VII

Semicorn was in fact a most reasonable young man, under a riding agreement, as was to appear almost at once.

Finding after all that the constitution need not be amended, Dwind finished the banking law and went to bed. Capuchin sent it the next morning to the governor with instructions peremptory. The instructions were that the legislature was to suspend all rules and enact it immediately.

Late in the afternoon Semicorn called him on the telephone.

“News from the capitol,” he said.

“Good!” said Capuchin, all of a sudden feeling his part. He was the engineer of great events. He was as one sitting at the hub of a vast wheel of change, controlling its movements, receiving reports from every point of the circumference. Here was a new use for the “Herald.” Department of intelligence. Semicorn had got this. He was the right man there.

“Yes, Mr. Semicorn,” he said. “What is it?”

“Your bank bill was beaten. The legislature killed it.”

That was all; and it was true.

What had occurred was grotesque. Capuchin’s messenger, who happened to be a person the governor detested, walked into the official presence unannounced, delivered the bill and the instructions about it, and walked out again, flicking the ashes of his cigar on the official carpet.

The governor said to himself, “Huh! Who does he think I am?”

Then he said to himself, “I’m the governor of this state.”

Never until this moment had he related himself egotistically to that fact; it was a strange, accidental fact. He walked about, saying it over and over in wonder. “I am the governor of this state.” He began to think what it meant. He could call out the militia or declare martial law. And he said again, “Who does he think I am?” this time with the emphasis on he, meaning Capuchin himself.

But he feared Capuchin. There was the bill on his desk. He was obliged to act. Calling his clerk he said, “Tell Hemstead and Swanson to come up here.” Hemstead was Speaker of the House; Swanson was President of the Senate.

When they appeared, the governor said to them: “Here’s a bill from Capuchin and he says suspend the rules and pass it. That’s all I know about it. Take it.”

The governor’s ego malady communicated itself to Hemstead and Swanson, who in the same way had been so far too bewildered by arriving suddenly on the public stage to become conscious of themselves as actors upon it. Now each one said to himself, “Who am I?”

It somehow got into the air. What the governor did to them they in turn did to the legislators, who were told to pass a bill they could not understand and to ask no questions. Each legislator asked himself, “Who am I?”

The rules were suspended, the bill was read, and the vote was no. Then the legislators resolved themselves a recess in order to grumble. They grumbled all the louder because they were not sure of what they had done and felt guilty and uneasy.

Fifteen minutes after receiving Semicorn’s message Capuchin walked in to see the governor.

“What’s happened to the bill?” he asked, in an Adam-where-art-thou tone.

“I sent it down right away with your instructions on it,” said the governor. “Why?”

“I hear they’ve killed it,” said Capuchin.

The governor was scared. He had never dreamed of a result like that. Forgetting who he was, he got up and went himself to see. When he returned he was out of breath from running up the stairway.

“That takes down anything,” he said. “They did kill it, deader than a snake.”

“Get them up here,” said Capuchin. “All of them.”

They straggled in, edged in, pushed one another in, one crossed the threshold on tip-toe and half a dozen followed in like manner, thinking it was etiquette. Two or three lurched in with a specious air of pugnacity. Hemstead and Swanson came last, as befitted their dignity, to show they could not be hurried.

A curious assortment and here at its worst from awkwardness of stage fright and embarrassment. It represented both the least and the best the League could do. Most of the folkmotes had sent their strongest men. In several cases, however, they had nominated candidates in a spirit of waggery, not expecting them to win; and others had been elected for no better reason than that they needed the job. Two members of that legislature could neither read nor write. Of parliamentary procedure they had no sense whatever. And of course they distrusted the few survivors of the over-turned order who tried to show them the way. There was some snickering during the suspense, until Capuchin began to speak.

“We’ve dropped a monkey wrench in the gear box,” he said, speaking gravely. “The governor ought to have told you.”

“I ought to of! I ought to of! I didn’t know anything about it,” said the governor.

An inarticulate murmuring began among the legislators. Here and there a voice crystallized. That was it. What the governor just said. Nobody knowed a blame thing about it. They wasn’t voting machines. Maybe it was wrong. What then? A new animal it was. Couldn’t make nary head nor tail out of it.

This was a kind of situation Capuchin could handle perfectly. His tone was familiar, conversational, authoritative, and it included them. They were uppermost in fact. It was their bill, not his.

However, it was his fault in one way. He should have told them about it beforehand. That was to say, he should have had the time. But he was obliged to do many things at once. Particularly, just at this time, he had been up to his neck in new hay. It was something they would like to hear about. He had got control of “The Northwestern Herald.” Tomorrow they should see. It would come out for the League, heart and fist.

Now about the bill. They didn’t understand it. Was that the trouble? Well, hear from him a secret. Neither did he understand it. He was not a banker. In fact, they had not a banker among them and thank God for that. Yet it was necessary to have a state bank in order that they should be able to create and control their own credit instead of buying it at ten per cent from the vultures, such men as Anx. Plaino. He had thought about this a long time, and then had gone to the Lothian College of Social Science in New York for aid. Did they know what the Lothian College was? It was a school on the people’s side—a school to teach the people precisely those things the privileged few had made so much mystery of, like finance and economics—a school to tell people what they could do, not what they couldn’t do. From the Lothian College he had borrowed a famous expert, had brought him to Liberty expressly to write that law. They would find him at the hotel, in bed, spent, sick, from the strain of writing it in haste, and all for nothing. A token of his interest in the people’s cause.

By this time they were all repenting and anxious to get back and pass the bill. He detained them to say how the intellectual radicals in the east were watching them, how the success of their experiment would change the face of society, and that the towers of privilege were quaking. They must remember this, and never do anything in pique to make one another ridiculous.

“Now wait,” he said. “This kind of emergency may rise again. I mean the need to pass a law quickly because the situation requires it. A law maybe that you cannot understand, even one that I cannot myself explain, in detail, except to say what it will do. Nobody understands everything. It’s a complicated world. Lots of things you have to take on the other fellow’s word. You don’t understand what the doctor is doing to you, do you? But you pay him to do it. Pick the right doctor. That’s the way. Now I think of something. Do you see this?” He pointed to his necktie—a red one—and began taking it off. “The governor will keep this,” he said. “Remember what it looks like. When the reading clerk down-stairs wears this tie you may know that what he is reading is our stuff, guaranteed. That’s our medicine, even though you can’t read the prescription.”

That amused them. What ill feeling was left went off in laughter. And of course they passed the bank bill at once.

Late that evening Capuchin went to the “Herald” office and asked Semicorn what kind of news story had been written on the incident of the day.

“Two,” said Semicorn, handing him the manuscripts.

One was a complete narrative of the facts, including Capuchin’s talk to the legislators. The other was a brief statement, in effect that the legislature had enacted a law authorizing a state bank; the law and the bank’s charter followed, and there was no mention of any mishap.

“That, of course,” said Capuchin.

Semicorn nodded.

“While we’re on this subject,” he said, “I mean, finding out what’s news ‘n’ what ain’t ‘n’ what to suppress, here’s another item. You’ve got a Russian Communist up there in the legislature. He’s heard they socialized women in Soviet Russia and he’s introduced a bill to do it here.”

“I know who that is,” said Capuchin. “Don’t print it.”

He said this without looking at the copy Semicorn held out to him.

“Suppressed,” said Semicorn, pleasantly, tossing it aside.

“Mr. Semicorn, we needn’t be so frank with one another,” said Capuchin. “Suppressed is a—ah—a bad word. A very bad word. Besides, it only means not to print.”

Semicorn grinned and Capuchin smiled.

From the railing gate Capuchin looked back. Semicorn was as he had seen him the first night here, head down, writing. “A most reasonable young man,” Capuchin thought. Yet there was somewhere in his mind a reservation. He kept looking. “Too reasonable,” he thought. To that he added, “But honest,” and let the gate slam.