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

sobbing, “Oh, poor Walter!” over and over, but after a time she varied the sorry tune. “Oh, poor Alice!” she moaned, clinging to her daughter’s hand. “Oh, poor, poor Alice to have this come on the night of your dinner⁠—just when everything seemed to be going so well⁠—at last⁠—oh, poor, poor, poor⁠—”

“Hush!” Alice said, sharply. “Don’t say ‘poor Alice’! I’m all right.”

“You must be!” her mother cried, clutching her. “You’ve just got to be! One of us has got to be all right⁠—surely God wouldn’t mind just one of us being all right⁠—that wouldn’t hurt Him⁠—”

“Hush, hush, mother! Hush!”

But Mrs. Adams only clutched her the more tightly. “He seemed such a nice young man, dearie! He may not see this in the paper⁠—Mr. Lohr said it was just a little bit of an item⁠—he may not see it, dearie⁠—”

Then her anguish went back to Walter again; and to his needs as a fugitive⁠—she had meant to repair his underwear, but had postponed doing so, and her neglect now appeared to be a detail as lamentable as the calamity itself. She could neither be stilled upon it, nor herself exhaust its urgings to self-reproach, though she finally took up another theme temporarily. Upon an unusually violent outbreak of her husband’s, in denunciation of the runaway, she cried out faintly that he was cruel; and further wearied her broken voice with details of Walter’s beauty as a baby, and of his bedtime pieties throughout his infancy.

So the hot night wore on. Three had struck before Mrs. Adams was got to bed; and Alice, returning to her own room, could hear her father’s bare feet thudding back and forth after that. “Poor papa!” she whispered in helpless imitation of her mother. “Poor papa! Poor mama! Poor Walter! Poor all of us!”

She fell asleep, after a time, while from across the hall the bare feet still thudded over their changeless route; and she woke at seven, hearing Adams pass her door, shod. In her wrapper she ran out into the hallway and found him descending the stairs.

“Papa!”

“Hush,” he said, and looked up at her with reddened eyes. “Don’t wake your mother.”

“I won’t,” she whispered. “How about you? You haven’t slept any at all!”

“Yes, I did. I got some sleep. I’m going over to the works now. I got to throw some figures together to show the bank. Don’t worry: I’ll get things fixed up. You go back to bed. Goodbye.”

“Wait!” she bade him sharply.

“What for?”

“You’ve got to have some breakfast.”

“Don’t want ’ny.”

“You wait!” she said, imperiously, and disappeared to return almost at once. “I can cook in my bedroom slippers,” she explained, “but I don’t believe I could in my bare feet!”

Descending softly, she made him wait in the dining-room until she brought him toast and eggs and coffee. “Eat!” she said. “And I’m going to telephone for a taxicab to take you, if you think you’ve really got to go.”

“No, I’m going to walk⁠—I want to walk.”

She shook her head anxiously. “You don’t look able. You’ve walked all night.”

“No, I didn’t,” he returned. “I tell you I got some sleep. I got all I wanted anyhow.”

“But, papa⁠—”

“Here!” he interrupted, looking up at her suddenly and setting down his cup of coffee. “Look here! What about this Mr. Russell? I forgot all about him. What about him?”

Her lip trembled a little, but she controlled it before she spoke. “Well, what about him, papa?” she asked, calmly enough.

“Well, we could hardly⁠—” Adams paused, frowning heavily. “We could hardly expect he wouldn’t hear something about all this.”

“Yes; of course he’ll hear it, papa.”

“Well?”

“Well, what?” she asked, gently.

“You don’t think he’d be the⁠—the cheap kind it’d make a difference with, of course.”

“Oh, no; he isn’t cheap. It won’t make any difference with him.”

Adams suffered a profound sigh to escape him. “Well⁠—I’m glad of that, anyway.”

“The difference,” she explained⁠—“the difference was made without his hearing anything about Walter. He doesn’t know about that yet.”

“Well, what does he know about?”

“Only,” she said, “about me.”

“What you mean by that, Alice?” he asked, helplessly.

“Never mind,” she said. “It’s nothing beside the real trouble we’re in⁠—I’ll tell you some time. You eat your eggs and toast; you can’t keep going on just coffee.”

“I can’t eat any eggs and toast,” he objected, rising. “I can’t.”

“Then wait till I can bring you something else.”

“No,” he said, irritably. “I won’t do it! I don’t want any dang food! And look here”⁠—he spoke sharply to stop her, as she went toward the telephone⁠—“I don’t want any dang taxi, either! You look after your mother when she wakes up. I got to be at work!”

And though she followed him to the front door, entreating, he could not be stayed or hindered. He went through the quiet morning streets at a rickety, rapid gait, swinging his old straw hat in his hands, and whispering angrily to himself as he went. His grizzled hair, not trimmed for a month, blew back from his damp forehead in the warm breeze; his reddened eyes stared hard at nothing from under blinking lids; and one side of his face twitched startlingly from time to time;⁠—children might have run from him, or mocked him.

When he had come into that fallen quarter his industry had partly revived and wholly made odorous, a negro woman, leaning upon her whitewashed gate, gazed after him and chuckled for the benefit of a gossiping friend in the next tiny yard. “Oh, good Satan! Wha’ssa matter that ole glue man?”

“Who? Him?” the neighbour inquired. “What he do now?”

“Talkin’ to his ole se’f!” the first explained, joyously. “Look like gone distracted⁠—ole glue man!”

Adams’s legs had grown more uncertain with his hard walk, and he stumbled heavily as he crossed the baked mud of his broad lot, but cared little for that, was almost unaware of it, in fact. Thus his eyes saw as little as his body felt, and so he failed to observe something that would have given him additional light upon an old phrase that already meant quite enough for him.

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