Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “Do you want to come in?” she inquired, looking out from the shade of her broad hat to where the little figure in blue overalls was marked off into stripes of sunshine and shadow by the intervening pickets of the gate. “Is there something you want here, little boy?”

  He succeeded in operating the latch, came in, and looked attentively over her excavations. “Have you found any nice worms?” he asked.

  “No, I haven’t found any at all,” she said, somewhat surprised by his adjective. “But I don’t think there are any ‘nice’ worms anywhere. Worms are all pretty horrid.”

  “No, they ain’t,” he returned promptly and seriously. “There’s lots o’ nice worms.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  “Yes, there is.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “There is, too,” he said stubbornly and with some asperity. “Everybody knows there’s plenty of nice worms.”

  “Where did you get such nonsense in your head?” Bella asked, a little sharply. “Who ever told you there are nice worms?”

  “Well, there is!”

  “But what makes you think so?” she insisted.

  “Well—” He hesitated, then said with a conclusive air, settling the question: “My mother. I guess she knows!”

  Bella stared at him incredulously for a moment.

  “What’s your name?”

  “My name’s George. My name’s George, the same as my papa,” he replied somewhat challengingly.

  “Don’t you live just across the street?” she asked. “Yes, I do.” He turned, pointing to the “George M. Sullender residence”; and Bella thought she detected a note of inherited pride in his tone as he added, “That’s where I live!”

  “But, George, you don’t mean,” she insisted curiously; “you don’t mean that your mother told you there are nice worms? Surely not!”

  “My mother did,” he asserted, and then with a little caution, modified the assertion. “My mother just the same as did.”

  “How was that?”

  And his reply, so unexpected by his questioner, sent a thrill of coming triumph through her. “My mother called my father a worm.”

  “What!”

  “She did,” said George. “She called him a worm over and over—”

  “What!”

  “And if he’s a worm,” George went on, stoutly, “well, I guess he’s nice, isn’t he? So there got to be plenty nice worms if he’s one.”

  “George!”

  “She calls him a worm most every little while, these days,” said George, expanding, and he added, in cold blood, “I like him a great deal better than what I do her.”

  “You do?”

  “She hit him this morning,” George thought fit to mention.

  “What?”

  “With a cloe’s-brush,” he said, dropping into detail. “She hit him on the back of the head with the wooden part of it and he said, ‘Ooh’!”

  “But she was just in fun, of course!”

  “No, she wasn’t; she was mad and said she was goin’ to take me with her and go back to my grampaw’s. I won’t go with her. She’s mad all the time, these days.”

  Bella stared, her lips parted, and she wished him to continue, but remembered her upbringing and tried to be a lady. “Georgie,” she said severely; “you shouldn’t tell such things. Don’t you know better than to speak in this way of what happens between your poor papa and your mother?”

  The effect upon George was nothing, for even at eight years of age a child is able to understand what interests an adult listener, and children deeply enjoy being interesting. In response to her admonition, he said simply: “Yesterday she threw a glass o’ water at him and cut where his ear is. It made a big mark on him.”

  “Georgie! I’m afraid you’re telling me a dreadful, dreadful story!” Bella said, though it may not be denied that in company with this suspicion there arrived a premonitory symptom of disappointment. “Why, I saw your papa yesterday evening, myself, and there wasn’t any mark or anything like—”

  “It don’t show,” George explained. “It took him a good while, but he got it fixed up so’s it didn’t show much. Then he brushed his hair over where it was.”

  “Oh!’

  “My mother hates my papa,” said George. “She just hates and hates him!”

  “What for?” Bella couldn’t stop this question. “She wants him to have more money and he says what good would that do because she’d only throw it around.”

  “No!”

  “Yes,” said George. “And she’s mad because once he got so mad at her he hit her.”

  “What!”

  “He did, too,” George informed her, nodding, his large eyes as honest as they were earnest. “She said she was goin’ to see my grampaw and she left me at home, but my papa catched her at the Pitcher Show with Mr. Grumbaugh.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Grumbaugh,” George repeated, with the air of explaining everything. “So my papa made her come home and he hit her, and she hit him, too!”

  “Before you!” Bella exclaimed, horrified.

  “Sure!” George said, and looked upon her with some superiority. “They do it all before me. Last week they had a big fight—”

  He would have continued willingly, but at this point he was interrupted. Across the street a door opened, and out of it came Mrs. Sullenders leading a five-year-old girl by the hand. She called loudly, though in a carefully sweet and musical tone:

  “George? Jaw — aurge? Oh, Jaw-awr-gie?”

  “Yes’m?” he shouted.

  Mrs. Sullender nodded smilingly to Bella, and called across:— “Georgie, you dear little naughty thing! Didn’t I tell you half an hour ago to come indoors and play with poor dear little Natalie? She’s been waiting and waiting so patiently!”

  George looked morose, but began to move in the desired direction. “I’m comin’,” he muttered, and was so gross as to add, under his breath, “Doggone you!” However, he went across the street; and then Mrs. Sullender, benevolently leading the two children by the hand, nodded again to Bella with a sweetness that was evident even at a distance, and re-entered the house, taking George and the tiny Natalie with her.

  Bella remained upon her knees, staring violently at the “Sullender Home,” and her thoughts were centred upon her husband. “Just wait till he gets here!” she thought.

  But she saved her triumph until after dinner, when he had made himself comfortable upon the lounge in their tiny “living-room” and seemed to be in good content with his briar pipe.

  “I had a caller after you left, this morning,” she informed him sunnily.

  “Who was it?”

  “Mr. George M. Sullender.”

  “So? That’s odd,” said Sperry. “I saw him starting down-town in his car just before I did. How did he happen to come back here?”

  “He didn’t. This was Mr. George M. Sullender, Junior.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Their little boy,” said Bella. “You’ve seen him playing in their yard with the little sister.”

  “Oh, yes. Did his mother send him over on an errand?”

  “No. He came to see if I’d found any ‘nice worms’,” Bella said, and added, in a carefully casual tone, but with a flashing little glance from the corner of her eye: “He said some worms must be nice because Mrs. Sullender is in the habit of calling Mr. Sullender a worm, and Georgie thinks his father is nice.”

  Young Mr. Sperry took his pipe from his mouth and looked at his wife incredulously. “What did you say about Mrs. Sullender’s calling Mr. Sullender—”

  “A ‘worm,’ William,” said Bella. “She calls him a ‘worm,’ William, because he doesn’t make even more money than he does, poor man. The child really hates his mother: he never once spoke of her as ‘mamma’ but he always said ‘my papa’ when he mentioned Mr. Sullender. I think I must have misjudged that poor creature a little, by the way. Of course he is pompous, but I think his pomposity is probably jus
t assumed to cover up his agony of mind. He has a recent scar that his wife put on his head, too, to cover up.”

  “Bella!”

  “Yes,” she said reflectively. “I think he’s mainly engaged in covering things up, poor thing. Of course he does strike his sweet-woman, now and then, when he finds her at the movies with gentlemen he doesn’t approve of; but one can hardly blame him, considering the life she leads him. It was last week, though, when they had their big fight, I understand — with the children looking on.”

  But at this, William rose to his feet and confronted her. “What on earth are you talking about, Bella?”

  “The Sullenders,” she said. “It was curious. It was like having the front of their house taken off, the way a curtain rolls up at the theatre and shows you one of those sordid Russian plays, for instance. There was the whole sickening actual life of this dreadful family laid bare before me: the continual petty bickerings that every hour or so grow into bitter quarrels with blows and epithets — and then, when other people are there, as we were, last night, the assumption of suavity, the false, too-sweet sweetness and absurd pomposities — oh, what an ugly revelation it is, Will! It’s so ugly it makes me almost sorry you were wrong about them — as you’re rather likely to be in your flash judgments, you poor dear!”

  Bella (who was “literary” sometimes) delivered herself of this speech with admirable dramatic quality, especially when she made her terse little realistic picture of the daily life of the Sullenders, but there was just a shade of happy hypocrisy and covert triumph in the final sentence, and she even thought fit to add a little more on the point. “How strange it is to think that only last night we were arguing about it!” she exclaimed. “And that I said we’d not need to wait a month to prove that I was right! Here it is only the next day, and it’s proved I was a thousand times righter than I said I was!”

  “Well, perhaps you’ll enlighten me—” he began, and she complied so willingly that she didn’t let him finish his request.

  She gave him Georgie’s revelation in detail, emphasizing and colouring it somewhat with her own interpretations of many things only suggested by the child’s meagre vocabulary; and she was naturally a little indignant when, at first, her husband declined to admit his defeat.

  “Why, it’s simply not believable,” he said. “Those people couldn’t seem what they seemed to be last night, and be so depraved. They were genuinely affectionate in the tone they used with each other and they—”

  “Good gracious!” Bella cried. “Do you think I’m making this up?”

  “No, of course not,” he returned hastily. “But the child may have made it up.”

  “About his own father and mother?”

  “Oh, I know; yet some children are the most wonderful little story-tellers: they tell absolutely inexplicable lies and hardly know why themselves.”

  But at this, Bella looked at him pityingly. “Listen a moment! There was all the sordid daily life of these people laid out before me in the poor little child’s prattle: a whole realistic novel, complete and consistent, and I’d like to know how you account for a child of seven or eight being able to compose such a thing — and on the spur of the moment, too! When children make up stories they make ’em up about extraordinary and absurd things, not about the sordid tragedies of every-day domestic life. Do you actually think this child made up what he told me?”

  “Well, it certainly does seem peculiar!”

  “‘Peculiar?’ Why, it’s terrible and it’s true!”

  “Well, if it is,” he said gloomily, “we certainly don’t want to get mixed up in it. We don’t want to come into a new neighbourhood and get involved in a scandal — or even in gossiping about one. We must be careful not to say anything about this, Bella.” —

  She looked away from him thoughtfully. “I suppose so, though of course these people aren’t friends of ours; they’re hardly acquaintances.”

  “No, but that’s all the more reason for our not appearing to be interested in their troubles. We’ll certainly be careful not to say anything about this, won’t we, Bella?”

  “Oh, I suppose so,” she returned absently. “Since the people are really nothing to us, though, I don’t suppose it matters whether we say anything or not.”

  “Oh, but it does!” he insisted, and then, something in her tone having caught his attention, he inquired: “You haven’t said anything to any one about it, have you, Bella?”

  “What?”

  “You haven’t repeated to any one what the child told you, have you?”

  “Oh, no,” she said lightly. “Not to any one who would have any personal interest in it.”

  “Oh, my!” William exclaimed, dismayed. “Who’d you tell?”

  “Nobody that has the slightest interest in the Sullenders,” Bella replied, with cold dignity. “Nobody that cares the slightest thing about them.”

  “Well, then, what in the world did you tell ’em for?”

  “Why, to pass the time, I suppose,” Bella said, a little offended. “Cousin Ethel dropped in for a while this afternoon and the whole thing was so extraordinary I just sketched it to her. What are you making such a fuss about?”

  “I’m not,” he protested feebly. “But even if the thing’s true, we don’t want to get the name of people that gossip about their—”

  “Oh, my!” she sighed impatiently. “I’ve told you Cousin Ethel hasn’t the slightest personal interest in these people, and besides she’ll never repeat what I told her.”

  “Well, if she doesn’t, it’ll be the first time!”

  “Will, please!”

  “Golly, I hope it won’t get back to the Sullenders!”

  “Such horrible people as that, what difference would it make?” Bella demanded. “And how could it get back? Cousin Ethel doesn’t move in Sullender circles. Not precisely!”

  “No, but her close friend, Mrs. Howard Peebles, is the aunt of Mrs. Frank Deem and Frank Deem is Sullender’s business partner.”

  “Oh, a Realtor, is he?”’ Bella said icily.

  William returned to the lounge, but did not recline. Instead, he sat down and took his head in his hands. “I do wish you hadn’t talked about it,” he said gloomily.

  Bella was sensitive; therefore she began to be angry. “Do you think it’s very intelligent,” she asked, “to imply that I don’t know enough not to make neighbourhood trouble? You may not recall that only last night you were sure that you were right and I was wrong about what sort of people these Sullenders are. Already, the very next day, you’ve had to confess that you were utterly mistaken and that your wife is wholly in the right. I suppose you may feel a little depressed about that and want to change the question to something else and claim I’m in the wrong about that. But don’t you think it’s a little bit childish of you, Will? Don’t you think that the way you’re taking your defeat is just a little bit — small?”

  He was hurt, and looked up at her with an expression that showed the injury. “I’d hardly have expected you’d call me that,” he said. “At least, not quite so soon after our wedding-trip!”

  “Well, I might have expected you wouldn’t be accusing me of gossiping harmfully,” she retorted. “Not quite so soon!”

  Young Mr. Sperry rose again. “Do you think that’s as bad as using the epithet ‘small’ to your husband?”

  “‘Epithet’?” she echoed. “You charge me with using ‘epithets’?”

  “Well, but didn’t—”

  “I think I’ll ask you to excuse me,” Bella said, with an aspect of nobility in suffering. Thereupon, proudly, she betook herself from the room.

  It was a tiff. Next day they were as polite to each other as if they had just been introduced, and this ceremonial formality was maintained between them until the third evening after its installation, when a calamity caused them to abandon it. After a stately dinner in their hundred square feet of dining-room, Bella had gone out into the twilight to refresh her strips of iris with fair water from the
garden hose, and William reclined upon his lounge, solitary with a gloomy pipe. Unexpectedly, he was summoned: Bella looked in upon him from the door and spoke hastily. “Uh — Mr and Mrs. Sullender—” she said. “Uh—” And as hastily she withdrew.

  Perturbed, he rose and went out to the little veranda, where, with a slightly nervous hospitality, Bella was now offering chairs to Mrs. George M. Sullender and her husband. Mrs. Sullender smilingly, and in her angelic voice, declined the offer.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “We came in for a moment to admire your lovely irises at closer range; we’re just passing on our way to some friends in Waverley Place.”

  “We’d be so glad—” Bella fluttered.

  “No, no, no,” Mrs. Sullender murmured caressingly. “We’ve only a moment — I’m so sorry you disturbed your husband — we’re just going over for bridge. I suppose you know most of the people in Waverley Place?”

  “No, I don’t think I know any.”

  “Well, of course we don’t think it compares to Highland Place,” Mrs. Sullender said, with a little deprecatory laugh. “I’m afraid it’s rather — well, gossipy.”

  “Oh—” Bella said. “Is it?”

  “I’m afraid so,” the gentle-mannered lady returned. “Of course that’s a great pity, too, in such a new little community where people are bound to be thrown together a great deal. Don’t you think it’s a great pity, Mrs. Sperry?”

  “Oh — naturally,” Bella acquiesced. “Yes, indeed.”

  “I knew you would. Of course it’s just thoughtlessness — most of the people who live there are so young — but we heard a really dreadful story only yesterday. It came from a very young newly-married couple, and my husband and I were so sorry to hear they’d started out by telling such dreadful things about their neighbours. Don’t you think it’s most unwise, Mrs. Sperry?”