Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington (ebook reader macos TXT) 📕

they’ve h’isted it a little every two years all the time I’ve worked for ’em. I’ve been head of the sundries department for seven years now, and I could hardly have more authority in that department unless I was a member of the firm itself.”

“Well, why don’t they make you a member of the firm? That’s what they ought to’ve done! Yes, and long ago!”

Adams laughed, but sighed with more heartiness than he had laughed. “They call me their ‘oldest standby’ down there.” He laughed again, apologetically, as if to excuse himself for taking a little pride in this title. “Yes, sir; they say I’m their ‘oldest standby’; and I guess they know they can count on my department’s turning in as good a report as they look for, at the end of every month; but they don’t have to take a man into the firm to get him to do my work, dearie.”

“But you said they depended on you, papa.”

“So they do; but of course not so’s they couldn’t get along without me.” He paused, reflecting. “I don’t just seem to know how to put it⁠—I mean how to put what I started out to say. I kind of wanted to tell you⁠—well, it seems funny to me, these last few years, the way your mother’s taken to feeling about it. I’d like to see a better established wholesale drug business than Lamb and Company this side the Alleghanies⁠—I don’t say bigger, I say better established⁠—and it’s kind of funny for a man that’s been with a business like that as long as I have to hear it called a ‘hole.’ It’s kind of funny when you think, yourself, you’ve done pretty fairly well in a business like that, and the men at the head of it seem to think so, too, and put your salary just about as high as anybody could consider customary⁠—well, what I mean, Alice, it’s kind of funny to have your mother think it’s mostly just⁠—mostly just a failure, so to speak.”

His voice had become tremulous in spite of him; and this sign of weakness and emotion had sufficient effect upon Alice. She bent over him suddenly, with her arm about him and her cheek against his. “Poor papa!” she murmured. “Poor papa!”

“No, no,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything to trouble you. I just thought⁠—” He hesitated. “I just wondered⁠—I thought maybe it wouldn’t be any harm if I said something about how things are down there. I got to thinking maybe you didn’t understand it’s a pretty good place. They’re fine people to work for; and they’ve always seemed to think something of me;⁠—the way they took Walter on, for instance, soon as I asked ’em, last year. Don’t you think that looked a good deal as if they thought something of me, Alice?”

“Yes, papa,” she said, not moving.

“And the work’s right pleasant,” he went on. “Mighty nice boys in our department, Alice. Well, they are in all the departments, for that matter. We have a good deal of fun down there somedays.”

She lifted her head. “More than you do at home ‘somedays,’ I expect, papa!” she said.

He protested feebly. “Now, I didn’t mean that⁠—I didn’t want to trouble you⁠—”

She looked at him through winking eyelashes. “I’m sorry I called it a ‘hole,’ papa.”

“No, no,” he protested, gently. “It was your mother said that.”

“No. I did, too.”

“Well, if you did, it was only because you’d heard her.”

She shook her head, then kissed him. “I’m going to talk to her,” she said, and rose decisively.

But at this, her father’s troubled voice became quickly louder: “You better let her alone. I just wanted to have a little talk with you. I didn’t mean to start any⁠—your mother won’t⁠—”

“Now, papa!” Alice spoke cheerfully again, and smiled upon him. “I want you to quit worrying! Everything’s going to be all right and nobody’s going to bother you any more about anything. You’ll see!”

She carried her smile out into the hall, but after she had closed the door her face was all pity; and her mother, waiting for her in the opposite room, spoke sympathetically.

“What’s the matter, Alice? What did he say that’s upset you?”

“Wait a minute, mama.” Alice found a handkerchief, used it for eyes and suffused nose, gulped, then suddenly and desolately sat upon the bed. “Poor, poor, poor papa!” she whispered.

“Why?” Mrs. Adams inquired, mildly. “What’s the matter with him? Sometimes you act as if he weren’t getting well. What’s he been talking about?”

“Mama⁠—well, I think I’m pretty selfish. Oh, I do!”

“Did he say you were?”

“Papa? No, indeed! What I mean is, maybe we’re both a little selfish to try to make him go out and hunt around for something new.”

Mrs. Adams looked thoughtful. “Oh, that’s what he was up to!”

“Mama, I think we ought to give it up. I didn’t dream it had really hurt him.”

“Well, doesn’t he hurt us?”

“Never that I know of, mama.”

“I don’t mean by saying things,” Mrs. Adams explained, impatiently. “There are more ways than that of hurting people. When a man sticks to a salary that doesn’t provide for his family, isn’t that hurting them?”

“Oh, it ‘provides’ for us well enough, mama. We have what we need⁠—if I weren’t so extravagant. Oh, I know I am!”

But at this admission her mother cried out sharply. “ ‘Extravagant’! You haven’t one tenth of what the other girls you go with have. And you can’t have what you ought to as long as he doesn’t get out of that horrible place. It provides bare food and shelter for us, but what’s that?”

“I don’t think we ought to try any more to change him.”

“You don’t?” Mrs. Adams came and stood before her. “Listen, Alice: your father’s asleep; that’s his trouble, and he’s got to be waked up. He doesn’t know that things have changed. When you and Walter were little children we did have enough⁠—at least it seemed to be about as much as most of the people we knew. But the town isn’t what it was