Читать книгу The Heritage of Hatcher Ide - Booth Tarkington - Страница 11

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She ran back to her rake, and he swung into his stride again; but paused as he reached the farther end of the Aldriches’ hedge, because the last of the four big trucks entering the broad driveway of the “Lash place” momentarily blocked his way. The traveling warehouse passed between two tall brick pillars capped with carved stone and followed its monstrous fellows toward the long, many-gabled gray stone house that faced a lawn three hundred feet deep and thus stood impressively that far back from the street. A stooping old man had opened the tall wrought-iron gates for the trucks and was turning to follow, but saw Hatcher and stopped.

“Giants, ain’t they?” he said, proud of the size of the trucks. “There’s French mantelpieces and doorways in ’em, too, along with the furniture that’s every stick of it from the Old Country. Been a contractor in there ten days now, tearing the place all up, working on plans she sent him. Yes, sir, I been employed on this place for thirty-one years now, Mr. Hatcher, and sole caretaker all the long time it’s been empty; but I guess this is the biggest job I’ve seen yet. I certainly hope Miss Sarah’ll like the way I handle things. How you feeling, Mr. Hatcher?”

“Bad,” Hatcher said. “How are you, George?”

“Fine!” George laughed. “I used to say I felt bad, too, sometimes at your age, fifty years ago; but I didn’t. Well, I hope everybody’s well at your house. Guess I better be doing a little overseeing.”

Hatcher walked on. The long hedge beside him now was taller than the Aldriches’, walling everything on the other side of it in an impenetrable security from the tarnishing glance of the passer-by, and it ended at a haughty brick pillar higher than the hedge. This pillar, marking a corner of the “Lash place”, Hatcher had often climbed, in earlier years, to seat himself atop the chilly scrolled stone ball above its square cap; for it marked also a corner of the smaller domain of the Ides. Beyond the pillar was an upward flourish of Lombardy poplars, then a thicket of varied shrubberies and another driveway, one into which the brooding Hatcher turned.

Hearing his name shouted behind him, he turned again, however, and went back to the sidewalk. A sandy-haired friend-since-childhood’s-hour, Gilpin Murray, who lived in the house opposite, was coming across the street to greet him. “ ’Lo, Hatch! How long you been home?”

“Two weeks,” Hatcher said, as they shook hands heartily. “You been away, too, haven’t you, Gilp?”

“Yes. Got back yesterday noon. Had a month’s job on a stock farm up near Earlsville. It got auctioned off yesterday, house and all; so that’s washed up. Spent most the summer job-hunting up and down the town. Pleasant walking, I don’t think. Well, anyhow, we had ourselves a time at Commencement, didn’t we? Seems a terrible long time ago, doesn’t it? I suppose you’re already started merrily in with Ide and Aldrich. Got anything for me down there?”

“Murder!” Hatcher said. “Not for me neither. They’re just letting me pretend on no pay.”

“Not so bad; not so bad!” Young Gilpin Murray laughed plaintively. “I’d take a job pretending for nothing any day. I don’t so much mind doing nothing as I do looking like it. Early in July I had one idea. Practically super-colossal. Get the dandelion rights to all the lawns on Butternut Lane, dig ’em up for nothing and sell the greens for food; but they told me that modern spinach is all so cultivated up nobody eats the plain simple wholesome greens of our forefathers any more, so everything collapsed. There’s one comfort: most of us promising Butternut Laners are in the same boat. Not all, though. You had a load o’ Pinkie Wilson yet?”

“No. What’s he doing?”

“Pinkie?” Gilpin spoke satirically. “Doing? Him? When’d pretty-face Pinkie Wilson ever do a damn thing but wear all the clothes, ride horses and eat half the cocktail sandwiches? Still can do on account of all that Erdvynn money; his mother was an Erdvynn. Phooey! Do you see the change in me, Hatch? Let it be a lesson to you.”

“What’s your trouble?”

“It’s what idleness does to you, Hatch. Up to this one month’s job, me walking the streets and then sitting round just talking. You get to listening to your aunts and grandmothers even; you get to telling people whose mother was who. Yes, sir; I’m all full of genealogy and gossip. I can tell you just who had so damn much jack to start with they’ve still got it—like the Erdvynn money in Pinkie Wilson’s family—and what must be the income tax on this Frenchified old female that’s fixing to come back and live next door to you. Heard about her, haven’t you? By the way, there’s a chance you or I might grab, Hatch.”

“Chance? What do you mean, chance?”

“My mother tells me the old thing used to be quite a pirate,” Gilpin said. “Out on capture all the time—and, look, she’s had two divorces, so she must expect to circulate some even yet. Well, here we are, two enterprising young fellers in what they call dire straits; so let the best man win. What would we care how old or froggified the bride just so she’d clothe and car us the way we used to be accustomed to and keep us in—”

Hatcher interrupted. “Oh, hell; talk sense, Gilp!”

“Same old Hatch!” Gilpin laughed. “Same old serious-minded scholar; won’t laugh and joke and cut-up about anything!” Then he looked at Hatcher with a friendly curiosity. “Going back to Pinkie Wilson, I suppose you’ve heard how my handsomest cousin pushed him out the gate?”

“Mary Gilpin? Did she? I thought they were all set.”

“Not Mary. She got herself a job in the city library last spring, Hatch, and, after she’d made Pinkie comprehend she preferred it to him, he rather turned his affections to another quarter, as the old books used to say. That’s why I’m more or less surprised to hear you haven’t run across him since you got back.”

“What?” Hatcher asked. “You mean the ‘other quarter’ is Dorcy Aldrich?”

“Yes; quite a lot. I thought you might find Pinkie sitting round in the way a good deal when you’re over there, Hatch. Bore for you and Dorcy both, of course. You’re supposed to be rather affianced or something, aren’t you? So I thought you might object to the encumbrance.”

“Me?” Hatcher laughed. “I’d look pretty objecting, wouldn’t I? What business would I have being engaged to any girl in the world—with my prospects? So I’m certainly not.”

“No; nor worrying about Pinkie, either,” Gilpin said, laughing too. “Everybody knows that pretty boy’d be as big a laugh to Dorcy as he was to Mary or would be to anybody else. Well—I’ll go back to my tasks now. I was getting Benedictine off my frazzled dinner coat when I saw you from the window. If you hear of anything that pays better, for God’s sake let me know!”

“Right, and if you run into a job where there’s room for two—”

“Right. Be seein’ you, Hatch.”

They separated and Hatcher turned back into the driveway. He walked thoughtfully, though he was not disturbed by his friend’s information; he didn’t need to be conceited in order to feel certain that Dorcy Aldrich would never find the egregious young Wilson anything but a rather easily disposable form of nuisance. There were serious things to worry about, and Gilpin’s gossip was already dismissed from Hatcher’s mind. The Tudorish brick and half-timbered house now before him, standing among old forest trees so tall that they shaded its roof, had an appearance slightly shabby; the slate of the roof, here and there, obviously needed repair or replacements. Hatcher Ide was home from his day’s work, the second in his life, and was again wondering darkly how many such profitless days he could endure.

He opened the unlocked front door, stepped into the broad half-paneled hall, and went into the living-room. Here a wood fire burned hissingly in a carved oak chimney-breast that reached to the falsely beamed long ceiling; and a brown-haired thin little girl, Hatcher’s ten-year-old sister Frances, stood staring out into the paled afterglow through the diamond-shaped panes of a bow window.

“This is getting pretty exciting, Hatch,” she said, not turning.

“What is, Francine?”

“Please don’t call me ‘Francine’ nor ‘Fanny’ either,” the little girl said, immobile. “I know my rights, and it’s ‘Frances’. Hatch, from here you can see through a sort of crack in the bushes into the Lash place—and they’re doing just more things over there! They’ve got the boards off the windows and everything’s all full of people in overalls. There’s a lady named Mrs. Florian coming to live there; but she hasn’t got any children and can’t be expected to very soon because now she hasn’t even got any husband. I asked Mother where’s Mr. Florian and she said he’s a Frenchman in the French army but got divorced from her. Mother told me she used to know this Mrs. Florian when she lived there before she was ever married at all the first time; but I kind of think she kind of didn’t like her much. She hasn’t come yet; but I want to get a good look at her when she does. Don’t you, too, Hatch?”

“Why?” Hatcher asked absently. “Just some fat old grass-widow. What you—”

“I asked Berry.” Frances turned, regarded her brother with grave eyes, brown like her hair and almost embarrassingly worshipful of him. “Berry was our gardener even then when this Mrs. Florian lived there, and, being a next-door gardener, he knows all about her. He even knew her when she wasn’t any older than me. Berry didn’t say she was fat then. He said her name was Sarah and she’s peculiar.”

“Oh, she’s peculiar, is she? How?”

“Berry didn’t say. He said she went away after she got married, before I got born, and’s never been back. Mother looked funny when I asked her about her some more and said she didn’t care to talk about her; but maybe that time it was because Father came home sick and she had to be too busy.”

“Father came home sick?” Hatcher said. “What are you talking about?”

“He did. He came home from the office sick about half-past three, just when I got here from school.” Frances’s large eyes, unwinking, seemed to fix themselves upon a far, far distant point, so profound were her inward calculations. “I bet Father got sick because this Mrs. Florian’s so peculiar and’s coming back to live next door.”

“What!” Hatcher laughed. “Has Father gone to bed? Where’s Mother?”

“No.” Systematic, Frances took the questions in turn. “He’s kind of walking round in his room. She’s upstairs now, trying to get him to eat something, the way she always does when anybody’s sick and doesn’t like food. He won’t. She—” Footsteps were heard upon the oaken stairway outside the open double doors of the living-room, and Frances paused; then added, “She’s quit. Father never got sick and came home before. When he had that cold I heard him tell Mother he couldn’t stay in the house because he has to make money. He’s strong because in college if he wasn’t strong how could he have been captain of—What you want, Mother?”

Mrs. Ide came into the room. Blue-eyed, comely and slight, like her brother Victor Linley, she lacked his philosophical serenity and had allowed the shapely contours of her face to be altered by a host of apprehensions. She smiled, however, as she answered Frances’s question. “I want you to get up to your own room and do your home work. There’s more than an hour before dinner.”

Frances gave the bow window a reluctant glance but obediently went to the door. “Mother,” she said musingly, as she went, “why don’t you like Mrs. Florian? Is it because she’s coming home made Father sick?”

“You do have ideas!” Mrs. Ide laughed. “Scram, funny child!” Then, as Frances departed, the mother turned to her son. “Poor Hatch! You don’t look as if you’d begun to like your new job yet.”

“I don’t, Mother. What’s the matter with Father?”

“I don’t know. He keeps insisting he’s all right but says he won’t come down for dinner; so of course he isn’t. Oh, dear me!” Mrs. Ide sank upon the somewhat worn green upholstery of a sofa before the fire. “I’ve been so afraid he’d have a breakdown I—”

“Breakdown?” Hatcher was annoyed. “What are you talking about? Don’t start imagining—”

“But it can’t be anything physical,” Harriet Ide protested. “Only a few days before you got home he let me have Dr. Loffen go over him, and the only thing wrong was that he was underweight. The long strain of these dreadful times—how many business men we’ve seen go down under it! I suppose it comes with a crash when it does come—anything mental.”

“Mental?” Hatcher was disgusted. “Are you trying to tell me Father’s out of his head?”

“No, of course not; but he’s not like himself, Hatcher, and it’s the first time in my life I ever knew him to come home from business in the middle of the afternoon because he wasn’t well.”

At this, Hatcher laughed outright. “There has to be a first time for everything, doesn’t there? Seems to me you’re just a wee bit out of your head, yourself, Mother.”

“I hope so!” she sighed. “If you’re going upstairs before dinner I wish you’d go in and see if you can’t get him at least to take the broth and toast I left in his room for him.”

“If he doesn’t, I will,” Hatcher said cheerily, and marched upstairs. Outside his father’s door, with his hand extended to the bronze knob, he was startled by a sound from within. It was a groan, a brief one—but it suggested extreme nausea. Hatcher opened the door quickly. “What’s the matter, Father—seasick?”

The kind of groan he’d heard led him to expect physical throes; but, to his astonishment, his father was walking up and down the large room with his hands clenched behind him. Hatcher was used to seeing him look worried; but never before had known him to be anything except self-contained and steady. He didn’t seem to be either, now. Frederic Ide was a broad-shouldered tall man, not fifty, too thin of late for the once-modish clothes of Scotch wool it was his habit to wear. He’d begun to stoop, to grow gray, and his intelligent, conscientious face had lost ruddiness with every Depression year—but Hatcher had never seen him so white as now.

“Father! What’s wrong? What’s—”

“Nothing!” Ide stopped his pacing, unclenched his hands and used them both in the gesture of a man who passionately repels assistance. “Nothing’s the matter! I felt a little ill downtown and came home; that’s all. Quiet your mother down if you can—so that she’ll let me alone! She—”

“But, Father, I heard you groaning!”

“No, you didn’t. I tell you I’m all right. Good heavens! Can’t a man have a slight indisposition for just once in his life without upsetting the whole household? For God’s sake, tell your mother to stop fretting and not send me any dinner but just let me alone! Tell her I’m not having a nervous breakdown, either.”

“No, sir; of course you’re not.” Hatcher laughed; then had a thought, not a well-inspired one. “Father, being in the Real Estate Department, it seems as if I wouldn’t get much chance to talk to you downtown, and I expect you prefer to put Ide and Aldrich’s affairs behind you when you’re home; but I got an idea to-day—it’s a business idea and I think it’s a pretty good one—so I might as well take this opportunity to place it before you. Down at the office after lunch I sprung it on that wizened old Mr. Barley because he kind of seems to be the head of my department, and he rather discouraged me and I—Well, of course I’ve only had two days’ experience but—but—”

“What is it? What are you trying to say?”

“Well, it’s this, sir. There’s a kind of grayish putty-color that wouldn’t show smoke much and it goes with a grayish apple-green I’d use for trim.”

“What?”

“Yes, sir. I was thinking that if you’d let me get all those vacant rental properties of yours down round Sheridan Avenue painted and brightened up in these two colors—”

Mr. Ide struck his hands together. “Do you want to do it to-night?”

“No, sir.”

“Then let me alone!”

Hatcher, a little startled, had another thought. “Father, did anything at the office send you into a tailspin? Are you worrying worse over business?”

“No!” Ide shouted, with a vehemence his son had never heard from him. “Yes! I always am. Who isn’t? That’s not what’s the matter with me, I tell you. I just want a little quiet, for God’s sake, and to be spared the sight of food.” He pointed to a tray of broth and toast upon a table. “Take those things out with you, will you, please!”

“Yes, sir; if you’re sure you’re all right—”

“Certainly! Please, please!” The gesture toward the door was one of entreaty.