flown from the fear of infection as
from the plague, but now my anxieties are of a wholly different nature.
Jimmie is mending now, but Alicia is far more ill than she knows.
Griselda has undertaken the stockings and at night, when I sit watching
and waiting for sounds from either of my invalids, I operate upon the
buttons. It is curious how much art enters into the sewing of a button.
A dog of a bachelor though I have ever been, I have never been compelled
to learn that handicraft before. But I have learned from Griselda, who
smiled crookedly when she imparted the law, that if you twist the thread
around several times after you have sewn it, the whole thing acquires,
relatively, the strength of a cable. To your punctured fingers you
attend afterwards.
Alicia, awakening at midnight, sat up in bed and caught me at my task;
she moaned most dolefully. I hastily put Jimmie's little "undies"
behind me, but too late.
"You'll never want me--or need me again--what's the use of getting
well?" she wailed weakly.
"Oh, yes, I shall, Alicia--more than ever," I hastened to assure her.
"You do everything now that I ought to do," she pressed with febrile
insistence. "I shall be no use any more."
"But don't you see, Alicia," I argued, touching her hot forehead, "that
I shall have to be earning money while you are doing the buttons? I
ought to be earning it now, so get well as quickly as you can. Jimmie
sees it; he's much better already." That logic seemed to soothe her
more than I had expected. She caught my hand impulsively and pressed it
to her cheek. The tremendous part played by affection in the lives of
children is a never-ceasing wonder to me.
Alicia is convalescent again, _laus Domini_, and Jimmie is now running
about the little house filling it with noise--which is music to my ears.
Laura and Randolph have fortunately thus far escaped infection. Jimmie
is wanting to resume "wolling up and down" the slope again, but this is
still _verboten_.
I can now take up my journeys into town again and I note with a pang
that I am growing shabby. The yearly purchases of clothes had been as
regular with me as my meals, but I have ordered no clothes for the
spring or summer. Odd, what a deleterious effect the shabbiness of
clothes has upon one's consciousness! The tinge of inferiority it
brings touches some very tender places in one's spirit, almost like a
shabby conscience. But the doctor of the neighborhood, a contemplative
fellow who obviously knows his business, though he talks of his
laboratory and his experiments like an alchemist, has earned the clothes
that I must do without. And of the two I needed them more.
My search is ended. There is jubilation in my heart again. I have
fallen into a livelihood; like the bricklayer who used to fare forth,
dinner pail in hand, I have found work.
And the way of it was an odd little stroke of Fate, a whimsicality that
would have pleased the ironic soul of Thomas Hardy.
An old college friend of mine, Minot Blackden, whom I used to call
Leonardo da Vinci because he was so full of ideas and inventions, had
rediscovered, he said, the art of glass-staining. After a five years'
residence in Italy, on a modest patrimony, most of which had gone into
glass or into stain, he had returned to his native land and set up a
shop _a la_ William Morris somewhere in the region of Bleecker Street,
and proceeded to stain glass. He had had some newspaper publicity
recently, and there were cuts of his work.
While passing a church in my hot and dusty peregrinations, it occurred
to me that here might be a chance of serving him and also myself. By
writing an interesting booklet about his craft, illustrating it
profusely and sending it with personal letters to all the vestries in
the country, I might bring a flood of custom to his shop. It is with
this forlorn proposal that I was blundering about to discover Minot
Blackden. I failed to find his shop, but I came face to face with my
old Salmon and Byrd acquaintance, Signor Visconti.
In his palm beach suit and Panama hat, Visconti made a splendent and
impressive figure in the purlieus of Bleecker Street.
"Ah-h, Signor Byrd," he cried with Latin cordiality, seizing my hand in
both his own, "you are what you call a sight for sick eyes. I have
often wonder about you--you must come into my banca--we must have leetla
refreshment!"
Refreshment appealed to me at the moment and gladly I accompanied him to
his private office in the bank, that stands between a junk warehouse and
a delicatessen emporium. With a charming tact he touched upon the hard
luck of Salmon and Byrd and dismissed the subject for good.
Briefly--for him--that is, with a wealth of gesture and illustration, he
informed me that he was looking for a man for his enlarging bank, and
asked me to recommend one.
"I want a fina man--" he explained. "American gentleman--who speeks a
leetla da Italian--who put up what you call a fina fronta--understand
me?"
"A fine front," I mused aloud, "and speaks Italian--no, Signor Visconti,
we had no such young man in our office. I can think of no one I could
recommend."
He was obviously nonplused.
"I thinka," he said, with, a gesture of final resolution, "if I could
finda some gentleman lika you, Mr. Byrd, he would be _precisamente_ what
I look for. I know," he added hastily with an apologetic laugh, "man
lika you, Signor, be hard to find!" And again he laughed heartily,
though watching me between narrowed eyelids. His drift was now obvious.
I was silent for a moment.
"Well, if it comes to that, Signor Visconti," I answered slowly, "I am
doing nothing in particular just now. I may be utterly no good for you,
but--but if--"
"Ah, you would try old Visconti, Signor!" And up flew his arms like
windmills. "You no ashamed to work in vot you Americans call da Guinea
colony!--no, no!" He noted the deprecating shadow on my face. "Ah, you
understanda--you know the granda history of the Italiana people.
You--but, Mr. Byrd--" and with an admirable histrionic transition he
suddenly turned grave and sad--"Mr. Byrd, you are the very man I looka
for," and he gripped both my hands. "But, Meester Byrd--I fear I cannot
afford to pay what you would expect. Ah, _sacra_--if I could! You, the
very man--_Dio_--" and he clapped a hand dramatically to his
forehead--"the very man, but!--" and his full smile of sad and wistful
regret seemed genuine for all its histrionic value.
"What do you propose to pay, Signor Visconti?" I inquired.
"I can only pay to start," he whispered hoarsely, with the round eyes of
a man facing the inevitable, "thirty-fiva, maybe forty dollars week.
Too leetla, I know," he added slowly, letting his hands fall on his
knees with resignation.
"Very well, Signor Visconti," I said. "If you will try me, I shall be
glad to come at forty dollars."
Visconti fairly leaped at my hand and the bargain was struck.