"Signor Visconti," I began huskily, "you do not understand me. I cannot
marry anybody, ever. I have four children to bring up--educate--to be
responsible for. The youngest of them is eight. I--you honor me
greatly by your kindness--but marriage is not for me."
He stared in speechless stupefaction at me as though I had revealed some
incredible horror to his eyes.
"Four children!" he whispered, with dilated eyes. "But who--but I
thought you have never been married?"
"I have not," I replied with an intense relief that was like a
restorative. Then, catching his meaning glance, I went on hastily;
"They are my sister's orphans. I am responsible for them. They have no
one else."
"Ah!" he drew in his breath with the sound of a syphon. "That is it, is
it?"
"Yes," I murmured, rising, resolved to put an end to this ghastly
episode. "Now, if you will excuse me--"
All at once his hands shot out and clutched both of mine.
"You're not good man!" he shouted vehemently. "No--not only good--you're
a great man! _Caro mio_--ah, I never make mistake--no!" And before I
knew what he was doing, he had embraced me in Continental fashion and
large tears stood in his eyes.
The cup of my torment was complete. A mad desire to get away possessed
me--only to get away. I stirred to move but he held me resolutely.
"We will think it out, my friend," he announced with sober energy. "We
will talk it over--work it out. I, too, am a man with a heart, _caro
mio_. It is I who understand--Have I not lost my poor Giovanna--Gina's
mother? If you two love each other--well--we must find--a way."
Hope bounded in my pulses as I noted that his enthusiasm was now
tempered by thoughtfulness.
"No, Mr. Visconti," I murmured with painful firmness. "I have no right
to love Miss Gina--and I wouldn't dream of telling her so, even if I
did--I am not free--"
"You--you're not _promesso_--what d'you call it--engaged?"
"Oh, no, no! It is only my heart that is engaged--not my word--there is
some one else--but it can never be anything--"
"But what does it mean?" he flashed, dark anger purpling his features
and kindling the air like a torch. "What did I see! My girl in your
arms--what was that!" His eyes now darted fiery anger and his arms were
arrested in the midst of a violent gesture.
I shook my head slowly. His anger was infinitely more agreeable to
me--like manna--after his parching enthusiasm.
"There was nothing," I answered quietly. "Miss Gina really turned her
ankle on the rug. And I caught her as she fell--just as you would have
done."
He stood panting for a moment, his gaze riveted upon me. At last he
turned away, with a pitiful movement of regret, apology, resignation.
The excellent man gave me the benefit of the doubt.
"Ah, _Dio mio_," he muttered. "_Poverina_! Go, my friend, now. I must
think. _Bellessa mia!--cara mia!_--what will I say to her? Ah, _Dio_!
what a bitter world!"
"I am more distressed than I can say," I murmured, with the crushed
voice of poignant suffering, "but what can I do--or say--more?"
"_Niente_--nothing, nothing," he muttered. "Good night!" and my
admiration for his spirit was high when he held out his trembling hand.
I tiptoed to the door like a thief and as I took my coat and hat, Gina
called out from the top of the stairs in uncomprehending astonishment.
"Not going--Randolph!" And like a small avalanche she shot down the
stairs.
"Yes--yes--he is going, _bellessa mia_!" firmly shouted Visconti as he
came running towards us. "He is called away--good night--good night!"
"Good night," I said and held out my hand to Gina. But Gina's manners
are more modern than her father's. She was dumbfounded and she turned
her back upon me angrily, registering doubtless some standard emotion
from a favorite movie. It was useless to try to placate her. I slipped
out of the door which will never more open for me.
The nightmarish quality of the episode persisted in my consciousness
like a drug throughout the passage homeward, and it was not until I
entered my door and saw a light in my study that reality began to assert
itself.
Reality meant the end--the end of my livelihood, the end of my hopes and
plans--the end of the tether. Like an unfledged boy I must begin to
breast the future all over again. A hero of romance would doubtless at
that moment have thrilled to the struggle with new and seemingly
insuperable obstacles. But alas! I am not a hero of romance! As I
threw my coat upon the hatstand, a great weariness and a deep dejection
fell upon me.
Alicia came out of my study to greet me. As usual she had been waiting
up for me.
"Why on earth aren't you in bed?" I growled irritably. Alicia scanned my
face amid the shadows cast by the lamplight. "Go to bed, child," I
repeated; "go to bed."
"Something has happened," she murmured, frightened; "something has
happened. Oh, tell me--what was it, Uncle Ranny?"
I looked down at her with a scowl that was meant to be forbidding--a
warning that I was in no mood for triflingness.
She seized my hand, still holding my gaze with that starry look in her
eyes that invariably probes deep and rests in my inmost soul.
"Something has hurt you, Uncle Ranny," she whispered tremulously, "and
you must tell me." Our eyes dwelt together for a space. "Oh, tell me!"
she gulped, with a sudden terror dilating her eyes. "It isn't--it isn't
that--man come back!"
"Oh, no!" I shuddered involuntarily at the image she evoked of
Pendleton. "Not that. Thank Heaven, Alicia, you're no Pollyanna; you
see the worst at once."
"No," I finally muttered, looking away, "I have hurt somebody."
"I can't believe that," she retorted vehemently. "But if you think
so--Please, please, tell me. It will be so much better, for you, Uncle
Ranny."
I had a sudden impulse to take her in my arms, but the emotion was not
paternal. And--I was to her "Uncle Ranny." All unconscious she was
guarded by her circle of sacred flames. Spasmodically I tore my hand
out of her grasp and walked unsteadily across the room to my table.
"Sit down over there," I motioned her as far away from me as possible.
She stood still without complying.
"What was it, Uncle Ranny, dear?" she breathed.
A sort of bittersweet pain went through me at the epithet and I reviled
myself inwardly for the impurity of my dark mind in the presence of this
simple, lovely purity. A profound sigh escaped me as I leaned my elbows
on the table and made a feeble effort to smile at the mocking visage of
Fate.
"I cannot go back to Visconti's any more, Alicia," I told her.
"Something has happened. That is ended. I must look about for something
else."
"Oh!" she gasped, "is it as bad as that?"
"As bad as that," I repeated mechanically.
"Then I know it was nothing you could help," she answered with a sudden
radiance that was like a benediction.
"So there is no use worrying about that. But you mean the money," and
her face clouded anxiously. "But I know what I'll do, Uncle Ranny," she
came gliding toward me. "There is always Mr. Andrews for me, you know.
You remember what he said: He'll take me back any time."
An instant of blackness was succeeded by a sudden burst of illumination.
Andrews! Andrews and the library--the library, all
catalogued--complete! Andrews would either buy it or help me to dispose
of it, and Alicia and the children need not after all suffer by my
catastrophe. My books were more like my flesh and blood, and to part
with them---but that consideration was of singularly brief endurance at
the moment. Those books, like a troop of old friends; would rescue us
all from disaster--come like a phalanx between us and defeat.
"You amazing child!" I cried, leaping to my feet. "Light!--You've
brought me light! Andrews!--The very man! To-morrow I am going to
Andrews!"
I seized her by the shoulders and whirled her about the room like a
marionette in a savage burst of energy. Alicia gasped and, spinning
away, laughed wildly with a laughter that bordered upon sobs. I dread
to reflect what our neighbors would have concluded, had they observed
through the windows the strange Dionysian rite of the quiet middle-aged
bachelor and his youthful pretty ward.
"Now go to bed, child," I commanded brusquely. "I have some thinking to
do."
"Shall I make you some coffee?" she pleaded, coming toward me, still
laughing.
"No--go to bed!" Before I was aware she had left a darting birdlike
kiss upon my cheek and fled like a breeze from the room.
My eyes dwelt upon the door for a space where she had vanished, and then
they turned involuntarily to the serried peaceful rows of books that had
been my life,--that now, in the last extremity of need, must, like the
camel in the desert, yield up their blood to be my livelihood.
The following morning, that is to-day, I made my way to Andrews, armed
with my catalogue, and greatly to that good fellow's astonishment
offered him the sale of my library.
He stared at me in blank amazement for an instant and then, recovering
himself, declared that he would like to see it.
"Come back to lunch with me," I suggested.
He could not do that, but agreed to come to dinner in the evening.
His shrewd old eyes took in much more than the details of my copies and
editions during his two or three hours at my house. With discreet but
observant gaze he followed the children about and measured, more
accurately no doubt than I could have done, the worth and solidity of my
household. He had seen something of my easy bachelor life in the old
days and, doubtless, was now drawing his contrasts and conclusions.
"What do you think you can offer?" I queried with some anxiety, as he
stood carefully fingering the books which, like Milton's one talent, it
were death to hide--for they were bread.
Andrews sat down and stared for an interval thoughtfully before him.
"I'll tell you what I'd like to offer you before we talk about the
books--" he spoke with an even, a studied deliberation. "I'd like to
offer you--a partnership!"
It was my turn to stare in stupefaction.
"It would be a great thing for me if you came in with me, Mr. Byrd," he
now spoke more quickly. "You see, I'm an old man, getting on,
sir--getting on. I want some new blood in the place--new blood--a fresh
point of view and young enthusiasm. That young lady of yours coming in
the way she did woke me up to that. And whom could I leave it to when it
comes to the end?" he speculated wistfully. "I have no relations."
I opened my mouth to speak, but Andrews took the privilege of age to
disregard me.
"I want a man with the tender touch for books, Mr. Byrd--the tender
touch. It's a beautiful business," he smacked his lips--"beautiful!
The hunting for them--it's--it's a knightly quest. And to find homes
for them--it's like placing bonny children. The bookmen of America are
generous. We ought to go to England--buy libraries--increase our
treasure."
"But, my dear Andrews," I spluttered, in agitated protest. "Do you know
what you are offering me? A career, a livelihood, life itself--the
future of those children of mine--what can I contribute, except these
books--and compared to your business and good will!--"
"If you were rich," he interrupted, "do you suppose I'd have the
effrontery to make you the offer? You see, I've known you a long time,
Mr. Byrd--and it's been a great pleasure to me. If I had a son--but,"
and his voice struck a harsher note with things repressed--"it's no use
going into that. That is the business for a man like you.
"We all need money," he pursued with new energy. "It's a thing to
despise if you can--a thing for sentimentalists to drivel about. But so
long as our present social and economic system continues, only a fool
would decry money. It's no good to you when your heart is breaking, but
neither is food nor water, nor shelter nor leisure. But when you want
food and shelter and leisure, that is as long as you're above ground,
you want money. I have prospered--done well. Will you come with me,
Randolph Byrd?"
"My dear good Andrews," I paced the room agitated, exultant, terrified
by this stroke of good fortune. "But how can I take advantage of your
unheard-of generosity? What can I offer? Will you take my books as a
contribution to capital?"
"No," he shook his head, with twinkling eyes and a queer crinkling of
the crow's-feet about them. "I don't think we need them. Books are
always--books," he concluded oracularly, with a ring in his voice of the
true bibliophile's reverence.
"Say you will come."
My heart was suddenly flooded by a rich inundation of hope. This was
permanence that Andrews was holding out--this was an anchorage. It was
neither Salmon and Byrd, nor Visconti's. This was my own peculiar
realm, and only a snob or a fool could reject it. _Ca me connait_. All
the turmoil and troubles of the past seemed to be melting rapidly away
like the shapes in dreams or unsubstantial clouds. My life would be
secure, the children nourished and educated. Alicia should have her
chance unchallenged--should be prepared against the advent of that
dream-hero of hers,--when he comes--when he comes! What else was I now
living for? I felt as might have felt the old woman of the nursery
rhyme, who lived in a shoe, had any one suddenly offered her a vine-clad
well-stocked cottage of many chambers, with a future reasonably safe for
her progeny. I saw on a sudden the clamorous city that had more than
once droned forth my doom, now rich in prospects and gayly reciting the
flattering tale of hope in my ears--the hope of becoming a bookseller in
face of my dreams of scholarship, eminence--fame, possibly! But this was
no dream. With a flitting smile I recognized the wayward cynicism and
irony of it. And in deep gratitude I gripped the hand of Andrews to
seal the bargain.
*BOOK THREE*
*CHAPTER XXII*
In returning to this all but neglected record of the things that made up
my life I realize with incredulity the passage of time. I realize, too,
that when you live the most fully, you write, reflect and record the
least. It was _after_ his years of slavery that Cervantes wrote Don
Quixote and inside a prison house that Bunyan and Sir Walter Raleigh
composed their best-known works.
I shall never compose "works", I am certain now, for my lot is business
to the end. Three times during the past two years I have been in
England and in France, attending sales, buying books, manuscripts and
libraries, and very narrowly I escaped sailing on the _Lusitania_, which
would probably have been the end of these memoirs and of me. Would it
have mattered? To the children, possibly. Not to me, certainly--except
in so far as they would have suffered by my exit. For though the
business of books is to me the one nearest akin to pleasure, it is
nevertheless a chaffering and a haggling in the market-place--the
reverse of all my tastes and aptitudes.
It is odd that externally I bear few of the marks of the indolent
lotus-eating soul that possesses me. People viewing me superficially
might think, with Andrews, that I am fitted for stratagems, spoils
and--business.
Yet how happy I was when Andrews made me his offer! How I plunged into
his affairs--our affairs--and gave them all my energy! The children, I
exulted inwardly, the children are now safe!
But nature abhors anomalies. To work for children alone is not enough.
One desires to work for a bosom companion, for some beloved woman, whose
breast is home, whose warm arms are the one refuge against the world,
whose eyes are the bright gateways to heaven. That fulfillment I never
had and never shall have. Hence the anomalous sense of frustration, of
incompleteness. Some psychoanalyst would doubtless brand this as a
well-known middle-aged complex, call it by name like a familiar and
proceed to "cure" me of it. But I am not going to any psychoanalyst. I
know my trouble and also its name---though I cannot call it after King
OEdipus or King David or the like.
_Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse_ mourned the flame-like Francesca
da Rimini. And the name and the author of my trouble is not Galeotto
but--Alicia--Alicia whom I did not take and now can never have.
I am no romantic Paolo to Alicia's Francesca. I am a business man--yes,
a middle-aged, almost alert New York business man of the approved
hard-varnish variety--with good, pat stereotyped phrases and a show of
manly sincerity. Who does not know that straight talk of most of us
modern business men, under which we can hide so much cunning, shrewdness
and chicane? Could I not have simply taken possession of Alicia by a
sort of eminent domain? Oh, I don't mean anything improper! I mean by
all the astute and usual methods, the bell--book--candle and
orange-blossoms sort of thing, like the hardheaded Mr. Pettigrew of
American novels, or the wicked marquess or baronet of the English.
But I could not--I could not.
Under the carapace of the turtle or the armadillo is a body of flesh
with nerves and blood and viscera--a soft living part. So also under
the shell of the maligned business man.
An infinite pity and tenderness stir me at the thought of Alicia. I
suddenly feel in my inmost soul the softness of her cheek and it touches
me as the delicacy of one's own child's flesh must touch one. If I had
a child of my own--but on that I must not let my mind dwell even in
dreams.
Yet, why not? Dreams are all I am going to have and, pardie, it is more
than I deserve. Much, very much has been given to me and I ought to
feel profoundly grateful. And I do feel grateful.
But--Alicia--is engaged.
I can hardly write the words, though these are the words that have
driven me to writing again.
I have been happy these two years and more--happy in my fashion. In
midst of the tumult and throb of the war spirit I, in common with other
business men, have been buying and selling and chaffering and
huckstering, rearing Laura's children, educating Alicia and prospering.
If newly rich labor has been buying motor cars, it must be admitted that
some abruptly enriched business men and their wives have had time to
turn from furs and bric-a-brac and interior decorating so far afield as
my own remote specialty. They have been buying books--libraries by the
yard, classics and first editions by the hundred. The fact that that
admirable American book-man, the young Widener, had managed to gather a
magnificent collection during his all too brief life, has stimulated
many to emulation. Shelley need no longer weep for Adonais. I have
sold collections of Keats _en bloc_ to gentlemen who have probably never
read Endymion in their lives, and even now I am holding a set of Shelley
first editions only because I could not bring myself to part with them
to the very crude, almost illiterate, customer who proves to be the
highest bidder. Rather would I sell them for less to a more enlightened
bookman. Oh, yes, I have been happy in my fashion. Yet, glancing over
the few brief scattering entries in this record, why does the tinge of
melancholy persist?
I find a quotation from Anatole France under date of some twenty-six
months ago to the point that "even the most desired changes have their
sadness, for all that we leave behind is a part of ourselves. One must
die to one sort of life in order to enter another."
What is it that I regret or regretted--unless it is the mere passage of
time that makes me older and older? And again I find:
"Life is a game best played by children and by those who retain the
hearts of children. To those who have the misfortune to grow up it is
often a nightmare." There it is again--the persistent note of regret.
Time will take them all from me--all, including Alicia. And then?--How
did I ever come to let passion steal into my heart?
I find some phrases from Hazlitt to the effect that "we take a dislike
to our favorite books after a time," and that "If mankind had wished for
what is right they might have had it long ago," and then later, a sort
of credo, or confession or apologia _pro vita mea_:
"This is a commercial age. If business is the path of least resistance
to a livelihood, so that a slenderly endowed creature like myself may
cling to the surface of the planet and pass on what has been
accomplished to the generations that must accomplish more--if that is
the easiest way, then that is the way of nature, my way. All business
may be more or less ignoble. But, if so, who in the present state of
evolution can wholly escape the ignoble?"
Yet I have not altered in essentials. Who shall say how I thrill at the
sight of beauty, or the rare work of a master? I cannot declare how my
pulses throb when a new author swims into my ken--his new voice, his
fresh note catch at my throat like a haunting melody and I have known my
eyes to fill at the sheer joy of the discovery.
Oh, you, Randolph Byrd, aged seventy, when you come with your white hair
and purblind eyes to scan these notes, will you receive them at their
face value? Will you believe that the sense of frustration underlying
them has to do with careers and fame and lives of Brunetto Latini? No,
my septuagenarian self--I have a respect for you and a warm pity. I
cannot so coldly gull you--take advantage of you! Damn careers and
business and Brunetto Latinis! I want love, passionate love and
children of my own loins and the beloved on my heart, and just the
common run of happiness that a thousand thousand men are at this moment
enjoying. Then why have I not taken it? Why have I not taken Alicia as
King David took Bathsheba, or whatever the lady's name was, in virtue of
sheer desire and power? Because I have been a finicking, hyper-refined,
hyper-sensitive fool, my aged friend; and now that she is engaged to be
married I should be--but now it's too late! Always, always, Randolph
Byrd, you have been too late!
All the world can give me advice and analyze me, yet nobody really knows
me. Dibdin, who knows me best of all, in reality knows me least. He
summed me up, or thought he did, before his periodical departure for
parts unknown, some twenty months ago.
"You see," he said, "you've really got a genius for kids. I told you
how I felt about Laura. Yet what do I do? I go off to the devil knows
where, because I am a tramp. That is stronger in me than anything else.
But you, you see, gave up everything else for them--everything. Who but
a fool could blink the meaning of that?"
Who but a fool, my dear old Dibdin, could be so blind as you? Who but a
fool could fail to see that I am consumed with passion for Alicia and
had only been waiting, dreading, hoping until she might be old enough to
know her own mind and heart--and waiting too long?
And now Alicia is engaged--and to my own nephew, Randolph--and life for
me, life in the rich, vivid, colorful, romantic sense of the word, is at
an end.
My nephew Randolph--a sophomore at Columbia--engaged to Alicia!
Flashes of savagery strike into my heart when I could find it possible
to hate that youth--notably when I catch the Pendleton expression in his
face, the Pendleton shiftiness in his eyes. At such moments I
experience an intense, all but irresistible desire to grapple with him
as on a certain occasion I grappled with his father, to knock his head
against the wall and choke that brazen-faced, insolent temerity out of
him with his last breath.
But I am only Uncle Ranny--and I don't suppose I shall do anything of
the kind. Have I not brought him up? Have I not labored and toiled for
him, watched over him? Is he not my child like the rest? There is
something about the person, the very flesh of the child one has reared
that disarms one's anger and turns the heart to water. His bad manners
hurt more deeply, yet they are not like the bad manners of a stranger.
His transgressions are not like others' transgressions. In God's name,
your soul cries out, there must be redeeming features, extenuating
conditions! Have I not had a hand in shaping him? And was he not
ineffably endearing as a child? He may be somewhat wild now, but is not
all youth like that on its path to manhood?
This is a parent's point of view, I see, not a rival's. Why, why did
that boy, of all the males in the world, take Alicia from me?
It was only yesterday that it happened, but already it seems like an
ancient calamity that stamps its victim with the slow grind of years of
pain, blanches his flesh and presses him down into the limbo of those
undergoing the slow drawn-out tortures of life.
Yet I was happy yesterday. I came home at one, as I do of Saturdays,
and the early April sunshine, while still treacherous, was nevertheless
full of dazzling promise of spring, of relief from the dread winter we
have endured. My head had been buzzing with schemes like a hive. The
lease of the chalet expires in May and I was full of vain notions of
taking a larger, more attractive house that should be a suitable setting
for Alicia. Only one year more of college is left for Alicia after this
and then--and then--Alicia had talked of entering the shop, and I should
have her with me all the time. How I longed and looked forward to that
day! Alicia my constant companion, sharing every moment of the day,
going and coming together, lunching together, discussing everything.
Who shall blame me if I saw visions?
And then, perhaps an hour after lunch, they suddenly entered my study
together--Randolph a half-pace or so behind her with something hangdog
in his look--an expression I detest in him--and Alicia, head high,
flushed with a look of desperate resolution about the somewhat haggard
eyes that startled me.
I had been occupied in turning over the pages and collating a Caxton, a
genuine Caxton that I meant later to show to Alicia--"The Royal Book,"
(1480, 2d year of the Regne of King Rychard the thyrd)--a beautiful
incunabulum.
Randolph moved abruptly forward with a jerk of the head, and, his eyes
failing to meet mine, he blurted out huskily:
"We're engaged, Uncle Ran--'Licia and I!"
"What!" I yelled harshly as one in pain and fell against the back of my
chair. "What--what on earth do you mean!"
But he merely looked away, making no response.
"Is this true, Alicia?" I shouted, as if to overtop the tumult in my
breast.
"Yes, Uncle Ranny," breathed Alicia, her eyes gazing into mine with a
look so poignantly sad and charged with pain that it froze me as I was
about to speak. I sat for a space, my mouth open, our eyes dwelling
together for an instant. And then, as by a sudden effort, Alicia smiled
valiantly, laid her hand stoutly on the shrinking boy's arm, and then
abruptly she lowered her gaze.
"But--but why--why now?" I spluttered. "You are both so young--you only
a sophomore, Randolph--and you, Alicia--in God's name, why now?"
Alicia glanced at Randolph as though depending on him to speak and then
contemptuously giving it up as hopeless, she straightened her shoulders
bravely and murmured in low distinct tones:
"I promised Randolph. He wants me to be engaged to him and I promised
him I would."
"You--you mean you--you love each other?" I stammered miserably, for
every word was a knife thrust into my own heart.
The lad Randolph was now shamed into a little manliness.
"Yes, we do, Uncle Ranny," came forth in his throaty voice. "That's
just it--we--we love each other. And--'Licia has promised to be engaged
to me 'til I am through college and get a job."
"I suppose it had to come, Uncle Ranny," explained Alicia with what
seemed to me a very labored serenity. "We grew up together. We have
been such chums and--and Randolph seemed to--to need me. Don't you see,
Uncle Ranny?" There was a piteous note of appeal in her voice which
only seemed to lacerate me the more. But I could not speak.
The sunshine had gone out of the April afternoon. Waves of darkness
seemed to be beating over me, and the strength and energy of a few
minutes back had oozed out of me like so much water. So weak and
shattered did I feel that on a sudden I was seized by a panic fear of
collapse.
"Please leave me now," my lips, strange cold dead things that seemed in
no way a part of my body, brought forth mechanically, yet with heavy
effort. "It's--it's a shock--we'll discuss it later." I do not envy
those two the sight of my face at that moment. I am pretty certain
Randolph did not see it, for he turned away, but I am in doubt about
Alicia. Her eyes were brimming with tears and she came toward me with a
sudden curious movement of the hands, as though she felt rather than saw
her way. Then abruptly her hands dropped to her side and she paused and
turned back sharply.
They left me then, both of them. I remained alone--crushed, stunned,
alone.
And suffering agony though I am, there is now in me a strange new sense
of familiarity with suffering. Anguish and heartache, thank God, are no
longer novelties. That much anodyne the sheer business of living does
bring to one. I am as sensitive to them as ever I was in my prehistoric
days of ease and leisure and reclusion, but they are old acquaintances
now. I must go on, hiding my dolor as best I can, working for the sunny
comely lad, Jimmie, so brilliant with promise, for the grave sweet-faced
Laura, replica of her mother, and--yes--for Randolph and Alicia. I
cannot rant and I must not betray any grief or make a spectacle of
myself before them. I must carry on.
"Small as might be your lamp," observes the sage of Belgium, "never part
with the oil that feeds it, but only give the flame that crowns it."
A poor and tenuous oil is that of my peculiar lamp, a petty flame and a
murky result. But such as they are, I must guard them.
I cannot down the feeling, however, that there is some mystery, some
secret reason behind this lightning-like development between Alicia and
the boy. With a leaden heart I must record it that he has proven a
disappointment to me. His mediocrity as a student concerns me less than
his general tendency to shiftiness, his unsteady eye and his heavy
drooping nether lip when he tells me that he "spent the night with the
fellows at the frat house", that "a fellow's got to associate with
friends of his own age", that "he's got to make friends", and so on. He
is through his allowance four days after receiving it and repeatedly
begs for more. More than once I have caught the odor of alcohol about
him as he came in late at night, and only the fact that he is Laura's
boy and that I have reared him has made me condone his many offenses.
Have I been spoiling him, I wonder? Would I have condoned and tolerated
as much if he were my own son? He is over a year younger than Alicia and
though a handsome enough lad in his way, I fancy I see too much of
Pendleton in his face for comfort. His father also was markedly
good-looking when he married poor Laura. Have I, I wonder, been rearing
another Pendleton?
But Alicia, the bright, the fair, the radiant, almost a woman now, with
more wisdom than I ever before found in women--how came she to do such a
thing as to engage herself to him? I can understand his possible
infatuation. But a girl, I had always believed, learns her woman's arts
by instinct. How can she be so blind to the boy's character and
defects? Can it be that she really loves him? Love, love, love! That
blind force that is said to move the stars--why can it be so haggard,
gaunt and painful a thing in the ordinary light of day? Woe is me that
I am too dull to comprehend it! Like the blooded horse in _Werther_ that
bites his own vein to ease his overstrained heart, I must bleed
inwardly--I must suffer and endure.
*CHAPTER XXIII*
Since it is for you, Randolph Byrd, aged seventy, that this vagrom
journal has been written, I should deem myself derelict and insincere if
I did not convey to you in every detail the sort of creature you were in
middle life. If you fail to approve of your progenitor, I shall know
that I have been exact, for I fail to approve of him myself.
We are at war. Every fiber in me should thrill to the President's
declaration of war against Germany, but here I have been calmly turning
the pages of "The Description of a Maske", by Thomas Campion (S.
Dunstone's Churchyard in Fleetstreet 1607). It is a beautiful volume in
excellent preservation, one of five brought in by a young man who is
going to enlist. He inherited them from a grandfather, possibly an old
fellow like you, who held them precious. I bought them eagerly, for I
know where I can dispose of them, though I should dearly like to place
them in my own shelves. We shall make a profit on them, and a handsome
one. That is the sort of thought that runs through my head, Randolph
Byrd, _aet._ 70, and that is the sort of man you were thirty odd years
ago. You never were young in your youth, my fine friend. Perhaps you
will grow younger as you grow older.
But that is not all. Above the sensuous pleasure in the books and
overriding the thought of lucre, is the strange romance of Alicia and
your namesake, Randolph Pendleton. It blasts all my previous
conceptions of romance. Where is the color and the warmth and the glory
of it? I had expected after their announcement of a few days ago that I
should be bitterly engaged in watching a glorious April dawn that would
blind me with its strange flames because it was not for me. Instead I
seem to see only a somber murky twilight whenever I surprise those two
in private colloquy. The mere thought of the possibility of Alicia
loving me (fantastic arrogance!) was wont to irradiate my heart and to
make me positively light-headed, so that I could scarcely withhold my
lips from smiling publicly. But my young cub of a nephew seems haggard
and obsessed by care, and upon Alicia's eyes I have more than once
observed traces of tears.
What can be the meaning of that?
Were I in reality a parent instead of masquerading as one, I should no
doubt endeavor to fathom this mystery. But you see, I am still, as
always, inadequate. The truth is, I dare not yet talk to Alicia about
her love. A little later, Randolph Byrd, a little later--when the pain
is more decently domesticated in my bosom and will not fly out like a
newly unchained hound. Meanwhile is it not best that I fasten my
attention upon Thomas Campion his Maske?
I may fill a little of the interim perhaps by telling you what I had
passed over in the busy silence of the last two or three years, that
Fred Salmon has attempted to make _amende honorable_. Fred Salmon, who
was the means of my losing all of the meager capital you should have
lived upon in your old age, has reappeared with a commendable attempt at
restitution.
Begoggled and be-linen-dustered, he drove up to the chalet some ten
months ago in a magnificently shining car of bizarre design and he
entered my door booming like not too distant thunder.
"Hello, Ranny!" he shouted out, and in a twinkling my study seemed to be
brimming with him, inundated by him, overflowing with Fred and his
Salmonism. "Have a cigar, my boy--how are you?--how is the family?--how
is the book business?"
"Which am I to answer first?" I grinned mildly.
"Never mind!" roared Fred. "I see you're all right. Ask me how's tricks
with me?" He was so obviously bursting with news that I complied at
once.
"Very well--how are your tricks, Fred?"
"Booming, booming, Randolph, my boy--and kiting! Jack Morgan himself
wouldn't blush to be in what I've got into! Put that on your piano,
Randolph, my boy!"
Fred is one of those who likes to talk of Jack Morgan, Harry Davison,
Gene Meyer and Barney Baruch, as though they were his daily cocktail
companions. This distant familiarity of moneyed men gives him a strange
exuberance.
"Consider that I have tried it on my piano and like the prelude," I told
him. "Now for the rest of the opus."
"O-puss! Oh, fudge!" he laughed. "Gosh! You're a great old bird,
Rannie--great old bird! Well, listen here, fellah--" he ran on, wild
horses could not have held him--"you think I like to brag, don't you?
Don't deny it--you know you do! Well, it's God's truth, Randolph, I do.
Some folks are like that--me, for instance. But I had nothing to brag
about, see? So I made up my mind I'd get into something so good it could
stand any amount of bragging. So what do I do, but go into oil--oil,
Randolph, my lad--and now I've got it--I've got it! Rich? Say, I'm
going to be filthy with it, Randolph, positively oozing, crawling with
money. That's how it's with me, boy!"
"Congratulations!" I held out my hand. He gripped it hard. "And what
do you do with your millions?" I added blandly.
"Oh, I ain't got 'em yet!" he shouted. "But they're coming,
Randolph--they're on the way, on the way! I hear the sound of their dear
little golden feet right now--sweetest sound you ever heard. And that
reminds me!--" And on a sudden he opened his duster and from his bosom
pocket brought forth a number of dazzling yellow certificates with
gorgeous blood red seals upon them.
"See these?" his large features were beaming a noon-day flood of
generosity. "Remember that twenty-five thousand you put in of your own
spondulix just before Salmon and Byrd went blooy? Well, this is that!
Here is a thousand shares of Salmon Oil to cover that, Randolph--and
some day you'll cash in with interest, my boy--big interest too--and
don't you forget it!"
I stared at him in silence for a space. But so genuine and sincere
seemed his air of righteous triumph that I repressed the Rabelaisian
laughter that shook me inwardly and only said:
"Thank you, Fred. You're a--white man."
"Don't say a word!" shouted Fred, thumping me on the back. "It's all to
the good!"
"By the way," I could not help adding after a glowing moment, "what is
the stock selling at now?"
Not for nothing am I the partner of the canny Andrews.
"Oh, now," retorted Fred in a tone somewhat injured at my lack of
romanticism--"now it ain't selling at all--yet! It's not issued yet,
see? We haven't floated it yet. I'm giving you this out of mine. You
can't sell it for a year. This is organizer's stock. But never fear,
my boy, this will net you more than twenty-five thousand some day, or my
name's Hubbard Squash!"
There was nothing to do but to hail Fred as a philanthropist and
humanitarian and to thank him for his golden-hued certificates,--sweet
augury of fabulous riches to come. I keep a small iron safe in my study
now to house such precious objects as the Campion Maske and the Caxton
that I bring home overnight or longer for study and collation. Very
solemnly I clicked the combination lock, opened the safe and carefully,
with ritualistic, almost hieratic movements, I reverently put Fred's
certificates into one of the little drawers. Fred watched me
attentively. That ceremony seemed to answer his sense of the dramatic.
"Yes, sir!" he nodded with great satisfaction, as a period to my
movements. "You have put away a little gold mine there, my boy. And
you don't have to work it, either. I'll do that! All you'll have to do
is to cash the dividend checks. And a word in your ear, Randolph: If I
'phone you and tell you to buy more, just you do it, boy--just you do
it!" Without describing to him my momentary mental reservation I, as it
were, promised.
"And, oh, say," bubbled Fred, struck by a sudden memory, "who do you
think is in on this property with me? You'd never guess in the world,
so might as well tell you! It's our old college chum, Visconti--the
guinea--and a great little sport that guinea is, let your uncle Fred
tell you. He's got the spondulix, boy, and he'll have more, he will.
He'll strike it rich on this deal, you bet your hat, and he'll be richer
than ever. And say!" one idea seemed to follow another in Fred's brain
like salmon running over rapids. "Hasn't he got a peacherine of a
daughter, the old boy? Know her? Great girl, Gina--wonderfully good
sport! She and I--say, we're great pals, that girl and I--cabarets,
dancing"--and he shook and quivered in a sudden fragmentary movement of
the latest dance--"great sport!" he concluded, panting ponderously.
"Angels and ministers of grace defend us!" I heard myself murmuring.
"Here! What you praying about?" demanded Fred, humorously suspicious.
"It was an invocation, Fred," I explained, "it's the most wonderful
thing I ever heard. Why, you and Gina are meant for each other. She's
a fine American girl"--I almost said "fina Americana girl," "and
you--you're a--you were simply created for each other!"
"Say," grinned Fred exultantly, "honest, Randolph, do you think so?"
"I do, most certainly."
"Well, well--wait and see. Stop, look, listen--watchful waiting is the
word," he muttered mysteriously. "Ta-ta, old man, I've got to shoot away
from here. Now remember what I said: Don't buy until you hear from me,
nor don't sell until you hear from me!"
"Stay to lunch," I begged. "After all, it's Sunday."
"Sorry, can't," he returned importantly. "Big things brewing. See you
again. Ta-ta!" And he was gone.
Such was the recrudescence of Fred Salmon and the certificates are still
in my safe in witness of it, and greatly to my surprise they have a
market value now, even though I cannot sell them. Judging by the curb
quotations the golden-hued leaflets are worth ten thousand dollars
to-day. But I know too well that something will happen before the year
is up and they will be worthless again. How should it be otherwise,
since they are mine?
Fred Salmon was never meant to be a whisperer or a negotiator of secret
treaties. The children in the house that Sunday morning could not fail
to overhear him and ever since he has been known to them and referred to
as "Brewster's Millions."
There is no contour to life. Life is chaotic. Whenever I thought of
Fred as marrying at all, I had mentally mated him with Gertrude. That,
in my opinion, would have been an ideally eugenic combination. But
instead, Fred is obviously attaching himself to Gina and Gertrude has
been eighteen months married to Minot Blackden, the rediscoverer of
glass-staining. They live happily in apartments, about a mile apart,
and I am told breakfast together occasionally.
And this notation, oh, my aged correspondent, proves to me that I am not
a novelist. For were I a novelist, I should doubtless idealize these
pictures--romanticize as I note them. Gertrude--my old cold flame,
Gertrude--married to Blackden! There ought to be a chapter of that--a
veritable lyric epithalamium upon those highly modern spousals.
Blackden should fix them forever in a series of stained-glass windows!
Instead of that, my feeling is, "What am I to Gertrude now, or what is
Gertrude to me? No more than Hecuba to the Player in 'Hamlet.'" Always
in place of romance, reality seems to break in, to take possession of my
pen and, willy-nilly, I find myself recording events as they happen,
without varnish or adornment.
But if my pen is so veracious as I have intimated above, why is it so
overproud and under-honest as not to record the torture that persists
beneath the seemingly calm surface of life, the agony, the anguish of
seeing Alicia daily under unaltered conditions, the same beloved Alicia,
yet with a barrier reared before her to which the screen of the Sleeping
Beauty was a miserable clipped privet hedge, to which Brynhild's circle
of fire was a pitiful conjuror's trick?
Having been forced by the pressure of circumstance into ordered and
natural life, I am now maddened by a passion to straighten it altogether
out of its odd contortions and entanglements. My soul cries out to live
naturally and virtually whispers to me every day that natural living is
the first requisite to constructively social living. I see heights
glimmering of service, of great impersonal love--but only through
personal love lies my path toward them.
In other words, I am now aware that you cannot, like another Aaron
Latta, "violate the feelings of sex." A few primal instincts there are,
so tremendously important, so powerfully imbedded in the human, in the
animal organism, that to violate them is to twist and crumple the
personality, the very soul within one--life itself. A normal man must
wive and beget and rear before his imagination is disentangled and freed
for the constructive and corporate life of humanity--before his use to
society is real and stable, reliable and not a sham.
I have reared children, but I have never had a wife or ever begotten any
children of my own. Alicia embodies the completion of life for me--and
Alicia is now pledged to some one else, leaving my world empty and
meaningless. Come what will and avoid me as she may, existence cannot
go on in this manner. I must take the risk of private talk with
Alicia--to my pain, possibly, but for my information inevitably. Is she
in reality in love with my nephew?
"Alicia," I began gruffly this evening after dinner, "I want to talk to
you. Will you come into my study in a few minutes?"
She lifted her eyes to mine searchingly for an instant and lowered them
again swiftly.
"Yes, Uncle Ranny," she murmured. There are times when I feel I could
jump out of my skin, as the phrase is, when she calls me Uncle Ranny.
That "uncleship" has been my undoing. Yet what a wealth of prerogatives
it has brought me!
I chose this evening because somehow all the world lay tranquillized.
Gusts of wind and plumps of April rain during the day gave way to a
great stillness even over this suburban countryside, where the rumble of
the trains is never absent; but the humid smell of the newly stirring
earth was still in my nostrils and our little lawn was already green
with young grass. One could almost hear the sap mounting in the trees.
There was a vernal feeling of peace and hope in the house--in my very
nerves.
We were in particular good humor moreover under the influence of
Jimmie's table talk. That boy is a source of constant delight and
bubbles vitality like a fountain. His presence in a room positively
gives the effect of added light. He is just now in love with long words
and announced that he "would give me a composition on how to tie a
necktie." He meant a demonstration and we all laughed heartily.
"Never mind," murmured Jimmie cheerfully to himself. "Demonstration--I
won't forget that one."
Griselda declares he is exactly as I was at his age. But I am certain I
never was half so delightful.
Laura was not with us. She is at a boarding-school at Rye this year and
comes home only upon alternate week-ends. Laura, sweet and grave-faced
like her mother, is never as hilarious as the rest of us often are. My
nephew Randolph was also absent. He, I suppose, was dining at his
eternal "frat house."
It occurred to me how happy we could be, just the three of us, Alicia,
Jimmie and I--plus, of course, Griselda. Alicia is beautiful now with a
tender coloring and movements of exuberant gayety that are like wine to
the heart. When her face is animated and her eyes flashing with
merriment, the house seems charged with the very elixir of delight. Of
late, however, I have seen little of her gayety and more of her pensive,
silent mood and that has been depressing. But to-night Alicia was her
old lovely self of the days before the engagement and I seized the
occasion to discover what I could about that puzzle.
Alone in my study, puffing at a cigarette which might have been a string
of hemp for all the taste I discerned in it, I feasted my mental eyes
for the _n_th time upon the picture of Alicia married to me, greeting me
as a wife upon my home-coming at night, nestling in my arms for the
delicious intimate fragmentary talk of the day lived through, of the
myriad little threads that take their place in the woof of life only
after the beloved has touched them with her love. The long quiet
evenings of intimacy and the nights which, in Goethe's phrase, become a
beautiful half of the life span.
Am I immoral, O Randolph of seventy? Then I dismally fear I am immoral.
For these are the pictures, old man, and these the thoughts that produce
them--bad as they certainly are for me. For Alicia is my ward--my
child. And whatever happens she must not suspect them. With an effort
and a corrugated brow I dismissed them as I heard Alicia's step on the
doorway. Very straight and demure she was as she entered, bringing with
her that aura of infinitude which always quickens my foolish pulses.
"Sit down, Alicia," I waved her to a chair with an attempt at a smile.
"Is anything the matter, Uncle Ranny?"
"No--no--nothing--" with exaggerated naturalness. "I only wanted to talk
to you."
"Wasn't Jimmie cunning!" she laughed, slipping into a chair. "He says
he is going to be a writer like Mark Twain and let you sell his books.
This environment, he says, is enough to make a writer of any fellow." I
laughed.
"Tell me, Alicia--" I began briskly enough, and then, noting her eyes
upon me, those deep eyes of a woman, I faltered:
"Do you--did you--when did this love affair between you and Randolph
begin?"
Alicia made no answer.
"Was it sudden--spontaneous--like that?" and I snapped my fingers, still
clinging to the spirit of lightness with which we had left the table.
"I have loved all of them--always," she murmured, gazing downward, "ever
since I've been with them."
"I know that--so have I--so do I--" and my laugh sounded in my own ears
like the grating of rough metallic surfaces together. "But I don't go
marrying you all--do I? That's a very serious business, Alicia, this
marrying."
How dull and prosy the words fell upon the air about me! Does middle
age mean being prosy when you mean to be alert, bright and crisp? Yet I
feel younger than any of them.
Her face lifting slowly and her wide-open gray eyes searching mine
suddenly struck me as so piteously sad that I then and there wrote
myself down an ass and a cad and turned away to hide my shame.
"I know it's serious, Uncle Ranny!" and her voice was like the muted
strings of a violin. "But don't you think I understand? Please don't
be afraid of me--won't you trust me--please?" And she left her chair
and made a step toward me with an imploring gesture of the hands.
"I am not a designing woman," she declared, with a half smile, and then
she ran on more vehemently, "I know that Randolph is younger than I. He
can tire of me a hundred times before he is ready to marry. Oh, we are
a long way from marrying. But he--he begged me to--to be engaged to him
and--and for certain reasons that I can't tell _any one_, I agreed. And
I'll keep my word if he keeps--" and there she paused.
A solemn, quite maternal tenderness in her face as she uttered those
words so fascinated me that suddenly I saw her anew--a new Alicia--and
with a strange tug at the heartstrings I marveled at the miracle.
I saw her suddenly not as _a_ woman, but as Woman--the mother of
mankind, the nurse, the nourisher of all the generations. There was in
her eyes a something rapt and sybilline--she was the eternal maternal
principle in nature, the keeper of man's destiny, older than I, as old
as the race--the spirit of motherhood!
And _she_ was engaged to Randolph!
Then, as though emerging from a maze, I blurted out, "You are not in
love with him, then?" ...
"Of course I love him!" she returned with fire. "I love everybody in
this house. This has been home--heaven to me. Why shouldn't I?--Oh,
you Randolph Byrd!--why are men so blind? I've trusted you all my life
as if you were God--and you can't let me manage--but you've got to trust
me!--I can help--I must--I can't tell you--but you'll never regret
it!--Oh, please, Uncle Ranny, don't press me any more," she added more
plaintively, her force suddenly leaving her as though she had come to
herself with a shock. A gush of tears filled her eyes. "Don't be--too
hard on me," she faltered. Her hand groped for the chair behind her,
and she sank weeping into it.
"Alicia! My God!" I cried out, choking. Flesh and blood could not bear
it. I leaped toward her with a wild impulse to take her in my arms, to
comfort her, to pour out against her lips the truth that I trusted her
and loved her more than any human being on earth.... My arms went out
and all but engulfed her. But--strangely--I checked myself. A powerful
inhibition suddenly held me arrested as in a vise. Both the curse and
the blessing of middle age were inherent in that inhibition. If I had
so much as touched her then, I knew in a flash of quivering intuition
that the truth I had perforce so carefully guarded would be spilled like
water. If I touched her then, I was lost!
Hastily I retreated a step or two. For a space of intense charged
silence Alicia sat drying her eyes, a little crumpled Niobe, the while I
with trembling fingers of the hand that was on my table fumbled stupidly
in the cigarette box.
"Trust you, Alicia!" I muttered, with an immense effort to control my
voice. "I trust you beyond any one. You are mistress in this house.
Do whatever you think best. I didn't mean to make you cry, child,
forgive me. You--you have answered my question. Now don't let's have
any more tears--please!"
And lighting a cigarette automatically I now approached her and stood
nearer to her.
"I'm--s-sorry, Uncle Ranny," she faltered.
She had called me Randolph Byrd in her vehemence and the sound of it was
still reverberating in my brain. But I was back to Uncle Ranny, like
another Cinderella in her pumpkin.
"Do you know what you are, Alicia?" I stood over her, puffing and
chattering against time, "You are an old-fashioned girl, that's what you
are--with emotions and--and all sorts of curious traits, when you ought
to be discussing Freud and complexes and the single standard and the
right of woman--" the right of woman, I had almost said, to motherhood
irrespective of marriage, upon which I had heard a fashionable young
woman descant only that morning in the shop, apropos of a book she was
buying on the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. But I paused in time.
"And all sorts of things," I trailed off lamely.
"Yes," she murmured, a faint sad smile wavering on her lips. "I'll do
that next time. I'll deliver a lecture to Jimmie some evening on the
OEdipus complex--or why it's inadvisable to marry your own grandmother."
Clearly Alicia is no stranger to the patter of the time. But what a
glorious, natural creature she is!
Her touch of satire after her tempest of emotion ravished me as perhaps
nothing else. How adorable she was in all her moods!
"Do it now, Alicia," I cried.
"Now--I must go up and wash my face," she murmured. I couldn't bear to
let her go.
"Where--where is Randolph to-night?" I clutched at her presence for
another instant.
"I don't know," and with a sudden swift movement she glided out of the
room. If only she knew how bewitching she is! But perhaps she is
better ignorant.
One thing is certain. She has answered my question. She is not in love
with Randolph.
Dimly I perceive a faint cohesiveness to the swimming lines of the
picture. For some reason that she knows best, that seemed good to her,
she yielded to the boy's importunities. In some way the mother in her
is involved. How little, after all, I know of my eldest nephew! Alicia
doubtless knows more--much more.
But this is the query that rises before me like a black pillar in the
roadway:
Can that splendid girl be deliberately planning to sacrifice herself for
some real or fancied good to the boy--hoping the while that by the time
his dangers are past, he might tire of her, and release her plighted
word? But suppose he shouldn't tire--as indeed how could he? Can I risk
her happiness in that manner--her happiness which means to me a thousand
times more than my own?
My own happiness--useless to think of that new! Whatever Alicia did or
didn't betray, it was patently obvious that I am simply Uncle Ranny--as
ever was. For one instant of excitement I was Randolph Byrd--but only
for that. Ah, well, no use to dwell upon that bitterness now.
But about that young pair--what would I better do, my aged counselor?
Doubtless at seventy you will be able to give me the sagest of advice.
But that will be too late, friend, _par trop_, too late. I must watch
more closely from this moment on. I have much to learn, Randolph Byrd.
Of this, however, I am certain: One individual may with nobility
sacrifice his life for another. That, according to my lights, is
inherent in the very order of the universe. But every one is entitled
to his or her own happiness. Woe and shame to the crippled soul that
allows another to maim him in his happiness. Every human being has the
unequivocal right to his share!
I am rambling, I see. My brain doubtless is still awhirl with the
emotions and overtones of the interview with Alicia.
The headlines of the evening paper over which my tired eyes stray are
vocal with the war spirit, with news of bridges guarded, of
preparations, of munitions, of espionage, of ships, troops,
volunteering! But the import of these makes hardly an impression upon
my mind. So impersonal a thing is patriotism juxtaposed to the intimate
business of living!
It is late. I must go to bed. Alicia's fiance has not yet come in.
To-day arrived a letter which overshadows all else, which momentarily
put even my last night's talk with Alicia in the background and aroused
strange sleeping instincts of alarm, of combat, of savage alertness.
The last thing I could now have expected or thought of was this letter
from Pendleton. The brilliant April sun turned darker as I opened it
and the warmth went out of the vernal air, turning spring back into
winter. This is what I read: