“Yes, I did. What of it?”
“And maybe—” Lucius suggested, with the utmost mildness— “just possibly, say about the time you began to use liquor a little at first, you decided that this hereditary thing was inevitable, and the idea made you melancholy about yourself, of course; but after all, you felt that the hereditary thing made a pretty fair excuse to yourself, didn’t you?”
“See here,” Joe said angrily, “I’m not in any mood to stand—”
“Pshaw!” Lucius interrupted. “I was only going on to say that it’s more and more curious to me about this hereditary notion. I’m thirty-five, and you’re only twenty-six. I remember well when your father began to drink especially. I was seventeen years old, and you were about eight. You see you were already born then, and so I can’t understand about the thirst being heredi —— —”
“Damn it all!” Joe Perley shouted; and he struck the table with his fist. “I told you I don’t want to talk, didn’t I? Didn’t you hear me say I was drinking!”
The amiable man across the table produced two cigars from his coat pocket. “We’ll change the subject,” he said. “Smoke, Joe?”
“No, thank you.”
“We’ll change the subject,” Lucius repeated. “I gather that this one is painful to you. You don’t mind my staying here if we talk about something else?”
“No — not much.”
“I mentioned that I asked Mary Ricketts to go with me to the band concert to-night, didn’t I?”
Mr. Allen inquired, as he lit his cigar. “I was telling you about that, wasn’t I, Joe?”
“You said something about it,” Mr. Perley replied with evident ennui.
“You know, Joe,” said Lucius, his tone becoming confidential, “I walk past the old Ricketts property every afternoon on my way home. It’s quite considerable out of my way, but I always do. Fact is,” he chuckled ruefully, “I can’t help it.”
“I suppose you want me to ask you why,” said his gloomy companion, with sincere indifference.
“Yes, Joe, will you?”
“All right. Why can’t you help it?”
“Well, there’s something about that old place so kind of pleasant and healthy and reliable. This is a funny world: there’s a lot of things a fellow’s got to be afraid of in it, and the older he gets the more he sees to scare him. I think what I like best about that old Ricketts property is the kind of safe look it has. It looks as if anybody that belonged in there was safe from ‘most any kind of disaster — bankruptcy, lunacy, ‘social ambition,’ money ambition, evil thoughts, or turning into a darn fool of any kind. You don’t happen to walk by there much, do you, Joe?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, sir, you ought to!” said Lucius genially. “The orchard’s in bloom, and you ought to see it. The Ricketts orchard is the show of this county. The good old judge has surely looked after those old apple-trees of his; they’re every one just solid blossom. Yes, sir, every last one! Why, it made me feel like a dryad!”
“Like a who?” -
“You mean that I’m thirty-five” — so Mr. Allen thought fit to interpret this question— “and that I’m getting a little fat, some baldish and a whole lot reddish. So I am; but I’ll tell you something, young Joseph: romance is a thing inside a person, just the same as your thirst. It doesn’t matter what his outside is like. My trousers always bag at the knees, even when they’re new, but my knees themselves are pure Grecian. It’s the skinny seamstress of forty that dreams the most of marquises in silver armour; and darky boys in school forget the lesson in reveries about themselves — they think of themselves on horseback as generals with white faces and straight blond hair. And everybody knows that the best poets are almost always outrageously ordinary to look at. This is springtime, Joseph; and the wren lays an egg no bigger than a fairy’s. The little birds — —”
“By George!” Mr. Perley exclaimed, in real astonishment. “See here!” he said. “Had you been drinking, yourself, before you came in? If not, it’s the first time I knew a person could get a talking jag on buttermilk.”
“No,” said Lucius, correcting him. “It’s on apple-blossoms. She was sitting under ’em pretending to read a book, but I suppose she was thinking about you, Joe.”
“Who was?”
“Mary,” Mr. Allen replied quietly. “Mary Ricketts.”
“You say she was thinking about me?”
“Probably she was, Joe. She was sitting there, and the little birds—”
“I know you’re a good lawyer,” Joe interrupted, shaking his head in gloomy wonder, “but everybody in town thinks you’re a nut, except when you’re on a law case, and I guess they’re about right. You certainly talk like one!”
Mr. Allen nodded. “A reputation like that is mighty helpful sometimes.”
“Well, if you like it you’re free to refer all inquirers to me,” said Joe heartily. “You’re trying to tell me Mary Ricketts was ‘thinking’ about me, and I don’t suppose I’ve seen her as much as five times this year; and I haven’t known her — not to speak of — since we were children. I don’t suppose I’ve had twenty minutes’ talk with her, all told, since I got back from college. The only girl I ever see anything of at all is Molly Baker, and that’s only because she happens to live next door. I don’t see even Molly to speak to more than once or twice a month. I don’t have anything to do with any of the girls. I keep away from ’em, because a man with the curse I’ve got hanging over me—”
“Thought you didn’t want to talk about that, Joe.”
“I don’t,” the young man said angrily. “But I want to know what you mean by this nonsense about Mary Ricketts and me.”
“I don’t know if I ought to tell you — exactly.” Here Lucius frowned as with a pressure of conscience. “I’m not sure I ought to. Do you insist on it, Joe?”
“Not if you’ve got to talk any more about ‘the little birds!’” Joe returned with sour promptness. “But if you can leave them out and talk in a regular way, I’d like to hear you.”
“Have you ever noticed,” Mr. Allen began, “that Mary Ricketts is a beautiful girl?”
“She’s not,” said Joe. “She’s not anything like ‘beautiful.’ Everybody in town knows and always has known that Mary Ricketts is an ordinarily good-looking girl. You can call her pretty if you want to stretch it a little, but that’s all.”
“That all, you think?”
“Certainly!”
“You ought to see her in the orchard, Joe!”
“Well, I’m not very likely to.”
“Well, just why not, now?”
“Well, why should I?”
“You mean you’ve never given much thought to her?”
“Certainly I haven’t,” said Joe. “Why should I?”
“Isn’t it strange now!” Mr. Allen shook his head wistfully. “I mentioned that I asked her to go to the band concert with me, didn’t I, Joe?”
“You did.”
“And did I tell you that she refused?”
“Lord, yes!”
“Well, that was it,” said Mr. Allen gently. “She just said, ‘No!’ She didn’t say ‘No, thank you.’
No, sir, nothing like that; just plain ‘No!’
‘Well,’ I thought to myself, ‘now why is that? Naturally, she’d want to go to the concert, wouldn’t she? Why, of course she would; it’s the first public event that’s happened since the lecture on “Liquid Air” at Masonic Hall, along back in February. Certainly she’d want to go. Well, then, what’s the matter? It must be simply she doesn’t want to go with you, Lucius Brutus Allen!’ That’s what I said to myself, Joe. ‘You’re practically a fat old man from her point of view,’ I said to myself. ‘She wants to go, but you aren’t the fellow she wants to go with. Well, who is it? Evidently,’ I reasoned, ‘evidently he hasn’t turned up, because she’s just the least bit snappish the way she tells me she isn’t pining for my escort.’ Well, sir, I began to cast around in my mind to think wh
o on earth it could be. ‘It isn’t Henry Wheen,’ I thought, ‘because she discouraged Henry so hard, more than a year ago, that Henry went and married that waitress here at his father’s hotel. And it isn’t Bax Lewis,’ I thought, ‘because she showed Bax he didn’t stand any chance from the first. And it isn’t Charlie McGregor or Cal Veedis,’ I thought, ‘because she just wouldn’t have anything to do with either of them, though they both tried to make her till the judge pretty near had to tell ’em right out that they’d better stay away. Well, it isn’t Doc Willis, and it isn’t Carlos Bollingbroke Thompson, nor Whit Connor,’ I thought, ‘because they’re old bachelors like me — and that just about finishes the list.’ Well, sir, there’s where I had to scratch my head. ‘It must be somebody,’ I thought, ‘somebody that hasn’t been coming around the Ricketts property at all, so far, because she’s never gone any place she could help with those that have been coming around there.’ Then I thought of you, Joe. ‘By George!’ I thought. ‘By George, it might be Joe Perley! He’s the only young man in town not married, engaged, or feeble-minded, that hasn’t ever showed any interest in Miss Mary. There’s no two ways about it: likely as not it’s liable to be Joe Perley!”’
“I never heard anything crazier in my life!” Joe said. “I don’t suppose Mary Ricketts has given me two thoughts in the last five years.”
Mr. Allen tilted back in his chair, his feet upon a rung of the table. He placed his cigar at the left extremity of his mouth, gazed at the ceiling, and waved his right hand in a take-it-or-leave-it gesture.
“Well, why would she?” Joe demanded. “There’s nothing about me that—”
“No,” said his friend. “Nothing except she doesn’t know you very well.”
At that Joe Perley laughed. “You are the funniest old Lucius!” he said. “Just because I’ve never been around there and the rest have, you say that proves — —”
Mr. Allen waved his hand again. “I only say there’s somebody could get her to go to that concert with him. Absolutely! Why absolutely? It’s springtime; she’s twenty-three. Of course, if it is you, she isn’t very liable to hear the music except along with her family — not when you’ve got such pressing engagements here, of course! I’m thinking of going up there again pretty soon myself, to see if maybe Judge and Mrs. Ricketts aren’t going to walk uptown for the concert, and maybe I can sort of push myself in among the family so that I can walk anyway in the same group with Mary! It’s going to be moonlight, and as balmy as a night in a piece of poetry! By George! you can smell apple-blossoms from one end of the town to the other, Joe!”
“How you hate talking!” Mr. Perley remarked discouragingly.
“I hear the band is going to try ‘Schubert’s Serenade,’” Lucius continued. “The boys aren’t so bad as we make out, after all; the truth is, they play almighty well. I expect you’ll be able to hear some of it from in here, Joe; but take me now — I want to be out in the moonlight in that apple-blossom smell when they play ‘Schubert’s Serenade!’ I want to be somewhere where I can see the moonshine shadow of Mary Ricketts’s hat fall across her cheek, so I can spend my time guessing whether she’s listening to the music with her eyes shut or open. It’s a pink-and-white hat, and she’s wearing a pink-and-white dress, too, to-day, Joe. She was sitting under those apple-blossoms, and the little bir—”
Sudden, loud and strong expressions suffered him not to continue for several moments.
“Certainly, Joe,” Mr. Allen then resumed. “I will not mention them again. I was only leading to the remark that nightingales serenading through the almond-groves of Sicily probably have nothing particular on our enterprising little city during a night in apple-blossom time. My great trouble, Joe, is never getting used to its being springtime. Every year when it comes around again it hits me just the same way — maybe a little more so each year that I grow older. And this has been the first plumb genuine spring day we’ve had. At the present hour this first true blue spring day is hushing itself down into the first spring evening, and in a little while there’ll be another miracle: the first scented and silvered spring night. All over town the old folks are coming out from their suppers to sit on their front porches, and the children are beginning to play hi-spy in and out among the trees. Pretty soon they’ll all, old and young, be strolling uptown to hear the band play on the court-house steps. I expect some of the young couples already have started; they like to walk slowly and not say much, on the way to the spring concert, you know.”
Mr. Allen drank another glass of buttermilk, smiled, then murmured with repletion and the pathos of a concluding bit of enthusiasm. “Oh, Lordy, Lordy!” he said, “What it is to be twenty or twenty-five in springtime!”
“Not for me,” Mr. Perley rejoined, shaking his head.
“No, I suppose not. It does seem pretty rough,” said Lucius, sympathetically, “to think of you sitting here in this reeky hole, when pretty nearly every other young fellow in town will be strolling through the apple-blossom smell in the moonlight with a girl on his arm, and the band playing, and all. Old soak Beeslum’ll probably be in here to join you after while, though; and four or five farm hands, and some of the regular Saturday-night town drunks, and maybe two or three Swedes. Oh, I expect you’ll have company enough, Joe!”
“I guess so. Anyhow, I haven’t much choice! This thing’s got me, and I’ve got to go through with it, Lucius.”
“I see. Yes, sir, it’s too bad! Too bad!” And Lucius looked sympathetically down, then cheerfully up again, as the swinging-doors parted to admit the entrance of the returned bartender. “Hello, George!”
“Back a’ready,” said George self-approvingly. “Ham, fried potatoes, coffee, and griddle-cakes, all tucked inside o’ me, too! Didn’t miss any customers, did I?”
“No.”
George came to the table. “Lemme look how many drinks you owe me fer sence I went out, Joe,” he said. “I had the place where she come to in the neck of the bottle marked with my thumb.” He lifted the bottle, regarded it thoughtfully at first, then with some surprise. He set it down upon the table without comment, began to whistle “Little Annie Rooney,” went behind the bar, doffed his hat, resumed his apron, and continued to whistle.
Mr. Allen rose, dusting some crumbs of cracker from his attire. “I guess I must have won the buttermilk record, George,” he said, as he placed a silver dollar upon the bar. “If buttermilk were intoxicating there wouldn’t be a sober creature on the face of the earth. Trouble with your other stuff, George, it tastes so rotten!”
“I take buttermilk sometimes myself, Lu,” said George as he made change. “I guess there ain’t nobody seen me carryin” much hard liquor sence my second child was born. That was the time they had to jug me, and — whoo, gosh! you’d ought to seen what I went through when I got home that night! She’s little and she was sick-abed, too, but that didn’t git in her way none! No, sir!”
“Good night,” said Lucius cheerily. “I’m going to stroll along Pawpaw Street before the band starts. Moon’ll be ‘way up in a little while now, and on such a night as this is going to be did Jessica, the Jew’s daughter — You know what I mean, George.”
“Yep,” said George blankly. “I gotcha, Lu.”
“I’m going,” said Lucius, “to go and push in with some folks to listen to the band with Good night, Joe.”
Joe Perley did not turn his head, but sat staring fixedly at the table, his attitude being much the same as that in which Lucius had discovered him.
“Good night, Joe,” the departing gentleman paused to repeat.
“What?”
“Nothing,” said Lucius. “I only said ‘good night.’”
“AH right,” said Joe absently. “Good night.”
Mr. Allen took a musical departure. “Oh, as I strolled out one summer evening,” he sang, “for to meet Miss Nellie Green, all the birds and the flow’rs was singing sweetly, wherev-urr they was to be seen!”
Thus, singing heartily, he passed between the swing
ing-doors and out to the street. Here he continued his euphonic mood, but moderated his expression of it to an inconspicuous humming. Dusk had fallen, a dusk as scented and as alive with spring as he had claimed it would be; and a fair shaft of the rising moon already struck upon the white cupola of the court-house.
— . — . Mary Ricketts was leaning upon the front gate of the Ricketts place when he came there.
“Good evening, Miss Mary,” he said. “Are the Judge and your mother at home?”
“They’re right there on the front porch, Mr. Allen,” she said cordially. “Won’t you come in?”
“In a minute,” he responded. “It does me good to hear you answer when I ask for your parents, Miss Mary.”
“How is that?”
“Why,” he said, “you always sound so friendly when I ask for them!”
She laughed, and explained her laughter by saying, “It’s funny you don’t always ask for them!”
“Just so,” he agreed. “I’ve been thinking about that. Are you all going up to the Square pretty soon, to hear the concert?”
“Father and mother are, I think,” she said. “I’m not.”
“Just ‘waiting at the gate’?”
“Not for any one!”
Lucius took off his hat and fanned himself, a conciliatory gesture. “I tell you I feel mighty sorry for one young man in this town to-night,” he said.
“Who’s that, Mr. Allen?”
“Well—” he hesitated. “I don’t know if I ought to tell you about it.”
“Why not me?” she asked, not curiously.
“Well — it’s that young Joe Perley.”
Miss Ricketts was mildly amused; Lucius’s tone was serious, and if she had any interest whatever in Mr. Perley it was of a quality most casual and remote. “Why should you either tell me or not tell me anything about him?” she asked.
“You know he’s such a good-looking young fellow,” said Lucius. “And he’s going to make a fine lawyer, too; I’ve had him with me in a couple of cases, and I’ve an idea he might have something like a real career, if—” He paused.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 501