Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  Eugene did not press an investigation of her meaning, but said vaguely, “I suppose not. Shall we——”

  “All right,” she assented, dropping into the leather chair, with her back to the shaded window. “You better set down, too, I reckon. I hope you’ll get something this time so you won’t feel cross, but I dunno. I can’t never tell what they’ll do. Well——”

  She sighed, closed her eyes, and was silent, while Eugene, seated in the stiff chair across the table from her, watched her profile, thought himself an idiot, and called himself that and other names. And as the silence continued, and the impassive woman in the easy-chair remained impassive, he began to wonder what had led him to be such a fool. It became clear to him that the similarity of his letter and Lucy’s needed no explanation involving telepathy, and was not even an extraordinary coincidence. What, then, had brought him back to this absurd place and caused him to be watching this absurd woman taking a nap in a chair? In brief: What the devil did he mean by it? He had not the slightest interest in Mrs. Horner’s naps—or in her teeth, which were being slightly revealed by the unconscious parting of her lips, as her breathing became heavier. If the vagaries of his own mind had brought him into such a grotesquerie as this, into what did the vagaries of other men’s minds take them? Confident that he was ordinarily saner than most people, he perceived that since he was capable of doing a thing like this, other men did even more idiotic things, in secret. And he had a fleeting vision of sober-looking bankers and manufacturers and lawyers, well-dressed church-going men, sound citizens—and all as queer as the deuce inside!

  How long was he going to sit here presiding over this unknown woman’s slumbers? It struck him that to make the picture complete he ought to be shooing flies away from her with a palm-leaf fan.

  Mrs. Horner’s parted lips closed again abruptly, and became compressed; her shoulders moved a little, then jerked repeatedly; her small chest heaved; she gasped, and the compressed lips relaxed to a slight contortion, then began to move, whispering and bringing forth indistinguishable mutterings.

  Suddenly she spoke in a loud, husky voice:

  “Lopa is here!”

  “Yes,” Eugene said dryly. “That’s what you said last time. I remember ‘Lopa.’ She’s your ‘control’ I think you said.”

  “I’m Lopa,” said the husky voice. “I’m Lopa herself.”

  “You mean I’m to suppose you’re not Mrs. Horner now?”

  “Never was Mrs. Horner!” the voice declared, speaking undeniably from Mrs. Horner’s lips—but with such conviction that Eugene, in spite of everything, began to feel himself in the presence of a third party, who was none the less an individual, even though she might be another edition of the apparently somnambulistic Mrs. Horner. “Never was Mrs. Horner or anybody but just Lopa. Guide.”

  “You mean you’re Mrs. Horner’s guide?” he asked.

  “Your guide now,” said the voice with emphasis, to which was incongruously added a low laugh. “You came here once before. Lopa remembers.”

  “Yes—so did Mrs. Horner.”

  Lopa overlooked his implication, and continued quickly: “You build. Build things that go. You came here once and old gentleman on this side, he spoke to you. Same old gentleman here now. He tell Lopa he’s your grandfather—no, he says ‘father.’ He’s your father.”

  “What’s his appearance?”

  “How?”

  “What does he look like?”

  “Very fine! White beard, but not long beard. He says someone else wants to speak to you. See here. Lady. Not his wife, though. No. Very fine lady! Fine lady, fine lady!”

  “Is it my sister?” Eugene asked.

  “Sister? No. She is shaking her head. She has pretty brown hair. She is fond of you. She is someone who knows you very well but she is not your sister. She is very anxious to say something to you—very anxious. Very fond of you; very anxious to talk to you. Very glad you came here—oh, very glad!”

  “What is her name?”

  “Name,” the voice repeated, and seemed to ruminate. “Name hard to get—always very hard for Lopa. Name. She wants to tell me her name to tell you. She wants you to understand names are hard to make. She says you must think of something that makes a sound.” Here the voice seemed to put a question to an invisible presence and to receive an answer. “A little sound or a big sound? She says it might be a little sound or a big sound. She says a ring—oh, Lopa knows! She means a bell! That’s it, a bell.”

  Eugene looked grave. “Does she mean her name is Belle?”

  “Not quite. Her name is longer.”

  “Perhaps,” he suggested, “she means that she was a belle.”

  “No. She says she thinks you know what she means. She says you must think of a colour. What colour?” Again Lopa addressed the unknown, but this time seemed to wait for an answer.

  “Perhaps she means the colour of her eyes,” said Eugene.

  “No. She says her colour is light—it’s a light colour and you can see through it.”

  “Amber?” he said, and was startled, for Mrs. Horner, with her eyes still closed, clapped her hands, and the voice cried out in delight:

  “Yes! She says you know who she is from amber. Amber! Amber! That’s it! She says you understand what her name is from a bell and from amber. She is laughing and waving a lace handkerchief at me because she is pleased. She says I have made you know who it is.”

  This was the strangest moment of Eugene’s life, because, while it lasted, he believed that Isabel Amberson, who was dead, had found means to speak to him. Though within ten minutes he doubted it, he believed it then.

  His elbows pressed hard upon the table, and, his head between his hands, he leaned forward, staring at the commonplace figure in the easy-chair. “What does she wish to say to me?”

  “She is happy because you know her. No—she is troubled. Oh—a great trouble! Something she wants to tell you. She wants so much to tell you. She wants Lopa to tell you. This is a great trouble. She says—oh, yes, she wants you to be—to be kind! That’s what she says. That’s it. To be kind.”

  “Does she——”

  “She wants you to be kind,” said the voice. “She nods when I tell you this. Yes; it must be right. She is a very fine lady. Very pretty. She is so anxious for you to understand. She hopes and hopes you will. Someone else wants to speak to you. This is a man. He says——”

  “I don’t want to speak to any one else,” said Eugene quickly. “I want——”

  “This man who has come says that he is a friend of yours. He says——”

  Eugene struck the table with his fist. “I don’t want to speak to any one else, I tell you!” he cried passionately. “If she is there I——” He caught his breath sharply, checked himself, and sat in amazement. Could his mind so easily accept so stupendous a thing as true? Evidently it could!

  Mrs. Horner spoke languidly in her own voice: “Did you get anything satisfactory?” she asked. “I certainly hope it wasn’t like that other time when you was cross because they couldn’t get anything for you.”

  “No, no,” he said hastily. “This was different. It was very interesting.”

  He paid her, went to his hotel, and thence to his train for home. Never did he so seem to move through a world of dream-stuff: for he knew that he was not more credulous than other men, and if he could believe what he had believed, though he had believed it for no longer than a moment or two, what hold had he or any other human being on reality?

  His credulity vanished (or so he thought) with his recollection that it was he, and not the alleged “Lopa,” who had suggested the word “amber.” Going over the mortifying, plain facts of his experience, he found that Mrs. Horner, or the subdivision of Mrs. Horner known as “Lopa,” had told him to think of a bell and of a colour, and that being furnished with these scientific data, he had leaped to the concl
usion that he spoke with Isabel Amberson!

  For a moment he had believed that Isabel was there, believed that she was close to him, entreating him—entreating him “to be kind.” But with this recollection a strange agitation came upon him. After all, had she not spoken to him? If his own unknown consciousness had told the “psychic’s” unknown consciousness how to make the picture of the pretty brown-haired, brown-eyed lady, hadn’t the picture been a true one? And hadn’t the true Isabel—oh, indeed her very soul!—called to him out of his own true memory of her?

  And as the train roared through the darkened evening he looked out beyond his window, and saw her as he had seen her on his journey, a few days ago—an ethereal figure flying beside the train, but now it seemed to him that she kept her face toward his window with an infinite wistfulness.

  . . . “To be kind!” If it had been Isabel, was that what she would have said? If she were anywhere, and could come to him through the invisible wall, what would be the first thing she would say to him?

  Ah, well enough, and perhaps bitterly enough, he knew the answer to that question! “To be kind”—to Georgie!

  . . . A red-cap at the station, when he arrived, leaped for his bag, abandoning another which the Pullman porter had handed him. “Yessuh, Mist’ Morgan. Yessuh. You’ car waitin’ front the station fer you, Mist’ Morgan, suh!”

  And people in the crowd about the gates turned to stare, as he passed through, whispering, “That’s Morgan.”

  Outside, the neat chauffeur stood at the door of the touring-car like a soldier in whip-cord.

  “I’ll not go home now, Harry,” said Eugene, when he had got in. “Drive to the City Hospital.”

  “Yes, sir,” the man returned. “Miss Lucy’s there. She said she expected you’d come there before you went home.”

  “She did?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Eugene stared. “I suppose Mr. Minafer must be pretty bad,” he said.

  “Yes, sir. I understand he’s liable to get well, though, sir.” He moved his lever into high speed, and the car went through the heavy traffic like some fast, faithful beast that knew its way about, and knew its master’s need of haste. Eugene did not speak again until they reached the hospital.

  Fanny met him in the upper corridor, and took him to an open door.

  He stopped on the threshold, startled; for, from the waxen face on the pillow, almost it seemed the eyes of Isabel herself were looking at him: never before had the resemblance between mother and son been so strong—and Eugene knew that now he had once seen it thus startlingly, he need divest himself of no bitterness “to be kind” to Georgie.

  George was startled, too. He lifted a white hand in a queer gesture, half forbidding, half imploring, and then let his arm fall back upon the coverlet. “You must have thought my mother wanted you to come,” he said, “so that I could ask you to—to forgive me.”

  But Lucy, who sat beside him, lifted ineffable eyes from him to her father, and shook her head. “No, just to take his hand—gently!”

  She was radiant.

  But for Eugene another radiance filled the room. He knew that he had been true at last to his true love, and that through him she had brought her boy under shelter again. Her eyes would look wistful no more.

  ALICE ADAMS

  To S. S. McClure

  Chapter I

  * * *

  THE PATIENT, an old-fashioned man, thought the nurse made a mistake in keeping both of the windows open, and her sprightly disregard of his protests added something to his hatred of her. Every evening he told her that anybody with ordinary gumption ought to realize that night air was bad for the human frame. “The human frame won’t stand everything, Miss Perry,” he warned her, resentfully. “Even a child, if it had just ordinary gumption, ought to know enough not to let the night air blow on sick people—yes, nor well people, either! ‘Keep out of the night air, no matter how well you feel.’ That’s what my mother used to tell me when I was a boy. ‘Keep out of the night air, Virgil,’ she’d say. ‘Keep out of the night air.’”

  “I expect probably her mother told her the same thing,” the nurse suggested.

  “Of course she did. My grandmother——”

  “Oh, I guess your grandmother thought so, Mr. Adams! That was when all this flat central country was swampish and hadn’t been drained off yet. I guess the truth must been the swamp mosquitoes bit people and gave ’em malaria, especially before they began to put screens in their windows. Well, we got screens in these windows, and no mosquitoes are goin’ to bite us; so just you be a good boy and rest your mind and go to sleep like you need to.”

  “Sleep?” he said. “Likely!”

  He thought the night air worst of all in April; he hadn’t a doubt it would kill him, he declared. “It’s miraculous what the human frame will survive,” he admitted on the last evening of that month. “But you and the doctor ought to both be taught it won’t stand too dang much! You poison a man and poison and poison him with this April night air——”

  “Can’t poison you with much more of it,” Miss Perry interrupted him, indulgently. “To-morrow it’ll be May night air, and I expect that’ll be a lot better for you, don’t you? Now let’s just sober down and be a good boy and get some nice sound sleep.”

  She gave him his medicine, and, having set the glass upon the center table, returned to her cot, where, after a still interval, she snored faintly. Upon this, his expression became that of a man goaded out of overpowering weariness into irony.

  “Sleep? Oh, certainly, thank you!”

  However, he did sleep intermittently, drowsed between times, and even dreamed; but, forgetting his dreams before he opened his eyes, and having some part of him all the while aware of his discomfort, he believed, as usual, that he lay awake the whole night long. He was conscious of the city as of some single great creature resting fitfully in the dark outside his windows. It lay all round about, in the damp cover of its night cloud of smoke, and tried to keep quiet for a few hours after midnight, but was too powerful a growing thing ever to lie altogether still. Even while it strove to sleep it muttered with digestions of the day before, and these already merged with rumblings of the morrow. “Owl” cars, bringing in last passengers over distant trolley-lines, now and then howled on a curve; far-away metallic stirrings could be heard from factories in the sooty suburbs on the plain outside the city; east, west, and south, switch-engines chugged and snorted on sidings; and everywhere in the air there seemed to be a faint, voluminous hum as of innumerable wires trembling overhead to vibration of machinery underground.

  In his youth Adams might have been less resentful of sounds such as these when they interfered with his night’s sleep: even during an illness he might have taken some pride in them as proof of his citizenship in a “live town”; but at fifty-five he merely hated them because they kept him awake. They “pressed on his nerves,” as he put it; and so did almost everything else, for that matter.

  He heard the milk-wagon drive into the cross-street beneath his windows and stop at each house. The milkman carried his jars round to the “back porch,” while the horse moved slowly ahead to the gate of the next customer and waited there. “He’s gone into Pollocks’,” Adams thought, following this progress. “I hope it’ll sour on ’em before breakfast. Delivered the Andersons’. Now he’s getting out ours. Listen to the darn brute! What’s he care who wants to sleep!” His complaint was of the horse, who casually shifted weight with a clink of steel shoes on the worn brick pavement of the street, and then heartily shook himself in his harness, perhaps to dislodge a fly far ahead of its season. Light had just filmed the windows; and with that the first sparrow woke, chirped instantly, and roused neighbours in the trees of the small yard, including a loud-voiced robin. Vociferations began irregularly, but were soon unanimous.

  “Sleep? Dang likely now, ain’t it!”

  Night
sounds were becoming day sounds; the far-away hooting of freight-engines seemed brisker than an hour ago in the dark. A cheerful whistler passed the house, even more careless of sleepers than the milkman’s horse had been; then a group of coloured workmen came by, and although it was impossible to be sure whether they were homeward bound from night-work or on their way to day-work, at least it was certain that they were jocose. Loose, aboriginal laughter preceded them afar, and beat on the air long after they had gone by.

  The sick-room night-light, shielded from his eyes by a newspaper propped against a water-pitcher, still showed a thin glimmering that had grown offensive to Adams. In his wandering and enfeebled thoughts, which were much more often imaginings than reasonings, the attempt of the night-light to resist the dawn reminded him of something unpleasant, though he could not discover just what the unpleasant thing was. Here was a puzzle that irritated him the more because he could not solve it, yet always seemed just on the point of a solution. However, he may have lost nothing cheerful by remaining in the dark upon the matter; for if he had been a little sharper in this introspection he might have concluded that the squalor of the night-light, in its seeming effort to show against the forerunning of the sun itself, had stimulated some half-buried perception within him to sketch the painful little synopsis of an autobiography.

  In spite of noises without, he drowsed again, not knowing that he did; and when he opened his eyes the nurse was just rising from her cot. He took no pleasure in the sight, it may be said. She exhibited to him a face mismodelled by sleep, and set like a clay face left on its cheek in a hot and dry studio. She was still only in part awake, however, and by the time she had extinguished the night-light and given her patient his tonic, she had recovered enough plasticity. “Well, isn’t that grand! We’ve had another good night,” she said as she departed to dress in the bathroom.