CHAPTER XXXVII.
The Departure of Uncle Peter—And Some German Philosophy
The Bineses, with the exception of Psyche, were at breakfast a week later. Miss Bines had been missing since the day that Mr. and Mrs. Cecil G. H. Mauburn had left for Montana City to put the Bines home in order.
Uncle Peter and Mrs. Bines had now determined to go, leaving Percival to follow when he had closed his business affairs.
"It's like starting West again to make our fortune," said Uncle Peter. He had suffered himself to regain something of his old cheerfulness of manner.
"I wish you two would wait until they can get the car here, and go back with me," said Percival. "We can go back in style even if we didn't save much more than a get-away stake."
But his persuasions were unavailing.
"I can't stand it another day," said Mrs. Bines, "and those letters keep coming in from poor suffering people that haven't heard the news."
"I'm too restless to stay," declared Uncle Peter. "I declare, with spring all greenin' up this way I'd be found campin' up in Central Park some night and took off to the calaboose. I just got to get out again where you can feel the wind blow and see a hundred miles and don't have to dodge horseless horse-cars every minute. It's a wonder one of 'em ain't got me in this town. You come on in the car, and do the style fur the family. One of them common Pullmans is good enough fur Marthy and me. And besides, I got to get Billy Brue back. He's goin' plumb daft lookin' night and day fur that man that got his thirty dollars and his breastpin. He says there'll be an ambulance backed up at the spot where he meets him—makes no difference if it's right on Fifth Avenue. Billy's kind of nearsighted at that, so I'm mortal afraid he'll make a mistake one of these nights and take some honest man's money and trinkets away from him."
"Well, here's a Sun editorial to take back with us," said Percival; "you remember we came East on one." He read aloud:
"The great fall in the price of copper, Western Trolley, and cordage stocks has ruined thousands of people all over this country. These losses are doubtless irreparable so far as the stocks in question are concerned. The losers will have to look elsewhere for recovery. That they will do so with good courage is not to be doubted. It might be argued with reasonable plausibility that Americans are the greatest fatalists in the world; the readiest to take chances and the least given to whining when the cards go against them.
"A case in point is that of a certain Western family whose fortune has been swept away by the recent financial hurricane. If ever a man liked to match with Destiny, not 'for the beers,' but for big stakes, the young head of the family in question appears to have been that man. He persisted in believing that the power and desire of the rich men controlling these three stocks were great enough to hold their securities at a point far above their actual value. In this persistence he displayed courage worthy of a better reward. A courage, moreover —the gambler's courage—that is typically American. Now he has had a plenty of that pleasure of losing which, in Mr. Fox's estimation, comes next to the pleasure of winning.
"From the point of view of the political economist or the moralist, thrift, saving, and contentment with a modest competence are to be encouraged, and the propensity to gamble is to be condemned. We stand by the copy-book precepts. Yet it is only honest to confess that there is something of this young American's love for chances in most of us. American life is still so fluid, the range of opportunity so great, the national temperament so buoyant, daring, and hopeful, that it is easier for an American to try his luck again than to sit down snugly and enjoy what he has. The fun and the excitement of the game are more than the game. There are Americans and plenty of them who will lose all they have in some magnificent scheme, and make much less fuss about it than a Paris shopkeeper would over a bad twenty-franc piece.
"Our disabled young Croesus from the West is a luminous specimen of the type. The country would be less interesting without his kind, and, on the whole, less healthy—for they provide one of the needed ferments. May the young man make another fortune in his own far West—and come once more to rattle the dry bones of our Bourse!"
"He'll be too much stuck on Montana by the time he gets that fortune," observed Uncle Peter.
"I will that, Uncle Peter. Still it's pleasant to know we've won their good opinion."
"Excuse me fur swearin', Marthy," said Uncle Peter, turning to Mrs. Bines, "but he can win a better opinion than that in Montana fur a damn sight less money."
"That editor is right," said Mrs. Bines, "what he says about American life being 'fluid.' There's altogether too much drinking goes on here, and I'm glad my son quit it."
Percival saw them to the train.
"Take care of yourself," said Uncle Peter at parting. "You know I ain't any good any more, and you got a whole family, includin' an Englishman, dependin' on you—we'll throw him on the town, though, if he don't take out his first papers the minute I get there."
His last shot from the rear platform was:
"Change your name back to 'Pete,' son, when you get west of Chicago. 'Tain't anything fancy, but it's a crackin' good business name fur a hustler!"
"All right, Uncle Peter,—and I hope I'll have a grandson that thinks as much of it as I do of yours."
When they had gone, he went back to the work of final adjustment. He had the help of Coplen, whom they had sent for. With him he was busy for a week. By lucky sales of some of the securities that had been hypothecated they managed to save a little; but, on the whole, it was what Percival described it, "a lovely autopsy."
At last the vexatious work was finished, and he was free again. At the end of the final day's work he left the office of Fouts in Wall Street, and walked up Broadway. He went slowly, enjoying the freedom from care. It was the afternoon of a day when the first summer heat had been felt, and as he loitered before shop windows or walked slowly through that street where all move quickly and most very hurriedly, a welcome little breeze came up from the bay to fan him and encourage his spirit of leisure.
At Union Square, when he would have taken a car to go the remainder of the distance, he saw Shepler, accompanied by Mrs. Van Geist and Miss Milbrey, alight from a victoria and enter a jeweller's.
He would have passed on, but Miss Milbrey had seen him, and stood waiting in the doorway while Shepler and Mrs. Van Geist went on into the store.
"Mr. Bines—I'm so glad!"
She stood, flushed with pleasure, radiant in stuff of filmy pink, with little flecks at her throat and waist of the first tender green of new leaves. She was unaffectedly delighted to see him.
"You are Miss Spring?" he said when she had given him her hand—"and you've come into all your mother had that was worth inheriting, haven't you?"
"Mr. Bines, shall we not see you now? I wanted so much to talk with you when I heard everything. Would it be impertinent to say I sympathised with you?"
He looked over her shoulder, in where Shepler and Mrs. Van Geist were inspecting a tray of jewels.
"Of course not impertinent—very kind—only I'm really not in need of any sympathy at all. You won't understand it; but we don't care so much for money in the West—for the loss of it—not so much as you New Yorkers would. Besides we can always make a plenty more."
The situation was, emphatically, not as he had so often dreamed it when she should marvel, perhaps regretfully, over his superiority to her husband as a money-maker. His only relief was to belittle the importance of his loss.
"Of course we've lost everything, almost—but I've not been a bit downcast about it. There's more where it came from, and no end of fun going after it. I'm looking forward to the adventures, I can tell you. And every one will be glad to see me there; they won't think the less of me, I assure you, because I've made a fluke here!"
"Surely, Mr. Bines, no one here could think less of you. Indeed, I think more of you. I think it's fine and big to go back with such courage. Do you know, I wish I were a man—I'd show them!"
"Really, Miss Milbrey—"
He looked over her shoulder again, and saw that Shepler was waiting for her.
"I think your friends are impatient."
"They can wait. Mr. Bines, I wonder if you have quite a correct idea of all New York people."
"Probably not; I've met so few, you know."
"Well, of course,—but of those you've met?"
"You can't know what my ideas are."
"I wish we might have talked more—I'm sure—when are you leaving?"
"I shall leave to-morrow."
"And we're leaving for the country ourselves. Papa and mamma go to-morrow—and, Mr. Bines, I should have liked another talk with you—I wish we were dining at the Oldakers' again."
He observed Shepler strolling toward them.
"I shall be staying with Aunt Cornelia a few days after to-morrow."
Shepler came up.
"And I shall be leaving to-morrow, Miss Milbrey."
"Ah, Bines, glad to see you!"
The accepted lover looked Miss Milbrey over with rather a complacent air—with the unruffled confidence of assured possession. Percival fancied there was a look almost of regret in the girl's eyes.
"I'm afraid," said Shepler, "your aunt doesn't want to be kept waiting. And she's already in a fever for fear you won't prefer the necklace she insists you ought to prefer."
"Tell Aunt Cornelia, please, that I shall be along in just a moment." "She's quite impatient, you know," urged Shepler.
Percival extended his hand.
"Good-bye, Miss Milbrey. Don't let me detain you. Sorry I shall not see you again."
She gave him her hand uncertainly, as if she had still something to say, but could find no words for it.
"Good-bye, Mr. Bines."
"Good-bye, young man," Shepler shook hands with him cordially, "and the best of luck to you out there. I shall hope to hear good reports from you. And mind, you're to look us up when you're in town again. We shall always be glad to see you. Good-bye!"
He led the girl back to the case where the largest diamonds reposed chastely on their couches of royal velvet.
Percival smiled as he resumed his walk—smiled with all that bitter cynicism which only youth may feel to its full poignance. Yet, heartless as she was, he recalled that while she talked to him he had imprinted an imaginary kiss deliberately upon her full scarlet lips. And now, too, he was forced to confess that, in spite of his very certain knowledge about her, he would actually prefer to have communicated it through the recognised physical media. He laughed again, more cheerfully.
"The spring has gotten a strangle-hold on my judgment," he said to himself.
At dinner that night he had the company of that estimable German savant, the Herr Doctor von Herzlich. He did not seek to incur the experience, but the amiable doctor was so effusive and interested that he saw no way of avoiding it gracefully. Returned from his archaeological expedition to Central America, the doctor was now on his way back to Marburg.
"I pleasure much in your news," said the cheerful man over his first glass of Rhine wine with the olive in it. "You shall now, if I have misapprehended you not, develop a new strongness of the character."
Percival resigned himself to listen. He was not unfamiliar with the lot of one who dines with the learned Von Herzlich.
"Now he's off," he said to himself.
"Ach! It is but now that you shall begin to live. Is it not that while you planned the money-amassing you were deferring to live—ah, yes—until some day when you had so much more? Yes? A common thought-failure it is—a common failure of the to-take-thoughtedness of life—its capacities and the intentions of the scheme under which we survive. Ach! So few humans learn that this invitation to live specifies not the hours, like a five-o'clock. It says—so well as Father-Mother Nature has learned to write the words to our unseeing eyes—'at once,' but we ever put off the living we are invited to at once—until to-morrow-next day, next year—until this or that be done or won. So now you will find this out. Before, you would have waited for a time that never came—no matter the all-money you gathered.
"Nor yet, my young friend, shall you take this matter to be of a seriousness, to be sorrow-worthy. If you take of the courage, you shall find the world to smile to your face, and father-mother you. You recall what the English Huxley says—Ah! what fine, dear man, the good Huxley—he says, yes, in the 'Genealogy of the Beasts,' 'It is a probable hypothesis that what the world is to organisms in general, each organism is to the molecules of which it is composed.' So you laugh at the world, the world it laugh back 'ha! ha! ha!'—then—soly—all your little molecules obediently respond—you thrill with the happiness—with the power—the desire—the capacity—you out-go and achieve. Yes? So fret not. Ach! we fret so much of what it shall be unwise to fret of. It is funny to fret. Why? Why fret? Yet but the month last, they have excavated at Nippur, from the pre-Sargonic strata, a lady and a gentleman of the House of Ptah. What you say in New York—'a damned fine old family,' yes, is it not? I am read their description, and seen of the photographs.
"They have now the expressions of indifference—of disinterest—without the prejudice—as if they say, 'Ach! those troubles of ours, three thousand eight hundred years in the B.C.—nearly come to six thousand years before now—Ach! those troubles,' say this philosophic-now lady and gentleman, of the House of Ptah of Babylonia—'such a silliness—those troubles and frets; it was not the while-worth that we should ever have sorrowed, because the scheme of time and creation is suchly big; had we grasped but its bigness, and the littleness of our span, should we have felt griefs? Nay, nay—nit,' like the street-youths say—would say the lady and gentleman now so passionless as to have philosophers become. And you, it should mean to you much. Humans are funniest when they weep and tremble before, like you say, 'the facts in the case.' Ha! I laugh to myself at them often when I observe. Their funniness of the beards and eyebrows, the bald head, of the dress, the solemnities of manner, as it were they were persons of weight. Ah, they are of their insignificance so loftily unconscious. Was it not great skill—to compel the admiration of the love-worthiest scientist—to create a unit of a numberless mass of units and then to enable it to feel each one the importance of the whole, as if each part were big as the whole? So you shall not fret I say.
"If the fret invade you, you shall do well to lie out in the friendly space, and look at this small topspinning of a world through the glass that reduces.
Yes? You had thought it of such bigness—its concerns of a sublime tragicness? Yet see now, these funny little animals on the surface of the spinning-ball. How frantic, as if all things were about to eventuate, remembering not that nothing ends. So? Observe the marks of their silliness, their unworthiness. You have reduced the ball to so big as a melon, yes? Watch the insects run about in the craziness, laughing, crying, loving their loves, hating their hates, fearing, fretting—killing one the other in such funny little clothes, made for such funny little purpose precisely—falling sick over the money-losings—and the ball so small, but one of such many—as many stars under the earth, remember, as above it.
"So! you are back to earth; you are a human like the rest, so foolish, so funny as any—so you say, 'Well, I shall not be more troubled again yet. I play the same game, but it is only a game, a little game to last an afternoon—I play my part—yes—the laughing part, crying part—loving, hating, killing part—what matter if I say it is good?' If the Maker there be to look down, what joys him most—the coward who fears and frets, and the whine makes for his soul or body? Ach! no, it is the one who say, it is good—I could not better have done myself—a great game, yes—'let her rip,' like you West-people remark—'let her rip—you cannot lose me,' like you say also. Ach, so! And then he say, the great Planner of it,' Ach! I am understood at last—good!—bright man that,' like you say, also—'bright man that—it is of a pleasure to see him do well!'
"So, my young friend, you shall pleasure yourself still much yet. It is of an excellence to pleasure one's self judiciously. The lotus is a leguminous plant—so excellent for the salad—not for the roast. You have of the salad overeaten—you shall learn of your successful capacity for it—you shall do well, then. You have been of the reckless deportment—you may still be of it. That is not the matter. You shall be reckless as you like—but without your stored energy surplus to harm you. Your environment from the now demands of you the faculties you will most pleasure yourself in developing. You shall produce what you consume. The gods love such. Ach, yes!"