Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  These mothers! From a daughter’s birth they’ll plan a bridegroom for her, though for a son many of them will hope that there’ll never be a bride. For years Harriet’s hope for her daughter and the darling cousin named for the loved husband had been the persistently guiding motive. The way to the cherished end wasn’t clear, of course, and that culmination was a long way ahead; but at least one obstacle, poor gentle Mary, had removed itself. Harriet didn’t see any mystery in the removal and neither did Irvie’s pleased parents; but the evening of that day ironically deepened the mystification of two observers. Edgar Semple must have felt both the irony and the mystification at least as keenly as I did.

  The dinner menu cards upon all the Inn’s tables had a typewritten slip attached to them:

  Farewell Hop Tonite, last of the season, but before the music, all guests of the Stonehaven Inn are invited by the Selectmen of this Town to take seats in the Inn s ballroom to witness a brief ceremony. The Stonehaven Inn cordially seconds this invitation.

  Respectfully,

  JOSIAH LABROSSE.

  ‘What in the world’s all this about the Selectmen?’ Irvie asked the rest of us at our table; but he looked self-conscious, and later it seemed probable that he’d been forewarned and already knew the answer. However, when we joined our fellow-guests in the ballroom, he made himself only a member of the audience and went with Emma and Edgar to join George Prettiman and Janey Blue and sit expectantly.

  The big room was comfortably filled; young people had come from the cottages for the ‘Hop’, and to the general surprise there were ‘native’ faces here and there while behind a table at one end of the room stood not only the three Selectmen of Stonehaven in Sunday black but a group of fishermen trying to look unaware of being in their best clothes. Orion and Alonzo Clafley and all the male members of the widespread Clafley family connection were there, a solemn delegation behind the Selectmen. Stalwart John Clafley Wade, the Head Selectman, had brought a gavel with him and he used it upon the table, rapping for order.

  ‘Mr. Irving Millerwood Pease,’ he said, ‘will kindly step forward.’

  ‘Why, what — —’ Irvie said loudly, apparently dumbfounded; then he rose, and, wearing an air of humorous puzzlement, walked forth into the open space between the audience and the delegation of local authorities.

  The Head Selectman addressed him with dignity. ‘Mr. Pease, the chosen representatives of the people of this town have taken this opportunity to meet with as many of our summer residents as may be here present in order to acknowledge a debt. During all the years that Stonehaven has entertained summer visitors there has never been a single accident or casualty that has proved fatal to any of Stonehaven’s summer guests, and Stonehaven is proud of the record. Last evening, as you all know, an unusual squall arose and except for your coolness and seamanship, Mr. Pease, there would in our judgement have been a triple drowning. Thanks to you, such did not occur and Stonehaven’s record for its care of our summer visitors wasn’t smirched by a tragedy. The Selectmen of this town have prepared a citation honouring you for this deed.’ Here Mr. Wade extended the written citation to Irvie. ‘Please accept it accompanied by the good will and admiration of all citizens of this our good town of Stonehaven.’

  As Irvie took the paper, and hand-clapping grew loud, I saw Emma’s face illumined as by a maternal happiness. She was the first to jump to her feet to emphasize an applause that became louder and louder. In a moment the rest of us were standing too, and that whole wing of the Inn resounded with an approval that almost shook its walls. Herein was the irony and the mystery: What had Irvie Pease done in the half hour that brought him this glorifying ovation and cost him his sweetheart?

  Chapter Fifteen

  A MYSTERY is a mystery to only those who puzzle, themselves with it, so this was one to only Edgar and me. Probably we both guessed the right answer often enough when our later speculations reverted to Mary Reame’s calling Emma ‘magnificent’; but we were to wait a long time for certainty of solution, and when it came it didn’t matter much. Stonehaven already looked dustily autumnal; Will and Evelyn went down with their two boys to Princeton; Harriet and I left Emma at Bryn Mawr and returned to a house that was lifeless without her. For us, as for out next neighbours, too, that whole area of the city felt blank, lacking the three young people whose daily doings so absorbed us and seemed to give us most of our reason for living. No wonder the old birds begin to lose interest in the nest when the young ones are preparing themselves to fly.

  Except for the interlude of the Christmas holidays we had a dull winter, though on a February afternoon Harriet came in from one of her woman’s club meetings bringing a bit of gossip to which for once I listened. Mary Reame was engaged to Frederick Charles Carhart, that affluent youngish widower-about-town, and Mary’s mother, in strictest confidence, had admitted it here and there.

  ‘It’ll be a large church wedding late in June’, Harriet said benevolently. ‘He’s very well off and a friend of the Reame family and everybody says Mary looks very, very happy. I don’t see how she could, seeing what she’s losing. Emma’ll be home in time to be a bridesmaid; but I do hope they won’t ask Irvie to be an usher.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t he be, Harriet?’

  She reproved me. ‘You don’t see it would be asking too much of him — after the way she treated him and how he must have suffered?’

  ‘He did? He suffered?’

  ‘What!’ she exclaimed. ‘You didn’t see how bravely he covered it up?’

  That was the legend Harriet had by this time established with herself; the ladies love these romantic vapours. Fled from hysterically by a notional girl who hadn’t known her own mind, Irvie had so gallantly hidden his wound that only those who knew him best could have guessed that he’d received it. Now he might have to endure playing a part in the ceremony that united her forever to another and he would smile; but the smile would be a spartan’s. In spite of the happy fact that everything would probably in time ‘work out satisfactorily’, Irvie during this interval was to be looked upon as martyred by a misplaced love. Worshipful women will go to any length to let their imaginations make for them such a picture.

  The actual event of the wedding, however, didn’t substantiate this one; Irvie, though he reached home in time, wasn’t asked to be an usher. Emma was a bridesmaid; so was Janey Blue, and, to the astonishment of old-fashioned people like the Peases and Harriet, so was Sylvia Stelling. Harriet, loudly exclamative, brought in this news a week before the wedding. ‘And her mother not ten days dead!’ my sister cried. ‘Mrs. Reame says Mary thought she simply had to ask Sylvia, so she wrote almost a month ago and did; but she didn’t get any answer at all from her till the very day after Mrs. Stelling’s funeral. Then Sylvia telegraphed her acceptance. Did you ever hear anything like it?’

  ‘Not that I recall, Harriet.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ she exclaimed. ‘It was even in our papers out here, how Mrs. Stelling collapsed at a dinner she was giving and lived only a few minutes. It was a stroke, and the very next day after the funeral, here was that telegram saying Sylvia’d be delighted — she actually used the word “delighted” — to accept Mary’s invitation. What these young people do nowadays! No respect for anything! They don’t care how they shock people. Think what it shows!’

  ‘That Sylvia didn’t care much for her mother?’ I suggested.

  ‘No, nor for anybody else, nor for what people think of her! Not that I blame her,’ Harriet continued, ‘for having no feeling for that spoiled, mannerless woman who lived only to display her self-indulgence and show. There are common decencies, though, and now Sylvia’s got her head she begins by proving she has no regard for ’em.

  Coming out here to be a bridesmaid the very next week after—’

  She was interrupted by Evelyn, who with a rush arrived in our downstairs library where Harriet had found me. ‘Have you heard that Sylvia Stelling—’ Evelyn began, and for a time the two produced one of those exclamatory
duets in which words become indistinguishable. Evelyn emerged from it with something like a brief solo. ‘Will’s simply aghast. He says if those are modern New York manners he—’

  ‘I can’t believe it!’ Harriet cried. ‘It’s just that girl! She’s freed from her suppressive mother and got her head at last so she — —’

  ‘Got her head?’ Evelyn interrupted. ‘I should say she has. You remember Irvie’s telling us about the classmate of his whose father was in the Trust Company or something that looked after the Stelling Estate? Irvie had some more about it when he was home at Christmas, did I tell you? Mrs. Stelling had only the income during her lifetime — of course, it was huge — the grandfather died just after Sylvia was born and he’d left it all in trust for her, and that was before the inheritance taxes were made so crushing, so Sylvia’ll have practically the whole thing. No wonder, with her awful bring-up — that outrageous mother and that shadow of a father — no wonder she thinks she can do what she pleases and can laugh at anybody who disapproves of her!’

  At Mary’s wedding Sylvia didn’t look like a person who laughs much at anything. She’d arrived in the costliest of foreign cars, one much noticed in even our crowded streets, and she’d brought Janey Blue, the Maid-of-Honour, with her — and also George Prettiman, who complaisantly accompanied his fiancée. Of course, during the processions to and from the altar, through stained-glass filterings of afternoon sunshine, my eyes were upon Emma who looked smilingly solemn and now could easily be thought a handsome girl, I was sure; but at both the church and the mulling reception afterward I more than once took account of the sensational heiress. She was already that; publicity had followed her from the moment of her mother’s death, and, though the wedding-guests were too well-bred to stare baldly, their curiosity about her maintained a running whisper on the air.

  She must have known it; but she didn’t show that she did. Though her expression now seemed rather determined than downcast, it struck me as still having in it a kind of sulkiness. She didn’t look at people when she spoke to them, nor did she smile nor in any way become affably responsive; but these reticences were those of long habit and by no means attributable to her bereavement. Without exertion she made the bride a subsidiary figure, and on all sides of me I heard the murmurings.

  ‘Have you seen her? No, not there; she’s that rather small darkish one standing talking to Irvie Pease and the out-of-town man that looks absurdly like the Apollo Belvedere.’... ‘You don’t see the attraction? Not in seventy millions?’... ‘Yes, the very next week after her mother’s funeral; but I hear that’s the way they do nowadays.’...

  ‘No, not pretty exactly but think of all that power in those small hands.’... ‘They say she brought two maids with her in another car.’... ‘Yes, I met her but she only said “How du do”, not another word.’... ‘Yes, probably marry somebody as rich as she is — or an Archduke or one of these Georgian Princes.’... ‘What’s it matter not being a beauty? Haven’t you seen those pearls?’

  On my way out of the Reames’ beflowered living-room, and on my way out of the house, too, if I could make it, I was brought to a halt by Harriet, Evelyn and Ella Martin, who also were speaking of the pearls. ‘What do you think of it?’ Ella asked me. ‘I mean of her wearing them to a wedding, making all this show with them the very week after she inherited them from her mother.’

  ‘Not at all’, Evelyn said, though her disapproving amazement wasn’t less than Ella’s. ‘Everybody at Stonehaven knew Mrs. Stelling’s pearls very well. These aren’t the same; they’re even finer and larger. They’re new ones, I tell you — absolutely. New ones! She’s begun to outdo her mother.’

  The Stelling caravan, only a stirring episode, departed eastward almost as soon as the out-shone bride had thrown her bouquet from the Reames’ stairway landing; but it was Sylvia’s shocking journey that brought the end of our sea mystery to Edgar and me. At dinner Emma, still gaily in her bridesmaid’s dress, had agreed with Harriet wistfully that Irvie had been able to bear the wedding more debonairly than if he’d had to ride the anguish of being an usher. ‘Of course since he’s a Princeton Senior now,’ our Bryn Mawr Sophomore said, ‘he has all the self-command he needs. When he congratulated Mary and Mr. Carhart you’d never have dreamed what it cost him or that he wasn’t the gayest of the gay. Mother, it was heart-breaking; he seemed almost careless about it!’

  Irvie himself proved how right she was about his carelessness. In the twilight Emma and I sat in wicker chairs upon our lawn and he sauntered over from his father’s house but declined an invitation to sit with us. ‘Thanks, no; just on my way to say hello to aunts and uncles I didn’t get around to at the reception. Did you both see that car Sylvia and Janey and George piled off in? It wasn’t one of the Stonehaven garage outfit of the Stellings’. New. Golly, isn’t she going to go it, though!’ He uttered a most carefree laugh. ‘Good old Janey better look out!’

  Emma didn’t follow this. ‘Why, Irvie?’

  ‘You haven’t got it yet? Didn’t I tell you all last summer Sylvia had her eye on George — if she ever got her chance?’

  ‘But George wouldn’t—’

  ‘George wouldn’t?’ Irvie’s tone was one of cheerful mockery. ‘George would! That poor guy’s so simple he’ll always do what anybody tells him to; it only depends on who’s the last person to tell him.’

  ‘Irvie! He’s not that supine!’

  ‘Then just call it sweetly tractable, Emma. I don’t say old Georgie’s got imagination enough to think up much of what he could do with all that dough; but he has just barely enough of his own to live on in the way he likes. The Blues aren’t too well off. If Georgie marries Janey he’ll have to go to work; but ouch, how could he? Janey’s mother’s practical and she persuaded them to put off their wedding until autumn so that George could get himself established in some business first, and he never will; he’s too helpless. That gives Sylvia plenty of time. Just wait. Well, I’ll be shoving along. I thought Mary made quite a cute little bride, didn’t you?’

  With that, he did shove along, swinging gracefully down the sylvan street, and Emma, after devoting a sigh to his bravery, gave a languid greeting to Edgar Semple who’d been hovering on the lawn at a little distance.

  He sat down with us but waited for some moments before he spoke. ‘The remarkable thing about it, Emma,’ he said deliberately, ’is that you saw what was coming in time to put the dinghy about.’

  ‘What?’ she said, staring. ‘What on earth do you mean? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ He laughed and turned to me. ‘Of course you must have thought it all out, sir, by this time; but anyhow here it is: Mary told Janey, and Janey couldn’t help telling George, of course, and at that reception this afternoon George let it out to me in the most casual way. He forgot all about it’s having been confidential until after he’d told me. We just got to talking about Stonehaven last summer and naturally our big squall came up and Mary’s rushing home by the first train she could get and—’

  ‘Edgar!’ Emma’s tone was peremptory. ‘I don’t care to hear — —’

  ‘Yes, I know’, he said apologetically. ‘Mind, I’m not trying to rub it in that I was right about putting a rowboat’s stern to the sea and running with it; but when you saw that Irvie was heading into the squall and would certainly swamp the boat, and you grabbed the oars out of his hands, slammed them into your oarlocks and put the dinghy about, you must have — —’

  ‘That’s my own affair!’ Emma’s face was dim to us in the thickened twilight; but the tensity of her voice and the rigidity of her figure were perceptible as she rose and stalked toward the house. She paused at the steps, called back shakily, ‘George Prettiman — what a fine authority for such a story! There’s absolutely nothing at all in what he says — or in what you’re saying, either, Edgar Semple!’ She let us hear her footsteps sound sharply as she crossed the portico and went into the house.

  ‘Anyhow,’ Edgar said
reflectively, ‘that’s what she did and it’s what saved them. Must have been at the last possible instant or she’d never have grabbed the oars from Irvie. Makes the whole thing pretty clear now, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Clear indeed!’ We two sat on that midland lawn a thousand miles away and looked upon the same picture of sudden Atlantic fury. We saw the three figures, two girls and a boy, beset by engulfing waters, and we knew that one of the girls had abruptly given up theory for practice. Confronted by the reality of rushing seas, Emma had grasped the truth. We could hear her outcry above the wind and the plunge of waves, ‘Put the boat about, Irvie! For God’s sake put her about!’ and, when he wouldn’t, Emma had done it herself, seizing the oars from him at the last possible instant, as Edgar had said. She’d got the half-filled dinghy about, and, while Mary had frenziedly bailed, Irvie’d sat nonplussed. When the rain came, and the sea fell, Emma’d put the oars back into Irvie’s hands.

  ‘That was it, you see’, Edgar said. ‘I knew it wasn’t Irvie’s being scared that changed Mary. He wasn’t. It wasn’t his being wrong about heading into the sea, either; though it would have drowned them. She could have forgiven him for that. George was rather vague. He just said Mary was upset because she thought Irvie ought to’ve given Emma the credit for taking the oars when she did; but of course you see how it finished poor old Irvie for Mary.’

  ‘Yes, of course, Edgar.’ In Alonzo Clafley’s rescuing boat Irvie, jolly with the rescuer, hadn’t mentioned that it was a girl who saved the dinghy; but it was when Alonzo brought the three to the cheering crowd on the float and pier, and Irvie let himself be hoisted upon high, that Mary’s incredulity became a stricken one. Irvie protested, but jovially and without the instant proclamation of Emma as their saviour. Later, at the Inn, when he’d disclaimed credit and said, ‘All I did was what I simply had to — or else!’ Mary saw that he’d never be able to deny himself even an unearned laurel. Probably his reference to letting Emma ‘spell’ him at the oars was his most injurious self-revelation. His being able to smudge it all over even to himself like that, and to believe that he’d as easily smudged it over for Mary, too, was what sped her flight from him.