On the Stairs

On the Stairs, by Henry B. Fuller

The Project Gutenberg EBook of On the Stairs, by Henry B. Fuller This
eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: On the Stairs
Author: Henry B. Fuller
Release Date: May 26, 2007 [EBook #21613]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON THE
STAIRS ***

Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team at http://www.pgdp.net

ON THE STAIRS
by Henry B. Fuller
Author of Lines Long and Short

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1918
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY HENRY B. FULLER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published March 1918
------------------------------------------------------------------------
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This volume may seem less a Novel than a Sketch of a Novel or a
Study for a Novel. It might easily be amplified; but, like other recent
work of mine, it was written in the conviction that story-telling,
whatever form it take, can be done within limits narrower than those
now generally employed.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

ON THE STAIRS

PART I
I
In the year 1873--
No, do not turn away from such an opening; I shall reach our own day

within a paragraph or so.
In the year 1873, then, Johnny McComas was perfectly willing to stand
to one side while Raymond Prince, surrounded by several of the
fellows, came down, in his own negligent and self-assured way, the
main stairway of Grant's Private Academy. For Johnny was newer there;
Johnny was younger in this world by a year or two, at an age when a
year or two makes a difference; and Johnny had but lately left behind
what might be described as a condition of servitude. So Johnny yielded
the right of way. He lowered his little snub nose by a few degrees, took
some of the gay smile out of his twinkling blue eyes, and waited with
an upward glance of friendly yet deferential sobriety until Raymond
should have passed.
"How are you, Johnny?" asked Raymond carelessly.
"I'm pretty well," replied Johnny, in all modesty.
In the year 1916--
Yes, I told you we should reach our own times presently.
In the year 1916, then, Raymond Prince was standing to one side,
whether willing or not, while John W. McComas, attended by several
men who would make their cares his own, came down the big marble
stairway of the Mid-Continent National Bank. Raymond, who had his
cares too, would gladly have been included in the company (or, rather,
have replaced it altogether); but he saw clearly that the time was not
propitious. McComas looked out through this swarm of lesser people,
half-saw Prince as in a mist, and gave him unsmilingly an abstracted
half-bow.
"How do you do?" he mumbled impersonally.
"I'm pretty well," returned Prince, in a toneless voice. But he was far
from that, whether in mind or estate.
Between these two dates and these two incidents lies most of my story.

Be quite sure that I shall tell it in my own fashion.
II
First, however, this: I do not intend to magnify the Academy and its
stairway. The Academy did very well in its day, and it happened to be
within easy distance of James Prince's residence. If its big green doors
were flanked on one side by a grocery and on the other by a laundry,
and if its stairway was worn untidily by other feet than those of Dr.
Grant's boys, I shall simply point out that this was all in the day of
small things and that Fastidiousness was still upon her way. Should this
not satisfy you, I will state that, in the year following, the Academy
moved into other quarters: it lodged itself in a near-by private residence
whose owner, in real estate, sensed down-heeled Decadence stealing
that way a few years before any of his neighbors felt it, and who made
his shifts accordingly. If even this does not satisfy you, I might sketch
the entrance and stairway, somewhere in Massachusetts, which are to
know the footfalls of Lawrence D. McComas, aged ten, grandson of
Johnny; but such a step would perhaps take us too far afield as well as
slightly into the future. One does not pass a lad through that gateway
on the spur of the moment.
Nor ought I to magnify, on the other hand, the marble stairway of the
Mid-Continent. This was not one of the town's greater banks; and the
stairway was at the disposal not only of the bank's clientèle, but at that
of sixteen tiers of tenants. However, it represented