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

fence, leaning upon it now; and he could feel, rather than see, that she was not looking at him, but that her head was again bowed in the same meekness with which she had said she hoped he prized her feeling for him. XI

The doleful bride remained in bed all the next day, prostrate under the continuing heat;⁠—in fact, it was not until a week had passed that she felt herself able to make the excursion projected by the hopeful bridegroom; and when they finally did set forth, in Dan’s light runabout, she began to suffer before they reached the gates of the carriage driveway.

“Oh, dear!” she said. “Is it going to be bumpy like this all the way? It hurts my back.”

Dan apologized. “I’m sorry I didn’t have those holes in the drive filled up; I’ll do it myself this evening. But here on the avenue,” he said, as they turned north from the gates, “we’ll have this fine cedar-block pavement for quite a good way.”

“Oh, dear!” she complained. “It’s worse on the cedar-block pavement than it was in your driveway.”

“It is a little teeny bit jolty,” Dan admitted. “You see this pavement’s been down over five years now, but it’s held out mighty well when you consider the traffic that’s been over it⁠—mighty well! It’s been one of the finest pavements I ever saw in any town.”

She gave a little moan. “You talk as if what it has been were a great help to us now. It does hurt my back, Dan.”

“Oh, it isn’t goin’ to keep on like this,” he assured her comfortingly. “The contracts are already signed for a new pavement. Six months from now this’ll all be as smooth as a billiard table.”

“But we have to go over it to-day!”

“That’s why I thought the runabout would be pleasanter for you,” he said. “Our old family carriage is more comfortable in some ways, but it hasn’t got rubber tires. I hardly notice the bumps myself with these tires.”

“I do!”

“Think what a great invention it is, though,” he said cheerfully. “Why, before long I shouldn’t wonder if you’d see almost everything that rolls usin’ rubber tires, and a good many such light traps as this with inflated ones like bicycles. If horseless carriages ever amount to anything, they’ll get to usin’ inflated rubber tires, too, most likely.”

“Oh, dear me!” Lena sighed. “Doesn’t this heat ever relent a little?”

He assured her that it did; that the hot spell would soon be over, and that she wouldn’t mind it when they reached the Addition, which was on higher ground. “It’s always cool out at Ornaby,” he said proudly. “The mean level’s twenty-eight feet higher than it is in this part of the city; and I never saw the day when you couldn’t find a breeze out there.”

“Then hurry and get there! It must be a terribly long way. I don’t see any higher ground ahead of us⁠—nothing but this eternal flatness and flatness and flatness! I don’t see how you people stand it. I should think somebody would build a hill!”

He laughed and told her that Ornaby was almost a hill. “Practically, it is,” he said. “Anyhow it’s a sort of plateau⁠—practically. You see the mean level⁠—”

“Oh, dear!” she sighed; and for a time they jogged on in silence.

He drove with one hand, holding over her with the other a green silk parasol, a performance not lacking in gallantry, nor altogether without difficulty, for his young horse was lively, in spite of the weather; yet it is doubtful if strangers, seeing the runabout pass, would have guessed the occupants a bride and groom.

Beneath the broad white rim of Lena’s straw hat the pretty little face was contorted with discontent; while her companion’s expression showed a puzzled discouragement not customarily associated with the expressions of bridegrooms. True, the discouragement passed before long, but it came back again after a little more conversation. Then it disappeared again, but returned when signs of capricious weather were seen in the sky. For it is new knowledge to nobody that the weather has an uneducated humour and will as soon play the baboon with a bride and groom, or with a kind cripple on an errand of mercy, as it will with the hardiest ruffian. But at first Dan welcomed the hints of change in the southwest.

“By George!” he said, nodding across the vast flat cornfields upon their left, for the runabout had now come into the open country. “There’s good news, Lena.”

“What is?”

“Look over yonder. We’re goin’ to get rain, and Heaven knows we need it! Look.”

Along the southwest horizon of cornfields and distant groves they saw a thickening nucleus of dark haze. Out of it, clouds of robust sculpture were slowly rising, muttering faintly as they rose, as if another planet approached and its giants grumbled, being roused from sleep to begin the assault.

“By George, that’s great!” Dan exclaimed in high delight. “That’s worth millions of dollars to the farmers, Lena.”

But Lena was as far as possible from sharing his enthusiasm. “I believe it’s going to be a thunderstorm. Turn back. I hate thunderstorms. I’m afraid of them.”

“Why, they won’t hurt you, Lena.”

“They frighten me and they do kill people. Please turn back.”

“But we’re almost there, dear. I think the rain’ll hold off, probably, but if it doesn’t we’d be more likely to get wet goin’ all the way back home than if we went ahead. I’ve got a tool shed out there we could wait under.”

“A tool shed? With all the tools in it? That’s just where the lightning would strike first!”

Dan laughed and tried to reassure her, but although they drove on in the bright sunshine for a time, she became more and more nervous. “It almost seems to me you don’t want to do things I want you to. We should have turned back when I first spoke of it.”

“Look, dear,” he said. “Just ahead of us there’s something you’re goin’ to be mighty