Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  Mrs. Dodge glanced sidelong at him — she was making intermittent efforts to read, and a table and a lamp were between them. “‘Done for us?’ Well, you said there was no alternative, didn’t you? It’s your policy, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so,” he groaned. “I suppose so, Lydia.” Then, shaking his head ruefully, and with a grunt of desolate laughter in his throat, he said: “I know, of course, that you’re going to lash me with it — my ‘policy’ — for the rest of our lives!”

  But this was a prediction unfulfilled, for they had missed a clew that was in their hands; or, more accurately, it had been in their mouths, and they had actually spoken it. A toy withheld becomes the universe to a child, and a lover withheld is life and death; but toys and lovers freely given are another matter. What Mr and Mrs. Dodge failed to see was the significant relation of five to three.

  — . — . The gloomy parents, despondently communing, were still in the library at midnight when Lily came home. They heard her laughter outside before the latchkey turned in the lock of the front door; and then, with the opening of the door, her voice sounded in a gay chattering like a run of staccato notes in an aria of spring. Accompanying it, interrupting it, there was heard a ‘cello obbligato, a masculine voice, young and lively, and this short duet closed with Lily’s “See you day-after-tomorrow!”

  She came dancing into the library, all white fur and flying silk.

  “Oh, you mustn’t!” she cried. “You dear things, you mustn’t sit up for me!”

  “We didn’t,” her mother said. “We were just reading. Who was it that brought you home? I asked your Aunt Sarah—”

  “Oh, no! Aunt Sarah was there, but I didn’t want to trouble her to come out of her way.” Lily seated herself lightly on the arm of her mother’s chair, letting one cheerful foot swing and resting an affectionate hand upon Mrs. Dodge’s shoulder. “Freddie Haines brought me home. He’s a nice boy.”

  “Is he?”

  “I like him awf’ly,” said Lily. “I danced with lots of others, though, too. I didn’t want ’em to think I was only going to dance with nobody but Fred.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “Freddie Haines is considerate,” said Lily. “He doesn’t mind my being an old engaged girl at all.” Upon this she looked across to meet her father’s frowning glance, and laughed. “Oh, Fred won’t tell; he’s never going to mention it. I didn’t forget I promised you to keep it under cover until we’re ready to have it announced. I haven’t told any one but Fred, and I’m not going to.” Here she jumped down from her mother’s chair, took an apple daintily from a bowl on the table, and skipped to the door, laughing reminiscently. “He didn’t take it seriously, anyhow!” she said as she went out. Then, humming a dance time, she ran upstairs to her bed.

  In the library the astounded parents gazed long upon each other, and the longer they gazed the wider were their eyes.

  “Well, at least there’s this much to be said for me,” Lily’s father said, finally; “when we decided to adopt my policy—”

  “Your what?” cried Mrs. Dodge. “Your policy!” He perceived that his policy was about to be claimed by another — not instantly, nor brazenly, but nevertheless with a slowly growing assurance that in time would browbeat him.

  To-night his wife said, “Your policy!” The day would come when she would say “Your policy?”

  XI. MRS. CROMWELL’S YOUNGEST DAUGHTER

  CORNELIA CROMWELL, HAVING passed her sixteenth birthday anniversary, had begun to think seriously about life and books, and was causing her parents some anxiety. She declined a birthday party, although in former years such festivals had obviously meant to her the topmost of her heart’s desire; and she expressed her reasons for this refusal in a baffling manner. “I simply don’t care to have one,” she said, coldly. “Isn’t that enough?” Then, being further pressed, and informed that this repeated explanation of hers was one of those not uncommon explanations that do not explain, she said with visibly increasing annoyance: “Frankly, it would be a useless expense, because I don’t care to have a party.”

  “She’s so queer lately,” her mother complained to Cornelia’s married sister Mildred. “She won’t go to other girls’ parties either. Of course, it isn’t desirable often, while she’s still in school, but there are a few she really ought to go to, especially now, during the holidays. She simply refuses — says she ‘doesn’t care to.’ It isn’t natural, and I don’t know what to make of it, she’s grown so moody.”

  “Don’t you think young girls nearly all get like that sometimes?” Mildred suggested. “Perhaps somebody hurt her feelings at the last party she did go to.” She laughed reminiscently. “I remember when I was about her age I was terribly anxious to please that funny little Paul Thompson, who used to live next door. He danced with me twice at somebody’s birthday party, and I felt perfectly uplifted about it. Then I overheard him talking to another boy, not thinking I was near him. He said his mother had told him he must be polite to me or he wouldn’t have done it, and he certainly never would again, no matter what his mother said, because I’d walked all over his new pumps. It just crushed me, and I know I moped around the house for days afterward; but I wouldn’t tell you what was the matter. It’s the most terribly sensitive age we go through, Mamma, and I just couldn’t have told you. Perhaps there’s been a Paul Thompson for Cornelia.”

  “No,” Mrs. Cromwell returned. “I’m sure there isn’t, and that nobody’s hurt her feelings. She came home from the last party she went to, a couple of months ago, in a perfect gale of high spirits; she’d had a glorious time. Then, a week or two later, when I spoke of arranging for her birthday, she got very moody — wouldn’t hear of any such thing; and she’s been so ever since. Your father’s getting cross about it and thinks we ought to do something.”

  “You don’t suppose — you don’t suppose she’s fallen in love? It does happen, you know, Mamma — even at fifteen and sixteen.”

  “No,” Mrs. Cromwell returned decidedly. “I’m certain it isn’t that. She’s sensible about the boys she knows, and she’s never shown the slightest sentimentality. I’ve thought over all those things, and it isn’t any of them. Nothing’s the matter with her health either; so there just isn’t any reason at all for a change in her. Yet she has changed — completely. In the space of a few weeks — you might almost say a few days — instead of being the bright, romping, responsive girl she’s always been, she’s become so silent and remote you’d think the rest of her family were mere distant and rather inferior acquaintances. It’s mysterious and extremely uncomfortable. Your father thinks we ought to send her away to school where she’d have a complete change, and I’ve had some correspondence about it with Miss Remy of your old school. I think perhaps—”

  Mrs. Cromwell stopped speaking, her attention arrested by the sound of a door opening and closing. She listened for a moment, then whispered: “There! She’s just come in. See for yourself.”

  The two ladies were sitting in a room that opened upon the broad central hallway of the house, and their view of that part of the black-and-white marble-floored hall just beyond the open double doors was unimpeded. Here appeared in profile the subject of their discussion, a plump brunette demoiselle, rosy-cheeked and far from uncomely, but weightily preoccupied with her own thoughts.

  She did not even glance into the room where sat her mother and sister, though the doorway was so wide that she must have been conscious of them; — she was going toward the stairway at the other end of the hall, and would have passed without offering any greeting, if her mother’s voice, a little strained, had not checked her.

  “Cornelia!”

  The girl paused unwillingly. “Yes?”

  “Don’t you see who’s here?”

  “Yes.” Cornelia nodded vaguely in the direction of her sister. “How do you do,” she said, not smiling. “I’m glad to see you.”

  “Is that all you have to say?” Mrs. Cromwell inquired.

  “Yes, Mamm
a, if you please. May I go now? There’s something important I want to attend to.”

  “What is it?”

  “Something important.”

  “You told us that,” her mother returned. “What is it?”

  Cornelia’s voice expressed the strained tolerance of a person who has already reported, over and over, all the known facts in a case. “Mamma, I explained that it’s something important. Would you mind letting me go?”

  “No! Do!” her mother replied crisply, and, when Cornelia had disappeared, turned again to her oldest daughter, and with widespread hands made the gesture of one displaying strange stuff for inspection.

  “You see? That’s what she’s like all the time.”

  “What do you suppose it is she says is so important?”

  Mrs. Cromwell laughed ruefully. “That’s all you’d ever find out about, it from her. If I ask her again at lunch what it was, she’ll do just what she did then. Her expression will show that she finds me a very trying person, and she’ll either say, ‘Nothing,’ or else, ‘It was something I wanted to attend to.’ And if we should follow her up to her room now, we shouldn’t learn any more about it. She’d probably be just pottering at her dressing-table or looking out of the window. That’s all we’d find her doing.”

  In this surmise Mrs. Cromwell was correct; — if she and Mildred had ascended to Cornelia’s room, they would have found her either rearranging the silver and porcelain trifles on her dressing-table, or else standing at the window near her desk and looking down pensively upon the suburban boulevard below. That is to say, by the time they opened the door she would have been doing one of those two things: Cornelia was quick of hearing.

  What they would have found her doing, if they could have entered her room without any forewarning sound of footsteps, however, was another matter. While her mother and sister continued to wonder about her downstairs, Cornelia went to her small desk of dull mahogany and seated herself before it, but, having done that, did nothing else for a minute or two; — instead, she sat listening, a precaution due to the possibility that her mother might indeed prove so curious as to follow up recent inquiries in person.

  Then she opened the desk, and after a final glance at her closed door, took from about her neck, beneath the collar of her brown silk blouse, a tiny key upon a fragile gold chain of links as slim as thin wire. With the key she unlocked a drawer inside the desk, and as she did this her expression altered; — the guarded look vanished, and there came in its place a tenderness, wistful and yet so keen that the colour in her cheeks heightened and her softened eyes grew lustrous.

  She took first from the drawer a little notebook bound in black leather, and opened it. All the pages were blank except the first one, upon which she had lately written the opening sentence of a novel that she intended to offer the world when the work had been secretly completed. She read the sentence over fondly and yet with some perplexity. It was this:

  Gregory Harlford had just fallen out of his airoplane at a height of 7000 feet and as he possessed no parachute he realized that only a miracle could save him from being dashed to pieces at the end of his descent.

  That was the original form of the sentence, but Cornelia had made an alteration. She had scratched out “7000” and replaced it with “5000.” To-day she looked at the latter figure thoughtfully for some time, and, having drawn a line through it, wrote “1000” above it. Then, for a few moments, she had an encouraged look and seemed about to begin a second sentence, but did not do so. Instead, she rested her elbow upon the desk and her chin upon her hand; and as she continued her study of the opening of her novel, her air of being encouraged gave way to a renewed bafflement. It was not that the opening sentence displeased her; — on the contrary. Yet whenever she wished to add another and get on with the story, she came to one of those inexplicable blank gaps in the creative mind, one of those flat stops that so often set even the most willing novelists to walking the floor or the links.

  She was sure that if she could once surmount the difficulty of the second sentence, the rest would flow easily from her. Gregory Hartford was to be the hero of her story, and she had in her mind’s eye a remarkably definite portrait of him, which she wished to include in the novel; but she felt that under the circumstances a description of his person and attributes would be out of place in the second sentence. There was a vague but persistent impediment somewhere; — inspiration failed to make an appearance, and, after waiting almost fifteen minutes for it, she sighed, pushed the little book away and turned to the other contents of the drawer.

  There were several queer items: the stub of an almost entirely consumed lead pencil; an odd bit of broken amber, not quite cylindrical, and half of an old shoe-lace. There were also a dozen dried violets, a flattened rosebud, and a packet of small sheets of note paper whereon appeared cryptic designs — line drawings most curious. These enigmas were what now occupied Cornelia.

  They were her own handiwork; nobody had even seen any of them, and they were of different ages. The oldest of the designs had been drawn long, long ago; — that is to say, long, long ago, according to Cornelia’s sense of the passage of time. For she was sixteen now, and she had made the first of the queer drawings four eternal years earlier, when she was only a child.

  It appeared to be the representation in profile of a steep stairway, or perhaps a series of superimposed cliffs, each with a small shelf at its base. Beginning at the bottom of the sheet of paper, this stairway, or series of cliffs, rose to a small plateau or summit near the top; and upon each step, or shelf of cliff, there was drawn one of those little figures children call “men”; — the body is emaciated to the extent that it becomes a single straight line, the arms and legs being similar lines, and the head a round black dot.

  In Cornelia’s drawing, each of these little figures was labelled, a name having been written beside it; and in some cases a descriptive word or two had been added beneath the name. Thus, under the name “Georgie P.”, which evidently belonged to the figure occupying the lowest step or shelf, there appeared in faded purple ink a phrase of qualified admiration, “Half Handsome.” Another expression of an enthusiasm limited by a defect in its subject seemed to refer to “Harold,” midway in the ascent— “Terribly Good Looking But Stingy.” However, the figure upon the summit, named in full, “William Peterson McAvoy,” was obviously the symbol of a being without flaw, for here Cornelia had carefully printed, all in capital letters: “ABSOLUTELY PERFECT.” Yet, in the next drawing, which, like all the others, was of the same stairway, or series of cliffs, with little “men” upon the steps or ledges, a sharp disaster had befallen this figure adorning with its perfection the summit of the first design. Cornelia had drawn a straight line from the summit down to the bottom of the page;

  and evidently this straight line indicated a precipice of catastrophical dimension. At the foot of it lay the dot and five lines representing the head, body, and members of William Peterson McAvoy, again thus denominated, and near by was written the simple explanation, “Too Snooty.” The summit was bare.

  In a subsequent design, done when Cornelia was thirteen, the half handsome Georgie P., who had sometimes occupied one step and sometimes another, finally made his appearance upon the summit, though without any other explanatory tribute than a date: “Sept. 16th.” But Georgie P. did not long remain in his high position. A drawing made only a week later depicted him miserably upon his back at the foot of the precipice, and beside him Cornelia had written: “Perfectly Odious. Well only another dream shatered.”

  All of the drawings were dated and thus proved that they were made at irregular intervals; — sometimes two or three months had elapsed between them; sometimes three or four would be produced within a week; and the figures upon the steps or ledges varied in name and relative position as greatly, though one or two of the names appeared upon all of the designs except the last and most recent one. This had been drawn only a month ago, and was interestingly different from its predecessors.
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  One thing that made it different was the fact that it contained a Mister. In the others there were Georgies and Harolds and Williams and Toms and Johnnies; but now, for the first time, with unique dignity, appeared “Mr. Bromley,” neither a Mister nor a Bromley having been seen upon any previous step or ledge. Moreover, this début of his was unprecedented. Instead of occupying one ledge and then another, sometimes ascending, sometimes descending, before reaching the final elevation, Mr.

  Bromley made his first appearance strikingly upon the summit. More than this, the ledges below him were unoccupied; — the lofty plateau alone was inhabited. The Harolds and Johnnies and Georgies were gone utterly from the picture, as if unworthy to be seen at all upon a mountain crowned with this supreme Mister.

  For the cliffs, or stairway, meant a mountain to Cornelia; — she thought of the drawings as a mountain; and she called the little packet, kept in the locked drawer, “My Mountain.” Her mountain was her own picture of her heart and of the impressions made upon it; — no wonder she kept it locked away! And now it was a deeper secret than ever, for in its present state it glorified the one name alone, and would have told her world everything. Mr. Bromley was the “English Professor,” aged forty-three, at the boarding-school where she was a day scholar; and not long ago he had told her she ought to think “less about candy and more about books and life.” That was what was the matter with Cornelia; — she had begun her novel immediately, and spent a great deal of time in her room, thinking about life and Mr. Bromley.

  Mr. Bromley was the hero of the novel and Cornelia thought of him as Gregory Harlford. The general public would never have supposed Mr. Bromley to be an aviator, and he had no claim, in fact, to be thought anything so dashing, though he was fond of chess and still played tennis sometimes. Nevertheless, he seemed to be a quietly resourceful man, one who would find a way out of almost any difficulty, and it was strange that he remained so long suspended in mid-air, in Cornelia’s story, even after the vacancy beneath him had been reduced to a thousand feet. For, after looking over her mountain, Cornelia again took up the little leather-bound notebook and renewed the struggle for a second sentence.