II
A MAN OF THE PEOPLE
Train Number Three, the Western Flyer, was late, as Kent hadpredicted--just how late the operator could not tell; and pending thechalking-up of its arriving time on the bulletin board, the two men sat onan empty baggage truck and smoked in companionable silence.
While they waited, Loring's thoughts were busy with many things, friendlysolicitude for the exile serving as the point of departure. He knew what ahandfast friend might know: how Kent had finished his postgraduate coursein the law and had succeeded to his father's small practice in the NewHampshire county town where he was born and bred. Also, he knew how Kent'sfriends, college friends who knew his gifts and ability, had deprecatedthe burial; and he himself had been curious enough to pay Kent a visit tospy out the reason why. On their first evening together in the stuffylittle law office which had been his father's, Kent had made a cleanbreast of it: there was a young woman in the case, and a promise passedbefore Kent had gone to college. She was a farmer's daughter, with nonotion for a change of environment; wherefore she had determined Kent'scareer and the scene of it, laying its lines in the narrow field of herown choosing.
Later, as Loring knew, the sentimental anchor had dragged until it washopelessly off holding-ground. The young woman had laid the blame at thedoor of the university, had given Kent a bad half-year of fault-findingand recrimination, and had finally made an end of the matter by bestowingher dowry of hillside acres on the son of a neighboring farmer.
Thereafter Kent had stagnated quietly, living with simple rigor the lifehe had marked out for himself; thankful at heart, Loring had suspected,for the timely intervention of the farmer's son, but holding himself wellin hand against a repetition of the sentimental offense. All this untilthe opening of the summer hotel at the foot of Old Croydon, and the comingof Elinor Brentwood.
No one knew just how much Miss Brentwood had to do with the long-delayedawakening of David Kent; but in Loring's forecastings she enjoyed the fullbenefit of the doubt. From tramping the hills alone, or whipping thestreams for brook trout, David had taken to spending his afternoons withlover-like regularity at the Croydon Inn; and at the end of the season hadelectrified the sleepy home town by declaring his intention to go West andgrow up with the country.
In Loring's setting-forth of the awakening, the motive was not far toseek. Miss Brentwood was ambitious, and if her interest in Kent had beenonly casual she would not have been likely to point him to the widerbattle-field. Again, apart from his modest patrimony, Kent had only hisprofession. The Brentwoods were not rich, as riches are measured inmillions; but they lived in their own house in the Back Bay wilderness,moved in Boston's older substantial circle, and, in a world where success,economic or other, is in some sort the touchstone, were many social planesabove a country lawyer.
Loring knew Kent's fierce poverty-pride--none better. Hence, he was at noloss to account for the exile's flight afield, or for his unhopefulpresent attitude. Meaning to win trophies to lay at Miss Brentwood's feet,the present stage of the rough joust with Fortune found him unhorsed,unweaponed and rolling in the dust of the lists.
Loring chewed his cigar reflectively, wishing his companion would open theway to free speech on the subject presumably nearest his heart. He had aword of comfort, negative comfort, to offer, but it might not be saiduntil Kent should give him leave by taking the initiative. Kent brokesilence at last, but the prompting was nothing more pertinent than thechalking-up of the delayed train's time.
"An hour and twenty minutes: that means any time after nine o'clock. I'mhonestly sorry for you, Grantham--sorry for any one that has to stay inthis charnel-house of a town ten minutes after he's through. What will youdo with yourself?"
Loring got up, looked at his watch, and made a suggestion, hoping thatKent would fall in with it.
"I don't know. Shall we go back to your rooms and sit a while?"
The exile's eyes gloomed suddenly.
"Not unless you insist on it. We should get back among the relics and Ishould bore you. I'm not the man you used to know, Grantham."
"No?" said Loring. "I sha'n't be hypocritical enough to contradict you.Nevertheless, you are my host. It is for you to say what you will do withme until train time."
"We can kill an hour at the rally, if you like. You have seen the streetparade and heard the band play: it is only fair that you should see themenagerie on exhibition."
Loring found his match-box and made a fresh light for his cigar.
"It's pretty evident that you and 'next-Governor' Bucks are on oppositesides of the political fence," he observed.
"We are. I should think a good bit less of myself than I do--and that'sneedless--if I trained in his company."
"Yet you will give him a chance to make a partizan of me? Well, comealong. Politics are not down on my western programme, but I'm here to seeall the new things."
The Gaston Opera House was a survival of the flush times, and barring acertain tawdriness from disuse and neglect, and a rather garish effectwhich marched evenly with the brick-and-terra-cotta fronts in Texas Streetand the American-Tudor cottages of the suburbs, it was a creditable relic.The auditorium was well filled in pit, dress-circle and gallery when Kentand his guest edged their way through the standing committee in the foyer;but by dint of careful searching they succeeded in finding two seats wellaround to the left, with a balcony pillar to separate them from theirnearest neighbors.
Since the public side of American politics varies little with thevariation of latitude or longitude, the man from the East found himself atonce in homely and remindful surroundings. There was the customary drapingof flags under the proscenium arch and across the set-piece villa of thebackground. In the semicircle of chairs arched from wing to wing sat thelocal and visiting political lights; men of all trades, these, some ofthem a little shamefaced and ill at ease by reason of their unwontedconspicuity; all of them listening with a carefully assumed air ofstrained attention to the speaker of the moment.
Also, there was the characteristic ante-election audience, typical of allAmerica--the thing most truly typical in a land where national types aresought for microscopically: wheel-horses who came at the party call; menwho came in the temporary upblaze of enthusiastic patriotism, which islighted with the opening of the campaign, and which goes out like a candlein a gust of wind the day after the election; men who came to applaudblindly, and a few who came to cavil and deride. Loring oriented himselfin a leisurely eye-sweep, and so came by easy gradations to the speaker.
Measured by the standard of fitness for his office of prolocutor the manstanding beside the stage-properties speaker's desk was worthy a secondglance. He was dark, undersized, trimly built; with a Vandyke beardclipped closely enough to show the lines of a bull-dog jaw, and eyes thathad the gift, priceless to the public speaker, of seeming to hold everyonlooking eye in the audience. Unlike his backers in the awkwardsemicircle, he wore a professional long coat; and the hands that markedhis smoothly flowing sentences were slim and shapely.
"Who is he?" asked Loring, in an aside to Kent.
"Stephen Hawk, the ex-district attorney: boomer, pettifogger, promoter--acharter member of the Gaston wolf-pack. A man who would persuade you intobelieving in the impeccability of Satan in one breath, and knife you inthe back for a ten-dollar bill in the next," was the rejoinder.
Loring nodded, and again became a listener. Hawk's speech was merelyintroductory, and it was nearing its peroration.
"Fellow citizens, this occasion is as auspicious as it is significant.When the people rise in their might to say to tyranny in whatsoever formit oppresses them, 'Thus far and no farther shalt thou go,' the night isfar spent and the light is breaking in the east.
"Since the day when we first began to wrest with compelling hands thenatural riches from the soil of this our adoptive State, politicaltrickery in high places, backed by the puissant might of aliencorporations, has ground us into the dust.
"But now the time of our deliverance is at han
d. Great movements givebirth to great leaders; and in this, our holy crusade against oppressionand tyranny, the crisis has bred the man. Ladies and gentlemen, I have thepleasure of presenting to you the speaker of the evening: our friend andfellow citizen the Honorable Jasper G. Bucks, by the grace of God, andyour suffrages, the next governor of the State."
In the storm of applause that burst upon the dramatic peroration of theex-district attorney, a man rose from the center of the stage semicircleand lumbered heavily forward to the footlights. Loring's first emotion wasof surprise, tempered with pity. The crisis-born leader, heralded by sucha flourish of rhetorical trumpets, was a giant in size; but with his hugefigure, unshapely and ill-clad, all promise of greatness seemed to pause.
His face, broad-featured, colorless, and beardless as a boy's, was eithera blank or an impenetrable mask. There was no convincement in thelack-luster gaze of the small, porcine eyes; no eloquence in the harsh,nasal tones of the untrained voice, or in the ponderous and awkwardwavings of the beam-like arms. None the less, before he had uttered adozen halting sentences he was carrying the audience with him step bystep; moving the great concourse of listeners with his commonplace periodsas a mellifluous Hawk could never hope to move it.
Loring saw the miracle in the throes of its outworking; saw and felt it inhis own proper person, and sought in vain to account for it. Was theresome subtile magnetism in this great hulk of a man that made itself feltin spite of its hamperings? Or was it merely that the people, weary ofempty rhetoric and unkept promises, were ripe to welcome and to follow anyman whose apparent earnestness and sincerity atoned for all his lacks?
Explain it as he might, Loring soon assured himself that the HonorableJasper G. Bucks was laying hold of the sentiment of the audience as thoughit were a thing tangible to be grasped by the huge hands. Unlike Hawk,whose speech flamed easily into denunciation when it touched on the aliencorporations, he counseled moderation and lawful reprisals. Landsyndicates, railroads, foreign capital in whatever employment, were primenecessities in any new and growing commonwealth. The province of thepeople was not to wreck the ship, but to guide it. And the remedy for allills lay in controlling legislation, faithfully and rigidly enforced.
"My friends: I'm only a plain, hard-handed farmer, as those of you who aremy fellow townsmen can testify. But I've seen what you've seen, and I'vesuffered what you've suffered. Year after year we send our representativesto the legislature, and what comes of it? Why, these corporations, lookingonly to their own interests, as they're in duty bound to do, buys 'em ifthey can. You can't blame 'em for that; it's business--their business. Butit is our business, as citizens of this great commonwealth, to prevent it.We have good laws on our statute books, but we need more of 'em; laws forcontrol, with plain, honest men at the capital, in the judiciary, in everyroot and branch of the executive, to enforce 'em. With such laws, and suchmen to see that they are executed, there wouldn't be any more extortion,any more raising of the rates of transportation on the produce of ourranches and farms merely because the eastern market for that particularproduct happened to jump a few cents on the dollar.
"No, my friends; plain, hard-handed farmer though I be, I can see whatwill follow an honest election of the people, by the people, and for thepeople. The State can be--it ought to be--sovereign within its ownboundaries. If we rise up as one man next Tuesday and put a ticket intothe ballot-box that says we are going to make it so, and keep it so,you'll see a new commodity tariff put into effect on the Western PacificRailroad the day after."
The speaker paused, and into the little gap of silence barked a voice fromthe gallery.
"That's what you say. But supposin' they don't do it?"
Loring was gazing steadfastly at the blank, heavy face, so utterly devoidof the enthusiasm the man was evoking in others. For one flitting instanthe thought he saw behind the mask. The immobile face, the awkwardgestures, the slipshod English became suddenly transparent, revealing thereal man; a man of titanic strength, of tremendous possibilities for goodor evil. Loring put up his glasses and looked again; but the figure of theflash-light inner vision had vanished, and the speaker was answering hisobjector as calmly as though the house held only the single critic to beset right.
"I'm always glad to hear a man speak right out in meeting," he said,dropping still deeper into the colloquialisms. "Supposing the corporationsdon't see the handwriting on the wall--won't see it, you say? Then, myfriend, it will become the manifest duty of the legislature and theexecutive to make 'em see it: always lawfully, you understand; always witha just and equitable respect for the rights of property in which our freeand glorious institutions are founded, but with level-handed justice, andwithout fear or favor."
A thunderous uproar of applause clamored on the heels of the answer, andthe Honorable Jasper mopped his face with a colored handkerchief and tooka swallow of water from the glass on the desk.
"Mind you, my friends, I'm not saying we are not going to find plenty ofstumps and roots and a tough sod in this furrow we are going to plow. It'sonly the fool or the ignoramus who underrates the strength of hisopponent. It is going to be just plain, honest justice and the will of thepeople against the money of the Harrimans and the Goulds and theVanderbilts and all the rest of 'em. But the law is mighty, and it willprevail. Give us an honest legislature to make such laws, and an executivestrong enough to enforce 'em, and the sovereign State will stand outglorious and triumphant as a monument against oppression.
"When that time comes--and it's a-coming, my friends--the corporations andthe syndicates will read the handwriting on the wall; don't you be afraidof that. If they should be a little grain thick-headed and sort o' blindat first, as old King Belshazzar was, it may be that the sovereign Statewill have to give 'em an object-lesson--lawfully, always lawfully, youunderstand. But when they see, through the medium of such an object-lessonor otherwise, as the case may be, that we mean business; when they seethat we, the people of this great and growing commonwealth, mean to assertour rights to live and move and have our being, to have fair, even-handedjustice meted out to ourselves, our wives and our little children, they'llcome down and quit watering their stock with the sweat of our brows; andthat hold-up motto of theirs, 'All the tariff the traffic will stand,'will be no more known in Israel!"
Again the clamor of applause rose like fine dust on the throng-heated air,and Kent looked at his watch.
"It is time we were going," he said; adding: "I guess you have had enoughof it, haven't you?"
Loring was silent for the better part of the way back to the railwaystation. When he spoke it was in answer to a delayed question of Kent's.
"What do I think of him? I don't know, David; and that's the plain truth.He is not the man he appears to be as he stands there haranguing thatcrowd. That is a pose, and an exceedingly skilful one. He is notaltogether apparent to me; but he strikes me as being a man of immensepossibilities--whether for good or evil, I can't say."
"You needn't draw another breath of uncertainty on that score," was thecurt rejoinder. "He is a demagogue, pure and unadulterated."
Loring did not attempt to refute the charge.
"Are he and his party likely to win?" he asked.
"God knows," said Kent. "We have had so many lightning transformations inpolitics in the State that nothing is impossible."
"I'd like to know," was Loring's comment. "It might make some differenceto me, personally."
"To you?" said Kent, inquiringly. "That reminds me: I haven't given you achance to say ten words about yourself."
"The chance hasn't been lacking. But my business out here is--well, itisn't exactly a Star Chamber matter, but I'm under promise in a way not totalk about it until I have had a conference with our people at thecapital. I'll write you about it in a few days."
They were ascending the steps at the end of the passenger platform again,and Loring broke away from the political and personal entanglement to giveKent one more opportunity to hear his word of negative comfort.
"
We dug up the field of recollection pretty thoroughly in our after-dinnerseance in your rooms, David, but I noticed there was one corner of it youleft undisturbed. Was there any good reason?"
Kent made no show of misunderstanding.
"There was the excellent reason which must have been apparent to youbefore you had been an hour in Gaston. I've made my shot, and missed."
Loring entered the breach with his shield held well to the fore. He wasthe last man in the world to assault a friend's confidence recklessly.
"I thought a good while ago, and I still think, that you are making amountain out of a mole-hill, David. Elinor Brentwood is a true woman inevery inch of her. She is as much above caring for false notions of casteas you ought to be."
"I know her nobility: which is all the more reason why I shouldn't takeadvantage of it. We may scoff at the social inequalities as much as weplease, but we can't laugh them out of court. As between a young woman whois an heiress in her own right, and a briefless lawyer, there aredifferences which a decent man is bound to efface. And I haven't beenable."
"Does Miss Brentwood know?"
"She knows nothing at all. I was unwilling to entangle her, even with aconfidence."
"The more fool you," said Loring, bluntly. "You call yourself a lawyer,and you have not yet learned one of the first principles of commonjustice, which is that a woman has some rights which even a besotted loveris bound to respect. You made love to her that summer at Croydon; youneedn't deny it. And at the end of things you walk off to make yourfortune without committing yourself; without knowing, or apparentlycaring, what your stiff-necked poverty-pride may cost her in years ofuncertainty. You deserve to lose her."
Kent's smile was a fair measure of his unhopeful mood.
"You can't well lose what you have never had. I'm not such an ass as tobelieve that she cared greatly."
"How do you know? Not by anything you ever gave her a chance to say, I'lldare swear. I've a bit of qualified good news for you, but the spirit ismoving me mightily to hold my tongue."
"Tell me," said Kent, his indifference vanishing in the turning of a leaf.
"Well, to begin with, Miss Brentwood is still unmarried, though thegossips say she doesn't lack plenty of eligible offers."
"Half of that I knew; the other half I took for granted. Go on."
"Her mother, under the advice of the chief of the clan Brentwood, has beenmaking a lot of bad investments for herself and her two daughters: inother words, she has been making ducks and drakes of the Brentwoodfortune."
Kent was as deeply moved as if the loss had been his own, and said asmuch, craving more of the particulars.
"I can't give them. But I may say that the blame lies at your door,David."
"At my door? How do you arrive at that?"
"By the shortest possible route. If you had done your duty by Elinor inthe Croydon summer, Mrs. Brentwood would have had a bright young attorneyfor a son-in-law and adviser, and the bad investments would not have beenmade."
Kent's laugh was entirely devoid of mirth.
"Don't trample on a man when he's down. I was neither a prophet nor theson of a prophet. But how bad is the smash? Surely you know that?"
"No, I don't. Bradford was telling me about it the day I left Boston. Hegave me to understand that the principal family holding at present is inthe stock of a certain western railway."
"Did he happen to know the name of the stock?" asked Kent, moistening hislips.
"He did. Fate flirts with you two in the usual fashion. Mrs. Brentwood'slittle fortune--and by consequence, Elinor's and Penelope's--is tied up inthe stock of the company whose platform we are occupying at the presentmoment--the Western Pacific."
Kent let slip a hard word directed at ill-advisers in general, and Loringtook his cue from the malediction.
"You swear pretty feelingly, David. Isn't our property as good a thing aswe of the Boston end have been cracking it up to be?"
"You know better about the financial part of it than I do. But--well, youare fresh from this anarchistic conclave at the Opera House. You canimagine what the stock of the Western Pacific, or of any other foreigncorporation doing business in this State, will be worth in six monthsafter Bucks and his crowd get into the saddle."
"You speak as if the result of the election were a foregone conclusion. Ihope it isn't. But we were talking more particularly of Miss Brentwood,and your personal responsibilities." The belated train was whistling forthe lower yard, and Loring was determined to say all that was in his mind.
"Yes; go on. I'm anxious to hear--more anxious than I seem to be,perhaps."
"Well, she is coming West, after a bit. She, and her sister and themother. Mrs. Brentwood's asthma is worse, and the wise men have orderedher to the interior. I thought you'd like to know."
"Is she--are they coming this way?" asked Kent.
The train was in, and the porter had fetched Loring's hand-bag from thecheck-stand. The guest paused with one foot on the step of thesleeping-car.
"If I were you, David, I'd write and ask; I should, by Jove. It would be atremendously cheeky thing to do, of course, having such a slightacquaintance with her as you have; but I'll be hanged if I shouldn'tchance it. And in the mean time, if I don't go back East next week, you'llhear from me. When you do, or if you do, take a day off and run up to thecapital. I shall need you. Good-by."
Kent watched the train pull out; stood looking after it until the two redeyes of the rear signals had disappeared in the dusty darkness of theillimitable plain. Then he went to his rooms, to the one which was calledby courtesy his office, and without allowing himself time for a nicebalancing of the pros and cons, squared himself at the desk to write aletter.
The Grafters Page 2