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

think I used to believe I’d always be in love with Dan, and in a way that was true⁠—whatever is left in me of the girl I used to be will always be in love with the boy he used to be. But I don’t know where that boy is any more. Do you understand?”

Harlan looked melancholy, as he nodded. “I suppose so.”

“I mean I’m true to my memory of him, perhaps. I’m afraid I don’t know just what I do mean.”

“I’m afraid I do, though,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s only that you’re hurt with him because Lena frightened him into keeping from even stepping over here for a minute to say, ‘Welcome home.’ ”

“No; it didn’t hurt⁠—not exactly,” she returned. “But he does seem changed.” She frowned. “Do you think he’s lost something, Harlan? Is it something⁠—something fine about him⁠—that’s lost? It seems to me⁠—it seems to me there must be. How could anybody expect a man to go through such a struggle for success as the one he’s been through and not bear the marks of it? Or maybe is it only his youthfulness he’s lost?”

“I don’t see anything missing,” Harlan replied. “He’s certainly not lost his optimistic oratory; he can still out-talk any man in town on the subject of Our Glorious Future. In fact, I think he’s even more that way than he used to be. Years ago he may have shown a few very faint traces of having been through a university, but you could sandpaper him to powder now and not find them: I don’t believe he could translate the first sentence of Caesar, or ‘Arma, virumque cano!’ The only things he ever talks about are his business and his boy and local politics. I think that’s all he can talk about.”

“Whereas,” Martha said, with a flash of the old championing, “the learned Mr. Harlan Oliphant has only to open his mouth in order to destroy a lonely woman’s whole joy in the Italian Renaissance.”

He lifted his hands, protesting, then dropped them in despair. “So I’ve lost it already!” he said. “And lost it in the old, old way!”

“Lost what?”

“Hope,” he explained. “You see I’m years and years older than Freddie Oliphant, and he was complaining to me the other day;⁠—he’s now considered so much ‘one of the older men’ that some of the pretty young things one sees at the Country Club were leaving him out of their festivities. You see where that puts me. So I hoped that when you came home⁠—”

“Yes?”

“Well, I hoped that maybe you and I shouldn’t quarrel any more, and⁠—”

“Quarrel? No; we mustn’t, indeed!” she said. “What else is there left for leftovers to do but to make the best of each other?”

“Nothing else, I’m afraid.”

“And I’d hoped,” he went on a little nervously;⁠—“I’d hoped maybe you’d let me see you a good deal⁠—that you’d let me take you places and⁠—”

“Good gracious!” Martha cried; and she laughed and blushed. “Haven’t you just taken me to church? Aren’t you already taking me places, Harlan?”

XXII

Martha had said that Dan’s remaining away “didn’t hurt⁠—not exactly”; and by this she meant to give Harlan the impression that she was less than hurt; but such a denial, thus qualified, means in truth more than hurt. She was a “big Western woman,” but she could be sensitive, and had her resentments and her smallnesses. Perhaps she was not quite genuinely sorry to believe that the old friend who neglected to bid her welcome home had begun to look almost middle-aged and seemed to have lost something fine that he had possessed in his youth. There were characteristic possessions of his that he had not lost, however; he had even acquired more of them, as she discovered one evening a few weeks after the Sunday noon when little Henry tore her dress.

Mr. Shelby had come home from his office in a state of irritability, which he made audible even before he entered the house; and from her windows upstairs she heard him denouncing his old negro driver. There had been a thunderstorm earlier in the afternoon, but that was no excuse⁠—“not a dog-gone bit of excuse!” Mr. Shelby declared⁠—for a carriage to be “all so sploshed-over with mud that a decent man’d be ashamed to get caught dead in it!” And he seemed to resent the fat old servitor’s wheezy explanation that the mud was the work of a malevolent motorcar. “Cain’t go nowhur them automob’les ain’ goin’ to git you these days! I had my carri’ge all spick-an’-span. Automob’le come zimmin’ by jes’ as we turn onto the avenoo. ‘Splickety-splick-splash!’ she say, an’ zoosh! jes’ look at my nice clean carri’ge solid mud! No, suh, Mist’ Shelby; I had my carri’ge all wash up fresh. Nasty ole automob’le spoil ev’ything! No, suh, I⁠—”

“Gee-mun-nent-ly!” Martha heard her father exclaim. “What you tryin’ to do? Talk me to death? I already heard enough talk in my office for one day, thank you! By Cripey, you stop that eternal gab o’ yours and get those horses into the barn and sponge their mouths out! Hear me?”

He came into the house and could be heard muttering snappishly to himself on the stairway, as he ascended to his room to “wash his face and hands for dinner.” But at the table he proved that soap and water were ineffective, at least to remove bitterness from a face; and he found fault with everything. The most unbearable of his troubles finally appeared to be put upon him by the salt, which the humidity of the weather had affected. “I s’pose this is the way you keep house in Italy!” he said. “Nothin’ but smell and deggeredation over there anyway⁠—they prob’ly don’t care whether they can get salt out o’ their saltcellars or not. But in this country, in a decent man’s house, he’d like to see at least one saltcellar on his table that’d work!”

“It’s apt to be like that in hot weather after a