Читать книгу The Heritage of Hatcher Ide - Booth Tarkington - Страница 9

IV

Table of Contents

Young Hatcher Ide, released from the slower pace of his uncle and swinging forward at his own natural stride, groped among his emotions, supposing them to be thoughts. “Some jolt!” he murmured, alluding to his interior reception of the fall of his elegant Uncle Victor all the way to a second-rate boarding-house. Uncle Victor’s sangfroid also disturbed the nephew; the recent exhibition of indifference to calamity went beyond the human. Pleased because he was allowed to wash his dog twice a week in the cellar! Golly!

Were these older people already calloused to the perishing of the order to which they belonged, or was it a fact that after you’re thirty it doesn’t much matter to you—or to anyone else—what happens to you? Why had they let everything go to pot? Just dumbness? Well, it was time for the new generation to get tough, take hold and do something different.

The only question was how to take hold of what.

He walked unanswering miles northward into air that smelt as much of burned oil as it did of soft coal smoke. Then, arrived in a residential fringe, he followed an ascending thoroughfare to the top of a suburban ridge, and turned into a shrubberied street labeled upon a corner lamp post, Butternut Lane. The “lane” was hard-surfaced between cement curbstones; but years of skilled landscaping had produced cloistral privacies for the elaborate houses on both sides of what was now a suburban avenue. Every prospect that met the eye spoke of success ensconced in a luxuriously dignified seclusion. Hatcher Ide, turning into Butternut Lane as sunset edged with gilt the silver trunks of noble beech trees and glazed with rose the autumnal lawns and gardens, thought this look of things so false as to be sardonic. Judging by all he’d heard in the two weeks he’d been at home, he’d come to the conclusion that everybody in the place was just about broke.

Some of the bankrupts evidently didn’t realize their condition. From between the stone pillars of a driveway gate there rolled forth a darkly glistening automobile with white-sided wheels. In the driver’s seat, exposed to the weather, sat a proud-eyed colored man in livery, and behind him, enclosed but visible through clear glass, a pretty woman all gray fur and gray velvet smiled out upon a world she seemed to like. She saw Hatcher, leaned forward, gayly threw him a kiss; and he responded by fumbling at a hat he wasn’t accustomed to wearing but had donned as appropriate to rent-collecting down in the city.

Fifty feet farther on, he stopped and looked over the top of the hedge that bordered the cement sidewalk. At the other end of a green lawn, near a house outwardly inspired by Mount Vernon, a girl in a pale green shirt and bright blue trousers was raking red and yellow leaves into a pile under one of the tall old trees. She had a neat profile and fair hair; her figure looked able, and she used the rake with a sustained vigor.

She saw Hatcher, waved to him with a high-flung hand, dropped the rake, ran lightly over the grass, and showed him across the top of the hedge a face much like that of the comely lady who’d just thrown a kiss to him. “Any luck?” she asked. “How was the job to-day?”

“Same’s yesterday,” Hatcher said. “Nothing plus nothing. They’re all bums. Me, I’m upside down. Just saw your mother slicking out in her big town-car. Doesn’t anything ever worry her, Dorcy?”

“No; especially not when she’s going after Harry.” Dorcy smiled indulgently. She was the only child of the junior partner in the firm of Ide and Aldrich; and, like almost everybody else, she affectionately called him “Harry”. He was that sort of father. “When Mother drives down to the office to bring him home, herself, why, for an hour beforehand you’d think she’s going to a party. The Romeo and Juliet stuff’s lasted so long with them it sometimes makes me think their generation did themselves a good turn tangling escapist romance with sex. Anything except rent-collecting get you upside down, Hatch?”

“Uncle Victor Linley,” Hatcher said. “Ran into him down in the dirtiest smoke where everybody used to live—nothing but a slum—and I found out he lives in it now, himself. Know what he’s doing? Handmaid to a cocker spaniel. Some woman named it Goldilocks and gave it to him; so he changed its name to Locksie. Helps the dog, he told me, and’s so tactful it didn’t offend the giver. His mind seemed to dwell on things like that. Is Uncle Victor screwy or am I?”

Dorcy neglected the question. “He’s the most fascinating man in town,” she said. “Some woman’s given him a spaniel, has she? There are others who’d like to give him a lot more than that. I simply worship his blue eyes! There’s something so mysterious and gripping about that type of slight, delicate-looking men with brilliant minds that have so much to offer and—”

“Listen!” Her enthusiasm seemed to stupefy Hatcher. “You’re talking about my uncle, not me! Have you any idea of his age? At that, though, he doesn’t seem to realize any more than a child what’s happened to him. He didn’t, even when I talked to him about the kind of world his generation’s let us in for. You don’t seem to appreciate that, yourself. Likely enough it’s because of the way your family somehow manage to go on living. Of course you can still do it because your father hasn’t got my father’s expenses—three children to keep in school and college at the same time, for instance. Take me: right up to when I got home I was spending as if I were on the top of the wave—and there’s Aunt Ada. Your father hasn’t any expensive old-maid sister to support, or old servant pensioners. Dorcy, you don’t seem to realize—”

“Don’t I?” Dorcy said. “Because I only rake leaves when the gardener has too much to do, I haven’t got a social conscience? You think because Father and Mother go on having themselves a big time I’m content to be a parasite? Girls aren’t like that these days—not any more than you are, yourself.”

“Yes, I know.” Hatcher was teasingly skeptical. “You all want to be secretaries or Hollywood, or female broadcasting wagsters, or both kinds of models or—”

“We do not! Look at my best friend, Mary Gilpin, downtown and on her feet about ten hours a day. Look at Amy Murray. Amy’s been to department stores and everywhere for weeks and weeks trying to land a job, and if she hadn’t told me that wherever she went too many girls had been there before her, I’d have been doing the same thing. If it weren’t for that, I’d probably be working harder than you do, Hatcher Linley Ide!”

“Dorcy! You really feel that way? I ask your pardon.” Hatcher looked at her solemnly over the top of the hedge. “Well, what’s it all mean? It means that youth hasn’t got anything but its own unrest and that’s something that leads to chaos. Well, what do we do about it? That’s up to the individual. Well, you and I are individuals, aren’t we? So what ought you and I to do?”

“I’ve been listening to broadcasts like that, too, Hatch; but I haven’t any idea.”

“I have,” Hatcher said, a little irritated. “It’s my own, thanks, and I just thought of it. We can’t find out what we ought to do till we first find where any openings are. The simple God’s truth, Dorcy, is that we ought to take a car and a trailer, and go up and down this country—I mean all over it, east and west and north and south—with a fine-tooth comb and study what’s the matter with it and what we can do to remedy it and find ourselves an opening for a better way of living and—”

“Who?” Dorcy interrupted. “Who ought to take a car and a trailer and—”

“You and I,” he said absently. “I suppose we could get married first and—”

“Hatcher Ide!” Dorcy’s color heightened; but she laughed amiably. “Isn’t your head just a bit in the clouds? If you don’t mind being reminded, we’re not even engaged.”

“Oh, well,” he said, “we’ve always expected to be. I’m serious, Dorcy; we ought to get a car and a trailer and—”

“What with?” she asked. “I made Father cut my allowance in half the other day, and what you’re earning—I mean what you’re not earning—”

“No.” He sighed. “Of course it’s impractical. Every really sensible idea always is impractical. For instance, my father’s got any quantity of vacant old brick and frame houses with the plumbing looted out of ’em and all blacked up with smoke; but if he’d let me buy second-hand plumbing and paint the outside a dark putty-color that wouldn’t much show smoke smears and with an attractive apple-green trim, and the inside walls painted—” He stopped abruptly; then added, “Impractical again, of course!”

“But why, Hatch? Why’n’t you go ahead and do it?”

Hatcher laughed. “I put it up to one of the old retainers at the office, Mr. Barley, and he looked scared. Told me I’d better not suggest my father’s sinking any more money in those properties. Said there was no use painting anything down in the heavy smoke and everybody quit doing it long ago. Maybe he’s right. Well—most likely what’ll really happen, we’ll get into this war against Hitler, ourselves, or, if we don’t, some day I’ll stop letting Father kid me into pretending I’m a rent collector and thumb my way to Canada and join up with some regiment there. You’d probably go, yourself, as a nurse or something.”

“Yes, I wouldn’t like to be out of it if—”

“No; you wouldn’t. You’ve got unrest too, of course, Dorcy. Well—” He sighed again; then was annoyed by a thunderous rumbling upon the street pavement behind him. He turned his head and saw a procession of four ponderous closed trucks moving slowly upon Butternut Lane. “What’s all this?” he asked. “Somebody in our neighborhood selling their furniture and moving out?”

“No; it’s furniture moving in,” Dorcy informed him. “It’s from Paris.”

“Where’s it going?”

“Into the Lash place, next door. The woman that owns the Lash place is coming home from France on account of the war. She was the Miss Sarah Lash that lived there when we were little; but I don’t remember her. Do you?”

“Me? Not any.”

“She’s rich,” Dorcy said. “The Lashes always were, of course, and she’s the only one left, so she’s got it all. She’s been married twice; she’s a double grass-widow. Her name’s Mrs. Florian, Mother told me; but from the way she spoke I don’t think she ever liked her much.”

Hatcher wasn’t interested. “Well—some old grass-widow,” he said vaguely. “I’ve got a dollar. I’ll grab the car after dinner, Dorcy, and run you in to see that jungle picture. Right?”

Dorcy stretched an arm across the hedge, gave him a pat on the shoulder. “Right!”