# The Girl from the Machine

Extracted from Scribner's magazine, Vol 40, 1906, pp. 467-479. Accompanying illustrations by Fletcher C. Ransom omitted.
THE GIRL FROM THE MACHINE
By Jesse Lynch Williams

### I

THE girl slipped into the shadow of a tree just beyond the crowd and listened, smiling appreciatively as she thought how disconcerted "the eloquent young candidate" would be to know that she was there. He was emitting burning words about the wickedness of the corporations, and her father was president or director of a score of the most conspicuous.
The speaker's efforts to convince the people that he was one of them, despite well-known handicaps of birth and inheritance, appealed to her as too delicious to keep to herself. The money enabling him to fight corporate wealth happened to have been inherited from a corporation. But the anticipated relish of mimicking him at home burned out in a blush as she suddenly realized that this would involve acknowledging that she had taken the trouble to go and hear him—a thing she did not care to proclaim. Perhaps the blush showed the real reason for this secret expedition.
Abstractly he was absurd, as represented by the papers (controlled by her father), but concretely he looked very nice as he stood up there with the flaring light overhead casting deep, interesting shadows upon his clean-cut face while he forgot himself in the vehemence with which he swayed the silent crowd before him.
Davidge, unaware of Miss Hallowell's proximity, presently caught a glimpse of the familiar figure of the Hallowells' butler, he being her escort, and his figure being of a sort inconvenient to hide in the shadow of middle-aged trees—hardly an æsthetic sight, but the orator sweeping grandly on to his peroration experienced the usual leap of the heart occasioned by the presence of anybody or anything even remotely associated with her. Subconsciously he kept wondering what the deuce old Gray might be doing in this remote edge of a dirty town miles away from the Hallowells' place at an hour usually claimed by the Hallowells' dinner.
As a lover, Davidge was grimly grateful that even this member of the household cared to come and hear him talk. As a politician he reminded himself that a servant's opinion counts as much as his master's at the polls—more, incidentally, than his mistress's—and resolved to seek out Gray at the conclusion of the speech to thank him for his interest.
So the girl behind the tree was caught.
"Nell!" he exclaimed with a burst of delight; "how sweet of you!" The vote was forgotten; he had her hand in his, he was making obeisance over it. The crowd was still cheering his name; he did not hear it.
"Oh, you needn't think it was because I admire you," she said, smiling easily. She withdrew her hand and retreated a little from him.
"I don't," he said in a lower tone; "but you came!" His voice was vibrant from speaking, his eye flashing, his atmosphere dominant.
"Oh," said the girl in an indolent manner, "I was just passing by this way."
"But you stopped!"
"I couldn't get through this crowd of yours with the machine. We haven't all had your experience in getting around the 'peopul,' Tom."
He laughed applaudingly at that. "You could have gone around the block, you know—if you'd wanted to." He drove his gaze down into her eyes, which fluttered like cowards and sought the shadow.
"Not with a broken-down machine," she returned glibly. "I had to put in the time somehow. You're not much of a speaker; are you?"
He paid no attention to the last. "Broken down?" he asked, a sudden plan coming into the back of his head. Politicians learn to see opportunities quickly.
"It's all right now."
"Oh!" he sighed, disappointed. Then looking sceptically at the fat, incompetent house servant, "Who fixed it?" he asked.
He kept demolishing her defences. Safety lay in flight. "Perhaps you'll be convinced that it's fixed if you'll take the trouble to get it for me," she answered. "I'm late enough as it is." He kept on gazing quizzically at Gray as she pointed down the dark side-street where the automobile stood. "But it would take him forever," she whispered, smiling, "to get through this crowd of yours."
"That's what I was counting on, Nell," he muttered and started off in the direction she pointed, adding, "I suppose you saw that."
She did see it; she felt it, too; her breast was thumping with it—another reason for her panicky desire to be rid of him.
She watched him as the crowd parted before him, some of them turning to point him out, to gaze after the hero, as he brushed by, ignoring their adulation. She had come here to be amused. … So she smiled satirically.
As usual after one of his moments Davidge had felt the jubilant glow that comes of masterly self-assertion, a delicious form of intoxication known to a few preachers, some actors, and to "born" orators. But the momentary sense of invincibility now only made him rebel the more at being thwarted in the thing he desired beyond all the public power the world could offer. The natural man within him raged, and he had to battle with a suffusing impulse to rush back, snatch her up in his arms, and make off with her to the uttermost ends of the earth, there to fight and keep her for his own to the end of time.
Presently the civilized man returned to the lady and her servant in a snorting forty-horse-power touring car.
"That's not my machine," she remarked, annoyed.
"It's mine," he said, jumping out beside her; "but I'll let you go home in it," he added with bantering condescension, and then stretched out an assisting hand deferentially.
The girl turned away with a manner calculated to freeze him. "Gray, will you be good enough to get my runabout?"
"Yes, Gray, get Miss Hallowell's runabout," put in Davidge, "and have it hauled to that garage half a mile down Main Street. I've telephoned them to expect it."
The girl turned in amazement.
"Whoever fixed your car," he said calmly, "bungled the job pretty badly; the vibration screws are gone."
"The vibration screws!"
"What did you think was the trouble?"
There had been no trouble, but she could not confess it now. She stood looking down the side-street, trapped, irritated, but considerably interested.
"Hurry, please," he said in a matter-of-fact manner; "I have another speech to make this evening." He touched her elbow gently. She bristled. He should have remembered how she always disliked being seized by the elbow.
"I do not care to go with you," she said.
"I know, but I'm afraid there's no way out of it, now," he replied with elaborate sympathy. "Gray has gone to hunt up a horse. Hurry, Nell, I'm due in Carusey in forty-five minutes."
"I'm not going with you, Tom!"
"Oh, yes you are!"
She felt that he was willing her toward the step. "It will be thirty miles around by your place," he whispered; "but I'll risk it—to please you."
She drew back abruptly. "Thanks," she said with sarcastic distinctness; "I'd hate to make you late!"
"Think how that would please your father," he returned. "Come, Nell, it's to be the speech of my life!"
"I'm not interested in your silly career."
"But I am!" he cried, and picking her up in his arms, he sprang into the car, threw in the clutch, and dashed for the open country.

### II

At first she said nothing, sinking into the depths of her fur collar and giving herself up to the soothing sensations of speed and the joyous fright of abduction,perhaps a heritage from former ages. He, too, said nothing, being still in a region of vehicles and frequent crossings. Finally her dignity compelled her to let him see a little of her disapproval.
"The vibration screws," she remarked, looking straight down the read, "were all right when I left the machine."
"I know," he said; "it was done after you came to hear me speak."
"How do you know?"
"I saw it done."
"Who did it?"
"Some foe of the money power."
"Why didn't you stop it?"
"But I'm a friend of the people."
"You did it!"
"Of course; putting the money power's machine out of business is my job, at present. Ask your father."
She looked at the fleeting landscape, the rising moon, and then at him. "I suppose you think you're very clever," she remarked sneeringly.
"It doesn't matter about that. I've got you."
"When we come to the trolley, I'll get out, if you please."
He reached down, engaged the high-speed gear, opened the throttle, and advanced the spark. "At this rate of speed, Nell? Really, I couldn't let you think of it."
"I prefer to go home by trolley."
"I'm fighting the trolleys."
There was a silence. They raced on through the cool, open country, the coil purring in high notes of delight as the car ate up the white road, bounding over bridges with a roar, dashing past farm-houses, disappointing eager dogs which could not reach the fence in time to bark at them.
Presently the girl spoke again, still deep in her coat and still looking straight ahead:
"Of course you realize that after this I can never have anything more to do with you; that I shall never speak to you; that I shall never come near you, that I—oh, oh!"
They were rounding a curve at rather high speed and centrifugal force had its way with her. She came very near him, indeed, and now was constrained to speak to him, too—a stiff apology for having clutched his arm. Perhaps it was his elbow.
"Your apology is accepted," he said, turning his face away.
She knew he was laughing at her.
"Witty, aren't you?" she flung out.
"It was a pretty good joke on you, Nell, when you stop to think of it. You would come to hear me speak, would you? Well, I'll teach you how to trifle with a reformer."
"Quite proud of yourself!"
"I'm proud of one thing."
She kept silent for a bounding half-mile.
He was bending over the wheel. "I'm sure you want to know what I'm so proud of," he said, tooting for the trolley crossing.
"I do not."
"Then I'll tell you. I," he said deliberately, "am honest about it, at any rate."
"You mean that I'm not?" Her cheeks flushed.
"Here are your vibration screws. Even your father's crowd acknowledges that I'm honest."
Oh, to jump out and break her neck so that the blame would fall upon him and he should have remorse all the days of his life! But she didn't; they seldom do. Between her teeth she said, "If you only knew how I hated you!" her voice shaking with it.
He observed the interesting curl of her lips and under it the momentary flash in the moonlight as he replied luxuriously: "Is that the reason you came to see me—'way over there, without any dinner?"
"I dined before starting, thank you."
"Did you? Nice of you to think of ordering dinner early, stirring up old Gray, coming all that distance—all to hear me speak."
"Oh, I admit being curious——"
"Aha!"
"To see you make a spectacle of yourself."
"But you liked my speech—you know you did. I know you did. A man can always tell."
"You convinced me of one thing: What they say about you is true."
"They say so many things. Do you believe them, Nell?"
He seemed serious and a little nicer in that tone; but it did not save him. "You have convinced me that you are just as conceited as a man can be."
"That isn't true, Nell. I could be still more conceited—if you would only let me."
She hurried away from that at once.
"Also you amused me. It must amuse your 'peo-pul' too, pretending to be one of them—coming in an imported car to do it. Ha, ha!"
"It's sweet of you, Nell, to be so much concerned about my success. But don't you worry about the people," he went on in a calm, conversational tone, as if they were the best of friends. "That is just the mistake so many of the bosses—so many reformers make, too. The people know me pretty well by this time, so much better than you do, Nell. And they understand the issues of this campaign so much better, too. Did you ever stop to think how little you appreciate all this? I don't believe you even understood what I was talking about."
"Oh, you don't?" she returned disdainfully. There was not enough difference in their ages to make her wish that he were younger, but there was quite enough to make her wish often that she were a little older. Just to show him that she was not the ignorant child he thought her, she now outlined his entire address. When she finished she found him bending over the wheel shaking with laughter.
"You dear thing! you lovely thing!" he cried jubilantly. "Conceited? Oh," he shouted aloud to the passing trees, echoing his horn from the distant hills, "there never was a man so conceited! Why, Nell, you must have been there the whole time! You must have listened to the whole speech!" Then, suddenly in the other tone, he said: "Oh, if I could only make you listen to me when I talk to you alone! No, don't be afraid, Nell, I won't. I know my place. But, oh, you dear, dear girl!" His voice came closer even though he did not. "If you only knew how I am missing you these days! If you only knew how I'm needing you! But that's all right, I'll shut up." He turned his gaze down the road again.
The combination of her emotions was almost too much for her. Just when he seemed to be taking her less seriously than ever he suddenly became devoted and deferential; while still showing her that he despised her he let her see how he loved her. She resented his masculine arrogance, his mannish tactlessness, and she hated herself for wanting to cry. So because she felt her heart giving way a little in spite of everything she pushed forth these words to him in desperation:
"The reason I came to hear you, the reason I listened so closely, if you must have it"—her clear voice rang defiantly in the frosty air—"I wanted to see whether you attacked my father!"
"Was that it, Nell?" he asked quietly.
"That was it."
The horn tooted dismally for a curve. He said nothing more.
It suddenly occurred to her for the first time why her father's name had been so consistently spared in the candidate's speeches. It opened a rift in the clouds that had gathered over them of late. It was the sort of thing to appeal to a girl, and it set her thinking.
The silence continued for so long that she became exceedingly uncomfortable. She had wanted to sting, but not to injure. His actions and his words this evening were hard to forgive, but it was harder to forget the reason for them. Besides, even if he did play the game roughly, it was all in the spirit of banter and good sport; whereas she felt that she had now done the nasty, cattish thing. Straightway, like her impulsive sort, she wanted to take all the blame. But girlish pride closed her lips, so she bit them, hating herself, her sex, her situation.
As for the young man, he too was taking her remark with undue seriousness, being in love with her. He had, to be sure, made jocular allusions to his fight with her father's interests—just as he and the old man himself were accustomed to do when they met at the club—because it seemed more sensible and civilized than to ignore the matter with a humorless silence which would only proclaim it uncomfortably. But the girl's serious reference to the affair, whether she really had suspected him or not, seemed in very bad taste. He had not thought it of her. It made him rather bitter as he reflected how little she realized the kind of attack he could make on Colonel Hallowell, if he wanted to, and at what a sacrifice he refrained.
The candidate sighed and still held his peace. He no longer felt strong and confident; he felt weak and discouraged. The cold, whistling air had cleared his brain of excitement and gayety. The reaction had now set in from the elation following his speech, a thing to be expected with temperaments of his sort, though he had never yet learned to expect it.
What was the use of doing the nice thing, when this was the way it was received by the one for whom it was done. Under all his romping badinage there had been a real craving for a little sympathy and understanding, the kind women can give. He was very tired. He had been going on his nerves for the past fortnight, and like a runner in the last lap, it sometimes seemed impossible to keep up the present pace until that terrible Tuesday, now only three days away.
Within the last two weeks a reaction, subtly abetted by the machine, had also set in with the reform movement throughout the State. Every day his managers reported that he was losing ground. A month ago he could have won easily, but now even his most enthusiastic followers predicted a close finish; and Colonel Hallowell, Davidge happened to know, was as confident in private as he was blatant in public. He predicted that his man Holmes would be elected governor by fifty thousand majority. This would mean not merely the death of Davidge's political aspirations, but what mattered a great deal more to him (at least he thought it did), it would also mean that the reform movement would die, as so many others have, in ridicule and despair, with the machine more firmly riveted to the government than ever.
There was a way out, and the girl had reminded him of it in an unfortunate manner. One day two years ago when Davidge was still a regular party man the old gentleman had said: "Tom, there's an envelope at my office containing twenty-five thousand dollars. Of course I know you don't want any of it for yourself, but you better tell the boys to come around."
In itself it was not very astonishing; they all did it, all the corporations; but Davidge hadn't expected it of Colonel Hallowell. It had been, indeed, one of the things that had set the young man thinking and had helped to disgust him with the game as it was played. Now, at that time, perhaps it might not have excited an apathetic public, but in these two years the country had become more sensitive about such matters. That much, at least, investigations, reform movements, and magazine exposures had accomplished. If this charge were made now against a man of Colonel Hallowell's standing it would be political capital worth far more than twenty-five thousand dollars to Davidge. …
Finally, it reduced itself in his mind to a question of whether or not he really had any right to suppress truth which meant so much to the good cause merely out of a selfish sentiment for a girl (who did not appreciate him). He had the average human capacity for self-deception, you see, and therefore saw his duty now in a light that was denied him as long as he had any hope of winning the girl's approval. Therefore, not being of the sort to waste time in feeling his pulse or analyzing his motives, he straightway began to outline a new speech for Carusey which would arouse the whole State. It was Saturday night. The thing would soak in effectively by Tuesday morning.
It was not to be much of a meeting; the machine had bought up all the available places in Carusey, except an assembly-room in the same building as the opera-house, where the opposition was holding its grand rally. Apparently the only reason the machine allowed them to have this place was because it had been undergoing repairs which were still unfinished. But it did not matter about the size of the audience as long as it included the inevitable reporters. They would do the rest.
Another sharp curve swept the girl almost into his arms. Her feet, clutching vainly at the rubber-covered floor of the car, slipped out from under her, and despite the low partition between the seats, Davidge felt the sweet weight of her slenderness against him. It was not a great weight, but it made him gasp, and his open lips caught a wind-swept wisp of odorous hair, which tingled him like a live wire. He had the sensitiveness of his kind to such influences and in his present overwrought nervous state the occurrence made him tremble as he clutched the wheel.
She recovered her balance quickly and merely remarked, with the comical drollness of the old days when things went better with them: "After all, we seem to be thrown together a good deal of late."
It was so like her to rise with smiling superiority to a thing which would have embarrassed maidens of the blushing, bridling order. It was one of the qualities in her that had first made her seem worth while, and now it came up to him, with its train of precious associations, far more potent than her physical allure. He had to face what he loved and would lose to-night. His Carusey speech might help his chances for the governorship; it would kill his chances with the girl.
He had made no reply to her facetious remark and they rode on in silence, wasting several more miles of moonlight.
"Why don't you talk to me?" she asked.
"I've got to think about my speech," he said, trying hard to do so.
Then after a pause, "Tell me about your speech, Tom."
"You wouldn't understand it," he answered abruptly.
"Oh, indeed!" she said. "Do you mind if I play with my dolls?"
He paid no attention to her fooling; seemed not to hear her, so intent was he upon his speech, bending abstractedly over the wheel.
Her father, who, with good-natured cynicism, took it for granted that this efficient young man would get over "the reform stage" and come around to a practical view of certain matters after his approaching defeat, had once remarked to Nell that Tom had great powers of concentration. She turned now and looked at him, saying to herself, "He has great powers of concentration."
With that something happened he knew nothing of. Somehow or other there had suddenly come to her at last the old feminine desire to belong to a man; the thing she had struggled against so long, feared and liked, hated and wanted to happen. Her shoulder was against his and she shuddered and rejoiced as her heart leaped out to him. He seemed so brave and fine, fighting on with his back to the wall for an unselfish cause against an outnumbering foe and yet scorning their methods. It suddenly dawned upon her that she had a hero at her feet, and that she had only trampled upon him. He had said that he needed her; it was sweet to be needed by him. He looked drawn and tired. Oh, to be of some real use, to make up for all that had gone before! The preliminary struggle of the captive was over. She was ready to yield to him now.
They were rapidly picking up familiar landmarks. Home would be upon them soon. She looked at him once more and smiled chaffingly. "I suppose you think you're going to make a very fine speech at Carusey," she said.
"The speech of my life," he muttered, without turning.
She laughed aloud at his momentous tone, not dreaming of what had been going on within his mind. "Plotting murder, or suicide—which is it?"
He laughed with her. "Murder," he said glibly. "One must make his choice in this world, Nell," he went on; "I'm done with suicide. We all come to it sooner or later: The survival of the fittest; your life or mine. It's the scheme of the universe, and we happen to be part of the universe. Ideals is only another name for obstacles. The logical conclusion of self-sacrifice is self-annihilation; and surely the object of being can't be non-being. Yes, I'm done with suicide."
She looked round at him as if bored by his sententiousness. "Dear me," she said, "I'm terribly afraid of you!"
"What's more to the point," he replied, with an answering smile, "I'm not afraid of you, either!"
She did not like this. "Aren't you?" she asked.
They glared at each other for a moment in the moonlight.
"Not a scrap," he said. "Shall we go on down to the east drive or is the new road finished?"
"You needn't trouble," she said; "I'm going to Carusey with you!"
"The deuce you are!"
"Don't you want me?"
"No."
"Oh, yes, you do."
"What makes you think so?"
"I'm sure you do. Why did you put my car out of order? Why did you run away with me? Why did you come so far out of your route?"
"Oh, just for a lark."
"Nonsense! You wouldn't risk missing the speech of your life just for a lark. You know it's because you were simply crazy to have me with you. I know it, too. A woman can always tell!"
"I suppose you think that's an imitation of my voice," he said, but could not help laughing at the way she was throwing his own words back at him.
She, too, seemed to enjoy it, and replied: "It doesn't matter about that; I'm going to Carusey!"
He turned and looked at her with new interest, smiling at her with amused admiration, and withal a bit nervous. If Nell were in the audience what would become of his speech—and the governorship? "I really believe you think you are going," he said condescendingly.
"Perfectly positive of it," she replied complacently; "just as positive as that you really want me, though you won't acknowledge it."
"Talk about my conceit!"
"We aren't talking about you at all just now. We talked about you enough. I'm doing it, now."
He laughed with the sheer joy of her, ignoring subsurface thoughts for the moment. "Who's running this car, anyway?" he demanded.
"You're running it," she returned suggestively.
He smiled banteringly. "Well, you needn't swagger so," he said.
"But I am proud of one thing," she said; "I am honest about it. I want to hear that 'speech of meh life,' and you're trying to make out that you don't want me to."
Davidge had stopped smiling banteringly. "Your feminine idea of wit, I suppose," he remarked, looking down the road.
"It is rather a good joke on you, Tom, when you stop to think about it; caught in your own trap! You would put the 'Money Powers" machine out of commission, would you? This is what you get for it." She felt herself, for some reason, gaining the ascendancy more and more every moment. Her vitality went up as his went down. Perhaps one reason for this was because, previously, she had had something to conceal; now he had. The girl turned and laughed at him, jeered at him, felt sure of him, looked around at him again, and loved him.
He was becoming really alarmed, a premonition of defeat, perhaps. "You can't seriously think of travelling all over the State with me, Nell. Why, it'll be midnight when we get back!"
"The moon will be so bully, then," she said in a low tone, tempting him.
"Think of what your father would say."
"Father's dining out. That's how I managed to slip away to hear you—all to hear you, Tom," she added with burlesque sentimentality. It was what he had accused her of a few minutes ago.
"Your father," said Davidge with an air of settling the matter, "is at Carusey."
She looked at him with the devil in her sweet eyes and said, "But not at our meeting, Tom."
"If you are really so much interested in 'our' meeting," he said desperately, "how do you expect me to account for a pretty woman, unchaperoned, late at night? Remember, they have spies all over looking for chances to make trouble for me."
"Oh, ho! you think you can shock me out of it, do you? Well, you can't! Tell everybody it's Colonel Hallowell's daughter; it will be a great card for the eloquent young reformer. Maybe they will think you've reformed me." She smiled and looked up at him artfully. "Perhaps you can—if you try."
He turned his face away. "You unscrupulous little flirt!"
"I'm not flirting with you, Tom; I'm really very much impressed by you this evening. Won't you please let me go?"
"No," he shouted, "I won't."
She was laughing at him, palpably laughing, she felt so sure of victory, revelling in it joyously as she watched him wriggle in silence.
"Here's the lodge," he growled, and slowed up, swerving out to turn the car in between the posts.
Her hands closed on his. There was a momentary struggle for the guidance of the car. "Quick, Tom, or we'll run smash into the gate!"
He put on the brakes and stopped short. The car was still in the road. Her hands still clutched his, and through the two thicknesses of gloves he felt her determination. She looked sparklingly up at his face. The moon, being high enough by this time, looked down upon her face, which was sweet and very near, as perhaps she realized.
Suddenly he had her in his arms. "Let go of that wheel," he whispered, gulping, "or I'll kiss you, Nell!"
"I'm going with you," she said steadily, "and you will never kiss me unless I allow it. I know you too well, Tom." She kept her gaze boldly upon his eyes, not twelve inches from her own, instinctively realizing the danger of flinching now. Thus they wasted several seconds (which might have been employed, for instance, in going to Carusey). Then slowly, with her free hand, she brought out of her sleeve her trump card. It was a small, folded, filmy thing called a handkerchief. With this she covered her laughing eyes while her body sobbed in his relaxing arms.
The candidate for governor turned on full power and the car leaped down the Carusey road with the coil singing higher and higher in ecstasy.
"Now we are even," thought the girl, smiling under her handkerchief.

### III

"But I have to go around by the stage door," said Tom, "so what'll you do? Told you not to come."
"Oh, that doesn't matter," she answered, full of resource, "Here come some very nice-looking women; I'll just follow them in as if I belonged to their party, and no one will know the difference. Good-by, Tom; make a good speech."
"I'll look for you here when the meeting is over," said Davidge, and he disappeared.
It was not until Nell had passed into the foyer, lined with pictures of Holmes, that she discovered that Tom had shunted her into the wrong meeting. But as there seemed to be nothing else to do, she followed the women with a bland smile, until she found them entering a box with the conscious air of the fat wives of prominent citizens whose husbands are to sit upon the platform. Whereupon they turned and looked coldly at the pretty stranger in the automobile coat, and then at the committee man with a large ribbon who had claimed the honor of being their usher. They now had the air of telling him that they had never seen this young person before in their lives.
"Have I made a mistake?" asked Nell, smiling sweetly at the ladies; then turning to the committeeman, "Did my father happen to tell you where I was to sit?"
The committeeman inquired the name of the father. She supplied the information. He looked up. So did the fat ladies.
"If you are separated from your party, Miss Hallowell," put in one of them, glancing at another, who nodded, "won't you come in here and sit with us? There's an extra seat, you see." They not only gave her a seat, but put her in front, where everybody in the audience could see that Miss Hallowell was their guest.
"Here comes your father," said one of the ladies; "he doesn't often attend political gatherings."
"Neither do I," said the girl, watching her father being led to a place of honor not far from the chairman of the meeting, which forthwith started off with a rush.
With Davidge things were not going so favorably. The moment he entered the smaller hall upstairs he discovered why he had been allowed by the machine to have it. In the course of the repairs still under way the partitions between the two rooms had been torn down and were not yet entirely put up—the machine had seen to that. The opening had been covered by a back-drop. Tom's room was two flights above the opera-house. The opening between the two was near the top of the wings of the opera-house stage and directly adjoining the stage of the smaller auditorium; in other words, all the noise of the big meeting was pouring up into the smaller meeting as through a megaphone. That was why the machine's committee had secured such a large and loud band; that was why every prominent man who entered the opera-house was cheered so enthusiastically. The Independents' rally was a failure. No other building was obtainable. So they decided to go out and parade some more—they had been parading since seven o'clock—and then have a meeting with sky-rockets in the open air.
Tom promised to join them in time to make his speech. Meanwhile, having heard his name mentioned from below in no uncertain tone, he decided that as long as his own meeting was broken up he would linger to look in on theirs. So he lit a cigar and simply crawled out upon the dark rafters, surrounded by scenery-tackle and dusty drops and gauzes. Looking down from here he could see the crowded stage below and a segment of the audience. He soon found the face he was searching for. Nell was looking on with considerable interest from the front of the proscenium box. He watched her eagerly. She could have descried him if she had looked up, but like all the rest down there, she was too intent upon what was going on.
Holmes, Tom's rival for the governorship, was speaking, and he seemed to be getting the audience on the run, rousing great enthusiasm by his condemnation of Davidge. Holmes was a good orator, with a self-confident manner and the gift of ridicule. His line of attack was all very old to Davidge, but it was new to Nell. The audience seemed to like it.
Holmes accused his young rival of having "the enthusiasm of youth!" Tom saw Nell smiling at this. Then he talked oratorically about boy alarmists and discoursed upon the necessity of having a man in office, "a man you can trust in times of danger and excitement, a man capable of meeting the burning issues of these perilous times with calmness and discretion." Nell put her head on one side and thought it over.
Next Holmes called upon the audience to tell him what this stripling, this traitor to his own cast was "doing all this for, any way? What's in it for him?" Then, reaching over as if to take hold of the audience with his long hands, he confided to them the damning reason: "He's not in this for his health, my friends. Do you know what's the matter with him? Listen! he's ambitious; ambitions! I tell you, ambitious!" Nell thought a man would not be worth much without ambition, so she didn't feel very badly over that.
But from this point on Holmes began by innuendo and implication to defame his rival to some purpose. Practically he accused Davidge of doing with his money what the reformer accused the machine of doing with their unlimited resources. It was merely the naughty boy's retort of "you're another" put into more or less grown-up language, but it would be effective, Davidge knew, launched at the eleventh hour of the campaign when too late thoroughly to counteract it. It was an old dodge, saving the big gun for the decisive moment, but it had not occurred to him that they would question his honesty. By dint of gathering in a few innocent facts and by enlarging upon inconsistencies such as may be found in every thinking man's political past, Holmes was enabled to create an impression which was as incriminating as it was false, and he led his now perfectly silent audience on from step to step with the telling effect of cumulative evidence.
"Well," thought Davidge, sensing the mind of the audience as an expert in audiences, "it looks as if he had 'em. It shows he's more afraid of me than I thought he was, anyway," he added grimly.
Tom was angry, but he took it all as a part of the game. Nell, however, had never attended a political rally before, and she took it very personally. She was becoming more and more furious with every applauded period. The ladies had whispered to her of the breaking up of poor Tom's meeting. She was glad, at any rate, that he was not at this one to hear these outrageous lies, and to see them countenanced, apparently, by her father.
Tom heard the lies and admired their cleverness, even while they made him hot, but he did not waste time in looking at her father. On Nell's unconscious face, with the foot- and top-lights shining full upon it, Davidge now saw something which made him wonder whether he cared, after all, to stoop to the machine's level, to pick up dirt and soil his fingers throwing it. If the reform movement had to resort to such methods to win, perhaps, there were worse things than losing. For that is how the so-called logical sex talks to itself sometimes when it thinks it is thinking and is really only feeling. The girl's hands were twisting in her lap, her lips were parted, her breath was coming fast. Tom, out upon his rafter, smoking voluminously, kept staring so intently at her blazing eyes that, with unconscious telepathy, despite her absorption, he suddenly drew her gaze up to his.
She started, gasped, and repressed an involuntary ejaculation. The ladies with her, startled by this sudden occurrence in the tense stillness of the house, followed her gaze and saw the unaccountable sight of a man crawling along the rafters; for Tom was about to leave. Also they beheld, in a bright shaft of light against the surrounding blackness above him, a moving cloud of smoke, which they thought accounted for all the rest.
"Fire!" screamed one of them shrilly. The speaker stopped. The woman pointed. Someone else screamed. It was a man this time. In a moment the place was in confusion. In a moment more it would be a panic, then a stampede, then a great disaster. Colonel Hallowell and several others on the platform sprang forward to quiet the crowd; some of the rest ran off the stage. "Keep your seats," someone in the orchestra kept shouting excitedly.
"There isn't any fire; there isn't any fire!" called Nell. No one heard her.
Out across the stage hanging to a rope swung Tom, streaked with dust. He dropped near the box, jumped across the footlights, and then back again with the girl in his arms. "You're safe, my darling, anyway, he cried as he made through the crowd for the property-room. He knew a short cut here for the street.
At last she made him understand. "Quick, Tom! Stop them! You must! Lives depend on it. There isn't any fire. It was your cigar smoke."
Now the psychology of the mob shows that it thinks and feels much more slowly than individuals. Many in the audience were still in their senses. They were making toward the exits faster and faster, but no one as yet was hurt.
But even Davidge's famous voice proved as futile as Colonel Hallowell's in the uproar. It was like shouting to Niagara Falls to stop. Wild gesticulation did not decrease the unreasoning alarm. Tom's face and clothes, streaked with the black dust of years, helped to terrorize them.
"Here, take this!" cried Nell, running out from the property-room with Raymond Hitchcock's fire-trumpet, used in the week's run of "Easy Dawson." "No, don't say that; they won't believe you, now. Say the fire's out!"
"The fire's out!" bellowed Tom through the speaking trumpet.
"Tell them you put it out!"
"I put it out, I tell you!"
"Show them your trumpet!"
"See! I'm a fireman!" He waved his trumpet. "All out! All over!"
"Show them your clothes and your face."
"See how I got blackened by it! I put the fire out!" he bellowed grandly, and repeated it all over again, his voice gaining power as he went on. Like children, men and women at such times require a sign more than an argument. It helped some of them wonderfully, the sight of that trumpet. "Why, you don't suppose I'd stay here just for the fun of talking!" he laughed good-naturedly through his trumpet. "If the fire weren't out I'd run with the first of 'em!" Perhaps the humor of it had got into Davidge's voice, or else it was merely the unconsciously transmitted conviction that there was no fire. At any rate, he was now even affecting that part of the mob seething near the exits. In a moment more the fatal trampling and piling up would have begun, the thing most feared in such disasters His calm, magnetic voice went on reassuringly: "Wait just a second, and I'll tell you all about it. Can't you wait? Funniest thing you ever saw! Just a minute—plenty of time to leave after my story."
Colonel Hallowell and the other would-be pacificators yielded to him. Naturally they were not so calm for they were unaware of the origin of the panic. In the excitement they had not recognized his dust-streaked face, but they seemed to recognize that this man was the natural leader, and that his calmness was gradually communicating itself to the terror-stricken crowd. Davidge now had them somewhat quieted down. Many of them were actually waiting expectantly for him to tell them all about it.
"Nell," he whispered, taken aback, "what the deuce'll I tell 'em now?"
"The truth—someone saw you smoking."
"It was simply this way—are you listening? Well, make 'em shut up back there. It was this way: a lady in the audience—I say a lady—deceived by cigar smoke—up in the wings. My cigar. I put the cigar out. See?"
The crowd now began to buzz with interest and reassurance; some of them laughed nervously. A few were still making for the doors, but the crucial moment had been turned in the direction of safety.
Davidge was about to turn away. The girl darted out to him again. "Quick, Tom, you idiot, you've got them now! Talk to them; they love you! Tell them the things he said about you were lies."
The inspiration was hers, but in some respects the masculine mind also has its superiority. Tom saw a better way than that, and waving his arms for silence, was off like a horse at the post:
"Friends: Far be it from me to attempt to continue the speech so unhappily interrupted by this amusing incident. I can only reiterate what the distinguished candidate has so ably and so eloquently said. I agree with him that you need a safe man, a man you can trust in peril—where is Holmes? You want a conservative man, a man you can rely upon in these days of alarmists! Where is Holmes? A man who can calmly and discreetly meet the burning issues of this campaign. Where is Holmes? I'm afraid, ladies and gentlemen, that Holmes's discretion is the better part of his valor; it has carried him home. I often wondered why he was called Holmes." Even the pun went now. The people were laughing hysterically. Some of those who had left the stage also flocked back at this point.
Tom went on, partly addressing the latter. "This is not my meeting. This is Holmes's meeting; but as long as he didn't seem to want it I thought I'd take it. Seemed a shame to waste such a fine large meeting. I don't suppose many of you recognize my face with all this dust on it, any more than you recognize my voice through the megaphone. There doesn't seem to be any chairman on deck—on the burning deck, eh?—to introduce me, so, with your very kind permission, I'll introduce myself! Ladies and gentlemen," throwing down the trumpet and applying his handkerchief, "my name is Thomas Davidge. If Holmes doesn't care enough for your votes to stay and ask for them, I do! This is the first and only time I ever stood on the enemies' platform. I would not have done so now, but that I felt that you needed me. And I think you do need me—not only now, but for two years—at the capitol! Friends, I have saved your lives to-night! If you care to, you can return the favor next Tuesday!"
A mighty roar of yells and applause went up, and at that point Holmes came running back upon the stage. Someone had told him what was going on. He grasped the arm of the chairman, appearing from the other wing, "For heaven's sake, shut him off," Holmes panted, "or he may win out, after all."
Colonel Hallowell, who had been quietly observing the whole procedure with a thoughtful scowl, now raised his authoritative hand; his two excited underlings stopped, obedient, but perplexed. "What do you mean?" faltered Holmes.
The astute old reader of the popular fancy pointed to the reporters, whose pencils were already busy once more. "May win!" he snarled sarcastically; "you're licked already."
"Hurrah!" cried a girl's voice excitedly in the wings behind them.
"What were you doing here, Nell?" asked her father, approaching. Someone in the departing audience was leading a cheer for Davidge.
"Oh, I came over with Tom," she said quietly.
"Well, you go back with me!" said the colonel, turning to go. Davidge was approaching.
"I think I'll go back with Tom," she replied casually.
Colonel Hallowell turned about fiercely. "You will, eh?" he growled. Then, looking from one to the other of the two determined mouths, the scowl modulated into the suspicion of a smile, as the astute old reader of the popular fancy added, "Yes, I guess you will."
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1929, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 94 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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