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

said. “If you want our summer evenings to be over you’ll have to drive me away yourself.”

“Nobody else could?”

“No.”

She was silent, leaning forward, with her elbows on her knees and her clasped hands against her lips. Then, not moving, she said softly:

“Well⁠—I won’t!”

She was silent again, and he said nothing, but looked at her, seeming to be content with looking. Her attitude was one only a graceful person should assume, but she was graceful; and, in the wan light, which made a prettily shaped mist of her, she had beauty. Perhaps it was beauty of the hour, and of the love scene almost made into form by what they had both just said, but she had it; and though beauty of the hour passes, he who sees it will long remember it and the hour when it came.

“What are you thinking of?” he asked.

She leaned back in her chair and did not answer at once. Then she said:

“I don’t know; I doubt if I was thinking of anything. It seems to me I wasn’t. I think I was just being sort of sadly happy just then.”

“Were you? Was it ‘sadly,’ too?”

“Don’t you know?” she said. “It seems to me that only little children can be just happily happy. I think when we get older our happiest moments are like the one I had just then: it’s as if we heard strains of minor music running through them⁠—oh, so sweet, but oh, so sad!”

“But what makes it sad for you?”

“I don’t know,” she said, in a lighter tone. “Perhaps it’s a kind of useless foreboding I seem to have pretty often. It may be that⁠—or it may be poor papa.”

“You are a funny, delightful girl, though!” Russell laughed. “When your father’s so well again that he goes out walking in the evenings!”

“He does too much walking,” Alice said. “Too much altogether, over at his new plant. But there isn’t any stopping him.” She laughed and shook her head. “When a man gets an ambition to be a multi-millionaire his family don’t appear to have much weight with him. He’ll walk all he wants to, in spite of them.”

“I suppose so,” Russell said, absently; then he leaned forward. “I wish I could understand better why you were ‘sadly’ happy.”

Meanwhile, as Alice shed what further light she could on this point, the man ambitious to be a “multi-millionaire” was indeed walking too much for his own good. He had gone to bed, hoping to sleep well and rise early for a long day’s work, but he could not rest, and now, in his nightgown and slippers, he was pacing the floor of his room.

“I wish I did know,” he thought, over and over. “I do wish I knew how he feels about it.”

XVIII

That was a thought almost continuously in his mind, even when he was hardest at work; and, as the days went on and he could not free himself, he became querulous about it. “I guess I’m the biggest dang fool alive,” he told his wife as they sat together one evening. “I got plenty else to bother me, without worrying my head off about what he thinks. I can’t help what he thinks; it’s too late for that. So why should I keep pestering myself about it?”

“It’ll wear off, Virgil,” Mrs. Adams said, reassuringly. She was gentle and sympathetic with him, and for the first time in many years he would come to sit with her and talk, when he had finished his day’s work. He had told her, evading her eye, “Oh, I don’t blame you. You didn’t get after me to do this on your own account; you couldn’t help it.”

“Yes; but it don’t wear off,” he complained. “This afternoon I was showing the men how I wanted my vats to go, and I caught my fool self standing there saying to my fool self, ‘It’s funny I don’t hear how he feels about it from somebody.’ I was saying it aloud, almost⁠—and it is funny I don’t hear anything!”

“Well, you see what it means, don’t you, Virgil? It only means he hasn’t said anything to anybody about it. Don’t you think you’re getting kind of morbid over it?”

“Maybe, maybe,” he muttered.

“Why, yes,” she said, briskly. “You don’t realize what a little bit of a thing all this is to him. It’s been a long, long while since the last time you even mentioned glue to him, and he’s probably forgotten everything about it.”

“You’re off your base; it isn’t like him to forget things,” Adams returned, peevishly. “He may seem to forget ’em, but he don’t.”

“But he’s not thinking about this, or you’d have heard from him before now.”

Her husband shook his head. “Ah, that’s just it!” he said. “Why haven’t I heard from him?”

“It’s all your morbidness, Virgil. Look at Walter: if Mr. Lamb held this up against you, would he still let Walter stay there? Wouldn’t he have discharged Walter if he felt angry with you?”

“That dang boy!” Adams said. “If he wanted to come with me now, I wouldn’t hardly let him, What do you suppose makes him so bullheaded?”

“But hasn’t he a right to choose for himself?” she asked. “I suppose he feels he ought to stick to what he thinks is sure pay. As soon as he sees that you’re going to succeed with the glue-works he’ll want to be with you quick enough.”

“Well, he better get a little sense in his head,” Adams returned, crossly. “He wanted me to pay him a three-hundred-dollar bonus in advance, when anybody with a grain of common sense knows I need every penny I can lay my hands on!”

“Never mind,” she said. “He’ll come around later and be glad of the chance.”

“He’ll have to beg for it then! I won’t ask him again.”

“Oh, Walter will come out all right; you needn’t worry. And don’t you see that Mr. Lamb’s not discharging him means there’s no hard feeling against you, Virgil?”

“I can’t make it out