And so the subject might have lapsed had it not been for Baldwin’s heterodoxy. That George R. Baldwin of all men should doubt the first maxim of their profession was beyond comprehension. Though he played his part in life with a suite of law offices in a skyscraper as a background, his serious business was lobbying bills through the legislature. His friends, who were many, boasted that he always stood by them, right or wrong. Which he did, indeed, and as they were generally wrong, the value of such friendship, or his opinions on practical politics, could hardly be overestimated. The day had been a hot one in Chicago, but now a cold draft of smoky air was sucking in through the narrow window-screen, on which the cinders hailed as the Limited plunged southward.
Smoke and dirt had long since begrimed the dark and sweaty face of Jennings, who, with waistcoat opened in the comfort dear to the Egyptian, was sprawling his shanks on the cushion opposite him, while Healy, doomed by corpulence to an attitude more erect, sitting with his chubby knees far apart, as the fat will, his paunch resting on the edge of the seat he filled, now and then brushed a fat palm over his red scalp and sighed, as he puffed his domestic cigar. But Baldwin sat and smiled, showing his excellent teeth beneath his reddish mustache, and visibly expanded. They could hear, as an undertone to their talking, the dull roll of the Pullman’s paper wheels, and now and then they were interrupted by the whistle’s long and lonesome note at a country road-crossing. Out through the double windows, against which Healy sometimes pressed his forehead because the glass cooled it, the dark fields wheeled past in an endless belt of blackness, save where an occasional bunch of sparks from the engine burrowed under the right-of-way fence, and then, in the momentary glow of light, they could catch sight of a tossing plume of corn, which told them they were out on the prairies of central Illinois.
When the train paused for the Big Four crossing at Gardner, they heard in the sudden flood of silence the snoring of a sensible fare-paying passenger who had gone to bed. The strident noise of the crickets and the frogs outside was noted only as an effect of the silence. The three men had no thought of retiring until they reached Pontiac at two o’clock, for the lives they led were such that they could not sleep until that hour, and then not very well.
Baldwin had lighted his imported cigar, the superior aroma of which, perceptible even in an atmosphere choked with coal gases and the fumes of the domestic cigars Jennings and Healy were smoking, indicated faintly the height of cultivation to which he had brought his appetites, when Jennings, flecking his ashes on the floor of the salon just as he would have done on his own parlor carpet, said:
“Well, go on with the story.”
Baldwin settled his chin over the blue cravat with the white polka dots that was knotted over the immaculate collar—a collar, incredulous men from southern Illinois were sometimes told, that was actually made on the shirt—drew his creased trousers a little farther above the tops of his patent leather boots, and began:
“One session there was an old man named Henderson in the house, who had come up from Greene County; Henderson of Greene, everybody called him, to distinguish him from Tom Henderson, of Effingham. He was a queer figure, was Henderson of Greene, tall and gaunt, with a stoop in his shoulders. He always wore a hickory shirt, opened at a red and wrinkled throat, and his hair was just a stubble bleached by harvest suns. The old man was a riddle to everybody in Springfield that winter. He was always in his seat, even on Monday evenings, when no one else was there. He voted always with his party, and he voted consistently as well, like a good country member, against all the Chicago legislation. But he was a silent man, who stood apart from his fellows, looking with eyes that peered from under his shaggy, sunburned brows with an expression no one could fathom. He never made a speech, he never introduced a bill, he never offered a resolution, he never even presented a petition, and when the speaker made his committee assignments, he placed the old man on the committees on History, Geology and Science, and on Civil Service Reform, and he did not even look disappointed.”
The two politicians chuckled.
“As for me,” continued Baldwin, “I never spoke to him, and never knew any one who did. The speaker himself only addressed him—and then as the gentleman from Greene—when they were verifying roll-calls. No one ever knew where he boarded. The herd book gave him a paragraph, saying that he had been born in Indiana along in ’37, and moved to this state sometime in the fifties. Left an orphan early, with no education, he had been a day laborer all his life, working at anything he could get, mostly on farms. He never had held office before, and none knew how he broke into the legislature—the tidal wave, I suppose. Every one knew he never would come back again.
“Well, we got down to the last night of the session. The hands of the clock had been turned back in that vain old attempt to stay the remorseless hours, but its pale and impassive face was impotent as a gravestone to stay dissolution and oblivion. I know men who would have spent a fortune to give that legislature one day more of life, but it was sweeping on to its midnight death. Somehow, whenever I think of the legislature, I think of that legislature, and whenever my mind conceives the state house it isn’t pictured to me as standing there on the hill, stately in the sunshine, but as it appeared that night as I walked over from the Leland, with the clouds flying low over its dome. The lower floors were dark and still as sepulchres, and the messenger boys who came over from the Western Union, now and then, reminded me of ghosts as they went by, their heels dragging on the marble floors of the corridor. A light was burning in the governor’s office, though the old man himself, I knew, was over at the mansion, pacing the floor of the library and cursing with classic curses. We were going to try that night to pass the Bailey bill over his veto.