Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  Mrs. Palmer repeated the name to herself thoughtfully. “‘Adams’—‘Virgil Adams.’ You said his name was Virgil Adams?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at her daughter. “Why, you know who that is, Mildred,” she said, casually. “It’s that Alice Adams’s father, isn’t it? Wasn’t his name Virgil Adams?”

  “I think it is,” Mildred said.

  Mrs. Palmer turned toward her husband. “You’ve seen this Alice Adams here. Mr. Lamb’s pet swindler must be her father.”

  Mr. Palmer passed a smooth hand over his neat gray hair, which was not disturbed by this effort to stimulate recollection. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Of course—certainly. Quite a good-looking girl—one of Mildred’s friends. How queer!”

  Mildred looked up, as if in a little alarm, but did not speak. Her mother set matters straight. “Fathers are amusing,” she said smilingly to Russell, who was looking at her, though how fixedly she did not notice; for she turned from him at once to enlighten her husband. “Every girl who meets Mildred, and tries to push the acquaintance by coming here until the poor child has to hide, isn’t a friend of hers, my dear!”

  Mildred’s eyes were downcast again, and a faint colour rose in her cheeks. “Oh, I shouldn’t put it quite that way about Alice Adams,” she said, in a low voice. “I saw something of her for a time. She’s not unattractive—in a way.”

  Mrs. Palmer settled the whole case of Alice carelessly. “A pushing sort of girl,” she said. “A very pushing little person.”

  “I——” Mildred began; and, after hesitating, concluded, “I rather dropped her.”

  “Fortunate you’ve done so,” her father remarked, cheerfully. “Especially since various members of the Lamb connection are here frequently. They mightn’t think you’d show great tact in having her about the place.” He laughed, and turned to his cousin. “All this isn’t very interesting to poor Arthur. How terrible people are with a newcomer in a town; they talk as if he knew all about everybody!”

  “But we don’t know anything about these queer people, ourselves,” said Mrs. Palmer. “We know something about the girl, of course—she used to be a bit too conspicuous, in fact! However, as you say, we might find a subject more interesting for Arthur.” She smiled whimsically upon the young man. “Tell the truth,” she said. “Don’t you fairly detest going into business with that tyrant yonder?”

  “What? Yes—I beg your pardon!” he stammered.

  “You were right,” Mrs. Palmer said to her husband. “You’ve bored him so, talking about thievish clerks, he can’t even answer an honest question.”

  But Russell was beginning to recover his outward composure. “Try me again,” he said. “I’m afraid I was thinking of something else.”

  This was the best he found to say. There was a part of him that wanted to protest and deny, but he had not heat enough, in the chill that had come upon him. Here was the first “mention” of Alice, and with it the reason why it was the first: Mr. Palmer had difficulty in recalling her, and she happened to be spoken of, only because her father’s betrayal of a benefactor’s trust had been so peculiarly atrocious that, in the view of the benefactor’s family, it contained enough of the element of humour to warrant a mild laugh at a club. There was the deadliness of the story: its lack of malice, even of resentment. Deadlier still were Mrs. Palmer’s phrases: “a pushing sort of girl,” “a very pushing little person,” and “used to be a bit too conspicuous, in fact.” But she spoke placidly and by chance; being as obviously without unkindly motive as Mr. Palmer was when he related the cause of Alfred Lamb’s amusement. Her opinion of the obscure young lady momentarily her topic had been expressed, moreover, to her husband, and at her own table. She sat there, large, kind, serene—a protest might astonish but could not change her; and Russell, crumpling in his strained fingers the lace-edged little web of a napkin on his knee, found heart enough to grow red, but not enough to challenge her.

  She noticed his colour, and attributed it to the embarrassment of a scrupulously gallant gentleman caught in a lapse of attention to a lady. “Don’t be disturbed,” she said, benevolently. “People aren’t expected to listen all the time to their relatives. A high colour’s very becoming to you, Arthur; but it really isn’t necessary between cousins. You can always be informal enough with us to listen only when you care to.”

  His complexion continued to be ruddier than usual, however, throughout the meal, and was still somewhat tinted when Mrs. Palmer rose. “The man’s bringing you cigarettes here,” she said, nodding to the two gentlemen. “We’ll give you a chance to do the sordid kind of talking we know you really like. Afterwhile, Mildred will show you what’s in bloom in the hothouse, if you wish, Arthur.”

  Mildred followed her, and, when they were alone in another of the spacious rooms, went to a window and looked out, while her mother seated herself near the center of the room in a gilt armchair, mellowed with old Aubusson tapestry. Mrs. Palmer looked thoughtfully at her daughter’s back, but did not speak to her until coffee had been brought for them.

  “Thanks,” Mildred said, not turning, “I don’t care for any coffee, I believe.”

  “No?” Mrs. Palmer said, gently. “I’m afraid our good-looking cousin won’t think you’re very talkative, Mildred. You spoke only about twice at lunch. I shouldn’t care for him to get the idea you’re piqued because he’s come here so little lately, should you?”

  “No, I shouldn’t,” Mildred answered in a low voice, and with that she turned quickly, and came to sit near her mother. “But it’s what I am afraid of! Mama, did you notice how red he got?”

  “You mean when he was caught not listening to a question of mine? Yes; it’s very becoming to him.”

  “Mama, I don’t think that was the reason. I don’t think it was because he wasn’t listening, I mean.”

  “No?”

  “I think his colour and his not listening came from the same reason,” Mildred said, and although she had come to sit near her mother, she did not look at her. “I think it happened because you and papa——” She stopped.

  “Yes?” Mrs. Palmer said, good-naturedly, to prompt her. “Your father and I did something embarrassing?”

  “Mama, it was because of those things that came out about Alice Adams.”

  “How could that bother Arthur? Does he know her?”

  “Don’t you remember?” the daughter asked. “The day after my dance I mentioned how odd I thought it was in him—I was a little disappointed in him. I’d been seeing that he met everybody, of course, but she was the only girl he asked to meet; and he did it as soon as he noticed her. I hadn’t meant to have him meet her—in fact, I was rather sorry I’d felt I had to ask her, because she—oh, well, she’s the sort that ‘tries for the new man,’ if she has half a chance; and sometimes they seem quite fascinated—for a time, that is. I thought Arthur was above all that; or at the very least I gave him credit for being too sophisticated.”

  “I see,” Mrs. Palmer said, thoughtfully. “I remember now that you spoke of it. You said it seemed a little peculiar, but of course it really wasn’t: a ‘new man’ has nothing to go by, except his own first impressions. You can’t blame poor Arthur—she’s quite a piquant looking little person. You think he’s seen something of her since then?”

  Mildred nodded slowly. “I never dreamed such a thing till yesterday, and even then I rather doubted it—till he got so red, just now! I was surprised when he asked to meet her, but he just danced with her once and didn’t mention her afterward; I forgot all about it—in fact, I virtually forgot all about her. I’d seen quite a little of her——”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Palmer. “She did keep coming here!”

  “But I’d just about decided that it really wouldn’t do,” Mildred went on. “She isn’t—well, I didn’t admire her.”

  “No,” her mother assented, and evidently followed a direct c
onnection of thought in a speech apparently irrelevant. “I understand the young Malone wants to marry Henrietta. I hope she won’t; he seems rather a gross type of person.”

  “Oh, he’s just one,” Mildred said. “I don’t know that he and Alice Adams were ever engaged—she never told me so. She may not have been engaged to any of them; she was just enough among the other girls to get talked about—and one of the reasons I felt a little inclined to be nice to her was that they seemed to be rather edging her out of the circle. It wasn’t long before I saw they were right, though. I happened to mention I was going to give a dance and she pretended to take it as a matter of course that I meant to invite her brother—at least, I thought she pretended; she may have really believed it. At any rate, I had to send him a card; but I didn’t intend to be let in for that sort of thing again, of course. She’s what you said, ‘pushing’; though I’m awfully sorry you said it.”

  “Why shouldn’t I have said it, my dear?”

  “Of course I didn’t say ‘shouldn’t,’” Mildred explained, gravely. “I meant only that I’m sorry it happened.”

  “Yes; but why?”

  “Mama”— Mildred turned to her, leaning forward and speaking in a lowered voice—“Mama, at first the change was so little it seemed as if Arthur hardly knew it himself. He’d been lovely to me always, and he was still lovely to me—but—oh, well, you’ve understood—after my dance it was more as if it was just his nature and his training to be lovely to me, as he would be to everyone—a kind of politeness. He’d never said he cared for me, but after that I could see he didn’t. It was clear—after that. I didn’t know what had happened; I couldn’t think of anything I’d done. Mama—it was Alice Adams.”

  Mrs. Palmer set her little coffee-cup upon the table beside her, calmly following her own motion with her eyes, and not seeming to realize with what serious entreaty her daughter’s gaze was fixed upon her. Mildred repeated the last sentence of her revelation, and introduced a stress of insistence.

  “Mama, it was Alice Adams!”

  But Mrs. Palmer declined to be greatly impressed, so far as her appearance went, at least; and to emphasize her refusal, she smiled indulgently. “What makes you think so?”

  “Henrietta told me yesterday.”

  At this Mrs. Palmer permitted herself to laugh softly aloud. “Good heavens! Is Henrietta a sooth-sayer? Or is she Arthur’s particular confidante?”

  “No. Ella Dowling told her.”

  Mrs. Palmer’s laughter continued. “Now we have it!” she exclaimed. “It’s a game of gossip: Arthur tells Ella, Ella tells Henrietta, and Henrietta tells——”

  “Don’t laugh, please, mama,” Mildred begged. “Of course Arthur didn’t tell anybody. It’s roundabout enough, but it’s true. I know it! I hadn’t quite believed it, but I knew it was true when he got so red. He looked—oh, for a second or so he looked—stricken! He thought I didn’t notice it. Mama, he’s been to see her almost every evening lately. They take long walks together. That’s why he hasn’t been here.”

  Of Mrs. Palmer’s laughter there was left only her indulgent smile, which she had not allowed to vanish. “Well, what of it?” she said.

  “Mama!”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Palmer. “What of it?”

  “But don’t you see?” Mildred’s well-tutored voice, though modulated and repressed even in her present emotion, never­theless had a tendency to quaver. “It’s true. Frank Dowling was going to see her one evening and he saw Arthur sitting on the stoop with her, and didn’t go in. And Ella used to go to school with a girl who lives across the street from her. She told Ella——”

  “Oh, I understand,” Mrs. Palmer interrupted. “Suppose he does go there. My dear, I said, ‘What of it?’”

  “I don’t see what you mean, mama. I’m so afraid he might think we knew about it, and that you and papa said those things about her and her father on that account—as if we abused them because he goes there instead of coming here.”

  “Nonsense!” Mrs. Palmer rose, went to a window, and, turning there, stood with her back to it, facing her daughter and looking at her cheerfully. “Nonsense, my dear! It was perfectly clear that she was mentioned by accident, and so was her father. What an extraordinary man! If Arthur makes friends with people like that, he certainly knows better than to expect to hear favourable opinions of them. Besides, it’s only a little passing thing with him.”

  “Mama! When he goes there almost every——”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Palmer said, dryly. “It seems to me I’ve heard somewhere that other young men have gone there ‘almost every!’ She doesn’t last, apparently. Arthur’s gallant, and he’s impressionable—but he’s fastidious, and fastidiousness is always the check on impressionableness. A girl belongs to her family, too—and this one does especially, it strikes me! Arthur’s very sensible; he sees more than you’d think.”

  Mildred looked at her hopefully. “Then you don’t believe he’s likely to imagine we said those things of her in any meaning way?”

  At this, Mrs. Palmer laughed again. “There’s one thing you seem not to have noticed, Mildred.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It seems to have escaped your attention that he never said a word.”

  “Mightn’t that mean——?” Mildred began, but she stopped.

  “No, it mightn’t,” her mother replied, comprehending easily. “On the contrary, it might mean that instead of his feeling it too deeply to speak, he was getting a little illumination.”

  Mildred rose and came to her. “Why do you suppose he never told us he went there? Do you think he’s—do you think he’s pleased with her, and yet ashamed of it? Why do you suppose he’s never spoken of it?”

  “Ah, that,” Mrs. Palmer said;—“that might possibly be her own doing. If it is, she’s well paid by what your father and I said, because we wouldn’t have said it if we’d known that Arthur——” She checked herself quickly. Looking over her daughter’s shoulder, she saw the two gentlemen coming from the corridor toward the wide doorway of the room; and she greeted them cheerfully. “If you’ve finished with each other for a while,” she added, “Arthur may find it a relief to put his thoughts on something prettier than a trust company—and more fragrant.”

  Arthur came to Mildred.

  “Your mother said at lunch that perhaps you’d——”

  “I didn’t say ‘perhaps,’ Arthur,” Mrs. Palmer interrupted, to correct him. “I said she would. If you care to see and smell those lovely things out yonder, she’ll show them to you. Run along, children!”

  Half an hour later, glancing from a window, she saw them come from the hothouses and slowly cross the lawn. Arthur had a fine rose in his buttonhole and looked profoundly thoughtful.

  Chapter XXI

  * * *

  THAT MORNING and noon had been warm, though the stirrings of a feeble breeze made weather not flagrantly intemperate; but at about three o’clock in the afternoon there came out of the southwest a heat like an affliction sent upon an accursed people, and the air was soon dead of it. Dripping negro ditch-diggers whooped with satires praising hell and hot weather, as the tossing shovels flickered up to the street level, where sluggish male pedestrians carried coats upon hot arms, and fanned themselves with straw hats, or, remaining covered, wore soaked handkerchiefs between scalp and straw. Clerks drooped in silent, big department stores; stenographers in offices kept as close to electric fans as the intervening bulk of their employers would let them; guests in hotels left the lobbies and went to lie unclad upon their beds; while in hospitals the patients murmured querulously against the heat, and perhaps against some noisy motorist who strove to feel the air by splitting it, not troubled by any foreboding that he, too, that hour next week, might need quiet near a hospital. The “hot spell” was a true spell, one upon men’s spirits; for it was so hot that, in suburban outskirts, golfers crept slowly bac
k over the low undulations of their club lands, abandoning their matches and returning to shelter.

  Even on such a day, sizzling work had to be done, as in winter. There were glowing furnaces to be stoked, liquid metals to be poured; but such tasks found seasoned men standing to them; and in all the city probably no brave soul challenged the heat more gamely than Mrs. Adams did, when, in a corner of her small and fiery kitchen, where all day long her hired African immune cooked fiercely, she pressed her husband’s evening clothes with a hot iron. No doubt she risked her life, but she risked it cheerfully in so good and necessary a service for him. She would have given her life for him at any time, and both his and her own for her children.

  Unconscious of her own heroism, she was surprised to find herself rather faint when she finished her ironing. However, she took heart to believe that the clothes looked better, in spite of one or two scorched places; and she carried them upstairs to her husband’s room before increasing blindness forced her to grope for the nearest chair. Then, trying to rise and walk, without having sufficiently recovered, she had to sit down again; but after a little while she was able to get upon her feet; and, keeping her hand against the wall, moved successfully to the door of her own room. Here she wavered; might have gone down, had she not been stimulated by the thought of how much depended upon her;—she made a final great effort, and floundered across the room to her bureau, where she kept some simple restoratives. They served her need, or her faith in them did; and she returned to her work.

  She went down the stairs, keeping a still tremulous hand upon the rail; but she smiled brightly when Alice looked up from below, where the woodwork was again being tormented with superfluous attentions.

  “Alice, don’t!” her mother said, commiseratingly. “You did all that this morning and it looks lovely. What’s the use of wearing yourself out on it? You ought to be lying down, so’s to look fresh for to-night.”