Front matter (continued 2)

"Ranny," she solemnly leaned forward, "I think I know what's troubling you. You needn't be so foolishly proud with me. It's a question of money, I take it. Well, I'm ready to help out with their bills. I know these things are expensive. I am willing to set aside part of my income for their bills. We could arrange that part of it somehow. Why, you foolish boy, won't you take me into your confidence?"

"It isn't that—at all," I stammered. "Why won't you understand—it's the children themselves. How can I throw them over?"

"You don't think you're doing anything for them here—you and this foundling-asylum girl, who comes from goodness knows what parents? Better let me manage this—"

Curiously, I felt offended at her speaking thus of the girl Alicia who seems as integrally a part of my charge and household as any of the rest.

"It's very good of you, Gertrude," I muttered, "to offer so much. But to take money from you for my sister's children is—out of the question." This put her more than ever out of temper.

"I never knew any one quite so idiotic," she retorted caustically. "You can do nothing yourself and you won't let anybody who can, help you." And after smoking in silence for a few minutes, Gertrude turned from me in disgust. Very smartly dressed she was, too, with a most becoming winter hat and handsome furs. I should like to please Gertrude. But she seems unable to grasp my point of view, namely, that touching those children I feel my responsibility to be personal.

"If only some one nearer to them than myself turned up," I murmured abjectly, "you'd see me bundling them out so quick it would make their little heads buzz."

"Nearer," she repeated vaguely, "when you know there is no such person."

"Their father, for instance," I explained. "I have no reason to think him dead. Laura had always felt certain he was alive. There are all sorts of explanations possible for his absence. He may come back, you know."

Gertrude laughed at me bitterly.

"The only likely explanation," she retorted, "is that he was tired of his wife and children. He is probably having a good time somewhere with some one who knows how to hold him."

That was a phrase that stung me. Why must she slur my poor sister now in her grave? I bowed my head but I could not reply even though I admit to a feeling of gloomy certainty that Jim Pendleton will never return.

"Good-by," said Gertrude, smiling grimly at me.

"Au revoir," I answered, letting her out. But she paid no further heed to me.

Why I should vent my undeniable irritation upon Alicia I do not know. But I called her into my study as soon as Gertrude had gone and she entered smiling brightly. The child, I believe, looks considerably happier than she did when first she came here and her eyes are less wistful. I was conscious of the sternness of a hanging judge upon my visage. But Alicia ignored my mood. Possibly she has found me out and knows that I am least to be feared when in appearance most despotic.

"Alicia," I began severely, "how are the children getting on? Are they all right?" (What an imbecile query!)

"Oh, yes, sir," she wonderingly answered.

"I mean—are they happy here?" I scowled at her.

"Yes, sir—they think it's lovely."

"Are they—are they afraid of me?" I demanded austerely, looking grimly at my finger nails.

"No-o, sir," she stammered, "they—they are not."

I was terrifying the child, I realized with a pang. But when I looked up suddenly the little vixen seemed to be struggling with laughter—though that can hardly be. She had the manners to turn away. An attaching little baggage is this child, but I'll have no nonsense.

"And you—" I pulled her up sharply, too sharply perhaps, whereat I grinned in mitigation—

"Do you feel competent to go on taking care of them?"

"Oh," she gasped—no suspicion of laughter now—"I just love it—Oh, you're not thinking of—of sending me away, after all, Mr. Byrd?"

There was a catch in the poor girl's voice and I felt stupid and brutal.

"No—no," I growled judicially. "Not at all. I merely wanted to make sure that there is no trouble of any sort. I suggest that you report to me every day or two upon anything that occurs to you—that you think I ought to know."

"Yes, sir," she faltered, "I will, sir."

"Have they clothes and shoes and things—warm enough for this weather?"

"Oh, yes, sir—heaps," she answered, smiling again.

"And you, have you everything you need?"

"Why, yes, sir—I think I have." Her shoes seemed thin and worn. I was in no mood to be superficial or evasive.

"Are those the best shoes you have?"

"Yes, sir," she answered faintly. Her calico frock also seemed extremely thin.

"That is all," I dismissed her curtly. "Ask Griselda to come to me, please."

"Griselda," I began, genial enough to one that is not in awe of me, "I wish you would look over the girl Alicia's wardrobe and get her whatever she needs in the way of shoes and things. Would you mind doing that?"

"Ay, I'll do it, Mr. Randolph. I know some cheap places in Fourteenth Street—"

"Heaven forbid, Griselda," I interrupted her. "I won't have that. There is enough inequality and heart-burning in the world without putting it among children. No, no. Buy the things where you bought the others—for Miss Laura's children."

Griselda laughed hoarsely.

"You'll not begin ruining the lassie with gaudy clothes!" she exclaimed.

"No, Griselda, I'll not. Good clothes have never yet ruined anybody," I gave her as my genuine conviction. "It's the other way about. It's poor clothes eat at the vitals of your self-respect like the fox in the tale of the Spartan lad."

"Have ye gone into the bills for the clothes for the bairns?" she flung at me.

"Not yet," I answered mildly. "But I'll make a walking tour through them one of these days."

"You'll walk backwards when you do, I'm thinking," flung out Griselda, and disappeared, muttering. In Griselda's lexicon extravagance is synonymous with crime and even outtops it. But she is certain to do as I ask.

There was a book auction to-day. And two days having elapsed since my interview with Gertrude I was sufficiently myself, when I lay down the paper announcing it, to think of going. The news of an auction still has the effect upon me that a bugle might exert upon some battered, superannuated cavalry horse. Despite the rise of the plutocratic collector, despite the shoals of dealers who have made of book-buying almost an exact science, I still dream of encountering one day the fortune of Edward Malone, who, late in the eighteenth century, bought Shakespeare's sonnets in the edition of 1609 and a first printing of the "Rape of Lucrece", all for two guineas.

I had already conducted Jimmie to his kindergarten. On the way, as he nestled his hand more firmly in mine, he looked up at me with a humorous smile and informed me that "we men have won'erful times together." It gave me a curious thrill and I felt grateful even for this companionship in my solitary life which Gertrude and so many others find foolish and despicable.

I was letting myself out at the front door when a plain, large-mouthed young woman of perhaps thirty, austerely garbed in black, stood facing me. I remained for a moment bereft of speech and then, of course, I foolishly apologized, I don't know why—perhaps for encumbering the earth.

"You wish to see Griselda?" I mumbled, with my hat in my hand.

"No," she declared, scrutinizing me in the murky hallway. "I want to see Mr. Randolph Byrd."

"I am he," I told her.

"I should like to talk to you," she said in a low voice. Mentally I waved a sad farewell to the book auction and to any bargains it might hold and led the way to my study.

"I am at your service," I told her, grinning, and all but offered her a cigarette.

"It's about the little girl, Alicia Palmer," she began hesitantly as though she had something dreadful to impart.

"Are you her teacher?" I wonderingly asked.

"No, Mr. Byrd, I am from the Home for Dependent Children—I am one of the inspectors."

"Ah, I see. You wish to—to inspect her," I blundered on stupidly, whereat she laughed.

"No—not exactly," she smiled. "To tell the truth, Mr. Byrd, I wish to inspect you—"

"Well, this is all there is of me," I broke in.

"And I want," she added, "to take her back to the Home."

"Take her back!" I cried, stung by something in her tone. "But—but why?"

"We don't allow our girls to live in the homes of bachelors," she murmured, lowering her eyes for an instant.

"Oh!" I gasped feebly. It is my eternal wrongness that seems to be at the bottom of everything. The picture of the children upon my hands without the girl Alicia swept me with a chill dismay.

"It ought to have been reported to us," she said reprovingly. "It really ought."

"What ought to have been reported?" I groped in bewilderment.

"The change—the transfer. We sent Alicia to Mrs. Pendleton," she explained. "When Mrs. Pendleton—er—died, we ought to have been notified—so we could look after her."

"I understand," I murmured weakly. "You see, my sister's death was so sudden that nobody thought of such things. I didn't even know she had taken this girl from your Home."

In my blundering way I then explained to her how the children came here, of their attachment to Alicia and of my own absurd dependence upon her—which I abruptly realized. I told her quite truthfully, I believe, that now the children could not get on without her. And the bitter thought assailed me that nothing in this world that is pleasant or fitting or agreeable can long be left unshattered; that everything human and sweet and tranquil must be by some human hands undone. What a miserably destructive race we are!

"Well," I concluded sadly, "I suppose now you'll take her away—and what I shall do with these three children is beyond me."

To my surprise, as I looked up, I distinctly saw a tear glisten in her eye. She looked away.

"You have a great many books," she observed with nervous irrelevance.

"The result of a misspent life," I sighed.

"Well, I don't know what to do or say," she said, rising awkwardly. "I'd like to see Alicia and—the other children. And I'll have to report—I shall call up the matron of the Home on the telephone."

"Won't you do it now?" I eagerly prompted.

"I'd better see Alicia first, I think—when will she be in?"

"At lunch time," I said; "won't you stay, or come to lunch?"

She seemed to recall that this was that obscene environment, the home of a bachelor.

"No, thank you," she murmured primly. "I'd better come again in the afternoon. Would three-thirty do all right?"

"Admirably," I told her.

"I'll do the very best I can," she reassured me.

"That's very good of you," I answered from a grateful heart.

Farewell, auctions! Farewell, peace! Once again I am in troubled waters, predestined like a bit of flotsam to bob about only in storm. Obscurely, deep within me, I long for power to do everything, to arrange everything, to make my world swing about me rhythmically instead of my lurching about it drunkenly. Even on this secret page, meant for no eyes but mine, I would pour out my grief and tragedy, the eternal underlying sadness of life—and then rise up a man of will and energy to manage my affairs. Instead, I can only weakly scribble ineptitudes to while away the time until a poor underpaid girl inspectress returns to pronounce sentence upon me. Am I, or am I not, to be allowed to live within hailing of tranquillity? Gertrude, I am wretchedly afraid, was right after all. What business has a manikin like myself to look with bold eyes upon duty, or to grapple with responsibility which an ordinary man would assume as if adding another key to his key-ring—to pocket and forget?

Falstaff could not have been more genial or hilarious than I feel at this moment, nor yet the ancient Pistol. When I left the dining room a few minutes ago, my dignity would have suffered permanent eclipse had the children espied me after I closed my door. I capered about the room like some rheumatic goat lilting a wild melody sotto voce.

The inspectress has pointed her thumbs upward. I hardly know whether Alicia, the children or Griselda decided the issue favorably.

"Do you wish to see Alicia alone?" I asked the inspectress when she returned. She will never know, that nice plain girl, with what tension I had awaited her. No lover she may have had has ever kept a tryst for her more tremulously—or she would not now be Miss Smith.

"No," was her reply, "she is only a child. I want to see her with the children." Alicia was already prepared and, I am bound to admit, partially primed.

"Here is Miss Smith, come to see you, Alicia," I announced with assumed lightness, as I ushered the lady in. Oh, it was very distinctly "ushered."

"How do you do, Alicia," Miss Smith held out her hand, melting at the sight of the children in the midst of play. "How are you—well and happy?"

"Oh, so happy!" answered Alicia, coming forward with flushed cheeks. "I am so glad you came."

"But why didn't you write us, child?" was the gentle remonstrance.

"I am awfully sorry, Miss Smith," from contrite Alicia. "But the time passed so quickly—I was just going to—and I had to get new clothes—and there are so many things to do."

Miss Smith looked down at Alicia's clothes dubiously. Perhaps she thought their quality too ruinously good for one of the inmates of her Home. She then glanced at the silent, wondering children.

"Hello, Miss Smith!" they cried in broken chorus, catching her eye. It was she who had originally brought Alicia to them. "You won't take Alicia away, will you?" Laura spoke up bravely.

"Why, dear?—Wouldn't you like to have her go away?" she returned, smiling uncertainly.

"No! We wouldn't!" replied all the children actually in one voice, with little Jimmie loudest, whereat we both laughed.

"Who," demanded Randolph sternly, "will sew our buttons on?"

"And who'll give me my baf?" cried Jimmie.

"Or help us with our lessons?" put in Laura.

"Well, we'll see!" Miss Smith came back brightly. I believe that young woman is genuinely fond of children. "What are you playing just now?"

They all began to explain at once.

"Shall I leave you with them?" I murmured.

"Yes—I'll stay a minute or two," she nodded—and I tiptoed out to await doom.

When I returned a few minutes later, I heard to my surprise Griselda's voice, just before I opened the door, rising to the full height of her indignation:

"If this is no fitting, then nothing is fitting—" whereupon I opened the door.

The children had disappeared. Griselda with flashing eyes was literally towering over poor Miss Smith. Evidently Griselda had been bearing testimony. Most excellent witness, Griselda! What chance had any Miss Smith against a rock of sheer personality like Griselda?

"It's all right," Miss Smith announced, smiling faintly as I entered. "I called up the matron this noon and she left it in my hands. This is an exception—the first of its kind in our institution—but I mean to let Alicia stay. She—she seems so happy here," she added, faltering.

"That's very gracious of you," I bowed. "I thank you. Shall we—tell them your decision?"

Griselda opened the door of the bedroom where they all had been cooped up like so many frightened little hares, and Randolph, unable to contain himself, demanded eagerly:

"Can she stay?"

"Yes," nodded Miss Smith, and wild shouts must have shattered the nerves of the other tenants. Jimmie, as a mark of highest favor, ran to Miss Smith and held forth his arms to be taken up into hers. He could not bestow a greater confidence. Alicia dabbed some happy tears from her cheeks. I begged Miss Smith to stay to tea with them, and unobtrusively escaped. Now my mind is agog with triumphant imaginings. If ever I become President, Griselda of a certainty shall be my Secretary of State.

CHAPTER VII

Now that the Christmas holidays have passed and I have been casting up accounts, the uneasy knowledge has come to me that I am no longer living on my income. The freshet of bills is surging about me yet. Perhaps I have been improvident, but I have not bought a book in ages. Andrews, the bookseller, informed me the other day, with an expression more of sorrow than of anger, that though he couldn't comprehend my unaccountable refusal of the Boswell, he had not the heart to offer it to any one else. He was holding it still, he declared, in order to spare a friend regrets.

"Sell it, Andrews, for God's sake—sell it," I told him.

"But you've had your order in for three years," he protested, "and never canceled it. Now suddenly you refuse it. That must mean something!"

"It means—I'll tell you what it means, Andrews: I have acquired a young family." I then briefly explained to him my situation.

"You don't tell me, Mr. Byrd—you don't tell me!" he repeated over and over. "Then this is what I do," he announced with a sudden ferocity of decision. "I hold that work, if I have to hold it for ten years, until such a time as you feel you can take it. Only I am so short of room here," he added blandly, "will you not store it for me on your shelves?"

"Why, you—you Samaritan!" I laughed in my embarrassment, clapping him on the shoulder. "What are you trying to do—make a bankrupt of me?"

"If you will include it under your insurance—" he answered—"but never mind: I'll insure it myself." And then he talked of something else. He was as good as his word. Before I reached home that Boswell was here and is now on my shelves. I have been gloating over that epic of personality and it occurs to me that Johnson and Griselda are kindred of the spirit.

Two months! It is incredible. Years must have passed since the children have come here. My past life seems remote as ancient Egypt. This morning came a letter from Biagi of the Laurentian, asking why he did not hear from me, when was I coming to Florence, and adding that at Oxford also some Brunetto Latini material has been recently unearthed and that I might stop on the way and examine it. I laughed. Gone are those days, never, I fear, to return. If only I could smell a good old parchment once again! I still remember the thrill I felt when Biagi first showed me the vellum script of Sophocles at the Laurentian. I could actually see the scribe in the Byzantium of the eleventh century reverently copying the lofty beautiful words, in a spirit of high worship, his pale cheeks flushed with his pious task. I was that scribe! Why, I ask, was that strange and eager feeling implanted in my particular bosom? Could it be that in some past age, I was myself the scholarly Greek?—But that is nonsense.

If only I could pay my bills. Yet I dare not touch the trifle Laura left to her children. That must remain for emergency.

And on May first we must change our quarters. The renting agent, a decent enough little person, was very apologetic.

"I have kids myself," he informed me deprecatingly, "and I know what it is. But you understand. A bachelor is one thing and four children is quite another. Makes a difference." I told him that I was more or less aware of the difference it made.

"And these people here, in this here, now, building," he explained, "they're so nasty nice—they can't stand the sight of a kid, let alone the sound." I made no comment, for too recently had I been just so nasty-nice.

We shall have to seek some pastures new.

Fred Salmon, as good as his word, has actually looked me up.

I don't know why the mere entry of that breezy Mohock into the room brought my unwilling fatherhood into a relief ten times sharper than I had felt it before. I suddenly felt myself a gawk and a failure before a man of the world—even though I did not wholly respect the man of the world. Once more I was acutely aware of lost freedom. Abstract Freedom, out of which I had stepped as a man steps from life into death.

Luckily Fred is not one to beat about the bush.

"You remember," he began, skillfully rotating the mutilated end of a cigar between his teeth, "my telling you at the club the kind of business you'd be suited for?"

"A bond salesman or a dog fancier," I answered promptly.

"Have you gone into anything?"

I replied in the negative.

"Well, I'm thinking of starting something," he announced solemnly.

"A dog kennel?" I queried.

"No—a bond business, Ran."

"I wish you luck, my boy," I told him.

"None of that—" he grinned, "I want you to go in with me."

I gazed at him in speechless astonishment.

"Have I said a bellyful?" he demanded, removing his vile cigar.

"A—yes," I gasped, "and more."

"Ha! That's the way I am," he laughed. "Ideas come to me and I act upon them."

"But—what have I done—" I began, stammering, "to deserve this—"

"You're the man for my money," he erupted boisterously, "I sometimes make a mistake in picking a horse, but never in picking a man, Ranny, my boy, never!"

When Henry the Fowler was tranquilly snaring finches and news was suddenly brought him that he had been elected Emperor, I doubt whether he had felt more completely graveled than did I at that moment. But to be serious with Fred Salmon was just then beyond me.

"You have come to the right man, this time, Fred," I gave him back a parody of his own tone, "not a doubt of it!"

"You bet I have, old Hoss," he cried, "don't I know it?"

"That is," I went on, "if fitness, training, experience, capacity, predilection and abundance of capital are factors, you have selected the one man—"

"Yah!" broke in Fred, "I know all about that. Don't try the sarcastic with me, old boy. I know all you can say and a darn sight more. But I told you it's the cut of your mug I want. What good is the best trained two-year old if he's a hammer-head? It's with a man as with a horse. You've got the right look to you—and that's what counts!"

The mockery of my thanks and all further attempts at clumsy satire were utterly ignored by Fred.

"You're comfortably fixed, I know," he said, ruminatively scanning my books, which curiously suggest wealth to every one. "But dash it all, man, you must want more money for something or other—more books, maybe. Everybody wants more something. I know," he ran on, "it isn't every fellah makes up his mind on the dot the way I do. You've got to turn it over in your so-called bean, I suppose. All right. But remember—I don't take no for answer."

"With that trifling limitation, I assume, I have a wide liberty of choice?" I ventured.

"Oh, yes," he grinned. "Outside the fact that you're coming in, you can go as far as you like. Salmon and Byrd!" he exclaimed suddenly. "How's that for a firm name? By gosh!—There's genius in it! May have been that which was driving me to you. I never go wrong. Salmon and Byrd—Gad! It's so good it scares me!"

"Salmon and Byrd," I repeated after him mechanically. "The menu strikes me as incomplete for a viveur like you. Add a little shrimp salad—or at least an artichoke."

He grinned but he would none of my flippancy.

"No, no," he wagged his head. "None of that. Don't spoil a fine thing. It's—what do they call it—sacrilege. A good firm name—it's half the battle. By George! This has been a day's work for me. I didn't know it was going to be so rich. We ought to have a dinner on it at the Knickerbocker—or Claridge's. What d'you say?"

In a flash I saw the vista of Fred's life spread out before me—noise and laughter, ventripotent bouts with costly dishes in expensive places, tinkling glasses—the world of money-making which consists as much in riotous expenditure as in half-jocund half-fanatical getting. It was to this world that Fred was inviting me.

"There will be supper at six o'clock, if you care to stay," I suggested mildly.

"No-no, thanks," said Fred reflectively. "I'd like to. But somehow not to-night. I couldn't. Better come along with me. And we'll work out details."

I resisted his urging, however, and he left me with this Parthian arrow:

"Think it over as much as you like, Randolph, my boy. But it's a go. Nothing you can say against it will hold a candle to the reasons in favor. The firm name alone is worth a hundred thousand dollars. Consider it settled. Never felt so sure of anything in all my life. So long, my boy. You'll hear from me."

He did not even turn his head when he heard my burst of almost hysterical laughter as he was closing the door. Always heretofore I had counted myself, how humble and insignificant soever, as of the priesthood in the temple of fine things. It was abasing to think that Fred had claimed me for the money-changers.

Never again do I wish to experience the martyred minutes of anguish that I have passed through during the last twenty-four hours.

For some reason that none can explain Jimmie suddenly came down with a fever. That bright little whorl of life all at once looked white, refused his food with the pallid pitiful smile of an octogenarian and, in a twinkling it seemed, his cheeks were burning, his eyes glittered dryly and his lips were parched. Called to his bedside, I leaned over him and the air about me seemed to darken. Laura's child was, I believed, dangerously ill. The heart within me turned leaden and even Griselda displayed alarm. Then and there I vowed inwardly that no strangers should have the care of this child if he recovered, so long as I could care for him myself.

The nearest doctor, who occupies a ground-floor apartment below, a brute of a man of thirty-five or so, elected, when he came up, to look wise and inscrutable. Calm and grave, he prescribed oil and with a murmured, "We shall see in the morning" he left me in an agony of doubt and anxiety.

The only person who exhibited any degree of calm was Alicia. And though she is still a child herself I confess to a feeling of resentment against what seemed to me callousness in the face of our perturbation. I saw visions of any number of diseases, of being quarantined, of Jimmie's possible death, of my bearing forevermore a feeling of nameless guilt before Laura's memory. I told them I should sit up the night.

"Oh, no, Mr. Byrd," insisted the girl with sudden vehemence. "Don't do that. I'll make up a place in the dining room and leave the door of their room open. I'll hear him if he wakes."

"I'm afraid, Alicia, you don't take this seriously enough," I told her sternly. She looked at me wistfully for a moment and then faintly smiled.

"Yes, sir, I do," she answered. "But it's no use our all wearing ourselves out at once if it's real sickness. But I don't think it's anything much."

"How can you know?" I demanded suspiciously.

"I just think so," she asserted. "At the Home children were always coming down like this. The next day they were as well as ever again."

"But this is not the Home," I retorted severely. The girl flushed. I saw I had hurt her.

"But he's a child," she insisted doggedly, in a low voice. I shook my head.

"I shall sit up in the study," I told her, "with the door open. I shall hear him if he calls. You'd better go to bed."

Her great haunting eyes looked at me for an instant and she left me. In the study I lighted a fire, drew up the large chair, lighted a cigarette and in dressing gown and slippers composed myself for the night, determined to spend it waking.

In my mind were revolving many things. Fred Salmon's absurd proposal, the strange trick of circumstances that had suddenly made me responsible for a houseful of children, the whereabouts of Dibdin, the amazing multiplicity of bills, the little lad's burning fever. Drowsiness began to assault my eyelids before the glowing fire. To combat it, I took down that sonata in words, Conrad's "The Nigger of the Narcissus", and reread the description of the Cape storm, which is not a description so much as the expression of the storm itself. As always in reading that book, I was overawed to the point of pain by what language can do. And pondering upon that, I allowed myself to doze off for a few seconds. Suddenly I awoke with a tremor and looked at my watch. To my amazement it was half-past six in the morning.

Abjectly guilty, I stole out and tiptoed into the dining room. The light was burning. I saw three chairs with a crumpled pillow upon them and Alicia, smiling drowsily, was gliding out of the children's room.

"How is he now?" I asked in a muffled tone, thinking basely to give her the idea that I had watched the night through.

"Sleeping quietly," was the reply. "His fever is mostly gone."

"That's splendid," I murmured sheepishly. "You are up—er—early, aren't you?"

"I just lay here on these chairs," she answered quietly. "I looked in at Jimmie about every half hour. He had a very good night." With a sharp pang of annoyance mingled with relief, I felt myself stark and unmasked. We gazed at each other in silence for a moment, and then I broke into muffled laughter, in which she softly joined. And though I felt myself a fool, I vow I could have hugged that child to my heart of hearts for her sense of humor no less than for her silent unfailing constancy.

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 debâcle.

"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 Mæcenas, 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 'Père 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.

A breath of the wide world has come to me with that pleasant burly note, of other-worldliness, of freedom, of rovings and wanderings, something of the zest I used to feel. I used to feel myself (or so I think) strung like a lute, sensitive to every breath and sign of beauty, to all the subtle tunes of life. My nerves are duller now, responsive only to the obvious. In the inverted world of business I suppose that is progress. Dibdin's letter has brought back something of my old self, at least a nostalgia of other days.

And here my conscience smites me. It is long since I have seen Gertrude. I must rectify that omission at once. After all, Gertrude has been patience itself with my vagaries. And the thought of the old freedom is struck through with the years of her friendship. Gertrude never interfered.

I have seen Gertrude and she was indulgently amiable when I read her Dibdin's letter.

"I believe, Ranny," she was pleased to say, "you are developing. Do you know, I think business experience very good for you?" It was very agreeable to see Gertrude curled up on a sofa in a very pretty tea gown comfortably smoking her cigarette. I felt suddenly that the neglect of feminine society is a mistake for any man, most of all for myself.

"I'm glad my partner isn't here," I told her. "He might give me away."

"I don't care," she answered. "You are a stronger man to-day than you were a few months and even a few weeks ago. Here you are attracting money. A thousand dollars is always a thousand dollars."

"Yes, indeed! Let Morgan look to his laurels," I relied. "His days are numbered."

"Don't be absurd," she laughed. "You'll be rich before you know it. But that isn't the point. Lots of other things you'll see in a new way. You've been a sentimentalist, Ranny," she went on explaining. "Business gives a man judgment instead of sentimentality. You'll come to understand that my advice to you in a number of things, including the children, had more sense to it then you guessed. You will recognize that even children can be cared for better by efficient people trained for it than by an inexperienced bachelor and a little foundling girl. Don't worry about that now," she added hastily, "but you'll find out."

My answering grin must have been of a sickly pallid hue, for I own I felt myself chilling at her words.

"I thought," I put in, "that that was all over and settled between us."

"So it is, Ranny dear," she answered quickly. "Don't misunderstand. I am not advising now. I am merely prophesying."

"Oh, in that case," I endeavored to be conciliatory, "it will be a pleasant game to watch how true your prophecy comes."

"Yes," she spoke more eagerly. "Now tell me about your business. It must be horribly interesting."

"It horribly is," I agreed, "and fearfully done." And I went on to describe to her amusement some of the ways and means of the ingenious Fred Salmon.

"How delightful," was her laughing comment. "Do you know, Ranny, when we're married I mean to come down to your office quite often?"

"Better come now," I suggested. "Who knows—whether there'll be an office by then?"

"Oh, it isn't so long to wait—perhaps in—June—or when you take your holiday."

"The sooner the better," I told her quite sincerely. "I see no object in any further delay—" whereat Gertrude seemed pleased.

"Oh, I'll spring it on you one of these days," she smiled gayly. "Now will you have some tea or something to drink?"

A very companionable person is Gertrude. Since, as a great man has said, a grand passion is as rare as a grand opera, I presume that notwithstanding novelists and romancers to the contrary, companionship is what virtually all successful marriages are based on. One thing my business experience has taught me thus far is a disgust with vague and indefinite conditions. The sooner Gertrude and I are married, the better I shall like it.

Barely had I written down the last words above than something occurred to give them the lie. I am still shaken with anger at what I have learned.

Alicia, whom I had thought to be in bed, rapped gently on my door and came in, her sweet candid face so charged with pain and alarm that I jumped from my chair at sight of her. I have seemed scarcely to notice her these months, yet I realize she has grown as dear to me as any of the other children. To see her suffering seemed poignantly intolerable.

"What on earth," I gasped, "is the matter, Alicia?" She could scarcely speak for the tears that were choking her. "Is it any of the children?"

"N-no, sir," she sobbed. "They—are—all right."

"What on earth can it be then?" I demanded, putting my arm about this little Niobe and gently seating her in the big chair. "Come, my dear, tell me about it." She made an effort to control her sobs.

"You are—going to—send me away," she wept. The same old story. That, I thought, must be this child's obsession.

"Am I?" I spoke as gently as I knew how, taking her little cold hand in mine, "and why am I going to do that?"

"I don't know," she sobbed bitterly. "I suppose because I am no use here—because you don't want me." I laughed at her boisterously in an endeavor to shake her out of that notion.

"And who," I asked, "has said anything of the kind?" She did not answer. "Was it Griselda?"

"No, sir," she breathed.

"Was it any of the children?"

"Oh, no, Uncle Ranny—I mean Mr. Byrd. They like me."

"What was it then?" I insisted gayly. "Come, out with it. I never heard such bosh. Come, tell me the whole story, Alicia."

"I—I was in the square this afternoon," she began, drying her eyes with a very wet and crumpled little handkerchief, "playing with Jimmie while Laura and Ranny were roller-skating—" and she paused.

"Yes, yes," I urged, "and then?"

"A lady stopped to talk to me—it was Miss—Miss Bayard."

"Miss Bayard?" I repeated wonderingly. It was strange Gertrude had not mentioned it. She must, I thought, have forgotten the incident. "And what," I prompted, "did Miss Bayard say?"

"She said," and Alicia's lips quivered pitifully, "'are you still here, child?'"

"Yes—go on!" I could hardly trust myself to speak for the premonitory anger that was rising within me.

"I told her, yes, ma'am." Alicia spoke somewhat more easily, feeling, evidently, that I was not against her. "And Miss Bayard said," she went on, "that she thought I had gone away weeks ago. I didn't understand what she meant, and I asked her where she thought I had gone. 'Didn't anybody from the Home come to look you up?' she asked me. And I told her that Miss Smith had come. And she asked me whether Miss Smith hadn't done anything about me. And I told her that Miss Smith had—that she said I could stay."

"And what did she say to that?" I gasped, by this time livid with anger.

"She said it was very strange—that she did not understand it. She didn't say it to me. She seemed to be speaking to herself. And then she just gave a little nod and walked away."

"Just gave a little nod and walked away," I repeated after her mechanically. "And because of that you thought I was planning to send you away?"

"Yes, Mr. Byrd," she murmured with a dejection that in the young is so profoundly touching it makes one's heart ache.

"Well," and I hope my sickly laugh was as reassuring as it was meant to be, "and if I tell you that I knew nothing at all about it—will that make you feel better?" She nodded. "And if I tell you that so far from planning to send you away, I couldn't do without you; that you are necessary in this house, that you are just the same to me as any of the other children; that I make no distinction between you; that, in short—this house is your home until—until you grow up and get married—as long as you want to be here—" and I sat on the side of the chair, drew her to me and patted her as I might have patted little Laura. "Is that all right?"

"Yes, Uncle—Mr. Ranny," she whispered, her head sinking toward me like a child's, and a sigh of deep content escaped her. "I don't want anything else in this world!"

How beautifully affection sits upon a child!

"Now go to bed, Alicia," I urged her gently, "and don't bother your innocent little head about anything of that sort. Miss Bayard was probably joking, but—she won't do that again—when she knows how badly it made you feel."

She stirred as from a trance and slowly rose. "How is the school work going?" I asked her. "All right?"

"Yes, Mr. Byrd," she murmured, "except the Latin—I don't put in enough time on it, the teacher says, especially the Latin composition."

"Ah, we'll have to remedy that. You must come and let me help you. What are you reading in Latin?"

"Cæsar's Commentaries," she smiled, shamefacedly, like a troubled child that has been restored to happiness.

"Ah, then you must get it right. For what would happen, Alicia, if you were to face the world ignorant of how Cæsar conquered the Belgians! And if you should go out into life without an intimate knowledge of the equipment of Cæsar's light-armed infantry, of the habits of the Gauls and the right use of the catapult or the proper employment of the chariot, the consequences might be little short of ignominious! Better come to me and let me set you straight. I know you understand indirect discourse from the way you told me your story to-night. But the subjunctive, my dear—ah, the subjunctive must be closer to you than a brother and nearer than hands and feet!"

She laughed a merry, delicious peal of laughter and when she said good night I put my hand upon her soft silken hair and sent from the room a very radiant, happy little girl.

But now, as my thought wanders back to Gertrude's surprising démarche, uncontrollable indignation again possesses me. To think that it was she who had instigated the visit of that little inspectress, Miss Smith, weeks ago! It is unbelievable. Underhand methods in Gertrude are new to me.

I have called up Gertrude on the telephone. And in spite of the lateness of the hour she insisted in a somewhat wintry voice that I had better come up at once and see her, as she put it, settle it once for all. Je m'y rend. To settle it once for all is precisely what I desire.

My desire has been stormily satisfied. Though inwardly indignant, I returned to Gertrude with every intention of being very bland and very reasonable, hoping against hope to have the unlovely fact somehow cleared away. But Gertrude, it seems, had decided that the indignation properly belonged to her.

"Hello, Ranny," she greeted me easily, in the gray tone that precedes a tempest. "What do you mean by speaking to me as you did over the telephone?"

"I—I mean this," I faltered, but that was the last time I faltered in speaking to her. "Did you or did you not report the case of Alicia to the Home and send an inspectress to me?"

She watched me with narrowed eyelids for a moment and then, deciding evidently, that a little truculence would reduce me to my normal state of pulp, she answered coolly:

"And suppose I did—what of it?"

"I merely want to know the truth," I answered her quietly enough. "Lies are so detestable to me." She flinched perceptibly, but drew herself up with hauteur.

"Well, then I didn't!" she returned loftily. "But what if I had? Somebody ought to have reported it," she ran on with gathering temper by which she thought to crush me. "I think it's indecent for you to have in the house a girl of that age who's no relation to you. The fact that you are a fool doesn't make it any less indecent. I'm the only woman friend you have and somebody has to see you don't make a worse idiot of yourself than nature made you to start with. Now do you understand, my excellent friend?"

And having discharged this volley she stood panting lividly, as if viewing my ruins. At the moment however I could not consider her. I knew only that flashes of red appeared before my eyes, that I spoke the literal truth when I told her:

"To me such an action and the person guilty of it would be equally contemptible."

"You say that to me?" she gasped, taking a step forward, with a colorable imitation of incredulity, strange in view of her denial.

"To you—yes," I told her, quietly enough, for now I was more master of myself. "And contemptible is only a mild euphemism for what I should really think." She stared at me speechless for a moment.

"You think!" she uttered in mocking scorn. "You've posed as a sort of God's fool—but what you are is the devil's tool."

"Take care, Gertrude," I warned her. "You might say something that you will regret even more."

She waved me contemptuously away.

"I'll say this," she returned in level tones, seating herself and clenching her hands in an effort at control—but in reality she was beginning a new offensive. "You'd better go home, Ranny, and make up your mind to send that girl away. All men are rotten. But it's because I thought you were different that—that—" she did not finish, but added: "And to have you gathering in girls from the gutter—"

"Stop!" I cried, "I won't hear another word," and turned away as if to go, not trusting myself to say more.

"Come back!" she called, jumping from the sofa. "Come back and listen: Either you send that girl away or I'll have nothing more to do with you. Is that understood?"

I laughed at her mirthlessly.

"Choose between her and me," she uttered with the touch of melodrama that few women seem to escape.

"Don't be theatrical," I told her, now more in control of myself. "That girl makes it possible for me to bring up Laura's children. She is no more to me than any of the others. But however that may be, she stays—understand that, please, Gertrude: she stays!"

"Then you've chosen?" she demanded in livid stupefaction.

"I've announced no choice. But the girl stays."

"Thank God!" she lifted her hands upwards, and I hope her prayer was acceptable. "I knew I was tied to a fool," she added, as though I had been holding her enchained, "but I did not know he was a knave as well. I'm free at last!"

I walked out without trusting myself to make reply.

I sincerely hope Gertrude will enjoy her freedom more than she did her bondage. Anyway, I am glad she has entered a denial.

As I walked home under a starry sky, however, I was amazed to feel my anger cooling rapidly; the sense of defeat, of disappointment with human nature, giving way to a new feeling of freedom, to an elation I had not experienced in years. I definitely felt a leap of exhilaration in the wake of the other mingled emotions. It took me by surprise.

Matrimony is obviously not for such shameful villains as myself. If Gertrude expects me to return on bended marrow bones and sue for forgiveness, I am certain she is mistaken. Matrimony is not for me. That at least is clear.

CHAPTER X

The dancing flamboyancy in his veins has proved too much for my revered, partner, Fred Salmon.

With a glimmer hall bravado, half amusement in his eyes, he announced to me this morning that he has "signed on for a piece of the Roumanian loan."

I was stupefied.

"How much?" I gasped faintly, watching him closely, for I could not believe it.

"Only a measly million," he replied with deprecating cockiness. "It was as much as I could do to make them let us come in at all. If it weren't for your cold feet I would have taken the three millions." And his chuckle irritated me beyond words.

He was in earnest. He was not joking.

"And where the devil," I spluttered, "will you get the money for even the initial payment?"

"Raise it, my boy, raise it," he bent, beetling over me. "If we want to amount to anything we've got to take chances. One syndicate participation like that and perhaps another with the newspaper publicity, and we're made men in the Street. Got to do it. Want to be a piker all your life? I don't!"

"You're—mad—" I stammered limply. "Stark, raving mad. And how do you propose to raise the money?"

"By selling the bonds, fellow!" he announced with aloof superiority.

"Have you got the bonds?"

"No. They are not even in this country. We give them ad interim certificates until the bonds arrive."

"Have you got the certificates?"

"No," was the astounding reply. "We'll sell 'em first, get the money for 'em, turn it over to Sampson & Company, the syndicate managers, and draw our certificates. That's how it works. Of course if we were a bigger house, better known, it would be easier. But we'll do it—don't you worry—we'll do it!"

"You mean," I groped, "we have to sell something we haven't even in hand and get money for it?"

"That's what it amounts to," he grinned, though less jauntily than before.

I felt myself crumbling to dust.

"Don't sit there like that!" he cried, regarding me as one looks down from the side of a great liner upon a drifting derelict. "Get busy! Get on the telephone and sell some Roumanian bonds!" And he chuckled in his absurd triumphant manner that will one day drive me to desperation. "Begin with your friend Visconti," he suggested. "He seems to have taken a shine to you. Talk to him in Dago."

Many and many a time had I asked myself what I was doing in that particular galley. To enter a new occupation without enthusiasm, for a cloistered monk like myself to go out into the market place as a chafferer and a huckster, among a race I had not even cared to understand, and to embrace their ideals and their career, concerning which I had not even curiosity, had been difficult enough. With the lash of my need I had whipped myself like a flagellant to the daily grind until custom had given it the ungrateful familiarity that the treadmill must have for the mule.

But to embark upon this murky enterprise of Fred's, charged for me with the dread of a hundred lurking pitfalls, into which I should infallibly stumble, charged with the fear of certain failure, all my instincts revolted against it. Nevertheless, like a lost soul, I suffered myself to be driven because I must.

It is to the glory of human nature that there is more of the milk and marrow of human kindness in it than pessimists give it credit for. The excellent Visconti, after listening to me in silence while I lamely and guiltily explained my offer to him, courteously replied in Italian.

"If you recommend them, Signor, I will take them. I cannot take many, but I will take five."

I thanked him as best I could, but I shrank back as under a blow. This man was buying not Roumanian bonds so much as my Word. Besides, though the bonds were right enough, I had nothing to give him and yet I wanted his money. I could not face it, and so I informed my egregious Fred.

"That's so," said Fred reflectively and for a moment he was lost in thought. Then, as is his wont, he suddenly began to radiate the heat of a new inspiration. "I've got it!" he cried. "Listen here. You've only put half your capital into this business. You've got in the vault—how much is it? Twenty-five thousand in securities?"

I gaped at him in terror.

"Well," he ran on, "suppose you bring them over, deposit them with Sampson and Company against that much in ad interim certificates—or else borrow money on 'em. Don't you see?" he slapped his knee gleefully, "then we have those certificates on hand. We can pass 'em right out to fellows like Visconti, who come straight across, and so go on with the game. When we're through, all you've done is to lend yourself—the firm—twenty-five thousand in securities, given us a big lift and you put your securities back in the vault. Don't you see that?"

"No."

"Isn't that clear?" he asked in an injured tone.

"Clear as pitch," I answered truthfully.

"Never mind," he clapped me smartly on the shoulder. "You go bring your securities over. I'll make it clear. Of course you'll draw interest on the loan you're making the firm."

And like the mule I am, I dully complied. And now we are laboring on with the sale of the million in foreign bonds to people the majority of whom have not a notion whether Roumania is the capital of Rome or a Central American republic. "L'insuccess," declares Balzac, "nous accuse toujours la puissance de nos pretentious." But as I had no pretensions in this business, loss and failure would be doubly humiliating. What then, I ask myself again, am I doing in that galley? Meantime what remains of my slender possessions is hypothecated to the pretensions I had never entertained.

I have been house-hunting in the suburbs. It is idle for me to try to find either a house or an apartment in any region that would be suitable for both my means and the children in New York. So for two Saturdays and two Sundays I have been trudging the dreariness of the less expensive suburbs in quest of a house.

"What!" exclaimed Fred, when he heard of it, "not going to leave the Shoe?"

"Yes," I told him. "The Shoe pinches, I must find another."

"Well, you're a funny old geezer," was his laughing comment. I could do better than that in describing him.

When I come home depressed and weary I find a shower of little attentions awaiting me, very winning and touchingly agreeable. Little Jimmie, with great serious eyes, ostentatiously brings me my slippers and dressing gown and watches my face intently for the reward of commendation. When I murmur, "Thanks, old man, very good of you," I can virtually see his little pulses pounding with exultation in his veins.

"Are you vewy tired, Uncle Ranny?" he inquires, keeping up the high drama of profound concern.

"So, so, old chap," I tell him, kissing his serious little face. "Nothing to worry about." A moment later I hear him dashing about the dining room very properly and completely oblivious of my fatigue.

Laura in the rôle of Hebe, gravely brings me tea on a small tray, and asks whether there is any book I desire or anything else that she might bring me.

But behind all these attentions I discern the directing hand of Alicia. Can it be that the child has instinctively divined that I have actually broken with Gertrude on her account, that the little woman's soul in her secretly exults in a feeling of victory? Since she cannot know all the conditions, she can feel, at most, I suppose, only a vague primitive sense of triumph in defeating the will of another woman. Perhaps I am attributing too much to her young intelligence, but at times I seem to perceive in her eyes, in her bearing, a touch of the protective instinct, of almost the maternal toward me, that I had never observed in her before. Possibly it is merely a sense of gratitude. At all events, those attentions of the little people are very soothing and grateful, notably now, since Griselda's have declined perforce, in view of her greatly increased work in the kitchen. Yet it staggers me at times when I realize the number of souls for whose shelter and livelihood I am responsible, for the complex machinery that I must keep revolving. Experience like that should be acquired young. Like Mr. Roosevelt, I would advocate early marriages.

I have found a house.

In Crestlands (thrilling are the names of suburbs!) thirty-five minutes from Grand Central Station, in Westchester County. I came upon a châlet-like cottage built largely upon a rock that I believe will answer our purpose. The rent is moderate and there is said to be an asparagus bed somewhere in the "grounds." I know there are two trees with gnarled roots grasping their way downward among the stones, in a business-like struggle for existence, and there are a few inches of lawn for the children. With a veritable terrain like that as dower, it will surprise no one that I took the cottage.

"The latitude's rather uncertain, and the longitude also is vague," as vague, almost, as that of Roumania; nevertheless I shall be henceforth a dweller of Suburbia.

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 châlet 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 rôle 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 châlet 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 Mæcenasship 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.