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

“He never said anything about it that I know of; but seems to me I recollect we had sort of a rumour around the place how you and that man⁠—le’s see, wasn’t his name Campbell, that died of typhoid fever? Yes, that was it, Campbell. Didn’t the ole man have you and Campbell workin’ sort of private on some glue proposition or other?”

“Yes, he did.” Adams nodded. “I found out a good deal about glue then, too.”

“Been workin’ on it since, I suppose?”

“Yes. Kept it in my mind and studied out new things about it.”

Lohr looked serious. “Well, but see here,” he said. “I hope it ain’t anything the ole man’ll think might infringe on whatever he had you doin’ for him. You know how he is: broad-minded, liberal, freehanded man as walks this earth, and if he thought he owed you a cent he’d sell his right hand for a pork-chop to pay it, if that was the only way; but if he got the idea anybody was tryin’ to get the better of him, he’d sell both his hands, if he had to, to keep ’em from doin’ it. Yes, at eighty, he would! Not that I mean I think you might be tryin’ to get the better of him, Virg. You’re a mighty close ole codger, but such a thing ain’t in you. What I mean: I hope there ain’t any chance for the ole man to think you might be⁠—”

“Oh, no,” Adams interrupted. “As a matter of fact, I don’t believe he’ll ever think about it at all, and if he did he wouldn’t have any real right to feel offended at me: the process I’m going to use is one I expect to change and improve a lot different from the one Campbell and I worked on for him.”

“Well, that’s good,” said Lohr. “Of course you know what you’re up to: you’re old enough, God knows!” He laughed ruefully. “My, but it will seem funny to me⁠—down there with you gone! I expect you and I both been gettin’ to be pretty much deadwood in the place, the way the young fellows look at it, and the only one that’d miss either of us would be the other one! Have you told the ole man yet?”

“Well⁠—” Adams spoke laboriously. “No. No, I haven’t. I thought⁠—well, that’s what I wanted to see you about.”

“What can I do?”

“I thought I’d write him a letter and get you to hand it to him for me.”

“My soul!” his friend exclaimed. “Why on earth don’t you just go down there and tell him?”

Adams became pitiably embarrassed. He stammered, coughed, stammered again, wrinkling his face so deeply he seemed about to weep; but finally he contrived to utter an apologetic laugh. “I ought to do that, of course; but in some way or other I just don’t seem to be able to⁠—to manage it.”

“Why in the world not?” the mystified Lohr inquired.

“I could hardly tell you⁠—’less’n it is to say that when you been with one boss all your life it’s so⁠—so kind of embarrassing⁠—to quit him, I just can’t make up my mind to go and speak to him about it. No; I got it in my head a letter’s the only satisfactory way to do it, and I thought I’d ask you to hand it to him.”

“Well, of course I don’t mind doin’ that for you,” Lohr said, mildly. “But why in the world don’t you just mail it to him?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Adams returned. “You know, like that, it’d have to go through a clerk and that secretary of his, and I don’t know who all. There’s a couple of kind of delicate points I want to put in it: for instance, I want to explain to him how much improvement and so on I’m going to introduce on the old process I helped to work out with Campbell when we were working for him, so’t he’ll understand it’s a different article and no infringement at all. Then there’s another thing: you see all during while I was sick he had my salary paid to me it amounts to considerable, I was on my back so long. Under the circumstances, because I’m quitting, I don’t feel as if I ought to accept it, and so I’ll have a check for him in the letter to cover it, and I want to be sure he knows it, and gets it personally. If it had to go through a lot of other people, the way it would if I put it in the mail, why, you can’t tell. So what I thought: if you’d hand it to him for me, and maybe if he happened to read it right then, or anything, it might be you’d notice whatever he’d happen to say about it⁠—and you could tell me afterward.”

“All right,” Lohr said. “Certainly if you’d rather do it that way, I’ll hand it to him and tell you what he says; that is, if he says anything and I hear him. Got it written?”

“No; I’ll send it around to you last of the week.” Adams moved toward his taxicab. “Don’t say anything to anybody about it, Charley, especially till after that.”

“All right.”

“And, Charley, I’ll be mighty obliged to you,” Adams said, and came back to shake hands in farewell. “There’s one thing more you might do⁠—if you’d ever happen to feel like it.” He kept his eyes rather vaguely fixed on a point above his friend’s head as he spoke, and his voice was not well controlled. “I been⁠—I been down there a good many years and I may not ’a’ been so much use lately as I was at first, but I always tried to do my best for the old firm. If anything turned out so’s they did kind of take offense with me, down there, why, just say a good word for me⁠—if you’d happen to feel like it, maybe.”

Old Charley Lohr assured him that he