National Avenue by Booth Tarkington (book recommendations website .txt) 📕

referred to an old and troubling puzzlement of his, but had long ago resigned himself to the impossibility of finding a solution. “I mean she’s like you because she’s always thought so much more of Dan than she has of me, Martha.”

“Perhaps it’s because you’ve never seemed to think much of anything, yourself,” she said gently. “Perhaps we’re apt to like people best who do a great deal of liking themselves.”

“I might like to have you like me, Martha,” Harlan ventured, and there was a quiet wistfulness about him then that touched her. “I might like it better than you know.”

She looked at him gravely. “I do like you,” she said. “I like you anyhow; but even if I didn’t, I’d like you because you’re Dan’s brother.”

Harlan sighed, but contrived a smile to accompany his sigh. “Yes; I’ve always understood that, Martha; and you’re not at all peculiar in your preference. Not only you and grandmother, but everybody else likes Dan much better than me.”

“And yet,” Martha said, a smouldering glow in her kind eyes, “you tell me that everybody’s laughing at him.”

“Haven’t you heard so yourself?”

“Yes, I have,” she cried angrily. “But how can they, if they like him?”

“Isn’t it plain enough? They like him because he’s a democratic, friendly soul, and they laugh at him because he’s so absurd about the Ornaby farm.”

“And you think he’s got to do the whole thing absolutely alone?”

“Why, no,” Harlan said, correcting her lightly, “I don’t think he’s going to be able to do the whole thing at all. He’ll get part way and then of course he’ll have to quit, because his money’ll give out. What he has left may last him a year or even longer, if he keeps on just doing with his little gang of darkies and himself.”

“And in the meantime, he’ll also keep on being a ‘laughing stock?’ That’s what you said, didn’t you?”

“I don’t think it was an exaggeration,” Harlan returned, defending himself, for her tone was sharply accusing. “After all,” he went on, with placative lightness, “isn’t it even rather a triumph in its way? You see, Martha, it isn’t every young man of his age who’d be well enough known to occupy that position.”

“A laughing stock?”

“Why, yes. Don’t you see it means a degree of prominence not at all within the reach of every Tom, Dick, and Harry. For instance, I couldn’t touch it: I don’t know enough people; but Dan’s one of those men of whom it’s said, ‘Oh, everybody in town knows him!’ So, you see, since he’s run wild over this Ornaby Addition, why, he actually has the whole town laughing at him.”

“Since he’s run wild!” she echoed scornfully. “And you say you don’t exaggerate! How has he ‘run wild?’ ”

“Ask your father,” was Harlan’s response, delivered quietly, though with some irritation; and Martha said sharply that she would, indeed; but this was mere retort, signifying no genuine intention on her part, for she knew well enough what her father would say. He had been saying it over and over, every evening of late; and her discussions with him of Dan Oliphant and Ornaby Addition had reached that point of feeble acrimony at which a participant with any remnant of wisdom falls back upon a despairing silence⁠—a silence despairing of the opponent’s sanity. Martha had no mind to release her father from the oppression of this silence of hers, merely to hear him repeat himself.

She knew, moreover, that Harlan had not far overshot the mark when he intimated that Dan had become the laughing stock of the town; nor was it grossly an exaggeration to describe him as “making orations to bankers and business men, especially your father.” The enthusiast for Ornaby Addition had indeed become somewhat oratorical upon his great subject; and the bankers and business men to whom he made speeches not only laughed about him, as did their secretaries and clerks and stenographers, distributing this humour widely, but often they laughed at him and rallied him, interrupting him as he prophesied coming splendours.

“You’ll see!” he would answer, laughing himself, albeit rather plaintively. “You can sit there and make all the fun o’ me you want to, but the day’ll come when you’ll wish you’d had a hand in makin’ this city what it is goin’ to be made! It isn’t only the money you’d get out of it, but the pride you’d take in it, and what you’d be able to tell your grandchildren about it. Why, gentlemen, ten years from now⁠—” Then he would go on painting his air castles for them while they chuckled or sometimes grew noisily hilarious.

But the toughest and most powerful of them all declined to chuckle; there was little good-nature and no hilarity left in dry old Mr. Shelby. He was seventy, and, as he crisply expressed himself, at his age he hated to have his time wasted for him; he didn’t see any pleasure in listening to the goings-on of a fool-boy about two minutes out of school! This viewpoint he went so far as to communicate to Dan directly, as the latter stood before him in the old gentleman’s office. For that matter, Mr. Shelby seldom cared to be anything except direct; it was his declared belief that directness was the only thing that paid, in the long run. “Usin’ a lot of tact and all that stuff to spare touchy people’s vanity, it’s all a waste of energy and they only hate you worse in the long run,” he said. “So I’m not goin’ to trouble to use any tact on you, young Mr. Dan Oliphant!”

He was a formidable old figure as he sat in his mahogany swivel-chair, which every instant threatened to swing him about to face his big, clean desk again with his back to the visitor. Neat with an extremity of precision, this old man had not altered perceptibly in appearance for many years, not even in his clothes; he was now exactly as he was in Dan’s childhood. The