Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “Oh, no,” Adams interrupted. “As a matter of fact, I don’t believe he’ll ever think about it at all, and if he did he wouldn’t have any real right to feel offended at me: the process I’m going to use is one I expect to change and improve a lot different from the one Campbell and I worked on for him.”

  “Well, that’s good,” said Lohr. “Of course you know what you’re up to: you’re old enough, God knows!” He laughed ruefully. “My, but it will seem funny to me—down there with you gone! I expect you and I both been gettin’ to be pretty much dead-wood in the place, the way the young fellows look at it, and the only one that’d miss either of us would be the other one! Have you told the ole man yet?”

  “Well——” Adams spoke laboriously. “No. No, I haven’t. I thought—well, that’s what I wanted to see you about.”

  “What can I do?”

  “I thought I’d write him a letter and get you to hand it to him for me.”

  “My soul!” his friend exclaimed. “Why on earth don’t you just go down there and tell him?”

  Adams became pitiably embarrassed. He stammered, coughed, stammered again, wrinkling his face so deeply he seemed about to weep; but finally he contrived to utter an apologetic laugh. “I ought to do that, of course; but in some way or other I just don’t seem to be able to—to manage it.”

  “Why in the world not?” the mystified Lohr inquired.

  “I could hardly tell you—’less’n it is to say that when you been with one boss all your life it’s so—so kind of embarrassing—to quit him, I just can’t make up my mind to go and speak to him about it. No; I got it in my head a letter’s the only satisfactory way to do it, and I thought I’d ask you to hand it to him.”

  “Well, of course I don’t mind doin’ that for you,” Lohr said, mildly. “But why in the world don’t you just mail it to him?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” Adams returned. “You know, like that, it’d have to go through a clerk and that secretary of his, and I don’t know who all. There’s a couple of kind of delicate points I want to put in it: for instance, I want to explain to him how much improvement and so on I’m going to introduce on the old process I helped to work out with Campbell when we were working for him, so’t he’ll understand it’s a different article and no infringement at all. Then there’s another thing: you see all during while I was sick he had my salary paid to me—it amounts to considerable, I was on my back so long. Under the circumstances, because I’m quitting, I don’t feel as if I ought to accept it, and so I’ll have a check for him in the letter to cover it, and I want to be sure he knows it, and gets it personally. If it had to go through a lot of other people, the way it would if I put it in the mail, why, you can’t tell. So what I thought: if you’d hand it to him for me, and maybe if he happened to read it right then, or anything, it might be you’d notice whatever he’d happen to say about it—and you could tell me afterward.”

  “All right,” Lohr said. “Certainly if you’d rather do it that way, I’ll hand it to him and tell you what he says; that is, if he says anything and I hear him. Got it written?”

  “No; I’ll send it around to you last of the week.” Adams moved toward his taxicab. “Don’t say anything to anybody about it, Charley, especially till after that.”

  “All right.”

  “And, Charley, I’ll be mighty obliged to you,” Adams said, and came back to shake hands in farewell. “There’s one thing more you might do—if you’d ever happen to feel like it.” He kept his eyes rather vaguely fixed on a point above his friend’s head as he spoke, and his voice was not well controlled. “I been—I been down there a good many years and I may not ’a’ been so much use lately as I was at first, but I always tried to do my best for the old firm. If anything turned out so’s they did kind of take offense with me, down there, why, just say a good word for me—if you’d happen to feel like it, maybe.”

  Old Charley Lohr assured him that he would speak a good word if opportunity became available; then, after the cab had driven away, he went up to his small apartment on the third floor and muttered ruminatively until his wife inquired what he was talking to himself about.

  “Ole Virg Adams,” he told her. “He’s out again after his long spell of sickness, and the way it looks to me he’d better stayed in bed.”

  “You mean he still looks too bad to be out?”

  “Oh, I expect he’s gettin’ his health back,” Lohr said, frowning.

  “Then what’s the matter with him? You mean he’s lost his mind?”

  “My goodness, but women do jump at conclusions!” he exclaimed.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Lohr, “what other conclusion did you leave me to jump at?”

  Her husband explained with a little heat: “People can have a sickness that affects their mind, can’t they? Their mind can get some affected without bein’ lost, can’t it?”

  “Then you mean the poor man’s mind does seem affected?”

  “Why, no; I’d scarcely go as far as that,” Lohr said, inconsistently, and declined to be more definite.

  Adams devoted the latter part of that evening to the composition of his letter—a disquieting task not completed when, at eleven o’clock, he heard his daughter coming up the stairs. She was singing to herself in a low, sweet voice, and Adams paused to listen incredulously, with his pen lifted and his mouth open, as if he heard the strangest sound in the world. Then he set down the pen upon a blotter, went to his door, and opened it, looking out at her as she came.

  “Well, dearie, you seem to be feeling pretty good,” he said. “What you been doing?”

  “Just sitting out on the front steps, papa.”

  “All alone, I suppose.”

  “No. Mr. Russell called.”

  “Oh, he did?” Adams pretended to be surprised. “What all could you and he find to talk about till this hour o’ the night?”

  She laughed gaily. “You don’t know me, papa!”

  “How’s that?”

  “You’ve never found out that I always do all the talking.”

  “Didn’t you let him get a word in all evening?”

  “Oh, yes; every now and then.”

  Adams took her hand and petted it. “Well, what did he say?”

  Alice gave him a radiant look and kissed him. “Not what you think!” she laughed; then slapped his cheek with saucy affection, pirouetted across the narrow hall and into her own room, and curtsied to him as she closed her door.

  Adams went back to his writing with a lighter heart; for since Alice was born she had been to him the apple of his eye, his own phrase in thinking of her; and what he was doing now was for her. He smiled as he picked up his pen to begin a new draft of the painful letter; but presently he looked puzzled. After all, she could be happy just as things were, it seemed. Then why had he taken what his wife called “this new step,” which he had so long resisted?

  He could only sigh and wonder. “Life works out pretty peculiarly,” he thought; for he couldn’t go back now, though the reason he couldn’t was not clearly apparent. He had to go ahead.

  Chapter XVII

  * * *

  HE WAS out in his taxicab again the next morning, and by noon he had secured what he wanted.

  It was curiously significant that he worked so quickly. All the years during which his wife had pressed him toward his present shift he had sworn to himself, as well as to her, that he would never yield; and yet when he did yield he had no plans to make, because he found them already prepared and worked out in detail in his mind; as if he had long contemplated the “step” he believed himself incapable of taking.

  Sometimes he had thought of improving his income by exchanging his little collection of bonds for a “small rental property,” if he could find “a good buy”; and he had spent many of his spare hours rambling over the enormously spreading city and its purlieus, looking for the i
deal “buy.” It remained unattainable, so far as he was concerned; but he found other things.

  Not twice a crow’s mile from his own house there was a dismal and slummish quarter, a decayed “industrial district” of earlier days. Most of the industries were small; some of them died, perishing of bankruptcy or fire; and a few had moved, leaving their shells. Of the relics, the best was a brick building which had been the largest and most important factory in the quarter: it had been injured by a long vacancy almost as serious as a fire, in effect, and Adams had often guessed at the sum needed to put it in repair.

  When he passed it, he would look at it with an interest which he supposed detached and idly speculative. “That’d be just the thing,” he thought. “If a fellow had money enough, and took a notion to set up some new business on a big scale, this would be a pretty good place—to make glue, for instance, if that wasn’t out of the question, of course. It would take a lot of money, though; a great deal too much for me to expect to handle—even if I’d ever dream of doing such a thing.”

  Opposite the dismantled factory was a muddy, open lot of two acres or so, and near the middle of the lot, a long brick shed stood in a desolate abandonment, not happily decorated by old coatings of theatrical and medicinal advertisements. But the brick shed had two wooden ells, and, though both shed and ells were of a single story, here was empty space enough for a modest enterprise—“space enough for almost anything, to start with,” Adams thought, as he walked through the low buildings, one day, when he was prospecting in that section. “Yes, I suppose I could swing this,” he thought. “If the process belonged to me, say, instead of being out of the question because it isn’t my property—or if I was the kind of man to do such a thing anyhow, here would be something I could probably get hold of pretty cheap. They’d want a lot of money for a lease on that big building over the way—but this, why, I should think it’d be practically nothing at all.”

  Then, by chance, meeting an agent he knew, he made inquiries—merely to satisfy a casual curiosity, he thought—and he found matters much as he had supposed, except that the owners of the big building did not wish to let, but to sell it, and this at a price so exorbitant that Adams laughed. But the long brick shed in the great muddy lot was for sale or to let, or “pretty near to be given away,” he learned, if anybody would take it.

  Adams took it now, though without seeing that he had been destined to take it, and that some dreary wizard in the back of his head had foreseen all along that he would take it, and planned to be ready. He drove in his taxicab to look the place over again, then down-town to arrange for a lease; and came home to lunch with his wife and daughter. Things were “moving,” he told them.

  He boasted a little of having acted so decisively, and said that since the dang thing had to be done, it was “going to be done right!” He was almost cheerful, in a feverish way, and when the cab came for him again, soon after lunch, he explained that he intended not only to get things done right, but also to “get ’em done quick!” Alice, following him to the front door, looked at him anxiously and asked if she couldn’t help. He laughed at her grimly.

  “Then let me go along with you in the cab,” she begged. “You don’t look able to start in so hard, papa, just when you’re barely beginning to get your strength back. Do let me go with you and see if I can’t help—or at least take care of you if you should get to feeling badly.”

  He declined, but upon pressure let her put a tiny bottle of spirits of ammonia in his pocket, and promised to make use of it if he “felt faint or anything.” Then he was off again; and the next morning had men at work in his sheds, though the wages he had to pay frightened him.

  He directed the workmen in every detail, hurrying them by example and exhortations, and receiving, in consequence, several declarations of independence, as well as one resignation, which took effect immediately. “Yous capitalusts seem to think a man’s got nothin’ to do but break his back p’doosin’ wealth fer yous to squander,” the resigning person loudly complained. “You look out: the toiler’s day is a-comin’, and it ain’t so fur off, neither!” But the capitalist was already out of hearing, gone to find a man to take this orator’s place.

  By the end of the week, Adams felt that he had moved satisfactorily forward in his preparations for the simple equipment he needed; but he hated the pause of Sunday. He didn’t want any rest, he told Alice impatiently, when she suggested that the idle day might be good for him.

  Late that afternoon he walked over to the apartment house where old Charley Lohr lived, and gave his friend the letter he wanted the head of Lamb and Company to receive “personally.” “I’ll take it as a mighty great favour in you to hand it to him personally, Charley,” he said, in parting. “And you won’t forget, in case he says anything about it—and remember if you ever do get a chance to put in a good word for me later, you know——”

  Old Charley promised to remember, and, when Mrs. Lohr came out of the “kitchenette,” after the door closed, he said thoughtfully, “Just skin and bones.”

  “You mean Mr. Adams is?” Mrs. Lohr inquired.

  “Who’d you think I meant?” he returned. “One o’ these partridges in the wall-paper?”

  “Did he look so badly?”

  “Looked kind of distracted to me,” her husband replied. “These little thin fellers can stand a heap sometimes, though. He’ll be over here again Monday.”

  “Did he say he would?”

  “No,” said Lohr. “But he will. You’ll see. He’ll be over to find out what the big boss says when I give him this letter. Expect I’d be kind of anxious, myself, if I was him.”

  “Why would you? What’s Mr. Adams doing to be so anxious about?”

  Lohr’s expression became one of reserve, the look of a man who has found that when he speaks his inner thoughts his wife jumps too far to conclusions. “Oh, nothing,” he said. “Of course any man starting up a new business is bound to be pretty nervous a while. He’ll be over here to-morrow evening, all right; you’ll see.”

  The prediction was fulfilled: Adams arrived just after Mrs. Lohr had removed the dinner dishes to her “kitchenette”; but Lohr had little information to give his caller.

  “He didn’t say a word, Virgil; nary a word. I took it into his office and handed it to him, and he just sat and read it; that’s all. I kind of stood around as long as I could, but he was sittin’ at his desk with his side to me, and he never turned around full toward me, as it were, so I couldn’t hardly even tell anything. All I know: he just read it.”

  “Well, but see here,” Adams began, nervously. “Well——”

  “Well what, Virg?”

  “Well, but what did he say when he did speak?”

  “He didn’t speak. Not so long I was in there, anyhow. He just sat there and read it. Read kind of slow. Then, when he came to the end, he turned back and started to read it all over again. By that time there was three or four other men standin’ around in the office waitin’ to speak to him, and I had to go.”

  Adams sighed, and stared at the floor, irresolute. “Well, I’ll be getting along back home then, I guess, Charley. So you’re sure you couldn’t tell anything what he might have thought about it, then?”

  “Not a thing in the world. I’ve told you all I know, Virg.”

  “I guess so, I guess so,” Adams said, mournfully. “I feel mighty obliged to you, Charley Lohr; mighty obliged. Good-night to you.” And he departed, sighing in perplexity.

  On his way home, preoccupied with many thoughts, he walked so slowly that once or twice he stopped and stood motionless for a few moments, without being aware of it; and when he reached the juncture of the sidewalk with the short brick path that led to his own front door, he stopped again, and stood for more than a minute. “Ah, I wish I knew,” he whispered, plaintively. “I do wish I knew what he thought about it.”

  He was roused by a laugh that came lig
htly from the little veranda near by. “Papa!” Alice called gaily. “What are you standing there muttering to yourself about?”

  “Oh, are you there, dearie?” he said, and came up the path. A tall figure rose from a chair on the veranda.

  “Papa, this is Mr. Russell.”

  The two men shook hands, Adams saying, “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” as they looked at each other in the faint light diffused through the opaque glass in the upper part of the door. Adams’s impression was of a strong and tall young man, fashionable but gentle; and Russell’s was of a dried, little old business man with a grizzled moustache, worried bright eyes, shapeless dark clothes, and a homely manner.

  “Nice evening,” Adams said further, as their hands parted. “Nice time o’ year it is, but we don’t always have as good weather as this; that’s the trouble of it. Well——” He went to the door. “Well—I bid you good evening,” he said, and retired within the house.

  Alice laughed. “He’s the old-fashionedest man in town, I suppose—and frightfully impressed with you, I could see!”

  “What nonsense!” said Russell. “How could anybody be impressed with me?”

  “Why not? Because you’re quiet? Good gracious! Don’t you know that you’re the most impressive sort? We chatterers spend all our time playing to you quiet people.”

  “Yes; we’re only the audience.”

  “‘Only!’” she echoed. “Why, we live for you, and we can’t live without you.”