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

get a bite downtown today⁠—he was going down to the bank⁠—and Walter eats downtown all the time lately, so I thought we wouldn’t bother to set the table for lunch. Come on and we’ll have something in the kitchen.”

“No,” Alice said, dully, as she went on with the work. “I don’t want anything.”

Her mother came closer to her. “Why, what’s the matter?” she asked, briskly. “You seem kind of pale, to me; and you don’t look⁠—you don’t look happy.”

“Well⁠—” Alice began, uncertainly, but said no more.

“See here!” Mrs. Adams exclaimed. “This is all just for you! You ought to be enjoying it. Why, it’s the first time we’ve⁠—we’ve entertained in I don’t know how long! I guess it’s almost since we had that little party when you were eighteen. What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing. I don’t know.”

“But, dearie, aren’t you looking forward to this evening?”

The girl looked up, showing a pallid and solemn face. “Oh, yes, of course,” she said, and tried to smile. “Of course we had to do it⁠—I do think it’ll be nice. Of course I’m looking forward to it.”

XX

She was indeed “looking forward” to that evening, but in a cloud of apprehension; and, although she could never have guessed it, this was the simultaneous condition of another person⁠—none other than the guest for whose pleasure so much cooking and scrubbing seemed to be necessary. Moreover, Mr. Arthur Russell’s premonitions were no product of mere coincidence; neither had any magical sympathy produced them. His state of mind was rather the result of rougher undercurrents which had all the time been running beneath the surface of a romantic friendship.

Never shrewder than when she analyzed the gentlemen, Alice did not libel him when she said he was one of those quiet men who are a bit flirtatious, by which she meant that he was a bit “susceptible,” the same thing⁠—and he had proved himself susceptible to Alice upon his first sight of her. “There!” he said to himself. “Who’s that?” And in the crowd of girls at his cousin’s dance, all strangers to him, she was the one he wanted to know.

Since then, his summer evenings with her had been as secluded as if, for three hours after the falling of dusk, they two had drawn apart from the world to some dear bower of their own. The little veranda was that glamorous nook, with a faint golden light falling through the glass of the closed door upon Alice, and darkness elsewhere, except for the one round globe of the street lamp at the corner. The people who passed along the sidewalk, now and then, were only shadows with voices, moving vaguely under the maple trees that loomed in obscure contours against the stars. So, as the two sat together, the back of the world was the wall and closed door behind them; and Russell, when he was away from Alice, always thought of her as sitting there before the closed door. A glamour was about her thus, and a spell upon him; but he had a formless anxiety never put into words: all the pictures of her in his mind stopped at the closed door.

He had another anxiety; and, for the greater part, this was of her own creating. She had too often asked him (no matter how gaily) what he heard about her, too often begged him not to hear anything. Then, hoping to forestall whatever he might hear, she had been at too great pains to account for it, to discredit and mock it; and, though he laughed at her for this, telling her truthfully he did not even hear her mentioned, the everlasting irony that deals with all such human forefendings prevailed.

Lately, he had half confessed to her what a nervousness she had produced. “You make me dread the day when I’ll hear somebody speaking of you. You’re getting me so upset about it that if I ever hear anybody so much as say the name ‘Alice Adams,’ I’ll run!” The confession was but half of one because he laughed; and she took it for an assurance of loyalty in the form of burlesque.

She misunderstood: he laughed, but his nervousness was genuine.

After any stroke of events, whether a happy one or a catastrophe, we see that the materials for it were a long time gathering, and the only marvel is that the stroke was not prophesied. What bore the air of fatal coincidence may remain fatal indeed, to this later view; but, with the haphazard aspect dispelled, there is left for scrutiny the same ancient hint from the Infinite to the effect that since events have never yet failed to be law-abiding, perhaps it were well for us to deduce that they will continue to be so until further notice.

… On the day that was to open the closed door in the background of his pictures of Alice, Russell lunched with his relatives. There were but the four people, Russell and Mildred and her mother and father, in the great, cool dining-room. Arched French windows, shaded by awnings, admitted a mellow light and looked out upon a green lawn ending in a long conservatory, which revealed through its glass panes a carnival of plants in luxuriant blossom. From his seat at the table, Russell glanced out at this pretty display, and informed his cousins that he was surprised. “You have such a glorious spread of flowers all over the house,” he said, “I didn’t suppose you’d have any left out yonder. In fact, I didn’t know there were so many splendid flowers in the world.”

Mrs. Palmer, large, calm, fair, like her daughter, responded with a mild reproach: “That’s because you haven’t been cousinly enough to get used to them, Arthur. You’ve almost taught us to forget what you look like.”

In defense Russell waved a hand toward her husband. “You see, he’s begun to keep me so hard at work⁠—”

But Mr. Palmer declined the responsibility. “Up to four or five in the afternoon, perhaps,”