The American: A Middle Western Legend (6 page)

The Statement

The act of awakening is, in a small way, a rebirth; as, for example, the way primitive people speak of sleep as the little death, and of death as the long sleep. At night, the brain relaxes; all the thousand currents of thought, which tugged with such remorseless contention, loosen; somewhere, there is a washing and a cleansing. Even the dreams which come with morning belong to another world, and this morning, when the Judge awakened, his dreams flurried for only an instant and then sank back into the pits of memory. For just a short while he clung to remnants, as people do, a face out of the past, a long road he had walked, a terrible thing happening; but the wonder of dreams is to prove to people that nothing is changeless; horror is washed away in an instant, and sunlight is a testimony to the goodness of life. And there are other testimonies upon waking, the softness of a warm bed, embracing, the way a mother folds a child into her gentle bosom, clean white sheets, a feather pillow, and downy blankets to keep out the nip of the autumn air. It is true that same may wake differently, on the hard, cold earth, on the wooden board of a prison cell, on a crunching cornshuck bag, on a vermin-ridden floor—and some into a horror of life from which sleep is the only surcease—yet the Judge was not prone to dwell on the copybook maxim: “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” He could too clearly trace back the steps by which he had gone, and although occasionally one or another had lent a helping hand, it was, to his way of thinking, his own strong hands which had pulled on the bootstraps hardest, and credit should be given where credit was due.

So to him, in the moments after awakening, this was the little rebirth after the little death, and the broad slab of sunshine intersecting the window and the room was the new compact life made with him. Unhurriedly, for it was still very early in the morning, he returned to the business of living, turned first from side to side, opened his eyes and then closed them, stretched with the warm and comfortable ease of an animal, sighed, sensually relaxed with the enfolding grasp of the bed, and experienced that wonderful sensation we know only upon awakening or in times of great weakness—that drift in and out of consciousness which enables the ego to float like a disembodied spirit. Starting to live again, he was not wholly in either the present or the past, and in quick succession he became many things, Pete Altgeld the farm boy, Pete Altgeld the soldier, Pete Altgeld the tramp, Pete Altgeld the wanderer who sought hope where there was no hope, Pete Altgeld dying, living, defeated, triumphant—he remembered the beginning of the change, when at the lowest point of sickness and despair, he found people who were good to him, helping him, feeding him; that was a nice point to come to life, to full consciousness, wondering only what there was back of his mind that disturbed him.

II

He heard voices through the door:

“Be quiet! You'll wake the Judge!”

“Who's shouting—you're shouting, yelling all the time, yelling be quiet”

“Quiet.”

“Quiet yourself.”

“I don't want none of your lip.”

“Well, I should say! I don't want none of yours.”

“I never seen a parlormaid who wasn't a hussy. You're a hussy.”

“I'm not. You don't call me that, lording it high and mighty. You think you own this house?”

“I'll turn you out.”

“Will you? I could tell a thing or two.”

“Just remember I'm housekeeper here. Now go down to the kitchen. You hear me? Down to the kitchen.”

Then the Judge heard the door of his wife's dressing room open, and she stepped outside and said, “Both of you go downstairs and stop this horrible racket.”

The Judge sat up in bed. Life was complex and even the servant problem was not simple. He knew what was disturbing him now. Today was November eleventh, in the year eighteen hundred and eighty-seven.

III

The Judge turned back the covers, let his feet dangle over the side of the bed for a moment, then wriggled his feet into the slippers. He went to the window and looked out into the sunny Chicago morning. November in Chicago is a good month, cold and fine and clean. Most of the leaves are gone from the trees, and those of the tree birds who haven't gone south are alive and brisk. Already, at this hour, still somewhat before seven, people were on their way to work. A policeman stood not far away, and a brewery wagon clattered by. All was right in the world. The Judge shivered a moment, found a bathrobe, and wrapped it around him.

This morning, the Judge was uncommonly alive to sounds, smells, to heat and cold, to the compass of the four walls of his room, to all the sensations which usually the body accepts so readily and unconcernedly. Irritation was ready and waiting, and many things contributed to it, a picture of Daniel Webster on the wall—What a stupid, ridiculous decoration for a bedroom wall! Why don't I throw it out! Black Daniel, black as his own ignorance!—an ugly carved curl in the back of a chair, the wallpaper, the rug on the floor. But he knew that he was consciously irritating himself, and he fought the feeling. He paced the room, back and forth, several times, stretched his arms, revolved them once or twice, opened the window, and breathed deeply of the cold morning air. But the chill was depressing rather than exciting, and he closed the window hurriedly, seating himself on the bed and rubbing his beard. He was not yet fully awake, and a drowsy reminiscence of sleep still lingered, expressing itself as a thoughtfulness, a slowly revolving wonder and meditation which could be shattered in a basin of cold water and soap, but which the Judge did not choose to shatter yet. Rathèr was he concerned with his irritation, his state of mind on this special day; and letting his thoughts drift, he sought to recover himself.

He took refuge in an old and reliable counterpoint; he was a judge and he despised judges, more so now than ever, and with that idea he smiled for the first time this morning. A case he had tried outlined itself, and for at least the fifth time he considered the sardonic and clever remark he might have and should have made at a certain point, a remark which would have been repeated for weeks all over Chicago—Judge Altgeld said that the other day—but which he did not make simply because he did not think of it until a good deal too late. And then, annoyed at himself for returning to this egotism so readily, he wrenched his thoughts away and dropped back into a vague trend of recollection.

Some things always stood out, leaped into silhouette effect, presented themselves as a matter of habit. A miserable and unhappy rainy day during his army service always recalled itself, although there was nothing so very special about it; it was just a lasting and well-remembered discomfort, and it stood out more sharply than anything else. Also, there was a consideration of chance and purposefulness which presented itself whenever he was in such a mood as this; he was a great believer in purposefulness: didn't the thread of his own proud ego run back into the mistiest memories of childhood, so that when he was the miserable, ugly child, standing before the father, he nevertheless felt within him his destiny, and knew so surely that it could not elude him? But in his recollection of his fever-blurred walk northward from the railroad, there was not so much certainty of destiny. He was a tramp, a dirty, ill-smelling, sick tramp, when he came to a farm and pleaded for shelter and work.

“But a sick man can't work,” Cam Williams, the farmer protested.

How well he remembered Cam Williams! No, a sick man can't work; so craftily, exalted by his fever, grinning as over a well-hidden joke, he bargained with the farmer. If he got well, he would work it off; he was a mighty worker in his health, and he boasted of what he had done on the railroad. “And if you die?” the farmer said. But the farmer wasn't taken in, not even a little bit. There are men who are kind and who love other men; and though the Judge did not fully understand this broad, encompassing love of a species that is so basic in some, he recognized that it existed. Otherwise, why had the farmer made the poor bargain, sheltered him, fed him, and given him work? Hadn't that been the beginning, there outside the little town of Savannah in Iowa? But his refuge lay in the fact that if it hadn't been this farmer, mightn't it have been another? The primer of success said that man was strong and mighty, and the clue to destiny lay in his head and his own two hands; and revolting against the broad, soft, species-loving man, the unreasonable humanitarian, the Judge sought for a train of events to bear out the primer. Memory paraded and collected and sorted, spurred on by the very fact that this was November 11, 1887. Had anyone been worse equipped, so ugly, so little gifted, so poorly raised, so miserably educated; all this was against him at the start, was it not? And he had gone down, deep down, before he came up. Was Cam Williams to receive the credit? Yet he, Pete Altgeld, John Peter Altgeld, Judge Altgeld, might have remained at the farm all his life, a laborer and then perhaps a farmer himself. Wasn't that to be weighed in the balance? Ambition is dissatisfaction, and on that thread the world spins. From farm laborer, he had gone to a job in Savannah, teaching, but that was not the end; he read law, worked on farms to swell his small earnings. It was not just that he came to know people; rather, he developed in himself those qualities which made people admire him, and thereby, not by chance, came his appointment as city attorney.

Sitting on his bed now, the Judge looked at his own two hands, strong, square, purposeful. “My doing,” he reflected. “And I could do it again—and again.”

No one gave him anything. He practiced law from the bottom; the smallest cases were not too mean for him. He fought his own campaigns; he stood on his own two feet, hammering his way into the job of prosecuting attorney of Andrew County, Iowa. Did they say he climbed on the Granger bandwagon without ideal or principle?—if a man walked there were mice enough nibbling at his feet. What would they say if he told them that he had known this same dominating purpose in himself when he was twelve years old? Was he jealous of his ambition? Did he hoard it? He could have remained there as prosecuting attorney; no one forced him to walk out on the job and go to Chicago. It was his doing; step by step, he saw his way and he took it.

And now he was Judge Altgeld of Chicago. Not Cam Williams! Not one of these damned species-lovers. Yet he could not hide from himself that this whole train of thought, this whole protest against the kindness of a simple farmer so long ago, came from the disturbing fact that today Albert Parsons and the others would die, that in not too many hours they would be hanging by their necks, with the life gone out of them.

IV

He dressed methodically. Though his friend, Joe Martin the gambler, had once remarked to him, “Pete, you're the damnedest Yankee, inside and outside, I've ever known,” he retained certain habits which might be called German. In some things, he was extraordinarily methodical; he had a sense of place for things and for people. Now, as he dressed, the routine of doing a simple thing he had done so often relaxed him, and when his wife put her head in the door and asked, “You'll be ready soon, dear?” he answered, “In a few minutes. And I'm hungry, too.” “Do you want eggs or hotcakes?” “I want hotcakes,” he nodded firmly. “Well, I just don't know if we have honey.” “Then butter. Butter is just as good. My goodness, does having hotcakes depend on honey? I remember hotcakes when honey was a dream. Believe me, a dream.” “All right,” she said. “Butter. I got some fresh butter yesterday.”

He took his little silver scissors and went to the mirror, to see whether his mustache or beard needed trimming today. A hair here or a hair there made all the difference in the world. Looking at his reflection, he was pleased, for on top of the train of memory, it was nice to see this dignified and not uncomely jurist of forty years. The close-clipped beard and mustache gave his face dignity, lessened the prow of his chin, yet did not age him as beards age some men. The mustache was carefully groomed to cover his harelip, and it was surprising what a difference that made in the whole aspect of his face. As a matter of fact, men who knew him long and fairly intimately were completely unaware of his defect, and of late he had even ceased to allow it to be a weight on his own mind. His face had become leaner, and that too helped. A good barber trained his unruly shock of hair to fold back over his fine brow, and he had a habit of so carrying his head as to give that clean, well-shaped brow its fullest effect. All in all, his appearance was not anything he would have to resist, anything to hold him back; it is true that he was not as tall as he would have preferred, but he had long ago formed a theory that small men fight better.

Trimming his mustache and beard, observing himself, half detachedly, the way men do in their morning mirror, he decided that he had made the best of a poor face, very much the best of it, even to the extent of winning the girl he wanted. That thought pushed away the last unpleasant connotations of the day, and he nodded agreement at his reflection. He had a penchant for storytelling, and some day he would write down the tale of his love and courtship. Actually, it was as good as those romances people are paid to write.

It was another ugly-duckling tale. Long, long ago, when he had held his first teaching job in Ohio, he fell in love with a girl named Emma Ford. Just to think of what he was then could explain why the girl's family would have nothing of him; but he always felt the girl cared for him, and his boyhood love was something he sought along with the more solid values men put store in. The girl was a dream that walked with him; she was part of loneliness; she was part of the indescribable ache when he lay on his back on the hard ground and looked at the stars. This was not to say that he had loved only one woman; women, to him, were beautiful, to be wanted, to be desired; but there were many women and only one who inhabited that time when he had nothing and wanted all. So it was not surprising that at the age of thirty, with a future, some property, and certainly some standing in the world, he had returned and asked for her hand again.