Читать книгу The Show Piece - Booth Tarkington - Страница 5

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THAT an able-minded man in his late forties could be made morally bilious by a dear innocent child of four or five, and that for years such a man, a family doctor, would return to that condition whenever he thought of that child, overtaxes credulity; but the thing has happened.

The older we grow the queerer we are—though it may be only that the older we grow the better we see how queer everybody is—but, even in the days of Irvie Pease’s infancy, Dr. Joseph Erb recognized the strangeness of his thoughts about the child. Later, old Erb began to perceive the even greater oddity of his going on, year after year, feeling the same way about Irvie—whom almost everybody else loved. Erb and I had gone into our fifties, though, before the doctor openly admitted to me the absurdity of his prejudice.

That afternoon, having prescribed a tonic and peevishly referred to my dislike of exercise, Erb sat down by one of the open windows of my workroom, lighted a bent cigarette and looked poisoned as a noisy young voice was heard from the front yard of the house next door. “At twenty or even thirty,” Erb said, “I wouldn’t have believed that at my present age I could be so irked by merely the voice of that fifteen-year-old child out there. How do you stand it, yourself?”

“Without fury,” I replied, not permitting myself to laugh. “It brings me no acute discomfort even though I come near living with it.”

“So you do,” he assented. “Why don’t you move away?”

At that, I did laugh. “Do you think Irvie Pease is the reason I’m such an old wreck that my sister calls you in to prescribe bitter syrups for me and threaten me with death if I don’t walk five miles a day?”

“I didn’t say anything about five miles,” he said. “You can push yourself around a few blocks at the end of an afternoon’s work, can’t you? You’d better—if you expect to finish this book you’re on!” His annoyance with me increased as the voice outdoors became noisier. “Stop making a fuss over a twenty minutes’ walk a day. Confound it, listen to that boy out there!”

“Why should we, Doctor?”

“Because we can’t help it! Not with that window open.”

“Look at me, Lucy!” the boy was shouting. “Watch me, Edgar! Look, all you kids! Everybody listen to me, the Old Maestro!”

Dr. Erb knew as well as I did that many people found this gay young voice anything but an unpleasant one; nevertheless he gave me a malign glance, and then, urged by the human perversity that draws the eye to what will afflict it, he stared down from the window into the broad front yard next door. So did I.

There was a stone sun-dial in the midst of the green lawn and upon it a youth in grey flannels had clambered to stand erect, inviting the attention of five or six contemporaries previously engaged in the chase of a pair of frolicsome cocker spaniels. The boy on the sun-dial was brown-haired, brown-eyed, tall for his age but comely and not cumbersome. Indeed he was so elaborately graceful that the strong suspicion of his being consciously so was readable in Dr. Erb’s crinkled expression.

“Hey!” the boy shouted. “Everybody shut up! Forget those tykes, stand still, look at me and listen! Me, the good Old Maestro’s giving you a recitativo. Anybody that laughs is fined five dollars!” Then, as the group of his young friends subdued themselves to watch and listen, he assumed a mock heroic attitude, one arm extended and the other upon his heart. “I’m a statue on a pedestal, see. Statue of an Orator in the Forum Romanorum.”

One of the boys made an objection. “You can’t be, Irving. Statues can’t talk.”

“This one can,” the youth on the sun-dial said, and improvised loudly. “Friends, Romans and Countrymen, lend me your great big stick-out ears! I come not to bury Caesar or anything but to praise him if I can think why. Black as the pitch from pole to pole, I am the captain of my fate, I am the master of my soul! Kindly cheer, everybody; cheers, please! Louder, please; anybody that doesn’t cheer loud as they can I’ll fine ten dollars.”

A smaller boy seated on the turf before him spoke up seriously. It was he who had objected to a statue’s talking. “You can’t, Irvie. Nobody here’s ever had ten dollars all at once in their whole lifetime.”

“Shut up, Edgar.” Irvie Pease stood on his left foot, waved his right leg and both arms. “Look! The Russian Ballet! Watch the Old Maestro perform a Russian Ballet on but a few square inches of sun-dial. I’m the Afternoon of a Faun, see. More cheers, please! Anybody that doesn’t cheer loud enough I’ll fine twenty dollars. Yay! Hurray for the Old Maestro doing the Russian Ballet!”

Then, singing “Too-da-loodle-doo” as his accompaniment, he did the Russian Ballet a little too much, fell from the sun-dial, came to ground on his hands and knees, laughing, and jumped up lightly. “What do I do next? I’ll tell you. The Old Maestro will now play an exhibition game of tennis. Hop around to the tennis court, everybody. The Old Maestro’s going to play an exhibition set of singles. Emma, I’ll let you be my ingloriously defeated opponent. The rest of you can be frenzied spectators. Follow the Old Maestro! Yay!”

Musically protracting his “Yay”, he ran round the house to the tennis court in the shrubberied wide back yard. He ran leapingly, the spirit of the ballet still upon him; and with a submissive kind of eagerness the half-dozen others followed him—all except one, the boy Edgar, who remained seated upon the ground near the sun-dial and appeared to be lost in thought. Young Emma, my niece, royally appointed to be Irvie Pease’s tennis opponent, ran almost as dancingly as he did.

“Tickled to death, isn’t she?” old Joe Erb said, as the sound of the young voices came to us more faintly. “They all think it’s a privilege to have Irvie Pease take a little notice of ’em. Of the whole kit-and-boodle of ’em, that young niece of yours is the most so. Ever think about that?”

“Yes, I’ve seemed to notice it.”

“I’ll bet you have! She and the rest of the kids aren’t much foolisher over him than the grown people around here are, though. Actual adults brighten all up if he condescends to jolly ’em a little. They’re always saying, ‘Hasn’t he the loveliest manners with older people?’ Manners? Just pure, bald patronizing!”

“Or just pure, bald youngness,” I suggested. “Amiable of him, too, because most of ’em at his age don’t waste their time noticing us at all.”

“Me,” Erb said, “I like that better than the patronizing. As for that young niece of yours, she’d consider it a big treat to be allowed to polish his shoes. I’ve seen her a dozen times helping everybody else spoil him, hanging on his every golden word. If you’re so fond of her, as they tell me you are, why’n’t you get her to laugh at him, instead?”

I laughed, myself, as I resumed my chair at my work-table; I’d risen to look out of the window. “ ‘Get her to laugh at him’? She does that all the time. It’s the chief item of Irvie’s spell. She’s always telling me what a ‘marvelous comedian’ he is.”

“I see,” Erb said. “It wouldn’t be any use to try to get her to laugh at him intelligently. At their age they laugh at what makes old people’s ears and stomachs ache. People our age have no effect upon the young, no matter what we say or do.”

“Odd view for a doctor,” I suggested. “Have the young not eyes? Do they not weep when you bolus ’em? Do they not bleed when you——”

Still looking down from the window, he paid no attention to me. “I like that one,” he said. “That serious, round-faced young Edgar Semple. He hasn’t followed the ‘Old Maestro’ and the others. He’s still sitting there. Engaged in one of his meditations. Odd boy; but I think he’s got something. I’d give a nickel to know what he’s thinking about. I’d give more, though, not to know what Irvie Pease is thinking about; but I always do. So does anybody that takes one good look at him.” Erb began to replace his stethoscope and blood-pressure apparatus in his satchel. “Irvie Pease’s mere shining face is always a plain proof that he never for an instant thinks about anything but himself and never will.”

“Thinks?” I said.

“Oh, of course you’re right.” Erb looked moody as he closed the satchel. “Absorption in self isn’t thought. Children naturally have the most, and even at our age there are some odious remnants; but these people who all their lives seem just made of it—pure egoism, spontaneous self-pushery, instinct for leadership and self-dramatization—why, damn it, they succeed; they get on! They put it over big on all the boobs, and I never knew a more stick-out precocious sample of it than Irvie Pease. Yes, and he’s going to be that way all his life. Why, damn it, he makes me sick!”

I laughed again, Erb spoke with so sharp a vehemence. “Could you admit,” I asked, “that you’re a pretty biased old gentleman?”

“Absolutely!” He was loudly emphatic. “Here I go, still breaking out every now and then, spending actual time blithering over a bright-faced young school-boy! Who’d believe it? It’s absurd and I think I’m crazy. I don’t care. Look here, I brought almost all of that squad of youngsters down there into this world and I swear that the first squeaks ever uttered by Master Irving Pease sounded like ‘Me! Me! Me!’ ”

“Don’t they all?” I asked.

“No, sir! Not to that extreme. Remember by when he was three how he’d bounce into a roomful o’ grown people and beller and charge about and stamp and squawk to make ’em all look at him and put on a fuss over him, how cute and smart and active he was? I never could bear sound or sight of him then, nor from then on!”

“Go it!” I said. “Old family doctor walking into dozens of familiar households for decades, I should think you’d have got used to——”

“Not a bit of it,” he interrupted. “I’ve cured hundreds of ’em in thirty-three years of practice and most of ’em were good as gold when sick and some of ’em were mighty mean little specimens; but oh my, Irvie Pease! Whenever he was sick he just grabbed the chance to be more prominent and keep everybody on the run. On your word now, have you ever got used to him, yourself?”

“ ‘Used to him’, Doctor? Are you trying to goad me into feeling guiltily critical of one of my own family connections?”

“Thank God he’s not one of mine!” the doctor said and moved toward the door. “Feel guilty or not as you like. There’s one person who ought to feel that way, though, and that’s Irvie Pease’s father. Sit still; don’t come downstairs with me. I ought to know my way by this time, oughtn’t I?” Then, as we heard a burst of youthful cheering from the tennis court behind the house next door, old Erb uttered a grunted exclamation and his stamping footsteps on the stairway seemed to repeat the vocal protest.

I didn’t try to get back into my work; the interruption of the doctor’s visit had dislodged me, and a few moments after he’d gone I found myself idly looking down from the window again. Young Edgar Semple alone was in view, still sitting on the grass staring at the sun-dial. Not a noticeable boy, he was short, sturdy, round-faced and serious, as Erb had said; remarkably quiet, too.

He was so quiet that I was often curious about him, wondering what his thoughts might be, though apparently they were always as undisturbing as were his voice and manner and his placid clear blue eyes. He was Irvie Pease’s cousin—his semi-adopted brother, in fact, a background figure brought up in the same house. As I stood watching him and wondering why the sun-dial seemed to fascinate him, he rose and, with his head bent in thought, walked slowly away toward the noisy tennis court behind the house. He hadn’t been thinking about the sun-dial at all, I concluded; but he’d most typically been thinking.

As my spectacled eyes followed the stocky figure of fourteen-year-old Edgar Semple on his slow and pondering way toward the tennis court, I comprehended that the boy’s long, long thoughts were occupied with a puzzle, and I guessed that his mystery might be Irvie Pease. This kind of speculative guessing being the business and habit of any writing man—always reaching for what people feel and think—I went on to wonder if Edgar mightn’t be trying to understand just what in Irvie’s character and behavior made him a leader and in particular so captivating to my niece, young Emma Millerwood.

Edgar passed from my sight, and an undeniable sense of guilt, no doubt the result of old Erb’s querulous talk, came upon me. It was preposterous; but that guiltiness increased a few moments later when I again heard a triumphant young voice. “Viva! Viva the Old Maestro!” I could distinguish the words. “Give the Old Maestro a big hand for that shot, you kids! Everybody cheer! Viva the Old Maestro! Viva!”

My interior qualm was distinct, and old Joe Erb would have had a worse one if he’d stayed. So susceptible we are to suggestion that it can be contagion: a few strongly spoken words first lodge in our ears, then convince us that we’ve long held opinions or feelings now at last coming to light. I wondered if what Erb, and now I, too, found irritating in Irvie Pease was our own long-past youth—or our loss of it! Herodotus said that in Egypt the old tom-cats always slew all the young ones.