Part 6

Like sunlight after storm, Jimmie's recovery is making the apartment ring again, and when it rings too much I close my door.

I close my door, but not upon the bills. These keep pouring in with the insistent buzzing of a swarm of hornets, and every day I see them with a more helpless dismay. I figure and I add and I calculate, but I seem unable to subtract. I cannot see how we could do without the things that are bought. Already my modest current account is near the point of exhaustion and nothing can possibly come in before April.

To-day, in my perplexity, I took an elevated train and journeyed southward into the region of money. What I should do there I hardly knew, but a nameless inner necessity seemed to be driving me to do something. I had a vague notion of consulting with Carmichael. But when I came into lower Broadway and was actually at Carmichael's door, I fled in disgust with myself for the sufficiently transparent reason that I really had nothing to say to him. I felt like a debutant pickpocket who turns back abruptly from the threshold of his calling because he realizes the absence of a vocation or is overcome by cowardice.

In the street I looked upon the driving masses of people, swarming, streaming, with strained faces, urged on by invisible whips of need, of desire, driven like the souls in Dante's hell by demoniac powers who ever cry, "Pay your way! pay your way!" They did not hear the cry now, the continual snapping of the infernal whips, but I heard them and I quaked inwardly. To myself I fancied the most of these surging figures upon a level of life that has few problems, that is always "happy" with the dull unexultant happiness of the slave or the captive, coming briskly to the office of a morning with a sort of tarnished metallic gayety, lunching at Childs' or at a counter unprovided with stools, clinging to a strap in a car jammed with their kind, visiting a motion-picture "palace" in the evening and living within their incomes because they must. And though all the rest was abhorrent, that last detail made me envy them.

Pay your way! Pay your way! The cry was beating in my pulses as I came away, droning in the car wheels as I traveled northward, dully insistent in the very noises of the streets about me.

Once within my own door the warmth enveloped me like summer air and with the warmth came the joyous laughter of the children playing in the dining room. In a bubbling of happy turbulence they came rushing toward me as I looked in upon them, demanding that I judge between them on the rules of their game.

"Just because she's a girl," complained Randolph loudly, indicating Laura, "she always wants to be queen."

"It isn't because I'm a girl," broke in Laura, panting. "It's because it's fair. Boys never want to be fair, Uncle Ranny, that's what's the matter. He's been king for half an hour and he always wants us to do impossible things so he can be king forever."

"And I want to be king, too," loudly proclaimed Jimmie.

I suppressed the nascent revolt as best I could and soothed the passions of pretenders. I reminded them that this was a democracy and that royalty in our land could count only upon a visitor's welcome.

"Aw, don't I know?" said Randolph fiercely. "I wouldn't be really truly king for anything."

It was a pleasure to me to enter from the turmoil of the outer world to this playing fountain of affectionate young life. Jimmie, Laura, Randolph, little glimmers of spark-like personality were fitfully flickering over their childish heads and it was my task to turn them into steady flames. That was what I owed to my sister Laura and that was the course upon which I was irrevocably embarked. But now, alone in my study, I still hear in the hum and rumor of the streets the insistent imperative cry, Pay your way! Pay your way!

*CHAPTER VIII*

The incredible has happened. No, not the incredible. The incredible is always happening. It is the impossible that has taken place.

I, Randolph Byrd, am now a business man--no priest of the temple, but a brazen money-changer as ever was.

The hum and the noise and rattle of it are perpetually in my ears like the whirr of machinery in the brain of the factory hand. I cannot think or put myself in the moods of thought. The sound of the ticker is constantly in my head, and my nerves crave movement.

Fred Salmon has accomplished his will.

"You must stir it and stump it and blow your own trumpet," is his motto, and he is teaching me to blow. The firm of Salmon and Byrd is an actuality and clownishly Fred is making the most of the humor of the name and doing his best to make me abet him. I say Fred has accomplished it all. But at the bottom it is Laura's children who are innocently the primal cause of my debacle.

"D'you know what you are?" Fred shot at me to-day in a flash of inspiration--he is dowered with a fecundity of flashes these days. "You are the original Old Man Who Lived in a Shoe! It's the kids that made you get into the game. Gosh! I wish we could get that fact on our letterhead!"

With Fred to think of an idiotic notion is to utter and commit it. And I live in constant dread lest some of our customers and clients, a sporadic body as yet, should inquire as to the children with which I know not what to do. Fred is an Elizabethan. In the spacious days he would have ruffed and strutted and wenched and taken chances with careless slashing humor among the best or the worst of them. He is a buccaneer who can throw the dice with jovial laughter when things loom blackest under the very guns of disaster. He is an enigma. He is, in short, my exact opposite.

Yet he has made me his partner and accomplice. I used to think myself adamant, but in his hands I am clay.

It is now late in March. The cold blasts are often succeeded by genial days of brilliant sunshine that already promise the birth of a new spring. How much I should delight in the flower market near the Laurentian or in walking up the hill toward Fiesole past the fairy-like Florentine villas, or strolling in the Lungarno and across the Ponte Vecchio to San Miniato--to the Pitti--the Uffizi--the gentle air of Fra Angelico's cloisters--what absurd fancies! ... I am in wintry New York, yoked to a broker, or as the letterhead styles us--Investment Bankers. And though we have received no cables as yet, we are equipped with a fascinating code cable address, which is "Sambyrd!" There is no end to our grandeur.

Sambyrd! How it all came about is still swathed in a sort of semi-transparent mystery for me--semi-transparent, for even now I do see one thing clearly: My income was hopelessly inadequate to the rearing of three children and my capital was already invaded. With the capital gone what was there left for me but addressing envelopes, the children in a Home like that which Alicia came from and general collapse and catastrophe!

And then there was Fred's enthusiasm.

"Money," said he sententiously, "is a very simple matter. It won't come rolling to you of its own accord, but you can get it. Every one must find his own way. This is my way--Salmon and Byrd. Will you join me and make it your way, too?"

And I, struggling like a fish in a net, like a bird in a snare, like any beast caught in a trap, could discern no way of my own.

"But what," I demanded in a sort of despairing indignation, "can I do at that business?"

"You can learn," said Fred. "And you'll be making something before you know it. And as we grow you'll make more."

And then I made the startling discovery that there are no parallels in life. Writers may babble of types and statisticians of means and averages and populations of facts, but I realized with pain that with all my books I knew of no guide or inspiration. The case of every blessed one of us is unique. I could think of no one in precisely my own circumstances. A pathetic, dejected melancholy overcame me at my fatal tardiness in learning that the world, like a hungry beast, was clamoring for decisions. "Decide! Decide! Decide!" it seems to roar with slavering jaws, "or I devour you! And if you don't decide I shall still devour you." The drifters perish without a struggle. I had drifted heretofore but now I must flagellate the will for a choice.

And so I yielded.

The half of my capital has already gone into our offices, and if chairs, desks and tables will make for success we shall both be millionaires. There are magnificent leather sofas such as I never dreamed of lolling on, but discussions and transactions of money, it seems, must be done within walls padded with luxury. Money breeds money, Fred is ever telling me, and even as bees are attracted by honey, so the opulent investors will flock to our richly fitted hive. The droning of the ticker and the sound of a typewriter are the only noises permissible, and the smoke of cigars must be the most fragrant.

I hardly know why I should be ironic. Never before have I derived so much amusement in a short space of time. There was the entrance of our first customer, Signor Visconti. He came, this enterprising Milanese, in response to one of the hundreds of individual circular letters we sent out to small banks and investors, on magnificent stationery, announcing our rare bargains in securities so safe that the rock of Gibraltar was pasteboard by comparison, so gilt-edged that only the best of government paper could dare to crackle in their presence; so remunerative that--anyway, Mr. Visconti, admirably dressed, came in.

The young woman who brought in his name had been drilled not to seem flustered. Fred flushed purple with pleasure and executed a brief but exquisite war dance on the rug.

"Tell him I shall see him directly," he murmured to the young woman and sprawled on the leather chair beside me in his triumph.

"Why don't you see him then?" I could not help asking.

"Wouldn't do," Fred wagged his head mysteriously. "Must keep him waiting at least a minute or two--though I'm burning up to get my talons into him."

I laughed at him.

"Now this is what you do, my boy," Fred gave me quick instruction in the hushed voice of a conspirator. "A minute or so after I leave you, you take your hat and coat and pass through the room where I'm talking to him. I won't notice you. When you're nearly at the door, I'll call you back. You'll be in a hurry, but you'll come back. I'll introduce you to Mr. Visconti, then I'll say confidential-like, but loud enough for him to hear, 'You going out about those bonds?' 'Yes,' you answer, 'but I'll be back soon.' 'While you're about it,' I'll say, 'you can tell Spifkins we can let him have that two-hundred thousand on call at four and three quarters.' You just nod quickly, like a busy man, salute Mr. Visconti and out you go."

"Where--do I go?" I stammered in a daze.

"You go to a telephone booth downstairs in the lobby and you call me up on the wire. And don't be surprised at anything I say until I hang up. Then you can walk round the block and come back. Is that clear?"

"Clear as an asphalt pavement," I answered in my bewilderment.

"That's all right then," he grinned and left me.

Complying with his absurd charge, nevertheless, I was duly introduced to the well-dressed, well-fed, deep-hued Italian banker from Macdougal Street and made my way to the telephone booth in the lobby of the building below. And this is what I heard in Fred's most suave and ingratiating tone.

"Oh, not at all, Mr. Ferris--always glad to hear from a customer. Ah--yes, Mr. Ferris. We can still let you have those bonds. Though in reality they are sold to another client. But I think we can give him something just as good that will suit him equally well. Yes, that will be all right. A hundred thousand, wasn't it? Well, well--ha! ha! Better late than never. Don't let that bother you. Yes, yes, Mr. Ferris. Send them over to your office as soon as my partner comes back. I am a little busy now with a customer. Oh, don't mention it, don't mention it! Eh? Why, yes--thanks. At the Waldorf about five, then. Ta-ta." And he hung up the receiver.

For a moment I stood speechless in the steaming booth with the telephone receiver in my hands and then I staggered out, shaken by helpless laughter.

When I returned, Visconti, smiling broadly, was in the process of being ushered out by Fred with warm exchanges of amiabilities. We all shook hands on the threshold in a cordial flurry of busy enthusiasm and a moment later Fred and I were alone.

"Just sold that fine peach of a Guinea ten thousand dollars' worth of Hesperus Power bonds," chuckled Fred in irrepressible glee.

"But where," I demanded, "did you get the bonds to sell?"

"Haven't got them yet," he paced the room in nervous jubilation. "But we'll get them in a jiffy--at the National City Bank. They've got lots of 'em over there."

Something dark and heavy and cold seemed to have dropped inside of me upon the vital parts, and chilled me for an instant.

"So this is this kind of a business?" I muttered.

"This is the way this kind of a business begins," he replied composedly.

That interlude of actual business after the ferocious activity of renting, equipping and furnishing an office, getting stationery printed and engraved, installing a ticker, making that mysterious body of connections that was Fred's province, was sufficiently exhilarating to make me accept it without much scrutiny. After all, what could I do? This was the furrow in which my plow was set and this, I suppose, is the custom of the country.

"How," I could not help wonderingly asking, "did you land the effulgent Visconti?"

"Oh, he's a good scout," explained Fred. "He runs a banking house for his fellow dagoes in Macdougal Street. He saw we were new and he likes to give young fellows a chance. He was quite frank. You see, it's nothing for the big houses to sell ten bonds or so. But he knows that to us just opening up it means a lot more than the commission. It means a Sale. Oh, he's a sport, all right."

"That surprises me more than I can say," I told him.

"There are some good-hearted brutes even in this business," growled Fred, "and don't you forget it."

"Do you think," I asked with a twinge of shame, "he saw through your telephoning business and that rigmarole of yours to me in the booth?"

"Damn if I don't think he did!" roared Fred. "But never mind. He's a sport. And some day, when we're big guns, we'll show him that we appreciate his hand-out by putting him on to something good--see if we don't!"

I felt as shamefaced as though we had committed a felony. Yet I suppose that this is the ordinary comparatively innocent chicane of even honest business, remnants of oriental chaffering and huckstering that still survive. I am hoping we shall grow out of it. Though at times I suspect a certain flamboyancy of temperament in Fred that makes him resort to such shifts rather than not.

A man who had purchased some bonds called up and inquired whether we would take them back. There was no reason for Fred's offering anything but an endeavor to dispose of them. But instead his grandiose reply was:

"Why, certainly we shall take those bonds back, Mr. Smith--and as many more of them as you've got. Yes, bring them down by all means."

Once he had hung up the receiver he turned toward me with blank dismay, muttering:

"Now what the hell shall we do with those things?"

I own to a flash of genuine anger at his imbecile untruthfulness.

"You don't know what to do?" I spluttered. "Then why on earth did you speak as though you had a dozen buyers waiting in a row?"

"Because that's business," he tried to shout me down. "That devil will have more confidence in us if we let him go back on his bargain than if he made a lot of money on it. Don't you know human nature?"

"Not human nature like that," I retorted bitterly. "Tell me what you are going to do about it."

"Let's get on the telephone, both of us," he spoke cheerfully, "and each call up as many people as we can and offer them those bonds before that weak sister gets here."

"A desperate remedy," I growled irritably. "Let me see you do it."

Fred lighted a cigar and gazed out of the window. When he turned his face was suave and benignant. He looked like nothing so much as a man about to fill a row of Christmas stockings. Then he betook himself to the telephone. In a cheerful, friendly, lingering voice he began to offer his gift to one after another of his list as though an inward and spiritual grace were moving him irresistibly to benefaction. His face was on a broad grin even under a series of repeated refusals, and I confess to experiencing a sort of truculent joy at what I believed to be his discomfiture. His accents, however, never lost their velvety quality nor did he betray by a single note any trace of disappointment. On the contrary he was warming to his work with a keen gusto. On a sudden the young woman at the telephone outside informed him that he was being called. He listened.

"Mr. Smith?" he answered mildly. "Hello! Bringing us those bonds? What? Decided to keep them, after all? Well, well," with a laugh, "the Lord be with you then, Mr. Smith. We could have sold them ten times over since you first called me. No, no. It doesn't matter. I'll find something else for the others. You're mighty wise, Mr. Smith--I'll hand that to you. No, it's all right. Come and see us. Good-by--good-by, sir!"

When he turned away from the telephone the perspiration beaded his forehead and puffy cheeks and he grinned genially.

"Whew," he whistled, passing a handkerchief over his face. "That was great fun. But why do they want to break in on the innocent morning with things like that! Well, that's how it is, Randolph, my boy," he added lightly and turned away to other things. In his way Fred compels my admiration. For this is only one instance of many, one thread in the texture of our daily life. How I long to read a few pages of "Urn Burial" in order to forget it all!

It is too soon to know whether or not we are a success. But we are each of us drawing a small salary and to me that is an immediate help.

What a curious jumble is our life! Forces strange and awe-inspiring, the very stars in their courses seem to be defending Laura's children, lest I should do them an injury. But in order to keep them and rear them I must resort to a kind of olla-podrida of backstairs shifts and devices, such as I have described, that make my cheek burn. But I suppose it is as Dibdin says: We are all the ministers and retinue, be it in court dress or in tinsel and livery, of that exalted prince of the world, the child. For me, however, it is still a struggle to grasp that ineluctable truth. Perhaps as a reward for this, as a sort of pourboire of Fate, I shall become gruesomely rich, a kind of Maecenas, an orgulous figure among scholars, and finance some new Tudor or early English texts or latter-day collections of the classics?

My pipe has gone out. I have taken to puffing a pipe in a manner that would delight the soul of Dibdin. Dibdin! Every day I expect to hear from him, but still my expectation is vain. The children are all abed and I sit here filled with a sense that I am responsible for all of them, sleeping and waking, for their nourishment and existence, for all this machinery that keeps the six of us going, and the thought fills me with awe--and yet there is a kind of pleasant sense of pride in it, too. Dibdin would say that I reminded him of a broody hen, and Dibdin would be right. A broody hen is a model of responsibility for all mankind.

Yet though I cannot look with young-eyed confidence upon all of this, or upon my enterprise with Fred, I can hardly resist a feeling that something of the youth and manhood I have spent as a solitary among books, something stirring and effervescent that I have suppressed, is struggling for an outlet. Fred's methods of business, though I wince at some of them, fill me with gusts of irresistible laughter. His constant horseplay and good humor are infectious.

To-day he came to me with a grave countenance and informed me that Sampson and Company, a house from which we sometimes buy a few bonds, desired to know whether we would join them in underwriting the Roumanian loan.

"And what did you say?" I inquired with equal gravity.

"Naturally I told him I must consult my partner."

"What did they say to that?"

"'Oh, sure,' he said, 'but it isn't a large loan--only fifteen millions. All we want you to take is about three millions.'"

I looked at him quizzically.

"Well, what d'you say, partner, shall we take it?"

I scrutinized his baffling expression and roared with laughter. He joined me, laughing, until the tears trickled down his cheeks.

"But look here," he began, the flamboyancy of his manner persisting even in private, "three millions isn't so much--and the profit would be large."

So long as it was horseplay I enjoyed the joke. But with Fred the barrier between jest and earnest is very thin, often indistinguishable.

"Don't talk rot," I told him. "Do you want a short cut to bankruptcy?"

"Well, it would be in a great cause," he grinned. "Got to help dear old Roumania!" And humming a musical-comedy tune, he left me. But I am still conscious of a dread lest Fred, in some moment of irresistible magnificence, should commit poor little Salmon and Byrd to the devil or the deep.

*CHAPTER IX*

To-day is a red-letter day for me. The red letter came from Dibdin. As a matter of fact his brief scrawl in the peculiar, heavy, unadorned script which I love is written on the minutely ruled paper and in the violet ink of the Hotel de France at Papeete. But it was so delightfully cheering to see his dear old fist again--almost like seeing the man himself. The sheet is dated more than two months ago, and postmarked San Francisco six days ago. I wonder what brute intrusted with mailing it has carried it about in his pocket.

Without a word of preamble it begins in Dibdin's abrupt manner.

"I've got you on my mind. How are the kids prospering--and you, old bookworm? I've picked up something for you even out here--a first edition of Balzac's 'Pere Goriot', somewhat fly-blown and the worse for wear, but intact all the same. I won't intrust it to the mails. I'll bring it to you.

"I am enclosing a check for a thousand dollars. Now don't be an idiot, however difficult that may prove. I know all you can say, and believe me it isn't worth a damn. Use it in some way for the kids and make me feel happy out here among the wrecks and loafers of white humanity. I wish you could come out here some day and see to what creatures that once were white men will stoop just to avoid a little work. However, that's by the way. I count on you to do as I ask or you'll make me sore.

"The blessed old tub I came out in sails for Suva in three days. And from Suva I go to the Marquesas. You'll hear from me again before long. If you want to take a chance and write me, the Hotel de France, Papeete, is still the best address I can offer you. Yours, Dibdin."

That was all--after months of waiting. I wish the old fellow enjoyed writing letters a little more than he seems to. Nevertheless I was delighted. The irrepressible tramp! He speaks of the Marquesas as if they were around the corner.

As to his check, my first impulse was to destroy it immediately. I shall keep it, however, as a memento of Dibdin's absurd generosity of spirit. It would have to be some desperate need that would ever compel me to use it. Dibdin little dreams of Salmon and Byrd.

I called in the children to show them the letter. And though they were less excited about it than I was, they seemed delighted at the fact that after a day in the office I should appear gay and cheerful instead of weary and careworn. Care is the badge of incomplete lives. And what I needed was a letter from Dibdin.