Alice Adams Booth Tarkington (ebook reader txt) 📖

let ’em! I know what you thought. ‘Here,’ you said to yourself, ‘here’s this ole fool J. A. Lamb; he’s kind of worn out and in his second childhood like; I can put it over on him, without his ever⁠—’ ”

“I did not!” Adams shouted. “A great deal you know about my feelings and all what I said to myself! There’s one thing I want to tell you, and that’s what I’m saying to myself now, and what my feelings are this minute!”

He struck the table a great blow with his thin fist, and shook the damaged knuckles in the air. “I just want to tell you, whatever I did feel, I don’t feel mean any more; not today, I don’t. There’s a meaner man in this world than I am, Mr. Lamb!”

“Oh, so you feel better about yourself today, do you, Virgil?”

“You bet I do! You worked till you got me where you want me; and I wouldn’t do that to another man, no matter what he did to me! I wouldn’t⁠—”

“What you talkin’ about! How’ve I ‘got you where I want you’?”

“Ain’t it plain enough?” Adams cried. “You even got me where I can’t raise the money to pay back what my boy owes you! Do you suppose anybody’s fool enough to let me have a cent on this business after one look at what you got over there across the road?”

“No, I don’t.”

“No, you don’t,” Adams echoed, hoarsely. “What’s more, you knew my house was mortgaged, and my⁠—”

“I did not,” Lamb interrupted, angrily. “What do I care about your house?”

“What’s the use your talking like that?” Adams cried. “You got me where I can’t even raise the money to pay what my boy owes the company, so’t I can’t show any reason to stop the prosecution and keep him out the penitentiary. That’s where you worked till you got me!”

“What!” Lamb shouted. “You accuse me of⁠—”

“ ‘Accuse you’? What am I telling you? Do you think I got no eyes?” And Adams hammered the table again. “Why, you knew the boy was weak⁠—”

“I did not!”

“Listen: you kept him there after you got mad at my leaving the way I did. You kept him there after you suspected him; and you had him watched; you let him go on; just waited to catch him and ruin him!”

“You’re crazy!” the old man bellowed. “I didn’t know there was anything against the boy till last night. You’re crazy, I say!”

Adams looked it. With his hair disordered over his haggard forehead and bloodshot eyes; with his bruised hands pounding the table and flying in a hundred wild and absurd gestures, while his feet shuffled constantly to preserve his balance upon staggering legs, he was the picture of a man with a mind gone to rags.

“Maybe I am crazy!” he cried, his voice breaking and quavering. “Maybe I am, but I wouldn’t stand there and taunt a man with it if I’d done to him what you’ve done to me! Just look at me: I worked all my life for you, and what I did when I quit never harmed you⁠—it didn’t make two cents’ worth o’ difference in your life and it looked like it’d mean all the difference in the world to my family⁠—and now look what you’ve done to me for it! I tell you, Mr. Lamb, there never was a man looked up to another man the way I looked up to you the whole o’ my life, but I don’t look up to you any more! You think you got a fine day of it now, riding up in your automobile to look at that sign⁠—and then over here at my poor little works that you’ve ruined. But listen to me just this one last time!” The cracking voice broke into falsetto, and the gesticulating hands fluttered uncontrollably. “Just you listen!” he panted. “You think I did you a bad turn, and now you got me ruined for it, and you got my works ruined, and my family ruined; and if anybody’d ’a’ told me this time last year I’d ever say such a thing to you I’d called him a dang liar, but I do say it: I say you’ve acted toward me like⁠—like a⁠—a doggone mean⁠—man!”

His voice, exhausted, like his body, was just able to do him this final service; then he sank, crumpled, into the chair by the table, his chin down hard upon his chest.

“I tell you, you’re crazy!” Lamb said again. “I never in the world⁠—” But he checked himself, staring in sudden perplexity at his accuser. “Look here!” he said. “What’s the matter of you? Have you got another of those⁠—?” He put his hand upon Adams’s shoulder, which jerked feebly under the touch.

The old man went to the door and called to the foreman.

“Here!” he said. “Run and tell my chauffeur to bring my car over here. Tell him to drive right up over the sidewalk and across the lot. Tell him to hurry!”

So, it happened, the great J. A. Lamb a second time brought his former clerk home, stricken and almost inanimate.

XXIV

About five o’clock that afternoon, the old gentleman came back to Adams’s house; and when Alice opened the door, he nodded, walked into the living-room without speaking; then stood frowning as if he hesitated to decide some perplexing question.

“Well, how is he now?” he asked, finally.

“The doctor was here again a little while ago; he thinks papa’s coming through it. He’s pretty sure he will.”

“Something like the way it was last spring?”

“Yes.”

“Not a bit of sense to it!” Lamb said, gruffly. “When he was getting well the other time the doctor told me it wasn’t a regular stroke, so to speak⁠—this ‘cerebral effusion’ thing. Said there wasn’t any particular reason for your father to expect he’d ever have another attack, if he’d take a little care of himself. Said he could consider himself well as anybody else long as he did that.”

“Yes. But he