Delphi Complete Works of Booth Tarkington (Illustrated), page 522
“Oh, dear!” Wallace groaned. “Oh, dear!”
“You’re going away to-day — all of you? He said that he was going on Tuesday. This is Tuesday.”
“Yes, we’re going — Gordon, too, Edna.”
“Is he?” she asked quietly. “But he’d be coming here first — just for a moment to tell me he’s sorry, wouldn’t he?”
“Edna, he can’t! You don’t understand — it would be just an agonizing thing for you both, and of no possible good. You’ve just said, yourself, that if he begged you, and we all begged you, you wouldn’t marry him—”
“No, never. You see something’s happened, and the last thing my father would like—”
“Well, then, you do understand it. You see, yourself, it would only be a useless pain to—”
“Then he isn’t coming?”
“He can’t! No, you poor thing, he isn’t. He isn’t coming, Edna.”
With her eyes still searchingly upon his, her body still stooping and her hands still pressed upon her breast, she stood repeating this to herself. “He isn’t — he isn’t coming.”
“No — no, he isn’t! He can’t! It’s no use.”
“You mean he isn’t coming at all — before he goes away? He isn’t coming to say—”
“Edna!” Wallace stepped nearer her, took one of her hands in both of his own and pressed it tightly. “Forget him! Forget all of us! There isn’t anything else to do. For God’s sake, forgive me for coming to tell you this! Good-bye — I’ve got to get out of here — Good-bye!”
He strode out and across the wooden front yard, but sent a fleeting, unhappy glance back over his shoulder as he reached the sidewalk. The stooping figure stood in the doorway, staring after him and the parted lips were moving. Even that brief, last glimpse of her made him all too certain of the words those lips were forming: “He isn’t coming, then? He isn’t coming at all?”
Wallace walked home slowly, at intervals wiping his face with a blue silk handkerchief and cursing the heat, though more frequently he made himself the subject of his profanity. As he opened the gate that gave access to the gravelled path through the deep lawn before his father’s cottage, however, and saw his mother waiting for him upon the verandah, the dull anger within him found a less direct and more satirical form of expression. “Crazy to hear the good news your sweet boy’s bringing you, are you?” he asked aloud, though at that distance she could not hear him. Then he closed the gate behind him with a metallic crash and walked moodily up the path.
Mrs. Corning came eagerly to meet him at the top of the verandah steps. “He’s pacing the living-room floor again; but he let Joseph pack for him, and everything will stay all right if we can just keep him in the frame of mind we’ve got him into. Wallace, you did what I—”
“Look here!” Wallace said gruffly. “It wouldn’t do anybody any harm if he went down there and told that girl good-bye and said he was sorry. That’s what I—”
“What!” Mrs. Corning cried out in shocked alarm. “Are you crazy?”
“You listen!” he said, and gave her a quick, roughly spoken account of the interview. “So what harm would it do?” he asked, concluding. “What harm would it do if he just saw her for a few moments and told her—”
“You’re crazy!” Mrs. Corning cried. “Absolutely crazy! Do you want to ruin everything just at the last moment, and all just because you’re a man and on that account can’t help being always gullible, emotional and susceptible when any woman seems to be in grief?” She laughed in humorous despair of all masculine good judgment under such circumstances, and then her laughter, continuing, became shriller. “You poor dear ninny, you actually believed she wouldn’t take him if he asked her? And that she wouldn’t know how to make him ask her if we were only soft enough to let him see her? What? When you come up here after seeing her and propose to send him straight to her? After arguing with him practically for days that he mustn’t see her, and then going down there yourself for the very purpose of keeping him away from her and satisfying him with the thought that you went as his substitute! Do you remember imploring him a while ago to use his head? Good heavens, Wallace, don’t you think you’d better use your own!”
Wallace looked sheepish. “Well — he’s waiting for me and I suppose I’ve got to go in there and tell him — tell him something! I don’t know what to—”
“You don’t?” Mrs. Corning asked, and now she laughed comfortably, with a pleased assurance that matters would go well. “Nothing’s simpler or easier than the mere truth, and that’s all you’ve got to tell him. Except for letting yourself get emotional and coming back in a temporarily wrought-up state, I think you did really rather well, Wallace, and, though she didn’t seem to take to it immediately, at least you implanted that idea about her going away, and your father’s offer later ought to do the rest. It might even be made a larger one with a hint that it would be conditional—” She broke off this train and went to the point of the present crisis. “Just go in there and tell Gordon the truth. You say she wasn’t crying and didn’t shed any tears while you were there. Tell him that. She spoke as if she put the blame on your father. Tell Gordon that. She said her father had hated everybody at the Point and she was sorry herself she’d ever had anything to do with us. Tell him that. You see, when you think you ought to feel sorry for a person and hear that he’s angry, you don’t feel so sorry! Then I think you ought to tell him that she seemed disappointed.”
“ ’Disappointed’?” Wallace asked, with satire. “Is that the impression I’ve given you: that she seemed merely ‘disappointed’ because he didn’t come?”
“Oh, dear!” Mrs. Corning smiled and shook her head pityingly. “I didn’t say to tell him she was disappointed because he didn’t come. I said just to tell him she seemed disappointed, and I don’t suppose many things are truer than that she is disappointed! I haven’t a doubt she’s thought he was almost within her grasp — a Corning!”
“You mean that’s what I’m to give him a chance to infer that her ‘disappointment’ is about?”
“Certainly!” Mrs. Corning spoke impatiently, genuinely irritated by his youthful, masculine blindness. “You poor goose, if you doubt the truth of it, just take it from me that I understand the situation perfectly, or, if you can’t do that, at least you care something for your brother’s peace of mind and his restoration to a cheerful and wholesome outlook, don’t you? We ought to be leaving here in three-quarters of an hour; we’ve got just that much time to save him, Wallace. I’ve told you precisely what to say to him — the real truth of the matter — and it’s only the real truth that’ll save him. You don’t propose to ruin him instead, do you?”
“You take the responsibility?”
“Good heavens, yes!” she exclaimed scornfully, and, at the same time, laughed with affection and put an amiable, urging hand upon his arm. “Go in; be cheerful with him and take your time about it. Keep him away from the windows on the other side of the house and stay with him until it’s almost time for us to be leaving. The trunks have already gone; the bags are ready to be brought down and put in the car, and, if you can just keep talking until it’s time to start, all the better. Tell him about this matter first and then talk about a whole lot of other things. Be brisk about it! Now then, in you go!”
“All right,” Wallace said doggedly, and went into the house.
Mrs. Corning’s thoughtful glance followed him through the open doorway until the light upon the back of his grey flannel coat was submerged within the shadows of the hall; then, her expression becoming one of grave content, she descended the steps, went round the cottage to the rear and began to talk with some workmen who were bringing shutters from the garage and placing them handily beneath their proper windows. She made the conversation as loud and as gay as she could, laughing a great deal, herself, and hoping that the cheerful sounds she produced were audible through the open windows of the living-room not far behind her. She protracted her liveliness for some time, then made a silence and listened; she could hear Wallace’s voice — it had the businesslike briskness she desired of it — and the contentment of her expression increased. She went into the house, ascended to her own room and did not leave it until a chauffeur came to inform her that it was time to be setting forth.
Wallace and Gordon were already standing beside the waiting open car when she came brightly from the house and joined them. Gordon, swallowing repeatedly, did not look at her, or at anything except the ground; but she took his arm cosily and affectionately. “You sit in the back seat with your poor old Muddie,” she said. “Wallace can hop in beside Webber, while you and I have this big roomy tonneau all comfy to ourselves.” Gordon followed her into the car meekly, not looking up, and, as the white-sided tires began to turn upon the driveway, Wallace spoke in a low tone to the chauffeur.
“Beat it, Webber! We’ve got plenty of time; but from here to the village, hit it up! When we get out on the New Yarmouth road you can take it easy. Right now, step on it!”
Wallace saw Pelter’s, closed and bleak, from only the side of his eye, as they fled through the glare over River Road; he controlled a tendency to shiver and knew, without turning, that his brother did not look up. “That’ll do, Webber. Take it easy now — it’s all right.”
At the crowded station in New Yarmouth he joined his mother and Gordon after making an inspection of a bulletin board upon an exterior wall of the building; he came to them ruefully. “An hour late, and we sent Webber back! What’ll we do? Try to find a movie open?”
“No — for heaven’s sake — no!” Gordon muttered. “No!”
“Of course not!” Mrs. Corning said quickly. “We don’t feel like any stupid old movie, Gordie and me. Too stuffy and hot, and that’s what it is in this awful place, too!” She took his arm. “We’ll just walk around a bit in the open air. You wait here, Wallace; Gordon and his poor old Muddie are going to take a nice little stroll and see all the sights of New Yarmouth from outside! Aren’t we, Gordie?”
His deep sigh seemed assent enough to satisfy her, and he let her take him out to the street behind the station. There he paused irresolutely, but only for an instant or two; she kept her arm tightly within his, chattering to him cheerfully and constantly of nothing, and Wallace, looking after them, saw them set forth upon the walk she had proposed. They did not return until the whistle of the approaching train had been heard. Mrs. Corning was still talking indefatigably, Gordon still kept his eyes upon the ground; but, when the train had roared into the station and they had found their car, he looked up for one short glance toward Mirthful Haven, gulped, and ascended the steps after his mother.
“Well — that’s done!” Wallace said to himself, and did not follow them immediately; he remained near the steps and stared up inquiringly at the sky. There were no clouds overhead where a pale blue seemed to be changing to dirty yellow, more with the haze than with approaching twilight; but in the west the thickness, remarked by the fishermen at noon and dwelling there all day, had abruptly become darker. A gloomy nucleus seemed to move behind the haze that hung upon the land. “Thunderstorm coming up over yonder,” Wallace said to the porter. “It looks like a heavy one.”
“It do that! Ain’ goin’ to be no trouble to us, though, inside ow nice dry cah, suh.”
“No,” Wallace laughed, as he mounted the steps. “It looks as if something pretty heavy might be going to drop down yonder, though — over Mirthful Haven way.”
His prognostication was correct. As he and his perturbed brother and their mother looked out from their flying, dry shelter, a few minutes later, and saw trees bending hazardously, cross-roads receding in turmoils of white dust and horses galloping in the fields, something heavy did drop down upon Mirthful Haven. The windbolt Webster Hazzard had predicted came with such suddenness, with such blackness and with such strength that no one in the village could remember its like, and there were not lacking inhabitants imaginative enough to connect it with the funeral of Long Harry Pelter. Huddling indoors, they spoke of this conjunction, as such things have always been spoken of since the ancients first saw strange signs in the sky and felt the earth staggering under foot at the time when some strong figure of a man met death or was buried. First, there had been the portent: Pelter’s dog was killed on the third day before his own violent passing, they said in Mirthful Haven, and now, on the third day after, the day of Pelter’s burial, came this bolt of wind in which the flimsy house where he was born and lived all his life could not easily escape perishing.
The cottagers still left upon the Point saw the sombre nucleus behind the haze grow monstrous and come out from the veil. Immediately all the sky was dark, then black. At sea a white wall seemed to advance from Old Bareface; it moved upon the black water, leaving all white behind it, and then quickly all the visible ocean was white. Thunderbolts crashed in the driven vapors; lightning ringed the village and the Point. But it was the fierce stroke of the wind that made the people cower in their shelters. From old roofs shingles flew up like decks of cards tossed into the air; great branches sped from elms in the village, and old trees crashed down in the deep woods. Then, upon this wind, came a tumult of pounding rain; water-spouts seemed to walk upon the sea — and all at once, in the west, there was a watery yellow light that stupendously became a dingy red. Dumfoundingly, the thunder only rumbled; the sinister nucleus passed out to sea, drawing all the vapors with it, tearing them from the reddened west; it was as if a black tent had been put down over land and sea, and was now torn up and blown away. The squall had lasted no more than twenty minutes; and now a startling, quiet twilight lay over the drenched and strewn earth and the noiselessly tossing sea.
Wires were down, with their poles, profusely; but those leading to the Point came in a conduit underground and were intact. It was Mrs. Sillery’s niece-by-marriage, at the Cornings’ cottage to assist in its closing, who telephoned to the small “exchange” in the village that there had been a catastrophe at Pelter’s. “It ain’t there!” she gasped. “It’s gone! It’s a-layin’ over on its side in the mud and water! Somebody better go see what’s happened to that girl. Pelter’s is gone, I tell you! It’s gone!”
The stars were out now; but neither their light nor that of the lanterns carried by the searchers discovered any trace of Edna at Pelter’s. When old Wye found her, it was upon that high rock at the crest of the cliffs where she had often sat in her childhood to watch the racing white manes of the sea-coursers, where she had watched for her father of nights and where she had sat with Gordon Corning and told him how the “Mirthful Lady” struck upon Old Bareface — asked him to understand and let them care for each other as though they “both were dead”. She was lying face downward, shivering, upon the wet rock, with her arms extended toward the house beyond the highway; and this prone attitude of supplication was that of a stricken creature who still begs for mercy after the stroke has fallen.
Old Wye saw the patch of sodden black upon the rock, fumbled his way to her, whimpering, and tried to lift her. “You come along, honey,” he panted. “Where I live, it ain’t hardly fit fer you. They wouldn’t want you ‘most any place back yonder in the village; but they’s one house where they do. You come along, honey. I can take you to one house in Mirthful Haven where you’ll be welcome.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
THE COMIC MASK that should sometimes have been where it never was, in attendance upon Corning in his imagination, might appropriately have come now to wear an aspect less irresponsibly pagan. By the arrival of spring, indeed, he should have felt that hovering grin as a merely benign mirthfulness, so little derisive that it might have been but a posture of lips to smile blessings upon him. Reassuring orderliness had slowly yet sweetly been restored into his household; the family life ran again into its proper pattern like soft batter into the waffle-iron, and all was admirable, nothing was shocking.
His daughter unresistingly drilled through a “finishing” year at a school, not Miss Branch’s, and in June would be taken upon a well-guided foreign excursion; Wallace should have his wedding then, as he deserved for the intelligence and application he had already shown in business, and, most gratifying of all, though the younger son was not the elder’s equal in displayed ability, Gordon had gradually emerged from distempers and melancholy; he was becoming sane, busy and willing. Health and nervous placidity seemed to be his reward, and, in private conversations with her husband and Wallace, Mrs. Corning sometimes complacently referred to her prediction that the episode of the previous summer might prove beneficial. When finally, in the early spring, evidence of Gordon’s normal condition became decisive and conspicuous she almost openly triumphed in the demonstration of her prophetic sagacity. Thus the time actually came when she spoke of it to Gordon himself.
“You’ll have to believe now that your poor old Muddie possessed quite a little commonsense, won’t you?” she said to him one day, with laughing tenderness. “You weren’t quite sure Muddie was right then; but I think possibly from now on you’ll trust her to know!” Mrs. Corning’s manner became more serious, though not less cheerful. “Dear, that distress you went through at the end of the summer — providentially it was short and such nonsense after all, when you come to think of it! We all go through those shakings-up when we’re young, dear. Life brings them to us because we need them. But afterward, no matter how much they’ve hurt us at the time, we can look back and see that they were just blessings in disguise. You’d got yourself into such a morbid, queer state, poor thing — and no wonder! — I think what happened was just what you needed to rouse you from it. Who knows?” She looked at him, here, with a motherly archness. “If it hadn’t happened I’m not sure — I’m not absolutely sure — that you’d have been wide awake enough by now to look as conscious as you do whenever you hear the pretty little name Peggy just barely mentioned!” She laughed and patted his cheek; became serious again. “There — don’t get red and don’t mind Muddie’s teasing. It’s so beautiful, and so right, Gordon, so right! And when one thinks of this exquisite young girl with her fair, fragile, pure face—”
