The Last Adam (13 page)

"They get around on a hot enough tip."

"Listen, I haven't said I wouldn't do it. What is it?"

"Just a minute. Did you hear somebody come in downstairs then?"

"No. That was a shutter swinging. What are you so jumpy about? This must be pretty hot."

"I'm not jumpy," Henry Harris said placidly. "I'm just careful. Well, matter of fact, Lester, you're the one I want, all right. I need somebody smart. But try not to be too smart, will you? I can do this without you; you can't do it without me. Now, it's not breaking the law. Absolutely not. You're perfectly safe; and nobody can say anything to you. So how about settling it at a hundred dollars. I'll pay you cash." He got a wallet from his back pocket and began to drop ten-dollar bills on the table. "There you are.'"

"This must be something," said Lester. "I'm probably a damn fool, but make it a hundred and fifty and I'll do it, short of murder."

"Didn't I tell you it wasn't breaking the law? Matter of fact, it's just doing your sworn duty. Nobody can say a word."

"Sold for one hundred and fifty."

They gazed a moment at each other. "Well, I used to hear in Church you hadn't ought to muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn," said Henry Harris. He counted five more bills, pushed them all across the table.

"I'm just a sucker, I can see that," said Lester. "But all right, shoot. I'll do it."

"You're a smart chap," smiled Henry Harris. "Get your profits in advance every time. Never can tell when something will slip up."

"I'm plenty smart enough to come in when it rains," agreed Lester, "but you're the smartest damn bastard in the country, and I know right now I'm being a boob not to say two hundred."

Henry Harris had been the smartest boy in the New Winton school. His father, Jacob Harris, rewarded him with the begrudged gift of his parental permission; the School Committee arranged about his railroad fares; and Henry Harris became the smartest boy in the then-new High School at Sansbury. He was a feather in New Winton's rustic cap.

Whether or not Henry Harris would have been the smartest young man at Yale was never determined. Jacob Harris thought that this had gone far enough. In his so thinking, an undoubted part had been played by the fact that Paul Banning's boy was at Yale. Like Jacob Harris, Paul Banning called himself a farmer, but in his case, other men did the farming. Paul Banning's personal approach to the soil was on the trotting tracks of the big eastern fairs. He had bred at least two pacers famous enough for the immortality of those sporting lithographs found in country hotel lobbies and the harness-rooms of city stables. He was, of course, a rich man; and so had his father been. Even his grandfather, while he did his own farming, had done it with a simple, patriarchal authority, directing many labourers on the best and biggest farm in New Winton. Jacob Harris was a real farmer, a poor one. Yale was obviously a place for rich men's sons. By this Jacob Harris did not mean to be ordering himself lowly and reverently to all his betters; in his opinion, his betters did not exist. He meant that college was suitable only for such inconsiderable creatures as young Herbert Banning. He didn't believe Herbert Banning could load so much as one hay wagon without dropping dead.

Like many smart people, Henry Harris had always been a realist. The qualities of plainness, poverty unashamed, had their value mainly in his father's mind. Few people, able to be disinterested, saw them as the fine things Jacob Harris said they were. Henry Harris saw better the Banning stables—they had not burned down until after old Paul's death in 1908—stretched beside the green. The building was as long as three barns; and to prove it, carried three graceful cupolas, each vaned with a small gold horse trotting up the wind. A strip of sward as carefully kept as a lawn separated the permanently closed east doors from the road along the green. It was the biggest and, to the small Henry Harris, passing it every day on his way to school, the most beautiful thing in New Winton.

If he were smart enough to see, by some such symbol, how poor was prowess in loading a hay wagon compared to the money to hire all the good loaders you wanted who worked while you sat at ease, he was also smart enough to see, after a while, that Yale was less important to him than Yale had appeared in his hopes and first harsh disappointment. Of course, it was impossible not to feel an envious pang when Herbert Banning came home from college with a boating straw banded in Yale colours on his head; wearing a pale grey suit with narrow trousers and a double-breasted coat elegantly ample and padded on the shoulders; smoking a pipe with a curved stem and Y '04 inlaid in silver on the bowl; but all that took money. Henry Harris guessed that, poor as he would have been at Yale, he would not profit, except perhaps academically. The intelligence that made him a good scholar showed him too that scholarship was rarely of any importance in this world. The adjustment did not mean that he forgave his father or Herbert Banning—the one for thwarting, like the stubborn old jackass he was, the first major ambition of Henry's life; the other for enjoying as a matter of course what Henry had wanted so passionately and in vain. Here were two accounts to be settled. For the moment he could not pay anything on them, and he did not waste time trying to or wishing that he could. Perhaps one of them was settled when Jacob Harris died without ever enjoying the ease which the prospering Henry, for appearance's sake, would soon have been forced to provide for him. Henry Harris let it go at that; all his energies were given to the problem of making money.

To make money, most young men might have thought it necessary to leave New Winton, where a dollar was seen in its true light—the certificate exchanged for a man's work all day—and where there existed no loose surplus for the gaining or wasting. Such a step is often praised as showing the vision and courage which brings success. Henry Harris had something better than that. He took what was nearest to hand and compelled it to serve him. He answered an advertisement about raising turkeys for profit. Raising them, he made money, exactly as the advertisement said that he would. When he had made a thousand dollars, he persuaded Isaac Quimby to let him buy into Quimby's feed, grain, and coal business. Once in, he began to consume Quimby by insisting on his privilege to reinvest his profits. Eventually they were large enough for him to stop that and begin to take a hand in Sansbury real estate.

This is perfectly simple to see and tell about; but most men, trying it, meet with every possible ill chance. Turkeys can pine and die. Mr. Quimby would have fleeced some presumptuous youths. Others would have plunged ignorantly in Sansbury building lots and lost everything. Doubtless luck is the chief factor, but, dispassionately considered, almost every financial unlucky person is a plain fool to start with. Henry Harris had that cleverness which is the very touch of Midas. He, knew how to fatten on other people's efforts. The general method he used could be seen when he first entered village politics. He threw in his lot with the helpless and disorganized Democratic, minority.

At the time it was not possible for Democrats to win locally. Henry Harris never expected them to. He meant to live on the Republicans. Other candidates worked hard and worried for the small offices; but not Henry Harris. He was a Democrat. It was considered good policy to let the Democrats have one job. Republican voters might or might not elect this or that Republican candidate, but Henry Harris, the leading Democrat, was always elected.

The next step in this old American story is transferral to a larger town, to a city; to state, then national politics. More than once it has ended only when some Henry Harris became President of the United States. Henry Harris would not be blind to the glitter of the chance, nor deaf to the thunder of opportunity awakening Democrats about 1910. He had all the qualifications. As well as a native, half-knavish wit, his was that careful mean shrewdness by which alone a man can climb, not too visibly soiled, through the sewer-like lower labyrinth of American politics. Henry Harris had, too, the bland, impregnable assurance required to rule on top.

Close-mouthed, sitting smiling on the steps of Bates' store in his old clothes, it might seem that sloth had stopped Henry Harris; but he was a thoughtful man and never an idle one. He might have reflected that here his time was his own, his money already ample to buy him everything he saw any reason to want. Out of what life has, Henry Harris lacked, in fact, only fame. Sensible though he might be to the violent pleasures found in overtaking and enjoying her, the whore, Fame, he did not follow. Musing, far-sighted and reflective, owing no explanation to anyone, he was apt enough at analogy. Like the girls at Maggie's in Bridgeport, Fame was at the end of a trip, inconvenient, tedious, fraught with expense and anxiety. He had given up Bridgeport, for he could see a bargain; and the short satisfaction of lewd dalliance, exchanged for a considerable expenditure of time and money, and a week of waiting to see if he had got gonorrhoea, made no bargain. National politics might be much like a trip to Maggie's.

Henry Harris was smiling now, watching Lester fold the ten-dollar bills in a pocket-book. Henry Harris' face, saturnine, almost morose in abstraction, changed altogether when he smiled. Seen carelessly, it was a smile of rare, intelligent warmth. Attracted by it, many people would never notice or understand the gleam of a puckish, merry spite, an indulgent malevolence in Henry Harris' dark eyes. The warmth was genuine. It was the inner warmth he felt while he surveyed the good order of his plans and resources. Reticent, dangerously smiling, he had taken loving pains with them. Each little plan was a work of art. He had perfected it; he had subjected it in the privacy of his mind to every sort of test and condition. He would get no surprises when it went into action.

Other people were the surprised ones. As much as success—and here perhaps lay a clue to the compensations of his simple, satisfactory life—Henry Harris could relish that familiar start of first blank surmise, the following quick or slow realization in his victims. Calm, steadily smiling out his unassailable relish, enjoying the belated twistings and fatally late quick-thinkings, he received objections, threats and insults as so much tribute. Knowing it, Henry Harris was modest about it; he never tried to make the fact that he was the smarter man appear in casual conversation. Anyone could talk. Most people, if they kept trying, could score small triumphs of repartee. Henry Harris, rarely rejoining, could wait, foretasting the fine jovial day when his enemies themselves would, by their own confounding, speak, even roar, the proofs of his wit.

He said, "Hand me down that last volume of the Connecticut Code, Lester. I'll show you something. I'm fixing up a little surprise for Matthew Herring. He takes such good care of the town money, he probably won't like it, but I doubt if he can help himself."

"Say, what are you going to do?"

"I'm going to try an old Fairfield County dodge, Lester. I don't claim the credit. Down there, they've been doing it for years. They thought it up for the mill town Polacks. Lot of those people don't read English very well, so they never know when taxes are due. When are taxes due in New Winton, Lester?"

"Why, I guess, about March fifteenth."

"Smart lad! And if you haven't paid up on or before the date what happens?"

"Nothing I ever heard of, so long as the town knows you and you pay pretty soon."

Henry Harris fingered the pages of the open volume. "Yes," he said. "That's true. We've been kind of shiftless." He shook his head. "Well, it's never too late to reform. I read here that it happens to be the duty of the Collector of Taxes to swear out warrants promptly for all delinquents. There's a two-dollar fee for him; there's a five-dollar fee for the constable serving the warrant. How many people do you think we might catch napping the morning of March sixteenth?"

"Oh, come to papa!" groaned Lester, falling back in the easy chair. "I knew I was a sucker! But, Henry, I'll have to hand it to you. Why, I bet we could catch a hundred!"

"About what I figured," Henry Harris agreed.

"I —" He stopped short, his face stiffening. On the panel of the closed door heavy knuckles had struck suddenly. Lester started with such violence that he stood on his feet while the door swung open.

"Good morning, Henry," said Doctor Bull. "Thought perhaps Clarence was over here. I have a certificate for him. How's tricks, Lester?" His blue eyes, twinkling a little, turned back on Henry Harris. "You don't look too well, Henry. Heart ever bother you? Palpitations?" He put out his hand, closed it over Henry Harris' wrist, his finger-tips shutting down on the radial artery while he felt for his watch.

Henry Harris jerked his hand away; the corners of his mouth grew firm; he began to smile. "You move pretty quiet for a man your size, George. Is it hard?"

"Professional training, Henry. We try not to go banging around a sick room. Come in sometime and I'll look you over. You're not as young as you were, you know. Little things like a knock on the door shouldn't shake you up."

"I'll probably live."

"Sure you will. But a time comes when we aren't so spry. Can't do all the things we used to do, Henry."

"Maybe not. Seems like I'm getting a little deaf, sometimes."

"Often happens. It hasn't affected me yet; but I always did have pretty keen hearing. Well, I'll have to see if I can get hold of Clarence. So long."

They could hear his heavy steps in the hall and the brisk thud of his descent on the stairs.

The rain continued. All the sky to be seen was the blanket of vapour ceaselessly condensing, in gradual movement just touching the hill-tops. Up to meet it a universal mist went off the earth, now colder from its remnants of melting snow than the air. In the little depression at the south-east corner of the New Winton green, a pool widened out. Roads merely gravel-surfaced, like those at the ends of the green, and the one bisecting it from Bates' store east to the station, were softening. Cars coming off them were spattered high with, grey mud. The broad surface of US6W held here and there flat thin sheets of water. Presenting a mechanical twitch of wind-shield wipers, motors moving on it came through fairly fast, raising clouds of spray. Down across fields to the west, clear now of snow, hung with haze, the river ice lay sunk pallid under a half foot of water.