CHAPTER XVIII
THEY thought of many ways to get him to do it, but none of such ingenuity as to inspire them with confidence. Mrs. Oliphant made more suggestions than her husband did, and she put most of them into the form of little dramatic dialogues imagined as taking place between Mr. Oliphant and Harlan. Mr. Oliphant was to say such-and-such things to Harlan, who would necessarily reply in certain terms, which she sketched;—whereupon his father could triumphantly turn the words just uttered into proof that Harlan would not only be doing his duty by helping Dan, but at the same time would make great headway with Martha Shelby in a straightforward manner involving not the slightest pose.
Unfortunately, after each of these small dramas in turn, becoming eager in her opinion that “thistime” she had “got it,” she was forced into pessimism by Mr. Oliphant’s pointing out that Harlan wouldn’t say what she had sketched for him; but, on the contrary, was certain to express himself to an effect precisely the opposite.
Many times that afternoon the poor lady murmured, “No, I suppose perhaps it wouldn’t do after all,” and pondered again. “But why don’t you think of a way thatwoulddo?” she asked, with more spirit, after one of her failures. “You’re a lawyer; you ought to be able to think ofsomething.”
He laughed and made the gesture of a man helpless between opposing viewpoints of his own. “What provokes me is that I can’t help seeing Harlan’s side of it, too. There’s a good deal to be said on his side, you know.”
“Yes, indeed,” she readily assented. “He thinks he’s perfectly right; but of course he isn’t.”
“Well, why isn’t he? After all, your mother trusted him to do just what we’re planning to get him not to do.”
“But her will doesn’tsayhe can’t help Dan. So why shouldn’t he?”
“No,” Mr. Oliphant interrupted; “it doesn’t say he mustn’t; but that’s what she counted on. In our hearts we’re blaming him for not betraying a trust, and for being unwilling to put money into the fire;—he honestly believes it would be putting it into the fire. And he won’t do it, even though he knows his refusing makes him look mean in the eyes of pretty much everybody he cares about, even in the eyes of the person he seems to care most about. Well, there’s something rather fine in a stand like that, after all.”
“Martha’d never forgive him!” Mrs. Oliphant said emphatically. “Never! If he doesn’t help Dan, now that he’s got somuch, she’d always believe him terribly stingy. So you see we ought to persuade him for his own good, too—if we could only think of a way.”
But they continued to find that elusive way beset by baffling afterthoughts; and when Dan came home from his excursion, successful and in high fettle, they spoke to him of the subject that had been engrossing them—and were straightway baffled again. Dan even declined the proffer of future assistance from his mother.
“Not a penny!” he said. “She didn’t have any faith in me, and she despised the whole idea of Ornaby. She gave me thirty-five hundred dollars of my own—bless her for it! She gave me that to do with as I please, and it’s plenty. Why, to-morrow I’m goin’ to fix up the interest on what’s owed on the land, and then I’ve got to settle another little matter, and after that I——”
“Wait, Dan,” his father interposed. “What other little matter is it you have to settle? I didn’t know anything had been worrying you except the probable foreclosure.”
“It didn’t, sir. I didn’t worry about this at all. I knew I could fixitall right, if I could just hold off the foreclosure. It seems I’ve never paid any of the taxes on the Addition—I’ve had so many other things on my mind, it seems I just kind of neglected that—and so somebody’s got a tax title to it; but now I can settle with him to-morrow morning and clear it off—and then I’m goin’ to turn up some sod out there! I’m goin’ to get ready to lay the foundation for my first factory!”
“But themoney, dear!” his mother cried. “How in the world do you expect even to lay the foundations unless we can get Harlan——”
“No, ma’am! I wouldn’t take a nickel of it if he begged me to! I’ve been pretty near where I was ready to steal to get money to pull me out of a hole; but I’ll never take one single cent of what grandma left Harlan, or of what she left you either. If she’d meant me to have it she’d have given it to me herself; but she didn’t have any faith in me, and she says so in plain words in her will. You don’t expect me to take help from her that she wanted toprevent, do you? Never in this world!”
“There! You see?” Mrs. Oliphant lamented, appealing to her husband. “I knew it hurt him, in spite of what he said. I knew it!”
“You’re all wrong,” Dan stoutly maintained. “She kind of explained to me what she was goin’ to do, though I didn’t see what she meant. It was just a few minutes before she died. She told me to remember not to be hurt, but she needn’t have worried about it, and I told her so. So don’tyouworry about it. I didn’t begin to build Ornaby on my expectations from her; I’ve carried it along this far by myself, and I expect to carry it the rest of the way. And I’m goin’ to build that factory! George McMillan thinks maybe he can float some of the stock for it in New York, and I don’t know but he’s got a little money of his own he may want to put in. The way I feel, why, it looks to me as if I was about ready to climb out on the top o’ the heap right now; and I’m certainly not baby enough to be hurt because my grandmother didn’t have any faith in me.”
He continued to protest and perhaps protested too much; for although it was clear enough to his parents that he was so heartened by his thirty-five hundred dollars as to anticipate miracles, yet it was not to be believed that his pride had suffered no injury at all. What appeared in his grandmother’s will as a severe criticism of his ability and judgment was more than a mere neutral lack of faith; and Mrs. Oliphant’s intuition had touched the truth; he was indeed hurt—but he never admitted it.
Moreover, he remained steadfast in refusal; he would neither allow his mother to help him with money nor countenance any appeal of hers, or his father’s, to Harlan. Both of them, uncountenanced, did with faint hope reopen the subject to Harlan, though they did it indirectly;—they made allusions to the pathos of the brave and independent position his brother had taken. But Harlan only looked slightly badgered, and replied that this extolled position of Dan’s was the only possible correct one under the circumstances.
From time to time the troubled parents tried other diplomacies of increasing feebleness, until finally it seemed best to mention the subject, even indirectly, no more. In the evenings the silences in the library were charged with feeling withheld from expression; though Dan enlivened the room when he came in, and made it boisterous if he brought the baby with him. Certainly no depression could be recorded against either of this pair; Henry Daniel glowed with health and became livelier with every month of increasing age and weight. As for Lena, after her outburst upon the reading of Mrs. Savage’s will, she was another of this household who was surcharged with repressed feeling; but her repression became a habit;—weeks went by when she did not slam a door. She appeared to become more tolerant of her husband at this period than she had ever been; and when she spoke to him at all, it was in a tone suggesting that her tolerance had in it something of compassion.
She devoted herself to her baby, perhaps finding a refuge in her devotion; but she declined to accompany Dan on Sunday afternoons when he went for a sidewalk excursion with the perambulator. This was an established custom in the town, she observed: every Sunday, early in the afternoon, the young fathers and mothers began to appear upon the sidewalks, the fathers pushing the baby-carriages and the mothers strolling a little way behind with the toddlers, if there were any of these, or perhaps lingering for a moment of gossip with friends encountered by the way, then scurrying on to overtake the perambulator.
High and low followed the custom; it was as well observed by the South Side, where lived most of the followers of handicrafts, as it was upon National Avenue and Amberson Boulevard. The perambulators of these two thoroughfares were the more luxurious; fine lace was to be seen upon the occupants, and the accompanying parents were well dressed; though Lena, looking from her window, sometimes shivered to see one of the passing young husbands wearing a Derby hat as a complement to the long frock coat that appeared to be a regalia garment necessary to this occasion.
By four o’clock, which was Dan’s favourite hour for his weekly perambulator stroll, most of the pedestrian families were on their way homeward from “Sunday dinner at grandpa’s and grandma’s,” the grandma and grandpa being almost invariably the parents of the young mother. Lena objected to the parade as “publicly provincial,” and pointed out that Dan lacked any plausible reason for joining it;—if the baby needed air he could be taken for a drive in the family carriage; and if Dan insisted on pushing him in the perambulator, the Oliphants’ back yard was “twice the size of Madison Square,” she said with elaborate exaggeration; but Henry Daniel’s father only laughed and continued to follow the custom of his fellow-townsmen.
The Sunday-afternoon excursion with the perambulator gave him his greatest happiness, and all through his bustling week days of work he looked forward to it, chuckling as he thought of it. And when the rewarding hour arrived, he went forth wheeling his son before him and cheerily unconscious that he was the only father in sight not accompanied (even at a distance) by a second parent for the occupant of the perambulator. He was proud to exhibit Henry Daniel and loved nothing better than to lift him out of the little carriage and talk uproarious baby-talk to him, and tickle him to make him laugh, and in every other possible manner show him off to other young parents—or to anybody who had time to listen to these hilarious paternal banalities. If other parents bragged of their own young, showing them off in turn, Dan’s manifestations with Henry Daniel would become but the louder; and if the other parents, being two to one, succeeded in drowning him out, he would restore his child to the perambulator tenderly and move on, sorry for people who had so little to make such a fuss about.
Sunday, he said, was the only day when he had a chance to get really acquainted with the baby; for all the rest of the week Dan was out hustling so early and so late that opportunities for making the acquaintance more intimate were few. A great part of his activity at this time was in the chase of possible buyers of Ornaby ground; and a driven life was led by those three men who had thought they might buy lots after the foreclosure. The Earl of Ornaby gave them little rest; and although he sometimes remained away from one or another of them for days at a time—perhaps upon the ardent request, “Well, for heaven’s sakes can’t you even give me a chance to think itover?”—he would write frequent letters to the pursued creature in the interval. Incessantly he persuaded, argued, and prophesied; seldom has a half-accepted, half-rejected lover shown such hot persistence in convincing his lady; and probably never have three dismal men in moderate circumstances been so urgently courted into the buying of lots.
They were not friends, these men; they had gone separately to Ornaby and had no knowledge of one another when the pursuit of them began; but they knew one another well before it was over. The vehement salesman had so quoted them to one another, making such glorifying use of their every admission not actually condemning Ornaby, that a conference of the quoted seemed to be a necessity. They thought to meet in secret; but within ten minutes found the hunter upon them.
“Gentlemen,” he began, “you wish to be alone, and I will not interrupt you”—and talked until two of them went home.
He went with them, and then returned to talk some more to the man at whose house the conference had been called.
Such deadly persistence finally prevailed upon a majority of the three and two more lots were sold in the Addition upon the liberal terms of nothing down and little more than nothing to be paid in periodical installments. Nevertheless, here were three actual sales, and if there ever lived a salesman who knew how to make three appear to be a hundred, because he himself believed three to be a hundred, that multi-visioned salesman was Daniel Oliphant.
In a day of quieter art certain academicians now gone from their academies had frequently the desire to paint pretty young women blue-robed and poised as if alighting from the air. Sometimes, upon the lower part of his canvas, beneath the poising lady’s alighting toe, such a painter would twirl a golden circle, then swathe her eyes with a blue kerchief and name the picture, “Dame Fortune on her Wheel.” The effect was of the dame blind, but dancing; and sometimes the course of events in the life of a human creature will warrant the conception, yet it has usually been observed that Fortune seldom dances to one who has not diligently begged the favour. It would seem the blinded lady has a little bit of her kerchief up.
The man who had built a picnic shack at Ornaby for his large family found his wife and children so reluctant to come home from the picnics that he enlarged the shack, put a cooking-stove and cots in it, and began to stay there from Saturday afternoon until Monday morning. His house was far down in the city where the smoke had begun to discourage his wife, and, in the unavailing struggle to keep things clean, she grew querulous. “If we could onlyliveout here!” she wailed one day when they were at the shack; and this outcry produced the first house in Ornaby Addition. It was a cottage of the “New Colonial” kind; and Dan drove all of his other Ornaby boosters to see every new phase of its construction, from the digging of the cellar to the polishing of the floors; for when the cottage was begun the purchasers of land in the Addition were increased in number to eight. By the time the cottage was finished there were fourteen, and several of these intended to build “right the first minute next spring,” Dan said.
He called them his “Ornaby boosters”; for he readily adopted the new vocabulary of commercial argot then being developed by “promoters,” by writers of advertisements, and by New York hustlers for trade. “Every Ornaby buyer is an Ornaby booster,” he said one day, when the new cottages in the Addition had brought him new buyers of lots; and, falling instantly in love with the cadence of this alliteration, went straight to the billboard men. Thereafter no one could go northward of the city for an afternoon drive and fail to find the gentle landscape wrecked. On every road the earl blazoned his great defacements: “Every Ornaby Buyer is an Ornaby Booster!”
At home he had two subjects, both subdivided. One was Henry Daniel, his growth, his wit, and his precocity; and the other was Ornaby Addition, its present magnificence and prospective splendour.
“And the queer thing is,” Harlan told Martha Shelby, “he believes every word of it. He actually still believes he’s making a success of that dreadful place. Isn’t it strange?”
But Martha said that she knew something stranger, and when he asked her what it was, she answered: “Why, it’s your still believing heisn’tmaking a success of the ‘dreadful place.’ ”
CHAPTER XIX
HARLAN laughed ruefully and told her that time, tide, and travel failed to alter her. “You don’t change as much as—as much as”—he looked about him for a comparison, and found one ready to hand in the material of which the Shelbys’ veranda was made. “You don’t change as much as this Western limestone does. It’s made of stone, too, but years and weather take its edges off and give it the look of being not so hard as it used to be.”
Not defending herself from the criticism, she gazed thoughtfully at Harlan as he sat fanning himself with his straw hat—he was warm and flushed after their walk on this hot June morning—then she turned her eyes again to the wide lawn stretching before her down to the National Avenue sidewalk. Looking out from the shade of the veranda, her eyes needed the shelter of the curved fingers of her hand, a protection she gave them, resting her elbow on the stone railing beside her. The trimmed grass of the lawn was a blazing green, seen waveringly through visible pulsations of the heated air; the fountain swan, still diligent under every discouragement, sprayed forth no skyward rainbow mists, but ejected a limpid rod of water of so brief an uplift that the bird seemed to carry in his throat the curved tip of a shepherd’s crook made of glass. The asphalt street, beyond the shade of its bordering maples, lay steaming and smelled of tar;—drooping bicyclists rode there, tinkling their little bells for a right of way. Surreys and phaetons gave them courteous passage, and frequently a swifter, noisier vehicle went by, grinding, squawking, and leaving blue oil-smoke on the air.
There were many more automobiles than when she had last gone away, Martha noticed; yet the outlook from the veranda was the old familiar one. To her eyes, however, it bore the familiar unfamiliar appearance that well-known things bear to the traveller at home again, but not yet quite adjusted after a long absence. For this was not her return from the little run she had made to England at the time of the baby’s christening next door, though that excursion was itself a longer one—much to her taste—than she had planned. The bit of old hickory serving her as a father resisted stiffly, but finally proved flexible under great pressure, and she took him even to Russia before she got through bending him. When his protestive squeakings at last became unbearable, she brought him home, but did not remain herself. In the Italian Alps there was a valley town with which she had fallen in love;—she returned to her native land merely as an escort for Mr. Shelby, and, having deposited him safely, hurried back to the terraced vineyards, the whitewashed walls with strings of red peppers dangling against them, and the frescoed old villa she had rented in the foreground of this picture.
It was a commonplace, she said, that the new Twentieth Century was the age of the annihilation of distances; people talked from New York to Chicago over a wire; the Atlantic was crossed in six days, the American continent in four; and her father could remember when it took him three weeks to get to Philadelphia; he “wouldn’t mind being taken care of by correspondence.”
Old Hickory, well-warranted in his outburst, replied that he didn’t “need any takin’ care of, thank you”—he was tired of being bossed to death, and he wanted her to understand she was mighty welcome to go and stay as long as she had a mind to! If she remained at home, he wouldn’t know when she might be draggin’ him off again without his exactly knowin’ how it happened. It was “curious,” he continued; he had sense enough never to let her interfere with him in his business; but in other matters he never knew when he mightn’t find himself in some dog-gone place he didn’twantto be in—at a plague-taken pink tea maybe, or even right spang in the middle of Europe in some heaven-forsaken garlic heap, with nothin’ to think about but old dead monks and nothin’ to do but hate the smell. If Martha liked hangin’ around those old worn-out nations that never showed a sign o’ life except advertisin’ chocolate and keepin’ their fertilizer right under their front parlour window for fear somebody’d steal it, why, she was certainly good and welcome to all she wanted of ’em! For himself, he had his business to ’tend to; and he didn’t want any aunt Ella to pester him, either; “aunt Ella” being his widowed sister, whom Martha had proposed as a housekeeper in substitute for herself. He was full and able—thank you again!—to get up in the morning and eat his ham and eggs without somebody’s pinning a bib around his neck, and he believed he knew how to wash and go to bed at night without any fussy woman fixin’ up his bureau every other day, so as to hide his nightshirts from him! Altogether, he was lookin’ forward to a little rest and liberty, thank you!
So Martha had gone with his earnest consent; for his complaint of her did not lack reason—she was headstrong and a compelling daughter—and she stayed until she had her fill of Italy for that while. Meantime, the abandoned father contentedly lived alone, except for his negro servants, and declared that at last he was his own man and began to feel as if he owned his own house; he felt that way for the first time since his daughter was born, he said. But a different view of his condition was maintained by a member of the household next door.
“A fine exhibition of filial duty!” Lena cried, in one of the irritated moods that returned upon her as the growing Henry Daniel began to be a little boy instead of a little baby. When he was a noisy little boy during the day his mother often became reminiscent, not happily, by the time his father came home in the evening. “You told me once she had a heart as big as she was,” Lena went on. “It looks like it, doesn’t it? Leaving that poor old man alone over there, month after month and year after year!”
Dan listened absently, his mind on a new customer for a lot. “Who you talkin’ about now?”
“You know! That big girl of yours.”
“Martha?” he said, his tone a weary one instantly. “How often have I told you she never was any girl of mine, big or little? What’s started you onthatagain?”
“I shouldn’t think you’d expect it would take much to start me,” Lena exclaimed, “when you remember you gave me your sacred promise I should have a year in Europe——”
“Oh, Lordy! Have we got to go all over that again?”
“—And when you remember you deliberately broke your word to me,” Lena went on, “and haven’t ever even made the slightest effort to keep it! You hold me here, suffocating in this place, year after year——”
“Now, see here,” he interrupted; “just think a minute, please! Is that fair? Haven’t you been back to New York every year for at least two or three——”
But Lena almost shouted her interruption. “Yes! Two or threeweeks! To visit myfamily! Do you think it means happiness for me to be withthem?—and all of ’em watching to see how I take care of my baby! Is that keeping your word to take me abroad? Oh,” she cried, with bitter laughter, “doesn’t it seem ironical even to you? That big creature next door was so jealous of me because I had what she wanted she couldn’t bear to stay where she had to look at it, so she goes away and gets whatIwanted!Isn’tit ironical, Dan? Don’t you see it at all?”
“I see you’ve got your imagination all stirred up again, that’s all.”
“Imagination!” she cried. “Yes; I should think my imaginationwouldget ‘all stirred up!’ Why, it’s funny! She can go and take what I want, but it can’t be any good to her; she hasn’t culture enough to see it or to feel it or to hear it. I can see her carrying that accent around Europe, and asking waiters for ‘ice wat-urr’ and ‘please to pass the but-urr!’ Yet she can go and I can’t!”
“ButIdidn’t send her,” Dan explained, since his wife clearly implied his responsibility. “You talk as if I——”
“No; but you had no right not to sendmeafter giving me your sacred——”
Dan interrupted her genially; he smiled and patted her pretty little shoulder, though it twitched away from his touch. “Lena, look here: I’ve got some big deals on, and I’m just about certain they’re goin’ to work out the right way. You see up to now the trouble’s been that all the money comin’ in had to be put right out again almost before I’d get hold of it. If it hadn’t been for that, I’d had that factory up and running long ago. But as I look ahead now, everything is mighty good—mightygood! If I can just put these deals through——”
“Yes; it’s always ‘if,’ ” she reminded him. “When have I ever talked to you that you weren’t just about to put through some ‘mighty big deals’? You said exactly the same last year.”
“Well, but this is a better year than last year. Why, I’ve done twice the business—yes, better’n that; it’s more like four times what I did last year. If Ornaby keeps on like this, why, a few years from now——”
She stopped him; informing him that she’d long since heard more than enough about “a few years from now”; whereupon, being full of the subject, he went down to the library to tell his father and mother what was inevitable within a few years. No skepticism dampened his library prophecies now; Harlan was no longer there to listen, staring with dry incredulity through his glasses.
Harlan had not sold Mrs. Savage’s old house, but had moved into it, and kept as precise a routine there as she had kept, and with the same servants. He had two bedrooms upstairs made into a library, but changed nothing on the lower floor; and often the old lady seemed still to be there in authority. At twilight, before Nimbus lit the electric table lamp in the “south front parlour,” the room to which she had always descended from her afternoon nap, it was not difficult to imagine that she was sitting in the stiff chair beside the plate-glass window. Of course Nimbus believed that he saw her there when he came in to light the lamp; and he often mumbled to her—always upon the same theme. He was grateful for the one hundred and thirty-five dollars she had left him, but considered the sum inadequate.
“No’m, indeed,” he said to the figure he saw in the stiff chair. “I thank you kindly, but didn’ I used you right all my days? How much it cost you slip down ten hunderd thirty-five on that paper, ’stead of one hunderd thirty-five?Youain’t got it, are you? Ain’t doin’youno good, do it? No’m, indeedy! ’Tain’t no use you bein’ sorry, neither. Make all the fuss you want to; you too late; nobody ain’t goin’ pay no ’tention to you!”
And in the kitchen he would discuss the apparition with his fourth wife, the fat cook, Myrtle. “Look to me like she can’t keep away,” he would say. “Set there same as ever. Set up straight in that stiff chair. See her plain as I see you, till I git that lamp lit.”
“Landy me, Nimbus, I wouldn’ go in that room unlessen the light bright as day if you give me trottin’ horse an’ gole harniss! How you keep from hollerin’?”
At this the tall, thin old fellow would laugh without making a sound; deep wrinkles in the design of half of a symmetrical cobweb appearing on each side of his face. Some profoundly interior secret of his might have been betrayed, it seemed, if he had allowed his merriment to become vocal; and this noiseless laugh of his awed his wife in much the same way, no doubt, that the laugh of a jungle witch-doctor ancestor of his had awed wives not unlike Myrtle. “She ain’t goin’ bother me ner you,” he explained. “She ain’t settin’ there ’count o’ me ner you. She settin’ there ’cause she so mad.”
“Who? Who she mad at?”
“Mad at somep’m!” Nimbus would say, and, becoming less uncomfortably mystic might allow a human chuckle to escape him. “Set there mad long as she want to; ’tain’t goin’ do her no good. She ain’tfixedto make no changes now!”
The new owner lived in the old house almost as quietly as Mrs. Savage, in the visions of Nimbus, went on living there. Harlan had several times thought of going to Italy, but the idea never culminated in action.
“I wanted to come, though,” he told Martha, as they sat on her veranda that hot morning, the day after her return. “I wanted to more than I ever wanted to do anything else. You see I’ve almost stopped going to the office; I just dangle about there sometimes to please father, but I don’t care to practise law. It’s a silly way of spending one’s life after all, fighting the sordid disputes of squabbling people. There was really nothing to keep me here.”
She did not alter her attitude, but still looked out upon the old familiar unfamiliar scene from beneath her sheltering curved fingers. “If you wanted to come, why didn’t you?”
“Because I’d only have done it to see you, and I suppose I have a remnant of pride. If you’d like a better answer, think of what I told you about yourself. I didn’t come because I know you’re stony. I knew you hadn’t changed.”
“About what?”
“About me,” he said, and added: “About anything!”
At this she turned her head and looked at him, for he spoke with a sour significance. “Well, have you changed, Harlan?” she asked gravely.
“About you,” he answered. “I haven’t—unfortunately.”
“But I meant: Haveyouchanged about anything? Aren’t you just what you were five or six years ago, only a little intensified—and richer?”
“Ah, I knew I’d get that,” he said. “I knew it would come before I could be with you long. I told my father and mother the very day my grandmother’s will was read that you’d hate me for it, and mother agreed quickly enough.”
“Why, no,” Martha said, and her surprise was genuine. “Why should I hate you because Mrs. Savage——”
“Because she left it to me and not to Dan, and because I didn’t think it was right or sensible to help him with any of it.”
“But he hasn’t needed any help,” Martha said. “It’s much better for him to be doing it without any help, and so splendidly.”
“So splendidly?” Harlan repeated, and he stared at her. “But you don’t take what Dan says seriously, do you? You don’t think that just because he says——”
“I haven’t seen him, Harlan.”
“But you speak as if you believe he’s actually succeeding in making that old fantasia of his into a reality.”
“Well,” she said, “isn’t he?”
“What? Why, he’s still just barely keeping his head above water. He sells vacant lots out there, yes—but to keep on selling them he has to put all they sell for into developing the land he hasn’t sold. It amounts precisely to the same thing as giving the property away. His mortgages used to worry him to death, but he’s got most of the place mortgaged now for three times what it was five years ago. You see——”
“I see that the land must be worth three times as much as it was five years ago, since he can borrow three times as much on it.”
“But, my dear Martha——”
“But, my dear Harlan!” she echoed mockingly, and thus disposed of his argument before he could deliver it. “The truth is, you’ve had the habit of undervaluing Dan so long that you can’t get over it. You can’t see that at last he’s begun to make a success of his ‘fantasia.’ Given time enough, critics who aren’t careful to keep themselves humble-minded always lose the power to see things as they are.”
Harlan winced a little under this sententious assault, and laughed at himself for wincing; then explained his rather painful laughter. “It’s almost amusing to me to find myself still cowering away from your humble-minded criticisms of me—just as I used to, Martha!”
“Yes, I know it,” she admitted. “I hate myself for the way I talk to you, Harlan;—somehow you always make me smug and superior. I’m the foolish kind of person who’s always made critical by superior criticism—critical of the critic, I mean.”
“But I’m not more critical of Dan than other people are. Have you asked your father what he thinks of Ornaby now, for instance?”
“Yes, I asked him last night.”
“What does he think of it?”
“He thinks the same as I do,” she said. “He’s been compelled to recognize that it’s going to be a tremendous success.”
“Then he’s changed his mind since last week,” Harlan returned, somewhat discomfited. “He told me——”
“Oh, yes, I know,” she said. “He didn’t say he thought it would be a success. He said he thought the Addition idea was just as crazy as he ever did, and Dan Oliphant was the biggest fool in seven states, and the noisiest! Those were his words precisely, Harlan.”
“But you just told me——”
“No,” she explained;—“you asked me what hethought. Do you suppose he’d admit to me that he ever made a business mistake? He knows perfectly well that he did make one when he refused to follow my advice and buy some of Dan’s stock when the poor boy was trying to finance his plan at the beginning. Papa confessed it absolutely.”
“He did?”
“Certainly,” she replied. “If he’d meant what he said he’d just have grunted it. Instead, he yelled it at me. With papa, that’s exactly the same as a perfectly open confession.”
Harlan shook his head, remaining more than doubtful of this interpretation. “So you believe if Dan tried now to organize a stock company for Ornaby——”
“They’d gobble it!” she said. “Papa especially! But he and others like him wouldn’t buy a single share when poor Dan went begging and peddling all over town; and now I’m glad they didn’t. It’s so much better for him to have done it alone.”
“But, my dear,” Harlan insisted, not altogether without exasperation, “hehasn’tdone it.”
“My dear,” she returned promptly; “he’sgoingto!”
“But, Martha——”
“Listen,” she said. “I’ll tell you something that you don’t understand, because you’ve been living here all along. When I went off to college, I spent the Christmas holidays visiting some Eastern girls, and papa didn’t see me for a whole year. Then he nearly fainted—I’d grown so! Yet I’d grown just as much the year before, but he never noticed it because I was living at home where he saw me every day. It’s the same way with a city like this, Harlan. I haven’t been here for so long that I can see the change. Everything is going to happen that Dan prophesied.”
She had spoken with gravity, but Harlan laughed, not impressed. “Yes, the boosters brag of the increase in population shown by the last census,” he said. “We’ve got a few thousand more Italians and Polish Jews and negroes, I suppose; and some new ugly factories and dwelling-houses of objectionable architecture. They’re beginning to build awful little shacks they call ‘bungalows,’ hurrying them up by the dozen. Is that the glorious cosmopolis of your hero’s prophecies, Martha? To my mind it’s only an extension of hideousness, and down where I live, in my grandmother’s old house, it’s getting so smoky in winter that the air is noxious—the whole town’s dirty, for that matter.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yesterday, as soon as I got here, I noticed that even in summer the air’s smokier than it used to be. I think the city was a cleaner place and a better-looking place when I went away. There’s the smoke, of course, and I’ve already seen how they’re beginning to tear old buildings down and put up bigger ones, and no building has any thought of having the slightest relation to the ones on each side of it. In a way, as you say, it’s getting hideous, though some of these long, wide streets are pleasant, even to a person who’s stayed in Europe too long perhaps—and National Avenue is really beautiful. I don’t know where except in towns like this you’ll find a long street of such big, solid, comfortable houses with green trees and clean lawns about them. This part of the town, at least, hasn’t changed; but a change has begun, and I believe it’s the growth—I think it’s the incredible growth that Dan predicted, Harlan. I think it’s begun.”
Again she had spoken gravely, though with a glinting look at him which had in it some hint of triumph, and piqued him.
“Well, if this fabulous growthhasbegun,” he said incautiously, “you’re surely not hero-worshipper enough to think it’s going to extend as far as Ornaby Addition, are you?”
She had hoped for this, had led him into it. “Papa’s going to begin building an extension of the Tennessee Avenue car line next month,” she said. “I forced him to admit how far out it would run.”
“Not so far as the Addition?”
“Within an eighth of a mile of it,” said Martha. “That’s what made him so noisy!”
CHAPTER XX
HARLAN was astonished, but he took his little defeat well; and Martha in turn encountered a surprise, for he showed a discomfited kind of pleasure. “So Ornaby Addition’s going to get its rapid transit at last,” he said. “That’s not so bad, you know. Why, Dan might come out pretty well on the thing after all!”
“But doesn’t that annoy you, Harlan?” she asked.
“You mean that Iwantto see my brother beaten? That I really haven’t good will toward him?”
“No, indeed I don’t. I mean: Wouldn’t it annoy you to find you’d always been mistaken about him?”
“But I’m not. I grew up in the same house with him, and I ought to know him. If he does happen to do anything with his wild old idea after all, it’ll be by the grace of a series of miracles no one could possibly have foreseen.”
“That is to say,” Martha observed, “you’d call him ‘a fool for luck.’ ”
“Let’s put it, Ihopehe is.”
“And you were just telling meIdidn’t change!” she cried.
“Yes,” he returned placidly;—“it seems we’re neither of us wiser than we used to be. We sit here talking of Dan and his Addition just as we’d have been talking about them if you’d never been away. You really ought to be speaking with a slight foreign accent and unable to put your mind on anything later than the seventeenth century.”
She nodded, agreeing. “Yes, it’s queer; and it makes mefeela little queer. You go away and stay for ever and ever; then you come back home and by the time your trunk’s unpacked you’re ready to wonder if you’ve been away at all;—maybe you’ve just had a long dream. Of course, too, I knew what was going on at home—not through papa!—but some of the girls of our old set here have been faithful about writing, in spite of their every single one of ’em getting married. That makes me feel I belong to the seventeenth century—almost ‘cinquecento!’ ”
“I’d prefer the ‘cinquecento,’ ” Harlan said, and immediately added: “Not that I care for it myself.”
“What!” she cried, her eyes widening. “You’d even criticize the Renaissance?”
It appeared that he would, and willingly. Offhand he called the Renaissance “a naïve movement amusingly overrated and with the single merit that it was better than what had gone before.” Martha was indignant, and they had an argument in which she proved to be no match for him. He had not been abroad since his junior vacation as an undergraduate, but he knew a great deal more about Italy than she did, though she had just come from long residence there. She continued to disagree with him, and presently was surprised by the suspicion that she enjoyed hearing him talk, and in a way, found him congenial in spite of their differences.
“You’re the only person I ever heard of that criticized the Renaissance,” she said, when he got up to go. “You’re all wrong, of course, even if I can’t prove it. You’re too much for me, but that’s only because you’re such an admirable bookworm.”
Then, as he went down the long path to the gate, she observed that his shoulders had acquired a little more habitual stoop in them than she remembered. Otherwise the tall figure might have been that of a thin athlete; and Harlan had a well-shaped head;—she was readily able to comprehend what one of her friends had written her of him: “And Harlan Oliphant seems to be just as sarcastic as he used to be, but heisawfully distinguished-looking as he grows older.” Nevertheless, even in this view of his back, Martha found something irritating, something consciously aristocratic, over-fastidious, skeptical, and precise. “That’s just what you are!” she said half-aloud, before she turned to go into the house. “You can be rather fascinating, but you’re really only an admirable bookworm in a nice, clean white collar!”
The admirable bookworm, unconscious that the definition of him had been enlarged, walked down National Avenue, keeping within the continuous shade of the big maple trees and perplexing himself with introspections as he went. He was dry and cold, as he knew, yet far from incapable of ardour, and he had never entirely lost the ardour he felt for Martha; but what surprised him was the renewed liveliness of that ancient pain she evoked within him. He had thought it dead, but evidently it had only fallen into a doze in her absence.
Of course he asked himself why he should ache because she had at once resumed with him her old critical attitude, and why, moreover, he should care about her at all. She had almost no coquetry and little more of the quality called “sheer feminine charm”; she was too downright and plain-minded to possess much of either. She was not masculine yet, as her father said with the plaintive irascibility of a man who knows because he has suffered, she was imperious. “A man might as well be dead as bossed to death,” he often complained. And although she was a handsome creature and graceful, Harlan saw a dozen prettier girls at the new Country Club every day that he played golf there. Notwithstanding all this, she had only to let him see her again after years of absence, and at once his heart leaped, then ached, and he could think of nothing but this Martha who thought so little of himself.
He was not the only member of his family who found Martha’s return disturbing; his sister-in-law also had long thoughts connected with the arrival from Italy. That evening before dinner, Dan was whistling in his bathroom, shampooing himself lavishly, when Lena came into his bedroom and addressed him through the open door.
“I suppose you’ve seen her,” she said, and gave utterance to an emotional little titter that quickly stopped his whistling.
He had heard such semblances of amusement from her often enough to understand their prophetic meaning. “In for it again!” was instantly his thought. “Seen her?” he said. “Who do you mean?”
“Your fair mountain range,” Lena replied, affecting a light mockery. “Of course you didn’t know she’s home again! Innocent old Dannie!”
“I heard she was to get here to-day, so I suppose she’s here; but I haven’t seen her. What about it?”
“Oh, nothing!” Lena returned, continuing her archness. “Do you suppose she can stand it?”
“Stand what?”
“Why, the sight of us—of her old sweetheart married to me,” Lena explained. “She’s stayed away till she thought she could bear it, but do you suppose shewillbe able to?”
“Yes, I think she’ll bear it,” he said gruffly and went on with his lathering.
“How about you? Do you thinkyou’llbe able to contain yourself when you——”
“I expect so.”
“Why don’t you ask me how she looks?” Lena inquired, still affecting to rally him gaily. “I know you’re dying to. I’ve seen her; I was looking from my window and saw her go out and walk up the street this afternoon. I laughed so!”
“What about?”
“She was such a perfect picture of a big Western woman! Absolutely typical!”
“You mean like mother, for instance?”
“No; your mother’s a dear thing who’d be lovely anywhere; I never think of her as Western at all,” Lena said. “She isn’t.”
“She is as much as Martha is—or anybody else. She was born here and——”
“Not at all!” Lena interrupted airily. “The real Western woman is like your mountain girl. Theyloveto be huge; that’s why they live in the prairie country—so they’ll look even bigger. One reason I laughed was because your friend was just exactly as much the typical Western woman after all this time abroad as she was before she went. She was wearing all kinds of expensive clothes, and I haven’t a doubt she’d got them in Paris, but on her they looked perfectly as Western as if she’d just bought ’em and put ’em on downtown at Kohn & Sons! Do you suppose you’ll be able to control your raptures at all when you meet her again, old innocent Dannie?”
“See here,” he said, “I wish you’d let me get fixed for dinner. I had a pretty hot day’s work and I’d like to——”
“Of course you would!” Lena said. “You’d like to make yourself beautiful because you’re going to hurry over there to her just as soon as you’ve finished your dinner, aren’t you? That’s what you have been planning, isn’t it?”
“Why, yes; certainly,” he answered. “I’d like to have you go with me. She’s an old friend of mine and all our family; she’s been away a long time, and it wouldn’t look very cordial not to——”
“Why, no; so it wouldn’t!” Lena mocked, but now her mockery was openly acrid. “It wouldn’t lookcordialand naturally you’d hate to have her think you lacked cordiality—a woman you were so cordial with you wanted your child to grow up to be like her instead of like its mother!—a woman you were so cordial with you had to hold her hand the very day you brought your bride home! It would beterribleto have her think——”
But here Dan closed the door, though not so sharply as Lena closed the outer door of his bedroom when she went out of it an instant later.
The subject of Martha’s return was not again mentioned directly during the evening; and after dinner, when Lena with arch significance inquired of her silent husband why he had settled down at the library table to write business letters when there was “so much to do in the neighbourhood,” Dan replied, without looking up, that his letters were important—he’d have to beg to be excused from talking. Lena picked up a book, and retired to the easy-chair and the lamp in the bay window, which had once been Harlan’s favourite reading place; but she did not read. She sat looking steadily at her husband—as he thoroughly and uncomfortably understood, though he kept doggedly at his writing.
After a time his mother and father were heard in the hall, going out; and he knew that they were “going over next door” to bid Martha welcome home. They had not mentioned where they were going, and he understood the significance of their not mentioning it—and so did Lena, as she sat watching him. He wondered why he did not rise and say to her: “There’s an old friend of mine next door; I haven’t seen her for years; I ought to go over and tell her I’m glad she’s home, and I want to! There’s no reason I shouldn’t, and you can make the most of it—I’m going!”
Lena had her own wonderings. She wondered why she was keeping her husband from going. Her thought was that she ought to say: “I don’t think I care for you enough any more to have a right to be jealous. Go to your old friend and tell her you’re glad she’s home again, since you wish to. I’m not so small about it as I’m making you think, and I really don’t care.”
Lena wondered why she did not say this to her husband;—in a manner she wanted to say it, and at the same time she knew that she would say nothing of the kind, but on the contrary, intended to keep him in fear of what she might do if he made any effort to appear “cordial,” as he had said, to Martha. Thus the husband and wife sat—the husband bent over his writing and the wife looking at him, her book in her lap. When she looked away from him it was not to the book that her gaze went, but to the wall across the room, where she saw nothing to please her; and when she had looked at the wall for a time she always looked again at Dan. His own eyes were kept to the writing upon the table, yet he must have been conscious of hers when they were upon him, for a deeper frown came upon his forehead whenever she looked away from the wall and again at him.
After a while Mr. and Mrs. Oliphant were heard returning, and in the library it somehow seemed strange, and like an event out of nature’s order, to hear such brisk and cheerful sounds, when the front door opened, letting in the two voices and their owners simultaneously.
“Indeed sheis!” Mrs. Oliphant was heard to say, while her husband continued a narrative evidently begun outside.
“And I told her so. I said, ‘By George, if an old maid’s a person who just gets lovelier and lovelier, Martha, why, then, maybe you’re——’ ”
But here his voice so abruptly dropped to a mumble no one could have doubted that the suppression was in obedience to a tactful gesture of his wife’s; nor was it difficult to picture this gesture as a movement of Mrs. Oliphant’s hand toward the open door of the library. Immediately afterward the two were heard ascending the stairs; the house again became as quiet as before; Dan went on with his writing, and Lena with her looking and wondering.
Often such a vigil between husband and wife does not end by leaving things as they were before it began. Between the two silent people appear to have taken place communications so imperceptible that neither is definitely aware of them, yet each may be affected by them as if by words spoken. It would seem that there is a danger here; for with couples not well wedded the unspoken words may be too true, or may carry altogether too much revelation. Lena stopped wondering; and then rather slowly it became clear to her that she and her husband no longer cared for each other at all. Long, long she had clung to her belief that she was still in love with him; and now all she had left to her of this was that she could still be jealous of him. “A fine reason for not leaving a man!” she said to herself;—especially a man who really cared about nothing but his business and his boy!
Suddenly she rose from her chair, the book in her lap falling to the floor, where she let it remain; and then she stood still, while Dan glanced up inquiringly from his work and met the strange, examining, hostile look she gave him.
There was a final moment of silence between them before Lena hurried across the room and left him. A minute later Dan rubbed his forehead, wondering again. Upstairs, Lena had not slammed her door.
He had an absent-minded impression that something had happened, but as its nature seemed indefinite, and he had now become more interested in his letters than in Martha’s return or Lena’s temper, he bent again to his work and kept at it with zest until after midnight.