 | Tales of the jazz age |  |
IV
The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve
before the passive mind as one unexplained, confusing
merry-go-round. True, they are a merry-go-round of
ill-gaited and wind-broken horses, painted first in pastel
colors, then in dull grays and browns, but perplexing
and intolerably dizzy the thing is, as never were the
merry-go-rounds of childhood or adolescence, as never,
surely, were the certain-coursed, dynamic roller-coasters
of youth. For most men and women these thirty years
are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life, a retreat
first from a front with many shelters, those myriad
amusements and curiosities of youth, to a line with less,
when we peel down our ambitions to one ambition, our
whom we are anæsthetic; ending up at last in a solitary,
desolate strong point that is not strong, where the
shells now whistle abominably, now are but half-heard
as, by turns frightened and tired, we sit waiting for
death.
At forty, then, Merlin was no different from himself
at thirty-five; a larger paunch, a gray twinkling near
his ears, a more certain lack of vivacity in his walk.
His forty-five differed from his forty by a like margin,
unless one mention a slight deafness in his left ear.
But at fifty-five the process had become a chemical
change of immense rapidity. Yearly he was more and
more an "old man" to his family—senile almost, so far
as his wife was concerned. He was by this time complete
owner of the bookshop. The mysterious Mr.
Moonlight Quill, dead some five years and not survived
by his wife, had deeded the whole stock and store to
him, and there he still spent his days, conversant now
by name with almost all that man has recorded for three
thousand years, a human catalogue, an authority upon
tooling and binding, upon folios and first editions, an
accurate inventory of a thousand authors whom he could
never have understood and had certainly never read.
At sixty-five he distinctly doddered. He had assumed
the melancholy habits of the aged so often portrayed
by the second old man in standard Victorian comedies.
He consumed vast warehouses of time searching for mislaid
spectacles. He "nagged" his wife and was nagged
in turn. He told the same jokes three or four times a
year at the family table, and gave his son weird, impossible
directions as to his conduct in life. Mentally and
materially he was so entirely different from the Merlin
Grainger of twenty-five that it seemed incongruous that
he should bear the same name.
He worked still in the bookshop with the assistance
of a youth, whom, of course, he considered very idle,
indeed, and a new young woman, Miss Gaffney. Miss
McCracken, ancient and unvenerable as himself, still
kept the accounts. Young Arthur was gone into Wall
Street to sell bonds, as all the young men seemed to be
doing in that day. This, of course, was as it should be.
Let old Merlin get what magic he could from his books—
the place of young King Arthur was in the countinghouse.
One afternoon at four when he had slipped noiselessly
up to the front of the store on his soft-soled slippers,
led by a newly formed habit, of which, to be fair, he
was rather ashamed, of spying upon the young man
clerk, he looked casually out of the front window, straining
his faded eyesight to reach the street. A limousine,
large, portentous, impressive, had drawn to the curb, and
the chauffeur, after dismounting and holding some sort
of conversation with persons in the interior of the car,
turned about and advanced in a bewildered fashion
toward the entrance of the Moonlight Quill. He opened
the door, shuffled in, and, glancing uncertainly at the old
man in the skull-cap, addressed him in a thick, murky
voice, as though his words came through a fog.
"Do you—do you sell additions?"
Merlin nodded.
"The arithmetic books are in the back of the store."
The chauffeur took off his cap and scratched a close-cropped,
fuzzy head.
"Oh, naw. This I want's a detecatif story." He jerked
a thumb back toward the limousine. "She seen it in
the paper. Firs' addition."
Merlin's interest quickened. Here was possibly a
big sale.
"Oh, editions. Yes, we've advertised some firsts,
title?"
"I forget. About a crime."
"About a crime. I have—well, I have `The Crimes
of the Borgias'—full morocco, London 1769, beautifully—"
"Naw," interrupted the chauffeur, "this was one fella
did this crime. She seen you had it for sale in the
paper." He rejected several possible titles with the air
of connoisseur.
" `Silver Bones,' " he announced suddenly out of a
slight pause.
"What?" demanded Merlin, suspecting that the stiffness
of his sinews were being commented on.
"Silver Bones. That was the guy that done the
crime."
"Silver Bones?"
"Silver Bones. Indian, maybe."
Merlin stroked his grizzly cheeks.
"Gees, Mister," went on the prospective purchaser,
"if you wanna save me an awful bawlin' out jes' try an'
think. The old lady goes wile if everything don't run
smooth."
But Merlin's musings on the subject of Silver Bones
were as futile as his obliging search through the shelves,
and five minutes later a very dejected charioteer wound
his way back to his mistress. Through the glass Merlin
could see the visible symbols of a tremendous uproar
going on in the interior of the limousine. The chauffeur
made wild, appealing gestures of his innocence, evidently
to no avail, for when he turned around and climbed
back into the driver's seat his expression was not a little
dejected.
Then the door of the limousine opened and gave forth
a pale and slender young man of about twenty, dressed
cane. He entered the shop, walked past Merlin, and
proceeded to take out a cigarette and light it. Merlin
approached him.
"Anything I can do for you, sir?"
"Old boy," said the youth coolly, "there are seveereal
things. You can first let me smoke my ciggy in here out
of sight of that old lady in the limousine, who happens
to be my grandmother. Her knowledge as to whether
I smoke it or not before my majority happens to be a
matter of five thousand dollars to me. The second thing
is that you should look up your first edition of the
`Crime of Sylvester Bonnard' that you advertised in
last Sunday's Times. My grandmother there happens
to want to take it off your hands."
Detecatif story! Crime of somebody! Silver Bones!
All was explained. With a faint deprecatory chuckle,
as if to say that he would have enjoyed this had life
put him in the habit of enjoying anything, Merlin doddered
away to the back of his shop where his treasures
were kept, to get this latest investment which he had
picked up rather cheaply at the sale of a big collection.
When he returned with it the young man was drawing
on his cigarette and blowing out quantities of smoke
with immense satisfaction.
"My God!" he said. "She keeps me so close to her
the entire day running idiotic errands that this happens
to be my first puff in six hours. What's the world coming
to, I ask you, when a feeble old lady in the milk-toast
era can dictate to a man as to his personal vices? I
happen to be unwilling to be so dictated to. Let's see
the book."
Merlin passed it to him tenderly and the young man,
after opening it with a carelessness that gave a momentary
jump to the book-dealer's heart, ran through
the pages with his thumb.
"No illustrations, eh?" he commented. "Well, old
boy, what's it worth? Speak up! We're willing to
give you a fair price, though why I don't know."
"One hundred dollars," said Merlin with a frown.
The young man gave a startled whistle.
"Whew! Come on. You're not dealing with somebody
from the cornbelt. I happen to be a city-bred
man and my grandmother happens to be a city-bred
woman, though I'll admit it'd take a special tax appropriation
to keep her in repair. We'll give you twenty-five
dollars, and let me tell you that's liberal. We've
got books in our attic, up in our attic with my old playthings,
that were written before the old boy that wrote
this was born."
Merlin stiffened, expressing a rigid and meticulous
horror.
"Did your grandmother give you twenty-five dollars
to buy this with?"
"She did not. She gave me fifty, but she expects
change. I know that old lady."
"You tell her," said Merlin with dignity, "that she
has missed a very great bargain."
"Give you forty," urged the young man. "Come on
now—be reasonable and don't try to hold us up—"
Merlin had wheeled around with the precious volume
under his arm and was about to return it to its special
drawer in his office when there was a sudden interruption.
With unheard-of magnificence the front door
burst rather than swung open, and admitted into the
dark interior a regal apparition in black silk and fur
which bore rapidly down upon him. The cigarette
leaped from the fingers of the urban young man and he
gave breath to an inadvertent "Damn!"—but it was
upon Merlin that the entrance seemed to have the most
remarkable and incongruous effect—so strong an effect
that the greatest treasure of his shop slipped from his
stood Caroline.
She was an old woman, an old woman remarkably
preserved, unusually handsome, unusually erect, but
still an old woman. Her hair was a soft, beautiful
white, elaborately dressed and jewelled; her face, faintly
rouged à la grande dame, showed webs of wrinkles at
the edges of her eyes and two deeper lines in the form of
stanchions connected her nose with the corners of her
mouth. Her eyes were dim, ill natured, and querulous.
But it was Caroline without a doubt: Caroline's features
though in decay; Caroline's figure, if brittle and
stiff in movement; Caroline's manner, unmistakably
compounded of a delightful insolence and an enviable
self assurance; and, most of all, Caroline's voice, broken
and shaky, yet with a ring in it that still could and did
make chauffeurs want to drive laundry wagons and
cause cigarettes to fall from the fingers of urban grandsons.
She stood and sniffed. Her eyes found the cigarette
upon the floor.
"What's that?" she cried. The words were not a
question—they were an entire litany of suspicion, accusation,
confirmation, and decision. She tarried over
them scarcely an instant. "Stand up!" she said to her
grandson, "stand up and blow that nicotine out of your
lungs!"
The young man looked at her in trepidation.
"Blow!" she commanded.
He pursed his lips feebly and blew into the air.
"Blow!" she repeated, more peremptorily than before.
He blew again, helplessly, ridiculously.
"Do you realize," she went on briskly, "that you've
forfeited five thousand dollars in five minutes?"
Merlin momentarily expected the young man to fall
nature that he remained standing—even blew
again into the air, partly from nervousness, partly, no
doubt, with some vague hope of reingratiating himself.
"Young ass!" cried Caroline. "Once more, just
once more and you leave college and go to work."
This threat had such an overwhelming effect upon
the young man that he took on an even paler pallor than
was natural to him. But Caroline was not through.
"Do you think I don't know what you and your
brothers, yes, and your asinine father too, think of me?
Well, I do. You think I'm senile. You think I'm
soft. I'm not!" She struck herself with her fist as
though to prove that she was a mass of muscle and
sinew. "And I'll have more brains left when you've
got me laid out in the drawing-room some sunny day
than you and the rest of them were born with."
"But Grandmother—"
"Be quiet. You, a thin little stick of a boy, who if it
weren't for my money might have risen to be a journeyman
barber out in the Bronx—Let me see your hands.
Ugh! The hands of a barber—you presume to be smart
with me, who once had three counts and a bona-fide duke,
not to mention half a dozen papal titles pursue me from
the city of Rome to the city of New York." She paused,
took breath. "Stand up! Blow!"
The young man obediently blew. Simultaneously
the door opened and an excited gentleman of middle age
who wore a coat and hat trimmed with fur, and seemed,
moreover, to be trimmed with the same sort of fur himself
on upper lip and chin, rushed into the store and up
to Caroline.
"Found you at last," he cried. "Been looking for
you all over town. Tried your house on the 'phone and
called the Moonlight—"
Caroline turned to him irritably.
"Do I employ you for your reminiscences?" she
snapped. "Are you my tutor or my broker?"
"Your broker," confessed the fur-trimmed man, taken
somewhat aback. "I beg your pardon. I came about
that phonograph stock. I can sell for a hundred and
five."
"Then do it."
"Very well. I thought I'd better—"
"Go sell it. I'm talking to my grandson."
"Very well. I—"
"Good-by."
"Good-by, Madame." The fur-trimmed man made
a slight bow and hurried in some confusion from the
shop.
"As for you," said Caroline, turning to her grandson,
"you stay just where you are and be quiet."
She turned to Merlin and included his entire length
in a not unfriendly survey. Then she smiled and he
found himself smiling too. In an instant they had both
broken into a cracked but none the less spontaneous
chuckle. She seized his arm and hurried him to the
other side of the store. There they stopped, faced each
other, and gave vent to another long fit of senile glee.
"It's the only way," she gasped in a sort of triumphant
malignity. "The only thing that keeps old folks like
me happy is the sense that they can make other people
step around. To be old and rich and have poor descendants
is almost as much fun as to be young and
beautiful and have ugly sisters."
"Oh, yes," chuckled Merlin. "I know. I envy you."
She nodded, blinking.
"The last time I was in here, forty years ago," she
your heels."
"I was," he confessed.
"My visit must have meant a good deal to you."
"You have all along," he exclaimed. "I thought—I
used to think at first that you were a real person—
human, I mean."
She laughed.
"Many men have thought me inhuman."
"But now," continued Merlin excitedly, "I understand.
Understanding is allowed to us old people—
after nothing much matters. I see now that on a certain
night when you danced upon a table-top you were
nothing but my romantic yearning for a beautiful and
perverse woman."
Her old eyes were far away, her voice no more than
the echo of a forgotten dream.
"How I danced that night! I remember."
"You were making an attempt at me. Olive's arms
were closing about me and you warned me to be free and
keep my measure of youth and irresponsibility. But
it seemed like an effect gotten up at the last moment.
It came too late."
"You are very old," she said inscrutably. "I did not
realize."
"Also I have not forgotten what you did to me when
I was thirty-five. You shook me with that traffic tie-up.
It was a magnificent effort. The beauty and power you
radiated! You became personified even to my wife, and
she feared you. For weeks I wanted to slip out of the
house at dark and forget the stuffiness of life with music
and cocktails and a girl to make me young. But then
—I no longer knew how."
"And now you are so very old."
With a sort of awe she moved back and away from him.
"Yes, leave me!" he cried. "You are old also; the
spirit withers with the skin. Have you come here only
to tell me something I had best forget: that to be old
and poor is perhaps more wretched than to be old and
rich; to remind me that my son hurls my gray failure in
my face?"
"Give me my book," she commanded harshly. "Be
quick, old man!"
Merlin looked at her once more and then patiently
obeyed. He picked up the book and handed it to her,
shaking his head when she offered him a bill.
"Why go through the farce of paying me? Once
you made me wreck these very premises."
"I did," she said in anger, "and I'm glad. Perhaps
there had been enough done to ruin me."
She gave him a glance, half disdain, half ill-concealed
uneasiness, and with a brisk word to her urban grandson
moved toward the door.
Then she was gone—out of his shop—out of his life.
The door clicked. With a sigh he turned and walked
brokenly back toward the glass partition that enclosed
the yellowed accounts of many years as well as the mellowed,
wrinkled Miss McCracken.
Merlin regarded her parched, cobwebbed face with
an odd sort of pity. She, at any rate, had had less from
life than he. No rebellious, romantic spirit cropping out
unbidden had, in its memorable moments, given her life
a zest and a glory.
Then Miss McCracken looked up and spoke to him:
"Still a spunky old piece, isn't she?"
Merlin started.
"Who?"
"Old Alicia Dare. Mrs. Thomas Allerdyce she is
now, of course; has been these thirty years."
"What? I don't understand you." Merlin sat down
suddenly in his swivel chair; his eyes were wide.
"Why, surely, Mr. Grainger, you can't tell me that
you've forgotten her, when for ten years she was the
most notorious character in New York. Why, one time
when she was the corespondent in the Throckmorton
divorce case she attracted so much attention on Fifth
Avenue that there was a traffic tie-up. Didn't you read
about it in the papers."
"I never used to read the papers." His ancient brain
was whirring.
"Well, you can't have forgotten the time she came in
here and ruined the business. Let me tell you I came
near asking Mr. Moonlight Quill for my salary, and
clearing out."
"Do you mean that—that you saw her?"
"Saw her! How could I help it with the racket
that went on. Heaven knows Mr. Moonlight Quill
didn't like it either, but of course he didn't say anything.
He was daffy about her and she could twist him around
her little finger. The second he opposed one of her whims
she'd threaten to tell his wife on him. Served him right.
The idea of that man falling for a pretty adventuress!
Of course he was never rich enough for her, even though
the shop paid well in those days."
"But when I saw her," stammered Merlin, "that is,
when I thought I saw her, she lived with her mother."
"Mother, trash!" said Miss McCracken indignantly.
"She had a woman there she called `Aunty' who was no
more related to her than I am. Oh, she was a bad one
—but clever. Right after the Throckmorton divorce
case she married Thomas Allerdyce, and made herself
secure for life."
"Who was she?" cried Merlin. "For God's sake what
was she—a witch?"
"Why, she was Alicia Dare, the dancer, of course.
In those days you couldn't pick up a paper without finding
her picture."
Merlin sat very quiet, his brain suddenly fatigued
and stilled. He was an old man now indeed, so old that
it was impossible for him to dream of ever having been
young, so old that the glamour was gone out of the world,
passing not into the faces of children and into the persistent
comforts of warmth and life, but passing out of
the range of sight and feeling. He was never to smile
again or to sit in a long reverie when spring evenings
wafted the cries of children in at his window until gradually
they became the friends of his boyhood out there,
urging him to come and play before the last dark came
down. He was too old now even for memories.
That night he sat at supper with his wife and son, who
had used him for their blind purposes. Olive said:
"Don't sit there like a death's-head. Say something."
"Let him sit quiet," growled Arthur. "If you encourage
him he'll tell us a story we've heard a hundred
times before."
Merlin went up-stairs very quietly at nine o'clock.
When he was in his room and had closed the door tight
he stood by it for a moment, his thin limbs trembling.
He knew now that he had always been a fool.
"O Russet Witch!"
But it was too late. He had angered Providence by
resisting too many temptations. There was nothing
left but heaven, where he would meet only those who,
like him, had wasted earth.
| Tales of the jazz age | |