Ladies and Gentlemen

He had been brought up a Baptist but almost on the heels of his wedding he joined his wife’s congregation. She was a strict Presbyterian, and in Dyketon the Presbyterians, next after the Episcopalians, constituted the most aristocratic department of piety. This step also pleased old Mr. Ralph exceedingly.

It wasn’t very long before Mr. Bracken, as everybody nearly except his intimates called him, was chief of staff down at the bank, closest adviser and right-hand-man to the owner. In another five years he was junior partner and vice-president. Five years more, and he, still on the sunny side of thirty-five, was president. Mr. Ralph had died and among the directors no other name was considered for the vacancy. His election merely was a matter of form. With his wife’s holdings and his own and his widowed mother-in-law’s, he controlled a heavy majority of the stock.

Jerome Bracken was a model to all young men growing up. Look at the way his earthly affairs were prospering! Look at his tithes to religion and to charity – one-tenth of all he made bestowed on good causes and in good deeds; a sober man laying up treasures not only in this world but for the world to come. Look how the Lord was multiplying his profits unto him! Mothers and fathers enjoined their sons’ notice upon these proofs. Jerome Bracken’s life was like a motto on a wall, like a burning torch in the night-time.

Still, there were those – a few only, be it said – who claimed that with increasing years and increasing powers Mr. Bracken took on a temper which made him hard and high-handed and greedy for yet more authority. This hardness does come often to those who sit in lofty seats and rule over the small destinies of the smaller fry. On the other hand, though, anyone who notably succeeds is sure to have his detractors; success breeds envy and envy breeds criticism. That fierce light which beats upon a throne brings out in clean relief any imperfections of the illumined one, and people are bound to notice them and some people are bound to comment on them.

Take, for instance, the time when that young fellow, Quinn, was caught dead to rights pilfering from the petty cash. It seemed he had been speculating in a small way at bucket-shops and, what was worse, betting on the races. It further seemed to quite a number of citizens that Mr. Bracken might have found it in his heart to be pitiful to the sinner. Not much more than a boy and his father and mother hard-working, decent people and his older brother a priest and all – these were the somewhat indirect arguments they offered in condonement. And besides, wasn’t old man Quinn ready to sell his cottage and use the money from the sale to make good the shortage? Then why not let the whole messy business drop where it was? Least said soonest mended. And so on and so forth.

Mr. Bracken couldn’t see the situation in any such light. He felt sorry enough for the lad and sorrier for the lad’s family, and so stated when a sort of unofficial delegation of the pleaders waited on him. Nor was it the amount of the theft that counted with him; he said that, too. But in his position he had a duty to the commonweal and topping that, an obligation to his depositors and his patrons. He refused to consent that the thing be hushed up. He went himself and swore out the warrant, and that night young Quinn’s wayward head tossed on a cot in the county jail. Mr. Bracken went before the grand jury likewise and pressed for the indictment; and at the trial in circuit court he was the prosecution’s chief witness, relating with a regretful but painstaking fidelity the language of the defendant’s confession to him.

Young Quinn accordingly departed to state’s prison for two years of hard labor, becoming what frequently is spoken of as a warning and an example. While there he learned to make chair-bottoms but so far as might be learned never made any after his release. When last heard of he was a hobo and presumably an associate of members of the criminal classes. By all current standards of righteous men the example was now a perfected one.

Persons who found fault with the attitude Mr. Bracken had taken in the case naturally did not know of any offsetting acts of kindliness performed by him behind closed doors. Regarding these acts there was no way for them to know. Had they known, perhaps they might have altered their judgments. Or perhaps not. Behind his back they probably would have gone right on picking him to pieces. A main point, though, was that nobody berated him to his face; nobody would dare. He passed through his maturing years shielded by an insulation of expressed approval for what he said and what he thought and what he did.

This was true of the home circle, which a fine and gracious flavor of domestic harmony perfumed; and it was true of his life locally and abroad. When you get to be a little tin god on wheels, the crowd is glad to trail along and grease the wheels for you with words of praise and admiring looks. And when everybody is saying yes, yes, oh yes, to you, why, you get out of the habit ever of saying no, emphatically no, to yourself. That’s only human nature, which is one of the few things that the automobile and the radio have not materially altered.

So much, for the moment, for this man who was a model to young men growing up. It is necessary to turn temporarily to one who went down, down, down, as that first one, in the estimation of a vast majority of his fellow beings was going up and up and ever higher up.

Queenie Sears was the one whose straying feet took hold on hell. Presently her establishment had a booze-artist for a proprietor and a hard and aggravating name among the police force. They called it the toughest joint in the First Ward. City court warrants were sworn out against her – for plain drunkenness, for disorderly conduct along with drunkenness, for fighting with other women of her sort, for suffering gaming and dope-peddling on her premises.

When an inmate of her house killed herself under peculiarly distressing circumstances, sermons were preached about her from at least two city pulpits, the ministers speaking of depravity and viciousness and the debauching of youth and plaguish blots on the fair burnished face of the civic shield. When she took the Keeley Cure – and speedily relapsed – those who frequented her neighborhood of ill repute had a hearty laugh over the joke of it. She was gross of size and waddled when she walked, and her big earrings of flawed diamonds rested against jowls of quivering, unwholesome bloat.

But dissipation did not destroy the beldame’s faculties for earning money – if money got that way could be said to be earned – and for putting it by. Mr. Jerome Bracken, who had known her back in those long bygone days of her comeliness, was in position to give evidence, had he been so minded, regarding her facility at saving it up. This was how he came to have such information:

Once or twice a year, say, she would call him on the telephone at his office in the bank. Across the wire to him her eaten-out voice would come, hoarse and flattened – a hoarseness and a flatness which increased as the years rolled by.

“Jerry,” she would say, following almost a set pattern, “you know who this is, don’t you – Queenie?”

“Yes,” he would answer; “what can I do for you now?”

“Same as you done the last time,” she would say. “I’ve got a few more iron men tucked away and I’m looking for a little suggestion about a place to put ’em. And, Jerry, I hope you don’t mind my calling you up. There ain’t nobody else I could depend on like I can on you.”

She never told him, in dollars and cents, how much she had for investment nor did he ever ask. If inwardly he guessed at the possible total his guess did not run to large figures. But just as he might have done in the case of any individual seeking his counsel in this regard, he would recommend to her this or that bond or such-and-such standard stock, and she would repeat the name after him until she had memorized it and then she would thank him.

“I’m mighty much obliged to you, Jerry,” she would say. “I ain’t ever lost any money yet by following after your advice. It’s awful good of you, helping me out this way, and I appreciate it – I certainly do.”

“That’s all right, Queenie,” he would tell her, in his precise manner of speech. “I’m glad to be able to serve you. You are free to call on me – by telephone – whenever you care to.”

“I won’t never forget it,” she would reply. “Well, good-by, Jerry.”

It never happened more than twice a year, sometimes only once in a year as they – these years – kept on mounting up.

They mounted up until Dyketon had increased herself from a sprawled-out county-seat into a city of the second class. She had 100,000 inhabitants now – only 83,000 according to the notoriously inadequate federal census figures, but fully 100,000 by the most conservative estimates of the Board of Trade – and old inhabitants were deploring that whereas once they knew by name or face everybody they met, now a fellow could take a stroll on almost every street and about every other person he ran into would be a total stranger to him.

New blood was quick and rampant in Dyketon’s commercial arteries and new leaders had risen up in this quarter or that, but two outstanding figures of the former times still were outstanding. On all customary counts Mr. Jerome Bracken was the best man in town and old Queenie Sears the worst woman. He led all in eminence, she distanced the field in iniquity. By every standard he was at the very top. Nobody disputed her evil hold on the bottommost place of all. Between those heights of his gentility and those depths of her indecency there was a space of a million miles that seemed to any imagination unbridgeable; at least that seemed so to Dyketon’s moralists, provided they ever had coupled the honored president of the State Bankers’ Association and the abandoned strumpet of Front Street in the same thought, which was improbable.

A certain day was a great day for him who was used to great days. But this one, by reason of two things, was really a day above other great days. In the same issue of the Dyketon Morning Sun appeared, at the top of the social notes, an announcement of his daughter’s engagement to Mr. Thomas H. Scopes III, a distinguished member of one of the oldest families in town, and, on the front page, his own announcement as an aspirant for the Republican nomination for United States Senator.

Until now he had put by all active political ambitions. From time to time, tempting prospects of office-holding had come to him; he had waved them aside. But now, his private fortune having passed the mark of two millions, and his business being geared to run practically on its own momentum and smoothly, he felt, and his formal card to the voters so stated, that he might with possible profit to the commonwealth devote the energies of his seasoned years to public service as a public servant. Quote: If the people by the expression of their will at the approaching primaries indicated him as the choice of his party for this high position, then so be it; his opponent would find him ready for the issue. End quote.

All the morning and all the afternoon until he left his office he was receiving the congratulations of associates and well-wishers upon Miss Bracken’s engagement and likewise upon his own decision to run for Senator. His desk telephone was jingling constantly. He stopped in at his club on the way home – the Metropolis Club it was, and the most exclusive one in town – and there he held a sort of levee. Whole-hearted support was promised him by scores, literally. The most substantial men in the whole city gathered about him, endorsing him for the step he had taken and pledging themselves to work for him and predicting his easy nomination and his equally easy election. The state generally went Republican – not always, but three times out of four on an average. Under this barrage of applause he unbent somewhat, showing more warmth, more geniality, than he had shown anywhere for a good long while. He did not unbend too far, though, but just far enough.

The club cynic, an aged and petulant retired physician, watching the scene in the club library from his regular seat by the tall marble fireplace, remarked under his voice to the first deputy club cynic, who now bore him company and who would succeed him on his death:

“Haughty as hell, even now, ain’t he? Notice this, Ike – he’s not acknowledging the enthusiasm of that flock of bootlickers that are swarming around him yonder, he’s merely accepting it as his proper due. What does the man think he is anyhow – God Almighty?”

“Humph!” answered the deputy. “You rate our budding statesman too low. Down in that Calvinistic soul of his he may sometimes question the workings of the Divine Scheme, but you bet he never has questioned his own omnipotence – the derned money-changing pouter pigeon. Look at him, all reared back there with one hand on his heart and the other under his coat-tails – like a steel engraving of Daniel Webster!”

“Not on his heart, Ike,” corrected the chief cynic grimly; “merely on the place where his heart would be if he had any heart. He had one once, I guess, but from disuse it’s withered up and been absorbed into the system. Remember, don’t you, how just here the other week he clamped down on poor old Hank Needham and squeezed the last cent out of him? He’ll win, though, mark my words on it. He always has had his way and he’ll keep on having it. Lord, Lord, and I can remember when we used to send real men to Washington from this state – human he-men, not glorified dollar-grabbers always looking for the main chance. Given half a show, Hank Needham could have come back; now he’s flat busted and he’ll be dead in six months, or I miss my guess.”

These isolated two – the official crab and his understudy – were the only men in the room, barring club servants, who remained aloof from the circle surrounding the candidate. They bided on where they were, eyeing him from under their drooped eyelids when, at the end of a happy hour, he passed out, a strong, erect, soldierly man in his ripening fifties. Then, together, they both grunted eloquently.

In a fine glow of contentment Jerome Bracken walked to his house. He wanted the exercise, he wanted to be alone for a little while with his optimism.

He was almost home when a city hospital ambulance hurried past him, its gong clanging for passage in the traffic of early evening. Just after it got by he saw a white-coated interne and a policeman wrestling with somebody who seemed to be fastened down to a stretcher in the interior of the motor, and from that struggling somebody he heard delirious sobbing outcries in a voice that was feminine and yet almost too coarsened and thick to be feminine.

Vaguely it irked him that even for a passing moment this interruption should break in on his thoughts. But no untoward thing disturbed the household rhapsody that night. There, as at the office, the bell on the telephone kept ringing almost constantly, and, being answered, the telephone yielded only felicitating words from all and sundry who had called up.

A man who had no shadow of earthly doubt touching on his destinies slept that night in Jerome Bracken’s bed. And if he dreamed we may be well assured that his dreams were untroubled by specters of any who had besought him for mercy and had found it not. A conscience that is lapped in eider-down is nearly always an easy conscience.

It was the fifth day after the next day when, with no warning whatsoever, Jerome Bracken got smashed all to flinders. He was in his office at the rear of the bank going over the morning mail – it mostly was letters written by friendly partisans over the state, including one from the powerful national committeeman for the state – when without knocking, his lawyer, Mr. Richard Griffin, opened the door and walked in followed by his local political manager, who also happened to be the local political boss. The faces of both wore looks of a grave uneasiness, the manners of both were concerned and unhappy.

“Morning, gentlemen,” said Mr. Bracken. “What is pressing down on your minds this fine day?”

Yankee-fashion, Mr. Griffin answered the question by putting another.

“Bracken,” he said, “how long have you been knowing this woman, Queenie Sears?”

“What do you mean?” demanded Mr. Bracken sharply.

“What I say. How long have you known her? And how well?”

“I don’t understand you, Dick.” The other’s tone was angry. “And by what right do you assume – ”

“Bracken,” snapped Griffin sharply, “I’m here as a man who’s been your lifelong friend – you must know that. And Dorgan here has come with me in the same capacity – as a friend of yours. This thing is serious. It’s damned serious. It’s likely to be about the most serious thing that ever happened to you. I’ll repeat the question and I’m entitled to a fair, frank answer: How long have you been acquainted with Queenie Sears?”

In his irate bewilderment Mr. Bracken could think of but one plausible explanation for this incredible inquiry. He started up from his chair, his hands gripping into fists. He almost shouted it.

“Has that dirty, libelous, scandal-mongering rag of an afternoon paper down the street had the effrontery this early in the campaign to attempt to besmirch my character? If it has I’ll – ”

“Not yet!” For the first time the politician was taking a hand in the talk. “But it will – before sundown tonight. Catch a Democrat outfit passing up a bet like this! Sweet chance!” He looked toward the lawyer. “You better tell him, Griffin,” he said with a certain gloomy decision. “Then when you’re through I’ll have my little say-so.”

“Probably that would be best,” agreed Griffin resignedly. “Sit down, won’t you, Bracken? I’m going to hand you a pretty hard blow right in the face.”

His amazement growing, Mr. Bracken sat down. Through what painfully followed, the other two continued to stand.

“Bracken,” stated Griffin, “I’ll start at the beginning. Something like a week ago Queenie Sears was taken from her dive down on the river shore to the municipal infirmary. She had delirium tremens – was raving crazy. She’d had them before, it appears, but this attack was the last one she’ll ever have. Because it killed her – that and a weak heart and bad kidneys and a few other complications, so the doctors say. Anyhow, she’s dead. She died about an hour ago.

“Well, early this morning her mind cleared up for a little while. They told her she was going, which she probably knew for herself, and advised her to put her worldly affairs – if she had any – in order. It seems she had considerable worldly affairs to put in order, which was a surprise. It seems from what she said that she had upwards of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, all in gilt-edged securities, all tucked away in a safe-deposit box, and all of it, every red cent of it, coined from the blood and the sweat and the degradations of fallen women. No need for us to go into that now. God knows, enough people will be only too glad to go into it when the news leaks out!

“As I say, they told her at the hospital that she was dying. So she asked for a lawyer and they got one – a young fellow named Dean that’s lately opened up an office. And he came and she made her will and it was signed in the presence of witnesses and will be offered for probate without delay. Trust some of our friends of the opposition to attend promptly to that detail. And, Bracken – take it steady, man – Bracken, she left every last miserable cent of that foul, tainted one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to you.”

“What!” The cry issued from Bracken’s throat in a gulping shriek.

“I’m saying she left it all to you. I’ve just seen the will. So has Dorgan. I sent for him as soon as the word reached me about half an hour ago and we went together and read the infernal thing. It says – I can almost quote it verbatim – that she’s leaving it to you because for thirty-six years you’ve been her best friend and really her only friend and her one disinterested adviser. And furthermore because – with almost her dying breath she said it – because you were solely instrumental in helping her to save and preserve her earnings… God, but that’s been hard! Now then, Dorgan, it’s your turn to speak.”

So Dorgan spoke, but briefly. Five minutes later, from the door on the point of departure, he was repeating with patience, in almost the soothing parental tone one might use to an ailing and unreasonable child, what already he had said at least twice over to that stricken figure slumped in the swivel chair at the big flat desk.

“Sure,” he was saying, “I’ll believe you, and Griffin here, he’ll believe you – ain’t he just promised you he would? – and there’s maybe five or six others’ll believe you – but who else is goin’ to take your word against what it says in black and white on that paper? And her lookin’ into the open grave when she told ’em to set it down? Nope, Bracken, you’re through, and it’s only a mercy to you that I’m comin’ here to be the first one to tell you you are. You can explain till you’re black in the face and you can refuse to touch that dough till the end of time, or you can give it to charity – if you’re lucky enough to find a charity that’ll take it – but, Bracken, it’s been hung around your neck like a grindstone and it was a dead woman’s hands that hung it there and it makes you altogether too heavy a load for any political organization to carry – you see that yourself, don’t you? And so, Bracken, you’re through!”

But to Bracken’s ears now the words came dimly, meaning little. Where he was huddled, he foresaw as with an eye for prophecy things coming to pass much as they truly did come to pass. He saw his wife – how well he knew that lukewarm lady who was not lukewarm in her animosities nor yet in her suspicions! – saw her closing a door of enduring contempt forever between them; he saw the breaking off of his daughter’s engagement to that young Scopes, who was the third bearer of an honored name, and his daughter despising him as the cause for her humiliation and her wrecked happiness; he saw himself thrown out of his church, thrown out of his bank, thrown out of all those pleasant concerns in which he had joyed and from which he had rendered the sweet savors of achievement and of creation. He saw himself being cut, being ignored, by those who had been glad to kowtow before him for his favor, being elbowed aside as though he were a thing unclean and leprous.

He heard, not Dorgan passing a compassionate but relentless sentence on him and his dearest of all hopes, but rather he seemed to hear the scornful laughter of unregenerate elderly libertines, rejoicing at the downfall of an offending brother exposed at his secret sins; and he seemed to hear derisive voices speaking – “Walking so straight up he reared backwards, and all the time – ” “Well, well, well, the church is certainly the place for a hypocrite to hide himself in, ain’t it?” “Acting like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, but now just look at him!” “His life was an open book till they found out where the dark pages were stuck together, he, he, he!” Thus and so he heard the scoffing voices speaking. He heard aright too, and as his head went down into his hands, he tasted in anticipation a draft too bitter for human strength to bear.

Griffin was another who did not hear the third repetition of Dorgan’s judgment. He had gone on ahead like a man anxious to quit a noisome sick-room and to one of the assistant cashiers in the outer office he was saying: “I advise you to get your chief to go home and lie down awhile. It might also be a good idea to call up his family doctor and get him to drop over here right away. From the looks of him, Mr. Bracken’s not a well man. He’s had a shock – a profound shock. His nerves might give way, I’d say, any minute. I’m afraid he’s in for a very, very hard time!”

Peace on Earth

This Christmas was going to be different. So far as Mr. and Mrs. Bugbee were concerned the Christmas before had been a total failure, disillusioning, disappointing, fraught with heart-burnings. But this coming one – well, just let everybody wait and see. They’d show them.

“It’s going to be so dog-goned different you’d be surprised!” said Mr. Bugbee. He said it after the plan had taken on shape and substance and, so saying, raised a hand in the manner of a man who plights a solemn troth.

But first the plan had to be born. It was born on a day in October when Mr. Bugbee came into the living-room of their light-housekeeping apartment on West Ninth Street just around the corner from Washington Square. The living-room was done in Early Byzantine or something – a connoisseur would know, probably – and Mrs. Bugbee was dressed to match the furnishings. She was pretty, though. Her friends said she reminded them of a Pre-Raphaelite Madonna, which either was or was not a compliment dependent on what privately the speaker thought about the Pre-Raphaelite school. Still, most of her friends liked it, being themselves expertly artistic. She had the tea things out – the hammered Russian set. This was her customary afternoon for receiving and presently there would be people dropping in. She lifted her nose and sniffed.