Booth Tarkington Page 44

  “Go on thinkin’ it’s over you,” Walter retorted, amused. “Go on and think it. It’ll do you good.”

  “Of course I’ll think it,” Adams said. “It isn’t anybody’s birthday. Certainly the decorations are on account of me coming downstairs. Didn’t you hear Alice say so?”

  “Sure, I heard her say so.”

  “Well, then——”

  Walter interrupted him with a little music. Looking shrewdly at Alice, he sang:

  “I was walkin’ out on Monday with my sweet thing.

  She’s my neat thing,

  My sweet thing:

  I’ll go round on Tuesday night to see her.

  Oh, how we’ll spoon——”

  “Walter!” his mother cried. “Where do you learn such vulgar songs?” However, she seemed not greatly displeased with him, and laughed as she spoke.

  “So that’s it, Alice!” said Adams. “Playing the hypocrite with your old man, are you? It’s some new beau, is it?”

  “I only wish it were,” she said, calmly. “No. It’s just what I said: it’s all for you, dear.”

  “Don’t let her con you,” Walter advised his father. “She’s got expectations. You hang around downstairs a while after dinner and you’ll see.”

  But the prophecy failed, though Adams went to his own room without waiting to test it. No one came.

  Alice stayed in the “living-room” until half-past nine, when she went slowly upstairs. Her mother, almost tearful, met her at the top, and whispered, “You mustn’t mind, dearie.”

  “Mustn’t mind what?” Alice asked, and then, as she went on her way, laughed scornfully. “What utter nonsense!” she said.

  Next day she cut the stems of the rather scant show of carnations and refreshed them with new water. At dinner, her father, still in high spirits, observed that she had again “dressed up” in honour of his second descent of the stairs; and Walter repeated his fragment of objectionable song; but these jocularities were rendered pointless by the eventless evening that followed; and in the morning the carnations began to appear tarnished and flaccid. Alice gave them a long look, then threw them away; and neither Walter nor her father was inspired to any rallying by her plain costume for that evening. Mrs. Adams was visibly depressed.

  When Alice finished helping her mother with the dishes, she went outdoors and sat upon the steps of the little front veranda. The night, gentle with warm air from the south, surrounded her pleasantly, and the perpetual smoke was thinner. Now that the furnaces of dwelling-houses were no longer fired, life in that city had begun to be less like life in a railway tunnel; people were aware of summer in the air, and in the thickened foliage of the shade-trees, and in the sky. Stars were unveiled by the passing of the denser smoke fogs, and to-night they could be seen clearly; they looked warm and near. Other girls sat upon verandas and stoops in Alice’s street, cheerful as young fishermen along the banks of a stream.

  Alice could hear them from time to time; thin sopranos persistent in laughter that fell dismally upon her ears. She had set no lines or nets herself, and what she had of “expectations,” as Walter called them, were vanished. For Alice was experienced; and one of the conclusions she drew from her experience was that when a man says, “I’d take you for anything you wanted me to,” he may mean it or he may not; but, if he does, he will not postpone the first opportunity to say something more. Little affairs, once begun, must be warmed quickly; for if they cool they are dead.

  But Alice was not thinking of Arthur Russell. When she tossed away the carnations she likewise tossed away her thoughts of that young man. She had been like a boy who sees upon the street, some distance before him, a bit of something round and glittering, a possible dime. He hopes it is a dime, and, until he comes near enough to make sure, he plays that it is a dime. In his mind he has an adventure with it: he buys something delightful. If he picks it up, discovering only some tin-foil which has happened upon a round shape, he feels a sinking. A dulness falls upon him.

  So Alice was dull with the loss of an adventure; and when the laughter of other girls reached her, intermittently, she had not sprightliness enough left in her to be envious of their gaiety. Besides, these neighbours were ineligible even for her envy, being of another caste; they could never know a dance at the Palmers’, except remotely, through a newspaper. Their laughter was for the encouragement of snappy young men of the stores and offices down-town, clerks, bookkeepers, what not—some of them probably graduates of Frincke’s Business College.

  Then, as she recalled that dark portal, with its dusty stairway mounting between close walls to disappear in the upper shadows, her mind drew back as from a doorway to Purgatory. Nevertheless, it was a picture often in her reverie; and sometimes it came suddenly, without sequence, into the midst of her other thoughts, as if it leaped up among them from a lower darkness; and when it arrived it wanted to stay. So a traveller, still roaming the world afar, sometimes broods without apparent reason upon his family burial lot: “I wonder if I shall end there.”

  The foreboding passed abruptly, with a jerk of her breath, as the street-lamp revealed a tall and easy figure approaching from the north, swinging a stick in time to its stride. She had given Russell up—and he came.

  “What luck for me!” he exclaimed. “To find you alone!”

  Alice gave him her hand for an instant, not otherwise moving. “I’m glad it happened so,” she said. “Let’s stay out here, shall we? Do you think it’s too provincial to sit on a girl’s front steps with her?”

  “‘Provincial?’ Why, it’s the very best of our institutions,” he returned, taking his place beside her. “At least, I think so to-night.”

  “Thanks! Is that practise for other nights somewhere else?”

  “No,” he laughed. “The practising all led up to this. Did I come too soon?”

  “No,” she replied, gravely. “Just in time!”

  “I’m glad to be so accurate; I’ve spent two evenings wanting to come, Miss Adams, instead of doing what I was doing.”

  “What was that?”

  “Dinners. Large and long dinners. Your fellow-citizens are immensely hospitable to a newcomer.”

  “Oh, no,” Alice said. “We don’t do it for everybody. Didn’t you find yourself charmed?”

  “One was a men’s dinner,” he explained. “Mr. Palmer seemed to think I ought to be shown to the principal business men.”

  “What was the other dinner?”

  “My cousin Mildred gave it.”

  “Oh, did she!” Alice said, sharply, but she recovered herself in the same instant, and laughed. “She wanted to show you to the principal business women, I suppose.”

  “I don’t know. At all events, I shouldn’t give myself out to be so much fêted by your ‘fellow-citizens,’ after all, seeing these were both done by my relatives, the Palmers. However, there are others to follow, I’m afraid. I was wondering—I hoped maybe you’d be coming to some of them. Aren’t you?”

  “I rather doubt it,” Alice said, slowly. “Mildred’s dance was almost the only evening I’ve gone out since my father’s illness began. He seemed better that day; so I went. He was better the other day when he wanted those cigars. He’s very much up and down.” She paused. “I’d almost forgotten that Mildred is your cousin.”

  “Not a very near one,” he explained. “Mr. Palmer’s father was my great-uncle.”

  “Still, of course you are related.”

  “Yes; that distantly.”

  Alice said placidly, “It’s quite an advantage.”

  He agreed. “Yes. It is.”

  “No,” she said, in the same placid tone. “I mean for Mildred.”

  “I don’t see——”

  She laughed. “No. You wouldn’t. I mean it’s an advantage over the rest of us who might like to compete for some of your t
ime; and the worst of it is we can’t accuse her of being unfair about it. We can’t prove she showed any trickiness in having you for a cousin. Whatever else she might plan to do with you, she didn’t plan that. So the rest of us must just bear it!”

  “The ‘rest of you!’” he laughed. “It’s going to mean a great deal of suffering!”

  Alice resumed her placid tone. “You’re staying at the Palmers’, aren’t you?”

  “No, not now. I’ve taken an apartment. I’m going to live here; I’m permanent. Didn’t I tell you?”

  “I think I’d heard somewhere that you were,” she said. “Do you think you’ll like living here?”

  “How can one tell?”

  “If I were in your place I think I should be able to tell, Mr. Russell.”

  “How?”

  “Why, good gracious!” she cried. “Haven’t you got the most perfect creature in town for your—your cousin? She expects to make you like living here, doesn’t she? How could you keep from liking it, even if you tried not to, under the circumstances?”

  “Well, you see, there’s such a lot of circumstances,” he explained; “I’m not sure I’ll like getting back into a business again. I suppose most of the men of my age in the country have been going through the same experience: the War left us with a considerable restlessness of spirit.”

  “You were in the War?” she asked, quickly, and as quickly answered herself, “Of course you were!”

  “I was a left-over; they only let me out about four months ago,” he said. “It’s quite a shake-up trying to settle down again.”

  “You were in France, then?”

  “Oh, yes; but I didn’t get up to the front much—only two or three times, and then just for a day or so. I was in the transportation service.”

  “You were an officer, of course.”

  “Yes,” he said. “They let me play I was a major.”

  “I guessed a major,” she said. “You’d always be pretty grand, of course.”

  Russell was amused. “Well, you see,” he informed her, “as it happened, we had at least several other majors in our army. Why would I always be something ‘pretty grand?’”

  “You’re related to the Palmers. Don’t you notice they always affect the pretty grand?”

  “Then you think I’m only one of their affectations, I take it.”

  “Yes, you seem to be the most successful one they’ve got!” Alice said, lightly. “You certainly do belong to them.” And she laughed as if at something hidden from him. “Don’t you?”

  “But you’ve just excused me for that,” he protested. “You said nobody could be blamed for my being their third cousin. What a contradictory girl you are!”

  Alice shook her head. “Let’s keep away from the kind of girl I am.”

  “No,” he said. “That’s just what I came here to talk about.”

  She shook her head again. “Let’s keep first to the kind of man you are. I’m glad you were in the War.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She was quiet a moment, for she was thinking that here she spoke the truth: his service put about him a little glamour that helped to please her with him. She had been pleased with him during their walk; pleased with him on his own account; and now that pleasure was growing keener. She looked at him, and though the light in which she saw him was little more than starlight, she saw that he was looking steadily at her with a kindly and smiling seriousness. All at once it seemed to her that the night air was sweeter to breathe, as if a distant fragrance of new blossoms had been blown to her. She smiled back to him, and said, “Well, what kind of man are you?”

  “I don’t know; I’ve often wondered,” he replied. “What kind of girl are you?”

  “Don’t you remember? I told you the other day. I’m just me!”

  “But who is that?”

  “You forget everything,” said Alice. “You told me what kind of a girl I am. You seemed to think you’d taken quite a fancy to me from the very first.”

  “So I did,” he agreed, heartily.

  “But how quickly you forgot it!”

  “Oh, no. I only want you to say what kind of a girl you are.”

  She mocked him. “‘I don’t know; I’ve often wondered!’ What kind of a girl does Mildred tell you I am? What has she said about me since she told you I was ‘a Miss Adams?’”

  “I don’t know; I haven’t asked her.”

  “Then don’t ask her,” Alice said, quickly.

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s such a perfect creature and I’m such an imperfect one. Perfect creatures have the most perfect way of ruining the imperfect ones.”

  “But then they wouldn’t be perfect. Not if they——”

  “Oh, yes, they remain perfectly perfect,” she assured him. “That’s because they never go into details. They’re not so vulgar as to come right out and tell that you’ve been in jail for stealing chickens. They just look absent-minded and say in a low voice, ‘Oh, very; but I scarcely think you’d like her particularly’; and then begin to talk of something else right away.”

  His smile had disappeared. “Yes,” he said, somewhat ruefully. “That does sound like Mildred. You certainly do seem to know her! Do you know everybody as well as that?”

  “Not myself,” Alice said. “I don’t know myself at all. I got to wondering about that—about who I was—the other day after you walked home with me.”

  He uttered an exclamation, and added, explaining it, “You do give a man a chance to be fatuous, though! As if it were walking home with me that made you wonder about yourself!”

  “It was,” Alice informed him, coolly. “I was wondering what I wanted to make you think of me, in case I should ever happen to see you again.”

  This audacity appeared to take his breath. “By George!” he cried.

  “You mustn’t be astonished,” she said. “What I decided then was that I would probably never dare to be just myself with you—not if I cared to have you want to see me again—and yet here I am, just being myself after all!”

  “You are the cheeriest series of shocks,” Russell exclaimed, whereupon Alice added to the series.

  “Tell me: Is it a good policy for me to follow with you?” she asked, and he found the mockery in her voice delightful. “Would you advise me to offer you shocks as a sort of vacation from suavity?”

  “Suavity” was yet another sketch of Mildred; a recognizable one, or it would not have been humorous. In Alice’s hands, so dexterous in this work, her statuesque friend was becoming as ridiculous as a fine figure of wax left to the mercies of a satirist.

  But the lively young sculptress knew better than to overdo: what she did must appear to spring all from mirth; so she laughed as if unwillingly, and said, “I mustn’t laugh at Mildred! In the first place, she’s your—your cousin. And in the second place, she’s not meant to be funny; it isn’t right to laugh at really splendid people who take themselves seriously. In the third place, you won’t come again if I do.”

  “Don’t be sure of that,” Russell said, “whatever you do.”

  “‘Whatever I do?’” she echoed. “That sounds as if you thought I could be terrific! Be careful; there’s one thing I could do that would keep you away.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I could tell you not to come,” she said. “I wonder if I ought to.”

  “Why do you wonder if you ‘ought to?’”

  “Don’t you guess?”

  “No.”

  “Then let’s both be mysteries to each other,” she suggested. “I mystify you because I wonder, and you mystify me because you don’t guess why I wonder. We’ll let it go at that, shall we?”

  “Very well; so long as it’s certain that you don’t tell me not to come again.”

  “I’ll not tell you that
—yet,” she said. “In fact——” She paused, reflecting, with her head to one side. “In fact, I won’t tell you not to come, probably, until I see that’s what you want me to tell you. I’ll let you out easily—and I’ll be sure to see it. Even before you do, perhaps.”

  “That arrangement suits me,” Russell returned, and his voice held no trace of jocularity: he had become serious. “It suits me better if you’re enough in earnest to mean that I can come—oh, not whenever I want to; I don’t expect so much!—but if you mean that I can see you pretty often.”

  “Of course I’m in earnest,” she said. “But before I say you can come ‘pretty often,’ I’d like to know how much of my time you’d need if you did come ‘whenever you want to’; and of course you wouldn’t dare make any answer to that question except one. Wouldn’t you let me have Thursdays out?”

  “No, no,” he protested. “I want to know. Will you let me come pretty often?”

  “Lean toward me a little,” Alice said. “I want you to understand.” And as he obediently bent his head near hers, she inclined toward him as if to whisper; then, in a half-shout, she cried,

  “Yes!”

  He clapped his hands. “By George!” he said. “What a girl you are!”

  “Why?”

  “Well, for the first reason, because you have such gaieties as that one. I should think your father would actually like being ill, just to be in the house with you all the time.”

  “You mean by that,” Alice inquired, “I keep my family cheerful with my amusing little ways?”

  “Yes. Don’t you?”

  “There were only boys in your family, weren’t there, Mr. Russell?”

  “I was an only child, unfortunately.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I see you hadn’t any sisters.”

  For a moment he puzzled over her meaning, then saw it, and was more delighted with her than ever. “I can answer a question of yours, now, that I couldn’t a while ago.”

  “Yes, I know,” she returned, quietly.

  “But how could you know?”

  “It’s the question I asked you about whether you were going to like living here,” she said. “You’re about to tell me that now you know you will like it.”