Читать книгу The Lorenzo Bunch - Booth Tarkington - Страница 5

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Ola removed her skates in the elevator, which was operated by a young mulatto woman whose expression, recognizably habitual, was that of a person cogitating upon something superior but remote. Alternating the languid conveyance of news and audible plyings of chewing-gum, she informed Mrs. Parker and Mrs. Finch that their husbands had lately arrived. “Just carried Mr. Ed Stem up, too,” she added, during the ascent. “Ought to get a hair cut. Hasn’t had one since that last boil.”

“He say how Mrs. Stem’s cold is?” Mabel asked. “She been out to-day, Emma?”

“Not as I’ve saw,” Emma replied. “Heard her kachoo couple times when I been up to the eighth.”

She opened the grilled iron door of the floor she’d just mentioned; the passengers stepped into the corridor, and Emma, chewing with more vigor, descended in brilliance from their sight. Mabel turned to the left, and, laughingly calling, “Olive oil, gals!” to Arlene and Ola, who had gone to the right, she walked thoughtfully to a varnished, brown door at the upper end of the corridor. Between the two upper panels of this door, which was mate to all the other doors in sight, there was a calling-card held by a thumb-tack and engraved “Mr. and Mrs. Arthur I. Finch”, with “The Lorenzo” added near the left lower corner.

Mabel, being Mrs. Arthur I. Finch and at home, turned the octagonal brass knob of the door and entered a passage so slight in dimensions that five or six steps took her through its other doorway, where she was immediately in possession, so to speak, of almost the whole of her apartment. It was a room somewhat larger than the pinched hallway promised; the carpet was deep green, the ceiling was pale green, and the wallpaper, beginning as green at the white-painted baseboards, altered its tint talentedly at about the level of the eye and finished as increasingly radiant orange at the ceiling. White-painted double doors in one wall seemed to promise a spacious room beyond; but this was misleading, since a double bed now stood on its head, concealed behind these double doors. To the furniture, which was almost identical in all the apartments of the Lorenzo, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur I. Finch had added a few personal items of their own—a radio cabinet, a red-legged card-table with indigenous brass ash-trays, and two dangerous-looking one-legged “smokers’-stands”, one beside each of the two “double-stuffed” easy-chairs. The Finches also owned, of course, an article not at present in view—a sedan—and upon the sedan they had to pay taxes.

Clinking sounds and the smell of boiling coffee came through the open door of the kitchenette. Mabel called in that direction, “You there, hon?” Not awaiting a response, she continued, “That’s right; you just go ahead and set the nook table, Art. I’ll be back in a minute and do all the rest. Got something funny to tell you later if you’re a good boy.”

She returned to the corridor outside and began to walk toward its other end, passing varnished brown doors, carded like hers and all of them portals to ingeniously compacted dwelling-places inhabited, for the most part, by young or youngish couples not essentially differing from Mr. and Mrs. Arthur I. Finch. To Mrs. Finch’s mind, however, three of these doors were incomparably more interesting than the others, since on the other side of these three dwelt members of “the Lorenzo bunch”, that exclusive group centralized on this, the top floor of the Lorenzo.

The bunch preferred the top, feeling themselves there in more ways than one. They lived there, devoting their lives to the enjoyment and the intricate little inflictions of one another’s society; and, of all the various clusters of human beings piled up in the Lorenzo—struggling up or sinking down in the world, and pleasantly unconcerned with the world’s future or past, or with anything at a distance from themselves—the bunch lived in the most unrelaxed intimacy. They might indeed have been upon a little ship, passengers so deeply engaged with one another’s smallest affairs as to be unaware of the vessel’s destination.

Mrs. Finch pushed a pearly disk in a shallow socket beside a door that bore a card engraved “Mr. and Mrs. Charles C. Rice” and, of course, also “The Lorenzo”. A man’s voice called “Kmin”; she entered a hallway twin to her own and an apartment almost as close kin to hers. An addition to young Mr. and Mrs. Rice’s furniture, however, instantly caught Mrs. Finch’s eye.

“Well, if you aren’t the nervy little copy-cats!” she cried. She first addressed the visible occupant of the apartment, a red-haired young man seemingly more interested in his evening newspaper than in her; then she called more loudly toward the open door of the kitchenette, “Say listen, Lide! Where’d you get the front to imitate I and Art and buy you these brass-and-mahogany smoking-stands?”

Mrs. Rice, black-haired, bright-eyed, button-nosed, slim and vivacious, showed herself briefly in the doorway. “Art and you took out a patent on ’em? Better tell Marcy and Burton they can’t sell any more, huh? How about Art getting those crash pants last summer right the next day after Charlie got his? What’s on your mind, sport? Come on in here; I’ll let you open this can for me while you’re spilling it.”

Mabel went into the kitchenette, and red-haired young Mr. Rice at once paid no attention to his newspaper. The little more than whispered conversation in the kitchenette, reaching his ears as suppressed poignancies of sound merely, let him know there was news afoot more piquant than any he could find in the paper. Emphatic sibilances from Mabel and gloating exclamations from Lida reached him; and continued repetitions of the one word he could plainly distinguish—the pronoun “she”—were not needed to inform him that the two were busy over one of the other ladies of the Lorenzo bunch.

The confidential talk, somewhat hurried, ended with “All under your hat, hon!” spoken archly by Mabel, as she came forth. “You tuck it away, see?”

She was reassured from the kitchenette. “Got you sport! Nerts even to my red-head!”

Mr. Rice was again apparently engrossed in his paper; but Mabel knew better. She gave him a mocking glance, said, “Don’t read too hard! Olive oil, Big Boy!” and departed, having produced within him just the disturbance—annoyance and curiosity mingled—believed by most of the wives in the bunch to be any husband’s proper condition.

“She’s got a front!” he said, after obeying his wife’s summons to the little table in the kitchenette nook. “You’d think Marcy and Burton’d haf to go out of business just so Mabe and Art’d own the only smokers’-stands in town. What was all that she was getting off her chest in here to you about this soup?”

“Soup?” his wife echoed. “What you mean, soup?”

“That’s what she was talking about, wasn’t it?” He tried to speak uninterestedly, but failed; and his facial expression, too, striving to be one of indifference, deceived nobody. “Thought I heard her talking about soup. Was she griping over our getting ours at Marcy and Burton’s because she and Art get theirs there?”

“Soup? Go right on thinking it was all about soup,” young Mrs. Rice said; then deliberately looked impenetrable.

He had to become franker in his questioning, to endure rebuffs and to be told several times that what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. To appetize him the more for the revelation, Mrs. Rice withheld it until they were washing the dishes together; then she told him all that Mabel Finch had told her. Innocently, he avenged himself for what he had been put through.

“Who’s this Mr. Gillespie Ives?” he asked.

Disgusted, Mrs. Rice attacked him. “Always showing you grew up in Hendersville! Once a rube always a rube, ain’t it the truth? Listen, strawstack; Gillespie Boulevard’s named for his family—but what’s the use? You’d never know who’s the goods in this town, not if you read the Sunday Society Section for a hunderd years!”

“Me? I wouldn’t read it once for a hunderd dollars; those people gripe me. What I’d like to know, though, who’s the girl Arlene says was such a looker this bird was after her? Who’d Arlene say she was, Lide?”

“Said some cousin of hers by marriage from out o’ town. Likely! Mabe’s dumb; but she didn’t swallow that.” Mrs. Rice rubbed dishes with a towel and chattered musingly. “Every time I been downtown with Arlene I’d notice if we met some real well-dressed fellow—sometimes maybe even with a white mustache—he’d tip his Fedora and kind of give her the funny eye as we passed him, and say listen, would she look conscious! Usually get out of even telling me his name; just say it was some fellow used to eat sometimes at the Griswold when she was cashier there. I guess Arlene was some sport around this town in those Griswold days. Some sport! Boy!”

“Think so, Lide?”

“Do I? Look at this afternoon. Boy! Roy may be quiet; but if I was her I wouldn’t take many chances on what he’d do. I’d like to know what he’d think about it if somebody told him.”

“I like Arlene,” Charlie said. “I guess everybody does; yet at the same time she always does seem to be holding something out on you.” He looked eager. “Arlene’s a mighty good-looking woman. How much you believe it amounts to, Lide?”

At that, Mrs. Rice thought it high time to sit on him again. “You thinking of starting in to find out on your little own?” she asked, and, the dishes being finished, informed him that she was going up the hall to the Stems’ apartment to see how Carrie’s cold was.

Young Mrs. Rice had no respect either for germs or for the theory that they spread contagions. In the apartment of Mr. and Mrs. Edson Stem she sat on the sofa with her head so close to Mrs. Stem’s stricken sinuses that caller and hostess were able to converse in whispers only. Poor Mr. Ed Stem, engaged with after-dinner solitaire, had to postpone knowing what it was all about until Lida Rice had replied to Charlie, over the telephone, that she was coming, they’d be in plenty of time for the second show at the Garfield Avenue and that he’d better sound more polite and keep his shirt on.

Meanwhile, separated from the home life of the Stems by a partition, Arlene Parker sat looking across the center table at her husband. Aided by a meditative cigar, he was studying some figures he’d been writing in a pocket note-book; and he remained unaware of his wife’s thoughtful gaze. Like her, he was long and thin; but, unlike her, he wasn’t handsome. He was dark, a little rugged and gaunt, with a lank, sallow jaw and shadowed friendly eyes; a quiet-seeming man with a look of being both reliable and self-reliant. Young Ola, disposed in acute angles upon the sofa with a technical work upon dancing from the city library, was long-legged and long-armed, like both her parents; but her expression was an exaggeration of her mother’s—Ola appeared to be a very storehouse of severely guarded secrets.

Parker’s figurings satisfied him. “They can swing it,” he said, replacing the note-book in an upper pocket of his waistcoat. “With rents ’way down where they are, Ernie’ll be all right. I took an option on one of those vacancies on the fourth floor for ’em, and to-morrow I’ll tell Ernie he might as well sign the lease and move in. You’ll kind of help his wife along to get started with the bunch, won’t you?”

Arlene’s response was not a direct one. “How’d you happen to take such a fancy to Ernie Foot, Roy?”

“What?” Her question surprised him. “I don’t know.” He appeared to consult his cigar. “Just liked him, I expect. Don’t you?”

“Sure,” she said. “I only wondered——”

He glanced across at her. “Maybe you don’t like her.”

“Couldn’t tell much about her, that one afternoon,” Arlene said. “She wanted to go shopping. We just rubbered around and priced things; she didn’t have any money.”

Parker seemed to have been enlightened by his cigar. “Tell you what I like about Ernie Foot. They put him next under me, the day he got his job, and I could see he was just a small-town boy new in the big burg; and of course that’s what he was, too. He and his wife had just moved up here from Corinth City then, and Corinth City isn’t over about seven or eight thousand population. I mean there was something about him suited me right from the start, and the longer I’ve known him the better I’ve liked him. It’s not just his good looks nor his being a frank, open-hearted, likeable young fellow anxious to fill his job right and all that; it seems to me there’s something about him that’s above the average run of people we know. Finer, you might say.”

“You mean finer than the bunch, Roy?”

“Well, yes. Yes, I do,” he said. “I wouldn’t say a word against the bunch. They’re our best friends. I like ’em all right and I’m anxious for them to like him and his wife. There’s something about Ernie Foot that’s different, as the ads put it—above the average run. I’m glad they’re going to quit their boarding-house and move to the Lorenzo where we’ll see more of ’em. You think the bunch’ll like ’em, don’t you, Arlene?”

“They will him.”

Parker looked a little disturbed. “Not her? You can tell by the way he talks he’s crazy about her, so I thought of course she must be——” He hesitated; then asked abruptly, “What’s the matter with her?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Why don’t you like her, Arlene?”

“I expect I’ll get to,” Arlene said impassively. “Maybe you don’t know it; but she’s just about the best-looking woman in the wide world.”

“So? The bunch would like that. Expect we might throw a little party for ’em some evening after they’ve moved in, Arlene?”

“Yes, if you want to. I expect we’ll haf to. I kind of wonder——” She paused.

“What?” he asked, as she didn’t go on. “What do you wonder?”

“Nothing.”

“Yes, you do,” he said with some urgency. “What’s on your mind?”

“Nothing.”

“Look here,” he began; but was interrupted. Ola, behind them on the sofa, spoke without looking up from her book.

“Mom’s holding out on you, Pop,” she said in an absent-minded monotone, turning a leaf in the book. “She never tells you anything and you don’t know anything about her. She means this woman’s going to make trouble here if these Foots move in.”

The child’s father, turning, stared at her from under his dark brows; but Arlene told her unemotionally that it was bedtime.

“All right,” Ola said; and, as willing to read her book in bed as elsewhere, went to the door of the tiny additional room included in the Parkers’ apartment. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

With this effect, she retired. Arlene laughed; but Parker looked up at her, and, seeing that his eyes were serious, she became serious, too. “What is it, Roy?”

“Well—I’ve been thinking. You and I are young yet; but it won’t be so many years before we’ll be getting middle-aged and—and maybe I’m foolish to think so, but lately it’s seemed to me that we might be getting more out of life than we do. Seems like there ought to be something—something more. Foolish of me, you think?”

“No, Roy. Go on.”

“Well, as I said, I like the bunch first rate; but—but you know how they are. Seems a good deal just always getting together and kind of gabble gabble, and going to movies and a lot of little excitements about each other’s affairs and no interest much in anything else, to speak of. More just a kind of gossiping and sociability than—well, than real living and true friendship, you might say.” He laughed apologetically. “Think so, too, maybe?”

“Yes, Roy. Go on.”

“Well, since I got to knowing Ernie Foot it’s seemed to me maybe you and I’d have more in our lives if we both of us had something like what you might call a—a true friendship for somebody like him and his wife. I—I mean——” He glanced up at her, embarrassed and wistful; then laughed feebly in mitigation of his sentimentalism. “Likely I’m foolish——”

“No, you aren’t,” she said gently. “Go on.”

“Well, I thought as fine a man as Ernie must certainly have a fine wife, too, and if you and I’d get to feeling about both of them the way I do about Ernie—well, there might be something more than we get from just being all the time with the bunch. I—I mean I’ve been sort of hoping so, Arlene.”

She looked down at him as he timidly advanced his idea; and in her kind eyes was a troubled adoration. “I understand what you mean, Roy. You want me to be a true friend to his wife. I will—if she’ll let me.”

“Anybody’d let you,” he said fondly; then was grave. “Ola picks up all kinds of things. There isn’t anything in what she said, is there? You don’t think Ernie Foot’s wife’s the kind to make trouble, do you?”

“No—I only thought——” She paused.

“Why don’t you tell me, Arlene?”

Her honest gaze fell from his; then she looked up sadly and put a hand on his shoulder. “You wouldn’t want me to, Roy. That afternoon I was shopping downtown with her something happened that made me wonder a little about her; that’s all. It didn’t amount to a great deal and I’d tell you all about it of course; but if I did it’d bring up some things you don’t like to talk about.”

“Would it?” His voice was suddenly husky. “Then don’t tell me. No, don’t tell me!” For a moment he looked haggard; then he made a manful effort, stood up, smiled waveringly upon her, patted her upon the shoulder and said briskly, “How about a game of cribbage, old lady?”

Arlene, hurrying to bring the cards and cribbage-board to the table, was so pleased that she blushed. “Don’t you fear!” she said, as they sat down to the game. “I’ll be her friend.”