Henry Blake Fuller

“ The dead hand of conscious propriety was upon him, checking any momentum that might lead to a spontaneous expression of patriotic feeling. The generous human juices could not run—could not even get started. When he said good-bye to Albert, it was not as to a son, nor even to a friend's son. Albert himself might have objected to any emotional expression that was too clearly to be seen; but he would have welcomed one which, cloaked in an unembarrassing obscurity, might at least have been felt. Johnny McComas frankly let himself "go," not only with Tom, but with Albert too. ”

“ The city was emphatically still in the "real-estate" stage. Anybody arriving without profession or training straightway began to sell lots. Nothing lay more openly abundant than land; the town had but to propagate itself automatically over the wide prairies. The wild flowers waved only to welcome the surveyor's gang; and new home-seekers—in the jargon of the trade—were ever hurrying to rasp themselves upon the ragged edges of the outskirts.
One Sunday morning in May, Raymond and I determined on an excursion to the country—or, at all events, to some of the remoter suburbs. ”

“ With one of these McComas cast his lot. At the start it was a simple enough affair; but Johnny must have sensed its potentialities and savored its affinities, its coming congruity with himself. It was to become, shortly, a club for the suddenly, violently rich, the flushed with dollars, the congested with prosperity—for newcomers who had met Success and beaten her at her own game. Stir on all hands, the reek of sudden felicity in the air. In later years people with access to better things of similar sort were known to become indignant when asked to associate themselves with it. ”

“ Thus Raymond began to approach a permanent impairment of his affairs at an age when recuperation for a man of his deficiencies was as good as out of the question. Further on still he began to suspect—even to realize—that he was unfitted to cope with adults. In his later fifties he began to pat children on their heads in parks and to rub the noses of horses in the streets. With the younger creatures of the human race and with the gentler orders of the brute creation he felt he could trust himself, and still escape disaster. ”

“ A new world was dawning—a red world that not all of us have been fated to meet so young.
Raymond Prince saw all these preparations and took them as a spectacle. He was now frankly but an onlooker in life, and he gazed at big things from their far rim. ”

“ Why should a big, old bank go under, while a new, little bank continues to float. I cannot tell you. I was far away at the time. Perhaps I could not tell you even if I had been on the spot. And to other questions, more important still, I may be unable to give, when the pinch comes, a clearer answer. The Mid-Continent dashed, or drifted, into the rocky hands of a receiver; and McComas's bank, after a fortnight of wobbling, righted itself and kept on its way.
I saw Raymond again in March. The receivership was going on languidly. Prospects were bright for nobody. ”

“ Johnny became violently communicative about the attractions of Dellwood Park and seemed to want to figure demonstratively in the eyes of Gertrude and Adele as an up-and-coming paladin of the business world. To most of us he seemed too self-assertive, too self-assured. He knew too clearly what he wanted, and showed it too clearly. Indeed it became apparent to me that while a boy of twelve may be accepted easily (at least in an early, simple society) , a youth of eighteen cannot altogether escape the issues of caste. It was borne in on me presently that Johnny might as well have remained away. ”

“ You may believe him influenced, if you like, by his last view of Johnny McComas and by Johnny's amazing effect of completeness and content. You may fancy him as visited by compunctions and mortifications due to his consciousness of his own futility. Or you may fall back upon the simple and general promptings that are smoothly current in the minds of us all. My own notion, however, is this: he never would have married at home; only an insidious whiff of romance, encountered in France or Italy, could have accomplished his undoing.
Raymond's own advices were meagre. ”

“ After a particularly flamboyant appreciation of McComas's services in a Sunday newspaper, I ventured to touch on our Johnny's rise in Raymond's hearing. The two had not met for years; and Johnny had probably no greater place in Raymond's mind than Raymond, as I remembered once finding, had in Johnny's. But Raymond did not yet pretend to overlook or to forget or to ignore him; nor did he yet allow himself to mention Johnny as a one-time dweller in his father's stable.
"Why, yes," said Raymond; "he seems to be coming on fast. Climbing like anything." ”

“ On one occasion Raymond took me up to his room so that I might hear some of his writings. He had been to Milwaukee or to Indianapolis, and had found himself moved to set down an account of his three days away from home. He led me through several big rooms downstairs before we got to his own particular quarters above. The furnishing of these rooms impressed me at the time; but I know, now, that they were heavy and clumsy when they were meant to be rich and massive, and were meretricious when they were meant to be elegant. ”

“ If he fell upon the ill luck of finding a ball in his hands, he would toss it to somebody else with an air of facetious negligence. To stand, as Johnny McComas could stand, and throw a ball straight up for seventy-five feet and then catch it without stirring a foot from the spot where he was planted, would have been an utter impossibility for him. In fact, Raymond simply cultivated his obviously natural gifts; he never exerted himself systematically to make good any of his deficiencies. ”

“ Once more it had become distinguished to have horses, and to exhibit them—in the right place. Althea was with her parents; so was the survivor of the stalwart twins.
Johnny had taken the blow hard. That a son of his, one so strong and robust, a youth on whom so much time and thought and care and money had been lavished to fit him for the world, should go down and go out (and in such a sudden, trivial fashion) —oh, it was more than he felt he could endure. ”

“ If even this does not satisfy you, I might sketch the entrance and stairway, somewhere in Massachusetts, which are to know the footfalls of Lawrence D. McComas, aged ten, grandson of Johnny; but such a step would perhaps take us too far afield as well as slightly into the future. One does not pass a lad through that gateway on the spur of the moment.
Nor ought I to magnify, on the other hand, the marble stairway of the Mid-Continent. This was not one of the town's greater banks; and the stairway was at the disposal not only of the bank's clientèle, but at that of sixteen tiers of tenants. ”

“ But Raymond looked abstractedly into the distance and undertook no definite reply. Possibly he had responded to Ruskin; more probably to some divine young sense of truth and fitness such as forms the natural endowment, by no means uncommon, of right-minded youth. Or it may be that he had simply reached the "critical" age, when Idealism calls the Daily Practicalities to its bar and delivers its harsh, imperious judgments; when it puts the world, if but for a few brief months, "where it belongs." ”

“ A number of prosperous middle-aged and elderly men were coming down together in a compact group. It seemed as if some directors' meeting was in progress—in progress from one office, or one building, to another. In the middle of the group was John W. McComas.
He was absorbed, abstracted. Raymond, like some of the other up-farers, had gained the landing, and like them now stood a little to one side. McComas looked out at him with no particular expression and indeed with no markedness of attention. ”

“ Raymond's father gave him a sober welcome. His mother attempted a brief, spasmodic display of affection; but it was too much, and only a maid and her pillows saw her for the next few days. His father seemed older, much older; tired, careworn, worried. The trouble of settling old Jehiel's estate had been all that could have been expected, and more. There were claims, complications, lawsuits, what not; and through all this maze James Prince had to put up with the inherited help of the dry, dismal old fellow whom I had seen in earlier days at the house. ”

“ She, in her turn, was now a delegate of luxury. He approved—and insisted upon—a showy, emphatic way of life, and a more than liberal scale of expenditure. He wanted to show the world what he could do for a fine woman; and I believe he wanted to show Raymond Prince.
Gossip had long since faded away to nothingness. If anybody had wondered at Johnny's course—a course that had run through possible dubiousness to hard-and-fast finality—the wonder was now inaudible. If anybody felt in him a lack of fastidiousness, the point was not pressed. The marriage seemed a happy solution, on the whole ”

“ Johnny sat there happy enough: an early example of the young business warrior diverting himself after the fray. Years afterward the scene came back to me when I met with a showy painting in the resonant new lobby of one of the greater hotels. It showed a terrace overlooking some placid Greek sea; the happy warrior standing ungirt and uncasqued, with a beautiful maiden of indeterminate status seated beside him; a graceful attendant holding a wreath above each happy and prosperous head, and a group of sandaled dancing-girls lightly footing it for the pleasure of the fortunate pair ”

“ He employed a direct, bluff, hearty kindness; but strength underlay the kindness, and came first—came uppermost—if occasion seriously required. Life with Raymond had been a laxative, when not an irritant; life with Johnny McComas became a tonic. She had felt somewhat loose and demoralized; now she felt braced.
Johnny was rich, and was getting richer yet. He was richer, much, than he had been but a few years before; richer than Raymond Prince, whose worldly fortunes seemed rather to dip. Johnny could give his wife whatever she fancied ”

“ A shameless new quarter suddenly obtruded itself with an ugly emphasis; unclassifiables, male and female, began to assert and disport themselves more daringly than dreamt of heretofore; and many good citizens who would crowd the town forward to a population of a million and to a status undeniably metropolitan came to stroll these tawdry, noisy new streets with a curiosity of mind at once disturbed, titillated, and somehow gratified. ”

“ His other son, the full equal of the lost one, still survived and was present to-day; and Johnny, grandly reconciled, was himself again.
Althea had taken the interval to make sure about her hair-ribbon and her skirts. The ribbons had been pronounced outgrown and superfluous, and had been banished. The suitability of longer skirts had been felt, and had been acted upon. Althea was now almost a young lady, and a very pretty one.
I say it without bitterness. The beauties of nature—those trifles that make the great differences—are indeed unequally distributed among human creatures. ”

“ Raymond did not much concern himself about his father's burdens. He assumed, I suppose, that such taxes on a man's brain and general vitality were proper enough to middle age and to the business life of a large city. However, he was living—just as he had principally lived abroad—on his father's bounty. His contributions to the press—whether a daily, or, of late, a monthly—brought in no significant sums; and a bequest of some size from his grandfather was slow in finding its way into his hands. ”

“ Why, Albert—"
"You have told him? He knows your—He knows the—the legend?"
"He does. And as you see, it makes no difference to him."
"Why should it? Why should he care for early matters that were over and past long years before he was born? He sees what he sees. He feels what he feels."
"He feels McComas."
"Why shouldn't he? Who wouldn't?"
Raymond relapsed into a moody silence. ”

“ Gluckstein thought of the orchestrion.
Raymond went to live at a sort of private hotel. Here he read and wrote. He carried with him a set of little red guide-books, long, long since out of date, and he restudied Europe in the light of early memories. He also subscribed to a branch of a public library in the vicinity—a vicinity that seemed on the far edge of things. However, the tendency of the town has always been centrifugal. Many of our worthies, if they have held on to life long enough, have had to make the same disconcerting trek. ”

“ The day before we left, Johnny McComas himself appeared. He had found a way to leave his widely ramifying interests for a few odd hours. A man of the right temperament gains greatly by a temporary estival transplantation; and if Johnny always contrived to seem dominant and prosperous at home, he now seemed lordly and triumphant abroad. He "dressed the part": he was almost as over-appropriately inappropriate as little Albert himself. He played ostentatiously with his boys on the sands, and did not mind Albert as one of their eye-drawing party. ”

“ Of this kind was McComas's. Johnny was not the man to stand still and let routine take its way—not the man to mark time, even through the vacation season. Nor could he have done so even if he had wanted to. But all I need say, just here, is that he came back home again after three or four days, all told, and that any threatened embarassment was nullified, or at least postponed.
Raymond heard in silence my account of the doings on the Atlantic shore: only a wry twist of the mouth and a flare of the nostrils. But as the weeks went on, and still no Albert, his anger became articulate. ”