Читать книгу: «Ladies and Gentlemen», страница 13
A Close Shave
On a certain day the young governor – Gov. G. W. Blankenship – left the Executive Mansion and motored up to the State Penitentiary.
As the car spun him north over good roads through the crisp morning air, he took stock of himself and of his past life and of his future prospects, nor had cause for disappointment or doubt regarding any one of these three. This was a fine large world – large yet cozy – and he gave it his unqualified indorsement while he rode along.
He took the penitentiary unawares. The warden was not expecting him. Nobody was – not even the warden’s pretty, amorous little wife. Of this, his first visit to the institution since his inauguration six months before, the governor meant to make a surprise visit. An announcement sent on ahead would have meant preparations for his arrival – an official reception and a speeding-up of the machinery. His design was to see how the place looked in, as you might say, its week-day clothes.
It looked pretty good. After a painstaking inspection he was bound to conclude that, for a prison, this prison came very near to being a model prison. The management was efficient, that was plain to be seen. The discipline, so far as he might judge, was strict without being cruel.
The climax to a very satisfactory forenoon came, when the warden at the end of the tour invited him to stay for luncheon.
“It’ll just be a simple meal, Governor,” said Warden Riddle, “with nobody else there except Mrs. Riddle. But I’d mightily like to have you take pot-luck with us.”
“Well, I believe I will do just that very thing,” said Governor Blankenship, heartily. Privately he was much pleased. “That is, if I’m not putting your household out on my account?”
“Of course not,” stated Riddle. “I’ll just chase a trusty across the road to tell the missis to put a third plate on the table – that’s all that’s necessary.” He spoke with the pride of a contented husband in a well-ordered home.
“Then I’ll get in my car and go find a barber shop,” said the governor, sliding the palm of his hand across his chin. “I started up country so soon after breakfast this morning that I forgot to shave.”
“No need for you to do that,” Riddle told him. “Don’t you remember seeing the little shop over back of the main building – not the big shop where the inmates are trimmed up, the little one where the staff have their barbering done? We’ve got a lifer over there who’s a wiz’ at his trade. I’ll guarantee you’ll get as good a shave from him as you ever had in your life, Governor.”
So, escorted by the warden, Governor Blankenship recrossed the enclosure to a wing behind the infirmary. From the doorway of a small, neat shop, properly equipped and spotlessly clean, the warden addressed the lone occupant, a young man in convict gray.
“Shave this gentleman right away,” he ordered. “A good quick job.”
“Yes, sir,” replied the prisoner.
“You needn’t wait, Warden,” said the governor. “I’ll rejoin you in your office in a few minutes.”
The warden accordingly departed, the barber closing the door behind him. The governor climbed into the chair and was tilted back. A crisp cloth was tucked about his collar, warm, soft suds were applied to his face and deft fingers kneaded the soap and rubbed it in among the hair roots, then the razor began mowing with smooth, even strokes over the governor’s jowls – first one jowl, then the other. This much was done in a silence broken only by the gentle scraping sound of the steel against the bristles.
It was the convict who spoke first, thereby violating a prison rule. He had finished with his subject’s jaws; the razor hovered above the Adam’s apple.
“I know you,” he said coldly; “you’re the governor.”
“Yes,” said his Excellency, “I am.”
“Then you ought to recognize me, too,” continued the barber. “Take a look!”
Slightly startled, Governor Blankenship blinked and peered upward into a face that was bent just above his own face.
“No,” he said, “I don’t believe I remember you. Where did we ever meet before?”
“In a courtroom,” said the prisoner, “in a courtroom at – ,” he named the principal city of the state, which also was the city where the governor held his citizenship. “You prosecuted me – you sent me here.”
All at once his voice grew shaky with passion; his features, which until now he had held in a composed blank, became distorted – a twisted mask of hatred.
Sudden apprehension stirred inside the young governor. He made as though to straighten up. A strong hand pressing on his breast kept him down, though.
“Stay still!” commanded the convict. “You haven’t got a chance. I locked the door there when the head-screw left. And don’t try to yell for help, either – I can take that head of yours off your shoulders at one swipe. Stay still and listen to me.”
As white under the patchings of lather as the lather was – yes, whiter – Governor Blankenship lay there, rigid with a great fear, and hearkened as his tormentor went on:
“Probably you wouldn’t remember me. Why should you? I was just one of the poor stiffs you persecuted when you were district attorney, building up the record that landed you in the governor’s chair. ‘Blood Hound’ Blankenship – that’s what they called you. And how you worked to put me away! Well, you had your wish. Here I am, in for keeps. And here you are, helpless as a baby, and a sharp razor right against your neck. Feel it, don’t you? I’ll make you feel it!”
The stricken man felt it, pressing at his throat, fraying the skin, ready to slice downward into his crawling flesh. The mere touch of it seemed to paralyze his vocal cords. He strove to speak, but for the life of him – and his life was the stake, he realized that – he couldn’t get the words out.
In a terrible relentless monotone the torturer went on:
“I don’t so much blame the judge – he seemed almost sorry for me when he was hanging the sentence on me. And I don’t blame the jury, either. But you – what you said about me, the way you went at me on cross-examination, the names you called me when you were summing up! I swore then that if ever I got a chance at you I’d fix you. And now I’ve got my chance – and I’ve got you right where I want you!”
“Wait – for God’s sake, wait!” In a strangled frenzied gurgle the helpless man pumped forth the entreaty.
“Why should I wait? They don’t have capital punishment any more in this state. All they can do is pile another life term on the one I’m already doing.”
“But wait – oh, please wait! I do seem to remember you now. Maybe – maybe I was too severe. If I took your case under advisement – if I pardoned you – if-if – ” He was begging so hard that he babbled.
The pressure of that deadly thing at his throat was relaxed the least bit.
“Now you’re getting reasonable,” said the lifer. “I thought the thing I wanted most in the world was to kill you. But after four years here, liberty would be pretty sweet too. There’s one thing they’ve always said about you – that you keep your word. Swear you’ll keep your trap shut about what’s happened in this shop today, and on top of that swear to me you’ll turn me out of here, and you can go!”
On these terms then the bargain was struck. The governor, having given his promise, had a good shave, twice over, with witch-hazel for a lotion, and having somewhat mastered his jumping nerves and regained his customary dignity, went home with the warden for luncheon.
From the foot of the table, little Mrs. Riddle shot covert smiles at him – and soft languishing glances. There was meaningness in her manner, in her caressing voice. Her husband talked along, suspecting nothing. He thought – if he gave it a thought – that she was flattered at having the governor at her board. As for the governor, even in his shaken state he had a secret glowing within.
As he was leaving, he remarked in a casual tone to his host:
“That pet barber of yours – Wyeth, I believe his name is. He interested me – aroused my sympathy, in fact.”
“My wife feels the same way about him,” said the warden. “But then, you know how women are. He’s young and well-mannered and she’s full of kindness for every human being.”
“Then probably she’d be pleased in case —h’m– in case I should grant him a pardon?”
Warden Riddle gave a start.
“She might,” he said, “but nobody else would. Governor, take it from me, that fellow’s bad all the way through. And the crime that landed him here – a cold-blooded, brutal murder – it was an atrocious thing, utterly unprovoked. No mitigating circumstances whatsoever, just plain butchery. Governor, as your friend I beg you, don’t be swept off your feet by any rush of misguided sentimentality for such a wretch. To turn him loose would kill you politically. You’re in line to be our next United States Senator. Already they’re saying over the country that you’re Presidential timber. There’s no telling how high or how far you’ll go if only you don’t make some fatal mistake. And this – this would be fatal. It would rouse the whole state against you. It would destroy you, not only with the party but with the people. You know what ruined your predecessor – he made too free a use of the pardoning power. Governor, if you let that man loose on society, you’re wrecked.”
That night, back at the Executive Mansion, the bachelor governor slept not a wink.
Was ever a man strung between the horns of a worse dilemma? Warden Riddle had been right. To open the prison doors for so infamous a creature as Wyeth was, would be damnation for all his ambitions. And Governor Blankenship was as ambitious as he was godly. And probably no more godly man ever lived. On the other hand, he had given his pledge to Wyeth.
There was this about Governor Blankenship: he had been named for the father of his country – that man who could not tell a lie. And, wittingly, Governor Blankenship had never in all his blameless life told a lie either. To keep the faith with himself and the world, to wear truth like a badge shining upon his breast, had from boyhood been his dearest ideal. Off that course he never intentionally had departed. With him it was more than a code of ethics and more than a creed of personal conduct – it was the holiest of religions. He unreservedly believed that one guilty falsehood – just one – would consign his soul to the bottommost pit of perdition forever. Here was a real Sir Galahad, a perfect knight of perfect honor.
Through days and weeks he walked between two invisible but ever-present mentors. One of them, whose name was Expediency, constantly tempted him.
“You passed your word under duress and in mortal fear,” Expediency whispered in his ear. “Let that man rot in his cell. ’Tis his just desert.”
But the other counselor, called Conscience, as repeatedly said to him: “You never told a lie. Can you tell one now?”
In such grievous plight, he received a secret message, sent by underground from Wyeth.
“I’m getting impatient,” was Wyeth’s word. “Are you, or are you not, going to come clean?”
This enhanced his desperation. From sleeplessness, from gnawing worry he lost flesh. People about him said the noble young governor was not like himself any more. They predicted a breakdown unless he was cured of what hidden cause it was which distressed him.
One morning he rose, haggard and red-eyed, from the bed upon which since midnight he had tossed and rolled. He had made his decision. Selfishness had won. He would break his promise to Wyeth. But since he must go to eternal Hell for a lie, he would go there for another and a sweeter reason.
Until now, his romantic dealings with little Mrs. Riddle had been mild and harmless, if clandestinely conducted. He had not philandered with her; he merely had flirted. On his side it had been an innocent flirtation – an agreeable diversion. But he knew the lady’s mind – knew she was weak and willing, where he had been strong and straightforward.
So be it then. For a crown to his other and lesser iniquity he would corrupt the wife of his devoted friend.
For the first time in a month he had zest for his breakfast. Conscience was so thoroughly drugged she seemed as though dead.
From the table he went to the long-distance telephone. He would call her up and arrange for an assignation. There was considerable delay in establishing the connection – a buzzing over the wire, a confusion of vague sounds. Finally his ringing was answered by a strange voice.
“I wish to speak with Mrs. Riddle,” he said.
There was a little pause. Then, in a fumbling, evasive fashion the voice made reply.
“She’s not here. She’s – she’s out.”
It occurred to the governor that he might as well tell the warden he had abandoned the idea of pardoning the barber.
“Then I’d like to talk with Mr. Riddle,” he said.
“He’s – he’s not here either. Who is this, please?”
In his double disappointment the governor forgot the possible need for caution. “This,” he said, “is Governor Blankenship.”
“Oh!” The voice became warmer. “Is that you, Governor? I’ve been trying for an hour to get you on your private line. This is Warden Riddle’s brother at the ’phone – you know, Henry Riddle? They got me up at daylight when this – this terrible thing was discovered, and I’ve been here ever since, doing what I could.”
“What terrible thing do you mean?”
“Haven’t you heard the news? Why, sir, the worst man in the penitentiary got away last night – Wyeth, the desperado. He – he had help. That’s why the warden’s away, why I’m in charge. My poor brother’s out with the posse trying to get trace of the scoundrel. I guess he’ll shoot him if he finds him.”
“But why is Mrs. Riddle absent at such a time?”
“Governor, that’s the worst part of it. She was the one that helped that devil to escape. And she – she went with him!”
To the end of his days Governor G. W. Blankenship was known as the man who never told a lie. When he died they carved something to that general effect upon his tombstone.
Good Sam
From the foot of the lake where most of the camps were, everybody had been driven out by the forest-fire. Among those who fled up to our end and took temporary quarters on the hotel reservation was my friend, the Native Genius.
My friend, the Native Genius, was a cowboy before he became a painter. He became a great man and was regarded in our Eastern art circles, but in his feelings and his language he remained a cowboy. He also was an historian of the folk-lore of the Old West that has ridden over the ultimate hill of the last free grazing and vanished forever and ever, alas! With none of the conscious effort which so often marks such an undertaking, he could twine a fragrant fictional boscage upon the solid trellis of remembered fact and make you like it. To my way of thinking, this was not the least of his gifts. Indeed not.
He joined us the evening before, bringing the tools of his trade and various finished or unfinished canvases. During the night my slumber was at intervals distracted by the far-off wails of a wind-instrument in travail. It was as though someone, enraged by its stubborn defiance, had put the thing to the torture. Distance muffled those moaning outcries but in them, piercing through the curtains of my sleepiness, were torment and anguish.
In the morning early, when I walked past the row of log houses at the farther side of the grounds, I came upon the author of this outrage. A male of the refugees sat at an open window and contended with a haunted saxophone for the lost soul of a ghostly tune.
He was young enough to have optimism. On the other hand, he was old enough to know better. He had the look about him – a wearied and red-eyed and a wannish look it was – of one who never knows when he is licked. Except among amateur musicians I would regard this as an admirable trait.
My friend was squatted on the top step of his cabin, two numbers on beyond. He greeted me and the new-born day with a wide yawn.
“Would you maybe like to buy a horn?” he asked, and flirted with his thumb toward the place next-door-but-one.
“I don’t think so,” I answered.
“I’m making a special inducement,” he said. “There’s a man’s hide goes with it.”
His mien changed then from the murderous to the resigned. “Lead me away from here,” he pleaded. “I don’t know which distresses me the most – the sight of so much suffering or the sound of it.”
We went by the scene of the unfinished crime and sat in the lee of the hotel veranda with the lake below us, blinking like a live turquoise in its rough matrix of gray mountains. The wind was in our favor there; to our ears reached only faint broken strains of that groaning and that bleating. But from other sources other interruptions ensued, all calculated to disturb the pious reflections of the elderly.
A domestic group, exercising rights of squatter sovereignty on the slope of the lawn in a tent, emerged therefrom and swarmed about us. Of parents there was but the customary pair, but of offspring there were seven or eight and although plainly of the same brood, a family resemblance marking each as brother or sister to the rest, these latter seemed miraculously all to be of substantially the same age or thereabouts. The father told a neighbor fifty yards away of their narrow escape; the mother joined in and was shrill in her lamentations for a threatened homestead over the hills across the water; the overalled little ones got underfoot and scuffled around and by their loud childish clamor still further interfered with our ruminations.
Then one of the big red busses hooted and drove up and disgorged upon us a locust plague of arriving tourists. The responsible strangers went within to claim reservations but the juveniles inundated the porches and the lawn, giving hearty indorsement to the scenery and taking snap-shots of it, and inquiring where souvenir postcards might be had and whether the fishing was any good here; and so on and so forth, according to their tribal habits. Hillocks of hand-baggage accumulated about us and trunks descended from a panting auto-truck in a thunderous cascade. A bobbed-haired camera bandit in search of picturesque local types came within easy shooting distance and aimed her weapon at us, asking no leave of her victims but shooting repeatedly at will; and she wore riding breeches and boots. Presumably she had been wearing them aboard the train. An oversized youth stumbled with his large undisciplined feet against an outlying suitcase and struck the wall and caromed off and almost upset us from our tilted chairs. Here plainly was an undergraduate – a perfect characteristic specimen. He was in the immature summer plumage.
“I always feel sorry for one of those college boys this season of the year in this climate,” said my friend as the gigantic fledgling lunged away toward the boat dock. “It’s too late for his coon-skin ulster and too early yet for him to tie a handkerchief around his scalp and go bareheaded.”
He arose, tagging me on the arm.
“Let’s ramble down the line a piece,” he suggested, “and maybe find us a hollow snag to hide in. After what I went through last night my nerves ain’t what they used to be, if they ever were.”
Below the creek we quit the paved highway and took the lower trail. Through the brush we could see where the vast blue eye of the lake had quit winking and was beginning to scowl. The wind must have changed quarters; it no longer brought us smells of ashes and char, but a fresher, sweeter smell as of rain gathering; and puffed clouds were forming over the range to the westward. The sunshine shut itself off with the quickness of a stage effect. Along the shore toward us limped a blackened smudge of a man, like a ranger turned chimney-sweep. For a fact, that precisely was what he was – Melber, assistant chief of the park forestry service. From tiredness he was crippled. He could shamble and that was about all.
“Well, we’ve got her whipped,” he told us, and leaned against a tree. He left smears like burnt cork on the bark where his shoulders rubbed. “This breeze hauling around ought to finish the job. She’ll burn herself out before dark, with or without showers. I’m on my way now to long-distance to notify the chief that we won’t need any reinforcements.”
“Much damage?”
“The colony is saved. By backfiring we held the flames on the upper edge of the road leading in from the station. But Ordman’s ranch is gone up in smoke, and the Colfax & Webster sawmill and eighteen thousand acres of the handsomest virgin pine on this side of the Divide. Man, you’d weep to see those raped woodlands – and all because some dam’-fool hiker didn’t have sense enough to put out his cigarette! Or hers, as the case may be!” He grinned through his mask and we were reminded of nigger minstrels.
“How close up did the burning get to my shebang?” inquired the Native Genius.
“Dog-gone close, Charley. But that wasn’t the big blaze – that was the other blaze which broke out soon after midnight. We got her – the second one, I mean – licked just over the rise behind your studio. My force fought till they dropped and even that bunch of I.W.W.’s that they rushed in on the special from Spokane did fairly well. I’ve revised some of my opinions about Wobblies. But there’s a million dead cinders in the grass around your cottage right now, Charley. And your back corral fence is all scorched.
“I leave it to you – wouldn’t you think with that first example before our eyes that everybody in both gangs would have sense enough not to be careless? But you never can tell, can you? When most of the crew knocked off late last night, seeing she was under control, one idiot builds a fire to heat himself up a pot of coffee. Would you believe it? – with the timber all just so much punk and tinder after this long dry spell, he kindles up a rousing big blaze right among the down-stuff and then drops off to sleep? I don’t much blame him for wanting to sleep – I’m dead on my own feet this minute – but to make a fire that size in such a place! He’s the kind that would call out the standing army to kill a cockroach! Well, when this poor half-wit wakes up, the fire is running through the tree-tops for a quarter of a mile south of him and we’ve got another battle on our hands that lasts until broad daybreak. It’s a God’s blessing we had the outfit and the emergency apparatus handy.”
“Who’s the guilty party?”
“Not one of my staff, you can gamble on that. And not one of the Spokane gang either. It was a green hand – fellow named Seymour working as a brakeman on the railroad and one of the few volunteers who refused to take any pay. And he was square enough to own up to what he’d done, too. Oh, I guess he had good intentions. But, thunderation, good intentions have ruined empires!
“Well, I’ve got to be getting along. I’m certainly going to put somebody’s nice clean bathroom on the bum as soon as I get through telephoning.”
Melber straightened himself and lurched off into the second-growth. He moved like a very old man, his blistered hands dangling.
“What he just now said about good intentions puts me in mind of Samson Goodhue,” said Charley. “There was one of the best paving contractors Hell ever had.” I knew what the expression on his face meant. It meant he was letting down a mental tentacle like a baited hook into the thronged private fish-pool of his early reminiscence. Scenting copy, I encouraged him.
“What about this Samson person?”
“I’m fixing to tell you,” he promised. “This looks to me like a good loafing place.”
We reposed side by side on a lichened log with our toes gouging the green moss, and he rolled a cigarette and proceeded:
Like I was just now telling you, his name was Samson Goodhue. So you can see how easy it was to twist that around into Good Samaritan and then to render that down for kitchen use into Good Sam. It was a regular trick name and highly suitable, seeing that he counted that day lost which, as the poet says, its low descending sun didn’t find him trying to help somebody out of a jam.
In fact, he really made a profession out of it. You might say he was an expert promoter. He wasn’t one of your meek and lowly ones, though.
They say the meek shall inherit the earth but I reckon not until everybody else is through with it.
Not Good Sam. He was just as pushing and determinated and persisting in his work as though he was taking orders for enlarging crayon portraits. And probably it wasn’t his fault that about every time he tackled a job of philanthropping the scheme seemed to go wrong. You had to give him credit for that. But after a while it got so that when the word spread that Good Sam was going around doing good, smart people ran for cover. They didn’t know but what it might be their turn next, and they figured they’d had enough hard luck already without calling in a specialist.
I remember like it was yesterday the first time I ever saw him operating – down in Triple Falls, this state. I hadn’t been there very long. Winter-time had driven a bunch of us beef-herders in off the range and we were encouraging the saloon industry – in fact, you might say we were practically supporting it. That was before I quit. I haven’t taken a drink for fifteen years now but, at that, I figure I’m even with the game. The day I quit I had enough to last me fifteen years.
Good Sam hadn’t been there much longer than we had. He blew in from somewhere back East and to look at him you’d have said offhand that here was just an average pilgrim, size sixteen-and-a-half collar, three-dollar pants, addicted to five-cent cigars and a drooping mustache; otherwise no distinguishing marks. He didn’t look a thing in the world like a genius. His gifts were hidden. But it didn’t take him long to begin showing them.
One bright cold morning Whiz Bollinger came in from his place proudly riding in a brand-new buckboard that had cost him thirty-two dollars, and right in front of Billy Grimm’s filling-station the cayuse he was driving balked on him. You understand I’m speaking of a filling-station in the old-fashioned sense. We’d read about automobiles and seen pictures of them but they hadn’t penetrated to our parts as yet. If a fellow was going somewhere by himself he generally rode a hoss and if he was moving his womenfolks he packed ’em in a prairie-schooner. Sometimes he’d let ’em live in one for a few years so they could have constant change of scene and air. I recall one day a bunch of old-timers were discussing the merits of different wagons – Old Hickory and South Bend and even Conestoga – and old Mar’m Whitaker spoke up and says: “Well, boys, I always have claimed and always will that the Murphey wagon is the best one they is for raisin’ a family in.”
So Billy Grimm’s sign was a pile of empty beer kegs racked up alongside the front door. Sometimes in mild weather he’d have another sign – some wayfarer that had been overtaken just as he got outside and was sleeping it off on the sidewalk. After the first of November all the flies in the state that didn’t have anywhere else to go went to Billy’s place and wintered there. He was Montana’s leading house-fly fancier. He was getting his share of my patronage and I happened to be on the spot when this Bollinger colt decided to stop right where he was and stay there until he froze solid.
You know how it is when a hoss goes balky. In less than no time at all the entire leisure class of Triple Falls were assembled, giving advice about how to get that hoss started again. They twisted his ear and they tried stoving in his ribs by kicking him in the side and they pushed against his hind quarters and dragged at the bit, and through it all that wall-eyed, Roman-nosed plug remained just as stationary as an Old Line Republican. Alongside of him, the Rock of Gibraltar would seem downright restless.
And then this Samson Goodhue comes bulging into the circle and takes charge. “Stand back, everybody, please,” he says, “while I show you how to unbalk a horse. Get me a few pieces of kindling wood, somebody,” he says, “and some paper or some straw or something.” Various persons hurry off in all directions, eager to obey. In every crowd there are plenty of suckers who’ll carry out any kind of orders if somebody who acts executive will give them. So when they’ve assembled his supplies for him he makes a little pile of ’em on the packed snow right under the cayuse’s belly and is preparing to scratch a match and telling Whiz Bollinger to climb back on his seat and take a strong grip on the reins, when Mrs. Oliver J. Doheny, who’s among the few ladies present, interferes with the proceedings.
Now this here Mrs. Oliver J. Doheny is at that remote period our principal reform element. She’s ’specially strong on cruelty to dumb beasts, being heartily against it. It’s only been a few weeks before this that a trapper trails down from across the international boundary with one of those big Canada bobcats that he’s caught in a trap and he’s got it on exhibition in a cage in Hyman Frieder’s Climax Clothing Store, when Mrs. Doheny happens along and sees how the thing sort of drags one foot where the trap pinched it and she begins tongue-lashing the Canuck for not having bound up its wounds.
When she’s slowed down for breath he says to her very politely: “Ma’am, in reply to same I would just state this: Ma’am, when my dear old mother was layin’ on her death-bed she called me to her side and she whispered to me, ‘My son, whatever else you do do, don’t you never try to nurse no sick lynxes.’ And, ma’am, I aim to keep that farewell promise to my dear dyin’ mother! But I ain’t no objections to your tryin’. Only, ma’am, I feels it my Christian duty to warn you right now that if you would get too close to this here unfortunate patient of mine he’s liable to turn you every way you can think of except loose.”
So on that occasion Mrs. Doheny thought better of her first impulse but now she is very harsh toward this stranger. “Do you mean to tell me,” she says, “that it is your deliberate intention to ignite a fire beneath this poor misguided animal’s – er – person?” Although a born reformer she was always very ladylike in her language.
