Together Part 14

"Yes, of course, the sentiment for nails!" the young man accepted whimsically. "Poor Junior did the sentiment as well as the business so admirably, and I shall be such a hollow bluff at both, I fear."

Nevertheless, the next morning Vickers was at breakfast on time, and when the Colonel's motor came around at eight-thirty, he followed his father into the hall, put on an un.o.btrusive black hat, selected a sober pair of gloves, and leaving his little cane behind him took the seat beside his father. Their neighbor in the block was getting into his brougham at the same moment.

"Alexander Harmon," the Colonel explained, "president of the Commercial Trust Company."

They pa.s.sed more of the Colonel's acquaintances on their way down the avenue, emerging from their comfortable houses for the day's work. It was the order of an industrial society, the young man realized, in a depressed frame of mind. He also realized, sympathetically, that he was occupying his brother's seat in the motor, and he was sorry for the old man at his side.

The Colonel looked at him as if he were debating whether he should ask his son to stop at a barber shop and sacrifice his pointed beard,--but he refrained.

Vickers had never seen the towering steel and terra-cotta building in which the hardware business was now housed. It stood in a cloud of mist and smoke close by the river in the warehouse district. As the car drew up before its pillared entrance, the Colonel pointed with pride to the bra.s.s plaque beside the door on which was engraved the architect's name.

"Corbin did it,--you know him? They say he's the best man in America. It was his idea to sign it, the same as they do in Paris. Pretty good building, eh?"

The young man threw back his head and cast a critical glance over the twelve-story monster and again at the dwarfed cla.s.sic entrance through which was pouring just now a stream of young men.

"Yes, Corbin is a good man," he a.s.sented vaguely, looking through the smoke drifts down the long crowded thoroughfare, on into a ma.s.s of telegraph wires, masts, and smokestacks, and lines of bulky freight cars. Some huge drays were backed against the Price building receiving bundles of iron rods that fell clanging into their place. Wagons rattled past over the uneven pavement, and below along the river locomotives whistled. Above all was the ba.s.s overtone of the city, swelling louder each minute with the day's work.

A picture of a fair palace in the cavernous depths of a Sienna street came over the young man with a vivid sense of pain. Under his breath he muttered to himself, "Fierce!" Then he glanced with compunction at the gentle old face by his side. How had he kept so perfectly sweet, so fine in the midst of all this welter? The Colonel was like an old Venetian lord, shrewd with the wisdom of men, gentle with more than a woman's mercy; but the current that flowed by his palace was not that of the Grand Ca.n.a.l, the winds not those of the Levant!

But mayhap there was a harmony in this shrill battlefield, if it could be found....

Within those long double doors there was a vast open area of floor s.p.a.ce, dotted with iron beams, and divided economically into little plots by screens, in each one of which was a desk with the name of its occupant on an enamel sign.

"The city sales department," the Colonel explained as they crossed to the bank of shooting elevators. The Colonel was obliged to stop and speak and shake hands with many men, mostly in shirt sleeves, with hats on their heads, smoking cigars or pipes. They all smiled when they caught sight of the old man's face, and when he stopped to shake hands with some one, the man's face shone with pride. It was plain enough that the "old man" was popular with his employees. The mere handshake that he gave had something instinctively human and kind in it. He had a little habit of kneading gently the hand he held, of clinging to it a trifle longer than was needed.

Every one of the six or seven hundred men in the building knew that the head of the business was at heart a plain man like themselves, who had never forgotten the day he sold his first bill of goods, and respected all his men each in his place as a man. They knew his "record" as a merchant and were proud of it. They thought him a "big man." Were he to drop out, they were convinced the business would run down, as if the main belt had slipped from the great fly-wheel of the machine shop. All the other "upstairs" men, as the firm members and managers of departments were called, were nonent.i.ties beside "our Colonel," the "whole thing," "it," as he was affectionately described.

So the progress to the elevators was slow, for the Colonel stopped to introduce his son to every man whose desk they pa.s.sed or whose eye he caught.

"My boy, Vickers, Mr. Slason--Mr. Slason is our credit man, Vick--you'll know him better soon.... Mr. Jameson, just a moment, please; I want you to meet this young man!"

"If he's got any of your blood in him, Colonel, he's all right," a beefy, red-faced man jerked out, chewing at an unlighted cigar and looking Vickers hard in the face.

Even the porters had to be introduced. It was a democratic advance! But finally they reached the "upstairs" quarters, where in one corner was the Colonel's private den, part.i.tioned off from the other offices by ground gla.s.s,--a bare s.p.a.ce with a little old black walnut desk, a private safe, and a set of desk telephones. Here Vickers stood looking down at the turmoil of traffic in the street below, while his father glanced over a ma.s.s of telegrams and memoranda piled on his desk.

The roar of business that had begun to rumble through the streets at daybreak and was now approaching its meridian stunned the young man's nerves. Deadened by the sound of it all, he could not dissociate from the volume that particular note, which would be his note, and live oblivious to the rest.... So this was business! And what a feeble reed he was with which to prop it! Visions of that other life came thronging to his mind,--the human note of other cities he had learned to love, the placid hours of contemplation, visions of things beautiful in a world of joy! Humorously he thought of the hundreds of thousands of dollars this busy hive earned each year. A minute fraction of its profits would satisfy him, make him richer than all of it. And he suspected that the thrifty Colonel had much more wealth stored away in that old-fashioned iron safe. What was the use of throwing himself into this great machine? It would merely grind the soul out of him and spit him forth.

To keep it going,--that was the reason for sacrificing his youth, his desire. But why keep the thing going? Pride, sentiment? He did not know the Colonel's feeling of fatherhood towards all the men who worked for him, his conviction that in this enterprise which he had created, all these human beings were able to live happier lives because of him, his leadership.

There was poetry in the old man, and imagination. But the young man, with his eyes filled with those other--more brilliant--glories, saw only the grime, heard only the dull roar of the wheels that turned out a meaningless flood of gold, like an engine contrived to supply desires and reap its percentage of profits.

"Father!" he cried involuntarily.

Hot words of protest were in his throat. Let some other young man be found to run the machine; or let them make a corporation of it and sell it in the market. Or close the doors, its work having been done. But give him his life, and a few dollars!

"Eh, Vick? Hungry? We'll go over to the club for luncheon in just a minute." And the old Colonel smiled affectionately at his son over his gla.s.ses.

"Not now--not just yet," Vickers said to himself, with a quick rush of comprehension.

But the "now" never seemed to come, the right moment for delivering the blow, through all those months that followed, while the young man was settling into his corner of the great establishment. When the mother or Isabelle confessed their doubts to the Colonel, the old man would say:--

"It will do him no harm, a little of it. He'll know how to look after your money, mother, when I am gone." And he added, "It's making a man of him, you'll see!"

There was another matter, little suspected by the Colonel, that was rapidly to make a man of his engaging young son.

CHAPTER XV

When Vickers Price raised his eyes from his desk and, losing for the moment the clattering note of business that surged all around him, looked through dusky panes into the cloud of mist and smoke, visions rose before him that were strange to the smoky horizon of the river city....

From the little balcony of his room on the Pincio, all Rome lay spread before him,--Rome smiling under the blue heaven of an April morning! The cypresses in the garden pointed to a cloudless sky. Beyond the city roofs, where the domes of churches rose like little islands, was the green band of the Janiculum, and farther southwards the river cut the city and was lost behind the Aventine. And still beyond the Campagna reached to the hills about Albano.

Beneath he could see the Piazza del Popolo, with a line of tiny cabs standing lazily in the sunlight, and just below the balcony was a garden where a fountain poured softly, night and day. Brilliant b.a.l.l.s of colored fruit hung from the orange trees, glossy against the yellow walls of the palazzo across the garden. From the steep street on the other side of the wall rose the thin voice of a girl, singing a song of the mountains, with a sad note of ancient woe, and farther away in the city sounded the hoa.r.s.e call of a pedler.... This was not the Rome of the antiquary, not the tawdry Rome of the tourist. It was the Rome of sunshine and color and music, the Rome of joy, of youth! And the young man, leaning there over the iron railing, his eyes wandering up and down the city at his feet, drank deep of the blessed draught,--the beauty and the joy of it, the spirit of youth and romance in his heart....

From some one of the rooms behind a neighboring balcony floated a woman's voice, swelling into a full contralto note, then sinking low and sweet into brooding contemplation. After a time Vickers went to his work, trying to forget the golden city outside the open window, but when the voice he had heard burst forth joyously outside, he looked up and saw the singer standing on her balcony, shading her eyes with a hand, gazing out over the city, her voice breaking forth again and again in scattered notes, as though compelled by the light and the joy of it all. She was dressed in a loose black morning gown that rippled in the breeze over her figure. She clasped her hands above her bronze-colored hair, the action revealing the pure white tint of neck and arms, the well-knit body of small bones. She stood there singing to herself softly, the note of spring and Rome in her voice. Still singing she turned into her room, and Vickers could hear her, as she moved back and forth, singing to herself. And as he hung brooding over Rome, listening to the gurgle of the fountain in the garden, he often listened to this contralto voice echoing the spirit within him....

Sometimes a little girl came out on the balcony to play.

"Are you English?" she asked the young man one day.

"No, American, like you, eh?" Vickers replied.

They talked, and presently the little girl running back into the room spoke to some one: "There is a nice man out there, mother. He says he's American, too." Vickers could not hear what the woman said in reply....

The child made them friends. Mrs. Conry, Vickers learned, was his neighbor's name, and she was taking lessons in singing, preparing herself, he gathered, for professional work,--a widow, he supposed, until he heard the little girl say one day, "when we go home to father,--we are going home, mother, aren't we? Soon?" And when the mother answered something unintelligible, the little girl with a child's subtle tact was silent....

This woman standing there on the balcony above the city,--all gold and white and black, save for the gray eyes, the curving lines of her supple body,--this was what he saw of Europe,--all outside those vivid Roman weeks that he shared with her fading into a vague background. Together they tasted the city,--its sunny climbing streets, its white squares, and dark churches, the fields beyond the Colosseum, the green Campagna, the vivid mornings, the windless moonlight nights! All without this marvellous circle, this charmed being of Rome, had the formlessness of a distant planet. Here life began and closed, and neither wished to know what the other had been in the world behind.

That she was from some Southern state,--"a little tiny place near the Gulf, far from every civilized thing," Mrs. Conry told him; and it was plain enough that she was meagrely educated,--there had been few advantages in that "tiny place." But her sensuous temperament was now absorbing all that it touched. Rome meant little to her beyond the day's charm, the music it made in her heart; while the man vibrated to every a.s.sociation, every memory of the laden city....

Thus the days and weeks slipped by until the gathering heat warned them of the pa.s.sing of time. One June day that promised to be fresh and cool they walked through the woods above the lake of Albano. Stacia Conry hummed the words of a song that Vickers had written and set to music, one of a cycle they had planned for her to sing--the Songs of the Cities. This was the song of Rome, and in it Vickers had embedded the sad strain that the girl sang coming up the street,--the cry of the past.

"That is too high for me," she said, breaking off. "And it is melancholy. I hate sad things. It reminds me of that desolate place at the end of the earth where I came from."

"All the purest music has a strain of sadness," Vickers protested.

"No, no; it has longing, pa.s.sion! ... I escaped!" She looked down on the cuplike lake, shimmering in the sun below. "I knew in my heart that _this_ lived, this world of sunshine and beauty and joy. I thirsted for it. Now I drink it!"

She turned on him her gray eyes, which were cool in spite of her emotion.

She had begun again the song in a lower key, when at a turn in the path they came upon a little wooden shrine, one of those wayside altars still left in a land where religion has been life. Before the weather-stained blue-and-red madonna knelt a strangely mediaeval figure,--a man wasted and bare-headed, with long hair falling matted over his eyes. An old sheepskin coat came to his bare knees. Dirty, forlorn, leaning wearily on his pilgrim's staff, the man was praying before the shrine, his lips moving silently.

"What a figure!" Vickers exclaimed in a low voice, taking from his pocket a little camera. As he tiptoed ahead of Mrs. Conry to get his picture before the pilgrim should rise, he saw the intense yearning on the man's face.

Beckoning to his companion, Vickers put the camera into his pocket and pa.s.sed on, Mrs. Conry following, shrinking to the opposite side of the way, a look of aversion on her mobile face.

"Why didn't you take him?" she asked as they turned the corner of the road.

"He was praying,--and he meant it," Vickers answered vaguely.

The woman's lips curved in disgust at the thought of the dirty pilgrim on his knees by the roadside.

"Only the weak pray! I hate that sort of thing,--prayer and penitence."