On the Stairs Part 2

I would not seem to stress either the saliency or the significance of these incidents. I simply put them down, after many years, just as they return to my memory. Memory is sporadic; memory is capricious; memory is inconsequent, sometimes forgetting the large thing to record the little.

And memory may again prove itself all these, and more, if I attempt to rescue from the past a children's party.

It was my young sister who "gave" it, as our expression was; parents in the background, providing the funds and engineering the mechanism, were not allowed greatly to count. The party was given for my sister's visitor, a little girl from some small interior town whose name (whether child's or town's) I have long since forgotten. Raymond was invited, of course;--"though he isn't very nice to us," as my sister ruefully observed; and some prompting toward fair play (as I vaguely termed it to myself) made me suggest Johnny McComas. He came.

There must have been some twenty-five of us--all that our small house would hold. There were more games than dances; and the games were largely "kissing" games: "post-office," "clap-in, clap-out," "drop the handkerchief," and such-like innocent infantilities. Some of us thought ourselves too old for this sort of thing, and would willingly have left it to the younger children; but the eager lady from next door, who was "helping," insisted that we all take part. This is the place for the Gertrudes and the Adeles, and they were there in good measure, be-bowed and be-sashed and fluttering about (or romping about) flushed and happy.

And this would be pre-eminently the place for Elsie, Jehiel's granddaughter and Raymond's cousin. Elsie would naturally be, in the general scheme, my childhood sweetheart; later, my fiancee; and ultimately my wife. Such a relationship would help me, of course, to keep tab more easily on Raymond during the long course of his life. For instance, at this very party I see her doing a polka with Johnny McComas, while Raymond (who had been sent to dancing-school, but had steadfastly refused to "learn") views Johnny with a mixture of envy and contempt. A year or two later, I see Elsie seated in the twilight at the head of her grandfather's grandiose front steps, surrounded by boys of seventeen or eighteen, while Raymond, sent on some errand to his grandfather's house, picks his way through the crowd to say to himself, censoriously, in the vestibule: "Well, if I can't talk any better at that age than they do...!" Yes, Elsie would undeniably have been an aid; but she never existed, and we must dispense with her for once and for all.

Raymond could always make himself difficult, and he usually did so at parties. To be difficult was to be choice, and to be choice was to be desirable. Therefore he got more of the kisses than he might have got otherwise--many more, in fact, than he cared for. But on this occasion a good part of his talent for making himself difficult was reserved until refreshment time. Most of the boys and girls had paired instinctively to make a prompt raid on the dining-room table, with Johnny McComas unabashedly to the fore; but Raymond lingered behind. My mother presently found him moping alone in the parlor, where he was looking with an over-emphatic care at the pictures.

"Why, Raymond dear! Why aren't you out with the others? Don't you want anything to eat?"

No; Raymond didn't want anything.

"But you do--of course you do. Come."

Then Raymond, thus urged and escorted,--and, above all, individualized,--allowed himself to be led out to the refreshments; and, to do him justice, he ate as much and as happily as any one else. Johnny McComas, with his mouth full, and with Gertrudes and Adeles all around him, welcomed him with the high sign of jovial _camaraderie_.

Yes, Johnny took his full share of the ice-cream and macaroons; he got his full quota of letters from the "post-office"; the handkerchief was dropped behind him every third or fourth time, and he always caught the attentive little girl who was whisking away--if he wanted to. He even took a manful part in the dancing.

"What a good schottische!" exclaimed one of the Adeles, as the industrious lady from next door, after a final bang, withdrew her hands from the keyboard. "And how well you dance!"

"Gee!" exclaimed Johnny, with his most open-faced smile; "is that what you call it--a schottische? I never tried it before in my life!"

"Learn by doing"--such might have been the motto of the town in those early, untutored days. And Johnny McComas emphatically made this motto his own.

PART II

I

Raymond went into the bank; not in due course, but rather more than a year later. After seeing some of his more advanced schoolfellows depart for Eastern colleges, after indulging a year of desultory study at home, and after pa.s.sing a summer and autumn among the Wisconsin lakes, he was formally claimed by Finance. There was no Franciscan ardor to clasp her close, as others have clasped Poverty and Obedience. He began his business career, as men have been recommended to begin their matrimonial career, with a slight aversion. However, his aversion never brought him any future good.

His year at home, so far as I could make out, was taken up largely with aesthetics and music. He read the "Seven Lamps of Architecture" and they lighted him along a road that led far, far from the constructional practicalities of the yard where we had spent a Sat.u.r.day forenoon, some five years before. He had begun to collect books on the brickwork of Piacenza and Cremona, and these too led him farther along the general path of aestheticism. During our years at the Academy the town, after an unprecedentedly thorough sweep by fire, had been rebuilding itself; and on more than one Sat.u.r.day forenoon of that period we had tramped together through the devastated district, rejoicing in the restorative activities on every hand and honestly admiring the fantasies and ingenuities of the "architects" of the day. But Raymond had now emerged from that innocent stage; summoning forth from some interior reservoir of taste an inspirational code of his own, he condemned these crudities and aberrations as severely as they probably deserved, and cultivated a confident belief that somewhere or other he was to find things which should square better with his likings and should respond more kindly to his mounting sensibilities.

"Not going to cut us?" I once asked. "Just as we're picking up, too?"

But Raymond looked abstractedly into the distance and undertook no definite reply. Possibly he had responded to Ruskin; more probably to some divine young sense of truth and fitness such as forms the natural endowment, by no means uncommon, of right-minded youth. Or it may be that he had simply reached the "critical" age, when Idealism calls the Daily Practicalities to its bar and delivers its harsh, imperious judgments; when it puts the world, if but for a few brief months, "where it belongs." His natural tendency toward generalization helped him here--helped, perhaps, too much. He pa.s.sed judgment not only on his parents, whom he had been finding very unsatisfactory, and on most of his a.s.sociates (myself, for example, whenever I happened to speak an appreciative word for his essentially admirable father), but on the community as such. A filmy visitant from Elsewhere had grazed his forehead and whispered in his ear that the town allotted to him by destiny was crude, alike in its deficiencies and in its affirmations, and that complete satisfaction for him lay altogether in another and riper quarter.

Perhaps it was some such discontent as this that led him in the direction of musical composition--or toward attempts at it. He had no adequate preparation for it, nor, so far as I could perceive, any justificatory call. He had once taken a few terms on the piano; and he had on his shelves a few elementary works on harmony; and he had in his fingertips a certain limited knack for improvisation; and he had once sketched out, rather haltingly, a few simple songs. Yet, all the same, another reservoir, one of uncertain depth and capacity, was opening up for him at an age when opening-up was the continuing and dominating feature of one's days--a muse was stirring the vibrant air about him; and I gathered, after two or three certain visits to his house, that he had embarked on some composition or other of an ambitious and comprehensive nature: a cantata, possibly, or even some higher flight.

As he had never domesticated musical theory and musical notation in his brain, most of his composing had to be carried on at the keyboard itself. The big piano in the big open drawing-room resounded with his strumming experiments in melody and harmony--sounds intelligible, often enough, to no ears but his own, and not always agreeable to them. I am sure he tried his parents' patience cruelly. His reiterated phrases and harmonizings were audible throughout a good part of the house. They did nothing toward relieving his mother's headaches, nothing toward raising his father's hopes that, pretty soon, he would come to grips with the elements of Loans and Discounts. Even the servants, setting the table, now and again closed the dining-room door.

"Oh, Raymond, Raymond; _not_ to-day!" his mother would sometimes plead.

I presume that, during this period, the diary was still going on; and no one with such a gift for writing will stop short at a diary. In fact, Raymond tried his hand at a few short stories--still another muse was fluttering about his temples. Most of these stories came back; but a few of them got printed obscurely in mangled form, and the failure of the venturesome periodicals sometimes deprived him of the honorarium (as pay was then pompously called) which would have given the last convincing touch to his claims on authorship. He spoke of these stories freely enough to me, but disclaimed all attempts at poetry: short of that field, I believe, he really did stay his hand.

Well, perhaps too many good fairies--good only to the pitch of velleity--buzzed and brushed, like muses, or pseudo-muses, about his brows. All this unsettled him--and sometimes annoyed his daily a.s.sociates. But how, without these instinctive young pa.s.ses at Art, could the unceasing, glamorous and needful rebirth of the world get itself accomplished?

II

As for Johnny McComas, he found one year of our Academy enough. It was the getting in, not the staying in, that provoked his young powers. Our school, moreover, was explicitly cla.s.sical in a day when the old cla.s.sical ideal still ruled respected everywhere; and Johnny, much as he liked being with us and of us, could not see the world in terms of Latin paradigms. He wanted to be "doing something"; he wanted to be "in business." During the summer following his year at Dr. Grant's I heard of him as somebody's office-boy somewhere downtown, and then quite lost sight of him for the five years that succeeded.

It occurred to me that Johnny must be doing just the right thing for himself; he would make the sort of office-boy that "business men" would contend for: easy to imagine the manoeuvres, even the feuds, that would enliven business blocks in the downtown district for the possession of Johnny's confident smile and dashing, forthright way. I learned, in due season, that Johnny had cast in his lot with a real-estate operator, and had been cherished, through periods harried by compet.i.tion, as a pearl of price.

The city was emphatically still in the "real-estate" stage. Anybody arriving without profession or training straightway began to sell lots.

Nothing lay more openly abundant than land; the town had but to propagate itself automatically over the wide prairies. The wild flowers waved only to welcome the surveyor's gang; and new home-seekers--in the jargon of the trade--were ever hurrying to rasp themselves upon the ragged edges of the outskirts.

One Sunday morning in May, Raymond and I determined on an excursion to the country--or, at all events, to some of the remoter suburbs. The bank would not claim his thoughts for twenty-four hours, nor the law-school mine. We left the train at a promising point and prepared to scuffle over a half-mile splotched with vervain and yarrow, yet to bloom, toward a long, thin range of trees that seemed to mark the course of some small stream. But between us and that possible stream there soon developed much besides the sprinkling of prairie flowers. We began to notice rough-ploughed strips of land that seemed to mean streets for some new subdivision; piles of lumber, here and there, which should serve to realize the ideals of the "home-seekers"; and presently a gay, improvised little shack with a disproportionate sign to blazon the hopes and ambitions of a well-known firm back in town. And in the doorway of the shack stood Johnny McComas.

He was as ruddy as ever, and his blue eyes were a bit sharper. He was slightly heavier than either of us, but no taller. He knew us as quickly as we knew him. For some reason he did not seem particularly glad to see us. He made the reason clear at once.

"They had me out here last Sunday," he said, looking about his chaotic domain disparagingly, "and they say they may have to have me out here next Sunday--somebody's sick or missing. But they won't," he continued darkly. It was a threat, we felt--a threat that would make some presumptuous superior cower and conform. "I really belong at our branch in Dellwood Park, where there _is_ something; not out here, beyond the last of everything." And he said more to indicate that his energies and abilities were temporarily going to waste.

But having put himself right in his own eyes and in ours, he began to give rein to his fundamental good nature. Emerging from the cloud that was just now darkening his merits and his future, he asked, interestedly enough, what we ourselves were doing.

I had to confess that I was still a student. Raymond mentioned briefly and reluctantly the bank. It was nothing to him that he, no less than Johnny, was now a man on a salary.

"Bank, eh?" said Johnny. "That's good. We're thinking of starting a bank next year at our Dellwood branch. It's far enough in, and it's far enough out. Plenty of good little businesses all around there. And I'm going to make them let me have a hand in managing it."

This warm ray of hope from the immediate future quite illumined Johnny.

He told us genially about the prospects of the venture in the midst of which he was encamped, and ended by feigning us as a young bridal couple that had come out to look for a "home."

"There may be one or two along pretty soon, if the day holds fair; so I might as well keep myself in practice." Then he jocularly let himself loose on transportation, and part payments down, and street improvements "in," and healthful country air for young children. He was very fluent and somewhat cynical, and turned the seamy side of his trade a little too clearly to view.

He explained how the spring had been exceptionally wet in that region,--"which, after all, _is_ low," he acknowledged,--and how his firm, by digging a few trenches in well-considered directions, had drained all its standing water to adjoining acres still lower, the property of a prospective rival. Recalling this smart trick made Johnny think better of the people who would maroon him for a succession of Sundays, and he became more genially communicative still.

"That gray streak off to the west--if you can see it--is our water drying up. Better be drying there than here. You can put a solid foot on every yard of our ground to-day. Come along with me and I'll show you your cottage--_domus, a, um_. Not quite right? Well, no great matter."

He pointed toward a yellow pile of two-by-fours, siding, and shingles.

"Be sure you make your last payment before you find yourselves warped out of shape."

We followed. Johnny seemed much more expert and worldly-wise than either of us. We held our innocent excursion in abeyance and bowed with a certain embarra.s.sed awe to Johnny's demonstration of his apt.i.tude for taking the world as it was and to his light-handed, care-free way of handling so serious a matter, to most men, as the founding of a home. As we continued our jaunt, I began to feel that I now liked Johnny a little less than I could have wished.

III

At about this time Raymond and I found ourselves members of a little circle that expressed itself chiefly through choral music. It was almost a neighborhood circle, and almost a self-made circle--it gradually evolved itself, with no special guidance or intention, until, finally, there it was. I, at that period, may have felt that it would verge on the presumptuous to pick and choose--to attempt consciously the fabrication of a social environment--and so I adopted with docility the one which presented itself. Raymond, on the other hand, may have felt that even the best which was available was unlikely to be good enough and have accepted fatalistically anything which could possibly be made to do.

Just why our little group of a dozen or so should have united on a musical basis and have expressed itself in a weekly "sing" I might find it hard to explain. None of us fellows was especially blessed with a voice; and the various Gertrudes and Adeles that met with us were a.s.suredly without any marked sanction to vocalize. Possibly the "sing"

was the mere outcome of youthful exuberance and of the tendency of young and eager molecules to crystallize into what came, later, to be termed a "bunch."

As for Raymond himself, he never sang at all. "Oh, come, Rayme; join in!" the other fellows would suggest--and suggest in vain.

"I'm doing _my_ part," he would return, giving the piano-stool a nearer hitch to the keyboard.

In fact, it was his specific function to preside at the Chickering, the Weber, the Steinway, according to the facilities offered by the particular home--for we moved about in rotation. This service, which we presently came to consider sufficient in itself, dispensed him from exhibiting his nature in so articulate a thing as actual vocal utterance. This he was quite opposed to: he would never even try a hymn in church. But he could accompany; he could improvise; he could modulate; he could transpose any simple air. The ease and readiness with which he did all this made less obvious--indeed, almost imperceptible--his fundamental unwillingness to abandon himself before others (especially if members of his own circle) to any manifestation that might be taxed with even a remote emotionalism. And yet, at that very time, he was laying the foundations of a claim to be that broad and vague thing called an "artist." Even as early as this, apparently, he was troubled by two contradictory impulses: he wanted to be an artist and give himself out; and he wanted to be a gentleman and hold himself in. An entangling, ruinous paradox.