GEORGE HELM

The Works of David Graham Phillips

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, New York

David Graham Phillips

GEORGE HELM

NEW YORK AND LONDON D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1912

Copyright, 1912, by D. APPLETON AND COMPANY Copyright, 1912, by Hearst’s Magazine Published September, 1912 Printed in the United States of America

I BEHIND THE BEARD

A COMET so dim that it is almost invisible will cause agitated interest in the heavens where great fixed stars blaze nightly unnoticed. Harrison was a large Ohio river town, and in its firmament blazed many and considerable fixed stars—presenting pretty nearly all varieties of peculiarity in appearance and condition. But when George Helm appeared everybody concentrated upon him.

“Did you see that young fellow with the red whiskers stumping down Main Street this afternoon?”—“Did you see that jay in[2] the funny frock coat and the stove pipe hat?”—“Who’s the big hulking chap that looks as if he’d just landed from nowhere?”—“I saw the queerest looking mud-dauber of a lawyer or doctor—or maybe preacher—sitting on the steps of Mrs. Beaver’s boarding-house.”—“I saw him, too. He had nice eyes—gray and deep-set—and they twinkled as if he were saying, ‘Yes, I know I’m a joke of a greenhorn, but I’m human, and I like you, and I’d like you to like me.’”

In towns, even the busiest of them, there is not any too much to talk about. Also, there is always any number of girls and widows sharply on the lookout for bread-winners; and the women easily get the men into the habit of noting and sizing up newly arrived males. No such new arrival, whether promising as a provider or not, escapes searching attention. Certainly there[3] was in young George Helm’s appearance no grace or beauty to detain the professional glance of a husband-seeker with a fancy for romantic ornamentation of the business of matrimony. Certainly also there was in that appearance no suggestion of latent possibilities of luxury-providing. A plain, serious-looking young man with darkish hair and a red beard, with a big loosely jointed body whose legs and arms seemed unduly long. A strong, rather homely face, stern to sadness in repose, flashing unexpectedly into keen appreciation of wit and fun when the chance offered. The big hands were rough from the toil of the fields—so rough that they would remain the hands of the manual laborer to the end.

The cheap, smooth frock suit and the not too fresh top hat had the air of being their wearer’s only costume, of having long served in that capacity, of getting the most[4] prudent care because they could not soon be relieved of duty.

“He lives in the room my boy Tom made out of the attic last summer,” said Mrs. Beaver, who supported her husband and children by taking in boarders. “And all he brung with him was in a paper shirt box. He wears a celluloid collar and cuffs, and he sponges off his coat and vest and pants every morning before he puts ’em on. So Tom says. He lies awake half the night reading or writing in bed—sometimes when he reads he laughs out loud, so you’d think he had company. And he sings hymns and recites poetry. And, my! how he does eat! Them long legs of his’n is hollow clear down.”

There is no doubt about the red beard. Since George Helm has become famous, the legend is that he always had a smooth face. But like most of the legends about him—like[5] that about his astonishing success and astounding marriage—this legend of the smooth face is as falsely inaccurate as most of the stuff that passes for truth about the men of might who have come up from the deep obscurity of the masses. It was a hideous red beard—of the irritating shade of bright red with which brick walls used to be—perhaps in some parts of the world still are—painted in the spring. It grew patchily. In spots it was straight; in other spots, curly. It was so utterly out of harmony with his hair that opinion divided as to which was dyed, and the wonder grew that he did not dye both to some common and endurable shade.

“What does he wear those whiskers for?”—“How can a man with hair like that on his face expect to get clients or anything else?” Nevertheless, public opinion—which is usually wrong about everything, including[6] its own exaggerated esteem for itself—was wrong in this case. As soon as a comet ceases to be a visitor and settles down into a fixed inhabitant with a regular orbit it ceases to attract attention, becomes obscure, acquires the dangerous habit of obscurity. George Helm, only twenty-four years old and without money, friends or influence, might have been driven back to the farm but for that beard.

Successful men feed their egotism with such shallow and silly old proverbial stuff as, “You can’t keep a good man down,” and “A husky hog will get its nose to the trough.” But they reckon ill who leave circumstance out of account in human affairs. And circumstance does not mean opportunity seen and seized, but opportunity that takes man by the nape of the neck and forcibly thrusts him into responsibility and painfully compels him to acquire the education[7] that finally leads to success. Those who arrive forget that they were not always wise and able; they forget how hardly they got wisdom and capacity, how fiercely their native human inertia and stupidity fought against learning. If some catastrophe—which God forbid!—should wipe out at a stroke all our leaders—all the geniuses who give us employment, run our affairs, write our books and newspapers, make our laws, blow the whistles for us to begin and to stop work, tell us when to go forth and when to come in out of the rain—if some cataclysm should orphan us entirely of these our

wondrous wise guardians, don’t you suspect that circumstance would almost overnight create a new set for us, quite as good, perhaps better? The human race is a vast reservoir of raw material for any and all human purposes. Let those who find cheer in feeling lonely in their unique, inborn, in[8]evitable greatness enjoy themselves to their fill. It is their privilege. But it is also the privilege of plain men and twinkling stars to laugh at them.

So, George Helm’s beard may have had more to do with his destiny than his conventional biographers will ever concede. He ceased to be a comet. But he did not cease to attract attention. And his awkwardness, his homeliness and his solitary “statesman’s” suit would not have sufficed to keep him in the public eye. That preposterous beard was vitally necessary. It accomplished its mission. The months—the clientless months—the months of dwindling purse and hope passed. George Helm remained a figure in Harrison. Some men were noted for the toilets or the eccentricity or the beauty of their wives, some men for their fortunes or their fine houses, some men for dog or horse or high power automobile.[9] George Helm was noted for his beard. It served as the gathering center for jokes and stories. The whole town knew all sorts of gossip about that “boy with the whiskers,” for, through the carmine mask, the boyishness had finally been descried. The local papers, hard put for matter to fill the space round patent medicine advertisements and paid news of dry goods, overshoes and

canned vegetables at cut prices, often made paragraphs about the whiskers. And the heartiest laugh at these jests came from serious, studious George Helm himself.

“Why don’t you shave ’em, George?”—He was of those men whom everybody calls by the first name.

“You never happened to see me without ’em?” Helm would reply.

“I’d like to,” was usually the retort.

“Well, I’ve seen myself without ’em—and[10] I guess I’m choosing the bluntest horn of the dilemma.”

It never occurred to any one in Harrison to wonder why, while George Helm’s whiskers were a butt, the young man himself was not. When Rostand made a tragic hero of a man with a comic nose, there was much outcry at the marvelous genius displayed in the feat. In fact, that particular matter required no genius at all. There is scarcely an individual of strongly marked personality who has not some characteristic, mental or physical, that is absurd, ridiculous. Go over the list of great men, past and present; note the fantastic, grotesque physical peculiarities alone. Those attention-arresting peculiarities helped, you will observe, not hindered, the man in coming into his own—the pot-belly of little Napoleon, the duck legs of giant Washington, the drooling and twitching of Sam Johnson.

[11]Try how you will, you cannot make a man ridiculous, unless he is ridiculous. Lincoln could—and did—play the clown hours at a time. Yet only shallow fools of conventionality-worshipers for an instant confused the man and the clever story-actor. Harrison laughed at George Helm’s whiskers; but it did not, because it could not, laugh at George Helm.

But, being a shallow-pated town, Harrison fancied it was laughing at Helm himself. It is the habit of human beings to mistake clothes and whiskers and all manner of mere externals for men. Occasionally they discover their mistake. Harrison discovered its mistake.

It nominated George Helm for Circuit Judge. There were two parties in that district—as there are everywhere else—the Republican and the Democratic. There was also—as wherever else there is any public[12] thing to steal—a third party that owned and controlled the other two. Sometimes this third party “fixes” the race so that Republican always wins and Democrat always loses; again, it “fixes” the race the other way; yet again—where there is what is known as an “intelligent and alert electorate”—this shrewd third party alternately puppets Republican and Democrat first under the wire—and then how the aforesaid intelligent and alert people do shout and applaud their own sagacity and independence!

They say that woman is lacking in the sense of humor. There must be something in the charge. Otherwise, would she not long ago have laughed herself to death at the political antics of man?

In Harrison and its surrounding country the sentiment was overwhelmingly Republican—which meant that the majority of the[13] “independent” farmers and artisans who were working early and late to enrich the Railway Trust, the Harvester Trust, the Beef Trust, the Money Trust, and the rest of the members of the third and only real party, said, when they sat doddering about politics, “Wall, I reckon I’ll keep on voting as I shot.” If the community had been Democratic, the dodder would have been, “I think it’s about time to turn the rascals out.” Needless to say, the third party cares not a rap which side wins. The vote goes into the ballot box Republican or Democratic; it is counted for the third party. In Harrison the Republican candidates of the third party always won, and its Democratic candidates were put up simply to make things interesting for the populace and to give them the feeling that they were sovereign citizens. The Republican candidate for Circuit Judge, the candidate slated[14] to win in a walk, was Judge Powers. He

had served two terms, to the entire content of the third party—and, being full of pious talk and solemn flapdoodle about the “sacredness of the judicial trust in a community of freemen,” to the entire content of the people. In a hilarious mood the Democratic machine, casting about for its sacrifice candidate, nominated George Helm—or, rather, George Helm’s whiskers.

It was a side-splitting joke. Everybody liked George. Everybody knew about his whiskers—knew him by his whiskers. It bade fair to inject that humor, so dearly beloved of the American people, into what was usually a dull campaign. The only trouble was that for the first time Helm failed to see a joke.

The night of his nomination the light in Mrs. Beaver’s tiny, stuffy attic room went out early. And if you could have looked in,[15] you would have discovered, by the starlight that the big form was lying quite still in the little bed which sagged and bulged with it. But George Helm was not asleep. He slept not a wink that whole night. And as soon as he had finished breakfast he went down to the barber shop at the corner.

“Bob,” said he to the colored proprietor, “I want a clean shave.”

“What’s that, Mr. Helm?” exclaimed the amazed barber. And two loungers at the table where the sporting papers were spread out sat up and stared.

“A clean shave, Bob,” said Helm gravely, seating himself in the chair.

Bob started a broad grin that, with the least encouragement, would have become a guffaw—and would have echoed throughout the district. But he did not get the encouragement. Instead, he saw something in[16] the kind, deep-set gray eyes, in the strong, sad mouth and chin, that set him soberly to work. The two loungers went outside to laugh and spread the news. But when they got outside they did not laugh. Why? It is impossible to explain the psychology of man the mass. They put the astounding news into currency—but not as a joke. Helm was shaving his beard. What did it mean?

“Our opponents,” said Judge Powers, “nominated a set of whiskers. The whiskers have disappeared—so there is no one running against us.”

The jest, being of the species which it is conventional to utter and to laugh at on stump and after-dinner occasions, got its momentary due of cackling and braying. But the mirth did not spread. For, before noon of that first day of the campaign, it had been discovered that the Democratic[17] machine had not nominated whiskers, but a man.

We are in the habit of regarding a human being as a mere conglomerate of sundry familiar conventionalities—of dress, of manner, of thought. We have formed the habit because with an occasional rare exception a human being is simply that and nothing more. So an individuality is always a startling apparition—fascinating, perhaps, certainly terrifying. The coming of a man makes us suddenly aware how few real men there are—real live men—how most of us are simply patterns of men who once lived, or, rather, differently proportioned composites of all past men. The excitement in peaceful Harrison and its somnolent environs was almost hysterical. For, in all that region, there was not, there had not been for years—not since the stern, elemental pioneer days—a real living man.[18] All the specimens of the genus homo were of the approved type of the past.

George Helm, man.

“George,” said Bill Desbrough, who had a law office across the hall in the same building—the Masonic Temple—“George, where’d you ever get the notion of those there whiskers you’ve just shed?”

“Oh, the girls,” replied George. “When I was a boy and a youngster the girls made fun of my face. So I hid it as soon as I could—as well as I could.”

“The fool women!” exclaimed Desbrough in disgust. “Why, George, you’ve got a face.”

“I’m afraid so,” said George with a rueful grin, passing his hand over the newly emerged visage.

“Afraid so!” cried Desbrough. “Let me tell you, old man, a face—a real face—is about the rarest thing in the world. Most[19] so-called faces are nothing but front sides of heads.” Desbrough looked at the “face” narrowly, searchingly. “Helm, I believe you are a great man.”

George laughed delightedly and derisively—as a sensible man does at a compliment. “Oh, shucks!” said he.

“Anyhow,” said Desbrough, “if you’d have produced that face a day earlier, you’d never have got the nomination. A man with a face never gets anything from the powers-that-be, without a fight, until he has put himself squarely on record as being with them. Even then they’re always a little afraid of him.” Desbrough nodded thoughtfully. “And they may well be, damn ’em,” he added.

“Well—I’ve got the nomination,” said Helm.

“I wonder what you’ll do with it,” said his friend.

[20]“I’m wondering what it’ll do with me,” replied Helm.

Desbrough glanced at him curiously.

George went on to explain. “Yesterday,” said he, “I was a boy of twenty-five”——

“Is that all you are!” cried Desbrough. “Why, even without the whiskers I’d have said thirty-five.”

“Oh, I’m one of those chaps who are born old,” laughed Helm. “I had lines and even wrinkles when I was eighteen. I’ll look younger at forty than I do now. Mother used to say I reminded her of her father—that he was homely enough to stop a clock when he was young and kept getting handsomer as he got older.”

“I know the kind,” said Bill Desbrough, “and it’s the best kind to be.”

“As I was saying,” proceeded George, “yesterday I was a boy. As soon as those fellows nominated me—they were laughing—they[21] thought it was a fine old joke—but, Bill, a queer sort of a something happened inside me. A kind of shock, like a man jumping out of a sound sleep to find the house afire.”

Desbrough was interestedly watching the face of his friend. Its expression was indeed strange—the look of power—sad, stern, inexorable—the look of the men whose wills and passions hurl them on and on to the conquest of the world. Suddenly it changed, softened. The human lines round the mobile, handsome mouth appeared. The gray eyes twinkled and danced. “So you see, Bill,” said he, “the nomination didn’t lose any time in beginning to do things to me.”

“And the whiskers?”

“Oh, they had to go,” said George simply. “The fight was on, and a fellow naturally throws away all the foolishness before he jumps in.”

[22]“So you’re going to make a fight?”

“Of course,” said George. “What else is there to do?”

“But you can’t win.”

“You mean I can’t lose. I’ve got nothing to lose.”

About the most dangerous character on this earth is a real man who has nothing to lose. When the powers-that-be discover such an one, and are convinced that he is indeed a real man and not a cunning bluff at it, they hasten to give him something to lose. They don’t feel safe until he has wife and children, or wealth, or position—something that will fill one arm and make the other cautious.

The three counties constituting that judicial district will not in many a year forget the first Helm campaign. In its second week Judge Powers canceled his speaking dates, giving out that he regarded it as undignified[23] for a judge to descend in the ermine to the political arena and scramble and tussle for votes. The truth was that George Helm had driven him to cover because he dared not face the facts of his judicial record as the young candidate proclaimed it throughout those counties, on the highways, in the by-ways no less, in town, in village, in country.

The day he began campaigning George counted his cash, found that in all the world he had three hundred and forty-seven dollars and fifty-six cents. He had been calculating that this money would keep him housed and fed and officed for about a year longer, assuming that he continued to be absolutely without clients. Then—he would teach school and toss hay and stack sacks at the threshing machine until he had put by the money for another two years’ try. To go into the campaign meant to use up his[24] resources in two months—for he could not hope to get any help from the Democratic machine. Its “contributions” from the various corporations would be used in paying the leaders and their henchmen for refraining from “doing anything disturbing.”

“Sorry, Mr. Helm,” said Pat Branagan, the local Democratic boss, “but we can’t spare you a cent for your campaign.”

“So I calculated,” said Helm.