Delphi Complete Works of Booth Tarkington (Illustrated), page 682
“I’ve got such a lot to say in a hurry, dearest,” the voice said, and Ames pressed the instrument closer against his ear. “It’s been such ages since Sunday night! Has it seemed that way to you too, sweet? I’ve been through —— But first I must have you tell me just one thing. You did tell me Sunday night — oh, so darlingly! — but I must hear it again before anything else. Say it, Ames; say it!”
“Ah — —” Ames coughed. “I — I think perhaps you’d better — —”
“Nobody’d be listening in on this line, would they?” Laila asked quickly.
“No, but — —”
“I understand,” she said. “There’s somebody besides you in your office. I see. I’ll have to take it for granted that you’re saying what I want to hear, won’t I?” She laughed fondly. “Don’t worry; I know it anyhow. I know you do. I’ll have to do all the talking, won’t I?”
“Yes, I — I believe so; but — —”
“I see,” Laila repeated, and went on rapidly, “I’m in a public station ‘way uptown. I wouldn’t have dared at home because I’ve a very strong suspicion he’s bribed both our old fat cook and the colored housemaid to watch me. I wouldn’t be surprised if he has somebody following me right now. These days are simple hell, Ames; I couldn’t live through them except for thinking of you. He hasn’t spoken a word to me since Sunday night nor I to him; but his eyes — oh, it’s horrible, darling! If it weren’t for the precious thrilling beautiful thought of you — —”
“Just a second,” Ames contrived to say, as she paused for a gasping breath. “Could you — could you call me again in about — —”
“No, I can’t,” Laila said. “I’m afraid to try it again. I’ll have to pour it all out now. Dearest, I just had to warn you — —”
“To what?”
“To warn you, darling. We’ve got to be oh, so careful, Ames, so careful! Dear heart, I’d come straight to you if it weren’t for that. You’re so open and frank and unsuspicious you’d never think of these things; but a woman has to. You see, if he thinks he’s got anything on us — well, you know what he could do. It mustn’t be that way, Ames. You and I can’t let it be that way. We’ve got to be right and have everybody feeling that we’re in the clear and that if anybody’s wrong it’s not us but they. The danger is he may have something, Ames. He may! Have you found out who that woman was?”
“No, I — no, I haven’t.”
“We must, we must!” Laila said. “We don’t know what use he might make of it. Then there was Bill, too; it could be awful! Darling, you’ll keep on trying to find out who the woman was, won’t you?”
“Just a second,” Ames said. “I’m afraid I — —”
“No, wait,” Laila broke in. “I mayn’t have another chance. We’ve got to have a little patience. You mustn’t try to see me and don’t call me on the telephone, whatever you do. I’ve been afraid you’d get so impatient you might. You see, with the servants listening we don’t know what might happen. We must just wait till a really safe chance. We’ve got to go on pretending, a while longer anyhow, as if Sunday night hadn’t happened. Now just tell me the one thing I want to hear again. If somebody’s listening they won’t understand just one little word. Darling, darling, you meant it, didn’t you?”
Something within Ames urged him powerfully to say nothing; but he didn’t see how to heed it. “Of course I — —” he began, with an impractical intention of going on in a business tone to explain what couldn’t very well be explained at the moment — if at all.
“Ah, darling!” Laila said. “If I could tell you what it means to hear you say it in that big manly voice of yours! That’s what I really needed, and now I’d better run home again. Thank you, thank you! Sweetheart, good-bye!”
Ames returned the instrument to its prongs and hoped that his attention didn’t seem to wander wildly when Mr. Roe resumed the subject of the New York appointment. The old man talked of it botheredly a while; then rose and said, “Well, I’ll be on my way. We don’t seem to get anywhere with it and I can see you’ve got a lot of other things on your mind. Don’t work too hard, my boy. Follow my example and put your difficulties on other people’s shoulders. Give my love to Kate and Celia, won’t you? Remarkable woman, Kate, remarkable! Don’t forget to give her my best.”
Ames said that indeed he’d remember; and, left alone, wiped his forehead, looked at the telephonic instrument fixedly, then wiped his forehead again. “Don’t ever do that any more!” may have been the essence of the thought he addressed to the telephone, when he’d recovered a sufficient equilibrium.
Laila seemed to feel that the episode of Sunday evening had somehow been much more decisive than he’d thought it; he must have appeared more ardent — much more — than he’d realized. Anyhow, there couldn’t be any doubt now that she was in love with him — quite a great deal in love with him, in fact — and took it for granted that he reciprocated. That wouldn’t do. He’d have to explain things to her, of course. As soon as they’d happen to be alone together again, with time enough, he’d have to put everything between them on a proper footing. Tuke was already jealous of him, she’d said, and this particularly wouldn’t do. Somehow Tuke would have to be shown — truthfully shown — that he had no real cause whatever for such a feeling. Ames could use eloquence when it was necessary, he knew, and, as soon as there arrived a good chance to talk to Laila, couldn’t he make her see that both their lives might be enriched by a new and fine relationship, one that Tuke wouldn’t mind?
It could consist of mutual devotion, sympathy and the shared sense of inner companionship. There’d be a secret kind of bond between them, better not mentioned often even by themselves; and yet, were it known and fully comprehended, it would merit no just reproach from anybody. A twilight talk with Laila now and then, when they could be quietly together, might be both relaxing and inspiring. She was easy to be with, could be a man’s friend without putting pressures upon him or being forever quoted by Mr. Roe as if her opinions were the best available and usually necessary for the settlement of important questions. A carefully rare half hour with Laila, when a hard day’s work was done, would be rewarding for a man who admitted to himself, as Ames straightforwardly did, that what he really needed from a woman sometimes wasn’t advice and control but a little unqualified admiration. Call it flattery if you insist; but no man was wholly without vanity and Laila didn’t stick pins into his. Yes, a quiet twilight with her at cautious intervals, so that of course nobody could possibly misinterpret or start talk ——
If Ames’s daughter and his wife had been invisibly present as he pursued this inviting thought, Celia could easily have proved by his expression that his seventeen-year-old boyishness had by no means departed out of him. One look, and Kate would have yielded the point. He was certain he’d found the best and pleasantest solution of his embarrassing but not disagreeable problem. That is, he was certain for some moments — until his gaze wandered from the telephone to the chair where Henry L. Roe had sat, and from the chair to the window that revealed the long chimneys of Plant Three, distant in the haze. Closer, in the haze of Ames Lanning’s mind, faces pressed: Tuke Speer’s and Henry L. Roe’s — yes, and Kate’s. They didn’t appear to give his proposed understanding with Laila their blessing or even to believe that he believed in it.
Ames’s gaze, returning to the telephone, seemed to regard the instrument as unreassuring.
XXXVI
AMES’S DAUGHTER, AT the same moment but at home, was also personifying an identically shaped small black mechanism. In the wide hall upstairs she sat before the table upon which it rested, stared at it angrily, extended her left hand to lift it and her right forefinger as if to operate the dial. Then she let both hands drop in her lap and applied to the telephone her favorite insult. “Pig!”
Kate, coming upstairs after seeing the last members of a Red Cross committee out of the house, overheard the stepdaughter’s exclamation, and remonstrated. “Think that’s fair to him, Celia? Just because he was cross over poor Marvin and didn’t come in to lunch last Sunday?”
“You’re on the wrong horse,” Celia said. “You don’t suppose I’d be goof enough to call that bird up, do you?”
“Pig-bird?” Kate said. “Calling up the poor creature might be a friendly thing to do, though, mightn’t it? You haven’t seen him since Sunday noon, I believe — three days, the longest absence since we came back to town, isn’t it? He might be sick, so naturally you’d want to know — —”
“Don’t be a brat!” Celia looked up resentfully. “He can be as sick as he likes, I wouldn’t send the doctor! Besides, except for a permanently lame shoulder he got from another mule he had trouble with Down South, he’s so husky I don’t believe he could manage to be sick. My calling him a pig just now didn’t have anything to do with him.”
“It didn’t, Celia? Odd!”
“No, it isn’t. I told you I wasn’t going to call him up, didn’t I? I was thinking of calling Mr. Augren; then, just as I was about to do it, I had a thought and didn’t. The reason I didn’t was because that pig would be sure to think the wrong thing if I did and so I called him what he is.”
“I see,” Kate said. “Clear as day. You were going to ask Mr. Augren to tell Miley you didn’t mean it, so he could come here again, all’s forgiven.”
Celia declined to smile. “I was going to call Mr. Augren to ask him for a Defense job in Roe Metal Products. The reason I didn’t was because suppose he put me in Plant Three, why, that’s where Miley is and no matter what you say about his modesty, of course he’d think I did it because he was staying away and I couldn’t bear it. What’s riding you?”
This inquiry was caused by the seriousness with which Kate had begun to regard her. “Celia, you haven’t been yourself since Sunday and you haven’t looked like yourself, either. Why have you suddenly decided you want a job?”
“What could be more reasonable?” Celia cried. “I’m tired of rolling bandages and tending benefit sales counters and just sitting knitting. Look at Roe Metal Products’ Defense contracts; I’d like to be a dollar-a-year girl or anything they want.”
“No,” Kate said. “That isn’t it — anyhow, not all of it. What’s the rest of it?”
“There isn’t any rest of it!” Celia was petulant. “Why all the fuss because a girl wants to go to work? You had a job yourself, didn’t you? — yes, and in Roe Metal Products, at that. You were working there when you and Father got engaged, weren’t you?”
“Yes.” Kate turned from her and looked thoughtfully at the long blue rug that covered most of the corridor floor. She sighed and then spoke abruptly with what seemed a melancholy impulse. “It might be just as well if I hadn’t.”
Celia jumped up from her seat before the telephone table. She put her hand on Kate’s arm. “Why would it have been just as well if you hadn’t? You mean something about the trouble between you and Father. Why not tell me?”
“Oh, well — —” Kate said. “When I was there I was most of the time in Mr. Roe’s own office and I suppose I did quite a little absorbing. We might be happier now if I hadn’t.”
“Why, Kate?”
“Made me think I know too much,” Kate answered. “Besides that, my father was a lawyer, you know, and I’d learned from him a little of what’s useful in setting out cases before a judge and jury. I’m afraid I went to work on Ames with my father’s ways in mind. I suppose even before we were married I did some hinting and — —”
“What!” Celia cried. “You don’t mean you imagine Father blames you for that, do you?”
“No, not blames, Celia. It’s a little hard to make you see; but there’s a long list of my advisings and managings.” Kate patted the hand that rested sympathetically upon her arm. “Let’s get back to you. Why do you want to get into Roe Metal Products, Celia?”
“No, you listen to me!” Celia said. “You’ve been sore at Father for months, so you won’t do anything. If harm comes of it, it’ll be your fault!”
“Yes,” Kate said gently. “That’s natural. You’re his daughter, so you’d say that.”
“Don’t waste my time!” Celia was vehement. “I love you both, and you know it; but you’re mad at Father just because he’s a simple human he-husband.”
“No, Celia. I’m trying to do what he wants.”
“Yes, not what he needs!” Celia cried. “You’ve implied he’s nourished rancor because of your ‘advisings and managings’. Well, why wouldn’t he? How’d it look to him? He’s always had sense enough to do what you said and it helped him; but it looked as if you wanted to change him and didn’t admire him the way he was. That wounded him as a lover, Kate. Lovers, both sexes, have got to be wholly admired or they’re hurt, aren’t they? Advice may help; but it hurts, too, because telling a person to change himself is really criticism, and the last person on earth a man can stand to be criticized by is the woman he’s in love with. Maybe you’ve never understood that.”
Kate was grave. “Maybe I haven’t.”
“No,” Celia said. “I don’t think you have; and yet you’re hurt with Father because he was hurt. Hurt means rancor, and you’ve let the two rancors come between you — and that’s all there is to it, except that you’ve got to do something.”
“Have I? What?”
“You know what!” Celia cried. “Don’t tell me you don’t, because you’re the shrewdest woman I know — and yet you choose to be a sorehead, letting your marriage go to pot rather than save it.” The girl drew her arms about her stepmother and kissed her. “All right, darling, fold your hands, mope and nurse your wrath, and then, if anything happens to Father, just sit and cry. Don’t ask me to follow your example, though. I’ll do what little I can. Good-bye!” Celia ran to the head of the stairway, turned there to shout, “You’ll be sorry!” and descended rapidly out of Kate’s sight.
The stepmother, startled, stood wondering acutely; then she went to the triple window at the end of the corridor and looked down upon the lawn and driveway. Celia’s car crunched brown gravel determinedly, passed between the stone gateposts and turned southward.
“She did see something!” Kate said. “She won’t tell me because she’s a good sport — and I’m his wife.”
This, half-whispered, formed a connection with another thought, a suspicion of the reason why Tuke Speer’s face brought panic into her stepdaughter’s imaginings. Kate went downstairs, walked slowly along the broad hallway and paused before the open door of her husband’s library. As she looked in, she couldn’t see the alcove at the other end of the long room; but, in her mental picturing, the foreground near the desk was occupied by two figures, a man’s and a woman’s standing close together — very likely in a consolatory embrace. Across the room, slightly out of line with her and the two shadow figures, was a window, open and with the shade up for air. Beyond the window she could see the lawn and shrubberies beside the house, wanly bright in the autumnal sunshine and only a little dimmed by the intersecting wires of the fly-screen. In her mind’s eye Kate darkened that scene, put a drizzly night outside and no strong illumination within the room — for, yes, Laila would have asked him at once to turn out the upper lights. That would have left the desk-lamp only, and by its feebler rays could a face outside the window have been seen through the wire screen? Could such a face have been seen and recognized from where she stood?
She tried passing and re-passing the open doorway, glancing within as she walked. “Yes,” she thought, “it might. Just barely it might.” Then, being as Henry L. Roe defined her a remarkable woman, she began to behave in a remarkable way.
She went into the room, sat in the easy-chair by the desk, looked upward as if to a manly bending figure. After a moment she rose with extended arms enfolding, and whispered, “Ames, darling, darling, you’re such a comfort to me!” Then she glanced at the open doorway and looked frightened, her eyes swept to the distant alcove and she uttered a sound, part gasp, part sob and part laugh. “Yes, Bill was there, too!” she said, on this note of rueful mirth. Why had so experienced a hand as Laila taken such chances? Of course because she didn’t care; she thought that Ames would be committed to her the more if someone saw and heard. Had Laila thought of the ominous window, though? Had she seen the face that Celia must have seen there? No. If Laila had seen that face she’d not have been so suave as she was when she joined the departing guests.
The window, now, to Kate’s gaze, seemed to frame the climax of a long tragedy grown at last too keen for bearing. “Poor soul! Poor Tuke!” she said finally, and drooped down into the chair again to sit thinking of the truth that lay within the most easily prattled of all the quotations from William Shakespeare: “What fools these mortals be!” She included herself passionately.
Celia, meanwhile, drove down through the town, set grimly upon a course of inconsistency. She reached a parking-space beside the shorter wing of Plant Three at ten minutes before five, maneuvered her car until it was directly behind another, a rather shabby one familiar to her, and then sat gazing toward the nearest entrance to the huge building some two hundred feet distant. At five the exodus from the offices began — girls, youths, neat “white-collar workers” of all ages. Some hurried, some dawdled, chatting, and many went toward a line of waiting ‘buses on the boulevard beyond the lot; but most dispersed themselves among the stagnant automobiles, set them in motion, backed and buzzed, jerked forward and away, until finally the open spaces were broad and only a few cars remained. The last of all was the one just before Celia’s, the “used car” Miley Stuart had thought himself entitled to buy after his first two months in the great factory.
It was twenty minutes after five when he appeared, walking slowly and absently but engaged in a cogitation more cheerful than otherwise, Celia fiercely thought. He was beside his car before he saw her and then he was startled enough to make the rounding of his eyes a tribute to anybody who caused it. He didn’t leap forward, but was as swiftly beside the door she opened for him.
