The fabric of civilized life is interwoven with blackmail: even some of the noblest people do favours for other people who are depended upon not to tell somebody something that the noblest people have done. Blackmail is born into us all, and our nurses teach us more blackmail by threatening to tell our parents if we won’t do this and that — and our parents threaten to tell the doctor — and so we learn! Blackmail is part of the daily life of a child. Displeased, his first resort to get his way with other children is a threat to “tell,” but by-and-by his experience discovers the mutual benefit of honour among blackmailers. Therefore, at eight it is no longer the ticket to threaten to tell the teacher; and, a little later, threatening to tell any adult at all is considered something of a breakdown in morals. Notoriously, the code is more liable to infraction by people of the physically weaker sex, for the very reason, of course, that their inferiority of muscle so frequently compels such a sin, if they are to have their way. But for Florence there was now no such temptation. Looking to the demolition of Atwater & Rooter, an exposure before adults of the results of “Truth” would have been an effect of the sickliest pallor compared to what might be accomplished by a careful use of the catastrophic Wallie Torbin.
On Sunday evening it was her privileged custom to go to the house of fat old Great-Uncle Joseph and remain until nine o’clock, in chatty companionship with Uncle Joseph and Aunt Carrie, his wife, and a few other relatives (including Herbert) who were in the habit of dropping in there, on Sunday evenings. In summer, lemonade and cake were frequently provided; in the autumn, one still found cake, and perhaps a pitcher of clear new cider: apples were a certainty.
This evening was glorious: there were apples and cider and cake, with walnuts, perfectly cracked, and a large open-hearted box of candy; for Uncle Joseph and Aunt Carrie had foreseen the coming of several more Atwaters than usual, to talk over the new affairs of their beautiful relative, Julia. Seldom have any relative’s new affairs been more thoroughly talked over than were Julia’s that evening; though all the time by means of symbols, since it was thought wiser that Herbert and Florence should not yet be told of Julia’s engagement; and Florence’s parents were not present to confess their indiscretion. Julia was referred to as “the traveller”; other makeshifts were employed with the most knowing caution, and all the while Florence merely ate inscrutably. The more sincere Herbert was placid; the foods absorbing his attention.
“Well, all I say is, the traveller better enjoy herself on her travels,” said Aunt Fanny, finally, as the subject appeared to be wearing toward exhaustion. “She certainly is in for it when the voyaging is over and she arrives in the port she sailed from, and has to show her papers. I agree with the rest of you: she’ll have a great deal to answer for, and most of all about the shortest one. My own opinion is that the shortest one is going to burst like a balloon.”
“The shortest one,” as the demure Florence had understood from the first, was none other than her Very Ideal. Now she looked up from the stool where she sat with her back against a pilaster of the mantelpiece. “Uncle Joseph,” she said;— “I was just thinking. What is a person’s reason?”
The fat gentleman, rosy with firelight and cider, finished his fifth glass before responding. “Well, there are persons I never could find any reason for at all. ‘A person’s reason’? What do you mean, ‘a person’s reason,’ Florence?”
“I mean: like when somebody says, ‘They’ll lose their reason,’” she explained. “Has everybody got a reason, and if they have, what is it, and how do they lose it, and what would they do then?”
“Oh! I see!” he said. “You needn’t worry. I suppose since you heard it you’ve been hunting all over yourself for your reason and looking to see if there was one hanging out of anybody else, somewhere. No; it’s something you can’t see, ordinarily, Florence. Losing your reason is just another way of saying, ‘going crazy’!”
“Oh!” she murmured, and appeared to be disturbed.
At this, Herbert thought proper to offer a witticism for the pleasure of the company.
“You know, Florence,” he said, “it only means acting like you most always do.” He applauded himself with a burst of changing laughter ranging from a bullfrog croak to a collapsing soprano; then he added: “Espeshually when you come around my and Henry’s Newspaper Building! You cert’nly ‘lose your reason’ every time you come around that ole place!”
“Well, course I haf to act like the people that’s already there,” Florence retorted, not sharply, but in a musing tone that should have warned him. It was not her wont to use a quiet voice for repartee. Thinking her humble, he laughed the more raucously.
“Oh, Florence!” he besought her. “Say not so! Say not so!”
“Children, children!” Uncle Joseph remonstrated.
Herbert changed his tone; he became seriously plaintive. “Well, she does act that way, Uncle Joseph! When she comes around there you’d think we were runnin’ a lunatic asylum, the way she takes on. She hollers and bellers and squalls and squawks. The least little teeny thing she don’t like about the way we run our paper, she comes flappin’ over there and goes to screechin’ around you could hear her out at the Poor House Farm!”
“Now, now, Herbert,” his Aunt Fanny interposed. “Poor little Florence isn’t saying anything impolite to you — not right now, at any rate. Why don’t you be a little sweet to her just for once?”
Her unfortunate expression revolted all the manliness in Herbert’s bosom. “Be a little sweet to her?” he echoed with poignant incredulity, and then in candour made plain how poorly Aunt Fanny inspired him. “I just exackly as soon be a little sweet to an alligator,” he said.
“Oh, oh!” said Aunt Carrie.
“I would!” Herbert insisted. “Or a mosquito. I’d rather, to either of ’em, ‘cause anyway they don’t make so much noise. Why, you just ought to hear her,” he went on, growing more and more severe. “You ought to just come around our Newspaper Building any afternoon you please, after school, when Henry and I are tryin’ to do our work in anyway some peace. Why, she just squawks and squalls and squ — —”
“It must be terrible,” Uncle Joseph interrupted. “What do you do all that for, Florence, every afternoon?”
“Just for exercise,” she answered dreamily; and her placidity the more exasperated her journalist cousin.
“She does it because she thinks she ought to be runnin’ our own newspaper, my and Henry’s; that’s why she does it! She thinks she knows more about how to run newspapers than anybody alive; but there’s one thing she’s goin’ to find out; and that is, she don’t get anything more to do with my and Henry’s newspaper. We wouldn’t have another single one of her ole poems in it, no matter how much she offered to pay us! Uncle Joseph, I think you ought to tell her she’s got no business around my and Henry’s Newspaper Building.”
“But, Herbert,” Aunt Fanny suggested;— “you might let Florence have a little share in it of some sort. Then everything would be all right.”
“It would?” he said. “It woo-wud? Oh, my goodness, Aunt Fanny, I guess you’d like to see our newspaper just utterably ruined! Why, we wouldn’t let that girl have any more to do with it than we would some horse!”
“Oh, oh!” both Aunt Fanny and Aunt Carrie exclaimed, shocked.
“We wouldn’t,” Herbert insisted. “A horse would know any amount more how to run a newspaper than she does. Soon as we got our printing-press, we said right then that we made up our minds Florence Atwater wasn’t ever goin’ to have a single thing to do with our newspaper. If you let her have anything to do with anything she wants to run the whole thing. But she might just as well learn to stay away from our Newspaper Building, because after we got her out yesterday we fixed a way so’s she’ll never get in there again!”
Florence looked at him demurely. “Are you sure, Herbert?” she inquired.
“Just you try it!” he advised her, and he laughed tauntingly. “Just come around to-morrow and try it; th
at’s all I ask!”
“I cert’nly intend to,” she responded with dignity. “I may have a slight supprise for you.”
“Oh, Florence, say not so! Say not so, Florence! Say not so!”
At this, she looked full upon him, and already she had something in the nature of a surprise for him; for so powerful was the still balefulness of her glance that he was slightly startled. “I might say not so,” she said. “I might, if I was speaking of what pretty eyes you say yourself you know you have, Herbert.”
It staggered him. “What — what do you mean?”
“Oh, nothin’,” she replied airily.
Herbert began to be mistrustful of the solid earth: somewhere there was a fearful threat to his equipoise. “What you talkin’ about?” he said with an effort to speak scornfully; but his sensitive voice almost failed him.
“Oh, nothin’,” said Florence. “Just about what pretty eyes you know you have, and Patty’s being pretty, too, and so you’re glad she thinks yours are pretty, the way you do — and everything!”
Herbert visibly gulped. He believed that Patty had betrayed him; had betrayed the sworn confidence of “Truth!”
“That’s all I was talkin’ about,” Florence added. “Just about how you knew you had such pretty eyes. Say not so, Herbert! Say not so!”
“Look here!” he said. “When’d you see Patty again between this afternoon and when you came over here?”
“What makes you think I saw her?”
“Did you telephone her?”
“What makes you think so?”
Once more Herbert gulped. “Well, I guess you’re ready to believe anything anybody tells you,” he said, with palsied bravado. “You don’t believe everything Patty Fairchild says, do you?”
“Why, Herbert! Doesn’t she always tell the truth?”
“Her? Why, half the time,” poor Herbert babbled, “you can’t tell whether she’s just makin’ up what she says or not. If you’ve gone and believed everything that ole girl told you, you haven’t got even what little sense I used to think you had!” So base we are under strain, sometimes — so base when our good name is threatened with the truth of us! “I wouldn’t believe anything she said,” he added, in a sickish voice, “if she told me fifty times and crossed her heart!”
“Wouldn’t you if she said you wrote down how pretty you knew your eyes were, Herbert? Wouldn’t you if it was on paper in your own handwriting?”
“What’s this about Herbert having ‘pretty eyes’?” Uncle Joe inquired, again bringing general attention to the young cousins; and Herbert shuddered. This fat uncle had an unpleasant reputation as a joker.
The nephew desperately fell back upon the hopeless device of attempting to drown out his opponent’s voice as she began to reply. He became vociferous with scornful laughter, badly cracked. “Florence got mad!” he shouted, mingling the purported information with hoots and cacklings. “She got mad because I and Henry played some games with Patty and wouldn’t let her play! She’s tryin’ to make up stories on us to get even. She made it up! It’s all made up! She — —”
“No, no,” Mr. Atwater interrupted. “Let Florence tell us. Florence, what was it about Herbert’s knowing he had ‘pretty eyes’?”
Herbert attempted to continue the drowning out. He bawled. “She made it up! It’s somep’n she made up herself! She — —”
“Herbert,” said Uncle Joseph;— “if you don’t keep quiet, I’ll take back the printing-press.”
Herbert substituted a gulp for the continuation of his noise.
“Now, Florence,” said Uncle Joseph, “tell us what you were saying about how Herbert knows he has such ‘pretty eyes’.”
Then it seemed to Herbert that a miracle befell. Florence looked up, smiling modestly. “Oh, it wasn’t anything, Uncle Joseph,” she said. “I was Just trying to tease Herbert any way I could think of.”
“Oh, was that all?” A hopeful light faded out of Uncle Joseph’s large and inexpressive face. “I thought perhaps you’d detected him in some indiscretion.”
Florence laughed, “I was just teasin’ him. It wasn’t anything, Uncle Joseph.”
Hereupon, Herbert resumed a confused breathing. Dazed, he remained uneasy, profoundly so: and gratitude was no part of his emotion. He well understood that in conflicts such as these Florence was never susceptible to impulses of compassion; in fact, if there was warfare between them, experience had taught him to be wariest when she seemed kindest. He moved away from her, and went into another room where his condition was one of increasing mental discomfort, though he looked over the pictures in his great-uncle’s copy of “Paradise Lost.” These illustrations, by M. Gustave Doré, failed to aid in reassuring his troubled mind.
When Florence left the house, he impulsively accompanied her, maintaining a nervous silence as they walked the short distance between Uncle Joseph’s front gate and her own. There, however, he spoke.
“Look here! You don’t haf to go and believe everything that ole girl told you, do you?”
“No,” said Florence heartily. “I don’t haf to.”
“Well, look here,” he urged, helpless but to repeat. “You don’t haf to believe whatever it was she went and told you, do you?”
“What was it you think she told me, Herbert?”
“All that guff — you know. Well, whatever it was you said she told you.”
“I didn’t,” said Florence. “I didn’t say she told me anything at all.”
“Well, she did, didn’t she?”
“Why, no,” Florence replied, lightly. “She didn’t say anything to me. Only I’m glad to have your opinion of her, how she’s such a story-teller and all — if I ever want to tell her, and everything!”
But Herbert had greater alarms than this, and the greater obscured the lesser. “Look here,” he said, “if she didn’t tell you, how’d you know it then?”
“How’d I know what?”
“That — that big story about my ever writin’ I knew I had” — he gulped again— “pretty eyes.”
“Oh, about that!” Florence said, and swung the gate shut between them. “Well, I guess it’s too late to tell you to-night, Herbert; but maybe if you and that nasty little Henry Rooter do every single thing I tell you to, and do it just exackly like I tell you from this time on, why maybe — I only say ‘maybe’ — well, maybe I’ll tell you some day when I feel like it.”
She ran up the path and up the veranda steps, but paused before opening the front door, and called back to the waiting Herbert:
“The only person I’d ever think of tellin’ about it before I tell you would be a boy I know.” She coughed, and added as by an afterthought, “He’d just love to know all about it; I know he would. So, when I tell anybody about it I’ll only tell just you and this other boy.”
“What other boy?” Herbert demanded.
And her reply, thrilling through the darkness, left him demoralized with horror.
“Wallie Torbin!”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, about four o’clock, Herbert stood gloomily at the main entrance of Atwater & Rooter’s Newspaper Building awaiting his partner. The other entrances were not only nailed fast but massively barricaded; and this one (consisting of the ancient carriage-house doors, opening upon a driveway through the yard) had recently been made effective for exclusion. A long and heavy plank leaned against the wall, near by, ready to be set in hook-shaped iron supports fastened to the inner sides of the doors; and when the doors were closed, with this great plank in place, a person inside the building might seem entitled to count upon the enjoyment of privacy, except in case of earthquake, tornado, or fire. In fact, the size of the plank and the substantial quality of the iron fastenings could be looked upon, from a certain viewpoint, as a real compliment to the energy and persistence of Florence Atwater.
Herbert had been in no complimentary frame of mind, however, when he devised the obstructions, nor was he now in such a frame of mind. He was pe
ssimistic in regard to his future, and also embarrassed in anticipation of some explanations it would be necessary to make to his partner. He strongly hoped that Henry’s regular after-school appearance at the Newspaper Building would precede Florence’s, because these explanations required both deliberation and tact, and he was convinced that it would be almost impossible to make them at all if Florence got there first.
He understood that he was unfortunately within her power; and he saw that it would be dangerous to place in operation for her exclusion from the Building this new mechanism contrived with such hopeful care, and at a cost of two dollars and twenty-five cents taken from the Oriole’s treasury. What he wished Henry to believe was that for some good reason, which Herbert had not yet been able to invent, it would be better to show Florence a little politeness. He had a desperate hope that he might find some diplomatic way to prevail on Henry to be as subservient to Florence as she had seemed to demand, and he was determined to touch any extremity of unveracity, rather than permit the details of his answer in “Truth” to come to his partner’s knowledge. Henry Rooter was not Wallie Torbin; but in possession of material such as this he could easily make himself intolerable.
Therefore, it was in a flurried state of mind that Herbert waited; and when his friend appeared, over the fence, his perturbation was not decreased. He even failed to notice the unusual gravity of Henry’s manner.
“Hello, Henry! I thought I wouldn’t start in working till you got here. I didn’t want to haf to come all the way downstairs again to open the door and hi’st our good ole plank up again.”
“I see,” said Henry, glancing nervously at their good ole plank. “Well, I guess Florence’ll never get in this good ole door — that is, she won’t if we don’t let her, or something.”
This final clause would have astonished Herbert if he had been less preoccupied with his troubles. “You bet she won’t!” he said mechanically. “She couldn’t ever get in here again — if the family didn’t go intafering around and give me the dickens and everything, because they think — they say they do, anyhow — they say they think — they think — —”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 325