Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “Jackass!”

  With that word still in his mind as his best definition of himself, he came down from the tower, but did not descend into the hotel. If he went to his room, he knew that he would throw himself face downward upon his bed; and he felt that already too many attitudes of his had been abject, and that he might profitably omit this final prostration. He walked to the northern parapet of the roof and looked down into the Arab town.

  Just beneath him was a lane separating the hotel from some native courtyards, and, within these courtyards, in the dusky twilight, women were crouched formlessly over braziers of reddening charcoal; camels were ruminating; and an evening peace seemed to have descended as part of the routine of the hour. It was not allowed to be broken by a tall negro whose dress consisted of a torn red jersey, a circular apron of jackals’ skins, and a few necklaces of teeth; — he rapped upon the closed green door that gave entrance to one of the courtyards, then, in a subdued voice, uttered a monotonous chant; but nobody opened the door or paid any attention to him. He rapped again, chanted again, and resignedly went away. Through the lane, burdened camels came stalking, silent, infinitely dignified, returning from the Desert; and their barefooted masters stole along as silently beside them. Beyond the courtyards, an Arab café could be seen, and there, at tables before it in the street, the patrons sat in their ivory-coloured robes, as they had been sitting through all the late afternoon, almost motionless and saying nothing.

  Somewhere, in what dim interior, and why, Allah alone knew, a torn-torn beat and beat; and there sounded the far penetrating tinny cry of the African oboe. In the oasis this throbbing and wailing went on eternally, and, like the ticking of an old clock in a farmhouse, could be heard whenever one listened for it. Now, in the hush of evening-fall, it became insistent with a wild and animal melancholy, as if some beast lay up in his lair, whining in time to his thumping heart-beats and brooding upon love and war. There was no other sound upon the air: figures in white and in rainbow robes moved noiselessly up and down a street that ran obliquely upon Ogle’s left, as he looked down from the parapet; but there was no laughter, no shouting of children’s voices at play; not even the barking of an Algerian dog.

  The twilight was deep blue upon the town, but keyhole-shaped windows shone in gold, and golden rhomboids fell upon the street from the lighted open doorways. A portly, white-robed man, pausing beside a door, was blue upon one side and became luminous gold upon the other; figures dappled with gold and blue seemed to swim in the air of that quiet street like gold and blue draperies adrift in azure tinted water. And along another street, meeting this one at a sharp angle and displayed to view from Ogle’s parapet, there were rows of houses, each with a little painted balcony above the open door; and in all the lamp-lit doorways, or upon the steps just beyond, painted girls in brilliant scarlet and green and orange and lavender and silver were sitting in the golden lights; for this was the street of the Ouled Nails and these were the dancing girls. Native soldiers passed solemnly; and now and then one of the girls would catch at the burnous of a man from the Desert as he strolled near her, and hold him until he snatched his robe sharply from her detaining hand.

  The blue twilight darkened quickly; dusk became night, and the lighted windows of a tower at a little distance were like the keyholes of a giant’s house all on fire within. Still the torn-torn throbbed, the oboe wailed, and the iridescent Ouleds sat in their golden doorways — and then, not far from him, Ogle heard again the little voiceless “Ah!” of pleasure that he had heard upon the gallery of the tower. For some time he had been conscious of a figure near him, looking down from the parapet; but he did not recognize it for Olivia’s until she sighed. This sigh, like that from the tower, was one of pleasure; yet at the sound a curious sympathy he had sometimes felt for her, in spite of her antagonism and his own resentment, became almost vividly emotional within him. He had long since understood that she had been ill-tempered because she suffered; and his guess was that her suffering, in cause, had kinship with his own. Both of them were victims of their own blind gods, he thought; and her sigh seemed to him a little like the call of a sister in the same affliction. He went to her, and spoke her name.

  She turned, recognizing him without surprise — her voice and manner had both become much gentler since she had so abruptly quitted him in Algiers. “Mr. Ogle? I supposed you were here.”

  “You did? Why?”

  “I met that French boy, young Momoro — isn’t that his name?- in a corridor of the hotel an hour or so ago. I supposed his mother must be with him, and so probably you’d be here too.”

  “But why should you —— —”

  She laughed amiably. “Because of the ‘Duumvir’ — when you danced with me, because you were looking for her. Never mind! I’d admired your taste, and I’m glad you have it, because now it gives me another chance to apologize to you. Compared to me, you’ve been a Bayard! You see I knew all along, underneath, that I was misbehaving; and lately, even when I’ve wanted to stop it, I haven’t been able to entirely. I went on acting like a surly idiot for a while when I was really all right inside, and just out of habit I’m still peckish with my mother and father sometimes, though I curse myself for it. But I don’t think I’d ever be that way with you again. You’ve been on my mind, Mr. Ogle. I made a vow about you.”

  “I hope you’ll tell me.”

  “That was what I vowed,” she said cheerfully. “I vowed to tell you. Could you stand my telling you quite a little?”

  In the darkness her voice was warm and kind; and the desolate young man felt the need of kindness just then. He was grateful. “I can stand almost anything, I find,” he said. “Especially, I think I could bear a little friendliness.”

  “You poor thing!” Olivia exclaimed. “I’m afraid the wonderful French lady may have been perplexing lately, perhaps even as perplexing as she seems to an American girl. I’m sure I’d never learn to know what a woman who looks like that was going to do next! But I want to talk, not about her, but about myself, Mr. Ogle, and a little about you. My vow was that if we ever did meet again, I’d tell you the real reason I couldn’t help being insulting to you. The first half of it is simple: I was insulting to everybody, I was in a perpetual temper because I was in a fury with my father. I think I don’t need to tell you much about that, because I’m sure you’ve understood it. You didn’t need to be a realistic playwright to understand why a girl of my age on a long voyage is in a state of fury with her father! It always means the father is taking her away from — well, of course from some ‘undesirable’ person at home and that he believes he can ‘cure’ her by absence. But just for my pride’s sake I do want to explain that I didn’t hate my father because he thought he could ‘cure’ me by the separation. That wasn’t at all why I hated him.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  She laughed ruefully. “Don’t you know what it is that a woman simply can’t stand from any man — not even from her father?”

  “I’ve always supposed there were several things of that kind.”

  “There’s one above all,” she said, and in the darkness, though he could not see her distinctly enough to be sure, he got the impression that she was blushing. “She can’t stand his being right!”

  “You mean you hated your father because you knew it would ‘cure’ you?”

  She laughed again, with a kind of helplessness. “I’m afraid I hated him because it had! Nobody has a right to be right as often as my father is! This is a dreadful confession, Mr. Ogle; but the rest of it isn’t quite so humiliating. You understand half the reason I was insulting to you — my disgusting moodiness; but the other half is the reason I made a vow to tell it. You see something — something has had a great effect on me during this African journey. I realized that when we got fairly deep down into the Desert — at Touggourt.”

  “I think I understand what you mean,” he said gravely. “Nobody’d quite understand the effect of Africa who hadn’t been here, and I suppose a great ma
ny who have been here wouldn’t understand. I’ve just begun to feel the Desert myself — I don’t know what change it might make in me; but other parts of Africa have been sufficiently effective.”

  “It wasn’t the Desert that made a change in me, Mr. Ogle,” she said. “I realized it at Touggurt and in the Desert; but what made the change” — she hesitated, and a ripple of laughter in her voice was a sound not of mirth, but of embarrassment— “well, I think places only help us to realize things in ourselves; they don’t make them happen. What made the change in me wasn’t a place at all, but a person. It was — it was you!”

  “I!” he cried. “I made a—”

  “Yes, I think so,” she said. “You see I belong to a very curious sex. We’re most curious of all in the way we lump yours together. When one of us hates one of you, she’s just as likely to abuse another of you as the one she hates, and it relieves her almost as much as if she’d actually abused that one. I was angry with my father — and the queer truth is, I was angry with the person at home from whom I was separated. You mayn’t understand it at all; but along with the rest of what she feels, a girl always is angry with the person from whom she’s separated in this particular way — it seems weak of him to allow it. And then, you see, my father showed himself so much the stronger of the two; the contrast wasn’t favourable. Well, so there were two men I was furious with — and I took it out on you! I struck at the whole sex through you, and when I had time to think it over I saw I’d had my revenge and began to feel a great deal better and be decent to people again. So you’re really my ‘cure,’ because I really did hit you.”

  “Did you?”

  “Don’t you know it yet?” she cried; and although he comprehended what she said as a reproach to his dullness, his conceit and his pride, she seemed friendlier than ever. “Why, of course I did!” she said. “I told you the truth about yourself, the insulting truth. But the real reason I wanted to is that — well, that, after all, you’re so nice!”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “Just that. The insulting truth only covers a little of you. The insulting truth about me, for instance, is that I’ve been a self-centred, bad-mannered, evil-tempered, little shrew — but, dear me! that was only a little of me. So’s your literary hauteur, or your New Yorkishness, or whatever it is, only a little of you. What the rest of you is, I know from the beautiful way you’ve stood my insults. I know you’re really a very gentle, chivalrous, fine person just deluded into the likeness of a cold-hearted snob. You made me furious because you had that Arab eye: I wanted to shake you and to shout at you, ‘Good heavens, you ingrowing blind Mr. Ogle, don’t you realize that the rest of us are part of humanity? Do you think you’re not? Don’t you know that we’re all the same ‘person really, and that you’re only a little of all of it?’ You see it was because I knew you were really so much nicer than you seemed that I was enraged with you. That’s what I vowed to tell you, if I ever met you again, Mr. Ogle, because I owed you a debt of gratitude. Can you bear my having paid it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, seriously. “Tell me one thing. You said I didn’t need to be a ‘realistic playwright’ in order to understand — —”

  She interrupted him. “Oh, yes; I saw your play in New York. My father and mother went to it and came home terribly shocked — at least Mother was and Papa pretended to be. I knew they hadn’t understood it, so I went to the matinée the next day without telling them. I wasn’t much shocked, of course — I saw what you were trying to do—”

  “‘Trying’?” he said mildly.

  “Yes. I thought sp.”

  “Then you didn’t like it?”

  At this her voice became non-committal, a little evasive. “I shouldn’t say just that. What I got from it was the idea that the man who wrote it could do something a lot better, something really important.” She hesitated. “I thought he could — maybe.”

  The hesitant “maybe” was the worst of what she said; and so much needless honesty had an unfortunate effect. One of the most uncompromising of the novelists had written of “The Pastoral Scene” as “perhaps the most important play since the sweeping away of all previous forms of art; perhaps the foundation play of a great new school”; and Ogle, now recalling this passage, failed to see that the enthusiast’s “perhaps” was as cautious as Olivia Tinker’s “maybe.” But “The Pastoral Scene,” besides being a triumph with the Few, had become instantly an institution with the Many; a severe weekly periodical had called it “one of those great popular successes that affect not only the art of a country, but the life of a country.” It was his first substantial achievement, and he thought of the play, since it was recent, as his “magnum opus”; — having used that expression to himself without a blush. And here was a little Midland girl telling him that what she got from it was an idea that he could do better — maybe! Suffering from wounded love and from betrayal as he was, the young playwright found time to add to his other emotions a sense of outrage, to regret the sympathetic inclinations that had led him to Olivia’s side, and to withdraw them utterly.

  “You’re very kind,” he said.

  An infinitesimal bit of what he felt was expressed to her in his voice; and she wished to be as kind as she could. “I haven’t ever mentioned to my father or mother that you wrote it,” she said. “You see, I went to school in New York until only last year, and besides our going to the theatres some of the girls who’d been abroad in the summer would bring home copies of French plays, and we’d read ’em; but of course my father and mother don’t know what’s going on, and they’d never understand that the only reason you write that way is because so many other people are doing the same thing too. But you mustn’t think I was really critical. I thought it was — well, honestly, I was interested in parts of it.”

  She was indeed too kind, and he told her so.

  “Too kind, Mr. Ogle?” she said; and she was troubled, understanding that if she had ever hurt him at all, she had hurt him now, when she honestly meant to be friendly. “I’m afraid you don’t say that as if you mean it. I don’t know a great deal about plays, of course: I only know—”

  “Don’t!” he interrupted her. “You’re going to say you only know what you like, yourself.”

  “I was going to say I only know what I feel about them. The only other thing you can know about plays, where they’re all pretty well done, is what somebody else feels about them, isn’t it?”

  For a moment he stared at her through the gloom; then he said icily: “I suppose so.”

  “Well, what I felt about your play—”

  “Never mind,” he said. “Let’s not talk of that any more. I’m a little curious upon one point. Something I overheard you say on the steamer to your mother gave me the impression that you didn’t know!” He checked himself, and reformed his sentence. “On the ‘Duumvir’ I think you weren’t aware that I am a playwright. Were you?”

  “No. I didn’t know until yesterday that you were the author of that play.”

  “Until yesterday? How could you have learned it here, in Biskra?”

  She laughed. “That’s simple. My father—”

  She stopped speaking, and leaned forward staring down from the parapet. “Why, how queer! There he is now.”

  Mrs. Tinker spoke from a little distance behind her. She was approaching over the roof with Mr and Mrs. Shuler. “Your father, Libby? Where do you see him?”

  Olivia answered quickly, “I don’t. I was mistaken; it’s someone else.” She had been looking down into the street of the Ouled Nails, but immediately she pointed in another direction. “Look at that tower, Mamma, with those curious Moorish windows blazing. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  But Mrs. Tinker leaned over the parapet. “Where did you think you saw your father, Libby?”

  “Nowhere. Look at that—”

  Mrs. Tinker uttered a sharp exclamation. “It is your father!” she said, and pointed downward to the left. “Certainly it’s he. Who in the world is th
at he’s got with him?”

  Tinker, beautifully unconscious of the splendid view of him afforded by the roof of the hotel, was sauntering through the street of the dancing girls with Mme. Momoro.

  XXIII

  MR. SHULER IMMEDIATELY cackled with delight in so happy a confirmation of his joke. “Didn’t I tell you to keep your eye on him, Mrs. Tinker?”

  Mrs. Tinker said nothing. The long building of the hotel was but two stories in height, and the five people now in a row close to the parapet of the roof looked down as from a theatre’s darkened balcony commanding a lighted stage. Among the robed Arab supernumeraries moving in many colours upon this stage, the two people in European dress were as conspicuous as any obvious hero and heroine in a play. Mme. Momoro, already dressed for the evening, lacked the Hellenic stillness once imagined of her by a poet; — in ivory satin, with her mantle of Venetian green brocade thrown back from her long and shining figure, and her head bare except for a veil of chiffon transparent enough to show the pale bronze gleamings beneath it, she was a charmingly animated Parisian in Islam.