“Never mind,” she said. “It’s nothing beside the real trouble we’re in—I’ll tell you some time. You eat your eggs and toast; you can’t keep going on just coffee.”
“I can’t eat any eggs and toast,” he objected, rising. “I can’t.”
“Then wait till I can bring you something else.”
“No,” he said, irritably. “I won’t do it! I don’t want any dang food! And look here”— he spoke sharply to stop her, as she went toward the telephone—“I don’t want any dang taxi, either! You look after your mother when she wakes up. I got to be at work!”
And though she followed him to the front door, entreating, he could not be stayed or hindered. He went through the quiet morning streets at a rickety, rapid gait, swinging his old straw hat in his hands, and whispering angrily to himself as he went. His grizzled hair, not trimmed for a month, blew back from his damp forehead in the warm breeze; his reddened eyes stared hard at nothing from under blinking lids; and one side of his face twitched startlingly from time to time;—children might have run from him, or mocked him.
When he had come into that fallen quarter his industry had partly revived and wholly made odorous, a negro woman, leaning upon her whitewashed gate, gazed after him and chuckled for the benefit of a gossiping friend in the next tiny yard. “Oh, good Satan! Wha’ssa matter that ole glue man?”
“Who? Him?” the neighbour inquired. “What he do now?”
“Talkin’ to his ole se’f!” the first explained, joyously. “Look like gone distracted—ole glue man!”
Adams’s legs had grown more uncertain with his hard walk, and he stumbled heavily as he crossed the baked mud of his broad lot, but cared little for that, was almost unaware of it, in fact. Thus his eyes saw as little as his body felt, and so he failed to observe something that would have given him additional light upon an old phrase that already meant quite enough for him.
There are in the wide world people who have never learned its meaning; but most are either young or beautifully unobservant who remain wholly unaware of the inner poignancies the words convey: “a rain of misfortunes.” It is a boiling rain, seemingly whimsical in its choice of spots whereon to fall; and, so far as mortal eye can tell, neither the just nor the unjust may hope to avoid it, or need worry themselves by expecting it. It had selected the Adams family for its scaldings; no question.
The glue-works foreman, standing in the doorway of the brick shed, observed his employer’s eccentric approach, and doubtfully stroked a whiskered chin. “Well, they ain’t no putticular use gettin’ so upset over it,” he said, as Adams came up. “When a thing happens, why, it happens, and that’s all there is to it. When a thing’s so, why, it’s so. All you can do about it is think if there’s anything you can do; and that’s what you better be doin’ with this case.”
Adams halted, and seemed to gape at him. “What—case?” he said, with difficulty. “Was it in the morning papers, too?”
“No, it ain’t in no morning papers. My land! It don’t need to be in no papers; look at the size of it!”
“The size of what?”
“Why, great God!” the foreman exclaimed. “He ain’t even seen it. Look! Look yonder!”
Adams stared vaguely at the man’s outstretched hand and pointing forefinger, then turned and saw a great sign upon the façade of the big factory building across the street. The letters were large enough to be read two blocks away.
“AFTER THE FIFTEENTH OF NEXT MONTH
THIS BUILDING WILL BE OCCUPIED BY
THE J. A. LAMB LIQUID GLUE CO. INC.”
A gray touring-car had just come to rest before the principal entrance of the building, and J. A. Lamb himself descended from it. He glanced over toward the humble rival of his projected great industry, saw his old clerk, and immediately walked across the street and the lot to speak to him.
“Well, Adams,” he said, in his husky, cheerful voice, “how’s your glue-works?”
Adams uttered an inarticulate sound, and lifted the hand that held his hat as if to make a protestive gesture, but failed to carry it out; and his arm sank limp at his side. The foreman, however, seemed to feel that something ought to be said.
“Our glue-works, hell!” he remarked. “I guess we won’t have no glue-works over here—not very long, if we got to compete with the sized thing you got over there!”
Lamb chuckled. “I kind of had some such notion,” he said. “You see, Virgil, I couldn’t exactly let you walk off with it like swallering a pat o’ butter, now, could I? It didn’t look exactly reasonable to expect me to let go like that, now, did it?”
Adams found a half-choked voice somewhere in his throat. “Do you—would you step into my office a minute, Mr. Lamb?”
“Why, certainly I’m willing to have a little talk with you,” the old gentleman said, as he followed his former employee indoors, and he added, “I feel a lot more like it than I did before I got that up, over yonder, Virgil!”
Adams threw open the door of the rough room he called his office, having as justification for this title little more than the fact that he had a telephone there and a deal table that served as a desk. “Just step into the office, please,” he said.
Lamb glanced at the desk, at the kitchen chair before it, at the telephone, and at the partition walls built of old boards, some covered with ancient paint and some merely weatherbeaten, the salvage of a house-wrecker; and he smiled broadly. “So these are your offices, are they?” he asked. “You expect to do quite a business here, I guess, don’t you, Virgil?”
Adams turned upon him a stricken and tortured face. “Have you seen Charley Lohr since last night, Mr. Lamb?”
“No; I haven’t seen Charley.”
“Well, I told him to tell you,” Adams began;—“I told him I’d pay you——”
“Pay me what you expect to make out o’ glue, you mean, Virgil?”
“No,” Adams said, swallowing. “I mean what my boy owes you. That’s what I told Charley to tell you. I told him to tell you I’d pay you every last——”
“Well, well!” the old gentleman interrupted, testily. “I don’t know anything about that.”
“I’m expecting to pay you,” Adams went on, swallowing again, painfully. “I was expecting to do it out of a loan I thought I could get on my glue-works.”
The old gentleman lifted his frosted eyebrows. “Oh, out o’ the glue-works? You expected to raise money on the glue-works, did you?”
At that, Adams’s agitation increased prodigiously. “How’d you think I expected to pay you?” he said. “Did you think I expected to get money on my own old bones?” He slapped himself harshly upon the chest and legs. “Do you think a bank’ll lend money on a man’s ribs and his broken-down old knee-bones? They won’t do it! You got to have some business prospects to show ’em, if you haven’t got any property nor securities; and what business prospects have I got now, with that sign of yours up over yonder? Why, you don’t need to make an ounce o’ glue; your sign’s fixed me without your doing another lick! That’s all you had to do; just put your sign up! You needn’t to——”
“Just let me tell you something, Virgil Adams,” the old man interrupted, harshly. “I got just one right important thing to tell you before we talk any further business; and that’s this: there’s some few men in this town made their money in off-colour ways, but there aren’t many; and those there are have had to be a darn sight slicker than you know how to be, or ever will know how to be! Yes, sir, and they none of them had the little gumption to try to make it out of a man that had the spirit not to let ’em, and the strength not to let ’em! I know what you thought. ‘Here,’ you said to yourself, ‘here’s this ole fool J. A. Lamb; he’s kind of worn out and in his second childhood like; I can put it over on him, without his ever——’”
“I did not!” Adams shouted. “A great
deal you know about my feelings and all what I said to myself! There’s one thing I want to tell you, and that’s what I’m saying to myself now, and what my feelings are this minute!”
He struck the table a great blow with his thin fist, and shook the damaged knuckles in the air. “I just want to tell you, whatever I did feel, I don’t feel mean any more; not to-day, I don’t. There’s a meaner man in this world than I am, Mr. Lamb!”
“Oh, so you feel better about yourself to-day, do you, Virgil?”
“You bet I do! You worked till you got me where you want me; and I wouldn’t do that to another man, no matter what he did to me! I wouldn’t——”
“What you talkin’ about! How’ve I ‘got you where I want you?’”
“Ain’t it plain enough?” Adams cried. “You even got me where I can’t raise the money to pay back what my boy owes you! Do you suppose anybody’s fool enough to let me have a cent on this business after one look at what you got over there across the road?”
“No, I don’t.”
“No, you don’t,” Adams echoed, hoarsely. “What’s more, you knew my house was mortgaged, and my——”
“I did not,” Lamb interrupted, angrily. “What do I care about your house?”
“What’s the use your talking like that?” Adams cried. “You got me where I can’t even raise the money to pay what my boy owes the company, so’t I can’t show any reason to stop the prosecution and keep him out the penitentiary. That’s where you worked till you got me!”
“What!” Lamb shouted. “You accuse me of——”
“‘Accuse you?’ What am I telling you? Do you think I got no eyes?” And Adams hammered the table again. “Why, you knew the boy was weak——”
“I did not!”
“Listen: you kept him there after you got mad at my leaving the way I did. You kept him there after you suspected him; and you had him watched; you let him go on; just waited to catch him and ruin him!”
“You’re crazy!” the old man bellowed. “I didn’t know there was anything against the boy till last night. You’re crazy, I say!”
Adams looked it. With his hair disordered over his haggard forehead and bloodshot eyes; with his bruised hands pounding the table and flying in a hundred wild and absurd gestures, while his feet shuffled constantly to preserve his balance upon staggering legs, he was the picture of a man with a mind gone to rags.
“Maybe I am crazy!” he cried, his voice breaking and quavering. “Maybe I am, but I wouldn’t stand there and taunt a man with it if I’d done to him what you’ve done to me! Just look at me: I worked all my life for you, and what I did when I quit never harmed you—it didn’t make two cents’ worth o’ difference in your life and it looked like it’d mean all the difference in the world to my family—and now look what you’ve done to me for it! I tell you, Mr. Lamb, there never was a man looked up to another man the way I looked up to you the whole o’ my life, but I don’t look up to you any more! You think you got a fine day of it now, riding up in your automobile to look at that sign—and then over here at my poor little works that you’ve ruined. But listen to me just this one last time!” The cracking voice broke into falsetto, and the gesticulating hands fluttered uncontrollably. “Just you listen!” he panted. “You think I did you a bad turn, and now you got me ruined for it, and you got my works ruined, and my family ruined; and if anybody’d ’a’ told me this time last year I’d ever say such a thing to you I’d called him a dang liar, but I do say it: I say you’ve acted toward me like—like a—a doggone mean—man!”
His voice, exhausted, like his body, was just able to do him this final service; then he sank, crumpled, into the chair by the table, his chin down hard upon his chest.
“I tell you, you’re crazy!” Lamb said again. “I never in the world——” But he checked himself, staring in sudden perplexity at his accuser. “Look here!” he said. “What’s the matter of you? Have you got another of those——?” He put his hand upon Adams’s shoulder, which jerked feebly under the touch.
The old man went to the door and called to the foreman.
“Here!” he said. “Run and tell my chauffeur to bring my car over here. Tell him to drive right up over the sidewalk and across the lot. Tell him to hurry!”
So, it happened, the great J. A. Lamb a second time brought his former clerk home, stricken and almost inanimate.
Chapter XXIV
* * *
ABOUT five o’clock that afternoon, the old gentleman came back to Adams’s house; and when Alice opened the door, he nodded, walked into the “living-room” without speaking; then stood frowning as if he hesitated to decide some perplexing question.
“Well, how is he now?” he asked, finally.
“The doctor was here again a little while ago; he thinks papa’s coming through it. He’s pretty sure he will.”
“Something like the way it was last spring?”
“Yes.”
“Not a bit of sense to it!” Lamb said, gruffly. “When he was getting well the other time the doctor told me it wasn’t a regular stroke, so to speak—this ‘cerebral effusion’ thing. Said there wasn’t any particular reason for your father to expect he’d ever have another attack, if he’d take a little care of himself. Said he could consider himself well as anybody else long as he did that.”
“Yes. But he didn’t do it!”
Lamb nodded, sighed aloud, and crossed the room to a chair. “I guess not,” he said, as he sat down. “Bustin’ his health up over his glue-works, I expect.”
“Yes.”
“I guess so; I guess so.” Then he looked up at her with a glimmer of anxiety in his eyes. “Has he came to yet?”
“Yes. He’s talked a little. His mind’s clear; he spoke to mama and me—and to Miss Perry.” Alice laughed sadly. “We were lucky enough to get her back, but papa didn’t seem to think it was lucky. When he recognized her he said, ‘Oh, my goodness, ’tisn’t you, is it!’”
“Well, that’s a good sign, if he’s getting a little cross. Did he—did he happen to say anything—for instance, about me?”
This question, awkwardly delivered, had the effect of removing the girl’s pallor; rosy tints came quickly upon her cheeks. “He—yes, he did,” she said. “Naturally, he’s troubled about—about——” She stopped.
“About your brother, maybe?”
“Yes, about making up the——”
“Here, now,” Lamb said, uncomfortably, as she stopped again. “Listen, young lady; let’s don’t talk about that just yet. I want to ask you: you understand all about this glue business, I expect, don’t you?”
“I’m not sure. I only know——”
“Let me tell you,” he interrupted, impatiently. “I’ll tell you all about it in two words. The process belonged to me, and your father up and walked off with it; there’s no getting around that much, anyhow.”
“Isn’t there?” Alice stared at him. “I think you’re mistaken, Mr. Lamb. Didn’t papa improve it so that it virtually belonged to him?”
There was a spark in the old blue eyes at this. “What?” he cried. “Is that the way he got around it? Why, in all my life I never heard of such a——” But he left the sentence unfinished; the testiness went out of his husky voice and the anger out of his eyes. “Well, I expect maybe that was the way of it,” he said. “Anyhow, it’s right for you to stand up for your father; and if you think he had a right to it——”
“But he did!” she cried.
“I expect so,” the old man returned, pacifically. “I expect so, probably. Anyhow, it’s a question that’s neither here nor there, right now. What I was thinking of saying—well, did your father happen to let out that he and I had words this morning?”
“No.”
“Well, we did.” He sighed and shook his head. “Your father—well, he used some pretty hard expressions toward me, you
ng lady. They weren’t so, I’m glad to say, but he used ’em to me, and the worst of it was he believed ’em. Well, I been thinking it over, and I thought I’d just have a kind of little talk with you to set matters straight, so to speak.”
“Yes, Mr. Lamb.”
“For instance,” he said, “it’s like this. Now, I hope you won’t think I mean any indelicacy, but you take your brother’s case, since we got to mention it, why, your father had the whole thing worked out in his mind about as wrong as anybody ever got anything. If I’d acted the way your father thought I did about that, why, somebody just ought to take me out and shoot me! Do you know what that man thought?”
“I’m not sure.”
He frowned at her, and asked, “Well, what do you think about it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t believe I think anything at all about anything to-day.”
“Well, well,” he returned; “I expect not; I expect not. You kind of look to me as if you ought to be in bed yourself, young lady.”
“Oh, no.”
“I guess you mean ‘Oh, yes’; and I won’t keep you long, but there’s something we got to get fixed up, and I’d rather talk to you than I would to your mother, because you’re a smart girl and always friendly; and I want to be sure I’m understood. Now, listen.”
“I will,” Alice promised, smiling faintly.
“I never even hardly noticed your brother was still working for me,” he explained, earnestly. “I never thought anything about it. My sons sort of tried to tease me about the way your father—about his taking up this glue business, so to speak—and one day Albert, Junior, asked me if I felt all right about your brother’s staying there after that, and I told him—well, I just asked him to shut up. If the boy wanted to stay there, I didn’t consider it my business to send him away on account of any feeling I had toward his father; not as long as he did his work right—and the report showed he did. Well, as it happens, it looks now as if he stayed because he had to; he couldn’t quit because he’d ’a’ been found out if he did. Well, he’d been covering up his shortage for a considerable time—and do you know what your father practically charged me with about that?”
Booth Tarkington Page 57
