A Hoosier Chronicle Part 39

"So much the worse for you, then!"

"There will be mornings when you won't think it so much fun. It rains and snows in Indiana sometimes."

He still resented the idea of her sacrifice, as he called it, in the cause of education. They were now so well acquainted that they were not always careful to be polite in their talk; but he had an uneasy feeling that she didn't wholly approve of him. All summer, when they had discussed politics, she had avoided touching upon his personal interests and activities. His alliance with Ba.s.sett, emphasized in the state convention, was a subject she clearly avoided. This morning, as he kept time to her quick step, he craved her interest and sympathy. Her plain gray suit and simple cloth hat could not disguise her charm or grace. It seemed to him that she was putting herself a little further away from him, that she was approaching the business of life with a determination, a spirit, a zest, that dwarfed to insignificance his own preoccupation with far less important matters. She turned to glance back at a group of children they had pa.s.sed audibly speculating as to the character of teacher the day held in store for them.

"Don't you think they're worth working for?" Sylvia asked.

Dan shrugged his shoulders.

"I suppose more lives are ground up in the school-teaching machine than in any other way. Go on! The girl who taught me my alphabet in the little red school-house in Harrison County earned her salary, I can tell you. She was seventeen and wore a pink dress."

"I'm sorry you don't approve of me or my clothes. Now Allen approves of me: I like Allen."

"His approval is important, I dare say."

"Yes, very. It's nice to be approved of. It helps some."

"And I suppose there ought to be a certain reciprocity in approval and disapproval?"

"Oh, there's bound to be!"

Their eyes met and they laughed lightheartedly.

"I'm going to tell you something," said Dan. "On the reciprocal theory I can't expect anything, but I'm lonesome and have no friends anyhow, so I'll give you a chance to say something withering and edged with a fine scorn."

"Good! I'll promise not to disappoint you."

"I'm going to be put on the legislature ticket to-day--to fill a vacancy. I suppose you'll pray earnestly for my defeat."

"Why should I waste prayers on that? Besides, Allen solemnly declares that the people are to be trusted. It's not for me to set my prayers against the will of the pee-pull."

"If you had a vote," he persisted, "you wouldn't vote for me?"

"I should have to know what you want to go to the legislature for before committing myself. What _are_ you doing it for?"

"To do all the mischief I can, of course; to support all the worst measures that come up; to jump when the boss's whip cracks!"

She refused to meet him on this ground. He saw that any expectation he might have that she would urge him to pledge himself to n.o.ble endeavor and high achievements as a state legislator were doomed to disappointment. He was taken aback by the tone of her retort.

"I hope you will do all those things. You could do nothing better calculated to help your chances."

"Chances?"

"Your chances--and we don't any of us have too many of coming to some good sometime."

"I believe you are really serious; but I don't understand you."

"Then I shall be explicit. Just this, then, to play the ungrateful part of the frank friend. The sooner you get your fingers burnt, the sooner you will let the fire alone. I suppose Mr. Ba.s.sett has given the word that you are graciously to be permitted to sit in his legislature. He could hardly do less for you than that, after he sent you into the arena last June to prod the sick lion for his entertainment."

They were waiting at a corner for a break in the street traffic, and he turned toward her guardedly.

"You put it pretty low," he mumbled.

"The thing itself is not so bad. From what I have heard and read about Mr. Ba.s.sett, I don't think he is really an evil person. He probably didn't start with any sort of ideals of public life: you did. I read in an essay the other night that the appeal of the highest should be always to the lowest. But you're not appealing to anybody; you're just following the band wagon to the centre of the track. Stop, Look, Listen!

You've come far enough with me now. The walls of my prison house loom before me. Good-morning!"

"Good-morning and good luck!"

That night Sylvia wrote a letter to one of her cla.s.smates in Boston.

"I'm a school-teacher," she said,--"a member of the gray sisterhood of American nuns. All over this astonishing country my sisters of this honorable order rise up in the morning, even as you and I, to teach the young idea how to shoot. I look with veneration upon those of our sisterhood who have grown old in the cla.s.sroom. I can see myself reduced to a bundle of nerves, irascible, worthless, ready for the sc.r.a.p-pile at, we will say, forty-two--only twenty years ahead of me! My work looks so easy and I like it so much that I went in fright to the dictionary to look up the definition of teacher. I find that I'm one who teaches or instructs. Think of it--I! That definition should be revised to read, 'Teacher: one who, conveying certain information to others, reads in fifty faces unanswerable questions as to the riddle of existence.'

'School: a place where the presumably wise are convinced of their own folly.' Note well, my friend: I am a gray sister, in a gray serge suit that fits, with white cuffs and collar, and with chalk on my fingers.

Oh, it's not what I'm required to teach, but what I'm going to learn that worries me!"

Luders's shop was not far from Sylvia's school and Allen devised many excuses for waylaying her. His machine being forbidden, he hung about until she appeared and trudged homeward with her. Often he came in a glow from the cabinetmaker's and submitted for her judgment the questions that had been debated that day at the shop. There was something sweet and wistful and charming in his boyishness; and she was surprised, as Harwood had been from the first, by the intelligence he evinced in political and social questions. He demanded absolute answers to problems that were perplexing wise men all over the world.

"If I could answer that," she would say to him, "I should be ent.i.tled to a monument more enduring than bra.s.s. The comfort and happiness of mankind isn't to be won in a day: we mustn't pull up the old tree till we've got a new one planted and growing."

"The Great Experiment will turn out all right yet! Some fellow we never heard of will give the lever a jerk some day, and there will be a rumble and a flash and it will run perfectly," he a.s.serted.

The state campaign got under way in October, and Harwood was often discussed in relation to it. Allen always praised Dan extravagantly, and was ever alert to defend him against her criticisms.

"My dad will run the roller over Ba.s.sett, but Dan will be smart enough to get from under. It's the greatest show on earth--continuous vaudeville--this politics! Dan's all right. He's got more brains than Ba.s.sett. One of these days Dan will take a flop and land clean over in the Thatcher camp. It's only a matter of time. Grat.i.tude and considerations like that are holding him back. But I'm not a partisan--not even on dad's side. I'm the philosopher who sits on the fence and keeps the score by innings."

It seemed to her, in those days and afterward, that Allen symbolized the unknown quant.i.ty in all the problems that absorbed him. His idealism was not a thing of the air, but a flowering from old and vigorous roots. His politics was a kind of religion, and it did not prove upon a.n.a.lysis to be either so fantastical or so fanatical as she had believed at first.

As the days shortened, he would prolong their walk until the shops and factories discharged their employees upon the streets. The fine thing about the people was, he said, the fact that they were content to go on from day to day, doing the things they did, when the restraints upon them were so light,--it proved the enduring worth of the Great Experiment. Then they would plunge into the thick of the crowd and cross the Monument plaza, where he never failed to pay a tribute in his own fashion to the men the gray shaft commemorated. In these walks they spoke French, which he employed more readily than she: in his high moods it seemed to express him better than English. It amused him to apply new names to the thoroughfares they traversed. For example, he gayly renamed Monument Place the Place de la Concorde, a.s.suring her that the southward vista in the Rue de la Meridienne, disclosing the lamp-bestarred terrace of the new Federal Building, and the electric torches of the Monument beyond, was highly reminiscent of Paris. Sylvia was able to dramatize for herself, from the abundant material he artlessly supplied, the life he had led abroad during his long exile: as a youngster he had enjoyed untrammeled freedom of the streets of Paris and Berlin, and he showed a curiously developed sympathy for the lives of the poor and unfortunate that had been born of those early experiences. He was a great resource to her, and she enjoyed him as she would have enjoyed a girl comrade. He confessed his admiration for Marian in the frankest fashion. She was adorable; the greatest girl in the world.

"Ah, sometime," he would say, "who knows!"

CHAPTER XXIII

A HOUSE-BOAT ON THE KANKAKEE

Harwood's faith in Ba.s.sett as a political prophet was badly shaken by the result of the campaign that fall. About half the Democratic candidates for state office were elected, but even more surprising was the rolling-up of a good working majority in both houses of the General a.s.sembly. If Thatcher had knifed Ba.s.sett men or if Thatcher men had been knifed at Ba.s.sett's behest, evidence of such perfidy was difficult to adduce from the returns. Harwood was not sure, as he studied the figures, whether his party's surprising success was attributable to a development of real strength in Thatcher, who had been much in evidence throughout the campaign, or whether Ba.s.sett deserved the credit. He was disposed to think it only another expression of that capriciousness of the electorate which is often manifested in years when national success is not directly involved. While Thatcher and Ba.s.sett had apparently struck a truce and harmonized their factions, Harwood had at no time entertained illusions as to the real att.i.tude of the men toward each other. When the _entente_ between the leaders was mentioned among Thatcher's intimates they were p.r.o.ne to declare that Ed would "get"

Ba.s.sett; it might take time, but the day of retribution would surely come.

As a candidate for the lower house in Marion County, Harwood had been thrust forward prominently into a campaign whose liveliness belied the traditional apathy of "off" years. On the Sat.u.r.day night before the election, Thatcher and Ba.s.sett had appeared together on the platform at a great meeting at the capital--one of those final flourishes by which county chairmen are p.r.o.ne to hearten their legions against the morrow's battle. Ba.s.sett had spoken for ten minutes at this rally, urging support of the ticket and in crisp phrases giving the lie to reports of his lukewarmness. His speech was the more noteworthy from the fact that it was the first time, in all his political career, that he had ever spoken at a political meeting, and there was no questioning its favorable impression.

Ba.s.sett was, moreover, reelected to his old seat in the senate without difficulty; and Harwood ran ahead of his a.s.sociates on the legislative ticket in Marion County, scoring a plurality that testified to his personal popularity. Another campaign must intervene before the United States Senatorship became an acute issue, and meanwhile the party in the state had not in many years been so united. Credit was freely given to the "Courier" for the formidable strength developed by the Democracy: and it had become indubitably a vigorous and conservative reflector of party opinion, without estranging a growing const.i.tuency of readers who liked its clean and orderly presentation of general news. The ownership of the newspaper had become, since the abrupt termination of the lawsuit inst.i.tuted by Thatcher, almost as much of a mystery as formerly.

Harwood's intimate relations with it had not been revived, and neither Mrs. Owen nor Ba.s.sett ever spoke to him of the newspaper except in the most casual fashion.

Dan was conscious that the senator from Fraser had changed in the years that had pa.s.sed since the beginning of their acquaintance. Ba.s.sett had outwardly altered little as he crossed the watershed of middle life; but it seemed to Dan that the ill-temper he had manifested in the Thatcher affair had marked a climacteric. The self-control and restraint that had so impressed him at first had visibly diminished. What Harwood had taken for steel seemed to him now only iron after all--and brittle iron.

During the last week of the campaign an incident occurred that shook Harwood a good deal. He had been away from the capital for several days making speeches, and finding that his itinerary would permit it, he ran into town unexpectedly one night to replenish his linen and look at his mail. An interurban car landed him in town at eleven o'clock, and he went directly to the Boordman Building. As he walked down the hall toward his office he was surprised to see a light showing on the ground-gla.s.s door of Room 66. Though Ba.s.sett kept a room at the Whitcomb for private conferences, he occasionally used his office in the Boordman for the purpose, and seeing the rooms lighted, Dan expected to find him there. He tried the door and found it locked, and as he drew out his key he heard suddenly the click of the typewriter inside. Miss Farrell was rarely at the office at night, but as Harwood opened the door, he found her busily tapping the keys of her machine. She swung round quickly with an air of surprise, stretched herself, and yawned.