BOOTH TARKINGTON. THE WORLD DOES MOVE

[The following excerpt describes Booth Tarkington's return to his native Indianapolis in 1913]

New York , however, was not my destination, being but a way station on this decisive journey to the verdant plain that had for me the persistent claim of native soil calling always, however faintly, to its wandering sons, "Come home!" A stranger, looking forth from his sleeping-car after a night of curving among the hills, might wonder why anybody should come home to this level monotony of landscape and the reiterating shabby back ends of wood and brick country towns, all alike. Moreover, a native son might himself feel a qualm or two of that same wonder, especially if he had been living in Paris . The flat lands were bleaker than they had been aforetime; the ground was dark and fertile, but great stretches of forest were gone, leaving only clumps of woodland here and there. The old bosky "snake fences" had disappeared, replaced by unamiable wire; and sometimes there would be a glimpse of a country road whereon an efficient, ugly little automobile bounced viciously into sudden distance, leaving the farmers' buggies and wagons, as it passed, enveiled and strangled in its long thick tail of dust. And sometimes, too, racing with the train, a demon of an interurban trolley-car would tear shrieking across the landscape.

Something of what had been the wistful charm of the long and wide flatness seemed to have disappeared; something of its old-time sleepy peacefulness seemed to be gone with the deep woods and rail fences. Nevertheless, it still had a voice and still could seem to murmur in its old-fashioned way, "Yes, this is home. It always will be home for those who were born in it. You have come home." And when I actually had reached home again, "old Charlie", the trolley-car conductor, who always remembered anybody that had ever lived on his "line", was warm in his congratulations. To him it seemed that any absence from his town must be unwilling, a hardship enforced. "You are certainly mighty lucky to get back to God's country again!" he said.

At first it did not appear to me that the Midland city had changed a great deal. It had grown, of course, because it was alive; and it was obviously not so clean as it had been. Almost into the Twentieth Century, natural gas had made it speckless, except for the ordinary dustiness of summer; and when the gas failed, anthracite helped to keep the air clear. There were not many factories in what was essentially a market town, the capital of an agricultural state, and what smoke there had been came principally from the railroad engines. Now, however, one was conscious sometimes of soft-coal smoke in the air, particularly at nightfall; but the traces were comparatively faint, far from unendurable.

The same pleasant old "principal residence streets" stretched serenely northward; the same green arches of joining branches shaded them; and the same solid, big old houses stood among the sun-and-shade-flecked green lawns; the same people lived in those houses. Two or three new buildings downtown had replaced old ones for offices and business; but the new ones were not veritable sky-scrapers--the tallest building in town was of twelve stories--and although the first apartment house was now more than ten years old, not more than half a dozen others had been built. One could stroll everywhere about the town, and, except for the automobiles, find only here and there a noticeable change….

[But] although most things "looked about the same" to the returned native, and the same old people and houses and trees and lawns and saloons appeared to be but slightly altered, principally by seeming a little older, there were tokens of a stirring, of something moving underneath, of unknown powers at work to produce a new kind of growing; but at first these hints were faint and not insistent. One felt that the town had somehow become more "citified"; it had become not only larger, that is to say, but more formal. Downtown there were traffic officers at several corners, and you couldn't drive just where and how you pleased, as in the easy-going old days of a little while before. In fact, one felt that the easy-going old days were gone forever. In this larger town young people wouldn't dance on a platform in somebody's yard by the light of paper lanterns; romantic gentlemen wouldn't pile an orchestra into "express wagons" and go midnight serenading; never again would a pretty young lady light the gas to show a bright window for the young Dons with fiddles, flutes and a harp upon the lawn below.

There was a great deal more asphalt and there were a great many more automobiles. A few "family carriages" were still to be seen on the streets, with a victoria or two andone or two broughams and coupes; "hired hacks" were still to be had at livery stables and horse cabs at the station; but the red-wheeled runabout had disappeared forever; the town's jeunesse doree (in the phrasing loved by the fin de siecle) now shot itself out to the country club with gas; the "fast trotter", that willing and faithful friend of youth, was gone with the red wheels, and so was the bicycle as the friend of pleasure. The little bells chimed no more above the darting lamps along the highways of a summer evening: there were too many automobiles.

Some of the streets had lengthened surprisingly and appeared to contemplate even more surprising extensions; asphalt and cement were stretching far into suburban territory, through what had been "picnic woods", not so very long before.