On the Stairs | Page 6

"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