Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  Alice shook her head gently. “But, papa, he told you——”

  “Never mind throwing that dang doctor up at me!” Adams interrupted, peevishly. “He said I’d be good for some kind of light job—if I could find just the right thing. ‘Where there wouldn’t be either any physical or mental strain,’ he said. Well, I got to find something like that. Anyway, I’ll feel better if I can just get out looking for it.”

  “But, papa, I’m afraid you won’t find it, and you’ll be disappointed.”

  “Well, I want to hunt around and see, anyhow.”

  Alice patted his hand. “You must just be contented, papa. Everything’s going to be all right, and you mustn’t get to worrying about doing anything. We own this house—it’s all clear—and you’ve taken care of mama and me all our lives; now it’s our turn.”

  “No, sir!” he said, querulously. “I don’t like the idea of being the landlady’s husband around a boarding-house; it goes against my gizzard. I know: makes out the bills for his wife Sunday mornings—works with a screw-driver on somebody’s bureau drawer sometimes—’tends the furnace maybe—one the boarders gives him a cigar now and then. That’s a fine life to look forward to! No, sir; I don’t want to finish as a land­lady’s husband!”

  Alice looked grave; for she knew the sketch was but too accurately prophetic in every probability. “But, papa,” she said, to console him, “don’t you think maybe there isn’t such a thing as a ‘finish,’ after all! You say perhaps we don’t learn to live till we die—but maybe that’s how it is after we die, too—just learning some more, the way we do here, and maybe through trouble again, even after that.”

  “Oh, it might be,” he sighed. “I expect so.”

  “Well, then,” she said, “what’s the use of talking about a ‘finish?’ We do keep looking ahead to things as if they’d finish something, but when we get to them, they don’t finish anything. They’re just part of going on. I’ll tell you—I looked ahead all summer to something I was afraid of, and I said to myself, ‘Well, if that happens, I’m finished!’ But it wasn’t so, papa. It did happen, and nothing’s finished; I’m going on, just the same—only——” She stopped and blushed.

  “Only what?” he asked.

  “Well——” She blushed more deeply, then jumped up, and, standing before him, caught both his hands in hers. “Well, don’t you think, since we do have to go on, we ought at least to have learned some sense about how to do it?”

  He looked up at her adoringly.

  “What I think,” he said, and his voice trembled;—“I think you’re the smartest girl in the world! I wouldn’t trade you for the whole kit-and-boodle of ’em!”

  But as this folly of his threatened to make her tearful, she kissed him hastily, and went forth upon her errand.

  Since the night of the tragic-comic dinner she had not seen Russell, nor caught even the remotest chance glimpse of him; and it was curious that she should encounter him as she went upon such an errand as now engaged her. At a corner, not far from that tobacconist’s shop she had just left when he overtook her and walked with her for the first time, she met him to-day. He turned the corner, coming toward her, and they were face to face; whereupon that engaging face of Russell’s was instantly reddened, but Alice’s remained serene.

  She stopped short, though; and so did he; then she smiled brightly as she put out her hand.

  “Why, Mr. Russell!”

  “I’m so—I’m so glad to have this—this chance,” he stammered. “I’ve wanted to tell you—it’s just that going into a new undertaking—this business life—one doesn’t get to do a great many things he’d like to. I hope you’ll let me call again some time, if I can.”

  “Yes, do!” she said, cordially, and then, with a quick nod, went briskly on.

  She breathed more rapidly, but knew that he could not have detected it, and she took some pride in herself for the way she had met this little crisis. But to have met it with such easy courage meant to her something more reassuring than a momentary pride in the serenity she had shown. For she found that what she had resolved in her inmost heart was now really true: she was “through with all that!”

  She walked on, but more slowly, for the tobacconist’s shop was not far from her now—and, beyond it, that portal of doom, Frincke’s Business College. Already Alice could read the begrimed gilt letters of the sign; and although they had spelled destiny never with a more painful imminence than just then, an old habit of dramatizing herself still prevailed with her.

  There came into her mind a whimsical comparison of her fate with that of the heroine in a French romance she had read long ago and remembered well, for she had cried over it. The story ended with the heroine’s taking the veil after a death blow to love; and the final scene again became vivid to Alice, for a moment. Again, as when she had read and wept, she seemed herself to stand among the great shadows in the cathedral nave; smelled the smoky incense on the enclosed air, and heard the solemn pulses of the organ. She remembered how the novice’s father knelt, trembling, beside a pillar of gray stone; how the faithless lover watched and shivered behind the statue of a saint; how stifled sobs and outcries were heard when the novice came to the altar; and how a shaft of light struck through the rose-window, enveloping her in an amber glow.

  It was the vision of a moment only, and for no longer than a moment did Alice tell herself that the romance provided a prettier way of taking the veil than she had chosen, and that a faithless lover, shaking with remorse behind a saint’s statue, was a greater solace than one left on a street corner protesting that he’d like to call some time—if he could! Her pity for herself vanished more reluctantly; but she shook it off and tried to smile at it, and at her romantic recollections—at all of them. She had something important to think of.

  She passed the tobacconist’s, and before her was that dark entrance to the wooden stairway leading up to Frincke’s Business College—the very doorway she had always looked upon as the end of youth and the end of hope.

  How often she had gone by here, hating the dreary obscurity of that stairway; how often she had thought of this obscurity as something lying in wait to obliterate the footsteps of any girl who should ascend into the smoky darkness above! Never had she passed without those ominous imaginings of hers: pretty girls turning into old maids “taking dictation”—old maids of a dozen different types, yet all looking a little like herself.

  Well, she was here at last! She looked up and down the street quickly, and then, with a little heave of the shoulders, she went bravely in, under the sign, and began to climb the wooden steps. Half-way up the shadows were heaviest, but after that the place began to seem brighter. There was an open window overhead somewhere, she found, and the steps at the top were gay with sunshine.

  IN THE ARENA

  Stories of Political Life

  To My Father

  Contents

  “In the First Place”

  Boss Gorgett

  The Aliens

  The Need of Money

  Hector

  Mrs. Protheroe

  Great Men’s Sons

  “In the First Place”

  * * *

  THE OLD-TIMER, a lean, retired pantaloon, sitting with loosely slippered feet close to the fire, thus gave of his wisdom to the questioning student:

  “Looking back upon it all, what we most need ‘in politics’ is more good men. Thousands of good men ARE in; and they need the others who are not in. More would come if they knew how MUCH they are needed. The dilettantes of the clubs who have so easily abused me, for instance, all my life, for being a ward-worker, these and those other reformers who write papers about national corruption when they don’t know how their own wards are swung, probably aren’t so useful as they might be. The exquisite who says that politics is ‘too dirty a business for a gentleman to meddle with’ is like the woman who lived in the parlour
and complained that the rest of her family kept the other rooms so dirty that she never went into them.

  “There are many thousands of young men belonging to what is for some reason called the ‘best class,’ who would like to be ‘in politics’ if they could begin high enough up—as ambassadors, for instance. That is, they would like the country to do something for them, though they wouldn’t put it that way. A young man of this sort doesn’t know how much he’d miss if his wishes were gratified. For my part, I’d hate not to have begun at the beginning of the game.

  “I speak of it as a game,” the old gentleman went on, “and in some ways it is. That’s where the fun of it comes in. Yet, there are times when it looks to me more like a series of combats, hand-to-hand fights for life, and fierce struggles between men and strange powers. You buy your newspaper and that’s your ticket to the amphitheatre. But the distance is hazy and far; there are clouds of dust and you can’t see clearly. To make out just what is going on you ought to get down in the arena yourself. Once you’re in it, the view you’ll have and the fighting that will come your way will more than repay you. Still, I don’t think we ought to go in with the idea of being repaid.

  “It seems an odd thing to me that so many men feel they haven’t any time for politics; can’t put in even a little, trying to see how their cities (let alone their states and the country) are run. When we have a war, look at the millions of volunteers that lay down everything and answer the call of the country. Well, in politics, the country needs ALL the men who have any patriotism—NOT to be seeking office, but to watch and to understand what is going on. It doesn’t take a great deal of time; you can attend to your business and do that much, too. When wrong things are going on and all the good men understand them, that is all that is needed. The wrong things stop going on.”

  Boss Gorgett

  * * *

  “I GUESS I’ve been what you might call kind of an assistant boss pretty much all my life; at least, ever since I could vote; and I was something of a ward-heeler even before that. I don’t suppose there’s any way a man of my disposition could have put in his time to less advantage and greater cost to himself. I’ve never got a thing by it, all these years, not a job, not a penny—nothing but injury to my business and trouble with my wife. She begins going for me, first of every campaign.

  Yet I just can’t seem to keep out of it. It takes a hold on a man that I never could get away from; and when I reach my second childhood and the boys have turned me out, I reckon I’ll potter along trying to look knowing and secretive, like the rest of the has-beens, letting on as if I still had a place inside. Lord, if I’d put in the energy at my business that I’ve frittered away on small politics! But what’s the use thinking about it?”

  Plenty of men go to pot horse-racing and stock gambling; and I guess this has just been my way of working off some of my nature in another fashion. There’s a good many like me, too; not out for office or contracts, nor anything that you can put your finger on in particular—nothing except the game. Of course, it’s a pleasure, knowing you’ve got more influence than some, but I believe the most you ever get out of it is in being able to help your friends, to get a man you like a job, or a good contract, something he wants, when he needs it.

  I tell you then’s when you feel satisfied, and your time don’t seem to have been so much thrown away. You go and buy a higher-priced cigar than you can afford, and sit and smoke it with your feet out in the sunshine on your porch railing, and watch your neighbour’s children playing in their yard; and they look mighty nice to you; and you feel kind, and as if everybody else was.

  But that wasn’t the way I felt when I helped to hand over to a reformer the nomination for mayor; then it was just selfish desperation and nothing else. We had to do it. You see, it was this way: the other side had had the city for four terms, and, naturally, they’d earned the name of being rotten by that time. Big Lafe Gorgett was their best. “Boss Gorgett,” of course our papers called him when they went for him, which was all the time; and pretty considerable of a man he was, too. Most people that knew him liked Lafe. I did. But he got a bad name, as they say, by the end of his fourth term as Mayor—and who wouldn’t? Of course, the cry went up all round that he and his crowd were making a fat thing out of it, which wasn’t so much the case as that Lafe had got to depending on humouring the gamblers and the brewers for campaign funds and so forth. In fact, he had the reputation of running a disorderly town, and the truth is, it was too wide open.

  But we hadn’t been much better when we’d had it, before Lafe beat us and got in; and everybody remembered that. The “respectable element” wouldn’t come over to us strong enough for anybody we could pick of our own crowd; and so, after trying it on four times, we started in to play it another way, and nominated Farwell Knowles, who was already running on an independent ticket, got out by the reform and purity people. That is: we made him a fusion candidate, hoping to find some way to control him later. We’d never have done it if we hadn’t thought it was our only hope. Gorgett was too strong, and he handled the darkeys better than any man I ever knew. He had an organization for it which we couldn’t break; and the coloured voters really held the balance of power with us, you know, as they do so many other places near the same size. They were getting pretty well on to it, too, and cost more every election. Our best chance seemed to be in so satisfying the “law-and-order” people that they’d do something to counterbalance this vote—which they never did.

  Well, sir, it was a mighty curious campaign. There never really was a day when we could tell where we stood, for certain. As anybody knows, the “better element” can’t be depended on. There’s too many of ’em forget to vote, and if the weather isn’t just right they won’t go to the polls. Some of ’em won’t go anyway—act as if they looked down on politics; say it’s only helping one boodler against another. So your true aristocrat won’t vote for either. The real truth is, he don’t care. Don’t care as much about the management of his city, State, and country as about the way his club is run. Or he’s ignorant about the whole business, and what between ignorance and indifference the worse and smarter of the two rings gets in again and old Mr. Aristocrat gets soaked some more on his sewer assessments. Then he’ll holler like a stabbed hand-organ; but he’ll keep on talking about politics being too low a business for a gentleman to mix in, just the same!

  Somebody said a pessimist is a man who has a choice of two evils, and takes both. There’s your man that don’t vote.

  And the best-dressed wards are the ones that fool us oftenest. We’re always thinking they’ll do something, and they don’t. But we thought, when we took Farwell Knowles, that we had ’em at last. Fact is, they did seem stirred up, too. They called it a “moral victory” when we were forced to nominate Knowles to have any chance of beating Gorgett. That was because it was their victory.

  Farwell Knowles was a young man, about thirty-two, an editorial writer on the Herald, an independent paper. I’d known him all his life, and his wife—too, a mighty sweet-looking lady she was. I’d always thought Farwell was kind of a dreamer, and too excitable; he was always reading papers to literary clubs, and on the speech-making side he wasn’t so bad—he liked it; but he hadn’t seemed to me to know any more about politics and people than a royal family would. He was always talking about life and writing about corruption, when, all the time, so it struck me, it was only books he was really interested in; and he saw things along book lines. Of course he was a tin god, politically.

  He was for “stern virtue” only, and everlastingly lashed compromise and temporizing; called politicians all the elegant hard names there are, in every one of his editorials, especially Lafe Gorgett, whom he’d never seen. He made mighty free with Lafe, referred to him habitually as “Boodler Gorgett,” and never let up on him from one year’s end to another.

  I was against our adopting him, not only for our own sakes—because I knew he’d be a hard man to han
dle—but for Farwell’s too. I’d been a friend of his father’s, and I liked his wife—everybody liked his wife. But the boys overruled me, and I had to turn in and give it to him.

  Not without a lot of misgivings, you can be sure. I had one little experience with him right at the start that made me uneasy and got me to thinking he was what you might call too literary, or theatrical, or something, and that he was more interested in being things than doing them. I’d been aware, ever since he got back from Harvard, that I was one of his literary interests, so to speak. He had a way of talking to me in a quizzical, condescending style, in the belief that he was drawing me out, the way you talk to some old book-peddler in your office when you’ve got nothing to do for a while; and it was easy to see he regarded me as a “character” and thought he was studying me. Besides, he felt it his duty to study the wickedness of politics in a Parkhurstian fashion, and I was one of the lost.

  One day, just after we’d nominated him, he came to me and said he had a friend who wanted to meet me. Asked me couldn’t I go with him right away. It was about five in the afternoon; I hadn’t anything to do and said, “Certainly,” thinking he meant to introduce me to some friend of his who thought I’d talk politics with him. I took that for granted so much that I didn’t ask a question, just followed along up street, talking weather. He turned in at old General Buskirk’s, and may I be shot if the person he meant wasn’t Buskirk’s daughter, Bella! He’d brought me to call on a girl young enough to be my daughter. Maybe you won’t believe I felt like a fool!

  I knew Buskirk, of course (he didn’t appear), but I hadn’t seen Bella since she was a child. She’d been “highly educated” and had been living abroad a good deal, but I can’t say that my visit made me for her—not very strong. She was good-looking enough, in her thinnish, solemn way, but it seemed to me she was kind of overdressed and too grand. You could see in a minute that she was intense and dreamy and theatrical with herself and superior, like Farwell; and I guess I thought they thought they’d discovered they were “kindred souls,” and that each of them understood (without saying it) that both of them felt that Farwell’s lot in life was a hard one because Mrs. Knowles wasn’t up to him. Bella gave him little, quiet, deep glances, that seemed to help her play the part of a person who understood everything—especially him, and reverenced greatness—especially his. I remember a fellow who called the sort of game it struck me they were carrying on “those soully flirtations.”