“I do,” Lena said, “I told you the other day I used to know him. I’m going around to speak to him.”
“I can’t wait, I’m afraid. Sam Kohn’s lookin’ for me in the lobby now, and he and I got to have a talk with his father. You take the car, Lena — I’ll leave it in front for you, and I’ll get Sam to drive me home from old man Kohn’s. I’ll have to hurry.”
McMillan was looking at his sister darkly and steadily. “I’ll see to Lena,” he said. “I’ll go with her wherever she wants to go, and then I’ll take her home.”
Lena laughed airily. “Why, no; it isn’t necessary. You’d better go with Dan.”
“No; I believe I’d better go with you, Lena.”
“Can’t wait for you to settle it,” Dan said. “It’s pretty important I don’t miss Sam. I may be out fairly late, Lena. Good-night.” And, leaving the brother and sister confronting each other, before they moved toward the stage door behind the boxes, he hurried out to the lobby, where Sam Kohn seized his arm.
“I’ll take you over to papa’s in my car, Dan,” he said. “I been talkin’ some more to the old man durin’ the show. He’ll stick, all right, as a favour to me, because I put it to him pretty stiff that you’re my old friend, and what you’ve done for this town has made money for Kohn & Sons, and’s bound to make more in the future, besides; and I told him anyhow, by golly, he just had to! Well, he says he’ll stick, and he’ll do it, Dan; but he ain’t none too sure he can carry them old shellbacks with him. He ain’t never been any pessimist about anything, Dan, but he thinks they see a chance to clean up if they call you. He’s afraid he can’t stop ’em from doin’ it, Dan.”
Dan frowned angrily. “Well — let ’em call! They can’t break me! I’ll make it, all right, Sam — I’ve been through these things before.”
Sam’s voice had shown some emotion, but now it became tremulous with sympathy and with anger. “That bunch of old shellbacks, they haven’t got sense enough to see what a man like you means to their own business in the long run. They haven’t got any what you call vision, as it were. They belong to the old generation, the bunch of old back numbers! Honest, they make me sick as a cat, Dan.”
He was still thus abusing the shellbacks when he and his friend passed out of the theatre, and were almost swept from their feet by squalls of chilling rain before they could get into his car. He did all the talking, an unusual thing for Dan to allow a companion to do. Always before, when misfortune had threatened, he had been jauntily voluble.
He did not come home until one o’clock, but there was a light in the library, and, going in, he found his mother reading “In Memoriam.” She had begun to stoop after her husband’s death, and her hair had lost its last touch of gray; it was all white now, so that even to the glamouring eyes of her son she had come to be a little, fragile old lady; but her good will to all the world still looked forth through the thick glass of her spectacles.
“Why, mother! You oughtn’t to be up this late!”
“I just got to reading — —” she explained. “I like to read on a rainy night. Did you lock the front door?”
“Yes. Isn’t Lena in?”
“Yes. Mr. McMillan brought her home an hour ago. Yes; she’s in.”
Dan laughed, noting her emphasis. “‘She is?’” he repeated. “Well, then we’re all in. Who else is left to come in?” He went to her and patted her shoulder. “I believe you were sitting up for me. Don’t you know better?”
“I might be anxious about you, such a bad night, Dan,” she said. “I don’t like to pester you, but you ought to take some regular exercise. You never have taken any; and you eat your meals just anytime you happen to get a minute or two. I do think you’ve been looking pretty run-down lately; but I wasn’t sitting up for you — not exactly, that is. I mean I was really sitting up for somebody else.”
“Who?”
She smiled apologetically. “Of course I know young people are different nowadays, and it isn’t a grandmother’s place to interfere; but I am afraid it was a mistake, your getting Henry that car.”
“You don’t mean to tell me he’s not in the house?”
“I’m afraid so. After the rest of you had gone he said he believed he’d go for a drive in his car. I said he mustn’t think of it on such a night, but he laughed, and I couldn’t get him to pay any attention. I was hoping to hear him come in before you did. Perhaps you’d better — —”
“Yes,” Dan said, as he strode into the hall. “I think I had.”
Chapter XXVIII
HE FOUND HENRY, but the search took two hours, and his clothes were sodden with the rain that drenched them as he got in and out of his car to make inquiries, or to investigate restaurants of lively all-night reputations. The red “speedster” he had bought for his son stood hub-deep in the running gutter before the last of these to be reached; and when the father brought his boy out of the place, and helped him into the Morgan limousine, Henry protested in a whimper somewhat incoherent that he wanted to drive his own car home; — he didn’t like to leave it out all night in the rain he said.
“I guess it has stood where it is about long enough!” Dan told him grimly. “But we’ll leave it there till I send a man for it in the morning — to sell it, Henry.”
Henry whimpered again; then recovered enough presence of mind to say no more. When they reached home, he went upstairs as quickly as he could, although once he had to employ the assistance of the banister railing; and his father followed him.
A light still shone into the hall from the library door, and Dan, whose face was pallid and startled, made his voice cheerful as he called from the stairway: “It’s all right, mother. The boy’s home and everything’s all right. Just a little foolishness with his car; and I’ve decided it’ll be offered for sale to-morrow. You go to bed now.”
Henry went to his room and Dan was following him, when Lena, wearing a bright kimono over her nightdress, made her appearance in the open doorway of her bedroom. “What is all this?” she asked petulantly.
“Never mind!”
“But I do mind! What are you saying about selling Henry’s car? Didn’t I hear you say — —”
“Yes, you did.” Dan closed the door of Henry’s room and came to her. “I made a terrible mistake to give it to him. We’ve both made a mistake the way we’ve raised him. He’s a good boy; he’s got a fine nature and a noble soul. But he’s got with bad companions. He’s been — —” He paused, and went on slowly, with difficulty: “He’s been — he’s been drinkin’, Lena.”
She said nothing, but stared at him blankly for a moment — then the stare became an angry one.
“We’ve got to change our whole way of treatin’ Henry,” her unhappy husband told her. “We’ve been all wrong. He — he got with bad companions — —”
“Yes,” she interrupted angrily. “I should think he might, in a town like this!”
“My Lord! It ain’t the town’s fault. For heaven’s sake, don’t go back to that old story at a time like this!”
“Yes, I will,” she said. “The time’s come when you’ve got to let me take Henry and go where I want to.”
Dan looked dazed. “Go where you want to? Why, where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere I please!”
“But, my Lord! You were away seven months out of last year. You only got back from Europe last October! What do you — —”
“I want to go and I want to take Henry with me! What’s just happened proves that I’m right. This is the wrong place for him.”
“But I tell you the place hasn’t got anything on earth to do with it.”
“Hasn’t it?” she cried. “I tell you it has all to do with it, just as it’s had all to do with me ever since I came here! I’ve hated it every instant of all these silly, wasted years I’ve been pent up here. And now it’s ruining my child — yes, ruining him — and you want me still to stay here and let him stay here! You want me to waste the rest of my life, and ruin my child’s life
, but I tell you, Dan Oliphant, you can’t make us do it — not either of us! Not either of us, do you hear?” She had become hysterical, and her voice was so wild and loud that Mrs. Oliphant had come into the hall, downstairs, and was calling up piteously to know what was the matter.
“What is the matter, Dan, dear?” she called. “What is the matter with Lena?”
But Lena, shrieking, “You can’t make us — you can’t make us!” ran into her room and locked the door. It was a thick old door, but she could still be heard, and it was not difficult to understand that she had thrown herself upon her bed, and was there convulsive, still shrieking: “You can’t make us! You can’t make us! You can’t, you can’t, you can’t — —”
Chapter XXIX
DAN REASSURED HIS mother as well as he could. “Only a fit of nerves; — too much music, I guess,” he said; and, returning to his son’s door, found it locked and Henry as unresponsive as the door. The father knocked repeatedly but not loudly, demanding admittance and obtaining the response of a profound silence. Then, as he heard Mrs. Oliphant slowly ascending the stairs to her belated bed, he decided to keep out of her way until he had better composed himself, and, retiring to his own room, discovered that his teeth were chattering.
He removed his cold and sodden garments; but his bed seemed as cold as his clothes; so he got up, put a dressing-gown over his pajamas, and again tried to sleep. The bed still seemed cold — so cold that his teeth still showed the disposition to chatter. However, he told himself that he had “more to worry about than a little chill”; and, between the chill and his more important worries, slept but fitfully. He was warm when the drizzly morning came — too warm — and, again communing with himself on the subject of his physical annoyances, philosophically dismissed the fever as unworthy of his attention. “A little temperature’s perfectly natural after a chill,” he thought. “It’ll pass off, and I’ve got other things to think about this day!”
So, descending early to the dining-room he had a cup of strong coffee, and left the house without having seen anybody except the cook and his chauffeur. The interview with his son was postponed until evening; — Dan felt he would be better fitted to speak with authority after he had beaten the shellbacks and had shown the First National, with the help of the Kohns and some others, that it wouldn’t do to “call” him.
He had a hard day of it; the shells of the shellbacks were tough and seasoned casings, tough as old hickory, and about as penetrable to mere argument. The morning began ominously, and the afternoon came to a close, in the office of Sam Kohn, Junior, in something not far from complete disaster; though Sam insisted, when he and Dan were finally left alone together there, that it was not complete.
“No, sir!” he said. “The way you got a perfect right to look at it, it ain’t near as bad as it might been. Maybe from one angle you can say you come out the little end of the horn, but from another angle, you certainly did come out, you might say. You got to look at it from this angle, Dan: you might been sittin’ there stone cold broke right now. I tell you last night late, when I talked it over with the old man after you’d gone, I was mighty scared it was goin’ to be bankruptcy — but it’s a lot better than that. Ain’t it better’n that, Dan?”
Dan looked up without altering the despondent attitude into which he had fallen, as he sat in one of his friend’s mahogany office chairs. “Yes; I guess it could have been a good deal worse. The only trouble is — —” He took a deep and laboured breath, then laughed plaintively. “The only trouble is, while it might have been worse, I wasn’t hardly prepared for its bein’ so bad!”
“But it ain’t so blame bad, Dan.”
“No; I thought when I showed ’em what I had to fall back on they’d see they couldn’t afford to call. I thought I could show ’em it would be so profitable to tide me over and let me renew that they’d see it was the best policy. They ought to have seen it, too!”
Agreeing with this, Sam swore heartily, then he added, “Them old hardshells! The worst about ’em is they got their business training when everything was on the small scale, and they don’t know what a liberal policy means. You take that old Shelby, for instance, he was raised on such a stingy scale he thinks everybody’s a gambler that borrows a nickel on a million-dollar bond! He’s got one foot in the grave and he’s so shrunk it takes two people to see him, but, by golly, he wants to get his hands on everything! They’re a tough bunch, Dan, and I’m glad you got away from ’em alive. Because you still are alive. Anyhow you’re that much!”
Dan shook his head. “Just barely, I guess. If it had been that Broadwood hard luck by itself, I’d have pulled out o’ the hole. If that hadn’t come just at the same time our sales smashed with the Four — —”
“That’s exactly the way bad things do come, though,” Sam interrupted, and went on to expound the philosophy of misfortune. “They come together, because that’s what makes ’em bad. It’s the comin’ together of bad things that makes all the trouble there is. If they’d come one at a time a person wouldn’t mind ’em so much. The angle I look at it, if a person goes along all right for a good while it’s only because a whole lot of bad things are holdin’ off on him. That makes ’em bound to come together when they do come. It never rains but it pours, Dan, as it were. That’s why, when such things happen, we got to put up the best umbrella a feller can lay his hands on.”
Dan did not seem to have heard him. “I could stand havin’ to sign over the Four to ’em, Sam,” he said. “I’d like to have kept it in my hands, but I could stand havin’ ’em take it. But when I think I had to sit here and sign over Ornaby — —” Suddenly he uttered a broken sound, like a groan; and his whole face became corrugated with a distortion that took more than a moment to conquer. “Why, I’ve just given my life’s blood to Ornaby, and now — —”
“Now?” Sam said testily. “Well, what’s the matter with now? Didn’t we force ’em to agree to turn you over some stock in it when they get the organization made? You ain’t out of Ornaby, are you? Not entirely, by no means!”
“It’s not mine,” Dan said. “It’s not mine any longer. Nothin’s mine any longer!”
His friend affected an angry impatience. “Don’t sit there and talk like that to a person that knows something! If you’d had to make the kind of assignment you might had to, you’d be where it would be pretty hard for you to come back. Ain’t you goin’ to try to come back?”
“Don’t you worry about that,” Dan said. “I’m just as sure to come back as I am to go out of that door!” He laughed rather shakily, as he rose to go. “Why, a few years from now — less’n that! — why, by this time next year if I don’t get Ornaby back I’ll make a new Ornaby — I’ll find it somewhere, and this town won’t take long to grow out to it, the way it’s started now. Don’t you ever worry about my comin’ back!”
“That’s the ticket!” his friend cried. “That’s the way you used to talk. You go home and get a good rest — you certainly been through a rough day, and you look like it! — and then you get up to-morrow morning and start to come back!”
“That’s the programme I’ve mapped out, Sammy. I guess you’re right about my gettin’ on home, too. I don’t feel just the freshest in the world.”
“Wait a minute,” the other said. “I want to make certain about one thing. You told me I mustn’t go near your brother, and my tacklin’ him the way I did this morning behind your back — well, I never liked the cold-blooded silk-stocking upstart, but he did show he’s a gentleman. I been afraid — —” He hesitated, somewhat confused. “Well, I know how it is in families, when one of a family don’t want help from another of the same family, the last person on earth, and I been kind of afraid you might hold it some against me, my tacklin’ him behind your back like that, after you told me not to.”
“Bless you, no!” Dan said heartily. “You haven’t done me anything except kindness.”
“Well, and I’ve had many’s the favour from you, both business and outside, D
an. That’s why I persuaded the old man the city needs a man like you. You got many’s the long year of good in you yet, Dan.”
“I hope so; I hope so,” Dan said, and held out his hand. “Good-night, and thank you.”
But Sam almost jumped as he took the extended hand. “My goodness, man, you ought to be home in bed! You had too much excitement and you got a high fever. If I had a temperature like that, I wouldn’t be here in my office; I’d be talkin’ to my doctor.”
“Oh, it’ll pass off,” Dan returned cheerfully. “It’s only one of those up-and-down things — chilly a little while and too hot the next little while. Good-night, old man.” And with that, he thanked this boyhood friend again, and descended to the busy street.
After a cloudy day the sky had cleared; a fair sunset was perceptible as a gloomy fire in the heart of the western smoke; and Dan, having long since dismissed his chauffeur, decided to walk home, instead of taking either a trolley car or a taxicab. Before he had gone far, however, he regretted this decision, for his feet had assumed a peculiar independence, and seemed to be unfamiliar parts of him: it was only by concentrating his will upon them that he forced them to continue to be his carriers. “Strange!” he thought. “A man’s own feet behavin’ like that!”
Then he laughed to himself, not grimly, yet somewhat ruefully. Everything he had believed his own seemed to be behaving like that. Ornaby Addition had been as much a part of him as his feet were, but he was making his feet behave; and when he could get his breath, and start in again, he would make Ornaby behave once more. The shellbacks might get Ornaby away from him for a while, but they couldn’t keep it!
When he reached the tall cast-iron Oliphant gateposts, white no longer, but oyster-coloured with the city grime, there was a taxicab waiting in the street before them; and by this time he was so lifelessly tired he wished the cab might carry him into the house, but exerting his will, made his erratic feet serve him that far. He found his brother-in-law in the library with Mrs. Oliphant, who was crying quietly.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 358