Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “Who does?”

  “Everybody,” he said. “You certainly couldn’t expect a thing like this not to be talked about, with the whole place in the state of excitement it was about McArdle’s coming here, let alone what’s happened since. I had no idea you’d deny it to me now, though I supposed you might to other people, as a matter of form. Of course no one would believe it could be a coincidence.”

  She stepped closer to him dangerously. “No one would believe what could be a coincidence, Henry Burnett?”

  “That you threw me over just by chance the very day before McArdle came to town and you took that shot at him.”

  “I did what?”

  “Hit him in the head,” Henry explained. “Your name didn’t get in the papers; but you don’t for a moment imagine that everybody in town doesn’t understand, do you, Lily?”

  She stamped her foot. “Understand what? What are you talking about? What does everybody understand?”

  “Your plan,” he said, simply. “You don’t think you can lay out a man like that — a man that every other girl in the place is ready to fight you for — you don’t think you can do it in such a way as to make you the only girl who has a chance to see him, and then spend all your time with him, and day after day send him so many bushels of flowers that the florist himself gasps over it — and read to him hour after hour, and drive more hours with him — you can’t do all that and expect people not to see it, can you?” Lily’s high colour was vanishing, pallor taking its place. “You needn’t believe I don’t hate you because I stop telling you so for a moment,” she said. “But there’s a mystery somewhere, and I’ve got to get at it. What do you mean I mustn’t expect people not to see?”

  “Why, the truth about how he got hurt.”

  Lily stepped back from him. “Henry Burnett,” she said, “Henry Burnett, do you dare—”

  Henry interrupted her. He had come to apologize; but what he believed to be her hypocrisy was too much for him. “I don’t see the use of your pretending,” he said. “The whole population knows you did it on purpose.”

  “Did what on purpose?”

  “Hit him in the head with your golf ball on purpose!”

  Lily uttered a loud cry and clasped her hands to her breast. Aghast, she stared at him with incredulous great eyes; but even as she stared, her mind’s eye renewed before itself some painful pictures that had mystified her — the spitefully uproarious girls in the park; her friend, Emma; the buzzing “tea”; the group at the gate as she came out; — and there were other puzzles that explained themselves in the dreadful light now shed upon them. Uttering further outcries, she sank into a chair.

  “Slander!” she gasped. “Oh, a horrible slander!”

  “What?” Henry cried again. “When everybody knows the things you can do with a golf ball if you care to? When that professional trick-player gave his exhibition here, knocking five balls into five hats in a row, and all that, how many of his shots didn’t you duplicate after you’d practised them? And some of the girls talked to the caddy McArdle had with him when it happened, and the boy said he didn’t think you were over forty yards away when you hit him. Lily, there isn’t a soul that knows you who’ll ever believe you didn’t do exactly what you planned to do. I don’t mean they think you could do it every time, or that they’re all certain you aimed at his head; but they all believe you tried to hit him — and succeeded!”

  “And you do?” she said. “You believe it?”

  He laughed bitterly. “Lily, it’s clear as daylight, and I knew it when I looked up and saw you with him to-day. I knew you’d won what you were after. It was in his face.”

  Lily gulped and smiled a wry smile. “I see,” she said. “It all works out, and nobody’ll ever believe I didn’t plan it. Yes, I think he proposed to me on the way home this afternoon.”

  “Let me wish you happiness,” Henry said, and seemed disposed to repeat his satiric bow, but thought better of it. “Is the engagement to be a long one?” he inquired, lightly, instead; and this seemed to be as effective as the bow, for Lily sprang up, as if she would strike him.

  “I could murder you!” she cried. “And, oh, how I’d like to! I’m not sure Mr. McArdle proposed to me; I only think he did. I told him I couldn’t listen because I was too angry.”

  “Too angry with whom?” Henry asked, frowning.

  “With you!” Lily shouted fiercely.

  At that, it was his turn to utter a loud cry. “Lily, is it true? Did you hate me so that you couldn’t even listen to him? Is it true?”

  “A thousand times true!” she said, and, in her helpless rage, began to weep. “But I hate you worse than that!”

  “And you sent me away because I couldn’t make you feel anything!” he cried. “Lily, when will you marry me?”

  “Do you think I’d ever be engaged to you again,” she sobbed, “when you believed I’d do a brutal thing like that on purpose?”

  “Lily,” he said again, “when will you marry me?”

  “Never,” she answered. “I’ll never marry anybody.” But even as she spoke, the fortunate young man’s shoulder was becoming damper with her tears.

  XXIX. MRS. CROMWELL’S OLDEST DAUGHTER

  ALL OF THE players except three had returned to the clubhouse before the close of the fine April afternoon, and, after an interval in the locker rooms, had departed either in their cars or strolling away on foot, homeward bound to the pleasant groups of suburban houses east of the country club. Westward lay the links, between ploughed fields and groves of beech and ash and maple, a spacious park of rolling meadows with a far boundary of woodland, and, beyond that, nothing but a smoky sunset. All was quiet; there were no sounds from within the clubhouse, nor came any from the links; and although no kine wound slowly o’er the lea and no ploughman plodded his weary way, the impending twilight in such a peace might well have stirred a poetic observer to murmurous quotation from the Elegy. Nevertheless, in this sweet evening silence, emotion was present and not peaceful.

  There was emotion far out upon the links, and there was more upon the western veranda of the clubhouse where two ladies sat, not speaking, but gazing intently toward where the dim and hazy great sun was immersing itself in the smoke of the horizon. These two emotional ladies were sisters; that was obvious, for they shared a type of young matronly fairness so decidedly that a photograph of one might have been mistaken, at first glance, for that of the other.

  A student of families, observing them, would have guessed immediately that their mother was a fair woman, probably still comely with robust good health, and of no inconsiderable weight in body as well as in general prestige. The two daughters were large young women, but graceful still; not so large as they were going to be some day, nor less well-favoured than they had been in their slenderer girlhood. They were alike, also, in the affluence displayed by the sober modishness of what they wore; and other tokens of this affluence appeared upon the club driveway, where waited two shining, black, closed cars, each with a trim and speechless driver unenclosed. The sisters were again alike in the expectancy with which they gazed out upon the broad avenue of the golf links; but there was a difference in their expressions; — for the expectancy of the younger one was a frowning expectancy, an indignant expectancy, while the expectancy of the other, who was only a year or two the older, appeared to be a timid and apprehensive expectancy — an expectancy, in fact, of calamity.

  This elder sister was the one who broke the long silence, though not by uttering words, the sound she produced being an exclamatory gasp and but faintly audible. It appeared to be comprehended as definite information, however, by the younger sister.

  “Where, Mildred?” she asked. “I don’t see them yet.”

  The other’s apprehension was emphasized upon her troubled forehead, as she nodded in the direction of the far boundary of the links. There, upon the low crest of rising ground capped with the outermost green, appeared six tiny figures, dwindled by the distance and dimmed by the mis
t that rose into the failing light. For the sun was now so far below the dark horizon that the last ruddiness grew dingy in the sky.

  “Yes,” said the younger sister, and her angry frown deepened. “It’s they.”

  “Oh, Anne!” the older murmured. “Oh, Anne!”

  “Yes, I should say so!” this Anne returned, decisively. “I certainly intend to express myself to my husband, Mildred.”

  Mildred shook her head unhappily. “If I only could to mine! But that’s just what I can’t do.”

  “I don’t know,” the other said. “I think in your place I should; though it’s true I can’t imagine myself in your place, Mildred. My husband has his faults, and one of ‘em’s the way he’s letting himself be used to-day, but I can’t imagine his behaving as your husband is behaving. Not that way!”

  She made an impatient gesture toward the west, where the six figures had left the green and were now moving toward the clubhouse, three of them playing deliberately as they came, with three smaller figures, the caddies, in advance. One of the players detached himself, keeping to the southern stretch of the fairway; while the two others, a man and a woman, kept to the northern, walking together, each halting close by when the other paused for a stroke.

  “Can you make out which is which, Anne?” the older sister inquired in a voice of faint hope. “Isn’t it John who’s playing off there by himself, and Hobart she keeps so close to her?”

  “Not very likely!” Anne returned with a short laugh. “She’s using my husband as a chaperon strictly, and I must say he’s behaving like a tactful one. It’s your John she ‘keeps so close to her’ — as usual, Mildred!”

  Mildred made merely a desolate sound, and then the sisters resumed the troubled silence that falls between people who have long since discussed to a conclusion every detail of an unhappy affair, and can only await its further development.

  The three players came nearer slowly, growing dimmer in the evening haze as they grew larger; until at last it was difficult to see them at all. Other things were as dim as they, the player to the south found to his cost; and, finally deciding to lose no more balls that day, he crossed the fairway to his competitors.

  “I’m through, John,” he called, cheerfully. “It’s no use in the world trying to play out these last two holes.”

  “I don’t suppose it is,” the other man assented. “Julietta rather wanted to, though.” He turned to the tall girl beside him. “Hobart says—”

  “I heard him!” she said, laughing a light laugh, a little taunting in its silveriness. “Hobart’s a well-trained husband. You know what that is, don’t you, John? A well-trained husband is one who doesn’t dare to call his soul his own. Hobart’s been worrying this last half hour about what Mrs. Simms will say to him for keeping her waiting.”

  “You’re right about that, Julietta,” Mr. Hobart Simms agreed. “My wife’s a pretty amiable lady; but I’ve kept her waiting longer than I like to, and old John’s done the same thing. So, as he’s probably in the same apologetic state I’m in, and it’s ridiculous to try to play these last two holes in the pitch dark anyhow, I suggest we—”

  The girl interrupted him, though it was to his brother-in-law that she addressed herself. “Are you in the ‘same apologetic state’ that Hobart is, John?” she asked; and there was an undercurrent in her voice that seemed to ask more than appeared upon the surface. She seemed to challenge, in fact, and yet to plead. “Are you as afraid of Mrs. Tower as Hobart is of Mrs. Simms, John?”

  Mr. Tower laughed placatively. “My dear Julietta! Of course if you’d like to play it out—”

  “There!” Julietta said, gaily triumphant. “You see he wants to, himself. I believe you’re the one man I know who isn’t terrorized by a wife, John.”

  She stepped closer to him, speaking through the darkness in a warm, soft voice, almost a whisper. “But then you’re a wonderful man, anyhow — the most wonderful I ever knew, John.”

  “Oh, no!” He laughed deprecatingly, and, pleased with her, yet embarrassed by his modesty, coughed lightly for a moment or two. “Of course I’m not; but I do value your thinking so, Julietta. I appreciate it very deeply indeed.”

  “Are you sure you do?” she said in a hurried whisper, so low that he could just hear it. Then she turned briskly toward his brother-in-law, who stood at a little distance, waiting their pleasure. “Run along, Hobart, and please tell Mrs. Tower I haven’t kidnapped him; — he’s staying to play it out with me of his own free will. And please pay all the caddies off and let them go. We don’t need them, and they’re dying to get home.”

  He was obedient, and from the clubhouse veranda, where lights now shone, it could be discerned that the party on the links had broken up. The caddies ran scurrying by, their shrill outcries disturbing the air about them, and, in their wake, the slight figure of Mr. Hobart Simms appeared within the radius of illumination from the building.

  “They’re coming,” Anne Simms said to her sister. “Don’t let them see anything.”

  Mr. Simms mounted the dozen steps that led up to the veranda. “Dear me, Anne!” he said. “I’m afraid you’ve been waiting quite a time. I can’t tell you how sorry—”

  But she cut his apology short. “Where’s John?”

  “Old John? Why, I gave up; but he’s decided to play it out. Old John and I started pretty late anyhow, and we were playing around with Julietta Voss, as it happened—”

  “Yes,” his wife said, dryly, “‘as it happens’ rather often! Where are they?”

  “Just out yonder.”

  “Where? We can’t see anybody.”

  “Well, they’re there anyhow,” he returned. ‘They’ll be along in a minute or two.”

  Mrs. Simms rose from her chair. “Suppose you go and bring them,” she said.

  But before he could make any response, her sister intervened. “No! Oh, no!” Mildred cried in a voice of distress, and, rising, too, she caught Anne’s hand in hers. “Don’t send him! It would look as if—” She stopped, perceptibly agitated.

  The surprise of the gentleman present was genuine, though not so acute as that of an inexperienced man who expects ladies never to show unreasonable and apparently causeless emotion. “Why, what’s the matter?” he said. “It doesn’t seem to me that just because two people happen to get interested in the game—”

  “Never mind!” his wife said, sharply. “If you intend to take your clubs down to the locker room you’d better be doing it.”

  “Very well.” He entered the clubhouse through a French window that opened upon the veranda, and his surprise was somewhat increased when his wife followed him.

  “Wait,” she said, as she closed the window behind her. “Hobart Simms, I never dreamed you’d allow yourself to be put in such a position.”

  “What?” he said. “What position am I in?”

  “I didn’t think you were this kind of man at all,” his wife informed him with continued severity. “I always believed you were intelligent — even about women!”

  “Oh, no,” he protested. “Don’t go so far as that, my dear!” He laughed as he spoke, but despite both his protest and his laughter, his looks deserved what Mrs. Simms declared to have been her previous opinion of him. Bodily, he was still a featherweight, and of that miraculous slimness which appears inconsistent with the possession of the organs necessary to sustain life; but his glance was the eagle’s.

  “I did think so!” his wife exclaimed. “I used to think you were different, and that women couldn’t fool you any more than men could.”

  “Anne, what woman has taken enough interest in me to fool me?”

  “Nobody. She doesn’t take any interest in you; she only uses you.”

  “Who is she?”

  The lady gave utterance to an outcry of indignant amazement at the everlasting stupidity of a man beguiled by a woman; for, in spite of the ages during which men have been beguiled by women, the women who are not doing the beguiling never cease to marvel that it can be do
ne. “You poor blind thing!” she cried. “Julietta Voss!”

  At this he was merely amused. “You’re not feeling well, Anne,” he remarked. “What you say doesn’t sound like you at your best. I never heard anything so—”

  Mrs. Simms interrupted him. “Who paid her caddy?”

  “I did. I paid both hers and old John’s, but I don’t think we need—”

  “What made you keep so far away from them? What made you play down the south side of the course and leave them so far over on the north? Did she ask you to?”

  “Good gracious!” he exclaimed. “It just happened! They were playing the same ball, against me. Naturally—”

  “‘Naturally,’” she said, taking up the word sharply, “it was like that all round the course, wasn’t it?”

  “What of it? I understood you to charge me with being fooled by poor little Julietta—”

  “Stop calling her ‘little’,” Mrs. Simms commanded. “She’s a foot taller than you are!”

  “Well, then,” he mildly remonstrated, “with all that advantage, what would she take the trouble to fool me for? If she wanted to make love to me » she could do it openly, by force.”

  At this, his wife’s face showed sheer despair of him. “I just said that she doesn’t take the slightest interest in you — except as a foil! This is the third time.”

  “The third time what?”

  “The third time you’ve been manoeuvred into coming out here to play with them. Good heavens, don’t you see it?”

  “No,” he returned, meekly. “Tell me in words of one syllable, Anne.”

  Mrs. Simms complied, and in her response there was that direct brevity not unusual with her sex in the climaxes of bitter moments. “She’s trying to get my sister’s husband away from her!”

  The bewilderment of Mr. Simms was complete. “Old John?” he cried. “Old John Tower? Poor little Julietta Voss is trying to get old John away from Mildred? Of all the preposterous—” His laughter interrupted his enunciation. “Why, that’s the most far-fetched fancy work I ever — But of course you don’t mean it seriously.”