MARTHA had said that Dan’s remaining away “didn’t hurt—not exactly”;
and by this she meant to give Harlan the impression that she was less
than hurt; but such a denial, thus qualified, means in truth more than
hurt. She was a “big Western woman,” but she could be sensitive, and had
her resentments and her smallnesses. Perhaps she was not quite genuinely
sorry to believe that the old friend who neglected to bid her welcome
home had begun to look almost middle-aged and seemed to have lost
something fine that he had possessed in his youth. There were
characteristic possessions of his that he had not lost, however; he had
even acquired more of them, as she discovered one evening a few weeks
after the Sunday noon when little Henry tore her dress.
Mr. Shelby had come home from his office in a state of irritability,
which he made audible even before he entered the house; and from her
windows upstairs she heard him denouncing his old negro driver. There
had been a thunderstorm earlier in the afternoon, but that was no
excuse—“not a dog-gone _bit_ of excuse!” Mr. Shelby declared—for a
carriage to be “all so sploshed-over with mud that a decent man’d be
ashamed to get caught dead in it!” And he seemed to resent the fat old
servitor’s wheezy explanation that the mud was the work of a malevolent
motor-car. “Cain’t go nowhur them automob’les ain’ goin’ to git you
these days! I had my carri’ge all spick-an’-span. Automob’le come
zimmin’ by jes’ as we turn onto the avenoo. ‘Splickety-splick-splash!’
she say, an’ _zoosh!_ jes’ look at my nice clean carri’ge solid mud! No,
suh, Mist’ Shelby; I had my carri’ge all wash up fresh. Nasty ole
automob’le spoil ev’ything! No, suh, I——”
“Gee-mun-nent-ly!” Martha heard her father exclaim. “What you tryin’ to
do? _Talk_ me to death? I already heard enough talk in my office for one
day, thank you! By Cripey, you stop that eternal gab o’ yours and get
those horses into the barn and sponge their mouths out! Hear me?”
He came into the house and could be heard muttering snappishly to
himself on the stairway, as he ascended to his room to “wash his face
and hands for dinner.” But at the table he proved that soap and water
were ineffective, at least to remove bitterness from a face; and he
found fault with everything. The most unbearable of his troubles finally
appeared to be put upon him by the salt, which the humidity of the
weather had affected. “I s’pose this is the way you keep house in
Italy!” he said. “Nothin’ but smell and deggeredation over there
anyway—they prob’ly don’t care whether they can get salt out o’ their
saltcellars or not. But in this country, in a decent man’s house, he’d
like to see at least one saltcellar on his table that’d _work_!”
“It’s apt to be like that in hot weather after a rain,” Martha returned
placidly. “What went wrong at the office this afternoon, papa?”
“Nothin’!” he said fiercely. “What’s my office got to do with wet salt?
Why can’t you ever learn to keep some connection between your thoughts?
Geemunently!”
“So you had a good day, did you, papa?”
“It would ’a’ been,” he replied angrily, “if it hadn’t been for a fool
friend o’ yours!”
“Somebody I’m responsible for?” she inquired with a genial sarcasm that
exasperated him into attempted mockery—for when he was angriest with
her he would repeat something she said, and, to point the burlesque,
would speak in a tinny and whining falsetto which he seemed to believe
was a crushing imitation of his daughter’s voice. “‘Somebody I’m
responsible for?’” he squeaked, using this form of reprisal now. “No; it
ain’t somebody you’re responsible for!” Here he fell back upon downright
ferocity. “Doggone him! Somebody _better_ be responsible for him!”
At this Martha made a good guess. “Dan Oliphant!”
“Yes, ma’am! And I came within just one o’ throwin’ him out o’ my
office! Stood up there and grinned at me in front o’ my own desk and
told me what I had to do! What I _had_ to do!”
“And _do_ you have to, papa?” she asked.
“What!”
“I only wondered——”
“Why, plague take him, I never saw the beat of it!” he went on,
disregarding her. “Walked right into my office and told me I had to run
my car line all the way across his Addition. Told me I _had_ to! I told
him we _were_ goin’ almost to the edge of it and that’d be every last
speck o’ the way we’d move until he does the right thing.”
“Until he does what ‘right thing,’ papa?”
“Until he quits bein’ a hog!” the old man returned violently. “He seems
to think the best men in this town got nothin’ on earth to do but spend
their time buildin’ up his property for him and makin’ it more valuable,
all for _his_ benefit. I told him when he was ready to act like a decent
man and reorganize his holdings with a good trust company’s advice, and
issue stock, and let somebody else _in_, we might talk to him and not
before.”
“What did Dan say?”
“Said he tried to get us in at the start, and now we could go plum _to_!
Said I’d put that car line through there whether I wanted to or not.
Threatened me with a petition of his lot owners, and said they were
liable to go before the legislature and get my charter annulled, if I
didn’t do it.”
“Was he angry, papa?”
“Angry? No!” Mr. Shelby vociferated. “What in continental did _he_ have
to be angry about? _I_ was the one that was angry. He stood up there and
laughed and bragged about what he was goin’ to do till you’d thought
he’d bust with the gas of it! Why, Great Geemunently!—you’d thought
this whole city’s got nothin’ to do but turn in and run around doin’
what Ornaby Addition says it’s got to! I says, ‘Yes!’ I says. ‘So from
now on the tail’s goin’ to wag the dog, is it?’ ‘I don’t know but it
might,’ he says. ‘This town’s done considerable laughin’ at me,’ he
says. ‘I expect it’s about time I did some laughin’ myself,’ he says.
‘You’ll have to look out for your charter, Mr. Shelby,’ he says.”
Martha ventured to continue her naïveté, and unfortunately carried it
too far. “And _will_ you have to look out for it, papa?” she asked
gently.
With his thin but hard old fist he struck the table a blow that jarred
the china and jingled the silver. “Haven’t you got any _sense_?” he
shouted. “I’ll show him who he’s talkin’ to! There’s a _few_ men left in
this town that’ll teach him a little before he gets through with ’em!
I’m not the only one he thinks he can lay down the law to.” He glared at
her, his small gray face flushing with his increased anger. “Are _you_
still standin’ up for him after the way he’s treated you?”
This took Martha’s breath, and for an instant she was at a loss. Never
before had her father seemed to notice how she was “treated”—by
anybody. “I don’t know what you—I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
“Don’t you?” he returned sharply, and, before the bright stare of his
angry eyes, her own troubled gaze fell. “You say you don’t know what I
mean?”
“Why—no. Not—not at all,” she murmured.
“Well, _I_ do!” And with a brief shot of breath between his almost
closed lips, he further expressed an emotion that remained enigmatic to
her. He rose. “Seems to me it’s about time you quit standin’ up for
him,” he said; and stalked out of the room, leaving her still at the
table.
She sat there in an attitude of some rigidity after she had heard him go
upstairs, and she continued to sit there, though she had finished her
dinner before he departed. The conclusion she reached in her thoughts
was that there was a question she would never ask him;—she would never
ask him what he had meant by that final remark of his. She hoped he
meant only that her pride ought to resent a neighbour’s failure to come
to say he was glad to see her at home again—but she feared her father
meant more than this. She feared he meant much more, and she so feared
it that she would never dare to ask him.
Yet she wondered why she wouldn’t dare. How could it ever be “about
time” for her to stop standing up for an old friend? And when Harlan was
announced to her, as she sat alone at the table, she rose with a little
sigh. She did not sigh because she was sorry he had come; it was because
she had just realized how much more his brother was still the heart of
her thoughts than was this faithful and constant escort.
For she and Harlan had already fallen into a relation not uncommon among
those she had spoken of as “left-overs”: a relation that becomes a
habit—a habit that in turn becomes a relation. She “went everywhere”
with him; and continued to go everywhere with him; and so, after a
while, their contemporaries, all married, never sent an invitation to
one without including the other. Then, as time went on, and the habit
continued and continued, it became common stock in the prattle of more
dashing and precipitous younger people. When talk languished and even
weather stencils failed to cover a blank, those who felt such covering a
necessity could always fall back on this, and wonder why the two didn’t
“get married and be done with it.”
In that manner a worn woman-of-the-world, aged twenty, complained to
Frederic Oliphant one evening at the Country Club, as he sat with her
after unsuccessfully attempting an imported dance he found himself too
old to learn. “You aren’t too old to learn it, if you wouldn’t insist on
being too polite to hold a girl as tight as these boys do,” the
woman-of-the-world informed him with the new frankness then becoming
fashionable. “You aren’t as old as your cousin Harlan. Why on earth
don’t he and Miss Shelby get married and be done with it? They’ve
certainly been just the same as engaged for almost as long as I can
remember. Everybody says they _must_ be engaged—by this time! They say
she used to be in love with his brother. I don’t see how anybody could
be in love with _him_!”
She glanced through an archway, near by, to where Dan and his wife and
Martha and Harlan and a dozen other people were gravely straggling out
of the dining-room; all of this party having the air of concluding a
festival that had not proved too hilarious. Dan, in particular, appeared
to have thought the occasion a solemn one. He had been placed next to
Martha; and she remarked cheerfully that it was the first time he had
been so near her “in ages.” After that, however, she found little more
to say to him, since he seemed to encounter certain definite
difficulties in saying anything to her in return.
“I _am_ coming in to—to call, some evening,” he stammered, laughing
uncomfortably to express his cordiality. “I’d have been to see you—I’d
have been over oftener, except——” He paused, then concluded his
ill-fated excuses hurriedly—“except I’m so busy these days.” And he
glanced uneasily across the table to where Lena sat smiling mysteriously
at him.
Martha thought it tactful, and the part of a true friend, to talk to
Harlan, who sat next to her on the other side.