The story, as he told it verbally in his curious language, remains vividly in my memory. But he had written it down, too, he said. And he gave me the written account, with the remark that I was free to hand it on to others if I “felt that way.” He called it “Initiation.” It runs as follows.
1
In my own family this happened, for Arthur was my nephew. And a remote Alpine valley was the place. It didn’t seem to me in the least suitable for such occurrences, except that it was Catholic, and the “Church,” I understand—at least, scholars who ought to know have told me so—has subtle Pagan origins incorporated unwittingly in its observations of certain Saints’ Days, as well as in certain ceremonials. All this kind of thing is Dutch to me, a form of poetry or superstition, for I am interested chiefly in the buying and selling of exchange, with an office in New York City, just off Wall Street, and only come to Europe now occasionally for a holiday. I like to see the dear old musty cities, and go to the Opera, and take a motor run through Shakespeare’s country or round the Lakes, get in touch again with London and Paris at the Ritz Hotels—and then back again to the greatest city on earth, where for years now I’ve been making a good thing out of it. Repton and Cambridge, long since forgotten, had their uses. They were all right enough at the time. But I’m now “on the make,” with a good fat partnership, and have left all that truck behind me.
My half-brother, however—he was my senior and got the cream of the family wholesale chemical works—has stuck to the trade in the Old Country, and is making probably as much as I am. He approved my taking the chance that offered, and is only sore now because his son, Arthur, is on the stupid side. He agreed that finance suited my temperament far better than drugs and chemicals, though he warned me that all American finance was speculative and therefore dangerous. “Arthur is getting on,” he said in his last letter, “and will some day take the director’s place you would be in now had you cared to stay. But he’s a plodder, rather.” That meant, I knew, that Arthur was a fool. Business, at any rate, was not suited to his temperament. Five years ago, when I came home with a month’s holiday to be used in working up connections in English banking circles, I saw the boy. He was fifteen years of age at the time, a delicate youth, with an artist’s dreams in his big blue eyes, if my memory goes for anything, but with a tangle of yellow hair and features of classical beauty that would have made half the young girls of my New York set in love with him, and a choice of heiresses at his disposal when he wanted them.
I have a clear recollection of my nephew then. He struck me as having grit and character, but as being wrongly placed. He had his grandfather’s tastes. He ought to have been, like him, a great scholar, a poet, an editor of marvellous old writings in new editions. I couldn’t get much out of the boy, except that he “liked the chemical business fairly,” and meant to please his father by “knowing it thoroughly” so as to qualify later for his directorship. But I have never forgotten the evening when I caught him in the hall, staring up at his grandfather’s picture, with a kind of light about his face, and the big blue eyes all rapt and tender (almost as if he had been crying) and replying, when I asked him what was up: “That was worth living for. He brought Beauty back into the world!”
“Yes,” I said, “I guess that’s right enough. He did. But there was no money in it to speak of.”
The boy looked at me and smiled. He twigged somehow or other that deep down in me, somewhere below the money-making instinct, a poet, but a dumb poet, lay in hiding. “You know what I mean,” he said. “It’s in you too.”
The picture was a copy—my father had it made—of the presentation portrait given to Baliol, and “the grandfather” was celebrated in his day for the translations he made of Anacreon and Sappho, of Homer, too, if I remember rightly, as well as for a number of classical studies and essays that he wrote. A lot of stuff like that he did, and made a name at it too. His Lives of the Gods went into six editions. They said—the big critics of his day—that he was “a poet who wrote no poetry, yet lived it passionately in the spirit of old-world, classical Beauty,” and I know he was a wonderful fellow in his way and made the dons and schoolmasters all sit up. We’re proud of him all right. After twenty-five years of successful “exchange” in New York City, I confess I am unable to appreciate all that, feeling more in touch with the commercial and financial spirit of the age, progress, development and the rest. But, still, I’m not ashamed of the classical old boy, who seems to have been a good deal of a Pagan, judging by the records we have kept. However, Arthur peering up at that picture in the dusk, his eyes half moist with emotion, and his voice gone positively shaky, is a thing I never have forgotten. He stimulated my curiosity uncommonly. It stirred something deep down in me that I hardly cared to acknowledge on Wall Street—something burning.
And the next time I saw him was in the summer of 1910, when I came to Europe for a two months’ look around—my wife at Newport with the children—and hearing that he was in Switzerland, learning a bit of French to help him in the business, I made a point of dropping in upon him just to see how he was shaping generally and what new kinks his mind had taken on. There was something in Arthur I never could quite forget. Whenever his face came into my mind I began to think. A kind of longing came over me—a desire for Beauty, I guess, it was. It made me dream.
I found him at an English tutor’s—a lively old dog, with a fondness for the cheap native wines, and a financial interest in the tourist development of the village. The boys learnt French in the mornings, possibly, but for the rest of the day were free to amuse themselves exactly as they pleased and without a trace of supervision—provided the parents footed the bills without demur.