Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  I was a mild fisherman, not an ardent one. Many an afternoon the ‘One o’Clock’ merely dawdled at sea without a line over the side and Orion sat by the chuggy two-cylinder engine in the stern, humouring it while I did indolent steering forward, content with our eight miles ‘an hour of ‘cruising speed’. Commonly we had no passengers. Harriet abhorred boats and Emma preferred her own rather dangerous sailing-dory. I didn’t like that dory; but Emma was often miles from shore in it alone, especially after Mary Reame’s arrival at Stonehaven to visit Janey Blue. When from the ‘One o’Clock’ I’d see the dory’s small grey patch of sail in the distance I’d head for it and hover near; then, when we were on land again, Emma’d reproach me pettishly for being an old hen; but next day, to make up for her temper, she’d perhaps be gentle and go out with Orion and me.

  Lacking Orion Clafley, I couldn’t get out in the old tub, myself, so trifling a motor-boatman was I. Near middle age when petrol locomotion arrived, I had never any faith that I could master the intricacies of a marine engine. Anybody can learn to’steer a boat; but of all men on earth I suppose I am the poorest mechanic; so when Orion Clafley lay flat with stomach trouble for a week, the ‘One o’Clock’ only swung about her mooring in the harbour, idle, until Edgar Semple volunteered to be my temporary engineer.

  By that time August had come and Will Pease heartly with it. Nobody had a more zestful delight in the place than his, and, though he devoted his days to the golf course and the beach, he seemed never tired enought to go to bed. He loved walking at night along the coast, following ankle-twisting paths through scratching bushes and over stony hillocks, or he would badger me into going by starlight to sit with him upon rocky juts into the sea. There he’d quote whole passages or salt phrases out of maritime poems all the way from Tudor ballads to Masefield; but I think there was never a night when he didn’t at least end by talking of his son. His voice always had a little change of tone when he spoke of Irvie, as if now he came to something happily confidential.

  ‘I wonder if you noticed the boy at dinner this evening?’ he thus said one night, when the incoming tide’s flying spume had driven us from the rocks and we began to make our way back to the Inn. ‘Did you happen to observe that he was just as jolly as usual, teasing his mother about her fear of getting stung by a jellyfish at the beach, and all that? You didn’t see any difference in him, did you?’

  ‘No, none at all.’

  ‘I thought not.’ We’d reached the boardwalk that runs beside the road leading to the Inn, and in an access of intimate friendliness Will took my arm. ‘You may be glad to know what a good sport the boy is. He’s had a bad little disappointment to-day. His mother and I are pretty tickled over the way he not only kept it dark but didn’t show his feelings. No, sir — not by the blink of an eye! That agent turned him down; but nobody’d guess it from Irvie.’

  ‘Agent?’ I’d forgotten. ‘How did — —’

  ‘You know’, Will said. ‘Irvie’s play. That agent he sent it to kept it all these weeks; but to-day Irvie had a letter from him. All it said was that except the end of the play showed promise, the material seemed timeworn and the agent didn’t feel that he could encourage himself enough to submit it to a manager, so he was returning it to the author. Well, after all that praise and publicity for the play at home, it must have been a pretty hard jolt to get such a letter, mustn’t it?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, Will. You say Irving “kept it dark”?’

  ‘Yes, from everybody, and of course we’ll never speak of it to him. The typewritten manuscript was in a big envelope; but the letter was separate. The desk clerk at the Inn handed Evelyn this afternoon’s mail for the four of us and she opened the smaller envelope by mistake. The flap wasn’t even sealed. When she saw the letter was from the agent she just couldn’t help reading it; then she put it back in the envelope and had the clerk put the manuscript and the letter back in Irvie’s box, so he’d get it when he came in. We didn’t see him till dinner-time, and at first we were both afraid to look at him; but he certainly took it like a good sport, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes, Will, certainly.’

  Will became even more confidential. ‘In the long run, though, this literary set-back might be a good thing, wouldn’t you think?’

  That surprised me into a stupid question. ‘You don’t mean, do you, Will, that you and Evelyn feel Irvie’s always been so much on the top of the wave that he needs a few set-backs to—’

  ‘No, no, no, never!’ Will dismissed the idea instantly. ‘If anything, he’s too modest about himself already. What I mean is that while this agent’s letter sounded officious and opinionated, as Evelyn repeated it to me, it might help Irvie to have no regrets about choosing the law for his life work. Anyhow, though, that nasty letter must have been a blow.’ Will’s paternal sympathy put a tremble into his voice. ‘If — if he were your boy wouldn’t you feel rather proud of the way he’s taking it?’

  Chapter Ten

  I DID think Irvie’s gameness a credit to him and I said so the next afternoon to Edgar Semple. We were out in the ‘One o’Clock’, flopping into a heavy southerly chop that kept me mopping the spray from my face; the old boat was notoriously ‘wet’. Emma was with us, to make up for an uncommonly sharp scolding she’d given me the day before when I’d closely followed her dory all the way back to the harbour mouth. Just now she was in the stem, hauling in a useless trolling line, and Edgar had come forward to the little cabin Tor a tarpaulin to shelter the engine and keep the spark-plugs dry.

  ‘Irvie’s not letting anybody see the wolf gnaw his vitals’, I said. ‘Plucky of him. Is he going to send his script to another agent?’

  ‘Sir?’ Edgar, unfolding his tarpaulin as he emerged from the tiny companionway, paused beside my steering-wheel. ‘Another agent? Why, he’s still waiting to hear from the one he did sent it to.’

  ‘He hasn’t told even you?’ My surprise was genuine; I hadn’t meant to give Irvie away. ‘I supposed of course—’

  Edgar was shrewd. ‘Oh, I see! Got the script back, has he? I hadn’t any doubt it would be that way; but I thought when it happened he’d keep it to himself — just let it ride until people forgot about it, or if somebody’d ask him he’d laugh and say something like, “Oh, that old thing? I decided to suppress it long ago, put it away among the follies of my youth.” Something like that — just sliding over it. That’d be Irvie’s way and a pretty good one, too. I can’t imagine his telling anybody about it now — last of all Aunt Evelyn or Uncle Will. So how did you happen to—’

  I explained, and Edgar laughed sympathetically. ‘Poor old Irvie! Well, he’ll keep it dark and so’ll we. If he thinks nobody knows, he won’t really mind much. He had his fun out of it at home and he’s having too good a time here.’ Edgar glanced at Emma’s back; she was busy with her wet trolling line, the chop was noisy and she couldn’t have heard us. ‘No need to mention it — to anybody — is there, sir?’

  ‘No, Edgar.’

  He went aft with his tarpaulin and I thought of what he’d said of ‘Irvie’s way’ and its being a pretty good one. Maybe it was — for Irvie. To hide our defeats, sliding them down to the cellars of our consciousness so that our public appearances shine forth to even ourselves as wholly undented — more of us than is suspected follow this solacing way. So long as the show window’s kept triumphantly bright and enticing, this kind of shopman can be content and feel that he prospers. Edgar evidently thought it not only a good way but the best way, for Irvie, and as usual would devote himself to keeping it smooth.

  .. The ‘One o’Clock’ was making heavy weather of it, and, after receiving several simultaneous quarts of salt water upon my already dripping front, I put the boat about and headed for the harbour with a following sea pushing us along in a sudden smallness of sound. The engine no longer needed the protection of the tarpaulin; Edgar let it drop and I could hear him debating a nautical question with Emma. We were towing the ‘One o’clock’s’ tender, a flat-bottomed
small rowboat without which I never put to sea, and the argument concerned this precaution.

  ‘Suppose we’d spring a plank or your old petrol tank got on fire’, I heard Emma say. ‘In a chop as heavy as this the three of us’d have a fine time in that shallow-draft little ten-foot dinghy! We’d have to head straight into the chop of course and that peanut shell’d do nothing but take in water over the bow and fill up. So there you’d be, having to swim for it!’

  ‘Of course you would’, Edgar returned. ‘You wouldn’t have much chance if you headed into such a chop as this; but you could be all right if you put the dinghy’s stern to it.’

  ‘Edgar Semple!’ Emma shouted her derision. ‘Everybody knows that the only possible way to ride out a blow is to keep heading into the sea.’

  ‘Not in a little rowboat like that dinghy’, he said. ‘Rowing with your back to the bow, you can’t see what’s coming or at what angle it’ll hit you. Put your stern to the waves, though, and you do see what’s coming at you and if you’re a sharp enough oarsman you can keep squared to it. A rowboat can go with the sea when it can’t go against it. Maybe you’ll have to bail some; but that way you’ll ride it out. Put your bow to it and you’ll swamp.’

  ‘You’re absolutely wrong!’ Emma cried. ‘Ask anybody.’

  ‘That’s the poorest way to settle anything, Emma — asking anybody. It’s better to ask somebody that knows.’

  ‘What a quibble!’ Emma laughed at him. ‘When you’re beaten in argument you always do that, Edgar.’

  ‘Always, Emma?’

  ‘Never knew you not to!’

  ‘Glad to hear it’, Edgar said. ‘I must be on the right track — going to be a lawyer.’

  ‘Yes, and how judge and juries’ll hate you! You’d never give up the least little point.’

  ‘No, not if it’s the right one, Emma.’

  ‘Or the wrong one!’ she said, and they laughed together merrily, much to my pleasure.

  When we’d left the ‘One o’Clock’ at her harbour mooring and had rowed ashore in the dinghy, the two skipped away from me and ran ahead. Irvie was having a small ‘tea-party or something’ at the Inn for Mary Reame, and Emma and Edgar feared to be late. I followed, a long way behind, and had a glimpse of Irvie’s party as I crossed the lounge on my way to the elevator. The double doors of a smaller room stood open and through the aperture there came the full sound of a piano and a manly young tenor voice singing ‘My Apple Blossom, You’.

  I saw Irvie at the piano and Mary Reame leaning upon it, as she had in his play. Irvie’s gay charm was out in full force; he knew dozens of songs, adroitly alternated the frolicsome with the sentimentalized, and, tinkling semblances of accompaniment out of a piano, he could — as his mother laughingly said — woo the bird off the tree. Mary Reame, I thought, seemed ready to leave her bough for Irvie.

  Emma and Edgar weren’t in sight from where I momentarily paused; but I could see the spectacularly handsome George Prettiman upon a sofa, seated beside his tall Janey Blue, who seemed to feel that Irvie’s music was all about George. Her hand stole to touch his and he received this sketch of a caress with amiable complacency. To that somehow rather touching picture of an ‘engaged young couple’ the moody-looking girl at the other end of their sofa offered a radical contrast.

  I’d seen her at the beach sometimes and recalled that Evelyn Pease had spoken of her as ‘that Stelling girl’, also that Miss Stelling had visited Mary Reame at home — and another recollection came faintly. Her name was Sylvia Stelling, wasn’t it? — and wasn’t it she for whom Irvie Pease, at sixteen or so, had cut his cigarettes in two with a pair of scissors?... Small and dark, she was what’s called ‘insignificant-looking’; but though she sat with downcast eyes I had the impression that she’d usually be discontented and yet feel, with an odd kind of sulkiness, that she was important. She remained immobile as, in the moment of my pausing, Irvie finished ‘My Apple Blossom, You’ and instantly swung into a carol of nonsense about the Sons of the Prophet and Abdullah Bulbul Ameer. There was a burst of joy, and Irvie’s voice was joined in the song by a dozen others but not by that of the girl at the end of the sofa. Her moody expression was unchanged; she didn’t move, didn’t even look up.

  For reasons not fathomed, the mental snapshot I had of her as she sat detached, not succumbing to Irvie’s voice or to anything else, came intermittently before me as I changed my salted clothes. I was curious enough to speak of her at our two-family table in the Inn’s dining-room.

  ‘All of you seemed to be having yourselves a time at Irvie’s party’, I said to Emma, who sat beside me. ‘All of you, that is, except one. I happened to glance through the doorway and it struck me that there was a Banquo at the feast.’

  Emma understood but quickly looked reticent, an expression familiar to me when she disapproved of a colleague and wouldn’t admit it. Irvie, across the table, was amused. ‘Means Sylvia Stelling’, he explained to the others. ‘She’s like that most of the time lately. Just dead pan. My guess is it’s because she was beginning to have her eye on poor old George but Janey jumped in first and collared him. Whoever was first would get him of course; he wouldn’t know what was happening. Old George’s really the “girl who never could say no”.’

  Evelyn looked displeased. ‘That’s nonsense, Irvie.

  None of those Stellings could care for anything except themselves, especially not that suppressed little Sylvia. She’s always been queer as queer and I don’t see how a girl like Mary Reame can bear to be visiting there. I used to think Mary fastidious in choosing her friends; but—’

  ‘She is!’ Emma spoke up quickly in loyal championage. ‘Mary’s just as fastidious as she ever was; she’s perfect! They were at school together, Aunt Evelyn, and visited each other several times when they were young.’ This brought a laugh from the rest of the table, and Emma explained herself. ‘I mean before they came out. Mary’s finished the week she promised Janey at the Blues’ cottage and she couldn’t decently turn Sylvia’s invitation down for the next wed? at the Stellings’, could she?’

  ‘Perhaps not’, Evelyn said. ‘I just don’t see, though, how any civilized person could live a week in that cottage — that atrocious mansion!’

  I thought Evelyn right about the ‘atrocious mansion’. The Stellings had built it, not long since, upon an ostentatious hilltop two or three miles away from both the sea and the village. I’d never been nearer it than the stone-pillared entrance to its long asphalt drive; but what could be seen of an Italianate balustraded roof, above pointed pines, had struck me as discomfiting in the northern New England landscape. Moreover, there’d been a rumour that Mrs. Stelling had instructed her architect to erect for her ‘a nice summer cottage that’ll be a replica of the Dowager Queen’s palace in Rome’. No doubt slanderous, this artful bit had nevertheless a Stelling flavour.

  Mrs. Stelling’s husband, as he was usually mentioned rather than as ‘Mr. Stelling’, was an emaciated, dreamy man with pale auburn hair, and he was believed to have been selected by Mrs. Stelling because of a fancy she’d taken to his ancestry, a ticket she might at times have occasion to use. His interest in life appeared to rest upon his stamp collecting. I’d never seen him except at the beach; but whenever we happened to come near each other there he seem convinced, in his misty way, that I was a fellow-collector. Possibly he thought that at my age nobody would wish to be anything else, and, as he didn’t listen to my vague responses, his harmless illusion continued from one season to another.

  ‘You’ll be interested to learn,’ he’d say in his suppressed voice, ‘that I’m now negotiating for nine of the rarest items out of the Sykes-Smythe estate in London.’

  Mr. Stelling’s suppressedness was easily recognized as a condition produced by his marriage to a bird of overwhelmingly different feather, much too gorgeous plumage. With her loose pink face, over-dressed hair and big aggressive head mounted neckless though pearled upon a ballooning bosom, she reminded me of Marie de’ Medici in surfe
ited middle age. At the beach, where only I saw her, Mrs. Stelling’s infrequent appearances seemed to bedizen the very sand and her querulous small eyes to challenge the right of the surf to make all that noise when she was speaking. At her ‘atrocious mansion’ she gave sumptuously oppressive entertainments, and Evelyn and Will Pease, after attending one of them, returned as quickly to the Inn as they respectably could. Will had a kind of horror of the Stellings’ style of living, and Evelyn more than shared it.

  .. ‘Those people!’ she said tonight at our dinner-table, after I’d brought up the subject of the Stellings’ daughter. ‘One or two more such families, with their liveries and champagne and dozen cars, not to speak of Roman palaces, would be the ruin of quiet old unfashionable Stonehaven. I don’t see what they ever wanted to come here for anyhow. They — —’

  ‘Oh, see here now’, Irvie interposed. ‘They had a right to, didn’t they? If you want to know the reason, though, Mother, it’s because Mrs. Stelling’s hay fever is better here. You can’t blame her for that, can you? Besides, take her on the right side and she’s quite a jolly old thing. I don’t see anything wrong in her living the way she likes to if she can afford it, and she certainly can. Thirty millions! Boy!’

  Will Pease spoke in troubled surprise. ‘You’re joking, aren’t you, Irvie?’

  ‘Ain’t I always?’ the cheerful youth responded. ‘Thirty millions isn’t just a guess, though. Bill Tropp in my class has an old uncle in New York who’s one of the trustees or what-you-may-call-’ems of the estate Mrs. Stelling’s father left, and Bill told me. Bill says it’s all honest money, too; her father made three blades of grass grow where one grew before. So what’s wrong about it?’