Читать книгу On the Stairs - Henry Blake Fuller - Страница 8

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You are not to suppose that while I was free to visit Johnny in the stable, I was not free to visit Raymond in the house. Though my people lived rather modestly on a side street, the interior of the Prince residence was not unknown to me. 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. It was all of the Second Empire, qualified by an erratic, exaggerated touch that was natively American. I am afraid I found it rather superb and was made uncomfortable—was even intimidated by it; all the more so that Raymond took it completely for granted. One room contained a big orchestrion with many pipes in tiers, like an organ's. On one occasion I heard it play the overture to "William Tell," and it managed the "Storm" very handily. There was a large, three-cornered piano in the same room—one of the sort I never could feel at home with; and this instrument, more than the other, I suppose, gave Raymond his futile and disadvantageous start toward music. Travel; art; anything but the bank.

I have no idea at what time of day he introduced me into the house, but it was an hour at which the men, as well as the women, were at home. In one part or another of the hall I met his mother. She was dark and lean; without being tall, she looked gaunt. She seemed occupied with herself, as she moved out of one shadow into another, and she gave scant attention to a casual boy. Raymond was really no more hospitable than any young and growing organism must be; but perhaps she was thankful that it was only one boy, instead of three or four.

In another room, somewhere on the first floor, I had a glimpse of his father. I remember him as a sedate man who did not insist. If he set a boy right, it was done but verbally; the boy was left to see the justness of the point and to act on it for himself. I gathered, later, that James Prince had done little, unaided, for himself; whatever he had accomplished had been in conjunction with other men—with his father, particularly; and when his father died, a few years later, he was the chief heir—and he never added much to what he had received. To him fell the property—and its worries. The worries, I surmise, were the greater part of it all. Everything has to be paid for, and James Prince's easily gained success was paid for, through the ensuing years, with considerable anxieties and perturbations.

It was his father, I presume, who was with him as I passed the library door: a bent, gray man, with a square head and a yellow face. A third man was between them; a tall, dry, cold fellow with iron-gray beard and no mustache—a face in the old New England tradition. This man was, of course, their lawyer, and I judge that he gave them little comfort. I felt him as chill and slow, as enjoying the tying and untying of legalities with a stiff, clammy hand, and as unlikely to be hurried on account of any temperament possessed by himself or manifested by his clients. Fire, in a wide sweep, had overtaken the town a year or two before—a community owned by the Eastern seaboard and mortgaged to its eyebrows; and the Princes, as I learned years later, had been building extensively on borrowed capital just before the fire-doom came. Probably too great a part of the funds employed came from their own bank.

Raymond, once the second floor was reached, showed me his desks and bookcases; also a new sort of pen which he had thought to be able to use, but which he had cast aside. And he offered to read me his account of the three days in Milwaukee, or wherever.

"If you would like to hear … ?" he said, with a sort of bashful determination.

"Just as you please," I replied, patient then, as ever after, in the face of the arts.

Nothing much seemed to have happened—nothing that I, at least, should have taken the trouble to set down; but a good part of his fifteen pages, as he read them, seemed interesting and even important. I suppose this came from the way he did it. As early as thirteen he had the knack; then, and always after, he enjoyed writing for its own sake. I feel sure that his father did not quite approve this taste. His grandfather, who had had a lesser education and felt an exaggerated respect for learning, may have had more patience. He talked for years about endowing some college, but never did it; when the time finally came, he was far too deep in his financial worries.

James Prince, as I have noted, occasionally mentioned to Raymond his conviction that he was wasting his time with all this scribbling, and that so much work by artificial light was imperiling his eyesight.

"What good is it all going to do you?" I once heard him ask. His tone was resigned, as if he had put the question several times before. "I don't think I'd write quite so much, if I were you."

Raymond looked at him in silence. "Not write?" he seemed to say. "You might as well ask me not to breathe."

"At least do it by daylight," his father suggested, or counseled—scarcely urged. "You won't have any eyes at all by the time you're thirty."

But Raymond liked his double student-lamp with green shades. He liked the quiet and retirement of late hours. I believe he liked even the smell and smear of the oil.

His father spoke, as I have reported; but he never took away the pen or put the light out. The boy seemingly had too strong a "slant": a misfortune—or, at least, a disadvantage—which a concerned parent must somehow endure. But he did take a more decided tack later on: he never said a word about Raymond's going to college, and Raymond, as a fact, never went. He fed his own intellectual furnace, and fed it in his own way. He learned an immense number of useless and unrelated things. In time they came to cumber him. Perhaps college would have been better, after all.

I never knew Raymond to show any affection for either of his parents; and he had no brothers and sisters. His father was an essentially kind, just man, and might have welcomed an occasional little manifestation of feeling. One day he told Raymond he had no heart. That was as far as emotion and the expression of emotion could carry him. Raymond's mother might have been kindly too, if she had not had herself. But a new doctor, a new remedy, a new draught from a new quarter—and her boy was instantly nowhere. Raymond's own position seemed to be that life in families was the ordained thing and was to be accepted. Well, this was the family ordained for him, and he would put up with it as best he might. But I kept on developing my own impression of him; and I see now just what that impression was going to be. Raymond, almost from the start, felt himself as an independent, detached, isolated individual, and he must have his little zone of quiet round him. Why in the world he should ever have married … !

I never knew him to show gratitude for anything given him by his parents. On the other hand, I never heard him ask them for anything. He possessed none of the little ingenuities by which boys sometimes secure a bit of pocket-money. If he wanted anything, he went without it until it was offered. Frankly, he seldom had to wait long.

Not that what came was always the right thing. He showed me his fountain-pen—one of the early half-failures—with some disdain. He always carried a number of things in his pocket, but never the pen. I myself tried it one day, and it went well enough; I should have been glad to have it for my own. But steel pens sufficed him; save once, when I saw him, in a high mood, experimenting fantastically with a quill one.

He cared no more about his clothes than any of the rest of us. He never laid any real stress on them at any time of life. He developed early a notion of the sufficiency of interior furnishings; mere external upholstery never quite secured his interest. I heard his father once or twice complain of his looking careless and shabby. He waited with equanimity until his father could take him to the clothier's. He asked but one thing; that there should be no indulgence in sartorial novelties at his expense. And I never met a sedater taste in neckties.

Three or four were hanging over the gas-jet, close to the window; they were all dark blues or grays, and most of them frayed. He expected a new one about Christmas; no hurry.

From that window, across the back yard, we saw Johnny McComas, in a bright new red tie, busy at his own window. I waved my hand, and he waved back. Raymond looked at him, but made no special sign. Johnny was packing up his specimens and his postage-stamps, preparatory to the family hegira, though neither of us knew.