Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “Ninety-four cents,” I answered, and felt my ears growing red with mortification. Too late, I remembered that the new-comer in a community should guard his tongue among the natives until he has unravelled the skein of their relationships, alliances, feuds, and private wars — a precept not unlike the classic injunction:

  “Yes, my darling daughter.

  Hang your clothes on a hickory limb,

  But don’t go near the water.”

  However, in my confusion I warmly regretted my failure to follow it, and resolved not to blunder again.

  Mr. Dowden thanked me for the information for which he had no real desire, and, the elderly ladies again taking up (with all too evident relief) their various mild debates, he inquired if I played bridge. “But I forget,” he added. “Of course you’ll be at the ‘Despatch’ office in the evenings, and can’t be here.” After which he immediately began to question me about my work, making his determination to give me no opportunity again to mention the Honorable David Beasley unnecessarily conspicuous, as I thought.

  I could only conclude that some unpleasantness had arisen between himself and Beasley, probably of political origin, since they were both in politics, and of personal (and consequently bitter) development; and that Mr. Dowden found the mention of Beasley not only unpleasant to himself but a possible embarrassment to the ladies (who, I supposed, were aware of the quarrel) on his account.

  After lunch, not having to report at the office immediately, I took unto myself the solace of a cigar, which kept me company during a stroll about Mrs. Apperthwaite’s capacious yard. In the rear I found an old-fashioned rose-garden — the bushes long since bloomless and now brown with autumn — and I paced its gravelled paths up and down, at the same time favoring Mr. Beasley’s house with a covert study that would have done credit to a porch-climber, for the sting of my blunder at the table was quiescent, or at least neutralized, under the itch of a curiosity far from satisfied concerning the interesting premises next door. The gentleman in the dressing-gown, I was sure, could have been no other than the Honorable David Beasley himself. He came not in eyeshot now, neither he nor any other; there was no sign of life about the place. That portion of his yard which lay behind the house was not within my vision, it is true, his property being here separated from Mrs. Apperthwaite’s by a board fence higher than a tall man could reach; but there was no sound from the other side of this partition, save that caused by the quiet movement of rusty leaves in the breeze.

  My cigar was at half-length when the green lattice door of Mrs. Apperthwaite’s back porch was opened and Miss Apperthwaite, bearing a saucer of milk, issued therefrom, followed, hastily, by a very white, fat cat, with a pink ribbon round its neck, a vibrant nose, and fixed, voracious eyes uplifted to the saucer. The lady and her cat offered to view a group as pretty as a popular painting; it was even improved when, stooping, Miss Apperthwaite set the saucer upon the ground, and, continuing in that posture, stroked the cat. To bend so far is a test of a woman’s grace, I have observed.

  She turned her face toward me and smiled. “I’m almost at the age, you see.”

  “What age?” I asked, stupidly enough.

  “When we take to cats,” she said, rising. “Spinsterhood” we like to call it. ‘Single-blessedness!’”

  “That is your kind heart. You decline to make one of us happy to the despair of all the rest.”

  She laughed at this, though with no very genuine mirth, I marked, and let my 1830 attempt at gallantry pass without other retort.

  “You seemed interested in the old place yonder.” She indicated Mr. Beasley’s house with a nod.

  “Oh, I understood my blunder,” I said, quickly. “I wish I had known the subject was embarrassing or unpleasant to Mr. Dowden.”

  “What made you think that?”

  “Surely,” I said, “you saw how pointedly he cut me off.”

  “Yes,” she returned, thoughtfully. “He rather did; it’s true. At least, I see how you got that impression.” She seemed to muse upon this, letting her eyes fall; then, raising them, allowed her far-away gaze to rest upon the house beyond the fence, and said, “It IS an interesting old place.”

  “And Mr. Beasley himself—” I began.

  “Oh,” she said, “HE isn’t interesting. That’s his trouble!”

  “You mean his trouble not to—”

  She interrupted me, speaking with sudden, surprising energy, “I mean he’s a man of no imagination.”

  “No imagination!” I exclaimed.

  “None in the world! Not one ounce of imagination! Not one grain!”

  “Then who,” I cried— “or what — is Simpledoria?”

  “Simple — what?” she said, plainly mystified.

  “Simpledoria.”

  “Simpledoria?” she repeated, and laughed. “What in the world is that?”

  “You never heard of it before?”

  “Never in my life.”

  “You’ve lived next door to Mr. Beasley a long time, haven’t you?”

  “All my life.”

  “And I suppose you must know him pretty well.”

  “What next?” she said, smiling.

  “You said he lived there all alone,” I went on, tentatively.

  “Except for an old colored couple, his servants.”

  “Can you tell me—” I hesitated. “Has he ever been thought — well, ‘queer’?”

  “Never!” she answered, emphatically. “Never anything so exciting! Merely deadly and hopelessly commonplace.” She picked up the saucer, now exceedingly empty, and set it upon a shelf by the lattice door. “What was it about — what was that name?— ‘Simpledoria’?”

  “I will tell you,” I said. And I related in detail the singular performance of which I had been a witness in the late moonlight before that morning’s dawn. As I talked, we half unconsciously moved across the lawn together, finally seating ourselves upon a bench beyond the rose-beds and near the high fence. The interest my companion exhibited in the narration might have surprised me had my nocturnal experience itself been less surprising. She interrupted me now and then with little, half-checked ejaculations of acute wonder, but sat for the most part with her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand, her face turned eagerly to mine and her lips parted in half-breathless attention. There was nothing “far away” about her eyes now; they were widely and intently alert.

  When I finished, she shook her head slowly, as if quite dumfounded, and altered her position, leaning against the back of the bench and gazing straight before her without speaking. It was plain that her neighbor’s extraordinary behavior had revealed a phase of his character novel enough to be startling.

  “One explanation might be just barely possible,” I said. “If it is, it is the most remarkable case of somnambulism on record. Did you ever hear of Mr. Beasley’s walking in his—”

  She touched me lightly but peremptorily on the arm in warning, and I stopped. On the other side of the board fence a door opened creakily, and there sounded a loud and cheerful voice — that of the gentleman in the dressing-gown.

  “HERE we come!” it said; “me and big Bill Hammersley. I want to show Bill I can jump ANYWAYS three times as far as he can! Come on, Bill.”

  “Is that Mr. Beasley’s voice?” I asked, under my breath.

  Miss Apperthwaite nodded in affirmation.

  “Could he have heard me?”

  “No,” she whispered. “He’s just come out of the house.” And then to herself, “Who under heaven is Bill Hammersley? I never heard of HIM!”

  “Of course, Bill,” said the voice beyond the fence, “if you’re afraid I’ll beat you TOO badly, you’ve still got time to back out. I did understand you to kind of hint that you were considerable of a jumper, but if — What? What’d you say, Bill?” There ensued a moment’s complete silence. “Oh, all right,” the voice then continued. “You say you’re in this to win, do you? Well, so’m I, Bill Hammersley; so’m I. Who’ll go first? Me? All right —
from the edge of the walk here. Now then! One — two — three! HA!”

  A sound came to our ears of some one landing heavily — and at full length, it seemed — on the turf, followed by a slight, rusty groan in the same voice. “Ugh! Don’t you laugh, Bill Hammersley! I haven’t jumped as much as I OUGHT to, these last twenty years; I reckon I’ve kind of lost the hang of it. Aha!” There were indications that Mr. Beasley was picking himself up, and brushing his trousers with his hands. “Now, it’s your turn, Bill. What say?” Silence again, followed by, “Yes, I’ll make Simpledoria get out of the way. Come here, Simpledoria. Now, Bill, put your heels together on the edge of the walk. That’s right. All ready? Now then! One for the money — two for the show — three to make ready — and four for to GO!” Another silence. “By jingo, Bill Hammersley, you’ve beat me! Ha, ha! That WAS a jump! What say?” Silence once more. “You say you can do even better than that? Now, Bill, don’t brag. Oh! you say you’ve often jumped farther? Oh! you say that was up in Scotland, where you had a spring-board? Oho! All right; let’s see how far you can jump when you really try. There! Heels on the walk again. That’s right; swing your arms. One — two — three! THERE you go!” Another silence. “ZING! Well, sir, I’ll be e-tarnally snitched to flinders if you didn’t do it THAT time, Bill Hammersley! I see I never really saw any jumping before in all my born days. It’s eleven feet if it’s an inch. What? You say you—”

  I heard no more, for Miss Apperthwaite, her face flushed and her eyes shining, beckoned me imperiously to follow her, and departed so hurriedly that it might be said she ran.

  “I don’t know,” said I, keeping at her elbow, “whether it’s more like Alice or the interlocutor’s conversation at a minstrel show.”

  “Hush!” she warned me, though we were already at a safe distance, and did not speak again until we had reached the front walk. There she paused, and I noted that she was trembling — and, no doubt correctly, judged her emotion to be that of consternation.

  “There was no one THERE!” she exclaimed. “He was all by himself! It was just the same as what you saw last night!”

  “Evidently.”

  “Did it sound to you” — there was a little awed tremor in her voice that I found very appealing— “did it sound to you like a person who’d lost his MIND?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know at all what to make of it.”

  “He couldn’t have been” — her eyes grew very wide— “intoxicated!”

  “No. I’m sure it wasn’t that.”

  “Then I don’t know what to make of it, either. All that wild talk about ‘Bill Hammersley’ and ‘Simpledoria’ and spring-boards in Scotland and—”

  “And an eleven-foot jump,” I suggested.

  “Why, there’s no more a ‘Bill Hammersley,’” she cried, with a gesture of excited emphasis, “than there is a ‘Simpledoria’!”

  “So it appears,” I agreed.

  “He’s lived there all alone,” she said, solemnly, “in that big house, so long, just sitting there evening after evening all by himself, never going out, never reading anything, not even thinking; but just sitting and sitting and sitting and SITTING — Well,” she broke off, suddenly, shook the frown from her forehead, and made me the offer of a dazzling smile, “there’s no use bothering one’s own head about it.”

  “I’m glad to have a fellow-witness,” I said. “It’s so eerie I might have concluded there was something the matter with ME.”

  “You’re going to your work?” she asked, as I turned toward the gate. “I’m very glad I don’t have to go to mine.”

  “Yours?” I inquired, rather blankly.

  “I teach algebra and plain geometry at the High School,” said this surprising young woman. “Thank Heaven, it’s Saturday! I’m reading Les Miserables for the seventh time, and I’m going to have a real ORGY over Gervaise and the barricade this afternoon!”

  III

  I DO NOT know why it should have astonished me to find that Miss Apperthwaite was a teacher of mathematics except that (to my inexperienced eye) she didn’t look it. She looked more like Charlotte Corday!

  I had the pleasure of seeing her opposite me at lunch the next day (when Mr. Dowden kept me occupied with Spencerville politics, obviously from fear that I would break out again), but no stroll in the yard with her rewarded me afterward, as I dimly hoped, for she disappeared before I left the table, and I did not see her again for a fortnight. On week-days she did not return to the house for lunch, my only meal at Mrs. Apperthwaite’s (I dined at a restaurant near the “Despatch” office), and she was out of town for a little visit, her mother informed us, over the following Saturday and Sunday. She was not altogether out of my thoughts, however — indeed, she almost divided them with the Honorable David Beasley.

  A better view which I was afforded of this gentleman did not lessen my interest in him; increased it rather; it also served to make the extraordinary didoes of which he had been the virtuoso and I the audience more than ever profoundly inexplicable. My glimpse of him in the lighted doorway had given me the vaguest impression of his appearance, but one afternoon — a few days after my interview with Miss Apperthwaite — I was starting for the office and met him full-face-on as he was turning in at his gate. I took as careful invoice of him as I could without conspicuously glaring.

  There was something remarkably “taking,” as we say, about this man — something easy and genial and quizzical and careless. He was the kind of person you LIKE to meet on the street; whose cheerful passing sends you on feeling indefinably a little gayer than you did. He was tall, thin — even gaunt, perhaps — and his face was long, rather pale, and shrewd and gentle; something in its oddity not unremindful of the late Sol Smith Russell. His hat was tilted back a little, the slightest bit to one side, and the sparse, brownish hair above his high forehead was going to be gray before long. He looked about forty.

  The truth is, I had expected to see a cousin german to Don Quixote; I had thought to detect signs and gleams of wildness, however slight — something a little “off.” One glance of that kindly and humorous eye told me such expectation had been nonsense. Odd he might have been — Gadzooks! he looked it — but “queer”? Never. The fact that Miss Apperthwaite could picture such a man as this “sitting and sitting and sitting” himself into any form of mania or madness whatever spoke loudly of her own imagination, indeed! The key to “Simpledoria” was to be sought under some other mat.

  ... As I began to know some of my co-laborers on the “Despatch,” and to pick up acquaintances, here and there, about town, I sometimes made Mr. Beasley the subject of inquiry. Everybody knew him. “Oh yes, I know Dave BEASLEY!” would come the reply, nearly always with a chuckling sort of laugh. I gathered that he had a name for “easy-going” which amounted to eccentricity. It was said that what the ward-heelers and camp-followers got out of him in campaign times made the political managers cry. He was the first and readiest prey for every fraud and swindler that came to Wainwright, I heard, and yet, in spite of this and of his hatred of “speech-making” (“He’s as silent as Grant!” said one informant), he had a large practice, and was one of the most successful lawyers in the state.

  One story they told of him (or, as they were more apt to put it, “on” him) was repeated so often that I saw it had become one of the town’s traditions. One bitter evening in February, they related, he was approached upon the street by a ragged, whining, and shivering old reprobate, notorious for the various ingenuities by which he had worn out the patience of the charity organizations. He asked Beasley for a dime. Beasley had no money in his pockets, but gave the man his overcoat, went home without any himself, and spent six weeks in bed with a bad case of pneumonia as the direct result. His beneficiary sold the overcoat, and invested the proceeds in a five-day’s spree, in the closing scenes of which a couple of brickbats were featured to high, spectacular effect. One he sent through a jeweller’s show-window in an attempt to intimidate some wholly imaginary pursu
ers, the other he projected at a perfectly actual policeman who was endeavoring to soothe him. The victim of Beasley’s charity and the officer were then borne to the hospital in company.

  It was due in part to recollections of this legend and others of a similar character that people laughed when they said, “Oh yes, I know Dave BEASLEY!”

  Altogether, I should say, Beasley was about the most popular man in Wainwright. I could discover nowhere anything, however, to shed the faintest light upon the mystery of Bill Hammersley and Simpledoria. It was not until the Sunday of Miss Apperthwaite’s absence that the revelation came.

  That afternoon I went to call upon the widow of a second-cousin of mine; she lived in a cottage not far from Mrs. Apperthwaite’s, upon the same street. I found her sitting on a pleasant veranda, with boxes of flowering plants along the railing, though Indian summer was now close upon departure. She was rocking meditatively, and held a finger in a morocco volume, apparently of verse, though I suspected she had been better entertained in the observation of the people and vehicles decorously passing along the sunlit thoroughfare within her view.

  We exchanged inevitable questions and news of mutual relatives; I had told her how I liked my work and what I thought of Wainwright, and she was congratulating me upon having found so pleasant a place to live as Mrs. Apperthwaite’s, when she interrupted herself to smile and nod a cordial greeting to two gentlemen driving by in a phaeton. They waved their hats to her gayly, then leaned back comfortably against the cushions — and if ever two men were obviously and incontestably on the best of terms with each other, THESE two were. They were David Beasley and Mr. Dowden. “I do wish,” said my cousin, resuming her rocking— “I do wish dear David Beasley would get a new trap of some kind; that old phaeton of his is a disgrace! I suppose you haven’t met him? Of course, living at Mrs. Apperthwaite’s, you wouldn’t be apt to.”