More dead than alive, but game to the core, the little heroine was carried off the field, a winner, every heart throbbing with human sympathy, every eye wet with proud and happy tears. It is not possible adequately to describe all that happened. One must have been there and seen it fully to comprehend the glory of it.
Touching the recent Albany and Washington hikes and hikers let me say at once that I cannot approve the cause of Votes for women as I had approved the cause of Bertha von Hillern. Where she showed heroic, most of the suffragettes appear to me grotesque. Where her aim was rational, their aim has been visionary. To me the younger of them seem as children who need to be spanked and kissed. There has been indeed about the whole Suffrage business something pitiful and comic.
Often I have felt like swearing “You idiots!” and then like crying “Poor dears!” But I have kept on with them, and had I been in Albany or Washington I would have caught Rosalie Jones in my arms, and before she could say “Jack Robinson” have exclaimed: “You ridiculous child, go and get a bath and put on some pretty clothes and come and join us at dinner in the State Banquet Hall, duly made and provided for you and the rest of you delightful sillies.”
Chapter the Ninth
Dr. Norvin Green—Joseph Pulitzer—Chester A. Arthur—General Grant—The Case of Fitz-John Porter
I
Truth we are told is stranger than fiction. I have found it so in the knowledge which has variously come to me of many interesting men and women. Of these Dr. Norvin Green was a striking example. To have sprung from humble parentage in the wilds of Kentucky and to die at the head of the most potential corporation in the world—to have held this place against all comers by force of abilities deemed indispensable to its welfare—to have gone the while his ain gait, disdaining the precepts of Doctor Franklin—who, by the way, did not trouble overmuch to follow them himself—seems so unusual as to rival the most stirring stories of the novel mongers.
When I first met Doctor Green he was president of a Kentucky railway company. He had been, however, one of the organizers of the Western Union Telegraph Company. He deluded himself for a little by political ambitions. He wanted to go to the Senate of the United States, and during a legislative session of prolonged balloting at Frankfort he missed his election by a single vote.
It may be doubted whether he would have cut a considerable figure at Washington. His talents were constructive rather than declamatory. He was called to a greater field—though he never thought it so—and was foremost among those who developed the telegraph system of the country almost from its infancy. He possessed the daring of the typical Kentuckian, with the dead calm of the stoic philosopher; imperturbable; never vexed or querulous or excited; denying himself none of the indulgences of the gentleman of leisure. We grew to be constant comrades and friends, and when he returned to New York to take the important post which to the end of his days he filled so completely his office in the Western Union Building became my downtown headquarters.
There I met Jay Gould familiarly; and resumed acquaintance with Russell Sage, whom I had known when a lad in Washington, he a hayseed member of Congress; and occasionally other of the Wall Street leaders. In a small way—though not for long—I caught the stock-gambling fever. But I was on the “inside,” and it was a cold day when I did not “clean up” a goodly amount to waste uptown in the evening. I may say that I gave this over through sheer disgust of acquiring so much and such easy and useless money, for, having no natural love of money—no aptitude for making money breed—no taste for getting it except to spend it—earning by my own accustomed and fruitful toil always a sufficiency—the distractions and dissipations it brought to my annual vacations and occasional visits, affronted in a way my self-respect, and palled upon my rather eager quest of pleasure. Money is purely relative. The root of all evil, too. Too much of it may bring ills as great as not enough.