Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  Then came a husky voice, inevitably that of a horrified coloured person hastening from a distance: “Oh, my soul!” There was a scurrying, and the girl was heard in furious yet hoarsely guarded vehemence: “Bring the clo’es prop! Bring the clo’es prop! We can poke that one down from the garage, anyway. Oh, my goodness, look at ’er go!”

  Mrs. Balche shook her head. “Naughty children!” she said, as she picked up the saucer and went to the kitchen door, which she held open for Violet to enter. “Want to come with mamma?”

  But Violet had lost even the faint interest in life he had shown a few moments earlier. He settled himself to another stupor in the sun.

  “Well, well,” Mrs. Balche said indulgently. “Afterwhile shall have some more nice keem.”

  Sunset was beginning to be hinted, two hours later, when, in another quarter of the town, a little girl of seven or eight, at play on the domestic side of an alley gate, became aware of an older girl regarding her fixedly over the top of the gate. The little girl felt embarrassed and paused in her gayeties, enfolding in her arms her pet and playmate. “Howdy’ do,” said the stranger, in a serious tone. “What’ll you take for that cat?”

  The little girl made no reply, and the stranger, opening the gate, came into the yard. She looked weary, rather bedraggled, yet hurried: her air was predominantly one of anxiety. “I’ll give you a quarter for that cat,” she said. “I want an all-white cat, but this one’s only got that one gray spot over its eye, and I don’t believe there’s an all-white cat left in town, leastways that anybody’s willing to part with. I’ll give you twenty-five cents for it. I haven’t got it with me, but I’ll promise to give it to you day after to-morrow.”

  The little girl still made no reply, but continued to stare, her eyes widening, and the caller spoke with desperation.

  “See here,” she said, “I got to have a whitish cat! That’n isn’t worth more’n a quarter, but I’ll give you thirty-five cents for her, money down, day after to-morrow.”

  At this, the frightened child set the cat upon the ground and fled into the house. Florence Atwater was left alone; that is to say, she was the only human being in the yard, or in sight. Nevertheless, a human voice spoke, not far behind her. It came through a knot-hole in the fence, and it was a voice almost of passion.

  “You grab it!”

  Florence stood in silence, motionless; there was a solemnity about her. The voice exhorted. “My goodness!” it said. “She didn’t say she wouldn’t sell it, did she? You can bring her the money like you said you would, can’t you? I got mine, didn’t I, almost without any trouble at all! My Heavens! Ain’t Kitty Silver pretty near crazy? Just think of the position we’ve put her into! I tell you, you got to!”

  But now Florence moved. She moved slowly at first: then with more decision and rapidity.

  That evening’s dusk had deepened into blue night when the two cousins, each with a scant, uneasy dinner eaten, met by appointment in the alley behind their mutual grandfather’s place of residence, and, having climbed the back fence, approached the kitchen. Suddenly Florence lifted her right hand, and took between thumb and forefinger a lock of hair upon the back of Herbert’s head.

  “Well, for Heavenses’ sakes!” he burst out, justifiably protesting.

  “Hush!” Florence warned him. “Kitty Silver’s talkin’ to somebody in there. It might be Aunt Julia! C’m’ere!”

  She led him to a position beneath an open window of the kitchen. Here they sat upon the ground, with their backs against the stone foundation of the house, and listened to voices and the clink of dishes being washed.

  “She’s got another ole coloured darky woman in there with her,” said Florence. “It’s a woman belongs to her church and comes to see her ‘most every evening. Listen; she’s telling her about it. I bet we could get the real truth of it maybe better this way than if we went in and asked her right out. Anyway, it isn’t eavesdropping if you listen when people are talkin’ about you, yourself. It’s only wrong when it isn’t any of your own bus—”

  “For Heavenses’ sakes hush up!” her cousin remonstrated. “Listen!”

  “‘No’m, Miss Julia, ma’am,’ I say” — thus came the voice of Mrs. Silver—”’no’m, Miss Julia, ma’am. Them the same two cats you han’ me, Miss Julia, ma’am,’ I say. ‘Leas’wise,’ I say, ‘them the two same cats whut was in nat closed-up brown basket when I open it up an’ take an’ fix to wash ’em. Somebody might ‘a’ took an’ change ’em ‘fo’ they got to me,’ I say, ‘Miss Julia, ma’am, but all the change happen to ’em sence they been in charge of me, that’s the gray whut come off ’em whiles I washin’ ’em an’ dryin’ ’em in corn meal and flannel. I dunno how much washin’ ’em change ’em, Miss Julia, ma’am,’ I say, ‘‘cause how much they change or ain’t change, that’s fer you to say and me not to jedge,’ I say.”

  “Lan’ o’ misery!” cried the visitor, chuckling delightedly. “I wonder how you done kep’ you face, Miss Kitty. What Miss Julia say?”

  A loud, irresponsible outburst of mirth on the part of Mrs. Silver followed. When she could again control herself, she replied more definitely. “Miss Julia say, she say she ain’t never hear no sech outragelous sto’y in her life! She tuck on! Hallelujah! An’ all time, Miz Johnson, I give you my word, I stannin’ there holdin’ nat basket, carryin’ on up hill an’ down dale how them the same two Berjum cats Mista Sammerses sen’ her: an’ trouble enough dess ten’in’ to that basket, lemme say to you, Miz Johnson, as anybody kin tell you whutever tried to take care o’ two cats whut ain’t yoosta each other in the same basket. An’ every blessed minute I stannin’ there, can’t I hear that ole Miz Blatch nex’ do’, out in her back yod an’ her front yod, an’ plum out in the street, hollerin’: ‘Kitty? Kitty? Kitty?’ ‘Yes!’ Miss Julia say, she say, ‘Fine sto’y!’ she say. ‘Them two cats you claim my Berjum cats, they got short hair, an’ they ain’t the same age an’ they ain’t even nowheres near the same size,’ she say. ‘One of ‘em’s as fat as bofe them Berjum cats,’ she say: ‘an’ it’s on’y got one eye,’ she say. ‘Well, Miss Julia, ma’am,’ I say— ‘one thing; they come out white, all ‘cept dess around that there skinnier one’s eye,’ I say: ‘dess the same you tell me they goin’ to,’ I say. ‘You right about that much, ma’am!’ I say.”

  “Oh, me!” Mrs. Johnson moaned, worn with applausive laughter. “What she respon’ then?”

  “I set that basket down,” said Kitty Silver, “an’ I start fer the do’, whiles she unfasten the lid fer to take one mo’ look at ’em, I reckon: but open window mighty close by, an’ nat skinny white cat make one jump, an’ after li’l while I lookin’ out thishere window an’ see that ole fat Miz Blatch’s tom, waddlin’ crost the yod todes home.”

  “What she doin’ now?” Mrs. Johnson inquired.

  “Who? Miss Julia? She settin’ out on the front po’che talkin’ to Mista Sammerses.”

  “My name! How she goin’ fix it with him, after all thishere dishcumaraddle?”

  “Who? Miss Julia? Leave her alone, honey! She take an’ begin talk so fas’ an’ talk so sweet, no young man ain’t goin’ to ricklect he ever give her no cats, not till he’s gone an’ halfway home! But I ain’t tole you the en’ of it, Miz Johnson, an’ the en’ of it’s the bes’ part whut happen.”

  “What’s that, Miss Kitty?”

  “Look!” said Mrs. Silver. “Mista Atwater gone in yonder, after I come out, an’ ast whut all them goin’s-on about. Well suh, an’ di’n’ he come walkin’ out in my kitchen an’ slip me two bright spang new silbuh dolluhs right in my han’?”

  “My name!”

  “Yessuh!” said Mrs. Silver triumphantly. And in the darkness outside the window Florence drew a deep breath. “I’d of felt just awful about this,” she said, “if Noble Dill had given Aunt Julia those Persian cats.”

  “Why?” Herbert inquired, puzzled by her way of looking at things. “I don’t see why it would make it any worse who gave ’em to her
.”

  “Well, it would,” Florence said. “But anyway, I think we did rather wrong. Did you notice what Kitty Silver said about what grandpa did?”

  “Well?”

  “I think we ought to tell him our share of it,” Florence returned thoughtfully. “I don’t want to go to bed to-night with all this on my mind, and I’m going to find grandpa right now and confess every bit of it to him.”

  Herbert hopefully decided to go with her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  JULIA, LIKE HERBERT, had been a little puzzled by Florence’s expression of a partiality for the young man, Noble Dill; it was not customary for anybody to confess a weakness for him. However, the aunt dismissed the subject from her mind, as other matters pressed sharply upon her attention; she had more worries than most people guessed.

  The responsibilities of a lady who is almost officially the prettiest person in a town persistently claiming sixty-five thousand inhabitants are often heavier than the world suspects, and there were moments when Julia found the position so trying that she would have preferred to resign. She was a warm-hearted, appreciative girl, naturally unable to close her eyes to sterling merit wherever it appeared: and it was not without warrant that she complained of her relatives. The whole family, including the children, she said, regaled themselves with her private affairs as a substitute for theatre-going. But one day, a week after the irretrievable disappearance of Fifi and Mimi, she went so far as to admit a note of unconscious confession into her protest that she was getting pretty tired of being mistaken for a three-ring circus! Such was her despairing expression, and the confession lies in her use of the word “three.”

  The misleading moderation of “three” was pointed out to her by her niece, whose mind at once violently seized upon the word and divested it of context — a process both feminine and instinctive, for this child was already beginning to be feminine. “Three!” she said. “Why, Aunt Julia, you must be crazy! There’s Newland Sanders and Noble Dill and that old widower, Ridgley, that grandpa hates so, and Mister Clairdyce and George Plum and the two new ones from out of town that Aunt Fanny Patterson said you had at church Sunday morning — Herbert said he didn’t like one of ‘em’s looks much, Aunt Julia. And there’s Parker Kent Usher and that funny-lookin’ one with the little piece of whiskers under his underlip that Noble Dill got so mad at when they were calling, and Uncle Joe laughed about, and I don’t know who all! Anyhow, there’s an awful lot more than three, Aunt Julia.”

  Julia looked down with little favour upon the talkative caller. Florence was seated upon the shady steps of the veranda, and Julia, dressed for a walk, occupied a wicker chair above her. “Julia, dressed for a walk” — how scant the words! It was a summer walk that Julia had dressed for: and she was all too dashingly a picture of coolness on a hot day: a brunette in murmurous white, though her little hat was a film of blackest blue, and thus also in belt and parasol she had almost matched the colour of her eyes. Probably no human-made fabric could have come nearer to matching them, though she had once met a great traveller — at least he went far enough in his search for comparisons — who told her that the Czarina of Russia had owned a deep sapphire of precisely the colour, but the Czarina’s was the only sapphire yet discovered that had it. One of Newland Sanders’s longest Poems-to-Julia was entitled “Black Sapphires.”

  Julia’s harmonies in black sapphire were uncalled for. If she really had been as kind as she was too often capable of looking, she would have fastened patches over both eyes — one patch would have been useless — and she would have worn flat shoes and patronized a dressmaker with genius enough to misrepresent her. But Julia was not great enough for such generosities: she should have been locked up till she passed sixty; her sufferings deserve no pity.

  And yet an attack of the mumps during the winter had brought Julia more sympathy than the epidemic of typhoid fever in the Old Ladies’ Infirmary brought all of the nine old ladies who were under treatment there. Julia was confined to her room for almost a month, during which a florist’s wagon seemed permanent before the house: and a confectioner’s frequently stood beside the florist’s. Young Florence, an immune who had known the mumps in infancy, became an almost constant attendant upon the patient, with the result that the niece contracted an illness briefer than the aunt’s, but more than equalling it in poignancy, caused by the poor child’s economic struggle against waste. Florence’s convalescence took place in her own home without any inquiries whatever from the outer world, but Julia’s was spent in great part at the telephone. Even a poem was repeated to her by the instrument:

  How the world blooms anew

  To think that you

  Can speak again,

  Can hear

  The words of men

  And the dear

  Own voice of you.

  This was Newland Sanders. He was just out of college, a reviewer, a poet, and once, momentarily, an atheist. It was Newland who was present and said such a remarkable thing when Julia had the accident to her thumb-nail in closing the double doors between the living-room and the library, where her peculiar old father sat reading. “To see you suffer,” Newland said passionately as she nursed her injury:— “to see you in pain, that is the one thing in the universe which I feel beyond all my capacities. Do you know, when you are made to suffer pain, then I feel that there is no God!”

  This strong declaration struck Herbert as one of the most impressive things he had ever heard, though he could not account for its being said to any aunt of his. Herbert had just dropped in without the formality of ringing the bell, and had paused in the hall, outside the open door of the living-room. He considered the matter, after Newland had spoken, and concluded to return to his own place of residence without disturbing anybody at his grandfather’s. At home he found his mother and father entertaining one of his uncles, one of his aunts, two of his great-uncles, one of his great-aunts, and one of his grown-up cousins, at cards: and he proved to be warranted in believing that they would all like to know what he had heard. Newland’s statement became quite celebrated throughout the family: and Julia, who had perceived almost a sacred something in his original fervour, changed her mind after hearing the words musingly repeated, over and over, by her fat old Uncle Joe.

  Florence thought proper to remind her of this to-day, after Julia’s protest containing the too moderately confessional word “three.”

  “If you don’t want to be such a circus,” the niece continued, reasoning perfectly, “I don’t see what you always keep leadin’ all of ’em on all the time just the same for.”

  “Who’ve you heard saying that, Florence?” her aunt demanded.

  “Aunt Fanny Patterson,” Florence replied absently. “F’r instance, Aunt Julia, I don’t see what you want to go walking with Newland Sanders for, when you said yourself you wished he was dead, or somep’n, after there got to be so muck talk in the family and everywhere about his sayin’ all that about the Bible when you hurt your thumb. All the family — —”

  Julia sighed profoundly. “I wish ‘all the family’ would try to think about themselves for just a little while! There’s entirely too little self-centredness among my relatives to suit me!”

  “Why, it’s only because you’re related to me that I pay the very slightest attention to what goes on here,” Florence protested. “It’s my own grandfather’s house, isn’t it? Well, if you didn’t live here, and if you wasn’t my own grandfather’s daughter, Aunt Julia, I wouldn’t ever pay the very slightest attention to you! Anyway, I don’t much criticize all these people that keep calling on you — anyway not half as much as Herbert does. Herbert thinks he always hass to act so critical, now his voice is changing.”

  “At your age,” said Julia, “my mind was on my schoolbooks.”

  “Why, Aunt Julia!” Florence exclaimed in frank surprise. “Grandpa says just the opposite from that. I’ve heard him say, time and time and time again, you always were this way, ever since you were four years old.”


  “What way?” asked her aunt.

  “Like you are now, Aunt Julia. Grandpa says by the time you were fourteen it got so bad he had to get a new front gate, the way they leaned on it. He says he hoped when you grew up he’d get a little peace in his own house, but he says it’s worse, and never for one minute the livelong day can he — —”

  “I know,” Julia interrupted. “He talks like a Christian Martyr and behaves like Nero. I might warn you to keep away from him, by the way, Florence. He says that either you or Herbert was over here yesterday and used his spectacles to cut a magazine with, and broke them. I wouldn’t be around here much if I were you until he’s got over it.”

  “It must have been Herbert broke ’em,” said Florence promptly.

  “Papa thinks it was you. Kitty Silver told him it was.”

  “Mean ole reptile!” said Florence, alluding to Mrs. Silver; then she added serenely, “Well, grandpa don’t get home till five o’clock, and it’s only about a quarter of two now. Aunt Julia, what are you waitin’ around here for?”

  “I told you; I’m going walking.”

  “I mean: Who with?”

  Miss Atwater permitted herself a light moan. “With Mr. Sanders and Mr. Ridgely, Florence.”

  Florence’s eyes grew large and eager. “Why, Aunt Julia, I thought those two didn’t speak to each other any more!”

  “They don’t,” Julia assented in a lifeless voice. “It just happened that Mr. Sanders and Mr. Ridgley and Mr. Dill, all three, asked me to take a walk this afternoon at two o’clock.”

  “But Noble Dill isn’t going?”

  “No,” said Julia. “I was fortunate enough to remember that I’d already promised someone else when he asked me. That’s what I didn’t remember when Mr. Ridgely asked me.”