Mrs. Sullender’s voice, wholly unruffled, and as indomitably tender as ever, gave no intimation that she spoke with a peculiar significance; but William Sperry was profoundly alarmed, and, with a sympathy that held no triumph in it, he knew that Bella was in a similar or worse condition.
“Ye-es,” Bella murmured. “Of — of course I do.”
“I knew you would feel that way,” said Mrs. Sullender soothingly. “It’s unwise, because gossip travels so. It nearly always goes straight back to the people it’s about. In fact, I don’t believe I ever knew of one single case where it didn’t. Did you, Mrs. Sperry?”
“I — I don’t — that is, well, no,” Bella stammered.
“No. It’s so unwise!” Mrs. Sullender insisted, with a little murmur of tender laughter. Then she took the arm of her solemn and silent husband, and they turned together toward the gate, but paused.
“Oh, I’d meant to tell you, Mrs. Sperry—”
“Uh — yes?”
“That dear little boy Georgie — the little boy you were chatting with the other morning when I called him in to play with my little girl — you remember, Mrs. Sperry?”
“Yes!” Bella gasped.
“I thought you made such friends with him you’d be sorry to know you won’t see him any more.”
“No?”
“No,” Mrs. Sullender cooed gently. “Poor little Georgie Goble!”
“Georgie — who?”
“Georgie Goble,” said Mrs. Sullender. “He was Goble, our chauffeur’s little boy. They lived over our garage and had quite a distressing time of it, poor things! The wife finally persuaded Goble to move to another town where she thinks chauffeurs’ pay is higher. I was sure you’d be sorry to hear the poor dear little boy had gone. They left yesterday. Good-night. Good-night, Mr. Sperry.”
With that, followed by somewhat feeble good-nights from both the Sperrys, she passed through the gate with her husband, and a moment later disappeared in the clean dusk of “Highland Place.”
Then Bella turned to her troubled William. “She — she certainly made it pl-plain!”
“Yes,” he said. “But after all, she really did let us down pretty easy.”
“‘Us,’” the young wife demanded sharply. “Did you say ‘Us?’”
“Yes,” he answered. “I think she let us down about as easy as we could have expected.”
Bella instantly threw herself in his arms. “Oh, William!” she cried. “William, do be the kind of husband that won’t throw this up at me when we’re forty and fifty! William, ‘promise me you’ll always say ‘Us’ when I get us in trouble!”
And William promised and William did.
THE TIGER
THE TWO LITTLE girls, Daisy Mears and Elsie Threamer, were nine years old, and they lived next door to each other; but there the coincidence came to an end; and even if any further similarity between them had been perceptible, it could not have been mentioned openly without causing excitement in Elsie’s family. Elsie belonged to that small class of exquisite children seen on canvas in the days when a painter would exhibit without shame a picture called “Ideal Head.” She was one of those rare little fair creatures at whom grown people, murmuring tenderly, turn to stare; and her childhood was attended by the exclamations not only of strangers but of people who knew her well. “Greuze!” they said, or “A child Saint Cecilia!” or “That angelic sweetness!” But whatever form preliminary admiration might take, the concluding tribute was almost always the same:— “And so unconscious, with it all!” When some unobservant and rambling-minded person did wander from the subject without mentioning Elsie’s unconsciousness, she was apt to take a dislike to him.
People often wondered what that ineffable child with the shadowy downcast eyes was thinking about. They would “give anything,” they declared, to know what she was thinking about. But nobody wondered what Daisy Mears was thinking about — on the contrary, people were frequently only too sure they knew what Daisy was thinking about.
From the days of her earliest infancy, Elsie, without making any effort, was a child continually noticed and acclaimed; whereas her next neighbour was but an inconspicuous bit of background, which may have been more trying for Daisy than any one realized. No doubt it also helped great aspirations to sprout within her, and was thus the very cause of the abrupt change in her character during their mutual tenth summer. For it was at this time that Daisy all at once began to be more talked about than Elsie had ever been. All over the neighbourhood and even beyond its borders, she was spoken of probably dozens of times as often as Elsie was — and with more feeling, more emphasis, more gesticulation, than Elsie had ever evoked.
Daisy had accidentally made the discovery that the means of becoming prominent are at hand for anybody, and that the process of using them is the simplest in the world; for of course all that a person desirous of prominence needs to do is to follow his unconventional impulses. In this easy way prodigious events can be produced at the cost of the most insignificant exertion, as is well understood by people who have felt a temptation to step from the roof of a high building, or to speak out inappropriately in church. Daisy still behaved rather properly in church, but several times she made herself prominent in Sunday school; and she stepped off the roof of her father’s garage, merely to become more prominent among a small circle of coloured people who stood in the alley begging her not to do it.
She spent the rest of that day in bed — for after all, while fame may so easily be obtained, it has its price, and the bill is inevitably sent in — but she was herself again the next morning, and at about ten o’clock announced to her mother that she had decided to “go shopping.”
Mrs. Mears laughed, and, just to hear what Daisy would say, asked quizzically:—’”Go shopping?’
What in the world do you mean, Daisy?”
“Well, I think it would be a nice thing for me to do, mamma,” Daisy explained. “You an’ grandma an’ Aunt Clara, you always keep sayin’, ‘I believe I’ll go shopping.’ I want to, too.”
“What would you do?”
“Why, I’d go shopping the way you do. I’d walk in a store an’ say: ‘Have you got any unb’eached muslin? Oh, I thought this’d be only six cents a yard! Haven’t you got anything nicer?’ Everything like that. I know, mamma. I know any amount o’ things to say when I go shopping. Can’t I go shopping, mamma?”
“Yes, of course,” her mother said, smiling. “You can pretend our big walnut tree is a department-store and shop all you want.”
“Well—” Daisy began, and then realizing that the recommendation of the walnut tree was only a suggestion, and not a command, she said, “Well, thank you, mamma,” and ran outdoors, swinging her brown straw hat by its elastic cord. The interview had taken place in the front hall, and Mrs. Mears watched the lively little figure for a moment as it was silhouetted against the ardent sunshine at the open doors; then she turned away, smiling, and for the rest of the morning her serene thought of Daisy was the picture of a ladylike child playing quietly near the walnut tree in the front yard.
Daisy skipped out to the gate, but upon the public sidewalk, just beyond, she moderated her speed and looked as important as she could, assuming at once the role she had selected in the little play she was making up as she went along. In part, too, her importance was meant to interest Elsie Threamer, who was standing in graceful idleness by the hedge that separated the Threamers’ yard from the sidewalk.
“Where you goin’, Daisy?” the angelic neighbour inquired.
Daisy paused and tried to increase a distortion of her face, which was her conception of a businesslike concentration upon “shopping.”
“What?” she inquired, affecting absent-mindedness.
‘‘ Where you goin’?”
“I haf to go shopping to-day, Elsie.”
Elsie laughed. “No, you don’t.”
“I do, too. I go shopping almost all the time lately. I haf to.”
“You don’t, either,” Elsie
said. “You don’t either haf to.”
“I do, too, haf to!” Daisy retorted. “I’m almos’ worn out, I haf to go shopping so much.”
“Where?”
“Every single place,” Daisy informed her impressively. “I haf to go shopping all the way downtown. I’ll take you with me if you haf to go shopping, too. D’you want to?”
Elsie glanced uneasily over her shoulder, but no one was visible at any of the windows of her house. Obviously, she was interested in her neighbour’s proposal, though she was a little timorous. “Well—” she said. “Of course I ought to go shopping, because the truth is I got more shopping to do than ‘most anybody. I haf to go shopping so much I just have the backache all the time! I guess—”
“Come on,” said Daisy. “I haf to go shopping in every single store down-town, and there’s lots o’ stores on the way we can go shopping in before we get there.”
“All right,” her friend agreed. “I guess I rilly better.”
She came out to the sidewalk, and the two turned toward the city’s central quarter of trade, walking quickly and talking with an accompaniment of many little gestures. “I rilly don’t know how I do it all,” said Elsie, assuming a care-worn air. “I got so much shopping to do an’ everything, my fam’ly all say they wonder I don’t break down an’ haf to go to a sanitanarian or somep’m because I do so much.”
“Oh, it’s worse’n that with me, my dear!” said Daisy. “I declare I doe’ know how I do live through it all! Every single day, it’s like this: I haf to go shopping all day long, my dear!”
“Well, I haf to, too, my dear! I never get time to even sit down, my dear!”
Daisy shook her head ruefully. “Well, goodness knows the last time I sat down, my dear!” she said. “My fam’ly say I got to take some rest, but how can I, with all this terrable shopping to do?”
“Oh, my dear!” Elsie exclaimed. “Why, my dear, I haven’t sat down since Christmus!”
Thus they enacted a little drama, improvising the dialogue, for of course every child is both playwright and actor, and spends most of his time acting in scenes of his own invention — which is one reason that going to school may be painful to him; lessons are not easily made into plays, though even the arithmetic writers do try to help a little, with their dramas of grocers and eggs, and farmers and bushels and quarts. A child is a player, and an actor is a player; and both “play” in almost the same sense — the essential difference being that the child’s art is instinctive, so that he is not so conscious of just where reality begins and made-up drama ends. Daisy and Elsie were now representing and exaggerating their two mothers, with a dash of aunt thrown in; they felt that they were the grown people they played they were; and the more they developed these “secondary personalities,” the better they believed in them.
“An’ with all my trouble an’ everything,” Daisy said, “I jus’ never get a minute to myself. Even my shopping, it’s all for the fam’ly.”
“So’s mine,” Elsie said promptly. “Mine’s every single bit for the fam’ly, an’ I never, never get through.”
“Well, look at me!” Daisy exclaimed, her hands fluttering in movements she believed to be illustrative of the rush she lived in. “My fam’ly keep me on the run from the minute I get up till after I go to bed. I declare I don’t get time to say my prayers! To-day I thought I might get a little rest for once in my life. But no! I haf to go shopping!”
“So do I, my dear! I haf to look at — Well, what do you haf to look at when we go in the stores?”
“Me? I haf to look at everything! There isn’t a thing left in our house. I haf to look at doilies, an’ all kinds embrawdries, an’ some apems for the servants, an’ taffeta, an’ two vases for the liberry mantelpice, an’ some new towerls, an’ kitchen-stove-polish, an’ underwear, an’ oilcloth, an’ lamp-shades, an’ some orstrich feathers for my blue vevvut hat. An’ then I got to get some—”
“Oh, my dear! I got more’n that I haf to look at,” Elsie interrupted. And she, likewise, went into details; but as Daisy continued with her own, and they both talked at the same time, the effect was rather confused, though neither seemed to be at all disturbed on that account. Probably they were pleased to think they were thus all the more realistically adult.
It was while they were chattering in this way that Master Laurence Coy came wandering along a side-street that crossed their route, and, catching sight of them, considered the idea of joining them. He had a weakness for Elsie, and an antipathy for Daisy, the latter feeling sometimes not unmingled with the most virulent repulsion; but there was a fair balance struck; in order to be with Elsie, he could bear being with Daisy. Yet both were girls, and, regarded in that light alone, not the company he cared to be thought of as deliberately choosing. Nevertheless, he had found no boys at home that morning; he was at a loss what to do with himself, and bored. Under these almost compulsory circumstances, he felt justified in consenting to join the ladies; and, overtaking them at the crossing, he stopped and spoke to them.
“Hay, there,” he said, taking care not to speak too graciously. “Where you two goin’, talkin’ so much?”
They paid not the slightest attention to him, but continued busily on their way.
“My dear Mrs. Smith!” Daisy exclaimed, speaking with increased loudness. “I jus’ pozzatively never have a minute to my own affairs! If I doe’ get a rest from my housekeepin’ pretty soon, I doe’ know what on earth’s goin’ to become o’ my nerves!”
“Oh, Mrs. Jones!” Elsie exclaimed. “It’s the same way with me, my dear. I haf to have the doctor for my nerves, every morning at seven or eight o’clock. Why, my dear, I never—”
“Hay!” Laurence called. “I said: ‘Where you goin’, talkin’ so much?’ Di’n’chu hear me?”
But they were already at some distance from him and hurrying on as if they had seen and heard nothing whatever. Staring after them, he caught a dozen more “my dears” and exclamatory repetitions of “Mrs. Smith, you don’t say so!” and “Why, Mis-suz Jones!” He called again, but the two little figures, heeding him less than they did the impalpable sunshine about them, hastened on down the street, their voices gabbling, their heads waggling importantly, their arms and hands incessantly lively in airy gesticulation.
Laurence was thus granted that boon so often defined by connoisseurs of twenty as priceless — a new experience. But he had no gratitude for it; what he felt was indignation. He lifted up his voice and bawled:
“HAY! Di’n’chu hear what! SAID? Haven’t you got ‘ny EARS?”
Well he knew they had ears, and that these ears heard him; but on the spur of the moment he was unable to think of anything more scathing than this inquiry. The shoppers went on, impervious, ignoring him with all their previous airiness — with a slight accentuation of it, indeed — even when he bellowed at them a second time and a third. Stung, he was finally inspired to add: “Hay! Are you gone crazy?” But they were halfway to the next crossing.
A bitterness came upon Laurence. “What I care?” he muttered. “I’ll show you what I care!” However, his action seemed to deny his words, for instead of setting about some other business to prove his indifference, he slowly followed the shoppers. He was driven by a necessity he felt to make them comprehend his displeasure with their injurious flouting of himself and of etiquette in general. “Got ‘ny politeness?” he muttered, and replied morosely: “No, they haven’t — they haven’t got sense enough to know what politeness means! Well, I’ll show ’em! They’ll see before I get through with ’em! Oh, oh! Jus’ wait a little: they’ll be beggin’ me quick enough to speak to ’em. ‘Oh, Laur-runce, please!’ they’ll say. ‘Please speak to us, Laur-runce. Won’chu please speak to us, Laurunce? We’d jus’ give anything to have you speak to us, Laurunce! Won’ chu, Laurunce, pull-lease?’ Then I’ll say: ‘Yes, I’ll speak to you, an’ you better listen if you want to learn some sense!’ Then I’ll call ’em everything I can think of!”
It might have b
een supposed that he had some definite plan for bringing them thus to their knees in supplication, but he was only solacing himself by sketching a triumphant climax founded upon nothing. Meanwhile he continued morbidly to follow, keeping about fifty yards behind them.
“Poot!” he sneered. “Think they’re wunnaful, don’t they? You wait! They’ll see!”
He came to a halt, staring. “Now what they doin’?”
Elsie and Daisy had gone into a small drug-store, where Daisy straightway approached the person in charge, an elderly man of weary appearance. “Do you keep taffeta?” she asked importantly. Since she and her friend were “playing” that they were shopping, of course they found it easily consistent to “play” that the druggist was a clerk in a department store; and no doubt, too, the puzzlement of the elderly man gave them a profound if secret enjoyment.
He moved toward his rather shabby soda-fountain, replying: “I got chocolate and strawb’ry and v’nilla. I don’t keep no fancy syrups.”
“Oh, my, no!” Daisy exclaimed pettishly. “I mean taffeta you wear.”
“What?”
“I mean taffeta you wear.”
“‘Wear’?” he said.
“I want to look at some taffeta,” Daisy said impatiently. “Taffeta.”
“Taffy?” the man said. “I don’t keep no line of candies.”
Daisy frowned, and shook her head. “I guess he’s kind of deaf or somep’m,” she said to Elsie; and then she shouted again at the elderly man: “Taffetah! It’s somep’m you wear. You wear it on you!”
“What for?” he said. “I ain’t deaf. You mean some brand of porous plaster? Mustard plaster?”
“Oh, my, no!” Daisy exclaimed, and turned to Elsie. “This is just the way it is. Whenever I go shopping, they’re always out of everything I want!”
“Oh, it’s exackly the same with me, my dear,” Elsie returned. “It’s too provoking! Rilly, the shops in this town—”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 516