Seventeen. Booth Tarkington
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It's the figure that really shows age first, and yours hasn't begun to.” And she added, briskly, “Go along like a good boy and get it ever!”
Mr. Baxter rose submissively and went upstairs to do as he was bid. But, after fifteen or twenty minutes, during which his footsteps had been audible in various parts of the house, he called down over the banisters:
“I can't find 'em.”
“Can't find what?”
“My evening clothes. They aren't anywhere in the house.”
“Where did you put them the last time you wore them?” she called.
“I don't know. I haven't had 'em on since last spring.”
“All right; I'll come,” she said, putting her sewing upon the table and rising. “Men never can find anything,” she observed, additionally, as she ascended the stairs. “Especially their own things!”
On this occasion, however, as she was obliged to admit a little later, women were not more efficacious than the duller sex. Search high, search low, no trace of Mr. Baxter's evening clothes were to be found. “Perhaps William could find them,” said Mrs. Baxter, a final confession of helplessness.
But William was no more to be found than the missing apparel. William, in fact, after spending some time in the lower back hall, listening to the quest above, had just gone out through the kitchen door. And after some ensuing futile efforts, Mr. Baxter was forced to proceed to his club in the accoutrements of business.
He walked slowly, enjoying the full moon, which sailed up a river in the sky—the open space between the trees that lined the street—and as he passed the house of Mr. Parcher he noted the fine white shape of a masculine evening bosom gleaming in the moonlight on the porch. A dainty figure in white sat beside it, and there was another white figure present, though this one was so small that Mr. Baxter did not see it at all. It was the figure of a tiny doglet, and it reposed upon the black masculine knees that belonged to the evening bosom.
Mr. Baxter heard a dulcet voice.
“He IS indifferink, isn't he, sweetest Flopit? Seriously, though, Mr. Watson was telling me about you to-day. He says you're the most indifferent man he knows. He says you don't care two minutes whether a girl lives or dies. Isn't he a mean ole wicked sing, p'eshus Flopit!”
The reply was inaudible, and Mr. Baxter passed on, having recognized nothing of his own.
“These YOUNG fellows don't have any trouble finding their dress-suits, I guess,” he murmured. “Not on a night like this!”
… Thus William, after a hard day, came to the gates of his romance, entering those portals of the moon in triumph. At one stroke his dashing raiment gave him high superiority over Johnnie Watson and other rivals who might loom. But if he had known to what undoing this great coup exposed him, it is probable that Mr. Baxter would have appeared at the Emerson Club, that night, in evening clothes.
VIII
JANE
William's period of peculiar sensitiveness dated from that evening, and Jane, in particular, caused him a great deal of anxiety. In fact, he began to feel that Jane was a mortification which his parents might have spared him, with no loss to themselves or to the world. Not having shown that consideration for anybody, they might at least have been less spinelessly indulgent of her. William's bitter conviction was that he had never seen a child so starved of discipline or so lost to etiquette as Jane.
For one thing, her passion for bread-and-butter, covered with apple sauce and powdered sugar, was getting to be a serious matter. Secretly, William was not yet so changed by love as to be wholly indifferent to this refection himself, but his consumption of it was private, whereas Jane had formed the habit of eating it in exposed places—such as the front yard or the sidewalk. At no hour of the day was it advisable for a relative to approach the neighborhood in fastidious company, unless prepared to acknowledge kinship with a spindly young person either eating bread-and-butter and apple sauce and powdered sugar, or all too visibly just having eaten bread-and-butter and apple sauce and powdered sugar. Moreover, there were times when Jane had worse things than apple sauce to answer for, as William made clear to his mother in an oration as hot as the July noon sun which looked down upon it.
Mrs. Baxter was pleasantly engaged with a sprinkling-can and some small flower-beds in the shady back yard, and Jane, having returned from various sidewalk excursions, stood close by as a spectator, her hands replenished with the favorite food and her chin rising and falling in gentle motions, little prophecies of the slight distensions which passed down her slender throat with slow, rhythmic regularity. Upon this calm scene came William, plunging round a corner of the house, furious yet plaintive.
“You've got to do something about that child!” he began. “I CAN not stand it!”
Jane looked at him dumbly, not ceasing, how ever, to eat; while Mrs. Baxter thoughtfully continued her sprinkling.
“You've been gone all morning, Willie,” she said. “I thought your father mentioned at breakfast that he expected you to put in at least four hours a day on your mathematics and—”
“That's neither here nor there,” William returned, vehemently. “I just want to say this: if you don't do something about Jane, I will! Just look at her! LOOK at her, I ask you! That's just the way she looked half an hour ago, out on the public sidewalk in front of the house, when I came by here with Miss PRATT! That was pleasant, wasn't it? To be walking with a lady on the public street and meet a member of my family looking like that! Oh, LOVELY!”
In the anguish of this recollection his voice cracked, and though his eyes were dry his gestures wept for him. Plainly, he was about to reach the most lamentable portion of his narrative. “And then she HOLLERED at me! She hollered, 'Oh, WILL—EE!'” Here he gave an imitation of Jane's voice, so damnatory that Jane ceased to eat for several moments and drew herself up with a kind of dignity. “She hollered, 'Oh, WILL—EE' at me!” he stormed. “Anybody would think I was about six years old! She hollered, 'Oh, Will—ee,' and she rubbed her stomach and slushed apple sauce all over her face, and she kept hollering, 'Will—ee!' with her mouth full. 'Will—ee, look! Good! Bread-and-butter and apple sauce and sugar! I bet you wish YOU had some, Will—ee!'”
“You did eat some, the other day,” said Jane. “You ate a whole lot. You eat it every chance you get!”
“You hush up!” he shouted, and returned to his description of the outrage. “She kept FOLLOWING us! She followed us, hollering, 'WILL—EE!' till it's a wonder we didn't go deaf! And just look at her! I don't see how you can stand it to have her going around like that and people knowing it's your child! Why, she hasn't got enough ON!”
Mrs. Baxter laughed. “Oh, for this very hot weather, I really don't think people notice or care much about—”
“'Notice'!” he wailed. “I guess Miss PRATT noticed! Hot weather's no excuse for—for outright obesity!” (As Jane was thin, it is probable that William had mistaken the meaning of this word.) “Why, half o' what she HAS got on has come unfastened—especially that frightful thing hanging around her leg—and look at her back, I just beg you! I ask you to look at her back. You can see her spinal cord!”
“Column,” Mrs. Baxter corrected. “Spinal column, Willie.”
“What do I care which it is?” he fumed. “People aren't supposed to go around with it EXPOSED, whichever it is! And with apple sauce on their ears!”
“There is not!” Jane