第113章

Maude surrendered,as one who gives way to the inevitable.When the actual building began we both of us experienced,I think;a certain mild excitement;and walked out there,sometimes with the children,in the spring evenings,and on Sunday afternoons."Excitement"is,perhaps,too strong a word for my feelings:there was a pleasurable anticipation on my part,a looking forward to a more decorous,a more luxurious existence;a certain impatience at the delays inevitable in building.But a new legal commercial enterprise of magnitude began to absorb me at his time,and somehow the building of this home--the first that we possessed was not the event it should have been;there were moments when I felt cheated,when I wondered what had become of that capacity for enjoyment which in my youth had been so keen.I remember indeed,one grey evening when Iwent there alone,after the workmen had departed,and stood in the litter of mortar and bricks and boards gazing at the completed front of the house.It was even larger than I had imagined it from the plans;in the Summer twilight there was an air about it,--if not precisely menacing,at least portentous,with its gaping windows and towering roof.I was a little tired from a hard day;I had the odd feeding of having raised up something with which--momentarily at least--I doubted my ability to cope:

something huge,impersonal;something that ought to have represented a fireside,a sanctuary,and yet was the embodiment of an element quite alien to the home;a restless element with which our American atmosphere had,by invisible degrees,become charged.As I stared at it,the odd fancy seized me that the building somehow typified my own career....Ihad gained something,in truth,but had I not also missed something?

something a different home would have embodied?

Maude and the children had gone,to the seaside.

With a vague uneasiness I turned away from the contemplation of those walls.The companion mansions were closed,their blinds tightly drawn;the neighbourhood was as quiet as the country,save for a slight but persistent noise that impressed itself on my consciousness.I walked around the house to spy in the back yard;a young girl rather stealthily gathering laths,and fragments of joists and flooring,and loading them into a child's express-wagon.She started when she saw me.She was little,more than a child,and the loose calico dress she wore seemed to emphasize her thinness.She stood stock-still,staring at me with frightened yet defiant eyes.I,too,felt a strange timidity in her presence.

"Why do you stop?"I asked at length.

"Say,is this your heap?"she demanded.

I acknowledged it.A hint of awe widened her eyes.Then site glanced at the half-filled wagon.

"This stuff ain't no use to you,is it?"

"No,I'm glad to have you take it."

She shifted to the other foot,but did not continue her gathering.An impulse seized me,I put down my walkingstick and began picking up pieces of wood,flinging them into the wagon.I looked at her again,rather furtively;she had not moved.Her attitude puzzled me,for it was one neither of surprise nor of protest.The spectacle of the "millionaire"owner of the house engaged in this menial occupation gave her no thrills.

I finished the loading.

"There!"I said,and drew a dollar bill out of my pocket and gave it to her.Even then she did not thank me,but took up the wagon tongue and went off,leaving on me a disheartening impression of numbness,of life crushed out.I glanced up once more at the mansion I had built for myself looming in the dusk,and walked hurriedly away....

One afternoon some three weeks after we had moved into the new house,Icame out of the Club,where I had been lunching in conference with Scherer and two capitalists from New York.It was after four o'clock,the day was fading,the street lamps were beginning to cast sickly streaks of jade-coloured light across the slush of the pavements.It was the sight of this slush (which for a brief half hour that morning had been pure snow,and had sent Matthew and Moreton and Biddy into ecstasies at the notion of a "real Christmas"),that brought to my mind the immanence of the festival,and the fact that I had as yet bought no presents.Such was the predicament in which I usually found myself on Christmas eve;and it was not without a certain sense of annoyance at the task thus abruptly confronting me that I got into my automobile and directed the chauffeur to the shopping district.The crowds surged along the wet sidewalks and overflowed into the street,and over the heads of the people I stared at the blazing shop-windows decked out in Christmas greens.My chauffeur,a bristly-haired Parisian,blew his horn insolently,men and women jostled each other to get out of the way,their holiday mood giving place to resentment as they stared into the windows of the limousine.With the American inability to sit still I shifted from one corner of the seat to another,impatient at the slow progress of the machine:and I felt a certain contempt for human beings,that they should make all this fuss,burden themselves with all these senseless purchases,for a tradition.The automobile stopped,and I fought my way across the sidewalk into the store of that time-honoured firm,Elgin,Yates and Garner,pausing uncertainly before the very counter where,some ten years before,I had bought an engagement ring.Young Mr.Garner himself spied me,and handing over a customer to a tired clerk,hurried forward to greet me,his manner implying that my entrance was in some sort an event.I had become used to this aroma of deference.

"What can I show you,Mr.Paret?"he asked.

"I don't know--I'm looking around,"I said,vaguely,bewildered by the glittering baubles by which I was confronted.What did Maude want?