Evelyn smiled a little wistfully. ‘He could hardly help feeling the temptation, though, could he, Will? He found the name of some agent in a theatrical magazine he bought, and he sent off the manuscript Tuesday; so if a manager takes it he’d really be almost compelled to go to New York and be a playwright, wouldn’t he?’
‘Not a bit of it’, Will said easily. ‘He and the rest of us would just go to the opening night, and naturally that’d be a gratification; but of course he’s got to finish college and go through law school. I’ve talked to him about it, and thank goodness he knows what’s solider and better worth while than theatrical glory! When he’s out of law school he’ll come back to his home town and live here, a good citizen and a good lawyer. We couldn’t well look forward to anything finer for him, could we?’
With a depth of feeling that moistened his mild eyes, Will addressed the question to me, and for a moment I was at a loss. Built unquestioningly in his own father’s image, Will Pease had the simple, constant hope to see his son honourably follow the same pattern. Like many another good soul certain that he and his forebears have found the best in life, Will had a profound urge, probably biological, to see his offspring settled into that perfectly believed-in groove. I had doubts; but with Will’s appealing eyes upon me I couldn’t even jocosely hint them. To his endearingly naïve question, my response was only, ‘No, Will; of course not.’
‘No, of course not!’ Brightened as readily as is a child, he repeated my flimsy confirmation. ‘American life doesn’t offer anything better. There isn’t much money in it maybe, and no wide fame — just the esteem and good will of his fellow-townsmen — but I say that a good American citizen living up to his highest principles in a good American community like this finds what we call “the good life”. Our son knows that as well as we do, Evelyn, and I thank God for it!’
Evelyn spoke softly and reached out from her chair to touch his hand. ‘Yes, Will; so do I.’
Her gesture touched more than Will’s hand; it touched my heart: those two were so assured that their son would preserve the perfection they saw in him. If he’d fail them, their sky would fall; but such chances are the common lot of all mothers and fathers. I could hope that this loving pair might always somehow keep themselves as proud of their Irvie as they were tonight in their certainty that he’d live the ‘good life’ they lived, themselves.
.. When we’d said our temporary good-bye to Will at the front door, Harriet and Evelyn, though they’d be on the train together next day, still pottered in talk, as women do; but I went on, and crossing the Peases’ lawn came upon Edgar Semple. He was standing hands in pockets under the starlight, doing nothing detectable; so I asked him if he indulged a farewell reverie.
‘Guess so’, he said. ‘You see, Irvie and I won’t be coming back in the autumn. We’ll be stopping at Princeton on our way from Stonehaven and we won’t see this old place again until the Christmas holidays. I always hate to leave here and I was just getting a picture of the house in the dark — and the bright light of the windows — fixed in my mind. It’s always been such a happy place that when I’m away I like to think of exactly how it looks in the night-time as well as by day and in all sorts of weather — in sunshine or when it’s rained on, and when the leaves are out and when they aren’t.’
‘I live but I don’t learn’, I informed him. ‘I’ve been gullible in crediting the slogan that for the new generation everything sentimental is both extinct and abhorrent.’ Then I added, ‘I haven’t yet thanked you for the pleasure you gave me the other night.’
‘The pleasure I’ He didn’t know what I meant.
‘What night?’
‘Good heavens, the night! What you did for Irvie’s play.’
‘What I did?’ He was still a blank.
‘Certainly. Not only your acting, which was the best present; but your contribution to the play itself — the changed soliloquy at the end, the altered version you made.’
‘I?’ I could see that he was startled. ‘Look here, where’d you get an idea I had anything to do with it?’
‘Partly from the author himself, Edgar. He talked to me about it when he was doubtful of it and planning to use his own version; but I also heard him telling old Sam Johnson Wilboyd that you ought to have a good part of the credit for the change.’
‘He did?’ Edgar’s tone wasn’t one of pleasure; he was annoyed. ‘Irvie oughtn’t to’ve done that.’
‘I rather thought he ought — and more, too.’
‘No, sir!’ The boy was emphatic. ‘When people feel they have to go around giving credit to more than one person for anything that goes off well, it gets all messed up and nobody knows what’s what. It’s a nuisance.’
T don’t think you need worry’, I said. ‘I seem to be the only person who really understands what you did for the play, and I haven’t thought it my affair to mention it.’
‘I’m certainly glad to hear so!’
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you like being praised?’
‘I wouldn’t be’, he said, with some impatience because of having to explain so simple a thing. ‘All it’d do’d be to dwindle the acclaim for Irvie a little and spoil what I get out of it, myself.’
‘What do you get out of it, Edgar?’
Again he seemed bothered by having to clarify the obvious. ‘What do I get out of it? Why, don’t you see? Irvie and I can’t both be popular figures. I’m not built that way; but he is. He was born to shine; it’s always tickled me to death that he was — and just think what it means to Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Will! So if sometimes I can stew up some way for him to shine even brighter, why, that’s what I like doing. I can’t shine, myself; it’s a sort of special gift that he’s got and I haven’t. He shines no matter what he does. Well, if I can add a little to that sometimes — and for such a lovable guy, the best friend I’ve got — and he gets the fun out of it he does and—’
With a palms outward gesture instead of more words, Edgar put the matter up to me to understand, and I wonderingly thought I did understand it. ‘So Irvie gets a whole lot of fun out of his shining, does he?’
There came a rare sound through the darkness — something most unusual from Edgar Semple — a chuckle, a fond one. ‘Doesn’t he, though! What he gets out of being a celebrity! He’s always been something of one in a way — you know, among our crowd and around through the neighbourhood and family connection — but now, after those pictures in the paper and the rest of it, he’s a celebrity all over town. People he doesn’t know have begun staring at him on the street — sometimes even from across the street.’
‘Have they, indeed?’
‘Oh, certainly! I’ve seen ’em do it and of course so’s Irvie. When it happens he does a little acting for ’em — nothing much, just speaking in a deeper voice and dropping his hand on my shoulder maybe, or walking a little differently. You could hardly tell it; but it’s there and he certainly does love it some. So do I, and where’s the harm?’
‘Nowhere that I can see.’ I laughed. ‘You’re sure, are you, that you’ll never want any credit for whatever ideas of yours Irvie may take up?’
‘Good heavens, no!’ Then Edgar laughed, too. ‘The last thing on earth I’d ever want to do’d be to horn in on Irvie’s glory. If life’s a game it seems to me I’m the kind that plays it safe.’
‘Play it, Edgar? You admit you do play it?’
‘No, I don’t think so’, he said. ‘It just is that way. What I mean, if I’d fall down on anything or’d make a fool of myself it wouldn’t matter a great deal because it wouldn’t be a really bad disappointment for anybody. I’d be no fallen idol and maybe I could pick myself up again without people’s even noticing I’d been down. Standing on a pinnacle, though — that’s a ticklish position.’
‘Irvie’s pinnacle, you mean, Edgar? You think that’s a dangerous — —’
‘No, no, not really, sir. He’ll stay up there of course. He’s safe, because we all want him to be and would do anythin
g on earth not to let him fall off. Happily he has that effect on everybody. No one could bear it if he ever did a Humpty Dumpty and — —’ Edgar stopped himself; Harriet, crossing the lawn, was beside us.
‘Why, Edgar Semple!’ she exclaimed. ‘Aren’t you going to Mary Reame’s good-bye party for Irvie and Emma and you? Emma and Irvie went quite a while ago.’
‘Golly, did they?’ He seemed surprised, as he turned away. ‘Then I’d better hop along, I suppose. Good night.’
‘That was nice of him’, Harriet said, when he was at a distance and we’d begun to walk toward our own house. ‘He wasn’t surprised; he only pretended to be. He’s very tactful about not pushing in when Emma has a chance to go anywhere with Irvie. Edgar’s often quite a really thoughtful sort of boy, don’t you think?’
Harriet was a kind woman; but, like Emma, and indeed like the rest of the Millerwoods and Peases, she seldom showed much interest in what Edgar was. She’d spared, now, only the one incidental thought to him, for, pausing as we reached the stone steps of the portico before our front door, she revealed what was on her mind these days.
‘I can’t tell you how glad I am that we’re getting off tomorrow’, she said. ‘You’re so absent-minded when you’re working on anything I don’t believe you really see things. I don’t suppose you’ve noticed how little Emma’s been eating every since the night of the play?’
‘I have, though, Harriet.’
‘Even you! Then indeed it’s a good thing we’re going. Emma’s at a sensitive age; she seems to worry over — over all sorts of things. She needs a change of scene. Having a lot of different people about her’ll be a great help, too. So will the sea and the air from the pine woods. She mustn’t begin getting thinner.’
Chapter Nine
STONEHAVEN was indeed a ‘change of scene’, and the ‘different people’ gave us a contrast equal to the landscape’s. In that sea-breezey spot, the Pease family and Harriet and Emma and I were not, as at home, looked upon as established elements vital to the place. At the Stonehaven Inn we’d spent summers numerous enough to be regarded as possibly worthy tributaries; but families who’d been cottage-dwellers for two or three generations couldn’t always prevent themselves from displaying a shade of condescension in their friendliness toward us and our fellow-sojourners at the Inn.
One of us, however, received no condescension from anybody; the rather he dispensed it. Cottagers, ‘natives’ and Inn guests alike, treated the much-invited Irvie as the principal young gentleman of the place — mainly, I thought, because he looked it. The rest of us bore our various little exclusions well and enjoyed our compensations. The Stonehaven Inn looked as inn-like as possible, set a knowingly savoury table, and from its verandah and terraces offered the most magnificent view of sea and harbour and surf-beleagured rocky islets within the gift of this stretch of coast.
The beach, not one of the Norsemen’s ‘long beaches’ but a short deep lunette of fine sand, bordered landward by wild grass stretching back to bayberry, juniper and thicketed groves of pine, was no more than ten minutes’ walk from the Inn. I took that walk most mornings, although nowadays I seldom went into the surf, those white surges being too briskly iced from the north for the sedentary who’ve not kept themselves robust after fifty. Harriet and Evelyn went with me; but usually abandoned me there; they were still sprightly enough to love sporting in cold seas. I’d walk a while, shell-hunting at the water’s varying edges; then I’d sit alone, or with non-bathing acquaintances near the bath-houses, and watch the classic spectacle — figures like nudes in sunlit action flying over the sand or at play in long green watery hollows that engulfed them with bubbling crystal.
Most of the time, naturally, I watched our own young people and their playfellows. Emma was a born intimate of the sea, an easy-going water-witch in it or on it. She out-swam and out-dived all of the other girls and most of the boys, too. In an impromptu half-mile swimming-race she’d come in second to Irvie Pease — which reminded me of what she always did at tennis. On the beach Irvie was of course a decorative figure; but in this he sometimes had competition, especially from one of his and Edgar’s summer friends, a youth all too appropriately named Prettiman. If John Bunyan had seen this sample of comeliness and had put it in a book, surely he’d have named it ‘Mr. Prettyman’.
When the squadron of young would come up out of the sea, frolicking or passing ‘medicine balls’, I sometimes suspected Irvie of knowing that he looked beautiful and of perhaps attitudinizing undetectably; but his friend George Prettiman could never be accused of any self-consciousness at all. He was too simple, too unimaginative and too lazy; though I think that in this time of his youth he was the handsomest person I ever saw.
I spoke of him to Evelyn one morning when she’d ‘gone in’ with Harriet but had come out soon and lay beside me for a sun-bath on the sand. ‘George Prettiman’s a remarkable boy, Evelyn. Usually a young gentleman so beauteous would get satirical treatment from his male contemporaries and sometimes from the girls, too. They’re likely to plaster him with nicknames referring to his symmetry. Good thing for Antinoiis that he didn’t live to-day, he’d have been made miserable; but George seems to get along with everybody. Both Irvie and Edgar appear to like him. They genuinely do, don’t they?’
‘Yes, indeed’, she said. ‘Everybody does. Maybe it’s because he’s so much more than good-natured that he’s really spinelessly gentle.’ She laughed. ‘The boys say he’ll do anything anybody tells him to. Yes, they all like him, especially Janey Blue, I believe.’
‘Janey Blue? Which one is Janey Blue?’
Evelyn sat up straight and shaded her eyes with a hand. ‘She’s a tall sandy-haired girl, even taller than Emma — almost too tall. There she is, just now passing that big rubber ball to Emma. She and George are supposed to be engaged, Irvie says.’
I watched Emma receive the ball from the tall sandyhaired girl and instantly, with a competent, long-armed swing, send it on to Irvie. ‘Are they old enough?’ I asked. ‘Aren’t all of that gambolling little troupe a lot too young to be thinking of betrothals and marriage?’
‘Murder, no!’ Evelyn had sunk back upon the sand and didn’t open her closed eyes. ‘I’m afraid you’ve reached the time of life when you don’t see these differences; they all look the same age to you. George Prettiman’s two or three years older than our own boys. He flunked out at Harvard year before last, and since then he hasn’t done anything at all except go to Pinehurst in the winter and come here in the summer.’
‘That makes him eligible for marriage, Evelyn?’
‘Why not? He’ll never do anything else especially, and Janey Blue’s never been able to look away from him since the first time she ever saw him. She’s old enough, too. Twenty, the same age as our dear Mary Reame.’
‘Mary Reame?’ I was surprised. ‘Mary’s twenty?’
‘Almost twenty-one.’ I saw that although Evelyn still didn’t open her eyes her face showed some amusement. ‘Mary Reame and Janey graduated in June last year from that New York “finishing school” Mary went to. Mary’s coming on here, by the way, to visit Janey later in the summer. She’s to spend a week with Janie and then another week with that Stelling girl who went to the same school and’s visited Mary once or twice out home. You didn’t know Mary’s coming?’
‘I believe I’d heard so.’ I looked toward the water where Emma and Irvie together, forgetting the ‘medicine ball’, were running again to dive through the curve of a wave, and were followed hand-in-hand by the superb George with his tall Janey. ‘I hadn’t realized, though, that Mary’s so fully “marriageable”.’
Evelyn sat up again, opened her eyes and gave me a glance in which I saw her amusement increase. ‘I’ve always heard,’ she said, ‘that it’s the most customary thing in the world for a boy to think he’s a little in love with a girl at least a shade older than himself. Mary Reame’s a darling creature and so far as I can judge she reciprocates — who wouldn’t? — but she’d hardly be able
to wait through two more years of college and then four of law school, would she? I don’t think any of us need to begin worrying about that, need we?’ — , ‘No,’ I said, ‘not about that.’
Irvie, interrupting a gallop to the bath-house to dress, paused beside his mother and me. Dripping and laughing, he looked down on us and it was easy to see why he drew the gaze of beach spectators more than did the sumptuous George Prettiman. Wet or dry, Irvie always had the ‘something’ that singled him out. ‘Water too cold for you to-day, Mother?’ he asked. ‘I saw you streaking out like a scared greyhound after one dip.’ He spoke to me jocosely. ‘How’s your darling old “One o’Clock” running this season? Had as many breakdowns as you did last year? Had to be towed in lately? Run into any whales off shore? Aren’t you ever going to invite me again to go out with you?’
‘Oh, come any day, any day, Irving.’
He laughed loudly. ‘That means no day, doesn’t it? I may fool you and take you up before the season’s over, though — go out with you and spoil your fishing! Might bring a girl or so with me to make sure of it.’ Then he danced away to the bath-house.
.. The ‘One o’Clock’ was a shabby old twenty-eight-foot fishing-boat; but that wasn’t her intended name. Orion Clafley, her elderly builder and owner, though his appearance and conversation wouldn’t have led anyone to suspect a streak of fantasy, had named her ‘HOUR!’, not anticipating what facetiousness would make of that word once he’d painted it in large white capital letters on her black stern. Stonehaven villagers, readily mistaking the final letter ‘I’ of ‘HOURI’ for the figure ‘T, thought ‘Hour One’ a perplexing name for any boat; then received Orion’s increasingly irritated explanations hilariously. The name ‘HOURI’ still appeared defiantly upon her stern; but for fifteen years this incongruously rather tubby craft had been gaily known to ‘natives’ and summer residents alike as the ‘One o’Clock’. I’d hired her, season after season, and Orion with her.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 458