Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “It’s curious,” he said, “the way things are. A fellow goes along, and everything seems to run all right, year after year — he can hear a little kind of grindin’ noise, maybe, sometimes, or something seems to slip, but he patches it up and doesn’t let it scare him — he keeps goin’ right along and everything seems to be workin’ about as usual — and then one thing goes wrong — and then another — and then all of a sudden the whole works pile up on top of him, and he’s down under the heap!” He took his hand again from Martha’s, and again passed it tremulously over his forehead in the old familiar gesture. “Well — maybe I could start in again if I can get over what ails me. I expect I need a good night’s rest first, though. Maybe I can sleep now.”

  Martha went tiptoeing out, and through the hall to the room that had been Lena’s. Harlan was there, sitting close beside his mother. “He wants to sleep,” Martha told them, but had no sooner spoken than Dan’s renewed coughing was heard — a sound that racked the sick man’s mother. She shivered and gasped, and then, as the convulsion became fainter, went out trembling into the hall.

  “Harlan,” Martha said, “why didn’t you tell me you tried to help Dan — at last?”

  He rose, looking annoyed. “I didn’t do anything that was in the slightest degree a sacrifice,” he said. “I don’t want you to misunderstand it. I never helped him when I thought it would be thrown away, and I didn’t this time. He made over the new house to me, and I guess Lena’ll sign the deed; she’ll have to. In time it’ll probably be worth all I gave for it. I wasn’t going to see the name of Oliphant dragged through all the miserable notoriety of bankruptcy — and there was something besides.”

  “Yes?” she said. “What was that?”

  “Well, a pack of old money-vultures were after him, and after all Dan’s my brother.”

  “Yes, he is!” Martha said. She began to cry bitterly, but silently; then suddenly she put her arms about him. “He’s still your brother, Harlan! We can say that yet; — he’s just in that room down the hall there — he’s not gone away — he’s still your brother, Harlan!”

  But even as Martha spoke, Mrs. Oliphant, looking through the door of the sick room, cried out in terror, then rushed to her son’s bedside. Dan had unexpectedly lifted himself almost half upright; he seemed to struggle to rise; and in his eyes, wide-opened, but seeing neither his mother nor the nurse, there was a look of startled incredulity — the look of one who suddenly recognizes, to his utter astonishment, an old acquaintance long since disappeared but now abruptly returned.

  A moment later the uncontrolled sobbing of his mother let Harlan know that he no longer had a brother in the room down the hall.

  Chapter XXXI

  THE WAR HALTED the wrecking of National Avenue, but not for long. Until the soldiers came home and the country could begin to get back into its great stride again, groups of the old, thick-walled, big-roomed houses were permitted to survive; and although it was a survival doomed, and the dignity of the dignified old things had begun to appear somewhat ridiculous, since they were smeared with the smoke-fog and begirt with automobile warehouses and salesbuildings and noisy garages and repair shops, and every other kind of shop and office, yet here and there was the semblance — or, at least, the reminder — of a fine, ample, and mannerly old street that had once been the glory of its town.

  But when the great heydays came, following the collapse of the war “expansion,” and the country took up its dropped trades again, and renewed with furious and reckless energy its suppressed building, and, instead of getting back into its old great stride, set forth in a new stride gigantic beyond all its striding aforetime, then indeed the old avenue perished utterly, and nothing was left even to hint what it had been, or to tell its noble story. Old Hickory Shelby’s house was the last to go; — the stone casing of his tall front doorway was the last of all the relics. Even when the rest of the house was flat, hauled away with the fountain swan and the cast-iron fence in dumping wagons and in the trucks of junk-dealers, the doorway was allowed to remain in place above the ruins of the veranda; and for several weeks stood forth against the setting sun like a fragment on the Roman Campagna. But in time it fell, too, as the Roman fragments will.

  When it was gone the old hickory stick was gone, too. He had declined to the last to be an ornament of his daughter’s fireside; and she never knew that she owed her husband’s ownership of the “new house” to her father’s insistence on a “conservative policy” for the bank of which he was one of the directors. Old Hickory’s thoughts were his own, as his ways were his own; and what he knew about himself he kept to himself, as he once or twice with a dry crackling informed his daughter.

  The new house was a white house, and it remained almost white; for the smoke reached it but thinly, and in northern Ornaby, where there were other large white houses among the groves Dan Oliphant had preserved, the people struggled successfully to keep the curse under. Shrubberies lived there, not suffocated; it was a place where faces stayed clean, children throve, and lilacs bloomed in transparent air.

  * * * *

  Martha drove downtown, late one afternoon of a cool day at the end of a green May, to bring her husband home from a directors’ meeting at the bank; for Harlan, in her interest, had inherited his father-in-law’s position; and, as they rolled homeward, checked now and then in the jam of traffic that filled the whole length of National Avenue, she spoke of the prevalence of “Sheridans,” those excellently serviceable cars.

  “Rather!” Harlan said. “All that old rascal had to do when he got control of the ‘Ornaby Four’ was to put back the old clutch and change the name. They’re all over the country. Dan would have made a great fortune if he’d lived and could have held on.”

  “I don’t think he’d mind missing the fortune much,” she said. “I wish he could know how many people are riding in his cars, though. He’d like to know about that.”

  They passed a “gas-station,” a flamboyantly painted bit of carnival, with an automobile warehouse and salesroom, and then an apartment house built round a begrimed courtyard, for its neighbours; and Harlan sighed. “It’s hard to imagine you and I once lived where these things are, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Yes, some of it’s pretty ugly.”

  “It’s all ugly. It’s all hideous!” he said.

  “No, not all.” And when they had left the avenue behind them, and reached the district of the bungalows and small wooden houses, she showed him gardens that he was forced to admit were “pretty.” But when they got beyond this, to where had been the broad stretches of woodland and meadow that Dan had planned for his “restricted residence district,” she insisted on her husband’s consent to the word “beautiful”; for the woodland was still there, so that one could hardly see the houses; and long hedges of bridal-wreath were flowering everywhere, as if snow had fallen upon the shrubberies.

  “Hasn’t beauty come, Harlan?” she said.

  “Oh, it’s well enough here,” he grumbled, as they swept into their own deep-shaded driveway.

  Then they descended at white stone steps that led them up and out upon a terrace, and there they found the other member of their household sitting placidly— “to enjoy the bridal-wreath,” she said.

  “Isn’t it rather chilly for you outdoors, mother?” Harlan asked; for she was now so fragile that she seemed almost transparent. “Don’t you want to go in?”

  “No, not just yet,” she said. “I was just sitting here thinking how your father would have enjoyed all this. The town was pleasant when he and I were young, but of course it was never anything like this.”

  “No,” Harlan said, with satire. “I should say it wasn’t!”

  “It’s a great change,” the old lady continued. “I don’t suppose my mother could have believed how beautiful it would come to be.”

  “No,” Harlan said, with a short laugh. “I don’t believe she could!”

  She overlooked his sarcasm, or was unaware of it, for she went on: �
��I don’t suppose I could believe how wonderful everything will be when my grandson gets to be as old as you are, Harlan.” But this thought made her wander from the subject. “I wish Lena would let him come home some day; I do want to see him; — I don’t want to go till I’ve seen him again.” Her voice became querulous, and then, with a habit she had formed in her old age, she began to talk more to herself than to her son and daughter-in-law, but for the most part in indistinct whispers. Her subject was still Henry, who had done well in the war, had been twice “decorated,” and now lived in Paris with his mother. The old lady murmured of him and of Lena for a little time; then fell into a reverie.

  Harlan joined his wife at the terrace wall. “Well, you’ve got a supporter in mother. She seems to think it’s beautiful.” He pointed upward to where an opening through the foliage of tall beech trees left a vista of the sky; and there, against the evening blue, the thinning end of a plume of smoke, miles long, was visible. “Do you, really? Even that?” he asked.

  “Dan must have thought so,” she said. “I think he felt something in it that neither you nor I can understand.”

  “I think maybe he did,” Harlan agreed. “Then why couldn’t he at least have lived to see the fruition of what he planted, since he loved it and it was beautiful to him? Why should he be ‘dead and forgotten?’”

  “Listen!” Martha said. She was still looking up at the smoke against the sky, so far above the long masses of flowering bridal-wreath that bordered the terrace where she and her husband stood. “Listen! That murmur of the city down yonder — why, it’s almost his voice!”

  Women

  CONTENTS

  PREAMBLE

  I. MRS. DODGE AND MRS. CROMWELL

  II. A LADY ACROSS THE STREET

  III. PERVERSITY OF A TELEPHONE

  IV. A GREAT MAN’S WIFE

  V. ONE OF MRS. CROMWELL’S DAUGHTERS

  VI. SALLIE EALING

  VII. NAPOLEON WAS A LITTLE MAN

  VIII. MRS. DODGE’S ONLY DAUGHTER

  IX. MRS. DODGE’S HUSBAND

  X. LILY’S ALMOST FIRST ENGAGEMENT

  XI. MRS. CROMWELL’S YOUNGEST DAUGHTER

  XII. HER HAPPIEST HOUR

  XIII. HEARTBREAK

  XIV. MRS. DODGE’S NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOUR

  XV. MRS. DODGE DECLINES TO TELL

  XVI. MRS. LESLIE BRAITHWAITE’S HUSBAND

  XVII. “DOLLING”

  XVIII. LILY’S FRIEND ADA

  XIX. PARENTS IN DARKNESS

  XX. DAMSEL DARK, DAMSEL FAIR

  XXI. MRS CROMWELL’S. NIECE

  XXII. WALLFLOWER

  XXIII. THE STRANGE MIRROR

  XXIV. TRANSFIGURATION

  XXV. GLAMOR CAN BE KEPT

  XXVI. DESERT SAND

  XXVII. MIRACULOUS ACCIDENT

  XXVIII. A PUBLIC MOCKERY

  XXIX. MRS. CROMWELL’S OLDEST DAUGHTER

  XXX. MRS. CROMWELL’S SON’S IN LAW

  XXXI. THE ANNIVERSARY DINNER

  PREAMBLE

  BUT WHY NOT?” Mrs. Dodge said, leading the “Discussion” at the Woman’s Saturday Club after the reading of Mrs. Cromwell’s essay, “Women as Revealed in Some Phases of Modern Literature.”

  “Why shouldn’t something of the actual life of such women as ourselves be the subject of a book?” Mrs. Dodge inquired. “Mrs. Cromwell’s paper has pointed out to us that in a novel a study of women must have a central theme, must focus upon a central figure or ‘heroine,’ and must present her as a principal participant in a centralized conflict or drama of some sort, in relation to a limited group of other ‘characters.’ Now, so far as I can see, my own life has no such centralizations, and I’m pretty sure Mrs. Cromwell’s hasn’t, either, unless she is to be considered merely as a mother; but she has other important relations in life besides her relations to her three daughters, just as I have others besides that I bear to my one daughter. In fact, I can’t find any central theme in Mrs. Cromwell’s life or my own; I can’t find any centralized drama in her life or mine, and I doubt if many of you can find such things in yours. Our lives seem to be made up of apparently haphazard episodes, some meaningless, others important, and although we do live principally with our families and friends and neighbours, I find that people I hardly know have sometimes walked casually into my fife, and influenced it, and then walked out of it as casually as they came in. All in all, I can’t see in our actual lives the cohesion that Mrs. Cromwell says is the demand of art. It appears to me that this very demand might tend to the damage of realism, which I take to mean lifelikeness and to be the most important demand of all. So I say: Why shouldn’t a book about women, or about a type of women, take for its subject some of the actual thoughts and doings of women like ourselves? Why should such a book be centralized and bound down to a single theme, a single conflict, a single heroine? The lives of most of us here consist principally of our thoughts and doings in relation to our children, our neighbours, and the people who casually walk into our lives and our children’s and neighbours’ lives and out again. It seems to me a book about us should be concerned with all of these almost as much as with ourselves.”

  “You haven’t mentioned husbands,” Mrs. Cromwell suggested. “Wouldn’t they—”

  “They should be included,” Mrs. Dodge admitted. “But I would have husbands and suitors represented in their proper proportion; that is to say, only in the proportion that they affect our thoughts and doings. In challenging the rules for centralization that you have propounded, Mrs. Cromwell, I do not propose that all rules of whatever nature should be thrown over. One in particular I should hold most advisable.”

  “What rule is it?” a member of the club inquired, for at this point Mrs. Dodge paused and the expression of her mouth was somewhat grim.

  “It is that a book about women should not be too long,” Mrs. Dodge replied. “Especially if it should be by a man, he would be wise to use brevity as a means of concealing what he doesn’t know. And besides,” she added, more leniently, “by brevity, he might hope to placate us a little. It might be his best form of apology.”

  I. MRS. DODGE AND MRS. CROMWELL

  WE LEARNED IN childhood that appearances are deceitful, and our subsequent scrambling about upon this whirling globe has convinced many of us that the most deceptive of all appearances are those of peace. The gentlest looking liquor upon the laboratory shelves was what removed the east wing of the Chemical Corporation’s building on Christmas morning; it was the stillest Sunday noon of a drowsy August when, without even the courtesy of a little introductory sputtering, the gas works blew up; and both of these disturbances were thought to be peculiarly outrageous because of the previous sweet aspects that prevented any one from expecting trouble. Yet those aspects, like the flat calm of the summer of 1914, should have warned people of experience that outbreaks were impending. What could offer to mortal eye a picture of more secure placidity than three smiling ladies walking homeward together after a club meeting? The particular three in mind, moreover, were in a visibly prosperous condition of life; for, although the afternoon was brightly cold, their furs afforded proof of expenditures with which any moderate woman would be satisfied, and their walk led them into the most luxurious stretch of the long thoroughfare that was called the handsome suburb’s finest street. The three addressed one another in the caressively amiable tones that so strikingly characterize the élite of their sex in converse; and their topic, which had been that of the club paper, was impersonal. In fact, it was more than impersonal, it was celestial. “Sweetness and Light: Essay. Mrs. Roderick Brooks Battle” — these were the words printed in the club’s year book beneath the date of that meeting, and Mrs. Roderick Brooks Battle was the youngest of the three placid ladies.

  “You’re all so sweet to say such lovely things about it,” she said, as they walked slowly along. “I only wish I deserved them, but of course, as everyone must have guessed, it was all Mr. Battle. I don’t suppose I could write a single connected paragraph without his te
lling me how, and if he hadn’t kept helping me I just wouldn’t have been ready with any paper at all. Never in the world!”

  “Oh, yes, you would, Amelia,” the elder of the two other ladies assured her. “For instance, dear, that beautiful thought about the ‘bravery of silence’ — about how much nobler it is never to answer an attack — I thought it was the finest thought in the whole paper, and I’m sure that was your own and not your husband’s, Amelia.”

  “Oh, no, Mrs. Cromwell,” Mrs. Battle returned, and although her manner was deferential to the older woman she seemed to be gently shocked; — her voice became a little protesting. “I could never in the world have experienced a thought like that just by myself. It was every bit Mr. Battle’s. In fact, he almost as much as dictated that whole paragraph to me, word for word. It seemed a shame for me to sit up there and appear to take the credit for it; but I knew, of course, that everybody who knows us the least bit intimately would understand I could never write anything and it was all Mr. Battle.”

  “My dear, you’ll never persuade us of it,” the third lady said. “There were thoughts in your paper so characteristically feminine that no one but a woman could possibly—”

  “Oh, but he could!” Mrs. Battle interrupted with an eagerness that was more than audible, for it showed itself vividly in her brightened eyes and the sudden glow of pink beneath them. “That’s one of the most wonderful things about Mr. Battle: his intellect is just as feminine as it is masculine, Mrs. Dodge. He’s absolutely — well, the only way I can express it is in his own words. Mr. Battle says no one can be great who isn’t universal in his thinking. And you see that’s where he excels so immensely; — Mr. Battle is absolutely universal in his thinking. It seems to me it’s one of the great causes of Mr. Battle’s success; he not only has the most powerful reasoning faculties I ever knew in any man but he’s absolutely gifted with a woman’s intuition.” She paused to utter a little murmur of fond laughter, as if she herself had so long and helplessly marvelled over Mr. Battle that she tolerantly found other people’s incredulous amazement at his prodigiousness natural but amusing. “You see, an intellect like Mr. Battle’s can’t be comprehended from knowing other men, Mrs. Dodge,” she added. “Other men look at things simply in a masculine way, of course. Mr. Battle says that’s only seeing half. Mr. Battle says women live on one hemisphere of a globe and men on the other, and neither can look round the circle, but from the stars the whole globe is seen — so that’s why we should keep our eyes among the stars! I wanted to work that thought into my paper, too. Isn’t it beautiful, the idea of keeping our eyes among the stars? But he said there wasn’t a logical opening for it, so I didn’t. Mr. Battle says we should never use a thought that doesn’t find its own logical place. That is, not in writing, he says. But don’t you think it’s wonderful — that idea of the globe and the two hemispheres and all?”