On the Stairs | Page 3

unhappy people. Perhaps I should brighten things by bringing forward, just here, Elsie, Jehiel's beautiful granddaughter. But he had no granddaughter. We must let Elsie pass.
Yet a fresh young shoot budding from a gnarled old trunk would afford a piquant contrast--has done so hundreds of times. Jehiel Prince undoubtedly was gnarled and old and tough; a charming granddaughter to cajole or wheedle him in the library, or to relax his indignant tension over young men during their summer attendance on swing or hammock, would have her uses. Yet a swing or a hammock would suggest, rather than the bleak stateliness of Jehiel's urban environment, some fair, remote domain with lawns and gardens; and Jehiel was far from possessing--or from wanting to possess--a country-house. Elsie may be revived, if necessary; but I can promise nothing. I rather think you have heard the last of her.
James lived a few hundred yards from his father; his house bulked to much the same effect. It was another symmetrical, indigenous box--in stone, however, and not in brick. It had its mortgage. If this mortgage was ever paid up, another came later--a mortgage which passed through various renewals and which, as values were falling, was always renewed for a lesser amount and was always demanding ready money to meet the difference. In later years Raymond, with this formidable weight still pressing upon him, received finally an offer of relief and liberation; some prosperous upstart, with plans of his own, said he would chance the property, mortgage and all, if paid a substantial bonus for doing so.
The premises included a stable. I mention the stable on account of Johnny McComas. He lived in it. Downstairs, the landau and the two horses, and another horse, and a buggy and phaeton, and sometimes a cow; upstairs, Johnny and his father and mother. Johnny could look out through a crumpled dimity curtain across the back yard and could see his father freezing ice-cream on a Sunday forenoon on the back kitchen porch; and he could also look into one of Raymond's windows on the floor above.
Every so often he would beg:--
"Oh, father, let me do it,--please!"
Then he would lose the double prospect and get, instead, a plate of vanilla with a tin spoon in it.
Raymond, who had no mastering passion for games, sat a good deal in his room, sometimes at one of the side windows; occasionally at the back one, in which case Johnny was quite welcome to look. Raymond had more desks than one, and books everywhere on the walls between them. He had a strong bent toward study, and was even beginning to dip into literary composition. He studied when he might better have been at play, and he kept up his diary under a student lamp into all hours of the night. He had been reading lately about Paris, and he was piecing out the elementary instruction of the Academy by getting together a collection of French grammars and dictionaries. He had about decided that sometime he would go to live on that island in the Seine near Notre Dame.
His father told him he was working too hard and too late--that it would hurt his health and probably injure his eyes. His mother made no comment and gave no advice. She was an invalid and thus had absorbing interests of her own. Raymond kept on reading and writing.
Perhaps I should begin to sketch, just about here, his awakening regard for some Gertrude or Adele, and his young rivalry with Johnny McComas for her favor; telling how Johnny won over Raymond the privilege of carrying her books to school, and how, in the end, he won Gertrude or Adele herself from Raymond, and married her. Fiddlesticks! Please put all such conventional procedures out of your head, and take what I am prepared to give you. The school was a boys' school. There was no Gertrude or Adele--as yet--any more than there was an Elsie. Raymond kept to his books and indulged in no juvenile philanderings. Forget all such foolish stereotypings of fancy.
As for the romance and the rivalry: when that came, it came with a vast difference.
IV
Jehiel Prince was a capitalist. So was James: a capitalist, and the son of a capitalist. They had some interests in common, and others apart. There was a bank, and there were several large downtown business-blocks whose tenants required a lot of bookkeeping, and there was a horse-car line. There was a bus-line, too, between the railroad depots and the hotels. James destined Raymond for the bank. He would hardly go to college, but at seventeen or so would begin on the collection-register or some such matter; later he might come to be a receiving-teller; pretty soon he might rise to an apprehension of banking as a science and have a