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, "À 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 æsthetic 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 æsthete 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. Hispensionwas 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 monthslater 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.Shelikes 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 dashin 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 themselvesclear. 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,thatwould make him tremble with anger and blush for shame.
I will say this in his behalf, however: hedid 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'llstand; 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.
"Idon't know who ordered your luggage down, sir;Ididn't," he said with a smile that was an experiment in disrespect.
Raymond looked as if he were for immediatelyadjusting 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. "Fewerwords 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 ministrationsof 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, thiscontretempswas 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 ahurdy-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 momentumwhich 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, andcynosure 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 régime. 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 reëlected once or twice, and the newspapers were still indulging their familiarstrain 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 coöperate 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, spasmodicdisplay 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 largecity. 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 wereau 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, heknew 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 thoughour 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 thatdispleasure 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.
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'swife, Johnny's domesticentouragewere 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'remine 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 werehis! 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 inthe 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 tooempresséeat 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 theinfant 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-recognizedfinesse, 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 quarterof 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 settlementof 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 thiscircumscribed 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, bothen grosanden détail. 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 distasteand 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 anaperçuor aWeltanschauung(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 youhaveto do this?" he asked me, with the paper in his hand. "Do youliketo 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 wishedto 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, norwas 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 coöperated, 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 understoodlimits) 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 manœuvre 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 festivitywere 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 coördination 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—thescalone, 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 tohave 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.