National Avenue, Booth Tarkington [8 ebook reader .txt] 📗

o’ simmerin’ down some, way ought to!” He widened one fat brown cheek in a slight distortion, producing a sound not vocal, but correctly interpreted by the horses as the call for an advance. Then, as they obediently set off at a trot, he chuckled; for although he complained of the heat he really liked it; and was not ill-equipped for it in shapeless linen, a straw hat, and slippers. “Tell me be’n five six whi’ men drop down dade right out in a middle the sidewalk today,” he said. “Way it keepin’ up, they be mo’ of ’em befo’ mawnin’. Look at them hosses bustin’ out an’ lathun theyse’f a’ready, an’ I ain’t trot ’em a full square yit!”

“You needn’t push ’em on my account,” Mr. Shelby said, “I’m not in any hurry.”

“No, suh,” the coloured man agreed, smiling over some private thought of his own. “I guess you ain’t! But she said, hot or no hot, git you home early’s I could fix it.” And then he laughed outright.

“Plague take it!” Mr. Shelby said again; for what amused the coachman made the master all the more peevish. Unquestionably, he was a deeply annoyed old gentleman, in spite of the fact that he was the coolest looking human being up and down the full length of National Avenue, into which thoroughfare the carriage had turned.

The long avenue might well have been mistaken for a colony of invalids and listless convalescents. Damp and languid citizens, their coats over bared forearms, made their painful way homeward from downtown, mopping fiery brows and throats; other coatless citizens, arrived at home, reclined melting in wicker rocking-chairs upon their verandas or lawns, likewise mopping as they melted; while beside them their wives and daughters, in flimsiest white, sat fanning plaintively. Here and there the stout father of a family stood near his front fence and played a weak and tepid stream from the garden hose over his lawn, or sprinkled the street, while his children, too hot to be importunate, begged lifelessly to relieve him of the task. The leaves of the massed foliage that made the street a green tunnel hung flaccidly gilding in the sun; and the sun abated not at all as it approached its setting. The air drooped upon the people with a weight too heavy to let them move readily, yet for breathing there seemed to be no air; and it had no motion, so that the transparent bits of paper, where the popcorn man or the hokey-pokey man had passed, lay in the street and on the sidewalks as still as so much lead.

“Seem like ev’thing wilted down flat,” Mr. Shelby’s fat coachman remarked as they turned into the driveway at home. “Me, I reckon if you’s to take little slim string o’ cobweb up on the roof an’ push ’er off, she’d fall ri’ down on the groun’ same as a flatiron. Look fountain, Mist’ Shelby!” He laughed happily, and waved his whip toward the bronze swan. “That duck, let alone he ain’t got stren’f ’nough to spout, he ain’t but jes’ hodly able to goggle his th’oat little bit.”

The swan was indeed put to it to eject a faint spray, for all over the town the people were making such demands on the water, already low with the dry season, that the depleted river whence it came threatened to disappear unless the drought were broken. However, neither drought nor heat had to do with Mr. Shelby’s peevishness, which visibly increased when the carriage turned into his driveway;⁠—what made him frown so bitterly was the sight of his daughter, charmingly dressed in fabrics of gossamer weight, her shapely hands gloved in spite of the weather, and her hazel eyes bright under a hat of ivory lace. She was sitting upon a wicker bench on the big veranda, but when the lathered bay horses trotted through the driveway gate, she jumped up and hurried to meet her father as he stepped out upon a stone horseblock near the veranda steps.

“Papa!” she cried, “you must hurry; we’re terribly late! I wouldn’t have waited for you, but I was afraid you wouldn’t go unless I took you.”

“I wouldn’t,” he said grimly. “You bet your sweet life I wouldn’t!”

“Won’t you hurry?” she urged.

“What for? Ain’t I dressed up enough? All I’m goin’ to do is wash my hands.”

“Then do,” she cried, as he moved to go indoors. “Please hurry!”

“Never you mind,” he returned crossly. “I don’t usually take more’n half a jiffy to just wash my hands, thank you!” And as he disappeared he was heard to mutter, not without vehemence: “Plague take it!”

A few moments later he reappeared, not visibly altered except that his irritated expression had become one of revolt. “Look a-here!” he said. “I don’t see as I’m called upon to promenade over there and join in with all this high jinks and goin’s-on!”

“Papa⁠—”

“I don’t mind an old-fashioned party,” he went on. “I used to go to plenty of ’em in my time, but when all they got for you to do is listen to half the women in town tryin’ to out-holler each other, why, you bet your bottom dollar I’m through!”

“But, papa⁠—”

“No, sir-ree!” he protested loudly. “You can well as not go on over there without me. Why, just look at the crowd they got in there already.”

He waved his hand to the neighbouring domain on the south, where the crowd he bitterly mentioned was not in sight, but was indicated by external manifestations. Open family carriages, surreys, runabouts, phaetons, and station wagons filled the Oliphants’ driveway, and, for a hundred yards or more, were drawn up to the curb on each side of the avenue. Coloured drivers sat at leisure, gossiping from one vehicle to another, or shouting over jokes about the hot weather. The horses drooped, or, with heads tossing at intervals, protested against their checkreins⁠—and one of them, detained in position by a strap fastened to a portable iron weight, alternately backed and advanced with such persistence