The Memoirs of an American Citizen Part 43

It wrung my heart to see what a wreck he was. He had let his beard grow to cover up his wasted face. His eyes were sunk and bloodshot. The old waterproof covered a thin flannel coat.

"I'm all right," he replied gloomily. "What do you want of me?"

"I want you to come out and get some dinner with me, first," I said.

But he shook his head, saying he must go home to May.

"It ain't no use, Van," he added, in a high, querulous voice. "We don't belong together. May and I are of the people--the people you fatten on."

"Quit that rot! I am one of the people, too."

"Oh, you're Senator, I expect, by this time," he sneered. "What did it cost you, Van?"

"I don't want to talk politics."

"That's all I care to talk. I want to get a chance to show you fellows up one of these days. I'm considering a proposition for part control of a paper--a labor weekly."

So he talked for a while about his scheme of getting hold of a little three-cent outfit and making it into an organ of kick and criticism. He had seen life from the inside during the war, he explained, and he wanted to give the public the benefit of his experience. He had a snarl for every conceivable thing that was, and he was eager to express it.

When I showed him that such an att.i.tude was dead against American feeling, he accused me of trying to suppress his enterprise because it was aimed at my friends, "the thieves and robbers." It was hopeless to argue with him, and the more we talked the worse I felt. He was just bitter and wild, and he kept saying: "You taught me what it meant! You showed me what it was to be rich!" The war had ruined his health and weakened his mind. The gentle, willing side in him had turned to fury.

He was a plain crank now!

"I'll buy this paper for you--or I'll start a new one for you to curse me and my friends with--if you'll just take May and the children and go down to my farm in the country. There are two thousand acres down there, Will, and you can do as you please on the place. When you've got back your health, then you can start in to baste me as good as you've a mind to."

But he refused to compromise his "cause." So we parted at the door of the saloon, he b.u.t.toning up his old raincoat and striding out for the West Side without a look back to me. And as I hailed a cab to take me to the club I heard in my ears that charge, "You taught me what it meant to be rich, Van!" It made me mad, but it hurt just the same.

Though I knew perfectly well that I was not responsible for his crankiness, yet I thought that if he could have kept on at business under me he would have been all right, earning a good living for his wife and children, and not taking up with thoughts he hadn't the mind to think out. For Will was not one to step safely out of the close ranks of men, but he was always a mighty faithful worker wherever he was put. And now he was just a crank--good for nothing.

CHAPTER x.x.x

THE COST

_A dinner at the Metropolitan Club--Old friends and enemies--A conservative Senator--Pleasant speeches--A favor for Henry I--I plan a gift for a tried friend--I find that I have nothing to give--Sloc.u.m's confession--Aims in life--The Supreme Bench--What money can't buy--Sloc.u.m pays for both_

A number of men gave me a dinner that evening at the Metropolitan Club.

Steele, Lardner, Morrison (of the New York and Chicago Railway Company), Joe Strauss, Jenks, Carmichael, and Bates were there, among others--all leaders in the community in various enterprises. Not all these gentlemen had looked with favor on my political aspirations; but, when they saw that I could win this trick as I had others, they sidled up to me. After all, no matter what they might think of me personally, or of my methods, they felt that I belonged to their crowd and would be a safe enough man to have in the Senate.

Just as we sat down, Sloc.u.m, who had been called to the telephone, came up to me, a smile on his wrinkled face, and said, raising his right hand:--

"Gentlemen, the legislature at Springfield has elected Mr. Harrington to fill the unexpired term of the late Senator Parkinson. Gentlemen, three cheers for Senator Harrington!"

As the men raised their champagne gla.s.ses to drink to me, Sloc.u.m shook me warmly by the hand, a smile broadening over his face. Although, as I told them, it had never been my part to talk, I said a few words, thanking them for their good-will, and promising them that I should do my best to serve the interests of the country we all believed was the greatest nation that had ever been. My old friend Orlando Bates, the president of the Tenth National, replied to my talk, expressing the confidence my a.s.sociates had in me. In the course of his graceful speech he said, "Mr. Harrington is so closely identified with the conservative interests of the country that we can feel a.s.sured he will stand as a bulwark against the populistic clamor so rife in the nation at the present time." And young Harvey Sturm, also a bank president, who followed him with a glowing speech, made flattering references to the work I had done "in upbuilding our glorious commonwealth." After deprecating the growth of socialistic sentiments and condemning the unrestricted criticism of the press in regard to capital, he closed with a special tribute: "Such men as Edward Harrington are the brains and the will of the nation. On their strong shoulders rests the progress of America. Were it not for their G.o.d-given energy, their will, their genius for organization, our broad prairies, our great forests, our vast mines, would cease to give forth their wealth!"

There was more of the same sort of talk before we broke up. Afterward, as the theatres and the opera closed, men dropped in to hear the news, and many of them came up to congratulate me. Among others old Dround wandered into the club in the course of the evening, and, some one having told him that I had been elected Senator, he came up to the corner where I was standing with a group of men, and hovered around for a time, trying to get a word with me. After a while I stepped out and shook hands with him.

"I am very glad to hear this, Mr. Harrington," he said slowly, pressing my hand in his trembling fist. "I have always believed that our best men should take an interest in the government of their country."

His eyes had a wandering expression, as if he were trying in vain to remember something out of the past, and he continued to deliver his little speech, drawing me to one side out of hearing of the men who were standing there. "I thought once to enter public life myself," he said, "but heavy business responsibilities demanded all my attention. I wonder," he lowered his voice confidentially, "if you will not find it possible to further the claims of my old friend Paxton's son. He desires to secure a diplomatic post. I have urged his merits on the President, and secured a.s.surance of his good-will; but nothing has yet been done. I cannot understand it."

Eri Paxton was a dissipated, no-account sort of fellow, but I a.s.sured Henry I. Dround that I would do my best for him. That was the least that the past demanded of me!

So it went on until past midnight, and the club began to empty, and I was left with a few friends about me. When they went I took Sloc.u.m up to my room for a last cigar before bed. We had some private matters to settle in connection with the election.

"You pulled out all right, Van," he said when we were alone. "But there wasn't much margin."

"I trusted Carmichael--I knew John wouldn't go back on me."

We sat and smoked awhile in silence. Now that I had picked the plum, the feeling came over me that Sloc.u.m ought to have had it. With that idea I burst out at last:--

"I've been thinking of one thing all along, Slo--and that is: What can I do for you when I am Senator? Name what you want, man, and if it's in my power to get it, it shall be yours. Without you I'd never have been here, and that's sure."

"I never cared much for politics," he replied thoughtfully. "I guess there isn't anything I want, which is more than most of your friends can say!"

"Something in the diplomatic service?" I suggested. He shook his head.

"How about a Federal judges.h.i.+p--you can afford to go out of practice."

"Yes, I can afford to go on the bench!" he replied dryly. "But it's no use to talk of it."

"What do you mean?"

"You ought to know, Van, that that is one thing that can't be bought in this country, not yet. I could no more get an appointment on the Federal bench than you could!"

"You mean on account of that old story? That's outlawed years ago!"

"You think so? The public forgets, but lawyers remember, and so do politicians. The President may make rotten appointments anywhere else, but if he should nominate me for the Circuit bench there would be such a howl go up all over that he would have to withdraw me. And he knows too much to try any such proposition."

It was no use to argue the question, for the lawyer had evidently been over the whole matter and knew the facts.

"It isn't that bribery matter, Van, alone; I have been hand and glove with you fellows too long to be above suspicion. My record is against me all through. It isn't worth talking about.... I have had my pay: I am a rich man, richer than I ever expected to be when I put foot in Chicago.

I have no right to complain."

But I felt that, in spite of all he said, that wasn't enough--somehow the money did not make it square for him. As the night pa.s.sed, he warmed up more than I had ever known him to in all the years we had worked together, and he let me see some way inside him. I remember he said something like this:--

"There were three things I promised myself I would do with my life. That was back in my senior year at Bowdoin College. I was a poor boy--had borrowed from a relative a few hundred dollars to go through college with, and felt the burden of that debt pretty hard. Well, of those three purposes, one was for myself. First, I promised myself I would pay back my uncle's loan. That was a simple matter of decency. He was not a rich man, and his children felt rather sore at his letting me have those six hundred dollars to spend on a college education. I managed to do that out of what I earned as a law clerk the first years we were together at Ma Pierson's. The next thing I had promised myself was to buy back our old brick house in the aristocratic part of Portland--the house my father had been obliged to part with after the panic of '76. I meant to put my mother and sisters in it. The only sister I have living is there now with her children. My mother died in her old home, and that has always been a comfort to me.... You may think it was my desire to do this that made me stick by you when we had that difference about the Chicago and London bonds, but you are mistaken. I went with you, Van, because I wanted to--just that. I saw then what it meant, and I am not kicking now.

"Well, the third aim I set myself when I was speculating, as college boys do about such things, was the hardest of all. The others, with reasonable success, I could hope to accomplish. And I did fulfil them sooner than I had any reason to hope I should. The third was a more difficult matter, and that was my ambition to sit some day on the Supreme Bench. There were two members of our family who had been distinguished judges, one of the Supreme Court of Maine, and another of the Federal Supreme Court, back in the early forties. I had always heard these two men referred to with the greatest respect in our family, especially my great-uncle, Judge Lambert Cus.h.i.+ng. Although by the time I came to college our family had reached a pretty low ebb, it was natural that I should secretly cherish the ambition to rise to the high-water mark.

"And," he concluded, "after thirty years of contact with the world, I haven't seen much that is more worthy of a man's ambition in our country than a seat on our Supreme Bench. I have no reason to be ashamed of my three aims in life. Two of them I made--the third I might never have come near to, anyway; but I chucked away my chance a good many years ago. However, I have done pretty well by myself as it is. So you see there is nothing, Van, that you can give me that I should want to take."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_So you see there is nothing, Van, that you can give me that I should want to take._"]

He reached for another cigar, and stretched his long legs. It was the first time he had ever spoken to me from the bottom of his heart, and now that he had revealed the truth about himself, there was nothing to be said. He was not just the ordinary corporation lawyer, who sells his learning and his shrewdness for a fat fee. I had run up against that kind often enough. They are an indispensable article to the modern man of affairs; for the strategy of our warfare is largely directed by them.

But Jaffrey Sloc.u.m was much more than such a trained prost.i.tute: he was a man of learning and a lover of the law for its own sake. I suspect that if he had ever sat on the bench he would have been a tough nut for the corporations....

"There's no better proverb, my friend, than the old one about the way you make your bed," Sloc.u.m summed up, rising to go. "It don't trouble you, perhaps, because you are made different. You are made to fit the world as it is to-day."