Delphi Complete Works of Booth Tarkington (Illustrated), page 23
“Doesn’t it beat your time,” he said, cheerily, “to think of what’s become of all the old boys? They turn up so differently from what we expected, when they turn up at all. We sized them up all right so far as character goes, I fancy, but we couldn’t size up the chances of life. Take poor old Pickle Haines: who’d have dreamed Pickle would shoot himself over a bankruptcy? I dare say that wasn’t all of it — might have been cherchez la femme, don’t you think? What do you make of Pickle’s case, John?”
There was no answer. Harkless’s chair was directly in front of the mantel-piece, and upon the carved wooden shelf, amongst tobacco-jars and little curios, cotillion favors and the like, there were scattered a number of photographs. One of these was that of a girl who looked straight out at you from a filigree frame; there was hardly a corner of the room where you could have stood without her clear, serious eyes seeming to rest upon yours.
“Cherchez la femme?” repeated Tom, puffing unconsciously. “Pickle was a good fellow, but he had the deuce of an eye for a girl. Do you remember—” He stopped short, and saw the man and the photograph looking at each other. Too late, he unhappily remembered that he had meant, and forgotten, to take that photograph out of the room before he brought Harkless in. Now he would have to leave it; and Helen Sherwood was not the sort of girl, even in a flat presentment, to be continually thrown in the face of a man who had lost her. And it always went hard, Tom reflected, with men who stretched vain hands to Helen, only to lose her. But there was one, he thought, whose outstretched hands might not prove so vain. Why couldn’t she have cared for John Harkless? Deuce take the girl, did she want to marry an emperor? He looked at Harkless, and pitied him with an almost tearful compassion. A feverish color dwelt in the convalescent’s cheek; the apathy that had dulled his eyes was there no longer; instead, they burned with a steady fire. The image returned his unwavering gaze with inscrutable kindness.
“You heard that Pickle shot himself, didn’t you?” Meredith asked. There was no answer; John did not hear him.
“Do you know that poor Jeny Haines killed himself, last March?” Tom said sharply.
There was only silence in the room. Meredith got up and rattled some tongs in the empty fireplace, but the other did not move or notice him in any way.
Meredith set the tongs down, and went quietly out of the room, leaving his friend to that mysterious interview.
When he came back, after a remorseful cigarette in the yard, Harkless was still sitting, motionless, looking up at the photograph above the mantel-piece.
They drove abroad every day, at first in the victoria, and, as Harkless’s strength began to come back, in a knock-about cart of Tom’s, a light trail of blue smoke floating back wherever the two friends passed. And though the country editor grew stronger in the pleasant, open city, Meredith felt that his apathy and listlessness only deepened, and he suspected that, in Harkless’s own room, where the photograph reigned, the languor departed for the time, making way for a destructive fire. Judge Briscoe, paying a second visit to Rouen, told Tom, in an aside, that their friend did not seem to be the same man. He was altered and aged beyond belief, the old gentleman whispered sadly.
Meredith decided that his guest needed enlivening — something to take him out of himself; he must be stirred up to rub against people once more. And therefore, one night he made a little company for him: two or three apparently betrothed very young couples, for whom it was rather dull, after they had looked their fill of Harkless (it appeared that every one was curious to see him); and three or four married young couples, for whom the entertainment seemed rather diverting in an absent-minded way (they had the air of remembering that they had forgotten the baby); and three or four bachelors, who seemed contented in any place where they were allowed to smoke; and one widower, whose manner indicated that any occasion whatever was gay enough for him; and four or five young women, who (Meredith explained to John) were of their host’s age, and had been “left over” out of the set he grew up with; and for these the modest party took on a hilarious and chipper character. “It is these girls that have let the men go by because they didn’t see any good enough; they’re the jolly souls!” the one widower remarked, confidentially. “They’ve been at it a long while, and they know how, and they’re light-hearted as robins. They have more fun than people who have responsibilities.”
All of these lively demoiselles fluttered about Harkless with commiserative pleasantries, and, in spite of his protestations, made him recline in the biggest and deepest chair on the porch, where they surfeited him with kindness and grouped about him with extra cushions and tenderness for a man who had been injured. No one mentioned the fact that he had been hurt; it was not spoken of, though they wished mightily he would tell them the story they had read luridly in the public prints. They were very good to him. One of them, in particular, a handsome, dark, kind-eyed girl, constituted herself at once his cicerone in Rouen gossip and his waiting-maid. She sat by him, and saw that his needs (and his not-needs, too) were supplied and oversupplied; she could not let him move, and anticipated his least wish, though he was now amply able to help himself; and she fanned him as if he were a dying consumptive.
They sat on Meredith’s big porch in the late twilight and ate a substantial refection, and when this was finished, a buzz of nonsense rose from all quarters, except the remote corners where the youthful affianced ones had defensively stationed themselves behind a rampart of plants. They, having eaten, had naught to do, and were only waiting a decent hour for departure. Laughing voices passed up and down the street, and mingled with the rhythmic plashing of Meredith’s fountain, and, beyond the shrubberies and fence, one caught glimpses of the light dresses of women moving to and fro, and of people sitting bareheaded on neighboring lawns to enjoy the twilight. Now and then would pass, with pipe and dog, the beflanneled figure of an undergraduate, home for vacation, or a trio of youths in knickerbockers, or a band of young girls, or both trio and band together; and from a cross street, near by, came the calls and laughter of romping children and the pulsating whirr of a lawn-mower: This sound Harkless remarked as a ceaseless accompaniment to life in Rouen; even in the middle of the night there was always some unfortunate, cutting grass.
When the daylight was all gone, and the stars had crept out, strolling negroes patrolled the sidewalks, thrumming mandolins and guitars, and others came and went, singing, making the night Venetian. The untrained, joyous voices, chording eerily in their sweet, racial minors, came on the air, sometimes from far away. But there swung out a chorus from fresh, Aryan throats, in the house south of Meredith’s:
“Where, oh where, are the grave old Seniors?
Safe, now, in the wide, wide world!”
“Doesn’t that thrill you, boy?” said Meredith, joining the group about Harkless’s chair. “Those fellows are Sophomores, class of heaven knows what. Aren’t you feeling a fossil. Father Abraham?”
A banjo chattered on the lawn to the north, and soon a mixed chorus of girls and boys sang from there:
“O, ‘Arriet, I’m waiting, waiting alone out ’ere.”
Then a piano across the street sounded the dearthful harmonies of Chopin’s Funeral March.
“You may take your choice,” remarked Meredith, flicking a spark over the rail in the ash of his cigar, “Chopping or Chevalier.”
“Chopin, my friend,” said the lady who had attached herself to Harkless. She tapped Tom’s shoulder with her fan and smiled, graciously corrective.
“Thank you, Miss Hinsdale,” he answered, gratefully. “And as I, perhaps, had better say, since otherwise there might be a pause and I am the host, we have a wide selection. In addition to what is provided at present, I predict that within the next ten minutes a talented girl who lives two doors south will favor us with the Pilgrims’ Chorus, piano arrangement, break down in the middle, and drift, into ‘Rastus on Parade,’ while a double quartette of middle-aged colored gentlemen under our Jim will make choral offering in our own back yard.”
“My dear Tom,” exclaimed Miss Hinsdale, “you forget Wetherford Swift!”
“I could stand it all,” put forth the widower, “if it were not for Wetherford Swift.”
“When is Miss Sherwood coming home?” asked one of the ladies. “Why does she stay away and leave him to his sufferings?”
“Us to his sufferings,” substituted a bachelor. “He is just beginning; listen.”
Through all the other sounds of music, there penetrated from an unseen source, a sawish, scraped, vibration of catgut, pathetic, insistent, painstaking, and painful beyond belief.
“He is in a terrible way to-night,” said the widower.
Miss Hinsdale laughed. “Worse every night. The violinist is young Wetherford Swift,” she explained to Harkless. “He is very much in love, and it doesn’t agree with him. He used to be such a pleasant boy, but last winter he went quite mad over Helen Sherwood, Mr. Meredith’s cousin, our beauty, you know — I am so sorry she isn’t here; you’d be interested in meeting her, I’m sure — and he took up the violin.”
“It is said that his family took up chloroform at the same time,” said the widower.
“His music is a barometer,” continued the lady, “and by it the neighborhood nightly observes whether Miss Sherwood has been nice to him or not.”
“It is always exceedingly plaintive,” explained another.
“Except once,” rejoined Miss Hinsdale. “He played jigs when she came home from somewhere or other, in June.”
“It was Tosti’s ‘Let Me Die,’ the very next evening,” remarked the widower.
“Ah,” said one of the bachelors, “but his joy was sadder for us than his misery. Hear him now.”
“I think he means it for ‘What’s this dull town to me,’” observed another, with some rancor. “I would willingly make the town sufficiently exciting for him—”
“If there were not an ordinance against the hurling of missiles,” finished the widower.
The piano executing the funeral march ceased to execute, discomfited by the persistent and overpowering violin; the banjo and the coster-songs were given over; even the collegians’ music was defeated; and the neighborhood was forced to listen to the dauntless fiddle, but not without protest, for there came an indignant, spoken chorus from the quarter whence the college songs had issued: “Ya-a-ay! Wetherford, put it away! She’ll come back!” The violin played on.
“We all know each other here, you see, Mr. Harkless,” Miss Hinsdale smiled benignantly.
“They didn’t bother Mr. Wetherford Swift,” said the widower. “Not that time. Do you hear him?— ‘Could ye come back to me, Douglas’?”
“Oh, but it isn’t absence that is killing him and his friends,” cried one of the young women. “It is Brainard Macauley.”
“That is a mistake,” said Tom Meredith, as easily as he could. “There goes Jim’s double quartette. Listen, and you will hear them try to — —”
But the lady who had mentioned Brainard Macauley cried indignantly: “You try to change the subject the moment it threatens to be interesting. They were together everywhere until the day she went away; they danced and ‘sat out’ together through the whole of one country-club party; they drove every afternoon; they took long walks, and he was at the Sherwoods’ every evening of her last week in town. ‘That is a mistake!’”
“I’m afraid it looks rather bleak for Wetherford,” said the widower. “I went up to the ‘Journal’ office on business, one day, and there sat Miss Sherwood in Macauley’s inner temple, chatting with a reporter, while Brainard finished some work.”
“Helen is eccentric,” said the former speaker, “but she’s not quite that eccentric, unless they were engaged. It is well understood that they will announce it in the fall.”
Miss Hinsdale kindly explained to Harkless that Brainard Macauley was the editor of the “Rouen Morning Journal”— “a very distinguished young man, not over twenty-eight, and perfectly wonderful.” Already a power to be accounted with in national politics, he was “really a tremendous success,” and sure to go far; “one of those delicate-looking men, who are yet so strong you know they won’t let the lightning hurt you.” It really looked as if Helen Sherwood (whom Harkless really ought to meet) had actually been caught in the toils at tet, those toils wherein so many luckless youths had lain enmeshed for her sake. He must meet Mr. Macauley, too, the most interesting man in Rouen. After her little portrait of him, didn’t Mr. Harkless agree that it looked really pretty dull for Miss Sherwood’s other lovers?
Mr. Harkless smiled, and agreed that it did indeed. She felt a thrill of compassion for him, and her subsequent description of the pathos of his smile was luminous. She said it was natural that a man who had been through so much suffering from those horrible “White-Cappers” should have a smile that struck into your heart like a knife.
Despite all that Meredith could do, and after his notorious effort to shift the subject he could do very little, the light prattle ran on about Helen Sherwood and Brainard Macauley. Tom abused himself for his wild notion of cheering his visitor with these people who had no talk, and who, if they drifted out of commonplace froth, had no medium to float them unless they sailed the currents, of local personality, and he mentally upbraided them for a set of gossiping ninnies. They conducted a conversation (if it could be dignified by a name) of which no stranger could possibly partake, and which, by a hideous coincidence, was making his friend writhe, figuratively speaking, for Harkless sat like a fixed shadow. He uttered scarcely a word the whole evening, though Meredith knew that his guests would talk about him enthusiastically, the next day, none the less. The journalist’s silence was enforced by the topics; but what expression and manner the light allowed them to see was friendly and receptive, as though he listened to brilliant suggestions. He had a nice courtesy, and Miss Hinsdale felt continually that she was cleverer than usual this evening, and no one took his silence to be churlish, though they all innocently wondered why he did not talk more; however, it was probable that a man who had been so interestingly and terribly shot would be rather silent for a time afterward.
That night, when Harkless had gone to bed Meredith sat late by his own window calling himself names. He became aware of a rhomboidal patch of yellow light on a wall of foliage without, and saw that it came from his friend’s window. After dubious consideration, he knocked softly on the door.
“Come.”
He went in. Harkless was in bed, and laughed faintly as Meredith entered. “I — I’m fearing you’ll have to let me settle your gas bill, Tom. I’m not like I used to be, quite. I find — since — since that business, I can’t sleep without a light. I rather get the — the horrors in the dark.”
Incoherently, Meredith made a compassionate exclamation and turned to go, and, as he left the room, his eye fell upon the mantel-piece. The position of the photographs had been altered, and the picture of the girl who looked straight out at you was gone. The mere rim of it was visible behind the image of an old gentleman with a sardonic mouth.
An hour later, Tom came back, and spoke through the closed door. “Boy, don’t you think you can get to sleep now?”
“Yes, Tom. It’s all right. You get to bed. Nothing troubles me.”
Meredith spent the next day in great tribulation and perplexity; he felt that something had to be done, but what to do he did not know. He still believed that a “stirring-up” was what Harkless needed — not the species of “stirring-up” that had taken place last night, but a diversion which would divert. As they sat at dinner, a suggestion came to him and he determined to follow it. He was called to the telephone, and a voice strange to his ear murmured in a tone of polite deference: “A lady wishes to know if Mr. Meredith and his visitor intend being present at the country-club this evening.”
He had received the same inquiry from Miss Hinsdale on her departure the previous evening, and had answered vaguely; hence he now rejoined:
“You are quite an expert ventriloquist, but you do not deceive me.”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” creaked the small articulation.
“This is Miss Hinsdale, isn’t it?”
“No, sir. The lady wishes to know if you will kindly answer her question.”
“Tell her, yes.” He hung up the receiver, and returned to the table. “Some of Clara Hinsdale’s play,” he explained. “You made a devastating impression on her, boy; you were wise enough not to talk any, and she foolishly thought you were as interesting as you looked. We’re going out to a country-club dance. It’s given for the devotees who stay here all summer and swear Rouen is always cool; and nobody dances but me and the very young ones. It won’t be so bad; you can smoke anywhere, and there are little tables. We’ll go.”
“Thank you, Tom, you’re so good to think of it, but — —”
“But what?”
“Would you mind going alone? I find it very pleasant sitting on your veranda, or I’ll get a book.”
“Very well, if you don’t want to go, I don’t. I haven’t had a dance for three months and I’m still addicted to it. But of course — —”
“I think I’d like to go.” Harkless acquiesced at once, with a cheerful voice and a lifeless eye, and the good Tom felt unaccountably mean in persisting.
They drove out into the country through mists like lakes, and found themselves part of a procession of twinkling carriage-lights, and cigar sparks shining above open vehicles, winding along the levels like a canoe fete on the water. In the entrance hall of the club-house they encountered Miss Hinsdale, very handsome, large, and dark, elaborately beaming and bending toward them warmly.
“Who do you think is here?” she said.
“Gomez?” ventured Meredith.
“Helen Sherwood!” she cried. “Go and present Mr. Harkless before Brainard Macauley takes her away to some corner.”
