On the Stairs | Page 8

a new stamp-album, he
wanted it hard, and he said so. I shall not go so far as to say that he
hectored his parents into sending him to our school. They were
probably feeling, on their own account, that they had come to town for
better things than they had been getting; and likely enough they met his
demands halfway. There was usually a certain element of cheeriness in
his nagging; but the cheeriness was quite secondary to the insistence.
"Oh, come, mother!" or, "Oh, father, now!" was commonly Johnny's
opening formula, employed with a smile, wheedling or protesting, as
the occasion seemed to require.
And, "Oh, well...!" was commonly the opening formula for the
response--meaning, in completed form, "Well, if we must, we must."
However, his parents were probably ready to meet with an open mind
the scorings of their young, sole critic, thinking that his urgency might
advance themselves no less than him. Well, in the autumn Johnny
turned up at the Academy with an equipment that included everything
approved and needed; and he was not long in letting us know that his
father was manager in the supply-yard of a large firm of contractors
and builders. His father had spent his earlier married years, it transpired,
about the grounds of a small-town "depot," and knew a good deal in

regard to lumber and cement.
To most of us fathers were fathers and businesses were
businesses--things to be accepted without comment or criticism. Our
own youthfulness, and the social tone of the day and region,
discouraged either. If I thought anything about it, I must have thought,
as I think still, that it was a manly and satisfying matter to come to
grips with the serviceable actualities of the building trades.
Construction, in its various phases, still seems to me a more useful and
more tonic concern than brokerage, for example, and similar forms of
office life.
Johnny soon suggested that I go with him, some Saturday afternoon, to
the "yard." I asked Raymond to join us. Raymond had just come on
Gothic architecture and was studying its historical phases. He was
picking up points about the English cathedrals and was making
drawings to illustrate the development of buttresses and of window
tracery. The yard was only a mile and a half away and the three of us
frolicked loosely along the streets until we got there. Johnny's father
was going about the place in an admirable pair of new blue overalls,
and carried a thick, blunt pencil behind one ear. He showed an
independent, breezy manner that had not been very marked before. He
was loud and clear and authoritative, and kept a dozen or more stout
fellows pretty busy. Once an elderly man in a high silk hat passed
through the yard on his way to its little office. He stopped, and he and
Johnny's father had some talk together. "Yes, sir!" said Johnny's father,
with considerable emphasis and momentum. I enjoyed his "Yes, sir!" It
was pleasant to find him so hearty and so well-mannered. He seemed to
have escaped from something and to be glad of it. The man in the high
hat hardly tried to stand up against him. As he turned away he smiled in
a curious fashion; and I thought I heard him say to himself, as he
moved back toward the door of the shed that had the sign "Office" on it:
"I wonder whether I'm going to run him, or whether he's going to run
me?"
Johnny was all eyes for a tall stack of lathing in bundles and for a pile
of sacks filled with hair from cows' hides, which last was to go into

plaster. Raymond looked at these objects of interest--and at several
others--with some degree of abstractedness. The English cathedrals, as
I was told later, had not been plastered. Raymond had already
developed some faculty for entertaining a concept freed from clogging
and qualifying detail; and this faculty grew as he grew. He liked his
ideal net; facts, practical facts, never had much charm for him. I
remember his once saying, when about twenty-three, that he should
have liked to be an architect, but that plumbing and speaking-tubes had
turned him away. If he could have drawn façades and stopped there, I
think he might have been quite happy and successful in the profession.
Johnny pulled a lath for each of us out of one of the bundles, and we
used them in our tour of the yard as alpenstocks. We found a glacier in
the shape of a mortar bed and were using the laths to sound its depths,
when Johnny's father appeared from round the corner of a lumber pile.
He clapped his hands with a loud report.
"Here! that won't do!" he said;