Part 3

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_ PART III

I

While Raymond was taking his course abroad, Johnny McComas was shaping his course at home. A colorless, unbiased statement--as it was meant to be; one which, despite the slight difference between "taking" and "shaping," has no slant and displays no animus. Colorless, yes; too colorless, perhaps you will object. If so, I will reword the matter. While Raymond, then, was in Europe cultivating his gentler faculties, Johnny remained in America, strengthening certain specific powers. Or, again: while Raymond was preparing, or so he thought, for a desirably decorative place in the "world" (the world at large), Johnny was qualifying himself, as he felt sure, for an important and remunerative position in that particular section of the world to which he had decided to confine his endeavors. And if you ask me, after I have colored a colorless statement, to bias an unbiased one, I shall refuse. I am not taking sides. Each of them was following his own likings--not the worst of rules for a growing and avid organism.

Raymond wrote, of course,--it was impossible that he should not; and I think I showed one or two of his early letters to Johnny. Johnny was not exactly interested; vistas were opened for which he had no eyes and which possessed no appositeness to his own aims.

"Still over there, eh?" he asked, on my producing a second letter. "These are the years that count," he added. He was probably implying that the final score would make a better showing for the man who spent those years in his native and proper environment.

He disregarded the general drift of the letters, but hit upon one or two novel expressions, and repeated them, half-quizzical, half-intrigue.

"Still over there," I echoed. A developing nature, I felt, must reach out for whatever it needs; and, in simpler form, I said so.

"Well, I'm no misfit," he rejoined briefly. To "feel at home" at home--that, I presume, was the advantage he was asserting.

Johnny, "at home," was not long in outgrowing the opportunities of Dellwood Park. Though he did not make, quite yet, the central district, a year or two later found him in an older and more important suburb--one that had passed the first acuteness of speculation and had pretty well settled down to a regulated life. It was not a suburb of the first rank, nor even perhaps of the second; but it suited his tastes and his present purposes. The new business combined banking and real-estate, and the banking department even maintained a small safety-deposit vault. There was also some insurance; and a little of mortgage-broking. Johnny was a highly prized element in this business and was pleased from the start with the outlook.

"A fellow," he said, "can pick up more experience out there in a month than he could in one of these big downtown offices in a year."

Nearly two years passed before I was to see him in his new environment. There came up a bit of business for a suburban client of mine which could as well be settled at Johnny's place as at another. It needed no more than a glance to perceive that Johnny was the dominant factor of the little institution. His was the biggest roller-top seen through a maze of gilt letters on a vast sheet of plate glass by commuters turning the corner morning and evening. His, too, chiefly, the deference of clerks and office-boy. He was ruddy and robust, and seemed likely to impose himself anywhere, when the time came. Thus far, a small Forum, perhaps; but he was the Caesar in it. He did not disdain to attend to my affair himself; he even showed an emphatic, if not ponderous, bonhomie.

Just as I was getting up to leave, a man of forty-five or more, with the general aspect of a contractor's foreman, put in his head. It was Johnny's father.

"I guess you know George Waite," Johnny said to him; "and I guess he knows you."

We shook hands, under Johnny's direction, and said that he was right. His father's hand--rough and with a broken nail or two--was that of a superintendent who on occasion helped with a plank or a mortarboard. He had an open face and a pleasant manner; he was not at all the dominant personage I remembered meeting in that "yard," years ago. Johnny, it seemed, was putting up a row of small houses on the suburb's edge, and his father was supervising the job. Johnny was pretty direct in saying what he wanted done, or not done, in connection with this work; and if his father made a suggestion it was as likely as not to be overruled. He was only one of the senators in Johnny's little curia, and probably far from the most important of them.

Johnny's father got away, after all, before I did. Johnny asked me to stay for a little, and there was not much for a young professional man to do after catching the 4.52 into town. We sat for a while talking of indifferent matters. Johnny, surrounded by his own prosperity, asked with a show of interest, and without condescension, about my progress in the law, and I was replying with the cautious vagueness of one whose practice is not yet all he hopes it will be. During this time I had noticed, through the maze of gilt lettering, a limousine standing just round the corner. Its curtains were drawn: "an odd circumstance," I had commented inwardly. All of a sudden the street-door of the bank burst open, and three masked men, brandishing revolvers, rushed in.

"You cover the cashier!" cried one; "we'll take care of the vault!"

Johnny McComas flung open a drawer, seized a revolver of his own, sprang to his feet--

Pardon me, dear reader. The simple fact is, I have suddenly been struck by my lack of drama. You see how awkwardly I provide it, when I try. What bank robbers, I ask you, would undertake such an adventure at half-past four in the afternoon? I cannot compete with the films. As a matter of fact, the vault stood locked, the tellers were gone, even the office-boy had stolen away, and Johnny and I were left alone together, exchanging rather feebly, and with increasing feebleness, some faint and unimportant boyhood reminiscences.... I feel abysmally abashed; let us open a new section.

II

As I have said, Raymond wrote. He wrote, for example, with a voluminous duteousness, to his parents. His letters to them, so far as they came to my notice, were curious; probably he meant that they should be saved and should become a sort of journal of his travels. They were almost completely impersonal. There was plenty of straight description; but beyond some slight indications of his own movements, past or intended, there was no narration. He never mentioned people he met; he never described his adventures--if he had any. He seemed to be saying to Europe, as Rastignac said to Paris, "A nous deux, maintenant!" He was at grips with the Old World, and that sufficed.

His letters to me, however, were not devoid of personal reactions. These commonly took an aesthetic turn. An early letter from Rome had a good deal to say about the Baroque. He met it everywhere; it was an abomination; it tried his soul. Fontana and Maderna, the Gog and Magog of architecture, had flanked the portals of art and had let through a hideous throng of artificialities and corruptions.... The word "Baroque" was new to me, and I looked it up. I learned that it described, not a current movement, as I had supposed, but an influence which had exhausted itself nearly three hundred years ago. But it was still recent and real to Raymond. And I learned, further, that this style had modern champions who could say a good word for it. In any event, it might be accepted calmly as a valuable and characteristic link in the general historic chain.

In another letter he was ecstatic over the Gothic brickwork of Cremona. It was so beautiful, he said in as many words, that it made his heart ache; not often did Raymond let himself go like that. Eager to follow his track--and to understand, if possible, his heart, however peculiar and baffling--I looked up, in turn, North Italian brickwork. This was twice three hundred years old. But it had stirred other modern hearts than Raymond's; for an English aesthete had tried (and almost succeeded) to impose it on his country as a living mode. "Very well," I said; "Italian brickwork may reasonably be accepted as a modern interest."

Raymond, before descending to Italy, had spent some months in Paris. Circumstances had enabled him to frequent a few studios, and his first letter to me from that city had been rather technical and "viewy." Incidentally, he had seen something of the students, and had found little to approve, either in their manners or their morals. He left Paris without reporting any moral infractions of his own and settled down for some stay in Florence. He was studying the language further, he reported: a language, he said, which was easy to begin, but hard to continue--the longer you studied the less you really knew. However, he knew enough for daily practical purposes. His pension was pleasant; small, and the few visitors were mostly English.

But there were one or two Americans in the house, and they came home a few months later with their account of Raymond and his ways. It was needed; for the three or four letters that he had printed in one of our newspapers contained little beyond descriptions of set sights--to think we should have continued to welcome that sort of thing so long! Well, these people reported him as conscientiously busy, for his hour each day, with grammar and dictionary. He was also getting his hand in painting; and he had "taken on" musical composition, even to instrumentation. "Too many irons!" commented my lively young informant. "And I think I should get my painting in Paris and my music in Germany." She also said that Raymond had next to no social life--he showed hardly the slightest desire to make acquaintances.

"An old Frenchman came to the place for a few days," she continued; "and as he was leaving he said your friend was living in an ivory tower--the windows few, the door narrow, and the key thrown away. 'Ivory tower'--do you understand what that means?"

"No," I said. But of course I understand now.

III

As a consequence of my call at Johnny McComas's office (or as a probable consequence), I received, some six months later, an invitation to his wedding. You will expect to hear that I was present, and perhaps acted as usher, or even as best man. Nothing of the sort was the case, however; I was absent at the time in the East. Nor are you to imagine me as continually following, at close range, the vicissitudes, major and minor, which made up his life, or made up Raymond's. An exact, perpetual attendance of fifty years is completely out of the question. Don't expect it.

Johnny married, I was told, a young woman living in his own suburb, the daughter of a manufacturer of some means. I met him about two months after his great step. He was still full of the new life, and full of the new wife.

"She's fine!" he declared. "Not too fine, but fine enough for me."

He cocked his hat to one side.

"Do you know, I talk to her just as I would to a man."

"Johnny!" I began, almost gasping.

"Well, what's wrong? Ever said anything much out of the way to you? Ever heard me say anything to any other fellow?"

"Why, no...." I was obliged to acknowledge.

"Then why the row? It's all easy as an old shoe. She likes it."

"I know. But--talking with a woman ... It isn't quite like...."

"Don't make any mistake. Just have the big things right, and they'll overlook lots of the little ones."

"H'm," I said doubtfully. "I supposed it was just the other way. Lay a lot of stress on certain little things, and larger shortcomings won't bother them. Bring her a bunch of flowers to-day, and she'll help you deed away the house and lot to-morrow."

"Fudge!" said Johnny. "I mean the really big things. There's only two. Ground to stand on and air to breathe."

"That is to say...?"

"A platform under her feet and an atmosphere about her. Well, she's got me to stand on and to surround her. She understands it. She likes it. Nothing else matters much."

"Ah!" said I.

"I'm her bedrock, and I'm her--How do they say it? I'm her--envelopment, as those painting fellows put it."

"See here, Johnny," I protested; "Don't get anachronistic. We are only in 1884. That expression won't reach America for ten or fifteen years. Have some regard for dates."

"It won't? Wasn't it in your friend's letter?"

"What friend?"

"Why, Prince; when he was in Paris. Didn't you read it to me?"

I remembered.

"Do you know," he went on, "I've been straight as a string--ever since. And I'm going to keep so."

"I should hope so, indeed."

"Whatever I may have been before. But I think it's better for a young fellow to dash in and find out than to keep standing on the edge and just wonder."

"Well, I don't know, Johnny," I returned soberly. "I'm going to be married myself, next month. And I expect to go to my bride just as pure--"

"No preaching," said Johnny. "The slate's wiped clean. Adele's all right for me, and I'm all right to her."

He adjusted his hat, making the two sides of the brim level.

"We're going to move shortly," he stated. "The business can go on where it is, for a while, but we're going to live somewhere else."

Perhaps in the city itself, it appeared; perhaps in some suburb toward the north. But no longer in one to the west. Johnny was developing some such scent for social values and some such feeling for impending topographical changes as had begun to stir the great houses that were grouped about the Princes.

"So you're the next one?" he said presently. "It's the only life. Good luck to you. And who's going to see you through? Prince?"

"Yes--'my friend.' I'm glad you remember him."

"Oh yes; I can remember him when I try. But I don't try very hard or very often. Back in this country?"

"He is."

"What's he doing?" Johnny fixed his hard blue eyes firmly on me.

I was sorry to have no very definite answer. "He has been in the East lately. He'll be back here in time for me."

"Well," said Johnny darkly; and that was all.

IV

Raymond's "tower" was not static, but peripatetic. Early in his second summer abroad it was standing among the Dutch windmills for a brief season; and when he learned that I was to have a short vacation in England--the only quarter of the Old World I ever cared for--he left it altogether for a fortnight and came across from Flushing to see me.

Two points immediately made themselves clear. Firstly, he was viewing the world through literature--through works of fiction in some cases, through guide-books in more. Everything was a spectacle, with himself quite outside as an onlooker; and nothing was a spectacle until it had been ranged and appraised in print. Secondly, if he was outside of things, America was still farther outside; it existed as a remote province not yet drawn into the activities and interests of the "world." He seemed willing, even anxious, to make himself secondary, subordinate. However he may have been on the Continent, here in England his desire to conform made him appear subservient and almost abject. My own unabashed and unconscious Americanism--the possible consequence of inexperience--sometimes embarrassed him, and he occasionally undertook to edit my dealings with members of the older half of our race, even with waiters and cabmen. As for the more boastful, aggressive, self-assertive sort of Americanism, that would make him tremble with anger and blush for shame.

I will say this in his behalf, however: he did not like England and was not at home there.

"The little differences," he observed, one day, "made more trouble than the big ones. A minor seventh is all right, while a minor second is distressing. I am happier among the Latins."

Yet I am sure that even among his Latins he took the purely objective view and valued their objects of interest according as they were starred and double-starred, or left unmarked in the comparative neglect of small print.

We saw together Canterbury and Cambridge and Brighton and a few other approved places. Through all these he walked with a meticulous circumspection, wondering what people thought, asking inwardly if he were squaring with their ideas of what conduct should be. Only once did I find him fully competent and sufficiently assertive. The incident occurred on a late afternoon, in a small side street just off the Strand, while I was casting about for one of those letter-pillars. Raymond was approached, as was proper to the locality and the time of day, by a young woman of thirty who had a hard, determined face and who was clothed on with a rustling black dress that jingled with jet. I was near enough to hear.

"Good-afternoon," she said.

"Good-afternoon."

"Where," with marked expressiveness, "are you going?"

"I'm going to stand right here."

"Give me a drink."

"Couldn't think of it."

"Stand," she said, with sudden viciousness, "stand and rot!"

Raymond, after an instant's surprise, made a response in his unstudied vernacular. "Yes, I'll stand; but you skip. Shoo!"

She was preparing some retort, but he waved both his hands, wide out, as if starting a ruffled, vindictive hen across a highway. At the same time he caught sight of a constable on the corner, and let her see that he saw--

"Constable!"--why, I am as bad as Raymond himself: I mean, of course, policeman.

But the London police are sometimes chary in the exercise of their functions. What really started the woman on her way was his next brief remark, accompanied by the hands, as before, though with a more decided shade of propulsion.

"Scoot!" She went, without words.

These were the only American observations I heard from Raymond during that fortnight.

I wish he had been as successful on the night of our arrival in London when we encountered, in the court behind the big gilded grille of the Grand Metropole, the porter of that grandiose establishment. We had come together from Harwich and did not reach this hotel until half an hour before midnight. We had had our things put on the pavement and had dismissed the cab, and the porter, with an airy, tentative insolence, now reported the place full.

"I don't know who ordered your luggage down, sir; I didn't," he said with a smile that was an experiment in disrespect.

Raymond looked as if he were for immediately adjusting himself to this--though I could hardly imagine his ever having done the like in Paris or in Florence. He was quite willing to confess himself in the wrong: yes, he ought to have remembered that the "season" was beginning; he ought to have known that this particular season, though young, had set in with uncommon vigor; he ought to have known that all the hotels, even the largest, were likely to be crowded and have sent on a wire. The porter, emboldened by the departure of the cab, and by my companion's contrite silence, began to embroider the theme.

Now a single week in England had taught me that no two men in that country--the home of political but not of social democracy--are likely to talk long on even terms. One man must almost necessarily take the upper hand and leave to the other the lower, and the relation must be reached early. I resolved on the upper--cab or no cab. I glared--as well and as coldly as I could. The fellow was only a year or so older than I.

"You are too chatty," I said. "Fewer words and more action. If you are full, call somebody to take us and our baggage to some hotel near by that is not full."

The fellow sobered down and gave us his first look resembling respect.

"Very good, sir. I will, sir. Thank you, sir,"--though he had nothing to thank me for, and though he well knew there was to be nothing.

Raymond looked at me as one looks at a friend who surprises by the sudden disclosure of some unexpected talent or power.

"But you said 'baggage,'" he commented.

"Indeed I did," said I.

V

Our new hotel, we discovered next morning, was duplicated in name by another, four doors down the street. During the day we heard the reason for this. A domestic difficulty had overtaken husband and wife and the two had separated, each keeping an interest in the serviceable name and a frontage on the familiar street. We were in the husband's hotel, under the very discreet ministrations of the young woman who had caused the break. "Do you quite like this?" Raymond had asked me. But he became reassured on seeing in the guest-book the names of two or three well-known and sufficiently respected compatriots. By the next day he was able to cast on Miss Brough, as she flitted (still discreetly) through her functions, the eye of a qualified idealization. I am sure he would never have viewed indulgently any such situation at home. But the poor, patient, cautious girl helped him toward realizing the sophistications and corruptions of European society, and so he welcomed her. But I believe he avoided speaking to her. She may have been hurt, or she may have been amused; or neither. Yet, after all, this contretemps was for him, I felt, but a prosaic substitute for something richer. A similar situation in Naples, say, taken at close range, might have quickened his interest considerably.

Next day there was something different for him to report. He had gone into a courtyard off Holborn, drawn by the sound of a hurdy-gurdy. Four or five little girls were dancing, and some older women stood looking on. For a few moments he looked on too, probably with an effect of aloof and amused patronage. But patronage was not for that court.

Presently one of the younger women, who wore a hat full of messy plumes and carried a small fish in each hand by the tail, stepped up and invited him to trip a measure with her. "Trip a measure"--it has a fine Elizabethan or Jacobean sound, whether she used the precise expression or not. But Raymond demurred; at first politely; later, perhaps not so politely. But he was whisked into the dance and made to take several turns. He was so embarrassed that he called it all an "adventure." Possibly it was meant for a lesson in manners.

Thus Raymond in England. As he said, he liked the Continent better. I hope he showed to better advantage there, and I should have liked to see him there--to be with him there. For he rather put a brake on any measure of exuberance and momentum which I might have brought to England with me, and I could only trust that his strait-jacket was partly unlaced among the French and Italians. I think that likely, for with them he was, of course, an acknowledged and unmistakable foreigner. But my fortnight with him was cramped and uncomfortable; and when we parted at the American Exchange--I for Liverpool and he for Calais--I confess I had a slight feeling of relief. I felt, too, that my conduct, however native and unstudied, had pleased the Island quite as well as his.

At the Exchange itself he never read American newspapers--least of all, one from his own town. I believe, too, he avoided them on the Continent. Living a very special life, he meant to keep himself integral, uncontaminate. And behind us both was the other world, his own, all vital and astir.

Yes, I am aware that my prose is pedestrian, and that Europe--as it once was, to us--deserves a brighter and higher note. I will attempt, just here, a purple patch.

Europe, then,--the beacon, hope, and cynosure of our fresh, ingenuous youth--the glamorous realm afar which drew to itself from across the sea our eager artist-bands, pilgrims to the Old, the Stately, and the Fair; Europe, which reared above our dull horizon the towers of Oxford and of Notre Dame, sent up into our pale, empty sky the shimmering mirage of Venice, and cast across our workaday way the grave and noble shadow of Rome; Europe, which gave out through the varying voices of Correggio, Canova, Hugo, and Wagner the cry, so lofty and so piercing-sweet, of Art; Europe, which with titles and insignia and social grandeurs, once dazzled and bemused our inexperienced senses ... and so on.

Easy!

But worth while?

I shall not attempt to decide.

To-day Europe seems not all we once found it; and we, on the other hand, have come to be more than some of us at least once figured ourselves. We are beginning to have glamours and importances of our own.

VI

Raymond lingered on for a year or more in Italy, and came home, as I have implied, in time for my wedding. He found his native city more uncouth and unkempt than ever. Such it was, absolutely; and such it was, relatively, after his years under a more careful and self-respecting regime. The population was still advancing by leaps and bounds, and hopeful spirits had formed a One-Million Club. A few others, even more ardent, said that the population was already a million, or close upon it, and busied themselves to start a Two-Million Club. They had their eyes wide open to the advantage of numbers, and tightly closed to the palpable fact that the community was unable properly to house and administer the numbers it already had. The city seemed to cry: "I need a friendly monitor--one who will point me out the decencies and compel me to adopt them." The demagogue who had ruled and misruled before had been reelected once or twice, and the newspapers were still indulging their familiar strain of irresponsible and ineffective criticism. The dark world behind him had become more populous and bold, and the forces for good still seemed unable to organize and cooeperate toward making betterment an actuality. But new people were always flocking in--people from the farms, villages and country-towns of the Middle region--and bringing with them the uncontaminated rustic ideals of rightness and decorum: a clean stream pouring into a turbid pool, and the time was to come when it would make itself felt. Meanwhile, the city remained--to Raymond--a gross, sharp village, one full of folk who, whether from the Middle West or from Middle Europe, had never come within ten leagues of gentility, and who, one and all, were absorbedly and unabashedly bent on the object which had suddenly assembled them at this one favored spot--the pushing of their individual fortunes. A hauptstadt-to-be, perhaps; but, so far, an immensely inchoate and repellent miscellany.

Raymond's father gave him a sober welcome. His mother attempted a brief, spasmodic display of affection; but it was too much, and only a maid and her pillows saw her for the next few days. His father seemed older, much older; tired, careworn, worried. The trouble of settling old Jehiel's estate had been all that could have been expected, and more. There were claims, complications, lawsuits, what not; and through all this maze James Prince had to put up with the inherited help of the dry, dismal old fellow whom I had seen in earlier days at the house. I had come, now, to a better professional knowledge of him. He was a man of probity, and of some ability, but a deliberate; impossible to hurry, and not easy, as it seemed, even to interest. Under him matters dragged dully through the courts, and others' nerves were worn to shreds. I remember how surprised I was one day on hearing that he had picked up enough resolution to die.

Raymond did not much concern himself about his father's burdens. He assumed, I suppose, that such taxes on a man's brain and general vitality were proper enough to middle age and to the business life of a large city. However, he was living--just as he had principally lived abroad--on his father's bounty. His contributions to the press--whether a daily, or, of late, a monthly--brought in no significant sums; and a bequest of some size from his grandfather was slow in finding its way into his hands.

As I have said, Raymond might have taken an advantageous position in home society. He made no effort, and I sometimes caught myself wondering if his attitude might be that there was "nobody here." He might have joined his father's club; but the older men principally played billiards and talked their business affairs between. However, he did not care for billiards, nor had their affairs any affinity with his. A younger set--noisy and assertive out of proportion to its numbers--gave him no consolation, still less anything like edification. They were au premier plan; they possessed no background; they were without atmosphere--without envelopment, as Johnny McComas might have amended it (though no such lack would have been noted or resented by Johnny himself). Bref, he knew what they all were without going to see. And as for "society," it rustled flimsily, like tissue-paper; bright, in a way, but still thin and crackling.

I wonder how he found such society as attended my wedding. I shall not describe it; I did not describe Johnny's--probably the more important event of the two for the purposes of this calm narrative. Yet, if you will permit me, I shall touch on two points.

I wish, first, to say that, in my ears and to my eyes, the name "Elsie" is just as dear and charming as it ever was. Perhaps, at one period of my courtship, I wondered if the name would wear. No name more delightful and suitable for a gay, arch, sweet young girl of twenty; but how, I asked myself, will the name sit on a woman of forty, or on one of sixty? Well, I will confess that, at forty, a certain strain of incongruity appeared; but it marvelously vanished during the following score of years, and the name now seems utterly right for the dainty figure and gentle face of my lifelong companion. And though our eldest daughter is unmarried and thirty-five, we have never regretted passing on this beautiful name to her.

My second point must deal with Raymond's attitude toward me on my wedding-day and on the days preceding it. He was stiff, constrained, dissatisfied--merely courteous toward my Elsie, and not at all cordial to me. I wondered whether he blamed me for thus bringing him back home; but the real reason, as I came to understand later, was quite different. He regarded the marriage of a friend as a personal deprivation, and the bride as the chief figure in the conspiracy. After my defection, or misappropriation, he solaced himself by trying to make one or two other friendships. When these friends married in turn, like process produced like results. These men, however, he threw overboard completely; in my case, he showed, after a while, some relenting, and ultimately even forgiveness. By the time he came to marry on his own account, the last of his very few bachelor friends had "gone off"; so there was no chance of inflicting on anybody that displeasure which others had several times inflicted on him.

He sent Elsie a suitable present, and stood beside me through the ceremony as graciously as he was able.

"I wish you both great joy," he said firmly, at the end; and it was six weeks before we saw him in our little home. _

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