Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  Mr. Vertrees, pinched, retired to his Landseers, and Mrs. Vertrees “managed somehow” on the dividends, though “managing” became more and more difficult as the years went by and money bought less and less. But there came a day when three servitors of Bigness in Philadelphia took greedy counsel with four fellow-worshipers from New York, and not long after that there were no more dividends for Mr. Vertrees. In fact, there was nothing for Mr. Vertrees, because the “traction stock” henceforth was no stock at all, and he had mortgaged his house long ago to help “manage somehow” according to his conception of his “position in life” — one of his own old-fashioned phrases. Six months before the completion of the New House next door, Mr. Vertrees had sold his horses and the worn Victoria and “station-wagon,” to pay the arrears of his two servants and re-establish credit at the grocer’s and butcher’s — and a pair of elderly carriage-horses with such accoutrements are not very ample barter, in these days, for six months’ food and fuel and service. Mr. Vertrees had discovered, too, that there was no salary for him in all the buzzing city — he could do nothing.

  It may be said that he was at the end of his string. Such times do come in all their bitterness, finally, to the man with no trade or craft, if his feeble clutch on that slippery ghost, Property, shall fail.

  The windows grew black while he paced the room, and smoky twilight closed round about the house, yet not more darkly than what closed round about the heart of the anxious little man patrolling the fan-shaped zone of firelight. But as the mantel clock struck wheezily six there was the rattle of an outer door, and a rich and beautiful peal of laughter went ringing through the house. Thus cheerfully did Mary Vertrees herald her return with her mother from their expedition among the barbarians.

  She came rushing into the library and threw herself into a deep chair by the hearth, laughing so uncontrollably that tears were in her eyes. Mrs. Vertrees followed decorously, no mirth about her; on the contrary, she looked vaguely disturbed, as if she had eaten something not quite certain to agree with her, and regretted it.

  “Papa! Oh, oh!” And Miss Vertrees was fain to apply a handkerchief upon her eyes. “I’m SO glad you made us go! I wouldn’t have missed it—”

  Mrs. Vertrees shook her head. “I suppose I’m very dull,” she said, gently. “I didn’t see anything amusing. They’re most ordinary, and the house is altogether in bad taste, but we anticipated that, and—”

  “Papa!” Mary cried, breaking in. “They asked us to DINNER!”

  “What!”

  “And I’m GOING!” she shouted, and was seized with fresh paroxysms. “Think of it! Never in their house before; never met any of them but the daughter — and just BARELY met her—”

  “What about you?” interrupted Mr. Vertrees, turning sharply upon his wife.

  She made a little face as if positive now that what she had eaten would not agree with her. “I couldn’t!” she said. “I—”

  “Yes, that’s just — just the way she — she looked when they asked her!” cried Mary, choking. “And then she — she realized it, and tried to turn it into a cough, and she didn’t know how, and it sounded like — like a squeal!”

  “I suppose,” said Mrs. Vertrees, much injured, “that Mary will have an uproarious time at my funeral. She makes fun of—”

  Mary jumped up instantly and kissed her; then she went to the mantel and, leaning an elbow upon it, gazed thoughtfully at the buckle of her shoe, twinkling in the firelight.

  “THEY didn’t notice anything,” she said. “So far as they were concerned, mamma, it was one of the finest coughs you ever coughed.”

  “Who were ‘they’?” asked her father. “Whom did you see?”

  “Only the mother and daughter,” Mary answered. “Mrs. Sheridan is dumpy and rustly; and Miss Sheridan is pretty and pushing — dresses by the fashion magazines and talks about New York people that have their pictures in ’em. She tutors the mother, but not very successfully — partly because her own foundation is too flimsy and partly because she began too late. They’ve got an enormous Moor of painted plaster or something in the hall, and the girl evidently thought it was to her credit that she selected it!”

  “They have oil-paintings, too,” added Mrs. Vertrees, with a glance of gentle price at the Landseers. “I’ve always thought oil-paintings in a private house the worst of taste.”

  “Oh, if one owned a Raphael or a Titian!” said Mr. Vertrees, finishing the implication, not in words, but with a wave of his hand. “Go on, Mary. None of the rest of them came in? You didn’t meet Mr. Sheridan or—” He paused and adjusted a lump of coal in the fire delicately with the poker. “Or one of the sons?”

  Mary’s glance crossed his, at that, with a flash of utter comprehension. He turned instantly away, but she had begun to laugh again.

  “No,” she said, “no one except the women, but mamma inquired about the sons thoroughly!”

  “Mary!” Mrs. Vertrees protested.

  “Oh, most adroitly, too!” laughed the girl. “Only she couldn’t help unconsciously turning to look at me — when she did it!”

  “Mary Vertrees!”

  “Never mind, mamma! Mrs. Sheridan and Miss Sheridan neither of THEM could help unconsciously turning to look at me — speculatively — at the same time! They all three kept looking at me and talking about the oldest son, Mr. James Sheridan, Junior. Mrs. Sheridan said his father is very anxious ‘to get Jim to marry and settle down,’ and she assured me that ‘Jim is right cultivated.’ Another of the sons, the youngest one, caught me looking in the window this afternoon; but they didn’t seem to consider him quite one of themselves, somehow, though Mrs. Sheridan mentioned that a couple of years or so ago he had been ‘right sick,’ and had been to some cure or other. They seemed relieved to bring the subject back to ‘Jim’ and his virtues — and to look at me! The other brother is the middle one, Roscoe; he’s the one that owns the new house across the street, where that young black-sheep of the Lamhorns, Robert, goes so often. I saw a short, dark young man standing on the porch with Robert Lamhorn there the other day, so I suppose that was Roscoe. ‘Jim’ still lurks in the mists, but I shall meet him to-night. Papa—” She stepped nearer to him so that he had to face her, and his eyes were troubled as he did. There may have been a trouble deep within her own, but she kept their surface merry with laughter. “Papa, Bibbs is the youngest one’s name, and Bibbs — to the best of our information — is a lunatic. Roscoe is married. Papa, does it have to be Jim?”

  “Mary!” Mrs. Vertrees cried, sharply. “You’re outrageous! That’s a perfectly horrible way of talking!”

  “Well, I’m close to twenty-four,” said Mary, turning to her. “I haven’t been able to like anybody yet that’s asked me to marry him, and maybe I never shall. Until a year or so ago I’ve had everything I ever wanted in my life — you and papa gave it all to me — and it’s about time I began to pay back. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to do anything — but something’s got to be done.”

  “But you needn’t talk of it like THAT!” insisted the mother, plaintively. “It’s not — it’s not—”

  “No, it’s not,” said Mary. “I know that!”

  “How did they happen to ask you to dinner?” Mr. Vertrees inquired, uneasily. “‘Stextrawdn’ry thing!”

  “Climbers’ hospitality,” Mary defined it. “We were so very cordial and easy! I think Mrs. Sheridan herself might have done it just as any kind old woman on a farm might ask a neighbor, but it was Miss Sheridan who did it. She played around it awhile; you could see she wanted to — she’s in a dreadful hurry to get into things — and I fancied she had an idea it might impress that Lamhorn boy to find us there to-night. It’s a sort of house-warming dinner, and they talked about it and talked about it — and then the girl got her courage up and blurted out the invitation. And mamma—” Here Mary was once more a victim to incorrigible merriment. “Mamma tried to say yes, and COULDN’T! She swallowed and squealed — I mean you coughed, dear! And then, papa
, she said that you and she had promised to go to a lecture at the Emerson Club to-night, but that her daughter would be delighted to come to the Big Show! So there I am, and there’s Mr. Jim Sheridan — and there’s the clock. Dinner’s at seven-thirty!”

  And she ran out of the room, scooping up her fallen furs with a gesture of flying grace as she sped.

  When she came down, at twenty minutes after seven, her father stood in the hall, at the foot of the stairs, waiting to be her escort through the dark. He looked up and watched her as she descended, and his gaze was fond and proud — and profoundly disturbed. But she smiled and nodded gaily, and, when she reached the floor, put a hand on his shoulder.

  “At least no one could suspect me to-night,” she said. “I LOOK rich, don’t I, papa?”

  She did. She had a look that worshipful girl friends bravely called “regal.” A head taller than her father, she was as straight and jauntily poised as a boy athlete; and her brown hair and her brown eyes were like her mother’s, but for the rest she went back to some stronger and livelier ancestor than either of her parents.

  “Don’t I look too rich to be suspected?” she insisted.

  “You look everything beautiful, Mary,” he said, huskily.

  “And my dress?” She threw open her dark velvet cloak, showing a splendor of white and silver. “Anything better at Nice next winter, do you think?” She laughed, shrouding her glittering figure in the cloak again. “Two years old, and no one would dream it! I did it over.”

  “You can do anything, Mary.”

  There was a curious humility in his tone, and something more — a significance not veiled and yet abysmally apologetic. It was as if he suggested something to her and begged her forgiveness in the same breath.

  And upon that, for the moment, she became as serious as he. She lifted her hand from his shoulder and then set it back more firmly, so that he should feel the reassurance of its pressure.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, in a low voice and gravely. “I know exactly what you want me to do.”

  CHAPTER VI

  IT WAS A brave and lustrous banquet; and a noisy one, too, because there was an orchestra among some plants at one end of the long dining-room, and after a preliminary stiffness the guests were impelled to converse — necessarily at the tops of their voices. The whole company of fifty sat at a great oblong table, improvised for the occasion by carpenters; but, not betraying itself as an improvisation, it seemed a permanent continent of damask and lace, with shores of crystal and silver running up to spreading groves of orchids and lilies and white roses — an inhabited continent, evidently, for there were three marvelous, gleaming buildings: one in the center and one at each end, white miracles wrought by some inspired craftsman in sculptural icing. They were models in miniature, and they represented the Sheridan Building, the Sheridan Apartments, and the Pump Works. Nearly all the guests recognized them without having to be told what they were, and pronounced the likenesses superb.

  The arrangement of the table was visibly baronial. At the head sat the great Thane, with the flower of his family and of the guests about him; then on each side came the neighbors of the “old” house, grading down to vassals and retainers — superintendents, cashiers, heads of departments, and the like — at the foot, where the Thane’s lady took her place as a consolation for the less important. Here, too, among the thralls and bondmen, sat Bibbs Sheridan, a meek Banquo, wondering how anybody could look at him and eat.

  Nevertheless, there was a vast, continuous eating, for these were wholesome folk who understood that dinner meant something intended for introduction into the system by means of an aperture in the face, devised by nature for that express purpose. And besides, nobody looked at Bibbs.

  He was better content to be left to himself; his voice was not strong enough to make itself heard over the hubbub without an exhausting effort, and the talk that went on about him was too fast and too fragmentary for his drawl to keep pace with it. So he felt relieved when each of his neighbors in turn, after a polite inquiry about his health, turned to seek livelier responses in other directions. For the talk went on with the eating, incessantly. It rose over the throbbing of the orchestra and the clatter and clinking of silver and china and glass, and there was a mighty babble.

  “Yes, sir! Started without a dollar.”... “Yellow flounces on the overskirt—”... “I says, ‘Wilkie, your department’s got to go bigger this year,’ I says.”... “Fifteen per cent. turnover in thirty-one weeks.”... “One of the biggest men in the biggest—”... “The wife says she’ll have to let out my pants if my appetite—”... “Say, did you see that statue of a Turk in the hall? One of the finest things I ever—”... “Not a dollar, not a nickel, not one red cent do you get out o’ me,’ I says, and so he ups and—”... “Yes, the baby makes four, they’ve lost now.”... “Well, they got their raise, and they went in big.”... “Yes, sir! Not a dollar to his name, and look at what—”... “You wait! The population of this town’s goin’ to hit the million mark before she stops.”... “Well, if you can show me a bigger deal than—”

  And through the interstices of this clamoring Bibbs could hear the continual booming of his father’s heavy voice, and once he caught the sentence, “Yes, young lady, that’s just what did it for me, and that’s just what’ll do it for my boys — they got to make two blades o’ grass grow where one grew before!” It was his familiar flourish, an old story to Bibbs, and now jovially declaimed for the edification of Mary Vertrees.

  It was a great night for Sheridan — the very crest of his wave. He sat there knowing himself Thane and master by his own endeavor; and his big, smooth, red face grew more and more radiant with good will and with the simplest, happiest, most boy-like vanity. He was the picture of health, of good cheer, and of power on a holiday. He had thirty teeth, none bought, and showed most of them when he laughed; his grizzled hair was thick, and as unruly as a farm laborer’s; his chest was deep and big beneath its vast facade of starched white linen, where little diamonds twinkled, circling three large pearls; his hands were stubby and strong, and he used them freely in gestures of marked picturesqueness; and, though he had grown fat at chin and waist and wrist, he had not lost the look of readiness and activity.

  He dominated the table, shouting jocular questions and railleries at every one. His idea was that when people were having a good time they were noisy; and his own additions to the hubbub increased his pleasure, and, of course, met the warmest encouragement from his guests. Edith had discovered that he had very foggy notions of the difference between a band and an orchestra, and when it was made clear to him he had held out for a band until Edith threatened tears; but the size of the orchestra they hired consoled him, and he had now no regrets in the matter.

  He kept time to the music continually — with his feet, or pounding on the table with his fist, and sometimes with spoon or knife upon his plate or a glass, without permitting these side-products to interfere with the real business of eating and shouting.

  “Tell ’em to play ‘Nancy Lee’!” he would bellow down the length of the table to his wife, while the musicians were in the midst of the “Toreador” song, perhaps. “Ask that fellow if they don’t know ‘Nancy Lee’!” And when the leader would shake his head apologetically in answer to an obedient shriek from Mrs. Sheridan, the “Toreador” continuing vehemently, Sheridan would roar half-remembered fragments of “Nancy Lee,” naturally mingling some Bizet with the air of that uxorious tribute.

  “Oh, there she stands and waves her hands while I’m away! A sail-er’s wife a sail-er’s star should be! Yo ho, oh, oh! Oh, Nancy, Nancy, Nancy Lee! Oh, Na-hancy Lee!”

  “HAY, there, old lady!” he would bellow. “Tell ’em to play ‘In the Gloaming.’ In the gloaming, oh, my darling, la-la-lum-tee — Well, if they don’t know that, what’s the matter with ‘Larboard Watch, Ahoy’? THAT’S good music! That’s the kind o’ music I like! Come on, now! Mrs. Callin, get ’em singin’ down in your part o’ the table. What�
�s the matter you folks down there, anyway? Larboard watch, ahoy!”

  “What joy he feels, as — ta-tum-dum-tee-dee-dum steals. La-a-r-board watch, ahoy!”

  No external bubbling contributed to this effervescence; the Sheridans’ table had never borne wine, and, more because of timidity about it than conviction, it bore none now; though “mineral waters” were copiously poured from bottles wrapped, for some reason, in napkins, and proved wholly satisfactory to almost all of the guests. And certainly no wine could have inspired more turbulent good spirits in the host. Not even Bibbs was an alloy in this night’s happiness, for, as Mrs. Sheridan had said, he had “plans for Bibbs” — plans which were going to straighten out some things that had gone wrong.

  So he pounded the table and boomed his echoes of old songs, and then, forgetting these, would renew his friendly railleries, or perhaps, turning to Mary Vertrees, who sat near him, round the corner of the table at his right, he would become autobiographical. Gentlemen less naive than he had paid her that tribute, for she was a girl who inspired the autobiographical impulse in every man who met her — it needed but the sight of her.

  The dinner seemed, somehow, to center about Mary Vertrees and the jocund host as a play centers about its hero and heroine; they were the rubicund king and the starry princess of this spectacle — they paid court to each other, and everybody paid court to them. Down near the sugar Pump Works, where Bibbs sat, there was audible speculation and admiration. “Wonder who that lady is — makin’ such a hit with the old man.” “Must be some heiress.” “Heiress? Golly, I guess I could stand it to marry rich, then!”