Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  She wasn’t fully in Irvie’s view: Emma, sitting forward, seemed to shelter her, and Irvie, busy with eating and talking, was almost surrounded, as it were, by his affectionate mother and father. Certainly he hadn’t observed Mary’s exhaustion — for, when we left the table and went toward the populous general living-room of the Inn, he skipped gaily forward and tk her by the arm.

  ‘Hi, old lady dearest—’ he began, and then as, not looking at him, she drooped closely against Emma, ‘Why, Mary!’ he exclaimed. ‘Good Lord, don’t you know it’s all over and here we all are again, safe and sound, the same as ever? What on earth’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m all right.’

  ‘But you look—’

  He wasn’t permitted to finish telling her how she looked. As we came through the lounge door he was seized upon, made the centre of a group of all ages crowding upon him with more congratulations, more enthusiasm and a dozen half-shouted questions at once: How had he done what he did, what had he felt while he was doing it, did he realize himself how remarkable was his exploit, were the girls too frightened to help, and was it true, as some shore-watchers claimed, that there’d been a waterspout in the storm? Will, Evelyn and Harriet, as happy parents of offspring saved magically from the sea, were also surrounded and detached from the rest of us. Mary, with Emma’s arm about her, turned to Edgar.

  ‘Please,’ she said weakly, ‘will you telephone to Janey Blue for me? She’s got her own car and I’d like her to come as soon as she can and get me.’

  ‘But, Mary!’ Emma began hurried remonstrances. ‘Wouldn’t I do almost as well as Janey? Next to her you’d say I’m your best friend, wouldn’t you? If you’d just let me—’

  ‘Emma, I’ve got to be out of this crowd.’

  ‘Then come up to my room’, Emma said. ‘You can lie down there until it’s time for you to go back to the Stellings’ cottage. You could—’

  ‘No, I don’t want to go back to the Stellings’ till I have to; I don’t want to have to talk to Mrs. Stelling, or Sylvia either, tonight. I don’t — —’

  ‘But, Mary, up in my room — —’

  ‘I just can’t stay here.’ Mary fought with her nerves. ‘I’ve got to get away or I’ll make an exhibition of myself. Please thank Mr and Mrs. Pease and tell them and your mother good-bye for me.’ She turned to me and put forth a little ice-cold hand, which I took with some astonishment. ‘Thank you for asking me out in your boat. I probably won’t see you again until you come home in the autumn, so good-bye.’

  ‘What do you mean, good-bye?’ Emma spoke sharply.

  ‘We’ll all be seeing you tomorrow, of course. You’ve only half finished your week at the Stellings’.’

  ‘No’, Mary said. ‘I telephoned the station from your room while you were taking our wet clothes down to dry. Please send mine home to me if you don’t mind. The station got me a reservation and I’m leaving on the early train tomorrow morning. Edgar, if you’ll please telephone Janey pretty quickly—’

  T don’t need to’, he told her. ‘Josiah Labrosse lets me use a car of his when I want it and it’s parked on the Inn drive just outside. If you think you’ve got to get to Janey—’

  ‘Yes, I do. She’ll take me back to the Stellings’ later. So please—’ —

  ‘Come right along’, Edgar said in a casual tone, though he was staring at her hard. He turned immediately, went out to the long verandah, down its steps and disappeared.

  Mary followed, still with Emma’s arm about her, and I stepped ahead of them to open the screen doors. Nobody appeared to notice us, and, before we knew that our movement had attracted any attention, the three of us stood upon the lighted verandah, waiting for Edgar to bring the car to the foot of its steps. Then Irvie came forth, but not unattended. A girl in her early ‘teens and three little boys pushed after him, all of them pressing upon him with extended fountain-pens.

  ‘Just a minute, just a minute!’ he begged them, laughing. ‘I can’t sign ’em all at once, can I?’ He spoke to us cheerfully. ‘What’s doing out here? It’s cold after that blow and if Mary’s still feeling so languid she’d better come sit with me by that nice log fire at the other end of the lounge. Come along, Mary; I’ll get rid of these autograph fiends and—’

  ‘No’, Mary said, moving away from him, with Emma, to the edge of the steps. ‘I’m going to Janey’s for a while before I go back to the Stellings’.’

  ‘You are?’ He was surprised; then seemed to comprehend. ‘I see. You still feel pretty shaken and it’s too noisy here. All right; we’ll go over to Janey’s and have a nice quite time there, dear. Just wait till I borrow a car and I’ll—’

  ‘No’, Mary said again. ‘Edgar’s got one; I’m going with him.’

  ‘But you—’ Irvie began. ‘Why, what—’

  It was then he realized that she hadn’t looked at him, wouldn’t look at him. He was astounded, wholly perplexed; stood staring at her.

  ‘Good-bye’, Mary said in a whispered gasp and moved uncertainly down the steps.

  Emma and I went with her. Edgar had just stopped a shabby old sedan for her on the drive below and jumped out; he opened the rear door of the car before I could extend my hand to it. Irvie came half-way down the steps, but halted abruptly, and the powerful fight of the porte-cochere lantern was full upon his face. Jolted by a lover’s rebuff, unable to understand the cause of it, and not yet quite sure that he was receiving it, he spoke brusquely.

  ‘See here! If you really mean you don’t want me to come with you—’

  ‘No,’ Mary said, her foot on the running-board, ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Oh, very well!’ Irvie looked haughty and in his voice was the resentment natural to a lover now certain that he was being badly treated for no reason. ‘Then I won’t!’

  Mary, her back to him, stepped half-way into the car; but suddenly she turned, stepped down and we saw tears copious in her eyes. She threw both arms about Emma, who stood silent and all at once seemed to me mysteriously dramatic. ‘You grand thing!’ Mary cried huskily to her. ‘Don’t think I’ll ever forget how magnificent you were — and are!’

  Then Mary almost leaped into the car, not needing either Edgar’s hand or mine to help her. A moment later, as Edgar jumped in and drove away, she seemed to be sitting almost doubled up on the back seat.

  Emma’d gone before I turned back to the steps; but the ‘teen-age girl and the three little boys were again assailing Irvie, clamouring for his autograph. I passed him without looking at him.

  Chapter Fourteen

  EDGAR FOUND ME in the writing-room when he came back to the Inn. No one else was there and he sat down, waiting for me to finish my letter. I put it aside. ‘You delivered her to Janey all right?’

  ‘“All right”?’ he repeated. ‘I couldn’t say just that. Janey and George Prettiman were wandering about the lawn; but when I got Mary out of the car, pretty crumpled, they came running up and Janey took her right in the house. George said he guessed Janey wouldn’t be out again and wanted to know what it was all about. Naturally I couldn’t tell him.’

  ‘No, Edgar; naturally you couldn’t.’

  ‘Because I didn’t know’, Edgar said, and shook his head ruefully. ‘I drove back here by the Pine Woods Road and I saw Irvie but didn’t let him know I did and drove on. He’s just rambling around in the dark wondering what happened. Uncle Will and Aunt Evelyn think he’s skipped out to avoid more acclaim; but that isn’t like him. Besides Mary herself, who do you think knows what did happen, sir?’

  ‘Emma does’, I said. ‘Maybe she even knows what Mary meant by calling her “magnificent”. Of course girls in emotion do say these things to each other.’

  ‘Golly, yes’, he assented. ‘Who knows what they mean by ’em? But whatever Emma knows, she won’t tell. She’ll never tell. There’s Janey Blue — she probably knows by this time, in confidence, because that’s why Mary wanted to get to her. She had to talk to somebody and it couldn’t be Emma.’

/>   I agreed. ‘No, it couldn’t be Emma.’

  ‘No’, he said. ‘It couldn’t because what Mary wanted to talk about was something that’d changed her toward Irvie, and she knew Emma’d fight that.’

  ‘Yes, Edgar.’

  ‘The way I see it’, he said, ‘Mary didn’t want to talk to Sylvia about it — she doesn’t like her enough — so the only person she could go to was Janey, her old school room-mate, and she’s telling Janey all about it right now. All about what? Why, about whatever happened that’s changed her toward Irvie. Well, what did?’

  T wasn’t present when it happened’, I reminded him. ‘The strange thing, though, is that one of the three persons who were present didn’t foresee this result. That’s Irvie. He did something Mary found so painful that she can’t bear the sight of him tonight — leaving on the morning train and may never wish to see him again — yet even when he came out on the verandah as she was leaving he hadn’t seen that she was changed toward him. Queer, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well — no.’ Edgar gave me a look that was itself rather queer. Though he didn’t smile, the usual calm of his expression was altered by a humorous desperation as if he had to speak out and say something he didn’t wish to say, an unwilling confession. ‘You know, sir, the honest God’s truth is’ — the words seemed to burst from him— ‘Irvie’s clever about a lot of things; but he just isn’t too darned awfully bright!’

  I stared at Edgar. ‘You’ve always thought that, haven’t you?’

  ‘Oh, in a way’, he admitted, with a sound like a groan. ‘I mean he — he thinks about himself a good deal and that stops anybody from thinking much about other people. When Irvie doesn’t have the kind of effect on them that he likes he — well, he wouldn’t dwell on it much. He rather thinks that everything he does and says is pretty much all right, you see, and if they didn’t think so he’d just be surprised and puzzled and hurt, the way he is tonight, for instance. Whatever he did that upset Mary, he’d minimize it, think it amounted to practically just nothing at all, wonder why it made her treat him as she did and of course he’d bury it. If I spoke of it to him, for instance, he’d say he didn’t know what I was talking about and pretty soon he actually wouldn’t.’ Edgar frowned; then laughed. ‘Anyhow, I know there’s one thing that didn’t happen.’

  ‘What’s that, Edgar?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s the very thing you think most probably did’, he said. ‘That out in the little boat Irvie got scared and showed it and that his behaving badly in that way is what changed Mary’s feeling about him. Isn’t it what you suspect?’

  ‘If I do, Edgar, it’s because I can’t think of anything else that could possibly—’

  ‘But it’s not possible!’ His emphasis was earnest. ‘It’s the simplest explanation of course and the first that’d occur to anybody; but Irvie’s playing the coward is one thing that positively could not have happened. I don’t think anybody knows him better than I do, and the one thing I’m certain of is that he wasn’t scared. In his whole life I’ve never known him to be physically afraid of anything. Have you, sir?’

  ‘No, not that I remember.’

  ‘Nor that anybody else remembers’, Edgar said with conviction. ‘I’ve seen him when he ought to’ve been scared and when everybody else was — but not Irvie. That time when Uncle? Will took Irvie and me out west we did some hill climbing and there wasn’t anything Irvie wouldn’t tackle. He got himself and me into places, ‘way up the side of a canyon, where it didn’t look as if we could ever either go up or down another inch and I was scared to death; but all Irvie did was joke about it and go on risking his neck till we wormed out way out. Really, he enjoys being in danger.’

  ‘Because it’s a chance for glory?’ I asked. ‘Or maybe because he couldn’t imagine the worst’s happening to himself, he’s so sure he has a destiny?’

  ‘Maybe a shade of both, sir; but what I’m insisting upon is that whatever happened out in that dinghy, it wasn’t Irvie’s showing the white feather. You can dismiss that impossibility from your mind.’

  ‘Very well’, I said, convinced that he was right. ‘Then we’re left in the dark.’

  ‘Yes, and may stay so’, he assented. ‘Irvie’ll let this be the end of it. Almost anybody else would write to Mary and demand explanations; but not he. He doesn’t like ’em. He never cares to go much into things, especially when they mayn’t be pleasant about himself. If somebody doesn’t like him, or changes from liking him, he doesn’t care to hear why. He won’t follow this up. By tomorrow he’ll have settled it, so far as he’s concerned, and just be saying to himself, “Oh, well, that’s the way some girls are, you never know what they’ll do, so forget it.” He’ll want the whole business to slide off and be forgotten.’

  ‘But, Edgar, he’s seemed to me pretty much in love and—’

  ‘Yes, he was’, Edgar said. ‘I mean was. That’s the way he is.’

  He knew his Irvie, and if Irvie had received a blow it left no bruise visible to the eye; whatever hurt he’d had he took no long time to dispose of it in his own way, for at the beach next morning he was as much his blithe untarnished self as ever I saw him. I was near him when a group of his young friends, boys and girls, came running up to him, calling to know why Mary Reame had left Stonehaven so unexpectedly: Was somebody in her family ill at home, was she sick, herself, after that awful storm, and of course he’d gone to the station to see her off, hadn’t he?

  ‘No, nothing’s the matter with her or anybody else’, he answered cheerfully. ‘She’s perfectly all right — just thought it’s getting near the end of the season and she’d better be hopping home. No, I didn’t see her off at the station; I overslept. Where’s that medicine ball?’

  Will and Evelyn and Harriet, just out of the bathhouses, were intercepted on their way to the surf; more people wanted to exclaim over yesterday’s adventure. Standing nearby, I was aware of a vague presence at my elbow and a thin voice addressing me.

  ‘It may interest you to know,’ Mr. Stelling said, ‘I’ve just received information of an old warehouse in Philadelphia where some remarkable discoveries have been made. Great stacks of letters dating from as much as a hundred years ago and never before examined have yielded astonishing finds. Three unique stamps not previously suspected of being still in existence were—’

  He broke off the sentence to murmur, ‘Dear me! What’s my wife saying to those people?’

  Wide, pink and aggressive, Mrs. Stelling had borne down on Will and Evelyn, pushing their friends aside, and was speaking querulously in her overfed, half-choked voice. ‘Mrs. Pease, will you kindly inform me what sort of bringing-up girls get from their mothers in those prairie towns out where you people live? When I let Sylvia go out there to visit this girl some years ago I think I must have been crazy! Such manners as—’

  ‘Oh, look here, Mother!’ Sylvia had followed Mrs. Stelling and made an annoyed attempt to interpose. ‘Since she was my visitor, not yours, and I didn’t care tuppence whether she stayed or went home, why the hullabaloo?’

  ‘“Hullabaloo”?’ Mrs. Stelling turned upon her. ‘Nice word to use to your mother! Not my visitor? Anybody who visits in my house is my visitor and when I’ve invited any house-guest for a week they’re supposed to stay out that week and not go getting my servants up for an untimely breakfast and ordering a car of mine out for a train, disturbing my whole household. You go take a walk with your father somewhere and don’t interfere with me when I’m expressing my opinion of Miss Mary Reame to the people responsible for her lack of manners.’ At this, Evelyn Pease laughed outright. ‘Where’d you get that idea, Mrs. Stelling?’

  ‘Aren’t you?’ Mrs. Stelling was more offended than disconcerted. ‘Aren’t you her aunts or uncles or something? You’re all from the same town, aren’t you? Besides, isn’t she engaged to your son?’

  Evelyn laughed again, merrily. ‘Not the least in the world, Mrs. Stelling’, she said, and seized Will’s hand. ‘Come, let’s get into the surf!
’ Taking her willing husband with her — he was laughing, too — she dashed by Mrs. Stelling and went splashing into the sea.

  I heard Sylvia speaking sullenly to her mother. ‘Hadn’t you better begin listening to me sometimes if you don’t want your blood pressure to—’ and Mrs. Stelling re sponding imperiously, ‘That’s enough from you, Sylvia!’ Sylvia said, ‘Oh, all right!’ and looked cowed as she walked moodily away.

  Mr. Stelling was no longer near me, and the outlines of his figure, as he faded himself into the distance, were expressive of nothing but overwhelmed retreat. Harriet hadn’t followed Will and Evelyn; she hurried to me, took me by the arm and led me away from listeners. ‘Wasn’t it lovely to see Evelyn put that awful, awful woman in her place!’ she said, as a prelude. ‘Now I want to know what you think Emma has on her mind.’

  ‘Have you asked her?’

  ‘No, she won’t let me even ask her and I’ve learned to know when it’s of no use to try. She puts a tensity about her, looks like a young priestess, sacrificial and exalted. She wouldn’t come to the beach, went out in her dory again and I know I’ll never, never get anything from her about what she’s thinking.’

  ‘No, you probably won’t.’

  ‘She’s odd sometimes, even to me’, Harriet said. ‘Of course, I agree with Will and Evelyn about Mary Reame. She got so upset by her fright that she had to get home to her mother, and they’re rather pleased about it because they believe it’ll disrupt any little affair that may have got started between her and Irvie. They like Mary, of course; but they’ve never felt that either spiritually or intellectually she’d ever be anywhere up to Irvie, and this proves it. Well—’ Harriet mused for a moment; then smiled as if upon a thought somewhat secret but one that brought her a noteworthy satisfaction. ‘Well — in the end it might turn out most decidedly for the best.’