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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lifted Masks, by Susan Glaspell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Lifted Masks
+       Stories
+
+Author: Susan Glaspell
+
+
+Release Date: January, 2005 [EBook #7368]
+This file was first posted on April 21, 2003
+Last Updated: July 5, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFTED MASKS ***
+
+
+
+
+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 same eager way, an eagerness close
+to the feverish. But the tenseness would always relax as she saw the
+picture. "She never looks quite so wilted down when she goes away as
+she does when she comes," the old man saw. "Upon my soul, I believe she
+really _goes_ there. It's--oh, Lord"--irritated at getting beyond his
+depth--"_I_ don't know!"
+
+He never called it anything now but "Her Picture." One day at just ten
+minutes of six he took it out of the window. "Seems kind of mean," he
+admitted, "but I just want to find out how much she does think of it."
+
+And when he found out he told himself that of all the mean men God had
+ever let live, he was the meanest. The girl came along in the usual
+hurried, anxious fashion. And when she saw the empty window he thought
+for a minute she was going to sink right down there on the sidewalk.
+Everything about her seemed to give way--as if something from which she
+had been drawing had been taken from her. The luminousness gone from
+her face, there were cruel revelations. "Blast my _soul!_" the old man
+muttered angrily, not far from tearfully. She looked up and down the
+noisy, dirty, parched street, then back to the empty window. For a
+minute she just stood there--that was the worst minute of all. And
+then--accepting--she turned and walked slowly away, walked as the
+too-weary and the too-often disappointed walk.
+
+It was with not wholly steady hand that the old man hastened to replace
+the picture, all the while telling himself what he thought of himself:
+more low-down than the cat who plays with the mouse, meaner than the
+man who'd take the bone from the dog, less to be loved than the man who
+would kick over the child's play-house, only to be compared with the
+brute who would snatch the cup of water from the dying--such were the
+verdicts he pronounced. He thought perhaps she would come back, and
+stayed there until almost seven, waiting for her, though pretending
+it was necessary that he take down and then put up again the front
+curtains. All the next day he was restless and irritable. As if to make
+up to the girl for the contemptible trick he had played he spent a whole
+hour that afternoon arranging a tapestry background for the picture.
+"She'll think," he told himself, "that this was why it was out, and
+won't be worried about its being gone again. This will just be a little
+sign to her that it's here to stay."
+
+He began his watch that night at half-past five. After fifteen minutes
+the thought came to him that she might be so disheartened she would go
+home by another street. He became so gloomily certain she would do this
+that he was jubilant when he finally saw her coming along on the other
+side--coming purposelessly, shorn of that eagerness which had always
+been able, for the moment, to vanquish the tiredness. But when she came
+to the place where she always crossed the street she only stood there an
+instant and then, a little more slowly, a little more droopingly, walked
+on. She had given up! She was not coming over!
+
+But she did come. After she had gone a few steps she hesitated again and
+this time started across the street. "That's right," approved the old
+man, "never give up the ship!"
+
+She passed the store as if she were not going to look in; she seemed
+trying not to look, but her head turned--and she saw the picture. First
+her body seemed to stiffen, and then something--he couldn't make out
+whether or not it was a sob--shook her, and as she came toward the
+picture on her white, tired face were the tears.
+
+"Don't you worry," he murmured affectionately to her retreating form,
+"it won't never be gone again."
+
+The very next week he was put to the test. The kind of lady who did
+not often pass along that street entered the shop and asked to see the
+picture in the window. He looked at her suspiciously. Then he frowned at
+her, as he stood there, fumbling. _Her_ picture! What would she think?
+What would she do? Then a crafty smile stole over his face and he walked
+to the window and got the picture. "The price of this picture, madame,"
+he said, haughtily, "is forty dollars,"--adding to himself, "That'll fix
+her."
+
+But the lady made no comment, and stood there holding the picture up
+before her. "I will take it," she said, quietly.
+
+He stared at her stupidly. Forty dollars! Then it must be that the
+picture was better than the young man had known. "Will you wrap it,
+please?" she asked. "I will take it with me."
+
+He turned to the back of the store. Forty dollars!--he kept repeating
+it in dazed fashion. And they had raised the rent on him, and the
+papers said coal would be high that winter--those facts seemed to have
+something to do with forty dollars. _Forty dollars!_--it was hammering
+at him, overwhelmed him, too big a sum to contend with. With long, grim
+stroke he tore off the wrapping paper; stoically he began folding it.
+But something was the matter. The paper would not go on right. Three
+times he took it off, and each time he could not help looking down at
+the picture of the pines. And each time the forest seemed to open a
+little farther; each time it seemed bigger--bigger even than forty
+dollars; it seemed as if it _knew things_--things more important than
+even coal and rent. And then the strangest thing of all happened: the
+forest faded away into its own shadowy distances, and in its place was
+a noisy, crowded, sun-baked street, and across the street was eagerly
+hurrying an anxious little girl, a frail little wisp of a girl who
+probably should not be crossing hot, noisy streets at all--then a
+light in tired eyes, a smile upon a worn face, relief as from a
+cooling breeze--and _anyway_, suddenly furious at the lady, furious at
+himself--"he'd be gol-_darned_ if it wasn't _her_ picture!"
+
+He walked firmly back to the front of the store.
+
+"I forgot at first," he said, brusquely, "that this picture belongs to
+someone else."
+
+The lady looked at him in astonishment. "I do not understand," she said.
+
+"There's nothing to understand," he fairly shouted, "except that it
+belongs to someone else!"
+
+She turned away, but came back to him. "I will give you fifty dollars
+for it," she said, in her quiet way.
+
+"Madame," he thundered at her, "you can stand there and offer me five
+hundred dollars, and I'm here to tell you that this picture is not for
+sale. Do you _hear_?"
+
+"I certainly do," replied the lady, and walked from the store.
+
+He was a long time in cooling off. "I tell you," he stormed to a
+very blue Lake Michigan he was putting into a frame, "it's hers--it's
+_hern_--and anybody that comes along here with any nonsense is just
+going to hear from _me_!"
+
+In the days which followed he often thought to go out and speak to her,
+but perhaps the old man had a restraining sense of values. He planned
+some day to go out and tell her the picture was hers, but that seemed
+a silly thing to tell her, for surely she knew it anyway. He worried a
+good deal about her cough, which seemed to be getting worse, and he had
+it all figured out that when cold weather came he would have her come in
+where it was warm, and take her look in there. He felt that he knew
+all about her, and though he did not know her name, though he had never
+heard her speak one word, in some ways he felt closer to her than to any
+one else in the world.
+
+Yet if the old man had known just how it was with the girl it is
+altogether unlikely that he would have understood. It would have
+mystified and disappointed him had he known that she had never seen a
+pine forest or a mountain in her life. Indeed there was a great deal
+about the little girl which the old man, together with almost all the
+rest of the world, would not have understood.
+
+Not that the surface facts about her were either incomprehensible or
+interesting. The tale of her existence would sound much like that of
+a hundred other girls in the same city. Inquiry about her would have
+developed the facts that she did typewriting for a land company, that
+she did not seem to have any people, and lived at a big boarding-house.
+At the boarding-house they would have told you that she was a nice
+little thing, quiet as a mouse, and that it was too bad she had to work,
+for she seemed more than half sick. There the story would have rested,
+and the real things about her would not have been touched.
+
+She worked for the Chicago branch of a big Northwestern land company.
+They dealt in the lands of Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington. The
+things she sat at her typewriter and wrote were of the wonders of that
+great country: the great timber lands, the valleys and hills, towering
+mountain peaks and rushing rivers. She typewrote "literature" telling
+how there was a chance for every man out there, how the big, exhaustless
+land was eager to yield of its store to all who would come and seek. Day
+after day she wrote those things telling how the sick were made well
+and the poor were made rich, how it was a land of indescribable wonders
+which the feeble pen could not hope to portray.
+
+And the girl with whom almost everything in life had gone wrong came to
+think of Out There as the place where everything was right. It was the
+far country where there was no weariness nor loneliness, the land where
+one did not grow tired, where one never woke up in the morning too tired
+to get up, where no one went to bed at night too tired to go to sleep.
+The street-cars did not ring their gongs so loud Out There, the newsboys
+had pleasant voices, and there were no elevated trains. It was a pure,
+high land which knew no smoke nor dirt, a land where great silences drew
+one to the heart of peace, where the people in the next room did not
+come in and bang things around late at night. Out There was a wide land
+where buildings were far apart and streets were not crowded. Even the
+horses did not grow tired Out There. Oh, it was a land where dreams
+came true--a beautiful land where no one ate prunes, where the gravy was
+never greasy and the potatoes never burned. It was a land of flowers and
+birds and lovely people--a land of wealth and health and many smiles.
+
+Her imagination made use of it all. She knew how men were reclaiming the
+desert of Idaho, of the tremendous undeveloped wealth of what had been
+an almost undiscovered State. She thrilled to the poetry of irrigation.
+Often when hot and tired and dusty her fancy would follow the little
+mountain stream from its birth way up in the clouds, her imagination
+rushing with it through sweetening forest and tumbling with it down
+cooling rocks until finally strong, bold, wise men guided it to the
+desert which had yearned for it through all the years, and the grateful
+desert smiled rich smiles of grain and flowers. She could make it more
+like a story than any story in any book. And she could always breathe
+better in thinking of the pine forests of Oregon. There was something
+liberating--expanding--in just the thought of them. She dreamed cooling
+dreams about them, dreams of their reaching farther than one's fancy
+could reach, big widening dreams of their standing there serene in the
+consciousness of their own immensity. They stood to her for a beautiful
+idea: the idea of space, of room--room for everybody, and then much more
+room! Even one's understanding grew big as one turned to them.
+
+And she loved to listen for the Pacific Ocean, coming from
+incomprehensible distances and unknowable countries, now rushing with
+passion to the wild coast of Oregon, again stealing into the Washington
+harbours. She loved to address the letters to Portland, Seattle,
+Spokane, Tacoma--all those pulsing, vivid cities of a country of big
+chances and big beauty. She loved to picture Seattle, a city builded
+upon many hills--how wonderful that a city should be builded upon
+hills!--in Chicago there was nothing that could possibly be thought of
+as a hill. And she loved to shut her eyes and let the great mountain
+peak grow in the distance, as one could see it from Portland--how noble
+a thing to see a mountain peak from a city! Sometimes she trembled
+before that consciousness of a mountain. Often when so tired she
+scarcely knew what she was doing she found she was saying her prayers
+to a mountain. Indeed, Out There seemed the place to send one's
+prayers--for was it not a place where prayers were answered?
+
+During that summer when the West was overrun with tourists who grumbled
+about everything from the crowded trains to the way in which sea-foods
+were served, this little girl sat in one of the hot office buildings of
+Chicago and across the stretch of miles drew to herself the spirit of
+that country of coming days. Thousands rode in Pullman cars along the
+banks of the Columbia--saw, and felt not; she sat before her typewriter
+in a close, noisy room and heard the cooling rush of waters and got the
+freeing message of the pines. In some rare moments when she rose from
+the things about her to the things of which she dreamed she possessed
+the whole great land, and as the sultry days sapped of her meagre
+strength, and the bending over the typewriter cramped an already too
+cramped chest she clung with a more and more passionate tenacity to the
+bigness and the beauty and rightness of things Out There. And it was so
+kind to her--that land of deep breaths and restoring breezes. It never
+shut her out. It always kept itself bigger and more wonderful than one
+could ever hope to fancy it.
+
+And the night she found the picture she knew that it was all really
+so. That was why it was so momentous a night. The picture was a dream
+visualised--a dreamer vindicated. They had pictures in the office, of
+course--some pictures trying to tell of that very kind of a place. But
+those were just pictures; this _proved_ it, told what it meant. It
+told that she had been right, and there was joy in knowing that she had
+known. She clung to the picture as one would to that which proves as
+real all one has long held dear, loved it as the dreamer loves that
+which secures him in his dreaming.
+
+She came to think of it as her own abiding place. Often when too tired
+for long wings of fancy she would just sink down in the deep, cool
+shadows of the pines, beside the little river which one knew so well was
+the gift of distant snows. It rested her most of all; it quieted her.
+
+She smiled sometimes to think how no one in the office knew about
+it, wondered what they would think if they knew. Often she would find
+someone in the office looking at her strangely. She used to wonder about
+it a little.
+
+And then one day Mr. Osborne sent for her to come into his office. He
+acted so queerly. As she came in and sat down near his desk he swung his
+chair around and sat there with his back to her. After that he got up
+and walked to the window.
+
+The head stenographer had complained of her cough. She said she did not
+think it right either to the girl or to the rest of them for her to be
+there. She said she hated to speak of it, but could not stand it any
+longer. That had been the week before, and ever since he had been
+putting it off. But now he could put it off no longer; the head
+stenographer was valuable, and besides he knew that she was right.
+
+And so he told her--this was all he could think of just then--that they
+were contemplating some changes in the office, and for a time would have
+less desk room. If he sent her machine to her home, would she be willing
+to do her work there for a while? Hers was the kind of work that could
+be done at home.
+
+She was sorry, for she wondered if she could find a place in her room
+for the typewriter, and it did not seem there would be air enough there
+to last her all day long. And she had grown fond of the office, with its
+"literature" and pictures and maps and the men who had just come from
+Out There coming in every once in a while. It was a bond--a place to
+touch realities. But of course there was nothing for her to do but
+comply, and she made no comment on the arrangement.
+
+She pushed her chair back and rose to go. "Are you alone in the world?"
+he asked abruptly then,
+
+"Yes; I--oh yes."
+
+It was too much for him. "How would you like," he asked recklessly, "to
+have me get you transportation out West?"
+
+She sank back in her chair. Every particle of colour had left her
+face. Her deep eyes had grown almost wild. "Oh," she gasped--"you can't
+mean--you don't think--"
+
+"You wouldn't want to go?"
+
+"I mean"--it was but a whisper--"it would be--too wonderful."
+
+"You would like it then?"
+
+She only nodded; but her lips were parted, her eyes glowing. He wondered
+why he had never seen before how different looking and--yes, beautiful,
+in a strange kind of way--she was.
+
+"I see you have a cold," he said, "and I think you would get along
+better out there. I'll see if I can fix up the transportation, and get
+something with our people in one of the towns that would be good for
+you."
+
+She leaned back in her chair and sat there smiling at him. Something in
+the smile made him say, abruptly: "That's all; you may go now, and I'll
+send a boy with your machine."
+
+She walked through the streets as one who had already found another
+country. More than one turned to look at her. She reached her room at
+last and pulling her one little chair up to the window sat staring out
+across the alley at the brick wall across from her. But she was not
+seeing a narrow alley and a high brick wall. She was seeing rushing
+rivers and mighty forests and towering peaks. She leaned back in her
+chair--an indulgence less luxurious than it sounds, as the chair only
+reached the middle of her back--and looked out at the high brick wall
+and saw a snow-clad range of hills. But she was tired; this tremendous
+idea was too much for her; the very wonder of it was exhausting. She lay
+down on her bed--radiant, but languid. Soon she heard a rush of waters.
+At first it was only someone filling the bath-tub, but after a while it
+was the little stream which flowed through her forest. And then she was
+not lying on a lumpy bed; she was sinking down under pine trees--all so
+sweet and still and cool. But an awful thing was happening!--the forest
+was on fire--it was choking and burning her! She awoke to find smoke
+from the building opposite pouring into her room; flies were buzzing
+about, and her face and hands were hot.
+
+She did little work in the next few days. It was hard to go on with the
+same work when waiting for a thing which was to make over one's whole
+life. The stress of dreams changing to hopes caused a great languor to
+come over her. And her chair was not right for her typewriter, and the
+smoke came in all the time. Strangely enough Out There seemed farther
+away. Sometimes she could not go there at all; she supposed it was
+because she was really going.
+
+At the close of the week she went to the office with her work. She was
+weak with excitement as she stepped into the elevator. Would Mr. Osborne
+have the transportation for her? Would he tell her when she was to go?
+
+But she did not see Mr. Osborne at all. When she asked for him the clerk
+just replied carelessly that he was not there. She was going to ask if
+he had left any message for her, but the telephone rang then and the
+man to whom she was talking turned away. Someone was sitting at her
+old desk, and they did not seem to be making the changes they had
+contemplated; everyone in the office seemed very busy and uncaring, and
+because she knew her chin was trembling she turned away.
+
+She had a strange feeling as she left the office: as if standing on
+ground which quivered, an impulse to reach out her hand and tell someone
+that something must be done right away, a dreadful fear that she was
+going to cry out that she could not wait much longer.
+
+All at once she found that she was crossing the street, and saw ahead
+the little art store with the wonderful picture which proved it was all
+really so. In the same old way, her step quickened. It would show her
+again that it was all just as she had thought it was, and if that were
+true, then it must be true also that Mr. Osborne was going to get her
+the transportation. It would prove that everything was all right.
+
+But a cruel thing happened. It failed her. It was just as beautiful--but
+something a long way off, impossible to reach. Try as she would, she
+could not get _into_ it, as she used to. It was only a picture; a
+beautiful picture of some pine trees. And they were very far away, and
+they had nothing at all to do with her.
+
+Through the window, at the back of the store, she saw the old man
+standing with his back to her. She thought of going in and asking to sit
+down--she wanted to sit down--but perhaps he would say something cross
+to her--he was such a queer looking old man--and she knew she would
+cry if anything cross was said to her. That he had watched for her each
+night, that he had tried and tried to think of a way of finding her,
+that he would have been more glad to see her than to see anyone in the
+world, would have been kinder to her than anyone on earth would have
+been--those were the things she did not know. And so--more lonely than
+she had ever been before--she turned away.
+
+On Monday she felt she could wait no longer. It did not seem that it
+would be _safe_. She got ready to go to see Mr. Osborne, but the getting
+ready tired her so that she sat a long time resting, looking out at the
+high brick wall beyond which there was nothing at all. She was counting
+the blocks, thinking of how many times she would have to cross the
+street. But just then it occurred to her that she could telephone.
+
+When she came back upstairs she crept up on the bed and lay there very
+still. The boy had said that Mr. Osborne was away and would be gone
+two weeks. No one in the office had heard him say anything about her
+transportation.
+
+All through the day she lay there, and what she saw before her was a
+narrow alley and a high brick wall. She had lost her mountains and her
+forests and her rivers and her lakes. She tried to go out to them in the
+same old way--but she could not get beyond the high brick wall. She was
+shut in. She tried to draw them to her, but they could not come across
+the wall. It shut them out. She tried to pray to the great mountain
+which one could see from Portland. But even prayers could get no farther
+than the wall.
+
+Late that afternoon, because she was so shut in that she was choking,
+because she was consumed with the idea that she must claim her country
+now or lose it forever, she got up and started for the picture. It was
+a long, long way to go, and dreadful things were in between--people who
+would bump against her, hot, uneven streets, horses that might run over
+her--but she must make the journey. She must make it because the things
+that she lived on were slipping from her--and she was choking--sinking
+down--and all alone.
+
+Step by step, never knowing just how her foot was going to make the next
+step, sick with the fear that people were going to run into her--the
+streets going up and down, the buildings round and round, she did
+go; holding to the window casings for the last few steps--each step
+a terrible chasm which she was never sure she was going to be able to
+cross--she was there at last. And in the window as she stood there,
+swayingly, was a dark, blurred thing which might have been anything at
+all. She tried to remember why she had come. What _was_ it--? And then
+she was sinking down into an abyss.
+
+That the hemorrhage came then, that the old man came out and found her
+and tenderly took her in, that he had her taken where she should have
+been taken long before, that the doctors said it was too late, and that
+soon their verdict was confirmed--those are the facts which would seem
+to tell the rest of the story. But deep down beneath facts rests truth,
+and the truth is that this is a story with the happiest kind of a happy
+ending. What facts would call the breeze from an electric fan was in
+truth the gracious breath of the pines. And when the nurse said "She's
+going," she was indeed going, but to a land of great spaces and benign
+breezes, a land of deep shadows and rushing waters. For a most wondrous
+thing had happened. She had called to the mountain, and the mountain had
+heard her voice; and because it was so mighty and so everlasting it drew
+her to itself, across high brick walls and past millions of hurrying,
+noisy people--oh, a most triumphant flight! And the mountain said--"I
+give you this whole great land. It is yours because you have loved it so
+well. Hills and valleys and rivers and forests and lakes--it is all for
+you." Yes, the nurse was quite right; she was going: going for a long
+sweet sleep beneath trees of many shadows, beside clear waters which had
+come from distant snows--really going "Out There."
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE PREPOSTEROUS MOTIVE
+
+
+The Governor was sitting alone in his private office with an open letter
+in his hand. He was devoutly and gloomily wishing that some other man
+was just then in his shoes. The Governor had not devoted a large portion
+of his life to nursing a desire of that nature, for he was a man in
+whose soul the flame of self-satisfaction glowed cheeringly; but just
+now there were reasons, and he deemed them ample, for deploring that he
+had been made chief executive of his native State.
+
+Had he chosen to take you into his confidence--a thing the Governor
+would assuredly choose not to do--he would have told you there were
+greater things in the world than the governorship of that State. He
+might have suggested a seat in the Senate of the United States as one
+of those things. It was of the United States Senate his Excellency
+was thinking as he sat there alone moodily deploring the gubernatorial
+shoes.
+
+The senior Senator was going to die. He differed therein from his
+fellows in that he was going to die soon, almost immediately. He had
+reached the tottering years even at the time of his reelection, and it
+had never been supposed that his life would outstretch his term. He had
+been sent back, not for another six years of service, but to hold out
+the leader of the Boxers, as they called themselves--the younger and
+unorthodox element of the party in the State, an element growing to
+dangerous proportions. It was only by returning the aged Senator, whom
+they held it would be brutal to turn down after a life of service to
+the party, that the "machine" won the memorable fight of the previous
+winter.
+
+From the viewpoint of the machine, the Governor was the senior Senator's
+logical successor. Had it not been for the heavy inroads of the Boxers,
+his Excellency would even then have been sitting in the Senate Chamber
+at Washington. It had not been considered safe to nominate the Governor.
+Had his supporters conceded that the time was at hand for a change,
+there would have been a general clamour for the leader of the
+Boxers--Huntington, undeniably the popular man of the State. And so
+they concocted a beautiful sentiment about "rounding out the veteran's
+career," and letting him "die with his boots on"; and through the
+omnipotence of sentiment, they won.
+
+Down in his heart the venerable Senator was not seeking to die with his
+boots on. He would have preferred sitting in a large chair before the
+fire and reading quietly of what other men were doing in the Senate of
+the United States. But they told him he must sacrifice that wish, for
+if he retired he would be succeeded by a dangerous man. And the old man,
+believing them, had gone dutifully back into the arena.
+
+Now it seemed that a power outside man's control was declaring against
+the well-laid plans of the machine. As the machine saw things, the time
+was not ripe for the senior Senator to die. He had just entered upon his
+new term, and the Governor himself had but lately stepped into a second
+term. They had assumed that the Senator would live on for at least two
+years, but now they heard that he was likely to die almost at once.
+His Excellency could not very well name himself for the vacancy, and it
+seemed dangerous just then to risk a call of the Assembly. They dared
+not let the Governor appoint a weaker man, even if he would consent
+to do so, for they would need the best they had to put up against the
+leader of the Boxers. With the Governor, they believed they could win,
+but the question of appointing him had suddenly become a knotty one.
+
+The Governor himself was bowed with chagrin. He saw now that he had
+erred in taking a second term, and he was not the man to enjoy reviewing
+his mistakes. As he sat there reading and rereading the letter which
+told him that the work of the senior Senator was almost done, he said to
+himself that it was easy enough to wrestle with men, but a harder thing
+to try one's mettle with fate. He spent a gloomy and unprofitable day.
+
+Late in the afternoon a telegram reached the executive office. Styles
+was coming to town that night, and wanted to see the Governor at the
+hotel. Things always cleared when Styles came to town; and so, though
+still unable to foresee the outcome, he brightened at once.
+
+Styles was a railroad man, and rich. People to whom certain things were
+a sealed book said that it was nice of Mr. Styles to take an interest in
+politics when he had so many other things on his mind, and that he must
+be a very public-spirited man. That he took an interest in politics,
+no one familiar with the affairs of the State would deny. The orthodox
+papers painted him as a public benefactor, but the Boxers arrayed him
+with hoofs and horns.
+
+The Governor and Mr. Styles were warm friends. It was said that their
+friendship dated from mere boyhood, and that the way the two men had
+held together through all the vicissitudes of life was touching and
+beautiful--at least, so some people observed. There were others whose
+eyebrows went up when the Governor and Mr. Styles were mentioned in
+their Damon and Pythias capacity.
+
+That night, in the public benefactor's room at the hotel, the Governor
+and his old friend had a long talk. When twelve o'clock came they were
+still talking; more than that, the Governor was excitedly pacing the
+floor.
+
+"I tell you, Styles," he expostulated, "I don't like it! It doesn't put
+me in a good light. It's too apparent, and I'll suffer for it, sure as
+fate. Mark my words, we'll all suffer for it!"
+
+Mr. Styles was sitting in an easy attitude before the table. The public
+benefactor never paced the floor; it did not seem necessary. He smoked
+in silence for a minute; then raised himself a little in his chair.
+
+"Well, have you anything better to offer?"
+
+"No, I haven't," replied the Governor, tartly; "but it seems to me you
+ought to have."
+
+Styles sank back in his chair and for several minutes more devoted
+himself to the art of smoking. There were times when this philanthropic
+dabbler in politics was irritating.
+
+"I think," he began presently, "that you exaggerate the unpleasant
+features of the situation. It will cause talk, of course; but isn't it
+worth it? You say it's unheard of; maybe, but so is the situation, and
+wasn't there something in the copy-books about meeting new situations
+with new methods? If you have anything better to offer, produce it; if
+not, we've got to go ahead with this. And really, I don't see that it's
+so bad. You have to go South to look after your cotton plantation; you
+find now that it's going to take more time than you feel you should
+take from the State; you can't afford to give it up; consequently, you
+withdraw in favor of the Lieutenant-Governor. We all protest, but you
+say Berriman is a good man, and the State won't suffer, and you simply
+can't afford to go on. Well, we can keep the Senator's condition pretty
+quiet here; and after all, he's sturdy, and may live on to the close
+of the year. After due deliberation Berriman appoints you. A little
+talk?--Yes. But it's worth a little talk. It seems to me the thing works
+out very smoothly."
+
+When Tom Styles leaned back in his chair and declared a thing worked
+out very smoothly, that thing was quite likely to go. In three days the
+Governor went South. When he returned, the newspaper men were startled
+by the announcement that business considerations which he could not
+afford to overlook demanded his withdrawal from office. Previous to this
+time the Lieutenant-Governor and Mr. Styles had met and the result of
+their meeting was not made a matter of public record.
+
+As the Governor had anticipated, many things were said. Inquiries were
+made into the venerable Senator's condition--which, the orthodox
+papers declared, was but another example of the indecency of the
+Boxer journals. The Governor went to his cotton plantation. The
+Lieutenant-Governor went into office, and was pronounced a worthy
+successor to a good executive. The venerable Senator continued to live.
+As Mr. Styles had predicted, the gossip soon quieted into a friendly
+hope that the Governor would realise large sums with his cotton.
+
+It was late in the fall when the senior Senator finally succumbed. The
+day the papers printed the story of his death, they printed speculative
+editorials on his probable successor. When the bereaved family commented
+with bitterness on this ill-concealed haste, they were told that it was
+politics--enterprise--life.
+
+The old man's remains lay in state in the rotunda of the State Capitol,
+and the building was draped in mourning. Many came and looked upon the
+quiet face; but far more numerous than those who gathered at his bier
+to weep were those who assembled in secluded corners to speculate on the
+wearing of his toga. It was politics--enterprise--life.
+
+Mr. Styles told the Lieutenant-Governor to be deliberate. There was no
+need of an immediate appointment, he said. And so for a time things went
+on about the State-house much as usual, save that the absorbing topic
+was the senatorial situation, and that every one was watching the new
+chief executive. The retired Governor now spent part of his time in the
+South, and part at home. The cotton plantation was not demanding all his
+attention, after all.
+
+It could not be claimed that John Berriman had ever done any great
+thing. He was not on record as having ever risen grandly to an occasion;
+but there may have been something in the fact that an occasion
+admitting of a grand rising had never presented itself. Before he became
+Lieutenant-Governor, he had served inoffensively in the State Senate for
+two terms. No one had ever worked very hard for Senator Berriman's vote.
+He had been put in by the machine, and it had always been assumed that
+he was machine property.
+
+Berriman himself had never given the matter of his place in the human
+drama much thought. He had an idea that it was proper for him to vote
+with his friends, and he always did it. Had he been called a tool, he
+would have been much ruffled; he merely trusted to the infallibility of
+the party.
+
+The Boxers did not approach him now concerning the appointment of
+Huntington. That, of course, was a fixed matter, and they were not young
+and foolish enough to attempt to change it.
+
+One day the Governor received a telegram from Styles suggesting that
+he "adjust that matter" immediately. He thought of announcing the
+appointment that very night, but the newspaper men had all left the
+building, and as he had promised that they should know of it as soon as
+it was made, he concluded to wait until the next morning.
+
+Governor Berriman had a brother in town that week, attending a meeting
+of the State Agricultural Society. Hiram Berriman had a large farm in
+the southern part of the State. He knew but little of political methods,
+and had primitive ideas about honesty. There had always been a strong
+tie between the brothers, despite the fact that Hiram was fifteen years
+the Governor's senior. They talked of many things that night, and the
+hour was growing late. They were about to retire when the Governor
+remarked, a little sleepily:
+
+"Well, to-morrow morning I announce the senatorial appointment."
+
+"You do, eh?" returned the farmer.
+
+"Yes, there's no need of waiting any longer, and it's getting on to the
+time the State wants two senators in Washington."
+
+"Well, I suppose, John," Hiram said, turning a serious face to his
+brother, "that you've thought the matter all over, and are sure you are
+right?"
+
+The Governor threw back his head with a scoffing laugh.
+
+"I guess it didn't require much thought on my part," he answered
+carelessly.
+
+"I don't see how you figure that out," contended Hiram warmly. "You're
+Governor of the State, and your own boss, ain't you?"
+
+It was the first time in all his life that anyone had squarely
+confronted John Berriman with the question whether or not he was his own
+boss, and for some reason it went deep into his soul, and rankled there.
+
+"Now see here, Hiram," he said at length, "there's no use of your
+putting on airs and pretending you don't understand this thing. You know
+well enough it was all fixed before I went in." The other man looked at
+him in bewilderment, and the Governor continued brusquely: "The party
+knew the Senator was going to die, and so the Governor pulled out and I
+went in just so the thing could be done decently when the time came."
+
+The old farmer was scratching his head.
+
+"That's it, eh? They got wind the Senator was goin' to die, and so the
+Governor told that lie about having to go South just so he could step
+into the dead man's shoes, eh?"
+
+"That's the situation--if you want to put it that way."
+
+"And now you're going to appoint the Governor?"
+
+"Of course I am; I couldn't do anything else if I wanted to."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Why, look here, Hiram, haven't you any idea of political obligation?
+It's expected of me."
+
+"Oh, it is, eh? Did you promise to appoint the Governor?"
+
+"Why, I don't know that I exactly made any promises, but that doesn't
+make a particle of difference. The understanding was that the Governor
+was to pull out and I was to go in and appoint him. It's a matter of
+honour;" and Governor Berriman drew himself up with pride.
+
+The farmer turned a troubled face to the fire.
+
+"I suppose, then," he said finally, "that you all think the Governor
+is the best man we have for the United States Senate. I take it that in
+appointing him, John, you feel sure he will guard the interests of the
+people before everything else, and that the people--I mean the working
+people of this State--will always be safe in his hands; do you?"
+
+"Oh, Lord, no, Hiram!" exclaimed the Governor irritably. "I don't think
+that at all!"
+
+Hiram Berriman's brown face warmed to a dull red.
+
+"You don't?" he cried. "You mean to sit there, John Berriman, and tell
+me that you don't think the man you're going to put in the United States
+Senate will be an honest man? What do you mean by saying you're going to
+put a dishonest man in there to make laws for the people, to watch over
+them and protect them? If you don't think he's a good man, if you don't
+think he's the best man the State has"--the old farmer was pounding the
+table heavily with his huge fist--"if you don't think that, in God's
+name, _why do you appoint him_?"
+
+"I wish I could make you understand, Hiram," said the Governor in an
+injured voice, "that it's not for me to say."
+
+"Why ain't it for you to say? Why ain't it, I want to know? Who's
+running you, your own conscience or some gang of men that's trying to
+steal from the State? Good God, I wish I had never lived to see the day
+a brother of mine put a thief in the United States Senate to bamboozle
+the honest, hard-working people of this State!"
+
+"Hold on, please--that's a little too strong!" flamed the Governor.
+
+"It ain't too strong. If a Senator ain't an honest man, he's a
+thief; and if he ain't lookin' after the welfare of the people, he's
+bamboozlin' them, and that's all there is about it. I don't know much
+about politics, but I ain't lived my life without learning a little
+about right and wrong, and it's a sorry day we've come to, John
+Berriman, if right and wrong don't enter into the makin' of a Senator!"
+
+The Governor could think of no fitting response, so he held his peace.
+This seemed to quiet the irate farmer, and he surveyed his brother
+intently, and not unkindly.
+
+"You're in a position now, John," he said, and there was a kind of
+homely eloquence in his serious voice, "to be a friend to the people.
+It ain't many of us ever get the chance of doin' a great thing. We work
+along, and we do the best we can with what comes our way, but most of
+us don't get the chance to do a thing that's goin' to help thousands
+of people, and that the whole country's goin' to say was a move for the
+right. You want to think of that, and when you're thinkin' so much about
+honour, you don't want to clean forget about honesty. Don't you stick
+to any foolish notions about bein' faithful to the party; it ain't the
+party that needs helpin'. No matter how you got where you are, you're
+Governor of the State right now, John, and your first duty is to the
+people of this State, not to Tom Styles or anybody else. Just you
+remember that when you're namin' your Senator in the morning."
+
+It was long before the Governor retired. He sat there by the fireplace
+until after the fire had died down, and he was too absorbed to grow
+cold. He thought of many things. Like the man who had preceded him in
+office, he wished that some one else was just then encumbered with the
+gubernatorial shoes.
+
+The next morning there was a heavy feeling in his head which he thought
+a walk in the bracing air might dispel, so he started on foot for the
+Statehouse. A light snow was on the ground, and there was something
+reassuring in the crispness of the morning. It would make a slave feel
+like a free man to drink in such air, he was thinking. Snatches of
+his brother's outburst of the night before kept breaking into his
+consciousness but curiously enough they did not greatly disturb him. He
+concluded that it was wonderful what a walk in the bracing air could do.
+From the foot of the hill he looked up at the State-house, for the first
+time in his experience seeing and thinking about it--not simply taking
+it for granted. There seemed a nobility about it--in the building
+itself, and back of that in what it stood for.
+
+As he walked through the corridor to his office he was greeted with
+cheerful, respectful salutations. His mood let him give the greetings a
+value they did not have and from that rose a sense of having the trust
+and goodwill of his fellows.
+
+But upon reaching his desk he found another telegram from Styles. It
+was imperatively worded and as he read it the briskness and satisfaction
+went from his bearing. He walked to the window and stood there
+looking down at the city, and, as it had been in looking ahead at
+the State-house, he now looked out over the city really seeing and
+understanding it, not merely taking it for granted. He found himself
+wondering if many of the people in that city--in that State--looked to
+their Governor with the old-fashioned trust his brother had shown. His
+eyes dimmed; he was thinking of the satisfaction it would afford his
+children, if--long after he had gone--they could tell how a great chance
+had once come into their father's life, and how he had proved himself a
+man.
+
+"Will you sign these now, Governor?" asked a voice behind him.
+
+It was his secretary, a man who knew the affairs of the State well, and
+whom every one seemed to respect.
+
+"Mr. Haines," he said abruptly, "who do you think is the best man we
+have for the United States Senate?"
+
+The secretary stepped back, dumfounded; amazed that the question should
+be put to him, startled at that strange way of putting it. Then he told
+himself he must be discreet. Like many of the people at the State-house,
+in his heart Haines was a Boxer.
+
+"Why, I presume," he ventured, "that the Governor is looked upon as the
+logical candidate, isn't he?"
+
+"I'm not talking about logical candidates. I want to know who you think
+is the man who would most conscientiously and creditably represent this
+State in the Senate of the United States."
+
+It was so simply spoken that the secretary found himself answering it as
+simply. "If you put it that way, Governor, Mr. Huntington is the man, of
+course."
+
+"You think most of the people feel that way?"
+
+"I know they do."
+
+"You believe if it were a matter of popular vote, Huntington would be
+the new Senator?"
+
+"There can be no doubt of that, Governor. I think they all have to admit
+that. Huntington is the man the people want."
+
+"That's all, Mr. Haines. I merely wondered what you thought about it."
+
+Soon after that Governor Berriman rang for a messenger boy and sent a
+telegram. Then he settled quietly down to routine work. It was about
+eleven when one of the newspaper men came in.
+
+"Good-morning, Governor," he said briskly "how's everything to-day?"
+
+"All right, Mr. Markham. I have nothing to tell you to-day, except that
+I've made the senatorial appointment."
+
+"Oh," laughed the reporter excitedly, "that's all, is it?"
+
+"Yes," replied the Governor, smiling too; "that's all!"
+
+The reporter looked at the clock. "I'll just catch the noon edition," he
+said, "if I telephone right away."
+
+He was moving to the other room when the Governor called to him.
+
+"See here, it seems to me you're a strange newspaper man!"
+
+"How so?"
+
+"Why, I tell you I've made a senatorial appointment--a matter of some
+slight importance--and you rush off never asking whom I've appointed."
+
+The reporter gave a forced laugh. He wished the Governor would not
+detain him with a joke now when every second counted.
+
+"That's right," he said, with strained pleasantness. "Well, who's the
+man?"
+
+The Governor raised his head. "Huntington," he said quietly, and resumed
+his work.
+
+"What?" gasped the reporter. "What?"
+
+Then he stopped in embarrassment, as if ashamed of being so easily taken
+in. "Guess you're trying to jolly me a little, aren't you, Governor?"
+
+"Jolly you, Mr. Markham? I'm not given to 'jollying' newspaper
+reporters. Here's a copy of the telegram I sent this morning, if you
+are still sceptical. Really, I don't see why you think it so impossible.
+Don't you consider Mr. Huntington a fit man for the place?"
+
+But for the minute the reporter seemed unable to speak. "May I ask," he
+fumbled at last, "why you did it?"
+
+"I had but one motive, Mr. Markham. I thought the matter over and it
+seemed to me the people should have the man they wanted. I am with them
+in believing Huntington the best man for the place." He said it simply,
+and went quietly back to his work.
+
+For many a long day politicians and papers continued the search for "the
+motive." Styles and his crowd saw it as a simple matter of selling out;
+they knew, of course, that it could be nothing else. After their first
+rage had subsided, and they saw there was nothing they could do, they
+wondered, sneeringly, why he did not "fix up a better story." That was a
+little _too_ simple-minded. Did he think people were fools? And even the
+men who profited by the situation puzzled their brains for weeks trying
+to understand it. There was something behind it, of course.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+HIS AMERICA
+
+
+He hated to see the reporter go. With the closing of that door it seemed
+certain that there was no putting it off any longer.
+
+But even when the man's footsteps were at last sounding on the stairway,
+he still clung to him.
+
+"Father," he asked, fretfully, "why do you always talk to those
+fellows?"
+
+Herman Beckman turned in his chair and stared at his son. Then he
+laughed. "Now, that's a fine question to come from the honour man of a
+law school! I hope, Fritz, that your oration to-night is going to have a
+little more sense in it than that."
+
+The calling up of his oration made him reach out another clutching
+hand to the vanished reporter. "But it's farcical, father, to be always
+interviewed by a paper nobody reads."
+
+"Nobody--_reads_?"
+
+"Why, nobody cares anything about the _Leader_. It's dead."
+
+Herman Beckman looked at his son sharply; something about him seemed
+strange. He decided that he was nervous about the commencement
+programme. Fritz had the one oration.
+
+The boy had opened the drawer of his study table and was fingering some
+papers he had taken out.
+
+"Sure you know it?" the man asked with affectionate parental anxiety.
+
+"Oh, I know it all right," Fred answered grimly, and again the father
+decided that he was nervous about the thing. He wasn't just like
+himself.
+
+The man walked to the window and stood looking across at the university
+buildings. Colleges had always meant much to Herman Beckman. The very
+day Fritz was born he determined that the boy was to go to college. It
+was good to witness the fulfilment of his dreams. He turned his glance
+to the comfortable room.
+
+"Pretty decent comfortable sort of place, isn't it, father?" Fred asked,
+following his father's look and thought from the Morris chair to the
+student's lamp, and all those other things which nowadays seem an
+inevitable part of the acquirement of learning.
+
+It made his father laugh. "Yes, my boy, I should call it decent--and
+comfortable." He grew thoughtful after that.
+
+"Pretty different from the place you had, father?"
+
+"Oh--me? My place to study was any place I could find. Sometimes on top
+of a load of hay, lots of times by the light of the logs. I've studied
+in some funny places, Fritz."
+
+"Well, you _got_ there, father!" the boy burst out with feeling. "By
+Jove, there aren't many of them _know_ the things you know!"
+
+"I know enough to know what I don't know," said the old man, a little
+sadly. "I know enough to know what I missed. I wanted to go to college.
+No one will ever know how I wanted to! I began to think I'd never feel
+right about it. But I have a notion that when I sit there to-night
+listening to you, Fritz, knowing that you're speaking for two hundred
+boys, half of whose fathers did go to college, I think I'm going to feel
+better about it then."
+
+The boy turned away. Something in the kindly words seemed as the cut of
+a whip across his face.
+
+"Well, Fritz," his father continued, getting into his coat, "I'll
+be going downtown. Leave you to put on an extra flourish or two." He
+laughed in proud parental fashion. "Anyway, I have some things to see
+about."
+
+The boy stood up. "Father, I have something to tell you." He said it
+shortly and sharply.
+
+The father stood there, puzzled.
+
+"You won't like my oration to-night, father."
+
+And still the man did not speak. The words would not have bothered him
+much--it was the boy's manner.
+
+"In fact, father, you're going to be desperately disappointed in it."
+
+The dull red was creeping into the man's cheeks. He was one to have
+little patience with that thing of not doing one's work. "Why am I going
+to be disappointed? This is no time to shirk! You should--"
+
+"Oh, you'll not complain of the time and thought I've put on it,"
+the boy broke in with a short, hard laugh. "But, you see, father--you
+see"--his armour had slipped from him--"it doesn't express--your views."
+
+"Did I ever say I wanted you to express 'my views'? Did I bring you up
+to be a mouthpiece of mine? Haven't I told you to _think_?" But with a
+long, sharp glance at his boy anger gave way. "Come, boy"--going
+over and patting him on the back--"brace up now. You're acting like a
+seven-year-old girl afraid to speak her first piece," and his big laugh
+rang out, eager to reassure.
+
+"You won't see it! You won't believe it! I don't suppose you'll
+believe it when you hear it!" He turned away, overwhelmed by a sudden
+realisation of just how difficult was the thing that lay before him.
+
+The man started toward his son, but instead he walked over and sat down
+at the opposite side of the table, waiting. He was beginning to see that
+there was something in this which he did not understand.
+
+At last the boy turned to him, fighting back some things, taking on
+other things. He gazed at the care-worn, rugged face--face of a worker
+and a dreamer, reading in those lines the story of that life, seeing
+more clearly than he had ever seen before the beauty and futility of it.
+Here was the idealist, the man who would give his whole lifetime to a
+dream he had dreamed. He loved his father very tenderly as he looked at
+him, read him, then.
+
+"Father," he asked quietly, "are you satisfied with your life?"
+
+The man simply stared--waiting, seeking his bearings.
+
+"You came to this country when you were nineteen years old--didn't you,
+father?" The man nodded. "And now you're--it's sixty-one, isn't it?"
+
+Again he nodded.
+
+"You've been in America, then, forty-two years. Father, do you think as
+much of it now as you did forty-two years ago?"
+
+"I don't know what you mean," the man said, searching his son's quiet,
+passionate face. "I can't make you out, Fritz."
+
+"My favourite story as a kid," the boy went on, "was to hear you tell of
+how you felt when your boat came sailing into New York Harbour, and you
+saw the first outlines of a country you had dreamed about all through
+your boyhood, which you had saved pennies for, worked nights for, ever
+since you were old enough to know the meaning of America. I mean," he
+corrected, significantly, "the meaning of what you thought was America.
+
+"It's a bully story, father," he continued, with a smile at once tender
+and hard; "the simple German boy, born a dreamer, standing there looking
+out at the dim shores of that land he had idealised. If ever a man came
+to America bringing it rich gifts, that man was you!"
+
+"Fritz," his father's voice was rendered harsh by mystification and
+foreboding, "tell me what you're talking about. Come to the point. Clear
+this up."
+
+"I'm talking about American politics--your party--having ruined your
+life! I'm talking about working like a slave all your days and having
+nothing but a mortgaged farm at sixty-one! I'm talking about playing a
+losing game! I'm saying, _What's the use?_ Father, I'm telling you that
+_I'm_ going to join the other party and make some money!"
+
+The man just sat there, staring.
+
+"Well," the boy took it up defiantly, "why not?"
+
+And then he moved, laid a not quite steady hand out upon the table. "My
+boy, you're not well. You've studied too hard. Now brace yourself up
+for to-night, and then we'll go down home and fix you up. What you need,
+Fritz," he said, trying to laugh, "is the hayfield."
+
+"You're not _seeing_ it!" The boy pushed back his chair and began moving
+about the room. "The only way I can brace myself up for to-night is
+to get so mad--father, usually you see things so easily! Don't you
+understand? It was my chance, my one moment, my time to strike. It will
+be years before I get such a hearing again. You see, father, the thing
+will be printed, and the men I want to have hear it, the men who _own
+this State_, will be there. One of them is to preside. And the story of
+it, the worth of it, to them, is that I'm your son. You see, after all,"
+he seized at this wildly, "I'm getting my start on the fact that I'm
+your son."
+
+"Go on," said the man; the brown of his wind-beaten face had yielded to
+a tinge of grey. "Just what is it you are going to say?"
+
+"I call it 'The New America,' a lot of this talk about doing things, the
+glory of industrial America, the true Americans the men of constructive
+genius, the patriotism of railroad and factory building, a eulogy of
+railroad officials and corporation presidents," he rushed on with a
+laugh. "Singing the song of Capital. Father, can't you see _why?_"
+
+The old man had risen. "Tell me this," he said. "None of it matters
+much, if you just tell me this: You _believe_ these things? You've
+thought it all out for yourself--and you _feel_ that way? You're honest,
+aren't you, Fritz?" He put that last in a whisper.
+
+The boy made no reply; after a minute the man sank back to his chair.
+The years seemed coming to him with the minutes.
+
+Fred was leaning against the wall. "Father," he said at last, "I hope
+you'll let me be a little roundabout. It's only fair to me to let me
+ramble on a little. I've got to put it all right before you or--or--You
+know, dad,"--he came back to his place by the table, "the first thing I
+remember very clearly is those men, your party managers, coming down to
+the farm one time and asking you to run for Governor. How many times is
+it you've run for Governor, father?" He put the question slowly.
+
+"Five," said the man heavily.
+
+"I don't know which time this was; but you didn't want to. You were
+sorry when you saw them coming. I heard some of the talk. You talked
+about your farm, what you wanted to do that summer, how you couldn't
+afford the time or the money. They argued that you owed it to the
+party--they always got you there; how no other man could hold down
+majorities as you could--a man like you giving the best years of his
+life to holding down majorities! They said you were the one man against
+whom no personal attack could be made. And when there was so much to
+fight, anyway--oh, I know that speech by heart! They've made great
+capital of your honesty and your clean life. In fact, they've held that
+up as a curtain behind which a great many things could go on. Oh, _you_
+didn't know about them; you were out in front of the curtain, but I
+haven't lived in this town without finding out that they needed your
+integrity and your clean record pretty bad!
+
+"That was out on the side porch. Mother had brought out some buttermilk,
+and they drank it while they talked. You put up a good fight. Your
+time was money to you at that time of year; a man shouldn't neglect his
+farm--but you never yet could hold out against that 'needing-you' kind
+of talk. They knew there was no chance for your election. You knew it.
+But it takes a man of just your grit to put any snap into a hopeless
+campaign.
+
+"Mother cried when you went to drive them back to town. You see, I
+remember all those things. She told about how hard you would work, and
+how it would do no good--that the State belonged to the other party.
+She talked about the farm, too, and the addition she had wanted for the
+house, and how now she wouldn't have it. Mother felt pretty bad that
+night. She's gone through a lot of those times."
+
+There was a silence.
+
+"You were away a lot that summer, and all fall. You looked pretty
+well used up when you came home, but you said that you had held down
+majorities splendidly."
+
+Again there was silence. It was the silences that seemed to be saying
+the most.
+
+"You had one term in Congress--that's the only thing you ever had. Then
+you did so much that they concentrated in your district and saw to
+it that you never got back. Julius Caesar couldn't have been elected
+again," he laughed harshly.
+
+"Father," the boy went on, after a pause, "you asked me if I were
+honest. There are two kinds of honesty. The primitive kind--like
+yours--and then the kind you develop for yourself. Do I believe the
+things I'm going to say to-night? No--not now. But I'll believe them
+more after I've heard the applause I'm sure to get. I'll believe them
+still more after I've had my first case thrown to me by our railroad
+friends who own this State. More and more after I've said them over in
+campaigning next fall, and pretty soon I'll be so sure I believe them
+that I really will believe them--and that," he concluded, flippantly,
+"is the new brand of American honesty. Why, any smart man can persuade
+himself he's not a hypocrite!"
+
+"My _God!_" it wrenched from the man. "_This?_ If you'd stolen
+money--killed a man--but hypocrisy, cant--the very thing I've fought
+hardest, hated most! You lived all your life with me to learn _this?_"
+
+"I lived all my life with you to learn what pays, and what doesn't. I
+lived all my life with you to learn from failure the value of success."
+
+"I never was sure I was a failure until this hour."
+
+"Father! Can't you see--"
+
+"Oh, don't _talk_ to me!" cried the old man, rising, reaching out his
+fist as though he would strike him. "Son of mine sitting there telling
+me he is fixing up a brand of honesty for himself!"
+
+The boy grew quieter as self-restraint left his father. "I mean
+that--just that," he said at last. "Let a man either give or get. If he
+gives, let it be to the real thing. There are two Americas. The America
+of you dreamers--and then the real America. Yours is an idea--an
+idea quite as much as an ideal. I don't think you have the slightest
+comprehension of how far apart it is from the real America. The people
+who dream of it over in Europe are a great deal nearer it than you
+people who work for it here. Father, the spirit of this country flows in
+a strong, swift, resistless current. You never got into it at all.
+Your kind of idealists influence it about as much--about as much as
+red lights burned on the banks of the great river would influence the
+current of that river. You're not _of_ it. You came here, throbbing
+with the love for America; and with your ideal America you've fought
+the real, and you've worked and you've believed and you've sacrificed.
+Father, _what's the use?_ In this State, anyway, it's hopeless. It has
+been so through your lifetime; it will be through mine."
+
+The man sat looking at him. He felt that he should say something,
+but the words did not come--held back, perhaps, by a sense of their
+uselessness. It was not so much what Fred said as it was the look in his
+eyes as he said it. There was nothing impetuous or youthful about that
+look, nothing to be laughed at or argued away. He had always felt that
+Fred had a mind which saw things straight, saw them in their right
+relations, and at that moment he had no words to plead for what Fred
+called the America of the dreamers.
+
+"I'm of the second generation, dad," the boy went on, at length,
+"and the second generation has an ideal of its own, and that ideal is
+Success. It took us these forty years to come to understand the spirit
+of America. You were a dreamer who loved America. I'm an American. We've
+translated democracy and brotherhood and equality into enterprise and
+opportunity and success--and that's getting Americanised. Now, father,"
+he sought refuge in the tone of every-day things, "you'll get used to
+it--won't you? I don't expect you to feel very good about it, but you
+aren't going to be broken up about it--are you? After all, father,"
+laughing and moving about as if to break the seriousness of things,
+"there's nothing criminal about being one of the other fellows--is
+there? Just remember that there _are_ folks who even think it's
+respectable!" The father had risen and picked up his hat. "No, Fred," he
+said, with a sadness in which there was great dignity, "there is nothing
+criminal in it if a man's conviction sends him that way. But to me there
+is something--something too sad for words in a man's selling his own
+soul."
+
+"Father! How extravagant! _Why_ is it selling one's soul to sit down
+and figure out what's the best thing to do?" He hesitated, hating to
+add hurt to hurt, not wanting to say that his father's fight should have
+been with the revolutionists, that his life was ineffective because,
+seeing his dream from within a dream, his thinking had been muddled. He
+only said: "As I say, father, it's a question of giving or getting. I
+couldn't even give in your way. And I've seen enough of giving to want
+a taste of getting. I want to make things go--and I see my chance. Why
+father," he laughed, trying to turn it, "there's nothing so American as
+wanting to make things _go_."
+
+He looked at him for a long minute. "My boy," he said, "I fear you are
+becoming so American that I am losing you."
+
+"Father," the boy pleaded, affectionately, "now don't--"
+
+The old man held up his hand. "You've tried to make me understand it,"
+he said, "and succeeded. You can't complain of the way you've succeeded.
+I don't know why I don't argue with you--plead; there are things I could
+say--should say, perhaps--but something assures me it would be useless.
+I feel a good many years older than I did when I came into this room,
+but the reason for it is not that you're joining the other party. You
+know what I think of the men who control this State, the men with whom
+you desire to cast your lot, but I trust the years I've spent fighting
+them haven't made a bigot of me. It's not joining their party--it's
+_using_ it--makes this the hardest thing I've been called upon to meet."
+
+"Father, don't look like that! How do you think I am going to get up and
+speak tonight with _that_ face before me?"
+
+"You didn't think, did you," the man laughed bitterly, "that I would
+inspire you to your effort?"
+
+The boy stood looking at his father, a strange new fire in his eyes.
+
+"Yes," he said, quietly, tenderly, "you will inspire me. When I get
+up before those men tonight I'm going to see the picture of that boy
+straining for his first glimpse of New York Harbour. I'm going to think
+for just a minute of the things that boy brought with him--things he
+has never lost. And then I'll see you as you stand here now---it will be
+enough. What I need to do is to get mad. If I falter I'll just think
+of some of those times when you came home from your campaigns--how you
+looked--what you said. It will bring the inspiration. Father, I figure
+it out like this. We're going to get it back. We're going to get what's
+coming to us. There's another America than the America of you dreamers.
+To yours you have given; from mine I will get. And the irony of
+it--don't think I don't see the irony of it--is that I will be called
+the real American. Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to make
+the railroads of this State--oh, it sounds like schoolboy talk, but just
+give me a little time--I'm going to make the railroads of this State
+pay off every cent of that mortgage on your farm! Father," he finished,
+impetuously, in a last appeal, "you're broken up now, disappointed, but
+would you honestly want me to travel the road you've traveled?"
+
+"My boy," answered the old man, and the tears came with it, "I wanted
+you to travel the road of an honest man."
+
+Herman Beckman did not go to the commencement exercises that night.
+There was no train home until morning, so he had the night to spend in
+town. He was alone, for his friends assumed that he would be out at the
+university. But he preferred being alone.
+
+He sat in his room at the hotel, reading. And he could read. Years of
+discipline stood him in good stead now. His life had taught him to read
+anywhere, at any time. He had never permitted himself the luxury of not
+being "in the mood." It was only the men who had gone to college who
+could do that. He _had_ to read. He always carried some little book with
+him, for how did a man know that he might not have to wait an hour for
+a train somewhere? The man had a simple-minded veneration for knowledge.
+He wanted to know about things. And he had never learned to pretend that
+he didn't want to know. He quite lacked the modern art of flippancy. He
+believed in great books.
+
+And so on the night that his son was being graduated from college he sat
+in his room at the hotel--cheap room in a mediocre hotel; he had never
+learned to feel at home in the rich ones--reading Marcus Aurelius. But
+his hand as he turned the pages trembled as the hand of a very old man.
+At midnight some reporters came in to ask him what he thought of his
+son's oration. They wanted a statement from him.
+
+He told them that he had never believed the sins of a parent should be
+visited on a child, and that it was even so with the thought. He had
+always contended that a man should do his own thinking. The contention
+applied to his son.
+
+"Gamey old brute!" was what one of the reporters said in the elevator.
+
+He could not read Marcus Aurelius after that. He went to bed, but he did
+not sleep. Many things passed before him. His anticipations, his dreams
+for Fritz, had brought the warmest pleasure of his stern, unrelaxing
+life. There was a great emptiness tonight. What was a man to turn to,
+think about, when he seemed stripped, not only of the future, but of the
+past? He seemed called upon to readjust the whole of his life, giving
+up that which he had held dearest. What was left? Daylight found him
+turning it over and over.
+
+In the morning he went home. He got away without seeing any of his
+friends.
+
+He did not try to read this morning; somehow it seemed there was no use
+in trying to read any more. He watched the country through which they
+were passing, thinking of the hundreds of times he had ridden over it in
+campaigning. He wondered, vaguely, just how much money he had spent on
+railroad fare--he had never accepted mileage. Fred's "What's the use?"
+kept ringing in his ears. There was something about that phrase which
+made one feel very tired and old. It even seemed there was no use
+looking out to see how the crops were getting on. _What's the use?
+What's the use?_ Was that a phrase one learned in college?
+
+There had been two things to tell "mother" that night. The first was
+that he had stopped in town and told Claus Hansen he could have that
+south hundred and sixty he had been wanting for two years.
+
+It was not easy to tell the woman who had worked shoulder to shoulder
+with him for thirty years, the woman who during those years had risen
+with him in the early morning and worked with him until darkness rescued
+the weary bodies, that in their old age they must surrender the fruit of
+their toil. They would have left just what they had started with. They
+had just held their own.
+
+Coming down on the train he had made up his mind that if Hansen were
+in town he would tell him that he could have the land. He felt so very
+tired and old, so bowed down with Fred's "What's the use?" that he saw
+that he himself would never get the mortgage paid off. And Fred had said
+something about making the railroads pay it. He did not know just how
+the boy figured that out--indeed, he was getting a little dazed about
+the whole thing--but if Fritz had any idea of having the railroads pay
+off the mortgage on _his_ farm--he couldn't forget how the boy looked
+when he said it, face white, eyes burning--he would see to it right now
+that there was no chance of that.
+
+He tried not to look at the land as he drove past it on the way home. He
+wondered just how much campaign literature it had paid for. He wondered
+if he would ever get used to seeing Claus Hansen putting up his hay over
+there in that field.
+
+He had felt so badly about telling mother that he told it very bluntly.
+And because he felt so sorry for her he said not one kind word, but just
+sat quiet, looking the other way.
+
+She was clearing off the table. He heard her scraping out the potato
+dish with great care. Then she was coming over to him. She came
+awkwardly, hesitatingly--her life had not schooled her in meeting
+emotional moments beautifully--but she laid her hand upon him, patted
+him on the shoulder as one would a child. "Never mind, papa--never you
+mind. It will make it easier for us. There's enough left--and it will
+make it easier. We're getting on--we're--" There she broke off abruptly
+into a vigorous scolding of the dog, who was lifting covetous nostrils
+to a piece of meat.
+
+That was all. And there was no woman in the country had worked harder.
+And Martha was ambitious; she liked land, and she did not like Claus
+Hansen's wife.
+
+Yes, he had had a good wife.
+
+Then there was that other thing to tell her--about Fritz. That was
+harder.
+
+Mother had not gone up to the city to hear Fritz "speak" because her
+feet were bothering her, and she could not wear her shoes. He had had a
+vague idea of how disappointed she was, though she had said very little
+about it. Martha never had been one to say much about things. When he
+came back, of course she had wanted to know all about it, and he had put
+her off. Now he had to tell her.
+
+It was much harder; and in the telling of it he broke down.
+
+This time she did not come over and pat his shoulder. Perhaps Martha
+knew--likely she had never heard the word intuition, but, anyway, she
+knew--that it was beyond that.
+
+It seemed difficult for her to comprehend. She was bewildered to find
+that Fritz could change parties all in a minute. She seemed to grasp,
+first of all, that it was disrespectful to his father. Some boys at
+school had been putting notions into his head.
+
+But gradually she began to see it. Fritz wanted to make money. Fritz
+wanted to have it easier. And the other people did "have it easier."
+
+It divided her feeling: sorry and indignant for the father, secretly
+glad and relieved for the boy. "He will have it easier than we had
+it, papa," she said at the last. "But it was not right of Fritz," she
+concluded, vaguely but severely.
+
+As she washed the dishes Martha was thinking that likely Fritz's wife
+would have a hired girl.
+
+Then Martha went up to bed. He said that he would come in a few minutes,
+but many minutes went by while he sat out on the side porch trying to
+think it out.
+
+The moon was shining brightly down on that hundred and sixty which Claus
+Hansen was to have. And the moon, too, seemed to be saying: "What's the
+use?"
+
+Well, what _was_ the use? Perhaps, after all, the boy was right. What
+had it all amounted to? What was there left? What had he done?
+
+Two Americas, Fred had said, and his but the America of the dreamers. He
+had always thought that he was fighting for the real. And now Fred said
+that he had never become an American at all.
+
+From the time he was twelve years old he had wanted to be an American.
+A queer old man back in the German village--an old man, he recalled
+strangely now, who had never been in America--told him about it. He told
+how all men were brothers in America, how the poor and the rich loved
+each other--indeed, how there were no poor and rich at all, but the
+same chance for every man who would work. He told about the marvellous
+resources of that distant America--gold in the earth, which men were
+free to go and get, hundreds upon hundreds of miles of untouched forests
+and great rivers--all for men to use, great cities no older than the men
+who were in them, which men at that present moment were _making_--every
+man his equal chance. He told of rich land which a man could have for
+nothing, which would be _his_, if he would but go and work upon it. In
+the heart of the little German boy there was kindled then a fire which
+the years had never put out. His cheeks grew red, his eyes bright and
+very deep as he listened to the story. He went home that night and
+dreamed of going to America. And through the years of his boyhood, penny
+by penny, he saved his money for America. It was his dream. It was
+the passion of his life. More plainly than the events of yesterday, he
+remembered his first glimpse of those wonderful shores--the lump in his
+throat, the passionate excitement, the uplift. Leaning over the railing
+of his boat, staring, searching, penetrating, worshipping, he lifted up
+his heart and sent out his pledge of allegiance to the new land. How he
+would love America, work for it, be true to it!
+
+He had three dollars and sixty cents in his pocket when he stepped upon
+American soil. He wondered if any man had ever felt richer. For had he
+not reached the land where there was an equal chance for every man who
+would work, where men loved each other as brothers, and where the earth
+itself was so rich and so gracious in its offerings?
+
+The old man crossed one leg over the other--slowly, stiffly. It made him
+tired and stiff now just to think of the work he had done between that
+day and this.
+
+But there was something which he had always had--that something was
+_his_ America. That had never wavered, though he soon learned that
+between it and realities were many things which were wrong and
+unfortunate. With the whole force and passion of his nature, with all
+his single mindedness--would some call it simple mindedness?--he threw
+himself into the fight against those things which were blurring men's
+vision of his America. No work, no sacrifice was too great, for America
+had enemies who called themselves friends, men who were striking heavy
+blows at that equal chance for every man. When he failed, it was because
+he did not know enough; he must work, he must study, he must think, in
+order to make more real to other men the America which was in his heart.
+He must fight for it because it was his.
+
+And now it seemed that the end had come; he was old, he was tired, he
+was not sure. Claus Hansen would have his land and his son would join
+hands with the things which he had spent his life in fighting. And far
+deeper and sadder and more bitter than that, he had not transmitted the
+America of his heart even to his own son. He was not leaving someone to
+fight for it in his stead, to win where he had failed. Fred saw in
+it but a place for gain. "I lived all my life with you to learn from
+failure the value of success." That was what he had given to his boy.
+Yes, that was what he had bequeathed to America. Could the failure, the
+futility of his life be more clearly revealed?
+
+Twice Martha had called to him, but still he sat, smoking, thinking.
+There was much to think about to-night.
+
+Finally, it was not thought, but visions. Too tired for conscious
+thinking, he gave himself up to what came--Fred's America, his America,
+the America of the dreamers--and the things which stood between. The
+America of the future---what would that America be?
+
+At the last, taking form from many things which came and went, shaping
+itself slowly, form giving place to new form, he seemed to see it grow.
+Out beyond that land Claus Hansen was to have, a long way off, there
+rose the vision of the America of the future--an America of realities,
+and yet an America of dreams; for the dreamers had become the
+realists---or was it that the realists had become dreamers? In the
+manifold forms taken on and cast aside destroying dualism had made way
+for the strength and the dignity and harmony of unity. He watched it as
+breathlessly, as yearningly, as the nineteen-year-old boy had watched
+the other America taking shape in the distance some forty years before.
+"How did you come?" he whispered. "What are you?"
+
+And the voice of that real America seemed to answer: "I came because for
+a long-enough time there were enough men who held me in their hearts. I
+came because there were men who never gave me up. I was won by men who
+believed that they had failed."
+
+Again there was a lump in his throat--once more an exultation flooded
+all his being. For to the old man--tired, stiff, smitten though he had
+been, there came again that same uplift which long before had come to
+the boy. Was there not here an answer to "What's the use?" For he would
+leave America as he came to it--loving it, believing in it. What were
+the work and the failure of a lifetime when there was something in his
+heart which was his? Should he say that he had fought in vain when
+he had kept it for himself? It was as real, as wonderful--yes as
+inevitable, as it had been forty years before. Realities had taken his
+land, his career, his hopes for the boy. But realities had not stripped
+him of his dream. The futility of the years could not harm the things
+which were in his heart. Even in America he had not lost His America.
+
+"Perhaps it is then that it is like that," he murmured, his vision
+carrying him back to the days of his broken English. "Perhaps it is that
+every man's America is in the inside of his own heart. Perhaps it is
+that it will come when it has grown big--big and very strong--in the
+hearts."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+THE ANARCHIST: HIS DOG
+
+
+Stubby had a route, and that was how he happened to get a dog. For the
+benefit of those who have never carried papers it should be thrown in
+that having a route means getting up just when there is really some fun
+in sleeping, lining up at the _Leader_ office--maybe having a scrap with
+the fellow who says you took his place in the line--getting your papers
+all damp from the press and starting for the outskirts of the city.
+Then you double up the paper in the way that will cause all possible
+difficulty in undoubling and hurl it with what force you have against
+the front door. It is good to have a route, for you at least earn your
+salt, so your father can't say _that_ any more. If he does, you know it
+isn't so.
+
+When you have a route, you whistle. All the fellows whistle. They may
+not feel like it, but it is the custom--as could be sworn to by many
+sleepy citizens. And as time goes on you succeed in acquiring the easy
+manner of a brigand.
+
+Stubby was little and everything about him seemed sawed off just a
+second too soon,--his nose, his fingers, and most of all, his hair. His
+head was a faithful replica of a chestnut burr. His hair did not lie
+down and take things easy. It stood up--and out!--gentle ladies couldn't
+possibly have let their hands sink into it--as we are told they do--for
+the hands just wouldn't sink. They'd have to float.
+
+And alas, gentle ladies didn't particularly want their hands to sink
+into it. There was not that about Stubby's short person to cause
+the hands of gentle ladies to move instinctively to his head. Stubby
+bristled. That is, he appeared to bristle. Inwardly, Stubby yearned,
+though he would have swung into his very best brigand manner on the spot
+were you to suggest so offensive a thing. Just to look at Stubby you'd
+never in a thousand years guess what a funny feeling he had sometimes
+when he got to the top of the hill where his route began and could see
+a long way down the river and the town curled in on the other side.
+Sometimes when the morning sun was shining through a mist--making things
+awful queer--some of the mist got into Stubby's squinty little eyes.
+After the mist behaved that way he always whistled so rakishly and threw
+his papers with such abandonment that people turned over in their beds
+and muttered things about having that little heathen of a paper boy
+shot.
+
+All along the route are dogs. Indeed, routes are distinguished by their
+dogs. Mean routes are those that have terraces and mean dogs; good
+routes--where the houses are close together and the dogs run out and wag
+their tails. Though Stubby's greater difficulty came through the wagging
+tails; he carried in a collie neighbourhood, and all collies seemed
+consumed with mighty ambitions to have routes. If you spoke to them--and
+how could you _help_ speaking to a collie when he came bounding out to
+you that way?--you had an awful time chasing him back, and when he got
+lost--and it seemed collies spent most of their time getting lost--the
+woman would put her head out next morning and want to know if you had
+coaxed her dog away.
+
+Some of the fellows had dogs that went with them on their routes. One
+day one of them asked Stubby why he didn't have a dog and he replied in
+surly fashion that he didn't have one 'cause he didn't want one. If he
+wanted one, he guessed he'd have one.
+
+And there was no one within ear-shot old enough or wise enough--or
+tender enough?--to know from the meanness of Stubby's tone, and by his
+evil scowl, that his heart was just breaking to own a dog.
+
+One day a new dog appeared along the route. He was yellow and looked
+like a cheap edition of a bull-dog. He was that kind of dog most
+accurately described by saying it is hard to describe him, the kind you
+say is just dog--and everybody knows.
+
+He tried to follow Stubby; not in the trusting, bounding manner of the
+collies--not happily, but hopingly. Stubby, true to the ethics of his
+profession, chased him back where he had come from. That there might
+be nothing whatever on his conscience, he even threw a stone after him.
+Stubby was an expert in throwing things at dogs. He could seem to just
+miss them and yet never hit them.
+
+The next day it happened again; but just as he had a clod poised for
+throwing, a window went up and a woman called: "For pity _sake_, little
+boy, don't chase him back _here_."
+
+"Why--why, ain't he yours?" called Stubby.
+
+"Mercy, _no_. We can't chase him away."
+
+"Who's is he?" demanded Stubby.
+
+"Why, he's nobody's! He just hangs around. I wish you'd coax him away."
+
+Well, that was a _new_ one! And then all in a heap it rushed over Stubby
+that this dog who was nobody's dog could, if he coaxed him away--and the
+woman _wanted_ him coaxed away--be his dog.
+
+And because that idea had such a strange effect on him he sang out, in
+off-hand fashion: "Oh, all right, I'll take him away and drown him for
+you!
+
+"Oh, little _boy_," called the woman, "why, don't _drown_ him!"
+
+"Oh, all right, I'll shoot him then!" called obliging Stubby, whistling
+for the dog--while all morning long the woman grieved over having sent a
+helpless little dog away with that perfectly _brutal_ paper boy!
+
+Stubby's mother was washing. She looked up from her tubs on the back
+porch to say, "Wish you'd take that bucket--" then seeing what was
+slinking behind her son, straightway assumed the role of destiny with,
+"Git out o' here!"
+
+Stubby snapped his fingers behind his back as much as to say, "Wait a
+minute."
+
+"A woman gave him to me," he said to his mother.
+
+"_Gave_ him to you?" she scoffed. "I sh' think she would!"
+
+Then something happened that had not happened many times in Stubby's
+short lifetime. He acknowledged his feelings.
+
+"I'd like to keep him. I'd like to have a dog."
+
+His mother shook her hands and the flying suds seemed expressing her
+scorn. "Huh! _That_ ugly good-for-nothing thing?"
+
+The dog had edged in between Stubby's feet and crouched there. "He could
+go with me on my route," said Stubby. "He'd kind of be company for me."
+
+And when he had said that he knew all at once just how lonesome he had
+been sometimes on his route, how he had wanted something to "kind of be
+company" for him.
+
+His face twitched as he stooped down to pat the dog. Mrs. Lynch looked
+at her son--youngest of her five. Not the hardness of her heart but the
+hardness of her life had made her unpractised in moments of tenderness.
+Something in the way Stubby was patting the dog suggested to her that
+Stubby was a "queer one." He _was_ kind of little to be carrying papers
+all by himself.
+
+Stubby looked up. "He could eat what's thrown away."
+
+That was an error in diplomacy. The woman's face hardened. "Mighty
+little'll be thrown away _this_ winter," she muttered.
+
+But just then Mrs. Johnson appeared on the other side of the fence and
+began hanging up her clothes and with that Mrs. Lynch saw her way to
+justify herself in indulging her son. Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. Lynch had
+"had words." "You just let him stay around, Stubby," she called, and
+you would have supposed from her tone it was Stubby who was on the other
+side of the fence, "maybe he'll keep the neighbour's chickens out! Them
+that ain't got chickens o' their own don't want to be bothered with the
+neighbours'!"
+
+That was how it happened that he stayed; and no one but Stubby knew--and
+possibly Stubby didn't either--how it happened that he was named Hero.
+It would seem that Hero should be a noble St. Bernard, or a particularly
+mean-looking bulldog, not a stocky, shapeless, squint-eyed yellow dog
+with one ear bitten half off and one leg built on an entirely different
+plan from its fellow legs. Possibly Stubby's own spiritual experiences
+had suggested to him that you weren't necessarily the way you looked.
+
+The chickens were pretty well kept out, though no one ever saw Hero
+doing any of it. Perhaps Hero had been too long associated with chasing
+to desire any part in it--even with roles reversed. If Stubby could help
+it, no one really saw Stubby doing the chasing either; he became skilled
+in chasing when he did not appear to be chasing; then he would get Hero
+to barking and turn to his mother with, "Guess you don't see so many
+chickens round nowadays."
+
+The fellows in the line jeered at Hero at first, but they soon tired of
+it when Stubby said he didn't want the cur but his mother made him
+stay around to keep the chickens out. He was a fine chicken dog, Stubby
+grudgingly admitted. He couldn't keep him from following, said Stubby,
+so he just let him come. Sometimes when they were waiting in line Stubby
+made ferocious threats at Hero. He was going to break his back and wring
+his head off and do other heartless things which for some reason he
+never started in right then and there to accomplish.
+
+It was different when they were alone--and they were alone a good deal.
+Stubby's route wasn't nearly so long after he had Hero to go with him.
+When winter came and five o'clock was dark and cold for starting out
+it was pretty good to have Hero trotting at his heels. And Hero always
+wanted to go; it was never so rainy nor so cold that that yellow dog
+seemed to think he would rather stay home by the fire. Then Hero was
+always waiting for him when he came home from school. Stubby would sing
+out, "Hello, cur!" and the tone was such that Hero did not grasp that he
+was being insulted. Sometimes when there was nobody about, Stubby
+picked Hero up in his arms and squeezed him--Stubby had not had a large
+experience with squeezing. At those times Hero would lick Stubby's face
+and whimper a little love whimper and such were the workings of Stubby's
+heart and mind that that made him of quite as much account as if he
+really had chased the chickens. Stubby, who had seen the way dogs can
+look at you out of their eyes, was not one to say of a dog, "What good
+is he?"
+
+But it seemed there were such people. There were even people who thought
+you oughtn't to have a dog to love and to love you if you weren't one
+of those rich people who could pay two dollars and a half a year for the
+luxury.
+
+Stubby first heard of those people one night in June. The father of the
+Lynch family was sitting in the back yard reading the paper when Hero
+and Stubby came running in from the alley. It was one of those moments
+when Hero, forgetting the bleakness of his youth, abandoned himself to
+the joy of living. He was tearing round and round Stubby, barking, when
+Stubby's father called out: "Here!--shut up there, you cur. You better
+lie low. You're going to be shot the first of August."
+
+Stubby, and as regards the joy of living Hero had done as much for
+Stubby as Stubby for Hero, came to a halt. The fun and frolic just
+died right out of him and he stood there staring at his father, who had
+turned the page and was settling himself to a new horror. At last Stubby
+spoke. "Why's he going to be shot on the first of August?" he asked in a
+tight little voice.
+
+His father looked up. "Why's he going to be shot? You got any two
+dollars and a half to pay for him?"
+
+He laughed as though that were a joke. Well, it was something of a joke.
+Stubby got ten cents a week out of his paper money. The rest he "turned
+in."
+
+Then he went back to his paper. There was another long pause before
+Stubby asked, in that tight queer little voice: "What'd I have to pay
+two dollars and a half for? Nobody owns him."
+
+His parent stirred scornfully. "Suppose you never heard of a dog tax,
+did you? S'pose they don't learn you nothing like that at school?"
+
+Yes, Stubby did know that dogs had to have checks, but he hadn't
+thought anything about that in connection with Hero. He ventured another
+question. "You have to have 'em for all dogs, even if you just picked
+'em up on the street and took care of 'em when nobody else would?"
+
+"You bet you do," his parent assured him genially. "You pay your dog tax
+or the policeman comes on the first of August and shoots your dog."
+
+With that he dismissed it for good, burying himself in his paper. For a
+minute the boy stood there in silence. Then he walked slowly round the
+house and sat down where his father couldn't see him. Hero followed--it
+was a way Hero had. The dog sat down beside the boy and after a couple
+of minutes the boy's arm stole furtively around him and they sat there
+very still for a long time.
+
+As nobody but Hero paid much attention to him, nobody save Hero noticed
+how quiet and queer Stubby was for the next three days. Hero must have
+noticed it, for he was quiet and queer too. He followed wherever Stubby
+would let him, and every time he got a chance he would nestle up to him
+and look into his face--that way even cur dogs have of doing when they
+fear something is wrong.
+
+At the end of three days Stubby, his little freckled face set and grim,
+took his stand in front of his father and came right out with: "I want
+to keep one week's paper money to pay Hero's tax."
+
+His father's chair had been tilted back against a tree. Now it came down
+with a thud. "Oh, you _do_, do you?"
+
+"I can earn the other fifty cents at little jobs."
+
+"You _can_, can you? Now ain't you smart!"
+
+The tone brought the blood to Stubby's face. "I think I got a right to,"
+he said, his voice low.
+
+The man's face, which had been taunting, grew ugly. "Look a-here, young
+man, none o' your lip!"
+
+The tears rushed to Stubby's eyes but he stumbled on: "I guess Hero's
+got a right to some of my paper money when he goes with me every day on
+my route."
+
+At that his father stared for a minute and then burst into a loud laugh.
+Blinded with tears, the boy turned to the house.
+
+After she had gone to bed that night Stubby's mother heard a sound from
+the alcove at the head of the stairs where her youngest child slept. As
+the sound kept on she got out of her bed and went to Stubby's cot.
+
+"Look here," she said, awkwardly but not unkindly, "this won't do. We're
+poor folks, Freddie" (it was only once in a while she called him that),
+"all we can do to live these times--we can't pay no dog tax."
+
+As Stubby did not speak she added: "I know you've taken to the dog, but
+just the same you ain't to feel hard to your pa. He can't help it--and
+neither can I. Things is as they is--and nobody can help it."
+
+As, despite this bit of philosophy Stubby was still gulping back sobs,
+she added what she thought a master stroke in consolation. "Now you just
+go right to sleep, and if they come to take this dog away maybe you can
+pick up another one in the fall."
+
+The sobs suddenly stopped and Stubby stared at her. And what he said
+after a long stare was: "I guess there ain't no use in you and me
+talking about it."
+
+"That's right," said she, relieved; "now you go right off to sleep."
+And she left him, never dreaming why Stubby had seen there was no use
+talking about it.
+
+Nor did he talk about it; but a change came over Stubby's funny little
+person in the next few days. The change was particularly concerned with
+his jaw, though there was something different, too, in the light in his
+eyes as he looked straight ahead, and something different in his voice
+when he said: "Come on, Hero."
+
+He got so he could walk into a store and demand, in a hard little voice:
+"Want a boy to do anything for you?" and when they said, "Got more boys
+than we know what to do with, sonny," Stubby would say, "All right," and
+stalk sturdily out again. Sometimes they laughed and said: "What could
+_you_ do?" and then Stubby would stalk out, but possibly a little less
+sturdily.
+
+Vacation came the next week, and still he had found nothing. His father,
+however, had been more successful. He found a place where they wanted a
+boy to work in a yard a couple of hours in the morning. For that Stubby
+was to get a dollar and a half a week. But that was to be turned in for
+his "keep." There were lots of mouths to feed--as Stubby's mother was
+always calling to her neighbour across the alley.
+
+But the yard gave Stubby an idea, and he earned some dimes and one
+quarter in the next week. Most folks thought he was too little--one kind
+lady told him he ought to be playing, not working--but there were people
+who would let him take a big shears and cut grass around flower beds,
+and things like that. This he had to do afternoons, when he was supposed
+to be off playing, and when he came home his mother sometimes said some
+folks had it easy--playing around all day.
+
+It was now the first week in July and Stubby had a dollar and twenty
+cents. It was getting to the point where he would wake in the night and
+find himself sitting up in bed, hands clenched. He dreamed dreams about
+how folks would let him live if he had ninety-nine cents but how he only
+had ninety-seven and a half, so they were going to shoot him.
+
+Then one day he found Mr. Stuart. He was passing the house after having
+asked three people if they wanted a boy, and they didn't, and seemed so
+surprised at the idea of their wanting him that Stubby's throat was all
+tight, when Mr. Stuart sang out: "Say, boy, want a little job?"
+
+It seemed at first it must be a joke--or a dream--anybody asking him if
+he _wanted_ one, but the man was beckoning to him, so he pulled himself
+together and ran up the steps.
+
+"Now here's a little package"--he took something out of the mail box.
+"It doesn't belong here. It's to go to three-hundred-two Pleasant
+street. You take it for a dime?"
+
+Stubby nodded.
+
+As he was going down the steps the man called: "Say, boy, how'd you like
+a steady job?"
+
+For the first minute it seemed pretty mean--making fun of a fellow that
+way!
+
+"This will be here every day. Suppose you come each day, about this
+time, and take it over there--not mentioning it to anybody."
+
+Stubby felt weak. "Why, all right," he managed to say.
+
+"I'll give you fifty cents a week. That fair?"
+
+"Yes, sir," said Stubby, doing some quick calculation.
+
+"Then here goes for the first week"--and he handed him the other forty
+cents.
+
+It was funny how fast the world could change! Stubby wanted to run--he
+hadn't been doing much running of late. He wanted to go home and get
+Hero to go with him to Pleasant street, but didn't. No, _sir_, when you
+had a job you had to 'tend to things!
+
+Well, a person could do things, if he had to, thought Stubby. No use
+saying you couldn't, you _could_, if you had to. He was back in tune
+with life. He whistled; he turned up his collar in the old rakish way;
+he threw a stick at a cat. Back home he jumped over the fence instead
+of going in the gate--lately he had actually been using the gate. And
+he cried, "Get out of my sight, you cur!" in tones which, as Hero
+understood things, meant anything but getting out of his sight.
+
+He was a little boy again. He slept at night as little boys sleep. He
+played with Hero along the route--taught him some new tricks. His jaw
+relaxed from its grown-upishness.
+
+It was funny about those Stuarts. Sometimes he saw Mr. Stuart, but never
+anybody else; the place seemed shut up. But each day the little package
+was there, and every day he took it to Pleasant street and left it at
+the door there--that place seemed shut up, too.
+
+When it was well into the second week Stubby ventured to say something
+about the next fifty cents.
+
+The man fumbled in his pockets. Something in his face was familiar to
+experienced Stubby. It suggested a having to have two dollars and a half
+by August first and only having a dollar and a quarter state of mind.
+
+"I haven't got the change. Pay you at the end of next week for the whole
+business. That all right?"
+
+Stubby considered. "I've got to have it before the first of August," he
+said.
+
+At that the man laughed--funny kind of laugh, it was, and muttered
+something. But he told Stubby he would have it before the first.
+
+It bothered Stubby. He wished the man had given it to him _then_. He
+would rather get it each week and keep it himself. A little of the
+grown-up look stole back.
+
+After that he didn't see Mr. Stuart, and one day, a week or so later,
+the package was not in the box and a man who wore the kind of clothes
+Stubby's father wore came around the house and asked him what he was
+doing.
+
+Stubby was wary. "Oh, I've got a little job I do for Mr. Stuart."
+
+The man laughed. "I had a little job I did for Mr. Stuart, too. You paid
+in advance?"
+
+Stubby pricked up his ears.
+
+"'Cause if you ain't, I'd advise you to look out for a little job
+some'eres else."
+
+Then it came out. Mr. Stuart was broke; more than that, he was "off his
+nut." Lots of people were doing little jobs for him--there was no sense
+in any of them, and now he had suddenly been called out of town!
+
+There was a trembly feeling through Stubby's insides, but outwardly he
+was bristling just like his hair bristled as he demanded: "Where am I to
+get what's coming to me?"
+
+"'Fraid you won't get it, sonny. We're all in the same boat." He looked
+Stubby up and down and then added: "Kind of little for that boat."
+
+"I _got_ to have it!" cried Stubby. "I tell you, I _got_ to!"
+
+The man shook his head. "_That_ cuts no ice. Hard luck, sonny, but we've
+got to take our medicine in this world. 'Taint no medicine for kids,
+though," he muttered.
+
+Stubby's face just then was too much for him. He put his hand in his
+pocket and drew out a dime, saying: "There now. You run along and get
+you a soda and forget your troubles. It ain't always like this. You'll
+have better luck next time."
+
+But Stubby did not get the soda. He put the dime in his pocket and
+turned toward home. Something was the matter with his legs--they acted
+funny about carrying him. He tried to whistle, but something was the
+matter with his lips, too.
+
+Counting this dime, he now had a dollar and eighty cents, and it was the
+twenty-eighth day of July. "Thirty days has September--April, June and
+November--" he was saying to himself. Then July was one of the long
+ones. Well, _that_ was a good thing! Been a great deal worse if July was
+a short one. Again he tried to whistle, and that time did manage to pipe
+out a few shrill little notes.
+
+When Hero came running up the hill to meet him he slapped him on the
+back and cried, "Hello, Hero!" in tones fairly swaggering with bravado.
+
+That night he engaged his father in conversation--the phrase is well
+adapted to the way Stubby went about it. "How is it about--'bout things
+like taxes"--Stubby crossed his knees and swung one foot to show his
+indifference--"if you have _almost_ enough--do they sometimes let you
+off?"--the detachment was a shade less perfect on that last.
+
+His father laughed scoffingly. "Well, I guess _not!_"
+
+"I thought maybe," said Stubby, "if a person had _tried_ awful hard--and
+had _most_ enough--"
+
+Something inside him was all shaky, so he didn't go on. His father said
+that _trying_ didn't have anything to do with it.
+
+It was hard for Stubby not to sob out that he thought trying _ought_ to
+have something to do with it, but he only made a hissing noise between
+his teeth that took the place of the whistle that wouldn't come.
+
+"Kind of seems," he resumed, "if a person would have had enough if they
+hadn't been beat out of it, maybe--if he done the best he could--"
+
+His father snorted derisively and informed him that doing the best you
+could made no difference to the government; hard luck stories didn't go
+when it came to the laws of the land.
+
+Thereupon Stubby took a little walk out to the alley and spent a
+considerable time in contemplation of the neighbour's chicken-yard. When
+he came back he walked right up to his father and standing there, feet
+planted, shoulders squared, wanted to know, in a desperate little voice:
+"If some one else was to give--say a dollar and eighty cents for Hero,
+could I take the other seventy out of my paper money?"
+
+The man turned upon him roughly. "Uh-_huh_! _That's_ it, is it? _That's_
+why you're getting so smart all of a sudden about government! Look
+a-here. Just l'me tell you something. You're lucky if you git enough
+to _eat_ this winter. Do you know there's talk of the factory shuttin'
+down? _Dog_ tax! Why you're lucky if you git _shoes_."
+
+Stubby had turned away and was standing with his back to his father,
+hands in his pockets.
+
+"And l'me tell you some'en else, young man. If you got any dollar and
+eighty cents, you give it to your mother!"
+
+As Stubby was turning the corner of the house he called after him:
+"How'd you like to have me get you an automobile?"
+
+He went doggedly from house to house the next afternoon, but nobody had
+any jobs. When Hero came running out to him that night he patted him,
+but didn't speak.
+
+That evening as they were sitting in the back yard--Stubby and Hero
+a little apart from the others--his father was discoursing with his
+brother about anarchists. They were getting commoner, his father
+thought. There were a good many of them at the shop. They didn't call
+themselves that, but that was what they were.
+
+"Well, what is an anarchist, anyhow?" Stubby's mother wanted to know.
+
+"Why, an anarchist," her lord informed her, "is one that's against
+the government. He don't believe in the law and order. The real bad
+anarchists shoot them that tries to enforce the laws of the land. Guess
+if you'd read the papers these days you'd know."
+
+Stubby's brain had been going round and round and these words caught in
+it as it whirled. The government--the laws of the land--why, it was the
+government and the laws of the land that were going to shoot Hero! It
+was the government--the laws of the land--that didn't care how hard you
+had _tried_--didn't care whether you had been cheated--didn't care how
+you _felt_--didn't care about anything except getting the money! His
+brain got hotter. Well, _he_ didn't believe in the government, either.
+He was one of those people--those anarchists--that were against the laws
+of the land.
+
+He'd done the very best he could and now the government was going
+to take Hero away from him just because he couldn't get--_couldn't_
+get--that other seventy cents.
+
+Stubby's mother didn't hear her son crying that night. That was because
+Stubby was successful in holding the pillow over his head.
+
+The next morning he looked in one of the papers he was carrying to
+see what it said about anarchists. Sure enough, some place way off
+somewhere, the anarchists had shot somebody that was trying to enforce
+the laws of the land. The laws of the land--that didn't _care_.
+
+That afternoon as Stubby tramped around looking for jobs he saw a good
+many boys playing with dogs. None of them seemed to be worrying about
+whether their dogs had checks. To Stubby's hot little brain and sore
+little heart came the thought that they didn't love their dogs any more
+than he loved Hero, either. But the government didn't care whether he
+loved Hero or not! Pooh!--what was that to the government? All it cared
+about was getting the money. He stood for a long time watching a boy
+giving his dog a bath. The dog was trying to get away and the boy and
+another boy were having lots of fun about it. All of a sudden Stubby
+turned and ran away--ran down an alley, ran through a number of alleys,
+just kept on running, blinded by the tears.
+
+And that night, in the middle of the night, that something in his head
+going round and round, getting hotter and hotter, he decided that the
+only thing for him to do was to shoot the policeman who came to take
+Hero away on the morning of August first--that would be day after
+to-morrow.
+
+All night long policemen with revolvers stood around his bed. When his
+mother called him at half-past four he was shaking so he could scarcely
+get into his clothes.
+
+On his way home from his route Stubby had to pass a police-station. He
+went on the other side of the street and stood there looking across. One
+of the policemen was playing with a dog!
+
+Suddenly he wanted to rush over and throw himself down at that
+policeman's feet--sob out the story--ask him to please, _please_ wait
+till he could get that other seventy cents.
+
+But just then the policeman got up and went in the station, and Stubby
+was afraid to go in the police-station.
+
+That policeman complicated things for Stubby. Before that it had been
+quite simple. The policeman would come to enforce the law of the land;
+but he did not believe in the law of the land, so he would just kill the
+policeman. But it seemed a policeman wasn't just a person who enforced
+the laws of the land. He was also a person who played with a dog.
+
+After a whole day of walking around thinking about it--his eyes burning,
+his heart pounding--he decided that the thing to do was to warn the
+policeman by writing a letter. He did not know whether real anarchists
+warned them or not, but Stubby couldn't get reconciled to the idea of
+killing a person without telling him you were going to do it. It seemed
+that even a policeman should be told--especially a policeman who played
+with a dog.
+
+The following letter was pencilled by a shaking hand, late that
+afternoon. It was written upon a barrel in the Lynch wood-shed, on a
+piece of wrapping paper, a bristly little head bending over it:
+
+To the Policeman who comes to take my dog 'cause I ain't got the two
+fifty--'cause I tried but could only get one eighty--'cause a man was
+off his nut and didn't pay me what I earned--
+
+This is to tell you I am an anarchist and do not believe in the
+government or the law and the order and will shoot you when you come. I
+wouldn't a been an anarchist if I could a got the money and I tried to
+get it but I couldn't get it--not enough. I don't think the government
+had ought to take things you like like I like Hero so I am against the
+government.
+
+Thought I would tell you first.
+
+Yours truly,
+
+F. LYNCH.
+
+I don't see how I can shoot you 'cause where would I get the revolver.
+So I will have to do it with the butcher knife. Folks are sometimes
+killed that way 'cause my father read it in the paper.
+
+If you wanted to take the one eighty and leave Hero till I can get the
+seventy I will not do anything to you and would be very much obliged.
+
+1113 Willow street.
+
+The letter was properly addressed and sealed--not for nothing had
+Stubby's teacher given those instructions in the art of letter writing.
+The stamp he paid for out of the dime the man gave him to get a soda
+with--and forget his troubles.
+
+Now Bill O'Brien was on the desk at the police-station and Miss Murphy
+of the Herald stood in with Bill. That was how it came about that the
+next morning a fat policeman, an eager-looking girl and a young fellow
+with a kodak descended into the hollow to 1113 Willow street.
+
+A little boy peeped around the corner of the house--such a wild-looking
+little boy--hair all standing up and eyes glittering. A yellow dog ran
+out and barked. The boy darted out and grabbed the dog in his arms and
+in that moment the girl called to the man with the black box: "Right
+now! Quick! Get him!"
+
+They were getting ready to shoot Hero! That box was the way the police
+did it! He must--oh, he _must--must_ ... Boy and dog sank to the
+ground--but just the same the boy was shielding the dog!
+
+When Stubby had pulled himself together the policeman was holding Hero.
+He said that Hero was certainly a fine dog--he had a dog a good
+deal like him at home. And Miss Murphy--she was choking back sobs
+herself--knew how he could earn the seventy cents that afternoon.
+
+In such wise do a good anarchist and a good story go down under the same
+blow. Some of those sobs Miss Murphy choked back got into what she wrote
+about Stubby and his yellow dog and the next day citizens with no sense
+of the dramatic sent money enough to check Hero through life.
+
+At first Stubby's father said he had a good mind to lick him. But
+something in the quality of Miss Murphy's journalism left a hazy feeling
+of there being something remarkable about his son. He confided to his
+good wife that it wouldn't surprise him much if Stubby was some day
+President. Somebody had to be President, said he, and he had noticed
+it was generally those who in their youthful days did things that made
+lively reading in the newspapers.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+AT TWILIGHT
+
+
+A breeze from the May world without blew through the class-room, and as
+it lifted his papers he had a curious sense of freshness and mustiness
+meeting. He looked at the group of students before him, half smiling at
+the way the breath of spring was teasing the hair of the girls sitting
+by the window. Anna Lawrence was trying to pin hers back again, but May
+would have none of such decorum, and only waited long enough for her
+to finish her work before joyously undoing it. She caught the laughing,
+admiring eyes of a boy sitting across from her and sought to conceal her
+pleasure in her unmanageable wealth of hair by a wry little face, and
+then the eyes of both strayed out to the trees that had scented
+that breeze for them, looking with frank longing at the campus which
+stretched before them in all its May glory that sunny afternoon. He
+remembered having met this boy and girl strolling in the twilight the
+evening before, and as a buoyant breeze that instant swept his own face
+he had a sudden, irrelevant consciousness of being seventy-three years
+old.
+
+Other eyes were straying to the trees and birds and lilacs of that world
+from which the class-room was for the hour shutting them out. He was
+used to it--that straying of young eyes in the spring. For more than
+forty years he had sat at that desk and talked to young men and women
+about philosophy, and in those forty years there had always been
+straying eyes in May. The children of some of those boys and girls had
+in time come to him, and now there were other children who, before
+many years went by, might be sitting upon those benches, listening to
+lectures upon what men had thought about life, while their eyes strayed
+out where life called. So it went on--May, perhaps, the philosopher
+triumphant.
+
+As, with a considerable effort--for the languor of spring, or some other
+languor, was upon him too--he brought himself back to the papers they
+had handed in, he found himself thinking of those first boys and girls,
+now men and women, and parents of other boys and girls. He hoped that
+philosophy had, after all, done something more than shut them out from
+May. He had always tried, not so much to instruct them in what men had
+thought, as to teach them to think, and perhaps now, when May had become
+a time for them to watch the straying of other eyes, they were the less
+desolate because of the habits he had helped them to form. He wanted to
+think that he had done something more than hold them prisoners.
+
+There was a sadness to-day in his sympathy. He was tired. It was hard
+to go back to what he had been saying about the different things the
+world's philosophers had believed about the immortality of the soul. So,
+as often when his feeling for his thought dragged, he turned to Gretta
+Loring. She seldom failed to bring a revival of interest--a freshening.
+She was his favourite student. He did not believe that in all the years
+there had been any student who had not only pleased, but helped him as
+she did.
+
+He had taught her father and mother. And now there was Gretta,
+clear-eyed and steady of gaze, asking more of life than either of them
+had asked; asking, not only May, but what May meant. For Gretta there
+need be no duality. She was one of those rare ones for whom the meaning
+of life opened new springs to the joy of life, for whom life intensified
+with the understanding of it. He never said a thing that gratified him
+as reaching toward the things not easy to say but that he would find
+Gretta's face illumined--and always that eager little leaning ahead for
+more.
+
+She had that look of waiting now, but to-day it seemed less an expectant
+than a troubled look. She wanted him to go on with what he had been
+saying about the immortality of the soul. But it was not so much a
+demand upon him--he had come to rely upon those demands, as it was--he
+had an odd, altogether absurd sense of its being a fear for him. She
+looked uncomfortable, fretted; and suddenly he was startled to see her
+searching eyes blurred by something that must be tears.
+
+She turned away, and for just a minute it seemed to leave him alone and
+helpless. He rubbed his forehead with his hand. It felt hot. It got that
+way sometimes lately when he was tired. And the close of that hour often
+found him tired.
+
+He believed he knew what she wanted. She would have him declare his own
+belief. In the youthful flush of her modernism she was impatient with
+that fumbling around with what other men had thought. Despising the
+muddled thinking of some of her classmates, she would have him put it
+right to them with "As for yourself--"
+
+He tried to formulate what he would care to say. But, perhaps just
+because he was too tired to say it right, the life the robin in the
+nearest tree was that moment celebrating in song seemed more important
+than anything he had to say about his own feeling toward the things men
+had thought about the human soul.
+
+It was ten minutes before closing time, but suddenly he turned to his
+class with: "Go out-of-doors and think about it. This is no day to sit
+within and talk of philosophy. What men have thought about life in the
+past is less important than what you feel about it to-day." He paused,
+then added, he could not have said why, "And don't let the shadow of
+either belief or unbelief fall across the days that are here for you
+now." Again he stopped, then surprised himself by ending, "Philosophy
+should quicken life, not deaden it."
+
+They were not slow in going, their astonishment in his wanting them to
+go quickly engulfed in their pleasure in doing so. It was only Gretta
+who lingered a moment, seeming too held by his manner in sending her out
+into the sunshine to care about going there. He thought she was going to
+come to the desk and speak to him. He was sure she wanted to. But at the
+last she went hastily, and he thought, just before she turned her face
+away, that it was a tear he saw on her lashes.
+
+Strange! Was she unhappy, she through whom life surged so richly? And
+yet was it not true, that where it gave much it exacted much? Feeling
+much, and understanding what she felt, and feeling for what she
+understood--must she also suffer much? Must one always pay?
+
+He sighed, and began gathering together his papers. Thoughts about life
+tired him to-day.
+
+On the steps he paused, unreasonably enough a little saddened as he
+watched some of them beginning a tennis game. Certainly they were losing
+no time--eager to let go thoughts about life for its pleasures, very few
+of them awake to that rich life he had tried to make them ready for.
+He drooped still more wearily at the thought that perhaps the most real
+gift he had for them was that unexpected ten minutes.
+
+Remembering a book he must have from the library, he turned back. He
+went to the alcove where the works on philosophy were to be found, and
+was reaching up for the volume he wanted, when a sentence from a lowly
+murmured conversation in the next aisle came to him across the stack of
+books.
+
+"That's all very well; we know, of course, that he doesn't believe, but
+what will he do when it comes to _himself?_"
+
+It arrested him, coming as it did from one of the girls who had just
+left his class-room. He stood there motionless, his hand still reaching
+up for the book.
+
+"Do? Why, face it, of course. Face it as squarely as he's faced every
+other fact of life."
+
+That was Gretta, and though, mindful of the library mandate for silence,
+her tone was low, it was vibrant with a fine scorn.
+
+"Well," said the first speaker, "I guess he'll have to face it before
+very long."
+
+That was not answered; there was a movement on the other side of the
+barricade of books--it might have been that Gretta had turned away. His
+hand dropped down from the high shelf. He was leaning against the books.
+
+"Haven't you noticed, Gretta, how he's losing his grip?"
+
+At that his head went up sharply; he stood altogether tense as he waited
+for Gretta to set the other girl right--Gretta, so sure-seeing, so much
+wiser and truer than the rest of them. Gretta would _laugh!_
+
+But she did not laugh. And what his strained ear caught at last was--not
+her scornful denial, but a little gasp of breath suggesting a sob.
+
+"_Noticed_ it? Why it breaks my heart!"
+
+He stared at the books through which her low, passionate voice had
+carried. Then he sank to the chair that fortunately was beside him.
+Power for standing had gone from him.
+
+"Father says--father's on the board, you know" (it was the first girl
+who spoke)--"that they don't know what to do about it. It's not justice
+to the school to let him begin another year. These things are arranged
+with less embarrassment in the big schools, where a man begins emeritus
+at a certain time. Though of course they'll pension him--he's done a lot
+for the school."
+
+He thanked Gretta for her little laugh of disdain. The memory of it was
+more comforting--more satisfying--than any attempt to put it into words
+could have been.
+
+He heard them move away, their skirts brushing the book-stacks in
+passing. A little later he saw them out in the sunshine on the campus.
+Gretta joined one of the boys for a game of tennis. Motionless, he sat
+looking out at her. She looked so very young as she played.
+
+For an hour he remained at the table in the alcove where he had
+overheard what his students had to say of him. And when the hour had
+gone by he took up the pen which was there upon the study table and
+wrote his resignation to the secretary of the board of trustees. It was
+very brief--simply that he felt the time had come when a younger man
+could do more for the school than he, and that he should like his
+resignation to take effect at the close of the present school year. He
+had an envelope, and sealed and stamped the letter--ready to drop in the
+box in front of the building as he left. He had always served the school
+as best he could; he lost no time now, once convinced, in rendering
+to it the last service he could offer it--that of making way for the
+younger man.
+
+Looking things squarely in the face, and it was the habit of a lifetime
+to look things squarely in the face, he had not been long in seeing that
+they were right. Things tired him now as they had not once tired him. He
+had less zest at the beginning of the hour, more relief at the close
+of it. He seemed stupid in not having seen it for himself, but possibly
+many people were a little stupid in seeing that their own time was over.
+Of course he had thought, in a vague way, that his working time couldn't
+be much longer, but it seemed part of the way human beings managed with
+themselves that things in even the very near future kept the remoteness
+of future things.
+
+Now he understood Gretta's troubled look and her tears. He knew how
+those fine nerves of hers must have suffered, how her own mind had
+wanted to leap to the aid of his, how her own strength must have
+tormented her in not being able to reach his flagging powers. It seemed
+part of the whole hardness of life that she who would care the most
+would be the one to see it most understandingly.
+
+What he was trying to do was to see it all very simply, in
+matter-of-fact fashion, that there might be no bitterness and the least
+of tragedy. It was nothing unique in human history he was facing. One
+did one's work; then, when through, one stopped. He tried to feel that
+it was as simple as it sounded, but he wondered if back of many of those
+brief letters of resignation that came at quitting-time there was the
+hurt, the desolation, that there was no use denying to himself was back
+of his.
+
+He hoped that most men had more to turn to. Most men of seventy-three
+had grandchildren. That would help, surrounding one with a feeling of
+the naturalness of it all. But that school had been his only child. And
+he had loved it with the tenderness one gives a child. That in him which
+would have gone to the child had gone to the school.
+
+The woman whom he loved had not loved him; he had never married. His
+life had been called lonely; but lonely though it undeniably had been,
+the life he won from books and work and thinking had kept the chill from
+his heart. He had the gift of drawing life from all contact with life.
+Working with youth, he kept that feeling for youth that does for the
+life within what sunshine and fresh air do for the room in which one
+dwells.
+
+It was now that the loneliness that blights seemed waiting for him....
+Life _used_ one--and that in the ugly, not the noble sense of being
+used. Stripped of the fine fancies men wove around it, what was it
+beyond just a matter of being sucked dry and then thrown aside? Why not
+admit that, and then face it? And the abundance with which one might
+have given--the joy in the giving--had no bearing upon the fact that it
+came at last to that question of getting one out of the way. It was
+no one's unkindness; it was just that life was like that. Indeed, the
+bitterness festered around the thought that it _was_ life itself--the
+way of life--not the brutality of any particular people. "They'll
+pension him--he's done a lot for the school." Even the grateful memory
+of Gretta's tremulous, scoffing little laugh for the way it fell short
+could not follow to the deep place that had been hurt.
+
+Getting himself in hand again, and trying to face this as simply and
+honestly as he had sought to face the other, he knew that it was true he
+had done a great deal for the school. He did not believe it too much to
+say he had done more for it than any other man. Certainly more than any
+other man he had given it what place it had with men who thought. He had
+come to it in his early manhood, and at a time when the school was in
+its infancy--just a crude, struggling little Western college. Gretta
+Loring's grandfather had been one of its founders--founding it in revolt
+against the cramping sectarianism of another college. He had gloried
+in the spirit which gave it birth, and it was he who, through the
+encroachings of problems of administration and the ensnarements and
+entanglements of practicality, had fought to keep unattached and
+unfettered that spirit of freedom in the service of truth.
+
+His own voice had been heard and recognised, and a number of times
+during the years calls had come from more important institutions, but he
+had not cared to go. For year by year there deepened that personal love
+for the little college to which he had given the youthful ardour of his
+own intellectual passion. All his life's habits were one with it. His
+days seemed beaten into the path that cut across the campus. The vines
+that season after season went a little higher on the wall out there
+indicated his strivings by their own, and the generation that had worn
+down even the stones of those front steps had furrowed his forehead and
+stooped his shoulders. He had grown old along with it! His days were
+twined around it. It was the place of his efforts and satisfactions
+(joys perhaps he should not call them), of his falterings and his hopes.
+He loved it because he had given himself to it; loved it because he had
+helped to bring it up. On the shelves all around him were books which it
+had been his pleasure--because during some of those hard years they were
+to be had in no other way--to order himself and pay for from his own
+almost ludicrously meagre salary. He remembered the excitement there
+always was in getting them fresh from the publisher and bringing them
+over there in his arms; the satisfaction in coming in next day and
+finding them on the shelves. Such had been his dissipations, his
+indulgences of self. Many things came back to him as he sat there going
+back over busy years, the works on philosophy looking down upon him, the
+shadows of that spring afternoon gathering around him. He looked like
+a very old man indeed as he at last reached out for the letter he had
+written to the trustees, relieving them of their embarrassment.
+
+Twilight had come on. On the front steps he paused and looked around
+the campus. It was growing dark in that lingering way it has in the
+spring--daylight creeping away under protest, night coming gently, as
+if it knew that the world having been so pleasant, day would be loath to
+go. The boys and girls were going back and forth upon the campus and the
+streets. They could not bear to go within. For more than forty years
+it had been like that. It would be like that for many times forty
+years--indeed, until the end of the world, for it would be the end of
+the world when it was not like that. He was glad that they were out in
+the twilight, not indoors trying to gain from books something of the
+meaning of life. That course had its satisfactions along the way, but it
+was surely no port of peace to which it bore one at the last.
+
+He shrunk from going home. There were so many readjustments he must
+make, once home. So, lingering, he saw that off among the trees a girl
+was sitting alone. She threw back her head in a certain way just then,
+and he knew by the gesture that it was Gretta Loring. He wondered what
+she was thinking about. What did one who thought think about--over there
+on the other side of life? Youth and age looked at life from opposite
+sides. Then they could not see it alike, for what one saw in life seemed
+to depend so entirely upon how the light was falling from where one
+stood.
+
+He could not have said just what it was made him cross the campus toward
+her. Part of it was the desire for human sympathy--one thing, at least,
+which age did not deaden. But that was not the whole of it, nor the
+deepest thing in it. It was an urge of the spirit to find and keep for
+itself a place where the light was falling backward upon life.
+
+She was quiet in her greeting, and gentle. Her cheeks were still
+flushed, her hair tumbled from her game, but her eyes were thoughtful
+and, he thought, sad. He felt that the sadness was because of him; of
+him and the things of which he made her think. He knew of her affection
+for him, the warmth there was in her admiration of the things for which
+he had fought. He had discovered that it hurt her now that others
+should be seeing and not he, pained her to watch so sorry a thing as his
+falling below himself, wounded both pride and heart that men whom she
+would doubtless say had never appreciated him were whispering among
+themselves about how to get rid of him. Why, the poor child might even
+be tormenting herself with the idea she ought to tell him!
+
+That was why he told her. He pointed to the address on the envelope,
+saying: "That carries my resignation, Gretta."
+
+Her start and the tears which rushed to her eyes told him he was right
+about her feeling. She did not seem able to say anything. Her chin was
+trembling.
+
+"I see that the time has come," he said, "when a younger man can do more
+for the school than I can hope to do for it."
+
+Still she said nothing at all, but her eyes were deepening and she
+had that very steadfast, almost inspired look that had so many times
+quickened him in the class-room.
+
+She was not going to deny it! She was not going to pretend!
+
+After the first feeling of not having got something needed he rose to
+her high ground--ground she had taken it for granted he would take.
+
+"And will you believe it, Gretta," he said, rising to that ground and
+there asking, not for the sympathy that bends down, but for a hand in
+passing, "there comes a hard hour when first one feels the time has come
+to step aside and be replaced by that younger man?"
+
+She nodded. "It must be," she said, simply; "it must be very much harder
+than any of us can know till we come to it."
+
+She brought him a sense of his advantage in experience--his riches. To
+be sure, there was that.
+
+And he was oddly comforted by the honesty in her which could not stoop
+to dishonest comforting. In what superficially might seem her failure
+there was a very real victory for them both. And there was nothing of
+coldness in her reserve! There was the fulness of understanding, and of
+valuing the moments too highly for anything there was to be said about
+it. There was a great spiritual dignity, a nobility, in the way she was
+looking at him. It called upon the whole of his own spiritual dignity.
+It was her old demand upon him, but this time the tears through which
+her eyes shone were tears of pride in fulfilment, not of sorrowing for
+failure.
+
+Suddenly he felt that his life had not been spent in vain, that the
+lives of all those men of his day who had fought the good fight for
+intellectual honesty--spiritual dignity--had not been spent in vain
+if they were leaving upon the earth even a few who were like the girl
+beside them.
+
+It turned him from himself to her. She was what counted--for she was
+what remained. And he remained in just the measure that he remained
+through her; counted in so far as he counted for her. It was as if he
+had been facing in the wrong direction and now a kindly hand had turned
+him around. It was not in looking back there he would find himself. He
+was not back there to be found. Only so much of him lived as had been
+able to wing itself ahead--on in the direction she was moving.
+
+It did not particularly surprise him that when she at last spoke it was
+to voice a shade of that same feeling. "I was thinking," she began, "of
+that younger man. Of what he must mean to the man who gives way to him."
+
+She was feeling her way as she went--groping among the many dim things
+that were there. He had always liked to watch her face when she was
+thinking her way step by step.
+
+"I think you used a word wrongly a minute ago," she said, with a smile.
+"You spoke of being replaced. But that isn't it. A man like you isn't
+replaced; he's"--she got it after a minute and came forth with it
+triumphantly--"fulfilled!"
+
+Her face was shining as she turned to him after that. "Don't you see?
+He's there waiting to take your place because you got him ready. Why,
+you made that younger man! Your whole life has been a getting ready for
+him. He can do his work be cause you first did yours. Of course he can
+go farther than you can! Wouldn't it be a sorry commentary on you if he
+couldn't?"
+
+Her voice throbbed warmly upon that last, and during the pause the light
+it had brought still played upon her face. "We were talking in class
+about immortality," she went on, more slowly. "There's one form of
+immortality I like to think about. It's that all those who from the very
+first have given anything to the world are living in the world to-day."
+There was a rush of tears to her eyes and of affection to her voice
+as she finished, very low: "You'll never die. You've deepened the
+consciousness of life too much for that."
+
+They sat there as twilight drew near to night, the old man and the young
+girl, silent. The laughter of boys and girls and the good-night calls of
+the birds were all around them. The fragrance of life was around
+them. It was one of those silences to which come impressions, faiths,
+longings, not yet born as thoughts.
+
+Something in the quality of that silence brought the rescuing sense
+of its having been good to have lived and done one's part--that sense
+which, from places of desolation and over ways rough and steep and dark,
+can find its way to the meadows of serenity.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Lifted Masks, by Susan Glaspell
+
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