Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  Henry showed no great enthusiasm about accompanying his father, and when they arrived at the new house seemed indifferent to the busy work going on there. Dan was loud and jocose with him, slapping him on the back at intervals, and inquiring in a shout how it felt to “be back in God’s country again.” Upon each of these manifestations, Henry smiled with a politeness somewhat constrained, replying indistinctly; and, as they went over the building, now in a skeleton stage of structure, Dan would stop frequently and address a workman with hearty familiarity: “Look what I got with me, Shorty! Just got him back all the way from Europe! How’d you like to have a boy as near a man as this? Pretty fine! Yes, sir; pretty fine, Shorty!” And he would throw his ponderous arm about his son’s thin shoulders, and Henry would bear the embrace with a bored patience, but move away as soon as he could find an excuse to do so.

  He was a dark, slender, rather sallow boy, short for the sixteen years he verged upon, though his face, with its small and shapely features, like his mother’s, looked older and profoundly reticent. It was one of those oldish young faces that seem too experienced not to understand the wisdom of withholding everything; and Henry appeared to be most of all withholding when he was with his boisterous, adoring father. Obviously this was not because the boy had any awe of Dan. On the contrary, as one of the friendly and admiring carpenters observed, “The Big Fellow, he’s so glad to have that son of his back he just can’t keep his hands off him; wants to jest hug him all the time, and it makes the kid tired. Well, I can remember when I was like that — thought I knew it all, and my old man didn’t know nothin’! I expect this kid does know a few things the Big Fellow doesn’t know he knows, mebbe! Looks like that kind of a kid to me.”

  The estimate was not ill-founded, as Henry presently demonstrated. Escaping from his father’s fond and heavy arm, he seated himself upon a slab of carved stone, produced a beautiful flat gold case, the size and shape of a letter envelope, and drew from it a tiny cigarette of a type made in France for women.

  Dan stared at him, frowned, and inquired uncomfortably, but with some severity: “Don’t you think you’re too young for that, Henry?”

  “Young?” Henry seemed to be mildly surprised as he lighted the cigarette. “No, I shouldn’t think so. I’ve smoked for quite some time now, you know.”

  “No; I certainly didn’t know.”

  “Oh, yes,” Henry returned placidly. “It’s years since I first began it.”

  “Well, but see here — —” Dan began; then paused, reddening. “I don’t believe it’ll be very good for your health,” he concluded feebly.

  “My health’s all right,” the youth said, with an air that began to be slightly annoyed. “Mother’s known I smoked a long while.”

  “Well, but — —” Dan stopped again, his embarrassment increasing and his perplexity increasing with it as he remembered that he himself had smoked at fifteen, surreptitiously. “Well — —” he began again, after a pause, during which Henry blew a beautifully formed little smoke ring. “Well — —”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Well — —” Dan said. “Well, I’m glad if you do smoke, you do it openly, anyhow.”

  “Yes, sir?” Henry returned, with a slight accent of surprise that suggested his inability to perceive any reason for not smoking openly. Then, regarding the incident as closed, he asked: “I suppose you’ll put up a garage in proportion to the house, won’t you? It’s about time I had a car of my own, don’t you think, sir?”

  “I expect so,” Dan said, still uncomfortable. “I expect we’ll have to see about it before long. Anyhow, I would rather you did it openly, Henry. I — I don’t — I — —” He stopped, in difficulties with a depth of feeling that affected his voice. “I — I don’t ever expect to be half as good a father to you, Henry, as my — as my own father was to me, but I — well, your uncle Harlan and I were afraid to smoke before him until we were almost grown up. We used to sneak out to the stable to smoke — or in alleys — and though my father was so much better a man than I am, and so much better a father to me than I can ever hope to be to you, I guess — I guess this is better, Henry. I mean I guess it’s better to have you open with me, like this. It’s an advance, I expect. I don’t know why we were afraid to smoke before father; he never whipped us and he was the kindest man — the best — the best father that ever — —” He was unable to continue; and Henry glanced up to see him, red-faced and swallowing, struggling with an emotion that made the boy wonder what in the world was the matter with him.

  “I suppose he was, probably,” Henry said. “How about that car? Don’t you think I might as well have it pretty soon? How about this week’s being as good as any other time?”

  Dan recovered himself, smiled, and patted his son’s shoulder. “I expect so, maybe. We’ll drive down to our agents on the avenue before we go home.”

  And at this Henry proved that he could still show some animation. He sprang up, shouting. “Ya-ay!” he cried. “Vive le sport!” And he leaped into the big Morgan limousine that stood waiting for them in the cluttered driveway. “Come on!” he shouted. “I’ll show you how to shoot a little life into this old town!”

  Rising from her nap, an hour later, Lena looked from her window and saw them returning. Henry was still animated, talking busily, and, as they came into the house, seemed willing to bear the weight of his father’s arm across his shoulders. The mother, looking down upon the pair, smiled thoughtfully to herself; — she was not more indulgent with the boy than his father was; but she knew that Henry was more hers than he was his father’s. He had always been so, because of some chord of subtle understanding struck by her nature and Henry’s. She had sometimes been in a temper with him when he was a noisy little boy, but as he grew older she had begun to feel only amusement over his naughtinesses, because she understood them so well; — she laughed at him sometimes, but had long since ceased to chide him. She had no blame for him, and she knew that he would never find fault with her, no matter what she did. They had a mysterious comprehension of each other — a comprehension so complete that they had never needed to speak of it.

  She heard him chattering to his grandmother in the hall downstairs, and knew by his tone that his father had bought him something, of which the boy would presently tell her; — she remained standing beside the closed window, waiting for him to come in with his news. Then, as she stood there, a gust drove down a multitude of soot flakes from the smokestack of an apartment house that had been built near by, on the cross street just south of the Oliphants’, while she was away. After the soot, which flecked the window, the smoke itself descended, enveloping the house so thickly that the window became opaque. Sounds were not shut out, however, and she could still hear all too well the chattering of a steam drill at work across the street, where a public garage was being built. She frowned at the noise, for the drill had disturbed her sleep; and so had the almost unceasing rumble of trucks passing the house; and so had the constant yelp of automobile signals rasping at one another for right of way.

  The smoke thinned out, revealing the busy street that had been so different when she had first looked forth upon it from this same window, a bride. She remembered how quiet it had been then — and suddenly she spoke aloud.

  “Well, I’m still here!”

  Then she laughed softly, as her eyes wandered to the north, crossed the iron picket fence that divided the Oliphants’ yard from the Shelbys’, and beheld the fountain swan. He was green no longer; his colour was that of the smoke; and though he still shot a crystal spray, the flying water was the only clean thing about him, or in sight.

  “Ridiculous old beast!” Lena said; but there was no bitterness in her tone. It was a long time since she had felt jealous of Martha; and, although she often told Harlan that Martha would never marry him, “because she still hopes Dan’ll be a widower some day,” the warning had come to be merely jocular, without intended sting. Moreover, she practised the same raillery with her brother after he had taken
up his residence in the town; for George offered himself as a rival to Harlan in the half-serious manner of a portly bachelor of forty mildly courting a contemporary.

  Lena repeated her opinion of the swan. “Ridiculous old beast!” This time she did not murmur the words as before; but spoke them in her mind, and she immediately followed them with others, the connection being made without any more feeling than she had about the swan. Her thought was merely speculative, even a little compassionate: “I suppose she does still hope it, poor old thing! She thinks maybe, if I leave him — —”

  But Henry came in with the news of his father’s munificence, and interrupted this thought that had been in her mind ever since the night of Martha’s return from the long absence in Italy. Throughout all the long time since then, there had always been in Lena’s mind a conviction, however obscured or half-forgotten, that some day she would leave her husband.

  Chapter XXVI

  SHE WAS MISTAKEN about Martha, who never had the definite hope Lena’s imagination attributed to her. Martha was steadfast because she could not help it, having been born with this endowment evidently; and her tenderness for the boy she had loved so heartily was imperishable; but the Dan Oliphant of the middle years did not seem to her to be that boy. What she felt for the big middle-aged man, she felt only because he had long ago been the beloved youth; she was not in love with him, nor with anybody. This was the explanation she still found it necessary to make to his brother about once a year — usually on New Year’s Day; for it was Harlan’s habit to select that hopeful anniversary as a good time to dwell a little upon his patience.

  “You call it your patience, but it became only your habit long ago,” she told him. “It would really unsettle you badly if I ever said I’d marry you, Harlan; and it would unsettle you even more if I not only said I would, but went ahead and did it. You’d find you’d never forgive me for upsetting your routine. If we were married, where in the world would you ever go? You haven’t been anywhere for so long, except to see me, that you’d be left without the destination you’ve been accustomed to. It’s gallant of you to still mention your willingness, every now and then, and I own up that I rather expect it and should miss it if you didn’t; but if you want to marry, you ought to look about for — well, say a pretty widow of twenty-nine, Harlan. She’d be better for you than one of the ‘buds,’ though you could have whichever you chose; — they’d jump at the chance! The trouble with me is that I’m too old — and I’m horribly afraid I look my age.”

  The fear was warranted, though it need not have been a fear. She had escaped the portliness that seemed to threaten her at thirty, and had escaped too far, perhaps; but her thinness was not angular; and if she looked her age, then that age was no more than a pleasantly responsible age, as Harlan told her, and neither a careworn nor a gray-haired age. In fact, it must be the perfect age, he said — and he wondered if it mightn’t be as kind as it looked, and be the perfect age for him.

  At that, she became more serious. “I’m surprised at myself every year I grow older,” she said. “I’m so much more romantic than I was at twenty, and it seems I keep growing more so. At twenty how I’d have laughed if I’d heard of a woman of forty who said she couldn’t marry because she was in love with no one! I suppose what would have struck me as funniest would have been the idea of a woman of forty talking about marrying at all.”

  She was “in love with no one,” but she could still be Harlan’s brother’s champion, if need arose; and after George McMillan took up his residence in the town, and began his mild rivalry, she had this amiable bachelor to second her. Moreover, it is to be admitted for her that she, who in the bloom of youth had never known how to display the faintest symptoms of coquetry, now sometimes enjoyed tokens of disturbance unwillingly exhibited by Harlan when the rival appeared to win an advantage. McMillan, dark and growing a little bald, counterbalanced what was lacking above by a decoration below already rare in the land, but not yet a curiosity, a Van Dyke beard, well suited to his face. In manner, too, he was equal to the flavour of a fine old portrait, and he had spoken from his childhood in the accent Harlan had carefully acquired. Thus the latter was sometimes but too well encountered on his own ground.

  He met one of these defeats in an early April twilight when he had expected to find Martha alone, as he knew a meeting of the board of directors of the “Ornaby Four” had been called for that evening, and George McMillan was a member of the board. The air was warm with one of the misplacements of this season, when sometimes a midsummer day wanders from its proper moorings and irrationally ascends almost to the chilly headwaters of spring. Martha was upon the veranda, occupied with a fan and the conversation of Mr. McMillan when Harlan arrived; and the newcomer was so maladroit as to make his disappointed expectations plain.

  “I thought you had a directors’ meeting,” he said, almost with his greeting and before he had seated himself in one of the wicker chairs brought out upon the veranda by the unseasonable warmth. “I thought there was — —”

  George assented placidly. “There was, but it couldn’t be held. Our president had to go to another one that he’s president of — the Broadwood Interurban. It’s in difficulties, I’m afraid, because of too high wages and too much competition by motorcycles and small cars. I hope Dan can straighten it out.”

  “I hope so,” Harlan said. “That is, strictly as his brother I hope so. As a human being still trying to exist in what was once a comfortable house, I might take another attitude. I live deep in the downtown district now, for my worst sins, and those long Broadwood cars screech every hour, night and day, on a curve not a hundred yards from my library.” He sighed. “But why should I waste my breath, still complaining? It all grows steadily worse and worse, year after year, and if one happens to like living in a city in his own native land, there’s nowhere to escape to. I suppose National Avenue — poor thing, look at the wreck of it! — I say I suppose it couldn’t have hoped to escape the fate of Fifth Avenue; for the same miserable ruction is going on all over the country. My illustrious brother and his kind have ruined everything that was peaceful and everything that was clean — they began by murdering the English language, and now they’ve murdered all whiteness. Beauty is dead.”

  “Isn’t that only a question of your definition?” McMillan inquired.

  “Why is it?”

  “For one reason, because everything’s a question of definitions.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Harlan returned somewhat brusquely; and Martha sat in silence, amused to perceive that her two callers had straightway resumed a tilting not infrequent when they met. A lady’s part was only to preside at the joust. “There’s only one definition of beauty,” Harlan added to his contradiction.

  “What is it?”

  “The one Athens believed in.”

  “It won’t do for that brother of yours,” his antagonist returned. “The Greeks are dead, and you can’t tie Dan and his sort down to a dead definition. The growth isn’t beautiful to you, but it is to them, or else they wouldn’t make it. Of course you’re sure you’re right about your own definition, but they’re so busy making what they’re sure is beautiful they don’t even know that anybody disagrees with them. It won’t do you the slightest good to disagree with them, either.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’ve got everything in their hands,” George McMillan replied cheerfully;— “and they’re too busy to listen to any one who isn’t making something besides criticisms.”

  “And for that reason,” Harlan began, “all of us who care for what’s quiet and cool and charming in life are to hold our peace and let — —”

  He was interrupted, unable to make himself heard because of a shattering uproar that came from beyond the iron fence to the south. A long and narrow motor car, enamelled Chinese red, stood in the Oliphants’ driveway, and an undersized boy of sixteen had just run out of the house and jumped into the driver’s seat. Dusk had not fallen darkly; he saw the group upon
the neighbouring veranda well enough, but either thought it too much effort to salute Martha and his uncles, or was preoccupied with the starting of his car; — he gave no sign of being aware of them. Evidently the unmuffled machine-gun firing of his exhaust was delightful to his young ears, for he increased its violence to the utmost, although the noise was unlawful, and continued it as he shot the car down the drive, out of the gates and down the street at a speed also unlawful.

  “There, at least,” Harlan said, “is something of which criticism might possibly be listened to with good effect — even by my busy brother.”

  But George laughed and shook his head. “No. That’s the very last thing he’d allow you to criticize. He’d only tell you that Henry is ‘the finest young man God ever made!’ In fact, that’s what he told me yesterday evening when I dined there; and I had more than a suspicion I’d caught a whiff of something suggesting a cocktail from our mutual nephew, as he came in for a hurried dinner between speedings. But that isn’t Dan’s fault.”

  “Yes, it is,” Harlan said. “Giving a sixteen-year-old boy a car like that!”

  “No, the fault is my sister’s. What’s a boy to do when his mother keeps him hanging around Paris so long in the autumn that it’s too late for him to make up his class-work, and he has only a tutor to cajole? I don’t blame Henry much. In fact, the older I grow the less I blame anything.”

  “No?” Harlan said. “I’m afraid the world won’t get anywhere very fast unless there are some people to point out its mistakes.”

  But the other bachelor jouster was not at all disconcerted by this reproof, nor by the tone of it, which was incautiously superior. “By George, Oliphant, I always have believed you were really a true Westerner under that surface of yours! The way you said ‘the world won’t get anywhere very fast’ was precisely in the right tone. You’re reverting to type, and if the reversion doesn’t stop I shan’t be surprised to hear of your breathing deep of the smoke and calling it ‘Prosperity’ with the best of them!”