There shone a jovial sun overhead on the appointed “day after to-morrow”; a day not cool yet of a temperature friendly to walkers; and the air, powdered with sunshine, had so much life in it that it seemed to sparkle. To Arthur Russell this was a day like a gay companion who pleased him well; but the gay companion at his side pleased him even better. She looked her prettiest, chattered her wittiest, smiled her wistfulest, and delighted him with all together.
“You look so happy it's easy to see your father's taken a good turn,” he told her.
“Yes; he has this afternoon, at least,” she said. “I might have other reasons for looking cheerful, though.”
“For instance?”
“Exactly!” she said, giving him a sweet look just enough mocked by her laughter. “For instance!”
“Well, go on,” he begged.
“Isn't it expected?” she asked.
“Of you, you mean?”
“No,” she returned. “For you, I mean!”
In this style, which uses a word for any meaning that quick look and colourful gesture care to endow it with, she was an expert; and she carried it merrily on, leaving him at liberty (one of the great values of the style) to choose as he would how much or how little she meant. He was content to supply mere cues, for although he had little coquetry of his own, he had lately begun to find that the only interesting moments in his life were those during which Alice Adams coquetted with him. Happily, these obliging moments extended themselves to cover all the time he spent with her. However serious she might seem, whatever appeared to be her topic, all was thou-and-I.
He planned for more of it, seeing otherwise a dull evening ahead; and reverted, afterwhile, to a forbidden subject. “About that dance at Miss Lamb's—since your father's so much better——”
She flushed a little. “Now, now!” she chided him. “We agreed not to say any more about that.”
“Yes, but since he IS better——”
Alice shook her head. “He won't be better to-morrow. He always has a bad day after a good one especially after such a good one as this is.”
“But if this time it should be different,” Russell persisted; “wouldn't you be willing to come if he's better by to-morrow evening? Why not wait and decide at the last minute?”
She waved her hands airily. “What a pother!” she cried. “What does it matter whether poor little Alice Adams goes to a dance or not?”
“Well, I thought I'd made it clear that it looks fairly bleak to me if you don't go.”
“Oh, yes!” she jeered.
“It's the simple truth,” he insisted. “I don't care a great deal about dances these days; and if you aren't going to be there——”
“You could stay away,” she suggested. “You wouldn't!”
“Unfortunately, I can't. I'm afraid I'm supposed to be the excuse. Miss Lamb, in her capacity as a friend of my relatives——”
“Oh, she's giving it for YOU! I see! On Mildred's account you mean?”
At that his face showed an increase of colour. “I suppose just on account of my being a cousin of Mildred's and of——”
“Of course! You'll have a beautiful time, too. Henrietta'll see that you have somebody to dance with besides Miss Dowling, poor man!”
“But what I want somebody to see is that I dance with you! And perhaps your father——”
“Wait!” she said, frowning as if she debated whether or not to tell him something of import; then, seeming to decide affirmatively, she asked: “Would you really like to know the truth about it?”
“If it isn't too unflattering.”
“It hasn't anything to do with you at all,” she said. “Of course I'd like to go with you and to dance with you—though you don't seem to realize that you wouldn't be permitted much time with me.”
“Oh, yes, I——”
“Never mind!” she laughed. “Of course you wouldn't. But even if papa should be better to-morrow, I doubt if I'd go. In fact, I know I wouldn't. There's another reason besides papa.”
“Is there?”
“Yes. The truth is, I don't get on with Henrietta Lamb. As a matter of fact, I dislike her, and of course that means she dislikes me. I should never think of asking her to anything I gave, and I really wonder she asks me to things SHE gives.” This was a new inspiration; and Alice, beginning to see her way out of a perplexity, wished that she had thought of it earlier: she should have told him from the first that she and Henrietta had a feud, and consequently exchanged no invitations. Moreover, there was another thing to beset her with little anxieties: she might better not have told him from the first, as she had indeed told him by intimation, that she was the pampered daughter of an indulgent father, presumably able to indulge her; for now she must elaborately keep to the part. Veracity is usually simple; and its opposite, to be successful, should be as simple; but practitioners of the opposite are most often impulsive, like Alice; and, like her, they become enmeshed in elaborations.
“It wouldn't be very nice for me to go to her house,” Alice went on, “when I wouldn't want her in mine. I've never admired her. I've always thought she was lacking in some things most people are supposed to be equipped with—for instance, a certain feeling about the death of a father who was always pretty decent to his daughter. Henrietta's father died just, eleven months and twenty-seven days before your cousin's dance, but she couldn't stick out those few last days and make it a year; she was there.”
Alice stopped, then laughed ruefully, exclaiming, “But this is dreadful of me!”
“Is it?”
“Blackguarding her to you when she's giving a big party for you! Just the way Henrietta would blackguard me to you—heaven knows what she WOULDN'T say if she talked about me to you! It would be fair, of course, but—well, I'd rather she didn't!” And with that, Alice let her pretty hand, in its white glove, rest upon his arm for a moment; and he looked down at it, not unmoved to see it there. “I want to be unfair about just this,” she said, letting a troubled laughter tremble through her appealing voice as she spoke. “I won't take advantage of her with anybody, except just—you! I'd a little rather you didn't hear anybody blackguard me, and, if you don't mind—could you promise not to give Henrietta the chance?”
It was charmingly done, with a humorous, faint pathos altogether genuine; and Russell found himself suddenly wanting to shout at her, “Oh, you DEAR!” Nothing else seemed adequate; but he controlled the impulse in favour of something more conservative.
“Imagine any one speaking unkindly of you—not praising you!”
“Who HAS praised me to you?” she asked, quickly.
“I haven't talked about you with any one; but if I did, I know they'd——”
“No, no!” she cried, and went on, again accompanying her words with little tremulous runs of laughter. “You don't understand this town yet. You'll be surprised when you do; we're different. We talk about one another fearfully! Haven't I just proved it, the way I've been going for Henrietta? Of course I didn't say anything really very terrible about her, but that's only because I don't follow that practice the way most of the others do. They don't stop with the worst of the truth they can find: they make UP things—yes, they really do! And, oh, I'd RATHER they didn't make up things about me—to you!”
“What difference would it make if they did?” he inquired, cheerfully. “I'd know they weren't true.”
“Even if you did know that, they'd make a difference,” she said. “Oh, yes, they would! It's too bad, but we don't like anything quite so well that's had specks on it, even if we've wiped the specks off;—it's just that much spoiled, and some things are all spoiled the instant they're the least bit spoiled. What a man thinks about a girl, for instance. Do you want to have what you think about me spoiled, Mr. Russell?”
“Oh, but that's already far beyond reach,” he said, lightly.
“But it can't be!” she protested.
“Why not?”
“Because it never can be. Men don't change their minds about one another often: they make it quite an event when they do, and talk about it as if something important had happened. But a girl only has to go down-town with a shoe-string unfastened, and every man who sees her will change his mind about her. Don't you know that's true?”
“Not of myself, I think.”
“There!” she cried. “That's precisely what every man in the world would say!”
“So you wouldn't trust me?”
“Well—I'll be awfully worried if you give 'em a chance to tell you that I'm too lazy to tie my shoe-strings!”
He laughed delightedly. “Is that what they do say?” he asked.
“Just about! Whatever they hope will get results.” She shook her head wisely. “Oh, yes; we do that here!”
“But I don't mind loose shoe-strings,” he said. “Not if they're yours.”
“They'll find out what you do mind.”
“But suppose,” he said, looking at her whimsically; “suppose I wouldn't mind anything—so long as it's yours?”
She courtesied. “Oh, pretty enough! But a girl who's talked about has a weakness that's often a fatal one.”
“What is it?”
“It's this: when she's talked about she isn't THERE. That's how they kill her.”
“I'm afraid I don't follow you.”
“Don't you see? If Henrietta—or Mildred—or any of 'em—or some of their mothers—oh, we ALL do it! Well, if any of 'em told you I didn't tie my shoe-strings, and if I were there, so that you could see me, you'd know it wasn't true. Even if I were sitting so that you couldn't see my feet, and couldn't tell whether the strings were tied or not just then, still you could look at me, and see that I wasn't the sort of girl to neglect my shoe-strings. But that isn't the way it happens: they'll get at you when I'm nowhere around and can't remind you of the sort of girl I really am.”
“But you don't do that,” he complained. “You don't remind me you don't even tell me—the sort of girl you really are! I'd like to know.”
“Let's be serious then,” she said, and looked serious enough herself. “Would you honestly like to know?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then, you must be careful.”
“'Careful?'” The word amused him.
“I mean careful not to get me mixed up,” she said. “Careful not to mix up the girl you might hear somebody talking about with the me I honestly try to make you see. If you do get those two mixed up—well, the whole show'll be spoiled!”
“What makes you think so?”
“Because it's——” She checked herself, having begun to speak too impulsively; and she was disturbed, realizing in what tricky stuff she dealt. What had been on her lips to say was, “Because it's happened before!” She changed to, “Because it's so easy to spoil anything—easiest of all to spoil anything that's pleasant.”
“That might depend.”
“No; it's so. And if you care at all about—about knowing a girl who'd like someone to know her——”
“Just 'someone?' That's disappointing.”
“Well—you,” she said.
“Tell me how 'careful' you want me to be, then!”
“Well, don't you think it would be nice if you didn't give anybody the chance to talk about me the way—the way I've just been talking about Henrietta Lamb?”
With that they laughed together, and he said, “You may be cutting me off from a great deal of information, you know.”
“Yes,” Alice admitted. “Somebody might begin to praise me to you, too; so it's dangerous to ask you to change the subject if I ever happen to be mentioned. But after all——” She paused.
“'After all' isn't the end of a thought, is it?”
“Sometimes it is of a girl's thought; I suppose men are neater about their thoughts, and always finish 'em. It isn't the end of the thought I had then, though.”
“What is the end of it?”
She looked at him impulsively. “Oh, it's foolish,” she said, and she laughed as laughs one who proposes something probably impossible. “But, WOULDN'T it be pleasant if two people could ever just keep themselves TO themselves, so far as they two were concerned? I mean, if they could just manage to be friends without people talking about it, or talking to THEM about it?”
“I suppose that might be rather difficult,” he said, more amused than impressed by her idea.
“I don't know: it might be done,” she returned, hopefully. “Especially in a town of this size; it's grown so it's quite a huge place these days. People can keep themselves to themselves in a big place better, you know. For instance, nobody knows that you and I are taking a walk together today.”
“How absurd, when here we are on exhibition!”
“No; we aren't.”
“We aren't?”
“Not a bit of it!” she laughed. “We were the other day, when you walked home with me, but anybody could tell that had just happened by chance, on account of your overtaking me; people can always see things like that. But we're not on exhibition now. Look where I've led you!”
Amused and a little bewildered, he looked up and down the street, which was one of gaunt-faced apartment-houses, old, sooty, frame boarding-houses, small groceries and drug-stores, laundries and one-room plumbers' shops, with the sign of a clairvoyant here and there.
“You see?” she said. “I've been leading you without your knowing it. Of course that's because you're new to the town, and you give yourself up to the guidance of an old citizen.”
“I'm not so sure, Miss Adams. It might mean that I don't care where I follow so long as I follow you.”
“Very well,” she said. “I'd like you to keep on following me at least long enough for me to show you that there's something nicer ahead of us than this dingy street.”
“Is that figurative?” he asked.
“Might be!” she returned, gaily. “There's a pretty little park at the end, but it's very proletarian, and nobody you and I know will be more likely to see us there than on this street.”
“What an imagination you have!” he exclaimed. “You turn our proper little walk into a Parisian adventure.”
She looked at him in what seemed to be a momentary grave puzzlement. “Perhaps you feel that a Parisian adventure mightn't please your—your relatives?”
“Why, no,” he returned. “You seem to think of them oftener than I do.”
This appeared to amuse Alice, or at least to please her, for she laughed. “Then I can afford to quit thinking of them, I suppose. It's only that I used to be quite a friend of Mildred's—but there! we needn't to go into that. I've never been a friend of Henrietta Lamb's, though, and I almost wish she weren't taking such pains to be a friend of yours.”
“Oh, but she's not. It's all on account of——”
“On Mildred's account,” Alice finished this for him, coolly. “Yes, of course.”
“It's on account of the two families,” he was at pains to explain, a little awkwardly. “It's because I'm a relative of the Palmers, and the Palmers and the Lambs seem to be old family friends.”
“Something the Adamses certainly are not,” Alice said. “Not with either of 'em; particularly not with the Lambs!” And here, scarce aware of what impelled her, she returned to her former elaborations and colourings. “You see, the differences between Henrietta and me aren't entirely personal: I couldn't go to her house even if I liked her. The Lambs and Adamses don't get on with each other, and we've just about come to the breaking-point as it happens.”
“I hope it's nothing to bother you.”
“Why? A lot of things bother me.”
“I'm sorry they do,” he said, and seemed simply to mean it.
She nodded gratefully. “That's nice of you, Mr. Russell. It helps. The break between the Adamses and the Lambs is a pretty bothersome thing. It's been coming on a long time.” She sighed deeply, and the sigh was half genuine; this half being for her father, but the other half probably belonged to her instinctive rendering of Juliet Capulet, daughter to a warring house. “I hate it all so!” she added.
“Of course you must.”
“I suppose most quarrels between families are on account of business,” she said. “That's why they're so sordid. Certainly the Lambs seem a sordid lot to me, though of course I'm biased.” And with that she began to sketch a history of the commercial antagonism that had risen between the Adamses and the Lambs.
The sketching was spontaneous and dramatic. Mathematics had no part in it; nor was there accurate definition of Mr. Adams's relation to the institution of Lamb and Company. The point was clouded, in fact; though that might easily be set down to the general haziness of young ladies confronted with the mysteries of trade or commerce. Mr. Adams either had been a vague sort of junior member of the firm, it appeared, or else he should have been made some such thing; at all events, he was an old mainstay of the business; and he, as much as any Lamb, had helped to build up the prosperity of the company. But at last, tired of providing so much intelligence and energy for which other people took profit greater than his own, he had decided to leave the company and found a business entirely for himself. The Lambs were going to be enraged when they learned what was afoot.
Such was the impression, a little misted, wrought by Alice's quick narrative. But there was dolorous fact behind it: Adams had succumbed.
His wife, grave and nervous, rather than triumphant, in success, had told their daughter that the great J. A. would be furious and possibly vindictive. Adams was afraid of him, she said.
“But what for, mama?” Alice asked, since this seemed a turn of affairs out of reason. “What in the world has Mr. Lamb to do with papa's leaving the company to set up for himself? What right has he to be angry about it? If he's such a friend as he claims to be, I should think he'd be glad—that is, if the glue factory turns out well. What will he be angry for?”
Mrs. Adams gave Alice an uneasy glance, hesitated, and then explained that a resignation from Lamb's had always been looked upon, especially by “that old man,” as treachery. You were supposed to die in the service, she said bitterly, and her daughter, a little mystified, accepted this explanation. Adams had not spoken to her of his surrender; he seemed not inclined to speak to her at all, or to any one.
Alice was not serious too long, and she began to laugh as she came to the end of her decorative sketch. “After all, the whole thing is perfectly ridiculous,” she said. “In fact, it's FUNNY! That's on account of what papa's going to throw over the Lamb business FOR! To save your life you couldn't imagine what he's going to do!”
“I won't try, then,” Russell assented.
“It takes all the romance out of ME,” she laughed. “You'll never go for a Parisian walk with me again, after I tell you what I'll be heiress to.” They had come to the entrance of the little park; and, as Alice had said, it was a pretty place, especially on a day so radiant. Trees of the oldest forest stood there, hale and serene over the trim, bright grass; and the proletarians had not come from their factories at this hour; only a few mothers and their babies were to be seen, here and there, in the shade. “I think I'll postpone telling you about it till we get nearly home again,” Alice said, as they began to saunter down one of the gravelled paths. “There's a bench beside a spring farther on; we can sit there and talk about a lot of things—things not so sticky as my dowry's going to be.”
“'Sticky?'” he echoed. “What in the world——” She laughed despairingly.
“A glue factory!”
Then he laughed, too, as much from friendliness as from amusement; and she remembered to tell him that the project of a glue factory was still “an Adams secret.” It would be known soon, however, she added; and the whole Lamb connection would probably begin saying all sorts of things, heaven knew what!
Thus Alice built her walls of flimsy, working always gaily, or with at least the air of gaiety; and even as she rattled on, there was somewhere in her mind a constant little wonder. Everything she said seemed to be necessary to support something else she had said. How had it happened? She found herself telling him that since her father had decided on making so great a change in his ways, she and her mother hoped at last to persuade him to give up that “foolish little house” he had been so obstinate about; and she checked herself abruptly on this declivity just as she was about to slide into a remark concerning her own preference for a “country place.” Discretion caught her in time; and something else, in company with discretion, caught her, for she stopped short in her talk and blushed.
They had taken possession of the bench beside the spring, by this time; and Russell, his elbow on the back of the bench and his chin on his hand, the better to look at her, had no guess at the cause of the blush, but was content to find it lovely. At his first sight of Alice she had seemed pretty in the particular way of being pretty that he happened to like best; and, with every moment he spent with her, this prettiness appeared to increase. He felt that he could not look at her enough: his gaze followed the fluttering of the graceful hands in almost continual gesture as she talked; then lifted happily to the vivacious face again. She charmed him.
After her abrupt pause, she sighed, then looked at him with her eyebrows lifted in a comedy appeal. “You haven't said you wouldn't give Henrietta the chance,” she said, in the softest voice that can still have a little laugh running in it.
He was puzzled. “Give Henrietta the chance?”
“YOU know! You'll let me keep on being unfair, won't you? Not give the other girls a chance to get even?”
He promised, heartily.
Alice had said that no one who knew either Russell or herself would be likely to see them in the park or upon the dingy street; but although they returned by that same ungenteel thoroughfare they were seen by a person who knew them both. Also, with some surprise on the part of Russell, and something more poignant than surprise for Alice, they saw this person.
All of the dingy street was ugly, but the greater part of it appeared to be honest. The two pedestrians came upon a block or two, however, where it offered suggestions of a less upright character, like a steady enough workingman with a naughty book sticking out of his pocket. Three or four dim shops, a single story in height, exhibited foul signboards, yet fair enough so far as the wording went; one proclaiming a tobacconist, one a junk-dealer, one a dispenser of “soft drinks and cigars.” The most credulous would have doubted these signboards; for the craft of the modern tradesman is exerted to lure indoors the passing glance, since if the glance is pleased the feet may follow; but this alleged tobacconist and his neighbours had long been fond of dust on their windows, evidently, and shades were pulled far down on the glass of their doors. Thus the public eye, small of pupil in the light of the open street, was intentionally not invited to the dusky interiors. Something different from mere lack of enterprise was apparent; and the signboards might have been omitted; they were pains thrown away, since it was plain to the world that the business parts of these shops were the brighter back rooms implied by the dark front rooms; and that the commerce there was in perilous new liquors and in dice and rough girls.
Nothing could have been more innocent than the serenity with which these wicked little places revealed themselves for what they were; and, bound by this final tie of guilelessness, they stood together in a row which ended with a companionable barbershop, much like them. Beyond was a series of soot-harried frame two-story houses, once part of a cheerful neighbourhood when the town was middle-aged and settled, and not old and growing. These houses, all carrying the label. “Rooms,” had the worried look of vacancy that houses have when they are too full of everybody without being anybody's home; and there was, too, a surreptitious air about them, as if, like the false little shops, they advertised something by concealing it.
One of them—the one next to the barber-shop—had across its front an ample, jig-sawed veranda, where aforetime, no doubt, the father of a family had fanned himself with a palm-leaf fan on Sunday afternoons, watching the surreys go by, and where his daughter listened to mandolins and badinage on starlit evenings; but, although youth still held the veranda, both the youth and the veranda were in decay. The four or five young men who lounged there this afternoon were of a type known to shady pool-parlours. Hats found no favour with them; all of them wore caps; and their tight clothes, apparently from a common source, showed a vivacious fancy for oblique pockets, false belts, and Easter-egg colourings. Another thing common to the group was the expression of eye and mouth; and Alice, in the midst of her other thoughts, had a distasteful thought about this.
The veranda was within a dozen feet of the sidewalk, and as she and her escort came nearer, she took note of the young men, her face hardening a little, even before she suspected there might be a resemblance between them and any one she knew. Then she observed that each of these loungers wore not for the occasion, but as of habit, a look of furtively amused contempt; the mouth smiled to one side as if not to dislodge a cigarette, while the eyes kept languidly superior. All at once Alice was reminded of Walter; and the slight frown caused by this idea had just begun to darken her forehead when Walter himself stepped out of the open door of the house and appeared upon the veranda. Upon his head was a new straw hat, and in his hand was a Malacca stick with an ivory top, for Alice had finally decided against it for herself and had given it to him. His mood was lively: he twirled the stick through his fingers like a drum-major's baton, and whistled loudly.
Moreover, he was indeed accompanied. With him was a thin girl who had made a violent black-and-white poster of herself: black dress, black flimsy boa, black stockings, white slippers, great black hat down upon the black eyes; and beneath the hat a curve of cheek and chin made white as whitewash, and in strong bilateral motion with gum.
The loungers on the veranda were familiars of the pair; hailed them with cacklings; and one began to sing, in a voice all tin:
“Then my skirt, Sal, and me did goRight straight to the moving-pitcher show.OH, you bashful vamp!”
The girl laughed airily. “God, but you guys are wise!” she said.
“Come on, Wallie.”
Walter stared at his sister; then grinned faintly, and nodded at Russell as the latter lifted his hat in salutation. Alice uttered an incoherent syllable of exclamation, and, as she began to walk faster, she bit her lip hard, not in order to look wistful, this time, but to help her keep tears of anger from her eyes.
Russell laughed cheerfully. “Your brother certainly seems to have found the place for 'colour' today,” he said. “That girl's talk must be full of it.”
But Alice had forgotten the colour she herself had used in accounting for Walter's peculiarities, and she did not understand. “What?” she said, huskily.
“Don't you remember telling me about him? How he was going to write, probably, and would go anywhere to pick up types and get them to talk?”
She kept her eyes ahead, and said sharply, “I think his literary tastes scarcely cover this case!”
“Don't be too sure. He didn't look at all disconcerted. He didn't seem to mind your seeing him.”
“That's all the worse, isn't it?”
“Why, no,” her friend said, genially. “It means he didn't consider that he was engaged in anything out of the way. You can't expect to understand everything boys do at his age; they do all sorts of queer things, and outgrow them. Your brother evidently has a taste for queer people, and very likely he's been at least half sincere when he's made you believe he had a literary motive behind it. We all go through——”
“Thanks, Mr. Russell,” she interrupted. “Let's don't say any more.”
He looked at her flushed face and enlarged eyes; and he liked her all the better for her indignation: this was how good sisters ought to feel, he thought, failing to understand that most of what she felt was not about Walter. He ventured only a word more. “Try not to mind it so much; it really doesn't amount to anything.”
She shook her head, and they went on in silence; she did not look at him again until they stopped before her own house. Then she gave him only one glimpse of her eyes before she looked down. “It's spoiled, isn't it?” she said, in a low voice.
“What's 'spoiled?'”
“Our walk—well, everything. Somehow it always—is.”
“'Always is' what?” he asked.
“Spoiled,” she said.
He laughed at that; but without looking at him she suddenly offered him her hand, and, as he took it, he felt a hurried, violent pressure upon his fingers, as if she meant to thank him almost passionately for being kind. She was gone before he could speak to her again.
In her room, with the door locked, she did not go to her mirror, but to her bed, flinging herself face down, not caring how far the pillows put her hat awry. Sheer grief had followed her anger; grief for the calamitous end of her bright afternoon, grief for the “end of everything,” as she thought then. Nevertheless, she gradually grew more composed, and, when her mother tapped on the door presently, let her in. Mrs. Adams looked at her with quick apprehension.
“Oh, poor child! Wasn't he——”
Alice told her. “You see how it—how it made me look, mama,” she quavered, having concluded her narrative. “I'd tried to cover up Walter's awfulness at the dance with that story about his being 'literary,' but no story was big enough to cover this up—and oh! it must make him think I tell stories about other things!”
“No, no, no!” Mrs. Adams protested. “Don't you see? At the worst, all HE could think is that Walter told stories to you about why he likes to be with such dreadful people, and you believed them. That's all HE'D think; don't you see?”
Alice's wet eyes began to show a little hopefulness. “You honestly think it might be that way, mama?”
“Why, from what you've told me he said, I KNOW it's that way. Didn't he say he wanted to come again?”
“N-no,” Alice said, uncertainly. “But I think he will. At least I begin to think so now. He——” She stopped.
“From all you tell me, he seems to be a very desirable young man,” Mrs. Adams said, primly.
Her daughter was silent for several moments; then new tears gathered upon her downcast lashes. “He's just—dear!” she faltered.
Mrs. Adams nodded. “He's told you he isn't engaged, hasn't he?”
“No. But I know he isn't. Maybe when he first came here he was near it, but I know he's not.”
“I guess Mildred Palmer would LIKE him to be, all right!” Mrs. Adams was frank enough to say, rather triumphantly; and Alice, with a lowered head, murmured:
“Anybody—would.”
The words were all but inaudible.
“Don't you worry,” her mother said, and patted her on the shoulder. “Everything will come out all right; don't you fear, Alice. Can't you see that beside any other girl in town you're just a perfect QUEEN? Do you think any young man that wasn't prejudiced, or something, would need more than just one look to——”
But Alice moved away from the caressing hand. “Never mind, mama. I wonder he looks at me at all. And if he does again, after seeing my brother with those horrible people——”
“Now, now!” Mrs. Adams interrupted, expostulating mournfully. “I'm sure Walter's a GOOD boy——”
“You are?” Alice cried, with a sudden vigour. “You ARE?”
“I'm sure he's GOOD, yes—and if he isn't, it's not his fault. It's mine.”
“What nonsense!”
“No, it's true,” Mrs. Adams lamented. “I tried to bring him up to be good, God knows; and when he was little he was the best boy I ever saw. When he came from Sunday-school he'd always run to me and we'd go over the lesson together; and he let me come in his room at night to hear his prayers almost until he was sixteen. Most boys won't do that with their mothers—not nearly that long. I tried so hard to bring him up right—but if anything's gone wrong it's my fault.”
“How could it be? You've just said——”
“It's because I didn't make your father this—this new step earlier. Then Walter might have had all the advantages that other——”
“Oh, mama, PLEASE!” Alice begged her. “Let's don't go over all that again. Isn't it more important to think what's to be done about him? Is he going to be allowed to go on disgracing us as he does?”
Mrs. Adams sighed profoundly. “I don't know what to do,” she confessed, unhappily. “Your father's so upset about—about this new step he's taking—I don't feel as if we ought to——”
“No, no!” Alice cried. “Papa mustn't be distressed with this, on top of everything else. But SOMETHING'S got to be done about Walter.”
“What can be?” her mother asked, helplessly. “What can be?”
Alice admitted that she didn't know.
At dinner, an hour later, Walter's habitually veiled glance lifted, now and then, to touch her furtively;—he was waiting, as he would have said, for her to “spring it”; and he had prepared a brief and sincere defense to the effect that he made his own living, and would like to inquire whose business it was to offer intrusive comment upon his private conduct. But she said nothing, while his father and mother were as silent as she. Walter concluded that there was to be no attack, but changed his mind when his father, who ate only a little, and broodingly at that, rose to leave the table and spoke to him.
“Walter,” he said, “when you've finished I wish you'd come up to my room. I got something I want to say to you.”
Walter shot a hard look at his apathetic sister, then turned to his father. “Make it to-morrow,” he said. “This is Satad'y night and I got a date.”
“No,” Adams said, frowning. “You come up before you go out. It's important.”
“All right; I've had all I want to eat,” Walter returned. “I got a few minutes. Make it quick.”
He followed his father upstairs, and when they were in the room together Adams shut the door, sat down, and began to rub his knees.
“Rheumatism?” the boy inquired, slyly. “That what you want to talk to me about?”
“No.” But Adams did not go on; he seemed to be in difficulties for words, and Walter decided to help him.
“Hop ahead and spring it,” he said. “Get it off your mind: I'll tell the worldIshould worry! You aren't goin' to bother ME any, so why bother yourself? Alice hopped home and told you she saw me playin' around with some pretty gay-lookin' berries and you——”
“Alice?” his father said, obviously surprised. “It's nothing about Alice.”
“Didn't she tell you——”
“I haven't talked with her all day.”
“Oh, I see,” Walter said. “She told mother and mother told you.”
“No, neither of 'em have told me anything. What was there to tell?”
Walter laughed. “Oh, it's nothin',” he said. “I was just startin' out to buy a girl friend o' mine a rhinestone buckle I lost to her on a bet, this afternoon, and Alice came along with that big Russell fish; and I thought she looked sore. She expects me to like the kind she likes, and I don't like 'em. I thought she'd prob'ly got you all stirred up about it.”
“No, no,” his father said, peevishly. “I don't know anything about it, and I don't care to know anything about it. I want to talk to you about something important.”
Then, as he was again silent, Walter said, “Well, TALK about it; I'm listening.”
“It's this,” Adams began, heavily. “It's about me going into this glue business. Your mother's told you, hasn't she?”
“She said you were goin' to leave the old place down-town and start a glue factory. That's all I know about it; I got my own affairs to 'tend to.”
“Well, this is your affair,” his father said, frowning. “You can't stay with Lamb and Company.”
Walter looked a little startled. “What you mean, I can't? Why not?”
“You've got to help me,” Adams explained slowly; and he frowned more deeply, as if the interview were growing increasingly laborious for him. “It's going to be a big pull to get this business on its feet.”
“Yes!” Walter exclaimed with a sharp skepticism. “I should say it was!” He stared at his father incredulously. “Look here; aren't you just a little bit sudden, the way you're goin' about things? You've let mother shove you a little too fast, haven't you? Do you know anything about what it means to set up a new business these days?”
“Yes, I know all about it,” Adams said. “About this business, I do.”
“How do you?”
“Because I made a long study of it. I'm not afraid of going about it the wrong way; but it's a hard job and you'll have to put in all whatever sense and strength you've got.”
Walter began to breathe quickly, and his lips were agitated; then he set them obstinately. “Oh; I will,” he said.
“Yes, you will,” Adams returned, not noticing that his son's inflection was satiric. “It's going to take every bit of energy in your body, and all the energy I got left in mine, and every cent of the little I've saved, besides something I'll have to raise on this house. I'm going right at it, now I've got to; and you'll have to quit Lamb's by the end of next week.”
“Oh, I will?” Walter's voice grew louder, and there was a shrillness in it. “I got to quit Lamb's the end of next week, have I?” He stepped forward, angrily. “Listen!” he said. “I'm not walkin' out o' Lamb's, see? I'm not quittin' down there: I stay with 'em, see?”
Adams looked up at him, astonished. “You'll leave there next Saturday,” he said. “I've got to have you.”
“You don't anything o' the kind,” Walter told him, sharply. “Do you expect to pay me anything?”
“I'd pay you about what you been getting down there.”
“Then pay somebody else;Idon't know anything about glue. You get somebody else.”
“No. You've got to—-”
Walter cut him off with the utmost vehemence. “Don't tell me what I got to do! I know what I got to do better'n you, I guess! I stay at Lamb's, see?”
Adams rose angrily. “You'll do what I tell you. You can't stay down there.”
“Why can't I?”
“Because I won't let you.”
“Listen! Keep on not lettin' me: I'll be there just the same.”
At that his father broke into a sour laughter. “THEY won't let you, Walter! They won't have you down there after they find out I'm going.”
“Why won't they? You don't think they're goin' to be all shot to pieces over losin' YOU, do you?”
“I tell you they won't let you stay,” his father insisted, loudly.
“Why, what do they care whether you go or not?”
“They'll care enough to fire YOU, my boy!”
“Look here, then; show me why.”
“They'll do it!”
“Yes,” Walter jeered; “you keep sayin' they will, but when I ask you to show me why, you keep sayin' they will! That makes little headway with ME, I can tell you!”
Adams groaned, and, rubbing his head, began to pace the floor. Walter's refusal was something he had not anticipated; and he felt the weakness of his own attempt to meet it: he seemed powerless to do anything but utter angry words, which, as Walter said, made little headway. “Oh, my, my!” he muttered, “OH, my, my!”
Walter, usually sallow, had grown pale: he watched his father narrowly, and now took a sudden resolution. “Look here,” he said. “When you say Lamb's is likely to fire me because you're goin' to quit, you talk like the people that have to be locked up. I don't know where you get such things in your head; Lamb and Company won't know you're gone. Listen: I can stay there long as I want to. But I'll tell you what I'll do: make it worth my while and I'll hook up with your old glue factory, after all.”
Adams stopped his pacing abruptly, and stared at him. “'Make it worth your while?' What you mean?”
“I got a good use for three hundred dollars right now,” Walter said. “Let me have it and I'll quit Lamb's to work for you. Don't let me have it and I SWEAR I won't!”
“Are you crazy?”
“Is everybody crazy that needs three hundred dollars?”
“Yes,” Adams said. “They are if they ask ME for it, when I got to stretch every cent I can lay my hands on to make it look like a dollar!”
“You won't do it?”
Adams burst out at him. “You little fool! If I had three hundred dollars to throw away, besides the pay I expected to give you, haven't you got sense enough to see I could hire a man worth three hundred dollars more to me than you'd be? It's a FINE time to ask me for three hundred dollars, isn't it! What FOR? Rhinestone buckles to throw around on your 'girl friends?' Shame on you! Ask me to BRIBE you to help yourself and your own family!”
“I'll give you a last chance,” Walter said. “Either you do what I want, or I won't do what you want. Don't ask me again after this, because——”
Adams interrupted him fiercely. “'Ask you again!' Don't worry about that, my boy! All I ask you is to get out o' my room.”
“Look here,” Walter said, quietly; and his lopsided smile distorted his livid cheek. “Look here: I expect YOU wouldn't give me three hundred dollars to save my life, would you?”
“You make me sick,” Adams said, in his bitterness. “Get out of here.”
Walter went out, whistling; and Adams drooped into his old chair again as the door closed. “OH, my, my!” he groaned. “Oh, Lordy, Lordy! The way of the transgressor——”