The Flirt

by Booth Tarkington

  Corliss described picturesquely the difficulties of this enterprise, the hardships and disappointments; how they dragged the big tools over the mountains by mule power; how they had kept it all secret; how he and Moliterno had done everything with the help of peasant labourers and one experienced man, who had “seen service in the Persian oil-fields.”

  He gave the business reality, colouring it with details relevant and irrelevant, anecdotes and wayside incidents: he was fluent, elaborate, explicit throughout. They sank five wells, he said, “at the angles of this irregular pentagon you see here on the map, outlined in blue. These red circles are the wells.” Four of the wells “came in tremendous,” but they had managed to get them sealed after wasting—he was “sorry to think how many thousand barrels of oil.” The fifth well was so enormous that they had not been able to seal it at the time of the speaker’s departure for America.

  “But I had a cablegram this morning,” he added, “letting me know they’ve managed to do it at last. Here is, the cablegram.” He handed Richard a form signed “Antonio Moliterno.”

  “Now, to go back to what I said about not `daring’ to speak of this in Naples,” he continued, smiling. “The fear is financial, not physical.”

  The knowledge of the lucky strike, he explained, must be kept from the “Neapolitan money-sharks.” A third of the land so rich in oil already belonged to the Moliterno estates, but it was necessary to obtain possession of the other two thirds “before the secret leaks into Naples.” So far, it was safe, the peasants of Basilicata being “as medieval a lot as one could wish.” He related that these peasants thought that the devils hiding inside the mountains had been stabbed by the drills, and that the oil was devils’ blood.

  “You can see some of the country people hanging about, staring at a well, in this kodak, though it’s not a very good one.” He put into Richard’s hand a small, blurred photograph showing a spouting well with an indistinct crowd standing in an irregular semicircle before it.

  “Is this the Basilicatan peasant costume? asked Richard, indicating a figure in the foreground, the only one revealed at all definitely. “It looks more oriental. Isn’t the man wearing a fez?”

  “Let me see,” responded Mr. Corliss very quickly. “Perhaps I gave you the wrong picture. Oh, no,” he laughed easily, holding the kodak closer to his eyes; “that’s all right: it is a fez. That’s old Salviati, our engineer, the man I spoke of who’d worked in Persia, you know; he’s always worn a fez since then. Got in the habit of it out there and says he’ll never give it up. Moliterno’s always chaffing him about it. He’s a faithful old chap, Salviati.”

  “I see.” Lindley looked thoughtfully at the picture, which the other carelessly returned to his hand. “There seems to be a lot of oil there.”

  “It’s one of the smaller wells at that. And you can see from the kodak that it’s just `blowing’—not an eruption from being `shot,’ or the people wouldn’t stand so near. Yes; there’s an ocean of oil under that whole province; but we want a lot of money to get at it. It’s mountain country; our wells will all have to go over fifteen-hundred feet, and that’s expensive. We want to pipe the oil to Salerno, where the Standard’s ships will take it from us, and it will need a great deal for that. But most of all we want money to get hold of the land; we must control the whole field, and it’s big!”

  “How did you happen to come here to finance it?”

  “I was getting to that. Moliterno himself is as honourable a man as breathes God’s air. But my experience has been that Neapolitan capitalists are about the cleverest and slipperiest financiers in the world. We could have financed it twenty times over in Naples in a day, but neither Moliterno nor I was willing to trust them. The thing is enormous, you see—a really colossal fortune—and Italian law is full of ins and outs, and the first man we talked to confidentially would have given us his word to play straight, and, the instant we left him, would have flown post-haste for Basilicata and grabbed for himself the two thirds of the field not yet in our hands. Moliterno and I talked it over many, many times; we thought of going to Rome for the money, to Paris, to London, to New York; but I happened to remember the old house here that my aunt had left me—I wanted to sell it, to add whatever it brought to the money I’ve already put in—and then it struck me I might raise the rest here as well as anywhere else.”

  The other nodded. “I understand.”

  “I suppose you’ll think me rather sentimental,” Corliss went on, with a laugh which unexpectedly betrayed a little shyness. “I’ve never forgotten that I was born here—was a boy here. In all my wanderings I’ve always really thought of this as home.”

  His voice trembled slightly and his face flushed; he smiled deprecatingly as though in apology for these symptoms of emotion; and at that both listeners felt (perhaps with surprise) the man’s strong attraction. There was something very engaging about him: in the frankness of his look and in the slight tremor in his voice; there was something appealing and yet manly in the confession, by this thoroughgoing cosmopolite, of his real feeling for the home-town.

  “Of course I know how very few people, even among the `old citizens,’ would have any recollection whatever of me,” he went on; “but that doesn’t make any difference in my sentiment for the place and its people. That street out yonder was named for my grandfather: there’s a statue of my great uncle in the State House yard; all my own blood: belonged here, and though I have been a wanderer and may not be remembered—naturally am NOT remembered—yet the name is honoured here, and I—I–-” He faltered again, then concluded with quiet earnestness: “I thought that if my good luck was destined to bring fortunes to others, it might as well be to my own kind—that at least I’d offer them the chance before I offered it to any one else.” He turned and looked Richard in the face. “That’s why I’m here, Mr. Lindley.”

  The other impulsively put out his hand. “I understand,” he said heartily.

  “Thank you.” Corliss changed his tone for one less serious. “You’ve listened very patiently and I hope you’ll be rewarded for it. Certainly you will if you decide to come in with us. May I leave the maps and descriptions with you?”

  “Yes, indeed. I’ll look them over carefully and have another talk with you about it.”

  “Thank heaven, THAT’S over!” exclaimed the lounger in the hammock, who had not once removed his fascinated stare from the expressive face of Valentine Corliss. “If you have now concluded with dull care, allow me to put a vital question: Mr. Corliss, do you sing?”

  The gentleman addressed favoured him with a quizzical glance from between half-closed lids, and probably checking an impulse to remark that he happened to know that his questioner sometimes sang, replied merely, “No.”

  “It is a pity.”

  “Why?”

  “Nothing,” returned the other, inconsequently. It just struck me that you ought to sing the Toreador song.”

  Richard Lindley, placing the notes and maps in his pocket, dropped them, and, stooping, began to gather the scattered papers with a very red face. Corliss, however, laughed good-naturedly.

  “That’s most flattering,” he said; “though there are other things in `Carmen’ I prefer—probably because one doesn’t hear them so eternally.”

  Vilas pulled himself up to a sitting position and began to swing again. “Observe our host, Mr. Corliss,” he commanded gayly. “He is a kind old Dobbin, much beloved, but cares damn little to hear you or me speak of music. He’d even rather discuss your oil business than listen to us talk of women, whereas nothing except women ever really interests YOU, my dear sir. He’s not our kind of man,” he concluded, mournfully; “not at all our kind of man!”

  “I hope,” Corliss suggested, “he’s going to be my kind of man in the development of these oil-fields.”

  “How ridic”—Mr. Vilas triumphed over the word after a slight struggle—“ulous! I shall review that: ridiculous of you to pretend to be interested in oil-fields. You are not that sort
of person whatever. Nothing could be clearer than that you would never waste the time demanded by fields of oil. Groundlings call this `the mechanical age’—a vulgar error. My dear sir, you and I know that it is the age of Woman! Even poets have begun to see that she is alive. Formerly we did not speak of her at all, but of late years she has become such a scandal that she is getting talked about. Even our dramas, which used to be all blood, have become all flesh. I wish I were dead—but will continue my harangue because the thought is pellucid. Women selecting men to mate with are of only two kinds, just as there are but two kinds of children in a toy-shop. One child sets its fancy on one partic”—the orator paused, then continued—“on one certain toy and will make a distressing scene if she doesn’t get it: she will have that one; she will go straight to it, clasp it and keep it; she won’t have any other. The other kind of woman is to be understood if you will make the experiment of taking the other kind of child to a toy-shop and telling her you will buy her any toy in the place, but that you will buy her only one. If you do this in the morning, she will still be in the shop when it is closing for the night, because, though she runs to each toy in turn with excitement and delight, she sees another over her shoulder, and the one she has not touched is always her choice—until she has touched it! Some get broken in the handling. For my part, my wires are working rather rustily, but I must obey the Stage-Manager. For my requiem I wish somebody would ask them to play Gounod’s masterpiece.”

  “What’s that?” asked Corliss, amused.

  “`The Funeral March of a Marionette!’”

  “I suppose you mean that for a cheerful way of announcing that you are a fatalist.”

  “Fatalism? That is only a word, declared Mr. Vilas gravely. “If I am not a puppet then I am a god. Somehow, I do not seem to be a god. If a god is a god, one thinks he would know it himself. I now yield the floor. Thanking you cordially, I believe there is a lady walking yonder who commands salutation.”

  He rose to his feet, bowing profoundly. Cora Madison was passing, strolling rather briskly down the street, not in the direction of her home. She waved her parasol with careless gayety to the trio under the trees, and, going on, was lost to their sight.

  “Hello!” exclaimed Corliss, looking at his watch with a start of surprise. “I have two letters to write for the evening mail. I must be off.”

  At this, Ray Vilas’s eyes—still fixed upon him, as they had been throughout the visit—opened to their fullest capacity, in a gaze of only partially alcoholic wildness.

  Entirely aware of this singular glare, but not in the least disconcerted by it, the recipient proffered his easy farewells. “I had no idea it was so late. Good afternoon. Mr. Vilas, I have been delighted with your diagnosis. Lindley, I’m at your disposal when you’ve looked over my data. My very warm thanks for your patience, and—addio!”

  Lindley looked after him as he strode quickly away across the green lawn, turning, at the street, in the direction Cora had taken; and the troubled Richard felt his heart sink with vague but miserable apprehension. There was a gasp of desperation beside him, and the sound of Ray Vilas’s lips parting and closing with little noises of pain.

  “So he knows her,” said the boy, his thin body shaking. “Look at him, damn him! See his deep chest, that conqueror’s walk, the easy, confident, male pride of him: a true-born, natural rake—the Toreador all over!”

  His agitation passed suddenly; he broke into a loud laugh, and flung a reckless hand to his companion’s shoulder.

  “You good old fool,” he cried. “YOU’LL never play Don Jose!”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Hedrick Madison, like too many other people, had never thought seriously about the moon; nor ever had he encouraged it to become his familiar; and he underwent his first experience of its incomparable betrayals one brilliant night during the last week of that hot month. The preface to this romantic evening was substantial and prosaic: four times during dinner was he copiously replenished with hash, which occasioned so rich a surfeit within him that, upon the conclusion of the meal, he found himself in no condition to retort appropriately to a solicitous warning from Cora to keep away from the cat. Indeed, it was half an hour later, and he was sitting—to his own consciousness too heavily—upon the back fence, when belated inspiration arrived. But there is no sound where there is no ear to hear, and no repartee, alas! when the wretch who said the first part has gone, so that Cora remained unscathed as from his alley solitude Hedrick hurled in the teeth of the rising moon these bitter words:

  “Oh, no; OUR cat only eats SOFT meat!”

  He renewed a morbid silence, and the moon, with its customary deliberation, swung clear of a sweeping branch of the big elm in the front yard and shone full upon him. Nothing warned the fated youth not to sit there; no shadow of imminent catastrophe tinted that brightness: no angel whisper came to him, bidding him begone—and to go in a hurry and as far as possible. No; he sat upon the fence an inoffensive lad, and—except for still feeling his hash somewhat, and a gradually dispersing rancour concerning the cat—at peace. It is for such lulled mortals that the ever-lurking Furies save their most hideous surprises.

  Chin on palms, he looked idly at the moon, and the moon inscrutably returned his stare. Plausible, bright, bland, it gave no sign that it was at its awful work. For the bride of night is like a card-dealer whose fingers move so swiftly through the pack the trickery goes unseen.

  This moon upon which he was placidly gazing, because he had nothing else to do, betokened nought to Hedrick: to him it was the moon of any other night, the old moon; certainly no moon of his delight. Withal, it may never be gazed upon so fixedly and so protractedly—no matter how languidly—with entire impunity. That light breeds a bug in the brain. Who can deny how the moon wrought this thing under the hair of unconscious Hedrick, or doubt its responsibility for the thing that happened?

  “LITTLE BOY!”

  It was a very soft, small voice, silky and queer; and at first Hedrick had little suspicion that it could be addressing him: the most rigid self-analysis could have revealed to him no possibility of his fitting so ignominious a description.

  “Oh, little boy!”

  He looked over his shoulder and saw, standing in the alley behind him, a girl of about his own age. She was daintily dressed and had beautiful hair which was all shining in pale gold.

  “Little boy!”

  She was smiling up at him, and once more she used that wantonly inaccurate vocative:

  “Little boy!”

  Hedrick grunted unencouragingly. “Who you callin’ `little boy’?”

  For reply she began to climb the fence. It was high, but the young lady was astonishingly agile, and not even to be deterred by several faint wails from tearing and ripping fabrics—casualties which appeared to be entirely beneath her notice. Arriving at the top rather dishevelled, and with irregular pennons here and there flung to the breeze from her attire, she seated herself cosily beside the dumbfounded Hedrick.

  She turned her face to him and smiled—and there was something about her smile which Hedrick did not like. It discomforted him; nothing more. In sunlight he would have had the better chance to comprehend; but, unhappily, this was moonshine.

  “Kiss me, little boy!” she said.

  “I won’t!” exclaimed the shocked and indignant Hedrick, edging uneasily away from her.

  “Let’s play,” she said cheerfully.

  “Play what?”

  “I like chickens. Did you know I like chickens?”

  The rather singular lack of connection in her remarks struck him as a misplaced effort at humour.

  “You’re having lots of fun with me, aren’t you?” he growled.

  She instantly moved close to him and lifted her face to his.

  “Kiss me, darling little boy!” she said.

  There was something more than uncommonly queer about this stranger, an unearthliness of which he was confusedly perceptive, but she was not without a curious kind of prettin
ess, and her pale gold hair was beautiful. The doomed lad saw the moon shining through it.

  “Kiss me, darling little boy!” she repeated.

  His head whirled; for the moment she seemed divine.

  George Washington used profanity at the Battle of Monmouth. Hedrick kissed her.

  He instantly pushed her away with strong distaste. “There!” he said angrily. “I hope that’ll satisfy you!” He belonged to his sex.

  “Kiss me some more, darling little boy!” she cried, and flung her arms about him.

  With a smothered shout of dismay he tried to push her off, and they fell from the fence together, into the yard, at the cost of further and almost fatal injuries to the lady’s apparel.

  Hedrick was first upon his feet. “Haven’t you got ANY sense?” he demanded.

  She smiled unwaveringly, rose (without assistance) and repeated: “Kiss me some more, darling little boy!”

  “No, I won’t! I wouldn’t for a thousand dollars!”

  Apparently, she did not consider this discouraging. She began to advance endearingly, while he retreated backward. “Kiss me some–-“

  “I won’t, I tell you!” Hedrick kept stepping away, moving in a desperate circle. He resorted to a brutal formula: “You make me sick!”

  “Kiss me some more, darling lit–-“

  “I won’t!” he bellowed. “And if you say that again I’ll–-“

  “Kiss me some more, darling little boy!” She flung herself at him, and with a yell of terror he turned and ran at top-speed.

  She pursued, laughing sweetly, and calling loudly as she ran, “Kiss me some more, darling little boy! Kiss me some more, darling little boy!”