Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “The Lord have mercy on us all!” she cried aloud. “To think that old rascal’d go out on a spree! He’d better of stayed in the country where he belonged.”

  It was the next morning that the House received a shock which loosed another riot, but one of a kind different from that which greeted Representative Rollinson’s vote on the “Breaker.” The reading-clerk had sung his way through an inconsequent bill; most of the members were buried in newspapers, gossiping, idling, or smoking in the lobbies, when a loud, cracked voice was heard shrilly demanding recognition.

  “Mr. Speaker!” Every one turned with a start. There was Uncle Billy, on his feet, violently waving his hands at the Speaker. “Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker!” His dress was disordered and muddy; his eyes shone with a fierce, absurd, liquorish light; and with each syllable that he uttered his beard wagged to an unspeakable effect of comedy. He offered the most grotesque spectacle ever seen in that hall — a notable distinction.

  For a moment the House sat in paralytic astonishment. Then came an awed whisper from a Republican: “Has the old fool really found his voice?”

  “No, he’s drunk,” said a neighbour. “I guess he can afford it, after his vote yesterday!”

  “Mister Speaker! Mister Speaker!”

  The cracked voice startled the lobbies. The hangers-on, the typewriters, the janitors, the smoking members came pouring into the chamber and stood, transfixed and open-mouthed.

  “Mister Speaker!”

  Then the place rocked with the gust of laughter and ironical cheering that swept over the Assembly, Members climbed upon their chairs and on desks, waving handkerchiefs, sheets of foolscap, and waste-baskets. “Hear ’im! He-ear ’im!” rang the derisive cry.

  The Speaker yielded in the same spirit and said:

  “The Gentleman from Wixinockee.”

  A semi-quiet followed and the cracked voice rose defiantly:

  “That’s who I am! I’m the Gentleman from Wixinockee an’ I stan’ here to defen’ the principles of the Democratic party!”

  The Democrats responded with violent hootings, supplemented by cheers of approval from the Republicans. The high voice out-shrieked them all: “Once a Democrat, always a Democrat! I voted Dem’cratic tick’t forty year, born a Democrat an’ die a Democrat. Fellow sizzens, I want to say to you right here an’ now that principles of Dem’cratic party saved this country a hun’erd times from Republican mal-’diministration an’ degerdation! Lemme tell you this: you kin take my life away but you can’t say I don’ stan’ by Dem’cratic party, mos’ glorious party of Douglas an’ Tilden, Hen’ricks, Henry Clay, an’ George Washin’ton. I say to you they hain’t no other party an’ I’m member of it till death an’ Hell an’ f’rever after, so help me God!”

  He smote the desk beside him with the back of his hand, using all his strength, skinning his knuckles so that the blood dripped from them, unnoticed. He waved both arms continually, bending his body almost double and straightening up again, in crucial efforts for emphasis. All the old jingo platitudes that he had learned from campaign speakers throughout his life, the nonsense and brag and blat, the cheap phrases, all the empty balderdash of the platform, rushed to his incoherent lips.

  The lord of misrule reigned at the end of each sentence, as the members sprang again upon the chairs and desks, roaring, waving, purple with laughter. The Speaker leaned back exhausted in his chair and let the gavel rest. Spectators, pages, galleries whooped and howled with the members. Finally the climax came.

  “I want to say to you just this here,” shrilled the cracked voice, “an’ you can tell the Republican party that I said so, tell ’em straight from me, an’ I hain’t goin’ back on it; I reckon they know who I am, too; I’m a man that’s honest — I’m as honest as the day is long, I am — as honest as the day is long—”

  He was interrupted by a loud voice. “Yes,” it cried, “when that day is the twenty-first of December!”

  That let pandemonium loose again, wilder, madder than before. A member threw a pamphlet at Uncle Billy. In a moment the air was thick with a Brobdingnagian snow-storm: pamphlets, huge wads of foolscap, bills, books, newspapers, waste-baskets went flying at the grotesque target from every quarter of the room. Members “rushed” the old man, hooting, cheering; he was tossed about, half thrown down, bruised, but, clamorous over all other clamours, jumping up and down to shriek over the heads of those who hustled him, his hands waving frantically in the air, his long beard wagging absurdly, still desperately vociferating his Democracy and his honesty.

  That was only the beginning. He had, indeed, “found his voice”; for he seldom went now to the boarding-house for his meals, but patronized the free-lunch counter and other allurements of the establishment across the way. Every day he rose in the House to speak, never failing to reach the assertion that he was “as honest as the day is long,” which was always greeted in the same way.

  For a time he was one of the jokes that lightened the tedious business of law-making, and the members looked forward to his “Mis-ter Speaker” as schoolboys look forward to recess. But, after a week, the novelty was gone.

  The old man became a bore. The Speaker refused to recognize him, and grew weary of the persistent shrilling. The day came when Uncle Billy was forcibly put into his seat by a disgusted sergeant-at-arms. He was half drunk (as he had come to be most of the time), but this humiliation seemed to pierce the alcoholic vapours that surrounded his always feeble intelligence. He put his hands up to his face and cried like a whimpering child. Then he shuffled out and went back to the saloon. He soon acquired the habit of leaving his seat in the House vacant; he was no longer allowed to make speeches there; he made them in the saloon, to the amusement of the loafers and roughs who infested it. They badgered him, but they let him harangue them, and applauded his rhodomontades.

  Hurlbut, passing the place one night at the end of the session, heard the quavering, drunken voice, and paused in the darkness to listen.

  “I tell you, fellow-countrymen, I’ve voted Dem’cratic tick’t forty year, live a Dem’crat, die a Dem’crat! An’ I’m’s honest as day is long!”

  It was five years after that session, when Hurlbut, now in the national Congress, was called to the district in which Wixinockee lies, to assist his hard-pressed brethren in a campaign. He was driving, one afternoon, to a political meeting in the country, when a recollection came to him and he turned to the committee chairman, who accompanied him, and said:

  “Didn’t Uncle Billy Rollinson live somewhere near here?”

  “Why, yes. You knew him in the legislature, didn’t you?”

  “A little. Where is he now?”

  “Just up ahead here. I’ll show you.”

  They reached the gate of a small, unkempt, weedy graveyard and stopped.

  “The inscription on the head-board is more or less amusing,” said the chairman, as he got out of the buggy, “considering that he was thought to be pretty crooked, and I seem to remember that he was ‘read out of the party,’ too. But he wrote the inscription himself, on his death-bed, and his son put it there.”

  There was a sparse crop of brown grass growing on the grave to which he led his companion. A cracked wooden head-board, already tilting rakishly, marked Henry’s devotion. It had been white-washed and the inscription done in black letters, now partly washed away by the rain, but still legible:

  HERE LIES THE MORTAL REMAINS OF WILLIAM ROLLINSON A LIFE-LONG DEMOCRAT AND A MAN AS HONEST AS THE DAY IS LONG

  The chairman laughed. “Don’t that beat thunder? You knew his record in the legislature didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was as crooked as they say he was, wasn’t he?”

  Hurlbut had grown much older in five years, and he was in Congress. He was climbing the ladder, and, to hold the position he had gained, and to insure his continued climbing, he had made some sacrifices within himself by obliging his friends — sacrifices which he did not name.

  “I co
uld hardly say,” he answered gently, his down-bent eyes fastened on the sparse, brown grass. “It’s not for us to judge too much. I believe, maybe, that if he could hear me now, I’d ask his pardon for some things I said to him once.”

  HECTOR

  IT ISN’T THE party manager, you understand, that gets the fame; it’s the candidate. The manager tries to keep his candidate in what the newspapers call a “blaze of publicity”; that is, to keep certain spots of him in the blaze, while sometimes it is the fact that a candidate does not know much of what is really going on; he gets all the red fire and sky-rockets, and, in the general dazzle and nervousness, is unconscious of the forces which are to elect or defeat him. Strange as it is, the more glare and conspicuousness he has, the more he usually wants. But the more a working political manager gets, the less he wants. You see, it’s a great advantage to keep out of the high lights.

  For my part, not even being known or important enough to be named “Dictator,” now and then, in the papers, I’ve had my fun in the game very quietly. Yet I did come pretty near being a famous man once, a good while ago, for about a week. That was just after Hector J. Ransom made his great speech on the “Patriotism of the Pasture” which set the country to talking about him and, in time, brought him all he desired.

  You remember what a big stir that speech made, of course — everybody remembers it. The people in his State went just wild with pride, and all over the country the papers had a sort of catch head-line: “Another Daniel Webster Come to Judgment!” When the reporters in my own town found out that Ransom was a second cousin of mine, I was put into a scare-head for the only time in my life. For a week I was a public character and important to other people besides the boys that do the work at primaries. I was interviewed every few minutes; and a reporter got me up one night at half-past twelve to ask for some anecdotes of Hector’s “Boyhood Days and Rise to Fame.”

  I didn’t oblige that young man, but I knew enough. I was always fond of my first cousin, Mary Ransom, Hector’s mother; and in the old days I never passed through Greenville, the little town where they lived, without stopping over, a train or two, to visit with her, and I saw plenty of Hector! I never knew a boy that left the other boys to come into the parlour (when there was company) quicker than Hector, and I certainly never saw a boy that “showed off” more. His mother was wrapped up in him; you could see in a minute that she fairly worshipped him; but I don’t know, if it hadn’t been for Mary, that I’d have praised his recitations and elocution so much, myself.

  Mary and I wouldn’t any more than get to tell each other how long since we’d heard from Aunt Sue, before Hector would grow uneasy and switch around on the sofa and say: “Ma, I’d rather you wouldn’t tell cousin Ben about what happened at the G. A. R. reunion. I don’t want to go through all that stuff again.”

  At that, Mary’s eyes would light up and she’d say: “You must, Hector, you must! I want him to hear you do it; he mustn’t go away without that!” Then she’d go on to tell me how Hector had recited Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech at a meeting of the local post of the G. A. R. and how he was applauded, and that many of the veterans had told him if he kept on he’d be Governor of his State some day, and how proud she was of him and how he was so different from ordinary boys that she was often anxious about him. Then she would urge him to let me have it — and he always would, especially if I said: “Oh, don’t make the boy do it, Mary!”

  He would stand out in the middle of the floor and thrust his chin out, knitting his brow and widening his nostrils, and shout “Of the people, By the people, and For the people” at the top of his lungs in that little parlour. He always had a great talent for mimicry, a talent of which I think he was absolutely unconscious. He would give his speeches in exactly the boy-orator style; that is, he imitated speakers who imitated others who had heard Daniel Webster. Mary and he, however, had no idea that he imitated anybody; they thought it was creative genius.

  When he had finished Lincoln, he would say: “Well, I’ve got another that’s a good deal better, but I don’t want to go through that today; it’s too much trouble,” with the result that in a few minutes Patrick Henry would take a turn or two in his grave. Hector always placed himself by a table for “Liberty or Death,” and barked his knuckles on it for emphasis. Little he cared, so long as he thought he’d got his effect! You could see, in spite of the intensity of his expression, that he was perfectly happy.

  When he’d worked us through that, and perhaps “Horatius at the Bridge” and the quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius and was pretty well emptied, he’d hang about and interrupt in a way that made me restless. Neither Mary nor I could get out two sentences before the boy would cut in with something like: “Don’t tell cousin Ben about that day I recited in school; I’m tired of all that guff!”

  Then Mary would answer: “It isn’t guff, precious. I never was prouder of you in my life.” And she’d go on to tell me about another of his triumphs, and how he made up speeches of his own sometimes, and would stand on a box and deliver them to his boy friends, though she didn’t say how the boys received them. All the while, Hector would stare at me like a neighbour’s cat on your front steps, to see what impression it made on me; and I was conscious that he was sure that I knew he was a wonderful boy. I think he felt that everybody knew it. Hector kind of palled on me.

  When he was about sixteen, Mary wrote me that she was in great distress about him because he had decided to go on the stage; that he had written to John McCullough, offering to take the place of leading man in his company to begin with. Mary was sure, she said, that the life of an actor was a hard one; Hector had always been very delicate (I had known him to eat a whole mince pie without apparent distress afterward) and she wanted me to write and urge him to change his mind. She felt sure Mr. McCullough would send for him at once, because Hector had written him that he already knew all the principal Shakespearian roles, could play Brutus, Cassius, or Mark Antony as desired; and he had added a letter of recommendation from the Mayor of their city, declaring that Hector was a finer elocutionist and tragedian than any actor he had ever seen.

  The dear woman’s anxiety was needless, for she wrote me, with as much surprise as pleasure, two months later, that for some reason Mr. McCullough had not answered the letter, and that she was very happy; she had persuaded Hector to go to college.

  How she kept him there, the first two years, I don’t know, for her husband had only left her about four hundred dollars a year. Of course, living in Greenville isn’t expensive, but it does cost something, and I honestly believe Mary came near to living on nothing. It was a small college that she’d sent the boy to, but it was a mother’s point with her that Hector should be as comfortable as anyone there.

  I stopped off at Greenville, one day, toward the end of his second year, but before he’d come home, and I saw how it was. Mary seemed as glad as ever to see me — it was the same old bright greeting that she’d always given me. She saw me from the dining-room window where she was eating her supper, and she came out, running down to the gate to meet me, like a girl; but she looked thin and pale.

  I said I’d go right in and have some supper with her, and at that the roses came back quickly to her cheeks. “No,” she said, “I wasn’t really at supper; only having a bite beforehand; I’m going up-town now to get the things for supper. You smoke a cigar out on the porch till I get back, and—”

  I took her by the arm. “Not much, Mary,” I said. “I’m going to have the same supper you had for yourself.”

  So I went straight out to the dining-room; and all I found on the table was some dry bread toasted and a baked apple without cream or sugar. It gave me a pretty good idea of what the general run of her meals must have been.

  I had a long talk with her that night, and I wormed it out of her that Hector’s college expenses were about twenty-five dollars a month, which left her six to live on. The truth is, she didn’t have enough to eat, and you could see how happy it made her. She re
ad me a good many of Hector’s letters, her voice often trembling with happiness over his triumphs. The letters were long, I’ll say that for Hector, which may have been to his credit as a son, or it may have been because he had such an interesting subject. There was no doubt that he had worked hard; he had taken all the chief prizes for oratory and essay writing and so forth that were open to him; he also allowed it to be seen that he was the chief person in the consideration of his class and the fraternity he had joined. Mary had a sort of humbleness about being the mother of such a son.

  But I settled one thing with her that night, though I had to hurt her feelings to do it. I owned a couple of small notes which had just fallen due, and I could spare the money. I put it as a loan to Hector himself; he was to pay me back when he got started, and so it was arranged that he could finish his course without his mother’s living on apples and toast.

  I went over to his Commencement with Mary and we hadn’t been in the town an hour before we saw that Hector was the king of the place. He had all the honours; first in his class, first in oratory, first in everything; professors and students all kow-towed and sounded the hew-gag before him. Most of Mary’s time was put in crying with happiness. As for Hector himself, he had changed in just one way: he no longer looked at people to see his effect on them; he was too confident of it.

  His face had grown to be the most determined I have ever seen. There was no obstinacy in it — he wasn’t a bull-dog — only set determination. No one could have failed to read in it an immensely powerful will. In a curious way he seemed “on edge” all the time. His nostrils were always distended, the muscles of his lean jaw were never lax, but continually at tension, thrusting the chin forward with his teeth hard together. His eyebrows were contracted, I think, even in his sleep, and he looked at everything with a sort of quick, fierce, appearance of scrutiny, though at that time I imagined that he saw very little. He had a loud, rich voice, his pronunciation was clipped to a deadly distinctness; he was so straight and his head so high in the air that he seemed almost to tilt back. With his tall figure and black hair, he was a boy who would have attracted attention, as they say, in any crowd, so that he might have been taken for a young actor. His best friend, a kind of Man Friday to him, was another young fellow from Greenville, whose name was Joe Lane. I liked Joe. I’d known him? since he was a boy. He was lazy and pleasant-looking, with reddish hair and a drawling, low voice. He had a humorous, sensible expression, though he was dissipated, I’d heard, but very gentle in his manners. I had a talk with him under the trees of the college campus in the moonlight, Commencement night. I can see the boy lying there now, sprawling on the grass with a cigar in his mouth.