Alice Adams--Booth Tarkington [115]
"Yes. I understand, dear."
"Yes, I'm afraid you do," he said. "Too bad! You oughtn't to understand it at your age. It seems to me a good deal as if the Lord really meant for the young people to have the good times, and for the old to have the troubles; and when anybody as young as you has trouble there's a big mistake somewhere."
"Oh, no!" she protested.
But he persisted whimsically in this view of divine error: "Yes, it does look a good deal that way. But of course we can't tell; we're never certain about anything--not about anything at all. Sometimes I look at it another way, though. Sometimes it looks to me as if a body's troubles came on him mainly because he hadn't had sense enough to know how not to have any--as if his troubles were kind of like a boy's getting kept in after school by the teacher, to give him discipline, or something or other. But, my, my! We don't learn easy!" He chuckled mournfully. "Not to learn how to live till we're about ready to die, it certainly seems to me dang tough!"
"Then I wouldn't brood on such a notion, papa," she said.
"'Brood?' No!" he returned. "I just kind o' mull it over." He chuckled again, sighed, and then, not looking at her, he said, "That Mr. Russell --your mother tells me he hasn't been here again-- not since----"
"No," she said, quietly, as Adams paused. "He never came again."
"Well, but maybe----"
"No," she said. "There isn't any 'maybe.' I told him good-bye that night, papa. It was before he knew about Walter--I told you."
"Well, well," Adams said. "Young people are entitled to their own privacy; I don't want to pry." He emptied his pipe into a chipped saucer on the table beside him, laid the pipe aside, and reverted to a former topic. "Speaking of dying----"
"Well, but we weren't!" Alice protested.
"Yes, about not knowing how to live till you're through living--and THEN maybe not!" he said, chuckling at his own determined pessimism. "I see I'm pretty old because I talk this way--I remember my grandmother saying things a good deal like all what I'm saying now; I used to hear her at it when I was a young fellow--she was a right gloomy old lady, I remember. Well, anyhow, it reminds me: I want to get on my feet again as soon as I can; I got to look around and find something to go into."
Alice shook her head gently. "But, papa, he told you----"
"Never mind throwing that dang doctor up at me!" Adams interrupted, peevishly. "He said I'd be good for SOME kind of light job--if I could find just the right thing. 'Where there wouldn't be either any physical or mental strain,' he said. Well, I got to find something like that. Anyway, I'll feel better if I can just get out LOOKING for it."
"But, papa, I'm afraid you won't find it, and you'll be disappointed."
"Well, I want to hunt around and SEE, anyhow."
Alice patted his hand. "You must just be contented, papa. Everything's going to be all right, and you mustn't get to worrying about doing anything. We own this house it's all clear--and you've taken care of mama and me all our lives; now it's our turn."
"No, sir!" he said, querulously. "I don't like the idea of being the landlady's husband around a boarding- house; it goes against my gizzard. I know: makes out the bills for his wife Sunday mornings-- works with a screw-driver on somebody's bureau drawer sometimes--'tends the furnace maybe--one the boarders gives him a cigar now and then. That's a FINE life to look forward to! No, sir; I don't want to finish as a landlady's husband!"
Alice looked grave; for she knew the sketch was but too accurately prophetic in every probability. "But, papa," she said, to console him, "don't you think maybe there isn't such a thing as a 'finish,' after all! You say perhaps we don't learn to live till we die but maybe that's how it is AFTER we die, too--just learning some more, the way we do here, and maybe through trouble again, even after that."
"Oh, it might be," he sighed. "I expect so."