“Well, then, Aunt Julia” — and now Florence came to her point— “what I wanted to know is just simply the plain and simple question: Will you give this dog Gammire to me?”
Julia leaned forward, laughing, and suddenly clapped her hands together, close to Florence’s face. “No, I won’t!” she cried. “There!”
The niece frowned, lines of anxiety appearing upon her forehead. “Well, why won’t you?”
“I won’t do it!”
“But, Aunt Julia, I think you ought to!”
“Why ought I to?”
“Because — —” said Florence. “Well, it’s necessary.”
“Why?”
“Because you know as well as I do what’s bound to happen to him!”
“What is?”
“Grandpa’ll chase him off,” said Florence. “He’ll take after him the minute he lays eyes on him, and scare him to death — and then he’ll get lost, and he won’t be anybody’s dog! I should think you’d just as lief he’d be my dog as have him chased all over town till a street car hits him or somep’n.”
But Julia shook her head. “That hasn’t happened yet.”
“It did happen with every other one you ever had,” Florence urged plaintively. “He chased ’em every last one off the place, and they never came back. You know perfectly well, Aunt Julia, grandpa’s just bound to hate this dog, and you know just exactly how he’ll act about him.”
“No, I don’t,” said Julia. “Not just exactly.”
“Well, anyway, you know he’ll behave awful.”
“It’s probable,” the aunt admitted.
“He always does,” Florence continued. “He behaves awful about everything I ever heard about. He — —”
“I’ll go pretty far with you, Florence,” Julia interposed, “but we’d better leave him a loophole. You know he’s a constant attendant at church and contributes liberally to many good causes.”
“Oh, you know what I mean! I mean he always acts horrable about anything pleasant. Of course I know he’s a good man, and everything; I just mean the way he behaves is perfeckly disgusting. So what’s the use your not givin’ me this dog? You won’t have him yourself as soon as grandpa comes home to lunch in an hour or so.”
“Oh, yes, I will!”
“Grandpa hasn’t already seen him, has he?”
“No.”
“Then what makes you say — —”
“He isn’t coming home to lunch. He won’t be home till five o’clock this afternoon.”
“Well, then, about six you won’t have any dog, and poor little Gammire’ll get run over by an automobile some time this very evening!” Florence’s voice became anguished in the stress of her appeal. “Aunt Julia, won’t you give me this dog?”
Julia shook her head.
“Won’t you, please?”
“No, dear.”
“Aunt Julia, if it was Noble Dill gave you this dog — —”
“Florence!” her aunt exclaimed. “What in the world makes you imagine such absurd things? Poor Mr. Dill!”
“Well, if it was, I think you ought to give Gammire to me because I like Noble Dill, and I — —”
But here her aunt laughed again and looked at her with some curiosity. “You still do?” she asked. “What for?”
“Well,” said Florence, swallowing, “he may be rather smallish for a man, but he’s very uncouth and distingrished-looking, and I think he doesn’t get to enjoy himself much. Grandpa talks about him so torrably and — and — —” Here, such was the unexpected depth of her feeling that she choked, whereupon her aunt, overcome with laughter, but nevertheless somewhat touched, sprang up and threw two pretty arms about her charmingly.
“You funny Florence!” she cried.
“Then will you give me Gammire?” Florence asked instantly.
“No. We’ll bring him in the house now, and you can stay for lunch.”
Florence was imperfectly consoled, but she had a thought that brightened her a little.
“Well, there’ll be an awful time when grandpa comes home this afternoon — but it certainly will be inter’sting!”
She proved a true prophet, at least to the extent that when Mr. Atwater opened his front gate that afternoon he was already in the presence of a deeply interested audience whose observation was unknown to him. Through the interstices of the lace curtains at an open window, the gaze of Julia and Florence was concentrated upon him in a manner that might have disquieted even so opinionated and peculiar a man as Mr. Atwater, had he been aware of it; and Herbert likewise watched him fixedly from an unseen outpost. Herbert had shown some recklessness, declaring loudly that he intended to lounge in full view; but when the well-known form of the ancestor was actually identified, coming up the street out of the distance, the descendant changed his mind. The good green earth ceased to seem secure; and Herbert climbed a tree. He surrounded himself with the deepest foliage; and beneath him some outlying foothills of Kitty Silver were visible, where she endeavoured to lurk in the concealment of a lilac bush.
Gammire was the only person in view. He sat just in the middle of the top step of the veranda, and his air was that of an endowed and settled institution. What passing traffic there was interested him but vaguely, not affecting the world to which he belonged — that world being this house and yard, of which he felt himself now, beyond all question, the official dog.
It had been a rather hard-working afternoon, for he had done everything suggested to him as well as a great many other things that he thought of himself. He had also made it clear that he had taken a fancy to everybody, but recognized Julia to be the head of the house and of his own universe; and though he was at the disposal of all her family and friends, he was at her disposal first. Whithersoever she went, there would he go also, unless she otherwise commanded. Just now she had withdrawn, closing the door, but he understood that she intended no permanent exclusion. Who was this newcomer at the gate?
The newcomer came to a halt, staring intolerantly. Then he advanced, slamming the gate behind him. “Get out o’ here!” he said. “You get off the place!”
Gammire regarded him seriously, not moving, while Mr. Atwater cast an eye about the lawn, seeming to search for something, and his gaze, thus roving, was arrested by a slight movement of great areas behind a lilac bush. It appeared that the dome of some public building had covered itself with antique textiles and was endeavouring to hide there — a failure.
“Kitty Silver!” he said. “What are you doing?”
“Suh?”
Debouching sidewise she came into fuller view, but retired a few steps. “Whut I doin’ whur, Mista Atwater?”
“How’d that dog get on my front steps?”
Her face became noncommittal entirely. “Thishere dog? He just settin’ there, suh.”
“How’d he get in the yard?”
“Mus’ somebody up an’ brung him in.”
“Who did it?”
“You mean: Who up an’ brung him in, suh?”
“I mean: Who does he belong to?”
“Mus’ be Miss Julia’s. I reckon he is, so fur.”
“What! She knows I don’t allow dogs on the place.”
“Yessuh.”
Mr. Atwater’s expression became more outraged and determined. “You mean to say that somebody’s trying to give her another dog after all I’ve been through with — —”
“It look that way, suh.”
“Who did it?”
“Miss Julia ain’t sayin’; an’ me, I don’ know who done it no mo’n the lilies of the valley whut toil not neither do they spins.”
In response, Mr. Atwater was guilty of exclamations lacking in courtesy; and turning again toward Gammire, he waved his arm. “Didn’t you hear me tell you to get out of here?”
Gammire observed the gesture, and at once “sat up,” placing his forepaws over his nose in prayer, but Mr. Atwater was the more incensed.
“Get out of here, you woolly black scoundrel!”
Mrs. Silver uttered a cry of injury before she perceived that she had mistaken her employer’s intention. Gammire also appeared to mistake it, for he came down upon the lawn, rose to his full height, on his “hind legs,” and in that humanlike posture “walked” in a wide circle. He did this with an affectation of conscientiousness thoroughly hypocritical; for he really meant to be humorous.
“My heavens!” Mr. Atwater cried, lamenting. “Somebody’s given her one of those things at last! I don’t like any kind of dog, but if there’s one dam thing on earth I won’t stand, it’s a trick poodle!”
And while the tactless Gammire went on, “walking” a circle round him, Mr. Atwater’s eye furiously searched the borders of the path, the lawn, and otherwheres, for anything that might serve as missile. He had never kicked a dog, or struck one with his hand, in his life; he had a theory that it was always better to throw something. “Idiot poodle!” he said.
But Gammire’s tricks were not idiocy in the eyes of Mr. Atwater’s daughter, as she watched them. They had brought to her mind the tricks of the Jongleur of Notre Dame, who had nothing to offer heaven itself, to mollify heaven’s rulers, except his entertainment of juggling and nonsense; so that he sang his thin jocosities and played his poor tricks before the sacred figure of the Madonna; but when the pious would have struck him down for it, she miraculously came to life just long enough to smile on him and show that he was right to offer his absurd best. And thus, as Julia watched the little Jongleur upon the lawn, she saw this was what he was doing: offering all he knew, hoping that someone might laugh at him, and like him. And, not curiously, after all, if everything were known, she found herself thinking of another foolish creature, who had nothing in the world to offer anybody, except what came out of the wistfulness of a foolish, loving heart. Then, though her lips smiled faintly as she thought of Noble Dill, all at once a brightness trembled along the eyelids of the Prettiest Girl in Town, and glimmered over, a moment later, to shine upon her cheek.
“You get out!” Mr. Atwater shouted, “D’ye hear me, you poodle?”
He found the missile, a stone of fair diameter. He hurled it violently.
“There, darn you!”
The stone missed, and Gammire fled desperately after it.
“You get over that fence!” Mr. Atwater cried. “You wait till I find another rock and I’ll — —”
He began to search for another stone, but, before he could find one, Gammire returned with the first. He deposited it upon the ground at Mr. Atwater’s feet.
“There’s your rock,” he said.
Mr. Atwater looked down at him fiercely, and through the black chrysanthemum two garnet sparks glinted waggishly.
“Didn’t you hear me tell you what I’d do if you didn’t get out o’ here, you darn poodle?”
Gammire “sat up,” placed his forepaws together over his nose and prayed. “There’s your rock,” he said. And he added, as clearly as if he used a spoken language, “Let’s get on with the game!”
Mr. Atwater turned to Kitty Silver. “Does he — does he know how to speak, or shake hands, or anything like that?” he asked.
The next morning, as the peculiar old man sat at breakfast, he said to the lady across the table: “Look here. Who did give Gamin to us?”
Julia bit her lip; she even cast down her eyes.
“Well, who was it?”
Her demureness still increased. “It was — Noble Dill.”
Mr. Atwater was silent; he looked down and caught a clownish garnet gleam out of a blackness neighbouring his knee. “Well, see here,” he said. “Why can’t you — why can’t you — —”
“Why can’t I what?”
“Why can’t you sit out in the yard the next time he calls here, instead of on the porch where it blows all through the house? It’s just as pleasant to sit under the trees, isn’t it?”
“Pleasanter,” said Julia.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
BY THE END of October, with the dispersal of foliage that has served all summer long as a screen for whatever small privacy may exist between American neighbours, we begin to perceive the rise of our autumn high tides of gossip. At this season of the year, in our towns of moderate size and ambition, where apartment houses have not yet condensed and at the same time sequestered the population, one may look over back yard beyond back yard, both up and down the street; especially if one takes the trouble to sit for an hour or so daily, upon the top of a high fence at about the middle of a block.
Of course an adult who followed such a course would be thought peculiar, no doubt he would be subject to inimical comment; but boys are considered so inexplicable that they have gathered for themselves many privileges denied their parents and elders, and a boy can do such a thing as this to his full content, without anybody’s thinking about it at all. So it was that Herbert Illingsworth Atwater, Jr., sat for a considerable time upon such a fence, after school hours, every afternoon of the last week in October; and only one person particularly observed him or was stimulated to any mental activity by his procedure. Even at that, this person was affected only because she was Herbert’s relative, of an age sympathetic to his and of a sex antipathetic.
In spite of the fact that Herbert, thus seriously disporting himself on his father’s back fence, attracted only an audience of one (and she hostile at a rather distant window) his behaviour might well have been thought piquant by anybody. After climbing to the top of the fence he would produce from interior pockets a small memorandum-book and a pencil. His expression was gravely alert, his manner more than businesslike; yet nobody could have failed to comprehend that he was enjoying himself, especially when his attitude became tenser, as it frequently did. Then he would rise, balancing himself at adroit ease, his feet one before the other on the inner rail, below the top of the boards, and with eyes dramatically shielded beneath a scoutish palm, he would gaze sternly in the direction of some object or movement that had attracted his attention and then, having satisfied himself of something or other, he would sit and decisively enter a note in his memorandum-book.
He was not always alone; sometimes he was joined by a friend, male, and, though shorter than Herbert, about as old; and this companion was inspired, it seemed, by motives precisely similar to those from which sprang Herbert’s own actions. Like Herbert he would sit upon the top of the high fence; like Herbert he would rise at intervals, for the better study of something this side the horizon; then, also like Herbert, he would sit again and write firmly in a little notebook. And seldom in the history of the world have any such sessions been invested by the participants with so intentional an appearance of importance.
That was what most irritated their lone observer at the somewhat distant upstairs back window. The important importance of Herbert and his friend was so extreme as to be all too plainly visible across four intervening broad back yards; in fact, there was sometimes reason to suspect that the two performers were aware of their audience and even of her goaded condition; and that they deliberately increased the outrageousness of their importance on her account. And upon the Saturday of that week, when the notebook writers were upon the fence the greater part of the afternoon, Florence’s fascinated indignation became vocal.
“Vile Things!” she said.
Her mother, sewing beside another window of the room, looked up inquiringly.
“What are, Florence?”
“Cousin Herbert and that nasty little Henry Rooter.”
“Are you watching them again?” her mother asked.
“Yes, I am,” said Florence; and added tartly, “Not because I care to, but merely to amuse myself at their expense.”
Mrs. Atwater murmured, “Couldn’t you find some other way to amuse yourself, Florence?”
“I don’t call this amusement,” the inconsistent girl responded, not without chagrin. “Think I’d spend all my days starin’ at Herbert Illingsworth Atwater, Junior, and that nasty little Henry Rooter, and call it amusement?”
“T
hen why do you do it?”
“Why do I do what, mamma?” Florence inquired, as in despair of Mrs. Atwater’s ever learning to put things clearly.
“Why do you ‘spend all your days’ watching them? You don’t seem able to keep away from the window, and it appears to make you irritable. I should think if they wouldn’t let you play with them you’d be too proud — —”
“Oh, good heavens, mamma!”
“Don’t use such expressions, Florence, please.”
“Well,” said Florence, “I got to use some expression when you accuse me of wantin’ to ‘play’ with those two vile things! My goodness mercy, mamma, I don’t want to ‘play’ with ’em! I’m more than four years old, I guess; though you don’t ever seem willing to give me credit for it. I don’t haf to ‘play’ all the time, mamma: and anyway, Herbert and that nasty little Henry Rooter aren’t playing, either.”
“Aren’t they?” Mrs. Atwater inquired. “I thought the other day you said you wanted them to let you play with them at being a newspaper reporter or editor or something like that, and they were rude and told you to go away. Wasn’t that it?”
Florence sighed. “No, mamma, it cert’nly wasn’t.”
“They weren’t rude to you?”
“Yes, they cert’nly were!”
“Well, then — —”
“Mamma, can’t you understand?” Florence turned from the window to beseech Mrs. Atwater’s concentration upon the matter. “It isn’t ‘playing’! I didn’t want to ‘play’ being a reporter; they ain’t ‘playing’ — —”
“Aren’t playing, Florence.”
“Yes’m. They’re not. Herbert’s got a real printing-press; Uncle Joseph gave it to him. It’s a real one, mamma, can’t you understand?”
“I’ll try,” said Mrs. Atwater. “You mustn’t get so excited about it, Florence.”
“I’m not!” Florence returned vehemently. “I guess it’d take more than those two vile things and their old printing-press to get me excited! I don’t care what they do; it’s far less than nothing to me! All I wish is they’d fall off the fence and break their vile ole necks!”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 320
