Delphi Complete Works of Booth Tarkington (Illustrated), page 680
“Was she?”
“I never felt so sorry for anybody in my life,” he declared. “Laila was — well, it’s hard to describe. It got so I couldn’t think of anything more to say.”
“What did you do then?”
“What? Why, I — —” He seemed to have the opening he’d hoped to lead up to; but Kate’s music and her preoccupation with it disturbed him. “I’m trying to tell you about it; but if you keep on playing — —”
“Oh, I beg your pardon!” Her hands dropped from the keys to her lap, and she swung about on the piano-bench to face him. Her expression was amiable. “Bill Jones was there to help you with her, wasn’t he, Ames?”
“Yes; oh, certainly! That is, he may have been partly asleep; I don’t know.”
“Didn’t you see him?”
“Yes — oh, yes, certainly! That is, he spoke to us and — —” Ames paused; then added, “There were — there were other people, too — at least, walking through the hall. I thought maybe one of ’em was you.”
“No,” Kate said, “not I. I was in here until they all began to go.”
“Were you?” Again Ames was temporarily relieved. “Well, of course, as you say, Bill Jones was there, too, Kate; but he isn’t the kind of man a woman turns to at a time like that — not a woman like Laila, a woman who’d been treated as she had by her own husband and — —”
Kate interrupted him. “How’d she been treated by her own husband, Ames?”
“What?” He stared, perplexed. “Why, you saw it.”
“Yes, so I did. Did you?”
He was completely at a loss. “Why, everybody did. What do you mean? I was right there beside them, wasn’t I?”
“Yes, at the last of it you were. The last of it was all you saw or that ‘everybody’ saw.” Kate spoke rapidly. “I’ll explain what I mean. You hadn’t been at Tuke Speer’s house before they came here. You hadn’t been with that husband and wife all day, Ames. You didn’t see what had been going on between them earlier, and you weren’t conscious of undercurrents between them after they got here. Who knows those things about a husband and wife enough to judge? You don’t know what a strain they’d been on together or what Tuke’s nerves had been put through before that miserable outburst came from him.”
“What!” Ames was astounded. “Why, see here, Kate, there hadn’t been anything at all going on between them. I have eyes, haven’t I? — and ears?”
“Yes, but they’re at a disadvantage, Ames — especially nowadays.”
“My eyes and ears are at a disadvantage— ‘especially nowadays’? Why?”
“For one reason because you’ve become an important and powerful man, Ames. People don’t show themselves as they really are to such men; they put on their best for you — their best and their most ingratiating. When you were on your way up and still struggling you had a lot better chance to see and hear the truth about people. Oh, I know you’re called an extraordinary judge of men, and you are when you judge of the work they do or can do for Roe Metal Products; but when you’re away from business and — —”
“I see!” He looked at her with some satire. “You’re telling me that away from business people put on a show for me, their best behavior? Tuke to-night, for instance?”
Kate’s color heightened. “No, Tuke wouldn’t; he’s too honest. I wasn’t thinking of Tuke, Ames.”
“I see you weren’t,” he said severely. “Of all the injustice! Why, when Tuke broke out in that unpardonable way, it was right out of a clear sky. She was — why, she’d been charming to everybody all evening, and when he did it she was being charming to Tuke himself! She was being affectionate. Yes, being affectionate! She actually had her hand on his hair and was stroking it. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Are you trying to tell me — —”
“Yes, Ames. Nobody knows quite all she’d been doing to Tuke to get him into such a state or how long she’d been at it. She may have begun it in the afternoon; she may have been at it all day.”
“What! Why, when they got here she came in laughing! Kate, you’re talking like a wild woman! I never heard — —”
The snapping of the lock of the front door, as a latch-key turned in it, interrupted him, and Kate called toward the hallway: “Celia? Hello there! How do you happen to be home so soon? Come in, won’t you?”
Celia came in, but only a few steps, remaining near the doorway. She was wet and pallid; she didn’t look up and didn’t smile, stood downcast. Kate went to her, exclaiming, laid hands upon her.
“What in the world! Why, your hair’s sodden and so’s your wrap and everything else! You must be wet to the bone. How on earth did you ever — —”
“I didn’t take my own car, Kate. I got Ellie and Thad Boscowen to drive me home because it was all a sour bore to-night, and I wouldn’t let them turn into our driveway but just hopped out and ran in. It’s raining, you know.”
“That hard?” Kate cried. “It doesn’t sound like it. Why, you’re dripping! Go get out of these clothes and into bed. Hurry!”
“Yes — I think I’d better,” Celia said, and went out of the room without having looked up.
Last doubts were removed from the mind of her father. The woman who’d passed the library door couldn’t possibly have been either his wife or his daughter — but who was it? He felt he’d better get on with telling Kate what had happened.
XXXIV
“AS I WAS saying,” he began, “No matter what peculiar theories you have about it, Laila was — well, she was all broken up, and, as I was saying, I never felt sorrier for anybody in my life.” Kate didn’t seem to be paying any attention to him but stood gazing concentratedly at the doorway through which Celia had just passed. “You aren’t listening?”
“What do you suppose is the matter with her?” Kate murmured; but the question was addressed to herself and she still gazed at the doorway.
“As I was saying when she came in — —” Ames spoke more loudly. “As I was saying — —”
“Yes?” Kate turned to him, and smiled. “You were saying I talked like a wild woman.”
“I meant about — about Laila,” he explained, half-apologetically. “I don’t mean in general, Kate, of course, and I didn’t mean to be rude. I suppose I was a little surprised because you don’t feel more sympathetic with her, especially when she was going through such an experience.” He paused, awaiting comment; but as none came he fell back upon the ancient method of reasoning by dialogue. “She’s one of our oldest and closest and dearest friends, isn’t she? Why, certainly she is! Well, she needed — she needed help, didn’t she? She certainly did, Kate. Somebody had to give it to her, didn’t they? Somebody had to help. Isn’t that so? Why, naturally it’s so!” Then, as Kate still made no response, he continued rather superiorly, “Come to think of it, I wonder you or some of the other women didn’t try to do anything for her at the moment it happened — I mean when Tuke was so outrageous to her. You’d think that at such a time all of her women friends would have gathered about her; but not one of you — —”
“No, we didn’t,” Kate admitted. “She didn’t seem to need us, Ames.”
Upon the pronoun “us” he detected her slight emphasis. “Kate, I can’t help thinking that’s unfair — really unfair!” he said, and plunged deeper into his hapless maze. The best of lawyers has never yet gained anything by defending to his wife the case of a woman recognized by her own sex as predatory. “It’s a queer thing,” he went on unhappily. “It’s a queer thing that when a wife is publicly insulted by her husband, treated the way Laila Speer was treated in our house to-night, her women friends leave it to the men in the party to try and buck her up. Yes, and then afterward you, Kate, seem inclined to whitewash Tuke for what he did and take his side.” Ames’s voice had begun to sound indignant; he heard it himself and it made him more so. “My God, don’t women ever stand up for one another? Why have they always got to pounce on one of their own sex the instant she’s in trouble?”
“Because we’re just a wolf pack, Ames?” Kate asked, not helping him to be calmer in spirit.
“Indeed it seems so sometimes!” Indignation is a never-failing stimulant to him who feels it. By virtue of it Ames recovered virtue and became sincerely the injured party. Moreover, that sense of being irked by his wife increased upon him. She seemed to feel herself subtly his better, to think she knew things that he didn’t and couldn’t know — and to be trying to set him against Laila Speer, to control his opinion of that lovely abused woman whom he’d had to comfort. Was it still Kate’s intention that he should never, never be allowed to think or act for himself in any matter whatever? “I’m not supposed to have any brains at all?” he asked.
“Don’t be ten years old, Ames!”
Upon this, two memory pictures flickered within the eyes of Ames Lanning’s mind: one was of an Attorney General of the United States receiving the news of a verdict Ames had won against him; and the other was of Plant Three’s new expansion, more his creation than even Mr. Roe’s, unending walls as busy within, now, by night as by day, where eight thousand men already worked in shifts for the coming defense of the country. Ames Lanning wasn’t so vain as Julius Caesar; but could be as sore at home.
“Thank you, Kate!” he said.
She muttered, “Oh, well — —” returned to the piano-bench, sat, lifted her hands to the keys, thought better of it and turned to face him again. “See here, I’m not trying to influence you in any way at all. I don’t want to. I talk too much. Just forget it.”
Nobody so easily forgets one of those instructions not to be ten years old. Ames, applying self-control, spoke quietly. “You say you’re not trying to influence me. On the contrary, you’re doing your best to make me think that Laila Speer was responsible for what Tuke did to her to-night.”
“Think what you like,” Kate said. “She was!”
“This is unbelievable!” he cried. “As if I hadn’t the evidence of my eyes and ears! I declare I don’t understand it. I’m damned if I do! Here you see a woman all gay and good and kind and affectionate go up to her husband and stroke his head — —”
“Yes,” Kate said, and once more talked too much. “If you care to know it, Ames, that was precisely the most devilish thing of all she did to him.”
“Good God!” Ames thrust clenched fists into the pockets of his dinner-jacket. “I’m damned if I ever heard such female poppycock! Why, I thought Laila Speer was a friend of yours! I thought you —— Why’d you wait all this time to show how you hate her?”
“I do not hate her.” Kate spoke clearly.
“You don’t? Why, of course you do; there’s plain evidence. Women! Ordinarily you’re big-hearted and generous and your hand is out to anybody; you wear your feet and fingers off working for charities, and yet just let an unhappy wife that we’ve both always considered one of our most cherished friends — let her get slapped in the face before us all by her drinking husband, and you jump on her as if she were your bitterest enemy! On top of that you try to make me think about her and hate her as you do. Well, I don’t fall for it; understand that, Kate — I don’t! I’m damned if I — —” He brought his hands from his pockets, slapped them together, and said, “Oh, here! This won’t do. If we can’t talk about it without quarreling we’d better not talk about it.”
“I agree,” Kate said sharply.
“Very well!” Ames was sad. “I’ll never try to discuss it with you again. I’d better get out of here. Goodnight.”
Kate began to play again as she heard him stalking down the hall toward his library. He didn’t go in there, however; the sight of the desk-lamp and the chair where Laila’d sat and wept seemed to reproach him for listening to slander of her. He’d turned away, had gone upstairs and was in his own bedroom before he remembered, with a considerable shock, something that his pain and anger had temporarily banished from his mind. “Oh hell!” he said; and, with one arm out of his coat, he stood staring at an etching of the small factory building in which Henry L. Roe had begun the subsequently vast projection of the Roe Metal Products Corporation. “Oh hell!” He hadn’t told Kate about kissing Laila.
He slid his arm back into the sleeve of his coat, stood for a moment in doubt; then removed the garment because he felt that to go downstairs and again try to tell her wouldn’t look well. Besides, it’d probably only prompt her (in spite of their having dropped the subject forever) to talk some more in that inexplicably slurring way about Laila — Laila, a mistreated, delicious, pitiable, beautiful woman who’d already been insulted in his house enough for one night.
Indignant again, he went to bed; and the comedy began to be serious.
At her piano, Kate Lanning was presently aware that Celia, in wrapper and slippers, had come so softly into the room as to be unheard, and, seated upon a sofa, was applying a towel to her moist hair. Kate stopped playing, looked at the pale girl, and asked, “Did you change everything?”
“Yes, of course. I was pretty wet. I’d have let them drive me in if I’d noticed how hard it was raining.”
“You didn’t notice that?” Kate shook her head. “I’m afraid you had found the party pretty sour!”
“I see what you mean,” Celia said. “Miley’s not being there. That pig! Oh, yes, he is! They told me they’d actually asked him to come and he said he had some work to do he couldn’t let go. Sunday evening! Trying to make me think he wouldn’t come because his presence would of course be distasteful to me after our row this morning. Hypocrite! But no, Kate, that wasn’t the reason I didn’t notice the rain; I was just too tired.”
“Yes; you look it. What’s really the matter?”
“Why, nothing! Can’t a person get tired sometimes without being cross-examined? What went on here to-night, Kate?”
“What makes you think anything special did, Celia?”
“Why — oh, I don’t know. They went home rather early, didn’t they? Then when I came in I thought it looked as though you and Father had been talking about something uncomfortable maybe. Were you?”
Kate made an impatient gesture. “I’m provoked with myself; I’ve just been treating him like the devil! What’s worse, I’ve probably made him think I was trying to boss him again. Not I! I’ve come to agree with the lady from Ohio who said that the only thing we can do about men is to let them do whatever they want to and then nurse ’em when it makes ’em sick.”
Bending over, Celia rubbed her head and spoke through the towel. “But what brought it on? Did something go wrong at the supper — or happen afterward?”
“It happened all evening, Celia, and finished in something sensationally disagreeable. Then your father began a post-mortem on it and I was mean to him and upset his temper. That’s all.”
“All?” Celia said. “Was it — was it anything about Laila Speer?”
“Of course.”
“She’s wicked!” Celia leaned back, let the towel drop upon the arm of the chair. “If you want to know what I think, she’s a darn dangerous woman.”
“She’s not wicked.” Kate shook her head. “Give her what she wants and Laila’ll be as good and happy as a pleased child at Christmas.”
“Yes, Kate; probably so would Hitler if you gave him the earth.”
“Don’t get to hating Laila,” Kate said. “When you hate people you forget they’re human beings and so you go wrong about ’em. She’s a wonderful lacemaker and sells yards of it for the Refugee Aid Society; she’s one of the best workers it’s got. She wouldn’t hurt anybody or anything except to get what she wants, and then she doesn’t do it in cold blood or because she gets any pleasure out of hurting people. I’ve known her to do all sorts of kind things, Celia. She’s just a person who follows her natural promptings.”
“Yes — like an animal!” Celia cried. “I hate her and I tell you she’s dangerous. What was it she did to-night?”
“Goaded Tuke till he couldn’t stand it and broke out before everybody.”
“But how?” Celia pressed her. “How’d she goad him? Was it anything she did about — about Father?”
Kate spoke negligently. “Yes, naturally it was. You know. You’ve been calling it molasses, haven’t you?”
“Did Tuke threaten Father, Kate?”
“Gracious, no, nothing like that, child!” Kate laughed, for Celia’s eyes, fixed upon her, were large and frightened. “Don’t be so disturbed. Tuke just spoke out roughly to her and she got pathetically hurt, of course, and had to be helped out of the room.”
“By Father?” Celia said. “Yes, of course; that’s a safe bet. What happened then, Kate?”
“Why, nothing. Ames took her into the library, where they were chaperoned by Bill Jones, and — —”
“Bill?” Celia spoke impulsively. “Bill? I didn’t — —”
“You didn’t what?”
“I didn’t imagine she’d want Bill there,” Celia said.
“Maybe she didn’t; but I don’t suppose he was a great deterrent. I’d put him on a couch in the alcove where it was dark; but he must have been awake because your father said he spoke to them. I’m sure even Bill didn’t stop Laila from weeping prettily and making poor Ames into a satisfactorily tender champion. It doesn’t need much imagination to know just about what she’d do under the circumstances, does it?”
“No!” Celia said with vehemence and sat straight, staring at her stepmother. “No, it doesn’t. It may need a little more, though, to know what Tuke’ll do about it. What did he — —”
“Tuke? He went home, Celia. After he’d spoken as he did to her he didn’t look at anybody, not a glance; he just strode out, got his hat and coat and went home.”
“What makes you think he went home?”
“What? Why, where else would he go? It was raining. Look at you when you came in. You don’t mean he was hanging about the house, waiting outside, do you? You didn’t see him when you came in, did you?”
“No, no. When I came in I was all wet and hurrying and didn’t see anything.”
“Then what’s the matter?” Kate leaned forward. “Don’t look so worried.”
