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B O O K S B Y
B O O T H T A R K I N G T O N
ALICE ADAMS
BEASLEY’S CHRISTMAS PARTY
BEAUTY AND THE JACOBIN
CHERRY
CONQUEST OF CANAAN
GENTLE JULIA
HARLEQUIN AND COLUMBINE
HIS OWN PEOPLE
IN THE ARENA
MONSIEUR BEAUCAIRE
PENROD
PENROD AND SAM
RAMSEY MILHOLLAND
SEVENTEEN
THE BEAUTIFUL LADY
THE FASCINATING STRANGER AND
OTHER STORIES
THE FLIRT
THE GENTLEMAN FROM INDIANA
THE GUEST OF QUESNAY
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS
THE MAN FROM HOME
THE MIDLANDER
THE TURMOIL
THE TWO VANREVELS
THE MIDLANDER
BY
BOOTH TARKINGTON
[Illustration]
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1924
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY IN THE UNITED STATES
AND GREAT BRITAIN
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
DEDICATED
TO
S. K. T.
The Midlander
CHAPTER I
PEOPLE used to say of the two Oliphant brothers that Harlan Oliphant
looked as if he lived in the Oliphants’ house, but Dan didn’t. This was
a poor sort of information to any one who had never seen the house, but
of course the supposition was that everybody had seen it and was
familiar with its significance. It stood in a great, fine yard, in that
row of great, fine yards at the upper end of National Avenue, before the
avenue swung off obliquely and changed its name to Amberson Boulevard.
The houses in the long row were such houses as are built no more;
bricklayers worked for a dollar a day and the workman’s day was ten
hours long when National Avenue grew into its glory. Those houses were
of a big-walled solidity to withstand time, fire, and tornado, but they
found another assailant not to be resisted by anything: this conqueror,
called Progress, being the growth of the city. Until the growth came
they were indomitable and fit for the centuries.
Moreover, they were of a dignified spaciousness not now to be
accomplished except by millionaires with wives content to spend their
days getting new servants. The New Yorker, admitted to these interiors
upon a visit westward, discovered an amplitude with which he had little
familiarity at home, where the brownstone fronts and squeezed apartments
showed him no such suites of big rooms; for, of all the million people
in New York, only a dozen families could have houses comparable in size
or stateliness. “Stately” was the word, though here some little care
must be taken, of course, with an eye to those who will not admit that
anything short of Blenheim or the Luxembourg is stately. The stateliness
of the Oliphants’ house was precisely the point in that popular
discrimination between the two young men who lived there: Harlan
Oliphant, like the house, was supposed to partake of this high quality,
but stateliness was the last thing any one ever thought of in connection
with Dan.
The youth of the brothers, in the happy and comfortable nineties of the
last century, is well remembered in their city, where the Christmas
holidays could never be thought really begun till the two Oliphants had
arrived from college and their broad-shouldered, long-tailed coats and
incredibly high white collars were seen officially moving in the figures
of a cotillion. They usually arrived on the same day, though often not
by the same train; but this was the mark of no disagreement or avoidance
of each other, yet bore some significance upon the difference between
them. It was the fashion to say of them that never were two brothers so
alike yet so unlike; and although both were tall, with blue eyes, brown
hair, and features of pleasant contour decisively outlined in what is
called a family likeness, people who knew them well found it a
satisfying and insoluble puzzle that they were the offspring of the same
father and mother.
The contrast appeared in childhood and was manifest to even the casual
onlooker when Dan Oliphant was eleven or twelve years old and Harlan ten
or eleven. At that age Harlan was already an aristocrat, and, what is
more remarkable, kept himself always immaculate. If his collar rumpled
or was soiled he went immediately to his room and got a fresh one; he
washed his hands three or four times a day without parental suggestion
and he brushed his hair almost every time he washed his hands. He was
fastidious in his choice of companions, had no taste for chance
acquaintances, and on a school holiday could most frequently be found in
the library at home, reading a book beyond his years. The lively Daniel,
on the contrary, disported himself about the neighbourhood—or about
other neighbourhoods, for that matter—in whatever society offered him
any prospect of gayety. He played marbles “for keeps” with ragtag and
bobtail on every vacant lot in town; he never washed his hands or face,
or brushed his hair, except upon repeated command, yet loved water well
enough to “run off swimming” and dive through a film of ice upon an
early Saturday in March. He regaled himself with horseplay up and down
the alleys and had long talks with negro coachmen in their stables,
acquiring strange wisdom of them; he learned how to swear with some
intricacy, how to smoke almost anything not fireproof, how to “inhale,”
how to gamble with implements more sophisticated than marbles, and how
to keep all these accomplishments from the knowledge of his parents. He
kept them from Harlan’s knowledge, also, though not out of any fear that
Harlan would “tell.”
At some time in their early childhood the brothers had made the
discovery that they were uncongenial. This is not to say that they were
unamiable together, but that they had assumed a relation not wholly
unknown among brothers. They spoke to each other when it was necessary;
but usually, if they happened to find themselves together, they were
silent, each apparently unconscious of the other’s presence. Sometimes,
though rarely, they had a short argument, seldom upon a subject of great
importance; and only once did a difference between them attain the
dimensions of a quarrel.
This was on a summer day of feverish temperature, and the heat may have
had something to do with the emotion displayed by young Daniel, then
aged twelve. He was engaged, that afternoon, with a business friend,
Master Sam Kohn, and they were importantly busy in a latticed
summer-house, an ornament of the commodious lawn. They had entered into
a partnership for the sale of “Fancy Brackets and Fittings,” which they
manufactured out of old cigar boxes, with the aid of glue, a jig-saw,
and blue paint. The computed profits were already enormous, though no
sales had been attempted, since the glue was slow to harden on such a
hot day; and the partners worked diligently, glad to shed their
perspiration for the steadily increasing means to obtain riches.
At five o’clock Harlan dropped lightly from the big stone-trimmed bay
window of the library, crossed the lawn, where the grass was being
gilded now by the westering sun, and halted before the entrance of the
summer-house. He was the picture of a cool young gentleman, perfect in
white linen; his coat and trousers of this pleasant material were
unflawed by wrinkle or stain; his patent-leather pumps, unmarred by the
slightest crack, glittered among the short green blades of grass; his
small black satin tie was as smooth as his brown hair.
To this perfection the busy partners within the summer-house were a
sufficient contrast. Soiled blue upon every available surface, they
continued their labours, paying no visible attention to the cold-eyed
young observer, but consulting each other perhaps the more importantly
because of the presence of an audience, however skeptical. Master Kohn,
swarthy, bow-legged, and somewhat undersized for his thirteen years, was
in fact pleased to be associated with the superior Harlan, even so
tenuously. He was pleased, also, to be a partner of Dan’s, though this
was no great distinction, because Dan, as the boys’ world knew, would
willingly be friendly (or even intimate) with anybody, and consequently
no social advancement was to be obtained through him. That commodity is
to be had of only those who decline to deal in it, and thus Sam Kohn
felt that he was becoming imbued with a certain amount of superiority
because Harlan Oliphant had come to look on at the work.
Sam decided to make a suggestion. “Look at your brother,” he said to
Dan. “Maybe he’d like to git into our partnership. We could give him a
share, if he starts in fresh and works hard.”
“Thanks!” Harlan said with cold sarcasm, and addressed his brother: “Do
you know what time it is and what the family is supposed to do this
evening?”
“Yes,” Dan answered, not looking up from his jig-saw. “We’re goin’ to
dinner at grandma Savage’s.”
“Mother sent me to tell you it’s time for you to come in and wash
yourself and dress up,” said Harlan. “The mess you’ve got yourself in,
it’ll take you till after six o’clock, and we’re supposed to be there
then.”
“Sam and I got some pretty important jobs to finish,” Dan returned
carelessly. “I got plenty time to change my clo’es and get washed up.”
“No, you haven’t. You quit playing with that boy and those dirty things
and go in the house.”
Upon this, Dan stopped the operation of the jig-saw and looked at his
brother in a puzzled way. “What you mean callin’ our brackets and
fittin’s ‘dirty things?’” he inquired. “I expect you don’t hardly
realize Sam Kohn and I got a regular factory here, Harlan.”
“A ‘factory,’ is it?” said Harlan, and laughed in the manner of a
contemptuous adult. “Well, you close up your old factory and come in the
house and get ready.”
“I can’t for a while,” Dan returned, beginning his work with the jig-saw
again. “I told you we got lots to do before we quit to-night.”
“You stop playing with that silly little saw,” Harlan said sharply, for
he had begun to feel some irritation. “You come in the house right this
instant.”
“No; I can’t yet, Harlan. Sam and I got to——”
“Never mind!” Harlan interrupted. “You come in the house and let this
boy go home.”
There was a frosty sharpness in his way of saying “let this boy go home”
that caused Dan to stop his work again and stare at his brother
challengingly. “Here!” he exclaimed. “This is as much my father and
mother’s yard as it is yours, and you got no business hintin’ at any
friend of mine to go home.”
“Haven’t I?” Harlan inquired, adopting a light mockery. “So this is a
friend of yours, is it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Oh, a _friend_?” Harlan mocked. “Oh, _excuse_ me! I didn’t understand!”
This proved to be intolerably provocative;—Dan abandoned the jig-saw
and stepped out of the summer-house to confront his brother frowningly.
“You shut up, Harlan Oliphant,” he said. “This is Sam Kohn’s and my
factory, and he’s got a right here. You quit your talkin’ so much around
here.”
“You quit your own talking,” Harlan retorted. “You do what mother sent
me to tell you to, and let that dirty little Jew go home!”
“What?” Dan cried.
“You better!” Harlan said, standing his ground, though Dan lifted his
hand threateningly. “We don’t want any dirty little Jews on our
premises.”
Dan gulped. “It isn’t his fault he’s a Jew. You take that back!”
“I won’t,” said Harlan. “He _is_ little and he _is_ dirty and he’s a
Jew. How you going to deny it?”
Flushed with anger and greatly perplexed, Dan glanced over his shoulder
at Master Kohn, who looked on with an inscrutable expression. “Well,
what if I can’t?” Dan said desperately, after this glance at his guest
and partner. “You got no right to insult him.”
“It isn’t an insult if it’s true, is it?”
“Yes, it is; and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. I got a notion—I
got a notion——”
“What notion have you got?” Harlan asked scornfully, as his brother
paused, swallowing heavily.
“I got a notion to make you ashamed!”
“How would you do it?”
“‘How?’ I’ll show you how!” And again Dan’s clenched right hand lowered
threateningly. The brothers stood eye to eye, and both faces were red.
“Go on,” said Harlan. “Hit me!”
Dan’s fist, like his expression, wavered for a moment, then he said:
“Well, I wish you weren’t my brother; but you are, and I won’t hit you.”
“I thought you wouldn’t,” Harlan retorted, turning toward the house. “I
guess I’ll have to tell mother you won’t wash yourself and dress until
she comes and sends this dirty little Jew out of our yard.”
Thus, having discovered the tender spot in his opponent’s sensibilities,
he avenged himself for the threat, and went on. His brother moved
impulsively, as if to follow and punish, but Mrs. Oliphant had long ago
impressed her sons heavily with the story of Cain and Abel, and he
halted, while Harlan went on coolly and disappeared into the house by a
side entrance.
“Doggone you!” Dan muttered; then turned back to the factory, where
Master Kohn, his head down and his hands in his pockets, was scuffing
sawdust meditatively with the soles of his shoes. Dan likewise scuffed
sawdust for a time.
“Well,” Sam Kohn said finally, “I guess I better go on home before your
mamma comes to turn me out.”
“I don’t guess she would,” Dan said, not looking at him, but keeping his
gaze upon his own scuffing shoe. “She’s got a good deal o’ politeness
about her, and I don’t guess she would. You got a right to stay here
long as you want, Sammy. It’s half your factory.”
“Not if your family puts me out, it ain’t.”
“He had no business to call you that, Sammy.”
“To call me which?”
“A—a Jew,” said Dan, still keeping his eyes upon the ground.
“Why, I am a Jew.”
“Well, maybe; but——” Dan paused uncomfortably, then continued: “Well,
he didn’t have any right to call you one.”
“Yes, he had,” Sam returned, to his friend’s surprise. “He could call me
a Jew just the same I could call you English.”
“English? I’m not English.”
“Well, you’re _from_ English.”
“No,” Dan protested mildly. “Not for a couple o’ hundred years, anyway.”
“Well, I ain’t from Jews a couple thousand years, maybe.”
“But I’m full-blooded American,” said Dan.
“So’m I,” Sam insisted. “You’re American from English, and I’m American
from Jews. He’s got a right to call me a Jew.”
Dan stared at him incredulously. “Don’t you mind it?”
“Yes,” Sam admitted, “I do when he says it for a insult. He’s got a
right to call me a Jew, but he hasn’t got no right to call me a Jew for
a insult.”
“Well, he did,” Dan remarked gloomily. “He meant it the way you might
call somebody ‘Irish’ or ‘Dutchy’ or ‘Nigger.’”
“I know it. He called me dirty and little, too. Well, I am little, but I
ain’t no dirtier than what you are, Dan, and you’re his own brother.”
“Well, then, you oughtn’t to mind his callin’ you dirty, Sam.”
“He wouldn’t call you dirty the same way he would me,” Sam returned
shrewdly; and then, after a momentary pause, he sighed and turned to go.
But that sigh of his, which had in it the quality of patience, strongly
affected Dan’s sympathies, for a reason he could not have explained.
“Don’t go, Sammy,” he said. “You don’t have to go just because he——”
“Yeh, I better,” Sam said, not looking back, but continuing to move
toward the distant gate. “I better go before your mamma comes to put me
out.”
Dan protested again, but Sam shook his head and went on across the lawn,
his hands in his pockets, his head down. The high iron fence, painted
white, culminated in an elaborate gateway, and, when Sam passed out to
the sidewalk there, the iron gateposts rose far above him. Plodding out
between these high white posts, the shabby little figure did not lack
pathos; nor was pathos absent from it as it went doggedly down the
street in the thinning gold of the late afternoon sunshine. Sam looked
back not once; but Dan watched him until he was out of sight, then
returned to the interior of the summer-house, sat down, and stared
broodingly at the littered floor. The floor was not what he saw,
however, for his actual eyes were without vision just then, and it was
his mind’s eye that was busy. It dwelt upon the picture of the exiled
Sam Kohn departing forlornly, and the longer it thus dwelt the warmer
and more threatening grew a painful feeling that seemed to locate itself
in Dan’s upper chest, not far below his collar bone.
This feeling remained there while he dressed; and it was still there
when he sat down at his grandmother’s table for dinner. In fact, it so
increased in poignancy that he could not eat with his customary
heartiness; and his lack of appetite, though he made play with seemingly
busy fork and spoon to cover it, fell under the sharp eye of the lady at
the head of the table. She was a handsome, dominant old woman, with high
colour in her cheeks at seventy-eight, and thick hair, darker than it
was gray, under her lace cap. She sat straight upright in her stiff
chair, for she detested easy-chairs and had never in all her life
lounged in one or sat with her knees crossed; such things were done not
by ladies, but by hoodlums, she said. Her husband, a gentle, submissive
old man, was frail and bent with his years, though they had brought him
great worldly prosperity; and the grandchildren of this couple never
spoke of the house as “Grandpa Savage’s,” but always as “Grandma
Savage’s,” an intuitive discrimination that revealed the rulership. Mrs.
Savage ruled by means of a talent she had for destructive criticism,
which several times prevented her optimistic husband from venturing into
ruin, and had established her as the voice of wisdom.
“Daniel,” she said presently;—“you’re not eating.”
“Yes, I am, grandma.”
“No. Ever since you came to the table, you’ve been sitting there with
your head bent down like that and moving your hands to pretend you’re
eating, but not eating. What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothin’,” he muttered, not lifting his head. “I’m all right.”
“Adelaide,” Mrs. Savage said to his mother;—“has his appetite been
failing lately?”
“Why, no, mamma,” Mrs. Oliphant answered. She was a pretty woman,
quietly cheerful and little given to alarms or anxieties. “Not
seriously,” she added, smiling. “He did very well at lunch, at least.”
“He looks sickish,” said Mrs. Savage grimly. “He looks as if he were
beginning a serious illness. Well people don’t sit with their heads down
like that. What is the matter with you, Daniel?”
“Nothin’,” he said. “I told you I’m all right.”
“He isn’t though,” Mrs. Savage insisted, addressing the others. “Do you
know what’s the matter with him, Harlan?”
“Too much glue, I expect.”
“What?”
“Too much glue,” Harlan repeated. “He was playing with a lot of nasty
glue and paint all afternoon, and I expect the smell’s made him sick.
Too much glue and too much Jew.”
“Jew?” his grandmother inquired. “What do you mean by ‘too much Jew,’
Harlan?”
“He had a dirty little bow-legged Jew playing with him.”
“See here!” Dan said huskily, but he did not look up. “You be careful!”
“Careful of what?” Harlan inquired scornfully.
“Careful of what you say.”
“Daniel, were you playing with a Jew?” his grandmother asked.
“Yes, I was.”
He still did not look up, but his voice had a tone, plaintive and
badgered, that attracted the attention of his grandfather, and the old
gentleman interposed soothingly: “Don’t let ’em fret you, Dannie. It
wasn’t particularly wicked of you to play with a Jew, I expect.”
“No,” said Dan’s father. “I don’t believe I’d let myself be much worried
over that, if I were you, Dan.”
“No?” said Mrs. Savage, and inquired further, somewhat formidably: “You
don’t prefer your sons to choose companions from their own circle, Henry
Oliphant?”
“Oh, yes, I do, ma’am,” he returned amiably. “As a general thing I
believe it’s better for them to be intimate with the children of their
mother’s and father’s old family friends; but at the same time I hope
Dan and Harlan won’t forget that we live in a country founded on
democratic principles. The population seems to me to begin to show signs
of altering with emigration from Europe; and it’s no harm for the boys
to know something of the new elements, though for that matter we’ve
always had Jews, and they’re certainly not bad citizens. I don’t see any
great harm in Dan’s playing a little with a Jewish boy, if he wants to.”
“I wasn’t playin’,” Dan said.
“Weren’t you?” his father asked. “What were you doing?”
“We were—we were manufacturing. We were manufacturing useful articles.”
“What were they?”
“Ornamental brackets to nail on walls and put things on. We were goin’
to make good money out of it.”
“Well, that was all right,” Mr. Oliphant said genially. “Not a bad idea
at all. You’re all right, Dannie.”
Unfortunately, a word of sympathy often undermines the composure of the
recipient; and upon this Dan’s lower lip began to quiver, though he
inclined his head still farther to conceal the new tokens of his
agitation.
He was not aided by his coolly observant young brother. “Going to cry
about it?” Harlan asked, quietly amused.
“You let Dannie alone,” said the grandfather; whereupon Harlan laughed.
“You ought to see what he and his little Jew partner called brackets!”
he said. “Dan’s always thinking he’s making something, and it’s always
something just awful. What he and that Sam Kohn were really making
to-day was a horrible mess of our summer-house. It’ll take a week’s work
for somebody to get it cleaned up, and he got mad at me and was going to
hit me because mamma sent me to tell him to come in the house and get
ready for dinner.”
“I did not,” Dan muttered.
“You didn’t? Didn’t you act like you were going to hit me?”
“Yes,” Dan said. “But it wasn’t because what you say. It was because you
called Sam names.”
“I didn’t.”
“You did!” And now Dan looked up, showing eyes that glistened along the
lower lids. “You—you hurt his feelings.”
Harlan had the air of a self-contained person who begins to be
exasperated by a persistent injustice, and he appealed to the company.
“I told him time and again mamma wanted him to come in and get ready to
come here for dinner, and he simply wouldn’t do it.”
Mrs. Savage shook her head. “I’ve always told you,” she said to her
daughter, “you’ll repent bitterly some day for your lack of discipline
with your children. You’re not raising them the way I raised mine, and
some day——”
But Harlan had not finished his explanation. “So, after I waited and
waited,” he continued, “and they just went on messing up our
summer-house, I told him he’d better come in and let the dirty little
Jew boy go home. That’s all I said, and he was going to hit me for it.”
“You—you hurt his fuf-feelings,” Dan stammered, as his emotion
increased. “I told you, you hurt his _feelings_!”
“Pooh!” Harlan returned lightly. “What feelings has he got? He wouldn’t
be around where he doesn’t belong if he had any.”
“I asked him there,” Dan said, the tears in his eyes overflowing as he
spoke; and he began to grope hurriedly through his various pockets for a
handkerchief. “He had a right to be where he was invited, didn’t he?
You—you called him——”
“I said he was just exactly what he is, and if he ever comes around our
yard again, I’ll say it again.”
“No, you won’t!”
“Oh, yes, I will,” Harlan said with perfect composure; and this evidence
that he believed himself in the right and would certainly carry out his
promise was too much for the suffering Dan, who startled his relatives
by unexpectedly sobbing aloud.
“You dog-gone old _thing_!” he cried, his shoulders heaving and his
voice choked with the half-swallowed tears in his throat. “I _will_ hit
you now!” He rose, making blind sweeps with both arms in the direction
of Harlan, and, in a kind of anguish, gurgling out imprecations and
epithets that shocked his family; but Mr. Oliphant caught the flailing
hands, took the boy by the shoulders and impelled him from the room,
going with him. A moment or two later the passionate voice ceased to be
coherent; plaintive sounds were heard, growing fainter with increasing
distance; and Mr. Oliphant, slightly flushed, returned to finish his
dinner.
“I sent him home,” he explained. “He’ll probably feel better, out in the
dark alone.”
“And may I inquire, Henry Oliphant,” said the old lady at the head of
the table;—“is that all you intend to do about it?”
“Well, I might talk to him after he cools off a little.”
“Yes, I suppose that will be all!” Mrs. Savage returned with a short
laugh, emphatically one of disapproval. “It’s a fine generation you
modern people are raising. When I was fifteen I was supposed to be a
woman, but my father whipped me for a slight expression of irreverence
on Sunday.”
“I’m sorry to hear it, ma’am,” her son-in-law said genially.
“I’m not sorry it happened,” she informed him, not relaxing. “Such
things were part of a discipline that made a strong people.”
“Yes, ma’am; I’ve no doubt it’s to your generation we owe what the
country is to-day.”
“And it’s your generation that’s going to let it go to the dogs!” the
old lady retorted sharply. “May I ask what you intend to do to protect
Harlan when you go home and his brother attacks him?”
But at this Oliphant laughed. “Dan won’t attack him. By the time we get
home Dan will probably be in bed.”
“Then he’ll attack Harlan to-morrow.”
“No, he won’t, ma’am. I don’t say Dan won’t sleep on a damp pillow
to-night, the way he was going on, but by to-morrow he’ll have forgotten
all about it.”
“He won’t,” she declared. “A child can’t have a passion like that, with
its parents doing nothing to discipline it, and then just forget. Harlan
only did his duty, but Dan will attack him again the first chance he
gets. You’ll see!”
Oliphant was content to let her have the last word—perhaps because he
knew she would have it in any event—so he laughed again, placatively,
and began to talk with his father-in-law of Mr. Blaine’s chances at the
approaching national convention; while Mrs. Savage shook her gloomy,
handsome head and made evident her strong opinion that the episode was
anything but closed. There would always henceforth be hatred between the
two brothers, she declared to her daughter, whom she succeeded in
somewhat depressing.
But as a prophet she appeared before long to have failed, at least in
regard to the predicted feeling between her two grandsons. Dan may have
slept on his wrath, but he did not cherish it; and the next day his
relations with Harlan were as usual. The unarmed neutrality, which was
not precisely a mutual ignoring, was resumed and continued. It
continued, indeed, throughout the youth of the brothers; and prevailed
with them during their attendance at the university at New Haven,
whither they went in imitation of their father before them. The studious
Harlan matriculated in company with his older brother; they were
classmates, though not roommates; and peace was still prevalent between
them when they graduated. Nevertheless, in considering and comprehending
the career of a man like Daniel Oliphant, certain boyhood episodes
appear to shed a light, and the conflict over little Sammy Kohn bears
some significance.