Books: Lifted Masks

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She smiled at him warmly; there was something so real about him when
he talked that way.

But his look then frightened her. It seemed for an instant as though
he would brush the tiny table aside and seize some invisible thing
by the throat. Then he said, cutting off each word short: "Young
Lady, what do you think of this? I'm worth more 'an a million
dollars--and my wife gets up at five o'clock every morning to do
washing and scrubbing."

"Oh, it's not that she _has_ to," he answered her look, "but
she _thinks_ she has to. See? Once we were poor. For twenty
years we were poor as dirt. Then she did have to do things like
that. Then I struck it. Or rather, it struck me. Oil. Oil on a bit
of land I had. I had just sense enough to make the most of it; one
thing led to another--well, you're not interested in that end of it.
But the fact is that now we're rich. Now she could have all the
things that these women have--Lord A'mighty she could lay abed every
day till noon if she wanted to! But--you see?--it _got_ her--those
hard, lonely, grinding years _took_ her. She's"--he shrunk from the
terrible word and faltered out--"her mind's not--"

There was a sobbing little flutter in Virginia's throat. In a dim
way she was glad to see that the girls were going. She _could_
not have them laughing at him--now.

"Well, you can about figure out how it makes me feel," he continued,
and looking into his face now it was as though the spirit redeemed
the flesh. "You're smart. You can see it without my callin' your
attention to it. Last time I went to see her I had just made fifty
thousand on a deal. And I found her down on her knees thinking she
was scrubbing the floor!"

Unconsciously Virginia's hand went out, following the rush of
sympathy and understanding. "But can't they--restrain her?" she
murmured.

"Makes her worse. Says she's got it to do--frets her to think she's
not getting it done."

"But isn't there some _way_?" she whispered. "Some way to make
her _know_?"

He pointed to the large boxes. "That," he said simply, "is the
meaning of those. It's been seven years--but I keep on trying."

She was silent, the tears too close for words. And she had thought
it cheap ambition!--vulgar aspiration--silly show--vanity!

"Suppose you thought I was a queer one, talking about lively looking
things. But you see now? Thought it might attract her attention,
thought something real gorgeous like this might impress money on
her. Though I don't know,"--he seemed to grow weary as he told it;
"I got her a lot of diamonds, thinking they might interest her, and
she thought she'd stolen 'em, and they had to take them away."

Still the girl did not speak. Her hand was shading her eyes.

"But there's nothing like trying. Nothing like keeping right on
trying. And anyhow--a fellow likes to think he's taking his wife
something from Paris."

They passed before her in their heartbreaking folly, their tragic
uselessness, their lovable absurdity and stinging irony--those
things they had bought that afternoon: an _opera cloak_--a
_velvet dress_--_those hats_--_red silk stockings_.

The mockery of them wrung her heart. Right there in the tea-shop
Virginia was softly crying.

"Oh, now that's too bad," he expostulated clumsily. "Why, look here,
Young Lady, I didn't mean you to take it so hard."

When she had recovered herself he told her much of the story. And
the thing which revealed him--glorified him--was less the grief he
gave to it than the way he saw it. "It's the cursed unfairness of
it," he concluded. "When you consider it's all because she did those
things--when you think of her bein' bound to 'em for life just
because she was _too faithful doin' 'em_--when you think that
now--when I could give her everything these women have got!--she's
got to go right on worrying about baking the bread and washing the
dishes--did it for me when I was poor--and now with me rich she can't
get _out_ of it--and I _can't reach_ her--oh, it's _rotten!_ I
tell you it's _rotten!_ Sometimes I can just hear my money _laugh_
at me! Sometimes I get to going round and round in a circle about it
till it seems I'm going crazy myself."

"I think you are a--a noble man," choked Virginia.

That disconcerted him. "Oh Lord--don't think that. No, Young Lady,
don't try to make any plaster saint out of _me_. My life goes
on. I've got to eat, drink and be merry. I'm built that way. But
just the same my heart on the inside's pretty sore, Young Lady. I
want to tell you that the whole inside of my heart is _sore as a
boil_!"

They were returning for the hats. Suddenly Virginia stopped, and it
was a soft-eyed and gentle Virginia who turned to him after the
pause. "There are lovely things to be bought in Paris for women who
aren't well. Such soft, lovely things to wear in your room. Not but
what I think these other things are all right. As you say, they
may--interest her. But they aren't things she can use just now, and
wouldn't you like her to have some of those soft lovely things she
could actually wear? They might help most of all. To wake in the
morning and find herself in something so beautiful--"

"Where do you get 'em?" he demanded promptly.

And so they went to one of those shops which have, more than all the
others, enshrined Paris in feminine hearts. And never was lingerie
selected with more loving care than that which Virginia picked out
that afternoon. A tear fell on one particularly lovely _robe de
nuit_--so soothingly soft, so caressingly luxurious, it seemed
that surely it might help bring release from the bondage of those
crushing years.

As they were leaving they were given two packages. "Just the kimona
thing you liked," he said, "and a trinket or two. Now that we're
such good friends, you won't feel like you did this morning."

"And if I don't want them myself, I might send them to my mother,"
Virginia replied, a quiver in her laugh at her own little joke.

He had put her in her cab; he had tried to tell her how much he thanked
her; they had said good-bye and the _cocher_ had cracked his whip
when he came running after her. "Why, Young Lady," he called out,
"we don't know each other's _names_."

She laughed and gave hers. "Mine's William P. Johnson," he said.
"Part French and part Italian. But now look here, Young Lady--or I
mean, Miss Clayton. A fellow at the hotel was telling me something
last night that made me _sick_. He said American girls sometimes
got awfully up against it here. He said one actually starved last
year. Now, I don't like that kind of business. Look here, Young Lady,
I want you to promise that if you--you or any of your gang--get up
against it you'll cable William P. Johnson, of Cincinnati, Ohio."

The twilight grey had stolen upon Paris. And there was a mist which
the street lights only penetrated a little way--as sometimes one's
knowledge of life may only penetrate life a very little way. Her cab
stopped by a blockade, she watched the burly back of William P.
Johnson disappearing into the mist. The red box which held the
yellow opera cloak she could see longer than all else.

"You never can tell," murmured Virginia. "It just goes to show that
you never can tell."

And whatever it was you never could tell had brought to Virginia's
girlish face the tender knowingness of the face of a woman.

II

THE PLEA

Senator Harrison concluded his argument and sat down. There was no
applause, but he had expected none. Senator Dorman was already
saying "Mr. President?" and there was a stir in the crowded
galleries, and an anticipatory moving of chairs among the Senators.
In the press gallery the reporters bunched together their scattered
papers and inspected their pencil-points with earnestness. Dorman
was the best speaker of the Senate, and he was on the popular side
of it. It would be the great speech of the session, and the prospect
was cheering after a deluge of railroad and insurance bills.

"I want to tell you," he began, "why I have worked for this
resolution recommending the pardon of Alfred Williams. It is one of
the great laws of the universe that every living thing be given a
chance. In the case before us that law has been violated. This does
not resolve itself into a question of second chances. The boy of
whom we are speaking has never had his first."

Senator Harrison swung his chair half-way around and looked out at
the green things which were again coming into their own on the
State-house grounds. He knew--in substance--what Senator Dorman
would say without hearing it, and he was a little tired of the whole
affair. He hoped that one way or other they would finish it up that
night, and go ahead with something else. He had done what he could,
and now the responsibility was with the rest of them. He thought
they were shouldering a great deal to advocate the pardon in the
face of the united opposition of Johnson County, where the crime had
been committed. It seemed a community should be the best judge of
its own crimes, and that was what he, as the Senator from Johnson,
had tried to impress upon them.

He knew that his argument against the boy had been a strong one. He
rather liked the attitude in which he stood. It seemed as if he were
the incarnation of outraged justice attempting to hold its own at
the floodgates of emotion. He liked to think he was looking far
beyond the present and the specific and acting as guardian of the
future--and the whole. In summing it up that night the reporters
would tell in highly wrought fashion of the moving appeal made by
Senator Dorman, and then they would speak dispassionately of the
logical argument of the leader of the opposition. There was more
satisfaction to self in logic than in mere eloquence. He was even a
little proud of his unpopularity. It seemed sacrificial.

He wondered why it was Senator Dorman had thrown himself into it so
whole-heartedly. All during the session the Senator from Maxwell had
neglected personal interests in behalf of this boy, who was nothing
to him in the world. He supposed it was as a sociological and
psychological experiment. Senator Dorman had promised the Governor
to assume guardianship of the boy if he were let out. The Senator
from Johnson inferred that as a student of social science his
eloquent colleague wanted to see what he could make of him. To
suppose the interest merely personal and sympathetic would seem
discreditable.

"I need not dwell upon the story," the Senator from Maxwell was
saying, "for you all are familiar with it already. It is said to
have been the most awful crime ever committed in the State. I grant
you that it was, and then I ask you to look for a minute into the
conditions leading up to it.

"When the boy was born, his mother was instituting divorce
proceedings against his father. She obtained the divorce, and
remarried when Alfred was three months old. From the time he was a
mere baby she taught him to hate his father. Everything that went
wrong with him she told him was his father's fault. His first vivid
impression was that his father was responsible for all the wrong of
the universe.

"For seven years that went on, and then his mother died. His
stepfather did not want him. He was going to Missouri, and the boy
would be a useless expense and a bother. He made no attempt to find
a home for him; he did not even explain--he merely went away and
left him. At the age of seven the boy was turned out on the world,
after having been taught one thing--to hate his father. He stayed a
few days in the barren house, and then new tenants came and closed
the doors against him. It may have occurred to him as a little
strange that he had been sent into a world where there was no place
for him.

"When he asked the neighbours for shelter, they told him to go to
his own father and not bother strangers. He said he did not know
where his father was. They told him, and he started to walk--a
distance of fifty miles. I ask you to bear in mind, gentlemen, that
he was only seven years of age. It is the age when the average boy
is beginning the third reader, and when he is shooting marbles and
spinning tops.

"When he reached his father's house he was told at once that he was
not wanted there. The man had remarried, there were other children,
and he had no place for Alfred. He turned him away; but the
neighbours protested, and he was compelled to take him back. For
four years he lived in this home, to which he had come unbidden, and
where he was never made welcome.

"The whole family rebelled against him. The father satisfied his
resentment against the boy's dead mother by beating her son, by
encouraging his wife to abuse him, and inspiring the other children
to despise him. It seems impossible such conditions should exist.
The only proof of their possibility lies in the fact of their
existence.

"I need not go into the details of the crime. He had been beaten by
his father that evening after a quarrel with his stepmother about
spilling the milk. He went, as usual, to his bed in the barn; but
the hay was suffocating, his head ached, and he could not sleep. He
arose in the middle of the night, went to the house, and killed both
his father and stepmother.

"I shall not pretend to say what thoughts surged through the boy's
brain as he lay there in the stifling hay with the hot blood
pounding against his temples. I shall not pretend to say whether he
was sane or insane as he walked to the house for the perpetration of
the awful crime. I do not even affirm it would not have happened had
there been some human being there to lay a cooling hand on his hot
forehead, and say a few soothing, loving words to take the sting
from the loneliness, and ease the suffering. I ask you to consider
only one thing: he was eleven years old at the time, and he had no
friend in all the world. He knew nothing of sympathy; he knew only
injustice."

Senator Harrison was still looking out at the budding things on the
State-house grounds, but in a vague way he was following the story.
He knew when the Senator from Maxwell completed the recital of facts
and entered upon his plea. He was conscious that it was stronger
than he had anticipated--more logic and less empty exhortation. He
was telling of the boy's life in reformatory and penitentiary since
the commission of the crime,--of how he had expanded under kindness,
of his mental attainments, the letters he could write, the books he
had read, the hopes he cherished. In the twelve years he had spent
there he had been known to do no unkind nor mean thing; he responded
to affection--craved it. It was not the record of a degenerate, the
Senator from Maxwell was saying.

A great many things were passing through the mind of the Senator
from Johnson. He was trying to think who it was that wrote that
book, "Put Yourself in His Place." He had read it once, and it
bothered him to forget names. Then he was wondering why it was the
philosophers had not more to say about the incongruity of people who
had never had any trouble of their own sitting in judgment upon
people who had known nothing but trouble. He was thinking also that
abstract rules did not always fit smoothly over concrete cases, and
that it was hard to make life a matter of rules, anyway.

Next he was wondering how it would have been with the boy Alfred
Williams if he had been born in Charles Harrison's place; and then
he was working it out the other way and wondering how it would have
been with Charles Harrison had he been born in Alfred Williams's
place. He wondered whether the idea of murder would have grown in
Alfred Williams's heart had he been born to the things to which
Charles Harrison was born, and whether it would have come within the
range of possibility for Charles Harrison to murder his father if he
had been born to Alfred Williams's lot. Putting it that way, it was
hard to estimate how much of it was the boy himself, and how much
the place the world had prepared for him. And if it was the place
prepared for him more than the boy, why was the fault not more with
the preparers of the place than with the occupant of it? The whole
thing was very confusing.

"This page," the Senator from Maxwell was saying, lifting the little
fellow to the desk, "is just eleven years of age, and he is within
three pounds of Alfred Williams's weight when he committed the
murder. I ask you, gentlemen, if this little fellow should be guilty
of a like crime to-night, to what extent would you, in reading of it
in the morning, charge him with the moral discernment which is the
first condition of moral responsibility? If Alfred Williams's story
were this boy's story, would you deplore that there had been no one
to check the childish passion, or would you say it was the inborn
instinct of the murderer? And suppose again this were Alfred
Williams at the age of eleven, would you not be willing to look into
the future and say if he spent twelve years in penitentiary and
reformatory, in which time he developed the qualities of useful and
honourable citizenship, that the ends of justice would then have
been met, and the time at hand for the world to begin the payment of
her debt?"

Senator Harrison's eyes were fixed upon the page standing on the
opposite desk. Eleven was a younger age than he had supposed. As he
looked back upon it and recalled himself when eleven years of
age--his irresponsibility, his dependence--he was unwilling to say
what would have happened if the world had turned upon him as it had
upon Alfred Williams. At eleven his greatest grievance was that the
boys at school called him "yellow-top." He remembered throwing a
rock at one of them for doing it. He wondered if it was criminal
instinct prompted the throwing of the rock. He wondered how high the
percentage of children's crimes would go were it not for
countermanding influences. It seemed the great difference between
Alfred Williams and a number of other children of eleven had been
the absence of the countermanding influence.

There came to him of a sudden a new and moving thought. Alfred
Williams had been cheated of his boyhood. The chances were he had
never gone swimming, nor to a ball game, or maybe never to a circus.
It might even be that he had never owned a dog. The Senator from
Maxwell was right when he said the boy had never been given his
chance, had been defrauded of that which has been a boy's heritage
since the world itself was young.

And the later years--how were they making it up to him? He recalled
what to him was the most awful thing he had ever heard about the
State penitentiary: they never saw the sun rise down there, and they
never saw it set. They saw it at its meridian, when it climbed above
the stockade, but as it rose into the day, and as it sank into the
night, it was denied them. And there, at the penitentiary, they
could not even look up at the stars. It had been years since Alfred
Williams raised his face to God's heaven and knew he was part of it
all. The voices of the night could not penetrate the little cell in
the heart of the mammoth stone building where he spent his evenings
over those masterpieces with which, they said, he was more familiar
than the average member of the Senate. When he read those things
Victor Hugo said of the vastness of the night, he could only look
around at the walls that enclosed him and try to reach back over the
twelve years for some satisfying conception of what night really
was.

The Senator from Johnson shuddered: they had taken from a living
creature the things of life, and all because in the crucial hour there
had been no one to say a staying word. Man had cheated him of the
things that were man's, and then shut him away from the world that
was God's. They had made for him a life barren of compensations.

There swept over the Senator a great feeling of self-pity. As
representative of Johnson County, it was he who must deny this boy
the whole great world without, the people who wanted to help him,
and what the Senator from Maxwell called "his chance." If Johnson
County carried the day, there would be something unpleasant for him
to consider all the remainder of his life. As he grew to be an older
man he would think of it more and more--what the boy would have done
for himself in the world if the Senator from Johnson had not been
more logical and more powerful than the Senator from Maxwell.

Senator Dorman was nearing the end of his argument. "In spite of the
undying prejudice of the people of Johnson County," he was saying,
"I can stand before you today and say that after an unsparing
investigation of this case I do not believe I am asking you to do
anything in violation of justice when I beg of you to give this boy
his chance."

It was going to a vote at once, and the Senator from Johnson County
looked out at the budding things and wondered whether the boy down
at the penitentiary knew the Senate was considering his case that
afternoon. It was without vanity he wondered whether what he had
been trained to think of as an all-wise providence would not have
preferred that Johnson County be represented that session by a less
able man.

A great hush fell over the Chamber, for ayes and noes followed
almost in alternation. After a long minute of waiting the secretary
called, in a tense voice:

"Ayes, 30; Noes, 32."

The Senator from Johnson had proven too faithful a servant of his
constituents. The boy in the penitentiary was denied his chance.

The usual things happened: some women in the galleries, who had boys
at home, cried aloud; the reporters were fighting for occupancy of
the telephone booths, and most of the Senators began the perusal of
the previous day's Journal with elaborate interest. Senator Dorman
indulged in none of these feints. A full look at his face just then
told how much of his soul had gone into the fight for the boy's
chance, and the look about his eyes was a little hard on the theory
of psychological experiment.

Senator Harrison was looking out at the budding trees, but his face
too had grown strange, and he seemed to be looking miles beyond and
years ahead. It seemed that he himself was surrendering the voices
of the night, and the comings and goings of the sun. He would never
look at them--feel them--again without remembering he was keeping
one of his fellow creatures away from them. He wondered at his own
presumption in denying any living thing participation in the
universe. And all the while there were before him visions of the boy
who sat in the cramped cell with the volume of a favourite poet
before him, trying to think how it would seem to be out under the
stars.

The stillness in the Senate-Chamber was breaking; they were going
ahead with something else. It seemed to the Senator from Johnson
that sun, moon, and stars were wailing out protest for the boy who
wanted to know them better. And yet it was not sun, moon, and stars
so much as the unused swimming hole and the uncaught fish, the
unattended ball game, the never-seen circus, and, above all, the
unowned dog, that brought Senator Harrison to his feet.

They looked at him in astonishment, their faces seeming to say it
would have been in better taste for him to have remained seated just
then.

"Mr. President," he said, pulling at his collar and looking straight
ahead, "I rise to move a reconsideration."

There was a gasp, a moment of supreme quiet, and then a mighty burst
of applause. To men of all parties and factions there came a single
thought. Johnson was the leading county of its Congressional
district. There was an election that fall, and Harrison was in the
race. Those eight words meant to a surety he would not go to
Washington, for the Senator from Maxwell had chosen the right word
when he referred to the prejudice of Johnson County on the Williams
case as "undying." The world throbs with such things at the moment
of their doing--even though condemning them later, and the part of
the world then packed within the Senate-Chamber shared the universal
disposition.

The noise astonished Senator Harrison, and he looked around with
something like resentment. When the tumult at last subsided, and he
saw that he was expected to make a speech, he grew very red, and
grasped his chair desperately.

The reporters were back in their places, leaning nervously forward.
This was Senator Harrison's chance to say something worth putting
into a panel by itself with black lines around it--and they were
sure he would do it.

But he did not. He stood there like a schoolboy who had forgotten
his piece--growing more and more red. "I--I think," he finally
jerked out, "that some of us have been mistaken. I'm in favour now
of--of giving him his chance."

They waited for him to proceed, but after a helpless look around the
Chamber he sat down. The president of the Senate waited several
minutes for him to rise again, but he at last turned his chair
around and looked out at the green things on the State-house
grounds, and there was nothing to do but go ahead with the second
calling of the roll. This time it stood 50 to 12 in favour of the
boy.

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