Part 8

This being Sunday, I took the children out there in the afternoon to examine their new demesne. With the air of a castellan exhibiting an old castle, I showed them through the rooms and in the phrases of the real-estate dealer I enumerated their advantages--with a heavy heart. But the children cared nothing about that. Randolph saw visions of a tent or an Indian tepee under one of the gnarled old trees and Jimmie illustrated how he would "woll down" the slope; all our "grounds" are slope _et praeterea nihil_. But Laura, detecting a neglected rose bush near one of the windows, clapped her hands for joy.

"This is like the house in 'Peter Pan', Uncle Ranny," she cried delightedly. "There will be roses peeping in, and babies peeping out."

I looked at her in poignant surprise. It was so absolutely the voice of her mother when she was a girl, the spirit and the expression. It is exactly that feature that my poor sister would have first taken into account; it might have been Laura herself. I turned away in order not to cloud their delight. The poetry of life is the only thing worth living for, yet what a toll the world exacts on that commodity!

Griselda, in spite of all temptation, had declined to come.

"Is there a good kitchen?" she demanded. I told her I thought there was.

"Then I will not waste my time looking for the birdies in the trees or the paint on the roof," she retorted stoutly. She even demurred at Alicia's coming. "There's over much to do," she protested darkly.

Of discomfort and wretchedness let none speak. I have sounded both and so much else that is unpleasant to the abysmal depths that I shall never again look with the same eyes upon the impassive faces of the men in the moving express train. They have all no doubt lived and suffered even as I, these, my brothers!

I have moved the household to my suburb, and this is a lament _de profundis_.

The legendary mandrake is a gurgling infant to the way my books cried upon removing. They not only screamed; they sobbed and quivered like broken souls to be dislodged from their place that has known and loved them so well and so long. Every object in the flat was a whole plantation of mandrakes. Their wailing and ululation resounds yet in their new and changed surroundings. Roses peeping in, indeed! To my books this is a house of sorrow. Forlorn and jumbled and still unsorted they stand and lie in heaps so that their fallen state wrings my lacerated heart. Alicia, to whom I sadly complained of this condition, consolingly answered:

"But my English teacher in school would say that that was a 'pathetic fallacy', Mr. Ranny. Books and things don't really feel, do they?"

"Don't they!" I bitterly exclaimed. "Let unemotional pedants speak as they stupidly will, Alicia. Nothing can be more poignantly pathetic than a fallacy!"

"Yes, sir," murmured Alicia and with reverent fingers she silently helped me to place some of those books. She has a tender touch for the objects of other people's love, a charming attribute in a woman.

And from the physical chaos in the chalet at Crestlands I am whirled madly every morning in a crowded express train, then in a convulsively serried subway car, to the more subtle chaos in the office of Salmon and Byrd--to sell Roumanian bonds. Roumanian bonds are overrunning those offices like the rats in the town of Hamelin. Ah, will not some piper, pied or otherwise, come and pipe them all into the sea? The answer, I grieve to say, is no! The impossibility of shifting one's burdens is the fundamental mistake of Creation.

Nothing irritates me more after a morning's fruitless telephoning or ineffectual running about than to have Fred Salmon smile sleekly, clap me on the back and mumble mechanically:

"Great work, old boy! You're doing fine!"

What is the use of these false inanities? On Saturday he came to me with the gratifying intelligence that Imber and Smith, who took two millions of the bonds, have already sold out their allotment.

"Damn them!" was the only answer I could find.

"That's what I say," he answered in his perfect role of being all things to all men, then reflectively, "I think Smith's a liar, though." I'll wager nevertheless that he congratulated Smith as heartily as he bruises my back. To be all things to all men is surely one of the most disgusting traits in a human biped. Fitfully ever and again I wish myself out of the ruck and rabble of all that. But sadly and heavily it comes to me that it is better perhaps to bear the ills one has than to fly to others that are a mere sinister blank. I seem like a man on a raft with the storm-lashed waves washing over me the while I gasp for breath and hope for rescue.

I wonder what this life would be like if upon coming home to Crestlands there were not those eager little retrievers to fetch and to carry and to wait upon me, to surround me with their glad young freshness. But in candor I must admit that but for them I should be leading my old secluded life, undisturbed among books, that now seems remote as a past incarnation.

The weeks go by and, toiling under our burden, we are desperately trying to stem the rush of time. In certain hard-pressed moments I have a sickly feeling that time will win--and crush us. A revoltingly new discovery I made yesterday, that Fred has taken to drinking during business hours, suddenly drew the life out of me like a suction pump. Then, realizing the meaning and the enormity of the fact, I was frightened out of fear and talked to him in as friendly and kindly a vein as the circumstances would permit, in an effort to show him our position and where it might lead us.

His first snarl of defiance gave way to contrition. He wept maudlin tears and made promises so robust that they ought to outlive him, but--I feel shaken as never before.

Meanwhile Sampson and Company are calling for the payments due on our allotment of bonds, and Fred, the smiler and the diplomat, is shirking interviews with them.

"What we need, Ranny," he said to me to-day in chastened mood, "is capital, more capital. We went into this business on a shoe string--sometimes it will hold till you can get a rope and sometimes--"

--"Even a life line is too late," I supplied.

He did not answer. But after a pause he began afresh:

"Couldn't you get round and see some of your rich friends--see whether they could tide us over for a spell?"

"Rich friends!" I writhed as one in torment. "Who are my rich friends? I have none, as you ought to know. I have now put in every cent of capital that I own--against your business experience, Fred. And this is where we've arrived. If my sister's children weren't dependent upon me--but then," I ended bitterly, "I shouldn't be here, as I think you know."

He bowed his head.

"Didn't your sister--wasn't there anything--?" But to his credit, he did not finish. If, as I suppose, he meant to ask whether Laura left any money that I could use, he evidently thought better of it and walked away in a somber silence. And that is where we stand.

That is where we stand in our business, and the needs of my household are expanding. Griselda knows nothing of my affairs and yet I surprise her dark eyes, singularly lustrous for one of her years, watching me at times out of her swarthy wrinkled face, as if divining the Jehannum I am experiencing. More than ever she lays herself out to perform incredible feats of economy, whilst I hypocritically pretend to be unaware of it.

The children, having prospered and grown during the winter, are in need of new summer wardrobes, which I have ordered bought. If it is to be disaster, then shabbiness shall not betray us. Like the man who donned evening clothes in which to sink with the _Titanic_, I have always entertained a stubborn faith in the policy of good clothes. Policy, policy--the trail of policy is over me like a fetid odor--and how clean and unsmirched I have always felt in my stupid transparency! Gertrude, if she knew it, would now rejoice that she had thrown me over.

I envy our clerks and typists who banish all cares at five in the afternoon and do not resume them until the following morning. What a gay life is theirs--if they but knew it. They jest and fool and hurl picturesque slang at one another and draw their pay on Saturdays, unconscious of how near to perdition we totter. If we go to the wall they will soon find other places. But I--shall find the wall. I wish I knew what the emotions of Fred are as, rucking his forehead heavily, he strides about our rugs. I only know, however, that mine are emotions of doom.

The black doom is upon us.

After days of haggling and lying and shuffling and paltering we have, as a firm, expired.

Our vain and concentrated efforts to sell something that we had not the necessary means and connections to sell led us to neglect the things we could have done.

I shall not soon forget the vile outburst of the heavy-jowled Sampson when as by a Sultan's firman, he imperiously summoned us to his office and told us in his language what he thought of us.

"People like you don't belong in the Street--they belong in jail. Assign!" he snarled, "Better assign at once and clear out!"

And not the least of the bitterness of that moment was the acrid realization that I could not charge him with having flattered and hounded Fred into the vanity of the enterprise, because at that moment Fred and I were one--with this distinction: What Fred was suffering would roll from his back like water from a rhinoceros, whereas I would remain obscenely branded by his words forevermore.

It was useless to argue, futile to protest. There was no time or place for extenuating circumstances. I was too full of shame and humiliation to offer any conciliatory suggestions, and I still had enough of mulish pride not to truckle to that fish-eyed bully. We walked out of that man's office bankrupts.

I still marvel how I found my way back to our own office through the lurid darkness that encompassed me. The world about me--the palpitating, pressing eager world, of which in a measure I had been a part--was suddenly strange and phantasmal and alien, the ghostly city of a dream. The people were shadows and their hurrying steps and errands as mysterious and as unrelated to my life as those of a colony of ants. The only actuality I did not envisage in that dark moment which was coextensive with eternity, was that _I_ was the anemic ghost stalking at noonday and the others were the reality.

"If only you had not taken the balance of my capital--" was the thought throbbing under my overwhelming misery--"if only you had left me that!" But I could not bring myself to whine to Fred. I kept stonily silent. A burning resentment swelled my heart so that I could not speak. The newspaper publicity Fred had craved would come to him now with a vengeance.

Now they are busy dismembering the corpse and colporting the remains, whilst I sit darkly at home in Crestlands like one disembodied, dead.

*CHAPTER XI*

I have had time to grow dulled to the shabby peripety of my career as a business man. The sickening details and legal forms of our failure are over, and I am wretchedly surviving on the loan made upon an insurance policy, but still I have evolved no plans for the future.

I sit in the shadow of the chalet watching Jimmie rolling down the slope and endeavoring to roll up again. The early August sun is hot in the heavens and the air even of Crestlands is muggy. And my pulses keep insistently repeating, repeating, "What is to become of us?" My pulses--but not my mind. That useless functionary has quite simply suspended operations.

I used to feel wise in reading Montaigne and Buckle, humorous with Rabelais and Cervantes, acute and a man of the world with Balzac or Sainte-Beuve. But none of these erstwhile comforters, it appears, seems able to lift up my spirit. Modern young critics talk of escape in literature, but it seems one can only escape when there is nothing very serious to escape from. Like a debauchee who had killed his palate or one who has swallowed an unwholesome dish overnight, the zestful taste for an essay of Elia, the gustatory rolling under the tongue of sentences in "Religio Medici", the keen pleasure in a Dryden preface, all these are now impossible. The savor of them has died for me. My dreams of Maecenasship for Tudor Texts have gone a-glimmering.

For joy in books the tranquil heart is needed. The world has been too much with me and neither poppy nor mandragora can banish the effects of it. There is no balm to sane me.

There was escape after all, though--if not in reading, then in writing. I can quite understand now the persistence of diarists in the world. I had no sooner written down the words above than a tremor of resolution shook me and I went into the baking city in quest of livelihood. I found nothing save exhaustion, but it is certain that in Crestlands I shall find even less.

I looked upon the teeming streets wide-eyed like a gawk, surprised anew that so many should find a foothold and sustenance where I had failed. The mystery of that will always baffle me. The deepening gloom gave way, however, when I entered Andrews' bookshop. His welcome was warm.

"Stranger," he greeted me cordially, "come into your own."

"I don't deny I have felt it calling," I admitted.

"'Course you did--there is nothing else in the world."

"Ah, how much else, Andrews!" I told him sadly.

Whether he has heard of my failure or not I cannot tell. If he has, he was tact itself.

"Here are some beautiful things for you to see," he announced, bustling as he led me to a table in the rear of the shop. I looked at his beautiful things and was able to give him some useful points about one or two of them. He has actually come upon a Caxton, the lucky devil! This was indeed "my own", as Andrews was shrewd enough to divine. _Ca me connait_. And his courtesy and his deference were strangely consoling in the light of my recent experiences. Courtesy and deference cost others so little, but what refreshing manna they are to one's self-respect!

I go on tramping the pavements of New York and I wish there were more point in my trampings.

Every morning I go forth with a faint glow of hope, and the dim basis of my hope, when I come to think it out, is something like this: In the haunts of men I may meet somebody, an old acquaintance who may know or hear of something whereby a broken reed like myself, a pronounced failure, may get the chance of earning a livelihood. A desperate enough situation when reduced to the glaring light of plain speech--but that is the best that I am able to do. If only Dibdin were here! Despairingly I am in need of a friend. But my past life has separated and insulated me, so that when I think of friends and my thought convulsively darts out this way and that, it encounters nothing but vacancy, empty air. Fred Salmon is avoiding the Club. He is the only one who had reached to me from the past, and the result I have already recorded. I am not eager to meet him, though I have worn out any hostility I may have felt toward him. _C'est un mauvais metier que celui de medire_. I find my inward man the better for thinking of Fred neutrally, when I think of him at all.

Illness was the one thing lacking to my ineffable Pilgrim's Progress, so infallibly illness has appeared.

Jimmie came down with measles on Saturday and yesterday Alicia followed his example. The crumpling of Alicia under illness has proved like the shattering of a column in the edifice of my household. The whole insecure structure is tottering. And though she is burning with fever, the unhappy girl is murmuring with anxiety that stockings go unmended and buttons unsewn.

"Don't you worry about that, little girl," I keep telling her. "Griselda will do those things."

"Griselda has too much to do as it is," she gulps and the tears start to her hot eyes. I have isolated her and Jimmie in my room, and Randolph and Laura are cautioned to keep as far as possible away from them. I remember the time when I would have flown from the fear of infection as from the plague, but now my anxieties are of a wholly different nature. Jimmie is mending now, but Alicia is far more ill than she knows.

Griselda has undertaken the stockings and at night, when I sit watching and waiting for sounds from either of my invalids, I operate upon the buttons. It is curious how much art enters into the sewing of a button. A dog of a bachelor though I have ever been, I have never been compelled to learn that handicraft before. But I have learned from Griselda, who smiled crookedly when she imparted the law, that if you twist the thread around several times after you have sewn it, the whole thing acquires, relatively, the strength of a cable. To your punctured fingers you attend afterwards.

Alicia, awakening at midnight, sat up in bed and caught me at my task; she moaned most dolefully. I hastily put Jimmie's little "undies" behind me, but too late.

"You'll never want me--or need me again--what's the use of getting well?" she wailed weakly.

"Oh, yes, I shall, Alicia--more than ever," I hastened to assure her.

"You do everything now that I ought to do," she pressed with febrile insistence. "I shall be no use any more."

"But don't you see, Alicia," I argued, touching her hot forehead, "that I shall have to be earning money while you are doing the buttons? I ought to be earning it now, so get well as quickly as you can. Jimmie sees it; he's much better already." That logic seemed to soothe her more than I had expected. She caught my hand impulsively and pressed it to her cheek. The tremendous part played by affection in the lives of children is a never-ceasing wonder to me.

Alicia is convalescent again, _laus Domini_, and Jimmie is now running about the little house filling it with noise--which is music to my ears. Laura and Randolph have fortunately thus far escaped infection. Jimmie is wanting to resume "wolling up and down" the slope again, but this is still _verboten_.

I can now take up my journeys into town again and I note with a pang that I am growing shabby. The yearly purchases of clothes had been as regular with me as my meals, but I have ordered no clothes for the spring or summer. Odd, what a deleterious effect the shabbiness of clothes has upon one's consciousness! The tinge of inferiority it brings touches some very tender places in one's spirit, almost like a shabby conscience. But the doctor of the neighborhood, a contemplative fellow who obviously knows his business, though he talks of his laboratory and his experiments like an alchemist, has earned the clothes that I must do without. And of the two I needed them more.

My search is ended. There is jubilation in my heart again. I have fallen into a livelihood; like the bricklayer who used to fare forth, dinner pail in hand, I have found work.

And the way of it was an odd little stroke of Fate, a whimsicality that would have pleased the ironic soul of Thomas Hardy.

An old college friend of mine, Minot Blackden, whom I used to call Leonardo da Vinci because he was so full of ideas and inventions, had rediscovered, he said, the art of glass-staining. After a five years' residence in Italy, on a modest patrimony, most of which had gone into glass or into stain, he had returned to his native land and set up a shop _a la_ William Morris somewhere in the region of Bleecker Street, and proceeded to stain glass. He had had some newspaper publicity recently, and there were cuts of his work.

While passing a church in my hot and dusty peregrinations, it occurred to me that here might be a chance of serving him and also myself. By writing an interesting booklet about his craft, illustrating it profusely and sending it with personal letters to all the vestries in the country, I might bring a flood of custom to his shop. It is with this forlorn proposal that I was blundering about to discover Minot Blackden. I failed to find his shop, but I came face to face with my old Salmon and Byrd acquaintance, Signor Visconti.

In his palm beach suit and Panama hat, Visconti made a splendent and impressive figure in the purlieus of Bleecker Street.

"Ah-h, Signor Byrd," he cried with Latin cordiality, seizing my hand in both his own, "you are what you call a sight for sick eyes. I have often wonder about you--you must come into my banca--we must have leetla refreshment!"

Refreshment appealed to me at the moment and gladly I accompanied him to his private office in the bank, that stands between a junk warehouse and a delicatessen emporium. With a charming tact he touched upon the hard luck of Salmon and Byrd and dismissed the subject for good.

Briefly--for him--that is, with a wealth of gesture and illustration, he informed me that he was looking for a man for his enlarging bank, and asked me to recommend one.

"I want a fina man--" he explained. "American gentleman--who speeks a leetla da Italian--who put up what you call a fina fronta--understand me?"

"A fine front," I mused aloud, "and speaks Italian--no, Signor Visconti, we had no such young man in our office. I can think of no one I could recommend."

He was obviously nonplused.

"I thinka," he said, with, a gesture of final resolution, "if I could finda some gentleman lika you, Mr. Byrd, he would be _precisamente_ what I look for. I know," he added hastily with an apologetic laugh, "man lika you, Signor, be hard to find!" And again he laughed heartily, though watching me between narrowed eyelids. His drift was now obvious. I was silent for a moment.

"Well, if it comes to that, Signor Visconti," I answered slowly, "I am doing nothing in particular just now. I may be utterly no good for you, but--but if--"

"Ah, you would try old Visconti, Signor!" And up flew his arms like windmills. "You no ashamed to work in vot you Americans call da Guinea colony!--no, no!" He noted the deprecating shadow on my face. "Ah, you understanda--you know the granda history of the Italiana people. You--but, Mr. Byrd--" and with an admirable histrionic transition he suddenly turned grave and sad--"Mr. Byrd, you are the very man I looka for," and he gripped both my hands. "But, Meester Byrd--I fear I cannot afford to pay what you would expect. Ah, _sacra_--if I could! You, the very man--_Dio_--" and he clapped a hand dramatically to his forehead--"the very man, but!--" and his full smile of sad and wistful regret seemed genuine for all its histrionic value.

"What do you propose to pay, Signor Visconti?" I inquired.

"I can only pay to start," he whispered hoarsely, with the round eyes of a man facing the inevitable, "thirty-fiva, maybe forty dollars week. Too leetla, I know," he added slowly, letting his hands fall on his knees with resignation.

"Very well, Signor Visconti," I said. "If you will try me, I shall be glad to come at forty dollars."

Visconti fairly leaped at my hand and the bargain was struck.

I am to begin earning a livelihood on Monday.

Who said that adversity is the best teacher? Possibly it is, but gladness is the ablest cocktail. There is no stimulant like a little success.

I am an august personage.

I shall choke with pride, so august am I become in the Banca e Casa Commerciale Visconti.

I call up the National City Bank concerning the price of bonds, or the rate of exchange, in English so presumably impeccable that Signor Visconti visibly puffs out his magnificent chest as he listens. There is a divinity that shapes our "frontas", rough-hew them how we will.

"Visconti's speaking," I say with firmness and the head of Visconti's curls his fine dyed mustache and turns away, glowing with ill-concealed pleasure. This is seemingly what the head of Visconti's has been waiting for. Mentally I offer a fervent prayer that he may never be disillusioned as to my capacity.