Читать книгу The Heritage of Hatcher Ide - Booth Tarkington - Страница 8

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Outside the city and its denser purlieus the sky was blue and the perspective neatly outlined in the clean air of a chilly bright afternoon in mid-September, Nineteen thirty-nine, the tenth year of the Depression. Down in the old “North Side”, however, no one could have been positive that the sun shone; the old “best residence section” lay ruinous in the smoke. The bad ten years had made it horrible and the surviving relics of the once imposing neighborhood grotesque. Its former character had become almost indistinguishable among dusty parking lots, “used car sales lots”, vacant automobile salesrooms, half-empty apartment buildings, languid filling-stations, outrageously-colored dirty billboards and the close ranks of small dim houses that had long since yielded their paint to the acids of the smoke.

Here and there, like degraded old aristocrats dying on their feet among sick proletarians, a few of the big thick-walled houses still stood, and the most massively pathetic of the scattered relics, the largest one left on fallen Sheridan Avenue, loomed dimly through that afternoon’s five o’clock stoking-time clouds of grime. Apparently awaiting the mercy-stroke of the wrecker, this big dirty old house, painful to the passer’s eye, occasionally to his ear, and, at meal times, to his nose, now made itself so vague in its own down-blown smoke that the fly-specked sign, “Rooms”, in one of the large, smeared plate-glass front windows could not be seen from a distance of fifty feet. Nevertheless, a sauntering gentleman on the opposite side of Sheridan Avenue paused to gaze that way.

Something over forty and of a slight and short but symmetrical figure, he had eyes so brightly blue that the color surprised any first glance at him. The whiteness of his collar, the trimness of his black clothes, the dustlessness of his hard hat, and the glisten of the malacca walking-stick in his gray-gloved hand were no more to be expected in this neighborhood than was the clean bright-collared golden spaniel that accompanied him. What caught this rather exquisite gentleman’s attention, and brought him and the spaniel to a halt, was a colloquy taking place across the street. In the marble-floored soiled vestibule outside the carved walnut front door of the shamed old house, a tallish young man was being harangued by a soiled fat woman who looked like two stuffed sacks, one upon the other, with a large unclean vegetable atop the upper and a pair of torn slippers under the lower.

The vegetable had a voice, cacklingly verbose, and the longer and louder this tireless voice talked, the more nasally reproachful and uninterruptable it became. It was accompanied by gestures with a dust-pan in the one hand and a bunch of rags in the other;—the soiled fat woman seemed to be injuredly resisting a proposal urged upon her with feeble persistence by the young man. Evidently she dramatized their relation, perhaps not without a dramatist’s pleasure in effective “situation”; for the young man’s brownish “country gentleman” clothes were fair provocation to evoke, for the benefit of passing traffic, a scene of wealth persecuting poverty.

An accusing phrase, “You rich people”, often and loudly repeated, interested some colored women who were idling by, and a group of smutted children stopped sidewalk play to listen. The gentleman across the street leaned restfully upon his serviceable malacca stick, smiled faintly, and the golden-haired spaniel sat down. Sometimes completed sentences from the controversial vestibule reached that far: “You rich people think all the poor’s got to do’s break their backs night and day to keep you in money. You rich people don’t ’preciate the poor’s got to eat same’s you rich people.”

All at once the young man in the vestibule seemed to become discouraged. His shoulders drooped, and, as the fat woman retired with a gratified air behind the closing door, he turned, came gloomily down the broad steps between carved stone balustrades and gave to view a boy’s face good-looking and pleasant even in disappointment. His hands were deep in his pockets, and his eyes remained downcast in melancholy till he reached the sidewalk; then he glanced up, stared and murmured, “Well, look who’s here!”

He crossed the street to the blue-eyed gentleman with the spaniel, and addressed him. “What on earth are you doing here, Uncle Victor?”

“My afternoon walk for Locksie’s health,” the uncle replied. “We stopped to see how much you’d accomplish with Mrs. Schapp. We couldn’t hope it’d be a great deal.”

“No! Mrs. Schapp’s the most rancid woman I ever had an argument with. You wouldn’t have thought I was trying to collect the rent from her; you’d have thought I was asking her for spending money to loaf on. Told me she had her bills to pay! You’ve never talked to her, have you, sir?”

“Yes. I used to call there on the same mercenary errand, Hatcher. Your father’s given you a job as a rent collector, has he?”

Hatcher Linley Ide, the nephew, looked despairingly at his Uncle Victor Linley. “My second day at it. Zero! Everybody said it would be hell to get out of college in Depression; but I’m just finding out. Dante missed this for his Inferno—sending a lost soul out to listen forever to why people that never paid any rent aren’t going to. I’m supposed to get a percentage; but I see that was just having fun with me. I think you’re all crazy!”

“Yes, we are,” the uncle said placidly. “People usually confirm that discovery at about your age—newly twenty-two, isn’t it, Hatcher?”

“Yes, ‘newly’.” The nephew looked annoyed. “I suppose that means you’re going to tell me I haven’t any idea how young I am. Aunt Ada Ide’s been saying that ever since I bought my first pipe. When does it stop? For instance, Uncle Victor, would somebody twice your age—say somebody round eighty or so—tell you that you don’t yet know how young you are?”

“I hope so, Hatcher, and I’d no more know what he meant than you do when your Aunt Ada says it to you. We’re all engulfed in our ignorance of our own youngness, which probably means that man never has knowledge of himself but is only a sort of cluster, subject to chemical reactions called instincts and emotions. Let’s not go into it. You were saying that all people of my age are insane. What symptom of our lunacy most frets you?”

“Why, owning so-called rental property in a section that’s gone to rats and roaches! A few years from now you won’t hear a human voice in it; the only sounds’ll be the termites chirping to their mates at evensong.”

“ ‘Mates’, Hatcher? ‘Evensong’? Then love and poetry will still be found among the ruins, you feel?”

Hatcher made an indignant gesture. “This region’s an eyesore, and I’d hate to tell you how much of it’s my father’s own property—his mortgaged very own! He owns whole half blocks of run-down houses, a third of ’em owing rent and the other two-thirds empty.”

“Yes, Hatcher. Your Grandfather Ide was a great believer in real estate for income. It’s why Ide and Aldrich still have a Real Estate Department.”

“Real Estate Department?” the nephew echoed. “Looks more like a Trash Department to me! If they’d give me some used plumbing and enough fresh paint, though, I’d rent some of Father’s vacant houses to a class of tenants that’d pay.”

“The smoke hasn’t much respect for fresh paint, Hatcher.”

“I know, I know!” Hatcher said. “You’d have to keep painting. Fresh every hour. I have an idea, though. There’s a color—a kind of grayish putty-color I’d use with a gray apple-green trim, and I’ll bet I could—” He interrupted himself. “What’s the use? Father’d say it’d only be sending good money after bad. I certainly wouldn’t waste it, myself, on that house across the street. It’s hopeless. It’s the last place on the list they gave me for to-day and it’s the worst, this old Linley house. They told me it’s a stinger and that it still belongs to you, Uncle Victor.”

“Yes,” Mr. Linley admitted. “It’s my only tangible asset—to use a legal word frivolously. I tried to collect the rent myself until I felt that I was familiar with all that Mrs. Schapp could ever tell me about everything. Then I entrusted the property to your father’s firm; but don’t wear yourself out pleading with Mrs. Schapp, Hatcher. She paid the first month’s rent when she moved in, four years ago. Since then—fourteen dollars all in one day in a burst of generosity, but that’s already long ago and won’t be repeated, I feel.”

“What!” Hatcher cried. “Fourteen dollars rent in four years? Why don’t you put her out?”

“Mrs. Schapp? I’m only afraid she’ll go without being put, Hatcher. If she does, nobody else would come in and the house’d be looted of its sturdy old plumbing, and all the windows broken in a night or two. In the meantime the taxes—”

“Taxes! You really are crazy, Uncle Victor! Why don’t you tear it down and make the yard into a parking lot, or at least into just a vacant mud flat? Look how many people have done that. At least it cuts the taxes, doesn’t it?”

“Somewhat, no doubt,” Victor Linley said. “Your mother and I were born there, Hatcher. So were you and so was—”

“Sentimentality about a thing that looks like that! I certainly don’t see it!”

“No?” Mr. Linley gazed thoughtfully across the street at the dismal mass that was his. “You were a child the last time you were inside the house, Hatcher; so perhaps you don’t remember the drawing-room with the parquetry floor and the brocade paneling. Your grandmother had her piano there and used to play accompaniments to my father and his ’cello. He was born in that house, too, you know, just after your great-grandfather built it. Your father and mother were married there—a pretty wedding. I never went farther than the vestibule in my own interviews with Mrs. Schapp; I shouldn’t care to pass that threshold again. The house must look pretty queer inside, now.”

“Outside, too, if you ask me!” Hatcher exclaimed ruthlessly. “Trouble is you still seem to think of it as the ‘old Linley house’ full of dear old memories and so on, whereas the bald truth is it’s only Mrs. Schapp’s rooming-house cutting into your income with taxes. Ought to be blown up if that’s the only way to get rid of it.” He coughed, as a cloud of smoke from the cheapest grade of soft coal blew stranglingly down upon them. “Whoo! What a neighborhood! I’m dirty all over from a day in it. Let’s get out of it. Going my way?”

“Yes. Pleasure. I haven’t seen enough of you since you got home.” Uncle and nephew began to walk northward together, and the golden spaniel trotted a little in advance of them. “How long’s it been since we’ve had a walk together, Hatcher?”

“Not since the end of my sophomore year, I suppose.” The nephew, a head taller than his uncle, mitigated the quick loose-limbed stride at which he usually walked, and he laughed apologetically. “Don’t mind my insults about your sentimentalness, Uncle Victor. I’m in a funny condition. I’ve been away from home too long. I shouldn’t have spent my junior vacation on that Scandinavian cruise and I ought to’ve come home last June right after Commencement instead of letting a classmate drag me out to his ranch. Seems to me I’ve been in a kind of trance or something all through these six years away at school and college and I’m just beginning to wake up. Ever had that feeling of having been a child, or in a dream, up to a sudden change in your life? Then you seem to wake up and begin to really look round you for the first time. Damned uncomfortable; but that’s how I feel. I’m just getting my eyes open—right in the middle of things I don’t understand—and it seems to me that all I can do is to go after the naked truth about everything and be tough.”

“Tough? Why?”

“Because everything else is, Uncle Victor. Life, I mean. Everything’s changed and my generation’s got to face it. We can’t look upon life as a bed of roses the way your generation did. You—”

“Did we?” The inquiry was mild; but Hatcher, glancing downward sidewise at his uncle’s somewhat delicately modeled figure, caught the inference. Mr. Linley walked with an almost unnoticeable limp; but the stick he carried was for use, and sometimes he became a little short of breath.

“Oh, I know,” Hatcher said. “Your generation had to do the ‘Over There’ stuff, and of course I know about your being shot and gassed, too, sir; but, after all, that was only a tough episode. When you got back life went on being the same old bed of roses it used to be in the Gay ’Nineties and pretty much always was, in this country, up to now. Now it’s turned tough. The whole world’s turned tough, and you’ve got to be tough yourself, to deal with it. I seem to’ve had that bed of roses idea myself up until just two weeks ago.”

“What happened then, Hatcher?”

“Why, that was when I got home. First thing that hit me was right in our house. Used to be three maids, a house-man and a cook; chauffeur in the room over the garage. All gone, except the cook and poor old Berry pretending still to be the gardener and do a little weeding round the yard. Practically a pensioner because he’s too decrepit to be turned out. No house-man, no maids, no chauffeur, one car instead of three. Father takes a ’bus to his office and leaves the old rattle-box for Mother to cash-and-carry in. I’m the one and only un-carred young business man in the whole country and I’m going to stay that way, I foresee. I ought to’ve left college two years ago and gone to work.”

“Ought you, Hatcher?”

“Of course I ought! Look where things have got to—everything run down, and Mother and Father breaking their necks to keep Janey in Smith and little Frances as a day pupil at the Garden School here. Me, I’d always expected to go into Ide and Aldrich, of course; so I asked Father when he wanted me to begin. Damn! For a while he couldn’t speak at all.”

“Yes,” Uncle Victor murmured. “We have those embarrassments nowadays.”

“Embarrassments! That what you call ’em? Father finally explained, and I got the picture: Ide and Aldrich!—Ide and Aldrich, the oldest and best—Ide and Aldrich so shot to pieces they haven’t got room for the son of the head of the firm to come in as even an office boy. In the Real Estate Department they’ve let everybody go except the two oldest clerks and that old-maid stenographer that’s been with ’em ever since before even Father was born. Got to keep them for charity. Chance for me? Not very! Nor anywhere else. There’s Father—one of the most important men in town and not an idea in his head how to place me or do anything with me. So here I am, all educated up and home again to be a problem child on my parents’ hands. What do I do?”

“Apparently you solve the problem yourself, like a little man, Hatcher. Almost instantly you become Ide and Aldrich’s rent collector.”

“Oh, I do, do I?” Hatcher laughed ruefully. “They let one of the withered clerks, old Mr. Barley, collect the few still partly collectible rents. Father saw that if I didn’t do something I’d probably just decay; so he brightened all up and faked this job for me—trying to collect back rents they’ve completely given up hoping for, only he didn’t put it that way. He thinks it kids me into feeling I’m really working because I’m anyhow walking all day, and breathing smoke and getting filthy inside and out. Good of him; but of course it’s just a joke. You don’t need a janitor down at your own office, Uncle Victor, do you?”

“My own office?” Uncle Victor inquired. “Where’s that?”

“What!” Hatcher half-shouted, and, open-mouthed, he looked both alarmed and indignant. “You’re supposed to be an architect, aren’t you? You don’t mean you’ve given it up?”

“No; it gave me up. Architecture’s rather closely connected with building, you know.”

“Not even an office any more!” the staring Hatcher exclaimed. “What in hell do you do?”

“Well—in the afternoon I take a walk with Locksie.”

“Is that all? My Cripes!”

“No, Hatcher; he’s an absorbing dog,” Mr. Linley said. “A gentle modern creature; but nothing’s more interesting than to see the punctilio with which he observes the inherited etiquette of his ancestors. A civilized dog; yet every day I learn from him something new about primordial life. Given to me as a pup by a lady who’d named him Goldilocks. I didn’t wish to seem critical of her; yet I felt I had to help him out of that, so I call him Locksie. She doesn’t mind.”

“Now isn’t that lucky!” The astounded nephew became satirical. “I must say you take things rather calmly, Uncle Victor. Here’s the whole other side of the globe gone to war and this whole side of it gone to pot and you’ve lost your own profession, even your office; but all that worries you is—” He paused, wondering why his uncle had halted beside a gate in a low iron fence. They had come some distance from the painful Linley house and had reached a less completely dilapidated part of the street. Behind the iron fence was a short space of smoky grass cut through by a cement path that led from the gate to the veranda steps of a narrow brick house. The place was dull, sooty and shabby between a red-painted grocery and a filling station. “What interests you here, Uncle Victor?”

“I live here.”

“What?”

“Very comfortable,” Mr. Linley said. “The landlady lets me bathe Locksie in the cellar twice a week. Food always digestible and by no means always bad. The other boarders interest me warmly—like a good play. They’re all richly what we call ‘characters’ and most likeable. For instance, there’s a steam-fitter’s assistant who’s become a Buddhist and—”

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Hatcher said. “I thought you lived at the Carlyle Club.”

“Not now,” his Uncle Victor informed him gently. “The Club’s gone, too, you see.”

“I’m damned!”

“Won’t you come in?”

“Thanks,” Hatcher said. “I’ve got to keep walking. Good-by, Uncle Victor!”