6 A Maker of Reputations

The next day’s session of both House and Senate was languid so far as concerned their own business, but there was keen interest in both bodies to see the newspaper accounts of Carton’s affairs. Both senators and representatives knew that first impressions were likely to have a deep effect upon the public, and the State was bound to get all its news from the press: there was no other source of either information or misinformation.

This little city is peculiar in the fact that it is more isolated than any other important place in the State. Nestling in its hollow in the hills, it has but a single line of railroad, and the members do not know how the people take any act of theirs until the trains come east and west, bringing the newspapers from the larger cities of the State.

Guthrie saw the Speaker open his Times and read his account with close attention. When Carton finished it, he leaned over in his chair—Guthrie sat scarcely a yard away—and whispered: “Billy, I thank you;” but, when he read some of the other papers, he frowned and once he bit his lip savagely. Guthrie later examined them at his leisure, and it was his opinion that the first impression upon the State would be unfavourable, despite the powerful influence of the Times. But he said nothing, and left Carton for the present, having an engagement to which he was looking forward with pleasure.

The Legislature adjourned for the day at 2 P. M., and he had asked Clarice Ransome to go driving with him on the beautiful river road that leads out of the town and into the great lowland valley. She had accepted, and half an hour later Guthrie was at the Governor’s door with the carriage.

“Don’t forget to show her all the glory of the place,” said Lucy Hastings as they drove away; and Guthrie, giving his promise, increased the speed of his horses until they swung with their long, level trot into the river road.

Winter had not come in full tide, yet the day was cold and crisp with a wonderful sunny light over the river and the brown hills. Guthrie felt a great exhilaration as he drew the fur robes more closely about them. It was partly the crisp and tonic freshness of the day and partly the presence, by his side, of Clarice with whom he began to feel for the first time the sense of comradeship. But its effect was to make him silent rather than talkative, and he spoke so seldom that Clarice glanced at him in surprise. He was looking straight ahead, apparently at the hills and the river, but, when she studied his face, the colour in her own cheeks deepened a little; suddenly, she was embarrassed, but as suddenly the embarrassment passed away.

“How is your Mr. Carton coming on?” she asked at length.

“Not too well, I fear,” he replied. “So far as I can judge from the newspapers that have come in, the impression that he has made upon the State in this crisis of his life is distinctly unfavourable. I shall do all I can for him in the Times, and the Times is powerful; but there are so many against us.”

Then he relapsed into a thoughtful silence, and she was studying him. She noticed the firm set of his head, the curve of a long and masterful jaw, and her respect for him increased.

“It seems to me, Mr. Guthrie,” she said, “that men in your profession are makers of reputations or—the destroyers of them!”

“That is so,” replied Guthrie with a slight smile. “We are the heralds, the trumpeters of fame, whether it is good or evil.”

“But you are trying to save Mr. Carton,” she said, quietly pursuing her purpose, “and, by and by, you will be seeking to make or save the reputation of somebody else. Now, what do you intend to do for yourself?”

Guthrie looked at her in slow surprise. He was so much immersed in his present work that he had not thought much about his future beyond the Washington bureau. So he told her again of his design to go to the national capital for the Times.

“But after that?” she persisted.

“Well I don’t know,” replied Guthrie slowly. “To tell you the truth I haven’t looked so far, but I suppose I expect to be a great editor some day.”

“But aren’t the great editors nowadays the proprietors? And, as I understand it, it takes a millionaire to be the proprietor of a successful newspaper. And are you a money-maker?”

She smiled at him, as if she asked the questions lightly or carelessly.

“No,” replied Guthrie with conviction, “I am not a money-maker. I’m a writer. I’ve thought in a vague sort of way that I’d like to be rich, but I suppose I never shall be. I can pursue money for a while, but, just when I’m about to catch up, something else that I’m more interested in draws me off.”

She smiled again, and once more regarded his face with attention as he gazed absently at the brown slope of the hills.

“I don’t think I should like to be an anonymous writer all my life,” she said. “No matter how brilliantly you may write a thing, only a few people in your office will know who has done it, and yet prestige, credit for good work, is part of one’s capital in life. When one’s work is of a semipublic nature, one is entitled to credit, not only from one’s employer, but from the public also.”

“Still,” said Guthrie, “in a country like this, journalism must be anonymous; it cannot be carried on in any other fashion.”

She did not reply. It did not seem to her that he had quite understood her, and she did not feel that she was entitled to go further with one whom she had not known long. She was quite sure that she liked him, and she was beginning to admire him, partly for his devotion to the cause of others; but she could not see to just what point his career would lead him.

She was aware, too, that her interest in him, to a great extent at least, was due to the difference between him and the young men whom she had known abroad Europeans and some Americans living in Europe. She found in Guthrie a zeal, an enthusiasm, a love of his work, a desire to make a career, and a disregard for the little things of life, that she found stimulating by contact. She did not care to disregard the little things herself, but she was beginning to be aware that they were merely little things after all. She had been accustomed to men who considered it bad form to be interested in one’s work, if one had any, and to feel or to affect to feel indifference or cynicism toward all things. She had once thought this distinguished and impressive—now she feared that it was only a pose or a mere weakness; an air of boredom which was once the hall-mark of superiority was becoming the badge of ill manners. She could not endorse all that Guthrie said; but she liked his sincerity, and he seemed to her more masculine than those others.

His thoughts, unlike hers, were not travelling beyond the one by his side. The paramount wish with him was to make a convert—that is, to bring her over to his ways of thinking. She had piqued him by her indifference, and sometimes by her critical coldness toward her own people and their affairs. This increased his desire to convert her and to interest her in her own. His zeal hitherto had been wholly professional, the case appealing to him somewhat in the manner of a difficult assignment, the non-performance of which would injure his prestige. But now, sitting by his side with no one else near, she made to him an appeal of a wholly different kind, and the appeal was of the essence feminine. She was not a woman to be converted, but just an attractive girl, and unconsciously he liked her much the better because of it. He suddenly realised that she was very beautiful—it had not occurred to him to see it before, and, for the while, he felt embarrassment.

A handsome old man with beautiful silver-gray hair met them. He was on foot, but he walked briskly and with vigour. A fine smile lighted up his face as he saw Guthrie, and he bowed.

“That was the Bishop was it not?” asked Clarice when the old man was out of hearing.

“Yes.”

“He seemed to know you well.”

“He does,” replied Guthrie. “He has known me all my life.”

He was tempted to tell her of Templeton’s case and his part in it, in order to see if she would support him; but he refrained, and he was glad of it when they met Templeton himself five minutes later.

Templeton was alone in a light cart behind a thoroughbred trotter, whose swift hoofs made sparks fly from the road. The man himself was wrapped in a great fur coat, and he handled the lines with a practised hand, making a brave appearance as he dashed past. He bowed curtly to Guthrie, the bow having in it a note of derision. “He thinks I wanted to publish that story about him and couldn’t,” was Guthrie’s inference.

“That was Mr. Templeton of the treasurer’s office,” he said in reply to Clarice’s inquiring look.

“He drives well,” she said.

“Yes, I suppose he is of the type that girls call ‘dashing!’”

She looked at him in surprise. There was a slight touch of bitterness in his tone, but, as he offered no explanation, she could not ask for one.

The road, still as smooth as a floor, ran close beside the river, and presently the hills dipped down, leaving low banks, where the water eddied into a cove. Here lay a large raft in the centre of which had been built a little log-house with a stove-pipe thrust through the roof. Two men sat on the raft at the door of the house, smoking their pipes. They were long, thin, angular, bony, and yellow, and they looked at the passing carriage with dull, expressionless eyes.

“Mountaineers,” said Guthrie. “They are pretty late with their raft, as the river is likely to be covered with ice any time, soon. Queer people, those. I’ve been among them a lot, but I can’t understand them. As I told you, they are a different race from us of the lowlands. They see everything at another angle. Ah, they’ve got a visitor!”

As the road began to ascend again, the carriage was proceeding slowly, and Guthrie saw a tall man cross the way and step upon the raft, which was tied to the bank.

“That looks much like the Reverend Zedekiah Pike,” said Miss Ransome.

“So much like him that it is he,” said Guthrie. “Those must be constituents of his; they float their timber down here from many parts of the mountains.”

He was idly watching Mr. Pike, not from any particular curiosity, but because the member naturally attracted attention, especially in a landscape which now contained so few human figures. This vague interest was suddenly increased to keen excitement when he saw one of the men on the raft spring to his feet at sight of Mr. Pike and draw a revolver. As he raised it aloft, the polished barrel shone in the wintry sunlight with a blue glitter, but Mr. Pike held up his hand as if in peace, the third man interfered, and the pistol was lowered.

Clarice was quivering with excitement and apprehension. She had never before seen a weapon drawn in anger.

“What does it mean?” she asked of Guthrie.

“I do not know,” he replied seriously, “except that we were on the edge of a tragedy. I saw that mountaineer’s finger on the trigger.”

“And what do you infer?” she asked, not able to hide her curiosity.

“That those men, instead of being Mr. Pike’s constituents, are the exact opposite.”

She understood Guthrie’s hint. She had heard of the mountain feuds, but they always seemed far away and vague; she could not realise them; even here the mountains were yet distant, and this was the capital of the State, full of peaceful men and women.

She looked back as they passed over the hill, and saw Mr. Pike standing very erect on the raft and talking to one of the men who was also standing. But the other, he who had drawn the revolver, was sitting down again, lazily smoking his pipe.

“It is no affair of mine, Mr. Guthrie,” she said, “but that little scene has aroused all my curiosity.”

“Mine has been burning a little, too,” said Guthrie with a laugh.

But they said no more of Mr. Pike at present, and Clarice by and by came back to Guthrie, who was a subject that interested her more. She knew no particular reason why she should have his possible career on her mind, but he seemed to her to be somewhat different from the ordinary types, and she wished to know how he had arrived at his present state.

Guthrie himself was a model interviewer, and much of his skill in the art lay in his lack of intrusiveness, his suppression of all the paraphernalia of his trade, and his simplicity of manner—all tending to inspire confidence in his subject and to make him feel that the interviewer was his confidential friend. This had grown to be second nature with him, so much a matter of practice rather than of deliberation that he failed to notice how he was confronted by an art of the same character as his own, but even more delicate.

Under her deft manipulation, Guthrie told of his early ambition to be a lawyer first, and then a statesman. In the State in which he was born and in which he lived, the law seemed to be the only pathway to public life. Practically everybody who rose to distinction among the people—save in commerce, and for that he had no vocation—had begun by defending or prosecuting petty criminals in magistrates’ courts. In the early days of the State, the only men of culture were the lawyers and the clergymen, and, in his part of it, the clergymen were debarred from public life by the nature of their calling. Hence it was left for the lawyers to make the laws and administer them.

It had never occurred to Guthrie as a boy to choose any other profession than the law, although the dusty court-houses, the sheepskin-bound books, and the sight of the lawyers browbeating witnesses or haggling over technicalities, repelled him to the last degree. Yet it was still the occupation to which all the brightest and most ambitious boys were expected to turn as a matter of course. In that country, when a boy developed unusual ability, it was customary to say: “Why, he’s smart enough to be a lawyer!” The strength of the lawyer with the public lay in his ability to speak, particularly in a State which loves oratory; and by oratory is meant the smooth flow of words, a sort of music appealing directly to the senses rather than any cogent form of logic. Guthrie early distrusted these orators, the majority of whom seemed to lean to demagogy and to whatever cause they thought the majority of the voters favoured; but, in those immature days, he believed it was his bad luck to come into contact with the poorer specimens of the class: off in the other counties, there were men of higher type.

So he went to the metropolis of the State and studied the law, always with an eye to a public career when he should have won his triumphs in the court-room before judge and jury. Meanwhile and in order to provide himself with funds he began to do work for the Times in odd hours, aided by the friendship of an influential member of its staff. He did not notice at the time that his study of the law was an effort, but that newspaper work was easy and spontaneous; the law did not interest him a particle, his newspaper work was like a game of base-ball, played for its own sake—for the game itself. Clever lawyers were pointed out to him and it was told how this man or that man had gone into court with no case at all, and by sheer ability had won. It revolted his moral sense that any man should use an intellect for the triumph of the wrong over the right. He was not prepared to say that a lawyer should not do his best for the side that retained him, but he began to fear that his own mental make-up forbade his doing it. One day he saw a great lawyer, famed for his skill in cross examination, frighten and confuse his opponent’s client on the witness stand until the man made contradictory statements and lost his case. Then everybody complimented the great lawyer on his skill, and the newspapers printed a eulogistic account of his triumph, with his picture at the top; but Guthrie and all the lawyers knew that the man who lost his case was right and should have won. He could never think of that incident without a shudder.

“But not all lawyers are like that; there are exceptions,” said Clarice.

“Happily there are,” said Guthrie, and he thought of old Senator Cobb who told him once that he had never taken a case which he did not believe to be right. And Guthrie knew that Senator Cobb told the truth. Clarice deftly led him back to himself and Guthrie resumed the thread of his story. He had been admitted to the bar, easily passing his examinations, learning enough for that purpose by the sheer power of memory and concentrated application. Then he looked around for an opportunity to practise and stayed a month in an office. But dry and dusty as the theory had seemed, the practice was worse. Nothing in it—neither its form nor its spirit—interested him; everything seemed to proceed indirectly—if you wanted a particular thing, you must ask for it under some other name than its own.

“Then,” said Guthrie with a laugh, containing no trace of bitterness, “I got down one evening and had it out with myself. It came upon me suddenly, but with the full power of conviction, that nature had not intended me to be a lawyer and to try cases. I was on the wrong road and I must get off at once. I was more resigned to this because I saw that in the city the law did not, as in the country, monopolise the best talent of the community. There the intellectual life was more varied; the law had good men, but there were men just as good in medicine, journalism, commerce, manufactures, and other pursuits. So you see, I was reconciled; every one wants to feel that the way is open for him to become President, whether he ever gets within a thousand miles of it or not. At any rate I went to the Times office.”

Guthrie stopped and laughed. His face lighted up with some humorous recollections of his foray into the law.

“And what happened at the Times office?” asked Clarice sympathetically.

“Why, they took me at once,” replied Guthrie. “I had been doing some work for them, as I told you, and they seemed to like it. ‘You get to the inside of things here,’ said the managing editor—I suppose I never got to the inside of the law. ‘I didn’t want to interfere with your study of the law, but I knew that sooner or later you’d come to us for a job. Why shouldn’t you? You’ll never be happy until you do the thing that suits you best.’ Well, I’ve been with the Times ever since.”

“It seems to me, nevertheless,” said Clarice meditatively, “that there are more prospects in the law than in journalism.”

“Don’t think that I pose as a critic of the law!” said Guthrie briskly. “It’s a noble profession, only it didn’t suit me. I speak from the personal standpoint of one man, your humble servant. I suppose that I’ve found now what the French call my metier. At least the work in it comes very easy.”

“But don’t you ever think of public life?” asked Clarice.

“Only in a semi-detached way now—that is, as a chronicler of it, with a small influence, perhaps, arising from that office. I am like one of the college boys at the football games who isn’t in the game itself, but who can stand on the coaching lines and shout and yell and who make a lot of noise, and sometimes delude the public into the belief that he is really an important person. No, I’m in this business now and, like General Grant, I’ll have to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer.”

Clarice let the subject go, nor did Guthrie resume it. Instead, just as they were entering a stretch of level road he cracked his whip over the horses and they swung into a long, easy trot, maintaining a speed that Clarice scarcely realised. But it was most invigorating. They were young and they were marching toward easy terms. The crisp, cold air rushed past, making the blood sparkle in their veins and deepening the red in their cheeks. Guthrie gave Clarice a sidelong glance, and again wondered why he had not noticed before how handsome she was. He observed the long curve of her eyelashes, the lips closed so firmly, her attitude of strength, and he reflected that after all it was worth while to convert this girl to his opinions; she might not be frivolous, as he had first thought, or devoted to secondary matters.

Though the landscape was wintry, it had also some lingering aspects of late autumn. The haze on the rolling hills was fine and misty like that of Indian summer, and afar three or four threads of smoke showed like silver wire against a white, cold sky. While the capital lay within the heart of a coil of hills, the edge of the great lowland valley was only a few miles away, and now they swung into it, the fertile lands stretching for miles and dotted at intervals with the solid brick houses, each inside its cluster of trees.

Clarice spoke her admiration and said it reminded her of rural France. Then Guthrie turned interviewer, and by suggestion induced her to tell much of her own life abroad. He wished to hear of the Count Raoul d’Estournelle, but he would not intimate anything concerning him nor did she speak of him. Instead she told of the teaching through which she had passed.

She had been taught to see what was only strange, outré, in her own country. The press of Europe reported solely its accidents and its crimes, and these by and by, appearing as the only pictures silhouetted against the screen, gave her a single mental impression of it.

“There was the Spanish War,” she said. “It gave me a distaste. Everybody on the Continent said it was the unprovoked attack of a big nation upon a little one with the deliberate intention of taking the latter’s territory.”

Guthrie smiled and said nothing. He knew all that had gone before that struggle, but he judged that she was, to a much larger extent than she realised, under adverse influences, and it would be wiser to keep silent for a while.

Then they drifted into the personal gossip of the capital. She wanted to know who everybody was and why they were what they were, and she could not have gone to a better guide than Guthrie. He had the entire history of the State at his fingers’ ends—not only its general history, but its family and personal story as well. He knew every man of importance in the State and his record, and he explained the character of all these people whom she had met in the capital and showed their political and personal relations to each other. While he was yet telling her these things, he turned and drove back over the road by which they had come, wishing to reach the capital at twilight. As the first faint tinge of dark appeared in the eastern sky they became silent. They were back among the hills again, and below them they saw the silver streak of the river. Clarice was impressed by the silence and loneliness of the world, but it was a loneliness without fear. It gave her, too, a stronger feeling of comradeship with Guthrie—a comradeship reaching a point where conversation was not necessary.

The red light from the setting sun blazed across the brown oaks, and covered the departing world with fire. Clarice shook herself a little. She would not yield to such feelings. She preferred to talk when she was driving with a young man at the approach of twilight, no matter who that young man might be.

“My mind goes back to Mr. Pike,” she said. “I am still wondering about that little scene on the raft.”

“I cannot guess what it meant,” said Guthrie.

In another hour they were in the capital and Guthrie left her at the door of the Governor’s house.

“I have enjoyed my drive,” she said sincerely, as she bade him good night. “I think I am beginning to feel the spell of the place!”

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