“But you do,” she said. “You do get it there.”
“No,” he murmured, in return. “I never did. I got out some of the old ones when I came in this morning, some that I hadn’t looked at for years, and it’s the same with them. You can do it much better yourself — your sketches show it.”
“No, no!” she protested, quickly.
“Yes, they do; and I wondered if it was only because you were young. But those I did when I was young are almost the same as the ones I paint now. I haven’t learned much. There hasn’t been any one to show me! And you can’t learn from print, never! Yet I’ve grown in what I SEE — grown so that the world is full of beauty to me that I never dreamed of seeing when I began. But I can’t paint it — I can’t get it on the canvas. Ah, I think I might have known how to, if I hadn’t had to teach myself, if I could only have seen how some of the other fellows did their work. If I’d ever saved money to get away from Canaan — if I could have gone away from it and come back knowing how to paint it — if I could have got to Paris for just one month! PARIS — for just one month!”
“Perhaps we will; you can’t tell what MAY happen.” It was always her reply to this cry of his.
“PARIS — for just one month!” he repeated, with infinite wistfulness, and then realizing what an old, old cry it was with him, he shook his head, impatiently sniffing out a laugh at himself, rose and went pottering about among the canvases, returning their faces to the wall, and railing at them mutteringly.
“Whatever took me into it, I don’t know. I might have done something useful. But I couldn’t bring myself ever to consider doing anything else — I couldn’t bear even to think of it! Lord forgive me, I even tried to encourage your father to paint. Perhaps he might as well, poor boy, as to have put all he’d made into buying Jonas out. Ah me! There you go, ‘Flower-Girls’! Turn your silly faces to the wall and smile and cry there till I’m gone and somebody throws you on a bonfire. I’LL never look at you again.” He paused, with the canvas half turned. “And yet,” he went on, reflectively, “a man promised me thirty-five dollars for that picture once. I painted it to order, but he went away before I finished it, and never answered the letters I wrote him about it. I wish I had the money now — perhaps we could have more than two meals a day.”
“We don’t need more,” said Ariel, scraping the palette attentively. “It’s healthier with only breakfast and supper. I think I’d rather have a new dress than dinner.”
“I dare say you would,” the old man mused. “You’re young — you’re young. What were you doing all this afternoon, child?”
“In my room, trying to make over mamma’s wedding-dress for to-night.”
“To-night?”
“Mamie Pike invited me to a dance at their house.”
“Very well; I’m glad you’re going to be gay,” he said, not seeing the faintly bitter smile that came to her face.
“I don’t think I’ll be very gay,” she answered.
“I don’t know why I go — nobody ever asks me to dance.”
“Why not?” he asked, with an old man’s astonishment.
“I don’t know. Perhaps it’s because I don’t dress very well.” Then, as he made a sorrowful gesture, she cut him off before he could speak. “Oh, it isn’t altogether because we’re poor; it’s more I don’t know how to wear what I’ve got, the way some girls do. I never cared much and — well, I’M not worrying, Roger! And I think I’ve done a good deal with mamma’s dress. It’s a very grand dress. I wonder I never thought of wearing it until to-day. I may be” — she laughed and blushed— “I may be the belle of the ball — who knows!”
“You’ll want me to walk over with you and come for you afterwards, I expect.”
“Only to take me. It may be late when I come away — if a good many SHOULD ask me to dance, for once! Of course I could come home alone. But Joe Louden is going to sort of hang around outside, and he’ll meet me at the gate and see me safe home.”
“Oh!” he exclaimed, blankly.
“Isn’t it all right?” she asked.
“I think I’d better come for you,” he answered, gently. “The truth is, I — I think you’d better not be with Joe Louden a great deal.”
“Why?”
“Well, he doesn’t seem a vicious boy to me, but I’m afraid he’s getting rather a bad name, my dear.”
“He’s not getting one,” she said, gravely. “He’s already got one. He’s had a bad name in Canaan for a long while. It grew in the first place out of shabbiness and mischief, but it did grow; and if people keep on giving him a bad name the time will come when he’ll live up to it. He’s not any worse than I am, and I guess my own name isn’t too good — for a girl. And yet, so far, there’s nothing against him except his bad name.”
“I’m afraid there is,” said Roger. “It doesn’t look very well for a young man of his age to be doing no better than delivering papers.”
“It gives him time to study law,” she answered, quickly. “If he clerked all day in a store, he couldn’t.”
“I didn’t know he was studying now. I thought I’d heard that he was in a lawyer’s office for a few weeks last year, and was turned out for setting fire to it with a pipe—”
“It was an accident,” she interposed.
“But some pretty important papers were burned, and after that none of the other lawyers would have him.”
“He’s not in an office,” she admitted. “I didn’t mean that. But he studies a great deal. He goes to the courts all the time they’re in session, and he’s bought some books of his own.”
“Well — perhaps,” he assented; “but they say he gambles and drinks, and that last week Judge Pike threatened to have him arrested for throwing dice with some negroes behind the Judge’s stable.”
“What of it? I’m about the only nice person in town that will have anything to do with him — and nobody except you thinks I’M very nice!”
“Ariel! Ariel!”
“I know all about his gambling with darkies,” she continued, excitedly, her voice rising, “and I know that he goes to saloons, and that he’s an intimate friend of half the riffraff in town; and I know the reason for it, too, because he’s told me. He wants to know them, to understand them; and he says some day they’ll make him a power, and then he can help them!”
The old man laughed helplessly. “But I can’t let him bring you home, my dear.”
She came to him slowly and laid her hands upon his shoulders. Grandfather and granddaughter were nearly of the same height, and she looked squarely into his eyes. “Then you must say it is because you want to come for me, not because I mustn’t come with Joe.”
“But I think it is a little because you mustn’t come with Joe,” he answered, “especially from the Pikes’. Don’t you see that it mightn’t be well for Joe himself, if the Judge should happen to see him? I understand he warned the boy to keep away from the neighborhood entirely or he would have him locked up for dice-throwing. The Judge is a very influential man, you know, and as determined in matters like this as he is irritable.”
“Oh, if you put it on that ground,” the girl replied, her eyes softening, “I think you’d better come for me yourself.”
“Very well, I put it on that ground,” he returned, smiling upon her.
“Then I’ll send Joe word and get supper,” she said, kissing him.
It was the supper-hour not only for them but everywhere in Canaan, and the cold air of the streets bore up and down and around corners the smell of things frying. The dining-room windows of all the houses threw bright patches on the snow of the side-yards; the windows of other rooms, except those of the kitchens, were dark, for the rule of the place was Puritanical in thrift, as in all things; and the good housekeepers disputed every record of the meters with unhappy gas-collectors.
There was no better housekeeper in town than Mrs. Louden, nor a thriftier, but hers was one of the few houses in Canaan, that evening, which showed bright lights in the
front rooms while the family were at supper. It was proof of the agitation caused by the arrival of Eugene that she forgot to turn out the gas in her parlor, and in the chamber she called a library, on her way to the evening meal.
That might not have been thought a cheerful feast for Joe Louden. The fatted calf was upon the board, but it had not been provided for the prodigal, who, in this case, was the brother that stayed at home: the fete rewarded the good brother, who had been in strange lands, and the good one had found much honor in his wanderings, as he carelessly let it appear. Mrs. Louden brightened inexpressibly whenever Eugene spoke of himself, and consequently she glowed most of the time. Her husband — a heavy, melancholy, silent man with a grizzled beard and no mustache — lowered at Joe throughout the meal, but appeared to take a strange comfort in his step-son’s elegance and polish. Eugene wore new evening clothes and was lustrous to eye and ear.
Joe escaped as soon as he could, though not before the count of his later sins had been set before Eugene in detail, in mass, and in all of their depth, breadth, and thickness. His father spoke but once, after nodding heavily to confirm all points of Mrs. Louden’s recital.
“You better use any influence you’ve got with your brother,” he said to Eugene, “to make him come to time. I can’t do anything with him. If he gets in trouble, he needn’t come to me! I’ll never help him again. I’m TIRED of it!”
Eugene glanced twinklingly at the outcast. “I didn’t know he was such a roarer as all that!” he said, lightly, not taking Joe as of enough consequence to be treated as a sinner.
This encouraged Mrs. Louden to pathos upon the subject of her shame before other women when Joe happened to be mentioned, and the supper was finished with the topic. Joe slipped away through the kitchen, sneakingly, and climbed the back fence. In the alley he lit a cheap cigarette, and thrusting his hands into his pockets and shivering violently — for he had no overcoat, — walked away singing to himself, “A Spanish cavalier stood in his retreat,” his teeth affording an appropriate though involuntary castanet accompaniment.
His movements throughout the earlier part of that evening are of uncertain report. It is known that he made a partial payment of forty-five cents at a second-hand book-store for a number of volumes — Grindstaff on Torts and some others — which he had negotiated on the instalment system; it is also believed that he won twenty-eight cents playing seven-up in the little room behind Louie Farbach’s bar; but these things are of little import compared to the established fact that at eleven o’clock he was one of the ball guests at the Pike Mansion. He took no active part in the festivities, nor was he one of the dancers: his was, on the contrary, the role of a quiet observer. He lay stretched at full length upon the floor of the enclosed porch (one of the strips of canvas was later found to have been loosened), wedged between the outer railing and a row of palms in green tubs. The position he occupied was somewhat too draughty to have been recommended by a physician, but he commanded, between the leaves of the screening palms, an excellent view of the room nearest the porch. A long window, open, afforded communication between this room, one of those used for dancing, and the dim bower which had been made of the veranda, whither flirtatious couples made their way between the dances.
It was not to play eavesdropper upon any of these that the uninvited Joe had come. He was not there to listen, and it is possible that, had the curtains of other windows afforded him the chance to behold the dance, he might not have risked the dangers of his present position. He had not the slightest interest in the whispered coquetries that he heard; he watched only to catch now and then, over the shoulders of the dancers, a fitful glimpse of a pretty head that flitted across the window — the amber hair of Mamie Pike. He shivered in the draughts; and the floor of the porch was cement, painful to elbow and knee, the space where he lay cramped and narrow; but the golden bubbles of her hair, the shimmer of her dainty pink dress, and the fluffy wave of her lace scarf as she crossed and recrossed in a waltz, left him, apparently, in no discontent. He watched with parted lips, his pale cheeks reddening whenever those fair glimpses were his. At last she came out to the veranda with Eugene and sat upon a little divan, so close to Joe that, daring wildly in the shadow, he reached out a trembling hand and let his fingers rest upon the end of her scarf, which had fallen from her shoulders and touched the floor. She sat with her back to him, as did Eugene.
“You have changed, I think, since last summer,” he heard her say, reflectively.
“For the worse, ma cherie?” Joe’s expression might have been worth seeing when Eugene said “ma cherie,” for it was known in the Louden household that Mr. Bantry had failed to pass his examination in the French language.
“No,” she answered. “But you have seen so much and accomplished so much since then. You have become so polished and so—” She paused, and then continued, “But perhaps I’d better not say it; you might be offended.”
“No. I want you to say it,” he returned, confidently, and his confidence was fully justified, for she said:
“Well, then, I mean that you have become so thoroughly a man of the world. Now I’ve said it! You ARE offended — aren’t you?”
“Not at all, not at all,” replied Mr. Bantry, preventing by a masterful effort his pleasure from showing in his face. “Though I suppose you mean to imply that I’m rather wicked.”
“Oh no,” said Mamie, with profound admiration, “not exactly wicked.”
“University life IS fast nowadays,” Eugene admitted. “It’s difficult not to be drawn into it!”
“And I suppose you look down on poor little Canaan now, and everybody in it!”
“Oh no,” he laughed, indulgently. “Not at all, not at all! I find it very amusing.”
“All of it?”
“Not you,” he answered, becoming very grave.
“Honestly — DON’T you?” Her young voice trembled a little.
“Honestly — indeed — truly—” Eugene leaned very close to her and the words were barely audible.
“You KNOW I don’t!”
“Then I’m — glad,” she whispered, and Joe saw his step-brother touch her hand, but she rose quickly. “There’s the music,” she cried, happily. “It’s a waltz, and it’s YOURS!”
Joe heard her little high heels tapping gayly towards the window, followed by the heavier tread of Eugene, but he did not watch them go.
He lay on his back, with the hand that had touched Mamie’s scarf pressed across his closed eyes.
The music of that waltz was of the old-fashioned swingingly sorrowful sort, and it would be hard to say how long it was after that before the boy could hear the air played without a recurrence of the bitterness of that moment. The rhythmical pathos of the violins was in such accord with a faint sound of weeping which he heard near him, presently, that for a little while he believed this sound to be part of the music and part of himself. Then it became more distinct, and he raised himself on one elbow to look about.
Very close to him, sitting upon the divan in the shadow, was a girl wearing a dress of beautiful silk. She was crying softly, her face in her hands.
IV. THE DISASTER
ARIEL HAD WORKED all the afternoon over her mother’s wedding-gown, and two hours were required by her toilet for the dance. She curled her hair frizzily, burning it here and there, with a slate-pencil heated over a lamp chimney, and she placed above one ear three or four large artificial roses, taken from an old hat of her mother’s, which she had found in a trunk in the store-room. Possessing no slippers, she carefully blacked and polished her shoes, which had been clumsily resoled, and fastened into the strings of each small rosettes of red ribbon; after which she practised swinging the train of her skirt until she was proud of her manipulation of it. She had no powder, but found in her grandfather’s room a lump of magnesia, that he was in the habit of taking for heart-burn, and passed it over and over her brown face and hands. Then a lingering gaze into her small mirror gave her joy at last: she yearned so hard t
o see herself charming that she did see herself so. Admiration came and she told herself that she was more attractive to look at than she had ever been in her life, and that, perhaps, at last she might begin to be sought for like other girls. The little glass showed a sort of prettiness in her thin, unmatured young face; tripping dance-tunes ran through her head, her feet keeping the time, — ah, she did so hope to dance often that night! Perhaps — perhaps she might be asked for every number. And so, wrapping an old waterproof cloak about her, she took her grandfather’s arm and sallied forth, high hopes in her beating heart.
It was in the dressing-room that the change began to come. Alone, at home in her own ugly little room, she had thought herself almost beautiful, but here in the brightly lighted chamber crowded with the other girls it was different. There was a big cheval-glass at one end of the room, and she faced it, when her turn came — for the mirror was popular — with a sinking spirit. There was the contrast, like a picture painted and framed. The other girls all wore their hair after the fashion introduced to Canaan by Mamie Pike the week before, on her return from a visit to Chicago. None of them had “crimped” and none had bedecked their tresses with artificial flowers. Her alterations of the wedding-dress had not been successful; the skirt was too short in front and higher on one side than on the other, showing too plainly the heavy-soled shoes, which had lost most of their polish in the walk through the snow. The ribbon rosettes were fully revealed, and as she glanced at their reflection she heard the words, “LOOK AT THAT TRAIN AND THOSE ROSETTES!” whispered behind her, and saw in the mirror two pretty young women turn away with their handkerchiefs over their mouths and retreat hurriedly to an alcove. All the feet in the room except Ariel’s were in dainty kid or satin slippers of the color of the dresses from which they glimmered out, and only Ariel wore a train.
She went away from the mirror and pretended to be busy with a hanging thread in her sleeve.
She was singularly an alien in the chattering room, although she had been born and lived all her life in the town. Perhaps her position among the young ladies may be best defined by the remark, generally current among them, that evening, to the effect that it was “very sweet of Mamie to invite her.” Ariel was not like the others; she was not of them, and never had been. Indeed, she did not know them very well. Some of them nodded to her and gave her a word of greeting pleasantly; all of them whispered about her with wonder and suppressed amusement; but none talked to her. They were not unkindly, but they were young and eager and excited over their own interests, — which were then in the “gentlemen’s dressing-room.”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 71