FullReads

“Got your story for the Herald set up yet?” he asked.

Farwell swallowed some more and just shook his head.

“Haven’t begun to work up the case for the Grand Jury yet?”

“No,” answered Farwell, in almost a whisper, his head hanging.

“Why,” Lafe said, in a tone of quiet surprise; “you haven’t given all that up, have you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, ain’t that strange?” said Lafe. “What’s the trouble?”

Knowles didn’t answer. In fact, I felt mighty sorry for him.

All at once, Gorgett’s manner changed; he threw away his cigar, the only time I ever saw him do it without lighting another at the end of it. His feet came down to the floor and he wheeled round on Farwell.

“I understand your wife’s a mighty nice lady, Mr. Knowles.”

Farwell’s head sank lower till we couldn’t see his face, only his fingers working kind of pitifully.

“I guess you’ve had rather a bad night?” said Gorgett, inquiringly.

“Oh, my God!” The words came out in a whisper from under Knowles’s tilted hat-brim.

“I believe I’d advise you to stick to your wife,” Gorgett went on, quietly, “and let politics alone. Somehow I don’t believe you’re the kind of man for it. I’ve taken considerable interest in you for some time back, Mr. Knowles, though I don’t suppose you’ve noticed it until lately; and I don’t believe you understand the game. You’ve said some pretty hard things in your paper about me; you’ve been more or less excitable in your statements; but that’s all right. What I don’t like altogether, though, is that it seems to me you’ve been really tooting your own horn all the time–calling everybody dishonest and scoundrels, to shove yourself forward. That always ends in sort of a lonely position. I reckon you feel considerably lonely, just now? Well, yesterday, I understand you were talking pretty free about the penitentiary. Now, that ain’t just the way to act, according to my notion. It’s a bad word. Here we are, he and I”–he pointed to me–“carrying on our little fight according to the rules, enjoying it and blocking each other, gaining a point here and losing one there, everything perfectly good-natured, when you turn up and begin to talk about the penitentiary! That ain’t quite the thing. You see words like that are liable to stir up the passions. It’s dangerous. You were trusted, when they told you the closet story, to regard it as a confidence–though they didn’t go through the form of pledging you–because your people had given their word not to betray Genz. But you couldn’t see it and there you went, talking about the Grand Jury and stripes and so on, stirring up passions and ugly feelings. And I want to tell you that the man who can afford to do that has to be mighty immaculate himself. The only way to play politics, whatever you’re for, is to learn the game first. Then you’ll know how far you can go and what your own record will stand. There ain’t a man alive whose record will stand too much, Mr. Knowles–and when you get to thinking about that and what your own is, it makes you feel more like treating your fellow-sinners a good deal gentler than you would otherwise. Now I’ve got a wife and two little girls, and my old mother’s proud of me (though you wouldn’t think it) and they’d hate it a good deal to see me sent over the road for playing the game the best I could as I found it.”

He paused for a moment, looking sad and almost embarrassed. “It ain’t any great pleasure to me,” he said, “to think that the people have let it get to be the game that it is. But I reckon it’s good for you. I reckon the best thing that ever happened to you is having to come here this morning to ask mercy of a man you looked down on.”