THE FLIRT
BY
BOOTH TARKINGTON
To
SUSANAH
THE FLIRT
CHAPTER ONE
Valentine Corliss walked up Corliss Street the hottest afternoon
of that hot August, a year ago, wearing a suit of white serge
which attracted a little attention from those observers who were
able to observe anything except the heat. The coat was shaped
delicately; it outlined the wearer, and, fitting him as women's
clothes fit women, suggested an effeminacy not an attribute of
the tall Corliss. The effeminacy belonged all to the tailor, an
artist plying far from Corliss Street, for the coat would have
encountered a hundred of its fellows at Trouville or Ostende this
very day. Corliss Street is the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, the
Park Lane, the Fifth Avenue, of Capitol City, that smoky
illuminant of our great central levels, but although it esteems
itself an established cosmopolitan thoroughfare, it is still
provincial enough to be watchful; and even in its torrid languor
took some note of the alien garment.
Mr. Corliss, treading for the first time in seventeen years
the pavements of this namesake of his grandfather, mildly repaid
its interest in himself. The street, once the most peaceful in
the world, he thought, had changed. It was still long and
straight, still shaded by trees so noble that they were betrothed, here and there, high over the wide white roadway, the
shimmering tunnels thus contrived shot with gold and blue; but
its pristine complete restfulness was departed: gasoline had
arrived, and a pedestrian, even this August day of heat, must
glance two ways before crossing.
Architectural transformations, as vital, staggered the
returned native. In his boyhood that posthumously libelled
sovereign lady, Anne, had terribly prevailed among the dwellings
on this highway; now, however, there was little left of the
jig-saw's hare-brained ministrations; but the growing pains of
the adolescent city had wrought some madness here. There had
been a revolution which was a riot; and, plainly incited by a new
outbreak of the colonies, the Goth, the Tudor, and the Tuscan had
harried the upper reaches to a turmoil attaining its climax in a
howl or two from the Spanish Moor.
Yet it was a pleasant street in spite of its improvements;
in spite, too, of a long, gray smoke-plume crossing the summer
sky and dropping an occasional atomy of coal upon Mr. Corliss's
white coat. The green continuous masses of tree-foliage, lawn,
and shrubbery were splendidly asserted; there was a faint
wholesome odour from the fine block pavement of the roadway,
white, save where the snailish water-wagon laid its long strips
of steaming brown. Locusts, serenaders of the heat, invisible
among the branches, rasped their interminable cadences, competing
bitterly with the monotonous chattering of lawn-mowers propelled
by glistening black men over the level swards beneath. And
though porch and terrace were left to vacant wicker chairs and
swinging-seats, and to flowers and plants in jars and green
boxes, and the people sat unseen--and, it might be guessed,
unclad for exhibition, in the dimmer recesses of their
houses--nevertheless, a summery girl under an alluring parasol
now and then prettily trod the sidewalks, and did not altogether
suppress an ample consciousness of the white pedestrian's stalwart grace; nor was his quick glance too distressingly modest to
be aware of these faint but attractive perturbations.
A few of the oldest houses remained as he remembered them,
and there were two or three relics of mansard and cupola days;
but the herd of cast-iron deer that once guarded these lawns,
standing sentinel to all true gentry: Whither were they fled?
In his boyhood, one specimen betokened a family of position and
affluence; two, one on each side of the front walk, spoke of a
noble opulence; two and a fountain were overwhelming. He
wondered in what obscure thickets that once proud herd now
grazed; and then he smiled, as through a leafy opening of
shrubbery he caught a glimpse of a last survivor, still loyally
alert, the haughty head thrown back in everlasting challenge and
one foreleg lifted, standing in a vast and shadowy backyard with
a clothesline fastened to its antlers.
Mr. Corliss remembered that backyard very well: it was an old
battlefield whereon he had conquered; and he wondered if "the
Lindley boys" still lived there, and if Richard Lindley would
hate him now as implacably as then.
A hundred yards farther on, he paused before a house more
familiar to him than any other, and gave it a moment's whimsical
attention, without emotion.
It was a shabby old brick structure, and it stood among the
gayest, the most flamboyant dwellings of all Corliss Street
like a bewildered tramp surrounded by carnival maskers. It held
place full in the course of the fury for demolition and
rebuilding, but remained unaltered--even unrepaired, one might
have thought--since the early seventies, when it was built.
There was a sagging cornice, and the nauseous brown which the
walls had years ago been painted was sooted to a repellent dinge,
so cracked and peeled that the haggard red bricks were exposed,
like a beggar through the holes in his coat. It was one of those
houses which are large without being commodious; its very tall,
very narrow windows, with their attenuated, rusty inside
shutters, boasting to the passerby of high ceilings but betraying
the miserly floor spaces. At each side of the front door was a
high and cramped bay-window, one of them insanely culminating in
a little six-sided tower of slate, and both of them girdled above
the basement windows by a narrow porch, which ran across the
front of the house and gave access to the shallow vestibule.
However, a pleasant circumstance modified the gloom of this
edifice and assured it a remnant of reserve and dignity in its
ill-considered old age: it stood back a fine hundred feet from
the highway, and was shielded in part by a friendly group of
maple trees and one glorious elm, hoary, robust, and majestic, a
veteran of the days when this was forest ground.
Mr. Corliss concluded his momentary pause by walking up the
broken cement path, which was hard beset by plantain-weed and the
long grass of the ill-kept lawn. Ascending the steps, he was
assailed by an odour as of vehement bananas, a diffusion from
some painful little chairs standing in the long, high, dim,
rather sorrowful hall disclosed beyond the open double doors.
They were stiff little chairs of an inconsequent, mongrel
pattern; armless, with perforated wooden seats; legs tortured by
the lathe to a semblance of buttons strung on a rod; and they had
that day received a streaky coat of a gilding preparation which
exhaled the olfactory vehemence mentioned. Their present station
was temporary, their purpose, as obviously, to dry; and they were
doing some incidental gilding on their own account, leaving blots
and splashes and sporadic little round footprints on the hardwood
floor.
The old-fashioned brass bell-handle upon the caller's right
drooped from its socket in a dead fag, but after comprehensive
manipulation on the part of the young man, and equal complaint on
its own, it was constrained to permit a dim tinkle remotely.
Somewhere in the interior a woman's voice, not young, sang a
repeated fragment of "Lead, Kindly Light," to the accompaniment
of a flapping dust-cloth, sounds which ceased upon a second
successful encounter with the bell. Ensued a silence, probably
to be interpreted as a period of whispered consultation out of
range; a younger voice called softly and urgently, "Laura!" and a
dark-eyed, dark-haired girl of something over twenty made her
appearance to Mr. Corliss.
At sight of her he instantly restored a thin gold card-case
to the pocket whence he was in the act of removing it. She
looked at him with only grave, impersonal inquiry; no
appreciative invoice of him was to be detected in her quiet eyes,
which may have surprised him, possibly the more because he was
aware there was plenty of appreciation in his own kindling
glance. She was very white and black, this lady. Tall, trim,
clear, she looked cool in spite of the black winter skirt she
wore, an effect helped somewhat, perhaps, by the crisp freshness
of her white waist, with its masculine collar and slim black tie,
and undoubtedly by the even and lustreless light ivory of her
skin, against which the strong black eyebrows and undulated
black hair were lined with attractive precision; but, most of
all, that coolness was the emanation of her undisturbed and
tranquil eyes. They were not phlegmatic: a continuing spark
glowed far within them, not ardently, but steadily and
inscrutably, like the fixed stars in winter.
Mr. Valentine Corliss, of Paris and Naples, removed his
white-ribboned straw hat and bowed as no one had ever bowed in
that doorway. This most vivid salutation--accomplished by adding
something to a rather ...
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