Eben Holden Part 38

I went away sore in the morning, but with no drooping spirit. In the middle of the afternoon I straightened up a moment to ease my back and look about me.

There at the edge of the gang stood the great Horace Greeley and Waxy McClingan. The latter beckoned me as he caught my eye. I went aside to greet them. Mr Greeley gave me his hand.

'Do you mean to tell me that you'd rather work than beg or borrow?' said he.

'That's about it,' I answered.

'And ain't ashamed of it?

'Ashamed! Why?' said I, not quite sure of his meaning. It had never occurred to me that one had any cause to be ashamed of working.

He turned to McClingan and laughed.

'I guess you'll do for the Tribune,' he said. 'Come and see me at twelve tomorrow.

And then they went away.

If I had been a knight of the garter I could not have been treated with more distinguished courtesy by those hard-handed men the rest of the day. I bade them goodbye at night and got my order for four dollars. One Pat Devlin, a great-hearted Irishman, who had shared my confidence and some of my doughnuts on the curb at luncheon time, I remember best of all.

'Ye'll niver fergit the toime we wurruked together under Boss McCormick,' said he.

And to this day, whenever I meet the good man, now bent and grey, he says always, 'Good-day if ye, Mr Brower. D'ye mind the toime we pounded the rock under Boss McCormick?

Mr Greeley gave me a place at once on the local staff and invited me to dine with him at his home that evening. Meanwhile he sent me to the headquarters of the Republican Central Campaign Committee, on Broadway, opposite the New York Hotel. Lincoln had been nominated in May, and the great political fight of 1860 was shaking the city with its thunders.

I turned in my copy at the city desk in good season, and, although the great editor had not yet left his room, I took a car at once to keep my appointment. A servant showed me to a seat in the big back parlour of Mr Greeley's home, where I spent a lonely hour before I heard his heavy footsteps in the hail. He immediately rushed upstairs, two steps at a time, and, in a moment, I heard his high voice greeting the babies. He came down shortly with one of them clinging to his hand.

'Thunder!' said he, 'I had forgotten all about you. Let's go right in to dinner.

He sat at the head of the table and I next to him. I remember how, wearied by the day's burden, he sat, lounging heavily, in careless att.i.tudes. He stirred his dinner into a hash of eggs, potatoes, squash and parsnips, and ate it leisurely with a spoon, his head braced often with his left forearm, its elbow resting on the table. It was a sort of letting go, after the immense activity of the day, and a casual observer would have thought he affected the uncouth, which was not true of him.

He asked me to tell him all about my father and his farm. At length I saw an absent look in his eye, and stopped talking, because I thought he had ceased to listen.

'Very well! very well!' said he.

I looked up at him, not knowing what he meant.

'Go on! Tell me all about it,' he added.

'I like the country best,' said he, when I had finished, 'because there I see more truth in things. Here the lie has many forms--unique, varied, ingenious. The rouge and powder on the lady's cheek--they are lies, both of them; the baronial and ducal crests are lies and the fools who use them are liars; the people who soak themselves in rum have nothing but lies in their heads; the mult.i.tude who live by their wits and the lack of them in others--they are all liars; the many who imagine a vain thing and pretend to be what they are not liars everyone of them. It is bound to be so in the great cities, and it is a mark of decay. The skirts of Elegabalus, the wigs and rouge pots of Madame Pompadour, the crucifix of Machiavelli and the innocent smile of Fernando Wood stand for something horribly and vastly false in the people about them. For truth you ve got to get back into the woods. You can find men there a good deal as G.o.d made them' genuine, strong and simple. When those men cease to come here you'll see gra.s.s growing in Broadway.

I made no answer and the great commoner stirred his coffee a moment in silence.

'Vanity is the curse of cities,' he continued, 'and Flattery is its handmaiden. Vanity, flattery and Deceit are the three disgraces. I like a man to be what he is--out and out. If he's ashamed of himself it won't be long before his friends'll be ashamed of him. There's the trouble with this town. Many a fellow is pretending to be what he isn't. A man cannot be strong unless he is genuine.

One of his children--a little girl--came and stood close to him as he spoke. He put his big arm around her and that gentle, permanent smile of his broadened as he kissed her and patted her red cheek.

'Anything new in the South?' Mrs Greeley enquired.

'Worse and worse every day,' he said. 'Serious trouble coming! The Charleston dinner yesterday was a feast of treason and a flow of criminal rhetoric. The Union was the chief dish. Everybody slashed it with his knife and jabbed it with his fork. It was slaughtered, roasted, made into mincemeat and devoured. One orator spoke of "rolling back the tide of fanaticism that finds its root in the conscience of the people."

Their metaphors are as bad as their morals.

He laughed heartily at this example of fervid eloquence, and then we rose from the table. He had to go to the office that evening, and I came away soon after dinner. I had nothing to do and went home reflecting upon all the great man had said.

I began shortly to see the truth of what he had told me--men licking the hand of riches with the tongue of flattery men so stricken with the itch of vanity that they grovelled for the touch of praise; men even who would do perjury for applause. I do not say that most of the men I saw were of that ilk, but enough to show the tendency of life in a great town.

I was filled with wonder at first by meeting so many who had been everywhere and seen everything, who had mastered all sciences and all philosophies and endured many perils on land and sea. I had met liars before--it was no Eden there in the north country--and some of them had attained a good degree of efficiency, but they lacked the candour and finish of the metropolitan school. I confess they were all too much for me at first. They borrowed my cash, they shared my confidence, they taxed my credulity, and I saw the truth at last.

'Tom's breaking down,' said a co-labourer on the staff one day. 'How is that?' I enquired.

'Served me a mean trick.'

'Indeed!'

'Deceived me,' said he sorrowfully.

'Lied, I suppose?'

'No. He told the truth, as G.o.d's my witness.'

Tom had been absolutely reliable up to that time.

Chapter 36

Those were great days in mid autumn. The Republic was in grave peril of dissolution. Liberty that had hymned her birth in the last century now hymned her destiny in the voices of bard and orator. Crowds of men gathered in public squares, at bulletin boards, on street corners arguing, gesticulating, exclaiming and cursing. Cheering mult.i.tudes went up and down the city by night, with bands and torches, and there was such a howl of oratory and applause on the lower half of Manhattan Island that it gave the reporter no rest. William H. Seward, Charles Sumner, John A. Dix, Henry Ward Beecher and Charles O'Connor were the giants of the stump. There was more violence and religious fervour in the political feeling of that time than had been mingled since '76. A sense of outrage was in the hearts of men. 'Honest Abe' Lincoln stood, as they took it, for their homes and their country, for human liberty and even for their G.o.d.

I remember coming into the counting-room late one evening. Loud voices had halted me as I pa.s.sed the door. Mr Greeley stood back of the counter; a rather tall, wiry grey-headed man before it. Each was shaking a right fist under the other's nose. They were shouting loudly as they argued. The stranger was for war; Mr Greeley for waiting. The publisher of the Tribune stood beside the latter, smoking a pipe; a small man leaned over the counter at the stranger's elbow, putting in a word here and there; half a dozen people stood by, listening. Mr Greeley turned to his publisher in a moment.

'Rhoades,' said he, 'I wish ye'd put these men out. They holler 'n yell, so I can't hear myself think.

Then there was a general laugh.

I learned to my surprise, when they had gone, that the tall man was William H. Seward, the other John A. Dix.

Then one of those fevered days came the Prince of Wales--a G.o.dsend, to allay pa.s.sion with curiosity.

It was my duty to handle some of 'the latest news by magnetic telegraph', and help to get the plans and progress of the campaign at headquarters. The Printer, as they called Mr Greeley, was at his desk when I came in at noon, never leaving the office but for dinner, until past midnight, those days. And he made the Tribune a mighty power in the state. His faith in its efficacy was sublime, and every line went under his eye before it went to his readers. I remember a night when he called me to his office about twelve o clock. He was up to his knees in the rubbish of the day-newspapers that he had read and thrown upon the floor; his desk was littered with proofs.

'Go an' see the Prince o' Wales,' he said. (That interesting young man had arrived on the Harriet Lane that morning and ridden up Broadway between cheering hosts.) 'I've got a sketch of him here an' it's all twaddle. Tell us something new about him. If he's got a hole in his sock we ought to know it.'

Mr Dana came in to see him while I was there.

'Look here, Dana,' said the Printer, in a rasping humour. 'By the G.o.ds of war! here's two columns about that performance at the Academy and only two sticks of the speech of Seward at St Paul. I'll have to get someone if go an' burn that theatre an' send the bill to me.

In the morning Mayor Wood introduced me to the Duke of Newcastle, who in turn presented me to the Prince of Wales--then a slim, blue-eyed youngster of nineteen, as gentle mannered as any I have ever met. It was my unpleasant duty to keep as near as possible to the royal party in all the festivities of that week.

The ball, in the Prince's honour, at the Academy of Music, was one of the great social events of the century. No fair of vanity in the western hemisphere ever quite equalled it. The fas.h.i.+ons of the French Court had taken the city, as had the Prince, by unconditional surrender. Not in the palace of Versailles could one have seen a more generous exposure of the charms of fair women. None were admitted without a low-cut bodice, and many came that had not the proper accessories. But it was the most brilliant company New York had ever seen.