Booth Tarkington Page 33

  “Yes, you had another!” he retorted, though not until after she had closed the door.

  Presently he heard his daughter moving about in her room across the narrow hall, and so knew that she had risen. He hoped she would come in to see him soon, for she was the one thing that didn’t press on his nerves, he felt; though the thought of her hurt him, as, indeed, every thought hurt him. But it was his wife who came first.

  She wore a lank cotton wrapper, and a crescent of gray hair escaped to one temple from beneath the handkerchief she had worn upon her head for the night and still retained; but she did everything possible to make her expression cheering.

  “Oh, you’re better again! I can see that, as soon as I look at you,” she said. “Miss Perry tells me you’ve had another splendid night.”

  He made a sound of irony, which seemed to dispose un­favourably of Miss Perry, and then, in order to be more certainly intelligible, he added, “She slept well, as usual!”

  But his wife’s smile persisted. “It’s a good sign to be cross; it means you’re practically convalescent right now.”

  “Oh, I am, am I?”

  “No doubt in the world!” she exclaimed. “Why, you’re practically a well man, Virgil—all except getting your strength back, of course, and that isn’t going to take long. You’ll be right on your feet in a couple of weeks from now.”

  “Oh, I will?”

  “Of course you will!” She laughed briskly, and, going to the table in the center of the room, moved his glass of medicine an inch or two, turned a book over so that it lay upon its other side, and for a few moments occupied herself with similar futilities, having taken on the air of a person who makes things neat, though she produced no such actual effect upon them. “Of course you will,” she repeated, absently. “You’ll be as strong as you ever were; maybe stronger.” She paused for a moment, not looking at him, then added, cheerfully, “So that you can fly around and find something really good to get into.”

  Something important between them came near the surface here, for though she spoke with what seemed but a casual cheerfulness, there was a little betraying break in her voice, a trembling just perceptible in the utterance of the final word. And she still kept up the affectation of being helpfully preoccupied with the table, and did not look at her husband—perhaps because they had been married so many years that without looking she knew just what his expression would be, and preferred to avoid the actual sight of it as long as possible. Meanwhile, he stared hard at her, his lips beginning to move with little distortions not lacking in the pathos of a sick man’s agitation.

  “So that’s it,” he said. “That’s what you’re hinting at.”

  “‘Hinting?’” Mrs. Adams looked surprised and indulgent. “Why, I’m not doing any hinting, Virgil.”

  “What did you say about my finding ‘something good to get into?’” he asked, sharply. “Don’t you call that hinting?”

  Mrs. Adams turned toward him now; she came to the bedside and would have taken his hand, but he quickly moved it away from her.

  “You mustn’t let yourself get nervous,” she said. “But of course when you get well there’s only one thing to do. You mustn’t go back to that old hole again.”

  “‘Old hole?’ That’s what you call it, is it?” In spite of his weakness, anger made his voice strident, and upon this stimulation she spoke more urgently.

  “You just mustn’t go back to it, Virgil. It’s not fair to any of us, and you know it isn’t.”

  “Don’t tell me what I know, please!”

  She clasped her hands, suddenly carrying her urgency to plaintive entreaty. “Virgil, you won’t go back to that hole?”

  “That’s a nice word to use to me!” he said. “Call a man’s business a hole!”

  “Virgil, if you don’t owe it to me to look for something different, don’t you owe it to your children? Don’t tell me you won’t do what we all want you to, and what you know in your heart you ought to! And if you have got into one of your stubborn fits and are bound to go back there for no other reason except to have your own way, don’t tell me so, for I can’t bear it!”

  He looked up at her fiercely. “You’ve got a fine way to cure a sick man!” he said; but she had concluded her appeal—for that time—and instead of making any more words in the matter, let him see that there were tears in her eyes, shook her head, and left the room.

  Alone, he lay breathing rapidly, his emaciated chest proving itself equal to the demands his emotion put upon it. “Fine!” he repeated, with husky indignation. “Fine way to cure a sick man! Fine!” Then, after a silence, he gave forth whispering sounds as of laughter, his expression the while remaining sore and far from humour.

  “And give us our daily bread!” he added, meaning that his wife’s little performance was no novelty.

  Chapter II

  * * *

  IN FACT, the agitation of Mrs. Adams was genuine, but so well under her control that its traces vanished during the three short steps she took to cross the narrow hall between her husband’s door and the one opposite. Her expression was matter-of-course, rather than pathetic, as she entered the pretty room where her daughter, half dressed, sat before a dressing-table and played with the reflections of a three-leafed mirror framed in blue enamel. That is, just before the moment of her mother’s entrance, Alice had been playing with the mirror’s reflections—posturing her arms and her expressions, clasping her hands behind her neck, and tilting back her head to foreshorten the face in a tableau conceived to represent sauciness, then one of smiling weariness, then one of scornful toleration, and all very piquant; but as the door opened she hurriedly resumed the practical, and occupied her hands in the arrangement of her plentiful brownish hair.

  They were pretty hands, of a shapeliness delicate and fine. “The best things she’s got!” a cold-blooded girl friend said of them, and meant to include Alice’s mind and character in the implied list of possessions surpassed by the notable hands. However that may have been, the rest of her was well enough. She was often called “a right pretty girl”—temperate praise meaning a girl rather pretty than otherwise, and this she deserved, to say the least. Even in repose she deserved it, though repose was anything but her habit, being seldom seen upon her except at home. On exhibition she led a life of gestures, the unkind said to make her lovely hands more memorable; but all of her usually accompanied the gestures of the hands, the shoulders ever giving them their impulses first, and even her feet being called upon, at the same time, for eloquence.

  So much liveliness took proper place as only accessory to that of the face, where her vivacity reached its climax; and it was unfortunate that an ungifted young man, new in the town, should have attempted to define the effect upon him of all this generosity of emphasis. He said that “the way she used her cute hazel eyes and the wonderful glow of her facial expression gave her a mighty spiritual quality.” His actual rendition of the word was “spirichul”; but it was not his pronunciation that embalmed this outburst in the perennial laughter of Alice’s girl friends; they made the misfortune far less his than hers.

  Her mother comforted her too heartily, insisting that Alice had “plenty enough spiritual qualities,” certainly more than possessed by the other girls who flung the phrase at her, wooden things, jealous of everything they were incapable of themselves; and then Alice, getting more championship than she sought, grew uneasy lest Mrs. Adams should repeat such defenses “outside the family”; and Mrs. Adams ended by weeping because the daughter so distrusted her intelligence. Alice frequently thought it necessary to instruct her mother.

  Her morning greeting was an instruction to-day; or, rather, it was an admonition in the style of an entreaty, the more petulant as Alice thought that Mrs. Adams might have had a glimpse of the posturings to the mirror. This was a needless worry; the mother had caught a thousand such glimpses, with Alice unaware, and she thought no
thing of the one just flitted.

  “For heaven’s sake, mama, come clear inside the room and shut the door! Please don’t leave it open for everybody to look at me!”

  “There isn’t anybody to see you,” Mrs. Adams explained, obeying. “Miss Perry’s gone downstairs, and——”

  “Mama, I heard you in papa’s room,” Alice said, not dropping the note of complaint. “I could hear both of you, and I don’t think you ought to get poor old papa so upset—not in his present condition, anyhow.”

  Mrs. Adams seated herself on the edge of the bed. “He’s better all the time,” she said, not disturbed. “He’s almost well. The doctor says so and Miss Perry says so; and if we don’t get him into the right frame of mind now we never will. The first day he’s outdoors he’ll go back to that old hole—you’ll see! And if he once does that, he’ll settle down there and it’ll be too late and we’ll never get him out.”

  “Well, anyhow, I think you could use a little more tact with him.”

  “I do try to,” the mother sighed. “It never was much use with him. I don’t think you understand him as well as I do, Alice.”

  “There’s one thing I don’t understand about either of you,” Alice returned, crisply. “Before people get married they can do anything they want to with each other. Why can’t they do the same thing after they’re married? When you and papa were young people and engaged, he’d have done anything you wanted him to. That must have been because you knew how to manage him then. Why can’t you go at him the same way now?”

  Mrs. Adams sighed again, and laughed a little, making no other response; but Alice persisted. “Well, why can’t you? Why can’t you ask him to do things the way you used to ask him when you were just in love with each other? Why don’t you anyhow try it, mama, instead of ding-donging at him?”

  “‘Ding-donging at him,’ Alice?” Mrs. Adams said, with a pathos somewhat emphasized. “Is that how my trying to do what I can for you strikes you?”

  “Never mind that; it’s nothing to hurt your feelings.” Alice disposed of the pathos briskly. “Why don’t you answer my question? What’s the matter with using a little more tact on papa? Why can’t you treat him the way you probably did when you were young people, before you were married? I never have understood why people can’t do that.”

  “Perhaps you will understand some day,” her mother said, gently. “Maybe you will when you’ve been married twenty-five years.”

  “You keep evading. Why don’t you answer my question right straight out?”

  “There are questions you can’t answer to young people, Alice.”

  “You mean because we’re too young to understand the answer? I don’t see that at all. At twenty-two a girl’s supposed to have some intelligence, isn’t she? And intelligence is the ability to understand, isn’t it? Why do I have to wait till I’ve lived with a man twenty-five years to understand why you can’t be tactful with papa?”

  “You may understand some things before that,” Mrs. Adams said, tremulously. “You may understand how you hurt me sometimes. Youth can’t know everything by being intelligent, and by the time you could understand the answer you’re asking for you’d know it, and wouldn’t need to ask. You don’t understand your father, Alice; you don’t know what it takes to change him when he’s made up his mind to be stubborn.”

  Alice rose and began to get herself into a skirt. “Well, I don’t think making scenes ever changes anybody,” she grumbled. “I think a little jolly persuasion goes twice as far, myself.”

  “‘A little jolly persuasion!’” Her mother turned the echo of this phrase into an ironic lament. “Yes, there was a time when I thought that, too! It didn’t work; that’s all.”

  “Perhaps you left the ‘jolly’ part of it out, mama.”

  For the second time that morning—it was now a little after seven o’clock—tears seemed about to offer their solace to Mrs. Adams. “I might have expected you to say that, Alice; you never do miss a chance,” she said, gently. “It seems queer you don’t some time miss just one chance!”

  But Alice, progressing with her toilet, appeared to be little concerned. “Oh, well, I think there are better ways of managing a man than just hammering at him.”

  Mrs. Adams uttered a little cry of pain. “‘Hammering,’ Alice?”

  “If you’d left it entirely to me,” her daughter went on, briskly, “I believe papa’d already be willing to do anything we want him to.”

  “That’s it; tell me I spoil everything. Well, I won’t interfere from now on, you can be sure of it.”

  “Please don’t talk like that,” Alice said, quickly. “I’m old enough to realize that papa may need pressure of all sorts; I only think it makes him more obstinate to get him cross. You probably do understand him better, but that’s one thing I’ve found out and you haven’t. There!” She gave her mother a friendly tap on the shoulder and went to the door. “I’ll hop in and say hello to him now.”

  As she went, she continued the fastening of her blouse, and appeared in her father’s room with one hand still thus engaged, but she patted his forehead with the other.

  “Poor old papa-daddy!” she said, gaily. “Every time he’s better somebody talks him into getting so mad he has a relapse. It’s a shame!”

  Her father’s eyes, beneath their melancholy brows, looked up at her wistfully. “I suppose you heard your mother going for me,” he said.

  “I heard you going for her, too!” Alice laughed. “What was it all about?”

  “Oh, the same danged old story!”

  “You mean she wants you to try something new when you get well?” Alice asked, with cheerful innocence. “So we could all have a lot more money?”

  At this his sorrowful forehead was more sorrowful than ever. The deep horizontal lines moved upward to a pattern of suffering so familiar to his daughter that it meant nothing to her; but he spoke quietly. “Yes; so we wouldn’t have any money at all, most likely.”

  “Oh, no!” she laughed, and, finishing with her blouse, patted his cheeks with both hands. “Just think how many grand openings there must be for a man that knows as much as you do! I always did believe you could get rich if you only cared to, papa.”

  But upon his forehead the painful pattern still deepened. “Don’t you think we’ve always had enough, the way things are, Alice?”

  “Not the way things are!” She patted his cheeks again; laughed again. “It used to be enough, maybe—anyway we did skimp along on it—but the way things are now I expect mama’s really pretty practical in her ideas, though, I think it’s a shame for her to bother you about it while you’re so weak. Don’t you worry about it, though; just think about other things till you get strong.”

  “You know,” he said; “you know it isn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world for a man of my age to find these grand openings you speak of. And when you’ve passed half-way from fifty to sixty you’re apt to see some risk in giving up what you know how to do and trying something new.”

  “My, what a frown!” she cried, blithely. “Didn’t I tell you to stop thinking about it till you get all well?” She bent over him, giving him a gay little kiss on the bridge of his nose. “There! I must run to breakfast. Cheer up now! Au ’voir!” And with her pretty hand she waved further encouragement from the closing door as she departed.

  Lightsomely descending the narrow stairway, she whistled as she went, her fingers drumming time on the rail; and, still whistling, she came into the dining-room, where her mother and her brother were already at the table. The brother, a thin and sallow boy of twenty, greeted her without much approval as she took her place.

  “Nothing seems to trouble you!” he said.

  “No; nothing much,” she made airy response. “What’s troubling yourself, Walter?”

  “Don’t let that worry you!” he returned, seeming to consider this to be repartee of an
effective sort; for he furnished a short laugh to go with it, and turned to his coffee with the manner of one who has satisfactorily closed an episode.

  “Walter always seems to have so many secrets!” Alice said, studying him shrewdly, but with a friendly enough amusement in her scrutiny. “Everything he does or says seems to be acted for the benefit of some mysterious audience inside himself, and he always gets its applause. Take what he said just now: he seems to think it means something, but if it does, why, that’s just another secret between him and the secret audience inside of him! We don’t really know anything about Walter at all, do we, mama?”

  Walter laughed again, in a manner that sustained her theory well enough; then after finishing his coffee, he took from his pocket a flattened packet in glazed blue paper; extracted with stained fingers a bent and wrinkled little cigarette, lighted it, hitched up his belted trousers with the air of a person who turns from trifles to things better worth his attention, and left the room.

  Alice laughed as the door closed. “He’s all secrets,” she said. “Don’t you think you really ought to know more about him, mama?”

  “I’m sure he’s a good boy,” Mrs. Adams returned, thoughtfully. “He’s been very brave about not being able to have the advantages that are enjoyed by the boys he’s grown up with. I’ve never heard a word of complaint from him.”

  “About his not being sent to college?” Alice cried. “I should think you wouldn’t! He didn’t even have enough ambition to finish high school!”

  Mrs. Adams sighed. “It seemed to me Walter lost his ambition when nearly all the boys he’d grown up with went to Eastern schools to prepare for college, and we couldn’t afford to send him. If only your father would have listened——”

  Alice interrupted: “What nonsense! Walter hated books and studying, and athletics, too, for that matter. He doesn’t care for anything nice that I ever heard of. What do you suppose he does like, mama? He must like something or other somewhere, but what do you suppose it is? What does he do with his time?”