Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  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 expression, we listened to him. We knew he was sencere! 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 neckwear 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 tomorrow. 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 mgger 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.”

  “Mr. Martin,” interrupted Fiderson, with indignation, “will you kindly inform me in what way ‘L’Aiglon’ was ‘low-down’?”

  “Well, sir, didn’t that huntin’-lodge appointment kind of put you in mind of a camp-meetin’ scandal?” returned old Tom quietly. “It did me.”

  “But—”

  “Well, sir, I can’t say as I understood the French of it, but I read the book in English before I come up, and it seemed to me he was pretty much of a low-down boy; yet I wanted to see how they’d make him out; hearin’ it was, thought, the country over, to be such a great play; though to tell the truth all I could tell about that was that every line seemed to end in ‘awze’; and ‘t they all talked in rhyme, and it did strike me as kind of enervatin’ to be expected to believe that people could keep it up that long; and that it wasn’t only the boy that never quit on the subject of himself and his folks, but pretty near any of ’em, if he’d git the chanst, did the same thing, so’t almost I sort of wondered if Rostand wasn’t that kind.”

  “Go on with Melville Bickner,” said I.

  “What do you expect,” retorted Mr. Martin with a vindictive gleam in his eye, “when you give a man one of these here spiral staircase cigars? Old Peter himself couldn’t keep straight along one subject if he tackled a cigar like this. Well, sir, I always thought Mel had a mighty mean time of it. He had to take care of his mother and two sisters, his little brother and an aunt that lived with them; and there was mighty little to do it on; big men don’t usually leave much but debts, and in this country, of course, a man can’t eat and spend long on his paw’s reputation, like that little Dook of Reishtod—”

  “I beg to tell you, Mr. Martin—” Fiderson began hotly.

  Martin waved his bony hand soothingly.

  “Oh, I know; they was money in his mother’s family, and they give him his vittles and clothes, and plenty, too. His paw didn’t leave much either — though he’d stole more than Boss Tweed. I suppose — and, just lookin’ at things from the point of what they’d earned, his maw’s folks had stole a good deal, too; or else you can say they were a kind of public charity; old Metternich, by what I can learn, bein’ the only one in the whole possetucky of ’em that really did anything to deserve his salary—” Mr. Martin broke off suddenly, observing that I was about to speak, and continued:

  “Mel didn’t git much law practice, jest about enough to keep the house goin’ and pay taxes. He kept workin’ for the party jest the same and jest as cheerfully as if it didn’t turn him down hard every time he tried to git anything for himself. They lived some ways out from town; and he sold the horses to keep the little brother in school, one winter, and used to walk in to his office and out again, twice a day, over the worst roads in the State, rain or shine, snow, sleet, or wind, without any overcoat; and he got kind of a skimpy, froze-up look to him that lasted clean through summer. He worked like a mule, that boy did, jest barely makin’ ends meet. He had to quit runnin’ with the girls and goin’ to parties and everything like that; and I expect it may have been some hard to do; for if they ever was a boy loved to dance and be gay, and up to any
thing in the line of fun and junketin’ round, it was Mel Bickner. He had a laugh I can hear yet — made you feel friendly to everybody you saw; feel like stoppin’ the next man you met and shakin’ hands and havin’ a joke with him.

  “Mel was engaged to Jane Grandis when Governor Bickner died. He had to go and tell her to take somebody else — it was the only thing to do. He couldn’t give Jane anything but his poverty, and she wasn’t used to it. They say she offered to come to him anyway, but he wouldn’t hear of it, and no more would he let her wait for him; told her she mustn’t grow into an old maid, lonely, and still waitin’ for the lightning to strike him — that is, his luck to come; and actually advised her to take ‘Gene Callender, who’d be’n pressin’ pretty close to Mel for her before the engagement. The boy didn’t talk to her this way with tears in his eyes and mourning and groaning. No, sir! It was done cheerful; and so much so that Jane never was quite sure afterwerds whether Mel wasn’t kind of glad to git rid of her or not. Fact is, they say she quit speakin’ to him. Mel knowed; a state of puzzlement or even a good mad’s a mighty sight better than bein’ all harrowed up and grief-stricken. And he never give her — nor any one else — a chanst to be sorry for him. His maw was the only one heard him walk the floor nights, and after he found, out she could hear him he walked in his socks.

  “Yes, sir! Meet that boy on the street, or go up in his office, you’d think that he was the gayest feller in town. I tell you there wasn’t anything pathetic about Mel Bickner! He didn’t believe in it. And at home he had a funny story every evening of the world, about something ‘d happened during the day; and ‘d whistle to the guitar, or git his maw into a game of cards with his aunt and the girls. Law! that boy didn’t believe in no house of mourning. He’d be up at four in the morning, hoein’ up their old garden; raised garden-truck for their table, sparrow-grass and sweet corn — yes, and roses, too; always had the house full of roses in June-time; never was a house sweeter-smellin’ to go into.