Lifted Masks Part 14

He felt it to-day as he never had before. He had left no mark; he had done nothing, stood for nothing. Never once had his personality made itself felt. He had signed the doc.u.ments; Harvey Francis had always "suggested"--the term was that man's own--the course to be pursued. And the "suggestions" had ever dictated the policy that would throw the most of influence or money to that splendidly organised machine that Francis controlled.

With an effort he shook himself free from his cheerless retrospect.

There was a thing or two he wanted to get from his desk, and his time was growing very short. He found what he wanted, and then, just as he was about to close the drawer, his eye fell on a large yellow envelope.

He closed the drawer; but only to reopen it, take out the envelope and remove the doc.u.ments it contained; and then one by one he spread them out before him on the desk.

He sat there looking down at them, wondering whether a man had ever stepped into office with as many pitfalls laid for him. During the last month they had been busy about the old State-house setting traps for the new Governor. The "machine" was especially jubilant over those contracts the Governor now had spread out before him. The convict labour question was being fought out in the State just then--organised labour demanding its repeal; country taxpayers insisting that it be maintained. Under the system the penitentiary had become self-supporting. In November the contracts had come up for renewal; but on the request of Harvey Francis the matter had been put off from time to time, and still remained open. Just the week before, Francis had put it to the Governor something like this:

"Don't sign those contracts. We can give some reason for holding them off, and save them up for Leyman. Then we can see that the question is agitated, and whatever he does about it is going to prove a bad thing for him. If he doesn't sign, he's in bad with the country fellows, the men who elected him. Don't you see? At the end of his administration the penitentiary, under you self-sustaining, will have cost them a pretty penny. We've got him right square!"

The clock was close to twenty minutes of twelve, and he concluded that he would go out and join some of his friends he could hear in the other room. It would never do for him to go upstairs with a long, serious face. He had had his day, and now Leyman was to have his, and if the new Governor did better than the old one, then so much the better for the State. As for the contracts, Leyman surely must understand that there was a good deal of rough sailing on political waters.

But it was not easy to leave the room. Walking to the window he again stood there looking out across the snow, and once more he went back now at the end of things to that day in the little red schoolhouse which stood out as the beginning.

He was called back from that dreaming by the sight of three men coming up the hill. He smiled faintly in antic.i.p.ation of the things Francis and the rest of them would say about the new Governor's arriving on foot. Leyman had requested that the inaugural parade be done away with--but one would suppose he would at least dignify the occasion by arriving in a carriage. Francis would see that the opposing papers handled it as a grand-stand play to the country const.i.tuents.

And then, forgetful of Francis, and of the approaching ceremony, the old man stood there by the window watching the young man who was coming up to take his place. How firmly the new Governor walked!

With what confidence he looked ahead at the State-house. The Governor--not considering the inconsistency therein--felt a thrill of real pride in thought of the State's possessing a man like that.

Standing though he did for the things pitted against him, down in his heart John Morrison had all along cherished a strong admiration for that young man who, as District Attorney of the State's metropolis, had aroused the whole country by his fearlessness and unquestionable sincerity. Many a day he had sat in that same office reading what the young District Attorney was doing in the city close by--the fight he was making almost single-handed against corruption, how he was striking in the high places fast and hard as in the low, the opposition, threats, and time after time there had been that same secret thrill at thought of there being a man like that. And when the people of the State, convinced that here was one man who would serve _them_, began urging the District Attorney for chief executive, Governor Morrison, linked with the opposing forces, doing all he could to bring about Leyman's defeat, never lost that secret feeling for the young man, who, unbacked by any organisation, struck blow after blow at the machine that had so long dominated the State, winning in the end that almost incomprehensible victory.

The new Governor had pa.s.sed from sight, and a moment later his voice came to the ear of the lonely man in the executive office. Some friends had stopped him just outside the Governor's door with a laughing "Here's hoping you'll do as much for us in the new office as you did in the old," and the new Governor replied, buoyantly: "Oh, but I'm going to do a great deal more!"

The man within the office smiled a little wistfully and with a sigh sat down before his desk. The clock now pointed to thirteen minutes of twelve; they would be asking for him upstairs. There were some sc.r.a.ps of paper on his desk and he threw them into the waste-basket, murmuring: "I can at least give him a clean desk."

He pushed his chair back sharply. A clean desk! The phrase opened to deeper meanings.... Why not clean it up in earnest? Why not give him a square deal--a real chance? Why not _sign the contracts_?

Again he looked at the clock--not yet ten minutes of twelve. For ten minutes more he was Governor of the State! Ten minutes of real governors.h.i.+p! Might it not make up a little, both to his own soul and to the world, for the years he had weakly served as another man's puppet? The consciousness that he could do it, that it was not within the power of any man to stop him, was intoxicating. Why not break the chains now at the last, and just before the end taste the joy of freedom?

He took up his pen and reached for the inkwell. With trembling, excited fingers he unfolded the contracts. He dipped his pen into the ink; he even brought it down on the paper; and then the tension broke. He sank back in his chair, a frightened, broken old man.

"Oh, no," he whispered; "no, not now. It's--" his head went lower and lower until at last it rested on the desk--"too late."

When he raised his head and grew more steady, it was only to see the soundness of his conclusion. He had not the right now in the final hour to buy for himself a little of glory. It would only be a form of self-indulgence. They would call it, and perhaps rightly, hush money to his conscience. They would say he went back on them only when he was through with them. Oh, no, there would be no more strength in it than in the average deathbed repentance. He would at least step out with consistency.

He folded the contracts and put them back into the envelope. The minute hand now pointed to seven minutes to twelve. Some one was tapping at the door, and the secretary appeared to say they were waiting for him upstairs. He replied that he would be there in a minute, hoping that his voice did not sound as strange to the other man as it had to himself.

Slowly he walked to the door leading into the corridor. This, then, was indeed the end; this the final stepping down from office! After years of what they called public service, he was leaving it all now with a sense of defeat and humiliation. A lump was in the old man's throat; his eyes were blurred. "But you, Frank Leyman," he whispered pa.s.sionately, turning as if for comfort to the other man, "it will be different with you! They'll not get you--not you!"

It lifted him then as a great wave--this pa.s.sionate exultation that here was one man whom corruption could not claim as her own. Here was one human soul not to be had for a price! There flitted before him again a picture of that seventeen-year-old boy in the little red schoolhouse, and close upon it came the picture of this other young man against whom all powers of corruption had been turned in vain.

With the one it had been the emotional luxury of a sentiment, a thing from life's actualities apart; with the other it was a force that dominated all things else, a force over which circ.u.mstances and design could not prevail. "I know all about it," he was saying. "I know about it all! I know how easy it is to fall! I know how fine it is to stand!"

His sense of disappointment in his own empty, besmirched career was almost submerged then as he projected himself on into the career of this other man who within the hour would come there in his stead.

How glorious was his opportunity, how limitless his possibilities, and how great to his own soul the satisfaction the years would bring of having done his best!

It had all changed now. That pa.s.sionate longing to vindicate himself, add one thing honourable and fine to his own record, had altogether left him, and with the new mood came new insight and what had been an impulse centred to a purpose.

It pointed to three minutes to twelve as he walked over to his desk, unfolded the contracts, and one by one affixed his signature. In a dim way he was conscious of how the interpretation of his first motive would be put upon it, how they would call him traitor and coward; but that mattered little. The very fact that the man for whom he was doing it would never see it as it was brought him no pang. And when he had carefully blotted the papers, affixed the seal and put them away, there was in his heart the clean, sweet joy of a child because he had been able to do this for a man in whom he believed.

The band was playing the opening strains as he closed the door behind him and started upstairs.

IX

"OUT THERE"

The old man held the picture up before him and surveyed it with admiring but disapproving eye. "No one that comes along this way'll have the price for it," he grumbled. "It'll just set here 'till doomsday."

It did seem that the picture failed to fit in with the rest of the shop. A persuasive young fellow who claimed he was closing out his stock let the old man have it for what he called a song. It was only a little out-of-the-way store which subsisted chiefly on the framing of pictures. The old man looked around at his views of the city, his pictures of cats and dogs and gorgeous young women, his flaming bits of landscape. "Don't belong in here," he fumed, "any more 'an I belong in Congress."

And yet the old man was secretly proud of his acquisition. He seemed all at once to be lifted from his realm of petty tradesman to that of patron of art. There was a hidden dignity in his scowling as he shuffled about pondering the least ridiculous place for the picture.

It is not fair to the picture to try repainting it in words, for words reduce it to a lithograph. It was a bit of a pine forest, through which there exuberantly rushed an unspoiled little mountain stream. Chromos and works of art may deal with kindred subjects.

There is just that one difference of dealing with them differently.

"It ain't what you _see_, so much as what you can guess is there," was the thought it brought to the old man who was dusting it. "Now this frame ain't three feet long, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit if that timber kept right on for a hundred miles. I kind of suspect it's on a mountain--looks cool enough in there to be on a mountain. Wish I was there. Bet they never see no such days as we do in Chicago. Looks as though a man might call his soul his own--out there."

He began removing some views of Lincoln Park and some corpulent Cupids in order to make room in the window for the new picture. When he went outside to look at it he shook his head severely and hastened in to take away some ardent young men and women, some fruit and flowers and fish which he had left thinking they might "set it off." It was evident that the new picture did not need to be "set off." "And anyway," he told himself, in vindication of entrusting all his goods to one bottom, "I might as well take them out, for the new one makes them look so kind of sick that no one would have them, anyhow." Then he went back to mounting views with the serenity of one who stands for the finer things.

His clamorous little clock pointed to a quarter of six when he finally came back to the front of the store. It was time to begin closing up for the night, but for the minute he stood there watching the crowd of workers coming from the business district not far away over to the boarding-house region, a little to the west. He watched them as they came by in twos and threes and fours: noisy people and worn-out people, people hilarious and people sullen, the gaiety and the weariness, the acceptance and the rebellion of humanity--he saw it pa.s.s. "As if any of _them_ could buy it," he p.r.o.nounced severely, adding, contemptuously, "or wanted to."

The girl was coming along by herself. He watched her as she crossed to his side of the street, thinking it was too bad for a poor girl to be as tired as that. She was dressed like many of the rest of them, and yet she looked different--like the picture and the chromo.

She turned an indifferent glance toward the window, and then suddenly she stood there very still, and everything about her seemed to change. "For all the world," he told himself afterward, "as if she'd found a long-lost friend, and was 'fraid to speak for fear it was too good to be true."

She did seem afraid to speak--afraid to believe. For a minute she stood there right in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at the picture. And when she came toward the window it was less as if coming than as if drawn. What she really seemed to want to do was to edge away; yet she came closer, as close as she could, her eyes never leaving the picture, and then fear, or awe, or whatever it was made her look so queer gave way to wonder--that wondering which is ready to open the door to delight. She looked up and down the street as one rubbing one's eyes to make sure of a thing, and then it all gave way to a joy which lighted her pale little face like--"Well, like nothing I ever saw before," was all the old man could say of it. "Why, she'd never know if the whole fire department was to run right up here on the sidewalk," he gloated. Just then she drew herself up for a long breath. "See?" he chuckled, delightedly. "She knows it has a smell!" She looked toward the door, but shook her head. "Knows she can't pay the price," he interpreted her. Then, she stepped back and looked at the number above the door. "Coming again," he made of that; "ain't going to run no chances of losing the place." And then for a long time she stood there before the picture, so deeply and so strangely quiet that he could not translate her. "I can't just get the run of it," was his bewildered conclusion. "I don't see why it should make anybody act like that."

And yet he must have understood more than he knew, for suddenly he was seeing her through a blur of tears.

As he began shutting up for the night he was so excited about the way she looked when she finally turned away that it never occurred to him to be depressed about her inability to pay the price.

He kept thinking of her, wondering about her, during the next day.

At a little before six he took up his station near the front window.

Once more the current of workers flowed by. "I'm an old fool," he told himself, irritated at the wait; "as if it makes any difference whether she comes or not--when she can't buy it, anyhow. She's just as big a fool as I am--liking it when she can't have it, only I'm the biggest fool of all--caring whether she likes it or not." But just then the girl pa.s.sed quickly by a crowd of girls who were ahead of her and came hurrying across the street. She was walking fast, and looked excited and anxious. "Afraid it might be gone," he said--adding, grimly: "Needn't worry much about that."

She came up to the picture as some people would enter a church. And yet the joy which flooded her face is not well known to churches.

"I'll tell you what it's like"--the old man's thoughts stumbling right into the heart of it--"it's like someone that's been wandering round in a desert country all of a sudden coming on a spring. She's _thirsty_--she's drinking it in--she can't get enough of it.

It's--it's the water of life to her!" And then, ashamed of saying a thing that sounded as if it were out of a poem, he shook his shoulders roughly as if to shake off a piece of sentiment unbecoming his age and s.e.x.

He went to the door and watched her as she pa.s.sed away. "I'll bet she'd never tip the scale to one hundred pounds," he decided. "Looks like a good wind could blow her away." She stooped a little and just as she pa.s.sed from sight he saw that she was coughing.

Then the old man made what he prided himself was a great deduction.

"She's been there, and she wants to go back. This kind of takes her back for a minute, and when she gets the breath of it she ain't so homesick."

All through those July days he watched each night for the frail-looking little girl who liked the picture of the pines. She would always come hurrying across the street in the same eager way, an eagerness close to the feverish. But the tenseness would always relax as she saw the picture. "She never looks quite so wilted down when she goes away as she does when she comes," the old man saw.

"Upon my soul, I believe she really _goes_ there. It's--oh, Lord"--irritated at getting beyond his depth--"_I_ don't know!"

He never called it anything now but "Her Picture." One day at just ten minutes of six he took it out of the window. "Seems kind of mean," he admitted, "but I just want to find out how much she does think of it."