Baldwin had been driven over from his Michigan Avenue home and caught
the Alton Limited when it made the station stop at Twenty-third Street,
where he boarded the last of its curtained Pullmans. This coach was
the political institution known to Illinois statesmanship as the
Springfield sleeper, and Baldwin and his two companions, Jennings,
the secretary of state, and Denny Healy, a canal commissioner, had
the capsulated coziness of its smoking compartment all to themselves.
Down by Dwight they had fallen into a desultory discussion of the
old question as to whether or not every man has his price. The
question could hardly interest these men long, for, after many years’
constant contemplation, under the gray dome of the state house, of the
weaknesses of men, they had come to an acceptance of the doctrine now
grown frank enough to have no lingering taint of cynicism. Jennings,
indeed, had just dismissed the subject by declaring:
“All men aire fer sale, an’ most of ’em damn cheap.”
And so the subject might have lapsed had it not been for Baldwin’s
heterodoxy. That George R. Baldwin of all men should doubt the first
maxim of their profession was beyond comprehension. Though he played
his part in life with a suite of law offices in a skyscraper as a
background, his serious business was lobbying bills through the
legislature. His friends, who were many, boasted that he always stood
by them, right or wrong. Which he did, indeed, and as they were
generally wrong, the value of such friendship, or his opinions on
practical politics, could hardly be overestimated. The day had been a
hot one in Chicago, but now a cold draft of smoky air was sucking in
through the narrow window-screen, on which the cinders hailed as the
Limited plunged southward.
Smoke and dirt had long since begrimed the dark and sweaty face of
Jennings, who, with waistcoat opened in the comfort dear to the
Egyptian, was sprawling his shanks on the cushion opposite him, while
Healy, doomed by corpulence to an attitude more erect, sitting with
his chubby knees far apart, as the fat will, his paunch resting on the
edge of the seat he filled, now and then brushed a fat palm over his
red scalp and sighed, as he puffed his domestic cigar. But Baldwin
sat and smiled, showing his excellent teeth beneath his reddish
mustache, and visibly expanded. They could hear, as an undertone to
their talking, the dull roll of the Pullman’s paper wheels, and now
and then they were interrupted by the whistle’s long and lonesome note
at a country road-crossing. Out through the double windows, against
which Healy sometimes pressed his forehead because the glass cooled
it, the dark fields wheeled past in an endless belt of blackness, save
where an occasional bunch of sparks from the engine burrowed under the
right-of-way fence, and then, in the momentary glow of light, they
could catch sight of a tossing plume of corn, which told them they were
out on the prairies of central Illinois.
When the train paused for the Big Four crossing at Gardner, they heard
in the sudden flood of silence the snoring of a sensible fare-paying
passenger who had gone to bed. The strident noise of the crickets and
the frogs outside was noted only as an effect of the silence. The
three men had no thought of retiring until they reached Pontiac at two
o’clock, for the lives they led were such that they could not sleep
until that hour, and then not very well.
Baldwin had lighted his imported cigar, the superior aroma of which,
perceptible even in an atmosphere choked with coal gases and the fumes
of the domestic cigars Jennings and Healy were smoking, indicated
faintly the height of cultivation to which he had brought his
appetites, when Jennings, flecking his ashes on the floor of the salon
just as he would have done on his own parlor carpet, said:
“Well, go on with the story.”
Baldwin settled his chin over the blue cravat with the white polka dots
that was knotted over the immaculate collar--a collar, incredulous men
from southern Illinois were sometimes told, that was actually made on
the shirt--drew his creased trousers a little farther above the tops of
his patent leather boots, and began:
“One session there was an old man named Henderson in the house, who
had come up from Greene County; Henderson of Greene, everybody called
him, to distinguish him from Tom Henderson, of Effingham. He was a
queer figure, was Henderson of Greene, tall and gaunt, with a stoop
in his shoulders. He always wore a hickory shirt, opened at a red and
wrinkled throat, and his hair was just a stubble bleached by harvest
suns. The old man was a riddle to everybody in Springfield that winter.
He was always in his seat, even on Monday evenings, when no one else
was there. He voted always with his party, and he voted consistently as
well, like a good country member, against all the Chicago legislation.
But he was a silent man, who stood apart from his fellows, looking
with eyes that peered from under his shaggy, sunburned brows with
an expression no one could fathom. He never made a speech, he
never introduced a bill, he never offered a resolution, he never
even presented a petition, and when the speaker made his committee
assignments, he placed the old man on the committees on History,
Geology and Science, and on Civil Service Reform, and he did not even
look disappointed.”
The two politicians chuckled.
“As for me,” continued Baldwin, “I never spoke to him, and never knew
any one who did. The speaker himself only addressed him--and then as
the gentleman from Greene--when they were verifying roll-calls. No one
ever knew where he boarded. The herd book gave him a paragraph, saying
that he had been born in Indiana along in ’37, and moved to this state
sometime in the fifties. Left an orphan early, with no education, he
had been a day laborer all his life, working at anything he could get,
mostly on farms. He never had held office before, and none knew how he
broke into the legislature--the tidal wave, I suppose. Every one knew
he never would come back again.
“Well, we got down to the last night of the session. The hands of
the clock had been turned back in that vain old attempt to stay the
remorseless hours, but its pale and impassive face was impotent as a
gravestone to stay dissolution and oblivion. I know men who would have
spent a fortune to give that legislature one day more of life, but it
was sweeping on to its midnight death. Somehow, whenever I think of
the legislature, I think of _that_ legislature, and whenever my mind
conceives the state house it isn’t pictured to me as standing there on
the hill, stately in the sunshine, but as it appeared that night as I
walked over from the Leland, with the clouds flying low over its dome.
The lower floors were dark and still as sepulchres, and the messenger
boys who came over from the Western Union, now and then, reminded me of
ghosts as they went by, their heels dragging on the marble floors of
the corridor. A light was burning in the governor’s office, though the
old man himself, I knew, was over at the mansion, pacing the floor of
the library and cursing with classic curses. We were going to try that
night to pass the Bailey bill over his veto.
“But the third floor blazed with electric lights, and the big dome
was full of noisy echoes. The senate kept its coat on--you know how
they mimic decorum over there--but the house was in its shirt-sleeves,
huddled like a pack of wolves around the speaker’s dais, with faces
ripe with whisky, shaking its fists under the umbrella of cigar smoke.
Every fellow was trying to get his bill passed in the last hour of the
session--you know what it is, Hank?”
“Oah, yes,” replied Jennings, “but ’tain’t nothin’ to what ’t used to
be under the ol’ constitution. We’d stack a pile o’ them ’ere private
acts up on the clerk’s desk, an’ pass ’em all t’ oncet ’ith a whoop.
Them ’as the days--but that ’as ’fore your time.”
“Those must have been good old days,” assented the lobbyist, “for the
gang.”
“I reckon! A feller could ’a’ done business in them days! Ol’ John M.’d
better left the ol’ constitution alone--it ’as good enough. But there
’as a passion fer change right after the war.”
The lobbyist politely nodded concurrence in this view and continued:
“Some of the members clambered on to their desks, filling the air with
oaths, ink bottles, and hurtling books with rattling leaves. Sometimes
an iron weight sheathed in paper whizzed by on a vindictive mission,
and one man made an Egyptian nigger-killer with rubber bands. Some even
hurled their copies of the revised statutes--it was the first use they
had ever found for them. Once in a while some one would toss a batch
of printed bills to the ceiling, where they set the glass prisms of
the chandeliers jingling, and then fell like autumn leaves, a shower
of dead pledges and withered hopes. And out of all the hubbub rose a
steady roar--”
“Like at a lynchin’ bee,” assisted Jennings.
“Exactly,” assented Baldwin, who had never seen a lynching. “There were
drunken howls and vacuous laughs, and yet we could hear through it all
the hoarse voice of the clerk, his throat so heated that you could see
the vapor of his breath, as you can an orator’s, or a wood-chopper’s
in winter, rapidly intoning senate bills on third reading. The pages
were growing heedless and impertinent. The newspaper correspondents,
their despatches on the wires, puffed their cigarettes in professional
unconcern, and awaited happenings worthy of late bulletins. The older
members, who had been through the mill many times before, lounged low
in their seats. One could see, above their desks, only their heads and
heels. The speaker, old ’Zeke himself, was in the chair, suave as ever,
but growing caustic. He had splintered his sounding-board early in the
evening, and had taken to tapping perfunctorily his walnut desk with
his little inadequate gavel. And yet he and the older members and the
newspaper men would cast occasionally an anxious glance at the clock,
and an expectant one at the big doors.
“As I sat there on the old, red lounge under the speaker’s flag-draped
canopy, I noticed Henderson of Greene, standing away back under the
galleries on the Democratic side, eying the proceedings with the same
mysterious stare that had never left him since he had been sworn in.
As I have said, I had never spoken to the fellow, but I had always
felt a pity for him--he impressed me as a man who had been stunned by
repeated raps of bad luck. Along toward the end of the session he had
brought his wife up from Greene County to the capital. She had that
tired look that country women have. Her face was seamed, her cheeks
hollow; her back was bent in a bow, and she walked hurriedly, anxiously
along in her flapping skirts beside her tall and somber husband. She
had never been away from home before, and the boys had many a laugh
over her wonder at the trolley-cars purring along under the maple
trees, and her fear of the elevators in the state house--though, for
my part, I could see nothing ludicrous in it all. She stayed three or
four days and they went everywhere, out to Oak Ridge to see Lincoln’s
tomb, over to Eighth Street to visit his old homestead, up to the
Geological Museum where the moth-eaten stuffed animals are, and out to
Camp Lincoln. They took many trolley rides, and even climbed to the
top of the state house dome, whence, they say, you can see Rochester
and the prairies for thirty miles around. He brought her over to the
house one or two mornings, but not on to the floor as other members did
their over-dressed wives; he sent her up to the gallery, where she sat
peering down over the railing at the gang--and her husband, who took no
part in all that was going on.
“The old woman’s interest in all these new things that had come into
her starved life, her ill-concealed pride in her husband’s membership
in such a distinguished body of law-givers, were touching to me, and as
I looked at him that last night of the session, and thought of her,
the wish to do something to lighten their lives came into my heart,
but just then, suddenly, old ’Zeke started from his chair, grasped his
gavel firmly, and leaned expectantly over his desk. At the same instant
the older members dragged their feet down from their desks and sat bolt
upright. The newspaper men flung away their cigarettes and adjusted
their eye-glasses. The assistant clerk, who had been reading, looked
up from the bill then under what I suppose they would have called
consideration, and hurriedly gave his place at the reading-desk to the
clerk of the house. I knew what was coming. I knew that the Bailey bill
was on its way over from the senate. And I heard Bill Hill call:
“‘Mistah Speakah.’
“At the sound of that voice the uproar in the chamber ceased. It became
so still that the silence tingled like a numbness through the body;
stiller than it had been any time since nine o’clock that morning, when
they had paused for the chaplain to say his prayer. The gang turned
around and stood motionless, panting, in its shirt-sleeves, as though a
flashlight photograph were to be taken. Half-way down the aisle stood
Hill. You know how he would look at such a time, in his long black
coat, his wide white shirt bosom with the big diamond, his rolling
collar and black string tie, and his long black hair falling to his
shoulders. You know how he would love such a moment--and it was his
last chance that session. He stood there quietly a whole minute, and
then putting a foot forward, said in his great bass voice:
“‘Mistah Speakah.’
“Old ’Zeke rose and said:
“‘Mister Doorkeeper.’
“‘A message from the senate, by its secretary.’
“‘A message from the senate by its secretary,’ repeated ’Zeke, and then
Bill had to give way to Sam Pollard, who stepped forth and said:
“‘Mr. Speaker, I am directed to inform the house that the senate
has passed senate bill No. 106’--I never shall forget the number
of that bill, after all the sleepless nights it caused me, and the
anxious mornings scanning the calendar to see if its black figures
were there--‘Senate bill No. 106. A bill for an act to amend an act
entitled: An Act concerning the exercise of the right of eminent
domain, notwithstanding the objections of the governor’--you know the
lingo.
“Then, as the speaker said, ‘The clerk will read the message,’ Hen
Harvey, who was clerk of the house, stretched his arm over the narrow
desk and took the file from the page. The old man was mad when he wrote
that veto message, and he gave both houses the devil. I never knew
the legislature to get such an unmerciful lamming in my life; it was
outrageous, for it was a good bill, and--”
“Ought ter pass,” interjected Jennings, repeating the trite phrase
sententiously.
“But nobody heard it, for when Hen began to read, the gang took a deep
breath and began to howl. From both sides of the chamber broke forth
a clamor of ‘Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker,’ until in the din even these
words were lost, and there was just that long, heavy roar. The boys
came over from the senate, for they had done their duty and had done
it nobly, in the face of a great storm of criticism, combined with
the abuse of the Chicago papers, and they wanted to help lift in the
house. And with them came the crowd of reformers from the Municipal
League, and stood about with George Herrick, the old man’s private
secretary. The reformers, as George pointed out members here and there,
and whispered in their ears, supposed that they were doing great things
in the fight against the bill, but that was only another time when they
deluded their precious selves. They did their reforming chiefly at
banquets, but George and the old man knew a thing or two about politics
themselves, and George, standing back by the Democratic cloak-room,
smoking his little cigarettes, was directing that fight with the party
lash in his hand, and some of the best men on the floor of the house to
do his bidding. He was the only private secretary I ever knew who could
set an army in the field.
“But through it all old ’Zeke stood there, game as ever, with a hard,
cold smile on his face, and you could hear the sharp, monotonous rap
of his gavel, rap, rap, rap, neither fast nor slow. The tumult did not
die during the reading of that scathing message, and when Hen’s ruined
voice ceased, and he rolled the message up again and thrust it in his
desk, ’Zeke smashed his gavel down and I heard him say:
“‘Will the house be in order?’
“And it was in order, for ’Zeke knew how to compel order in that
bear-pit when he wanted to, and he never raised his voice to do it
either, only his eye, and the gavel. And so, when they were quiet, he
said: ‘The question is: Shall the house concur with the senate in the
passage of senate bill No. 106, notwithstanding the objections of the
governor?’
“The house tried to break away from him again, but he held it in his
gavel fist, drawing the curb tight, and turned to recognize old Long
John Riley, who was standing like a tall tree beside his desk, with his
hand upraised.
“‘The gentleman from Cook!’
“‘Mr. Speaker,’ said Riley, ‘I move the previous question.’
“There was another roar, but ’Zeke’s gavel fell, and his eyes blazed
black again, and he said:
“‘The gentleman from Cook moves the previous question, and the question
is: Shall the main question be now put? Those in favor of this question
will say aye’--there was a roar of ayes--‘and those opposed will say
no.’ There was a heavier roar of noes, and then came the old cry: ‘Ayes
and noes, ayes and noes, Mr. Speaker, ayes and noes, damn you, don’t
you dare to shut off debate!’ But ’Zeke only smiled and his gavel
cracked--and they were still. Then in the stillness he said:
“‘Gentlemen are as familiar with the rules as is the chair. They are
well aware that the chair is powerless to order a roll-call after a
_viva voce_ vote, unless he is in doubt as to the result, the demand
for the yeas and nays not having been preferred before the question
had been put to the house. In this instance’--and the splendid old
fellow swung his gavel to his ear, and the smile flickered out of
his face--‘in this instance the chair is not in doubt. The ayes seem
to have it, the ayes have it, and the main question is ordered.’
The hammer fell like a bolt, and then calmly leaning on it, his eye
traveled around over the turbulent mob, until it lit on George Herrick
and his little band of dazed reformers--and I knew he was thinking
of the old man over in the mansion whom he hated with an Indian’s
hate--and as he looked George in the eye, the cold smile came back, and
he said:
“‘The question is: Shall the house concur with the senate in the
passage of senate bill No. 106, notwithstanding the objections of the
governor. Upon this question those in favor of the bill will vote aye,
and those opposed will vote no, when their names are called, and the
clerk will call the roll.’ The gavel fell, and the speaker, holding it
where it had fallen, leaned half his length over his desk and motioned
to Hen Harvey. Hen had taken off his coat and vest and collar--he would
call _that_ roll himself--and as he unbuttoned his cuffs, inclining his
head toward the speaker, ’Zeke yelled in his ear:
“‘Now, Hen, damn it, call that roll to beat all hell.’
“Then we knew that the Bailey bill fight was on to a finish. We had
had our first big battle with the reformers, and were down together
in the last ditch. Whenever a bill with something in it is about to
pass the legislature, a strange quality steals into the atmosphere,
just as there does in the council chamber in Chicago when anything
is to be pulled off--don’t you know? There is a forebodement, an
apprehensiveness, that electrifies the nerves and oppresses the lungs.
I felt it there that night. We had had a heavy fight to pass the bill
in the first place, and now we had to override a veto! It’s hard
enough to get the seventy-seven votes that constitute a majority, with
the people against you--men are such cowards--but when it comes to
rounding up two-thirds--a hundred and two--it’s an entirely different
problem. We had been working quietly at the thing for days, for we knew
the veto was coming, and that the old man would wait until the last
night to send it in. We had a hundred and one tried and true men who
would stick to the end. The hundred and second was Jim Berry. We had
his promise, and believed he would stay in line--though he was afraid
of his constits--for he was poor and in debt.
“Judge Hardin came and sat beside me that we might check them off for
ourselves, and Hen began calling the roll:
“‘Allen!’
“‘Aye!’
“‘Ambaugh!’
“‘Aye!’
“‘Anderson!’
“‘Aye!’
“‘Bartly!’
“‘Aye!’
“The leaders, Jamison over on the Republican side, and Riley on
the Democratic, sat at their desks, with roll-calls, at which
they thoughtfully blew the smoke of their cigars as they checked
off the progress of the vote. They appeared as unconcerned as the
correspondents. I never can forget the drollery of the wink Jamison
gave me as he voted no--it was necessary to have some one who had
voted with the majority to move a reconsideration of the vote in case
anything happened. ’Zeke did not resume his seat during the roll-call,
as the rules permitted him to do, but stood bending over his desk with
an alert eye on the cadets. The vote up to this point was propitious,
but ’Zeke knew, and Jamison and Riley knew, and Judge Hardin and I
knew, and we were not so sanguine as the correspondents, who had
already begun to toss sheets of copy to the frowsy telegraph boys,
running to and fro between the press gallery and the Western Union.
We were chiefly interested just then whether Berry would vote right
or not. I was keeping an eye on him and noticed that he was beginning
to fidget in his seat, and chew his cigar, and tear paper into little
pieces. And the roll-call went on:
“‘Beel!’
“‘Aye!’
“‘Bell!’
“‘No!’
“Bell, of course, was on the other side, and was standing back with
George Herrick, keeping their fellows in line and cheering up the
reformers from the Municipal League, but we knew his vote would have
its effect on Berry, so I pulled the speaker’s coat-tail, and ’Zeke
leaned over and whispered hoarsely to the clerk. Hen observed a
lengthened pause and then began to call more slowly. Berry was the next
name.
“‘Berry!’ Hen drawled.
“There was no reply.
“‘Berry!’
“There was no reply.
“Hen looked long at Berry, and the poltroon sat there with his eyes
cast down, rolling his cigar around and around in his mouth, tearing
up his little flakes of paper, and swinging from side to side in his
chair. Then Hen called the next name:
“‘Briggs!’
“‘No!’ he voted, and Berry looked up for the first time since the bill
had come over from the senate. ’Zeke rapped fiercely with his gavel,
and Hen paused. Then ’Zeke said sharply: