The American: A Middle Western Legend (7 page)

And she took him. This tall, beautiful, well-educated girl took him, Pete Altgeld, the disinherited, the self-made. Some might be cynical about this, but he couldn't be; he knew her better than any of them. He had her, in the morning, in the daytime, at night. This was the romance that life gives to only a few, and life had given it to him.

It was no wonder that looking at his face in the mirror, snipping a hair here, a hair there, he was able to forget that today was sure to be profoundly disturbing, and take comfort from the man who had married the woman, Emma Ford. He had a fine wife, and it was a boyhood love, the best love, the most lasting. When other men looked at her, casually at first, and then more intently, he felt the fierce pride of possession. Shouldn't a man stand on the firm foundation of his own things? Here he was in his own house, in this fine graystone mansion that was his; he had been only twelve years in Chicago, and the achievement was no small one. Actually, he had grown with the city, grown with the brutal, creative vigor of it.

How well he recalled what kind of a place Chicago had been in 1875! There, already, America's peculiar triumph, the railroads, converged. From the west and southwest the cattle came, by the millions, to be gutted, blooded, and rendered; a crazy-quilt of a city grew around the process of slaughter. Coal came from the south, iron from the north. Lumber drifted in through the lakes. Five hundred miles of Godforsaken street alternated between ice and mud, and an endless vista of shacks and sprawling factories spread like fast-multiplying mold. Here, a whole creed of power, success, wealth, and brute energy came into being. Alongside the horsecars came cattle riders from the vast prairie lands westward, and alongside the sooty trains were magnificent carriages. From the east, the south, the west, from the across the seas, workingmen poured in by the hundreds of. thousands—Yankees, Rebels, Germans, Irish, Bohemians, Jews, Slavs, Poles, Russians—hard, desperate men who fought to put enough in their bellies to maintain life, and always it seemed that for every job there were two men; and even as these men fought, others fought them, a new kind of giant, emperor, king, the man of the million dollars and the hundred million dollars. So there was blood let, and violence, and such a ferment as existed nowhere else in all the known world, and still into every corner of the earth Chicago sent forth her hungry cry for men, and more men.

This was it, his city, making him and made out of him. A man should stand on what is his own.

V

He went down to breakfast, and when he was at the foot of the stairs, his wife said to him, “Isn't it a fine morning, dear?” “A fine morning—yes, a fine morning,” he answered. She was wearing a gray skirt and a white blouse, crisp, clean, and bright; a person whom mornings agreed with, she smiled confidently. It might be said about her, if you were to say one thing to define her, that she was poised, and it was poise the Judge needed and appreciated. If it came to him that other people were speaking about her childlessness, and what a shame it was that a man like the Judge had no children, his reaction was furious anger; what did they know, and what did they understand of marriage and of what a man wanted of a wife?

As they sat down at the table, he looked at her again, nodded, and returned her smile. As usual, his paper was folded alongside his plate. As he unfolded it, he was already spooning into the heavy applesauce. “Cream?” his wife asked him. He nodded. He read, in the large black head,
ANARCHISTS TO DTE TODAY.
Then he took his second spoonful of sauce.
ANARCHISTS TO DIE TODAY.

Emma, his wife, poured heavy, yellow-tinted cream onto his fruit as he read, “At long last, after a year and a half, finis will be written to the Case of the Anarchists, and honest citizens can draw a deep breath and sleep soundly in their beds once more. We express our approval that in spite of so much malignant pressure put to bear, the verdict—”

His wife interrupted him by asking what it was.

“What?”

“I don't think,” she said, “that it's good for you to read at meals. I don't think it's good for your digestion, and it certainly isn't polite.”

“Polite?”

“It's simply bad manners, Pete.”

He always bowed to his wife when it came to manners. He had been congratulated many times, by those of his friends who knew about such things, on his wife's impeccable taste. Of taste, he had a small and carefully and painfully acquired stock, and while he trusted it, he did not stretch it. As long as he lived, he would not forget his first formal dinner, in the not so distant past, where the array of silver baffled; challenged, and angered him all at once, and with what pain and forbearance he got through, always managing to be a little behind the others.

“I'm sorry,” he nodded. “Only—”

“I wonder if the newspaper isn't a curse rather than a benefit. After all, what pleasure is there in knowing the misery of the world scarcely an hour after you awaken?”

“Very little, I suppose,” he admitted, folding the paper and returning to the fruit.

“Is it the anarchists?” she asked him.

“Yes.” And added after a moment, “They're going to die today. They're going to be hanged.”

She watched him as he ate. Actually, she knew more of him than he thought, than most of his friends thought. She knew about things inside of him, and when they came up, over the improving surface of the jurist, she took her stand—not entirely with selfishness, but with a fondness which recognized, as so few did, that there was fire inside that had never been allowed to burn.

“It's so long since they've been sentenced—over a year.”

“About sixteen months.”

“And they've had every chance,” she said carefully. “I think people are just tired of hearing about the anarchists. I think people are tired of talking about them.”

“Are they?”

“I think they are,” she said, still carefully. “With all you've said, Peter, I think they've had a fair trial.”

“I don't,” he said.

“You change your opinion,” she smiled. “I've heard you say that it was a very fair trial, an exceptionally fair trial. Are those your words?”

“Yes.”

“And every chance for appeal?”

“Yes.”

“But you change your opinion?”

The maid came in with the hotcakes. “Draw the blinds, please,” Mrs. Altgeld said, “and let in the sun.” When she had gone, the Judge said:

“Yes, I change my opinion, Emma. I don't think that's anything to be ashamed of. Too many people never change. I admit I change hard, but sometimes I change.”

“But they're anarchists.”

“Or socialists, or communists. I'm not sure I know what they are. I don't see that it matters a lot.”

“No. And at least we'll be able to sleep without worrying about bombs—”

“Emma!”

She knew signs of anger in him. She helped him to honey, and he began to eat the hotcakes. “They're good?” she asked.

“Very good. I'm going to get fat, too. Emma, look here. In this damned paper—”

“I don't like you to swear,” she said.

“I know. I shouldn't swear. Especially at breakfast, I shouldn't swear. I know and I'm sorry. But look here, in the paper it says: ‘… honest citizens can draw a deep breath and sleep soundly in their beds …' The same words. I don't like it when people begin to talk like sheep. Some of us should think.”

“Are you calling me a sheep?”

“No, no, no. But what were they tried for—for being anarchists, or communists, or socialists? No! For throwing the bomb. For over a year we've been crazy on this subject of bombs. But there's no evidence to convict them.”

At that moment, she brought it up. She was not going to bring it up, not going to mention it. It was ammunition that lay in her lap, ready to fire both ways; he knew it, yet she brought it up. An appeal for clemency for these men who were going to die had been signed by sixty thousand citizens of Chicago, some of them very prominent men. Yet John Peter Altgeld's name was missing. She said, casually, “Then why didn't you sign the petition? Goudy signed it. Brown signed it. But you didn't.”

“I didn't,” he admitted.

“Would you sign it now?”

“I don't know,” he said.

“Then where is the principle in your belief in their innocence?”

“I don't know. Am I supposed to have principles? You knew me the way I used to be, Emma, a long time ago. Should that produce principles?”

What he wanted to say after that eluded him, and he felt ashamed of bringing up the past in so childish a manner. He stabbed at his food and found that he no longer desired it, and he was almost grateful to Emma when she poured him a cup of coffee. “Thank you,” he said, contritely, and then became angry again when he realized that she was feeling sorry for him, sorry she had ever brought up the matter of the petition: He didn't want sympathy; he did what was right: suddenly, he told himself that and then in the saying it collapsed like a pricked balloon. His friend, Joe Martin the gambler, always said that you played the game to win and didn't count the stakes; but that was as childish as anything else, and even his friend Martin worshipped sincerely at the foot of a sort of perverted honesty, not holding his life much higher than a so-called debt of honor, whatever his honor was. Was there a pattern in his life concerning men who were good—in the accepted sense of the word—and did he despise such men? Of course he hadn't put his name to the petition; what good would it have done, in his own terms? He was a judge. He sat on the bench, enforcing the law, whether it was good law or bad law, just law or unjust law—and how well he knew that law and justice were things apart—and yet when he rendered a decision, did he stand on principle or the letter of the law? It was not a good world he inhabited; he had only to look around Chicago to see that, he had only to look back in his own memory to see what the world did to the weak, the small, and even to the strong who were not strong enough; yet hadn't he long ago decided that it was the best of all possible worlds? Hadn't he fought on that belief, up and up, step by step, proving the legend of America and making himself almost a caricature of that legend, a judge in a graystone house? Not, it is true, one of those like Field, or Armour, or McCormick—he had a different memory from theirs and he couldn't elude it entirely, and to prove that he had written a book,
Our Penal Machinery and its Victims.
Even if his desire to understand what makes criminal men was no more virtuous than Armour's desire to understand what makes sick cattle, as some of his enemies said, he was nevertheless interested in men and believed that crime could be cured as well as punished. But was that principle, or was the only principle that of the advancement of Judge Altgeld within the only frame he knew?

His wife said that she was sorry. “Now I'm sorry,” she said. “Why did I mention that? Why don't we forget about the anarchists? Finish your breakfast, please.”

He pushed his plate away. He knew the gesture displeased her; it was not right, it was an old, bad habit of his. And his wife said, more hotly:

“It's become like a sickness here in Chicago, this whole business of the anarchists. It's in our blood now, it seems.”

“Maybe it is a sickness.”

“Sometimes I would want to live anywhere, anywhere but here.”

The Judge said, “Here? This is what I am. I came here with nothing. I think a man who had nothing once, he tries to forget it, but he can't. Maybe Chicago is like a mother for me, so I could excuse this or that, and say, it's Chicago.”

VI

They said of Chicago then, in one of those pat phrases which have as little truth as substance, that it killed pigs and made men; but not long after Pete Altgeld came, he saw the men killed along with the pigs, and if there was a repugnance toward eating the flesh of one, that about limited the ethic. Pete Altgeld could have been king-pin in Savannah; Joe Martin had sketched that out once, saying: “I would have stayed. County attorney, state legislature, congress, senate. The place for a big frog, if he's smart, is a small puddle.” “And you?” Pete Altgeld asked. “Well,” his friend answered, “some big frogs want to be bigger.” But that was not entirely the case with Pete Altgeld when he threw over a good job, a job he had sweated for, fought for, suffered for too, to come to Chicago with one hundred dollars or so in his pockets and not a friend in the world, just a small-town, small-time lawyer, such as were a dime a dozen in the queen of western cities. It was more than that, for Chicago was sending out a call that could be heard a long way, a sound in which the clink of silver dollars mingled with the meshing gears of machines, the squealing of stuck pigs, the cry of many thousand voices, and somewhere, lost in it almost yet not entirely, an echo of the old western warwhoop. Chicago asked for men like Pete Altgeld. When he called it his mother, he was not far from wrong, for it was as much a mother as anything he had known, and sometimes it was not unkind to men who could hold on and suck at those swelling teats. How many days had he spent in his first small office standing at the window and watching the wonder that America had made and which only America could have made. The few cases he got in those days were not enough to keep him busy; he lived in his office, worked there when there was work, and uncertainly at first, but soon more confidently, reached out his fingers to take the pulse of the city.

It was not a very clean game he was playing; honesty and perseverance had a place, but they were strictly limited; of more importance were the people you knew, the way you used them, and the way you allowed them to use you. Nor were most of the cases that came his way fine struggles of jurisprudence; more often they were miserable pieces of the whole wretched melodrama the city presented. Divorce, or petty thievery, or for example the case which brought him the friendship of Joe Martin. Martin ran a high-class gambling parlor. A client came to Altgeld complaining of a good-sized loss at Martin's house, and asking Altgeld to recover for him, as was then possible within the law. Altgeld sent his demands to Martin, and when Martin came to see him, he called Altgeld's client a liar, labeled Altgeld's action as part of a big blackmail racket, and stated that, the client had never lost a dime at his place. Altgeld liked Martin's looks, a small, ruddy-faced, loudly dressed, and well-groomed man. So while he took the money, he questioned the client until he had determined that this time Martin was in the right; he threw out his client, returned the money to Martin, and made one of the best friends he had, better than the friends he made when he learned the method of political deals, when he learned that no lawyer has to starve if he climbs onto one or another of the political bandwagons. And he had climbed on. He had grown with Chicago.