“You’ve got to have some breakfast.”
“Don’t want ‘ny.”
“You wait!” she said, imperiously, and disappeared to return almost at once. “I can cook in my bedroom slippers,” she explained, “but I don’t believe I could in my bare feet!”
Descending softly, she made him wait in the dining-room until she brought him toast and eggs and coffee. “Eat!” she said. “And I’m going to telephone for a taxicab to take you, if you think you’ve really got to go.”
“No, I’m going to walk—I WANT to walk.”
She shook her head anxiously. “You don’t look able. You’ve walked all night.”
“No, I didn’t,” he returned. “I tell you I got some sleep. I got all I wanted anyhow.”
“But, papa–-“
“Here!” he interrupted, looking up at her suddenly and setting down his cup of coffee. “Look here! What about this Mr. Russell? I forgot all about him. What about him?”
Her lip trembled a little, but she controlled it before she spoke. “Well, what about him, papa?” she asked, calmly enough.
“Well, we could hardly–-” Adams paused, frowning heavily. “We could hardly expect he wouldn’t hear something about all this.”
“Yes; of course he’ll hear it, papa.”
“Well?”
“Well, what?” she asked, gently.
“You don’t think he’d be the—the cheap kind it’d make a difference with, of course.”
“Oh, no; he isn’t cheap. It won’t make any difference with him.”
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 his projected great industry, saw his old clerk, and immediately walked across the street and the lot to speak to him.
“Well, Adams,” he said, in his husky, cheerful voice, “how’s your glue-works?”
Adams uttered an inarticulate sound, and lifted the hand that held his hat as if to make a protective gesture, but failed to carry it out; and his arm sank limp at his side. The foreman, however, seemed to feel that something ought to be said.
“Our glue-works, hell!” he remarked. “I guess we won’t HAVE no glue-works over here not very long, if we got to compete with the sized thing you got over there!”
Lamb chuckled. “I kind of had some such notion,” he said. “You see, Virgil, I couldn’t exactly let you walk off with it like swallering a pat o’ butter, now, could I? It didn’t look exactly reasonable to expect me to let go like that, now, did it?”
Adams found a half-choked voice somewhere in his throat. “Do you—would you step into my office a minute, Mr. Lamb?”
“Why, certainly I’m willing to have a little talk with you,” the old gentleman said, as he followed his former employee indoors, and he added, “I feel a lot more like it than I did before I got THAT up, over yonder, Virgil!”
Adams threw open the door of the rough room he called his office, having as justification for this title little more than the fact that he had a telephone there and a deal table that served as a desk. “Just step into the office, please,” he said.
Lamb glanced at the desk, at the kitchen chair before it, at the telephone, and at the partition walls built of old boards, some covered with ancient paint and some merely weatherbeaten, the salvage of a house-wrecker; and he smiled broadly. “So these are your offices, are they?” he asked. “You expect to do quite a business here, I guess, don’t you, Virgil?”
Adams turned upon him a stricken and tortured face. “Have you seen Charley Lohr since last night, Mr. Lamb?”
“No; I haven’t seen Charley.”
“Well, I told him to tell you,” Adams began;— “I told him I’d pay you–-“
“Pay me what you expect to make out o’ glue, you mean, Virgil?”
“No,” Adams said, swallowing. “I mean what my boy owes you. That’s what I told Charley to tell you. I told him to tell you I’d pay you every last–-“