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

with her work, putting into it a sudden violence inspired by the recollection; but Alice, enlightened, gave utterance to a laugh of lugubrious derision. “Oh, the glue factory again!” she cried. “How silly!” And she renewed her laughter.

So often do the great projects of parents appear ignominious to their children. Mrs. Adams’s conception of a glue factory as a fairy godmother of this family was an absurd old story which Alice had never taken seriously. She remembered that when she was about fifteen her mother began now and then to say something to Adams about a “glue factory,” rather timidly, and as a vague suggestion, but never without irritating him. Then, for years, the preposterous subject had not been mentioned; possibly because of some explosion on the part of Adams, when his daughter had not been present. But during the last year Mrs. Adams had quietly gone back to these old hints, reviving them at intervals and also reviving her husband’s irritation. Alice’s bored impression was that her mother wanted him to found, or buy, or do something, or other, about a glue factory; and that he considered the proposal so impracticable as to be insulting. The parental conversations took place when neither Alice nor Walter was at hand, but sometimes Alice had come in upon the conclusion of one, to find her father in a shouting mood, and shocking the air behind him with profane monosyllables as he departed. Mrs. Adams would be left quiet and troubled; and when Alice, sympathizing with the goaded man, inquired of her mother why these tiresome bickerings had been renewed, she always got the brooding and cryptic answer, “He could do it⁠—if he wanted to.” Alice failed to comprehend the desirability of a glue factory⁠—to her mind a father engaged in a glue factory lacked impressiveness; had no advantage over a father employed by Lamb and Company; and she supposed that Adams knew better than her mother whether such an enterprise would be profitable or not. Emphatically, he thought it would not, for she had heard him shouting at the end of one of these painful interviews, “You can keep up your dang talk till you die and I die, but I’ll never make one God’s cent that way!”

There had been a culmination. Returning from church on the Sunday preceding the collapse with which Adams’s illness had begun, Alice found her mother downstairs, weeping and intimidated, while her father’s stamping footsteps were loudly audible as he strode up and down his room overhead. So were his endless repetitions of invective loudly audible: “That woman! Oh, that woman; Oh, that danged woman!”

Mrs. Adams admitted to her daughter that it was “the old glue factory” and that her husband’s wildness had frightened her into a “solemn promise” never to mention the subject again so long as she had breath. Alice laughed. The “glue factory” idea was not only a bore, but ridiculous, and her mother’s evident seriousness about it one of those inexplicable vagaries we sometimes discover in the people we know best. But this Sunday rampage appeared to be the end of it, and when Adams came down to dinner, an hour later, he was unusually cheerful. Alice was glad he had gone wild enough to settle the glue factory once and for all; and she had ceased to think of the episode long before Friday of that week, when Adams was brought home in the middle of the afternoon by his old employer, the “great J. A. Lamb,” in the latter’s car.

During the long illness the “glue factory” was completely forgotten, by Alice at least; and her laugh was rueful as well as derisive now, in the kitchen, when she realized that her mother’s mind again dwelt upon this abandoned nuisance. “I thought you’d got over all that nonsense, mama,” she said.

Mrs. Adams smiled, pathetically. “Of course you think it’s nonsense, dearie. Young people think everything’s nonsense that they don’t know anything about.”

“Good gracious!” Alice cried. “I should think I used to hear enough about that horrible old glue factory to know something about it!”

“No,” her mother returned patiently. “You’ve never heard anything about it at all.”

“I haven’t?”

“No. Your father and I didn’t discuss it before you children. All you ever heard was when he’d get in such a rage, after we’d been speaking of it, that he couldn’t control himself when you came in. Wasn’t I always quiet? Did I ever go on talking about it?”

“No; perhaps not. But you’re talking about it now, mama, after you promised never to mention it again.”

“I promised not to mention it to your father,” said Mrs. Adams, gently. “I haven’t mentioned it to him, have I?”

“Ah, but if you mention it to me I’m afraid you will mention it to him. You always do speak of things that you have on your mind, and you might get papa all stirred up again about⁠—” Alice paused, a light of divination flickering in her eyes. “Oh!” she cried. “I see!”

“What do you see?”

“You have been at him about it!”

“Not one single word!”

“No!” Alice cried. “Not a word, but that’s what you’ve meant all along! You haven’t spoken the words to him, but all this urging him to change, to ‘find something better to go into’⁠—it’s all been about nothing on earth but your foolish old glue factory that you know upsets him, and you gave your solemn word never to speak to him about again! You didn’t say it, but you meant it⁠—and he knows that’s what you meant! Oh, mama!”

Mrs. Adams, with her hands still automatically at work in the flooded dishpan, turned to face her daughter. “Alice,” she said, tremulously, “what do I ask for myself?”

“What?”

“I say, What do I ask for myself? Do you suppose I want anything? Don’t you know I’d be perfectly content on your father’s present income if I were the only person to be considered? What do I care about any pleasure for myself? I’d be willing never to have a maid again; I don’t mind