THE FOURTH MESSENGER OF JOB
The rain Caleb Conover had so eagerly desired as a check on fair weather
reformers’ Election Day zeal began soon after midnight, and with it a
gale that is still remembered as the “Big November Wind.”
The wind-whips lashed the many-windowed Mausoleum, and the roar and
swirl of dashing water echoed from roof and veranda-cover. The autumn
gale-blasts set the naked trees to creaking and groaning like sentient
things. Here and there a huge branch was ripped from its trunk and
ploughed a gash in the lawn’s withered turf. More than one maple and ash
on the Conover grounds crashed to earth with a rending din that was
drowned in the howl of the storm.
A belated equinoctial was sweeping the Mountain State, driven on the
breath of a tornado such as not one year in twenty can record, east of
the Mississippi. Its screaming onset unroofed houses, tore up forest
giants, wrecked telegraph lines, buffeted fragile dwellings to their
fall and dissolved hayricks into miles of flying wisps.
Yet none of the three members of the Conover family, sheltered within
the Mausoleum, were awakened by the bellow of the cyclone, for none were
asleep. Letty, alone in her great, hideous bedroom, lay alternately
praying and weeping in maudlin comfortlessness over her absent daughter;
and at sound of the hubbub outside wept the more and prayed with an
added terror.
Gerald, despite the early start he must make in the morning, was still
dressed, and was slouching back and forth in his suite of apartments,
muttering occasionally to himself, and at other times pausing to gaze
lifelessly ahead of him. As the ever-louder voice of the storm broke in
on his thoughts, he stopped short in his aimless march, his dry lips
twitching and on his face the nervous terror of a suddenly awakened
child. He shambled into an inner chamber, unlocked and opened a drawer
in his chiffonier, fumbled for a moment or two with something he took
therefrom, then closed and locked the drawer and returned to the light.
In a few moments the nervousness had died out of his face and bearing,
and with a return of his habitual listless air he had resumed his walk.
Caleb Conover, stretched on a camp-bed in the corner of his study,
smiled contentedly as the rain beat in torrents on the panes. But when
the gale waxed fiercer and the rain at last ceased, he frowned.
“Going to blow off clear and cold after all!” he grumbled, turning over.
“And the Weather Bureau’s the only one that can’t be ‘fixed.’”
But even the shriek of the storm could not long hold his attention. The
Railroader was vaguely troubled as to himself. Heretofore, like
Napoleon’s, his steel will had been able to dictate to Nature as
imperiously as to his fellow-man. When he had commanded the presence of
Sleep, the drowsy god had hastened on the moment to do his bidding. He
had slumbered or awakened at wish. On the eve of his greatest crisis he
had been unable to sleep like a baby. Yet for the past few weeks he had
been aware of a subtle change. Sleep had deserted him, even as had so
much else that he had loftily regarded as his to command.
He had acquired an unpleasant habit of lying awake for hours in that big
lonely study of his, of seeking in vain to recover his old-time power of
perfect self-mastery. Thought, Memory, Unrest—a trio that never could
unduly assail him in saner hours—now had a way of rushing in upon the
insomniac with the extinguishing of the last light. To-night these
unwelcomed guests were lingering still longer than usual, and all the
Conover’s dominating will power failed to banish them.
At length he gave over the struggle and let his vagrant fancies have
their will. Was he growing old, he wondered, that his forces—mental,
physical and political—thus wavered?
Worry? He had heard others complain of it, and he had laughed at them.
Nerves? Those were for women. Not for a man with an eighteen-inch neck.
Then what ailed him? He had been this way ever since—ever since—Yes, it
was the night Anice Lanier left that he had first lain awake.
Anice Lanier! He had never analyzed his feelings toward her. He had been
dully satisfied to know that in her presence he ever had an unwonted
feeling of content, of sure knowledge that she would understand; that
she was as unlike his general idea of women as he himself differed from
his equally contemptuous estimate of other men; that he was at his best
with her. Had he been less practical and more given to hackneyed phrases
of thought, he would have said she inspired him.
But now? The Railroader could not yet force himself to dwell on the
jarring end of all that. He tried to think of something else. Blanche?
Yes, _there_ was a nice sort of complication, wasn’t it? Another
international marriage and the usual ending thereof.
“These foreigners can give us poor Yankee jays cards and spades at the
bunco game!” he mused, half-admiringly. “They beat _our_ ‘con’ men hands
down, for they don’t even need to pay out cash in manufacturing green
goods and gold bricks, and they don’t get jugged when they’re found out.
When’ll American girls get sense? When their parents do, I presume.”
And this unwelcome answer to his own question brought him back to the
memory of his joy at hearing of Blanche’s proposed marriage to d’Antri.
It had seemed to him to set the capstone of fulfilment to his social
yearnings. As father of a princess, he had in fancy seen himself at last
exalted amid the close-serried ranks of that class to whom only his
wealth had heretofore entitled him to ingress. And money—even _his_
money—had failed to act as _open sesame_. But surely as father-in-law to
a prince——
Even the very patent fiasco attendant on his one effort to use this
relationship as a master key to the portals of society had not wholly
discouraged him. Later, when, practically by acclamation, he should have
won the Governorship, and when the Princess d’Antri’s European triumphs
should be noised abroad in Granite, surely _then_——
But now there was no question of acclamation. If he should win it would
be by bare margin. He knew that. And, as for Blanche—well, if he could
keep the worst of the scandal out of the American papers and make people
think his daughter had come home merely because her husband abused her,
or because she was tired of her surroundings—if he could achieve this
much it would be the best he could expect.
Gerald, too; he had hoped so much from the boy’s glittering New York
connections. Now _that_ illusion was forever gone. Though his son’s more
recent behavior had in a slight measure softened the hurt to paternal
pride and hope, yet the hurt itself, Caleb knew, must always remain. And
that particular pride and hope were forever dead.
The Railroader was not in any sense a religious devotee. For appearance
sake, however, and to add still further force to his liberal gifts to
the Catholic clergy, he semi-occasionally attended mass at the
Cathedral. He also, for other reasons, occupied now and then, with
Letty, his higher-priced pew in the Episcopal church of St. Simeon
Stylites, religious rendezvous of Granite’s smart set.
At one of these two places of worship—he could not now remember
which—and, after all, it didn’t matter—he had heard, some time recently,
a Scripture reading that had held his attention more closely than did
most passages of the sort. It was a story of some man—he could not
remember whom—the recital of whose continued and unmerited ill-luck had
stamped itself on the hearer’s mind. The man had been rich, prosperous,
happy. Then one day four messengers had come to him in swift succession,
with tales of disaster to goods and family, each narration telling of
worse misfortunes than had its predecessor. And the fourth had left its
recipient stripped of wealth and family.
In a quaint twist of thought Conover, as he lay staring up into the dark
and listening to the noisy rage of the storm, fell to fitting the
biblical story to his own case.
“The first message I got,” he reflected, becoming grimly entertained in
his own analogy, “knocked over my plans for Jerry. Then the second stole
from me the only square woman I ever knew and all my chances of a
campaign walkover. The third smashed my idees for Blanche, and for
making a hit in society. The fourth—well, I guess the fourth ain’t
showed up yet. Will it clean me out when it _does_ come, I wonder, like
it did the feller in the Bible? Let’s see, _he_ had a whiny fool for a
wife, too, if I remember it straight. Yes, there’s a whole lot of points
in common between me and him. I wonder if he ever run for any office.
How was it all those messages of his wound up? ‘And—and I only am
escaped alone to tell thee.’ That was it.
“I wonder was he the same chap that had all those devils cast out of
him. I don’t just remember, but whoever it was that had ’em cast out,
I’d like to ’a’ known him, for he was a _man_. Most folks’ natures ain’t
big enough to hold a single half-size devil, let alone a whole crowd of
’em. If that Bible chap had all those it showed he was a man enough to
hold ’em. And if only one of ’em had been cast out it’d ’a’ been a
bigger thing he did than it would be for a dozen ordinary men to turn
into saints. Maybe I’m a little bit like _that_ feller, too.”
After which plunge into the theological exegesis—the first and last
whereof he ever was guilty—Caleb Conover turned his thoughts to the
morrow’s election, and thus communed with himself till dawn caught him
open-eyed and unsleepy, his splendid strength and energy in nowise
diminished by forty-eight hours of wakefulness.
It was a tattered, desolate world that met the Railroader’s eyes as he
gazed down from his window across the broad grounds and over the city
that lay at their foot. The wind had fallen, and a pink-gray light was
filling the clean-swept sky. Nature seemed ashamed to look on the
results of her own violence, for the dawnlight crept timidly over the
sleeping houses.
Everywhere were strewn signs of the hurricane. Tree branches, toppled
chimneys, unroofed shanties, swaths of telegraph and telephone wires,
overturned fences; these and a thousand other proofs of the gale’s brief
power lay broadcast throughout Granite’s streets.
And, with the first glimmers in the east, the people of city and State
were afoot, for history was to be made. Election Day had begun.
Midnight had again come around. The election was long since over, yet
the city did not ring with the uproar incident on such affairs. For the
result was not yet known. The storm of the previous night had cut off
telegraph and telephone communication in twenty parts of the Mountain
State. Granite itself was isolated. Hundreds of mechanics were at work
repairing the various lines of broken wire and replacing overthrown
poles. But the work had not yet sufficiently progressed to allow the
full transmission of election returns from the up-State counties.
Train service remained unimpaired, save for an occasional broken trestle
on one or two of the minor branches of the C. G. & X. And since
nightfall some of the returns had been brought to Granite by rail, but
these merely proved the closeness of the conflict, and gave no true hint
as to the actual outcome. The Granite vote was all in, hours ago. From
the slums and the dark places of the city’s underworld the long-trained
servants of the Machine had swarmed to the polls, overwhelming all
opposition from the smaller and more respectable element, and had
carried Granite tumultuously for Conover.
The Railroader, with a dozen or more men—district leaders, ward captains
and picked adherents of his own—sat about the big centre table of his
study, an Arthur, somewhat changed in the modernizing and surrounded by
equally altered Paladins. A telegraph operator sat at an instrument in a
far corner of the room, jotting down and carrying to the table such few
despatches as were at last beginning to trickle in. At Conover’s left a
ticker purred forth infrequent lengths of message-laden tape.
The table was littered with papers, yellow sheets of “flimsy,” bottles,
glasses and open cigar boxes. The henchmen lounged about, drinking and
smoking in nervous suspense, fighting over again the day’s battle, and
hazarding innumerable diverse opinions on the bearing each new despatch
would have on the general result. All were in a greater or less state of
tension, and relieved it by frequent resource to the battalion of
bottles that dotted the board.
Conover, alone of them all, touched no liquor. Before him was a big cup
of black coffee, which a noiseless-treading footman entered the room
every few minutes to renew.
“Ain’t that li’ble to keep you awake to-night, Boss?” asked Shevlin, as
he watched the fourth cupful vanish at a swallow.
“It don’t bother me any more,” returned Caleb, “I’m too used to it. But
I can remember when a single cup of it at Sunday morning breakfast would
make me so I couldn’t sleep a wink all church time. I’d toss from one
end of my pew to the other the whole morning. I couldn’t seem to drowse
no matter how long Father Healy’s sermon was. ’Nother county heard
from?” as the operator laid a message before him. “Read it, Billy.”
“Delayed in transmission,” spelled Shevlin. “Jericho County, with two
precincts missing, gives Conover 7,239, Standish 4,895.”
A yell went around the table. Bourke scribbled hurriedly on a pad, then
announced:
“That offsets the Standish lead in Haldane by 780. Two to one you’ve got
Bowden, too.”
A purr from the ticker, and Caleb caught up the tape.
“This machine don’t agree with you,” he reported. “Bowden complete gives
me 5,861 and Standish 6,312. That cuts us down a bit.”
“Did you ever see such a rag-time ’lection!” growled Shevlin. “It’s like
a seesaw board. One minute it’s you, and the next minute it ain’t.
What’s the hay-eaters up-State thinkin’ about, anyhow? A year ago they’d
no more ’a’ dared to——”
“A year’s a long time, son, in a country that makes a hero to order one
day and puts him into the discard the next.”
“Oh, if you’d ’a’ only just let us work like we always have before! We’d
’a’ sent this Standish person screechin’ up a tree. He’d ’a’ thought a
whale had bit him! But with all this amachoor line of drorin’-room
stunts at the polls an’ givin’ him the chance to——”
“That’s _my_ business,” replied Caleb. “Cut it out.”
And Billy relapsed into grumbling incoherence. Nor did any of the rest
dare voice their equally strong opinions on the subject of Conover’s
recent mystifying campaign tactics. Had a less powerful Boss dictated
and carried out such a senselessly honest plan of battle, his leadership
would have ended with the issuance of his first order. Impregnable as
had been Conover’s position in the machine, he himself well knew he had
strained his power and influence well-nigh to the breaking point. Should
he, in spite of his self-confidence and the wondrous skill he had
employed along this new line of warfare, lose the day——
“Coming in better now,” remarked the operator after a fusillade of
clicks had held his attention to the instrument for a minute or two.
“They’ve got the lines patched up enough to allow you straight service.
The stuff’ll all be here in a rush pretty soon.”
“Here comes some more ticker reports!” cried Staatz, leader of the Third
District, and strongest man, next to Conover himself, in all the
Machine. “Why can’t it hurry up? Here—‘Pompton County complete gives
Conover 28,042, Standish 6,723.’”
Another and louder yell from the tableful, and a battering of bottles
and glasses on the board. Conover alone sat calm through the din. Bourke
again did rapid figuring.
“Hooray!” he yelled. “That brings it up all right. Pompton County and
the city of Granite together give you enough plurality to stall all the
jay counties except——”
“It hangs on the one city of Grafton now,” interposed Caleb, who had as
usual gripped the whole situation before his lieutenant had jotted down
the first line of figures. “We’ve got enough reports to bring it up to
that. We know where we stand everywhere else, except in a few places too
small to count. As Grafton goes, the State will go. That’s a cinch.”
“That’s right,” admitted Bourke after another spasm of ciphering. “But
how’d you get onto us when the rest of us——?”
“If I didn’t get onto things before the rest of you did, one of you
would be sitting at the head of this table instead of me.”
The Railroader glanced, as by accident, toward Staatz, who coughed
raucously and plunged at once into talk.
“Pete Brayle tried to backtrack us on the sly in Pompton County, I
hear,” said the latter. “Thought it’d get him a soft place in the reform
gang in case they won. A lot of good it did him.”
“Brayle’s always looking for soft places,” observed Caleb dryly. “And he
ain’t the only one. Such fellers gen’rally end up in a soft place, all
right. Only it’s apt to be a swamp, and that’s——”
“Jericho County complete returns,” translated the operator aloud, as his
machine began again to click out its news, “Conover 7,910, Standish
5,495.”
“Why don’t we hear from Grafton?” asked Staatz.
“They’re patching up the connection now,” answered the operator. “It’s
farthest city on the line. You’ve got all the rest of the returns from
its county.”
“That place is a regular nest of reformers, from the mayor down,”
commented Bourke. “And besides, Standish won a lot of votes by his
grand-stand scrap in the op’ra house there last month. It looks bad.”
“Most reform places do after they’ve tried a dose of their own medicine
for awhile,” answered Caleb. “But we’ve spent enough good dough there to
square the whole noble army of martyrs. I guess Grafton’s O. K.”
“Boss,” said Billy Shevlin, “you’re the only man in this whole shootin’
match what ain’t all hectic over this fight. An’ you’re the one man
who’s _It_ or out in th’ woolly white snow accordin’ to th’ way that
genial beast of prey th’ free an’ independent an’ otherwise bought-up
voters jumps. Ain’t you worried none?”
“What good’d that do? No use paying twice, if there’s anything to worry
about. And if there ain’t, what’s the use of wasting a lot of good
anxiety? Start my phonograph going.”
“Phonograph?” hotly protested Staatz. “At a time like this, when
everything hangs on the next half hour and——”
“Well,” drawled Caleb, and if his words were light, his steady eyes
fixed the district leader’s vexed gaze as a wasp might pierce an angry,
blundering bumblebee, “I don’t believe the voters of the Mountain
State’ll rise in arms to any extent and demand a new election and a new
Boss just because they hear I wanted a little music. I like the
phonograph. It’s the only musical instrument I ever had time to learn to
play. And it’s the only one that’ll play over the pieces I like as often
as I want to hear ’em, and won’t make me listen to a lot of opera
war-whoops in Dutch and Dago. But, say, Staatz, I’m not forcing other
folks to listen to it. If you’re not stuck on the way I amuse myself,
there ain’t nobody exactly imploring you to stay on here.”
Staatz, his red face redder than its wont, and his great gray mustache
abristle at the Railroader’s tone and look, nevertheless mumbled some
apology. But Caleb did not hear him out. He broke in on the words with a
curt nod, then said to Shevlin:
“Start it up, Billy. Any old tune’ll do. There’s none there but the kind
I like. Might try——”
Again the footman came in. This time not with coffee, but with a card.
“I thought I told Gaines I wasn’t to be broke in on this evening,” began
Conover, glowering at the intruder. “Say I can’t see anyone. I’m busy,
and——”
He had taken the card as he spoke. Now, as he read it, his order trailed
off into perplexed silence, even as Billy Shevlin, his face one big grin
at Staatz’s discomfiture, started the phonograph on the classic strains
of “Everybody Works but Father.”
“Turn off that measly racket!” roared Caleb. “Ain’t you got any better
sense than to go fooling with toys a time like this? I’ll be back in a
few minutes, boys. My New York lawyer wants me for something.”
He left the study and hurried downstairs to where, in the hall, a man
stood awaiting him.
“Come in here, Wendell,” directed the Railroader, shaking hands with his
new guest, and leading the way to the library. “What’re you doing in
this part of the country? Glad to see you.”
“I bring you bad news—very bad news, I am afraid,” began the lawyer as
Conover closed the library door behind them.
“I know that,” snapped Caleb. “I knew it as soon as I saw your face, but
I didn’t want you shouting it out in the hall where my butler could hear
you. That’s why I—well, what is it? Tell me, can’t you?”
“Your son——”
“Yes, Jerry, of course. I knew that, too. But what’s he done this time?”
“This is, as I said, a very serious——”
“Good Lord, man! I didn’t s’pose you’d took a four-hour train ride from
New York a night like this to tell me he’d won a ping pong prize or
joined the Y. M. C. A. The chap that’s got to have news broke to him has
a head too thick for truth to be let into it any other way. Don’t stand
there like a lump of putty. What’s up?”
The lawyer, flushing at the coarse invective, spared the father no
longer. He spoke, and to the point.
“Your son,” he said, “is in the West Thirtieth Street police station on
a charge of murder.”
Conover looked at him without a start, without visible emotion. For a
full half minute he made no reply, no comment. Nor did his light, keen
eyes flicker or turn aside.
Then—and Wendell feared from his words that the tidings had turned
Caleb’s brain—the Railroader muttered, half to himself:
“‘And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.’”