Books: Love, The Fiddler
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Lloyd Osbourne >> Love, The Fiddler
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There was something childlike in the Grossenstecks' confidence in
me; I mean the old people; for it was otherwise with Teresa, with
whom I often quarrelled over my artistic reforms, and who took any
conflict in taste to heart. There were whole days when she would
not speak to me at all, while I, on my side, was equally
obstinate, and all this, if you please, about some miserable
tapestry or a Louise Seize chair or the right light for a picture
of Will Low's. But she was such a sweet girl and so pretty that
one could not be angry with her long, and what with our fights and
our makings up I dare say we made it more interesting to each
other than if we had always agreed. It was only once that our
friendship was put in real jeopardy, and that was when her parents
decided they could not die happy unless we made a match of it.
This was embarrassing for both of us, and for a while she treated
me very coldly. But we had it out together one evening in the
library and decided to let the matter make no difference to us,
going on as before the best of friends. I was the last person to
expect a girl of eighteen to care for a man of forty, particularly
one like myself, ugly and grey-haired, who had long before outworn
the love of women. In fact I had to laugh, one of those sad laughs
that come to us with the years, at the thought of anything so
absurd; and I soon got her to give up her tragic pose and see the
humour of it all as I did. So we treated it as a joke, rallied the
old folks on their sentimental folly, and let it pass.
It set me thinking, however, a great deal about the girl and her
future, and I managed to make interest with several of my friends
and get her invited to some good houses. Of course it was
impossible to carry the old people into this galere. They were
frankly impossible, but fortunately so meek and humble that it
never occurred to them to assert themselves or resent their
daughter going to places where they would have been refused. Uncle
Gingersnaps would have paid money to stay at home, and Mrs.
Grossensteck had too much homely pride to put herself in a false
position. They saw indeed only another reason to be grateful to
me, and another example of my surpassing kindness. Pretty, by no
means a fool, and gowned by the best coutourieres of Paris, Teresa
made quite a hit, and blossomed as girls do in the social
sunshine. The following year, in the whirl of a gay New York
winter, one would scarcely have recognised her as the same person.
She had "made good," as boys say, and had used my stepping-stones
to carry her far beyond my ken. In her widening interests, broader
range, and increased worldly knowledge we became naturally better
friends than ever and met on the common ground of those who led
similar lives. What man would not value the intimacy of a young,
beautiful, and clever woman? in some ways it is better than love
itself, for love is a duel, with wounds given and taken, and its
pleasures dearly paid for. Between Teresa and myself there was no
such disturbing bond, and we were at liberty to be altogether
frank in our intercourse.
One evening when I happened to be dining at the house, the absence
of her father and the indisposition of her mother left us tete-a-
tete in the smoking-room, whither she came to keep me company with
my cigar. I saw that she was restless and with something on her
mind to tell me, but I was too old a stager to force a confidence,
least of all a woman's, and so I waited, said nothing, and blew
smoke rings.
"Hugo," she said, "there is something I wish to speak to you
about."
"I've known that for the last hour, Teresa," I said.
"This is something serious," she said, looking at me strangely.
"Blaze away," I said.
"Hugo," she broke out, "you have been borrowing money from my
father."
I nodded.
"A great deal of money," she went on.
"For him--no," I said. "For me--well, yes."
"Eight or nine hundred dollars," she said.
"Those are about the figures," I returned. "Call it nine hundred."
"Oh, how could you! How could you!" she exclaimed.
I remained silent. In fact I did not know what to say.
"Don't you see the position you're putting yourself in?" she said.
"Position?" I repeated. "What position?"
"It's horrible, it's ignoble," she broke out. "I have always
admired you for the way you kept yourself clear of such an
ambiguous relation--you've known to the fraction of an inch what
to take, what to refuse--to preserve your self-respect--my
respect--unimpaired. And here I see you slipping into degradation.
Oh, Hugo! I can't bear it."
"Is it such a crime to borrow a little money?" I asked.
"Not if you pay it back," she returned. "Not if you mean to pay it
back. But you know you can't. You know you won't!"
"You think it's the thin edge of the wedge?" I said. "The
beginning of the end and all that kind of thing?"
"You will go on," she cried. "You will become a dependent in this
house, a hanger-on, a sponger. I will hate you. You will hate
yourself. It went through me like a knife when I found it out."
I smoked my cigar in silence. I suppose she was quite right--
horribly right, though I didn't like her any better for being so
plain-spoken about it. I felt myself turning red under her gaze.
"What do you want me to do?" I said at length.
"Pay it back," she said.
"I wish to God I could," I said. "But you know how I live, Teresa,
hanging on by the skin of my teeth--hardly able to keep my head
above water, let alone having a dollar to spare."
"Then you can't pay," she said.
"I don't think I can," I returned.
"Then you ought to leave this house," she said.
"You have certainly made it impossible for me to stay, Teresa," I
said.
"I want to make it impossible," she cried. "You--you don't
understand--you think I'm cruel--it's because I like you, Hugo--
it's because you're the one man I admire above anybody in the
world. I'd rather see you starving than dishonoured."
"Thank you for your kind interest," I said ironically. "Under the
circumstances I am almost tempted to wish you admired me less."
"Am I not right?" she demanded.
"Perfectly right," I returned. "Oh, yes! Perfectly right."
"And you'll go," she said.
"Yes, I'll go," I said.
"And earn the money and pay father?" she went on.
"And earn the money and pay father," I repeated.
"And then come back?" she added.
"Never, never, never!" I cried out.
I could see her pale under the lights.
"Oh, Hugo! don't be so ungenerous," she said. "Don't be so--so----"
She hesitated, apparently unable to continue.
"Ungenerous or not," I said, "damn the words, Teresa, this isn't a
time to weigh words. It isn't in flesh and blood to come back. I
can't come back. Put yourself in my place."
"Some day you'll thank me," she said.
"Very possibly," I returned. "Nobody knows what may not happen.
It's conceivable, of course, I might go down on my bended knees,
but really, from the way I feel at this moment, I do not think
it's likely."
"You want to punish me for liking you," she said.
"Teresa," I said, "I have told you already that you are right. You
insist on saving me from a humiliating position. I respect your
courage and your straightforwardness. You remind me of an ancient
Spartan having it out with a silly ass of a stranger who took
advantage of her parents' good-nature. I am as little vain, I
think, as any man, and as free from pettiness and idiotic pride--
but you mustn't ask the impossible. You mustn't expect the whipped
dog to come back. When I go it will be for ever."
"Then go," she said, and looked me straight in the eyes.
"I have only one thing to ask," I said. "Smooth it over to your
father and mother. I am very fond of your father and mother,
Teresa; I don't want them to think I've acted badly, or that I
have ceased to care for them. Tell them the necessary lies, you
know."
"I will tell them," she said.
"Then good-bye," I said, rising. "I suppose I am acting like a
baby to feel so sore. But I am hurt."
"Good-bye, Hugo," she said.
I went to the door and down the stairs. She followed and stood
looking after me the length of the hall as I slowly put on my hat
and coat. That was the last I saw of her, in the shadow of a palm,
her girlish figure outlined against the black behind. I walked
into the street with a heart like lead, and for the first time in
my life I began to feel I was growing old.
I have been from my youth up an easy-going man, a drifter, a
dawdler, always willing to put off work for play. But for once I
pulled myself together, looked things in the face, and put my back
to the wheel. I was determined to repay that nine hundred dollars,
if I had to cut every dinner-party for the rest of the season. I
was determined to repay it, if I had to work as I had never worked
before. My first move was to change my address. I didn't want
Uncle Gingersnaps ferreting me out, and Mrs. Grossensteck weeping
on my shoulder. My next was to cancel my whole engagement book. My
third, to turn over my wares and to rack my head for new ideas.
I had had a long-standing order from Granger's Weekly for a
novelette. I had always hated novelettes, as one had to wait so
long for one's money and then get so little; but in the humour I
then found myself I plunged into the fray, if not with enthusiasm,
at least with a dogged perseverance that was almost as good.
Granger's Weekly liked triviality and dialogue, a lot of fuss
about nothing and a happy ending. I gave it to them in a heaping
measure. Dixie's Monthly, from which I had a short-story order,
set dialect above rubies. I didn't know any dialect, but I
borrowed a year's file and learned it like a lesson. They wrote
and asked me for another on the strength of "The Courting of
Amandar Jane." The Permeator was keen on Kipling and water, and I
gave it to them--especially the water. Like all Southern families
the Dundonalds had once had their day. I had travelled everywhere
when I was a boy, and so I accordingly refreshed my dim memories
with some modern travellers and wrote a short series for The
Little Gentleman; "The Boy in the Carpathians," "The Boy in Old
Louisiana," "A Boy in the Tyrol," "A Boy in London," "A Boy in
Paris," "A Boy at the Louvre," "A Boy in Corsica," "A Boy in the
Reconstruction." I reeled off about twenty of them and sold them
to advantage.
It was a terribly dreary task, and I had moments of revolt when I
stamped up and down my little flat and felt like throwing my
resolution to the winds. But I stuck tight to the ink-bottle and
fought the thing through. My novelette, strange to say, was good.
Written against time and against inclination, it has always been
regarded since as the best thing I ever did, and when published in
book form outran three editions.
I made a thundering lot of money--for me, I mean, and in
comparison to my usual income--seldom under five hundred dollars a
month and often more. In eleven weeks I had repaid Grossensteck
and had a credit in the bank. Nine hundred dollars has always
remained to me as a unit of value, a sum of agonising significance
not lightly to be spoken of, the fruits of hellish industry and
self-denial. All this while I had had never a word from the
Grossenstecks. At least they wrote to me often--telephoned--
telegraphed--and my box at the club was choked with their letters.
But I did not open a single one of them, though I found a pleasure
in turning them over and over, and wondering as to what was within
them. There were several in Teresa's fine hand, and these
interested me most of all and tantalised me unspeakably. There was
one of hers, cunningly addressed to me in a stranger's writing
that I opened inadvertently; but I at once perceived the trick and
had the strength of mind to throw it in the fire unread.
Perhaps you will wonder at my childishness. Sometimes I wondered
at it myself. But the wound still smarted, and something stronger
than I seemed to withhold me from again breaking the ice. Besides,
those long lonely days, and those nights, almost as long in the
retrospect, when I lay sleepless on my bed, had shown me I had
been drifting into another peril no less dangerous than
dependence. I had been thinking too much of the girl for my own
good, and our separation had brought me to a sudden realisation of
how deeply I was beginning to care for her. I hated her, too, the
pitiless wretch, so there was a double reason for me not to go
back.
One night as I had dressed to dine out and stepped into the
street, looking up at the snow that hid the stars and silenced
one's footsteps on the pavement, a woman emerged from the gloom,
and before I knew what she was doing, had caught my arm. I shook
her off, thinking her a beggar or something worse, and would have
passed on my way had she not again struggled to detain me. I
stopped, and was on the point of roughly ordering her to let me
go, when I looked down into her veiled face and saw that it was
Teresa Grossensteck.
"Hugo!" she said. "Hugo!"
I could only repeat her name and regard her helplessly.
"Hugo," she said, "I am cold. Take me upstairs. I am chilled
through and through."
"Oh, but Teresa," I expostulated, "it wouldn't be right. You know
it wouldn't be right. You might be seen."
She laid her hand, her ungloved, icy hand, against my cheek.
"I have been here an hour," she said. "Take me to your rooms. I am
freezing."
I led her up the stairs and to my little apartment. I seated her
before the fire, turned up the lights, and stood and looked at
her.
"What have you come here for?" I said. "I've paid your father--
paid him a month ago."
She made no answer, but spread her hands before the fire and
shivered in the glow. She kept her eyes fixed on the coals in
front of her and put out the tips of her little slippered feet.
Then I perceived that she was in a ball gown and that her arms
were bare under her opera cloak.
At last she broke the silence.
"How cheerless your room is," she said, looking about. "Oh, how
cheerless!"
"Did you come here to tell me that?" I said.
"No," she said. "I don't know why I came. Because I was a fool, I
suppose--a fool to think you'd want to see me. Take me home,
Hugo." She rose as she said this and looked towards the door. I
pressed her to take a little whiskey, for she was still as cold as
death and as white as the snow queen in Hans Andersen's tale, but
she refused to let me give her any.
"Take me home, please," she repeated.
Her carriage was waiting a block away. Hendricks, the footman,
received my order with impassivity and shut us in together with
the unconcern of a good servant. It was dark in the carriage, and
neither of us spoke as we whirled through the snowy streets. Once
the lights of a passing hansom illumined my companion's face and I
saw that she was crying. It pleased me to see her suffer; she had
cost me eleven weeks of misery; why should she escape scot-free!
"Hugo," she said, "are you coming back to us, Hugo?"
"I don't know," I said.
"Why don't you know?" she asked.
"Oh, because!" I said.
"That's no answer," she said.
There was a pause.
"I was beginning to care too much about you," I said. "I think I
was beginning to fall in love with you. I've got out of one false
position. Why should I blunder into another?"
"Would it be a false position to love me?" she said.
"Of course that would a good deal depend on you," I said.
"Suppose I wanted you to," she said.
"Oh, but you couldn't!" I said.
"Why couldn't I?" she said.
"But forty," I objected; "nobody loves anybody who's forty, you
know."
"I do," she said, "though, come to think of it, you were thirty-
nine--when--when it first happened, Hugo."
I put out my arms in the dark and caught her to me. I could not
believe my own good fortune as I felt her trembling and crying
against my breast. I was humbled and ashamed. It was like a dream.
An old fellow like me--forty, you know.
"It was a mighty near thing, Teresa," I said.
"I guess it was--for me!" she said.
"I meant myself, sweetheart," I said.
"For both of us then," she said, in a voice between laughter and
tears, and impulsively put her arms round my neck.
THE AWAKENING OF GEORGE RAYMOND
I
George Raymond's father had been a rich man, rich in those days
before the word millionaire had been invented, and when a modest
hundred thousand, lent out at an interest varying from ten to
fifteen per cent, brought in an income that placed its possessor
on the lower steps of affluence. He was the banker of a small New
Jersey town, a man of portentous respectability, who proffered two
fingers to his poorer clients and spoke about the weather as
though it belonged to him. When the school-children read of
Croesus in their mythology, it was Jacob Raymond they saw in their
mind's eye; such expressions as "rich beyond the dreams of
avarice" suggested him as inevitably as pumpkin did pie; they
wondered doubtfully about him in church when that unfortunate
matter of the camel was brought up with its attendant difficulties
for the wealthy. Even Captain Kidd's treasure, in those times so
actively sought for along the whole stretch of the New England
coast, conjured up a small brick building with "Jacob Raymond,
Banker" in gilt letters above the lintel of the door.
But there came a day when that door stayed locked and a hundred
white faces gathered about it, blocking the village street and
talking in whispers though the noonday sun was shining. Raymond's
bank was insolvent, and the banker himself, a fugitive in tarry
sea clothes, was hauling ropes on a vessel outward bound for
Callao. He might have stayed in Middleborough and braved it out,
for he had robbed no man and his personal honour was untarnished,
having succumbed without dishonesty to primitive methods and lack
of capital. But he chose instead the meaner course of flight. Of
all the reproachful faces he left behind him his wife's was the
one he felt himself the least able to confront; and thus,
abandoning everything, with hardly a dozen dollars in his pocket,
he slipped away to sea, never to be seen or heard of again.
Mrs. Raymond was a woman of forty-five, a New Englander to her
finger-tips, proud, arrogant, and fiercely honest; a woman who
never forgot, never forgave, and who practised her narrow
Christianity with the unrelentingness of an Indian. She lived up
to an austere standard herself, and woe betide those who fell one
whit behind her. She was one of those just persons who would have
cast the first stone at the dictates of conscience and with a sort
of holy joy in her own fitness to do so. For years she had been
the richest woman in Middleborough, the head of everything
charitable and religious, the mainstay of ministers, the court of
final appeal in the case of sinners and backsliders. Now, in a
moment, through no fault of her own, the whole fabric of her life
had crumbled. Again had the mighty fallen.
She had not a spark of pity for her husband. To owe what you could
not pay was to her the height of dishonour. It was theft, and she
had no compunction in giving it the name, however it might be
disguised or palliated. She could see no mitigating circumstances
in Raymond's disgrace, and the fact that she was innocently
involved in his downfall filled her with exasperation. The big old
corner house was her own. She had been born in it. It had been her
marriage portion from her father. She put it straightway under the
hammer; her canal stock with it; her furniture and linen; a row of
five little cottages on the outskirts of the town where five poor
families had found not only that their bodies, but the welfare of
their souls, had been confided to her grim keeping. She stripped
herself of everything, and when all had been made over to the
creditors there still remained a deficit of seventeen hundred
dollars. This debt which was not a debt, for she was under no
legal compulsion to pay a penny of it, would willingly have been
condoned by men already grateful for her generosity; but she would
hear of no such compromise, not even that her notes be free of
interest, and she gave them at five per cent, resolute that in
time she would redeem them to the uttermost farthing.
Under these sudden changes of fortune it is seldom that the
sufferer remains amid the ruins of past prosperity. The human
instinct is to fly and hide. The wound heals more readily amongst
strangers. The material evils of life are never so intolerable as
the public loss of caste. It may be said that it is people, not
things, which cause most of the world's unhappiness. Mrs. Raymond
came to New York, where she had not a friend except the son she
brought with her, there to set herself with an undaunted heart to
earn the seventeen hundred dollars she had voluntarily taken on
her shoulders to repay.
George Raymond, her son, was then a boy of fifteen. High-strung,
high-spirited, with all the seriousness of a youngster who had
prematurely learned to think for himself, he had arrived at the
age when ineffaceable impressions are made and the tendencies of a
lifetime decided. Passionately attached to his father, he had lost
him in a way that would have made death seem preferable. He saw
his mother, so shortly before the great lady of a little town,
working out like a servant in other people's houses. The tragedy
of it all ate into his soul and overcame him with a sense of
hopelessness and despair. It would not have been so hard could he
have helped, even in a small way, towards the recovery of their
fortunes; but his mother, faithful even in direst poverty to her
New England blood, sent him to school, determined that at any
sacrifice he should finish his education. But by degrees Mrs.
Raymond drifted into another class of work. She became a nurse,
and, in a situation where her conscientiousness was invaluable,
slowly established a connection that in time kept her constantly
busy. She won the regard of an important physician, and not only
won it but kept it, and thus little by little found her way into
good houses, where she was highly paid and treated with
consideration.
Had it not been for the seventeen hundred dollars and the five per
cent interest upon it, she could have earned enough to keep
herself and her son very comfortable in the three rooms they
occupied on Seventh Street. But this debt, ever present in the
minds of both mother and son, hung over them like a cloud and took
every penny there was to spare. Those two years from fifteen to
seventeen were the most terrible in Raymond's life. At an age when
he possessed neither philosophy nor knowledge and yet the fullest
capacity to suffer, he had to bear, with what courage he could
muster, the crudest buffets of an adverse fate.
Raymond drudged at his books, passed from class to class and
returned at night to the empty rooms he called home, where he
cooked his own meals and sat solitary beside the candle until it
was the hour for bed. His mother was seldom there to greet him. As
a nurse she was kept prisoner, for weeks at a time, in the houses
where she was engaged. It meant much to the boy to find a note
from her lying on the table when he returned at night; more still
to wait at street corners in his shabby overcoat for those
appointments she often made with him. When she took infectious
cases and dared neither write nor speak to him, they had an hour
planned beforehand when she would smile at him from an open window
and wave her hand.
But she was not invariably busy. There were intervals between her
engagements when she remained at home; when those rooms,
ordinarily so lonely and still, took on a wonderful brightness
with her presence; when Raymond, coming back from school late in
the afternoon, ran along the streets singing, as he thought of his
mother awaiting him. This stern woman, the harsh daughter of a
harsh race, had but a single streak of tenderness in her withered
heart. To her son she gave transcendent love, and the whole of her
starved nature went out to him in immeasurable devotion. Their
poverty, the absence of all friends, the burden of debt, the
unacknowledged disgrace, and (harder still to bear) the long and
enforced separations from each other, all served to draw the pair
into the closest intimacy. Raymond grew towards manhood without
ever having met a girl of his own age; without ever having had a
chum; without knowing the least thing of youth save much of its
green-sickness and longing.
When the great debt had been paid off and the last of the notes
cancelled there came no corresponding alleviation of their
straitened circumstances. Raymond had graduated from the High
School and was taking the medical course at Columbia University.
Every penny was put by for the unavoidable expenses of his
tuition. The mother, shrewd, ambitious, and far-seeing, was
staking everything against the future, and was wise enough to
sacrifice the present in order to launch her son into a
profession. In those days fresh air had not been discovered.
Athletics, then in their infancy, were regarded much as we now do
prize-fighting. The ideal student was a pale individual who wore
out the night with cold towels around his head, and who had a
bigger appetite for books than for meat. Docile, unquestioning,
knowing no law but his mother's wish; eager to earn her
commendation and to repay with usury the immense sacrifices she
had made for him, Raymond worked himself to a shadow with study,
and at nineteen was a tall, thin, narrow-shouldered young man with
sunken cheeks and a preternatural whiteness of complexion.
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