on the day that the silver-laced maple, then in fullest leaf, had passed by the space of three delicate palm-shaped banners the sill of the third-story office window, lessing, of weatheral, lessing & co., brokers in real estate, crossed over to his partner's desk before sitting down at his own, and remained quietly leaning against it and looking out of the window without a word. he remained there staring out over the new, orderly growth of the suburb, toward the river, until the stenographer from the outer room had come in with the vase which she had been filling with great golden roses, and gone out again, after placing it carefully in the exact middle of the top of the junior partner's desk.[pg 108] by that time lessing's rather plump, practical hand had crept out along the rim of the desk until it was covered by peter's lean one, and still neither of them had said a word. the roses had come in from lessing's country place that morning in lessing's car, and lessing's wife had gathered them. there were exactly seventeen, full-blown and fragrant, and one small bud of promise which peter presently removed from its vase to his button hole. the act had almost the significance of a ritual, a thing done many times with particular meaning.
"somehow," peter said as he fastened it with a pin underneath his lapel, "seventeen years seems a shorter time to look back on than to look forward to."
"well, when we've put twenty-five years of work into it—and that's nothing to what we'll get into the next seventeen." lessing's tone keyed admirably with the bright ample day outside, the rapid glint of the river and the tips of the maple all a-tremble with the urgency of new growth. the senior partner's eye roved from that to the restrained richness of the office[pg 109] furniture from which the new was not yet worn, and returned to the contemplation of the towering white cumuli beginning to pile up beyond the farther bank of the river. "there's no end to what a man can lift," he asserted confidently, "once he's got his feet under him."
"we've carried a lot," peter assented cheerfully, "and sometimes it was rather steep going, but now it's carrying us. the question is"—and here his voice fell off a shade and a slight gathering appeared between his eyes—"the real question is, i suppose, what it is carrying us to."
"where's the good of that?" julian protested. "it's only a limitation to set out for a particular place. the fun is in the going. you keep right along with the procession until old age gets you. the thing is just to keep it up as long as you can." he swung himself into a sitting posture on the edge of the desk and noted that the slight pucker had not left his partner's eyes. "what's the idea?" he wished affectionately to know.
"oh, nothing much, but i sort of grew up with the idea of duty—something you had to do because there was nobody else to do it.[pg 110] you had not only to do it but you had to like it, not because it was likable, but because it was your duty. it was always right in front of me: i couldn't see over or around it; i just had to do it."
"well, you did it," lessing corroborated. "clarice says the way you've taken care of ellen——"
"and the way ellen has taken care of me—but then ellen was all the woman i had." he caught himself up swiftly after that; it was seldom even to his partner that anything escaped him in reference to the interior life of dreams which had gone on in him, quite happily behind his undistinguished exterior. "but somehow it hasn't seemed to come out anywhere. i've done my duty ... and when i'm dead and ellen's dead, where is it? after all, what have i done?"
"ah, look at pleasanton," julian reminded him; "do you call that nothing?" they looked together toward the esplanade along the river, beginning at this hour to be flecked with the white aprons of nurse-maids and their charges. "we've given them clean water to drink and[pg 111] clean streets, and a safe place for the children to play in. the fight we had with the city council for that ...!" he waved his arm again toward the well-parked river front. "ever since i sold your farm for you and you began putting your money into the business, we've walked right along with it. even before you left siegel brothers and we used to sit up nights with the map, planning where to put our money like a checker-board, we saw things like this for the town, and now we've made 'em true. and you say we've done nothing!" the senior partner was touched a little in his tenderest susceptibilities.
"oh, well," peter admitted with a shamed laugh, "i suppose man is an incurable egotist. i was thinking of something more personal, something mine, the way a book or a picture belongs to the man who makes it."
"the game isn't over yet," lessing reminded him, with a glance at the unfolding bud which clarice had sent as a symbol of the opening year; "you're only forty. and, anyway, the money's yours; you made it." something in the word recalled him to a thought that had[pg 112] been earlier in his mind. "clarice wanted me to ask you to-day if you had any idea how much you are worth."
peter's attention came back from the window with a start. "does that mean the fresh air fund or the association for the protection of ownerless pups?"
julian grinned. "ownerless bachelors rather. clarice has an idea you are well enough off to marry."
"if it were a proposition of my being married to clarice i should consider myself well enough off without anything else——" peter dropped the light, accustomed banter for a sober tone. "how well off does your wife think i ought to be?"
"she's got it figured out that all you've spent on making ellen comfortable for life isn't a patch on what she and the boys cost me, so it's high time you set about your natural destiny of making some woman happy."
"look here, julian, is it an object for a man to live for, making some woman happy?"
"well, it keeps you on the jump all right," lessing assured him. "what else is there?[pg 113] it's a way of making yourself happy when you come to look at it; keeping her and the kids so that you leave the world better off than you found it. it suits me." he was looking, indeed, particularly well suited, in spite of a disposition to portliness and a suspicion of thinning hair, with what the seventeen years just past had brought him. a warm appreciation of what those things were touched his regard for his companion with a sober affectionateness. "i reckon clarice is right: a wife and a couple of kids is the prescription for your case. that's why she wanted me to remind you that you could afford 'em."
"and has she named the day?" peter wished to know whimsically.
"oh, i say, weatheral——"
"my dear julian, if i hadn't been able to see what clarice has been up to for the last six months, at least i could have depended on ellen to see it for me."
"she doesn't object, does she?"
"oh, if you think the privilege of being aunt to your children has made up to her for not being aunt to mine——"[pg 114]
"the privilege is on the other side. but anyway, i'm glad you got on to it. i didn't want to be a spoil sport. i suppose women's instincts can be trusted in these things, but i hated to see clarice coming it over you blind."
peter wondered to himself a little, which of the charming ladies to whom he had been introduced lately, clarice had selected for him. he wasn't, however, concerned about her coming it blind over anybody but the senior partner who got down now from the desk, whistling softly and walking with a wide step as a man will in june when affairs go well with him, and he feels that if there are still some things which he desires he is able to get them for himself.
"don't forget you're coming to us on saturday; and we dine together to-night as usual."
"as usual." always on the anniversary of their beginning business together weatheral and lessing, who were still, in spite of seeing one another daily for seventeen years, able to be interested in one another, dined apart from their families, savouring pleasantly that essential essence of maleness, the mutual power of work well accomplished. it was the best tribute[pg 115] that clarice and ellen could pay to the occasion that they understood that, much as their several lives had profited by the partnership, they were still and naturally outside of it.
on this occasion, however, it was impossible for peter to keep mrs. lessing out of the background of his consciousness, because of the part her suggestion of the morning played in new realization of himself as the rich mr. weatheral of pleasanton. he credited her with sufficient knowledge of his character to have egged julian on to the reminder as a part of the game she had played with him for the past two or three years, by which peter was to be instated in a life more in keeping with his opportunities.
it was a game clarice played with life everywhere, coaxing it to yield its choicest bloom to her. she had an instinct for choiceness like a hummingbird, darting here and there for sweetness. her flutterings were never of uncertainty but such as kept her in the perfect airy poise. if she wanted marriage for peter it was because she could imagine nothing better for anybody than a marriage like hers, and if[pg 116] she chose this time for letting him know that she was thinking of it, it was because in those terms she could bring closest to him his new-found possibilities. if she could have reached peter with the personal certainty of riches by explaining to him how far his dollars would stretch end to end, or how many acres of postage stamps he could buy with them, she might have thought less of him on that account, but she would have helped him to understanding even on those terms. you couldn't have made clarice lessing believe that whatever their limitations, people weren't entitled to help simply because they needed it.
it had come upon peter by leaps and bounds during the last two or three years, both the wealth and the necessity of putting it to himself in terms of personal expression. during the first ten years of the partnership, the only use for money the simple needs of ellen and himself had established was to put it back into the business; a use which had become almost an obligation during the time when both children and opportunity were coming to julian faster than the cash to meet them. it was due[pg 117] to the high ground that clarice had made for them all out of what she and the children stood for, that peter's superior cash contribution to the firm had become a privilege. they had had, he and ellen, their stringent occasions; it had been clarice's part to see that since they endured the pinch of poverty they should at least get something human out of it. it came out for peter pleasantly as he walked home through the mild june evening, just how much they had had. much, much more than they would have been able to buy with the money they might in strict equity have withdrawn from the business. nothing, he had long admitted, that he could have purchased for his sister would have been so satisfying as what clarice contributed, pressing the full cup of her motherhood to ellen's thirsty lips. they might have grown sleek, he and ellen, without exceeding a proper ratio of expenditure, and if in the end they had been a little less rich, they would still have had enough to go on being sleek and comfortable to the end. that he was still fit, as mrs. lessing's transparent efforts to marry him to her friends guaranteed him to be,[pg 118] he felt was owing greatly to the terms on which clarice had admitted him to the adventure of bringing up a family. that a special fitness was required for admission to mrs. lessing's circle he would have guessed even without the aid of print which consistently described it as our best society, for it was a best attested to by all the marks by which clarice herself expressed the essential fineness of things.
one couldn't have told, from anything that appeared on the surface of the lessing's social environment, that life did not proceed there as it did between clarice and the weatherals, by means of its subtler sympathies, and proceed, at least so far as the women were concerned, on a still higher plane of grace and harmony. it moved about her table and across the lawns of lessing's handsome country place, with such soundless ease and perfection as it had glided for peter through the house with the shining walls. or at least so it had seemed on those occasions during the last few years when he had found himself wondrously inside it.
it had been accepted by ellen on the mere certainty of clarice's mother having been one[pg 119] of the thatcher inwoods, that clarice should enlarge her social borders with lessing's increasing means until they included people among whom ellen would have been miserably shy and out of tune. but not ellen herself guessed how much of peter's admission to its inaccessibility was owing to the returns from hardly snatched options and long-nursed opportunities, coming in in checks of six figures. perhaps clarice herself never knew. it was one of the things that went with being a thatcher inwood, wherever an occasion presented a handle of nobility, to seize by that and maintain it in the face of any contingent smallness. clarice wouldn't have introduced peter to her friends if he hadn't been fit, and it was part of the social creed of women like clarice lessing, which takes almost the authority of religion, that he wouldn't have been in a position to be introduced if he hadn't been fit. so it had happened for the past two years that peter had found himself skirting the fringe of best society, and identifying it with the life he had lived so long, sitting with his book open on his knees in their little flat, with ellen across the fire[pg 120] from him knitting white things for julian's children. but the idea that having come into this neighbourhood of fine appreciations he was to take up his home and live there, opened more slowly. it required more than one of clarice's swift hummingbird darts, more than the flutter of suggestion to brush its petals awake for him.
it lay so deep under all the years, the power of loving. he knew almost nothing about it except that he had had it once, and that marriage without it would be unthinkable, even such a marriage as mrs. lessing had let him see was now possible to him. she had called with all her delicate friendly skill, on something which only now under that summons he began to miss. it was like a lost word in every sentence in which the ordinary hopes of men are to be read, and he felt that until he found it again all the help mrs. lessing could afford him would not enable him to think of marriage as a thing desirable in itself. it was missing in him still, when he came that night rather late to the apartment where only the japanese houseboy awaited him. one of the first things he had[pg 121] done for ellen with his increasing means, had been to buy back for her the house at bloombury with the garden and a bit of the orchard. she had been there now since decoration day, retiring more and more into the kindly village life as a point of vantage from which to mark with pride the social distance that peter travelled from her. it had been understood from the beginning that she wasn't to go with him. the tapping of her crutch was no more to be heard in the new gracious existence than in the house where she had never followed him. life for ellen was lived close at hand. there were hollyhocks and currant bushes in her garden and julian's children overran it.
it was not ellen then that peter missed as he sat alone in the house that night with his back to the lowered light and his gaze seeking the river and the flitting shapes of boats that went up and down on it, freighted with young voices and laughter. he missed the lovely lady. he knew now why he had not been able to think of marriage in the way clarice held it out to him, as a happy contingency of his now being as rich as he had intended to be. it[pg 122] was because he had not thought of her clearly for a long time.
there had been a period in the beginning of his life with ellen, when the lady of his dreams had been so near the surface of all his thinking that she took on form and likeness from anything that was lovely and young in his neighbourhood, but as things lovely and young drifted from him with the years; and as the business took deeper and deeper hold on his attention, she had become a mere floating figment, a live fluttering spark in the very core of all his imaginings.
she had been beside him, a pleasant, indeterminate presence in the long journey she travelled from the printed page to the accompanying click of ellen's needles. sometimes at the opera she took on a gossamer tint from the singer's face, and longer ago than he could afford operas, he had understood that all the beauty of the world, bursting apple buds, the great curve of the surf that set the beaches trembling, derived somehow its pertinence from her. now at the age of forty he had ceased to think very much about the lovely lady.[pg 123]
it occurred to him that this might have something to do with his failure to get a new relation to life out of his new wealth.
it had struck peter rather forlornly during the past few years that there was little use he could put money to, except to make more money. he could see by turning his head to the room behind him how little there was there of what he had fancied once riches would bring him. the lines of the room were good, the amount of the annual rent assured that to him, the furniture was good and the rugs expensive. ellen believed that money in rugs was a good investment, particularly if the colours were strong and would stand fading. there were some choice things here and there, a vase and pictures which peter had chosen for himself, though he was aware, as he took them in under the dull glow, that ellen had arranged them in strict reference to the size of the frames, and that the whole effect failed of satisfaction. he thought his life might be somewhat like that room, full of good things but lacking the touch that should set them in fruitful order. it stole over him as persuasively as the warm growing[pg 124] smell of the park below him that the something missed might be the touch and presence of the lovely lady.
