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THE INNOCENTS
BOOKS BY
SINCLAIR LEWIS
THE INNOCENTS
THE JOB
THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK
OUR MR. WRENN
HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK
[ESTABLISHED 1817]
[Illustration: THE INNOCENTS]
THE INNOCENTS
A STORY FOR LOVERS
BY
SINCLAIR LEWIS
AUTHOR OF "THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK" "THE JOB" ETC.
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
THE INNOCENTS
Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published October, 1917
F-R
A DEDICATORY INTRODUCTION
If this were a ponderous work of realism, such as the author has
attempted to write, and will doubtless essay again, it would be perilous
to dedicate it to the splendid assembly of young British writers, lest
the critics search for Influences and Imitations. But since this is a
flagrant excursion, a tale for people who still read Dickens and clip
out spring poetry and love old people and children, it may safely
confess the writer's strident admiration for Compton Mackenzie, Hugh
Walpole, Oliver Onions, D. H. Lawrence, J. D. Beresford, Gilbert Cannan,
Patrick MacGill, and their peers, whose novels are the histories of our
contemporaneous Golden Age. Nor may these be mentioned without a yet
more enthusiastic tribute to their master and teacher (he probably
abominates being called either a master or a teacher), H. G. Wells.
THE INNOCENTS
CHAPTER I
Mr. and Mrs. Seth Appleby were almost old. They called each other
"Father" and "Mother." But frequently they were guilty of holding hands,
or of cuddling together in corners, and Father was a person of stubborn
youthfulness. For something over forty years Mother had been trying to
make him stop smoking, yet every time her back was turned he would sneak
out his amber cigarette-holder and puff a cheap cigarette, winking at
the shocked crochet tidy on the patent rocker. Mother sniffed at him and
said that he acted like a young smart Aleck, but he would merely grin in
answer and coax her out for a walk.
As they paraded, the sun shone through the fuzzy, silver hair that
puffed out round Father's crab-apple face, and an echo of delicate
silver was on Mother's rose-leaf cheeks.
They were rustic as a meadow-ringed orchard, yet Father and Mother had
been born in New York City, and there lived for more than sixty years.
Father was a perfectly able clerk in Pilkings's shoe-store on Sixth
Avenue, and Pilkings was so much older than Father that he still called
him, "Hey you, Seth!" and still gave him advice about handling lady
customers. For three or four years, some ten years back, Father and Mr.
Pilkings had displayed ill-feeling over the passing of the amiable
elastic-sided Congress shoe. But that was practically forgotten, and
Father began to feel fairly certain of his job.
There are three sorts of native New-Yorkers: East Side Jews and
Italians, who will own the city; the sons of families that are so rich
that they swear off taxes; and the people, descendants of shopkeepers
and clerks, who often look like New-Englanders, and always listen with
timid admiration when New-Yorkers from Ohio or Minnesota or California
give them information about the city. To this meek race, doing the
city's work and forgotten by the city they have built, belonged the
Applebys. They lived in a brown and dusky flat, with a tortoise-shell
tabby, and a canary, and a china hen which held their breakfast boiled
eggs. Every Thursday Mother wrote to her daughter, who had married a
prosperous and severely respectable druggist of Saserkopee, New York,
and during the rest of her daytimes she swept and cooked and dusted,
went shyly along the alien streets which had slipped into the
cobblestoned village she had known as a girl, and came back to dust
again and wait for Father's nimble step on the four flights of stairs up
to their flat. She was as used to loneliness as a hotel melancholiac;
the people they had known had drifted away to far suburbs. In each other
the Applebys found all life.
In July, Father began his annual agitation for a vacation. Mr. Pilkings,
of Pilkings & Son's Standard Shoe Parlor, didn't believe in vacations.
He believed in staying home and saving money. So every year it was
necessary for Father to develop a cough, not much of a cough, merely a
small, polite noise, like a mouse begging pardon of an irate bee, yet
enough to talk about and win him a two weeks' leave. Every year he
schemed for this leave, and almost ruined his throat by sniffing snuff
to make him sneeze. Every year Mr. Pilkings said that he didn't believe
there was anything whatever the matter with Father and that, even if
there was, he shouldn't have a vacation. Every year Mother was
frightened almost to death by apprehension that they wouldn't be able to
get away.
Father laughed at her this July till his fluffy hair shook like a dog's
ears in fly-time. He pounded his fist on the prim center-table by which
Mother had been solemnly reading the picture-captions in the _Eternity
Filmco's Album of Funny Film Favorites_. The statuettes of General
Lafayette and Mozart on the false mantel shook with his lusty thumping.
He roared till his voice filled the living-room and hollowly echoed in
the porcelain sink in the kitchen.
"Why," he declaimed, "you poor little dried codfish, if it wasn't for me
you'd never have a vacation. You trust old dad to handle Pilkings. We'll
get away just as sure as God made little apples."
"You mustn't use curse-words," murmured Mother, undiscouraged by forty
years of trying to reform Father's vocabulary. "And it would be a just
judgment on you for your high mightiness if you didn't get a vacation,
and I don't believe Mr. Pilkings will give you one, either, and if it
wa'n't for--"
"Why, I've got it right under my hat."
"Yes, you always think you know so much more--"
Father rounded the table, stealthily and treacherously put his lips at
her ear, and blew a tremendous "Zzzzzzzz," which buzzed in her ear like
a file on a saw-blade.
Mother leaped up, furious, and snapped, "I'm simply ashamed of you, the
way you act, like you never would grow up and get a little common sense,
what with scaring me into conniption fits, and as I was just going to
say, and I only say it for your own good, if you haven't got enough
sense to know how little sense you have got, you at your time of life,
why, well, all I can say is--you ought to know better."
Then Father and Mother settled peacefully down and forgot all about
their disagreement.
Since they had blessedly been relieved of the presence of their talented
daughter, who, until her marriage, had been polite to them to such an
extent that for years they had lived in terror, they had made rather a
point of being naughty and noisy and happy together, but by and by they
would get tired and look affectionately across the table and purr.
Father tinkered away at a broken lamp-shade till suddenly, without
warning, he declared that Mother scolded him merely to conceal her faith
in his ability to do anything. She sniffed, but she knew that he was
right. For years Mother had continued to believe in the cleverness of
Seth Appleby, who, in his youth, had promised to become manager of the
shoe-store, and gave the same promise to-day.
Father justified his shameless boast by compelling Mr. Pilkings to grant
him the usual leave of absence, and they prepared to start for West
Skipsit, Cape Cod, where they always spent their vacations at the
farm-house of Uncle Joe Tubbs.
Mother took a week to pack, and unpack, to go panting down-stairs to the
corner drug-store for new tubes of tooth-paste and a presentable sponge,
to remend all that was remendable, to press Father's flappy, shapeless
little trousers with the family flat-iron, to worry over whether she
should take the rose-pink or the daffodil-yellow wrapper--which had both
faded to approximately the same shade of gray, but which were to her
trusting mind still interestingly different. Each year she had to
impress Mrs. Tubbs of West Skipsit with new metropolitan finery, and
this year Father had no peace nor comfort in the menage till she had
selected a smart new hat, incredibly small and close and sinking coyly
down over her ear. He was only a man folk, he was in the way, incapable
of understanding this problem of fashion, and Mother almost slapped him
one evening for suggesting that it "wouldn't make such a gosh-awful lot
of difference if she didn't find some new fad to impress Sister Tubbs."
But Mother wearied of repacking their two cheap wicker suit-cases and
the brown pasteboard box, and Father suddenly came to the front in his
true capacity as boss and leader. He announced, loudly, on the evening
before they were to depart, "We're going to have a party to-night, old
lady."
At the masterful tones of this man of the world, who wasn't afraid of
train or travel, who had gone successfully through the mysteries of
purchasing transportation clear to Cape Cod, Mother looked impressed.
But she said, doubtfully, "Oh, do you think we better, Father? We'll be
traveling and all--"
"Yes-sir-ee! We're going to a movie, and then we're going to have a
banana split, and I'm going to carry my cane and smoke a seegar. You
know mighty well you like the movies as well as I do."
"Acting up like a young smarty!" Mother said, but she obediently put on
her hat--Lord, no, not the new small hat; that was kept to impress West
Skipsit, Massachusetts--and as she trotted to the movies beside him, the
two of them like solemn white puppies venturing away from their mother,
she occasionally looked admiringly up, a whole inch up, at her hero.