The American: A Middle Western Legend (21 page)

And sometimes, there were statements of support. Almost without exception, the socialist and labor papers supported his stand. And here and there, small papers, small-town papers, little western sheets, hand-set, run by one or two men—these came out to back him, to praise him, to say that there were men who admired and loved him.

Yet the other could not but have its effect. Emma saw the change in him, the widening streaks in his hair, a redness about his eyes; his carriage was not so erect. She came on him once as he sat at his desk, reading and re-reading a foul little verse from
The New York Sun:

O, Wild Chicago, When the Time

Is Ripe for Ruin's deeds
,

When constitutions, courts and laws

Go down midst crashing creeds
,

Lift up your weak and guilty hands

From out of the wreck of states
,

And as the crumbling towers fall down

Write ALTGELD on your gates!

He turned to her and said, “It's not nice, is it, my dear Emma?”

“How can you stand all this?”

“All of it and a lot more.”

“Won't it ever stop?”

“This is only the beginning, Emma. We go on from here. It's only the beginning for them—and for me too.”

PART FOUR

The Second Variation

On a March evening of 1895, he finished a quiet, intimate, yet triumphant dinner, just himself, Altgeld, Governor of Illinois, Emma, his wife, and Hinrichsen, the Secretary of State, the three of them under the big crystal chandelier, intimate, confidence resolved, Emma watching her husband with affection and admiration, Hinrichsen noticing how she looked at the Governor and thinking that a woman had never looked at him that way, and Altgeld smiling, pouring out a glass of clear yellow wine for each of them, and proposing the toast to his wife.

She said the toast should be otherwise, “After two years, Pete—”

Hinrichsen proposed that they drink to the Governor. “Not to myself, Buck.” “This is your night, this is what you worked for.” “Only a beginning, a plan—the work still comes.” “Then we drink to that,” Hinrichsen said. “Then to success, to the plan.” The Governor said, all right, he would drink to that. He stood up with his second glass of wine and had to grasp the edge of the table to keep himself from reeling, and smiled again to quiet the look of alarm that came into his wife's eyes.

“A people's party,” he said simply.

His wife rose and walked around the table to offer him her arm, but there was something of annoyance in the manner of his refusal, as he said, “Go into the parlor with Buck, my dear. They'll be coming soon.” And as she still looked at him, “I have a little work to get out of the way.”

“Yes. But you won't keep them waiting?”

“Suppose you call me when they're all here.”

“All right.”

He turned away, and when Hinrichsen looked at her questioningly, she shook her head. Hinrichsen offered her his arm, but she didn't move until the Governor had left the room, and then she sighed and her whole body seemed to loosen, wilt.

“He'll be all right, Emma,” Hinrichsen said.

“Yes—”

“The man's tired. My god, when you think of what he's done—when you think of any man coming out from under the past two years, and coming out with half the country afraid of him, hating him, and half the country worshiping the ground he walks on—well, that's something to consider.”

They were walking into the parlor, and she stopped suddenly, pulling her arm loose, facing the big man. “Is it for me, Buck? Is that what I should consider? Do you know that he's dying?”

“No.” And then added, very slowly, “I knew he was sick—”

“The way he walks—you've seen that?”

“Yes.”

“He's forty-eight years old, and he's dying, and all he's ever known is struggle, no rest, no peace. I'm tired of it. It had to be this kind of a finish for him, out of his childhood, out of all the rotten terror of it. Well, I don't want him to have this. I want him to go away, to have a little peace.”

Hinrichsen nodded.

She smiled, relaxed, became the hostess again. “He doesn't know what peace is or what a man is supposed to do with it. There are cigars in the cabinet, Buck. Please help yourself. Do you want some brandy?”

“I'll wait, thank you, Emma.”

She sat down on a small, plush-covered lady's chair, the wooden rosebuds of the back making a frame for her, hands crossed demurely, a gentle lady with graying hair, but still good to look at, still alive and attractive. She asked the big, red-faced politician:

“Will he carry it off?”

“What do you think?”

“I think he could do almost anything. I remember how he was a boy with a German accent, and he read a book with a dirty finger marking out the words. That was when he fell in love with me, do you know?”

“I know.”

“And he doesn't want to die. My God, Buck, none of us want to die. They tried to destroy him because he pardoned three men who were innocent, but he came out like a giant, and the people want him—”

“Emma, stop it!”

“Yes. You like him, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“At first you hated him. People hate him at first.”

“I like him.”

“All right. I won't be hysterical, Buck. Schilling will be here, and Joe Martin and Darrow and Sam McConnell, and it will be like old times, won't it?”

“That's right.”

“And then he'll want me to go, Pete will—it's no woman's world yet, is it, though it will be some day—but afterwards he sits down and tells me, word for word; it comes clearer and better, I suppose.”

Hinrichsen said, “You're a remarkable woman, Emma.” He took a cigar from a gold case, snipped the end neatly with a cutter that hung on a gold chain on his vest, and, as he lit it, said, “Would it be violating any confidence to tell me why he hates Grover Cleveland the way he does?”

“You know.”

“I know what anyone does, Emma. I know that during the big Pullman strike, the president pushed Federal troops in. I know that Pete stood up to him. I know what the Federal marshals were. But there's more than that. You don't have to tell me.”

“I'll tell you. Do you know how someone is bought, bought body and soul and hand and foot? Do you know you can buy a president? You want to know why Pete hates him—well, because he's a frightened man, a stupid man, a man who sold himself. When he came into this state with his troops, his guns, those thugs whom he swore in as Federal employees, Pete was ready to fight him. Yes. And what would that have meant? State militia ranged against Federal troops. Pete knew what it would have meant, and it was too big, so the men out at Pullman lost. Little men whose wives and children had nothing to eat, and they put themselves together to ask for something more. The Army came in, and they lost. Do you still want to know why Pete hates Grover Cleveland? It's not a confidence.”

II

Governor Pete Altgeld walked to his office with a slow, shuffling step. Sometimes, it was this way, sometimes less, sometimes more. Inside, a process was at work, the nerves were going, the fine connections were breaking down. He was like a man in a house going bad, the roof leaking, walls splitting, floors rotting; and like a man in such a house and unable to repair the damage done, he would sometimes vent his fury on himself. This was not the night-time fear, the fear that spread over his body so strangely, as if he were all a sponge and the fear water soaking through, creeping over his heart, paralyzing it almost with a significance of death and uselessness and finality, the utter ending of an ending; but this was impatience and anger in which he could curse God for giving him the body he had, malaria-wracked, disease-ridden; not fall into superstition and black magic, thinking of sin and payment of sin, but demand life and strength, harshly and imperiously—yet uselessly.

Sitting down at his desk, he put his face in his hands, and then lowered the whole side of himself in the dark, until he lay with his shoulders and face and hands hunched upon the desk, inert and lost and angered and terrified, searching for himself and for something strong to put his two hands on, to hang onto and to hold himself up with.

The thought of Parsons held out sustenance in the fact of Parsons' lack of fear; Parsons had stood on the edge of death and had not been afraid, but Parsons was young and strong and smiling, and Parsons had faith, more faith than he, more direction and singleness of purpose. Parsons had starved and gone hungry and ridden the rods of freights from town to town, talking to ragged mobs of workers, and never known what it was to have a hundred dollars of cold cash in his pockets, and never known the taste of yellow wine after a fine, rich dinner—so why did he look to him for strength?

Thoughts of Parsons revived him from his despair, and substituted anger for misery. He had enemies; they hated him; he hated them. Parsons was quiet in his grave, and he, Pete Altgeld, had nothing to be ashamed of. He had fought Pullman, the way he knew, going over his tax accounts, making the city bite into him, the way he had fought the
Tribune
—the way it sometimes seemed to him he was fighting the whole nation. He had fought the president too. They could do nothing to him that he wasn't strong enough to take, say nothing about him. In New York, they said of him that he was a Burr without Burr's brains, a Johann Most without Most's decency, a Eugene Debs without Debs' cour age—without Debs' courage. He turned that over and over; Debs had courage, no doubt of that—the same kind of courage Parsons had; they were cut out of the same cloth, and that was why he had waited so anxiously during the big strike to meet Debs. They had an appointment, carefully arranged by Schilling, and then Debs never showed up. What sort of wild ideas lay in back of his head as he waited to meet Debs? The President of the United States was sending troops into the sovereign State of Illinois. He was defying the president. If his militia had turned their guns on the Federal troops, what would have happened? Could history hang on such thin threads, or was it part and parcel of the sudden, impossible world he created as he waited for Debs to come? It had seemed to him then, only months ago, that a whole era of history was coming to an end, and that out of chaos would come something new and possible; but Debs never came; the Federal police took him, and the half-formed dream dissolved without ever being. Now he had another way, a better way. He was not a Debs, a Parsons. He was a democratic politician, and, as some said, the best America had ever produced.…

His wife's voice broke through the darkness into his thoughts. “Pete?”

“Yes.”

“Sitting here in the dark?”

“I must have dozed off.”

“You're feeling all right?”

“Fine. Fine.”

“Are you—”

“As a matter of fact, I never felt better.”

“They're here. They're all inside, waiting for you.”

“Yes?”

“I put out brandy and cigars. You're sure you're all right?”

“Fine. Don't wait up for me, Emma.”

He always said that and she always waited, sitting and performing careful needlework on some useless piece of linen, sometimes until the gray light of dawn dissolved the shadows around her lamp.

III

By midnight, in the parlor, the cigar smoke lay like a blanket of dirty gauze, and the faces of the older men had that gray look which comes with weariness and age. Darrow was lost in some inner contemplation; Joe Martin sprawled low on the couch, his legs thrust out; Schilling was hunched up; and Hinrichsen enveloped the lady's chair. McConnell, talking as he sipped brandy, was saying to the Governor:

“Populism is a lost cause. No matter how I look at it, it's a lost cause. The people's party is going down, down, down, and in ten years it won't exist.”

“For the tenth time, I tell you this is not populism.”

“It amounts to the same,” Joe Martin said.

“Like hell it does! I'm not a socialist—you ought to know that is no one else in this fool country does. I'm the Democratic Governor of one on the biggest industrial states in the union. I'm no populist—I'm a Democrat! Do I have to drill that into your skulls?”

“Pete—Pete, wait a minute,” Hinrichsen said. “You're tired. We're all tired. Let's not get to calling names.” And to McConnell, “Sam, let me put it this way. The party is rotten. All right, I grant you, that's a point of view. It's Pete's point of view, it's mine. It's rotten to a point where it doesn't matter a damn whether you vote Democrat or Republican. Suppose the Republicans put up McKinley, as they're very likely to do; suppose the Democrats put up Cleveland again? What's the difference—you tell me?”

“Don't be an idiot!”