“Do you play?” he asked, and his tone and look were those of one who watches at the sick-bed of a valued child.
“Yes, a little.”
“I love the piano.” He was untroubled by any remorse for what he and some of his gang had done only two days since to a previously fine instrument in his dormitory entry. He had forgotten the dead past in his present vision, which was of a luxurious room in a spacious mansion, and a tired man of affairs coming quietly into that room — from a conference at which he had consolidated the haberdashery trade of the world — and sinking noiselessly upon a rich divan, while a beautiful woman in a dress of brown and tan, her hair slightly silvered, played to him through the twilight upon a grand piano, the only other sound in the great house being the softly murmurous voices of perfectly trained children being put to bed in a distant nursery upstairs.
“I like the stage, too,” she said. “Don’t you?”
“You know! Did you see The Tinkle-Dingle Girl?”
“Yes. I liked it.”
“It’s a peach show.” He spoke with warranted authority. During the university term just finished he had gone eight times to New York, and had enriched his critical perceptions of music and the drama by ten visits to The Tinkle-Dingle Girl, two of his excursions having fallen on matinee days. “Those big birds that played the comedy parts were funny birds, weren’t they?”
“The tramp and the brewer? Yes. Awfully funny.”
“We’ll go lots to the theatre!” He spoke eagerly and with superb simplicity, quite without consciousness that he was skipping much that would usually be thought necessarily intermediate. An enchanting vision engrossed his mind’s eye. He saw himself night after night at The Tinkle-Dingle Girl, his lovely wife beside him — growing matronly, perhaps, but slenderly matronly — with a grace of years that only added to her beauty, and always wearing tan gloves and a brown veil.
The bewilderment of her expression was perhaps justified.
“What!”
At this he realized the import of what he had said and what, in a measure, it did assume. He became pinkish, then pink, then more pink; and so did she. Paralyzed, the blushing pair looked at each other throughout this duet in colour, something like a glint of alarm beginning to show through the wide astonishment in her eyes; and with the perception of this he was assailed by an acute perturbation. He had spoken thoughtlessly, even hastily, he feared; he should have given her more time. Would she rise now with chilling dignity and leave him, it might be forever? Was he to lose her just when he had found her? He shuddered at the ghastly abyss of loneliness disclosed by the possibility. But this was only the darkest moment before a radiance that shot heavenward like the flaming javelins of an equatorial sunrise.
Her eyes lowered slowly till the long, brown lashes shadowed the rose-coloured cheek and the fall of her glance came to rest upon the arms of their two chairs, where the edge of her coat sleeve just touched the knuckle of his little finger. Two people were passing in front of them; there was no one who could see; and with a lightning-swift impulse she turned her wrist and for a half second, while his heart stopped beating, touched all his fingers with her own, then as quickly withdrew her hand and turned as far away from him as the position of her chair permitted.
It was a caress of incredible brevity, and so fleeting, so airy, that it was little more than a touch of light itself, like the faint quick light from a flying star one might just glimpse on one’s hand as it passed. But in our pleasant world important things have resulted from touches as evanescent as that. Nature has its uses for the ineffable.
Blazing with glory, dumb with rapture, Henry Millick Chester felt his heart rebound to its work, while his withheld breath upheaved in a gulp that half suffocated him. Thus, blinded by the revelation of the stupefying beauty of life, he sat through a heaven-stricken interval, and time was of no moment. Gradually he began to perceive, in the midst of the effulgence which surrounded the next chair like a bright mist, the adorable contour of a shoulder in a tan coat and the ravishing outline of a rosy cheek that belonged to this divine girl who was his.
By and by he became dreamily aware of other objects beyond that cheek and that shoulder, of a fat man and his fat wife on the opposite side of the car near the end. Unmistakably they were man and wife, but it seemed to Henry that they had no reason to be — such people had no right to be married. They had no obvious right to exist at all; certainly they had no right whatever to exist in that car. Their relation to each other had become a sickening commonplace, the bleakness of it as hideously evident as their overfed convexity. It was visible that they looked upon each other as inevitable nuisances which had to be tolerated. They were horrible. Had Love ever known these people? It was unthinkable! For lips such as theirs to have pronounced the name of the god would have been blasphemy; for those fat hands ever to have touched, desecration! Henry hated the despicable pair.
All at once his emotion changed: he did not hate them, he pitied them. From an immense height he looked down with compassion upon their wretched condition. He pitied everybody except himself and the roseate being beside him; they floated together upon a tiny golden cloud, alone in the vast sky at an immeasurable altitude above the squalid universe. A wave of pity for the rest of mankind flooded over him, but most of all he pitied that miserable, sodden, befleshed old married couple.
He was dimly aware of a change that came over these fat people, a strangeness; but he never did realize that at this crisis his eyes, fixed intently upon them and aided by his plastic countenance, had expressed his feelings and sentiments regarding them in the most lively and vivid way. For at the moment when the stout gentleman laid his paper down, preparatory to infuriated inquiry, both he and his wife were expunged from Henry’s consciousness forever and were seen of him thenceforth no more than if they had been ether and not solid flesh. The exquisite girl had been pretending to pick a thread out of her left sleeve with her right hand — but now at last she leaned back in her chair and again turned her face partly toward Henry. Her under lip was caught in slightly beneath her upper teeth, as if she had been doing something that possibly she oughtn’t to be doing, and though the pause in the conversation had been protracted — it is impossible to calculate how long — her charming features were still becomingly overspread with rose. She looked toward her rapt companion, not at him, and her eyes were preoccupied, tender, and faintly embarrassed.
The pause continued.
He leaned a little closer to her. And he looked at her and looked at her and looked at her. At intervals his lips moved as if he were speaking, and yet he was thinking wordlessly. Leaning thus toward her, his gaze and attitude had all the intensity of one who watches a ninth-inning tie in the deciding game of a championship series. And as he looked and looked and looked, the fat man and his wife, quite unaware of their impalpability, also looked and looked and looked in grateful fascination.
“Did you—” Henry Millick Chester finally spoke these words in a voice he had borrowed, evidently from a stranger, for it did not fit his throat and was so deep that it disappeared — it seemed to fall down a coal-hole and ended in a dusty choke. “Did you—” he began again, two octaves higher, and immediately squeaked out. He said “Did you” five times before he subjugated the other two words.
“Did you — mean that?”
“What?” Her own voice was so low that he divined rather than heard what she said. He leaned even a little closer — and the fat man nudged his wife, who elbowed his thumb out of her side morbidly: she wasn’t missing anything.
“Did you — did you mean that?”
“Mean what?”
“That!”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“When you — when you — oh, you know!”
“No, I don’t.”
“When you — when you took my hand.”
“I!”
With sudden, complete self-possession she turned quickly to face him, giving him a look of half-shocked, half-a
mused astonishment.
“When I took your hand?” she repeated incredulously. “What are you saying?”
“You — you know,” he stammered. “A while ago when — when — you — you—”
“I didn’t do anything of the kind!” Impending indignation began to cloud the delicate face ominously. “Why in the world should I?”
“But you—”
“I didn’t!” She cut him off sharply. “I couldn’t. Why, it wouldn’t have been nice! What made you dream I would do a thing like that? How dare you imagine such things!”
At first dumfounded, then appalled, he took the long, swift, sickening descent from his golden cloud with his mouth open, but it snapped tight at the bump with which he struck the earth. He lay prone, dismayed, abject. The lovely witch could have made him believe anything; at least it is the fact that for a moment she made him believe he had imagined that angelic little caress; and perhaps it was the sight of his utter subjection that melted her. For she flashed upon him suddenly with a dazing smile, and then, blushing again but more deeply than before, her whole attitude admitting and yielding, she offered full and amazing confession, her delicious laugh rippling tremulously throughout every word of it.
“It must have been an accident — partly!”
“I love you!” he shouted.
The translucent fat man and his wife groped for each other feverishly, and a coloured porter touched Henry Millick Chester on the shoulder.
“Be in Richmon’ less’n fi’ minutes now,” said the porter. He tapped the youth’s shoulder twice more; it is his office to awaken the rapt dreamer. “Richmon,’ In’iana, less’n fi’ minutes now,” he repeated more slowly.
Henry gave him a stunned and dishevelled “What?”
“You get off Richmon’, don’t you?”
“What of it? We haven’t passed Dayton yet.”
“Yessuh, long ‘go. Pass’ Dayton eight-fifty. Be in Richmon’ mighty quick now.”
The porter appeared to be a malicious liar. Henry appealed pitifully to the girl.
“But we haven’t passed Dayton?”
“Yes, just after you sat down by me. We stopped several minutes.”
“Yessuh. Train don’t stop no minutes in Richmon’ though,” said the porter with a hard laugh, waving his little broom at some outlying freight cars they were passing. “Gittin’ in now. I got you’ bag on platfawm.”
“I don’t want to be brushed,” Henry said, almost sobbing. “For heaven’s sake, get out!”
Porters expect anything. This one went away solemnly without even lifting his eyebrows.
The brakes were going on.
One class of railway tragedies is never recorded, though it is the most numerous of all and fills the longest list of heartbreaks; the statics ignore it, yet no train ever leaves its shed, or moves, that is not party to it. It is time and overtime that the safety-device inventors should turn their best attention to it, so that the happy day may come at last when we shall see our common carriers equipped with something to prevent these lovers’ partings.
The train began to slow down.
Henry Millick Chester got waveringly to his feet; she rose at the same time and stood beside him.
“I am no boy,” he began, hardly knowing what he said, but automatically quoting a fragment from his forthcoming address to his father. “I have reached man’s estate and I have met the only—”
He stopped short with an exclamation of horror. ‘You — you haven’t even told me your name!”
‘My name?” the girl said, a little startled.
‘Yes! And your address!”
“I’m not on my way home now,” she said. “I’ve been visiting in New York and I’m going to St. Louis to make another visit.”
“But your name!”
She gave him an odd glance of mockery, a little troubled.
“You mightn’t like my name!”
“Oh, please, please!”
“Besides, do you think it’s quite proper for me to—”
“Oh, please! To talk of that now! Please!” The train had stopped.
The glint of a sudden decision shone in the lovely eyes. “I’ll write it for you so you won’t forget.”
She went quickly to the writing desk at the end of the compartment, he with her, the eyes of the fat man and his wife following them like two pairs of searchlights swung by the same mechanism.
“And where you live,” urged Henry. “I shall write to you every day.” He drew a long, deep breath and threw back his head. “Till the day — the day when I come for you.”
“Don’t look over my shoulder.” She laughed shyly, wrote hurriedly upon a loose sheet, placed it in an envelope, sealed the envelope, and then, as he reached to take it, withheld it tantalizingly. “No. It’s my name and where I live, but you can’t have it. Not till you’ve promised not to open it until the train is clear out of the station.”
Outside the window sounded the twice-repeated “Awl aboh-oh,” and far ahead a fatal bell was clanging.
“I promise,” he gulped.
“Then take it!”
With a strange, new-born masterfulness he made a sudden impetuous gesture and lifted both the precious envelope and the fingers that inclosed it to his lips. Then he turned and dashed to the forward end of the car where a porter remained untipped as Henry leaped from the already rapidly moving steps of the car to the ground. Instantly the wonderful girl was drawn past him, leaning and waving from the railed rear platform whither she had run for this farewell. And in the swift last look that they exchanged there was in her still-flushing, lovely face a light of tenderness and of laughter, of kindness and of something like a fleeting regret.
The train gained momentum, skimming onward and away, the end of the observation car dwindling and condensing into itself like a magician’s disappearing card, while a white handkerchief, waving from the platform, quickly became an infinitesimal shred of white — and then there was nothing. The girl was gone.
Probably Henry Millick Chester owes his life to the fact that there are no gates between the station building and the tracks at Richmond. For gates and a ticket-clipping official might have delayed Henry’s father in the barely successful dash he made to drag from the path of a backing local a boy wholly lost to the outward world in a state of helpless puzzlement, which already threatened to become permanent as he stared and stared at a sheet of railway notepaper whereon was written in a charming hand:
Mary Smith
Chicago
The Short Stories
Tarkington attended Princeton University in the early 1890’s
List of Short Stories in Chronological Order
IN THE FIRST PLACE
BOSS GORGETT
THE ALIENS
THE NEED OF MONEY
HECTOR
MRS. PROTHEROE
GREAT MEN’S SONS
BEASLEY’S CHRISTMAS PARTY
THE SPRING CONCERT
CAPTAIN SCHLOTTERWERZ
THE FASINATING STRANGER
THE PARTY
THE ONE-HUNDRED-DOLLAR BILL
JEANNETTE
THE SPRING CONCERT
WILLAMILLA
THE ONLY CHILD
LADIES’ WAYS
MAYTIME IN MARLOWE
YOU
US
THE TIGER
MARY SMITH
List of Short Stories in Alphabetical Order
BEASLEY’S CHRISTMAS PARTY
BOSS GORGETT
CAPTAIN SCHLOTTERWERZ
GREAT MEN’S SONS
HECTOR
IN THE FIRST PLACE
JEANNETTE
LADIES’ WAYS
MARY SMITH
MAYTIME IN MARLOWE
MRS. PROTHEROE
THE ALIENS
THE FASINATING STRANGER
THE NEED OF MONEY
THE ONE-HUNDRED-DOLLAR BILL
THE ONLY CHILD
THE PARTY
THE SPRING CONCER
T
THE SPRING CONCERT
THE TIGER
US
WILLAMILLA
YOU
The Plays
“Seawood Cottage”, Kennebunkport, Maine — the summer home of Tarkington
The Man from Home
Co-written with Harry Leon Wilson
CONTENTS
ORIGINAL CAST OF CHARACTERS
CHARACTERS
THE FIRST ACT
THE SECOND ACT
THE THIRD ACT
THE FOURTH ACT
The original frontispiece
TO
WILLIAM HODGE
ORIGINAL CAST OF CHARACTERS
in
THE MAN FROM HOME
by
BOOTH TARKINGTON and HARRY LEON WILSON
PRESENTED UNDER THE MANAGEMENT OF LIEBLER & CO.
AT THE
STUDEBAKER THEATRE, CHICAGO
SEPTEMBER 29, 1907
WHERE IT RAN FOR A YEAR; THEN OPENED IN NEW YORK
AT THE
ASTOR THEATRE
AUGUST 17, 1908
CHARACTERS AND PLAYERS
Daniel Voorhees Pike William Hodge
The Grand Duke Vasili Vasilivitch Eben Plympton
The Earl of Hawcastle E. J. Ratcliffe
The Hon. Alermic St. Aubyn Echlin P. Gayer
Ivanoff Henry Harmon
Horace Granger-Simpson Hassard Short
Ribiere Harry L. Lang
Mariano Anthony Asher
Michele Antonio Salerno
Carabiniere A. Montegriffo
Valet de Chambre C. L. Felton
Ethel Granger-Simpson Olive Wyndam
Comtesse de Champigny Alice Johnson
Lady Creech Ida Vernon
TIME: THE PRESENT
PLACE: SORRENTO, SOUTHERN ITALY
CHARACTERS
MEN
DANIEL VOORHEES PIKE
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 520