Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

“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.