that he could command a good view, and yet be fairly secure. The final
skirmish was on in earnest. Two State Senators--coatless, tieless,
collarless, their faces dirty, their hair rumpled, were finishing the
stair carpet. The chairman of the appropriations committee in the House
was doing the stretching in a still uncarpeted bit of the corridor, and
a member who had recently denounced the appropriations committee as a
disgrace to the State was presiding at the hammer. They were doing most
exquisitely harmonious team work. A railroad and anti-railroad member
who fought every time they came within speaking distance of one another
were now in an earnest and very chummy conference relative to a large
wrinkle which had just been discovered on the first landing. Many men
were standing around holding their backs, and many others were deeply
absorbed in nursing their fingers. The doors of the offices were all
open, and there was a general hauling in of furniture and hanging of
pictures. Clumsy but well-meaning fingers were doing their best with
“finishing touches.” The Prince grew so excited about it all that they
had to keep urging him not to take too many chances of being seen.
“And I'll tell you,” Senator Bruner was saying, “it isn't only because
I knew it would be funny that I wanted you to see it; but--well, you see
America isn't the real America when she has on her best clothes and is
trying to show off. You haven't seen anybody who hasn't prepared for
your coming, and that means you haven't seen them as they are at all.
Now here we are. This is us! You see that fellow hanging a picture down
there? He's president of the First National Bank. Came over a little
while ago, got next to the situation, and stayed to help. And--say, this
is good! Notice that red-headed fellow just getting up from his knees?
Well, he's president of the teamsters' union--figured so big in a strike
here last year. I call that pretty rich! He's the fellow they are all
so afraid of, but I guess he liked the idea of the boys doing it
themselves, and just sneaked in and helped.--There's the Governor. He's
a fine fellow. He wouldn't be held up by anybody--not even to get ready
for a Prince, but he's worked like a Trojan all day to make things come
his way. Yes sir--this is the sure-enough thing. Here you have the
boys off dress parade. Not that we run away from our dignity every day,
but--see what I mean?”
“I see,” replied the Prince, and he looked as though he really did.
“You know--say, dodge there! Move back! No--too late. The Governor's
caught us. Look at him!”
The Governor's eyes had turned upward, and he had seen. He put his hands
on his back--he couldn't look up without doing that--and gave a long,
steady stare. First, Senator Bruner waved; then Senator Patton waved;
then Mr. McVeigh waved; and then the Prince waved. Other people were
beginning to look up. “They're all on,” laughed Patton, “let's go down.”
At first they were disposed to think it pretty shabby treatment. “We
worked all day to get in shape,” grumbled Harry Weston, “and then you go
ring the curtain up on us before it's time for our show to begin.”
But the Prince made them feel right about it. He had such a good time
that they were forced to concede the move had been a success. And he
said to the Governor as he was leaving: “I see that the only way to see
America is to see it when America is not seeing you.”
VIII
THE LAST SIXTY MINUTES
“Nine--ten--” The old clock paused as if in dramatic appreciation of
the situation, and then slowly, weightily, it gave the final stroke,
“Eleven!”
The Governor swung his chair half-way round and looked the timepiece
full in the face. Already the seconds had begun ticking off the last
hour of his official life. On the stroke of twelve another man would be
Governor of the State. He sat there watching the movement of the minute
hand.
The sound of voices, some jovial, some argumentative, was borne to
him through the open transom. People were beginning to gather in
the corridors, and he could hear the usual disputes about tickets of
admission to the inaugural.
His secretary came in just then with some letters. “Could you see
Whitefield now?” he asked. “He's waiting out here for you.”
The old man looked up wearily. “Oh, put him off, Charlie. Tell him you
can talk to him about whatever it is he wants to know.”
The secretary had his hand on the knob, when the Governor added, “And,
Charlie, keep everybody out, if you can. I'm--I've got a few private
matters to go over.”
The younger man nodded and opened the door. He half closed it behind
him, and then turned to say, “Except Francis. You'll want to see him if
he comes in, won't you?”
He frowned and moved impatiently as he answered, curtly: “Oh, yes.”
Francis! Of course it never occurred to any of them that he could close
the door on Francis. He drummed nervously on his desk, then suddenly
reached down and, opening one of the drawers, tossed back a few things
and drew out a newspaper. He unfolded this and spread it out on the
desk. Running across the page was the big black line, “Real Governors
of Some Western States,” and just below, the first of the series,
and played up as the most glaring example of nominal and real in
governorship, was a sketch of Harvey Francis.
He sat there looking at it, knowing full well that it would not
contribute to his peace of mind. It did not make for placidity of spirit
to be told at the end of things that he had, as a matter of fact, never
been anybody at all. And the bitterest part of it was that, looking back
on it now, getting it from the viewpoint of one stepping from it, he
could see just how true was the statement: “Harvey Francis has been
the real Governor of the State; John Morrison his mouthpiece and
figurehead.”
He walked to the window and looked out over the January landscape. It
may have been the snowy hills, as well as the thoughts weighing him
down, that carried him back across the years to one snowy afternoon when
he stood up in a little red schoolhouse and delivered an oration on “The
Responsibilities of Statesmanship.” He smiled as the title came back to
him, and yet--what had become of the spirit of that seventeen-year-old
boy? He had meant it all then; he could remember the thrill with which
he stood there that afternoon long before and poured out his sentiments
regarding the sacredness of public trusts. What was it had kept him,
when his chance came, from working out in his life the things he had so
fervently poured into his schoolboy oration?
Someone was tapping at the door. It was an easy, confident tap, and
there was a good deal of reflex action in the Governor's “Come in.”
“Indulging in a little meditation?”
The Governor frowned at the way Francis said it, and the latter went on,
easily: “Just came from a row with Dorman. Everybody is holding him up
for tickets, and he--poor young fool--looks as though he wanted to jump
in the river. Takes things tremendously to heart--Dorman does.”
He lighted a cigar, smiling quietly over that youthful quality of
Dorman's. “Well,” he went on, leaning back in his chair and looking
about the room, “I thought I'd look in on you for a minute. You see
I'll not have the _entree_ to the Governor's office by afternoon.” He
laughed, the easy, good-humoured laugh of one too sophisticated to spend
emotion uselessly.
It was he who fell into meditation then, and the Governor sat looking at
him; a paragraph from the newspaper came back to him: “Harvey Francis
is the most dangerous type of boss politician. His is not the crude and
vulgar method that asks a man what his vote is worth. He deals gently
and tenderly with consciences. He knows how to get a man without fatally
injuring that man's self-respect.”
The Governor's own experience bore out the summary. When elected to
office as State Senator he had cherished old-fashioned ideas of serving
his constituents and doing his duty. But the very first week Francis
had asked one of those little favours of him, and, wishing to show his
appreciation of support given him in his election, he had granted it.
Then various courtesies were shown him; he was let in on a “deal,” and
almost before he realised it, it seemed definitely understood that he
was a “Francis man.”
Francis roused himself and murmured: “Fools!--amateurs.”
“Leyman?” ventured the Governor.
“Leyman and all of his crowd!”
“And yet,” the Governor could not resist, “in another hour this same
fool will be Governor of the State. The fool seems to have won.”
Francis rose, impatiently. “For the moment. It won't be lasting. In any
profession, fools and amateurs may win single victories. They can't keep
it up. They don't know _how_. Oh, no,” he insisted, cheerfully, “Leyman
will never be re-elected. Fact is, I'm counting on this contract
business we've saved up for him getting in good work.” He was moving
toward the door. “Well,” he concluded, with a curious little laugh, “see
you upstairs.”
The Governor looked at the clock. It pointed now to twenty-five minutes
past eleven. The last hour was going fast. In a very short time he must
join the party in the anteroom of the House. But weariness had come over
him. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.
He was close upon seventy, and to-day looked even older than his years.
It was not a vicious face, but it was not a strong one. People who
wanted to say nice things of the Governor called him pleasant or genial
or kindly. Even the men in the appointive offices did not venture to say
he had much force.
He felt it to-day as he never had before. He had left no mark; he had
done nothing, stood for nothing. Never once had his personality made
itself felt. He had signed the documents; Harvey Francis had always
“suggested”--the term was that man's own--the course to be pursued. And
the “suggestions” had ever dictated the policy that would throw the most
of influence or money to that splendidly organised machine that Francis
controlled.
With an effort he shook himself free from his cheerless retrospect.
There was a thing or two he wanted to get from his desk, and his time
was growing very short. He found what he wanted, and then, just as he
was about to close the drawer, his eye fell on a large yellow envelope.
He closed the drawer; but only to reopen it, take out the envelope and
remove the documents it contained; and then one by one he spread them
out before him on the desk.
He sat there looking down at them, wondering whether a man had ever
stepped into office with as many pitfalls laid for him. During the last
month they had been busy about the old State-house setting traps for the
new Governor. The “machine” was especially jubilant over those contracts
the Governor now had spread out before him. The convict labour question
was being fought out in the State just then--organised labour demanding
its repeal; country taxpayers insisting that it be maintained. Under
the system the penitentiary had become self-supporting. In November the
contracts had come up for renewal; but on the request of Harvey Francis
the matter had been put off from time to time, and still remained open.
Just the week before, Francis had put it to the Governor something like
this:
“Don't sign those contracts. We can give some reason for holding them
off, and save them up for Leyman. Then we can see that the question is
agitated, and whatever he does about it is going to prove a bad thing
for him. If he doesn't sign, he's in bad with the country fellows, the
men who elected him. Don't you see? At the end of his administration the
penitentiary, under you self-sustaining, will have cost them a pretty
penny. We've got him right square!”
The clock was close to twenty minutes of twelve, and he concluded that
he would go out and join some of his friends he could hear in the other
room. It would never do for him to go upstairs with a long, serious
face. He had had his day, and now Leyman was to have his, and if the new
Governor did better than the old one, then so much the better for the
State. As for the contracts, Leyman surely must understand that there
was a good deal of rough sailing on political waters.
But it was not easy to leave the room. Walking to the window he again
stood there looking out across the snow, and once more he went back now
at the end of things to that day in the little red schoolhouse which
stood out as the beginning.
He was called back from that dreaming by the sight of three men coming
up the hill. He smiled faintly in anticipation of the things Francis and
the rest of them would say about the new Governor's arriving on foot.
Leyman had requested that the inaugural parade be done away with--but
one would suppose he would at least dignify the occasion by arriving in
a carriage. Francis would see that the opposing papers handled it as a
grand-stand play to the country constituents.
And then, forgetful of Francis, and of the approaching ceremony, the old
man stood there by the window watching the young man who was coming
up to take his place. How firmly the new Governor walked! With what
confidence he looked ahead at the State-house. The Governor--not
considering the inconsistency therein--felt a thrill of real pride in
thought of the State's possessing a man like that.
Standing though he did for the things pitted against him, down in his
heart John Morrison had all along cherished a strong admiration for
that young man who, as District Attorney of the State's metropolis,
had aroused the whole country by his fearlessness and unquestionable
sincerity. Many a day he had sat in that same office reading what the
young District Attorney was doing in the city close by--the fight he was
making almost single-handed against corruption, how he was striking in
the high places fast and hard as in the low, the opposition, threats,
and time after time there had been that same secret thrill at thought of
there being a man like that. And when the people of the State, convinced
that here was one man who would serve _them_, began urging the District
Attorney for chief executive, Governor Morrison, linked with the
opposing forces, doing all he could to bring about Leyman's defeat,
never lost that secret feeling for the young man, who, unbacked by any
organisation, struck blow after blow at the machine that had so long
dominated the State, winning in the end that almost incomprehensible
victory.
The new Governor had passed from sight, and a moment later his voice
came to the ear of the lonely man in the executive office. Some friends
had stopped him just outside the Governor's door with a laughing “Here's
hoping you'll do as much for us in the new office as you did in the
old,” and the new Governor replied, buoyantly: “Oh, but I'm going to do
a great deal more!”
The man within the office smiled a little wistfully and with a sigh
sat down before his desk. The clock now pointed to thirteen minutes of
twelve; they would be asking for him upstairs. There were some scraps of
paper on his desk and he threw them into the waste-basket, murmuring: “I
can at least give him a clean desk.”
He pushed his chair back sharply. A clean desk! The phrase opened to
deeper meanings.... Why not clean it up in earnest? Why not give him a
square deal--a real chance? Why not _sign the contracts_?
Again he looked at the clock--not yet ten minutes of twelve. For
ten minutes more he was Governor of the State! Ten minutes of real
governorship! Might it not make up a little, both to his own soul and to
the world, for the years he had weakly served as another man's puppet?
The consciousness that he could do it, that it was not within the power
of any man to stop him, was intoxicating. Why not break the chains now
at the last, and just before the end taste the joy of freedom?
He took up his pen and reached for the inkwell. With trembling, excited
fingers he unfolded the contracts. He dipped his pen into the ink; he
even brought it down on the paper; and then the tension broke. He sank
back in his chair, a frightened, broken old man.
“Oh, no,” he whispered; “no, not now. It's--” his head went lower and
lower until at last it rested on the desk--“too late.”
When he raised his head and grew more steady, it was only to see the
soundness of his conclusion. He had not the right now in the final
hour to buy for himself a little of glory. It would only be a form of
self-indulgence. They would call it, and perhaps rightly, hush money
to his conscience. They would say he went back on them only when he was
through with them. Oh, no, there would be no more strength in it than
in the average deathbed repentance. He would at least step out with
consistency.
He folded the contracts and put them back into the envelope. The minute
hand now pointed to seven minutes to twelve. Some one was tapping at
the door, and the secretary appeared to say they were waiting for him
upstairs. He replied that he would be there in a minute, hoping that his
voice did not sound as strange to the other man as it had to himself.
Slowly he walked to the door leading into the corridor. This, then, was
indeed the end; this the final stepping down from office! After years of
what they called public service, he was leaving it all now with a sense
of defeat and humiliation. A lump was in the old man's throat; his
eyes were blurred. “But you, Frank Leyman,” he whispered passionately,
turning as if for comfort to the other man, “it will be different with
you! They'll not get you--not you!”
It lifted him then as a great wave--this passionate exultation that here
was one man whom corruption could not claim as her own. Here was one
human soul not to be had for a price! There flitted before him again a
picture of that seventeen-year-old boy in the little red schoolhouse,
and close upon it came the picture of this other young man against whom
all powers of corruption had been turned in vain. With the one it
had been the emotional luxury of a sentiment, a thing from life's
actualities apart; with the other it was a force that dominated all
things else, a force over which circumstances and design could not
prevail. “I know all about it,” he was saying. “I know about it all! I
know how easy it is to fall! I know how fine it is to stand!”
His sense of disappointment in his own empty, besmirched career was
almost submerged then as he projected himself on into the career of
this other man who within the hour would come there in his stead. How
glorious was his opportunity, how limitless his possibilities, and how
great to his own soul the satisfaction the years would bring of having
done his best!
It had all changed now. That passionate longing to vindicate himself,
add one thing honourable and fine to his own record, had altogether left
him, and with the new mood came new insight and what had been an impulse
centred to a purpose.
It pointed to three minutes to twelve as he walked over to his desk,
unfolded the contracts, and one by one affixed his signature. In a dim
way he was conscious of how the interpretation of his first motive would
be put upon it, how they would call him traitor and coward; but that
mattered little. The very fact that the man for whom he was doing
it would never see it as it was brought him no pang. And when he had
carefully blotted the papers, affixed the seal and put them away, there
was in his heart the clean, sweet joy of a child because he had been
able to do this for a man in whom he believed.
The band was playing the opening strains as he closed the door behind
him and started upstairs.
IX
“OUT THERE”
The old man held the picture up before him and surveyed it with admiring
but disapproving eye. “No one that comes along this way'll have the
price for it,” he grumbled. “It'll just set here 'till doomsday.”
It did seem that the picture failed to fit in with the rest of the shop.
A persuasive young fellow who claimed he was closing out his stock let
the old man have it for what he called a song. It was only a little
out-of-the-way store which subsisted chiefly on the framing of pictures.
The old man looked around at his views of the city, his pictures of cats
and dogs and gorgeous young women, his flaming bits of landscape. “Don't
belong in here,” he fumed, “any more 'an I belong in Congress.”
And yet the old man was secretly proud of his acquisition. He seemed all
at once to be lifted from his realm of petty tradesman to that of patron
of art. There was a hidden dignity in his scowling as he shuffled about
pondering the least ridiculous place for the picture.
It is not fair to the picture to try repainting it in words, for words
reduce it to a lithograph. It was a bit of a pine forest, through which
there exuberantly rushed an unspoiled little mountain stream. Chromos
and works of art may deal with kindred subjects. There is just that one
difference of dealing with them differently. “It ain't what you _see_,
so much as what you can guess is there,” was the thought it brought to
the old man who was dusting it. “Now this frame ain't three feet long,
but it wouldn't surprise me a bit if that timber kept right on for a
hundred miles. I kind of suspect it's on a mountain--looks cool enough
in there to be on a mountain. Wish I was there. Bet they never see no
such days as we do in Chicago. Looks as though a man might call his soul
his own--out there.”
He began removing some views of Lincoln Park and some corpulent Cupids
in order to make room in the window for the new picture. When he went
outside to look at it he shook his head severely and hastened in to take
away some ardent young men and women, some fruit and flowers and fish
which he had left thinking they might “set it off.” It was evident that
the new picture did not need to be “set off.” “And anyway,” he told
himself, in vindication of entrusting all his goods to one bottom, “I
might as well take them out, for the new one makes them look so kind of
sick that no one would have them, anyhow.” Then he went back to mounting
views with the serenity of one who stands for the finer things.
His clamorous little clock pointed to a quarter of six when he finally
came back to the front of the store. It was time to begin closing up
for the night, but for the minute he stood there watching the crowd
of workers coming from the business district not far away over to the
boarding-house region, a little to the west. He watched them as they
came by in twos and threes and fours: noisy people and worn-out people,
people hilarious and people sullen, the gaiety and the weariness, the
acceptance and the rebellion of humanity--he saw it pass. “As if any of
_them_ could buy it,” he pronounced severely, adding, contemptuously,
“or wanted to.”
The girl was coming along by herself. He watched her as she crossed to
his side of the street, thinking it was too bad for a poor girl to be
as tired as that. She was dressed like many of the rest of them, and
yet she looked different--like the picture and the chromo. She turned an
indifferent glance toward the window, and then suddenly she stood there
very still, and everything about her seemed to change. “For all the
world,” he told himself afterward, “as if she'd found a long-lost
friend, and was 'fraid to speak for fear it was too good to be true.”
She did seem afraid to speak--afraid to believe. For a minute she stood
there right in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at the picture. And
when she came toward the window it was less as if coming than as if
drawn. What she really seemed to want to do was to edge away; yet she
came closer, as close as she could, her eyes never leaving the picture,
and then fear, or awe, or whatever it was made her look so queer
gave way to wonder--that wondering which is ready to open the door to
delight. She looked up and down the street as one rubbing one's eyes to
make sure of a thing, and then it all gave way to a joy which lighted
her pale little face like--“Well, like nothing I ever saw before,” was
all the old man could say of it. “Why, she'd never know if the whole
fire department was to run right up here on the sidewalk,” he gloated.
Just then she drew herself up for a long breath. “See?” he chuckled,
delightedly. “She knows it has a smell!” She looked toward the door,
but shook her head. “Knows she can't pay the price,” he interpreted her.
Then, she stepped back and looked at the number above the door. “Coming
again,” he made of that; “ain't going to run no chances of losing the
place.” And then for a long time she stood there before the picture, so
deeply and so strangely quiet that he could not translate her. “I can't
just get the run of it,” was his bewildered conclusion. “I don't see why
it should make anybody act like that.” And yet he must have understood
more than he knew, for suddenly he was seeing her through a blur of
tears.