My desire has been stormily satisfied. Though inwardly indignant, I returned to Gertrude with every intention of being very bland and very reasonable, hoping against hope to have the unlovely fact somehow cleared away. But Gertrude, it seems, had decided that the indignation properly belonged to her."Hello, Ranny," she greeted me easily, in the gray tone that precedes a tempest. "What do you mean by speaking to me as you did over the telephone?""I—I mean this," I faltered, but that was the last time I faltered in speaking to her. "Did you or did you not report the case of Alicia to the Home and send an inspectress to me?"She watched me with narrowed eyelids for a moment and then, deciding evidently, that a little truculence would reduce me to my normal state of pulp, she answered coolly:"And suppose I did—what of it?""I merely want to know the truth," I answered her quietly enough. "Lies are so detestable to me." She flinched perceptibly, but drew herself up with hauteur."Well, then I didn't!" she returned loftily. "But what if I had? Somebody ought to have reported it," she ran on with gathering temper by which she thought to crush me. "I think it's indecent for you to have in the house a girl of that age who's no relation to you. The fact that you are a fool doesn't make it any less indecent. I'm the only woman friend you have and somebody has to see you don't make a worse idiot of yourself than nature made you to start with. Now do you understand, my excellent friend?"And having discharged this volley she stood panting lividly, as if viewing my ruins. At the moment however I could not consider her. I knew only that flashes of red appeared before my eyes, that I spoke the literal truth when I told her:"To me such an action and the person guilty of it would be equally contemptible.""You say that to me?" she gasped, taking a step forward, with a colorable imitation of incredulity, strange in view of her denial."To you—yes," I told her, quietly enough, for now I was more master of myself. "And contemptible is only a mild euphemism for what I should really think." She stared at me speechless for a moment."Youthink!" she uttered in mocking scorn. "You've posed as a sort of God's fool—but what you are is the devil's tool.""Take care, Gertrude," I warned her. "You might say something that you will regret even more."She waved me contemptuously away."I'll say this," she returned in level tones, seating herself and clenching her hands in an effort at control—but in reality she was beginning a new offensive. "You'd better go home, Ranny, and make up your mind to send that girl away. All men are rotten. But it's because I thought you were different that—that—" she did not finish, but added: "And to have you gathering in girls from the gutter—""Stop!" I cried, "I won't hear another word," and turned away as if to go, not trusting myself to say more."Come back!" she called, jumping from the sofa. "Come back and listen: Either you send that girl away or I'll have nothing more to do with you. Is that understood?"I laughed at her mirthlessly."Choose between her and me," she uttered with the touch of melodrama that few women seem to escape."Don't be theatrical," I told her, now more in control of myself. "That girl makes it possible for me to bring up Laura's children. She is no more to me than any of the others. But however that may be, she stays—understand that, please, Gertrude: she stays!""Then you've chosen?" she demanded in livid stupefaction."I've announced no choice. But the girl stays.""Thank God!" she lifted her hands upwards, and I hope her prayer was acceptable. "I knew I was tied to a fool," she added, as though I had been holding her enchained, "but I did not know he was a knave as well. I'm free at last!"I walked out without trusting myself to make reply.I sincerely hope Gertrude will enjoy her freedom more than she did her bondage. Anyway, I am glad she has entered a denial.As I walked home under a starry sky, however, I was amazed to feel my anger cooling rapidly; the sense of defeat, of disappointment with human nature, giving way to a new feeling of freedom, to an elation I had not experienced in years. I definitely felt a leap of exhilaration in the wake of the other mingled emotions. It took me by surprise.Matrimony is obviously not for such shameful villains as myself. If Gertrude expects me to return on bended marrow bones and sue for forgiveness, I am certain she is mistaken. Matrimony is not for me. That at least is clear.CHAPTER XThe dancing flamboyancy in his veins has proved too much for my revered, partner, Fred Salmon.With a glimmer hall bravado, half amusement in his eyes, he announced to me this morning that he has "signed on for a piece of the Roumanian loan."I was stupefied."How much?" I gasped faintly, watching him closely, for I could not believe it."Only a measly million," he replied with deprecating cockiness. "It was as much as I could do to make them let us come in at all. If it weren't for your cold feet I would have taken the three millions." And his chuckle irritated me beyond words.He was in earnest. He was not joking."And where the devil," I spluttered, "will you get the money for even the initial payment?""Raise it, my boy, raise it," he bent, beetling over me. "If we want to amount to anything we've got to take chances. One syndicate participation like that and perhaps another with the newspaper publicity, and we're made men in the Street. Got to do it. Want to be a piker all your life? I don't!""You're—mad—" I stammered limply. "Stark, raving mad. And how do you propose to raise the money?""By selling the bonds, fellow!" he announced with aloof superiority."Have you got the bonds?""No. They are not even in this country. We give themad interimcertificates until the bonds arrive.""Have you got the certificates?""No," was the astounding reply. "We'll sell 'em first, get the money for 'em, turn it over to Sampson & Company, the syndicate managers, and draw our certificates. That's how it works. Of course if we were a bigger house, better known, it would be easier. But we'll do it—don't you worry—we'll do it!""You mean," I groped, "we have to sell something we haven't even in hand and get money for it?""That's what it amounts to," he grinned, though less jauntily than before.I felt myself crumbling to dust."Don't sit there like that!" he cried, regarding me as one looks down from the side of a great liner upon a drifting derelict. "Get busy! Get on the telephone and sell some Roumanian bonds!" And he chuckled in his absurd triumphant manner that will one day drive me to desperation. "Begin with your friend Visconti," he suggested. "He seems to have taken a shine to you. Talk to him in Dago."Many and many a time had I asked myself what I was doing in that particular galley. To enter a new occupation without enthusiasm, for a cloistered monk like myself to go out into the market place as a chafferer and a huckster, among a race I had not even cared to understand, and to embrace their ideals and their career, concerning which I had not even curiosity, had been difficult enough. With the lash of my need I had whipped myself like a flagellant to the daily grind until custom had given it the ungrateful familiarity that the treadmill must have for the mule.But to embark upon this murky enterprise of Fred's, charged for me with the dread of a hundred lurking pitfalls, into which I should infallibly stumble, charged with the fear of certain failure, all my instincts revolted against it. Nevertheless, like a lost soul, I suffered myself to be driven because I must.It is to the glory of human nature that there is more of the milk and marrow of human kindness in it than pessimists give it credit for. The excellent Visconti, after listening to me in silence while I lamely and guiltily explained my offer to him, courteously replied in Italian."If you recommend them, Signor, I will take them. I cannot take many, but I will take five."I thanked him as best I could, but I shrank back as under a blow. This man was buying not Roumanian bonds so much as my Word. Besides, though the bonds were right enough, I had nothing to give him and yet I wanted his money. I could not face it, and so I informed my egregious Fred."That's so," said Fred reflectively and for a moment he was lost in thought. Then, as is his wont, he suddenly began to radiate the heat of a new inspiration. "I've got it!" he cried. "Listen here. You've only put half your capital into this business. You've got in the vault—how much is it? Twenty-five thousand in securities?"I gaped at him in terror."Well," he ran on, "suppose you bring them over, deposit them with Sampson and Company against that much inad interimcertificates—or else borrow money on 'em. Don't you see?" he slapped his knee gleefully, "then we have those certificates on hand. We can pass 'em right out to fellows like Visconti, who come straight across, and so go on with the game. When we're through, all you've done is to lend yourself—the firm—twenty-five thousand in securities, given us a big lift and you put your securities back in the vault. Don't you see that?""No.""Isn't that clear?" he asked in an injured tone."Clear as pitch," I answered truthfully."Never mind," he clapped me smartly on the shoulder. "You go bring your securities over. I'll make it clear. Of course you'll draw interest on the loan you're making the firm."And like the mule I am, I dully complied. And now we are laboring on with the sale of the million in foreign bonds to people the majority of whom have not a notion whether Roumania is the capital of Rome or a Central American republic. "L'insuccess," declares Balzac, "nous accuse toujours la puissance de nos pretentious." But as I had no pretensions in this business, loss and failure would be doubly humiliating. What then, I ask myself again, am I doing in that galley? Meantime what remains of my slender possessions is hypothecated to the pretensions I had never entertained.I have been house-hunting in the suburbs. It is idle for me to try to find either a house or an apartment in any region that would be suitable for both my means and the children in New York. So for two Saturdays and two Sundays I have been trudging the dreariness of the less expensive suburbs in quest of a house."What!" exclaimed Fred, when he heard of it, "not going to leave the Shoe?""Yes," I told him. "The Shoe pinches, I must find another.""Well, you're a funny old geezer," was his laughing comment. I could do better than that in describing him.When I come home depressed and weary I find a shower of little attentions awaiting me, very winning and touchingly agreeable. Little Jimmie, with great serious eyes, ostentatiously brings me my slippers and dressing gown and watches my face intently for the reward of commendation. When I murmur, "Thanks, old man, very good of you," I can virtually see his little pulses pounding with exultation in his veins."Are you vewy tired, Uncle Ranny?" he inquires, keeping up the high drama of profound concern."So, so, old chap," I tell him, kissing his serious little face. "Nothing to worry about." A moment later I hear him dashing about the dining room very properly and completely oblivious of my fatigue.Laura in the rôle of Hebe, gravely brings me tea on a small tray, and asks whether there is any book I desire or anything else that she might bring me.But behind all these attentions I discern the directing hand of Alicia. Can it be that the child has instinctively divined that I have actually broken with Gertrude on her account, that the little woman's soul in her secretly exults in a feeling of victory? Since she cannot know all the conditions, she can feel, at most, I suppose, only a vague primitive sense of triumph in defeating the will of another woman. Perhaps I am attributing too much to her young intelligence, but at times I seem to perceive in her eyes, in her bearing, a touch of the protective instinct, of almost the maternal toward me, that I had never observed in her before. Possibly it is merely a sense of gratitude. At all events, those attentions of the little people are very soothing and grateful, notably now, since Griselda's have declined perforce, in view of her greatly increased work in the kitchen. Yet it staggers me at times when I realize the number of souls for whose shelter and livelihood I am responsible, for the complex machinery that I must keep revolving. Experience like that should be acquired young. Like Mr. Roosevelt, I would advocate early marriages.I have found a house.In Crestlands (thrilling are the names of suburbs!) thirty-five minutes from Grand Central Station, in Westchester County. I came upon a châlet-like cottage built largely upon a rock that I believe will answer our purpose. The rent is moderate and there is said to be an asparagus bed somewhere in the "grounds." I know there are two trees with gnarled roots grasping their way downward among the stones, in a business-like struggle for existence, and there are a few inches of lawn for the children. With a veritable terrain like that as dower, it will surprise no one that I took the cottage."The latitude's rather uncertain, and the longitude also is vague," as vague, almost, as that of Roumania; nevertheless I shall be henceforth a dweller of Suburbia.This being Sunday, I took the children out there in the afternoon to examine their new demesne. With the air of a castellan exhibiting an old castle, I showed them through the rooms and in the phrases of the real-estate dealer I enumerated their advantages—with a heavy heart. But the children cared nothing about that. Randolph saw visions of a tent or an Indian tepee under one of the gnarled old trees and Jimmie illustrated how he would "woll down" the slope; all our "grounds" are slopeet praeterea nihil. But Laura, detecting a neglected rose bush near one of the windows, clapped her hands for joy."This is like the house in 'Peter Pan', Uncle Ranny," she cried delightedly. "There will be roses peeping in, and babies peeping out."I looked at her in poignant surprise. It was so absolutely the voice of her mother when she was a girl, the spirit and the expression. It is exactly that feature that my poor sister would have first taken into account; it might have been Laura herself. I turned away in order not to cloud their delight. The poetry of life is the only thing worth living for, yet what a toll the world exacts on that commodity!Griselda, in spite of all temptation, had declined to come."Is there a good kitchen?" she demanded. I told her I thought there was."Then I will not waste my time looking for the birdies in the trees or the paint on the roof," she retorted stoutly. She even demurred at Alicia's coming. "There's over much to do," she protested darkly.Of discomfort and wretchedness let none speak. I have sounded both and so much else that is unpleasant to the abysmal depths that I shall never again look with the same eyes upon the impassive faces of the men in the moving express train. They have all no doubt lived and suffered even as I, these, my brothers!I have moved the household to my suburb, and this is a lamentde profundis.The legendary mandrake is a gurgling infant to the way my books cried upon removing. They not only screamed; they sobbed and quivered like broken souls to be dislodged from their place that has known and loved them so well and so long. Every object in the flat was a whole plantation of mandrakes. Their wailing and ululation resounds yet in their new and changed surroundings. Roses peeping in, indeed! To my books this is a house of sorrow. Forlorn and jumbled and still unsorted they stand and lie in heaps so that their fallen state wrings my lacerated heart. Alicia, to whom I sadly complained of this condition, consolingly answered:"But my English teacher in school would say that that was a 'pathetic fallacy', Mr. Ranny. Books and things don't really feel, do they?""Don't they!" I bitterly exclaimed. "Let unemotional pedants speak as they stupidly will, Alicia. Nothing can be more poignantly pathetic than a fallacy!""Yes, sir," murmured Alicia and with reverent fingers she silently helped me to place some of those books. She has a tender touch for the objects of other people's love, a charming attribute in a woman.And from the physical chaos in the châlet at Crestlands I am whirled madly every morning in a crowded express train, then in a convulsively serried subway car, to the more subtle chaos in the office of Salmon and Byrd—to sell Roumanian bonds. Roumanian bonds are overrunning those offices like the rats in the town of Hamelin. Ah, will not some piper, pied or otherwise, come and pipe them all into the sea? The answer, I grieve to say, is no! The impossibility of shifting one's burdens is the fundamental mistake of Creation.Nothing irritates me more after a morning's fruitless telephoning or ineffectual running about than to have Fred Salmon smile sleekly, clap me on the back and mumble mechanically:"Great work, old boy! You're doing fine!"What is the use of these false inanities? On Saturday he came to me with the gratifying intelligence that Imber and Smith, who took two millions of the bonds, have already sold out their allotment."Damn them!" was the only answer I could find."That's what I say," he answered in his perfect rôle of being all things to all men, then reflectively, "I think Smith's a liar, though." I'll wager nevertheless that he congratulated Smith as heartily as he bruises my back. To be all things to all men is surely one of the most disgusting traits in a human biped. Fitfully ever and again I wish myself out of the ruck and rabble of all that. But sadly and heavily it comes to me that it is better perhaps to bear the ills one has than to fly to others that are a mere sinister blank. I seem like a man on a raft with the storm-lashed waves washing over me the while I gasp for breath and hope for rescue.I wonder what this life would be like if upon coming home to Crestlands there were not those eager little retrievers to fetch and to carry and to wait upon me, to surround me with their glad young freshness. But in candor I must admit that but for them I should be leading my old secluded life, undisturbed among books, that now seems remote as a past incarnation.The weeks go by and, toiling under our burden, we are desperately trying to stem the rush of time. In certain hard-pressed moments I have a sickly feeling that time will win—and crush us. A revoltingly new discovery I made yesterday, that Fred has taken to drinking during business hours, suddenly drew the life out of me like a suction pump. Then, realizing the meaning and the enormity of the fact, I was frightened out of fear and talked to him in as friendly and kindly a vein as the circumstances would permit, in an effort to show him our position and where it might lead us.His first snarl of defiance gave way to contrition. He wept maudlin tears and made promises so robust that they ought to outlive him, but—I feel shaken as never before.Meanwhile Sampson and Company are calling for the payments due on our allotment of bonds, and Fred, the smiler and the diplomat, is shirking interviews with them."What we need, Ranny," he said to me to-day in chastened mood, "is capital, more capital. We went into this business on a shoe string—sometimes it will hold till you can get a rope and sometimes—"—"Even a life line is too late," I supplied.He did not answer. But after a pause he began afresh:"Couldn't you get round and see some of your rich friends—see whether they could tide us over for a spell?""Rich friends!" I writhed as one in torment. "Who are my rich friends? I have none, as you ought to know. I have now put in every cent of capital that I own—against your business experience, Fred. And this is where we've arrived. If my sister's children weren't dependent upon me—but then," I ended bitterly, "I shouldn't be here, as I think you know."He bowed his head."Didn't your sister—wasn't there anything—?" But to his credit, he did not finish. If, as I suppose, he meant to ask whether Laura left any money that I could use, he evidently thought better of it and walked away in a somber silence. And that is where we stand.That is where we stand in our business, and the needs of my household are expanding. Griselda knows nothing of my affairs and yet I surprise her dark eyes, singularly lustrous for one of her years, watching me at times out of her swarthy wrinkled face, as if divining the Jehannum I am experiencing. More than ever she lays herself out to perform incredible feats of economy, whilst I hypocritically pretend to be unaware of it.The children, having prospered and grown during the winter, are in need of new summer wardrobes, which I have ordered bought. If it is to be disaster, then shabbiness shall not betray us. Like the man who donned evening clothes in which to sink with theTitanic, I have always entertained a stubborn faith in the policy of good clothes. Policy, policy—the trail of policy is over me like a fetid odor—and how clean and unsmirched I have always felt in my stupid transparency! Gertrude, if she knew it, would now rejoice that she had thrown me over.I envy our clerks and typists who banish all cares at five in the afternoon and do not resume them until the following morning. What a gay life is theirs—if they but knew it. They jest and fool and hurl picturesque slang at one another and draw their pay on Saturdays, unconscious of how near to perdition we totter. If we go to the wall they will soon find other places. But I—shall find the wall. I wish I knew what the emotions of Fred are as, rucking his forehead heavily, he strides about our rugs. I only know, however, that mine are emotions of doom.The black doom is upon us.After days of haggling and lying and shuffling and paltering we have, as a firm, expired.Our vain and concentrated efforts to sell something that we had not the necessary means and connections to sell led us to neglect the things we could have done.I shall not soon forget the vile outburst of the heavy-jowled Sampson when as by a Sultan's firman, he imperiously summoned us to his office and told us in his language what he thought of us."People like you don't belong in the Street—they belong in jail. Assign!" he snarled, "Better assign at once and clear out!"And not the least of the bitterness of that moment was the acrid realization that I could not charge him with having flattered and hounded Fred into the vanity of the enterprise, because at that moment Fred and I were one—with this distinction: What Fred was suffering would roll from his back like water from a rhinoceros, whereas I would remain obscenely branded by his words forevermore.It was useless to argue, futile to protest. There was no time or place for extenuating circumstances. I was too full of shame and humiliation to offer any conciliatory suggestions, and I still had enough of mulish pride not to truckle to that fish-eyed bully. We walked out of that man's office bankrupts.I still marvel how I found my way back to our own office through the lurid darkness that encompassed me. The world about me—the palpitating, pressing eager world, of which in a measure I had been a part—was suddenly strange and phantasmal and alien, the ghostly city of a dream. The people were shadows and their hurrying steps and errands as mysterious and as unrelated to my life as those of a colony of ants. The only actuality I did not envisage in that dark moment which was coextensive with eternity, was thatIwas the anemic ghost stalking at noonday and the others were the reality."If only you had not taken the balance of my capital—" was the thought throbbing under my overwhelming misery—"if only you had left me that!" But I could not bring myself to whine to Fred. I kept stonily silent. A burning resentment swelled my heart so that I could not speak. The newspaper publicity Fred had craved would come to him now with a vengeance.Now they are busy dismembering the corpse and colporting the remains, whilst I sit darkly at home in Crestlands like one disembodied, dead.CHAPTER XII have had time to grow dulled to the shabby peripety of my career as a business man. The sickening details and legal forms of our failure are over, and I am wretchedly surviving on the loan made upon an insurance policy, but still I have evolved no plans for the future.I sit in the shadow of the châlet watching Jimmie rolling down the slope and endeavoring to roll up again. The early August sun is hot in the heavens and the air even of Crestlands is muggy. And my pulses keep insistently repeating, repeating, "What is to become of us?" My pulses—but not my mind. That useless functionary has quite simply suspended operations.I used to feel wise in reading Montaigne and Buckle, humorous with Rabelais and Cervantes, acute and a man of the world with Balzac or Sainte-Beuve. But none of these erstwhile comforters, it appears, seems able to lift up my spirit. Modern young critics talk of escape in literature, but it seems one can only escape when there is nothing very serious to escape from. Like a debauchee who had killed his palate or one who has swallowed an unwholesome dish overnight, the zestful taste for an essay of Elia, the gustatory rolling under the tongue of sentences in "Religio Medici", the keen pleasure in a Dryden preface, all these are now impossible. The savor of them has died for me. My dreams of Mæcenasship for Tudor Texts have gone a-glimmering.For joy in books the tranquil heart is needed. The world has been too much with me and neither poppy nor mandragora can banish the effects of it. There is no balm to sane me.There was escape after all, though—if not in reading, then in writing. I can quite understand now the persistence of diarists in the world. I had no sooner written down the words above than a tremor of resolution shook me and I went into the baking city in quest of livelihood. I found nothing save exhaustion, but it is certain that in Crestlands I shall find even less.I looked upon the teeming streets wide-eyed like a gawk, surprised anew that so many should find a foothold and sustenance where I had failed. The mystery of that will always baffle me. The deepening gloom gave way, however, when I entered Andrews' bookshop. His welcome was warm."Stranger," he greeted me cordially, "come into your own.""I don't deny I have felt it calling," I admitted."'Course you did—there is nothing else in the world.""Ah, how much else, Andrews!" I told him sadly.Whether he has heard of my failure or not I cannot tell. If he has, he was tact itself."Here are some beautiful things for you to see," he announced, bustling as he led me to a table in the rear of the shop. I looked at his beautiful things and was able to give him some useful points about one or two of them. He has actually come upon a Caxton, the lucky devil! This was indeed "my own", as Andrews was shrewd enough to divine.Ça me connait. And his courtesy and his deference were strangely consoling in the light of my recent experiences. Courtesy and deference cost others so little, but what refreshing manna they are to one's self-respect!I go on tramping the pavements of New York and I wish there were more point in my trampings.Every morning I go forth with a faint glow of hope, and the dim basis of my hope, when I come to think it out, is something like this: In the haunts of men I may meet somebody, an old acquaintance who may know or hear of something whereby a broken reed like myself, a pronounced failure, may get the chance of earning a livelihood. A desperate enough situation when reduced to the glaring light of plain speech—but that is the best that I am able to do. If only Dibdin were here! Despairingly I am in need of a friend. But my past life has separated and insulated me, so that when I think of friends and my thought convulsively darts out this way and that, it encounters nothing but vacancy, empty air. Fred Salmon is avoiding the Club. He is the only one who had reached to me from the past, and the result I have already recorded. I am not eager to meet him, though I have worn out any hostility I may have felt toward him.C'est un mauvais metier que celui de medire. I find my inward man the better for thinking of Fred neutrally, when I think of him at all.Illness was the one thing lacking to my ineffable Pilgrim's Progress, so infallibly illness has appeared.Jimmie came down with measles on Saturday and yesterday Alicia followed his example. The crumpling of Alicia under illness has proved like the shattering of a column in the edifice of my household. The whole insecure structure is tottering. And though she is burning with fever, the unhappy girl is murmuring with anxiety that stockings go unmended and buttons unsewn."Don't you worry about that, little girl," I keep telling her. "Griselda will do those things.""Griselda has too much to do as it is," she gulps and the tears start to her hot eyes. I have isolated her and Jimmie in my room, and Randolph and Laura are cautioned to keep as far as possible away from them. I remember the time when I would have flown from the fear of infection as from the plague, but now my anxieties are of a wholly different nature. Jimmie is mending now, but Alicia is far more ill than she knows.Griselda has undertaken the stockings and at night, when I sit watching and waiting for sounds from either of my invalids, I operate upon the buttons. It is curious how much art enters into the sewing of a button. A dog of a bachelor though I have ever been, I have never been compelled to learn that handicraft before. But I have learned from Griselda, who smiled crookedly when she imparted the law, that if you twist the thread around several times after you have sewn it, the whole thing acquires, relatively, the strength of a cable. To your punctured fingers you attend afterwards.Alicia, awakening at midnight, sat up in bed and caught me at my task; she moaned most dolefully. I hastily put Jimmie's little "undies" behind me, but too late."You'll never want me—or need me again—what's the use of getting well?" she wailed weakly."Oh, yes, I shall, Alicia—more than ever," I hastened to assure her."You do everything now that I ought to do," she pressed with febrile insistence. "I shall be no use any more.""But don't you see, Alicia," I argued, touching her hot forehead, "that I shall have to be earning money while you are doing the buttons? I ought to be earning it now, so get well as quickly as you can. Jimmie sees it; he's much better already." That logic seemed to soothe her more than I had expected. She caught my hand impulsively and pressed it to her cheek. The tremendous part played by affection in the lives of children is a never-ceasing wonder to me.Alicia is convalescent again,laus Domini, and Jimmie is now running about the little house filling it with noise—which is music to my ears. Laura and Randolph have fortunately thus far escaped infection. Jimmie is wanting to resume "wolling up and down" the slope again, but this is stillverboten.I can now take up my journeys into town again and I note with a pang that I am growing shabby. The yearly purchases of clothes had been as regular with me as my meals, but I have ordered no clothes for the spring or summer. Odd, what a deleterious effect the shabbiness of clothes has upon one's consciousness! The tinge of inferiority it brings touches some very tender places in one's spirit, almost like a shabby conscience. But the doctor of the neighborhood, a contemplative fellow who obviously knows his business, though he talks of his laboratory and his experiments like an alchemist, has earned the clothes that I must do without. And of the two I needed them more.My search is ended. There is jubilation in my heart again. I have fallen into a livelihood; like the bricklayer who used to fare forth, dinner pail in hand, I have found work.And the way of it was an odd little stroke of Fate, a whimsicality that would have pleased the ironic soul of Thomas Hardy.An old college friend of mine, Minot Blackden, whom I used to call Leonardo da Vinci because he was so full of ideas and inventions, had rediscovered, he said, the art of glass-staining. After a five years' residence in Italy, on a modest patrimony, most of which had gone into glass or into stain, he had returned to his native land and set up a shopà laWilliam Morris somewhere in the region of Bleecker Street, and proceeded to stain glass. He had had some newspaper publicity recently, and there were cuts of his work.While passing a church in my hot and dusty peregrinations, it occurred to me that here might be a chance of serving him and also myself. By writing an interesting booklet about his craft, illustrating it profusely and sending it with personal letters to all the vestries in the country, I might bring a flood of custom to his shop. It is with this forlorn proposal that I was blundering about to discover Minot Blackden. I failed to find his shop, but I came face to face with my old Salmon and Byrd acquaintance, Signor Visconti.In his palm beach suit and Panama hat, Visconti made a splendent and impressive figure in the purlieus of Bleecker Street."Ah-h, Signor Byrd," he cried with Latin cordiality, seizing my hand in both his own, "you are what you call a sight for sick eyes. I have often wonder about you—you must come into my banca—we must have leetla refreshment!"Refreshment appealed to me at the moment and gladly I accompanied him to his private office in the bank, that stands between a junk warehouse and a delicatessen emporium. With a charming tact he touched upon the hard luck of Salmon and Byrd and dismissed the subject for good.Briefly—for him—that is, with a wealth of gesture and illustration, he informed me that he was looking for a man for his enlarging bank, and asked me to recommend one."I want a fina man—" he explained. "American gentleman—who speeks a leetla da Italian—who put up what you call a fina fronta—understand me?""A fine front," I mused aloud, "and speaks Italian—no, Signor Visconti, we had no such young man in our office. I can think of no one I could recommend."He was obviously nonplused."I thinka," he said, with, a gesture of final resolution, "if I could finda some gentleman lika you, Mr. Byrd, he would beprecisamentewhat I look for. I know," he added hastily with an apologetic laugh, "man lika you, Signor, be hard to find!" And again he laughed heartily, though watching me between narrowed eyelids. His drift was now obvious. I was silent for a moment."Well, if it comes to that, Signor Visconti," I answered slowly, "I am doing nothing in particular just now. I may be utterly no good for you, but—but if—""Ah, you would try old Visconti, Signor!" And up flew his arms like windmills. "You no ashamed to work in vot you Americans call da Guinea colony!—no, no!" He noted the deprecating shadow on my face. "Ah, you understanda—you know the granda history of the Italiana people. You—but, Mr. Byrd—" and with an admirable histrionic transition he suddenly turned grave and sad—"Mr. Byrd, you are the very man I looka for," and he gripped both my hands. "But, Meester Byrd—I fear I cannot afford to pay what you would expect. Ah,sacra—if I could! You, the very man—Dio—" and he clapped a hand dramatically to his forehead—"the very man, but!—" and his full smile of sad and wistful regret seemed genuine for all its histrionic value."What do you propose to pay, Signor Visconti?" I inquired."I can only pay to start," he whispered hoarsely, with the round eyes of a man facing the inevitable, "thirty-fiva, maybe forty dollars week. Too leetla, I know," he added slowly, letting his hands fall on his knees with resignation."Very well, Signor Visconti," I said. "If you will try me, I shall be glad to come at forty dollars."Visconti fairly leaped at my hand and the bargain was struck.I am to begin earning a livelihood on Monday.Who said that adversity is the best teacher? Possibly it is, but gladness is the ablest cocktail. There is no stimulant like a little success.I am an august personage.I shall choke with pride, so august am I become in the Banca e Casa Commerciale Visconti.I call up the National City Bank concerning the price of bonds, or the rate of exchange, in English so presumably impeccable that Signor Visconti visibly puffs out his magnificent chest as he listens. There is a divinity that shapes our "frontas", rough-hew them how we will."Visconti's speaking," I say with firmness and the head of Visconti's curls his fine dyed mustache and turns away, glowing with ill-concealed pleasure. This is seemingly what the head of Visconti's has been waiting for. Mentally I offer a fervent prayer that he may never be disillusioned as to my capacity.I toil as I have never toiled before. I come early and go late and frequently have my lunch sent in from the adjoining delicatessen, powdered no doubt by the contiguous junk house, and the "boss", as the others call him, smiles with a rare unction that spells approval.With difficulty we are actually living on my income. If I had the half of my capital back that I had no business to put into Salmon and Byrd—but ifs inaugurate depressing trains of thoughts. My library alone stands between me and disaster, so like a prudent man of business I have begun a catalogue of it and I am training Alicia to help me. I must not again be caught by so desperate a prospect as recently faced me.How my little household had been affected by my late slough of despond I realize only now that I have passed it. Laughter and high spirits seem to have been uncorked again. We play and we rollic and chatter, more than in the early days of ourvie de famille—how long ago is it?—something less than a year, no longer!It is now the end of September and the schools have reopened. We are all sanely and industriously busy, like a normal American family, and as though its so-called head were an adequately competent being, and not the bungling masquerading amateur that he is. "Who never ate in tears his bread"—well, we have made intimate acquaintance of poverty and we fear it less than of yore—though we hate it more. It may be an impostor, but who maintains that all impostors are harmless? I certainly would deny that premise, so—we are cataloguing the library."Here is 'The Anatomy of Melancholy' by Burton," announces Alicia, taking down a volume."Small quarto, printed at Oxford, 1621," I finish for her."Yes," she breathes, marveling wide-eyed. "How can you remember such things, Uncle Ranny?" for so I have asked her to call me."How can I remember?" I ask in surprise. "How can I remember that you are Alicia Palmer, close to the towering age of fifteen, or that Jimmie Pendleton is five?""But we—are people," avers Alicia, "and we are—yours." I own to a slight thrill at this sweet investiture, implicit in her words, but I seem obtuse to it."But so is a great book a person," I sententiously inform her, "and 'Oxford, 1621', means a first edition, Alicia—not merely a person but a personage. That book is as proud an aristocrat as though it were plastered with coronets and simply throbbing with Norman blood. There is a whole heraldry about it—it is a prince among books. And all, Alicia, because it aroused men's interest and has given them delight from about the time the Pilgrims first landed at Plymouth. It's a book that could take Doctor Johnson out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise. Also, if the worst came to the worst, it could feed us for a time, and that is very important, isn't it, Alicia?""Yes," she breathes in awe which for some reason delights me. "What a wonderful thing it must be to write a great book." And she fingers the next volume with even greater reverence."The 'Life of Edward Malone', by Sir James Prior," reads Alicia. "Is that a prince among books, too?""No," I answer. "That is just a friend. Malone, you see, was crossed in love in the days of Doctor Johnson, and by way of consolation became a book-collector and a Shakesperian commentator. They say the Irish are fickle. But here is one who could never love again. So whenever I read his life, I think I see through a sort of mist the lovely lady whom he lost and all about him is curiously dear to me. He wouldn't feed us for very long, Alicia, but he has given me many hours of pleasure.""Are book-collectors people—crossed in love?" she inquires with gentle subtlety, and I am surprised that one of her youthfulness should be arrested by that particular point."If you mean me," I answer quietly, "then I can tell you that I wasn't. No one ever loved me enough to cross me. I am a collector by a sort of—spontaneous degeneration."Alicia throws her fine young head back and peals with delicious laughter. Afterwards I catch her smiling to herself as she copies down the titles.I am amazed to note how lovely that child has become since she has been here. Her thin, frightened expression has given way to one of happy confidence. All too soon she will be enriching some young man's life with happiness. Her interest in my musty old books has given her a value of companionship in my eyes that I trust I shall not exaggerate at the expense of my niece and nephews—though Alicia is hardly one to take advantage of such a situation. Nevertheless, I must be on my guard.After all, though she is the chartered, custodian of the others, andquis custodiet ipsos—who shall watch over Alicia? Obviously, it is my task to improve her mind in order to make her the better guardian for them.And Alicia's mind is improving apace."Uncle Ranny," she inquired the other day, "may I ask what that first edition of Boswell's 'Johnson', cost you?""It costs me nothing but a sleepless hour now and then," I told her. "It is not paid for. But I owe Andrews four hundred dollars for it. God knows when I shall pay it. But why do you ask, Alicia?""I have just read inBook Prices Currentthat a copy was sold by Sotheby's in London for one hundred pounds.""Already!" I murmured and I was lost in admiration not of the accretion in value—I am used to that—but of the girl's facility in acquiring the interest and the jargon of my hobby."Oh, Mr. Andrews must have a wonderful place!" she exclaimed. "That must be a splendid business. Where is he? How I'd love to see it!""You shall some day, Alicia," I told her. "He is in Twenty-ninth Street, and an excellent fellow he is."I then explained to her how Andrews had insisted upon planting the book on my shelves.Alicia gazed at me in silence for a moment, then suddenly tears glittered in her eyes."It's because of us," she said, with a quivering lip, "because we came that you couldn't buy it!""Don't talk rubbish, Alicia," I flared at her. "A collector gets almost as much pleasure in thinking of books he can't get as in those he buys. Don't you think you alone are worth more to me than an old Boswell?""No," she murmured gloomily, "but I'm going to try to be."
My desire has been stormily satisfied. Though inwardly indignant, I returned to Gertrude with every intention of being very bland and very reasonable, hoping against hope to have the unlovely fact somehow cleared away. But Gertrude, it seems, had decided that the indignation properly belonged to her.
"Hello, Ranny," she greeted me easily, in the gray tone that precedes a tempest. "What do you mean by speaking to me as you did over the telephone?"
"I—I mean this," I faltered, but that was the last time I faltered in speaking to her. "Did you or did you not report the case of Alicia to the Home and send an inspectress to me?"
She watched me with narrowed eyelids for a moment and then, deciding evidently, that a little truculence would reduce me to my normal state of pulp, she answered coolly:
"And suppose I did—what of it?"
"I merely want to know the truth," I answered her quietly enough. "Lies are so detestable to me." She flinched perceptibly, but drew herself up with hauteur.
"Well, then I didn't!" she returned loftily. "But what if I had? Somebody ought to have reported it," she ran on with gathering temper by which she thought to crush me. "I think it's indecent for you to have in the house a girl of that age who's no relation to you. The fact that you are a fool doesn't make it any less indecent. I'm the only woman friend you have and somebody has to see you don't make a worse idiot of yourself than nature made you to start with. Now do you understand, my excellent friend?"
And having discharged this volley she stood panting lividly, as if viewing my ruins. At the moment however I could not consider her. I knew only that flashes of red appeared before my eyes, that I spoke the literal truth when I told her:
"To me such an action and the person guilty of it would be equally contemptible."
"You say that to me?" she gasped, taking a step forward, with a colorable imitation of incredulity, strange in view of her denial.
"To you—yes," I told her, quietly enough, for now I was more master of myself. "And contemptible is only a mild euphemism for what I should really think." She stared at me speechless for a moment.
"Youthink!" she uttered in mocking scorn. "You've posed as a sort of God's fool—but what you are is the devil's tool."
"Take care, Gertrude," I warned her. "You might say something that you will regret even more."
She waved me contemptuously away.
"I'll say this," she returned in level tones, seating herself and clenching her hands in an effort at control—but in reality she was beginning a new offensive. "You'd better go home, Ranny, and make up your mind to send that girl away. All men are rotten. But it's because I thought you were different that—that—" she did not finish, but added: "And to have you gathering in girls from the gutter—"
"Stop!" I cried, "I won't hear another word," and turned away as if to go, not trusting myself to say more.
"Come back!" she called, jumping from the sofa. "Come back and listen: Either you send that girl away or I'll have nothing more to do with you. Is that understood?"
I laughed at her mirthlessly.
"Choose between her and me," she uttered with the touch of melodrama that few women seem to escape.
"Don't be theatrical," I told her, now more in control of myself. "That girl makes it possible for me to bring up Laura's children. She is no more to me than any of the others. But however that may be, she stays—understand that, please, Gertrude: she stays!"
"Then you've chosen?" she demanded in livid stupefaction.
"I've announced no choice. But the girl stays."
"Thank God!" she lifted her hands upwards, and I hope her prayer was acceptable. "I knew I was tied to a fool," she added, as though I had been holding her enchained, "but I did not know he was a knave as well. I'm free at last!"
I walked out without trusting myself to make reply.
I sincerely hope Gertrude will enjoy her freedom more than she did her bondage. Anyway, I am glad she has entered a denial.
As I walked home under a starry sky, however, I was amazed to feel my anger cooling rapidly; the sense of defeat, of disappointment with human nature, giving way to a new feeling of freedom, to an elation I had not experienced in years. I definitely felt a leap of exhilaration in the wake of the other mingled emotions. It took me by surprise.
Matrimony is obviously not for such shameful villains as myself. If Gertrude expects me to return on bended marrow bones and sue for forgiveness, I am certain she is mistaken. Matrimony is not for me. That at least is clear.
CHAPTER X
The dancing flamboyancy in his veins has proved too much for my revered, partner, Fred Salmon.
With a glimmer hall bravado, half amusement in his eyes, he announced to me this morning that he has "signed on for a piece of the Roumanian loan."
I was stupefied.
"How much?" I gasped faintly, watching him closely, for I could not believe it.
"Only a measly million," he replied with deprecating cockiness. "It was as much as I could do to make them let us come in at all. If it weren't for your cold feet I would have taken the three millions." And his chuckle irritated me beyond words.
He was in earnest. He was not joking.
"And where the devil," I spluttered, "will you get the money for even the initial payment?"
"Raise it, my boy, raise it," he bent, beetling over me. "If we want to amount to anything we've got to take chances. One syndicate participation like that and perhaps another with the newspaper publicity, and we're made men in the Street. Got to do it. Want to be a piker all your life? I don't!"
"You're—mad—" I stammered limply. "Stark, raving mad. And how do you propose to raise the money?"
"By selling the bonds, fellow!" he announced with aloof superiority.
"Have you got the bonds?"
"No. They are not even in this country. We give themad interimcertificates until the bonds arrive."
"Have you got the certificates?"
"No," was the astounding reply. "We'll sell 'em first, get the money for 'em, turn it over to Sampson & Company, the syndicate managers, and draw our certificates. That's how it works. Of course if we were a bigger house, better known, it would be easier. But we'll do it—don't you worry—we'll do it!"
"You mean," I groped, "we have to sell something we haven't even in hand and get money for it?"
"That's what it amounts to," he grinned, though less jauntily than before.
I felt myself crumbling to dust.
"Don't sit there like that!" he cried, regarding me as one looks down from the side of a great liner upon a drifting derelict. "Get busy! Get on the telephone and sell some Roumanian bonds!" And he chuckled in his absurd triumphant manner that will one day drive me to desperation. "Begin with your friend Visconti," he suggested. "He seems to have taken a shine to you. Talk to him in Dago."
Many and many a time had I asked myself what I was doing in that particular galley. To enter a new occupation without enthusiasm, for a cloistered monk like myself to go out into the market place as a chafferer and a huckster, among a race I had not even cared to understand, and to embrace their ideals and their career, concerning which I had not even curiosity, had been difficult enough. With the lash of my need I had whipped myself like a flagellant to the daily grind until custom had given it the ungrateful familiarity that the treadmill must have for the mule.
But to embark upon this murky enterprise of Fred's, charged for me with the dread of a hundred lurking pitfalls, into which I should infallibly stumble, charged with the fear of certain failure, all my instincts revolted against it. Nevertheless, like a lost soul, I suffered myself to be driven because I must.
It is to the glory of human nature that there is more of the milk and marrow of human kindness in it than pessimists give it credit for. The excellent Visconti, after listening to me in silence while I lamely and guiltily explained my offer to him, courteously replied in Italian.
"If you recommend them, Signor, I will take them. I cannot take many, but I will take five."
I thanked him as best I could, but I shrank back as under a blow. This man was buying not Roumanian bonds so much as my Word. Besides, though the bonds were right enough, I had nothing to give him and yet I wanted his money. I could not face it, and so I informed my egregious Fred.
"That's so," said Fred reflectively and for a moment he was lost in thought. Then, as is his wont, he suddenly began to radiate the heat of a new inspiration. "I've got it!" he cried. "Listen here. You've only put half your capital into this business. You've got in the vault—how much is it? Twenty-five thousand in securities?"
I gaped at him in terror.
"Well," he ran on, "suppose you bring them over, deposit them with Sampson and Company against that much inad interimcertificates—or else borrow money on 'em. Don't you see?" he slapped his knee gleefully, "then we have those certificates on hand. We can pass 'em right out to fellows like Visconti, who come straight across, and so go on with the game. When we're through, all you've done is to lend yourself—the firm—twenty-five thousand in securities, given us a big lift and you put your securities back in the vault. Don't you see that?"
"No."
"Isn't that clear?" he asked in an injured tone.
"Clear as pitch," I answered truthfully.
"Never mind," he clapped me smartly on the shoulder. "You go bring your securities over. I'll make it clear. Of course you'll draw interest on the loan you're making the firm."
And like the mule I am, I dully complied. And now we are laboring on with the sale of the million in foreign bonds to people the majority of whom have not a notion whether Roumania is the capital of Rome or a Central American republic. "L'insuccess," declares Balzac, "nous accuse toujours la puissance de nos pretentious." But as I had no pretensions in this business, loss and failure would be doubly humiliating. What then, I ask myself again, am I doing in that galley? Meantime what remains of my slender possessions is hypothecated to the pretensions I had never entertained.
I have been house-hunting in the suburbs. It is idle for me to try to find either a house or an apartment in any region that would be suitable for both my means and the children in New York. So for two Saturdays and two Sundays I have been trudging the dreariness of the less expensive suburbs in quest of a house.
"What!" exclaimed Fred, when he heard of it, "not going to leave the Shoe?"
"Yes," I told him. "The Shoe pinches, I must find another."
"Well, you're a funny old geezer," was his laughing comment. I could do better than that in describing him.
When I come home depressed and weary I find a shower of little attentions awaiting me, very winning and touchingly agreeable. Little Jimmie, with great serious eyes, ostentatiously brings me my slippers and dressing gown and watches my face intently for the reward of commendation. When I murmur, "Thanks, old man, very good of you," I can virtually see his little pulses pounding with exultation in his veins.
"Are you vewy tired, Uncle Ranny?" he inquires, keeping up the high drama of profound concern.
"So, so, old chap," I tell him, kissing his serious little face. "Nothing to worry about." A moment later I hear him dashing about the dining room very properly and completely oblivious of my fatigue.
Laura in the rôle of Hebe, gravely brings me tea on a small tray, and asks whether there is any book I desire or anything else that she might bring me.
But behind all these attentions I discern the directing hand of Alicia. Can it be that the child has instinctively divined that I have actually broken with Gertrude on her account, that the little woman's soul in her secretly exults in a feeling of victory? Since she cannot know all the conditions, she can feel, at most, I suppose, only a vague primitive sense of triumph in defeating the will of another woman. Perhaps I am attributing too much to her young intelligence, but at times I seem to perceive in her eyes, in her bearing, a touch of the protective instinct, of almost the maternal toward me, that I had never observed in her before. Possibly it is merely a sense of gratitude. At all events, those attentions of the little people are very soothing and grateful, notably now, since Griselda's have declined perforce, in view of her greatly increased work in the kitchen. Yet it staggers me at times when I realize the number of souls for whose shelter and livelihood I am responsible, for the complex machinery that I must keep revolving. Experience like that should be acquired young. Like Mr. Roosevelt, I would advocate early marriages.
I have found a house.
In Crestlands (thrilling are the names of suburbs!) thirty-five minutes from Grand Central Station, in Westchester County. I came upon a châlet-like cottage built largely upon a rock that I believe will answer our purpose. The rent is moderate and there is said to be an asparagus bed somewhere in the "grounds." I know there are two trees with gnarled roots grasping their way downward among the stones, in a business-like struggle for existence, and there are a few inches of lawn for the children. With a veritable terrain like that as dower, it will surprise no one that I took the cottage.
"The latitude's rather uncertain, and the longitude also is vague," as vague, almost, as that of Roumania; nevertheless I shall be henceforth a dweller of Suburbia.
This being Sunday, I took the children out there in the afternoon to examine their new demesne. With the air of a castellan exhibiting an old castle, I showed them through the rooms and in the phrases of the real-estate dealer I enumerated their advantages—with a heavy heart. But the children cared nothing about that. Randolph saw visions of a tent or an Indian tepee under one of the gnarled old trees and Jimmie illustrated how he would "woll down" the slope; all our "grounds" are slopeet praeterea nihil. But Laura, detecting a neglected rose bush near one of the windows, clapped her hands for joy.
"This is like the house in 'Peter Pan', Uncle Ranny," she cried delightedly. "There will be roses peeping in, and babies peeping out."
I looked at her in poignant surprise. It was so absolutely the voice of her mother when she was a girl, the spirit and the expression. It is exactly that feature that my poor sister would have first taken into account; it might have been Laura herself. I turned away in order not to cloud their delight. The poetry of life is the only thing worth living for, yet what a toll the world exacts on that commodity!
Griselda, in spite of all temptation, had declined to come.
"Is there a good kitchen?" she demanded. I told her I thought there was.
"Then I will not waste my time looking for the birdies in the trees or the paint on the roof," she retorted stoutly. She even demurred at Alicia's coming. "There's over much to do," she protested darkly.
Of discomfort and wretchedness let none speak. I have sounded both and so much else that is unpleasant to the abysmal depths that I shall never again look with the same eyes upon the impassive faces of the men in the moving express train. They have all no doubt lived and suffered even as I, these, my brothers!
I have moved the household to my suburb, and this is a lamentde profundis.
The legendary mandrake is a gurgling infant to the way my books cried upon removing. They not only screamed; they sobbed and quivered like broken souls to be dislodged from their place that has known and loved them so well and so long. Every object in the flat was a whole plantation of mandrakes. Their wailing and ululation resounds yet in their new and changed surroundings. Roses peeping in, indeed! To my books this is a house of sorrow. Forlorn and jumbled and still unsorted they stand and lie in heaps so that their fallen state wrings my lacerated heart. Alicia, to whom I sadly complained of this condition, consolingly answered:
"But my English teacher in school would say that that was a 'pathetic fallacy', Mr. Ranny. Books and things don't really feel, do they?"
"Don't they!" I bitterly exclaimed. "Let unemotional pedants speak as they stupidly will, Alicia. Nothing can be more poignantly pathetic than a fallacy!"
"Yes, sir," murmured Alicia and with reverent fingers she silently helped me to place some of those books. She has a tender touch for the objects of other people's love, a charming attribute in a woman.
And from the physical chaos in the châlet at Crestlands I am whirled madly every morning in a crowded express train, then in a convulsively serried subway car, to the more subtle chaos in the office of Salmon and Byrd—to sell Roumanian bonds. Roumanian bonds are overrunning those offices like the rats in the town of Hamelin. Ah, will not some piper, pied or otherwise, come and pipe them all into the sea? The answer, I grieve to say, is no! The impossibility of shifting one's burdens is the fundamental mistake of Creation.
Nothing irritates me more after a morning's fruitless telephoning or ineffectual running about than to have Fred Salmon smile sleekly, clap me on the back and mumble mechanically:
"Great work, old boy! You're doing fine!"
What is the use of these false inanities? On Saturday he came to me with the gratifying intelligence that Imber and Smith, who took two millions of the bonds, have already sold out their allotment.
"Damn them!" was the only answer I could find.
"That's what I say," he answered in his perfect rôle of being all things to all men, then reflectively, "I think Smith's a liar, though." I'll wager nevertheless that he congratulated Smith as heartily as he bruises my back. To be all things to all men is surely one of the most disgusting traits in a human biped. Fitfully ever and again I wish myself out of the ruck and rabble of all that. But sadly and heavily it comes to me that it is better perhaps to bear the ills one has than to fly to others that are a mere sinister blank. I seem like a man on a raft with the storm-lashed waves washing over me the while I gasp for breath and hope for rescue.
I wonder what this life would be like if upon coming home to Crestlands there were not those eager little retrievers to fetch and to carry and to wait upon me, to surround me with their glad young freshness. But in candor I must admit that but for them I should be leading my old secluded life, undisturbed among books, that now seems remote as a past incarnation.
The weeks go by and, toiling under our burden, we are desperately trying to stem the rush of time. In certain hard-pressed moments I have a sickly feeling that time will win—and crush us. A revoltingly new discovery I made yesterday, that Fred has taken to drinking during business hours, suddenly drew the life out of me like a suction pump. Then, realizing the meaning and the enormity of the fact, I was frightened out of fear and talked to him in as friendly and kindly a vein as the circumstances would permit, in an effort to show him our position and where it might lead us.
His first snarl of defiance gave way to contrition. He wept maudlin tears and made promises so robust that they ought to outlive him, but—I feel shaken as never before.
Meanwhile Sampson and Company are calling for the payments due on our allotment of bonds, and Fred, the smiler and the diplomat, is shirking interviews with them.
"What we need, Ranny," he said to me to-day in chastened mood, "is capital, more capital. We went into this business on a shoe string—sometimes it will hold till you can get a rope and sometimes—"
—"Even a life line is too late," I supplied.
He did not answer. But after a pause he began afresh:
"Couldn't you get round and see some of your rich friends—see whether they could tide us over for a spell?"
"Rich friends!" I writhed as one in torment. "Who are my rich friends? I have none, as you ought to know. I have now put in every cent of capital that I own—against your business experience, Fred. And this is where we've arrived. If my sister's children weren't dependent upon me—but then," I ended bitterly, "I shouldn't be here, as I think you know."
He bowed his head.
"Didn't your sister—wasn't there anything—?" But to his credit, he did not finish. If, as I suppose, he meant to ask whether Laura left any money that I could use, he evidently thought better of it and walked away in a somber silence. And that is where we stand.
That is where we stand in our business, and the needs of my household are expanding. Griselda knows nothing of my affairs and yet I surprise her dark eyes, singularly lustrous for one of her years, watching me at times out of her swarthy wrinkled face, as if divining the Jehannum I am experiencing. More than ever she lays herself out to perform incredible feats of economy, whilst I hypocritically pretend to be unaware of it.
The children, having prospered and grown during the winter, are in need of new summer wardrobes, which I have ordered bought. If it is to be disaster, then shabbiness shall not betray us. Like the man who donned evening clothes in which to sink with theTitanic, I have always entertained a stubborn faith in the policy of good clothes. Policy, policy—the trail of policy is over me like a fetid odor—and how clean and unsmirched I have always felt in my stupid transparency! Gertrude, if she knew it, would now rejoice that she had thrown me over.
I envy our clerks and typists who banish all cares at five in the afternoon and do not resume them until the following morning. What a gay life is theirs—if they but knew it. They jest and fool and hurl picturesque slang at one another and draw their pay on Saturdays, unconscious of how near to perdition we totter. If we go to the wall they will soon find other places. But I—shall find the wall. I wish I knew what the emotions of Fred are as, rucking his forehead heavily, he strides about our rugs. I only know, however, that mine are emotions of doom.
The black doom is upon us.
After days of haggling and lying and shuffling and paltering we have, as a firm, expired.
Our vain and concentrated efforts to sell something that we had not the necessary means and connections to sell led us to neglect the things we could have done.
I shall not soon forget the vile outburst of the heavy-jowled Sampson when as by a Sultan's firman, he imperiously summoned us to his office and told us in his language what he thought of us.
"People like you don't belong in the Street—they belong in jail. Assign!" he snarled, "Better assign at once and clear out!"
And not the least of the bitterness of that moment was the acrid realization that I could not charge him with having flattered and hounded Fred into the vanity of the enterprise, because at that moment Fred and I were one—with this distinction: What Fred was suffering would roll from his back like water from a rhinoceros, whereas I would remain obscenely branded by his words forevermore.
It was useless to argue, futile to protest. There was no time or place for extenuating circumstances. I was too full of shame and humiliation to offer any conciliatory suggestions, and I still had enough of mulish pride not to truckle to that fish-eyed bully. We walked out of that man's office bankrupts.
I still marvel how I found my way back to our own office through the lurid darkness that encompassed me. The world about me—the palpitating, pressing eager world, of which in a measure I had been a part—was suddenly strange and phantasmal and alien, the ghostly city of a dream. The people were shadows and their hurrying steps and errands as mysterious and as unrelated to my life as those of a colony of ants. The only actuality I did not envisage in that dark moment which was coextensive with eternity, was thatIwas the anemic ghost stalking at noonday and the others were the reality.
"If only you had not taken the balance of my capital—" was the thought throbbing under my overwhelming misery—"if only you had left me that!" But I could not bring myself to whine to Fred. I kept stonily silent. A burning resentment swelled my heart so that I could not speak. The newspaper publicity Fred had craved would come to him now with a vengeance.
Now they are busy dismembering the corpse and colporting the remains, whilst I sit darkly at home in Crestlands like one disembodied, dead.
CHAPTER XI
I have had time to grow dulled to the shabby peripety of my career as a business man. The sickening details and legal forms of our failure are over, and I am wretchedly surviving on the loan made upon an insurance policy, but still I have evolved no plans for the future.
I sit in the shadow of the châlet watching Jimmie rolling down the slope and endeavoring to roll up again. The early August sun is hot in the heavens and the air even of Crestlands is muggy. And my pulses keep insistently repeating, repeating, "What is to become of us?" My pulses—but not my mind. That useless functionary has quite simply suspended operations.
I used to feel wise in reading Montaigne and Buckle, humorous with Rabelais and Cervantes, acute and a man of the world with Balzac or Sainte-Beuve. But none of these erstwhile comforters, it appears, seems able to lift up my spirit. Modern young critics talk of escape in literature, but it seems one can only escape when there is nothing very serious to escape from. Like a debauchee who had killed his palate or one who has swallowed an unwholesome dish overnight, the zestful taste for an essay of Elia, the gustatory rolling under the tongue of sentences in "Religio Medici", the keen pleasure in a Dryden preface, all these are now impossible. The savor of them has died for me. My dreams of Mæcenasship for Tudor Texts have gone a-glimmering.
For joy in books the tranquil heart is needed. The world has been too much with me and neither poppy nor mandragora can banish the effects of it. There is no balm to sane me.
There was escape after all, though—if not in reading, then in writing. I can quite understand now the persistence of diarists in the world. I had no sooner written down the words above than a tremor of resolution shook me and I went into the baking city in quest of livelihood. I found nothing save exhaustion, but it is certain that in Crestlands I shall find even less.
I looked upon the teeming streets wide-eyed like a gawk, surprised anew that so many should find a foothold and sustenance where I had failed. The mystery of that will always baffle me. The deepening gloom gave way, however, when I entered Andrews' bookshop. His welcome was warm.
"Stranger," he greeted me cordially, "come into your own."
"I don't deny I have felt it calling," I admitted.
"'Course you did—there is nothing else in the world."
"Ah, how much else, Andrews!" I told him sadly.
Whether he has heard of my failure or not I cannot tell. If he has, he was tact itself.
"Here are some beautiful things for you to see," he announced, bustling as he led me to a table in the rear of the shop. I looked at his beautiful things and was able to give him some useful points about one or two of them. He has actually come upon a Caxton, the lucky devil! This was indeed "my own", as Andrews was shrewd enough to divine.Ça me connait. And his courtesy and his deference were strangely consoling in the light of my recent experiences. Courtesy and deference cost others so little, but what refreshing manna they are to one's self-respect!
I go on tramping the pavements of New York and I wish there were more point in my trampings.
Every morning I go forth with a faint glow of hope, and the dim basis of my hope, when I come to think it out, is something like this: In the haunts of men I may meet somebody, an old acquaintance who may know or hear of something whereby a broken reed like myself, a pronounced failure, may get the chance of earning a livelihood. A desperate enough situation when reduced to the glaring light of plain speech—but that is the best that I am able to do. If only Dibdin were here! Despairingly I am in need of a friend. But my past life has separated and insulated me, so that when I think of friends and my thought convulsively darts out this way and that, it encounters nothing but vacancy, empty air. Fred Salmon is avoiding the Club. He is the only one who had reached to me from the past, and the result I have already recorded. I am not eager to meet him, though I have worn out any hostility I may have felt toward him.C'est un mauvais metier que celui de medire. I find my inward man the better for thinking of Fred neutrally, when I think of him at all.
Illness was the one thing lacking to my ineffable Pilgrim's Progress, so infallibly illness has appeared.
Jimmie came down with measles on Saturday and yesterday Alicia followed his example. The crumpling of Alicia under illness has proved like the shattering of a column in the edifice of my household. The whole insecure structure is tottering. And though she is burning with fever, the unhappy girl is murmuring with anxiety that stockings go unmended and buttons unsewn.
"Don't you worry about that, little girl," I keep telling her. "Griselda will do those things."
"Griselda has too much to do as it is," she gulps and the tears start to her hot eyes. I have isolated her and Jimmie in my room, and Randolph and Laura are cautioned to keep as far as possible away from them. I remember the time when I would have flown from the fear of infection as from the plague, but now my anxieties are of a wholly different nature. Jimmie is mending now, but Alicia is far more ill than she knows.
Griselda has undertaken the stockings and at night, when I sit watching and waiting for sounds from either of my invalids, I operate upon the buttons. It is curious how much art enters into the sewing of a button. A dog of a bachelor though I have ever been, I have never been compelled to learn that handicraft before. But I have learned from Griselda, who smiled crookedly when she imparted the law, that if you twist the thread around several times after you have sewn it, the whole thing acquires, relatively, the strength of a cable. To your punctured fingers you attend afterwards.
Alicia, awakening at midnight, sat up in bed and caught me at my task; she moaned most dolefully. I hastily put Jimmie's little "undies" behind me, but too late.
"You'll never want me—or need me again—what's the use of getting well?" she wailed weakly.
"Oh, yes, I shall, Alicia—more than ever," I hastened to assure her.
"You do everything now that I ought to do," she pressed with febrile insistence. "I shall be no use any more."
"But don't you see, Alicia," I argued, touching her hot forehead, "that I shall have to be earning money while you are doing the buttons? I ought to be earning it now, so get well as quickly as you can. Jimmie sees it; he's much better already." That logic seemed to soothe her more than I had expected. She caught my hand impulsively and pressed it to her cheek. The tremendous part played by affection in the lives of children is a never-ceasing wonder to me.
Alicia is convalescent again,laus Domini, and Jimmie is now running about the little house filling it with noise—which is music to my ears. Laura and Randolph have fortunately thus far escaped infection. Jimmie is wanting to resume "wolling up and down" the slope again, but this is stillverboten.
I can now take up my journeys into town again and I note with a pang that I am growing shabby. The yearly purchases of clothes had been as regular with me as my meals, but I have ordered no clothes for the spring or summer. Odd, what a deleterious effect the shabbiness of clothes has upon one's consciousness! The tinge of inferiority it brings touches some very tender places in one's spirit, almost like a shabby conscience. But the doctor of the neighborhood, a contemplative fellow who obviously knows his business, though he talks of his laboratory and his experiments like an alchemist, has earned the clothes that I must do without. And of the two I needed them more.
My search is ended. There is jubilation in my heart again. I have fallen into a livelihood; like the bricklayer who used to fare forth, dinner pail in hand, I have found work.
And the way of it was an odd little stroke of Fate, a whimsicality that would have pleased the ironic soul of Thomas Hardy.
An old college friend of mine, Minot Blackden, whom I used to call Leonardo da Vinci because he was so full of ideas and inventions, had rediscovered, he said, the art of glass-staining. After a five years' residence in Italy, on a modest patrimony, most of which had gone into glass or into stain, he had returned to his native land and set up a shopà laWilliam Morris somewhere in the region of Bleecker Street, and proceeded to stain glass. He had had some newspaper publicity recently, and there were cuts of his work.
While passing a church in my hot and dusty peregrinations, it occurred to me that here might be a chance of serving him and also myself. By writing an interesting booklet about his craft, illustrating it profusely and sending it with personal letters to all the vestries in the country, I might bring a flood of custom to his shop. It is with this forlorn proposal that I was blundering about to discover Minot Blackden. I failed to find his shop, but I came face to face with my old Salmon and Byrd acquaintance, Signor Visconti.
In his palm beach suit and Panama hat, Visconti made a splendent and impressive figure in the purlieus of Bleecker Street.
"Ah-h, Signor Byrd," he cried with Latin cordiality, seizing my hand in both his own, "you are what you call a sight for sick eyes. I have often wonder about you—you must come into my banca—we must have leetla refreshment!"
Refreshment appealed to me at the moment and gladly I accompanied him to his private office in the bank, that stands between a junk warehouse and a delicatessen emporium. With a charming tact he touched upon the hard luck of Salmon and Byrd and dismissed the subject for good.
Briefly—for him—that is, with a wealth of gesture and illustration, he informed me that he was looking for a man for his enlarging bank, and asked me to recommend one.
"I want a fina man—" he explained. "American gentleman—who speeks a leetla da Italian—who put up what you call a fina fronta—understand me?"
"A fine front," I mused aloud, "and speaks Italian—no, Signor Visconti, we had no such young man in our office. I can think of no one I could recommend."
He was obviously nonplused.
"I thinka," he said, with, a gesture of final resolution, "if I could finda some gentleman lika you, Mr. Byrd, he would beprecisamentewhat I look for. I know," he added hastily with an apologetic laugh, "man lika you, Signor, be hard to find!" And again he laughed heartily, though watching me between narrowed eyelids. His drift was now obvious. I was silent for a moment.
"Well, if it comes to that, Signor Visconti," I answered slowly, "I am doing nothing in particular just now. I may be utterly no good for you, but—but if—"
"Ah, you would try old Visconti, Signor!" And up flew his arms like windmills. "You no ashamed to work in vot you Americans call da Guinea colony!—no, no!" He noted the deprecating shadow on my face. "Ah, you understanda—you know the granda history of the Italiana people. You—but, Mr. Byrd—" and with an admirable histrionic transition he suddenly turned grave and sad—"Mr. Byrd, you are the very man I looka for," and he gripped both my hands. "But, Meester Byrd—I fear I cannot afford to pay what you would expect. Ah,sacra—if I could! You, the very man—Dio—" and he clapped a hand dramatically to his forehead—"the very man, but!—" and his full smile of sad and wistful regret seemed genuine for all its histrionic value.
"What do you propose to pay, Signor Visconti?" I inquired.
"I can only pay to start," he whispered hoarsely, with the round eyes of a man facing the inevitable, "thirty-fiva, maybe forty dollars week. Too leetla, I know," he added slowly, letting his hands fall on his knees with resignation.
"Very well, Signor Visconti," I said. "If you will try me, I shall be glad to come at forty dollars."
Visconti fairly leaped at my hand and the bargain was struck.
I am to begin earning a livelihood on Monday.
Who said that adversity is the best teacher? Possibly it is, but gladness is the ablest cocktail. There is no stimulant like a little success.
I am an august personage.
I shall choke with pride, so august am I become in the Banca e Casa Commerciale Visconti.
I call up the National City Bank concerning the price of bonds, or the rate of exchange, in English so presumably impeccable that Signor Visconti visibly puffs out his magnificent chest as he listens. There is a divinity that shapes our "frontas", rough-hew them how we will.
"Visconti's speaking," I say with firmness and the head of Visconti's curls his fine dyed mustache and turns away, glowing with ill-concealed pleasure. This is seemingly what the head of Visconti's has been waiting for. Mentally I offer a fervent prayer that he may never be disillusioned as to my capacity.
I toil as I have never toiled before. I come early and go late and frequently have my lunch sent in from the adjoining delicatessen, powdered no doubt by the contiguous junk house, and the "boss", as the others call him, smiles with a rare unction that spells approval.
With difficulty we are actually living on my income. If I had the half of my capital back that I had no business to put into Salmon and Byrd—but ifs inaugurate depressing trains of thoughts. My library alone stands between me and disaster, so like a prudent man of business I have begun a catalogue of it and I am training Alicia to help me. I must not again be caught by so desperate a prospect as recently faced me.
How my little household had been affected by my late slough of despond I realize only now that I have passed it. Laughter and high spirits seem to have been uncorked again. We play and we rollic and chatter, more than in the early days of ourvie de famille—how long ago is it?—something less than a year, no longer!
It is now the end of September and the schools have reopened. We are all sanely and industriously busy, like a normal American family, and as though its so-called head were an adequately competent being, and not the bungling masquerading amateur that he is. "Who never ate in tears his bread"—well, we have made intimate acquaintance of poverty and we fear it less than of yore—though we hate it more. It may be an impostor, but who maintains that all impostors are harmless? I certainly would deny that premise, so—we are cataloguing the library.
"Here is 'The Anatomy of Melancholy' by Burton," announces Alicia, taking down a volume.
"Small quarto, printed at Oxford, 1621," I finish for her.
"Yes," she breathes, marveling wide-eyed. "How can you remember such things, Uncle Ranny?" for so I have asked her to call me.
"How can I remember?" I ask in surprise. "How can I remember that you are Alicia Palmer, close to the towering age of fifteen, or that Jimmie Pendleton is five?"
"But we—are people," avers Alicia, "and we are—yours." I own to a slight thrill at this sweet investiture, implicit in her words, but I seem obtuse to it.
"But so is a great book a person," I sententiously inform her, "and 'Oxford, 1621', means a first edition, Alicia—not merely a person but a personage. That book is as proud an aristocrat as though it were plastered with coronets and simply throbbing with Norman blood. There is a whole heraldry about it—it is a prince among books. And all, Alicia, because it aroused men's interest and has given them delight from about the time the Pilgrims first landed at Plymouth. It's a book that could take Doctor Johnson out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise. Also, if the worst came to the worst, it could feed us for a time, and that is very important, isn't it, Alicia?"
"Yes," she breathes in awe which for some reason delights me. "What a wonderful thing it must be to write a great book." And she fingers the next volume with even greater reverence.
"The 'Life of Edward Malone', by Sir James Prior," reads Alicia. "Is that a prince among books, too?"
"No," I answer. "That is just a friend. Malone, you see, was crossed in love in the days of Doctor Johnson, and by way of consolation became a book-collector and a Shakesperian commentator. They say the Irish are fickle. But here is one who could never love again. So whenever I read his life, I think I see through a sort of mist the lovely lady whom he lost and all about him is curiously dear to me. He wouldn't feed us for very long, Alicia, but he has given me many hours of pleasure."
"Are book-collectors people—crossed in love?" she inquires with gentle subtlety, and I am surprised that one of her youthfulness should be arrested by that particular point.
"If you mean me," I answer quietly, "then I can tell you that I wasn't. No one ever loved me enough to cross me. I am a collector by a sort of—spontaneous degeneration."
Alicia throws her fine young head back and peals with delicious laughter. Afterwards I catch her smiling to herself as she copies down the titles.
I am amazed to note how lovely that child has become since she has been here. Her thin, frightened expression has given way to one of happy confidence. All too soon she will be enriching some young man's life with happiness. Her interest in my musty old books has given her a value of companionship in my eyes that I trust I shall not exaggerate at the expense of my niece and nephews—though Alicia is hardly one to take advantage of such a situation. Nevertheless, I must be on my guard.
After all, though she is the chartered, custodian of the others, andquis custodiet ipsos—who shall watch over Alicia? Obviously, it is my task to improve her mind in order to make her the better guardian for them.
And Alicia's mind is improving apace.
"Uncle Ranny," she inquired the other day, "may I ask what that first edition of Boswell's 'Johnson', cost you?"
"It costs me nothing but a sleepless hour now and then," I told her. "It is not paid for. But I owe Andrews four hundred dollars for it. God knows when I shall pay it. But why do you ask, Alicia?"
"I have just read inBook Prices Currentthat a copy was sold by Sotheby's in London for one hundred pounds."
"Already!" I murmured and I was lost in admiration not of the accretion in value—I am used to that—but of the girl's facility in acquiring the interest and the jargon of my hobby.
"Oh, Mr. Andrews must have a wonderful place!" she exclaimed. "That must be a splendid business. Where is he? How I'd love to see it!"
"You shall some day, Alicia," I told her. "He is in Twenty-ninth Street, and an excellent fellow he is."
I then explained to her how Andrews had insisted upon planting the book on my shelves.
Alicia gazed at me in silence for a moment, then suddenly tears glittered in her eyes.
"It's because of us," she said, with a quivering lip, "because we came that you couldn't buy it!"
"Don't talk rubbish, Alicia," I flared at her. "A collector gets almost as much pleasure in thinking of books he can't get as in those he buys. Don't you think you alone are worth more to me than an old Boswell?"
"No," she murmured gloomily, "but I'm going to try to be."