“Are you?” Russell asked, smiling.
“I? Oh — —” She paused, lifting both hands in a charming gesture of helplessness. “Oh, I’m just — me!”
His glance followed the lightly waved hands with keen approval, then rose to the lively and colourful face, with its hazel eyes, its small and pretty nose, and the lip-caught smile which seemed the climax of her decorative transition. Never had he seen a creature so plastic or so wistful.
Here was a contrast to his cousin Mildred, who was not wistful, and controlled any impulses toward plasticity, if she had them. “By George!” he said. “But you ARE different!”
With that, there leaped in her such an impulse of roguish gallantry as she could never resist. She turned her head, and, laughing and bright-eyed, looked him full in the face.
“From whom?” she cried.
“From — everybody!” he said. “Are you a mind-reader?”
“Why?”
“How did you know I was thinking you were different from my cousin, Mildred Palmer?”
“What makes you think I DID know it?”
“Nonsense!” he said. “You knew what I was thinking and I knew you knew.”
“Yes,” she said with cool humour. “How intimate that seems to make us all at once!”
Russell left no doubt that he was delighted with these gaieties of hers. “By George!” he exclaimed again. “I thought you were this sort of girl the first moment I saw you!”
“What sort of girl? Didn’t Mildred tell you what sort of girl I am when she asked you to dance with me?”
“She didn’t ask me to dance with you — I’d been looking at you. You were talking to some old ladies, and I asked Mildred who you were.”
“Oh, so Mildred DIDN’T — —” Alice checked herself. “Who did she tell you I was?”
“She just said you were a Miss Adams, so I — —”
“‘A’ Miss Adams?” Alice interrupted.
“Yes. Then I said I’d like to meet you.”
“I see. You thought you’d save me from the old ladies.”
“No. I thought I’d save myself from some of the girls Mildred was getting me to dance with. There was a Miss Dowling — —”
“Poor man!” Alice said, gently, and her impulsive thought was that Mildred had taken few chances, and that as a matter of self-defense her carefulness might have been well founded. This Mr. Arthur Russell was a much more responsive person than one had supposed.
“So, Mr. Russell, you don’t know anything about me except what you thought when you first saw me?”
“Yes, I know I was right when I thought it.”
“You haven’t told me what you thought.”
“I thought you were like what you ARE like.”
“Not very definite, is it? I’m afraid you shed more light a minute or so ago, when you said how different from Mildred you thought I was. That WAS definite, unfortunately!”
“I didn’t say it,” Russell explained. “I thought it, and you read my mind. That’s the sort of girl I thought you were — one that could read a man’s mind. Why do you say ‘unfortunately’ you’re not like Mildred?”
Alice’s smooth gesture seemed to sketch Mildred. “Because she’s perfect — why, she’s PERFECTLY perfect! She never makes a mistake, and everybody looks up to her — oh, yes, we all fairly adore her! She’s like some big, noble, cold statue— ‘way above the rest of us — and she hardly ever does anything mean or treacherous. Of all the girls I know I believe she’s played the fewest really petty tricks. She’s — —”
Russell interrupted; he looked perplexed. “You say she’s perfectly perfect, but that she does play SOME — —”
Alice laughed, as if at his sweet innocence. “Men are so funny!” she informed him. “Of course girls ALL do mean things sometimes. My own career’s just one long brazen smirch of ’em! What I mean is, Mildred’s perfectly perfect compared to the rest of us.”
“I see,” he said, and seemed to need a moment or two of thoughtfulness. Then he inquired, “What sort of treacherous things do YOU do?”
“I? Oh, the very worst kind! Most people bore me particularly the men in this town — and I show it.”
“But I shouldn’t call that treacherous, exactly.”
“Well, THEY do,” Alice laughed. “It’s made me a terribly unpopular character! I do a lot of things they hate. For instance, at a dance I’d a lot rather find some clever old woman and talk to her than dance with nine-tenths of these nonentities. I usually do it, too.”
“But you danced as if you liked it. You danced better than any other girl I — —”
“This flattery of yours doesn’t quite turn my head, Mr. Russell,” Alice interrupted. “Particularly since Mildred only gave you Ella Dowling to compare with me!”
“Oh, no,” he insisted. “There were others — and of course Mildred, herself.”
“Oh, of course, yes. I forgot that. Well — —” She paused, then added, “I certainly OUGHT to dance well.”
“Why is it so much a duty?”
“When I think of the dancing-teachers and the expense to papa! All sorts of fancy instructors — I suppose that’s what daughters have fathers for, though, isn’t it? To throw money away on them?”
“You don’t — —” Russell began, and his look was one of alarm. “You haven’t taken up — —”
She understood his apprehension and responded merrily, “Oh, murder, no! You mean you’re afraid I break out sometimes in a piece of cheesecloth and run around a fountain thirty times, and then, for an encore, show how much like snakes I can make my arms look.”
“I SAID you were a mind-reader!” he exclaimed. “That’s exactly what I was pretending to be afraid you might do.”
“‘Pretending?’ That’s nicer of you. No; it’s not my mania.”
“What is?”
“Oh, nothing in particular that I know of just now. Of course I’ve had the usual one: the one that every girl goes through.”
“What’s that?”
“Good heavens, Mr. Russell, you can’t expect me to believe you’re really a man of the world if you don’t know that every girl has a time in her life when she’s positive she’s divinely talented for the stage! It’s the only universal rule about women that hasn’t got an exception. I don’t mean we all want to go on the stage, but we all think we’d be wonderful if we did. Even Mildred. Oh, she wouldn’t confess it to you: you’d have to know her a great deal better than any man can ever know her to find out.”
“I see,” he said. “Girls are always telling us we can’t know them. I wonder if you — —”
She took up his thought before he expressed it, and again he was fascinated by her quickness, which indeed seemed to him almost telepathic. “Oh, but DON’T we know one another, though!” she cried.
“Such things we have to keep secret — things that go on right before YOUR eyes!”
“Why don’t some of you tell us?” he asked.
“We can’t tell you.”
“Too much honour?”
“No. Not even too much honour among thieves, Mr. Russell. We don’t tell you about our tricks against one another because we know it wouldn’t make any impression on you. The tricks aren’t played against you, and you have a soft side for cats with lovely manners!”
“What about your tricks against us?”
“Oh, those!” Alice laughed. “We think they’re rather cute!”
“Bravo!” he cried, and hammered the ferrule of his stick upon the pavement.
“What’s the applause for?”
“For you. What you said was like running up the black flag to the masthead.”
“Oh, no. It was just a modest little sign in a pretty flower-bed: ‘Gentlemen, beware!’”
“I see I must,” he said, gallantly.
“Thanks! But I mean, beware of the whole bloomin’ garden!” Then, picking up a thread that had almost disappeared: “You needn’t think you’ll ever find out whether I�
�m right about Mildred’s not being an exception by asking her,” she said. “She won’t tell you: she’s not the sort that ever makes a confession.”
But Russell had not followed her shift to the former topic. “‘Mildred’s not being an exception?’” he said, vaguely. “I don’t — —”
“An exception about thinking she could be a wonderful thing on the stage if she only cared to. If you asked her I’m pretty sure she’d say, ‘What nonsense!’ Mildred’s the dearest, finest thing anywhere, but you won’t find out many things about her by asking her.”
Russell’s expression became more serious, as it did whenever his cousin was made their topic. “You think not?” he said. “You think she’s — —”
“No. But it’s not because she isn’t sincere exactly. It’s only because she has such a lot to live up to. She has to live up to being a girl on the grand style to herself, I mean, of course.” And without pausing Alice rippled on, “You ought to have seen ME when I had the stage-fever! I used to play ‘Juliet’ all alone in my room.’ She lifted her arms in graceful entreaty, pleading musically,
“O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest thy love prove — —”
She broke off abruptly with a little flourish, snapping thumb and finger of each outstretched hand, then laughed and said, “Papa used to make such fun of me! Thank heaven, I was only fifteen; I was all over it by the next year.”
“No wonder you had the fever,” Russell observed. “You do it beautifully. Why didn’t you finish the line?”
“Which one? ‘Lest thy love prove likewise variable’? Juliet was saying it to a MAN, you know. She seems to have been ready to worry about his constancy pretty early in their affair!”
Her companion was again thoughtful. “Yes,” he said, seeming to be rather irksomely impressed with Alice’s suggestion. “Yes; it does appear so.”
Alice glanced at his serious face, and yielded to an audacious temptation. “You mustn’t take it so hard,” she said, flippantly.
“It isn’t about you: it’s only about Romeo and Juliet.”
“See here!” he exclaimed. “You aren’t at your mind-reading again, are you? There are times when it won’t do, you know!”
She leaned toward him a little, as if companionably: they were walking slowly, and this geniality of hers brought her shoulder in light contact with his for a moment. “Do you dislike my mind-reading?” she asked, and, across their two just touching shoulders, gave him her sudden look of smiling wistfulness. “Do you hate it?”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t,” he said, gravely. “It’s quite pleasant. But I think it says, ‘Gentlemen, beware!’”
She instantly moved away from him, with the lawless and frank laugh of one who is delighted to be caught in a piece of hypocrisy. “How lovely!” she cried. Then she pointed ahead. “Our walk is nearly over. We’re coming to the foolish little house where I live. It’s a queer little place, but my father’s so attached to it the family have about given up hope of getting him to build a real house farther out. He doesn’t mind our being extravagant about anything else, but he won’t let us alter one single thing about his precious little old house. Well!” She halted, and gave him her hand. “Adieu!”
“I couldn’t,” he began; hesitated, then asked: “I couldn’t come in with you for a little while?”
“Not now,” she said, quickly. “You can come — —” She paused.
“When?”
“Almost any time.” She turned and walked slowly up the path, but he waited. “You can come in the evening if you like,” she called back to him over her shoulder.
“Soon?”
“As soon as you like!” She waved her hand; then ran indoors and watched him from a window as he went up the street. He walked rapidly, a fine, easy figure, swinging his stick in a way that suggested exhilaration. Alice, staring after him through the irregular apertures of a lace curtain, showed no similar buoyancy. Upon the instant she closed the door all sparkle left her: she had become at once the simple and sometimes troubled girl her family knew.
“What is going on out there?” her mother asked, approaching from the dining-room.
“Oh, nothing,” Alice said, indifferently, as she turned away. “That Mr. Russell met me downtown and walked up with me.”
“Mr. Russell? Oh, the one that’s engaged to Mildred?”
“Well — I don’t know for certain. He didn’t seem so much like an engaged man to me.” And she added, in the tone of thoughtful preoccupation: “Anyhow — not so terribly!”
Then she ran upstairs, gave her father his tobacco, filled his pipe for him, and petted him as he lighted it.
CHAPTER XI
AFTER THAT, SHE went to her room and sat down before her three-leaved mirror. There was where she nearly always sat when she came into her room, if she had nothing in mind to do. She went to that chair as naturally as a dog goes to his corner.
She leaned forward, observing her profile; gravity seemed to be her mood. But after a long, almost motionless scrutiny, she began to produce dramatic sketches upon that ever-ready stage, her countenance: she showed gaiety, satire, doubt, gentleness, appreciation of a companion and love-in-hiding — all studied in profile first, then repeated for a “three-quarter view.” Subsequently she ran through them, facing herself in full.
In this manner she outlined a playful scenario for her next interview with Arthur Russell; but grew solemn again, thinking of the impression she had already sought to give him. She had no twinges for any underminings of her “most intimate friend” — in fact, she felt that her work on a new portrait of Mildred for Mr.
Russell had been honest and accurate. But why had it been her instinct to show him an Alice Adams who didn’t exist?
Almost everything she had said to him was upon spontaneous impulse, springing to her lips on the instant; yet it all seemed to have been founded upon a careful design, as if some hidden self kept such designs in stock and handed them up to her, ready-made, to be used for its own purpose. What appeared to be the desired result was a false-coloured image in Russell’s mind; but if he liked that image he wouldn’t be liking Alice Adams; nor would anything he thought about the image be a thought about her.
Nevertheless, she knew she would go on with her false, fancy colourings of this nothing as soon as she saw him again; she had just been practicing them. “What’s the idea?” she wondered. “What makes me tell such lies? Why shouldn’t I be just myself?” And then she thought, “But which one is myself?”
Her eyes dwelt on the solemn eyes in the mirror; and her lips, disquieted by a deepening wonder, parted to whisper:
“Who in the world are you?”
The apparition before her had obeyed her like an alert slave, but now, as she subsided to a complete stillness, that aspect changed to the old mockery with which mirrors avenge their wrongs. The nucleus of some queer thing seemed to gather and shape itself behind the nothingness of the reflected eyes until it became almost an actual strange presence. If it could be identified, perhaps the presence was that of the hidden designer who handed up the false, ready-made pictures, and, for unknown purposes, made Alice exhibit them; but whatever it was, she suddenly found it monkey-like and terrifying. In a flutter she jumped up and went to another part of the room.
A moment or two later she was whistling softly as she hung her light coat over a wooden triangle in her closet, and her musing now was quainter than the experience that led to it; for what she thought was this, “I certainly am a queer girl!” She took a little pride in so much originality, believing herself probably the only person in the world to have such thoughts as had been hers since she entered the room, and the first to be disturbed by a strange presence in the mirror. In fact, the effect of the tiny episode became apparent in that look of preoccupied complacency to be seen for a time upon any girl who has found reason to suspect that she is a being without counterpart.
“Where’d you see me?”
“Down-town.”
“This afternoon, you mean, Walter?”
“Yes, ‘this afternoon, I mean, Walter,’” he returned, burlesquing her voice at least happily enough to please himself; for he laughed applausively. “Oh, you never saw me! I passed you close enough to pull a tooth, but you were awful busy. I never did see anybody as busy as you get, Alice, when you’re towin’ a barge. My, but you keep your hands goin’! Looked like the air was full of ’em! That’s why I’m onto why you look so tickled this evening; I saw you with that big fish.”
Mrs. Adams laughed benevolently; she was not displeased with this rallying. “Well, what of it, Walter?” she asked. “If you happen to see your sister on the street when some nice young man is being attentive to her — —”
Walter barked and then cackled. “Whoa, Sal!” he said. “You got the parts mixed. It’s little Alice that was ‘being attentive.’ I know the big fish she was attentive to, all right, too.”
“Yes,” his sister retorted, quietly. “I should think you might have recognized him, Walter.”
Walter looked annoyed. “Still harpin’ on THAT!” he complained. “The kind of women I like, if they get sore they just hit you somewhere on the face and then they’re through. By the way, I heard this Russell was supposed to be your dear, old, sweet friend Mildred’s steady. What you doin’ walkin’ as close to him as all that?”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 289