Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Read online

  The Collected Works of

  BOOTH TARKINGTON

  (1869-1946)

  Contents

  The Growth Trilogy

  The Penrod Series

  The Novels

  The Gentleman from Indiana

  Monsieur Beaucaire

  Cherry

  The Two Vanrevels

  The Beautiful Lady

  The Conquest of Canaan

  The Guest of Quesnay

  His Own People

  The Flirt

  Penrod

  The Turmoil

  Penrod and Sam

  Seventeen

  The Magnificent Ambersons

  Ramsey Milholland

  Harlequin and Columbine

  Alice Adams

  Gentle Julia

  The Midlander

  Women

  The Plutocrat

  Claire Ambler

  Penrod Jashber

  The Show Piece

  The Shorter Fiction

  In the Arena

  Beasley’s Christmas Party

  The Spring Concert

  Captain Schlotterwerz

  The Fascinating Stranger and Other Stories

  The Short Stories

  List of Short Stories in Chronological Order

  List of Short Stories in Alphabetical Order

  The Plays

  The Man from Home

  Beauty and the Jacobin

  The Gibson Upright

  The Non-Fiction

  The Rich Man’s War

  The Delphi Classics Catalogue

  © Delphi Classics 2018

  Version 1

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  The Collected Works of

  BOOTH TARKINGTON

  By Delphi Classics, 2018

  COPYRIGHT

  Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by Delphi Classics.

  © Delphi Classics, 2018.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

  ISBN: 978 1 78656 407 8

  Delphi Classics

  is an imprint of

  Delphi Publishing Ltd

  Hastings, East Sussex

  United Kingdom

  Contact: [email protected]

  www.delphiclassics.com

  Explore American Masters with Delphi Classics

  For the first time in digital publishing history, Delphi Classics is proud to present the complete works of these important American authors.

  Explore Americans

  The Growth Trilogy

  The Turmoil (1915)

  The Magnificent Ambersons (1918)

  The Midlander (1924; re-titled National Avenue in 1927)

  The Penrod Series

  Penrod (1914)

  Penrod and Sam (1916)

  Penrod Jashber (1929)

  The Novels

  Indianapolis, Indiana — Booth Tarkington’s birthplace

  Indianapolis, c. 1904

  The author was named after his uncle and Governor of California, (Booth) Newton Tarkington

  The Gentleman from Indiana

  The Gentleman from Indiana was first published in America in 1899. It was the author’s debut novel and it proved to be a modest commercial success. Tarkington would go on to become one of the most famous American novelists during the first three decades of the twentieth century. He was not only widely read during his lifetime, but is also only one of three novelists, alongside William Faulkner and John Updike, to ever receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. The Pulitzer prizes were established in 1917 when newspaper publisher, Joseph Pulitzer, left money in his will to Columbia University to open a journalism school. The Pulitzers would become some of the most coveted awards for journalists as well as authors of novels, dramas, history, poetry and biography.

  The Gentleman from Indiana centres on John Harkless, a young law school graduate, who chooses, against expectations, to settle down in a small, dreary town in Indiana. He soon becomes the owner and editor of a local newspaper and discovers that the town is represented in the Senate and House of Representatives by corrupt officials. Harkless is determined to expose and defeat the evil that permeates the town and is desperate to win justice for his community, even if it means taking on violent forces and placing himself in physical danger. Tarkington would actually briefly become a member of the legislature in 1902 when, running for the Republican Party, he was elected to the Indiana House of Representatives for one term. In 1915, the novel was adapted as a silent film starring Dustin Farnum and Winifred Kingston and directed by Frank Lloyd.

  Advertisement for the 1915 silent film

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I. THE YOUNG MAN WHO CAME TO STAY

  CHAPTER II. THE STRANGE LADY

  CHAPTER III. LONESOMENESS

  CHAPTER IV. THE WALRUS AND THE CARPENTER

  CHAPTER V. AT THE PASTURE BARS: ELDER-BUSHES MAY HAVE STINGS

  CHAPTER VI. JUNE

  CHAPTER VII. MORNING: “SOME IN RAGS AND SOME IN TAGS AND SOME IN VELVET

  CHAPTER VIII. GLAD AFTERNOON: THE GIRL BY THE BLUE TENT-POLE

  CHAPTER IX. NIGHT: IT IS BAD LUCK TO SING BEFORE BREAKFAST

  CHAPTER X. THE COURT-HOUSE BELL

  CHAPTER XI. JOHN BROWN’S BODY

  CHAPTER XII. JERRY THE TELLER

  CHAPTER XIII. JAMES FISBEE

  CHAPTER XIV. A RESCUE

  CHAPTER XV. NETTLES

  CHAPTER XVI. PRETTY MARQUISE

  CHAPTER XVII. HELEN’S TOAST

  CHAPTER XVIII. THE TREACHERY OF H. FISBEE

  CHAPTER XIX. THE GREAT HARKLESS COMES HOME

  The first edition of the novel

  CHAPTER I. THE YOUNG MAN WHO CAME TO STAY

  THERE IS A fertile stretch of flat lands in Indiana where unagrarian Eastern travellers, glancing from car-windows, shudder and return their eyes to interior upholstery, preferring even the swaying caparisons of a Pullman to the monotony without. The landscape lies interminably level: bleak in winter, a desolate plain of mud and snow; hot and dusty in summer, in its flat lonesomeness, miles on miles with not one cool hill slope away from the sun. The persistent tourist who seeks for signs of man in this sad expanse perceives a reckless amount of rail fence; at intervals a large barn; and, here and there, man himself, incurious, patient, slow, looking up from the fields apathetically as the Limited flies by. Widely separated from each other are small frame railway stations — sometimes with no other building in sight, which indicates that somewhere behind the adjacent woods a few shanties and thin cottages are grouped about a couple of brick stores.

  On the station platforms there are always two or three wooden packing-boxes, apparently marked for travel, but they are sacred from disturbance and remain on the platform forever; possibly the right train never comes along. They serve to enthrone a few station loafers, who look out from under their hat-brims at the faces in the car-windows with the languid scorn a permanent fixture always has for a transient, and the pity an American feels for a fellow-being who does not live in his town. Now and then the train passes a town built scatteringly about a court-house, with a mill or two humming near the tracks. This is a county-seat, and the inhabitants and the local papers refer to it confidently as “our city.” The heart of the flat lands is a
central area called Carlow County, and the county-seat of Carlow is a town unhappily named in honor of its first settler, William Platt, who christened it with his blood. Natives of this place have sometimes remarked, easily, that their city had a population of from five to six thousand souls. It is easy to forgive them for such statements; civic pride is a virtue.

  The social and business energy of Plattville concentrates on the Square. Here, in summer-time, the gentlemen are wont to lounge from store to store in their shirt sleeves; and here stood the old, red-brick court-house, loosely fenced in a shady grove of maple and elm— “slipp’ry ellum” — called the “Court-House Yard.” When the sun grew too hot for the dry-goods box whittlers in front of the stores around the Square and the occupants of the chairs in front of the Palace Hotel on the corner, they would go across and drape themselves over the court-house fence, under the trees, and leisurely carve there initials on the top board. The farmers hitched their teams to the fence, for there were usually loafers energetic enough to shout “Whoa!” if the flies worried the horses beyond patience. In the yard, amongst the weeds and tall, unkept grass, chickens foraged all day long; the fence was so low that the most matronly hen flew over with propriety; and there were gaps that accommodated the passage of itinerant pigs. Most of the latter, however, preferred the cool wallows of the less important street corners. Here and there a big dog lay asleep in the middle of the road, knowing well that the easy-going Samaritan, in his case, would pass by on the other side.

  Only one street attained to the dignity of a name — Main Street, which formed the north side of the Square. In Carlow County, descriptive location is usually accomplished by designating the adjacent, as, “Up at Bardlocks’,” “Down by Schofields’,” “Right where Hibbards live,” “Acrost from Sol. Tibbs’s,” or, “Other side of Jones’s field.” In winter, Main Street was a series of frozen gorges land hummocks; in fall and spring, a river of mud; in summer, a continuing dust heap; it was the best street in Plattville.

  The people lived happily; and, while the world whirled on outside, they were content with their own. It would have moved their surprise as much as their indignation to hear themselves spoken of as a “secluded community”; for they sat up all night to hear the vote of New York, every campaign. Once when the President visited Rouen, seventy miles away, there were only few bankrupts (and not a baby amongst them) left in the deserted homes of Carlow County. Everybody had adventures; almost everybody saw the great man; and everybody was glad to get back home again. It was the longest journey some of them ever set upon, and these, elated as they were over their travels, determined to think twice ere they went that far from home another time.

  On Saturdays, the farmers enlivened the commercial atmosphere of Plattville; and Miss Tibbs, the postmaster’s sister and clerk, used to make a point of walking up and down Main Street as often as possible, to get a thrill in the realization of some poetical expressions that haunted her pleasingly; phrases she had employed frequently in her poems for the “Carlow County Herald.” When thirty or forty country people were scattered along the sidewalks in front of the stores on Main Street, she would walk at nicely calculated angles to the different groups so as to leave as few gaps as possible between the figures, making them appear as near a solid phalanx as she could. Then she would murmur to herself, with the accent of soulful revel, “The thronged city streets,” and, “Within the thronged city,” or, “Where the thronging crowds were swarming and the great cathedral rose.” Although she had never been beyond Carlow and the bordering counties in her life, all her poems were of city streets and bustling multitudes. She was one of those who had been unable to join the excursion to Rouen when the President was there; but she had listened avidly to her friends’ descriptions of the crowds. Before that time her muse had been sylvan, speaking of “Flow’rs of May,” and hinting at thoughts that overcame her when she roved the woodlands thro’; but now the inspiration was become decidedly municipal and urban, evidently reluctant to depart beyond the retail portions of a metropolis. Her verses beginning, “O, my native city, bride of Hibbard’s winding stream,” — Hibbard’s Creek runs west of Plattville, except in time of drought— “When thy myriad lights are shining, and thy faces, like a dream, Go flitting down thy sidewalks when their daily toil is done,” were pronounced, at the time of their publication, the best poem that had ever appeared in the “Herald.”

  This unlucky newspaper was a thorn in the side of every patriot of Carlow County. It was a poor paper; everybody knew it was a poor paper; it was so poor that everybody admitted it was a poor paper — worse, the neighboring county of Amo possessed a better paper, the “Amo Gazette.” The “Carlow County Herald” was so everlastingly bad that Plattville people bent their heads bitterly and admitted even to citizens of Amo that the “Gazette” was the better paper. The “Herald” was a weekly, issued on Saturday; sometimes it hung fire over Sunday and appeared Monday evening. In their pride, the Carlow people supported the “Herald” loyally and long; but finally subscriptions began to fall off and the “Gazette” gained them. It came to pass that the “Herald” missed fire altogether for several weeks; then it came out feebly, two small advertisements occupying the whole of the fourth page. It was breathing its last. The editor was a clay-colored gentleman with a goatee, whose one surreptitious eye betokened both indolence of disposition and a certain furtive shrewdness. He collected all the outstanding subscriptions he could, on the morning of the issue just mentioned, and, thoughtfully neglecting several items on the other side of the ledger, departed from Plattville forever.

  The same afternoon a young man from the East alighted on the platform of the railway station, north of the town, and, entering the rickety omnibus that lingered there, seeking whom it might rattle to deafness, demanded to be driven to the Herald Building. It did not strike the driver that the newcomer was precisely a gay young man when he climbed into the omnibus; but, an hour later, as he stood in the doorway of the edifice he had indicated as his destination, depression seemed to have settled into the marrow of his bones. Plattville was instantly alert to the stranger’s presence, and interesting conjectures were hazarded all day long at the back door of Martin’s Dry-Goods Emporium, where all the clerks from the stores around the Square came to play checkers or look on at the game. (This was the club during the day; in the evening the club and the game removed to the drug, book, and wall-paper store on the corner.) At supper, the new arrival and his probable purposes were discussed over every table in the town. Upon inquiry, he had informed Judd Bennett, the driver of the omnibus, that he had come to stay. Naturally, such a declaration caused a sensation, as people did not come to Plattville to live, except through the inadvertency of being born there. In addition, the young man’s appearance and attire were reported to be extraordinary. Many of the curious, among them most of the marriageable females of the place, took occasion to pass and repass the sign of the “Carlow County Herald” during the evening.

  Meanwhile, the stranger was seated in the dingy office upstairs with his head bowed low on his arms. Twilight stole through the dirty window-panes and faded into darkness. Night filled the room. He did not move. The young man from the East had bought the “Herald” from an agent; had bought it without ever having been within a hundred miles of Plattville. He had vastly overpaid for it. Moreover, the price he had paid for it was all the money he had in the world.

  The next morning he went bitterly to work. He hired a compositor from Rouen, a young man named Parker, who set type all night long and helped him pursue advertisements all day. The citizens shook their heads pessimistically. They had about given up the idea that the “Herald” could ever amount to anything, and they betrayed an innocent, but caustic, doubt of ability in any stranger.

  One day the new editor left a note on his door; “Will return in fifteen minutes.”

  Mr. Rodney McCune, a politician from the neighboring county of Gaines, happening to be in Plattville on an errand to his henchmen, found the no
te, and wrote beneath the message the scathing inquiry, “Why?”

  When he discovered this addendum, the editor smiled for the first time since his advent, and reported the incident in his next issue, using the rubric, “Why Has the ‘Herald’ Returned to Life?” as a text for a rousing editorial on “honesty in politics,” a subject of which he already knew something. The political district to which Carlow belonged was governed by a limited number of gentlemen whose wealth was ever on the increase; and “honesty in politics” was a startling conception to the minds of the passive and resigned voters, who discussed the editorial on the street corners and in the stores. The next week there was another editorial, personal and local in its application, and thereby it became evident that the new proprietor of the “Herald” was a theorist who believed, in general, that a politician’s honor should not be merely of that middling healthy species known as “honor amongst politicians”; and, in particular, that Rodney McCune should not receive the nomination of his party for Congress. Now, Mr. McCune was the undoubted dictator of the district, and his followers laughed at the stranger’s fantastic onset.

  But the editor was not content with the word of print; he hired a horse and rode about the country, and (to his own surprise) he proved to be an adaptable young man who enjoyed exercise with a pitchfork to the farmer’s profit while the farmer talked. He talked little himself, but after listening an hour or so, he would drop a word from the saddle as he left; and then, by some surprising wizardry, the farmer, thinking over the interview, decided there was some sense in what that young fellow said, and grew curious to see what the young fellow had further to say in the “Herald.”