I shall choke with pride, so august am I become in the Banca e Casa
Commerciale Visconti.
I call up the National City Bank concerning the price of bonds, or the
rate of exchange, in English so presumably impeccable that Signor
Visconti visibly puffs out his magnificent chest as he listens. There
is a divinity that shapes our "frontas", rough-hew them how we will.
"Visconti's speaking," I say with firmness and the head of Visconti's
curls his fine dyed mustache and turns away, glowing with ill-concealed
pleasure. This is seemingly what the head of Visconti's has been
waiting for. Mentally I offer a fervent prayer that he may never be
disillusioned as to my capacity.
I toil as I have never toiled before. I come early and go late and
frequently have my lunch sent in from the adjoining delicatessen,
powdered no doubt by the contiguous junk house, and the "boss", as the
others call him, smiles with a rare unction that spells approval.
With difficulty we are actually living on my income. If I had the half
of my capital back that I had no business to put into Salmon and
Byrd--but ifs inaugurate depressing trains of thoughts. My library
alone stands between me and disaster, so like a prudent man of business
I have begun a catalogue of it and I am training Alicia to help me. I
must not again be caught by so desperate a prospect as recently faced
me.
How my little household had been affected by my late slough of despond I
realize only now that I have passed it. Laughter and high spirits seem
to have been uncorked again. We play and we rollic and chatter, more
than in the early days of our _vie de famille_--how long ago is
it?--something less than a year, no longer!
It is now the end of September and the schools have reopened. We are
all sanely and industriously busy, like a normal American family, and as
though its so-called head were an adequately competent being, and not
the bungling masquerading amateur that he is. "Who never ate in tears
his bread"--well, we have made intimate acquaintance of poverty and we
fear it less than of yore--though we hate it more. It may be an
impostor, but who maintains that all impostors are harmless? I
certainly would deny that premise, so--we are cataloguing the library.
"Here is 'The Anatomy of Melancholy' by Burton," announces Alicia,
taking down a volume.
"Small quarto, printed at Oxford, 1621," I finish for her.
"Yes," she breathes, marveling wide-eyed. "How can you remember such
things, Uncle Ranny?" for so I have asked her to call me.
"How can I remember?" I ask in surprise. "How can I remember that you
are Alicia Palmer, close to the towering age of fifteen, or that Jimmie
Pendleton is five?"
"But we--are people," avers Alicia, "and we are--yours." I own to a
slight thrill at this sweet investiture, implicit in her words, but I
seem obtuse to it.
"But so is a great book a person," I sententiously inform her, "and
'Oxford, 1621', means a first edition, Alicia--not merely a person but a
personage. That book is as proud an aristocrat as though it were
plastered with coronets and simply throbbing with Norman blood. There
is a whole heraldry about it--it is a prince among books. And all,
Alicia, because it aroused men's interest and has given them delight
from about the time the Pilgrims first landed at Plymouth. It's a book
that could take Doctor Johnson out of bed two hours sooner than he
wished to rise. Also, if the worst came to the worst, it could feed us
for a time, and that is very important, isn't it, Alicia?"
"Yes," she breathes in awe which for some reason delights me. "What a
wonderful thing it must be to write a great book." And she fingers the
next volume with even greater reverence.
"The 'Life of Edward Malone', by Sir James Prior," reads Alicia. "Is
that a prince among books, too?"
"No," I answer. "That is just a friend. Malone, you see, was crossed
in love in the days of Doctor Johnson, and by way of consolation became
a book-collector and a Shakesperian commentator. They say the Irish are
fickle. But here is one who could never love again. So whenever I read
his life, I think I see through a sort of mist the lovely lady whom he
lost and all about him is curiously dear to me. He wouldn't feed us for
very long, Alicia, but he has given me many hours of pleasure."
"Are book-collectors people--crossed in love?" she inquires with gentle
subtlety, and I am surprised that one of her youthfulness should be
arrested by that particular point.
"If you mean me," I answer quietly, "then I can tell you that I wasn't.
No one ever loved me enough to cross me. I am a collector by a sort
of--spontaneous degeneration."
Alicia throws her fine young head back and peals with delicious
laughter. Afterwards I catch her smiling to herself as she copies down
the titles.
I am amazed to note how lovely that child has become since she has been
here. Her thin, frightened expression has given way to one of happy
confidence. All too soon she will be enriching some young man's life
with happiness. Her interest in my musty old books has given her a
value of companionship in my eyes that I trust I shall not exaggerate at
the expense of my niece and nephews--though Alicia is hardly one to take
advantage of such a situation. Nevertheless, I must be on my guard.
After all, though she is the chartered, custodian of the others, and
_quis custodiet ipsos_--who shall watch over Alicia? Obviously, it is
my task to improve her mind in order to make her the better guardian for
them.
And Alicia's mind is improving apace.
"Uncle Ranny," she inquired the other day, "may I ask what that first
edition of Boswell's 'Johnson', cost you?"
"It costs me nothing but a sleepless hour now and then," I told her.
"It is not paid for. But I owe Andrews four hundred dollars for it.
God knows when I shall pay it. But why do you ask, Alicia?"
"I have just read in _Book Prices Current_ that a copy was sold by
Sotheby's in London for one hundred pounds."
"Already!" I murmured and I was lost in admiration not of the accretion
in value--I am used to that--but of the girl's facility in acquiring the
interest and the jargon of my hobby.
"Oh, Mr. Andrews must have a wonderful place!" she exclaimed. "That
must be a splendid business. Where is he? How I'd love to see it!"
"You shall some day, Alicia," I told her. "He is in Twenty-ninth
Street, and an excellent fellow he is."
I then explained to her how Andrews had insisted upon planting the book
on my shelves.
Alicia gazed at me in silence for a moment, then suddenly tears
glittered in her eyes.
"It's because of us," she said, with a quivering lip, "because we came
that you couldn't buy it!"
"Don't talk rubbish, Alicia," I flared at her. "A collector gets almost
as much pleasure in thinking of books he can't get as in those he buys.
Don't you think you alone are worth more to me than an old Boswell?"
"No," she murmured gloomily, "but I'm going to try to be."
*BOOK TWO*
*CHAPTER XII*
Many months have passed since I last made an entry in this, which I mean
to be a record of my life for later years, when I am grown old and white
and memory gives back vividly only the days of childhood.
It must be that the stoking of the furnace below all winter, or else my
absorption in Visconti's, has banished reflection upon events from out
of my mind. It is not reflection that was banished, however, but only
the energy to record it. The folk who work the treadmill leave few
records behind them. And I am of the treadmill, occupant of an office
chair, one of the gray mass of dwellers in the suburbs of life.
The office of Visconti's, that was at first like a queer old wharf in
some foreign city to a ship from distant parts, has grown familiar and
almost homelike, so that I feel the barnacles gathering about my hulk at
the mooring place.
It is ever the same. I come and I labor and I go. The chair and the
desk await me of a morning and by ten o'clock it is as though I had
never left them. I go forth of an afternoon into freedom and feel a
momentary desire to wander about as of old. The bland frontages of New
York still have a lure for me. But the nestlings for whom I am laboring
are at Crestlands and to them I automatically hasten my steps.
But is all that about to end?
To-day, for the first time since his disappearance, I heard of poor
Laura's husband,--Pendleton.
For to-day I have received an astonishing letter from Dibdin, and it is
that, I suppose, which has stirred me to writing again.
"Be prepared," Dibdin's letter begins, after his usual abrupt manner,
"be prepared for a sort of shock."
"A week ago I arrived in Yokohama with half a schooner-load of stocks
and stones, carvings, idols, etc., homeward bound.
"If you have ever been in Yokohama you will remember the Grand Hotel on
the Bund." Yes, I do remember. It was the one bright spot for me in
Japan on my brief and disappointing journey six years ago. Heaven knows
why I went there. Once I had viewed the Temples at Nikko, the sacred
deer on the Island of Miyajima and the volcanic cone of Fujiyama, there
was nothing else to do. I am not an ethnologist and there were no
bookshops. While awaiting my steamer, the only refuge was that
self-same Grand Hotel at Yokohama, where you can still sit in a chair
facing a window, as commercial travelers in provincial hotels in America
sit, and look out across the water towards Tokio, and smoke and idle and
gossip. Of an afternoon there is tea with excellent little
cakes--served by Japanese girls in kimonos so gorgeous that even a
geisha would be too modest to wear them in the street. The color,
however, is meant for western eyes. The ladies, American and English
from Tokio and thereabout, wives of commission merchants, agents, naval
officers, diplomats, tourists, gather around and do what they can to
annihilate reputations,--as is the way the world over.
There is also a bar--the longest in Asia. Incidentally, every bar in
the East is the longest and men from Hongkong, Shanghai, Peking, Kobe
and Yokohama carry the measurements of their respective bars in their
heads for purposes of competitive argument. We all need something to
brag about, and there's little else in those parts. When the ladies
have finished their tea and have gone to their rooms or their
'rickshaws, the bar at the Grand is the next halting stage for the men.
I have not thought of it for years, though it is vivid enough to me now.
It is one of the five points on the globe where, if you loiter long
enough, you are certain to encounter every one you ever knew.
But--Pendleton!
"If you remember this setting," runs Dibdin's letter, "you will realize
how easy it was even for a bear like me to pick up quickly the gossip of
the place and, incidentally, the legend of Patterson. Patterson I
learned was a drifter, an idler, a gambler, and a staunch support of the
Grand bar. He is adroit, suave, pleasant, shifty--an American. Some
trader found him on the beach in the Marquesas, took him along for
company among the islands and ultimately landed him here. He has traded
in skins, in silk, in insurance; is said to have all but killed a man in
a card brawl and has cleaned out many a tourist at poker. Now, he is no
longer allowed to play cards at the Grand.
"I had a curiosity to see this bird of plumage and two days ago,
Mainwaring, the excellent manager of this hotel, pointed him out to me.
"Judge of my amazement, as novelists say, when I recognized in Patterson
none other than the author of all your troubles, your vanished
brother-in-law--_Pendleton!_
"Will it surprise you to learn that my first emotion was a desire to
rush upon him as he leaned across the bar and drive a knife into his
back?
"Instead, however, I got Mainwaring to introduce me and if Pendleton was
surprised, he concealed it successfully. Presently he was drinking my
liquor and chattering about the islands from which I am a recent
arrival. If I disguised the cold rage I felt against the man you must
give me credit for more diplomacy than you ordinarily do.
"'You talk like a New Yorker,' I presently let fall in a casual manner.
"'Ah, there you have me!' he threw out in a blandly mysterious sort of
way. 'Truth is, I don't know where I come from!'
"In short, he tried on the lapsed memory sort of thing. Woke up one day
to find himself at Manila. Didn't know his own name or who he was or
whence. Initials on his linen were J.P. so he took the name of
Patterson--as good as any other, and so forth. Very sad. But then one
must take life as one finds it. Some of us are elected to martyrdom in
this world. That, you understand, was his drift.
"'Well,' I told him calmly, 'if you really want to know who you are, I
can tell you.'
"He turned, I thought, a shade paler, but he played his part smoothly.
"'You don't mean it!' he exclaimed with a quite seraphic ecstasy. 'You
know me! My God, man, you are my deliverer come at last!'
"'You are Jim Pendleton,' I told him quietly and then I told him a few
other things. My reasoning was like this: If he is the thorough hound I
thought he was, he would have an excellent chance of bolting--and good
riddance. If there was a shred of decency left in the man, now was the
time for it to show.
"Well, he surprised me. I saw real tears in his eyes. He begged for
every detail I could give him. His voice broke when he tried to ask
questions about Laura and the kids. He has not bolted. He is quite
pathetically attached to me. I am dashed if I can tell whether it's
real or not. I don't believe for a minute in the lapsed memory dodge,
but I am flabbergasted. He seems so pitifully keen for every scrap I
can tell him. Maybe the poor brute is really ashamed of his past and is
trying only to save his face under this rigmarole of lost identity? He
clings to me and I have him, so to speak, under observation. If it
should even seem remotely possible to make a man of him again, don't you
think the risk of bringing him home might be worth taking? I don't
know, I don't know. I shall use the best judgment I've got about me,
but don't for a moment think I'll let you down. It's your interest I'm
thinking of and the interest of the kids.
"I can't leave here for several weeks yet. That ought to give me time
to take his measure. I know what he has been. Question is, can a
leopard change his spots, or a beachcomber his character? We'll see,
Randolph, my boy, we'll see what we see. Hard luck is hard luck, but
this man--well, I needn't tell you. There is such a thing, to be sure,
as trying back. I'd like to have a second chance myself, if I behaved
like a villain. But of this fellow I am far from sure. I will say,
though, that he's drinking less and trying to keep decent not only in my
own sight, but to the surprise of all the white colony here.
"You will hear from me again before long."
As I read, I felt gradually overshadowed by the immense somber fact
conveyed in this letter. It was like a black cloud bank that comes up
swiftly, blotting out the sun from over the landscape. It was not a
thing to blink, to wave aside or to dismiss with a shrug of the
shoulders. It was instant and tyrannous, demanding anew urgent thought
and decision. Fortunately I am no longer the same creature that was
bodily hurled from tranquillity and leisure, like a monk from his cell,
into the cold wind-swept ways of life. I seem a little less like chaff
in the breeze. My backbone seemed actually to stiffen and settle as I
posed the problem.
The problem is the fate of the children. To receive and re-create
Pendleton means to give them up.
Well--and did I not assume their care only because there was none else?
Now there would be--there might be--some one else. Pendleton has a
legal right to his own children and, if he could establish it
satisfactorily, no doubt a moral right as well.
The advent of Pendleton might prove to have incalculable advantages for
myself. Here, on the one side, is the treadmill. On the other there
is, or there was, ease and leisure and dreams. My small competency is
gone in the wake of that man's destructive progress. But for myself, I
might manage an easier and more agreeable way of subsisting than the way
of Visconti's. Those are the cold facts, clearly enough--but somehow
they will not let me rest. My world has been violently jarred, for all
my painful calmness, and I seem unable to fit the parts again into
exactly the old solidity of groove and joint. There are lurking
interstices which I cannot fill. "Who is Kim--Kim--Kim?" the hero of an
unforgettable tale was wont to ask himself. And he felt his soul
floating off and dipping into the infinite. Likewise, I ask myself now,
Who is Randolph Byrd? And the startling truth returns that the children
in my house and I are inseparable, that I and they are one!
With this and the fact that Pendleton is in all likelihood coming back
to claim them, I am, pending further news from Dibdin, left to grapple.
At any rate, Dibdin also is returning.
It is now the spring and the year is beginning to smile again. I have
been prospering at Visconti's and my income is now again the same as it
was before ever the children came to me--before I became a business man.
But there is not a soul to whom I can confide my new dilemma.
There is Minot Blackden, the glass stainer, whom I have finally
discovered to be a near neighbor of Visconti's. To be exact, his studio
and living quarters are in King Street, and we sometimes have our lunch
together. But Blackden is so much in the grip of his medieval art that
it gets into his food, stains his tapering hands and even spatters upon
his finely pointed blue-black beard. All he can see in me is the
Philistine who has cast all else aside for the sizzling fleshpots. When
I chanced to mention having four children in my house, he looked upon me
as a bird-of-Paradise might look upon a polar bear; I was to him a
visible but incredible symbol of something strange and gross. There is
nothing placid or resigned about Blackden. He is intense, incandescent.
"Do you realize," he said to me, "that I am restoring a lost art to the
world?"
"But does it give you food?" I asked him.
"What does food matter?" he expostulated. "What does anything else in
the world matter?"
Nevertheless, he was eager to take up my suggestion concerning the
writing of a booklet upon his new craft and he has been sending it out
broadcast. But so intensely devotional is his attitude to the whole
business that I have not the face to suggest payment for the work, nor
has he referred to it again. I know little of his art, but I know that
his returns are increasing. It is obvious that I cannot burden a soul,
burning with that gemlike flame of Blackden's, with any such confidence
as the impending return of Pendleton. At times I think that Minot
Blackden and Gertrude Bayard ought to marry each other. They are both
so single-minded and so absolutely sure of themselves. But in the
meantime there is no one I can talk to.
No--absolutely no one.
Walking to Grand Central station these brilliant afternoons is a thing I
cannot resist. It is the only exercise I get. Crossing Washington
Square, I strike into Fifth Avenue and by the time I reach Fourteenth
Street I have a delicious sense of losing myself, of merging into the
crowd, that is very soothing after a day in the office. There is nothing
so stimulating as the energetic crowd in Fifth Avenue. At Brentano's
bookstore I usually pause and scrutinize the window. I am very sound in
the latest novels and the newest developments in stationery.
To-day, as my eyes were feasting on the cover jacket of Mr. Arnold
Bennett's latest, a lady coming down the avenue likewise paused before
the window and as we glanced at each other I found I was facing
Gertrude. Of course she had a perfect right to cut me. She smiled
uncertainly instead and put out her hand.
"Hello, Ranny," she murmured casually. "No reason why we can't meet as
friends, is there?"
"Not the least in the world," I returned hastily. "Why should there be?"
"I didn't know--but of course you always were a sensible person."