Mr. Richard Gorman, twenty-six, city reporter of The Citizen, strode rapidly up the street, with proud cold news-nose lifted. His complacent smile, hard-lipped, loosened into servility.
“Ah, there, Dick,” said John Smallwood, clasping his hand affectionately, and squeezing his arm. “Just the man I was looking for. Do you know Mr. Bryan?”
“As fellow newspaper men,” said the Commoner, “Dick and I have been close friends for — how many years is it, my boy?”
“Three, I think, sir,” said Mr. Gorman, blushing prettily.
“I wish you could have been here, Dick,” said the Reverend Smallwood, “to hear what Mr. Bryan was saying about us. The good people of this town would be mighty proud to hear it.”
“I’d like another statement from you before you go, Mr. Bryan,” said Richard Gorman. “There’s a story going the rounds that you may make your home with us in the future.”
When questioned by a Citizen reporter, Mr. Bryan refused either to confirm or deny the rumor:
“I may have a statement to make later,” he observed with a significant smile, “but at present I must content myself by saying that if I could have chosen the place of my birth, I could not have found a fairer spot than this wonderland of nature.”
Earthly Paradise, thinks Commoner.
“I have travelled far in my day,” continued the man who had been chosen three times by a great Party to contend for the highest honor within the gift of the people. “I have gone from the woods of Maine to the wave-washed sands of Florida, from Hatteras to Halifax, and from the summits of the Rockies to where Missouri rolls her turgid flood, but I have seen few spots that equal, and none that surpass, the beauty of this mountain Eden.”
The reporter made notes rapidly.
The years of his glory washed back to him upon the rolling tides of rhetoric — the great lost days of the first crusade when the money barons trembled beneath the shadow of the Cross of Gold, and Bryan! Bryan! Bryan! Bryan! burned through the land like a comet. Ere I was old. 1896. Ah, woeful ere, which tells me youth’s no longer here.
Foresees Dawn of New Era.
When pressed more closely by the reporter as to his future plans, Mr. Bryan replied:
“My schedule is completely filled, for months to come, with speaking engagements that will take me from one end of the country to the other, in the fight I am making for the reduction of the vast armaments that form the chief obstacle to the reign of peace on earth, good-will to men. After that, who knows?” he said, flashing his famous smile. “Perhaps I shall come back to this beautiful region, and take up my life among my good friends here as one who, having fought the good fight, deserves to spend the declining years of his life not only within sight, but within the actual boundaries, of the happy land of Canaan.”
Asked if he could predict with any certainty the date of his proposed retirement, the Commoner answered characteristically with the following beautiful quotation from Longfellow:
“When the war-drum throbbed no longer,
And the battle-flags were furled
In the Parliament of man,
The Federation of the world.”
The magic cell of music — the electric piano in the shallow tiled lobby of Altamont’s favorite cinema, the Ajax, stopped playing with firm, tinny abruptness, hummed ominously for a moment, and without warning commenced anew. It’s a long way to Tipperary. The world shook with the stamp of marching men.
Miss Margaret Blanchard and Mrs. C. M. McReady, the druggist’s drugged wife who, by the white pitted fabric of her skin, and the wide bright somnolence of her eyes, on honey-dew had fed too often, came out of the theatre and turned down toward Wood’s pharmacy.
To-day: Maurice Costello and Edith M. Storey in Throw Out the Lifeline, a Vitagraph Release.
Goggling, his great idiot’s head lolling on his scrawny neck, wearing the wide-rimmed straw hat that covered him winter and summer, Willie Goff, the pencil merchant, jerked past, with inward lunges of his crippled right foot. The fingers of his withered arm pointed stiffly toward himself, beckoning to him, and touching him as he walked with stiff jerking taps, in a terrible parody of vanity. A gaudy handkerchief with blue, yellow and crimson patterns hung in a riotous blot from his breast-pocket over his neatly belted gray Norfolk jacket, a wide loose collar of silk barred with red and orange stripes flowered across his narrow shoulders. In his lapel a huge red carnation. His thin face, beneath the jutting globular head, grinned constantly, glutting his features with wide, lapping, receding, returning, idiot smiles. For should he live a thousand years, he never will be out of humor. He burred ecstatically at the passers-by, who grinned fondly at him, and continued down to Wood’s where he was greeted with loud cheers and laughter by a group of young men who loitered at the fountain’s end. They gathered around him boisterously, pounding his back and drawing him up to the fountain. Pleased, he looked at them warmly, gratefully. He was touched and happy.
“What’re you having, Willie?” said Mr. Tobias Pottle.
“Give me a dope,” said Willie Goff to the grinning jerker, “a dope and lime.”
Pudge Carr, the politician’s son, laughed hilariously. “Want a dope and lime, do you, Willie?” he said, and struck him heavily on the back. His thick stupid face composed itself.
“Have a cigarette, Willie,” he said, offering the package to Willie Goff.
“What’s yours?” said the jerker to Toby Pottle.
“Give me a dope, too.”
“I don’t want anything,” said Pudge Carr. Such drinks as made them nobly wild, not mad.
Pudge Carr held a lighted match to Willie’s cigarette, winking slowly at Brady Chalmers, a tall, handsome fellow, with black hair, and a long dark face. Willie Goff drew in on his cigarette, lighting it with dry smacking lips. He coughed, removed the weed, and held it awkwardly between his thumb and forefinger, looking at it, curiously.
They sputtered with laughter, involved and lost in clouds of fume, and guzzling deep, the boor, the lackey, and the groom.
Brady Chalmers took Willie’s colored handkerchief gently from his pocket and held it up for their inspection. Then he folded it carefully and put it back.
“What are you all dressed up about, Willie?” he said. “You must be going to see your girl.”
Willie Goff grinned cunningly.
Toby Pottle blew a luxurious jet of smoke through his nostrils. He was twenty-four, carefully groomed, with slick blond hair, and a pink massaged face.
“Come on, Willie,” he said, blandly, quietly, “you’ve got a girl, haven’t you?”
Willie Goff leered knowingly; at the counter-end, Tim McCall, twenty-eight, who had been slowly feeding cracked ice from his cupped fist into his bloated whisky-fierce jowls, collapsed suddenly, blowing a bright rattling hail upon the marble ledge.
“I’ve got several,” said Willie Goff. “A fellow’s got to have a little Poon–Tang, hasn’t he?”
Flushed with high ringing laughter, they smiled, spoke respectfully, uncovered before Miss Tot Webster, Miss Mary McGraw, and Miss Martha Cotton, older members of the Younger Set. They called for stronger music, louder wine.
“How do you do?”
“Aha! Aha!” said Brady Chalmers to Miss Mary McGraw. “Where were YOU that time?”
“YOU’LL never know,” she called back. It was between them — their little secret. They laughed knowingly with joy of possession.
“Come on back, Pudge,” said Euston Phipps, their escort. “You too, Brady.” He followed the ladies back — tall,