Across the Years

by Eleanor H. Porter

“And was--he?” demanded I.

“I don’t know. Mary said she couldn’t tell exactly. He seemed worried, sometimes, and quite put out at the way his wife acted about goin’ to places. Then, other times, he didn’t seem to notice or care if he did have to go alone. It wa’n’t that he was unkind to her. It was just that he was so busy lookin’ after himself that he forgot all about her. But Betty took it all as bein’ ashamed of her, no matter what he did; and for a while she just seemed to pine away under it. They’d moved to Washington by that time and, of course, with him in the President’s Cabinet, it was pretty hard for her.

“Then, all of a sudden, she took a new turn and begun to study and to try to learn things--everything: how to talk and dress and act, besides stuff that was just book-learnin’. She’s been doin’ that for quite a spell and Mary says she thinks she’d do pretty well now, in lots of ways, if only she had half a chance--somethin’ to encourage her, you know. But her husband don’t seem to take no notice, now, just as if he’s got tired expectin’ anythin’ of her and that’s made her so scared and discouraged she’s too nervous to act as if she did know anythin’. An’ there ’t is.

“Well, maybe she is just an ordinary woman,” sighed the old man, a little sternly, “if bein’ ‘ordinary’ means she’s like lots of others. For I suspect, stranger, that, if the truth was told, lots of other big men have got wives just like her--women what have been workin’ so tarnal hard to help their husbands get ahead that they hain’t had time to see where they themselves was goin’. And by and by they wake up to the fact that they hain’t got nowhere. They’ve just stayed still, ’way behind.

“Mary says she don’t believe Betty would mind even that, if her husband only seemed to care--to--to understand, you know, how it had been with her and how--Crickey! I guess they’ve come,” broke off the old man suddenly, craning his neck for a better view of the door.

From outside had sounded the honk of an automobile horn and the wild cheering of men and boys. A few minutes later the long-delayed programme began.

It was the usual thing. Before the Speaker of the Day came other speakers, and each of them, no matter what his subject, failed not to refer to “our illustrious fellow townsman” in terms of highest eulogy. One told of his humble birth, his poverty-driven boyhood, his strenuous youth. Another drew a vivid picture of his rise to fame. A third dilated upon the extraordinary qualities of brain and body which had made such achievement possible and which would one day land him in the White House itself.

Meanwhile, close to the speaker’s stand sat the Honorable Jonas Whitermore himself, for the most part grim and motionless, though I thought I detected once or twice a repetition of the half-troubled, half-questioning glances directed toward his wife that I had seen before. Perhaps it was because I was watching him so closely that I saw the sudden change come to his face. The lips lost their perfunctory smile and settled into determined lines. The eyes, under their shaggy brows, glowed with sudden fire. The entire pose and air of the man became curiously alert, as if with the eager impatience of one who has determined upon a certain course of action and is anxious only to be up and doing. Very soon after that he was introduced, and, amid deafening cheers, rose to his feet. Then, very quietly, he began to speak.

We had heard he was an orator. Doubtless many of us were familiar with his famous nickname “Silver-tongued Joe.” We had expected great things of him--a brilliant discourse on the tariff, perhaps, or on our foreign relations, or yet on the Hague Tribunal. But we got none of these. We got first a few quiet words of thanks and appreciation for the welcome extended him; then we got the picture of an everyday home just like ours, with all its petty cares and joys so vividly drawn that we thought we were seeing it, not hearing about it. He told us it was a little home of forty years ago, and we began to realize, some way, that he was speaking of himself.

“I may, you know, here,” he said, “for I am among my own people. I am at home.”