How Like a God

V

He was still conscious of an irritation at Mrs. Jordan’s persistent noises below, but he found that he had mounted another step, and another. His eyes were now level with the first landing, one flight up, the floor where the two art students lived. Another step, and he could see the grey plaster figure in the niche in the curved wall, beside the flimsy little electric lamp that always got knocked off when he passed it with his overcoat flapping.

He looked at it, really looked at it, as if he had never seen it before, and yet he did not now see it. His ears acutely registered the movements of Mrs. Jordan, and yet he did not hear them. He did hear himself, in his brain somewhere. Do you realize that you are going on, going ahead? Do you realize that you don’t at all know what you are doing?

You have felt like this before, less acutely, that day for instance you ate dinner at the club with your son more than two years ago. Paul, his name is. You called him Paul.

That didn’t seem real either. Nor did that note, on a square piece of blue paper, which you found on your office desk one morning in the pile of personal mail.

“Dear Mr. Sidney,” it said, “if you can spare me an hour, some day this week, I would like very much to ask you about something. It was a long time ago, but I believe you will remember my name. Sincerely, Emily Davis.”

At the top was an address and telephone number.

When she was shown into your office, you were genuinely shocked. She was an old woman now. As she looked at you pleasantly, you could see anxious years in her eyes, and a present anxiety too.

“Little Will Sidney,” she smiled. “Now that I see you, I know I was foolish to take so long to make up my mind.”

You escorted her to the big leather seat in the corner, and took a chair in front of her. She seemed to know a good deal about you, the year you had come to New York, the date of your marriage with Erma, the fact of your having no children. She told you, briefly but completely, of her own journey through the many days. Mr. Davis had practiced law in Cleveland, never very successfully, for seven years, then they had moved to Chicago. There it was even worse, he never squeezed more than a scanty living out of it; and there was nothing but a modest insurance payment for her and her little son when one winter he took pneumonia and died. Mrs. Davis managed to get a position as a teacher in the Chicago public schools, which she still held; she was in New York only for a visit, having come, it appeared, expressly to see you. She had somehow kept her son Paul fed and clothed to the end of high school, and he had worked his way through the University of Chicago.

“It’s Paul really I came to see you about. He graduated from the university two years ago; he’s twenty-four now. He’s a good boy and I thought you might help.”

“Where is he?”

“In New York. He has a job now and then, but he thinks he wants to be a sculptor. He studied in Chicago a while and won a prize; now he works at it so hard, he can’t keep a job very long. What he wants more than anything else is to go abroad for two or three years.”

You considered.

“If he has real talent he certainly should be encouraged,” you agreed judiciously. “I might speak to Dick — Mr. Carr — about it.”

“I thought you might do it yourself,” she said. “You see, you’re his father.”

You stared at her.

“I wasn’t going to tell you,” she went on, “but after all, why shouldn’t I? Jim’s dead, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. He was born a few months after we got to Cleveland. That was really why we went away.”

You stammered, “Can you — that is — I don’t see how you can know—”

“I know well enough.”

“What does he look like?”

“Not much like anyone.” She smiled. “You’ll just have to take my word for it; it’s funny, it never occurred to me that you might doubt it.”

“Well.” You got up from your chair.

You walked to the window and looked down into the street. “Of course he doesn’t know?”

“Good heavens no! There’s no reason why he should.”

“None at all,” you reassured her. “It was a foolish question. Of course he mustn’t know. As for helping him — yes, of course. I’d like—” You hesitated. “I’d like to see him,” you said.

She agreed at once. Two days later you met him in the lobby of your club. You knew him at once, and hastened over and extended your hand.

“Mr. Davis? I’m Mr. Sidney.”

Later, seated in the dining-room with soup in front of you, you examined him critically. He was rather poorly dressed; his hands were big and strong and not too clean, and his coat-sleeves were too short. His hair and eyes were dark. You thought that he resembled you a little, particularly in structure.

“Your mother tells me you would like to study abroad,” you observed.

“Yes, sir. I would like to. It’s almost essential.”

“Are there better teachers over there than in New York?”

He explained that it wasn’t so mud a matter of teachers, it was the stimulation, the atmosphere, the tradition, the opportunity to see the great works of the masters. He talked of all this at length, in a sensible and straightforward manner.

“I suppose,” you observed, “you could make out over there on three thousand a year.”

“Less than that,” he replied quickly, “surely much less. I should say two thousand would be ample. That’s forty dollars a week.” Then he added, a little awkwardly, “Of course, if there really is a chance of your helping me out, you would want to find out if I’m likely to deserve it. I haven’t much stuff, a few figures and a group or two, but if you could come down some day and look at them...”

It wasn’t much of a studio — a small room with an alcove on the top floor of an old house in one of those obscure streets west of Seventh Avenue, below Fourteenth. Apparently he both worked and slept there, and perhaps ate too. Clay and plaster figures were scattered about; there were two marble groups, one, quite large, of workmen lifting a beam. It seemed to you very big and impressive.

“I worked nearly two years on that,” Paul said, “and it’s all wrong. See, look here.”

You listened attentively and nodded your head from time to time. After he had finished talking about it you still thought the group big and smooth and impressive. He brought out some portfolios.

“By the way,” he said suddenly, “I almost forgot. Here’s a letter from Mother.”

You opened and read it. She thanked you, and said she knew she need never worry about her son, and bade you goodbye.

You looked at him in surprise. “Where is she? She hasn’t gone?”

He nodded. “Back to Chicago. Yesterday. You see she only had a week off.”

He opened one of the portfolios and began turning over the sketches, pointing and explaining.

He finished with the portfolios and stood in front of you.

“Mother suggested something before she left,” he said doubtfully, “but I don’t know whether you’d care about it. She thought I ought to stay on a month or two and do a bust of you. You have a fine head and a strong face, not at all ordinary. Quite interesting.”

The sittings began the following Monday.

You told no one about Paul, not even Jane, though you were at that time seeing more of her than you had for years, on account of the recent illness and death of your mother, the journey to the funeral in Ohio, and Margaret’s difficulties.

You and Jane and Margaret and Rose had gone out on the same train, and Larry came from Idaho, his first trip east since his departure, five years before. Everything was done before you arrived, nothing was left but the dismal role of polite mourner.

So on the evening after the funeral you all left for New York. You had engaged a drawing-room for the three girls and a compartment for yourself and Larry, who, having got as far east as Ohio, had been persuaded by Jane to come on to New York for a visit.

“What’s up between Rose and Margaret?” asked Larry. “They act as if they’d like to bite chunks out of each other.”

“They would,” you replied. “There’s a hell of a row on. Margaret’s going to be a corespondent and Rose doesn’t want her to.”

Larry, stooping to get a magazine from his bag, straightened up to stare at you.

“Don’t ask me,” you went on hastily. “I really don’t know an awful lot about it, but we’re both due to find out. Jane asked me to come back, and bring you, as soon as we got settled.”

Your ring at the door of the drawingroom, and your entrance in response to Jane’s summons, evidently interrupted Rose in the middle of a speech. Margaret, on one of the cross-seats, made room for Larry beside her, and then turned her eyes again on Rose.

“Say it again, so the head of the family can hear you,” she drawled with a glance at you. She turned to Larry. “I don’t really know you, though you’re my brother, but you look like a nice man.”

“Count me out,” said Larry so hastily that everybody laughed.

“As far as that’s concerned, me, too,” you put in. “There’s no occasion to dig at me, Margaret. I’m the head of nobody’s family. We came back because Jane asked us to.”

“Bill may not be the head of the family,” said Jane, “but he’s got a better head than any of us.”

“Thanks,” you said. “I don’t know what it’s all about anyway, except that somebody’s wife is going to get a divorce by proving that Margaret stole her husband, and Rose is sore, because if her sister’s name is dragged in the mire, she may have trouble marrying a noble scion of the wholesale leather trade.”

This produced a double explosion. Rose shouted above the train’s roar that her fiancé wasn’t a businessman at all, but that he was of an old and fastidious family; while Margaret declared that she had stolen nobody’s husband, and that he wasn’t just somebody. Dr. Oehmsen was an internationally known scientist and a great man.

“Sure,” agreed Rose, “that’s why it’s such a mess. What the tabloids won’t do!”

“They make the mire, we don’t,” returned Margaret.

“They put you in it, and me too,” Rose appealed to all of you. “I’m not asking her to give up her great man. Though if you could see him...”

Margaret exploded, “You’re a selfish outrageous little beast!” and began to cry.

You marvelled at the turmoil and fury. In a way you envied them. Do you envy them now? Ah, that would be more than tolerable now, that would be blessed, to be again frozen with indifference! What will Rose and her fastidious family say when they hear of this? What will Margaret and Larry? What if they were all here now, what if they suddenly appeared on the stairs around you?