The Gentleman From Indiana

B >> Booth Tarkington >> The Gentleman From Indiana

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Mr. Parker was a long, loose, gaunt gentleman, with a peremptory forehead
and a capable jaw, but on the present occasion his capability was baffled
and swamped in the attempt to steer the craft of his talent up an
unaccustomed channel without a pilot. "I don't see as it's any use,
Fisbee," he said, morosely, after a series of efforts that littered the
floor in every direction. "I'm a born compositor, and I can't shift my
trade. I stood the pace fairly for a week, but I'll have to give up; I'm
run plumb dry. I only hope they won't show him our Saturday with your
three columns of 'A Word of the Lotus Motive,' reprinted from February.
I begin to sympathize with the boss, because I know what he felt when I
ballyragged him for copy. Yes, sir, I know how it is to be an editor in a
dead town now."

"We must remember, too," said his companion, thoughtfully, "there is the
Thursday issue of this week to be prepared, almost at once."

"_Don't_! Please don't mention that, Fisbee!" Parker tilted far back in
his chair with his feet anchored under the desk, preserving a precarious
balance. "I ain't as grateful for my promotion to joint Editor-in-Chief as
I might be. I'm a middling poor man for the hour, I guess," he remarked,
painfully following the peregrinations of a fly on his companion's sleeve.

Mr. Fisbee twisted up another sheet, and employed his eyes in following
the course of a crack in the plaster, a slender black aperture which
staggered across the dusty ceiling and down the dustier wall to disappear
behind a still dustier map of Carlow County. "That's the trouble!"
exclaimed Parker, observing the other's preoccupation. "Soon as you get to
writing a line or two that seems kind of promising, you begin to take a
morbid interest in that blamed crack. It's busted up enough copy for me,
the last eight days, to have filled her up twenty times over. I don't know
as I ever care to see that crack again. I turned my back on it, but there
wasn't any use in that, because if a fly lights on you I watch him like a
brother, and if there ain't any fly I've caught a mania for tapping my
teeth with a pencil, that is just as good."

To these two gentlemen, thus disengaged, reentered (after a much longer
absence than Miss Selina's quatrain justified) Mr. Ross Schofield, a
healthy glow of exertion lending pleasant color to his earnest visage, and
an almost visible laurel of success crowning his brows. In addition to
this imaginary ornament, he was horned with pencils over both ears, and
held some scribbled sheets in his hand.

"I done a good deal down there," he announced cheerfully, drawing up a
chair to the desk. "I thought up a heap of things I've heard lately, and
they'll fill up mighty well. That there poem of Miss Seliny's was a kind
of an inspiration to me, and I tried one myself, and it didn't come hard
at all. When I got started once, it jest seemed to flow from me. I didn't
set none of it up," he added modestly, but with evident consciousness of
having unearthed genius in himself and an elate foreknowledge of the treat
in store for his companions. "I thought I'd ort to see how you liked it
first." He offered the papers to Mr. Parker, but the foreman shook his
head.

"You read it, Ross," I said. "I don't believe I feel hearty enough to-day.
Read the items first--we can bear the waiting."

"What waiting?" inquired Mr. Schofield.

"For the poem," replied Parker, grimly.

With a vague but not fleeting smile, Ross settled the sheets in order, and
exhibited tokens of that pleasant nevousness incident to appearing before
a critical audience, armed with literature whose merits should delight
them out of the critical attitude. "I run across a great scheme down
there," he volunteered amiably, by way of preface; "I described everything
in full, in as many words as I could think up; it's mighty filling, and
it'll please the public, too; it gives 'em a lot more information than
they us'ally git. I reckon there's two sticks of jest them extry words
alone."

"Go on," said the foreman, rather ominously.

Ross began to read, a matter necessitating a puckered brow and at times an
amount of hesitancy and ruminating, as his results had already cooled a
little, and he found his hand difficult to decipher. "Here's the first,"
he said:

"'The large and handsome, fawn-colored, two years and one-half year old
Jersey of Frederick Bibshaw Jones, Esquire----'"

The foreman interrupted him: "Every reader of the 'Herald' will be glad to
know that Jersey's age and color! But go on."

"'--Frederick Bibshaw Jones, Esquire,'" pursued his assistant, with some
discomfiture, "'--Esquire, our popular and well-dressed fellow-citizen----
'"

"You're right; Bib Jones is a heavy swell," said Parker in a breaking
voice.

"'--Citizen, can be daily seen wandering from the far end of his pasture-
lot to the other far end of it.'"

"'His!'" exclaimed Parker. "'_His_ pasture-lot?' The Jersey's?"

"No," returned the other, meekly, "Bib Jones's."

"Oh," said Parker. "Is that the end of that item? It is! You want to get
out of Plattville, my friend; it's too small for you; you go to Rouen and
you'll be city editor of the 'Journal' inside of a week. Let's have
another."

Mr. Schofield looked up blankly; however, he felt that there was enough
live, legitimate news in his other items to redeem the somewhat tame
quality of the first, and so, after having crossed out several of the
extra words which had met so poor a reception, he proceeded:

"'Whit Upton's pigs broke out last Wednesday and rooted up a fine patch of
garden truck. Hard luck, Whit.'

"'Jerusalem Hawkins took a drive yesterday afternoon. He had the bay to
his side-bar. Jee's buggy has been recently washed. Congratulations,
Jee.'"

"There's thrilling information!" shouted the foreman. "That'll touch the
gentle reader to the marrow. The boss had to use some pretty rotten copy
himself, but he never got as low as that. But we'll use it; oh, we'll use
it! If we don't get her out he'll have a set-back, but if they show her to
him it'll kill him. If it doesn't, and he gets well, he'll kill us. But
we'll use it, Ross. Don't read any more to us, though; I feel weaker than
I did, and I wasn't strong before. Go down and set it all up."

Mr. Schofield rejoined with an injured air, and yet hopefully: "I'd like
to see what you think of the poetry--it seemed all right to me, but I
reckon you ain't ever the best judge of your own work. Shall I read it?"
The foreman only glanced at him in silence, and the young man took this
for assent. "I haven't made up any name for it yet."

"'O, the orphan boy stood on the hill,
The wind blew cold and very chill--'"

Glancing at his auditors, he was a trifle abashed to observe a glaze upon
the eyes of Mr. Parker, while a purple tide rose above his neck-band and
unnaturally distended his throat and temples. With a placative little
laugh, Mr. Schofield remarked: "I git the swing to her all right, I
reckon, but somehow it doesn't sound so kind of good as when I was writing
it." There was no response, and he went on hurriedly:

"'But there he saw the little rill--'"

The poet paused to say, with another amiable laugh: "It's sort of hard to
git out of them ill, hill, chill rhymes once you strike 'em. It runs on
like this:

"'--Little rill
That curved and spattered around the hill.'

"I guess that's all right, to use 'hill' twice; don't you reckon so?

"'And the orphan he stood there until
The wind and all gave him a chill;
And he sickened--'"

That day Ross read no more, for the tall printer, seemingly incapable of
coherent speech, kicked the desk impotently, threw his arms above his
head, and, his companions confidently looking to see him foam at the
mouth, lost his balance and toppled over backward, his extensive legs
waving wildly in the air as he struck the floor. Mr. Schofield fled.

Parker made no effort to rise, but lay glaring at the ceiling, breathing
hard. He remained in that position for a long time, until finally the
glaze wore away from his eyes and a more rational expression settled over
his features. Mr. Fisbee addressed him timidly: "You don't think we could
reduce the size of the sheet?"

"It would kill him," answered his prostrate companion. "We've got to fill
her solid some way, though I give up; I don't know how. How that man has
worked! It was genius. He just floated around the county and soaked in
items, and he wrote editorials that people read. One thing's certain: we
can't do it. We're ruining his paper for him, and when he gets able to
read, it'll hurt him bad. Mighty few knew how much pride he had in it. Has
it struck you that now would be a precious good time for it to occur to
Rod McCune to come out of his hole? Suppose we go by the board, what's to
stop him? What's to stop him, anyway? Who knows where the boss put those
copies and affidavits, and if we did know, would we know the best way to
use 'em? If we did, what's to keep the 'Herald' alive until McCune lifts
his head? And if we don't stop him, the 'Carlow County Herald' is
finished. Something's got to be done!'"

No one realized this more poignantly than Mr. Fisbee, but no one was less
capable of doing something of his own initiation. And although the Tuesday
issue was forthcoming, embarrassingly pale in spots--most spots--Mr.
Martin remarked rather publicly that the items were not what you might
call stirring, and that the unpatented pages put him in mind of Jones's
field in winter with a dozen chunks of coal dropped in the snow. And his
observations on the later issues of the week (issues which were put forth
with a suggestion of spasm, and possibly to the permanent injury of Mr.
Parker's health, he looked so thin) were too cruelly unkind to be repeated
here. Indeed, Mr. Fisbee, Parker, the luckless Mr. Schofield, and the
young Tipworthy may be not untruthfully likened to a band of devoted
mariners lost in the cold and glaring regions of a journalistic Greenland:
limitless plains of empty white paper extending about them as far as the
eye could reach, while life depended upon their making these terrible
voids productive; and they shrank appalled from the task, knowing no means
to fertilize the barrens; having no talent to bring the still snows into
harvests, and already feeling-in the chill of Mr. Martin's remarks--a
touch of the frost that might wither them.

It was Fisbee who caught the first glimpse of a relief expedition clipping
the rough seas on its lively way to rescue them, and, although his first
glimpse of the jaunty pennant of the relieving vessels was over the
shoulder of an iceberg, nothing was surer than that the craft was flying
to them with all good and joyous speed. The iceberg just mentioned
assumed--by no melting process, one may be sure--the form of a long
letter, first postmarked at Rouen, and its latter substance was as
follows:

"Henry and I have always believed you as selfish, James Fisbee, as you are
self-ingrossed and incapable. She has told us of your 'renunciation'; of
your 'forbidding' her to remain with you; how you 'commanded,' after you
had 'begged' her, to return to us, and how her conscience told her she
should stay and share your life in spite of our long care of her, but that
she yielded to your 'wishes' and our entreaty. What have you ever done for
her and what have you to offer her? She is our daughter, and needless to
say we shall still take care of her, for no one believes you capable of
it, even in that miserable place, and, of course, in time she will return
to her better wisdom, her home, and her duty. I need scarcely say we have
given up the happy months we had planned to spend in Dresden. Henry and I
can only stay at home to pray that her preposterous mania will wear itself
out in short order, as she will find herself unfitted for the ridiculous
task which she insists upon attempting against the earnest wishes of us
who have been more than father and mother to her. Of course, she has
talked volumes of her affection for us, and of her gratitude, which we do
not want--we only want her to stay with us. Please, please try to make her
come back to us--we cannot bear it long. If you are a man you will send
her to us soon. Her excuse for not returning on the day we wired our
intention to go abroad at once (and I may as well tell you now that our
intention to go was formed in order to bring affairs to a crisis and to
draw her away from your influence--we always dreaded her visit to you and
held it off for years)--her excuse was that your best friend, and, as I
understand it, your patron, had been injured in some brawl in that
Christian country of yours--a charming place to take a girl like her--and
she would not leave you in your 'distress' until more was known of the
man's injuries. And now she insists--and you will know it from her by the
next mail--on returning to Plattville, forsooth, because she has been
reading your newspaper, and she says she knows you are in difficulties
over it, and it is her moral obligation--as by some wild reasoning of her
own she considers herself responsible for your ruffling patron's having
been alone when he was shot--to go down and help. I suppose he made love
to her, as all the young men she meets always do, sooner or later, but I
have no fear of any rustic entanglements tor her; she has never been
really interested, save in one affair. We are quite powerless--we have
done everything; but we cannot alter her determination to edit your paper
for you. Naturally, she knows nothing whatever about such work, but she
says, with the air of triumphantly quelching all such argument, that she
has talked a great deal to Mr. Macauley of the 'Journal.' Mr. Macauley is
the affair I have alluded to; he is what she has meant when she has said,
at different times, that she was interested in journalism. But she is very
business-like now. She has bought a typewriter and purchased a great
number of soft pencils and erasers at an art shop; I am only surprised
that she does not intend to edit your miserable paper in water-colors. She
is coming at once. For mercy's sake don't telegraph her not to; your
forbiddings work the wrong way. Our only hope is that she will find the
conditions so utterly discouraging at the very start that she will give it
up and come home. If you are a man you will help to make them so. She has
promised to stay with that country girl with whom she contracted such an
incomprehensible friendship at Miss Jennings's.

"Oh, James, pray for grace to be a man once in your life and send her back
to us! Be a man--try to be a man! Remember the angel you killed! Remember
all we have done for you and what a return you have made, and be a man for
the first time. Try and be a man!

"Your unhappy sister-in-law,

"MARTHA SHERWOOD."

Mr. Fisbee read the letter with a great, rising delight which no sense of
duty could down; indeed, he perceived that his sense of duty had ceased to
conflict with the one strong hope of his life, just as he perceived that
to be a man, according to Martha Sherwood, was, in part, to assist Martha
Sherwood to have her way in things; and, for the rest, to be the sort of
man she persuaded herself she would be were she not a woman. This he had
never been able to be.

By some whimsy of fate, or by a failure of Karma (or, perhaps, by some
triumph of Kismetic retribution), James Fisbee was born in one of the most
business-like and artless cities of a practical and modern country, of
money-getting, money-saving parents, and he was born a dreamer of the
past. He grew up a student of basilican lore, of choir-screens, of Persian
frescoes, and an ardent lounger in the somewhat musty precincts of Chaldea
and Byzantium and Babylon. Early Christian Symbolism, a dispute over the
site of a Greek temple, the derivation of the lotus column, the
restoration of a Gothic buttress--these were the absorbing questions of
his youth, with now and then a lighter moment spent in analytical
consideration of the extra-mural decorations of St. Mark's. The world
buzzed along after its own fashion, not disturbing him, and his
absorptions permitted only a faint consciousness of the despair of his
relatives regarding his mind. Arrived at middle-age, and a little more, he
found himself alone in the world (though, for that matter, he had always
been alone and never of the world), and there was plenty of money for him
with various bankers who appeared to know about looking after it.
Returning to the town of his nativity after sundry expeditions in Syria--
upon which he had been accompanied by dusky gentlemen with pickaxes and
curly, long-barrelled muskets--he met, and was married by, a lady who was
ambitious, and who saw in him (probably as a fulfilment of another
Kismetic punishment) a power of learning and a destined success. Not long
after the birth of their only child, a daughter, he was "called to fill
the chair" of archaeology in a newly founded university; one of the kind
which a State and a millionaire combine to purchase ready-made. This one
was handed down off the shelf in a more or less chaotic condition, and for
a period of years betrayed considerable doubt as to its own intentions,
undecided whether they were classical or technical; and in the settlement
of that doubt lay the secret of the past of the one man in Plattville so
unhappy as to possess a past. From that settlement and his own preceding
action resulted his downfall, his disgrace with his wife's relatives, the
loss of his wife, the rage, surprise, and anguish of her sister, Martha,
and Martha's husband, Henry Sherwood, and the separation from his little
daughter, which was by far to him the hardest to bear. For Fisbee, in his
own way, and without consulting anybody--it never occurred to him, and he
was supposed often to forget that he had a wife and child--had informally
turned over to the university all the money which the banks had kindly
taken care of, and had given it to equip an expedition which never
expedited. A new president of the institution was installed; he talked to
the trustees; they met, and elected to become modern and practical and
technical; they abolished the course in fine arts, which abolished
Fisbee's connection with them, and they then employed his money to erect a
building for the mechanical engineering department. Fisbee was left with
nothing. His wife and her kinsfolk exhibited no brilliancy in holding a
totally irresponsible man down to responsibilities, and they made a
tragedy of a not surprising fiasco. Mrs. Fisbee had lived in her
ambitions, and she died of heartbreak over the discovery of what manner of
man she had married. But, before she died, she wisely provided for her
daughter.

Fisbee told Parker the story after his own queer fashion.

"You see, Mr. Parker," he said, as they sat together in the dust and
litter of the "Herald" office, on Sunday afternoon, "you see, I admit that
my sister-in-law has always withheld her approbation from me, and possibly
her disapproval is well founded--I shall say probably. My wife had also a
considerable sum, and this she turned over to me at the time of our
marriage, though I had no wish regarding it one way or the other. When I
gave my money to the university with which I had the honor to be
connected, I added to it the fund I had received from her, as I was the
recipient of a comfortable salary as a lecturer in the institution and had
no fear of not living well, and I was greatly interested in providing that
the expedition should be perfectly equipped. Expeditions of the magnitude
of that which I had planned are expensive, I should, perhaps, inform you,
and this one was to carry on investigations regarding several important
points, very elaborately; and I am still convinced it would have settled
conclusively many vital questions concerning the derivation of the
Babylonian column, as: whether the lotus column may be without prejudice
said to--but at the present moment I will not enter into that. I fear I
had no great experience in money matters, for the transaction had been
almost entirely verbal, and there was nothing to bind the trustees to
carry out my plans for the expedition. They were very sympathetic, but
what could they do? they begged leave to inquire. Such an institution
cannot give back money once donated, and it was clearly out of character
for a school of technology and engineering to send savants to investigate
the lotus column."

"I see," Mr. Parker observed, genially. He listened with the most
ingratiating attention, knowing that he had a rich sensation to set before
Plattville as a dish before a king, for Fisbee's was no confidential
communication. The old man might have told a part of his history long ago,
but it had never occurred to him to talk about his affairs--things had a
habit of not occurring to Fisbee--and the efforts of the gossips to draw
him out always passed over his serene and absent head.

"It was a blow to my wife," the old man continued, sadly, "and I cannot
deny that her reproaches were as vehement as her disappointment was
sincere." He hurried over this portion of his narrative with a vaguely
troubled look, but the intelligent Parker read poor Mrs. Fisbee's state of
mind between the sentences. "She never seemed to regard me in the same
light again," the archaeologist went on. "She did not conceal from me that
she was surprised and that she could not look upon me as a practical man;
indeed, I may say, she appeared to regard me with marked antipathy. She
sent for her sister, and begged her to take our daughter and keep her from
me, as she did not consider me practical enough-I will substitute for her
more embittered expressions--to provide for a child and instruct it in the
world's ways. My sister-in-law, who was childless, consented to adopt the
little one, on the conditions that I renounced all claim, and that the
child legally assumed her name and should be in all respects as her own
daughter, and that I consented to see her but once a year, in Rouen, at my
brother-in-law's home.

"I should have refused, but I--my wife--that is--she was--very pressing--
in her last hours, and they all seemed to feel that I ought to make
amends--all except the little girl herself, I should say, for she
possessed, even as an infant, an exceptional affection for her father. I
had nothing; my salary was gone, and I was discomfited by the combined
actions of the trustees and my relatives, so--I--I gave her up to them,
and my wife passed away in a more cheerful frame of mind, I think. That is
about all. One of the instructors obtained the position here for me, which
I--I finally--lost, and I went to See the little girl every New Year's
day. This year she declared her intention of visiting _me_, but she was
persuaded by friends who were conversant with the circumstances to stay
with them, where I could be with her almost as much as at my apartment at
Mr. Tibbs's. She had long since declared her intention of some day
returning to live with me, and when she came she was strenuous in
insisting that the day had come." The old man's voice broke suddenly as he
observed: "She has--a very--beautiful--character, Mr. Parker."

The foreman nodded with warm confirmation. "I believe you, sir. Yes, sir;
I saw her, and I guess she looks it. You take that kind of a lady usually,
and catch her in a crowd like the one show-day, and she can't help doing
the Grand Duchess, giving the tenants a treat--but not her; she didn't
seem to _separate_ herself from 'em, some way."

"She is a fine lady," said the other simply. "I did not accept her
renunciation, though I acknowledge I forbade it with a very poignant envy.
I could not be the cause of her giving up for my sake her state of ease
and luxury--for my relatives are more than well-to-do, and they made it
plain she must choose between them and me, with the design, I think, of
making it more difficult to choose me. And, also, it seemed to me, as it
did to her, that she owed them nearly everything, but she declared I had
lived alone so long that she owed me everything, also. She is a--
beautiful--character, Mr. Parker."

"Well," said Parker, after a pause, "the town will be upside down over
this; and folks will be mighty glad to have it explained about your being
out there so much, and at the deepo, and all this and that. Everybody in
the place has been wondering what in--that is--" he finished in some
confusion--"that is--what I started to say was that it won't be so bad as
it might be, having a lady in the office here. I don't cuss to speak of,
and Ross can lay off on his till the boss comes back. Besides, it's our
only chance. If she can't make the 'Herald' hum, we go to the wall."

The old man did not seem to hear him. "I forbade the renunciation she
wished to make for my sake," he said, gently, "but I accept it now for the
sake of our stricken friend--for Mr. Harkless."

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