Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “It’s I,” said a voice I didn’t know— a queer, hoarse voice. “Come down.”

  “Who’s ‘I’?” I asked.

  “Farwell Knowles,” said the voice. “Let me in!”

  I started, and looked down.

  He was standing on the steps where the light of a street-lamp fell on him, and I saw even by the poor glimmer that something was wrong; he was white as a dead man. There was something wild in his attitude; he had no hat, and looked all mixed-up and disarranged.

  “Come down—come down!” he begged thickly, beckoning me with his arm.

  I got on some clothes, slipped downstairs without wakening my wife, lit the hall light, and took him into the library. He dropped in a chair with a quick breath like a sob, and when I turned from lighting the gas I was shocked by the change in him since afternoon. I never saw such a look before. It was like a rat you’ve seen running along the gutter side of the curbstone with a terrier after it.

  “What’s the matter, Farwell?” I asked.

  “Oh, my God!” he whispered.

  “What’s happened?”

  “It’s hard to tell you,” said he. “Oh, but it’s hard to tell.”

  “Want some whiskey?” I asked, reaching for a decanter that stood handy. He nodded and I gave him good allowance.

  “Now,” said I, when he’d gulped it down, “let’s hear what’s turned up.”

  He looked at me kind of dimly, and I’ll be shot if two tears didn’t well up in his eyes and run down his cheeks. “I’ve come to ask you,” he said slowly and brokenly, “to ask you—if you won’t intercede with Gorgett for me; to ask you if you won’t beg him to—to grant me—an interview before to-morrow noon.”

  “What!”

  “Will you do it?”

  “Certainly. Have you asked for an interview with him yourself?”

  He struck the back of his hand across his forehead—struck hard, too.

  “Have I tried? I’ve been following him like a dog since five o’clock this afternoon, beseeching him to give me twenty minutes’ talk in private. He laughed at me! He isn’t a man; he’s an iron-hearted devil! Then I went to his house and waited three hours for him. When he came, all he would say was that you were supposed to be running this campaign for me, and I’d better consult with you. Then he turned me out of his house!”

  “You seem to have altered a little since this afternoon.” I couldn’t resist that.

  “This afternoon!” he shuddered. “I think that was a thousand years ago!”

  “What do you want to see him for?”

  “What for? To see if there isn’t a little human pity in him for a fellow-being in agony—to end my suspense and know whether or not he means to ruin me and my happiness and my home forever!”

  Farwell didn’t seem to be regarding me so much in the light of a character as usual; still, one thing puzzled me, and I asked him how he happened to come to me.

  “Because I thought if anyone in the world could do anything with Gorgett, you’d be the one,” he answered. “Because it seemed to me he’d listen to you, and because I thought—in my wild clutching at the remotest hope—that he meant to make my humiliation more awful by sending me to you to ask you to go back to him for me.”

  “Well, well,” I said, “I guess if you want me to be of any use you’ll have to tell me what it’s all about.”

  “I suppose so,” he said, and choked, with a kind of despairing sound; “I don’t see any way out of it.”

  “Go ahead,” I told him. “I reckon I’m old enough to keep my counsel. Let it go, Farwell.”

  “Do you know,” he began, with a sharp grinding of his teeth, “that dishonourable scoundrel has had me watched, ever since there was talk of me for the fusion candidate? He’s had me followed, shadowed, till he knows more about me than I do myself.”

  I saw right there that I’d never really measured Gorgett for as tall as he really was. “Have a cigar?” I asked Knowles, and lit one myself. But he shook his head and went on:

  “You remember my taking you to call on General Buskirk’s daughter?”

  “Quite well,” said I, puffing pretty hard.

  “An angel! A white angel! And this beast, this boodler has the mud in his hands to desecrate her white garments!”

  “Oh,” says I.

  The angel’s knight began to pace the room as he talked, clinching and unclinching his hands, while the perspiration got his hair all scraggly on his forehead. You see Farwell was doing some suffering and he wasn’t used to it.

  “When she came home from abroad, a year ago,” he said, “it seemed to me that a light came into my life. I’ve got to tell you the whole thing,” he groaned, “but it’s hard! Well, my wife is taken up with our little boy and housekeeping—I don’t complain of her, mind that—but she really hasn’t entered into my ambitions, my inner life. She doesn’t often read my editorials, and when she does, she hasn’t been serious in her consideration of them and of my purposes. Sometimes she differed openly from me and sometimes greeted my work for truth and light with indifference! I had learned to bear this, and more; to save myself pain I had come to shrink from exposing my real self to her. Then, when this young girl came, for the first time in my life I found real sympathy and knew what I thought I never should know; a heart attuned to my own, a mind that sought my own ideals, a soul of the same aspirations—and a perfect faith in what I was and in what it was my right to attain. She met me with open hands, and lifted me to my best self. What, unhappily, I did not find at home, I found in her—encouragement. I went to her in every mood, always to be greeted by the most exquisite perception, always the same delicate receptiveness. She gave me a sister’s love!”

  I nodded; I knew he thought so.

  “Well, when I went into this campaign, what more natural than that I should seek her ready sympathy at every turn, than that I should consult with her at each crisis, and, when I became the fusion candidate, that I should go to her with the news that I had taken my first great step toward my goal and had achieved thus far in my struggle for the cause of our hearts—reform?”

  “You went up to Buskirk’s after the convention?” I asked.

  “No; the night before.” He took his head in his hands and groaned, but without pausing in his march up and down the room. “You remember, it was known by ten o’clock, after the primaries, that I should receive the nomination. As soon as I was sure, I went to her; and I found her in the same state of exaltation and pride that I was experiencing myself. There was always the answer in her, I tell you, always the response that such a nature as mine craves. She took both my hands and looked at me just as a proud sister would. ‘I read your news,’ she said. ‘It is in your face!’ Wasn’t that touching? Then we sat in silence for a while, each understanding the other’s joy and triumph in the great blow I had struck for the right. I left very soon, and she came with me to the door. We stood for a moment on the step—and—for the first time, the only time in my life—I received a—a sister’s caress.”

  “Oh,” said I. I understood how Gorgett had managed to be so calm that afternoon.

  “It was the purest kiss ever given!” Farwell groaned again.

  “Who was it saw you?” I asked.

  He dropped into a chair and I saw the tears of rage and humiliation welling up again in his eyes.

  “We might as well have been standing by the footlights in a theatre!” he burst out, brokenly. “Who saw it? Who didn’t see it? Gorgett’s sleuth-hound, the man he sent to me this afternoon, for one; the policeman on the beat that he’d stopped for a chat in front of the house, for another; a maid in the hall behind us, the policeman’s sweetheart she is, for another! Oh!” he cried, “the desecration! That one caress, one that I’d thought a sacred secret between us forever—and in plain sight of those three hideous vulgarians, all belonging to my enemy, Gorgett! Ah, t
he horror of it—what horror!”

  Farwell wrung his hands and sat, gulping as if he were sick, without speaking for several moments.

  “What terms did the man he sent offer from Gorgett?” I asked.

  “No terms! He said to go ahead and print my story about the closet; it was a matter of perfect indifference to him; that he meant to print this about me in their damnable party-organ to-morrow, in any event, and only warned me so that I should have time to prepare Miss Buskirk. Of course he don’t care! I’ll be ruined, that’s all. Oh, the hideous injustice of it, the unreason! Don’t you see the frightful irony of it? The best thing in my life, the widest and deepest; my friendship with a good woman becomes a joke and a horror! Don’t you see that the personal scandal about me absolutely undermines me and nullifies the political scandal of the closet affair? Gorgett will come in again and the Grand Jury would laugh at any attack on him. I’m ruined for good, for good and all, for good and all!”

  “Have you told Miss Buskirk?”

  He uttered a kind of a shriek. “No! I can’t! How could I? What do you think I’m made of? And there’s her father—and all her relatives, and mine, and my wife—my wife! If she leaves me—”

  A fit of nausea seemed to overcome him and he struggled with it, shivering. “My God! Do you think I can face it? I’ve come to you for help in the most wretched hour of my life—all darkness, darkness! Just on the eve of triumph to be stricken down—it’s so cruel, so devilish! And to think of the horrible comic-weekly misery of it, caught kissing a girl, by a policeman and his sweetheart, the chambermaid! Ugh! The vulgar ridicule—the hideous laughter!” He raised his hands to me, the most grovelling figure of a man I ever saw.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, help me, help me. . . .”

  Well, sir, it was sickening enough, but after he had gone, and I tumbled into bed again, I thought of Gorgett and laughed myself to sleep with admiration.

  When Farwell and I got to Gorgett’s office, fairly early the next morning, Lafe was sitting there alone, expecting us, of course, as I knew he would be, but in the same characteristic, lazy attitude I’d found him in, the day before; feet up on the desk, hat-brim tilted ’way forward, cigar in the right-hand corner of his mouth, his hands in his pockets, his double-chin mashing down his limp collar. He didn’t even turn to look at us as we came in and closed the door.

  “Come in, gentlemen, come in,” says he, not moving. “I kind of thought you’d be along, about this time.”

  “Looking for us, were you?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said he. “Sit down.”

  We did; Farwell looking pretty pale and red-eyed, and swallowing a good deal.

  There was a long, long silence. We just sat and watched Gorgett. I didn’t want to say anything; and I believe Farwell couldn’t. It lasted so long that it began to look as if the little blue haze at the end of Lafe’s cigar was all that was going to happen. But by and by he turned his head ever so little, and looked at Knowles.

  “Got your story for the Herald set up yet?” he asked.

  Farwell swallowed some more and just shook his head.

  “Haven’t begun to work up the case for the Grand Jury yet?”

  “No,” answered Farwell, in almost a whisper, his head hanging.

  “Why,” Lafe said, in a tone of quiet surprise; “you haven’t given all that up, have you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, ain’t that strange?” said Lafe. “What’s the trouble?”

  Knowles didn’t answer. In fact, I felt mighty sorry for him.

  All at once, Gorgett’s manner changed; he threw away his cigar, the only time I ever saw him do it without lighting another at the end of it. His feet came down to the floor and he wheeled round on Farwell.

  “I understand your wife’s a mighty nice lady, Mr. Knowles.”

  Farwell’s head sank lower till we couldn’t see his face, only his fingers working kind of pitifully.

  “I guess you’ve had rather a bad night?” said Gorgett, inquiringly.

  “Oh, my God!” The words came out in a whisper from under Knowles’s tilted hat-brim.

  “I believe I’d advise you to stick to your wife,” Gorgett went on, quietly, “and let politics alone. Somehow I don’t believe you’re the kind of man for it. I’ve taken considerable interest in you for some time back, Mr. Knowles, though I don’t suppose you’ve noticed it until lately; and I don’t believe you understand the game. You’ve said some pretty hard things in your paper about me; you’ve been more or less excitable in your statements; but that’s all right. What I don’t like altogether, though, is that it seems to me you’ve been really tooting your own horn all the time—calling everybody dishonest and scoundrels, to shove yourself forward. That always ends in sort of a lonely position. I reckon you feel considerably lonely, just now? Well, yesterday, I understand you were talking pretty free about the penitentiary. Now, that ain’t just the way to act, according to my notion. It’s a bad word. Here we are, he and I”—he pointed to me—“carrying on our little fight according to the rules, enjoying it and blocking each other, gaining a point here and losing one there, everything perfectly good-natured, when you turn up and begin to talk about the penitentiary! That ain’t quite the thing. You see words like that are liable to stir up the passions. It’s dangerous. You were trusted, when they told you the closet story, to regard it as a confidence—though they didn’t go through the form of pledging you—because your people had given their word not to betray Genz. But you couldn’t see it and there you went, talking about the Grand Jury and stripes and so on, stirring up passions and ugly feelings. And I want to tell you that the man who can afford to do that has to be mighty immaculate himself. The only way to play politics, whatever you’re for, is to learn the game first. Then you’ll know how far you can go and what your own rec­ord will stand. There ain’t a man alive whose record will stand too much, Mr. Knowles—and when you get to thinking about that and what your own is, it makes you feel more like treating your fellow-sinners a good deal gentler than you would otherwise. Now I’ve got a wife and two little girls, and my old mother’s proud of me (though you wouldn’t think it) and they’d hate it a good deal to see me sent over the road for playing the game the best I could as I found it.”

  He paused for a moment, looking sad and almost embarrassed. “It ain’t any great pleasure to me,” he said, “to think that the people have let it get to be the game that it is. But I reckon it’s good for you. I reckon the best thing that ever happened to you is having to come here this morning to ask mercy of a man you looked down on.”

  Farwell shifted a little in his chair, but he didn’t speak, and Gorgett went on:

  “I suppose you think it’s mighty hard that your private character should be used against you in a political question by a man you call a public corruptionist. But I’m in a position where I can’t take any chances against an antagonist that won’t play the game my way. I had to find your vulnerable point to defend myself, and, in finding it, I find that there’s no need to defend myself any longer, because it makes all your weapons ineffective. I believe the trouble with you, Mr. Knowles, is that you’ve never realized that politicians are human beings. But we are: we breathe and laugh and like to do right, like other folks. And, like most men, you’ve thought you were different from other men, and you aren’t. So, here you are. I believe you said you’d had a hard night?”

  Knowles looked up at last, his lips working for a while before he could speak. “I’ll resign now—if you’ll—if you’ll let me off,” he said.

  Gorgett shook his head. “I’ve got the election in my hand,” he answered, “though you fellows don’t know it. You’ve got nothing to offer me, and you couldn’t buy me if you had.”

  At that, Knowles just sank into himself with a little, faint cry, in a kind of heap. There wasn’t anything but anguish and despair to him. Big tears were slid
ing down his cheeks.

  I didn’t say anything. Gorgett sat looking at him for a good while; and then his fat chin began to tremble a little and I saw his eyes shining in the shadow under his old hat-brim.

  He got up and went over to Farwell with slow steps and put his hand gently on his shoulder.

  “Go on home to your wife,” he said, in a low voice that was the saddest I ever heard. “I don’t bear you any ill-will in the world. Nobody’s going to give you away.”

  The Aliens

  * * *

  PIETRO TOBIGLI, that gay young chestnut vender—he of the radiant smiles—gave forth, in his warm tenor, his own interpretation of “Ach du lieber Augustine,” whenever Bertha, rosy waitress in the little German restaurant, showed her face at the door. For a month it had been a courtship; and the merchant sang often:

  “Ahaha, du libra Ogostine,

  Ogostine, Ogostine!

  Ahaha, du libra Ogostine,

  Nees coma ross.”

  The acquaintance, begun by the song and Pietro’s wonderful laugh, had grown tender. The chestnut vender had a way with him; he looked like the “Neapolitan Fisher Lad” of the chromos, and you could have fancied him of two centuries ago, putting a rose in his hair; even as it was, he had the ear-rings. But the smile of him it was that won Bertha, when she came to work in the little restaurant. It was a smile that put the world at its ease; it proclaimed the coming of morning over the meadows, and, taking every bystander into an April friendship, ran on suddenly into a laugh that was like silver, and like a strange puppy’s claiming you for the lost master.

  So it befell that Bertha was fascinated; that, blushing, she laughed back to him, and was nothing offended when, at his first sight of her, he rippled out at once into “Ahaha, du libra Ogostine.”

  Within two weeks he was closing his business (no intricate matter) every evening, to walk home with her, through the September moonlight. Then extraordinary things happened to the English language.