Читать книгу The Show Piece - Booth Tarkington - Страница 6

Table of Contents

THE doctor was right about Irvie Pease’s father. Pretty Evelyn Pease, the mother, was doting creature enough; but, from the day of his son’s birth, Will Pease seemed mastered by a kind of ancestor worship in reverse, a blinded pride and joy in this offspring, their only child. William Levering Pease was otherwise better than a merely sensible man. He was a lawyer, possessed of a conscientious but agile mind that more than once, and before he was fifty, held honorable attention in the country’s highest court. His genial manner was genuine, coming from the heart; he had “literary leanings”, loved scholarship, and, though a rock for his principles, he was actually, I think, the very best liked and respected citizen of our populous community.

For my part, I didn’t like anybody better than I liked Will Pease. The earlier Peases and my own family had been intimate even before our country town began to swell and smoke itself up into cityhood seventy years ago, and there’d been more than one intermarriage to group us the more closely. Will Pease was my third cousin; and his wife’s first cousin, Irving Millerwood, had married my sister, Harriet. Thus the young Irvie—Master Irving Millerwood Pease, named for my brother-in-law—was my sister’s second-cousin-by-marriage and a third cousin to my niece, Emma Millerwood, Harriet’s daughter.

These relationships, often confusing to the people actually involved, are of course but fog and cobweb on the brain of a maddened listener for whom there’s an ill-advised attempt to make them clear. I’m not so rash; I’m only explaining that after old Joe Erb had unfortunately put me in the way of feeling a little fed-up with Irvie Pease sometimes, my feeling of guilt for the sensation was the more pointed because undeniably I was Irvie’s relative, however distantly and intricately.

The association of the two families was further knitted because after the death of my brother-in-law, Irving Millerwood, my widowed sister, Harriet, and her little daughter had come to live with me, next door to the Peases. Will and Evelyn Pease were Harriet’s contemporaries, not mine. She was fourteen years my junior; they were of like age, and throughout her girlhood and short married life she’d been the inseparable companion of Evelyn. Though upon need I could retreat to my workroom, a remodeled attic, the households in their intimacy were almost as one.

As nature seems to have provided that the most heartfelt business of any generation is the next one, the three children in the two houses, especially Irvie, largely absorbed the attention of the adults. My niece, Emma, only four when she and her mother came to live with me, was brought up, as we say, with Irvie Pease and that other boy of the Peases’, Edgar Semple, whom even old Joe Erb had confessed he liked. Here was another cousinship. Edgar was an orphaned nephew of Evelyn Pease’s, and Will and Evelyn had taken him in, which was like their kind hearts.

They didn’t legally adopt him; but the treatment he had from them was in all respects what he’d have received if he’d been their own son—a slightly younger brother of Irvie’s, warmly cherished though less on the way to become a personage. Both Edgar and Irvie seemed to take this same view. At least it was evident in Edgar’s manner, and Irvie could never have been allowed to doubt his own superior prominence and promise.

Dr. Joseph Erb placed upon the father most of the blame for Irvie’s youthful showiness; but here a change in American custom was concerned. Will Pease, like many another of only the fourth generation after the pioneers, had been brought up so strictly and with such consequent numberless small mortifications that on the very day after the birth of his son he told me happily that he’d never say an arbitrary no to him, the boy should live in freedom; and Will kept his word. He kept it so well that whatever else Irvie was, he was himself, his own child and on the way to be his own man. I sometimes thought, though, that he’d inherited himself—not from his lovable parents but from some everybody’s darling far back in his ancestry.

Enhancing such heritage, poor Irvie had begun even in infancy to hear talk of his talents. Both parents quoted him in his presence. They dwelt upon his babyhood’s precocities of wit, described with delight his young unconventionalities, and nobody need think he didn’t understand. When he was no more than two, his facial expression, especially when his bodily beauty was being extolled, often made me laugh within my ribs; I was too fond of Will and Evelyn to be open with such mirth.

Will Pease, teaming, would stop a friend on a downtown street and tell him something little Irvie had said or done, and then, perhaps that evening, would let Irvie hear him repeating to callers what the astonished and delighted friend had exclaimed in comment. Thus early do some of us learn our prominence.

When Irvie was eight Will told his partners and stenographers, and everybody else on their floor of the Millerwood Building, that Irvie of his own choice had begun to read Don Quixote and had written “a rather remarkable little poem” about the book. Will typed copies of the poem, sent them to relatives and friends and even handed me one in the Peases’ living-room after a fairly large but congenial dinner-party. He coughed, laughed placatively, and asked me if I’d mind reading it aloud to the company. I contrived to do it with gravity.

“Don Quixote thought he was a knight

Perhaps he was right.

It was a long time of yore

People do not wear armors any more.

Though of knights now there are none

My own heart whispers some day I will become one.”

During the reading, Will Pease sat on the edge of his chair, and, leaning forward, listened as if to angels’ choiring; but when I finished he did his best to be a modest father. Coughing apologetically, he explained that though of course the verses were faulty in form he really couldn’t help feeling that a certain quality in the thought made them rather worth hearing, if we hadn’t minded. He had to confess that he was really pretty foolish over the boy, he went on, with an engaging laugh at himself; and probably he oughtn’t to have asked grown people to listen to an eight-year-old child’s poetizing. On the other hand, he and Evelyn both had a feeling that maybe it did show just a glimmer of something perhaps rather unusual—the use of the word “whispers” in the last line of the poem, for instance—and, well, he couldn’t help feeling that the verses showed something that some day might—might develop into—well, something unusual and—and——

“You don’t need to be making excuses, Will.” The interruption came from Janet Millerwood, Will’s aunt, a woman of my own age but all her life an undiscourageable, almost professional enthusiast. “Everybody knows how unusual Irvie already is,” she said. “No other living child of eight could possibly have written anything to compare with those lines of his. I liked particularly that touch of Irvie’s about his heart’s whispering to him that he’d be a knight some day. The word ‘whispers’ makes it a touch that has actual subtlety. He felt the thing emotionally, you see. He didn’t just think it; he felt it. There’s analysis there, instinctive discrimination, and it’s always the true essence of poetry to deal in these shades of meaning. I’m grateful to Irvie for a real pleasure, and I think it’s all simply too wonderful for words!” She turned to her sleepy old husband. “Don’t you feel so, too, Frank?”

“I liked it first rate,” he said obediently. “It’s remarkable.”

My sister Harriet, glowing, clapped her hands. “More than just remarkable,” she declared. “There’s only one Irvie!”

I glanced at Irvie’s mother. She sat deprecatorily blushing but proud as Punch. I saw something more; behind her chair a door stood ajar and beyond it, in the hall, was the poet, himself. He’d tiptoed there to listen, being obviously certain that his poem was going to be at least mentioned. I restrained my hilarious upsurge, looked dreamy and let him go on thinking himself unseen.

The hall was dim; but Irvie’s pleasure was too bright to be obscured. Never, for sheer complacency, have I seen his eavesdropper’s smile equalled, even upon the face of an applauded adult. He waited until everybody had finished the obligatory exclamations about him; then he stole away—most likely to write another subtle poem, I suspected.

By less than this have I known full-grown persons to be ruined, so far as any comfort in their society was concerned. By less did I once see a sober-minded woman of thirty so changed that until her recovery people ran at sight of her. They didn’t run at sight of Irvie Pease, though, except toward him. Old Joe Erb was Irvie’s only detractor, a pitiable minority, and when I more or less—mainly less and with inward mirth—became somewhat of the Doctor’s opinion, I naturally didn’t tell anybody. Irvie of course, though he saw us, was almost unaware of such dim old creatures as Erb and me, plainly looked upon us as inconsequent objects in his adjacent scenery. When his attention was unavoidably drawn to myself, he showed the slightly amused tolerance for the obsolete that is really in the heart of all youth when it acknowledges the existence of a bygone era’s relics.

He accepted applause, though, from any quarter, old or young, expected it and was graciously used to it. By the time he was fifteen he’d had a lifetime of it from the Peases and Millerwoods, aunts, uncles and cousins, and from the general circles in which he moved. My sister regarded him as a part of her reverent and tender mourning for her worshipped husband because Irvie had been named for him. She could never bear the slightest hint of criticism of Irvie Pease, and as for the young Emma, my niece, she was Irvie’s serf.

Where’s a man so rare that even in mature age he’s acquired the art of self-protection when he speaks to ladies of their idols? On the evening after a tennis tournament arranged by Irvie Pease to celebrate his sixteenth birthday, I stirred up an actual scene at my own dinner-table where sat only my sister, my niece and myself. Emma and Harriet were exclamatory over the humorous little speech addressed by Irvie to the tennis spectators (of whom I’d been one) when he’d accepted the silver cup donated by his great-aunt Janet and awarded to him as the winner of the “tournament”.

A fond flush decorated Emma’s brow and cheeks; she was beginning to turn prettier after a plain childhood and the warm color made her almost lovely. “Wasn’t he darlingly funny, though!” she cried. “He’s always making fun of himself in the cutest way, especially when he has an honor or something bestowed on him. You know—like calling himself the ‘Old Maestro’ or ‘Irvie, the Idiot Earl’—all those funny things he makes up to call himself. He’s really so terribly modest, the way he makes fun of himself; it just makes everybody think all the more of him.”

I had an unfortunate impulse to be educational. “Yes, indeed,” I said airily. “Many biographies show it to be a successful method, Emma. Self-aggrandizement dressed up as mirthful self-belittlement is an excellent old device to win the innocent.”

Harriet gave me a stare that should have stopped me. “You didn’t think that was a charming little speech of his?” she asked.

“Yes, charming. I think Irvie had a regret, though.”

“What regret?”

“I had a low idea,” I said. “I thought Irvie was sorry he couldn’t make both speeches—the presentation one by poor old Janet Millerwood and his own, too.”

“But that would have been impossible!” Young Emma’s eyes were enlarged by seeing a person of my age lost to common sense. “How could anybody make a speech presenting a cup to himself and then another accepting it? Those are two utterly different things, don’t you see? They’re just the opposite. So how could Irvie have done both?”

“He couldn’t, Emma. I only had an impression he was rather restive during his great-aunt’s address to him and that he was thinking of a few rather nice things about himself he could have wished her to add. That’s not so rare, dear, in recipients of awards—even when they have bald or grey heads.”

“Why, how awful of you!” Emma’s bright hazel eyes attained their largest. “I never heard such absurd blind nonsense!”

“Don’t wither me, Emma!” Like many another rash old tease of an uncle making trouble for himself, I went on with my prattle. Emma was the most athletic girl in our large neighborhood, and on a tennis court a flying marvel. “When Irvie got up the tournament to honor his birthday,” I said musingly, “you don’t suppose he was pretty sure of one probability, do you?”

“What probability?”

“That you’d let him win, Emma.”

“Let him!” she cried. “Let him! What on earth do you mean?”

“I’m afraid I thought you slacked off rather plainly in the set you lost to him, Emma.”

“What!” She seemed to see me as a horrifying spectacle. “Of all the accusations! There never was a fairer contest. Irvie beat Edgar and he beat Mary Reame and Harry Enders, and so did I. We couldn’t play more than one set each with each or we’d have been there all night, and if every one of us didn’t play our best every time it wouldn’t have been a real tournament. Doesn’t that satisfy you?”

“It’s not to the point, dear,” I said. “I had the unworthy thought that Irvie knew you’d let him win because you always do.”

“Oh!” Emma uttered the one exclamation. It was a hurt outcry, and, although her lips moved as if she tried to add something to it, she couldn’t. In fact, she burst into tears, rose from the table and brokenly left the room.

“Thoughtful of you!” my sister said. “Do you think it considerate to tease her by casting slurs on——”

“Slurs?” I tried to laugh myself out of a false position. “Are you taking it seriously, too? Can’t I be allowed to try to be a comic old bystander once in a while? Slurs? Good heavens! They’re only children. Slurs!”

“What else could they seem to Emma?” my sister said. “What are you trying to do to her? Spoil her friendship with a dear boy who’s the splendid only son of our own kinsfolk, our next neighbors and best friends? I declare I think you’d better dose your old dried-up sense of humor with a narcotic!”

Snubbed speechless, I nevertheless strongly agreed with her as she, too, abandoned me to my coffee and the four candles that lighted our small table. Irvie wasn’t to be joked about. Henceforth when my thoughts of him tempted me to be a funny dog I’d better become a miracle of silence.