ON THE STAIRS HENRY B. FULLER On the Stairs On the Stairs by Henry B. Fuller Author of Lines Long and Short BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY (g&e fttoetffte prc# CambriDge 1918 COPYRIGHT, IQiS, BY HENRY B. FULLER ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published March igi8 r AUTHOR S NOTE THIS volume may seem less a Novel than a Sketch of a Novel or a Study for a Novel. It might easily be amplified; but, like other recent work of mine, it was written in the conviction that story-telling, whatever form it take, can be done within limits narrower than those now generally employed. 586610 ON THE STAIRS PART I IN the year 1873 No, do not turn away from such an open ing; I shall reach our own day within a para graph or so. In the year 1873, then, Johnny McComas was perfectly willing to stand to one side while Raymond Prince, surrounded by sev eral of the fellows, came down, in his own negligent and self-assured way, the main stairway of Grant s Private Academy. For Johnny was newer there; Johnny was younger in this world by a year or two, at an age when a year or two makes a difference; and Johnny had but lately left behind what might be described as a condition of servitude. So Johnny yielded the right of way. He lowered his little snub nose by a few degrees, took some of the gay smile out of his twinkling [ 1 1 ON THE STAIRS blue eyes, and waited with an upward glance of friendly yet deferential sobriety until Ray mond should have passed. "How are you, Johnny?" asked Raymond carelessly. "I m pretty well," replied Johnny, in all modesty. In the year 1916 Yes, I told you we should reach our own times presently. In the year 1916, then, Raymond Prince was standing to one side, whether willing or not, while John W. McComas, attended by several men who would make their cares his own, came down the big marble stairway of the Mid-Continent National Bank. Ray mond, who had his cares too, would gladly have been included in the company (or, rather, have replaced it altogether); but he saw clearly that the time was not propitious. McComas looked out through this swarm of lesser people, half-saw Prince as in a mist, and gave him unsmilingly an abstracted half -bow. "How do you do?" he mumbled imper sonally. [ 2 1 ON THE STAIRS "I m pretty well," returned Prince, in a toneless voice. But he was -far from that whether in mind or estate. Between these two dates and these two incidents lies most of my story. Be quite sure that I shall tell it in my own fashion. n First, however, this: I do not intend to magnify the Academy and its stairway. The Academy did very well in its day, and it hap pened to be within easy distance of James Prince s residence. If its big green doors were flanked on one side by a grocery and on the other by a laundry, and if its stairway was worn untidily by other feet than those of Dr. Grant s boys, I shall simply point out that this was all in the day of small things and that Fastidiousness was still upon her way. Should this not satisfy you, I will state that, in the year following, the Academy moved into other quarters: it lodged itself in a near-by private residence whose owner, in real estate, sensed down-heeled Decadence stealing that way a few years before any of his neighbors [ 3 ] ON THE STAIRS felt it, and who made his shifts accordingly. If even this does not satisfy you, I might sketch the entrance and stairway, somewhere in Massachusetts, which are to know the foot falls of Lawrence D. McComas, aged ten, grandson of Johnny; but such a step would perhaps take us too far afield as well as slightly into the future. One does not pass a lad through that gateway on the spur of the moment. Nor ought I to magnify, on the other hand, the marble stairway of the Mid-Continent. This was not one of the town s greater banks; and the stairway was at the disposal not only of the bank s clientele, but at that of sixteen tiers of tenants. However, it represented some advanced architect s ideal of grandeur, and it served to make the bank s president seem haughty when in truth he was only preoc cupied. As you may now surmise, this story, even at its highest, will not throw millions on the habituated and indifferent air; nor, at its most distended, will it push the pride of life too far. That has been done already in suf- [ 4 ] ON THE STAIRS ficing measure by many others. Let us ride here an even keel and keep well within rule and reason. I am simply to tell you how, as the years moved on, John McComas climbed the stairs of life from the bottom to the top or so, at least, he was commonly considered to have done; and how, through the same years, Ray mond Prince passed slowly and reluctantly along the same stairs from top to bottom or so his critics usually regarded his course. Nor without some color of justice. I presume that they will pass each other somewhere near the middle of my volume. ni In 1873 James Prince was living in a small, choice residential district near the Lake. Its choiceness was great, but was not duly guarded. The very smallness of the neigh borhood a triumphant record of early for tunes put it upon a precarious basis : there was all too slight a margin against encroach ments. And, besides, the discovery came to be made, some years later, that it was upon [ 5 ] ON THE STAIRS the wrong side of the river altogether. But it held up well in 1873; and it continued to do so through the eighties. Perhaps it was not until the middle or later nineties that the real exodus began. Some of the early magnates had died; some had evaporated financially; others had come to perceive, either for them selves or through their children, that the road to social consideration now ran another way. In due course a congeries of bulky and gran diose edifices, built lavishly in the best taste of their own day, remained to stare vacantly at the infrequent passer-by, or to tremble before the imminent prospect of sinking to unworthy uses: odd, old-time megatheriums stranded ineptly in their mortgage-mud. But through the seventies the neighborhood held up its head and people came from far to see it. James Prince lived in one of these houses; and, around the corner, old Jehiel Prince lingered on in another. James was, of course, Raymond s father. Jehiel was his grandfather. Raymond, when we take him up, was at the age of thirteen. [ 6 ] ON THE STAIRS And Johnny McComas, if you care tp know, was close on twelve. Jehiel Prince was of remote New England origin, and had come West by way of York State. He had been born somewhere between Utica and Rochester. He put up his house on no basis of domestic sociability; it was designed as a sort of monument to his per sonal success. He had not left the East to be a failure, or to remain inconspicuous. His contractor or his architect, if one had been employed had imagined a heavy, square affair of dull-red brick, with brown-stone trim mings in heavy courses. Items: a high base ment, an undecorated mansard in slate; a big, clumsy pair of doors, set in the middle of all, at the top of a heavily balustraded flight of brown-stone steps; one vast window on the right of the doors to light the "parlor," and another like it, on the left, to light the "li brary " : a f agade reared before any allegiance to "periods," and in a style best denominated local or indigenous. Jehiel was called a capi talist and had a supplementary office in the high front basement; and here he was fretting I 7 1 ON THE STAIRS by himself, off and on, in 1873; and here he continued to fret by himself, off and on, until 1880, when he fretted himself from earth. He was an unhappy man, with no essential mastery of life. His wife existed somewhere upstairs. They seldom spoke indeed seldom met unless papers to shift the units of a perplexed estate were up for consideration. Sometimes her relatives stole into the house to see her and hoped, with fearfulness, not to meet her husband in some passageway. He himself had plenty of relatives, by blood as well as by marriage; too many of these were rascals, and they kept him busy. The town, in the seventies, was at the adventurous, formative stage; almost everybody was leav ing the gravel walks of Probity to take a short cut across the fair lawns of Success, and the social landscape was a good deal cut up and disfigured. "Poor relations!" such was Jehiel s brief, scornful rating of the less capable among these supernumeraries. A poor relation rep resented, to him, the lowest form of animal life. [ 8 ] ON THE STAIRS And when the chicane and intrigue of the more clever among them roused his indigna tion he would exclaim: "They re putting me through the smut-machine!" an ignomin ious, exasperating treatment which he refused to undergo without loud protests. These pro tests often reduced his wife to trembling and to tears. At such times she might hide an elder sister one on the pursuit of some slight dole in a small back bedroom, far from sight and hearing. An ugly house, inhabited by unhappy peo ple. Perhaps I should brighten things by bringing forward, just here, Elsie, Jehiel s beautiful granddaughter. But he had no granddaughter. We must let Elsie pass. Yet a fresh young shoot budding from a gnarled old trunk would afford a piquant contrast has done so hundreds of times. Jehiel Prince undoubtedly was gnarled and old and tough; a charming granddaughter to cajole or wheedle him in the library, or to relax his indignant tension over young men during their summer attendance on swing or hammock, would have her uses. Yet a swing [ 9 ] ON THE STAIRS or a hammock would suggest, rather than the bleak stateliness of JehiePs urban environ ment, some fair, remote domain with lawns and gardens; and Jehiel was far from possess ing or from wanting to possess a coun try-house. Elsie may be revived, if necessary; but I can promise nothing. I rather think you have heard the last of her. James lived a few hundred yards from his father; his house bulked to much the same effect. It was another symmetrical, indige nous box in stone, however, and not in brick. It had its mortgage. If this mortgage was ever paid up, another came later a mort gage which passed through various renewals and which, as values were falling, was always renewed for a lesser amount and was always demanding ready money to meet the differ ence. In later years Raymond, with this for midable weight still pressing upon him, re ceived finally an offer of relief and liberation; some prosperous upstart, with plans of his own, said he would chance the property, mortgage and all, if paid a substantial bonus for doing so. [ 10 1 ON THE STAIRS The premises included a stable. I mention the stable on account of Johnny McComas. He lived in it. Downstairs, the landau and the two horses, and another horse, and a buggy and phaeton, and sometimes a cow; upstairs, Johnny and his father and mother. Johnny could look out through a crumpled dimity curtain across the back yard and could see his father freezing ice-cream on a Sunday forenoon on the back kitchen porch; and he could also look into one of Raymond s win dows on the floor above. Every so often he would beg : "Oh, father, let me do it, please!" Then he would lose the double prospect and get, instead, a plate of vanilla with a tin spoon in it. Raymond, who had no mastering passion for games, sat a good deal in his room, some times at one of the side windows; occasionally at the back one, in which case Johnny was quite welcome to look. Raymond had more desks than one, and books everywhere on the walls between them. He had a strong bent toward study, and was even beginning ON THE STAIRS to dip into literary composition. He studied when he might better have been at play, and he kept up his diary under a student lamp into all hours of the night. He had been read ing lately about Paris, and he was piecing out the elementary instruction of the Academy by getting together a collection of French grammars and dictionaries. He had about decided that sometime he would go to live on that island in the Seine near Notre Dame. His father told him he was working too hard and too late that it would hurt his health and probably injure his eyes. His mother made no comment and gave no ad vice. She was an invalid and thus had ab sorbing interests of her own. Raymond kept on reading and writing. Perhaps I should begin to sketch, just about here, his awakening regard for some Gertrude or Adele, and his young rivalry with Johnny McComas for her favor; telling how Johnny won over Raymond the privilege of carrying her books to school, and how, in the end, he won Gertrude or Adele herself from Raymond, and married her. Fiddlesticks! Please put I 12 ] ON THE STAIRS all such conventional procedures out of your head, and take what I am prepared to give you. The school was a boys school. There was no Gertrude or Adele as yet any more than there was an Elsie. Raymond kept to his books and indulged in no juvenile philanderings. Forget all such foolish stereo- typings of fancy. As for the romance and the rivalry: when that came, it came with a vast difference. IV Jehiel Prince was a capitalist. So was James: a capitalist, and the son of a capital ist. They had some interests in common, and others apart. There was a bank, and there were several large downtown business-blocks whose tenants required a lot of bookkeeping, and there was a horse-car line. There was a bus-line, too, between the railroad depots and the hotels. James destined Raymond for the bank. He would hardly go to college, but at seventeen or so would begin on the collec tion-register or some such matter; later he might come to be a receiving-teller; pretty [ 13 1 ON THE STAIRS soon lie might rise to an apprehension of bank ing as a science and have a line as an official in the Bankers 9 Gazette. Beyond that he might go as far as he was able. James thought that, thus favored in early years, the boy might go far. But Raymond had just taken on Rome, and was finding it even more interesting than Paris. The Academy s professor of ancient history began to regard him as a prodigy. Then, somehow or other, Raymond got hold of Gregorovius, with his "City of Rome in the Middle Ages" though his teacher did not know of this, and would have been sure to consider it an undesirable deviation from the straight and necessary path; and thence forth the dozens of ordinary boys about him counted, I feel sure, for less than ever. Do you know what I m going to do? I m going to put myself into the story as one of the characters. Then the many Fs will no longer refer to the author named on the title- page, but will represent the direct participa tion direct, even though inconspicuous of a person whose name, status, and general [ 14 ] ON THE STAIRS nature will be made manifest, incidentally and gradually, as we proceed. You object that though one s status and general nature may be revealed "gradually," such can scarcely be the case as regards one s name? But if I tell you that my Christian name is, let us say, Oliver, and then intimate in some succeeding section that my surname is Ormsby, and then do not disclose my middle initial which may be W until the mid dle of the book (in some documentary connec tion, perhaps), shall I not be doing the thing "gradually"? Oliver W. Ormsby. H m! I m not so sure that I like it. Well, my name may turn out, after all, to be something quite different. And possibly I may be found to be without any middle initial whatever. But to return to the method itself. You will find it pursued in many good novels and in many bad ones; with admirable discretion to make an instance in "The Way of All Flesh"; and the procedure may be humbly copied here. It will involve, of course, a rather close attendance on both Raymond [ 15 1 ON THE STAIRS and Johnny through a long term of years; but perhaps the difficulties involved or, rather, the awkwardnesses can be got round in one way or another. At the Academy we like Raymond well enough, on the whole You see at once how the method applies: I make myself an attendant there, and I place my age midway between the ages of the other two. As I say, we liked Raymond well enough, yet did not quite feel that he coalesced. "Coalesced" was hardly the word we used such verbal grandeurs were reserved for our "compositions"; but you know what I mean. Another point to be made clear without delay is this: that when Johnny appeared at the Academy, he had lately left behind him the previous condition of servitude involved in a lodgment above the landau, the phaeton, and sometimes the cow. His father and mother, as I saw them and remember them, appeared to be rather nice people. Perhaps they had lately come from some small country town and had not been able, at first, to realize [ 16 ] ON THE STAIRS themselves and their abilities to the best ad vantage in the city. Assuredly his father knew how to drive horses and to care for them ; and he had an intuitive knack for safeguarding his self-respect. And Johnny s mother was perfectly competent to cook and to keep house even above a stable most neatly. If Johnny s curtain was rumpled, that was Johnny s own incorrigible fault. The window- sill was a wide one, and Johnny, I found, used it as a catch-all. He kept there a few boxes of "bugs," as we called his pinned-down speci mens, and an album of postage-stamps that was always in a state of metamorphosis. He had some loose stamps too, and sometimes, late in the afternoon or on Saturdays, we "traded." Johnny s mother was likely to caution us about her freshly scrubbed floors, and sometimes gave me a cooky on my leav ing. I never heard of Raymond s having been there. But presently the trading stopped, and the "bugs," however firmly pinned down, took their flight. Johnny s father and mother "moved" that was the brief, unadorned, [ 17 ] ON THE STAIRS sufficing formula. It was all accepted as in evitable; hardly for a boy a little past twelve, like myself, to question the movements of Olympian elders; nor even, in fact, to feel an abiding interest in them when I had seen them but three or four times in all. I never speculated never asked where they had come from; never considered the nature of their tenure (not wondering how much Johnny s father may have been paid for driv ing the two bays and washing the parlor and bedroom windows and milking the cow, when there was one, and not figuring the reduction in wages due to the renting value of the three or four small rooms they occupied); nor did I much concern myself as to whither they might have gone. Probably opportunity had opened up a more promising path. However, the path did not lead far; for Johnny, a month or two later, made his first appearance at the Academy, on the opening of the fall term. During the preceding year he had been going to a public school "across the tracks" and had played with a boisterous crowd in a big cin dered yard. [ 18 ] ON THE STAIRS Therefore, when Raymond, surrounded by half a dozen other boys, took occasion, on the stairs, to say : "How are you, Johnny?" And Johnny, with his back to the wall of the landing, replied : " I m pretty well," Johnny may have meant that, despite the novelty and the strangeness of his situation, he was very well, indeed; feeling, doubtless, that he was finally where he had a right to be and that his alert face was turned the proper way. The boys about Raymond were asking him to take part in a football game. It was not that Raymond was especially popular; but he could run. In that simple day football was football principally a matter of running and of straightforward kicking; and Raymond could do both better than any other boy in the school. He could also outjump any of us when he would take the trouble to try. In fact, his physical faculties were in his legs; his arms were nowhere. He was never able to throw either far or straight. Some of his early I 19 ] ON THE STAIRS attempts at throwing were met with shouts of ridicule, and he never tried the thing further. If he fell upon the ill luck of finding a ball in his hands, he would toss it to somebody else with an air of facetious negligence. To stand, as Johnny McComas could stand, and throw a ball straight up for seventy-five feet and then catch it without stirring a foot from the spot where he was planted, would have been an utter impossibility for him. In fact, Ray mond simply cultivated his obviously natural gifts; he never exerted himself systematically to make good any of his deficiencies. He was so as a boy; and he remained so always. In those early days we had no special play grounds. We commonly used the streets. There was li,ttle traffic. Pedestrians took their chances on the sidewalks with leapfrog and the like, and we took ours, in turn, in the wide roadway with "pom-pom-peel- away" and similar games. Football, how ever, would take us to a vacant corner lot, some two streets away. Some absentee owner in the East was doubtless paying taxes on it with hopes of finally recouping himself [ 20 J ON THE STAIRS through the unearned increment. Mean while it ran somewhat to rubbish and tin cans, to bare spots from which adjoining home- makers had removed irregular squares of turf, and to holes in the dry, brown earth where potatoes had been baked with a mini mum of success and a maximum of wood ashes and acrid smoke. It was on the way to this frequented tract that Raymond care lessly let fall a word about Johnny McComas. Perhaps he need not have said that Johnny had lately been living above his father s stable but he spoke without special ani mus. A few of the boys thought Johnny s intrusion odd, even cheeky; but most of them, employing the social assimilability of youth, especially that of youth in the Middle West, laid little stress upon it. Johnny made his place, in due time and on his own merits. Or shall I say, rather, by his own powers? V You are not to suppose that while I was free to visit Johnny in the stable, I was not free to visit Raymond in the house. Though ON THE STAIRS my people lived rather modestly on a side street, the interior of the Prince residence was not unknown to me. On one occasion Jlaymond took me up to his room so that I might hear some of his writings. He had been to Milwaukee or to Indianapolis, and had found himself moved to set down an account of his three days away from home. He led me through several big rooms downstairs before we got to his own particular quarters above. The furnishing of these rooms im pressed me at the time; but I know, now, that they were heavy and clumsy when they were meant to be rich and massive, and were meretricious when they were meant to be elegant. It was all of the Second Empire, qualified by an erratic, exaggerated touch that was natively American. I am afraid I found it rather superb and was made uncom fortable was even intimidated by it; all the more so that Raymond took it completely for granted. One room contained a big or chestrion with many pipes in tiers, like an organ s. On one occasion I heard it play the overture to "William Tell," and it managed ON THE STAIBS the "Storm" very handily. There was a large, three-cornered piano in the same room one of the sort I never could feel at home with; and this instrument, more than the other, I suppose, gave Raymond his futile and disadvantageous start toward music. Travel; art; anything but the bank. I have no idea at what time of day he in troduced me into the house, but it was an hour at which the men, as well as the women, were at home. In one part or another of the hall I met his mother. She was dark and lean; without being tall, she looked gaunt. She seemed occupied with herself, as she moved out of one shadow into another, and she gave scant attention to a casual boy. Raymond was really no more hospitable than any young and growing organism must be; but perhaps she was thankful that it was only one boy, instead of three or four. In another room, somewhere on the first floor, I had a glimpse of his father. I remem ber him as a sedate man who did not insist. If he set a boy right, it was done but ver bally; the boy was left to see the justness of t & 1 ON THE STAIRS the point and to act on it for himself. I gathered, later, that James Prince had done little, unaided, for himself; whatever he had accomplished had been in conjunction with other men with his father, particularly; and when his father died, a few years later, he was the chief heir and he never added much to what he had received. To him fell the property and its worries. The worries, I surmise, were the greater part of it all. Everything has to be paid for, and James Prince s easily gained success was paid for, through the ensuing years, with consider able anxieties and perturbations. It was his father, I presume, who was with him as I passed the library door: a bent, gray man, with a square head and a yellow face. A third man was between them; a tall, dry, cold fellow with iron-gray beard and no mus tache a face in the old New England tradi tion. This man was, of course, their lawyer, and I judge that he gave them little comfort. I felt him as chill and slow, as enjoying the tying and untying of legalities with a stiff, clammy hand, and as unlikely to be hurried ON THE STAIRS on account of any temperament possessed by himself or manifested by his clients. Fire, in a wide sweep, had overtaken the town a year or two before a community owned by the Eastern seaboard and mortgaged to its eye brows; and the Princes, as I learned years later, had been building extensively on bor rowed capital just before the fire-doom came. Probably too great a part of the funds em ployed came from their own bank. Raymond, once the second floor was reached, showed me his desks and bookcases; also a new sort of pen which he had thought to be able to use, but which he had cast aside. And he offered to read me his account of the three days in Milwaukee, or wherever. "If you would like to hear . . . ?" he said, with a sort of bashful determination. "Just as you please," I replied, patient then, as ever after, in the face of the arts. Nothing much seemed to have happened nothing that I, at least, should have taken the trouble to set down; but a good part of his fifteen pages, as he read them, seemed in teresting and even important. I suppose this t 25 ] ON THE STAIRS came from the way he did it. As early as thirteen he had the knack; then, and always after, he enjoyed writing for its own sake. I feel sure that his father did not quite approve this taste. His grandfather, who had had a lesser education and felt an exaggerated re spect for learning, may have had more pa tience. He talked for years about endowing some college, but never did it; when the time finally came, he was far too deep in his finan cial worries. James Prince, as I have noted, occasionally mentioned to Raymond his conviction that he was wasting his time with all this scrib bling, and that so much work by artificial light was imperiling his eyesight. "What good is it all going to do you? "I once heard him ask. His tone was resigned, as if he had put the question several times before. "I don t think I d write quite so much, if I were you." Raymond looked at him in silence. "Not write?" he seemed to say. "You might as well ask me not to breathe." "At least do it by daylight," his father ON THE STAIRS suggested, or counseled, scarcely urged. "You won t have any eyes at all by the time you re thirty." But Raymond liked his double student- lamp with green shades. He liked the quiet and retirement of late hours. I believe he liked even the smell and smear of the oil. His father spoke, as I have reported; but he never took away the pen or put the light out. The boy seemingly had too strong a "slant": a misfortune or, at least, a dis advantage .which a concerned parent must somehow endure. But he did take a more decided tack later on : he never said a word about Raymond s going to college, and Ray mond, as a fact, never went. He fed his own intellectual furnace, and fed it in his own way. He learned an immense number of use less and unrelated things. In time they came to cumber him. Perhaps college would have been better, after all. I never knew Raymond to show any affec tion for either of his parents; and he had no brothers and sisters. His father was an essentially kind, just man, and might have [ 27 ] ON THE STAIRS welcomed an occasional little manifestation of feeling. One day he told Raymond he had no heart. That was as far as emotion and the expression of emotion could carry him. Raymond s mother might have been kindly too, if she had not had herself. But a new doctor, a new remedy, a new draught from a new quarter and her boy was instantly nowhere. Raymond s own position seemed to be that life in families was the ordained thing and was to be accepted. Well, this was the family ordained for him, and he would put up with it as best he might. But I kept on developing my own impression of him; and I see now just what that impression was go ing to be. Raymond, almost from the start, felt himself as an independent, detached, isolated individual, and he must have his little zone of quiet round him. Why in the world he should ever have married . . .! I never knew him to show gratitude for anything given him by his parents. On the other hand, I never heard him ask them for anything. He possessed none of the little ingenuities by which boys sometimes secure [ 28 ] ON THE STAIRS a bit of pocket-money. If he wanted any thing, he went without it until it was offered. Frankly, he seldom had to wait long. Not that what came was always the right thing. He showed me his fountain-pen one of the early half -failures with some disdain. He always carried a number of things in his pocket, but never the pen. I myself tried it one day, and it went well enough; I should have been glad to have it for my own. But steel pens sufficed him; save once, when I saw him, in a high mood, experimenting fantastically with a quill one. He cared no more about his clothes than any of the rest of us. He never laid any real stress on them at any time of life. He devel oped early a notion of the sufficiency of in terior furnishings; mere external upholstery never quite secured his interest. I heard his father once or twice complain of his looking careless and shabby. He waited with equa nimity until his father could take him to the clothier s. He asked but one thing; that there should be no indulgence in sartorial [ 29 ] ON THE STAIRS novelties at his expense. And I never met a sedater taste in neckties. Three or four were hanging over the gas- jet, close to the window; they were all dark blues or grays, and most of them frayed. He expected a new one about Christmas; no hurry. From that window, across the back yard, we saw Johnny McComas, in a bright new red tie, busy at his own window. I waved my hand, and he waved back. Raymond looked at him, but made no special sign. Johnny was packing up his specimens and his post age-stamps, preparatory to the family heg- ira, though neither of us knew. VI Raymond, who might have asked for al most anything, asked for nothing. Johnny, who was in position to ask for next to nothing, asked for almost everything. He was con stantly teasing his parents, so far as my ob servation went; and his teasing was a form of criticism. "You are not doing the right thing by me" such might have seemed his plaint. [ 30 ] ON THE STAIRS He was beginning to spread, to reach out: acquisitiveness and assimilativeness were to be his two watchwords. He hankered after the externalities; he wanted "things." If it was only a new stamp-album, he wanted it hard, and he said so. I shall not go so far as to say that he hectored his parents into send ing him to our school. They were probably feeling, on their own account, that they had come to town for better things than they had been getting; and likely enough they met his demands halfway. There was usually a cer tain element of cheeriness in his nagging; but the cheeriness was quite secondary to the insistence. "Oh, come, mother!" or, "Oh, father, now!" was commonly Johnny s opening for mula, employed with a smile, wheedling or protesting, as the occasion seemed to require. And, "Oh, well . . .!" was commonly the opening formula for the response mean ing, in completed form, "Well, if we must, we must." However, his parents were probably ready to meet with an open mind the scorings of [ 31 ] ON THE STAIRS their young, sole critic, thinking that his urgency might advance themselves no less than him. Well, in the autumn Johnny turned up at the Academy with an equip ment that included everything approved and needed; and he was not long in letting us know that his father was manager in the sup ply-yard of a large firm of contractors and builders. His father had spent his earlier mar ried years, it transpired, about the grounds of a small-town "depot," and knew a good deal in regard to lumber and cement. To most of us fathers were fathers and businesses were businesses things to be accepted without comment or criticism. Our own youthfulness, and the social tone of the day and region, discouraged either. If I thought anything about it, I must have thought, as I think still, that it was a manly and satisfying matter to come to grips with the serviceable actualities of the building trades. Construction, in its various phases, still seems to me a more useful and more tonic concern than brokerage, for example, and similar forms of office life. I 32 J ON THE STAIRS Johnny soon suggested that I go with him, some Saturday afternoon, to the "yard." I asked Raymond to join us. Raymond had just come on Gothic architecture and was studying its historical phases. He was pick ing up points about the English cathedrals and was making drawings to illustrate the development of buttresses and of window tracery. The yard was only a mile and a half away and the three of us frolicked loosely along the streets until we got there. John ny s father was going about the place in an admirable pair of new blue overalls, and carried a thick, blunt pencil behind one ear. He showed an independent, breezy manner that had not been very marked before. He was loud and clear and authori tative, and kept a dozen or more stout fel lows pretty busy. Once an elderly man in a high silk hat passed through the yard on his way to its little office. He stopped, and he and Johnny s father had some talk together. "Yes, sir!" said Johnny s father, with con siderable emphasis and momentum. I en joyed his "Yes, sir!" It was pleasant to find I 33 ] ON THE STAIRS him so hearty and so well-mannered. He seemed to have escaped from something and to be glad of it. The man in the high hat hardly tried to stand up against him. As he turned away he smiled in a curious fashion; and I thought I heard him say to himself, as he moved back toward the door of the shed that had the sign "Office" on it: "I wonder whether I m going to run him, or whether he s going to run me?" Johnny was all eyes for a tall stack of lath ing in bundles and for a pile of sacks filled with hair from cows hides, which last was to go into plaster. Raymond looked at these objects of interest and at several others with some degree of abstractedness. The English cathedrals, as I was told later, had not been plastered. Raymond had already de veloped some faculty for entertaining a con cept freed from clogging and qualifying detail; and this faculty grew as he grew. He liked his ideal net; facts, practical facts, never had much charm for him. I remember his once saying, when about twenty-three, that he should have liked to be an architect, but that [ 34 1 ON THE STAIRS plumbing and speaking-tubes had turned him away. If he could have drawn fagades and stopped there, I think he might have been quite happy and successful in the profession. Johnny pulled a lath for each of us out of one of the bundles, and we used them in our tour of the yard as alpenstocks. We found a glacier in the shape of a mortar bed and were using the laths to sound its depths, when Johnny s father appeared from round the corner of a lumber pile. He clapped his hands with a loud report. "Here! that won t do!" he said; and none of us thought it remotely possible to with stand him. "Enough for one morning," he added, and he waved both arms with a broad scoop to motion us toward the street gate. "Oh, father, now!" began Johnny (with no smile at all), conscious of his position as host. "No more, to-day," said his father. "School six days a week would be about my idea." Raymond said nothing, but drew up his mouth to one side and himself led us toward the street. [ 35 ] ON THE STAIRS VII 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 inconse quent, 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 pjay (as I vaguely termed it to myself) made me suggest Johnny McComas. He came. There must have been some twenty-five I 36 J ON THE STAIRS 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 hand kerchief," 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 grand daughter and Raymond s cousin. Elsie would naturally be, in the general scheme, my child hood sweetheart; later, my fiancee; and ulti mately 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 Ray mond (who had been sent to dancing-school, but had steadfastly refused to "learn") views [ 37 ] ON THE STAIRS Johnny with a mixture of envy and contempt. A year or two later, I see Elsie seated in the twi light at the head of her grandfather s grandiose front steps, surrounded by boys of seventeen or eighteen, while Raymond, sent on some er rand to his grandfather s house, picks his way through the crowd to say to himself, censori ously, 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 diffi cult, 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 re freshment 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 Ray mond lingered behind. My mother presently [ 38 ] ON THE STAIRS 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 any thing to eat?" No; Raymond did n 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 hap pily 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 handker chief was dropped behind him every third or fourth time, and he always caught the atten tive 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 t 39 1 ON THE STAIRS 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, untu tored days. And Johnny McComas emphat ically 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 school fellows depart for Eastern colleges, after in dulging a year of desultory study at home, and after passing 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 busi ness 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 Archi tecture" and they lighted him along a road that led far, far from the constructional prac ticalities of the yard where we had spent a [ 41 ] ON THE STAIRS Saturday forenoon, some five years before. He had begun to collect books on the brick work of Piacenza and Cremona, and these too led him farther along the general path of sestheticism. During our years at the Acad emy the town, after an unprecedentedly thor ough sweep by fire, had been rebuilding it self; and on more than one Saturday 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 ingenui ties of the "architects" of the day. But Ray mond 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 aber rations 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 re spond 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 I 42 ] ON THE STAIRS 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 endow ment, by no means uncommon, of right- minded youth. Or it may be that he had simply reached the "critical" age, when Ideal ism 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 passed judgment not only on his parents, whom he had been finding very unsatisfactory, and on most of his associates (myself, for example, whenever I happened to speak an apprecia tive word for his essentially admirable father), but on the community as such. A filmy visit ant 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. [ 43 ] ON THE STAIRS Perhaps it was some such discontent ag 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 finger tips a certain limited knack for improvisa tion; 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 continu ing and dominating feature of one s days a muse was stirring the vibrant air about him; and I gathered, after two or three cer tain visits to his house, that he had embarked on some composition or other of an ambitious and comprehensive nature: a cantata, possi bly, or even some higher flight. As he had never domesticated musical theory and musi cal notation in his brain, most of his com posing had to be carried on at the keyboard itself. The big piano in the big open drawing- [ 44 ] ON THE STAIRS room resounded with his strumming experi ments in melody and harmony sounds in telligible, 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 flut tering about his temples. Most of these stories came back; but a few of them got printed ob scurely in mangled form, and the failure of the venturesome periodicals sometimes deprived [ 45 ] ON THE STAIRS him of the honorarium (as pay was then pom pously called) which would have given the last convincing touch to his claims on author ship. 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 associates. But how, without these instinctive young passes at Art, could the unceasing, glamorous and needful rebirth of the world get itself accomplished? n 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 classical in a day when the old classical ideal still ruled respected everywhere; and Johnny, much as he liked being with us I 46 ] ON THE STAIRS 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 "busi ness men" would contend for: easy to im agine the manoeuvres, even the feuds, that would enliven business blocks in the down town 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 competition, 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 I 47 ] ON THE STAIRS 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 hur rying 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 prom ising 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 pos sible stream there soon developed much be sides 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 1 a gay, impro vised little shack with a disproportionate [ 48 ] ON THE STAIRS sign to blazon the hopes and ambitions of a well-known firm back in town. And in the doorway of the shack stood Johnny Mc- Comas. 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 dis paragingly, "and they say they may have to have me out here next Sunday some body s sick or missing. But they won t," he continued darkly. It was a threat, we felt a threat that would make some pre sumptuous superior cower and conform. " I really belong at our branch in Dellwood Park, where there is something; not out here, be yond the last of everything." And he said more to indicate that his energies and abili ties were temporarily going to waste. But having put himself right in his own eyes and in ours, he began to give rein to his \ 49 1 ON THE STAIRS 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 manag ing 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 f 50 1 ON THE STAIRS 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 ex ceptionally 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 be came 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 [ 51 ]. ON THE STAIRS 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 embarrassed awe to Johnny s demonstration of his aptitude 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. in At about this time Raymond and I found ourselves members of a little circle that ex pressed 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 fabri- [ 52 ] ON THE STAIRS cation 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 avail able 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 assuredly 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. [ 53 ] ON THE STAIRS In fact, it was his specific function to pre side at the Chickering, the Weber, the Stein- way, 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 articu late a thing as actual vocal utterance. This he was quite opposed to : he would never even try a hymn in church. But he could accom pany; 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 aban don himself before others (especially if mem bers 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 im pulses: he wanted to be an artist and give himself out; and he wanted to be a gentle- [ 54 ] ON THE STAIRS man and hold himself in. An entangling, ruinous paradox. This comment on Raymond s musical in clinations and musical services may require a bit of shading: I believe that, after all, he never quite cared for music unless he had, in all literalness, his "hand" in it. He never liked to hear any one else play the piano, still less the violin; concerts of all sorts were likely to bore him; and he never really rose to an understanding of the more recondite and elaborate musical forms: to have his fingers on the keyboard especially when improvising in a secure inarticulateness was his great desideratum. In our little group we ran from seventeen to nineteen; some of us just finishing high school, others just on the edge of college, others (like myself) engaged in professional studies, and still others making a debut in business as clerks. We sang mostly the inno cent old songs, American or English, of an earlier day, and sometimes the decorous numbers from the self-respecting operetta recently established in London. No contribu- [ 55 1 ON THE STAIRS tions from a new and dubious foreign element had yet come to cheapen our taste, to dis turb our nervous systems, or to throw upon the negro, the Hawaiian, or the Argentine the onus of a crass passion that one was more desirous of expressing than of acknowledging. No; there was assuredly no excess of emo- tion*al life whether good or bad in the body of music we favored. Perhaps what our little circle really desired was simply good- fellowship and a high degree of harmonious clamor. Certainly all our doings, whether on Friday evening, or on the other fore noons, afternoons, and evenings of the week, were quite devoid of an embarrassing sex- consciousness. We "trained together," as the expression went all the fellows and all the Gertrudes and Adeles with no sense of malaise, and postponing, or setting aside, in the miraculous American fashion, all sex ual considerations whatsoever. I hardly know just why I should have thought that Johnny McComas could be in troduced successfully into this circle. Johnny, as he had told us in his suburb, had cut loose F 56 1 ON THE STAIRS from his parents. He was now living on his own, in a neighborhood not far from ours from his, as it had once been. One evening I ventured to bring him round. He developed an obstreperous baritone it was the same voice, now more specifically in action, that I had first heard on the devastated prairie; and he made himself rather preponderant, whether he happened to know the song or not. "Why, you re quite an addition!" com mented one of the girls, in surprise almost in consternation. "He is, indeed, if he does n t drown us all out!" muttered one of the fellows, be hind his back. Yes, Johnny was vociferous so long as the singing went on. But he developed, be sides an obstreperous voice, an obstreperous interest in one of our Adeles a piercing so prano who was our mainstay; and he showed some tendency to defeat the occasion by segre gating her in a bay window. Segregation was the last of our aims, and Johnny did not quite please. Furthermore, Johnny seemed to feel himself among a lot of boys who were yet to f 57 1 ON THE STAIRS make their "start," overlooking the fact that Raymond was in the bank, and ignorant of the further fact that one of our fellows was just beginning to be a salesman in a bond house. Johnny became violently communicative about the attractions of Dellwood Park and seemed to want to figure demonstratively in the eyes of Gertrude and Adele as an up-and- coming paladin of the business world. To most of us he seemed too self-assertive, too self-assured. He knew too clearly what he wanted, and showed it too clearly. Indeed it became apparent to me that while a boy of twelve may be accepted easily (at least in an early, simple society), a youth of eighteen cannot altogether escape the issues of caste. It was borne in on me presently that Johnny might as well have remained away. In fact "We shan t need him again," said the brother of the soprano to me, as the evening broke up. And Raymond himself remarked to me a day later : "Don t push him; he ll get along without your help." I 58 ] ON THE STAIRS IV While the rankness of new elements in a new era had not penetrated our homes, it had begun to make itself manifest in public places. The town, within sixty years, had risen from a population of nearly nil to a population of some five or six hundred thousand; and it was only in due course, perhaps, that "vice" now raised its head and that a "criminal class" came into effective, unabashed functioning. It was to be many years before the better ele ments learned how to combine for an efficient opposition to impudent evils. A heterogene ous populace, newly arrived, was still willing to elect mayors of native blood; but one of these, elected and reflected to the town s lasting harm, might as well have been of the newer, and wholly exterior, tradition: a genial, loose-lipped demagogue who saw an oppor tunity to weld the miscellany of discrepant elements into a compact engine for the further ance of his own coarse ambitions, and who allowed his supporters such a measure of license as was needed to make their support [ 59 1 ON THE STAIRS continuing. A shameless new quarter sud denly obtruded itself with an ugly emphasis; unclassifiables, male and female, began to assert and disport themselves more daringly than dreamt of heretofore; and many good citizens who would crowd the town forward to a population of a million and to a status undeniably metropolitan came to stroll these tawdry, noisy new streets with a curiosity of mind at once disturbed, titillated, and some how gratified. Said some: "This is a new thing; do we quite like it? " Said others: " The town is certainly moving ahead; we don t know but that we do." Yes, a good many social observers set forth to see for themselves the new phenomena and to appraise the value of them in the coming political and social life of the community. Of course, many of these observers were too young and heedless to draw inferences from the sudden flood of new bars and bright lights and crass tunes and youthful creatures in short skirts who seemed not quite to know whether their proper element was the stage above or the range of tables below; in fact, these ob- [ 60 ] ON THE STAIRS servers waived all attempt at speculative thought and became participants. Raymond and I had heard comments on the new developments from OUT elders; we were not without our own curiosity (though we had enough fastidiousness not to graze things very close, still less to wade into them very deep), and we decided one evening that we would look into two or three of these new and notable places of public entertainment. The first of them offered little. The second of them developed Johnny McComas. He sat at a table, talking too familiarly, or at least too forbearingly, with a rubicund, hard- faced man in shirt-sleeves standing at his elbow probably the head of the place, or his first aide; and he was buying obviously unnecessary glasses of things for two of the young creatures in short skirts Gertrudes and Adeles of that particular stratum, or Katies and Maggies, if preferred. Johnny sat there happy enough: an early example of the young business warrior diverting himself after the fray. Years afterward the scene came back to me when I met with a showy paint- [ 61 ] ON THE STAIRS ing in the resonant new lobby of one of the greater hotels. It showed a terrace overlook ing some placid Greek sea; the happy warrior standing ungirt and uncasqued, with a beau tiful maiden of indeterminate status seated beside him; a graceful attendant holding a wreath above each happy and prosperous head, and a group of sandaled dancing-girls lightly footing it for the pleasure of the for tunate pair; the whole scene illuminated by the supreme, smiling self-satisfaction of the relaxed soldier amid the pipings of peace. So Johnny; he had earned the money and won the right to spend it in pleasure; his, too, the duty of refreshing himself for the strenuous morrow. He saw us and nodded. "Life!" that was what he seemed to say. He made a feint to interest us in his companions; but they were poor things, as we knew, and as he must have known too. He left them without much regret and without much ceremony, and took us on to the next place. "It s life, isn t it?" he said in so many words. ON THE STAIRS Raymond s nose went up disdainfully. "Life!" Some such manifestations, if properly handled and framed, might be life in Paris, perhaps; but he could not accept them as life here at home, within a mile or two of his own study. What this evening offered him seemed to require a considerable touch of refining before it could reach acceptance. It was all only an imperfectly specious substitute for life, only a coarse parody on life. The town, he told me the next day, made him think of a pumpkin: it was big and sudden and coarse- textured. "I ve had enough of it," he added; "I want something different, and something a lot better." Johnny, as I say, took us to the next place; we might not have known how to take our selves there. Johnny honestly liked the glare, the noise, the uproarious music, and the hu man press both on the sidewalks and in the packed, panting interiors. I liked it all, too, for once in a way; but I soon saw that, for Raymond, even once in a way was once too often. In this last place a girl with a hand too familiarly laid on his arm gave the finishing I 63 ] ON THE STAIRS touch; it was a coarse, dingy little hand, with some tawdry rings. Raymond never liked close quarters; neither in those days, nor ever after, did he care to come decisively to grips with actual life. "Keep off!" was what his look said to the offender. The poor, puz zled little debutante quickly stepped back, and we all regained the street. Raymond was trembling with embarrassment and vexation. "Why, you were making a hit," said Johnny. "Let s get home," said Raymond to me, ignoring Johnny. "This is enough, and more than enough. What a hole this town is com ing to be!" V Raymond stayed on at the bank, though if one might judge by his words and actions with no enthusiasm in the present and no hopefulness for the future. He did what he had to do, and did it fairly well; but there was no sign that he was looking forward, and there remained scant likelihood that he would meet the expectations of his father and grandfather [ 64 ] ON THE STAIRS by mastering the business. On the contrary, I think he actually set his face against it: he seemed as resolute not to learn banking as he had been resolute not to learn dancing. Pro fessor Baltique and the little girls in light- soled shoes and bright-colored sashes had given him up in the waltz; and it looked as if James B. Prince must presently renounce all hope of his ever learning how to turn the col lective spare cash of many depositors to pro fit. I recall the day when the chief little light of the dancing-class, after some moments of completely static tramplings by Raymond in the midst of the floor, suddenly began to pout and to frown, and then left him in the midst of the dance and of the company and came to tears before she could reach an elder sister by the side wall. Raymond accepted the inci dent without comment. If his demeanor ex pressed anything, it expressed his satisfaction at carrying a point. But he did not wait until a vexed and dis appointed bank left him high and dry. Though he must have known that many young clerks in the office envied him his billet [ 65 1 ON THE STAIRS and that many young fellows outside it would have been glad to get in on any terms what ever, he never gave a sign that he valued his opportunity; and when he finally pulled out it was with no regard to any possible successor. The younger men in the bank were a rather trim lot, and were expected to be. They did wonders, in the way of dressing, on their sixty or seventy-five dollars a month. Raymond s own dressing, for some little time past, had grown somewhat slack and careless. I did him the injustice of supposing that he felt himself to be himself, and hors concours so far as the general body of clerklings was concerned; but he had other reasons. He had given up buying books and period icals : no new volumes to be seen in his room ex cept works of travel (preferably guide-books) and grammars and dictionaries of foreign lan guages. For all such works of general uplift and inspiration as the intending tourist in Eu rope might expect to profit by, he depended on circulating libraries or the shelves of friends. I myself lent him a book of travels in the Dol omites, and scarcely know, now, whether I did [ 66 1 ON THE STAIRS well or ill. Raymond, in short, was silently, doggedly saving, with the intention of taking a trip or of making a sojourn abroad. The cleavage came in James Prince s front parlor, one Sunday afternoon, and I hap pened to be present. A very few words suf ficed. Raymond s father had picked up a thick little book from the centre-table, the only book in the room, and was looking back and forth between this wo^k an Italian dictionary and Raymond himself. "What do you expect to get out of this?" he asked. "I expect to learn some Italian," Raymond replied. "Would n t French be more useful?" "I know all the French I need." , "Where do you expect to use your Italian? " "In Italy. I did n t go to college." Impossible to depict the quality of Ray mond s tone in speaking these five words. There was no color, no emphasis, no seeming presentation of a case. It was the cool, level statement of a fact; nor did he try to make the fact too pertinent, too cogent. An hour-long [ 67 ] ON THE STAIRS oration would not have been more effective. He had calmly taken off a lid and had per mitted a look within. His father saw saw that whatever Raymond, by plus or by minus, might be, he was no longer a boy. "I know," said James Prince, slowly. He was looking past us both and was opening and shutting the covers of the book unconsciously. A day or two later, Raymond gave me the rest. His father had asked him how much money he had. Out of his sixty or seventy- five a month Raymond had set aside several hundreds; "and I said I could make the rest by corresponding for some newspaper," he continued. This was in the simple day when travel-letters from Europe were still printed and read in the newspapers, and even "re munerated" by editors. Incredible, perhaps, in this day; yet true for that. His father had asked him how long he in tended to be away. Raymond was noncom mittal. He might travel for a year, or he might try " living " there for a while a long while. A matter of funds and of luck, it seemed. His father, without pressing him [ 68 ] ON THE STAIRS closely, offered to double whatever sum he had saved up. He appeared neither pleased nor displeased by Raymond s course. He felt I suppose, that the bank would hardly suffer, and that Raymond (whom he did not under stand) might get some profit. Fathers have their own opinions of sons, which opinions range, I dare say, all the way from charitable ness to desperation. In the case of my own son, I am glad to say, a very slight degree of charitableness was all the tax laid upon me. There were some distressing months of angu larity, both in physique and in manners, at seventeen; then a quick and miraculous es cape into trimness and grace. And my grand son, now at nine, promises to be, I am glad to state, even more of a success and a pleasure. As for Raymond, he had developed unevenly : his growth had gone athwart. Possibly the "world," that vast, vague entity of which his father s knowledge was restricted almost to one narrow field, might aid in straighten ing the boy out. "Well, try it for a year," his father said, not unkindly, and almost wistfully. ON THE STAIRS VI When Johnny McComas heard of Ray mond s resolve, he drew up his round face into a grimace. He thought the step queer, and he said so. But, "Oh, well, if a fellow can afford it!" he added. And he did not explain just what meaning he attached to the word "afford." But Johnny could see no valid reason for a fellow s giving the town the go-by at nineteen and at just that stage of the town s develop ment. Johnny was so made that the com munity which housed him was necessarily the centre of the cosmos; he himself, howsoever placed, was necessarily at the centre of the circle so why leave the central dot for some vague situation on the circumference? And take this particular town: what a present! what a future! what a wide extension over the limitless prairie with every passing month! a prairie which merely needed to be cut up into small checkers and sold to hopeful newcomers; a prairie which produced profits as freely as it produced goldenrod and asters; a [ 70 ] ON THE STAIRS prairie upon which home-seekers might settle down under agents whose wide range, running from helpful cooperation to absolute flim flam, need leave no competent " operator" other than rich. "What are you going to get out of it?" asked Johnny earnestly. Raymond attempted no set reply. Johnny, he recognized, was out for positive results, for tangible returns; his idea was to get on in the world by definite and unmistakable stages. Raymond never welcomed the idea of "getting on" not at least in the sense in which his own day and place used the expres sion. To do so was but to acknowledge some early inferiority. Raymond was not conscious of any inferiority to be overcome. Johnny might, of course, on this particular point, feel as he chose. About this time old Jehiel Prince began to come more frequently to his son s house. He was yellower and grayer, and he was get ting testy and irascible. He sometimes brought his lawyer with him, and the pair made James Prince an active participant in their concerns. [ 71 ] ON THE STAIRS However, Jehiel was perhaps less unhappy here than in his own home. When there, he sat moodily alone, of evenings, in his base ment office; and Raymond, who was some times sent over with documents or with mes sages, impatiently reported him to me as i ,, glum. "Poor old fellow! he does n t know how to live!" said Raymond in complacent pity. He himself, of course, had but to assemble all the bright-hued elements that awaited him a few months ahead to make his own life a poem, a song. "I can do that," he once said, in a moment when exaltation had briefly made him con fidential. ; Raymond never saw his grandmother at least he never cared to see her. Here, if no where else, he was willing to take a cue, and he took it from the head of the family. He thought that so many years of town life might have made her a little less rustic in the end: the York State of 1835 or of 1840 need not have remained York State so im- mitigably. And if there was a domestic blight ON THE STAIRS on the house he was willing to believe that she was two thirds to blame: behind the old soul was a pack of poor relations. Particularly a brother-in-law a bilious, cadaverous fel low, whom I saw once, and once was enough. He had been an itinerant preacher farther East, and he lived in a woeful little cottage along one of Jehiel s horse-car routes. His mournful-eyed wife was always asking help. He too had "gone into real-estate," and un successfully. He was the dull reverse of that victorious obverse upon which Johnny Mc- Comas was beginning to shine. Another of her relatives, a niece, had mar ried a small-town sharper. He had brought her to the larger town, and his sharpness had taken on a keener edge. He, too, had gone into real-estate a lean, wiry little man, in credibly arid and energetic, and carrying a preposterously large mustache. There was trouble with him after Jehiel s death. It de veloped that one of the documents which old Beulah Prince had been cajoled or hectored into signing had deeded to him tempora rily and for a specific purpose some forty [ 73 ] ON THE STAIRS acres of purple and yellow prairie flowers, de lightful blossoms nodding and swaying in the wind, and that he had refused to deed more than half of them back: his services at that particular juncture were "worth something," he said. Well, life (as may have been re marked previously) would be quite tolerable without one s relatives. Meanwhile the sum mer flowers bloomed and nodded on, under the windy blue sky, all unaware of their dis grace. A month after Raymond s decision, flowers (of the sort favored in cemeteries) were trying to bloom over old Jehiel. Some stroke, some lesion, had put a period to the unhappy ca reer of this grim old man. Raymond set to one side, for a few weeks, his new trunk and portmanteau; for a few weeks only he had no notion of making, ultimately, any great change in his plans. It was obvious that James Prince was looking forward to a year or two of harassing procedure in the courts, for old Jehiel s estate was unlikely to smooth out with celerity; but Raymond was clearly of no use at home, even as a mere source of [ 74 ] ON THE STAIRS sympathy. A fortnight after his grandfather s funeral he was off. The singing-class would have given him good-bye in a special session; but his eyes were now on brighter matters and the vocal izing Gertrudes and Adeles were dim. He got out of it. Besides, the affair might come to involve something like ceremony; and he was always desirous of avoiding (save in the arts) the ceremonial side of life. When he came back from his first sojourn on the Continent he was a young man of mark, as things went in our particular town and time; or, rather, he might have been such, had he but chosen. The family fortunes were then merely at the stage of worry and still far from that of im pending disaster. Raymond came back with money, position, and a certain aureole of personal distinction just the sort of young man who would be asked to act as usher at a wedding. He was asked repeatedly; but he never acted, and his excuses and subterfuges for avoiding such a service almost became one of the comedies of the day. He had no relish for seeing himself walking ceremo- I 75 ] ON THE STAIRS nially up a church aisle under the eyes of hundreds, and I knew better than to ask him to walk up any aisle for me. He never did the thing but once, and that was under the inescapable compulsion of his fiancee who, for her part, insisted on eyes and plenty of them. A man may never cease to be as tonished at the workings of feminine prefer ences on such an occasion, but can hardly escape accommodating himself to them. Ger trudes are Gertrudes. But the wedding is years ahead, while the departure for Europe is imminent. Raymond had a tepid, awkward parting with his mother, whose headaches would not allow her to go to the train; and he shook hands rather coldly and constrainedly with his father, who would have welcomed, as I guess, some slight show of filial warmth, and he threw an embarrassedly facetious word to me about the weight of his portmanteau, and so was off. And it was years, rather than months, before he came back. PART III I WHILE Raymond was taking his course abroad, Johnny McComas was shaping his course at home. A colorless, unbiased state ment as it was meant to be; one which, despite the slight difference between "taking" and " shaping," has no slant and displays no animus. Colorless, yes; too colorless, perhaps you will object. If so, I will reword the mat ter. While Raymond, then, was in Europe cultivating his gentler faculties, Johnny re mained in America, strengthening certain specific powers. Or, again: while Raymond was preparing, or so he thought, for a desir ably decorative place in the "world" (the world at large), Johnny was qualifying him self, as he felt sure, for an important and re munerative position in that particular section of the world to which he had decided to con fine his endeavors. And if you ask me, after I have colored a colorless statement, to bias [ 77 ] ON THE STAIRS an unbiased one, I shall refuse. I am not taking sides. Each of them was following his own likings not the worst of rules for a growing and avid organism. Raymond wrote, of course, it was impos sible that he should not; and I think I showed one or two of his early letters to Johnny. Johnny was not exactly interested; vistas were opened for which he had no eyes and which possessed no appositeness to his own aims. "Still over there, eh?" he asked, on my producing a second letter. "These are the years that count," he added. He was probably implying that the final score would make a better showing for the man who spent those years in his native and proper environment. He disregarded the general drift of the let ters, but hit upon one or two "novel expres sions, and repeated them, half-quizzical, half- intrigued. " Still over there," I echoed. A developing nature, I felt, must reach out for whatever it needs; and, in simpler form, I said so. "Well, I m no misfit," he rejoined briefly. [ 78 ] ON THE STAIRS To "feel at home" at home that, I pre sume, was the advantage he was asserting. Johnny, "at home," was not long in out growing the opportunities of Dellwood Park. Though he did not make, quite yet, the cen tral district, a year or two later found him in an older and more important suburb one that had passed the first acuteness of specula tion and had pretty well settled down to a regulated life. It was not a suburb of the first rank, nor even perhaps of the second; but it suited his tastes and his present pur poses. The new business combined banking and real-estate, and the banking department even maintained a small safety-deposit vault. There was also some insurance; and a little of mortgage-broking. Johnny was a highly prized element in this business and was pleased from the start with the outlook. "A fellow," he said, "can pick up more experience out there in a month than he could in one of these big downtown offices in a year." Nearly two years passed before I was to see him in his new environment. There came up [ 79 ] ON THE STAIRS a bit of business for a suburban client of mine which could as well be settled at Johnny s place as at another. It needed no more than a glance to perceive that Johnny was the dominant factor of the little institution. His was the biggest roller-top seen through a maze of gilt letters on a vast sheet of plate glass by commuters turning the corner morn ing and evening. His, too, chiefly, the defer ence of clerks and office-boy. He was ruddy and robust, and seemed likely to impose him self anywhere, when the time came. Thus far, a small Forum, perhaps; but he was the Caesar in it. He did not disdain to attend to my affair himself; he even showed an em phatic, if not ponderous, bonhomie. Just as I was getting up to leave, a man of forty-five or more, with the general aspect of a contractor s foreman, put in his head. It was Johnny s father. "I guess you know George Waite," Johnny said to him; "and I guess he knows you." We shook hands, under Johnny s direc tion, and said that he was right. His father s hand rough and with a broken nail or [ 80 ] ON THE STAIRS two was that of a superintendent who on occasion helped with a plank or a mortar board. He had an open face and a pleasant manner; he was not at all the dominant per sonage I remembered meeting in that "yard," years ago. Johnny, it seemed, was putting up a row of small houses on the suburb s edge, and his father was supervising the job. Johnny was pretty direct in saying what he wanted done, or not done, in connection with this work; and if his father made a suggestion it was as likely as not to be overruled. He was only one of the senators in Johnny s little curia, and probably far from the most impor tant of them. Johnny s father got away, after all, before I did. Johnny asked me to stay for a little, and there was not much for a young profes sional man to do after catching the 4.52 into town. We sat for a while talking of indifferent matters. Johnny, surrounded by his own prosperity, asked with a show of interest, and without condescension, about my progress in the law, and I was replying with the cau tious vagueness of one whose practice is not [ 81 1 ON THE STAIRS yet all he hopes it will be. During this time I had noticed, through the maze of gilt letter ing, a limousine standing just round the corner. Its curtains were drawn: "an odd circum stance," I had commented inwardly. All of a sudden the street-door of the bank burst open, and three masked men, brandishing revolvers, rushed in. "You cover the cashier!" cried one; "we ll take care of the vault!" Johnny McComas flung open a drawer, seized a revolver of his own, sprang to his feet Pardon me, dear reader. The simple fact is, I have suddenly been struck by my lack of drama. You see how awkwardly I provide it, when I try. What bank robbers, I ask you, would undertake such an adventure at half -past four in the afternoon? I cannot com pete with the films. As a matter of fact, the vault stood locked, the tellers were gone, even the office-boy had stolen away, and Johnny and I were left alone together, exchanging rather feebly, and with increasing feebleness, some faint and unimportant boyhood remin- l 82 ] ON THE STAIRS iscences. ... I feel abysmally abashed; let us open a new section. n As I have said, Raymond wrote. He wrote, for example, with a voluminous duteousness, to his parents. His letters to them, so far as they came to my notice, were curious; prob ably he meant that they should be saved and should become a sort of journal of his travels. They were almost completely impersonal. There was plenty of straight description; but beyond some slight indications of his own movements, past or intended, there was no narration. He never mentioned peo ple he met; he never described his adven tures if he had any. He seemed to be saying to Europe, as Rastignac said to Paris, V "A nous deux, maintenant!" He was at grips with the Old World, and that sufficed. His letters to me, however, were not devoid of personal reactions. These commonly took an aesthetic turn. An early letter from Rome had a good deal to say about the Baroque. He met it everywhere; it was an abomina- [ 83 ] ON THE STAIRS tion; it tried his soul. Font ana and Maderna, the Gog and Magog of architecture, had flanked the portals of art and had let through a hideous throng of artificialities and corrup tions. . . . The word "Baroque" was new to me, and I looked it up. I learned that it de scribed, not a current movement, as I had supposed, but an influence which had ex hausted itself nearly three hundred years ago. But it was still recent and real to Raymond. And I learned, further, that this style had modern champions who could say a good word for it. In any event, it might be accepted calmly as a valuable and characteristic link in the general historic chain. In another letter he was ecstatic over the Gothic brickwork of Cremona. It was so beautiful, he said in as many words, that it made his heart ache; not often did Raymond let himself go like that. Eager to follow his track and to understand, if possible, his heart, however peculiar and baffling I looked up, in turn, North Italian brickwork. This was twice three hundred year sold. But it had stirred other modern hearts than Ray- [ 84 1 ON THE STAIRS mond s; for an English aesthete had tried (and almost succeeded) to impose it on his country as a living mode. "Very well," I said; "Italian brickwork may reasonably be accepted as a modern interest." Raymond, before descending to Italy, had spent some months in Paris. Circumstances had enabled him to frequent a few studios, and his first letter to me from that city had been rather technical and "viewy." Inci dentally, he had seen something of the stu dents, and had found little to approve, either in their manners or their morals. He left Paris without reporting any moral infractions of his own and settled down for some stay in Florence. He was studying the language fur ther, he reported : a language, he said, which was easy to begin, but hard to continue the longer you studied the less you really knew. However, he knew enough for daily practical purposes. His pension was pleasant; small, and the few visitors were mostly Eng lish. But there were one or two Americans in the house, and they came home a few months [ 85 ] ON THE STAIRS later with their account of Raymond and his ways. It was needed; for the three or four letters that he had printed in one of our news papers contained little beyond descriptions of set sights to think we should have con tinued to welcome that sort of thing so long! Well, these people reported him as conscien tiously busy, for his hour each day, with grammar and dictionary. He was also get ting his hand in painting; and he had "taken on" musical composition, even to instrumen tation. "Too many irons!" commented my lively young informant. "And I think I should get my painting in Paris and my music in Germany." She also said that Raymond had next to no social life he showed hardly the slightest desire to make acquaintances. "An old Frenchman came to the place for a few days," she continued; "and as he was leav ing he said your friend was living in an ivory tower the windows few, the door narrow, and the key thrown away. Ivory tower do you understand what that means?" "No," I said. But of course I understand now. [ 86 ] ON THE STAIRS HI As a consequence of my call at Johnny McComas s office (or as a probable conse quence), I received, some six months later, an invitation to his wedding. You will ex pect to hear that I was present, and perhaps acted as usher, or even as best man. Nothing of the sort was the case, however; I was ab sent at the time in the East. Nor are you to imagine me as continually following, at close range, the vicissitudes, major and minor, which made up his life, or made up Ray mond s. An exact, perpetual attendance of fifty years is completely out of the question. Don t expect it. Johnny married, I was told, a young woman living in his own suburb, the daughter of a manufacturer of some means. I met him about two months after his great step. He was still full of the new life, and full of the new wife. "She s fine!" he declared. "Not too fine, but fine enough for me." He cocked his hat to one side. [ 87 ] ON THE STAIRS "Do you know, I talk to her just as I would to a man." "Johnny I" I began, almost gasping. "Well, what s wrong? Ever said anything much out of the way to you? Ever heard me say anything to any other fellow?" "Why, no ..." I was obliged to acknowl edge. "Then why the row? It s all easy as an old shoe. She likes it." "I know. But talking with a woman .. . It is n t quite like . . ." "Don t make any mistake. Just have the big things right, and they ll overlook lots of the little ones." "H m," I said doubtfully. "I supposed it was just the other way. Lay a lot of stress on certain little things, and larger shortcom ings won t bother them. Bring her a bunch of flowers to-day, and she ll help you deed away the house and lot to-morrow." "Fudge!" said Johnny. "I mean the really big things. There s only two. Ground to stand on and air to breathe." "That is to say . . . ?" [ 88 ] ON THE STAIRS "A platform under her feet and an at mosphere about her. Well, she s got me to stand on and to surround her. She under stands it. She likes it. Nothing else matters much." "Ah!" said I. "I m her bedrock, and I m her How do they say it? I m her envelopment, as those painting fellows put it." "See here, Johnny," I protested; "Don t get anachronistic. We are only in 1884. That expression won t reach America for ten or fifteen years. Have some regard for dates." "It won t? Was n t it in your friend s let ter?" "What friend?" "Why, Prince; when he was in Paris. Did n t you read it to me?" I remembered. "Do you know," he went on, "I ve been straight as a string ever since. And I m going to keep so." "I should hope so, indeed." "Whatever I may have been before. But I think it s better for a young fellow to dash [ 89 ] ON THE STAIRS in and find out than to keep standing on the edge and just wonder." "Well, I don t know, Johnny," I returned soberly. "I m going to be married myself, next month. And I expect to go to my bride just as pure " "No preaching," said Johnny. " The slate s wiped clean. Adele s all right for me, and I m all right to her." He adjusted his hat, making the two sides of the brim level. "We re going to move shortly," he stated. "The business can go on where it is, for a while, but we re going to live somewhere else." Perhaps in the city itself, it appeared; per haps in some suburb toward the north. But no longer in one to the west. Johnny was developing some such scent for social values and some such feeling for impending topo graphical changes as had begun to stir the great houses that were grouped about the Princes. "So you re the next one?" he said pres ently. "It s the only life. Good luck to you. And who s going to see you through? Prince? " I 90 ] ON THE STAIRS "Yes my friend. I m glad you re member him." "Oh yes; I can remember him when I try. But I don t try very hard or very often. Back in this country?" "He is." "What s he doing?" Johnny fixed his hard blue eyes firmly on me. I was sorry to have no very definite an swer. "He has been in the East lately. He ll be back here in time for me." "Well," said Johnny darkly; and that was all. IV Raymond s "tower" was not static, but peripatetic. Early in his second summer abroad it was standing among the Dutch windmills for a brief season; and when he learned that I was to have a short vacation in England the only quarter of the Old World I ever cared for he left it altogether for a fortnight and came across from Flush ing to see me. Two points immediately made themselves [ 91 ] ON THE STAIRS clear. Firstly, he was viewing the world through literature through works of fic tion in some cases, through guidebooks in more. Everything was a spectacle, with him self quite outside as an onlooker; and nothing was a spectacle until it had been ranged and appraised in print. Secondly, if he was out side of things, America was still farther out side; it existed as a remote province not yet drawn into the activities and interests of the "world." He seemed willing, even anxious, to make himself secondary, subordinate. However he may have been on the Conti nent, here in England his desire to conform made him appear subservient and almost abject. My own unabashed and unconscious Americanism the possible consequence of inexperience sometimes embarrassed him, and he occasionally undertook to edit my dealings with members of the older half of our race, even with waiters and cabmen. As for the more boastful, aggressive, self-asser tive sort of Americanism, that would make him tremble with anger and blush for shame. I will say this in his behalf, however: he [ 92 ] ON THE STAIRS did not like England and was not at home there. "The little differences," he observed, one day, "made more trouble than the big ones. A minor seventh is all right, while a minor second is distressing. I am happier among the Latins." Yet I am sure that even among his Latins he took the purely objective view and valued their objects of interest according as they were starred and double-starred, or left un marked in the comparative neglect of small print. We saw together Canterbury and Cam bridge and Brighton and a few other ap proved places. Through all these he walked with a meticulous circumspection, wonder ing what people thought, asking inwardly if he were squaring with their ideas of what conduct should be. Only once did I find him fully competent and sufficiently asser tive. The incident occurred on a late after noon, in a small side street just off the Strand, while I was casting about for one of those letter-pillars. Raymond was approached, [ 93 ] ON THE STAIRS as was proper to the locality and the time of day, by a young woman of thirty who had a hard, determined face and who was clothed on with a rustling black dress that jingled with jet. I was near enough to hear. "Good-afternoon," she said. "Good-afternoon." "Where," with marked expressiveness, "are you going?" "I m going to stand right here." "Give me a drink." "Could n t think of it." "Stand," she said, with sudden vicious- ness, "stand and rot!" Raymond, after an instant s surprise, made a response in his unstudied vernacular. "Yes, I ll stand; but you skip. Shoo!" She was preparing some retort, but he waved both his hands, wide out, as if start ing a ruffled, vindictive hen across a high way. At the same time he caught sight of a constable on the corner, and let her see that he saw "Constable!" why, I am as bad as Ray mond himself: I mean, of course, policeman. [ 94 1 ON THE STAIRS But the London police are sometimes chary in the exercise of their functions. What really started the woman on her way was his next brief remark, accompanied by the hands, as before, though with a more decided shade of propulsion. "Scoot!" She went, without words. These were the only American observa tions I heard from Raymond during that fortnight. I wish he had been as successful on the night of our arrival in London when we en countered, in the court behind the big gilded grille of the Grand Metropole, the porter of that grandiose establishment. We had come together from Harwich and did not reach this hotel until half an hour before mid night. We had had our things put on the pavement and had dismissed the cab, and the porter, with an airy, tentative insolence, now reported the place full. "/ don t know who ordered your luggage down, sir; / did n t," he said with a smile that was an experiment in disrespect. Raymond looked as if he were for mime- [ 95 1 ON THE STAIRS diately adjusting himself to this though I could hardly imagine his ever having done the like in Paris or in Florence. He was quite willing to confess himself in the wrong: yes, he ought to have remembered that the "sea son" was beginning; he ought to have known that this particular season, though young, had set in with uncommon vigor; he ought to have known that all the hotels, even the largest, were likely to be crowded and have sent on a wire. The porter, emboldened by the departure of the cab, and by my com panion s contrite silence, began to embroider the theme. Now a single week in England had taught me that no two men in that country the home of political but not of social democracy ( are likely to talk long on even terms. One man must almost necessarily take the upper hand and leave to the other the lower, and the relation must be reached early. I re solved on the upper cab or no cab. I glared as well and as coldly as I could. The fel low was only a year or so older than I. "You are too chatty," I said. "Fewer [ 96 ] ON THE STAIRS words and more action. If you are full, call somebody to take us and our baggage to some hotel near by that is not full." The fellow sobered down and gave us his first look resembling respect. "Very good, sir. I will, sir. Thank you, sir," though he had nothing to thank me for, and though he well knew there was to be nothing. Raymond looked at me as one looks at a friend who surprises by the sudden disclo sure of some unexpected talent or power. "But you said baggage, " he commented. / Indeed I did," said I. Our new hotel, we discovered next morn ing, was duplicated in name by another, four doors down the street. During the day we heard the reason for this. A domestic diffi culty had overtaken husband and wife and the two had separated, each keeping an in terest in the serviceable name and a frontage on the familiar street. We were in the hus band s hotel, under the very discreet minis- [ 97 ] ON THE STAIKS trations of the young woman who had caused the break. "Do you quite like this?" Ray mond had asked me. But he became reas sured on seeing in the guest-book the names of two or three well-known and sufficiently respected compatriots. By the next day he was able to cast on Miss Brough, as she flitted (still discreetly) through her functions, the eye of a qualified idealization. I am sure he would never have viewed indulgently any such situation at home. But the poor, patient, cautious girl helped him toward real izing the sophistications and corruptions of European society, and so he welcomed her. But I believe he avoided speaking to her. She may have been hurt, or she may have been amused; or neither. Yet, after all, this contretemps was for him, I felt, but a prosaic substitute for something richer. A similar situation in Naples, say, taken at close range, might have quickened his interest consid erably. Next day there was something different for him to report. He had gone into a court yard off Holborn, drawn by the sound of a [ 98 ] ON THE STAIRS hurdy-gurdy. Four or five little girls were dancing, and some older women stood look ing on. For a few moments he looked on too, probably with an effect of aloof and amused patronage. But patronage was not for that court. Presently one of the younger women, who wore a hat full of messy plumes and carried a small fish in each hand by the tail, stepped up and invited him to trip a measure with her. "Trip a measure" it has a fine Eliza bethan or Jacobean sound, whether she used the precise expression or not. But Raymond demurred; at first politely; later, perhaps not so politely. But he was whisked into the dance and made to take several turns. He was so embarrassed that he called it all an " adventure." Possibly it was meant for v a lesson in manners. Thus Raymond in England. As he said, he liked the Continent better. I hope he showed to better advantage there, and I should have liked to see him there to be with him there. For he rather put a brake on any measure of exuberance and momen- [ 99 ] ON THE STAIRS turn which I might have brought to England with me, and I could only trust that his strait-jacket was partly unlaced among the French and Italians. I think that likely, for with them he was, of course, an acknowledged and unmistakable foreigner. But my fort night with him was cramped and uncomfort able; and when we parted at the American Exchange I for Liverpool and he for Calais I confess I had a slight feeling of relief. I felt, too, that my conduct, however native and unstudied, had pleased the Island quite as well as his. At the Exchange itself he never read Ameri can newspapers least of all, one from his own town. I believe, too, he avoided them on the Continent. Living a very special life, he meant to keep himself integral, uncon- taminate. And behind us both was the other world, his own, all vital and astir. Yes, I am aware that my prose is pedes trian, and that Europe as it once was, to us deserves a brighter and higher note. I will attempt, just here, a purple patch. Europe, then, the beacon, hope, and [ 100 ] ON THE STAIRS cynosure of our fresh, ingenuous youth the glamorous realm afar which drew to itself from across the sea our eager artist-bands, pilgrims to the Old, the Stately, and the Fair; Europe, which reared above our dull horizon the towers of Oxford and of Notre Dame, sent up into our pale, empty sky the shimmer ing mirage of Venice, and cast across our workaday way the grave and noble shadow of Rome; Europe, which gave out through the varying voices of Correggio, Canova, Hugo, and Wagner the cry, so lofty and so piercing-sweet, of Art; Europe, which with titles and insignia and social grandeurs, once dazzled and bemused our inexperienced senses . . . and so on. Easy! But worth while? I shall not attempt to decide. To-day Europe seems not all we once found it; and we, on the other hand, have come to be more than some of us at least once figured our selves. We are beginning to have glamours and importances of our own. [ 101 ] ON THE STAIRS VI Raymond lingered on for a year or more in Italy, and came home, as I have implied, in time for my wedding. He found his native city more uncouth and unkempt than ever. Such it was, absolutely; and such it was, rel atively, after his years under a more careful and self-respecting regime. The population was still advancing by leaps and bounds, and hopeful spirits had formed a One-Million Club. A few others, even more ardent, said that the population was already a million, or close upon it, and busied themselves to start a Two-Million Club. They had their eyes wide open to the advantage of numbers, and tightly closed to the palpable fact that the community was unable properly to house and administer the numbers it already had. The city seemed to cry: "I need a friendly moni tor one who will point me out the decen cies and compel me to adopt them." The demagogue who had ruled and misruled be fore had been reflected once or twice, and the newspapers were still indulging their familiar I 102 ] ON THE STAIRS strain of irresponsible and ineffective criti cism. The dark world behind him had be come more populous and bold, and the forces for good still seemed unable to organize and cooperate toward making betterment an actuality. But new people were always flock ing in people from the farms, villages and country-towns of the Middle region and bringing with them the uncontaminated rustic ideals of Tightness and decorum : a clean stream pouring into a turbid pool, and the time was to come when it would make itself felt. Mean while, the city remained to Raymond a gross, sharp village, one full of folk who, whether from the Middle West or from Mid dle Europe, had never come within ten leagues of gentility, and who, one and all, were ab- sorbedly and unabashedly bent on the object which had suddenly assembled them at this one favored spot the pushing of their in dividual fortunes. A hauptstadt-to-be, per haps; but, so far, an immensely inchoate and repellent miscellany. Raymond s father gave him a sober wel come. His mother attempted a brief, spas- [ 103 ] ON THE STAIRS modic display of affection; but it was too much, and only a maid and her pillows saw her for the next few days. His father seemed older, much older; tired, careworn, worried. The trouble of settling old Jehiel s estate had been all that could have been expected, and more. There were claims, complications, lawsuits, what not; and through all this maze James Prince had to put up with the inherited help of the dry, dismal old fellow whom I had seen in earlier days at the house. I had come, now, to a better professional knowledge of him. He was a man of probity, and of some ability, but a deliberate; impossible to hurry, and not easy, as it seemed, even to interest. Under him matters dragged dully through the courts, and others nerves were worn to shreds. I remember how surprised I was one day on hearing that he had picked up enough resolution to die. Raymond did not much concern himself about his father s burdens. He assumed, I suppose, that such taxes on a man s brain and general vitality were proper enough to middle age and to the business life of a large [ 104 ] ON THE STAIRS city. However, he was living just as he had principally lived abroad on his father s bounty. His contributions to the press whether a daily, or, of late, a monthly brought in no significant sums; and a bequest of some size from his grandfather was slow in finding its way into his hands. As I have said, Raymond might have taken an advantageous position in home society. He made no effort, and I sometimes caught myself wondering if his attitude might be that there was "nobody here." He might have joined his father s club; but the older men principally played billiards and talked their business affairs between. However, he did not care for billiards, nor had their affairs any affinity with his. A younger set noisy and assertive out of proportion to its numbers gave him no consolation, still less anything like edification. They were au premier plan; they possessed no background; they were without atmosphere without envelopment, as Johnny McComas might have amended it (though no such lack would have been noted or resented by Johnny himself). Bref, he [ 105 J ON THE STAIRS knew what they all were without going to see. And as for "society," it rustled flimsily, like tissue-paper; bright, in a way, but still thin and crackling. I wonder how he found such society as attended my wedding. I shall not describe it ; I did not describe Johnny s probably the more important event of the two for the purposes of this calm narrative. Yet, if you will permit me, I shall touch on two points. I wish, first, to say that, in my ears and to my eyes, the name " Elsie" is just as dear and charming as it ever was. Perhaps, at one period of my courtship, I wondered if the name would wear. No name more delightful and suitable for a gay, arch, sweet young girl of twenty; but how, I asked myself, will the name sit on a woman of forty, or on one of sixty? Well, I will confess that, at forty, a certain strain of incongruity appeared; but it marvelously vanished during the following score of years, and the name now seems ut terly right for the dainty figure and gentle face of my lifelong companion. And though it 106 I ON THE STAIRS our eldest daughter is unmarried and thirty- five, we have never regretted passing on this beautiful name to her. My second point must deal with Ray mond s attitude toward me on my wedding- day and on the days preceding it. He was stiff, constrained, dissatisfied merely court eous toward my Elsie, and not at all cordial to me. I wondered whether he blamed me for thus bringing him back home; but the real reason, as I came to understand later, was quite different. He regarded the marriage of a friend as a personal deprivation, and the bride as the chief figure in the conspiracy. After my defection, or misappropriation, he solaced himself by trying to make one or two other friendships. When these friends married in turn, like process produced like results. These men, however, he threw over board completely; in my case, he showed, after a while, some relenting, and ultimately even forgiveness. By the time he came to marry on his own account, the last of his very few bachelor friends had "gone off"; so there was no chance of inflicting on anybody that [ 107 ] ON THE STAIRS displeasure which others had several times inflicted on him. He sent Elsie a suitable present, and stood beside me through the ceremony as graciously as he was able. " I wish you both great joy," he said firmly, at the end; and it was six weeks before we saw him in our little home. PART IV I JOHNNY McCoMAS was still carrying on his business life and his home life in the suburb where he had married, when I came, finally, to make my first call on the domestic group of which he was the nub. Still in the fu ture was the day when he was to move into town, and to have also a summer home on the North Shore, and to make some of his father-in-law s spare funds yield profitable re sults, and to arouse among wistful clerks and unsuccessful "operators * an admiring won der as the youngest bank-president in the "Loop." I looked in on him one evening in late November. I found a house too emphatically furnished and a wife too concerned about making an impression. I did not consider myself a young man of prime consequence and did not relish the expenditure of so much effort: after all, Johnny s standing, Johnny s [ 109 1 ON THE STAIRS wife, Johnny s domestic entourage were not before a judgment-bar. It was plain to see that for Mrs. John W. McComas complete social comfort had not yet been reached, and I wondered if the next move might not show it as farther away than ever. Johnny himself was bluff and direct, and took things as a matter of course. Much had been done, but more remained to be done; meanwhile all was well and good. After a little, his wife was content to leave us alone together, and we drifted to Johnny s "den" a word new at that time, and descriptive of the only feature of his home on which he laid the slightest self-conscious emphasis. I had heard that there were twins boys; and soon, as the evening was still young, I heard the twins themselves. They had reached the age of ten months, and conse quently had developed wants, but no artic ulate means for making those wants known. Therefore they howled, and they began howling in unison now. Perhaps it was for them that a foresighted mother had left us alone together. [ no ] ON THE STAIRS "Great little hollerers!" said Johnny plac idly, pulling at his pipe. - I was still a bachelor. "Might shut the door?" I proposed. "If you like," said Johnny, without en thusiasm. "They wake me every morning at five," he added. Yes, I was still a bachelor and probably a tactless, even a brutal, one. "Might move them to another bedroom, farther away?" I suggested. The house seemed big enough for such an arrangement. "Don t want to," declared Johnny. He began pulling at his pipe again, and there was a little silence during which I might meditate on the curt nobility of his remark. The fact was, of course, that Johnny loved life; he embraced it with gusto, with both arms outspread. No sidestepping its ad vances; no dodging its sharp angles; no feeble mitigating of a situation for which he was himself responsible; no paltry deadening of domestic uproar merely because he himself happened to be within the domestic environ ment. "If Adele stands it, I will too [ HI 1 ON THE STAIRS they re mine as well as hers," such I con ceive to have been his attitude. Johnny had no nerves, and only a minimum of sensibility. The sound-waves broke on his sensorium as ripples break on a granite coast. Perhaps they pleased him; perhaps they even soothed him. Why, bless you! these children were his! They were facts as great and as unes- capable as the ebb and flow of the tides, as dawn and twilight, as the morning and eve ning stars. And the evening stars were singing together. Great may have been the jubilation for Johnny s ears, boundless the content in Johnny s heart. I really think that Johnny felt through the din some of the exhilaration that often came to him with a good brisk scrap in his office or in the other man s office. In fact, home and business were Johnny s two sources of interest and pleasure the warp and woof of his life and he was determined on getting the ut most out of each. His interest in his home circle may somewhat have declined or at least have moderated with advancing years, but it was incandescent now. His interest in t ON THE STAIRS the outside world that oyster-bin await ing his knife never slackened, not even when the futility of piling up the empty shells became daylight-clear, and when higher things strove perseveringly, even unmistak ably, to beckon him on. Never, in fact, throughout his life did he exhibit more than two essential concerns : one for his family and clan; and one for the great outside mass of mediocre individuals through whose inepti tudes he justly expected to profit. Well, the door of the den remained open, and our talk went on to the rising and falling of infant voices. At last, thinking that my good-bye must be to Johnny only, I rose to go. You might reasonably ask for a clearer im pression of his home and a more definite ac count of his wife. But what can I say when the primary address was so disconcertingly to the ear? Of his wife who came down, during a lull, at the last moment I can only say that she seemed too empressee at the begin ning and too casual at the end. Perhaps she had decided that, after all, I was no more than I myself claimed to be. Perhaps the [ 113 1 ON THE STAIRS infant hurricane was still ruffling the surface of her mind, or even disturbing its depths. "I won t ask you to call again," she said, as we shook hands for a good-night: "we shall be moving in the spring." She spoke with a satisfied air of self -recognized finesse, and as in the confident hope of completing very promptly some well-planned little pro gramme; but "Visit us there," said Johnny, with a quick cordiality which prevented his wife from re deeming herself . -! i "There" had been the chief topic in the den. Many neighborhoods had been brought forward, with their attendant advantages and disadvantages. Johnny told me what he thought, and let me say what I thought. When I listened, it was as a man who might soon have a similar problem to consider. When I spoke it was to utter banalities se dately; any neighborhood might do, I said, that had good air; yes, and good schools looking toward the future. And any house, I felt, would serve, if it had a nursery that was sealed, sound proof, remote ... f 114 1 ON THE STAIRS "Well, best luck in your search for your roof-tree," I said earnestly to them both. " Roof-tree !" echoed Johnny. And, in fact, my observation did seem rather arti ficial and insincere. n By the time Raymond reached home, Johnny McComas had turned his informal suburban enterprise into a "state" bank, with his father-in-law as president and him self as cashier. The father-in-law lent his name and furnished most of the capital; Johnny himself provided the driving power. And by the time Raymond had become, through his father s death, the head of the family and the controller of the family funds, Johnny had turned his state bank into a national bank, with its offices in the city and with himself as president; and he had bought at a bargain a satisfactory house on the edge of the neighborhood where we first met him. The street was marked for business advance more promptly and more unmistakably than the precise quarter ON THE STAIRS of the Princes. It would do as a home for a few years. The transaction appealed both to McComas s thrift and his pride. The coming of his new little bank, with its mod est capital, made no particular stir in the "street"; and the great group of houses to the eastward were so apprehensive of open outrage, in one form or another, that his approach, in a guise still social, provoked but scant concern. James Prince died when Raymond was about thirty. A careful, plodding man who had never brought any direct difficulties upon himself, but who had been worried and worried out through troubles left him by others. On the whole, he had found life an unrewarding thing; and he passed along, at fifty-five, with no great regrets. The tangle of family affairs had finally been straightened out in considerable measure, though Ray mond found enough detail still left to make him realize what a five years his father had passed through; and when, the year follow ing, his mother died, with the settlement of her estate almost overlapping the settlement [ H6 ] ON THE STAIRS of his father s, he acquired a new sense of the grinding, taxing possibilities of business. I speak from his own viewpoint; he was sus ceptible unduly, abnormally so to the grind and the tax. After a few months of clammy old Brand and his methods, he sud denly cut loose from him (without waiting for him to die, as he did a little later); and he told me that I was the man to wind up these tedious affairs. They were not nearly so difficult and complicated as they seemed to him they were now largely routine matters, in fact; and I hope I carried things along at a tempo which satisfied him. This is not to deny that Raymond seemed to have days when he found even me dilatory and exasperating; but old Brand would probably have driven him mad. Well, the prospects of his estate were not too brilliant. The lawsuits had been expen sive and sometimes unsuccessful; the bank had passed a dividend, and the old houses, which had meant a lot of money in their day, meant less now and even loss in a near future. The time was fast coming when this [ 117 ] ON THE STAIRS circumscribed and unprotected neighbor hood was to admit other and prejudicial interests: boarding-houses, of course; and refined homes for inebriates; and correspond ence-schools for engineers; and one of the Prince houses became eventually the seat of a publishing-firm which needed a little distinction more than it needed a wide spread of glass close to the sidewalk. Whatever the state of Raymond s for tunes, it was easy to see that they were not likely to improve in his hands. He detested business, both en gros and en detail. Despite his ancestry, he seemed to have been born with no faculty for money-making, and he never tried to make up his deficiency. It was all of a piece with the stone-throwing of his boyhood days he never attempted to improve himself: it was enough to follow the gifts with which he had been natively endowed. Precept, example, opportunity all these went for naught. To the end of his days he viewed the American "business man" as a portentous and inexplicable phe nomenon one to be regarded with dis- [ H8 ] ON THE STAIRS taste and wonder. He persisted in thinking of the type as a juvenile one an energetic and clever boy, who was immensely active and immensely productive of results (in an immensely limited field), but who was in capable of anything like an apergu or a Welt- anschauung (oh, he had plenty of words for it!), and who was essentially booked to lose much more than he gained. He disliked "offices" and abominated "hours." I think that even my own modest professional applica tions sometimes became a puzzle to him. . . . And here I stand convicted of having perpetrated another section without one short paragraph and without a single line of conversation. Let me hasten to bring Ray mond to my suite and my desk-side, and make him speak. He came down one morning, as adminis trator of his mother s estate, to consider the appraisal of the personal property many familiar items, and some discouraging ones. "Do you have to do this?" he asked me, with the paper in his hand. "Do you like to do it?" I 119 1 ON THE STAIRS "The world s work," I rejoined temper ately. "It s got to be done." "H m!" tie returned. "The world s a varied place. And its work is varied too. This blessed town must be taught that." Was he girding himself to be one of its teachers? From that time on I resolved to take him patiently and good-humoredly : a friend must bear a friend s infirmities. Ill I did not know, with precision, what phases of the world s work were engaging Raymond s attention. I suppose he was adventuring, rather vaguely, among the "liberal arts," though he probably saw, by this time, that a full professional exercise of any of them was beyond his reach. He was heard of as writing short essays and reviews for one or two genteel publications, as making water-color tours through the none too alluring suburbs, as composing minor pieces for a little musical society which he had joined and which he wished [ 120 1 ON THE STAIRS to advance, and so on. Acquaintances re ported him at architectural exhibits and at book-auctions occasions neither numer ous nor important. He lived on alone in his father s house expensively; too ex pensively, of course, for it was an exacting place to keep up. He was coming to be known in a small circle but an influential one as a young man of wealth, culture, and good-will. But his wealth was less than supposed, his cul ture was self-centred, and his good-will was neither broad nor zealous. However, the new day was coming when he could be turned to account or when, at least, people made the attempt. This, however, does not mean philanthropy. That was barely dawning as a social neces sity. The few who were supporting chari table institutions and were working in the recently evolved slums were neither con spicuous nor fashionable. Nor does it mean political betterment. No efforts had yet been successful in substituting for the city s execu tive incubus a man of worthier type, nor ON THE STAIRS was there yet any effective organization founded on the assumption which would have seemed remote and fantastic indeed that a city council could be improved. Parlor lectures on civics were of course still farther in the future. Poor government was simply a permanent disability, like weather, or lameness, or the fashions; folk must get along as best they could in spite of it. The town remained a chaos of maladministra tion and of non-administration; but when the decencies are, for the time being, de spaired of, one may still try for the luxuries. So the city girded itself for a great festival; the nation approved and cooperated, and a vast congeries of white palaces began to rise on our far edge. The detailed execution of this immense undertaking was largely local, of course. Though the work was initiated by older heads (some of them were too old and were dropped), there were places on the innum erable committees for younger ones for men in their early thirties; their vigor, en thusiasm, and even initiative (within under- ON THE STAIRS stood limits) would greatly further the cause. There were (among others) committees on entertainment to engage the services of young men of position, leisure, and social experience. There were many foreign digni taries to be received and guided; there must be lively and presentable youths to help manoeuvre them. Raymond, who was sup posed to have mingled in European society (instead of having viewed it from afar, in detachment), was asked to serve in this field. There were equally good opportunities for brisk, aggressive young men on finance com mittees and such-like bodies, wherein promi nent sexagenarians did the heavily orna mental and allowed good scope for younger men who had begun to get a record and who wished to confirm ability in influential eyes. This opened a road for John W. McComas, who made a record, indeed, in the matter of gathering local subscriptions. He dented the consciousness of several important men in his own field, and got praised in the press for his indefatigability and his powers of persuasion. Before the six months of fes- [ 123 1 ON THE STAIRS tivity were half over, our Johnny had be come a "prominent citizen" and his new bank almost a household word. Raymond did less well. The great organ ization was an executive hierarchy: ranks and rows of officials, with due heed not only to coordination but to subordination. Some men do their best under such conditions; others, their worst. Raymond, a strong in dividualist, a pronounced egoist, could not "fall in." Even in his simple field one concerned chiefly with but the outward flourishes the big machine irked and em barrassed him. He withdrew. When an im perial prince was publicly "received," with ceremonies that mingled old-world formal ities (however lamely followed) and local inspirations (however poorly disciplined), the moving event went off with no help of his: I believe he even smiled at it all from a balcony. It was here that Raymond began to make clear his true type. He was Goethe s "bad citizen" the man who is unable to com mand and unwilling to oboy. [ 124 ] ON THE STAIRS After a particularly flamboyant appre ciation of McComas s services in a Sunday newspaper, I ventured to touch on our Johnny s rise in Raymond s hearing. The two had not met for years; and Johnny had probably no greater place in Raymond s mind than Raymond, as I remembered once finding, had in Johnny s. But Raymond did not yet pretend to overlook or to forget or to ignore him; nor did he yet allow himself to mention Johnny as a one-time dweller in his father s stable. "Why, yes," said Raymond; "he seems to be coming on fast. Climbing like anything." This, I felt, was disapproval, slightly tinc tured with contempt. But there are two kinds of progress on a ladder or a stairway. There is the climbing up, and there is (as we sometimes let ourselves say) the climbing down. It was at the imperial reception that Ray mond and Johnny finally met. Let us figure Raymond as descending from his satirical balcony, and Johnny, with his wife, as ear nestly working his way up the great stairway [ 125 1 ON THE STAIRS the scalone, as Italy had taught Raymond to call it. This was an ample affair with an elaborate handrail, whose function was nulli fied by potted plants, and with a commodi ous landing, whose corners contained many thickset palms. A crowd swarmed up; a crowd swarmed down; the hundreds were con gested among the palms. Johnny, with his wife on his arm, was robust and hearty, and smiled on things in general as he fought their way up. He took the occasion as he took any other occasion: much for granted, but with a certain air of richly belonging and of worthily fitting in. His wife "I sup pose it was his wife," said Raymond was elaborately gowned and in high feather: a successful delegate of luxury. Obviously an occasion of this sort was precisely what she had long been waiting for. Despite the press about her, she made her costume and her carriage tell for all they might. A triumph ing couple, even Raymond was obliged to concede. The acme of team work . . . "There we were stuck in the crowd," said Raymond, whose one desire seemed to [ 126 1 ON THE STAIRS have been to gain the street. "Not too close, fortunately. I had to bow, but I did n t have to speak; and I did n t have to be pre sented. He gave me quite a nod." And no great exercise of imagination was required for me to see how distant and re served was Raymond s bow in return. IV That autumn, after the festal flags had ceased their flaunting and fire had made a wide sweep over the white palaces, Raymond suddenly went abroad. It was to be a stay of three or four months. He first wrote me from Paris. He wrote again in December, also from Paris, and told me tout court that he was engaged to be married. I give this news to you as suddenly as he gave it to me. You can supply motives as easily as I. His parents were gone and his family life was nil. The old house was large and lonely. You may believe him influenced, if you like, by his last view of Johnny McComas and by Johnny s amazing effect of completeness ON THE STAIRS and content. You may fancy him as visited by compunctions and mortifications due to his consciousness of his own futility. Or you may fall back upon the simple and gen eral promptings that are smoothly current in the minds of us all. My own notion, however, is this: he never would have married at home; only an insidious whiff of romance, encountered in France or Italy, could have accomplished his undoing. Raymond s own advices were meagre. "Your emotional participation not particu larly desired " such seemed to be the mes sage that lay invisible between his few lines. But other correspondents supplied the lacunoe. He was to marry a girl whose family formed part of the American colony in the French capital. At least, the feminine members of the family were there: the mother, and an elder sister. The father, according to a cus tom that still provoked Gallic comment, was elsewhere: he was following the markets in America. The bride-to-be was between nineteen and twenty. Raymond himself was thirty-three. [ 128 ] ON THE STAIRS He advised me, later, that the wedding would take place at the end of February and requested me to obtain and forward some of the quaint documents demanded at such a juncture by the French authorities. He added that he hoped for a honeymoon in Italy, but that his fiancee favored Biarritz and Pau. The wedding came off at one of the Ameri can churches in Paris. It was a sumptuous ceremonial, aided by a bishop (who was on his travels, but who had not forgotten to bring along his vestments) and by the at tendance of half the colony. Raymond was obliged to put up with all this pomp and show, much as it ran counter to his tastes and inclinations. But fortunately he was made even less of than most young men on such an occasion; he had few connections on either side of the water, so the bride s connections dominated the day and made her the chief figure still more completely than is commonly the case. And the honeymoon was spent, not in the north of Italy, but in the south of France. F 129 1 ON THE STAIRS There are times when a young girl must have her way. And there are times when a young husband (but not so young) will deter mine to have his. I knew Raymond. The couple were in no haste to get home. The four months ran to almost a year. I first met the new wife at a reception in the early autumn. "Gertrude," said Raymond, "let me pre sent to you my old friend " H m! let me see: what is my name? Oh, yes: "Ger trude, let me present to you my old friend, George Waite." Can a young bride, dressed in black, and dressed rather simply too, look almost wicked? Well, this one contrived to. The effect was not due to her face, which had an expression of naive sophistication, or of sophisticated naivete, not at all likely to mislead the mature; nor to her carriage, which, though slightly self-conscious, was modest enough, and not a bit too demure. It was due to her dress, which, after all, was not quite so simple, either in intention or in execution, as it seemed. It was black, and I 130 1 ON THE STAIRS black only; and it was trimmed with black jet or spangles or passementerie or what ever let some one else find the name. It was cut close, and it was cut low; too close and too low she was the young married woman with a vengeance. It took a tone and bespoke a tradition to which most of us were as yet strangers, and our initiation into a new and equivocal realm had been too sudden for our powers of adjustment. It was Paris in its essence the thing in itself and it had all come unedited through the hands of a mother and a sister who were so rapt or so subservient as to be incapable of offering opposition to the full pungency of the Parisian evangel, and of hushing down an emphatic text for acceptance in a more quiet environment. I can only say that sev eral nice young chaps looked once and then looked away. Raymond himself was incon venienced. Nor did matters mend when, within a week or so, Mrs. Raymond Prince began to rate the women of her new circle as "homespun." Her little hand fell most heavily on these t 131 1 ON THE STAIRS poor aborigines when two or three members of Raymond s singing-class loyally came to one of her own receptions. These Adeles and Gertrudes of the earlier day were now wives and mothers, with the interests proper to such. They had shepherded babies through croup and diphtheria, and were now seeing husky, wholesome boys and girls of twelve and thirteen through the primary schools. When among themselves, they talked of servants and husbands. They had not mar ried and gone West or East; they had mar ried at home, and they had stayed at home. They had had too many things on their hands and minds to catch up much of the recent exoticism stirring about them here in town, and they were far from able to cope with this recent importation of exoticism from the Rue de la Paix. Raymond came home, one afternoon, in time for the last half-hour of his wife s last reception. Her dress, on this occasion, was quite as daring, in its way, as on the other, and original to the point of the bizarre. One of the early Adeles was leaving, but she [ 132 ] ON THE STAIRS stopped for a moment and attempted speech. She was the particular Adele with the pierc ing soprano voice a voice which had since lowered itself to sing lullabies to three suc cessive infants. "Well, Raymond " she began hope fully, and stopped. She tried again, but failed; and she passed on and out with her words unsaid. "Well, Raymond" Yes, I am afraid that that was the impression of more early friends than one. Raymond had expected, of course, to give his wife her own way at the beginning at the very beginning, that is; and he had expected, equally, to have her make a defi nite impression on the circle awaiting her. But Well, he had intended to "take her in hand," and to do it soon. She was to be formed, or re-formed; she was to be adjusted, both to things in general and to himself es pecially. Besides being her husband, he was [ 133 1 ON THE STAIRS to be her kindly elder brother, her monitor, patient but firm; she was to enter upon a state of tutelage. He was pretty certain to be right in all his views, opinions and prac tices; and she, if her views, opinions and prac tices were at variance with his, was pretty certain to be in the wrong. He assumed that, during those few years in Paris, she had learned it all in one big lesson only. The time had been too short to confirm all this sudden instruction into a reasoned and as similated way of life; by no means had that superficial miscellany been rubbed into the warp and woof of her being. The Parisian top-dressing would be removed and the essen tial subsoil be exposed and tilled. . . . H m! One of the strongest of her early impres sions was naturally that of the house in which she was to live. It was big and roomy; it was detached, and thus open to light and air. But its elephantine woodwork repelled her, for she had grown up amid the rococo exuberances of Paris apartments. The heavy honesty of black-walnut depressed her after [ 134 ] ON THE STAIRS the gilded stucco of her mother s salon. And that huge, portentous orchestrion took up such an immensity of room! I doubt if the neighborhood itself pleased her much better, though it was homogeneous (in its way), and dignified, and enjoyed an exceptional measure of quietude. Perhaps it was too quiet, after some years of a bal cony on a boulevard. And it is true that some of the big houses were vacant, and that some of the families roundabout went away too often and stayed away too long. An empty house is a dead house, and when doors and windows are boarded up you may say the dead house is laid out. Things were sometimes triste the French for final con demnation. The exodus so long foreshad owed seemed appreciably under way. This Gertrude became increasingly conscious, as the months went on, that most of the peo ple she wanted to see and most of the houses she was prompted to frequent were miles away, and that, the flood-tide of business rolled between. Of her reaction to the circle in which she I 135 ] ON THE STAIRS first found herself I have given you one or two indications. It would be easy, as it would be customary, to give some other of her early social experiences in detail and her reactions to them; but my interest is frankly in her husband and in his reactions. It was of him, too, that I saw the most; and I have never gone greatly into society. At the end of a long and possibly some what dull winter his wife began to hint the advantageousness of transferring themselves to that other part of town. Raymond was not precisely in the position where he cared to pay high rent for a small house, while a big house was standing empty and unrealiz able. Pouts; frowns . . . But nature came to his aid. With a new young life soon to appear above the horizon, now was no time to shift. His son should be born in the house in which he ought to be born. A reasonable view, on the whole; and it pre vailed. Raymond had said "son," and son it was. The baby was not named Raymond: his father, however much of an egoist, was not [ 136 ] ON THE STAIRS willing to put himself forward as such so obviously, nor for a period that promised to be indefinitely long. Nor was the baby called Bartholomew, after his maternal grandfather in the East: for who cared to inflict such an old-fashioned, four-syllable name on such a small morsel of flesh? He entered the battle under the neutral and not over-colorful pennon of Albert: his mother could thus call him "Bertie," and think, not too remotely, of her parent on the stock exchange. Raymond was not long in discovering, after reaching home, what sacrifices the new life was to involve. On the Continent, in the midst of change and stir, these had not foretold themselves. Back in his own house, his interests "intellectual interests" he called them began to assert themselves in the old way. But he was no longer free to range the fields of the mind and take shots at the arts as they rose. Least of all was he to read in the evening. That was to neglect, to affront. However, the arrival of little Albert poor tad ! changed the current of his wife s own interests and helped to place [ 137 ] ON THE STAIRS one more rather vital matter in abeyance. He was to live for a while, anyway in his present home; and he was to pursue for a while, anyway some of the accus tomed interests of his bachelor days. He expected that, before long, his wife would accept his environment and the practices he had always followed within it. She needed enlightenment on many points. He had al ready communicated some of his views on dress, for example; and he had readjusted her notions on the preparation of salads. He gave her, pretty constantly, corrective glances through, or over, his eyeglasses, for his sight had begun to weaken early, as his father had foreseen, and he meant that such glances should count. She required to be edited; well, the new manuscript was worth his pains, and would be highly creditable in its revised version. VI If one advantage showed forth from a sit uation that seemed, in general, not alto gether promising, it was this: Raymond, [ 138 1 ON THE STAIRS hearing his native town commented upon unfavorably by his wife, who was keen and constant in her criticisms, began to defend it. It was one thing for the native- born to pick flaws; it was another when that ungracious work was attempted by a new comer. And he meant not only to defend it, but to remain in it, though his wife had married him partly on the strength of his European predilections, and largely on the assumption that a good part of their mar ried life would be spent abroad. He even began to wonder if he might not join in and help improve things. Like most of his fellow- townsmen, he regarded the city s participa tion in the late national festival as a great step in advance, the first of many like steps soon to follow. The day after the Fair was late; but better to be late than never. Really, there was hope for the Big Black Botch. More and more he felt inclined to lessen still further its lessening enormity. After all, this town was the town of his birth : and a fundamental egoism cried out that it should be more worthy of him. He recalled a group of Amer- [ 139 ] ON THE STAIRS ican women Easterners whom, during his first trip abroad, he had caught poring over the guest-book of a hotel in Sorrento. He was the last male arrival in a slow season; he seemed interesting and promising; evi dently they had had hopes. "But," asked one of them, "how is it you are willing to register openly from such a town as that?" and Raymond had felt the sting. "Such nerve, such bumptiousness!" he said to me in recalling that query some years later. But he did not add that he had tried to deliver any riposte. Instead he was now to make a belated return at home, where effort most counted. The years immediately to come were to be full of new openings and op portunities; in his own way, and under his peculiar handicaps, he was to try to take some advantage of them. PART V I LITTLE ALBERT S babyhood kept his mother a good deal at home and by "home" I mean the house in which he had been born. His father s lessened interest in Europe (and his diminished deference for it) kept his mother at home completely and by "home" I now mean the town in which Al bert had been born. Father, mother, and offspring filled the big house as well as they could the big, old house as it was some times called by those who cherished a chro nology that was purely American; and Al bert was more than a year and a half along in life before his grandmother came across to see him and to inspect the distant m6- nage. She brought her water-waves and her sharpened critical sense, and went back leaving the impression that she was artificial and exacting. [ 141 1 ON THE STAIRS "She missed her Paris," said Raymond, "and her drive in the Bois." "H m!" said I, recalling that the town s recent chief executive had pronounced us, not many years back, the equal of Paris in civic beauty. "We have no Bois, as yet," he added, thoughtfully. "Do you think we ever shall have one?" He was revolving the Bois, not as a definite tract of park land, but as a social institution. "I think," said I, "that we had better be satisfied with developing according to our own nature and needs." "Yes," he returned; "there was the French man at the fox-hunt: No band, no prome nade, no nossing/ Well, we must go on our own tack, as soon as we discover it." It need not be imagined that his mother- in-law s look-in of a month made his wife more contented. She kept on wishing for her new friends in another quarter, and (more strongly) for the familiar scenes of the other side. Raymond did not wish the expense involved in either move. His affairs were [ 142 ] ON THE STAIES now going but tolerably. So far as the bank was concerned a bank that had once been almost a "family" institution his influ ence was naught. He was only a stockholder, and a smaller stockholder than once. His interest, in any sense, was but a brief, pe riodical interest in dividends. These were coming with a commendable regularity still. His rentals came in fairly too; but most of them were now derived from properties on the edge of the business district proper ties with no special future and likely only to hold their own however favorable gene ral conditions might continue. Travel? No. A man travels best in his youth, when he is foot-free, care-free, fancy-free. Go travel ing too late, or once too often, and there is a difference. The final checking-off of some thing one has "always meant to see" may result in the most ashen disappointment of all: even intuition, without the pains of actual experience, should suffice to warn. Besides, as Raymond said, "We ve both had a good deal of it. Let s stay at home." [ 143 ] ON THE STAIRS His wife cast about her. There is a mood in which a deprivation of high comedy may drive one to low-down farce. To-day people are even going farther. A worthy stage is dead, they say; and they patronize, somewhat will fully and contemptuously (or with a loose, slack tolerance that is worse), the moving pictures. Perhaps it was in some such mood that Raymond s wife took up with Mrs. Johnny McComas. They were but three streets apart. Mrs. McComas was lively, energetic, determined to drive on; and her ability to assimilate rapidly and light-hand- edly her growing opulence made it seem by no means a mere vulgar external adornment. She knew how to move among the remark able furnishings with which she had sur rounded herself in that old-new house, and how to make the momentum gained there serve her ends in the world outside. "It will be a short life here," her husband had told her on their taking possession; "then, a quick sale at a good figure to some manufacturing concern, and on we go." "If it s to be short, let s make it merry," [ 144 ] ON THE STAIRS she had rejoined; and nothing had been spared that could give liveliness to their stately old interiors, while those interiors lasted. Mrs. Raymond Prince vaguely pronounced their house "amusing." It had, like Adele McComas herself, a provocative dash which fell in with her present mood, and it pleased her that its chatelaine was inclined to dress up to its wayward sofas and hangings. She even went with Mrs. Johnny on shopping tours and abetted her as her fancies, desires and expenditures ran riot. It was a mood of irresponsibility almost of defiant irrespon sibility. Now was the nascent day of the country club. Several of these welcome institutions had lately set themselves up in a modest, tentative way. Acceptance was complete, and all they had to do was to grow. With one of these McComas cast his lot. At the start it was a simple enough affair; but Johnny must have sensed its potentialities and savored its affinities, its coming congruity with him self. It was to become, shortly, a club for [ 145 ] ON THE STAIRS the suddenly, violently rich, the flushed with dollars, the congested with prosperity for newcomers who had met Success and beaten her at her own game. Stir on all hands, the reek of sudden felicity in the air. In later years people with access to better things of similar sort were known to become indignant when asked to associate themselves with it. "Why should I want to join that ?" was the question they put. But it pleased Johnny McComas, both by its present manifestations and its latent possibilities. It was richly in unison with his own nature, and I believe he had a ravishing vision of its magnificent futurities. Last year my wife and I were taken to a Sunday afternoon concert out there. We found a place of towers and arcades, of end less corridors planted with columns and num berless chairs in numberless varieties, of fountained courts, of ball-rooms, of concert- halls, of gay apparel and cool drinks. We heard of fairs, horse-shows, tournaments in golf and tennis. The restaurant, with its acre of tables, glassed and naperied; the ranges of [ 146 ] ON THE STAIRS telephone booths, all going it together; the cellars, a vast subterrene, with dusky avenues of lockers, each cluttered with beverages of individual predilection though I suppose that, after all, they were a good deal alike . . . Well, it was too much for us; and my Elsie, who is essentially, the lady, if woman ever was, came away feeling a little dowdy and a good deal out of date. At that earlier period, however, it was still simple; the germ was there, but the develop ment of its possibilities had only begun. When Mrs. McComas invited Mrs. Prince to drive out with her and see some tennis, Mrs. Prince was quite ready to accept. I do not know just what mode of locomo tion they employed. It was in the early days of the automobile and Johnny McComas was one of the first men in town to have one. I recall, in fact, some of his initial experiences with it. On a Sunday afternoon I encountered him in one of these still relatively unstudied contraptions on a frequented driveway. An other man was sitting beside him patiently. The conveyance was making no progress at [ 147 ] ON THE STAIRS all. Fortunately it had stopped close enough to the curb not to interfere with the progress of other and more familiar equipages. "We re stuck," said Johnny, jovially, as he caught sight of me. "Ran for three or four miles slick as a whistle and look at us now! " It entertained him a kink in a new toy. And he enjoyed the interest of the people collected about. "You re gummed up, I expect," said I. In those days nobody knew much about the new creature and its habits, and one man s guess was as good as another s. Two or three by standers eyed me deferentially, as a probable expert. "Likely enough," he agreed and that made me an expert beyond doubt. "But this will do for to-day. We ve been here twenty minutes." He had the car pushed to a near-by stable, amidst the mixed emotions of the little crowd, and next day he had it hauled home. "You were right," he said, when I met him out again in it, a week later. "It was gummed up, so to speak; but it s working like a charm \ 148 1 ON THE STAIRS to-day. Get in and I 11 take you a few miles. That other fellow got an awful grouch." It may have been by this machine, or by some more familiar mode of locomotion, that the two women reached the country club and its tennis tournament. Gertrude Prince strolled through its grounds and galleries with the aloof and amused air of one touring through a foreign town a town never seen before and likely to be left behind altogether within an hour or two. It was at once semi-smart and semi-simple. She took it lightly, even con descendingly; and when Johnny McGomas himself appeared somewhat later and set them down at a little marble table near a fountain-jet and offered cocktails as a pre liminary to a variety of sandwiches, she de cided, after looking about and seeing a few other ladies with glasses before them on other little marble tables, to accept. It was a lark in some town of the provinces Meaux or Melun; what difference did it make? They formed a little group altogether to Johnny s liking. His wife was dressed dash ingly ; his wife s guest made a very fair second ; f 149 1 ON THE STAIRS he himself, although he never lifted a racquet, was in the tennis garb of that day. "You both look ripping," he declared with hearty satisfaction. To look thus, before com peting items in the throng, was the object of the place, the reason for its developing mise en scene. Johnny himself looked ripping cool, con fident, content, and at the top of his days. "It was amusing ..." said Gertrude to me, with an upward inflection, a week later. And she asked me for more about Johnny McComas. n If those were days when people began to combine for the pursuit of pleasure, they were also days when people began to gather at the call of public duty. If clubs were forming on the borders, other clubs, leagues, societies were forming nearer the centre organiza tions to make effective the scattered good- will of the well-disposed and to gain some better ment in the local political life. To initiate and conduct such movements only a few were [ 150 ] ON THE STAIRS needed; but the many were expected to con tribute, if not their zeal and their time, at least their dollars. It was patriotic righteous ness made easy: a man had only to give his fifty dollars or his five hundred to feel, with out further personal exertion, that he was a good citizen and was forwarding, as all good citizens should, a worthy cause. This way of doing it fell in wonderfully well with Ray mond s temperament and abilities (or lack of them) : the liberality of his contributions did not remain unknown, and he was some times held up as a favorable specimen of the American citizen. Another movement was soon to engage his attention. If the prosperous were to have their playgrounds beyond the city s outskirts, the less prosperous should have theirs within the city s limits. The scheme of a system of small parks and playgrounds quite took Raymond s fancy. It contained, besides the idea of social amelioration, the even more grateful idea of municipal beautification. In time, indeed, might not this same notion, fortified by experience and given a wider f 151 1 ON THE STAIRS application, end by redeeming the town not merely in spots but in its entirety? a saved and graced whole, not only as to its heart, but as to its liberal and varied borders of water, woodland and prairie. "I should be proud of that," said Ray mond heartily. The name of such a city, fol lowing one s own name on any hotel-register, would indeed be a matter for pride. He attended several of the early meetings that were designed to get some such project, in its simpler form, under way. He had friends among professional men in the arts, and some acquaintances among newly formed bodies of social workers. He was not slow in perceiving that the way was likely to be tedi ous and hard. It called for organization the organization of hope, of patience, of hot, untiring zeal, of finesse against political chi cane, of persistence in the face of indifference and selfishness. "It will take years of or ganized endeavor," he confessed. He recog nized his own ineffectiveness beyond the nar row pale of hopeful suggestion, and wished that here too the giving of a substantial sum [ 152 ] ON THE STAIRS a large penny-in-the-slot might produce quick and facile results. His wife, it is to be feared, looked upon these activities of his, however slight, with a lack-lustre eye. She knew nothing of local problems and local needs. She was conscious of a hortatory manner in small matters and of indifference, which she almost made neg lect, in matters that appeared to her to be larger. If she asked for a fairer share in his evenings he belonged to a literary club, a musical society, and so on it was scant consolation to be told that he objected to some of her own activities and associations. He did not much care, for example, to have her "run" with the McComases and others of that type or to have her dawdle over glasses, tall, broad, or short, in places of general dem ocratic assemblage; and he told her so. I be lieve it was about here that she began to find him something of a prig and a doctrinaire; and she was not incapable, under provocation, of mentioning her impressions. It was about here, I suspect, that he told her something of Johnny McComas and his origins at least [ 153 1 ON THE STAIRS he once or twice spoke of Johnny with a cer tain sharp scorn to me. He assuredly spoke of other country clubs on the other side of town which were more desirable for her and equally accessible, save in the material sense of mere miles. Though he took no interest in athletics, nor even in the lighter out-of-door sports, he was willing to join one of those clubs, if it was required of him. His reference to Johnny McComas was de signed, no doubt, to repel her; but the effect, as became perfectly apparent, was quite the contrary. She was interested, even fascinated, by the rise of a man from so little to so much. She found words and words to express her admiration of Johnny s type, and when Eng lish words ran short she found words in French. He was gaillard ; he had ilan. What was n t he? What had n t he? Bits of bravado, I still incline to think. No, the McComases were not to be left be hind all of a sudden. One day she made an other excursion to the outskirts with them; and she reported it to Raymond, with a little air of suppressed mockery, as a perfectly un- [ 154 ] ON THE STAIRS objectionable jaunt. She had gone with them to the cemetery. Johnny s mother had died the year before, and he had been putting up a monument in Roselands. This structure, it developed, was no mere memorial to an individual. It was a tall shaft, set in the mid dle of a large lot. I saw it later myself: a lavish erection (with all its accessory features taken into account) one designed, as I felt, to show Johnny himself to posterity as an ancestor, as the founder of a family line. Assuredly his own name, aside from the tall obelisk itself, was the largest thing in view. Raymond took this account of Johnny s latest phase with an admirable seriousness; he thought the better of him for it. He him self was inclined to divide human-kind into two classes, those who had cemetery-lots (with monuments), and those who had not. The latter, of course, are in a majority every where. One thinks of Naples and of the sad road that winds up past the Alhambra to Well, yes; in a majority, of course; and in evitably so in a large town suddenly thrown [ 155 ] ON THE STAIRS together by a heaping up of fortuitous and miscellaneous elements. In later years, when things were going rather badly with Raymond, and when consideration seemed to fail, he could always comfort himself with thoughts of the Princes own monument in that same cemetery. This was another tall shaft in a gray granite now no longer to be found, and had been set up by old Jehiel on the occasion of the reinterment of some infants by his first wife a transaction carried out years be fore Raymond was born. Some of the dates on the base of the monument went back to the early thirties. Well, there it stood, with the subordinated headstones of Jehiel and old Beulah, of his own parents, and of the half- mythical babes who, if they had given noth ing else to the world, had furnished a future nephew with a social perspective. Raymond, reconsidering Johnny s recent effort, now be gan to disparage that improvised background, and led his wife to view his own lot theirs, hers only a hundred yards from the other. But she could not respond to old Jehiel and Beulah though she tried to be properly [ 156 ] ON THE STAIRS sympathetic over their son and his wife. Still less could she vitalize the infants who had en countered an epidemic on the prairie frontier and had succumbed more than three score years ago. If she thought of any child at all, she thought doubtless of little Albert (now romping about in his first tweed knicker bockers), who would not die for many years, perhaps, and who was like enough to be buried in quite another spot. But I think she thought, most of all, of the manly, cheerful sorrow of Johnny McComas before the new monument in the other lot. Ill These were also days of panic. Banks went down and bank officials threw themselves after. The city was thrilled, even charmed, to find that its financial perturbations touched, however slightly, the nerves of London and Paris. I myself was in Algeria that winter: my Elsie and I had decided on three months along the Mediterranean. It was on the white, glaring walls of the casino at Biskra that the news was first bulletined for our eyes. It had [ 157 1 ON THE STAIRS a glare of its own, I assure you : for a few days we knew little enough how we ourselves might be standing. I thought of the Mid-Continent, with its cumbersome counters and partitions done in walnut veneer and its old-fashioned pavement in squares of black and white. I thought too of Johnny McComas s new institution, with so many bright brass handrails and such a spread of tasteful mosaics underfoot. How had they fared? Well, they had fared quite differently. Why should a big, old bank go under, while a new, little bank continues to float. I cannot tell you. I was far away at the time. Perhaps I could not tell you even if I had been on the spot. And to other ques tions, more important still, I may be unable to give, when the pinch comes, a clearer an swer. The Mid-Continent dashed, or drifted, into the rocky hands of a receiver; and Mc Comas s bank, after a fortnight of wobbling, righted itself and kept on its way. I saw Raymond again in March. The re ceivership was going on languidly. Prospects were bright for nobody. [ 158 ] ON THE STAIRS "All this puts an end to one of my plans, anyhow," he said. "What plan is that?" I asked. I was reminded that these were also the days of a quickened interest in education. This interest was expressing itself in large new in stitutions, and these institutions were gener ously embodying themselves in solid stone in mullions, groins, gargoyles, finials, and the whole volume of approved scholastic detail. Donors were grouping themselves in "halls" and dormitories round a certain inchoate campus, and were putting on the fronts of their buildings their own names, or the names of deceased husbands or wives, fathers or mothers so many bids for a monumental immortality. "I had hoped for a Prince Hall," said Ray mond. And he explained that it would have been in memory of his parents. I must pause for a moment on this matter. I do not believe that Raymond had ever thought, in seriousness, of any such gift. It must have been at best an errant fancy, and if concerned with commemorating anybody [ 159 ] ON THE STAIRS concerned with commemorating himself. But I will say this for him : he never was disposed to try getting things out of people, for he hated attempts at trickery almost as much as he detested the exercise of the shrewdness in volved in bargaining and dickering. Per con tra, he often showed himself not averse to giving things to other people; but the basis for that giving must be clearly understood all round. He would not compete; he would not struggle; he would not descend to a war of wits. His to bestow, from some serene height; his the r61e, in fact, of the kindly patron. Let but his own superiority be recognized let him only be regarded as hors concours and he would sometimes deign to do the most generous acts. These acts embraced, now and again, the entertainment of writers and art ists, either at his home or elsewhere: his fel lows for he was a writer and an artist too. But it was all done with the understanding that there was a difference: he was a writer and an artist but he was something more. Those who failed to feel the difference were not always bidden a second time. [ 160 ] ON THE STAIRS And his fancy for patronage was developing just at a time when patronage was becoming more difficult, awkward, impracticable! But though "Prince Hall" never saw the light, other and humbler forms of patronage came to be accepted by him. Toward the end of April Raymond and his wife joined one of the clubs which he had brought to her notice. Though in a formative stage, like others, it was good (we ourselves joined it some few years later); and she made it her concern, through the summer, to give it some of those shaping pats which for a new club, as for a new vase have the greater value the earlier they are bestowed. She was active about the place, and she became conspicuous. It was soon seen that she was "gay" or was inclined to be, under favoring condi tions. The conditions were most favoring, it began to be felt, when her husband was not about. A good many thought him stiff, and a few who used obsolete dictionary words pro nounced him proud a term stately enough to constitute somehow a tribute, though a [ 161 1 ON THE STAIRS damnatory one. It was soon seen, too, that just as he irked her, so she disparaged him an open road to others. One day she gave a lunch at the club places for a dozen. Johnny McComas ap peared there for the first time. It was a plainer place than his own, but I credit him with perceiving that it was much more worth while. Adele McComas did not appear for a good reason. Those obstreperous twins now had a little sister two weeks old. The wife was doubtless better at home, but was the husband better at the club? If I had been a member at that time, and present, I should have felt like following him to some corner of the veranda and saying: "Oh, come, now, Johnny, will this quite do?" Well, I know what his look would have been it came later. He would have turned that wide, round face on me, with the curly hair about the temples which gave him somehow an expres sion of abiding youth and frankness; and he would have directed those hard, bright blue eyes of his to look straight ahead at me eyes that seemed to hold back nothing, yet [ 162 1 ON THE STAIRS really told nothing at all; and would have dis claimed any wrong-doing or any intention of wrong-doing. And I should have felt myself a foolish meddler. Well, the innocent informalities of the sum mer were resumed by the same set in town next winter. The memories and the methods of one season were tided over to another. Gertrude was still "gay" perhaps gayer and a little more openly impatient with her husband, and a little more openly dis dainful of him. Young men swarmed and fluttered, and those who had "never tried it on" before seemed inclined to try it on now. I take, on the whole, a tempered view by which I mean, a favorable view of our society and its moral tone. I am assured, and I believe from my own observations, that this is higher than in some other of our large cities. I dislike scandal, and I have no desire to bear tales. Either is far from being the object of these present pages. Nothing that I present need be taken as typical, as tyran- nously representative. Raymond criticized, expostulated. Friends f 163 1 ON THE STAIRS began to come to him with impressions and reports. I whether for good or ill was not one of these. They named names names which I shall not record here. But it was one of Raymond s own impressions, and a vivid one, which finally prompted him to make a move. IV January found the social life of the town in full swing. We had recovered from last year s financial jolt, and entertaining was constant. Raymond and his wife were in vited out a good deal. He was bored by it all; but his wife remained interested and in defatigable. Finally came a dance at one of the great houses. Raymond rebelled, and refused point-blank to go: an evening in his library was his mood. His wife protested, cajoled, and he finally found a reason for giving in. As I say, they were bidden to one of the great houses one of the few that possessed an actual fagade, a central court, and a big staircase: it had too its galleries of paintings [ 164 ] ON THE STAIRS and of Oriental curios before Oriental curios became too common. Its owner was also, with the rest, a musical amateur. He was a man of forty-five, and like Raymond had a wife too many years younger than himself for his own comfort. This lively lady lived on fiddles and horns dancing was an inexhaustible pleasure. At her dancing-parties, of which she gave three or four a season, her husband would show himself below for a few moments for civility s sake, and then retire to a remote den on an upper floor, well shut out from the sounds of his wife s frivolous measures, but accessible to a few habitues of age and tastes approximating his own. The question of music of another quality and to another purpose was in the air it was a matter of endowing and housing an orchestra. Informal pour-parlers were under way in various quarters, and Raymond felt disposed, and even able, to contribute in a modest measure. It was his pride to have been asked, and it was his pride, despite un toward conditions, to put up a good front and do as much as he could. An hour s con- [ 165 1 ON THE STAIRS fab over cigarettes in that retired little den might clarify one atmosphere, if not another. The court and its staircase were set with palms, as is the ineluctable wont on such occasions and for such places; and people, between the dances, or during them, were brushing the fronds aside as they thronged the galleries round the court to see the Bar- bizon masters then in vogue and the Chinese jades. As Raymond passed down the stair way, he met his wife coming up on the arm of Johnny McComas. "She looked self-conscious," Raymond said to me, a few days after. I told him that he had seen only what he was expecting to see. "And he looked too beastly self-satisfied." I told him that of late I had seldom seen Johnny look any other way. "Where was his wife?" he asked. I told him she might easily be in the crowd on some other man s arm. "Why were they there at all?" he de manded. And I did not tell him that prob ably they were there through his own wife s good offices. [ 166 1 ON THE STAIRS That meeting on the stairs! he made a grievance of it, an injury. The earlier meet ing, with Johnny s own wife on his arm, had annoyed him as a general assertion of pros perity. This present meeting, with Raymond Prince s wife on Johnny s arm, exasperated him as a challenging assertion of power and predominance. "I shall act," Raymond declared. "Nothing rash," said I. " Nothing uncon- sidered, I hope." "I shall act," he repeated. And he set his jaw more decisively than a strong man always finds necessary. Raymond s mind was turning more and more to a set scene with McComas; some meeting between them was, to his notion, a scene a faire. It seemed demanded by a Gallic sense of form : it must be gone through with as a requisite to his role of offended hus band. One difficulty was that Raymond fluc tuated daily, almost hourly, in his view of his [ 167 ] ON THE STAIRS wife of the wife, I may say. To-day he took the old view: the wife was her husband s property and any attempt on her was a deadly injury to him. To-morrow he took the newer view: the wife was an individual human being and a free moral agent; there fore a lapse, while it meant disgrace for her, was, for him, but an affront which he must endure with dignified composure. Meanwhile the pair saw little of each other, and Albert, puzzled, began to enter upon his opportunity (a wide and lingering one it became) for learning adjustment to awk ward and disconcerting conditions. Well, Raymond had his meeting. Imagine whether it was agreeable. Imagine whether it was agreeable to me, in whose office it was held. Raymond had the difficult part of one who must act because he has deliberately committed himself to action, yet has no sure ground to act upon, and therefore no line to take with real effect. It was here and now that McComas turned his round face four square to his uncertain accuser, and let loose a steady, unspeaking stare from those hard [ 168 ] ON THE STAIRS blue eyes, and declared that nothing had oc curred upon which an accusation could justly be based. He was emphatic; and he was blunt; the son and grandson of a rustic. Nothing, he said. Had there really been nothing? You are entitled to ask. And I might be inclined to answer, if I knew. I simply don t. I was in position to know some thing, to know much; but everything? no. Think, if you please, of the many domestic situations which must pass without the full light of detailed knowledge knowledge that comes too late, or never comes at all. Consider the simple, willful girl who marries impulsively on the assumption that the new acquaintance is a bachelor. Cases have been known where it developed that he was not. Consider the phrase of the marriage service, "if any of you know just cause or impedi ment": who can declare that, in a given in stance, some impediment, moral if not legal, might not be brought against either contract ing party, however trustful the other? Con sider the story of the anxious American mother who, alarmed by reports about a f 169 1 ON THE STAIRS fascinating scoundrel under whom her daugh ter was studying music somewhere in mid- Europe, went abroad alone to investigate. Her letter to the awaiting father, back home, ran for page after page on non-essentials and dealt with the real point only in a brief, embarrassed, bewildered postscript of one line: "Oh, William, I don t know!" Neither do I "know." But my account of later events may help you to decide the question for yourselves. Raymond had set his mind on a divorce. If grounds could not be found in one quarter, they must be found in another. If McComas, that prime figure, was unable to bring aid, then there must be cooperation among the other and lesser figures. Raymond revived and reviewed the tales that had involved several younger men. The more he dwelt on them, the more inflamed he became, and the more certain that he had been wronged. I did not accompany him through his pro ceedings such advice as I had given him near the beginning was the advice simply of a friend. My own part of the great field of [ 170 1 ON THE STAIRS the law is a relatively unimpassioned one office-work involving real-estate, convey ancing, loans, and the like. I suggested to Raymond the proper counsel for the particu lar case, and there, for a while, I left him. His wife s parents came on from the East. The mother, after some years abroad, had lately resumed her domestic duties in the land of her birth. The father, who knew all of one subject, and nothing of any other, de tached himself for a week or two from the one worthy interest in life and accompanied her. The " street " was still there when he returned. They seemed experienced and worldly-wise in their respective fields and their respective aspects, but they entered upon this new mat ter with a poor grace. Here was another mother who did not quite "know," and an other father who waited, at a second remove, for definite knowledge that did not quite come. First there were maladroit attempts to bring a reconciliation; and afterwards, and more shrewdly, endeavors to gain as much as possible for their daughter from the wreck. ON THE STAIRS Raymond was determined to keep pos session of Albert. Mrs. McComas, mother of three, stoutly declared that the mother should have her child. Other women said the same, and maintained the point regard less of the mother s course or conduct. Many women have said the same in many cases, and perhaps they are right. Perhaps they are completely right in the case of a boy of six, who surely needs a woman s care. But it is not difficult, even when material is more abundant than definite, to throw an atmos phere of dubiousness about a woman and to make it appear that she is not a "proper per son . . ." So it appeared to the judge in this case, and so he ruled with a shading, how ever. Albert might spend with his mother one month every summer and some finan cial concession on Raymond s part helped make the time brief. However, she was to have nothing to say about Albert s mode of life through the rest of the year, and nothing (more specifically) about his education. "That makes him mine," said Raymond. And he set his lips firmly. He was one of [ 172 ] ON THE STAIRS those who set their lips firmly after the event is determined. I do not know whether Raymond had any real affection for Albert. I do not know whether he realized what it was for a father to undertake, single handed, the charge of a boy of six. I think that what moved him chiefly was his determination to carry a point. However all this may be, I remember what he said as, after the decree, he walked out with Albert s hand in his. "Well, it s over!" Over! as if a separation involving a child is ever "over"! PART VI I His domestic difficulty left behind, Raymond settled down to a middle-aged life of dignity and leisure or attempted to. But the trial had rather shaken the dignity, and the sole control of Albert ate into the leisure. There followed, naturally, a period of restlessness and discontent. Those who imputed no blame to Raymond still felt it unfortunate, even calamitous, that he should not have learned how to get on with a young wife. But there were those that did blame him blamed him for an unbending, self-satisfied prig who would have driven almost any spirited young woman to despera tion. These disparaged him; sometimes not always covertly they ridiculed him. That hurt not only his dignity, but his pride. Some of you have perhaps been looking for a generalized expression of general ideas for some observations on marriage and divorce f 174 1 ON THE STAIRS which should have the detachable and quot able quality of epigram. Yet suppose I were to observe, just here, that Marriage makes a promise to the ear and breaks it to the hope; or that Divorce is the martyr s crown after the tortures of Incompatibility; or that Mar riage is the Inferno, the Divorce-Court the Purgatory, and Divorce itself the Paradiso of human life? You would not be likely to think the better of me, and I should cer tainly think less well of myself. Though I am conscious of a homespun quality of thought and diction, I must keep within the limits set me by nature, eschewing "bril liancy" and continuing to deal not in ab stract considerations but in concrete facts. Little Albert spent a good part of his time in a condition of bewilderment; he perceived early that he must not ask questions, that he must not try to understand. At intervals he ran noisily through the big house and made it seem emptier than ever. A nurse, or govern ess, or attendant of some special qualifica tions was required even for the short time before he should begin his month with his [ 175 1 ON THE STAIRS mother, who was spending some months with her parents in the East. Even the prelim inaries for this small event occasioned con siderable thought and provoked a reluctant correspondence. His mother prompted probably by her own mother wrote on the subject of Albert s summer clothes. She wished to buy most of them herself. The Eastern climate in summer had its special points; also local usage in children s cos tuming must be considered in detailed appearance her child must conform measur ably to that particular juvenile society in which he was to appear. Then there was the nurse, or governess. Should Albert be brought on by her? And should she, once in the East, remain there to take him back; or . . .? "Oh, the devil!" cried Raymond, in his library, as he turned page after page of dif fuse discourse. "How long is she going to run on? How many more things is she going to think of?" And she had felt impelled to address him, despite the cool tone of her letter, as "Dear [ 176 ] ON THE STAIRS Raymond." And that seemed to put him under the compulsion of addressing her, in turn, as "Dear Gertrude"! Truly, modes of address were scanty, inadequate. Well, Albert went East (wearing some of the disesteemed things he already possessed) to be outfitted for the summer shores of New Jersey. His governess took him as far as Philadelphia, where the Eastern connection met him, and "poored" him, sent the woman back home, and took him out on the shin ing sands. During the child s absence she made covers for the drawing-room sofas and chairs; the house, bereft of Albert and draped in pale Holland, became more dismal than ever. Raymond, now left alone, was free to de vise a way of life in single harness. He liked it quite as well as the other way. He told him self, and he told me, that he liked it even better. I believe he did ; and I believe he was relieved by the absence of Albert, whose little daily regimen, even when directed by competent assistance, had begun to grind into his father s consciousness. I even believe [ 177 ] ON THE STAIRS that the one serious drawback in Raymond s comfortable summer was the need of studying over a school for Albert in the fall. Raymond spent much of his time among his books. He had long since given up try ing to "write anything"; less than ever was he in a mood to try that sort of exercise now. He looked over his shelves and resolved that he would make up a collection of books for the Art Museum. They were to be books on architecture, of which he had many. The Museum library, with hundreds of archi tectural students in and out, had few vol umes in architecture, or none. He visioned a Raymond Prince alcove those boys should be enabled to learn about the Byzan tine buildings, just then coming into their own; and about the Renaissance in all its varieties, especially the Spanish Plateresque. He had a number of expensive and elaborate publications which dealt with that period, and with others, and he resolved to add new works from outside. He resumed his habit of going to book-auctions (though little de veloped at them), dickered with local dealers f 178 1 ON THE STAIRS who limited themselves to a choice clientele, and sent to London for catalogues over which he studied endlessly. He would still play the role of patron and benefactor. Per haps he foresaw the time when the Museum would recognize donors of a certain impor tance by bronze memorial tablets set up in its entrance hall. Well, he would make his alcove important enough for any measure of recognition. It was all a work which in terested him in its details and which was more in correspondence than a larger one with his present means. n Before my wife and I left for an outing on the seaboard, news came from that quarter about Gertrude and Albert. Intelligence even reached us, through the same corre spondent, regarding Mrs. Johnny McComas. Mrs. Johnny, with her three children, was frequenting the same sands and the same board walk. It was possible to imagine the arrangement as having been suggested by Raymond s one-time wife. See it for your- I 179 ] ON THE STAIRS self. Mrs. Raymond and Mrs. Johnny slowly promenading back and forth together, or seated side by side beneath their respective parasols or under some gay awning shared in common, while their authentic children played about them. What if people whether friends, acquaintances, or strangers did say, "She is divorced"? There she was, with her own son plainly beside her and her closest woman friend giving her complete countenance. If a separation, who to blame? The husband, doubtless. In fact, there was already springing up in her Eastern circle, I was to find, the tradition of a dour, stiff man, years too old, with whom it was im possible to live. It is unlikely that Gertrude, at any time even at this time would have been willing to rank Mrs. Johnny as her closest friend. But Mrs. Johnny had spoken a good word for her in a trying season, and at the present juncture her friendly presence was invaluable. She could speak a good word now she was, so to say, a continuing wit ness. The two, I presume, were seen to- [ 180 ] ON THE STAIRS gether a good deal, along with the children, especially Albert; and Mrs. Johnny, cooper ating (if unconsciously) with Gertrude s mother, did much to stabilize a somewhat uncertain situation. : It was the understanding that Mrs. Johnny was in rather poor health this sum mer; the birth of her little daughter had left her a different woman, and the tonic of the sea-air was needed to remake her into her high-colored and energetic self. There was nothing especially reviving in the Wiscon sin lakes, to which (placid inland ponds) they had confined their previous summer sojourns : and the vogue of the fresher resorts farther north on the greater lakes had not yet reached them. This year let the salt surf roll and the salt winds blow. My wife and I, in our Eastern peregrina tions, passed a few days at the particular beach frequented by the two mothers. We really found in Mrs. Johnny s aspect and carriage some justification for the incredible legend of her poor health. She walked with less vigor than formerly and was glad to sit I 181 ] ON THE STAIRS down more frequently; and once or twice we saw her taking the air at her bedroom window instead of on the broad walk before the shops. Her boys played robustly on the sands, and would play with Albert or rather, let him play with them if urged to. But, like most twins, they were self-suf ficing; besides, they were several years older. To produce the full effect of team-work be tween the families required some persever ance and a bit of manoeuvring. The little girl was hardly two. Gertrude and her mother welcomed us rather emphatically too emphatically, we felt. The latter offered us politic lunches in the large dining-room of their hotel, and laid great stress upon our provenance when we met her friends on the promenade. We seemed to be becoming a part of a general plan of campaign pawns on the board. This shortened our stay. The day before we left, Johnny McComas himself appeared. He had found a way to leave his widely ramifying interests for a few odd hours. A man of the right tempera- [ 182 ] ON THE STAIRS ment gains greatly by a temporary estival transplantation; and if Johnny always con trived to seem dominant and prosperous at home, he now seemed lordly and triumph ant abroad. He "dressed the part": he was almost as over-appropriately inappropriate as little Albert himself. He played osten tatiously with his boys on the sands, and did not mind Albert as one of their eye-draw ing party. He, whether his wife did or no, responded fully and immediately to the salt waves and the salt winds. "Immense! isn t it?" he said to me, throwing out his chest to the breeze and tee tering in his white shoes, out of sheer abun dance of vitality, on the planks beneath him. There was only one drawback: his wife was really not well. And he wondered au dibly to me, while my own wife was having a few words near by with Gertrude, how it was that a young woman could, within the first year of her married life, bear twins with no hurt or harm, and yet weaken, later, through the birth of a single child. [ 183 ] ON THE STAIRS "She doesn t seem at all lively, that s a fact," he said, with a possible touch of im patience. "But another two weeks will do wonders for her," he added: "she ll go back all right." Prepotent Johnny! No doubt it was a drain on vitality to live abreast of such a man, to keep step with his robustious stride. On the forenoon of the day we left, Johnny was walking with Gertrude and her mother along the accepted promenade. His excess of vitality and of action gave him an air of gallantry not altogether pleasing to see. His wife sat at her window, looking down and waving her hand rather languidly. The Johnny of her belief had come, in part, as suredly, for a bit of enjoyment. She smiled unconcernedly. in Raymond waited back home for Albert, and Albert did not return. We gathered from a newspaper published near the shores of Narragansett Bay that Albert, as his mother s triumphant possession, was now [ 184 ] ON THE STAIRS being shown at another resort and a more important one, judging by his grandmother s social affiliations; also, that Mrs. McComas, who had not done any too well on the Jer sey shore, was appearing at the new plage doubtless as the just and sympathetic friend (of social prominence in her own community) who had stood stanch through difficulties unjustly endured. Her hus band himself had, of course, returned to the West. His business called him, even in midsum mer. He had his bank, but he had more than his bank. There are banks and banks you can divide them up in several different ways. There are, of course, as we have seen, the banks that fail, and the banks that do not. And there are the banks that exist as an end in themselves, and the banks that exist as a means to other things: those that function along methodically, without taking on any extraneous features; and those that serve as a nucleus for accumulating interests, as a fulcrum to move affairs through a wide and varied range. Of tmY [ 185 ] ON THE STAIRS kind was McComas s. Johnny was not the man to stand still and let routine take its way not the man to mark time, even through the vacation season. Nor could he have done so even if he had wanted to. But all I need say, just here, is that he came back home again after three or four days, all told, and that any threatened embarassment was nullified, or at least postponed. Raymond heard in silence my account of the doings on the Atlantic shore : only a wry twist of the mouth and a flare of the nostrils. But as the weeks went on, and still no Albert, his anger became articulate. "I shall teach her that an agreement is an agreement," he declared. "She will never try this again." Albert finally came home, three weeks late; his mother brought him herself. The governess transferred him from the hands of one parent to those of the other; and Raymond had asked my presence for that moment, as a sort of moral urge. "Who knows," he asked, "what delay she may try for next?" [ 186 ] ON THE STAIRS He gave one look at the picturesque, if not fantastic, toggery of his restored child. "Did you ever see anything like that?" he said scornfully; and I foresaw a sacrificial bonfire or its equivalent with Albert presently clothed in sane autumn garb. Albert was followed, within a week, by a letter from his mother. This was diffuse and circumlocutory, like the first. But its general sense was clear. If Raymond was thinking of putting Albert into a boarding- school . . . "There she goes again!" exclaimed the exacerbated father. "A matter with which, by hard-and-fast agreement, she has abso lutely nothing to do!" However, if he was thinking of a boarding- school . . . "A child barely seven!" cried Raymond. "Why, half of them will hardly consider one of eight!" Still, if he was thinking well, Mrs. Mc- Comas knew of a charming one, an old-es tablished one, one in which the head-master s wife, a delightful, motherly soul . . . And it [ 187 ] ON THE STAIRS was just within the Wisconsin line, not forty miles from town . . . "I see her camping at the gate!" said Ray mond bitterly. "Or taking a house there. Or spending months at a hotel near by. Con stantly fussing round the edge of things. Running in on every visitors day . . ." "Likely enough," I said. "A mother s a mother." "Well," rejoined Raymond, "the boy shall go to school in another year. But the school will be a good deal more than forty miles from here no continual week-end trips. And it will not be in a town that has an endurable hotel that ought to be easy to arrange, in this part of the world. No, it won t be near any town at all. I don t suppose she would take a tent?" he queried sardonically. "To some mothers the blue tent of heaven would alone suffice," I said perhaps un worthily. "Rubbish!" he ejaculated; and I felt that a word fitly spoken or perhaps unfittingly was rebuked. I 188 1 ON THE STAIKS IV In due season, Albert went off to school, according to his father s plans; and it was not the school which Adele McComas had hoped to see Albert enter a little before her own boys should leave it. Raymond, after another year of daily attentions to Albert s small daily concerns, was glad to have him away. He did not see his boy s mother a frequent visitor at this school, nor did he purpose being a frequent visitor himself. The establishment was approved, well-rec ommended: let it do its work unaided, un hindered. No, Adele McComas never saw Albert at the school of her predilection; indeed, it was not long after the choice had been made that she lost all opportunity of seeing any thing at all. She withered out, like a high- colored, hardy-seeming flower that belies all promise, and died when her little girl was months short of four. Her name was on the new monument with in six weeks. It was the third name. That [ 189 1 ON THE STAIRS of Johnny s father had lately been placed above that of his mother, and that of his wife was now clearly legible upon the oppo site side of the shaft s base. Some of John ny s friends saw in this promptitude a high mark of respect and affection; others felt a haste, almost undue, to turn the new erec tion into a bulletin of "actualities"; and a few surmised that had the work not been done with promptitude it might have come to be done in a leisurely fashion that spelled neglect : if it were to be done, t were well it were done quickly a formal token of re gard checked off and disposed of. During Albert s first year at his school his mother made two or three appearances. She was exigent, and she showed herself to the school authorities as fertile in blandish ments. The last of her visits was made in a high-powered touring-car. Raymond heard of this, and warned the school head against a possible attempt at abduction. The second year opened more quietly. One visit a visit without eagerness and obvi ously lacking in any fell intent, and that was f 190 1 ON THE STAIRS all. It was fair to surmise that this once- urgent, once- vehement mother had developed a newer and more compelling interest. She had made herself a figure at Adele McComas s funeral or, at least, others had made her a figure at it. She began to be seen here and there in the company of the widower, and it was reported privately to me that she had been perceived standing side by side with him in decorous contemplation, as it were in a sort of transient, elegiac revery a deux, before the monument. It was no sur prise, therefore, when we heard, two months later, that they had married. " That stable-boy ! " said Raymond. "After me!" The expression was strong, and I did not care to assent. Instead, I began: "And now, whatever may or may not have been, everything is " " Everything is right, at last ! " he concluded for me. "And if they those two are put in the right," he went on, "I suppose I am put in I 191 1 ON THE STAIRS the wrong and more in the wrong than ever!" He stared forward, across his littered table, beyond his bookcases, through his thick- lensed glasses, as if confronting the stiffening legend of a husband too old, too dry, too un- pliable; the victim, finally, of a sudden turn that was peculiarly malapropos and disrel ishing, the head of a household tricked rather ridiculously before the world. Reserve now began to grow on him. He simplified relationships and saw fewer peo ple. Before these, and before the many at a greater remove, he would maintain a cau tious dignity as a detached and individual human creature, as a man, however much, in the world s eyes, he might have seemed to fail as a husband. V John W. McComas, at forty-five, was in apogee. His bank, as I have said, was coming to be more than a mere bank; it was now the focus of many miscellaneous enterprises. Sev eral of these were industrial companies; pros- [ 192 ] ON THE STAIRS pectuses bearing his name and that of his institution constantly came my way. Some of these undertakings were novel and daring, but most of them went through; and he was more likely to use his associates than they were to use him. As I have said, he possessed but two interests in the world : his business now his businesses and his family; and he concentrated on both. It might be said that he insisted on the most which each would yield. He concentrated on his new domestic life with peculiar intensity. His boys were away at a preparatory school and were looking for ward to college. He centred on his daughter, a future hope, and on his wife, a present real ity and triumph. Over her, in particular, he bent like a flame, a bright flame that dazzled and did not yet sear. He was able, by this time, to coalesce with the general tradition in which she had been brought up or at least with the newer tradition to which she had adjusted herself; and he was able to bring to bear a personal power the application of which she had never experienced. She found [ 193 ] ON THE STAIRS herself handled with decision. She almost liked it at least it simplified some teasing problems. He employed a direct, bluff, hearty kindness; but strength underlay the kindness, and came first came uppermost if occasion seriously required. Life with Raymond had been a laxative, when not an irritant; life with Johnny McComas became a tonic. She had felt somewhat loose and demoralized; now she felt braced. Johnny was rich, and was getting richer yet. He was richer, much, than he had been but a few years before; richer than Raymond Prince, whose worldly fortunes seemed rather to dip. Johnny could give his wife whatever she fan cied; when she hesitated, things were urged upon her, forced upon her. She, in her turn, was now a delegate of luxury. He approved and insisted upon a showy, emphatic way of life, and a more than liberal scale of expenditure. He wanted to show the world what he could do for a fine woman; and I be lieve he wanted to show Raymond Prince. Gossip had long since faded away to noth ingness. If anybody had wondered at John- [ 194 ] ON THE STAIRS ny s course a course that had run through possible dubiousness to hard-and-fast final ity the wonder was now inaudible. If anybody felt in him a lack of fastidiousness, the point was not pressed. The marriage seemed a happy solution, on the whole; and the people most concerned those who met the new pair appeared to feel that a problem was off the board and glad to have it so. Raymond, on the eve of the marriage, had softened things for himself by leaving for a few months in Rome. Back, he began to cast about for some means of occupation and some way of making a careful assertion of his dignity. At this time "society" was begin ning to sail more noticeably about the edge of the arts, and an important coterie was feeling that something might well be done to lift the drama from its state of degradation. Why not build or remodel a theatre, they asked, form a stock company, compose a rep ertory, and see together a series of such per formances as might be viewed without a total departure from taste and intelligence? [ 195 ] ON THE STAIRS The experiment ran its own quaint course. The remodeling of the hall chosen introduced the sponsors of the movement to the fire-laws and resulted in a vast, unlooked-for expense. A good company though less stress was laid on its roster than on the list of guarantors went astray in the hands of a succession of directors, not always competent. The sub scribers refused to occupy their boxes more than one night a week, and, later on, not even that: the space was filled for a while with servitors and domestic dependents, and pres ently by nobody ... $ Raymond went into the enterprise. He put in a goodly sum of money that never came back to him; and if he cooperated but indif ferently, or worse, he was not more inept than some of his associates. He was displeased to learn that the McComases had given enough to the guarantee-fund to insure them a box. And it offended him that, on the opening night, his former wife, one of a large and as sertive party, should make her voice heard during intermissions (and at some other times too) quite across the small auditorium. The [ 196 ] ON THE STAIRS situation was generally felt to be piquant, and at the end of the performance people, in the lobby were amused (save the few who had the affair greatly at heart) to hear Johnny McComas s comment on the play. It was a far-fetched problem-play from the German, and Raymond had been one of those who favored it for an opening. "Did you ever see such a play in your life? " queried Johnny. "What was it all about? And was n t he the fool!" McComas really caring nothing for the evening s entertainment either way could easily afford a large amount for social prestige, and his wife for general social consolidation. It was little to Johnny that his thousands went up in exacting systems of ventilation and in salaries for an expensive staff; but it was awkward for Raymond to lose a sum which, while absolutely less, was relatively much greater. After a few months the scheme was dropped; the expensive installation went to the advantage of a vaudeville manager; Raymond felt poorer, even slightly crippled r and the voice of the present Mrs. Johnnj [ 197 1 ON THE STAIRS McComas ran till the end across that tiny salle. This, I am glad to say, was the last of Raymond s endeavors to patronize the arts. VI Albert s last year at his distant school ended rather abruptly. He came home, ail ing, 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 sec ond child of her own; little Althea was nice enough, and she liked her pretty well . . . [ 198 1 ON THE STAIRS But there was her own flesh and blood cry ing for her perhaps. So she descended on the old, familiar interior familiar and dis tasteful and resumed with zeal the r61e 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 ex treme of fashion to an extreme still more dar ing 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 attitude toward young bachelors, if only in considera tion of his own dignity, his "face." There was the dining-room yes, she stayed to meals, of course, and to many of them! [ 199 1 ON THE STAIRS 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 con trived somehow to circumvent 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 pre posterous. Albert kept mostly to his room. It was the same room which Raymond himself had oc cupied 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 Ray mond s endeavor to fill in the remnant of [ 200 ] ON THE STAIRS Albert s previous vacation with some enter taining 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 the atre better; and Raymond, during those last weeks in August, had sat through many woe ful and stifling performances of vaudeville that he might regain and keep his hold on his son. His presence at these functions was ob served 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 Al bert, preoccupied with knockabouts or trained dogs. Albert spent some of his daylight hours in bed; some in moving about the room spirit lessly. He looked out with lack-lustre eyes at the sagging wires, and seemed to be won dering how they could ever have interested him. His mother, as soon as she saw him, put [ 201 1 ON THE STAIRS 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 be gun 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 glass. Gertrude McComas had had no desire to [ 202 1 ON THE STAIRS inherit memories of her predecessor; if she had not urged the promptest action her hus band s plan might have given him a still more gratifying profit. They had built their new house out on the North Shore. 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 par ticipation 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 them selves to that desired field with a certainty of some few social relations secured in ad vance. 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 [ 203 ] ON THE STAIRS 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 situtation wore on him hor ribly. 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. Ray mond consoled himself as best he might with the thought that this sojourn was, after all, but preliminary, as Gertrude had herself im plied, to the coming month on the Maine coast or at Mackinac. A change of air, a greater [ 204 ] ON THE STAIRS 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, gleam ing 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 com pletely. His education progressed, entering another phase, and still with the unauthor ized 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 [ 206 1 ON THE STAIRS attention, even if he had not the right qual ity 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 assumed that age in itself brought knowledge, and that young men in their twenties even their late twenties were but boys. The disadvantage of hold ing this view became apparent when he be gan to do business with them. He depended too much on his own vague fund of experi ence, 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 infor mally and much too confidently. The family bank, after languishing along for a liberal time under its receiver, had been [ 207 ] ON THE STAIRS 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 fam ily holdings of real-estate, on the edge of the central district rather than in it, did not share the general and almost automatic ad vance in values, and an uncertain, slow- moving scheme for a general public improve ment 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 ad vertising 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 cumbering old mort gage. The other old Jehiel s was rented, at no great advantage, to a kind of corre spondence school which conducted dubious courses and was precarious pay. In such circumstances Raymond began to [ 208 ] ON THE STAIRS 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 assumed and usually realized), had now become a game for experts. Profits for the few : disaster or at least disillusionment for the many. Ray mond thought he could "exchange" to ad vantage, 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 [ 209 ] ON THE STAIRS continue the jargon of the day and its inter ests; but Raymond sensitively, even fastidi ously, 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 dicker 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 occa sion, his interests greatly suffered. Thus Raymond began to approach a per manent impairment of his affairs at an age when recuperation for a man of his defi ciencies 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 ON THE STAIRS 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 passed 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. n As regards the affairs of McComas, I nat urally 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 THE STAIRS on prosperously: their success justified his concentration on them. As regards his home and his domestic af fairs, 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 rea son why we should not cultivate that particu lar 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 assert, 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, f 212 1 ON THE STAIRS 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 al ways 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 pros perity. 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. [ 213 ] ON THE STAIRS His wife, who had seemed to begin by brac ing herself to stand against him, now seemed to have braced herself to stand with him perhaps a more commendable wifely attitude. 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 strag gler, 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 [ 214 ] ON THE STAIRS 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 mean while get the good out of a clear, fair after noon, if but a single one. Through all this gay stir the McComaseg 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. Whe ther or not there was a point in dispute, I do not know; but when he rose and led me [ 215 ] ON THE STAIRS 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 passed 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. And about his wife? Well, the slate ap peared to have been wiped if there really had been any definite marks upon it. As suredly no smears were left to show. Those of the younger generation of seven or eight years before had used the time and arranged their f 216 1 ON THE STAIRS futures, and the still younger were pressing into their places witness Johnny s own brood. Gertrude McComas was now a self- assured though careful matron careful, I thought, not to ask too much of general society; careful not to notice whether or no she received too little; careful, most of all, not to let it appear that she was careful. Perhaps it was this care which made up a part of her general strain and enabled her to keep the lithe slenderness of her early figure. We came back to town the three of us by train. Both of my Elsies were thought ful. Certainly we were playing a less brilliant part than the family we had just left. ra Meanwhile Albert pursued his studies. Though he had not so far to come for a short vacation as the McComas young men, he spent the short vacations at the school. He was at an awkward age, and Raymond, who could see him with eyes not unduly clouded by affection, felt him to be an unpromising cub. [ 217 ] ON THE STAIRS He was no adornment for any house, and no satisfying companion for his father. So he passed the Easter week among his teachers. McComas too saw little of Albert. Those months with his mother were usually worked off at some distant resort, which his step father was often too busy to reach. Only once did he spend any of the allotted time in McComas s house. This was a fortnight in that grandiose yet tawdry fabric which had been sacrificed to business, and the occa sion was an illness in the family (not Albert s) which delayed the summer s outing. Mc Comas had accepted Albert with a large toler ance at least he was not annoyed. In fact, the boy s mother, however she may have harassed Raymond, never (to do her justice) pushed Albert on her second husband. So, when the juncture arrived, "Why, yes," Johnny had said, "have him here, of course; and let him stay as long as you like. He does n t bother me" Well, Albert went ahead, doing his Latin, and groping farther into the dusky penum bra of mathematics. "Why?" he asked; and [ 218 ] ON THE STAIRS they explained that it was the necessary prep aration for the university. Albert pondered. He began to fear that he must continue learn ing things he did n t want or need, so that he might go ahead toward learning other things he didn t want or need. He took a plaintive, discouraged tone in a letter to his mother; and she making an exception to her rule passed along the protest to McComas. She felt, I suppose, that he would give an answering note. Johnny laughed. He himself cared nothing for study; and he was so happily constituted, as well as so constantly occupied, that he never had to take refuge in a book. "Oh, well," he said, broadly, "he ll live through it all, and live it down. I expect Tom and Joe to. The final gains will be in quite another direction." Raymond had heard the same plaint from Albert, and was less pleased. The boy was clearly to be no student, still less a lover of the arts. Raymond passed over all thought of old Jehiel, the ruthlessly acquisitive, and placed the blame on the other grandfather, f 219 1 ON THE STAIRS who was now in an early dotage after a life long harnessing to the stock-ticker. " I don t know how he s coming out!" was Raymond s impatient remark, over one of Albert s letters. "Who knows what any boy is going to be?" Albert accepted his school readily enough as a place of residence. He did not now need, so much as before, his mother s small cares in fact, was glad to be relieved from them; nor was he quite advanced enough to profit from a cautious father s hints and sugges tions. I found myself hoping that Raymond, at the coming stage of Albert s develop ment, might have as little trouble as I had had over my own boy (with whose early ca reer I shall not burden you). Yet, after all, fathers may apprehensively exchange views and cautiously devise methods of approach only to find their efforts superfluous: so many boys come through perfectly well, after all. Simply consider, for example, those in our old singing-class. The only one to occasion any inconvenience was Johnny McComas, and he was not a member at all. [ 220 ] ON THE STAIRS The one side of the matter that began to concern Raymond was the money side. Al bert cost at school, and was going to cost more at college. His father began to econo mize. For instance, he cut off, this spring, the contribution which he had been making for years in support of an organization of reformers that had been working for civic betterment. These men, considering their small number and their limited resources had done wonders in raising the tone and quality of the local administration. The city s reputation, outside, had become re spectable. But a sag had begun to show it self the relapse that is pretty certain to follow on an extreme and perhaps over strained endeavor. The little band needed money. Raymond was urged to reconsider and to continue the upgrade would soon be $ reached again. Raymond sent, reluc tantly, a smaller amount and asked why the net for contributions was not cast a little wider. He even suggested a few names. Whether he mentioned the name of John [ 221 ] ON THE STAIRS W. McComas I do not know, but McComas was given an opportunity to help. "See what they ve sent me," he said to me one day on the street. He smiled over the urgent, fervid phrases of the appeal. The world, so far as he was concerned, was going very well. It did n t need improvement; and if it did, he had n t the time to improve it. "They appear to be losing their grip," he added. "They did n t do very well last elec tion, anyhow." I sensed his reluctance to be associated with a cause that seemed to be a losing one. "Well, I don t know," I said. "I m giving something myself; and if I can afford to, you can." But he developed no interest. He sent a check absurdly disproportionate to his capac ity (he was embarrassed, I am glad to say, when he mentioned later the amount); and I incline to think that even this bit was done almost out of a personal regard for me. Raymond cut a part of his own contribu tion out of Albert s allowance, and there was [ 222 1 ON THE STAIRS better reason than ever why Albert should not take a long trip for only four or five days at home. IV It is tiresome, I know, to read about muni cipal reform; most of us want the results and not the process and some of us not even the results. And it is no less tiresome to read about investments, unless we are dealing with some young knight of finance who strives successfully for his lady s favor and who, successful, lives with her ever after in the style to which her father has accustomed her. But in the case of a maladroit man of fifty ... I had asked Raymond to call on me with any new scheme that was taking his attention, and one forenoon he walked in. He had an envelope of loose papers. He laid some of them on my desk and thumbed a few others with an undecided expression. "What do you think of this?" he asked. "I ve got to have more money, and here s something that may bring it in." [ 223 ] ON THE STAIRS It was a speculative industrial affair in Upper Michigan. I saw some familiar names attached among them that of John W. McComas, though not prominently. "I ll find out for you," I said. "I don t want you to find out from him." " I 11 find out." Raymond fingered his envelope fussily: there was nothing left in it. "It s all costing me too much. Extras at that school. That big house too big, too expensive. I can t lug it along any farther. Find me some one to buy it." "I ll see," I said. I told him about our visit to the club, two or three months before. I implied, in as deli cate and circumambulatory a way as possible, that his one-time wife, according to my own observations, taken under peculiarly favor able, because exacting, conditions, was com pletely accepted. "Oh yes," he replied, as if the matter had been settled years ago, and as if he had long had that sense of it. Yes, he seemed to be saying, the marriage had made it all right [ 224 1 ON THE STAIRS for her, and had soon begun to make it better for him. Possibly not a "deceived" husband; and no longer so rawly flagrant a failure as a human companion. "Their house is good, I gather," he went on. "There were some plates of it in the architectural journals. Just how good he does n t know, I suppose and never will." "I found him fairly appreciative of it." "Possibly as a financial achievement brought about by his own money." "He s learning some of its good points," I declared. "There was some talk of having Albert there, just before they went off to the Yellow stone." He frowned. "Well, this can t go on so many more years, now." I did not quite get Raymond s attitude. He did not want the boy with him at home. He did not want to meet any extra expenses and Mrs. McComas was assuredly paying Albert s way through mid-summer, as well as eternally buying him clothes. I think that what Raymond wanted and wanted but rather weakly was his own will, whether ON THE STAIRS there was any advantage in it or not, and wanted that will without payments, charges, costs. I disliked his grudging way, or rather, his balking way, as regarded a recognition of the liberality of his former wife s husband for that was what it came to. I returned his prospectus. " I 11 look this up. How about that company in Montana?" I continued. " They ve passed a dividend. I was count ing on something from that quarter." "And how about the factory in Iowa?" "That will bring me something next year." " Well," I said, doubling back to the mat ter that had brought him in, "I ll inquire about this and let you know." In the course of a few days I called on McComas. Others were calling. Others were always calling. If I wanted to see him I should have to wait. I had expected to wait. I waited. When I was finally admitted, he rose and came halfway through his splendors of up holstery to give me an Olympian greeting. ON THE STAIRS "It s brass tacks," I said. "Three min utes will do." "Four, if you like." "Three. Frankly, very frankly, is this a thing" here I used the large page of or namental letter-press as a word-saver "is this a thing for an ordinary investor?" "Ordinary investor" that is what I called Raymond. Perhaps I flattered him unduly. "Why, "responded McComas, with a grim ace, "it s a right enough thing for the right man or men. Several of us expect to do pretty well out of it." Several ? How about the rank out sider?" "Anybody that you know sniffing?" "Yes." "Who?" "Well Prince." "H m." Johnny pondered; became mag nanimous. "Well, it ain t for him. Pull his nose away. I don t want his money." He knew what he had taken. He may have had a prescience of what he was yet to take. He could afford an interim of generosity. [ 227 1 ON THE STAIRS A year or so went on, and we met the Mc- Comases at a horse-show. Once more it had become distinguished to have horses, and to exhibit them in the right place. Althea was with her parents; so was the survivor of the stalwart twins. Johnny had taken the blow hard. That a son of his, one so strong and robust, a youth on whom so much time and thought and care and money had been lavished to fit him for the world, should go down and go out (and in such a sudden, trivial fashion) oh, it was more than he felt he could endure. But he was built on a broad plan; his nature, when the test came, opened a wide door to the assimi lation of experiences and offered a wide mar gin for adjustment to their jars. His other son, the full equal of the lost one, still sur vived and was present to-day; and Johnny, grandly reconciled, was himself again. Althea had taken the interval to make sure about her hair-ribbon and her skirts. The ribbons had been pronounced outgrown and [ 228 ] ON THE STAIRS superfluous, and had been banished. The suitability of longer skirts had been felt, and had been acted upon. Althea was now almost a young lady, and a very pretty one. I say it without bitterness. The beauties of nature those trifles that make the great differences are indeed unequally distrib uted among human creatures. Not all girls are pretty; not all attractive; not all equipped to make their way. No. You will assume for yourselves the green ery of grass and trees, the slow cumuli in the afternoon sky, the lively, brightly dressed throngs on lawns and verandas, and the horses; yes, even those were present, some where or other. Gertrude McComas was of the crowd; suitably dressed (or, perhaps, attired), a little less spare than once, and somehow con veying the impression, if unobtrusively, that her presence was necessary for the complete ness of the function. She was pleasant with Althea, who had a horse on her mind and a number on her back. Gertrude had returned from the North [ 229 ] ON THE STAIRS with Althea and Albert, a week before Al bert s allotted time with her was up, so that they might all be a part of this occasion. Albert was now taller than his father, had begun to gather up a little assertiveness on reaching the end of his preparatory days, had taken his examinations, and was un derstood to be within a month or so of college. I cannot say that Althea s skirts, however much thought she had given them, were long to-day. The only skirts she wore were the skirts of her riding-coat. The rest of her was boots and trousers; and she carried a little quirt with which she flecked the dust from her nethers, now and again, rather smartly. Albert looked obviously envious, and obviously perturbed. His various knockings from pillar to post had left him without horse and without horsemanship. And here was a young feminine (almost a relative, in a sense; well, was she, or was she not?) who was dressed as he (with some slight differences) might have been dressed, and who was doing [ 230 ] ON THE STAIRS (or was about to do) some of the things that he himself (as he was now keenly conscious) had always hankered to do ... How was he to take it all? the difference, the like ness, the closeness, the distance . . . And we my wife and I became sud denly, poignantly, even bitterly aware that our Elsie, beside us in her tailor-made, had never been on a horse in her life and was now perhaps too old to make a good begin ning. After a little while AJthea was carried away for her "entry" or "event," or what ever they properly call it for I am no sportsman. Some small section of the crowd interested itself about the same time at least got between us and the proceedings. We saw little or nothing just heads, hats and parasols. All I know is that, in a few moments, Althea reappeared I think she had leaped something. Her father was by her side, vastly proud and happy. Her mother (as I shall say for short) arrived from somewhere, with a gratified smile. Her big brother presently drew up alongside on [ 231 ] ON THE STAIRS a polo-pony, and gave her a big, flat-handed pat in the middle of her placard, and a hand some young woman, who was pointed out to us as the wife he had married in February, during our fortnight at Miami, reached up to her bridle-hand and gave it a squeeze. And there was a deep fringe of miscellaneous friends, acquaintances and rivals. "What do you think of our daughter, now!" asked Johnny, loudly and generally, as he lifted Althea down. He looked about as if to sweep together the widest assemblage of praises and applause. Many flocked; many congratulated; but still further tribute must be levied. McComas caught sight of Albert. The young fellow stood on the edge of the thing, staring, embarrassed, shaken to his centre. "Here, you, Albert!" Johnny cried; "come over and shake hands with the winner!" And meanwhile, Raymond, off by himself somewhere or other, I suppose, may have been studying how in the world he was ever going to put Albert through Yale. [ 232 ] ON THE STAIRS VI Business once more! It ought to be barred. I get enough of it in my daily routine without having it in trude here. Business should do no more than provide the platform and the scenic back ground for the display of young love, hope and beauty. But here we have to deal with the affairs of a worried and incompetent man half way through his fifties. Raymond came in one morning, on my sum mons. His manner was depressed ; it was becom ing habitually so. I tried to cheer him with indifferent topics, among them the horse- show, which I saw so unsatisfactorily and which I have described so inadequately. He had already heard about it from Albert, and he felt no relish for the friendliness Johnny McComas had displayed on that occasion. " Try ing to get him, too?" was Raymond s comment. "Oh, I would n t quite say that . . ." "I have a letter from his mother. She wants to know about college." [ 233 1 ON THE STAIRS "Well, how are things?" "Oh, I don t know; poor." "That Iowa company?" "Next year." "Again?" "Yes next year; as usual." "Well, I have news for you." "Good?" he asked, picking up a little. "That depends on how you look at it. I have a buyer for your house." "Thank God!" "Don t hurry to thank God. Perhaps you will want to thank the Devil." Raymond s face fell. "You don t mean that he on top of everything else has come forward to ?" "My friend! my friend! It isn t that at all. He has nothing to do with it. Quite another party." And it was. A Mr. Gluckstein, a sort of impresario made suddenly rich by a few seasons with fiddlers and prima donnas, was the man. He was willing, he said, and I paid the news out as evenly and considerately as I could, he was willing to take the house [ 234 ] ON THE STAIRS and assume the mortgage but he asked a bonus of five thousand dollars for doing it. "The scoundrel!" groaned Raymond, his face twisted by contemptuous rage. "The impudent scoundrel ! " "Possibly so. But that is his offer and the only one. And it is his best." Raymond sat with his eyes on the floor. He was afraid to let me see his face. He hated the house it was an incubus, a mill stone; but He visibly despaired. "What shall I do about Albert s college, now?" he muttered presently. He seemed to have passed at a bound be yond the stage of sale and transfer. The odious property was off his hands and every hope of a spare dollar had gone with it. "His mother writes " began Raymond. "Yes?" "She tells me Well, her father died last month, it seems, and she is expecting something out of his estate. ..." "Estate? Is there one?" "Who can say? A man in that business! [ 235 ] ON THE STAIRS There might be something; there might be nothing or less. And it might take a year or more to get it." "And if there is anything?" "She says she will look after Albert s first year or two. I was about to refuse, but I expect I shall have to listen now." He was silent. Then he broke out: "But there won t be. That old woman with her water-waves and her wrinkles is still hanging on; even if there should be anything, she would be the one to get most of it. I know her she would snatch it all!" "Listen, Raymond, * I said; "y u na d better let me help you here." "I don t want you to. There must be some way to manage." He fell into thought. "I doubt if she can do anything, herself. Whatever she did would come through him in the end. You say he likes Albert?" He was silent again. "I don t want to meet either of them but I would about as soon meet him as her." [ 236 ] ON THE STAIRS I saw that he was nerving himself for another scene a faire. Well, it would be less trying than the first one. If his sense of form, his flair for fatalism, still persisted, ease was out of the question and no surrogate could serve. Perhaps, after all, there had been nothing between those two. Anyway, in the general eye the marriage had made everything right. She was accepted, certainly. And as cer tainly he had lived down, if he had ever possessed it, the reputation of a hapless hus band. He wrote to her in a non-committal way a letter which left loopholes, room for accommodation. Her reply suggested that he call at the bank; she would pass on the word. He told me he would try to do so. I saw the impudent concert-monger was to have his house. And so, one forenoon, at eleven or so, Ray mond, after some self-drivings, reached the bank; by appointment, as he understood. Through the big doors; up the wide, balus- traded stairway it was the first time he [ 237 ] ON THE STAIRS had ever been in the place. He was well on the way to the broad, square landing, when some lively clerks or messengers, who had been springing along behind him, all at once slackened their pace and began to skirt the paneled marble walls. A number of pros perous middle-aged and elderly men were coming down together in a compact group. It seemed as if some directors meeting was in progress in progress from one office, or one building, to another. In the middle of the group was John W. McComas. He was absorbed, abstracted. Raymond, like some of the other up-farers, had gained the landing, and like them now stood a little to one side. McComas looked out at him with no particular expression and indeed with no markedness of attention. "How do you do?" he said indifferently. "I m pretty well," said Raymond dis piritedly. "And that was all! "he reported next day in a high state of indignation. "Don t sup pose I shall try it again!" But a careless Gertrude had failed to in- [ 238 1 ON THE STAIRS form her husband of the appointment. She had been busy, or he had been away from home . . . "Go once more," I counseled, I pleaded. A note came to him from McComas a decent, a civil. Come and talk things over that was its purport. He went. McComas, as you can guess, was very bland, very expansive, very magnanimous (to his own sense). "I like Albert!" he de clared heartily. But he did little to cloak the fact that it was his own money which was to carry the boy through college. Raymond was in the depths for a month. After Gluckstein had got his deed for the house and Albert had packed his trunk for the East, he felt that now indeed he had lost wife, home and son. PART VIII I BEFORE leaving his house for good and all, Raymond spent a dismal fortnight in going over old papers out-of-date documents which once had interested his father and grandfather, books, diaries and memoranda which had occupied his own youthful days: the slowly deposited, encumbering sediment of three generations, long in one place. There were several faded agreements with the sig nature of the ineffable individual who had married into the family, had received a quit claim to those suburban acres, and had then, at a point of stress, refused to give them back. There were sheaves of old receipted bills among them one for the set of parlor furni ture in the best (or the worst) style of the Second Empire. There were drafts of Ray mond s early compositions his first at tempts at the essay and the short story; there was an ancient, heavily annotated [ 240 ] ON THE STAIRS Virgil (only six books), and there was a sheepskin algebra in which he had taken, by himself, a post-school course as a means of intellectual tonic, with extra problems dexterously worked out and inserted on bits of blue paper . . . "I filled the furnace seven times," he said to me, laconically. I myself felt the strain of it all. It is less wearing to move every two or three years, as most of us do, than to move but once near the end of a long life, of a succession of lives. I never asked what Mr. Gluckstein thought of the orchestrion. Raymond went to live at a sort of private hotel. Here he read and wrote. He carried with him a set of little red guide-books, long, long since out of date, and he restudied Eu rope in the light of early memories. He also subscribed to a branch of a public library in the vicinity a vicinity that seemed on the far edge of things. However, the tendency of the town has always been centrifugal. Many of our worthies, if they have held on to ON THE STAIRS life long enough, have had to make the same disconcerting trek. From this retreat Raymond occasionally issued to concerts and picture-exhibitions. I do not know that he was greatly concerned for them; but they carried on a familiar tra dition and gave employment still to a failing momentum. From this same retreat there would issue, about the Christmas season, a few water- colors on Italian subjects. If they were faint and feeble, I shall not say so. We ourselves have one of them an indecisive view of the ruins in the Roman Forum. It is not quite the Forum I recall; but then, as we know, the Roman Forum, for the past half -century, has altered almost from year to year. Letters reached him occasionally from Albert the freshman. They might well have come from Albert the sophomore. Raymond showed me one of them on an evening when I had called to see him in his new quar ters. He was comfortable enough and snug. On the walls and shelves were books and pic- [ 242 ] ON THE STAIRS tures that I remembered seeing in his boy hood 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 passed 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 cocky; also, rather rest less I wondered if he would last to be a sophomore. And he displayed little of the con sideration 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-com mittal response. "Well," Raymond burst out, "he need n t respect me if he does n t admire him!" , [ 243 ] ON THE STAIRS n 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 apprecia tion of Althea s feat (as it was regarded) and to congratulate her upon it. Johnny Mc Comas was not at all displeased. Albert had not been light-handed and graceful, but he developed (under this sudden stress) a sturdy, downright mode of speech which showed sin cerity if not dexterity. The square-standing, straight-speaking farm-lad straight-speak ing, if none too ready was sounding an atavistic note caught from his great-grand father 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, how ever, 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 [ 244 ] ON THE STAIRS a somewhat inexpressive boy; now, as a po tential gallant, he was negligible, as compared with others. But Albert, speaking in a sense either specific or general, did not mean to re main 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 sophomore 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 am bitions were waxing daily; his passions too. There must be an outlet for all this vigor business, or matrimony, or war. In one short twelvemonth he compassed 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 [ 245 ] ON THE STAIRS 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 ob jection. 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 Mc Comas 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 [ 246 ] ON THE STAIRS 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 gi gantic, 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 un noticed. 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 [ 247 ] ON THE STAIRS by, between the horse-block and the syringa- bushes, "Albert is n 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. ra 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 pub lic, 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 partici pation was "indicated." The bank s name [ 248 ] ON THE STAIRS 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 finan cial 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 ve randa 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 Mc Comas as a seasoned adult who could look after himself, but her own Albert was still a [ 249 ] ON THE STAIRS boy. It was easy to see him freezing, soaking, falling, lying in distress. She busied herself behind a great plate-glass window on a fre quented thoroughfare a window heaped with battered helmets and emptied shells that drew the idle curiosity or the poignant inter est of the passer-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 [ 250 ] ON THE STAIRS 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 dis pleased 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 feel- l 251 ] ON THE STAIRS ing. 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 expres sion that was too clearly to be seen; but he would have welcomed one which, cloaked in an unembarrassing 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 shame faced. 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 serv ice 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 ON THE STAIRS first, credit the news. His son s very strength and vigor had helped build up his own exu berant 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 pro test. The proud monument at Roselands was taking a cruel toll. His other son was com memorated on the third side of its base; but though a fresh unf rayed 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 bereave ment. Albert, whose injuries had made him ap pear 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 [ 253 ] ON THE STAIRS 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 1" said Althea to her girl friends; and Albert volunteered few concrete facts that might qualify or de tract from her ideal. Those few months comprised his contribu tion to the cause. He mended more rapidly than might have been expected, and soon be gan to feel the resurgence of those belliger encies 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 per sisted, and after the close pattern of a Mc- Comas still before his eyes. A hero, if they wished; but a hero with money in his pocket. [ 254 ] ON THE STAIRS Meanwhile, McComas looked at his grand son 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 wheel barrow 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. "Of course." "You would like to come with me?" "Yes." Surely his own father could not help him to a future. "Well, take your choice. What do you want? Bank?" [ 255 ] ON THE STAIRS But Albert had heard something about banks. Bank clerks, in these close-knit days, when anybody who fell out of the lock-step was lost, were but a sort of financial militia. Even if he were pushed along with the friend liest zeal, it might be years before he reached the place and the end desired. Nor had he much more fondness for growing up under the eye of McComas than under that of his own father. "Bank?" repeated McComas. "No." McComas grinned. It was the grin he used when greatly pleased. "One of those Western concerns?" "Yes," said Albert; "send me West." When Raymond heard that Albert had cast in his lot with McComas and meant soon to leave for Colorado, he winced. Albert, to him, was still a boy, and this term in the West but another kind of schooling. "Just as his mother tried to influence him before," said Raymond to me bitterly, "so McComas will influence him now." And I could not deny that McComas had the whip hand. [ 256 1 ON THE STAIRS The unintermittency of business correspond ence, the cogency of a place on the pay roll . . . No, it was not to be denied that Raymond had lost Albert finally. And Althea went to the train, to see him off as to another war. "Finally" perhaps I have used the word too soon. I dropped in on Raymond, one evening, at his private hotel. It was about four months after Albert s departure for the West. His quarters seemed as snugly comfortable as ever, and as completely adapted to his ulti mately discovered personality and its peculiar requirements. Raymond master of a big house! Raymond leading a public life! But he himself was perturbed. It was a letter from Albert it was two or three let ters, in fact. "He says he is going to marry her." "Her?" "Althea. Althea McComas." [ 257 ] ON THE STAIRS Albert, in the West, had done well. He had taken hold immediately, decisively. The ini tiative which would never have developed under his father had been liberated during his war service and was now mounting to a still higher pitch among the mountains. >. "He is going to do," McComas had told me, after the second month. "He is a won der," he had said, later. Be that as it may. McComas was doubtless inclined to the favorable view. He had de termined in advance that Albert was, to suc ceed. Albert was meeting, successfully, known expectations of success as a young man may. "He started so well," said his father. "And now ..." "And now?" "Now he wants to marry the daughter of a stable-boy!" "Raymond," I saidf "drop the stable- boy. That was never true; and if it were it would have no relevancy here and now." "I should say not! Why, Albert " "You have told him? He knows your He knows the the legend?" [ 258 ] ON THE STAIRS "He does. And as you see, it makes no difference to him." "Why should it? Why should he care for early matters that were over and past long years before he was born? He sees what he sees. He feels what he feels." "He feels McComas." "Why shouldn t he? Who would n t?" Raymond relapsed into a moody silence. I saw, presently, that he was trying to break from it. He had another consideration to offer. "And then," he began, "about his mother. He must have understood some thing. He must know by now." "Know?" I returned. "If he does, he has the advantage over all the rest of us. 7 don t know/ You don t know. Neither does anybody else. Another old matter as well rectified as society and its usages can manage, and best left alone." "Well, it s it s indelicate. Albert ought to feel that." " Raymond ! " I protested. " We must leave it to the young to smooth over the rough old [ 259 ] ON THE STAIRS places and to salve the aching old sores. That s their great use and function." "Not Albert s," he said stubbornly. "I don t want him to do it, and I don t want it done in that way." Another silence. I could see that he was gathering force for still another objection. "It s a desertion," said the undying egoist. "It s a piece of treachery. It s a going over to the enemy." "If you mean McComas, Albert went over months ago. And he does n t seem to have lost anything by doing so," I ventured to add. "This marriage would clinch it, would confirm it. I should lose him at last, and completely, just as I have lost every thing." "Raymond," I could scarcely keep from saying, "you deceive yourself. You have really never cared for Albert at all. The only concern here is your own pride the futile working of a will that is too weak to get its own way." ^ But I kept silence, and he continued the [ 260 J ON THE STAIRS silence. Yet I felt that he was gathering force for the greatest objection of all. "I have heard them spoken of," he said, after a little, "as as brother and sister. For them to marry! It s unseemly." "Raymond!" I protested again, with even more vigor than before. " Why must you say a thing like that?" "The same father and mother now. Liv ing together going about together as mem bers of one family . . . They did, you know." "Yes, for a few weeks in the year. One family ? What is the mere label? Nothing. What is the real situation? Everything. Of blood-relationship not a trace. Why, even cousins marry but here are two strains absolutely different. . . . Have you," I asked, "have you brought up this point with Albert?" Raymond glanced at the letters. "You have! And he says what I say!" Raymond put the letters away. Albert had doubtless said much more and said it with the vigor of indignant youth. [ 261 ] ON THE STAIRS VI At a wedding the father of the bridegroom need not be conspicuous least of all when the wedding takes place in a church. He may avoid, better than at a home wedding, too close contact with the various units of the bridal party. In view of such considerations, Raymond Prince was able to be present, with discomfort minimized, at his son s mar riage. We attended, too, of course. My wife has a woman s fondness for weddings and so has our Elsie. It came in June. The church was the church the church with the elms and ash- trees around it, the triangular lawn with the hydrangeas and elderberry-bushes blossoming here and there, and the gardens and planta tions of private wealth looking across from all sides; the church where everybody who is anybody gets married as a matter of course at that time of year; the church which has plenty of room for limousines on both sides of its converging streets, and on a third cross- ON THE STAIRS street close by; the church which has the popular and sympathetic rector, who has known you ever since you were a boy (or girl), the competent organist, and the valiant surpliced choir (valiant though small); the church which, under its broad squat tower and low spire, possesses, about its altar-rail, room for many palms and rubber-plants and for as many bridesmaids and ushers as the taste of the high contracting parties may require : a space reached by a broad flight of six or seven steps, and wide enough for any deployment, high enough for the whole as semblage to see, and grand enough (with its steps and all) to make a considerable effect when the first notes of the Wedding March sound forth and the newly wedded couple walk down and out into married life. "Be married in your uniform!" Johnny McComas had said effusively. "Well, I m not in the service, now . . ." replied Albert. "You have been, haven t you? Haven t you?" Johnny repeated, as if there could be two answers. ( 263 ] ON THE STAIRS "Why, I was only a private . . ." Albert submitted. "So were lots of other good fellows." "It s soiled," said Albert. "There s a stain on the shoulder." "All the better. We ve done something for the country. Let those people know it." So Albert walked down the aisle in khaki. Althea was in white my wife named the material expertly. She wore a long veil. There were flower-girls, too, my wife knew their names. "She s the most beautiful bride I ever saw!" my wife declared. "This is the most beautiful wedding I ever attended!" She al ways says that. Johnny McComas was in white, too. As he stood beside the bridal pair he seemed al most too festive, too estival, too ebullient for this poor earth of ours. His wife, whose cos tume I will not describe and whose state of mind I shall not explore, showed a subdued sedateness though a glad which restored the balance. Raymond Prince saw the ceremony from [ 264 ] ON THE STAIRS one of the back pews. If he attended the out- of-door reception at the house, it must have been but briefly: I quite missed him there. For him the wedding proper had been less a ceremony than a parade. I can fancy how he resented the organist s grand outburst and the triumphal descent (undeniably effective) of the bridal party over those six or seven steps. Again he was an unregarded and negligible spectator. I presume he missed Johnny s hand in Albert s, and Johnny s pressure on Albert s shoulder the one with the stain; and I hope he did. It was the hand of the stronger, taking possession. "My prop, my future mainstay!" said Johnny s action. And it was as an unregarded and negligi ble spectator now his permanent role that Raymond Prince took the slow train back to town. THE END CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . A UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY BERKELEY Return to desk from which borrowed. This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. V 28 1947 17May 548M OJ964 LU <b IBRARY 55B INTER-LIBRARY LOAN SAN DIEGC 1NTERUBRARY RIVERSIDE -100m-9, 47(A5702sl6)476 CDSE017727 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY