far too wise and far too cunning to be bewitched by it. In his heart he
pitied the men about him, who laughed wildly, and shouted, and climbed
recklessly to the rails and ratlines. He had been deceived too often not
to know that it was not real. He knew from cruel experience that in
a few moments the tall buildings would crumble away, the thousands of
columns of white smoke that flashed like snow in the sun, the busy,
shrieking tug-boats, and the great statue would vanish into the sea,
leaving it gray and bare. He closed his eyes and shut the vision out. It
was so beautiful that it tempted him; but he would not be mocked, and he
buried his face in his hands. They were carrying the farce too far, he
thought. It was really too absurd; for now they were at a wharf which
was so real that, had he not known by previous suffering, he would have
been utterly deceived by it. And there were great crowds of smiling,
cheering people, and a waiting guard of honor in fresh uniforms, and
rows of police pushing the people this way and that; and these men about
him were taking it all quite seriously, and making ready to disembark,
carrying their blanket-rolls and rifles with them.
A band was playing joyously, and the man in the next cot, who was being
lifted to a stretcher, said, “There’s the Governor and his staff; that’s
him in the high hat.” It was really very well done. The Custom-house
and the Elevated Railroad and Castle Garden were as like to life as a
photograph, and the crowd was as well handled as a mob in a play. His
heart ached for it so that he could not bear the pain, and he turned his
back on it. It was cruel to keep it up so long. His keeper lifted him
in his arms, and pulled him into a dirty uniform which had belonged,
apparently, to a much larger man--a man who had been killed probably,
for there were dark-brown marks of blood on the tunic and breeches. When
he tried to stand on his feet, Castle Garden and the Battery disappeared
in a black cloud of night, just as he knew they would; but when he
opened his eyes from the stretcher, they had returned again. It was a
most remarkably vivid vision. They kept it up so well. Now the young
Doctor and the hospital steward were pretending to carry him down a
gang-plank and into an open space; and he saw quite close to him a long
line of policemen, and behind them thousands of faces, some of them
women’s faces--women who pointed at him and then shook their heads and
cried, and pressed their hands to their cheeks, still looking at him. He
wondered why they cried. He did not know them, nor did they know him. No
one knew him; these people were only ghosts.
There was a quick parting in the crowd. A man he had once known shoved
two of the policemen to one side, and he heard a girl’s voice speaking
his name, like a sob; and She came running out across the open space and
fell on her knees beside the stretcher, and bent down over him, and he
was clasped in two young, firm arms.
“Of course it is not real, of course it is not She,” he assured himself.
“Because She would not do such a thing. Before all these people She
would not do it.”
But he trembled and his heart throbbed so cruelly that he could not bear
the pain.
She was pretending to cry.
“They wired us you had started for Tampa on the hospital ship,” She was
saying, “and Aunt and I went all the way there before we heard you had
been sent North. We have been on the cars a week. That is why I missed
you. Do you understand? It was not my fault. I tried to come. Indeed, I
tried to come.”
She turned her head and looked up fearfully at the young Doctor.
“Tell me, why does he look at me like that?” she asked. “He doesn’t know
me. Is he very ill? Tell me the truth.” She drew in her breath quickly.
“Of course you will tell me the truth.”
When she asked the question he felt her arms draw tight about his
shoulders. It was as though she was holding him to herself, and from
some one who had reached out for him. In his trouble he turned to his
old friend and keeper. His voice was hoarse and very low.
“Is this the same young lady who was on the transport--the one you used
to drive away?”
In his embarrassment, the hospital steward blushed under his tan, and
stammered.
“Of course it’s the same young lady,” the Doctor answered briskly. “And
I won’t let them drive her away.” He turned to her, smiling gravely. “I
think his condition has ceased to be dangerous, madam,” he said.
People who in a former existence had been his friends, and Her brother,
gathered about his stretcher and bore him through the crowd and lifted
him into a carriage filled with cushions, among which he sank lower
and lower. Then She sat beside him, and he heard Her brother say to the
coachman, “Home, and drive slowly and keep on the asphalt.”
The carriage moved forward, and She put her arm about him and his head
fell on her shoulder, and neither of them spoke. The vision had lasted
so long now that he was torn with the joy that after all it might be
real. But he could not bear the awakening if it were not, so he raised
his head fearfully and looked up into the beautiful eyes above him. His
brows were knit, and he struggled with a great doubt and an awful joy.
“Dearest,” he said, “is it real?”
“Is it real?” she repeated.
Even as a dream, it was so wonderfully beautiful that he was satisfied
if it could only continue so, if but for a little while.
“Do you think,” he begged again, trembling, “that it is going to last
much longer?”
She smiled, and, bending her head slowly, kissed him.
“It is going to last--always,” she said.
THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT
The mass-meeting in the Madison Square Garden which was to help set
Cuba free was finished, and the people were pushing their way out of
the overheated building into the snow and sleet of the streets. They
had been greatly stirred and the spell of the last speaker still hung so
heavily upon them that as they pressed down the long corridor they were
still speaking loudly in his praise.
A young man moved eagerly amongst them, and pushed his way to wherever a
voice was raised above the rest. He strained forward, listening openly,
as though he tried to judge the effect of the meeting by the verdict of
those about him.
But the words he overheard seemed to clash with what he wished them to
be, and the eager look on his face changed to one of doubt and of grave
disappointment. When he had reached the sidewalk he stopped and stood
looking back alternately into the lighted hall and at the hurrying
crowds which were dispersing rapidly. He made a movement as though he
would recall them, as though he felt they were still unconvinced, as
though there was much still left unsaid.
A fat stranger halted at his elbow to light his cigar, and glancing up
nodded his head approvingly.
“Fine speaker, Senator Stanton, ain’t he?” he said.
The young man answered eagerly. “Yes,” he assented, “he is a great
orator, but how could he help but speak well with such a subject?”
“Oh, you ought to have heard him last November at Tammany Hall,” the fat
stranger answered. “He wasn’t quite up to himself to-night. He wasn’t so
interested. Those Cubans are foreigners, you see, but you ought to
heard him last St. Patrick’s day on Home Rule for Ireland. Then he was
talking! That speech made him a United States senator, I guess. I don’t
just see how he expects to win out on this Cuba game. The Cubans haven’t
got no votes.”
The young man opened his eyes in some bewilderment.
“He speaks for the good of Cuba, for the sake of humanity,” he ventured.
“What?” inquired the fat stranger. “Oh, yes, of course. Well, I must be
getting on. Good-night, sir.”
The stranger moved on his way, but the young man still lingered
uncertainly in the snow-swept corridor shivering violently with the cold
and stamping his feet for greater comfort. His face was burned to a deep
red, which seemed to have come from some long exposure to a tropical
sun, but which held no sign of health. His cheeks were hollow and his
eyes were lighted with the fire of fever and from time to time he was
shaken by violent bursts of coughing which caused him to reach toward
one of the pillars for support.
As the last of the lights went out in the Garden, the speaker of the
evening and three of his friends came laughing and talking down the long
corridor. Senator Stanton was a conspicuous figure at any time, and even
in those places where his portraits had not penetrated he was at once
recognized as a personage. Something in his erect carriage and an
unusual grace of movement, and the power and success in his face, made
men turn to look at him. He had been told that he resembled the
early portraits of Henry Clay, and he had never quite forgotten the
coincidence.
The senator was wrapping the collar of his fur coat around his throat
and puffing contentedly at a fresh cigar, and as he passed, the night
watchman and the ushers bowed to the great man and stood looking after
him with the half-humorous, half-envious deference that the American
voter pays to the successful politician. At the sidewalk, the policemen
hurried to open the door of his carriage and in their eagerness made a
double line, through which he passed nodding to them gravely. The young
man who had stood so long in waiting pushed his way through the line to
his side.
“Senator Stanton,” he began timidly, “might I speak to you a moment? My
name is Arkwright; I am just back from Cuba, and I want to thank you for
your speech. I am an American, and I thank God that I am since you are
too, sir. No one has said anything since the war began that compares
with what you said to-night. You put it nobly, and I know, for I’ve been
there for three years, only I can’t make other people understand it, and
I am thankful that some one can. You’ll forgive my stopping you, sir,
but I wanted to thank you. I feel it very much.”
Senator Stanton’s friends had already seated themselves in his carriage
and were looking out of the door and smiling with mock patience. But the
senator made no move to follow them. Though they were his admirers they
were sometimes skeptical, and he was not sorry that they should hear
this uninvited tribute. So he made a pretence of buttoning his long coat
about him, and nodded encouragingly to Arkwright to continue. “I’m glad
you liked it, sir,” he said with the pleasant, gracious smile that
had won him a friend wherever it had won him a vote. “It is very
satisfactory to know from one who is well informed on the subject that
what I have said is correct. The situation there is truly terrible. You
have just returned, you say? Where were you--in Havana?”
“No, in the other provinces, sir,” Arkwright answered. “I have been all
over the island, I am a civil engineer. The truth has not been half
told about Cuba, I assure you, sir. It is massacre there, not war. It is
partly so through ignorance, but nevertheless it is massacre. And what
makes it worse is, that it is the massacre of the innocents. That is
what I liked best of what you said in that great speech, the part about
the women and children.”
He reached out his hands detainingly, and then drew back as though in
apology for having already kept the great man so long waiting in the
cold. “I wish I could tell you some of the terrible things I have seen,”
he began again, eagerly as Stanton made no movement to depart. “They are
much worse than those you instanced to-night, and you could make so much
better use of them than any one else. I have seen starving women nursing
dead babies, and sometimes starving babies sucking their dead mother’s
breasts; I have seen men cut down in the open roads and while digging
in the fields--and two hundred women imprisoned in one room without
food and eaten with small-pox, and huts burned while the people in them
slept--”
The young man had been speaking impetuously, but he stopped as suddenly,
for the senator was not listening to him. He had lowered his eyes
and was looking with a glance of mingled fascination and disgust at
Arkwright’s hands. In his earnestness the young man had stretched them
out, and as they showed behind the line of his ragged sleeves the others
could see, even in the blurred light and falling snow, that the wrists
of each hand were gashed and cut in dark-brown lines like the skin of a
mulatto, and in places were a raw red, where the fresh skin had but just
closed over. The young man paused and stood shivering, still holding his
hands out rigidly before him.
The senator raised his eyes slowly and drew away.
“What is that?” he said in a low voice, pointing with a gloved finger at
the black lines on the wrists.
A sergeant in the group of policemen who had closed around the speakers
answered him promptly from his profound fund of professional knowledge.
“That’s handcuffs, senator,” he said importantly, and glanced at
Stanton as though to signify that at a word from him he would take this
suspicious character into custody. The young man pulled the frayed cuffs
of his shirt over his wrists and tucked his hands, which the cold had
frozen into an ashy blue, under his armpits to warm them.
“No, they don’t use handcuffs in the field,” he said in the same low,
eager tone; “they use ropes and leather thongs; they fastened me behind
a horse and when he stumbled going down the trail it jerked me forward
and the cords would tighten and tear the flesh. But they have had a long
time to heal now. I have been eight months in prison.”
The young men at the carriage window had ceased smiling and were
listening intently. One of them stepped out and stood beside the
carriage door looking down at the shivering figure before him with a
close and curious scrutiny.
“Eight months in prison!” echoed the police sergeant with a note of
triumph; “what did I tell you?”
“Hold your tongue!” said the young man at the carriage door. There was
silence for a moment, while the men looked at the senator, as though
waiting for him to speak.
“Where were you in prison, Mr. Arkwright?” he asked.
“First in the calaboose at Santa Clara for two months, and then
in Cabanas. The Cubans who were taken when I was, were shot by the
fusillade on different days during this last month. Two of them, the
Ezetas, were father and son, and the Volunteer band played all the time
the execution was going on, so that the other prisoners might not hear
them cry ‘Cuba Libre’ when the order came to fire. But we heard them.”
The senator shivered slightly and pulled his fur collar up farther
around his face. “I’d like to talk with you,” he said, “if you have
nothing to do to-morrow. I’d like to go into this thing thoroughly.
Congress must be made to take some action.”
The young man clasped his hands eagerly. “Ah, Mr. Stanton, if you
would,” he cried, “if you would only give me an hour! I could tell you
so much that you could use. And you can believe what I say, sir--it is
not necessary to lie--God knows the truth is bad enough. I can give you
names and dates for everything I say. Or I can do better than that, sir.
I can take you there yourself--in three months I can show you all you
need to see, without danger to you in any way. And they would not know
me, now that I have grown a beard, and I am a skeleton to what I was.
I can speak the language well, and I know just what you should see, and
then you could come back as one speaking with authority and not have to
say, ‘I have read,’ or ‘have been told,’ but you can say, ‘These are the
things I have seen’--and you could free Cuba.”
The senator coughed and put the question aside for the moment with a
wave of the hand that held his cigar. “We will talk of that to-morrow
also. Come to lunch with me at one. My apartments are in the Berkeley
on Fifth Avenue. But aren’t you afraid to go back there?” he asked
curiously. “I should think you’d had enough of it. And you’ve got a
touch of fever, haven’t you?” He leaned forward and peered into the
other’s eyes.
“It is only the prison fever,” the young man answered; “food and this
cold will drive that out of me. And I must go back. There is so much to
do there,” he added. “Ah, if I could tell them, as you can tell them,
what I feel here.” He struck his chest sharply with his hand, and on the
instant fell into a fit of coughing so violent that the young man at
the carriage door caught him around the waist, and one of the policemen
supported him from the other side.
“You need a doctor,” said the senator kindly. “I’ll ask mine to have a
look at you. Don’t forget, then, at one o’clock to-morrow. We will go
into this thing thoroughly.” He shook Arkwright warmly by the hand and
stooping stepped into the carriage. The young man who had stood at the
door followed him and crowded back luxuriously against the cushions.
The footman swung himself up beside the driver, and said “Uptown
Delmonico’s,” as he wrapped the fur rug around his legs, and with
a salute from the policemen and a scraping of hoofs on the slippery
asphalt the great man was gone.
“That poor fellow needs a doctor,” he said as the carriage rolled up
the avenue, “and he needs an overcoat, and he needs food. He needs about
almost everything, by the looks of him.”
But the voice of the young man in the corner of the carriage objected
drowsily--
“On the contrary,” he said, “it seemed to me that he had the one thing
needful.”
By one o’clock of the day following, Senator Stanton, having read the
reports of his speech in the morning papers, punctuated with “Cheers,”
“Tremendous enthusiasm” and more “Cheers,” was still in a willing frame
of mind toward Cuba and her self-appointed envoy, young Mr. Arkwright.
Over night he had had doubts but that the young man’s enthusiasm would
bore him on the morrow, but Mr. Arkwright, when he appeared, developed,
on the contrary, a practical turn of mind which rendered his suggestions
both flattering and feasible. He was still terribly in earnest, but
he was clever enough or serious enough to see that the motives which
appealed to him might not have sufficient force to move a successful
statesman into action. So he placed before the senator only those
arguments and reasons which he guessed were the best adapted to
secure his interest and his help. His proposal as he set it forth was
simplicity itself.
“Here is a map of the island,” he said; “on it I have marked the places
you can visit in safety, and where you will meet the people you ought to
see. If you leave New York at midnight you can reach Tampa on the second
day. From Tampa we cross in another day to Havana. There you can visit
the Americans imprisoned in Morro and Cabanas, and in the streets you
can see the starving pacificos. From Havana I shall take you by rail to
Jucaro, Matanzas, Santa Clara and Cienfuegos. You will not be able
to see the insurgents in the fields--it is not necessary that you
should--but you can visit one of the sugar plantations and some of the
insurgent chiefs will run the forts by night and come in to talk with
you. I will show you burning fields and houses, and starving men and
women by the thousands, and men and women dying of fevers. You can see
Cuban prisoners shot by a firing squad and you can note how these rebels
meet death. You can see all this in three weeks and be back in New York
in a month, as any one can see it who wishes to learn the truth. Why,
English members of Parliament go all the way to India and British
Columbia to inform themselves about those countries, they travel
thousands of miles, but only one member of either of our houses of
Congress has taken the trouble to cross these eighty miles of water that
lie between us and Cuba. You can either go quietly and incognito, as
it were, or you can advertise the fact of your going, which would be
better. And from the moment you start the interest in your visit will
grow and increase until there will be no topic discussed in any of our
papers except yourself, and what you are doing and what you mean to do.
“By the time you return the people will be waiting, ready and eager to
hear whatever you may have to say. Your word will be the last word for
them. It is not as though you were some demagogue seeking notoriety, or
a hotel piazza correspondent at Key West or Jacksonville. You are the
only statesman we have, the only orator Americans will listen to, and I
tell you that when you come before them and bring home to them as
only you can the horrors of this war, you will be the only man in this
country. You will be the Patrick Henry of Cuba; you can go down to
history as the man who added the most beautiful island in the seas to
the territory of the United States, who saved thousands of innocent
children and women, and who dared to do what no other politician has
dared to do--to go and see for himself and to come back and speak the
truth. It only means a month out of your life, a month’s trouble and
discomfort, but with no risk. What is a month out of a lifetime, when
that month means immortality to you and life to thousands? In a month
you would make a half dozen after-dinner speeches and cause your friends
to laugh and applaud. Why not wring their hearts instead, and hold this
thing up before them as it is, and shake it in their faces? Show it to
them in all its horror--bleeding, diseased and naked, an offence to our
humanity, and to our prated love of liberty, and to our God.”
The young man threw himself eagerly forward and beat the map with his
open palm. But the senator sat apparently unmoved gazing thoughtfully
into the open fire, and shook his head.
While the luncheon was in progress the young gentleman who the night
before had left the carriage and stood at Arkwright’s side, had entered
the room and was listening intently. He had invited himself to some
fresh coffee, and had then relapsed into an attentive silence, following
what the others said with an amused and interested countenance. Stanton
had introduced him as Mr. Livingstone, and appeared to take it for
granted that Arkwright would know who he was. He seemed to regard him
with a certain deference which Arkwright judged was due to some fixed
position the young man held, either of social or of political value.
“I do not know,” said Stanton with consideration, “that I am prepared to
advocate the annexation of the island. It is a serious problem.”
“I am not urging that,” Arkwright interrupted anxiously; “the
Cubans themselves do not agree as to that, and in any event it is an
afterthought. Our object now should be to prevent further bloodshed. If
you see a man beating a boy to death, you first save the boy’s life
and decide afterward where he is to go to school. If there were any one
else, senator,” Arkwright continued earnestly, “I would not trouble you.
But we all know your strength in this country. You are independent and
fearless, and men of both parties listen to you. Surely, God has given
you this great gift of oratory, if you will forgive my speaking so, to
use only in a great cause. A grand organ in a cathedral is placed there
to lift men’s thoughts to high resolves and purposes, not to make people
dance. A street organ can do that. Now, here is a cause worthy of your
great talents, worthy of a Daniel Webster, of a Henry Clay.”
The senator frowned at the fire and shook his head doubtfully.
“If they knew what I was down there for,” he asked, “wouldn’t they put
me in prison too?”
Arkwright laughed incredulously.
“Certainly not,” he said; “you would go there as a private citizen, as
a tourist to look on and observe. Spain is not seeking complications
of that sort. She has troubles enough without imprisoning United States
senators.”
“Yes; but these fevers now,” persisted Stanton, “they’re no respecter
of persons, I imagine. A United States senator is not above smallpox or
cholera.”
Arkwright shook his head impatiently and sighed.
“It is difficult to make it clear to one who has not been there,” he
said. “These people and soldiers are dying of fever because they are
forced to live like pigs, and they are already sick with starvation. A
healthy man like yourself would be in no more danger than you would be
in walking through the wards of a New York hospital.”
Senator Stanton turned in his armchair, and held up his hand
impressively.
“If I were to tell them the things you have told me,” he said warningly,
“if I were to say I have seen such things--American property in flames,
American interests ruined, and that five times as many women and
children have died of fever and starvation in three months in Cuba as
the Sultan has massacred in Armenia in three years--it would mean war
with Spain.”
“Well?” said Arkwright.
Stanton shrugged his shoulders and sank back again in his chair.