Part 10

And now came this first stirring of resurrection. It hurt me. I didn’t want it. It was like the return of life to a frozen limb. Numbness was preferable to anguish.

“Lovey,” I said, as the old man hung about me when I was undressing that night, “how would you feel if one of your daughters—”

He raised himself from the task of pulling off my boots, which to humor him I allowed him to perform, and looked at me in terror.

“They ain’t—they ain’t after me?”

“No, no! But suppose they were—wouldn’t you like to see them?”

He dropped the boot he held in his hand.

“Y’ain’t goin’ to ’ave them ’unted up for me, Slim?”

“I don’t know anything about them, Lovey. That isn’t my point at all. But suppose—just suppose—you could see them again; would you do it?”

He shook his bald head.

“They’re dead to me. I’m dead to them. If we was to see each other now ’twouldn’t be nothink but diggin’ up a corpse.”

“Nothink but diggin’ up a corpse,” I repeated to myself as I turned east from Fifth Avenue, leaving the brown trees of the Park behind me, and took the few steps necessary to reach my uncle Van Elstine’s door. He had married my mother’s sister, and during the lifetime of my aunt the families had been fairly intimate. Of late years they had drifted apart, as families will, though touch-and-go relations were still maintained.

I have to admit that while waiting for Annette in the library up-stairs I was nervous. I was coming back to that family life in which I should have interests, affections, cares, responsibilities. For the past three years I had had no one to think of but myself; and if in that freedom there were heartaches, there were no complexities.

Though it was not yet dark, the curtains were drawn and the room was lighted not only by a shaded lamp, but by the flicker of a fire. When Annette, wearing a tea-gown, appeared at last in the doorway she stood for a second to examine me.

“Why, Jack!” she exclaimed, then. “I didn’t know you were in New York. Have you brought Frank with you?”

“I am Frank,” I laughed, going forward to offer my hand. “I didn’t know Jack and I were so much alike. But you’re the second person who has said it within a few days.”

“It’s your mustache, I think,” she explained as we shook hands. “I never saw you wear one before.”

“I never did.”

“Do sit down. They’ll bring tea in a minute. I’m so glad to see you. But if it’s not a rude question, tell me why you’ve been here all this time and never let me know.”

It would be difficult to define the conditions which made Annette at the age of thirty-three what Cantyre styled one of the smartest women in New York, but the minute you saw her you felt that it was so. My uncle Van Elstine was only comfortably off; their house was not large; though they entertained a good deal, their manner of living was not showy. But my aunt Van Elstine had established the tradition—some women have the art of doing it—that whatever she had and did and said was “the thing,” and Annette, as her only child and heiress, had kept it up.

As far as I could understand the matter, which had been explained to me once or twice, my aunt was exclusive. In the rush of the newly come and the rise of the newly rich, which marked the last quarter of the nineteenth century in New York, she and a few like-minded friends had made it their business to pick and choose and form what might literally be called an _élite_. By 1913, however, the _élite_ was not only formed but founded on a rock as firm as the granite of Manhattan, and Annette’s picking and choosing could be on another principle. Hers was that more civilized American tendency to know every one worth knowing, which is still largely confined, so they tell me, to Washington and New York. Where her mother had withdrawn Annette went forward. Her _flair_ for the important or the soon to be important was unerring. Hers was one of the few drawing-rooms through which every one interesting, both domestic and foreign, was bound at some time to pass. Being frankly and unrestrainedly curious, she kept in touch with the small as well as with the great, with the young as well as with the old, maintaining an enormous correspondence, and getting out of her correspondents every ounce of entertainment they could yield her. On her side she repaid them by often lending them a helping hand.

The warmth of her greeting now was due not to the fact that I was her cousin, but to her belief that I had been up to something. It was always those who had been up to something with whom she was most eager to come heart to heart. Without temptations of her own, as far as I could ever see, she got from the indiscretions of others the same sort of pleasure that a scientist finds in studying the wrigglings of microbes under a microscope.

Having some inkling of this, I answered her questions not untruthfully, but with reservations, saying that I had not come to see her because I had been down on my luck.

“And how did you come to be down on your luck?”

“Can’t you guess?”

“You don’t look it now.”

“I’ve been doing better lately. I’ve made two or three friends who’ve given me a hand.” Carrying the attack in her direction, I asked, “How did you hear that I was in New York?”

“Hilda Grace told me. She said you’d been working on that memorial of hers. She thought it awfully strange—you won’t think me rude in repeating it?—that a man like you should be only in a secondary position.”

“If she knew how glad I was to get that—”

She changed the subject abruptly.

“When did you last hear from home?”

I thought it sufficient to say: “Not for a long time. I may as well admit that nowadays I never hear from home at all.”

“And, if it’s not a rude question, why don’t you?”

“Partly, I suppose, because I don’t write.”

“So I understood from Jack. But, Frank dear, do you think it kind?”

I broke in with the question, the answer to which I had really come to get, “When did you last see Jack?”

“About eighteen months ago; just before he was married. He knew you were somewhere about, but he wasn’t confidential on the subject.”

“No; he wouldn’t be. Did he seem all right?”

“Quite; and awfully in love with Mary Sweet. What’s she like, really?”

I described my new sister-in-law as I remembered her, going on to say: “I suppose you gave Jack a good time. Did you—did you take him about anywhere?”

“Let me see. I took him to—where was it? I took him to the Wynfords’—and—and—oh, yes!—to the Barrys’. And it’s too funny! I really think Regina fell in love with him at first sight. For a month or two she questioned me about him every time we met. Then all of a sudden she stopped. If she was struck by the thunderbolt, as the French put it—well, all I can say is that it serves her right.”

“Serves her right—what for?”

“Oh, the way she’s carried on. It’s disgraceful. Do you know her? Her father is an architect, like you.”

Annette’s round, dusky face, which had no beauty but a quick, dimpling play of expression, was one that easily betrayed her ruling passion of curiosity. It was now so alight with anticipation that I tried to be more than ever casual.

“I’ve—I’ve just met her.”

“Where?”

“Once at the memorial, when she came with Mrs. Grace; and a few nights ago I dined with her at the Coningsbys’.”

“I wonder she didn’t take you for Jack.”

To this I was not obliged to make a response for the reason that, the man having arrived with the tea, Annette had to give her attention to the placing of the tray.

When I had taken a cup of tea from her hand I created a diversion with the question, “What did you mean by saying the way she carried on was disgraceful?”

“Why, the way she gets engaged and disengaged. It’s been three times in as many years, and goodness knows how many more experiments—”

“I suppose she’s trying to find the right man.”

“It’s pretty hard on those she takes up and puts down in the process. She’ll get left in the end, you’ll see if she doesn’t.”

“Isn’t it better to get left than to marry the wrong man?”

“The very day I took Jack to see her she’d broken off her engagement to Jim Hunter. I didn’t know it at the time. It was two or three days later before it came out. If I had known it and told Jack—”

“Well, what then?”

“Oh, I don’t say anything. They were awfully taken with each other. But I’m glad he was saved. If he hadn’t gone straight back to Montreal he might now be in the place of poor Stephen Cantyre.”

“I see a good deal of Cantyre.”

“So I understand.”

“Who told you?”

“Elsie Coningsby.”

“You seem to have got a good deal of information about me all of a sudden.”

“Because you’ve dropped right into the little circle in which we all know one another with a kind of village-like intimacy. New York is really a congeries of villages.”

“But any one could see that Cantyre would never make a husband for a high-spirited girl like Miss Barry.”

“How do you know she’s high-spirited, if it’s not a rude question?”

“Oh, one can tell.”

“You’ve seen her only twice. You must have noticed her very particularly.”

“I’ve noticed Cantyre very particularly; and just as he wouldn’t make her the right kind of husband she wouldn’t make him the right kind of wife.”

When Annette said anything in which there was a special motive a series of concentric shadows fled over her face like ripples from the spot where a stone is thrown into a pool.

“Well, I’m glad you don’t like her, if it isn’t a rude thing to say.”

“What has my liking her or not liking her got to do with it?”

“Nothing but the question of your own safety. If she notices how much you’re like Jack—”

“If she was going to notice that,” I said, boldly, “she would have done it already.”

“And so much the worse for you if she has—unless you’re put on your guard.”

“If you mean put on my guard against the danger of being Cantyre’s successor in a similar experience—”

“That was my idea.”

“Well, I can give you all the reassurance you need, Annette. In the first place, I’ve got no money—”

The relevance of her interruption did not come to me till nearly a year later.

“Frank dear, I must ask you, while I think of it, didn’t you know that your mother was very, very ill?”

All the blood in my body seemed to rush back to my heart and to stay there. We talked no more of Regina Barry, nor of anything but stark fundamental realities. In an instant they became as much the essentials of my life as if Regina Barry had never existed. Annette showed herself much better informed as to my career than she pretended to be, giving me to understand that the day on which I disappeared my mother had received a kind of death-blow. She was of the type to leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness to go after that which was lost; and in her inability to do so she had been seized, so Annette told me, with a mortal pining away. With her decline my father was declining also, and all because of me.

“I’ve been the most awful rotter, Annette,” I groaned, as I staggered to my feet. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, Frank, I do know it. That’s why I’ve been so glad to get hold of you at last, and ask you to—to redeem yourself.”

“Redeem myself by going back?”

She looked up at me and nodded.

“Oh, but how can I?”

_CHAPTER XII_

My question was answered next evening by Beady Lamont.

Greatly to Lovey’s disgust, I made it a point to attend every Saturday meeting at the club.

“Them low fellas ain’t fit company for you, Slim,” he would protest. “What’s the use of cuttin’ out the booze and bein’ rich if you don’t ’old yer ’ead above the likes o’ that?”

“They’ve been awfully white with us, Lovey.”

“They wasn’t no whiter with us than they’d be with anybody else; and don’t three out o’ every five give ’em the blue Peter?”

But though we had this discussion once a week, he always accompanied me to Vandiver Street, showing his disapproval when he got there in sitting by himself and refusing to respond to advances.

I have to confess that I needed the fellowship of men who had been through the same mill as myself, in order to keep up the fight. Again let me repeat it, I am giving you but a faint idea of the struggle I had to make. No evil habit relinquishes its hold easily, and the one to which I had given myself over is perhaps the most tenacious of all. It would be wearisome if I were to keep telling you how near I came at times to courting the old disaster, and how close the shave by which I sheered away; but I never felt safer than a blind man walking along the edge of a cliff. More than once I tore the blue star from my buttonhole, though on each occasion I juggled myself into putting it back again. I juggled myself as I did on the morning when I gazed at the brown-green water flowing beneath Greeley’s Slip. I said that what I didn’t do to-day I would still be free to do to-morrow, thus tiding myself over the worst minutes, if only by a process of postponement.

But among my brothers at the club I heard so many tales of heroic resistance that I grew ashamed of my periods of weakness. What Pyn and Mouse and the Scotchman and the piano-mover and Beady Lamont could do, I told myself, I also could do. Moreover, new men came in, and more than one of the educated type turned to me for help. To a journalist named Edmonds, and to an actor named Prince, I stood as next friend, and only declined to officiate in the same capacity for Headlights, the big-eyed tailor, and the wee bye Daisy, when they returned, penitent, on the ground that I couldn’t watch over more than two men efficiently. With the actor I had no trouble, but twice I had to go down to Stinson’s and pull Edmonds out of a drunken spell. To keep him out was putting me on all my mettle; and in order to maintain my mettle I had to stay out myself. My courage was no whit nobler than that of the man who would turn tail in the battle if it weren’t for shame before his comrades; but there is something to be got out of even such valor as that.

And in the club I got it. Perhaps we were all putting up a bluff. Perhaps those whom I looked upon as heroes were inwardly no more glorious than I. But when the fellows whom I patted on the back patted me in their turn, I was obliged to live up to their commendation. There came, indeed, a time when I couldn’t help seeing that in the eyes of new-comers especially I was taken as a pillar of the club, and knew that I couldn’t fall without bringing down some of the living walls along with me. To be strong enough to hold up my portion of the weight became once more with me then a question of _noblesse oblige_.

The Saturday evening after my talk with Annette was a special one. After the actor, the journalist, Headlights, and Daisy had renewed their pledge for a week, Lovey and I stood up with the Scotchman, the piano-mover, and three or four others, and repeated ours for a month. It probably seems a simple thing to you; but for us who knew what had been our perils during the preceding month and the months preceding that, it was a solemn undertaking. The first vow of all had been relatively easy, since new resolutions have an attraction in themselves. The weekly vows that came afterward were not so fiercely hard, because they were but weekly. When it came to promising for a month—well, I can only say that to us a month had the length which it has to a child. It seemed to stretch on indefinitely ahead of one. The foe, retreating as we pressed forward, was always keeping up a rear-guard fight, and we never woke in the morning without being aware that we might strike an ambush before nightfall. We got so tired of the struggle that we often thought of the relief it would be to be captured; and many a time the resolution was made that when this month was up....

And just at these minutes the chaps who seemed stronger would close in about us, or those who seemed weaker would make some appeal, and when the critical Saturday evening came round we would walk up again, impelled by forces beyond our control, and repledge ourselves.

On such occasions there was always some word spoken to us by men who had fought longer than we had and seen the enemy routed more effectively. That night the speaker to the blue-star men was that club benefactor and favorite, Beady Lamont. He was a huge mass of muscle, turning the scale at three hundred and more. Strength was in every movement when he walked and every pose when he stood still. To my architect’s eye he planted his legs as though they were ancient Egyptian monoliths. Comparatively small round the abdomen, his chest was like a great drum. His arms—but why give a description? Hercules must have been like him, and Goliath of Gath, and Charlemagne, and the Giants that were in Those Days. They said that in drink he used to be terrible; but now his big, jolly face was all a quiver of good-will.

His voice was one of those husky chuckles of which the very gurgles make you laugh. To make you laugh was his principle function in the club. On this evening he began his talk with a string of those amusing, disconnected anecdotes which used to be a feature of after-dinner speeches, somewhat as a boy will splash about in the water before he begins to swim. But when he swam it was with vigor.

“And now some of you blue-star guys is probably hittin’ a question that sooner or later knocks at the nuts of most of us chaps that’s trying to make good all over again. That’s families. Say, ain’t families the deuce? You may run like a hare, or climb like a squirrel, or light away like a skeeter—and your family’ll be at your heels. It’s somethin’ fierce. You can never get away from them; they’ll never let you get away from them. Because”—his voice fell to a tone of solemnity—“because no matter how fast you sprint, or how high you climb, or how graceful you can dodge—you carries your family with you. You can no more turn your back on it than you can on your own stummick. You may refuse to pervide for it, you may treat it cruel, you may leave it to look out for itself; but you can never git away from knowin’ in your heart that if you’re a bum husband or father or son you’re considerable more bum as a man. That’s why the family is after us. Can’t shake ’em off! Got ’em where they won’t be shook off. God A’mighty Hisself put ’em there, and, oh, boys, listen to me and I’ll tell you why.”

He made dabs at his wrists as though to turn up his sleeves, like a man warming to his work. Taking a step or two forward he braced his left hand on his barrel-shaped hip, while his gigantic forefinger was pointed dramatically toward his audience.

“Say, did any of you married guys ever wish to God you was single again? Sure you did! Was any of you chaps with two or three little kids to feed ever sorry for the day when he heard the first of his young ones cry? Surest thing you know! Did any of us with a father and a mother, with brothers and sisters, too, very likely, ever kick because we hadn’t been born an orphan and an only child? You bet your sweet life we did! The drinkin’ man don’t want no hangers-on. He wants to be free. Life ain’t worth a burnt match to him when he’s got other people to think of, and a home to keep up, and can’t spend every penny on hisself. Some of us here to-night has cursed our wives; some of us has beat our children; some of us has cut out father and mother as if they’d never done nothin’ for us, and we could cast off from ’em with no more conscience than a tug’ll cast off from a liner.

“But, boys, when God A’mighty put us into this world He put us into a family first of all. He gives us kindness there, and care, and eddication, and the great big thing that fills the whole universe and that we ain’t got no other name for only love. As soon as we’d got pretty well grown He give us another feeling—one that druv us by and by to go and start a family for ourselves. Most of us went and started one, and them that haven’t done it yet’ll do it before the next few years is out. But, boys, what’s it all for? Everything’s got to be for somethin’ or else it’s just lumberin’ up the ground; and this here matter of families is either the worst or the best thing you’ll find anywhere on earth. If it’s not the best it’s the worst, and it has to be one or t’other.

“Now I stand before you as one who used to think it was the worst. I won’t say nothin’ of my father and mother. Them things is too sacred to be trotted out. But I’ll speak of my wife, because she’s that grateful for what’s been done for me—and everything done for me has been done twice as much, ten times as much, for her—that she’d like me to bring her into whatever I’ve got to say. I’ve known the time when I was as crazy to be quit of my family as a dog to be rid of the tin can tied to his tail. I had a wife, then, and three children; and, O my God! but I thought they was a drag! I couldn’t go nowhere without thinkin’ I ought to be with ’em, and I couldn’t take a drink without knowin’ I had to steal it from my little boy and my two little girls. They was the p’ison of my life. There was nights when I was reelin’ home and I used to hope that the house had been burnt down durin’ the day and they buried in the ashes. That’d leave me free again. Not to have no home—not to have to ante up for no one but myself—was the only thing I ever prayed for. And by gum, but my prayer was answered! One night I come home and found the house empty. My wife had decamped, and left a note that run somethin’ like this: ‘Dear Beady,’ says she, ‘I can’t stand this life no more,’ says she. ‘If it was only me I wouldn’t mind; but I can’t see my children kicked and beat and starved and hated, not by no one.’ And then she signed her name.

“Well, say, boys, most of you has heard what happened to me after that. I sure had one grand time while it lasted—and it lasted just about six months. I saw a man oncet—we was movin’ a party from Harlem to the Bronx—fall down a flight of stairs with a sofa on his back, and he sure did get some pace on. Well, my pace was just about as quick—and as dead easy as he struck the landin’ at the bottom I struck the gutter. Now you know the rest of my story, because some of you guys has had a hand in it.

“But what I want to tell you is this: That when I begun to come to again, as you might say, the first thing I wondered about was the wife and the kids. I couldn’t get ’em out of my mind, nohow. What did I ever have ’em for? I asked myself. Why in hell did I ever get married? Nobody never druv me into it. I did it of my own accord. I went hangin’ after the girl, who had a good place in the kitchen department of a big store, and I never let her have no peace till she said she’d marry me, and did it. Why had I been such a crazy fool? There was days and days, sittin’ right in there in that back room, when I asked myself that; and at last I got the answer. I’m goin’ to tell it to you now, because there’s a lot of you shysters that’s only been a few weeks in the club that’s askin’ yourselves that very same thing. You’ve got wives and kids, the Lord knows where—scattered to the four winds of heaven, for anything you know—and you wish you hadn’t. But, say, don’t you go on wishin’ no such thing; for I’m goin’ to tell you what God A’mighty said to me right there in that back settin’-room.”

He squared himself now, planting his Egyptian monoliths with a force which in itself was a kind of eloquence. His hands were thrust deep into his trousers pockets and his big chest expanded.