Alice Adams

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Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington Scanned by Charles Keller with
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ALICE ADAMS by BOOTH TARKINGTON

CHAPTER I

The patient, an old-fashioned man, thought the nurse made a
mistake in keeping both of the windows open, and her sprightly
disregard of his protests added something to his hatred of her.
Every evening he told her that anybody with ordinary gumption
ought to realize that night air was bad for the human frame.
"The human frame won't stand everything, Miss Perry," he warned
her, resentfully. "Even a child, if it had just ordinary
gumption, ought to know enough not to let the night air blow on
sick people yes, nor well people, either! 'Keep out of the night
air, no matter how well you feel.' That's what my mother used to
tell me when I was a boy. 'Keep out of the night air, Virgil,'
she'd say. 'Keep out of the night air.'"

"I expect probably her mother told her the same thing," the nurse
suggested.

"Of course she did. My grandmother----"

"Oh, I guess your GRANDmother thought so, Mr. Adams! That was
when all this flat central country was swampish and hadn't been
drained off yet. I guess the truth must been the swamp
mosquitoes bit people and gave 'em malaria, especially before
they began to put screens in their windows. Well, we got screens
in these windows, and no mosquitoes are goin' to bite us; so just
you be a good boy and rest your mind and go to sleep like you
need to."

"Sleep?" he said. "Likely!"

He thought the night air worst of all in April; he hadn't a doubt
it would kill him, he declared. "It's miraculous what the human
frame WILL survive," he admitted on the last evening of that
month. "But you and the doctor ought to both be taught it won't
stand too dang much! You poison a man and poison and poison him
with this April night air----"

"Can't poison you with much more of it," Miss Perry interrupted
him, indulgently. "To-morrow it'll be May night air, and I
expect that'll be a lot better for you, don't you? Now let's
just sober down and be a good boy and get some nice sound sleep."

She gave him his medicine, and, having set the glass upon the
center table, returned to her cot, where, after a still interval,
she snored faintly. Upon this, his expression became that of a
man goaded out of overpowering weariness into irony.

"Sleep? Oh, CERTAINLY, thank you!"

However, he did sleep intermittently, drowsed between times, and
even dreamed; but, forgetting his dreams before he opened his
eyes, and having some part of him all the while aware of his
discomfort, he believed, as usual, that he lay awake the whole
night long. He was conscious of the city as of some single great
creature resting fitfully in the dark outside his windows. It
lay all round about, in the damp cover of its night cloud of
smoke, and tried to keep quiet for a few hours after midnight,
but was too powerful a growing thing ever to lie altogether
still. Even while it strove to sleep it muttered with digestions
of the day before, and these already merged with rumblings of the
morrow. "Owl" cars, bringing in last passengers over distant
trolley-lines, now and then howled on a curve; faraway metallic
stirrings could be heard from factories in the sooty suburbs on
the plain outside the city; east, west, and south, switch-engines
chugged and snorted on sidings; and everywhere in the air there
seemed to be a faint, voluminous hum as of innumerable wires
trembling overhead to vibration of machinery underground.

In his youth Adams might have been less resentful of sounds such
as these when they interfered with his night's sleep: even during
an illness he might have taken some pride in them as proof of his
citizenship in a "live town"; but at fifty-five he merely hated
them because they kept him awake. They "pressed on his nerves,"
as he put it; and so did almost everything else, for that matter.

He heard the milk-wagon drive into the cross-street beneath his
windows and stop at each house. The milkman carried his jars
round to the "back porch," while the horse moved slowly ahead to
the gate of the next customer and waited there. "He's gone into
Pollocks'," Adams thought, following this progress. "I hope
it'll sour on 'em before breakfast. Delivered the Andersons'.
Now he's getting out ours. Listen to the darn brute! What's HE
care who wants to sleep!" His complaint was of the horse, who
casually shifted weight with a clink of steel shoes on the worn
brick pavement of the street, and then heartily shook himself in
his harness, perhaps to dislodge a fly far ahead of its season.
Light had just filmed the windows; and with that the first
sparrow woke, chirped instantly, and roused neighbours in the
trees of the small yard, including a loud-voiced robin.
Vociferations began irregularly, but were soon unanimous.

"Sleep? Dang likely now, ain't it!"

Night sounds were becoming day sounds; the far-away hooting of
freight-engines seemed brisker than an hour ago in the dark. A
cheerful whistler passed the house, even more careless of
sleepers than the milkman's horse had been; then a group of
coloured workmen came by, and although it was impossible to be
sure whether they were homeward bound from night-work or on their
way to day- work, at least it was certain that they were jocose.
Loose, aboriginal laughter preceded them afar, and beat on the
air long after they had gone by.

The sick-room night-light, shielded from his eyes by a newspaper
propped against a water-pitcher, still showed a thin glimmering
that had grown offensive to Adams. In his wandering and
enfeebled thoughts, which were much more often imaginings than
reasonings, the attempt of the night-light to resist the dawn
reminded him of something unpleasant, though he could not
discover just what the unpleasant thing was. Here was a puzzle
that irritated him the more because he could not solve it, yet
always seemed just on the point of a solution. However, he may
have lost nothing cheerful by remaining in the dark upon the
matter; for if he had been a little sharper in this introspection
he might have concluded that the squalor of the night-light, in
its seeming effort to show against the forerunning of the sun
itself, had stimulated some half-buried perception within him to
sketch the painful little synopsis of an autobiography.

In spite of noises without, he drowsed again, not knowing that he
did; and when he opened his eyes the nurse was just rising from
her cot. He took no pleasure in the sight, it may be said. She
exhibited to him a face mismodelled by sleep, and set like a clay
face left on its cheek in a hot and dry studio. She was still
only in part awake, however, and by the time she had extinguished
the night-light and given her patient his tonic, she had
recovered enough plasticity. "Well, isn't that grand! We've had
another good night," she said as she departed to dress in the
bathroom.

"Yes, you had another!" he retorted, though not until after she
had closed the door.

Presently he heard his daughter moving about in her room across
the narrow hall, and so knew that she had risen. He hoped she
would come in to see him soon, for she was the one thing that
didn't press on his nerves, he felt; though the thought of her
hurt him, as, indeed, every thought hurt him. But it was his
wife who came first.

She wore a lank cotton wrapper, and a crescent of gray hair
escaped to one temple from beneath the handkerchief she had worn
upon her head for the night and still retained; but she did
everything possible to make her expression cheering.

"Oh, you're better again! I can see that, as soon as I look at
you," she said. "Miss Perry tells me you've had another splendid
night."

He made a sound of irony, which seemed to dispose unfavourably of
Miss Perry, and then, in order to be more certainly intelligible,
he added, "She slept well, as usual!"

But his wife's smile persisted. "It's a good sign to be cross;
it means you're practically convalescent right now."

"Oh, I am, am I?"

"No doubt in the world!" she exclaimed. "Why, you're practically
a well man, Virgil--all except getting your strength back, of
course, and that isn't going to take long. You'll be right on
your feet in a couple of weeks from now."

"Oh, I will?"

"Of course you will!" She laughed briskly, and, going to the
table in the center of the room, moved his glass of medicine an
inch or two, turned a book over so that it lay upon its other
side, and for a few moments occupied herself with similar
futilities, having taken on the air of a person who makes things
neat, though she produced no such actual effect upon them. "Of
course you will," she repeated, absently. "You'll be as strong
as you ever were; maybe stronger." She paused for a moment, not
looking at him, then added, cheerfully, "So that you can fly
around and find something really good to get into."

Something important between them came near the surface here, for
though she spoke with what seemed but a casual cheerfulness,
there was a little betraying break in her voice, a trembling just
perceptible in the utterance of the final word. And she still
kept up the affectation of being helpfully preoccupied with the
table, and did not look at her husband--perhaps because they had
been married so many years that without looking she knew just
what his expression would be, and preferred to avoid the actual
sight of it as long as possible. Meanwhile, he stared hard at
her, his lips beginning to move with little distortions not
lacking in the pathos of a sick man's agitation.

"So that's it," he said. "That's what you're hinting at."

"'Hinting?'" Mrs. Adams looked surprised and indulgent. "Why,
I'm not doing any hinting, Virgil."

"What did you say about my finding 'something good to get into?'"
he asked, sharply. "Don't you call that hinting?"

Mrs. Adams turned toward him now; she came to the bedside and
would have taken his hand, but he quickly moved it away from her.

"You mustn't let yourself get nervous," she said. "But of course
when you get well there's only one thing to do. You mustn't go
back to that old hole again."

"'Old hole?' That's what you call it, is it?" In spite of his
weakness, anger made his voice strident, and upon this
stimulation she spoke more urgently.

"You just mustn't go back to it, Virgil. It's not fair to any of
us, and you know it isn't."

"Don't tell me what I know, please!"

She clasped her hands, suddenly carrying her urgency to plaintive
entreaty. "Virgil, you WON'T go back to that hole?"

"That's a nice word to use to me!" he said. "Call a man's
business a hole!"

"Virgil, if you don't owe it to me to look for something
different, don't you owe it to your children? Don't tell me you
won't do what we all want you to, and what you know in your heart
you ought to! And if you HAVE got into one of your stubborn fits
and are bound to go back there for no other reason except to have
your own way, don't tell me so, for I can't bear it!"

He looked up at her fiercely. "You've got a fine way to cure a
sick man!" he said; but she had concluded her appeal--for that
time--and instead of making any more words in the matter, let him
see that there were tears in her eyes, shook her head, and left
the room.

Alone, he lay breathing rapidly, his emaciated chest proving
itself equal to the demands his emotion put upon it. "Fine!" he
repeated, with husky indignation. "Fine way to cure a sick man!
Fine!" Then, after a silence, he gave forth whispering sounds as
of laughter, his expression the while remaining sore and far from
humour.

"And give us our daily bread!" he added, meaning that his wife's
little performance was no novelty.

CHAPTER II

In fact, the agitation of Mrs. Adams was genuine, but so well
under her control that its traces vanished during the three short
steps she took to cross the narrow hall between her husband's
door and the one opposite. Her expression was matter-of-course,
rather than pathetic, as she entered the pretty room where her
daughter, half dressed, sat before a dressing-table and played
with the reflections of a three-leafed mirror framed in blue
enamel. That is, just before the moment of her mother's
entrance, Alice had been playing with the mirror's
reflections--posturing her arms and her expressions, clasping her
hands behind her neck, and tilting back her head to foreshorten
the face in a tableau conceived to represent sauciness, then one
of smiling weariness, then one of scornful toleration, and all
very piquant; but as the door opened she hurriedly resumed the
practical, and occupied her hands in the arrangement of her
plentiful brownish hair.

They were pretty hands, of a shapeliness delicate and fine. "The
best things she's got!" a cold-blooded girl friend said of them,
and meant to include Alice's mind and character in the implied
list of possessions surpassed by the notable hands. However that
may have been, the rest of her was well enough. She was often
called "a right pretty girl"--temperate praise meaning a girl
rather pretty than otherwise, and this she deserved, to say the
least. Even in repose she deserved it, though repose was
anything but her habit, being seldom seen upon her except at
home. On exhibition she led a life of gestures, the unkind said
to make her lovely hands more memorable; but all of her usually
accompanied the gestures of the hands, the shoulders ever giving
them their impulses first, and even her feet being called upon,
at the same time, for eloquence.

So much liveliness took proper place as only accessory to that of
the face, where her vivacity reached its climax; and it was
unfortunate that an ungifted young man, new in the town, should
have attempted to define the effect upon him of all this
generosity of emphasis. He said that "the way she used her cute
hazel eyes and the wonderful glow of her facial expression gave
her a mighty spiritual quality." His actual rendition of the
word was "spirichul"; but it was not his pronunciation that
embalmed this outburst in the perennial laughter of Alice's girl
friends; they made the misfortune far less his than hers.

Her mother comforted her too heartily, insisting that Alice had
"plenty enough spiritual qualities," certainly more than
possessed by the other girls who flung the phrase at her, wooden
things, jealous of everything they were incapable of themselves;
and then Alice, getting more championship than she sought, grew
uneasy lest Mrs. Adams should repeat such defenses "outside the
family"; and Mrs. Adams ended by weeping because the daughter so
distrusted her intelligence. Alice frequently thought it
necessary to instruct her mother.

Her morning greeting was an instruction to-day; or, rather, it
was an admonition in the style of an entreaty, the more petulant
as Alice thought that Mrs. Adams might have had a glimpse of the
posturings to the mirror. This was a needless worry; the mother
had caught a thousand such glimpses, with Alice unaware, and she
thought nothing of the one just flitted.

"For heaven's sake, mama, come clear inside the room and shut the
door! PLEASE don't leave it open for everybody to look at me!"

"There isn't anybody to see you," Mrs. Adams explained, obeying.
"Miss Perry's gone downstairs, and----"

"Mama, I heard you in papa's room," Alice said, not dropping the
note of complaint. "I could hear both of you, and I don't think
you ought to get poor old papa so upset--not in his present
condition, anyhow."

Mrs. Adams seated herself on the edge of the bed. "He's better
all the time," she said, not disturbed. "He's almost well. The
doctor says so and Miss Perry says so; and if we don't get him
into the right frame of mind now we never will. The first day
he's outdoors he'll go back to that old hole--you'll see! And if
he once does that, he'll settle down there and it'll be too late
and we'll never get him out."

"Well, anyhow, I think you could use a little more tact with
him."

"I do try to," the mother sighed. "It never was much use with
him. I don't think you understand him as well as I do, Alice."

"There's one thing I don't understand about either of you," Alice
returned, crisply. "Before people get married they can do
anything they want to with each other. Why can't they do the
same thing after they're married? When you and papa were young
people and engaged, he'd have done anything you wanted him to.
That must have been because you knew how to manage him then. Why
can't you go at him the same way now?"

Mrs. Adams sighed again, and laughed a little, making no other
response; but Alice persisted. "Well, WHY can't you? Why can't
you ask him to do things the way you used to ask him when you
were just in love with each other? Why don't you anyhow try it,
mama, instead of ding-donging at him?"

"'Ding-donging at him,' Alice?" Mrs. Adams said, with a pathos
somewhat emphasized. "Is that how my trying to do what I can for
you strikes you?"

"Never mind that; it's nothing to hurt your feelings." Alice
disposed of the pathos briskly. "Why don't you answer my
question? What's the matter with using a little more tact on
papa? Why can't you treat him the way you probably did when you
were young people, before you were married? I never have
understood why people can't do that."

"Perhaps you WILL understand some day," her mother said, gently.
"Maybe you will when you've been married twenty-five years."

"You keep evading. Why don't you answer my question right
straight out?"

"There are questions you can't answer to young people, Alice."

"You mean because we're too young to understand the answer? I
don't see that at all. At twenty-two a girl's supposed to have
some intelligence, isn't she? And intelligence is the ability to
understand, isn't it? Why do I have to wait till I've lived with
a man twenty-five years to understand why you can't be tactful
with papa?"

"You may understand some things before that," Mrs. Adams said,
tremulously. "You may understand how you hurt me sometimes.
Youth can't know everything by being intelligent, and by the time
you could understand the answer you're asking for you'd know it,
and wouldn't need to ask. You don't understand your father,
Alice; you don't know what it takes to change him when he's made
up his mind to be stubborn."

Alice rose and began to get herself into a skirt. "Well, I don't
think making scenes ever changes anybody," she grumbled. "I
think a little jolly persuasion goes twice as far, myself."

"'A little jolly persuasion!'" Her mother turned the echo of
this phrase into an ironic lament. "Yes, there was a time when I
thought that, too! It didn't work; that's all."

"Perhaps you left the 'jolly' part of it out, mama."

For the second time that morning--it was now a little after seven
o'clock--tears seemed about to offer their solace to Mrs. Adams.
"I might have expected you to say that, Alice; you never do miss
a chance," she said, gently. "It seems queer you don't some time
miss just ONE chance!"

But Alice, progressing with her toilet, appeared to be little
concerned. "Oh, well, I think there are better ways of managing
a man than just hammering at him."

Mrs. Adams uttered a little cry of pain. "'Hammering,' Alice?"

"If you'd left it entirely to me," her daughter went on, briskly,
"I believe papa'd already be willing to do anything we want him
to."

"That's it; tell me I spoil everything. Well, I won't interfere
from now on, you can be sure of it."

"Please don't talk like that," Alice said, quickly. "I'm old
enough to realize that papa may need pressure of all sorts; I
only think it makes him more obstinate to get him cross. You
probably do understand him better, but that's one thing I've
found out and you haven't. There!" She gave her mother a
friendly tap on the shoulder and went to the door. "I'll hop in
and say hello to him now."

As she went, she continued the fastening of her blouse, and
appeared in her father's room with one hand still thus engaged,
but she patted his forehead with the other.

"Poor old papa-daddy!" she said, gaily. "Every time he's better
somebody talks him into getting so mad he has a relapse. It's a
shame!"

Her father's eyes, beneath their melancholy brows, looked up at
her wistfully. "I suppose you heard your mother going for me,"
he said.

"I heard you going for her, too!" Alice laughed. "What was it
all about?"

"Oh, the same danged old story!"

"You mean she wants you to try something new when you get well?"
Alice asked, with cheerful innocence. "So we could all have a
lot more money?"

At this his sorrowful forehead was more sorrowful than ever. The
deep horizontal lines moved upward to a pattern of suffering so
familiar to his daughter that it meant nothing to her; but he
spoke quietly. "Yes; so we wouldn't have any money at all, most
likely."

"Oh, no!" she laughed, and, finishing with her blouse, patted his
cheeks with both hands. "Just think how many grand openings
there must be for a man that knows as much as you do! I always
did believe you could get rich if you only cared to, papa."

But upon his forehead the painful pattern still deepened. "Don't
you think we've always had enough, the way things are, Alice?"

"Not the way things ARE!" She patted his cheeks again; laughed
again. "It used to be enough, maybe anyway we did skimp along on
it--but the way things are now I expect mama's really pretty
practical in her ideas, though, I think it's a shame for her to
bother you about it while you're so weak. Don't you worry about
it, though; just think about other things till you get strong."

"You know," he said; "you know it isn't exactly the easiest thing
in the world for a man of my age to find these grand openings you
speak of. And when you've passed half-way from fifty to sixty
you're apt to see some risk in giving up what you know how to do
and trying something new."

"My, what a frown!" she cried, blithely. "Didn't I tell you to
stop thinking about it till you get ALL well?" She bent over him,
giving him a gay little kiss on the bridge of his nose. "There!
I must run to breakfast. Cheer up now! Au 'voir!" And with her
pretty hand she waved further encouragement from the closing door
as she departed.

Lightsomely descending the narrow stairway, she whistled as she
went, her fingers drumming time on the rail; and, still
whistling, she came into the dining-room, where her mother and
her brother were already at the table. The brother, a thin and
sallow boy of twenty, greeted her without much approval as she
took her place.

"Nothing seems to trouble you!" he said.

"No; nothing much," she made airy response. "What's troubling
yourself, Walter?"

"Don't let that worry you!" he returned, seeming to consider this
to be repartee of an effective sort; for he furnished a short
laugh to go with it, and turned to his coffee with the manner of
one who has satisfactorily closed an episode.

"Walter always seems to have so many secrets!" Alice said,
studying him shrewdly, but with a friendly enough amusement in
her scrutiny. "Everything he does or says seems to be acted for
the benefit of some mysterious audience inside himself, and he
always gets its applause. Take what he said just now: he seems
to think it means something, but if it does, why, that's just
another secret between him and the secret audience inside of him!
We don't really know anything about Walter at all, do we, mama?"

Walter laughed again, in a manner that sustained her theory well
enough; then after finishing his coffee, he took from his pocket
a flattened packet in glazed blue paper; extracted with stained
fingers a bent and wrinkled little cigarette, lighted it, hitched
up his belted trousers with the air of a person who turns from
trifles to things better worth his attention, and left the room.

Alice laughed as the door closed. "He's ALL secrets," she said.
"Don't you think you really ought to know more about him, mama?"

"I'm sure he's a good boy," Mrs. Adams returned, thoughtfully.
"He's been very brave about not being able to have the advantages
that are enjoyed by the boys he's grown up with. I've never
heard a word of complaint from him."

"About his not being sent to college?" Alice cried. "I should
think you wouldn't! He didn't even have enough ambition to
finish high school!"

Mrs. Adams sighed. "It seemed to me Walter lost his ambition
when nearly all the boys he'd grown up with went to Eastern
schools to prepare for college, and we couldn't afford to send
him. If only your father would have listened----"

Alice interrupted: "What nonsense! Walter hated books and
studying, and athletics, too, for that matter. He doesn't care
for anything nice that I ever heard of. What do you suppose he
does like, mama? He must like something or other somewhere, but
what do you suppose it is? What does he do with his time?"

"Why, the poor boy's at Lamb and Company's all day. He doesn't
get through until five in the afternoon; he doesn't HAVE much
time."

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