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Lifted Masks; stories

by Susan Glaspell · English · Gutenberg #7368 · 352,456 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Lifted Masks; stories

Author: Susan Glaspell


        
Release date: January 1, 2005 [eBook #7368]
                Most recently updated: March 15, 2018

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFTED MASKS; STORIES ***




Produced by Suzanne L. Shell, Charles Franks and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team









LIFTED MASKS

STORIES

By Susan Glaspell

1912


TO

THE MEMORY OF MY FRIEND

JENNIE PRESTON



CONTENTS


I “ONE OF THOSE IMPOSSIBLE AMERICANS”

II THE PLEA

III FOR LOVE OF THE HILLS

IV FRECKLES M'GRATH

V FROM A TO Z

VI THE MAN OF FLESH AND BLOOD

VII HOW THE PRINCE SAW AMERICA

VIII THE LAST SIXTY MINUTES

IX “OUT THERE”

X THE PREPOSTEROUS MOTIVE

XI HIS AMERICA

XII THE ANARCHIST: HIS DOG

XIII AT TWILIGHT




LIFTED MASKS




I

“ONE OF THOSE IMPOSSIBLE AMERICANS”


“N'avez-vous pas--” she was bravely demanding of the clerk when she saw
that the bulky American who was standing there helplessly dangling
two flaming red silk stockings which a copiously coiffured young woman
assured him were _bien chic_ was edging nearer her. She was never
so conscious of the truly American quality of her French as when
a countryman was at hand. The French themselves had an air of “How
marvellously you speak!” but fellow Americans listened superciliously
in an “I can do better than that myself” manner which quite untied
the Gallic twist in one's tongue. And so, feeling her French was being
compared, not with mere French itself, but with an arrogant new American
brand thereof, she moved a little around the corner of the counter and
began again in lower voice:

“_Mais, n'avez_--”

“Say, Young Lady,” a voice which adequately represented the figure broke
in, “_you_, aren't French, are you?”

She looked up with what was designed for a haughty stare. But what is a
haughty stare to do in the face of a broad grin? And because it was such
a long time since a grin like that had been grinned at her it happened
that the stare gave way to a dimple, and the dimple to a laughing: “Is
it so bad as that?”

“Oh, not your French,” he assured her. “You talk it just like the rest
of them. In fact, I should say, if anything--a little more so. But do
you know,”--confidentially--“I can just spot an American girl every
time!”

“How?” she could not resist asking, and the modest black hose she
was thinking of purchasing dangled against his gorgeous red ones in
friendliest fashion.

“Well, Sir--I don't know. I don't think it can be the
clothes,”--judicially surveying her.

“The clothes,” murmured Virginia, “were bought in Paris.”

“Well, you've got _me_. Maybe it's the way you wear 'em. Maybe
it's 'cause you look as if you used to play tag with your brother.
Something--anyhow--gives a fellow that 'By jove there's an American
girl!' feeling when he sees you coming round the corner.”

“But why--?”

“Lord--don't begin on _why_. You can say _why_ to anything. Why don't
the French talk English? Why didn't they lay Paris out at right angles?
Now look here, Young Lady, for that matter--_why_ can't you help me
buy some presents for my wife? There'd be nothing wrong about it,” he
hastened to assure her, “because my wife's a mighty fine woman.”

The very small American looked at the very large one. Now Virginia was a
well brought up young woman. Her conversations with strange men had been
confined to such things as, “Will you please tell me the nearest way
to--?” but preposterously enough--she could not for the life of her
have told why--frowning upon this huge American--fat was the literal
word--who stood there with puckered-up face swinging the flaming hose
would seem in the same shameful class with snubbing the little boy who
confidently asked her what kind of ribbon to buy for his mother.

“Was it for your wife you were thinking of buying these red stockings?”
 she ventured.

“Sure. What do you think of 'em? Look as if they came from Paris all
right, don't they?”

“Oh, they look as though they came from Paris, all right,” Virginia
repeated, a bit grimly. “But do you know”--this quite as to that little
boy who might be buying the ribbon--“American women don't always
care for all the things that look as if they came from Paris. Is your
wife--does she care especially for red stockings?”

“Don't believe she ever had a pair in her life. That's why I thought it
might please her.”

Virginia looked down and away. There were times when dimples made things
hard for one.

Then she said, with gentle gravity: “There are quite a number of women
in America who don't care much for red stockings. It would seem too bad,
wouldn't it, if after you got these clear home your wife should turn out
to be one of those people? Now, I think these grey stockings are lovely.
I'm sure any woman would love them. She could wear them with grey suede
slippers and they would be so soft and pretty.”

“Um--not very lively looking, are they? You see I want something to
cheer her up. She--well she's not been very well lately and I thought
something--oh something with a lot of _dash_ in it, you know, would just
fill the bill. But look here. We'll take both. Sure--that's the way out
of it. If she don't like the red, she'll like the grey, and if she don't
like the--You like the grey ones, don't you? Then here”--picking up two
pairs of the handsomely embroidered grey stockings and handing them to
the clerk--“One,” holding up his thumb to denote one--“me,”--a vigorous
pounding of the chest signifying me. “One”--holding up his forefinger
and pointing to the girl--“mademoiselle.”

“Oh no--no--no!” cried Virginia, her face instantly the colour of the
condemned stockings. Then, standing straight: “Certainly _not_.”

“No? Just as you say,” he replied good humouredly. “Like to have you
have 'em. Seems as if strangers in a strange land oughtn't to stand on
ceremony.”

The clerk was bending forward holding up the stockings alluringly.
“_Pour mademoiselle, n'est-ce-pas_?”

“_Mais--non!_” pronounced Virginia, with emphasis.

There followed an untranslatable gesture. “How droll!” shoulder and
outstretched hands were saying. “If the kind gentleman _wishes_ to give
mademoiselle the _joli bas_--!”

His face had puckered up again. Then suddenly it unpuckered. “Tell you
what you might do,” he solved it. “Just take 'em along and send them to
your mother. Now your mother might be real glad to have 'em.”

Virginia stared. And then an awful thing happened. What she was thinking
about was the letter she could send with the stockings. “Mother dear,”
 she would write, “as I stood at the counter buying myself some stockings
to-day along came a nice man--a stranger to me, but very kind and
jolly--and gave me--”

There it was that the awful thing happened. Her dimple was showing--and
at thought of its showing she could not keep it from showing! And how
could she explain why it was showing without its going on showing? And
how--?

But at that moment her gaze fell upon the clerk, who had taken
the dimple as signal to begin putting the stockings in a box. The
Frenchwoman's eyebrows soon put that dimple in its proper place. “And
so the _petite Americaine_ was not too--oh, not _too_--” those French
eyebrows were saying.

All in an instant Virginia was something quite different from a little
girl with a dimple. “You are very kind,” she was saying, and her mother
herself could have done it no better, “but I am sure our little joke had
gone quite far enough. I bid you good-morning”. And with that she
walked regally over to the glove counter, leaving red and grey and black
hosiery to their own destinies.

“I loathe them when their eyebrows go up,” she fumed. “Now _his_ weren't
going up--not even in his mind.”

She could not keep from worrying about him. “They'll just 'do' him,” she
was sure. “And then laugh at him in the bargain. A man like that has no
_business_ to be let loose in a store all by himself.”

And sure enough, a half hour later she came upon him up in the dress
department. Three of them had gathered round to “do” him. They were
making rapid headway, their smiling deference scantily concealing their
amused contempt. The spectacle infuriated Virginia. “They just think
they can _work_ us!” she stormed. “They think we're _easy_. I suppose
they think he's a _fool_. I just wish they could get him in a business
deal! I just wish--!”

“I can assure you, sir,” the English-speaking manager of the department
was saying, “that this garment is a wonderful value. We are able to let
you have it at so absurdly low a figure because--”

Virginia did not catch why it was they were able to let him have it at
so absurdly low a figure, but she did see him wipe his brow and look
helplessly around. “Poor _thing_,” she murmured, almost tenderly, “he
doesn't know what to do. He just _does_ need somebody to look after
him.” She stood there looking at his back. He had a back a good deal
like the back of her chum's father at home. Indeed there were various
things about him suggested “home.” Did one want one's own jeered at? One
might see crudities one's self, but was one going to have supercilious
outsiders coughing those sham coughs behind their hypocritical hands?

“For seven hundred francs,” she heard the suave voice saying.

_Seven hundred francs_! Virginia's national pride, or, more accurately,
her national rage, was lashed into action. It was with very red
cheeks that the small American stepped stormily to the rescue of her
countryman.

“Seven hundred francs for _that_?” she jeered, right in the face of the
enraged manager and stiffening clerks. “Seven hundred francs--indeed!
Last year's model--a hideous colour, and “--picking it up, running it
through her fingers and tossing it contemptuously aside--“abominable
stuff!”

“Gee, but I'm grateful to you!” he breathed, again wiping his brow. “You
know, I was a little leery of it myself.”

The manager, quivering with rage and glaring uglily, stepped up to
Virginia. “May I ask--?”

But the fat man stepped in between--he was well qualified for
that position. “Cut it out, partner. The young lady's a friend of
_mine_--see? She's looking out for me--not you. I don't want your stuff,
anyway.” And taking Virginia serenely by the arm he walked away.

“This was no place to buy dresses,” said she crossly.

“Well, I wish I knew where the places _were_ to buy things,” he replied,
humbly, forlornly.

“Well, what do you want to buy?” demanded she, still crossly.

“Why, I want to buy some nice things for my wife. Something the real
thing from Paris, you know. I came over from London on purpose. But
Lord,”--again wiping his brow--“a fellow doesn't know where to _go_.”

“Oh well,” sighed Virginia, long-sufferingly, “I see I'll just have to
take you. There doesn't seem any way out of it. It's evident you can't
go _alone_. _Seven hundred francs_!”

“I suppose it was too much,” he conceded meekly. “I tell you I _will_
be grateful if you'll just stay by me a little while. I never felt so up
against it in all my life.”

“Now, a very nice thing to take one's wife from Paris,” began Virginia
didactically, when they reached the sidewalk, “is lace.”

“L--ace? Um! Y--es, I suppose lace is all right. Still it never struck
me there was anything so very _lively_ looking about lace.”

“'Lively looking' is not the final word in wearing apparel,” pronounced
Virginia in teacher-to-pupil manner. “Lace is always in good taste,
never goes out of style, and all women care for it. I will take you to
one of the lace shops.”

“Very well,” acquiesced he, truly chastened. “Here, let's get in this
cab.”

Virginia rode across the Seine looking like one pondering the destinies
of nations. Her companion turned several times to address her, but it
would have been as easy for a soldier to slap a general on the back.
Finally she turned to him.

“Now when we get there,” she instructed, “don't seem at all interested
in things. Act--oh, bored, you know, and seeming to want to get me away.
And when they tell the price, no matter what they say, just--well
sort of groan and hold your head and act as though you are absolutely
overcome at the thought of such an outrage.”

“U--m. You have to do that here to get--lace?”

“You have to do that here to get _anything_---at the price you should
get it. You, and people who go shopping the way you do, bring discredit
upon the entire American nation.”

“That so? Sorry. Never meant to do that. All right, Young Lady, I'll do
the best I can. Never did act that way, but suppose I can, if the rest
of them do.”

“Groan and hold my head,” she heard him murmuring as they entered the
shop.

He proved an apt pupil. It may indeed be set down that his aptitude was
their undoing. They had no sooner entered the shop than he pulled out
his watch and uttered an exclamation of horror at the sight of the time.
Virginia could scarcely look at the lace, so insistently did he keep
waving the watch before her. His contempt for everything shown was open
and emphatic. It was also articulate. Virginia grew nervous, seeing the
real red showing through in the Frenchwoman's cheeks. And when the price
was at last named--a price which made Virginia jubilant--there burst
upon her outraged ears something between a jeer and a howl of rage, the
whole of it terrifyingly done in the form of a groan; she looked at
her companion to see him holding up his hands and wobbling his head as
though it had been suddenly loosened from his spine, cast one look at
the Frenchwoman--then fled, followed by her groaning compatriot.

“I didn't mean you to act like _that_!” she stormed.

“Why, I did just what you told me to! Seemed to me I was following
directions to the letter. Don't think for a minute _I'm_ going to bring
discredit on the American nation! Not a bad scheme--taking out my watch
that way, was it?”

“Oh, beautiful _scheme_. I presume you notice, however, that we have no
lace.”

They walked half a block in silence. “Now I'll take you to another
shop,” she then volunteered, in a turning the other cheek fashion, “and
here please do nothing at all. Please just--sit.”

“Sort of as if I was feeble-minded, eh?”

“Oh, don't _try_ to look feeble-minded,” she begged, alarmed at seeming
to suggest any more parts; “just sit there--as if you were thinking of
something very far away.”

“Say, Young Lady, look here; this is very nice, being put on to the
tricks of the trade, but the money end of it isn't cutting much ice,
and isn't there any way you can just _buy_ things--the way you do in
Cincinnati? Can't you get their stuff without making a comic opera out
of it?”

“No, you can't,” spoke relentless Virginia; “not unless you want them to
laugh and say 'Aren't Americans fools?' the minute the door is shut.”

“Fools--eh? I'll show them a thing or two!”

“Oh, please show them nothing here! Please just--sit.”

While employing her wiles to get for three hundred and fifty francs
a yoke and scarf aggregating four hundred, she chanced to look at her
American friend. Then she walked rapidly to the rear of the shop,
buried her face in her handkerchief, and seemed making heroic efforts
to sneeze. Once more he was following directions to the letter. Chin
resting on hands, hands resting on stick, the huge American had taken
on the beatific expression of a seventeen-year-old girl thinking of
something “very far away.” Virginia was long in mastering the sneeze.

On the sidewalk she presented him with the package of lace and also with
what she regarded the proper thing in the way of farewell speech. She
supposed it _was_ hard for a man to go shopping alone; she could see how
hard it would be for her own father; indeed it was seeing how difficult
it would be for her father had impelled her to go with him, a stranger.
She trusted his wife would like the lace; she thought it very nice, and
a bargain. She was glad to have been of service to a fellow countryman
who seemed in so difficult a position.

But he did not look as impressed as one to whom a farewell speech was
being made should look. In fact, he did not seem to be hearing it. Once
more, and in earnest this time, he appeared to be thinking of something
very far away. Then all at once he came back, and it was in anything but
a far-away voice he began, briskly: “Now look here, Young Lady, I don't
doubt but this lace is great stuff. You say so, and I haven't seen man,
woman or child on this side of the Atlantic knows as much as you do.
I'm mighty grateful for the lace--don't you forget that, but just the
same--well, now I'll tell you. I have a very special reason for wanting
something a little livelier than lace. Something that seems to have
Paris written on it in red letters--see? Now, where do you get the
kind of hats you see some folks wearing, and where do you get the
dresses--well, it's hard to describe 'em, but the kind they have in
pictures marked 'Breezes from Paris'? You see--_S-ay!_--_what_ do you
think of _that?_”

“That” was in a window across the street. It was an opera cloak. He
walked toward it, Virginia following. “Now _there_,” he turned to her,
his large round face all aglow, “is what I want.”

It was yellow; it was long; it was billowy; it was insistently and
recklessly regal.

“That's the ticket!” he gloated.

“Of course,” began Virginia, “I don't know anything about it. I am in a
very strange position, not knowing what your wife likes or--or has. This
is the kind of thing everything has to go _with_ or one wouldn't--one
couldn't--”

“Sure! Good idea. We'll just get everything to go with it.”

“It's the sort of thing one doesn't see worn much outside of Paris--or
New York. If one is--now my mother wouldn't care for that coat at all.”
 Virginia took no little pride in that tactful finish.

“Can't sidetrack me!” he beamed. “I _want_ it. Very thing I'm after,
Young Lady.”

“Well, of course you will have no difficulty in buying the coat without
me,” said she, as a dignified version of “I wash my hands of you.” “You
can do here as you said you wished to do, simply go in and pay what they
ask. There would be no use trying to get it cheap. They would know that
anyone who wanted it would”--she wanted to say “have more money than
they knew what to do with,” but contented herself with, “be able to pay
for it.”

But when she had finished she looked at him; at first she thought she
wanted to laugh, and then it seemed that wasn't what she wanted to
do after all. It was like saying to a small boy who was one beam over
finding a tin horn: “Oh well, take the horn if you want to, but you
can't haul your little red waggon while you're blowing the horn.” There
seemed something peculiarly inhuman about taking the waggon just when he
had found the horn. Now if the waggon were broken, then to take away
the horn would leave the luxury of grief. But let not shadows fall upon
joyful moments.

With the full ardour of her femininity she entered into the purchasing
of the yellow opera cloak. They paid for that decorative garment the sum
of two thousand five hundred francs. It seemed it was embroidered, and
the lining was--anyway, they paid it.

And they took it with them. He was going to “take no chances on losing
it.” He was leaving Paris that night and held that during his stay
he had been none too impressed with either Parisian speed or Parisian
veracity.

Then they bought some “Breezes from Paris,” a dress that would “go with”
 the coat. It was violet velvet, and contributed to the sense of doing
one's uttermost; and hats--“the kind you see some folks wearing.” One
was the rainbow done into flowers, and the other the kind of black hat
to outdo any rainbow. “If you could just give me some idea what type
your wife is,” Virginia was saying, from beneath the willow plumes. “Now
you see this hat quite overpowers me. Do you think it will overpower
her?”

“Guess not. Anyway, if it don't look right on her head she may enjoy
having it around to look at.”

Virginia stared out at him. The _oddest_ man! As if a hat were any good
at all if it didn't look right on one's head!

Upon investigation--though yielding to his taste she was still vigilant
as to his interests--Virginia discovered a flaw in one of the plumes.
The sylph in the trailing gown held volubly that it did not _fait rien_;
the man with the open purse said he couldn't see that it figured much,
but the small American held firm. That must be replaced by a perfect
plume or they would not take the hat. And when she saw who was in
command the sylph as volubly acquiesced that _naturellement_ it must be
_tout a fait_ perfect. She would send out and get one that would be oh!
so, so, _so_ perfect. It would take half an hour.

“Tell you what we'll do,” Virginia's friend proposed, opera cloak
tight under one arm, velvet gown as tight under the other, “I'm
tired--hungry--thirsty; feel like a ham sandwich--and something. I'm
playing you out, too. Let's go out and get a bite and come back for the
so, so, _so_ perfect hat.”

She hesitated. But he had the door open, and if he stood holding it that
way much longer he was bound to drop the violet velvet gown. She did not
want him to drop the velvet gown and furthermore, she _would_ like a cup
of tea. There came into her mind a fortifying thought about the relative
deaths of sheep and lambs. If to be killed for the sheep were indeed no
worse than being killed for the lamb, and if a cup of tea went with the
sheep and nothing at all with the lamb--?

So she agreed. “There's a nice little tea-shop right round the corner.
We girls often go there.”

“Tea? Like tea? All right, then”--and he started manfully on.

But as she entered the tea-shop she was filled with keen sense of
the desirableness of being slain for the lesser animal. For, cosily
installed in their favourite corner, were “the girls.”

Virginia had explained to these friends some three hours before that she
could not go with them that afternoon as she must attend a musicale some
friends of her mother's were giving. Being friends of her mother's, she
expatiated, she would have to go.

Recollecting this, also for the first time remembering the musicale, she
bowed with the _hauteur_ of self-consciousness.

Right there her friend contributed to the tragedy of a sheep's death by
dropping the yellow opera cloak. While he was stooping to pick it up the
violet velvet gown slid backward and Virginia had to steady it until
he could regain position. The staring in the corner gave way to
tittering--and no dying sheep had ever held its head more haughtily.

The death of this particular sheep proved long and painful. The legs
of Virginia's friend and the legs of the tea-table did not seem well
adapted to each other. He towered like a human mountain over the dainty
thing, twisting now this way and now that. It seemed Providence--or
at least so much of it as was represented by the management of that
shop--had never meant fat people to drink tea. The table was rendered
further out of proportion by having a large box piled on either side of
it.

Expansively, and not softly, he discoursed of these things. What did
they think a fellow was to do with his _knees_? Didn't they sell tea
enough to afford any decent chairs? Did all these women pretend to
really _like_ tea?

Virginia's sense of humour rallied somewhat as she viewed him eating
the sandwiches. Once she had called them doll-baby sandwiches; now that
seemed literal: tea-cups, _petit gateau_, the whole service gave the
fancy of his sitting down to a tea-party given by a little girl for her
dollies.

But after a time he fell silent, looking around the room. And when he
broke that pause his voice was different.

“These women here, all dressed so fine, nothing to do but sit around and
eat this folderol, _they_ have it easy--don't they?”

The bitterness in it, and a faint note of wistfulness, puzzled her.
Certainly _he_ had money.

“And the husbands of these women,” he went on; “lots of 'em, I suppose,
didn't always have so much. Maybe some of these women helped out in the
early days when things weren't so easy. Wonder if the men ever think how
lucky they are to be able to get it back at 'em?”

She grew more bewildered. Wasn't he “getting it back?” The money he had
been spending that day!

“Young Lady,” he said abruptly, “you must think I'm a queer one.”

She murmured feeble protest.

“Yes, you must. Must wonder what I want with all this stuff, don't you?”

“Why, it's for your wife, isn't it?” she asked, startled.

“Oh yes, but you must wonder. You're a shrewd one, Young Lady; judging
the thing by me, you must wonder.”

Virginia was glad she was not compelled to state her theory. Loud and
common and impossible were terms which had presented themselves, terms
which she had fought with kind and good-natured and generous. Their
purchases she had decided were to be used, not for a knock, but as a
crashing pound at the door of the society of his town. For her part,
Virginia hoped the door would come down.

“And if you knew that probably this stuff would never be worn at all,
that ten to one it would never do anything more than lie round on
chairs--then you _would_ think I was queer, wouldn't you?”

She was forced to admit that that would seem rather strange.

“Young Lady, I believe I'll tell you about it. Never do talk about it
to hardly anybody, but I feel as if you and I were pretty well
acquainted--we've been through so much together.”

She smiled at him warmly; there was something so real about him when he
talked that way.

But his look then frightened her. It seemed for an instant as though he
would brush the tiny table aside and seize some invisible thing by the
throat. Then he said, cutting off each word short: “Young Lady, what
do you think of this? I'm worth more 'an a million dollars--and my wife
gets up at five o'clock every morning to do washing and scrubbing.”

“Oh, it's not that she _has_ to,” he answered her look, “but she
_thinks_ she has to. See? Once we were poor. For twenty years we were
poor as dirt. Then she did have to do things like that. Then I struck
it. Or rather, it struck me. Oil. Oil on a bit of land I had. I had just
sense enough to make the most of it; one thing led to another--well,
you're not interested in that end of it. But the fact is that now we're
rich. Now she could have all the things that these women have--Lord
A'mighty she could lay abed every day till noon if she wanted to!
But--you see?--it _got_ her--those hard, lonely, grinding years _took_
her. She's”--he shrunk from the terrible word and faltered out--“her
mind's not--”

There was a sobbing little flutter in Virginia's throat. In a dim way
she was glad to see that the girls were going. She _could_ not have them
laughing at him--now.

“Well, you can about figure out how it makes me feel,” he continued,
and looking into his face now it was as though the spirit redeemed the
flesh. “You're smart. You can see it without my callin' your attention
to it. Last time I went to see her I had just made fifty thousand on a
deal. And I found her down on her knees thinking she was scrubbing the
floor!”

Unconsciously Virginia's hand went out, following the rush of sympathy
and understanding. “But can't they--restrain her?” she murmured.

“Makes her worse. Says she's got it to do--frets her to think she's not
getting it done.”

“But isn't there some _way_?” she whispered. “Some way to make her
_know_?”

He pointed to the large boxes. “That,” he said simply, “is the meaning
of those. It's been seven years--but I keep on trying.”

She was silent, the tears too close for words. And she had thought it
cheap ambition!--vulgar aspiration--silly show--vanity!

“Suppose you thought I was a queer one, talking about lively looking
things. But you see now? Thought it might attract her attention, thought
something real gorgeous like this might impress money on her. Though I
don't know,”--he seemed to grow weary as he told it; “I got her a lot of
diamonds, thinking they might interest her, and she thought she'd stolen
'em, and they had to take them away.”

Still the girl did not speak. Her hand was shading her eyes.

“But there's nothing like trying. Nothing like keeping right on trying.
And anyhow--a fellow likes to think he's taking his wife something from
Paris.”

They passed before her in their heartbreaking folly, their tragic
uselessness, their lovable absurdity and stinging irony--those
things they had bought that afternoon: an _opera cloak_--a _velvet
dress_--_those hats_--_red silk stockings_.

The mockery of them wrung her heart. Right there in the tea-shop
Virginia was softly crying.

“Oh, now that's too bad,” he expostulated clumsily. “Why, look here,
Young Lady, I didn't mean you to take it so hard.”

When she had recovered herself he told her much of the story. And the
thing which revealed him--glorified him--was less the grief he gave
to it than the way he saw it. “It's the cursed unfairness of it,”
 he concluded. “When you consider it's all because she did those
things--when you think of her bein' bound to 'em for life just because
she was _too faithful doin' 'em_--when you think that now--when I could
give her everything these women have got!--she's got to go right on
worrying about baking the bread and washing the dishes--did it for me
when I was poor--and now with me rich she can't get _out_ of it--and
I _can't reach_ her--oh, it's _rotten!_ I tell you it's _rotten!_
Sometimes I can just hear my money _laugh_ at me! Sometimes I get to
going round and round in a circle about it till it seems I'm going crazy
myself.”

“I think you are a--a noble man,” choked Virginia.

That disconcerted him. “Oh Lord--don't think that. No, Young Lady, don't
try to make any plaster saint out of _me_. My life goes on. I've got to
eat, drink and be merry. I'm built that way. But just the same my heart
on the inside's pretty sore, Young Lady. I want to tell you that the
whole inside of my heart is _sore as a boil_!”

They were returning for the hats. Suddenly Virginia stopped, and it
was a soft-eyed and gentle Virginia who turned to him after the pause.
“There are lovely things to be bought in Paris for women who aren't
well. Such soft, lovely things to wear in your room. Not but what I
think these other things are all right. As you say, they may--interest
her. But they aren't things she can use just now, and wouldn't you like
her to have some of those soft lovely things she could actually wear?
They might help most of all. To wake in the morning and find herself in
something so beautiful--”

“Where do you get 'em?” he demanded promptly.

And so they went to one of those shops which have, more than all the
others, enshrined Paris in feminine hearts. And never was lingerie
selected with more loving care than that which Virginia picked out that
afternoon. A tear fell on one particularly lovely _robe de nuit_--so
soothingly soft, so caressingly luxurious, it seemed that surely it
might help bring release from the bondage of those crushing years.

As they were leaving they were given two packages. “Just the kimona
thing you liked,” he said, “and a trinket or two. Now that we're such
good friends, you won't feel like you did this morning.”

“And if I don't want them myself, I might send them to my mother,”
 Virginia replied, a quiver in her laugh at her own little joke.

He had put her in her cab; he had tried to tell her how much he thanked
her; they had said good-bye and the _cocher_ had cracked his whip when
he came running after her. “Why, Young Lady,” he called out, “we don't
know each other's _names_.”

She laughed and gave hers. “Mine's William P. Johnson,” he said. “Part
French and part Italian. But now look here, Young Lady--or I mean, Miss
Clayton. A fellow at the hotel was telling me something last night that
made me _sick_. He said American girls sometimes got awfully up against
it here. He said one actually starved last year. Now, I don't like that
kind of business. Look here, Young Lady, I want you to promise that if
you--you or any of your gang--get up against it you'll cable William P.
Johnson, of Cincinnati, Ohio.”

The twilight grey had stolen upon Paris. And there was a mist which the
street lights only penetrated a little way--as sometimes one's knowledge
of life may only penetrate life a very little way. Her cab stopped by a
blockade, she watched the burly back of William P. Johnson disappearing
into the mist. The red box which held the yellow opera cloak she could
see longer than all else.

“You never can tell,” murmured Virginia. “It just goes to show that you
never can tell.”

And whatever it was you never could tell had brought to Virginia's
girlish face the tender knowingness of the face of a woman.




II

THE PLEA


Senator Harrison concluded his argument and sat down. There was no
applause, but he had expected none. Senator Dorman was already saying
“Mr. President?” and there was a stir in the crowded galleries, and an
anticipatory moving of chairs among the Senators. In the press gallery
the reporters bunched together their scattered papers and inspected
their pencil-points with earnestness. Dorman was the best speaker of
the Senate, and he was on the popular side of it. It would be the great
speech of the session, and the prospect was cheering after a deluge of
railroad and insurance bills.

“I want to tell you,” he began, “why I have worked for this resolution
recommending the pardon of Alfred Williams. It is one of the great laws
of the universe that every living thing be given a chance. In the case
before us that law has been violated. This does not resolve itself into
a question of second chances. The boy of whom we are speaking has never
had his first.”

Senator Harrison swung his chair half-way around and looked out at the
green things which were again coming into their own on the State-house
grounds. He knew--in substance--what Senator Dorman would say without
hearing it, and he was a little tired of the whole affair. He hoped that
one way or other they would finish it up that night, and go ahead with
something else. He had done what he could, and now the responsibility
was with the rest of them. He thought they were shouldering a great deal
to advocate the pardon in the face of the united opposition of Johnson
County, where the crime had been committed. It seemed a community
should be the best judge of its own crimes, and that was what he, as the
Senator from Johnson, had tried to impress upon them.

He knew that his argument against the boy had been a strong one. He
rather liked the attitude in which he stood. It seemed as if he were
the incarnation of outraged justice attempting to hold its own at the
floodgates of emotion. He liked to think he was looking far beyond the
present and the specific and acting as guardian of the future--and the
whole. In summing it up that night the reporters would tell in highly
wrought fashion of the moving appeal made by Senator Dorman, and then
they would speak dispassionately of the logical argument of the leader
of the opposition. There was more satisfaction to self in logic than
in mere eloquence. He was even a little proud of his unpopularity. It
seemed sacrificial.

He wondered why it was Senator Dorman had thrown himself into it so
whole-heartedly. All during the session the Senator from Maxwell had
neglected personal interests in behalf of this boy, who was nothing to
him in the world. He supposed it was as a sociological and psychological
experiment. Senator Dorman had promised the Governor to assume
guardianship of the boy if he were let out. The Senator from Johnson
inferred that as a student of social science his eloquent colleague
wanted to see what he could make of him. To suppose the interest merely
personal and sympathetic would seem discreditable.

“I need not dwell upon the story,” the Senator from Maxwell was saying,
“for you all are familiar with it already. It is said to have been the
most awful crime ever committed in the State. I grant you that it was,
and then I ask you to look for a minute into the conditions leading up
to it.

“When the boy was born, his mother was instituting divorce proceedings
against his father. She obtained the divorce, and remarried when Alfred
was three months old. From the time he was a mere baby she taught him
to hate his father. Everything that went wrong with him she told him was
his father's fault. His first vivid impression was that his father was
responsible for all the wrong of the universe.

“For seven years that went on, and then his mother died. His stepfather
did not want him. He was going to Missouri, and the boy would be a
useless expense and a bother. He made no attempt to find a home for him;
he did not even explain--he merely went away and left him. At the age of
seven the boy was turned out on the world, after having been taught one
thing--to hate his father. He stayed a few days in the barren house,
and then new tenants came and closed the doors against him. It may have
occurred to him as a little strange that he had been sent into a world
where there was no place for him.

“When he asked the neighbours for shelter, they told him to go to his
own father and not bother strangers. He said he did not know where his
father was. They told him, and he started to walk--a distance of fifty
miles. I ask you to bear in mind, gentlemen, that he was only seven
years of age. It is the age when the average boy is beginning the third
reader, and when he is shooting marbles and spinning tops.

“When he reached his father's house he was told at once that he was not
wanted there. The man had remarried, there were other children, and
he had no place for Alfred. He turned him away; but the neighbours
protested, and he was compelled to take him back. For four years he
lived in this home, to which he had come unbidden, and where he was
never made welcome.

“The whole family rebelled against him. The father satisfied his
resentment against the boy's dead mother by beating her son, by
encouraging his wife to abuse him, and inspiring the other children to
despise him. It seems impossible such conditions should exist. The only
proof of their possibility lies in the fact of their existence.

“I need not go into the details of the crime. He had been beaten by his
father that evening after a quarrel with his stepmother about spilling
the milk. He went, as usual, to his bed in the barn; but the hay was
suffocating, his head ached, and he could not sleep. He arose in the
middle of the night, went to the house, and killed both his father and
stepmother.

“I shall not pretend to say what thoughts surged through the boy's brain
as he lay there in the stifling hay with the hot blood pounding against
his temples. I shall not pretend to say whether he was sane or insane as
he walked to the house for the perpetration of the awful crime. I do not
even affirm it would not have happened had there been some human being
there to lay a cooling hand on his hot forehead, and say a few soothing,
loving words to take the sting from the loneliness, and ease the
suffering. I ask you to consider only one thing: he was eleven years old
at the time, and he had no friend in all the world. He knew nothing of
sympathy; he knew only injustice.”

Senator Harrison was still looking out at the budding things on the
State-house grounds, but in a vague way he was following the story. He
knew when the Senator from Maxwell completed the recital of facts and
entered upon his plea. He was conscious that it was stronger than he had
anticipated--more logic and less empty exhortation. He was telling of
the boy's life in reformatory and penitentiary since the commission
of the crime,--of how he had expanded under kindness, of his mental
attainments, the letters he could write, the books he had read, the
hopes he cherished. In the twelve years he had spent there he had been
known to do no unkind nor mean thing; he responded to affection--craved
it. It was not the record of a degenerate, the Senator from Maxwell was
saying.

A great many things were passing through the mind of the Senator from
Johnson. He was trying to think who it was that wrote that book, “Put
Yourself in His Place.” He had read it once, and it bothered him to
forget names. Then he was wondering why it was the philosophers had
not more to say about the incongruity of people who had never had any
trouble of their own sitting in judgment upon people who had known
nothing but trouble. He was thinking also that abstract rules did not
always fit smoothly over concrete cases, and that it was hard to make
life a matter of rules, anyway.

Next he was wondering how it would have been with the boy Alfred
Williams if he had been born in Charles Harrison's place; and then he
was working it out the other way and wondering how it would have been
with Charles Harrison had he been born in Alfred Williams's place.
He wondered whether the idea of murder would have grown in Alfred
Williams's heart had he been born to the things to which Charles
Harrison was born, and whether it would have come within the range of
possibility for Charles Harrison to murder his father if he had been
born to Alfred Williams's lot. Putting it that way, it was hard to
estimate how much of it was the boy himself, and how much the place the
world had prepared for him. And if it was the place prepared for him
more than the boy, why was the fault not more with the preparers of the
place than with the occupant of it? The whole thing was very confusing.

“This page,” the Senator from Maxwell was saying, lifting the little
fellow to the desk, “is just eleven years of age, and he is within three
pounds of Alfred Williams's weight when he committed the murder. I ask
you, gentlemen, if this little fellow should be guilty of a like crime
to-night, to what extent would you, in reading of it in the morning,
charge him with the moral discernment which is the first condition of
moral responsibility? If Alfred Williams's story were this boy's story,
would you deplore that there had been no one to check the childish
passion, or would you say it was the inborn instinct of the murderer?
And suppose again this were Alfred Williams at the age of eleven, would
you not be willing to look into the future and say if he spent twelve
years in penitentiary and reformatory, in which time he developed the
qualities of useful and honourable citizenship, that the ends of justice
would then have been met, and the time at hand for the world to begin
the payment of her debt?”

Senator Harrison's eyes were fixed upon the page standing on the
opposite desk. Eleven was a younger age than he had supposed. As he
looked back upon it and recalled himself when eleven years of age--his
irresponsibility, his dependence--he was unwilling to say what would
have happened if the world had turned upon him as it had upon Alfred
Williams. At eleven his greatest grievance was that the boys at school
called him “yellow-top.” He remembered throwing a rock at one of them
for doing it. He wondered if it was criminal instinct prompted the
throwing of the rock. He wondered how high the percentage of children's
crimes would go were it not for countermanding influences. It seemed the
great difference between Alfred Williams and a number of other children
of eleven had been the absence of the countermanding influence.

There came to him of a sudden a new and moving thought. Alfred Williams
had been cheated of his boyhood. The chances were he had never gone
swimming, nor to a ball game, or maybe never to a circus. It might even
be that he had never owned a dog. The Senator from Maxwell was right
when he said the boy had never been given his chance, had been defrauded
of that which has been a boy's heritage since the world itself was
young.

And the later years--how were they making it up to him? He recalled
what to him was the most awful thing he had ever heard about the State
penitentiary: they never saw the sun rise down there, and they never saw
it set. They saw it at its meridian, when it climbed above the stockade,
but as it rose into the day, and as it sank into the night, it was
denied them. And there, at the penitentiary, they could not even look up
at the stars. It had been years since Alfred Williams raised his face
to God's heaven and knew he was part of it all. The voices of the night
could not penetrate the little cell in the heart of the mammoth stone
building where he spent his evenings over those masterpieces with which,
they said, he was more familiar than the average member of the Senate.
When he read those things Victor Hugo said of the vastness of the night,
he could only look around at the walls that enclosed him and try to
reach back over the twelve years for some satisfying conception of what
night really was.

The Senator from Johnson shuddered: they had taken from a living
creature the things of life, and all because in the crucial hour there
had been no one to say a staying word. Man had cheated him of the things
that were man's, and then shut him away from the world that was God's.
They had made for him a life barren of compensations.

There swept over the Senator a great feeling of self-pity. As
representative of Johnson County, it was he who must deny this boy the
whole great world without, the people who wanted to help him, and what
the Senator from Maxwell called “his chance.” If Johnson County carried
the day, there would be something unpleasant for him to consider all the
remainder of his life. As he grew to be an older man he would think of
it more and more--what the boy would have done for himself in the world
if the Senator from Johnson had not been more logical and more powerful
than the Senator from Maxwell.

Senator Dorman was nearing the end of his argument. “In spite of the
undying prejudice of the people of Johnson County,” he was saying, “I
can stand before you today and say that after an unsparing investigation
of this case I do not believe I am asking you to do anything in
violation of justice when I beg of you to give this boy his chance.”

It was going to a vote at once, and the Senator from Johnson County
looked out at the budding things and wondered whether the boy down
at the penitentiary knew the Senate was considering his case that
afternoon. It was without vanity he wondered whether what he had been
trained to think of as an all-wise providence would not have preferred
that Johnson County be represented that session by a less able man.

A great hush fell over the Chamber, for ayes and noes followed almost in
alternation. After a long minute of waiting the secretary called, in a
tense voice:

“Ayes, 30; Noes, 32.”

The Senator from Johnson had proven too faithful a servant of his
constituents. The boy in the penitentiary was denied his chance.

The usual things happened: some women in the galleries, who had boys
at home, cried aloud; the reporters were fighting for occupancy of the
telephone booths, and most of the Senators began the perusal of the
previous day's Journal with elaborate interest. Senator Dorman indulged
in none of these feints. A full look at his face just then told how much
of his soul had gone into the fight for the boy's chance, and the
look about his eyes was a little hard on the theory of psychological
experiment.

Senator Harrison was looking out at the budding trees, but his face too
had grown strange, and he seemed to be looking miles beyond and years
ahead. It seemed that he himself was surrendering the voices of the
night, and the comings and goings of the sun. He would never look at
them--feel them--again without remembering he was keeping one of his
fellow creatures away from them. He wondered at his own presumption
in denying any living thing participation in the universe. And all the
while there were before him visions of the boy who sat in the cramped
cell with the volume of a favourite poet before him, trying to think how
it would seem to be out under the stars.

The stillness in the Senate-Chamber was breaking; they were going ahead
with something else. It seemed to the Senator from Johnson that sun,
moon, and stars were wailing out protest for the boy who wanted to know
them better. And yet it was not sun, moon, and stars so much as the
unused swimming hole and the uncaught fish, the unattended ball game,
the never-seen circus, and, above all, the unowned dog, that brought
Senator Harrison to his feet.

They looked at him in astonishment, their faces seeming to say it would
have been in better taste for him to have remained seated just then.

“Mr. President,” he said, pulling at his collar and looking straight
ahead, “I rise to move a reconsideration.”

There was a gasp, a moment of supreme quiet, and then a mighty burst
of applause. To men of all parties and factions there came a single
thought. Johnson was the leading county of its Congressional district.
There was an election that fall, and Harrison was in the race. Those
eight words meant to a surety he would not go to Washington, for the
Senator from Maxwell had chosen the right word when he referred to the
prejudice of Johnson County on the Williams case as “undying.” The
world throbs with such things at the moment of their doing--even though
condemning them later, and the part of the world then packed within the
Senate-Chamber shared the universal disposition.

The noise astonished Senator Harrison, and he looked around with
something like resentment. When the tumult at last subsided, and he saw
that he was expected to make a speech, he grew very red, and grasped his
chair desperately.

The reporters were back in their places, leaning nervously forward.
This was Senator Harrison's chance to say something worth putting into a
panel by itself with black lines around it--and they were sure he would
do it.

But he did not. He stood there like a schoolboy who had forgotten his
piece--growing more and more red. “I--I think,” he finally jerked out,
“that some of us have been mistaken. I'm in favour now of--of giving him
his chance.”

They waited for him to proceed, but after a helpless look around the
Chamber he sat down. The president of the Senate waited several minutes
for him to rise again, but he at last turned his chair around and
looked out at the green things on the State-house grounds, and there
was nothing to do but go ahead with the second calling of the roll. This
time it stood 50 to 12 in favour of the boy.

A motion to adjourn immediately followed--no one wanted to do anything
more that afternoon. They all wanted to say things to the Senator from
Johnson; but his face had grown cold, and as they were usually afraid of
him, anyhow, they kept away. All but Senator Dorman--it meant too much
with him. “Do you mind my telling you,” he said, tensely, “that it was
as fine a thing as I have ever known a man to do?”

The Senator from Johnson moved impatiently. “You think it 'fine,'” he
asked, almost resentfully, “to be a coward?”

“Coward?” cried the other man. “Well, that's scarcely the word. It
was--heroic!”

“Oh no,” said Senator Harrison, and he spoke wearily, “it was a clear
case of cowardice. You see,” he laughed, “I was afraid it might haunt me
when I am seventy.”

Senator Dorman started eagerly to speak, but the other man stopped him
and passed on. He was seeing it as his constituency would see it, and
it humiliated him. They would say he had not the courage of his
convictions, that he was afraid of the unpopularity, that his judgment
had fallen victim to the eloquence of the Senator from Maxwell.

But when he left the building and came out into the softness of the
April afternoon it began to seem different. After all, it was not he
alone who leaned to the softer side. There were the trees--they were
permitted another chance to bud; there were the birds--they were allowed
another chance to sing; there was the earth--to it was given another
chance to yield. There stole over him a tranquil sense of unison with
Life.




III

FOR LOVE OF THE HILLS


“Sure you're done with it?”

“Oh, yes,” replied the girl, the suggestion of a smile on her face, and
in her voice the suggestion of a tear. “Yes; I was just going.”

But she did not go. She turned instead to the end of the alcove and sat
down before a table placed by the window. Leaning her elbows upon it she
looked about her through a blur of tears.

Seen through her own eyes of longing, it seemed that almost all of the
people whom she could see standing before the files of the daily papers
were homesick. The reading-room had been a strange study to her during
those weeks spent in fruitless search for the work she wanted to do, and
it had likewise proved a strange comfort. When tired and disconsolate
and utterly sick at heart there was always one thing she could do--she
could go down to the library and look at the paper from home. It was not
that she wanted the actual news of Denver. She did not care in any vital
way what the city officials were doing, what buildings were going up, or
who was leaving town. She was only indifferently interested in the fires
and the murders. She wanted the comforting companionship of that paper
from home.

It seemed there were many to whom the papers offered that same sympathy,
companionship, whatever it might be. More than anything else it perhaps
gave to them--the searchers, drifters--a sense of anchorage. She would
not soon forget the day she herself had stumbled in there and found the
home paper. Chicago had given her nothing but rebuffs that day, and in
desperation, just because she must go somewhere, and did not want to go
back to her boarding-place, she had hunted out the city library. It was
when walking listlessly about in the big reading-room it had occurred to
her that perhaps she could find the paper from home; and after that when
things were their worst, when her throat grew tight and her eyes dim,
she could always comfort herself by saying: “After a while I'll run down
and look at the paper.”

But to-night it had failed her. It was not the paper from home to-night;
it was just a newspaper. It did not inspire the belief that things would
be better to-morrow, that it must all come right soon. It left her as
she had come---heavy with the consciousness that in her purse was eleven
dollars, and that that was every cent she had in the whole world.

It was hard to hold back the tears as she dwelt upon the fact that it
was very little she had asked of Chicago. She had asked only a chance to
do the work for which she was trained, in order that she might go to the
art classes at night. She had read in the papers of that mighty young
city of the Middle West--the heart of the continent--of its brawn and
its brain and its grit. She had supposed that Chicago, of all places,
would appreciate what she wanted to do. The day she drew her hard-earned
one hundred dollars from the bank in Denver--how the sun had shone that
day in Denver, how clear the sky had been, and how bracing the air!--she
had quite taken it for granted that her future was assured. And now,
after tasting for three weeks the cruelty of indifference, she looked
back to those visions with a hard little smile.

She rose to go, and in so doing her eyes fell upon the queer little
woman to whom she had yielded her place before the Denver paper.
Submerged as she had been in her own desolation she had given no heed
to the small figure which came slipping along beside her beyond the bare
thought that she was queer-looking. But as her eyes rested upon her now
there was something about the woman which held her.

She was a strange little figure. An old-fashioned shawl was pinned
tightly about her shoulders, and she was wearing a queer, rusty little
bonnet. Her hair was rolled up in a small knot at the back of her head.
She did not look as though she belonged in Chicago. And then, as the
girl stood there looking at her, she saw the thin shoulders quiver, and
after a minute the head that was wearing the rusty bonnet went down into
the folds of the Denver paper.

The girl's own eyes filled, and she turned to go. It seemed she could
scarcely bear her own unhappiness that day, without coming close to the
heartache of another. But when she reached the end of the alcove she
glanced back, and the sight of that shabby, bent figure, all alone
before the Denver paper, was not to be withstood.

“I am from Colorado, too,” she said softly, laying a hand upon the bent
shoulders.

The woman looked up at that and took the girl's hand in both of her
thin, trembling ones. It was a wan and a troubled face she lifted, and
there was something about the eyes which would not seem to have been
left there by tears alone.

“And do you have a pining for the mountains?” she whispered, with a
timid eagerness. “Do you have a feeling that you want to see the sun
go down behind them tonight and that you want to see the darkness come
stealing up to the tops?”

The girl half turned away, but she pressed the woman's hand tightly in
hers. “I know what you mean,” she murmured.

“I wanted to see it so bad,” continued the woman, tremulously, “that
something just drove me here to this paper. I knowed it was here because
my nephew's wife brought me here one day and we come across it. We took
this paper at home for more 'an twenty years. That's why I come. 'Twas
the closest I could get.”

“I know what you mean,” said the girl again, unsteadily.

“And it's the closest I will ever get!” sobbed the woman.

“Oh, don't say that,” protested the girl, brushing away her own tears,
and trying to smile; “you'll go back home some day.”

The woman shook her head. “And if I should,” she said, “even if I
should, 'twill be too late.”

“But it couldn't be too late,” insisted the girl. “The mountains, you
know, will be there forever.”

“The mountains will be there forever,” repeated the woman, musingly;
“yes, but not for me to see.” There was a pause. “You see,”--she said it
quietly--“I'm going blind.”

The girl took a quick step backward, then stretched out two impulsive
hands. “Oh, no, no you're not! Why--the doctors, you know, they do
everything now.”

The woman shook her head. “That's what I thought when I come here.
That's why I come. But I saw the biggest doctor of them all today--they
all say he's the best there is--and he said right out 'twas no use to do
anything. He said 'twas--hopeless.”

Her voice broke on that word. “You see,” she hurried on, “I wouldn't
care so much, seems like I wouldn't care 't all, if I could get there
first! If I could see the sun go down behind them just one night! If I
could see the black shadows come slippin' over 'em just once! And then,
if just one morning--just once!--I could get up and see the sunlight
come a streamin'--oh, you know how it looks! You know what 'tis I want
to see!”

“Yes; but why can't you? Why not? You won't go--your eyesight will last
until you get back home, won't it?”

“But I can't go back home; not now.”

“Why not?” demanded the girl. “Why can't you go home?”

“Why, there ain't no money, my dear,” she explained, patiently. “It's a
long way off--Colorado is, and there ain't no money. Now, George--George
is my brother-in-law--he got me the money to come; but you see it took
it all to come here, and to pay them doctors with. And George--he ain't
rich, and it pinched him hard for me to come--he says I'll have to wait
until he gets money laid up again, and--well he can't tell just when 't
will be. He'll send it soon as he gets it,” she hastened to add.

“But what are you going to do in the meantime? It would cost less to get
you home than to keep you here.”

“No, I stay with my nephew here. He's willin' I should stay with him
till I get my money to go home.”

“Yes, but this nephew, can't he get you the money? Doesn't he know,” she
insisted, heatedly, “what it means to you?”

“He's got five children, and not much laid up. And then, he never seen
the mountains. He doesn't know what I mean when I try to tell him about
gettin' there in time. Why, he says there's many a one living back in
the mountains would like to be livin' here. He don't understand--my
nephew don't,” she added, apologetically.

“Well, _someone_ ought to understand!” broke from the girl. “I
understand! But--” she did her best to make it a laugh--“eleven dollars
is every cent I've got in the world!”

“Don't!” implored the woman, as the girl gave up trying to control the
tears. “Now, don't you be botherin'. I didn't mean to make you feel so
bad. My nephew says I ain't reasonable, and maybe I ain't.”

The girl raised her head. “But you _are_ reasonable. I tell you, you
_are_ reasonable!”

“I must be going back,” said the woman, uncertainly. “I'm just making
you feel bad, and it won't do no good. And then they may be stirred up
about me. Emma--Emma's my nephew's wife--left me at the doctor's office
'cause she had some trading to do, and she was to come back there for
me. And then, as I was sittin' there, the pinin' came over me so strong
it seemed I just must get up and start! And”---she smiled wanly---“this
was far as I got.”

“Come over and sit down by this table,” said the girl, impulsively, “and
tell me a little about your home back in the mountains. Wouldn't you
like to?”

The woman nodded gratefully. “Seems most like getting back to them to
find someone that knows about them,” she said, after they had drawn
their chairs up to the table and were sitting there side by side.

The girl put her rounded hand over on the thin, withered one. “Tell me
about it,” she said again.

“Maybe it wouldn't be much interesting to you, my dear. It's just a
common life--mine is. You see, William and I--William was my husband--we
went to Georgetown before it really was any town at all. Years and years
before the railroad went through, we was there. Was you ever there?” she
asked wistfully.

“Oh, very often,” replied the girl. “I love every inch of that country!”

A tear stole down the woman's face. “It's most like being home to find
someone that knows about it,” she whispered.

“Yes, William and I went there when 'twas all new country,” she went
on, after a pause. “We worked hard, and we laid up a little money. Then,
three years ago, William took sick. He was sick for a year, and we had
to live up most of what we'd saved. That's why I ain't got none now. It
ain't that William didn't provide.”

The girl nodded.

“We seen some hard days. But we was always harmonious--William and
I was. And William had a great fondness for the mountains. The night
before he died he made them take him over by the window and he looked
out and watched the darkness come stealin' over the daylight--you know
how it does in them mountains. 'Mother,' he said to me--his voice was
that low I could no more 'an hear what he said--'I'll never see another
sun go down, but I'm thankful I seen this one.'”

She was crying outright now, and the girl did not try to stop her.

“And that's the reason I love the mountains,” she whispered at last. “It
ain't just that they're grand and wonderful to look at. It ain't just
the things them tourists sees to talk about. But the mountains has
always been like a comfortin' friend to me. John and Sarah is buried
there--John and Sarah is my two children that died of fever. And then
William is there--like I just told you. And the mountains was a comfort
to me in all those times of trouble. They're like an old friend. Seems
like they're the best friend I've got on earth.”

“I know what you mean,” said the girl, brokenly. “I know all about it.”

“And you don't think I'm just notional,” she asked wistfully, “in pinin'
to get back while--whilst I can look at them?”

The girl held the old hand tightly in hers with a clasp more responsive
than words.

“It ain't but I'd know they was there. I could feel they was there all
right, but”--her voice sank with the horror of it--“I'm 'fraid I might
forget just how they look!”

“Oh, but you won't,” the girl assured her. “You'll remember just how
they look.”

“I'm scared of it. I'm scared there might be something I'd forget. And
so I just torment myself thinkin'--'Now do I remember this? Can I
see just how that looks?' That's the way I got to thinkin' up in the
doctor's office, when he told me there was nothing to do, and I was so
worked up it seemed I must get up and start!”

“You must try not to worry about it,” murmured the girl. “You'll
remember.”

“Well, maybe so. Maybe I will. But that's why I want just one more look.
If I could look once more I'd remember it forever. You see I'd look to
remember it, and I would. And do you know--seems like I wouldn't mind
going blind so much then? When I'd sit facin' them I'd just say to
myself: 'Now I know just how they look. I'm seeing them just as if I had
my eyes!' The doctor says my sight'll just kind of slip away, and when I
look my last look, when it gets dimmer and dimmer to me, I want the last
thing I see to be them mountains where William and me worked and was
so happy! Seems like I can't bear it to have my sight slip away here
in Chicago, where there's nothing I want to look at! And then to have a
little left--to have just a little left!--and to know I could see if I
was there to look--and to know that when I get there 'twill be--Oh, I'll
be rebellious-like here--and I'd be contented there! I don't want to be
complainin'--I don't want to!--but when I've only got a little left I
want it--oh, I want it for them things I want to see!”

“You will see them,” insisted the girl passionately. “I'm not going to
believe the world can be so hideous as that!”

“Well, maybe so,” said the woman, rising. “But I don't know where 'twill
come from,” she added doubtfully.

She took her back to the doctor's office and left her in the care of the
stolid Emma. “Seems most like I'd been back home,” she said in parting;
and the girl promised to come and see her and talk with her about the
mountains. The woman thought that talking about them would help her to
remember just how they looked.

And then the girl returned to the library. She did not know why she
did so. In truth she scarcely knew she was going there until she found
herself sitting before that same secluded table at which she and the
woman had sat a little while before. For a long time she sat there with
her head in her hands, tears falling upon a pad of yellow paper on the
table before her.

Finally she dried her eyes, opened her purse, and counted her money. It
seemed that out of her great desire, out of her great new need, there
must be more than she had thought. But there was not, and she folded
her hands upon the two five-dollar bills and the one silver dollar and
looked hopelessly about the big room.

She had forgotten her own disappointments, her own loneliness. She was
oblivious to everything in the world now save what seemed the absolute
necessity of getting the woman back to the mountains while she had eyes
to see them.

But what could she do? Again she counted the money. She could make
herself, some way or other, get along without one of the five-dollar
bills, but five dollars would not take one very close to the mountains.
It was at that moment that she saw a man standing before the Denver
paper, and noticed that another man was waiting to take his place. The
one who was reading had a dinner pail in his hand. The clothes of the
other told that he, too, was of the world's workers. It was clear to the
girl that the man at the file was reading the paper from home; and the
man who was ready to take his place looked as if waiting for something
less impersonal than the news of the day.

The idea came upon her with such suddenness, so full born, that it made
her gasp. They--the people who came to read the Denver paper, the people
who loved the mountains and were far from them, the people who were
themselves homesick and full of longing--were the people to understand.

It took her but a minute to act. She put the silver dollar and one
five-dollar bill back in her purse. She clutched the other bill in
her left hand, picked up a pencil, and began to write. She headed the
petition: “To all who know and love the mountains,” and she told the
story with the simpleness of one speaking from the heart, and the
directness of one who speaks to those sure to understand. “And so I
found her here by the Denver paper,” she said, after she had stated
the tragic facts, “because it was the closest she could come to the
mountains. Her heart is not breaking because she is going blind. It is
breaking because she may never again look with seeing eyes upon those
great hills which rise up about her home. We must do it for her simply
because we would wish that, under like circumstances, someone would do
it for us. She belongs to us because we understand.

“If you can only give fifty cents, please do not hold it back because
it seems but little. Fifty cents will take her twenty miles nearer
home--twenty miles closer to the things upon which she longs that her
last seeing glance may fall.”

After she had written it she rose, and, the five-dollar bill in one
hand, the sheets of yellow paper in the other, walked down the long room
to the desk at which one of the librarians sat. The girl's cheeks were
very red, her eyes shining as she poured out the story. They mingled
their tears, for the girl at the desk was herself young and far from
home, and then they walked back to the Denver paper and pinned the
sheets of yellow paper just above the file. At the bottom of the
petition the librarian wrote: “Leave your money at the desk in this
room. It will be properly attended to.” The girl from Colorado then
turned over her five-dollar bill and passed out into the gathering
night.

Her heart was brimming with joy. “I can get a cheaper boarding place,”
 she told herself, as she joined the home-going crowds, “and until
something else turns up I'll just look around and see if I can't get a
place in a store.”

       *       *       *       *       *

One by one they had gathered around while the woman was telling the
story. “And so, if you don't mind,” she said, in conclusion, “I'd like
to have you put in a little piece that I got to Denver safe, so's they
can see it. They was all so worked up about when I'd get here. Would
that cost much?” she asked timidly.

“Not a cent,” said the city editor, his voice gruff with the attempt to
keep it steady.

“You might say, if it wouldn't take too much room, that I was much
pleased with the prospect of getting home before sundown to-night.”

“You needn't worry but what we'll say it all,” he assured her. “We'll
say a great deal more than you have any idea of.”

“I'm very thankful to you,” she said, as she rose to go.

They sat there for a moment in silence. “When one considers,” someone
began, “that they were people who were pushed too close even to
subscribe to a daily paper--”

“When one considers,” said the city editor, “that the girl who started
it had just eleven dollars to her name--” And then he, too, stopped
abruptly and there was another long moment of silence.

After that he looked around at the reporters. “Well, it's too bad you
can't all have it, when it's so big a chance, but I guess it falls
logically to Raymond. And in writing it, just remember, Raymond, that
the biggest stories are not written about wars, or about politics, or
even murders. The biggest stories are written about the things which
draw human beings closer together. And the chance to write them doesn't
come every day, or every year, or every lifetime. And I'll tell you,
boys, all of you, when it seems sometimes that the milk of human
kindness has all turned sour, just think back to the little story you
heard this afternoon.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Slowly the sun slipped down behind the mountains; slowly the long
purple shadows deepened to black; and with the coming of the night there
settled over the everlasting hills, and over the soul of one who had
returned to them, that satisfying calm that men call peace.




IV

FRECKLES M'GRATH


Many visitors to the State-house made the mistake of looking upon the
Governor as the most important personage in the building. They would
walk up and down the corridors, hoping for a glimpse of some of the
leading officials, when all the while Freckles McGrath, the real
character of the Capitol, and by all odds the most illustrious person in
it, was at once accessible and affable.

Freckles McGrath was the elevator boy. In the official register his
name had gone down as William, but that was a mere concession to
the constituents to whom the official register was sent out. In the
newspapers--and he appeared with frequency in the newspapers--he was
always “Freckles,” and every one from the Governor down gave him that
title, the appropriateness of which was stamped a hundred fold upon his
shrewd, jolly Irish face.

Like every one else on the State pay-roll, Freckles was keyed high
during this first week of the new session. It was a reform Legislature,
and so imbued was it with the idea of reforming that there was grave
danger of its forcing reformation upon everything in sight. It happened
that the Governor was of the same faction of the party as that dominant
in the Legislature; reform breathed through every nook and crevice of
the great building.

But high above all else in importance towered the Kelley Bill. From
the very opening of the session there was scarcely a day when some of
Freckles' passengers did not in hushed whispers mention the Kelley Bill.
From what he could pick up about the building, and what he read in the
newspapers, Freckles put together a few ideas as to what the Kelley Bill
really was. It was a great reform measure, and it was going to show the
railroads that they did not own the State. The railroads were going to
have to pay more taxes, and they were making an awful fuss about it; but
if the Kelley Bill could be put through it would be a great victory for
reform, and would make the Governor “solid” in the State.

Freckles McGrath was strong for reform. That was partly because the
snatches of speeches he heard in the Legislature were more thrilling
when for reform than when against it; it was partly because he adored
the Governor, and in no small part because he despised Mr. Ludlow.

Mr. Ludlow was a lobbyist. Some of the members of the Legislature
were Mr. Ludlow's property--or at least so Freckles inferred from
conversation overheard at his post. There had been a great deal of talk
that session about Mr. Ludlow's methods.

Freckles himself was no snob. Although he had heard Mr. Ludlow called
disgraceful, and although he firmly believed he was disgraceful, he did
not consider that any reason for not speaking to him. And so when Mr.
Ludlow got in all alone one morning, and the occasion seemed to demand
recognition of some sort, Freckles had chirped: “Good-morning!”

But the man, possibly deep in something else, simply knit together
his brows and gave no sign of having heard. After that, Henry Ludlow,
lobbyist, and Freckles McGrath, elevator boy, were enemies.

A little before noon, one day near the end of the session, a member of
the Senate and a member of the House rode down together in the elevator.

“There's no use waiting any longer,” the Senator was saying as they got
in. “We're as strong now as we're going to be. It's a matter of Stacy's
vote, and that's a matter of who sees him last.”

Freckles widened out his ears and gauged the elevator for very slow
running. Stacy had been written up in the papers as a wabbler on the
Kelley Bill.

“He's all right now,” pursued the Senator, “but there's every chance
that Ludlow will see him before he casts his vote this afternoon, and
then--oh, I don't know!” and with a weary little flourish of his hands
the Senator stepped off.

Freckles McGrath sat wrapped in deep thought. The Kelley Bill was coming
up in the Senate that afternoon. If Senator Stacy voted for it, it would
pass. If he voted against it, it would fail. He would vote for it if he
didn't see Mr. Ludlow; he wouldn't vote for it if he did. That was the
situation, and the Governor's whole future, Freckles felt, was at stake.

The bell rang sharply, and he was vaguely conscious then that it had
been ringing before. In the next half-hour he was very busy taking down
the members of the Legislature. Strangely enough, Senator Stacy and the
Governor went down the same trip, and Freckles beamed with approbation
when, he saw them walk out of the building together.

Stacy was one of the first of the senators to return. Freckles sized him
up keenly as he stepped into the elevator, and decided that he was still
firm. But there was a look about Senator Stacy's mouth which suggested
that there was no use in being too sure of him. Freckles considered the
advisability of bursting forth and telling him how much better it would
be to stick with the reform fellows; but just as the boy got his courage
screwed up to speaking point, Senator Stacy got off.

About ten minutes later Freckles had the elevator on the ground floor,
and was sitting there reading a paper, when he heard a step that made
him prick up his ears. The next minute Mr. Ludlow turned the corner. He
was immaculately dressed, as usual, and his iron-grey moustache seemed
to stand out just a little more pompously than ever. There was a
sneering look in his eyes as he stepped into the car. It seemed to be
saying: “They thought they could beat me, did they? Oh, they're easy,
they are!”

Freckles McGrath slammed the door of the cage and started the car up. He
did not know what he was going to do, but he had an idea that he did
not want any other passenger. When half way between the basement and the
first floor, he stopped the elevator. He must have time to think. If
he took that man up to the Senate Chamber, he would simply strike
the death-blow to reform! And so he knelt and pretended to be fixing
something, and he thought fast and hard.

“Something broke?” asked an anxious voice.

Freckles looked around into Mr. Ludlow's face, and he saw that the
eminent lobbyist was nervous.

“Yes,” he said calmly. “It's acting queer. Something's all out of
whack.”

“Well, drop it to the basement and let me out,” said Mr. Ludlow sharply.

“Can't drop it,” responded Freckles. “She's stuck.”

Mr. Ludlow came and looked things over, but his knowledge did not extend
to the mechanism of elevators.

“Better call someone to come and take us out,” he said nervously.

Freckles straightened himself up. A glitter had come into his small grey
eyes, and red spots were burning in his freckled cheeks.

“I think she'll run now,” he said.

And she did run. Never in all its history had that State-house elevator
run as it ran then. It rushed past the first and second floors like
a thing let loose, with an utter abandonment that caused the blood to
forsake the eminent lobbyist's face.

“Stop it, boy!” he cried in alarm.

“Can't!” responded Freckles, his voice thick with terror. “Running
away!” he gasped.

“Will it--fall?” whispered the lobbyist.

“I--I think so!” blubbered Freckles.

The central portion of the State-house was very high. Above that part
of the building which was in use there was a long stretch leading to
the tower. The shaft had been built clear up, though practically unused.
Past floors used for store-rooms, past floors used for nothing at
all, they went--the man's face white, the boy wailing out incoherent
supplications. And then, within ten feet of the top of the shaft, and
within a foot of the top floor of the building, the elevator came to
a rickety stop. It wabbled back and forth; it did strange and terrible
things.

“She's falling!” panted Freckles. “Climb!”

And Henry Ludlow climbed. He got the door open, and he clambered up. No
sooner had the man's feet touched the solid floor than Freckles reached
up and slammed the door of the cage. Why he did that he was not sure at
the time. Later he felt that something had warned him not to give his
prisoner's voice a full sweep down the shaft.

Henry Ludlow was far from dull. As he saw the quick but even descent of
the car, he knew that he had been tricked. He would have been more than
human had there not burst from him furious and threatening words. But
what was the use? The car was going down--down--down, and there he was,
perhaps hundreds of feet above any one else in the building--alone,
tricked, beaten!

Of course he tried the door at the head of the winding stairway, knowing
full well that it would be locked. They always kept it locked; he had
heard one of the janitors asking for the keys to take a party up just
a few days before. Perhaps he could get out on top of the building and
make signals of distress. But the door leading outside was locked also.
There he was--helpless. And below--well, below they were passing the
Kelley Bill!

He rattled the grating of the elevator shaft. He made strange, loud
noises, knowing all the while he could not make himself heard. And then
at last, alone in the State-house attic, Henry Ludlow, eminent lobbyist,
sat down on a box and nursed his fury.

Below, Freckles McGrath, the youngest champion of reform in the
building, was putting on a bold front. He laughed and he talked and he
whistled. He took people up and down with as much nonchalance as if he
did not know that up at the top of that shaft angry eyes were
straining themselves for a glimpse of the car, and terrible curses were
descending, literally, upon his stubby red head.

It was a great afternoon at the State-house. Every one thronged to the
doors of the Senate Chamber, where they were putting through the Kelley
Bill. The speeches made in behalf of the measure were brief. The great
thing now was not to make speeches; it was to reach “S” on roll-call
before a man with iron-grey hair and an iron-grey moustache could come
in and say something to the fair-haired member with the weak mouth who
sat near the rear of the chamber.

Freckles was called away just as it went to a vote. When he came back
Senator Kelley was standing out in the corridor, and a great crowd of
men were standing around slapping him on the back. The Governor himself
was standing on the steps of the Senate Chamber; his eyes were bright,
and he was smiling.

Freckles turned his car back to the basement. He wanted to be all
alone for a minute, to dwell in solitude upon the fact that it was he,
Freckles McGrath, who had won this great victory for reform. It was he,
Freckles McGrath, who had assured the Governor's future. Why, perhaps he
had that afternoon made for himself a name which would be handed down in
the histories!

Freckles was a kind little boy, and he knew that an elegant gentleman
could not find the attic any too pleasant a place in which to spend the
afternoon, go he decided to go up and get Mr. Ludlow. It took courage;
but he had won his victory and this was no time for faltering.

There was something gruesome about the long ascent. He thought of
stories he had read of lonely turrets in which men were beheaded, and
otherwise made away with. It seemed he would never come to the top, and
when at last he did it was to find two of the most awful-looking eyes
he had ever seen--eyes that looked as though furies were going to escape
from them--peering down upon him.

The sight of that car, moving smoothly and securely up to the top, and
the sight of that audacious little boy with the freckled face and the
bat-like eyes, that little boy who had played his game so well, who had
wrought such havoc, was too much for Henry Ludlow's self-control. Words
such as he had never used before, such as he would not have supposed
himself capable of using, burst from him. But Freckles stood calmly
gazing up at the infuriated lobbyist, and just as Mr. Ludlow was saying,
“I'll beat your head open, you little brat!” he calmly reversed the
handle and sent the car skimming smoothly to realms below. He was
followed by an angry yell, and then by a loud request to return, but he
heeded them not, and for some time longer the car made its usual rounds
between the basement and the legislative chambers.

In just an hour Freckles tried it again. He sent the car to within three
feet of the attic floor, and then peered through the grating, his
face tied in a knot of interrogation. The eminent lobbyist stood there
gulping down wrath and pride, knowing well enough what was expected of
him.

“Oh--all right,” he muttered at last, and with that much of an
understanding Freckles sent the car up, opened the door, and Henry
Ludlow stepped in.

No word was spoken between them until the light from the floor upon
which the Senate Chamber was situated came in view. Then Freckles turned
with a polite inquiry as to where the gentleman wished to get off.

“You may take me down to the office of the Governor,” said Mr. Ludlow
stonily, meaningly.

“Sure,” said Freckles cheerfully. “Guess you'll find the Governor in his
office now. He's been in the Senate most of the afternoon, watching 'em
pass that Kelley Bill.”

Mr. Ludlow's lips drew in tightly. He squared his shoulders, and his
silence was tremendous.

In just fifteen minutes Freckles was sent for from the executive office.

“I demand his discharge!” Mr. Ludlow was saying as the elevator boy
entered.

“It happens you're not running this building,” the Governor returned
with a good deal of acidity. “Though of course,” he added with dignity,
“the matter will be carefully investigated.”

The Governor was one great chuckle inside, and his heart was full of
admiration and gratitude; but would Freckles be equal to bluffing it
through? Would the boy have the finesse, the nice subtlety, the real
master hand, the situation demanded? If not, then--imp of salvation
though he was--in the interest of reform, Freckles would have to go.

It was a very innocent looking boy who stood before him and looked
inquiringly into his face.

“William,” began the Governor--Freckles was pained at first, and then
remembered that officially he was William--“this gentleman has made a
very serious charge against you.”

Freckles looked at Mr. Ludlow in a hurt way, and waited for the Governor
to proceed.

“He says,” went on the chief executive, “that you deliberately took him
to the top of the building and wilfully left him there a prisoner all
afternoon. Did you do that?”

“Oh, sir,” burst forth Freckles, “I did the very best I could to save
his life! I was willing to sacrifice mine for him. I--”

“You little liar!” broke in Ludlow.

The Governor held up his hand. “You had your chance. Let him have his.”

“You see, Governor,” began Freckles, as if anxious to set right a great
wrong which had been done him, “the car is acting bad. The engineer said
only this morning it needed a going over. When it took that awful shoot,
I lost control of it. Maybe I'm to be discharged for losing control of
it, but not”--Freckles sniffled pathetically---“but not for anything
like what he says I done. Why Governor,” he went on, ramming his
knuckles into his eyes, “I ain't got nothing against him! What'd I take
him to the attic for?”

“Of course not for money,” sneered Mr. Ludlow.

The Governor turned on him sharply. “When you can bring any proof of
that, I'll be ready to hear it. Until you can, you'd better leave it out
of the question.”

“Strange it should have happened this very afternoon,” put in the
eminent lobbyist.

The Governor looked at him with open countenance. “You were especially
interested in something this afternoon? I thought you told me you had no
vital interest here this session.”

There was nothing to be said. Mr. Ludlow said nothing.

“Now, William,” pursued the Governor, fearful in his heart that this
would be Freckles' undoing, “why did you close the door of the shaft
before you started down?”

“Well, you see, sir,” began Freckles, still tremulously, “I'm so used to
closin' doors. Closin' doors has become a kind of second nature with me.
I've been told about it so many times. And up there, though I thought I
was losin' my life, still I didn't neglect my duty.”

The Governor put his hand to his mouth and coughed.

“And why,” he went on, more secure now, for a boy who could get out
of that could get out of anything, “why was it you didn't make some
immediate effort to get Mr. Ludlow down? Why didn't you notify someone,
or do something about it?”

“Why, I supposed, of course, he walked down by the stairs,” cried
Freckles. “I never dreamed he'd want to trust the elevator after the way
she had acted.”

“The door was locked,” snarled the eminent lobbyist.

“Well, now, you see, I didn't know that,” explained Freckles
expansively. “Late in the afternoon I took a run up just to test
the car--and there you were! I never was so surprised in my life. I
supposed, of course, sir, that you'd spent the afternoon in the Senate,
along with everybody else.”

Once more the Governor put his hand to his mouth.

“Your case will come before the executive council at its next meeting,
William. And if anything like this should happen again, you will be
discharged on the spot.” Freckles bowed. “You may go now.”

When he was almost at the door the Governor called to him.

“Don't you think, William,” he said--the Governor felt that he and
Freckles could afford to be generous--“that you should apologise to the
gentleman for the really grave inconvenience to which you have been the
means of subjecting him?”

Freckles' little grey eyes grew steely. He looked at Henry Ludlow, and
there was an ominous silence. Then light broke over his face. “On behalf
of the elevator,” he said, “I apologise.”

And a third time the Governor's hand was raised to his mouth.

The next week Freckles was wearing a signet ring; long and audibly had
he sighed for a ring of such kind and proportions. He was at some pains
in explaining to everyone to whom he showed it that it had been sent him
by “a friend up home.”




V

FROM A TO Z


Thus had another ideal tumbled to the rubbish heap! She seemed to be
breathing the dust which the newly fallen had stirred up among
its longer dead fellows. Certainly she was breathing the dust from
somewhere.

During her senior year at the university, when people would ask: “And
what are you going to do when you leave school, Miss Willard?” she would
respond with anything that came to hand, secretly hugging to her mind
that idea of getting a position in a publishing house. Her conception of
her publishing house was finished about the same time as her class-day
gown. She was to have a roll-top desk--probably of mahogany--and a big
chair which whirled round like that in the office of the under-graduate
dean. She was to have a little office all by herself, opening on
a bigger office--the little one marked “Private.” There were to be
beautiful rugs--the general effect not unlike the library at the
University Club--books and pictures and cultivated gentlemen who spoke
often of Greek tragedies and the Renaissance. She was a little uncertain
as to her duties, but had a general idea about getting down between nine
and ten, reading the morning paper, cutting the latest magazine, and
then “writing something.”

Commencement was now four months past, and one of her professors had
indeed secured for her a position in a Chicago “publishing house.” This
was her first morning and she was standing at the window looking down
into Dearborn Street while the man who was to have her in charge was
fixing a place for her to sit.

That the publishing house should be on Dearborn Street had been her
first blow, for she had long located her publishing house on that
beautiful stretch of Michigan Avenue which overlooked the lake. But
the real insult was that this publishing house, instead of having a
building, or at least a floor, all to itself, simply had a place
penned off in a bleak, dirty building such as one who had done work in
sociological research instinctively associated with a box factory. And
the thing which fairly trailed her visions in the dust was that the
partition penning them off did not extend to the ceiling, and the
adjoining room being occupied by a patent medicine company, she was face
to face with glaring endorsements of Dr. Bunting's Famous Kidney and
Bladder Cure. Taken all in all there seemed little chance for Greek
tragedies or the Renaissance.

The man who was “running things”--she buried her phraseology with her
dreams--wore a skull cap, and his moustache dragged down below his chin.
Just at present he was engaged in noisily pulling a most unliterary pine
table from a dark corner to a place near the window. That accomplished,
an ostentatious hunt ensued, resulting in the triumphant flourish of
a feather duster. Several knocks at the table, and the dust of many
months--perhaps likewise of many dreams--ascended to a resting place
on the endorsement of Dr. Bunting's Kidney and Bladder Cure. He next
produced a short, straight-backed chair which she recognised as brother
to the one which used to stand behind their kitchen stove. He gave it a
shake, thus delicately indicating that she was receiving special favours
in this matter of an able-bodied chair, and then announced with brisk
satisfaction: “So! Now we are ready to begin.” She murmured a “Thank
you,” seated herself and her buried hopes in this chair which did not
whirl round, and leaned her arms upon a table which did not even dream
in mahogany.

In the _other_ publishing house, one pushed buttons and uniformed
menials appeared--noiselessly, quickly and deferentially. At this
moment a boy with sandy hair brushed straight back in a manner
either statesmanlike or clownlike--things were too involved to know
which--shuffled in with an armful of yellow paper which he flopped down
on the pine table. After a minute he returned with a warbled “Take Me
Back to New York Town” and a paste-pot. And upon his third appearance he
was practising gymnastics with a huge pair of shears, which he finally
presented, grinningly.

There was a long pause, broken only by the sonorous voice of Dr. Bunting
upbraiding someone for not having billed out that stuff to Apple Grove,
and then the sandy-haired boy appeared bearing a large dictionary,
followed by the man in the skull cap behind a dictionary of equal
unwieldiness. These were set down on either side of the yellow paper,
and he who was filling the position of cultivated gentleman pulled up a
chair, briskly.

“Has Professor Lee explained to you the nature of our work?” he wanted
to know.

“No,” she replied, half grimly, a little humourously, and not far from
tearfully, “he didn't--explain.”

“Then it is my pleasure to inform you,” he began, blinking at her
importantly, “that we are engaged here in the making of a dictionary.”

“A _dic--?_” but she swallowed the gasp in the laugh coming up to meet
it, and of their union was born a saving cough.

“Quite an overpowering thought, is it not?” he agreed pleasantly. “Now
you see you have before you the two dictionaries you will use most, and
over in that case you will find other references. The main thing”--his
voice sank to an impressive whisper--“is _not_ to infringe the
copyright. The publisher was in yesterday and made a little talk to the
force, and he said that any one who handed in a piece of copy infringing
the copyright simply employed that means of writing his own resignation.
Neat way of putting it, was it not?”

“Yes, _wasn't_ it--neat?” she agreed, wildly.

She was conscious of a man's having stepped in behind her and taken a
seat at the table next hers. She heard him opening his dictionaries and
getting out his paper. Then the man in the skull cap had risen and
was saying genially: “Well, here is a piece of old Webster, your first
'take'--no copyright on this, you see, but you must modernise
and expand. Don't miss any of the good words in either of these
dictionaries. Here you have dictionaries, copy-paper, paste, and
Professor Lee assures me you have brains--all the necessary ingredients
for successful lexicography. We are to have some rules printed
to-morrow, and in the meantime I trust I've made myself clear. The main
thing”--he bent down and spoke it solemnly--“is _not_ to infringe the
copyright.” With a cheerful nod he was gone, and she heard him saying to
the man at the next table: “Mr. Clifford, I shall have to ask you to be
more careful about getting in promptly at eight.”

She removed the cover from her paste-pot and dabbled a little on a piece
of paper. Then she tried the unwieldy shears on another piece of paper.
She then opened one of her dictionaries and read studiously for fifteen
minutes. That accomplished, she opened the other dictionary and pursued
it for twelve minutes. Then she took the column of “old Webster,” which
had been handed her pasted on a piece of yellow paper, and set about
attempting to commit it to memory. She looked up to be met with the
statement that Mrs. Marjory Van Luce De Vane, after spending years under
the so-called best surgeons of the country, had been cured in six
weeks by Dr. Bunting's Famous Kidney and Bladder Cure. She pushed the
dictionaries petulantly from her, and leaning her very red cheek
upon her hand, her hazel eyes blurred with tears of perplexity and
resentment, her mouth drawn in pathetic little lines of uncertainty,
looked over at the sprawling warehouse on the opposite side of Dearborn
Street. She was just considering the direct manner of writing one's
resignation--not knowing how to infringe the copyright--when a voice
said: “I beg pardon, but I wonder if I can help you any?”

She had never heard a voice like that before. Or, _had_ she heard
it?--and where? She looked at him, a long, startled gaze. Something made
her think of the voice the prince used to have in long-ago dreams. She
looked into a face that was dark and thin and--different. Two very
dark eyes were looking at her kindly, and a mouth which was a baffling
combination of things to be loved and things to be deplored was
twitching a little, as though it would like to join the eyes in a smile,
if it dared.

Because he saw both how funny and how hard it was, she liked him. It
would have been quite different had he seen either one without the
other.

“You can tell me how _not_ to infringe the copyright,” she laughed. “I'm
not sure that I know what a copyright is.”

He laughed--a laugh which belonged with his voice. “Mr. Littletree isn't
as lucid as he thinks he is. I've been here a week or so, and picked up
a few things you might like to know.”

He pulled his chair closer to her table then and gave her a lesson in
the making of copy. Edna Willard was never one-half so attractive as
when absorbed in a thing which someone was showing her how to do. Her
hazel eyes would widen and glisten with the joy of comprehending; her
cheeks would flush a deeper pink with the coming of new light, her mouth
would part in a child-like way it had forgotten to outgrow, her head
would nod gleefully in token that she understood, and she had a way
of pulling at her wavy hair and making it more wavy than it had been
before. The man at the next table was a long time in explaining the
making of a dictionary. He spoke in low tones, often looking at the
figure of the man in the skull cap, who was sitting with his back to
them, looking over copy. Once she cried, excitedly: “Oh--I _see_!” and
he warned, “S--h!” explaining, “Let him think you got it all from him.
It will give you a better stand-in.” She nodded, appreciatively, and
felt very well acquainted with this kind man whose voice made her think
of something--called to something--she did not just know what.

After that she became so absorbed in lexicography that when the men
began putting away their things it was hard to realise that the morning
had gone. It was a new and difficult game, the evasion of the copyright
furnishing the stimulus of a hazard.

The man at the next table had been watching her with an amused
admiration. Her child-like absorption, the way every emotion from
perplexity to satisfaction expressed itself in the poise of her head and
the pucker of her face, took him back over years emotionally barren to
the time when he too had those easily stirred enthusiasms of youth. For
the man at the next table was far from young now. His mouth had never
quite parted with boyishness, but there was more white than black in his
hair, and the lines about his mouth told that time, as well as forces
more aging than time, had laid heavy hand upon him. But when he looked
at the girl and told her with a smile that it was time to stop work,
it was a smile and a voice to defy the most tell-tale face in all the
world.

During her luncheon, as she watched the strange people coming and going,
she did much wondering. She wondered why it was that so many of the men
at the dictionary place were very old men; she wondered if it would be a
good dictionary--one that would be used in the schools; she wondered if
Dr. Bunting had made a great deal of money, and most of all she wondered
about the man at the next table whose voice was like--like a dream which
she did not know that she had dreamed.

When she had returned to the straggling old building, had stumbled down
the narrow, dark hall and opened the door of the big bleak room, she saw
that the man at the next table was the only one who had returned from
luncheon. Something in his profile made her stand there very still. He
had not heard her come in, and he was looking straight ahead, eyes
half closed, mouth set--no unsurrendered boyishness there now. Wholly
unconsciously she took an impulsive step forward. But she stopped, for
she saw, and felt without really understanding, that it was not just
the moment's pain, but the revealed pain of years. Just then he began
to cough, and it seemed the cough, too, was more than of the moment. And
then he turned and saw her, and smiled, and the smile changed all.

As the afternoon wore on the man stopped working and turning a little in
his chair sat there covertly watching the girl. She was just typically
girl. It was written that she had spent her days in the happy ways of
healthful girlhood. He supposed that a great many young fellows had
fallen in love with her--nice, clean young fellows, the kind she would
naturally meet. And then his eyes closed for a minute and he put up his
hand and brushed back his hair; there was weariness, weariness weary of
itself, in the gesture. He looked about the room and scanned the faces
of the men, most of them older than he, many of them men whose histories
were well known to him. They were the usual hangers on about newspaper
offices; men who, for one reason or other--age, dissipation, antiquated
methods--had been pitched over, men for whom such work as this came as
a godsend. They were the men of yesterday--men whom the world had rushed
past. She was the only one there, this girl who would probably sit here
beside him for many months, with whom the future had anything to do.
Youth!--Goodness!--Joy!--Hope!--strange things to bring to a place
like this. And as if their alienism disturbed him, he moved restlessly,
almost resentfully, bit his lips nervously, moistened them, and began
putting away his things.

As the girl was starting home along Dearborn Street a few minutes later,
she chanced to look in a window. She saw that it was a saloon, but
before she could turn away she saw a man with a white face--white with
the peculiar whiteness of a dark face, standing before the bar drinking
from a small glass. She stood still, arrested by a look such as she had
never seen before: a panting human soul sobbingly fluttering down into
something from which it had spent all its force in trying to rise.
When she recalled herself and passed on, a mist which she could neither
account for nor banish was dimming the clear hazel of her eyes.

The next day was a hard one at the dictionary place. She told herself
it was because the novelty of it was wearing away, because her fingers
ached, because it tired her back to sit in that horrid chair. She did
not admit of any connection between her flagging interest and the fact
that the place at the next table was vacant.

The following day he was still absent. She assumed that it was
nervousness occasioned by her queer surroundings made her look around
whenever she heard a step behind her. Where was he? Where had that look
carried him? If he were in trouble, was there no one to help him?

The third day she did an unpremeditated thing. The man in the skull cap
had been showing her something about the copy. As he was leaving, she
asked: “Is the man who sits at the next table coming back?”

“Oh yes,” he replied grimly, “he'll be back.”

“Because,” she went on, “if he wasn't, I thought I would take his
shears. These hurt my fingers.”

He made the exchange for her--and after that things went better.

He did return late the next morning. After he had taken his place
he looked over at her and smiled. He looked sick and shaken--as if
something that knew no mercy had taken hold of him and wrung body and
soul.

“You have been ill?” she asked, with timid solicitude.

“Oh no,” he replied, rather shortly.

He was quiet all that day, but the next day they talked about the work,
laughed together over funny definitions they found. She felt that he
could tell many interesting things about himself, if he cared to.

As the days went on he did tell some of those things--out of the way
places where he had worked, queer people whom he had known. It seemed
that words came to him as gifts, came freely, happily, pleased, perhaps,
to be borne by so sympathetic a voice. And there was another thing about
him. He seemed always to know just what she was trying to say; he never
missed the unexpressed. That made it easy to say things to him; there
seemed a certain at-homeness between his thought and hers. She accounted
for her interest in him by telling herself she had never known any one
like that before. Now Harold, the boy whom she knew best out at
the university, why one had to _say_ things to Harold to make him
understand! And Harold never left one wondering--wondering what he had
meant by that smile, what he had been going to say when he started to
say something and stopped, wondering what it was about his face that one
could not understand. Harold never could claim as his the hour after
he had left her, and was one ever close to anyone with whom one did not
spend some of the hours of absence? She began to see that hours spent
together when apart were the most intimate hours of all.

And as Harold did not make one wonder, so he did not make one worry.
Never in all her life had there been a lump in her throat when she
thought of Harold. There was often a lump in her throat when the man at
the next table was coughing.

One day, she had been there about two months, she said something to him
about it. It was hard; it seemed forcing one's way into a room that had
never been opened to one--there were several doors he kept closed.

“Mr. Clifford,” she turned to him impetuously as they were putting away
their things that night, “will you mind if I say something to you?”

He was covering his paste-pot. He looked up at her strangely. The
closed door seemed to open a little way. “I can't conceive of 'minding'
anything you might say to me, Miss Noah,”--he had called her Miss Noah
ever since she, by mistake, had one day called him Mr. Webster.

“You see,” she hurried on, very timid, now that the door had opened a
little, “you have been so good to me. Because you have been so good to
me it seems that I have some right to--to--”

His head was resting upon his hand, and he leaned a little closer as
though listening for something he wanted to hear.

“I had a cousin who had a cough like yours,”--brave now that she could
not go back--“and he went down to New Mexico and stayed for a year, and
when he came back--when he came back he was as well as any of us. It
seems so foolish not to”--her voice broke, now that it had so valiantly
carried it--“not to--”

He looked at her, and that was all. But she was never wholly the same
again after that look. It enveloped her being in a something which left
her richer--different. It was a look to light the dark place between two
human souls. It seemed for the moment that words would follow it, but
as if feeling their helplessness--perhaps needlessness--they sank back
unuttered, and at the last he got up, abruptly, and walked away.

One night, while waiting for the elevator, she heard two of the men
talking about him. When she went out on the street it was with head
high, cheeks hot. For nothing is so hard to hear as that which one has
half known, and evaded. One never denies so hotly as in denying to one's
self what one fears is true, and one never resents so bitterly as in
resenting that which one cannot say one has the right to resent.

That night she lay in her bed with wide open eyes, going over and over
the things they had said. “_Cure?_”--one of them had scoffed, after
telling how brilliant he had been before he “went to pieces”--“why all
the cures on earth couldn't help him! He can go just so far, and then
he can no more stop himself--oh, about as much as an ant could stop a
prairie fire!”

She finally turned over on her pillow and sobbed; and she wondered
why--wondered, yet knew.

But it resulted in the flowering of her tenderness for him. Interest
mounted to defiance. It ended in blind, passionate desire to “make it
up” to him. And again he was so different from Harold; Harold did not
impress himself upon one by upsetting all one's preconceived ideas.

She felt now that she understood better--understood the closed doors. He
was--she could think of no better word than sensitive.

And that is why, several mornings later, she very courageously--for
it did take courage--threw this little note over on his desk--they
had formed a habit of writing notes to each other, sometimes about the
words, sometimes about other things.

“IN-VI-TA-TION, _n._ That which Miss Noah extends to Mr. Webster for
Friday evening, December second, at the house where she lives--hasn't
she already told him where that is? It is the wish of Miss Noah to
present Mr. Webster to various other Miss Noahs, all of whom are
desirous of making his acquaintance.”

She was absurdly nervous at luncheon that day, and kept telling herself
with severity not to act like a high-school girl. He was late in
returning that noon, and though there seemed a new something in his
voice when he asked if he hadn't better sharpen her pencils, he said
nothing about her new definition of invitation. It was almost five
o'clock when he threw this over on her desk:

“AP-PRE-CI-A-TION, _n._ That sentiment inspired in Mr. Webster by the
kind invitation of Miss Noah for Friday evening.

“RE-GRET, _n._ That which Mr. Webster experiences because, for reasons
into which he cannot go in detail, it is impossible for him to accept
Miss Noah's invitation.

“RE-SENT-MENT, _n._ That which is inspired in Mr. Webster by the
insinuation that there are other Miss Noahs in the world.”

Then below he had written: “Three hours later. Miss Noah, the world is
queer. Some day you may find out--though I hope you never will--that it
is frequently the things we most want to do that we must leave undone.
Miss Noah, won't you go on bringing me as much of yourself as you can
to Dearborn Street, and try not to think much about my not being able
to know the Miss Noah of Hyde Park? And little Miss Noah--I thank you.
There aren't words enough in this old book of ours to tell you how
much--or why.”

That night he hurried away with never a joke about how many words she
had written that day. She did not look up as he stood there putting on
his coat.

It was spring now, and the dictionary staff had begun on W.

They had written of Joy, of Hope and Life and Love, and many other
things. Life seemed pressing just behind some of those definitions,
pressing the harder, perhaps, because it could not break through the
surface.

For it did not break through; it flooded just beneath.

How did she know that he cared for her? She could not possibly have
told. Perhaps the nearest to actual proof she could bring was that he
always saw that her overshoes were put in a warm place. And when one
came down to facts, the putting of a girl's rubbers near the radiator
did not necessarily mean love.

Perhaps then it was because there was no proof of it that she was most
sure. For some of the most sure things in the world are things which
cannot be proved.

It was only that they worked together and were friends; that they
laughed together over funny definitions they found, that he was kind to
her, and that they seemed remarkably close together.

That is as far as facts can take it.

And just there--it begins.

For the force which rushes beneath the facts of life, caring nothing for
conditions, not asking what one desires or what one thinks best, caring
as little about a past as about a future--save its own future--the force
which can laugh at man's institutions and batter over in one sweep what
he likes to call his wisdom, was sweeping them on. And because it could
get no other recognition it forced its way into the moments when he
asked her for an eraser, when she wanted to know how to spell a word.
He could not so much as ask her if she needed more copy-paper without
seeming to be lavishing upon her all the love of all the ages.

And so the winter had worn on, and there was really nothing whatever to
tell about it.

She was quiet this morning, and kept her head bent low over her work.
For she had estimated the number of pages there were between W and Z.
Soon they would be at Z;--and then? Then? Shyly she turned and looked
at him; he too was bent over his work. When she came in she had said
something about its being spring, and that there must be wild flowers in
the woods. Since then he had not looked up.

Suddenly it came to her--tenderly, hotly, fearfully yet bravely, that it
was she who must meet Z. She looked at him again, covertly. And she
felt that she understood. It was the lines in his face made it clearest.
Years, and things blacker, less easily surmounted than years--oh yes,
that too she faced fearlessly--were piled in between. She knew now that
it was she--not he--who could push them aside.

It was all very unmaidenly, of course; but maidenly is a word love and
life and desire may crowd from the page.

Perhaps she would not have thrown it after all--the little note she had
written--had it not been that when she went over for more copy-paper she
stood for a minute looking out the window. Even on Dearborn Street the
seductiveness of spring was in the air. Spring, and all that spring
meant, filled her.

Because, way beyond the voice of Dr. Bunting she heard the songs of
far-away birds, and because beneath the rumble of a printing press she
could get the babble of a brook, because Z was near and life was strong,
the woman vanquished the girl, and she threw this over to his desk:

“CHAFING-DISH, n. That out of which Miss Noah asks Mr. Webster to eat
his Sunday night lunch tomorrow. All the other Miss Noahs are going to
be away, and if Mr. Webster does not come, Miss Noah will be all alone.
Miss Noah does not like to be lonely.”

She ate no lunch that day; she only drank a cup of coffee and walked
around.

He did not come back that afternoon. It passed from one to two, from two
to three, and then very slowly from three to four, and still he had not
come.

He too was walking about. He had walked down to the lake and was
standing there looking out across it.

Why not?--he was saying to himself--fiercely, doggedly. Over and over
again--Well, _why_ not?

A hundred nights, alone in his room, he had gone over it. Had not life
used him hard enough to give him a little now?--longing had pleaded.
And now there was a new voice--more prevailing voice--the voice of her
happiness. His face softened to an almost maternal tenderness as he
listened to that voice.

Too worn to fight any longer, he gave himself up to it, and sat there
dreaming. They were dreams of joy rushing in after lonely years, dreams
of stepping into the sunlight after long days in fog and cold, dreams
of a woman before a fireplace--her arms about him, her cheer and her
tenderness, her comradeship and her passion--all his to take! Ah, dreams
which even thoughts must not touch--so wonderful and sacred they were.

A long time he sat there, dreaming dreams and seeing visions. The force
that rules the race was telling him that the one crime was the denial
of happiness--his happiness, her happiness; and when at last his fight
seemed but a puerile fight against forces worlds mightier than he, he
rose, and as one who sees a great light, started back toward Dearborn
Street.

On the way he began to cough. The coughing was violent, and he stepped
into a doorway to gain breath. And after he had gone in there he
realised that it was the building of Chicago's greatest newspaper.

He had been city editor of that paper once. Facts, the things he knew
about himself, talked to him then. There was no answer.

It left him weak and dizzy and crazy for a drink. He walked on slowly,
unsteadily, his white face set. For he had vowed that if it took the
last nerve in his body there should be no more of that until after they
had finished with Z. He knew himself too well to vow more. He was not
even sure of that.

He did not turn in where he wanted to go, but resistance took the last
bit of force that was in him. He was trembling like a sick man when he
stepped into the elevator.

She was just leaving. She was in the little cloak room putting on her
things. She was all alone in there.

He stepped in. He pushed the door shut, and stood there leaning against
it, looking at her, saying nothing.

“Oh--you are ill?” she gasped, and laid a frightened hand upon him.

The touch crazed him. All resistance gone, he swept her into his arms;
he held her fiercely, and between sobs kissed her again and again. He
could not let her go. He frightened her. He hurt her. And he did not
care--he did not know.

Then he held her off and looked at her. And as he looked into her eyes,
passion melted to tenderness. It was she now--not he; love--not
hunger. Holding her face in his two hands, looking at her as if getting
something to take away, his white lips murmured words too inarticulate
for her to hear. And then again he put his arms around her--all
differently. Reverently, sobbingly, he kissed her hair. And then he was
gone.

He did not come out that Sunday afternoon, but Harold dropped in
instead, and talked of some athletic affairs over at the university. She
wondered why she did not go crazy in listening to him, and yet she could
answer intelligently. It was queer--what one _could_ do.

They had come at last to Z. There would be no more work upon the
dictionary after that day. And it was raining--raining as in Chicago
alone it knows how to rain.

They wrote no notes to each other now. It had been different since that
day. They made small effort to cover their raw souls with the mantle of
commonplace words.

Both of them had tried to stay away that last day. But both were in
their usual places.

The day wore on eventlessly. Those men with whom she had worked, the
men of yesterday, who had been kind to her, came up at various times for
little farewell chats. The man in the skull cap told her that she had
done excellent work. She was surprised at the ease with which she could
make decent reply, thinking again that it was queer--what one could do.

He was moving. She saw him lay some sheets of yellow paper on the desk
in front. He had finished with his “take.” There would not be another to
give him. He would go now.

He came back to his desk. She could hear him putting away his things.
And then for a long time there was no sound. She knew that he was just
sitting there in his chair.

Then she heard him get up. She heard him push his chair up to the table,
and then for a minute he stood there. She wanted to turn toward him; she
wanted to say something--do something. But she had no power.

She saw him lay an envelope upon her desk. She heard him walking away.
She knew, numbly, that his footsteps were not steady. She knew that he
had stopped; she was sure that he was looking back. But still she had no
power.

And then she heard him go.

Even then she went on with her work; she finished her “take” and
laid down her pencil. It was finished now--and he had gone.
Finished?--_Gone?_ She was tearing open the envelope of the letter.

This was what she read:

“Little dictionary sprite, sunshine vender, and girl to be loved, if I
were a free man I would say to you--Come, little one, and let us learn
of love. Let us learn of it, not as one learns from dictionaries, but
let us learn from the morning glow and the evening shades. But Miss
Noah, maker of dictionaries and creeper into hearts, the bound must not
call to the free. They might fittingly have used my name as one of the
synonyms under that word Failure, but I trust not under Coward.

“And now, you funny little Miss Noah from the University of Chicago,
don't I know that your heart is blazing forth the assurance that
you don't _care_ for any of those things--the world, people, common
sense--that you want just love? They made a grand failure of you out at
your university; they taught you philosophy and they taught you Greek,
and they've left you just as much the woman as women were five thousand
years ago. Oh, I know all about you--you little girl whose hair tried
so hard to be red. Your soul touched mine as we sat there writing
words--words--words, the very words in which men try to tell things, and
can't--and I know all about what you would do. But you shall not do
it. Dear little copy maker, would a man standing out on the end of a
slippery plank have any right to cry to someone on the shore--'Come out
here on this plank with me?' If he loved the someone on the shore,
would he not say instead--'Don't get on this plank?' Me get off the
plank--come with you to the shore--you are saying? But you see, dear,
you only know slippery planks as viewed from the shore--God grant you
may never know them any other way!

“It was you, was it not, who wrote our definition of happiness? Yes, I
remember the day you did it. You were so interested; your cheeks grew so
very red, and you pulled and pulled at your wavy hair. You said it was
such an important definition. And so it is, Miss Noah, quite the most
important of all. And on the page of life, Miss Noah, may happiness be
written large and unblurred for you. It is because I cannot help you
write it that I turn away. I want at least to leave the page unspoiled.

“I carry a picture of you. I shall carry it always. You are sitting
before a fireplace, and I think of that fireplace as symbolising the
warmth and care and tenderness and the safety that will surround you.
And sometimes as you sit there let a thought of me come for just a
minute, Miss Noah--not long enough nor deep enough to bring you any
pain. But only think--I brought him happiness after he believed all
happiness had gone. He was so grateful for that light which came after
he thought the darkness had settled down. It will light his way to the
end.

“We've come to Z, and it's good-bye. There is one thing I can give you
without hurting you,--the hope, the prayer, that life may be very, very
good to you.”

The sheets of paper fell from her hands. She sat staring out into
Dearborn Street. She began to see. After all, he had not understood her.
Perhaps men never understood women; certainly he had not understood
her. What he did not know was that she was willing to _pay_ for her
happiness--_pay_--pay any price that might be exacted. And anyway--she
had no choice. Strange that he could not see that! Strange that he could
not see the irony and cruelty of bidding her good-bye and then telling
her to be happy!

It simplified itself to such an extent that she _grew_ very calm. It
would be easy to find him, easy to make him see--for it was so very
simple--and then....

She turned in her copy. She said good-bye quietly, naturally, rode down
in the lumbering old elevator and started out into the now drenching
rain toward the elevated trains which would take her to the West Side;
it was so fortunate that she had heard him telling one day where he
lived.

When she reached the station she saw that more people were coming down
the stairs than were going up. They were saying things about the trains,
but she did not heed them. But at the top of the stairs a man in uniform
said: “Blockade, Miss. You'll have to take the surface cars.”

She was sorry, for it would delay her, and there was not a minute to
lose. She was dismayed, upon reaching the surface cars, to find she
could not get near them; the rain, the blockade on the “L” had caused
a great crowd to congregate there. She waited a long time, getting more
and more wet, but it was impossible to get near the cars. She thought
of a cab, but could see none, they too having all been pressed into
service.

She determined, desperately, to start and walk. Soon she would surely
get either a cab or a car. And so she started, staunchly, though she was
wet through now, and trembling with cold and nervousness.

As she hurried through the driving rain she faced things fearlessly. Oh
yes, she understood--everything. But if he were not well--should he not
have her with him? If he had that thing to fight, did he not need her
help? What did men think women were like? Did he think she was one to
sit down and reason out what would be advantageous? Better a little
while with him on a slippery plank than forever safe and desolate upon
the shore!

She never questioned her going; were not life and love too great to be
lost through that which could be so easily put right?

The buildings were reeling, the streets moving up and down--that
awful rain, she thought, was making her dizzy. Labouriously she walked
on--more slowly, less steadily, a pain in her side, that awful reeling
in her head.

Carriages returning to the city were passing her, but she had not
strength to call to them, and it seemed if she walked to the curbing she
would fall. She was not thinking so clearly now. The thing which took
all of her force was the lifting of her feet and the putting them
down in the right place. Her throat seemed to be closing up--and her
side--and her head....

Someone had her by the arm. Then someone was speaking her name; speaking
it in surprise--consternation--alarm.

It was Harold.

It was all vague then. She knew that she was in a carriage, and
that Harold was talking to her kindly. “You're taking me there?” she
murmured.

“Yes--yes, Edna, everything's all right,” he replied soothingly.

“Everything's all right,” she repeated, in a whisper, and leaned her
head back against the cushions.

They stopped after a while, and Harold was standing at the open door
of the cab with something steaming hot which he told her to drink. “You
need it,” he said decisively, and thinking it would help her to tell it,
she drank it down.

The world was a little more defined after that, and she saw things which
puzzled her. “Why, it looks like the city,” she whispered, her throat
too sore now to speak aloud.

“Why sure,” he replied banteringly; “don't you know we have to go
through the city to get out to the South Side?”

“Oh, but you see,” she cried, holding her throat, “but you see, it's the
_other_ way!”

“Not to-night,” he insisted; “the place for you to-night is home. I'm
taking you where you belong.”

She reached over wildly, trying to open the door, but he held her back;
she began to cry, and he talked to her, gently but unbendingly. “But you
don't _understand!_” she whispered, passionately. “I've _got_ to go!”

“Not to-night,” he said again, and something in the way he said it made
her finally huddle back in the corner of the carriage.

Block after block, mile after mile, they rode on in silence. She felt
overpowered. And with submission she knew that it was Z. For the
whole city was piled in between. Great buildings were in between, and
thousands of men running to and fro on the streets; man, and all man
had builded up, were in between. And then Harold--Harold who had always
seemed to count for so little, had come and taken her away.

Dully, wretchedly--knowing that her heart would ache far worse to-morrow
than it did to-night--she wondered about things. Did things like rain
and street-cars and wet feet and a sore throat determine life? Was it
that way with other people, too? Did other people have barriers--whole
cities full of them--piled in between? And then did the Harolds come and
take them where they said they belonged? Were there not _some_ people
strong enough to go where they wanted to go?




VI

THE MAN OF FLESH AND BLOOD


The elements without were not in harmony with the spirit which it was
desired should be engendered within. By music, by gay decorations,
by speeches from prominent men, the board in charge of the boys'
reformatory was striving to throw about this dedication of the new
building an atmosphere of cheerfulness and good-will--an atmosphere
vibrant with the kindness and generosity which emanated from the State,
and the thankfulness and loyalty which it was felt should emanate from
the boys.

Outside the world was sobbing. Some young trees which had been planted
along the driveway of the reformatory grounds, and which were expected
to grow up in the way they should go, were rocking back and forth in
passionate insurrection. Fallen leaves were being spit viciously through
the air. It was a sullen-looking landscape which Philip Grayson, he who
was to be the last speaker of the afternoon, saw stretching itself down
the hill, across the little valley, and up another little hill of that
rolling prairie state. In his ears was the death wail of the summer.
It seemed the spirit of out-of-doors was sending itself up in mournful,
hopeless cries.

The speaker who had been delivering himself of pedantic encouragement
about the open arms with which the world stood ready to receive the most
degraded one, would that degraded one but come to the world in proper
spirit, sat down amid perfunctory applause led by the officers
and attendants of the institution, and the boys rose to sing. The
brightening of their faces told that their work as performers was more
to their liking than their position as auditors. They threw back their
heads and waited with well-disciplined eagerness for the signal to
begin. Then, with the strength and native music there are in some three
hundred boys' throats, there rolled out the words of the song of the
State.

There were lips which opened only because they must, but as a whole
they sang with the same heartiness, the same joy in singing, that he
had heard a crowd of public-school boys put into the song only the week
before. When the last word had died away it seemed to Philip Grayson
that the sigh of the world without was giving voice to the sigh of the
world within as the well-behaved crowd of boys sat down to resume their
duties as auditors.

And then one of the most important of the professors from the State
University was telling them about the kindness of the State: the State
had provided for them this beautiful home; it gave them comfortable
clothing and nutritious food; it furnished that fine gymnasium in which
to train their bodies, books and teachers to train their minds;
it provided those fitted to train their souls, to work against the
unfortunate tendencies--the professor stumbled a little there--which had
led to their coming. The State gave liberally, gladly, and in return it
asked but one thing: that they come out into the world and make useful,
upright citizens, citizens of which any State might be proud. Was that
asking too much? the professor from the State University was saying.

The sobbing of the world without was growing more intense. Many pairs of
eyes from among the auditors were straying out to where the summer
lay dying. Did they know--those boys whom the State classed as
unfortunates--that out of this death there would come again life? Or did
they see but the darkness--the decay--of to-day?

The professor from the State University was putting the case very
fairly. There were no flaws--seemingly--to be picked in his logic. The
State had been kind; the boys were obligated to good citizenship.
But the coldness!--comfortlessness!--of it all. The open arms of the
world!--how mocking in its abstractness. What did it mean? Did it mean
that they--the men who uttered the phrase so easily--would be willing to
give these boys aid, friendship when they came out into the world? What
would they say, those boys whose ears were filled with high-sounding,
non-committal phrases, if some man were to stand before them and say,
“And so, fellows, when you get away from this place, and are ready to
get your start in the world, just come around to my office and I'll help
you get a job?” At thought of it there came from Philip Grayson a queer,
partly audible laugh, which caused those nearest him to look his way in
surprise.

But he was all unconscious of their looks of inquiry, absorbed in the
thoughts that crowded upon him. How far away the world--his kind of
people--must seem to these boys of the State Reform School. The speeches
they had heard, the training that had been given them, had taught
them--unconsciously perhaps, but surely--to divide the world into two
great classes: the lucky and the unlucky, those who made speeches
and those who must listen, the so-called good and the so-called bad;
perhaps--he smiled a little at his own cynicism--those who were caught
and those who were not.

There came to him these words of a poet of whom he used to be fond:

    In men whom men pronounce as ill,
    I find so much of goodness still;
    In men whom men pronounce divine,
      I find so much of sin and blot;
    I hesitate to draw the line
      Between the two, when God has not.

When God has not! He turned and looked out at the sullen sky,
returning--as most men do at times--to that conception of his childhood
that somewhere beyond the clouds was God. God! Did God care for the boys
of the State Reformatory? Was that poet of the western mountains right
when he said that God was not a drawer of lines, but a seer of the good
that was in the so-called bad, and of the bad in the so-called good, and
a lover of them both?

If that was God, it was not the God the boys of the reformatory had been
taught to know. They had been told that God would forgive the
wicked, but it had been made clear to them--if not in words, in
implications--that it was they who were the wicked. And the so-called
godly men, men of such exemplary character as had been chosen to address
them that afternoon, had so much of the spirit of God that they, too,
were willing to forgive, be tolerant, and--he looked out at the bending
trees with a smile--disburse generalities about the open arms of the
world.

What would they think--those three hundred speech-tired boys--if some
man who had been held before them as exemplary were to rise and lay bare
his own life--its weaknesses, its faults, perhaps its crimes--and tell
them there was weakness and there was strength in every human being, and
that the world-old struggle of life was to overcome one's weakness with
one's strength.

The idea took strange hold on him. It seemed the method of the world--at
any rate it had been the method of that afternoon--for the men who stood
before their fellows with clean hands to plant themselves on the far
side of a chasm of conventions, or narrow self-esteem, or easily won
virtue, and cry to those beings who struggled on the other side of that
chasm--to those human beings whose souls had never gone to school: “Look
at us! Our hands are clean, our hearts are pure. See how beautiful it
is to be good! Come ye, poor sinners, and be good also.” And the poor
sinners, the untaught, birthmarked human souls, would look over at the
self-acclaimed goodness they could see far across the chasm, and even
though attracted to it (which, he grimly reflected, would not seem
likely) the thing that was left with them was a sense of the width of
the chasm.

He had a sense of needless waste, of unnecessary blight. He looked down
at those three hundred faces and it was as if looking at human waste;
and it was human stupidity, human complacency and cowardice kept those
human beings human drift.

With what a smug self-satisfaction--under the mask of benevolence--the
speakers of that afternoon had flaunted their virtue--their position!
How condescendingly they had spoken of the home which we, the good,
prepare for you, the bad, and what namby-pambyness there was, after all,
in that sentiment which all of them had voiced--and now you must pay us
back by being good!

Oh for a man of flesh and blood to stand up and tell how he himself had
failed and suffered! For a man who could bridge that chasm with strong,
broad, human understanding and human sympathies--a man who would stand
among them pulse-beat to pulse-beat and cry out, “I know! I understand!
I fought it and I'll help you fight it too!”

The sound of his own name broke the spell that was upon him. He looked
to the centre of the stage and saw that the professor from the State
University had seated himself and that the superintendent of
the institution was occupying the place of the speaker. And the
superintendent was saying:

“We may esteem ourselves especially fortunate in having him with us this
afternoon. He is one of the great men of the State, one of the men
who by high living, by integrity and industry, has raised himself to a
position of great honour among his fellow men. A great party--may I say
the greatest of all parties?--has shown its unbounded confidence in him
by giving him the nomination for the governorship of the State. No man
in the State is held in higher esteem to-day than he. And so it is with
special pleasure that I introduce to you that man of the future--Philip
Grayson.”

The superintendent sat down then, and he himself--Philip Grayson--was
standing in the place where the other speakers had stood. It was with
a rush which almost swept away his outward show of calm that it came to
him that he--candidate for the governorship--was well fitted to be
that man of flesh and blood for whom he had sighed. That he himself was
within grasp of an opportunity to get beneath the jackets and into the
very hearts and souls of those boys, and make them feel that a man of
sins and virtues, of weaknesses and strength, a man who had had much to
conquer, and for whom the fight would never be finally won, was standing
before them stripped of his coat of conventions and platitudes, and in
nakedness of soul and sincerity of heart was talking to them as a man
who understood.

Almost with the inception of the idea was born the consciousness of what
it might cost. And as in answer to the silent, blunt question, Is it
worth it? there looked up at him three hundred pairs of eyes--eyes
behind which there was good as well as bad, eyes which had burned with
the fatal rush of passion, and had burned, too, with the hot tears of
remorse--eyes which had opened on a hostile world.

And then the eyes of Philip Grayson could not see the eyes which were
before him, and he put up his hand to break the mist--little caring
what the men upon the platform would think of him, little thinking what
effect the words which were crowding into his heart would have upon his
candidacy. But one thing was vital to him now: to bring upon that ugly
chasm the levelling forces of a common humanity, and to make those boys
who were of his clay feel that a being who had fallen and risen again,
a fellow being for whom life would always mean a falling and a rising
again, was standing before them, and--not as the embodiment of a distant
goodness, not as a pattern, but as one among them, verily as man to
man--was telling them a few things which his own life had taught him
were true.

It was his very consecration which made it hard to begin. He was fearful
of estranging them in the beginning, of putting between them and him
that very thing he was determined there should not be.

“I have a strange feeling,” he said, with a winning little smile, “that
if I were to open my heart to-day, just open it clear up the way I'd
like to if I could, that you boys would look into it, and then jump back
in a scared kind of way and cry, 'Why--that's me!' You would be a little
surprised--wouldn't you?--if you could look back and see the kind of boy
I was, and find I was much the kind of boy you are?

“Do you know what I think? I think hypocrisy is the worst thing in the
world. I think it's worse than stealing, or lying, or any of the other
bad things you can name. And do you know where I think lots of the
hypocrisy comes from? I think it comes from the so-called self-made
men--from the real good men, the men who say 'I haven't got one bad
thing charged up to my account.'

“Now the men out campaigning for me call me a self-made man. Your
superintendent just now spoke of my integrity, of the confidence reposed
in me, and all that. But do you know what is the honest truth? If I am
any kind of a man worth mentioning, if I am deserving of any honour, any
confidence, it is not because I was born with my heart filled with good
and beautiful things, for I was not. It is because I was born with much
in my heart that we call the bad, and because, after that bad had grown
stronger and stronger through the years it was unchecked, and after it
had brought me the great shock, the great sorrow of my life, I began
then, when older than you boys are now, to see a little of that great
truth which you can put briefly in these words: 'There is good and there
is bad in every human heart, and it is the struggle of life to conquer
the bad with the good.' What I am trying to say is, that if I am worthy
any one's confidence to-day, it is because, having seen that truth, I
have been able, through never ceasing trying, through slow conquering,
to crowd out some of the bad and make room for a little of the good.

“You see,” he went on, three hundred pairs of eyes hard upon him now,
“some of us are born to a harder struggle than others. There are people
who would object to my saying that to you, even if I believed it. They
would say you would make the fact of being born with much against which
to struggle an excuse for being bad. But look here a minute; if you were
born with a body not as strong as other boys' bodies, if you couldn't
run as far, or jump as high, you wouldn't be eternally saying, 'I can't
be expected to do much; I wasn't born right.' Not a bit of it! You'd
make it your business to get as strong as you could, and you wouldn't
make any parade of the fact that you weren't as strong as you should be.
We don't like people who whine, whether it's about weak bodies or weak
souls.

“I've been sitting here this afternoon wondering what to say to you
boys. I had intended telling some funny stories about things which
happened to me when I was a boy. But for some reason a serious mood has
come over me, and I don't feel just like those stories now. I haven't
been thinking of the funny side of life in the last half-hour. I've been
thinking of how much suffering I've endured since the days when I, too,
was a boy.”

He paused then; and when he went on his voice tested to the utmost the
silence of the room: “There is lots of sorrow in this old world. Maybe
I'm on the wrong track, but as I see it to-day human beings are making
a much harder thing of their existence than there is any need of. There
are millions and millions of them, and year after year, generation after
generation, they fight over the same old battles, live through the same
old sorrows. Doesn't it seem all wrong that after the battle has been
fought a million times it can't be made a little easier for those who
still have it before them?

“If a farmer had gone over a bad road, and the next day saw another
farmer about to start over the same road, wouldn't he send him back?
Doesn't it seem too bad that in things which concern one's whole life
people can't be as decent as they are about things which involve only an
inconvenience? Doesn't it seem that when we human beings have so much in
common we might stand together a little better? I'll tell you what's the
matter. Most of the people of this world are coated round and round with
self-esteem, and they're afraid to admit any understanding of the things
which aren't good. Suppose the farmer had thought it a disgrace to admit
he had been over that road, and so had said: 'From what I have read in
books, and from what I have learned in a general way, I fancy that road
isn't good.' Would the other farmer have gone back? I rather think he
would have said he'd take his chances. But you see the farmer said
he _knew_; and how did he know? Why, because he'd been over the road
himself.”

As he paused again, looking at them, he saw it all with a clarifying
simplicity. He himself knew life for a fine and beautiful thing. He had
won for himself some of the satisfactions of understanding, certain rare
delights of the open spirit. He wanted to free the spirits of these
boys to whom he talked; wanted to show them that spirits could free
themselves, indicate to them that self-control and self-development
carried one to pleasures which sordid self-indulgences had no power to
bestow. It was a question of getting the most from life. It was a matter
of happiness.

It was thus he began, slowly, the telling of his life's story:

“I was born with strange, wild passions in my heart. I don't know where
they came from; I only know they were there. I resented authority. If
someone who had a right to dictate to me said, 'Philip, do this,' then
Philip would immediately begin to think how much he would rather do the
other thing. And,” he smiled a little, and some of the boys smiled with
him in anticipation, “it was the other thing which Philip usually did.

“I didn't go to a reform school, for the very good reason that there
wasn't any in the State where I lived.” Some of he boys smiled again,
and he could hear the nervous coughing of one of the party managers
sitting close to him. “I was what you would call a very bad boy. I
didn't mind any one. I was defiant--insolent. I did bad things
just because I knew they were bad, and--and I took a great deal of
satisfaction out of it.”

The sighing of the world without was the only sound which vibrated
through the room. “I say,” he went on, “that I got a form of
satisfaction from it. I did not say I got happiness; there is a vast
difference between a kind of momentary satisfaction and that thing--that
most precious of all things--which we call happiness. Indeed, I was very
far from happy. I had hours when I was so morose and miserable that I
hated the whole world. And do you know what I thought? I thought there
was no one in all the world who had the same kind of things surging up
in his heart that I did. I thought there was no one else with whom it
was as easy to be bad, or as hard to be good. I thought that no one
understood. I thought that I was all alone.

“Did you ever feel like that? Did you ever feel that no one else knew
anything about such feelings as you had? Did you ever feel that here was
you, and there was the rest of the world, and that the rest of the world
didn't know anything about you, and was just generally down on you? Now
that's the very thing I want to talk away from you to-day. You're not
the only one. We're all made of the same kind of stuff, and there's none
of us made of stuff that's flawless. We all have a fight; some an easy
one, and some a big one, and if you have formed the idea that there is
a kind of dividing-line in the world, and that on the one side is the
good, and on the other side the bad, why, all I can say is that you have
a wrong notion of things.

“Well, I grew up to be a man, and because I hadn't fought against any of
the stormy things in my heart they kept growing stronger and stronger. I
did lots of wild, ugly things, things of which I am bitterly ashamed.
I went to another place, and I fell in with the kind of fellows you can
imagine I felt at home with. I had been told when I was a boy that it
was wrong to drink and gamble. I think that was the chief reason I took
to drink and gambling.”

There was another cough, more pronounced this time, from the party
manager, and the superintendent was twisting uneasily in his seat.
It was the strangest speech that had ever been delivered at the boys'
reformatory. The boys were leaning forward--self-forgetful, intent. “One
night I was playing cards with a crowd of my friends, and one of the
men, the best friend I had, said something that made me mad. There was a
revolver right there which one of the men had been showing us. Some kind
of a demon got hold of me, and without so much as a thought I picked up
that revolver and fired at my friend.”

The party manager gave way to an exclamation of horror, and the
superintendent half rose from his seat. But before any one could say
a word Philip Grayson continued, looking at the half-frightened faces
before him: “I suppose you wonder why I am not in the penitentiary. I
had been drinking, and I missed my aim; and I was with friends, and it
was hushed up.”

He rested his hand upon the table, and looked out at the sullen
landscape. His voice was not steady as he went on: “It's not an easy
thing to talk about, boys. I never talked about it to any one before in
all my life. I'm not telling it now just to entertain you or to create
a sensation. I'm telling it,” his voice grew tense in its earnestness,
“because I believe that this world could be made a better and a sweeter
place if those who have lived and suffered would not be afraid to reach
out their hands and cry: 'I know that road--it's bad! I steered off to a
better place, and I'll help you steer off, too.'”

There was not one of the three hundred pairs of eyes but was riveted
upon the speaker's colourless face. The masks of sullenness and defiance
had fallen from them. They were listening now--not because they must,
but because into their hungry and thirsty souls was being poured the
very sustenance for which--unknowingly--they had yearned.

“We sometimes hear people say,” resumed the candidate for Governor,
“that they have lived through hell. If by that they mean they've lived
through the deepest torments the human heart can know, then I can say
that I, too, have lived through hell. What I suffered after I went home
that night no one in this world will ever know. Words couldn't tell it;
it's not the kind of thing words can come anywhere near. My whole life
spread itself out before me; it was not a pleasant thing to look at. But
at last, boys, out of the depths of my darkness, I began to get a little
light. I began to get some understanding of the battle which it falls
to the lot of some of us human beings to wage. There was good in me,
you see, or I wouldn't have cared like that, and it came to me then, all
alone that terrible night, that it is the good which lies buried away
somewhere in our hearts must fight out the bad. And so--all alone,
boys--I began the battle of trying to get command of my own life. And do
you know--this is the truth--it was with the beginning of that battle I
got my first taste of happiness. There is no finer feeling in this world
than the sense of coming into mastery of one's self. It is like opening
a door that has shut you in. Oh, you don't do it all in a minute. This
is no miracle I'm talking about. It's a fight. But it's a fight that can
be won. It's a fight that's gloriously worth the winning. I'm not saying
to you, 'Be good and you'll succeed.' Maybe you won't succeed. Life
as we've arranged it for ourselves makes success a pretty tough
proposition. But that doesn't alter the fact that it pays to be a decent
sort. You and I know about how much happiness there is in the other kind
of thing. And there is happiness in feeling you're doing what you can to
develop what's in you. Success or failure, it brings a sense of having
done your part,--that bully sense of having put up the best fight you
could.”

He leaned upon the table then, as though very weary. “I don't know, I am
sure, what the people of my State will think of all this. Perhaps they
won't want a man for their Governor who once tried to kill another man.
But,” he looked around at them with that smile of his which got straight
to men's hearts, “there's only one of me, and there are three hundred
of you, and how do I know but that in telling you of that stretch of bad
road ahead I've made a dozen Governors this very afternoon!”

He looked from row to row of them, trying to think of some last word
which would leave them with a sense of his sincerity. What he did say
was: “And so, boys, when you get away from here, and go out into the
world to get your start, if you find the arms of that world aren't quite
as wide open as you were told they would be, if there seems no place
where you can get a hold, and you are saying to yourself, 'It's no
use--I'll not try,' before you give up just remember there was one man
who said he knew all about it, and give that one man a chance to show
he meant what he said. So look me up, if luck goes all against you, and
maybe I can give you a little lift.” He took a backward step, as though
to resume his seat, and then he said, with a dry little smile which took
any suggestion of heroics from what had gone before, “If I'm not at the
State-house, you'll find my name in the directory of the city where your
programme tells you I live.”

He sat down, and for a moment there was silence. Then, full-souled,
heart-given, came the applause. It was not led by the attendants this
time; it was the attendants who rose at last to stop it. And when the
clapping of the hands had ceased, many of those hands were raised to
eyes which had long been dry.

The exercises were drawn to a speedy close, and he found the party
manager standing by his side. “It was very grand,” he sneered, “very
high-sounding and heroic, but I suppose you know,” jerking his hand
angrily toward a table where a reporter for the leading paper of the
opposition was writing, “that you've given them the winning card.”

As he replied, in far-off tone, “I hope so,” the candidate for Governor
was looking, not at the reporter who was sending out a new cry for
the opposition, but into those faces aglow with the light of new
understanding and new-born hopes. He stood there watching them filing
out into the corridor, craning their necks to throw him a last look,
and as he turned then and looked from the window it was to see that
the storm had sobbed itself away, and that along the driveway of the
reformatory grounds the young trees--unbroken and unhurt--were rearing
their heads in the way they should go.




VII

HOW THE PRINCE SAW AMERICA


They began work at seven-thirty, and at ten minutes past eight every
hammer stopped. In the Senate Chamber and in the House, on the stairways
and in the corridors, in every office from the Governor's to the
custodian's they laid down their implements and rose to their feet. A
long whistle had sounded through the building. There was magic in its
note.

“What's the matter with you fellows?” asked the attorney-general,
swinging around in his chair.

“Strike,” declared one of the men, with becoming brevity.

“Strike of what?”

“Carpet-Tackers' Union Number One,” replied the man, kindly gathering up
a few tacks.

“Never heard of it.”

“Organised last night,” said the carpet-tacker, putting on his coat.

“Well I'll--” he paused expressively, then inquired: “What's your game?”

“Well, you see, boss, this executive council that runs the State-house
has refused our demands.”

“What are your demands?”

“Double pay.”

“Double pay! Now how do you figure it out that you ought to have double
pay?”

“Rush work. You see we were under oath, or pretty near that, to get
every carpet in the State-house down by four o'clock this afternoon. Now
you know yourself that rush work is hard on the nerves. Did you ever get
rush work done at a laundry and not pay more for it? We was anxious as
anybody to get the Capitol in shape for the big show this afternoon. But
there's reason in all things.”

“Yes,” agreed his auditor, “there is.”

The man looked at him a little doubtfully. “Our president--we elected
Johnny McGuire president last night--went to the Governor this morning
with our demands.”

The Governor's fellow official smiled--he knew the Governor pretty well.
“And he turned you down?”

The striker nodded. “But there's an election next fall; maybe the
turning down will be turned around.”

“Maybe so--you never can tell. I don't know just what power
Carpet-Tackers' Union Number One will wield, but the Governor's pretty
solid, you know, with Labour as a whole.”

That was true, and went home. The striker rubbed his foot uncertainly
across the floor, and took courage from its splinters. “Well, there's
one thing sure. When Prince Ludwig and his train-load of big guns show
up at four o'clock this afternoon they'll find bare floors, and pretty
bum bare floors, on deck at this place.”

The attorney-general rubbed his own foot across the splintered,
miserable boards. “They are pretty bum,” he reflected. “I wonder,” he
added, as the man was half-way out of the door, “what Prince Ludwig will
think of the American working-man when he arrives this afternoon?”

“Just about as much,” retorted the not-to-be-downed carpet-tacker, “as
he does about American generosity. And he may think a few things,” he
added weightily, “about American independence.”

“Oh, he's sure to do that,” agreed the attorney-general.

He joined the crowd in the corridor. They were swarming out from all
the offices, all talking of the one thing. “It was a straight case of
hold-up,” declared the Governor's secretary. “They supposed they had us
on the hip. They were getting extra money as it was, but you see they
just figured it out we'd pay anything rather than have these wretched
floors for the reception this afternoon. They thought the Governor would
argue the question, and then give in, or, at any rate, compromise. They
never intended for one minute that the Prince should find bare floors
here. And I rather think,” he concluded, “that they feel a little done
up about it themselves.”

“What's the situation?” asked a stranger within the gates.

“It's like this,” a newspaper reporter told him; “about a month ago
there was a fire here and the walls and carpets were pretty well knocked
out with smoke and water. The carpets were mean old things anyway,
so they voted new ones. And I want to tell you”--he swelled with
pride--“that the new ones are beauties. The place'll look great when we
get 'em down. Well, you know Prince Ludwig and his crowd cross the State
on their way to the coast, and of course they were invited to stop. Last
week Billy Patton--he's running the whole show--declined the invitation
on account of lack of time, and then yesterday comes a telegram saying
the Prince himself insisted on stopping. You know he's keen about Indian
dope--and we've got Indian traditions to burn. So Mr. Bill Patton had to
make over his schedule to please the Prince, and of course we were all
pretty tickled about it, for more reasons than one. The telegram didn't
come until five o'clock yesterday afternoon, but you know what a hummer
the Governor is when he gets a start. He made up his mind this building
should be put in shape within twenty-four hours. They engaged a whole
lot of fellows to work on the carpets to-day. Then what did they do but
get together last night--well, you know the rest. Pretty bum-looking old
shack just now, isn't it?” and the reporter looked around ruefully.

It was approaching the hour for the legislature to convene, and the
members who were beginning to saunter in swelled the crowd--and the
indignation--in the rotunda.

The Governor, meanwhile, had been trying to get other men, but
Carpet-Tackers' Union Number One had looked well to that. The biggest
furniture dealer in the city was afraid of the plumbers. “Pipes burst
last night,” he said, “and they may not do a thing for us if we get
mixed up in this. Sorry--but I can't let my customers get pneumonia.”

Another furniture man was afraid of the teamsters. For one reason or
another no one was disposed to respond to the Macedonian cry, and when
the Governor at last gave it up and walked out into the rotunda he was
about as disturbed as he permitted himself to get. “It's the idea of
lying down,” he said. “I'd do anything--anything!--if I could only think
what to do.”

A popular young member of the House overheard the remark. “By George,
Governor,” he burst forth, after a minute's deep study--“say--by Jove, I
say, let's do it ourselves!”

They all laughed, but the Governor's laugh stopped suddenly, and he
looked hard at the young man.

“Why not?” the young legislator went on. “It's a big job, but there are
a lot of us. We've all put down carpets at home; what are we afraid to
tackle it here for?”

Again the others laughed, but the Governor did not. “Say, Weston,” he
said, “I'd give a lot--I tell you I'd give a lot--if we just could!”

“Leave it to me!”--and he was lost in the crowd.

The Governor's eyes followed him. He had always liked Harry Weston. He
was the very sort to inspire people to do things. The Governor smiled
knowingly as he noted the men Weston was approaching, and his different
manner with the various ones. And then he had mounted a few steps of the
stairway, and was standing there facing the crowd.

“Now look here,” he began, after silence had been obtained, “this isn't
a very formal meeting, but it's a mighty important one. It's a clear
case of Carpet-Tackers' Union against the State. What I want to know
is--Is the State going to lie down?”

There were loud cries of “No!”--“Well, I should say not!”

“Well, then, see here. The Governor's tried for other men and can't get
them. Now the next thing I want to know is--What's the matter with us?”

They didn't get it for a minute, and then everybody laughed.

“It's no joke! You've all put down carpets at home; what's the use of
pretending you don't know how to do it? Oh yes--I know, bigger
building, and all that, but there are more of us, and the principle of
carpet-tacking is the same, big building or little one. Now my scheme
is this--Every fellow his own carpet-tacker! The Governor's office
puts down the Governor's carpet; the Secretary's office puts down the
Secretary's carpet; the Senate puts down the Senate carpet--and we'll
look after our little patch in the House!”

“But you've got more fellows than anybody else,” cried a member of the
Senate.

“Right you are, and we'll have an over-flow meeting in the corridors
and stairways. The House, as usual, stands ready to do her part,”--that
brought a laugh for the Senators, and from them.

“Now get it out of your heads this is a joke. The carpets are here; the
building is full of able-bodied men; the Prince is coming at four--by
his own request, and the proposition is just this: Are we going to
receive him in a barn or in a palace? Let's hear what Senator Arnold
thinks about it.”

That was a good way of getting away from the idea of its being a joke.
Senator Arnold was past seventy. Slowly he extended his right arm and
tested his muscle. “Not very much,” he said, “but enough to drive a tack
or two.” That brought applause and they drew closer together, and the
atmosphere warmed perceptibly. “I've fought for the State in more ways
than one,”--Senator Arnold was a distinguished veteran of the Civil
War--“and if I can serve her now by tacking down carpets, then it's
tacking down carpets I'm ready to go at. Just count on me for what
little I'm worth.”

Someone started the cry for the Governor. “Prince Ludwig is being
entertained all over the country in the most lavish manner,” he began,
with his characteristic directness in stating a situation. “By his own
request he is to visit our Capitol this afternoon. I must say that I,
for one, want to be in shape for him. I don't like to tell him that we
had a labour complication and couldn't get the carpets down. Speaking
for myself, it is a great pleasure to inform you that the carpet in
the Governor's office will be in proper shape by four o'clock this
afternoon.”

That settled it. Finally Harry Weston made himself heard sufficiently
to suggest that when the House and Senate met at nine o'clock motions to
adjourn be entertained. “And as to the rest of you fellows,” he cried,
“I don't see what's to hinder your getting busy right now!”

There were Republicans and there were Democrats; there were friends
and there were enemies; there were good, bad and--no, there were no
indifferent. An unprecedented harmony of thought, a millennium-like
unity of action was born out of that sturdy cry--Every man his own
carpet-tacker! The Secretary of State always claimed that he drove the
first tack, but during the remainder of his life the Superintendent of
Public Instruction also contended hotly for that honour. The rivalry
as to who would do the best job, and get it done most quickly, became
intense. Early in the day Harry Weston made the rounds of the building
and announced a fine of one-hundred dollars for every wrinkle. There
were pounded fingers and there were broken backs, but slowly, steadily
and good-naturedly the State-house carpet was going down. It was a good
deal bigger job than they had anticipated, but that only added zest
to the undertaking. The news of how the State officials were employing
themselves had spread throughout the city, and guards were stationed at
every door to keep out people whose presence would work more harm than
good. All assistance from women was courteously refused. “This is solemn
business,” said the Governor, in response to a telephone from some of
the fair sex, “and the introduction of the feminine element might throw
about it a social atmosphere which would result in loss of time. And
then some of the boys might feel called upon to put on their collars and
coats.”

Stretch--stretch--stretch, and tack--tack--tack, all morning long it
went on, for the State-house was large--oh, very large. There should
have been a Boswell there to get the good things, for the novelty of the
situation inspired wit even in minds where wit had never glowed before.
Choice bits which at other times would fairly have gone on official
record were now passed almost unnoticed, so great was the surfeit.
Instead of men going out to lunch, lunch came in to them. Bridget
Haggerty, who by reason of her long connection with the boarding-house
across the street was a sort of unofficial official of the State, came
over and made the coffee and sandwiches, all the while calling down
blessings on the head of every mother's son of them, and announcing in
loud, firm tones that while all five of her boys belonged to the union
she'd be after tellin' them what she thought of this day's work!

It was a United States Senator who did the awful trick, and, to be fair,
the Senator did not think of it as an awful trick at all. He came over
there in the middle of the morning to see the Governor, and in a few
hurried words--it was no day for conversation--was told what was going
on. It was while standing out in the corridor watching the perspiring
dignitaries that the idea of his duty came to him, and one reason he was
sure he was right was the way in which it came to him in the light of
a duty. Here was America in undress uniform! Here was--not a thing
arranged for show, but absolutely the thing itself! Prince Ludwig had
come with a sincere desire to see America. Every one knew that he was
not seeing it at all. He would go back with memories of bands and flags
and people all dressed up standing before him making polite speeches.
But would he carry back one small whiff of the spirit of the country?
Again Senator Bruner looked about him. The Speaker of the House was
just beginning laying the stair carpet; a judge of the Supreme Court
was contending hotly for a better hammer. “It's an insult to expect any
decent man to drive tacks with a hammer like this,” he was saying.
Here were men--real, live men, men with individuality, spirit. When
the Prince had come so far, wasn't it too bad that he should not see
anything but uniforms and cut glass and dress suits and other externals
and non-essentials? Senator Bruner was a kind man; he was a good fellow;
he was hospitable--patriotic. He decided now in favour of the Prince.

He had to hurry about it, for it was almost twelve then. One of
the vice-presidents of the road lived there, and he was taken into
confidence, and proved an able and eager ally. They located the special
train bearing the Prince and ordered it stopped at the next station.
The stop was made that Senator Patton might receive a long telegram
from Senator Bruner. “I figure it like this,” the Senator told the
vice-president. “They get to Boden at a quarter of one and were going
to stop there an hour. Then they were going to stop a little while at
Creyville. I've told Patton the situation, and that if he wants to do
the right thing by the prince he'll cut out those stops and rush right
through here. That will bring him in--well, they could make it at a
quarter of two. I've told him I'd square it with Boden and Creyville.
Oh, he'll do it all right.”

And even as he said so came the reply from Patton: “Too good to miss.
Will rush through. Arrive before two. Have carriage at Water Street.”

“That's great!” cried the Senator. “Trust Billy Patton for falling
in with a good thing. And he's right about missing the station crowd.
Patton can always go you one better,” he admitted, grinningly.

They had luncheon together, and they were a good deal more like
sophomores in college than like a United States Senator and a big
railroad man. “You don't think there's any danger of their getting
through too soon?” McVeigh kept asking, anxiously.

“Not a bit,” the Senator assured him. “They can't possibly make it
before three. We'll come in just in time for the final skirmish. It's
going to be a jolly rush at the last.”

They laid their plans with skill worthy of their training. The State
library building was across from the Capitol, and they were connected
by tunnel. “I never saw before,” said the Senator, “what that tunnel
was for, but I see now what a great thing it is. We'll get him in at
the west door of the library--we can drive right up to it, you know, and
then we walk him through the tunnel. That's a stone floor”--the Senator
was chuckling with every sentence--“so I guess they won't be carpeting
it. There's a little stairway running up from the tunnel---and say, we
must telephone over and arrange about those keys. There'll be a good
deal of climbing, but the Prince is a good fellow, and won't mind. It
wouldn't be safe to try the elevator, for Harry Weston would be in it
taking somebody a bundle of tacks. The third floor is nothing but store
rooms; we'll not be disturbed up there, and we can look right down the
rotunda and see the whole show. Of course we'll be discovered in time;
some one is sure to look up and see us, but we'll fix it so they won't
see us before we've had our fun, and it strikes me, McVeigh, that for
two old fellows like you and me we've put the thing through in pretty
neat shape.”

It was a very small and unpretentious party which stepped from the
special at Water Street a little before two. The Prince was wearing
a long coat and an automobile cap and did not suggest anything at
all formidable or unusual. “You've saved the country,” Senator Patton
whispered in an aside. “He was getting bored. Never saw a fellow jolly
up so in my life. Guess he was just spoiling for some fun. Said it would
be really worth while to see somebody who wasn't looking for him.”

Senator Bruner beamed. “That's just the point. He's caught my idea
exactly.”

It went without a hitch. “I feel,” said the Prince, as they were
hurrying him through the tunnel, “that I am a little boy who has run
away from school. Only I have a terrible fear that at any minute some
band may begin to play, and somebody may think of making a speech.”

They gave this son of a royal house a seat on a dry-goods box, so placed
that he could command a good view, and yet be fairly secure. The final
skirmish was on in earnest. Two State Senators--coatless, tieless,
collarless, their faces dirty, their hair rumpled, were finishing the
stair carpet. The chairman of the appropriations committee in the House
was doing the stretching in a still uncarpeted bit of the corridor, and
a member who had recently denounced the appropriations committee as a
disgrace to the State was presiding at the hammer. They were doing most
exquisitely harmonious team work. A railroad and anti-railroad member
who fought every time they came within speaking distance of one another
were now in an earnest and very chummy conference relative to a large
wrinkle which had just been discovered on the first landing. Many men
were standing around holding their backs, and many others were deeply
absorbed in nursing their fingers. The doors of the offices were all
open, and there was a general hauling in of furniture and hanging of
pictures. Clumsy but well-meaning fingers were doing their best with
“finishing touches.” The Prince grew so excited about it all that they
had to keep urging him not to take too many chances of being seen.

“And I'll tell you,” Senator Bruner was saying, “it isn't only because
I knew it would be funny that I wanted you to see it; but--well, you see
America isn't the real America when she has on her best clothes and is
trying to show off. You haven't seen anybody who hasn't prepared for
your coming, and that means you haven't seen them as they are at all.
Now here we are. This is us! You see that fellow hanging a picture down
there? He's president of the First National Bank. Came over a little
while ago, got next to the situation, and stayed to help. And--say, this
is good! Notice that red-headed fellow just getting up from his knees?
Well, he's president of the teamsters' union--figured so big in a strike
here last year. I call that pretty rich! He's the fellow they are all
so afraid of, but I guess he liked the idea of the boys doing it
themselves, and just sneaked in and helped.--There's the Governor. He's
a fine fellow. He wouldn't be held up by anybody--not even to get ready
for a Prince, but he's worked like a Trojan all day to make things come
his way. Yes sir--this is the sure-enough thing. Here you have the
boys off dress parade. Not that we run away from our dignity every day,
but--see what I mean?”

“I see,” replied the Prince, and he looked as though he really did.

“You know--say, dodge there! Move back! No--too late. The Governor's
caught us. Look at him!”

The Governor's eyes had turned upward, and he had seen. He put his hands
on his back--he couldn't look up without doing that--and gave a long,
steady stare. First, Senator Bruner waved; then Senator Patton waved;
then Mr. McVeigh waved; and then the Prince waved. Other people were
beginning to look up. “They're all on,” laughed Patton, “let's go down.”

At first they were disposed to think it pretty shabby treatment. “We
worked all day to get in shape,” grumbled Harry Weston, “and then you go
ring the curtain up on us before it's time for our show to begin.”

But the Prince made them feel right about it. He had such a good time
that they were forced to concede the move had been a success. And he
said to the Governor as he was leaving: “I see that the only way to see
America is to see it when America is not seeing you.”




VIII

THE LAST SIXTY MINUTES


“Nine--ten--” The old clock paused as if in dramatic appreciation of
the situation, and then slowly, weightily, it gave the final stroke,
“Eleven!”

The Governor swung his chair half-way round and looked the timepiece
full in the face. Already the seconds had begun ticking off the last
hour of his official life. On the stroke of twelve another man would be
Governor of the State. He sat there watching the movement of the minute
hand.

The sound of voices, some jovial, some argumentative, was borne to
him through the open transom. People were beginning to gather in
the corridors, and he could hear the usual disputes about tickets of
admission to the inaugural.

His secretary came in just then with some letters. “Could you see
Whitefield now?” he asked. “He's waiting out here for you.”

The old man looked up wearily. “Oh, put him off, Charlie. Tell him you
can talk to him about whatever it is he wants to know.”

The secretary had his hand on the knob, when the Governor added, “And,
Charlie, keep everybody out, if you can. I'm--I've got a few private
matters to go over.”

The younger man nodded and opened the door. He half closed it behind
him, and then turned to say, “Except Francis. You'll want to see him if
he comes in, won't you?”

He frowned and moved impatiently as he answered, curtly: “Oh, yes.”

Francis! Of course it never occurred to any of them that he could close
the door on Francis. He drummed nervously on his desk, then suddenly
reached down and, opening one of the drawers, tossed back a few things
and drew out a newspaper. He unfolded this and spread it out on the
desk. Running across the page was the big black line, “Real Governors
of Some Western States,” and just below, the first of the series,
and played up as the most glaring example of nominal and real in
governorship, was a sketch of Harvey Francis.

He sat there looking at it, knowing full well that it would not
contribute to his peace of mind. It did not make for placidity of spirit
to be told at the end of things that he had, as a matter of fact, never
been anybody at all. And the bitterest part of it was that, looking back
on it now, getting it from the viewpoint of one stepping from it, he
could see just how true was the statement: “Harvey Francis has been
the real Governor of the State; John Morrison his mouthpiece and
figurehead.”

He walked to the window and looked out over the January landscape. It
may have been the snowy hills, as well as the thoughts weighing him
down, that carried him back across the years to one snowy afternoon when
he stood up in a little red schoolhouse and delivered an oration on “The
Responsibilities of Statesmanship.” He smiled as the title came back to
him, and yet--what had become of the spirit of that seventeen-year-old
boy? He had meant it all then; he could remember the thrill with which
he stood there that afternoon long before and poured out his sentiments
regarding the sacredness of public trusts. What was it had kept him,
when his chance came, from working out in his life the things he had so
fervently poured into his schoolboy oration?

Someone was tapping at the door. It was an easy, confident tap, and
there was a good deal of reflex action in the Governor's “Come in.”

“Indulging in a little meditation?”

The Governor frowned at the way Francis said it, and the latter went on,
easily: “Just came from a row with Dorman. Everybody is holding him up
for tickets, and he--poor young fool--looks as though he wanted to jump
in the river. Takes things tremendously to heart--Dorman does.”

He lighted a cigar, smiling quietly over that youthful quality of
Dorman's. “Well,” he went on, leaning back in his chair and looking
about the room, “I thought I'd look in on you for a minute. You see
I'll not have the _entree_ to the Governor's office by afternoon.” He
laughed, the easy, good-humoured laugh of one too sophisticated to spend
emotion uselessly.

It was he who fell into meditation then, and the Governor sat looking at
him; a paragraph from the newspaper came back to him: “Harvey Francis
is the most dangerous type of boss politician. His is not the crude and
vulgar method that asks a man what his vote is worth. He deals gently
and tenderly with consciences. He knows how to get a man without fatally
injuring that man's self-respect.”

The Governor's own experience bore out the summary. When elected to
office as State Senator he had cherished old-fashioned ideas of serving
his constituents and doing his duty. But the very first week Francis
had asked one of those little favours of him, and, wishing to show his
appreciation of support given him in his election, he had granted it.
Then various courtesies were shown him; he was let in on a “deal,” and
almost before he realised it, it seemed definitely understood that he
was a “Francis man.”

Francis roused himself and murmured: “Fools!--amateurs.”

“Leyman?” ventured the Governor.

“Leyman and all of his crowd!”

“And yet,” the Governor could not resist, “in another hour this same
fool will be Governor of the State. The fool seems to have won.”

Francis rose, impatiently. “For the moment. It won't be lasting. In any
profession, fools and amateurs may win single victories. They can't keep
it up. They don't know _how_. Oh, no,” he insisted, cheerfully, “Leyman
will never be re-elected. Fact is, I'm counting on this contract
business we've saved up for him getting in good work.” He was moving
toward the door. “Well,” he concluded, with a curious little laugh, “see
you upstairs.”

The Governor looked at the clock. It pointed now to twenty-five minutes
past eleven. The last hour was going fast. In a very short time he must
join the party in the anteroom of the House. But weariness had come over
him. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

He was close upon seventy, and to-day looked even older than his years.
It was not a vicious face, but it was not a strong one. People who
wanted to say nice things of the Governor called him pleasant or genial
or kindly. Even the men in the appointive offices did not venture to say
he had much force.

He felt it to-day as he never had before. He had left no mark; he had
done nothing, stood for nothing. Never once had his personality made
itself felt. He had signed the documents; Harvey Francis had always
“suggested”--the term was that man's own--the course to be pursued. And
the “suggestions” had ever dictated the policy that would throw the most
of influence or money to that splendidly organised machine that Francis
controlled.

With an effort he shook himself free from his cheerless retrospect.
There was a thing or two he wanted to get from his desk, and his time
was growing very short. He found what he wanted, and then, just as he
was about to close the drawer, his eye fell on a large yellow envelope.

He closed the drawer; but only to reopen it, take out the envelope and
remove the documents it contained; and then one by one he spread them
out before him on the desk.

He sat there looking down at them, wondering whether a man had ever
stepped into office with as many pitfalls laid for him. During the last
month they had been busy about the old State-house setting traps for the
new Governor. The “machine” was especially jubilant over those contracts
the Governor now had spread out before him. The convict labour question
was being fought out in the State just then--organised labour demanding
its repeal; country taxpayers insisting that it be maintained. Under
the system the penitentiary had become self-supporting. In November the
contracts had come up for renewal; but on the request of Harvey Francis
the matter had been put off from time to time, and still remained open.
Just the week before, Francis had put it to the Governor something like
this:

“Don't sign those contracts. We can give some reason for holding them
off, and save them up for Leyman. Then we can see that the question is
agitated, and whatever he does about it is going to prove a bad thing
for him. If he doesn't sign, he's in bad with the country fellows, the
men who elected him. Don't you see? At the end of his administration the
penitentiary, under you self-sustaining, will have cost them a pretty
penny. We've got him right square!”

The clock was close to twenty minutes of twelve, and he concluded that
he would go out and join some of his friends he could hear in the other
room. It would never do for him to go upstairs with a long, serious
face. He had had his day, and now Leyman was to have his, and if the new
Governor did better than the old one, then so much the better for the
State. As for the contracts, Leyman surely must understand that there
was a good deal of rough sailing on political waters.

But it was not easy to leave the room. Walking to the window he again
stood there looking out across the snow, and once more he went back now
at the end of things to that day in the little red schoolhouse which
stood out as the beginning.

He was called back from that dreaming by the sight of three men coming
up the hill. He smiled faintly in anticipation of the things Francis and
the rest of them would say about the new Governor's arriving on foot.
Leyman had requested that the inaugural parade be done away with--but
one would suppose he would at least dignify the occasion by arriving in
a carriage. Francis would see that the opposing papers handled it as a
grand-stand play to the country constituents.

And then, forgetful of Francis, and of the approaching ceremony, the old
man stood there by the window watching the young man who was coming
up to take his place. How firmly the new Governor walked! With what
confidence he looked ahead at the State-house. The Governor--not
considering the inconsistency therein--felt a thrill of real pride in
thought of the State's possessing a man like that.

Standing though he did for the things pitted against him, down in his
heart John Morrison had all along cherished a strong admiration for
that young man who, as District Attorney of the State's metropolis,
had aroused the whole country by his fearlessness and unquestionable
sincerity. Many a day he had sat in that same office reading what the
young District Attorney was doing in the city close by--the fight he was
making almost single-handed against corruption, how he was striking in
the high places fast and hard as in the low, the opposition, threats,
and time after time there had been that same secret thrill at thought of
there being a man like that. And when the people of the State, convinced
that here was one man who would serve _them_, began urging the District
Attorney for chief executive, Governor Morrison, linked with the
opposing forces, doing all he could to bring about Leyman's defeat,
never lost that secret feeling for the young man, who, unbacked by any
organisation, struck blow after blow at the machine that had so long
dominated the State, winning in the end that almost incomprehensible
victory.

The new Governor had passed from sight, and a moment later his voice
came to the ear of the lonely man in the executive office. Some friends
had stopped him just outside the Governor's door with a laughing “Here's
hoping you'll do as much for us in the new office as you did in the
old,” and the new Governor replied, buoyantly: “Oh, but I'm going to do
a great deal more!”

The man within the office smiled a little wistfully and with a sigh
sat down before his desk. The clock now pointed to thirteen minutes of
twelve; they would be asking for him upstairs. There were some scraps of
paper on his desk and he threw them into the waste-basket, murmuring: “I
can at least give him a clean desk.”

He pushed his chair back sharply. A clean desk! The phrase opened to
deeper meanings.... Why not clean it up in earnest? Why not give him a
square deal--a real chance? Why not _sign the contracts_?

Again he looked at the clock--not yet ten minutes of twelve. For
ten minutes more he was Governor of the State! Ten minutes of real
governorship! Might it not make up a little, both to his own soul and to
the world, for the years he had weakly served as another man's puppet?
The consciousness that he could do it, that it was not within the power
of any man to stop him, was intoxicating. Why not break the chains now
at the last, and just before the end taste the joy of freedom?

He took up his pen and reached for the inkwell. With trembling, excited
fingers he unfolded the contracts. He dipped his pen into the ink; he
even brought it down on the paper; and then the tension broke. He sank
back in his chair, a frightened, broken old man.

“Oh, no,” he whispered; “no, not now. It's--” his head went lower and
lower until at last it rested on the desk--“too late.”

When he raised his head and grew more steady, it was only to see the
soundness of his conclusion. He had not the right now in the final
hour to buy for himself a little of glory. It would only be a form of
self-indulgence. They would call it, and perhaps rightly, hush money
to his conscience. They would say he went back on them only when he was
through with them. Oh, no, there would be no more strength in it than
in the average deathbed repentance. He would at least step out with
consistency.

He folded the contracts and put them back into the envelope. The minute
hand now pointed to seven minutes to twelve. Some one was tapping at
the door, and the secretary appeared to say they were waiting for him
upstairs. He replied that he would be there in a minute, hoping that his
voice did not sound as strange to the other man as it had to himself.

Slowly he walked to the door leading into the corridor. This, then, was
indeed the end; this the final stepping down from office! After years of
what they called public service, he was leaving it all now with a sense
of defeat and humiliation. A lump was in the old man's throat; his
eyes were blurred. “But you, Frank Leyman,” he whispered passionately,
turning as if for comfort to the other man, “it will be different with
you! They'll not get you--not you!”

It lifted him then as a great wave--this passionate exultation that here
was one man whom corruption could not claim as her own. Here was one
human soul not to be had for a price! There flitted before him again a
picture of that seventeen-year-old boy in the little red schoolhouse,
and close upon it came the picture of this other young man against whom
all powers of corruption had been turned in vain. With the one it
had been the emotional luxury of a sentiment, a thing from life's
actualities apart; with the other it was a force that dominated all
things else, a force over which circumstances and design could not
prevail. “I know all about it,” he was saying. “I know about it all! I
know how easy it is to fall! I know how fine it is to stand!”

His sense of disappointment in his own empty, besmirched career was
almost submerged then as he projected himself on into the career of
this other man who within the hour would come there in his stead. How
glorious was his opportunity, how limitless his possibilities, and how
great to his own soul the satisfaction the years would bring of having
done his best!

It had all changed now. That passionate longing to vindicate himself,
add one thing honourable and fine to his own record, had altogether left
him, and with the new mood came new insight and what had been an impulse
centred to a purpose.

It pointed to three minutes to twelve as he walked over to his desk,
unfolded the contracts, and one by one affixed his signature. In a dim
way he was conscious of how the interpretation of his first motive would
be put upon it, how they would call him traitor and coward; but that
mattered little. The very fact that the man for whom he was doing
it would never see it as it was brought him no pang. And when he had
carefully blotted the papers, affixed the seal and put them away, there
was in his heart the clean, sweet joy of a child because he had been
able to do this for a man in whom he believed.

The band was playing the opening strains as he closed the door behind
him and started upstairs.




IX

“OUT THERE”


The old man held the picture up before him and surveyed it with admiring
but disapproving eye. “No one that comes along this way'll have the
price for it,” he grumbled. “It'll just set here 'till doomsday.”

It did seem that the picture failed to fit in with the rest of the shop.
A persuasive young fellow who claimed he was closing out his stock let
the old man have it for what he called a song. It was only a little
out-of-the-way store which subsisted chiefly on the framing of pictures.
The old man looked around at his views of the city, his pictures of cats
and dogs and gorgeous young women, his flaming bits of landscape. “Don't
belong in here,” he fumed, “any more 'an I belong in Congress.”

And yet the old man was secretly proud of his acquisition. He seemed all
at once to be lifted from his realm of petty tradesman to that of patron
of art. There was a hidden dignity in his scowling as he shuffled about
pondering the least ridiculous place for the picture.

It is not fair to the picture to try repainting it in words, for words
reduce it to a lithograph. It was a bit of a pine forest, through which
there exuberantly rushed an unspoiled little mountain stream. Chromos
and works of art may deal with kindred subjects. There is just that one
difference of dealing with them differently. “It ain't what you _see_,
so much as what you can guess is there,” was the thought it brought to
the old man who was dusting it. “Now this frame ain't three feet long,
but it wouldn't surprise me a bit if that timber kept right on for a
hundred miles. I kind of suspect it's on a mountain--looks cool enough
in there to be on a mountain. Wish I was there. Bet they never see no
such days as we do in Chicago. Looks as though a man might call his soul
his own--out there.”

He began removing some views of Lincoln Park and some corpulent Cupids
in order to make room in the window for the new picture. When he went
outside to look at it he shook his head severely and hastened in to take
away some ardent young men and women, some fruit and flowers and fish
which he had left thinking they might “set it off.” It was evident that
the new picture did not need to be “set off.” “And anyway,” he told
himself, in vindication of entrusting all his goods to one bottom, “I
might as well take them out, for the new one makes them look so kind of
sick that no one would have them, anyhow.” Then he went back to mounting
views with the serenity of one who stands for the finer things.

His clamorous little clock pointed to a quarter of six when he finally
came back to the front of the store. It was time to begin closing up
for the night, but for the minute he stood there watching the crowd
of workers coming from the business district not far away over to the
boarding-house region, a little to the west. He watched them as they
came by in twos and threes and fours: noisy people and worn-out people,
people hilarious and people sullen, the gaiety and the weariness, the
acceptance and the rebellion of humanity--he saw it pass. “As if any of
_them_ could buy it,” he pronounced severely, adding, contemptuously,
“or wanted to.”

The girl was coming along by herself. He watched her as she crossed to
his side of the street, thinking it was too bad for a poor girl to be
as tired as that. She was dressed like many of the rest of them, and
yet she looked different--like the picture and the chromo. She turned an
indifferent glance toward the window, and then suddenly she stood there
very still, and everything about her seemed to change. “For all the
world,” he told himself afterward, “as if she'd found a long-lost
friend, and was 'fraid to speak for fear it was too good to be true.”

She did seem afraid to speak--afraid to believe. For a minute she stood
there right in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at the picture. And
when she came toward the window it was less as if coming than as if
drawn. What she really seemed to want to do was to edge away; yet she
came closer, as close as she could, her eyes never leaving the picture,
and then fear, or awe, or whatever it was made her look so queer
gave way to wonder--that wondering which is ready to open the door to
delight. She looked up and down the street as one rubbing one's eyes to
make sure of a thing, and then it all gave way to a joy which lighted
her pale little face like--“Well, like nothing I ever saw before,” was
all the old man could say of it. “Why, she'd never know if the whole
fire department was to run right up here on the sidewalk,” he gloated.
Just then she drew herself up for a long breath. “See?” he chuckled,
delightedly. “She knows it has a smell!” She looked toward the door,
but shook her head. “Knows she can't pay the price,” he interpreted her.
Then, she stepped back and looked at the number above the door. “Coming
again,” he made of that; “ain't going to run no chances of losing the
place.” And then for a long time she stood there before the picture, so
deeply and so strangely quiet that he could not translate her. “I can't
just get the run of it,” was his bewildered conclusion. “I don't see why
it should make anybody act like that.” And yet he must have understood
more than he knew, for suddenly he was seeing her through a blur of
tears.

As he began shutting up for the night he was so excited about the way
she looked when she finally turned away that it never occurred to him to
be depressed about her inability to pay the price.

He kept thinking of her, wondering about her, during the next day. At
a little before six he took up his station near the front window.
Once more the current of workers flowed by. “I'm an old fool,” he told
himself, irritated at the wait; “as if it makes any difference whether
she comes or not--when she can't buy it, anyhow. She's just as big a
fool as I am--liking it when she can't have it, only I'm the biggest
fool of all--caring whether she likes it or not.” But just then the
girl passed quickly by a crowd of girls who were ahead of her and came
hurrying across the street. She was walking fast, and looked excited and
anxious. “Afraid it might be gone,” he said--adding, grimly: “Needn't
worry much about that.”

She came up to the picture as some people would enter a church. And yet
the joy which flooded her face is not well known to churches. “I'll tell
you what it's like”--the old man's thoughts stumbling right into the
heart of it--“it's like someone that's been wandering round in a desert
country all of a sudden coming on a spring. She's _thirsty_--she's
drinking it in--she can't get enough of it. It's--it's the water of life
to her!” And then, ashamed of saying a thing that sounded as if it were
out of a poem, he shook his shoulders roughly as if to shake off a piece
of sentiment unbecoming his age and sex.

He went to the door and watched her as she passed away. “I'll bet she'd
never tip the scale to one hundred pounds,” he decided. “Looks like a
good wind could blow her away.” She stooped a little and just as she
passed from sight he saw that she was coughing.

Then the old man made what he prided himself was a great deduction.
“She's been there, and she wants to go back. This kind of takes her back
for a minute, and when she gets the breath of it she ain't so homesick.”

All through those July days he watched each night for the frail-looking
little girl who liked the picture of the pines. She would always come
hurrying across the street in the sam

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