Delphi Complete Works of Booth Tarkington (Illustrated), page 693
If he was at all astonished, as she seemed to expect, his expression gave no sign of it. He looked only the more rueful. “No. You only prove what I already knew — that you were always the Guardian Angel. It’s your nature to prevent calamity and to take hold of things and straighten them out and develop them, so I don’t know whether what you’ve done with me and for me’s been done because it was your nature or for a reason I’d like better.”
“What?” She spoke the word vaguely.
“Kate, does this interest you?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’m telling you, upon my soul, I don’t know whether you’ve ever loved me or not and if you do now. Do you?”
Upon this, she leaned back slowly and gazed into the fire. “I’m not sure what that means, Ames. When I was a girl I went through the experience people call falling in love. It was with you, and in time the state of being in love with you made me try to make all that I thought and did useful to you. Trying to be useful to you became the habit of my life. There’s my own question: When love turns into just a habit of life is it still love? Is a habit the kind of love you mean?”
“No.” His voice was slightly unsteady again. “You seem to be telling me that you don’t know whether you love me or not.”
With her gaze still upon the fire, she assented. “That’s how it seems to me.”
He rose abruptly, strode down the long room and back again. “Once I’d have assumed that you were the last woman in all this world to say such a thing. I mean the last woman to tell her husband after ten years that she doesn’t know whether or not she loves him. I’d think it’s because you’ve finally seen what kind of fool I could make of myself, except you must have known that much about me all along.”
Kate’s deep look into the fire changed; her expression became absentminded as she glanced toward his desk. She left her chair, went to the vase of chrysanthemums and began to rearrange them thoughtfully, seeming engrossed with them. He stared at her; then strode to the door before he spoke.
“At least I’ve been able to talk with you a little, for the first time; I can hope that it may happen again. For me that would be a great hope. I can have it, can’t I?”
Her back was toward him as she busied herself with moving the chrysanthemums about in their vase; and, finding that she didn’t answer his question, he turned through the doorway. Kate heard the departing step and her lifted hands became still. Again the wet gale splashed the windows. She looked into the long past, looked into times before that other rainy day of which this one reminded her. “I like to hear the rain splattering on the window-panes,” Mrs. Fennigate had said upon her deathbed; but Kate was remembering a larger tragedy than her mother’s. More clearly than her memory had seen it for years, there rose upon her inner sight the wasted face of Malcolm Fennigate, and the melancholy eyes searched her through and through with a question: “You’ll keep to your own encasement forever?”
Over his shoulder Ames saw how motionless she was, standing unaware with uplifted hands poised above the flowering vase. The attitude was that of one who brings a votive offering to the altar, and so was a true symbol of her and of her sort: compassionate good women, creation’s loveliest work; they give and give and always give. Ames Lanning, desiring no gift, sorrowfully turned once more toward the stairway in the hall.
Then there was the faintest sound, as if she meant to speak; but the one appealing word that came from her was not so much as clearly whispered. His heart heard it well enough.
“Wait.”
Image of Josephine (1945)
CONTENTS
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
TO
MAJOR BOOTH T. JAMESON, A.C.
I
“BOASTING’S THE VULGAREST thing there is,” the fair young girl, Josephine, informed her three guests as they came out of the big brick Oaklin house after lunch. “Boasting’s practically the same thing as bragging, and both are incredibly vulgar.”
The guests, two girls and a boy, all three of their hostess’s age, fourteen, were already depressed, though well fed, and they became gloomier as she used what they thought a show-off word. “ ’Incredibly,’ ” the boy repeated. “That’s about the hundredth time to-day you’ve said something was ‘incredibly,’ Josephine. You’ve said about a thousand things were ‘vulgar,’ too. Besides that, you can deny it all you want to; but you were boasting or bragging, or both or whatever you call it, just as I taxed you with.”
“I did not!” young Josephine cried. “You’re incredibly mistaken! There! I’ll say it as frequently as I wish to and I’d like to see you endeavor to stop me because I’ll throw you down and rub your face in the grass if you do, the way I did yesterday. Want me to show Ella and Sophie I can?”
In heated response he used an expression still permissible to youthful fashion that year, 1932. “Can it! Can that stuff!” Young Josephine Oaklin, slim from small feet to broad shoulders, was an athlete and as precociously active bodily as she was mentally. Jamie Elliston well knew she’d not hesitate to manhandle him. “Go on and incredibly yourself sick,” he said. “It’ll sure be swell, so have yourself a time. I’m through objecting.”
“ ’Sure’! ‘Swell’!” Josephine taunted him gayly. “Those two foul old words are fifty percent of your vocabulary, my dear. The other fifty consists of ‘guy’ and ‘gal’ and ‘can it.’ Take those away and you’d be denied all utterance.”
“Oh, I would? Then listen to this: Skip it, you heel! Suit you any better?”
Sophie and Ella, each boredly skewering a patent-leather toe into the newly April-green grass, looked on coldly. “Always tangling with the boy-friend, isn’t she?” Ella said. “I don’t deny you gave us a nice lunch, Josephine; but who couldn’t with all those servants, and if you think always picking on Jamie to prove he’s yours is interesting, it simply isn’t.”
“I’m not hers,” Jamie began. “I’m not any — —”
Sophie agreed with Ella. “Yes, Josephine, you’re supposed to be having a luncheon party for us; but now we’ve eaten it, what do we do next?”
“Well, I’ll see; but there’s an important event going to happen here this afternoon.” Josephine made her pretty fourteen-year-old face as mysterious as she could. “Of course I don’t mean anything important about you three or anything like that. The importance is going to be on the adult scale. It’s essential I keep within call of the house, so we can’t go anywhere else, soda-fountaining or anything. Fortunately we’ve got plenty of room to do whatever I decide till I get called in, since our yard happens to be the only one in town that comprises a full block.”
“Oh, no! No vulgar boasting or bragging!” The Elliston boy became loudly sarcastic. “Never missed a chance yet to holler you got a yard that covers a whole block and’s got your family’s private art gallery in it besides the house and all the old bushes and trees! Listen, what’s this adult scale you claim you’re going to mix up with? Adult scale! That’s a cute one.”
Josephine moved toward him dangerously. “Asking to get your nose rubbed in the grass?”
He backed away. “You let me alone!”
Josephine leaped, caught him about his middle, threw him and did what she had threatened; but her two other guests remained apathetic. “If you think you’re giving Sophie and me a good time at your luncheon party,” Ella said, “you’re mistaken, Josephine. Can’t you two lovers do anything but fight? It’s pretty boresome for us spectators.”
Jamie Elliston, prone, cried out thickly against the word “lovers,” whereupon Miss Oaklin rubbed the grass with his face again; then let him rise. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” she said. “I’ll show you three some new basketball shots I’ve worked up. Come on.”
She ran ahead and they followed slowly round the wide house. Jamie, muttering morosely, used a white handkerchief upon his face and the green-stained knees of his trousers. “Doesn’t care whose clothes she destroys! Got a basket in front the side wall of their old art gallery. Wants to show us she can make more baskets than we can, just because your old Miss Murray’s School for Girls’ basketball team’s got her for its captain.”
“You’re not up to the minute, Jamie,” Ella informed him. “Nobody can deny she’s a good player and everybody thought the team’d elect her captain this year; but the girls on it all simply declined and elected Amy Keller instead.”
“Good!” Jamie cheered up a little. “So our proud and mighty old gal’s just a humble member of the team.”
“Not so humble,” Ella said. “Practises hour after hour all alone by herself so’s to prove even if she isn’t captain she’s anyhow the best.”
They’d come round the house to an open space before a building of pale limestone, the “old art gallery.” It wasn’t old. Jamie had used the term in the instinctive manner of the young, for whom “old” naturally defines anything uninteresting, difficult or contemptible. Attached to the Tudorish brick house by a stone passageway, the skylighted gallery, a single story high and windowless on this side, made a convenient backstop. Josephine was already poised with a ball in the center of the open space and facing a “basket” set up before the wall.
“Watch this shot!” she called. “Notice the new way I use my wrist and — —”
Ella interrupted her drearily. “What’s the use your having that four-thousand-dollar tennis court back yonder? There are four of us and we could all get our rubber-soles and — —”
“No. The court’s covered on account of spring rains. You watch this shot; it’s different. Zing!” As adroit as she was graceful, Josephine “shot” the ball accurately. “Basket! Got a basket! Run get the ball for me, Jamie; I appoint you my retriever.” She glanced at his face, and laughed. “What’s the matter? Insulted speechless again?”
The discontented Ella made another protest. “Josephine, is it entertaining guests they just get to stand around while you shoot baskets? Hostesses are supposed to afford pleasure from the background, aren’t they?”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Josephine said, assuming a confidential air. “I haven’t got much time to think up anything until later. You see, this important event on the adult scale I mentioned may begin to take place almost any instant and I’ve got my mother on my mind because she’s out at a big female luncheon at the Country Club. She always gets absorbed, especially if there’s contract; but I impressed and impressed it on her that she had to be on time. She ought to be here right now and I can’t get a second’s peace of mind till I see her car on our driveway.”
Jamie Elliston spoke with pain. “ ’Impressed it’! ‘Impressed it on my mother’!”
“She does,” Sophie told him. “That’s exactly what she does. Josephine absolutely runs her mother. Everybody in town knows Mrs. Oaklin does everything Josephine tells her to.”
Josephine listened to this with a matter-of-course complacency; then “I hear a car now!” she cried, and ran back by the way she’d come. When she reached a corner of the house she stopped and looked toward a porte-cochère that sheltered a side entrance. There a taxicab had just halted; a preoccupied man carrying two thick brief-cases stepped out, rang the doorbell and disappeared within the house. The taxicab drove on till it reached a graveled space before a large brick garage at the end of the driveway. The driver stopped his car, lighted a cigarette and waited. Josephine ran back to her guests.
“It’s commencing,” she said. “Mr. Oscar Glessit’s got here. He’s Grandfather’s lawyer; but look, I’ve got a little time left, so I can show you some more of my shots. When I haf to go in the house the rest of you can practise ’em till I come out again, so it stands to reason I’ll do all the shooting up to then. Fetch me the ball, Sophie, since the princely Mr. Elliston’s so ungracious about it.”
Sophie Tremoille went for the ball. “Oh, all right!” she said almost admiringly, as she brought it. “Always got to have your way! You think everybody else are just your mere attendants, don’t you?”
“Well — —” Josephine laughed, and in this contortion her daintily shaped features were prettier than ever. “You ought to keep remembering who I am, oughtn’t you?”
“Well, honest to gosh!” This was Jamie appealing to Ella. “She means it!”
He was right. Young Josephine laughed, amused by her own egregiousness; but she did mean it.
II
WITHIN THE HOUSE, meanwhile, the “important event” had begun to take place, and it was even more important than she’d said. The passageway from the art gallery led by a door now closed into a large and lofty oblong room, at one end of which stood a splendid Jacobean mantelpiece of carved and blackened oak. The great fireplace, wherein small logs burned, was flanked by its proper antique adjuncts, part and parcel of the same despoiled Manor overseas: paneled high wainscotings similarly blackened by time, smoke and dark wax. Further aged panelings along the southern wall of the room separated the diamond-paned, deeply recessed windows of seventeenth-century glass that laid yellow rhomboids of sunshine on the broad-planked floor. The other sides of the room displayed books almost to the high and elaborate plaster ceiling — books on long “set-in” shelves, rows of tall thin books, rows of massive shorter books, rows of books in “special bindings,” tooled and gilded; and almost all of these books bore upon the arts of painting, sculpture, music and architecture. More books, as well as portfolios too large for the shelves, were stacked upon heavy Jacobean tables; but that there should be comfort in the room, however incongruously, the chairs and a couch against the north wall were of to-day and done in scarlet leather.
This was Mr. Thomas Oaklin’s library. Manorial himself, black-coated and wing-collared, with a beautiful Cashmere shawl over his knees, he sat in an easy-chair near the fireplace — a white-haired, finely withered old man palely handsome and still commanding. As he talked to his lawyer, Oscar Glessit, he sometimes made a gesture with a long, bony and old-veined white hand; but the movement was always so consciously suave that it took care not to disturb the inch-and-a-half ash of the cigar held between the first and second fingers. The picture he presented to the eye conveyed flawlessly the tradition in which he loved to live — connoisseur patron of art, grand seigneur — easily possible to an eighth-generation American, fastidious and scholarly third-generation mid-western millionaire. So neatly, in his rich surrounding, he made this portrait of himself that his knowing he made it is little to be doubted.
“You have it all in order now, Glessit,” he said graciously. “I’ve no further criticism.”
“Yes, it’ll do at last, Mr. Oaklin.” The lawyer sat at one of the Jacobean tables, and upon it his open brief-cases revealed a dismal quantity of legal papers. “Broadly, it all sounds simple enough, sir; but in detail it’s a rather staggeringly elaborate affair. The amount of securities involved and not leaving them to the natural heirs — —”
“Just a moment.” Mr. Oaklin slightly lifted his long-ashed cigar as a middle-aged tall colored man entered the room. “What is it, Harvey?”
“Mr. Horne on the telephone, sir. Ask me find out how soon you expectin’ him, sir. Say he ready come now if you want him.”
“I do. Tell him so, Harvey.”
The colored man departed soft-footedly, and Mr. Oaklin’s grey eyes denoted pleasure. “We’ve got a surprise for John Constable Horne, I think, Glessit, what?”
“No question, sir. I hope Mr. Horne’ll have the patience to go through these papers as he ought to, considering what you plan for him; but, knowing him, I doubt it. By the way, until I drew them up for you I never knew his middle name was Constable. Is that a family name?”
“No, Glessit. His parents — rather ‘arty’ people in their day — naïvely named him for the greatest British landscapist, perhaps the greatest of all landscapists; but from boyhood John Horne’s admired that painter so much he’s always thought it would be pretentious to use the name. Probably he thinks it’s more American, too, to call himself John C. Horne; he’s notional. He’s a dozen years younger than I — at my age I find that my friends are all my juniors, otherwise they wouldn’t be alive — but John Horne’s life, like my own, has been a continuous devotion to the Fine Arts. He’s spent almost as much time as I have, myself, in my gallery of paintings and sculptures, and he’s a genuine authority upon Oriental art, in particular upon the Northern Wei stone sculptures. I fear this doesn’t much interest you, Glessit.” Mr. Oaklin smiled faintly and with his left hand rang a small steel bell beside him upon a squat old black table.
The colored man, Harvey, reappeared in the doorway. “Yes, sir?”
“Harvey, has my daughter-in-law come home?”
“Yes, sir. Few minutes ago. Upstairs changin’ her dress again.”
“And Miss Josephine’s where you can find her when I wish her to come in?”
“Yes, sir. Basketballin’ right outside.”
Harvey waited a moment; then, seeing that his employer had fallen into a meditation, departed. The lawyer, rearranging though not rustling certain of his papers, glanced up from time to time during the next fifteen minutes, but refrained from speaking. Mr. Oaklin not infrequently went into these silences — contemplations concerned with the past or with art, or with God knows what, Oscar Glessit thought; men as old as Thomas Oaklin seemed to live mainly in their own old dead worlds. The old dead world at present engaging Mr. Oaklin was shattered by the noisy voice of his friend, John Constable Horne, who walked into the library already talking. He was followed by Harvey, bringing upon a tray a decanter of sherry, thin wine glasses and a porcelain basket of small cakes.
