The newspapers were so extravagant in their abuse of Governor Altgeld
for his pardon of the anarchists that one not knowing the facts might
have received the impression that the Governor had already pardoned
most of the prisoners in the penitentiary, and would presently pardon
those that remained, provided the crimes they had committed, or were
said to have committed, had been heinous enough. The fact was that he
issued no more pardons, proportionately at least, than the governors
who preceded him, since notwithstanding the incessant grinding of
society’s machinery of vengeance the populations of prisons grow with
the populations outside of them.
But partizanship was intense in those days; and the fact that Governor
Altgeld was responsible for such a hegira from the Capitol at
Springfield as Colonel McKenzie had longed to behold in the Capitol
at Frankfort exacerbated the bitter feeling. The sentiment thus
created, however, did increase the hopes of convicts, and the Governor
was continually importuned by their friends--those of them that had
friends, which was apt to be a pitifully small percentage of the whole
number--to give them back their liberty. A few weeks after the pardons
had been issued to the anarchists, George Brennan of Braidwood, then a
clerk in the State House, told me a moving story of a young man of his
acquaintance, who was then confined in the penitentiary at Joliet. The
young man was dying of tuberculosis, and his mother, having no other
hope than that he might be released to die at home, had made her appeal
to Brennan, and he had seen to the filing of an application in due
form, and now he asked me if I would not call the Governor’s attention
to it. I got out the great blue envelope containing the thin papers in
the case--they were as few as the young man’s friends--and took them
over to the Governor, but no sooner had I laid them on his desk and
made the first hesitating and tentative approach to the subject, than I
divined the moment to be wholly inauspicious. The Governor did not even
look at the papers, he did not even touch the big blue linen envelope,
but shook his head and said:
“No, no, I will not pardon any more. The people are opposed to it; they
do not believe in mercy; they love revenge; they want the prisoners
punished to the bitterest extremity.”
I did not then know how right he was in his cynical generalization,
though I did know that his decision was so far from his own heart
that it was no decision at all, but merely the natural human reaction
against all the venom that had been voided upon him, and I went away
then, and told Brennan that we must wait until the Governor was in
another mood.
Three or four days afterward I met the Governor one morning as he
was passing through the rotunda of the State House, his head bent
in habitual abstraction, and seeing me in what seemed always some
subconscious way he stopped and said:
“Oh, by the way: that pardon case you spoke of the other morning--I
was somewhat hasty I fear, and out of humor. If you’ll get the papers
I’ll see what can be done.”
I knew of course what could be done, and knew then that it would be
done, and I made haste to get the papers, which had been kept on my
desk awaiting that propitious season which I had the faith to feel
would come sooner or later, though I had not expected it to come quite
so soon as that. I already anticipated the gladness that would light up
Brennan’s good Irish face when I handed him the pardon for his friend,
and I could dramatize the scene in that miner’s cottage in Braidwood
when the pardoned boy flew to his mother’s arms. I intended to say
nothing then to Brennan, however, but to wait until the pardon, signed
and sealed, could be delivered into his hands, but as I was going
across the hall to the Governor’s chambers I encountered Brennan, and
then of course could not hold back the good news. And so I told him,
looking into his blue eyes to behold the first ripple of the smile
I expected to see spread over his face; but there was no smile. He
regarded me quite soberly, shook his head, and said:
“It’s too late now.”
And he drew from his pocket a telegram, and, without any need to read
it, said:
“He died last night.”
I took the papers back and had them filed away among those cases that
had been finally disposed of, though that formality could not dispose
of the case for me. The Governor was waiting for the papers, and at
last when the morning had almost worn away I went over to his chambers
to add another fardel to that heavy load which I had thought it was to
be my lot that day to see lightened in the doing of an act of grace and
pity. I told him as he sat alone at his desk, and the shade of sorrow
deepened a moment on his pale face; but he said nothing, and I was glad
to go.
The poor little tragedy had its impressions for me, and it was not
long until I thought I saw in it the motive of a story, which at once
I began to write. The theme was the embarrassment which a governor’s
conscience created for him because during a critical campaign he knew
it to be his duty to pardon a notorious convict,--and I invented the
situations and expedients to bear the tale along to that thrilling
climax in which the governor was delivered out of his difficulty by
the most opportune death of the convict, whom a higher hand could
dramatically be said to have pardoned. I worked very hard on the story,
and thought it pretty fine, and I sent it away at last to an eastern
magazine. And then I waited, and at length a letter came saying that
the story was well enough thought of in that editorial room to hold
it until the editor-in-chief should return from Europe and hand down
a final decision. I waited for weeks, and then one morning there on
my desk was an envelope, ominous in its bigness; it was one of those
letters you do not have to open in order to read them, because you
know what they say; I knew my manuscript had come back. But when I
opened the package, instead of the familiar slip of rejection, there
was a letter; the editor liked the story, saw much in it, he said,
but felt--and quite rightly I am sure--that its ending, with the
convict dying in the very nick of time to save the governor from his
embarrassment, was an evasion of the whole moral issue; besides, the
conclusion was too melodramatic,--that was the word he used,--and would
I change it?
The day after all was bright and cheerful; I remember it well, the
sun lying on the State House lawns, their green dotted with the gold
of dandelions, and the trees twisting their leaves almost rapturously
in a sparkling air we did not often breathe on those humid prairies.
And--though this has nothing whatever to do with the case, and enters
it only as one of those incidents that linger in the memory--William
Jennings Bryan was there that day, calling on the Governor and the
Secretary of State. He was then a young congressman from Nebraska, and
he made a speech; but I was interested in the story far more than in
politics or any speech about it, even the brilliant speech of a man
who so soon, and with such remarkable _élan_, was to charge across the
country on the hosts of privilege.
And I changed the story; I made that poor harried governor drain
his bitter cup of duty to the lees, and gave the story an ending
so remorselessly logical, so true to the facts and fates of human
experience, that it might have been as depressing as one of Hardy’s
“Little Ironies”--could it have resembled them in any other way,
which of course it could not, unless it were in that imitation with
which the last author I had been reading was pretty sure though all
unconsciously to be flattered. I changed the story, and sent the MS.
back to the waiting editor; and it was returned as the string snaps
back to the bow, with a letter that showed plainly that his interest in
the tale had all evaporated. He had no regrets, it appeared, save one
perhaps, since he concluded his letter by saying:
“Besides, you have destroyed the fine dramatic ending which the story
possessed in its first draft.”
The experience uprooted another of society’s oak-trees for me, and
it has continued to lie there, with the roots of its infallibility
withering whitely in the air, though humanity still somehow continues
to arrange itself about the institution as best it can. This process
of uprooting, I suppose, goes on in life to the very end; but it is
wholesome after all, since life grows somehow easier after one has
learned that human beings are all pretty human and pretty much alike
in their humanness, and the great service of literature to mankind has
been, and more and more will be, I hope, to teach human beings this
salutary and consoling lesson.
But, in no way despairing, I kept the manuscript by me, and when I
was not trying to write other stories I was retouching it, until in
the end its fate was almost that of the portrait which the artist in
one of Balzac’s stories kept on trying to improve until it was but
a meaningless scumble of gray, with no likeness to anything in this
universe. Its fate was not quite that bad, however, since it made for
me a friend.