The Essential Booth Tarkington Collection. Booth Tarkington
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you always had, like a--like a--well, you know I must have told you a thousand times that it was like a nice friendly puppy; so why shouldn't I say so now? And your eyebrows! When you look like that, nobody could ever forget you, Joe!"
He rose from the log, and the mongrel leaped upon him uproariously, thinking they were to go home, belike to food.
The lady laughed again. "Don't let him spoil my parasol. And I must warn you now: Never, never TREAD ON MY SKIRT! I'm very irritable about such things!"
He had taken three or four uncertain backward steps from her. She sat before him, radiant with laughter, the loveliest creature he had ever seen; but between him and this charming vision there swept, through the warm, scented June air, a veil of snow like a driven fog, and, half obscured in the heart of it, a young girl stood, knee-deep in a drift piled against an old picket gate, her black water-proof and shabby skirt flapping in the blizzard like torn sails, one of her hands out-stretched toward him, her startled eyes fixed on his.
"And, oh, how like you," said the lady; "how like you and nobody else in the world, Joe, to have a yellow dog!"
"ARIEL TABOR!"
His lips formed the words without sound.
"Isn't it about time?" she said. "Are strange ladies in the HABIT of descending from trains to take you home?"
Once, upon a white morning long ago, the sensational progress of a certain youth up Main Street had stirred Canaan. But that day was as nothing to this. Mr. Bantry had left temporary paralysis in his wake; but in the case of the two young people who passed slowly along the street to-day it was petrifaction, which seemingly threatened in several instances (most notably that of Mr. Arp) to become permanent.
The lower portion of the street, lined with three and four story buildings of brick and stone, rather grim and hot facades under the mid-day sun, afforded little shade to the church-comers, who were working homeward in processional little groups and clumps, none walking fast, though none with the appearance of great leisure, since neither rate of progress would have been esteemed befitting the day. The growth of Canaan, steady, though never startling, had left almost all of the churches down-town, and Main Street the principal avenue of communication between them and the "residence section." So, to-day, the intermittent procession stretched along the new cement side-walks from a little below the Square to Upper Main Street, where maples lined the thoroughfare and the mansions of the affluent stood among pleasant lawns and shrubberies. It was late; for this had been a communion Sunday, and those far in advance, who had already reached the pretty and shady part of the street, were members of the churches where services had been shortest; though few in the long parade looked as if they had been attending anything very short, and many heads of families were crisp in their replies to the theological inquiries of their offspring. The men imparted largely a gloom to the itinerant concourse, most of them wearing hot, long black coats and having wilted their collars; the ladies relieving this gloom somewhat by the lighter tints of their garments; the spick-and-span little girls relieving it greatly by their white dresses and their faces, the latter bright with the hope of Sunday ice-cream; while the boys, experiencing some solace in that they were finally out where a person could at least scratch himself if he had to, yet oppressed by the decorous necessities of the day, marched along, furtively planning, behind imperturbably secretive countenances, various means for the later dispersal of an odious monotony.
Usually the conversation of this long string of the homeward-bound was not too frivolous or worldly; nay, it properly inclined to discussion of the sermon; that is, praise of the sermon, with here and there a mild "I-didn't-like-his-saying" or so; and its lighter aspects were apt to concern the next "Social," or various pleasurable schemes for the raising of funds to help the heathen, the quite worthy poor, or the church.
This was the serious and seemly parade, the propriety of whose behavior was to-day almost disintegrated when the lady of the bridge walked up the street in the shadow of a lacy, lavender parasol carried by Joseph Louden. The congregation of the church across the Square, that to which Joe's step-aunt had been late, was just debouching, almost in mass, upon Main Street, when these two went by. It is not quite the truth to say that all except the children came to a dead halt, but it is not very far from it. The air was thick with subdued exclamations and whisperings.
Here is no mystery. Joe was probably the only person of respectable derivation in Canaan who had not known for weeks that Ariel Tabor was on her way home. And the news that she had arrived the night before had been widely disseminated on the way to church, entering church, IN church (even so!), and coming out of church. An account of her house in the Avenue Henri Martin, and of her portrait in the Salon--a mysterious business to many, and not lacking in grandeur for that!--had occupied two columns in the Tocsin, on a day, some months before, when Joe had found himself inimically head-lined on the first page, and had dropped the paper without reading further. Ariel's name had been in the mouth of Canaan for a long time; unfortunately for Joe, however, not in the mouth of that Canaan which held converse with him.
Joe had not known her. The women recognized her, infallibly, at first glance; even those who had quite forgotten her. And the women told their men. Hence the un-Sunday-like demeanor of the procession, for few towns hold it more unseemly to stand and stare at passers-by, especially on the Sabbath.--BUT Ariel Tabor returned--and walking with--WITH JOE LOUDEN! ...
A low but increasing murmur followed the two as they proceeded. It ran up the street ahead of them; people turned to look back and paused, so that they had to walk round one or two groups. They had, also, to walk round Norbert Flitcroft, which was very like walking round a group. He was one of the few (he was waddling home alone) who did not identify Miss Tabor, and her effect upon him was extraordinary. His mouth opened and he gazed stodgily, his widening eyes like sun-dogs coming out of a fog. He did not recognize her escort; did not see him at all until they had passed, after which Mr. Flitcroft experienced a few moments of trance; came out of it stricken through and through; felt nervously of his tie; resolutely fell in behind the heeling mongrel and followed, at a distance of some forty paces, determined to learn what household this heavenly visitor honored, and thrilling with the intention to please that same household with his own presence as soon and as often as possible.
Ariel flushed a little when she perceived the extent of their conspicuousness; but it was not the blush that Joe remembered had reddened the tanned skin of old; for her brownness had gone long ago, though it had not left her merely pink and white. This was a delicate rosiness rising from her cheeks to her temples as the earliest dawn rises. If there had been many words left in Joe, he would have called it a divine blush; it fascinated him, and if anything could have deepened the glamour about her, it would have been this blush. He did not understand it, but when he saw it he stumbled.
Those who gaped and stared were for him only blurs in the background; truly, he saw "men as trees walking"; and when it became necessary to step out to the curb in passing some clump of people, it was to him as if Ariel and he, enchantedly alone, were working their way through underbrush in the woods.
He kept trying to realize that this lady of wonder was Ariel Tabor, but he could not; he could not connect the shabby Ariel, whom he had treated as one boy treats another, with this young woman of the world. He had always been embarrassed, himself, and ashamed of her, when anything she did made him remember that, after all, she was a girl; as, on the day he ran away, when she kissed a lock of his hair escaping from the bandage. With that recollection, even his ears grew red: it did not seem probable that it would ever happen again! The next instant he heard himself calling her "Miss Tabor."
At this she seemed amused. "You ought to have called me that, years ago," she said, "for all you knew me!"
"I did know her--YOU, I mean!" he answered. "I used to know nearly everything you were going to say before you said it. It seems strange now--"
"Yes," she interrupted. "It does seem strange now!"
"Somehow," he went on, "I doubt if now I'd know."
"Somehow," she echoed, with fine gravity, "I doubt it, too."