Booth Tarkington Page 43

  Mrs. Adams, with her hands still automatically at work in the flooded dishpan, turned to face her daughter. “Alice,” she said, tremulously, “what do I ask for myself?”

  “What?”

  “I say, What do I ask for myself? Do you suppose I want anything? Don’t you know I’d be perfectly content on your father’s present income if I were the only person to be considered? What do I care about any pleasure for myself? I’d be willing never to have a maid again; I don’t mind doing the work. If we didn’t have any children I’d be glad to do your father’s cooking and the housework and the washing and ironing, too, for the rest of my life. I wouldn’t care. I’m a poor cook and a poor housekeeper; I don’t do anything well; but it would be good enough for just him and me. I wouldn’t ever utter one word of com——”

  “Oh, goodness!” Alice lamented. “What is it all about?”

  “It’s about this,” said Mrs. Adams, swallowing. “You and Walter are a new generation and you ought to have the same as the rest of the new generation get. Poor Walter—asking you to go to the movies and a Chinese restaurant: the best he had to offer! Don’t you suppose I see how the poor boy is deteriorating? Don’t you suppose I know what you have to go through, Alice? And when I think of that man upstairs——” The agitated voice grew louder. “When I think of him and know that nothing in the world but his stubbornness keeps my children from having all they want and what they ought to have, do you suppose I’m going to hold myself bound to keep to the absolute letter of a silly promise he got from me by behaving like a crazy man? I can’t! I can’t do it! No mother could sit by and see him lock up a horn of plenty like that in his closet when the children were starving!”

  “Oh, goodness, goodness me!” Alice protested. “We aren’t precisely ‘starving,’ are we?”

  Mrs. Adams began to weep. “It’s just the same. Didn’t I see how flushed and pretty you looked, this afternoon, after you’d been walking with this young man that’s come here? Do you suppose he’d look at a girl like Mildred Palmer if you had what you ought to have? Do you suppose he’d be going into business with her father if your father——”

  “Good heavens, mama; you’re worse than Walter: I just barely know the man! Don’t be so absurd!”

  “Yes, I’m always ‘absurd,’” Mrs. Adams moaned. “All I can do is cry, while your father sits upstairs, and his horn of plenty——”

  But Alice interrupted with a peal of desperate laughter. “Oh, that ‘horn of plenty!’ Do come down to earth, mama. How can you call a glue factory, that doesn’t exist except in your mind, a ‘horn of plenty’? Do let’s be a little rational!”

  “It could be a horn of plenty,” the tearful Mrs. Adams insisted. “It could! You don’t understand a thing about it.”

  “Well, I’m willing,” Alice said, with tired skepticism. “Make me understand, then. Where’d you ever get the idea?”

  Mrs. Adams withdrew her hands from the water, dried them on a towel, and then wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. “Your father could make a fortune if he wanted to,” she said, quietly. “At least, I don’t say a fortune, but anyhow a great deal more than he does make.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that before, mama, and you think he could make it out of a glue factory. What I’m asking is: How?”

  “How? Why, by making glue and selling it. Don’t you know how bad most glue is when you try to mend anything? A good glue is one of the rarest things there is; and it would just sell itself, once it got started. Well, your father knows how to make as good a glue as there is in the world.”

  Alice was not interested. “What of it? I suppose probably anybody could make it if they wanted to.”

  “I said you didn’t know anything about it. Nobody else could make it. Your father knows a formula for making it.”

  “What of that?”

  “It’s a secret formula. It isn’t even down on paper. It’s worth any amount of money.”

  “‘Any amount?’” Alice said, remaining incredulous. “Why hasn’t papa sold it then?”

  “Just because he’s too stubborn to do anything with it at all!”

  “How did papa get it?”

  “He got it before you were born, just after we were married. I didn’t think much about it then: it wasn’t till you were growing up and I saw how much we needed money that I——”

  “Yes, but how did papa get it?” Alice began to feel a little more curious about this possible buried treasure. “Did he invent it?”

  “Partly,” Mrs. Adams said, looking somewhat preoccupied. “He and another man invented it.”

  “Then maybe the other man——”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Then his family——”

  “I don’t think he left any family,” Mrs. Adams said. “Anyhow, it belongs to your father. At least it belongs to him as much as it does to any one else. He’s got an absolutely perfect right to do anything he wants to with it, and it would make us all comfortable if he’d do what I want him to—and he knows it would, too!”

  Alice shook her head pityingly. “Poor mama!” she said. “Of course he knows it wouldn’t do anything of the kind, or else he’d have done it long ago.”

  “He would, you say?” her mother cried. “That only shows how little you know him!”

  “Poor mama!” Alice said again, soothingly. “If papa were like what you say he is, he’d be—why, he’d be crazy!”

  Mrs. Adams agreed with a vehemence near passion. “You’re right about him for once: that’s just what he is! He sits up there in his stubbornness and—lets us slave here in the kitchen when if he wanted to—if he’d so much as lift his little finger——”

  “Oh, come, now!” Alice laughed. “You can’t build even a glue factory with just one little finger.”

  Mrs. Adams seemed about to reply that finding fault with a figure of speech was beside the point; but a ringing of the front door bell forestalled the retort. “Now, who do you suppose that is?” she wondered aloud; then her face brightened. “Ah—did Mr. Russell ask if he could——”

  “No, he wouldn’t be coming this evening,” Alice said. “Probably it’s the great J. A. Lamb: he usually stops for a minute on Thursdays to ask how papa’s getting along. I’ll go.”

  She tossed her apron off, and as she went through the house her expression was thoughtful. She was thinking vaguely about the glue factory and wondering if there might be “something in it” after all. If her mother was right about the rich possibilities of Adams’s secret—but that was as far as Alice’s speculations upon the matter went at this time: they were checked, partly by the thought that her father probably hadn’t enough money for such an enterprise, and partly by the fact that she had arrived at the front door.

  Chapter XII

  * * *

  THE FINE old gentleman revealed when she opened the door was probably the last great merchant in America to wear the chin beard. White as white frost, it was trimmed short with exquisite precision, while his upper lip and the lower expanses of his cheeks were clean and rosy from fresh shaving. With this trim white chin beard, the white waistcoat, the white tie, the suit of fine gray cloth, the broad and brilliantly polished black shoes, and the wide-brimmed gray felt hat, here was a man who had found his style in the seventies of the last century, and thenceforth kept it. Files of old magazines of that period might show him, in woodcut, as, “Type of Boston Merchant”; Nast might have drawn him as an honest statesman. He was eighty, hale and sturdy, not aged; and his quick blue eyes, still unflecked, and as brisk as a boy’s, saw everything.

  “Well, well, well!” he said, heartily. “You haven’t lost any of your good looks since last week, I see, Miss Alice, so I guess I’m to take it you haven’t been worrying over your daddy. The young feller’s getting along all right, is he?”

  “He’s much better; he’s sitting up, Mr. Lamb. Won’t you come in
?”

  “Well, I don’t know but I might.” He turned to call toward twin disks of light at the curb, “Be out in a minute, Billy”; and the silhouette of a chauffeur standing beside a car could be seen to salute in response, as the old gentleman stepped into the hall. “You don’t suppose your daddy’s receiving callers yet, is he?”

  “He’s a good deal stronger than he was when you were here last week, but I’m afraid he’s not very presentable, though.”

  “‘Presentable?’” The old man echoed her jovially. “Pshaw! I’ve seen lots of sick folks. I know what they look like and how they love to kind of nest in among a pile of old blankets and wrappers. Don’t you worry about that, Miss Alice, if you think he’d like to see me.”

  “Of course he would—if——” Alice hesitated; then said quickly, “Of course he’d love to see you and he’s quite able to, if you care to come up.”

  She ran up the stairs ahead of him, and had time to snatch the crocheted wrap from her father’s shoulders. Swathed as usual, he was sitting beside a table, reading the evening paper; but when his employer appeared in the doorway he half rose as if to come forward in greeting.

  “Sit still!” the old gentleman shouted. “What do you mean? Don’t you know you’re weak as a cat? D’you think a man can be sick as long as you have and not be weak as a cat? What you trying to do the polite with me for?”

  Adams gratefully protracted the handshake that accompanied these inquiries. “This is certainly mighty fine of you, Mr. Lamb,” he said. “I guess Alice has told you how much our whole family appreciate your coming here so regularly to see how this old bag o’ bones was getting along. Haven’t you, Alice?”

  “Yes, papa,” she said; and turned to go out, but Lamb checked her.

  “Stay right here, Miss Alice; I’m not even going to sit down. I know how it upsets sick folks when people outside the family come in for the first time.”

  “You don’t upset me,” Adams said. “I’ll feel a lot better for getting a glimpse of you, Mr. Lamb.”

  The visitor’s laugh was husky, but hearty and reassuring, like his voice in speaking. “That’s the way all my boys blarney me, Miss Alice,” he said. “They think I’ll make the work lighter on ’em if they can get me kind of flattered up. You just tell your daddy it’s no use; he doesn’t get on my soft side, pretending he likes to see me even when he’s sick.”

  “Oh, I’m not so sick any more,” Adams said. “I expect to be back in my place ten days from now at the longest.”

  “Well, now, don’t hurry it, Virgil; don’t hurry it. You take your time; take your time.”

  This brought to Adams’s lips a feeble smile not lacking in a kind of vanity, as feeble. “Why?” he asked. “I suppose you think my department runs itself down there, do you?”

  His employer’s response was another husky laugh. “Well, well, well!” he cried, and patted Adams’s shoulder with a strong pink hand. “Listen to this young feller, Miss Alice, will you! He thinks we can’t get along without him a minute! Yes, sir, this daddy of yours believes the whole works’ll just take and run down if he isn’t there to keep ’em wound up. I always suspected he thought a good deal of himself, and now I know he does!”

  Adams looked troubled. “Well, I don’t like to feel that my salary’s going on with me not earning it.”

  “Listen to him, Miss Alice! Wouldn’t you think, now, he’d let me be the one to worry about that? Why, on my word, if your daddy had his way, I wouldn’t be anywhere. He’d take all my worrying and everything else off my shoulders and shove me right out of Lamb and Company! He would!”

  “It seems to me I’ve been soldiering on you a pretty long while, Mr. Lamb,” the convalescent said, querulously. “I don’t feel right about it; but I’ll be back in ten days. You’ll see.”

  The old man took his hand in parting. “All right; we’ll see, Virgil. Of course we do need you, seriously speaking; but we don’t need you so bad we’ll let you come down there before you’re fully fit and able.” He went to the door. “You hear, Miss Alice? That’s what I wanted to make the old feller understand, and what I want you to kind of enforce on him. The old place is there waiting for him, and it’d wait ten years if it took him that long to get good and well. You see that he remembers it, Miss Alice!”

  She went down the stairs with him, and he continued to impress this upon her until he had gone out of the front door. And even after that, the husky voice called back from the darkness, as he went to his car, “Don’t forget, Miss Alice; let him take his own time. We always want him, but we want him to get good and well first. Good-night, good-night, young lady!”

  When she closed the door her mother came from the farther end of the “living-room,” where there was no light; and Alice turned to her.

  “I can’t help liking that old man, mama,” she said. “He always sounds so—well, so solid and honest and friendly! I do like him.”

  But Mrs. Adams failed in sympathy upon this point. “He didn’t say anything about raising your father’s salary, did he?” she asked, dryly.

  “No.”

  “No. I thought not.”

  She would have said more, but Alice, indisposed to listen, began to whistle, ran up the stairs, and went to sit with her father. She found him bright-eyed with the excitement a first caller brings into a slow convalescence: his cheeks showed actual hints of colour; and he was smiling tremulously as he filled and lit his pipe. She brought the crocheted scarf and put it about his shoulders again, then took a chair near him.

  “I believe seeing Mr. Lamb did do you good, papa,” she said. “I sort of thought it might, and that’s why I let him come up. You really look a little like your old self again.”

  Adams exhaled a breathy “Ha!” with the smoke from his pipe as he waved the match to extinguish it. “That’s fine,” he said. “The smoke I had before dinner didn’t taste the way it used to, and I kind of wondered if I’d lost my liking for tobacco, but this one seems to be all right. You bet it did me good to see J. A. Lamb! He’s the biggest man that’s ever lived in this town or ever will live here; and you can take all the Governors and Senators or anything they’ve raised here, and put ’em in a pot with him, and they won’t come out one-two-three alongside o’ him! And to think as big a man as that, with all his interests and everything he’s got on his mind—to think he’d never let anything prevent him from coming here once every week to ask how I was getting along, and then walk right upstairs and kind of call on me, as it were—well, it makes me sort of feel as if I wasn’t so much of a nobody, so to speak, as your mother seems to like to make out sometimes.”

  “How foolish, papa! Of course you’re not ‘a nobody.’”

  Adams chuckled faintly upon his pipe-stem, what vanity he had seeming to be further stimulated by his daughter’s applause. “I guess there aren’t a whole lot of people in this town that could claim J. A. showed that much interest in ’em,” he said. “Of course I don’t set up to believe it’s all because of merit, or anything like that. He’d do the same for anybody else that’d been with the company as long as I have, but still it is something to be with the company that long and have him show he appreciates it.”

  “Yes, indeed, it is, papa.”

  “Yes, sir,” Adams said, reflectively. “Yes, sir, I guess that’s so. And besides, it all goes to show the kind of a man he is. Simon pure, that’s what that man is, Alice. Simon pure! There’s never been anybody work for him that didn’t respect him more than they did any other man in the world, I guess. And when you work for him you know he respects you, too. Right from the start you get the feeling that J. A. puts absolute confidence in you; and that’s mighty stimulating: it makes you want to show him he hasn’t misplaced it. There’s great big moral values to the way a man like him gets you to feeling about your relations with the business: it ain’t all just dollars and cents—not by any means!”

  H
e was silent for a time, then returned with increasing enthusiasm to this theme, and Alice was glad to see so much renewal of life in him; he had not spoken with a like cheerful vigour since before his illness. The visit of his idolized great man had indeed been good for him, putting new spirit into him; and liveliness of the body followed that of the spirit. His improvement carried over the night: he slept well and awoke late, declaring that he was “pretty near a well man and ready for business right now.” Moreover, having slept again in the afternoon, he dressed and went down to dinner, leaning but lightly on Alice, who conducted him.

  “My! but you and your mother have been at it with your scrubbing and dusting!” he said, as they came through the “living-room.” “I don’t know I ever did see the house so spick and span before!” His glance fell upon a few carnations in a vase, and he chuckled admiringly. “Flowers, too! So that’s what you coaxed that dollar and a half out o’ me for, this morning!”

  Other embellishments brought forth his comment when he had taken his old seat at the head of the small dinner-table. “Why, I declare, Alice!” he exclaimed. “I been so busy looking at all the spick-and-spanishness after the house-cleaning, and the flowers out in the parlour—‘living-room’ I suppose you want me to call it, if I just got to be fashionable—I been so busy studying over all this so-and-so, I declare I never noticed you till this minute! My, but you are all dressed up! What’s goin’ on? What’s it about: you so all dressed up, and flowers in the parlour and everything?”

  “Don’t you see, papa? It’s in honour of your coming downstairs again, of course.”

  “Oh, so that’s it,” he said. “I never would ’a’ thought of that, I guess.”

  But Walter looked sidelong at his father, and gave forth his sly and knowing laugh. “Neither would I!” he said.

  Adams lifted his eyebrows jocosely. “You’re jealous, are you, sonny? You don’t want the old man to think our young lady’d make so much fuss over him, do you?”