Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “I wish you couldn’t,” said Russell. “That would be a new experience for both of us, wouldn’t it?”

  “It might be a rather bleak one for me,” she answered, lightly. “I’m afraid I’ll miss these summer evenings with you when they’re over. I’ll miss them enough, thanks!”

  “Do they have to be over some time?” he asked.

  “Oh, everything’s over some time, isn’t it?”

  Russell laughed at her. “Don’t let’s look so far ahead as that,” he said. “We don’t need to be already thinking of the cemetery, do we?”

  “I didn’t,” she said, shaking her head. “Our summer evenings will be over before then, Mr. Russell.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Good heavens!” she said. “There’s laconic eloquence: almost a proposal in a single word! Never mind, I shan’t hold you to it. But to answer you: well, I’m always looking ahead, and somehow I usually see about how things are coming out.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I suppose most of us do; at least it seems as if we did, because we so seldom feel surprised by the way they do come out. But maybe that’s only because life isn’t like a play in a theatre, and most things come about so gradually we get used to them.”

  “No, I’m sure I can see quite a long way ahead,” she insisted, gravely. “And it doesn’t seem to me as if our summer evenings could last very long. Something’ll interfere—somebody will, I mean—they’ll say something——”

  “What if they do?”

  She moved her shoulders in a little apprehensive shiver. “It’ll change you,” she said. “I’m just sure something spiteful’s going to happen to me. You’ll feel differently about—things.”

  “Now, isn’t that an idea!” he exclaimed.

  “It will,” she insisted. “I know something spiteful’s going to happen!”

  “You seem possessed by a notion not a bit flattering to me,” he remarked.

  “Oh, but isn’t it? That’s just what it is! Why isn’t it?”

  “Because it implies that I’m made of such soft material the slightest breeze will mess me all up. I’m not so like that as I evidently appear; and if it’s true that we’re afraid other people will do the things we’d be most likely to do ourselves, it seems to me that I ought to be the one to be afraid. I ought to be afraid that somebody may say something about me to you that will make you believe I’m a professional forger.”

  “No. We both know they won’t,” she said. “We both know you’re the sort of person everybody in the world says nice things about.” She lifted her hand to silence him as he laughed at this. “Oh, of course you are! I think perhaps you’re a little flirtatious—most quiet men have that one sly way with ’em—oh, yes, they do! But you happen to be the kind of man everybody loves to praise. And if you weren’t, I shouldn’t hear anything terrible about you. I told you I was unpopular: I don’t see anybody at all any more. The only man except you who’s been to see me in a month is that fearful little fat Frank Dowling, and I sent word to him I wasn’t home. Nobody’d tell me of your wickedness, you see.”

  “Then let me break some news to you,” Russell said. “Nobody would tell me of yours, either. Nobody’s even mentioned you to me.”

  She burlesqued a cry of anguish. “That is obscurity! I suppose I’m too apt to forget that they say the population’s about half a million nowadays. There are other people to talk about, you feel, then?”

  “None that I want to,” he said. “But I should think the size of the place might relieve your mind of what seems to insist on burdening it. Besides, I’d rather you thought me a better man than you do.”

  “What kind of a man do I think you are?”

  “The kind affected by what’s said about people instead of by what they do themselves.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m not,” he said. “If you want our summer evenings to be over you’ll have to drive me away yourself.”

  “Nobody else could?”

  “No.”

  She was silent, leaning forward, with her elbows on her knees and her clasped hands against her lips. Then, not moving, she said softly:

  “Well—I won’t!”

  She was silent again, and he said nothing, but looked at her, seeming to be content with looking. Her attitude was one only a graceful person should assume, but she was graceful; and, in the wan light, which made a prettily shaped mist of her, she had beauty. Perhaps it was beauty of the hour, and of the love scene almost made into form by what they had both just said, but she had it; and though beauty of the hour passes, he who sees it will long remember it and the hour when it came.

  “What are you thinking of?” he asked.

  She leaned back in her chair and did not answer at once. Then she said:

  “I don’t know; I doubt if I was thinking of anything. It seems to me I wasn’t. I think I was just being sort of sadly happy just then.”

  “Were you? Was it ‘sadly,’ too?”

  “Don’t you know?” she said. “It seems to me that only little children can be just happily happy. I think when we get older our happiest moments are like the one I had just then: it’s as if we heard strains of minor music running through them—oh, so sweet, but oh, so sad!”

  “But what makes it sad for you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, in a lighter tone. “Perhaps it’s a kind of useless foreboding I seem to have pretty often. It may be that—or it may be poor papa.”

  “You are a funny, delightful girl, though!” Russell laughed. “When your father’s so well again that he goes out walking in the evenings!”

  “He does too much walking,” Alice said. “Too much altogether, over at his new plant. But there isn’t any stopping him.” She laughed and shook her head. “When a man gets an ambition to be a multi-millionaire his family don’t appear to have much weight with him. He’ll walk all he wants to, in spite of them.”

  “I suppose so,” Russell said, absently; then he leaned forward. “I wish I could understand better why you were ‘sadly’ happy.”

  Meanwhile, as Alice shed what further light she could on this point, the man ambitious to be a “multi-millionaire” was indeed walking too much for his own good. He had gone to bed, hoping to sleep well and rise early for a long day’s work, but he could not rest, and now, in his nightgown and slippers, he was pacing the floor of his room.

  “I wish I did know,” he thought, over and over. “I do wish I knew how he feels about it.”

  Chapter XVIII

  * * *

  THAT WAS a thought almost continuously in his mind, even when he was hardest at work; and, as the days went on and he could not free himself, he became querulous about it. “I guess I’m the biggest dang fool alive,” he told his wife as they sat together one evening. “I got plenty else to bother me, without worrying my head off about what he thinks. I can’t help what he thinks; it’s too late for that. So why should I keep pestering myself about it?”

  “It’ll wear off, Virgil,” Mrs. Adams said, reassuringly. She was gentle and sympathetic with him, and for the first time in many years he would come to sit with her and talk, when he had finished his day’s work. He had told her, evading her eye, “Oh, I don’t blame you. You didn’t get after me to do this on your own account; you couldn’t help it.”

  “Yes; but it don’t wear off,” he complained. “This afternoon I was showing the men how I wanted my vats to go, and I caught my fool self standing there saying to my fool self, ‘It’s funny I don’t hear how he feels about it from somebody.’ I was saying it aloud, almost—and it is funny I don’t hear anything!”

  “Well, you see what it means, don’t you, Virgil? It only means he hasn’t said anything to anybody about it. Don’t you think you’re getting kind of morbid over it?”

  “Maybe, maybe,” he muttered.

  “Why,
yes,” she said, briskly. “You don’t realize what a little bit of a thing all this is to him. It’s been a long, long while since the last time you even mentioned glue to him, and he’s probably forgotten everything about it.”

  “You’re off your base; it isn’t like him to forget things,” Adams returned, peevishly. “He may seem to forget ’em, but he don’t.”

  “But he’s not thinking about this, or you’d have heard from him before now.”

  Her husband shook his head. “Ah, that’s just it!” he said. “Why haven’t I heard from him?”

  “It’s all your morbidness, Virgil. Look at Walter: if Mr. Lamb held this up against you, would he still let Walter stay there? Wouldn’t he have discharged Walter if he felt angry with you?”

  “That dang boy!” Adams said. “If he wanted to come with me now, I wouldn’t hardly let him. What do you suppose makes him so bull-headed?”

  “But hasn’t he a right to choose for himself?” she asked. “I suppose he feels he ought to stick to what he thinks is sure pay. As soon as he sees that you’re going to succeed with the glue-works he’ll want to be with you quick enough.”

  “Well, he better get a little sense in his head,” Adams returned, crossly. “He wanted me to pay him a three-hundred-dollar bonus in advance, when anybody with a grain of common sense knows I need every penny I can lay my hands on!”

  “Never mind,” she said. “He’ll come around later and be glad of the chance.”

  “He’ll have to beg for it then! I won’t ask him again.”

  “Oh, Walter will come out all right; you needn’t worry. And don’t you see that Mr. Lamb’s not discharging him means there’s no hard feeling against you, Virgil?”

  “I can’t make it out at all,” he said, frowning. “The only thing I can think it means is that J. A. Lamb is so fair-minded—and of course he is one of the fair-mindedest men alive—I suppose that’s the reason he hasn’t fired Walter. He may know,” Adams concluded, morosely—“he may know that’s just another thing to make me feel all the meaner: keeping my boy there on a salary after I’ve done him an injury.”

  “Now, now!” she said, trying to comfort him. “You couldn’t do anybody an injury to save your life, and everybody knows it.”

  “Well, anybody ought to know I wouldn’t want to do an injury, but this world isn’t built so’t we can do just what we want.” He paused, reflecting. “Of course there may be one explanation of why Walter’s still there: J. A. maybe hasn’t noticed that he is there. There’s so many I expect he hardly knows him by sight.”

  “Well, just do quit thinking about it,” she urged him. “It only bothers you without doing any good. Don’t you know that?”

  “Don’t I, though!” he laughed, feebly. “I know it better’n anybody! How funny that is: when you know thinking about a thing only pesters you without helping anything at all, and yet you keep right on pestering yourself with it!”

  “But why?” she said. “What’s the use when you know you haven’t done anything wrong, Virgil? You said yourself you were going to improve the process so much it would be different from the old one, and you’d really have a right to it.”

  Adams had persuaded himself of this when he yielded; he had found it necessary to persuade himself of it—though there was a part of him, of course, that remained unpersuaded; and this discomfiting part of him was what made his present trouble. “Yes, I know,” he said. “That’s true, but I can’t quite seem to get away from the fact that the principle of the process is a good deal the same—well, it’s more’n that; it’s just about the same as the one he hired Campbell and me to work out for him. Truth is, nobody could tell the difference, and I don’t know as there is any difference except in these improvements I’m making. Of course, the improvements do give me pretty near a perfect right to it, as a person might say; and that’s one of the things I thought of putting in my letter to him; but I was afraid he’d just think I was trying to make up excuses, so I left it out. I kind of worried all the time I was writing that letter, because if he thought I was just making up excuses, why, it might set him just so much more against me.”

  Ever since Mrs. Adams had found that she was to have her way, the depths of her eyes had been troubled by a continuous uneasiness; and, although she knew it was there, and sometimes veiled it by keeping the revealing eyes averted from her husband and children, she could not always cover it under that assumption of absent-mindedness. The uneasy look became vivid, and her voice was slightly tremulous now, as she said, “But what if he should be against you—although I don’t believe he is, of course—you told me he couldn’t do anything to you, Virgil.”

  “No,” he said, slowly. “I can’t see how he could do anything. It was just a secret, not a patent; the thing ain’t patentable. I’ve tried to think what he could do—supposing he was to want to—but I can’t figure out anything at all that would be any harm to me. There isn’t any way in the world it could be made a question of law. Only thing he could do’d be to tell people his side of it, and set ’em against me. I been kind of waiting for that to happen, all along.”

  She looked somewhat relieved. “So did I expect it,” she said. “I was dreading it most on Alice’s account: it might have—well, young men are so easily influenced and all. But so far as the business is concerned, what if Mr. Lamb did talk? That wouldn’t amount to much. It wouldn’t affect the business; not to hurt. And, besides, he isn’t even doing that.”

  “No; anyhow not yet, it seems.” And Adams sighed again, wistfully. “But I would give a good deal to know what he thinks!”

  Before his surrender he had always supposed that if he did such an unthinkable thing as to seize upon the glue process for himself, what he would feel must be an overpowering shame. But shame is the rarest thing in the world: what he felt was this unremittent curiosity about his old employer’s thoughts. It was an obsession, yet he did not want to hear what Lamb “thought” from Lamb himself, for Adams had a second obsession, and this was his dread of meeting the old man face to face. Such an encounter could happen only by chance and unexpectedly; since Adams would have avoided any deliberate meeting, so long as his legs had strength to carry him, even if Lamb came to the house to see him. But people do meet unexpectedly; and when Adams had to be down-town he kept away from the “wholesale district.” One day he did see Lamb, as the latter went by in his car, impassive, going home to lunch; and Adams, in the crowd at a corner, knew that the old man had not seen him. Nevertheless, in a street-car, on the way back to his sheds, an hour later, he was still subject to little shivering seizures of horror.

  He worked unceasingly, seeming to keep at it even in his sleep, for he always woke in the midst of a planning and estimating that must have been going on in his mind before consciousness of himself returned. Moreover, the work, thus urged, went rapidly, in spite of the high wages he had to pay his labourers for their short hours. “It eats money,” he complained, and, in fact, by the time his vats and boilers were in place it had eaten almost all he could supply; but in addition to his equipment he now owned a stock of “raw material,” raw indeed; and when operations should be a little further along he was confident his banker would be willing to “carry” him.

  Six weeks from the day he had obtained his lease he began his glue-making. The terrible smells came out of the sheds and went writhing like snakes all through that quarter of the town. A smiling man, strolling and breathing the air with satisfaction, would turn a corner and smile no more, but hurry. However, coloured people had almost all the dwellings of this old section to themselves; and although even they were troubled, there was recompense for them. Being philosophic about what appeared to them as in the order of nature, they sought neither escape nor redress, and soon learned to bear what the wind brought them. They even made use of it to enrich those figures of speech with which the native impulses of coloured people decorate their communications: they flavoured met
aphor, simile, and invective with it; and thus may be said to have enjoyed it. But the man who produced it took a hot bath as soon as he reached his home the evening of that first day when his manufacturing began. Then he put on fresh clothes; but after dinner he seemed to be haunted, and asked his wife if she “noticed anything.”

  She laughed and inquired what he meant.

  “Seems to me as if that glue-works smell hadn’t quit hanging to me,” he explained. “Don’t you notice it?”

  “No! What an idea!”

  He laughed, too, but uneasily; and told her he was sure “the dang glue smell” was somehow sticking to him. Later, he went outdoors and walked up and down the small yard in the dusk; but now and then he stood still, with his head lifted, and sniffed the air suspiciously. “Can you smell it?” he called to Alice, who sat upon the veranda, prettily dressed and waiting in a reverie.

  “Smell what, papa?”

  “That dang glue-works.”

  She did the same thing her mother had done: laughed, and said, “No! How foolish! Why, papa, it’s over two miles from here!”

  “You don’t get it at all?” he insisted.

  “The idea! The air is lovely to-night, papa.”

  The air did not seem lovely to him, for he was positive that he detected the taint. He wondered how far it carried, and if J. A. Lamb would smell it, too, out on his own lawn a mile to the north; and if he did, would he guess what it was? Then Adams laughed at himself for such nonsense; but could not rid his nostrils of their disgust. To him the whole town seemed to smell of his glue-works.

  Nevertheless, the glue was making, and his sheds were busy. “Guess we’re stirrin’ up this ole neighbourhood with more than the smell,” his foreman remarked one morning.

  “How’s that?” Adams inquired.

  “That great big, enormous ole dead butterine factory across the street from our lot,” the man said. “Nothin’ like settin’ an example to bring real estate to life. That place is full o’ carpenters startin’ in to make a regular buildin’ of it again. Guess you ought to have the credit of it, because you was the first man in ten years to see any possibilities in this neighbourhood.”