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

all this so-and-so, I declare I never noticed you till this minute! My, but you are all dressed up! What’s goin’ on? What’s it about: you so all dressed up, and flowers in the parlour and everything?”

“Don’t you see, papa? It’s in honour of your coming downstairs again, of course.”

“Oh, so that’s it,” he said. “I never would ’a’ thought of that, I guess.”

But Walter looked sidelong at his father, and gave forth his sly and knowing laugh. “Neither would I!” he said.

Adams lifted his eyebrows jocosely. “You’re jealous, are you, sonny? You don’t want the old man to think our young lady’d make so much fuss over him, do you?”

“Go on thinkin’ it’s over you,” Walter retorted, amused. “Go on and think it. It’ll do you good.”

“Of course I’ll think it,” Adams said. “It isn’t anybody’s birthday. Certainly the decorations are on account of me coming downstairs. Didn’t you hear Alice say so?”

“Sure, I heard her say so.”

“Well, then⁠—”

Walter interrupted him with a little music. Looking shrewdly at Alice, he sang:

“I was walkin’ out on Monday with my sweet thing.
She’s my neat thing,
My sweet thing:
I’ll go round on Tuesday night to see her.
Oh, how we’ll spoon⁠—”

“Walter!” his mother cried. “Where do you learn such vulgar songs?” However, she seemed not greatly displeased with him, and laughed as she spoke.

“So that’s it, Alice!” said Adams. “Playing the hypocrite with your old man, are you? It’s some new beau, is it?”

“I only wish it were,” she said, calmly. “No. It’s just what I said: it’s all for you, dear.”

“Don’t let her con you,” Walter advised his father. “She’s got expectations. You hang around downstairs a while after dinner and you’ll see.”

But the prophecy failed, though Adams went to his own room without waiting to test it. No one came.

Alice stayed in the living-room until half-past nine, when she went slowly upstairs. Her mother, almost tearful, met her at the top, and whispered, “You mustn’t mind, dearie.”

“Mustn’t mind what?” Alice asked, and then, as she went on her way, laughed scornfully. “What utter nonsense!” she said.

Next day she cut the stems of the rather scant show of carnations and refreshed them with new water. At dinner, her father, still in high spirits, observed that she had again “dressed up” in honour of his second descent of the stairs; and Walter repeated his fragment of objectionable song; but these jocularities were rendered pointless by the eventless evening that followed; and in the morning the carnations began to appear tarnished and flaccid.

Alice gave them a long look, then threw them away; and neither Walter nor her father was inspired to any rallying by her plain costume for that evening. Mrs. Adams was visibly depressed.

When Alice finished helping her mother with the dishes, she went outdoors and sat upon the steps of the little front veranda. The night, gentle with warm air from the south, surrounded her pleasantly, and the perpetual smoke was thinner. Now that the furnaces of dwelling-houses were no longer fired, life in that city had begun to be less like life in a railway tunnel; people were aware of summer in the air, and in the thickened foliage of the shade-trees, and in the sky. Stars were unveiled by the passing of the denser smoke fogs, and tonight they could be seen clearly; they looked warm and near. Other girls sat upon verandas and stoops in Alice’s street, cheerful as young fishermen along the banks of a stream.

Alice could hear them from time to time; thin sopranos persistent in laughter that fell dismally upon her ears. She had set no lines or nets herself, and what she had of “expectations,” as Walter called them, were vanished. For Alice was experienced; and one of the conclusions she drew from her experience was that when a man says, “I’d take you for anything you wanted me to,” he may mean it or, he may not; but, if he does, he will not postpone the first opportunity to say something more. Little affairs, once begun, must be warmed quickly; for if they cool they are dead.

But Alice was not thinking of Arthur Russell. When she tossed away the carnations she likewise tossed away her thoughts of that young man. She had been like a boy who sees upon the street, some distance before him, a bit of something round and glittering, a possible dime. He hopes it is a dime, and, until he comes near enough to make sure, he plays that it is a dime. In his mind he has an adventure with it: he buys something delightful. If he picks it up, discovering only some tinfoil which has happened upon a round shape, he feels a sinking. A dullness falls upon him.

So Alice was dull with the loss of an adventure; and when the laughter of other girls reached her, intermittently, she had not sprightliness enough left in her to be envious of their gaiety. Besides, these neighbours were ineligible even for her envy, being of another caste; they could never know a dance at the Palmers’, except remotely, through a newspaper. Their laughter was for the encouragement of snappy young men of the stores and offices downtown, clerks, bookkeepers, what not⁠—some of them probably graduates of Frincke’s Business College.

Then, as she recalled that dark portal, with its dusty stairway mounting between close walls to disappear in the upper shadows, her mind drew back as from a doorway to Purgatory. Nevertheless, it was a picture often in her reverie; and sometimes it came suddenly, without sequence, into the midst of her other thoughts, as if it leaped up among them from a lower darkness; and when it arrived it wanted to stay. So a traveller, still roaming the world afar, sometimes broods without apparent reason upon his family burial lot: “I wonder if I shall end there.”

The foreboding passed abruptly, with a jerk of her breath, as the street-lamp revealed a tall and easy figure approaching from the north, swinging a stick