On the Stairs | Page 6

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