Collected Stories (49 page)

Mr. Trueman chuckled and took his cigar from between his teeth. “Maybe the stars will throw some light on all that, if we get the run of them,” he said humorously. Then he added: “Mustn’t be a reformer, R. E. Nothing in it. That’s the only time you ever get off on the wrong foot. Life is what it always has been, always will be. No use to make a fuss.” He got up, said: “Good-night, R. E.,” said goodnight to me, too, because this had been an unusual occasion, and went down the sidewalk with his wide, sailor-like tread, as if he were walking the deck of his own ship.

When Dillon and Trueman went to St. Joseph, or, as we called it, St. Joe, they stopped at the same hotel, but their diversions were very dissimilar. Mr. Dillon was a family man and a good Catholic; he behaved in St. Joe very much as if he were at home. His sister was Mother Superior of a convent there, and he went to see her often.
The nuns made much of him, and he enjoyed their admiration and all the ceremony with which they entertained him. When his two daughters were going to the convent school, he used to give theatre parties for them, inviting their friends.

Mr. Trueman’s way of amusing himself must have tried his friend’s patience—Dillon liked to regulate other people’s affairs if they needed it. Mr. Trueman had a lot of poker-playing friends among the commission men in St. Joe, and he sometimes dropped a good deal of money. He was supposed to have rather questionable women friends there, too. The grasshopper men of our town used to say that Trueman was financial adviser to a woman who ran a celebrated sporting house. Mary Trent, her name was. She must have been a very unusual woman; she had credit with all the banks, and never got into any sort of trouble. She had formerly been head mistress of a girls’ finishing school and knew how to manage young women. It was probably a fact that Trueman knew her and found her interesting, as did many another sound business man of that time. Mr. Dillon must have shut his ears to these rumors,—a measure of the great value he put on Trueman’s companionship.

Though they did not see much of each other on these trips, they immensely enjoyed taking them together. They often dined together at the end of the day, and afterwards went to the theatre. They both loved the theatre; not this play or that actor, but the theatre,—whether they saw
Hamlet or Pinafore.
It was an age of good acting, and the drama held a more dignified position in the world than it holds today.

After Dillon and Trueman had come home from the city, they used sometimes to talk over the plays they had seen, recalling the great scenes and fine effects. Occasionally an item in the Kansas City
Star
would turn their talk to the stage.

“J. H., I see by the paper that Edwin Booth is very sick,” Mr. Dillon announced one evening as Trueman came up to take the empty chair.

“Yes, I noticed.” Trueman sat down and lit his dead cigar. “He’s not a young man any more.” A long pause. Dillon always seemed to know when the pause would be followed by a remark, and waited for it. “The first time I saw Edwin Booth was in Buffalo. It was in
Richard the Second,
and it made a great impression on me at the time.” Another pause. “I don’t know that I’d care to see him in that play again. I like tragedy, but that play’s a little too tragic. Something very black about it. I think I prefer
Hamlet.
”

They had seen Mary Anderson in St. Louis once, and talked of it for years afterwards. Mr. Dillon was very proud of her because she was a Catholic girl, and called her “our Mary.” It was curious that a third person, who had never seen these actors or read the plays, could get so much of the essence of both from the comments of two business men who used none of the language in which such things are usually discussed, who merely reminded each other of moments here and there in the action. But they saw the play over again as they talked of it, and perhaps whatever is seen by the narrator as he speaks is sensed by the listener, quite irrespective of words. This transference of experience went further: in some way the lives of those two men came across to me as they talked, the strong, bracing reality of successful, large-minded men who had made their way in the world when business was still a personal adventure.

Mr. Dillon went to Chicago once a year to buy goods for his store. Trueman would usually accompany him as far as St. Joe, but no farther. He dismissed Chicago as “too big.” He didn’t like to be one of the crowd, didn’t feel at home in a city where he wasn’t recognized as J. H. Trueman.

It was one of these trips to Chicago that brought about the end—for me and for them; a stupid, senseless, commonplace end.

Being a Democrat, already somewhat “tainted” by the free-silver agitation, one spring Dillon delayed his visit to Chicago in order to be there for the Democratic Convention—it was the Convention that first nominated Bryan.

On the night after his return from Chicago, Mr. Dillon was seated in his chair on the sidewalk, surrounded by a group of men who wanted to hear all about the nomination of a man from a neighbour State. Mr. Trueman came across the street in his leisurely way, greeted
Dillon, and asked him how he had found Chicago,—whether he had had a good trip.

Mr. Dillon must have been annoyed because Trueman didn’t mention the Convention. He threw back his head rather haughtily. “Well, J. H., since I saw you last, we’ve found a great leader in this country, and a great orator.” There was a frosty sparkle in his voice that presupposed opposition,—like the feint of a boxer getting ready.

“Great windbag!” muttered Trueman. He sat down in his chair, but I noticed that he did not settle himself and cross his legs as usual.

Mr. Dillon gave an artificial laugh. “It’s nothing against a man to be a fine orator. All the great leaders have been eloquent. This Convention was a memorable occasion; it gave the Democratic party a rebirth.”

“Gave it a black eye, and a blind spot, I’d say!” commented Trueman. He didn’t raise his voice, but he spoke with more heat than I had ever heard from him. After a moment he added: “I guess Grover Cleveland must be a sick man; must feel like he’d taken a lot of trouble for nothing.”

Mr. Dillon ignored these thrusts and went on telling the group around him about the Convention, but there was a special nimbleness and exactness in his tongue, a chill politeness in his voice that meant anger. Presently he turned again to Mr. Trueman, as if he could now trust himself:

“It was one of the great speeches of history, J. H.; our grandchildren will have to study it in school, as we did Patrick Henry’s.”

“Glad I haven’t got any grandchildren, if they’d be brought up on that sort of tall talk,” said Mr. Trueman. “Sounds like a schoolboy had written it. Absolutely nothing back of it but an unsound theory.”

Mr. Dillon’s laugh made me shiver; it was like a thin glitter of danger. He arched his curly eyebrows provokingly.

“We’ll have four years of currency reform, anyhow. By the end of that time, you old dyed-in-the-wool Republicans will be thinking differently. The under dog is going to have a chance.”

Mr. Trueman shifted in his chair. “That’s no way for a banker to talk.” He spoke very low. “The Democrats will have a long time to be sorry they ever turned Pops. No use talking to you while your Irish is up. I’ll wait till you cool off.” He rose and walked away, less
deliberately than usual, and Mr. Dillon, watching his retreating figure, laughed haughtily and disagreeably. He asked the grain-elevator man to take the vacated chair. The group about him grew, and he sat expounding the reforms proposed by the Democratic candidate until a late hour.

For the first time in my life I listened with breathless interest to a political discussion. Whoever Mr. Dillon failed to convince, he convinced me. I grasped it at once: that gold had been responsible for most of the miseries and inequalities of the world; that it had always been the club the rich and cunning held over the poor; and that “the free and unlimited coinage of silver” would remedy all this. Dillon declared that young Mr. Bryan had looked like the patriots of old when he faced and challenged high finance with: “You shall not press this crown of thorns upon the brow of labour; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” I thought that magnificent; I thought the cornfields would show them a thing or two, back there!

R. E. Dillon had never taken an aggressive part in politics. But from that night on, the Democratic candidate and the free-silver plank were the subject of his talks with his customers and depositors. He drove about the country convincing the farmers, went to the neighbouring towns to use his influence with the merchants, organized the Bryan Club and the Bryan Ladies’ Quartette in our county, contributed largely to the campaign fund. This was all a new line of conduct for Mr. Dillon, and it sat unsteadily on him. Even his voice became unnatural; there was a sting of come-back in it. His new character made him more like other people and took away from his special personal quality. I wonder whether it was not Trueman, more than Bryan, who put such an edge on him.

While all these things were going on, Trueman kept to his own office. He came to Dillon’s bank on business, but he did not “come back to the sidewalk,” as I put it to myself. He waited and said nothing, but he looked grim. After a month or so, when he saw that this thing was not going to blow over, when he heard how Dillon had been talking to representative men all over the county, and saw the figure he had put down for the campaign fund, then Trueman remarked to some of his friends that a banker had no business to
commit himself to a scatter-brained financial policy which would destroy credit.

The next morning Mr. Trueman went to the bank across the street, the rival of Dillon’s, and wrote a cheque on Dillon’s bank “for the amount of my balance.” He wasn’t the sort of man who would ever know what his balance was, he merely kept it big enough to cover emergencies. That afternoon the Merchants’ National took the check over to Dillon on its collecting rounds, and by night the word was all over town that Trueman had changed his bank. After this there would be no going back, people said. To change your bank was one of the most final things you could do. The little, unsuccessful men were pleased, as they always are at the destruction of anything strong and fine.

All through the summer and the autumn of that campaign Mr. Dillon was away a great deal. When he was at home, he took his evening airing on the sidewalk, and there was always a group of men about him, talking of the coming election; that was the most exciting presidential campaign people could remember. I often passed this group on my way to the post-office, but there was no temptation to linger now. Mr. Dillon seemed like another man, and my zeal to free humanity from the cross of gold had cooled. Mr. Trueman I seldom saw. When he passed me on the street, he nodded kindly.

The election and Bryan’s defeat did nothing to soften Dillon. He had been sure of a Democratic victory. I believe he felt almost as if Trueman were responsible for the triumph of Hanna and McKinley. At least he knew that Trueman was exceedingly well satisfied, and that was bitter to him. He seemed to me sarcastic and sharp all the time now.

I don’t believe self-interest would ever have made a breach between Dillon and Trueman. Neither would have taken advantage of the other. If a combination of circumstances had made it necessary that one or the other should take a loss in money or prestige, I think Trueman would have pocketed the loss. That was his way. It was his code, moreover. A gentleman pocketed his gains mechanically, in the day’s routine; but he pocketed losses punctiliously, with a sharp, if bitter, relish. I believe now, as I believed then, that this was a quarrel
of “principle.” Trueman looked down on anyone who could take the reasoning of the Populist party seriously. He was a perfectly direct man, and he showed his contempt. That was enough. It lost me my special pleasure of summer nights: the old stories of the early West that sometimes came to the surface; the minute biographies of the farming people; the clear, detailed, illuminating accounts of all that went on in the great crop-growing, cattle-feeding world; and the silence,—the strong, rich, out-flowing silence between two friends, that was as full and satisfying as the moonlight. I was never to know its like again.

After that rupture nothing went well with either of my two great men. Things were out of true, the equilibrium was gone. Formerly, when they used to sit in their old places on the sidewalk, two black figures with patches of shadow below, they seemed like two bodies held steady by some law of balance, an unconscious relation like that between the earth and the moon. It was this mathematical harmony which gave a third person pleasure.

Before the next presidential campaign came round, Mr. Dillon died (a young man still) very suddenly, of pneumonia. We didn’t know that he was seriously ill until one of his clerks came running to our house to tell us he was dead. The same clerk, half out of his wits—it looked like the end of the world to him—ran on to tell Mr. Trueman.

Mr. Trueman thanked him. He called his confidential man, and told him to order flowers from Kansas City. Then he went to his house, informed his housekeeper that he was going away on business, and packed his bag. That same night he boarded the Santa Fé Limited and didn’t stop until he was in San Francisco. He was gone all spring. His confidential clerk wrote him letters every week about the business and the new calves, and got telegrams in reply. Trueman never wrote letters.

When Mr. Trueman at last came home, he stayed only a few months. He sold out everything he owned to a stranger from Kansas City; his feeding ranch, his barns and sheds, his house and town lots. It was a terrible blow to me; now only the common, everyday people would be left. I used to walk mournfully up and down before his office while all these deeds were being signed,—there were usually
lawyers and notaries inside. But once, when he happened to be alone, he called me in, asked me how old I was now, and how far along I had got in school. His face and voice were more than kind, but he seemed absent-minded, as if he were trying to recall something. Presently he took from his watch-chain a red seal I had always admired, reached for my hand, and dropped the piece of carnelian into my palm.