Chapter 11

“You don't?” he cried. “You mean to sit there, John Berriman, and tell me that you don't think the man you're going to put in the United States Senate will be an honest man? What do you mean by saying you're going to put a dishonest man in there to make laws for the people, to watch over them and protect them? If you don't think he's a good man, if you don't think he's the best man the State has”--the old farmer was pounding the table heavily with his huge fist--“if you don't think that, in God's name, _why do you appoint him_?”

“I wish I could make you understand, Hiram,” said the Governor in an injured voice, “that it's not for me to say.”

“Why ain't it for you to say? Why ain't it, I want to know? Who's running you, your own conscience or some gang of men that's trying to steal from the State? Good God, I wish I had never lived to see the day a brother of mine put a thief in the United States Senate to bamboozle the honest, hard-working people of this State!”

“Hold on, please--that's a little too strong!” flamed the Governor.

“It ain't too strong. If a Senator ain't an honest man, he's a thief; and if he ain't lookin' after the welfare of the people, he's bamboozlin' them, and that's all there is about it. I don't know much about politics, but I ain't lived my life without learning a little about right and wrong, and it's a sorry day we've come to, John Berriman, if right and wrong don't enter into the makin' of a Senator!”

The Governor could think of no fitting response, so he held his peace. This seemed to quiet the irate farmer, and he surveyed his brother intently, and not unkindly.

“You're in a position now, John,” he said, and there was a kind of homely eloquence in his serious voice, “to be a friend to the people. It ain't many of us ever get the chance of doin' a great thing. We work along, and we do the best we can with what comes our way, but most of us don't get the chance to do a thing that's goin' to help thousands of people, and that the whole country's goin' to say was a move for the right. You want to think of that, and when you're thinkin' so much about honour, you don't want to clean forget about honesty. Don't you stick to any foolish notions about bein' faithful to the party; it ain't the party that needs helpin'. No matter how you got where you are, you're Governor of the State right now, John, and your first duty is to the people of this State, not to Tom Styles or anybody else. Just you remember that when you're namin' your Senator in the morning.”

It was long before the Governor retired. He sat there by the fireplace until after the fire had died down, and he was too absorbed to grow cold. He thought of many things. Like the man who had preceded him in office, he wished that some one else was just then encumbered with the gubernatorial shoes.

The next morning there was a heavy feeling in his head which he thought a walk in the bracing air might dispel, so he started on foot for the Statehouse. A light snow was on the ground, and there was something reassuring in the crispness of the morning. It would make a slave feel like a free man to drink in such air, he was thinking. Snatches of his brother's outburst of the night before kept breaking into his consciousness but curiously enough they did not greatly disturb him. He concluded that it was wonderful what a walk in the bracing air could do. From the foot of the hill he looked up at the State-house, for the first time in his experience seeing and thinking about it--not simply taking it for granted. There seemed a nobility about it--in the building itself, and back of that in what it stood for.

As he walked through the corridor to his office he was greeted with cheerful, respectful salutations. His mood let him give the greetings a value they did not have and from that rose a sense of having the trust and goodwill of his fellows.

But upon reaching his desk he found another telegram from Styles. It was imperatively worded and as he read it the briskness and satisfaction went from his bearing. He walked to the window and stood there looking down at the city, and, as it had been in looking ahead at the State-house, he now looked out over the city really seeing and understanding it, not merely taking it for granted. He found himself wondering if many of the people in that city--in that State--looked to their Governor with the old-fashioned trust his brother had shown. His eyes dimmed; he was thinking of the satisfaction it would afford his children, if--long after he had gone--they could tell how a great chance had once come into their father's life, and how he had proved himself a man.

“Will you sign these now, Governor?” asked a voice behind him.

It was his secretary, a man who knew the affairs of the State well, and whom every one seemed to respect.

“Mr. Haines,” he said abruptly, “who do you think is the best man we have for the United States Senate?”

The secretary stepped back, dumfounded; amazed that the question should be put to him, startled at that strange way of putting it. Then he told himself he must be discreet. Like many of the people at the State-house, in his heart Haines was a Boxer.

“Why, I presume,” he ventured, “that the Governor is looked upon as the logical candidate, isn't he?”

“I'm not talking about logical candidates. I want to know who you think is the man who would most conscientiously and creditably represent this State in the Senate of the United States.”

It was so simply spoken that the secretary found himself answering it as simply. “If you put it that way, Governor, Mr. Huntington is the man, of course.”

“You think most of the people feel that way?”

“I know they do.”

“You believe if it were a matter of popular vote, Huntington would be the new Senator?”

“There can be no doubt of that, Governor. I think they all have to admit that. Huntington is the man the people want.”

“That's all, Mr. Haines. I merely wondered what you thought about it.”

Soon after that Governor Berriman rang for a messenger boy and sent a telegram. Then he settled quietly down to routine work. It was about eleven when one of the newspaper men came in.

“Good-morning, Governor,” he said briskly “how's everything to-day?”

“All right, Mr. Markham. I have nothing to tell you to-day, except that I've made the senatorial appointment.”

“Oh,” laughed the reporter excitedly, “that's all, is it?”

“Yes,” replied the Governor, smiling too; “that's all!”

The reporter looked at the clock. “I'll just catch the noon edition,” he said, “if I telephone right away.”

He was moving to the other room when the Governor called to him.

“See here, it seems to me you're a strange newspaper man!”

“How so?”

“Why, I tell you I've made a senatorial appointment--a matter of some slight importance--and you rush off never asking whom I've appointed.”

The reporter gave a forced laugh. He wished the Governor would not detain him with a joke now when every second counted.

“That's right,” he said, with strained pleasantness. “Well, who's the man?”

The Governor raised his head. “Huntington,” he said quietly, and resumed his work.

“What?” gasped the reporter. “What?”

Then he stopped in embarrassment, as if ashamed of being so easily taken in. “Guess you're trying to jolly me a little, aren't you, Governor?”

“Jolly you, Mr. Markham? I'm not given to 'jollying' newspaper reporters. Here's a copy of the telegram I sent this morning, if you are still sceptical. Really, I don't see why you think it so impossible. Don't you consider Mr. Huntington a fit man for the place?”

But for the minute the reporter seemed unable to speak. “May I ask,” he fumbled at last, “why you did it?”

“I had but one motive, Mr. Markham. I thought the matter over and it seemed to me the people should have the man they wanted. I am with them in believing Huntington the best man for the place.” He said it simply, and went quietly back to his work.

For many a long day politicians and papers continued the search for “the motive.” Styles and his crowd saw it as a simple matter of selling out; they knew, of course, that it could be nothing else. After their first rage had subsided, and they saw there was nothing they could do, they wondered, sneeringly, why he did not “fix up a better story.” That was a little _too_ simple-minded. Did he think people were fools? And even the men who profited by the situation puzzled their brains for weeks trying to understand it. There was something behind it, of course.

XI

HIS AMERICA

He hated to see the reporter go. With the closing of that door it seemed certain that there was no putting it off any longer.

But even when the man's footsteps were at last sounding on the stairway, he still clung to him.

“Father,” he asked, fretfully, “why do you always talk to those fellows?”

Herman Beckman turned in his chair and stared at his son. Then he laughed. “Now, that's a fine question to come from the honour man of a law school! I hope, Fritz, that your oration to-night is going to have a little more sense in it than that.”

The calling up of his oration made him reach out another clutching hand to the vanished reporter. “But it's farcical, father, to be always interviewed by a paper nobody reads.”

“Nobody--_reads_?”

“Why, nobody cares anything about the _Leader_. It's dead.”

Herman Beckman looked at his son sharply; something about him seemed strange. He decided that he was nervous about the commencement programme. Fritz had the one oration.

The boy had opened the drawer of his study table and was fingering some papers he had taken out.

“Sure you know it?” the man asked with affectionate parental anxiety.

“Oh, I know it all right,” Fred answered grimly, and again the father decided that he was nervous about the thing. He wasn't just like himself.

The man walked to the window and stood looking across at the university buildings. Colleges had always meant much to Herman Beckman. The very day Fritz was born he determined that the boy was to go to college. It was good to witness the fulfilment of his dreams. He turned his glance to the comfortable room.

“Pretty decent comfortable sort of place, isn't it, father?” Fred asked, following his father's look and thought from the Morris chair to the student's lamp, and all those other things which nowadays seem an inevitable part of the acquirement of learning.

It made his father laugh. “Yes, my boy, I should call it decent--and comfortable.” He grew thoughtful after that.

“Pretty different from the place you had, father?”

“Oh--me? My place to study was any place I could find. Sometimes on top of a load of hay, lots of times by the light of the logs. I've studied in some funny places, Fritz.”

“Well, you _got_ there, father!” the boy burst out with feeling. “By Jove, there aren't many of them _know_ the things you know!”

“I know enough to know what I don't know,” said the old man, a little sadly. “I know enough to know what I missed. I wanted to go to college. No one will ever know how I wanted to! I began to think I'd never feel right about it. But I have a notion that when I sit there to-night listening to you, Fritz, knowing that you're speaking for two hundred boys, half of whose fathers did go to college, I think I'm going to feel better about it then.”

The boy turned away. Something in the kindly words seemed as the cut of a whip across his face.

“Well, Fritz,” his father continued, getting into his coat, “I'll be going downtown. Leave you to put on an extra flourish or two.” He laughed in proud parental fashion. “Anyway, I have some things to see about.”

The boy stood up. “Father, I have something to tell you.” He said it shortly and sharply.

The father stood there, puzzled.

“You won't like my oration to-night, father.”

And still the man did not speak. The words would not have bothered him much--it was the boy's manner.

“In fact, father, you're going to be desperately disappointed in it.”

The dull red was creeping into the man's cheeks. He was one to have little patience with that thing of not doing one's work. “Why am I going to be disappointed? This is no time to shirk! You should--”

“Oh, you'll not complain of the time and thought I've put on it,” the boy broke in with a short, hard laugh. “But, you see, father--you see”--his armour had slipped from him--“it doesn't express--your views.”

“Did I ever say I wanted you to express 'my views'? Did I bring you up to be a mouthpiece of mine? Haven't I told you to _think_?” But with a long, sharp glance at his boy anger gave way. “Come, boy”--going over and patting him on the back--“brace up now. You're acting like a seven-year-old girl afraid to speak her first piece,” and his big laugh rang out, eager to reassure.

“You won't see it! You won't believe it! I don't suppose you'll believe it when you hear it!” He turned away, overwhelmed by a sudden realisation of just how difficult was the thing that lay before him.

The man started toward his son, but instead he walked over and sat down at the opposite side of the table, waiting. He was beginning to see that there was something in this which he did not understand.

At last the boy turned to him, fighting back some things, taking on other things. He gazed at the care-worn, rugged face--face of a worker and a dreamer, reading in those lines the story of that life, seeing more clearly than he had ever seen before the beauty and futility of it. Here was the idealist, the man who would give his whole lifetime to a dream he had dreamed. He loved his father very tenderly as he looked at him, read him, then.

“Father,” he asked quietly, “are you satisfied with your life?”

The man simply stared--waiting, seeking his bearings.

“You came to this country when you were nineteen years old--didn't you, father?” The man nodded. “And now you're--it's sixty-one, isn't it?”

Again he nodded.

“You've been in America, then, forty-two years. Father, do you think as much of it now as you did forty-two years ago?”

“I don't know what you mean,” the man said, searching his son's quiet, passionate face. “I can't make you out, Fritz.”

“My favourite story as a kid,” the boy went on, “was to hear you tell of how you felt when your boat came sailing into New York Harbour, and you saw the first outlines of a country you had dreamed about all through your boyhood, which you had saved pennies for, worked nights for, ever since you were old enough to know the meaning of America. I mean,” he corrected, significantly, “the meaning of what you thought was America.

“It's a bully story, father,” he continued, with a smile at once tender and hard; “the simple German boy, born a dreamer, standing there looking out at the dim shores of that land he had idealised. If ever a man came to America bringing it rich gifts, that man was you!”

“Fritz,” his father's voice was rendered harsh by mystification and foreboding, “tell me what you're talking about. Come to the point. Clear this up.”

“I'm talking about American politics--your party--having ruined your life! I'm talking about working like a slave all your days and having nothing but a mortgaged farm at sixty-one! I'm talking about playing a losing game! I'm saying, _What's the use?_ Father, I'm telling you that _I'm_ going to join the other party and make some money!”

The man just sat there, staring.

“Well,” the boy took it up defiantly, “why not?”

And then he moved, laid a not quite steady hand out upon the table. “My boy, you're not well. You've studied too hard. Now brace yourself up for to-night, and then we'll go down home and fix you up. What you need, Fritz,” he said, trying to laugh, “is the hayfield.”

“You're not _seeing_ it!” The boy pushed back his chair and began moving about the room. “The only way I can brace myself up for to-night is to get so mad--father, usually you see things so easily! Don't you understand? It was my chance, my one moment, my time to strike. It will be years before I get such a hearing again. You see, father, the thing will be printed, and the men I want to have hear it, the men who _own this State_, will be there. One of them is to preside. And the story of it, the worth of it, to them, is that I'm your son. You see, after all,” he seized at this wildly, “I'm getting my start on the fact that I'm your son.”

“Go on,” said the man; the brown of his wind-beaten face had yielded to a tinge of grey. “Just what is it you are going to say?”

“I call it 'The New America,' a lot of this talk about doing things, the glory of industrial America, the true Americans the men of constructive genius, the patriotism of railroad and factory building, a eulogy of railroad officials and corporation presidents,” he rushed on with a laugh. “Singing the song of Capital. Father, can't you see _why?_”

The old man had risen. “Tell me this,” he said. “None of it matters much, if you just tell me this: You _believe_ these things? You've thought it all out for yourself--and you _feel_ that way? You're honest, aren't you, Fritz?” He put that last in a whisper.

The boy made no reply; after a minute the man sank back to his chair. The years seemed coming to him with the minutes.

Fred was leaning against the wall. “Father,” he said at last, “I hope you'll let me be a little roundabout. It's only fair to me to let me ramble on a little. I've got to put it all right before you or--or--You know, dad,”--he came back to his place by the table, “the first thing I remember very clearly is those men, your party managers, coming down to the farm one time and asking you to run for Governor. How many times is it you've run for Governor, father?” He put the question slowly.

“Five,” said the man heavily.

“I don't know which time this was; but you didn't want to. You were sorry when you saw them coming. I heard some of the talk. You talked about your farm, what you wanted to do that summer, how you couldn't afford the time or the money. They argued that you owed it to the party--they always got you there; how no other man could hold down majorities as you could--a man like you giving the best years of his life to holding down majorities! They said you were the one man against whom no personal attack could be made. And when there was so much to fight, anyway--oh, I know that speech by heart! They've made great capital of your honesty and your clean life. In fact, they've held that up as a curtain behind which a great many things could go on. Oh, _you_ didn't know about them; you were out in front of the curtain, but I haven't lived in this town without finding out that they needed your integrity and your clean record pretty bad!

“That was out on the side porch. Mother had brought out some buttermilk, and they drank it while they talked. You put up a good fight. Your time was money to you at that time of year; a man shouldn't neglect his farm--but you never yet could hold out against that 'needing-you' kind of talk. They knew there was no chance for your election. You knew it. But it takes a man of just your grit to put any snap into a hopeless campaign.

“Mother cried when you went to drive them back to town. You see, I remember all those things. She told about how hard you would work, and how it would do no good--that the State belonged to the other party. She talked about the farm, too, and the addition she had wanted for the house, and how now she wouldn't have it. Mother felt pretty bad that night. She's gone through a lot of those times.”

There was a silence.

“You were away a lot that summer, and all fall. You looked pretty well used up when you came home, but you said that you had held down majorities splendidly.”

Again there was silence. It was the silences that seemed to be saying the most.

“You had one term in Congress--that's the only thing you ever had. Then you did so much that they concentrated in your district and saw to it that you never got back. Julius Caesar couldn't have been elected again,” he laughed harshly.

“Father,” the boy went on, after a pause, “you asked me if I were honest. There are two kinds of honesty. The primitive kind--like yours--and then the kind you develop for yourself. Do I believe the things I'm going to say to-night? No--not now. But I'll believe them more after I've heard the applause I'm sure to get. I'll believe them still more after I've had my first case thrown to me by our railroad friends who own this State. More and more after I've said them over in campaigning next fall, and pretty soon I'll be so sure I believe them that I really will believe them--and that,” he concluded, flippantly, “is the new brand of American honesty. Why, any smart man can persuade himself he's not a hypocrite!”

“My _God!_” it wrenched from the man. “_This?_ If you'd stolen money--killed a man--but hypocrisy, cant--the very thing I've fought hardest, hated most! You lived all your life with me to learn _this?_”

“I lived all my life with you to learn what pays, and what doesn't. I lived all my life with you to learn from failure the value of success.”

“I never was sure I was a failure until this hour.”

“Father! Can't you see--”

“Oh, don't _talk_ to me!” cried the old man, rising, reaching out his fist as though he would strike him. “Son of mine sitting there telling me he is fixing up a brand of honesty for himself!”

The boy grew quieter as self-restraint left his father. “I mean that--just that,” he said at last. “Let a man either give or get. If he gives, let it be to the real thing. There are two Americas. The America of you dreamers--and then the real America. Yours is an idea--an idea quite as much as an ideal. I don't think you have the slightest comprehension of how far apart it is from the real America. The people who dream of it over in Europe are a great deal nearer it than you people who work for it here. Father, the spirit of this country flows in a strong, swift, resistless current. You never got into it at all. Your kind of idealists influence it about as much--about as much as red lights burned on the banks of the great river would influence the current of that river. You're not _of_ it. You came here, throbbing with the love for America; and with your ideal America you've fought the real, and you've worked and you've believed and you've sacrificed. Father, _what's the use?_ In this State, anyway, it's hopeless. It has been so through your lifetime; it will be through mine.”

The man sat looking at him. He felt that he should say something, but the words did not come--held back, perhaps, by a sense of their uselessness. It was not so much what Fred said as it was the look in his eyes as he said it. There was nothing impetuous or youthful about that look, nothing to be laughed at or argued away. He had always felt that Fred had a mind which saw things straight, saw them in their right relations, and at that moment he had no words to plead for what Fred called the America of the dreamers.