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His Own People By: Booth Tarkington (1869-1946) |
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by Booth Tarkington I. A Change of Lodging 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has sheathed its flying tentacles and withdrawn by dim processes, the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... Continue reading book >>
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Fiction |
Literature |
Romance |
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