Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  By and by he stood still, aware of another presence in the dimness of the neighbouring yard. The only sound in all the world seemed to be a minute tinkling and plashing of water where the stoic swan maintained himself at his duty while other birds slept; but upon the stone rim of the fountain Dan thought he discerned a white figure sitting. He went to the fence between the two lawns to make sure, and found that he was right; a large and graceful woman sat there, leaning over and drawing one hand meditatively to and fro through the water.

  “Martha?” he said in a low voice.

  She looked up, said “Dan!” under her breath, and came to the fence. “Why, you poor thing! You’re still in that heavy long coat!”

  “Am I?” he asked vaguely. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “‘Hadn’t noticed?’ In this weather!”

  “It is fairly hot,” he said, as though this circumstance had just been called to his attention.

  “Then why don’t you take it off?”

  “My coat?” he returned absently. “I don’t mind it.”

  “I do,” Martha said. “You don’t need to bother about talking to me with your coat off, do you? It’s only a dozen years or so since we hid our shoes and stockings in the harness closet in your stable and ran off barefoot to go wading in the street after a thunderstorm. Take it off.”

  “Well — —” He complied, explaining, “I just came out to get cool.”

  “So did I; but I don’t believe it can be done, Dan. I believe this is the worst night for sheer hotness we’ve had in two or three years. I haven’t felt it so much since the day I landed in New York from Cherbourg, summer before last. I’ll never forget that day!”

  “In New York?” he asked, astonished.

  “I should say so! I suppose I felt it more because I was just from abroad, but I think people from our part of the country suffer fearfully from the heat in New York, anyhow.”

  “I believe they do,” he said thoughtfully. “And New York people suffer from the heat when they come out here. That must be it.”

  “Do you think so?” She appeared to be surprised. “I don’t see how New York people could mind the heat anywhere else very much after what they get at home.”

  “Oh, but they do, Martha! They suffer terribly from heat if they come out here, for instance. You see they don’t spend the summers in New York. They either go abroad in summer or else to the country.”

  “Does she?” Martha asked quickly; but corrected herself. “Do they?”

  “Yes,” he said, seeming to be unaware of the correction. “That’s why it upsets her so. You see — —”

  “Yes?”

  “Well — —” he said, hesitating. “It — it does kind of upset her. It — —” He paused, then added lamely, “It’s just the heat, though. That’s all seems to be really the matter; she can’t stand the weather.”

  “She’ll get used to it,” Martha said gently. “You mustn’t worry, Dan.”

  “Oh, I don’t. In a few days she’ll probably see how lovely it really is here, and she’ll begin to enjoy it and be more like herself. Everything’ll be all right in a day or so; I’m sure of that.”

  “Yes, Dan.”

  “Of course just now, what with the heat and all and everybody strangers to her, why, it’s no wonder it makes her feel a little upset. Anybody would be, but in a few days from now” — he hesitated, and concluded, with a somewhat lame insistence, “Well, it’ll all be entirely different.”

  “Yes, Dan,” she said again, but there was an almost imperceptible tremble in her voice, and his attention was oddly caught by it.

  All his mind had been upon the suffering little bride, but there was something in the quality of this tremulousness in Martha’s voice that made him think about Martha, instead. And suddenly he looked at her with the same wonder he had felt earlier this queer evening, when he noticed for the first time that emanation of serenity between his father and mother. For there seemed to be something about Martha, too, that he had known familiarly all his life, but had never thought of before.

  There is indeed a light that is light in darkness, and these strange moments of revelation, when they come, are brought most often by the night. Daylight, showing too many things, may afterwards doubt them, but they are real and not to be forgotten. They are only moments; and yet, while this one had its mystic little life, Dan was possessed in part by the feeling, altogether vague, that somewhere a peculiar but indefinable mistake had been made by somebody not identified to him.

  Moreover, here was matter more curious still: this thing he had all his life known about Martha, but had never realized until now, made her in a moment a woman new to him, so that she seemed to stand there, facing him across the iron fence, a new Martha. He had no definition in words for what he felt, nor sought one; but it was as if he found himself in possession of an ineffable gift, inexpressibly valuable and shining vaguely in the darkness. This shining, wan and touching, seemed to come from Martha herself; and this newness of hers, that was yet so old, put a glamour about her. The dim, kind face and shimmering familiar figure were beautiful, he saw, never before having had consciousness of her as beautiful; but what most seemed to glow upon him out of the glamour about her was the steadfastness within her; for that was the jewel worn by the very self of her and shining upon him in the night.

  “Martha — —” he said in a low voice.

  “Yes, Dan?”

  “You’ve always been such a friend of mine, I — I — I’ve never said much about how I feel about it. I haven’t got anything I wouldn’t sooner part with, Martha.”

  “I hope so,” she said gently, and bowed her head in a kind of meekness. “I hope so, Dan, but — —” She stopped.

  “But what, Martha?”

  “I’m afraid,” she said slowly, “your wife isn’t going to like me.”

  “Oh, but she will,” he returned, trying to put heartiness into this assurance. “She’s bound to! Why, everybody in the world likes you, Martha.”

  “No; I had the feeling as soon as I spoke to her that she never would, Dan. It was just a feeling, but I’m afraid it’ll turn out so. That doesn’t mean I won’t try my best to make her.”

  “You won’t need to try. Of course just now she’s suffering so terribly, poor little thing — —”

  “Poor Dan!” Martha said, as he stopped speaking and sighed instead. “You never could bear to see anybody suffer. The trouble is it always makes you suffer more than the person that’s doing the original suffering.”

  “Oh, no. But I don’t know what on earth to do for her. Of course, in a few days, when she begins to see what it’s really like here, and I get her to understand a little more about the Addition — —”

  He stopped, startled to hear his name called in a querulous little voice from an upstairs window.

  “She’s awake,” he said in a whisper.

  “Who on earth are you talking with out there?” called the querulous voice.

  “Good-night,” he whispered, moving away hurriedly; but, looking back, he saw that Martha remained at the separating iron fence, leaning upon it now; and he could feel, rather than see, that she was not looking at him, but that her head was again bowed in the same meekness with which she had said she hoped he prized her feeling for him.

  Chapter XI

  THE DOLEFUL BRIDE remained in bed all the next day, prostrate under the continuing heat; — in fact, it was not until a week had passed that she felt herself able to make the excursion projected by the hopeful bridegroom; and when they finally did set forth, in Dan’s light runabout, she began to suffer before they reached the gates of the carriage driveway.

  “Oh, dear!” she said. “Is it going to be bumpy like this all the way? It hurts my back.”

  Dan apologized. “I’m sorry I didn’t have those holes in the drive filled up; I’ll do it myself this evening. But here on the avenue,” he said, as they turned north from the gates, “we’ll have this fine cedar-block pavement for quite a good
way.”

  “Oh, dear!” she complained. “It’s worse on the cedar-block pavement than it was in your driveway.”

  “It is a little teeny bit jolty,” Dan admitted. “You see this pavement’s been down over five years now, but it’s held out mighty well when you consider the traffic that’s been over it — mighty well! It’s been one of the finest pavements I ever saw in any town.”

  She gave a little moan. “You talk as if what it has been were a great help to us now. It does hurt my back, Dan.”

  “Oh, it isn’t goin’ to keep on like this,” he assured her comfortingly. “The contracts are already signed for a new pavement. Six months from now this’ll all be as smooth as a billiard table.”

  “But we have to go over it to-day!”

  “That’s why I thought the runabout would be pleasanter for you,” he said. “Our old family carriage is more comfortable in some ways, but it hasn’t got rubber tires. I hardly notice the bumps myself with these tires.”

  “I do!”

  “Think what a great invention it is, though,” he said cheerfully. “Why, before long I shouldn’t wonder if you’d see almost everything that rolls usin’ rubber tires, and a good many such light traps as this with inflated ones like bicycles. If horseless carriages ever amount to anything, they’ll get to usin’ inflated rubber tires, too, most likely.”

  “Oh, dear me!” Lena sighed. “Doesn’t this heat ever relent a little?”

  He assured her that it did; that the hot spell would soon be over, and that she wouldn’t mind it when they reached the Addition, which was on higher ground. “It’s always cool out at Ornaby,” he said proudly. “The mean level’s twenty-eight feet higher than it is in this part of the city; and I never saw the day when you couldn’t find a breeze out there.”

  “Then hurry and get there! It must be a terribly long way. I don’t see any higher ground ahead of us — nothing but this eternal flatness and flatness and flatness! I don’t see how you people stand it. I should think somebody would build a hill!”

  He laughed and told her that Ornaby was almost a hill. “Practically, it is,” he said. “Anyhow it’s a sort of plateau — practically. You see the mean level — —”

  “Oh, dear!” she sighed; and for a time they jogged on in silence.

  He drove with one hand, holding over her with the other a green silk parasol, a performance not lacking in gallantry, nor altogether without difficulty, for his young horse was lively, in spite of the weather; yet it is doubtful if strangers, seeing the runabout pass, would have guessed the occupants a bride and groom.

  Beneath the broad white rim of Lena’s straw hat the pretty little face was contorted with discontent; while her companion’s expression showed a puzzled discouragement not customarily associated with the expressions of bridegrooms. True, the discouragement passed before long, but it came back again after a little more conversation. Then it disappeared again, but returned when signs of capricious weather were seen in the sky. For it is new knowledge to nobody that the weather has an uneducated humour and will as soon play the baboon with a bride and groom, or with a kind cripple on an errand of mercy, as it will with the hardiest ruffian. But at first Dan welcomed the hints of change in the southwest.

  “By George!” he said, nodding across the vast flat cornfields upon their left, for the runabout had now come into the open country. “There’s good news, Lena.”

  “What is?”

  “Look over yonder. We’re goin’ to get rain, and Heaven knows we need it! Look.”

  Along the southwest horizon of cornfields and distant groves they saw a thickening nucleus of dark haze. Out of it, clouds of robust sculpture were slowly rising, muttering faintly as they rose, as if another planet approached and its giants grumbled, being roused from sleep to begin the assault.

  “By George, that’s great!” Dan exclaimed in high delight. “That’s worth millions of dollars to the farmers, Lena.”

  But Lena was as far as possible from sharing his enthusiasm. “I believe it’s going to be a thunderstorm. Turn back. I hate thunderstorms. I’m afraid of them.”

  “Why, they won’t hurt you, Lena.”

  “They frighten me and they do kill people. Please turn back.”

  “But we’re almost there, dear. I think the rain’ll hold off, probably, but if it doesn’t we’d be more likely to get wet goin’ all the way back home than if we went ahead. I’ve got a tool shed out there we could wait under.”

  “A tool shed? With all the tools in it? That’s just where the lightning would strike first!”

  Dan laughed and tried to reassure her, but although they drove on in the bright sunshine for a time, she became more and more nervous. “It almost seems to me you don’t want to do things I want you to. We should have turned back when I first spoke of it.”

  “Look, dear,” he said. “Just ahead of us there’s something you’re goin’ to be mighty proud of some day. It’s Ornaby Addition, Lena!”

  Before them the dirt road, grown with long grass between the ruts, had been widened to the dimensions of a city street as it passed between old forest groves of beech and elm, through which other wide rough roads had recently been cut. Beyond the woods were some open fields, where lines of stakes were driven in the ground to outline — apparently in a mood of over-optimistic prophecy — some scores of building lots and various broad avenues. But so far as could be seen from the runabout, felled trees and wooden stakes were all that proved Ornaby to be an Addition and not a farm, though a few negroes were burning the remnants of a rail fence in a field not far from the road. And what made the whole prospect rather desolate was the malicious caprice of the weather; — the very moment when Dan stopped the runabout and waved his hand in a proud semicircle of display, the first of the robust clouds passed over the sun and Ornaby lay threatened in a monstrous shadow.

  “Look, Lena!” the exultant proprietor cried. “This is Ornaby!”

  “Is it?” she said desolately. “I do wish you’d turned round when I said. It’s going to thunder and lighten horribly, and I know I’m going to be frightened to death.”

  Then, as a louder rumble sounded in the sky, she shivered, clutching Dan’s arm. “I know that struck somewhere!”

  “It might have struck somewhere in the next county,” he laughed.

  “What! Why, look at the sky right over us. I never saw anything so awful.”

  Dan laughed again and patted her small, clutching hand soothingly. “It’s just a pleasant little summer thundershower, Lena.”

  “Little!” she cried. “Do you call storms like this ‘little’ out here?”

  For, in truth, Dan’s reassuring word was not well supported by the aspect of the sky. Above them hung what appeared to be a field of inverted gray haystacks, while from westward ragged, vast draperies advanced through a saffron light that suddenly lay upon all the land. A snort of wind tore at the road, carrying dust high aloft; then there was a curious silence throughout all the great space of the saffron light, and some large raindrops fell in a casual way, then stopped.

  “You see?” said the cheery Dan. “That’s all we’ll get, likely enough. I shouldn’t be surprised it’d clear up now.”

  “‘Clear up!’” Lena cried incredulously. “I do believe you’re crazy! Oh, heavens!”

  And the heavens she thus adjured appeared heartily inclined to warrant her outcry. Satan fell from the sky in a demoniac swoop of lightning, carrying darkness with him; wind and water struck the runabout together; and Dan was fain to drive into the woods beside the road, while Lena clung to him and wailed. He tied the trembling horse to a tree, and got the bride and her wrecked parasol under the inadequate shelter of the tool house he had mentioned, but found little happiness there. A hinge had broken; the negroes had carried the door away to repair it; the roof leaked everywhere and was sonorous with the hail that fell presently with the heavy rain. At every bedazzlement of the lightning Lena gasped, then shrieked throughout the ensuing uproar, and bef
ore long whimpered that she was freezing. In fact, her wet clothes, little more than gauze, appeared to be dissolving upon her, while the air grew cold with the hail.

  Dan put his soggy coat about her, petted her, and piled wet sticks together, saying that he would make a fire for her if he could. Whereupon she wept and uttered a pathetic laughter. “Burn up with the heat one minute,” she said, through chattering teeth, “and the next freeze to death if you can’t make a fire! What a place!”

  Of course Dan defended his climate, but his argument was of as little avail as were his attempts to build a fire with sodden wood and drenched matches. Lena suffered from the cold as expressively as she had from the heat, and forgetting that these changes in temperature had not been unknown to her in her own native habitat and elsewhere, she convinced herself perfectly that all of her troubles were put upon her by “the West.” Yet in this she was not so unreasonable as might appear; — our sufferings from interior disturbances are adept in disguising themselves as inflictions from outside.

  These troubles of hers were not alleviated by two unfortunate remarks made by her young husband in the course of his efforts to hearten her. After one of the numerous electrical outrages, appalling in brilliancy and uproar, he said he was sorry he couldn’t have taken her to the old Ornaby farmhouse for shelter; and when Lena reproached him for not having thought of this sooner, he explained too hastily that the house had been struck by lightning and burned to the ground during a thunderstorm earlier in the summer. After that, as she became almost hysterical, he straightway went on to his second blunder. “But nobody was hurt,” he said. “Nobody at all, Lena. There wasn’t anybody in the house; and anyhow I don’t believe the lightning’s really struck right near us during this whole shower. Why, it’s nothin’ at all; I’ve seen storms a thousand times worse than this. Only last summer I got caught out on a little lake, north of here, in a canoe, and pretty near a real tornado came up, with thunder and lightning that would make this little racket to-day look like something you’d get from a baby’s toy. We didn’t mind it; we just — —”