National Avenue - Booth Tarkington (the little red hen ebook TXT) 📗

nowadays? I’d hoped you’d let me sit on the veranda a little while with you, Martha; but I can’t ask you to stay out in an air made hideous by all this squawking and squealing.”

“Then you might come in with me,” she laughed. “Our walls are pretty thick.”

The walls of the big old house were as she said, but open windows brought the shrill, incessant “Watch me!” indoors, and the annoyed Harlan complained further of his nephew. “It makes one respect the Chinese,” he said. “They at least pay some attention to ancestors. Only certain tribes biologically very low worship children, I understand; but that seems to be our most prevalent American habit today. We’re deliberately making this the age of the abject worship of children⁠—and I wish my grandmother could have lived to give her opinion of it!”

“What do you think she’d say, Harlan?”

“Isn’t hard to guess! She’d have said we’re heading the children straight for perdition. In fact, she thought that about our own generation; she thought father and mother were heading Dan and me that way; yet we were under heavy discipline compared to the way this terrible little Henry’s being brought up. Lena’s family were severe with her, I understand, and she doesn’t believe in discipline. As for Dan, he’s always been just the child’s slave.”

Martha looked compassionate. “Yes,” she said slowly. “I suppose he had to have something he could worship.”

“Well, he’s got Ornaby Addition,” Harlan suggested dryly.

“No. He had to have something besides. I think he’d have worshipped his wife, if she had ever let him, but I suppose she⁠—”

“No,” Harlan said, breaking the indefinite pause into which Martha had absently strayed. “But she’s always capable of being jealous.” And he looked at Martha from the side of his eye.

“Jealous of me?”

“You’ve certainly been made well enough aware of it from the very day he brought her home, Martha.”

“Oh, yes,” she assented cheerfully. “She’s never doubted that I’ve always cared for Dan, but she knows that he wasn’t in love with me. She must have always been sure of that, because⁠—well, here I was⁠—he had only to step over next door and ask me, but he asked her, instead. And yet, as you say, she disliked me from the start. She certainly saw I wasn’t the sort to take him away from her, even if I’d thought I could⁠—and I knew I couldn’t. Yet it’s true she was jealous. Do you know what I think really made her so, Harlan? I think almost the principal reason was because I’m so tall.”

“What?”

“Yes, I do believe it,” Martha insisted. “Someone told me she used to be called ‘French doll’ in New York, and was very sensitive about it. She wanted to be thought a temperamental and romantic opera heroine, and would never stand near a tall woman because she was afraid of being made to look more like a French doll. I think she couldn’t endure the thought of her husband’s having a woman friend as big as I am.”

“No doubt she’s never wanted to be near you herself,” Harlan said. “But I think her feeling isn’t quite so much on the physical plane as that.”

“Oh, yes, it was. A man mightn’t understand it, but⁠—”

“A man might, though,” he interrupted. “Lena’s always been afraid that you’re just what she’d call the type of big Western woman Dan ought to have married in order to be happy.”

“What?” Martha cried, but her colour deepened, and there was agitation in her voice, though she laughed. “Why, what nonsense!”

“Is it?” Harlan said, and now agitation became evident in his own voice, though he controlled it manfully. “It’s what I’ve always been afraid of, myself.”

“No, no!” she cried, her colour still deepening. “That’s just nonsense!”

“Is it?” he repeated grimly. “My grandmother Savage didn’t think so. She cut Dan off with a shilling because she hoped Lena would leave him and give him a chance to marry you⁠—eventually!”

“Harlan Oliphant! What on earth are you talking about?”

“I think you understand me,” he said. “Grandmother was a shrewd old lady, and as good a judge of character as one often sees; but sometimes she overshot the mark, as most of us do, no doubt, when we think we understand other people so thoroughly that we can manipulate their destinies. She thought a good deal that was true about Lena; but she despised her too much, and made the mistake of thinking her purely mercenary. That’s why I was the residuary legatee, Martha.”

“Of all the nonsense!” she protested, and continued to protest. She’d never heard anything so farfetched in all her life, she declared⁠—people didn’t put such Machiavellian subtleties into their wills; and Harlan was a creative romanticist instead of the critic she’d always believed him to be. But his romancing wasn’t successful; it was too incredible.

He listened, skeptically marking the difference between the vehemence of the words she used and the lack of conviction in the voice that uttered them. “Never mind, Martha,” he said at last. “I see you believe it and agree with me.”

“I don’t,” she still protested; but her tone was now so feeble that it only proved her determined never to make the open admission of what she denied. “It would be too tragic.”

“Why?”

“To think of that poor old woman⁠—”

“Yes,” he agreed. “I’m afraid it must irritate her now if she knows.”

“To think of her⁠—” Martha said. “Poor thing! I mean it would be too tragic to think of her hoping and planning such⁠—such preposterousness!”

At this Harlan looked at her so sharply, so gravely, that he seemed to ask much more than appeared upon the surface of his question: “But would it be preposterous? Suppose Lena and Dan should⁠—”

“Separate?” she said, as he stopped at the word. “They never will.”

“But I asked you, if they should?”

Martha shook her head, smiling faintly; and she looked away from him⁠—far away, it seemed⁠—as she spoke. “People don’t stay ardently in love forever, Harlan. I don’t suppose anybody stays in love with anybody⁠—forever. I