Читать книгу The Lorenzo Bunch - Booth Tarkington - Страница 3

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As the earlier of the two afternoon programs at the Garfield Avenue Theater was completed and a sparse procession of patrons emerged to the sidewalk, an imported closed automobile stopped before the entrance and a colored chauffeur, neat in dark grey, opened the door of the rear compartment. Chauffeurs and such cars being by no means a matter of course before that theater, a few of the recent audience paused to stare mildly as a stoutish fair young man of what seemed to the observers an aristocratic appearance stepped forth from the interior of this costly machine, sauntered to the box-office in the lobby, bought a ticket and entered the theater.

Inside, the lights were still on for the interval; he paused for a moment at the outer end of an aisle, glanced over the scattered clumps of people still remaining in their seats, then determined where he would sit and passed down the aisle, removing his tan suede gloves as he went. Far forward, he paused again, glanced back idly over the audience, as if for no reason; then took an aisle seat in the third row from the front, and looked back again over his shoulder casually. After that, however, facing the vacant screen, he seemed to compose himself for the entertainment.

He had attracted the attention of two young matrons who sat at about the middle of the house. “Look, Arlene,” one of them said to the other. “There’s that fellow again.”

“Which fellow you mean, hon?”

“You know. The one with the New York-looking hat and gloves and cane—only to-day he’s got a blue suit on and the other times it was grey with a zippy blue handkerchief in the breast pocket. Don’t you remember?”

“Yes,” the other said absently. “You mean the blond that just sat down in the third row, don’t you?”

“Yeppy. Who you s’pose he was looking round for, Arlene?”

“Search me, Mabel!”

The fashionable young man in the third row, turning slightly in his chair, once more gave the audience behind him a seemingly casual survey, this time a longer one. The face he thus reciprocally exhibited to them was of an evenly pale comeliness; though about the blue eyes were the somewhat puffy modelings often characteristic of plump fair young men for whom dissipation is the only escape from boredom. Upon his upper lip a mustache little more than a blond hint of manliness seemed to one of the two young matrons already discussing him a final exquisite proof of his modishness.

“I do love a man to look like that, Arlene,” she said. “Cream de la cream all over, huh? I been trying I don’t know how long to make Art sport a handkerchief in his chest pocket and grow a mustache only as wide as his nose like that. Those little twin mustaches give ’em that Ritzy look, don’t you say so, hon? Why’n’t you make Roy grow one?”

“Roy?” Arlene laughed briefly at the suggestion that she could make her husband do anything fashionable—or perhaps at the suggestion that she could make him do anything at all. “Talk sense!”

“Look!” Mabel was suddenly excited. “He’s looking straight at us! Look, he’s keeping on looking at us, Arlene. Look, he looks like he thinks he knows us!” She giggled. “What’s he think he’s trying to do, pick us up?”

“Sh!” Arlene whispered, and looked indifferently away from the fashionable young man who continued to stare in their direction. “Better not talk so loud.”

The lights went out, and a fragmentary affair called a “pre-view” began flatly to be visible upon the vivid screen; but Mabel couldn’t immediately stop tingling over the young man whom they now saw as only the vaguest silhouette of shoulders and head. “He’s stopped looking; but I bet he was, Arlene. I bet anything he was wondering if he couldn’t make us.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

Mabel persisted. “But look, listen here! This is the third time we’ve seen him here. He was here the day last week I wore my plaid skirt and Madam Thompson hat, and then he was here Friday aft and look, it’s only Monday and here he is again! He rubbered around a good deal those other times, too, don’t you remember? But this is the first time he’s spotted us. Honest, I think that was kind of a funny look he gave us. It looked like the look you give somebody when you’ve been looking for ’em quite a while and just spotted ’em.” She giggled again. “I bet my old Art’d be sore if he was here and saw it! Honest, hon, what I better do if he gets up and follows us when we go out? S’pose he does speak to me, what I better do?”

“He won’t speak to you,” Arlene said calmly. “Don’t worry, Mabe.”

Her tone was quietly that of a woman who knows what she’s talking about; but Mabel was too pleased with the prospect of a slight adventure to be easily convinced. “He certainly was looking at one of us, Arlene.” Then she felt it the part of friendship to be modest or at least fair-minded. “The reason I’m pretty sure it’s me, it’s because he couldn’t seen you as well, account of people between, as he could me. Gosh Pete, I bet Art’d be mad! Anything like the slightest liberty always gets Art sore.” She giggled again; then presently her attention became concentrated upon the screen, drawn there by the pictured appearances of far remote persons to whom she was unknown but with whom she nevertheless enjoyed an unctuous kind of intimacy. “Claud Barnes and Myrta Beal! Say, hon, that’s good camera-work, too, you know it? Myrta won’t make any more pictures without Claud and’s going to get her divorce this month and marry him. They been crazy about each other ever since they did ‘Hearts of Fire’ together. He used to be prackly cuckoo over Paula Oberlin.”

“No,” Arlene said. “It was Marie Loner; she took dope. Oh, look! Myrta’s going to get her sport clothes torn in the bushes again, same as she did in ‘Rough House’, and he’ll pin ’em together with thorns for her the way he did then; you watch. What’ll you bet he doesn’t?”

Mabel wisely declined to bet anything, and the two became absorbed in the story revealed before them, in spite of the fact that the pattern of this revelation was familiar to them, and the fact also that they felt so personal an intimacy with the two principal actors that these lost all illusion of being other than Mr. Claud Barnes and Miss Myrta Beal. “Look,” Mabel whispered. “Claud’s going to get in trouble now; Myrta’s husband’s got a gun.” Not pausing, she murmured eagerly of the clothes worn by Miss Beal. “Myrta never wears it cut lower’n about fourteen inches in the back. Her back’s not so good; that’s why she runs to these opera cloaks. Look, lined with white ermine every inch of it! What you bet it cost, hon?”

Mabel had almost forgotten the fashionable blond young man; but, when the disks of film had spun out sound and picture for something like an hour more, Arlene said, “Here’s where we came in,” the two rose for departure, and Mabel’s previous excitement returned. There was the clatter of a walking-stick falling to the floor near the front of the house, and, as the pair of young matrons reached the aisle and turned toward the outer doors, Mabel clutched her friend’s arm and whispered, “Wha’d I tell you? That fellow’s following us out. Didn’t I tell you!”

“Come on,” Arlene said in a dry voice, and strode with some rapidity to the open lobby, where the smoked yellow twilight of the October day showed her to be a tall, rather thin young woman with a thin, handsome face. She had brown hair, not touched with bronze or any ruddiness; her grey eyes were cool and reticent. She looked knowing, experienced and what is called likeable.

Neither her black plain hat, rather large, nor her dark clothes were worn to compel the gaze of passers-by, though this couldn’t well be said of the green beret, yellow coat and tan skirt of her blonde little friend, Mabel. Arlene had once told her husband, Roy Parker, in confidence, that Mabel looked like a plump little pink-and-white pig made pretty, a true enough caricature; though Arlene had modified it conscientiously by adding that Mabel was a lively little thing, awful dumb but nice to run around with.

Mabel just now, in the lobby of the Garfield Avenue Theater, was livelier than Arlene wished her to be. “Hay! Don’t walk so fast, hon. I simply got to see if I’m not right.” So swift was Arlene’s long-legged stride that her loose coat breezed out behind her, and Mabel detained her only by grasping it. “Wait, Arlene! I bet you anything you like he’s right behind us and——”

Her voice collapsed into a delighted gasp as the young man came quickly out into the lobby by way of the door that had just closed itself behind them. Arlene, moving toward the sidewalk, did not look round; though she was as well aware of him as was her excited companion. Mabel suffered a disappointment; the young man spoke, but not to her.

“Ah—Mrs. Parker,” he said. “Ah—just a moment, please, Mrs. Parker.” Arlene walked on a few steps as if she intended to make no response whatever. He spoke more urgently. “Just a moment, Arlene, please!” She frowned, showed annoyance plainly; but paused. He lifted his hat, glanced at Mabel and asked, “Will you give me just a moment, Mrs. Parker?”

It was clear that he meant a moment aside with him, out of Mabel’s hearing. Arlene hesitated, then said, “Oh—well!” in the tone of one who finds it necessary to humor some importunate inferior and be done with it.

Mabel perceived that manners really compelled her to move on, as if indifferently, to a little distance, out of earshot. Piqued for herself and aglow with an almost stinging curiosity, she did this, and, pretending to be interested in Garfield Avenue’s passing traffic, watched Arlene and the fashionable young man as they stood together at one side of the lobby. Mabel’s impression was that the young man, though he kept his face impassive, put forth some request, pressing it upon Arlene, and that Arlene, less genial than usual, refused to grant it. Obviously laconic with him, she was seen to shake her head several times as he talked; then she decisively turned away from him and moved to rejoin her friend upon the sidewalk.

He followed, as if to renew his urgings; but, nearing Mabel, shrugged his shoulders slightly and strolled obliquely upon his own way. His chauffeur, across the street, had seen him and brought the impressive car to the curb before the theater; the young man stepped within and swept nobly away.

Mabel, clutching her friend’s arm as they began to walk toward home, gasped again. “Pete’s sakes, look at that million-dollar car! Listen, but ain’t you mysterious, Arlene! You knew him all the time! Who is he?”

Arlene, walking briskly, seemed to wish to regard the incident as closed. “Oh, just a fellow.”