Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  Briscoe and Tom Meredith made their way through the crowd, and climbed into the buckboard. “All right, Lige,” called the judge to Willetts, who was at the horses’ heads. “You go get into line with the boys; they want you. We’ll go down on Main Street to see the parade,” he explained to the ladies, gathering the reins in his hand.

  He clucked to the roans, and by dint of backing and twisting and turning and a hundred intricate manoeuvres, accompanied by entreaties and remonstrances and objurgations, addressed to the occupants of surrounding vehicles, he managed to extricate the buckboard from the press; and once free, the team went down the road toward Main Street at a lively gait. The judge’s call to the colts rang out cheerily; his handsome face was one broad smile. “This is a big day for Carlow,” he said; “I don’t remember a better day’s work in twenty years.”

  “Did you tell him about Mr. Halloway?” asked Helen, leaning forward anxiously.

  “Warren told him before we left the car,” answered Briscoe. “He’d have declined on the spot, I expect, if we hadn’t made him sure it was all right with Kedge.”

  “If I understood what Mr. Smith was saying, Halloway must have behaved very well,” said Meredith.

  The judge laughed. “He saw it was the only way to beat McCune, and he’d have given his life and Harkless’s, too, rather than let McCune have it.”

  “Why didn’t you stay with him, Tom?” asked Helen.

  “With Halloway? I don’t know him.”

  “One forgives a generous hilarity anything, even such quips as that,” she retorted. “Why did you not stay with Mr. Harkless?”

  “That’s very hospitable of you,” laughed the young man. “You forget that I have the felicity to sit at your side. Judge Briscoe has been kind enough to ask me to review the procession from his buckboard and to sup at his house with other distinguished visitors, and I have accepted.”

  “But didn’t he wish you to remain with him?”

  “But this second I had the honor to inform you that I am here distinctly by his invitation.”

  “His?”

  “Precisely, his. Judge Briscoe, Miss Sherwood will not believe that you desire my presence. If I intrude, pray let me—” He made as if to spring from the buckboard, and the girl seized his arm impatiently.

  “You are a pitiful nonsense-monger!” she cried; and for some reason this speech made him turn his glasses upon her gravely. Her lashes fell before his gaze, and at that he took her hand and kissed it quickly.

  “No, no,” she faltered. “You must not think it. It isn’t — you see, I — there is nothing!”

  “You shall not dull the edge of my hilarity,” he answered, “especially since so much may be forgiven it.”

  “Why did you leave Mr. Harkless?” she asked, without raising her eyes.

  “My dear girl,” he replied, “because, for some inexplicable reason, my lady cousin has not nominated me for Congress, but instead has chosen to bestow that distinction upon another, and, I may say, an unworthier and unfitter man than I. And, oddly enough, the non-discriminating multitude were not cheering for me; the artillery was not in action to celebrate me; the band was not playing to do me honor; therefore why should I ride in the midst of a procession that knows me not? Why should I enthrone me in an open barouche — a little faded and possibly not quite secure as to its springs, but still a barouche — with four white horses to draw it, and draped with silken flags, both barouche and steeds? Since these things were not for me, I flew to your side to dissemble my spleen under the licensed prattle of a cousin.”

  “Then who is with him?”

  “The population of this portion of our State, I take it.”

  “Oh, it’s all right,” said the judge, leaning back to speak to Helen. “Keating and Smith and your father are to ride in the carriage with him. You needn’t be afraid of any of them letting him know that H. Fisbee is a lady. Everybody understands about that; of course they know it’s to be left to you to break it to him how well a girl has run his paper.” The old gentleman chuckled, and looked out of the corner of his eye at his daughter, whose expression was inscrutable.

  “I!” cried Helen. “I tell him! No one must tell him. He need never know it.”

  Briscoe reached back and patted her cheek. “How long do you suppose he will be here in Plattville without it’s leaking out?”

  “But they kept guard over him for months and nobody told him.”

  “Ah,” said Briscoe, “but this is different.”

  “No, no, no!” she exclaimed. “It must be kept from him somehow!”

  “He’ll know it by to-morrow, so you’d better tell him this evening.”

  “This evening?”

  “Yes. You’ll have a good chance.”

  “I will?”

  “He’s coming to supper with us. He and your father, of course, and Keating and Bence and Boswell and Smith and Tom Martin and Lige. We’re going to have a big time, with you and Minnie to do the honors; and we’re all coming into town afterwards for the fireworks; I’ll let him drive you in the phaeton. You’ll have plenty of time to talk it over with him and tell him all about it.”

  Helen gave a little gasp. “Never!” she cried. “Never!”

  The buckboard stopped on the “Herald” corner, and here, and along Main Street, the line of vehicles which had followed it from the station took their places. The Square was almost a solid mass of bunting, and the north entrance of the court-house had been decorated with streamers and flags, so as to make it a sort of stand. Hither the crowd was already streaming, and hither the procession made its way. At intervals the cannon boomed, and Schofields’ Henry was winnowing the air with his bell; nobody had a better time that day than Schofields’ Henry, except old Wilkerson, who was with the procession.

  In advance, came the boys, whooping and somersaulting, and behind them, rode a band of mounted men, sitting their horses like cavalrymen, led by the sheriff and his deputy and Jim Bardlock; then followed the Harkless Club of Amo, led by Boswell, with the magnanimous Halloway himself marching in the ranks; and at sight of this the people shouted like madmen. But when Helen’s eye fell upon his fat, rather unhappy face, she felt a pang of pity and unreasoning remorse, which warned her that he who looks upon politics when it is red must steel his eyes to see many a man with the heart-burn. After the men of Amo, came the Harkless Club of Gainesville, Mr. Bence in the van with the step of a grenadier. There followed next, Mr. Ephraim Watts, bearing a light wand in his hand and leading a detachment of workers from the oil-fields in their stained blue overalls and blouses; and, after them, came Mr. Martin and Mr. Landis at the head of an organization recognized in the “Order of Procession,” printed in the “Herald,” as the Business Men of Plattville. They played in such magnificent time that every high-stepping foot in all the line came down with the same jubilant plunk, and lifted again with a unanimity as complete as that of the last vote the convention had taken that day. The leaders of the procession set a brisk pace, and who could have set any other kind of a pace when on parade to the strains of such a band, playing such a tune as “A New Coon in Town,” with all its might and main?

  But as the line swung into the Square, there came a moment when the tune was ended, the musicians paused for breath, and there fell comparative quiet. Amongst the ranks of Business Men ambled Mr. Wilkerson, singing at the top of his voice, and now he could be heard distinctly enough for those near to him to distinguish the melody with which it was his intention to favor the public:

  “Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!

  As we go marching on.”

  The words, the air, that husky voice, recalled to the men of Carlow another day and another procession, not like this one. And the song Wilkerson was singing is the one song every Northern-born American knows and can sing. The leader of the band caught the sound, signalled to his men; twenty instruments rose as one to twenty mouths; the snare-drum rattled, the big drum crashed, the leader lifted his baton high over his head, and music b
urst from twenty brazen throats:

  “Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!”

  Instantaneously, the whole procession began to sing the refrain, and the people in the street, and those in the wagons and carriages, and those leaning from the windows joined with one accord, the ringing bells caught the time of the song, and the upper air reverberated in the rhythm.

  The Harkless Club of Carlow wheeled into Main Street, two hundred strong, with their banners and transparencies. Lige Willetts rode at their head, and behind him strode young William Todd and Parker and Ross Schofield and Homer Tibbs and Hartley Bowlder, and even Bud Tipworthy held a place in the ranks through his connection with the “Herald.” They were all singing.

  And, behind them, Helen saw the flag-covered barouche and her father, and beside him sat John Harkless with his head bared.

  She glanced at Briscoe; he was standing on the front seat with Minnie beside him, and both were singing. Meredith had climbed upon the back seat and was nervously fumbling at a cigarette.

  “Sing, Tom!” the girl cried to him excitedly.

  “I should be ashamed not to,” he answered; and dropped the cigarette and began to sing “John Brown’s Body” with all his strength. With that she seized his hand, sprang up beside him, and over the swelling chorus her full soprano rose, lifted with all the power in her.

  The barouche rolled into the Square, and, as it passed, Harkless turned, and bent a sudden gaze upon the group in the buckboard; but the western sun was in his eyes, and he only caught a glimpse of a vague, bright shape and a dazzle of gold, and he was borne along and out of view, down the singing street.

  “Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!

  Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!

  Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!

  As we go marching on!”

  The barouche stopped in front of the courthouse, and he passed up a lane they made for him to the steps. When he turned to them to speak, they began to cheer again, and he had to wait for them to quiet down.

  “We can’t hear him from over here,” said Briscoe, “we’re too far off. Mr. Meredith, suppose you take the ladies closer in, and I’ll stay with the horses. You want to hear his speech.”

  “He is a great man, isn’t he?” Meredith said to Helen, gravely, as he handed her out of the buckboard. “I’ve been trying to realize for the last few minutes, that he is the same old fellow I’ve been treating so familiarly all day long.”

  “Yes, he is a great man,” she answered. “This is only the beginning.”

  “That’s true,” said Briscoe, who had overheard her. “He’ll go pretty far. A man that people know is steady and strong and level-headed can get whatever he wants, because a public man can get anything, if people know he’s safe and honest and they can rely on him for sense. It sounds like a simple matter; but only three or four public men in the country have convinced us that they are like that. Hurry along, young people.”

  Crossing the street, they met Miss Tibbs; she was wiping her streaming eyes with the back of her left hand and still mechanically waving her handkerchief with her right. “Isn’t it beautiful?” she said, not ceasing to flutter, unconsciously, the little square of cambric. “There was such a throng that I grew faint and had to come away. I don’t mind your seeing me crying. Pretty near everybody cried when he walked up to the steps and we saw that he was lame.”

  Standing on the outskirts of the crowd, they could hear the mellow ring of Harkless’s voice, but only fragments of the speech, for it was rather halting, and was not altogether clear in either rhetoric or delivery; and Mr. Bence could have been a good deal longer in saying what he had to say, and a thousand times more oratorical. Nevertheless, there was not a man or woman present who did not declare that it was the greatest speech ever heard in Plattville; and they really thought so — to such lengths are loyalty and friendship sometimes carried in Carlow and Amo and Gaines.

  He looked down upon the attentive, earnest faces and into the kindly eyes of the Hoosier country people, and, as he spoke, the thought kept recurring to him that this was the place he had dreaded to come back to; that these were the people he had wished to leave — these, who gave him everything they had to give — and this made it difficult to keep his tones steady and his throat clear.

  Helen stood so far from the steps (nor could she be induced to penetrate further, though they would have made way for her) that only fragments reached her, but what she heard she remembered:

  “I have come home... Ordinarily a man needs to fall sick by the wayside or to be set upon by thieves, in order to realize that nine-tenths of the world is Samaritan, and the other tenth only too busy or too ignorant to be. Down here he realizes it with no necessity of illness or wounds to bring it out; and if he does get hurt, you send him to Congress.... There will be no other in Washington so proud of what he stands for as I shall be. To represent you is to stand for realities — fearlessness, honor, kindness.... We are people who take what comes to us, and it comes bountifully; we are rich — oh, we are all Americans here!... This is the place for a man who likes to live where people are kind to one another, and where they have the old-fashioned way of saying ‘Home.’ Other places, they don’t seem to get so much into it as we do. And to come home as I have to-day.... I have come home....”

  Every one meant to shake hands with him, and, when the speech was over, those nearest swooped upon him, cheering and waving, and grasping at his hand. Then a line was formed, and they began to defile by him, as he stood on the steps, and one by one they came up, and gave him hearty greetings, and passed on through the court-house and out at the south door. Tom Meredith and Minnie Briscoe came amongst the others, and Tom said only, “Good old boy,” as he squeezed his friend’s hand; and then, as he went down the hall, wiping his glasses, he asked Minnie if she believed the young man on the steps had risen from a sick bed that morning.

  It was five-o’clock when Harkless climbed the stairs to the “Herald” office, and his right arm and hand were aching and limp. Below him, as he reached the landing, he could see boys selling extras containing his speech (taken by the new reporter), and long accounts of the convention, of the nominee’s career, and the celebration of his home-coming. The sales were rapid; for no one could resist the opportunity to read in print descriptions of what his eyes had beheld and his ears had heard that day.

  Ross Schofield was the only person in the editorial room, and there was nothing in his appearance which should cause a man to start and fall back from the doorway; but that was what Harkless did.

  “What’s the matter, Mr. Harkless?” cried Ross, hurrying forward, fearing that the other had been suddenly reseized by illness.

  “What are those?” asked Harkless, with a gesture of his hand which seemed to include the entire room.

  “Those!” repeated Ross, staring blankly.

  “Those rosettes — these streamers — that stovepipe — all this blue ribbon.”

  Ross turned pale. “Ribbon?” he said, inquiringly. “Ribbon?” He seemed unable to perceive the decorations referred to.

  “Yes,” answered John; “these rosettes on the chairs, that band, and — —”

  “Oh!” Ross exclaimed. “That?” He fingered the band on the stovepipe as if he saw it for the first time. “Yes; I see.”

  “But what are they for?” asked Harkless, touching one of the streamers curiously.

  “Why — it’s — it’s likely meant for decorations.”

  John picked up the ink-well, staring in complete amazement at the hard knot of ribbon with which it was garnished.

  “They seem to have been here some time.”

  “They have; I reckon they’re almost due to be called in. They’ve be’n up ever sence — sence — —”

  “Who put them up, Ross?”

  “We did.”

  “What for?”

  Ross was visibly embarrassed. “Why — fer — fer the other editor.”

  “For Mr. Fisbee?”

  “Land, no! You don’t suppose
we’d go to work and bother to brisken things up fer that old gentleman, do you?”

  “I meant young Mr. Fisbee — he is the other editor, isn’t he?”

  “Oh!” said Ross, coughing. “Young Mr. Fisbee? Yes; we put ’em up fer him.”

  “You did! Did he appreciate them?”

  “Well — he seemed to — kind of like ’em.”

  “Where is he now? I came here to find him.”

  “He’s gone.”

  “Gone? Hasn’t he been here this afternoon?”

  “Yes; some ‘the time. Come in and stayed durin’ the leevy you was holdin’, and saw the extra off all right.”

  “When will he be back?”

  “Sence it’s be’n a daily he gits here by eight, after supper, but don’t stay very late; the new man and old Mr. Fisbee and Parker look after whatever comes in late, unless it’s something special. He’ll likely be here by half-past eight at the farthest off.”

  “I can’t wait till then.” John took a quick turn about the room. “I’ve been wanting to see him every minute since I got in,” he said impatiently, “and he hasn’t been near me. Nobody could even point him out to me. Where has he gone? I want to see him now.”

  “Want to discharge him again?” said a voice from the door, and turning, they saw that Mr. Martin stood there observing them.

  “No,” said Harkless; “I want to give him the ‘Herald.’ Do you know where he is?”

  Mr. Martin stroked his beard deliberately. “The person you speak of hadn’t ort to be very hard to find — in Carlow. The committee was reckless enough to hire that carriage of yours by the day, and Keating and Warren Smith are setting in it up at the corner, with their feet on the cushions to show they’re used to ridin’ around with four white horses every day in the week. It’s waitin’ till you’re ready to go out to Briscoe’s. It’s an hour before supper time, and you can talk to young Fisbee all you want. He’s out there.”