The incident, like that on which the story itself was founded, occurred
in the course of another effort to induce the Governor to save a poor
wretch from the gallows. The autumn preceding, just when the World’s
Fair at Chicago was at its apogee, a half-crazed boy had assassinated
Carter Harrison, the old mayor of that city, and had been promptly
tried and condemned to death. The time for the execution of the
sentence drew on, and two or three days before the black event I had a
telegram from Peter Dunne and other newspaper friends in Chicago asking
me to urge the governor, or the acting governor as it happened at that
time to be, to commute the sentence to one of imprisonment for life.
The boy, so the telegrams said, was clearly insane, and had been at the
time of his crazy and desperate deed; his case had not been presented
with the skill that might have saved him, or at least might have saved
another in such a plight; there had been the customary hue and cry, the
most cherished process of the English law, “and,” Dunne concluded, “do
get Joe Gill to let him off.”
Joe Gill was Joseph B. Gill, the young Lieutenant-Governor of the
state, and because Governor Altgeld was just then out of the state he
was on the bridge as acting governor. Gill had been one of the Immortal
101, and as a representative had made a record in support of certain
humane measures in behalf of the miners of the state. The newspaper
correspondents had had pleasure in celebrating him and his work in
their despatches, and because of his popularity among the miners, to
say nothing of his popularity among the newspaper men, he had been
nominated for lieutenant-governor on the ticket with Altgeld. There was
in our relations a _camaraderie_ which put any thought of presumption
out of the question; besides, I was always so much opposed to the
killing of human beings, especially to that peculiarly horrible form of
killing which the state deliberately and in cold blood commits under
the euphemism of “capital punishment,” that I was always ready to ask
any governor to commute a sentence of death that had been pronounced
against anybody; so that it seemed a simple matter to ask Joe Gill,
himself the heart of kindness, to save the life of this boy whose soul
had wandered so desperately astray in the clouds which darkened it.
Early the next morning--the telegrams had come at night--I went over
to the governor’s office, and the governor’s private secretary told
me that Lieutenant-Governor Gill had not yet appeared, and as a good
secretary, anxious to protect his chief, he asked:
“What do you want to see him about?”
“This Prendergast they’re going to hang in Chicago next Friday.”
At this a man sitting in the room near the secretary’s desk looked up
with a sudden access of intense interest; and, starting from his chair
and transfixing me with a sharp glance, he asked:
“What interest have you in the Prendergast case?”
“None,” I said, “except that I don’t want to have him, or anybody,
hanged.”
On the man’s face, tired, with the expression of world-weariness life
gives to the countenance behind which there has been too much serious
contemplation of life, a face that seemed prematurely wrinkled, there
suddenly appeared a smile as winning as a woman’s, and he said in a
voice that had the timbre of human sympathy and the humor of a peculiar
drawl:
“Well, you’re all right, then.”
It thereupon occurred to the governor’s secretary to introduce us, and
so I made the acquaintance of Clarence Darrow. He had taken it upon
himself to neglect his duties as the attorney of some of the railroads
and other large corporations in Chicago long enough to come down to
Springfield on his own initiative and responsibility to plead with the
Governor for this lad’s life (he was always going on some such Quixotic
errand of mercy for the poor and the friendless), and we retired to the
governor’s ante-chamber to await the coming of Gill. We talked for a
while about the Prendergast case, which might have had more sympathetic
consideration had it not persisted as the Carter Harrison case in
the mind of that public, which when its latent spirit of vengeance
is aroused can so easily become the mob, but it was not long until I
discovered that Darrow had read books other than those of the law,
and for an hour we talked of Tolstoy and the other great Russians,
and of Thomas Hardy and of Mr. Howells, to enumerate no more of the
long catalogue of those realists whom we liked in common, and when I
discovered that he actually knew Mr. Howells, knew him personally, as
the saying is, I could feel that poor Prendergast, though I had never
seen him in my life, or scarcely ever thought of him until the night
before, had done me one service at least, and it made me all the more
anxious to save him.
When Joe Gill’s tall Egyptian form came swinging into the room our
talk of books was interrupted long enough to arrange for a hearing
that afternoon, and then we resumed our talk, and it endured through
luncheon and after, and I left him only long enough to have a
conversation with Gill and to ask him as a sort of personal favor to an
old friend to spare the boy’s life.
At two o’clock the hearing was called. The reporters and the governor’s
secretary and George Brennan and I made the audience, and Gill sat
up erectly in the governor’s chair to hear the appeal. Darrow asked
me the proper address for a governor, and I said since this was the
lieutenant-governor I thought “Your Excellency” would be propitiative,
and Darrow made one of those eloquent appeals for mercy of which he
is the complete master. It moved us all, but the Lieutenant-Governor
gathered himself together and refused it, and Darrow went back to
Chicago to unfold those legal technicalities which make our law
so superior to other forms in that they can stay the hand of its
vengeance. He did not succeed in the end, and the boy was hanged, and
murder has gone on in Chicago since, I understand, the same as before.
But Darrow could not leave Springfield until midnight of that day, and
we talked about books all the evening, and when he boarded his train
he had in his valise the MS. of my story about another governor and
another pardon, concerning which he was charged to answer a certain
question to which all my doubts and perplexities could be reduced,
namely: “Is it worth while, and if not, is there any use in going on
and trying to write one that is?”
I had to wait almost as long for his decision as though he had been an
editor himself, but when I called at his office in Chicago one morning
in the autumn to get the MS., and he told me that his answer to my
question was “yes,” and that he would, if I agreed, send the story to
Mr. Howells, I was as happy as though he had been an editor and had
accepted it for publication. I could not agree to its being sent on to
weary Mr. Howells, but took it back with me to Springfield, in hope, if
not in confidence.