On the Stairs Part 16

He was comfortable enough and snug. On the walls and shelves were books and pictures that I remembered seeing in his boyhood bedroom.

"I like it here," he said emphatically. And in truth it was the den of a born bachelor--one who had discovered himself too late.

Well, Raymond pa.s.sed me Albert's letter. He showed it to me, not with pride, but (as was evident from the questioning eye he kept on my face) with a view to learning what I thought of it. He was asking a verdict, yet shrinking from it.

Albert was rather c.o.c.ky; also, rather restless--I wondered if he would last to _be_ a soph.o.m.ore. And he displayed little of the consideration due a father. Clearly, Raymond, as a parent, had been weighed and found wanting. Albert's ideal stood high in another quarter, and his life's ambition might soon drive him in a direction the reverse of academic.

"How does it strike you?" asked Raymond, as I sat mulling over Albert's sheets.

I searched my mind for some non-committal response.

"Well," Raymond burst out, "he needn't respect _me_ if he doesn't admire _him_!"

II

Albert's response to McComas at the horse-show had not been noticeably prompt or adroit, but he cast about manfully for words and presently was able to voice his appreciation of Althea's feat (as it was regarded) and to congratulate her upon it. Johnny McComas was not at all displeased.

Albert had not been light-handed and graceful, but he developed (under this sudden stress) a st.u.r.dy, downright mode of speech which showed sincerity if not dexterity. The square-standing, straight-speaking farm-lad--straight-speaking, if none too ready--was sounding an atavistic note caught from his great-grandfather back in York State.

"Stuff in him!" commented Johnny. "It's a wonder, but there is. Must be his mother."

Albert made no particular impression, however, on Althea herself. A dozen other young fellows had been more demonstrative and more fluent.

He simply slid over the surface of her mind and fell away again. She had known him--intermittently--for years as a somewhat inexpressive boy; now, as a potential gallant, he was negligible, as compared with others.

But Albert, speaking in a sense either specific or general, did not mean to remain negligible.

He soon forgot most of the details of the day at the horse-show. He had hardly a greater affinity for sport than his father had had. He began his soph.o.m.ore year with no interest in athletics. The compulsory gymnasium-work bored him. He made no single team--put forth not the least effort to make one. The football crowd, the baseball crowd, even the tennis crowd, gave him up and left him alone.

Yet his bodily energies and his mental ambitions were waxing daily; his pa.s.sions too. There must be an outlet for all this vigor--business, or matrimony, or war. In one short twelvemonth he compa.s.sed all three.

By the end of Albert's second year, the day had come when a self-respecting young man of fortune and position found it hard if he must confess: "I have taken all yet given nothing." The Great War waged more furiously than ever, and came more close. The country had first said, "You may," and, later, "You must." Albert did not wait for the "must." He closed his year a month or so in advance--as he had done once before--and enrolled in a college-unit for service abroad.

Raymond gave his consent--a matter of form, a futility. In fact, Albert enrolled first and asked (or advised) later. His mother, of a mixed mind, would have interposed an objection. McComas hushed her down. "Let him go. He has the makings of a man. Don't cut off his best chance."

McComas had a right to speak. Tom McComas was going too, and going with his father's warm approval. If he could leave a young wife and a three-year-old boy, need a young bachelor student be held back?

Albert came West for a good-bye. His father held his hand and gave him a long scrutiny--part of the time with eyes wide open, part of the time with eyes closed to a fine, inquiring, studious line. But he never saw what there was to see. In his own body there was not one drop of martial blood; in his being not an iota of the bellicose spirit. Why men fight, even why boys fight--all this had been a mystery which he must take on faith, with little help from the fisticuffs and brawls of school-days, or even from the gigantic, agonizing closing-in of whole peoples, now under way.

Yet Albert understood, and meant to take his share.

Who, indeed, as Raymond had once asked petulantly, could know what a boy was going to be?

When Althea saw Albert in khaki, she _saw_ him: this time no indifference, no fusing him with the crowd, no letting him fade away unnoticed. If he had shaken before her on her hurdle-taker, she now shook before him in his brown regimentals. It was as if, in an instant, he had bolted from their familiar--their sometimes over-familiar--atmosphere.

He confused, he perturbed her: he was so like, yet so different; so close, yet so remote. Was he a relative, of sorts--a relative in some loose sense; or was he a strange young hero, with his face set toward yet stranger scenes...?

"Come," said her father, who was close by, between the horse-block and the syringa-bushes, "Albert isn't the only soldier on the battle-field.

Look at Tom, here!"

Althea turned her eyes dutifully toward her stalwart brother, who humorously put up his stiffened fingers to the stiff brim of his hat; and then she looked back at Albert.

III

McComas's bank, like others, put its office-machinery at the disposal of the Government, when the first war-loan was in the making. It seemed a small matter, at the beginning, but administrative organization was taxed and clerical labors piled up hugely as the big, slow event moved along through its various stages. This work in itself came almost to seem an adequate contribution to the cause; surely in the mere percentage of interest offered there was little to appeal to the financial public, except perhaps the depositors of savings banks.

McComas himself felt no promptings to subscribe to this loan; but his directors thought that a reasonable degree of partic.i.p.ation was "indicated." The bank's name went down, with the names of some others; and the clerks who had been working over hours on the new and exacting minutiae of the undertaking were given a chance to divert their savings toward the novel securities. The bank displayed the Nation's flag, and the flags of some of the allies. It all made a busy corner. McComas thought of his son in khaki, and felt himself warming daily as a patriot.

"We can do them up," he declared. The war, with him, was still largely a matter of financial pressure. The pressure, even if exerted at long range, was bound to tell. Many of "our boys" would never get "over there" at all. They were learning how to safeguard our country's future within our country itself.

His wife, who had been flitting from veranda to veranda in their pleasant suburban environment, and been doing, with other ladies of her circle, some desultory work for the wounded soldiers of the future, now came down to the centre of the town and took up the work in good earnest. She saw Tom McComas as a seasoned adult who could look after himself, but her own Albert was still a boy. It was easy to see him freezing, soaking, falling, lying in distress. She busied herself behind a great plate-gla.s.s window on a frequented thoroughfare--a window heaped with battered helmets and emptied sh.e.l.ls that drew the idle curiosity or the poignant interest of the pa.s.ser-by. Bandages, sweaters, iodine-tubes filled her thoughts and her hands. And Althea, in company with several sprightly and entertaining young girls of her own set, began to pick up some elementary notions in nursing.

"Why, it's the most delightfully absorbing thing I've ever done!" she declared. A new world was dawning--a red world that not all of us have been fated to meet so young.

Raymond Prince saw all these preparations and took them as a spectacle.

He was now frankly but an onlooker in life, and he gazed at big things from their far rim. He had no spare funds to put into federal hands, and felt by no means able to afford the conversion of any of his few remaining investments with a loss of nearly half his present returns. He viewed a patriotic parade or two from the curbstone and attended now and then some patriotic meeting in the public parks--a flag-raising, for example. On these occasions he preferred to stand at some remove, so that it would be unnecessary to raise his hat: the requirement of a formal salute made him distressingly self-conscious. Yet he was displeased if other men, no nearer, failed to lift theirs; and he would be indignant when young fellows, engaged in games near by, gave the exercises no heed at all.

In one of the parades the flag of France went by. This was a picturesque and semi-exotic event; it stirred some memories of early days abroad, and Raymond, with an effort, did, stiffly and with an obvious (even an obtrusive) self-consciousness, manage to get off his hat. A highly vocal young man alongside looked at this cold and creaking manoeuvre with disapproval, even disgust.

"Can't you holler?" he asked.

No, Raymond could not "holler." The dead hand of conscious propriety was upon him, checking any momentum that might lead to a spontaneous expression of patriotic feeling. The generous human juices could not run--could not even get started. When he said good-bye to Albert, it was not as to a son, nor even to a friend's son. Albert himself might have objected to any emotional expression that was too clearly to be seen; but he would have welcomed one which, cloaked in an unembarra.s.sing obscurity, might at least have been felt. Johnny McComas frankly let himself "go," not only with Tom, but with Albert too. Albert could not but think within himself that it was all somewhat overdone; he was a bit abashed, even if not quite shamefaced. But the recollection of Johnny's warm hand-clasp and vibrant voice sometimes came to comfort him, in camp across the water, at times when the picture of his own father's chill adieux brought little aid.

IV

A few brief months ended the foreign service of both our young men.

Albert came home invalided, and Tom McComas along with others, lay dead between the opposing lines of trenches. His father would not, at first, credit the news. His son's very strength and vigor had helped build up his own exuberant optimism. It simply could not be; his son, his only remaining son, a happy husband, a gratified parent.... But the truth bore in, as the truth will, and McComas had his days of rebellious--almost of blasphemous--protest. The proud monument at Roselands was taking a cruel toll. His other son was commemorated on the third side of its base; but though a fresh unfrayed flag waved for months over turf below which no one lay, it was long before that great granite block came to betray to the world this latest and cruelest bereavement.

Albert, whose injuries had made him appear as likely to be a useless piece on the board for longer than the army surgeons thought worth while, was sent back home and made his convalescence under the care of his mother; within her house, indeed--for his father had no quarters to offer him. Among McComas's flower-beds and garden-paths he enjoyed the ministrations of a physician other and better than any that practices on those fields of hate--one who complemented the prosaic physical cares required for the body with an affluent stream of healing directed toward both mind and heart. He had come back to be a hero to Althea, with evidences of his heroism graved on his own bruised form.

"Hasn't he been wonderful!" said Althea to her girl friends; and Albert volunteered few concrete facts that might qualify or detract from her ideal.

Those few months comprised his contribution to the cause. He mended more rapidly than might have been expected, and soon began to feel the resurgence of those belligerencies which are proper to the nature of the healthy young male. But his belligerencies were not at all militaristic.

He had seen war at short range, knew what it was, and desired it no more. He meant to let loose his energies, as soon as might be, in that other warfare, business; it would be after the manner of a great-grandfather of whom a tradition persisted, and after the close pattern of a McComas still before his eyes. A hero, if they wished; but a hero with money in his pocket.

Meanwhile, McComas looked at his grandson and writhed. So many openings, so many things to be done; yet what future aid had he to count on for carrying along his line and for reaping the opportunities in his field?

A child of four, in rompers, pushing a little wheelbarrow of pebbles along garden-paths. The years dragged. It was all too great an irony.

He sent for Albert. Albert still limped a little, but it was not to be for long.

"You've done enough for your country," he declared with blunt emphasis.

"Now do something for me. You're almost well?"

"I think so."

"You want to pitch in?"

"I do."

"You want to amount to something?" continued McComas, pausing on the edge of an invidious bit of characterization.