“Hector’s done well,” I said.
“Oh, Lord, yes!” Joe answered. “He always will. He’s going ‘way up in the world.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Because he’s so sure of it. It only needs a little luck to make him a great man. In fact, he already is a great man.”
“You mean you think he has a great mind?”
“Why, no, sir; but I think he has a purpose so big and so set, that it might be called great, and it will make him great.”
“What purpose?”
Joe answered quietly but very slowly, pulling at his cigar after each syllable: “Hec — tor — J. Ran — som!”
“I declare,” I put in, “I thought you were his friend!”
“So I am,” the young fellow returned. “Friend, admirer, and doer-in-ordinary to Hector J. Ransom, that’s my quality. I’ve done errands and odd jobs for him all my life. Most people who meet him do; though it might be hard to say why. I haven’t hitched my wagon to a star; nobody’ll get to do that, because this star isn’t going to take anything to the zenith but itself.”
“Going to the zenith, is he?”
“Surely.”
“You mean,” said I, “that he’s going to make a fine lawyer?”
“Oh, no, I think not. He might have been called one in the last generation, but, as I understand it, nowadays a lawyer has to work out business propositions more than oratory.”
“And you think Hector has only his oratory?”
“I think that’s his vehicle; it’s his racing sulky and he’ll drive it pretty hard. We’re good friends, but if you want me to be frank, I should say that he’d drive on over my dead body if it lay in the road to where he was going.” Lane rolled over in the grass with a little chuckle. “Of course,” he went on, “I talk about him this way because I know what you’ve done for him and I’d like to help you to be sure that he’s going to be a success. He’ll do you credit!”
“What are you going to do, yourself, Joe?” I asked.
“Me?” He sat up, looking surprised. “Why, didn’t you know? I didn’t get my degree. They threw me out at the eleventh hour for getting too publicly tight — celebrating Hector’s winning the works of Lord Byron, the prize in the senior debate! I’ll never be a credit to anybody; and as for what I’m going to do — go back to Greenville and loaf in Tim’s pool-room, I suppose, and watch Hector’s balloon.”
However, Hector’s balloon seemed uninclined to soar, at the set-off — though Hector didn’t. The next summer began a presidential campaign, and Hector, knowing that I was chairman of my county committee, and strangely overestimating my importance, came up to see me: he asked me to use my influence with the National Committee to have him sent to make speeches in one of the doubtful States; he thought he could carry it for us. I explained that I had no wires leading up so far as the National Committee. There were other things I might have explained, but it didn’t seem much use. Hector would have thought I wanted to “keep him down.”
He thought so anyway, because, after a crestfallen moment, he began to look at me in his fierce eye-to-eye way with what seemed to me a dark suspicion. He came and struck my desk with his clinched fist (he was always strong on that), and exclaimed:
“Then by the eternal gods, if my own flesh and blood won’t help me, I’ll go to Chicago myself, lay my credentials before the committee, unaided, and wring from them—”
“Hold on, Hector,” I said. “Why didn’t you say you had credentials? What are they?”
“What are they?” he answered in a rising voice. “You ask me what are my credentials? The credentials of my patriotism, my poverty, and my pride! You ask me for my credentials? The credentials of youth!” (He hit the desk every few words.) “The credentials of enthusiasm! The credentials of strength! You ask for my credentials? The credentials of red blood, of red corpuscles, of young manhood, ripest in the glorious young West! The credentials of vitality! Of virile—”
“Hold on,” I said again, but I couldn’t stop him. He went on for probably fifteen minutes, pacing the room and gesticulating and thundering at me, though we two were all alone. I felt mighty ridiculous, but, of course, I’d been through much the same thing with one or two candidates and orators before. I thought then that he was practising on me, but I came afterward to see that I was partly wrong. “Oratory” was his only way of expressing himself; he couldn’t just talk, to save his life. All you could do, when he began, was to sit and take it till he got through, which consumed some valuable time for me that afternoon. I suppose I was profane inside, for having given him that cue with “credentials.” Finally I got in a question:
“Why not begin a little more mildly, Hector? Why don’t you make some speeches in your own county first?”
“I have consented to make the Fourth of July oration at Greenville,” he answered.
Before he could go on, I got up and slapped him on the back. “That’s right!” I said. “That’s right! Go back and show the home folks what you can do, and I’ll come down to hear it!”
And so I did. Mary was, if possible, more flustered and upset than at Hector’s Commencement. She and Joe Lane and I had a bench close up to the stand, and on the other side of Mary sat a girl I’d never seen before. Mary introduced me to her in a way that made me risk a guess that Hector liked her more than common. Her name was Laura Rainey, and she’d come to Greenville, a year before, to teach in the high-school. She was young, not quite twenty, I reckoned, and as pretty and dainty a girl as ever I saw; thin and delicate-looking, though not in the sense of poor health; and she struck me as being very sweet and thoughtful. Joe Lane told me, with his little chuckle, that she’d had a good deal of trouble in the school on account of all the older boys falling in love with her.
Something in the way he spoke made me watch Joe, and I was sure if he’d been one of her pupils he wouldn’t have lightened her worries much in that direction. He had it himself. I saw it, or, I should say, I felt it, in spite of his never seeming to look at her. She looked at him, however, and pretty often, too; and there was a good deal of interest in her eyes, only it was a sad kind, which I understood, I thought, when I found that Joe had been on a long spree and had just sobered up the day before.
Hector sat above us on the platform, with the Mayor and the County Judge, and when the latter introduced him, and the same old white pitcher and glass of water on a pine table, the boy came forward with slow and impressive steps, and, setting his left fist on his hip, allowed his right arm to hang straight by his side till his hand rested on the table, like a statesman of the day standing for a photograph. His brow contained a commanding frown, and he stood for some moments in that position, while, to my astonishment, the crowd cheered itself hoarse.
There was no mistaking the genuine enthusiasm that he evoked, though I didn’t feel it myself. I suppose the only explanation is that he had a great deal of what is called “magnetism.” What made it I don’t know. He was good-looking enough, with his dark eyes and hair, and white, intense face and black clothes; but there was more in the cheering than appreciation of that. I could not doubt that he produced on the crowd, by his quiet attitude, an apparition of greatness. There was some kind of hypnotism in it, I suppose.
The speech was about what I was looking for: bombastic platitudes delivered with such earnestness and velocity that “every point scored” and the cheering came whenever he wanted it.
For instance: he would retire a few steps toward the rear, and, pointing to the sky, adjure it in a solemn voice which made every one lean forward in a dead hush:
“Tell me, ye silent stars, that seem to slumber ‘neath the auroral coverlet of day, tell me, down what laurelled pathways among ye walk our dead, the heroes whose blood was our benison, bequeathing to us the heritage of this flower-strewn land; they who have passed to that bourne whence no traveller returns? Answer me: Are not theirs the loftiest names inscribed on your marble catalogues of the nations?” He let his voice ou
t startlingly and shouted: “CREEPS there a creature of the earth with spirit so sordid as to doubt it, to doubt who heads those gilded rolls! If there be, then I say to him, ‘Beware!’ For the names I see written above me to-day on the immemorial canopy of heaven begin with that of the spotless knight, the unsceptred and uncrowned king, the godlike and immaculate” — (here he turned suddenly, ran to the front of the stage, and, with outstretched fist shaking violently over our heads, thundered at the full power of his lungs): “GEORGE WASHINGTON!”
He did the same for Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Grant, and four or five governors and senators of the State; and at every name the crowd went wild, worked up to it by Hector in the same way. But what surprised me was his daring to conclude his list with a votive offering laid at the feet of Passley Trimmer. Trimmer was the congressional representative of that district and one of the meanest men and smartest politicians in the world. He was always creeping out of tight places and money-scandals by the skin of his teeth; and yet, by building up the finest personal machine in the State, he stuck to his seat in Congress term after term, in spite of the fact that most of the intelligent and honest men in his district despised him. It was a proof of the power Hector held over his audience that, by his tribute to Trimmer, he was able to evoke the noisiest enthusiasm of the afternoon.
Nevertheless, what really tickled me most was the boy’s peroration. It gave me a pretty clear insight into his “innard workings.” He led up to it in his favourite way: stepping backward a pace or two and sinking his voice to a kind of Edwin Booth quiet; gradually growing a little louder; then suddenly turning on the thunder and running forward.
“You ask me for our credentials?” he roared. (Nobody had, this time.) “In the Lexicon of the Peoples, you ask me for my country’s credentials? The credentials of our pastures, our population and our pride! You ask me for my country’s credentials? I reply: ‘The credentials of our youth and our enthusiasm! Of red corpuscles! Of red blood! The credentials of the virility and of the magnificent manhood of the Columbian Continent!’ You ask for my country’s credentials and I answer: ‘The credentials of Glory! By right of the eternal and Almighty God!’”
Of course there was a great deal more, but that’s enough to show how he had polished it.
I walked back to Mary’s with Joe Lane, while Hector followed, making a kind of Royal Progress through the crowds, with his mother and Miss Rainey.
“You see it now, yourself, don’t you?” Joe said to me.
“You mean about his doing well?”
“What else? He’s just shown what he can do with people. The day will come when you’ll have to take him at his own valuation.”
I couldn’t help laughing. “Well, Joe,” I said, “that sounds as if you, at least, already took Hector at his own valuation.”
“In some things,” he answered, “I think I do. Don’t you take him for an ass, sir. Sometimes I believe he’s guided by a really superior intelligence—”
“Must be a sub-consciousness, then, Joe!”
“Exactly,” he said seriously. “He doesn’t make a single mistake. He’s trained his manner so that, while a very few people laugh at him, he does things that the town would resent in any one else. He doesn’t go round with the boys, and they look up to him for it. He isn’t pompous, but he’s acquired a kind of stateliness of manner that’s made Greenville call him ‘Mister Ransom’ instead of ‘Hec.’ You probably think that his request to the National Committee only shows he’s got all the nerve in the world; but I believe, on my soul, that if it had been granted he could have made good.”
“What did he want to run Passley Trimmer into his Pantheon for, to-day?” I asked.
Joe’s honest face looked a little dark at this. “It’s only another proof of the shrewdness that directs him, though it was, maybe, a little bit sickening. He talks gold and stars and eternal gods, about sweetness and light and pure politics and reform, but he wants Passley Trimmer’s machine to take him up. Passley Trimmer and his brother, Link, are a good-sized curse to this district, I expect you know, but Hector’s courting them. Link is the dirtiest we’ve ever had here, and he holds all the rottenest in this county solid for Passley. He’s overbearing; ugly, too; shot a nigger in the hip a year ago, and crippled him for life on account of a little back-talk, and got off scot-free. I had a row with him in a saloon last week; I was tight, I suppose, though there’s always been bad blood between us, anyway, drunk or sober, and I didn’t know much what happened, except that I refused to drink in his company and he cursed me out and I blacked an eye for him before they separated us. Well, sir, next day, here was Hector demanding that I go and apologize to Link. I said I’d as soon apologize to a rattlesnake, and Hector upbraided me in his rhetoric, but with a whole lot of real feeling, too. He was even pathetic about it: put it on the ground that I owed it to morality, by which he meant Hector. I was known to be his most intimate friend; I had done him an irrecoverable injury with the Trimmers, who would extend their retaliation and let him have a share of it, as my friend. He ended by declaring that he should withhold the light of his countenance from me until I had repaired the wrong done to his cause, and had apologized to Link!”
“Did you do it?”
The good fellow answered with his little chuckle: “Of course! Don’t you see that he gets everybody to do what he wants? It’s almost sheer will, and he’s a true cloud-compeller.”
I wanted to understand something else, and I didn’t know how much Mary could tell me; that is, I was sure that she would think that Miss Rainey was in love with Hector. Mary wouldn’t be able to see how any girl could help it.
“Joe,” I said, “does Hector seem much taken with this Miss Rainey?”
We had come to the gate, and Lane stopped to relight a cigar before he answered. He kept the match at the stub until it burned out, half hiding his face from me with his hands, shielding the flame from a breeze that wasn’t blowing.
“Yes,” he said finally, “as much as he could be with anybody — at least he wants her to be taken with him.”
“Do you think she is?”
He swung the gate open, and stood to let me pass in first. “She could be of great help to him. We’ve all got to help Hector.”
I was going on: “You believe she will—”
“Did you ever hear,” he interrupted, “of Jane Welsh Carlyle?”
I thought about that answer of Joe’s most of the evening, and it struck me he was right. It was one of those things you couldn’t possibly explain to save your life, but you knew it: everybody had got to help Hector. Everybody had to get behind him and push. Hector took it for granted in a way that passed the love of woman!
And yet, as we sat at Mary’s supper-table, that evening, I don’t know that I ever felt less real liking for any of my kin than I felt for Hector, though, perhaps, that was because he seemed to keep rubbing it in on me in indirect ways that I had done him an injury by not helping him with the National Committee, and that I ought to know it, after his triumph of the afternoon. I could see that Mary agreed with him, though in her gentle way.
Young Lane and Miss Rainey stayed for supper, too, and were very quiet. Miss Rainey struck me as a quiet girl generally, and Joe never talked, anyway, when in Hector’s company. For that matter, nobody else did; there was mighty little chance. The truth is, Hector had an impediment of speech: he couldn’t listen.
Of course he talked only about himself. That followed, because it was all there was in him. Not that it always seemed to be about himself. For instance, I remember one of his ways of rubbing it into me, that evening. He had been delivering himself of some opinions on the nature of Genius, fragments (like his “credentials” — I had a sneaking idea) of some undeveloped oration or other. “Look at Napoleon!” he bade us, while Mary was cutting the pie. “Could Barras with all his jealous and malevolent opposition, could Barras with all his craft, all his machinations, with all the machinery of the State, could Barras oppose the upward flight
of that mighty spirit? No! Barras, who should have been the faithful friend, the helper, the disciple and believer, Barras, I say, set himself to destroy the youth whose genius he denied, and Barras was himself destroyed! He fell, for he had dared to oppose the path of one of the eternal stars!”
That was a sample, and I don’t exaggerate it. I couldn’t exaggerate Hector; it’s beyond me; he always exaggerated himself beyond anybody else’s power to do it. But I loved to hear Joe Lane’s chuckle and I got one out of him when I offered him a cigar as we went out on the porch.
“Take one,” I said. “It’s one of Barras’s best.”
“Better get in line,” was all he added to the chuckle.
A good many visitors dropped in, during the evening, Greenville’s greatest come to congratulate Hector on the speech. Everybody in the county was talking about him that night, they said. Hector received these people in his old-fashioned-statesman manner, though I noticed that already he shook hands like a candidate. He would grasp the caller’s hand quickly and decidedly, instead of letting the other do the gripping. And I could see that all those who came in, even hard-headed men twice his age, treated him deferentially, with the air of intimate respect that he somehow managed to exact from people. Perhaps I don’t do him justice: he was a “mighty myster’us” boy!
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 474