A smaller boy seated on the turf before him spoke up seriously. It was he who had objected to a statue’s talking.
‘You can’t, Irvie. Nobody here’s ever had ten dollars all at once in their whole lifetime.’
‘Shut up, Edgar.’ Irvie Pease stood on his left foot, waved his right leg and both arms. ‘Look! The Russian Ballet! Watch the Old Maestro perform a Russian Ballet on but a few square inches of sun-dial. I’m the Afternoon of a Faun, see. More cheers, please! Anybody that doesn’t cheer loud enough I’ll fine twenty dollars. Yay! Hurray for the Old Maestro doing the Russian Ballet!’
Then, singing ‘Too-da-loodle-doo’ as his accompaniment, he did the Russian Ballet a little too much, fell from the sun-dial, came to ground on his hands and knees, laughing, and jumped up lightly. ‘What do I do next? I’ll tell you. The Old Maestro will now play an exhibition game of tennis. Hop around to the tennis court, everybody. The Old Maestro’s going to play an exhibition set of singles. Emma, I’ll let you be my ingloriously defeated opponent. The rest of you can be frenzied spectators. Follow the Old Maestro! Yay!’
Musically protracting his ‘Yay’, he ran round the house to the tennis court in the shrubberied wide back yard. He ran leapingly, the spirit of the ballet still upon him; and with a submissive kind of eagerness the half-dozen others followed him — all except one, the boy Edgar, who remained seated upon the ground near the sun-dial and appeared to be lost in thought. Young Emma, my niece, royally appointed to be Irvie Pease’s tennis opponent, ran almost as dancingly as he did.
‘Tickled to death, isn’t she?’ old Joe Erb said, as the sound of the young voices came to us more faintly. ‘They all think it’s a privilege to have Irvie Pease take a little notice of ’em. Of the whole kit-and-boodle of ’em, that young niece of yours is the most so. Ever think about that?’
‘Yes, I’ve seemed to notice it.’
‘I’ll bet you have! She and the rest of the kids aren’t much foolisher over him than the grown people around here are, though. Actual adults brighten all up if he condescends to jolly ’em a little. They’re always saying, “Hasn’t he the loveliest manners with older people?” Manners? Just pure, bald patronizing!’
‘Or just pure, bald youngness’, I suggested. ‘Amiable of him, too, because most of ’em at his age don’t waste their time noticing us at all.’
‘Me,’ Erb said, ‘I like that better than the patronizing. As for that young niece of yours, she’d consider it a big treat to be allowed to polish his shoes. I’ve seen her a dozen times helping everybody else spoil him, hanging on his every golden word. If you’re so fond of her, as they tell me you are, why’n’t you get her to laugh at him, instead?’
I laughed, myself, as I resumed my chair at my worktable: I’d risen to look out of the window. ‘“Get her to laugh at him”? She does that all the time. It’s the chief item of Irvie’s spell. She’s always telling me what a “marvellous comedian” he is.’
‘I see’, Erb said. ‘It wouldn’t be any use to try to get her to laugh at him intelligently. At their age they laugh at what makes old people’s ears and stomachs ache. People our age have no effect upon the young, no matter what we say or do.’
‘Odd view for a doctor’, I suggested. ‘Have the young not eyes? Do they not weep when you bolus ’em? Do they not bleed when you — —’
Still looking down from the window, he paid no attention to me. ‘I like that one’, he said. ‘That serious, round-faced young Edgar Semple. He hasn’t followed the “Old Maestro” and the others. He’s still sitting there. Engaged in one of his meditations. Odd boy; but I think he’s got something. I’d give a nickel to know what he’s thinking about. I’d give more, though, not to know what Irvie Pease it thinking about; but I always do. So does anybody that takes one good look at him.’ Erb began to replace his stethoscope and blood-pressure apparatus in his satchel. ‘Irvie Pease’s mere shining face is always a plain proof that he never for an instant thinks about anything but himself and never will.’
‘Thinks?’ I said.
‘Oh, of course you’re right.’ Erb looked moody as he closed the satchel. ‘Absorption in self isn’t thought. Children naturally have the most, and even at our age there are some odious remnants; but these people who all their lives seem just made of it — pure egoism, spontaneous self-pushery, instinct for leadership and selfdramatization — why, damn it, they succeed; they get on! They put it over big on all the boobs, and I never knew a more stick-out precocious sample of it than Irvie Pease.
Yes, and he’s going to be that way all his life. Why, damn it, he makes me sick!’
I laughed again, Erb spoke with so sharp a vehemence. ‘Could you admit,’ I asked, ‘that you’re a pretty biased old gentleman?’
‘Absolutely!’ He was loudly emphatic. ‘Here I go, still breaking out every now and then, spending actual time blithering over a bright-faced young school-boy! Who’d believe it? It’s absurd and I think I’m crazy. I don’t care. Look there, I brought almost all of that squad of youngsters down there into this world and I swear that that first squeaks ever uttered by Master Irving Pease sounded like “Me! Me! Me!”’
‘Don’t they all?’ I asked.
‘No, sir! Not to that extreme. Remember by when he was three how he’d bounce into a roomful o’ grown people and beller and charge about and stamp and squawk to make ’em all look at him and put on a fuss over him, how cute and smart and active he was? I never could bear sound or sight of him then, nor from then on!’
‘Go it!’ I said. ‘Old family doctor walking into dozens of familiar households for decades, I should thing you’d have got used to—’
‘Not a bit of it’, he interrupted. ‘I’ve cured hundreds of ’em in thirty-three years of practice and most of ’em were good as gold when sick and some of ’em were mighty mean little specimens; but oh my, Irvie Pease! Whenever he was sick he just grabbed the chance to be more prominent and keep everybody on the run.
On your word now, have you ever got used to him, yourself?’
‘“Used to him”, Doctor? Are you trying to goad me into feeling guiltily critical of one of my own family connections?’
‘Thank God he’s not one of mine!’ the doctor said and moved toward the door. ‘Feel guilty or not as you like. There’s one person who ought to feel that way, though, and that’s Irvie Pease’s father. Sit still; don’t come downstairs with me. I ought to know my way by this time, oughtn’t I?’ Then, as we heard a burst of youthful cheering from the tennis court behind the house next door, old Erb uttered a grunted exclamation and his stamping footsteps on the stairway seemed to repeat the vocal protest.
I didn’t try to get back into my work; the interruption of the doctor’s visit had dislodged me, and a few moments after he’d gone I found myself idly looking down from the window again. Young Edgar Semple alone was in view, still sitting on the grass staring at the sun-dial. Not a noticeable boy, he was short, sturdy, round-faced and serious, as Erb had said; remarkably quiet too.
He was so quiet that I was often curious about him, wondering what his thoughts might be, though apparently they were always as undisturbing as were his voice and manner and his placid clear blue eyes. He was Irvie Pease’s cousin — his semi-adopted brother, in fact, a background figure brought up in the same house. As I stood watching him and wondering why the sun-dial seemed to fascinate him, he rose and, with his head bent in thought, walked slowly away toward the noisy tennis court behind the house. He hadn’t been thinking about the sun-dial at all, I concluded; but he’d most typically been thinking.
As my spectacled eyes followed the stocky figure of fourteen-year-old Edgar Semple on his slow and pondering way toward the tennis court, I comprehended that the boy’s long, long thoughts were occupied with a puzzle, and I guessed that his mystery might be Irvie Pease. This kind of speculative guessing being the business and habit of any writing man — always reaching for what people feel and think — I went on to wonder if Edgar mightn’t be try
ing to understand just what in Irvie’s character and behaviour made him a leader and in particular so captivating to my niece, young Emma Millerwood.
Edgar passed from my sight, and an undeniable sense of guilt, no doubt the result of old Erb’s querulous talk, came upon me. It was preposterous; but that guiltiness increased a few moments later when I again heard a triumphant young voice. ‘Viva! Viva the Old Maestro!’ I could distinguish the words. ‘Give the Old Maestro a big hand for that shot, you kids! Everybody cheer! Viva the Old Maestro! Viva!’
My interior qualm was distinct, and old Joe Erb would have had a worse one if he’d stayed. So susceptible we are to suggestion that it can be contagion: a few strongly-spoken words first lodge in our ears, then convince us that we’ve long held opinions or feelings now at last coming to light. I wondered if what Erb, and now I, too, found irritating in Irvie Pease was our own long-past youth — or our loss of it! Herodotus said that in Egypt the old torn-cats always slew all the young ones.
Chapter Two
THE DOCTOR WAS right about Irvie Pease’s father.
Pretty Evelyn Pease, the mother, was doting creature enough; but, from the day of his son’s birth, Will Pease seemed mastered by a kind of ancestor worship in reverse, a blinded pride and joy in this offspring, their only child. William Levering Pease was otherwise better than a merely sensible man. He was a lawyer, possessed of a conscientious but agile mind that more than once, and before he was fifty, held honourable attention in the country’s highest court. His genial manner was genuine, coming from the heart; he had ‘literary leanings’, loved scholarship, and, though a rock for his principles, he was actually, I think, the very best liked and respected citizen of our populous community.
For my part, I didn’t like anybody better than I liked Will Pease. The earlier Peases and my own family had been intimate even before our country town began to swell and smoke itself up into cityhood seventy years ago, and there’d been more than one intermarriage to group us the more closely. Will Pease was my third cousin; and his wife’s first cousin, Irving Millerwood, had married my sister, Harriet. Thus the young Irvie — Master Irving Millerwood Pease, named for my brother-in-law — was my sister’s second-cousin-by-marriage and a third cousin to my niece, Emma Millerwood, Harriet’s daughter.
These relationships, often confusing to the people actually involved, are of course, but fog and cobweb on the brain of a maddened listener for whom there’s an ill-advised attempt to make them clear. I’m not so rash; I’m only explaining that after old Joe Erb had unfortunately put me in the way of feeling a little fed-up with Irvie Pease sometimes, my feeling of guilt for the sensation was the more pointed because undeniably I was Irvie’s relative, however distantly and intricately.
The association of the two families was further knitted because after the death of my brother-in-law, Irving Millerwood, my widowed sister, Harriet, and her little daughter had come to live with me, next door to the Peases. Will and Evelyn Pease were Harriet’s contemporaries, not mine. She was fourteen years my junior; they were of like age, and throughout her girlhood and short married life she’d been the inseparable companion of Evelyn. Though upon need I could retreat to my workroom, a remodelled attic, the households in their intimacy were almost as one.
As nature seems to have provided that the most heartfelt business of any generation is the next one, the three children in the two houses, especially Irvie, largely absorbed the attention of the adults. My niece, Emma, only four when she and her mother came to live with me, was brought up, as we say, with Irvie Pease and that other boy of the Peases’, Edgar Semple, whom even old Joe Erb had confessed he liked. Here was another cousin-ship. Edgar was an orphaned nephew of Evelyn Pease’s, and Will and Evelyn had taken him in, which was like their kind hearts.
They didn’t legally adopt him; but the treatment he had from them was in all respects what he’d have received if he’d been their own son — a slightly younger brother of Irvie’s, warmly cherished though less on the way to become a personage. Both Edgar and Irvie seemed to take this same view. At least it was evident in Edgar’s manner, and Irvie could never have been allowed to doubt his own superior prominence and promise.
Dr. Joseph Erb placed upon the father most of the blame for Irvie’s youthful showiness; but here a change in American custom was concerned. Will Pease, like many another of only the fourth generation after the pioneers, had been brought up so strictly and with such consequent numberless small mortifications that on the very day after the birth of his son he told me happily that he’d never say an arbitrary no to him, the boy should live in freedom; and Will kept his word. He kept it so well that whatever else Irvie was, he was himself, his own child and on the way to be his own man. I sometimes thought, though, that he’d inherited himself — not from his lovable parents but from some everybody’s darling far back in his ancestry.
Enhancing such heritage, poor Irvie had begun even in infancy to hear talk of his talents. Both parents quoted him in his presence. They dwelt upon his babyhood’s precocities of wit, described with delight his young unconventionalities, and nobody need think he didn’t understand. When he was no more than two, his facial expression, especially when his bodily beauty was being extolled, often made me laugh within my ribs; I was too fond of Will and Evelyn to be open with such mirth.
Will Pease, beaming, would stop a friend on a downtown street and tell him something little Irvie had said or done, and then, perhaps that evening, would let Irvie hear him repeating to callers what the astonished and delighted friend had exclaimed in comment. Thus early do some of us learn our prominence.
When Irvie was eight Will told his partners and stenographers, and everybody else on their floor of the Millerwood Building, that Irvie of his own choice had begun to read Don Quixote and had written ‘a rather remarkable little poem’ about the book. Will typed copies of the poem, sent them to relatives and friends and even handed me one in the Peases’ living-room after a fairly large but congenial dinner-party. He coughed, laughed placatively, and asked me if I’d mind reading it aloud to the company. I contrived to do it with gravity.
‘Don Quixote thought he was a knight
Perhaps he was right.
It was a long time of yore
People do not wear armours any more.
Though of knights now there are none
My own heart whispers some day I will become one.’
During the reading, Will Pease sat on the edge of his chair, and, leaning forward, listened as if to angel’s choiring; but when I finished he did his best to be a modest father. Coughing apologetically, he explained that though of course the verses were faulty in form he really couldn’t help feeling that a certain quality in the thought made them rather worth hearing, if we hadn’t minded. He had to confess that he was really pretty foolish over the boy, he went on, with an engaging laugh at himself; and probably he oughtn’t to have asked grown people to listen to an eight-year-old child’s poetizing. On the other hand, he and Evelyn both had a feeling that maybe it did show just a glimmer of something perhaps rather unusual — the use of the word ‘whispers’ in the last line of the poem, for instance — and, well, he couldn’t help feeling that the verses showed something that some day might — might develop into — well, something unusual and — and —
‘You don’t need to be making excuses, Will.’ The interruption came from Janet Millerwood, Will’s aunt, a woman of my own age but all her life an undiscourageable, almost professional enthusiast. ‘Everybody knows how unusual Irvie already is’, she said. ‘No other living child of eight could possible have written anything to compare with those lines of his. I liked particularly that touch of Irvie’s about his heart’s whispering to him that he’d be a knight some day. The word “whispers” makes it a touch that has actual subtlety. He felt the thing emotionally, you see. He didn’t just think it; he felt it.
There’s analysis there, instinctive discrimination, and it’s always the true essence of poetry to dea
l in these shades of meaning. I’m grateful to Irvie for a real pleasure, and I think it’s all simply too wonderful for words!’ She turned to her sleepy old husband. ‘Don’t you feel so, too, Frank?’
‘I liked it first rate’, he said obediently. ‘It’s remarkable.’
My sister Harriet, glowing, clapped her hands. ‘More than just remarkable’, she declared. ‘There’s only one Irvie!’
I glanced at Irvie’s mother. She sat deprecatorily blushing but proud as Punch. I saw something more; behind her chair a door stood ajar and beyond it, in the hall, was the poet, himself. He’d tiptoed there to listen, being obviously certain that his poem was going to be at least mentioned. I restrained my hilarious upsurge, looked dreamy and let him go on thinking himself unseen.
The hall was dim; but Irvie’s pleasure was too bright to be obscured. Never, for sheer complacency, have I seen his eavesdropper’s smile equalled, even upon the face of an applauded adult. He waited until everybody had finished the obligatory exclamations about him; then he stole away — most likely to write another subtle poem, I suspected.
By less than this have I known full-grown persons to be ruined, so far as any comfort in their society was concerned. By less did I once see a sober-minded woman of thirty so changed that until her recovery people ran at sight of her. They didn’t run at sight of Irvie Pease, though, except toward him. Old Joe Erb was Irvie’s only detractor, a pitiable minority, and when I more or less — mainly less and with inward mirth — became somewhat of the Doctor’s opinion, I naturally didn’t tell anybody. Irvie of course, though he saw us, was almost unaware of such dim old creatures as Erb and me, plainly looked upon us as inconsequent objects in his adjacent scenery. When his attention was unavoidably drawn to myself, he showed the slightly amused tolerance for the obsolete that is really in the heart of all youth when it acknowledges the existence of a bygone era’s relics.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 453