in that district had at last become more than suspicious of the honesty
and fidelity of their chosen leaders. He had come at just the right
time. And he now won again--an overwhelming victory that could not be
reversed by election frauds, with Branagan no longer assenting and
assisting--a victory that frightened Reichman not only for his damaged
machine but also for his personal safety; for, a Democratic county
prosecutor, a subtle henchman of Branagan’s, had been elected along
with Helm, and Reichman knew that Judge Powers would desert him the
instant it became to his interest so to do.
“No wonder,” replied Helm, with a smile. “I haven’t any place yet.
I’m trying to find my place.... If the choice in, say, Lincoln’s
day, had been what it is now--between serving a knave and serving a
fool--between serving a knave that’s owned by its money and serving a
fool that’s enslaved to the knave by its folly--if Abe Lincoln had had
choice between those two rotten apples, I wonder which he would have
chosen?”
“Lincoln was a practical man,” said Branagan. “He had all the cranks
and romantic reformers down on him. Don’t you believe what the
histories say. I _know_ because I lived then.”
“Yes--he was a practical man,” said Helm. “He must have been, for he
won.”
“And I reckon you’ll win, too.”
“Yes,” said Helm, with a humorous drawl, “I reckon I will.”
The excitement of boss over campaign and victory is the same in kind
as the excitement of humblest, most fatuous partisan--though it is
vastly different in degree. Branagan had been hypnotized out of his
sordidness--for the moment--by the issues and by Helm. But even as he
arranged his mind for talking business with Reichman he returned to
his normal state; and when he and the Republican boss got together
for the grand pow-wow he was wondering at his own sentimentality of
a few days before. The chief article of the treaty of peace was no
more George Helm. Branagan agreed with a qualm and a genuine regret,
but he agreed as one obeying the plain mandate of the instinct of
self-preservation.
“I wish to God we could get him out of the Senate,” said Reichman. “Of
course our boys in charge up at the capital will see that he don’t get
a chance to say much or to do anything. Still, I wish he was back in
the ranks--away back.”
“Well--he will be in two years,” said Branagan. “And what’s two years
in politics?”
“That’s right,” assented Reichman. “Two years isn’t any time,
anywhere.”
“Except in jail,” said Branagan, with a loud laugh.
Reichman conceded only the feeblest of smiles to this coarse jest,
savoring of innuendo. “Those sort of chaps,” pursued he, “have to be
caught young and put out of business. I’ve attended to a dozen of ’em
in the last ten years.”
“I’d never ’a touched him,” said Branagan, “after that first campaign,
if I hadn’t been put in a position where I was forced to do it.”
“That was my fault, Pat, I admit,” said Reichman. “But it won’t occur
again.”
“I know it, Emil,” said Pat. “We’ve both had our lesson.... I won’t say
nothin’ to Helm. I’ll keep him jollied along until his term’s about up.”
“Then--over he drops,” laughed Reichman.
Branagan did not laugh. He liked Helm. But he did nod--and Branagan’s
nod was as good as his word, and his word he had never broken.
III
“THERE GOES A MAN”
Mrs. Salfield and Mrs. Ramon, leaders in Cincinnati’s fashionable
society, were disposed in a comfortable corner of Mrs. Salfield’s
ballroom. They were sheltered from rheumatism-provoking draughts. They
were at conversational range from the music. They commanded a full
view of the beautiful ball, even of the supper room, where a dozen men
were “mopping up the champagne instead of doing their dancing duty,”
as Mrs. Ramon put it. Mrs. Ramon, posing as of the younger generation,
went in--somewhat awkwardly--for the “picturesque” in language. Mrs.
Salfield, frankly an old woman, tolerated slang as she tolerated
rowdy modern manners and “disgraceful, not to say indecent exposure in
ball dresses”; but in her own person she adhered to the old fashions
of moderately low dresses and moderately incorrect English. Said Mrs.
Ramon:
“There goes that charming grandniece of yours. How graceful she is. I
thought you told me she was twenty-nine.”
“Eleanor Clearwater--twenty-nine!” exclaimed Mrs. Salfield. “She’s not
yet twenty-four.”
“Oh, I remember, you said she _looked_ twenty-nine--so
serious--dignified--reserved--really icy. But that was only two months
ago. She looks eighteen now. She’s been away--hasn’t she?”
“Just returned,” said Mrs. Salfield.
“It did her a world of good--freshened her up--no, softened--no, I mean
warmed.”
“She’s been visiting the Hollisters, down at Harrison.”
“A country town. I supposed she’d been to baths or springs or
something. Really the change in her is quite miraculous. She has waked
up.”
“Eleanor never was what one’d call sleepy,” said Mrs. Salfield, rather
stiffly.
“Oh, she was always interested in _things_--books, serious
subjects--too much so for my taste. But you know what I mean. She
looks _human_--looks as if she had a human interest. It was the one
thing lacking to make her entirely interesting and beautiful--to give
her magnetism. You notice how the men flock about her. She’s having
a triumph. Why, she looks round--looks at the men--in a positively
flirtatious way. Really, Clara, it’s too wonderful. _What_ has happened
to her?”
“What could happen to a girl in Harrison? Nothing but Bart Hollister.”
“It couldn’t be Bart,” said Mrs. Ramon.
“It isn’t anybody,” said Mrs. Salfield. “It’s simply a case of
coming-to a little late. So many young people take life too solemnly at
first. They feel responsible for it.”
The phenomenon thus noted by Mrs. Ramon had escaped no one’s eyes.
Even Eleanor’s father, the absorbed George Clearwater, United States
Senator and “lumber king,” had seen it. Eleanor Clearwater had gone
to Harrison, a reserved, cool, not to say cold young woman, with an
air that made her seem years older than she was, and with an interest
in men so faint that it discouraged all but two dauntless fortune
hunters--who were promptly sent to look further. She had come back,
a lively, coquettish person, with a modern tendency to audacities
in dress and speech. Every one wondered; no one could explain. She
could have explained, but she would not have admitted the truth even
to herself. Four men proposed within two weeks after her return. She
refused them all--in a gay, mocking way, thus enabling them to feel
that they had not humiliated themselves, that she had imagined they
were proposing merely to make interesting conversation.
The cause she would not admit? A lank, homely, ill dressed country
town lawyer, one George Helm. The year before he had been the joke
of Harrison because of his absurd beard and his seedy suit with
its flowing tails. The shaving of the beard, the changing of the
“statesman’s frock” for an ill fitting sack suit, two campaigns in
which he had developed power and originality as a speaker, an election
to the State Senate by attacking “everything that was respectable
and decent,” that is, by telling the truth about the upper-class
grafters--these circumstances had combined to make him a considerable
and serious figure in Harrison. But for such as the Hollisters and
the Clearwaters he remained a bumpkin, a demagogue, an impossible
lower-class person.
Yet he had wrought the wondrous, proposal-fraught change in Miss
Clearwater. And he had done it by impudently pausing at her phaeton in
Harrison’s main street and telling her, with exasperating indifference
to her icy manner, that he could marry her if he wished but that he had
no place in his life for such a person as she.
Why had this transformed her? For two reasons, both important to those
men who would fain have influence over one--or more--of the female sex.
The first is, that he had been able to impress upon her the fact that
he was a worth-while person. The second is, that he, being serious and
simple, had shown her that he, the man worth-while, meant it when he
said she was not a girl a worth-while man would care to marry. With
these two propositions firmly fixed in her head, Eleanor Clearwater
could not fail to see that it was “up to” her to demonstrate her power
over man.
She invited proposals--proposals not too obviously incited chiefly by
her charms as an heiress. She got the proposals. But still she was
not satisfied. There was one man--a homely man, but a man with far
and away the handsomest soul she had ever seen--simple, proud, honest
and fearless--looking from eyes that were the more beautiful for the
rugged homeliness of the rest of his face. This man whom her woman’s
heart defiantly told her was supremely worth-while--this man had said
_she_ was not worth-while. Therefore, there were worlds still defiantly
unconquered--which meant that nothing was conquered. It irritated
her--as her father had been irritated until all the lumber interests
had been gathered in under his lordship. It irritated her yet more
profoundly that such an absurdity as this gentle and friendly disdain
of bucolic homeliness should irritate her. But she could not change her
nature.
He had set her to thinking about him. He had her worried, as the saying
is. And when a man gets a woman in that state, she will not emerge from
it until something definite has occurred.
Woman has little to think about but men--thanks to a social system
cunningly contrived by man for his own benefit. She thinks of man in
general until she centers upon one man. She then thinks of him until
she finds him out. When that comes to pass, she goes back to men in
general, until a new personal interest develops. This, so long as any
remnant of charm gives her hope. Man is woman’s career. Not so with
men; not so with George Helm, State Senator-elect and desperately in
earnest about making a career.
* * * * *
While Eleanor Clearwater was sleeping away the excitements of the
Salfield ball in her attractive bedroom in the Clearwater palace,
George Helm was at work several hundred miles away in his dingy back
office in the Masonic Building at Harrison. When she should be awakened
by her maid to dress for her first engagement of the day, she would
soon be thinking of George Helm--thinking how ugly and obscure and
ungainly he was--and what magnetic eyes he had. Thinking the more, the
more she tried not to think. But George Helm was not thinking of her
at all.
He was sitting beside the rickety old table in a wooden chair, a
kitchen chair. It was tilted back and Helm’s long lank legs were
tangled up with each other and with the rungs in amazing twists.
Perhaps you have happened to know an occasional man--or woman--whose
every act and trick of manner had an inexplicable fascination.
When George Helm was self-conscious, he had no more magnetism
than is inseparable from intelligent, sympathetic good nature
sunning in a kindly keen sense of humor. But the instant he lost
self-consciousness--as he always did on the platform, and as he was
more and more doing in private life, now that he had begun to have
success--that instant he became a magnet, one of those human magnets
who interest you, no matter what they do, and in repose. Even in
bed--that too short, sagging bed in the attic of Mrs. Beaver’s
boarding-house--even as he lay doubled up, there was the fascination of
the unique, the perfectly natural and unassuming.
As he sat twisted in and upon the wobbly kitchen chair, his friend,
lazy Bill Desbrough, from across the hall, looked in every few minutes,
hoping George would encourage him to enter. It was curious about
George Helm, how in spite of his lack of what passes for dignity, no
one ever--even in the days when he was thought to be a joke--“the boy
with that beard”--no one ever ventured to interrupt him without an
encouraging look from those deep-set blue-gray eyes.
At last George looked up and smiled as Bill stood in the doorway. He
said:
“Come in, you loafer.”
“How’s State Senator-elect Helm to-day?” inquired Bill, lounging in,
his hands in his pockets, his pipe hanging from the corner of his
mouth. “How does it feel to be famous?”
“To be less obscure,” corrected George. He had a passion--and a
genius--for accuracy.
“To be famous,” insisted Desbrough.
“Do you know who is State Senator for the district adjoining this--on
either side?--or to the north or south?”
Bill Desbrough’s laugh was confession.
“There are fifty State Senators in this State alone,” continued George.
“There are forty-eight States in the Union. Fifty times forty-eight----”
“Why are you trying to make yourself out so small?”
“Or--to look at it another way, I belong to the Democratic boss of
Harrison--Pat Branagan, saloon-keeper. He belongs to the Republican
boss, Al Reichman. Al belongs to Senator Harvey Sayler, the State boss.
Sayler belongs to the big monopolistic combines that center in Wall
Street. They belong to a dozen big plutocrats who belong to about three
of their number. And those three belong to their money--do what it
says, say and think what it tells ’em to.”
“I hope you’re happy now,” said Bill. “You’ve made yourself out to be
about equal to a patch on the ragged pant-leg of some cotton-picking
coon working for the sub-lessee of a mortgaged farm in a poor corner of
Arkansas.”
“Or, to look at it another way,” continued Helm, untwisting his legs,
immediately to re-knot them in an even more intricate tangle, “a State
Senator gets six dollars a day while the Legislature’s in session. It
meets for sixty days every two years. His term’s four years. So, my
money value as the State sees it is one hundred and eighty dollars a
year--about fifty cents a day.”
“Well, I hope you’ve shrunk yourself back to normal human size,” said
his friend. “I suppose that’s what you’re doing this for.”
“No, Bill. To locate myself. I want to see just where I stand. The
slave of a slave of a slave of a slave of a slave of a slave of a
slave--I think that’s the right degree--and at fifty cents a day.”
“Branagan gives you some pretty good law cases,” suggested Bill.
Helm eyed him somberly.
“You know you don’t want to be too _damn_ independent, old man,”
continued Bill.
“To locate myself,” pursued Helm, as if Bill had not spoken. “I want to
see just how far I’ve got to go before----”
He paused here. Said Bill--not altogether in jest, “Before you’re
President of the U. S. A.?”
“No,” said George gravely. “Before I’m a man. Before I belong to
myself.” He laughed with his peculiar illumination of the whole face
apparently from the light of the eyes. “You see, Bill, I’m aiming to go
further than most Presidents--especially these latter-day chaps.”
“Further than most plutocrats,” said Desbrough. “As you said, _they_
belong to their boodle bags.... You haven’t broken with Branagan?”
“Not yet,” said Helm. “I’ll have to, soon after the Legislature opens.
You see, we’re the minority, and nowadays the majority-boss always uses
the minority votes to put through whatever dirty business a lot of his
men have to be let off from voting for.”
“Well--don’t break with good old Pat till you have to.”
“I’ll get all I can first, you may be sure,” said Helm. “I’m a
practical man--that is, I’m a practical politician, with a dangerous,
incurable hankering for being a man--self-owned and self-bossed.”
“You give Branagan good legal service for what he pays you.”
“And he hasn’t yet asked me to do any law work that I’ve not been able
to stand for.”
“Pat’s a little afraid of you,” declared Desbrough. “He knows how
strong you are with the people.”
Helm slowly shook his head. “I don’t deceive myself. He’s saving
me till he really needs me.” He straightened out his long figure
deliberately, rose and began to pace up and down the office. “It’s
all a question of money, Bill. In this day a man has got to have an
independence--or do what some other man says.”
“If I could speak as you can--and hold the crowds--and draw in their
votes---- You, a Democrat, elected from this district of shell-back
Republicans who talk about the Civil War as if Morgan was still raiding
the State.” Bill laughed. “Why don’t you drop politics, George? Why
fool with the silly game? The people’ll never learn anything. They
can always be buncoed--the asses! What did God make ’em for? To work
like hell all day and then hand over most of what they’ve made to some
clever chap--and thank him for taking it.”
“That used to be so,” replied Helm. “But they’re waking up, Bill. All
they need is the right kind of leaders.”
“Meaning you?”
“Meaning me,” said Helm. And his expression far removed his statement
from vanity or egotism.
Desbrough puffed at his pipe in silence. Presently he said:
“You can count me in, George--if there’s anything I can do.”
They did not shake hands. They exchanged no gushing remarks. They
did not look at each other with exalted sentimentality. They simply
looked--then George grinned and nodded--and said:
“All right, Bill. You’re in.”
A long silence. Then Desbrough:
“Not that I believe in the game, old man. I don’t. I despise the
people. I’d go in with the wise boys who rob them if I didn’t happen to
have inherited enough to slop along on.”
“How much have you got?” said George--a necessary question, as this was
to be a partnership.
“Nineteen hundred and fifty a year--county bonds and a farm. My law
practice--I made seventy-five dollars last year.”
“You won’t take anything but people too poor to pay--and then only when
you think they’re being wronged by somebody with money. That’s why I
asked you in.”
“You didn’t----” Desbrough stopped and laughed. “Yes, you did, come to
think of it. I’d never have offered if you hadn’t made me feel that you
wanted me. I’d not have done it even then, if you hadn’t compelled me.
How do you compel people to do things without even asking ’em, George?”
For reply Helm laughed. Said he:
“Nineteen hundred and fifty a year. That’s enough for you. I must have
more--about five thousand a year.”
“You can make it at the law.”
“If the gang didn’t shut me out of the courts, when I broke with them.
And if I’d take crooked cases. I’ve thought that all out. It can’t be
done any more. Lincoln and the big fellows of the past could. But that
was a different day. Now all the law cases worth-while--all the good
fees--come from the very chaps I’ve got to attack. A lawyer who has
done any business as a lawyer can go into politics in only one way--and
that’s a more or less crooked way. I’ve thought it all out, Bill. I
can’t afford to make an independence, and then wash up and go in on the
level. I hoped I could see my way clear to do it. But--I can’t.”
“But you won’t get money any other way,” said Desbrough. “And if you
haven’t got the money to live on and to carry on your campaigns, why,
you’re beaten in advance.”
“I haven’t forgotten my campaign for judge,” said Helm. “Bill, I’ve
learned a thing or two about practical politics. I’m going to play
cards--not play the fool.”
“Why not marry Clara Hollister?” cried Desbrough, suddenly inspired.
“Would she have you?” asked Helm.
“_Me?_ Good Lord, what’d _I_ do with another wife? I had _one_, and am
paying alimony. No, I mean _you_ marry Clara.”
Helm laughed uproariously. “Take another look at me, Bill,” said he.
“You’ve forgotten.”
“Women don’t know anything about handsome and ugly in men,” said Bill.
“Besides, you’re not what _women’d_ call plain. Don’t laugh, George.
I’d back you to win any woman you took after. A man that can catch
crowds can catch a woman. With a woman, it isn’t what a man _looks_.
It’s what he _says_--and does.”
“I’ve got no woman-talk,” said Helm.
“You can grab off Clara Hollister if you want her--and she has twenty
thousand a year in her own right. And she’ll let you do what you please
with it.”
“Her father’s the head devil in these parts of the gang I’m after.”
“The twenty thousand’s hers. She’s a good deal of a snob, but she’d be
what you wanted her to be, if you married her. That’s the way it is
with women.”
“Was that your experience?”
“I spoke from experience,” replied Desbrough, undaunted. “I made my
wife over when I married her--and then didn’t like the job. I’d rather
pay alimony than be constantly reminded of my failure.”
“No--I can’t marry for independence,” said Helm. “She wouldn’t have me
and--I don’t want her.”
“Then--why not that friend of hers--that Miss Clearwater? I saw you
talking to her down the street one day before the election. She’d be
less easy to manage than Clara. But no woman’s difficult--for a firm
man who’s patient and can keep his temper--and isn’t in love.”
Helm had become acutely self-conscious and so awkward that a chair
which was apparently not near his path became involved with his big
feet and fell on its side with a crash. As Helm straightened from
picking it up, he was extraordinarily red for the amount of exertion.
Said he:
“Leave the women out of it. I’m not a marrying man.”
Desbrough laughed mockingly. “You’ll find out you’re mistaken--as soon
as you’ve got money enough to make it worth a needy woman’s while to
take after you. _I_ thought _I_ wasn’t a marrying man. Three months and
four days after my uncle died and left me that money I was waiting at
the altar.”
“I’m not a marrying man,” repeated Helm awkwardly.
“In some ways Miss Clearwater would be just the girl for you. She’d
take an interest in your career. She has ideals--and they’re about as
far removed from her father’s as a church from a speak-easy. I think
she’s got money of her own. Yes, I’m sure she has. Her mother left her
what the old man had settled on her.”
“If I did marry,” said Helm, abruptly self-possessed, “it’d be a woman
that suited _me_--one I felt at home with. I want no grand rich ladies,
Bill. Anyhow, I’ve thought of another way--one that’s practical.”
And he seated himself and proceeded to unfold the scheme upon which he
had been seriously at work ever since the election. It was a simple
scheme, wisely devoid of untried originality, but effective. His two
campaigns, despite the silence of the plutocracy-controlled press, had
got him a considerable reputation throughout the State. The press is
not so necessary to the spread of intelligence as is latterly imagined.
Long before there was a press, long before there was any written means
of communication, news and knowledge of all kinds spread rapidly
throughout the world, pausing only at the great desert stretches
between peoples--and not often halted there for long. The old ways of
communication have not been closed up. To this day the real and great
reputations of the world are not press-made or press-sustained or
even materially press-assisted. They are the work of mouth-to-mouth
communication. And those reputations, by the way, are they against
which the calumny and the innuendo of the press strive in vain.
It had spread from man to man throughout the State that there had
arisen in Harrison a strange, plain youth of great sincerity as a man
and of great power as a speaker. The Jews of ancient days are not
the only people who have dreamed of a Messiah. The Messiah-dream,
the Messiah-longing has been the dream and the longing of the whole
human race, toiling away in obscurity, oppressed, exploited, fooled,
despised. Hence, news of leaders springing up spreads fast and far
among the people. The news about Helm was hardly more than a rumor.
A hundred miles from Harrison, and they had his name wrong. A little
further, and they hadn’t yet heard his name. But far and wide there was
the rumor of a light in the direction of Harrison. Would it be a little
star or a big? a fixed star or a mere comet?--would it prove to be
nothing but a meteorite, flashing and fading out? Would it be a sun?
These questions not definite, but simply the vague, faint suggestion of
question.
The people!--how little we understand them--how much and how often we
misunderstand them. The people, so ignorant, yet so quaintly wise--as
they toil in the obscurity, building patiently, working and hoping--and
waiting always for leaders. Deceived a thousand times, they wait on and
hope on--since leaders they must have, and since leaders will surely
come.