Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “Ah, that would be too beautiful!” he said.

  And then he shivered; for his name was spoken from within.

  It was soon plain to him that he need not have feared a few words, for he did not in the least understand those with which the eminent surgeons favored him; and they at once took their departure. He did understand, however, what Horner told him. Mr. Barrett, Warren Smith, and the sleepy young man had reentered the ward; and Horner was following, but waited for Meredith. Somehow, the look of the sheriff’s Sunday coat, wrinkling forlornly from his broad, bent shoulders, was both touching and solemn. He said simply: “He’s conscious and not out of his head. They’re gone in to take his ante-mortem statement,” and they went into the room.

  Harkless’s eyes were bandaged. The lawyer was speaking to him, and as Horner went awkwardly toward the cot. Warren said something indicative of the sheriff’s presence, and the hand on the sheet made a formless motion which Horner understood, for he took the pale fingers in his own, very gently, and then set them back. Smith turned toward Meredith, but the latter made a gesture which forbade the attorney to speak of him, and went to a corner and sat down with his head in his hands.

  The sleepy young man opened a notebook and shook a stylographic pen so that the ink might flow freely. The lawyer, briefly and with unlegal agitation, administered an oath, to which Harkless responded feebly, and then there was silence.

  “Now, Mr. Harkless, if you please,” said Barrett, insinuatingly; “if you feel like telling us as much as you can about it?”

  He answered in a low, rather indistinct voice, very deliberately, pausing before almost every word. It was easy work for the sleepy stenographer.

  “I understand. I don’t want to go off my head again before I finish. Of course I know why you want this. If it were only for myself I should tell you nothing, because, if I am to leave, I should like it better if no one were punished. But that’s a bad community over there; they are everlastingly worrying our people; they have always been a bother to us, and it’s time it was stopped for good. I don’t believe very much in punishment, but you can’t do a great deal of reforming with the Cross-Roaders unless you catch them young — very young, before they’re weaned — they wean them on whiskey, I think. I realize you needn’t have sworn me for me to tell you this.”

  Homer and Smith had started at the mention of the Cross-Roads, but they subdued their ejaculations, while Mr. Barrett looked as if he had known it, of course. The room was still, save for the dim voice and the soft transcribings of the stylographic pen.

  “I left Judge Briscoe’s, and went west on the pike to a big tree. It rained, and I stepped under the tree for shelter. There was a man on the other side of the fence. It was Bob Skillett. He was carrying his gown and hood — I suppose it was that — on his arm. Then I saw two others a little farther east, in the middle of the road; and I think they had followed me from the Briscoes’, or near there. They had their foolish regalia on, as all the rest had, — there was plenty of lightning to see. The two in the road were simply standing there in the rain, looking at me through the eye-holes in their hoods. I knew there were others — plenty — but I thought they were coming from behind me — the west.

  “I wanted to get home — the court-house yard was good enough for me — so I started east, toward town. I passed the two gentlemen; and one fell down as I went by him, but the other fired a shot as a signal, and I got his hood off his face for it — I stopped long enough — and it was Force Johnson. I know him well. Then I ran, and they followed. A little ahead of me I saw six or eight of them spread across the road. I knew I’d have a time getting through, so I jumped the fence to cut across the fields, and I lit in a swarm of them — it had rained them just where I jumped. I set my back to the fence, but one of the fellows in the road leaned over and smashed my head in, rather — with the butt of a gun, I believe. I came out from the fence and they made a little circle around me. No one said anything. I saw they had ropes and saplings, and I didn’t want that, exactly, so I went into them. I got a good many hoods off before it was over, and I can swear to quite a number besides those I told you.”

  He named the men, slowly and carefully. Then he went on: “I think they gave up the notion of whipping. We all got into a bunch, and they couldn’t clear to shoot without hitting some of their own: and there was a lot of gouging and kicking — one fellow nearly got my left eye, and I tried to tear him apart and he screamed so that I think he was hurt. Once or twice I thought I might get away, but somebody hammered me over the head and face again, and I got dizzy; and then they all jumped away from me suddenly, and Bob Skillett stepped up — and — shot me. He waited for a good flurry of lightning, and I was slow tumbling down. Some one else fired a shot-gun, I think — I can’t be sure — about the same time, from the side. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t, and then they got together, for a consultation. The man I had hurt — I didn’t recognize him — came and looked at me. He was nursing himself all over; and groaned; and I laughed, I — at any rate, my arm was lying stretched out on the grass, and he stamped his heel into my hand, and after a little of that I quit feeling.

  “I’m not quite clear about what happened afterwards. They went away, not far, I think. There’s an old shed, a cattle-shelter, near there, and I think the storm drove them under it to wait for a slack. It seemed a long time. Sometimes I was conscious, sometimes I wasn’t. I thought I might be drowned, but I suppose the rain was good for me. Then I remember being in motion, being dragged and carried a long way. They took me up a steep, short slope, and set me down near the top. I knew that was the railroad embankment, and I thought they meant to lay me across the track, but it didn’t occur to them, I suppose — they are not familiar with melodrama — and a long time after that I felt and heard a great banging and rattling under me and all about me, and it came to me that they had disposed of me by hoisting me into an empty freight-car. The odd part of it was that the car wasn’t empty, for there were two men already in it, and I knew them by what they said to me.

  “They were the two shell-men who cheated Hartley Bowlder, and they weren’t vindictive; they even seemed to be trying to help me a little, though perhaps they were only stealing my clothes, and maybe they thought for them to do anything unpleasant would be superfluous; I could see that they thought I was done for, and that they had been hiding in the car when I was put there. I asked them to try to call the train men for me, but they wouldn’t listen, or else I couldn’t make myself understood. That’s all. The rest is a blur. I haven’t known anything more until those surgeons were here. Please tell me how long ago it happened. I shall not die, I think; there are a good many things I want to know about.” He moved restlessly and the nurse soothed him.

  Meredith rose and left the room with a noiseless step. He went out to the stars again, and looked to them to check the storm of rage and sorrow that buffeted his bosom. He understood lynching, now the thing was home to him, and his feeling was no inspiration of a fear lest the law miscarry; it was the itch to get his own hand on the rope. Horner came out presently, and whispered a long, broad, profound curse upon the men of the Cross-Roads, and Meredith’s gratitude to him was keen. Barrett went away, soon after, leaving the cab for the gentlemen from Plattville. Meredith had a strange, unreasonable desire to kick Barrett, possibly for his sergeant’s sake. Warren Smith sat in the ward with the nurse and Gay, and the room was very quiet. It was a long vigil.

  They were only waiting.

  At five o’clock he was still alive — just that, Smith came out to say. Meredith sent his driver with a telegram to Helen which would give Plattville the news that Harkless was found and was not yet gone from them. Homer took the cab and left for the station; there was a train, and there were things for him to do in Carlow. At noon Meredith sent a second telegram to Helen, as barren of detail as the first: he was alive — was a little improved. This telegram did not reach her, for she was on the way to Rouen, and half of the population of Carlow — at
least, so it appeared to the unhappy conductor of the accommodation — was with her.

  They seemed to feel that they could camp in the hospital halls and corridors, and they were an incalculable worry to the authorities. More came on every train, and nearly all brought flowers, and jelly, and chickens for preparing broth, and they insisted that the two latter delicacies be fed to the patient at once. Meredith was possessed by an unaccountable responsibility for them all, and invited a great many to stay at his own house. They were still in ignorance of the truth about the Cross-Roads, and some of them spent the day (it was Sunday) in planning an assault upon the Rouen jail for the purpose of lynching Slattery in case Harkless’s condition did not improve at once. Those who had heard his statement kept close mouths until the story appeared in full in the Rouen papers on Monday morning; but by that time every member of the Cross-Roads White-Caps was lodged in the Rouen jail with Slattery. Homer and a heavily armed posse rode over to the muddy corners on Sunday night, and the sheriff discovered that he might have taken the Skilletts and Johnsons single-handed and unarmed. Their nerve was gone; they were shaken and afraid; and, to employ a figure somewhat inappropriate to their sullen, glad surrender, they fell upon his neck in their relief at finding the law touching them. They had no wish to hear “John Brown’s Body” again. They wanted to get inside of a strong jail, and to throw themselves on the mercy of the court as soon as possible. And those whom Harkless had not recognized delayed not to give themselves up; they did not desire to remain in Six-Cross-Roads. Bob Skillett, Force Johnson, and one or two others needed the care of a physician badly, and one man was suffering from a severely wrenched back. Homer had a train stopped at a crossing, so that his prisoners need not be taken through Plattville, and he brought them all safely to Rouen. Had there chanced any one to ride through the deserted Cross-Roads the next morning, passing the trampled fields and the charred ruins of the two shanties to the east, and listening to the lamentations of the women and children, he would have declared that at last the old score had been paid, and that Six-Cross-Roads was wiped out.

  The Carlow folks were deeply impressed with the two eminent surgeons, of whom some of them had heard, and on Tuesday, the bulletins marking considerable encouragement, most of them decided to temporarily risk the editor of the “Herald” to such capable hands, and they returned quietly to their homes; only a few were delayed in reaching Carlow by travelling to the first station in the opposite direction before they succeeded in planting themselves on the proper train.

  Meanwhile, the object of their solicitude tossed and burned on his bed of pain. He was delirious most of the time, and, in the intervals of half-consciousness, found that his desire to live, very strong at first, had disappeared; he did not care much about anything except rest — he wanted peace. In his wanderings he was almost always back in his college days, beholding them in an unhappy, distorted fashion. He would lie asprawl on the sward with the others, listening to the Seniors singing on the steps, and, all at once, the old, kindly faces would expand enormously and press over him with hideous mouthings, and an ugly Senior in cap and gown would stamp him and grind a spiked heel into his hand; then they would toss him high into air that was all flames, and he would fall and fall through the raging heat, seeing the cool earth far beneath him, but never able to get down to it again. And then he was driven miles and miles by dusky figures, through a rain of boiling water; and at other times the whole universe was a vast, hot brass bell, and it gave off a huge, continuous roar and hum, while he was a mere point of consciousness floating in the exact centre of the heat and sound waves, and he listened, listened for years, to the awful, brazen hum from which there could be no escape; at the same time it seemed to him that he was only a Freshman on the slippery roof of the tower, trying to steal the clapper of the chapel bell.

  Finally he came to what he would have considered a lucid interval, had it not appeared that Helen Sherwood was whispering to Tom Meredith at the foot of his bed. This he knew to be a fictitious presentation of his fever, for was she not by this time away and away for foreign lands? And, also, Tom Meredith was a slim young thing, and not the middle-aged youth with an undeniable stomach and a baldish head, who, by the grotesque necromancy of his hallucinations, assumed a preposterous likeness to his old friend. He waved his hand to the figures and they vanished like figments of a dream; but all the same the vision had been realistic enough for the lady to look exquisitely pretty. No one could help wishing to stay in a world which contained as charming a picture as that.

  And then, too quickly, the moment of clearness passed; and he was troubled about the “Herald,” beseeching those near him to put copies of the paper in his hands, threatening angrily to believe they were deceiving him, that his paper had suspended, if the three issues of the week were not instantly produced. What did they mean by keeping the truth from him? He knew the “Herald” had not come out. Who was there to get it out in his absence? He raised himself on his elbow and struggled to be up; and they had hard work to quiet him.

  But the next night Meredith waited near his bedside, haggard and dishevelled. Harkless had been lying in a long stupor; suddenly he spoke, quite loudly, and the young surgeon, Gay, who leaned over him, remembered the words and the tone all his life.

  “Away and away — across the waters,” said John Harkless. “She was here — once — in June.”

  “What is it, John?” whispered Meredith, huskily. “You’re easier, aren’t you?”

  And John smiled a little, as if, for an instant, his swathed eyes penetrated the bandages, and saw and knew his old friend again.

  That same night a friend of Rodney McCune’s sent a telegram from Rouen: “He is dying. His paper is dead. Your name goes before convention in September.”

  CHAPTER XIII. JAMES FISBEE

  ON MONDAY MORNING three men sat in council in the “Herald” office; that is, if staring out of dingy windows in a demented silence may be called sitting in council; that was what Mr. Fisbee and Parker and Ross Schofield were doing. By almost desperate exertions, these three and Bud Tipworthy had managed to place before the public the issues of the paper for the previous week, unaided by their chief, or, rather, aided by long accounts of his condition and the manner of his mishap; and, in truth, three copies were at that moment in the possession of Dr. Gay, accompanied by a note from Parker warning the surgeon to exhibit them to his patient only as a last resort, as the foreman feared the perusal of them might cause a relapse.

  By indiscriminate turns, acting as editors, reporters, and typesetters — and particularly space-writers — the three men had worried out three issues, and part of the fourth (to appear the next morning) was set up; but they had come to the end of their string, and there were various horrid gaps yet to fill in spite of a too generous spreading of advertisements. Bud Tipworthy had been sent out to besiege Miss Tibbs, all of whose recent buds of rhyme had been hot-housed into inky blossom during the week, and after a long absence the youth returned with a somewhat abrupt quatrain, entitled “The Parisians of Old,” which she had produced while he waited — only four lines, according to the measure they meted, which was not regardful of art — less than a drop in the bucket, or, to preserve the figure, a single posy where they needed a bouquet. Bud went down the rickety outside stairs, and sat on the lowest step, whistling “Wait till the Clouds Roll by, Jenny”; Ross Schofield descended to set up the quatrain, and Fisbee and Parker were left to silence and troubled meditation.

  They were seated on opposite sides of Harkless’s desk. Sheets of blank scratch-paper lay before them, and they relaxed not their knit brows. Now and then, one of them, after gazing vacantly about the room for ten or fifteen minutes, would attack the sheet before him with fiercest energy; then the energy would taper off, and the paragraph halt, the writer peruse it dubiously, then angrily tear off the sheet and hurl it to the floor. All around them lay these snowballs of defeated journalism.

  Mr. Parker was a long, loose, gaunt gentleman, with a per
emptory 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.