In the Arena by Booth Tarkington

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The Democrats responded with violent hootings, supplemented by cheers
of approval from the Republicans. The high voice out-shrieked them
all: "Once a Democrat, always a Democrat! I voted Dem'cratic tick't
forty year, born a Democrat an' die a Democrat. Fellow sizzens, I want
to say to you right here an' now that principles of Dem'cratic party
saved this country a hun'erd times from Republican mal-'diministration
an' degerdation! Lemme tell you this: you kin take my life away but
you can't say I don' stan' by Dem'cratic party, mos' glorious party of
Douglas an' Tilden, Hen'ricks, Henry Clay, an' George Washin'ton. I
say to you they _hain't_ no other party an' I'm member of it till
death an' Hell an' f'rever after, so help me _God_!"

He smote the desk beside him with the back of his hand, using all his
strength, skinning his knuckles so that the blood dripped from them,
unnoticed. He waved both arms continually, bending his body almost
double and straightening up again, in crucial efforts for
emphasis. All the old jingo platitudes that he had learned from
campaign speakers throughout his life, the nonsense and brag and blat,
the cheap phrases, all the empty balderdash of the platform, rushed to
his incoherent lips.

The lord of misrule reigned at the end of each sentence, as the
members sprang again upon the chairs and desks, roaring, waving,
purple with laughter. The Speaker leaned back exhausted in his chair
and let the gavel rest. Spectators, pages, galleries whooped and
howled with the members. Finally the climax came.

"I want to say to you just this _here_," shrilled the cracked
voice, "an' you can tell the Republican party that I said so, tell 'em
straight from _me_, an' I hain't goin' back on it; I reckon they
know who I am, too; I'm a man that's honest--I'm as honest as the day
is long, I am--as honest as the day is long--"

He was interrupted by a loud voice. "_Yes_," it cried, "_when
that day is the twenty-first of December!_"

That let pandemonium loose again, wilder, madder than before. A member
threw a pamphlet at Uncle Billy. In a moment the air was thick with a
Brobdingnagian snow-storm: pamphlets, huge wads of foolscap, bills,
books, newspapers, waste-baskets went flying at the grotesque target
from every quarter of the room. Members "rushed" the old man, hooting,
cheering; he was tossed about, half thrown down, bruised, but,
clamorous over all other clamours, jumping up and down to shriek over
the heads of those who hustled him, his hands waving frantically in
the air, his long beard wagging absurdly, still desperately
vociferating his Democracy and his honesty.

That was only the beginning. He had, indeed, "found his voice"; for he
seldom went now to the boarding-house for his meals, but patronized
the free-lunch counter and other allurements of the establishment
across the way. Every day he rose in the House to speak, never failing
to reach the assertion that he was "as honest as the day is long,"
which was always greeted in the same way.

For a time he was one of the jokes that lightened the tedious business
of law-making, and the members looked forward to his "_Mis-ter
Speaker_" as schoolboys look forward to recess. But, after a week,
the novelty was gone.

The old man became a bore. The Speaker refused to recognize him, and
grew weary of the persistent shrilling. The day came when Uncle Billy
was forcibly put into his seat by a disgusted sergeant-at-arms. He was
half drunk (as he had come to be most of the time), but this
humiliation seemed to pierce the alcoholic vapours that surrounded his
always feeble intelligence. He put his hands up to his face and cried
like a whimpering child. Then he shuffled out and went back to the
saloon. He soon acquired the habit of leaving his seat in the House
vacant; he was no longer allowed to make speeches there; he made them
in the saloon, to the amusement of the loafers and roughs who infested
it. They badgered him, but they let him harangue them, and applauded
his rhodomontades.

Hurlbut, passing the place one night at the end of the session, heard
the quavering, drunken voice, and paused in the darkness to listen.

"I tell you, fellow-countrymen, I've voted Dem'cratic tick't forty
year, live a Dem'crat, die a Dem'crat! An' I'm's honest as day is
long!"

* * * * *

It was five years after that session, when Hurlbut, now in the
national Congress, was called to the district in which Wixinockee
lies, to assist his hard-pressed brethren in a campaign. He was
driving, one afternoon, to a political meeting in the country, when a
recollection came to him and he turned to the committee chairman, who
accompanied him, and said:

"Didn't Uncle Billy Rollinson live somewhere near here?"

"Why, yes. You knew him in the legislature, didn't you?"

"A little. Where is he now?"

"Just up ahead here. I'll show you."

They reached the gate of a small, unkempt, weedy graveyard and
stopped.

"The inscription on the head-board is more or less amusing," said the
chairman, as he got out of the buggy, "considering that he was thought
to be pretty crooked, and I seem to remember that he was 'read out of
the party,' too. But he wrote the inscription himself, on his
death-bed, and his son put it there."

There was a sparse crop of brown grass growing on the grave to which
he led his companion. A cracked wooden head-board, already tilting
rakishly, marked Henry's devotion. It had been white-washed and the
inscription done in black letters, now partly washed away by the rain,
but still legible:

HERE LIES THE MORTAL REMAINS OF WILLIAM ROLLINSON A LIFE-LONG DEMOCRAT
AND A MAN AS HONEST AS THE DAY IS LONG

The chairman laughed. "Don't that beat thunder? You knew his record in
the legislature didn't you?"

"Yes."

"He _was_ as crooked as they say he was, wasn't he?"

Hurlbut had grown much older in five years, and he was in Congress. He
was climbing the ladder, and, to hold the position he had gained, and
to insure his continued climbing, he had made some sacrifices within
himself by obliging his friends--sacrifices which he did not name.

"I could hardly say," he answered gently, his down-bent eyes fastened
on the sparse, brown grass. "It's not for us to judge too much. I
believe, maybe, that if he could hear me now, I'd ask his pardon for
some things I said to him once."

HECTOR

It isn't the party manager, you understand, that gets the fame; it's
the candidate. The manager tries to keep his candidate in what the
newspapers call a "blaze of publicity"; that is, to keep certain spots
of him in the blaze, while sometimes it is the fact that a candidate
does not know much of what is really going on; he gets all the red
fire and sky-rockets, and, in the general dazzle and nervousness, is
unconscious of the forces which are to elect or defeat him. Strange
as it is, the more glare and conspicuousness he has, the more he
usually wants. But the more a working political manager gets, the less
he wants. You see, it's a great advantage to keep out of the high
lights.

For my part, not even being known or important enough to be named
"Dictator," now and then, in the papers, I've had my fun in the game
very quietly. Yet I did come pretty near being a famous man once, a
good while ago, for about a week. That was just after Hector J. Ransom
made his great speech on the "Patriotism of the Pasture" which set the
country to talking about him and, in time, brought him all he desired.

You remember what a big stir that speech made, of course--everybody
remembers it. The people in his State went just wild with pride, and
all over the country the papers had a sort of catch head-line:
"Another Daniel Webster Come to Judgment!" When the reporters in my
own town found out that Ransom was a second cousin of mine, I was put
into a scare-head for the only time in my life. For a week I was a
public character and important to other people besides the boys that
do the work at primaries. I was interviewed every few minutes; and a
reporter got me up one night at half-past twelve to ask for some
anecdotes of Hector's "Boyhood Days and Rise to Fame."

I didn't oblige that young man, but I knew enough. I was always fond
of my first cousin, Mary Ransom, Hector's mother; and in the old days
I never passed through Greenville, the little town where they lived,
without stopping over, a train or two, to visit with her, and I saw
plenty of Hector! I never knew a boy that left the other boys to come
into the parlour (when there was company) quicker than Hector, and I
certainly never saw a boy that "showed off" more. His mother was
wrapped up in him; you could see in a minute that she fairly
worshipped him; but I don't know, if it hadn't been for Mary, that I'd
have praised his recitations and elocution so much, myself.

Mary and I wouldn't any more than get to tell each other how long
since we'd heard from Aunt Sue, before Hector would grow uneasy and
switch around on the sofa and say: "Ma, I'd rather you wouldn't tell
cousin Ben about what happened at the G. A. R. reunion. I don't want
to go through all that stuff again."

At that, Mary's eyes would light up and she'd say: "You must, Hector,
you must! I want him to hear you do it; he mustn't go away without
that!" Then she'd go on to tell me how Hector had recited Lincoln's
Gettysburg speech at a meeting of the local post of the G. A. R. and
how he was applauded, and that many of the veterans had told him if he
kept on he'd be Governor of his State some day, and how proud she was
of him and how he was so different from ordinary boys that she was
often anxious about him. Then she would urge him to let me have
it--and he always would, especially if I said: "Oh, don't _make_
the boy do it, Mary!"

He would stand out in the middle of the floor and thrust his chin out,
knitting his brow and widening his nostrils, and shout "Of the people,
By the people, and For the people" at the top of his lungs in that
little parlour. He always had a great talent for mimicry, a talent of
which I think he was absolutely unconscious. He would give his
speeches in exactly the boy-orator style; that is, he imitated
speakers who imitated others who had heard Daniel Webster. Mary and
he, however, had no idea that he imitated anybody; they thought it was
creative genius.

When he had finished Lincoln, he would say: "Well, I've got another
that's a good deal better, but I don't want to go through that today;
it's too much trouble," with the result that in a few minutes Patrick
Henry would take a turn or two in his grave. Hector always placed
himself by a table for "Liberty or Death," and barked his knuckles on
it for emphasis. Little he cared, so long as he thought he'd got his
effect! You could see, in spite of the intensity of his expression,
that he was perfectly happy.

When he'd worked us through that, and perhaps "Horatius at the Bridge"
and the quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius and was pretty well
emptied, he'd hang about and interrupt in a way that made me
restless. Neither Mary nor I could get out two sentences before the
boy would cut in with something like: "Don't tell cousin Ben about
that day I recited in school; I'm tired of all that guff!"

Then Mary would answer: "It isn't guff, precious. I never was prouder
of you in my life." And she'd go on to tell me about another of his
triumphs, and how he made up speeches of his own sometimes, and would
stand on a box and deliver them to his boy friends, though she didn't
say how the boys received them. All the while, Hector would stare at
me like a neighbour's cat on your front steps, to see what impression
it made on me; and I was conscious that he was sure that I knew he was
a wonderful boy. I think he felt that everybody knew it. Hector kind
of palled on me.

When he was about sixteen, Mary wrote me that she was in great
distress about him because he had decided to go on the stage; that he
had written to John McCullough, offering to take the place of leading
man in his company to begin with. Mary was sure, she said, that the
life of an actor was a hard one; Hector had always been very delicate
(I had known him to eat a whole mince pie without apparent distress
afterward) and she wanted me to write and urge him to change his
mind. She felt sure Mr. McCullough would send for him at once, because
Hector had written him that he already knew all the principal
Shakespearian roles, could play Brutus, Cassius, or Mark Antony as
desired; and he had added a letter of recommendation from the Mayor of
their city, declaring that Hector was a finer elocutionist and
tragedian than any actor he had ever seen.

The dear woman's anxiety was needless, for she wrote me, with as much
surprise as pleasure, two months later, that for some reason
Mr. McCullough had not answered the letter, and that she was very
happy; she had persuaded Hector to go to college.

How she kept him there, the first two years, I don't know, for her
husband had only left her about four hundred dollars a year. Of
course, living in Greenville isn't expensive, but it does cost
something, and I honestly believe Mary came near to living on
nothing. It was a small college that she'd sent the boy to, but it was
a mother's point with her that Hector should be as comfortable as
anyone there.

I stopped off at Greenville, one day, toward the end of his second
year, but before he'd come home, and I saw how it was. Mary seemed as
glad as ever to see me--it was the same old bright greeting that she'd
always given me. She saw me from the dining-room window where she was
eating her supper, and she came out, running down to the gate to meet
me, like a girl; but she looked thin and pale.

I said I'd go right in and have some supper with her, and at that the
roses came back quickly to her cheeks. "No," she said, "I wasn't
really at supper; only having a bite beforehand; I'm going up-town now
to get the things for supper. You smoke a cigar out on the porch till
I get back, and--"

I took her by the arm. "Not much, Mary," I said. "I'm going to have
the same supper you had for yourself."

So I went straight out to the dining-room; and all I found on the
table was some dry bread toasted and a baked apple without cream or
sugar. It gave me a pretty good idea of what the general run of her
meals must have been.

I had a long talk with her that night, and I wormed it out of her that
Hector's college expenses were about twenty-five dollars a month,
which left her six to live on. The truth is, she didn't have enough to
eat, and you could see how happy it made her. She read me a good many
of Hector's letters, her voice often trembling with happiness over his
triumphs. The letters were long, I'll say that for Hector, which may
have been to his credit as a son, or it may have been because he had
such an interesting subject. There was no doubt that he had worked
hard; he had taken all the chief prizes for oratory and essay writing
and so forth that were open to him; he also allowed it to be seen that
he was the chief person in the consideration of his class and the
fraternity he had joined. Mary had a sort of humbleness about being
the mother of such a son.

But I settled one thing with her that night, though I had to hurt her
feelings to do it. I owned a couple of small notes which had just
fallen due, and I could spare the money. I put it as a loan to Hector
himself; he was to pay me back when he got started, and so it was
arranged that he could finish his course without his mother's living
on apples and toast.

I went over to his Commencement with Mary and we hadn't been in the
town an hour before we saw that Hector was the king of the place. He
had _all_ the honours; first in his class, first in oratory,
first in everything; professors and students all kow-towed and sounded
the hew-gag before him. Most of Mary's time was put in crying with
happiness. As for Hector himself, he had changed in just one way: he
no longer looked at people to see his effect on them; he was too
confident of it.

His face had grown to be the most determined I have ever seen. There
was no obstinacy in it--he wasn't a bull-dog--only set determination.
No one could have failed to read in it an immensely powerful will. In
a curious way he seemed "on edge" all the time. His nostrils were
always distended, the muscles of his lean jaw were never lax, but
continually at tension, thrusting the chin forward with his teeth hard
together. His eyebrows were contracted, I think, even in his sleep,
and he looked at everything with a sort of quick, fierce, appearance
of scrutiny, though at that time I imagined that he saw very little.
He had a loud, rich voice, his pronunciation was clipped to a deadly
distinctness; he was so straight and his head so high in the air that
he seemed almost to tilt back. With his tall figure and black hair, he
was a boy who would have attracted attention, as they say, in any
crowd, so that he might have been taken for a young actor. His best
friend, a kind of Man Friday to him, was another young fellow from
Greenville, whose name was Joe Lane. I liked Joe. I'd known him? since
he was a boy. He was lazy and pleasant-looking, with reddish hair and
a drawling, low voice. He had a humorous, sensible expression, though
he was dissipated, I'd heard, but very gentle in his manners. I had a
talk with him under the trees of the college campus in the moonlight,
Commencement night. I can see the boy lying there now, sprawling on
the grass with a cigar in his mouth.

"Hector's done well," I said.

"Oh, Lord, yes!" Joe answered. "He always will. He's going 'way up in
the world."

"What makes you think so?"

"Because he's so sure of it. It only needs a little luck to make him a
great man. In fact, he already is a great man."

"You mean you think he has a great mind?"

"Why, no, sir; but I think he has a purpose so big and so set, that it
might be called great, and it will make him great."

"What purpose?"

Joe answered quietly but very slowly, pulling at his cigar after each
syllable: "Hec--tor--J. Ran--som!"

"I declare," I put in, "I thought you were his friend!"

"So I am," the young fellow returned. "Friend, admirer, and
doer-in-ordinary to Hector J. Ransom, that's my quality. I've done
errands and odd jobs for him all my life. Most people who meet him do;
though it might be hard to say why. I haven't hitched my wagon to a
star; nobody'll get to do that, because this star isn't going to take
anything to the zenith but itself."

"Going to the zenith, is he?"

"Surely."

"You mean," said I, "that he's going to make a fine lawyer?"

"Oh, no, I think not. He might have been called one in the last
generation, but, as I understand it, nowadays a lawyer has to work out
business propositions more than oratory."

"And you think Hector has only his oratory?"

"I think that's his vehicle; it's his racing sulky and he'll drive it
pretty hard. We're good friends, but if you want me to be frank, I
should say that he'd drive on over my dead body if it lay in the road
to where he was going." Lane rolled over in the grass with a little
chuckle. "Of course," he went on, "I talk about him this way because
I know what you've done for him and I'd like to help you to be sure
that he's going to be a success. He'll do you credit!"

"What are you going to do, yourself, Joe?" I asked.

"Me?" He sat up, looking surprised. "Why, didn't you know? I didn't
get my degree. They threw me out at the eleventh hour for getting too
publicly tight--celebrating Hector's winning the works of Lord Byron,
the prize in the senior debate! I'll never be a credit to anybody; and
as for what I'm going to do--go back to Greenville and loaf in Tim's
pool-room, I suppose, and watch Hector's balloon."

However, Hector's balloon seemed uninclined to soar, at the
set-off--though Hector didn't. The next summer began a presidential
campaign, and Hector, knowing that I was chairman of my county
committee, and strangely overestimating my importance, came up to see
me: he asked me to use my influence with the National Committee to
have him sent to make speeches in one of the doubtful States; he
thought he could carry it for us. I explained that I had no wires
leading up so far as the National Committee. There were other things
I might have explained, but it didn't seem much use. Hector would have
thought I wanted to "keep him down."

He thought so anyway, because, after a crestfallen moment, he began to
look at me in his fierce eye-to-eye way with what seemed to me a dark
suspicion. He came and struck my desk with his clinched fist (he was
always strong on that), and exclaimed:

"Then by the eternal gods, if my own flesh and blood won't help me,
I'll go to Chicago myself, lay my credentials before the committee,
unaided, and wring from them--"

"Hold on, Hector," I said. "Why didn't you say you had credentials?
What are they?"

"What are they?" he answered in a rising voice. "You ask me what are
my credentials? The credentials of my patriotism, my poverty, and my
pride! You ask me for my credentials? The credentials of youth!" (He
hit the desk every few words.) "The credentials of enthusiasm! The
credentials of strength! You ask for my credentials? The credentials
of red blood, of red corpuscles, of young manhood, ripest in the
glorious young West! The credentials of vitality! Of virile--"

"Hold on," I said again, but I couldn't stop him. He went on for
probably fifteen minutes, pacing the room and gesticulating and
thundering at me, though we two were all alone. I felt mighty
ridiculous, but, of course, I'd been through much the same thing with
one or two candidates and orators before. I thought then that he was
practising on me, but I came afterward to see that I was partly
wrong. "Oratory" was his only way of expressing himself; he couldn't
just _talk_, to save his life. All you could do, when he began,
was to sit and take it till he got through, which consumed some
valuable time for me that afternoon. I suppose I was profane inside,
for having given him that cue with "credentials." Finally I got in a
question:

"Why not begin a little more mildly, Hector? Why don't you make some
speeches in your own county first?"

"I have consented to make the Fourth of July oration at Greenville,"
he answered.

Before he could go on, I got up and slapped him on the back. "That's
right!" I said. "That's right! Go back and show the home folks what
you can do, and I'll come down to hear it!"

And so I did. Mary was, if possible, more flustered and upset than at
Hector's Commencement. She and Joe Lane and I had a bench close up to
the stand, and on the other side of Mary sat a girl I'd never seen
before. Mary introduced me to her in a way that made me risk a guess
that Hector liked her more than common. Her name was Laura Rainey, and
she'd come to Greenville, a year before, to teach in the high-school.
She was young, not quite twenty, I reckoned, and as pretty and dainty
a girl as ever I saw; thin and delicate-looking, though not in the
sense of poor health; and she struck me as being very sweet and
thoughtful. Joe Lane told me, with his little chuckle, that she'd had
a good deal of trouble in the school on account of all the older boys
falling in love with her.

Something in the way he spoke made me watch Joe, and I was sure if
he'd been one of her pupils he wouldn't have lightened her worries
much in that direction. He had it himself. I saw it, or, I should say,
I felt it, in spite of his never seeming to look at her. She looked at
him, however, and pretty often, too; and there was a good deal of
interest in her eyes, only it was a sad kind, which I understood, I
thought, when I found that Joe had been on a long spree and had just
sobered up the day before.

Hector sat above us on the platform, with the Mayor and the County
Judge, and when the latter introduced him, and the same old white
pitcher and glass of water on a pine table, the boy came forward with
slow and impressive steps, and, setting his left fist on his hip,
allowed his right arm to hang straight by his side till his hand
rested on the table, like a statesman of the day standing for a
photograph. His brow contained a commanding frown, and he stood for
some moments in that position, while, to my astonishment, the crowd
cheered itself hoarse.

There was no mistaking the genuine enthusiasm that he evoked, though I
didn't feel it myself. I suppose the only explanation is that he had
a great deal of what is called "magnetism." What made it I don't
know. He was good-looking enough, with his dark eyes and hair, and
white, intense face and black clothes; but there was more in the
cheering than appreciation of that. I could not doubt that he produced
on the crowd, by his quiet attitude, an apparition of greatness. There
was some kind of hypnotism in it, I suppose.

The speech was about what I was looking for: bombastic platitudes
delivered with such earnestness and velocity that "every point scored"
and the cheering came whenever he wanted it.

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