Delphi Complete Works of Booth Tarkington (Illustrated), page 738
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.
For instance: he would retire a few steps toward the rear, and, pointing to the sky, adjure it in a solemn voice which made every one lean forward in a dead hush:
“Tell me, ye silent stars, that seem to slumber ‘neath the auroral coverlet of day, tell me, down what laurelled pathways among ye walk our dead, the heroes whose blood was our benison, bequeathing to us the heritage of this flower-strewn land; they who have passed to that bourne whence no traveller returns? Answer me: Are not theirs the loftiest names inscribed on your marble catalogues of the nations?” He let his voice out startlingly and shouted: “CREEPS there a creature of the earth with spirit so sordid as to doubt it, to doubt who heads those gilded rolls! If there be, then I say to him, ‘Beware!’ For the names I see written above me to-day on the immemorial canopy of heaven begin with that of the spotless knight, the unsceptred and uncrowned king, the godlike and immaculate” — (here he turned suddenly, ran to the front of the stage, and, with outstretched fist shaking violently over our heads, thundered at the full power of his lungs): “GEORGE WASHINGTON!”
He did the same for Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Grant, and four or five governors and senators of the State; and at every name the crowd went wild, worked up to it by Hector in the same way. But what surprised me was his daring to conclude his list with a votive offering laid at the feet of Passley Trimmer. Trimmer was the congressional representative of that district and one of the meanest men and smartest politicians in the world. He was always creeping out of tight places and money-scandals by the skin of his teeth; and yet, by building up the finest personal machine in the State, he stuck to his seat in Congress term after term, in spite of the fact that most of the intelligent and honest men in his district despised him. It was a proof of the power Hector held over his audience that, by his tribute to Trimmer, he was able to evoke the noisiest enthusiasm of the afternoon.
Nevertheless, what really tickled me most was the boy’s peroration. It gave me a pretty clear insight into his “innard workings.” He led up to it in his favourite way: stepping backward a pace or two and sinking his voice to a kind of Edwin Booth quiet; gradually growing a little louder; then suddenly turning on the thunder and running forward.
“You ask me for our credentials?” he roared. (Nobody had, this time.) “In the Lexicon of the Peoples, you ask me for my country’s credentials? The credentials of our pastures, our population and our pride! You ask me for my country’s credentials? I reply: ‘The credentials of our youth and our enthusiasm! Of red corpuscles! Of red blood! The credentials of the virility and of the magnificent manhood of the Columbian Continent!’ You ask for my country’s credentials and I answer: ‘The credentials of Glory! By right of the eternal and Almighty God!’”
