On the Stairs Part 12

VI

Albert's last year at his distant school ended rather abruptly. He came home, ailing, about a month before the close of the school year. He was thin and languid. He may have been growing too fast; he may have been studying too hard; he may have missed the "delightful motherly soul" who would have brooded over him at the school first proposed; or the drinking-water may have been infected--_que sais-je_? Well, Albert moped during much of May through the big house, and his mother heard of his return and his moping, made the most of it, and insisted on a visitation.

The child-element, of late, had not been large in her life. Her two tall stepsons were flourishing in absence; she had had no second child of her own; little Althea was nice enough, and she liked her pretty well....

But there was her own flesh and blood crying for her--perhaps. So she descended on the old, familiar interior--familiar and distasteful--and resumed with zeal the role of mother.

Her presence was awkward, anomalous. The servants were disconcerted, and scarcely knew how to take her fluttery yet imperious orders. For Raymond himself, as any one could see, it was all purgatory--or worse. Every room had its peculiar and disagreeable memories. There was the chamber-threshold over which they had discussed her tendency to out-mode the mode and to push every extreme of fashion to an extreme still more daring--for that black gown with spangles, or whatever, had been but the first of a long, flagrant line. There was the particular spot in the front hall, before that monumental, old-fashioned, black-walnut "hat-rack," where he had cautioned more care in her att.i.tude toward young bachelors, if only in consideration of his own dignity, his "face." There was the dining-room--yes, she stayed to meals, of course, and to many of them!--where (in the temporary absence of service) he had criticized more than once the details of her housekeeping and of her menu--had told her just how he "wanted things" and how he meant to have them. And in each case she had pouted, or scoffed, and had contrived somehow to circ.u.mvent him, to thwart him, and to get with well-cloaked, or with uncloaked, insistence her own way. Heavenly recollections! He felt, too, from her various glances and shrugs, that the house was more of a horror to her than ever, and, above all, that abominable orchestrion more hugely preposterous.

Albert kept mostly to his room. It was the same room which Raymond himself had occupied as a boy. It had the same view of that window above the stable at which Johnny McComas had sorted his insects and arranged his stamps. The stable was now, of course, a garage; but the time was on the way when both car and chauffeur would be dispensed with. Parallel wires still stretched between house and garage, as an evidence of Raymond's endeavor to fill in the remnant of Albert's previous vacation with some entertaining novelty that might help wipe out his recollection of the month lately spent with his mother. Albert was modern enough to prefer wireless--just then coming in--to "bugs" and postage-stamps; but the time remaining had been short. Besides, Albert liked the theatre better; and Raymond, during those last weeks in August, had sat through many woeful and stifling performances of vaudeville that he might regain and keep his hold on his son. His presence at these functions was observed and was commented upon by several persons who were aware of the aid he was giving for a bettered stage.

"Fate's irony!" he himself would sometimes say inwardly, with a sidelong glance at Albert, preoccupied with knockabouts or trained dogs.

Albert spent some of his daylight hours in bed; some in moving about the room spiritlessly. He looked out with lack-l.u.s.tre eyes at the sagging wires, and seemed to be wondering how they could ever have interested him. His mother, as soon as she saw him, put him at death's door--at least she saw him headed straight for that dark portal. She began to insist, after a few days, that he go home with her: he would be hers, by right, within a fortnight, anyhow. Her new house, she declared, would be an immensely better place for him, and would immensely help him to get well, if--with a half-sob--he ever _was_ to get well.

She knew, of course, the early legend of Johnny McComas, and had no wish to linger in its locale.

"You _do_ want to go with your own, own mother--don't you, dear?"

"Yes," replied Albert faintly.

The town-house of Johnny McComas, bought at an open-eyed bargain and on a purely commercial basis, had some time since fulfilled its predestined function. It had been taken over, at a very good price, by an automobile company; the purchasers had begun to tear it down before the last load of furniture was fairly out, and had quickly run up a big block in russet brick and plate gla.s.s. Gertrude McComas had had no desire to inherit memories of her predecessor; if she had not urged the promptest action her husband's plan might have given him a still more gratifying profit.

They had built their new house out on the North Sh.o.r.e. At one time the society of that quarter had seemed, however desirable to the McComases, somewhat inaccessible. But the second wife was more likely to help Johnny thitherward than the first. Besides, the partic.i.p.ation of the new pair in the scheme of dramatic uplift--however slight, essentially--had made the promised land nearer and brighter. They might now transplant themselves to that desired field with a certainty of some few social relations secured in advance.

They had a long-reaching, rough-cast house, in a semi-Spanish style, high above the water. They had ten acres of lawn and thicket. They had their own cow. And there was little Althea--a nice enough child--for a playmate.

"Let me get Albert away from all this smoke and grime," his mother pleaded--or argued--or demanded, dramatically. "Let me give him the pure country air. Let me give him the right things to eat and drink. Let me look after his poor little clothes,--if" (with another half-sob) "he is ever to wear them again. Let me give him a real mother's real care.

You _would_ like that better, wouldn't you, dear?"

"Yes," said Albert faintly.

It is quite possible, of course, that his school really had scanted the motherly touch.

"You see how it goes!" Raymond finally said to me, one evening, in the shadow of the orchestrion. "And what she will dress him in _this_ time...!"

The whole situation wore on him horribly. There was a light play over his cheeks and jaws: I almost heard his teeth grit.

A few days later Albert was transferred to his mother's place in the country. Raymond consoled himself as best he might with the thought that this sojourn was, after all, but preliminary, as Gertrude had herself implied, to the coming month on the Maine coast or at Mackinac. A change of air, a greater change of air, a change to an air immensely and unmistakably and immediately tonic and upbuilding--that, as his mother stated, with emphasis, was what Albert required.

So Albert, by way of introduction to his real summer, came to be domiciled under the splendid new roof of Johnny McComas--a roof, to Raymond's exacerbated sense, gleaming but heavy. Its tiles--he had not seen them, but he readily visualized them--bore him down. He was not obliged, as yet, to meet McComas himself. That came later.

PART VII

I

Albert recovered in due season--a little more rapidly, it may be, than if he had stayed with his father, but not more completely. His education progressed, entering another phase, and still with the unauthorized cooperation of his mother. During his stay with her she had really wrought no great havoc in his wardrobe, whatever she may have accomplished on a previous occasion. In fact, Albert had reached the point where he dressed in a manlier fashion--a fashion fortunately standardized beyond a mother's whims. In his turn, as it had been with his brothers by marriage, it was now the real preparatory school, with college looming ahead.

By this time Raymond had completely made his belated adieux to aesthetic concerns and had begun to concentrate on practical matters--on his own.

They needed his attention, even if he had not the right quality of attention to give. I had my doubts, and they did not grow less as time went on. Raymond was now within hail of fifty, and he added to his long list of earlier mistakes a new mistake peculiar to his years and to his training--or his lack of it.

Briefly, he a.s.sumed that age in itself brought knowledge, and that young men in their twenties--even their late twenties--were but boys. The disadvantage of holding this view became apparent when he began to do business with them. He depended too much on his own vague fund of experience, and did not realize how dangerous it might be to encounter keen specialists--however young--in their own field. He was now engaged in a general recasting of his affairs, and they came to him in numbers--bright, boyish, young fellows, he called them. He tended to patronize them, and he began to deal with them rather informally and much too confidently.

The family bank, after languishing along for a liberal time under its receiver, had been wound up, and the stockholders, among whom he was a large one but far from the largest, accepted the results and turned wry faces to new prospects elsewhere. The family holdings of real-estate, on the edge of the central district rather than in it, did not share the general and almost automatic advance in values, and an uncertain, slow-moving scheme for a general public improvement--one that continually promised to eventuate yet continually held off--had kept one of his warehouses vacant for years: its only income was contributed by an advertising company, which utilized part of its front as a bulletin-board. Rents in this quarter kept down, though taxes--more through rising rates than increased valuations--went up. And those two big old houses! Raymond still lived, too expensively in one, and paid interest on a c.u.mbering old mortgage. The other--old Jehiel's--was rented, at no great advantage, to a kind of correspondence school which conducted dubious courses and was precarious pay.

In such circ.u.mstances Raymond began to lend an ear to offers of "real-estate trades" and to suggestions for reinvestments. But real-estate, in which almost everybody had once dabbled (with advantage a.s.sumed and usually realized), had now become a game for experts.

Profits for the few: disaster--or at least disillusionment--for the many. Raymond thought he could "exchange" to advantage, and the bright young men (who knew what they were about much better than he did) flocked to help him. Well, one man in a hundred exchanges with profit; the ninety-and-nine, the further they go the more they lose--onions peeled coat by coat. Thus Raymond, until I heard of some of his operations and tried to stop them. One frank-faced, impudent young chap, who thought he was secure in a contract, I had to frighten off; but others had preceded him.

Investments were offered him too: schemes in town, and schemes--bolder and more numerous--out of town. Some of these had the support of McComas and his "crowd," and turned out advantageously enough, for those on the "inside"--to continue the jargon of the day and its interests; but Raymond sensitively, even fastidiously, stepped away from these, and trusted himself, rather, to financial free lances who often were not only without principle, but also without definite foothold.

"If you would only consult me!" more than once I had occasion to remonstrate. "Who are these people? What organization have they got--what responsibility?"

But though he would d.i.c.ker with strangers, who took hours of his time with their specious palaverings, he shrank more and more from his own tenants and his own agents. One rather important lease had to be renewed over his head--or behind his back. Still, I do not know that, on this particular occasion, his interests greatly suffered.

Thus Raymond began to approach a permanent impairment of his affairs at an age when recuperation for a man of his deficiencies was as good as out of the question. Further on still he began to suspect--even to realize--that he was unfitted to cope with adults. In his later fifties he began to pat children on their heads in parks and to rub the noses of horses in the streets. With the younger creatures of the human race and with the gentler orders of the brute creation he felt he could trust himself, and still escape disaster. If he found little girls sticking rows of fallen catalpa-blossoms on the spikes of iron fences, he would stop and praise their powers of design. He became susceptible to tiny boys in brown sweaters or infinitesimal blue overalls, and he seldom pa.s.sed without a touch of sympathy the mild creatures that helped deliver the laundry-bundles or the milk. Especially if they were white: he was always sorry, he said, for white coats in a dirty town.

But such matters of advancing age are for the future.

II

As regards the affairs of McComas, I naturally had a lesser knowledge.

They were more numerous and more complicated; nor was I close to them. I can only say that they went on prosperously, and continued to go on prosperously: their success justified his concentration on them.

As regards his home and his domestic affairs, I can have more to say. My wife and I called once or twice at their new house; with a daughter of twenty-odd, there was no reason why we should not cultivate that particular suburb, and every reason why we should.

Johnny's two sons were at home, briefly, as seniors who were soon to graduate. They were tall, hearty lads, with some of their father's high coloring. One of them was to be injured on the ball-field in his last term, and to die at home a month later. The other, recovering some of the individuality which a twin sometimes finds it none too easy to a.s.sert, was to marry before he had been out of college six weeks--marry young, like his father before him. The girl, young Althea, rather resembling her mother,--her own mother,--was beginning to think less of large hair-bows and more of longer dresses. Her father was quite wrapped up in her and her stepmother seemed to take to her kindly.

Johnny, in conducting us over his house, laid great stress on her room.

On her suite, rather; or even on her wing. She had her own study, her own bath, her own sleeping porch and sun-parlor. Everything had been very delicately and richly done. And she had her own runabout in the garage.

"The boys will go, of course," Johnny said to us, with his arm about his daughter; "but our little Althea will be a good girl and not leave her poor old father."

Ah, yes, girls sometimes have a way of lingering at home. Our own Elsie has always remained faithful to her parents.

Johnny had chosen to call himself "old" and "poor." Of course he looked neither. True, his chestnut hair was beginning to gray; but it made, unless clipped closer than he always wore it, at least an intimation of a florid aureole of crisp vigor; and his whole person gave an exudation of power and prosperity. No sorrow had come to him beyond the death of his parents--an inevitable loss which he had duly recorded in public.

That record had yet to receive another name--and yet another.

His wife, who had seemed to begin by bracing herself to stand against him, now seemed to have braced herself to stand with him--perhaps a more commendable wifely att.i.tude. I mean that the discipline incident to a life of success which was not without its rigors had become to her almost a second nature. The order of the day was cooperation, team-work; in the grand advance she was no straggler, no malingerer. It was a matter of pride to keep step with him; she was now beyond the fear which possibly for the first few years had troubled her--the fear that he, by word, or look, or even by silence, might hint to her that she was not fully "keeping up." Johnny himself was now rather heavy; for the regimen which they were pursuing he had the strength that insured against any loss of flesh through tax on the nerves. His wife, for her part, looked rather lean--trained, even trained down. As the wife of Raymond, she would probably have lapsed by now into pinguitude and sloth--unless discontent and exasperation had prevented.

After showing us the private grandeurs of their own estate, they motored us to the coordinated splendors of their club. It had been a good club--one of the best of its kind--from the start, and now it had grown bigger and better. Its arcaded porches and its verandas were wide; its links showed the hand of the expert, yet also the sensitive touch of the landscape gardener; an orchestra of greater size and merit than is common in such heedless gatherings played for itself if not for the gossiping, stirring throng; and people talked golf-jargon (for which I don't care) and polo (of which I know even less). Though the day was one in the relatively early spring, things were "going"; temporary backsets would doubtless ensue--meanwhile get the good out of a clear, fair afternoon, if but a single one.

Through all this gay stir the McComases contrived to make themselves duly felt. Johnny himself was one of the governors, I gathered; as such he took part in a small, hurried confab in the smoking-room. Whether or not there was a point in dispute, I do not know; but when he rose and led me forth with his curved palm under my elbow the matter had been settled his way, and no ill-feeling left: rather, as I sensed it, a feeling of relief that some one had promptly and energetically laid a moot question for once and all.

His two tall boys I saw walking, with an amiable air of an habituated understanding, around a billiard-table: "Can you beat them?" asked Johnny proudly, as we pa.s.sed the open window. His daughter circulated confidently, as being almost a member in full and regular standing herself. She seemed to know intimately any number of girls of her own age, and even a few lads of seventeen or so--an advantage which our Elsie, at that stage, never quite enjoyed, and which, due allowance made for altered conditions, she was somewhat slow in gaining, later.