III
Meanwhile Albert pursued his studies. Though he had not so far to come for a short vacation as the McComas young men, he spent the short vacations at the school. He was at an awkward age, and Raymond, who could see him with eyes not unduly clouded by affection, felt him to be an unpromising cub.He was no adornment for any house, and no satisfying companion for his father. So he passed the Easter week among his teachers.
McComas too saw little of Albert. Those months with his mother were usually worked off at some distant resort, which his stepfather was often too busy to reach. Only once did he spend any of the allotted time in McComas's house. This was a fortnight in that grandiose yet tawdry fabric which had been sacrificed to business, and the occasion was an illness in the family (not Albert's) which delayed the summer's outing. McComas had accepted Albert with a large tolerance—at least he was not annoyed. In fact, the boy's mother, however she may have harassed Raymond, never (to do her justice) pushed Albert on her second husband. So, when the juncture arrived,—
"Why, yes," Johnny had said, "have him here, of course; and let him stay as long as you like. He doesn't botherme."
Well, Albert went ahead, doing his Latin, and groping farther into the dusky penumbra of mathematics. "Why?" he asked; andthey explained that it was the necessary preparation for the university. Albert pondered. He began to fear that he must continue learning things he didn't want or need, so that he might go ahead toward learning other things he didn't want or need. He took a plaintive, discouraged tone in a letter to his mother; and she—making an exception to her rule—passed along the protest to McComas. She felt, I suppose, that he would give an answering note.
Johnny laughed. He himself cared nothing for study; and he was so happily constituted, as well as so constantly occupied, that he never had to take refuge in a book.
"Oh, well," he said, broadly, "he'll live through it all, and live it down. I expect Tom and Joe to. The final gains will be in quite another direction."
Raymond had heard the same plaint from Albert, and was less pleased. The boy was clearly to be no student, still less a lover of the arts. Raymond passed over all thought of old Jehiel, the ruthlessly acquisitive, and placed the blame on the other grandfather,who was now in an early dotage after a lifelong harnessing to the stock-ticker.
"Idon't know how he's coming out!" was Raymond's impatient remark, over one of Albert's letters. "Who knows whatanyboy is going to be?"
Albert accepted his school readily enough as a place of residence. He did not now need, so much as before, his mother's small cares—in fact, was glad to be relieved from them; nor was he quite advanced enough to profit from a cautious father's hints and suggestions. I found myself hoping that Raymond, at the coming stage of Albert's development, might have as little trouble as I had had over my own boy (with whose early career I shall not burden you). Yet, after all, fathers may apprehensively exchange views and cautiously devise methods of approach only to find their efforts superfluous: so many boys come through perfectly well, after all. Simply consider, for example, those in our old singing-class. The only one to occasion any inconvenience was Johnny McComas, and he was not a member at all.
The one side of the matter that began to concern Raymond was the money side. Albert cost at school, and was going to cost more at college. His father began to economize. For instance, he cut off, this spring, the contribution which he had been making for years in support of an organization of reformers that had been working for civic betterment. These men, considering their small number and their limited resources had done wonders in raising the tone and quality of the local administration. The city's reputation, outside, had become respectable. But a sag had begun to show itself—the relapse that is pretty certain to follow on an extreme and perhaps overstrained endeavor. The little band needed money. Raymond was urged to reconsider and to continue—the upgrade would soon be reached again. Raymond sent, reluctantly, a smaller amount and asked why the net for contributions was not cast a little wider. He even suggested a few names.
Whether he mentioned the title="222" name of JohnW. McComas I do not know, but McComas was given an opportunity to help.
"See what they've sent me," he said to me one day on the street.
He smiled over the urgent, fervid phrases of the appeal. The world, so far as he was concerned, was going very well. It didn't need improvement; and if it did, he hadn't the time to improve it.
"They appear to be losing their grip," he added. "They didn't do very well last election, anyhow."
I sensed his reluctance to be associated with a cause that seemed to be a losing one.
"Well, I don't know," I said. "I'm giving something myself; and if I can afford to, you can."
But he developed no interest. He sent a check absurdly disproportionate to his capacity (he was embarrassed, I am glad to say, when he mentioned later the amount); and I incline to think that even this bit was done almost out of a personal regard for me.
Raymond cut a part of his own contribution out of Albert's allowance, and there wasbetter reason than ever why Albert should not take a long trip for only four or five days at home.
IV
It is tiresome, I know, to read about municipal reform; most of us want the results and not the process—and some of us not even the results. And it is no less tiresome to read about investments, unless we are dealing with some young knight of finance who strives successfully for his lady's favor and who, successful, lives with her ever after in the style to which her father has accustomed her. But in the case of a maladroit man of fifty....
I had asked Raymond to call on me with any new scheme that was taking his attention, and one forenoon he walked in.
He had an envelope of loose papers. He laid some of them on my desk and thumbed a few others with an undecided expression.
"What do you think of this?" he asked. "I've got to have more money, and here's something that may bring it in."
It was a speculative industrial affair in Upper Michigan. I saw some familiar names attached—among them that of John W. McComas, though not prominently.
"I'll find out for you," I said.
"I don't want you to find out from him."
"I'll find out."
Raymond fingered his envelope fussily: there was nothing left in it.
"It's all costing me too much. Extras at that school. That big house—too big, too expensive. I can't lug it along any farther. Find me some one to buy it."
"I'll see," I said.
I told him about our visit to the club, two or three months before. I implied, in as delicate and circumambulatory a way as possible, that his one-time wife, according to my own observations, taken under peculiarly favorable, because exacting, conditions, was completely accepted.
"Oh yes," he replied, as if the matter had been settled years ago, and as if he had long had that sense of it. Yes, he seemed to be saying, the marriage had made it all rightfor her, and had soon begun to make it better for him. Possibly not a "deceived" husband; and no longer so rawly flagrant a failure as a human companion.
"Their house is good, I gather," he went on. "There were some plates of it in the architectural journals. Just how good he doesn't know, I suppose—and never will."
"I found him fairly appreciative of it."
"Possibly—as a financial achievement brought about by his own money."
"He's learning some of its good points," I declared.
"There was some talk of having Albert there, just before they went off to the Yellowstone." He frowned. "Well, this can't go on so many more years, now."
I did not quite get Raymond's attitude. He did not want the boy with him at home. He did not want to meet any extra expenses—and Mrs. McComas was assuredly paying Albert's way through mid-summer, as well as eternally buying him clothes. I think that what Raymond wanted—and wanted but rather weakly—was his own will, whetherthere was any advantage in it or not, and wanted that will without payments, charges, costs.
I disliked his grudging way, or rather, his balking way, as regarded a recognition of the liberality of his former wife's husband—for that was what it came to.
I returned his prospectus. "I'll look this up. How about that company in Montana?" I continued.
"They've passed a dividend. I was counting on something from that quarter."
"And how about the factory in Iowa?"
"That will bring me something next year."
"Well," I said, doubling back to the matter that had brought him in, "I'll inquire about this and let you know."
In the course of a few days I called on McComas. Others were calling. Others were always calling. If I wanted to see him I should have to wait. I had expected to wait. I waited.
When I was finally admitted, he rose and came halfway through his splendors of upholstery to give me an Olympian greeting.
"It's brass tacks," I said. "Three minutes will do."
"Four, if you like."
"Three. Frankly, very frankly, is this a thing"—here I used the large page of ornamental letter-press as word-saver—"is this a thing for an ordinary investor?"
"Ordinary investor"—that is what I called Raymond. Perhaps I flattered him unduly.
"Why," responded McComas, with a grimace, "it's a right enough thing for the right man—or men. Several of us expect to do pretty well out of it."
"'Several'? How about the rank outsider?"
"Anybody thatyouknow sniffing?"
"Yes."
"Who?"
"Well—Prince."
"H'm." Johnny pondered; became magnanimous. "Well, it ain't for him. Pull his nose away. I don't want his money."
He knew what he had taken. He may have had a prescience of what he was yet to take. He could afford an interim of generosity.
V
A year or so went on, and we met the McComases at a horse-show. Once more it had become distinguished to have horses, and to exhibit them—in the right place. Althea was with her parents; so was the survivor of the stalwart twins.
Johnny had taken the blow hard. That a son of his, one so strong and robust, a youth on whom so much time and thought and care and money had been lavished to fit him for the world, should go down and go out (and in such a sudden, trivial fashion)—oh, it was more than he felt he could endure. But he was built on a broad plan; his nature, when the test came, opened a wide door to the assimilation of experiences and offered a wide margin for adjustment to their jars. His other son, the full equal of the lost one, still survived and was present to-day; and Johnny, grandly reconciled, was himself again.
Althea had taken the interval to make sure about her hair-ribbon and her skirts. The ribbons had been pronounced outgrown andsuperfluous, and had been banished. The suitability of longer skirts had been felt, and had been acted upon. Althea was now almost a young lady, and a very pretty one.
I say it without bitterness. The beauties of nature—those trifles that make the great differences—are indeed unequally distributed among human creatures. Not all girls are pretty; not all attractive; not all equipped to make their way. No.
You will assume for yourselves the greenery of grass and trees, the slow cumuli in the afternoon sky, the lively, brightly dressed throngs on lawns and verandas, and the horses; yes, even those were present, somewhere or other.
Gertrude McComas was of the crowd; suitably dressed (or, perhaps, attired), a little less spare than once, and somehow conveying the impression, if unobtrusively, that her presence was necessary for the completeness of the function. She was pleasant with Althea, who had a horse on her mind and a number on her back.
Gertrude had returned from the Northwith Althea and Albert, a week before Albert's allotted time with her was up, so that they might all be a part of this occasion. Albert was now taller than his father, had begun to gather up a little assertiveness on reaching the end of his preparatory days, had taken his examinations, and was understood to be within a month or so of college.
I cannot say that Althea's skirts, however much thought she had given them, were long to-day. The only skirts she wore were the skirts of her riding-coat. The rest of her was boots and trousers; and she carried a little quirt with which she flecked the dust from her nethers, now and again, rather smartly.
Albert looked—obviously envious, and obviously perturbed. His various knockings from pillar to post had left him without horse and without horsemanship. And here was a young feminine (almost a relative, in a sense; well, was she, or was she not?) who was dressed as he (with some slight differences) might have been dressed, and who was doing(or was about to do) some of the things that he himself (as he was now keenly conscious) had always hankered to do.... How was he to take it all?—the difference, the likeness, the closeness, the distance....
And we—my wife and I—became suddenly, poignantly, even bitterly aware that our Elsie, beside us in her tailor-made, had never been on a horse in her life—and was now perhaps too old to make a good beginning.
After a little while Althea was carried away for her "entry" or "event," or whatever they properly call it—for I am no sportsman. Some small section of the crowd interested itself about the same time—at least got between us and the proceedings. We saw little or nothing—just heads, hats and parasols. All I know is that, in a few moments, Althea reappeared—I think she had leaped something. Her father was by her side, vastly proud and happy. Her mother (as I shall say for short) arrived from somewhere, with a gratified smile. Her big brother presently drew up alongside ona polo-pony, and gave her a big, flat-handed pat in the middle of her placard, and a handsome young woman, who was pointed out to us as the wife he had married in February, during our fortnight at Miami, reached up to her bridle-hand and gave it a squeeze. And there was a deep fringe of miscellaneous friends, acquaintances and rivals.
"What do you think of our daughter, now!" asked Johnny, loudly and generally, as he lifted Althea down. He looked about as if to sweep together the widest assemblage of praises and applause. Many flocked; many congratulated; but still further tribute must be levied. McComas caught sight of Albert. The young fellow stood on the edge of the thing, staring, embarrassed, shaken to his centre.
"Here, you, Albert!" Johnny cried; "come over and shake hands with the winner!"
And meanwhile, Raymond, off by himself somewhere or other, I suppose, may have been studying how in the world he was ever going to put Albert through Yale.
VI
Business once more!
It ought to be barred. I get enough of it in my daily routine without having it intrude here. Business should do no more than provide the platform and the scenic background for the display of young love, hope and beauty. But here we have to deal with the affairs of a worried and incompetent man half way through his fifties.
Raymond came in one morning, on my summons. His manner was depressed; it was becoming habitually so. I tried to cheer him with indifferent topics,—among them the horse-show, which I saw so unsatisfactorily and which I have described so inadequately. He had already heard about it from Albert, and he felt no relish for the friendliness Johnny McComas had displayed on that occasion.
"Trying to gethim, too?" was Raymond's comment.
"Oh, I wouldn't quite saythat...."
"I have a letter from his mother. She wants to know about college."
"Well, howarethings?"
"Oh, I don't know; poor."
"That Iowa company?"
"Next year."
"Again?"
"Yes—next year; as usual."
"Well, I have news for you."
"Good?" he asked, picking up a little.
"That depends on how you look at it. I have a buyer for your house."
"Thank God!"
"Don't hurry to thank God. Perhaps you will want to thank the Devil."
Raymond's face fell. "You don't mean thathe—on top of everything else—has come forward to—?"
"My friend! my friend! It isn't that at all. 'He' has nothing to do with it. Quite another party."
And it was. A Mr. Gluckstein, a sort of impresario made suddenly rich by a few seasons with fiddlers and prima donnas, was the man. He was willing, he said,—and I paid the news out as evenly and considerately as I could,—he was willing to take the houseand assume the mortgage—but he asked a bonus of five thousand dollars for doing it.
"The scoundrel!" groaned Raymond, his face twisted by contemptuous rage. "The impudent scoundrel!"
"Possibly so. But that is his offer—and the only one. And it is his best."
Raymond sat with his eyes on the floor. He was afraid to let me see his face. He hated the house—it was an incubus, a millstone; but—
He visibly despaired. "What shall I do about Albert's college, now?" he muttered presently.
He seemed to have passed at a bound beyond the stage of sale and transfer. The odious property was off his hands—and every hope of a spare dollar had gone with it.
"His mother writes—" began Raymond.
"Yes?"
"She tells me—Well, her father died last month, it seems, and she is expecting something out of his estate...."
"Estate? Is there one?"
"Who can say? A man in that business!There might be something; there might be nothing or less. And it might take a year or more to get it."
"And if there is anything?"
"She says she will look after Albert's first year or two. I was about to refuse, but I expect I shall have to listen now."
He was silent. Then he broke out:—
"But there won't be. That old woman with her water-waves and her wrinkles is still hanging on; even if there should be anything, she would be the one to get most of it. I know her—she would snatch it all!"
"Listen, Raymond," I said; "you had better letmehelp you here."
"I don't want you to. There must be some way to manage."
He fell into thought.
"I doubt if she can do anything, herself. Whatever she did would come through him in the end. You say he likes Albert?" He was silent again. "I don't want to meet either of them—but I would about as soon meet him as her."
I saw that he was nerving himself for anotherscène à faire. Well, it would be less trying than the first one. If his sense of form, hisflairfor fatalism, still persisted, ease was out of the question and no surrogate could serve.
Perhaps, after all, there had been nothing between those two. Anyway, in the general eye the marriage had made everything right. She was accepted, certainly. And as certainly he had lived down, if he had ever possessed it, the reputation of a hapless husband.
He wrote to her in a non-committal way—a letter which left loopholes, room for accommodation. Her reply suggested that he call at the bank; she would pass on the word. He told me he would try to do so. I saw the impudent concert-monger was to have his house.
And so, one forenoon, at eleven or so, Raymond, after some self-drivings, reached the bank; by appointment, as he understood. Through the big doors; up the wide, balustraded stairway—it was the first time hehad ever been in the place. He was well on the way to the broad, square landing, when some lively clerks or messengers, who had been springing along behind him, all at once slackened their pace and began to skirt the paneled marble walls. A number of prosperous middle-aged and elderly men were coming down together in a compact group. It seemed as if some directors' meeting was in progress—in progress from one office, or one building, to another. In the middle of the group was John W. McComas.
He was absorbed, abstracted. Raymond, like some of the other up-farers, had gained the landing, and like them now stood a little to one side. McComas looked out at him with no particular expression and indeed with no markedness of attention.
"How do you do?" he said indifferently.
"I'm pretty well," said Raymond dispiritedly.
"And that was all!" he reported next day in a high state of indignation. "Don't suppose I shall try it again!"
But a careless Gertrude had failed to informher husband of the appointment. She had been busy, or he had been away from home....
"Go once more," I counseled, I pleaded.
A note came to him from McComas—a decent, a civil. Come and talk things over—that was its purport. He went.
McComas, as you can guess, was very bland, very expansive, very magnanimous (to his own sense). "IlikeAlbert!" he declared heartily. But he did little to cloak the fact that it was his own money which was to carry the boy through college.
Raymond was in the depths for a month. After Gluckstein had got his deed for the house and Albert had packed his trunk for the East, he felt that now indeed he had lost wife, home and son.
PART VIII
I
Before leaving his house for good and all, Raymond spent a dismal fortnight in going over old papers—out-of-date documents which once had interested his father and grandfather, books, diaries and memoranda which had occupied his own youthful days: the slowly deposited, encumbering sediment of three generations, long in one place. There were several faded agreements with the signature of the ineffable individual who had married into the family, had received a quit-claim to those suburban acres, and had then, at a point of stress, refused to give them back. There were sheaves of old receipted bills—among them one for the set of parlor furniture in the best (or the worst) style of the Second Empire. There were drafts of Raymond's early compositions—his first attempts at the essay and the short story; there was an ancient, heavily annotatedVirgil (only six books), and there was a sheepskin algebra in which he had taken, by himself, a post-school course as a means of intellectual tonic, with extra problems dexterously worked out and inserted on bits of blue paper....
"I filled the furnace seven times," he said to me, laconically.
I myself felt the strain of it all. It is less wearing to move every two or three years, as most of us do, than to move but once—near the end of a long life, of a succession of lives.
I never asked what Mr. Gluckstein thought of the orchestrion.
Raymond went to live at a sort of private hotel. Here he read and wrote. He carried with him a set of little red guide-books, long, long since out of date, and he restudied Europe in the light of early memories. He also subscribed to a branch of a public library in the vicinity—a vicinity that seemed on the far edge of things. However, the tendency of the town has always been centrifugal. Many of our worthies, if they have held on tolife long enough, have had to make the same disconcerting trek.
From this retreat Raymond occasionally issued to concerts and picture-exhibitions. I do not know that he was greatly concerned for them; but they carried on a familiar tradition and gave employment still to a failing momentum.
From this same retreat there would issue, about the Christmas season, a few watercolors on Italian subjects. If they were faint and feeble, I shall not say so. We ourselves have one of them—an indecisive view of the ruins in the Roman Forum. It is not quite the Forum I recall; but then, as we know, the Roman Forum, for the past half-century, has altered almost from year to year.
Letters reached him occasionally from Albert the freshman. They might well have come from Albert the sophomore. Raymond showed me one of them on an evening when I had called to see him in his new quarters.
He was comfortable enough and snug. On the walls and shelves were books and picturesthat I remembered seeing in his boyhood bedroom.
"I like it here," he said emphatically. And in truth it was the den of a born bachelor—one who had discovered himself too late.
Well, Raymond passed me Albert's letter. He showed it to me, not with pride, but (as was evident from the questioning eye he kept on my face) with a view to learning what I thought of it. He was asking a verdict, yet shrinking from it.
Albert was rather cocky; also, rather restless—I wondered if he would last tobea sophomore. And he displayed little of the consideration due a father. Clearly, Raymond, as a parent, had been weighed and found wanting. Albert's ideal stood high in another quarter, and his life's ambition might soon drive him in a direction the reverse of academic.
"How does it strike you?" asked Raymond, as I sat mulling over Albert's sheets.
I searched my mind for some non-committal response.
"Well," Raymond burst out, "he needn't respectmeif he doesn't admirehim!"
II
Albert's response to McComas at the horse-show had not been noticeably prompt or adroit, but he cast about manfully for words and presently was able to voice his appreciation of Althea's feat (as it was regarded) and to congratulate her upon it. Johnny McComas was not at all displeased. Albert had not been light-handed and graceful, but he developed (under this sudden stress) a sturdy, downright mode of speech which showed sincerity if not dexterity. The square-standing, straight-speaking farm-lad—straight-speaking, if none too ready—was sounding an atavistic note caught from his great-grandfather back in York State.
"Stuff in him!" commented Johnny. "It's a wonder, but there is. Must be his mother."
Albert made no particular impression, however, on Althea herself. A dozen other young fellows had been more demonstrative and more fluent. He simply slid over the surface of her mind and fell away again. She had known him—intermittently—for years asa somewhat inexpressive boy; now, as a potential gallant, he was negligible, as compared with others. But Albert, speaking in a sense either specific or general, did not mean to remain negligible.
He soon forgot most of the details of the day at the horse-show. He had hardly a greater affinity for sport than his father had had. He began his sophomore year with no interest in athletics. The compulsory gymnasium-work bored him. He made no single team—put forth not the least effort to make one. The football crowd, the baseball crowd, even the tennis crowd, gave him up and left him alone.
Yet his bodily energies and his mental ambitions were waxing daily; his passions too. There must be an outlet for all this vigor—business, or matrimony, or war. In one short twelvemonth he compassed all three.
By the end of Albert's second year, the day had come when a self-respecting young man of fortune and position found it hard if he must confess: "I have taken all yet given nothing." The Great War waged more furiously than ever, and came more close. The country hadfirst said, "You may," and, later, "You must." Albert did not wait for the "must." He closed his year a month or so in advance—as he had done once before—and enrolled in a college-unit for service abroad.
Raymond gave his consent—a matter of form, a futility. In fact, Albert enrolled first and asked (or advised) later. His mother, of a mixed mind, would have interposed an objection. McComas hushed her down. "Let him go. He has the makings of a man. Don't cut off his best chance."
McComas had a right to speak. Tom McComas was going too, and going with his father's warm approval. If he could leave a young wife and a three-year-old boy, need a young bachelor student be held back?
Albert came West for a good-bye. His father held his hand and gave him a long scrutiny—part of the time with eyes wide open, part of the time with eyes closed to a fine, inquiring, studious line. But he never saw what there was to see. In his own body there was not one drop of martial blood; in his being not an iota of the bellicose spirit. Whymen fight, even why boys fight—all this had been a mystery which he must take on faith, with little help from the fisticuffs and brawls of school-days, or even from the gigantic, agonizing closing-in of whole peoples, now under way.
Yet Albert understood, and meant to take his share.
Who, indeed, as Raymond had once asked petulantly, could know what a boy was going to be?
When Althea saw Albert in khaki, shesawhim: this time no indifference, no fusing him with the crowd, no letting him fade away unnoticed. If he had shaken before her on her hurdle-taker, she now shook before him in his brown regimentals. It was as if, in an instant, he had bolted from their familiar—their sometimes over-familiar—atmosphere. He confused, he perturbed her: he was so like, yet so different; so close, yet so remote. Was he a relative, of sorts—a relative in some loose sense; or was he a strange young hero, with his face set toward yet stranger scenes...?
"Come," said her father, who was closeby, between the horse-block and the syringa-bushes, "Albert isn't the only soldier on the battle-field. Look at Tom, here!"
Althea turned her eyes dutifully toward her stalwart brother, who humorously put up his stiffened fingers to the stiff brim of his hat; and then she looked back at Albert.
III
McComas's bank, like others, put its office-machinery at the disposal of the Government, when the first war-loan was in the making. It seemed a small matter, at the beginning, but administrative organization was taxed and clerical labors piled up hugely as the big, slow event moved along through its various stages. This work in itself came almost to seem an adequate contribution to the cause; surely in the mere percentage of interest offered there was little to appeal to the financial public, except perhaps the depositors of savings banks. McComas himself felt no promptings to subscribe to this loan; but his directors thought that a reasonable degree of participation was "indicated." The bank's title="249" namewent down, with the names of some others; and the clerks who had been working over hours on the new and exacting minutiæ of the undertaking were given a chance to divert their savings toward the novel securities. The bank displayed the Nation's flag, and the flags of some of the allies. It all made a busy corner. McComas thought of his son in khaki, and felt himself warming daily as a patriot.
"We can do them up," he declared. The war, with him, was still largely a matter of financial pressure. The pressure, even if exerted at long range, was bound to tell. Many of "our boys" would never get "over there" at all. They were learning how to safeguard our country's future within our country itself.
His wife, who had been flitting from veranda to veranda in their pleasant suburban environment, and been doing, with other ladies of her circle, some desultory work for the wounded soldiers of the future, now came down to the centre of the town and took up the work in good earnest. She saw Tom McComas as a seasoned adult who could look after himself, but her own Albert was still aboy. It was easy to see him freezing, soaking, falling, lying in distress. She busied herself behind a great plate-glass window on a frequented thoroughfare—a window heaped with battered helmets and emptied shells that drew the idle curiosity or the poignant interest of the passer-by. Bandages, sweaters, iodine-tubes filled her thoughts and her hands. And Althea, in company with several sprightly and entertaining young girls of her own set, began to pick up some elementary notions in nursing.
"Why, it's the most delightfully absorbing thing I've ever done!" she declared. A new world was dawning—a red world that not all of us have been fated to meet so young.
Raymond Prince saw all these preparations and took them as a spectacle. He was now frankly but an onlooker in life, and he gazed at big things from their far rim. He had no spare funds to put into federal hands, and felt by no means able to afford the conversion of any of his few remaining investments with a loss of nearly half his present returns. He viewed a patriotic parade or two from thecurbstone and attended now and then some patriotic meeting in the public parks—a flag-raising, for example. On these occasions he preferred to stand at some remove, so that it would be unnecessary to raise his hat: the requirement of a formal salute made him distressingly self-conscious. Yet he was displeased if other men, no nearer, failed to lift theirs; and he would be indignant when young fellows, engaged in games near by, gave the exercises no heed at all.
In one of the parades the flag of France went by. This was a picturesque and semi-exotic event; it stirred some memories of early days abroad, and Raymond, with an effort, did, stiffly and with an obvious (even an obtrusive) self-consciousness, manage to get off his hat. A highly vocal young man alongside looked at this cold and creaking manœuvre with disapproval, even disgust.
"Can't you holler?" he asked.
No, Raymond could not "holler." The dead hand of conscious propriety was upon him, checking any momentum that might lead to a spontaneous expression of patriotic feeling.The generous human juices could not run—could not even get started. When he said good-bye to Albert, it was not as to a son, nor even to a friend's son. Albert himself might have objected to any emotional expression that was too clearly to be seen; but he would have welcomed one which, cloaked in an unembarrassing obscurity, might at least have been felt. Johnny McComas frankly let himself "go," not only with Tom, but with Albert too. Albert could not but think within himself that it was all somewhat overdone; he was a bit abashed, even if not quite shamefaced. But the recollection of Johnny's warm hand-clasp and vibrant voice sometimes came to comfort him, in camp across the water, at times when the picture of his own father's chill adieux brought little aid.
IV
A few brief months ended the foreign service of both our young men. Albert came home invalided, and Tom McComas along with others, lay dead between the opposing lines of trenches. His father would not, atfirst, credit the news. His son's very strength and vigor had helped build up his own exuberant optimism. It simply could not be; his son, his only remaining son, a happy husband, a gratified parent.... But the truth bore in, as the truth will, and McComas had his days of rebellious—almost of blasphemous—protest. The proud monument at Roselands was taking a cruel toll. His other son was commemorated on the third side of its base; but though a fresh unfrayed flag waved for months over turf below which no one lay, it was long before that great granite block came to betray to the world this latest and cruelest bereavement.
Albert, whose injuries had made him appear as likely to be a useless piece on the board for longer than the army surgeons thought worth while, was sent back home and made his convalescence under the care of his mother; within her house, indeed—for his father had no quarters to offer him. Among McComas's flower-beds and garden-paths he enjoyed the ministrations of a physician other and better than any that practices on those fields ofhate—one who complemented the prosaic physical cares required for the body with an affluent stream of healing directed toward both mind and heart. He had come back to be a hero to Althea, with evidences of his heroism graved on his own bruised form.
"Hasn't he been wonderful!" said Althea to her girl friends; and Albert volunteered few concrete facts that might qualify or detract from her ideal.
Those few months comprised his contribution to the cause. He mended more rapidly than might have been expected, and soon began to feel the resurgence of those belligerencies which are proper to the nature of the healthy young male. But his belligerencies were not at all militaristic. He had seen war at short range, knew what it was, and desired it no more. He meant to let loose his energies, as soon as might be, in that other warfare, business; it would be after the manner of a great-grandfather of whom a tradition persisted, and after the close pattern of a McComas still before his eyes. A hero, if they wished; but a hero with money in his pocket.
Meanwhile, McComas looked at his grandson and writhed. So many openings, so many things to be done; yet what future aid had he to count on for carrying along his line and for reaping the opportunities in his field? A child of four, in rompers, pushing a little wheelbarrow of pebbles along garden-paths. The years dragged. It was all too great an irony.
He sent for Albert. Albert still limped a little, but it was not to be for long.
"You've done enough for your country," he declared with blunt emphasis. "Now do something for me. You're almost well?"
"I think so."
"You want to pitch in?"
"I do."
"You want to amount to something?" continued McComas, pausing on the edge of an invidious bit of characterization.
"Of course."
"You would like to come with me?"
"Yes." Surely his own father could not help him to a future.
"Well, take your choice. What do you want? Bank?"
But Albert had heard something about banks. Bank clerks, in these close-knit days, when anybody who fell out of the lock-step was lost, were but a sort of financial militia. Even if he were pushed along with the friendliest zeal, it might be years before he reached the place and the end desired. Nor had he much more fondness for growing up under the eye of McComas than under that of his own father.
"Bank?" repeated McComas.
"No."
McComas grinned. It was the grin he used when greatly pleased.
"One of those Western concerns?"
"Yes," said Albert; "send me West."
When Raymond heard that Albert had cast in his lot with McComas and meant soon to leave for Colorado, he winced. Albert, to him, was still a boy, and this term in the West but another kind of schooling. "Just as his mother tried to influence him before," said Raymond to me bitterly, "so McComas will influence him now." And I could not deny that McComas had the whip hand.The unintermittency of business correspondence, the cogency of a place on the payroll....
No, it was not to be denied that Raymond had lost Albert finally.
And Althea went to the train, to see him off—as to another war.
V
"Finally"—perhaps I have used the word too soon.
I dropped in on Raymond, one evening, at his private hotel. It was about four months after Albert's departure for the West. His quarters seemed as snugly comfortable as ever, and as completely adapted to his ultimately discovered personality and its peculiar requirements. Raymond master of a big house! Raymond leading a public life!
But he himself was perturbed. It was a letter from Albert—it was two or three letters, in fact.
"He says he is going to marry her."
"Her?"
"Althea. Althea McComas."
Albert, in the West, had done well. He had taken hold immediately, decisively. The initiative which would never have developed under his father had been liberated during his war service and was now mounting to a still higher pitch among the mountains.
"He is going to do," McComas had told me, after the second month. "He is a wonder," he had said, later.
Be that as it may. McComas was doubtless inclined to the favorable view. He had determined in advance that Albert was to succeed. Albert was meeting, successfully, known expectations of success—as a young man may.
"He started so well," said his father. "And now...."
"And now?"
"Now he wants to marry the daughter of a stable-boy!"
"Raymond," I said; "drop the 'stable-boy.' That was never true; and if it were it would have no relevancy here and now."
"I should say not! Why, Albert—"
"You have told him? He knows your—He knows the—the legend?"
"He does. And as you see, it makes no difference to him."
"Why should it? Why should he care for early matters that were over and past long years before he was born? He sees what he sees. He feels what he feels."
"He feels McComas."
"Why shouldn't he? Who wouldn't?"
Raymond relapsed into a moody silence. I saw, presently, that he was trying to break from it. He had another consideration to offer.
"And then," he began, "about—his mother. He must have understood—something. He must know—by now."
"Know?" I returned. "If he does, he has the advantage over all the rest of us.Idon't 'know.'Youdon't 'know.' Neither does anybody else. Another old matter—as well rectified as society and its usages can manage, and best left alone."
"Well, it's—it's indelicate. Albert ought to feel that."
"Raymond!" I protested. "We must leave it to the young to smooth over the rough oldplaces and to salve the aching old sores. That's their great use and function."
"Not Albert's," he said stubbornly. "I don't want him to do it, and I don't want it done in that way."
Another silence. I could see that he was gathering force for still another objection.
"It's a desertion," said the undying egoist. "It's a piece of treachery. It's a going over to the enemy."
"If you mean McComas, Albert went over months ago. And he doesn't seem to have lost anything by doing so," I ventured to add.
"This marriage would clinch it, would confirm it. I should lose him at last, and completely, just as I have lost—everything."
"Raymond," I could scarcely keep from saying, "you deceive yourself. You have really never cared for Albert at all. The only concern here is your own pride—the futile working of a will that is too weak to get its own way."
But I kept silence, and he continued thesilence. Yet I felt that he was gathering force for the greatest objection of all.
"I have heard them spoken of," he said, after a little, "as—as brother and sister. For them to marry! It's unseemly."
"Raymond!" I protested again, with even more vigor than before. "Why must you say a thing like that?"
"The same father and mother—now. Living together—going about together as members of one family.... They did, you know."
"Yes, for a few weeks in the year. 'One family'? What is the mere label? Nothing. What is the real situation? Everything. Of blood-relationship not a trace. Why, even cousins marry—but here are two strains absolutely different.... Have you," I asked, "have you brought up this point with—Albert?"
Raymond glanced at the letters.
"You have! And he says what I say!"
Raymond put the letters away.
Albert had doubtless said much more—and said it with the vigor of indignant youth.