Booth Tarkington Page 47

  Such was the impression, a little misted, wrought by Alice’s quick narrative. But there was dolorous fact behind it: Adams had succumbed.

  His wife, grave and nervous, rather than triumphant, in success, had told their daughter that the great J. A. would be furious and possibly vindictive. Adams was afraid of him, she said.

  “But what for, mama?” Alice asked, since this seemed a turn of affairs out of reason. “What in the world has Mr. Lamb to do with papa’s leaving the company to set up for himself? What right has he to be angry about it? If he’s such a friend as he claims to be, I should think he’d be glad—that is, if the glue factory turns out well. What will he be angry for?”

  Mrs. Adams gave Alice an uneasy glance, hesitated, and then explained that a resignation from Lamb’s had always been looked upon, especially by “that old man,” as treachery. You were supposed to die in the service, she said bitterly, and her daughter, a little mystified, accepted this explanation. Adams had not spoken to her of his surrender; he seemed not inclined to speak to her at all, or to any one.

  Alice was not serious too long, and she began to laugh as she came to the end of her decorative sketch. “After all, the whole thing is perfectly ridiculous,” she said. “In fact, it’s funny! That’s on account of what papa’s going to throw over the Lamb business for! To save your life you couldn’t imagine what he’s going to do!”

  “I won’t try, then,” Russell assented.

  “It takes all the romance out of me,” she laughed. “You’ll never go for a Parisian walk with me again, after I tell you what I’ll be heiress to.” They had come to the entrance of the little park; and, as Alice had said, it was a pretty place, especially on a day so radiant. Trees of the oldest forest stood there, hale and serene over the trim, bright grass; and the proletarians had not come from their factories at this hour; only a few mothers and their babies were to be seen, here and there, in the shade. “I think I’ll postpone telling you about it till we get nearly home again,” Alice said, as they began to saunter down one of the gravelled paths. “There’s a bench beside a spring farther on; we can sit there and talk about a lot of things—things not so sticky as my dowry’s going to be.”

  “‘Sticky?’” he echoed. “What in the world——”

  She laughed despairingly.

  “A glue factory!”

  Then he laughed, too, as much from friendliness as from amusement; and she remembered to tell him that the project of a glue factory was still “an Adams secret.” It would be known soon, however, she added; and the whole Lamb connection would probably begin saying all sorts of things, heaven knew what!

  Thus Alice built her walls of flimsy, working always gaily, or with at least the air of gaiety; and even as she rattled on, there was somewhere in her mind a constant little wonder. Everything she said seemed to be necessary to support something else she had said. How had it happened? She found herself telling him that since her father had decided on making so great a change in his ways, she and her mother hoped at last to persuade him to give up that “foolish little house” he had been so obstinate about; and she checked herself abruptly on this declivity just as she was about to slide into a remark concerning her own preference for a “country place.” Discretion caught her in time; and something else, in company with discretion, caught her, for she stopped short in her talk and blushed.

  They had taken possession of the bench beside the spring, by this time; and Russell, his elbow on the back of the bench and his chin on his hand, the better to look at her, had no guess at the cause of the blush, but was content to find it lovely. At his first sight of Alice she had seemed pretty in the particular way of being pretty that he happened to like best; and, with every moment he spent with her, this prettiness appeared to increase. He felt that he could not look at her enough: his gaze followed the fluttering of the graceful hands in almost continual gesture as she talked; then lifted happily to the vivacious face again. She charmed him.

  After her abrupt pause, she sighed, then looked at him with her eyebrows lifted in a comedy appeal. “You haven’t said you wouldn’t give Henrietta the chance,” she said, in the softest voice that can still have a little laugh running in it.

  He was puzzled. “Give Henrietta the chance?”

  “You know! You’ll let me keep on being unfair, won’t you? Not give the other girls a chance to get even?”

  He promised, heartily.

  Chapter XV

  * * *

  ALICE HAD said that no one who knew either Russell or herself would be likely to see them in the park or upon the dingy street; but although they returned by that same ungenteel thoroughfare they were seen by a person who knew them both. Also, with some surprise on the part of Russell, and something more poignant than surprise for Alice, they saw this person.

  All of the dingy street was ugly, but the greater part of it appeared to be honest. The two pedestrians came upon a block or two, however, where it offered suggestions of a less upright character, like a steady enough workingman with a naughty book sticking out of his pocket. Three or four dim shops, a single story in height, exhibited foul signboards, yet fair enough so far as the wording went; one proclaiming a tobacconist, one a junk-dealer, one a dispenser of “soft drinks and cigars.” The most credulous would have doubted these signboards; for the craft of the modern tradesman is exerted to lure indoors the passing glance, since if the glance is pleased the feet may follow; but this alleged tobacconist and his neighbours had long been fond of dust on their windows, evidently, and shades were pulled far down on the glass of their doors. Thus the public eye, small of pupil in the light of the open street, was intentionally not invited to the dusky interiors. Something different from mere lack of enterprise was apparent; and the signboards might have been omitted; they were pains thrown away, since it was plain to the world that the business parts of these shops were the brighter back rooms implied by the dark front rooms; and that the commerce there was in perilous new liquors and in dice and rough girls.

  Nothing could have been more innocent than the serenity with which these wicked little places revealed themselves for what they were; and, bound by this final tie of guilelessness, they stood together in a row which ended with a companionable barber-shop, much like them. Beyond was a series of soot-harried frame two-story houses, once part of a cheerful neighbourhood when the town was middle-aged and settled, and not old and growing. These houses, all carrying the label, “Rooms,” had the worried look of vacancy that houses have when they are too full of everybody without being anybody’s home; and there was, too, a surreptitious air about them, as if, like the false little shops, they advertised something by concealing it.

  One of them—the one next to the barber-shop—had across its front an ample, jig-sawed veranda, where aforetime, no doubt, the father of a family had fanned himself with a palm-leaf fan on Sunday afternoons, watching the surreys go by, and where his daughter listened to mandolins and badinage on starlit evenings; but, although youth still held the veranda, both the youth and the veranda were in decay. The four or five young men who lounged there this afternoon were of a type known to shady pool-parlours. Hats found no favour with them; all of them wore caps; and their tight clothes, apparently from a common source, showed a vivacious fancy for oblique pockets, false belts, and Easter-egg colourings. Another thing common to the group was the expression of eye and mouth; and Alice, in the midst of her other thoughts, had a distasteful thought about this.

  The veranda was within a dozen feet of the sidewalk, and as she and her escort came nearer, she took note of the young men, her face hardening a little, even before she suspected there might be a resemblance between them and any one she knew. Then she observed that each of these loungers wore not for the occasion, but as of habit, a look of furtively amused contempt; the mouth smiled to one side as if not to dislodge a cigarette, while the eyes kept languidly superior. All at once Alice was reminded of W
alter; and the slight frown caused by this idea had just begun to darken her forehead when Walter himself stepped out of the open door of the house and appeared upon the veranda. Upon his head was a new straw hat, and in his hand was a Malacca stick with an ivory top, for Alice had finally decided against it for herself and had given it to him. His mood was lively: he twirled the stick through his fingers like a drum-major’s baton, and whistled loudly.

  Moreover, he was indeed accompanied. With him was a thin girl who had made a violent black-and-white poster of herself: black dress, black flimsy boa, black stockings, white slippers, great black hat down upon the black eyes; and beneath the hat a curve of cheek and chin made white as whitewash, and in strong bilateral motion with gum.

  The loungers on the veranda were familiars of the pair; hailed them with cacklings; and one began to sing, in a voice all tin:

  “Then my skirt, Sal, and me did go

  Right straight to the moving-pitcher show.

  Oh, you bashful vamp!”

  The girl laughed airily. “God, but you guys are wise!” she said. “Come on, Wallie.”

  Walter stared at his sister; then grinned faintly, and nodded at Russell as the latter lifted his hat in salutation. Alice uttered an incoherent syllable of exclamation, and, as she began to walk faster, she bit her lip hard, not in order to look wistful, this time, but to help her keep tears of anger from her eyes.

  Russell laughed cheerfully. “Your brother certainly seems to have found the place for ‘colour’ to-day,” he said. “That girl’s talk must be full of it.”

  But Alice had forgotten the colour she herself had used in accounting for Walter’s peculiarities, and she did not understand. “What?” she said, huskily.

  “Don’t you remember telling me about him? How he was going to write, probably, and would go anywhere to pick up types and get them to talk?”

  She kept her eyes ahead, and said sharply, “I think his literary tastes scarcely cover this case!”

  “Don’t be too sure. He didn’t look at all disconcerted. He didn’t seem to mind your seeing him.”

  “That’s all the worse, isn’t it?”

  “Why, no,” her friend said, genially. “It means he didn’t consider that he was engaged in anything out of the way. You can’t expect to understand everything boys do at his age; they do all sorts of queer things, and outgrow them. Your brother evidently has a taste for queer people, and very likely he’s been at least half sincere when he’s made you believe he had a literary motive behind it. We all go through——”

  “Thanks, Mr. Russell,” she interrupted. “Let’s don’t say any more.”

  He looked at her flushed face and enlarged eyes; and he liked her all the better for her indignation: this was how good sisters ought to feel, he thought, failing to understand that most of what she felt was not about Walter. He ventured only a word more. “Try not to mind it so much; it really doesn’t amount to anything.”

  She shook her head, and they went on in silence; she did not look at him again until they stopped before her own house. Then she gave him only one glimpse of her eyes before she looked down. “It’s spoiled, isn’t it?” she said, in a low voice.

  “What’s ‘spoiled?’”

  “Our walk—well, everything. Somehow it always—is.”

  “‘Always is’ what?” he asked.

  “Spoiled,” she said.

  He laughed at that; but without looking at him she suddenly offered him her hand, and, as he took it, he felt a hurried, violent pressure upon his fingers, as if she meant to thank him almost passionately for being kind. She was gone before he could speak to her again.

  In her room, with the door locked, she did not go to her mirror, but to her bed, flinging herself face down, not caring how far the pillows put her hat awry. Sheer grief had followed her anger; grief for the calamitous end of her bright afternoon, grief for the “end of everything,” as she thought then. Never­theless, she gradually grew more composed, and, when her mother tapped on the door presently, let her in. Mrs. Adams looked at her with quick apprehension.

  “Oh, poor child! Wasn’t he——”

  Alice told her. “You see how it—how it made me look, mama,” she quavered, having concluded her narrative. “I’d tried to cover up Walter’s awfulness at the dance with that story about his being ‘literary,’ but no story was big enough to cover this up—and oh! it must make him think I tell stories about other things!”

  “No, no, no!” Mrs. Adams protested. “Don’t you see? At the worst, all he could think is that Walter told stories to you about why he likes to be with such dreadful people, and you believed them. That’s all he’d think; don’t you see?”

  Alice’s wet eyes began to show a little hopefulness. “You honestly think it might be that way, mama?”

  “Why, from what you’ve told me he said, I know it’s that way. Didn’t he say he wanted to come again?”

  “N-no,” Alice said, uncertainly. “But I think he will. At least I begin to think so now. He——” She stopped.

  “From all you tell me, he seems to be a very desirable young man,” Mrs. Adams said, primly.

  Her daughter was silent for several moments; then new tears gathered upon her downcast lashes. “He’s just—dear!” she faltered.

  Mrs. Adams nodded. “He’s told you he isn’t engaged, hasn’t he?”

  “No. But I know he isn’t. Maybe when he first came here he was near it, but I know he’s not.”

  “I guess Mildred Palmer would like him to be, all right!” Mrs. Adams was frank enough to say, rather triumphantly; and Alice, with a lowered head, murmured:

  “Anybody—would.”

  The words were all but inaudible.

  “Don’t you worry,” her mother said, and patted her on the shoulder. “Everything will come out all right; don’t you fear, Alice. Can’t you see that beside any other girl in town you’re just a perfect queen? Do you think any young man that wasn’t prejudiced, or something, would need more than just one look to——”

  But Alice moved away from the caressing hand. “Never mind, mama. I wonder he looks at me at all. And if he does again, after seeing my brother with those horrible people——”

  “Now, now!” Mrs. Adams interrupted, expostulating mournfully. “I’m sure Walter’s a good boy——”

  “You are?” Alice cried, with a sudden vigour. “You are?”

  “I’m sure he’s good, yes—and if he isn’t, it’s not his fault. It’s mine.”

  “What nonsense!”

  “No, it’s true,” Mrs. Adams lamented. “I tried to bring him up to be good, God knows; and when he was little he was the best boy I ever saw. When he came from Sunday-school he’d always run to me and we’d go over the lesson together; and he let me come in his room at night to hear his prayers almost until he was sixteen. Most boys won’t do that with their mothers—not nearly that long. I tried so hard to bring him up right—but if anything’s gone wrong it’s my fault.”

  “How could it be? You’ve just said——”

  “It’s because I didn’t make your father take this—this new step earlier. Then Walter might have had all the advantages that other——”

  “Oh, mama, please!” Alice begged her. “Let’s don’t go over all that again. Isn’t it more important to think what’s to be done about him? Is he going to be allowed to go on disgracing us as he does?”

  Mrs. Adams sighed profoundly. “I don’t know what to do,” she confessed, unhappily. “Your father’s so upset about—about this new step he’s taking—I don’t feel as if we ought to——”

  “No, no!” Alice cried. “Papa mustn’t be distressed with this, on top of everything else. But something’s got to be done about Walter.”

  “What can be?” her mother asked, helplessly. “What can be?”

&nbs
p; Alice admitted that she didn’t know.

  At dinner, an hour later, Walter’s habitually veiled glance lifted, now and then, to touch her furtively;—he was waiting, as he would have said, for her to “spring it”; and he had prepared a brief and sincere defense to the effect that he made his own living, and would like to inquire whose business it was to offer intrusive comment upon his private conduct. But she said nothing, while his father and mother were as silent as she. Walter concluded that there was to be no attack, but changed his mind when his father, who ate only a little, and broodingly at that, rose to leave the table and spoke to him.

  “Walter,” he said, “when you’ve finished I wish you’d come up to my room. I got something I want to say to you.”

  Walter shot a hard look at his apathetic sister, then turned to his father. “Make it to-morrow,” he said. “This is Satad’y night and I got a date.”

  “No,” Adams said, frowning. “You come up before you go out. It’s important.”

  “All right; I’ve had all I want to eat,” Walter returned. “I got a few minutes. Make it quick.”

  He followed his father upstairs, and when they were in the room together Adams shut the door, sat down, and began to rub his knees.

  “Rheumatism?” the boy inquired, slyly. “That what you want to talk to me about?”

  “No.” But Adams did not go on; he seemed to be in difficulties for words, and Walter decided to help him.

  “Hop ahead and spring it,” he said. “Get it off your mind: I’ll tell the world I should worry! You aren’t goin’ to bother me any, so why bother yourself? Alice hopped home and told you she saw me playin’ around with some pretty gay-lookin’ berries and you——”