LOUISE ENCOUNTERS JANEWAY

After dinner the two men adjourned to the library. The evening was cool and a fire burned in the grate. Between Janeway and Judge Harrison there existed a bond of sympathy that draws men together and holds them together better than most common traits, namely, a freemasonry of brains.

They discussed, with the reserved diplomacy in which both were experienced practitioners, the figures at which Janeway could be induced to accept the proffered position of general counsel for the Durand Companies, and the details of the arrangement--and drifted from the more important topic to the current political situation. Judge Harrison, as National Republican Committeeman for the State and a member of the executive board, always kept in touch with national affairs, because the national policies had a very direct bearing on the steel business. He liked politics, anyway, and enjoyed the share of power that fell within his sphere of influence. Janeway himself had always felt the force of the Judge’s views, and drawn from them many of his own ideas of American polity. But Janeway wanted now to make, and did make it very clear that his duties as counsel should include no political obligations of any sort.

“It is not necessary they should,” said Harrison, quite serene in his programme. “I shall turn over to you everything except political responsibility. So far as Republican policies are concerned, I, myself, shall try to keep track of them; and Simms is very useful with the powers at Washington; he and Bob are hand-in-glove with the departments. And nobody pays any attention to Congress lately, anyway--the cheapest men, in the House especially, that have ever met in Washington.

“I don’t know whether it’s a sign I’m getting old, Janeway,” continued Harrison, “but I notice almost every time I come in contact with them what an inferior set of men, in Congress and out, make our laws. You see it strikingly, too, at a national political convention. Where are the equals of the last generation of politicians and lawmakers? Our own profession is the sole exception, and it is an exception only at the top.”

“What has happened,” responded Janeway, weighing Harrison’s remark, “is that business is taking all the American brains that used to supply our political life. Business is as voracious as the twin daughters of the horse leech. Our great rewards are not in politics to-day--that’s the trouble; they are in business. It’s inevitable,” continued Janeway, “that talent should seek the avenues of greatest reward. When Michael Angelo wrought and Leonardo painted, the highest honors of their time and place went to painters and architects and sculptors. Leonardo nowadays would be an aeronautical engineer, or transforming the snows of the Sierras into hot-point electric irons for thrifty women to start disastrous fires with in hotels and apartment-houses.”

“I shouldn’t mind the beggarly politicians so much,” persisted Harrison, “if the people had held up. When I was a young man and lived up north we used to ride to Chicago in the day coaches of the train. There was a parlor-car at the hind end, but it was mostly empty. I rode among the people, because my business came from them; so did Matt Carpenter, our United States Senator. More than one wintry morning I’ve seen Tim Howe, Postmaster-General of the United States, after getting out at Green Bay for the six-o’clock morning train, curled up on the last seat of a day coach, next to the Baker heater, in his ulster, for an after-daylight nap. It was a thousand times more interesting to sit out in the day coach and talk to the people than it was to isolate yourself in the parlor-car.

“I used to ride--I have ridden--everywhere on the train except on the cow catcher--and enjoyed it. I’ve talked with the engineer in the cab--and he was always a stalwart American. In the baggage-car I’ve watched an old, gray-bearded express messenger surreptitiously open a barrel of black bass, put on at Oshkosh for South Water Street, filch one out of the ice for his Sunday dinner, nail up the barrel again--and called him an honest man; I’d have trusted him with every dollar I had in the world. He knew the fish were netted outside of the law, and took his private toll out of them on the way to market. We didn’t think it a serious malfeasance--and I was the railroad attorney myself at that time.

“To-day I ride to the city in a train of parlor-cars; I talk to no one, unless it is to some millionaire who takes not a blamed bit more interest in me than I do in him. If I have to take a train of day coaches, I’m shocked at the people that ride in them--ignorant of everything, impossible to talk to--Huns, Polacks, Greeks, Letts, dagoes--specimens of every savage tribe of Europe and Jews from every conceivable European haunt of the ten tribes. I’ve encountered in those day coaches Spanish Jews from Constantinople, Syrian peddlers from Lebanon, wild men from every jungle in the Balkans--but fewer and fewer of our old-fashioned Americans. Where are they? What’s become of our ancestors? We’ve run the population up to one hundred and ten millions. But--the quality! Janeway,” demanded Harrison sternly, “have you faith, in the face of it all, and with such mongrel crews as we gather in Washington, in the stability of our political institutions?”

“Faith in them as the best yet devised by man.”

“That’s no answer.”

“I have hope in them.”

“In the ability of people to govern themselves?”

“Better than anybody else can or will govern them.”

Harrison shook his head. “They’re not making much of a job of it to-day,” he growled.

“They’re not governing themselves to-day. They’re being governed by a minority of one.”

“What’s the remedy?”

“Pare the presidential patronage claws.”

“There’s too much liberty, anyway.”

“Not enough, Judge. When abuses in popular government arise, the remedy should always be the same; instead of restricting the power of the people, add to it; I’m for the referendum.”

“Mob law!” said the Judge grimly, but without releasing his cigar from between his teeth.

Janeway was at no loss for a retort. “Our mob is a pretty good one yet.”

They heard voices in the hall. A tapping on the open door of the room interrupted the conversation, and Gertrude Durand, with Kennedy, walked in on them.

“What wickedness are you two plotting in this darkened room?” demanded Gertrude, as she stopped at her uncle’s chair and threw her arm about his neck.

“Why, mostly trying to save the country,” exclaimed Janeway, looking with approval on Gertrude’s shining dark eyes. “Hello, Jim.”

“That’s what everybody’s doing,” complained Kennedy, in the dry tone that profitably characterized his speech in court and out, “except me. I’m only trying to save my salary--and making a poor job of that. Judge,” he continued, “they sustained your demurrer to-day in the Telephone Case. Simms had a message.”

Harrison, pleased, gave only indirect evidence of it. “You two didn’t come out here to tell me that,” he said, eying the couple with approving distrust.

“No,” confessed Gertrude, “I came out to coax my adorable auntie to come to my house, without fail, Tuesday afternoon. The women are to meet to talk over the Children’s Hospital bazaar.”

“It will take exactly one thousand bazaars to get that Children’s Hospital going, Gertrude,” prophesied Harrison, in sceptical mood.

“Now don’t you be pessimistic, Uncle Sidney,” said Gertrude reprovingly. “We are _going_ to get it going. And we should be delighted to have you and Mr. Janeway----”

“But greatly surprised,” suggested Janeway, “if we appeared.”

Gertrude had a rejoinder ready. “Bishop Marion is going to be there.”

“No credit to him,” returned Janeway. “He _has_ to be.”

“I hope you two are not out without a chaperon,” said the Judge.

Gertrude laughed. “For a wonder, we’re not. Louise came over to help us coax.”

Harrison pricked up his ears. “Louise? Where is she?”

“Down-stairs with Auntie.”

“We’ll go down,” said her uncle. “Two pretty women here at once demand our best attention.”

After the discussion of the hospital benefit--a set charity idea of Gertrude’s and an annual fixture--had subsided, Janeway walked over to where Louise was talking with her aunt.

“I was coming over to-night,” he said to her, when Mrs. Harrison left them, “to call on you and Mr. Durand, but Judge Harrison got me into the library and I couldn’t--or wouldn’t--shake loose from him.”

“You’d have missed Robert,” responded Louise. “He’s in Chicago to-night.”

“But I’m coming very soon,” continued Janeway.

“We shall be glad to see you any time; and I hope before I go away.”

“You are going away?”

“To Italy.”

He looked at her very deliberately and with unconcealed surprise. They were standing now. Janeway asked her to sit down, and, drawing a chair, sat before her. “You’re not afraid of the submarines?”

She said not. He gazed at her reprovingly. “You ought to be,” he remarked at length.

“I’m not,” she insisted, but without any attempt to convert him to views of her own.

He continued to regard her with surprise, but his eyes were not unsympathetic.

“You’ll think better of that,” he predicted. “Your husband will hardly let you expose yourself in that way.” He used a tentative tone, but since he did not put the remark in the form of a question, Louise avoided an answer. “Uncle Sidney,” she said, instead, “told us you, yourself, were very nearly a passenger on the _Lusitania_.”

“I cancelled passage the day before it sailed--fortunately.”

“Was it the warnings?”

He almost ignored the implication. “I’m sure I should have cut a poor figure swimming in Irish waters at any season of the year. But men charged with business matters have less choice in their movements than women of leisure.”

Louise shrugged her shoulders slightly. “Doesn’t everything depend on what we consider our responsibilities and our situations?”

The question failed to draw him out. “How long are you to be gone?” he asked.

“That doesn’t even remotely answer my question, does it?” she objected.

“About situations, responsibilities, no. The reason I didn’t respond is because I hope you haven’t any exaggerated ideas about being needed over there--wild ideas on that point prevail so now among American women--and men, too, for that matter. But you don’t impress me as being of the hysterical type that nourish delusions or fall for silly propaganda.” He spoke with little of tactful or gentle endeavor to win her to his views--rather, his tone and manner, like his words, were blunt. Only a blend of honest concern for her welfare redeemed them from unpleasantness. “They seem to think they are called on personally,” he continued, “to get into the limelight and save the world; Atlas himself had nothing on their conception of their job.”

“I’m as innocent as a baby of anything like that,” protested Louise. “My trip is purely a personal desire for a change.”

His eyebrows rose. “Great heavens!” he exclaimed. “For a change!”

She saw her mistake and flushed. “Oh, I shouldn’t say that, should I? No matter!” There was impatience in her tone. “Call it a whim, anything you like--I’m just going.”

“Then I have the less hesitation,” he returned gravely, “in trying to dissuade you from going. If you were a mere female with a mission I should keep still; that kind ought to go--Europe just now is the place for them. But _not_ for those who would be a loss to--” He was suddenly conscious of a sensation of floundering.

It did not escape Louise. She smiled in revenge. “To whom?” she asked coolly.

“To those to whom they are dear,” he returned collectedly.

“Or ought to be,” she suggested, with a sceptical laugh. Yet the quality of her laugh was not unpleasant. They were looking directly into each other’s eyes, and their exchanges were animated. “I hope,” he returned, “you wouldn’t expect _me_ to approve such a qualification. And I renew my own question--how long are you going to be gone?”

“Indefinitely.”

“Jingo!” He paused for a minute. “And no protests will change your determination?”

“You are the first to utter any.”

“The first?”

Both the tone and the manner of his question warned her. “Well, it so happens you are my first confidant,” she rejoined.

“Oh, I see. You’re really not going at all, then.”

“But I am.”

“Your husband will never let you.”

She only rose to her feet as if the discussion were profitless, laughing again--not significantly or covertly, just naturally, at his seriousness. But her laugh again fell pleasingly on Janeway’s ears.

He was reluctant to give up. “I’ll lay a wager you don’t go,” he exclaimed, rising in turn, and refusing to be dismissed.

Louise, smiling reservedly, paused. “What shall it be?”

“Whatever you like,” he answered, betrayed into something like eagerness.

She hesitated just long enough to dismiss him. “Whatever it might be, I couldn’t honestly take it--for,” she declared, with deliberate emphasis and meeting his eyes unafraid, “I’m going.”