Delphi Complete Works of Booth Tarkington (Illustrated), page 663
“I only asked him for an estimate,” Kate explained. “Just for repairing the leaks. But he told me patching here and there’d be practically thrown away, the whole house ought to be re-roofed. You don’t need to tell me again that you can’t afford it; but it seems to me that Ames could if you managed better about him, Aunt Daisy.”
“Managed better?” Aunt Daisy repeated in frankest astonishment. “Managed Ames better?”
“I mean,” Kate said hurriedly, “I mean about his being more prosperous. I mean of course he’s settled down with Caldwell, Hardy and Caldwell and seems contented just to be in a rut there; but if you could only somehow stimulate him to try and get with a more important firm, where maybe he’d have a percentage and — —”
Here she was stopped. “Come with me!” Aunt Daisy gave this as a command and preceded her niece into the dark little room called “the library”. Aunt Daisy pointed to a portrait on the wall above the narrow glassed book-case that gave the room its name. The portrait was of a Vandyke-bearded gentleman rigid in a winged collar and black frock coat, with a silk hat on the table beside which he stood. “Look at that picture,” Aunt Daisy said. “My husband, John Cunningham, gazes down upon us. What do you think he’s saying?”
“I don’t know, Aunt Daisy. I’d be afraid to quote what the dead say; they mightn’t like it.”
“Smart, aren’t you?” Aunt Daisy retorted. “He was my husband and I know what he’s saying now as well as if I heard his voice. He’s saying, ‘Take care! Be on your guard, Marguerite. If you’re not watchful you’ll be caught in a web and find yourself consorting with an enemy who cost us eight thousand dollars that might very well make as much as forty thousand for you now, if you had it, Marguerite Cunningham.’ That’s what he’s saying to me, and he’s speaking to you too, Kate Fennigate; he’s telling you that you needn’t waste your breath on traps and insinuations that are clear as day to a woman of my age and experience. Leaks in the roof, indeed! I’ll keep pans under ’em till Kingdom Come before I’ll let my daughter consent to her husband’s betraying this family by consorting with Oscar J. Bortshleff. I hope you understand now what your Uncle John is saying to you, Kate Fennigate!”
Kate was meek. She hadn’t really expected to accomplish anything, though. She was sorry for her Uncle John. If he’d been alive, she thought, he very likely would have said what Aunt Daisy said he would; Aunt Daisy’d have made him. Cousin Roberta Gilpin had told Kate that Uncle John sometimes drank a good deal and would be away from home for as much as a week, no wonder. Kate wasn’t sorry for Uncle John only; she was sorry for all men. They seemed to her to have a pretty hard time — except those that avoided domestication. On the other hand, old bachelors and old widowers appeared to live in a dusty sort of loneliness; they didn’t even know what not to eat or when to have their hair cut and plainly lacked both care and guidance. Then, too, a domesticated man had compensations: Ames was often delighted by young Celia, especially since she’d become interested in her studies.
Talking over these thoughts with her confirmed friend, Tuke Speer, Kate made him laugh aloud. “Mrs. Cunningham’s too much for you, I’m afraid,” he said. “I gather you conclude a man ought to marry at about sixty; but I’ve known mothers-in-law who were charming. You’re a funny girl.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. For instance, why don’t you like to go about more? Of course I understand that for a good while after losing your father you didn’t feel like it; but now it’s different, isn’t it? You seem to be burying yourself in this house. When you do go out anywhere you have the air of a girl who’s thinking about trigonometry and’s going to wear nose-glasses pretty soon. Of course the boys like you but — —”
“Yes, ‘but’,” she said, as he paused. “ ’But’ indeed! What you mean is that I’m convenient to talk to but by no means would any of ’em ever fall in love with me. Not they, and nobody else. Nobody ever did or will, and I’m not deeply concerned about that.”
“Perhaps that’s the trouble,” he suggested. “I mean your not being deeply concerned about it. You always look as if you weren’t, and it sets up a barrier — like one that surrounds a settledly married woman. Now that I think of it, it’s much more like that than like trigonometry. Nobody’d ever try to make love to you any more than he would to a girl he knew to be engaged — engaged, betrothed and unalterably plighted to marry some man on the other side of the world. You aren’t, are you?”
“No.” Her color heightened but so slightly that he didn’t perceive it.
“Well, then, maybe it’s trigonometry after all, Kate. Anyhow, there’s a preoccupation. Maybe it’s trying to get good old Ames where the stuff he’s got entitles him to be. By the way, Ames ought to be in the Carlyle Club. They very kindly put me in a while ago and it’s a pleasant institution. I think Ames would enjoy it, don’t you?”
“Yes — yes, he would.”
“You don’t think he could afford it?”
“Not as things are, probably; but if he could — well, it would be difficult.”
“I see,” Tuke said. “He wouldn’t be allowed to. Mussolini would envy your aunt. Too bad; the men at the club all think Ames is a great fellow. By the way, the noisiest of ’em, Bill Jones, claims to know you; says he always has.”
“Yes, I suppose so. He knows everybody, doesn’t he?”
“Certainly seems to,” Tuke said. “That reminds me, the other night he took me to see that girl Ames told me you said inquired about me because of my terrible hair. Remember? It was months ago, ‘way back when you and I first began to know each other and — —”
“Laila Capper.” Kate spoke the name in a low voice, thoughtfully.
“Yes,” Tuke said. “She’s a lustrous-looking creature. There were half a dozen competitors of Bill’s there — he seems fairly overboard about her in his own whoop-it-up way. Her talk was just personal gabble, kidding, gestures and everybody-come-hither. She tried to fuss me about you, because somebody’d told her you and I were at those Chamber Music concerts together last month. Went on to say you’d been her most intimate friend for years. I couldn’t imagine it. Were you?”
“Well — probably I was.”
“So? Then you can tell me if I’ve sized her up right. No talk, just gabble and razz and whose-baby-are-you? Isn’t that about all there is?”
“And her beauty, Tuke.”
“Plenty,” Tuke said. “Plenty; but what of it if it’s only a dumb-head’s coating? I did think, though, that she’s jolly and good-natured, glad to give everybody a good time. Well, after all, what more does any girl need?”
“Need for what, Tuke?”
“To be a dazzler,” he replied. “I’m not talking about your kind of girl, of course, because you really are non-personal. I was saying Miss Laila Capper’s got what gets ’em. Holler all you like; but beauty is and’s always been what goes places. Beauty’s got to have animation with it, that’s true; but it doesn’t much matter what kind of animation, so what more does this girl need than what she’s got?”
“What indeed, Tuke! Entirely he-man, aren’t you? Women are designed by Allah as accessories. ‘Escape’ would be the stylish new word for it, wouldn’t it? Women are born to provide escape for men?”
Tuke looked slightly annoyed. “You know that wasn’t what I meant and that I wasn’t talking about myself. I’d look for something I don’t see any symptoms of in Miss Capper.”
“Yes, of course,” Kate said. “I didn’t mean I thought you were the kind who’d fall for just make-whoopee and Turkish Delight. I’m sorry.”
“ ’Turkish Delight’?” he repeated. “Well, she isn’t fat, you know; and all the same I did get another impression of her besides what I’ve mentioned.”
“A more admiring impression?”
“It was this,” Tuke said. “She’s not my style, of course, and I can’t imagine her ever saying anything an undazed man could listen to; but she has got a frank, outspoken, straightforward look that’s attractive. I mean you can see right away that she’d never let anybody down, that she isn’t the slightest bit tricky or catty, wouldn’t ever do anybody dirt to get an advantage for herself and that she truly is just what she seems to be — an up-to-the-minute, been-everywhere, smart-crowd Beauty but a darned good sport and completely on the level.”
Kate was able to look at him scrutinizingly, for, absorbed in his analysis, he gazed frowningly at the wall. He was wholly in earnest; and, although she had a severe temptation to gasp at him, “You didn’t even notice her accent?” the impulse had to be downed. Tuke’s revelation of his simplicity, she knew, was only another instance of the ancient and modern but always dumbfounding incompetencies of men in their witless relations with women.
XIII
SHE LOOKED AT him long. He knew nothing of her gaze and, in spite of their intimate companionship, he knew almost as little of herself, Kate thought. He took it for granted that she (being “non-personal”) agreed with him about Laila’s good sportsmanship and straightforward character, and when he spoke again his topic had changed. He began to talk of the still wildly soaring stock market and Mr. Roe’s foresight in providing buffers for Metal Products when the ultimate certain crash should come. The two friends often spoke of Tuke’s work, of Mr. Roe and of the second big Plant Metal Products had built, and usually Kate was interested; but now she was absentminded. She’d already begun to wait with a prophetic sickishness for Tuke to mention Laila Capper again.
She saw him almost every day, walked with him through twilight, sat many evenings facing him under Uncle John’s portrait in “the library”, as they explored the “expanding universe”, new chemistry, old religion, American business, Mr. Roe, Tuke himself, and Ames Lanning. Tuke didn’t speak of Laila again for six weeks; then all he said was, “Bill and I were out at your friend Laila Capper’s again last night. She asked me to shoot a round of golf with her Sunday morning.” Kate said, “I’m sure you’ll enjoy it” and they went at once into a political argument.
At the dinner table, a fortnight after this, Aunt Daisy, always ruthless, made a pertinent inquiry: “What’s become of your red-headed Speer man, Kate? I was beginning to think you and he couldn’t live without seeing each other at least once a day; but I don’t seem to have seen him around lately. You oughtn’t to mind, because he’s just a beginner at that ordinary old Roe’s Works and I bet he’s as poor as a Unitarian churchmouse. What did you fight over?”
Ames interposed mildly. “He isn’t quite so poor as that. At any rate, if he is, he won’t stay so. He’s one of the most energetic, up-and-coming — —”
“Pooh!” Ames’s mother-in-law often checked him thus. “He’s a red-head, isn’t he? Never saw a red-head yet that wouldn’t fly off the handle at the slightest contradiction, especially in hot weather like this. What did you fight about, Kate, or has he got another girl?”
Ames again tried to be of help. “Mary, do tell your mother that even after we were engaged and before the war there were times when I was so busy that we didn’t see each other for several — —”
“I’m afraid I couldn’t quite say that, Ames dear.” Gentle Mary looked distressed. “I mean I don’t think we went without seeing each other so long as this. I mean I don’t think you ever stayed away quite so long as Tuke’s been — —”
“Hold everything, please!” Kate recovered a momentarily lost composure. “I’m not a complete wreck, ladies and gentlemen. Don’t look so sympathetic, Ames! I’m very, very fond of Tuke Speer; but we haven’t reached the point where we confide everything to each other, so he hasn’t told me why he fails to find me a daily necessity of late. Maybe he’s just tired of looking at me — such things do happen — but I’m still able to make Celia keep her hair brushed, amn’t I?”
“Blast you, yes!” Celia said precociously, and the inquiry was over; but the next day brought an answer, an expected one, to the person most concerned.
In the afternoon Kate had finished her daily task as a masseuse. She’d given Mary a “rub” and was darkening the patient’s bedroom for the rest old Dr. Powls had prescribed to follow the treatment. Aunt Daisy came in exasperated by a back-door argument. “It’s that upstart negro, Wilberforce,” she explained. “I never was so provoked! The politicians spoil ’em. They don’t stop at merely buying their votes on election day for two dollars; they spout speeches to ’em that make ’em believe they’re the sultans of this earth. Wilberforce used to cut my grass once a week for seventy-five cents and only too glad to get it. He’s been grumbling all summer, hasn’t been around for over two weeks and now what do you think he has the face to ask me? Said he couldn’t think of it under a dollar and a quarter! Kept telling me over and over, ‘No, ma’am, I couldn’t think of it for less. I simpully couldn’t consider it.’ I told him to get off my back porch and never dare set foot there again. Well, Mary, that settles it.”
“Oh, dear!” Upon the bed Mary became murmurous. “You think —— Couldn’t it go a little while longer without being mowed? These hot days he — he looks so tired when he comes from the office, Mother.”
“Tired, does he? Tired of being a failure maybe. Always babying him, Mary! He’s supposed to be an athlete, isn’t he? I guess it won’t hurt him to cut my grass. It might put a little gimp in him, enough to make him decide to cut some ice in this world and be somebody! I’m going out on the street-car to see what Roberta Gilpin’s doing for her sciatica — I’ll bet it’s wrong — and I won’t be back till dinnertime. Ames’ll be here by the time you get up and you can tell him you want to give me a surprise, wouldn’t it be nice if he’d have the lawn all shipshape again to give my eyes a treat when I get back.”
“Oh, dear! Mother, do you think it really needs to be — —”
“ ’Needs!’ Why, it’s a disgrace! It makes the whole place look shiftless. I should think Ames’d be ashamed to see it; but of course if you want to go on babying him and letting him wander through his whole life with his head in the clouds and no shine on his shoes — —”
“No, I’ll tell him.” Mary’s hand, lifted in protest, dropped limply upon the coverlet. “I’ll tell him, Mother. He’ll do it.”
Kate left them, waited until Mrs. Cunningham had gone forth; then went to the anomalous old brick stable behind the house, dragged out the lawnmower and began to cut the grass. The lawnmower was a heavy, old-fashioned one, Wilberforce hadn’t left it sharp, the grass was long and tough, and indoors thermometers in this part of the city had pushed their threads of mercury to the discouraging figure ninety-six. Kate toiled determinedly, wiping her face with bared forearms, pausing to get her hair out of her eyes or to mutter fiercely at the lawnmower when it jerked and balked. The swathes she cut were interminable in length, and, when she’d worked an hour, the area of mowed lawn seemed a trifle compared to the vast shaggy spaces still untouched.
An hour for half the front yard! At this rate she’d have the vile grass cut, not by the time Ames came home but at about midnight! Aching in ankles, knees, back and biceps, hating the sound of the mower in her ears, itching from grass inside her stained canvas shoes, she rested two minutes; then seized the machine’s handle again, a shabby small figure at an angle of forty-five degrees pushing savagely in a rage with the grass, the heat and the dull blades of the mower.
She’d turned at the end of a swathe and started upon a new one when the lawnmower jammed, her fingers slipped from the wet handle, she stumbled, tearing her white cotton skirt, and went down on knees and elbows. This was her posture as Laila Capper’s passing “convertible” abruptly swung to the curb and stopped. Tuke Speer and Laila jumped out, and Tuke ran forward. “Let me help you up!”
Kate wasn’t gracious. “What for?” she asked, as she got to her feet and cleared her eyes of damp hair.
“Well, I only thought — —” Not at all at his ease, Tuke began to explain. “I — I thought maybe you’d hurt yourself. Laila’s giving a woods picnic and picked me up at the Plant. We were just on the way to —— I mean we saw you fall and — —”
Laila, cool-looking in lilac linen, came up laughing. “You looked so funny!” she exclaimed. “I hope it didn’t hurt you, but the way you flopped it was just like some terribly funny animal looking for its hole! You mustn’t blame us for laughing, you dear little Kate; but really — —” Overcome with mirth, Laila was unable to continue.
“Please don’t think I did any laughing, Kate.” Tuke’s embarrassment made him awkward. “I — I mean Laila’s sense of humor is always with her; but I — —”
“Never mind, Tuke.” Kate brushed at green stains, and, with forearms to which blades of grass adhered, wiped her moist red face. She looked down at her bedraggled skirt, and laughed too. “I must still look pretty funny, I should think.”
“Oh, no, not a bit! Indeed you don’t — no, indeed — —” Tuke seemed to feel that he ought to reassure her; but he was interrupted. Ames Lanning, languid after his hot day’s work, turned in from the sidewalk and came across the raggedly mowed stretch of lawn.
“Hello, hello, hello!” he said. “How do you do, Miss Capper. What’s up, Tuke? Kate, what on earth have you been doing?”
Laila took Tuke’s arm. “How’s Mr. Ames Lanning’s elegant baritone?” she asked, with the slightest inflection of coquettish impertinence. “Singing at any more parties these days? I’d hate to think I was missing it. Your poor dear cousin here stepped on her skirt and gave us an imitation of a woodchuck in the grass, so we stopped to see if she needed help. She didn’t, so we’d better be on our way. Adios! Tuke, we’ll be feffly late.”
Tuke would have turned toward Kate again; but Laila gave a possessive tug to his arm, released it and ran lightly toward her car. He had to follow. Ames looked Kate over. “She meant you’d fallen down? Yes, look at your knees and that skirt! Why, it’s all rags! You mean to tell me you were trying to cut this grass? Where’s Wilberforce?”
Kate was redder than ever. “He’s resigned — in person,” she said, and grasped the handle of the lawnmower again. “If you’ll stand out of my way, please — —”
