"We can hold out six months longer,--at least six months." My mother's
tone made the six months stretch encouragingly into six long years.
I see her now, vividly as if it were only yesterday. We were at our
scant breakfast, I as blue as was ever even twenty-five, she brave and
confident. And hers was no mere pretense to reassure me, no cheerless
optimism of ignorance, but the through-and-through courage and strength
of those who flinch for no bogey that life or death can conjure. Her
tone lifted me; I glanced at her, and what shone from her eyes set me on
my feet, face to the foe. The table-cloth was darned in many places, but
so skilfully that you could have looked closely without detecting it.
Not a lump of sugar, not a slice of bread, went to waste in that house;
yet even I had to think twice to realize that we were poor, desperately
poor. She did not hide our poverty; she beautified it, she dignified it
into Spartan simplicity. I know it is not the glamour over the past that
makes me believe there are no women now like those of the race to which
she belonged. The world, to-day, yields comfort too easily to the
capable; hardship is the only mould for such character, and in those
days, in this middle-western country, even the capable were not
strangers to hardship.
"When I was young," she went on, "and things looked black, as they have
a habit of looking to the young and inexperienced,"--that put in with a
teasing smile for me,--"I used to say to myself, 'Well, anyhow, they
can't _kill_ me.' And the thought used to cheer me up wonderfully. In
fact, it still does."
I no longer felt hopeless. I began to gnaw my troubles again--despair is
still.
"Judge Granby is a dog," said I; "yes, a dog."
"Why 'dog'?" objected my mother. "Why not simply 'mean man'? I've never
known a dog that could equal a man who set out to be 'ornery.'"
"When I think of all the work I've done for him in these three years--"
"For yourself," she interrupted. "Work you do for others doesn't amount
to much unless it's been first and best for yourself."
"But he was benefited by it, too," I urged, "and has taken life easy,
and has had more clients and bigger fees than he ever had before. I'd
like to give him a jolt. I'd stop nagging him to put my name in a
miserable corner of the glass in his door. I'd hang out a big sign of my
own over my own office door."
My mother burst into a radiant smile. "I've been waiting a year to hear
that," she said.
Thereupon I had a shock of fright--inside, for I'd never have dared to
show fear before my mother. There's nothing else that makes you so brave
as living with some one before whom you haven't the courage to let your
cowardice show its feather. If we didn't keep each other up to the mark,
what a spectacle of fright and flight this world-drama would be!
Vanity, the greatest of vices, is also the greatest of virtues, or the
source of the greatest virtues--which comes to the same thing.
"When will you do it?" she went on, and then I knew I was in for it, and
how well-founded was the suspicion that had been keeping my lips
tight-shut upon my dream of independence.
"I'll--I'll think about it," was my answer, in a tone which I hoped she
would see was not hesitating, but reflective; "I mustn't go too far,--or
too fast."
"Better go too far and too fast than not go at all," retorted my wise
mother. "Once a tortoise beat a hare,--_once_. It never happened again,
yet the whole timid world has been talking about it ever since." And she
fell into a study from which she roused herself to say, "You'd better
let _me_ bargain for the office and the furniture,--and the big sign."
She knew--but could not or would not teach me--how to get a dollar's
worth for a dollar; would not, I suspect, for she despised parsimony,
declaring it to be another virtue which is becoming only in a woman.
"Of course,--when--" I began.
"We've got to do something in the next six months," she warned. And now
she made the six months seem six minutes.
I had at my tongue's end something about the danger of dragging her down
into misfortune; but before speaking I looked at her, and, looking,
refrained. To say it to _her_ would have been too absurd,--to her who
had been left a widow with nothing at all, who had educated me for
college, and who had helped me through my first year there,--helped me
with money, I mean. But for what she gave besides, more, immeasurably
more,--but for her courage in me and round me and under me,--I'd never
have got my degree or anything else, I fear. To call that courage help
would be like saying the mainspring helps the watch to go. I looked at
her. "They can't kill me, can they?" said I, with a laugh which sounded
so brave that it straightway made me brave.
So it was settled.
But that was the first step in a fight I can't remember even now without
a sinking at the heart. The farmers of Jackson County, of which Pulaski
was the county seat, found in litigation their chief distraction from
the stupefying dullness of farm life in those days of pause, after the
Indian and nature had been conquered and before the big world's arteries
of thought and action had penetrated. The farmers took eagerly to
litigation to save themselves from stagnation. Still, a new lawyer,
especially if he was young, had an agonizing time of it convincing their
slow, stiff, suspicious natures that he could be trusted in such a
crisis as "going to law."
To make matters worse I fell in love.
* * * * *
Once--it was years afterward, though not many years ago--Burbank, at the
time governor, was with me, and we were going over the main points for
his annual message. One of my suggestions--my orders to all my agents,
high and low, have always been sugar-coated as "suggestions"--started a
new train of thought in him, and he took pen and paper to fix it before
it had a chance to escape. As he wrote, my glance wandered along the
shelves of the book-cases. It paused on the farthest and lowest shelf. I
rose and went there, and found my old school-books, those I used when I
was in Public School Number Three, too near thirty years ago!
In the shelf one book stood higher than the others--tall and thin and
ragged, its covers torn, its pages scribbled, stained and dog-eared.
Looking through that old physical geography was like a first talk with a
long-lost friend. It had, indeed, been my old friend. Behind its broad
back I had eaten forbidden apples, I had aimed and discharged the
blow-gun, I had reveled in blood-and-thunder tales that made the drowsy
schoolroom fade before the vast wilderness, the scene of breathless
struggles between Indian and settler, or open into the high seas where
pirate, or worse-than-pirate Britisher, struck flag to American
privateer or man-o'-war.
On an impulse shot up from the dustiest depths of memory, I turned the
old geography sidewise and examined the edges of the cover. Yes, there
was the _cache_ I had made by splitting the pasteboard with my
jack-knife. I thrust in my fingernail; out came a slip of paper. I
glanced at Burbank--he was still busy. I, somewhat stealthily, you may
imagine, opened the paper and--well, my heart beat much more rapidly as
I saw in a school-girl scrawl:
[Illustration: (handwriting)]
[Transcriber's Note: the image is approximately this:
Harvey Sayler hait
Elizabeth Crosby love
with the letters "H", "a", "r", "e", "y", "S", "l", "e" in the first
line and "E", "l", "a", "e", "h", "r", "s", "y" in the second line, in
that order, struck out, as marked by the game mentioned in the
following paragraph.]
I was no longer master of a state; I was a boy in school again. I could
see her laboring over this game of "friendship, love, indifference,
hate." I could see "Redney" Griggs, who sat between her and me, in the
row of desks between and parallel to my row and hers,--could see him
swoop and snatch the paper from her, look at it, grin maliciously, and
toss it over to me. I was in grade A, was sixteen, and was beginning to
take myself seriously. She was in grade D, was little more than half my
age, but looked older,--and how sweet and pretty she was! She had black
hair, thick and wavy, with little tresses escaping from plaits and
ribbons to float about her forehead, ears, and neck. Her skin was darker
then, I think, than it is now, but it had the same smoothness and
glow,--certainly, it could not have had more.
* * * * *
I think the dart must have struck that day,--why else did I keep the bit
of paper? But it did not trouble me until the first winter of my
launching forth as "Harvey Sayler, Attorney and Counselor at Law." She
was the daughter of the Episcopal preacher; and, as every one thought
well of the prospects of my mother's son, our courtship was undisturbed.
Then, in the spring, when fortune was at its coldest and love at its
most feverish, her father accepted a call to a church in Boston, eight
hundred miles away.
To go to see her was impossible; how could the money be spared,--fifty
dollars, at the least? Once--when they had been gone about four
months--my mother insisted that I must. But I refused, and I do not know
whether it is to my credit or not, for my refusal gave her only pain,
whereas the sacrifices she would have had to make, had I gone, would
have given her only pleasure. I had no fear that Betty would change in
our separation. There are some people you hope are stanch, and some
people you think will be stanch, if--, and then there are those, many
women and a few men, whom it is impossible to think of as false or even
faltering. I did not fully appreciate that quality then, for my memory
was not then dotted with the graves of false friendships and littered
with the rubbish of broken promises; but I did appreciate it enough to
build securely upon it.
Build? No, that is not the word. There may be those who are stimulated
to achievement by being in love, though I doubt it. At any rate, I was
not one of them. My love for her absorbed my thoughts, and paralyzed my
courage. Of the qualities that have contributed to what success I may
have had, I put in the first rank a disposition to see the gloomiest
side of the future. But it has not helped to make my life happier,
invaluable though it has been in preventing misadventure from catching
me napping.
So another year passed. Then came hard times,--_real_ hard times. I had
some clients--enough to insure mother and myself a living, with the
interest on mortgage and note kept down. But my clients were poor, and
poor pay, and slow pay. Nobody was doing well but the note-shavers.
I--How mother fought to keep the front brave and bright!--not her front,
for that was bright by nature, like the sky beyond the clouds; but our
front, my front,--the front of our affairs. No one must see that we were
pinching,--so I must be the most obviously prosperous young lawyer in
Pulaski. What that struggle cost her I did not then realize; no, could
not realize until I looked at her face for the last time, looked and
turned away and thought on the meaning of the lines and the hollows over
which Death had spread his proclamation of eternal peace. I have heard
it said of those markings in human faces, "How ugly!" But it seems to me
that, to any one with eyes and imagination, line and wrinkle and hollow
always have the somber grandeur of tragedy. I remember my mother when
her face was smooth and had the shallow beauty that the shallow dote on.
But her face whereon was written the story of fearlessness, sacrifice,
and love,--that is the face beautiful of my mother for me.
In the midst of those times of trial, when she had ceased to smile,--for
she had none of that hypocritical cheerfulness which depresses and is a
mere vanity to make silly onlookers cry "Brave!" when there is no true
bravery,--just when we were at our lowest ebb, came an offer from Bill
Dominick to put me into politics.
I had been interested in politics ever since I was seven years old. I
recall distinctly the beginning:--
On a November afternoon,--it must have been November, though I remember
that it was summer-warm, with all the windows open and many men in the
streets in shirt-sleeves,--at any rate, I was on my way home from
school. As I neared the court-house I saw a crowd in the yard and was
reminded that it was election day, and that my father was running for
reëlection to the state senate; so, I bolted for his law office in the
second story of the Masonic Temple, across the street from the
court-house.
He was at the window and was looking at the polling place so intently
that he took no notice of me as I stood beside him. I know now why he
was absorbed and why his face was stern and sad. I can shut my eyes and
see that court-house yard, the long line of men going up to vote, single
file, each man calling out his name as he handed in his ballot, and Tom
Weedon--who shot an escaping prisoner when he was deputy
sheriff--repeating the name in a loud voice. Each oncoming voter in that
curiously regular and compact file was holding out his right arm stiff
so that the hand was about a foot clear of the thigh; and in every one
of those thus conspicuous hands was a conspicuous bit of white paper--a
ballot. As each man reached the polling window and gave in his name, he
swung that hand round with a stiff-armed, circular motion that kept it
clear of the body and in full view until the bit of paper disappeared in
the slit in the ballot box.
I wished to ask my father what this strange spectacle meant; but, as I
glanced up at him to begin my question, I knew I must not, for I felt
that I was seeing something which shocked him so profoundly that he
would take me away if I reminded him of my presence. I know now that I
was witnessing the crude beginnings of the money-machine in
politics,--the beginnings of the downfall of parties,--the beginnings of
the overthrow of the people as the political power. Those stiff-armed
men were the "floating voters" of that ward of Pulaski. They had been
bought up by a rich candidate of the opposition party, which was less
scrupulous than our party, then in the flush of devotion to "principles"
and led by such old-fashioned men as my father with old-fashioned
notions of honor and honesty. Those "floaters" had to keep the ballot in
full view from the time they got it of the agent of their purchaser
until they had deposited it beyond the possibility of substitution--he
must see them "deliver the goods."
My father was defeated. He saw that, in politics, the day of the public
servant of public interests was over, and that the night of the private
servant of private interests had begun. He resigned the leadership into
the dexterous hands of a politician. Soon afterward he died, muttering:
"Prosperity has ruined my country!"
From that election day my interest in politics grew, and but for my
mother's bitter prejudice I should have been an active politician,
perhaps before I was out of college.
Pulaski, indeed all that section of my state, was strongly of my party.
Therefore Dominick, its local boss, was absolute. At the last county
election, four years before the time of which I am writing, there had
been a spasmodic attempt to oust him. He had grown so insolent, and had
put his prices for political and political-commercial "favors" to our
leading citizens so high, that the "best element" in our party
reluctantly broke from its allegiance. To save himself he had been
forced to order flagrant cheating on the tally sheets; his ally and
fellow conspirator, M'Coskrey, the opposition boss, was caught and was
indicted by the grand jury. The Reformers made such a stir that Ben
Cass, the county prosecutor, though a Dominick man, disobeyed his master
and tried and convicted M'Coskrey. Of course, following the custom in
cases of yielding to pressure from public sentiment, he made the
trial-errors necessary to insure reversal in the higher court; and he
finally gave Dominick's judge the opportunity to quash the indictment.
But the boss was relentless,--Cass had been disobedient, and had put
upon "my friend M'Coskrey" the disgrace of making a sorry figure in
court. "Ben can look to his swell reform friends for a renomination,"
said he; "he'll not get it from me."
Thus it came to pass that Dominick's lieutenant, Buck Fessenden,
appeared in my office one afternoon in July, and, after a brief parley,
asked me how I'd like to be prosecuting attorney of Jackson County. Four
thousand a year for four years, and a reëlection if I should give
satisfaction; and afterward, the bench or a seat in Congress! I could
pay off everything; I could marry!
It was my first distinct vision of the plum tree. To how many thousands
of our brightest, most promising young Americans it is shown each year
in just such circumstances!