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

in the wide world people who have never learned its meaning; but most are either young or beautifully unobservant who remain wholly unaware of the inner poignancies the words convey: “a rain of misfortunes.” It is a boiling rain, seemingly whimsical in its choice of spots whereon to fall; and, so far as mortal eye can tell, neither the just nor the unjust may hope to avoid it, or need worry themselves by expecting it. It had selected the Adams family for its scaldings; no question.

The glue-works foreman, standing in the doorway of the brick shed, observed his employer’s eccentric approach, and doubtfully stroked a whiskered chin.

“Well, they ain’t no putticular use gettin’ so upset over it,” he said, as Adams came up. “When a thing happens, why, it happens, and that’s all there is to it. When a thing’s so, why, it’s so. All you can do about it is think if there’s anything you can do; and that’s what you better be doin’ with this case.”

Adams halted, and seemed to gape at him. “What⁠—case?” he said, with difficulty. “Was it in the morning papers, too?”

“No, it ain’t in no morning papers. My land! It don’t need to be in no papers; look at the size of it!”

“The size of what?”

“Why, great God!” the foreman exclaimed. “He ain’t even seen it. Look! Look yonder!”

Adams stared vaguely at the man’s outstretched hand and pointing forefinger, then turned and saw a great sign upon the façade of the big factory building across the street. The letters were large enough to be read two blocks away.

“After the fifteenth of next month
this building will be occupied by
the J. A. Lamb Liquid Glue Co. Inc.”

A gray touring-car had just come to rest before the principal entrance of the building, and J. A. Lamb himself descended from it. He glanced over toward the humble rival of his projected great industry, saw his old clerk, and immediately walked across the street and the lot to speak to him.

“Well, Adams,” he said, in his husky, cheerful voice, “how’s your glue-works?”

Adams uttered an inarticulate sound, and lifted the hand that held his hat as if to make a protective gesture, but failed to carry it out; and his arm sank limp at his side. The foreman, however, seemed to feel that something ought to be said.

“Our glue-works, hell!” he remarked. “I guess we won’t have no glue-works over here not very long, if we got to compete with the sized thing you got over there!”

Lamb chuckled. “I kind of had some such notion,” he said. “You see, Virgil, I couldn’t exactly let you walk off with it like swallering a pat o’ butter, now, could I? It didn’t look exactly reasonable to expect me to let go like that, now, did it?”

Adams found a half-choked voice somewhere in his throat. “Do you⁠—would you step into my office a minute, Mr. Lamb?”

“Why, certainly I’m willing to have a little talk with you,” the old gentleman said, as he followed his former employee indoors, and he added, “I feel a lot more like it than I did before I got that up, over yonder, Virgil!”

Adams threw open the door of the rough room he called his office, having as justification for this title little more than the fact that he had a telephone there and a deal table that served as a desk. “Just step into the office, please,” he said.

Lamb glanced at the desk, at the kitchen chair before it, at the telephone, and at the partition walls built of old boards, some covered with ancient paint and some merely weatherbeaten, the salvage of a house-wrecker; and he smiled broadly. “So these are your offices, are they?” he asked. “You expect to do quite a business here, I guess, don’t you, Virgil?”

Adams turned upon him a stricken and tortured face. “Have you seen Charley Lohr since last night, Mr. Lamb?”

“No; I haven’t seen Charley.”

“Well, I told him to tell you,” Adams began;⁠—“I told him I’d pay you⁠—”

“Pay me what you expect to make out o’ glue, you mean, Virgil?”

“No,” Adams said, swallowing. “I mean what my boy owes you. That’s what I told Charley to tell you. I told him to tell you I’d pay you every last⁠—”

“Well, well!” the old gentleman interrupted, testily. “I don’t know anything about that.”

“I’m expecting to pay you,” Adams went on, swallowing again, painfully. “I was expecting to do it out of a loan I thought I could get on my glue-works.”

The old gentleman lifted his frosted eyebrows. “Oh, out o’ the glue-works? You expected to raise money on the glue-works, did you?”

At that, Adams’s agitation increased prodigiously. “How’d you think I expected to pay you?” he said. “Did you think I expected to get money on my own old bones?” He slapped himself harshly upon the chest and legs. “Do you think a bank’ll lend money on a man’s ribs and his broken-down old knee-bones? They won’t do it! You got to have some business prospects to show ’em, if you haven’t got any property nor securities; and what business prospects have I got now, with that sign of yours up over yonder? Why, you don’t need to make an ounce o’ glue; your sign’s fixed me without your doing another lick! That’s all you had to do; just put your sign up! You needn’t to⁠—”

“Just let me tell you something, Virgil Adams,” the old man interrupted, harshly. “I got just one right important thing to tell you before we talk any further business; and that’s this: there’s some few men in this town made their money in off-colour ways, but there aren’t many; and those there are have had to be a darn sight slicker than you know how to be, or ever will know how to be! Yes, sir, and they none of them had the little gumption to try to make it out of a man that had the spirit not to let ’em, and the strength not to