Part 6

I cannot tell in what surprise, in what a haze, or with what emotions I went about that task. I got the blanks and the records, and, before the executive clerk, whose work it was, had come down, I made out those three pardons, in the largest, roundest hand I could command, impressed them with the Great Seal of State, had the secretary of state sign them, and took them over to the governor’s office. I was admitted to his private room, and there he sat, at his great flat desk. The only other person in the room was Dreier, a Chicago banker, who had never wearied, it seems, in his efforts to have those men pardoned. He was standing, and was very nervous; the moment evidently meant much to him. The Governor took the big sheets of imitation parchment, glanced over them, signed his name to each, laid down the pen, and handed the papers across the table to Dreier. The banker took them, and began to say something. But he only got as far as----

“Governor, I hardly”--when he broke down and wept. Altgeld made an impatient gesture; he was gazing out of the window in silence, on the elm-trees in the yard. He took out his watch, told Dreier he would miss his train--Dreier was to take the Alton to Joliet, deliver the pardons to the men in person, and go on into Chicago with them that night--and Dreier nervously rolled up the pardons, took up a little valise, shook hands, and was gone.

On the table was a high pile of proofs of the document in which Governor Altgeld gave the reasons for his action. It was an able paper; one might well rank it among state papers, and I suppose no one now, in these days, when so many of Altgeld’s democratic theories are popular, would deny that his grounds were just and reasonable, or that he had done what he could to right a great wrong; though he would regret that so great a soul should have permitted itself to mar the document by expressions of hatred of the judge who tried the case. But perhaps it is not so easy to be calm and impersonal in the midst of the moving event, as it is given to others to be long afterward.

But whatever feelings he may have had, he was calm and serene ever after. I saw him as I was walking down to the Capitol the next morning. It was another of those June days which now and then are so perfect on the prairies. The Governor was riding his horse--he was a gallant horseman--and he bowed and smiled that faint, wan smile of his, and drew up to the curb a moment. There was, of course, but one subject then, and I said:

“Well, the storm will break now.”

“Oh, yes,” he replied, with a not wholly convincing air of throwing off a care, “I was prepared for that. It was merely doing right.”

I said something to him then to express my satisfaction in the great deed that was to be so wilfully, recklessly, and cruelly misunderstood. I did not say all I might have said, for I felt that my opinions could mean so little to him. I have wished since that I had said more,--said something, if that might have been my good fortune, that could perhaps have made a great burden a little easier for that brave and tortured soul. But he rode away with that wan, persistent smile. And the storm did break, and the abuse it rained upon him broke his heart; but I never again heard him mention the anarchist case.

XIV

The newspapers were so extravagant in their abuse of Governor Altgeld for his pardon of the anarchists that one not knowing the facts might have received the impression that the Governor had already pardoned most of the prisoners in the penitentiary, and would presently pardon those that remained, provided the crimes they had committed, or were said to have committed, had been heinous enough. The fact was that he issued no more pardons, proportionately at least, than the governors who preceded him, since notwithstanding the incessant grinding of society’s machinery of vengeance the populations of prisons grow with the populations outside of them.

But partizanship was intense in those days; and the fact that Governor Altgeld was responsible for such a hegira from the Capitol at Springfield as Colonel McKenzie had longed to behold in the Capitol at Frankfort exacerbated the bitter feeling. The sentiment thus created, however, did increase the hopes of convicts, and the Governor was continually importuned by their friends--those of them that had friends, which was apt to be a pitifully small percentage of the whole number--to give them back their liberty. A few weeks after the pardons had been issued to the anarchists, George Brennan of Braidwood, then a clerk in the State House, told me a moving story of a young man of his acquaintance, who was then confined in the penitentiary at Joliet. The young man was dying of tuberculosis, and his mother, having no other hope than that he might be released to die at home, had made her appeal to Brennan, and he had seen to the filing of an application in due form, and now he asked me if I would not call the Governor’s attention to it. I got out the great blue envelope containing the thin papers in the case--they were as few as the young man’s friends--and took them over to the Governor, but no sooner had I laid them on his desk and made the first hesitating and tentative approach to the subject, than I divined the moment to be wholly inauspicious. The Governor did not even look at the papers, he did not even touch the big blue linen envelope, but shook his head and said:

“No, no, I will not pardon any more. The people are opposed to it; they do not believe in mercy; they love revenge; they want the prisoners punished to the bitterest extremity.”

I did not then know how right he was in his cynical generalization, though I did know that his decision was so far from his own heart that it was no decision at all, but merely the natural human reaction against all the venom that had been voided upon him, and I went away then, and told Brennan that we must wait until the Governor was in another mood.

Three or four days afterward I met the Governor one morning as he was passing through the rotunda of the State House, his head bent in habitual abstraction, and seeing me in what seemed always some subconscious way he stopped and said:

“Oh, by the way: that pardon case you spoke of the other morning--I was somewhat hasty I fear, and out of humor. If you’ll get the papers I’ll see what can be done.”

I knew of course what could be done, and knew then that it would be done, and I made haste to get the papers, which had been kept on my desk awaiting that propitious season which I had the faith to feel would come sooner or later, though I had not expected it to come quite so soon as that. I already anticipated the gladness that would light up Brennan’s good Irish face when I handed him the pardon for his friend, and I could dramatize the scene in that miner’s cottage in Braidwood when the pardoned boy flew to his mother’s arms. I intended to say nothing then to Brennan, however, but to wait until the pardon, signed and sealed, could be delivered into his hands, but as I was going across the hall to the Governor’s chambers I encountered Brennan, and then of course could not hold back the good news. And so I told him, looking into his blue eyes to behold the first ripple of the smile I expected to see spread over his face; but there was no smile. He regarded me quite soberly, shook his head, and said:

“It’s too late now.”

And he drew from his pocket a telegram, and, without any need to read it, said:

“He died last night.”

I took the papers back and had them filed away among those cases that had been finally disposed of, though that formality could not dispose of the case for me. The Governor was waiting for the papers, and at last when the morning had almost worn away I went over to his chambers to add another fardel to that heavy load which I had thought it was to be my lot that day to see lightened in the doing of an act of grace and pity. I told him as he sat alone at his desk, and the shade of sorrow deepened a moment on his pale face; but he said nothing, and I was glad to go.

The poor little tragedy had its impressions for me, and it was not long until I thought I saw in it the motive of a story, which at once I began to write. The theme was the embarrassment which a governor’s conscience created for him because during a critical campaign he knew it to be his duty to pardon a notorious convict,--and I invented the situations and expedients to bear the tale along to that thrilling climax in which the governor was delivered out of his difficulty by the most opportune death of the convict, whom a higher hand could dramatically be said to have pardoned. I worked very hard on the story, and thought it pretty fine, and I sent it away at last to an eastern magazine. And then I waited, and at length a letter came saying that the story was well enough thought of in that editorial room to hold it until the editor-in-chief should return from Europe and hand down a final decision. I waited for weeks, and then one morning there on my desk was an envelope, ominous in its bigness; it was one of those letters you do not have to open in order to read them, because you know what they say; I knew my manuscript had come back. But when I opened the package, instead of the familiar slip of rejection, there was a letter; the editor liked the story, saw much in it, he said, but felt--and quite rightly I am sure--that its ending, with the convict dying in the very nick of time to save the governor from his embarrassment, was an evasion of the whole moral issue; besides, the conclusion was too melodramatic,--that was the word he used,--and would I change it?

The day after all was bright and cheerful; I remember it well, the sun lying on the State House lawns, their green dotted with the gold of dandelions, and the trees twisting their leaves almost rapturously in a sparkling air we did not often breathe on those humid prairies. And--though this has nothing whatever to do with the case, and enters it only as one of those incidents that linger in the memory--William Jennings Bryan was there that day, calling on the Governor and the Secretary of State. He was then a young congressman from Nebraska, and he made a speech; but I was interested in the story far more than in politics or any speech about it, even the brilliant speech of a man who so soon, and with such remarkable _élan_, was to charge across the country on the hosts of privilege.

And I changed the story; I made that poor harried governor drain his bitter cup of duty to the lees, and gave the story an ending so remorselessly logical, so true to the facts and fates of human experience, that it might have been as depressing as one of Hardy’s “Little Ironies”--could it have resembled them in any other way, which of course it could not, unless it were in that imitation with which the last author I had been reading was pretty sure though all unconsciously to be flattered. I changed the story, and sent the MS. back to the waiting editor; and it was returned as the string snaps back to the bow, with a letter that showed plainly that his interest in the tale had all evaporated. He had no regrets, it appeared, save one perhaps, since he concluded his letter by saying:

“Besides, you have destroyed the fine dramatic ending which the story possessed in its first draft.”

The experience uprooted another of society’s oak-trees for me, and it has continued to lie there, with the roots of its infallibility withering whitely in the air, though humanity still somehow continues to arrange itself about the institution as best it can. This process of uprooting, I suppose, goes on in life to the very end; but it is wholesome after all, since life grows somehow easier after one has learned that human beings are all pretty human and pretty much alike in their humanness, and the great service of literature to mankind has been, and more and more will be, I hope, to teach human beings this salutary and consoling lesson.

But, in no way despairing, I kept the manuscript by me, and when I was not trying to write other stories I was retouching it, until in the end its fate was almost that of the portrait which the artist in one of Balzac’s stories kept on trying to improve until it was but a meaningless scumble of gray, with no likeness to anything in this universe. Its fate was not quite that bad, however, since it made for me a friend.

XV

The incident, like that on which the story itself was founded, occurred in the course of another effort to induce the Governor to save a poor wretch from the gallows. The autumn preceding, just when the World’s Fair at Chicago was at its apogee, a half-crazed boy had assassinated Carter Harrison, the old mayor of that city, and had been promptly tried and condemned to death. The time for the execution of the sentence drew on, and two or three days before the black event I had a telegram from Peter Dunne and other newspaper friends in Chicago asking me to urge the governor, or the acting governor as it happened at that time to be, to commute the sentence to one of imprisonment for life. The boy, so the telegrams said, was clearly insane, and had been at the time of his crazy and desperate deed; his case had not been presented with the skill that might have saved him, or at least might have saved another in such a plight; there had been the customary hue and cry, the most cherished process of the English law, “and,” Dunne concluded, “do get Joe Gill to let him off.”

Joe Gill was Joseph B. Gill, the young Lieutenant-Governor of the state, and because Governor Altgeld was just then out of the state he was on the bridge as acting governor. Gill had been one of the Immortal 101, and as a representative had made a record in support of certain humane measures in behalf of the miners of the state. The newspaper correspondents had had pleasure in celebrating him and his work in their despatches, and because of his popularity among the miners, to say nothing of his popularity among the newspaper men, he had been nominated for lieutenant-governor on the ticket with Altgeld. There was in our relations a _camaraderie_ which put any thought of presumption out of the question; besides, I was always so much opposed to the killing of human beings, especially to that peculiarly horrible form of killing which the state deliberately and in cold blood commits under the euphemism of “capital punishment,” that I was always ready to ask any governor to commute a sentence of death that had been pronounced against anybody; so that it seemed a simple matter to ask Joe Gill, himself the heart of kindness, to save the life of this boy whose soul had wandered so desperately astray in the clouds which darkened it.

Early the next morning--the telegrams had come at night--I went over to the governor’s office, and the governor’s private secretary told me that Lieutenant-Governor Gill had not yet appeared, and as a good secretary, anxious to protect his chief, he asked:

“What do you want to see him about?”

“This Prendergast they’re going to hang in Chicago next Friday.”

At this a man sitting in the room near the secretary’s desk looked up with a sudden access of intense interest; and, starting from his chair and transfixing me with a sharp glance, he asked:

“What interest have you in the Prendergast case?”

“None,” I said, “except that I don’t want to have him, or anybody, hanged.”

On the man’s face, tired, with the expression of world-weariness life gives to the countenance behind which there has been too much serious contemplation of life, a face that seemed prematurely wrinkled, there suddenly appeared a smile as winning as a woman’s, and he said in a voice that had the timbre of human sympathy and the humor of a peculiar drawl:

“Well, you’re all right, then.”

It thereupon occurred to the governor’s secretary to introduce us, and so I made the acquaintance of Clarence Darrow. He had taken it upon himself to neglect his duties as the attorney of some of the railroads and other large corporations in Chicago long enough to come down to Springfield on his own initiative and responsibility to plead with the Governor for this lad’s life (he was always going on some such Quixotic errand of mercy for the poor and the friendless), and we retired to the governor’s ante-chamber to await the coming of Gill. We talked for a while about the Prendergast case, which might have had more sympathetic consideration had it not persisted as the Carter Harrison case in the mind of that public, which when its latent spirit of vengeance is aroused can so easily become the mob, but it was not long until I discovered that Darrow had read books other than those of the law, and for an hour we talked of Tolstoy and the other great Russians, and of Thomas Hardy and of Mr. Howells, to enumerate no more of the long catalogue of those realists whom we liked in common, and when I discovered that he actually knew Mr. Howells, knew him personally, as the saying is, I could feel that poor Prendergast, though I had never seen him in my life, or scarcely ever thought of him until the night before, had done me one service at least, and it made me all the more anxious to save him.

When Joe Gill’s tall Egyptian form came swinging into the room our talk of books was interrupted long enough to arrange for a hearing that afternoon, and then we resumed our talk, and it endured through luncheon and after, and I left him only long enough to have a conversation with Gill and to ask him as a sort of personal favor to an old friend to spare the boy’s life.

At two o’clock the hearing was called. The reporters and the governor’s secretary and George Brennan and I made the audience, and Gill sat up erectly in the governor’s chair to hear the appeal. Darrow asked me the proper address for a governor, and I said since this was the lieutenant-governor I thought “Your Excellency” would be propitiative, and Darrow made one of those eloquent appeals for mercy of which he is the complete master. It moved us all, but the Lieutenant-Governor gathered himself together and refused it, and Darrow went back to Chicago to unfold those legal technicalities which make our law so superior to other forms in that they can stay the hand of its vengeance. He did not succeed in the end, and the boy was hanged, and murder has gone on in Chicago since, I understand, the same as before. But Darrow could not leave Springfield until midnight of that day, and we talked about books all the evening, and when he boarded his train he had in his valise the MS. of my story about another governor and another pardon, concerning which he was charged to answer a certain question to which all my doubts and perplexities could be reduced, namely: “Is it worth while, and if not, is there any use in going on and trying to write one that is?”

I had to wait almost as long for his decision as though he had been an editor himself, but when I called at his office in Chicago one morning in the autumn to get the MS., and he told me that his answer to my question was “yes,” and that he would, if I agreed, send the story to Mr. Howells, I was as happy as though he had been an editor and had accepted it for publication. I could not agree to its being sent on to weary Mr. Howells, but took it back with me to Springfield, in hope, if not in confidence.

XVI

However, it has seemed to be my fate, or my weakness, which we too often confuse with fate, to vacillate between an interest in letters and an interest in politics, and after that year, whose days and nights were almost wholly given to studying law, I was admitted to the bar, and thereupon felt qualified to go out on the stump in the campaign that autumn and speak in behalf of the Democratic ticket. It was fun to drive out over Sangamon County in those soft autumn evenings, over the soft roads,--though if it rained they became too soft,--and to speak in schoolhouses to the little audiences of farmers, or of miners, on the iniquities of the tariff. If we had been a little more devoted to principle, perhaps, than we were to party, we might better have spoken of the iniquities of that Democratic minority in the Senate which had just completed its betrayal of us all and helped to perpetrate those iniquities, but when you belong to a party you are presumed to adjust yourself to what your representatives do, and to make the best of what generally is a pretty bad bargain. The bargain of those senators had been particularly bad, and so, instead of speaking in the tones of righteous indignation, we had to adopt the milder accents of apology and explanation, and it was difficult to explain to some of those audiences. There was more or less heckling, and now and then impromptu little debates, and sometimes when the meeting was done, and we started on the long ride back to town, we would find that the nuts had been removed from the axles of our carriage-wheels. Perhaps that argument was as good as any we had made, and it could not matter much anyway, since partizan speeches never convince anybody, and if they could, if they could do anything but deepen and intensify prejudice, whole batteries of the world’s best orators in that year could not have overcome the vicious effects of that high betrayal, even though they had been led to the charge by Phocion and Demosthenes.

I suppose no greater moral wrong was ever committed in America. It had been bad enough that a policy of favoritism and advantage which appealed to so many because of the good luck of its reassuring name, had endured so long, as a sort of necessity in the development of a new continent; it had been bad enough that labor had first been lied to and then subjugated by the lie, that women had been driven into mills, and children had been fed to the Moloch of the machines, and that on these sacrifices there had been reared in America an insolent plutocracy with the ideals of a gambler and the manners of a wine-agent. But when the workingmen had learned at last that the system did not “protect” them, and when thousands of young men in the land, filled with the idealism of youth, had recognized the lie and the hypocrisy, and hated them with a fine moral abhorrence, and had turned to the Democratic party and trusted it to redeem its promise to reform this evil, and had put it in power in the nation, only to have its leaders in the Senate betray them with the brutal cynicism such a cause as theirs demands, then there was committed a deed little short of dastardly. If that seems too strong a word, the deed was surely contemptible, and base enough to fill anyone with despair of the party and of the party system as it had been developed in America, though it has been understood by only two men so far as I know--M. Ostrogorski and Golden Rule Jones. It was enough to disgust anyone with politics altogether, and to forswear them and parties, too, although I never quite understood the philosophy of the attitude until, a few years later, Golden Rule Jones made it clear. He made many things clear, for he dropped the plummet of his original mind down, down, down, more profoundly into fundamental life than anyone I can think of.

To me, in those days, the tariff question had seemed entirely fundamental. I used to think that if we could but have civil-service reform, and tariff for revenue only, the world would go very well. The tariff question is not considered fundamental in these days, of course, so fast and so far past the Mugwumps has the world run, though everybody realizes its evil, and knows, or should know, that the notion of privilege on which tariffs are founded is quite fundamentally wrong, and every political party promises to reduce its rates, or revise them, or at least to take some measures against the lie.