On the Stairs | Page 4

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 line as an official in the Bankers'
Gazette. Beyond that he might go as far as he was able. James thought
that, thus favored in early years, the boy might go far.
But Raymond had just taken on Rome, and was finding it even more
interesting than Paris. The Academy's professor of ancient history
began to regard him as a prodigy. Then, somehow or other, Raymond
got hold of Gregorovius, with his "City of Rome in the Middle
Ages"--though his teacher did not know of this, and would have been
sure to consider it an undesirable deviation from the straight and
necessary path; and thenceforth the dozens of ordinary boys about him
counted, I feel sure, for less than ever.
Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to put myself into the
story as one of the characters. Then the many I's will no longer refer to
the author named on the title-page, but will represent the direct
participation--direct, even though inconspicuous--of a person whose
name, status, and general nature will be made manifest, incidentally
and gradually, as we proceed. You object that though one's status and
general nature may be revealed "gradually," such can scarcely be the
case as regards one's name? But if I tell you that my Christian name is,
let us say, Oliver, and then intimate in some succeeding section that my
surname is Ormsby, and then do not disclose my middle initial--which
may be W--until the middle of the book (in some documentary
connection, perhaps), shall I not be doing the thing "gradually"?
Oliver W. Ormsby. H'm! I'm not so sure that I like it. Well, my name
may turn out, after all, to be something quite different. And possibly I
may be found to be without any middle initial whatever.

But to return to the method itself. You will find it pursued in many
good novels and in many bad ones; with admirable discretion--to make
an instance--in "The Way of All Flesh"; and the procedure may be
humbly copied here. It will involve, of course, a rather close attendance
on both Raymond and Johnny through a long term of years; but perhaps
the difficulties involved--or, rather, the awkwardnesses--can be got
round in one way or another.
At the Academy we like Raymond well enough, on the whole--
You see at once how the method applies: I make myself an attendant
there, and I place my age midway between the ages of the other two.
As I say, we liked Raymond well enough, yet did not quite feel that he
coalesced. "Coalesced" was hardly the word we used--such verbal
grandeurs were reserved for our "compositions"; but you know what I
mean. Another point to be made clear without delay is this: that when
Johnny appeared at the Academy, he had lately left behind him the
previous condition of servitude involved in a lodgment above the
landau, the phaeton, and sometimes the cow. His father and mother, as
I saw them and remember them, appeared to be rather nice people.
Perhaps they had lately come from some small country town and had
not been able, at first, to realize themselves and their abilities to the
best advantage in the city. Assuredly his father knew how to drive
horses and to care for them; and he had an intuitive knack for
safeguarding his self-respect. And Johnny's mother was perfectly
competent to cook and to keep house--even above a stable--most neatly.
If Johnny's curtain was rumpled, that was Johnny's own incorrigible
fault. The window-sill was a wide one, and Johnny, I found, used it as a
catch-all. He kept there a few boxes of "bugs," as we called his
pinned-down specimens, and an album of postage-stamps that was
always in a state of metamorphosis. He had some loose stamps too, and
sometimes, late in the afternoon or on Saturdays, we "traded." Johnny's
mother was likely to caution us about her freshly scrubbed floors, and
sometimes gave me a cooky on my leaving. I never heard of
Raymond's having been there.
But presently the trading stopped, and the "bugs," however firmly

pinned down, took their flight. Johnny's father and mother
"moved"--that was the brief, unadorned, sufficing formula. It was all
accepted as inevitable; hardly for a boy a little past twelve, like myself,
to question the movements of Olympian elders; nor even, in fact, to feel
an abiding interest in them when I had seen them but three or four