Alice Adams | Page 3

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Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington Scanned by Charles Keller with
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ALICE ADAMS by BOOTH TARKINGTON
CHAPTER I
The patient, an old-fashioned man, thought the nurse made a mistake in
keeping both of the windows open, and her sprightly disregard of his
protests added something to his hatred of her. Every evening he told
her that anybody with ordinary gumption ought to realize that night air
was bad for the human frame. "The human frame won't stand
everything, Miss Perry," he warned her, resentfully. "Even a child, if it
had just ordinary gumption, ought to know enough not to let the night
air blow on sick people yes, nor well people, either! 'Keep out of the

night air, no matter how well you feel.' That's what my mother used to
tell me when I was a boy. 'Keep out of the night air, Virgil,' she'd say.
'Keep out of the night air.'"
"I expect probably her mother told her the same thing," the nurse
suggested.
"Of course she did. My grandmother----"
"Oh, I guess your GRANDmother thought so, Mr. Adams! That was
when all this flat central country was swampish and hadn't been drained
off yet. I guess the truth must been the swamp mosquitoes bit people
and gave 'em malaria, especially before they began to put screens in
their windows. Well, we got screens in these windows, and no
mosquitoes are goin' to bite us; so just you be a good boy and rest your
mind and go to sleep like you need to."
"Sleep?" he said. "Likely!"
He thought the night air worst of all in April; he hadn't a doubt it would
kill him, he declared. "It's miraculous what the human frame WILL
survive," he admitted on the last evening of that month. "But you and
the doctor ought to both be taught it won't stand too dang much! You
poison a man and poison and poison him with this April night air----"
"Can't poison you with much more of it," Miss Perry interrupted him,
indulgently. "To-morrow it'll be May night air, and I expect that'll be a
lot better for you, don't you? Now let's just sober down and be a good
boy and get some nice sound sleep."
She gave him his medicine, and, having set the glass upon the center
table, returned to her cot, where, after a still interval, she snored faintly.
Upon this, his expression became that of a man goaded out of
overpowering weariness into irony.
"Sleep? Oh, CERTAINLY, thank you!"
However, he did sleep intermittently, drowsed between times, and even

dreamed; but, forgetting his dreams before he opened his eyes, and
having some part of him all the while aware of his discomfort, he
believed, as usual, that he lay awake the whole night long. He was
conscious of the city as of some single great creature resting fitfully in
the dark outside his windows. It lay all round about, in the damp cover
of its night cloud of smoke, and tried to keep quiet for a few hours after
midnight, but was too powerful a growing thing ever to lie altogether
still. Even while it strove to sleep it muttered with digestions of the day
before, and these already merged with rumblings of the morrow. "Owl"
cars, bringing in last passengers over distant trolley-lines, now and then
howled on a curve; faraway metallic stirrings could be heard from
factories in the sooty suburbs on the plain outside the city; east, west,
and south, switch-engines chugged and snorted on sidings; and
everywhere in the air there seemed to be a faint, voluminous hum as of
innumerable wires trembling overhead to vibration of machinery
underground.
In his youth Adams might have been less resentful of sounds such as
these when they interfered with his night's sleep: even during an illness
he might have taken some pride in them as proof of his citizenship in a
"live town"; but at fifty-five he merely hated them because they kept
him awake. They "pressed on his nerves," as he put it; and so