Alice Adams - Booth Tarkington (chrome ebook reader .TXT) 📗

would like to see your dear, beautiful, loving face when you get this news.

I would like to go out on the public streets and just dance and shout and it is all I can do to help doing it, especially when I know we will be talking it all over together this time next week, and oh my darling, now that your folks have no excuse for putting it off any longer we might be in our own little home before Xmas.

Would you be glad?

Well, darling, this settles everything and makes our future just about as smooth for us as anybody could ask. I can hardly realize after all this waiting life’s troubles are over for you and me and we have nothing to do but to enjoy the happiness granted us by this wonderful, beautiful thing we call life. I know I am not any poet and the one I tried to write about you the day of the picnic was fearful but the way I think about you is a poem.

Write me what you think of the news. I know but write me anyhow.

I’ll get it before we start home and I can be reading it over all the time on the tram.

Your always loving

Virgil.

The sound of her mother’s diligent scrubbing in the hall came back slowly to Alice’s hearing, as she restored the letter to the packet, wrapped the packet in its muslin covering, and returned it to the drawer. She had remained upon her knees while she read the letter; now she sank backward, sitting upon the floor with her hands behind her, an unconscious relaxing for better ease to think. Upon her face there had fallen a look of wonder.

For the first time she was vaguely perceiving that life is everlasting movement. Youth really believes what is running water to be a permanent crystallization and sees time fixed to a point: some people have dark hair, some people have blond hair, some people have gray hair. Until this moment, Alice had no conviction that there was a universe before she came into it. She had always thought of it as the background of herself: the moon was something to make her prettier on a summer night.

But this old letter, through which she saw still flickering an ancient starlight of young love, astounded her. Faintly before her it revealed the whole lives of her father and mother, who had been young, after all⁠—they really had⁠—and their youth was now so utterly passed from them that the picture of it, in the letter, was like a burlesque of them. And so she, herself, must pass to such changes, too, and all that now seemed vital to her would be nothing.

When her work was finished, that afternoon, she went into her father’s room. His recovery had progressed well enough to permit the departure of Miss Perry; and Adams, wearing one of Mrs. Adams’s wrappers over his nightgown, sat in a high-backed chair by a closed window. The weather was warm, but the closed window and the flannel wrapper had not sufficed him: round his shoulders he had an old crocheted scarf of Alice’s; his legs were wrapped in a heavy comfort; and, with these swathings about him, and his eyes closed, his thin and grizzled head making but a slight indentation in the pillow supporting it, he looked old and little and queer.

Alice would have gone out softly, but without opening his eyes, he spoke to her: “Don’t go, dearie. Come sit with the old man a little while.”

She brought a chair near his. “I thought you were napping.”

“No. I don’t hardly ever do that. I just drift a little sometimes.”

“How do you mean you drift, papa?”

He looked at her vaguely. “Oh, I don’t know. Kind of pictures. They get a little mixed up⁠—old times with times still ahead, like planning what to do, you know. That’s as near a nap as I get⁠—when the pictures mix up some. I suppose it’s sort of drowsing.”

She took one of his hands and stroked it. “What do you mean when you say you have pictures like ‘planning what to do’?” she asked.

“I mean planning what to do when I get out and able to go to work again.”

“But that doesn’t need any planning,” Alice said, quickly. “You’re going back to your old place at Lamb’s, of course.”

Adams closed his eyes again, sighing heavily, but made no other response.

“Why, of course you are!” she cried. “What are you talking about?”

His head turned slowly toward her, revealing the eyes, open in a haggard stare. “I heard you the other night when you came from the party,” he said. “I know what was the matter.”

“Indeed, you don’t,” she assured him. “You don’t know anything about it, because there wasn’t anything the matter at all.”

“Don’t you suppose I heard you crying? What’d you cry for if there wasn’t anything the matter?”

“Just nerves, papa. It wasn’t anything else in the world.”

“Never mind,” he said. “Your mother told me.”

“She promised me not to!”

At that Adams laughed mournfully. “It wouldn’t be very likely I’d hear you so upset and not ask about it, even if she didn’t come and tell me on her own hook. You needn’t try to fool me; I tell you I know what was the matter.”

“The only matter was I had a silly fit,” Alice protested. “It did me good, too.”

“How’s that?”

“Because I’ve decided to do something about it, papa.”

“That isn’t the way your mother looks at it,” Adams said, ruefully. “She thinks it’s our place to do something about it. Well, I don’t know⁠—I don’t know; everything seems so changed these days. You’ve always been a good daughter, Alice, and you ought to have as much as any of these girls you go with; she’s convinced me she’s right about that. The trouble is⁠—” He faltered, apologetically, then went on, “I mean the question is⁠—how to get it for you.”

“No!” she cried. “I had no business to make such a fuss