George Helm

MRS. SALFIELD and Mrs. Ramon, leaders in Cincinnati’s fashionable society, were disposed in a comfortable corner of Mrs. Salfield’s ballroom. They were sheltered from rheumatism-provoking draughts. They were at conversational range from the music. They commanded a full view of the beautiful ball, even of the supper room, where a dozen men were “mopping up the champagne instead of doing their dancing duty,” as Mrs. Ramon put it. Mrs. Ramon, posing as of the younger generation, went in—somewhat awkwardly—for the “picturesque” in language. Mrs. Salfield, frankly an old woman, tolerated slang as she tolerated rowdy modern manners and “disgraceful, not to say indecent exposure in ball dresses”; but in her own person she adhered to the old fashions of moderately low dresses and moderately incorrect English. Said Mrs. Ramon:

“There goes that charming grandniece of yours. How graceful she is. I thought you told me she was twenty-nine.”

“Eleanor Clearwater—twenty-nine!” exclaimed Mrs. Salfield. “She’s not yet twenty-four.”

“Oh, I remember, you said she looked twenty-nine—so serious—dignified—reserved—really icy. But that was only two months ago. She looks eighteen now. She’s been away—hasn’t she?”

“Just returned,” said Mrs. Salfield.

“It did her a world of good—freshened her up—no, softened—no, I mean warmed.”

“She’s been visiting the Hollisters, down at Harrison.”

“A country town. I supposed she’d been to baths or springs or something. Really the change in her is quite miraculous. She has waked up.”

“Eleanor never was what one’d call sleepy,” said Mrs. Salfield, rather stiffly.

“Oh, she was always interested in things—books, serious subjects—too much so for my taste. But you know what I mean. She looks human—looks as if she had a human interest. It was the one thing lacking to make her entirely interesting and beautiful—to give her magnetism. You notice how the men flock about her. She’s having a triumph. Why, she looks round—looks at the men—in a positively flirtatious way. Really, Clara, it’s too wonderful. What has happened to her?”

“What could happen to a girl in Harrison? Nothing but Bart Hollister.”

“It couldn’t be Bart,” said Mrs. Ramon.

“It isn’t anybody,” said Mrs. Salfield. “It’s simply a case of coming-to a little late. So many young people take life too solemnly at first. They feel responsible for it.”

The phenomenon thus noted by Mrs. Ramon had escaped no one’s eyes. Even Eleanor’s father, the absorbed George Clearwater, United States Senator and “lumber king,” had seen it. Eleanor Clearwater had gone to Harrison, a reserved, cool, not to say cold young woman, with an air that made her seem years older than she was, and with an interest in men so faint that it discouraged all but two dauntless fortune hunters—who were promptly sent to look further. She had come back, a lively, coquettish person, with a modern tendency to audacities in dress and speech. Every one wondered; no one could explain. She could have explained, but she would not have admitted the truth even to herself. Four men proposed within two weeks after her return. She refused them all—in a gay, mocking way, thus enabling them to feel that they had not humiliated themselves, that she had imagined they were proposing merely to make interesting conversation.

The cause she would not admit? A lank, homely, ill dressed country town lawyer, one George Helm. The year before he had been the joke of Harrison because of his absurd beard and his seedy suit with its flowing tails. The shaving of the beard, the changing of the “statesman’s frock” for an ill fitting sack suit, two campaigns in which he had developed power and originality as a speaker, an election to the State Senate by attacking “everything that was respectable and decent,” that is, by telling the truth about the upper-class grafters—these circumstances had combined to make him a considerable and serious figure in Harrison. But for such as the Hollisters and the Clearwaters he remained a bumpkin, a demagogue, an impossible lower-class person.

Yet he had wrought the wondrous, proposal-fraught change in Miss Clearwater. And he had done it by impudently pausing at her phaeton in Harrison’s main street and telling her, with exasperating indifference to her icy manner, that he could marry her if he wished but that he had no place in his life for such a person as she.

Why had this transformed her? For two reasons, both important to those men who would fain have influence over one—or more—of the female sex. The first is, that he had been able to impress upon her the fact that he was a worth-while person. The second is, that he, being serious and simple, had shown her that he, the man worth-while, meant it when he said she was not a girl a worth-while man would care to marry. With these two propositions firmly fixed in her head, Eleanor Clearwater could not fail to see that it was “up to” her to demonstrate her power over man.

She invited proposals—proposals not too obviously incited chiefly by her charms as an heiress. She got the proposals. But still she was not satisfied. There was one man—a homely man, but a man with far and away the handsomest soul she had ever seen—simple, proud, honest and fearless—looking from eyes that were the more beautiful for the rugged homeliness of the rest of his face. This man whom her woman’s heart defiantly told her was supremely worth-while—this man had said she was not worth-while. Therefore, there were worlds still defiantly unconquered—which meant that nothing was conquered. It irritated her—as her father had been irritated until all the lumber interests had been gathered in under his lordship. It irritated her yet more profoundly that such an absurdity as this gentle and friendly disdain of bucolic homeliness should irritate her. But she could not change her nature.

He had set her to thinking about him. He had her worried, as the saying is. And when a man gets a woman in that state, she will not emerge from it until something definite has occurred.

Woman has little to think about but men—thanks to a social system cunningly contrived by man for his own benefit. She thinks of man in general until she centers upon one man. She then thinks of him until she finds him out. When that comes to pass, she goes back to men in general, until a new personal interest develops. This, so long as any remnant of charm gives her hope. Man is woman’s career. Not so with men; not so with George Helm, State Senator-elect and desperately in earnest about making a career.

While Eleanor Clearwater was sleeping away the excitements of the Salfield ball in her attractive bedroom in the Clearwater palace, George Helm was at work several hundred miles away in his dingy back office in the Masonic Building at Harrison. When she should be awakened by her maid to dress for her first engagement of the day, she would soon be thinking of George Helm—thinking how ugly and obscure and ungainly he was—and what magnetic eyes he had. Thinking the more, the more she tried not to think. But George Helm was not thinking of her at all.

He was sitting beside the rickety old table in a wooden chair, a kitchen chair. It was tilted back and Helm’s long lank legs were tangled up with each other and with the rungs in amazing twists. Perhaps you have happened to know an occasional man—or woman—whose every act and trick of manner had an inexplicable fascination. When George Helm was self-conscious, he had no more magnetism than is inseparable from intelligent, sympathetic good nature sunning in a kindly keen sense of humor. But the instant he lost self-consciousness—as he always did on the platform, and as he was more and more doing in private life, now that he had begun to have success—that instant he became a magnet, one of those human magnets who interest you, no matter what they do, and in repose. Even in bed—that too short, sagging bed in the attic of Mrs. Beaver’s boarding-house—even as he lay doubled up, there was the fascination of the unique, the perfectly natural and unassuming.

As he sat twisted in and upon the wobbly kitchen chair, his friend, lazy Bill Desbrough, from across the hall, looked in every few minutes, hoping George would encourage him to enter. It was curious about George Helm, how in spite of his lack of what passes for dignity, no one ever—even in the days when he was thought to be a joke—“the boy with that beard”—no one ever ventured to interrupt him without an encouraging look from those deep-set blue-gray eyes.

At last George looked up and smiled as Bill stood in the doorway. He said:

“Come in, you loafer.”

“How’s State Senator-elect Helm to-day?” inquired Bill, lounging in, his hands in his pockets, his pipe hanging from the corner of his mouth. “How does it feel to be famous?”

“To be less obscure,” corrected George. He had a passion—and a genius—for accuracy.

“To be famous,” insisted Desbrough.

“Do you know who is State Senator for the district adjoining this—on either side?—or to the north or south?”

Bill Desbrough’s laugh was confession.

“There are fifty State Senators in this State alone,” continued George. “There are forty-eight States in the Union. Fifty times forty-eight——”

“Why are you trying to make yourself out so small?”

“Or—to look at it another way, I belong to the Democratic boss of Harrison—Pat Branagan, saloon-keeper. He belongs to the Republican boss, Al Reichman. Al belongs to Senator Harvey Sayler, the State boss. Sayler belongs to the big monopolistic combines that center in Wall Street. They belong to a dozen big plutocrats who belong to about three of their number. And those three belong to their money—do what it says, say and think what it tells ’em to.”

“I hope you’re happy now,” said Bill. “You’ve made yourself out to be about equal to a patch on the ragged pant-leg of some cotton-picking coon working for the sub-lessee of a mortgaged farm in a poor corner of Arkansas.”

“Or, to look at it another way,” continued Helm, untwisting his legs, immediately to re-knot them in an even more intricate tangle, “a State Senator gets six dollars a day while the Legislature’s in session. It meets for sixty days every two years. His term’s four years. So, my money value as the State sees it is one hundred and eighty dollars a year—about fifty cents a day.”

“Well, I hope you’ve shrunk yourself back to normal human size,” said his friend. “I suppose that’s what you’re doing this for.”

“No, Bill. To locate myself. I want to see just where I stand. The slave of a slave of a slave of a slave of a slave of a slave of a slave—I think that’s the right degree—and at fifty cents a day.”

“Branagan gives you some pretty good law cases,” suggested Bill.

Helm eyed him somberly.

“You know you don’t want to be too damn independent, old man,” continued Bill.

“To locate myself,” pursued Helm, as if Bill had not spoken. “I want to see just how far I’ve got to go before——”

He paused here. Said Bill—not altogether in jest, “Before you’re President of the U. S. A.?”

“No,” said George gravely. “Before I’m a man. Before I belong to myself.” He laughed with his peculiar illumination of the whole face apparently from the light of the eyes. “You see, Bill, I’m aiming to go further than most Presidents—especially these latter-day chaps.”

“Further than most plutocrats,” said Desbrough. “As you said, they belong to their boodle bags.... You haven’t broken with Branagan?”

“Not yet,” said Helm. “I’ll have to, soon after the Legislature opens. You see, we’re the minority, and nowadays the majority-boss always uses the minority votes to put through whatever dirty business a lot of his men have to be let off from voting for.”

“Well—don’t break with good old Pat till you have to.”

“I’ll get all I can first, you may be sure,” said Helm. “I’m a practical man—that is, I’m a practical politician, with a dangerous, incurable hankering for being a man—self-owned and self-bossed.”

“You give Branagan good legal service for what he pays you.”

“And he hasn’t yet asked me to do any law work that I’ve not been able to stand for.”

“Pat’s a little afraid of you,” declared Desbrough. “He knows how strong you are with the people.”

Helm slowly shook his head. “I don’t deceive myself. He’s saving me till he really needs me.” He straightened out his long figure deliberately, rose and began to pace up and down the office. “It’s all a question of money, Bill. In this day a man has got to have an independence—or do what some other man says.”

“If I could speak as you can—and hold the crowds—and draw in their votes—— You, a Democrat, elected from this district of shell-back Republicans who talk about the Civil War as if Morgan was still raiding the State.” Bill laughed. “Why don’t you drop politics, George? Why fool with the silly game? The people’ll never learn anything. They can always be buncoed—the asses! What did God make ’em for? To work like hell all day and then hand over most of what they’ve made to some clever chap—and thank him for taking it.”

“That used to be so,” replied Helm. “But they’re waking up, Bill. All they need is the right kind of leaders.”

“Meaning you?”

“Meaning me,” said Helm. And his expression far removed his statement from vanity or egotism.

Desbrough puffed at his pipe in silence. Presently he said:

“You can count me in, George—if there’s anything I can do.”

They did not shake hands. They exchanged no gushing remarks. They did not look at each other with exalted sentimentality. They simply looked—then George grinned and nodded—and said:

“All right, Bill. You’re in.”

A long silence. Then Desbrough:

“Not that I believe in the game, old man. I don’t. I despise the people. I’d go in with the wise boys who rob them if I didn’t happen to have inherited enough to slop along on.”

“How much have you got?” said George—a necessary question, as this was to be a partnership.

“Nineteen hundred and fifty a year—county bonds and a farm. My law practice—I made seventy-five dollars last year.”

“You won’t take anything but people too poor to pay—and then only when you think they’re being wronged by somebody with money. That’s why I asked you in.”

“You didn’t——” Desbrough stopped and laughed. “Yes, you did, come to think of it. I’d never have offered if you hadn’t made me feel that you wanted me. I’d not have done it even then, if you hadn’t compelled me. How do you compel people to do things without even asking ’em, George?”

For reply Helm laughed. Said he:

“Nineteen hundred and fifty a year. That’s enough for you. I must have more—about five thousand a year.”

“You can make it at the law.”

“If the gang didn’t shut me out of the courts, when I broke with them. And if I’d take crooked cases. I’ve thought that all out. It can’t be done any more. Lincoln and the big fellows of the past could. But that was a different day. Now all the law cases worth-while—all the good fees—come from the very chaps I’ve got to attack. A lawyer who has done any business as a lawyer can go into politics in only one way—and that’s a more or less crooked way. I’ve thought it all out, Bill. I can’t afford to make an independence, and then wash up and go in on the level. I hoped I could see my way clear to do it. But—I can’t.”

“But you won’t get money any other way,” said Desbrough. “And if you haven’t got the money to live on and to carry on your campaigns, why, you’re beaten in advance.”

“I haven’t forgotten my campaign for judge,” said Helm. “Bill, I’ve learned a thing or two about practical politics. I’m going to play cards—not play the fool.”

“Why not marry Clara Hollister?” cried Desbrough, suddenly inspired.

“Would she have you?” asked Helm.

“Me? Good Lord, what’d I do with another wife? I had one, and am paying alimony. No, I mean you marry Clara.”

Helm laughed uproariously. “Take another look at me, Bill,” said he. “You’ve forgotten.”

“Women don’t know anything about handsome and ugly in men,” said Bill. “Besides, you’re not what women’d call plain. Don’t laugh, George. I’d back you to win any woman you took after. A man that can catch crowds can catch a woman. With a woman, it isn’t what a man looks. It’s what he says—and does.”

“I’ve got no woman-talk,” said Helm.

“You can grab off Clara Hollister if you want her—and she has twenty thousand a year in her own right. And she’ll let you do what you please with it.”

“Her father’s the head devil in these parts of the gang I’m after.”

“The twenty thousand’s hers. She’s a good deal of a snob, but she’d be what you wanted her to be, if you married her. That’s the way it is with women.”

“Was that your experience?”

“I spoke from experience,” replied Desbrough, undaunted. “I made my wife over when I married her—and then didn’t like the job. I’d rather pay alimony than be constantly reminded of my failure.”

“No—I can’t marry for independence,” said Helm. “She wouldn’t have me and—I don’t want her.”

“Then—why not that friend of hers—that Miss Clearwater? I saw you talking to her down the street one day before the election. She’d be less easy to manage than Clara. But no woman’s difficult—for a firm man who’s patient and can keep his temper—and isn’t in love.”

Helm had become acutely self-conscious and so awkward that a chair which was apparently not near his path became involved with his big feet and fell on its side with a crash. As Helm straightened from picking it up, he was extraordinarily red for the amount of exertion. Said he:

“Leave the women out of it. I’m not a marrying man.”

Desbrough laughed mockingly. “You’ll find out you’re mistaken—as soon as you’ve got money enough to make it worth a needy woman’s while to take after you. I thought I wasn’t a marrying man. Three months and four days after my uncle died and left me that money I was waiting at the altar.”

“I’m not a marrying man,” repeated Helm awkwardly.

“In some ways Miss Clearwater would be just the girl for you. She’d take an interest in your career. She has ideals—and they’re about as far removed from her father’s as a church from a speak-easy. I think she’s got money of her own. Yes, I’m sure she has. Her mother left her what the old man had settled on her.”

“If I did marry,” said Helm, abruptly self-possessed, “it’d be a woman that suited me—one I felt at home with. I want no grand rich ladies, Bill. Anyhow, I’ve thought of another way—one that’s practical.”

And he seated himself and proceeded to unfold the scheme upon which he had been seriously at work ever since the election. It was a simple scheme, wisely devoid of untried originality, but effective. His two campaigns, despite the silence of the plutocracy-controlled press, had got him a considerable reputation throughout the State. The press is not so necessary to the spread of intelligence as is latterly imagined. Long before there was a press, long before there was any written means of communication, news and knowledge of all kinds spread rapidly throughout the world, pausing only at the great desert stretches between peoples—and not often halted there for long. The old ways of communication have not been closed up. To this day the real and great reputations of the world are not press-made or press-sustained or even materially press-assisted. They are the work of mouth-to-mouth communication. And those reputations, by the way, are they against which the calumny and the innuendo of the press strive in vain.

It had spread from man to man throughout the State that there had arisen in Harrison a strange, plain youth of great sincerity as a man and of great power as a speaker. The Jews of ancient days are not the only people who have dreamed of a Messiah. The Messiah-dream, the Messiah-longing has been the dream and the longing of the whole human race, toiling away in obscurity, oppressed, exploited, fooled, despised. Hence, news of leaders springing up spreads fast and far among the people. The news about Helm was hardly more than a rumor. A hundred miles from Harrison, and they had his name wrong. A little further, and they hadn’t yet heard his name. But far and wide there was the rumor of a light in the direction of Harrison. Would it be a little star or a big? a fixed star or a mere comet?—would it prove to be nothing but a meteorite, flashing and fading out? Would it be a sun? These questions not definite, but simply the vague, faint suggestion of question.

The people!—how little we understand them—how much and how often we misunderstand them. The people, so ignorant, yet so quaintly wise—as they toil in the obscurity, building patiently, working and hoping—and waiting always for leaders. Deceived a thousand times, they wait on and hope on—since leaders they must have, and since leaders will surely come.

Helm did not exaggerate the public interest in himself. If anything he, the most cautiously Caledonian of career-builders, estimated his reputation at less than it was. But he had the true man of the people’s instinct for the feeling of the people. His crusading spirit was not either academic or fanatic. It was the sensible indignation of the man who discovers that a certain evil has gone far enough and must be put down. He felt that, if he could manage his career sensibly, he could make it all he wished. The pressing problem was how to increase this reputation into fame of the kind useful to his purposes as a public man, and how to transform that increased reputation into a cleanly-acquired independence.

“And it seems to me, Bill,” said he, “that the best available plan is a lecture tour—through the towns, villages, crossroads hamlets of the whole State.”

“Talking politics? Nobody’ll listen to politics except round election time. That’s why robbing the people’s the easiest and the favorite way to make money.”

“Everything’s politics,” said Helm. “Religion’s politics, and education’s politics, and farming and mining and factories and doctors and storekeeping—everything! What’s politics but settling how the proceeds of everybody’s labor are to be distributed—whether the man who works is to get what he works for or somebody else is to get it? And that question means everything that affects any human being, morally, mentally, physically. I’m going to talk politics, but they’ll not know it.”

“Where do I come in?”

“You’re to be my manager—arrange the dates and so on. It’s got to be arranged while I’m busy in the Legislature, in January and February. I’ll do what I can there to make myself talked about. You’ll correspond with culture clubs and literary circles and churches that want debts raised and public schools and trade schools with lecture courses.”

Desbrough looked willing but helpless. “Is there much chance to lecture in this State?” said he. “I thought that sort of thing had died out.”

“If it had, we’d raise it from the dead,” said Helm. “But it hasn’t.”

He took from the drawer of his table a bundle of papers. He waved them triumphantly at his friend, saying:

“Here it is, Bill—all down in black and white. A hundred and eighty-six chances to lecture—if it’s worked right.”

Desbrough, the lazy man, groaned. “Why didn’t you pick out somebody else, damn you!” he cried.

“You offered,” said Helm.

“You hypnotized me,” retorted Desbrough. “Lord, what a pile of work!”

“Yes,” said Helm. “You’ll have to begin right away. I calculate to make twenty-five hundred dollars by the first of June. I want to build this thing up in a couple of years into a steady income of five to ten thousand—an income nobody can touch so long as people’ll come out to hear me.” The handsome blue-gray eyes looked anxiously from the homely face. “Bill, am I deceiving myself? Do you think they’ll pay to hear me?”

“You can’t expect ’em to pay much—at first.”

“I was thinking it’d be about right to ask ten dollars for the little places, and fifteen to thirty for the bigger ones.”

“I’ll have to feel that out,” said Bill. “Leave something for the manager to do.”

“Put the prices low, Bill,” said George. “It’s safer. Also, we want to reach all the people. And I’m going to write some lectures that’ll educate ’em in what’s going on under their noses. About these lectures—they’re to be a mixture of humorous and serious. I’ve got a lot of good stories I can work in. The first lecture’s pretty nearly ready.”

“What’s it about?”

“The American Home—as it was—as it is—as it should be.”

“Wit, wisdom and weeps?”

Helm nodded.

“That sounds good. I begin to feel that there’s something in it.... Look here, Helm—that tour’s going to be a frightful strain on your health.”

George looked down at his long lean figure in the baggy blue suit. “There isn’t anything about me to get sick, Bill,” said he. “Back where I come from they dry ’em out like an oak board before they send ’em away from home. All the germs get when they tackle us folks is broken teeth.”

Why does the world insist on believing that luck is the deciding factor in human affairs? Why is the successful man forced to pretend that he is “fortune’s favorite,” under penalty of being despised as a plodding or scheming fellow, if he does not? Because most men either cannot or will not plan. They “trust to luck”—and lose, except in romances and equally fictitious biographies. Without exception, all success is the result of plan. If a man has success thrust into his hands, it is immediately snatched away unless he plans wisely to keep it. If a successful man is wholly or partly ruined by chance, his habit of successful planning soon restores all that has been lost. Luck is an element for which every wise man makes allowance in his planning—for the good luck that will enable him to shorten his journey along the road he would have traveled in any event, for the bad luck that may lengthen the journey. Good and bad luck affect rate, not direction—among the men who attain to and persist in the triumphant class, from the successful grocer to the successful poet or composer.

That winter luck favored George Helm. He did not have to break with the machine.

Senator Sayler, the representative of the plutocracy, quarreled with some of his largest clients—his bosses, they fancied themselves, until he, as astute as he was bold and cynical, showed them that he had made himself indispensable to them. He, the rich man as well as the expert and most intelligent politician; they, merely rich men, crudely buying of politicians the coveted robbers’ licenses. The quarrel grew out of the idiotic greediness of his clients. They wished to rob to the point where the goose begins to squawk—and forthwith changes from goose into a creature of a wholly different kind, fighting with ferocity for life. Sayler proceeded to teach them a lesson. He, ostensibly head of the Republican machine and hostile to everything connected with the Democratic party, ordered his faithful ally-lieutenant, the Democratic State boss, Hazelrigg, to make a vigorous unsparing campaign against the plutocracy.

“Give ’em hell,” said Sayler. “Don’t turn loose a lot of long-eared cranks. They frighten sensible people and make the plutocracy stronger. Dig up some earnest, conscientious young fellows—if there are any such that haven’t been brought up for these stupid brutes we’re going to teach a lesson.”

Hazelrigg had heard of Helm. Pat Branagan had given Helm a letter to him, but Helm had not presented it and had been keeping out of sight until he should have spied out the new land of the State capital. He sent for Helm to look him over. Hazelrigg was a college man who had made up his mind to be rich. Discovering, after a few years of effort by honest ways, that if he succeeded at all it would be when he was too old to enjoy, he had taken the short cut—with notable success. Being the minority boss, he could maintain a pose of virtue that deceived all but shrewd eyes. He understood Helm in the main at a glance—asked him to speak against a rotten bill then pending. Helm spoke.

Hazelrigg listened with mingled feelings of joy and fear. “We must keep him poor,” he said to himself. “Then he can’t make trouble for us.”

Before the first month was over, Hazelrigg had made George Helm the chief spokesman of the party in its campaign against the rapacities of the plutocracy. The old wheel-horse orators, familiar and more or less discredited slobberers of virtuous sentiments from mouths raw and ragged with corruption, were angered and made futile attempts to “haze” the new favorite. Hazelrigg soon quelled that mutiny. Of all the understrappers at the beck and call of a machine boss, the orators—they upon whose lips the people hang spellbound—are the lowest, the most despised by their fellow slaves and the most brutally worked and the most meagerly paid.

As Sayler had taken the muzzle from the press of the State to make his “object lesson” thoroughly effective, in a few weeks George Helm became famous—newspaper famous—the beanstalk variety of fame, showy but perishable. Bill Desbrough came up to see him.

“The lecture scheme’s off—isn’t it?” said he.

“By no means,” replied Helm. “I’ll let you into my secret, Bill. You’re close-mouthed—closer mouthed than I am.”

“I doubt it,” said Desbrough.

“Yes, for I’m telling you my secret—and you’ll not tell anybody. Here’s the secret! By those lecture tours I’m going to build up in every part of this State a machine of my own—groups of people I can trust and who feel they can trust me. There’s some skullduggery back of this spasm of party virtue. It won’t last. We must hurry and make all we can out of it.”

Most men cannot see the obvious, even when it is pointed out to them. The occasional rare man—the man of genius of one kind or another—is he who sees the obvious without assistance. In between these two classes lies a third class, not small like that of genius—yet not huge like the other. To this third class—those able to see the obvious if and when it is pointed out to them—belonged William Desbrough. He reflected on what George Helm had said; and up went his admiration a considerable number of notches. Said he:

“George, what a run you’ll give ’em!”

Helm clapped him on the shoulder with his loud, joyous, boyish laugh. “Put all your money on that, Bill!” cried he.

Helm’s successes wrought in him the usual swift change. The temperament of success, the ability to throw one’s whole concentrated self into an enterprise, involves a highly organized nervous system—hence, extreme sensitiveness, torments from anxiety and from self-doubt. Only an iron constitution could have borne the fatigues of that first campaign of his—the now famous “buggy” campaign—with its nerve strain of the man fighting again desperate odds to save himself from ruin under avalanches of ridicule. And when he finally “made good” in his home district, the question at once arose, “But can I make good at the capital?” This question was in the way to be answered with an emphatic yes.

The respect with which he was treated by other men—men of consequence! The serious attention the papers gave his utterances! The huge piles of letters praising his courage, his logic, his freedom from crude abuse, his clearness of statement—letters from all parts of the State, from all parts of the Union! Those letters made his heart burn with new energy and high hope. He had indeed guessed right. The people—his people—the long-suffering masses were certainly on the alert for a leader. Yes, he was in the way to accomplish something of what he had resolved when he left the farm, because he was intelligent enough to discover that the big monopolies headed by the railway trusts had reduced the nominally independent farmer to the slavery of the poorly paid wage-earner of the cities and towns. He was in the way to be of use in the gigantic task of restoring democracy and opportunity to the republic.

This man, planted upon this rock-founded confidence, could not but show in his exterior the external change. But where the small fellow reveals his fleeting or trivial success in an access of swagger, the large, simple nature reveals it in the deeper absorption in the career, the lessened consciousness of self. And as George Helm’s self-consciousness had been the sole cause of his awkwardness and the chief cause of his extreme plainness, the change was most striking. He was no longer awkward. His long, spare figure revealed—as it always had on the platform after the first embarrassed moment—the innate grace that is in every natural, self-conscious creature. As for the homeliness—how can a strong face be homely when in place of the unattractive expression of shy greenness there come the dignity and beauty of a large intelligence fittingly occupied? “There goes a man who amounts to something,” they now said about Helm. And when you hear that said of a man, you may be sure he will not turn to you a homely face.

Senator Sayler had come on from Washington and had taken a house in the suburbs for the session because of the importance of the curious program he was putting through. He went to hear Helm speak against one of the grab bills his refractory clients were insisting upon. Sayler, as you knew, was a cynic; and when you find cynicism in a man, you may be sure you are at the cover for a lively and annoying secret self-contempt. He listened with his most cynical smile to the simple, sensible eloquence of the young farmer-looking lawyer. But, as he listened, he was saying to himself, “We must attack this fellow, but it will not be easy.” Afterward he had Hazelrigg bring Helm to the Lieutenant Governor’s private room and talked with him for an hour. He would have talked much longer, had there not been a gentle knock at the door.

He disregarded it. The door opened and in came his wife—and Eleanor Clearwater. Mrs. Sayler—the trained wife of the public man—smiled engagingly at Helm and said to her husband:

“We simply can’t wait any longer, Harvey. We were wondering how you dared keep us waiting. But if we had known whom you had with you——” She put out her hand to Helm. “That was a splendid speech, Mr. Helm. I don’t know you, but it made me feel as if I did. I detest politics but not the kind you talk.”

Helm lapsed toward, but not into, his former awkwardness. He might have done better had not Eleanor been standing there, not all dignity and ice, but all merry smiles and impatience to speak.

“How do you do, Mr. Helm?” said she, as soon as Mrs. Sayler finished. “Father and I came to stop with Mrs. Sayler only this morning—and here you are. Really, it’s—it’s—what shall I call it—our always running across each other?”

Helm had no woman-talk. He stood—not too awkwardly—and silently gazed at the lovely and radiant young lady so unaccountably transformed from her former cold reserve. And, as the astute Sayler did not fail to note, he looked at her hungrily. Even Carlotta Sayler, the self-absorbed, saw in Helm’s tell-tale face that there was “something or other between those two—though how could it possibly be!”

“I was about to ask Mr. Helm to dine with us to-morrow night,” said Sayler.

“Yes, do,” cried Carlotta, who never missed a cue. “It’s to be early and most informal—no evening clothes or such nonsense. Won’t it be delightful, Eleanor? Your father will be so pleased to meet one of our coming men.”

Poor Helm was framing a refusal when he caught in Eleanor’s eyes a look of appeal—a pleading request that he accept. Nor had he the excuse that Sayler was of the enemy. Sayler had shown him that he harbored no such petty notions of obligation as possess the average man who fancies that his foe ought to become his friend if he does him the honor of giving him a free cigar, or a free dinner, or a free drink. Also, he wished to talk with Sayler again. Sayler, expert at the political game, had in their hour’s talk taught him more than he had learned of all the other men with whom he had discussed politics. And Sayler was—for some mysterious reason—eager to give him the ammunition of facts about the doings of the plutocracy which he most needed.

“Thank you, ma’am, I’ll be glad to come,” said Helm. He added, “I’ve heard you’re very dressy out at your place. You’re sure you won’t mind my clothes? I haven’t any dress suits.”

“A man can go where he pleases in what he pleases,” said Sayler. “But there’s no truth in that report about us. The women at our place are dressy, of course. They always are everywhere. If they’re not that, they think they’re not anything—and perhaps they’re right. But it’s go-as-you-please with the men.”

Sayler discovered that he wished to look at the west wing of the capitol, walked with his wife, thus forcing Helm to walk with Eleanor—and to walk ahead where he could observe. There was plenty to see.

A serious young woman is never in any circumstances so interesting to a man as a light and gay, pretty woman, whatever men may pretend. It is inborn in the male to regard the female as the representative of the lighter side of life; and so long as he is not married to her, light she should be if she would please him—light and full of coquetry of the kind he happens to regard as “womanly.” George Helm had cherished deep in his heart a peculiar feeling for Eleanor Clearwater since that first long talk he had with her, the only woman he had met who possessed worldly knowledge and beauty, refined and glorified by the highest civilized arts of manner and dress. Not love—not possibility of love, though he fancied it was love! Rather, a feeling that here at last was a representative of the best in womankind—and George Helm, like all the ambitious, was born with the passion for the best of everything.

But this Eleanor was no longer the empedestaled goddess, the passive recipient of the homage due her beauty and her taste and her station. She had come to life; she had descended from her pedestal; she had placed herself—no, not within reach of men, but most tantalizingly less out of reach. And she spent that half hour or so in deliberately trying to captivate him, in putting him at ease, in making him feel that she was almost if not quite within reach. She did not herself realize—but Harvey Sayler did—how far she was going. But neither did she realize how much she had been affected by the fact that each time she saw this man he had made a stride forward as with seven league boots away from the crudeness of the bucolic and toward his certain goal of power with vast masses of men. If she had not heard the speech before she saw him, if she had not found her own opinion confirmed by Sayler’s manner toward him, she probably would not have gone so far. Not because she was calculating, you reader ever ready to discover your own deepest failings, however slightly manifested in another; but because she was human—delightfully human, since George Helm had dropped her abruptly down from the perch to which she had been raised by lifelong flatteries and extravagant compliment.

However, it was not until after dinner the following night that she really “laid siege.” She was alone with poor Helm in the library—how cleverly the sly Sayler had maneuvered that!

You have seen a large fish moving in ease and grace through the water? You have seen that same fish flopping and floundering and flapping about on land to which the angler has drawn it? That visualizes George Helm, at home among men, among politicians, or making a speech, and George Helm in a drawing-room among a lot of women in dresses cut as he had seen them cut only in illustrations. And the most ludicrous part of it all was that he fancied himself perfectly at ease. Eleanor Clearwater had hypnotized him into imagining his flounderings were like his motions in his native element.

Said she at length—any woman and almost any man can supply the preliminary or leading-up conversation:

“What a fascinating career you will have! Oh, I know you haven’t told me about it. You simply won’t talk about yourself, and have made me tell you everything about myself from bibs up. But I can guess your career.”

“We had only got you as far as short dresses,” said he. “When you left that boarding school——”

“Nothing since,” interrupted she. “I’ve simply been sitting round waiting for a husband. What else is there for a woman? Still, I never wish I’d been a man.”

“Why not?” asked George. He was twisted into one of his strange poses—legs wound round each other, body bent forward, supported by his elbows. He had never been so blissfully, airily happy as watching this beautiful girl, with the most wonderful light he had ever beheld reflecting from her fair shoulders.

She looked at him with eyes suddenly grave. “Because as a woman I have the chance to be some day loved by a man. As a man”—her eyes danced—“I’d have had nothing to look forward to but just a woman.”

“What kind of a man do you want?” asked he—and his honest, rugged face showed in its frank innocence how impersonal the question was.

“A man like you,” said she audaciously, her face merry.

He laughed loudly—a contagious outburst of joyous good humor that made the luxurious, conventional room seem a poor sort of place. Such a laugh is a very different matter from one that seems a poor, noisy sort of clamor in a room.

“You have courage—strength. You don’t pose.” All this she said with the lightness that made it in good taste—and none the less sincere. “You are on the side all these other men have deserted as soon as they became prosperous.”

“Perhaps I shall, too,” said he.

“I suppose it must be the wrong side, or surely all of them wouldn’t have left it. But—somehow, I think you won’t.”

“I can’t,” said he. And he—his real self—began to look from his eyes—and to look at her.

In spite of herself, she became serious. “No—you can’t,” assented she, absently. “You’ve changed—every time I’ve seen you. But not in that one respect. Whenever I look at you, I still see—as I did that first time—farms and factories—and thousands of men and women at work——”

“And children,” he interrupted, a strange, somehow ferocious note in his quiet voice.

“I don’t forget them,” said she. “I try to, but I don’t.... No, you’ll not change sides. And you’ll marry some woman on that side, and she’ll——”

“I’ll marry the woman I want—when I can afford to marry,” said he. “Women aren’t on one side or the other. This is a man’s fight. A woman—she goes with the man who takes her.”

She smiled with some raillery. “Be careful to select the woman of that sort,” said she, “or you may have to change your mind—suddenly and rather disagreeably—about women.”

He made a large gesture of indifference.

“You don’t care about women?” she asked.

A look of melancholy came into his face. He said with a quaint smile, “They began it. They don’t care about me.”

“Why not?”

“What a foolish question!”

“You’re mistaken,” said she. “Any woman would like you, and if a woman fell in love with you she’d be crazy about you.”

He laughed boyishly as at a huge joke.

“You’re a peculiar sort of man—a sort not many women would appreciate. If you find one who does, you’ll see that I was right. She’ll be a peculiar sort of woman and she’ll belong to you.”

There was pathos in his expression of gratitude. She saw it, understood it—and the tears welled into her eyes. What a lonely, fascinating figure of a man—so different from all other men—so modest about himself—and with such incredibly luminous eyes, tender yet strong. She was looking directly at him. The changing expression of his eyes terrified her—fascinated her. He stood up, and his gesture compelled her to stand also—and to look at him. He stretched out his powerful arm. She tried to draw back; she could not.

“I believe,” said he in an awed, hushed voice, his eyes looking at her wonderingly, “I believe you are the woman.”

He had misunderstood, she said to herself. Then— “No,” she thought, “I’ve been leading him on. What a foolish, bad thing to do! And he thinks I was in earnest—when nothing could induce me——”

He interrupted her thoughts with, “Yes—you are the woman!”

He had her shoulders in his grasp now and was looking down at her with an expression of sheer amazement, mingled with a tenderness that sent a thrill and a hot wave of—yes, of delight—through her. This man— She, Eleanor Clearwater, tolerate the touch of this man and—delight in it!

“That is absurd!” she cried hysterically. She looked at him with pleading eyes. “Let me go—please.”

He lifted his hands from her shoulders. Then—how it happened she never could understand—she, trying to draw back, was drawn forward—into his arms—had been kissed by him—was in a whirl of joy, of terror, of wonder, of disbelief in the reality of what was happening. She, who prided herself on never having allowed any man to be in the least familiar with her—she in the arms of this bucolic person whom she hardly knew. It was impossible—it was insane.

“Please let me go,” she said feebly. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me!”

He was holding her at arm’s length again—this powerful man, with the compelling eyes— If only he would not look at her so, she might recover herself. He was saying in the sweetest, tenderest voice she had ever heard:

“You—for me! It simply can’t be, Miss Clearwater.”

“Some woman will care for you—as I told you,” she said in a breathless way. “But not I. You told me once you wouldn’t have me.”

“But I didn’t know you then,” replied he. “Now—I’ve got to have you!”

She gave a cry of dismay. “Oh—don’t say that—please!” she pleaded. “I’m sure you don’t want me.”

“No, I don’t want you,” confessed he, frankly. “I don’t know what on earth I’m going to do with you. How can you break with your father and everybody and go tracking off into poverty with me?”

“As for that,” began she, “I’ve got something of my own, and——”

She stopped short in horror. What was she saying? Who was talking out of her mouth and with her voice? She covered her face with her hands. “I don’t mean it—I’m mad—crazy!” And she was in his arms, with him caressing her hair.

“You don’t want me,” he said gently, “and I don’t want you. But it looks as if we’d got to—doesn’t it, Ellen?”

If there had been any abbreviation of her name that she detested more than any and all others, it had been Ellen. Yet now—in this absurd, lunatic dream she was having, she liked Ellen—in his voice. It seemed to be the name she had been waiting for, the name her man would brand upon her. Ellen. No longer Eleanor Clearwater, but just Ellen—nothing more.

She laughed hysterically. “I’m glad you didn’t select Ella instead,” said she. “No doubt I’d have accepted it, but I’d always have felt low.”

They were looking at each other in a dazed way. At the sound of voices and laughter in the hall, both started and the crimson of shame deepened and deepened on Miss Clearwater’s cheeks and neck and shoulders. They faced the others with every sign of confusion and guilt, neither daring to look at the other. He stammered out phrases of departure and left, still with not a glance at her. Sayler decided that he had made an absurd premature proposal and had been sent about his business—“When he might have had her if he’d kept after her with a firm tread.”

Out in the cold winter night, George strode along until he was half way to his hotel. Then he paused and addressed the stars, reeling with silent laughter!

“What a damn fool I’ve made of myself!”

Another man might have said, “What a fool she made of me!” But George Helm was no self-excuser, no shifter of responsibilities.

“But I’ve got to put it through,” he went on, still speaking aloud but addressing the dim landscape in the horizon of which towered the Capitol. “And since I’ve got to do it, I’ll do it!”

A damn fool!—to take upon his already too heavily burdened shoulders this extra weight of a woman—and just the kind of woman who could be heaviest, most useless.

However, instead of walking with bent shoulders, he strode along, shoulders erect. And presently he was whistling like a boy in a pasture.