Читать книгу The Lorenzo Bunch - Booth Tarkington - Страница 4

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Mabel watched the fine car as it turned westward at the next corner. “Look. Crossing over to Gillespie Boulevard. I bet he lives on Gillespie Boulevard—with that car!—or else out in Goldwood. Did you know that’s what they call Oldwood Park now? They call it ‘Goldwood’. Bet he lives in Goldwood and going to drive out Gillespie Boulevard. D’you know they say Goldwood is even on top of Gillespie Boulevard socially? Honest, hon, aren’t you going to come across? Where’d you ever know that bird?”

“When I was cashier at the Griswold,” Arlene said. “I knew about every fellow in town when I was at the Griswold; they’d all come in there.”

“Say, honest, what you want to keep on being so mysterious for? I and you’ve belonged to the bunch about three years now and I’ve heard you say you quit the Griswold five years before that. Isn’t that straight?”

“Yes,” Arlene said. “I stayed on at the Griswold five years after Roy and I were married, on account of the salary; but I quit when little Ola was four years old so’s to devote more time to the child. Ola’s going on thirteen now. I was only twenty when Roy and I were married, and he was just four months older’n I was. Roy’s almost thirty-four now; he’ll be thirty-four the seventeenth of——”

“Listen!” Mabel openly showed irritation. “I know how old you and Roy and Ola are, and how old you were when you were married and everything, don’t I? Haven’t you ever seen that bird since you were at the Griswold?”

“Hardly more’n to say hello to on the street.”

“Oh, all right!” Mabel said, and took pains to let both her annoyance and her skepticism be audible in her voice. “Have it your own way. Why, certainly!”

“What’s the matter? What you sore about, Mabe?”

“Oh, nothing! Have it your own way, Arlene.”

The two young women walked on for some distance without speaking, Mabel being silent because of petulance, Arlene because of a meditation that engaged her. Mabel’s pretty, pink, piggish face showed painted lips resentfully pouting and artificially sparse eyebrows thinly scowling; Arlene thought she’d better take these distortions as a warning. Charlie Rice and Ed Stem and other husbands in their group often said Mabe Finch might be dumb but anyhow was the best little pal in the bunch, and that was really because Mabel was such a cosy talker. Get her alone and she’d tell anything to anybody—confidentially!

“Don’t be sore,” Arlene said. “He’s just a fellow I used to know when I was at the Gris——”

“Yes, I already heard that! Say, honest, do you mean you aren’t going to tell me his name? I know I’ve seen that good-looking sporty face of his somewhere before, and it kind of seems to me it was in the Sunday Rotogravure Section; I bet it’ll be there again and his name with it, too!”

“His name?” Arlene said promptly, upon that. “Gillespie Ives.”

“Pete’s sakes!” Mabel cried, enraptured. “Gillespie Ives! You mean to say you’ve known the great Gillespie Ives all this time and never——”

“Great?” Arlene laughed. “Where’d you get that ‘great’ stuff? He don’t count with me, hon; not a nickel’s worth.”

“Oh, he don’t? Say, listen! Why’s Gillespie Ives been at the Garfield Avenue Theater three times looking for you and what was it all about in the lobby just now? He certainly showed interest, hon!”

“Not in me,” Arlene said impatiently; but comprehended that Mabel must be told something and hoped that a part of the truth would satisfy her. “Listen, I’ll tell you, Mabe. It’s a laugh on him all right. One afternoon a couple weeks ago I was downtown shopping with a good-looking married girl-friend of mine and——”

“Who was she?”

“Who?” Arlene hesitated. “Why, she was a cousin of mine by marriage from out o’ town. Well, he passed us on the sidewalk in front of Marcy and Burton’s, and I noticed he’d turned around and was following us. He hasn’t got anything to do with his time, that bird, and it looks like he’s getting to be more and more of a chaser. He——”

“Pete’s sakes!” Mabel interrupted. “With a wife like Mrs. Gillespie Ives—anyhow judging from her pictures in the papers! He ought to be ashamed! Why, with a wife like that, if he’s around chasing everybody he sees on the street, he must have one of those manias you read about!”

“No. Too much money, I guess, and nothing to do, and he always did get that way over a whole lot of good looks on a girl.”

“Well, go on, Arlene. What happened?”

“Nothing at all. I had our Chev parked right by where we were and I saw he was fixing to speak to us; so I just poked her in ahead of me and jumped in, myself, and slid on down the street.”

“Well, go ahead. What then?”

“Nothing at all,” Arlene said again, and laughed. “That’s the whole business. First time he came to the Garfield Avenue Theater, last week, of course I knew what he was there for as soon as he commenced looking around. He thought maybe she’d be with me again and so he——”

“You’re skipping, Arlene.” Mabel was suspicious. “How’d he come to look for you at the Garfield Avenue if it’s straight you’ve never more’n said hello to him once or twice since you worked at the Griswold all that time ago?”

“Looked me up in the ’phone-book.”

“You mean he called you up?”

“Called me up?” Arlene laughed. “Men like that don’t call apartments where they’re liable to get a husband on the ’phone. No, he must have figured the Garfield Avenue was the nearest theater to where I lived; so he dropped in there, hoping she might be with me. I ducked out on him the first two times; but to-day he got me treed for a minute, and that’s all there is to it, Mabe.”

“All? Why, you haven’t——”

“Nuts over pretty women,” Arlene explained. “Tried to get me to tell him who she was and how to find her. I wouldn’t. That’s all the beans.”

“All?” Mabel was but the more suspicious. “Funny I never heard you mention any out o’ town cousin of yours by marriage before, Arlene.”

“That so? Might be a good many things I’ve never mentioned, don’t you expect so?”

“I certainly do!” Mabel said in bitter complaint. “I never knew anybody that kept more mysterious with their best friends. You never tell me anything. I bet you got a past that if poor Roy knew all about it the very hair on his head would——”

“That’ll do, Mabel!” Arlene spoke sharply, and this reference to her husband overspread her face with quick color; but, instantly realizing that her now deeply offended companion must again be placated, she said in a troubled voice, “Excuse me, Mabel; I didn’t mean it. You say I never tell you anything and maybe that’s so—I guess it’s kind of a habit.” She hesitated; but saw that it was necessary to continue her explanation. “Roy never wanted me to go on working at the Griswold after we were married and I wouldn’t of; but those days we just had to have the money. He hated my being there so much that afterwards—well, it’s something we just never talk about. You understand, don’t you? It’s like people that have been through a sickness or something they want to forget and so never mention.”

“You mean Roy can’t stand talking about it?” Mabel asked hungrily. “You mean he still gets sore on account of the sporty fellows that came in there and you——”

“I mean we don’t talk about it,” Arlene said. “What I don’t talk about with my husband I just as soon not talk about with anybody else, Mabel.”

“Oh, certainly,” Mabel returned, courteous in resentment. Then, pondering, she tried to think of something further with which to fret her tall companion. “Say listen, Arlene; s’pose this good-looking cousin of yours comes to find out some day Gillespie Ives was crazy over her and you choked him off, why, what about that? Aren’t you even going to tell her?”

“No, I’m not.”

“But listen here; he’s Gillespie Ives, and she might think you hadn’t done her much of a favor. I don’t say I expect she’d flop right into a date with him or anything; but when a man like that gets that way, why, I bet she’d certainly at least want to know it. S’pose she finds out——”

“Well, let her!” Arlene looked bored. “I’m not going to tell her.”

“But why not?”

“Gosh!” Arlene exclaimed. “She’s got a nice husband, and I don’t know her well enough to know what she’d do.”

“You don’t? I thought you said she’s your cousin.”

“By marriage,” Arlene said promptly, and yawned. “Listen, let’s quit talking about this, will you? There’s really nothing to it.”

“Okay.” Mabel’s assent was grudging; she felt that her curiosity had been treated as intrusive, something that happened too often when she was with Arlene. However, she postponed to a better occasion the reprisals natural under the circumstances, and the two friends walked on for almost a block, not talking.

They were nearing home; the yellow of the twilight was left only in the western sky, and the further distances of long, straight Garfield Avenue were obscured in gloom. A voluminous dirty smoke drooped down upon the street from the chimneys of smallish supposedly Spanish, Norman, Italian, Tudor, Georgian and Colonial houses and from the brick apartment buildings and from corner groceries, drug stores, delicatessen shops and shops that were semi-suburban branches of greater establishments downtown. Long ’buses and longer trolley-cars rolled by crowded with the thrifty who didn’t put themselves to the expense of “all day parking” downtown, and no doubt carrying also some too poor or too economical to support automobiles. But most of the evening home-coming folk who lived along these upper reaches of Garfield Avenue, three miles or more from the thriving city’s center, whizzed by in those ubiquitous vehicles, sedans.

The sedans strove with one another, stole marches on one another, quarreled, edged one another callously into peril, complained of one another and cursed one another. One, a complainer, having passed squawkily by Mrs. Finch and Mrs. Parker, was itself just afterward fiercely upbraided for halting unexpectedly at the curb before an apartment building; and, at the same moment, as if the outcries of the profane sedans heralded the brilliant spectacle, twin straight miles of street lights leaped instantaneously into white radiance.

“There’s Ed,” Mabel said, alluding to the owner of the abused sedan, as he crossed the sidewalk and entered the apartment house. “Of the whole bunch he’s the rottenest driver, easy! They think they got it all over the rest of us ever since they bought that new Pontie. I was going to ask him how Carrie’s cold is; but he’s gone in. I certainly hope she won’t come near me while she’s infectious. Listen, hon, when’s this new couple going to move in?”

Arlene had become absent-minded. “Who?”

“This couple that’s such friends of Roy’s—Foot, didn’t you say their name is? When they going to move in?”

“Oh, the Foots,” Arlene said. “Pretty soon, I guess. Roy’s only a friend of his; he’s never even seen her yet and I just barely know her, myself. He’s a real nice fellow, though, Ernest Foot.”

“Think they’ll do for the bunch, Arlene? Think we’ll want to take ’em in?”

“I don’t know,” Arlene said. “She’s awful good-looking. Look, there’s Ola.”

A thin, long-legged schoolgirl, roller-skating on the cement sidewalk, clattered toward the two young women. “He’s home,” the skater said to Arlene. “How about some eats?”

Mabel was glad this application didn’t concern her; she thought it nuisance enough to have to get supper for herself and Art. “Ain’t that a kid all over? Never stop making you do something for ’em from the day they’re born till they get married and give you the go-by for good. Not me!”

Ola, not removing her skates and preceding her mother and Mrs. Finch, clattered into the stone-faced entrance of the eight-storied brick apartment building. The vestibule, paved with black and white tiles, ended in two open glass doors with a glass transom above them, and the transom bore in neat gilt lettering the building’s title, “The Lorenzo”. The owner’s reticence in omitting to state what Lorenzo this namesake implied may have been either modest or uninformed, though certainly he wished to hint enticingly of magnificence. Nor was this wish of his ungratified by various tenants; young Mrs. Finch seldom entered the building without lifting a complacent glance to the name upon the transom.

“The Lorenzo,” she murmured now with pleasure. “I always like to have people notice me turning in here, don’t you, hon? Art says it may be a little old-fashioned, but it’s lots more dignified than those new ones up the Avenue. I expect even your Mr. Gillespie Ives’d think we’re at least a little somebody if he saw we lived here.” She lowered her voice to a suggestive, confidential tone. “You going to tell Roy about him, hon?”

“What!” Arlene was surprised and irritated. “I told you——”

“Oh, yes,” Mabel said quickly. “I forgot. On account you don’t like to talk about anything that dates back to your old days at the Griswold. I forgot.”

They passed between the glass doors and ascended four stone steps to a corridor, where Ola, still wearing her skates though seriously practising some tap-dancing steps, was awaiting them. Mabel was effusive over the long-legged little girl’s show of talent, and, for the time, made no more mention of Mr. Gillespie Ives. What she injuredly said to herself, however, was, “Thinks she put that over on me!”