The Gentleman From Indiana

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THE GENTLEMAN FROM INDIANA

BY BOOTH TARKINGTON

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. THE YOUNG MAN WHO CAME TO STAY
II. THE STRANGE LADY
III. LONESOMENESS
IV. THE WALRUS AND THE CARPENTER
V. AT THE PASTURE BARS: ELDER-BUSHES MAY HAVE STINGS
VI. JUNE
VII. MORNING: "SOME IN RAGS AND SOME IN TAGS AND SOME IN VELVET GOWNS"
VIII. GLAD AFTERNOON: THE GIRL BY THE BLUE TENT POLE
IX. NIGHT: IT IS BAD LUCK TO SING BEFORE BREAKFAST
X. THE COURT-HOUSE BELL
XI. JOHN BROWN'S BODY
XII. JERRY THE TELLER
XIII. JAMES FISBEE
XIV. A RESCUE
XV. NETTLES
XVI. PRETTY MARQUISE
XVII. HELEN'S TOAST
XVIII. THE TREACHERY OF H. FISBEE
XIX. THE GREAT HARKLESS COMES HOME

CHAPTER I

THE YOUNG MAN WHO CAME TO STAY

There is a fertile stretch of flat lands in Indiana where unagrarian
Eastern travellers, glancing from car-windows, shudder and return their
eyes to interior upholstery, preferring even the swaying caparisons of a
Pullman to the monotony without. The landscape lies interminably level:
bleak in winter, a desolate plain of mud and snow; hot and dusty in
summer, in its flat lonesomeness, miles on miles with not one cool hill
slope away from the sun. The persistent tourist who seeks for signs of man
in this sad expanse perceives a reckless amount of rail fence; at
intervals a large barn; and, here and there, man himself, incurious,
patient, slow, looking up from the fields apathetically as the Limited
flies by. Widely separated from each other are small frame railway
stations--sometimes with no other building in sight, which indicates that
somewhere behind the adjacent woods a few shanties and thin cottages are
grouped about a couple of brick stores.

On the station platforms there are always two or three wooden packing-
boxes, apparently marked for travel, but they are sacred from disturbance
and remain on the platform forever; possibly the right train never comes
along. They serve to enthrone a few station loafers, who look out from
under their hat-brims at the faces in the car-windows with the languid
scorn a permanent fixture always has for a transient, and the pity an
American feels for a fellow-being who does not live in his town. Now and
then the train passes a town built scatteringly about a court-house, with
a mill or two humming near the tracks. This is a county-seat, and the
inhabitants and the local papers refer to it confidently as "our city."
The heart of the flat lands is a central area called Carlow County, and
the county-seat of Carlow is a town unhappily named in honor of its first
settler, William Platt, who christened it with his blood. Natives of this
place have sometimes remarked, easily, that their city had a population of
from five to six thousand souls. It is easy to forgive them for such
statements; civic pride is a virtue.

The social and business energy of Plattville concentrates on the Square.
Here, in summer-time, the gentlemen are wont to lounge from store to store
in their shirt sleeves; and here stood the old, red-brick court-house,
loosely fenced in a shady grove of maple and elm--"slipp'ry ellum"--called
the "Court-House Yard." When the sun grew too hot for the dry-goods box
whittlers in front of the stores around the Square and the occupants of
the chairs in front of the Palace Hotel on the corner, they would go
across and drape themselves over the court-house fence, under the trees,
and leisurely carve there initials on the top board. The farmers hitched
their teams to the fence, for there were usually loafers energetic enough
to shout "Whoa!" if the flies worried the horses beyond patience. In the
yard, amongst the weeds and tall, unkept grass, chickens foraged all day
long; the fence was so low that the most matronly hen flew over with
propriety; and there were gaps that accommodated the passage of itinerant
pigs. Most of the latter, however, preferred the cool wallows of the less
important street corners. Here and there a big dog lay asleep in the
middle of the road, knowing well that the easy-going Samaritan, in his
case, would pass by on the other side.

Only one street attained to the dignity of a name--Main Street, which
formed the north side of the Square. In Carlow County, descriptive
location is usually accomplished by designating the adjacent, as, "Up at
Bardlocks'," "Down by Schofields'," "Right where Hibbards live," "Acrost
from Sol. Tibbs's," or, "Other side of Jones's field." In winter, Main
Street was a series of frozen gorges land hummocks; in fall and spring, a
river of mud; in summer, a continuing dust heap; it was the best street in
Plattville.

The people lived happily; and, while the world whirled on outside, they
were content with their own. It would have moved their surprise as much as
their indignation to hear themselves spoken of as a "secluded community";
for they sat up all night to hear the vote of New York, every campaign.
Once when the President visited Rouen, seventy miles away, there were only
few bankrupts (and not a baby amongst them) left in the deserted homes of
Carlow County. Everybody had adventures; almost everybody saw the great
man; and everybody was glad to get back home again. It was the longest
journey some of them ever set upon, and these, elated as they were over
their travels, determined to think twice ere they went that far from home
another time.

On Saturdays, the farmers enlivened the commercial atmosphere of
Plattville; and Miss Tibbs, the postmaster's sister and clerk, used to
make a point of walking up and down Main Street as often as possible, to
get a thrill in the realization of some poetical expressions that haunted
her pleasingly; phrases she had employed frequently in her poems for the
"Carlow County Herald." When thirty or forty country people were scattered
along the sidewalks in front of the stores on Main Street, she would walk
at nicely calculated angles to the different groups so as to leave as few
gaps as possible between the figures, making them appear as near a solid
phalanx as she could. Then she would murmur to herself, with the accent of
soulful revel, "The thronged city streets," and, "Within the thronged
city," or, "Where the thronging crowds were swarming and the great
cathedral rose." Although she had never been beyond Carlow and the
bordering counties in her life, all her poems were of city streets and
bustling multitudes. She was one of those who had been unable to join the
excursion to Rouen when the President was there; but she had listened
avidly to her friends' descriptions of the crowds. Before that time her
muse had been sylvan, speaking of "Flow'rs of May," and hinting at
thoughts that overcame her when she roved the woodlands thro'; but now the
inspiration was become decidedly municipal and urban, evidently reluctant
to depart beyond the retail portions of a metropolis. Her verses
beginning, "O, my native city, bride of Hibbard's winding stream,"--
Hibbard's Creek runs west of Plattville, except in time of drought--"When
thy myriad lights are shining, and thy faces, like a dream, Go flitting
down thy sidewalks when their daily toil is done," were pronounced, at the
time of their publication, the best poem that had ever appeared in the
"Herald."

This unlucky newspaper was a thorn in the side of every patriot of Carlow
County. It was a poor paper; everybody knew it was a poor paper; it was so
poor that everybody admitted it was a poor paper--worse, the neighboring
county of Amo possessed a better paper, the "Amo Gazette." The "Carlow
County Herald" was so everlastingly bad that Plattville people bent their
heads bitterly and admitted even to citizens of Amo that the "Gazette" was
the better paper. The "Herald" was a weekly, issued on Saturday; sometimes
it hung fire over Sunday and appeared Monday evening. In their pride, the
Carlow people supported the "Herald" loyally and long; but finally
subscriptions began to fall off and the "Gazette" gained them. It came to
pass that the "Herald" missed fire altogether for several weeks; then it
came out feebly, two small advertisements occupying the whole of the
fourth page. It was breathing its last. The editor was a clay-colored
gentleman with a goatee, whose one surreptitious eye betokened both
indolence of disposition and a certain furtive shrewdness. He collected
all the outstanding subscriptions he could, on the morning of the issue
just mentioned, and, thoughtfully neglecting several items on the other
side of the ledger, departed from Plattville forever.

The same afternoon a young man from the East alighted on the platform of
the railway station, north of the town, and, entering the rickety omnibus
that lingered there, seeking whom it might rattle to deafness, demanded to
be driven to the Herald Building. It did not strike the driver that the
newcomer was precisely a gay young man when he climbed into the omnibus;
but, an hour later, as he stood in the doorway of the edifice he had
indicated as his destination, depression seemed to have settled into the
marrow of his bones. Plattville was instantly alert to the stranger's
presence, and interesting conjectures were hazarded all day long at the
back door of Martin's Dry-Goods Emporium, where all the clerks from the
stores around the Square came to play checkers or look on at the game.
(This was the club during the day; in the evening the club and the game
removed to the drug, book, and wall-paper store on the corner.) At supper,
the new arrival and his probable purposes were discussed over every table
in the town. Upon inquiry, he had informed Judd Bennett, the driver of the
omnibus, that he had come to stay. Naturally, such a declaration caused a
sensation, as people did not come to Plattville to live, except through
the inadvertency of being born there. In addition, the young man's
appearance and attire were reported to be extraordinary. Many of the
curious, among them most of the marriageable females of the place, took
occasion to pass and repass the sign of the "Carlow County Herald" during
the evening.

Meanwhile, the stranger was seated in the dingy office upstairs with his
head bowed low on his arms. Twilight stole through the dirty window-panes
and faded into darkness. Night filled the room. He did not move. The young
man from the East had bought the "Herald" from an agent; had bought it
without ever having been within a hundred miles of Plattville. He had
vastly overpaid for it. Moreover, the price he had paid for it was all the
money he had in the world.

The next morning he went bitterly to work. He hired a compositor from
Rouen, a young man named Parker, who set type all night long and helped
him pursue advertisements all day. The citizens shook their heads
pessimistically. They had about given up the idea that the "Herald" could
ever amount to anything, and they betrayed an innocent, but caustic, doubt
of ability in any stranger.

One day the new editor left a note on his door; "Will return in fifteen
minutes."

Mr. Rodney McCune, a politician from the neighboring county of Gaines,
happening to be in Plattville on an errand to his henchmen, found the
note, and wrote beneath the message the scathing inquiry, "Why?"

When he discovered this addendum, the editor smiled for the first time
since his advent, and reported the incident in his next issue, using the
rubric, "Why Has the 'Herald' Returned to Life?" as a text for a rousing
editorial on "honesty in politics," a subject of which he already knew
something. The political district to which Carlow belonged was governed
by a limited number of gentlemen whose wealth was ever on the increase;
and "honesty in politics" was a startling conception to the minds of the
passive and resigned voters, who discussed the editorial on the street
corners and in the stores. The next week there was another editorial,
personal and local in its application, and thereby it became evident that
the new proprietor of the "Herald" was a theorist who believed, in
general, that a politician's honor should not be merely of that middling
healthy species known as "honor amongst politicians"; and, in particular,
that Rodney McCune should not receive the nomination of his party for
Congress. Now, Mr. McCune was the undoubted dictator of the district, and
his followers laughed at the stranger's fantastic onset.

But the editor was not content with the word of print; he hired a horse
and rode about the country, and (to his own surprise) he proved to be an
adaptable young man who enjoyed exercise with a pitchfork to the farmer's
profit while the farmer talked. He talked little himself, but after
listening an hour or so, he would drop a word from the saddle as he left;
and then, by some surprising wizardry, the farmer, thinking over the
interview, decided there was some sense in what that young fellow said,
and grew curious to see what the young fellow had further to say in the
"Herald."

Politics is the one subject that goes to the vitals of every rural
American; and a Hoosier will talk politics after he is dead.

Everybody read the campaign editorials, and found them interesting,
although there was no one who did not perceive the utter absurdity of a
young stranger's dropping into Carlow and involving himself in a party
fight against the boss of the district. It was entirely a party fight;
for, by grace of the last gerrymander, the nomination carried with it the
certainty of election. A week before the convention there came a
provincial earthquake; the news passed from man to man in awe-struck
whispers--McCune had withdrawn his name, making the hollowest of excuses
to his cohorts. Nothing was known of the real reason for his disordered
retreat, beyond the fact that he had been in Plattville on the morning
before his withdrawal and had issued from a visit to the "Herald" office
in a state of palsy. Mr. Parker, the Rouen printer, had been present at
the close of the interview; but he held his peace at the command of his
employer. He had been called into the sanctum, and had found McCune, white
and shaking, leaning on the desk.

"Parker," said the editor, exhibiting a bundle of papers he held in his
hand, "I want you to witness a verbal contract between Mr. McCune and
myself. These papers are an affidavit and copies of some records of a
street-car company which obtained a charter while Mr McCune was in the
State legislature. They were sent to me by a man I do not know, an
anonymous friend of Mr. McCune's; in fact, a friend he seems to have lost.
On consideration of our not printing these papers, Mr. McCune agrees to
retire from politics for good. You understand, if he ever lifts his head
again, politically, We publish them, and the courts will do the rest. Now,
in case anything should happen to me----"

"Something will happen to you, all right," broke out McCune. "You can bank
on that, you black----"

"Come," the editor interrupted, not unpleasantly "why should there be
anything personal, in all this? I don't recognize you as my private enemy
--not at all; and I think you are getting off rather easily; aren't you?
You stay out of politics, and everything will be comfortable. You ought
never to have been in it, you see. It's a mistake not to keep square,
because in the long run somebody is sure to give you away--like the fellow
who sent me these. You promise to hold to a strictly private life?"

"You're a traitor to the party," groaned the other, "but you only
wait----"

The editor smiled sadly. "Wait nothing. Don't threaten, man. Go home to
your wife. I'll give you three to one she'll be glad you are out of it."

"I'll give you three to one," said McCune, "that the White Caps will get
you if you stay in Carlow. You want to look out for yourself, I tell you,
my smart boy!"

"Good-day, Mr. McCune," was the answer. "Let me have your note of
withdrawal before you leave town this afternoon." The young man paused a
moment, then extended his hand, as he said: "Shake hands, won't you? I--I
haven't meant to be too hard on you. I hope things will seem easier and
gayer to you before long; and if--if anything should turn up that I can do
for you in a private way, I'll be very glad, you know. Good-by."

The sound of the "Herald's" victory went over the State. The paper came
out regularly. The townsfolk bought it and the farmers drove in for it.
Old subscribers came back. Old advertisers renewed. The "Herald" began to
sell in Amo, and Gaines County people subscribed. Carlow folk held up
their heads when journalism was mentioned. Presently the "Herald"
announced a news connection with Rouen, and with that, and the aid of
"patent insides," began an era of three issues a week, appearing on
Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. The Plattville Brass Band serenaded
the editor.

During the second month of the new regime of the "Herald," the working
force of the paper received an addition. One night the editor found some
barroom loafers tormenting a patriarchal old man who had a magnificent
head and a grand white beard. He had been thrown out of a saloon, and he
was drunk with the drunkenness of three weeks steady pouring. He propped
himself against a wall and reproved his tormentors in Latin. "I'm walking
your way, Mr. Fisbee," remarked the journalist, hooking his arm into the
old man's. "Suppose we leave our friends here and go home?"

Mr. Fisbee was the one inhabitant of the town who had an unknown past; no
one knew more about him than that he had been connected with a university
somewhere, and had travelled in unheard-of countries before he came to
Plattville. A glamour of romance was thrown about him by the gossips, to
whom he ever proved a fund of delightful speculation. There was a dark,
portentous secret in his life, it was agreed; an opinion not too well
confirmed by the old man's appearance. His fine eyes had a pathetic habit
of wandering to the horizon in a questioning fashion that had a queer sort
of hopelessness in it, as if his quest were one for the Holy Grail,
perhaps; and his expression was mild, vague, and sad. He had a look of
race and blood; and yet, at the first glance, one saw that he was lost in
dreams, and one guessed that the dreams would never be of great
practicability in their application. Some such impression of Fisbee was
probably what caused the editor of the "Herald" to nickname him (in his
own mind) "The White Knight," and to conceive a strong, if whimsical,
fancy for him.

Old Fisbee had come (from nobody knew where) to Plattville to teach, and
had been principal of the High School for ten years, instructing his
pupils after a peculiar fashion of his own, neglecting the ordinary
courses of High School instruction to lecture on archaeology to the
dumfounded scholars; growing year by year more forgetful and absent, lost
in his few books and his own reflections, until, though undeniably a
scholar, he had been discharged for incompetency. He was old; he had no
money and no way to make money; he could find nothing to do. The blow had
seemed to daze him for a time; then he began to drop in at the hotel bar,
where Wilkerson, the professional drunkard, favored him with his society.
The old man understood; he knew it was the beginning of the end. He sold
his books in order to continue his credit at the Palace bar, and once or
twice, unable to proceed to his own dwelling, spent the night in a lumber
yard, piloted thither by the hardier veteran, Wilkerson.

The morning after the editor took him home, Fisbee appeared at the
"Herald" office in a new hat and a decent suit of black. He had received
his salary in advance, his books had been repurchased, and he had become
the reportorial staff of the "Carlow County Herald"; also, he was to write
various treatises for the paper. For the first few evenings, when he
started home from the office, his chief walked with him, chatting
heartily, until they had passed the Palace bar. But Fisbee's redemption
was complete.

The old man had a daughter. When she came to Plattville, he told her what
the editor of the "Herald" had done for him.

The journalist kept steadily at his work; and, as time went on, the
bitterness his predecessor's swindle had left him passed away. But his
loneliness and a sense of defeat grew and deepened. When the vistas of the
world had opened to his first youth, he had not thought to spend his life
in such a place as Plattville; but he found himself doing it, and it was
no great happiness to him that the congressional representative of the
district, the gentleman whom the "Herald's" opposition to McCune had sent
to Washington, came to depend on his influence for renomination; nor did
the realization that the editor of the "Carlow County Herald" had come to
be McCune's successor as political dictator produce a perceptibly
enlivening effect on the young man. The years drifted very slowly, and to
him it seemed they went by while he stood far aside and could not even see
them move. He did not consider the life he led an exciting one; but the
other citizens of Carlow did when he undertook a war against the "White
Caps." The natives were much more afraid of the "White Caps" than he was;
they knew more about them and understood them better than he did.

CHAPTER II

THE STRANGE LADY

IT was June. From the patent inner columns of the "Carlow County Herald"
might be gleaned the information (enlivened by cuts of duchesses) that the
London season had reached a high point of gaiety; and that, although the
weather had grown inauspiciously warm, there was sufficient gossip for the
thoughtful. To the rapt mind of Miss Selina Tibbs came a delicious moment
of comparison: precisely the same conditions prevailed in Plattville.

Not unduly might Miss Selina lay this flattering unction to her soul, and
well might the "Herald" declare that "Carlow events were crowding thick
and fast." The congressional representative of the district was to deliver
a lecture at the court-house; a circus was approaching the county-seat,
and its glories would be exhibited "rain or shine"; the court had cleared
up the docket by sitting to unseemly hours of the night, even until ten
o'clock--one farmer witness had fallen asleep while deposing that he "had
knowed this man Hender some eighteen year"--and, as excitements come
indeed when they do come, and it seldom rains but it pours, the identical
afternoon of the lecture a strange lady descended from the Rouen
Accommodation and was greeted on the platform by the wealthiest citizen of
the county. Judge Briscoe, and his daughter, Minnie, and (what stirred
wonder to an itch almost beyond endurance) Mr. Fisbee! and they then drove
through town on the way to the Briscoe mansion, all four, apparently, in a
fluster of pleasure and exhilaration, the strange lady engaged in earnest
conversation with Mr. Fisbee on the back seat.

Judd Bennett had had the best stare at her, but, as he immediately fell
into a dreamy and absent state, little satisfaction could be got from him,
merely an exasperating statement that the stranger seemed to have a kind
of new look to her. However, by means of Miss Mildy Upton, a domestic of
the Briscoe household, the community was given something a little more
definite. The lady's name was Sherwood; she lived in Rouen; and she had
known Miss Briscoe at the eastern school the latter had attended (to the
feverish agitation of Plattville) three years before; but Mildy confessed
her inadequacy in the matter of Mr. Fisbee. He had driven up in the
buckboard with the others and evidently expected to stay for supper Mr.
Tibbs, the postmaster (it was to the postoffice that Miss Upton brought
her information) suggested, as a possible explanation, that the lady was
so learned that the Briscoes had invited Fisbee on the ground of his being
the only person in Plattville they esteemed wise enough to converse with
her; but Miss Tibbs wrecked her brother's theory by mentioning the name of
Fisbee's chief.

"You see, Solomon," she sagaciously observed, "if that were true, they
would have invited him, instead of Mr. Fisbee, and I wish they had. He
isn't troubled with malaria, and yet the longer he lives here the
sallower-looking and sadder-looking he gets. I think the company of a
lovely stranger might be of great cheer to his heart, and it will be
interesting to witness the meeting between them. It may be," added the
poetess, "that they _have_ already met, on his travels before he settled
here. It may be that they are old friends--or even more."

"Then what," returned her brother, "what is he doin' settin' up in his
office all afternoon with ink on his forehead, while Fisbee goes out
ridin' with her and stays for supper after_werds_?"

Although the problem of Fisbee's attendance remained a mere maze of
hopeless speculation, Mildy had been present at the opening of Miss
Sherwood's trunk, and here was matter for the keen consideration of the
ladies, at least. Thoughtful conversations in regard to hats and linings
took place across fences and on corners of the Square that afternoon; and
many gentlemen wondered (in wise silence) why their spouses were absent-
minded and brooded during the evening meal.

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