Delphi Complete Works of Booth Tarkington (Illustrated), page 730
“What a horrible thought!” his mother exclaimed. “No, it’s absolutely impossible that anybody could be so lost to decency. Even she’d never do such a thing — with the Blues in their cottage and Janey here to be faced every day. No, I’m not fearing anything as bad as that; but I did hope that no overpowering family would ever rent that place. No other kind of family would want it or be able to pay for it; but it does look as if it’s happening.”
Two days later, as the people of France were celebrating the anniversary of the capture of the Bastille, there appeared on our beach at Stonehaven a figure comparable in its effect on ourselves to what the French might be supposed to feel did they behold, seemingly reclothed in the flesh, an apparition of Louis XVI. Our own apparition, moreover, might well have written “Rien” in his diary as Louis is said to have done on the evening of the day that cost him everything; one was as little aware as the other that anything extraordinary had happened or was happening. George Prettiman, whom we beheld with incredulity before us, plainly didn’t know that he was startling or even that Janey Blue’s friends had gathered about her as if to shut out the sight of him.
Some people come to Stonehaven for but a season; others for two or three. They live on the fringes of the place, as it were; know little and care less about either its continuous life or the semi-continuous life that gathers itself there every summer. On the beach these fringe people were disporting themselves as usual, not conscious how the habitués had clustered themselves into groups focussing their unbelieving stares upon Mr. Prettiman.
When I arrived he was just coming up out of the surf to stand placidly dripping upon its fluctuant edges and debate with himself, apparently, the question whether or not he’d be the better for another dip. He’d lost his beauty; fat can do this in less time than that elapsed since we’d seen him. Any sculptor knows how readily a little over-pudginess of a chin can bring pudginess to a nose, too, and how a slight protrusion of the abdomen can dwindle the proportions of a leg. He’d lost not a part of his beauty but all of it and was as little conscious of this as that he’d ever had any. For some moments he stood in contented vague contemplation; then returned into the surf.
The groups of bathers and non-bathers who’d been centered upon him spellbound began to break up and circulate among themselves. They all seemed to be saying, or, rather, gasping, “Can you believe it!”
Irving Pease and Emma had been swimming far out beyond the life raft, unaware of the sensation ashore. They turned, and it happened that they came out of the surf at the same time that George Prettiman came forth from his second plunge therein. The three figures emerged together with no one else near them. Emma stared, confounded; then gave George an amazed nod of recognition and walked away. Irvie Pease remained, however, the noon sun shining on his wet head and on George’s. Greetings were exchanged and the two shook hands; Irvie was seen to be holding some converse with the pariah.
“Oh, I wish he hadn’t done that!” Harriet exclaimed. “Surely he didn’t need to shake hands with him.”
“But he couldn’t very well help it,” Evelyn said. “George put out his hand, and after all he’s an old friend of Irvie’s. I wish I knew what they’re saying.” She had not long to wait. George went to the bath-houses and Irvie came laughing to join a hurriedly increasing group about his mother. Everybody wanted to know what had been said.
“Just nothing at all,” Irvie reported. “Except he’s fat as the Dickens, you wouldn’t know he’d ever been away. He said Hello and didn’t I think the water colder than usual to-day, and I said, ‘Well, not much colder’, and he said well, maybe it wasn’t but just seemed so to him, and then he said, ‘Well, be seeing you,’ and trotted off to his bath-house.” Irvie looked merrily at the semi-circle of serious faces now about him. “What more did you expect? Old George never said anything yet, did he?”
Three voices asked the same question, “But does it mean she’s here?”
“Search me!” Irvie said, and he and Emma went back for another swim.
The talk at our lunch-table and most of the other tables at the Inn, too, was concerned with the same question: Had she had the effrontery to come back to Stonehaven or was George Prettiman a mere errand boy detached to see that the palace was made ready for a tenant? For our table at least, Irvie disposed of the latter possibility. “Does anybody think he’s got sense enough?”
The question was settled the next day. I had not been to the beach but returned, at the hour for lunch, from an excursion in the “One o’Clock”, and the commotion of talk I heard from the Inn verandah gave me the answer as I went up the steps. It was jumbled but the fragments were sufficient: “No wonder she brought a house-party with her!” . . . “Looked as discontented as ever.” . . . “Oh, she’d have front enough for anything.” . . . “Who on earth are those people she’s brought here — self-confident theatrical-looking, the kind she would bring here?” . . . “Why on earth did Irvie Pease feel called upon to — —”
Irvie, standing just inside the screened doors of the Inn, was explaining that matter to his mother and Harriet. Both ladies, for almost the first time in their lives, looked critical of him, Harriet so much so that her displeasure was marked by her not looking at him at all. Apparently she looked out through the screen doors. Evelyn was almost sharp with him.
“Why on earth you had to let that woman go about presenting you to all her party — —”
“She didn’t, Mother!” Irvie’s tone was protestive. “I didn’t meet half of ’em. You see, there was a man I’d known at college — —”
“Yes, you’ve explained that, Irving.”
“Well, I had to speak to him, didn’t I? I couldn’t — —”
Emma came in, interrupting. “The most amazing thing! I mean the effect of Janey Blue’s getting another glimpse of George Prettiman. She doesn’t know how it happened to her.”
“How what happened to her?” Harriet asked.
“I mean the whole thing, Mother. He’s pudgy, absolutely pudgy! She doesn’t know how it happened to her in the first place. She sees she must have worshipped his beauty and it’s all gone. I talked to her and she wonders — she absolutely wonders! — how she wasted so much time on him and so much tragedy. She’s really cured; but isn’t it strange?”
END SYNOPSIS AND NOTES.
THE FOLLOWING IS a synopsis of the end as Mr. Tarkington wrote it, with the addition of some notes of his:
The very things that Irvie’s father and mother deplore — the publicity, the riches and show-off that attend Sylvia — attract Irvie. Sylvia tires of her beautiful, “harmless” George Prettiman and she decides upon changing him for Irvie.
Irvie is tempted by the vision — yachts, palaces, shining as the host at great parties, living in the delightful glare of the continuous conspicuousness that he loves. Edgar is horrified, tries to fight off the coming dreadful blow to Emma, the treachery to an old friend, George Prettiman, and the crushing disappointment to Will and Evelyn Pease, who abhor Sylvia Stelling and everything for which she stands.
Edgar’s devoted a large part of his own life to building up Irvie as a fine and triumphant figure in a worthy and useful life; he has subordinated even his own lifelong devotion to Emma for that end. In despair he sees that he has failed with Irvie, for whom Aladdin’s Cave has seemed to open.
All the egoism with which Irvie was born and which has been so long fostered by those who have loved him draws him onward. He falls for his vision of what Sylvia offers and takes her.
More than balancing this dénouement and “on the bright side”, is the increasing emphasis placed upon the developing character of Edgar Semple. Irvie has been the “show window”; but Edgar is the stock of goods, so to speak. Of course Irvie’s father’s plans for the two boys fall to the ground — Irvie isn’t going to be any good citizen, fine home-town lawyer; that’s all off. He looks toward being a great gentleman, country life, Palm Beach, big house-parties, patron of the arts, racing stable maybe. Will Pease’s plans, however, though at first seeming to fall to the ground, don’t do so. Edgar Semple, who in reality has always been the backbone of Irvie’s “success”, brilliantly upholds those plans and will more than fulfill Will’s hopes for the old law office.
The narrator’s partiality for Edgar is justified and his half-hidden long hope in regard to Emma is satisfied. Her maturing mind, awakened by shock, at last perceives that all along the best of Irvie, so to say, has come from Edgar. Edgar was always the substance and Irvie the surface glitter.
As for Irvie himself — to continue with another allusion to the Arabian Nights — the result is not Aladdin’s Cave but the ship upon which Sinbad is drawn to destruction upon the Lodestone Rock. Sylvia’s released egoism hasn’t let her picture herself as an over-shadowed or subservient wife but the rather as a super-dominant figure — with husbands (if she chooses another presently) who serve as equerries or attendants, background figures who must do what she tells them and run errands as she chooses. For all her follies and costly glitterings, she holds the purse strings tight, as did her mother before her — though possibly she’d let Irvie collect stamps and become another faded figure like her father, the unnoticeable Mr. Stelling.
Irvie is left to his tragi-comedy; but, to the narrator’s great satisfaction, the reward for Emma and for Irvie’s parents, too, rests upon the competent shoulders and the rising star of Edgar Semple.
NOTES:
An instance of Irvie’s talk — an automobile accident he saw. His whole account consists of what he was doing before, during and after the accident; what he said and did. Nothing about the people who were hurt.
I’d see Irvie one day with a Great Dane. Irvie loves to pretend to fight with the big dog. Irvie always thinks someone’s looking at him. When he walks he’s always making a picture out of himself — his dog is an appanage, like something to wear. After Sylvia is married to Irvie he gets to be her Great Dane — only middle-sized and rather cowed. Nobody’s ever stood up to Sylvia and nobody’s going to.
Will Pease dies, and Irvie at the funeral is a conspicuous and noble sufferer — holding up his mother. Self-conscious grief, though of course he does feel some. Edgar looked after things.
I see a party as probably the last view you’d have of Irvie. Sylvia is fascinated and courting somebody else. Irvie’s rather carelessly ordered by her to run and get something for the benefit of the man she’s showing off at. I’d been afraid that Emma might again be glamored and made unhappy by seeing Irvie at the party, where I think he will be as of yore the great figure and will give Emma a return of her feeling for him. Doesn’t — because Irvie is a pricked balloon.
In the end, when Sylvia has thrown Irvie out, Emma and I both suppose Edgar will take him back into the law firm, even though Edgar now has another partner. Edgar says no and means no. Irvie would be thought to have a right to come back into what had once been his father’s old firm; but Edgar is hard about it. No!
I see this is partly Edgar’s anger over the way Irvie treated Emma, and for the first time Emma — married to Edgar for some months — seems really to look up to him.
The Shorter Fiction
Tarkington attended Phillips Exeter Academy boarding school, New Hampshire
In the Arena (1905)
STORIES OF POLITICAL LIFE
CONTENTS
IN THE FIRST PLACE
PART I
BOSS GORGETT
THE ALIENS
THE NEED OF MONEY
HECTOR
PART II
MRS. PROTHEROE
GREAT MEN’S SONS
The original frontispiece
TO
MY FATHER
IN THE FIRST PLACE
THE OLD-TIMER, A lean, retired pantaloon, sitting with loosely slippered feet close to the fire, thus gave of his wisdom to the questioning student:
“Looking back upon it all, what we most need in politics is more good men. Thousands of good men are in; and they need the others who are not in. More would come if they knew how much they are needed. The dilettantes of the clubs who have so easily abused me, for instance, all my life, for being a ward-worker, these and those other reformers who write papers about national corruption when they don’t know how their own wards are swung, probably aren’t so useful as they might be. The exquisite who says that politics is ‘too dirty a business for a gentleman to meddle with’ is like the woman who lived in the parlour and complained that the rest of her family kept the other rooms so dirty that she never went into them.
“There are many thousands of young men belonging to what is for some reason called the ‘best class,’ who would like to be ‘in politics’ if they could begin high enough up — as ambassadors, for instance. That is, they would like the country to do something for them, though they wouldn’t put it that way. A young man of this sort doesn’t know how much he’d miss if his wishes were gratified. For my part, I’d hate not to have begun at the beginning of the game.
“I speak of it as a game,” the old gentleman went on, “and in some ways it is. That’s where the fun of it comes in. Yet, there are times when it looks to me more like a series of combats, hand-to-hand fights for life, and fierce struggles between men and strange powers. You buy your newspaper and that’s your ticket to the amphitheatre. But the distance is hazy and far; there are clouds of dust and you can’t see clearly. To make out just what is going on you ought to get down in the arena yourself. Once you’re in it, the view you’ll have and the fighting that will come your way will more than repay you. Still, I don’t think we ought to go in with the idea of being repaid.
“It seems an odd thing to me that so many men feel they haven’t any time for politics; can’t put in even a little, trying to see how their cities (let alone their states and the country) are run. When we have a war, look at the millions of volunteers that lay down everything and answer the call of the country. Well, in politics, the country needs all the men who have any patriotism — not to be seeking office, but to watch and to understand what is going on. It doesn’t take a great deal of time; you can attend to your business and do that much, too. When wrong things are going on and all the good men understand them, that is all that is needed. The wrong things stop going on.”
PART I
BOSS GORGETT
I GUESS I’VE been what you might call kind of an assistant boss pretty much all my life; at least, ever since I could vote; and I was something of a ward-heeler even before that. I don’t suppose there’s any way a man of my disposition could have put in his time to less advantage and greater cost to himself. I’ve never got a thing by it, all these years, not a job, not a penny — nothing but injury to my business and trouble with my wife. She begins going for me, first of every campaign.
Yet I just can’t seem to keep out of it. It takes a hold on a man that I never could get away from; and when I reach my second childhood and the boys have turned me out, I reckon I’ll potter along trying to look knowing and secretive, like the rest of the has-beens, letting on as if I still had a place inside. Lord, if I’d put in the energy at my business that I’ve frittered away on small politics! But what’s the use thinking about it?
Plenty of men go to pot horse-racing and stock gambling; and I guess this has just been my way of working off some of my nature in another fashion. There’s a good many like me, too; not out for office or contracts, nor anything that you can put your finger on in particular — nothing except the game. Of course, it’s a pleasure, knowing you’ve got more influence than some, but I believe the most you ever get out of it is in being able to help your friends, to get a man you like a job, or a good contract, something he wants, when he needs it.
I tell you then’s when you feel satisfied, and your time don’t seem to have been so much thrown away. You go and buy a higher-priced cigar than you can afford, and sit and smoke it with your feet out in the sunshine on your porch railing, and watch your neighbour’s children playing in their yard; and they look mighty nice to you; and you feel kind, and as if everybody else was.
But that wasn’t the way I felt when I helped to hand over to a reformer the nomination for mayor; then it was just selfish desperation and nothing else. We had to do it. You see, it was this way: the other side had had the city for four terms, and, naturally, they’d earned the name of being rotten by that time. Big Lafe Gorgett was their best. “Boss Gorgett,” of course our papers called him when they went for him, which was all the time; and pretty considerable of a man he was, too. Most people that knew him liked Lafe. I did. But he got a bad name, as they say, by the end of his fourth term as Mayor — and who wouldn’t? Of course, the cry went up all round that he and his crowd were making a fat thing out of it, which wasn’t so much the case as that Lafe had got to depending on humouring the gamblers and the brewers for campaign funds and so forth. In fact, he had the reputation of running a disorderly town, and the truth is, it was too wide open.
But we hadn’t been much better when we’d had it, before Lafe beat us and got in; and everybody remembered that. The “respectable element” wouldn’t come over to us strong enough for anybody we could pick of our own crowd; and so, after trying it on four times, we started in to play it another way, and nominated Farwell Knowles, who was already running on an independent ticket, got out by the reform and purity people. That is: we made him a fusion candidate, hoping to find some way to control him later. We’d never have done it if we hadn’t thought it was our only hope. Gorgett was too strong, and he handled the darkeys better than any man I ever knew. He had an organization for it which we couldn’t break; and the coloured voters really held the balance of power with us, you know, as they do so many other places near the same size, They were getting pretty well on to it, too, and cost more every election. Our best chance seemed to be in so satisfying the “law-and-order” people that they’d do something to counterbalance this vote — which they never did.
