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

said. “You’re about to tell me that now you know you will like it.”

“More telepathy!” he exclaimed. “Yes, that was it, precisely. I suppose the same thing’s been said to you so many times that you⁠—”

“No, it hasn’t,” Alice said, a little confused for the moment. “Not at all. I meant⁠—” She paused, then asked in a gentle voice, “Would you really like to know?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, I was only afraid you didn’t mean it.”

“See here,” he said. “I did mean it. I told you it was being pretty difficult for me to settle down to things again. Well, it’s more difficult than you know, but I think I can pull through in fair spirits if I can see a girl like you ‘pretty often.’ ”

“All right,” she said, in a businesslike tone. “I’ve told you that you can if you want to.”

“I do want to,” he assured her. “I do, indeed!”

“How often is ‘pretty often,’ Mr. Russell?”

“Would you walk with me sometimes? Tomorrow?”

“Sometimes. Not tomorrow. The day after.”

“That’s splendid!” he said. “You’ll walk with me day after tomorrow, and the night after that I’ll see you at Miss Lamb’s dance, won’t I?”

But this fell rather chillingly upon Alice. “Miss Lamb’s dance? Which Miss Lamb?” she asked.

“I don’t know⁠—it’s the one that’s just coming out of mourning.”

“Oh, Henrietta⁠—yes. Is her dance so soon? I’d forgotten.”

“You’ll be there, won’t you?” he asked. “Please say you’re going.”

Alice did not respond at once, and he urged her again: “Please do promise you’ll be there.”

“No, I can’t promise anything,” she said, slowly. “You see, for one thing, papa might not be well enough.”

“But if he is?” said Russell. “If he is you’ll surely come, won’t you? Or, perhaps⁠—” He hesitated, then went on quickly, “I don’t know the rules in this place yet, and different places have different rules; but do you have to have a chaperone, or don’t girls just go to dances with the men sometimes? If they do, would you⁠—would you let me take you?”

Alice was startled. “Good gracious!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Don’t you think your relatives⁠—Aren’t you expected to go with Mildred⁠—and Mrs. Palmer?”

“Not necessarily. It doesn’t matter what I might be expected to do,” he said. “Will you go with me?”

“I⁠—No; I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t. I’m not going.”

“But why?”

“Papa’s not really any better,” Alice said, huskily. “I’m too worried about him to go to a dance.” Her voice sounded emotional, genuinely enough; there was something almost like a sob in it. “Let’s talk of other things, please.”

He acquiesced gently; but Mrs. Adams, who had been listening to the conversation at the open window, just overhead, did not hear him. She had correctly interpreted the sob in Alice’s voice, and, trembling with sudden anger, she rose from her knees, and went fiercely to her husband’s room.

XIII

He had not undressed, and he sat beside the table, smoking his pipe and reading his newspaper. Upon his forehead the lines in that old pattern, the historical map of his troubles, had grown a little vaguer lately; relaxed by the complacency of a man who not only finds his health restored, but sees the days before him promising once more a familiar routine that he has always liked to follow.

As his wife came in, closing the door behind her, he looked up cheerfully, “Well, mother,” he said, “what’s the news downstairs?”

“That’s what I came to tell you,” she informed him, grimly.

Adams lowered his newspaper to his knee and peered over his spectacles at her. She had remained by the door, standing, and the great greenish shadow of the small lampshade upon his table revealed her but dubiously. “Isn’t everything all right?” he asked. “What’s the matter?”

“Don’t worry: I’m going to tell you,” she said, her grimness not relaxed. “There’s matter enough, Virgil Adams. Matter enough to make me sick of being alive!”

With that, the markings on his brows began to emerge again in all their sharpness; the old pattern reappeared. “Oh, my, my!” he lamented. “I thought maybe we were all going to settle down to a little peace for a while. What’s it about now?”

“It’s about Alice. Did you think it was about me or anything for myself?”

Like some ready old machine, always in order, his irritability responded immediately and automatically to her emotion. “How in thunder could I think what it’s about, or who it’s for? Say it, and get it over!”

“Oh, I’ll ‘say’ it,” she promised, ominously. “What I’ve come to ask you is, How much longer do you expect me to put up with that old man and his doings?”

“Whose doings? What old man?”

She came at him, fiercely accusing. “You know well enough what old man, Virgil Adams! That old man who was here the other night.”

“Mr. Lamb?”

“Yes; ‘Mister Lamb’!” She mocked his voice. “What other old man would I be likely to mean except J. A. Lamb?”

“What’s he been doing now?” her husband inquired, satirically. “Where’d you get something new against him since the last time you⁠—”

“Just this!” she cried. “The other night when that man was here, if I’d known how he was going to make my child suffer, I’d never have let him set his foot in my house.”

Adams leaned back in his chair as though her absurdity had eased his mind. “Oh, I see,” he said. “You’ve just gone plain crazy. That’s the only explanation of such talk, and it suits the case.”

“Hasn’t that man made us all suffer every day of our lives?” she demanded. “I’d like to know why it is that my life and my children’s lives have to be sacrificed to him?”

“How are they ‘sacrificed’ to him?”

“Because you keep on working for him! Because you keep on letting him hand out whatever miserable little pittance he chooses to give you; that’s why! It’s as if he were some horrible old Juggernaut and I had to see my children’s own father throwing them under the wheels to keep him satisfied.”

“I won’t hear any more such stuff!” Lifting his paper, Adams affected to read.

“You’d better