“Where, Roger? Where do you think it’s going to end?”
“They’ve tried twice now,” he said, gloomily. “Last time, if the idiot had taken the precaution to see that there was plenty of gas in his borrowed car before they started, they’d have been married. Some day before long he’ll borrow enough gas, and then she’s going to slip out and meet him again, and they will.”
“No, no!” his wife protested. “I can’t bear to hear you say so.”
“It’ll happen, just the same,” he assured her, grimly. “Nothing on earth that we’ve done has been able to make her see this cub except as an angel — a persecuted angel. She really meant it when she called him that; — on my soul, I believe she did! We’ve told her the truth about him over and over till the repetition makes us sick. What effect does it have on her? We’ve told her what his own father said about him, that he’s ‘absolutely no good on earth and never will be!’ What help was that? Then we tried having other people tell her their opinions of Crabbe. It only made her hate the other people. We’ve tried indulgence; we made the greatest effort to interest her in other things; we’ve tried to get her interested in other young men; we’ve tried giving her anything she wanted; we’ve tried to get her to travel; offered her Europe, Asia, and the whole globe; and then when she wouldn’t go and everything else we tried was no good, we tried taking the whole thing as a joke — making good-natured fun of this cub; trying to make her see him as ridiculous — and the end of that was her first attempt to run away with him! Well, she did it again, and if we keep on as we’re going she’ll do it again! What’s our alternative? I ask you!”
His wife could only moan that she didn’t know; — her mind as well as her emotion was exhausted, she said; and the only thing she could suggest now was that he should try to get Lily to come down to dinner. He assented gloomily, “Well, I’ll see, though it makes me sick to listen to her when she’s like this,” and went upstairs to his daughter’s room.
After he had knocked repeatedly upon the door, obtaining only the significant response of silence, he turned the knob, found himself admitted into darkness, and pressed a button upon the wall just inside the door. The light, magically instantaneous, glowed from the apricot-coloured silk shades of two little lamps on slender tables, one at each side of the daintily painted bed; — and upon the soft green coverlet, with her fair and delicate head upon the lace pillow, lay his daughter. With hands pressed palm to palm upon her breast, her attitude was that of a crusader’s lady in stone upon a tomb; and the closed eyes, the exquisite white profile, thin with suffering, the slender, long outline of her figure, could not fail to touch a father’s heart. For the wasting of long-drawn anguish was truly sculptured there, even though the attitude might have been a little calculated.
“Lily,” he said, gently, as he approached the bed, “your mother wants to know if you wouldn’t like to come down to dinner.”
The dark eyelids remained as they were; but the pale lips just moved. “No, thank you.”
“You won’t?”
“No.”
“Then shall we send your dinner up to you, Lily?”
“No, thank you,” she whispered.
He had come into the room testily, in a gloomy impatience; but she seemed so genuinely in pain and so pathetically fragile a contestant against her solid mother and against his own robust solidity that suddenly he lost every wish to chide her, even every wish to instruct her. He became weak with compassion, and the only wish left in him was the wish to make her happier. He sat down upon a painted little chair beside the bed.
“Lily, child,” he said, huskily, “for pity’s sake, what is it you want?”
And again the pathetic lips just moved.
“You know, Papa.”
There was something in the whispered word “Papa” that cried to him of sweetness under torture, and cried of it with so keen a sound that he groaned aloud. “O, baby girl!” he said, succumbing then and there, when he had least expected such a thing to happen to him. “We can’t let you suffer like this! Don’t you know we’ll do anything on earth to make you happy?”
“No. You wouldn’t do the one thing — Papa?”
“I said anything,” he groaned.
X. LILY’S ALMOST FIRST ENGAGEMENT
WHEN HE CAME downstairs to his wife, five minutes later, he told her desperately to what he had consented.
“There isn’t any alternative,” he said, in his defence against Mrs. Dodge’s outcry. “It was going to happen anyhow, in spite of everything we could do, and she’s grown so thin — I hadn’t realized it, but she’s lost heaven knows how many pounds! You don’t want the child to die, do you? Well, when I saw her there, so worn and stricken, it came over me what that alternative would mean to us! When it comes to risking her life, I give up. I’d give my own life to keep her from marrying this idiot, but not hers! There’s only one thing for us to do, and we’ve got to go through with it.”
“I can’t!”
“Yes, you can,” he told her, angrily. “And since we’ve got to do it we’ll do it right. Not another word to her from either of us in dispraise of her idiot.
On the contrary! And he’s to be asked to dinner to-morrow night, and as often as she wants him afterward. Blast him, I’ll put him into my own office and try my darnedest to make it a job that’ll interest him. They can be married as soon as he’s saved enough to pay his own way. I’ll give her enough for hers. We’re beaten, Lydia. There’s nothing else to do.”
She protested despairingly, and in continued despair finally surrendered her “better judgment,” as she called it, to his weakness. Thus, after a painful evening of argument, they went unhappily to their uneasy beds, but woke in the morning determined to be thoroughbreds in the manner of their acceptance of Oswald Crabbe Osborne as their daughter’s betrothed.
Their encounter with him, when he came to dinner that evening in this recognized capacity, was an almost overwhelming trial of their gameness; but they succeeded in presenting the semblance of a somewhat strained beaming upon him, and were rewarded by the sight of a fading daughter blossoming again.
For Lily was radiant: her eyes and cheeks glowed; her feet danced; she was all light and love and gaiety.
At the table she laughed at every nothing, caressed her father, patted her mother’s cheek again and again, and from her eyes poured sunshine upon her lover across the centrepiece of roses.
Crabbe received the sunshine with complacency, for he was accustomed to it; and although his position in regard to her father and mother was a novelty, he appeared to accept their change of front as something he had confidently expected all along. That is to say, he took it as a simple and natural matter, of course, and was not surprised to be shown every consideration by his former opponents.
In truth, they showed him more consideration than he was able to perceive. As was already well known to them, he had not the equipment for what is often spoken of as general conversation; his views upon religious, political, scientific, or literary subjects were tactfully not sought, because of his having omitted to acquire the information sometimes held to be a necessary preliminary to the formation of views; — in fact, as Lily’s parents were previously aware, he lacked even those vagrant symptoms of ambition, the views without the information. Therefore, Mr and Mrs. Dodge kept the talk at first as weatherly, and then as personal, as they could make it, hoping he might shine a little, or at least that some faint spark might come from him to brighten their own impressions of him. They wanted to force themselves to like him; they had genuine yearnings to think better of him than had been their habit; but although they strove within themselves to attain these ends, they cannot be thought to have succeeded. The nearest Crabbe came to giving them a spark was when he spoke of his father; and even that apparent momentary gleam was not a happy one.
“He’s well,” Crabbe said, replying to Mrs. Dodge’s inquiry. “He’s usually well enough. He takes pretty good care of his health and all. I guess h
e’s a good deal surprised; but probably not enough to make him sick.”
“Isn’t he?” Mr. Dodge said, and he laughed hopefully, for it seemed to him that here was an unexpected hint of humour, something he had never attributed to the young man. “What would surprise him as much as that?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” Crabbe replied. “But he told me once he always got sick if anything surprised him too much. He says it injures his digestion. What he’s surprised about now, it was when I told him about Lily’s telephoning me this morning you were going to find me a position that would interest me. He certainly said he was surprised.”
Mr. Dodge’s expectations collapsed, though his expression remained indomitably genial. “I see,” he said. “Well, we’ll surprise him more by showing him how well you get on at the work.”
“I know I will,” Crabbe returned, simply. “I mean I’m certain to if it is interesting. It’s just like I’ve been telling Lily: the only reason I ever had any trouble at all in business, it’s because the luck’s been all one way so far; — it kept against my getting anything to do that had any possibilities in it. But it’ll be different from now on, I guess. All anybody needs to do for me, Mr. Dodge, is to find me a position where I’ll feel some use in getting my brain to work.”
Mr. Dodge said he was sure of it, gave his attention to his plate for a few moments, and then, with the gallant assistance of his wife, returned to the weather. Later, when they were alone together in the library, where they could hear from the drawing-room the pretty sound of Lily’s prattling, and, at brief intervals, her happy laughter, the parents faced their misery.
“It’s unbelievable,” Mr. Dodge said, huskily. “You don’t run across these extreme cases of self-satisfied asininity more than a few times in your whole life, even counting all the hundreds and thousands of people you come in contact with. And to think you’ve got to take such a case into your family!”
“It’s your idea!” his wife reminded him.
“It isn’t! It’s not my idea; it’s a monstrous delusion that’s got hold of our girl and that we failed to show her is a delusion. Well, since we couldn’t show her it is, and since opposing her in it was injuring her health, what’s left for us to do but to act as if it were a reality? It isn’t my idea to treat this moron as an angel and take him into our family: it’s the dreadful necessity that her delusion has forced upon us.”
“Thank you for not ending with, ‘Isn’t that logical?”’ she said. “I’ve been under such a strain, keeping my face cordial at the table, I don’t believe I could have stood it!”
“Under a strain?” he echoed. “I should say so!” He gave her a commiserating and comradelike pat upon her shoulder as he passed behind her to get a book from the shelves. “We’ve both been under a strain, Lydia, and I’m afraid we’ve got to go on being under it.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “That’s the prospect — for the rest of our lives!”
“I’m afraid so.” Then, with grave faces, they settled down to their books, or, at least, tried to settle down to them, but looked into vague and troubled distance more than they read; — ever and anon, as Lily’s merriment was made ripplingly vocal in the drawing-room, the silence of the library would become intensified and then be broken by a mother’s sigh. But at ten o’clock the front door was heard to close with soft reluctance; and Lily left upon the air a trail of dance music in slender soprano as she skipped down the hall and into the library. She threw her arms about her mother, then about her father, kissing them in turn.
“Now you’ve let yourselves begin to know him,” she cried, “isn’t he wonderful? Isn’t he wonderful. Mamma? Isn’t he wonderful, Papa?”
The two thoroughbreds proved of what stuff heroism is made. They said Crabbe was wonderful.. — .Upon an evening two weeks later, Mr.
Dodge, again alone with his wife in the library, reverted to this opinion. “I think Crabbe Osborne is more than wonderful,” he said. “I think he’s unique. I hate to be premature, but he’s been in my office for several days now, and, though they don’t say it, I can see that everyone there agrees with me. He couldn’t possibly have a duplicate.”
“Isn’t he ‘interested’ in anything you’ve offered him? Hasn’t he been able to get his ‘brain’ to work?”
“Not yet,” Mr. Dodge replied. “He’s a little discouraged about it, I’m afraid.”
“But you aren’t, are you?” She made this inquiry with a pointedness not wasted upon him, for he had already perceived the indications that thenceforth in their private hours, until death did them part, he was to be the defender of their acceptance of Crabbe Osborne. Mrs. Dodge adopted her husband’s policy, but could not relinquish her attitude of having been forced to it.
“I’m not discouraged about my daughter’s health and spirits,” he retorted, a little sharply. “I’m not discouraged about having done the right thing. The ‘right thing’? How often do I have to tell you it was the only thing? Look what it’s done for Lily. She was literally pining away. How many weeks was it that we never once saw her smile? How many dozens and dozens of miserable, agonizing scenes did we have with her? How long was it that every day was only another of weeping and outcries — and untouched food on trays outside her door — and tears on untouched food on the table when she did come to the dining-room? I tell you, this house was nothing but a nightmare!”
“And how would you define most of our dinners during the last fortnight?”
He winced, but continued to defend himself. “At least we’ve reduced the nightmare. If our dinners with the moron are nightmares for us, they aren’t for Lily. Only two of us suffer, where it was nightmare for all three of us before. And it’s been easier for us this second week than it was the first one.”
“Not for me,” his wife said, dismally. ‘“The more I see of him the more terrible it is to think of him as permanent.”
“But can’t you think only of Lily?”
“Indeed, I can! I’m doing just that!”
“Well, then,” he urged, “think of the difference in her these two weeks have made. Now she’s interested in everything, happy in everything. How many times did we try to get her to go to the country club dances and be with the other young people of the kind she liked and enjoyed before this spell came upon her? She said she ‘hated the horrible old place!’ because Crabbe Osborne couldn’t go there.”
“He didn’t mind that,” Mrs. Dodge remarked. “He went anyhow until they sent him a note reminding him he wasn’t a member. That was why Lily said she hated it and we couldn’t get her to go any more. I was surprised she decided to go to-night, since she knows he can’t be there.”
“There’s the very point I’m making,” her husband said. “Two weeks ago we’d both have thought it was the last thing in the world she’d consent to do, and this evening we didn’t even suggest it to her; she went of her own volition, and cheerfully, too! I ask you if that doesn’t show she’s a different creature. And isn’t it better for two to suffer than three?”
“I ask you,” she returned, sharply: “How short sighted are you? We’re giving her a recess from pain, yes; but what are we thrusting her into? When she does see him as he is, and finds herself bound to him for life, isn’t she going to turn to us then, when it’s too late, and say: ‘Why didn’t you save me?’”
“Oh, Lord!” the father groaned, and his gesture was that of a man who has tried to make the best of his misery, but abandons the effort. “I don’t know! I can’t see! When you put it like that, I don’t know whether we’re doing right or wrong.” He paced the library floor, walking heavily, his head down. “It’s a miserable thing any way you look at it,” he said. “I did have just one slight alleviation: it seemed to me I bore it a little better, having him at the dinner-table this week, than I did the week before. It seemed to me maybe it might be because I was getting to like him a little, perhaps.”
“No,” Mrs. Dodge said, grimly. “It was because he was here five times the first
week and only three the second.”
“Is that so?” He stopped his pacing and stood still. “So she asked him five times the first week and only three the second. Doesn’t that look as if maybe—”
“No, I’m afraid not,” his wife interrupted, unhesitatingly destroying this obscure germ of hope. “When you give a child a toy it’ll play with it more at first than it will later. That doesn’t mean the child won’t cry if you try to take the toy away, does it?”
“No, I suppose not.” He had relapsed into gloom again. “And I suppose my poor little alleviation was—”
“Your ‘alleviation,’” Mrs. Dodge informed him, “was in the diminished number of the acute attacks — three instead of five — and not because you began to feel any affection for the disease itself.”
“I’m afraid you’re right,” he said. “And I’m afraid you’ve found the correct definition for what afflicts us.” He sank into a chair, unhappily limp and relaxed, his arms hanging flaccidly over the arms of the chair, “Crabbe Osborne is our disease,” he said. “It’s a disease the more awful because when a child gets it the parents get it, too, and when they give the child an opiate they only stop her pain for a little while; and then the child and the parents, all three of ’em, have got to have the disease for the rest of their lives! And the greatest mystery of it all is that an absolutely chance boy, with no malice, no harm in him — a mere drifting bit of flesh and nothing, that we’d never heard of a year ago — that a meaningless thing like Crabbe Osborne should do all this to us!”
“It isn’t,” she said. “He has nothing whatever to do with it. It’s Lily’s imagination. Her imagination was in the state to get the disease, and it just happened this boy was the nearest thing at a crucial moment. It might as well have happened to be someone else.”
“If it had only been any one else!” Mr. Dodge exclaimed. “I’m willing to agree with you, though: Crabbe just happened to be the fatal microbe. Well, he’s done for us, that’s sure!”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 367