Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “Go ahead!” he whispered. “Do that all you want to. If you’ll keep it up like this awhile, I’ll follow with ‘Little Brown Jug, How I Love Thee!’ It seems to pay, after all!”

  The welcome strains, however, were but the prelude to a harsher sound which interrupted and annihilated them: the Court-house bell clanging out twelve. “All right,” said Joe. “It’s noon and I’m ‘across Main Street bridge.’”

  He opened his eyes and looked about him whimsically. Then he shook his head again.

  A lady had just emerged from the bridge and was coming toward him.

  It would be hard to get at Joe’s first impressions of her. We can find conveyance for only the broadest and heaviest. Ancient and modern instances multiply the case of the sleeper who dreams out a long story in accurate color and fine detail, a tale of years, in the opening and shutting of a door. So with Joseph, in the brief space of the lady’s approach. And with him, as with the sleeper, it must have been — in fact it was, in his recollections, later — a blur of emotion.

  At first sight of her, perhaps it was pre-eminently the shock of seeing anything so exquisite where he had expected to see nothing at all. For she was exquisite — horrid as have been the uses of the word, its best and truest belong to her; she was that and much more, from the ivory ferrule of the parasol she carried, to the light and slender footprint she left in the dust of the road. Joe knew at once that nothing like her had ever before been seen in Canaan.

  He had little knowledge of the millinery arts, and he needed none to see the harmony — harmony like that of the day he had discovered a little while ago. Her dress and hat and gloves and parasol showed a pale lavender overtint like that which he had seen overspreading the western slope. (Afterward, he discovered that the gloves she wore that day were gray, and that her hat was for the most part white.) The charm of fabric and tint belonging to what she wore was no shame to her, not being of primal importance beyond herself; it was but the expression of her daintiness and the adjunct of it. She was tall, but if Joe could have spoken or thought of her as “slender,” he would have been capable of calling her lips “red,” in which case he would not have been Joe, and would have been as far from the truth as her lips were from red, or as her supreme delicateness was from mere slenderness.

  Under the summer hat her very dark hair swept back over her temples with something near trimness in the extent to which it was withheld from being fluffy. It may be that this approach to trimness, which was, after all, only a sort of coquetry with trimness, is the true key to the mystery of the vision of the lady who appeared to Joe. Let us say that she suppressed everything that went beyond grace; that the hint of floridity was abhorrent to her. “Trim” is as clumsy as “slender”; she had escaped from the trimness of girlhood as wholly as she had gone through its coltishness. “Exquisite.” Let us go back to Joe’s own blurred first thought of her and be content with that!

  She was to pass him — so he thought — and as she drew nearer, his breath came faster.

  “REMEMBER! ACROSS MAIN STREET BRIDGE AT NOON!” Was THIS the fay of whom the voice had warned him? With that, there befell him the mystery of last night. He did not remember, but it was as if he lived again, dimly, the highest hour of happiness in a life a thousand years ago; perfume and music, roses, nightingales and plucked harp-strings. Yes; something wonderful was happening to him.

  She had stopped directly in front of him; stopped and stood looking at him with her clear eyes. He did not lift his own to hers; he had long experience of the averted gaze of women; but it was not only that; a great shyness beset him. He had risen and removed his hat, trying (ineffectually) not to clear his throat; his every-day sense urging upon him that she was a stranger in Canaan who had lost her way — the preposterousness of any one’s losing the way in Canaan not just now appealing to his every — day sense.

  “Can I — can I—” he stammered, blushing miserably, meaning to finish with “direct you,” or “show you the way.”

  Then he looked at her again and saw what seemed to him the strangest sight of his life. The lady’s eyes had filled with tears — filled and overfilled. “I’ll sit here on the log with you,” she said. And her voice was the voice which he had heard saying, “REMEMBER! ACROSS MAIN STREET BRIDGE AT NOON!”

  “WHAT!” he gasped.

  “You don’t need to dust it!” she went on, tremulously. And even then he did not know who she was.

  XI. WHEN HALF-GODS GO

  THERE WAS A silence, for if the dazzled young man could have spoken at all, He could have found nothing to say; and, perhaps, the lady would not trust her own voice just then. His eyes had fallen again; he was too dazed, and, in truth, too panic-stricken, now, to look at her, though if he had been quite sure that she was part of a wonderful dream he might have dared. She was seated beside him, and had handed him her parasol in a little way which seemed to imply that of course he had reached for it, so that it was to be seen how used she was to have all tiny things done for her, though this was not then of his tremulous observing. He did perceive, however, that he was to furl the dainty thing; he pressed the catch, and let down the top timidly, as if fearing to break or tear it; and, as it closed, held near his face, he caught a very faint, sweet, spicy emanation from it like wild roses and cinnamon.

  He did not know her; but his timidity and a strange little choke in his throat, the sudden fright which had seized upon him, were not caused by embarrassment. He had no thought that she was one he had known but could not, for the moment, recall; there was nothing of the awkwardness of that; no, he was overpowered by the miracle of this meeting. And yet, white with marvelling, he felt it to be so much more touchingly a great happiness than he had ever known that at first it was inexpressibly sad.

  At last he heard her voice again, shaking a little, as she said:

  “I am glad you remembered.”

  “Remembered what?” he faltered.

  “Then you don’t?” she cried. “And yet you came.”

  “Came here, do you mean?”

  “Yes — now, at noon.”

  “Ah!” he half whispered, unable to speak aloud. “Was it you who said — who said, ‘Remember! Across — across—”’

  “‘Across Main Street bridge at noon!’” she finished for him, gently. “Yes.”

  He took a deep breath in the wonder of it. “Where was it you said that?” he asked, slowly. “Was it last night?”

  “Don’t you even know that you came to meet me?”

  “I — came to — to meet — you!”

  She gave a little pitying cry, very near a sob, seeing his utter bewilderment.

  “It was like the strangest dream in the world,” she said. “You were at the station when I came, last night. You don’t remember at all?”

  His eyes downcast, his face burning hotly, he could only shake his head.

  “Yes,” she continued. “I thought no one would be there, for I had not written to say what train I should take, but when I stepped down from the platform, you were standing there; though you didn’t see me at first, not until I had called your name and ran to you. You said, ‘I’ve come to meet you,’ but you said it queerly, I thought. And then you called a carriage for me; but you seemed so strange you couldn’t tell how you knew that I was coming, and — and then I — I understood you weren’t yourself. You were very quiet, but I knew, I knew! So I made you get into the carriage — and — and—”

  She faltered to a stop, and with that, shame itself brought him courage; he turned and faced her. She had lifted her handkerchief to her eyes, but at his movement she dropped it, and it was not so much the delicate loveliness of her face that he saw then as the tears upon her cheeks.

  “Ah, poor boy!” she cried. “I knew! I knew!”

  “You — you took me home?”

  “You told me where you lived,” she answered. “Yes, I took you home.”

  “I don’t understand,” he stammered, huskily. “I don’t understand!”
/>   She leaned toward him slightly, looking at him with great intentness.

  “You didn’t know me last night,” she said. “Do you know me now?”

  For answer he could only stare at her, dumfounded. He lifted an unsteady hand toward her appealingly. But the manner of the lady, as she saw the truth, underwent an April change. She drew back lightly; he was favored with the most delicious, low laugh he had ever heard, and, by some magic whisk which she accomplished, there was no sign of tears about her.

  “Ah! I’m glad you’re the same, Joe!” she said. “You never would or could pretend very well. I’m glad you’re the same, and I’m glad I’ve changed, though that isn’t why you have forgotten me. You’ve forgotten me because you never thought of me. Perhaps I should not have known you if you had changed a great deal — as I have!”

  He started, leaning back from her.

  “Ah!” she laughed. “That’s it! That funny little twist of the head you always had, like a — like a — well, you know I must have told you a thousand times that it was like a nice friendly puppy; so why shouldn’t I say so now? And your eyebrows! When you look like that, nobody could ever forget you, Joe!”

  He rose from the log, and the mongrel leaped upon him uproariously, thinking they were to go home, belike to food.

  The lady laughed again. “Don’t let him spoil my parasol. And I must warn you now: Never, never TREAD ON MY SKIRT! I’m very irritable about such things!”

  He had taken three or four uncertain backward steps from her. She sat before him, radiant with laughter, the loveliest creature he had ever seen; but between him and this charming vision there swept, through the warm, scented June air, a veil of snow like a driven fog, and, half obscured in the heart of it, a young girl stood, knee-deep in a drift piled against an old picket gate, her black water-proof and shabby skirt flapping in the blizzard like torn sails, one of her hands out-stretched toward him, her startled eyes fixed on his.

  “And, oh, how like you,” said the lady; “how like you and nobody else in the world, Joe, to have a yellow dog!”

  “ARIEL TABOR!”

  His lips formed the words without sound.

  “Isn’t it about time?” she said. “Are strange ladies in the HABIT of descending from trains to take you home?”

  Once, upon a white morning long ago, the sensational progress of a certain youth up Main Street had stirred Canaan. But that day was as nothing to this. Mr. Bantry had left temporary paralysis in his wake; but in the case of the two young people who passed slowly along the street to-day it was petrifaction, which seemingly threatened in several instances (most notably that of Mr. Arp) to become permanent.

  The lower portion of the street, lined with three and four story buildings of brick and stone, rather grim and hot facades under the mid-day sun, afforded little shade to the church-comers, who were working homeward in processional little groups and clumps, none walking fast, though none with the appearance of great leisure, since neither rate of progress would have been esteemed befitting the day. The growth of Canaan, steady, though never startling, had left almost all of the churches down-town, and Main Street the principal avenue of communication between them and the “residence section.” So, to-day, the intermittent procession stretched along the new cement side-walks from a little below the Square to Upper Main Street, where maples lined the thoroughfare and the mansions of the affluent stood among pleasant lawns and shrubberies. It was late; for this had been a communion Sunday, and those far in advance, who had already reached the pretty and shady part of the street, were members of the churches where services had been shortest; though few in the long parade looked as if they had been attending anything very short, and many heads of families were crisp in their replies to the theological inquiries of their offspring. The men imparted largely a gloom to the itinerant concourse, most of them wearing hot, long black coats and having wilted their collars; the ladies relieving this gloom somewhat by the lighter tints of their garments; the spick-and-span little girls relieving it greatly by their white dresses and their faces, the latter bright with the hope of Sunday ice-cream; while the boys, experiencing some solace in that they were finally out where a person could at least scratch himself if he had to, yet oppressed by the decorous necessities of the day, marched along, furtively planning, behind imperturbably secretive countenances, various means for the later dispersal of an odious monotony.

  Usually the conversation of this long string of the homeward-bound was not too frivolous or worldly; nay, it properly inclined to discussion of the sermon; that is, praise of the sermon, with here and there a mild “I-didn’t-like-his-saying” or so; and its lighter aspects were apt to concern the next “Social,” or various pleasurable schemes for the raising of funds to help the heathen, the quite worthy poor, or the church.

  This was the serious and seemly parade, the propriety of whose behavior was to-day almost disintegrated when the lady of the bridge walked up the street in the shadow of a lacy, lavender parasol carried by Joseph Louden. The congregation of the church across the Square, that to which Joe’s step-aunt had been late, was just debouching, almost in mass, upon Main Street, when these two went by. It is not quite the truth to say that all except the children came to a dead halt, but it is not very far from it. The air was thick with subdued exclamations and whisperings.

  Here is no mystery. Joe was probably the only person of respectable derivation in Canaan who had not known for weeks that Ariel Tabor was on her way home. And the news that she had arrived the night before had been widely disseminated on the way to church, entering church, IN church (even so!), and coming out of church. An account of her house in the Avenue Henri Martin, and of her portrait in the Salon — a mysterious business to many, and not lacking in grandeur for that! — had occupied two columns in the Tocsin, on a day, some months before, when Joe had found himself inimically head-lined on the first page, and had dropped the paper without reading further. Ariel’s name had been in the mouth of Canaan for a long time; unfortunately for Joe, however, not in the mouth of that Canaan which held converse with him.

  Joe had not known her. The women recognized her, infallibly, at first glance; even those who had quite forgotten her. And the women told their men. Hence the un-Sunday-like demeanor of the procession, for few towns hold it more unseemly to stand and stare at passers-by, especially on the Sabbath. — BUT Ariel Tabor returned — and walking with — WITH JOE LOUDEN! ...

  A low but increasing murmur followed the two as they proceeded. It ran up the street ahead of them; people turned to look back and paused, so that they had to walk round one or two groups. They had, also, to walk round Norbert Flitcroft, which was very like walking round a group. He was one of the few (he was waddling home alone) who did not identify Miss Tabor, and her effect upon him was extraordinary. His mouth opened and he gazed stodgily, his widening eyes like sun-dogs coming out of a fog. He did not recognize her escort; did not see him at all until they had passed, after which Mr. Flitcroft experienced a few moments of trance; came out of it stricken through and through; felt nervously of his tie; resolutely fell in behind the heeling mongrel and followed, at a distance of some forty paces, determined to learn what household this heavenly visitor honored, and thrilling with the intention to please that same household with his own presence as soon and as often as possible.

  Ariel flushed a little when she perceived the extent of their conspicuousness; but it was not the blush that Joe remembered had reddened the tanned skin of old; for her brownness had gone long ago, though it had not left her merely pink and white. This was a delicate rosiness rising from her cheeks to her temples as the earliest dawn rises. If there had been many words left in Joe, he would have called it a divine blush; it fascinated him, and if anything could have deepened the glamour about her, it would have been this blush. He did not understand it, but when he saw it he stumbled.

  Those who gaped and stared were for him only blurs in the background; truly, he saw “men as trees walking”; and
when it became necessary to step out to the curb in passing some clump of people, it was to him as if Ariel and he, enchantedly alone, were working their way through underbrush in the woods.

  He kept trying to realize that this lady of wonder was Ariel Tabor, but he could not; he could not connect the shabby Ariel, whom he had treated as one boy treats another, with this young woman of the world. He had always been embarrassed, himself, and ashamed of her, when anything she did made him remember that, after all, she was a girl; as, on the day he ran away, when she kissed a lock of his hair escaping from the bandage. With that recollection, even his ears grew red: it did not seem probable that it would ever happen again! The next instant he heard himself calling her “Miss Tabor.”

  At this she seemed amused. “You ought to have called me that, years ago,” she said, “for all you knew me!”

  “I did know her — YOU, I mean!” he answered. “I used to know nearly everything you were going to say before you said it. It seems strange now—”

  “Yes,” she interrupted. “It does seem strange now!”

  “Somehow,” he went on, “I doubt if now I’d know.”

  “Somehow,” she echoed, with fine gravity, “I doubt it, too.”

  Although he had so dim a perception of the staring and whispering which greeted and followed them, Ariel, of course, was thoroughly aware of it, though the only sign she gave was the slight blush, which very soon disappeared. That people turned to look at her may have been not altogether a novelty: a girl who had learned to appear unconscious of the Continental stare, the following gaze of the boulevards, the frank glasses of the Costanza in Rome, was not ill equipped to face Main Street, Canaan, even as it was to-day.