Delphi Complete Works of Booth Tarkington (Illustrated), page 687
“No; I believe not.”
“Is that all I can get you to say to me?”
“Yes, Kate. Good-bye.”
She went to her own room, wrote a letter to Laila, and, having finished it and read it over twice, made a confetti shower of it for her wastebasket. “Trying to reach that mind!” she thought. “Am I hysterical — struggling to be square and put truth into such a mind when it’s frantic with disappointment, cursing amid the wreckage of its delusions? I see it can’t be done; but trying has at least satisfied my womanly honor.” Toward sunset she was carefully writing another letter, not this time to Laila, when she was interrupted by Celia, excitedly gloomy.
“Kate, here’s a little more simple hell for Father; they’ll break his back. I’ve just taken a call from him and he says he won’t be home to-night or to-morrow or to-morrow night, either — not till Sunday morning. He’s had a cot put in his office at Roeville and he wants a bag packed and sent to him. I’ve got Miley coming as soon as he’s off and he and I’ll drive up to Roeville with it.”
“Yes, Celia. Is it trouble with the union, did he say?”
“Between two unions, he said, Kate. Told me Mr. Roe and Sam Augren have been up there all day, too, but are on their way home, because Mr. Roe’s practically frantic and knew, himself, he wasn’t doing any good. Father thinks he’ll be able to talk the squad of labor leaders up there to death if he can keep ’em awake long enough.”
Kate smiled feebly. “He was able to joke about it?”
“With his words only,” Celia explained. “His voice didn’t sound particularly jestful. How about that bag?”
Kate packed it, and, having watched its hustled departure, returned to her letter. This one she didn’t destroy and it was handed to Tuke Speer the next day, Saturday, at noon, by an apologetic Miley Stuart. “I hope you’ll excuse me for bothering you, sir,” the young Southerner said, “but Mrs. Lanning asked me to let her know if you thought there’d be an answer. If you don’t mind I’ll just sit around till you’ve read it.”
“All right, sit around.” Tuke read the letter, put it in his pocket, said, “Tell her yes”; and, at a little after five in the afternoon, walked into the Lannings’ living-room where Kate awaited him.
“It’s no good,” he said. “All the talk in the world isn’t going to change anything; but when you put it on the ground of old friendship and that your life’s as much involved as anybody’s, I couldn’t keep on saying I wouldn’t even listen to you. You’ve got a right to talk to me if you want to, I guess; but your own intelligence ought to’ve informed you by this time that you can’t accomplish anything by it. Go ahead, though.”
They hadn’t shaken hands but stood looking at each other. “You won’t sit down, Tuke, to listen?”
“Oh, certainly, certainly!”
They sat, facing each other, and, after a moment of scrutiny, she said compassionately, “You ought to take some vitamins, Tuke.”
He didn’t laugh — apparently he hadn’t been amused for a long time and never would laugh again — but he made a rusty sound that was like a dried bone of laughter. “You don’t need any, yourself, I see. You’re as pretty as ever and as healthy-looking. The more luck for you — that you’re not a real worrier. The people that don’t worry about things are those that don’t care. You’re supposed to do the talking, though, not I. Get going, why don’t you?” Then, as she only sat, thoughtful, he added, “By the way, since you think I need vitamins, you haven’t advised me to stop drinking. Why don’t you?”
“Because I think you already have, Tuke.”
“What? You don’t think I was drunk the night I asked my wife if she was?”
“No, I knew you weren’t.”
“You did? Curious; but you’re right. I cut it all out for good months ago, longer than anybody’s noticed. I got the idea I’d like to die sober. Get ahead with it now. I’m listening.”
“No, you aren’t,” Kate said. “You aren’t, because you’re in a state of terrific emotion and a person in that state can’t listen, because listening has to be done with the mind. How am I going to reach that part of you?”
“I don’t know, Kate; that’s your headache.”
“Yes, I know,” she said. “Poor old fellow, you’ve been suffering so long and so hard that sometimes you wonder if you have any mind left. Your work at Plant Three ought to be the answer to that, though; nobody there doubts that your mind’s still operating, Tuke Speer. Your work hasn’t suffered.”
“Automatic, Kate, automatic — and a hell of a lot anybody in that set-up cares or even notices whether my work suffers or not.” Tuke flushed, as an old soreness burned within him. “After I’d been there a year and a half I’d caught up with Sam Augren and we were running even. Look where Sam is now and where I’m not! I know more about Roe Metal Products in a minute than he does in an hour. How I do run on! Reminds me of the way I used to brag to you in Mrs. Cunningham’s library about how high I was going to go in the business. Well, here I am bragging again about how really good I am, all appearances much to the contrary! Frustration, what? Think it’s just my vanity talking?”
“No, Tuke.”
“They’ve passed me over,” Tuke said, still flushed, “how many times in these last years? I used to think maybe it was most likely because on top of being red-headed I got to be skinny-looking a good while ago and quit being talky. Besides that, I’m nobody’s back-slapper. No, don’t give me that wise look of yours, Kate. I know well enough it’s been partly because they thought I took too many drinks now and then; but I wouldn’t ‘a’ been taking those drinks if they’d ever given me a chance — and of course if my damned home life had been different. Want to hear me beef some more?”
“You don’t need to, not to me, Tuke; I’d do it for you. I knew something about the business when I was in Mr. Roe’s office, you might remember.”
“What’s the use?” Tuke said. “It’s all over. I’ve been fixing things to get out and I’ve handed in my resignation. Put it in a note of less than twenty words Thursday night, mailed it to old man Roe yesterday; he certainly has it by to-day. Surprise you?”
“No, not any, Tuke. What are you going to do?”
“How the hell do I know?” His straight gaze at her seemed to glitter for an instant. “I’m not living much in the future these days; I don’t know that there’ll be any. A reason for my resignation right now’s pretty plain to you, though, isn’t it? I just thought I’d beat your husband to it and that I wouldn’t give my wife and him the pleasure of throwing me out. See?”
Kate looked at him calmly. “My husband wouldn’t do that.”
“Oh, he wouldn’t?” Tuke’s dry bone of laughter was heard again. “She spent a good part of the afternoon day before yesterday in his private office. That jolt you any?”
“No, Tuke; I know she did.”
“You do? Not from him I’ll swear.”
“No, he didn’t tell me.”
“I thought not,” Tuke said. “What do you suppose they talked about?”
Kate smiled. “About almost anything that people can talk about in public, Tuke. You’ve been in that office, haven’t you? It’s about as private as an excursion train to Niagara Falls.”
“You don’t know Laila,” Tuke said. “I’m surprised; I rather thought you did — at least that much. She can make any place private, if there’s a man there she’s taken a fancy to.” At this, Kate’s gaze drooped; he saw the wince and continued: “Yes, I see you get it. That same morning she’d faked my striking her, put on a screeching act before our two servants. Gives her away, doesn’t it? — she’ll sue for divorce pretty soon. She went to him for further planning. What’d be the step they’d take first? Me summarily discharged, therefore discredited. Broke, too. That’d be their idea, wouldn’t it?”
Kate, looking up again, shook her head slowly. “I know your wife better than you know my husband. She’s furious with you, and Ames is an old friend. She probably relies more on his judgment than on anybody else’s; naturally she’d ask him for advice — yes, sympathetic advice — but if she was so raging with you that she’d ask him to put you out of the business — Tuke, she’d merely horrify him. Nothing on earth could make him do a thing like that.”
“Nothing but Laila, I’m willing to admit,” Tuke said. “Women like you think they understand men; but there are some things about ’em they can’t. You’re worth ten thousand of Laila; you’re that much more intelligent than she and in your way you’re even about as good-looking as she is; but Laila was born, I swear, knowing one thing completely out of your field of understanding — and that’s how to get men insane about her and keep ’em that way. There isn’t a man in the world you could hold, Kate Lanning, if she decided she wanted him.”
Kate spoke gently. “Poor Tuke!”
“Meaning I’m witch-ridden?” Tuke said. “Maybe; but she’d take any man from you like rolling off a log. For one thing, you wouldn’t do what she would; you couldn’t. You’re proud and if you saw him sliding away you wouldn’t lift a finger to keep him.”
“No.” Kate inclined her head. “Not just to keep him.”
“You think she hasn’t got him?” Tuke said. “She took him away from you once, you know.”
“No, she didn’t. I didn’t have him then, Tuke.”
“What! Why, you worked for him night and day. You kept house for him. You took care of his child. You did nothing else but plan and work for him. You made him completely dependent upon you, whether he knew it or not; and yet Laila only gave him a look or two and a pat on the sleeve and she had him! Well, maybe he’s still dependent on you, whether he knows it or not; but do you think she couldn’t do it again? Couldn’t? She has.”
“No. She couldn’t and she hasn’t!”
“No?” Tuke said. “I’ll settle that for you. I’ll tell you what I saw. A while ago we spoke of my asking her, before the crowd here, if she was drunk. Hardly more than ten minutes after that I saw — —”
Kate interrupted him. “Oh, yes!” she said serenely. “I know all about it, Tuke, I know what you saw.”
“You do? Celia told you?”
“Practically; but anybody’d have known what was bound to happen,” Kate said, and smiled again. “Anybody’d know almost exactly what Laila’d do — yes, and what Ames would of course do — under the circumstances.”
Tuke didn’t understand. “God, but you take it coolly! Yes, I suppose you’re right, saying anybody’d know what they’d do. After all the cooing at each other and arm-grabbing and shoulder-pushing every time we saw ’em together for months, even I ought to’ve known what I’d see as soon as they thought they were alone! I didn’t know, though — up to then I only suspected — and since then I’ve been walking round with red inside my skull as well as on top of it. You wouldn’t know!”
“I wouldn’t know how you hate my husband?”
“Hate him?” Tuke didn’t make a gesture; he sat motionless and his voice was quiet. “I remember the day I loved that man. Thursday night I went into Frederic’s restaurant, and he was there. I knew that if I looked at him I’d do something crazy; I was afraid I would anyhow. If young Stuart hadn’t happened to barge in, chattering and skipping about between us, I think I would have. Hate him? Yes.”
Kate now didn’t look so healthy as he’d said she did. “You aren’t exactly an assassin, Tuke. Ames could have looked after himself pretty well. All you’d have done was make a brawl.”
“Maybe,” Tuke said. “Even that’d have been enough, wouldn’t it? — if it got into the papers or old Roe heard of it and what it was about? It might happen yet — any time. I couldn’t answer for myself under certain circumstances.”
“Couldn’t you? I could.”
“Think you know me better than I know myself? Old stuff, Kate Fennigate!”
The two were looking at each other steadily. “What are you and I doing, Tuke?” Kate asked. “Are we having a sort of duel? It mustn’t be like this.” She rose, went to a table, took up a silver box, opened it and offered it to him. “These cigarettes are Celia’s. Won’t you light one?”
“No, thank you.”
“Not even Celia’s?”
“No.”
XLIII
KATE RETURNED TO sit in the chair that faced his. “So far we’ve got nowhere, have we?” she asked.
“Yes, and nowhere’s where we’ll stay, Kate.”
“That’d be a pity,” she said, “because you’ve dug up a good part of your misery out of yourself, Tuke — out of a jealous man’s imaginings.”
“I didn’t imagine what I saw, did I? I didn’t imagine their kissings and murmurings of ‘dearest’ and ‘darling’ and ‘love’ with their arms about each other, did I? When two people do that as soon as they think they’re alone together, it doesn’t need much imagination to understand what it means, does it?”
The determined woman facing him didn’t look sickened; she smiled. “Thanks. Thanks for that!” she cried, and leaned toward him. “Thanks because it makes your condition so clear. No, you didn’t imagine what you saw. Yes, you did imagine what it meant — because it didn’t mean anything, Tuke.”
“What? Have you actually slicked yourself into believing — —”
“Wait!” she exclaimed. “You said they thought they were alone together. They couldn’t have thought anything of the kind. You saw the open door just beyond them, didn’t you? — yes, and the very window you looked through, with the shade up and the light upon them! You saw Bill Jones, didn’t you? Why, he talked to them! You saw Celia, didn’t you? Anybody could have passed that door or come in at any moment, and can you imagine their not realizing that? What’s more, they weren’t doing anything that any other two people in the same position wouldn’t have done. Nothing, I tell you!”
“You’re his wife and you call it nothing?”
“Certainly! Laila had deviled you all evening; but there were only three people who knew that — you and she and I. Then, you poor thing, you let her get you, and, even though she’d asked for it, it threw her into a state of emotion, and any man will comfort and pet a woman when she’s like that. Think of this: Haven’t you ever had a weeping woman throw herself into your arms before the funeral when you’ve had a friend die? Women do that, I tell you. Nobody was dead; but Laila wanted some man to say he loved her enough to stand by her. When she went to his office it was probably about how she persuades herself you’ve been treating her. Ames has always been fond of her and — —”
“ ’Fond’!”
Kate drew a deep breath; she saw she hadn’t shaken him. “You’ve been letting it eat into you a long, long time, haven’t you?” she asked.
“Yes, a long, long time — ever since my wife began to go out for him.”
“Naturally she did!” Kate spoke urgently. “That wasn’t to her discredit, was it?”
Tuke frowned; this puzzled him. “I didn’t know you were so liberal. I was under the impression you believed in marriage’s being respected.”
“Yes, Tuke; but many an attractive wife has been thought rather clever and not undutiful for making up to her husband’s boss. It’s been thought to have advantages. Don’t you realize it’s supposed to be an entirely innocent way of helping on the husband’s preferment?”
Tuke’s expression seemed to show a bony kind of pity. “Has it helped my ‘preferment’? No wonder you haven’t got any lines in your face; you can kid yourself into believing anything. So it’s all been on my account, has it? — just to get him to give her beloved husband a better salary that hasn’t happened?”
“No, Tuke; I didn’t say all on your account — not all — but if a husband gets jealous when his wife’s making up to the Boss she’ll naturally think herself insulted and behave like the devil, especially if she wants to get her husband a bigger salary on her own account as well as his.”
“ ’As well as his’!” Tuke echoed. “I wonder that didn’t choke you, Kate!”
“No!” Kate wasn’t baffled. “You know what Laila wants, the things she has a passion for. Why haven’t you given her these things, Tuke?”
He’d slumped a little in his chair; but at this he sat straight. “What the hell do you mean? What with?”
“I’m only trying to show you,” Kate said. “If you had given her the things she wants she’d have been kinder to you, wouldn’t she?”
“Kinder? She’d have sweetied all over me. My God, you don’t suppose I know her too little to understand that if I were in your husband’s place and he in mine, I’d be the one? What Laila wants, her life blood — clothes, clothes, clothes, jewels and jewels, shiny cars, head waiters and the damn society column, other fool women yearning and rubbering and their husbands cackling, ‘Hi, Beautiful!’ Spill those over her, she’ll be in heaven and love you to death. You and I both know that, and what the hell’s it got to do with anything?”
The gaze of Kate’s brown eyes became even more piercing than compassionate. “But if you could spill those things over her, you still would, anyhow, would you, Tuke?”
“I would, God help me, I would!” Tuke’s voice for the first time had violence. “I would; I couldn’t help it and I wouldn’t even want to help it. Call me any kind of crazy fool you like; but don’t try to understand it. People like you couldn’t possibly. Laila’s over there at the house now, locked in her room and brooding on how to get rid of me, dig me so deep into the gutter that I can never reach high enough to harm her or the new husband she’s planning for; but if I had a diamond mine I’d use it to buy her and keep her bought!” With this, the passion that shook him seemed to pass; he spoke quietly again. “You’ve let yourself in for this, Kate. If you don’t like the exhibition — —”
“Wait,” she said. “How long has Laila kept herself locked in her room?”
“This time? Since night before last, after she’d been— ‘for advice’! — to your husband.”
“Does she know you’ve resigned?”
“Yes, she had that information from me last night — through the locked door. I wanted her to know that I was beating her and Ames to it. Well, anything more? I suppose what you really got me here for’s to find out what I’m going to do, isn’t it?”
