Читать книгу The Heritage of Hatcher Ide - Booth Tarkington - Страница 12

VI

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Hatcher took the tray and went out, carrying it with him to his own room, where, being young and not apprehensive about his appetite for dinner, he kept his word. Of course everything was really all right, he thought, finishing the broth and toast. He didn’t happen to remember ever hearing his self-contained father say “for God’s sake” before, and certainly he’d never seen him use such gestures; but he’d be all right to-morrow, of course.

The son talked soothingly to his mother at dinner, and afterward, forgetting the cares of the day and all other cares, went forth gayly and took Dorcy to the jungle picture. On the way home they talked about how much it would cost them to get to Africa on a freighter, and, when they reached Butternut Lane, Hatcher left the car in the Aldriches’ driveway and went into the house with Dorcy. As they opened the front door they heard the sound of an uproarious piano.

“It’s Harry,” Dorcy said, and laughed. “They had a cocktail party here and then went out to dinner somewhere, and after that they were going to a meeting to raise money for the Boys’ Club; but now they’re back and he’s playing swing at Mother because she pretends to hate it. They do have the biggest times together!”

Mrs. Aldrich, even more piquantly pretty in a blue and gold evening dress than she’d been in her gray furs and velvet in the afternoon, appeared in the double doorway that led from the room where resounded the music. She carried a clinking amber glass in her hand, and, her sweet eyes sparkling, she laughed happily. “Come in, you children,” she said. “Help me to stop him. I absolutely can’t do a thing with him to-night!”

They did as she asked, and Dorcy, running forward, threw her arms about the big rubicund blond man who sat thumping the piano. He was improvising, singing in a hoarse jolly voice as he played, and he tried to go on despite Dorcy’s arms about his neck. “Boops-a-daisy! I’m half crazy! Take it aisy!” he sang; then protested, “Stop it, Dorcy. Ouch! You’ll spill my grog.” He shook her off, drank sputteringly from a freshly filled glass that he lifted from beside him on the piano bench; then swung himself round and greeted Hatcher shoutingly. “Sit down, Bo! That’s right; sit down. How’s the collecting for our grand old firm getting on, laddie boy? Don’t tell me; don’t tell me! I’d offer you a highball; but the guid wifie here always says you’re still too young, Hatch.” He let Dorcy push him to the end of the bench so that she could sit beside him; then he slapped her loudly on the back. “How’s tricks, baby?”

Dorcy slapped his shoulder heartily, in return. “How went the Boys’ Club, Harry? Raise any money for it?”

“Bet your neck we did, baby! Why for have I been carrying a subscription list around everywhere I went these last two months? Anybody wants to do business with me, ‘All right,’ says I, ‘but first: What do I put your name down for to keep poor kids off the streets nights even if it has to be only a dollar?’ Then here’s my only born child asks me if we raised any money? Shame!”

Dorcy looked at him with fondest pride. “Nobody but you could have kept the Boys’ Club alive through these tough times. Know what a good guy this guy is, Hatch? Fourth of July he and Mother took a hundred of those kids out to a camp on Silver Creek—kept ’em there a week; yes, and stayed there with ’em, themselves. Harry played a tin piano to ’em and went on hikes with ’em, all bit up with chiggers and mosquitoes till he looked like a raspberry patch. Heat of the summer, and look how fat poor Harry is, too! Hurrah for Harry!”

She slapped his shoulder again, just as he drank, so that he choked. “Stop it!” he said, stooped and set his glass upon the floor. “I’m fat; but I’ve got human shoulders, haven’t I? Whenever you flatter me up a little, you always seem to think you have to hit me, too. You’re so muscular I should think the boys’d hate you.”

Uproarious, Dorcy slapped him again. “Hurrah for you, Harry! You’re the cats!”

“Yes!” he shouted, jumped up, jerked her up with him, clasped her about the waist and began to dance with her, singing to an improvised tune, “Hurrah, hurrah for me! I’m the cats; the cat’s whiskers, the cat’s ankles, the cat’s uncles and even her tail! I’m all the cats, by glory; that’s why I never fail!”

Mrs. Aldrich, delighted, made burlesque gestures of helplessness. “Such a man!” she cried to Hatcher. “He’s been like this for hours!” She affected an arch jealousy. “Oh, I know why you’re so excited, Harry Aldrich! It’s because that black-haired siren’s coming back next door after all these years and you think you can dazzle her into having one of her affairs of passion with you!”

Harry Aldrich dropped upon the piano bench, pulled Dorcy down beside him, lifted his glass, drank hastily; then bellowed with laughter. “Discovered! Little bright eyes knows my secret. That’s a honey! Hatch, my wife’s on to me. Sarah Lash Florian! Her and me—oh, my soul!”

He protracted his merriment; and Hatcher’s thoughts, following involuntarily one of the myriad trails with which memory crosshatches the human mind, returned momentarily to an inconsequential scene of some hours earlier. This was of his solemn little sister Frances in the bow window and of her absurd small voice announcing her infantile conclusion: “I bet Father got sick because this Mrs. Florian’s so peculiar and’s coming back to live next door.” Frances’s nonsense was no more significant than Mrs. Aldrich’s; the effect upon Hatcher was only to remind him of his father.

“By the way, sir,” he said, “Father wouldn’t tell us what was the matter with him when he got sick down at the office this afternoon and came home. Before he left did he say anything to you about how he felt or what was wrong with him?” Mrs. Aldrich and Dorcy instantly made outcries of sympathy; but Hatcher assured them that nothing serious was in question and began to repeat his inquiry. “Sir, did Father say whether he’d eaten anything that disagreed with him or—”

“Why—no,” Harry Aldrich said. “I don’t think so.” He seemed to be trying to remember. “No, I don’t think your father went into any details, Hatch. I believe I recall he just mentioned that he felt a little under the weather and thought he’d better go home and lie down a while. No, I’m pretty sure he didn’t say. Get off this bench, baby; your mother wants me to play Oompta-Zing.”

He renewed his performance upon the piano, while his wife and Dorcy, feigning anguish, tried vainly to dislodge him from the bench. Hatcher was only vaguely aware of this fond scuffle and of the resounding wires. Harry Aldrich’s tone had been casual and reassuring; but for no clear reason it evoked imaginings that had slowly been forming themselves under the surface of Hatcher’s mind ever since his odd talk with his father before dinner. Harry was one of the friendliest, most sympathetic souls in the world: Was his apparent lack of anxiety assumed out of consideration for his partner’s son and with the wish not to alarm him? After all, it must have needed some ailment beyond the ordinary to take that partner home in the middle of the afternoon for the first time in his life; and surely Harry realized this. All at once a feeling that something might be pretty wrong at home came upon Hatcher; he rose to go, and, in spite of reproaches from Dorcy, and Harry Aldrich’s protest that the evening was just beginning, got himself out rather abruptly.

At home, after he’d put the shabby car in the empty-looking big garage behind the house, his mother met him at the front door. “Be very quiet, dear,” she said. “He hasn’t eaten anything; but finally he consented to try those insomnia pills Dr. Loffen gave me after my operation, and took two. For quite a while I could hear his bed creaking with his tossing about; but now it doesn’t any more, so I do hope he’s asleep.”

Hatcher looked at her earnestly. “Did you get him to tell you what was wrong?”

“No, not a thing. He’s never had anything but colds before and I don’t know how to handle him. When he’d look at me, insisting he only needed to be let alone, his face was just pitiful. It’s so strange! Go up quietly, dear.”

Hatcher, increasingly disturbed, went upstairs on tiptoe and, as noiselessly, into his own room. He undressed, turned out the light, and, in his pajamas, stepped to his door, opened it and listened. From his father’s room, across the hall, he heard no sound and the whole place was still; but to his ears there came from the distance a faintish clatter of busy thumpings. Somewhere in the night, apparently, a lot of idiots had suddenly decided to build a house. He closed the door softly, went to the open window near his bed and heard the hammering more distinctly.

Outside, the big old trees had already shed leaves profusely in high winds and premature frosts, and, between angular half-bare black branches, he saw rows of gleaming oblongs, the windows of the long stone house next door all alight. The noise of the hammers came from there. Mrs. Florian would be home so soon, then, that night-shifts of workmen were needed. Lighted windows in that house were as unprecedented as his father’s untimely coming home from business—perhaps because of some mental shock. Two thoughts now seemed to collide in young Hatcher Ide’s mind almost as spontaneously as, hours earlier, the still younger fancies of his little sister Frances had put together the two unexpected things that had happened.

Hatcher remembered the strange groan. Was it fantastic to wonder if his father had gagged with nausea—nausea not physical—because Mrs. Florian was coming home? For heaven’s sake, then, who and what was this Mrs. Florian—this twice-married Sarah Lash? Hatcher couldn’t remember her at all; a boy’s mind easily erases an adult absentee. His mother, next-door neighbor to this Sarah Lash, hadn’t liked her; and Mrs. Aldrich, next-door neighbor on the other side, laughed about her, alluded derisively to “affairs of passion”. Gilpin Murray’s mother, just across the street, had used the unpleasantly suggestive term “pirate”. Mrs. Florian had been married twice and was now, for the second time, a divorcée. “One of her affairs of passion,” Mrs. Aldrich had said. Evidently Mrs. Florian’d had quite a number of such affairs.

The blue darkness outside the window, patched in the middle distance with the rows of lemon-colored oblongs, seemed to become ominous. Night, for youth especially, is incentive to fancies that may be charming—or may be dreadful. Hatcher felt a secret somewhere. Could it be possible that one of this Sarah Lash’s affairs of passion—a hidden one—when his father was younger—Hatcher almost gagged, himself; but his imaginings continued. Was this gross old grass-widow coming home to plaster the former object of one of her affairs of passion with reminders and—and some hideous form of blackmail—or what?

“That’d be a hot one for me!” he thought. “Just the finishing touch for little old Hatcher Linley Ide, B. A.!” His was a generous nature, devotedly loyal; nevertheless, it can’t be denied that at twenty-two our first misgivings in the face of catastrophe—especially imagined catastrophe—are usually for ourselves. Hatcher’s mental picture was of himself returned to a depleted household and no job—and, as “the finishing touch”, to bear the conspicuous odium of being the son of a man held up to the city’s derision by the clamorous echoes of some sexy old scandal. “Sweet!” he thought. “Wherever I go, everybody looking at me sidewise, wondering if I can take it. Grand!”

Then Hatcher thought of the face of his father—a fine face and a strong, good face, lined with the years of struggle to uphold an old business and a growing family—and a muffled laugh whispered in the darkened bedroom. “It’s a crazy world; but I must be the craziest damnfool in it!” Hatcher said.

He got into bed, and went to sleep thinking about pretty Dorcy Aldrich and about dirty old mortgaged houses freshened up with grayish putty-colored paint and a green trim.