His Own People E-Book

Booth Tarkington

• Herausgeber: DigiCat
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

In "His Own People," Booth Tarkington delves into the complexities of American identity and social stratification in the early 20th century. This novel employs a rich, narrative style characterized by keen observational humor and a detailed portrayal of Midwestern society. Tarkington's incisive depictions of familial relationships and societal expectations unfold within a framework that critically examines the American Dream, offering a tapestry of characters that are both relatable and vividly realized. The interplay of personal ambition against an evolving societal backdrop renders the book a crucial commentary on the era's cultural landscape. Booth Tarkington, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, hailed from Indianapolis, which greatly influenced his literary settings and themes. Growing up in an era marked by significant social and technological change, Tarkington was keenly aware of the tensions between tradition and modernity, a theme that resonates throughout "His Own People." His background in theater and literature enriched his storytelling, enabling him to create multifaceted characters whose struggles mirror the broader societal dilemmas of his time. Readers seeking a nuanced exploration of social dynamics and American values will find "His Own People" compelling. Tarkington's deft characterization and satirical wit not only illuminate the intricacies of his characters' lives but also evoke deep reflections on our own societal frameworks. This book is essential for anyone interested in the evolution of American literature and the themes that define human experience.

Leseprobe

Booth Tarkington

His Own People

 

EAN 8596547340379

DigiCat, 2022 Contact: [email protected]

Table of Contents

I. A Change of Lodging

II. Music on the Pincio

III. Glamour

IV. Good Fellowship

V. Lady Mount Rhyswicke

VI. Rake's Progress

VII. The Next Morning

VIII. What Cornish Knew

IX. Expiation

X. The Cab at the Corner

I. A Change of Lodging

Table of Contents

The glass-domed “palm-room” of the Grand Continental Hotel Magnifique in Rome is of vasty heights and distances, filled with a mellow green light which filters down languidly through the upper foliage of tall palms, so that the two hundred people who may be refreshing or displaying themselves there at the tea-hour have something the look of under-water creatures playing upon the sea-bed. They appear, however, to be unaware of their condition; even the ladies, most like anemones of that gay assembly, do not seem to know it; and when the Hungarian band (crustacean-like in costume, and therefore well within the picture) has sheathed its flying tentacles and withdrawn by dim processes, the tea-drinkers all float out through the doors, instead of bubbling up and away through the filmy roof. In truth, some such exit as that was imagined for them by a young man who remained in the aquarium after they had all gone, late one afternoon of last winter. They had been marvelous enough, and to him could have seemed little more so had they made such a departure. He could almost have gone that way himself, so charged was he with the uplift of his belief that, in spite of the brilliant strangeness of the hour just past, he had been no fish out of water.

While the waiters were clearing the little tables, he leaned back in his chair in a content so rich it was nearer ecstasy. He could not bear to disturb the possession joy had taken of him, and, like a half-awake boy clinging to a dream that his hitherto unkind sweetheart has kissed him, lingered on in the enchanted atmosphere, his eyes still full of all they had beheld with such delight, detaining and smiling upon each revelation of this fresh memory—the flashingly lovely faces, the dreamily lovely faces, the pearls and laces of the anemone ladies, the color and romantic fashion of the uniforms, and the old princes who had been pointed out to him: splendid old men wearing white mustaches and single eye-glasses, as he had so long hoped and dreamed they did.

“Mine own people!” he whispered. “I have come unto mine own at last. Mine own people!” After long waiting (he told himself), he had seen them—the people he had wanted to see, wanted to know, wanted to be of! Ever since he had begun to read of the “beau monde” in his schooldays, he had yearned to know some such sumptuous reality as that which had come true to-day, when, at last, in Rome he had seen—as he wrote home that night—“the finest essence of Old-World society mingling in Cosmopolis.”

Artificial odors (too heavy to keep up with the crowd that had worn them) still hung about him; he breathed them deeply, his eyes half-closed and his lips noiselessly formed themselves to a quotation from one of his own poems:

While trails of scent, like cobweb's films Slender and faint and rare, Of roses, and rich, fair fabrics, Cling on the stirless air, The sibilance of voices, At a wave of Milady's glove, Is stilled—

He stopped short, interrupting himself with a half-cough of laughter as he remembered the inspiration of these verses. He had written them three months ago, at home in Cranston, Ohio, the evening after Anna McCord's “coming-out tea.” “Milady” meant Mrs. McCord; she had “stilled” the conversation of her guests when Mary Kramer (whom the poem called a “sweet, pale singer”) rose to sing Mavourneen; and the stanza closed with the right word to rhyme with “glove.” He felt a contemptuous pity for his little, untraveled, provincial self of three months ago, if, indeed, it could have been himself who wrote verses about Anna McCord's “coming-out tea” and referred to poor, good old Mrs. McCord as “Milady”!

The second stanza had intimated a conviction of a kind which only poets may reveal:

She sang to that great assembly, They thought, as they praised her tone; But she and my heart knew better: Her song was for me alone.

He had told the truth when he wrote of Mary Kramer as pale and sweet, and she was paler, but no less sweet, when he came to say good-by to her before he sailed. Her face, as it was at the final moment of the protracted farewell, shone before him very clearly now for a moment: young, plaintive, white, too lamentably honest to conceal how much her “God-speed” to him cost her. He came very near telling her how fond of her he had always been; came near giving up his great trip to remain with her always.

“Ah!” He shivered as one shivers at the thought of disaster narrowly averted. “The fates were good that I only came near it!”

He took from his breast-pocket an engraved card, without having to search for it, because during the few days the card had been in his possession the action had become a habit.

“Comtesse de Vaurigard,” was the name engraved, and below was written in pencil: “To remember Monsieur Robert Russ Mellin he promise to come to tea Hotel Magnifique, Roma, at five o'clock Thursday.”

There had been disappointment in the first stages of his journey, and that had gone hard with Mellin. Europe had been his goal so long, and his hopes of pleasure grew so high when (after his years of saving and putting by, bit by bit, out of his salary in a real-estate office) he drew actually near the shining horizon. But London, his first stopping-place, had given him some dreadful days. He knew nobody, and had not understood how heavily sheer loneliness—which was something he had never felt until then—would weigh upon his spirits. In Cranston, where the young people “grew up together,” and where he met a dozen friends on the street in a half-hour's walk, he often said that he “liked to be alone with himself.” London, after his first excitement in merely being there, taught him his mistake, chilled him with weeks of forbidding weather, puzzled and troubled him.

He was on his way to Paris when (as he recorded in his journal) a light came into his life. This illumination first shone for him by means of one Cooley, son and inheritor of all that had belonged to the late great Cooley, of Cooley Mills, Connecticut. Young Cooley, a person of cheery manners and bright waistcoats, was one of Mellin's few sea-acquaintances; they had played shuffleboard together on the steamer during odd half-hours when Mr. Cooley found it possible to absent himself from poker in the smoking-room; and they encountered each other again on the channel boat crossing to Calais.

“Hey!” was Mr. Cooley's lively greeting. “I'm meetin' lots of people I know to-day. You runnin' over to Paris, too? Come up to the boat-deck and meet the Countess de Vaurigard.”

“Who?” said Mellin, red with pleasure, yet fearing that he did not hear aright.