Again the persistent rocking until at last the room grew dark, and the old man rose in response to a loud knock on the door of the stairs, stirred himself and lighted an oil lamp so that he might find his way to the tray of food that Mrs. Tolliver thrust in at the door of his cell. There was no gas in this room beneath the roof; Gramp Tolliver had been an expense for too many years. It would have cost twenty dollars to fit his room with gas lights. And in ten years he had produced nothing save the scraps of paper covered with bird track handwriting that were stowed away in the pigeonholes of the desk.
In those days there came to Grandpa Tolliver, more by some obscure instinct than by any communication with those outside his cell, the certainty that his granddaughter’s behavior was a source of irritation to the people of the Town. True, he occasionally overheard from the kitchen below snatches of reproachful conversation which drifted upward by way of the ventilator ... strange remarks which appeared to come out of the blue, yet when pieced together they provided a coherent story. Reproaches of sulkiness, of silence, of secrecy, cast by a mother, who desired nothing so much as confidences, against a daughter who was incapable of anything but secrecy. They were an ill-matched pair. This the old man understood, with a sort of wicked satisfaction, because the things which in Ellen were incomprehensible to her mother were the things which had come down to the girl from himself. It was another mark in the long score between Grandpa Tolliver and his daughter-in-law; another, in which nature herself took a hand, in the long battle between two fiercely antagonistic temperaments.
He could not have known that the people in the Town likewise had reproaches for Ellen. He could not have known that they said it was her duty to begin giving music lessons in order to prop up the fortunes of a proud and bankrupt family. Yet in his unearthly way, he did know; and in some vague way he was pleased. Even in his isolation so impregnable, so defiant, his heart was warmed by the thought of an ally. The enemy was driving Ellen, a neutral, into his camp; and into his icy heart there came drop by drop a warm trickle of unaccustomed sympathy. Not that Gramp Tolliver planned active aid; that would have been too much to expect, for Gramp Tolliver had discovered half a century earlier the idiocy of mixing in the affairs of other people.
Instead he chuckled and read in triumph and vindication The Decline and Fall.
8
ON the morning of the third day before Christmas, Clarence Murdock, bearing a neat handbag packed with those things which he would need during a journey of three weeks through the middle-western country, turned his back on the Babylon Arms and made his way toward the railway station and the transcontinental express. Behind him he left the two young men whom, in the fashion of bachelors who have migrated without root or connection from the provinces into a great city, he had picked up as companions somewhere amid the flotsam and jetsam of Manhattan life. They had come to him separately, each drawn perhaps in his own way by the smug neatness which marked the life and character of Clarence. Yet the two men were in no way alike. Their difference was manifested in the very reasons for their attachment to Clarence. The one, an adventurous boisterous soul, had fastened upon Clarence because Clarence had a talent for keeping things in order, a perfect genius indeed for pigeonholing the very emotions of his own life. Out of the mighty chaos which was the essence of the wholehearted Homer Bunce, there emerged a pathetic need for order and comfort; and this Clarence supplied to superb satisfaction. Even the books and pillows of their tiny apartment were kept in scrupulous order. Disorder made Clarence nervous.
Mr. Wyck, on the other hand, had found strength in Clarence, a thing which Bunce himself never even thought of finding in the orderly depths of Clarence’s soul. For Mr. Wyck’s family was old and Mr. Wyck himself lacked vitality. There was in the lower Manhattan in those days a street named for the Wycks, a street renamed long since, in the hasty fashion of a great city, for a Tammany politician. His family was so old (as age went in New York) that there remained only himself and two spinster aunts who lived at Yonkers. It was this antiquity of blood which the pale Mr. Wyck counted upon as the very rod and staff of his existence. At his first meeting with Clarence, at an annual outing on Staten Island of the employees of the Superba Electrical Company, Inc., Mr. Wyck had sensed in Clarence a certain un-American and shameful respect for an old family name, the strange yearning in a man with no tradition for a name which carried with it memories, even though they were very distant and virtually obsolete, of coaches and country estates. They were distant, for seventy years had gone the way of eternity since there had been money in the Wyck family, and the descendant of the patroons, the last of the Wycks, now followed his fortune as a clerk in the accounting department of the Superba Electrical Company, Inc.
On the rock of this respect for tradition, Wyck had fastened his hope. At length, he discovered in Clarence a man who was impressed; and the self-respect of Mr. Wyck, for all the insignificance of his world, increased in direct proportion with the awe produced in Clarence Murdock by the awful sound of the name Wyck.
Thus the three had come together, living in a fashion contented enough, in a tiny apartment filled with beaded portières bought at a Seventh Avenue emporium and leather cushions decorated with pyrographic Indian heads by loving sisters and aunts. Yet a spirit of unrest hovered over the place, an uneasiness which none save Mr. Wyck discerned with any degree of clarity. He alone knew that the day would come when, one after the other with fatal precision, his two companions would find their present mode of life unendurable. In turn each was certain to choose, from among the hordes of girls that swarmed the streets of New York, a mate. Only the gods knew who these two women might be or where they were at that moment. There was only one certainty, and that Mr. Wyck, with the sensitiveness of an effeminate man of low vitality, admitted to himself. Clarence and Bunce would marry, Bunce no doubt for love because his animal spirits were high, Clarence perhaps because he would be trapped by the glamour of a tradition.
Oh, Mr. Wyck understood this. It troubled him in the moments when he was left in solitude. It disturbed his digestion of the greasy meals which he ate alone each day in some hole-in-the-wall restaurant far downtown near the offices of the Superba Electrical Company, Inc. It was impossible that he should ever marry. Women had never interested him; the very idea filled him with a faint disgust. He would not only be left alone in the world; he would no longer possess even Clarence who respected his name. He knew that any woman was stronger than himself.