Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  Beauty it was, in good faith, to Cornelia, and, so far as she was concerned, Praxiteles, experimenting to improve Mr. Bromley, could only have marred him. There was gray in his hair, but it was not emphasized, since he was an ashen blond; and for Cornelia — unaware of his actual years and content to remain so — he had no age, he had only perfection. So beautiful he was in the rosy light with which she encircled him.

  “Aren’t you going to eat your waffles, now you’ve got ’em?” he asked, a little querulously.

  “Waffles?” she said, as if she knew of none and the word were strange to her. “Waffles?”

  “Aren’t you going to eat them? I supposed that was why you came here.”

  She looked down at her plate, appeared surprised to find it occupied, and uttered a courtesy laughter with such grace it seemed almost that she sang the diatonic scale. This effect was so pronounced, indeed, that several people at other tables turned — again — to look at her, and Mr. Bromley reddened. “Oh, yes,” she said. “You mean these waffles. Yes, indeed!” And here she repeated her too musical laughter, accompanying it with several excited gestures of amazement as she exclaimed, “Imagine my not noticing them when they’re absolutely my favourite food! Absolutely they are, my dear man, I do assure you!”

  Then, having touched a waffle with her fork, she set the fork down, placed her elbows on the table, rested her chin in her hands and gazed upon her companion lustrously. “Air. Bromley,” she said, “how did your father and mother happen to choose ‘Gregory’ for your first name? Were you named for somebody else, or did they just have kind of an inspiration to call you Gregory.”

  “I was named for an uncle,” he replied briefly.

  “How beautiful!” she murmured.

  “What?”

  “It’s a beautiful name,” she said, and, not changing her attitude, continued to gaze upon him.

  “Why in the world don’t you eat your food?” he asked, impatiently. He had become but too well aware that Cornelia was attracting a covertly derisive attention; and he began to think her a bothersomely eccentric child. Following her noticeable elegance and her diatonic laughter, her dreamy attitude in the presence of untouched waffles was conspicuous, and he was annoyed in particular by the interest with which two occupants of a table against the opposite wall were regarding him and Cornelia.

  One of these interested persons was another of his pupils, a girl of Cornelia’s age. He could not fail to note how frequently she glanced at him, and after each glance whispered seriously with her mother across their table; then both would stare surreptitiously at him and his rapt vis-à-vis. There was something like a disapproving surveillance — even something inimical — in their continuing observation, he thought; nor was he remote from the truth in this impression.

  Cornelia’s schoolmate was enjoying herself, excited by what she had easily prevailed upon a nervous mother to see as a significant contretemps. Moreover, the daughter had just imparted to the mother a secret known to half the school, but not to Mrs. Cromwell.

  “Crazy about him!” the schoolmate whispered. “Absolutely! She picked up the stub of his pencil and kept it, and a piece of an old broken pipe. We teased her, and she got red and ran away. She won’t speak to us for days if we say anything about him she doesn’t like. Everybody knows she’s simply frantic. Did you ever see such airs as she’s been putting on, and did you hear her calling him her ‘dear man’ and talking about ‘I do assure you’? And then looking at him like that — the poor smack!”

  “I never in all my life saw anything like it!” the mother returned, her brow dark and her eyes wide “She looked straight at us and never made the slightest sign when we bowed to her! The idea of as careful a woman as Mrs. Cromwell allowing her daughter to get into such a state, in the first place, is very shocking to me; and in the second, to permit her to come here, at her age, and lunch in public with a man she’s in such a state about — a man supposed to be her teacher and old enough to be almost her grandfather — I simply can’t imagine what she means by it.”

  The schoolmate giggled. “Cornelia’s mother? Don’t you believe it. Mrs. Cromwell doesn’t know a thing about it.”

  “Then she ought to know, and immediately. If one of my daughters behaved like that, I should certainly be thankful to any one who informed me of it. I certainly—”

  “Look!” the schoolmate whispered, profoundly stirred. “Look at her now!”

  Cornelia was worth the look thus advised. Under repeated pressure to dispose of her waffles, she had made some progress with them, but now with the plate removed and a cooling sherbet substituted before her, she had resumed her rapt posture, her elbows upon the table, her chin upon her hands, her wistful bright eyes fixed upon the face of the uncomfortable gentleman opposite her.

  “Was your uncle a very distinguished man, Mr. Bromley?” she asked. “I mean the one they named you ‘Gregory’ after.”

  “Not in any way,” he said. He had finished his own lunch, and moved back slightly but significantly in his chair. “Hadn’t you better eat your sherbet?” he suggested. “I believe it’s about time for me to go.”

  She sighed, lowered her eyes, and obediently ate the sherbet; but ate it so slowly that by the time she had finished it they were alone in the room except for a waitress, who made her own lingering conspicuous.

  “Now, then,” Mr. Bromley said, briskly, “if you’ve quite concluded your—”

  “But I haven’t had any coffee,” Cornelia interrupted. “I always have a small cup after lunch.”

  “Does your mother—”

  “Mamma?” she said, appearing greatly surprised. “Oh, dear, yes. She takes it herself.”

  He resigned himself, and the waitress brought the little cup; but as Cornelia conveyed the contents to her lips entirely by means of the accompanying tiny spoon, and her care not to be injured by hot liquid was extreme, he thought that never in his life had he seen any person drink an after-dinner cup of coffee so slowly. And, all the while, Cornelia, silent, seemed to be dreamily yet completely engrossed with this long process of consumption; her lowered eyes were always upon the tiny spoon. The impatient Mr. Bromley sat and sat, and finally lost his manners so far as to begin a nervous tapping upon the rugless floor with the sole of his right shoe.

  This was the oddest child in the world, he thought. A little while ago she had looked at him with so intent a curious dreaminess that she had annoyed him; now she seemed to have forgotten him in her epicurean absorption in half a gill of coffee. And so he frowned, and shifted in his chair and tapped the floor with his shoe, and did not know that the tapping had grown rhythmical. For, though her eyes were lowered and her lips were silent, Cornelia was keeping time to it with a song. Each tap of Mr. Bromley’s foot was a syllable of the song.

  The hours I spent with thee, dear heart,

  Are as a string of pearls to me;

  I count them over, every one apart —

  — . — . But at last her pearls were gone; the little cup was empty. “Now,” he said, “if you’ve finished, Miss Cromwell—” And he pushed back his chair decisively, rising as he did so.

  Still she sat and did not look up, but with her eyes upon the empty cup, she asked: “Would you let this be my lunch, Mr. Bromley? Would you mind if I charged it to Papa?”

  “Nonsense,” he said. He had already paid the waitress. “Ah — if you intend remaining here—”

  “No, I’m coming,” she said, meekly. “I just — —” She rose, and as she did she looked up at him radiantly, facing him. “You — you’ve been ever so nice to me, Mr. Bromley.”

  Her cheeks were glowing, her lifted happy eyes were all too worshipfully eloquent; and for a moment, as the two stood there, Mr. Bromley felt a strange little embarrassment, this time not an annoyed embarrassment. Who can know what is in a young girl’s heart? Suddenly, to his own surprise, he felt a slight inexplicable emotion; — something in Cornelia’s look pleased him and even touched him. Just for the five or six
seconds that he knew this feeling, something mysterious, something charming, seemed about to happen.

  “No,” he said. “It’s you who were nice to me. I — I’ve enjoyed it — truly.”

  She drew a deep breath. “Have you really?” she cried. And with that, she turned and ran to the door, all sixteen. But, with the door open, she called back to him over her shoulder, “I’m glad it’s Friday, Mr. Bromley.”

  “Why?”

  Because it’s only till Monday when school begins!”

  XIII. HEARTBREAK

  SHE RAN OUT of the door and to the street, where she turned northward, away from home, with her cheeks afire and her heart still singing; but what it sang now was, “Monday! Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday — Monday again!” All through the year she would see him on every one of those days. Cornelia was happy.

  She was altogether happy; and she had just spent the happiest hour of her life. Other happy hours she might know, and many different kinds of happiness, but never again an hour of such untouched happiness as this. Happiness unshadowed cannot come often after childhood, and sixteen is one of the years that close childhood.

  She was too happy to be with any one except herself; she could not talk to any one except herself; and so her feet bore her lightly to the open country outside the suburban town, and here, pleased with the bracing winter wind upon her face, she walked and walked — and her walking was more like dancing. She did not come home until the twilight of the short day had begun to verge into dusk; and, when she entered the house she went quickly up to her own room without seeing anybody on the way. In her heart she was singing gaily, “Monday! Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday—”

  But as she pressed the light on at a lamp upon her dressing-table, something disquieted her. She flew to her open desk, and, breathless, clasped both hands about her throat, for before her was her sacred mountain, but not as she had left it. The little papers had blown about the room. Someone had closed the window, and gathered the drawings together. Someone had left a paperweight upon them. Someone had seen the mountain.

  The door opened behind her, as Cornelia stood staring at this violation, and she turned to face her mother.

  Mrs. Cromwell closed the door, but she did not sit down or even advance farther into the room. “Cornelia, where have you been all day?”

  “What? Nowhere in particular.”

  “Where did you lunch?”

  “What? Nowhere in particular.”

  “Cornelia!”

  “Yes, Mamma.” Cornelia had resumed her armour; her look was moody and her tone fatigued. “Cornelia, I am asking you where you lunched.”

  “I said, ‘Nowhere in particular,’ Mamma.”

  “I know you did.” And upon this Mrs. Cromwell’s voice trembled a little. “I wish you to tell me the truth, Cornelia.”

  Cornelia stood before her, apparently imperturbable, with passive eyes evasive; and Mrs. Cromwell, not knowing that her daughter’s knees were trembling, began to speak with the severity she felt.

  “Cornelia, your father and I have been talking in the library, and we’ve made up our minds this sort of thing must come to a stop.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “This rudeness of yours, this moodiness and secretiveness.”

  “I’m not secretive.”

  “You are. You’re an entirely changed girl. Last year you’d no more have done what you’re doing now than you’d have flown!”

  “What am I doing now?”

  “You’re standing there trying to deceive me,”

  Mrs. Cromwell answered sharply. “But I’m not deceived any longer, Cornelia; I’ve learned the truth. We knew that a change had come over you, and you were moody and indifferent toward your family, but we did at least suppose your mind was on your books. But to-day—”

  “To-day!” Cornelia cried out suddenly, her look of moodiness all gone. She pointed to her desk. “Were you in here to-day after I went out? Did you—”

  “You left your door open and your window, and those sheets of paper were blowing clear out into the hall. Naturally, I”

  “Mamma!” Cornelia’s voice was loud now, and her finger trembled violently as she pointed to the mountain. “Mamma, did you — did you—”

  Mrs. Cromwell laughed impatiently. “Naturally, as I picked them up I couldn’t very well help seeing what they were and drawing certain conclusions.”

  “You dared!” Cornelia cried, fiercely. “Mamma, you dared!”

  “Cornelia, you will please not speak to me in that tone. I’m very glad it happened because, though of course I shouldn’t take those little drawings of yours seriously, and they’re of no significance worth mentioning, there was one of them that did shed a light on something I heard later in the afternoon.”

  “What? What did you hear?”

  Mrs. Cromwell came a step nearer her, gravely. “Cornelia, you needn’t have tried to deceive me about where you went when you slipped out of the house before lunch and caused me so much anxiety. I telephoned and telephoned—”

  Cornelia interrupted; her shaking finger still pointed to the desk; “I don’t care to hear this. What I want to know is how you dared — how you dared to—”

  “Cornelia, you must not ask your mother how she ‘dares’ to do anything. We know where you lunched, and you might have guessed that you couldn’t do such a thing without our hearing of it. A lady who saw you came straight here to know if it was by my consent, and I’m very grateful to her for it. In conjunction with the drawing I’d just seen, which surprised me greatly, to say the least, what this lady told me was a shock to me, as it is to your father, too, Cornelia. To think that you’d deceive us like this — to say nothing of the indiscretion of a schoolmaster who is supposed to be in charge of—”

  “Mr. Bromley?” Cornelia cried. “Do you mean Mr. Bromley?”

  “I certainly do. I think his conduct—”

  “I asked him,” Cornelia interrupted fiercely. “I saw him from the window and I ran down and walked ahead of him, and almost got run over by a taxicab on purpose, and he saved me, and I asked him to let me have lunch with him and told him I was going there anyway. Mamma, don’t you dare—”

  Her voice broke; she gulped and choked; her trembling was but too visible now. “Mamma, if you ever dare say anything against Mr. Bromley—”

  “I agree that we may quite as well leave him out of it,” her mother said, sharply. “Your own excitement is all the evidence I need that your father and I have been wise in the decision we’ve just come to.”

  Something ominous in this arrested Cornelia’s anger; and she stared at her mother incredulously. “‘Decision’?” she repeated, slowly. “What ‘decision’?”

  “We’re going to put you into Miss Remy’s school on the Hudson,” Mrs. Cromwell said. “Your father’s already engaged a drawing-room for us on the afternoon train to-morrow. I’m going with you, and you’ll begin the new term there on Monday.”

  Cornelia still stared. “No—” she said. “No, Mamma, no—”

  Mrs. Cromwell was touched, seeing the terror that gathered in her child’s eyes. “You’ll love it there after a little while, dear. You may think it’s pleasant to stay here, but after you’ve been there a week or so, it’s such a lovely place that you—”

  But Cornelia threw herself down passionately at her mother’s feet. “No! No! No!” she sobbed, over and over again; and in this half-articulate anguish, Mrs. Cromwell read and understood Cornelia’s secret indeed. She was compassionate, yet all the more confirmed in her belief that the decision just made with her husband was a wise one.

  Cornelia could bring no eloquence to alter her fate. “No! No! No!” was only her protest against what she understood was inevitable, though, as she wept brokenly upon her pillow that night, she thought of one resource that would avoid the inevitable, so desperate she was. But she decided to live, and found living hardest when she was on her way to the train next day, and the route chosen by her fa
ther’s chauffeur cruelly passed the Blue Tea Room.

  On the train, thinking of the flying miles that so bitterly lengthened between her and that sacred little blue-painted room, she came to the end of the song her heart had chanted there in time to a tapping foot; — it was the refrain of the car wheels upon the humming rails all that aching way:

  I tell each bead unto the end and there

  A cross is hung.

  XIV. MRS. DODGE’S NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOUR

  AT FIVE O’CLOCK upon a February afternoon the commodious rooms on the lower floor of Mrs. Cromwell’s big house resounded with all the noise that a hundred women unaided by firearms could make. A hundred men, gathered in a similar social manner, if that were possible, might either be quiet or produce a few uproariously bellowing groups, a matter depending upon the presence or absence of noisy individuals; but a hundred habitually soft-voiced women, brought together for a brief enjoyment of one another’s society and a trifling incidental repast, must almost inevitably abandon themselves to that vocal rioting ultimately so helpful to the incomes of the “nerve specialists.” The strain, of course, is not put upon the nerves by the overpitched voices alone. At times during Mrs. Cromwell’s “tea” the face of almost every woman in the house was distressed by the expression of caressive animation maintained upon it. The most conscientious of the guests held this expression upon their faces from the moment they entered the house until they left it; they went about from room to room, from group to group, shouting indomitably; and, without an instant’s relaxation, kept a sweet archness frozen upon their faces, no matter how those valiant faces ached.

  Men may not flatter themselves in believing it is for them that women most ardently sculpture their expressions. A class of women has traduced the rest: those women who are languid where there are no men. The women at Mrs. Cromwell’s “tea,” with not a man in sight, so consistently moulded their faces that the invitations might well have read, “From Four to Six: a Ladies’ Masque.”