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Page 3
Life was terribly earnest to young Holcombe, and he regarded it from
the point of view of one who looks down upon it from the judge's bench,
and listens with a frown to those who plead its cause. He was not
fooled by it; he was alive to its wickedness and its evasions. He would
tell you that he knew for a fact that the window man in his district
was a cousin of the Tammany candidate, and that the contractor who had
the cleaning of the street to do was a brother-in-law of one of the
Hall's sachems, and that the policeman on his beat had not been in the
country eight months. He spoke of these damning facts with the air of
one who simply tells you that much, that you should see how terrible
the whole thing really was, and what he could tell if he wished.
In his own profession he recognized the trials of law-breakers only as
experiments which went to establish and explain a general principle.
And prisoners were not men to him, but merely the exceptions that
proved the excellence of a rule. Holcombe would defend the lowest
creature or the most outrageous of murderers, not because the man was
a human being fighting for his liberty or life, but because he wished
to see if certain evidence would be admitted in the trial of such a
case. Of one of his clients the judge, who had a daughter of his own,
said, when he sentenced him, "Were there many more such men as you in
the world, the women of this land would pray to God to be left
childless." And when some one asked Holcombe, with ill-concealed
disgust, how he came to defend the man, he replied: "I wished to show
the unreliability of expert testimony from medical men. Yes; they tell
me the man was a very bad lot."
It was measures, not men, to Holcombe, and law and order were his twin
goddesses, and "no compromise" his watchword.
"You can elect your man if you'll give me two thousand dollars to
refit our club-room with," one of his political acquaintances once
said to him. "We've five hundred voters on the rolls now, and the
members vote as one man. You'd be saving the city twenty times that
much if you keep Croker's man out of the job. You know _that_ as
well as I do."
"The city can better afford to lose twenty thousand dollars," Holcombe
answered, "than we can afford to give a two-cent stamp for
corruption."
"All right," said the heeler; "all right, Mr. Holcombe. Go on. Fight
'em your own way. If they'd agree to fight you with pamphlets and
circulars you'd stand a chance, sir; but as long as they give out
money and you give out reading-matter to people that can't read,
they'll win, and I naturally want to be on the winning side."
When the club to which Holcombe belonged finally succeeded in getting
the Police Commissioners indicted for blackmailing gambling-houses,
Holcombe was, as a matter of course and of public congratulation, on
the side of the law; and as Assistant District Attorney--a position
given him on account of his father's name and in the hope that it
would shut his mouth--distinguished himself nobly.
Of the four commissioners, three were convicted--the fourth, Patrick
Meakim, with admirable foresight having fled to that country from
which few criminals return, and which is vaguely set forth in the
newspapers as "parts unknown."
The trial had been a severe one upon the zealous Mr. Holcombe, who
found himself at the end of it in a very bad way, with nerves unstrung
and brain so fagged that he assented without question when his doctor
exiled him from New York by ordering a sea voyage, with change of
environment and rest at the other end of it. Some one else suggested
the northern coast of Africa and Tangier, and Holcombe wrote minute
directions to the secretaries of all of his reform clubs urging
continued efforts on the part of his fellow-workers, and sailed away
one cold winter's morning for Gibraltar. The great sea laid its hold
upon him, and the winds from the south thawed the cold in his bones,
and the sun cheered his tired spirit. He stretched himself at full
length reading those books which one puts off reading until illness
gives one the right to do so, and so far as in him lay obeyed his
doctor's first command, that he should forget New York and all that
pertained to it. By the time he had reached the Rock he was up and
ready to drift farther into the lazy, irresponsible life of the
Mediterranean coast, and he had forgotten his struggles against
municipal misrule, and was at times for hours together utterly
oblivious of his own personality.
A dumpy, fat little steamer rolled itself along like a sailor on shore
from Gibraltar to Tangier, and Holcombe, leaning over the rail of its
quarter-deck, smiled down at the chattering group of Arabs and Moors
stretched on their rugs beneath him. A half-naked negro, pulling at
the dates in the basket between his bare legs, held up a handful to
him with a laugh, and Holcombe laughed back and emptied the cigarettes
in his case on top of him, and laughed again as the ship's crew and
the deck passengers scrambled over one another and shook out their
voluminous robes in search of them. He felt at ease with the world and
with himself, and turned his eyes to the white walls of Tangier with a
pleasure so complete that it shut out even the thought that it was a
pleasure.
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