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

able.” He went to the door. “You hear, Miss Alice? That’s what I wanted to make the old feller understand, and what I want you to kind of enforce on him. The old place is there waiting for him, and it’d wait ten years if it took him that long to get good and well. You see that he remembers it, Miss Alice!”

She went down the stairs with him, and he continued to impress this upon her until he had gone out of the front door. And even after that, the husky voice called back from the darkness, as he went to his car, “Don’t forget, Miss Alice; let him take his own time. We always want him, but we want him to get good and well first. Good night, good night, young lady!”

When she closed the door her mother came from the farther end of the living-room, where there was no light; and Alice turned to her.

“I can’t help liking that old man, mama,” she said. “He always sounds so⁠—well, so solid and honest and friendly! I do like him.”

But Mrs. Adams failed in sympathy upon this point. “He didn’t say anything about raising your father’s salary, did he?” she asked, dryly.

“No.”

“No. I thought not.”

She would have said more, but Alice, indisposed to listen, began to whistle, ran up the stairs, and went to sit with her father. She found him bright-eyed with the excitement a first caller brings into a slow convalescence: his cheeks showed actual hints of colour; and he was smiling tremulously as he filled and lit his pipe. She brought the crocheted scarf and put it about his shoulders again, then took a chair near him.

“I believe seeing Mr. Lamb did do you good, papa,” she said. “I sort of thought it might, and that’s why I let him come up. You really look a little like your old self again.”

Adams exhaled a breathy “Ha!” with the smoke from his pipe as he waved the match to extinguish it. “That’s fine,” he said. “The smoke I had before dinner didn’t taste the way it used to, and I kind of wondered if I’d lost my liking for tobacco, but this one seems to be all right. You bet it did me good to see J. A. Lamb! He’s the biggest man that’s ever lived in this town or ever will live here; and you can take all the Governors and Senators or anything they’ve raised here, and put ’em in a pot with him, and they won’t come out one-two-three alongside o’ him! And to think as big a man as that, with all his interests and everything he’s got on his mind⁠—to think he’d never let anything prevent him from coming here once every week to ask how I was getting along, and then walk right upstairs and kind of call on me, as it were well, it makes me sort of feel as if I wasn’t so much of a nobody, so to speak, as your mother seems to like to make out sometimes.”

“How foolish, papa! Of course you’re not ‘a nobody.’ ”

Adams chuckled faintly upon his pipe-stem, what vanity he had seeming to be further stimulated by his daughter’s applause. “I guess there aren’t a whole lot of people in this town that could claim J. A. showed that much interest in ’em,” he said. “Of course I don’t set up to believe it’s all because of merit, or anything like that. He’d do the same for anybody else that’d been with the company as long as I have, but still it is something to be with the company that long and have him show he appreciates it.”

“Yes, indeed, it is, papa.”

“Yes, sir,” Adams said, reflectively. “Yes, sir, I guess that’s so. And besides, it all goes to show the kind of a man he is. Simon pure, that’s what that man is, Alice. Simon pure! There’s never been anybody work for him that didn’t respect him more than they did any other man in the world, I guess. And when you work for him you know he respects you, too. Right from the start you get the feeling that J. A. puts absolute confidence in you; and that’s mighty stimulating: it makes you want to show him he hasn’t misplaced it. There’s great big moral values to the way a man like him gets you to feeling about your relations with the business: it ain’t all just dollars and cents⁠—not by any means!”

He was silent for a time, then returned with increasing enthusiasm to this theme, and Alice was glad to see so much renewal of life in him; he had not spoken with a like cheerful vigour since before his illness. The visit of his idolized great man had indeed been good for him, putting new spirit into him; and liveliness of the body followed that of the spirit. His improvement carried over the night: he slept well and awoke late, declaring that he was “pretty near a well man and ready for business right now.” Moreover, having slept again in the afternoon, he dressed and went down to dinner, leaning but lightly on Alice, who conducted him.

“My! but you and your mother have been at it with your scrubbing and dusting!” he said, as they came through the living-room. “I don’t know I ever did see the house so spick and span before!” His glance fell upon a few carnations in a vase, and he chuckled admiringly. “Flowers, too! So that’s what you coaxed that dollar and a half out o’ me for, this morning!”

Other embellishments brought forth his comment when he had taken his old seat at the head of the small dinner-table. “Why, I declare, Alice!” he exclaimed. “I been so busy looking at all the spick-and-spanishness after the housecleaning, and the flowers out in the parlour⁠—‘living-room’ I suppose you want me to call it, if I just got to be fashionable⁠—I been so busy studying over