on. She saw in me the ambition that I thought I had buried in my love
for her. She knew that if I stayed with her, I’d never be anything but a
miserable shyster, living from hand to mouth, despising myself and all I
did, coming perhaps in time to hate her because she had been the cause
of my degradation. She went to Judge McLaurin, and asked him to tell her
the truth. He told her, old Covenanter that he was. Then she went up the
mountain to Boyce and asked him if he wanted her to come back to him.
She knew that it was the only action I’d consider final. He told her to
come. She told me that she was leaving me. I pleaded with her all that
night, but she went with the dawn. I couldn’t hold her. I went up Pisgah
with her till we came to the trail to Boyce’s cabin. We could see the
wood smoke curling up above the masses of shining green leaves and pink
clusters of the laurel. ‘You’re going away from me,’ she said, ‘far
away, and you’ll climb a higher mountain than Pisgah.’ I begged her to
come with me, but she shook her head. ‘I’m giving you up for your sake,’
she told me. ‘But you need me,’ I pleaded. ‘Not now,’ she said. ‘But
some day I shall, and then I’ll call you. And no matter where you are,
you’ll come, won’t you, Burt?’ I promised her that I would. The last I
saw of her was as she climbed the trail to Boyce’s cabin. From that day
to this”--he touched the crumpled little white letter--“she has sent me
no word.”
“It’s strange, isn’t it,” Rhoda said, her voice not quite steady, “that
a woman may live with a man through long years and never really know him
at all?”
“Should I have told you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose I’d have married you, even if you
had. It’s not deception, perhaps, when you’ve never seen her nor written
to her since you married me; and yet---- Are you going to her, Burt?”
“To-morrow’s the conference. I must be there if I am to be the man
chosen.”
“Do you want to go?”
“I wonder,” he mused, “if you’ll understand me when I tell you that,
other things being equal, I should go to-night. It’s with no sense of
failing you, and with no idea of helping her, but I promised her--that
I’d come if she called.”
“Even if there weren’t the conference,” Rhoda said, “you’re a marked man
now. You couldn’t go back to a little village in the mountains without
it being known and the reason for it blazoned. It wouldn’t do, would
it?” She could not quite succeed in making her tone judicial. Her own
eagerness palpitated back of the assumed impartiality. “You’ve wanted
the presidency too long to throw away the chance of it.”
“I’ve never wanted it,” he said.
“You don’t mean,” she demanded, her vexation rising into view, “that
I’ve urged you to seek something you haven’t desired?”
“It’s more complex than that,” he shrugged. “I suppose it’s simply that
I married the Armond hope as well as you. Old Peter set a standard for
your family which has kept you all up on your toes. If the dead see, he
must chuckle sometimes over its way of working.”
“Why?” she flared, letting her annoyance catch at a point of difference
less vital than the main issue. “He gave his whole service to his
country. He was one of the really great men of his generation, wasn’t
he? You’ve never known my father as I knew him. You’ve always let
yourself be influenced by the demagogic attacks on him. You’ve thought
that because he made a great fortune he couldn’t be an idealist. Haven’t
you seen that, if he had been a materialist, he wouldn’t have trained
his family as he did? Why, it’s been his torch that I’ve tried to keep
alight, and if I have done anything for you, Burton, it has been by that
torch’s flame.”
“You’ve done a very great deal, Rhoda,” he said. “I’m not questioning
the number or the brightness of the candles you’ve burned in my game.
I’m only questioning the value of the game itself. Power’s like money.
If you give up all else to possess it, then it possesses you.”
“But----”
“I know. I should have chosen long ago. I’m not turning back now. I owe
you that, I think. If I’m anything at all beyond a struggling lawyer in
a little city----” He broke off suddenly as the young servant came to
the library curtains.
“Senator Manning and two other gentlemen,” he announced.
They came almost on his heels, three men with the aspect of dignitaries:
Manning tall, thin, almost cadaverous, with the eye and the hand of a
Richelieu; Wilk heavy, ponderous, inscrutable as a great Buddha; Laflin,
a blend of college professor and Wall Street lawyer, hiding a predatory
keenness behind horn-rimmed spectacles. Characteristically, Stroude
felt, they fell into place, Wilk into the nearest easy chair, Manning
into an Italian seat which put him in the centre of a softly lighted
stage, and Laflin back in the shadows. After a moment of casual
conversation Rhoda rose to leave them. Stroude halted her. “I have an
idea,” he said, “that these gentlemen have come to me on an errand which
concerns you as well as myself.--Do you mind if she stays?”
“Not at all,” said Manning suavely. Laflin nodded, and old man Wilk
grunted assent. Rhoda went over beyond Laflin as far outside the group
as she could, and just out of her husband’s line of vision; but he
turned his chair a little, that he might encompass her in his sight as
Manning began to speak.
“It makes it a little easier for us,” he said, “that you have guessed
something of our mission.”
“I couldn’t help knowing,” Stroude swung back, “when every other man in
the Senate has known it for days.”
“Not definitely,” boomed Wilk. “There’s always talk, of course, and
often more smoke than fire.”
“Sometimes it’s only a screen for the protection of a real issue,”
Manning went on, “but in this case the fire is burning. You know, I am
sure, that the conference to determine the best candidate for the next
term of the presidency is to be held here in Washington to-morrow.”
“At noon,” smiled Stroude.
“Your information,” Manning said, “is speedy as well as accurate. The
time was not determined until seven o’clock this evening. Seven men know
it.”
“And their wives,” cut in Laflin, peering at Rhoda.
“We have canvassed the field thoroughly before coming to you,” Manning
continued with his air of authoritative spokesmanship. “We have
eliminated, for one reason or another, all the men who have been under
consideration. Bannister is too old. Maxwell is too radical. Vandringham
is too theatrical. Stearns is too variable. Durham is too light.
Landreau lacks the necessary tradition. Penn comes from the wrong
location. Jarvis jumped the party. The process brings us to you.”
“How about Corliss?”
“I don’t mind telling you,” Manning said, “that Carmichael is fighting
desperately for Corliss, and that, without Covinger’s help, he _might_
be able to swing the conference. Mr. Laflin, Senator Wilk, and I have
never swerved from our determination to have you. Carmichael has Bennett
and Franklin with him. Covinger is the determining vote. You have him.”
“Are you sure?”
“Certain. He’s attending on Parker’s proxy. We won that point this
afternoon. He’s solidly with you.”
“Even against Corliss? Corliss is from his state.”
“Even against him.”
“Why?”
“Well, it seems that Corliss has an old scandal against him which
frightens Covinger. He’s afraid that it might make an election issue. By
the way---- You’re not interested in these affairs, Mrs. Stroude?”
“Very vitally,” she said, “and there’s nothing you need fear to discuss
before me.”
Manning cleared his throat, and old man Wilk stirred uneasily in his
chair. Laflin’s mobile mouth twisted.
“Go on,” said Stroude. “What’s the charge?”
“Carmichael says,” Manning stated, “that there’s an old story back in
your own state, Stroude, that might explode. We’ve all known you a good
many years, all of us but Laflin, and we’ve never heard a whisper of it.
I have told him that I do not believe it. So has Senator Wilk.”
“What’s the story?” Stroude’s fingers, lighting a match, did not
tremble.
“Well, if you insist----”
“I do.”
“Carmichael says that you stole another man’s wife.”
“There was no theft about it. She came with me. Later she went back to
her husband. I left the place, started to practise law, and married. My
wife never heard the story until to-night.” He looked down at Dell
Martin’s letter, not yet read by him, topping the documents on the table
in front of him. “It’s an old story,” he said, “and one not likely to
explode unless----”
“Unless what?” Laflin demanded from the gloom.
“Unless I choose to revive it by an overt act,” Stroude retorted. “It
all happened more than twenty-five years ago in a tiny community in the
mountains. I know the people there. They’re my kind, my stock. They
won’t talk to strangers coming in. There’s only one way the newspapers
could get the story. I’d have to lead them to it.”
“That’s true,” old man Wilk grunted. “I know the mountains.”
“Then it’s settled,” Manning said with evident relief. “I fancy a story
as old as that, cut off altogether by the time between, could not be a
very appalling Banquo’s ghost.” He arose a little wearily. “You’ll be
at the conference to-morrow?” He named the time and place. “It’s
necessary that you should be. Without you, Covinger may switch. You may
have to combat Carmichael directly. You’ll be ready?”
“If I’m--if it’s necessary,” Stroude said.
The other two men stood up. Wilk unwieldily, Laflin with quick ease,
smiling at Stroude as he held out his hand. “This was a real
star-chamber session,” he said, “according to the best rules of old
Peter Armond. Wouldn’t the old pirate have loved to sit in a ten-minute
game of four men who decided the next president?”
“What do you mean?” Rhoda’s voice rang out in challenge, and Manning and
Wilk rushed to speech to head off Laflin, but he went on in almost
boyish unconcern: “Old Peter trained me, you know, and I’ve always had a
soft spot for him in my heart, although I’ve known what a wolf in
sheep’s clothing he was. We have to hand it to him, though, that with
all his grafting and his materialism, he was a great party builder. He
was the first of the Warwicks in American national life. We’re just
rattling around in his shoes, but we’ll do our best to put you over.”
He moved off, almost pushed by Manning’s eagerness to depart, but his
voice seemed to linger in the room after the three of them had gone.
Stroude sat toying with a paper-knife. Rhoda, deep in the shadows, did
not stir. A clock in the hall boomed twelve. Stroude, sighing, put his
hand over Dell Martin’s letter. Then Rhoda spoke. “Is Mr. Laflin telling
the truth about my father,” she asked Stroude, “or what he thinks is the
truth?”
“The truth.”
“That he wasn’t an idealist--a patriot?”
“Well, if he was----”
“I understand. And you’ve known it always?”
“Since before I knew you.”
“Then do you mean”--she came back to the chair beside the table--“that
through all these years my standards have meant nothing to you? That you
have known them to be false?”
“They aren’t false,” he said. “The standards are true enough.”
“But the man who gave them to me wasn’t?”
“Well, he didn’t live up to the code.”
“Your own code?”
“I’ve tried to hold to it.”
“The one Judge McLaurin taught you?”
“The very one. The one Judge Foxwell taught _him_. He got it, I believe,
from John Marshall. Don’t think about it, Rhoda. Those old boys lived in
different days. Sometimes I think that I’m an anachronism.” He sought to
smile at her, but the smile faded before her intensity. “Don’t let a
chance word of Laflin’s bother you,” he counselled. “He didn’t know you,
of course, as your father’s daughter, or he’d have cut out his tongue
before saying what he did.”
“It doesn’t matter who said it,” she declared. “It’s not that alone that
hurts; it’s the knowledge that I’ve meant so little to you that cuts
deep--now. I used to think, Burt, even when I knew that you didn’t love
me, that I was giving you something fine and splendid. I let myself
believe that the Armond tradition was the beacon which was lighting your
way. I thought that if I couldn’t give you anything else, I was at least
giving you that torch. And now I find out that the light I was holding
for you was only marsh fire. You’ve never needed me!” Her voice rose to
accusation.
“Oh, yes,” he countered, but he could not put verity into his tone.
“No,” she said. “You don’t owe me anything for the playing of the game.
I’ve loved that for itself.”
“But you thought you were giving me the other----”
“And I wasn’t. It’s really a joke, isn’t it? A buccaneer teaching his
family the Golden Rule, and the family passing it on!”
“It isn’t a joke, Rhoda. I’ve always taken it in the measure of your
intention.”
“And been sorry for me?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve never sought pity.”
“None of us do.”
“It’s funny, isn’t it,” she mused, “that one woman who loved you set you
free, so that another woman whom you didn’t love might take away that
freedom?”
“I’ve had as much freedom as most men,” he said, but his eyes went back
to the crumpled missive. Rhoda’s glance, following his, saw its
significance. “Read it,” she challenged him. He hesitated an instant, as
if doubting his desire to read it before her watchfulness, then drew the
letter from its envelope.
Pale tracing on common paper met his gaze. “_Burt_,” he read, “_you’re a
great man now, and maybe you’ve forgotten me. I’ve never forgotten you.
Every morning and every night I’ve prayed for you. Boyce has been good
to me, better than I deserved; but oh, Burt, all that my life has been
since I left you is just a hope that eternity will bring us together
again. I used to believe it would, but I’m getting afraid, now that it’s
coming near. Won’t you come to me for just one hour before I go? You
told me once that hell wouldn’t keep you if I_----”
Before the pathos of the call something in Stroude’s soul trembled. He
didn’t love Dell now, he told himself as he came to the end of the page.
He hadn’t loved her in twenty years. There was no thrill of remembered
passion rising from the white page to stir his heart, but there was
something deeper, more poignant than romance in the plea which this
woman in the mountains had sent him across time and distance. Through
those long years she had never wavered in her belief in him and in the
promise he had made to her. Out of the depths of his spirit he had told
her that he would come to her if she should ever need him. It was a
promise given not only to the woman who had heard and heeded it, but to
the God of his faith and his fathers. If he failed to keep it, no matter
what the cost, he would be violating more than an old love. He would be
tearing down his own code. Through whatever glory might come to him he
would know himself as a man who had failed in the one virtue on which he
had always prided himself, the keeping of his word. It was an oath he
had taken to Dell Martin, just as he would take an oath to uphold the
Constitution of the United States if--if he climbed the mountain of
Rhoda’s vision!
Realization of the immediacy of his problem came to him with the sight
of his wife’s fan, broken, lying beyond the letter in his hand. He
looked up to find Rhoda’s eyes studying him. But he must not fail her,
he told himself, snatching at the straw of conventionality in the
current of emotion. The very fact that he had not given her love put him
under obligation to her. Because of her, because of the expectations
she had harboured for him, because of the time and thought and labour
she had spent for the advancement she had thought he sought, because of
her very disillusionment now, he could not fail her. He must go to the
conference, even if it meant the breaking of a vow he had made before
the altar of his one great love. It was part of the price, he reasoned,
that all men pay for power; but he felt that something within him was
dying as he turned the page of Dell Martin’s letter.
“--_if I called for you_,” he picked up the thread. “_That was why I
didn’t call when I needed you before, when our boy was born. I couldn’t
let you know about him. You’d never have let me go if you’d known. But
it doesn’t matter now, does it? And oh, Burt, I need you so! If you’ll
only hold my hand again, I won’t fear the crossing. And perhaps when you
come to die, you’ll find the going easier if you have the memory of this
hour you’ll give me. Won’t you come?_” It was signed waveringly,
“_Dell_.”
He folded it back into the envelope, and put it in his pocket. “You
aren’t going?” Rhoda asked him, her voice strangely strained.
“Yes,” he said, “I’m going.”
“But to-morrow----”
“It’s the long years afterward I’m thinking of,” he told her.
“And the nomination----”
“Sometimes the things we put out of our lives,” he said, “are the only
things we really keep.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “I can’t understand you at all to-night,
Burton. Why should a man give up the highest honour a nation can give
him----”
“There are other kinds of honour, Rhoda.”
“To go to a woman he hasn’t seen for twenty-five years?”
“She is the----” he began, then halted quickly in the fear of the hurt
his word might give her.
“I understand,” she said.
She picked up her broken fan, and moved toward the door, but before she
reached it, turned back. Her face was stonily calm. “Shall I telephone
Senator Manning in the morning that you will not be there?” she asked
him.
“If you will,” he said.
As his car bore him past the shadowy white pile on the other side of the
Square, Stroude sighed. A man does not live with a dream--even the dream
of another--through season after season without catching some gleam of
its radiance; but in Boyce Martin’s straight look as he met him at the
train gate, Stroude began to drink of his justification.
“You Stroudes always kept your word,” the other man said.
“We aim to,” said Stroude, unconsciously slipping back into the
vernacular of his youth. “It was her letter,” he explained. “I never
knew about the boy.”
“I know,” said Martin. “I--I’ve loved him as if he’d been the child I’ve
never had. That’s why I came for you.” He held out his hand and Stroude
grasped it. “You’re one of us, after all.”
As the train slid past the Potomac and threaded the low pines of the
Virginia river lands, Stroude pondered the mountaineer’s tribute. In the
light of it he saw the path to Dell Martin’s cabin leading higher than
the way across the Square. For the first time in many years he felt the
surge of freedom rising in his soul. A thousand shackles fell away as
the last lights of Washington slid down on the horizon.
THE ONE HUNDRED DOLLAR BILL
BY BOOTH TARKINGTON
From _McCall’s_
The new one hundred dollar bill, clean and green, freshening the heart
with the colour of springtime, slid over the glass of the teller’s
counter and passed under his grille to a fat hand, dingy on the
knuckles, but brightened by a flawed diamond. This interesting hand was
a part of one of those men who seem to have too much fattened muscle for
their clothes: his shoulders distended his overcoat; his calves strained
the sprightly checked cloth, a little soiled, of his trousers; his short
neck bulged above the glossy collar. His hat, round and black as a pot
and appropriately small, he wore slightly obliqued, while under its
curled brim his small eyes twinkled surreptitiously between those upper
and nether puffs of flesh that mark the too faithful practitioner of
unhallowed gaieties. Such was the first individual owner of the new one
hundred dollar bill, and he at once did what might have been expected of
him.
Moving away from the teller’s grille, he made a cylindrical packet of
bills smaller in value--“ones” and “fives”--then placed round them, as a
wrapper, the beautiful one hundred dollar bill, snapped a rubber band
over it; and the desired inference was plain: a roll all of hundred
dollar bills, inside as well as outside. Something more was plain, too:
obviously the man’s small head had a sportive plan in it, for the
twinkle between his eye puffs hinted of liquor in the offing and lively
women impressed by a show of masterly riches. Here, in brief, was a man
who meant to make a night of it, who would feast, dazzle, compel
deference and be loved. For money gives power, and power is loved; no
doubt he would be loved. He was happy, and went out of the bank
believing that money is made for joy.
So little should we be certain of our happiness in this world. The
splendid one hundred dollar bill was taken from him untimely, before
nightfall that very evening. At the corner of two busy streets he parted
with it to the law, though in a mood of excruciating reluctance and only
after a cold-blooded threatening on the part of the lawyer. This latter
walked away thoughtfully with the one hundred dollar bill, not now quite
so clean, in his pocket.
Collinson was the lawyer’s name, and in years he was only twenty-eight,
but already of the slightly harried appearance that marks the young
husband who begins to suspect that the better part of his life was his
bachelorhood. His dark, ready-made clothes, his twice soled shoes, and
his hair, which was too long for a neat and businesslike aspect, were
symptoms of necessary economy; but he did not wear the eager look of a
man who saves to “get on for himself.” Collinson’s look was that of an
employed man who only deepens his rut with his pacing of it.
An employed man he was, indeed; a lawyer without much hope of ever
seeing his name on the door or on the letters of the firm that employed
him, and his most important work was the collection of small debts. This
one hundred dollar bill now in his pocket was such a collection, small
to the firm and the client, though of a noble size to himself and the
long-pursued debtor from whom he had just collected it.
The banks were closed; so was the office, for it was six o’clock and
Collinson was on his way home when by chance he encountered the debtor:
there was nothing to do but to keep the bill overnight. This was no
hardship, however, as he had a faint pleasure in the unfamiliar
experience of walking home with such a thing in his pocket; and he felt
a little important by proxy when he thought of it.
Upon the city the November evening had come down dark and moist. Lighted
windows and street lamps appeared and disappeared in the altering
thicknesses of fog, but at intervals, as Collinson walked on northward,
he passed a small shop, or a cluster of shops, where the light was close
to him and bright, and at one of these oases of illumination he lingered
a moment, with a thought to buy a toy in the window for his
three-year-old little girl. The toy was a gaily coloured acrobatic
monkey that willingly climbed up and down a string, and he knew that the
“baby,” as he and his wife still called their child, would scream with
delight at the sight of it. He hesitated, staring into the window rather
longingly, and wondering if he ought to make such a purchase. He had
twelve dollars of his own in his pocket, but the toy was marked “35
cents,” and he decided he could not afford it. So he sighed and went on,
turning presently into a darker street.
When he reached home, the baby was crying over some inward perplexity
not to be explained; and his wife, pretty and a little frowzy, was as
usual, and as he had expected. That is to say, he found her irritated by
cooking, bored by the baby, and puzzled by the dull life she led. Other
women, it appeared, had happy and luxurious homes, and during the
malnutritious dinner she had prepared she mentioned many such women by
name, laying particular stress upon the achievements of their husbands.
Why should she (“alone,” as she put it) lead the life she did in one
room and a kitchenette, without even being able to afford to go to the
movies more than once or twice a month? Mrs. Theodore Thompson’s husband
had bought a perfectly beautiful little sedan automobile; he gave his
wife everything she wanted. Mrs. Will Gregory had merely mentioned that
her old Hudson seal coat was wearing a little, and her husband had
instantly said: “What’ll a new one come to, girlie? Four or five
hundred? Run and get it!” Why were other women’s husbands like that--and
why, oh, why--was hers like _this_?”
“My goodness!” he said. “You talk as if I had sedans and sealskin coats
and theatre tickets _on_ me! Well, I haven’t; that’s all!”
“Then go out and get ’em!” she said fiercely. “Go out and get ’em!”
“What with?” he inquired. “I have twelve dollars in my pocket, and a
balance of seventeen dollars at the bank; that’s twenty-nine. I get
twenty-five from the office day after to-morrow--Saturday; that makes
fifty-four; but we have to pay forty-five for rent on Monday; so that’ll
leave us nine dollars. Shall I buy you a sedan and a sealskin coat on
Tuesday, out of the nine?”