I was still a bachelor. "Might shut the door?" I proposed.
"If you like," said Johnny, without enthusiasm. "They wake me every morning at five," he added.
Yes, I was still a bachelor—and probably a tactless, even a brutal, one.
"Might move them to another bedroom, farther away?" I suggested. The house seemed big enough for such an arrangement.
"Don't want to," declared Johnny. He began pulling at his pipe again, and there was a little silence during which I might meditate on the curt nobility of his remark.
The fact was, of course, that Johnny loved life; he embraced it with gusto, with both arms outspread. No sidestepping its advances; no dodging its sharp angles; no feeble mitigating of a situation for which he was himself responsible; no paltry deadening of domestic uproar merely because he himself happened to be within the domestic environment. "If Adele stands it, I will too—they're mine as well as hers,"—such I conceive to have been his attitude. Johnny had no nerves, and only a minimum of sensibility. The sound-waves broke on his sensorium as ripples break on a granite coast. Perhaps they pleased him; perhaps they even soothed him. Why, bless you! these children were his! They were facts as great and as unescapable as the ebb and flow of the tides, as dawn and twilight, as the morning and evening stars. And the evening stars were singing together. Great may have been the jubilation for Johnny's ears, boundless the content in Johnny's heart.
I really think that Johnny felt through the din some of the exhilaration that often came to him with a good brisk scrap in his office—or in the other man's office. In fact, home and business were Johnny's two sources of interest and pleasure—the warp and woof of his life—and he was determined on getting the utmost out of each. His interest in his home circle may somewhat have declined—or at least have moderated—with advancing years, but it was incandescent now. His interest in the outside world—that oyster-bin awaiting his knife—never slackened, not even when the futility of piling up the empty shells became daylight-clear, and when higher things strove perseveringly, even unmistakably, to beckon him on. Never, in fact, throughout his life did he exhibit more than two essential concerns: one for his family and clan; and one for the great outside mass of mediocre individuals through whose ineptitudes he justly expected to profit.
Well, the door of the den remained open, and our talk went on to the rising and falling of infant voices. At last, thinking that my good-bye must be to Johnny only, I rose to go. You might reasonably ask for a clearer impression of his home and a more definite account of his wife. But what can I say when the primary address was so disconcertingly to the ear? Of his wife—who came down, during a lull, at the last moment—I can only say that she seemed too empressée at the beginning and too casual at the end. Perhaps she had decided that, after all, I was no more than I myself claimed to be. Perhaps the infant hurricane was still ruffling the surface of her mind, or even disturbing its depths.
"I won't ask you to call again," she said, as we shook hands for a good-night: "we shall be moving in the spring." She spoke with a satisfied air of self-recognized finesse, and as in the confident hope of completing very promptly some well-planned little programme; but—
"Visit us there," said Johnny, with a quick cordiality which prevented his wife from redeeming herself.