Part 18
"I cannot go back to Visconti's any more, Alicia," I told her. "Something has happened. That is ended. I must look about for something else."
"Oh!" she gasped, "is it as bad as that?"
"As bad as that," I repeated mechanically.
"Then I know it was nothing you could help," she answered with a sudden radiance that was like a benediction.
"So there is no use worrying about that. But you mean the money," and her face clouded anxiously. "But I know what I'll do, Uncle Ranny," she came gliding toward me. "There is always Mr. Andrews for me, you know. You remember what he said: He'll take me back any time."
An instant of blackness was succeeded by a sudden burst of illumination. Andrews! Andrews and the library--the library, all catalogued--complete! Andrews would either buy it or help me to dispose of it, and Alicia and the children need not after all suffer by my catastrophe. My books were more like my flesh and blood, and to part with them---but that consideration was of singularly brief endurance at the moment. Those books, like a troop of old friends; would rescue us all from disaster--come like a phalanx between us and defeat.
"You amazing child!" I cried, leaping to my feet. "Light!--You've brought me light! Andrews!--The very man! To-morrow I am going to Andrews!"
I seized her by the shoulders and whirled her about the room like a marionette in a savage burst of energy. Alicia gasped and, spinning away, laughed wildly with a laughter that bordered upon sobs. I dread to reflect what our neighbors would have concluded, had they observed through the windows the strange Dionysian rite of the quiet middle-aged bachelor and his youthful pretty ward.
"Now go to bed, child," I commanded brusquely. "I have some thinking to do."
"Shall I make you some coffee?" she pleaded, coming toward me, still laughing.
"No--go to bed!" Before I was aware she had left a darting birdlike kiss upon my cheek and fled like a breeze from the room.
My eyes dwelt upon the door for a space where she had vanished, and then they turned involuntarily to the serried peaceful rows of books that had been my life,--that now, in the last extremity of need, must, like the camel in the desert, yield up their blood to be my livelihood.
The following morning, that is to-day, I made my way to Andrews, armed with my catalogue, and greatly to that good fellow's astonishment offered him the sale of my library.
He stared at me in blank amazement for an instant and then, recovering himself, declared that he would like to see it.
"Come back to lunch with me," I suggested.
He could not do that, but agreed to come to dinner in the evening.
His shrewd old eyes took in much more than the details of my copies and editions during his two or three hours at my house. With discreet but observant gaze he followed the children about and measured, more accurately no doubt than I could have done, the worth and solidity of my household. He had seen something of my easy bachelor life in the old days and, doubtless, was now drawing his contrasts and conclusions.
"What do you think you can offer?" I queried with some anxiety, as he stood carefully fingering the books which, like Milton's one talent, it were death to hide--for they were bread.
Andrews sat down and stared for an interval thoughtfully before him.
"I'll tell you what I'd like to offer you before we talk about the books--" he spoke with an even, a studied deliberation. "I'd like to offer you--a partnership!"
It was my turn to stare in stupefaction.
"It would be a great thing for me if you came in with me, Mr. Byrd," he now spoke more quickly. "You see, I'm an old man, getting on, sir--getting on. I want some new blood in the place--new blood--a fresh point of view and young enthusiasm. That young lady of yours coming in the way she did woke me up to that. And whom could I leave it to when it comes to the end?" he speculated wistfully. "I have no relations."
I opened my mouth to speak, but Andrews took the privilege of age to disregard me.
"I want a man with the tender touch for books, Mr. Byrd--the tender touch. It's a beautiful business," he smacked his lips--"beautiful! The hunting for them--it's--it's a knightly quest. And to find homes for them--it's like placing bonny children. The bookmen of America are generous. We ought to go to England--buy libraries--increase our treasure."
"But, my dear Andrews," I spluttered, in agitated protest. "Do you know what you are offering me? A career, a livelihood, life itself--the future of those children of mine--what can I contribute, except these books--and compared to your business and good will!--"
"If you were rich," he interrupted, "do you suppose I'd have the effrontery to make you the offer? You see, I've known you a long time, Mr. Byrd--and it's been a great pleasure to me. If I had a son--but," and his voice struck a harsher note with things repressed--"it's no use going into that. That is the business for a man like you.
"We all need money," he pursued with new energy. "It's a thing to despise if you can--a thing for sentimentalists to drivel about. But so long as our present social and economic system continues, only a fool would decry money. It's no good to you when your heart is breaking, but neither is food nor water, nor shelter nor leisure. But when you want food and shelter and leisure, that is as long as you're above ground, you want money. I have prospered--done well. Will you come with me, Randolph Byrd?"
"My dear good Andrews," I paced the room agitated, exultant, terrified by this stroke of good fortune. "But how can I take advantage of your unheard-of generosity? What can I offer? Will you take my books as a contribution to capital?"
"No," he shook his head, with twinkling eyes and a queer crinkling of the crow's-feet about them. "I don't think we need them. Books are always--books," he concluded oracularly, with a ring in his voice of the true bibliophile's reverence.
"Say you will come."
My heart was suddenly flooded by a rich inundation of hope. This was permanence that Andrews was holding out--this was an anchorage. It was neither Salmon and Byrd, nor Visconti's. This was my own peculiar realm, and only a snob or a fool could reject it. _Ca me connait_. All the turmoil and troubles of the past seemed to be melting rapidly away like the shapes in dreams or unsubstantial clouds. My life would be secure, the children nourished and educated. Alicia should have her chance unchallenged--should be prepared against the advent of that dream-hero of hers,--when he comes--when he comes! What else was I now living for? I felt as might have felt the old woman of the nursery rhyme, who lived in a shoe, had any one suddenly offered her a vine-clad well-stocked cottage of many chambers, with a future reasonably safe for her progeny. I saw on a sudden the clamorous city that had more than once droned forth my doom, now rich in prospects and gayly reciting the flattering tale of hope in my ears--the hope of becoming a bookseller in face of my dreams of scholarship, eminence--fame, possibly! But this was no dream. With a flitting smile I recognized the wayward cynicism and irony of it. And in deep gratitude I gripped the hand of Andrews to seal the bargain.
*BOOK THREE*
*CHAPTER XXII*
In returning to this all but neglected record of the things that made up my life I realize with incredulity the passage of time. I realize, too, that when you live the most fully, you write, reflect and record the least. It was _after_ his years of slavery that Cervantes wrote Don Quixote and inside a prison house that Bunyan and Sir Walter Raleigh composed their best-known works.
I shall never compose "works", I am certain now, for my lot is business to the end. Three times during the past two years I have been in England and in France, attending sales, buying books, manuscripts and libraries, and very narrowly I escaped sailing on the _Lusitania_, which would probably have been the end of these memoirs and of me. Would it have mattered? To the children, possibly. Not to me, certainly--except in so far as they would have suffered by my exit. For though the business of books is to me the one nearest akin to pleasure, it is nevertheless a chaffering and a haggling in the market-place--the reverse of all my tastes and aptitudes.
It is odd that externally I bear few of the marks of the indolent lotus-eating soul that possesses me. People viewing me superficially might think, with Andrews, that I am fitted for stratagems, spoils and--business.
Yet how happy I was when Andrews made me his offer! How I plunged into his affairs--our affairs--and gave them all my energy! The children, I exulted inwardly, the children are now safe!
But nature abhors anomalies. To work for children alone is not enough. One desires to work for a bosom companion, for some beloved woman, whose breast is home, whose warm arms are the one refuge against the world, whose eyes are the bright gateways to heaven. That fulfillment I never had and never shall have. Hence the anomalous sense of frustration, of incompleteness. Some psychoanalyst would doubtless brand this as a well-known middle-aged complex, call it by name like a familiar and proceed to "cure" me of it. But I am not going to any psychoanalyst. I know my trouble and also its name---though I cannot call it after King OEdipus or King David or the like.
_Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse_ mourned the flame-like Francesca da Rimini. And the name and the author of my trouble is not Galeotto but--Alicia--Alicia whom I did not take and now can never have.
I am no romantic Paolo to Alicia's Francesca. I am a business man--yes, a middle-aged, almost alert New York business man of the approved hard-varnish variety--with good, pat stereotyped phrases and a show of manly sincerity. Who does not know that straight talk of most of us modern business men, under which we can hide so much cunning, shrewdness and chicane? Could I not have simply taken possession of Alicia by a sort of eminent domain? Oh, I don't mean anything improper! I mean by all the astute and usual methods, the bell--book--candle and orange-blossoms sort of thing, like the hardheaded Mr. Pettigrew of American novels, or the wicked marquess or baronet of the English.
But I could not--I could not.
Under the carapace of the turtle or the armadillo is a body of flesh with nerves and blood and viscera--a soft living part. So also under the shell of the maligned business man.
An infinite pity and tenderness stir me at the thought of Alicia. I suddenly feel in my inmost soul the softness of her cheek and it touches me as the delicacy of one's own child's flesh must touch one. If I had a child of my own--but on that I must not let my mind dwell even in dreams.
Yet, why not? Dreams are all I am going to have and, pardie, it is more than I deserve. Much, very much has been given to me and I ought to feel profoundly grateful. And I do feel grateful.
But--Alicia--is engaged.
I can hardly write the words, though these are the words that have driven me to writing again.
I have been happy these two years and more--happy in my fashion. In midst of the tumult and throb of the war spirit I, in common with other business men, have been buying and selling and chaffering and huckstering, rearing Laura's children, educating Alicia and prospering. If newly rich labor has been buying motor cars, it must be admitted that some abruptly enriched business men and their wives have had time to turn from furs and bric-a-brac and interior decorating so far afield as my own remote specialty. They have been buying books--libraries by the yard, classics and first editions by the hundred. The fact that that admirable American book-man, the young Widener, had managed to gather a magnificent collection during his all too brief life, has stimulated many to emulation. Shelley need no longer weep for Adonais. I have sold collections of Keats _en bloc_ to gentlemen who have probably never read Endymion in their lives, and even now I am holding a set of Shelley first editions only because I could not bring myself to part with them to the very crude, almost illiterate, customer who proves to be the highest bidder. Rather would I sell them for less to a more enlightened bookman. Oh, yes, I have been happy in my fashion. Yet, glancing over the few brief scattering entries in this record, why does the tinge of melancholy persist?
I find a quotation from Anatole France under date of some twenty-six months ago to the point that "even the most desired changes have their sadness, for all that we leave behind is a part of ourselves. One must die to one sort of life in order to enter another."
What is it that I regret or regretted--unless it is the mere passage of time that makes me older and older? And again I find:
"Life is a game best played by children and by those who retain the hearts of children. To those who have the misfortune to grow up it is often a nightmare." There it is again--the persistent note of regret. Time will take them all from me--all, including Alicia. And then?--How did I ever come to let passion steal into my heart?
I find some phrases from Hazlitt to the effect that "we take a dislike to our favorite books after a time," and that "If mankind had wished for what is right they might have had it long ago," and then later, a sort of credo, or confession or apologia _pro vita mea_:
"This is a commercial age. If business is the path of least resistance to a livelihood, so that a slenderly endowed creature like myself may cling to the surface of the planet and pass on what has been accomplished to the generations that must accomplish more--if that is the easiest way, then that is the way of nature, my way. All business may be more or less ignoble. But, if so, who in the present state of evolution can wholly escape the ignoble?"
Yet I have not altered in essentials. Who shall say how I thrill at the sight of beauty, or the rare work of a master? I cannot declare how my pulses throb when a new author swims into my ken--his new voice, his fresh note catch at my throat like a haunting melody and I have known my eyes to fill at the sheer joy of the discovery.
Oh, you, Randolph Byrd, aged seventy, when you come with your white hair and purblind eyes to scan these notes, will you receive them at their face value? Will you believe that the sense of frustration underlying them has to do with careers and fame and lives of Brunetto Latini? No, my septuagenarian self--I have a respect for you and a warm pity. I cannot so coldly gull you--take advantage of you! Damn careers and business and Brunetto Latinis! I want love, passionate love and children of my own loins and the beloved on my heart, and just the common run of happiness that a thousand thousand men are at this moment enjoying. Then why have I not taken it? Why have I not taken Alicia as King David took Bathsheba, or whatever the lady's name was, in virtue of sheer desire and power? Because I have been a finicking, hyper-refined, hyper-sensitive fool, my aged friend; and now that she is engaged to be married I should be--but now it's too late! Always, always, Randolph Byrd, you have been too late!
All the world can give me advice and analyze me, yet nobody really knows me. Dibdin, who knows me best of all, in reality knows me least. He summed me up, or thought he did, before his periodical departure for parts unknown, some twenty months ago.
"You see," he said, "you've really got a genius for kids. I told you how I felt about Laura. Yet what do I do? I go off to the devil knows where, because I am a tramp. That is stronger in me than anything else. But you, you see, gave up everything else for them--everything. Who but a fool could blink the meaning of that?"
Who but a fool, my dear old Dibdin, could be so blind as you? Who but a fool could fail to see that I am consumed with passion for Alicia and had only been waiting, dreading, hoping until she might be old enough to know her own mind and heart--and waiting too long?
And now Alicia is engaged--and to my own nephew, Randolph--and life for me, life in the rich, vivid, colorful, romantic sense of the word, is at an end.
My nephew Randolph--a sophomore at Columbia--engaged to Alicia!
Flashes of savagery strike into my heart when I could find it possible to hate that youth--notably when I catch the Pendleton expression in his face, the Pendleton shiftiness in his eyes. At such moments I experience an intense, all but irresistible desire to grapple with him as on a certain occasion I grappled with his father, to knock his head against the wall and choke that brazen-faced, insolent temerity out of him with his last breath.
But I am only Uncle Ranny--and I don't suppose I shall do anything of the kind. Have I not brought him up? Have I not labored and toiled for him, watched over him? Is he not my child like the rest? There is something about the person, the very flesh of the child one has reared that disarms one's anger and turns the heart to water. His bad manners hurt more deeply, yet they are not like the bad manners of a stranger. His transgressions are not like others' transgressions. In God's name, your soul cries out, there must be redeeming features, extenuating conditions! Have I not had a hand in shaping him? And was he not ineffably endearing as a child? He may be somewhat wild now, but is not all youth like that on its path to manhood?
This is a parent's point of view, I see, not a rival's. Why, why did that boy, of all the males in the world, take Alicia from me?
It was only yesterday that it happened, but already it seems like an ancient calamity that stamps its victim with the slow grind of years of pain, blanches his flesh and presses him down into the limbo of those undergoing the slow drawn-out tortures of life.
Yet I was happy yesterday. I came home at one, as I do of Saturdays, and the early April sunshine, while still treacherous, was nevertheless full of dazzling promise of spring, of relief from the dread winter we have endured. My head had been buzzing with schemes like a hive. The lease of the chalet expires in May and I was full of vain notions of taking a larger, more attractive house that should be a suitable setting for Alicia. Only one year more of college is left for Alicia after this and then--and then--Alicia had talked of entering the shop, and I should have her with me all the time. How I longed and looked forward to that day! Alicia my constant companion, sharing every moment of the day, going and coming together, lunching together, discussing everything. Who shall blame me if I saw visions?
And then, perhaps an hour after lunch, they suddenly entered my study together--Randolph a half-pace or so behind her with something hangdog in his look--an expression I detest in him--and Alicia, head high, flushed with a look of desperate resolution about the somewhat haggard eyes that startled me.
I had been occupied in turning over the pages and collating a Caxton, a genuine Caxton that I meant later to show to Alicia--"The Royal Book," (1480, 2d year of the Regne of King Rychard the thyrd)--a beautiful incunabulum.
Randolph moved abruptly forward with a jerk of the head, and, his eyes failing to meet mine, he blurted out huskily:
"We're engaged, Uncle Ran--'Licia and I!"
"What!" I yelled harshly as one in pain and fell against the back of my chair. "What--what on earth do you mean!"
But he merely looked away, making no response.
"Is this true, Alicia?" I shouted, as if to overtop the tumult in my breast.
"Yes, Uncle Ranny," breathed Alicia, her eyes gazing into mine with a look so poignantly sad and charged with pain that it froze me as I was about to speak. I sat for a space, my mouth open, our eyes dwelling together for an instant. And then, as by a sudden effort, Alicia smiled valiantly, laid her hand stoutly on the shrinking boy's arm, and then abruptly she lowered her gaze.
"But--but why--why now?" I spluttered. "You are both so young--you only a sophomore, Randolph--and you, Alicia--in God's name, why now?"
Alicia glanced at Randolph as though depending on him to speak and then contemptuously giving it up as hopeless, she straightened her shoulders bravely and murmured in low distinct tones:
"I promised Randolph. He wants me to be engaged to him and I promised him I would."
"You--you mean you--you love each other?" I stammered miserably, for every word was a knife thrust into my own heart.
The lad Randolph was now shamed into a little manliness.
"Yes, we do, Uncle Ranny," came forth in his throaty voice. "That's just it--we--we love each other. And--'Licia has promised to be engaged to me 'til I am through college and get a job."
"I suppose it had to come, Uncle Ranny," explained Alicia with what seemed to me a very labored serenity. "We grew up together. We have been such chums and--and Randolph seemed to--to need me. Don't you see, Uncle Ranny?" There was a piteous note of appeal in her voice which only seemed to lacerate me the more. But I could not speak.
The sunshine had gone out of the April afternoon. Waves of darkness seemed to be beating over me, and the strength and energy of a few minutes back had oozed out of me like so much water. So weak and shattered did I feel that on a sudden I was seized by a panic fear of collapse.
"Please leave me now," my lips, strange cold dead things that seemed in no way a part of my body, brought forth mechanically, yet with heavy effort. "It's--it's a shock--we'll discuss it later." I do not envy those two the sight of my face at that moment. I am pretty certain Randolph did not see it, for he turned away, but I am in doubt about Alicia. Her eyes were brimming with tears and she came toward me with a sudden curious movement of the hands, as though she felt rather than saw her way. Then abruptly her hands dropped to her side and she paused and turned back sharply.
They left me then, both of them. I remained alone--crushed, stunned, alone.
And suffering agony though I am, there is now in me a strange new sense of familiarity with suffering. Anguish and heartache, thank God, are no longer novelties. That much anodyne the sheer business of living does bring to one. I am as sensitive to them as ever I was in my prehistoric days of ease and leisure and reclusion, but they are old acquaintances now. I must go on, hiding my dolor as best I can, working for the sunny comely lad, Jimmie, so brilliant with promise, for the grave sweet-faced Laura, replica of her mother, and--yes--for Randolph and Alicia. I cannot rant and I must not betray any grief or make a spectacle of myself before them. I must carry on.
"Small as might be your lamp," observes the sage of Belgium, "never part with the oil that feeds it, but only give the flame that crowns it."
A poor and tenuous oil is that of my peculiar lamp, a petty flame and a murky result. But such as they are, I must guard them.