Alice Adams--Booth Tarkington [107]
Adams suffered a profound sigh to escape him. "Well--I'm glad of that, anyway."
"The difference," she explained--"the difference was made without his hearing anything about Walter. He doesn't know about THAT yet."
"Well, what does he know about?"
"Only," she said, "about me."
"What you mean by that, Alice?" he asked, helplessly.
"Never mind," she said. "It's nothing beside the real trouble we're in--I'll tell you some time. You eat your eggs and toast; you can't keep going on just coffee."
"I can't eat any eggs and toast," he objected, rising. "I can't."
"Then wait till I can bring you something else."
"No," he said, irritably. "I won't do it! I don't want any dang food! And look here"--he spoke sharply to stop her, as she went toward the telephone --"I don't want any dang taxi, either! You look after your mother when she wakes up. I got to be at WORK!"
And though she followed him to the front door, entreating, he could not be stayed or hindered. He went through the quiet morning streets at a rickety, rapid gait, swinging his old straw hat in his hands, and whispering angrily to himself as he went. His grizzled hair, not trimmed for a month, blew back from his damp forehead in the warm breeze; his reddened eyes stared hard at nothing from under blinking lids; and one side of his face twitched startlingly from time to time;--children might have run from him, or mocked him.
When he had come into that fallen quarter his industry had partly revived and wholly made odorous, a negro woman, leaning upon her whitewashed gate, gazed after him and chuckled for the benefit of a gossiping friend in the next tiny yard. "Oh, good Satan! Wha'ssa matter that ole glue man?"
"Who? Him?" the neighbour inquired. "What he do now?"
"Talkin' to his ole se'f!" the first explained, joyously. "Look like gone distracted--ole glue man!"
Adams's legs had grown more uncertain with his hard walk, and he stumbled heavily as he crossed the baked mud of his broad lot, but cared little for that, was almost unaware of it, in fact. Thus his eyes saw as little as his body felt, and so he failed to observe something that would have given him additional light upon an old phrase that already meant quite enough for him.
There are in the wide world people who have never learned its meaning; but most are either young or beautifully unobservant who remain wholly unaware of the inner poignancies the words convey: "a rain of misfortunes." It is a boiling rain, seemingly whimsical in its choice of spots whereon to fall; and, so far as mortal eye can tell, neither the just nor the unjust may hope to avoid it, or need worry themselves by expecting it. It had selected the Adams family for its scaldings; no question.
The glue-works foreman, standing in the doorway of the brick shed, observed his employer's eccentric approach, and doubtfully stroked a whiskered chin.
"Well, they ain't no putticular use gettin' so upset over it," he said, as Adams came up. "When a thing happens, why, it happens, and that's all there is to it. When a thing's so, why, it's so. All you can do about it is think if there's anything you CAN do; and that's what you better be doin' with this case."
Adams halted, and seemed to gape at him. "What --case?" he said, with difficulty. "Was it in the morning papers, too?"
"No, it ain't in no morning papers. My land! It don't need to be in no papers; look at the SIZE of it!"
"The size of what?"
"Why, great God!" the foreman exclaimed. "He ain't even seen it.
Look! Look yonder!"
Adams stared vaguely at the man's outstretched hand and pointing forefinger, then turned and saw a great sign upon the facade of the big factory building across the street. The letters were large enough to be read two blocks away.
"AFTER THE FIFTEENTH OF NEXT MONTH THIS BUILDING WILL BE OCCUPIED BY THE J. A. LAMB LIQUID GLUE CO. INC."
A gray touring-car had just come to rest before the principal entrance of the building, and J. A. Lamb himself descended from it. He glanced over toward the humble rival of