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

doing the work. If we didn’t have any children I’d be glad to do your father’s cooking and the housework and the washing and ironing, too, for the rest of my life. I wouldn’t care. I’m a poor cook and a poor housekeeper; I don’t do anything well; but it would be good enough for just him and me. I wouldn’t ever utter one word of com⁠—”

“Oh, goodness!” Alice lamented. “What is it all about?”

“It’s about this,” said Mrs. Adams, swallowing. “You and Walter are a new generation and you ought to have the same as the rest of the new generation get. Poor Walter⁠—asking you to go to the movies and a Chinese restaurant: the best he had to offer! Don’t you suppose I see how the poor boy is deteriorating? Don’t you suppose I know what you have to go through, Alice? And when I think of that man upstairs⁠—” The agitated voice grew louder. “When I think of him and know that nothing in the world but his stubbornness keeps my children from having all they want and what they ought to have, do you suppose I’m going to hold myself bound to keep to the absolute letter of a silly promise he got from me by behaving like a crazy man? I can’t! I can’t do it! No mother could sit by and see him lock up a horn of plenty like that in his closet when the children were starving!”

“Oh, goodness, goodness me!” Alice protested. “We aren’t precisely ‘starving,’ are we?”

Mrs. Adams began to weep. “It’s just the same. Didn’t I see how flushed and pretty you looked, this afternoon, after you’d been walking with this young man that’s come here? Do you suppose he’d look at a girl like Mildred Palmer if you had what you ought to have? Do you suppose he’d be going into business with her father if your father⁠—”

“Good heavens, mama; you’re worse than Walter: I just barely know the man! don’t be so absurd!”

“Yes, I’m always ‘absurd,’ ” Mrs. Adams moaned. “All I can do is cry, while your father sits upstairs, and his horn of plenty⁠—”

But Alice interrupted with a peal of desperate laughter. “Oh, that ‘horn of plenty’! Do come down to earth, mama. How can you call a glue factory, that doesn’t exist except in your mind, a ‘horn of plenty’? Do let’s be a little rational!”

“It could be a horn of plenty,” the tearful Mrs. Adams insisted. “It could! You don’t understand a thing about it.”

“Well, I’m willing,” Alice said, with tired skepticism. “Make me understand, then. Where’d you ever get the idea?”

Mrs. Adams withdrew her hands from the water, dried them on a towel, and then wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. “Your father could make a fortune if he wanted to,” she said, quietly. “At least, I don’t say a fortune, but anyhow a great deal more than he does make.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that before, mama, and you think he could make it out of a glue factory. What I’m asking is: How?”

“How? Why, by making glue and selling it. Don’t you know how bad most glue is when you try to mend anything? A good glue is one of the rarest things there is; and it would just sell itself, once it got started. Well, your father knows how to make as good a glue as there is in the world.”

Alice was not interested. “What of it? I suppose probably anybody could make it if they wanted to.”

“I said you didn’t know anything about it. Nobody else could make it. Your father knows a formula for making it.”

“What of that?”

“It’s a secret formula. It isn’t even down on paper. It’s worth any amount of money.”

“ ‘Any amount’?” Alice said, remaining incredulous. “Why hasn’t papa sold it then?”

“Just because he’s too stubborn to do anything with it at all!”

“How did papa get it?”

“He got it before you were born, just after we were married. I didn’t think much about it then: it wasn’t till you were growing up and I saw how much we needed money that I⁠—”

“Yes, but how did papa get it?” Alice began to feel a little more curious about this possible buried treasure. “Did he invent it?”

“Partly,” Mrs. Adams said, looking somewhat preoccupied. “He and another man invented it.”

“Then maybe the other man⁠—”

“He’s dead.”

“Then his family⁠—”

“I don’t think he left any family,” Mrs. Adams said. “Anyhow, it belongs to your father. At least it belongs to him as much as it does to anyone else. He’s got an absolutely perfect right to do anything he wants to with it, and it would make us all comfortable if he’d do what I want him to⁠—and he knows it would, too!”

Alice shook her head pityingly. “Poor mama!” she said. “Of course he knows it wouldn’t do anything of the kind, or else he’d have done it long ago.”

“He would, you say?” her mother cried. “That only shows how little you know him!”

“Poor mama!” Alice said again, soothingly. “If papa were like what you say he is, he’d be⁠—why, he’d be crazy!”

Mrs. Adams agreed with a vehemence near passion. “You’re right about him for once: that’s just what he is! He sits up there in his stubbornness and lets us slave here in the kitchen when if he wanted to⁠—if he’d so much as lift his little finger⁠—”

“Oh, come, now!” Alice laughed. “You can’t build even a glue factory with just one little finger.”

Mrs. Adams seemed about to reply that finding fault with a figure of speech was beside the point; but a ringing of the front door bell forestalled the retort. “Now, who do you suppose that is?” she wondered aloud, then her face brightened. “Ah⁠—did Mr. Russell ask if he could⁠—”

“No, he wouldn’t be coming this evening,” Alice said. “Probably it’s the great J. A. Lamb: he usually stops for a minute on Thursdays to ask how papa’s getting along. I’ll go.”

She tossed her apron off, and as she went through the house her expression was thoughtful. She was thinking vaguely