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

rain,” Martha returned placidly. “What went wrong at the office this afternoon, papa?”

“Nothin’!” he said fiercely. “What’s my office got to do with wet salt? Why can’t you ever learn to keep some connection between your thoughts? Geemunently!”

“So you had a good day, did you, papa?”

“It would ’a’ been,” he replied angrily, “if it hadn’t been for a fool friend o’ yours!”

“Somebody I’m responsible for?” she inquired with a genial sarcasm that exasperated him into attempted mockery⁠—for when he was angriest with her he would repeat something she said, and, to point the burlesque, would speak in a tinny and whining falsetto which he seemed to believe was a crushing imitation of his daughter’s voice. “ ‘Somebody I’m responsible for?’ ” he squeaked, using this form of reprisal now. “No; it ain’t somebody you’re responsible for!” Here he fell back upon downright ferocity. “Doggone him! Somebody better be responsible for him!”

At this Martha made a good guess. “Dan Oliphant!”

“Yes, ma’am! And I came within just one o’ throwin’ him out o’ my office! Stood up there and grinned at me in front o’ my own desk and told me what I had to do! What I had to do!”

“And do you have to, papa?” she asked.

“What!”

“I only wondered⁠—”

“Why, plague take him, I never saw the beat of it!” he went on, disregarding her. “Walked right into my office and told me I had to run my car line all the way across his Addition. Told me I had to! I told him we were goin’ almost to the edge of it and that’d be every last speck o’ the way we’d move until he does the right thing.”

“Until he does what ‘right thing,’ papa?”

“Until he quits bein’ a hog!” the old man returned violently. “He seems to think the best men in this town got nothin’ on earth to do but spend their time buildin’ up his property for him and makin’ it more valuable, all for his benefit. I told him when he was ready to act like a decent man and reorganize his holdings with a good trust company’s advice, and issue stock, and let somebody else in, we might talk to him and not before.”

“What did Dan say?”

“Said he tried to get us in at the start, and now we could go plum to! Said I’d put that car line through there whether I wanted to or not. Threatened me with a petition of his lot owners, and said they were liable to go before the legislature and get my charter annulled, if I didn’t do it.”

“Was he angry, papa?”

“Angry? No!” Mr. Shelby vociferated. “What in continental did he have to be angry about? I was the one that was angry. He stood up there and laughed and bragged about what he was goin’ to do till you’d thought he’d bust with the gas of it! Why, Great Geemunently!⁠—you’d thought this whole city’s got nothin’ to do but turn in and run around doin’ what Ornaby Addition says it’s got to! I says, ‘Yes!’ I says. ‘So from now on the tail’s goin’ to wag the dog, is it?’ ‘I don’t know but it might,’ he says. ‘This town’s done considerable laughin’ at me,’ he says. ‘I expect it’s about time I did some laughin’ myself,’ he says. ‘You’ll have to look out for your charter, Mr. Shelby,’ he says.”

Martha ventured to continue her naivete, and unfortunately carried it too far. “And will you have to look out for it, papa?” she asked gently.

With his thin but hard old fist he struck the table a blow that jarred the china and jingled the silver. “Haven’t you got any sense?” he shouted. “I’ll show him who he’s talkin’ to! There’s a few men left in this town that’ll teach him a little before he gets through with ’em! I’m not the only one he thinks he can lay down the law to.” He glared at her, his small gray face flushing with his increased anger. “Are you still standin’ up for him after the way he’s treated you?”

This took Martha’s breath, and for an instant she was at a loss. Never before had her father seemed to notice how she was “treated”⁠—by anybody. “I don’t know what you⁠—I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

“Don’t you?” he returned sharply, and, before the bright stare of his angry eyes, her own troubled gaze fell. “You say you don’t know what I mean?”

“Why⁠—no. Not⁠—not at all,” she murmured.

“Well, I do!” And with a brief shot of breath between his almost closed lips, he further expressed an emotion that remained enigmatic to her. He rose. “Seems to me it’s about time you quit standin’ up for him,” he said; and stalked out of the room, leaving her still at the table.

She sat there in an attitude of some rigidity after she had heard him go upstairs, and she continued to sit there, though she had finished her dinner before he departed. The conclusion she reached in her thoughts was that there was a question she would never ask him;⁠—she would never ask him what he had meant by that final remark of his. She hoped he meant only that her pride ought to resent a neighbour’s failure to come to say he was glad to see her at home again⁠—but she feared her father meant more than this. She feared he meant much more, and she so feared it that she would never dare to ask him.

Yet she wondered why she wouldn’t dare. How could it ever be “about time” for her to stop standing up for an old friend? And when Harlan was announced to her, as she sat alone at the table, she rose with a little sigh. She did not sigh because she was sorry he had come; it was because she had just realized how much more his brother was still the heart of her thoughts than was this faithful and constant escort.

For she and Harlan had already fallen into a