The Gentleman From Indiana

B >> Booth Tarkington >> The Gentleman From Indiana

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"In the rain?"

"Take her with you to Tibbs's."

"Their noon meal is long since over; and their larder is not--is not--
extensive."

"Father!" called the girl. She was stirring; they could hear her moving
about the room.

"You've got to go in and tell her," said the foreman, desperately, and
together they stumbled into the room. A small table at one end of it was
laid with a snowy cloth and there was a fragrance of tea, and, amidst
various dainties, one caught a glimpse of cold chicken and lettuce leaves.
Fisbee stopped, dumfounded, but the foreman, after stammeringly declining
an invitation to partake, alleging that his own meal awaited, sped down to
the printing-room, and seized upon Bud Tipworthy with a heavy hand.

"Where did all that come from, up there?"

"Leave go me! _What_ 'all that'?"

"All that tea and chicken and salad and wafers--all kinds of things;
sardines, for all I know!"

"They come in Briscoes' buckboard while you was gone. Briscoes sent 'em in
a basket; I took 'em up and she set the basket under the table. You'd seen
it if you'd 'a' looked. _Quit_ that!" And it was unjust to cuff the
perfectly innocent and mystified Bud, and worse not to tell him what the
punishment was for.

Before the day was over, system had been introduced, and the "Herald" was
running on it: and all that warm, rainy afternoon, the editor and Fisbee
worked in the editorial rooms, Parker and Bud and Mr. Schofield (after his
return with the items and a courteous message from Ephraim Watts) bent
over the forms downstairs, and Uncle Xenophon was cleaning the store-room
and scrubbing the floor.

An extraordinary number of errands took the various members of the
printing force up to see the editor-in-chief, literally to see the editor-
in-chief; it was hard to believe that the presence had not flown--hard to
keep believing, without the repeated testimony of sight, that the dingy
room upstairs was actually the setting for their jewel; and a jewel they
swore she was. The printers came down chuckling and gurgling after each
interview; it was partly the thought that she belonged to the "Herald,"
_their_ paper. Once Ross, as he cut down one of the temporarily distended
advertisements, looked up and caught the foreman giggling to himself.

"What in the name of common-sense you laughin' at, Cale?" he asked.

"What are _you_ laughing at?" rejoined the other.

"I dunno!"

The day wore on, wet and dreary outside, but all within the "Herald's"
bosom was snug and busy and murmurous with the healthy thrum of life and
prosperity renewed. Toward six o'clock, system accomplished, the new
guiding-spirit was deliberating on a policy as Harkless would conceive a
policy, were he there, when Minnie Briscoe ran joyously up the stairs,
plunged into the room, waterproofed and radiant, and caught her friend in
her eager arms, and put an end to policy for that day.

But policy and labor did not end at twilight every day; there were
evenings, as in the time of Harkless, when lamps shone from the upper
windows of the "Herald" building. For the little editor worked hard, and
sometimes she worked late; she always worked early. She made some mistakes
at first, and one or two blunders which she took more seriously than any
one else did. But she found a remedy for all such results of her
inexperience, and she developed experience. She set at her task with the
energy of her youthfulness and no limit to her ambition, and she felt that
Harkless had prepared the way for a wide expansion of the paper's
interests; wider than he knew. She had a belief that there were
possibilities for a country newspaper, and she brought a fresh point of
view to operate in a situation where Harkless had fallen, perhaps, too
much in the rut; and she watched every chance with a keen eye and looked
ahead of her with clear foresight. What she waited and yearned for and
dreaded, was the time when a copy of the new "Herald" should be placed in
the trembling hands of the man who lay in the Rouen hospital. Then, she
felt, if he, unaware of her identity, should place everything in her hands
unreservedly, that would be a tribute to her work--and how hard she would
labor to deserve it! After a time, she began to realize that, as his
representative and the editor of the "Herald," she had become a factor in
district politics. It took her breath--but with a gasp of delight, for
there was something she wanted to do.

Above all, she brought a light heart to her work. One evening in the
latter part of that first week of the new regime, Parker perceived Bud
Tipworthy standing in the doorway of the printing-room, beckoning him
silently to come without.

"What's the matter, Buddie?"

"Listen. She's singin' over her work."

Parker stepped outside. On the pavement, people had stopped to listen;
they stood in the shadow, looking up with parted lips at the open, lighted
Windows, whence came a clear, soft, reaching voice, lifted in song; now it
swelled louder, unconsciously; now its volume was more slender and it
melted liquidly into the night; again, it trembled and rose and dwelt in
the ear, strong and pure; and, hearing it, you sighed with unknown
longings. It was the "Angels' Serenade."

Bud Tipworthy's sister, Cynthia, was with him, and Parker saw that she
turned from the window and that she was crying, quietly; she put her hand
on the boy's shoulder and patted it with a forlorn gesture which, to the
foreman's eye, was as graceful as it was sad. He moved closer to Bud and
his big hand fell on Cynthia's brother's other shoulder, as he realized
that red hair could look pretty sometimes; and he wondered why the
editor's singing made Cynthy cry; and at the same time he decided to be
mighty good to Bud henceforth. The spell of night and song was on him;
that and something more; for it is a strange, inexplicable fact that the
most practical chief ever known to the "Herald" had a singularly
sentimental influence over her subordinates, from the moment of her
arrival. Under Harkless's domination there had been no more steadfast
bachelors in Carlow than Ross Schofield and Caleb Parker, and, like
timorous youths in a graveyard, daring and mocking the ghosts in order to
assuage their own fears, they had so jibed and jeered at the married state
that there was talk of urging the minister to preach at them; but now let
it be recorded that at the moment Caleb laid his hand on Bud's other
shoulder, his associate, Mr. Schofield, was enjoying a walk in the far end
of town with a widow, and it is not to be doubted that Mr. Tipworthy's
heart, also, was no longer in his possession, though, as it was after
eight o'clock, the damsel of his desire had probably long since retired to
her couch.

For some faint light on the cause of these spells, we must turn to a
comment made by the invaluable Mr. Martin some time afterward. Referring
to the lady to whose voice he was now listening in silence (which shows
how great the enthralling of her voice was), he said: "When you saw her,
or heard her, or managed to be around, any, where she was, why, if you
couldn't git up no hope of marryin' _her_, you wanted to marry
_somebody_."

Mr. Lige Willetts, riding idly by, drew rein in front of the lighted
windows, and listened with the others. Presently he leaned from his horse
and whispered to a man near him:

"I know that song."

"Do you?" whispered the other.

"Yes; he and I heard her sing it, the night he was shot."

"So!"

"Yes, sir. It's by Beethoven."

"Is it?"

"It's a seraphic song," continued Lige.

"No!" exclaimed his friend; then, shaking his head, he sighed: "Well, it's
mighty sweet."

The song was suddenly woven into laughter in the unseen chamber, and the
lights in the windows went out, and a small lady and a tall lady and a
thin old man, all three laughing and talking happily, came down and drove
off in the Briscoe buckboard. The little crowd dispersed quietly; Lige
Willetts plucked to his horse and cantered away to overtake the buckboard;
William Todd took his courage between his teeth, and, the song ringing in
his ears, made a desperate resolve to call upon Miss Bardlock that
evening, in spite of its being a week day, and Caleb Parker gently and
stammeringly asked Cynthia if she would wait till he shut up the shop, and
let him walk home with her and Bud.

Soon the Square was quiet as before, and there was naught but peace under
the big stars of July.

That day the news had come that Harkless, after weeks of alternate
improvement and relapse, hazardously lingering in the borderland of
shadows, had passed the crucial point and was convalescent. His recovery
was assured. But from their first word of him, from the message that he
was found and was alive, none of the people of Carlow had really doubted
it. They are simple country people, and they know that God is good.

CHAPTER XV

NETTLES

Two men who have been comrades and classmates at the Alma Mater of John
Harkless and Tom Meredith; two who have belonged to the same dub and
roomed in the same entry; who have pooled their clothes and money in a
common stock for either to draw on; who have shared the fortunes of
athletic war, triumphing together, sometimes with an intense triumphancy;
two men who were once boys getting hazed together, hazing in no unkindly
fashion in their turn, always helping each other to stuff brains the night
before an examination and to blow away the suffocating statistics like
foam the night after; singing, wrestling, dancing, laughing, succeeding
together, through the four kindest years of life; two such brave
companions, meeting in the after years, are touchingly tender and
caressive of each other, but the tenderness takes the shy, United States
form of insulting epithets, and the caresses are blows. If John Harkless
had been in health, uninjured and prosperous, Tom Meredith could no more
have thrown himself on his knees beside him and called him "old friend"
than he could have danced on the slack-wire.

One day they thought the patient sleeping; the nurse fanned him softly,
and Meredith had stolen in and was sitting by the cot. One of Harkless's
eyes had been freed of the bandage, and, when Tom came in, it was closed;
but, by and by, Meredith became aware that the unbandaged eye had opened
and that it was suffused with a pathetic moisture; yet it twinkled with a
comprehending light, and John knew that it was his old Tom Meredith who
was sitting beside him, with the air of having sat there very often
before. But this bald, middle-aged young man, not without elegance, yet a
prosperous burgher for all that--was _this_ the slim, rollicking broth of
a boy whose thick auburn hair used to make one streak of flame as he spun
around the bases on a home run? Without doubt it was the stupendous fact,
wrought by the alchemy of seven years.

For, though seven years be a mere breath in the memories of the old, it is
a long transfiguration to him whose first youth is passing, and who finds
unsolicited additions accruing to some parts of his being and strange
deprivations in others, and upon whom the unhappy realization begins to be
borne in, that his is no particular case, and that he of all the world is
not to be spared, but, like his forbears, must inevitably wriggle in the
disguising crucible of time. And, though men accept it with apparently
patient humor, the first realization that people do grow old, and that
they do it before they have had time to be young, is apt to come like a
shock.

Perhaps not even in the interminable months of Carlow had Harkless
realized the length of seven years so keenly as he did when he beheld his
old friend at his bedside. How men may be warped apart in seven years,
especially in the seven years between twenty-three and thirty! At the
latter age you may return to the inseparable of seven years before and
speak not the same language; you find no heartiness to carry on with each
other after half an hour. Not so these classmates, who had known each
other to the bone.

Ah, yes, it was Tom Meredith, the same lad, in spite of his masquerade of
flesh; and Helen was right: Tom had not forgotten.

"It's the old horse-thief!" John murmured, tremulously.

"You go plumb to thunder," answered Meredith between gulps.

When he was well enough, they had long talks; and at other times Harkless
lay by the window, and breathed deep of the fresh air, while Meredith
attended to his correspondence for him, and read the papers to him. But
there was one phenomenon of literature the convalescent insisted upon
observing for himself, and which he went over again and again, to the
detriment of his single unswathed eye, and this was the Carlow "Herald."

The first letter he had read to him was one from Fisbee stating that the
crippled forces left in charge had found themselves almost distraught in
their efforts to carry on the paper (as their chief might conclude for
himself on perusal of the issues of the first fortnight of his absence),
and they had made bold to avail themselves of the services of a young
relative of the writer's from a distant city--a capable journalist, who
had no other employment for the present, and who had accepted the
responsibilities of the "Herald" temporarily. There followed a note from
Parker, announcing that Mr. Fisbee's relative was a bird, and was the kind
to make the "Herald" hum. They hoped Mr. Harkless would approve of their
bespeaking the new hand on the sheet; the paper must have suspended
otherwise. Harkless, almost overcome by his surprise that Fisbee possessed
a relative, dictated a hearty and grateful indorsement of their action,
and, soon after, received a typewritten rejoinder, somewhat complicated in
the reading, because of the numerous type errors and their corrections.
The missive was signed "H. Fisbee," in a strapping masculine hand that
suggested six feet of enterprise and muscle spattering ink on its shirt
sleeves.

John groaned and fretted over the writhings of the "Herald's" headless
fortnight, but, perusing the issues produced under the domination of H.
Fisbee, he started now and then, and chuckled at some shrewd felicities of
management, or stared, puzzled, over an oddity, but came to a feeling of
vast relief; and, when the question of H. Fisbee's salary was settled and
the tenancy assured, he sank into a repose of mind. H. Fisbee might be an
eccentric fellow, but he knew his business, and, apparently, he knew
something of other business as well, for he wrote at length concerning the
Carlow oil fields, urging Harkless to take shares in Mr. Watts's company
while the stock was very low, two wells having been sunk without
satisfactory results. H. Fisbee explained with exceeding technicality his
reasons for believing that the third well would strike oil.

But with his ease of mind regarding the "Herald," Harkless found himself
possessed by apathy. He fretted no longer to get back to Plattville. With
the prospect of return it seemed an emptiness glared at him from hollow
sockets, and the thought of the dreary routine he must follow when he went
back gave him the same faint nausea he had felt the evening after the
circus. And, though it was partly the long sweat of anguish which had
benumbed him, his apathy was pierced, at times, by a bodily horror of the
scene of his struggle. At night he faced the grotesque masks of the Cross-
Roads men and the brutal odds again; over and over he felt the blows, and
clapped his hand to where the close fire of Bob Skillett's pistol burned
his body.

And, except for the release from pain, he rejoiced less and less in his
recovery. He remembered a tedious sickness of his childhood and how
beautiful he had thought the world, when he began to get well, how
electric the open air blowing in at the window, how green the smile of
earth, and how glorious to live and see the open day again. He had none of
that feeling now. No pretty vision came again near his bed, and he beheld
his convalescence as a mistake. He had come to a jumping-off place in his
life--why had they not let him jump? What was there left but the weary
plod, plod, and dust of years?

He could have gone back to Carlow in better spirit if it had not been for
the few dazzling hours of companionship which had transformed it to a
paradise, but, gone, left a desert. She, by the sight of her, had made him
wish to live, and now, that he saw her no more, she made him wish to die.
How little she had cared for him, since she told him she did not care,
when he had not meant to ask her. He was weary, and at last he longed to
find the line of least resistance and follow it; he had done hard things
for a long time, but now he wanted to do something easy. Under the new
genius--who was already urging that the paper should be made a daily--the
"Herald" could get along without him; and the "White-Caps" would bother
Carlow no longer; and he thought that Kedge Halloway, an honest man, if a
dull one, was sure to be renominated for Congress at the district
convention which was to meet at Plattville in September--these were his
responsibilities, and they did not fret him. Everything was all right.
There was only one thought which thrilled him: his impression that she had
come to the hospital to see him was not a delusion; she had really been
there--as a humane, Christian person, he said to himself. One day he told
Meredith of his vision, and Tom explained that it was no conjuration of
fever.

"But I thought she'd gone abroad," said Harkless, staring.

"They had planned to," answered his friend. "They gave it up for some
reason. Uncle Henry decided that he wasn't strong enough for the trip, or
something."

"Then--is she--is she here?"

"No; Helen is never here in summer. When she came back from Plattville,
she went north, somewhere, to join people she had promised, I think."
Meredith had as yet no inkling or suspicion that his adopted cousin had
returned to Plattville. What he told Harkless was what his aunt had told
him, and he accepted it as the truth.

Mrs. Sherwood (for she was both Mr. and Mrs. Sherwood) had always
considered Fisbee an enigmatic rascal, and she regarded Helen's defection
to him in the light of a family scandal to be hushed up, as well as a
scalding pain to be borne. Some day the unkind girl-errant would "return
to her wisdom and her duty"; meanwhile, the less known about it the
better.

Meredith talked very little to Harkless of his cousin, beyond lightly
commenting on the pleasure and oddity of their meeting, and telling him of
her friendly anxiety about his recovery; he said she had perfect
confidence from the first that he would recover. Harkless had said a word
or two in his delirium and a word or two out of it, and these, with once a
sudden brow of suffering, and a difference Meredith felt in Helen's manner
when they stood together by the sick man's bedside, had given the young
man a strong impression, partly intuitive, that in spite of the short time
the two had known each other, something had happened between them at
Plattville, and he ventured a guess which was not far from the truth.
Altogether, the thing was fairly plain--a sad lover is not so hard to
read--and Meredith was sorry, for they were the two people he liked best
on earth.

The young man carried his gay presence daily to the hospital, where
Harkless now lay in a pleasant room of his own, and he tried to keep his
friend cheery, which was an easy matter on the surface, for the journalist
turned ever a mask of jokes upon him; but it was not hard for one who
liked him as Meredith did to see through to the melancholy underneath.
After his one reference to Helen, John was entirely silent of her, and
Meredith came to feel that both would be embarrassed if occasion should
rise and even her name again be mentioned between them.

He did not speak of his family connection with Mr. Fisbee to the invalid,
for, although the connection was distant, the old man was, in a way, the
family skeleton, and Meredith had a strong sense of the decency of reserve
in such a matter. There was one thing Fisbee's shame had made the old man
unable not to suppress when he told Parker his story; the wraith of a
torrid palate had pursued him from his youth, and the days of drink and
despair from which Harkless had saved him were not the first in his life.
Meredith wondered as much as did Harkless where Fisbee had picked up the
journalistic "young relative" who signed his extremely business-like
missives in such a thundering hand. It was evident that the old man was
grateful to his patron, but it did not occur to Meredith that Fisbee's
daughter might have an even stronger sense of gratitude, one so strong
that she could give all her young strength to work for the man who had
been good to her father.

There came a day in August when Meredith took the convalescent from the
hospital in a victoria, and installed him in his own home. Harkless's
clothes hung on his big frame limply; however, there was a drift of light
in his eyes as they drove slowly through the pretty streets of Rouen. The
bandages and splints and drugs and swathings were all gone now, and his
sole task was to gather strength. The thin face was sallow no longer; it
was the color of evening shadows; indeed he lay among the cushions
seemingly no more than a gaunt shadow of the late afternoon, looking old
and gray and weary. They rolled along abusing each other, John sometimes
gratefully threatening his friend with violence.

The victoria passed a stone house with wide lawns and an inhospitable air
of wealth and importunate rank; over the sward two peacocks swung,
ambulating like caravals in a green sea; and one expected a fine lady to
come smiling and glittering from the door. Oddly enough, though he had
never seen the place before, it struck Harkless with a sense of
familiarity. "Who lives there?" he asked abruptly.

"Who lives there? On the left? Why that--that is the Sherwood place,"
Meredith answered, in a tone which sounded as if he were not quite sure of
it, but inclined to think his information correct. Harkless relapsed into
silence.

Meredith's home was a few blocks further up the same street; a capacious
house in the Western fashion of the Seventies. In front, on the lawn,
there was a fountain with a leaping play of water; maples and shrubbery
were everywhere; and here and there stood a stiff sentinel of Lombardy
poplar. It was all cool and incongruous and comfortable; and, on the
porch, sheltered from publicity by a multitude of palms and flowering
plants, a white-jacketed negro appeared with a noble smile and a more
important tray, whereon tinkled bedewed glasses and a crystal pitcher,
against whose sides the ice clinked sweetly. There was a complement of
straws.

When they had helped him to an easy chair on the porch, Harkless whistled
luxuriously. "Ah, my bachelor!" he exclaimed, as he selected a straw.

"'Who would fardels bear?'" rejoined Mr. Meredith. Then came to the other
a recollection of an auburn-haired ball player on whom the third strike
had once been called while his eyes wandered tenderly to the grandstand,
where the prettiest girl of that commencement week was sitting.

"Have you forgot the 'Indian Princess'?" he asked.

"You're a dull old person," Tom laughed. "Haven't you discovered that 'tis
they who forget us? And why shouldn't they? Do _we_ remember well?--
anybody except just us two, I mean, of course."

"I've a notion we do, sometimes."

The other set his glass on the tray, and lit his cigarette. "Yes; when
we're unsuccessful. Then I think we do."

"That may be true."

"Of course it is. If a lady wishes to make an impression on me that is
worth making, let her let me make none on her."

"You think it is always our vanity?"

"Analyze it as your revered Thomas does and you shall reach the same
conclusion. Let a girl reject you and--" Meredith broke off, cursing
himself inwardly, and, rising, cried gaily: "What profiteth it a man if he
gain the whole wisdom in regard to women and loseth not his own heart? And
neither of us is lacking a heart--though it may be; one can't tell, one's
self; one has to find out about that from some girl. At least, I'm rather
sure of mine; it's difficult to give a tobacco-heart away; it's drugged on
the market. I'm going to bring out the dogs; I'm spending the summer at
home just to give them daily exercise."

This explanation of his continued presence in Rouen struck John as quite
as plausible as Meredith's more seriously alleged reasons for not joining
his mother and sister, at Winter Harbor. (He possessed a mother, and, as
he explained, he had also sisters to satiety, in point of numbers.)
Harkless knew that Tom had stayed to look after him; and he thought there
never was so poor a peg as himself whereon to hang the warm mantle of such
a friendship. He knew that other mantles of affection and kindliness hung
on that self-same peg, for he had been moved by the letters and visits
from Carlow people, and he had heard the story of their descent upon the
hospital, and of the march on the Cross-Roads. Many a good fellow, too,
had come to see him during his better days--from Judge Briscoe, openly
tender and solicitous, to the embarrassed William Todd, who fiddled at
his hat and explained that, being as he was in town on business (a
palpable fiction) he thought he'd look in to see if "they was any word
would wish to be sent down to our city." The good will the sick man had
from every one touched him, and made him feel unworthy, and he could see
nothing he had done to deserve it. Mr. Meredith could (and would not--
openly, at least) have explained to him that it made not a great deal of
difference what he did; it was what people thought he was.

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