Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  I wasn’t to see much more of their immediate progress toward that goal. For a longer time than I could spare I had to interrupt my seasons at Stonehaven and at home, too. The winter before Emma came out of Bryn Mawr was a hard one on my burdened elderliness, and Dr. Erb hustled me to Arizona. Harriet went with me, but only for my installation upon a salubrious ranch, and there I stayed — not unhappily, for I could still ride a little and I wrote enough to finish two more books. I had not infrequent letters from ‘all the family’ except Irvie, who was reported by Harriet to have become ‘a great favourite in Boston’. She was amused by Edgar’s seeming to fall into the habit of just being a book-worm, not caring how he looks and wearing the same old clothes the whole time’. He didn’t come to Stonehaven at all during his vacations now; but continued his studies in Will’s office and did legal odd jobs of various kinds for the firm.

  From Stonehaven she reported voluminously and with bitterness: ‘After trying for two seasons with no success to rent their cottage, the Blue family are back in it again. Emma tells me that Janey tried her hand at several jobs but didn’t make a go at any of them and I must say you’d hardly know her as the same girl she used to be. She’s as amiable as ever but somehow looks all dried up and perfectly certain to be an old maid. The one shock seems to have made a sort of husk of her. I suppose you may not see enough of lighter current periodicals to be aware of the present career of the person who gave it to her; but one can’t pick up any of them in the Inn reading-room without being confronted by the face of Mrs. George Prettiman. They say she has a press agent and I don’t doubt it— “Mrs. George Prettiman sips cocktails with Prince Rebedos”; “Mrs. George Prettiman’s table at Giambini’s” — oh, Mrs. George Prettiman at Jockey Clubs, at restaurants, at night spots and on beaches, Mrs. George Prettiman everywhere.

  ‘There seems to be a sort of public for this new type, its Roman entertainments and panoplies. We’ve always had the great spenders, but the older breed of them had a kind of dignity, founded hospitals and libraries, lived in as much quiet as they could find. Who are these new ones? They aren’t “climbers” — they aren’t even conscious of the old prestiges that could be climbed to. I think what they want is simply envy for their conspicuousness and power. It makes one wonder what kind of world we’re living in. Sometimes everything seems upside down with every kind of vulgarity on top, and yet we know that there does still exist our same old world wherein there’s decency in taste and manners and people still lead sensible lives in their own quiet ways. What’s more, I firmly believe such people are even in the majority, though they seem submerged under all this gaudiness, hectic pretence, restlessness and modernity. Among all the hundreds of people we know at home no one is much like that and neither are any of our friends that we know in others cities. Here at Stonehaven the new breed was unknown until the Stellings came, and Mrs. George Prettiman, outdoing her mother a hundredfold, will never set eyes on the place again. She took what she wanted from it, and, not having inherited the hay fever, will have no possible use for her mother’s dusty old palace on the hilltop, thank heaven.

  ‘I’ve never seen Emma happier than she is this summer.’

  I knew what Harriet meant by that concluding sentence.

  When old Erb crabbedly went over me upon my return home he acknowledged the caution of my Arizona medical adviser, but said, ‘Oh, yes, you could have come back months ago; but it’s just as well to be safe. Guess that’s what you’ll be now if some of these new bugs they’re always finding don’t get at you. Well, I guess your sister’ll have told you all about the “new blood” Will Pease has got in his law office. You can’t keep that Irvie down; he’s been showing off again.’

  Irvie had, and most effectively. I knew all about it from Harriet’s recent letters and from Will Pease’s and from Emma’s. During this first year after their graduation from the law school Will had put the groundwork of one of his important cases in the hands of the ‘new blood’, Irvie and Edgar, and this groundwork had been done so thoroughly that when the case came to be tried, Will himself and the older attorneys had been astonished to find how little was left for them to do. The two youngest members of the firm had the affair so well in hand, in fact, that wisdom decreed its being left to them almost entirely. Edgar’s preparation of the case, and in particular an argument Will assigned to Irvie, had brought subsequent expressions of approval not far short of enthusiastic from both judge and jury. Will felt a new solidity in his office, and Irvie had won actual reputation as an expert ‘trial lawyer’.

  ‘What a team!’ Will said. ‘By the time we went into court we found we had to leave virtually the whole thing to those two because they’d made themselves such masters of every detail that they knew a lot more about it than we did, ourselves. Now we know who’ll take our places when we retire.’

  Old Fenelon Pease, a cousin Will had inherited as a rather idle member of the firm, stopped me on the street and added something to this. ‘I don’t go to court much these days; but I didn’t miss an hour of that trial. It was a fascinating thing to see how that case had been prepared and how it worked out, unfolding itself day after day. Really it almost didn’t need any of the speeches; that young Semple had the whole thing on the table before him clear as day. It was interesting to see how my young cousin Irvie came back to him for point after point and Semple always had them for him. I don’t mean that Irvie didn’t make a good speech. He did indeed; but who couldn’t under such circumstances? Of course I don’t mean to take away any of the credit he won for it.’

  ‘No, of course not’, I said, and the better understood Will Pease when he informed me that Irvie’d have a longer vacation than would Edgar that summer. ‘There really isn’t much for Irvie to do around the office for this while’, Will said. ‘Nothing important’s coming up during the summer and he might just as well go on to Stonehaven when his mother and the rest of you do. Edgar’s needed, though. He’s come to be kind of a backbone for the detail work in the office that’s always having to be cleared away. I think I can bring him on with me in August. He hasn’t taken any vacation at all for some years. Says he hasn’t needed any; but he’ll be the better for a little freshening up at old Stonehaven. He’s certainly a Trojan for work.’

  ‘A little freshening up at old Stonehaven’, Will had said, and, when I had my first glimpse of the sea on our drive from the station, I knew that this was what I’d needed for myself. Orion Clafley had a new four-cylinder engine in the ‘One o’Clock’ and the boat was ready for me. I was out with him in her the next day and so were Emma and Irvie Pease, laughing together over the futility of their putting out trolling lines that never caught anything.

  Chapter Eighteen

  IRVIE MUST HAVE felt that anything like a clear-cut proposal of marriage to Emma would be to deal in the superfluous, and probably so did she. She’d been so long and so plainly ‘there’ for him as whatever he needed her to be — wife, servant, supporter, anything at all — he had only to realize that he did need her and their affair seemed to be settled. It had taken that shape during my absence, and Emma herself, and of course Harriet, and Evelyn, too — though Evelyn may have doubted that anybody in the world would ever be quite ‘up to’ Irvie — were now well content.

  As Harriet had written me, Emma was indeed happy. She’d never been a possessive girl; but she now possessed what she’d always wanted, the long prospect of ministering to the beloved. I don’t think that she understood his need of an Edgar Semple to minister to him, too.

  Irvie was as optimistically versatile in his plans for the future as he’d always been in the past. Without eavesdropping I’d often hear fragments of these plans projected to my always receptive niece as the two passed and re-passed my chair gaily arm-in-arm in their pacings of the Inn’s long verandah.

  ‘It’ll take a lot of money but I’ll swing it’, I’d hear him say; and, on their return to where I sat, ‘A house in the country, not too big at first but we can add to it. Lots of visi
tors and dogs and shootings—’ And then, as they came by again, ‘Interesting people. Not the commonplace kind, but people we’d really like to entertain, people who’ve been everywhere and done all sorts of things and—’ Then as they came again, ‘That part of the firm’s fee they split between Edgar and me didn’t amount to so much, and things may come a little slow at first; but there are lots of openings now in reorganizing business and in politics and all that. I might take a whirl at a senatorship some time, who knows?’ Irvie was laughing as he said this, but was a little more serious as they passed again. ‘Then we must have a station wagon with Something’. Farms on it. Country life for our background but lots of travel thrown in and’—’

  It was too easy to see that for Emma these were not merely words. They were enchantments, not because of what they promised — she didn’t care about that — but because they were the music of the voice she loved; it didn’t matter what Irvie said; the voice was enough. What she saw when she looked at him couldn’t be seen by any other, even though the reflection of her vision shone in her own face. Irvie saw it there and delighted in it; but so could anybody else see it there and when I did, too much, I felt myself to be an unwishful intruder and that I needed a walk.

  ‘Idyllic’ was of course my sister’s word for the state of things. ‘Naturally Will knows it’s happening and he couldn’t be more delighted. When he comes, in August, you’ll see. He told me before we left home that he’d always wished this might happen when Irvie came to settle down — everything so suitable. A girl that Irvie’d grown up with and who understood him and would help to make his future as bright as it ought to be. I don’t like extreme words; but oh, I don’t see how anything could be more rapturous!’

  We’d come to Stonehaven a little earlier than usual, toward the end of June. It was the day after Harriet had gone so far as ‘rapturous’ that Evelyn came indignantly to our lunch table with what seemed a portent. She’d been talking with a group of fellow-guests on the verandah. ‘Here it is the twelfth of July’, she said. ‘Wouldn’t you think that if anybody intended to occupy a cottage for this summer they’d already have done it? Besides, who in the world would want to rent a “show place” like the Stellings’?’

  ‘Who does?’ Irvie asked. ‘Are there signs of life on the hilltop?’

  ‘Yes, there are’, Evelyn said. ‘Gardeners getting weeds out of the drive, and Mrs. Paxton was motoring by there yesterday and said she saw one of those enormous trucks just going in. Said she thought she saw another farther up the drive. Of course the place would have to be renovated if there’s going to be a tenant; but—’

  Irvie, teasing his mother, interrupted with a mischievous suggestion. ‘Maybe it’s Sylvia herself coming back to look the old place over once more. Wouldn’t it be a treat to see good old George Prettiman, the beautiful millionaire, on our beach again?’

  ‘What a horrible thought!’ his mother exclaimed. ‘No, it’s absolutely impossible that anybody could be so lost to decency. Even she’d never do such a thing — with the Blues in their cottage and Janey here to be faced every day. No, I’m not fearing anything as bad as that; but I did hope that no overpowering family would ever rent that place. No other kind of family would want it or be able to pay for it; but it does look as if it’s happening.’ Two days later, as the people of France were celebrating the anniversary of the capture of the Bastille, there appeared on our beach at Stonehaven a figure comparable in its effect on ourselves to what the French might be supposed to feel did they behold, seemingly reclothed in the flesh, an apparition of Louis XVI. Our own apparition, moreover, might well have written ‘Rien’ in his diary as Louis is said to have done on the evening of the day that cost him everything; one was as little aware as the other that anything extraordinary had happened or was happening. George Prettiman, whom we beheld was incredulity before us, plainly didn’t know that he was startling or even that Janey Blue’s friends had gathered about her as if to shut out the sight of him.

  Some people come to Stonehaven for but a season; others for two or three. They live on the fringes of the place, as it were; know little and care less about either its continuous life or the semi-continuous life that gathers itself there every summer. On the beach these fringe people were disporting themselves as usual, not conscious how the habitués had clustered themselves into groups focusing their unbelieving stares upon Mr. Prettiman.

  When I arrived he was just coming up out of the surf to stand placidly dripping upon its fluctuant edges and debate with himself, apparently, the question whether or not he’d be the better for another dip. He’d lost his beauty; fat can do this in less time than that elapsed since we’d seen him. Any sculptor knows how readily a little overpudginess of a chin can bring pudginess to a nose, too, and how a slight protrusion of the abdomen can dwindle the proportions of a leg. He’d lost not a part of his beauty but all of it and was as little conscious of this as that he’d ever had any. For some moments he stood in contented vauge contemplation; then returned into the surf.

  The groups of bathers and non-bathers who’d been centred upon him spellbound began to break up and circulate among themselves. They all seemed to be saying, or, rather, gasping, ‘Can you believe it!’

  Irving Pease and Emma had been swimming far out beyond the life raft, unaware of the sensation ashore. They turned, and it happened that they came out of the surf at the same time that George Prettiman came forth from his second plunge therein. The three figures emerged together with no one else near them. Emma stared, confounded; then gave George an amazed nod of recognition and walked away. Irvie Pease remained, however, the noon sun shining on his wet head and on George’s. Greetings were exchanged and the two shook hands; Irvie was seen to be holding some converse with the pariah.

  ‘Oh, I wish he hadn’t done that!’ Harriet exclaimed. ‘Surely he didn’t need to shake hands with him.’

  ‘But he couldn’t very well help it’, Evelyn said. ‘George put out his hand, and after all he’s an old friend of Irvie’s. I wish I knew what they’re saying.’ She had not long to wait. George went to the bath-houses and Irvie came laughing to join a hurriedly increasing group about his mother. Everybody wanted to know what had been said.

  ‘Just nothing at all’, Irvie reported. ‘Except he’s fat as the Dickens, you wouldn’t know he’d ever been away. He said Hello and didn’t I think the water colder than usual to-day, and I said, “Well, not much colder”, and he said well, maybe it wasn’t but just seemed so to him, and then he said, “Well, be seeing you”, and trotted off to his bath-house.’ Irvie looked merrily at the semi-circle of serious faces now about him. ‘What more did you expect? Old George never said anything yet, did he?’

  Three voices asked the same question, ‘But does it mean she’s here?’

  ‘Search me!’ Irvie said, and he and Emma went back for another swim.

  The talk at our lunch-table and most of the other tables at the Inn, too, was concerned with the same question: Had she had the effrontery to come back to Stonehaven or was George Prettiman a mere errand boy detached to see that the palace was made ready for a tenant? For our table at least, Irvie disposed of the latter possibility. ‘Does anybody think he’s got sense enough?’

  The question was settled the next day. I had not been to the beach but returned, at the hour for lunch, from an excursion in the ‘One o’Clock’, and the commotion of talk I heard from the Inn verandah gave me the answer as I went up the steps. It was jumbled but the fragments were sufficient: ‘No wonder she brought a house-party with her!’... ‘Looked as discontented as ever.’... ‘Oh, she’d have front enough for anything.’... ‘Who on earth are those people she’s brought here — self-confident theatrical-looking, the kind she would bring here?’... ‘Why on earth did Irvie Pease feel called upon to—’

  Irvie, standing just inside the screened doors of the Inn, was explaining that matter to his mother and Harriet. Both ladies, for almost the first time in their lives, looked critical of him, H
arriet so much so that her displeasure was marked by her not looking at him at all. Apparently she looked out through the screen doors. Evelyn was almost sharp with him.

  ‘Why on earth you had to let that woman go about presenting you to all her party—’

  ‘She didn’t, Mother!’ Irvie’s tone was protestive. ‘I didn’t meet half of ’em. You see, there was a man I’d known at college—’

  ‘Yes, you’ve explained that, Irving.’

  ‘Well, I had to speak to him, didn’t I? I couldn’t—’

  Emma came in, interrupting. ‘The most amazing thing! I mean the effect of Janey Blue’s getting another glimpse of George Prettiman. She doesn’t know how it happened to her.’

  ‘How what happened to her?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘I mean the whole thing, Mother. He’s pudgy, absolutely pudgy! She doesn’t know how it happened to her in the first place. She sees she must have worshipped his beauty and it’s all gone. I talked to her and she wonders — she absolutely wonders? — how she wasted so much time on him and so much tragedy. She’s really cured; but isn’t it strange?’

  The following is a synopsis of the end as Mr. Tarkington wrote it, with the addition of some notes of his:

  The very things that Irvie’s father and mother deplore — the publicity, the riches and show-off that attend Sylvia— ‘attract Irvie. Sylvia tires of her beautiful, ‘harmless’ George Prettiman and she decides upon changing him for Irvie.

  Irvie is tempted by the vision — yachts, palaces, shining as the host at great parties, living in the delightful glare of the continuous conspicuousness that he loves. Edgar is horrified, tries to fight off the coming dreadful blow to Emma, the treachery to an old friend, George Prettiman, and the crushing disappointment to Will and Evelyn Pease, who abhor Sylvia Stelling and everything for which she stands.