Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  CHAPTER III

  BEGINNING AT THE beginning and learning from the ground up was a long course for Bibbs at the sanitarium, with milk and “zwieback” as the basis of instruction; and the months were many and tiresome before he was considered near enough graduation to go for a walk leaning on a nurse and a cane. These and subsequent months saw the planning, the building, and the completion of the New House; and it was to that abode of Bigness that Bibbs was brought when the cane, without the nurse, was found sufficient to his support.

  Edith met him at the station. “Well, well, Bibbs!” she said, as he came slowly through the gates, the last of all the travelers from that train. She gave his hand a brisk little shake, averting her eyes after a quick glance at him, and turning at once toward the passage to the street. “Do you think they ought to’ve let you come? You certainly don’t look well!”

  “But I certainly do look better,” he returned, in a voice as slow as his gait; a drawl that was a necessity, for when Bibbs tried to speak quickly he stammered. “Up to about a month ago it took two people to see me. They had to get me in a line between ’em!”

  Edith did not turn her eyes directly toward him again, after her first quick glance; and her expression, in spite of her, showed a faint, troubled distaste, the look of a healthy person pressed by some obligation of business to visit a “bad” ward in a hospital. She was nineteen, fair and slim, with small, unequal features, but a prettiness of color and a brilliancy of eyes that created a total impression close upon beauty. Her movements were eager and restless: there was something about her, as kind old ladies say, that was very sweet; and there was something that was hurried and breathless. This was new to Bibbs; it was a perceptible change since he had last seen her, and he bent upon her a steady, whimsical scrutiny as they stood at the curb, waiting for an automobile across the street to disengage itself from the traffic.

  “That’s the new car,” she said. “Everything’s new. We’ve got four now, besides Jim’s. Roscoe’s got two.”

  “Edith, you look—” he began, and paused.

  “Oh, WE’re all well,” she said, briskly; and then, as if something in his tone had caught her as significant, “Well, HOW do I look, Bibbs?”

  “You look—” He paused again, taking in the full length of her — her trim brown shoes, her scant, tapering, rough skirt, and her coat of brown and green, her long green tippet and her mad little rough hat in the mad mode — all suited to the October day.

  “How do I look?” she insisted.

  “You look,” he answered, as his examination ended upon an incrusted watch of platinum and enamel at her wrist, “you look — expensive!” That was a substitute for what he intended to say, for her constraint and preoccupation, manifested particularly in her keeping her direct glance away from him, did not seem to grant the privilege of impulsive intimacies.

  “I expect I am!” she laughed, and sidelong caught the direction of his glance. “Of course I oughtn’t to wear it in the daytime — it’s an evening thing, for the theater — but my day wrist-watch is out of gear. Bobby Lamhorn broke it yesterday; he’s a regular rowdy sometimes. Do you want Claus to help you in?”

  “Oh no,” said Bibbs. “I’m alive.” And after a fit of panting subsequent to his climbing into the car unaided, he added, “Of course, I have to TELL people!”

  “We only got your telegram this morning,” she said, as they began to move rapidly through the “wholesale district” neighboring the station. “Mother said she’d hardly expected you this month.”

  “They seemed to be through with me up there in the country,” he explained, gently. “At least they said they were, and they wouldn’t keep me any longer, because so many really sick people wanted to get in. They told me to go home — and I didn’t have any place else to go. It’ll be all right, Edith; I’ll sit in the woodshed until after dark every day.”

  “Pshaw!” She laughed nervously. “Of course we’re all of us glad to have you back.”

  “Yes?” he said. “Father?”

  “Of course! Didn’t he write and tell you to come home?” She did not turn to him with the question. All the while she rode with her face directly forward.

  “No,” he said; “father hasn’t written.”

  She flushed a little. “I expect I ought to’ve written sometime, or one of the boys—”

  “Oh no; that was all right.”

  “You can’t think how busy we’ve all been this year, Bibbs. I often planned to write — and then, just as I was going to, something would turn up. And I’m sure it’s been just the same way with Jim and Roscoe. Of course we knew mamma was writing often and—”

  “Of course!” he said, readily. “There’s a chunk of coal fallen on your glove, Edith. Better flick it off before it smears. My word! I’d almost forgotten how sooty it is here.”

  “We’ve been having very bright weather this month — for us.” She blew the flake of soot into the air, seeming relieved.

  He looked up at the dingy sky, wherein hung the disconsolate sun like a cold tin pan nailed up in a smoke-house by some lunatic, for a decoration. “Yes,” said Bibbs. “It’s very gay.” A few moments later, as they passed a corner, “Aren’t we going home?” he asked.

  “Why, yes! Did you want to go somewhere else first?”

  “No. Your new driver’s taking us out of the way, isn’t he?”

  “No. This is right. We’re going straight home.”

  “But we’ve passed the corner. We always turned—”

  “Good gracious!” she cried. “Didn’t you know we’d moved? Didn’t you know we were in the New House?”

  “Why, no!” said Bibbs. “Are you?”

  “We’ve been there a month! Good gracious! Didn’t you know—” She broke off, flushing again, and then went on hastily: “Of course, mamma’s never been so busy in her life; we ALL haven’t had time to do anything but keep on the hop. Mamma couldn’t even come to the station to-day. Papa’s got some of his business friends and people from around the OLD-house neighborhood coming to-night for a big dinner and ‘house-warming’ — dreadful kind of people — but mamma’s got it all on her hands. She’s never sat down a MINUTE; and if she did, papa would have her up again before—”

  “Of course,” said Bibbs. “Do you like the new place, Edith?”

  “I don’t like some of the things father WOULD have in it, but it’s the finest house in town, and that ought to be good enough for me! Papa bought one thing I like — a view of the Bay of Naples in oil that’s perfectly beautiful; it’s the first thing you see as you come in the front hall, and it’s eleven feet long. But he would have that old fruit picture we had in the Murphy Street house hung up in the new dining-room. You remember it — a table and a watermelon sliced open, and a lot of rouged-looking apples and some shiny lemons, with two dead prairie-chickens on a chair? He bought it at a furniture-store years and years ago, and he claims it’s a finer picture than any they saw in the museums, that time he took mamma to Europe. But it’s horribly out of date to have those things in dining-rooms, and I caught Bobby Lamhorn giggling at it; and Sibyl made fun of it, too, with Bobby, and then told papa she agreed with him about its being such a fine thing, and said he did just right to insist on having it where he wanted it. She makes me tired! Sibyl!”

  Edith’s first constraint with her brother, amounting almost to awkwardness, vanished with this theme, though she still kept her full gaze always to the front, even in the extreme ardor of her denunciation of her sister-in-law.

  “SIBYL!” she repeated, with such heat and vigor that the name seemed to strike fire on her lips. “I’d like to know why Roscoe couldn’t have married somebody from HERE that would have done us some good! He could have got in with Bobby Lamhorn years ago just as well as now, and Bobby’d have introduced him to the nicest girls in town, but instead of that he had to go and pick up this Sibyl Rink! I met some awfully nice people from her town when mamma and I were at Atlantic City, last spring, and not one had e
ver heard of the Rinks! Not even HEARD of ’em!”

  “I thought you were great friends with Sibyl,” Bibbs said.

  “Up to the time I found her out!” the sister returned, with continuing vehemence. “I’ve found out some things about Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan lately—”

  “It’s only lately?”

  “Well—” Edith hesitated, her lips setting primly. “Of course, I always did see that she never cared the snap of her little finger about ROSCOE!”

  “It seems,” said Bibbs, in laconic protest, “that she married him.”

  The sister emitted a shrill cry, to be interpreted as contemptuous laughter, and, in her emotion, spoke too impulsively: “Why, she’d have married YOU!”

  “No, no,” he said; “she couldn’t be that bad!”

  “I didn’t mean—” she began, distressed. “I only meant — I didn’t mean—”

  “Never mind, Edith,” he consoled her. “You see, she couldn’t have married me, because I didn’t know her; and besides, if she’s as mercenary as all that she’d have been too clever. The head doctor even had to lend me the money for my ticket home.”

  “I didn’t mean anything unpleasant about YOU,” Edith babbled. “I only meant I thought she was the kind of girl who was so simply crazy to marry somebody she’d have married anybody that asked her.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Bibbs, “it’s all straight.” And, perceiving that his sister’s expression was that of a person whose adroitness has set matters perfectly to rights, he chuckled silently.

  “Roscoe’s perfectly lovely to her,” she continued, a moment later. “Too lovely! If he’d wake up a little and lay down the law, some day, like a MAN, I guess she’d respect him more and learn to behave herself!”

  “‘Behave’?”

  “Oh, well, I mean she’s so insincere,” said Edith, characteristically evasive when it came to stating the very point to which she had led, and in this not unique of her sex.

  Bibbs contented himself with a non-committal gesture. “Business is crawling up the old streets,” he said, his long, tremulous hand indicating a vasty structure in course of erection. “The boarding-houses come first and then the—”

  “That isn’t for shops,” she informed him. “That’s a new investment of papa’s — the ‘Sheridan Apartments.’”

  “Well, well,” he murmured. “I supposed ‘Sheridan’ was almost well enough known here already.”

  “Oh, we’re well enough known ABOUT!” she said, impatiently. “I guess there isn’t a man, woman, child, or nigger baby in town that doesn’t know who we are. But we aren’t in with the right people.”

  “No!” he exclaimed. “Who’s all that?”

  “Who’s all what?”

  “The ‘right people.’”

  “You know what I mean: the best people, the old families — the people that have the real social position in this town and that know they’ve got it.”

  Bibbs indulged in his silent chuckle again; he seemed greatly amused. “I thought that the people who actually had the real what-you-may-call-it didn’t know it,” he said. “I’ve always understood that it was very unsatisfactory, because if you thought about it you didn’t have it, and if you had it you didn’t know it.”

  “That’s just bosh,” she retorted. “They know it in this town, all right! I found out a lot of things, long before we began to think of building out in this direction. The right people in this town aren’t always the society-column ones, and they mix around with outsiders, and they don’t all belong to any one club — they’re taken in all sorts into all their clubs — but they’re a clan, just the same; and they have the clan feeling and they’re just as much We, Us and Company as any crowd you read about anywhere in the world. Most of ’em were here long before papa came, and the grandfathers of the girls of my age knew each other, and—”

  “I see,” Bibbs interrupted, gravely. “Their ancestors fled together from many a stricken field, and Crusaders’ blood flows in their veins. I always understood the first house was built by an old party of the name of Vertrees who couldn’t get along with Dan’l Boone, and hurried away to these parts because Dan’l wanted him to give back a gun he’d lent him.”

  Edith gave a little ejaculation of alarm. “You mustn’t repeat that story, Bibbs, even if it’s true. The Vertreeses are THE best family, and of course the very oldest here; they were an old family even before Mary Vertrees’s great-great-grandfather came west and founded this settlement. He came from Lynn, Massachusetts, and they have relatives there YET — some of the best people in Lynn!”

  “No!” exclaimed Bibbs, incredulously.

  “And there are other old families like the Vertreeses,” she went on, not heeding him; “the Lamhorns and the Kittersbys and the J. Palmerston Smiths—”

  “Strange names to me,” he interrupted. “Poor things! None of them have my acquaintance.”

  “No, that’s just it!” she cried. “And papa had never even heard the name of Vertrees! Mrs. Vertrees went with some anti-smoke committee to see him, and he told her that smoke was what made her husband bring home his wages from the pay-roll on Saturday night! HE told us about it, and I thought I just couldn’t live through the night, I was so ashamed! Mr. Vertrees has always lived on his income, and papa didn’t know him, of course. They’re the stiffist, most elegant people in the whole town. And to crown it all, papa went and bought the next lot to the old Vertrees country mansion — it’s in the very heart of the best new residence district now, and that’s where the New House is, right next door to them — and I must say it makes their place look rather shabby! I met Mary Vertrees when I joined the Mission Service Helpers, but she never did any more than just barely bow to me, and since papa’s break I doubt if she’ll do that! They haven’t called.”

  “And you think if I spread this gossip about Vertrees the First stealing Dan’l Boone’s gun, the chances that they WILL call—”

  “Papa knows what a break he made with Mrs. Vertrees. I made him understand that,” said Edith, demurely, “and he’s promised to try and meet Mr. Vertrees and be nice to him. It’s just this way: if we don’t know THEM, it’s practically no use in our having build the New House; and if we DO know them and they’re decent to us, we’re right with the right people. They can do the whole thing for us. Bobby Lamhorn told Sibyl he was going to bring his mother to call on her and on mamma, but it was weeks ago, and I notice he hasn’t done it; and if Mrs. Vertrees decides not to know us, I’m darn sure Mrs Lamhorn’ll never come. That’s ONE thing Sibyl didn’t manage! She SAID Bobby offered to bring his mother—”

  “You say he is a friend of Roscoe’s?” Bibbs asked.

  “Oh, he’s a friend of the whole family,” she returned, with a petulance which she made an effort to disguise. “Roscoe and he got acquainted somewhere, and they take him to the theater about every other night. Sibyl has him to lunch, too, and keeps—” She broke off with an angry little jerk of the head. “We can see the New House from the second corner ahead. Roscoe has built straight across the street from us, you know. Honestly, Sibyl makes me think of a snake, sometimes — the way she pulls the wool over people’s eyes! She honeys up to papa and gets anything in the world she wants out of him, and then makes fun of him behind his back — yes, and to his face, but HE can’t see it! She got him to give her a twelve-thousand-dollar porch for their house after it was—”

  “Good heavens!” said Bibbs, staring ahead as they reached the corner and the car swung to the right, following a bend in the street. “Is that the New House?”

  “Yes. What do you think of it?”

  “Well,” he drawled, “I’m pretty sure the sanitarium’s about half a size bigger; I can’t be certain till I measure.”

  And a moment later, as they entered the driveway, he added, seriously: “But it’s beautiful!”

  CHAPTER IV

  IT WAS GRAY stone, with long roofs of thick green slate. An architect who loved the milder “Gothic motives” had built what he
liked: it was to be seen at once that he had been left unhampered, and he had wrought a picture out of his head into a noble and exultant reality. At the same time a landscape-designer had played so good a second, with ready-made accessories of screen, approach and vista, that already whatever look of newness remained upon the place was to its advantage, as showing at least one thing yet clean under the grimy sky. For, though the smoke was thinner in this direction, and at this long distance from the heart of the town, it was not absent, and under tutelage of wind and weather could be malignant even here, where cows had wandered in the meadows and corn had been growing not ten years gone.

  Altogether, the New House was a success. It was one of those architects’ successes which leave the owners veiled in privacy; it revealed nothing of the people who lived in it save that they were rich. There are houses that cannot be detached from their own people without protesting: every inch of mortar seems to mourn the separation, and such a house — no matter what be done to it — is ever murmurous with regret, whispering the old name sadly to itself unceasingly. But the New House was of a kind to change hands without emotion. In our swelling cities, great places of its type are useful as financial gauges of the business tides; rich families, one after another, take title and occupy such houses as fortunes rise and fall — they mark the high tide. It was impossible to imagine a child’s toy wagon left upon a walk or driveway of the New House, and yet it was — as Bibbs rightly called it— “beautiful.”

  What the architect thought of the “Golfo di Napoli,” which hung in its vast gold revel of rococo frame against the gray wood of the hall, is to be conjectured — perhaps he had not seen it.

  “Edith, did you say only eleven feet?” Bibbs panted, staring at it, as the white-jacketed twin of a Pullman porter helped him to get out of his overcoat.

  “Eleven without the frame,” she explained. “It’s splendid, don’t you think? It lightens things up so. The hall was kind of gloomy before.”