Part 4

It is an excellent thing for a modest man of real merit to discover that he has unsuspected resources of steady courage. It was an excellent thing for George Helm. From that day he took on a new dignity and assurance--created about himself the atmosphere that inspires men to confidence in their leaders. He changed the liking of his followers into that passionate loyalty which is the great force in the world of action. For most men cannot reason and judge; they must choose a party and a leader by instinct and must trust themselves to that party and that leader implicitly. The story of history is the story of loyalty--and of loyalty betrayed. The mass has trusted and worshiped a class; the class has become infatuated with itself, has trampled on and betrayed the mass.

George Helm had won, the previous fall, because the mass of the people in that district had at last become more than suspicious of the honesty and fidelity of their chosen leaders. He had come at just the right time. And he now won again--an overwhelming victory that could not be reversed by election frauds, with Branagan no longer assenting and assisting--a victory that frightened Reichman not only for his damaged machine but also for his personal safety; for, a Democratic county prosecutor, a subtle henchman of Branagan’s, had been elected along with Helm, and Reichman knew that Judge Powers would desert him the instant it became to his interest so to do.

“No wonder,” replied Helm, with a smile. “I haven’t any place yet. I’m trying to find my place.... If the choice in, say, Lincoln’s day, had been what it is now--between serving a knave and serving a fool--between serving a knave that’s owned by its money and serving a fool that’s enslaved to the knave by its folly--if Abe Lincoln had had choice between those two rotten apples, I wonder which he would have chosen?”

“Lincoln was a practical man,” said Branagan. “He had all the cranks and romantic reformers down on him. Don’t you believe what the histories say. I _know_ because I lived then.”

“Yes--he was a practical man,” said Helm. “He must have been, for he won.”

“And I reckon you’ll win, too.”

“Yes,” said Helm, with a humorous drawl, “I reckon I will.”

The excitement of boss over campaign and victory is the same in kind as the excitement of humblest, most fatuous partisan--though it is vastly different in degree. Branagan had been hypnotized out of his sordidness--for the moment--by the issues and by Helm. But even as he arranged his mind for talking business with Reichman he returned to his normal state; and when he and the Republican boss got together for the grand pow-wow he was wondering at his own sentimentality of a few days before. The chief article of the treaty of peace was no more George Helm. Branagan agreed with a qualm and a genuine regret, but he agreed as one obeying the plain mandate of the instinct of self-preservation.

“I wish to God we could get him out of the Senate,” said Reichman. “Of course our boys in charge up at the capital will see that he don’t get a chance to say much or to do anything. Still, I wish he was back in the ranks--away back.”

“Well--he will be in two years,” said Branagan. “And what’s two years in politics?”

“That’s right,” assented Reichman. “Two years isn’t any time, anywhere.”

“Except in jail,” said Branagan, with a loud laugh.

Reichman conceded only the feeblest of smiles to this coarse jest, savoring of innuendo. “Those sort of chaps,” pursued he, “have to be caught young and put out of business. I’ve attended to a dozen of ’em in the last ten years.”

“I’d never ’a touched him,” said Branagan, “after that first campaign, if I hadn’t been put in a position where I was forced to do it.”

“That was my fault, Pat, I admit,” said Reichman. “But it won’t occur again.”

“I know it, Emil,” said Pat. “We’ve both had our lesson.... I won’t say nothin’ to Helm. I’ll keep him jollied along until his term’s about up.”

“Then--over he drops,” laughed Reichman.

Branagan did not laugh. He liked Helm. But he did nod--and Branagan’s nod was as good as his word, and his word he had never broken.

III

“THERE GOES A MAN”

Mrs. Salfield and Mrs. Ramon, leaders in Cincinnati’s fashionable society, were disposed in a comfortable corner of Mrs. Salfield’s ballroom. They were sheltered from rheumatism-provoking draughts. They were at conversational range from the music. They commanded a full view of the beautiful ball, even of the supper room, where a dozen men were “mopping up the champagne instead of doing their dancing duty,” as Mrs. Ramon put it. Mrs. Ramon, posing as of the younger generation, went in--somewhat awkwardly--for the “picturesque” in language. Mrs. Salfield, frankly an old woman, tolerated slang as she tolerated rowdy modern manners and “disgraceful, not to say indecent exposure in ball dresses”; but in her own person she adhered to the old fashions of moderately low dresses and moderately incorrect English. Said Mrs. Ramon:

“There goes that charming grandniece of yours. How graceful she is. I thought you told me she was twenty-nine.”

“Eleanor Clearwater--twenty-nine!” exclaimed Mrs. Salfield. “She’s not yet twenty-four.”

“Oh, I remember, you said she _looked_ twenty-nine--so serious--dignified--reserved--really icy. But that was only two months ago. She looks eighteen now. She’s been away--hasn’t she?”

“Just returned,” said Mrs. Salfield.

“It did her a world of good--freshened her up--no, softened--no, I mean warmed.”

“She’s been visiting the Hollisters, down at Harrison.”

“A country town. I supposed she’d been to baths or springs or something. Really the change in her is quite miraculous. She has waked up.”

“Eleanor never was what one’d call sleepy,” said Mrs. Salfield, rather stiffly.

“Oh, she was always interested in _things_--books, serious subjects--too much so for my taste. But you know what I mean. She looks _human_--looks as if she had a human interest. It was the one thing lacking to make her entirely interesting and beautiful--to give her magnetism. You notice how the men flock about her. She’s having a triumph. Why, she looks round--looks at the men--in a positively flirtatious way. Really, Clara, it’s too wonderful. _What_ has happened to her?”

“What could happen to a girl in Harrison? Nothing but Bart Hollister.”

“It couldn’t be Bart,” said Mrs. Ramon.

“It isn’t anybody,” said Mrs. Salfield. “It’s simply a case of coming-to a little late. So many young people take life too solemnly at first. They feel responsible for it.”

The phenomenon thus noted by Mrs. Ramon had escaped no one’s eyes. Even Eleanor’s father, the absorbed George Clearwater, United States Senator and “lumber king,” had seen it. Eleanor Clearwater had gone to Harrison, a reserved, cool, not to say cold young woman, with an air that made her seem years older than she was, and with an interest in men so faint that it discouraged all but two dauntless fortune hunters--who were promptly sent to look further. She had come back, a lively, coquettish person, with a modern tendency to audacities in dress and speech. Every one wondered; no one could explain. She could have explained, but she would not have admitted the truth even to herself. Four men proposed within two weeks after her return. She refused them all--in a gay, mocking way, thus enabling them to feel that they had not humiliated themselves, that she had imagined they were proposing merely to make interesting conversation.

The cause she would not admit? A lank, homely, ill dressed country town lawyer, one George Helm. The year before he had been the joke of Harrison because of his absurd beard and his seedy suit with its flowing tails. The shaving of the beard, the changing of the “statesman’s frock” for an ill fitting sack suit, two campaigns in which he had developed power and originality as a speaker, an election to the State Senate by attacking “everything that was respectable and decent,” that is, by telling the truth about the upper-class grafters--these circumstances had combined to make him a considerable and serious figure in Harrison. But for such as the Hollisters and the Clearwaters he remained a bumpkin, a demagogue, an impossible lower-class person.

Yet he had wrought the wondrous, proposal-fraught change in Miss Clearwater. And he had done it by impudently pausing at her phaeton in Harrison’s main street and telling her, with exasperating indifference to her icy manner, that he could marry her if he wished but that he had no place in his life for such a person as she.

Why had this transformed her? For two reasons, both important to those men who would fain have influence over one--or more--of the female sex. The first is, that he had been able to impress upon her the fact that he was a worth-while person. The second is, that he, being serious and simple, had shown her that he, the man worth-while, meant it when he said she was not a girl a worth-while man would care to marry. With these two propositions firmly fixed in her head, Eleanor Clearwater could not fail to see that it was “up to” her to demonstrate her power over man.

She invited proposals--proposals not too obviously incited chiefly by her charms as an heiress. She got the proposals. But still she was not satisfied. There was one man--a homely man, but a man with far and away the handsomest soul she had ever seen--simple, proud, honest and fearless--looking from eyes that were the more beautiful for the rugged homeliness of the rest of his face. This man whom her woman’s heart defiantly told her was supremely worth-while--this man had said _she_ was not worth-while. Therefore, there were worlds still defiantly unconquered--which meant that nothing was conquered. It irritated her--as her father had been irritated until all the lumber interests had been gathered in under his lordship. It irritated her yet more profoundly that such an absurdity as this gentle and friendly disdain of bucolic homeliness should irritate her. But she could not change her nature.

He had set her to thinking about him. He had her worried, as the saying is. And when a man gets a woman in that state, she will not emerge from it until something definite has occurred.

Woman has little to think about but men--thanks to a social system cunningly contrived by man for his own benefit. She thinks of man in general until she centers upon one man. She then thinks of him until she finds him out. When that comes to pass, she goes back to men in general, until a new personal interest develops. This, so long as any remnant of charm gives her hope. Man is woman’s career. Not so with men; not so with George Helm, State Senator-elect and desperately in earnest about making a career.

* * * * *

While Eleanor Clearwater was sleeping away the excitements of the Salfield ball in her attractive bedroom in the Clearwater palace, George Helm was at work several hundred miles away in his dingy back office in the Masonic Building at Harrison. When she should be awakened by her maid to dress for her first engagement of the day, she would soon be thinking of George Helm--thinking how ugly and obscure and ungainly he was--and what magnetic eyes he had. Thinking the more, the more she tried not to think. But George Helm was not thinking of her at all.

He was sitting beside the rickety old table in a wooden chair, a kitchen chair. It was tilted back and Helm’s long lank legs were tangled up with each other and with the rungs in amazing twists. Perhaps you have happened to know an occasional man--or woman--whose every act and trick of manner had an inexplicable fascination. When George Helm was self-conscious, he had no more magnetism than is inseparable from intelligent, sympathetic good nature sunning in a kindly keen sense of humor. But the instant he lost self-consciousness--as he always did on the platform, and as he was more and more doing in private life, now that he had begun to have success--that instant he became a magnet, one of those human magnets who interest you, no matter what they do, and in repose. Even in bed--that too short, sagging bed in the attic of Mrs. Beaver’s boarding-house--even as he lay doubled up, there was the fascination of the unique, the perfectly natural and unassuming.

As he sat twisted in and upon the wobbly kitchen chair, his friend, lazy Bill Desbrough, from across the hall, looked in every few minutes, hoping George would encourage him to enter. It was curious about George Helm, how in spite of his lack of what passes for dignity, no one ever--even in the days when he was thought to be a joke--“the boy with that beard”--no one ever ventured to interrupt him without an encouraging look from those deep-set blue-gray eyes.

At last George looked up and smiled as Bill stood in the doorway. He said:

“Come in, you loafer.”

“How’s State Senator-elect Helm to-day?” inquired Bill, lounging in, his hands in his pockets, his pipe hanging from the corner of his mouth. “How does it feel to be famous?”

“To be less obscure,” corrected George. He had a passion--and a genius--for accuracy.

“To be famous,” insisted Desbrough.

“Do you know who is State Senator for the district adjoining this--on either side?--or to the north or south?”

Bill Desbrough’s laugh was confession.

“There are fifty State Senators in this State alone,” continued George. “There are forty-eight States in the Union. Fifty times forty-eight----”

“Why are you trying to make yourself out so small?”

“Or--to look at it another way, I belong to the Democratic boss of Harrison--Pat Branagan, saloon-keeper. He belongs to the Republican boss, Al Reichman. Al belongs to Senator Harvey Sayler, the State boss. Sayler belongs to the big monopolistic combines that center in Wall Street. They belong to a dozen big plutocrats who belong to about three of their number. And those three belong to their money--do what it says, say and think what it tells ’em to.”

“I hope you’re happy now,” said Bill. “You’ve made yourself out to be about equal to a patch on the ragged pant-leg of some cotton-picking coon working for the sub-lessee of a mortgaged farm in a poor corner of Arkansas.”

“Or, to look at it another way,” continued Helm, untwisting his legs, immediately to re-knot them in an even more intricate tangle, “a State Senator gets six dollars a day while the Legislature’s in session. It meets for sixty days every two years. His term’s four years. So, my money value as the State sees it is one hundred and eighty dollars a year--about fifty cents a day.”

“Well, I hope you’ve shrunk yourself back to normal human size,” said his friend. “I suppose that’s what you’re doing this for.”

“No, Bill. To locate myself. I want to see just where I stand. The slave of a slave of a slave of a slave of a slave of a slave of a slave--I think that’s the right degree--and at fifty cents a day.”

“Branagan gives you some pretty good law cases,” suggested Bill.

Helm eyed him somberly.

“You know you don’t want to be too _damn_ independent, old man,” continued Bill.

“To locate myself,” pursued Helm, as if Bill had not spoken. “I want to see just how far I’ve got to go before----”

He paused here. Said Bill--not altogether in jest, “Before you’re President of the U. S. A.?”

“No,” said George gravely. “Before I’m a man. Before I belong to myself.” He laughed with his peculiar illumination of the whole face apparently from the light of the eyes. “You see, Bill, I’m aiming to go further than most Presidents--especially these latter-day chaps.”

“Further than most plutocrats,” said Desbrough. “As you said, _they_ belong to their boodle bags.... You haven’t broken with Branagan?”

“Not yet,” said Helm. “I’ll have to, soon after the Legislature opens. You see, we’re the minority, and nowadays the majority-boss always uses the minority votes to put through whatever dirty business a lot of his men have to be let off from voting for.”

“Well--don’t break with good old Pat till you have to.”

“I’ll get all I can first, you may be sure,” said Helm. “I’m a practical man--that is, I’m a practical politician, with a dangerous, incurable hankering for being a man--self-owned and self-bossed.”

“You give Branagan good legal service for what he pays you.”

“And he hasn’t yet asked me to do any law work that I’ve not been able to stand for.”

“Pat’s a little afraid of you,” declared Desbrough. “He knows how strong you are with the people.”

Helm slowly shook his head. “I don’t deceive myself. He’s saving me till he really needs me.” He straightened out his long figure deliberately, rose and began to pace up and down the office. “It’s all a question of money, Bill. In this day a man has got to have an independence--or do what some other man says.”

“If I could speak as you can--and hold the crowds--and draw in their votes---- You, a Democrat, elected from this district of shell-back Republicans who talk about the Civil War as if Morgan was still raiding the State.” Bill laughed. “Why don’t you drop politics, George? Why fool with the silly game? The people’ll never learn anything. They can always be buncoed--the asses! What did God make ’em for? To work like hell all day and then hand over most of what they’ve made to some clever chap--and thank him for taking it.”

“That used to be so,” replied Helm. “But they’re waking up, Bill. All they need is the right kind of leaders.”

“Meaning you?”

“Meaning me,” said Helm. And his expression far removed his statement from vanity or egotism.

Desbrough puffed at his pipe in silence. Presently he said:

“You can count me in, George--if there’s anything I can do.”

They did not shake hands. They exchanged no gushing remarks. They did not look at each other with exalted sentimentality. They simply looked--then George grinned and nodded--and said:

“All right, Bill. You’re in.”

A long silence. Then Desbrough:

“Not that I believe in the game, old man. I don’t. I despise the people. I’d go in with the wise boys who rob them if I didn’t happen to have inherited enough to slop along on.”

“How much have you got?” said George--a necessary question, as this was to be a partnership.

“Nineteen hundred and fifty a year--county bonds and a farm. My law practice--I made seventy-five dollars last year.”

“You won’t take anything but people too poor to pay--and then only when you think they’re being wronged by somebody with money. That’s why I asked you in.”

“You didn’t----” Desbrough stopped and laughed. “Yes, you did, come to think of it. I’d never have offered if you hadn’t made me feel that you wanted me. I’d not have done it even then, if you hadn’t compelled me. How do you compel people to do things without even asking ’em, George?”

For reply Helm laughed. Said he:

“Nineteen hundred and fifty a year. That’s enough for you. I must have more--about five thousand a year.”

“You can make it at the law.”

“If the gang didn’t shut me out of the courts, when I broke with them. And if I’d take crooked cases. I’ve thought that all out. It can’t be done any more. Lincoln and the big fellows of the past could. But that was a different day. Now all the law cases worth-while--all the good fees--come from the very chaps I’ve got to attack. A lawyer who has done any business as a lawyer can go into politics in only one way--and that’s a more or less crooked way. I’ve thought it all out, Bill. I can’t afford to make an independence, and then wash up and go in on the level. I hoped I could see my way clear to do it. But--I can’t.”

“But you won’t get money any other way,” said Desbrough. “And if you haven’t got the money to live on and to carry on your campaigns, why, you’re beaten in advance.”

“I haven’t forgotten my campaign for judge,” said Helm. “Bill, I’ve learned a thing or two about practical politics. I’m going to play cards--not play the fool.”

“Why not marry Clara Hollister?” cried Desbrough, suddenly inspired.

“Would she have you?” asked Helm.

“_Me?_ Good Lord, what’d _I_ do with another wife? I had _one_, and am paying alimony. No, I mean _you_ marry Clara.”

Helm laughed uproariously. “Take another look at me, Bill,” said he. “You’ve forgotten.”

“Women don’t know anything about handsome and ugly in men,” said Bill. “Besides, you’re not what _women’d_ call plain. Don’t laugh, George. I’d back you to win any woman you took after. A man that can catch crowds can catch a woman. With a woman, it isn’t what a man _looks_. It’s what he _says_--and does.”

“I’ve got no woman-talk,” said Helm.

“You can grab off Clara Hollister if you want her--and she has twenty thousand a year in her own right. And she’ll let you do what you please with it.”

“Her father’s the head devil in these parts of the gang I’m after.”

“The twenty thousand’s hers. She’s a good deal of a snob, but she’d be what you wanted her to be, if you married her. That’s the way it is with women.”

“Was that your experience?”

“I spoke from experience,” replied Desbrough, undaunted. “I made my wife over when I married her--and then didn’t like the job. I’d rather pay alimony than be constantly reminded of my failure.”

“No--I can’t marry for independence,” said Helm. “She wouldn’t have me and--I don’t want her.”

“Then--why not that friend of hers--that Miss Clearwater? I saw you talking to her down the street one day before the election. She’d be less easy to manage than Clara. But no woman’s difficult--for a firm man who’s patient and can keep his temper--and isn’t in love.”

Helm had become acutely self-conscious and so awkward that a chair which was apparently not near his path became involved with his big feet and fell on its side with a crash. As Helm straightened from picking it up, he was extraordinarily red for the amount of exertion. Said he:

“Leave the women out of it. I’m not a marrying man.”

Desbrough laughed mockingly. “You’ll find out you’re mistaken--as soon as you’ve got money enough to make it worth a needy woman’s while to take after you. _I_ thought _I_ wasn’t a marrying man. Three months and four days after my uncle died and left me that money I was waiting at the altar.”

“I’m not a marrying man,” repeated Helm awkwardly.

“In some ways Miss Clearwater would be just the girl for you. She’d take an interest in your career. She has ideals--and they’re about as far removed from her father’s as a church from a speak-easy. I think she’s got money of her own. Yes, I’m sure she has. Her mother left her what the old man had settled on her.”

“If I did marry,” said Helm, abruptly self-possessed, “it’d be a woman that suited _me_--one I felt at home with. I want no grand rich ladies, Bill. Anyhow, I’ve thought of another way--one that’s practical.”

And he seated himself and proceeded to unfold the scheme upon which he had been seriously at work ever since the election. It was a simple scheme, wisely devoid of untried originality, but effective. His two campaigns, despite the silence of the plutocracy-controlled press, had got him a considerable reputation throughout the State. The press is not so necessary to the spread of intelligence as is latterly imagined. Long before there was a press, long before there was any written means of communication, news and knowledge of all kinds spread rapidly throughout the world, pausing only at the great desert stretches between peoples--and not often halted there for long. The old ways of communication have not been closed up. To this day the real and great reputations of the world are not press-made or press-sustained or even materially press-assisted. They are the work of mouth-to-mouth communication. And those reputations, by the way, are they against which the calumny and the innuendo of the press strive in vain.