He accepted applause, though, from any quarter, old or young, expected it and was graciously used to it. By the time he was fifteen he’d had a lifetime of it from the Peases and Millerwoods, aunts, uncles and cousins, and from the general circles in which he moved. My sister regarded him as a part of her reverent and tender mourning for her worshipped husband because Irvie had been named for him. She could never bear the slightest hint of criticism of Irvie Pease, and as for the young Emma, my niece, she was Irvie’s serf.
Where’s a man so rare that even in mature age he’s acquired the art of self-protection when he speaks to ladies of their idols? On the evening after a tennis tournament arranged by Irvie Pease to celebrate his sixteenth birthday, I stirred up an actual scene at my own dinner-table where sat only my sister, my niece and myself. Emma and Harriet were exclamatory over the humorous little speech addressed by Irvie to the tennis spectators (of whom I’d been one) when he’d accepted the silver cup donated by his great-aunt Janet and awarded to him as the winner of the ‘tournament’.
A fond flush decorated Emma’s brow and cheeks; she was beginning to turn prettier after a plain childhood and the warm colour made her almost lovely. ‘Wasn’t he darlingly funny, though!’ she cried. ‘He’s always making fun of himself in the cutest way, especially when he has an honour or something bestowed on him. You know — like calling himself the “Old Maestro” or “Irvie, the Idiot Earl” — all those funny things he makes up to call himself. He’s really so terribly modest, the way he makes fun of himself; it just makes everybody think all the more of him.’
I had an unfortunate impulse to be educational. ‘Yes, indeed’, I said airily. ‘Many biographies show it to be a successful method, Emma. Self-aggrandizement dressed up as mirthful self-belittlement is an excellent old device to win the innocent.’
Harriet gave me a stare that should have stopped me. ‘You didn’t think that was a charming little speech of his?’ she asked.
‘Yes, charming. I think Irvie had a regret, though.’
‘What regret?’
‘I had a low idea’, I said. ‘I thought Irvie was sorry he couldn’t make both speeches — the presentation one by poor old Janet Millerwood and his own, too.’
‘But that would have been impossible!’ Young Emma’s eyes were enlarged by seeing a person of my age lost to common sense. ‘How could anybody make a speech presenting a cup to himself and then another accepting it? Those are two utterly different things, don’t you see? They’re just the opposite. So how could Irvie have done both?’
‘He couldn’t, Emma. I only had an impression he was rather restive during his great-aunt’s address to him and that he was thinking of a few rather nice things about himself he could have wished her to add. That’s not so rare, dear, in recipients of awards — even when they have bald or grey heads.’
‘Why, how awful of you!’ Emma’s bright hazel eyes attained their largest. ‘I never heard such absurd blind nonsense!’
‘Don’t wither me, Emma!’ Like many another rash old tease of an uncle making trouble for himself, I went on with my prattle. Emma was the most athletic girl in our large neighbourhood, and on a tennis court a flying marvel. ‘When Irvie got up the tournament to honour his birthday,’ I said musingly, ‘you don’t suppose he was pretty sure of one probability, do you?’
‘What probability?’
‘That you’d let him win, Emma.’
‘Let him!’ she cried. ‘Let him! What on earth do you mean?’
‘I’m afraid I thought you slacked off rather plainly in the set you lost to him, Emma.’
‘What!’ She seemed to see me as a horrifying spectacle.
‘Of all the accusations! There never was a fairer contest. Irvie beat Edgar and he beat Mary Reame and Harry Enders, and so did I. We couldn’t play more than one set each with each other or we’d have been there all night, and if every one of us didn’t play our best every time it wouldn’t have been a real tournament. Doesn’t that satisfy you?’
‘It’s not to the point, dear’, I said. ‘I had the unworthy thought that Irvie knew you’d let him win because you always do.’
‘Oh!’ Emma uttered the one exclamation. It was a hurt outcry, and, although her lips moved as if she tried to add something to it, she couldn’t. In fact, she burst into tears, rose from the table and brokenly left the room.
‘Thoughtful of you!’ my sister said. ‘Do you think it considerate to tease her by casting slurs on—’
‘Slurs?’ I tried to laugh myself out of a false position. ‘Are you taking it seriously, too? Can’t I be allowed to try to be a comic old bystander once in a while? Slurs? Good heavens! They’re only children. Slurs!’
‘What else could they seem to Emma?’ my sister said. ‘What are you trying to do to her? Spoil her friendship with a dear boy who’s the splendid only son of our own kinsfolk, our next neighbours and best friends? I declare I think you’d better dose your old dried-up sense of humour with a narcotic!’
Snubbed speechless, I nevertheless strongly agreed with her as she, too, abandoned me to my coffee and the four candles that lighted our small table. Irvie wasn’t to be joked about. Henceforth when my thoughts of him tempted me to be a funny dog I’d better become a miracle of silence.
Chapter Three
ON a rainy aftemoon during the Christmas holidays I’d come downstairs to the family library and found Emma and Edgar Semple there playing backgammon. They were busier with argument, though, than with the game.
I took the book I wanted^ and would have departed; but Emma stopped me. She tossed her dice-box crossly upon the gaudy gaming board, said ‘Wait, Uncle, please’; then spoke emotionally to Edgar.
‘Edgar, you’ve got to. You’ve got to tell him and let him decide. If you won’t tell him I will.’
Edgar shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t.’
‘Tell me what?’ I asked.
As usual Edgar’s expression calmly revealed nothing. ‘It’s of no consequence, sir.’
‘Oh, isn’t it?’ Emma cried. ‘All right, then, I’ll just prove it is and pretty serious consequence at that, because it’s — it’s about Irvie’s ruining his health!’
‘His what?’ I said. ‘To me he appears robust.’
‘Ah, but you don’t know!’ My niece’s eyes were suddenly moist; she jumped up and openly suffered at me. ‘He’s — he’s killing himself!’
I tried not to laugh. ‘How?’
‘He’s smoking himself to death.’ Emma so unhappily believed what she said that she had ado not to sob aloud. ‘His father and mother don’t even know that he smokes at all because old Aunt Janet promised if he wouldn’t until he’s eighteen she’d give him a car. But he is; he’s been smoking for a whole year and he coughs and coughs and won’t listen to anybody! Whenever I try to tell him the risk he’s running, he just laughs and says we’ve all got to — got to’ — Emma’s voice broke, but she finished the dreadful quotation— ‘got to die some time so — so why not young!’
‘Boys before Irvie have talked like that to girls’, I said. ‘Most of ’em cough, too, when they begin to try to smoke.’
‘“Begin”?’ she cried. ‘“Begin to try”? Oh, you’ve never known anybody that smokes and inhales every breath as Irvie does! Even I didn’t, until last night! Nobody can live and smoke the way he does — sixty cigarettes an hour!’
‘No,’ I said, ‘you’re right. As a regular practice that’d be poor hygiene; but nobody could do it. Even Irvie couldn’t, Emma.’
Several tears were already out upon her cheeks; now she added others. ‘He does! Sixty an hour! It’s how he smokes all the time except when he’s with his father and mother or Aunt Janet. I’ve been begging and begging Edgar to tell Uncle Will and Aunt Evelyn and he won’t do it — he just won’t!’
‘Well—’ Edgar said. ‘I rather think I’d better not.’
‘Do you want him to die?’ Emma’s vehemence reached this climax. ‘Uncle Will or Aunt Evelyn wouldn’t puni
sh him; they never did in their lives. They’d just try to save him. They’d get Dr. Erb to examine his lungs and try to cure him. What else is there to do?’
‘Is that what you want me to decide?’ I asked.
‘You’ve got to do more!’ She caught my sleeve imploringly. ‘Edgar won’t tell them and if I do, Irvie’ll hate me. You won’t go on letting him smoke sixty cigarettes an hour, will you? You’ll tell them, won’t you?’
I patted her hand. ‘I’m like Edgar. I believe I’d better keep out of it, Emma.’
She snatched her hand away, made a fist of it with which to gouge her eyes. ‘Nobody!’ she wept. ‘Nobody, nobody’ll lift a finger to help!’ Concluding with a gulp delivered at our consciences, she left us and went elsewhere — to continue her weeping, so I surmised, not without compassion.
‘Too bad’, I said to young Edgar. ‘What’s made her so excited about it?’
He rose thoughtfully from the backgammon table. ‘She’ll calm down out of it, sir. It doesn’t amount to anything. Irvie doesn’t smoke much, not more than the rest of the boys do. He just happens to be the one the girls worry about.’
‘But if he tells her he smokes sixty cigarettes an hour—’
‘No, sir.’ Edgar’s calm remained complete. ‘Irvie didn’t tell her that.’
‘But she just declared—’
‘I know’, he said. ‘I’ll explain it if you don’t mind keeping it confidential.’ He permitted the faintest of smiles to appear momentarily upon his round face and in his blue eyes. ‘You know how Irvie is. He doesn’t mean any harm and it doesn’t do any. He just likes to keep a good deal going on about him, if you’ve ever happened to notice.’
‘Yes, I’ve happened to.’
‘I thought so’, Edgar said with the cool detachment that often gave me an odd feeling about him: I seemed to be talking with an imperturbable person of my own age — or even older! ‘I’m afraid you might get a wrong idea of him, sir. Older people usually see only one or two sides of younger people.’
I laughed. ‘We belong to different tribes, do we?’
‘I think so, sir. It’s why I’ve a notion that maybe in your own mind you’re sometimes a little hard on Irvie.’
‘I’ll add to your mind-reading, Edgar’, I said. ‘If I’m hard on Irvie, as you say, maybe it’s because he reminds me mortifyingly that at his age I, too, was something of a prima donna — at least to my own view.’
‘Yes, sir; but isn’t everybody to some extent more or less just a bit that way?’ Edgar seemed satisfied that we’d established this platform. ‘Well, then, I’ll go ahead. As you implied, yourself, it’s only human for a boy to like having the girls think they’re worrying about him. That’s why Irvie’s got ’em all believing this sixty-an-hour tragedy. He didn’t tell ’em he smoked that hard; he let ’em find it out for themselves. That was just last night c and made a big sensation, especially, of course, with Emma, and so—’
‘But, Edgar, if he didn’t tell them he — —’
‘No, sir. Emma got excited and counted ’em.’
‘But it can’t be done, Edgar.’
‘No, of course not.’ Edgar’s smile appeared again. ‘She did count ’em, though — exactly sixty. Then she started the big fuss; but it was funny to see Irvie keep looking sideways at Sylvia to see what she—’
‘Sylvia?’ At the moment I didn’t place any Sylvia among Irvie’s young subsidiaries.
‘Sylvia Stelling’, Edgar explained. ‘You’ve probably seen her on the beach with the rest of us at Stonehaven in summer. She’s visiting Mary Reame over the holidays. Irvie’s kind of impressed with her for the simple reason she’s a New Yorker, and he can’t ever help trying his best to impress the people that impress him.’ Most everybody seems to be like that, though, I’ve noticed — especially playing up strong to anyone from a bigger town. Well, Irvie did the sixty-an-hour stunt mostly on Sylvia’s account; but of course the rest were expected to—’
‘Edgar, you said Emma counted—’
‘Yes, sir, if you don’t mind remembering it’s confidential. The crowd met over at our house after dinner to go skating at the Riverside Rink and come back later for hot chocolate and things. Uncle Will and Aunt Evelyn had gone to Ladies’ Night at the Nineteenth Century Literary Club that Uncle Will’s president of, and the house was all ours. Well, Irvie said he’d decided not to skate; he was going to stay home and smoke and read Chaucer and Montaigne—’
‘Read what, Edgar?’
‘Chaucer and Montaigne, sir. I mean that’s what he said. Emma told him he was smoking himself to death; but anyhow she and the rest of us went and skated a while. The rink was too crowded, though, and we didn’t stay long. We were back in just an hour and Irvie was sitting by the fire with the Canterbury book on his lap and a whale of a pile of cigarette stubs in Uncle Will’s big glass ash-tray on the table beside him. Emma counted ’em and screamed out he’d finished sixty in that one hour — three packs. They were there, too, all right — sixty stubs — and the girls certainly made enough noise about ’em! Sylvia did some of it; so it went off pretty well, you see.’
‘No, I don’t see!’ I said. ‘While the rest of you were gone had someone else come in— ‘maybe more than one — and helped Irvie to smoke all those—’
‘No, sir. Nobody but Irvie’d been there. It’s simpler than it looks. I wondered how he’d done it, and when I get to wondering I always seem to have to poke around in my mind till I think out the answer. Well, I thought I had the answer to the sixty-an-hour problem; but I had to poke around in other places besides my mind to prove I was right.’
‘That’s all?’ I asked with interest. ‘You wanted to prove it to yourself only?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Edgar looked surprised. ‘Maybe it’s a bad habit; but I seem to be like that. I always seem to have to know. Anyhow it’s why, when the crowd went out to the kitchen to make the chocolate, I looked in the table drawer and found the scissors Uncle Will keeps in there to clip things out of the newspapers that he wants to save. There were some little shreds of tobacco on the scissors and some more on the floor. You see, don’t you, sir?’
T begin to, Edgar.’
‘Yes’, he said. ‘Irvie’d cut his cigarettes in two; then he just smoked a little bit of each half and put it in the ash-tray. They made such an outrageous big hill on the tray he was pretty sure somebody’d count ’em — most likely Emma because she was already fussed up about his smoking — and of course she did; so it turned out to be a pretty good go.’
‘Good go?’ I echoed. ‘Is that what you call it?’
‘Why, certainly, sir; that’s all it was. I wouldn’t be giving it away to you, of course, except maybe Emma — just now while she thinks she’s all wrought up over it — well, she might get to working on you some more and there’d be just a chance you’d think you ought to tell Uncle Will and Aunt Evelyn. If you should, they’d be worried over what doesn’t amount to anything at all.’
‘Aren’t you forgetting my niece’s worrying?’ I asked.
‘No, I’m not very likely to forget anything about Emma.’ Here there was something like ruefulness, a slight undertone in the voice of this uncommonly self-possessed boy. ‘I suppose you mean you feel she ought to be cheered up by being told about the scissors, sir?’
‘Yes, that is what I feel.’
He shook his head. ‘No, sir. Giving it away to Emma’d put me in a pretty unsporting hole, as if I’d tried to make him look goofy to you — and so to her, too. That wouldn’t be right at all.’
‘Not even if he’s been behaving goofily, Edgar?’
‘He hasn’t. Not really, sir. It was just a kid kind of thing to do. Don’t you make any allowances,’ this remarkable Edgar asked me, ‘for Irvie’s just being his age?’
‘His age? It’s about the same as yours, isn’t it?’
A trace of pain appeared upon Edgar’s brow and seemed as near a token of desperation as that unemotional surface could produce. ‘Lo
ok here’, he said. ‘I simply can’t be the means of getting Irvie into any sort of mess with Emma or our crowd or with you or anybody. Technically I’m an outsider in our family, sir; but you’d never in the world know it from Irvie any more than you would from Aunt Evelyn or Uncle Will. There isn’t a stingy bone in his body; he’s as generous as any real brother could be. I owe everything to his father and mother, and, instead of grudging it, Irvie’s always wanted me to have as much from them as he has himself — sometimes actually more. There isn’t anything in the world I wouldn’t do for him and jump at the chance! If through what I’ve told you it’d get exaggerated around that he’d been pulling a fast one to keep the girls worked up over his health—’
I interrupted. ‘Wasn’t that actually what he did?’
‘No, sir. He just put on an act — really kind of enjoyable if you look at it right — to get the crowd going and impress Sylvia. Not that he cares anything about her personally; it was only because she’s a visiting girl and from New York. That little cigarette show oughtn’t to be taken up by older people. Where on earth was the least harm in it, sir?’
‘But you heard Emma—’
‘Yes; don’t worry’, Edgar said. ‘She really kind of enjoys making this moan over Irvie, because in the back of her head she knows perfectly well he’s in robust health, as you said. Girls like making that kind of fuss and then forgetting it and then doing it again. Irvie’s funny some ways; he likes having ’em do it, and I’d certainly hate to be the one to mess it all up. He’s a grand old Irvie, sir, and please, I do hope my telling you about this bit of kidding isn’t going to make you conscientiously feel that you ought to — ought to—’
I put a cordial end to the boy’s uneasiness. ‘No; I’ll remember you told me in confidence, Edgar. I think perhaps you’re right; girls probably do enjoy this kind of worrying. How’d you get that idea?’
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 454