Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “Senator, be quick,” he said sharply, at the same time alert to see that they were unobserved. “Mrs. Protheroe wants to speak to you at once. You’ll find her near the big palms under the stairway in the hall.”

  He was gone—he had wormed his way half across the room—before the other, in his simple amazement could answer. When Alonzo at last found a word, it was only a monosyllable, which, with his accompanying action, left a matron of years, who was at that moment being pressed fondly to his side, in a state of mind almost as dumbfounded as his own. “Here!” was all he said as he pressed the plate and napkin into her hand and departed forcibly for the hall, leaving a spectacular wreckage of trains behind him.

  The upward flight of the stairway left a space underneath, upon which, as it was screened (save for a narrow entrance) by a thicket of palms, the crowd had not encroached. Here were placed a divan and a couple of chairs; there was shade from the glare of gas, and the light was dim and cool. Mrs. Protheroe had risen from the divan when Alonzo entered this grotto, and stood waiting for him.

  He stopped in the green entrance-way with a quick exclamation.

  She did not seem the same woman who had put such slights upon him, this tall, white vision of silk, with the summery scarf falling from her shoulders. His great wrath melted at the sight of her; the pain of his racked pride, which had been so hot in his breast, gave way to a species of fear. She seemed not a human being, but a white spirit of beauty and goodness who stood before him, extending two fine arms to him in long, white gloves.

  She left him to his trance for a moment, then seized both his hands in hers and cried to him in her rapturous, low voice: “Ah, Senator, you have come! I knew you understood!”

  “Yes ma’am,” he whispered chokily.

  She drew him to one of the chairs and sank gracefully down upon the divan near him.

  “Mr. Truslow was so afraid you wouldn’t,” she went on rapidly, “but I was sure. You see I didn’t want anybody to suspect that I had any influence with you. I didn’t want them to know, even, that I’d talked to you. It all came to me after the first day that we met. You see I’ve believed in you, in your power and in your reserve, from the first. I want all that you do to seem to come from yourself and not from me or any one else. Oh, I believe in great, strong men who stand upon their own feet and conquer the world for themselves! That’s your way, Senator Rawson. So, you see, as they think I’m lobbying for the bill, I wanted them to believe that your speech for it to-morrow comes from your own great, strong mind and heart and your sense of right, and not from any suggestion of mine.”

  “My speech!” he stammered.

  “Oh, I know,” she cried; “I know you think I don’t believe much in speeches, and I don’t ordinarily, but a few, simple, straightforward and vigorous words from you, to-morrow, may carry the bill through. You’ve made such progress, you’ve been so reserved, that you’ll carry great weight—and there are three votes of the drains-and-dikes that are against us now, but will follow yours absolutely. Do you think I would have ‘cut’ you if it hadn’t been best?”

  “But I—”

  “Oh, I know you didn’t actually promise me to speak, that day. But I knew you would when the time came! I knew that a man of power goes over all obstacles, once his sense of right is aroused! I knew—I never doubted it, that once you felt a thing to be right you would strike for it, with all your great strength—at all costs—at all—”

  “I can’t—I—I—can’t!” he whispered nervously. “Don’t you see—don’t you see—I—”

  She leaned toward him, lifting her face close to his. She was so near him that the faint odour of her hair came to him again, and once more the unfortunate Senator from Stackpole risked a meeting of his eyes with hers, and saw the light shining far down in their depths.

  At this moment the shadow of a portly man who was stroking his beard the wrong way projected itself upon them from the narrow, green entrance to the grotto. Neither of them perceived it.

  Senator Josephus Battle passed on, but when Alonzo Rawson emerged, a few moments later, he was pledged to utter a few simple, straightforward and vigorous words in favour of the bill. And—let the shame fall upon the head of the scribe who tells it—he had kissed Mrs. Protheroe!

  The fight upon the “Sunday Baseball Bill,” the next morning, was the warmest of that part of the session, though for a while the reporters were disappointed. They were waiting for Senator Battle, who was famous among them for the vituperative vigour of his attacks and for the kind of personalities which made valuable copy. And yet, until the debate was almost over, he contented himself with going quietly up and down the aisles, whispering to the occupants of the desks, and writing and sending a multitude of notes to his colleagues. Meanwhile, the orators upon both sides harangued their fellows, the lobby, the unpolitical audience, and the patient presiding officer to no effect, so far as votes went. The general impression was that it would be close.

  Alonzo Rawson sat, bent over his desk, his eyes fixed with gentle steadiness upon Mrs. Protheroe, who occupied the chair wherein he had first seen her. A senator of the opposition was finishing his denunciation, when she turned and nodded almost imperceptibly to the young man.

  He gave her one last look of pathetic tenderness and rose.

  “The Senator from Stackpole!”

  “I want,” Alonzo began, in his big voice: “I want to say a few simple, straightforward but vigorous words about this bill. You may remember I spoke against it on its second reading—”

  “You did that!” shouted Senator Battle suddenly.

  “I want to say now,” the Senator from Stackpole continued, “that at that time I hadn’t studied the subject sufficiently. I didn’t know the conditions of the case, nor the facts, but since then a great light has broke in upon me—”

  “I should say it had! I saw it break!” was Senator Battle’s second violent interruption.

  When order was restored, Alonzo, who had become very pale, summoned his voice again. “I think we’d ought to take into consideration that Sunday is the working-man’s only day of recreation and not drive him into low groggeries, but give him a chance in the open air to indulge his love of wholesome sport—”

  “Such as the ancient Romans enjoyed!” interposed Battle vindictively.

  “No, sir!” Alonzo wheeled upon him, stung to the quick. “Such a sport as free-born Americans and only free-born Americans can play in this wide world—the American game of baseball, in which no other nation of the Earth is our equal!”

  This was a point scored and the cheering lasted two minutes. Then the orator resumed:

  “I say: ‘Give the working-man a chance!’ Is his life a happy one? You know it ain’t! Give him his one day. Don’t spoil it for him with your laws—he’s only got one! I’m not goin’ to take up any more of your time, but if there’s anybody here who thinks my well-considered opinion worth following I say: ‘Vote for this bill.’ It is right and virtuous and ennobling, and it ought to be passed! I say: ‘Vote for it.’”

  The reporters decided that the Senator from Stackpole had “wakened things up.” The gavel rapped a long time before the chamber quieted down, and when it did, Josephus Battle was on his feet and had obtained the recognition of the chair.

  “I wish to say, right here,” he began, with a rasping leisureliness, “that I hope no member of this honoured body will take my remarks as personal or unparliamentary—but”—he raised a big forefinger and shook it with menace at the presiding officer, at the same time suddenly lifting his voice to an unprintable shriek—“I say to you, sir, that the song of the siren has been heard in the land, and the call of Delilah has been answered! When the Senator from Stackpole rose in this chamber, less than three weeks ago, and denounced this iniquitous measure, I heard him with pleasure—we all heard him with pleasure—and respect! In spite of his youth and the poor quality of his exp
ression, we listened to him. We knew he was sincere! What has caused the change in him? What has, I ask? I shall not tell you, upon this floor, but I’ve taken mighty good care to let most of you know, during the morning, either by word of mouth or by note of hand! Especially those of you of the drains-and-dikes and others who might follow this young Samson, whose locks have been shore! I’ve told you all about that, and more—I’ve told you the inside history of some facts about the bill that I will not make public, because I am too confident of our strength to defeat this devilish measure, and prefer to let our vote speak our opinion of it! Let me not detain you longer. I thank you!”

  Long before he had finished, the Senator from Stackpole was being held down in his chair by Truslow and several senators whose seats were adjacent; and the vote was taken amid an uproar of shouting and confusion. When the clerk managed to proclaim the result over all other noises, the bill was shown to be defeated and “killed,” by a majority of five votes.

  A few minutes later, Alonzo Rawson, his neck-wear disordered and his face white with rage, stumbled out of the great doors upon the trail of Battle, who had quietly hurried away to his hotel for lunch as soon as he had voted.

  The black automobile was vanishing round a corner. Truslow stood upon the edge of the pavement staring after it ruefully:

  “Where is Mrs. Protheroe?” gasped the Senator from Stackpole.

  “She’s gone,” said the other.

  “Gone where?”

  “Gone back to Paris. She sails day after to-morrow. She just had time enough to catch her train for New York after waiting to hear how the vote went. She told me to tell you good-bye, and that she was sorry. Don’t stare at me Rawson! I guess we’re in the same boat!—Where are you going?” he finished abruptly.

  Alonzo swung by him and started across the street. “To find Battle!” the hoarse answer came back.

  The conquering Josephus was leaning meditatively upon the counter of the cigar-stand of his hotel when Alonzo found him. He took one look at the latter’s face and backed to the wall, tightening his grasp upon the heavy-headed ebony cane it was his habit to carry, a habit upon which he now congratulated himself.

  But his precautions were needless. Alonzo stopped out of reaching distance.

  “You tell me,” he said in a breaking voice; “you tell me what you meant about Delilah and sirens and Samsons and inside facts! You tell me!”

  “You wild ass of the prairies,” said Battle, “I saw you last night behind them pa’ms! But don’t you think I told it—or ever will! I just passed the word around that she’d argued you into her way of thinkin’, same as she had a good many others. And as for the rest of it, I found out where the nigger in the woodpile was, and I handed that out, too. Don’t you take it hard, my son, but I told you her husband left her a good deal of land around here. She owns the ground that they use for the baseball park, and her lease would be worth considerable more if they could have got the right to play on Sundays!”

  Senator Trumbull sat up straight, in bed, that night, and, for the first time during his martyrdom, listened with no impatience to the prayer which fell upon his ears.

  “O Lord Almighty,” through the flimsy partition came the voice of Alonzo Rawson, quaveringly, but with growing strength: “Aid Thou me to see my way more clear! I find it hard to tell right from wrong, and I find myself beset with tangled wires. O God, I feel that I am ignorant, and fall into many devices. These are strange paths wherein Thou hast set my feet, but I feel that through Thy help, and through great anguish, I am learning!”

  Great Men’s Sons

  * * *

  MME. BERNHARDT and M. Coquelin were playing “L’Aiglon.” Toward the end of the second act people began to slide down in their seats, shift their elbows, or casually rub their eyes; by the close of the third, most of the taller gentlemen were sitting on the small of their backs with their knees as high as decorum permitted, and many were openly coughing; but when the fourth came to an end, active resistance ceased, hopelessness prevailed, the attitudes were those of the stricken field, and the over-crowded house was like a college chapel during an interminable compulsory lecture. Here and there—but most rarely—one saw an eager woman with bright eyes, head bent forward and body spellbound, still enchantedly following the course of the play. Between the acts the orchestra pattered ragtime and inanities from the new comic operas, while the audience in general took some heart. When the play was over, we were all enthusiastic; though our admiration, however vehement in the words employed to express it, was somewhat subdued as to the accompanying manner, which consisted, mainly, of sighs and resigned murmurs. In the lobby a thin old man with a grizzled chin-beard dropped his hand lightly on my shoulder, and greeted me in a tone of plaintive inquiry:

  “Well, son?”

  Turning, I recognized a patron of my early youth, in whose woodshed I had smoked my first cigar, an old friend whom I had not seen for years; and to find him there, with his long, dust-coloured coat, his black string tie and rusty hat, brushed on every side by opera cloaks and feathers, was a rich surprise, warming the cockles of my heart. His name is Tom Martin; he lives in a small country town, where he commands the trade in Dry Goods and Men’s Clothing; his speech is pitched in a high key, is very slow, sometimes whines faintly; and he always calls me “Son.”

  “What in the world!” I exclaimed, as we shook hands.

  “Well,” he drawled, “I dunno why I shouldn’t be as meetropolitan as anybody. I come over on the afternoon accommodation for the show. Let’s you and me make a night of it. What say, son?”

  “What did you think of the play?” I asked, as we turned up the street toward the club.

  “I think they done it about as well as they could.”

  “That all?”

  “Well,” he rejoined with solemnity, “there was a heap of it, wasn’t there!”

  We talked of other things, then, until such time as we found ourselves seated by a small table at the club, old Tom somewhat uneasily regarding a twisted cigar he was smoking and plainly confounded by the “carbonated” syphon, for which, indeed, he had no use in the world. We had been joined by little Fiderson, the youngest member of the club, whose whole nervous person jerkily sparkled “L’Aiglon” enthusiasm.

  “Such an evening!” he cried, in his little spiky voice. “Mr. Martin, it does one good to realize that our country towns are sending representatives to us when we have such things; that they wish to get in touch with what is greatest in Art. They should do it often. To think that a journey of only seventy miles brings into your life the magnificence of Rostand’s point of view made living fire by the genius of a Bernhardt and a Coquelin!”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Martin, with a curious helplessness, after an ensuing pause, which I refused to break, “yes, sir, they seemed to be doing it about as well as they could.”

  Fiderson gasped slightly. “It was magnificent! Those two great artists! But over all the play—the play! Romance new-born; poesy marching with victorious banners; a great spirit breathing! Like ‘Cyrano’—the birth-mark of immortality on this work!”

  There was another pause, after which old Tom turned slowly to me, and said: “Homer Tibbs’s opened up a cigar-stand at the deepo. Carries a line of candy, magazines, and fruit, too. “Home’s a hustler.”

  Fiderson passed his hand through his hair.

  “That death scene!” he exclaimed at me, giving Martin up as a log accidentally rolled in from the woods. “I thought that after ‘Wagram’ I could feel nothing more; emotion was exhausted; but then came that magnificent death! It was tragedy made ecstatic; pathos made into music; the grandeur of a gentle spirit, conquered physically but morally unconquerable! Goethe’s ‘More Light’ outshone!”

  Old Tom’s eyes followed the smoke of his perplexing cigar along its heavy strata in the still air of the room, as he inquired if I remembered Orlando T. Bickner’s boy, Mel
. I had never heard of him, and said so.

  “No, I expect not,” rejoined Martin. “Prob’ly you wouldn’t; Bickner was governor along in my early days, and I reckon he ain’t hardly more than jest a name to you two. But we kind of thought he was the biggest man this country had ever seen, or was goin’ to see, and he was a big man. He made one president, and could have been it himself, instead, if he’d be’n willing to do a kind of underhand trick, but I expect without it he was about as big a man as anybody’d care to be; governor, senator, secretary of state—and just owned his party! And, my law!—the whole earth bowin’ down to him; torchlight processions and sky-rockets when he come home in the night; bands and cannon if his train got in, daytime; home-folks so proud of him they couldn’t see; everybody’s hat off; and all the most important men in the country following at his heels—a country, too, that’d put up consider’ble of a comparison with everything Napoleon had when he’d licked ’em all, over there.

  “Of course he had enemies, and, of course, year by year, they got to be more of ’em, and they finally downed him for good; and like other public men so fixed, he didn’t live long after that. He had a son, Melville, mighty likable young fellow, studyin’ law when his paw died. I was livin’ in their town then, and I knowed Mel Bickner pretty well; he was consider’ble of a man.

  “I don’t know as I ever heard him speak of that’s bein’ the reason, but I expect it may’ve be’n partly in the hope of carryin’ out some of his paw’s notions, Mel tried hard to git into politics; but the old man’s local enemies jumped on every move he made, and his friends wouldn’t help any; you can’t tell why, except that it generally is thataway. Folks always like to laugh at a great man’s son and say he can’t amount to anything. Of course that comes partly from fellows like that ornery little cuss we saw to-night, thinkin’ they’re a good deal because somebody else done something, and the somebody else happened to be their paw; and the women run after ’em, and they git low-down like he was, and so on.”