Part 4

________________________________________________
_ PART IV

I

Johnny McComas was still carrying on his business life and his home life in the suburb where he had married, when I came, finally, to make my first call on the domestic group of which he was the nub. Still in the future was the day when he was to move into town, and to have also a summer home on the North Shore, and to make some of his father-in-law's spare funds yield profitable results, and to arouse among wistful clerks and unsuccessful "operators" an admiring wonder as the youngest bank-president in the "Loop."

I looked in on him one evening in late November. I found a house too emphatically furnished and a wife too concerned about making an impression. I did not consider myself a young man of prime consequence and did not relish the expenditure of so much effort: after all, Johnny's standing, Johnny's wife, Johnny's domestic entourage were not before a judgment-bar. It was plain to see that for Mrs. John W. McComas complete social comfort had not yet been reached, and I wondered if the next move might not show it as farther away than ever.

Johnny himself was bluff and direct, and took things as a matter of course. Much had been done, but more remained to be done; meanwhile all was well and good. After a little, his wife was content to leave us alone together, and we drifted to Johnny's "den"--a word new at that time, and descriptive of the only feature of his home on which he laid the slightest self-conscious emphasis.

I had heard that there were twins--boys; and soon, as the evening was still young, I heard the twins themselves. They had reached the age of ten months, and consequently had developed wants, but no articulate means for making those wants known. Therefore they howled, and they began howling in unison now. Perhaps it was for them that a foresighted mother had left us alone together.

"Great little hollerers!" said Johnny placidly, pulling at his pipe.

I was still a bachelor. "Might shut the door?" I proposed.

"If you like," said Johnny, without enthusiasm. "They wake me every morning at five," he added.

Yes, I was still a bachelor--and probably a tactless, even a brutal, one.

"Might move them to another bedroom, farther away?" I suggested. The house seemed big enough for such an arrangement.

"Don't want to," declared Johnny. He began pulling at his pipe again, and there was a little silence during which I might meditate on the curt nobility of his remark.

The fact was, of course, that Johnny loved life; he embraced it with gusto, with both arms outspread. No sidestepping its advances; no dodging its sharp angles; no feeble mitigating of a situation for which he was himself responsible; no paltry deadening of domestic uproar merely because he himself happened to be within the domestic environment. "If Adele stands it, I will too--they're mine as well as hers,"--such I conceive to have been his attitude. Johnny had no nerves, and only a minimum of sensibility. The sound-waves broke on his sensorium as ripples break on a granite coast. Perhaps they pleased him; perhaps they even soothed him. Why, bless you! these children were his! They were facts as great and as unescapable as the ebb and flow of the tides, as dawn and twilight, as the morning and evening stars. And the evening stars were singing together. Great may have been the jubilation for Johnny's ears, boundless the content in Johnny's heart.

I really think that Johnny felt through the din some of the exhilaration that often came to him with a good brisk scrap in his office--or in the other man's office. In fact, home and business were Johnny's two sources of interest and pleasure--the warp and woof of his life--and he was determined on getting the utmost out of each. His interest in his home circle may somewhat have declined--or at least have moderated--with advancing years, but it was incandescent now. His interest in the outside world--that oyster-bin awaiting his knife--never slackened, not even when the futility of piling up the empty shells became daylight-clear, and when higher things strove perseveringly, even unmistakably, to beckon him on. Never, in fact, throughout his life did he exhibit more than two essential concerns: one for his family and clan; and one for the great outside mass of mediocre individuals through whose ineptitudes he justly expected to profit.

Well, the door of the den remained open, and our talk went on to the rising and falling of infant voices. At last, thinking that my good-bye must be to Johnny only, I rose to go. You might reasonably ask for a clearer impression of his home and a more definite account of his wife. But what can I say when the primary address was so disconcertingly to the ear? Of his wife--who came down, during a lull, at the last moment--I can only say that she seemed too empressee at the beginning and too casual at the end. Perhaps she had decided that, after all, I was no more than I myself claimed to be. Perhaps the infant hurricane was still ruffling the surface of her mind, or even disturbing its depths.

"I won't ask you to call again," she said, as we shook hands for a good-night: "we shall be moving in the spring." She spoke with a satisfied air of self-recognized finesse, and as in the confident hope of completing very promptly some well-planned little programme; but--

"Visit us there," said Johnny, with a quick cordiality which prevented his wife from redeeming herself.

"There" had been the chief topic in the den. Many neighborhoods had been brought forward, with their attendant advantages and disadvantages. Johnny told me what he thought, and let me say what I thought. When I listened, it was as a man who might soon have a similar problem to consider. When I spoke it was to utter banalities sedately; any neighborhood might do, I said, that had good air; yes, and good schools--looking toward the future. And any house, I felt, would serve, if it had a nursery that was sealed, sound proof, remote....

"Well, best luck in your search for your roof-tree," I said earnestly to them both.

"'Roof-tree'!" echoed Johnny. And, in fact, my observation did seem rather artificial and insincere.

II

By the time Raymond reached home, Johnny McComas had turned his informal suburban enterprise into a "state" bank, with his father-in-law as president and himself as cashier. The father-in-law lent his name and furnished most of the capital; Johnny himself provided the driving power. And by the time Raymond had become, through his father's death, the head of the family and the controller of the family funds, Johnny had turned his state bank into a national bank, with its offices in the city and with himself as president; and he had bought--at a bargain--a satisfactory house on the edge of the neighborhood where we first met him. The street was marked for business advance more promptly and more unmistakably than the precise quarter of the Princes. It would do as a home for a few years. The transaction appealed both to McComas's thrift and his pride. The coming of his new little bank, with its modest capital, made no particular stir in the "street"; and the great group of houses to the eastward were so apprehensive of open outrage, in one form or another, that his approach, in a guise still social, provoked but scant concern.

James Prince died when Raymond was about thirty. A careful, plodding man who had never brought any direct difficulties upon himself, but who had been worried--and worried out--through troubles left him by others. On the whole, he had found life an unrewarding thing; and he passed along, at fifty-five, with no great regrets. The tangle of family affairs had finally been straightened out in considerable measure, though Raymond found enough detail still left to make him realize what a five years his father had passed through; and when, the year following, his mother died, with the settlement of her estate almost overlapping the settlement of his father's, he acquired a new sense of the grinding, taxing possibilities of business. I speak from his own viewpoint; he was susceptible--unduly, abnormally so--to the grind and the tax. After a few months of clammy old Brand and his methods, he suddenly cut loose from him (without waiting for him to die, as he did a little later); and he told me that I was the man to wind up these tedious affairs. They were not nearly so difficult and complicated as they seemed to him--they were now largely routine matters, in fact; and I hope I carried things along at a tempo which satisfied him. This is not to deny that Raymond seemed to have days when he found even me dilatory and exasperating; but old Brand would probably have driven him mad.

Well, the prospects of his estate were not too brilliant. The lawsuits had been expensive and sometimes unsuccessful; the bank had passed a dividend, and the old houses, which had meant a lot of money in their day, meant less now and even loss in a near future. The time was fast coming when this circumscribed and unprotected neighborhood was to admit other--and prejudicial--interests: boarding-houses, of course; and refined homes for inebriates; and correspondence-schools for engineers; and one of the Prince houses became eventually the seat of a publishing-firm which needed a little distinction more than it needed a wide spread of glass close to the sidewalk.

Whatever the state of Raymond's fortunes, it was easy to see that they were not likely to improve in his hands. He detested business, both en gros and en detail. Despite his ancestry, he seemed to have been born with no faculty for money-making, and he never tried to make up his deficiency. It was all of a piece with the stone-throwing of his boyhood days--he never attempted to improve himself: it was enough to follow the gifts with which he had been natively endowed. Precept, example, opportunity--all these went for naught. To the end of his days he viewed the American "business man" as a portentous and inexplicable phenomenon--one to be regarded with distaste and wonder. He persisted in thinking of the type as a juvenile one--an energetic and clever boy, who was immensely active and immensely productive of results (in an immensely limited field), but who was incapable of anything like an apercu or a Weltanschauung (oh, he had plenty of words for it!), and who was essentially booked to lose much more than he gained. He disliked "offices" and abominated "hours." I think that even my own modest professional applications sometimes became a puzzle to him....

And here I stand--convicted of having perpetrated another section without one short paragraph and without a single line of conversation. Let me hasten to bring Raymond to my suite and my desk-side, and make him speak.

He came down one morning, as administrator of his mother's estate, to consider the appraisal of the personal property--many familiar items, and some discouraging ones.

"Do you have to do this?" he asked me, with the paper in his hand. "Do you like to do it?"

"The world's work," I rejoined temperately. "It's got to be done."

"H'm!" he returned. "The world's a varied place. And its work is varied too. This blessed town must be taught that."

Was he girding himself to be one of its teachers?

From that time on I resolved to take him patiently and good-humoredly: a friend must bear a friend's infirmities.

III

I did not know, with precision, what phases of the world's work were engaging Raymond's attention. I suppose he was adventuring, rather vaguely, among the "liberal arts," though he probably saw, by this time, that a full professional exercise of any of them was beyond his reach. He was heard of as writing short essays and reviews for one or two genteel publications, as making water-color tours through the none too alluring suburbs, as composing minor pieces for a little musical society which he had joined and which he wished to advance, and so on. Acquaintances reported him at architectural exhibits and at book-auctions--occasions neither numerous nor important. He lived on alone in his father's house--expensively; too expensively, of course, for it was an exacting place to keep up.

He was coming to be known in a small circle--but an influential one--as a young man of wealth, culture, and good-will. But his wealth was less than supposed, his culture was self-centred, and his good-will was neither broad nor zealous.

However, the new day was coming when he could be turned to account--or when, at least, people made the attempt.

This, however, does not mean philanthropy. That was barely dawning as a social necessity. The few who were supporting charitable institutions and were working in the recently evolved slums were neither conspicuous nor fashionable. Nor does it mean political betterment. No efforts had yet been successful in substituting for the city's executive incubus a man of worthier type, nor was there yet any effective organization founded on the assumption--which would have seemed remote and fantastic indeed--that a city council could be improved. Parlor lectures on civics were of course still farther in the future. Poor government was simply a permanent disability, like weather, or lameness, or the fashions; folk must get along as best they could in spite of it. The town remained a chaos of maladministration and of non-administration; but when the decencies are, for the time being, despaired of, one may still try for the luxuries. So the city girded itself for a great festival; the nation approved and cooeperated, and a vast congeries of white palaces began to rise on our far edge.

The detailed execution of this immense undertaking was largely local, of course. Though the work was initiated by older heads (some of them were too old and were dropped), there were places on the innumerable committees for younger ones--for men in their early thirties; their vigor, enthusiasm, and even initiative (within understood limits) would greatly further the cause. There were (among others) committees on entertainment to engage the services of young men of position, leisure, and social experience. There were many foreign dignitaries to be received and guided; there must be lively and presentable youths to help manoeuvre them. Raymond, who was supposed to have mingled in European society (instead of having viewed it from afar, in detachment), was asked to serve in this field.

There were equally good opportunities for brisk, aggressive young men on finance committees and such-like bodies, wherein prominent sexagenarians did the heavily ornamental and allowed good scope for younger men who had begun to get a record and who wished to confirm ability in influential eyes. This opened a road for John W. McComas, who made a record, indeed, in the matter of gathering local subscriptions. He dented the consciousness of several important men in his own field, and got praised in the press for his indefatigability and his powers of persuasion. Before the six months of festivity were half over, our Johnny had become a "prominent citizen" and his new bank almost a household word.

Raymond did less well. The great organization was an executive hierarchy: ranks and rows of officials, with due heed not only to cooerdination but to subordination. Some men do their best under such conditions; others, their worst. Raymond, a strong individualist, a pronounced egoist, could not "fall in." Even in his simple field--one concerned chiefly with but the outward flourishes--the big machine irked and embarrassed him. He withdrew. When an imperial prince was publicly "received," with ceremonies that mingled old-world formalities (however lamely followed) and local inspirations (however poorly disciplined), the moving event went off with no help of his: I believe he even smiled at it all from a balcony.

It was here that Raymond began to make clear his true type. He was Goethe's "bad citizen"--the man who is unable to command and unwilling to obey.

After a particularly flamboyant appreciation of McComas's services in a Sunday newspaper, I ventured to touch on our Johnny's rise in Raymond's hearing. The two had not met for years; and Johnny had probably no greater place in Raymond's mind than Raymond, as I remembered once finding, had in Johnny's. But Raymond did not yet pretend to overlook or to forget or to ignore him; nor did he yet allow himself to mention Johnny as a one-time dweller in his father's stable.

"Why, yes," said Raymond; "he seems to be coming on fast. Climbing like anything."

This, I felt, was disapproval, slightly tinctured with contempt. But there are two kinds of progress on a ladder or a stairway. There is the climbing up, and there is (as we sometimes let ourselves say) the climbing down.

It was at the imperial reception that Raymond and Johnny finally met. Let us figure Raymond as descending from his satirical balcony, and Johnny, with his wife, as earnestly working his way up the great stairway--the scalone, as Italy had taught Raymond to call it. This was an ample affair with an elaborate handrail, whose function was nullified by potted plants, and with a commodious landing, whose corners contained many thickset palms. A crowd swarmed up; a crowd swarmed down; the hundreds were congested among the palms. Johnny, with his wife on his arm, was robust and hearty, and smiled on things in general as he fought their way up. He took the occasion as he took any other occasion: much for granted, but with a certain air of richly belonging and of worthily fitting in. His wife--"I suppose it was his wife," said Raymond--was elaborately gowned and in high feather: a successful delegate of luxury. Obviously an occasion of this sort was precisely what she had long been waiting for. Despite the press about her, she made her costume and her carriage tell for all they might. A triumphing couple, even Raymond was obliged to concede. The acme of team work....

"There we were--stuck in the crowd," said Raymond, whose one desire seemed to have been to gain the street. "Not too close, fortunately. I had to bow, but I didn't have to speak; and I didn't have to be 'presented.' He gave me quite a nod."

And no great exercise of imagination was required for me to see how distant and reserved was Raymond's bow in return.

IV

That autumn, after the festal flags had ceased their flaunting and fire had made a wide sweep over the white palaces, Raymond suddenly went abroad. It was to be a stay of three or four months. He first wrote me from Paris.

He wrote again in December, also from Paris, and told me tout court that he was engaged to be married. I give this news to you as suddenly as he gave it to me.

You can supply motives as easily as I. His parents were gone and his family life was nil. The old house was large and lonely. You may believe him influenced, if you like, by his last view of Johnny McComas and by Johnny's amazing effect of completeness and content. You may fancy him as visited by compunctions and mortifications due to his consciousness of his own futility. Or you may fall back upon the simple and general promptings that are smoothly current in the minds of us all. My own notion, however, is this: he never would have married at home; only an insidious whiff of romance, encountered in France or Italy, could have accomplished his undoing.

Raymond's own advices were meagre. "Your emotional participation not particularly desired"--such seemed to be the message that lay invisible between his few lines. But other correspondents supplied the lacunae. He was to marry a girl whose family formed part of the American colony in the French capital. At least, the feminine members of the family were there: the mother, and an elder sister. The father, according to a custom that still provoked Gallic comment, was elsewhere: he was following the markets in America. The bride-to-be was between nineteen and twenty. Raymond himself was thirty-three.

He advised me, later, that the wedding would take place at the end of February and requested me to obtain and forward some of the quaint documents demanded at such a juncture by the French authorities. He added that he hoped for a honeymoon in Italy, but that his fiancee favored Biarritz and Pau.

The wedding came off at one of the American churches in Paris. It was a sumptuous ceremonial, aided by a bishop (who was on his travels, but who had not forgotten to bring along his vestments) and by the attendance of half the colony. Raymond was obliged to put up with all this pomp and show, much as it ran counter to his tastes and inclinations. But fortunately he was made even less of than most young men on such an occasion; he had few connections on either side of the water, so the bride's connections dominated the day and made her the chief figure still more completely than is commonly the case. And the honeymoon was spent, not in the north of Italy, but in the south of France.

There are times when a young girl must have her way. And there are times when a young husband (but not so young) will determine to have his. I knew Raymond.

The couple were in no haste to get home. The four months ran to almost a year. I first met the new wife at a reception in the early autumn.

"Gertrude," said Raymond, "let me present to you my old friend--" H'm! let me see: what is my name?--Oh, yes: "Gertrude, let me present to you my old friend, George Waite."

Can a young bride, dressed in black, and dressed rather simply too, look almost wicked? Well, this one contrived to.

The effect was not due to her face, which had an expression of naive sophistication, or of sophisticated naivete, not at all likely to mislead the mature; nor to her carriage, which, though slightly self-conscious, was modest enough, and not a bit too demure. It was due to her dress, which, after all, was not quite so simple, either in intention or in execution, as it seemed. It was black, and black only; and it was trimmed with black jet or spangles or passementerie or whatever--let some one else find the name. It was cut close, and it was cut low; too close and too low--she was the young married woman with a vengeance. It took a tone and bespoke a tradition to which most of us were as yet strangers, and our initiation into a new and equivocal realm had been too sudden for our powers of adjustment. It was Paris in its essence--the thing in itself--and it had all come unedited through the hands of a mother and a sister who were so rapt or so subservient as to be incapable of offering opposition to the full pungency of the Parisian evangel, and of hushing down an emphatic text for acceptance in a more quiet environment. I can only say that several nice young chaps looked once and then looked away. Raymond himself was inconvenienced. Nor did matters mend when, within a week or so, Mrs. Raymond Prince began to rate the women of her new circle as "homespun."

Her little hand fell most heavily on these poor aborigines when two or three members of Raymond's singing-class loyally came to one of her own receptions. These Adeles and Gertrudes of the earlier day were now wives and mothers, with the interests proper to such. They had shepherded babies through croup and diphtheria, and were now seeing husky, wholesome boys and girls of twelve and thirteen through the primary schools. When among themselves, they talked of servants and husbands. They had not married and gone West or East; they had married at home, and they had stayed at home. They had had too many things on their hands and minds to catch up much of the recent exoticism stirring about them here in town, and they were far from able to cope with this recent importation of exoticism from the Rue de la Paix.

Raymond came home, one afternoon, in time for the last half-hour of his wife's last reception. Her dress, on this occasion, was quite as daring, in its way, as on the other, and original to the point of the bizarre. One of the early Adeles was leaving, but she stopped for a moment and attempted speech. She was the particular Adele with the piercing soprano voice--a voice which had since lowered itself to sing lullabies to three successive infants.

"Well, Raymond--" she began hopefully, and stopped. She tried again, but failed; and she passed on and out with her words unsaid.

"Well, Raymond--" Yes, I am afraid that that was the impression of more early friends than one.

V

Raymond had expected, of course, to give his wife her own way at the beginning--at the very beginning, that is; and he had expected, equally, to have her make a definite impression on the circle awaiting her. But--

Well, he had intended to "take her in hand," and to do it soon. She was to be formed, or re-formed; she was to be adjusted, both to things in general and to himself especially. Besides being her husband, he was to be her kindly elder brother, her monitor, patient but firm; she was to enter upon a state of tutelage. He was pretty certain to be right in all his views, opinions and practices; and she, if her views, opinions and practices were at variance with his, was pretty certain to be in the wrong. He assumed that, during those few years in Paris, she had learned it all in one big lesson only. The time had been too short to confirm all this sudden instruction into a reasoned and assimilated way of life; by no means had that superficial miscellany been rubbed into the warp and woof of her being. The Parisian top-dressing would be removed and the essential subsoil be exposed and tilled....

H'm!

One of the strongest of her early impressions was naturally that of the house in which she was to live. It was big and roomy; it was detached, and thus open to light and air. But its elephantine woodwork repelled her, for she had grown up amid the rococo exuberances of Paris apartments. The heavy honesty of black-walnut depressed her after the gilded stucco of her mother's salon. And that huge, portentous orchestrion took up such an immensity of room!

I doubt if the neighborhood itself pleased her much better, though it was homogeneous (in its way), and dignified, and enjoyed an exceptional measure of quietude. Perhaps it was too quiet, after some years of a balcony on a boulevard. And it is true that some of the big houses were vacant, and that some of the families roundabout went away too often and stayed away too long. An empty house is a dead house, and when doors and windows are boarded up you may say the dead house is laid out. Things were sometimes triste--the French for final condemnation. The exodus so long foreshadowed seemed appreciably under way. This Gertrude became increasingly conscious, as the months went on, that most of the people she wanted to see and most of the houses she was prompted to frequent were miles away, and that the flood-tide of business rolled between.

Of her reaction to the circle in which she first found herself I have given you one or two indications. It would be easy, as it would be customary, to give some other of her early social experiences in detail and her reactions to them; but my interest is frankly in her husband and in his reactions. It was of him, too, that I saw the most; and I have never gone greatly into society.

At the end of a long and possibly somewhat dull winter his wife began to hint the advantageousness of transferring themselves to that other part of town. Raymond was not precisely in the position where he cared to pay high rent for a small house, while a big house was standing empty and unrealizable. Pouts; frowns.... But nature came to his aid. With a new young life soon to appear above the horizon, now was no time to shift. His son should be born in the house in which he ought to be born. A reasonable view, on the whole; and it prevailed.

Raymond had said "son," and son it was. The baby was not named Raymond: his father, however much of an egoist, was not willing to put himself forward as such so obviously, nor for a period that promised to be indefinitely long. Nor was the baby called Bartholomew, after his maternal grandfather in the East: for who cared to inflict such an old-fashioned, four-syllable name on such a small morsel of flesh? He entered the battle under the neutral and not over-colorful pennon of Albert: his mother could thus call him "Bertie," and think, not too remotely, of her parent on the stock exchange.

Raymond was not long in discovering, after reaching home, what sacrifices the new life was to involve. On the Continent, in the midst of change and stir, these had not foretold themselves. Back in his own house, his interests--"intellectual interests" he called them--began to assert themselves in the old way. But he was no longer free to range the fields of the mind and take shots at the arts as they rose. Least of all was he to read in the evening. That was to neglect, to affront. However, the arrival of little Albert--poor tad!--changed the current of his wife's own interests and helped to place one more rather vital matter in abeyance. He was to live--for a while, anyway--in his present home; and he was to pursue--for a while, anyway--some of the accustomed interests of his bachelor days. He expected that, before long, his wife would accept his environment and the practices he had always followed within it. She needed enlightenment on many points. He had already communicated some of his views on dress, for example; and he had readjusted her notions on the preparation of salads. He gave her, pretty constantly, corrective glances through, or over, his eyeglasses,--for his sight had begun to weaken early, as his father had foreseen,--and he meant that such glances should count. She required to be edited; well, the new manuscript was worth his pains, and would be highly creditable in its revised version.

VI

If one advantage showed forth from a situation that seemed, in general, not altogether promising, it was this: Raymond, hearing his native town commented upon unfavorably by his wife,--who was keen and constant in her criticisms,--began to defend it. It was one thing for the native-born to pick flaws; it was another when that ungracious work was attempted by a newcomer. And he meant not only to defend it, but to remain in it, though his wife had married him partly on the strength of his European predilections, and largely on the assumption that a good part of their married life would be spent abroad. He even began to wonder if he might not join in and help improve things. Like most of his fellow-townsmen, he regarded the city's participation in the late national festival as a great step in advance,--the first of many like steps soon to follow. The day after the Fair was late; but better to be late than never. Really, there was hope for the Big Black Botch. More and more he felt inclined to lessen still further its lessening enormity. After all, this town was the town of his birth: and a fundamental egoism cried out that it should be more worthy of him. He recalled a group of American women--Easterners--whom, during his first trip abroad, he had caught poring over the guest-book of a hotel in Sorrento. He was the last male arrival in a slow season; he seemed interesting and promising; evidently they had had hopes. "But," asked one of them, "how is it you are willing to register openly from such a town as that?"--and Raymond had felt the sting. "Such nerve, such bumptiousness!" he said to me in recalling that query some years later. But he did not add that he had tried to deliver any riposte. Instead he was now to make a belated return at home, where effort most counted. The years immediately to come were to be full of new openings and opportunities; in his own way, and under his peculiar handicaps, he was to try to take some advantage of them. _

Read next: Part 5

Read previous: Part 3

Table of content of On the Stairs


GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book