Lifted Masks Part 18

The reporter looked at the clock. "I'll just catch the noon edition," he said, "if I telephone right away."

He was moving to the other room when the Governor called to him.

"See here, it seems to me you're a strange newspaper man!"

"How so?"

"Why, I tell you I've made a senatorial appointment--a matter of some slight importance--and you rush off never asking whom I've appointed."

The reporter gave a forced laugh. He wished the Governor would not detain him with a joke now when every second counted.

"That's right," he said, with strained pleasantness. "Well, who's the man?"

The Governor raised his head. "Huntington," he said quietly, and resumed his work.

"What?" gasped the reporter. "What?"

Then he stopped in embarra.s.sment, as if ashamed of being so easily taken in. "Guess you're trying to jolly me a little, aren't you, Governor?"

"Jolly you, Mr. Markham? I'm not given to 'jollying' newspaper reporters. Here's a copy of the telegram I sent this morning, if you are still sceptical. Really, I don't see why you think it so impossible. Don't you consider Mr. Huntington a fit man for the place?"

But for the minute the reporter seemed unable to speak. "May I ask,"

he fumbled at last, "why you did it?"

"I had but one motive, Mr. Markham. I thought the matter over and it seemed to me the people should have the man they wanted. I am with them in believing Huntington the best man for the place." He said it simply, and went quietly back to his work.

For many a long day politicians and papers continued the search for "the motive." Styles and his crowd saw it as a simple matter of selling out; they knew, of course, that it could be nothing else.

After their first rage had subsided, and they saw there was nothing they could do, they wondered, sneeringly, why he did not "fix up a better story." That was a little _too_ simple-minded. Did he think people were fools? And even the men who profited by the situation puzzled their brains for weeks trying to understand it.

There was something behind it, of course.

XI

HIS AMERICA

He hated to see the reporter go. With the closing of that door it seemed certain that there was no putting it off any longer.

But even when the man's footsteps were at last sounding on the stairway, he still clung to him.

"Father," he asked, fretfully, "why do you always talk to those fellows?"

Herman Beckman turned in his chair and stared at his son. Then he laughed. "Now, that's a fine question to come from the honour man of a law school! I hope, Fritz, that your oration to-night is going to have a little more sense in it than that."

The calling up of his oration made him reach out another clutching hand to the vanished reporter. "But it's farcical, father, to be always interviewed by a paper n.o.body reads."

"n.o.body--_reads_?"

"Why, n.o.body cares anything about the _Leader_. It's dead."

Herman Beckman looked at his son sharply; something about him seemed strange. He decided that he was nervous about the commencement programme. Fritz had the one oration.

The boy had opened the drawer of his study table and was fingering some papers he had taken out.

"Sure you know it?" the man asked with affectionate parental anxiety.

"Oh, I know it all right," Fred answered grimly, and again the father decided that he was nervous about the thing. He wasn't just like himself.

The man walked to the window and stood looking across at the university buildings. Colleges had always meant much to Herman Beckman. The very day Fritz was born he determined that the boy was to go to college. It was good to witness the fulfilment of his dreams. He turned his glance to the comfortable room.

"Pretty decent comfortable sort of place, isn't it, father?" Fred asked, following his father's look and thought from the Morris chair to the student's lamp, and all those other things which nowadays seem an inevitable part of the acquirement of learning.

It made his father laugh. "Yes, my boy, I should call it decent--and comfortable." He grew thoughtful after that.

"Pretty different from the place you had, father?"

"Oh--me? My place to study was any place I could find. Sometimes on top of a load of hay, lots of times by the light of the logs. I've studied in some funny places, Fritz."

"Well, you _got_ there, father!" the boy burst out with feeling. "By Jove, there aren't many of them _know_ the things you know!"

"I know enough to know what I don't know," said the old man, a little sadly. "I know enough to know what I missed. I wanted to go to college. No one will ever know how I wanted to! I began to think I'd never feel right about it. But I have a notion that when I sit there to-night listening to you, Fritz, knowing that you're speaking for two hundred boys, half of whose fathers did go to college, I think I'm going to feel better about it then."

The boy turned away. Something in the kindly words seemed as the cut of a whip across his face.

"Well, Fritz," his father continued, getting into his coat, "I'll be going downtown. Leave you to put on an extra flourish or two." He laughed in proud parental fas.h.i.+on. "Anyway, I have some things to see about."

The boy stood up. "Father, I have something to tell you." He said it shortly and sharply.

The father stood there, puzzled.

"You won't like my oration to-night, father."

And still the man did not speak. The words would not have bothered him much--it was the boy's manner.

"In fact, father, you're going to be desperately disappointed in it."

The dull red was creeping into the man's cheeks. He was one to have little patience with that thing of not doing one's work. "Why am I going to be disappointed? This is no time to s.h.i.+rk! You should--"

"Oh, you'll not complain of the time and thought I've put on it,"

the boy broke in with a short, hard laugh. "But, you see, father--you see"--his armour had slipped from him--"it doesn't express--your views."

"Did I ever say I wanted you to express 'my views'? Did I bring you up to be a mouthpiece of mine? Haven't I told you to _think_?"

But with a long, sharp glance at his boy anger gave way. "Come, boy"--going over and patting him on the back--"brace up now. You're acting like a seven-year-old girl afraid to speak her first piece,"

and his big laugh rang out, eager to rea.s.sure.

"You won't see it! You won't believe it! I don't suppose you'll believe it when you hear it!" He turned away, overwhelmed by a sudden realisation of just how difficult was the thing that lay before him.