Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “Well, well, well!” he said, heartily. “You haven’t lost any of your good looks since last week, I see, Miss Alice, so I guess I’m to take it you haven’t been worrying over your daddy. The young feller’s getting along all right, is he?”

  “He’s much better; he’s sitting up, Mr. Lamb. Won’t you come in?”

  “Well, I don’t know but I might.” He turned to call toward twin disks of light at the curb, “Be out in a minute, Billy”; and the silhouette of a chauffeur standing beside a car could be seen to salute in response, as the old gentleman stepped into the hall. “You don’t suppose your daddy’s receiving callers yet, is he?”

  “He’s a good deal stronger than he was when you were here last week, but I’m afraid he’s not very presentable, though.”

  “‘Presentable?’” The old man echoed her jovially. “Pshaw! I’ve seen lots of sick folks. I know what they look like and how they love to kind of nest in among a pile of old blankets and wrappers. Don’t you worry about THAT, Miss Alice, if you think he’d like to see me.”

  “Of course he would — if — —” Alice hesitated; then said quickly, “Of course he’d love to see you and he’s quite able to, if you care to come up.”

  She ran up the stairs ahead of him, and had time to snatch the crocheted wrap from her father’s shoulders. Swathed as usual, he was sitting beside a table, reading the evening paper; but when his employer appeared in the doorway he half rose as if to come forward in greeting.

  “Sit still!” the old gentleman shouted. “What do you mean? Don’t you know you’re weak as a cat? D’you think a man can be sick as long as you have and NOT be weak as a cat? What you trying to do the polite with ME for?”

  Adams gratefully protracted the handshake that accompanied these inquiries. “This is certainly mighty fine of you, Mr. Lamb,” he said. “I guess Alice has told you how much our whole family appreciate your coming here so regularly to see how this old bag o’ bones was getting along. Haven’t you, Alice?”

  “Yes, papa,” she said; and turned to go out, but Lamb checked her.

  “Stay right here, Miss Alice; I’m not even going to sit down. I know how it upsets sick folks when people outside the family come in for the first time.”

  “You don’t upset me,” Adams said. “I’ll feel a lot better for getting a glimpse of you, Mr. Lamb.”

  The visitor’s laugh was husky, but hearty and re-assuring, like his voice in speaking. “That’s the way all my boys blarney me, Miss Alice,” he said. “They think I’ll make the work lighter on ’em if they can get me kind of flattered up. You just tell your daddy it’s no use; he doesn’t get on MY soft side, pretending he likes to see me even when he’s sick.”

  “Oh, I’m not so sick any more,” Adams said. “I expect to be back in my place ten days from now at the longest.”

  “Well, now, don’t hurry it, Virgil; don’t hurry it. You take your time; take your time.”

  This brought to Adams’s lips a feeble smile not lacking in a kind of vanity, as feeble. “Why?” he asked. “I suppose you think my department runs itself down there, do you?”

  His employer’s response was another husky laugh. “Well, well, well!” he cried, and patted Adams’s shoulder with a strong pink hand. “Listen to this young feller, Miss Alice, will you! He thinks we can’t get along without him a minute! Yes, sir, this daddy of yours believes the whole works ‘ll just take and run down if he isn’t there to keep ’em wound up. I always suspected he thought a good deal of himself, and now I know he does!”

  Adams looked troubled. “Well, I don’t like to feel that my salary’s going on with me not earning it.”

  “Listen to him, Miss Alice! Wouldn’t you think, now, he’d let me be the one to worry about that? Why, on my word, if your daddy had his way, I wouldn’t be anywhere. He’d take all my worrying and everything else off my shoulders and shove me right out of Lamb and Company! He would!”

  “It seems to me I’ve been soldiering on you a pretty long while, Mr. Lamb,” the convalescent said, querulously. “I don’t feel right about it; but I’ll be back in ten days. You’ll see.”

  The old man took his hand in parting. “All right; we’ll see, Virgil. Of course we do need you, seriously speaking; but we don’t need you so bad we’ll let you come down there before you’re fully fit and able.” He went to the door. “You hear, Miss Alice? That’s what I wanted to make the old feller understand, and what I want you to kind of enforce on him. The old place is there waiting for him, and it’d wait ten years if it took him that long to get good and well. You see that he remembers it, Miss Alice!”

  She went down the stairs with him, and he continued to impress this upon her until he had gone out of the front door. And even after that, the husky voice called back from the darkness, as he went to his car, “Don’t forget, Miss Alice; let him take his own time. We always want him, but we want him to get good and well first. Good-night, good-night, young lady!”

  When she closed the door her mother came from the farther end of the “living-room,” where there was no light; and Alice turned to her.

  “I can’t help liking that old man, mama,” she said. “He always sounds so — well, so solid and honest and friendly! I do like him.”

  But Mrs. Adams failed in sympathy upon this point. “He didn’t say anything about raising your father’s salary, did he?” she asked, dryly.

  “No.”

  “No. I thought not.”

  She would have said more, but Alice, indisposed to listen, began to whistle, ran up the stairs, and went to sit with her father. She found him bright-eyed with the excitement a first caller brings into a slow convalescence: his cheeks showed actual hints of colour; and he was smiling tremulously as he filled and lit his pipe. She brought the crocheted scarf and put it about his shoulders again, then took a chair near him.

  “I believe seeing Mr. Lamb did do you good, papa,” she said. “I sort of thought it might, and that’s why I let him come up. You really look a little like your old self again.”

  Adams exhaled a breathy “Ha!” with the smoke from his pipe as he waved the match to extinguish it. “That’s fine,” he said. “The smoke I had before dinner didn’t taste the way it used to, and I kind of wondered if I’d lost my liking for tobacco, but this one seems to be all right. You bet it did me good to see J. A. Lamb! He’s the biggest man that’s ever lived in this town or ever will live here; and you can take all the Governors and Senators or anything they’ve raised here, and put ’em in a pot with him, and they won’t come out one-two-three alongside o’ him! And to think as big a man as that, with all his interests and everything he’s got on his mind — to think he’d never let anything prevent him from coming here once every week to ask how I was getting along, and then walk right upstairs and kind of CALL on me, as it were well, it makes me sort of feel as if I wasn’t so much of a nobody, so to speak, as your mother seems to like to make out sometimes.”

  “How foolish, papa! Of COURSE you’re not ‘a nobody.’”

  Adams chuckled faintly upon his pipe-stem, what vanity he had seeming to be further stimulated by his daughter’s applause. “I guess there aren’t a whole lot of people in this town that could claim J. A. showed that much interest in ’em,” he said. “Of course I don’t set up to believe it’s all because of merit, or anything like that. He’d do the same for anybody else that’d been with the company as long as I have, but still it IS something to be with the company that long and have him show he appreciates it.”

  “Yes, indeed, it is, papa.”

  “Yes, sir,” Adams said, reflectively. “Yes, sir, I guess that’s so. And besides, it all goes to show the kind of a man he is. Simon pure, that’s what that man is, Alice. Simon pure! There’s never been anybody work for him that didn’t respect him more than they did any other man in the world, I guess. And when you work for him you know he respects you, too. Right from the start you get the feeling that J. A. puts absolute confidence in you; and that’s migh
ty stimulating: it makes you want to show him he hasn’t misplaced it. There’s great big moral values to the way a man like him gets you to feeling about your relations with the business: it ain’t all just dollars and cents — not by any means!”

  He was silent for a time, then returned with increasing enthusiasm to this theme, and Alice was glad to see so much renewal of life in him; he had not spoken with a like cheerful vigour since before his illness. The visit of his idolized great man had indeed been good for him, putting new spirit into him; and liveliness of the body followed that of the spirit. His improvement carried over the night: he slept well and awoke late, declaring that he was “pretty near a well man and ready for business right now.” Moreover, having slept again in the afternoon, he dressed and went down to dinner, leaning but lightly on Alice, who conducted him.

  “My! but you and your mother have been at it with your scrubbing and dusting!” he said, as they came through the “living-room.” “I don’t know I ever did see the house so spick and span before!” His glance fell upon a few carnations in a vase, and he chuckled admiringly. “Flowers, too! So THAT’S what you coaxed that dollar and a half out o ‘me for, this morning!”

  Other embellishments brought forth his comment when he had taken his old seat at the head of the small dinner-table. “Why, I declare, Alice!” he exclaimed. “I been so busy looking at all the spick-and-spanishness after the house-cleaning, and the flowers out in the parlour— ‘living room’ I suppose you want me to call it, if I just GOT to be fashionable — I been so busy studying over all this so-and-so, I declare I never noticed YOU till this minute! My, but you ARE all dressed up! What’s goin’ on? What’s it about: you so all dressed up, and flowers in the parlour and everything?”

  “Don’t you see, papa? It’s in honour of your coming downstairs again, of course.”

  “Oh, so that’s it,” he said. “I never would ‘a’ thought of that, I guess.”

  But Walter looked sidelong at his father, and gave forth his sly and knowing laugh. “Neither would I!” he said.

  Adams lifted his eyebrows jocosely. “You’re jealous, are you, sonny? You don’t want the old man to think our young lady’d make so much fuss over him, do you?”

  “Go on thinkin’ it’s over you,” Walter retorted, amused. “Go on and think it. It’ll do you good.”

  “Of course I’ll think it,” Adams said. “It isn’t anybody’s birthday. Certainly the decorations are on account of me coming downstairs. Didn’t you hear Alice say so?”

  “Sure, I heard her say so.”

  “Well, then — —”

  Walter interrupted him with a little music. Looking shrewdly at Alice, he sang:

  “I was walkin’ out on Monday with my sweet thing.

  She’s my neat thing,

  My sweet thing:

  I’ll go round on Tuesday night to see her.

  Oh, how we’ll spoon — —”

  “Walter!” his mother cried. “WHERE do you learn such vulgar songs?” However, she seemed not greatly displeased with him, and laughed as she spoke.

  “So that’s it, Alice!” said Adams. “Playing the hypocrite with your old man, are you? It’s some new beau, is it?”

  “I only wish it were,” she said, calmly. “No. It’s just what I said: it’s all for you, dear.”

  “Don’t let her con you,” Walter advised his father. “She’s got expectations. You hang around downstairs a while after dinner and you’ll see.”

  But the prophecy failed, though Adams went to his own room without waiting to test it. No one came.

  Alice stayed in the “living-room” until half-past nine, when she went slowly upstairs. Her mother, almost tearful, met her at the top, and whispered, “You mustn’t mind, dearie.”

  “Mustn’t mind what?” Alice asked, and then, as she went on her way, laughed scornfully. “What utter nonsense!” she said.

  Next day she cut the stems of the rather scant show of carnations and refreshed them with new water. At dinner, her father, still in high spirits, observed that she had again “dressed up” in honour of his second descent of the stairs; and Walter repeated his fragment of objectionable song; but these jocularities were rendered pointless by the eventless evening that followed; and in the morning the carnations began to appear tarnished and flaccid.

  Alice gave them a long look, then threw them away; and neither Walter nor her father was inspired to any rallying by her plain costume for that evening. Mrs. Adams was visibly depressed.

  When Alice finished helping her mother with the dishes, she went outdoors and sat upon the steps of the little front veranda. The night, gentle with warm air from the south, surrounded her pleasantly, and the perpetual smoke was thinner. Now that the furnaces of dwelling-houses were no longer fired, life in that city had begun to be less like life in a railway tunnel; people were aware of summer in the air, and in the thickened foliage of the shade-trees, and in the sky. Stars were unveiled by the passing of the denser smoke fogs, and to-night they could be seen clearly; they looked warm and near. Other girls sat upon verandas and stoops in Alice’s street, cheerful as young fishermen along the banks of a stream.

  Alice could hear them from time to time; thin sopranos persistent in laughter that fell dismally upon her ears. She had set no lines or nets herself, and what she had of “expectations,” as Walter called them, were vanished. For Alice was experienced; and one of the conclusions she drew from her experience was that when a man says, “I’d take you for anything you wanted me to,” he may mean it or, he may not; but, if he does, he will not postpone the first opportunity to say something more. Little affairs, once begun, must be warmed quickly; for if they cool they are dead.

  But Alice was not thinking of Arthur Russell. When she tossed away the carnations she likewise tossed away her thoughts of that young man. She had been like a boy who sees upon the street, some distance before him, a bit of something round and glittering, a possible dime. He hopes it is a dime, and, until he comes near enough to make sure, he plays that it is a dime. In his mind he has an adventure with it: he buys something delightful. If he picks it up, discovering only some tin-foil which has happened upon a round shape, he feels a sinking. A dulness falls upon him.

  So Alice was dull with the loss of an adventure; and when the laughter of other girls reached her, intermittently, she had not sprightliness enough left in her to be envious of their gaiety. Besides, these neighbours were ineligible even for her envy, being of another caste; they could never know a dance at the Palmers’, except remotely, through a newspaper. Their laughter was for the encouragement of snappy young men of the stores and offices down-town, clerks, bookkeepers, what not — some of them probably graduates of Frincke’s Business College.

  Then, as she recalled that dark portal, with its dusty stairway mounting between close walls to disappear in the upper shadows, her mind drew back as from a doorway to Purgatory. Nevertheless, it was a picture often in her reverie; and sometimes it came suddenly, without sequence, into the midst of her other thoughts, as if it leaped up among them from a lower darkness; and when it arrived it wanted to stay. So a traveller, still roaming the world afar, sometimes broods without apparent reason upon his family burial lot: “I wonder if I shall end there.”

  The foreboding passed abruptly, with a jerk of her breath, as the street-lamp revealed a tall and easy figure approaching from the north, swinging a stick in time to its stride. She had given Russell up — and he came.

  “What luck for me!” he exclaimed. “To find you alone!”

  Alice gave him her hand for an instant, not otherwise moving. “I’m glad it happened so,” she said. “Let’s stay out here, shall we? Do you think it’s too provincial to sit on a girl’s front steps with her?”

  “‘Provincial?’ Why, it’s the very best of our institutions,” he returned, taking his place beside her. “At least, I think so to-night.”

  “Thanks! Is that practice for other nights somewhere else?”

&nbs
p; “No,” he laughed. “The practicing all led up to this. Did I come too soon?”

  “No,” she replied, gravely. “Just in time!”

  “I’m glad to be so accurate; I’ve spent two evenings wanting to come, Miss Adams, instead of doing what I was doing.”

  “What was that?”

  “Dinners. Large and long dinners. Your fellow-citizens are immensely hospitable to a newcomer.”

  “Oh, no,” Alice said. “We don’t do it for everybody. Didn’t you find yourself charmed?”

  “One was a men’s dinner,” he explained. “Mr. Palmer seemed to think I ought to be shown to the principal business men.”

  “What was the other dinner?”

  “My cousin Mildred gave it.”

  “Oh, DID she!” Alice said, sharply, but she recovered herself in the same instant, and laughed. “She wanted to show you to the principal business women, I suppose.”

  “I don’t know. At all events, I shouldn’t give myself out to be so much feted by your ‘fellow-citizens,’ after all, seeing these were both done by my relatives, the Palmers. However, there are others to follow, I’m afraid. I was wondering — I hoped maybe you’d be coming to some of them. Aren’t you?”

  “I rather doubt it,” Alice said, slowly. “Mildred’s dance was almost the only evening I’ve gone out since my father’s illness began. He seemed better that day; so I went. He was better the other day when he wanted those cigars. He’s very much up and down.” She paused. “I’d almost forgotten that Mildred is your cousin.”