Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “But I didn’t send her,” Dan explained, since his wife clearly implied his responsibility. “You talk as if I — —”

  “No; but you had no right not to send me after giving me your sacred — —”

  Dan interrupted her genially; he smiled and patted her pretty little shoulder, though it twitched away from his touch. “Lena, look here: I’ve got some big deals on, and I’m just about certain they’re goin’ to work out the right way. You see up to now the trouble’s been that all the money comin’ in had to be put right out again almost before I’d get hold of it. If it hadn’t been for that, I’d had that factory up and running long ago. But as I look ahead now, everything is mighty good — mighty good! If I can just put these deals through — —”

  “Yes; it’s always ‘if,’” she reminded him. “When have I ever talked to you that you weren’t just about to put through some ‘mighty big deals’? You said exactly the same last year.”

  “Well, but this is a better year than last year. Why, I’ve done twice the business — yes, better’n that; it’s more like four times what I did last year. If Ornaby keeps on like this, why, a few years from now — —”

  She stopped him; informing him that she’d long since heard more than enough about “a few years from now”; whereupon, being full of the subject, he went down to the library to tell his father and mother what was inevitable within a few years. No skepticism dampened his library prophecies now; Harlan was no longer there to listen, staring with dry incredulity through his glasses.

  Harlan had not sold Mrs. Savage’s old house, but had moved into it, and kept as precise a routine there as she had kept, and with the same servants. He had two bedrooms upstairs made into a library, but changed nothing on the lower floor; and often the old lady seemed still to be there in authority. At twilight, before Nimbus lit the electric table lamp in the “south front parlour,” the room to which she had always descended from her afternoon nap, it was not difficult to imagine that she was sitting in the stiff chair beside the plate-glass window. Of course Nimbus believed that he saw her there when he came in to light the lamp; and he often mumbled to her — always upon the same theme. He was grateful for the one hundred and thirty-five dollars she had left him, but considered the sum inadequate.

  “No’m, indeed,” he said to the figure he saw in the stiff chair. “I thank you kindly, but didn’ I used you right all my days? How much it cost you slip down ten hunderd thirty-five on that paper, ‘stead of one hunderd thirty-five? You ain’t got it, are you? Ain’t doin’ you no good, do it? No’m, indeedy! ‘Tain’t no use you bein’ sorry, neither. Make all the fuss you want to; you too late; nobody ain’t goin’ pay no ‘tention to you!”

  And in the kitchen he would discuss the apparition with his fourth wife, the fat cook, Myrtle. “Look to me like she can’t keep away,” he would say. “Set there same as ever. Set up straight in that stiff chair. See her plain as I see you, till I git that lamp lit.”

  “Landy me, Nimbus, I wouldn’ go in that room unlessen the light bright as day if you give me trottin’ horse an’ gole harniss! How you keep from hollerin’?”

  At this the tall, thin old fellow would laugh without making a sound; deep wrinkles in the design of half of a symmetrical cobweb appearing on each side of his face. Some profoundly interior secret of his might have been betrayed, it seemed, if he had allowed his merriment to become vocal; and this noiseless laugh of his awed his wife in much the same way, no doubt, that the laugh of a jungle witch-doctor ancestor of his had awed wives not unlike Myrtle. “She ain’t goin’ bother me ner you,” he explained. “She ain’t settin’ there ‘count o’ me ner you. She settin’ there ‘cause she so mad.”

  “Who? Who she mad at?”

  “Mad at somep’m!” Nimbus would say, and, becoming less uncomfortably mystic might allow a human chuckle to escape him. “Set there mad long as she want to; ‘tain’t goin’ do her no good. She ain’t fixed to make no changes now!”

  The new owner lived in the old house almost as quietly as Mrs. Savage, in the visions of Nimbus, went on living there. Harlan had several times thought of going to Italy, but the idea never culminated in action.

  “I wanted to come, though,” he told Martha, as they sat on her veranda that hot morning, the day after her return. “I wanted to more than I ever wanted to do anything else. You see I’ve almost stopped going to the office; I just dangle about there sometimes to please father, but I don’t care to practise law. It’s a silly way of spending one’s life after all, fighting the sordid disputes of squabbling people. There was really nothing to keep me here.”

  She did not alter her attitude, but still looked out upon the old familiar unfamiliar scene from beneath her sheltering curved fingers. “If you wanted to come, why didn’t you?”

  “Because I’d only have done it to see you, and I suppose I have a remnant of pride. If you’d like a better answer, think of what I told you about yourself. I didn’t come because I know you’re stony. I knew you hadn’t changed.”

  “About what?”

  “About me,” he said, and added: “About anything!”

  At this she turned her head and looked at him, for he spoke with a sour significance. “Well, have you changed, Harlan?” she asked gravely.

  “About you,” he answered. “I haven’t — unfortunately.”

  “But I meant: Have you changed about anything? Aren’t you just what you were five or six years ago, only a little intensified — and richer?”

  “Ah, I knew I’d get that,” he said. “I knew it would come before I could be with you long. I told my father and mother the very day my grandmother’s will was read that you’d hate me for it, and mother agreed quickly enough.”

  “Why, no,” Martha said, and her surprise was genuine. “Why should I hate you because Mrs. Savage — —”

  “Because she left it to me and not to Dan, and because I didn’t think it was right or sensible to help him with any of it.”

  “But he hasn’t needed any help,” Martha said. “It’s much better for him to be doing it without any help, and so splendidly.”

  “So splendidly?” Harlan repeated, and he stared at her. “But you don’t take what Dan says seriously, do you? You don’t think that just because he says — —”

  “I haven’t seen him, Harlan.”

  “But you speak as if you believe he’s actually succeeding in making that old fantasia of his into a reality.”

  “Well,” she said, “isn’t he?”

  “What? Why, he’s still just barely keeping his head above water. He sells vacant lots out there, yes — but to keep on selling them he has to put all they sell for into developing the land he hasn’t sold. It amounts precisely to the same thing as giving the property away. His mortgages used to worry him to death, but he’s got most of the place mortgaged now for three times what it was five years ago. You see — —”

  “I see that the land must be worth three times as much as it was five years ago, since he can borrow three times as much on it.”

  “But, my dear Martha — —”

  “But, my dear Harlan!” she echoed mockingly, and thus disposed of his argument before he could deliver it. “The truth is, you’ve had the habit of undervaluing Dan so long that you can’t get over it. You can’t see that at last he’s begun to make a success of his ‘fantasia.’ Given time enough, critics who aren’t careful to keep themselves humble-minded always lose the power to see things as they are.”

  Harlan winced a little under this sententious assault, and laughed at himself for wincing; then explained his rather painful laughter. “It’s almost amusing to me to find myself still cowering away from your humble-minded criticisms of me — just as I used to, Martha!”

  “Yes, I know it,” she admitted. “I hate myself for the way I talk to you, Harlan; — somehow you always make me smug and superior. I’m the foolish kind of person who’s always made critical by superior criticism — critical of the critic, I mean.”
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br />   “But I’m not more critical of Dan than other people are. Have you asked your father what he thinks of Ornaby now, for instance?”

  “Yes, I asked him last night.”

  “What does he think of it?”

  “He thinks the same as I do,” she said. “He’s been compelled to recognize that it’s going to be a tremendous success.”

  “Then he’s changed his mind since last week,” Harlan returned, somewhat discomfited. “He told me — —”

  “Oh, yes, I know,” she said. “He didn’t say he thought it would be a success. He said he thought the Addition idea was just as crazy as he ever did, and Dan Oliphant was the biggest fool in seven states, and the noisiest! Those were his words precisely, Harlan.”

  “But you just told me — —”

  “No,” she explained;— “you asked me what he thought. Do you suppose he’d admit to me that he ever made a business mistake? He knows perfectly well that he did make one when he refused to follow my advice and buy some of Dan’s stock when the poor boy was trying to finance his plan at the beginning. Papa confessed it absolutely.”

  “He did?”

  “Certainly,” she replied. “If he’d meant what he said he’d just have grunted it. Instead, he yelled it at me. With papa, that’s exactly the same as a perfectly open confession.”

  Harlan shook his head, remaining more than doubtful of this interpretation. “So you believe if Dan tried now to organize a stock company for Ornaby — —”

  “They’d gobble it!” she said. “Papa especially! But he and others like him wouldn’t buy a single share when poor Dan went begging and peddling all over town; and now I’m glad they didn’t. It’s so much better for him to have done it alone.”

  “But, my dear,” Harlan insisted, not altogether without exasperation, “he hasn’t done it.”

  “My dear,” she returned promptly; “he’s going to!”

  “But, Martha — —”

  “Listen,” she said. “I’ll tell you something that you don’t understand, because you’ve been living here all along. When I went off to college, I spent the Christmas holidays visiting some Eastern girls, and papa didn’t see me for a whole year. Then he nearly fainted — I’d grown so! Yet I’d grown just as much the year before, but he never noticed it because I was living at home where he saw me every day. It’s the same way with a city like this, Harlan. I haven’t been here for so long that I can see the change. Everything is going to happen that Dan prophesied.”

  She had spoken with gravity, but Harlan laughed, not impressed. “Yes, the boosters brag of the increase in population shown by the last census,” he said. “We’ve got a few thousand more Italians and Polish Jews and negroes, I suppose; and some new ugly factories and dwelling-houses of objectionable architecture. They’re beginning to build awful little shacks they call ‘bungalows,’ hurrying them up by the dozen. Is that the glorious cosmopolis of your hero’s prophecies, Martha? To my mind it’s only an extension of hideousness, and down where I live, in my grandmother’s old house, it’s getting so smoky in winter that the air is noxious — the whole town’s dirty, for that matter.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yesterday, as soon as I got here, I noticed that even in summer the air’s smokier than it used to be. I think the city was a cleaner place and a better-looking place when I went away. There’s the smoke, of course, and I’ve already seen how they’re beginning to tear old buildings down and put up bigger ones, and no building has any thought of having the slightest relation to the ones on each side of it. In a way, as you say, it’s getting hideous, though some of these long, wide streets are pleasant, even to a person who’s stayed in Europe too long perhaps — and National Avenue is really beautiful. I don’t know where except in towns like this you’ll find a long street of such big, solid, comfortable houses with green trees and clean lawns about them. This part of the town, at least, hasn’t changed; but a change has begun, and I believe it’s the growth — I think it’s the incredible growth that Dan predicted, Harlan. I think it’s begun.”

  Again she had spoken gravely, though with a glinting look at him which had in it some hint of triumph, and piqued him.

  “Well, if this fabulous growth has begun,” he said incautiously, “you’re surely not hero-worshipper enough to think it’s going to extend as far as Ornaby Addition, are you?”

  She had hoped for this, had led him into it. “Papa’s going to begin building an extension of the Tennessee Avenue car line next month,” she said. “I forced him to admit how far out it would run.”

  “Not so far as the Addition?”

  “Within an eighth of a mile of it,” said Martha. “That’s what made him so noisy!”

  Chapter XX

  HARLAN WAS ASTONISHED, but he took his little defeat well; and Martha in turn encountered a surprise, for he showed a discomfited kind of pleasure. “So Ornaby Addition’s going to get its rapid transit at last,” he said. “That’s not so bad, you know. Why, Dan might come out pretty well on the thing after all!”

  “But doesn’t that annoy you, Harlan?” she asked.

  “You mean that I want to see my brother beaten? That I really haven’t good will toward him?”

  “No, indeed I don’t. I mean: Wouldn’t it annoy you to find you’d always been mistaken about him?”

  “But I’m not. I grew up in the same house with him, and I ought to know him. If he does happen to do anything with his wild old idea after all, it’ll be by the grace of a series of miracles no one could possibly have foreseen.”

  “That is to say,” Martha observed, “you’d call him ‘a fool for luck.’”

  “Let’s put it, I hope he is.”

  “And you were just telling me I didn’t change!” she cried.

  “Yes,” he returned placidly;— “it seems we’re neither of us wiser than we used to be. We sit here talking of Dan and his Addition just as we’d have been talking about them if you’d never been away. You really ought to be speaking with a slight foreign accent and unable to put your mind on anything later than the seventeenth century.”

  She nodded, agreeing. “Yes, it’s queer; and it makes me feel a little queer. You go away and stay for ever and ever; then you come back home and by the time your trunk’s unpacked you’re ready to wonder if you’ve been away at all; — maybe you’ve just had a long dream. Of course, too, I knew what was going on at home — not through papa! — but some of the girls of our old set here have been faithful about writing, in spite of their every single one of ’em getting married. That makes me feel I belong to the seventeenth century — almost ‘cinquecento!’”

  “I’d prefer the ‘cinquecento,’” Harlan said, and immediately added: “Not that I care for it myself.”

  “What!” she cried, her eyes widening. “You’d even criticize the Renaissance?”

  It appeared that he would, and willingly. Offhand he called the Renaissance “a naïve movement amusingly overrated and with the single merit that it was better than what had gone before.” Martha was indignant, and they had an argument in which she proved to be no match for him. He had not been abroad since his junior vacation as an undergraduate, but he knew a great deal more about Italy than she did, though she had just come from long residence there. She continued to disagree with him, and presently was surprised by the suspicion that she enjoyed hearing him talk, and in a way, found him congenial in spite of their differences.

  “You’re the only person I ever heard of that criticized the Renaissance,” she said, when he got up to go. “You’re all wrong, of course, even if I can’t prove it. You’re too much for me, but that’s only because you’re such an admirable bookworm.”

  Then, as he went down the long path to the gate, she observed that his shoulders had acquired a little more habitual stoop in them than she remembered. Otherwise the tall figure might have been that of a thin athlete; and Harlan had a well-shaped head; — she was readily able to comprehend what one of her friends had written her of him: “
And Harlan Oliphant seems to be just as sarcastic as he used to be, but he is awfully distinguished-looking as he grows older.” Nevertheless, even in this view of his back, Martha found something irritating, something consciously aristocratic, over-fastidious, skeptical, and precise. “That’s just what you are!” she said half-aloud, before she turned to go into the house. “You can be rather fascinating, but you’re really only an admirable bookworm in a nice, clean white collar!”

  The admirable bookworm, unconscious that the definition of him had been enlarged, walked down National Avenue, keeping within the continuous shade of the big maple trees and perplexing himself with introspections as he went. He was dry and cold, as he knew, yet far from incapable of ardour, and he had never entirely lost the ardour he felt for Martha; but what surprised him was the renewed liveliness of that ancient pain she evoked within him. He had thought it dead, but evidently it had only fallen into a doze in her absence.

  Of course he asked himself why he should ache because she had at once resumed with him her old critical attitude, and why, moreover, he should care about her at all. She had almost no coquetry and little more of the quality called “sheer feminine charm”; she was too downright and plain-minded to possess much of either. She was not masculine yet, as her father said with the plaintive irascibility of a man who knows because he has suffered, she was imperious. “A man might as well be dead as bossed to death,” he often complained. And although she was a handsome creature and graceful, Harlan saw a dozen prettier girls at the new Country Club every day that he played golf there. Notwithstanding all this, she had only to let him see her again after years of absence, and at once his heart leaped, then ached, and he could think of nothing but this Martha who thought so little of himself.

  He was not the only member of his family who found Martha’s return disturbing; his sister-in-law also had long thoughts connected with the arrival from Italy. That evening before dinner, Dan was whistling in his bathroom, shampooing himself lavishly, when Lena came into his bedroom and addressed him through the open door.