In the Arena | Page 3

the
polls. Some of 'em won't go anyway--act as if they looked down on
politics; say it's only helping one boodler against another. So your true

aristocrat won't vote for either. The real truth is, he don't care. Don't
care as much about the management of his city, State, and country as
about the way his club is run. Or he's ignorant about the whole business,
and what between ignorance and indifference the worse and smarter of
the two rings gets in again and old Mr. Aristocrat gets soaked some
more on his sewer assessments. Then he'll holler like a stabbed
hand-organ; but he'll keep on talking about politics being too low a
business for a gentleman to mix in, just the same!
Somebody said a pessimist is a man who has a choice of two evils, and
takes both. There's your man that don't vote.
And the best-dressed wards are the ones that fool us oftenest. We're
always thinking they'll do something, and they don't. But we thought,
when we took Farwell Knowles, that we had 'em at last. Fact is, they
did seem stirred up, too. They called it a "moral victory" when we were
forced to nominate Knowles to have any chance of beating Gorgett.
That was because it was their victory.
Farwell Knowles was a young man, about thirty-two, an editorial writer
on the _Herald_, an independent paper. I'd known him all his life, and
his wife--too, a mighty sweet-looking lady she was. I'd always thought
Farwell was kind of a dreamer, and too excitable; he was always
reading papers to literary clubs, and on the speech-making side he
wasn't so bad--he liked it; but he hadn't seemed to me to know any
more about politics and people than a royal family would. He was
always talking about life and writing about corruption, when, all the
time, so it struck me, it was only books he was really interested in; and
he saw things along book lines. Of course he was a tin god, politically.
He was for "stern virtue" only, and everlastingly lashed compromise
and temporizing; called politicians all the elegant hard names there are,
in every one of his editorials, especially Lafe Gorgett, whom he'd never
seen. He made mighty free with Lafe, referred to him habitually as
"Boodler Gorgett", and never let up on him from one year's end to
another.
I was against our adopting him, not only for our own sakes--because I

knew he'd be a hard man to handle--but for Farwell's too. I'd been a
friend of his father's, and I liked his wife--everybody liked his wife. But
the boys overruled me, and I had to turn in and give it to him.
Not without a lot of misgivings, you can be sure. I had one little
experience with him right at the start that made me uneasy and got me
to thinking he was what you might call too literary, or theatrical, or
something, and that he was more interested in being things than doing
them. I'd been aware, ever since he got back from Harvard, that I was
one of his literary interests, so to speak. He had a way of talking to me
in a _quizzical_, condescending style, in the belief that he was drawing
me out, the way you talk to some old book-peddler in your office when
you've got nothing to do for a while; and it was easy to see he regarded
me as a "character" and thought he was studying me. Besides, he felt it
his duty to study the wickedness of politics in a Parkhurstian fashion,
and I was one of the lost.
One day, just after we'd nominated him, he came to me and said he had
a friend who wanted to meet me. Asked me couldn't I go with him right
away. It was about five in the afternoon; I hadn't anything to do and
said, "Certainly," thinking he meant to introduce me to some friend of
his who thought I'd talk politics with him. I took that for granted so
much that I didn't ask a question, just followed along up street, talking
weather. He turned in at old General Buskirk's, and may I be shot if the
person he meant wasn't Buskirk's daughter, Bella! He'd brought me to
call on a girl young enough to be my daughter. Maybe you won't
believe I felt like a fool!
I knew Buskirk, of course (he didn't appear), but I hadn't seen Bella
since she was a child. She'd been "highly educated" and had been living
abroad a good deal, but I can't say that my visit made me for her--not
very strong. She was good-looking enough, in her thinnish, solemn way,
but it seemed to me she was kind of overdressed and