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