Alice Adams. Booth Tarkington
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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,