On the Stairs | Page 2

some advanced
architect's ideal of grandeur, and it served to make the bank's president
seem haughty when in truth he was only preoccupied.
As you may now surmise, this story, even at its highest, will not throw
millions on the habituated and indifferent air; nor, at its most distended,
will it push the pride of life too far. That has been done already in
sufficing measure by many others. Let us ride here an even keel and
keep well within rule and reason.
I am simply to tell you how, as the years moved on, John McComas
climbed the stairs of life from the bottom to the top--or so, at least, he
was commonly considered to have done; and how, through the same

years, Raymond Prince passed slowly and reluctantly along the same
stairs from top to bottom--or so his critics usually regarded his course.
Nor without some color of justice, I presume that they will pass each
other somewhere near the middle of my volume.
III
In 1873 James Prince was living in a small, choice residential district
near the Lake. Its choiceness was great, but was not duly guarded. The
very smallness of the neighborhood--a triumphant record of early
fortunes--put it upon a precarious basis: there was all too slight a
margin against encroachments. And, besides, the discovery came to be
made, some years later, that it was upon the wrong side of the river
altogether. But it held up well in 1873; and it continued to do so
through the eighties. Perhaps it was not until the middle or later
nineties that the real exodus began. Some of the early magnates had
died; some had evaporated financially; others had come to perceive,
either for themselves or through their children, that the road to social
consideration now ran another way. In due course a congeries of bulky
and grandiose edifices, built lavishly in the best taste of their own day,
remained to stare vacantly at the infrequent passer-by, or to tremble
before the imminent prospect of sinking to unworthy uses: odd,
old-time megatheriums stranded ineptly in their mortgage-mud. But
through the seventies the neighborhood held up its head and people
came from far to see it.
James Prince lived in one of these houses; and, around the corner, old
Jehiel Prince lingered on in another.
James was, of course, Raymond's father. Jehiel was his grandfather.
Raymond, when we take him up, was at the age of thirteen. And
Johnny McComas, if you care to know, was close on twelve.
Jehiel Prince was of remote New England origin, and had come West
by way of York State. He had been born somewhere between Utica and
Rochester. He put up his house on no basis of domestic sociability; it
was designed as a sort of monument to his personal success. He had not
left the East to be a failure, or to remain inconspicuous. His

contractor--or his architect, if one had been employed--had imagined a
heavy, square affair of dull-red brick, with brown-stone trimmings in
heavy courses. Items: a high basement, an undecorated mansard in slate;
a big, clumsy pair of doors, set in the middle of all, at the top of a
heavily balustraded flight of brown-stone steps; one vast window on
the right of the doors to light the "parlor," and another like it, on the left,
to light the "library": a façade reared before any allegiance to "periods,"
and in a style best denominated local or indigenous. Jehiel was called a
capitalist and had a supplementary office in the high front basement;
and here he was fretting by himself, off and on, in 1873; and here he
continued to fret by himself, off and on, until 1880, when he fretted
himself from earth. He was an unhappy man, with no essential mastery
of life. His wife existed somewhere upstairs. They seldom
spoke--indeed seldom met--unless papers to shift the units of a
perplexed estate were up for consideration. Sometimes her relatives
stole into the house to see her and hoped, with fearfulness, not to meet
her husband in some passageway. He himself had plenty of relatives,
by blood as well as by marriage; too many of these were rascals, and
they kept him busy. The town, in the seventies, was at the adventurous,
formative stage; almost everybody was leaving the gravel walks of
Probity to take a short cut across the fair lawns of Success, and the
social landscape was a good deal cut up and disfigured.
"Poor relations!"--such was Jehiel's brief, scornful rating of the less
capable among these supernumeraries. A poor relation represented, to
him, the lowest form of animal life.
And when the chicane and intrigue of the more clever among them
roused his indignation he would exclaim: "They're putting me through
the smut-machine!"--an ignominious, exasperating treatment