Part 19

I cannot down the feeling, however, that there is some mystery, some secret reason behind this lightning-like development between Alicia and the boy. With a leaden heart I must record it that he has proven a disappointment to me. His mediocrity as a student concerns me less than his general tendency to shiftiness, his unsteady eye and his heavy drooping nether lip when he tells me that he "spent the night with the fellows at the frat house", that "a fellow's got to associate with friends of his own age", that "he's got to make friends", and so on. He is through his allowance four days after receiving it and repeatedly begs for more. More than once I have caught the odor of alcohol about him as he came in late at night, and only the fact that he is Laura's boy and that I have reared him has made me condone his many offenses.

Have I been spoiling him, I wonder? Would I have condoned and tolerated as much if he were my own son? He is over a year younger than Alicia and though a handsome enough lad in his way, I fancy I see too much of Pendleton in his face for comfort. His father also was markedly good-looking when he married poor Laura. Have I, I wonder, been rearing another Pendleton?

But Alicia, the bright, the fair, the radiant, almost a woman now, with more wisdom than I ever before found in women--how came she to do such a thing as to engage herself to him? I can understand his possible infatuation. But a girl, I had always believed, learns her woman's arts by instinct. How can she be so blind to the boy's character and defects? Can it be that she really loves him? Love, love, love! That blind force that is said to move the stars--why can it be so haggard, gaunt and painful a thing in the ordinary light of day? Woe is me that I am too dull to comprehend it! Like the blooded horse in _Werther_ that bites his own vein to ease his overstrained heart, I must bleed inwardly--I must suffer and endure.

*CHAPTER XXIII*

Since it is for you, Randolph Byrd, aged seventy, that this vagrom journal has been written, I should deem myself derelict and insincere if I did not convey to you in every detail the sort of creature you were in middle life. If you fail to approve of your progenitor, I shall know that I have been exact, for I fail to approve of him myself.

We are at war. Every fiber in me should thrill to the President's declaration of war against Germany, but here I have been calmly turning the pages of "The Description of a Maske", by Thomas Campion (S. Dunstone's Churchyard in Fleetstreet 1607). It is a beautiful volume in excellent preservation, one of five brought in by a young man who is going to enlist. He inherited them from a grandfather, possibly an old fellow like you, who held them precious. I bought them eagerly, for I know where I can dispose of them, though I should dearly like to place them in my own shelves. We shall make a profit on them, and a handsome one. That is the sort of thought that runs through my head, Randolph Byrd, _aet._ 70, and that is the sort of man you were thirty odd years ago. You never were young in your youth, my fine friend. Perhaps you will grow younger as you grow older.

But that is not all. Above the sensuous pleasure in the books and overriding the thought of lucre, is the strange romance of Alicia and your namesake, Randolph Pendleton. It blasts all my previous conceptions of romance. Where is the color and the warmth and the glory of it? I had expected after their announcement of a few days ago that I should be bitterly engaged in watching a glorious April dawn that would blind me with its strange flames because it was not for me. Instead I seem to see only a somber murky twilight whenever I surprise those two in private colloquy. The mere thought of the possibility of Alicia loving me (fantastic arrogance!) was wont to irradiate my heart and to make me positively light-headed, so that I could scarcely withhold my lips from smiling publicly. But my young cub of a nephew seems haggard and obsessed by care, and upon Alicia's eyes I have more than once observed traces of tears.

What can be the meaning of that?

Were I in reality a parent instead of masquerading as one, I should no doubt endeavor to fathom this mystery. But you see, I am still, as always, inadequate. The truth is, I dare not yet talk to Alicia about her love. A little later, Randolph Byrd, a little later--when the pain is more decently domesticated in my bosom and will not fly out like a newly unchained hound. Meanwhile is it not best that I fasten my attention upon Thomas Campion his Maske?

I may fill a little of the interim perhaps by telling you what I had passed over in the busy silence of the last two or three years, that Fred Salmon has attempted to make _amende honorable_. Fred Salmon, who was the means of my losing all of the meager capital you should have lived upon in your old age, has reappeared with a commendable attempt at restitution.

Begoggled and be-linen-dustered, he drove up to the chalet some ten months ago in a magnificently shining car of bizarre design and he entered my door booming like not too distant thunder.

"Hello, Ranny!" he shouted out, and in a twinkling my study seemed to be brimming with him, inundated by him, overflowing with Fred and his Salmonism. "Have a cigar, my boy--how are you?--how is the family?--how is the book business?"

"Which am I to answer first?" I grinned mildly.

"Never mind!" roared Fred. "I see you're all right. Ask me how's tricks with me?" He was so obviously bursting with news that I complied at once.

"Very well--how are your tricks, Fred?"

"Booming, booming, Randolph, my boy--and kiting! Jack Morgan himself wouldn't blush to be in what I've got into! Put that on your piano, Randolph, my boy!"

Fred is one of those who likes to talk of Jack Morgan, Harry Davison, Gene Meyer and Barney Baruch, as though they were his daily cocktail companions. This distant familiarity of moneyed men gives him a strange exuberance.

"Consider that I have tried it on my piano and like the prelude," I told him. "Now for the rest of the opus."

"O-puss! Oh, fudge!" he laughed. "Gosh! You're a great old bird, Rannie--great old bird! Well, listen here, fellah--" he ran on, wild horses could not have held him--"you think I like to brag, don't you? Don't deny it--you know you do! Well, it's God's truth, Randolph, I do. Some folks are like that--me, for instance. But I had nothing to brag about, see? So I made up my mind I'd get into something so good it could stand any amount of bragging. So what do I do, but go into oil--oil, Randolph, my lad--and now I've got it--I've got it! Rich? Say, I'm going to be filthy with it, Randolph, positively oozing, crawling with money. That's how it's with me, boy!"

"Congratulations!" I held out my hand. He gripped it hard. "And what do you do with your millions?" I added blandly.

"Oh, I ain't got 'em yet!" he shouted. "But they're coming, Randolph--they're on the way, on the way! I hear the sound of their dear little golden feet right now--sweetest sound you ever heard. And that reminds me!--" And on a sudden he opened his duster and from his bosom pocket brought forth a number of dazzling yellow certificates with gorgeous blood red seals upon them.

"See these?" his large features were beaming a noon-day flood of generosity. "Remember that twenty-five thousand you put in of your own spondulix just before Salmon and Byrd went blooy? Well, this is that! Here is a thousand shares of Salmon Oil to cover that, Randolph--and some day you'll cash in with interest, my boy--big interest too--and don't you forget it!"

I stared at him in silence for a space. But so genuine and sincere seemed his air of righteous triumph that I repressed the Rabelaisian laughter that shook me inwardly and only said:

"Thank you, Fred. You're a--white man."

"Don't say a word!" shouted Fred, thumping me on the back. "It's all to the good!"

"By the way," I could not help adding after a glowing moment, "what is the stock selling at now?"

Not for nothing am I the partner of the canny Andrews.

"Oh, now," retorted Fred in a tone somewhat injured at my lack of romanticism--"now it ain't selling at all--yet! It's not issued yet, see? We haven't floated it yet. I'm giving you this out of mine. You can't sell it for a year. This is organizer's stock. But never fear, my boy, this will net you more than twenty-five thousand some day, or my name's Hubbard Squash!"

There was nothing to do but to hail Fred as a philanthropist and humanitarian and to thank him for his golden-hued certificates,--sweet augury of fabulous riches to come. I keep a small iron safe in my study now to house such precious objects as the Campion Maske and the Caxton that I bring home overnight or longer for study and collation. Very solemnly I clicked the combination lock, opened the safe and carefully, with ritualistic, almost hieratic movements, I reverently put Fred's certificates into one of the little drawers. Fred watched me attentively. That ceremony seemed to answer his sense of the dramatic.

"Yes, sir!" he nodded with great satisfaction, as a period to my movements. "You have put away a little gold mine there, my boy. And you don't have to work it, either. I'll do that! All you'll have to do is to cash the dividend checks. And a word in your ear, Randolph: If I 'phone you and tell you to buy more, just you do it, boy--just you do it!" Without describing to him my momentary mental reservation I, as it were, promised.

"And, oh, say," bubbled Fred, struck by a sudden memory, "who do you think is in on this property with me? You'd never guess in the world, so might as well tell you! It's our old college chum, Visconti--the guinea--and a great little sport that guinea is, let your uncle Fred tell you. He's got the spondulix, boy, and he'll have more, he will. He'll strike it rich on this deal, you bet your hat, and he'll be richer than ever. And say!" one idea seemed to follow another in Fred's brain like salmon running over rapids. "Hasn't he got a peacherine of a daughter, the old boy? Know her? Great girl, Gina--wonderfully good sport! She and I--say, we're great pals, that girl and I--cabarets, dancing"--and he shook and quivered in a sudden fragmentary movement of the latest dance--"great sport!" he concluded, panting ponderously.

"Angels and ministers of grace defend us!" I heard myself murmuring.

"Here! What you praying about?" demanded Fred, humorously suspicious.

"It was an invocation, Fred," I explained, "it's the most wonderful thing I ever heard. Why, you and Gina are meant for each other. She's a fine American girl"--I almost said "fina Americana girl," "and you--you're a--you were simply created for each other!"

"Say," grinned Fred exultantly, "honest, Randolph, do you think so?"

"I do, most certainly."

"Well, well--wait and see. Stop, look, listen--watchful waiting is the word," he muttered mysteriously. "Ta-ta, old man, I've got to shoot away from here. Now remember what I said: Don't buy until you hear from me, nor don't sell until you hear from me!"

"Stay to lunch," I begged. "After all, it's Sunday."

"Sorry, can't," he returned importantly. "Big things brewing. See you again. Ta-ta!" And he was gone.

Such was the recrudescence of Fred Salmon and the certificates are still in my safe in witness of it, and greatly to my surprise they have a market value now, even though I cannot sell them. Judging by the curb quotations the golden-hued leaflets are worth ten thousand dollars to-day. But I know too well that something will happen before the year is up and they will be worthless again. How should it be otherwise, since they are mine?

Fred Salmon was never meant to be a whisperer or a negotiator of secret treaties. The children in the house that Sunday morning could not fail to overhear him and ever since he has been known to them and referred to as "Brewster's Millions."

There is no contour to life. Life is chaotic. Whenever I thought of Fred as marrying at all, I had mentally mated him with Gertrude. That, in my opinion, would have been an ideally eugenic combination. But instead, Fred is obviously attaching himself to Gina and Gertrude has been eighteen months married to Minot Blackden, the rediscoverer of glass-staining. They live happily in apartments, about a mile apart, and I am told breakfast together occasionally.

And this notation, oh, my aged correspondent, proves to me that I am not a novelist. For were I a novelist, I should doubtless idealize these pictures--romanticize as I note them. Gertrude--my old cold flame, Gertrude--married to Blackden! There ought to be a chapter of that--a veritable lyric epithalamium upon those highly modern spousals. Blackden should fix them forever in a series of stained-glass windows!

Instead of that, my feeling is, "What am I to Gertrude now, or what is Gertrude to me? No more than Hecuba to the Player in 'Hamlet.'" Always in place of romance, reality seems to break in, to take possession of my pen and, willy-nilly, I find myself recording events as they happen, without varnish or adornment.

But if my pen is so veracious as I have intimated above, why is it so overproud and under-honest as not to record the torture that persists beneath the seemingly calm surface of life, the agony, the anguish of seeing Alicia daily under unaltered conditions, the same beloved Alicia, yet with a barrier reared before her to which the screen of the Sleeping Beauty was a miserable clipped privet hedge, to which Brynhild's circle of fire was a pitiful conjuror's trick?

Having been forced by the pressure of circumstance into ordered and natural life, I am now maddened by a passion to straighten it altogether out of its odd contortions and entanglements. My soul cries out to live naturally and virtually whispers to me every day that natural living is the first requisite to constructively social living. I see heights glimmering of service, of great impersonal love--but only through personal love lies my path toward them.

In other words, I am now aware that you cannot, like another Aaron Latta, "violate the feelings of sex." A few primal instincts there are, so tremendously important, so powerfully imbedded in the human, in the animal organism, that to violate them is to twist and crumple the personality, the very soul within one--life itself. A normal man must wive and beget and rear before his imagination is disentangled and freed for the constructive and corporate life of humanity--before his use to society is real and stable, reliable and not a sham.

I have reared children, but I have never had a wife or ever begotten any children of my own. Alicia embodies the completion of life for me--and Alicia is now pledged to some one else, leaving my world empty and meaningless. Come what will and avoid me as she may, existence cannot go on in this manner. I must take the risk of private talk with Alicia--to my pain, possibly, but for my information inevitably. Is she in reality in love with my nephew?

"Alicia," I began gruffly this evening after dinner, "I want to talk to you. Will you come into my study in a few minutes?"

She lifted her eyes to mine searchingly for an instant and lowered them again swiftly.

"Yes, Uncle Ranny," she murmured. There are times when I feel I could jump out of my skin, as the phrase is, when she calls me Uncle Ranny. That "uncleship" has been my undoing. Yet what a wealth of prerogatives it has brought me!

I chose this evening because somehow all the world lay tranquillized. Gusts of wind and plumps of April rain during the day gave way to a great stillness even over this suburban countryside, where the rumble of the trains is never absent; but the humid smell of the newly stirring earth was still in my nostrils and our little lawn was already green with young grass. One could almost hear the sap mounting in the trees. There was a vernal feeling of peace and hope in the house--in my very nerves.

We were in particular good humor moreover under the influence of Jimmie's table talk. That boy is a source of constant delight and bubbles vitality like a fountain. His presence in a room positively gives the effect of added light. He is just now in love with long words and announced that he "would give me a composition on how to tie a necktie." He meant a demonstration and we all laughed heartily.

"Never mind," murmured Jimmie cheerfully to himself. "Demonstration--I won't forget that one."

Griselda declares he is exactly as I was at his age. But I am certain I never was half so delightful.

Laura was not with us. She is at a boarding-school at Rye this year and comes home only upon alternate week-ends. Laura, sweet and grave-faced like her mother, is never as hilarious as the rest of us often are. My nephew Randolph was also absent. He, I suppose, was dining at his eternal "frat house."

It occurred to me how happy we could be, just the three of us, Alicia, Jimmie and I--plus, of course, Griselda. Alicia is beautiful now with a tender coloring and movements of exuberant gayety that are like wine to the heart. When her face is animated and her eyes flashing with merriment, the house seems charged with the very elixir of delight. Of late, however, I have seen little of her gayety and more of her pensive, silent mood and that has been depressing. But to-night Alicia was her old lovely self of the days before the engagement and I seized the occasion to discover what I could about that puzzle.

Alone in my study, puffing at a cigarette which might have been a string of hemp for all the taste I discerned in it, I feasted my mental eyes for the _n_th time upon the picture of Alicia married to me, greeting me as a wife upon my home-coming at night, nestling in my arms for the delicious intimate fragmentary talk of the day lived through, of the myriad little threads that take their place in the woof of life only after the beloved has touched them with her love. The long quiet evenings of intimacy and the nights which, in Goethe's phrase, become a beautiful half of the life span.

Am I immoral, O Randolph of seventy? Then I dismally fear I am immoral. For these are the pictures, old man, and these the thoughts that produce them--bad as they certainly are for me. For Alicia is my ward--my child. And whatever happens she must not suspect them. With an effort and a corrugated brow I dismissed them as I heard Alicia's step on the doorway. Very straight and demure she was as she entered, bringing with her that aura of infinitude which always quickens my foolish pulses.

"Sit down, Alicia," I waved her to a chair with an attempt at a smile.

"Is anything the matter, Uncle Ranny?"

"No--no--nothing--" with exaggerated naturalness. "I only wanted to talk to you."

"Wasn't Jimmie cunning!" she laughed, slipping into a chair. "He says he is going to be a writer like Mark Twain and let you sell his books. This environment, he says, is enough to make a writer of any fellow." I laughed.

"Tell me, Alicia--" I began briskly enough, and then, noting her eyes upon me, those deep eyes of a woman, I faltered:

"Do you--did you--when did this love affair between you and Randolph begin?"

Alicia made no answer.

"Was it sudden--spontaneous--like that?" and I snapped my fingers, still clinging to the spirit of lightness with which we had left the table.

"I have loved all of them--always," she murmured, gazing downward, "ever since I've been with them."

"I know that--so have I--so do I--" and my laugh sounded in my own ears like the grating of rough metallic surfaces together. "But I don't go marrying you all--do I? That's a very serious business, Alicia, this marrying."

How dull and prosy the words fell upon the air about me! Does middle age mean being prosy when you mean to be alert, bright and crisp? Yet I feel younger than any of them.

Her face lifting slowly and her wide-open gray eyes searching mine suddenly struck me as so piteously sad that I then and there wrote myself down an ass and a cad and turned away to hide my shame.

"I know it's serious, Uncle Ranny!" and her voice was like the muted strings of a violin. "But don't you think I understand? Please don't be afraid of me--won't you trust me--please?" And she left her chair and made a step toward me with an imploring gesture of the hands.

"I am not a designing woman," she declared, with a half smile, and then she ran on more vehemently, "I know that Randolph is younger than I. He can tire of me a hundred times before he is ready to marry. Oh, we are a long way from marrying. But he--he begged me to--to be engaged to him and--and for certain reasons that I can't tell _any one_, I agreed. And I'll keep my word if he keeps--" and there she paused.

A solemn, quite maternal tenderness in her face as she uttered those words so fascinated me that suddenly I saw her anew--a new Alicia--and with a strange tug at the heartstrings I marveled at the miracle.

I saw her suddenly not as _a_ woman, but as Woman--the mother of mankind, the nurse, the nourisher of all the generations. There was in her eyes a something rapt and sybilline--she was the eternal maternal principle in nature, the keeper of man's destiny, older than I, as old as the race--the spirit of motherhood!

And _she_ was engaged to Randolph!

Then, as though emerging from a maze, I blurted out, "You are not in love with him, then?" ...

"Of course I love him!" she returned with fire. "I love everybody in this house. This has been home--heaven to me. Why shouldn't I?--Oh, you Randolph Byrd!--why are men so blind? I've trusted you all my life as if you were God--and you can't let me manage--but you've got to trust me!--I can help--I must--I can't tell you--but you'll never regret it!--Oh, please, Uncle Ranny, don't press me any more," she added more plaintively, her force suddenly leaving her as though she had come to herself with a shock. A gush of tears filled her eyes. "Don't be--too hard on me," she faltered. Her hand groped for the chair behind her, and she sank weeping into it.

"Alicia! My God!" I cried out, choking. Flesh and blood could not bear it. I leaped toward her with a wild impulse to take her in my arms, to comfort her, to pour out against her lips the truth that I trusted her and loved her more than any human being on earth.... My arms went out and all but engulfed her. But--strangely--I checked myself. A powerful inhibition suddenly held me arrested as in a vise. Both the curse and the blessing of middle age were inherent in that inhibition. If I had so much as touched her then, I knew in a flash of quivering intuition that the truth I had perforce so carefully guarded would be spilled like water. If I touched her then, I was lost!

Hastily I retreated a step or two. For a space of intense charged silence Alicia sat drying her eyes, a little crumpled Niobe, the while I with trembling fingers of the hand that was on my table fumbled stupidly in the cigarette box.

"Trust you, Alicia!" I muttered, with an immense effort to control my voice. "I trust you beyond any one. You are mistress in this house. Do whatever you think best. I didn't mean to make you cry, child, forgive me. You--you have answered my question. Now don't let's have any more tears--please!"

And lighting a cigarette automatically I now approached her and stood nearer to her.

"I'm--s-sorry, Uncle Ranny," she faltered.

She had called me Randolph Byrd in her vehemence and the sound of it was still reverberating in my brain. But I was back to Uncle Ranny, like another Cinderella in her pumpkin.