Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “Mel was what I call a useful citizen. As I said, I knowed him well. I don’t recollect I ever heard him speak of himself, nor yet of his father but once — for that, I reckon, he jest couldn’t; and for himself; I don’t believe it ever occurred to him.

  “And he was a smart boy. Now, you take it, all in all, a boy can’t be as smart as Mel was, and work as hard as he did, and not git somewhere — in this State, anyway! And so, about the fifth year, things took a sudden change for him; his father’s enemies and his own friends, both, had to jest about own they was beat. The crowd that had been running the conventions and keepin’ their own men in all the offices, had got to be pretty unpopular, and they had the sense to see that they’d have to branch out and connect up with some mighty good men, jest to keep the party in power. Well, sir, Mel had got to be about the most popular and respected man in the county. Then one day I met him on the street; he was on his way to buy an overcoat, and he was lookin’ skimpier and more froze-up and genialer than ever. It was March, and up to jest that time things had be’n hardest of all for Mel. I walked around to the store with him, and he was mighty happy; goin’ to send his mother north in the summer, and the girls were goin’ to have a party, and Bob, his little brother, could go to the best school in the country in the fall. Things had come his way at last, and that very morning the crowd had called him in and told him they were goin’ to run him for county clerk.

  “Well, sir, the next evening I heard Mel was sick. Seein’ him only the day before on the street, out and well, I didn’t think anything of it — thought prob’ly a cold or something like that; but in the morning I heard the doctor said he was likely to die. Of course I couldn’t hardly believe it; thing like that never does seem possible, but they all said it was true, and there wasn’t anybody on the street that day that didn’t look blue or talked about anything else. Nobody seemed to know what was the matter with him exactly, and I reckon the doctor did jest the wrong thing for it. Near as I can make out, it was what they call appendicitis nowadays, and had come on him in the night.

  “Along in the afternoon I went out there to see if there was anything I could do. You know what a house in that condition is like. Old Fes Bainbridge, who was some sort of a relation, and me sat on the stairs together outside Mel’s room. We could hear his voice, clear and strong and hearty as ever. He was out of pain; and he had to die with the full flush of health and strength on him, and he knowed it. Not wantin’ to go, through the waste and wear of a long sickness, but with all the ties of life clinchin’ him here, and success jest comin.’ We heard him speak of us, amongst others, old Fes and me; wanted ’em to be sure not forget to tell me to remember to vote for Fillmore if the ground-hog saw his shadow election year, which was an old joke I always had with him. He was awful worried about his mother, though he tried not to show it, and when the minister wanted to pray fer him, we heard him say, ‘No, sir, you pray fer my mamma!’ That was the only thing that was different from his usual way of speakin’; he called his mother ‘mamma, and he wouldn’t let ’em pray for him neither; not once; all the time he could spare for their prayin’ was put in for her.

  “He called in old Fes to tell him all about his life insurance. He’d carried a heavy load of it, and it was all paid up; and the sweat it must have took to do it you’d hardly like to think about. He give directions about everything as careful and painstaking as any day of his life. He asked to speak to Fes alone a minute, and later I helped Fes do what he told him. ‘Cousin Fes,’ he says, ‘it’s bad weather, but I expect mother’ll want all the flowers taken out to the cemetery and you better let her have her way. But there wouldn’t be any good of their stayin’ there; snowed on, like as not. I wish you’d wait till after she’s come away, and git a wagon and take ’em in to the hospital. You can fix up the anchors and so forth so they won’t look like funeral flowers.’

  “About an hour later his mother broke out with a scream, sobbin’ and cryin’, and he tried to quiet her by tellin’ over one of their old-time family funny stories; it made her worse, so he quit. ‘Oh, Mel,’ she says, ‘you’ll be with your father—’

  “I don’t know as Mel had much of a belief in a hereafter; certainly he wasn’t a great churchgoer. ‘Well,’ he says, mighty slow, but hearty and smiling, too, ‘if I see father, I — guess — I’ll — be — pretty — well — fixed!’ Then he jest lay still, tryin’ to quiet her and pettin’ her head. And so — that’s the way he went.”

  Fiderson made one of his impatient little gestures, but Mr. Martin drowned his first words with a loud fit of coughing.

  “Well, sir,” he observed, “I read that ‘Leg-long’ book down home; and I heard two or three countries, and especially ourn, had gone middling crazy over it; it seemed kind of funny that we should, too, so I thought I better come up and see it for myself, how it was, on the stage, where you could look at it; and — I expect they done it as well as they could. But when that little boy, that’d always had his board and clothes and education free, saw that he’d jest about talked himself to death, and called for the press notices about his christening to be read to him to soothe his last spasms — why, I wasn’t overly put in mind of Melville Bickner.”

  Mr. Martin’s train left for Plattsville at two in the morning. Little Fiderson and I escorted him to the station. As the old fellow waved us good-bye from within the gates, Fiderson turned and said:

  “Just the type of sodden-headed old pioneer that you couldn’t hope to make understand a beautiful thing like ‘L’Aiglon’ in a thousand years. I thought it better not to try, didn’t you?”

  Beasley’s Christmas Party

  CONTENTS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  TO

  JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

  Beasley’s Christmas Party

  I

  THE MAPLE-BORDERED STREET was as still as a country Sunday; so quiet that there seemed an echo to my footsteps. It was four o’clock in the morning; clear October moonlight misted through the thinning foliage to the shadowy sidewalk and lay like a transparent silver fog upon the house of my admiration, as I strode along, returning from my first night’s work on the “Wainwright Morning Despatch.”

  I had already marked that house as the finest (to my taste) in Wainwright, though hitherto, on my excursions to this metropolis, the state capital, I was not without a certain native jealousy that Spencerville, the county-seat where I lived, had nothing so good. Now, however, I approached its purlieus with a pleasure in it quite unalloyed, for I was at last myself a resident (albeit of only one day’s standing) of Wainwright, and the house — though I had not even an idea who lived there — part of my possessions as a citizen. Moreover, I might enjoy the warmer pride of a next-door-neighbor, for Mrs. Apperthwaite’s, where I had taken a room, was just beyond.

  This was the quietest part of Wainwright; business stopped short of it, and the “fashionable residence section” had overleaped this “forgotten backwater,” leaving it undisturbed and unchanging, with that look about it which is the quality of few urban quarters, and eventually of none, as a town grows to be a city — the look of still being a neighborhood. This friendliness of appearance was largely the emanation of the homely and beautiful house which so greatly pleased my fancy.

  It might be difficult to say why I thought it the “finest” house in Wainwright, for a simpler structure would be hard to imagine; it was merely a big, old-fashioned brick house, painted brown and very plain, set well away from the street among some splendid forest trees, with a fair spread of flat lawn. But it gave back a great deal for your glance, just as some people do. It was a large house, as I say, yet it looked not like a mansion but like a home; and made you wish that you lived in it. Or, driving by, of an evening, you would have liked to hitch your horse and go in; it spoke so surely of hearty, old-fashioned people living there, who would welcome you merrily.

  It looked like a house where th
ere were a grandfather and a grandmother; where holidays were warmly kept; where there were boisterous family reunions to which uncles and aunts, who had been born there, would return from no matter what distances; a house where big turkeys would be on the table often; where one called “the hired man” (and named either Abner or Ole) would crack walnuts upon a flat-iron clutched between his knees on the back porch; it looked like a house where they played charades; where there would be long streamers of evergreen and dozens of wreaths of holly at Christmas-time; where there were tearful, happy weddings and great throwings of rice after little brides, from the broad front steps: in a word, it was the sort of a house to make the hearts of spinsters and bachelors very lonely and wistful — and that is about as near as I can come to my reason for thinking it the finest house in Wainwright.

  The moon hung kindly above its level roof in the silence of that October morning, as I checked my gait to loiter along the picket fence; but suddenly the house showed a light of its own. The spurt of a match took my eye to one of the upper windows, then a steadier glow of orange told me that a lamp was lighted. The window was opened, and a man looked out and whistled loudly.

  I stopped, thinking that he meant to attract my attention; that something might be wrong; that perhaps some one was needed to go for a doctor. My mistake was immediately evident, however; I stood in the shadow of the trees bordering the sidewalk, and the man at the window had not seen me.

  “Boy! Boy!” he called, softly. “Where are you, Simpledoria?”

  He leaned from the window, looking downward. “Why, THERE you are!” he exclaimed, and turned to address some invisible person within the room. “He’s right there, underneath the window. I’ll bring him up.” He leaned out again. “Wait there, Simpledoria!” he called. “I’ll be down in a jiffy and let you in.”

  Puzzled, I stared at the vacant lawn before me. The clear moonlight revealed it brightly, and it was empty of any living presence; there were no bushes nor shrubberies — nor even shadows — that could have been mistaken for a boy, if “Simpledoria” WAS a boy. There was no dog in sight; there was no cat; there was nothing beneath the window except thick, close-cropped grass.

  A light shone in the hallway behind the broad front doors; one of these was opened, and revealed in silhouette the tall, thin figure of a man in a long, old-fashioned dressing-gown.

  “Simpledoria,” he said, addressing the night air with considerable severity, “I don’t know what to make of you. You might have caught your death of cold, roving out at such an hour. But there,” he continued, more indulgently; “wipe your feet on the mat and come in. You’re safe NOW!”

  He closed the door, and I heard him call to some one up-stairs, as he rearranged the fastenings:

  “Simpledoria is all right — only a little chilled. I’ll bring him up to your fire.”

  I went on my way in a condition of astonishment that engendered, almost, a doubt of my eyes; for if my sight was unimpaired and myself not subject to optical or mental delusion, neither boy nor dog nor bird nor cat, nor any other object of this visible world, had entered that opened door. Was my “finest” house, then, a place of call for wandering ghosts, who came home to roost at four in the morning?

  It was only a step to Mrs. Apperthwaite’s; I let myself in with the key that good lady had given me, stole up to my room, went to my window, and stared across the yard at the house next door. The front window in the second story, I decided, necessarily belonged to that room in which the lamp had been lighted; but all was dark there now. I went to bed, and dreamed that I was out at sea in a fog, having embarked on a transparent vessel whose preposterous name, inscribed upon glass life-belts, depending here and there from an invisible rail, was SIMPLEDORIA.

  II

  MRS. APPERTHWAITE’S WAS a commodious old house, the greater part of it of about the same age, I judged, as its neighbor; but the late Mr. Apperthwaite had caught the Mansard fever of the late ‘Seventies, and the building-disease, once fastened upon him, had never known a convalescence, but, rather, a series of relapses, the tokens of which, in the nature of a cupola and a couple of frame turrets, were terrifyingly apparent. These romantic misplacements seemed to me not inharmonious with the library, a cheerful and pleasantly shabby apartment down-stairs, where I found (over a substratum of history, encyclopaedia, and family Bible) some worn old volumes of Godey’s Lady’s Book, an early edition of Cooper’s works; Scott, Bulwer, Macaulay, Byron, and Tennyson, complete; some odd volumes of Victor Hugo, of the elder Dumas, of Flaubert, of Gautier, and of Balzac; Clarissa, Lalla Rookh, The Alhambra, Beulah, Uarda, Lucile, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Ben-Hur, Trilby, She, Little Lord Fauntleroy; and of a later decade, there were novels about those delicately tangled emotions experienced by the supreme few; and stories of adventurous royalty; tales of “clean-limbed young American manhood;” and some thin volumes of rather precious verse.

  ’Twas amid these romantic scenes that I awaited the sound of the lunch-bell (which for me was the announcement of breakfast), when I arose from my first night’s slumbers under Mrs. Apperthwaite’s roof; and I wondered if the books were a fair mirror of Miss Apperthwaite’s mind (I had been told that Mrs. Apperthwaite had a daughter). Mrs. Apperthwaite herself, in her youth, might have sat to an illustrator of Scott or Bulwer. Even now you could see she had come as near being romantically beautiful as was consistently proper for such a timid, gentle little gentlewoman as she was. Reduced, by her husband’s insolvency (coincident with his demise) to “keeping boarders,” she did it gracefully, as if the urgency thereto were only a spirit of quiet hospitality. It should be added in haste that she set an excellent table.

  Moreover, the guests who gathered at her board were of a very attractive description, as I decided the instant my eye fell upon the lady who sat opposite me at lunch. I knew at once that she was Miss Apperthwaite, she “went so,” as they say, with her mother; nothing could have been more suitable. Mrs. Apperthwaite was the kind of woman whom you would expect to have a beautiful daughter, and Miss Apperthwaite more than fulfilled her mother’s promise.

  I guessed her to be more than Juliet Capulet’s age, indeed, yet still between that and the perfect age of woman. She was of a larger, fuller, more striking type than Mrs. Apperthwaite, a bolder type, one might put it — though she might have been a great deal bolder than Mrs. Apperthwaite without being bold. Certainly she was handsome enough to make it difficult for a young fellow to keep from staring at her. She had an abundance of very soft, dark hair, worn almost severely, as if its profusion necessitated repression; and I am compelled to admit that her fine eyes expressed a distant contemplation — obviously of habit not of mood — so pronounced that one of her enemies (if she had any) might have described them as “dreamy.”

  Only one other of my own sex was present at the lunch-table, a Mr. Dowden, an elderly lawyer and politician of whom I had heard, and to whom Mrs. Apperthwaite, coming in after the rest of us were seated, introduced me. She made the presentation general; and I had the experience of receiving a nod and a slow glance, in which there was a sort of dusky, estimating brilliance, from the beautiful lady opposite me.

  It might have been better mannered for me to address myself to Mr. Dowden, or one of the very nice elderly women, who were my fellow-guests, than to open a conversation with Miss Apperthwaite; but I did not stop to think of that.

  “You have a splendid old house next door to you here, Miss Apperthwaite,” I said. “It’s a privilege to find it in view from my window.”

  There was a faint stir as of some consternation in the little company. The elderly ladies stopped talking abruptly and exchanged glances, though this was not of my observation at the moment, I think, but recurred to my consciousness later, when I had perceived my blunder.

  “May I ask who lives there?” I pursued.

  Miss Apperthwaite allowed her noticeable lashes to cover her eyes for an instant, then looked up again.

  “A Mr. Beasley,” she said.

  “Not
the Honorable David Beasley!” I exclaimed.

  “Yes,” she returned, with a certain gravity which I afterward wished had checked me. “Do you know him?”

  “Not in person,” I explained. “You see, I’ve written a good deal about him. I was with the “Spencerville Journal” until a few days ago, and even in the country we know who’s who in politics over the state. Beasley’s the man that went to Congress and never made a speech — never made even a motion to adjourn — but got everything his district wanted. There’s talk of him now for Governor.”

  “Indeed?”

  “And so it’s the Honorable David Beasley who lives in that splendid place. How curious that is!”

  “Why?” asked Miss Apperthwaite.

  “It seems too big for one man,” I answered; “and I’ve always had the impression Mr. Beasley was a bachelor.”

  “Yes,” she said, rather slowly, “he is.”

  “But of course he doesn’t live there all alone,” I supposed, aloud, “probably he has—”

  “No. There’s no one else — except a couple of colored servants.”

  “What a crime!” I exclaimed. “If there ever was a house meant for a large family, that one is. Can’t you almost hear it crying out for heaps and heaps of romping children? I should think—”

  I was interrupted by a loud cough from Mr. Dowden, so abrupt and artificial that his intention to check the flow of my innocent prattle was embarrassingly obvious — even to me!

  “Can you tell me,” he said, leaning forward and following up the interruption as hastily as possible, “what the farmers were getting for their wheat when you left Spencerville?”