“That’s what America is for,” said Clayton, “and it’s worth while to be allowed to help even in a little way to make, as old Walt says, ‘a nation of friends, of equals.’”
THE HAS-BEEN
AS HOLMAN loitered along the pavement that June morning, glad once more to be back in Springfield after so many years, he recalled with a sigh another morning, far gone, when first he had come up to the capital of his state. “A morning just like this,” he was thinking, “all green and sunny and hopeful and—pure. My God!” But he put aside regret; it was enough just then to be back after so many years of absence—years of dingy poverty which had kept him down in stupid Jasper, never once able to get back during the session, if only for a day to see the boys!—even as a man of fifty, with gray hair straggling beneath his broad, slouch hat, with his long, dusty coat, and worn, old shoes, that fell softly on the hot sidewalk, far other than the young representative who had come up to the capital so long before. In Capitol Avenue he had the state house in full view, the gray, swelling dome still patiently brooding over the stupidities and trivialities which the bickering human beings, running about like insects below, were proudly and solemnly achieving. The little flags were at their staffs on either wing. Once, at the sight he might have hurried, knowing his presence to be required beneath that flag on the house wing. No need now to hasten any more; he was not needed there, nor anywhere in the world.
The sidewalk was filled with men striding like the statesmen they felt themselves to be, and none among them now to remember him; but he walked with them under the railroad’s ugly trestle, past the old white house on the little hill, still with its lightning-rod to keep alive one of the best of Lincoln stories, and up the broad walk to the state house. Inside, the cool shades of the big pile were grateful as they used to be. Through the open doors of offices he could see clerks at work, or at least at desks, somehow coming off victorious, it seemed, in their desperate business of holding on to their slippery, eel-like, political jobs; then the crowded elevator—and the inevitable old soldier to operate it. All as it used to be; and he, like some risen ghost long since laid in its political grave, stalking among earthly presences that had forgotten him.
The doorkeepers at the house regarded him with the official misanthropy and distrust, but Holman quelled their glance, pronounced the word “Ex-member,” and so passed in to the one barren prerogative left him out of the years of former power and prestige.
The house, on the order of senate bills on first reading, was inattentive; members lolled in their seats, read newspapers, talked, gossiped, wrote letters, now and then threw paper wads at one another—incipiencies of that horseplay which would mark the session’s close. The clerk mumbled the said senate bills on first reading, the speaker turned in his chair to talk with some one on the divan behind him, swinging about now and then to say, “First reading of the bill!” and to tap the sounding-board with his gavel. And, of them all, not one he knew, not one to recognize him! But, yes, there was one, after all; just one. Down the center aisle, reclining in his chair nonchalantly, was a young fellow, almost a boy to Holman’s disadvantage point of years, whose head, turned at that instant, showed a profile which, when age and authority should visit it, would cause one to remark it; a fair brow, strong nose and good-humored lips parting now in a smile at some remark a member across the aisle had made. As Holman looked at young McCray his mind went back to another morning in another June, when the air came in through the tall, open windows with the breath of young summer in Illinois, the very odor of the prairie flowers themselves, the morning that Baldwin had come to him. And now McCray sat there, representing his old district, with all the opportunities, dreams, ambitions, illusions he himself had had—and lost.
But Holman was not much given to introspection—his eye was not long turned inward; and now, turned outward, it lighted on a white head far down toward the front of the house.
“Why, if there isn’t, after all, one o’ the old-timers! Say, young fellow,” he said, speaking to an assistant sergeant-at-arms who had been standing near and, unable to identify Holman as a representative of any railroad or other interest entitled to respect on that floor, had been eying him with some suspicion. “Say,” said Holman, pointing with a long forefinger, “ain’t that old Ike Bemis down there—Bemis, of Tazewell? Yes? Well, now, just call a page boy, won’t you? And have him tell Bemis an old friend wants to see him.”
Bemis was, in his way, a phenomenon unparalleled in politics; he had been in the house before Holman and had held on, minority member from his district, the Republican and Democratic machines working harmoniously together, for a quarter of a century. And as he came up the aisle in response to Holman’s message he seemed to Holman to have changed little; only his hair from iron gray had grown white, and his face was not so clear or ruddy or healthy as he had known it. He was dressed as he used to be in the gray clothes that made him look so like a prosperous farmer, and the hand he held out to Holman was, by some mystery, rough and horny, as if it had worked indeed.
“Why, bless the Lord!” he cried, “if it ain’t Jim Holman!”