Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  Meanwhile, paunchy with wind and wetness, unmannerly clouds came smoking out of the blackened west. Rumbling, they drew on. Then from cloud to cloud dizzy amazements of white fire staggered, crackled and boomed on to the assault; the doors of the winds were opened; the tanks of deluge were unbottomed; and the storm took the town. So, presently, Noble noticed that it was raining and decided to go home.

  With an idea that he was fulfilling his customary duties, he locked the doors of the two inner rooms, dropped the keys gently into a wastebasket, and passing by an umbrella which stood in a corner, went out to the corridor, and thence stepped into the street of whooping rain.

  Here he became so practical as to turn up his collar; and, substantially aided by the wind at his back, he was not long in leaving the purlieus of commerce behind him for Julia’s Street. Other people lived on this street — he did, himself, for that matter; and, in fact, it was the longest street in the town; moreover, it had an official name with which the word “Julia” was entirely unconnected; but for Noble Dill (and probably for Newland Sanders and for some others in age from nineteen to sixty) it was “Julia’s Street” and no other.

  It was a tumultuous street as Noble splashed along the sidewalk. Incredibly elastic, the shade-trees were practising calisthenics, though now and then one outdid itself and lost a branch; thunder and lightning romped like loosed scandal; rain hissed upon the pavement and capered ankle-high. It was a storm that asked to be left to itself for a time, after giving fair warning that the request would be made; and Noble and the only other pedestrian in sight had themselves to blame for getting caught.

  This other pedestrian was some forty or fifty yards in advance of Noble and moved in the same direction at about the same gait. He wore an old overcoat, running with water; the brim of his straw hat sagged about his head, so that he appeared to be wearing a bucket; he was a sodden and pathetic figure. Noble himself was as sodden; his hands were wet in his very pockets; his elbows seemed to spout; yet he spared a generous pity for the desolate figure struggling on before him.

  All at once Noble’s heart did something queer within his wet bosom. He recognized that figure, and he was not mistaken. Except the One figure, and those of his own father and mother and three sisters, this was the shape that Noble would most infallibly recognize anywhere in the world and under any conditions. In spite of the dusk and the riot of the storm, Noble knew that none other than Mr. Atwater splashed before him.

  He dismissed a project for seizing upon a fallen branch and running forward to walk beside Mr. Atwater and hold the branch over his venerated head. All the branches were too wet; and Noble feared that Mr. Atwater might think the picture odd and decline to be thus protected. Yet he felt that something ought to be done to shelter Julia’s father and perhaps save him from pneumonia; surely there was some simple, helpful, dashing thing that ordinary people couldn’t think of, but that Noble could. He would do it and not stay to be thanked. And then, to-morrow evening, not sooner, he would go to Julia and smile and say; “Your father didn’t get too wet, I hope, after all?” And Julia: “Oh, Noble, he’s talked of you all day long as his ‘new Sir Walter Raleigh’!”

  Suddenly will-o’-the-wisp opportunity flickered before him, and in his high mood he paused not at all to consider it, but insanely chased it. He had just reached a crossing, and down the cross street, walking away from Noble, was the dim figure of a man carrying an umbrella. It was just perceptible that he was a fat man, struggling with seeming feebleness in the wind and making poor progress. Mr. Atwater, moving up Julia’s Street, was out of sight from the cross street where struggled the fat man.

  Noble ran swiftly down the cross street, jerked the umbrella from the fat man’s grasp; ran back, with hoarse sounds dying out behind him in the riotous dusk; turned the corner, sped after Mr. Atwater, overtook him, and thrust the umbrella upon him. Then, not pausing the shortest instant for thanks or even recognition, the impulsive boy sped onward, proud and joyous in the storm, leaving his beneficiary far behind him.

  In his young enthusiasm he had indeed done something for Mr. Atwater. In fact, Noble’s kindness had done as much for Mr. Atwater as Julia’s gentleness had done for Noble, but how much both Julia and Noble had done was not revealed in full until the next evening.

  That was a warm and moonshiny night of air unusually dry, and yet Florence sneezed frequently as she sat upon the “side porch” at the house of her Great-Aunt Carrie and her Great-Uncle Joseph. Florence had a cold in the head, though how it got to her head was a process involved in the mysterious ways of colds, since Florence’s was easily to be connected with Herbert’s remark that he wouldn’t ever be caught takin’ his death o’ cold sittin’ on the damp grass in the night air just to listen to a lot o’ tooty-tooty. It appeared from Florence’s narrative to those interested listeners, Aunt Carrie and Uncle Joseph, that she had been sitting on the grass in the night air when both air and grass were extraordinarily damp. In brief, she had been at her post soon after the storm cleared on the preceding evening, but she had heard no tooty-tooty; her overhearings were of sterner stuff.

  “Well, what did Julia say then?” Aunt Carrie asked eagerly.

  “She said she’d go up and lock herself in her room and stuff cushions over her ears if grandpa didn’t quit makin’ such a fuss.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He made more rumpus than ever,” said Florence. “He went on and on, and told the whole thing over and over again; he seemed like he couldn’t tell it enough, and every time he told it his voice got higher and higher till it was kind of squealy. He said he’d had his raincoat on and he didn’t want an umberella anyhow, and hadn’t ever carried one a single time in fourteen years! And he took on about Noble Dill and all this and that about how you bet he knew who it was! He said he could tell Noble Dill in the dark any time by his cigarette smell, and, anyway, it wasn’t too dark so’s he couldn’t see his skimpy little shoulders, and anyway he saw his face. And he said Noble didn’t hand him the umberella; he stuck it all down over him like he was somep’n on fire he wanted to put out; and before he could get out of it and throw it away this ole fat man that it belonged to and was chasin’ Noble, he ran up to grandpa from behind and took hold of him, or somep’n, and they slipped, and got to fussin’ against each other; and then after a while they got up and grandpa saw it was somebody he knew and told him for Heaven’s sake why didn’t he take his ole umberella and go on home; and so he did, because it was raining, and I guess he proba’ly had to give up; he couldn’t out-talk grandpa.”

  “No,” said Uncle Joe. “He couldn’t, whoever he was. But what happened about Noble Dill?”

  Florence paused to accumulate and explode a sneeze, then responded pleasantly: “He said he was goin’ to kill him. He said he often and often wanted to, and now he was. That’s the reason I guess Aunt Julia wrote that note this morning.”

  “What note?” Aunt Carrie inquired. “You haven’t told us of that.”

  “I was over there before noon,” said Florence, “and Aunt Julia gave me a quarter and said she’d write a note for me to take to Noble Dill’s house when he came home for lunch, and give it to him. She kind of slipped it to me, because grandpa came in there, pokin’ around, while she was just finishin’ writin’ it. She didn’t put any envelope on it even, and she never said a single thing to me about its bein’ private or my not readin’ it if I wanted to, or anything.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” said Aunt Carrie. “You didn’t, did you, Florence?”

  “Why, she didn’t say not to,” Florence protested, surprised. “It wasn’t even in an envelope.”

  Mr. Joseph Atwater coughed. “I hardly think we ought to ask what the note said, even if Florence was — well, indiscreet enough to read it.”

  “No,” said his wife. “I hardly think so either. It didn’t say anything important anyhow, probably.”

  “It began, ‘Dear Noble,’” said Florence promptly. “Dear Noble’; that’s the w
ay it began. It said how grandpa was just all upset to think he’d accepted an umberella from him when Noble didn’t have another one for himself like that, and grandpa was so embarrassed to think he’d let Noble do so much for him, and everything, he just didn’t know what to do, and proba’ly it would be tactful if he wouldn’t come to the house till grandpa got over being embarrassed and everything. She said not to come till she let him know.”

  “Did you notice Noble when he read it?” asked Aunt Carrie.

  “Yessir! And would you believe it; he just looked too happy!” Florence made answer, not wholly comprehending with what truth.

  “I’ll bet,” said Uncle Joseph;— “I’ll bet a thousand dollars that if Julia told Noble Dill he was six feet tall, Noble would go and order his next suit of clothes to fit a six-foot man.”

  And his wife complemented this with a generalization, simple, yet of a significance too little recognized. “They don’t see a thing!” she said. “The young men that buzz around a girl’s house don’t see a thing of what goes on there! Inside, I mean.”

  Yet at that very moment a young man was seeing something inside a girl’s house a little way down that same street. That same street was Julia’s Street and the house was Julia’s. Inside the house, in the library, sat Mr. Atwater, trying to read a work by Thomas Carlyle, while a rhythmic murmur came annoyingly from the veranda. The young man, watching him attentively, saw him lift his head and sniff the air with suspicion, but the watcher took this pantomime to be an expression of distaste for certain versifyings, and sharing that distaste, approved. Mr. Atwater sniffed again, threw down his book and strode out to the veranda. There sat dark-haired Julia in a silver dress, and near by, Newland Sanders read a long young poem from the manuscript.

  “Who is smoking out here?” Mr. Atwater inquired in a dead voice.

  “Nobody, sir,” said Newland with eagerness. “I don’t smoke. I have never touched tobacco in any form in my life.”

  Mr. Atwater sniffed once more, found purity; and returned to the library. But here the air seemed faintly impregnated with Orduma cigarettes. “Curious!” he said as he composed himself once more to read — and presently the odour seemed to wear away and vanish. Mr. Atwater was relieved; the last thing he could have wished was to be haunted by Noble Dill.

  Yet for that while he was. Too honourable to follow such an example as Florence’s, Noble, of course, would not spy or eavesdrop near the veranda where Julia sat, but he thought there could be no harm in watching Mr. Atwater read. Looking at Mr. Atwater was at least the next thing to looking at Julia. And so, out in the night, Noble was seated upon the top of the side fence, looking through the library window at Mr. Atwater.

  After a while Noble lit another Orduma cigarette and puffed strongly to start it. The smoke was almost invisible in the moonlight, but the night breeze, stirring gently, wafted it toward the house, where the open window made an inward draft and carried it heartily about the library.

  Noble was surprised to see Mr. Atwater rise suddenly to his feet. He smote his brow, put out the light, and stamped upstairs to his own room.

  His purpose to retire was understood when the watcher saw a light in the bedroom window overhead. Noble thought of the good, peculiar old man now disrobing there, and he smiled to himself at a whimsical thought: What form would Mr. Atwater’s embarrassment take, what would be his feeling, and what would he do, if he knew that Noble was there now, beneath his window and thinking of him?

  In the moonlight Noble sat upon the fence, and smoked Orduma cigarettes, and looked up with affection at the bright window of Mr. Atwater’s bedchamber. Abruptly the light in that window went out.

  “Saying his prayers now,” said Noble. “I wonder if — —” But, not to be vain, he laughed at himself and left the thought unfinished.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A WEEK LATER, on a hot July afternoon, Miss Florence Atwater, recovered from her cold, stood in the shady back yard of her place of residence and yawned more extensively than any one would have believed possible, judging by her face in repose. Three of her friends, congenial in age and sex, were out of town for the summer; two had been ascertained, by telephonic inquiries, to be taking commanded siestas; and neither the other one nor Florence had yet forgotten that yesterday, although they were too religious to commit themselves to a refusal to meet as sisters in the Great Beyond, they had taken the expurgated oath that by Everything they would never speak to each other again so long as they both should live.

  Florence was at the end of her resources. She had sought distraction in experimental cookery; but, having scorched a finger, and having been told by the cook that a person’s own kitchen wasn’t worth the price at eleven dollars a week if it had to git all smelled up with broiled rubber when the femometer stood at ninety-sevvum degrees in the shade, the experimenter abusedly turned her back on the morose woman and went out to the back yard for a little peace.

  After an interval of torpor, she decided to go and see what Herbert was doing — a move not short of desperation, on account of Herbert’s new manner toward her. For a week Herbert had steadily pursued his scientific career, and he seemed to feel that in it he had attained a distinction beyond the reach of Florence. What made it ridiculous for her to hope was, of course, the fact that she was a girl, and Herbert had explained this to her in a cold, unpleasant way; for it is true that what is called “feminism” must be acquired by men, and is not a condition, or taste, natural to them. At thirteen it has not been acquired.

  She found him at home. He was importantly engaged in a room in the cellar, where were loosely stored all manner of incapacitated household devices; two broken clothes-wringers, a crippled and rusted sewing-machine, an ice-cream freezer in like condition, a cracked and discarded marble mantelpiece, chipped porcelain and chinaware of all sorts, rusted stove lids and flatirons, half a dozen dead mops and brooms. This was the laboratory, and here, in congenial solitude, Herbert conducted his investigations. That is to say, until Florence arrived he was undisturbed by human intrusion, but he was not alone — far from it! There was, in fact, almost too much life in the place.

  Where the light fell clearest from the cobwebby windows at the ground level overhead, he had placed a long deal table, once a helpmate in the kitchen, but now a colourless antique on three legs and two starch boxes. Upon the table were seven or eight glass jars, formerly used for preserves and pickles, and a dozen jelly glasses (with only streaks and bits of jelly in them now) and five or six small round pasteboard pill-boxes. The jars were covered, some with their own patent tops, others with shingles or bits of board, and one with a brick. The jelly glasses stood inverted, and were inhabited; so were the preserve jars and pickle jars; and so were the pill-boxes, which evidently contained star boarders, for they were pierced with “breathing holes,” and one of them, standing upon its side like a little wheel, now and then moved in a faint, ghostly manner as if about to start rolling on its own account — whereupon Herbert glanced up and addressed it sternly, though somewhat inconsistently: “You shut up!”

  In the display of so much experimental paraphernalia, there may have been a hint that Herbert’s was a scientific nature craving rather quantity than quality; his collection certainly possessed the virtue of multitudinousness, if that be a virtue; and the birds in the neighbourhood must have been undergoing a great deal of disappointment. In brief, as many bugs as Herbert now owned have seldom been seen in the custody of any private individual. And nearly all of them were alive, energetic and swearing, though several of the preserve jars had been imperfectly drained of their heavy syrups, and in one of them a great many spiders seemed to be having, of the whole collection, the poorest time; being pretty well mired down and yet still subject to disagreements among themselves. The habits of this group, under such unusual surroundings, formed the subject of Herbert’s special study at the moment of Florence’s arrival. He was seated at the table and frowning with science as he observed the unfortunates through that magnifying-
glass, his discovery of which was responsible for their present condition and his own choice of a career.

  Florence paused in the doorway, but he gave no sign of recognition, unless his intensified preoccupation was a sign, and Florence, perceiving what line of conduct he meant to adopt, instinctively selected a reciprocal one for herself. “Herbert Atwater, you ought to be punished! I’m goin’ to tell your father and mother.”

  “You g’way,” Herbert returned, unmoved; and, without condescending to give her a glance, he set down the magnifying-glass, and with a pencil wrote something profoundly entomological in a soiled memorandum book upon the table. “Run away, Flor’nce. Run away somewheres and play.”

  Florence approached. “‘Play’!” she echoed tartly. “I should think you wouldn’t talk much about ‘playin’,’ the way you’re teasing those poor, poor little bugs!”

  “‘Teasing’!” Herbert exclaimed: “That shows! That shows!”

  “Shows what?”

  “How much you know!” He became despondent about her. “See here, Florence; it does look to me as though at your age a person ought to know anyway enough not to disturb me when I’m expairamenting, and everything. I should think — —”

  But she did not prove so meek as to await the conclusion of his remonstrance. “I never saw anything as wicked in my whole born days! What did any of those poor, poor little bugs ever do to you, I’d like to know, you got to go and confine ’em like this! And look how dirty your hands are!”

  This final charge, wandering so far from her previous specifications of his guilt, was purely automatic and conventional; Florence often interjected it during the course of any cousinly discussion, whatever the subject in dispute, and she had not even glanced at Herbert’s hands to assure herself that the accusation was warranted. But, as usual, the facts supported her; and they also supported Herbert in his immediate mechanical retort: “So’re yours!”