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Title: The Plum Tree
Author: David Graham Phillips
Illustrator: E. M. Ashe
Release Date: January 25, 2007 [EBook #20449]
Language: English
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[Illustration: SHE WAS AT THE STATION IN HER PHAETON TO MEET ME]
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THE PLUM TREE
By
DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS
Author of
The Cost, Golden Fleece, Etc.
Illustrated By
E. M. ASHE
NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
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Copyright 1905
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
March
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. HOW IT ALL BEGAN 1
II. AT THE COURT OF A SOVEREIGN 17
III. SAYLER "DRAWS THE LINE" 33
IV. THE SCHOOL OF LIFE-AS-IT-IS 44
V. A GOOD MAN AND HIS WOES 68
VI. MISS RAMSAY REVOLTS 78
VII. BYGONES 96
VIII. A CALL FROM "THE PARTY" 107
IX. TO THE SEATS OF THE MIGHTY 123
X. THE FACE IN THE CROWD 136
XI. BURBANK 144
XII. BURBANK FIRES THE POPULAR HEART 163
XIII. ROEBUCK & CO. PASS UNDER THE YOKE 168
XIV. A "BOOM-FACTORY" 177
XV. MUTINY 193
XVI. A VICTORY FOR THE PEOPLE 199
XVII. SCARBOROUGH 209
XVIII. A DANGEROUS PAUSE 221
XIX. DAVID SENT OUT AGAINST GOLIATH 224
XX. PILGRIMS AND PATRIOTS 234
XXI. AN INTERLUDE 249
XXII. MOSTLY ABOUT MONEY 261
XXIII. IN WHICH A MOUSE HELPS A LION 271
XXIV. GRANBY INTRUDES AGAIN 282
XXV. AN HOUR OF EMOTION 292
XXVI. "ONLY AN OLD JOKE" 296
XXVII. A DOMESTIC DISCORD 306
XXVIII. UNDER A CRAYON PORTRAIT 314
XXIX. A LETTER FROM THE DEAD 327
XXX. A PHILOSOPHER RUDELY INTERRUPTED 333
XXXI. HARVEY SAYLER, SWINEHERD 345
XXXII. A GLANCE BEHIND THE MASK OF GRANDEUR 365
XXXIII. A "SPASM OF VIRTUE" 380
XXXIV. "LET US HELP EACH OTHER" 387
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THE PLUM TREE
I
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
"We can hold out six months longer,--at least six months." My mother's
tone made the six months stretch encouragingly into six long years.
I see her now, vividly as if it were only yesterday. We were at our
scant breakfast, I as blue as was ever even twenty-five, she brave and
confident. And hers was no mere pretense to reassure me, no cheerless
optimism of ignorance, but the through-and-through courage and strength
of those who flinch for no bogey that life or death can conjure. Her
tone lifted me; I glanced at her, and what shone from her eyes set me on
my feet, face to the foe. The table-cloth was darned in many places, but
so skilfully that you could have looked closely without detecting it.
Not a lump of sugar, not a slice of bread, went to waste in that house;
yet even I had to think twice to realize that we were poor, desperately
poor. She did not hide our poverty; she beautified it, she dignified it
into Spartan simplicity. I know it is not the glamour over the past that
makes me believe there are no women now like those of the race to which
she belonged. The world, to-day, yields comfort too easily to the
capable; hardship is the only mould for such character, and in those
days, in this middle-western country, even the capable were not
strangers to hardship.
"When I was young," she went on, "and things looked black, as they have
a habit of looking to the young and inexperienced,"--that put in with a
teasing smile for me,--"I used to say to myself, 'Well, anyhow, they
can't _kill_ me.' And the thought used to cheer me up wonderfully. In
fact, it still does."
I no longer felt hopeless. I began to gnaw my troubles again--despair is
still.
"Judge Granby is a dog," said I; "yes, a dog."
"Why 'dog'?" objected my mother. "Why not simply 'mean man'? I've never
known a dog that could equal a man who set out to be 'ornery.'"
"When I think of all the work I've done for him in these three years--"
"For yourself," she interrupted. "Work you do for others doesn't amount
to much unless it's been first and best for yourself."
"But he was benefited by it, too," I urged, "and has taken life easy,
and has had more clients and bigger fees than he ever had before. I'd
like to give him a jolt. I'd stop nagging him to put my name in a
miserable corner of the glass in his door. I'd hang out a big sign of my
own over my own office door."
My mother burst into a radiant smile. "I've been waiting a year to hear
that," she said.
Thereupon I had a shock of fright--inside, for I'd never have dared to
show fear before my mother. There's nothing else that makes you so brave
as living with some one before whom you haven't the courage to let your
cowardice show its feather. If we didn't keep each other up to the mark,
what a spectacle of fright and flight this world-drama would be!
Vanity, the greatest of vices, is also the greatest of virtues, or the
source of the greatest virtues--which comes to the same thing.
"When will you do it?" she went on, and then I knew I was in for it, and
how well-founded was the suspicion that had been keeping my lips
tight-shut upon my dream of independence.
"I'll--I'll think about it," was my answer, in a tone which I hoped she
would see was not hesitating, but reflective; "I mustn't go too far,--or
too fast."
"Better go too far and too fast than not go at all," retorted my wise
mother. "Once a tortoise beat a hare,--_once_. It never happened again,
yet the whole timid world has been talking about it ever since." And she
fell into a study from which she roused herself to say, "You'd better
let _me_ bargain for the office and the furniture,--and the big sign."
She knew--but could not or would not teach me--how to get a dollar's
worth for a dollar; would not, I suspect, for she despised parsimony,
declaring it to be another virtue which is becoming only in a woman.
"Of course,--when--" I began.
"We've got to do something in the next six months," she warned. And now
she made the six months seem six minutes.
I had at my tongue's end something about the danger of dragging her down
into misfortune; but before speaking I looked at her, and, looking,
refrained. To say it to _her_ would have been too absurd,--to her who
had been left a widow with nothing at all, who had educated me for
college, and who had helped me through my first year there,--helped me
with money, I mean. But for what she gave besides, more, immeasurably
more,--but for her courage in me and round me and under me,--I'd never
have got my degree or anything else, I fear. To call that courage help
would be like saying the mainspring helps the watch to go. I looked at
her. "They can't kill me, can they?" said I, with a laugh which sounded
so brave that it straightway made me brave.
So it was settled.
But that was the first step in a fight I can't remember even now without
a sinking at the heart. The farmers of Jackson County, of which Pulaski
was the county seat, found in litigation their chief distraction from
the stupefying dullness of farm life in those days of pause, after the
Indian and nature had been conquered and before the big world's arteries
of thought and action had penetrated. The farmers took eagerly to
litigation to save themselves from stagnation. Still, a new lawyer,
especially if he was young, had an agonizing time of it convincing their
slow, stiff, suspicious natures that he could be trusted in such a
crisis as "going to law."
To make matters worse I fell in love.
* * * * *
Once--it was years afterward, though not many years ago--Burbank, at the
time governor, was with me, and we were going over the main points for
his annual message. One of my suggestions--my orders to all my agents,
high and low, have always been sugar-coated as "suggestions"--started a
new train of thought in him, and he took pen and paper to fix it before
it had a chance to escape. As he wrote, my glance wandered along the
shelves of the book-cases. It paused on the farthest and lowest shelf. I
rose and went there, and found my old school-books, those I used when I
was in Public School Number Three, too near thirty years ago!
In the shelf one book stood higher than the others--tall and thin and
ragged, its covers torn, its pages scribbled, stained and dog-eared.
Looking through that old physical geography was like a first talk with a
long-lost friend. It had, indeed, been my old friend. Behind its broad
back I had eaten forbidden apples, I had aimed and discharged the
blow-gun, I had reveled in blood-and-thunder tales that made the drowsy
schoolroom fade before the vast wilderness, the scene of breathless
struggles between Indian and settler, or open into the high seas where
pirate, or worse-than-pirate Britisher, struck flag to American
privateer or man-o'-war.
On an impulse shot up from the dustiest depths of memory, I turned the
old geography sidewise and examined the edges of the cover. Yes, there
was the _cache_ I had made by splitting the pasteboard with my
jack-knife. I thrust in my fingernail; out came a slip of paper. I
glanced at Burbank--he was still busy. I, somewhat stealthily, you may
imagine, opened the paper and--well, my heart beat much more rapidly as
I saw in a school-girl scrawl:
[Illustration: (handwriting)]
[Transcriber's Note: the image is approximately this:
Harvey Sayler hait
Elizabeth Crosby love
with the letters "H", "a", "r", "e", "y", "S", "l", "e" in the first
line and "E", "l", "a", "e", "h", "r", "s", "y" in the second line, in
that order, struck out, as marked by the game mentioned in the
following paragraph.]
I was no longer master of a state; I was a boy in school again. I could
see her laboring over this game of "friendship, love, indifference,
hate." I could see "Redney" Griggs, who sat between her and me, in the
row of desks between and parallel to my row and hers,--could see him
swoop and snatch the paper from her, look at it, grin maliciously, and
toss it over to me. I was in grade A, was sixteen, and was beginning to
take myself seriously. She was in grade D, was little more than half my
age, but looked older,--and how sweet and pretty she was! She had black
hair, thick and wavy, with little tresses escaping from plaits and
ribbons to float about her forehead, ears, and neck. Her skin was darker
then, I think, than it is now, but it had the same smoothness and
glow,--certainly, it could not have had more.
* * * * *
I think the dart must have struck that day,--why else did I keep the bit
of paper? But it did not trouble me until the first winter of my
launching forth as "Harvey Sayler, Attorney and Counselor at Law." She
was the daughter of the Episcopal preacher; and, as every one thought
well of the prospects of my mother's son, our courtship was undisturbed.
Then, in the spring, when fortune was at its coldest and love at its
most feverish, her father accepted a call to a church in Boston, eight
hundred miles away.
To go to see her was impossible; how could the money be spared,--fifty
dollars, at the least? Once--when they had been gone about four
months--my mother insisted that I must. But I refused, and I do not know
whether it is to my credit or not, for my refusal gave her only pain,
whereas the sacrifices she would have had to make, had I gone, would
have given her only pleasure. I had no fear that Betty would change in
our separation. There are some people you hope are stanch, and some
people you think will be stanch, if--, and then there are those, many
women and a few men, whom it is impossible to think of as false or even
faltering. I did not fully appreciate that quality then, for my memory
was not then dotted with the graves of false friendships and littered
with the rubbish of broken promises; but I did appreciate it enough to
build securely upon it.
Build? No, that is not the word. There may be those who are stimulated
to achievement by being in love, though I doubt it. At any rate, I was
not one of them. My love for her absorbed my thoughts, and paralyzed my
courage. Of the qualities that have contributed to what success I may
have had, I put in the first rank a disposition to see the gloomiest
side of the future. But it has not helped to make my life happier,
invaluable though it has been in preventing misadventure from catching
me napping.
So another year passed. Then came hard times,--_real_ hard times. I had
some clients--enough to insure mother and myself a living, with the
interest on mortgage and note kept down. But my clients were poor, and
poor pay, and slow pay. Nobody was doing well but the note-shavers.
I--How mother fought to keep the front brave and bright!--not her front,
for that was bright by nature, like the sky beyond the clouds; but our
front, my front,--the front of our affairs. No one must see that we were
pinching,--so I must be the most obviously prosperous young lawyer in
Pulaski. What that struggle cost her I did not then realize; no, could
not realize until I looked at her face for the last time, looked and
turned away and thought on the meaning of the lines and the hollows over
which Death had spread his proclamation of eternal peace. I have heard
it said of those markings in human faces, "How ugly!" But it seems to me
that, to any one with eyes and imagination, line and wrinkle and hollow
always have the somber grandeur of tragedy. I remember my mother when
her face was smooth and had the shallow beauty that the shallow dote on.
But her face whereon was written the story of fearlessness, sacrifice,
and love,--that is the face beautiful of my mother for me.
In the midst of those times of trial, when she had ceased to smile,--for
she had none of that hypocritical cheerfulness which depresses and is a
mere vanity to make silly onlookers cry "Brave!" when there is no true
bravery,--just when we were at our lowest ebb, came an offer from Bill
Dominick to put me into politics.
I had been interested in politics ever since I was seven years old. I
recall distinctly the beginning:--
On a November afternoon,--it must have been November, though I remember
that it was summer-warm, with all the windows open and many men in the
streets in shirt-sleeves,--at any rate, I was on my way home from
school. As I neared the court-house I saw a crowd in the yard and was
reminded that it was election day, and that my father was running for
reëlection to the state senate; so, I bolted for his law office in the
second story of the Masonic Temple, across the street from the
court-house.
He was at the window and was looking at the polling place so intently
that he took no notice of me as I stood beside him. I know now why he
was absorbed and why his face was stern and sad. I can shut my eyes and
see that court-house yard, the long line of men going up to vote, single
file, each man calling out his name as he handed in his ballot, and Tom
Weedon--who shot an escaping prisoner when he was deputy
sheriff--repeating the name in a loud voice. Each oncoming voter in that
curiously regular and compact file was holding out his right arm stiff
so that the hand was about a foot clear of the thigh; and in every one
of those thus conspicuous hands was a conspicuous bit of white paper--a
ballot. As each man reached the polling window and gave in his name, he
swung that hand round with a stiff-armed, circular motion that kept it
clear of the body and in full view until the bit of paper disappeared in
the slit in the ballot box.
I wished to ask my father what this strange spectacle meant; but, as I
glanced up at him to begin my question, I knew I must not, for I felt
that I was seeing something which shocked him so profoundly that he
would take me away if I reminded him of my presence. I know now that I
was witnessing the crude beginnings of the money-machine in
politics,--the beginnings of the downfall of parties,--the beginnings of
the overthrow of the people as the political power. Those stiff-armed
men were the "floating voters" of that ward of Pulaski. They had been
bought up by a rich candidate of the opposition party, which was less
scrupulous than our party, then in the flush of devotion to "principles"
and led by such old-fashioned men as my father with old-fashioned
notions of honor and honesty. Those "floaters" had to keep the ballot in
full view from the time they got it of the agent of their purchaser
until they had deposited it beyond the possibility of substitution--he
must see them "deliver the goods."
My father was defeated. He saw that, in politics, the day of the public
servant of public interests was over, and that the night of the private
servant of private interests had begun. He resigned the leadership into
the dexterous hands of a politician. Soon afterward he died, muttering:
"Prosperity has ruined my country!"
From that election day my interest in politics grew, and but for my
mother's bitter prejudice I should have been an active politician,
perhaps before I was out of college.
Pulaski, indeed all that section of my state, was strongly of my party.
Therefore Dominick, its local boss, was absolute. At the last county
election, four years before the time of which I am writing, there had
been a spasmodic attempt to oust him. He had grown so insolent, and had
put his prices for political and political-commercial "favors" to our
leading citizens so high, that the "best element" in our party
reluctantly broke from its allegiance. To save himself he had been
forced to order flagrant cheating on the tally sheets; his ally and
fellow conspirator, M'Coskrey, the opposition boss, was caught and was
indicted by the grand jury. The Reformers made such a stir that Ben
Cass, the county prosecutor, though a Dominick man, disobeyed his master
and tried and convicted M'Coskrey. Of course, following the custom in
cases of yielding to pressure from public sentiment, he made the
trial-errors necessary to insure reversal in the higher court; and he
finally gave Dominick's judge the opportunity to quash the indictment.
But the boss was relentless,--Cass had been disobedient, and had put
upon "my friend M'Coskrey" the disgrace of making a sorry figure in
court. "Ben can look to his swell reform friends for a renomination,"
said he; "he'll not get it from me."
Thus it came to pass that Dominick's lieutenant, Buck Fessenden,
appeared in my office one afternoon in July, and, after a brief parley,
asked me how I'd like to be prosecuting attorney of Jackson County. Four
thousand a year for four years, and a reëlection if I should give
satisfaction; and afterward, the bench or a seat in Congress! I could
pay off everything; I could marry!
It was my first distinct vision of the plum tree. To how many thousands
of our brightest, most promising young Americans it is shown each year
in just such circumstances!
II
AT THE COURT OF A SOVEREIGN
That evening after supper I went to see Dominick.
In the lower end of Pulaski there was a large beer-garden, known as
Dominick's headquarters. He received half the profits in return for
making it his loafing-place, the seat of the source of all political
honor, preferment and privilege in the third, sixth and seventh
congressional districts. I found him enthroned at the end of a long
table in the farthest corner of the garden. On one side of him sat James
Spencer, judge of the circuit court,--"Dominick's judge"; on the other
side Henry De Forest, principal owner of the Pulaski Gas and Street
Railway Company. There were several minor celebrities in politics, the
law, and business down either side of the table, then Fessenden, talking
with Cowley, our lieutenant governor. As soon as I appeared Fessenden
nodded to me, rose, and said to the others generally: "Come on, boys,
let's adjourn to the next table. Mr. Dominick wants to talk to this
young fellow."
I knew something of politics, but I was not prepared to see that
distinguished company rise and, with not a shadow of resentment on any
man's face, with only a respectful, envious glance at me, who was to
deprive them of sunshine for a few minutes, remove themselves and their
glasses to another table. When I knew Dominick better, and other bosses
in this republic of ours, I knew that the boss is never above the
weaknesses of the monarch class for a rigid and servile court etiquette.
My own lack of this weakness has been a mistake which might have been
serious had my political power been based upon men. It is a blunder to
treat men without self-respect as if they were your equals. They expect
to cringe; if they are not compelled to do so, they are very likely to
forget their place. At the court of a boss are seen only those who have
lost self-respect and those who never had it. The first are the lower
though they rank themselves, and are ranked, above the "just naturally
low."
But--Dominick was alone, his eternal glass of sarsaparilla before him.
He used the left corner of his mouth both for his cigar and for speech.
To bid me draw near and seat myself, he had to shift his cigar. When the
few words necessary were half-spoken, half-grunted, he rolled his cigar
back to the corner which it rarely left. He nodded condescendingly, and,
as I took the indicated chair at his right, gave me a hand that was fat
and firm, not unlike the flabby yet tenacious sucker of a moist
sea-creature.
He was a huge, tall man, enormously muscular, with a high head like a
block, straight in front, behind and on either side; keen, shifty, pig
eyes, pompous cheeks, a raw, wide mouth; slovenly dress, with a big
diamond as a collar button and another on his puffy little finger. He
was about forty years old, had graduated from blacksmith too lazy to
work into prize-fighter, thence into saloon-keeper. It was as a
saloon-keeper that he founded and built his power, made himself the
local middleman between our two great political factors, those who buy
and break laws and those who aid and abet the lawlessness by selling
themselves as voters or as office-holders.
Dominick had fixed his eyes upon his sarsaparilla. He frowned savagely
into its pale brown foam when he realized that I purposed to force him
to speak first. His voice was ominously surly as he shifted his cigar to
say: "Well, young fellow, what can I do for you?"
"Mr. Fessenden told me you wanted to see me," said I.
"He didn't say nothing of the sort," growled Dominick. "I've knowed Buck
seventeen years, and he ain't no liar."
I flushed and glanced at the distinguished company silently waiting to
return to the royal presence. Surely, if these eminent fellow citizens
of mine endured this insulting monarch, I could,--I, the youthful, the
obscure, the despondent. Said I: "Perhaps I did not express myself quite
accurately. Fessenden told me you were considering making me your
candidate for county prosecutor, and suggested that I call and see
you."
[Illustration: HE SHIFTED HIS CIGAR TO SAY: "WELL, YOUNG FELLOW, WHAT
CAN I DO FOR YOU?" p. 20]
Dominick gave a gleam and a grunt like a hog that has been flattered
with a rough scratching of its hide. But he answered: "I don't give no
nominations. That's the province of the party, young man."
"But _you_ are the party," was my reply. At the time I was not conscious
that I had thus easily dropped down among the hide-scratchers. I assured
myself that I was simply stating the truth, and ignored the fact that
telling the truth can be the most degrading sycophancy, and the subtlest
and for that reason the most shameless, lying.
"Well, I guess I've got a little something to say about the party," he
conceded. "Us young fellows that are active in politics like to see
young fellows pushed to the front. A good many of the boys ain't stuck
on Ben Cass,--he's too stuck on himself. He's getting out of touch with
the common people, and is boot-licking in with the swells up town. So,
when I heard you wanted the nomination for prosecutor, I told Buck to
trot you round and let us look you over. Good party man?"
"Yes--and my father and grandfather before me."
"No reform germs in your system?"
I laughed--I was really amused, such a relief was it to see a gleam of
pleasantry in that menacing mass. "I'm no better than my party," said I,
"and I don't desert it just because it doesn't happen to do everything
according to my notions."
"That's right," approved Dominick, falling naturally into the role of
political schoolmaster. "There ain't no government without
responsibility, and there ain't no responsibility without organization,
and there ain't no organization without men willing to sink their
differences." He paused.
I looked my admiration,--I was most grateful to him for this chance to
think him an intellect. Who likes to admit that he bows before a mere
brute? The compulsory courtiers of a despot may possibly and in part
tell the truth about him, after they are safe; but was there ever a
voluntary courtier whose opinion of his monarch could be believed? The
more distinguished the courtier the greater his necessity to exaggerate
his royal master--or mistress--to others and to himself.
Dominick forged on: "Somebody's got to lead, and the leader's got to be
obeyed. Otherwise what becomes of the party? Why, it goes to hell, and
we've got anarchy."
This was terse, pointed, plausible--the stereotyped "machine" argument.
I nodded emphatically.
"Ben Cass," he proceeded, "believes in discipline and organization and
leadership only when they're to elect him to a fat job. He wants to use
the party, but when the party wants service in return, up goes Mr. Cass'
snout and tail, and off he lopes. He's what I call a cast iron--" I
shall omit the vigorous phrase wherein he summarized Cass. His
vocabulary was not large; he therefore frequently resorted to the
garbage barrel and the muck heap for missiles.
I showed in my face my scorn for the Cass sort of selfishness and
insubordination. "The leader has all the strings in his hand," said I.
"He's the only one who can judge what must be done. He must be trusted
and obeyed."
"I see you've got the right stuff in you, young man," said Dominick
heartily. "So you want the job?"
I hesitated,--I was thinking of him, of his bestial tyranny, and of my
self-respect, unsullied, but also untempted, theretofore.
He scowled. "Do you, or don't you?"
"Yes," said I,--I was thinking of the debts and mother and Betty. "Yes,
indeed; I'd esteem it a great honor, and I'd be grateful to you." If I
had thrust myself over-head into a sewer I should have felt less vile
than I did as my fears and longings uttered those degrading words.
He grunted. "Well, we'll see. Tell the boys at the other table to come
back." He nodded a dismissal and gave me that moist, strong grip again.
As I went toward the other table each man there had a hand round his
glass in readiness for the message of recall. I mentally called the
roll--wealth, respectability, honor, all on their knees before Dominick,
each with his eye upon the branch of the plum tree that bore the kind of
fruit he fancied. And I wondered how they felt inside,--for I was then
ignorant of the great foundation truth of practical ethics, that a man's
conscience is not the producer but the product of his career.
Fessenden accompanied me to the door. "The old man's in a hell of a
humor to-night," said he. "His wife's caught on to a little game he's
been up to, and she's the only human being he's afraid of. She came in
here, one night, and led him out by the ear. What a fool a man is to
marry when there's a chance of running into a mess like that! But--you
made a hit with him. Besides, he needs you. Your family--" Buck checked
himself, feeling that drink was making him voluble.
"He's a strong man, isn't he?" said I; "a born leader."
"Middle-weight champion in his day," replied Fessenden. "He can still
knock out anybody in the organization in one round."
"Good night and thank you," said I. So I went my way, not elated but
utterly depressed,--more depressed than when I won the first case in
which I knew my client's opponent was in the right and had lost only
because I outgeneraled his stupid lawyer. I was, like most of the sons
and daughters of the vigorous families of the earnest, deeply religious
early-West, an idealist by inheritance and by training; but I suppose
any young man, however practical, must feel a shock when he begins those
compromises between theoretical and practical right which are part of
the daily routine of active life, and without which active life is
impossible.
I had said nothing to my mother, because I did not wish to raise her
hopes--or her objections. I now decided to be silent until the matter
should be settled. The next day but one Fessenden came, bad news in his
face. "The old man liked you," he began, "but--"
I had not then learned to control my expression. I could not help
showing what ruins of lofty castles that ominous "but" dropped upon my
head.
"You'll soon be used to getting it in the neck if you stay in politics,"
said Fessenden. "There's not much else. But you ain't so bad off as you
think. The old man has decided that he can afford to run one of his
reliable hacks for the place. He's suddenly found a way of sinking his
hooks in the head devil of the Reformers and Ben Cass' chief backer,
Singer,--you know him,--the lawyer."
Singer was one of the leaders of the state bar and superintendent of our
Sunday-school.
"Dominick has made De Forest give Singer the law business of the Gas and
Street Railway Company, so Singer is coming over to us." Buck grinned.
"He has found that 'local interests must be subordinated to the broader
interests of the party in state and nation.'"
I had been reading in our party's morning paper what a wise and
patriotic move Singer had made in advising the putting off of a Reform
campaign,--and I had believed in the sincerity of his motive!
Fessenden echoed my sneer, and went on: "He's a rotten hypocrite; but
then, we can always pull the bung out of these Reform movements that
way."
"You said it isn't as bad for me as it seems," I interrupted.
"Oh, yes. You're to be on the ticket. The old man's going to send you
to the legislature,--lower house, of course."
I did not cheer up. An assemblyman got only a thousand a year.
"The pay ain't much," confessed Buck, "but there ain't nothing to do
except vote according to order. Then there's a great deal to be picked
up on the side,--the old man understands that others have got to live
besides him. Salaries in politics don't cut no figure nowadays, anyhow.
It's the chance the place gives for pick-ups."
At first I flatly refused, but Buck pointed out that I was foolish to
throw away the benefits sure to come through the "old man's" liking for
me. "He'll take care of you," he assured me. "He's got you booked for a
quick rise." My poverty was so pressing that I had not the courage to
refuse,--the year and a half of ferocious struggle and the longing to
marry Betty Crosby had combined to break my spirit. I believe it is
Johnson who says the worst feature of genteel poverty is its power to
make one ridiculous. I don't think so. No; its worst feature is its
power to make one afraid.
That night I told my mother of my impending "honors." We were in the
dark on our little front porch. She was silent, and presently I thought
I heard her suppressing a sigh. "You don't like it, mother?" said I.
"No, Harvey, but--I see no light ahead in any other direction, and I
guess one should always steer toward what light there is." She stood
behind my chair, put her hands on my shoulders, and rested her chin
lightly on the top of my head. "Besides, I can trust you. Whatever
direction you take, you're sure to win in the end."
I was glad it was dark. An hour after I went to bed I heard some one
stirring in the house,--it seemed to me there was a voice, too. I rose
and went into the hall, and so, softly to my mother's room. Her door was
ajar. She was near the window, kneeling there in the moonlight,
praying--for me.
* * * * *
I had not been long in the legislature before I saw that my position was
even more contemptible than I anticipated. So contemptible, indeed, was
it that, had I not been away from home and among those as basely
situated as myself, it would have been intolerable,--a convict
infinitely prefers the penitentiary to the chain gang. Then, too, there
was consolation in the fact that the people, my fellow citizens, in
their stupidity and ignorance about political conditions, did not
realize what public office had come to mean. At home they believed what
the machine-controlled newspapers said of me--that I was a "manly,
independent young man," that I was "making a vigorous stand for what was
honest in public affairs," that I was the "honorable and distinguished
son of an honorable and distinguished father." How often I read those
and similar eulogies of young men just starting in public life! And is
it not really amazing that the people believe, that they never say to
themselves: "But, if he were actually what he so loudly professes to be,
how could he have got public office from a boss and a machine?"
I soon gave up trying to fool myself into imagining I was the servant of
the people by introducing or speaking for petty little popular
measures. I saw clearly that graft was the backbone, the whole skeleton
of legislative business, and that its fleshly cover of pretended public
service could be seen only by the blind. I saw, also, that no one in the
machine of either party had any real power. The state boss of our party,
United States Senator Dunkirk, was a creature and servant of
corporations. Silliman, the state boss of the opposition party, was the
same, but got less for his services because his party was hopelessly in
the minority and its machine could be useful only as a sort of
supplement and scapegoat.
With the men at the top, Dunkirk and Silliman, mere lackeys, I saw my
own future plainly enough. I saw myself crawling on year after
year,--crawling one of two roads. Either I should become a political
scullion, a wretched party hack, despising myself and despised by those
who used me, or I should develop into a lackey's lackey or a plain
lackey, lieutenant of a boss or a boss, so-called--a derisive name,
really, when the only kind of boss-ship open was head political procurer
to one or more rich corporations or groups of corporations. I felt I
should probably become a scullion, as I thought I had no taste or
instinct for business, and as I was developing some talent for "mixing,"
and for dispensing "hot air" from the stump.
I turned these things over and over in my mind with an energy that
sprang from shame, from the knowledge of what my mother would think if
she knew the truth about her son, and from a realization that I was no
nearer marrying Betty Crosby than before. At last I wrought myself into
a sullen fury beneath a calm surface. The lessons in self-restraint and
self-hiding I learned in that first of my two years as assemblyman have
been invaluable.
When I entered upon my second and last winter, I was outwardly as serene
as--as a volcano on the verge of eruption.
III
SAYLER "DRAWS THE LINE"
In February the railways traversing our state sent to the capitol a bill
that had been drawn by our ablest lawyers and reviewed by the craftiest
of the great corporation lawyers of New York City. Its purpose, most
shrewdly and slyly concealed, was to exempt the railways from
practically all taxation. It was so subtly worded that this would be
disclosed only when the companies should be brought to court for
refusing to pay their usual share of the taxes. Such measures are
usually "straddled" through a legislature,--that is, neither party takes
the responsibility, but the boss of each machine assigns to vote for
them all the men whose seats are secure beyond any ordinary assault of
public indignation. In this case, of the ninety-one members of the lower
house, thirty-two were assigned by Dunkirk and seventeen by Silliman to
make up a majority with three to spare.
My boss, Dominick, got wind that Dunkirk and Silliman were cutting an
extra melon of uncommon size. He descended upon the capitol and served
notice on Dunkirk that the eleven Dominick men assigned to vote for the
bill would vote against it unless he got seven thousand dollars apiece
for them,--seventy-seven thousand dollars. Dunkirk needed every one of
Dominick's men to make up his portion of the majority; he yielded after
trying in vain to reduce the price. All Dominick would say to him on
that point, so I heard afterward, was:
"Every day you put me off, I go up a thousand dollars a head."
We who were to be voted so profitably for Dunkirk, Silliman, Dominick,
and the railroads, learned what was going on,--Silliman went on a "tear"
and talked too much. Nine of us, _not_ including myself, got together
and sent Cassidy, member from the second Jackson County district, to
Dominick to plead for a share. I happened to be with him in the Capital
City Hotel bar when Cassidy came up, and, hemming and hawing, explained
how he and his fellow insurgents felt.
Dominick's veins seemed cords straining to bind down a demon struggling
to escape. "It's back to the bench you go, Pat Cassidy,--back to the
bench where I found you," he snarled, with a volley of profanity and
sewage. "I don't know nothing about this here bill except that it's for
the good of the party. Go back to that gang of damned wharf rats, and
tell 'em, if I hear another squeak, I'll put 'em where I got 'em."
Cassidy shrank away with a furtive glance of envy and hate at me, whom
Dominick treated with peculiar consideration,--I think it was because I
was the only man of education and of any pretensions to "family" in
official position in his machine. He used to like to class himself and
me together as "us gentlemen," in contrast to "them muckers," meaning my
colleagues.
Next day, just before the voting began, Dominick seated himself at the
front of the governor's gallery,--the only person in it. I see him now
as he looked that day,--black and heavy-jawed and scowling, leaning
forward with both forearms on the railing, and his big, flat chin
resting on his upturned, stubby thumbs. He was there to see that each
of us, his creatures, dependent absolutely upon him for our political
lives, should vote as he had sold us in block. There was no chance to
shirk or even to squirm. As the roll-call proceeded, one after another,
seven of us, obeyed that will frowning from the gallery,--jumped through
the hoop of fire under the quivering lash. I was eighth on the roll.
"Sayler!" How my name echoed through that horrible silence!
I could not answer. Gradually every face turned toward me,--I could see
them, could feel them, and, to make bad enough worse, I yielded to an
imperious fascination, the fascination of that incarnation of
brute-power,--power of muscle and power of will. I turned my eyes upon
the amazed, furious eyes of my master. It seemed to me that his lips
must give passage to the oaths and filth swelling beneath his chest, and
seething behind his eyes.
"Sayler!" repeated the clerk in a voice that exploded within me.
"No!" I shouted,--not in answer to the clerk, but in denial of that
insolent master-to-dog command from the beast in the gallery.
The look in his eyes changed to relief and contemptuous approval. There
was a murmur of derision from my fellow members. Then I remembered that
a negative was, at that stage of the bill, a vote for it,--I had done
just the reverse of what I intended. The roll-call went on, and I sat
debating with myself. Prudence, inclination, the natural timidity of
youth, the utter futility of opposition, fear, above all else,
fear,--these joined in bidding me let my vote stand as cast. On the
other side stood my notion of self-respect. I felt I must then and there
and for ever decide whether I was a thing or a man. Yet, again and again
I had voted for measures just as corrupt,--had voted for them with no
protest beyond a cynical shrug and a wry look. Every man, even the
laxest, if he is to continue to "count as one," must have a point where
he draws the line beyond which he will not go. The liar must have things
he will not lie about, the thief things he will not steal, the
compromiser things he will not compromise, the practical man in the
pulpit, in politics, in business, in the professor's chair, or
editorial tribune, things he will not sacrifice, whatever the cost. That
is "practical honor." I had reached my line of practical honor, my line
between possible compromise and certain demoralization. And I realized
it.
When the roll-call ended I rose, and, in a voice that I knew was firm
and clear, said: "Mr. Speaker, I voted in the negative by mistake. I
wish my vote recorded in the affirmative. I am against the bill."
Amid a fearful silence I took my seat. With a suddenness that made me
leap, a wild and crazy assemblyman, noted as the crank of that session,
emitted a fantastic yell of enthusiastic approval. Again there was that
silence; then the tension of the assembly, floor and crowded galleries,
burst in a storm of hysterical laughter.
I wish I could boast how brave I felt as I reversed my vote, how
indifferent to that tempest of mockery, and how strong as I went forth
to meet my master and hear my death-warrant. But I can't, in
honesty,--I'm only a human being, not a hero, and these are my
_con_fessions, not my _pro_fessions. So I must relate that, though the
voice that requested the change of vote was calm and courageous, the man
behind it was agitated and sick with dread. There may be those who have
the absolute courage some men boast,--if not directly, then by
implication in despising him who shows that he has it not. For myself, I
must say that I never made a venture,--and my life has been a succession
of ventures, often with my whole stake upon the table,--I never made a
venture that I did not have a sickening sensation at the heart. My
courage, if it can be called by so sounding a name, has been in daring
to make the throw when every atom of me was shrieking, "You'll lose!
You'll be ruined!"
I did not see Dominick until after supper. I had nerved myself for a
scene,--indeed, I had been hoping he would insult me. When one lacks the
courage boldly to advance along the perilous course his intelligence
counsels, he is lucky if he can and will goad some one into kicking him
along it past the point where retreat is possible. Such methods of
advance are not dignified, but then, is life dignified? To my surprise
and alarm, Dominick refused to kick me into manhood. He had been paid,
and the seventy-seven thousand dollars, in bills of large denomination,
were warming his heart from the inner pocket of his waistcoat. So he
came up to me, scowling, but friendly.
"Why didn't you tell me you wanted to be let off, Harvey?" he said
reproachfully. "I'd 'a' done it. Now, damn you, you've put me in a place
where I've got to give you the whip."
To flush at this expression from Dominick was a hypocritical refinement
of sensitiveness. To draw myself up haughtily, to turn on my heel and
walk away,--that was the silliness of a boy. Still, I am glad I did both
those absurd things. When I told my mother how I had ruined myself in
politics she began to cry,--and tears were not her habit. Then she got
my father's picture and kissed it and talked to it about me, just as if
he were there with us; and for a time I felt that I was of heroic
stature.
But, as the days passed, with no laurels in the form of cases and fees,
and as clients left me through fear of Dominick's power, I shriveled
back to human size, and descended from my pedestal. From the
ground-level I began again to look about the matter-of-fact world.
I saw I was making only a first small payment on the heavy price for the
right to say, no, for the right to be free to break with any man or any
enterprise that menaced my self-ownership. That right I felt I must
keep, whatever its cost. Some men can, or think they can, lend their
self-ownership and take it back at convenience; I knew I was not of
them--and let none of them judge me. Especially let none judge me who
only deludes himself that he owns himself, who has sold himself all his
life long for salaries and positions or for wealth, or for the empty
reputation of power he wields only on another's sufferance.
A glance about me was enough to disclose the chief reason why so many
men had surrendered the inner citadel of self-respect. In the crucial
hour, when they had had to choose between subservience and a hard battle
with adversity, forth from their hearts had issued a traitor weakness,
the feeling of responsibility to wife and children, and this traitor
had easily delivered them captive to some master or masters. More, or
less, than human, it seemed to me, was the courage that could make
successful resistance to this traitor, and could strike down and drag
down wife and children. "I must give up Elizabeth," I said to myself,
"for her own sake as well as for mine. Marry her I must not until I am
established securely in freedom. And when will that be?" In my mood of
darkness and despair, the answer to that question was a relentless,
"Never, especially if you are weighted with the sense of obligation to
her, of her wasting her youth in waiting for you."
I wrote her all that was in my mind. "You must forget me," I said, "and
I shall forget you--for I see that you are not for me."
The answer came by telegraph--"Please don't ever again hurt me in that
way." And of the letter which came two days later I remember clearly
this sentence: "If you will not let me go on with you, I will make the
journey alone."
This shook me, but I knew only too well how the bright and beautiful
legions of the romantic and the ideal could be put to flight, could be
hurled headlong into the abyss of oblivion by the phalanxes of fact.
"I see what I must do," was my answer to her letter. "And I shall do it.
Be merciful to me, Elizabeth. Do not tempt me to a worse cowardice than
giving you up. I shall not write again."
And I did not. Every one of her letters was answered--sometimes, I
remember, I wrote to her the whole night through, shading my window so
that mother could not from her window see the reflection of my lamp's
light on the ground and become anxious. But I destroyed those long and
often agonized answers. And I can not say whether my heart was the
heavier in the months when I was getting her letters, to which I dared
not reply, or in those succeeding months when her small, clear
handwriting first ceased to greet me from the mail.
IV
THE SCHOOL OF LIFE-AS-IT-IS
A day or so after I lost the only case of consequence I had had in more
than a year, Buck Fessenden came into my office, and, after dosing me
liberally with those friendly protestations and assurances which please
even when they do not convince, said: "I know you won't give me away,
Sayler, and I can't stand it any longer to watch you going on this way.
Don't you see the old man's after you hammer and tongs? He'll never let
up. You won't get no clients, and, if you do, _you won't win no cases_."
Those last five words, spoken in Buck's most significant manner,
revealed what my modesty--or, if you prefer, my stupidity--had hidden
from me. I had known all along that Dominick was keeping away and
driving away clients; but I had not suspected his creatures on the
bench. To this day, after all these years of use, only with the greatest
reluctance and with a moral uneasiness which would doubtless amuse most
political managers, do I send "suggestions" or "intimations" to my men
in judicial office--and I always do it, and always have done it,
indirectly. And I feel relieved and grateful when my judges, eager to
"serve the party," anticipate me by sending me a reassuring hint.
I did not let Buck see into my mind. "Nonsense!" I pooh-poohed; "I've no
cause to complain of lack of business: but even if I had, I'd not blame
Dominick or any one else but myself." Then I gave him a straight but
good-humored look. "Drop it, Buck," said I. "What did the old man send
you to me for? What does he want?"
He was too crafty to defend an indefensible position. "I'll admit he did
send me," said he with a grin, "but I came on my own account, too. Do
you want to make it up with him? You can get back under the plum tree if
you'll say the word."
I could see my mother, as I had seen her two hours before at our poor
midday meal,--an old, old woman, so broken, so worn! And all through
the misery this Dominick had brought upon us. Before I could control
myself to speak, Buck burst out, a look of alarm in his face, "Don't say
it, Mr. Sayler,--I know,--I know. I told him it'd be no use. Honest, he
ain't as bad as you think,--he don't know no better, and it's because he
liked and still likes you that he wants you back." He leaned across the
desk toward me, in his earnestness,--and I could not doubt his
sincerity. "Sayler," he went on, "take my advice, get out of the state.
You ain't the sort that gives in, and no more is he. You've got more
nerve than any other man I know, bar none, but don't waste it on a fool
fight. You know enough about politics to know what you're up against."
"Thank you," said I, "but I'll stay on."
He gave over trying to persuade me. "I hope," said he, "you've got a
card up your sleeve that the old man don't know about."
I made some vague reply, and he soon went away. I felt that I had
confirmed his belief in my fearlessness. Yet, if he could have looked
into my mind, how he would have laughed at his credulity! Probably he
would have pitied me, too, for it is one of the curious facts of human
nature that men are amazed and even disgusted whenever they see--in
others--the weaknesses that are universal. I doubt not, many who read
these memoirs will be quite honestly Pharisaical, thanking Heaven that
they are not touched with any of my infirmities.
It may have been coincidence, though I think not, that, a few days after
Fessenden's call, a Reform movement against Dominick appeared upon the
surface of Jackson County politics. I thought, at the time, that it was
the first streak of the dawn I had been watching for,--the awakening of
the sluggish moral sentiment of the rank and file of the voters. I know
now that it was merely the result of a quarrel among the corporations
that employed Dominick. He had been giving the largest of them,
Roebuck's Universal Gas and Electric Company, called the Power Trust,
more than its proportional share of the privileges and spoils. The
others had protested in vain, and as a last resort had ordered their
lawyers to organize a movement to "purify" Jackson County, Dominick's
stronghold.
I did not then know it, but I got the nomination for county prosecutor
chiefly because none of the other lawyers, not even those secretly
directing the Reform campaign, was brave enough publicly to provoke the
Power Trust. I made a house to house, farm to farm, man to man, canvass.
We had the secret ballot, and I was elected. The people rarely fail to
respond to that kind of appeal if they are convinced that response can
not possibly hurt, and may help, their pockets. And, by the way, those
occasional responses, significant neither of morality nor of
intelligence, lead political theorists far astray. As if honor or
honesty could win other than sporadic and more or less hypocritical
homage--practical homage, I mean--among a people whose permanent ideal
is wealth, no matter how got or how used. That is another way of saying
that the chief characteristic of Americans is that we are human and,
whatever we may profess, cherish the human ideal universal in a world
where want is man's wickedest enemy and wealth his most winning friend.
But as I was relating, I was elected, and my majority, on the face of
the returns, was between ten and eleven hundred. It must actually have
been many thousands, for never before had Dominick "doctored" the tally
sheets so recklessly.
Financially I was now on my way to the surface. I supposed that I had
become a political personage also. Was I not in possession of the most
powerful office in the county? I was astonished that neither Dominick
nor any other member of his gang made the slightest effort to conciliate
me between election day and the date of my taking office. I did succeed
in forcing from reluctant grand juries indictments against a few of the
most notorious, but least important, members of the gang; and I got one
conviction--which was reversed on trial-errors by the higher court.
The truth was that my power had no existence. Dominick still ruled,
through the judges and the newspapers. The press was silent when it
could not venture to deprecate or to condemn me.
But I fought on almost alone. I did not fail to make it clear to the
people why I was not succeeding, and what a sweep there must be before
Jackson County could have any real reform. I made an even more vigorous
campaign for reëlection than I had made four years before. The farmers
stood by me fairly well, but the town went overwhelmingly against me.
Why? Because I was "bad for business" and, if reëlected, would be still
worse. The corporations with whose law-breaking I interfered were
threatening to remove their plants from Pulaski,--that would have meant
the departure of thousands of the merchants' best customers, and the
destruction of the town's prosperity. I think the election was fairly
honest. Dominick's man beat me by about the same majority by which I had
been elected.
"Bad for business!"--the most potent of political slogans. And it will
inevitably result some day in the concentration of absolute power,
political and all other kinds, in the hands of the few who are strongest
and cleverest. For they can make the people bitterly regret and speedily
repent having tried to correct abuses; and the people, to save their
dollars, will sacrifice their liberty. I doubt if they will, in our time
at least, learn to see far enough to realize that who captures their
liberty captures them and, therefore, their dollars too.
By my defeat in that typical contest I was disheartened,
embittered,--and ruined. For, in my enthusiasm and confidence I had gone
deeply into debt for the expenses of the Reform campaign. At midnight of
election day I descended into the black cave of despair. For three weeks
I explored it. When I returned to the surface, I was a man, ready to
deal with men on the terms of human nature. I had learned my lesson.
For woman the cost of the attainment of womanhood's maturity is the
beautiful, the divine freshness of girlhood. For man, the cost of the
attainment of manhood's full strength and power is equally great, and
equally sad,--his divine faith in human nature, his divine belief that
abstract justice and right and truth rule the world.
Even now, when life is redeeming some of those large promises to pay
which I had long ago given up as hopeless bad debts; even now, it gives
me a wrench to remember the crudest chapter in that bitter lesson. So
certain had I been of reëlection that I had arranged to go to Boston the
day after my triumph at the polls. For I knew from friends of the
Crosbys in Pulaski that Elizabeth was still unmarried, was not engaged,
and upon that I had built high a romantic hope.
* * * * *
I made up my mind that mother and I must leave Pulaski, that I must give
up the law and must, in Chicago or Cleveland, get something to do that
would bring in a living at once. Before I found courage to tell her that
which would blast hopes wrapped round and rooted in her very heart, and,
fortunately, before I had to confess to her the debts I had made, Edward
Ramsay threw me a life-line.
He came bustling into my office one afternoon, big and broad, and
obviously pleased with himself, and, therefore, with the world. He had
hardly changed in the years since we were at Ann Arbor together. He had
kept up our friendship, and had insisted on visiting me several times,
though not in the past four years, which had been as busy for him as for
me. Latterly his letters urging me to visit him at their great country
place, away at the other end of the state, had set me a hard task of
inventing excuses.
"Well, well!" he exclaimed, shaking my hand violently in both his. "You
wouldn't come to see me, so I've come to you."
I tried not to show the nervousness this announcement stirred. "I'm
afraid you'll find our hospitality rather uncomfortable," was all I
said. Mother and I had not spread much sail to our temporary gust of
prosperity; and when the storm began to gather, she straightway
closereefed.
"Thanks, but I can't stop with you this time," said he. "I'm making an
inspection of the Power Trust's properties, and I've got mother and
sister along. We're living in the private car the company gives me for
the tour." He went on to tell how, since his father's death, he had been
forced into responsibilities, and was, among many other things, a member
of the Power Trust's executive committee.
Soon came the inevitable question, "And how are you getting on?"
"So so," replied I; "not too well, just at the present. I was beaten,
you know, and have to go back to my practice in January."
"Wish you lived in my part of the state," said he. "But the Ramsay
Company hasn't anything down here." He reflected a moment, then beamed.
"I can get you the legal business of the Power Trust if you want it," he
said. "Their lawyer down here goes on the bench, you know--he was on the
ticket that won. Roebuck wanted a good, safe, first-class man on the
bench in this circuit."
But he added nothing more about the Power Trust vacancy at Pulaski.
True, my first impulse was that I couldn't and wouldn't accept; also, I
told myself it was absurd to imagine they would consider me. Still, I
wished to hear, and his failure to return to the subject settled once
more the clouds his coming had lifted somewhat.
Mother was not well enough to have the Ramsays at the house that
evening, so I dined with them in the car. Mrs. Ramsay was the same
simple, silent, ill-at-ease person I had first met at the Ann Arbor
commencement,--probably the same that she had been ever since her
husband's wealth and her children's infection with newfangled ideas had
forced her from the plain ways of her youth. I liked her, but I was not
so well pleased with her daughter. Carlotta was then twenty-two, had
abundant, noticeably nice brown hair, an indifferent skin, pettish lips,
and restless eyes, a little too close together,--a spoiled wilful young
woman, taking to herself the deference that had been paid chiefly to her
wealth. She treated me as if I were a candidate for her favor whom she
was testing so that she might decide whether she would be graciously
pleased to tolerate him.
Usually, superciliousness has not disturbed me. It is a cheap and
harmless pleasure of cheap and harmless people. But just at that time my
nerves were out of order, and Miss Ramsay's airs of patronage "got" on
me. I proceeded politely to convey to her the impression that she did
not attract me, that I did not think her worth while--this, not through
artful design of interesting by piquing, but simply in the hope of
rasping upon her as she was rasping upon me. When I saw that I had
gained my point, I ignored her. I tried to talk with Ed, then with his
mother, but neither would interfere between me and Carlotta. I had to
talk to her until she voluntarily lapsed into offended silence. Then Ed,
to save the evening from disaster, began discussing with me the fate of
our class-mates. I saw that Carlotta was studying me curiously,--even
resentfully, I thought; and she was coldly polite when I said good
night.
She and her mother called on my mother the next morning. "And what a
nice girl Miss Ramsay is,--so sensible, so intelligent, and so
friendly!" said my mother, relating the incidents of the visit in minute
detail when I went home at noon.
"I didn't find her especially friendly," said I. Whereat I saw, or
fancied I saw, a smile deep down in her eyes,--and it set me to
thinking.
In the afternoon Ed looked in at my office in the court-house to say
good-by. "But first, old man, I want to tell you I got that place for
you. I thought I had better use the wire. Old Roebuck is
delighted,--telegraphed me to close the arrangement at
once,--congratulated me on being able to get you. I knew it'd be so. He
has his eyes skinned for bright young men,--all those big men have.
Whenever a fellow, especially a bright young lawyer, shows signs of
ability, they scoop him in."
"I can't believe it," said I, dazed. "I've been fighting him for four
years--hard."
"That's it!" said he. "And don't you fret about its being a case of
trying to heap coals of fire on your head. Roebuck don't use the
fire-shovel for that sort of thing. He's snapping you up because you've
shown him what you can do. That's the way to get on nowadays, they tell
me. Whenever the fellows on top find the chap, especially one in public
office, who makes it hot for them, they hire him. Good business all
around."
Thus, so suddenly that it giddied me, I was translated from failure to
success, from poverty to affluence, from the most harassing anxiety to
ease and security. Two months before I should have rejected the Power
Trust's offer with scorn, and should have gloried in my act as proof of
superior virtue. But in those crucial two months I had been apprentice
to the master whom all men that ever come to anything in this world must
first serve. I had reformed my line of battle, had adjusted it to the
lines laid down in the tactics of Life-as-it-is.
Before I was able to convince myself that my fortunes had really
changed, Ed Ramsay telegraphed me to call on him in Fredonia on business
of his own. It proved to be such a trifle that I began to puzzle at his
real reason for sending for me. When he spun that trifle out over ten
days, on each of which I was alone with Carlotta at least half my waking
hours, I thought I had the clue to the mystery. I saw how I could
increase the energy of his new enthusiasm for me, and, also, how I could
cool it, if I wished to be rash and foolish and to tempt fate again.
"Oh, the business didn't amount to much," was my answer to one of my
mother's first questions, on my return. She smiled peculiarly. In spite
of my efforts, the red came--at least I felt red.
"How did you like his sister?" she went on, again with that fluttering
smile in the eyes only.
"A very nice girl," said I, in anything but a natural manner. My
mother's expression teased me into adding: "Don't be silly. Nothing of
_that_ sort. You are always imagining that every one shares your opinion
of me. She isn't likely to fall in love with me. Certainly I shan't with
her."
Mother's silence somehow seemed argumentative.
"I couldn't marry a girl for her money," I retorted to it.
"Of course not," rejoined mother. "But there are other things to marry
for besides money, or love,--other things more sensible than either. For
instance, there are the principal things,--home and children."
I was listening with an open mind.
"The glamour of courtship and honeymoon passes," she went on. "Then
comes the sober business of living,--your career and your home. The
woman's part in both is better played if there isn't the sort of love
that is exacting, always interfering with the career, and making the
home-life a succession of ups and downs, mostly downs."
"Carlotta is very ambitious," said I.
"Ambitious for her husband," replied my mother, "as a sensible woman
should be. She appreciates that a woman's best chance for big dividends
in marriage is by being the silent partner in her husband's career.
She'll be very domestic when she has children. I saw it the instant I
looked at her. She has the true maternal instinct. What a man who's
going to amount to something needs isn't a woman to be taken care of,
but a woman to take care of him."
She said no more,--she had made her point; and, when she had done that,
she always stopped.
Within a month Ed Ramsay sent for me again, but this time it was
business alone. I found him in a panic, like a man facing an avalanche
and armed only with a shovel. Dunkirk, the senior United States senator
for our state, lived at Fredonia. He had seen that, by tunneling the
Mesaba Range, a profitable railroad between Fredonia and Chicago could
be built that would shorten the time at least three hours. But it would
take away about half the carrying business of the Ramsay Company,
besides seriously depreciating the Ramsay interest in the existing
road. "And," continued Ed, "the old scoundrel has got the capital
practically subscribed in New York. The people here are hot for the new
road. It'll be sure to carry at the special election, next month. He has
the governor and legislature in his vest pocket, so they'll put through
the charter next winter."
"I don't see that anything can be done," said Ed's lawyer, old Judge
Barclay, who was at the consultation. "It means a big rake-off for
Dunkirk. Politics is on a money basis nowadays. That's natural enough,
since there is money to be made out of it. I don't see how those in
politics that don't graft, as they call it, are any better than those
that do. Would they get office if they didn't help on the jobs of the
grafters? I suppose we might buy Dunkirk off."
"What do you think, Harvey?" asked Ed, looking anxiously at me. "We've
got to fight the devil with fire, you know."
I shook my head. "Buying him off isn't fighting,--it's surrender. We
must fight him,--with fire."
I let them talk themselves out, and then said, "Well, I'll take it to
bed with me. Perhaps something will occur to me that can be worked up
into a scheme."
In fact, I had already thought of a scheme, but before suggesting it I
wished to be sure it was as good as it seemed. Also, there was a
fundamental moral obstacle,--the road would be a public benefit; it
ought to be built. That moral problem caused most of my wakefulness that
night, simple though the solution was when it finally came. The first
thing Ed said to me, as we faced each other alone at breakfast, showed
me how well spent those hours were.
"About this business of the new road," said he. "If I were the only
party at interest, I'd let Dunkirk go ahead, for it's undoubtedly a good
thing from the public standpoint. But I've got to consider the interests
of all those I'm trustee for,--the other share-holders in the Ramsay
Company and in our other concerns here."
"Yes," replied I, "but why do you say Dunkirk intends to build the road?
Why do you take that for granted?"
"He's all ready to do it, and it'd be a money-maker from the start."
"But," I went on, "you must assume that he has no intention of building,
that he is only making an elaborate bluff. How do you know but that he
wants to get this right of way and charter so that he can blackmail you
and your concerns, not merely once, but year after year? You'd gladly
pay him several hundred thousand a year not to use his charter and right
of way, wouldn't you?"
"I never thought of that!" exclaimed Ed. "I believe you're right,
Harvey, and you've taken a weight off my conscience. There's nothing
like a good lawyer to make a man see straight. What an infernal hound
old Dunkirk is!"
"And," I went on, "if he should build the road, what would he do with
it? Why, the easiest and biggest source of profit would be to run big
excursions every Saturday and Sunday, especially Sunday, into Fredonia.
He'd fill the place every Sunday, from May till November, with
roistering roughs from the slums of Chicago. How'd the people like
that?"
"He wouldn't dare," objected Ramsay, stupidly insisting on leaning
backward in his determination to stand straight. "He's a religious
hypocrite. He'd be afraid."
"As Deacon Dunkirk he wouldn't dare," I replied. "But as the Chicago and
Fredonia Short Line he'd dare anything, and nobody would blame him
personally. You know how that is."
Ed was looking at me in dazed admiration. "Then," I went on, "there are
the retail merchants of Fredonia. Has it ever occurred to them, in their
excitement in favor of this road, that it'll ruin them? Where will the
shopping be done if the women can get to Chicago in two hours and a
half?"
"You're right, you're right!" exclaimed Ed, rising to pace the floor in
his agitation. "Bully for you, Harvey! We'll show the people that the
road'll ruin the town morally and financially."
"But you must come out in favor of it," said I. "We mustn't give Dunkirk
the argument that you're fighting it because you'd be injured by it. No,
you must be hot for the road. Perhaps you might give out that you were
considering selling your property on the lake front to a company that
was going to change it into a brewery and huge pleasure park. As the
lake's only a few hundred yards wide, with the town along one bank and
your place along the other, why, I think that'd rouse the people to
their peril."
"That's the kind of fire to fight the devil with," said he, laughing. "I
don't think Mister Senator Dunkirk will get the consent of Fredonia."
"But there's the legislature," said I.
His face fell. "I'm afraid he'll do us in the end, old man."
I thought not, but I only said, "Well, we've got until next winter,--if
we can beat him here."
Ed insisted that I must stay on and help him at the delicate task of
reversing the current of Fredonia sentiment. My share of the work was
important enough, but, as it was confined entirely to making
suggestions, it took little of my time. I had no leisure, however, for
there was Carlotta to look after.
* * * * *
When it was all over and she had told Ed and he had shaken hands with
her and had kissed me and had otherwise shown the chaotic condition of
his mind, and she and I were alone again, she said, "How did it happen?
I don't remember that you really proposed to me. Yet we certainly are
engaged."
"We certainly are," said I, "and that's the essential point, isn't it?"
"Yes," she admitted, "but,--" and she looked mystified.
"We drifted," I suggested.
She glanced at me with a smile that was an enigma. "Yes--we just
drifted. Why do you look at me so queerly?"
"I was just going to ask you that same question," said I by way of
evasion.
Then we both fell to thinking, and after a long time she roused herself
to say, "But we shall be very happy. I am so fond of you. And you are
going to be a great man and you do so look it, even if you aren't tall
and fair, as I always thought the man I married would be. Don't look at
me like that. Your eyes are strange enough when you are smiling; but
when you--I often wonder what you're so sad about."
"Have you ever seen a grown person's face that wasn't sad in repose?" I
asked, eager to shift from the particular to the general.
"A few idiots or near idiots," she replied with a laugh. Thereafter we
talked of the future and let the past sleep in its uncovered coffin.
V
A GOOD MAN AND HIS WOES
After Ed and I had carried the Fredonia election against Dunkirk's road,
we went fishing with Roebuck in the northern Wisconsin woods. I had two
weeks, two uninterrupted weeks, in which to impress myself upon him;
besides, there was Ed, who related in tedious but effective detail, on
the slightest provocation, the achievements that had made him my devoted
admirer. So, when I went to visit Roebuck, in June, at his house near
Chicago, he was ready to listen to me in the proper spirit.
I soon drew him on to tell of his troubles with Dunkirk--how the Senator
was gouging him and every big corporation doing business in the state.
"I've been loyal to the party for forty years," said he bitterly, "yet,
if I had been on the other side it couldn't cost me more to do business.
I have to pay enough here, heaven knows. But it costs me more in your
state,--with your man Dunkirk." His white face grew pink with anger.
"It's monstrous! Yet you should have heard him address my Sunday-school
scholars at the last annual outing I gave them. What an evidence of the
power of religion it is that such wretches as he pay the tribute of
hypocrisy to it!"
His business and his religion were Roebuck's two absorbing
passions,--religion rapidly predominating as he drew further away from
sixty.
"Why do you endure this blackmailing, Mr. Roebuck?" I asked. "He is
growing steadily worse."
"He is certainly more rapacious than he was ten years ago," Roebuck
admitted. "Our virtues or our vices, whichever we give the stronger hold
on us, become more marked as we approach Judgment. When we finally go,
we are prepared for the place that has been prepared for us."
"But why do you put up with his impudence?"
"What can we do? He has political power and is our only protection
against the people. They have been inflamed with absurd notions about
their rights. They are filled with envy and suspicion of the rich. They
have passed laws to hamper us in developing the country, and want to
pass more and worse laws. So we must either go out of business and let
the talents God has given us lie idle in a napkin, or pay the Dunkirks
to prevent the people from having their ignorant wicked way, and
destroying us and themselves. For how would they get work if we didn't
provide it for them?"
"A miserable makeshift system," said I, harking back to Dunkirk and his
blackmailing, for I was not just then in the mood to amuse myself with
the contortions of Roebuck's flexible and fantastic "moral sense."
"I've been troubled in conscience a great deal, Harvey, a great deal,
about the morality of what we business men are forced to do. I
hope--indeed I feel--that we are justified in protecting our property in
the only way open to us. The devil must be fought with fire, you know."
"How much did Dunkirk rob you of last year?" I asked.
"Nearly three hundred thousand dollars," he said, and his expression
suggested that each dollar had been separated from him with as great
agony as if it had been so much flesh pinched from his body. "There was
Dominick, besides, and a lot of infamous strike-bills to be quieted. It
cost five hundred thousand dollars in all--in your state alone. And we
didn't ask a single bit of new legislation. All the money was paid just
to escape persecution under those alleged laws! Yet they call this a
free country! When I think of the martyrdom--yes, the mental and moral
martyrdom, of the men who have made this country--What are the few
millions a man may amass, in compensation for what he has to endure?
Why, Sayler, I've not the slightest doubt you could find well-meaning,
yes, really honest, God-fearing people, who would tell you I am a
scoundrel! I have read _sermons_, delivered from _pulpits_ against me!
_Sermons_ from _pulpits_!"
"I have thought out a plan," said I, after a moment's silent and shocked
contemplation of this deplorable state of affairs, "a plan to end
Dunkirk and cheapen the cost of political business."
At "cheapen the cost" his big ears twitched as if they had been tickled.
"You can't expect to get what you need for nothing," I continued, "in
the present state of public opinion. But I'm sure I could reduce
expenses by half--at least half."
I had his undivided attention.
"It is patently absurd," I went on, "that you who finance politics and
keep in funds these fellows of both machines should let them treat you
as if you were their servants. Why don't you put them in their place,
servants at servants' wages?"
"But I've no time to go into politics,--and I don't know anything about
it--don't want to know. It's a low business,--ignorance, corruption,
filthiness."
"Take Dunkirk, for example," I pushed on. "His lieutenants and heelers
hate him because he doesn't divide squarely. The only factor in his
power is the rank and file of the voters of our party. They, I'm
convinced, are pretty well aware of his hypocrisy,--but it doesn't
matter much what they think. They vote like sheep and accept whatever
leaders and candidates our machine gives them. They are almost
stone-blind in their partizanship and they can always be fooled up to
the necessary point. And we can fool them ourselves, if we go about it
right, just as well as Dunkirk does it for hire."
"But Dunkirk is _their_ man, isn't he?" he suggested.
"Any man is their man whom you choose to give them," replied I. "And
don't _you_ give them Dunkirk? He takes the money from the big business
interests, and with it hires the men to sit in the legislature and
finances the machine throughout the state. It takes big money to run a
political machine. His power belongs to you people, to a dozen of you,
and you can take it away from him; his popularity belongs to the party,
and it would cheer just as loudly for any other man who wore the party
uniform."
"I see," he said reflectively; "the machine rules the party, and money
rules the machine, and we supply the money and don't get the benefit.
It's as if I let my wife or one of my employés run my property."
"Much like that," I answered. "Now, why shouldn't you finance the
machine directly and do away with Dunkirk, who takes as his own wages
about half what you give him? He takes it and wastes it in stock
speculations,--gambling with your hard-earned wealth, gambling it away
cheerfully, because he feels that you people will always give him more."
"What do you propose?" he asked; and I could see that his acute business
mind was ready to pounce upon my scheme and search it hopefully if
mercilessly.
"A secret, absolutely secret, combine of a dozen of the big corporations
of my state,--those that make the bulk of the political business,--the
combine to be under the management of some man whom they trust and whose
interests are business, not political."
"He would have enormous power," said Roebuck.
I knew that he would point first and straight at that phase of my
scheme, no matter how subtly I might disguise it. So I had pushed it
into his face and had all but pointed at it myself so that I might
explain it away. "Power?" said I. "How do you make that out? Any member
of the combine that is dissatisfied can withdraw at any time and go
back to the old way of doing business. Besides, the manager won't dare
appear in it at all,--he'll have to hide himself from the people and
from the politicians, behind some popular figure-head. There's another
advantage that mustn't be overlooked. Dunkirk and these other demagogues
who bleed you are inflaming public sentiment more and more against you
big corporations,--that's their way of frightening you into yielding to
their demands. Under the new plan their demagoguery would cease. Don't
you think it's high time for the leaders of commerce and industry to
combine intelligently against demagoguery? Don't you think they have
cringed before it, and have financed and fostered it too long?"
This argument, which I had reserved for the last, had all the effect I
anticipated. He sat rubbing his broad, bald forehead, twisting his white
whiskers and muttering to himself. Presently he asked, "When are you and
Lottie Ramsay going to be married?"
"In the fall," said I. "In about three months."
"Well, we'll talk this over again--after you are married and settled.
If you had the substantial interests to give you the steadiness and
ballast, I think you'd be the very man for your scheme. Yes,
something--some such thing as you suggest--must be done to stop the
poisoning of public opinion against the country's best and strongest
men. The political department of the business interests ought to be as
thoroughly organized as the other departments are. Come to me again
after you're married."
I saw that his mind was fixed, that he would be unable to trust me until
I was of his class, of the aristocracy of corpulent corporate persons. I
went away much downcast; but, two weeks afterward he telegraphed for me,
and when I came he at once brought up the subject of the combine.
"Go ahead with it," he said. "I've been thinking it over and talking it
over. We shall need only nine others besides myself and you. You
represent the Ramsay interest."
He equipped me with the necessary letters of introduction and sent me
forth on a tour of my state. When it was ended, my "combine" was formed.
And _I_ was the combine,--was master of this political blind pool. I
had taken the first, the hardest step, toward the realization of my
dream of real political power,--to become an unbossed boss, not the
agent and servant of Plutocracy or Partizanship, but using both to
further my own purposes and plans.
I had thus laid out for myself the difficult feat of controlling two
fiery steeds. Difficult, but not impossible, if I should develop skill
as a driver--for the skilful driver has a hand so light that his horses
fancy they are going their own road at their own gait.
VI
MISS RAMSAY REVOLTS
The last remark Roebuck had made to me--on his doorstep, as I was
starting on my mission--was: "Can't you and Lottie hurry up that
marriage of yours? You ought to get it over and out of the way." When I
returned home with my mission accomplished, the first remark my mother
made after our greeting was: "Harvey, I wish you and Lottie were going
to marry a little sooner."
A note in her voice made me look swiftly at her, and then, without a
word, I was on my knees, my face in her lap and she stroking my head. "I
feel that I'm going to--to your father, dear," she said.
I heard and I thought I realized; but I did not. Who, feeling upon him
the living hand of love, was ever able to imagine that hand other than
alive? But her look of illness, of utter exhaustion,--_that_ I
understood and suffered for. "You must rest," said I; "you must sit
quiet and be waited on until you are strong again."
"Yes, I will rest," she answered, "as soon as my boy is settled."
That very day I wrote Carlotta telling her about mother's health and
asking her to change the date of our wedding to the first week in
August, then just under a month away. She telegraphed me to come and
talk it over.
She was at the station in her phaeton to meet me. We had not driven far
before I felt and saw that she was intensely irritated against me. As I
unburdened my mind of my anxieties about mother, she listened coldly.
And I had to wait a long time before I got her answer, in a strained
voice and with averted eyes: "Of course, I'm sorry your mother isn't
well, but I can't get ready that soon."
It was not her words that exasperated me; the lightning of speech from
the storm-clouds of anger tends to clear the air. It was her expression.
Never have I known any one who could concentrate into brows and eyes and
chin and lips more of that sullen and aggressive obstinacy which is the
climax of provocativeness. Patience, in thought at least, with refusal
has not been one of my virtues. This refusal of hers, this denial of
happiness to one who had deserved so much and had received so little,
set temper to working in me like a quick poison. But I was silent, not
so much from prudence as from inability to find adequate words.
"I can't do it," repeated Carlotta, "and I won't." She made it clear
that she meant the "won't,"--that she was bent upon a quarrel.
But in my struggle to train those stanchest of servants and maddest of
masters, the passions, I had got at least far enough always to choose
both the time and the ground of a quarrel. So I said: "Very well,
Carlotta. Then, that is settled." And with an air sufficiently deceptive
to pass muster before angry eyes, I proceeded to talk of indifferent
matters.
As I sat beside her, my temper glowering in the straining leash, I
revolved her conduct and tried to puzzle out its meaning. It is clear,
thought I, that she does not care for me as people about to marry
usually profess to care. Then, does she wish to break the engagement?
That tamed my anger instantly.
Yes, I thought on, she wishes to be free--to free me. And, as my combine
is formed and my career well advanced in the way to being established,
what reason is there for trying to prevent her from freeing herself?
None--for I can easily explain the situation to mother. "Yes," I
concluded, "you can avoid a quarrel, can remain friends with Carlotta,
can give and get freedom." What had changed her? I did not know; I did
not waste time in puzzling; I did not tempt fate by asking. "You are
poor, she is rich," I reminded myself. "That makes it impossible for you
to hesitate. You must give her no excuse for thinking you lack pride."
Thus I reasoned and planned, my temper back in its kennel and peaceful
as a sheep. That evening I avoided being alone with her; just as I was
debating how to announce that I must be leaving by the first train in
the morning a telegram came from Roebuck calling me to Chicago at once.
When we were all going to bed, I said to Mrs. Ramsay: "I shall see you
and Ed in the morning, but"--to Carlotta--"you don't get up so early.
I'll say good-by now,"--this in the friendliest possible way.
I was conscious of Mrs. Ramsay's look of wonder and anxiety; of Ed's
wild stare from Carlotta to me and back again at her. She bit her lip
and her voice was unsteady as she said: "Oh, no, Harvey. I'll be up."
There was a certain meekness in her tone which would probably have
delighted me had I been what is usually called "masterful."
When I came down at seven o'clock after an unquiet night, Carlotta was
lying in wait for me, took me into the parlor and shut the door. "What
do you mean?" she demanded, facing me with something of her wonted
imperiousness.
"Mean?" said I, for once feeling no resentment at her manner.
"By leaving--this way," she explained with impatience.
"You heard Mr. Roebuck's telegram," said I.
"You are angry with me," she persisted.
"No, Carlotta," said I. "I was, but I am not. As soon as I saw what you
wished, I was grateful, not angry."
"What did I wish?"
"To let me know as gently and kindly as you could that you purposed to
end our engagement. And I guess you are right. We do not seem to care
for each other as we ought if we--"
"You misunderstood me," she said, pale and with flashing eyes, and in
such a struggle with her emotions that she could say no more.
If I had not seen that only her pride and her vanity were engaged in the
struggle, and her heart not at all, I think I should have abandoned my
comfortable self-deception that my own pride forbade discussion with
her. As it was, I was able to say: "Don't try to spare me, Carlotta, I'm
glad you had the courage and the good sense not to let us both drift
into irrevocable folly. I thank you." I opened the door into the hall.
"Let us talk no more about it. We could say to each other only the
things that sting or the things that stab. Let us be friends. You must
give me your friendship, at least." I took her hand.
She looked strangely at me. "You want me to humble myself, to crawl at
your feet and beg your pardon," said she between her teeth. "But I
shan't." She snatched away her hand and threw back her head.
"I wish nothing but what is best for us both," said I. "But let us not
talk of it now--when neither of us is calm."
"You don't care for me!" she cried.
"Do _you_ love _me_?" I rejoined.
Her eyes shifted. I waited for her reply and, when it did not come, I
said: "Let us go to breakfast."
"I'll not go in just now," she answered, in a quiet tone, a sudden and
strange shift from that of the moment before. And she let me take her
hand, echoed my good-by, and made no further attempt to detain me.
That was a gloomy breakfast despite my efforts to make my own seeming of
good-humor permeate to the others. Mrs. Ramsay hid a somber face behind
the coffee-urn; Ed ate furiously, noisily, choking every now and then.
He drove me to the station; his whole body was probably as damp from his
emotions as were his eyes and his big friendly hand. The train got
under way; I drew a long breath. I was free.
But somehow freedom did not taste as I had anticipated. Though I
reminded myself that I had acted as any man with pride and self-respect
would have acted in such delicate circumstances, and though I knew that
Carlotta was no more in love with me than I was with her, this end to
our engagement seemed even more humiliating to me than its beginning had
seemed. It was one more instance of that wretched fatality which has
pursued me through life, which has made every one of my triumphs come to
me in mourning robes and with a gruesome face. In the glittering array
of "prizes" that tempts man to make a beast and a fool of himself in the
gladiatorial show called Life, the sorriest, the most ironic, is the
grand prize, Victory.
* * * * *
The parlor car was crowded; its only untaken seat was in the smoking
compartment, which had four other occupants, deep in a game of poker.
Three of them were types of commonplace, prosperous Americans; the
fourth could not be so easily classed and, therefore, interested
me--especially as I was in the mood to welcome anything that would crowd
to the background my far from agreeable thoughts.
The others called him "Doc," or Woodruff. As they played, they drank
from flasks produced by each in turn. Doc drank with the others, and
deeper than any of them. They talked more and more, he less and less,
until finally he interrupted their noisy volubility only when the game
compelled. I saw that he was one of those rare men upon whom amiable
conversation or liquor or any other relaxing force has the reverse of
the usual effect. Instead of relaxing, he drew himself together and
concentrated more obstinately upon his game. Luck, so far as the cards
controlled it, was rather against him, and the other three players took
turns at audacious and by no means unskilful play. I was soon admiring
the way he "sized up" and met each in turn. Prudence did not make him
timid. He advanced and retreated, "bluffed" and held aloof, with
acuteness and daring.
At a station perhaps fifty miles from Chicago, the other three
left,--and Doc had four hundred-odd dollars of their money.
I dropped into the seat opposite him--it was by the window--and amused
myself watching him, while waiting for a chance to talk with him; for I
saw that he was a superior person, and, in those days, when I was
inconspicuous and so was not compelled constantly to be on guard, I
never missed a chance to benefit by such exchanges of ideas.
He was apparently about forty years old, to strike a balance between the
youth of eyes, mouth, and contour, and the age of deep lines and
grayish, thinning hair. He had large, frank, blue eyes, a large nose, a
strong forehead and chin, a grossly self-indulgent mouth,--there was the
weakness, there, as usual! Evidently, the strength his mind and
character gave him went in pandering to physical appetites. In
confirmation of this, there were two curious marks on him,--a nick in
the rim of his left ear, a souvenir of a bullet or a knife, and a scar
just under the edge of his chin to the right. When he compressed his
lips, this scar, not especially noticeable at other times, lifted up
into his face, became of a sickly, bluish white, and transformed a
careless, good-humored cynic into a man of danger, of terror.
His reverie began, as I gathered from his unguarded face, in cynical
amusement, probably at his triumph over his friends. It passed on to
still more agreeable things,--something in the expression of the mouth
suggested thoughts of how he was going to enjoy himself as he "blew in"
his winnings. Then his features shadowed, darkened, and I had my first
view of the scar terrible. He shook his big head and big shoulders,
roused himself, made ready to take a drink, noticed me, and said, "Won't
you join me?" His look was most engaging.
I accepted and we were soon sociable, each taking an instinctive liking
to the other. We talked of the business situation, of the news in the
papers, and then of political affairs. Each of us saw that there he was
at the other's keenest interest in life. He knew the game,--practical
politics as distinguished from the politics talked by and to the public.
But he evaded, without seeming to do so, all the ingenious traps I laid
for drawing from him some admission that would give me a clue to where
he "fitted in." I learned no more about him than I thought he learned
about me.
"I hope we shall meet again," said I cordially, as we parted at the
cab-stand.
"Thank you," he answered, and afterward I remembered the faint smile in
his eyes.
I, of course, knew that Roebuck was greatly interested in my project for
putting political business on a business basis; but not until he had
explained why he sent for me did I see how it had fascinated and
absorbed his mind. "You showed me," he began, "that you must have under
you a practical man to handle the money and do the arranging with the
heelers and all that sort of thing."
"Yes," said I; "it's a vital part of the plan. We must find a man who is
perfectly trustworthy and discreet. Necessarily he'll know or suspect
something--not much, but still something--of the inside workings of the
combine."
"Well, I've found him," went on Roebuck, in a triumphant tone. "He's a
godless person, with no character to lose, and no conception of what
character means. But he's straight as a string. Providence seems to have
provided such men for just such situations as these, where the devil
must be fought with fire. I've been testing him for nearly fifteen
years. But you can judge for yourself."
I was the reverse of pleased. It was not in my calculations to have a
creature of Roebuck's foisted upon me, perhaps--indeed, probably--a spy.
I purposed to choose my own man; and I decided while he was talking,
that I would accept the Roebuck selection only to drop him on some
plausible pretext before we began operations. I was to meet the man at
dinner,--Roebuck had engaged a suite at the Auditorium. "It wouldn't do
to have him at my house or club," said he; "neither do we want to be
seen with him."
Coincidence is so familiar a part of the daily routine that I was not
much surprised when my acquaintance, the astute poker player with the
scar, walked in upon us at the Auditorium. But Roebuck was both
astonished and chagrined when we shook hands and greeted each other like
old friends.
"How do you do, Mr. Sayler?" said Woodruff.
"Glad to see you, Doctor Woodruff," I replied. "Then you knew me all the
time? Why didn't you speak out? We might have had an hour's business
talk in the train."
"If I'd shown myself as leaky as all that, I guess there'd have been no
business to talk about," he replied. "Anyhow, I didn't know you till you
took out your watch with the monogram on the back, just as we were
pulling in. Then I remembered where I'd seen your face before. I was up
at your state house the day that you threw old Dominick down. That's
been a good many years ago."
That chance, easy, smoking-compartment meeting, at which each had
studied the other dispassionately, was most fortunate for us both.
The relation that was to exist between us--more, much more, than that of
mere employer and employé--made fidelity, personal fidelity, imperative;
and accident had laid the foundation for the mutual attachment without
which there is certain to be, sooner or later, suspicion on both sides,
and cause for it.
The two hours and a half with Woodruff, at and after dinner, served to
reinforce my first impression. I saw that he was a thorough man of the
world, that he knew politics from end to end, and that he understood the
main weaknesses of human nature and how to play upon them for the
advantage of his employers and for his own huge amusement. He gave a
small exhibition of that skill at the expense of Roebuck. He appreciated
that Roebuck was one of those unconscious hypocrites who put conscience
out of court in advance by assuming that whatever they wish to do is
right or _they_ could not wish to do it. He led Roebuck on to show off
this peculiarity of his,--a jumbling, often in the same breath, of the
most sonorous piety and the most shameless business perfidy. All the
time Woodruff's face was perfectly grave,--there are some men who refuse
to waste any of their internal enjoyment in external show.
Before he left us I arranged to meet him the next morning for the
settlement of the details of his employment. When Roebuck and I were
alone, I said: "What do you know about him? Who is he?"
"He comes of a good family here in Chicago,--one of the best. Perhaps
you recall the Bowker murder?"
"Vaguely," I answered.
"It was Woodruff who did it. We had a hard time getting him off. Bowker
and Woodruff's younger brother were playing cards one day, and Bowker
accused him of cheating. Young Woodruff drew,--perhaps they both drew at
the same time. At any rate, Bowker shot first and killed his man,--he
got off on the plea of self-defense. It was two years before Bowker and
Doc met,--in the lobby of the Palmer House,--I happened to be there. I
was talking to a friend when suddenly I felt as if something awful was
about to happen. I started up, and saw Bowker just rising from a table
at the far end of the room. I shan't ever forget his look,--like a bird
charmed by a snake. His lips were ajar and wrinkled as if his blood had
fled away inside of him, and his throat was expanding and contracting."
Roebuck wiped beads of sweat from his forehead. "It was Doc Woodruff
walking slowly toward him, with a wicked smile on his face, and that
scar--you noticed the scar?"
I nodded.
"Well, you can imagine how that scar stood out. He came slowly on,
nobody able to move a muscle to stop him. When he was about ten feet
from Bowker and as near me as you are now, Bowker gave a kind of shudder
and scream of fright, drew his pistol, and fired. The bullet clipped
Woodruff's ear. Quick as that--" Roebuck snapped his fingers--"Doc drew,
and sent a bullet into his heart. He fell forward across the table and
his pistol crashed on the marble floor. Doc looked at him, gave a cold
sort of laugh, like a jeer and a curse, and walked out into the street.
When he met a policeman he said, 'I've killed Dick Bowker. Here's my
gun. Lock me up'--perfectly cool, just as he talked to us to-night."
"And you got him off?"
"Yes. I hated to do it, too, for Dick was one of my best friends. But
Doc was too useful to us. In his line he's without an equal."
"How did he get that scar?" said I.
"Nobody knows. He left here when he was a boy,--to avoid being sent to
the reformatory. When he turned up, after a dozen years, he said he had
been a doctor, but didn't say where or how. And he had that scar. One
day a man asked him how he got it. He picked up a bottle, and, with his
pleasant laugh, broke it over the fellow's jaw. 'About like that,' said
he. People don't ask him questions."
"He's my man," said I.
VII
BYGONES
A telegram had been thrust under my door--"I must see you. Don't fail to
stop off here on your way back. Answer. Carlotta."
Again she was at the station in her phaeton. Her first look, long before
I was near enough for speech, showed me how her mood had changed; but
she waited until we were clear of the town. "Forgive me," she then said
in the abrupt, direct manner which was the expression of her greatest
charm, her absolute honesty. "I've got the meanest temper in the world,
but it don't last, and as soon as you were gone I was ashamed of
myself."
"I don't understand why you are making these apologies," said I, "and I
don't understand why you were angry."
"That's what it means to be a man," she replied. "Your letter about your
mother made me furious. You hadn't ever urged me to hurry up the
wedding on your own account. And your letter made me feel as if, while
you personally didn't care whether we ever married or not, still for
your mother's sake you were willing to--to sacrifice yourself."
"Let me see my letter," said I.
"I tore it into a thousand pieces," said she. "But I don't mean that you
really wrote just that. You didn't. But you made me jealous of your
mother, and my temper got hold of me, and then I read the meanest kind
of things into and under and all round every word. And--I'm sorry."
I could find nothing to say. I saw my freedom slipping from me. I
watched it, sick at heart; yet, on the other hand, I neither tried nor
wished to detain it, though I could easily have made a renewal of our
engagement impossible. I have no explanation for this conflict of
emotions and motives.
"Don't make it so hard for me," she went on. "I never before in my life
told anybody I was sorry for anything, and I thought I never would. But
I _am_ sorry, and--we'll have the wedding the first day of August."
Still I found nothing to say. It was so painfully obvious that, true to
her training, she had not given and was not giving a thought to the
state of my mind and feelings. What _she_ wished, that she would do--the
rest did not interest her.
"Are you satisfied, my lord?" she demanded. "Have I humbled myself
sufficiently?"
"You haven't humbled yourself at all," said I. "You have only humbled
me."
She did not pause on my remark long enough to see what it meant. "Now
that it's all settled," she said gaily, "I don't mind telling you that I
began to make my preparations to be married on the first of
August--when, do you think?"
"When?" I said.
"The very day I got your nasty letter, putting me second to your
mother." And she laughed, and was still laughing, when she added: "So,
you see, I was determined to marry you."
"I do," said I dryly. "I suppose I ought to feel flattered."
"No, you oughtn't," she retorted. "I simply made up my mind to marry
you. And I'd do it, no matter what it cost. I get _that_ from father.
But I've got mother's disposition, too--and that makes me far too good
for such a cold, unsentimental, ambitious person as you."
"Don't you think you're rather rash to confess so frankly--when I could
still escape?"
"Not at all," was her confident answer. "I know you, and so I know
nothing could make you break your word."
"There's some truth in that,"--and I hope that I do not deceive myself
in thinking I was honest there. "More truth, perhaps, than you guess."
She looked shrewdly at me--and friendlily. "Don't be too sure I haven't
guessed," said she. "Nobody's ever so blind as he lets others think.
It's funny, isn't it? There are things in your mind that you'd never
tell me, and things in my mind that I'd never tell you. And each of us
guesses most of them, without ever letting on." She laughed queerly, and
struck the horse smartly so that he leaped into a gait at which
conversation was impossible.
When we resumed, the subject was the details of our wedding.
At home again, I found my mother too ill to leave her bed. She had been
ill before,--many times when she wouldn't confess it, several times when
she was forced to admit it, but never before so ill that she could not
dress and come down stairs. "I shall be up to-morrow," she assured me,
and I almost believed her. She drew a letter from under her pillow.
"This came while you were away," she went on. "I kept it here,
because--" a look of shame flitted across her face, and then her eyes
were steady and proud again,--"why should I be ashamed of it? I had the
impulse to destroy the letter, and I'm not sure but that I'm failing in
my duty."
I took it,--yes, it was from Boston, from Betty. I opened it and
fortunately had nerved myself against showing myself to my mother. There
was neither beginning nor end, just a single sentence:
"From the bottom of my broken heart I am thankful that I have been
spared the horror of discovering I had bound myself for life to a
coward."
The shot went straight to the center of the target. But----There lay my
mother--did _she_ not have the right to determine my destiny--she who
had given me my life and her own? I tore up Betty's letter, and I looked
at mother and said, "There's nothing in that to make me waver--or
regret." It was the only lie I ever told her. I told it well, thank God,
for she was convinced, and the look in her face repaid me a
thousandfold. It repays me once more as I write.
Carlotta and I were married at her bedside, and she lived only until the
next day but one. When the doctor told me of the long concealed mortal
disease that was the cause of her going, he ended with: "And, Mr.
Sayler, it passes belief that she managed to keep alive for five years.
I can't understand it." But _I_ understood. She simply refused to go
until she felt that her mission was accomplished.
"We must never forget her," said Carlotta, trying to console me by
grieving with me.
I did not answer,--how could I explain? Never forget her! On the
contrary, I knew that I must forget, and that I must work and grow and
so heal the wound and cover its scar. I lost not a day in beginning.
To those few succeeding months I owe the power I have had all these
years to concentrate my mind upon whatever I will to think about; for in
those months I fought the fight I dared not lose--fought it and won. Let
those who have never loved talk of remembering the dead.
* * * * *
I turned away from her grave with the resolve that my first act of power
would be to stamp out Dominick. But for him she would not have gone for
many a year. It was his persecutions that involved us in the miseries
which wasted her and made her fall a victim to the mortal disease. It
was his malignity that poisoned her last years, which, but for him,
would have been happy.
As my plans for ousting Dunkirk took shape, I saw clearly that, if he
were to be overthrown at once, I must use part of the existing control
of the machine of the party,--it would take several years, at least
three, to build up an entirely new control. To work quickly, I must use
Croffut, Dunkirk's colleague in the Senate. And Croffut was the creature
of Dominick.
Early in September Woodruff came to me, at Fredonia, his manner
jubilant. "I can get Dominick," he exclaimed. "He is furious against
Dunkirk because he's just discovered that Dunkirk cheated him out of a
hundred thousand dollars on that perpetual street railway franchise,
last winter."
"But we don't want Dominick," said I.
My face must have reflected my mind, for Woodruff merely replied, "Oh,
very well. Of course that alters the case."
"We must get Croffut without him," I went on.
Woodruff shook his head. "Can't get him," he said. "Dominick controls
the two southern ranges of counties. He finances his own machine from
what he collects from vice and crime in those cities. He gives that
branch of the plum tree to the boys. He keeps the bigger one, the
corporations, for himself."
"He can be destroyed," said I, waving aside these significant reminders.
"Yes, in five years or so of hard work. Meanwhile, Dunkirk will run
things at the capital to suit himself. Anyhow, you're taking on a good
deal more than's necessary--starting with two big fights, one of 'em
against a man you ought to use to do up the other. It's like breaking
your own sword at the beginning of the duel."
"Go back to the capital," said I, after a moment's thought; "I'll
telegraph you up there what to do."
It was my first test--my first chance to show whether I had learned at
the savage school at which I had been a pupil. Scores, hundreds of men,
can plan, and plan wisely,--at almost any cross-roads' general store you
hear in the conversation round the stove as good plans as ever moved the
world to admiration. But execution,--there's the rub! And the first
essential of an executive is freedom from partialities and hatreds,--not
to say, "Do I like him? Do I hate him? Was he my enemy a year or a week
or a moment ago?" but only to ask oneself the one question, "Can he be
useful to me _now_?"
"I will use Dominick to destroy Dunkirk, and then I will destroy him," I
said to myself. But that did not satisfy me. I saw that I was
temporizing with the weakness that has wrecked more careers than
misjudgment. I felt that I must decide then and there whether or not I
would eliminate personal hatred from my life. After a long and bitter
struggle, I did decide once and for all.
I telegraphed Woodruff to go ahead. When I went back to Pulaski to
settle my affairs there, Dominick came to see me. Not that he dreamed of
the existence of my combine or of my connection with the new political
deal, but simply because I had married into the Ramsay family and was
therefore now in the Olympus of corporate power before which he was on
his knees,--for a price, like a wise devotee, untroubled by any such
qualmishness as self-respect. I was ready for him. I put out my hand.
"I'm glad you're willing to let bygones be bygones, Mr. Sayler," said
he, so moved that the tears stood in his eyes.
Then it flashed on me that, after all, he was only a big brute, driven
blindly by his appetites. How silly to plot revenges upon the creatures
of circumstance--how like a child beating the chair it happens to
strike against! Hatreds and revenges are for the small mind with small
matters to occupy it. Of the stones I have quarried to build my career,
not one has been, or could have been, spared to waste as a missile.
I went down to the Cedar Grove cemetery, where my mother lay beside my
father. My two sisters who died before I was born were at their feet;
her parents and his on either side. And I said to her, "Mother, I am
going to climb up to a place where I can use my life as you would have
me use it. To rise in such a world as this I shall have to do many
things you would not approve. I shall do them. But when I reach the
height, I shall justify myself and you. I know how many have started
with the same pledge and have been so defiled by what they had to handle
that when they arrived they were past cleansing; and they neither kept
nor cared to keep their pledge. But I, mother, shall not break this
pledge to you."
VIII
A CALL FROM "THE PARTY"
About a month after the Chicago and Fredonia bill was smothered in
committee there appeared upon the threshold of my office, in the
administration building of the Ramsay Company, a man whom at first
glance you might have taken for an exhorter or a collector for some
pious enterprise. But if you had made a study of faces, your second
glance would have cut through that gloze of oily, apologetic appeal.
Behind a thin screen of short gray beard lay a heavy loose mouth, cruel
and strong; above it, a great beak and a pair of pale green eyes,
intensely alive. They were in startling contrast to the apparent
decrepitude of the stooped shambling body, far too small for its
covering of decent but somewhat rusty black.
"Senator Dunkirk," said I, rising and advancing to greet the justly
feared leader of my party. I knew there was an intimate connection
between this visit and the death of his pet project. I thought it safe
to assume that he had somehow stumbled upon Woodruff's tunnelings, and
with that well-trained nose of his had smelled out their origin. But I
need not have disquieted myself; I did not then know how softly Woodruff
moved, sending no warnings ahead, and leaving no trail behind.
For several minutes the Senator and I felt for each other in the dark in
which we both straightway hid. He was the first to give up and reveal
himself in the open. "But I do not wish to waste your time and my own,
Mr. Sayler," he said; "I have come to see you about the threatened split
in the party. You are, perhaps, surprised that I should have come to
you, when you have been so many years out of politics, but I think you
will understand, as I explain myself. You know Mr. Roebuck?"
"I can't say that I _know_ him," I replied. "He is not an easy man to
know--indeed, who is?"
"A very able man; in some respects a great man," Dunkirk went on. "But,
like so many of our great men of business, he can not appreciate
politics,--the difficulties of the man in public life where persuasion
and compromise must be used, authority almost never. And, because I have
resisted some of his impossible demands, he has declared war on the
party. He has raised up in it a faction headed by your old enemy,
Dominick. I need not tell you what a brute, what a beast he is, the
representative of all that is abhorrent in politics."
"A faction headed by Dominick couldn't be very formidable," I suggested.
"But Dominick isn't the nominal leader," replied Dunkirk. "Roebuck is
far too shrewd for that. No, he has put forward as the decoy my
colleague, Croffut,--perhaps you know him? If so, I needn't tell you
what a vain, shallow, venal fellow he is, with his gift of gab that
fools the people."
"I know him," said I, in a tone which did not deny the accuracy of
Dunkirk's description.
"Their object," continued the Senator, "is to buy the control of the
party machinery away from those who now manage it in the interests of
conservatism and fair dealing. If they succeed, the only business
interest that will be considered in this state will be the Power Trust.
And we shall have Dominick, the ignorant brute, lashed on by Roebuck's
appetites, until the people will rise in fury and elect the
opposition,--and you know what _it_ is."
"What you say is most interesting," said I, "but I confess I haven't
imagination enough to conceive a condition of affairs in which anybody
with 'the price' couldn't get what he wanted by paying for it. Perhaps
the business interests would gain by a change,--the other crowd might be
less expensive. Certainly the demands of our party's machine have become
intolerable."
"It astonishes me, Mr. Sayler, to hear you say that,--you, who have been
in politics," he protested, taken aback by my hardly disguised attack
upon him,--for he was in reality "party" and "machine." "Surely, you
understand the situation. We must have money to maintain our
organization, and to run our campaign. Our workers can't live on air;
and, to speak of only one other factor, there are thousands and
thousands of our voters, honest fellows, too, who must be paid to come
to the polls. They wouldn't vote against us for any sum; but, unless we
pay them for the day lost in the fields, they stay at home. Now, where
does our money come from? The big corporations are the only source,--who
else could or would give largely enough? And it is necessary and just
that they should be repaid. But they are no longer content with moderate
and prudent rewards for their patriotism. They make bigger and bigger,
and more and more unreasonable, demands on us, and so undermine our
popularity,--for the people can't be blinded wholly to what's going on.
And thus, year by year, it takes more and more money to keep us in
control."
"You seem to have forgotten my point," said I, smiling. "Why should
_you_ be kept in control? If you go out, the others come in. They
bluster and threaten, in order to get themselves in; but, once they're
elected, they discover that it wasn't the people's woes they were
shouting about, but their own. And soon they are docile 'conservatives'
lapping away at the trough, with nothing dangerous in them but their
appetites."
"Precisely,--their appetites," said he.
"A starved man has to practise eating a long, long time before he can
equal the performances of a trained glutton," I suggested.
His facial response to my good-humored raillery was feeble indeed. And
it soon died in a look of depression that made him seem even older and
more decrepit than was his wont. "The same story, wherever I go," said
he sadly. "The business interests refuse to see their peril. And when I,
in my zeal, persist, they,--several of them, Sayler, have grinned at me
and reminded me that the legislature to be elected next fall will choose
my successor! As if my own selfish interests were all I have in mind! I
am old and feeble, on the verge of the grave. Do you think, Mr. Sayler,
that I would continue in public life if it were not for what I conceive
to be my duty to my party? I have toiled too long for it--"
"Your record speaks for itself, Senator," I put in, politely but
pointedly.
"You are very discouraging, Sayler," he said forlornly. "But I refuse to
be discouraged. The party needs you, and I have come to do my duty, and
I won't leave without doing it."
"I have nothing to do with the company's political contributions," said
I. "You will have to see Mr. Ramsay, as usual."
He waved his hand. "Let me explain, please. Roover is about to
resign,--as you probably know, he's been chairman of the party's state
committee for seventeen years. I've come to ask you to take his place."
It was impossible wholly to hide my amazement, my stupefaction. Had he
had the shadowiest suspicion of my plans, of the true inwardness of the
Croffut-Dominick movement, he would as readily have offered me his own
head. In fact, he was offering me his own head; for, with the money and
the other resources at my command, I needed only this place of official
executive of the party to make me master. And here he was, giving me the
place, under the delusion that he could use me as he had been using
Roover.
He must have misread my expression, for he went on: "Don't refuse on
impulse, Sayler. I and the others will do everything to make your duties
as light as possible."
"I should not be content to be a mere figure-head, as Roover has been,"
I warned him. He had come, in his desperation, to try to get the man who
combined the advantages of being, as he supposed, Dominick's enemy and a
member of one of the state's financially influential families. He had
come to cozen me into letting him use me in return for a mockery of an
honor. And I was simply tumbling him, or, rather, permitting him to
tumble himself, into the pit he had dug for me. Still, I felt that I
owed it to my self-respect to give him a chance. "If I take the place, I
shall fill it _to the best of my ability_."
"Certainly, certainly,--we want your ability." Behind his bland, cordial
mask I saw the spider eyes gleaming and the spider claws twitching as he
felt his net quiver under hovering wings. "We want you--we need you,
Sayler. We expect you to do your best."
My best! What would my "best" have been, had I been only what he
thought,--dependent upon him for supplies, surrounded by his
lieutenants, hearing nothing but what he chose to tell me, and able to
execute only such orders as he gave or approved!
"I am sure we can count on you," he urged.
"I will try it," said I, after a further hesitation that was not
altogether show.
He did not linger,--he wished to give me no chance to change my mind and
fly his net. I was soon alone, staring dazedly at my windfall and
wondering if fortune would ever give me anything without attaching to it
that which would make me doubt whether my gift had more of bitter or
more of sweet in it.
Dunkirk announced the selection of a new chairman that very
afternoon,--as a forecast, of course, for there was the formality of my
"election" by the sixty-three members of the state committee to be gone
through. His proposition was well received. The old-line politicians
remembered my father; the Reformers recalled my fight against Dominick;
the business men liked my connection with the Ramsay Company, assuring
stability and regard for "conservatism"; the "boys" were glad because I
had a rich wife and a rich brother-in-law. The "boys" always cheer when
a man with money develops political aspirations.
I did not see Woodruff until I went down to the capital to begin my
initiation. I came upon him there, in the lobby of the Capital City
Hotel. As we talked for a moment like barely-acquainted strangers,
saying nothing that might not have been repeated broadcast, his look was
asking: "How did you manage to trap Dunkirk into doing it?" I never told
him the secret, and so never tore out the foundation of his belief in me
as a political wizard. It is by such judicious use of their few strokes
of good luck that successful men get their glamour of the superhuman. In
the eyes of the average man, who is lazy or intermittent, the result of
plain, incessant, unintermittent work is amazing enough. All that is
needed to make him cry, "Genius!" is a little luck adroitly exploited.
I left Woodruff, to join Dunkirk. "Who is that chap over there,--Doctor
Woodruff?" I asked him.
"Woodruff?" replied the Senator. "Oh, a lobbyist. He does a good deal
for Roebuck, I believe. An honest fellow,--for that kind,--they tell me.
It's always well to be civil to them."
Dunkirk's "initiation" of me into the duties of my office wiped away my
last lingering sense of double, or, at least, doubtful, dealing. He told
me nothing that was not calculated to mislead me. And he was so glib and
so frank and so sympathetic that, had I not known the whole machine from
the inside, I should have been his dupe.
It is not pleasant to suspect that, in some particular instance, one of
your fellow men takes you for a simple-minded fool. To know you are
being so regarded, not in one instance, but in general, is in the
highest degree exasperating, no matter how well your vanity is under
control.
Perhaps I should not have been able to play my part and deceive my
deceiver had I been steadily at headquarters. As it was, I went there
little and then gave no orders, apparently contenting myself with the
credit for what other men were doing in my name. In fact, so obvious did
I make my neglect as chairman that the party press commented on it and
covertly criticized me. Dunkirk mildly reproached me for lack of
interest. He did not know--indeed, he never knew--that his chief
lieutenant, Thurston, in charge at headquarters, had gone over to "the
enemy," and was Woodruff's right-hand man. And it is not necessary for
me to say where Woodruff got the orders he transmitted to Thurston.
My excuse for keeping aloof was that I was about to be transformed into
a man of family. As I was fond of children I had looked forward to this
with more eagerness than I ventured to show to my wife. She might not
have liked it, eager though she was also. As soon as she knew that her
longings were to be satisfied, she entered upon a course of preparation
so elaborate that I was secretly much amused, though I thoroughly
approved and encouraged her. Every moment of her days was laid out in
some duty imposed upon her by the regimen she had arranged after a study
of all that science says on the subject.
As perfect tranquillity was a fundamental of the _régime_, she permitted
nothing to ruffle her. But Ed more than made up for her calm. Two weeks
before the event, she forbade him to enter her presence--"or any part of
the grounds where I'm likely to see you," said she. "The very sight of
you, looking so flustered, unnerves me."
While he and I were waiting in the sitting-room for the news, he turned
his heart inside out.
"I want to tell you, Harvey," said he, "that the--boy or girl--whichever
it is--is to be my heir."
"I shan't hold you to that," I replied with a laugh.
"No,--I'll never marry," he went on. "There was an--an angel. You know
the Shaker settlement?--well, out there."
I looked at him in wonder. If ever there was a man who seemed
unromantic, it was he, heavy and prosaic and so shy that he was visibly
agitated even in bowing to a woman acquaintance.
"I met her," he was saying, "when I was driving that way,--the horse
ran, I was thrown out, and her parents had to take me in and let her
nurse me. You've seen her face,--or faces like it. Most of those
Madonnas over on the other side in all the galleries suggest her.
Well,--her parents were furious,--wouldn't hear of it,--you know Shakers
think marriage and love and all those things are wicked. And she thought
so, too. How she used to suffer! It wore her to a shadow. She wouldn't
marry me,--wouldn't let me so much as touch her hand. But we used to
meet and--then she caught a cold--waiting hours for me, one winter
night, when there'd been a misunderstanding about the place--I was in
one place, she in another. And the cold,--you see, she couldn't fight
against it. And--and--there won't be another, Harvey. All women are
sacred to me for her sake, but I couldn't any more marry than I
could--could stop feeling her sitting beside me, just a little way off,
wrapped in her drab shawl, with her face--like a glimpse through the
gates of Heaven."
Within me up-started the memories that I kept battened down.
"Your children are mine, too, Harvey," he ended.
I took from Carlotta's work-basket an unfinished bit of baby clothing. I
went to him and held it up and pointed to the monogram she had
embroidered on it.
"E. R. S.," he read aloud. Then he looked at me with a queer expression
beginning to form in his eyes.
"Edward Ramsay Sayler, if it's a boy," said I. "Edwina Ramsay Sayler, if
it's a girl."
He snatched the bit of linen from me and buried his face in it.
The baby was a boy,--fortunately, for I don't admire the name Edwina,
and I shouldn't have liked to handicap a child with it. Carlotta and Ed
were delighted, but I felt a momentary keen disappointment. I had wanted
a girl. Girls never leave their parents completely, as boys do. Also I
should rather have looked forward to my child's having a sheltered life,
one in which the fine and beautiful ideals do not have to be molded into
the gross, ugly forms of the practical. I may say, in passing, that I
deplore the entrance of women into the world of struggle. Women are the
natural and only custodians of the ideals. We men are compelled to
wander, often to wander far, from the ideal. Unless our women remain
aloof from action, how are the ideals to be preserved? Man for action;
woman to purify man, when he returns stained with the blood and sin of
battle.
But--with the birth of the first child I began to appreciate how
profoundly right my mother had been about marriage and its source of
happiness. There are other flowers than the rose,--other flowers, and
beautiful, the more beautiful for its absence.
IX
TO THE SEATS OF THE MIGHTY
We, our party, carried the state, as usual. Our legislative majority was
increased by eleven, to thirty-seven on joint ballot. It was certain
that Dunkirk's successor would be of the same political faith; but would
he be Dunkirk? At first that venerable custodian of the plum tree hadn't
a doubt. He had come to look on it as his personal property. But, after
he had talked to legislators-elect from various parts of the state, he
became uneasy. He found that the party's members were dangerously evenly
divided between himself and the "Dominick-Croffut" faction. And soon he
was at me to declare for him.
I evaded as long as I could,--which did not decrease his nervousness.
When he put it to me point-blank, I said: "I can't do it, Senator. I
will not mix in quarrels within the party."
"But they are saying you are against me," he pleaded.
"And your people are saying I am for you," I retorted.
"But surely you are not against _me_ and for Schoolcraft? What has he
done for you?"
"And what have _you_ done for me?" I replied,--a mere interrogation,
without any feeling in it. "Tell me. I try to pay my debts."
His eyes shifted. "Nothing, Sayler, nothing," he said. "I didn't mean to
insinuate that you owed me anything. Still, I thought--you wouldn't have
been state chairman, except--"
As he halted, I said, "Except that you needed me. And you will recall
that I took it only on condition that I should be free."
"Then you are opposed to me," he said. "Nobody can be on the fence in
this fight."
"I do not think you can be elected," I replied.
As he sat silent, the puffs under his eyes swelled into bags and the
pallor of his skin changed to the gray which makes the face look as if a
haze or a cloud lay upon it. I pitied him so profoundly that, had I
ventured to speak, I should have uttered impulsive generosities that
would have cost me dear. How rarely are our impulses of generosity
anything but impulses to folly, injustice, and wrong!
"We shall see," was all he said, and he rose and shambled away.
They told me he made a pitiful sight, wheedling and whining among the
legislators. But he degraded himself to some purpose. He succeeded in
rallying round him enough members to deadlock the party caucus for a
month,--members from the purely rural districts, where the sentiment of
loyalty is strongest, where his piety and unselfish devotion to the
party were believed in, and his significance as a "statesman." I let
this deadlock continue--forty-one for Dunkirk, forty-one for
Schoolcraft--until I felt that the party throughout the state was
heartily sick of the struggle. Then Woodruff bought, at twelve thousand
dollars apiece, two Dunkirk men to vote to transfer the contest to the
floor of a joint session of the two houses.
After four days of balloting there, seven Dominick-Croffut men voted for
me--my first appearance as a candidate. On the seventy-seventh ballot
Schoolcraft withdrew, and all the Dominick-Croffut men voted for me. On
the seventy-ninth ballot I got, in addition, two opposition votes
Woodruff had bought for me at eight hundred dollars apiece. The ballot
was: Dunkirk, forty-one; Grassmere, (who was receiving the opposition's
complimentary vote) thirty-six; Sayler, forty-three. I was a Senator of
the United States.
There was a wild scene. Threats, insults, blows even, were exchanged.
And down at the Capital City Hotel Dunkirk crawled upon a table and
denounced me as an infamous ingrate, a traitor, a serpent he had warmed
in his bosom. But the people of the state accepted it as natural and
satisfactory that "the vigorous and fearless young chairman of the
party's state committee" should be agreed on as a compromise. An hour
after that last ballot, he hadn't a friend left except some galling
sympathizers from whom he hid himself. Those who had been his firmest
supporters were paying court to the new custodian of the plum tree.
The governor was mine, and the legislature. Mine was the Federal
patronage, also--all of it, if I chose, for Croffut was my dependent,
though he did not realize it; mine also were the indefinitely vast
resources of the members of my combine. Without my consent no man could
get office anywhere in my state, from governorship and judgeship down as
far as I cared to reach. Subject only to the check of public
sentiment,--so easily defeated if it be not defied,--I was master of the
making and execution of laws. Why? Not because I was leader of the
dominant party. Not because I was a Senator of the United States. Solely
because I controlled the sources of the money that maintained the
political machinery of both parties. The hand that holds the purse
strings is the hand that rules,--if it knows how to rule; for rule is
power _plus_ ability.
I was not master because I had the plum tree. I had the plum tree
because I was master.
* * * * *
The legislature attended to such of the demands of my combine and such
of the demands of the public as I thought it expedient to grant, and
then adjourned. Woodruff asked a three months' leave. I did not hear
from or of him until midsummer, when he sent me a cablegram from
London. He was in a hospital there, out of money and out of health. I
cabled him a thousand dollars and asked him to come home as soon as he
could. It was my first personal experience with that far from uncommon
American type, the periodic drunkard. I had to cable him money three
times before he started.
When he came to me at Washington, in December, he looked just as
before,--calm, robust, cool, cynical, and dressed in the very extreme of
the extreme fashion. I received him as if nothing had happened. It was
not until the current of mutual liking was again flowing freely between
us that I said: "Doc, may I impose on your friendship to the extent of
an intrusion into your private affairs?"
He started, and gave me a quick look, his color mounting. "Yes," he said
after a moment.
"When I heard from you," I went on, "I made some inquiries. I owe you no
apology. You had given me a shock,--one of the severest of my life. But
they told me that you never let--that--that peculiarity of yours
interfere with business."
His head was hanging. "I always go away," he said. "Nobody that knows me
ever sees me when--at that time."
I laid my hand on his arm. "Doc, why do you do--that sort of thing?"
The scar came up into his face to put agony into the reckless despair
that looked from his eyes. For an instant I stood on the threshold of
_his_ Chamber of Remorse and Vain Regret,--and well I knew where I was.
"Why not?" he asked bitterly. "There's always a--sort of horror--inside
me. And it grows until I can't bear it. And then--I drown it--why
shouldn't I?"
"That's very stupid for a man of your brains," said I. "There's
nothing--nothing in the world, except death--that can not be wiped out
or set right. Play the game, Doc. Play it with me for five years. Play
it for all there is in it. Then--go back, if you want to."
He thought a long time, and I did not try to hurry him. At length he
said, in his old off-hand manner: "Well, I'll go you, Senator; I'll not
touch a drop."
And he didn't. Whenever I thought I saw signs of the savage internal
battle against the weakness, I gave him something important and
absorbing to do, and I kept him busy until I knew the temptation had
lost its power for the time.
This is the proper place to put it on the record that he was the most
scrupulously honest man I have ever known. He dealt with the shadiest
and least scrupulous of men--those who train their consciences to be the
eager servants of their appetites; he handled hundreds of thousands of
dollars, millions, first and last, all of it money for which he could
never have been forced to account. He has had at one time as much as
half a million dollars in checks payable to bearer. I am not confiding
by nature or training, but I am confident that he kept not a penny for
himself beyond his salary and his fixed commission. I put his salary at
the outset, at ten thousand a year; afterward, at fifteen; finally, at
twenty. His commissions, perhaps, doubled it.
There are many kinds of honesty nowadays. There is "corporate honesty,"
not unlike that proverbial "honor among thieves," which secures a fair
or fairly fair division of the spoils. Then there is "personal
honesty," which subdivides into three kinds--legal, moral, and
instinctive. Legal honesty needs no definition. Moral honesty defies
definition--how untangle its intertwinings of motives of fear, pride,
insufficient temptation, sacrifice of the smaller chance in the hope of
a larger? Finally, there is instinctive honesty--the rarest, the only
bed-rock, unassailable kind. Give me the man who is honest simply
because it never occurs to him, and never could occur to him, to be
anything else. That is Woodruff.
There is, to be sure, another kind of instinctively honest man--he who
disregards loyalty as well as self-interest in his uprightness. But
there are so few of these in practical life that they may be
disregarded.
Perhaps I should say something here as to the finances of my combine,
though it was managed in the main precisely like all these
political-commercial machines that control both parties in all the
states, except a few in the South.
My assessments upon the various members of my combine were sent, for
several years, to me, afterward to Woodruff directly, in one thousand,
five thousand, and ten thousand dollar checks, sometimes by mail, and at
other times by express or messenger.
These checks were always payable to bearer; and I made through Woodruff,
for I kept to the far background in all my combine's affairs, an
arrangement with several large banks in different parts of the state,
including one at the capital, that these checks were to be cashed
without question, no matter who presented them, provided there was a
certain flourish under the line where the amount was written in figures.
Sometimes these checks were signed by the corporation, and sometimes
they were the personal checks of the president or some other high
official. Often the signature was that of a person wholly disconnected,
so far as the public knew. Once, I remember, Roebuck sent me a thousand
dollar check signed by a distinguished Chicago lawyer who was just then
counsel to his opponent in a case involving millions, a case which
Roebuck afterward won!
Who presented these checks? I could more easily say who did not.
From the very beginning of my control I kept my promise to reduce the
cost of the political business to my clients. When I got the machine
thoroughly in hand, I saw I could make it cost them less than a third of
what they had been paying, on the average, for ten years. I cut off,
almost at a stroke, a horde of lobbyists, lawyers, threateners without
influence, and hangers-on of various kinds. I reduced the payments for
legislation to a system, instead of the shameless, scandal-creating and
wasteful auctioneering that had been going on for years.
In fact, so cheaply did I run the machine that I saw it would be most
imprudent to let my clients have the full benefit. Cheapness would have
made them uncontrollably greedy and exacting, and would have given them
a wholly false idea of my value as soon as it had slipped their short
memories how dearly they used to pay.
So I continued to make heavy assessments, and put by the surplus in a
reserve fund for emergencies. I thought, for example, that I might some
day have trouble with one or more members of my combine; my reserve
would supply me with the munitions for forcing insurgents to return to
their agreements.
This fund was in no sense part of my private fortune. Nowhere else, I
think, do the eccentricities of conscience show themselves more
interestingly than in the various attitudes of the various political
leaders toward the large sums which the exigencies of commercialized
politics place absolutely and secretly under their control. I have no
criticism for any of these attitudes.
I have lived long enough and practically enough to learn not to
criticize the morals of men, any more than I criticize their facial
contour or their physical build. "As many men, so many minds,"--and
morals. Wrong, for practical purposes, is that which a man can not
cajole or compel his conscience to approve.
It so happened that I had a sense that to use my assessments for my
private financial profits would be wrong. Therefore, my private fortune
has been wholly the result of the opportunities which came through my
intimacy with Roebuck and such others of the members of my combine as
were personally agreeable,--or, perhaps it would be more accurate to
say, not disagreeable, for, in the circumstances, I naturally saw a side
of those men which a friend must never see in a friend. I could not help
having toward most of these distinguished clients of mine much the
feeling his lawyer has for the guilty criminal he is defending.
X
THE FACE IN THE CROWD
Except the time given to the children,--there were presently three,--my
life, in all its thoughts and associations, was now politics: at
Washington, from December until Congress adjourned, chiefly national
politics, the long and elaborate arrangements preliminary to the
campaign for the conquest of the national fields; at home, chiefly state
politics,--strengthening my hold upon the combine, strengthening my hold
upon the two political machines. As the days and the weeks, the months
and the years, rushed by, as the interval between breakfast and bedtime,
between Sunday and Sunday, between election day and election day again,
grew shorter and shorter, I played the game more and more furiously.
What I won, once it was mine, seemed worthless in itself, and worth
while only if I could gain the next point; and, when that was gained,
the same story was repeated. Whenever I paused to reflect, it was to
throttle reflection half-born, and hasten on again.
"A silly business, this living, isn't it?" said Woodruff to me.
"Yes,--but--" replied I. "You remember the hare and the hatter in _Alice
in Wonderland_. 'Why?' said the hare. 'Why not?' said the hatter. A
sensible man does not interrogate life; he lives it."
"H'm," retorted Woodruff.
And we went on with the game,--shuffling, dealing, staking. But more and
more frequently there came hours, when, against my will, I would pause,
drop my cards, watch the others; and I would wonder at them, and at
myself, the maddest of these madmen,--and the saddest, because I had
moments in which I was conscious of my own derangement.
I have often thought on the cause of this dissatisfaction which has
never ceased to gird me, and which I have learned girds all men of
intelligence who lead an active life. I think it is that such men are
like a civilized man who has to live among a savage tribe. To keep
alive, to have influence, he must pretend to accept the savage point of
view, must pretend to disregard his own knowledge and intelligent
methods, must play the game of life with the crude, clumsy counters of
caste and custom and creed and thought which the savages regard as fit
and proper. Intelligent men of action do see as clearly as the
philosophers; but they have to pretend to adapt their mental vision to
that of the mass of their fellow men or, like the philosophers, they
would lead lives of profitless inaction, enunciating truths which are of
no value to mankind until it rediscovers them for itself. No man of
trained reasoning power could fail to see that the Golden Rule is not a
piece of visionary altruism, but a sound principle of practical
self-interest. Or, could anything be clearer, to one who takes the
trouble really to think about it, than that he who advances himself at
the expense of his fellow men does not advance, but sinks down into the
class of murderers for gain, thieves, and all those who seek to advance
themselves by injustice? Yet, so feeble is man's reason, so near to the
brute is he, so under the rule of brute appetites, that he can not
think beyond the immediate apparent good, beyond to-day's meal.
I once said to Scarborough: "Politics is the science and art of fooling
the people."
"That is true, as far as it goes," he said. "If that were all, justice,
which is only another name for common sense, would soon be established.
But, unfortunately, politics is the art of playing upon cupidity, the
art of fooling the people into thinking they are helping to despoil the
other fellow and will get a share of the swag."
And he was right. It is by subtle appeal to the secret and shamefaced,
but controlling, appetites of men that the clever manipulate them. To
get a man to vote for the right you must show him that he is voting for
the personally profitable. And very slow he is to believe that what is
right can be practically profitable. Have not the preachers been
preaching the reverse all these years; have they not been insisting that
to do right means treasure in Heaven only?
* * * * *
It was in my second term as Senator, toward the middle of it. I was
speaking, one afternoon, in defense of a measure for the big
contributors, which the party was forcing through the Senate in face of
fire from the whole country. Personally, I did not approve the measure.
It was a frontal attack upon public opinion, and frontal attacks are as
unwise and as unnecessary in politics as in war. But the party leaders
in the nation insisted, and, as the move would weaken their hold upon
the party and so improve my own chances, I was not deeply aggrieved that
my advice had been rejected. Toward the end of my speech, aroused by
applause from the visitors' gallery, I forgot myself and began to look
up there as I talked, instead of addressing myself to my fellow
Senators. The eyes of a speaker always wander over his audience in
search of eyes that respond. My glance wandered, unconsciously, until it
found an answering glance that fixed it.
This answering glance was not responsive, nor even approving. It was the
reverse,--and, in spite of me, it held me. At first it was just a pair
of eyes, in the shadow of the brim of a woman's hat, the rest of the
face, the rest of the woman, hid by those in front and on either side.
There was a movement among them, and the whole face appeared,--and I
stopped short in my speech. I saw only the face, really only the mouth
and the eyes,--the lips and the eyes of Elizabeth Crosby,--an expression
of pain, and of pity.
[Illustration: I SAW ONLY THE LIPS AND EYES OF ELIZABETH CROSBY p. 141]
I drank from the glass of water on my desk, and went on. When I ventured
to look up there again, the face was gone. Had I seen or imagined? Was
it she or was it only memory suddenly awakening and silhouetting her
upon that background of massed humanity? I tried to convince myself that
I had only imagined, but I knew that I had seen.
Within me--and, I suppose, within every one else--there is a dual
personality: not a good and a bad, as is so often shallowly said; but
one that does, and another that watches. The doer seems to me to be
myself; the watcher, he who stands, like an idler at the rail of a
bridge, carelessly, even indifferently, observing the tide of my thought
and action that flows beneath,--who is he? I do not know. But I do know
that I have no control over him,--over his cynical smile, or his lip
curling in good-natured contempt of me, or his shrug at self-excuse, or
his moods when he stares down at the fretting stream with a look of
weariness so profound that it is tragic. It was he who was more
interested in the thoughts,--the passion, the protest, the defiance, and
the dread,--which the sight of that face set to boiling within me.
Sometimes he smiled cynically at the turmoil, and at other times he
watched it with what seemed to me bitter disgust and disappointment and
regret.
While this tempest was struggling to boil over into action, Carlotta
appeared. She had never stayed long at Washington after the first
winter; she preferred, for the children and perhaps for herself, the
quiet and the greater simplicity of Fredonia. But--"I got to thinking
about it," said she, "and it seemed to me a bad idea for a man to be
separated so long from his wife and children--and home influences."
That last phrase was accompanied by one of her queer shrewd looks.
"Your idea is not without merit," replied I judicially.
"What are you smiling at?" she demanded sharply.
"If it was a smile," said I, "it was at myself."
"No, you were laughing at me. You think I am jealous."
"Of what? Of whom?"
She looked fixedly at me and finally said: "I want to tell you two
things about myself and you. The first is that I am afraid of you."
"Why?" said I.
"I don't know," she answered.
"And the second confession?"
"That I never trust you."
"Why?"
"I don't know."
"Yet you are always telling me I am cold."
She laughed shortly. "So is a stick of dynamite," said she.
She stayed on at Washington.
XI
BURBANK
It was through Carlotta that I came to know Burbank well.
He was in the House, representing the easternmost district of our state.
I had disliked him when we were boys in the state assembly together,
and, when I met him again in Washington, he seemed to me to have all his
faults of fifteen years before aggravated by persistence in them.
Finally, I needed his place in Congress for a useful lieutenant of
Woodruff's and ordered him beaten for the renomination. He made a bitter
fight against decapitation, and, as he was popular with the people of
his district, we had some difficulty in defeating him. But when he was
beaten, he was of course helpless and hopelessly discredited,--the
people soon forget a fallen politician. He "took off his coat" and
worked hard and well for the election of the man who had euchred him out
of the nomination. When he returned to Washington to finish his term,
he began a double, desperate assault upon my friendship. The direct
assault was unsuccessful,--I understood it, and I was in no need of
lieutenants. More than I could easily take care of were already striving
to serve me, scores of the brightest, most ambitious young men of the
state eager to do my bidding, whatever it might be, in the hope that in
return I would "take care of" them, would admit them to the coveted
inclosure round the plum tree. The plum tree! Is there any kind of fruit
which gladdens the eyes of ambitious man, that does not glisten upon
some one of its many boughs, heavy-laden with corporate and public
honors and wealth?
Burbank's indirect attack, through his wife and Carlotta, fared better.
The first of it I distinctly recall was after a children's party at our
house. Carlotta singled out Mrs. Burbank for enthusiastic commendation.
"The other women sent nurses with their children," said she, "but Mrs.
Burbank came herself. She was so sweet in apologizing for coming. She
said she hadn't any nurse, and that she was so timid about her children
that she never could bring herself to trust them to nurses. And really,
Harvey, you don't know how nice she was all the afternoon. She's the
kind of mother I approve of, the kind I try to be. Don't you admire
her?"
"I don't know her," said I. "The only time I met her she struck me as
being--well, rather silent."
"That's it," she exclaimed triumphantly. "She doesn't care a rap for
men. She's absorbed in her children and her husband." Then, after a
pause, she added: "Well, she's welcome to him. I can't see what she
finds to care for."
"Why?" said I.
"Oh, he's distinguished-looking, and polite, offensively polite to
women--he doesn't understand them at all--thinks they like deference and
flattery, the low-grade molasses kind of flattery. He has a very nice
smile. But he's so stilted and tiresome, always serious,--and such a
pose! It's what I call the presidential pose. No doubt he'll be
President some day."
"Why?" said I. It is amusing to watch a woman fumble about for reasons
for her intuitions.
Carlotta did uncommonly well. "Oh, I don't know. He's the sort of
high-average American that the people go crazy about. He--he--_looks_
like a President, that sort of--solemn--no-sense-of-humor, _Sunday_
look,--you know what I mean. Anyhow, he's going to be President."
I thought not. A few days later, while what Carlotta had said was fresh
in my mind, he overtook me walking to the capitol. As we went on
together, I was smiling to myself. He certainly did look and talk like a
President. He was of the average height, of the average build, and of a
sort of average facial mold; he had hair that was a compromise among the
average shades of brown, gray, and black, with a bald spot just where
most men have it.
His pose--I saw that Carlotta was shrewdly right. He was acutely
self-conscious, and was acting his pose every instant. He had selected
it early in life; he would wear it, even in his nightshirt, until death.
He said nothing brilliant, but neither did he say anything that would
not have been generally regarded as sound and sensible. His impressive
manner of delivering his words made one overvalue the freight they
carried. But I soon found, for I studied him with increasing interest,
thanks to my new point of view upon him,--I soon found that he had one
quality the reverse of commonplace. He had magnetism.
Whenever a new candidate was proposed for Mazarin's service, he used to
ask, first of all, "Has he luck?" My first question has been, "Has he
magnetism?" and I think mine is the better measure. Such of one's luck
as is not the blundering blindness of one's opponents is usually the
result of one's magnetism. However, it is about the most dangerous of
the free gifts of nature,--which are all dangerous. Burbank's merit lay
in his discreet use of it. It compelled men to center upon him; he
turned this to his advantage by making them feel, not how he shone, but
how they shone. They went away liking him because they had new reasons
for being in love with themselves.
I found only two serious weaknesses. The first was that he lacked the
moral courage boldly to do either right or wrong. That explained why, in
spite of his talents for impressing people both privately and from the
platform, he was at the end of his political career. The second weakness
was that he was ashamed of his very obscure and humble origin. He knew
that his being "wholly self-made" was a matchless political asset, and
he used it accordingly. But he looked on it somewhat as the beggar looks
on the deformity he exhibits to get alms.
Neither weakness made him less valuable to my purpose,--the first one,
if anything, increased his value. I wanted an instrument that was
capable, but strong only when I used it.
I wanted a man suitable for development first into governor of my state,
and then into a President. I could not have got the presidency for
myself, but neither did I want it. My longings were all for power,--the
reality, not the shadow. In a republic the man who has the real power
must be out of view. If he is within view, a million hands stretch to
drag him from the throne. He _must_ be out of view, putting forward his
puppets and changing them when the people grow bored or angry with them.
And the President--in all important matters he must obey his party,
which is, after all, simply the "interests" that finance it; in
unimportant matters, his so-called power is whittled down by the party's
leaders and workers, whose requirements may not be disregarded. He
shakes the plum tree, but he does it under orders; others gather the
fruit, and he gets only the exercise and the "honor."
I had no yearning for puppetship, however exalted the title or sonorous
the fame; but to be the power that selects the king-puppet of the
political puppet-hierarchy, to be the power that selects and rules
him,--that was the logical development of my career.
In Burbank I thought I had found a man worthy to wear the puppet
robes,--one who would glory in them. He, like most of the other
ambitious men I have known, cared little who was behind the throne,
provided he himself was seated upon it, the crown on his head and the
crowds tossing the hats that shelter their dim-thinking brains. Also, in
addition to magnetism and presence, he had dexterity and distinction and
as much docility as can be expected in a man big enough to use for
important work.
In September I gave him our party nomination for governor. In our
one-sided state that meant his election.
As I had put him into the governorship not so much for use there as for
use thereafter, it was necessary to protect him from my combine, which
had destroyed his two immediate predecessors by over-use,--they had
become so unpopular that their political careers ended with their terms.
Protect him I must, though the task would be neither easy nor pleasant.
It involved a collision with my clients,--a square test of strength
between us. What was to me far more repellent, it involved my personally
taking a hand in that part of my political work which I had hitherto
left to Woodruff and his lieutenants.
One does not in person chase and catch and kill and dress and serve the
chicken he has for dinner; he orders chicken, and hears and thinks no
more about it until it is served. Thus, all the highly disagreeable part
of my political work was done by others; Woodruff, admirably capable and
most careful to spare my feelings, received the demands of my clients
from their lawyers and transmitted them to the party leaders in the
legislature with the instructions how the machinery was to be used in
making them into law. As I was financing the machines of both parties,
his task was not difficult, though delicate.
But now that I began to look over Woodruff's legislative program in
advance, I was amazed at the rapacity of my clients, rapacious though I
knew them to be. I had been thinking that the independent
newspapers--there were a few such, but of small circulation and
influence--were malignant in their attacks upon my "friends." In fact,
as I soon saw, they had told only a small part of the truth. They had
not found out the worst things that were done; nor had they grasped how
little the legislature and the governor were doing other than the
business of the big corporations, most of it of doubtful public benefit,
to speak temperately. An hour's study of the facts and I realized as
never before why we are so rapidly developing a breed of
multi-millionaires in this country with all the opportunities to wealth
in their hands. I had only to remember that the system which ruled my
own state was in full blast in every one of the states of the Union.
Everywhere, no sooner do the people open or propose to open a new road
into a source of wealth, than men like these clients of mine hurry to
the politicians and buy the rights to set up toll-gates and to fix their
own schedule of tolls.
However, the time had now come when I must assert myself. I made no
radical changes in that first program of Burbank's term. I contented
myself with cutting off the worst items, those it would have ruined
Burbank to indorse. My clients were soon grumbling, but Woodruff handled
them well, placating them with excuses that soothed their annoyance to
discontented silence. So ably did he manage it that not until Burbank's
third year did they begin to come directly to me and complain of the way
they were being "thrown down" at the capitol.
Roebuck, knowing me most intimately and feeling that he was my author
and protector, was frankly insistent. "We got almost nothing at the last
session," he protested, "and this winter--Woodruff tells me we may not
get the only thing we're asking."
I was ready for him, as I was for each of the ten. I took out the list
of measures passed or killed at the last session in the interest of the
Power Trust. It contained seventy-eight items, thirty-four of them
passed. I handed it to him.
"Yes,--a few things," he admitted, "but all trifles!"
"That little amendment to the Waterways law must alone have netted you
three or four millions already."
"Nothing like that. Nothing like that."
"I can organize a company within twenty-four hours that will pay you
four millions in cash for the right, and stock besides."
He did not take up my offer.
"You have already had thirteen matters attended to this winter," I
pursued. "The one that can't be done--Really, Mr. Roebuck, the whole
state knows that the trustees of the Waukeegan Christian University are
your dummies. It would be insanity for the party to turn over a hundred
thousand acres of valuable public land gratis to them, so that they can
presently sell it to you for a song."
He reddened. "Newspaper scandal!" he blustered, but changed the subject
as soon as he had shown me and re-shown himself that his motives were
pure.
I saw that Burbank's last winter was to be crucial. My clients were
clamorous, and were hinting at all sorts of dire doings if they were not
treated better. Roebuck was questioning, in the most malignantly
friendly manner, "whether, after all, Harvey, the combine isn't a
mistake, and the old way wasn't the best." On the other hand Burbank was
becoming restless. He had so cleverly taken advantage of the chances to
do popular things, which I had either made for him or pointed out to
him, that he had become something of a national figure. When he got
eighty-one votes for the presidential nomination in our party's national
convention his brain was dizzied. Now he was in a tremor lest my clients
should demand of him things that would diminish or destroy this sapling
popularity which, in his dreams, he already saw grown into a mighty tree
obscuring the national heavens.
I gave many and many an hour to anxious thought and careful planning
that summer and fall. It was only a few days before Doc Woodruff
appeared at Fredonia with the winter's legislative program that I saw my
way straight to what I hoped was broad day. The program he brought was
so outrageous that it was funny. There was nothing in it for the Ramsay
interests, but each of the other ten had apparently exhausted the
ingenuity of its lawyers in concocting demands that would have wrecked
for ever the party granting them.
"Our friends are modest," said I.
"They've gone clean crazy," replied Woodruff. "And if you could have
heard them talk! It's impossible to make them see that anybody has any
rights but themselves."
"Well, let me have the details," said I. "Explain every item on this
list; tell me just what it means, and just how the lawyers propose to
disguise it so the people won't catch on."
When he finished, I divided the demands into three classes,--the
impossible, the possible, and the practicable. "Strike out all the
impossible," I directed. "Cut down the possible to the ten that are
least outrageous. Those ten and the practicable must be passed."
He read off the ten which were beyond the limits of prudence, but not
mob-and-hanging matters. "We can pass them, of course," was his comment.
"We could pass a law ordering the state house burned, but--"
"Precisely," said I. "I think the consequences will be interesting." I
cross-marked the five worst of the ten possibilities. "Save those until
the last weeks of the session."
Early in the session Woodruff began to push the five least bad of the
bad measures on to the calendar of the legislature, one by one. When the
third was introduced, Burbank took the Limited for Washington. He
arrived in time to join my wife and my little daughter Frances and me at
breakfast. He was so white and sunken-eyed and his hands were so
unsteady that Frances tried in vain to take her solemn, wondering,
pitying gaze from his face. As soon as my study door closed behind us,
he burst out, striding up and down.
"I don't know _what_ to think, Sayler," he cried, "I don't _know_ what
to think! The demands of these corporations have been growing, growing,
growing! And now--You have seen the calendar?"
"Yes," said I. "Some of the bills are pretty stiff, aren't they? But the
boys tell me they're for our best friends, and that they're all
necessary."
"No doubt, no doubt," he replied, "but it will be impossible to
reconcile the people." Suddenly he turned on me, his eyes full of fear
and suspicion. "Have _you_ laid a plot to ruin me, Sayler? It certainly
looks that way. Have you a secret ambition for the presidency--"
"Don't talk rubbish, James," I interrupted. Those few meaningless votes
in the national convention had addled his common sense. "Sit down,--calm
yourself,--tell me all about it."
He seated himself and ran his fingers up and down his temples and
through his wet hair that was being so rapidly thinned and whitened by
the struggles and anxieties of his ambition. "My God!" he cried out,
"how I am punished! When I started in my public career, I looked
forward and saw just this time,--when I should be the helpless tool in
the hands of the power I sold myself to. Governor!" He almost shouted
the word, rising and pacing the floor again. "Governor!"--and he laughed
in wild derision.
I watched him, fascinated. I, too, at the outset of my career, had
looked forward, and had seen the same peril, but I had avoided it.
Wretched figure that he was!--what more wretched, more pitiable than a
man groveling and moaning in the mire of his own self-contempt?
"Governor!" I said to myself, as I saw awful thoughts flitting like
demons of despair across his face. And I shuddered, and pitied, and
rejoiced,--shuddered at the narrowness of my own escape; pitied the man
who seemed myself as I might have been; and rejoiced that I had had my
mother with me and in me to impel me into another course.
"Come, come, Burbank," said I, "you're not yourself; you've lost
sleep--"
"Sleep!" he interrupted, "I have not closed my eyes since I read those
cursed bills."
"Tell me what you want done," was my suggestion. "I'll help in any way
I can,--any way that's practicable."
"Oh, I understand your position, Sayler," he answered, when he had got
control of himself again, "but I see plainly that the time has come when
the power that rules me,--that rules us both,--has decided to use me to
my own destruction. If I refuse to do these things, it will destroy
me,--and a hundred are eager to come forward and take my place. If I do
these things, the people will destroy me,--and neither is that of the
smallest importance to our master."
His phrases, "the power that rules us both," and "our master," jarred on
me. So far as he knew, indeed, so far as "our master" knew, were not he
and I in the same class? But that was no time for personal vanity. All I
said was: "The bills must go through. This is one of those crises that
test a man's loyalty to the party."
"For the good of the party!" he muttered with a bitter sneer. "Crime
upon crime--yes, crime, I say--that the party may keep the favor of the
powers! And to what end? to what good? Why, that the party may continue
in control and so may be of further use to its rulers." He rested his
elbows on the table and held his face between his hands. He looked
terribly old, and weary beyond the power ever to be rested again. "I
stand with the party,--what am I without it?" he went on in a dull
voice. "The people may forget, but, if I offend the master,--he never
forgives or forgets. I'll sign the bills, Sayler,--_if_ they come to me
as party measures."
Burbank had responded to the test.
A baser man would have acted as scores of governors, mayors, and judges
have acted in the same situation--would have accepted popular ruin and
would have compelled the powers to make him rich in compensation. A
braver man would have defied it and the powers, would have appealed to
the people--with one chance of winning out against ten thousand chances
of being disbelieved and laughed at as a "man who thinks he's too good
for his party." Burbank was neither too base nor too brave; clearly, I
assured myself, he is the man I want. I felt that I might safely relieve
his mind, so far as I could do so without letting him too far into my
secret plans.
I had not spent five minutes in explanation before he was up, his face
radiant, and both hands stretched out to me.
"Forgive me, Harvey!" he cried. "I shall never distrust you again. I put
my future in your hands."
XII
BURBANK FIRES THE POPULAR HEART
That was, indeed, a wild winter at the state capital,--a "carnival of
corruption," the newspapers of other states called it. One of the first
of the "black bills" to go through was a disguised street railway grab,
out of which Senator Croffut got a handsome "counsel fee" of fifty-odd
thousand dollars. But as the rout went on, ever more audaciously and
recklessly, he became uneasy. In mid-February he was urging me to go
West and try to do something to "curb those infernal grabbers." I
refused to interfere. He went himself, and Woodruff reported to me that
he was running round the state house and the hotels like a crazy man;
for when he got into the thick of it, he realized that it was much worse
than it seemed from Washington. In a few days he was back and at me
again.
"It's very strange," said he suspiciously. "The boys say they're getting
nothing out of it. They declare they're simply obeying orders."
"Whose orders?" I asked.
"I don't know," he answered, his eyes sharply upon me. "But I do know
that, unless something is done, I'll not be returned to the Senate.
We'll lose the legislature, sure, next fall."
"It does look that way," I said with a touch of melancholy. "That street
railway grab was the beginning of our rake's progress. We've been going
it, hell bent, ever since."
He tossed his handsome head and was about to launch into an angry
defense of himself. But my manner checked him. He began to plead. "_You_
can stop it, Sayler. Everybody out there says you can. And, if I am
reëlected, I've got a good chance for the presidential nomination.
Should I get it and be elected, we could form a combination that would
interest you, I think."
It was a beautiful irony that in his conceit he should give as his
reason why I should help him the very reason why I was not sorry he was
to be beaten. For, although he was not dangerous, still he was a rival
public figure to Burbank in our state, and,--well, accidents sometimes
happen, unless they're guarded against.
"What shall I do?" I asked him.
"Stop them from passing any more black bills. Why, they've got half a
dozen ready, some of them worse even than the two they passed over
Burbank's veto, a week ago."
"For instance?"
He cited three Power Trust bills.
"But why don't _you_ stop those three?" said I. "They're under the
special patronage of Dominick. You have influence with him."
"Dominick!" he groaned. "Are you sure?" And when I nodded emphatically,
he went on: "I'll do what I can, but--" He threw up his hands.
He was off for the West that night. When he returned, his face wore the
look of doom. He had always posed for the benefit of the galleries,
especially the women in the galleries. But now he became sloven in
dress, often issued forth unshaven, and sat sprawled at his desk in the
Senate, his chin on his shirt bosom, looking vague and starting when any
one spoke to him.
Following my advice on the day when I sent him away happy, Burbank left
the capital and the state just before the five worst bills left the
committees. He was called to the bedside of his wife who, so all the
newspapers announced, was at the point of death at Colorado Springs.
While he was there nursing her as she "hovered between life and death,"
the bills were jammed through the senate and the assembly.
He telegraphed the lieutenant governor not to sign them, as he was
returning and wished to deal with them himself. He reached the capital
on a Thursday morning, sent the bills back with a "ringing" veto
message, and took the late afternoon train for Colorado Springs. It was
as good a political "grand-stand play" as ever thrilled a people.
The legislature passed the bills over his veto and adjourned that night.
Press and people, without regard to party lines, were loud in their
execrations of the "abandoned and shameless wretches" who had "betrayed
the state and had covered themselves with eternal infamy." I quote from
an editorial in the newspaper that was regarded as my personal organ.
But there was only praise for Burbank; his enemies, and those who had
doubted his independence and had suspected him of willingness to do
anything to further his personal ambitions, admitted that he had shown
"fearless courage, inflexible honesty, and the highest ideals of private
sacrifice to public duty." And they eagerly exaggerated him, to make his
white contrast more vividly with the black of the "satanic spawn" in the
legislature. His fame spread, carried far and wide by the sentimentality
in that supposed struggle between heart and conscience, between love for
the wife of his bosom and duty to the people.
Carlotta, who like most women took no interest in politics because it
lacks "heart-interest," came to me with eyes swimming and cheeks aglow.
She had just been reading about Burbank's heroism.
"Isn't he splendid!" she cried. "I always told you he'd be President.
And you didn't believe me."
"Be patient with me, my dear," said I. "I am not a woman with
seven-league boots of intuition. I'm only a heavy-footed man."
XIII
ROEBUCK & CO. PASS UNDER THE YOKE
And now the stage had been reached at which my ten mutinous clients
could be, and must be, disciplined.
As a first step, I resigned the chairmanship of the state committee and
ordered the election of Woodruff to the vacancy. I should soon have
substituted Woodruff for myself, in any event. I had never wanted the
place, and had taken it only because to refuse it would have been to
throw away the golden opportunity Dunkirk so unexpectedly thrust at me.
Holding that position, or any other officially connecting me with my
party's machine, made me a target; and I wished to be completely hidden,
for I wished the people of my state to think me merely one of the party
servants, in sympathy with the rank and file rather than with the
machine. Yet, in the chairmanship, in the targetship, I must have a man
whom I could trust through and through; and, save Woodruff, who was
there for the place?
When my resignation was announced, the independent and the opposition
press congratulated me on my high principle in refusing to have any
official connection with the machine responsible for such infamies. When
Woodruff's election was announced it came as a complete surprise. Such
of the newspapers as dared, and they were few, denounced it as infamy's
crown of infamy; and the rank and file of the party was shocked,--as I
had known it would be. He made not a murmur, but I knew what must be in
his mind. I said nothing until six weeks or two months had passed; then
I went straight at him.
"You are feeling bitter against me," said I. "You think I dropped out
when there was danger of heavy firing, and put you up to take it."
"No, indeed, Senator," he protested, "nothing like that. Honestly, I
have not had a bitter thought against you. I'm depressed simply because,
just as I had a chance to get on my feet again, they won't let me."
"But," I rejoined, "I did resign and put you in my place because I
didn't want to take the fire and thought you could."
"And so I can," said he. "I haven't any reputation to lose. I'm no worse
off than I was before. Let 'em do their damnedest."
"Your first campaign will probably be a failure," I went on, "and, the
day after election, there'll be a shout for your head."
He shrugged his shoulders. "I'm enlisted for the war," said he. "You're
my general. I go where you order."
I hope the feelings that surged up in me showed in my face, as I
stretched out my hand. "Thank you, Doc," said I. "And--there's another
side to it. It isn't all black."
"It isn't black at all," he replied stoutly.
I explained: "I've wanted you to have the place from the outset. But I
shouldn't dare give it to you except at a time like this, when our party
has done so many unpopular things that one more won't count; and there's
so much to be said against us, so much worse things than they can
possibly make out your election to be, that it'll soon be almost
neglected."
"They're beginning to drop me already and go back to harrying those poor
devils of ours in the legislature," said Woodruff.
"A few weeks more," I went on, "and you'll be safe and you are to stay
chairman, no matter what happens. When they have leisure to attack you,
there'll be nothing to attack. The people will have dismissed the matter
from their minds. They don't care to watch the threshing of old straw."
I saw that I had lifted a weight from him, though he said nothing.
So much for my first move toward the chastening of my clients. Further
and even more effective in the same direction, I cut down our campaign
fund for the legislative ticket to one-fifth what it usually was; and,
without even Woodruff's knowing it, I heavily subsidized the opposition
machine. Wherever it could be done with safety I arranged for the
trading off of our legislative ticket for our candidate for governor.
"The legislature is hopelessly lost," I told Woodruff; "we must
concentrate on the governorship. We must save what we can." In fact, so
overwhelmingly was our party in the majority, and so loyal were its
rank and file, that it was only by the most careful arrangement of weak
candidates and of insufficient campaign funds that I was able to throw
the legislature to the opposition. Our candidate for governor,
Walbrook--Burbank was ineligible to a second successive term--was
elected by a comfortable plurality. And, by the way, I saw to it that
the party organs gave Woodruff enthusiastic praise for rescuing so much
from what had looked like utter ruin.
My clients had been uneasy ever since the furious popular outburst which
had followed their breaking away from my direction and restraint. When
they saw an opposition legislature, they readily believed what they read
in the newspapers about the "impending reign of radicalism." Silliman,
the opposition leader, had accepted John Markham's offer of one hundred
and fifty thousand dollars for Croffut's seat in the Senate; but I
directed him to send Veerhoft, one of the wildest and cleverest of the
opposition radicals. He dared not disobey me. Veerhoft went, and Markham
never saw again the seventy-five thousand he had paid Silliman as a
"retainer."
Veerhoft in the United States Senate gave my clients the chills; but I
was preparing the fever for them also. I had Silliman introduce bills in
both houses of the legislature that reached for the privileges of the
big corporations and initiated proceedings to expose their corruption. I
had Woodruff suggest to Governor Walbrook that, in view of the popular
clamor, he ought to recommend measures for equalizing taxation and
readjusting the prices of franchises. As my clients were bonded and
capitalized on the basis of no expense either for taxes or for
franchises, the governor's suggestion, eagerly adopted by Silliman's
"horde," foreshadowed ruin. If the measures should be passed, all the
dividends and interest they were paying on "water" would go into the
public treasury.
My clients came to me, singly and in pairs, to grovel and to implore. An
interesting study these arrogant gentlemen made as they cringed, utterly
indifferent to the appearance of self-respect, in their agony for their
imperiled millions. A mother would shrink from abasing herself to save
the life of her child as these men abased themselves in the hope of
saving their dollars. How they fawned and flattered! They begged my
pardon for having disregarded my advice; they assured me that, if I
would only exert that same genius of mine which had conceived the
combine, I could devise some way of saving them from this tidal wave of
popular clamor,--for they hadn't a suspicion of my part in making that
tidal wave.
Reluctantly I consented to "see what I can do."
The instant change in the atmosphere of the capital, the instant outcry
from the organs of both parties that "the people had voted for reform,
not for confiscatory revolution," completed my demonstration. My clients
realized who was master of the machines. The threatening storm rapidly
scattered; the people, relieved that the Silliman program of upheaval
was not to be carried out, were glad enough to see the old
"conservative" order restored,--our people always reason that it is
better to rot slowly by corruption than to be frightened to death by
revolution.
"Hereafter, we must trust to your judgment in these political matters,
Harvey," said Roebuck. "The manager must be permitted to manage."
I smiled at the ingenuousness of this speech. It did not ruffle me.
Roebuck was one of those men who say their prayers in a patronizing
tone.
Yes, I was master. But it is only now, in the retrospect of years, that
I have any sense of triumph; for I had won the supremacy with small
effort, comparatively,--with the small effort required of him who sees
the conditions of a situation clearly, and, instead of trying to combat
or to change them, intelligently uses them to his ends. Nor do I now
regard my achievement as marvelous. Everything was in my favor; against
me, there was nothing,--no organization, no plan, no knowledge of my
aim. I wonder how much of their supernal glory would be left to the
world's men of action, from its Alexanders and Napoleons down to its
successful bandits and ward-bosses, if mankind were in the habit of
looking at what the winner had opposed to him,--Alexander faced only by
flocks of sheep-like Asiatic slaves; Napoleon routing the badly trained,
wretchedly officered soldiers of decadent monarchies; and the bandit or
ward-boss overcoming peaceful and unprepared and unorganized citizens.
Who would erect statues or write eulogies to a man for mowing a field of
corn-stalks with a scythe? Mankind is never more amusing than in its
hero-worship.
No, I should simply have been stupid had I failed.
But--even had I been disposed to rein in and congratulate myself at the
quarter-stretch, I could not have done it. A man has, perhaps, some
choice as to his mount before he enters the race for success. But once
in the saddle and off, he must let the reins go; his control is confined
to whip and spur.
XIV
A "BOOM-FACTORY"
In the early autumn of that last year of his as governor, Burbank's wife
died--a grim and unexpected fulfilment of their pretended anxieties of
six months before.
It was, in some respects, as great a loss to me as to him--how great to
us both I did not--indeed, could not--measure until several years
passed. She was what I regard as a typical American wife--devoted to her
husband, jealously guarding his interests, yet as keen to see his
shortcomings as she was to see her own. And how much more persistent and
intelligent in correcting her faults than he in correcting his! Like
most men, he was vain--that is, while he would probably have admitted in
a large, vague way that he wasn't perfect, when it came to details he
would defend his worst fault against any and all criticism. Like most
women, she, too, was vain--but an intelligent woman's vanity, instead of
making her self-complacent, somehow spurs her on to hide her weak
points and to show her best points in the best light. For example, Mrs.
Burbank, a pretty woman and proud of it, was yet conscious of her
deficiencies in dress and in manners through her plain and rural early
surroundings. It was interesting, and instructive, too, to watch her
studying and cleverly copying, or rather, adapting Carlotta; for she
took from Carlotta only that which could be fitted without visible joint
into her own pattern.
Latterly, whenever I was urging upon Burbank a line of action requiring
courage or a sacrifice of some one of his many insidious forms of
personal vanity, I always arranged for her to be present at our
conferences. And she would sit there, apparently absorbed in her sewing;
but in reality she was seeing not only the surface reasons I gave him,
but also those underlying and more powerful reasons which we do not
utter, sometimes because we like to play the hypocrite to ourselves,
again because we must give the other person a chance to play the
hypocrite before himself--and us. And often I left him reluctant and
trying to muster courage to refuse or finesse to evade, only to find
him the next day consenting, perhaps enthusiastic. Many's the time she
spared me the disagreeable necessity of being peremptory--doubly
disagreeable because show of authority has ever been distasteful to me
and because an order can never be so heartily executed as is an
assimilated suggestion.
When I went to him a month after her death, I expected he would still be
crushed as he was at the funeral. I listened with a feeling of revulsion
to his stilted and, as it seemed to me, perfunctory platitudes on his
"irreparable loss"--stale rhetoric about _her_, and to her most intimate
friend and his! I had thought he would be imagining himself done with
ambition for ever; I had feared his strongly religious nature would lead
him to see a "judgment" upon him and her for having exaggerated her
indisposition to gain a political point. And I had mapped out what I
would say to induce him to go on. Instead, after a few of those
stereotyped mortuary sentences, he shifted to politics and was presently
showing me that her death had hardly interrupted his plannings for the
presidential nomination. As for the "judgment," I had forgotten that in
his religion his deity was always on his side, and his misfortunes were
always of the evil one. These deities of men of action! Man with his god
a ventriloquist puppet in his pocket, and with his conscience an old dog
Tray at his heels, needing no leading string!
However, it gave me a shock, this vivid reminder from Burbank of the
slavery of ambition--ambition, the vice of vices. For it takes its
victims' all--moral, mental, physical. And, while other vices rarely
wreck any but small men or injure more than what is within their small
circles of influence, ambition seizes only the superior and sets them on
to use their superior powers to blast communities, states, nations,
continents. Yet it is called a virtue. And men who have sold themselves
to it and for it to the last shred of manhood are esteemed and, mystery
of mysteries, esteem themselves!
I had come to Burbank to manufacture him into a President. His wife and
I had together produced an excellent raw material. Now, to make it up
into the finished product!
He pointed to the filing-cases that covered the west wall of his library
from floor to ceiling, from north window to south. "I base my hope on
those--next to you, of course," said he. Then with his "woeful widower"
pose, he added: "They were _her_ suggestions."
I looked at the filing-cases and waited for him to explain.
"When we were first married," he went on presently, "she said, 'It seems
to me, if I were a public man, I should keep everything relating to
myself--every speech, all that the newspapers said, every meeting and
the lists of the important people who were there, notes of _all_ the
people I ever met anywhere, every letter or telegram or note I received.
If you do, you may find after a few years that you have an enormous list
of acquaintances. You've forgotten them because you meet so many, but
they will not have forgotten you, who were one of the principal figures
at the meeting or reception.' That's in substance what she said. And so,
we began and kept it up"--he paused in his deliberate manner, compressed
his lips, then added--"together."
I opened one of the filing-cases, glanced at him for permission, took
out a slip of paper under the M's. It was covered with notes, in Mrs.
Burbank's writing, of a reception given to him at the Manufacturers'
Club in St. Louis three years before. A lot of names, after each some
reminders of the standing and the personal appearance of the man.
Another slip, taken at random from the same box, contained similar notes
of a trip through Montana eight years before.
"Wonderful!" I exclaimed, as the full value of these accumulations
loomed in my mind. "I knew she was an extraordinary woman. Now I see
that she had genius for politics."
His expression--a peering through that eternal pose of his--made me
revise my first judgment of his mourning. For I caught a glimpse of a
real human being, one who had loved and lost, looking grief and pride
and gratitude. "If she had left me two or three years earlier," he said
in that solemn, posing tone, "I doubt if I should have got one step
further. As it is, I may be able to go on, though--I have lost--my
staff."
What fantastic envelopes does man, after he has been finished by
Nature, wrap about himself in his efforts to improve her handiwork!
Physically, even when most dressed, we are naked in comparison with the
enswathings that hide our real mental and moral selves from one
another--and from ourselves.
My campaign was based on the contents of those filing-cases. I learned
all the places throughout the West--cities, towns, centrally-located
villages--where he had been and had made an impression; and by simple
and obvious means we were able to convert them into centers of "the
Burbank boom." I could afterward trace to the use we made of those
memoranda the direct getting of no less than one hundred and seven
delegates to the national convention--and that takes no account of the
vaster indirect value of so much easily worked-up, genuine, unpurchased
and unpurchasable "Burbank sentiment." The man of only local prominence,
whom Burbank remembered perfectly after a chance meeting years before,
could have no doubt who ought to be the party's nominee for President.
The national machine of our party was then in the custody, and
supposedly in the control, of Senator Goodrich of New Jersey. He had a
reputation for Machiavellian dexterity, but I found that he was an
accident rather than an actuality.
The dominion of the great business interests over politics was the rapid
growth of about twenty years--the consolidations of business naturally
producing concentrations of the business world's political power in the
hands of the few controllers of the big railway, industrial and
financial combines. Goodrich had happened to be acquainted with some of
the most influential of these business "kings"; they naturally made him
their agent for the conveying of their wishes and their bribes of one
kind and another to the national managers of both parties. They knew
little of the details of practical politics, knew only what they needed
in their businesses; and as long as they got that, it did not interest
them what was done with the rest of the power their "campaign
contributions" gave.
With such resources any man of good intelligence and discretion could
have got the same results as Goodrich's. He was simply a lackey,
strutting and cutting a figure in his master's clothes and under his
master's name. He was pitifully vain of his reputation as a Machiavelli
and a go-between. Vanity is sometimes a source of great strength; but
vanity of that sort, and about a position in which secrecy is the prime
requisite, could mean only weakness.
Throughout his eight years of control of our party it had had possession
of all departments of the national administration--except of the House
of Representatives during the past two years. This meant the
uninterrupted and unchecked reign of the interests. To treat with
consideration the interests, the strong men of the country, they who
must have a free hand for developing its resources, to give them
privileges and immunities beyond what can be permitted the ordinary
citizen or corporation--that is a course which, however offensive to
abstract justice, still has, as it seems to me, a practical justice in
it, and, at any rate, must be pursued so long as the masses of the
voters are short-sighted, unreasoning and in nose-rings to political
machines. A man's rights, whatever they may be in theory, are in
practice only what he has the intelligence and the power to compel.
But, for the sake of the nation, for the upholding of civilization
itself, these over-powerful interests should never be given their heads,
should be restrained as closely as may be to their rights--their
_practical_ rights. Goodrich had neither the sagacity nor the
patriotism--nor the force of will, for that matter--to keep them within
the limits of decency and discretion. Hence the riot of plunder and
privilege which revolted and alarmed me when I came to Washington and
saw politics in the country-wide, yes, history-wide, horizon of that
view-point.
Probably I should have been more leisurely in bringing my presidential
plans to a focus, had I not seen how great and how near was the peril to
my party. It seemed to me, not indeed a perfect or even a satisfactory,
but the best available, instrument for holding the balances of order as
even as might be between our country's two opposing elements of
disorder--the greedy plunderers and the rapidly infuriating plundered.
And I saw that no time was to be lost, if the party was not to be blown
to fragments. The first mutterings of the storm were in our summary
ejection from control of the House in the midway election. If the party
were not to be dismembered, I must oust Goodrich, must defeat his plans
for nominating Cromwell, must nominate Burbank instead. If I should
succeed in electing him, I reasoned that I could through him carry out
my policy of moderation and _practical_ patriotism--to yield to the
powerful few a minimum of what they could compel, to give to the
prostrate but potentially powerful many at least enough to keep them
quiet--a stomachful. The world may have advanced; but patriotism still
remains the art of restraining the arrogance of full stomachs and the
anger of empty ones.
In Cromwell, Goodrich believed he had a candidate with sufficient hold
upon the rank and file of the party to enable him to carry the election
by the usual means--a big campaign fund properly distributed in the
doubtful states. I said to Senator Scarborough of Indiana soon after
Cromwell's candidacy was announced: "What do you think of Goodrich's
man?"
Scarborough, though new to the Senate then, had shown himself far and
away the ablest of the opposition Senators. He had as much intellect as
any of them; and he had what theorists, such as he, usually lack, skill
at "grand tactics"--the management of men in the mass. His one
weakness--and that, from my standpoint, a great one--was a literal
belief in democratic institutions and in the inspiring but in practice
pernicious principle of exact equality before the law.
"Cromwell's political sponsors," was his reply, "are two as shrewd
bankers as there are in New York. I have heard it said that a fitting
sign for a bank would be: 'Here we do nothing for nothing for nobody.'"
An admirable summing up of Cromwell's candidacy. And I knew that it
would so appear to the country, that no matter how great a corruption
fund Goodrich might throw into the campaign, we should, in that time of
public exasperation, be routed if Cromwell was our standard-bearer--so
utterly routed that we could not possibly get ourselves together again
for eight, perhaps twelve years. There might even be a re-alignment of
parties with some sort of socialism in control of one of them. If
control were to be retained by the few who have the capital and the
intellect to make efficient the nation's resources and energy, my
projects must be put through at once.
I had accumulated a fund of five hundred thousand dollars for my
"presidential flotation"--half of it contributed by Roebuck in exchange
for a promise that his son-in-law should have an ambassadorship if
Burbank were elected; the other half set aside by me from the "reserve"
I had formed out of the year-by-year contributions of my combine. By the
judicious investment of that capital I purposed to get Burbank the
nomination on the first ballot--at least four hundred and sixty of the
nine hundred-odd delegates.
In a national convention the delegates are, roughly speaking, about
evenly divided among the three sections of the country--a third from
east of the Alleghanies; a third from the West; a third from the South.
It was hopeless for us to gun for delegates in the East; that was the
especial bailiwick of Senator Goodrich. The most we could do there would
be to keep him occupied by quietly encouraging any anti-Cromwell
sentiment--and it existed a-plenty. Our real efforts were to be in the
West and South.
I organized under Woodruff a corps of about thirty traveling agents.
Each man knew only his own duties, knew nothing of the general plan, not
even that there was a general plan. Each was a trained political worker,
a personal retainer of ours. I gave them their instructions; Woodruff
equipped them with the necessary cash. During the next five months they
were incessantly on the go--dealing with our party's western machines
where they could; setting up rival machines in promising localities
where Goodrich controlled the regular machines; using money here,
diplomacy there, both yonder, promises of patronage everywhere.
Such was my department of secrecy. At the head of my department of
publicity I put De Milt, a sort of cousin of Burbank's and a newspaper
man. He attended to the subsidizing of news agencies that supplied
thousands of country papers with boiler-plate matter to fill their
inside pages. He also subsidized and otherwise won over many small town
organs of the party. Further, he and three assistants wrote each week
many columns of "boom" matter, all of which was carefully revised by
Burbank himself before it went out as "syndicate letters." If Goodrich
hadn't been ignorant of conditions west of the Alleghanies and confident
that his will was law, he would have scented out this department of
publicity of mine and so would have seen into my "flotation." But he
knew nothing beyond his routine. I once asked him how many country
newspapers there were in the United States, and he said: "Oh, I don't
know. Perhaps three or four thousand." Even had I enlightened him to the
extent of telling him that there were about five times that number, he
would have profited nothing. Had he been able to see the importance of
such a fact to capable political management, he would have learned it
long before through years of constant use of the easiest avenue into the
heart of the people.
He did not wake up to adequate action until the fourth of that group of
states whose delegations to our national conventions were habitually
bought and sold, broke its agreement with him and instructed its
delegation to vote for Burbank. By the time he had a corps of agents in
those states, Doc Woodruff had "acquired" more than a hundred delegates.
Goodrich was working only through the regular machinery of the party and
was fighting against a widespread feeling that Cromwell shouldn't, and
probably couldn't, be elected; we, on the other hand, were manufacturing
presidential sentiment for a candidate who was already popular. Nor had
Goodrich much advantage over us with the regular machines anywhere
except in the East.
Just as I was congratulating myself that nothing could happen to prevent
our triumph at the convention, Roebuck telegraphed me to come to
Chicago. I found with him in the sitting-room of his suite in the
Auditorium Annex, Partridge and Granby, next to him the most important
members of my combine, since they were the only ones who had interests
that extended into many states. It was after an uneasy silence that
Granby, the uncouth one of the three, said:
"Senator, we brought you here to tell you this Burbank nonsense has gone
far enough."
XV
MUTINY
It was all I could do not to show my astonishment and sudden fury. "I
don't understand," said I, in a tone which I somehow managed to keep
down to tranquil inquiry.
But I did understand. It instantly came to me that the three had been
brought into line for Cromwell by their powerful business associates in
Wall Street, probably by the great bankers who loaned them money. Swift
upon the surge of anger I had suppressed before it flamed at the surface
came a surge of triumph--which I also suppressed. I had often wished,
perhaps as a matter of personal pride, just this opportunity; and here
it was!
"Cromwell must be nominated," said Granby in his insolent tone. He had
but two tones--the insolent and the cringing. "He's safe and sound.
Burbank isn't trusted in the East. And we didn't like his conduct last
year. He caters to the demagogues."
Roebuck, through his liking for me, I imagine, rather than through
refined instinct, now began to speak, thinly disguising his orders as
requests. I waited until he had talked himself out. I waited with the
same air of calm attention until Partridge had given me his jerky
variation. I waited, still apparently calm, until the silence must have
been extremely uncomfortable to them. I waited until Granby said
sharply, "Then it is settled?"
"Yes," said I, keeping all emotion out of my face and voice. "It is
settled. Ex-Governor Burbank is to be nominated. I am at a loss to
account for this outbreak. However, I shall at once take measures to
prevent its occurring again. Good day."
And I was gone--straight to the train. I did not pause at Fredonia but
went on to the capital. The next morning I had the legislature and the
attorney-general at work demolishing Granby's business in my state--for
I had selected him to make an example of, incidentally because he had
insulted me, but chiefly because he was the most notorious of my ten,
was about the greediest and crudest "robber baron" in the West. My
legislature was to revoke his charter; my attorney-general was to
enforce upon him the laws I had put on the statute books against just
such emergencies. And it had never entered their swollen heads that I
might have taken these precautions that are in the primer of political
management.
My three mutineers pursued me to the capital, missed me, were standing
breathless at the door of my house near Fredonia on the morning of the
third day. I refused to be seen until the afternoon of the fourth day,
and then I forbade Granby. But when I descended to the reception-room he
rushed at me, tried to take my hand, pouring out a stream of sickening
apologies. I rang the bell. When a servant appeared, I said, "Show this
man the door."
Granby turned white and, after a long look into my face, said in a
broken voice to Roebuck: "For God's sake, don't go back on me, Mr.
Roebuck. Do what you can for me."
As the curtain dropped behind him, I looked expectantly at Roebuck,
sweating with fright for his imperiled millions. Probably his mental
state can be fully appreciated only by a man who has also felt the dread
of losing the wealth upon which he is wholly dependent for courage,
respect and self-respect.
"Don't misunderstand me, Harvey," he began to plead, forgetting that
there was anybody else to save besides himself. "I didn't mean--"
"What _did_ you mean?" I interrupted, my tone ominously quiet.
"We didn't intend--" began Partridge.
"What _did_ you intend?" I interrupted as quietly as before.
They looked nervously each at the other, then at me. "If you think
Burbank's the man," Roebuck began again, "why, you may go ahead--"
There burst in me such a storm of anger that I dared not speak until I
could control and aim the explosion. Partridge saw how, and how
seriously, Roebuck had blundered. He thrust him aside and faced me.
"What's the use of beating around the bush?" he said bluntly. "We've
made damn fools of ourselves, Senator. We thought we had the whip. We
see that we haven't. We're mighty sorry we didn't do a little thinking
before Roebuck sent that telegram. We hope you'll let us off as easy as
you can, and we promise not to meddle in your business again--and you
can bet your life we'll keep our promise."
"I think you will," said I.
"I am a man of my word," said he. "And so is Roebuck."
"Oh, I don't mean that," was my answer. "I mean, when the Granby
object-lesson in the stupidity of _premature_ ingratitude is complete,
you shan't be able to forget it."
They drifted gloomily in the current of their unpleasant thoughts; then
each took a turn at wringing my hand. I invited them up to my
sitting-room where we smoked and talked amicably for a couple of hours.
It would have amused the thousands of employés and dependents over whom
these two lorded it arrogantly to have heard with what care they weighed
their timid words, how nervous they were lest they should give me fresh
provocation. As they were leaving, Roebuck said earnestly: "Isn't there
_anything_ I can do for you, Harvey?"
"Why, yes," said I. "Give out a statement next Sunday in Chicago--for
the Monday morning papers--indorsing Cromwell's candidacy. Say you and
all your associates are enthusiastic for it because his election would
give the large enterprises that have been the object of demagogic attack
a sense of security for at least four years more."
He thought I was joking him, being unable to believe me so lacking in
judgment as to fail to realize what a profound impression in Cromwell's
favor such a statement from the great Roebuck would produce. I wrote and
mailed him an interview with himself the following day; he gave it out
as I had requested. It got me Burbank delegations in Illinois, South
Dakota and Oregon the same week.
XVI
A VICTORY FOR THE PEOPLE
I arrived at Chicago the day before the convention and, going at once to
our state headquarters in the Great Northern, shut myself in with Doc
Woodruff. My door-keeper, the member of the legislature from Fredonia,
ventured to interrupt with the announcement that a messenger had come
from Senator Goodrich.
"Let him in," said I.
As the door-man disappeared Doc Woodruff glanced at his watch, then said
with a smile: "You've been here seven minutes and a half--just time for
a lookout down stairs to telephone to the Auditorium and for the
messenger to drive from there here. Goodrich is on the anxious-seat, all
right."
The messenger was Goodrich's handy-man, Judge Dufour. I myself have
always frowned on these public exhibitions of the intimacy of judges in
practical politics; but Goodrich had many small vanities--he liked his
judges to hold his coat and his governors to carry his satchel. One
would say that such petty weaknesses would be the undoing of a man.
Fortunately, we are not as weak as our weakness but as strong as our
strength; and while the universal weaknesses are shared by the strong,
their strength is peculiar and rare. After Dufour had introduced himself
and we had exchanged commonplaces he said: "Senator, there's a little
conference of some of the leaders at headquarters and it isn't complete
without you. So, Senator Goodrich has sent me over to escort you."
"Thank you--very courteous of you and of him," said I without
hesitation, for I knew what was coming as soon as his name had been
brought in, and my course was laid out. "But I can't leave just now.
Please ask him if he won't come over--any time within the next four
hours." This blandly and without a sign that I was conscious of Dufour's
stupefaction--for his vanity made him believe that the god the great
Dufour knelt to must be the god of gods.
There is no more important branch of the art of successful dealing with
men than the etiquette of who shall call upon whom. Many a man has in
his very hour of triumph ruined his cause with a blunder there--by going
to see some one whom he should have compelled to come to him, or by
compelling some one to come to him when he should have made the
concession of going. I had two reasons for thus humiliating Goodrich,
neither of them the reason he doubtless attributed to me, the desire to
feed my vanity. My first reason was his temperament; I knew his having
to come to me would make him bow before me in spirit, as he was a
tyrant, and tyrants are always cringers. My second reason was that I
thought myself near enough to control of the convention to be able to
win control by creating the atmosphere of impending success. There is
always a lot of fellows who wait to see who is likely to win, so that
they may be on the side of the man in the plum tree; often there are
enough of these to gain the victory for him who can lure them over at
just the right moment.
As soon as Dufour had taken his huge body away I said to Woodruff: "Go
out with your men and gather in the office down stairs as many members
of the doubtful delegations as you can. Keep them where they'll be bound
to see Goodrich come in and go out."
He rushed away, and I waited--working with the leaders of three
far-western states. At the end of two hours, I won them by the spectacle
of the arriving Goodrich. He came in, serene, smiling, giving me the
joyously shining eyes and joyously firm hand-clasp of the politician's
greeting; not an outward sign that he would like to see me tortured to
death by some slow process then and there. Hypocritical preliminaries
were not merely unnecessary but even highly ridiculous; yet, so great
was his anger and confusion that he began with the "prospects for an
old-time convention, with old-time enthusiasm and that generous rivalry
which is the best sign of party health."
"I hope not, Senator," said I pleasantly. "Here, we think the fight is
over--and won."
He lifted his eyebrows; but I saw his maxillary muscles twitching. "We
don't figure it out just that way at headquarters," he replied oilily.
"But, there's no doubt about it, your man has developed strength in the
West."
"And South," said I, with deliberate intent to inflame, for I knew how
he must feel about those delegates we had bought away from him.
There were teeth enough in his smile--but little else. "I think Burbank
and Cromwell will be about even on the first ballot," said he. "May the
best man win! We're all working for the good of the party and the
country. But--I came, rather, to get your ideas about platform."
I opened a drawer in the table at which I was sitting and took out a
paper. "We've embodied our ideas in this," said I, holding the paper
toward him. "There's a complete platform, but we only insist on the five
paragraphs immediately after the preamble."
He seemed to age as he read. "Impossible!" he finally exclaimed.
"Preposterous! It would be difficult enough to get any money for
_Cromwell_ on such a platform, well as our conservative men know they
can trust him. But for _Burbank_--you couldn't get a cent--not a damn
cent! A rickety candidate on a rickety platform--that's what they'd
say."
I made no answer.
"May I ask," he presently went on, "has ex-Governor Burbank seen
this--this astonishing document?"
Burbank had written it. I confess when he first showed it to me, it had
affected me somewhat as it was now affecting Goodrich. For, a dealer
with business men as well as with public sentiment, I appreciated
instantly the shock some of the phrases would give the large interests.
But Burbank had not talked to me five minutes before I saw he was in the
main right and that his phrases only needed a little "toning down" so
that they wouldn't rasp too harshly on "conservative" ears, "Yes, Mr.
Burbank has seen it," said I. "He approves it--though, of course, it
does not represent his _personal_ views, or his _intentions_."
"If Mr. Burbank approves _this_," exclaimed Goodrich, red and tossing
the paper on the table, "then my gravest doubts about him are confirmed.
He is an utterly unsafe man. He could not carry a single state in the
East where there are any large centerings of capital or of
enterprise--not even our yellow-dog states."
"He can and will carry them all," said I. "They _must_ go for him,
because after the opposition have nominated, and have announced their
platform, your people will regard him as, at any rate, much the less of
two evils. We have decided on that platform because we wish to make it
possible for him to carry the necessary Western states. We can't hold
our rank and file out here unless we have a popular platform. The people
must have their way _before_ election, Senator, if the interests are to
continue to have their way _after_ election."
"I'll never consent to that platform," said he, rising.
"Very well," said I with a mild show of regret, rising also as if I had
no wish to prolong the interview.
He brought his hand down violently upon the paper. "This," he exclaimed,
"is a timely uncovering of a most amazing plot--a plot to turn our party
over to demagoguery."
"To rescue it from the combination of demagoguery and plutagoguery that
is wrecking it," said I without heat, "and make it again an instrument
of at least sanity, perhaps of patriotism."
"We control the platform committee," he went on, "and I can tell you
now, Senator Sayler, that that there platform, nor nothing like it, will
never be reported." In his agitation he went back to the grammar of his
youthful surroundings.
"I regret that you will force us to a fight on the floor of the
convention," I returned. "It can't but make a bad impression on the
country to see two factions in the party--one for the people, the other
against them."
Goodrich sat down.
"But," I went on, "at least, such a fight will insure Burbank all the
delegates except perhaps the two or three hundred you directly control.
You are courageous, Senator, to insist upon a count of noses on the
issues we raise there."
He took up the platform again, and began to pick it to pieces phrase by
phrase. That was what I wanted. Some phrases I defended, some I conceded
might be altered to advantage, others I cheerfully agreed to discard
altogether. Presently he had a pencil in his hand and was going over the
crucial paragraphs, was making interlineations. And he grew more and
more reasonable. At last I suggested that he take the platform away
with him, make the changes agreed upon and such others as he might
think wise, and send it back for my criticism and suggestions. He
assented, and we parted on excellent terms--"harmony" in the convention
was assured.
When the amended platform came back late in the afternoon, I detained
Goodrich's messenger, the faithful Dufour again. It was still the
Burbank platform, with no changes we could not concede. I had a copy
made and gave it to Dufour, saying: "Tell the Senator I think this
admirable, a great improvement. But I'll try to see him to-night and
thank him."
I did not try to see him, however. I took no risk of lessening the
effect created by his having to come to me. He had entered through
groups of delegates from all parts of the country. He had passed out
through a crowd, so well did my men employ the time his long stay with
me gave them.
On the next day the platform was adopted. On the following day, amid
delirious enthusiasm in the packed galleries and not a little agitation
among the delegates--who, even to the "knowing ones," were as ignorant
of what was really going on as private soldiers are of the general's
plan of battle--amid waving of banners and crash of band and shriek of
crowd Burbank was nominated on the first ballot. Our press hailed the
nomination as a "splendid victory of the honest common sense of the
entire party over the ultra conservatism of a faction associated in the
popular mind with segregated wealth and undue enjoyment of the favors of
laws and law-makers."
When I saw Burbank he took me graciously by the hand. "I thank you,
Harvey," he said, "for your aid in this glorious victory of the people."
I did not realize then that his vanity was of the kind which can in an
instant spring into a Redwood colossus from the shriveled stalk to which
the last glare of truth has wilted it. Still his words and manner jarred
on me. As our eyes met, something in mine--perhaps something he imagined
he saw--made him frown in the majesty of offended pose. Then his
timidity took fright and he said apologetically, "How can I repay you?
After all, it is your victory."
I protested.
"Then _ours_," said he. "Yours, for us."
XVII
SCARBOROUGH
Now came _the_ problem--to elect.
We hear much of many wonders of combination and concentration of
_industrial_ power which railway and telegraph have wrought. But nothing
is said about what seems to me the greatest wonder of them all--how
these forces have resulted in the concentration of the _political_ power
of upwards of twelve millions of our fifteen million voters; how the few
can impose their ideas and their will upon widening circles, out and
out, until all are included. The people are scattered; the powers
confer, man to man, day by day. The people are divided by partizan and
other prejudices; the powers are bound together by the one
self-interest. The people must accept such political organizations as
are provided for them; the powers pay for, and their agents make and
direct, those organizations. The people are poor; the powers are rich.
The people have not even offices to bestow; the powers have offices to
give and lucrative employment of all kinds, and material and social
advancement,--everything that the vanity or the appetite of man craves.
The people punish but feebly--usually the wrong persons--and soon
forget; the powers relentlessly and surely pursue those who oppose them,
forgive only after the offender has surrendered unconditionally, and
they never forget where it is to their interest to remember. The powers
know both what they want and how to get it; the people know neither.
Back in March, when Goodrich first suspected that I had outgeneraled
him, he opened negotiations with the national machine of the opposition
party. He decided that, if I should succeed in nominating Burbank, he
would save his masters and himself by nominating as the opposition
candidate a man under their and his control, and by electing him with an
enormous campaign fund.
Beckett, the subtlest and most influential of the managers of the
national machine of the opposition party, submitted several names to
him. He selected Henry J. Simpson, Justice of the Supreme Court of
Ohio--a slow, shy, ultra-conservative man, his brain spun full in every
cell with the cobwebs of legal technicality. He was, in his way, almost
as satisfactory a candidate for the interests as Cromwell would have
been. For, while he was honest, of what value is honesty when combined
with credulity and lack of knowledge of affairs? They knew what advisers
he would select, men trained in their service and taken from their legal
staffs. They knew he would shrink from anything "radical" or
"disturbing"--that is, would not molest the two packs of wolves, the
business and the political, at their feast upon the public. He came of a
line of bigoted adherents of his party; he led a simple, retired life
among sheep and cows and books asleep in the skins of sheep and cows. He
wore old-fashioned rural whiskers, thickest in the throat, thinning
toward the jawbone, scant about the lower lip, absent from the upper.
These evidences of unfitness to cope with up-to-date corruption seemed
to endear him to the masses.
As soon as those big organs of the opposition that were in the control
of the powers began to talk of Simpson as an ideal candidate, I
suspected what was in the wind. But I had my hands full; the most I
could then do was to supply my local "left-bower," Silliman, with funds
and set him to work for a candidate for his party more to my taste. It
was fortunate for me that I had cured myself of the habit of worrying.
For it was plain that, if Goodrich and Beckett succeeded in getting
Simpson nominated by the opposition, I should have a hard fight to raise
the necessary campaign money. The large interests either would finance
Simpson or, should I convince them that Burbank was as good for their
purposes as Simpson, would be indifferent which won.
I directed Silliman to work for Rundle of Indiana, a thoroughly honest
man, in deadly earnest about half a dozen deadly wrong things, and
capable of anything in furthering them--after the manner of fanatics. If
he had not been in public life, he would have been a camp-meeting
exhorter. Crowds liked to listen to him; the radicals and radically
inclined throughout the West swore by him; he had had two terms in
Congress, had got a hundred-odd votes for the nomination for President
at the last national convention of the opposition. A splendid scarecrow
for the Wall Street crowd, but difficult to nominate over Goodrich's man
Simpson in a convention of practical politicians.
In May--it was the afternoon of the very day my mutineers got back into
the harness--Woodruff asked me if I would see a man he had picked up in
a delegate-hunting trip into Indiana. "An old pal of mine, much the
better for the twelve years' wear since I last saw him. He has always
trained with the opposition. He's a full-fledged graduate of the Indiana
school of politics, and that's the best. It's almost all craft
there--they hate to give up money and don't use it except as a last
resort."
He brought in his man--Merriweather by name. I liked the first look at
him--keen, cynical, indifferent. He had evidently sat in so many games
of chance of all kinds that play roused in him only the ice-cold passion
of the purely professional.
"There's been nothing doing in our state for the last two or three
years--at least nothing in my line," said he. "A rank outsider,
Scarborough--"
I nodded. "Yes, I know him. He came into the Senate from your state two
years ago."
"Well, he's built up a machine of his own and runs things to suit
himself."
"I thought he wasn't a politician," said I.
Merriweather's bony face showed a faint grin. "The best ever," said he.
"He's put the professionals out of business, without its costing him a
cent. I've got tired of waiting for him to blow over."
Tired--and hungry, I thought. After half an hour of pumping I sent him
away, detaining Woodruff. "What does he really think about Rundle?" I
asked.
"Says he hasn't the ghost of a chance--that Scarborough'll control the
Indiana delegation and that Scarborough has no more use for lunatics
than for grafters."
This was not encouraging. I called Merriweather back. "Why don't you
people nominate Scarborough at St. Louis?" said I.
Behind his surface of attention, I saw his mind traveling at lightning
speed in search of my hidden purpose along every avenue that my
suggestion opened.
"Scarborough'd be a dangerous man for you," he replied. "He's got a
nasty way of reaching across party lines for votes."
I kept my face a blank.
"You've played politics only in your own state or against the Eastern
crowd, these last few years," he went on, as if in answer to my
thoughts. "You don't realize what a hold Scarborough's got through the
entire West. He has split your party and the machine of his own in our
state, and they know all about him and his doings in the states to the
west. The people like a fellow that knocks out the regulars."
"A good many call him a demagogue, don't they?" said I.
"Yes--and he is, in sort of a way," replied Merriweather. "But--well,
he's got a knack of telling the truth so that it doesn't scare folks.
And he's managed to convince them that he isn't looking out for number
one. It can't be denied that he made a good governor. For instance, he
got after the monopolies, and the cost of living is twenty per cent.
lower in Indiana than just across the line in Ohio."
"Then I should say that all the large interests in the country would
line up against him," said I.
"Every one," said Merriweather, and an expression of understanding
flitted across his face. He went on: "But it ain't much use talking
about him. He couldn't get the nomination--at least, it wouldn't be easy
to get it for him."
"I suppose not," said I. "That's a job for a first-class man--and
they're rare." And I shook hands with him.
About a week later he returned, and tried to make a report to me. But I
sent him away, treating him very formally. I appreciated that, being an
experienced and capable man, he knew the wisdom of getting intimately in
touch with his real employer; but, as I had my incomparable Woodruff,
better far than I at the rough work of politics, there was no necessity
for my entangling myself. Merriweather went to Woodruff, and Woodruff
reported to me--Scarborough's friends in Indianapolis all agreed that
he did not want the nomination and would not have it.
"We must force it on him," said I. "We must have Scarborough."
Immediately after Burbank's nomination, Goodrich concentrated upon
nominating Judge Simpson. He had three weeks, and he worked hard and
well. I think he overdid it in the editorials in our party organs under
his influence in New York, Boston and other eastern cities--never a day
without lugubrious screeds on the dismal outlook for Burbank if the
other party should put up Simpson. But his Simpson editorials in big
opposition papers undoubtedly produced an effect. I set for De Milt and
his bureau of underground publicity the task of showing up, as far as it
was prudent to expose intimate politics to the public, Goodrich and his
crowd and their conspiracy with Beckett and his crowd to secure the
opposition nomination for a man of the same offensive type as Cromwell.
And I directed Woodruff to supply Silliman and Merriweather and that
department of my "bi-partizan" machine with all the money they wanted.
"They can't spend much to advantage at this late day except for
traveling expenses," said I. "Our best plan, anyhow, is good honest
missionary work with the honest men of the other party who wish to see
its best man nominated."
While Goodrich's agents and Beckett's agents were industriously
arranging the eastern machinery of the opposition party for Simpson,
Merriweather had Silliman's men toiling in the West and South to get
Rundle delegates or uninstructed delegations. And, after our
conversation, he was reinforced by Woodruff and such men of his staff as
could be used without suspicion. Woodruff himself could permeate like an
odorless gas; you knew he was there only by the results. Nothing could
be done for Rundle in his own state; but the farther away from his home
our men got, the easier it was to induce--by purchase and otherwise--the
politicians of his party to think well of him. This the more because
they regarded Simpson as a "stuff" and a "stiff"--and they weren't far
wrong.
"It may not be Scarborough, and it probably won't be Rundle," Woodruff
said in his final report to me, "but it certainly won't be Simpson.
He's the dead one, no matter how well he does on the first ballot."
But I would not let him give me the details--the story of shrewd and
slippery plots, stratagems, surprises. "I am worn out, mind and body,"
said I in apology for my obvious weariness and indifference.
For six months I had been incessantly at work. The tax upon memory
alone, to say nothing of the other faculties, had been crushing. Easy as
political facts always were for me, I could not lightly bear the strain
of keeping constantly in mind not merely the outlines, but also hundreds
of the details, of the political organizations of forty-odd states with
all their counties. And the tax on memory was probably the least. Then
added to all my political work was business care; for while I was
absorbed in politics, Ed Ramsay had badly muddled the business. Nor had
I, like Burbank and Woodruff, the power to empty my mind as I touched
the pillow and so to get eight hours of unbroken rest each night.
Woodruff began asking me for instructions. But my judgment was
uncertain, and my imagination barren. "Do as you think best," said I. "I
must rest. I've reached my limit,"--my limit of endurance of the sights
and odors and befoulings of these sewers of politics I must in person
adventure in order to reach my goal. I must pause and rise to the
surface for a breath of decent air or I should not have the strength to
finish these menial and even vile tasks which no man can escape if he is
a practical leader in the practical activities of practical life.
XVIII
A DANGEROUS PAUSE
I took train for my friend Sandys' country place near Cleveland,
forbidding Woodruff or Burbank or my secretaries to communicate with me.
Sandys had no interest in politics--his fortune was in real estate and,
therefore, did not tempt or force him into relations with political
machines.
Early in the morning after my arrival I got away from the others and,
with a stag-hound who remembered me with favor from my last visit,
struck into woods that had never been despoiled by man. As I tramped on
and on, my mind seemed to revive, and I tried to take up the plots and
schemes that had been all-important yesterday. But I could not. Instead,
as any sane man must when he and nature are alone and face to face, I
fell to marveling that I could burn up myself, the best of me, the best
years of my one life, in such a fever of folly and fraud as this
political career of mine. I seemed to be in a lucid interval between
paroxysms of insanity. I reviewed the men and things of my world as one
recalls the absurd and repellent visions of a nightmare. I shrank from
passing from this mood of wakefulness and reason back into the unreal
reality of what had for years been my all-in-all. I wandered hour after
hour, sometimes imagining that I was flying from the life I loathed,
again that somewhere in those cool, green, golden-lighted mazes I should
find--my lost youth, and her. For, how could I think of _it_ without
thinking of _her_ also? It had been lighted by her; it had gone with
her; it lived in memory, illumined by her.
The beautiful, beautiful world-that-ought-to-be! The hideous, the
horrible world-that-is!
I did not return to the house until almost dinner-time. "I have to go
away to-morrow morning," I announced after dinner. For I felt that, if I
did not fly at once, I should lose all heart for the task which must be
finished.
"Why," protested Sandys, "you came to stay until we all started with you
for St. Louis."
"I must go," I repeated. I did not care to invent an excuse; I could
not give the reason. Had I followed my impulse, I should have gone at
once, that night.
By noon the next day I had again flung myself into the vexed political
ocean whose incessant buffetings give the swimmers small chance to think
of anything beyond the next oncoming wave.
XIX
DAVID SENT OUT AGAINST GOLIATH
I was almost master of myself again when, a week later, I got aboard the
car in which Carlotta and I were taking our friends to look on at the
opposition's convention at St. Louis.
When we arrived, I went at once to confer with Merriweather in a room at
the Southern Hotel which no one knew he had. "Simpson has under, rather
than over, five hundred delegates," was his first item of good news. "It
takes six hundred and fifty to nominate. As his sort of boom always
musters its greatest strength on the first ballot, I'm putting my money
two to one against him."
"And Scarborough?" I asked, wondering at my indifference to this
foreshadowing of triumph.
"My men talk him to every incoming delegation. It's well known that he
don't want the nomination and has forbidden his friends to vote for him
and has pledged them to work against him. Then, too, the bosses and the
boys don't like him--to put it mildly. But I think we're making every
one feel he's the only man they can put up, with a chance to beat
Burbank."
[Illustration: "THAT," I REPLIED TO MRS. SANDYS, "IS SENATOR SCARBOROUGH
OF INDIANA" p. 226]
My wife and our friends and I dined at the Southern that night. As we
were about to leave, the streets began to fill. And presently through
the close-packed masses came at a walk an open carriage--the
storm-center of a roar that almost drowned the music of the four or five
bands. The electric lights made the scene bright as day.
"Who is he?" asked the woman at my side--Mrs. Sandys.
She was looking at _the_ man in that carriage--there were four, but
there was no mistaking him. He was seated, was giving not the slightest
heed to the cheering throngs. His soft black hat was pulled well down
over his brows; his handsome profile was stern, his face pale. If that
crowd had been hurling curses at him and preparing to tear him limb from
limb he would not have looked different. He was smooth-shaven, which
made him seem younger than I knew him to be. And over him was the
glamour of the world-that-ought-to-be in which he lived and had the
power to compel others to live as long as they were under the spell of
his personality.
"That," I replied to Mrs. Sandys, "is Senator Scarborough of Indiana."
"What's he so stern about?"
"I'm sure I don't know--perhaps to hide his joy," said I.
But I did know, and my remark was the impulsive fling of envy. He had
found out, several weeks before, what a strong undercurrent was running
toward him. He was faced by a dilemma--if he did not go to the
convention, it would be said that he had stayed away deliberately, and
he would be nominated; if he went, to try to prevent his nomination, the
enthusiasm of his admirers and followers would give the excuse for
forcing the nomination upon him. And as he sat there, with that ominous
tumult about him, he was realizing how hard his task was to be.
His companions pushed him a passage through the crowds on the sidewalk
and in the lobby, and he shut himself away in the upper part of the
hotel. When we left, half an hour later, the people were packed before
that face of the hotel which displayed the banner of the Indiana
delegation, were cheering Scarborough, were clamoring--in vain--for him
to show himself.
"But won't he offend them?" asked my wife.
"A crowd loves like a woman," said I. "Indifference only excites it."
"Oh, _I_ never loved that way," protested Mrs. Sandys.
"Then," said my wife, rather sourly I thought, "you and Mr. Sandys have
something to live for."
And so we talked no more politics. There may be American women who
_really_ like to talk politics, but I never happened to know one with so
little sense. It's a pity we men do not imitate our women more closely
in one respect. In season and out of season, they never talk anything
but business--woman's one business. When other things are being
discussed, they listen, or rather, pretend to listen; in reality, their
minds are still on their business, and how they shall contrive to bring
it back into the conversation with advantage to themselves.
Next day the convention adopted a wishy-washy platform much like
Burbank's--if anything, weaker. I saw Goodrich's blight upon it. But the
victory cost him dear. That night the delegates realized what a blunder
they had made--or thought they realized it after Merriweather and his
staff had circulated among them. Few of them had been trusted by Beckett
with the secret that, with that platform and with Simpson as the
nominee, their party would have the interests behind it, would almost
certainly win. They only saw ahead a dull campaign, and no real issue
between the parties, and their candidate, if he was Simpson, much the
less attractive personality of the two.
The following morning the voting began; and after seven ballots Simpson
had thirty-nine votes less than on the first ballot. "It was like a
funeral," was the verdict of my disappointed guests that evening. A
night of debate and gloom among the politicians and other delegates, and
on the opening ballot Merriweather sprung his trap.
The first big doubtful state in the alphabetical list of states is
Illinois. When the secretary of the convention called for Illinois'
vote, it was cast solidly for Scarborough.
There was straightway pandemonium. It was half an hour before any one
could get a hearing. Then Indiana was called, and Pierson, attorney
general of that state and chairman of its delegation, cast its vote as
in the other ballots, for Hitchens, its governor. From my box I was
watching Scarborough and his immediate friends going from delegation to
delegation, and I knew what he was about. When Iowa was called and cast
its vote solidly for him I knew he had failed.
"How white he is!" said Mrs. Sandys, who was looking at him through
opera-glasses.
I borrowed them and saw that his gaze was fixed on a box on the other
side of the huge auditorium, on a woman in that box--I had only to look
at her to see which woman. She was beautiful, of that type of charm
which the French sum up in the phrase "the woman of thirty." I have
heard crowds bellow too often to be moved by it--though the twenty or
thirty thousand gathered under that roof were outdoing the cannonade of
any thunderstorm. But that woman's look in response to
Scarborough's--there was sympathy and understanding in it, and more,
infinitely more. He had been crushed for the moment--and I understood
enough of his situation to understand what a blow to all his plans this
untimely apparent triumph was. She was showing that she too felt the
blow, but she was also sending a message of courage to him--one of those
messages that transcend words, like music, like the perfumes of flowers
and fields, like that which fills us as we look straight up into a clear
night sky. I lowered the glasses and looked away--I could not bear it.
For the moment I hated him--hating myself for it.
I heard Carlotta asking a woman in the box next ours the name of "the
woman with the white plume in the big black hat in the seventh box on
the other side."
"Mrs. Scarborough," was the answer.
"Oh, is that _she_?" exclaimed Mrs. Sandys, almost snatching her glasses
from me in her eagerness. "You know who she was--John Dumont's
widow--you remember him? She must be an unusual person to have attracted
two such men."
But Scarborough was nominated now. He waved aside those who tried to
take him up and bear him to the platform. He walked down the aisle alone
and ascended amid a tense silence; he stood looking calmly out. His face
had lost its whiteness of a few minutes before. As he stood there, big
and still, a sort of embodiment of fearlessness, I wondered--and I fancy
many others were wondering--whether he was about to refuse the
nomination. But an instant's thought drove the wild notion from my mind.
He could not strike that deadly blow at his party.
"Fellow delegates," said he--a clearer, more musical voice than his I
have never heard--"I thank you for this honor. As you know, I opposed
the platform you saw fit to adopt. I have nothing to retract. I do not
like it. But, after all, a candidate must be his own platform. And I
bring my public record as proof of my pledge--that--" he paused and the
silence was tremendous. He went on, each word distinct and by
itself--"if I am elected"--a long pause--"I shall obey the
Constitution"--another long pause--"I shall enforce the laws!"
He was descending to the aisle before the silence was broken--a feeble,
rippling applause, significant of disappointment at what seemed an
anti-climax. He had merely repeated in condensed form the oath of office
which a President takes at his inauguration. But somehow--no doubt, it
was the magic of his voice and his manner and superb presence--those
simple words kept on ringing; and all at once--full half a minute must
have elapsed, a long time in such circumstances--all at once the
enormous meaning of the two phrases boomed into the brains of those
thousands: If this man is elected, there will be a President without
fear or favor, and he will really obey the Constitution, will really
enforce the laws! That little speech, though only a repetition of an
oath embodied in our century-old supreme law, was a firebrand to light
the torch of revolution, of revolution back toward what the republic
used to be before differences of wealth divided its people into upper,
middle and lower classes, before enthroned corporate combinations made
equality before the law a mockery, before the development of our vast
material resources restored to the intelligent and energetic few their
power over the careless and purposeless many.
As the multitude realized his meaning,--I doubt if many times in all
history such a sight and sound has burst upon mortal ears and eyes. For
the moment I was daunted; it was impossible not to think that here was
the whole people, not to feel that Scarborough had been chosen President
and was about to fulfil his pledge. Daunted, yet thrilled too. For, at
bottom, are we not all passionate dreamers of abstract right and
justice?
Then I remembered; and I said to myself, "He has defied the interests.
David has gone out against Goliath--but the Davids do not win nowadays.
I can elect Burbank."
But where was the elation that thought would have set to swelling in the
_me_ of less than two weeks before? And then I began clearly to see
that, for me at least, the prize, to be prized, must be fairly won from
start to goal; and to be enjoyed, must gladden eyes that would in turn
gladden me with the approval and sympathy which only a woman can give
and without which a man is alone and indeed forlorn.
XX
PILGRIMS AND PATRIOTS
From St. Louis I went direct to Burbank.
His heart had been set upon a grand speech-making tour. He was fond of
wandering about, showing himself to cheering crowds; and he had a deep,
and by no means unwarranted, confidence in his platform magnetism. At
first I had been inclined to give him his way. But the more I considered
the matter, the stronger seemed to become the force of the
objections--it takes a far bigger man than was Burbank at that stage of
his growth not to be cheapened by "steeple-chasing for votes"; also, the
coming of the candidate causes jealousy and heart-burnings over matters
of precedence, reception and entertainment among the local celebrities,
and so he often leaves the party lukewarm where he found it
enthusiastic. Further, it uses up local campaign money that ought to be
spent in hiring workers at the polls, which is the polite phrase for
vote-buying as "retaining-fee" is the polite phrase for bribe.
I decided against the tour and for the highly expensive but always
admirable and profitable "pilgrimage plan".
Burbank's own home was at Rivington, and I should have had him visited
there, had it not been on a single-track branch-railway which could not
handle without danger and discomfort the scores of thousands we were
planning to carry to and from him almost daily. So, it was given out
that he purposed as far as possible to withdraw from the strife of the
campaign and to await the results in the dignified calm in which he
wished the voters to determine it. He took--after Woodruff had carefully
selected it--a "retired" house "in the country."
And it was in the open country. A farm garden adjoined it on the one
side, a wheat field on the other, a large orchard to the rear. The broad
meadow in front gave plenty of room for delegations visiting the
"standard bearer of the party of patriotism" in his "rural seclusion,"
to hear his simple, spontaneous words of welcome. But for all the remote
aspect of the place, it was only five minutes' drive and ten minutes'
walk from a station through which four big railroads passed. One of the
out-buildings was changed into a telegraph office from which accounts of
the enthusiasm of the delegations and of his speeches could be sent to
the whole country. On his desk in his little study stood a private-wire
telephone that, without danger of leakage, would put him in direct
communication either with my study at Fredonia or with Doc Woodruff's
privatest private room in the party national headquarters at Chicago.
Thus, our statesman, though he seemed to be aloof, was in the very thick
of the fray; and the tens of thousands of his fellow citizens, though
they seemed to come almost on their own invitation inspired by
uncontrollable enthusiasm for the great statesman, were in fact free
excursionists--and a very troublesome, critical, expensive lot they
were. But--the public was impressed. It sits in its seat in the theater
of action and believes that the play is real, and ignores and forgets
the fact that there is a behind-the-scenes.
The party distributed from various centers tons of "literature." And in
addition to meetings arranged by state and local committees, a series
of huge demonstrations was held in the cities of every doubtful state.
Besides the party's regular speakers, we hired as many "independent"
orators as we could. But all these other branches of the public side of
the campaign were subsidiary to the work at the "retreat." It might be
called the headquarters of the rank and file of the party--those
millions of "principle" voters and workers who were for Burbank because
he was the standard-bearer of their party. No money, no bribes of
patronage have to be given to them; but it costs several millions to
raise that mass to the pitch of hot enthusiasm which will make each
individual in it certain to go to the polls on election day and take his
neighbors, instead of staying at home and hoping the party won't lose.
Burbank's work was, therefore, highly important. But the seat of the
real campaign was Woodruff's privatest private room in the Chicago
headquarters. For, there were laid and were put in the way of execution
the plans for acquiring those elements that, in the doubtful states,
have the balance of power between the two opposing and about evenly
matched masses of "principle" voters. I just now recall a talk I had
with my wife, about that time. She took no interest in politics and
rarely spoke of political matters--and both of us discouraged political
talk before the children. One day she said to me: "This campaign of
yours and Mr. Burbank's must be costing an awful lot of money."
"A good deal," said I.
"Several millions?"
"This is a big country, and you can't stir it up politically for
nothing. Why do you ask?"
"Who gives the money?" she persisted.
"The rich men--the big corporations--give most of it."
"Why?"
"Patriotism," said I. "To save the nation from our wicked opponent."
"How do Mr. Roebuck and the others get it back?" she pursued, ignoring
my pleasantry.
"Get what back?"
"Why the money they advance. They aren't the men to _give_ anything."
I answered with a smile only.
She lapsed into thoughtfulness. When I was assuming that her mind had
wandered off to something else she said: "The people must be very
stupid--not to suspect."
"Or, the rich men and the corporations very stupid to give," I
suggested.
"Do you mean that they don't get it back?" she demanded.
"Of course," said I, "their patriotism must be rewarded. We can not
expect them to save the country year after year for nothing."
"I should think not!" she said, adding disgustedly, "I think politics is
very silly. And men get excited about it! But _I_ never listen."
Arriving at the "retreat" from the Scarborough convention, I found
Burbank much perturbed because Scarborough had been nominated. He did
not say so--on the contrary, he expressed in sonorous phrases his
satisfaction that there was to be "a real test of strength between
conservatism and radicalism." He never dropped his pose, even with
me--not even with himself.
"I confess I don't share your cheerfulness," said I. "If Scarborough
were a wild man, we'd have a walkover. But he isn't, and I fear he'll
be more and more attractive to the wavering voters, to many of our own
people. Party loyalty has been overworked in the last few presidential
campaigns. He'll go vote-hunting in the doubtful states, but it won't
seem undignified. He's one of those men whose dignity comes from the
inside and can't be lost."
Burbank was unable to conceal his annoyance--he never could bear praise
of another man of his own rank in public life. Also he showed surprise.
"Why, I understood--I had been led to believe--that you--favored his
nomination," was his guarded way of telling me he knew I had a hand in
bringing it about.
"So I did," replied I. "He was your only chance. He won't be able to get
a campaign fund of so much as a quarter of a million, and the best
workers of his party will at heart be against him. Simpson would have
had--well, Goodrich could and would have got him enough to elect him."
Burbank's eyes twitched. "I think you're prejudiced against Senator
Goodrich, Harvey," said he in his gentlest tone. "He is first of all a
loyal party man."
"Loyal fiddlesticks!" replied I. "He is agent of the Wall Street
crowd--they're his party. He's just the ordinary machine politician,
with no more party feeling than--than--" I smiled--"than any other man
behind the scenes."
Burbank dodged this by taking it as a jest. He always shed my frank
speeches as humor. "Prejudice, prejudice, Harvey!" he said in mild
reproof. "We need Goodrich, and--"
"Pardon me," I interrupted. "We do not need him. On the contrary, we
must put him out of the party councils. If we don't, he may try to help
Scarborough. The Senate's safe, no matter who's elected President; and
Goodrich will rely on it to save his crowd. He's a mountain of vanity
and the two defeats we've given him have made every atom of that vanity
quiver with hatred of us."
"I wish you could have been here when he called," said Burbank. "I am
sure you would have changed your mind."
"When does he resign the chairmanship of the national committee?" I
asked. "He agreed to plead bad health and resign within two weeks after
the convention."
Burbank gave an embarrassed cough. "Don't you think, Harvey," said he,
"that, to soothe his vanity, it might be well for us--for you--to let
him stay on there--nominally, of course? I know _you_ care nothing for
titles."
Instead of being angered by this attempt to cozen me, by this exhibition
of treachery, I felt disgust and pity--how nauseating and how hopeless
to try to forward one so blind to his own interests, so easily
frightened into surrender to his worst enemies! But I spoke very quietly
to him. "The reason you want me to be chairman--for it is you that want
and need it, not I--the reason I _must_ be chairman is because the
machine throughout the country must know that Goodrich is out and that
your friends are in. In what other way can this be accomplished?"
He did not dare try to reply.
I went on: "If he stays at the head of the national committee
Scarborough will be elected."
"You are prejudiced, Harvey--"
"Please don't say that again, Governor," I interrupted coldly. "I
repeat, Goodrich must give place to me, or Scarborough will be
elected."
"You don't mean that you would turn against me?" came from him in a
queer voice after a long pause.
"While I was in St. Louis, working to make you President," said I, "you
were plotting behind my back, plotting against me and yourself."
"You were at St. Louis aiding in the nomination of the strongest
candidate," he retorted, his bitterness distinct though guarded.
"Strongest--yes. But strongest with whom?"
"With the people," he replied.
"Precisely," said I. "But the people are not going to decide this
election. The party lines are to be so closely drawn that money will
have the deciding vote. The men who organize and direct industry and
enterprise--_they_ are going to decide it. And, in spite of Goodrich's
traitorous efforts, the opposition has put up the man who can't get a
penny from them."
In fact, I had just discovered that Scarborough had instructed Pierson,
whom he had made chairman of his campaign, not to take any money from
any corporation even if it was offered. But I thought it wiser to keep
this from Burbank.
He sat folding a sheet of paper again and again. I let him reason it
out. Finally he said: "I see your point, Harvey. But I practically
promised Goodrich--practically asked him to remain--"
I waited.
"For the sake of the cause," he went on when he saw he was to get no
help from me, "any and all personal sacrifices must be made. If you
insist on having Goodrich's head, I will break my promise, and--"
"Pardon me again," I interrupted. My mood would not tolerate twaddle
about "the cause" and "promises" from Burbank--Burbank, whose "cause,"
as he had just shown afresh, was himself alone, and who promised
everything to everybody and kept only the most advantageous promises
after he had made absolutely sure how his advantage lay. "It's all a
matter of indifference to me. If you wish to retain Goodrich, do so. He
must not be dismissed as a personal favor to me. The favor is to you. I
do not permit any man to thimblerig his debts to me into my debts to
him."
Burbank seemed deeply moved. He came up to me and took my hand. "It is
not like my friend Sayler to use the word indifference in connection
with me," he said. And then I realized how completely the nomination had
turned his head. For his tone was that of the great man addressing his
henchman.
I did not keep my amusement out of my eyes. "James," said I,
"indifference is precisely the word. I should welcome a chance to
withdraw from this campaign. I have been ambitious for power, _you_ want
place. If you think the time has come to dissolve partnership, say
so--and trade yourself off to Goodrich."
He was angry through and through, not so much at my bluntness as at my
having seen into his plot to help himself at my expense--for, not even
when I showed it to him, could he see that it was to his interest to
destroy Goodrich. Moral coward that he was, the course of conciliation
always appealed to him, whether it was wise or not, and the course of
courage always frightened him. He bit his lip and dissembled his anger.
Presently he began to pace up and down the room, his head bent, his
hands clasped behind him. After perhaps five minutes he paused to say:
"You insist on taking the place yourself, Harvey?"
I stood before him and looked down at him. "Your suspicion that I have
also a personal reason is well-founded, James," said I. "I wouldn't put
myself in a position where I should have to ask as a favor what I now
get as a right. If I help you to the presidency, I must be master of the
national machine of the party, able to use it with all its power and
against _any one_--" here I looked him straight in the eye--"who shall
try to build himself up at my expense. Personally, we are friends, and
it has been a pleasure to me to help elevate a man I liked. But there is
no friendship in affairs, except where friendship and interest point the
same way. It is strange that a man of your experience should expect
friendship from me at a time when you are showing that you haven't for
me even the friendship of enlightened self-interest."
"Your practice is better than your theory, Harvey," said he, putting on
an injured, forgiving look and using his chest tones. "A better friend
never lived than you, and I know no other man who gets the absolute
loyalty you get." He looked at me earnestly. "What has changed you?" he
asked. "Why are you so bitter and so--so unlike your even-tempered
self?"
I waved his question aside,--I had no mind to show him my uncovered
coffin with its tenant who only slept, or to expose to him the feelings
which the erect and fearless figure of Scarborough had set to stirring
in me. "I'm careful to choose my friends from among those who can serve
me and whom I can therefore serve," I said. "And that is the
sentimentalism of the wise. I wish us to remain friends--therefore, I
must be able to be as useful to you as you can be useful to me."
"Goodrich shall go," was the upshot of his thinking. "I'll telephone him
this afternoon. Is my old friend satisfied?"
"You have done what was best for yourself," said I, with wholly
good-humored raillery. And we shook hands, and I went.
I was glad to be alone where I could give way to my weariness and
disgust; for I had lost all the joy of the combat. The arena of ambition
had now become to me a ring where men are devoured by the beast-in-man
after hideous battles. I turned from it, heart-sick. "If only I had less
intelligence, less insight," I thought, "so that I could cheat myself as
Burbank cheats himself. Or, if I had the relentlessness or the supreme
egotism, or whatever it is, that enables great men to trample without a
qualm, to destroy without pity, to enjoy without remorse."
XXI
AN INTERLUDE
My nerves began to feel as if some one were gently sliding his fingers
along their bared length--not a pain, but as fear-inspiring as the sound
of the stealthy creep of the assassin moving up behind to strike a
sudden and mortal blow. I dismissed business and politics and went
cruising on the lakes with restful, non-political Fred Sandys.
After we had been knocking about perhaps a week, we landed one noon at
the private pier of the Liscombes to lunch with them. As Sandys and I
strolled toward the front of the house, several people, also guests for
lunch, were just descending from a long buckboard. At sight of one of
them I stopped short inside, though I mechanically continued to walk
toward her. I recognized her instantly--the curve of her shoulders, the
poise of her head, and her waving jet-black hair to confirm. And without
the slightest warning there came tumbling and roaring up in me a
torrent of longings, regrets; and I suddenly had a clear understanding
of my absorption in this wretched game I had been playing year in and
year out with hardly a glance up from the table. That wretched game with
its counterfeit stakes; and the more a man wins, the poorer he is.
She seemed calm enough as she faced me. Indeed, I was not sure when she
had first caught sight of me, or whether she had recognized me, until
Mrs. Liscombe began to introduce us. "Oh, yes," she then interrupted, "I
remember Senator Sayler very well. We used to live in the same town. We
went to the same school." And with a friendly smile she gave me her
hand.
What did I say? I do not know. But I am sure I gave no sign of the
clamor within. I had not cultivated surface-calm all those years in
vain. I talked, and she talked--but I saw only her face, splendid
fulfilment of the promise of girlhood; I hardly heard her words, so
greatly was her voice moving me. It was an unusually deep voice for a
woman, sweet and with a curious carrying quality that made it seem
stronger than it was. In figure she was delicate, but radiant of life
and health--aglow, not ablaze. She was neither tall nor short, and was
dressed simply, but in the fashion--I heard the other women discussing
her clothes after she left. And she still had the mannerism that was
most fascinating to me--she kept her eyes down while she was talking or
listening, and raised them now and then with a full, slow look at you.
When Mrs. Liscombe asked her to come to dinner the next evening with the
people she was visiting, she said: "Unfortunately, I must start for
Washington in the morning. I am overhauling my school and building an
addition."
It had not occurred to me to think where she had come from or how she
happened to be there, or of anything in the years since I was last with
her. The reminder that she had a school came as a shock--she was so
utterly unlike my notion of the head of a school. I think she saw or
felt what was in my mind, for she went on, to me: "I've had it six years
now--the next will be the seventh."
"Do you like it?" I asked.
"Don't I look like a happy woman?"
"You do," said I, after our eyes had met. "You are."
"There were sixty girls last year--sixty-three," she went on. "Next year
there will be more--about a hundred. It's like a garden, and I'm the
gardener, busy from morning till night, with no time to think of
anything but my plants and flowers."
She had conjured a picture that made my heart ache. I suddenly felt old
and sad and lonely--a forlorn failure. "I too am a gardener," said I.
"But it's a sorry lot of weeds and thistles that keeps me occupied. And
in the midst of the garden is a plum tree--that bears Dead Sea fruit."
She was silent.
"You don't care for politics?" said I.
"No," she replied, and lifted and lowered her eyes in a slow glance that
made me wish I had not asked. "It is, I think, gardening with weeds and
thistles, as you say." Then, after a pause: "Do _you_ like it?"
"Don't ask me," I said with a bitterness that made us both silent
thereafter.
That evening I got Fred to land me at the nearest town. The train she
must have been on had just gone. In the morning I took the express for
the East. Arrived at Washington, I drove straight to her school.
A high iron fence, not obstructing the view from the country road; a
long drive under arching maples and beeches; a rambling, fascinating old
house upon the crest of a hill; many windows, a pillared porch, a low,
very wide doorway. It seemed like her in its dark, cool, odorous beauty.
She herself was in the front hall, directing some workmen. "Why, Senator
Sayler, this _is_ a surprise," she said, advancing to greet me. But
there was no suggestion of surprise in her tone or her look, only a
friendly welcome to an acquaintance.
She led the way into the drawing-room to the left. The furniture and
pictures were in ghostly draperies; everything was in confusion. We went
on to a side veranda, seated ourselves. She looked inquiringly at me.
"I do not know why," was my answer. "I only know--I had to come."
She studied me calmly. I remember her look, everything about her--the
embroidery on the sleeves and bosom of her blouse, the buckles on her
white shoes. I remember also that there was a breeze, and how good it
felt to my hot face, to my eyes burning from lack of sleep. At last she
said: "Well--what do you think of my little kingdom?"
"It is yours--entirely?"
"House, gardens--everything. I paid the last of my debts in June."
"I'm contrasting it with my own," I said.
"But that isn't fair," she protested with a smile. "You must remember,
I'm only a woman."
"With my own," I went on, as if she had not interrupted. "Yours
is--yours, honestly got. It makes you proud, happy. Mine--" I did not
finish.
She must have seen or felt how profoundly I was moved, for I presently
saw her looking at me with an expression I might have resented for its
pity from any other than her. "Why do you tell _me_ this?" she asked.
"There is always for every one," was my answer, "some person to whom he
shows himself as he is. You are that person for me because--I'm
surrounded by people who care for me for what I can give. Even my
children care to a great extent for that reason. It's the penalty for
having the power to give the material things all human beings crave.
Only two persons ever cared--cared much for me just because I was
myself. They were my mother--and you."
She laughed in quiet raillery. "Two have cared for you, but you have
cared for only one. And what devotion you have given him!"
"I have cared for my mother--for my children--"
"Yes--your children. I forgot them."
"And--for you."
She made what I thought a movement of impatience.
"For you," I repeated. Then: "Elizabeth, you were right when you wrote
that I was a coward."
She rose and stood--near enough to me for me to catch her faint, elusive
perfume--and gazed out into the distance.
"In St. Louis the other day," I went on, "I saw a man who has risen to
power greater than I can ever hope to have. And he got it by marching
erect in the open."
"Yet you have everything you used to want," she said dreamily.
"Yes--everything. Only to learn how worthless what I wanted was. And for
this trash, this dirt, I have given--all I had that was of value."
"All?"
"All," I replied. "Your love and my own self-respect."
"Why do you think you've not been brave?" she asked after a while.
"Because I've won by playing on the weaknesses and fears of men which my
own weaknesses and fears enabled me to understand."
"You have done wrong--deliberately?"
"Deliberately."
"But that good might come?"
"So I told myself."
"And good has come? I have heard that figs do grow on thistles."
"Good has come. But, I think, in spite of me, not through me."
"But now that you see," she said, turning her eyes to mine with appeal
in them, and something more, I thought, "you will--you will not go on?"
"I don't know. Is there such a thing as remorse without regret?" And
then my self-control went and I let her see what I had commanded myself
to keep hid: "I only know clearly one thing, Elizabeth--only one thing
matters. _You_ are the whole world to me. You and I could--what could we
not do together!"
Her color slowly rose, slowly vanished. "Was _that_ what you came to
tell me?" she asked.
"Yes," I answered, not flinching.
"_That_ is the climax of your moralizings?"
"Yes," I answered. "And of my cowardice."
A little icy smile just changed the curve of her lips. "When I was a
girl, you won my love--or took it when I gave it to you, if you prefer.
And then--you threw it away. For an ambition you weren't brave enough to
pursue honorably, you broke my heart."
"Yes," I answered. "But--I loved you."
"And now," she went on, "after your years of self-indulgence, of
getting what you wanted, no matter about the cost, you see me again. You
find I have mended my heart, have coaxed a few flowers of happiness to
bloom. You find there was something you did not destroy, something you
think it will make you happier to destroy."
"Yes," I answered, "I came to try to make you as unhappy as I am. For I
love you."
She drew a long breath. "Well," she said evenly, "for the first time in
your life you are defeated. I learned the lesson you so thoroughly
taught me. And I built the wall round my garden high and strong. You--"
she smiled, a little raillery, a little scorn--"you can't break in,
Harvey--nor slip in."
"No need," I said. "For I _am_ in--I've always been in."
Her bosom rose and fell quickly, and her eyes shifted. But that was for
an instant only. "If you were as brave as you are bold!" she scoffed.
"If I were as brave without you as I should be with you!" I replied.
Then: "But you love as a woman loves--herself first, the man afterward."
"Harvey Sayler denouncing selfishness!"
"Do not sneer," I said. "For--I love you as a man loves. A poor, pale
shadow of ideal love, no doubt, but a man's best, Elizabeth."
I saw that she was shaken; but even as I began to thrill with a hope so
high that it was giddy with fear, she was once more straight and strong
and calm.
"You have come. You have tried. You have failed," she went on after a
long pause. And in spite of her efforts, that deep voice of hers was
gentle and wonderfully sweet. "Now--you will return to your life, I to
mine." And she moved toward the entrance to the drawing-room, I
following her. We stood in silence at the front doorway waiting for my
carriage to come up. I watched her--maddeningly mistress of herself.
"How can you be so cold!" I cried. "Don't you see, don't you feel, how
I, who love you, suffer?"
Without a word she stretched out her beautiful, white hands, long and
narrow and capable. In each of the upturned palms were four deep and
bloody prints where her nails had been crushing into them.
Before I could lift my eyes to her face she was turning to rejoin her
workmen. As I stood uncertain, dazed, she glanced at me with a bright
smile. "Good-by again," she called. "A pleasant journey!"
"Thank you," I replied. "Good-by."
Driving toward the road gates, I looked at the house many times, from
window to window, everywhere. Not a glimpse of her until I was almost at
the road again. Then I saw her back--the graceful white dress, the knot
of blue-black hair, the big white hat, and she directing her workmen
with her closed white parasol.
XXII
MOSTLY ABOUT MONEY
I went up to New York, to find confusion and gloom at our headquarters
there.
Senator Goodrich had subtly given the impression, not only to the
workers but also to the newspaper men, who had given it to the public,
that with his resignation the Burbank campaign had fallen to pieces.
"And I fear you'll have some difficulty in getting any money at all down
town," said Revell, the senior Senator from New York state, who envied
and hated Goodrich and was therefore, if not for personal reasons,
amiably disposed toward me. "They don't like our candidate."
"Naturally," said I. "That's why he's running and that's why he may
win."
"Of course, he'll carry everything here in the East. The only doubt was
in this state, but I had no difficulty in making a deal with the
opposition machine as soon as they had sounded Scarborough and had
found that if he should win, there'd be nothing in it for them--nothing
but trouble. I judged he must have thrown them down hard, from their
being so sore. How do things look out West?"
"Bad," said I. "Our farmers and workingmen have had lots of idle time
these last four years. They've done too much of what they call
thinking."
"Then you need money?" asked Revell, lengthening his sly, smug old face.
"We must have four millions, at least. And we must get it from those
people down town."
He shook his head.
"I think not," was my careless reply. "When they wake up to the danger
in Scarborough's election, the danger to business, especially to their
sort of business, they'll give me twice four millions if I ask it."
"What do you wish me to do?"
"Nothing, except look after these eastern states. We'll take care of the
West, and also of raising money here for our campaign during October out
there."
"Can I be of any service to you in introducing you down town?" he asked.
"No, thank you," said I. "I have a few acquaintances there. I'm not
going to fry any fat this trip. My fire isn't hot enough yet."
And I did not. I merely called on two of the big bankers and four heads
of industrial combinations and one controller of an ocean-to-ocean
railway system. I stayed a very few minutes with each, just long enough
to set him thinking and inquiring what the election of Scarborough would
mean to him and to his class generally. "If you'll read his speeches,"
said I to each, "you'll see he intends to destroy your kind of business,
that he regards it as brigandage. He's honest, afraid of nothing, and an
able lawyer, and he can't be fooled or fooled with. If he's elected
he'll carry out his program, Senate or no Senate--and no matter what
scares you people cook up in the stock market." To this they made no
answer beyond delicately polite insinuations about being tired of paying
for that which was theirs of right. I did not argue; it is never
necessary to puncture the pretenses of men of affairs with a view to
saving them from falling into the error of forgetting that whatever
"right" may mean on Sunday, on week days it means that which a man can
compel.
I returned to Fredonia and sent Woodruff East to direct a campaign of
calamity-howling in the eastern press, for the benefit of the New York,
Boston and Philadelphia "captains of industry." At the end of ten days I
recalled him, and sent Roebuck to Wall Street to confirm the fears and
alarms Woodruff's campaign had aroused. And in the West I was laying out
the money I had been able to collect from the leading men of Minnesota,
Illinois, Ohio and western Pennsylvania--except a quarter of a million
from Howard of New York, to whom we gave the vice-presidential
nomination for that sum, and about half a million more given by several
eastern men, to whom we promised cabinet offices and posts abroad. I put
all this money, not far from two millions, into our "campaign of
education" and into those inpourings of delegations upon Burbank at his
"rural retreat."
To attempt to combat Scarborough's popularity with the rank and file of
his own party, was hopeless. I contented myself with restoring order
and arousing enthusiasm in the main body of our partizans in the
doubtful and uneasy states. So ruinous had been Goodrich's management
that even at that comparatively simple task we should not have succeeded
but for the fortunate fact that the great mass of partizans refuses to
hear anything from the other side; they regard reasoning as
disloyalty--which, curiously enough, it so often is. Then, too, few
newspapers in the doubtful states printed the truth about what
Scarborough and his supporters were saying and doing. The cost of this
perversion of publicity to us--direct money cost, I mean--was almost
nothing. The big papers and news associations were big properties, and
their rich proprietors were interested in enterprises to which
Scarborough's election meant disaster; a multitude of the smaller
papers, normally of the opposition, were dependent upon those same
enterprises for the advertising that kept them alive.
Perhaps the most far-sighted--certainly, as the event showed, the most
fortunate--single stroke of my campaign was done in Illinois. That
state was vital to our success; also it was one of the doubtful states
where, next to his own Indiana, Scarborough's chances were best. I felt
that we must put a heavy handicap on his popularity there. I had noticed
that in Illinois the violently radical wing of the opposition was very
strong. So I sent Merriweather to strengthen the radicals still further.
I hoped to make them strong enough to put through their party's state
convention a platform that would be a scarecrow to timid voters in
Illinois and throughout the West; and I wished for a "wild man" as the
candidate for governor, but I didn't hope it, though I told Merriweather
it must be done. Curiously enough, my calculation of the probabilities
was just reversed. The radicals were beaten on platform; but, thanks to
a desperate effort of Merriweather's in "coaxing" rural delegates, a
frothing, wild-eyed, political crank got the nomination. And he never
spoke during the campaign that he didn't drive voters away from his
ticket--and, therefore, from Scarborough. And our machine there
sacrificed the local interests to the general by nominating a popular
and not insincere reformer.
When Roebuck and I descended upon Wall Street on October sixteenth,
three weeks before election, I had everything in readiness for my final
and real campaign.
Throughout the doubtful states, Woodruff was in touch with local machine
leaders of Scarborough's party, with corruptible labor and fraternal
order leaders, with every element that would for a cash price deliver a
body of voters on election day. Also he had arranged in those states for
the "right sort" of election officers at upward of five hundred polling
places, at least half of them places where several hundred votes could
be shifted without danger or suspicion. Also, Burbank and our corps of
"spellbinders" had succeeded beyond my hopes in rousing partizan
passion--but here again part of the credit belongs to Woodruff. Never
before had there been so many free barbecues, distributions of free
uniforms to well-financed Burbank and Howard Campaign Clubs, and
arrangings of those expensive parades in which the average citizen
delights. The wise Woodruff spent nearly one-third of my "education"
money in this way.
One morning I found him laughing over the bill for a grand Burbank rally
at Indianapolis--about thirty-five thousand dollars, as I remember the
figures.
"What amuses you?" said I.
"I was thinking what fools the people are, never to ask themselves where
all the money for these free shows comes from, and why those who give
are willing to give so much, and how they get it back. What an ass the
public is!"
"Fortunately," said I.
"For us," said he.
"And for itself," I rejoined.
"Perhaps," he admitted. "It was born to be plucked, and I suppose our
crowd does do the plucking more scientifically than less experienced
hands would."
"I prefer to put it another way," said I. "Let's say that we save it
from a worse plucking."
"That _is_ better," said Doc. For, on his way up in the world, he was
rapidly developing what could, and should, be called conscience.
I looked at him and once more had a qualm like shame before his moral
superiority to me. We were plodding along on about the same moral
level; but he had ascended to that level, while I had descended to it.
There were politicians posing as pure before the world and even in the
party's behind-the-scene, who would have sneered at Doc's "conscience."
Yet, to my notion, they, who started high and from whatever sophistry of
motive trailed down into the mire, are lower far than they who began
deep in the mire and have been struggling bravely toward the surface. I
know a man who was born in the slums, was a pickpocket at eight years of
age, was a boss at forty-five, administering justice according to his
lights. I know a man who was born what he calls a gentleman and who, at
forty-five, sold himself for the "honors" of a high office. And once,
after he had shaken hands with that boss, he looked at me, furtively
made a wry face, and wiped his hand with his pocket handkerchief!
The other part of our work of preparation--getting the Wall Street
whales in condition for the "fat-frying"--was also finished. The Wall
Street Roebuck and I adventured was in a state of quake from fear of the
election of "the scourge of God," as our subsidized socialist and
extreme radical papers had dubbed Scarborough--and what invaluable
campaign material their praise of him did make for us!
Roebuck and I went from office to office among the great of commerce,
industry and finance. We were received with politeness, deferential
politeness, everywhere. But not a penny could we get. Everywhere the
same answer: "We can not see our way to contributing just yet. But if
you will call early next week--say Monday or Tuesday--" four or five
days away--"we'll let you know what we can do." The most ardent
eagerness to placate us, to keep us in good humor; but not a cent--until
Monday or Tuesday.
When I heard "Monday or Tuesday" for the third time, my suspicions were
rousing. When I heard it for the fifth time, I understood. Wall Street
was negotiating with the other side, and would know the result by
Monday, or at the latest Tuesday.
XXIII
IN WHICH A MOUSE HELPS A LION
I did not dare communicate my suspicions to my "dear friend" Roebuck. As
it was, with each refusal I had seen his confidence in me sink; if he
should get an inkling how near to utter disaster I and my candidate
were, he would be upon me like a tiger upon its trainer when he slips. I
reasoned out my course while we were descending from the fifth "king's"
office to our cab: If the negotiations with the opposition should be
successful, I should not get a cent; if they should fail, Wall Street
would be frantic to get its contributions into my hand; therefore, the
only sane thing to do was to go West, and make such preparations as I
could against the worst.
"Let's go back to the Holland," said I to Roebuck, in a weary, bored
tone. "These people are a waste of time. I'll start home to-night, and
when they see in the morning papers that I've left for good, they may
come to their senses. But they'll have to hunt me out. I'll not go near
them again. And when they come dragging themselves to you, don't forget
how they've treated us to-day."
Roebuck was silent, glancing furtively at me now and then, not knowing
what to think. "How is it possible to win without them?" he finally
said. "This demagogue Scarborough has set the people crazy. I can't
imagine what possesses these men of property with interests throughout
the country. They are inviting ruin."
I smiled. "My dear Roebuck," I replied, "do you suppose I'm the man to
put all my eggs into one basket--and that basket Wall Street?"
And I refused to talk any more politics with him. We dined together, I
calm and in the best of spirits; we went to a musical farce, and he
watched me glumly as I showed my lightness of heart. Then I went alone,
at midnight, to the Chicago Express sleeper--to lie awake all night
staring at the phantoms of ruin that moved in dire panorama before me.
In every great affair there is a crisis at which one must stake all upon
a single throw. I had staked all upon Wall Street. Without its
contributions, Woodruff's arrangements could not be carried out.
* * * * *
When I descended at the Fredonia station I found De Milt waiting for me.
He had news that was indeed news. I shall give it here more
consecutively than my impatience for the event permitted him to give it
to me.
About ten days before, a paragraph in one of Burbank's "pilgrimage"
speeches had been twisted by the reporter so that it seemed a personal
attack upon Scarborough. As Burbank was a stickler for the etiquette of
campaigning, he not only sent out a denial and a correction but also
directed De Milt to go to Scarborough's home at Saint X, Indiana, and
convey the explanation in a personal message. De Milt arrived at Saint X
at eight in the evening. As he was leaving the parlor car he saw a man
emerge from its drawing-room, make a hasty descent to the platform,
hurriedly engage a station hack and drive away. De Milt had an amazing
memory for identities--something far rarer than memory merely for faces.
He was convinced he knew that man; and being shrewd and quick of
thought, he jumped into a trap and told the driver to follow the hack
which was just disappearing. A few minutes' driving and he saw it turn
in at a gateway.
"Whose place is that?" he asked.
"The old Gardiner homestead," was the answer. "President Scarborough
lives there."
De Milt did not discuss this rather premature entitling of Senator
Scarborough. He said: "Oh--I've made a mistake," descended and sent his
trap away. Scarborough's house was quiet, not a soul about, lights in
only a few windows. De Milt strolled in at the open gates and, keeping
out of view, made a detour of the gardens, the "lay" of which he could
see by the starlight. He was soon in line with the front door--his man
was parleying with a servant. "Evidently he's not expected," thought my
chief of publicity.
Soon his man entered. De Milt, keeping in the shadows, moved round the
house until he was close under open windows from which came light and
men's voices. Peering through a bush he saw at a table-desk a man whom
he recognized as Senator Scarborough. Seated opposite him, with a very
uneasy, deprecating expression on his face, was John Thwing, president
of the Atlantic and Western System, and Senator Goodrich's
brother-in-law.
De Milt could not hear what Thwing was saying, so careful was that
experienced voice to reach only the ears for whom its insinuating
subtleties were intended. But he saw a puzzled look come into
Scarborough's face, heard him say: "I don't think I understand you,
John."
Thwing unconsciously raised his voice in his reply, and De Milt
caught--"satisfactory assurances from you that these alarming views and
intentions attributed to you are false, and they'll be glad to exert
themselves to elect you."
Scarborough smiled. "Impossible," he said. "Very few of them would
support _me_ in any circumstances."
"You are mistaken, Hampden," was Thwing's answer. "On the contrary, they
will--"
Scarborough interrupted with an impatient motion of his head.
"Impossible!" he repeated. "But in any case, why should they send you to
me? My speeches speak for themselves. Surely no intelligent man could
fancy that my election would mean harm to any legitimate business, great
or small, East or West. You've known me for twenty years, Thwing. You
needn't come to me for permission to reassure your friends--such of them
as you can _honestly_ reassure."
"I have been reassuring them," Thwing answered. "I tell them that you
are about the last man in the world to permit mob rule."
"Precisely," said Scarborough. "I purpose to continue to do what I can
to break up the mob that is being led on by demagogues disguised as
captains of industry and advance agents of prosperity--led on to pillage
the resources of the country, its riches and its character."
This ought to have put Thwing on his guard. But, convinced that the gods
he worshiped must be the gods of all men, whatever they might profess,
he held to his purpose.
"Still, you don't quite follow me," he persisted. "You've said some very
disquieting things against some of my friends--of course, they
understand that the exigencies of campaigning, the necessity of rousing
the party spirit, the--"
Thwing stopped short; De Milt held his breath. Scarborough was leaning
forward, was holding Thwing's eyes with one of those looks that grip.
"Do you mean," said he, "that, if I'll assure these friends of yours
that I don't mean what I say, they'll buy me the presidency?"
"My dear Hampden," expostulated Thwing, "nothing of the sort. Simply
that the campaign fund which Burbank must get to be elected won't go to
him, but will be at the disposal of your national committee. My friends,
naturally, won't support their enemies."
De Milt, watching Scarborough, saw him lower his head, his face flushing
deeply.
"Believe me, Hampden," continued Thwing, "without our support Burbank is
beaten, and you are triumphantly elected--not otherwise. But you know
politics; I needn't tell you. You know that the presidency depends upon
getting the doubtful element in the doubtful states."
Scarborough stood, and, without lifting his eyes, said in a voice very
different from his strong, clear tones of a few minutes before: "I
suppose in this day no one is beyond the reach of insult. I have
thought I was. I see I have been mistaken. And it is a man who has known
me twenty years and has called me friend, who has taught me the deep
meaning of the word shame. The servant will show you the door." And he
left Thwing alone in the room.
I had made De Milt give me the point of his story as soon as I saw its
drift. While he was going over it in detail, I was thinking out all the
bearings of Scarborough's refusal upon my plans.
"Has Senator Goodrich seen Governor Burbank yet?" I asked De Milt in a
casual tone, when he had told how he escaped unobserved in Thwing's wake
and delivered Burbank's message the next morning.
"I believe he's to see him by appointment to-morrow," replied De Milt.
So my suspicion was well-founded. Goodrich, informed of his
brother-in-law's failure, was posting to make peace on whatever terms he
could honeyfugle out of my conciliation-mad candidate.
A few minutes later I shut myself in with the long-distance telephone
and roused Burbank from bed and from sleep. "I am coming by the first
train to-morrow," I said. "I thought you'd be glad to know that I've
made satisfactory arrangements in New York--unexpectedly satisfactory."
"That's good--excellent," came the reply. I noted an instant change of
tone which told me that Burbank had got, by some underground route, news
of my failure in New York and had been preparing to give Goodrich a
cordial reception.
"If Goodrich comes, James," I went on, "don't see him till I've seen
you."
A pause, then in a strained voice: "But I've given him an appointment at
nine to-morrow."
"Put him off till noon. I'll be there at eleven. It's--imperative." That
last word with an accent I did not like to use, but knew how to use--and
when.
Another pause, then: "Very well, Harvey. But we must be careful about
him. De Milt has told you how dangerous he is, hasn't he?"
"Yes--how dangerous he tried to be." I was about to add that Goodrich
was a fool to permit any one to go to such a man as Scarborough with
such a proposition; but I bethought me of Burbank's acute moral
sensitiveness and how it would be rasped by the implication of his
opponent's moral superiority. "We're past the last danger, James. That's
all. Sleep sound. Good night."
"Good night, old man," was his reply in his pose's tone for affection.
But I could imagine him posing there in his night shirt, the anger
against me snapping in his eyes.
On the train the next morning, De Milt, who had evidently been doing a
little thinking, said, "I hope you won't let it out to Cousin James that
I told you Goodrich was coming to see him."
"Certainly not," I replied, not losing the opportunity to win over to
myself one so near to my political ward. "I'm deeply obliged to you for
telling me." And presently I went on: "By the way, has anything been
done for you for your brilliant work at Saint X?"
"Oh, that's all right," he said, "I guess Cousin James'll look after
me--unless he forgets about it." "Cousin James" had always had the habit
of taking favors for granted unless reward was pressed for; and since he
had become a presidential candidate, he was inclining more than ever to
look on a favor done him as a high privilege which was its own reward.
I made no immediate reply to De Milt; but just before we reached the
capital, I gave him a cheque for five thousand dollars. "A little
expression of gratitude from the party," said I. "Your reward will come
later." From that hour he was mine, for he knew now by personal
experience that "the boys" were right in calling me appreciative.
It is better to ignore a debt than to pay with words.
XXIV
GRANBY INTRUDES AGAIN
Burbank had grown like a fungus in his own esteem.
The adulation of the free excursionists I had poured in upon him, the
eulogies in the newspapers, the flatteries of those about him, eager to
make themselves "solid" with the man who might soon have the shaking of
the huge, richly laden presidential boughs of the plum tree--this
combination of assaults upon sanity was too strong for a man with such
vanity as his, a traitor within. He had convinced his last prudent doubt
that he was indeed a "child of destiny." He was resentful lest I might
possibly think myself more important than he to the success of the
campaign. And his resentment was deepened by the probably incessant
reminders of his common sense that all this vast machine, public and
secret, could have been set in motion just as effectively for any one
of a score of "statesmen" conspicuous in the party.
I saw through his labored cordiality; and it depressed me again--started
me down toward those depths of self-condemnation from which I had been
held up for a few days by the excitement of the swiftly thronging events
and by the necessity of putting my whole mind upon moves for my game.
"I am heartily glad you were successful," he began when we were alone.
"That takes a weight off my mind."
"You misunderstood me, I see," said I. "I haven't got anything from
those people in New York as yet. But within a week they'll be begging me
to take whatever I need. Thwing's report will put them in a panic."
His face fell. "Then I must be especially courteous to Goodrich," he
said, after thinking intently. "Your hopes might be disappointed."
"Not the slightest danger," was my prompt assurance. "And if you take my
advice, you will ask Goodrich how his agent found Senator Scarborough's
health, and then order him out of this house. Why harbor a deadly snake
that can be of no use to you?"
"But you seem to forget, Harvey, that he is the master of at least the
eastern wing of the party. And you must now see that he will stop at
nothing, unless he is pacified."
"He is the fetch-and-carry of an impudent and cowardly crowd in Wall
Street," I retorted, "that is all. When they find he can no longer do
their errands, they'll throw him over and come to us. And we can have
them on our own terms."
We argued, with growing irritation on both sides, and after an hour or
so, I saw that he was hopelessly under the spell of his pettiness and
his moral cowardice. He had convinced himself that I was jealous of
Goodrich and would sacrifice anything to gratify my hate. And Goodrich's
sending an agent to Scarborough had only made him the more formidable in
Burbank's eyes. As I looked in upon his mind and watched its weak,
foolish little workings, my irritation subsided. "Do as you think best,"
said I wearily. "But when he presents the mortgage you are going to give
him on your presidency, remember my warning."
He laughed this off, feeling my point only in his vanity, not at all in
his judgment. "And how will _you_ receive him, Harvey? He will be sure
to come to you next--must, as you are in charge of my campaign."
"I'll tell him straight out that I'll have nothing to do with him," said
I blandly. "The Wall Street submission to the party must be brought to
me by some other ambassador. I'll not help him to fool his masters and
to hide it from them that he has lost control."
I could have insisted, could have destroyed Goodrich--for Burbank would
not have dared disobey me. But the campaign, politics in general, life
itself, filled me with disgust, a paralyzing disgust that made me almost
lose confidence in my theory of practical life.
"What's the use?" I said to myself. "Let Burbank keep his adder. Let it
sting him. If it so much as shoots a fang at me, I can crush it."
And so, Burbank lifted up Goodrich and gave hostages to him; and
Goodrich, warned that I would not deal with him, made some excuse or
other to his masters for sending Senator Revell to me. "See Woodruff,"
said I to Revell, for I was in no mood for such business. "He knows best
what we need."
"They give up too damn cheerfully," Woodruff said to me, when I saw him
a week or ten days later, and he gave me an account of the negotiations.
"I suspect they've paid more before."
"They have," said I. "In two campaigns where they had to elect against
hard times."
"But I've a notion," he warned me, "that our candidate has promised them
something privately."
"No doubt," I replied, as indifferently as I felt.
I had intended to make some speeches--I had always kept the public side
of my career in the foreground, and in this campaign my enforced
prominence as director of the machine was causing the public to dwell
too much on the real nature of my political activity. But I could not
bring myself to it. Instead, I set out for home to spend the time with
my children and to do by telephone, as I easily could, such directing of
Woodruff as might be necessary.
My daughter Frances was driving me from the Fredonia station. A man
darted in front of the horses, flung up his arms and began to shriek
curses at me. If she had not been a skilful driver, we should both have
been thrown from the cart. As it was, the horses ran several miles
before she got them under control, I sitting inactive, because I knew
how it would hurt her pride if I should interfere.
When the horses were quiet, she gave me an impetuous kiss that more than
repaid me for the strain on my nerves. "You are the dearest papa that
ever was!" she said. Then--"Who was he? He looked like a crazy man!"
"No doubt he is," was my reply. And I began complimenting her on her
skill with horses, chiefly to prevent her pressing me about the man. I
had heard, and had done, so much lying that I had a horror of it, and
tried to make my children absolutely truthful--my boy Ed used to think
up and do mischief just for the pleasure of pleasing me by confessing.
To make my example effective, I was always strictly truthful with them.
I did not wish to tell her who the man was; but I instantly recognized,
through the drunken dishevelment, my mutineer, Granby--less than a year
before one of the magnates of the state. My orders about him had been
swiftly and literally obeyed. Deserted by his associates, blacklisted at
the banks, beset by his creditors, harassed by the attorney general, his
assets chained with injunctions, his liabilities given triple fangs, he
went bankrupt, took to drink, became a sot and a barroom lounger. His
dominant passion was hatred of me; he discharged the rambling and
frantic story of his wrongs upon whoever would listen. And here he was
in Fredonia!
I had one of my secretaries telephone the police to look after him; they
reported that he had disappeared.
The next morning but one, my daughter and I went for an early walk. At
the turn of the main drive just beyond view from the lodge, she
exclaimed, "Oh, father, _oh_!" and clung to me. Something--like a
scarecrow, but not a scarecrow--swung from a limb overhanging the drive.
The face was distorted and swollen; the arms and legs were drawn up in
sickening crookedness. Before I saw, I knew it was Granby.
I took Frances home, then returned, passing the swaying horror far on
the other side of the road. I got the lodge-keeper, and he and I went
back together. I had them telephone from the lodge for the coroner and
personally saw to it that the corpse should be reported as found in the
open woods a long distance from my place. But Granby had left a message
"to the public" in his room at the hotel: "Senator Sayler ruined me and
drove me to death. I have gone to hang myself in his park. Down with
monopoly!" In spite of my efforts, this was published throughout the
country--though not in Fredonia. Such of the big opposition papers as
were not under our control sent reporters and raked out the whole story;
and it was blown up hugely and told everywhere. Our organs retold it,
giving the true color and perspective; but my blundering attempt to
avoid publicity had put me in too bad a light.
It was the irony of fate--my power thus ludicrously thwarted by a
triviality. Within twenty-four hours I realized the danger to our
campaign. I sent Woodruff post-haste to the widow. He gave her
convincing assurances that she and her children were to be lifted from
the slough of poverty into which Granby's drunkenness had thrust them.
And in return she wrote at his dictation and issued an apparently
uninspired public statement, exonerating me from all blame for her
husband's reverses, and saying that he had been acting strangely for
over a year and had been insane for several months. In brief, I did
everything suggested by sincere regret and such skill at influencing
public opinion as I had and commanded. But not until my reports began to
show the good effects of the million dollars Woodruff put into the last
week of the campaign, did I begin to hope again.
Another hope brightened toward confidence when, on the Saturday before
election, I sprung my carefully matured scheme for stiffening those of
our partizans who were wavering. The Scarborough speakers had, with
powerful effect, been taunting us with our huge campaign fund, daring us
to disclose its sources. On that Sunday morning, when it was too late
for the opposition to discount me, I boldly threw open a set of
campaign ledgers which showed that our fund was just under a million
dollars, with the only large subscription, the hundred thousand which I
myself had given. Tens of thousands of our partizans, longing for an
excuse for staying with us, returned cheering to the ranks--enough of
them in the doubtful states, we believed, to restore the floating vote
to its usual balance of power.
Each horse of my team had taken a turn at doing dangerous, even
menacing, threshing about; but both were now quietly pulling in the
harness, Partizanship as docile as Plutocracy. The betting odds were six
to five against us, but we of the "inside" began to plunge on Burbank
and Howard.
XXV
AN HOUR OF EMOTION
It was after midnight of election day before we knew the result, so
close were the two most important doubtful states.
Scarborough had swept the rural districts and the small towns. But we
had beaten him in the cities where the machines and other purchasable
organizations were powerful. His state gave him forty-two thousand
plurality, Burbank carried his own state by less than ten thousand--and
in twenty-four years our majority there in presidential campaigns had
never before been less than forty thousand.
By half-past one, the whole capital city knew that Burbank had won. And
they flocked and swarmed out the road to his modest "retreat," until
perhaps thirty thousand people were shouting, blowing horns, singing,
sending up rockets and Roman candles, burning red fire, lighting
bonfires in and near the grounds. I had come down from Fredonia to be
in instant touch with Burbank and the whole national machine, should
there arise at the last minute necessity for bold and swift action. When
Burbank finally yielded to the mob and showed himself on his porch with
us, his immediate associates, about him, I for the first time
unreservedly admired him. For the man inside seemed at last to swell
until the presidential pose he had so long worn prematurely was filled
to a perfect fit. And in what he said as well as in the way he said it
there was an unexpected dignity and breadth and force. "I have made him
President," I thought, "and it looks as if the presidency had made him a
man."
After he finished, Croffut spoke, and Senator Berwick of Illinois. Then
rose a few calls for me. They were drowned in a chorus of hoots, toots
and hisses. Burbank cast a quick glance of apprehension at me--again
that hidden conviction of my vanity, this time shown in dread lest it
should goad me into hating him. I smiled reassuringly at him--and I can
say in all honesty that the smile came from the bottom of my heart. An
hour later, as I bade him good night, I said:
"I believe the man and the opportunity have met, Mr. President. God
bless you."
Perhaps it was the unusualness of my speaking with feeling that caused
the tears to start in his eyes. "Thank you, Harvey," he replied,
clasping my hand in both his. "I realize now the grave responsibility. I
need the help of every friend--the _true_ help of every _true_ friend.
And I know what I owe to you just as clearly as if _she_ were here to
remind me."
I was too moved to venture a reply. Woodruff and I drove to the hotel
together--the crowd hissing me wherever it recognized me. Woodruff
looked first on one side then on the other, muttering at them. "The
fools!" he said to me, with his abrupt, cool laugh. "Just like them,
isn't it? Cheering the puppet, hissing its proprietor."
I made no answer--what did it matter? Not for Burbank's position and
opportunity, as in that hour of emotion they appeared even to us who
knew politics from behind the scenes, not for the reality of what the
sounding title of President seems to mean, would I have changed with
him, would I have paid the degrading price he had paid. I preferred my
own position--if I had bowed the knee, at least it was not to men. As
for hisses, I saw in them a certain instinctive tribute to my power. The
mob cheers its servant, hisses its master.
"Doc," said I, "do you want to go to the Senate instead of Croffut?"
By the flames on the torches on either side I saw his amazement. "Me?"
he exclaimed. "Why, you forget I've got a past."
"I do," said I, "and so does every one else. All we know is that you've
got a future."
He drew in his breath hard and leaned back into the corner where the
shadow hid him. At last he said in a quiet earnest voice: "You've given
me self-respect, Senator. I can only say--I'll see that you never regret
it."
I was hissed roundly at the hotel entrance, between cheers for Croffut
and Berwick, and even for Woodruff. But I went to bed in the most
cheerful, hopeful humor I had known since the day Scarborough was
nominated. "At any rate"--so I was thinking--"my President, with my
help, will be a man."
XXVI
"ONLY AN OLD JOKE"
On the train going home, I was nearer to castle-building than at any
time since my boyhood castles collapsed under the rude blows of
practical life.
My paths have not always been straight and open, said I to myself; like
all others who have won in the conditions of this world of man still
thrall to the brute, I have had to use the code of the jungle. In
climbing I have had to stoop, at times to crawl. But, now that I have
reached the top, I shall stand erect. I shall show that the sordidness
of the struggle has not unfitted me to use the victory. True, there are
the many and heavy political debts I've had to contract in getting
Burbank the presidency; and as we must have a second term to round out
our work, we shall be compelled to make some further compromises. We
must still deal with men on the terms which human nature exacts. But in
the main we can and we will do what is just and right, what helps to
realize the dreams of the men and women who founded our country--the men
and women like my father and mother.
And my mother's grave, beside my father's and among the graves of my
sisters and my grandparents, rose before me. And I recalled the pledge I
had made there, in the boyish beginnings of my manhood and my career.
"My chance and Burbank's," said I, "comes just in time. We are now at
the age where reputation is fixed; and our children are growing up and
will soon begin to judge us and be judged from us."
Years of patient sowing, thought I, and at last the harvest! And what a
harvest it will be! For under the teachings of experience I have sown
not starlight and moonshine, but seeds.
The next morning I could not rise; it was six weeks before I was able to
leave my bed. During that savage illness I met each and every one of the
reckless drafts I had been drawing against my reserve vitality. Four
times the doctors gave me up; once even Frances lost hope. When I was
getting well she confessed to me how she had warned God that He need
never expect to hear from her again if her prayer for me were not
answered--and I saw she rather suspected that her threat was not
unassociated with my recovery.
Eight weeks out of touch with affairs, and they the crucial eight weeks
of all my years of thought and action! At last the harvest, indeed; and
I was reaping what I had sown.
In the second week of January I revolted against the doctors and nurses
and had my political secretary, Wheelock, telephone for Woodruff--the
legislature had elected him to the Senate three days before. When he had
sat with me long enough to realize that I could bear bad news, he said:
"Goodrich and Burbank have formed a combination against you."
"How do you know?" said I, showing no surprise, and feeling none.
"Because"--he laughed--"I was in it. At least, they thought so until
they had let me be safely elected. As nearly as I can make it out, they
began to plot about ten days after you fell sick. At first they had it
on the slate to do me up, too. But--the day after Christmas--Burbank
sent for me--"
"Wait a minute," I interrupted. And I began to think. It was on
Christmas day that Burbank telephoned for the first time in nearly three
weeks, inquiring about my condition. I remembered their telling me how
minute his questionings were. And I had thought his solicitude was proof
of his friendship! Instead, he had been inquiring to make sure about the
reports in the papers that I was certain to recover, in order that he
might shift the factors in his plot accordingly. "When did you say
Burbank sent for you?" I asked.
"On Christmas day," Woodruff replied.
I laughed; he looked at me inquiringly. "Nothing," said I. "Only an old
joke--as old as human nature. Go on."
"Christmas day," he continued; "I didn't get to him until next morning.
I can't figure out just why they invited me into their combine."
But I could figure it out, easily. If I had died, my power would have
disintegrated and Woodruff would have been of no use to them. When they
were sure I was going to live, they had to have him because he might be
able to assassinate me, certainly could so cripple me that I would--as
they reasoned--be helpless under their assaults. But it wasn't necessary
to tell Woodruff this, I thought.
"Well," said I, "and what happened?"
"Burbank gave me a dose of his 'great and gracious way'--you ought to
see the 'side' he puts on now!--and turned me over to Goodrich. He had
been mighty careful not to give himself away any further than that. Then
Goodrich talked to me for three solid hours, showing me it was my duty
to the party as well as to myself to join him and Burbank in eliminating
the one disturber of harmony--that meant you."
"And didn't they tell you they'd destroy you if you didn't?"
"Oh, that of course," he answered indifferently.
"Well, what did you do?"
"Played with 'em till I was elected. Then I dropped Goodrich a line.
'You can go to hell,' I wrote. 'I travel only with men'."
"Very imprudent," was my comment.
"Yes," he admitted, "but I had to do something to get the dirt off my
hands."
"So Burbank has gone over to Goodrich!" I went on presently, as much to
myself as to him.
"I always knew he was one of those chaps you have to keep scared to keep
straight," said Woodruff. "They think your politeness indicates fear and
your friendship fright. Besides, he's got a delusion that his popularity
carried the West for him and that you and I did him only damage."
Woodruff interrupted himself to laugh. "A friend of mine," he resumed,
"was on the train with Scarborough when he went East to the meeting of
Congress last month. He tells me it was like a President-elect on the
way to be inaugurated. The people turned out at every cross-roads, even
beyond the Alleghanies. And Burbank knows it. If he wasn't clean daft
about himself he'd realize that if it hadn't been for you--well, I'd
hate to say how badly he'd have got left. But then, if it hadn't been
for you, he'd never have been governor. He was a dead one, and you
hauled him out of the tomb."
True enough. But what did it matter now?
"He's going to get a horrible jolt before many months," Woodruff went
on. "I can see you after him."
"You forget. He's President," I answered. "He's beyond our reach."
"Not when he wants a renomination," insisted Woodruff.
"He can get that without us--_if_," I said. "You must remember we've
made him a fetish with our rank and file. And he's something of a fetish
with the country, now that he's President. No, we can't destroy
him--can't even injure him. He'll have to do that himself, if it's done.
Besides--"
I did not finish. I did not care to confess that since Frances and I saw
Granby swinging from that tree in my grounds I had neither heart nor
stomach for the relentless side of the game. Indeed, whether from
calculation or from sentimentality or from both--or, from a certain
sympathy and fellow feeling for all kinds of weakness--I have never
pursued those who have played me false, except when exemplary punishment
was imperative.
"Well--" Woodruff looked bitterly disappointed. "I guess you're right."
He brightened. "I forgot Goodrich for a minute. Burbank'll do himself up
through that--I'd have to be in a saloon to feel free to use the
language that describes him."
"I fear he will," I said. And it was not a hypocrisy--for I did not, and
could not, feel anger toward him. Had I not cut this staff deliberately
because it was crooked? What more natural than that it should give way
under me as soon as I leaned upon it?
"Your sickness certainly couldn't have come at an unluckier time,"
Woodruff observed just before he left.
"I'm not sure of that," was my reply. "It would have been useless to
have found him out sooner. And if he had hidden himself until later, he
might have done us some serious mischief."
As he was the President-elect, to go to him uninvited would have been
infringement of his dignity as well as of my pride. A few days later I
wrote him, thanking him for his messages and inquiries during my illness
and saying that I was once more taking part in affairs. He did not reply
by calling me up on the telephone, as he would have done in the
cordial, intimate years preceding his grandeur. Instead he sent a
telegram of congratulation, following it with a note. He urged me to go
South, as I had planned, and to stay until I was fully restored. "I
shall deny myself the pleasure of seeing you until you return." That
sentence put off our meeting indefinitely--I could see him smiling at
its adroitness as he wrote it.
But he made his state of mind even clearer. His custom had been to begin
his notes "Dear Harvey," or "Dear Sayler," and to end them "James" or
"Burbank." This note began "My dear Senator"; it ended, "Yours
sincerely, James E. Burbank." As I stared at these phrases my blood
steamed in my brain. Had he spat in my face my fury would have been
less, far less. "So!" I thought in the first gush of anger, "you feel
that you have been using me, that you have no further use for me. You
have decided to take the advice of those idiotic independent newspapers
and 'wash your hands of the corruptionist who almost defeated you'."
To make war upon him was in wisdom impossible--even had I wished. And
when anger flowed away and pity and contempt succeeded, I really did
not wish to war upon him. But there was Goodrich--the real
corruptionist, the wrecker of my plans and hopes, the menace to the
future of the party. I sent for Woodruff and together we mapped out a
campaign against the senior senator from New Jersey in all the
newspapers we could control or influence. I gave him a free hand to
use--with his unfailing discretion, of course--all the facts we had
accumulated to Goodrich's discredit. I put at his disposal a hundred
thousand dollars. As every available dollar of the party funds had been
used in the campaign, I advanced this money from my own pocket.
And I went cheerfully away to Palm Beach, there to watch at my ease the
rain of shot and shell upon my enemy.
XXVII
A DOMESTIC DISCORD
After a month in the South, I was well again--younger in feeling, and in
looks, than I had been for ten years. Carlotta and the children, except
"Junior" who was in college, had gone to Washington when I went to
Florida. I found her abed with a nervous attack from the double strain
of the knowledge that Junior had eloped with an "impossible" woman he
had met, I shall not say where, and of the effort of keeping the
calamity from me until she was sure he had really entangled himself
hopelessly.
She was now sitting among her pillows, telling the whole story. "If he
only hadn't married her!" she ended.
This struck me as ludicrous--a good woman citing to her son's discredit
the fact that he had goodness' own ideals of honor.
"What are you laughing at?" she demanded.
I was about to tell her I was hopeful of the boy chiefly because he had
thus shown the splendid courage that more than redeems folly. But I
refrained. I had never been able to make Carlotta understand me or my
ideas, and I had long been weary of the resentful silences or angry
tirades which mental and temperamental misunderstandings produce.
"Courage never gets into a man unless it's born there," said I. "Folly
is born into us all and can be weeded out."
"What can be expected?" she went on after trying in vain to connect my
remark with our conversation. "A boy needs a father. You've been so busy
with your infamous politics that you've given him scarcely a thought."
Painfully true, throughout; but it was one of those criticisms we can
hardly endure even when we make it upon ourselves. I was silent.
"I've no patience with men!" she went on. "They're always meddling with
things that would get along better without them, and letting their own
patch run to weeds."
Unanswerable. I held my peace.
"What are you going to do about it, Harvey? How _can_ you be so calm?
Isn't there _anything_ that would rouse you?"
"I'm too busy thinking what to do to waste any energy in blowing off
steam," was my answer in my conciliatory tone.
"But there's nothing we _can_ do," she retorted, with increasing anger,
which vented itself toward me because the true culprit, fate, was not
within reach.
"Precisely," I agreed. "Nothing."
"That creature won't let him come to see me."
"And you musn't see him when he sends for you," said I. "He'll come as
soon as his money gives out. She'll see that he does."
"But you aren't going to cut him off!"
"Just that," said I.
A long silence, then I added in answer to her expression: "And _you_
must not let him have a cent, either."
In a gust of anger, probably at my having read her thoughts, she blurted
out: "One would think it was _your_ money."
I had seen that thought in her eyes, had watched her hold it back behind
her set teeth, many times in our married years. And I now thanked my
stars I had had the prudence to get ready for the inevitable moment when
she would speak it. But at the same time I could not restrain a flush of
shame. "It _is_ my money," I forced myself to say. "Ask your brother.
He'll tell you what I've forbidden him to tell before--that I have twice
rescued you and him from bankruptcy."
"With our own money," she retorted, hating herself for saying it, but
goaded on by a devil that lived in her temper and had got control many a
time, though never before when I happened to be the one with whom she
was at outs.
"No--with my own," I replied tranquilly.
"_Your_ own!" she sneered. "Every dollar you have has come through what
you got by marrying me--through what you married me for. Where would you
be if you hadn't married me? You know very well. You'd still be fighting
poverty as a small lawyer in Pulaski, married to Betty Crosby or
whatever her name was." And she burst into hysterical tears. At last she
was showing me the secrets that had been tearing at her, was showing me
her heart where they had torn it.
"Probably," said I in my usual tone, when she was calm enough to hear
me. "So, that's what you brood over?"
"Yes," she sobbed. "I've hated you and myself. Why don't you tell me it
isn't so? I'll believe it--I don't want to hear the truth. I know you
don't love me, Harvey. But just say you don't love _her_."
"What kind of middle-aged, maudlin moonshine is this, anyway?" said I.
"Let's go back to Junior. We've passed the time of life when people can
talk sentimentality without being ridiculous."
"That's true of me, Harvey," she said miserably, "but not of you. You
don't look a day over forty--you're still a young man, while I--"
She did not need to complete the sentence. I sat on the bed beside her
and patted her vaguely. She took my hand and kissed it. And I said--I
tried to say it gently, tenderly, sincerely: "People who've been
together, as you and I have, see each other always as at first, they
say."
She kissed my hand gratefully again. "Forgive me for what I said," she
murmured. "You know I didn't think it, really. I've got such a nasty
disposition and I felt so down, and--that was the only thing I could
find to throw at you."
"Please--_please_!" I protested. "Forgive isn't a word that I'd have the
right to use to any one."
"But I must--"
"Now, _I've_ known for years," I went on, "that you were in love with
that other man when I asked you to marry me. I might have taunted you
with it, might have told you how I've saved him from going to jail for
passing worthless checks."
This delighted her--this jealousy so long and so carefully hidden. Under
cover of her delight I escaped from the witness-stand. And the discovery
that evening by Doc Woodruff that my son's ensnarer had a husband living
put her in high good humor. "If he'd only come home," said she, adding:
"Though, now I feel that he's perfectly safe with her."
"Yes--let them alone," I replied. "He has at least one kind of sense--a
sense of honor. And I suspect and hope that he has at bottom common
sense too. Let him find her out for himself. Then, he'll be done with
her, and her kind, for good."
"I must marry him off as soon as possible," said Carlotta. "I'll look
about for some nice, quiet young girl with character and looks and
domestic tastes." She laughed a little bitterly. "You men can profit by
experience and it ruins us women."
"Unjust," said I, "but injustice and stupidity are the ground plan of
life."
We had not long to wait. The lady, as soon as Junior reached the end of
his cash, tried to open negotiations. Failing and becoming convinced
that he had been cast off by his parents, she threw aside her mask. One
straight look into her real countenance was enough for the boy. He fled
shuddering--but not to me as I had expected. Instead, he got a place as
a clerk in Chicago.
"Why not let him shift for himself a while?" suggested Woodruff, who
couldn't have taken more trouble about the affair if the boy had been
his own. "A man never knows whether his feet were made to stand on and
walk with, unless he's been down to his uppers."
"I think the boy's got his grandmother in him," said I. "Let's give him
a chance."
"He'll make a career for himself yet--like his father's," said
Woodruff.
That, with the sincerest enthusiasm. But instinctively I looked at him
for signs of sarcasm. And then I wondered how many "successful" men
would, in the same circumstances, have had the same curiously
significant instinct.
XXVIII
UNDER A CRAYON PORTRAIT
It was now less than a month before inauguration. Daily the papers gave
probable selections for the high posts under the approaching
administration; and, while many of them were attributed to my influence,
Roebuck's son as ambassador to Russia was the only one I even approved
of. As payments for the services of the plutocracy they were unnecessary
and foolishly lavish; as preparations for a renomination and reëlection,
the two guiding factors in every plan of a President-elect, they were
preposterous. They were first steps toward an administration that would
make Scarborough's triumph inevitable, in spite of his handicap of
idealism.
I sent Woodruff west to find out what Burbank was doing about the places
I had pledged--all of them less "honorable" but more lucrative offices
which party workers covet. He returned in a few days with the news that,
according to the best information he could get through his spies in
Burbank's _entourage_, all our pledges would be broken; the
Sayler-Burbank machine was to be made over into a Goodrich-Burbank.
I saw that I could not much longer delay action. But I resolved to put
it off until the very last minute, meanwhile trying to force Burbank to
send for me. My cannonade upon Goodrich in six thousand newspapers,
great and small, throughout the West and South, had been reinforced by
the bulk of the opposition press. I could not believe it was to be
without influence upon the timid Burbank, even though he knew who was
back of the attack, and precisely how I was directing it. I was
relying--as I afterward learned, not in vain--upon my faithful De Milt
to bring to "Cousin James'" attention the outburst of public sentiment
against his guide, philosopher and friend, the Wall Street
fetch-and-carry.
I had fixed on February fifteenth as the date on which I would telegraph
a formal demand for an interview. On February eleventh, he
surrendered--he wired, asking me to come. I took a chance; I wired back
a polite request to be excused as I had urgent business in Chicago. And
twenty-four hours later I passed within thirty miles of Rivington on my
way to Chicago with Carlotta--we were going to see Junior, hugely proud
of himself and his twenty-seven dollars a week. At the Auditorium a
telegram waited from Burbank: He hoped I would come as soon as I could;
the matters he wished to discuss were most important.
Toward noon of the third day thereafter we were greeting each other--he
with an attempt at his old-time cordiality, I without concealment of at
least the coldness I felt. But my manner apparently, and probably,
escaped his notice. He was now blind and drunk with the incense that had
been whirling about him in dense clouds for three months; he was
incapable of doubting the bliss of any human being he was gracious to.
He shut me in with him and began confiding the plans he and Goodrich had
made--cabinet places, foreign posts, and so forth. His voice, lingering
and luxuriating upon the titles--"my ambassador to his Brittanic
Majesty," "my ambassador to the German Emperor," and so on--amused and a
little, but only a little, astonished me; I had always known that he
was a through-and-through snob. For nearly an hour I watched his
ingenuous, childish delight in bathing himself in himself, the wonderful
fountain of all these honors. At last he finished, laid down his list,
took off his nose-glasses. "Well, Harvey, what do you think?" he asked,
and waited with sparkling eyes for my enthusiastic approval.
"I see Goodrich drove a hard bargain," said I. "Yet he came on his
knees, if you had but realized it."
Burbank's color mounted. "What do you mean, Sayler?" he inquired, the
faint beginnings of the insulted god in his tone and manner.
"You asked my opinion," I answered, "I'm giving it. I don't recall a
single name that isn't obviously a Goodrich suggestion. Even the Roebuck
appointment--"
"Sayler," he interrupted, in a forbearing tone, "I wish you would not
remind me so often of your prejudice against Senator Goodrich. It is
unworthy of you. But for my tact--pardon my frankness--your prejudice
would have driven him away, and with him a support he controls--"
I showed my amusement.
"Don't smile, Sayler," he protested with some anger in his smooth, heavy
voice. "You are not the only strong man in the party. And I venture to
take advantage of our long friendship to speak plainly to you. I wish to
see a united party. One of my reasons for sending for you was to tell
you how greatly I am distressed and chagrined by the attacks on Senator
Goodrich in our papers."
"Did you have any other reason for sending for me?" said I very quietly.
"That was the principal one," he confessed.
"Oh!" I exclaimed.
"What do you mean, Sayler?"
"I thought possibly you might also have wished to tell me how unjust you
thought the attacks on me in the eastern papers, and to assure me that
they had only strengthened our friendship."
He was silent.
I rose, threw my overcoat on my arm, took up my hat.
"Wait a moment, please," he said. "I have always found you very
impartial in your judgments--your clear judgment has been of the highest
usefulness to me many times."
"Thank you," I said. "You are most kind--most generous."
"So," he went on, not dreaming that he might find sarcasm if he searched
for it, "I hope you appreciate why I have refrained from seeing you, as
I wished. I know, Sayler, your friendship was loyal. I know you did
during the campaign what you thought wisest and best. But I feel that
you must see now what a grave mistake you made. Don't misunderstand me,
Harvey. I do not hold it against you. But you must see, no doubt you do
see, that it would not be fair for me, it would not be in keeping with
the dignity of the great office with which the people have intrusted me,
to seem to lend my approval."
I looked straight at him until his gaze fell. Then I said, my voice even
lower than usual: "If you will look at the election figures carefully
you will find written upon them a very interesting fact. That fact is:
In all the doubtful states--the ones that elected you--Scarborough swept
everything where our party has heretofore been strongest; you were
elected by carrying districts where our party has always been weakest.
_And in those districts, James, our money was spent--as you well know._"
I waited for this to cut through his enswaddlings of self-complacence,
waited until I saw its acid eating into him. Then I went on: "I hope you
will never again deceive yourself, or let your enemies deceive you. As
to your plans--the plans for Goodrich and his crowd--I have nothing to
say. My only concern is to have Woodruff's matters--his
pledges--attended to. That I must insist upon."
He lowered his brows in a heavy frown.
"I have your assent?" I insisted.
"Really, Harvey,"--there was an astonishing change from the complacent,
superior voice of a few minutes before,--"I'll do what I can--but--the
responsibilities--the duties of--of my position--"
"You are going to _take_ the office, James," said I. "You can't cheat
the men who _gave_ it to you."
He did not answer.
"I pledged my word," I went on. "You gave the promises. I indorsed for
you. The debts _must_ be met." Never before had I enjoyed using that
ugliest of words.
"You ask me to bring myself into unpopularity with the entire country,"
he pleaded. "Several of the men on your list are ex-convicts. Others are
about to be indicted for election frauds. Many are men utterly without
character--"
"They did _your_ work, James," said I. "I guarantee that in no case will
the unpleasant consequences to you be more than a few disagreeable but
soon forgotten newspaper articles. You haggle over these trifles,
and--why, look at your cabinet list! There are two names on it--two of
the four Goodrich men--that will cost you blasts of public
anger--perhaps the renomination."
"Is _this_ my friend Harvey Sayler?" he exclaimed, grief and pain in
that face which had been used by him for thirty years as the sculptor
uses the molding clay.
"It is," I answered calmly. "And never more your friend than now, when
you have ceased to be a friend to him--and to yourself."
"Then do not ask me to share the infamy of those wretches," he pleaded.
"They are our allies and helpers," I said, "wretches only as I and all
of us in practical politics are wretches. Difference of degree, perhaps;
but not of kind. And, James, if our promises to these invaluable fellow
workers of ours are not kept, kept to the uttermost, you will compel me
and my group of Senators to oppose and defeat your most important
nominations. And I shall myself, publicly, from the floor of the Senate,
show up these Goodrich nominees of yours as creatures of corrupt
corporations and monopolies." I said this without heat; every word of it
fell cold as arctic ice upon his passion.
A long pause, then: "Your promises shall be kept," he assented with
great dignity of manner; "not because you threaten, Harvey, but because
I value your friendship beyond anything and everything. And I may add I
am sorry, profoundly sorry, my selections for the important places do
not please you."
"I think of your future," I said. "You _talk_ of friendship--"
"No, no, Harvey," he protested, with a vehemence of reassurance that
struck me as amusing.
"And," I went on, "it is in friendship, James, that I warn you not to
fill all your crucial places with creatures of the Goodrich crowd. They
will rule your administration, they will drive you, in spite of
yourself, on and on, from excess to excess. You will put the middle West
irrevocably against you. You will make even the East doubtful. You are
paying, paying with your whole future, for that which is already yours.
If you lose your hold on the people, the money-crowd will have none of
you. If you keep the people, the money-crowd will be your very humble
servant."
I happened just then to glance past him at a picture on the wall over
his chair. It was a crayon portrait of his wife, made from an enlarged
photograph--a poor piece of work, almost ludicrous in its distortions of
proportion and perspective. But it touched me the more because it was
such a humble thing, reminiscent of her and his and my lowly beginnings.
And an appeal seemed to go straight to my heart from those eyes that had
so often been raised from the sewing in sympathetic understanding of
the things I was struggling to make her husband see.
I pointed to the picture; he slowly turned round in his chair until he
too was looking at it. "What would _she_ say, Burbank," I asked, "if she
were with us now?"
And then I went on to analyze his outlined administration, to show him
in detail why I thought it would ruin him, to suggest men who were as
good party men as the Goodrich crowd and would be a credit to him and a
help. And he listened with his old-time expression, looking up at his
dead wife's picture all the while. "You must be _popular_, at any cost,"
I ended. "The industrial crowd will stay with the party, no matter what
we do. As long as Scarborough is in control on the other side, we are
their only hope. And so, we are free to seek popularity--and we must
regain it or we're done for. Money won't save us when we've lost our
grip on the rank and file. The presidency can't be bought again for
_you_. If it must be bought next time, another figure-head will have to
be used."
"I can't tell you how grateful I am," was his conclusion after I had put
my whole mind before him and he and I had discussed it. "But there are
certain pledges to Goodrich--"
"Break them," said I. "To keep them is catastrophe."
I knew the pledges he had in the foreground of his thoughts--a St. Louis
understrapper of the New York financial crowd for Secretary of the
Treasury; for Attorney General a lawyer who knew nothing of politics or
public sentiment or indeed of anything but how to instruct corporations
in law-breaking and law-dodging.
He thought a long time. When he answered it was with a shake of the
head. "Too late, I'm afraid, Harvey. I've asked the men and they've
accepted. That was a most untimely illness of yours. I'll see what can
be done. It's a grave step to offend several of the most conspicuous men
in the party."
"Not so serious as to offend the party itself," I replied. "Money is a
great power in politics, but partizanship is a greater."
"I'll think it over," was the most he had the courage to concede. "I
must look at all sides, you know. But, whatever I decide, I thank you
for your candor."
We separated, the best friends in the world, I trying to recover some
few of the high hopes of him that had filled me on election night. "He's
weak and timid," I said to myself, "but at bottom he must have a longing
to be President in fact as well as in name. Even the meanest slave longs
to be a man."
I should have excepted the self-enslaved slaves of ambition. Of all
bondmen, they alone, I believe, not only do not wish freedom, but also
are ever plotting how they may add to their chains.
XXIX
A LETTER FROM THE DEAD
I was living alone at the Willard.
Soon after the death of Burbank's wife, his sister and brother-in-law,
the Gracies, had come with their three children to live with him and to
look after his boy and girl. Trouble between his family and mine,
originating in some impertinences of the oldest Gracie girl, spread from
the children to the grown people until, when he went into the White
House, he and I were the only two on speaking terms. I see now that this
situation had large influence on me in holding aloof and waiting always
for overtures from him. At the time I thought, as no doubt he thought
also, that the quarrel was beneath the notice of men.
At any rate my family decided not to come to Washington during his first
winter in the White House. I lived alone at the Willard. One afternoon
toward the end of February I returned there from the Senate and found
Woodruff, bad news in his face. "What is it?" I asked indifferently,
for I assumed it was some political tangle.
"Your wife--was taken--very ill--very suddenly," he said. His eyes told
me the rest.
If I had ever asked myself how this news would affect me, I should have
answered that it would give me a sensation of relief. But, instead of
relief, I felt the stunning blow of a wave of sorrow which has never
wholly receded. Not because I loved her--that I never did. Not because
she was the mother of my children--my likes and dislikes are direct and
personal. Not because she was my wife--that bond had been galling. Not
because I was fond of her--she had one of those cold, angry natures that
forbid affection. No; I was overwhelmed because she and I had been
intimates, with all the closest interests of life in common, with the
whole world, even my children whom I loved passionately, outside that
circle which fate had drawn around us two. I imagine this is not
uncommon among married people,--this unhealable break in their routine
of association when one departs. No doubt it often passes with the
unthinking for love belatedly discovered.
"She did not suffer," said Woodruff gently. "It was heart disease. She
had just come in from a ride with your oldest daughter. They were
resting and talking in high spirits by the library fire. And then--the
end came--like putting out the light."
Heart disease! Often I had noted the irregular beat of her heart--a
throb, a long pause, a flutter, a short pause, a throb. And I could
remember that more than once the sound had been followed by the shadowy
appearance, in the door of my mind, of one of those black thoughts which
try to tempt hope but only make it hide in shame and dread. Now, the
memory of those occasions tormented me into accusing myself of having
wished her gone. But it was not so.
She had told me she had heart trouble; but she had confided to no one
that she knew it might bring on the end at any moment. She left a
letter, sealed and addressed to me:
Harvey--
I shall never have the courage to tell you, yet I feel you ought to
know. I think every one attributes to every one else less
shrewdness than he possesses. I know you have never given me the
credit of seeing that you did not love me. And you were so kind and
considerate and so patient with my moods that no doubt I should
have been deceived had I not known what love is. I think, to have
loved and to have been loved develops in a woman a sort of sixth
sense--sensitiveness to love. And that had been developed in me,
and when it never responded to your efforts to deceive me, I knew
you did not love me.
Well, neither did I love you, though I was able to hide it from
you. And it has often irritated me that you were so unobservant.
You know now the cause of many of my difficult moods, which have
seemed causeless.
I admired you from the first time we met. I have liked you, I have
been proud of you, I would not have been the wife of any other man
in the world, I would not have had any other father for my
children. But I have kept on loving the man I loved before I met
you.
Why? I don't know. I despised him for his weaknesses. I should
never have married him, though mother and Ed both feared I would. I
think I loved him because I knew he loved me. That is the way it is
with women--they seldom love independently. Men like to love; women
like to be loved. And, poor, unworthy creature that he was, still
he would have died for me, though God had denied him the strength
to live for me. But all that God gave him--the power to love--he
gave me. And so he was different in my eyes from what he was in any
one's else in the world. And I loved him.
I don't tell you this because I feel regret or remorse. I don't;
there never was a wife truer than I, for I put him completely
aside. I tell you, because I want you to remember me right after
I'm gone, Harvey dear. You may remember how I was silly and jealous
of you, and think I am mistaken about my own feelings. But jealousy
doesn't mean love. When people really love, I think it's seldom
that they're jealous. What makes people jealous usually is
suspecting the other person of having the same sort of secret they
have themselves. It hurt my vanity that you didn't love me; and it
stung me to think you cared for some one else, just as I did.
I want you to remember me gently. And somehow I think that, after
you've read this, you will, even if you did love some one else. If
you ever see this at all, Harvey--and I may tear it up some day on
impulse--but if you ever do see it, I shall be dead, and we shall
both be free. And I want you to come to me and look at me and--
It ended thus abruptly. No doubt she had intended to open the envelope
and finish it--but, what more was there to say?
I think she must have been content with the thoughts that were in my
mind as I looked down at her lying in death's inscrutable calm. I had
one of my secretaries hunt out the man she had loved--a sad, stranded
wreck of a man he had become; but since that day he has been sheltered
at least from the worst of the bufferings to which his incapacity for
life exposed him.
There was a time when I despised incapables; then I pitied them; but
latterly I have felt for them the sympathetic sense of brotherhood. Are
we not all incapables? Differing only in degree, and how slightly there,
if we look at ourselves without vanity; like practice-sketches put upon
the slate by Nature's learning hand and impatiently sponged away.
XXX
A PHILOSOPHER RUDELY INTERRUPTED
After the funeral I lingered at our Fredonia place. There was the estate
to settle; my two daughters had now no one to look after them; Junior
must be started right at learning the business of which he would soon be
the head, as his uncle had shown himself far too easy-going for large
executive responsibility. So, I stayed on, doing just enough to keep a
face of plausibility upon my pretexts for not returning to Washington.
The fact was that Carlotta's death had deepened my mood of distaste into
disgust. It had set me to brooding over the futility and pettiness of my
activities in politics, of all activities of whatever kind. I watched Ed
and my children resuming the routine of their lives, swiftly adjusting
themselves to the loss of one who had been so dear to them and
apparently so necessary to their happiness. The cry of "man overboard,"
a few ripples, a few tears; the sailing on, with the surface of the
water smooth again and the faces keen and bright.
Woodruff wrote, urging; then he sent telegram after telegram. Still I
procrastinated; for all the effect his letters and telegrams had upon
me, I might as well have left them unopened. My final answer was: "Act
as you would if I were dead."
Probably, what had given my pessimism its somberest tone was the
attitude of the public toward Burbank's high appointments. I had
confidently predicted that filling all the high offices with men who had
no interest but "the interests," men who were notoriously the agents and
servants of the great "campaign contributors," would cause a public
outcry that could not be ignored. The opposition press did make
perfunctory criticisms; but nowhere was there a sign that the people
were really angered.
I got the clue to this mystery from my gardener, who prided himself on
being strenuously of the opposition party. "What do you think of the new
administration?" said I when I came upon him one morning at the
rhododendron beds.
"Much better than I allowed," said he. "Burbank's got good men around
him."
"You approve of his Cabinet?"
"Of course, they're all strong party men. I like a good party man. I
like a man that has convictions and principles, and stands up for 'em."
"Your newspapers say some pretty severe things about those men."
"So I read," said he, "but you know how that is, Mr. Sayler. They've got
to pound 'em to please the party. But nobody believes much he sees in
the newspapers. Whenever I read an item about things I happen to know,
it's all wrong. And I guess they don't get it any nearer right about the
things I don't happen to know. Now, all this here talk of there being so
many millionaires--I don't take no kind of stock in it."
"No?" said I.
"Of course, some's poor and some's rich--that's got to be. But I think
it's all newspaper lies about these here big fortunes and about all the
leading men in politics being corrupt. I know it ain't so about the
leading men in _my_ party, and I reckon there ain't no more truth in it
about the leading men of your'n. I was saying to my wife last night,
'It's all newspaper lies,' says I, 'just like the story they printed
about Mrs. Timmins eloping with Maria Wilmerding's husband, when she had
only went over to Rabbit Forks to visit her married daughter.' No, they
can't fool me--them papers."
"That's one way of looking at it," said I.
"It's horse sense," said he.
And I have no doubt that to the average citizen, leading a small, quiet
life and dealing with affairs in corner-grocery retail, the stupendous
facts of accumulations of wealth and wholesale, far-and-wide purchases
of the politicians, the vast system of bribery, with bribes adapted to
every taste and conscience, seem impossibilities, romancings of
partizanship and envy and sensationalism. Nor can he understand the way
superior men play the great games, the heartlessness of ambition, the
cynicism of political and commercial prostitution, the sense of
superiority to the legal and moral codes which comes to most men with
success.
Your average citizen is a hero-worshiper too. He knows his own and his
neighbor's weaknesses, but he gapes up at the great with glamoured eyes,
and listens to their smooth plausibilities as to the reading of the
Gospel from the pulpit. He belongs to the large mass of those who
believe, not to the small class of those who question. But for the
rivalries and jealousies of superior men which have kept them always
divided into two parties, the ins and the outs, I imagine the masses
would have remained for ever sunk in the most hopeless, if the most
delightful, slavery--that in which the slave accepts his lowliness as a
divine ordinance and looks up to his oppressors and plunderers as
hero-leaders. And no doubt, so long as the exuberant riches of our
country enable the triumphant class to "take care of" all the hungry who
have intellect enough to make themselves dangerous, we shall have no
change--except occasional spasms whenever a large number of unplaced
intelligent hungry are forcing the full and fat to make room for them.
How long will this be?
If our education did not merely feed prejudices instead of removing
them, I should say not long. As it is, I expect to "leave the world as
wicked and as foolish as I found it." At any rate, until the millenium,
I shall continue to play the game under the rules of human
nature--instead of under the rules of human ideals, as does my esteemed
friend Scarborough. And I claim that we practical men are as true and
useful servants of our country and of our fellow men as he. If men like
him are the light, men like us are the lantern that shields it from the
alternating winds of rapacity and resentment.
But, in running on about myself, I have got away from my point, which
was how slight and even flimsy a pretense of fairness will shelter a man
in high place--and therefore a Burbank. "He will fool the people as
easily as he fools himself," said I. And more than ever it seemed to me
that I must keep out of the game of his administration. My necessity of
party regularity made it impossible for me to oppose him; my equal
necessity of not outraging my sense of the wise, not to speak of the
decent, made it impossible for me to abet him.
At last Woodruff came in person. When his name was brought to me, I
regretted that I could not follow my strong impulse to refuse to see
him. But at sight of his big strong body and big strong face, with its
typically American careless good humor--the cool head, the warm heart,
the amused eyes and lips that could also harden into sternness of
resolution--at sight of this old friend and companion-in-arms, my mood
began to lift and I felt him stirring in it like sunshine attacking a
fog. "I know what you've come to say," I began, "but don't say it. I
shall keep to my tent for the present."
"Then you won't have a tent to keep to," retorted he.
"Very well," said I. "My private affairs will give me all the occupation
I need."
He laughed. "The general resigns from the command of the army to play
with a box of lead soldiers."
"That sounds well," said I. "But the better the analogy, the worse the
logic. I am going out of the business of making and working off gold
bricks and green goods--and that's no analogy."
"Then you must be going to kill yourself," he replied. "For that's
life."
"Public life--active life," said I. "Here, there are other things." And
I looked toward my two daughters, whose laughter reached us from their
pony-cart just rounding a distant curve in the drive.
His gaze followed mine and he watched the two children until they were
out of sight, watched them with the saddest, hungriest look in his eyes.
"Guess you're right," he said gruffly.
After a silence I asked: "What's the news?"
A quizzical smile just curled his lips, and it broadened into a laugh as
he saw my own rather shamefaced smile of understanding. "Seems to me,"
said he, "that I read somewhere once how a king, perhaps it was an
emperor, so hankered for the quiet joys that he got off the throne and
retired to a monastery--and then established lines of post-horses from
his old capital to bring him the news every half-hour or so. I reckon
he'd have taken his job back if he could have got it."
"I reckon," said I.
"Well," said he, "the news is that they're about to oust you from the
chairmanship of the national committee and from control in this state."
"Really?" said I, in an indifferent tone--though I felt anything but
indifferent.
"Really," said he. "Burbank is throwing out our people throughout the
country and is putting Goodrich men in place of 'em--wherever our
fellows won't turn traitor. And they've got hold of Roebuck. He's giving
a dinner at the Auditorium to-morrow night. It's a dinner of eleven
covers. I think you can guess who ten of 'em are for. The eleventh is
for Dominick!"
That was enough. I grasped the situation instantly. The one weak spot in
my control of my state was my having left the city bosses their local
power, instead of myself ruling the cities from the state capital. Why
had I done this? Perhaps the bottom reason was that I shrank from
permitting any part of the machine for which I was directly responsible
to be financed by collections from vice and crime. I admit that the
distinction between corporate privilege and plunder and the pickings and
stealings and prostitutions of individuals is more apparent than real. I
admit that the kinds of vice and crime I tolerated are far more harmful
than the other sorts which are petty and make loathed outcasts of their
wretched practitioners. Still, I was snob or Pharisee or Puritan enough
to feel and to act upon the imaginary distinction. And so, I had left
the city bosses locally independent--for, without the revenues and other
aids from vice and crime, what city political machine could be kept up?
"Dominick!" I exclaimed.
"Exactly!" said Woodruff. "Now, Mr. Sayler, the point is just here. I
don't blame you for wanting to get out. If I had any other game, I'd get
out myself. But what's to become of us--of all your friends, not only in
this state but throughout the country? Are you going to stand by and see
them slaughtered and not lift a finger to help 'em?"
There was no answering him. Yet the spur of vanity, which clipped into
me at thought of myself thrown down and out by these cheap ingrates and
scoundrels, had almost instantly ceased to sting; and my sense of weary
disgust had returned. If I went into the battle again, what work faced
me? The same old monotonous round. To outflank Burbank and Goodrich by
tricks as old as war and politics, and effective only because human
stupidity is infinite and unteachable. To beat down and whip back into
the ranks again these bandits of commerce disguised as respectable,
church-going, law-upholding men of property--and to do this by the same
old methods of terror and force.
"You can't leave us in the lurch," said Doc. "And the game promises to
be interesting once more. I don't like racing on the flat. It's the
hurdles that make the fun."
I pictured myself again a circus horse, going round and round the ring,
jumping the same old hurdles at the same old intervals. "Take my place,
Doc," said I.
He shook his head. "I'm a good second," said he, "but a rotten bad
first."
It was true enough. He mysteriously lacked that mysterious something
which, when a man happens to have been born with it, makes other men
yield him the command--give it to him, force it on him, if he hangs
back.
"What do you want me to do?" I asked.
"That dinner to-morrow night is in Suite L. Go to it--that's the
shortest way to put Roebuck and Dominick out of business. Face 'em and
they'll skulk."
"It's a risk," said I. I saw at once that he was right, but I was in a
reluctant humor.
"Not a bit of it," was his confident reply. "I had a horse that was
_crazy_--would run away on any old provocation. But no matter how busy
he was at kicking up the dust and the dashboard, you could always halt
him by ringing a bell once. He'd been in the street-car service. That's
the way it is with men, especially strong men, that have been broken to
the bell. They hear it ring and they can't resist. Go up and ring the
bell."
"Go ring it yourself," said I.
"You're the bell," said he.
XXXI
HARVEY SAYLER, SWINEHERD
At a little after eight the following night, I was in Chicago, was
knocking at Suite L in the Auditorium Hotel; I was hearing sounds from
within that indicated that the dinner was under way. The door swung back
and there stood old Roebuck himself, napkin in hand, his shriveling old
face showing that his dollar sense was taking up the strength which his
other senses were losing. He was saying cordially, "Ah, Croffut, you are
late--"
Then his dim eyes saw me; he pulled himself up like a train when the
air-brakes are clapped on.
"They told me at the office that you were at dinner," said I in the tone
of one who has unintentionally blundered. "As I was looking for dinner,
I rather hoped you'd ask me to join you. But I see that--"
"Come right in," he said smoothly, but gray as a sheep. "You'll find
some old friends of yours. We're taking advantage of the convention of
western manufacturers to have a little reunion."
I now had a full view of the table. There was a silence that made the
creaking of starched evening shirt-bosoms noisy as those men drew long
stealthy breaths when breathing became imperative. All my "clients" and
Dominick--he at Roebuck's right. At Roebuck's left there was a vacant
chair. "Shall I sit here?" said I easily.
"That place was reserved--was for--but--" stammered Roebuck.
"For Granby's ghost?" said I pleasantly.
His big lips writhed. And as my glance of greeting to these old friends
of mine traveled down one side of the table and up the other, it might
have been setting those faces on fire, so brightly did they flare. It
was hard for me to keep my disgust beneath the surface. Those
"gentlemen" assembled there were among the "leading citizens" of my
state; and Roebuck was famous on both sides of the Atlantic as a king of
commerce and a philanthropist. Yet, every one of those brains was busy
most of its hours with assassin-like plottings--and for what purpose?
For ends so petty, so gross and stupid that it was inconceivable how
intelligence could waste life upon them, not to speak of the utter
depravity and lack of manliness. Liars cheats, bribers; and flaunting
the fruits of infamy as honors, as titles to respect, as gifts from
Almighty God! And here they were, assembled now for silly plottings
against the man whose only offense in their eyes was that he was saving
them from themselves--was preventing them from killing the goose that
would cheerfully keep on laying golden eggs for the privilege of
remaining alive. It was pitiful. It was nauseating. I felt my
degradation in stooping to such company.
I spoke to Dominick last. To my surprise he squarely returned my gaze.
His eyes were twinkling, as the eyes of a pig seem to be, if you look
straight into its face when it lifts its snout from a full trough.
Presently he could contain the huge volume of his mirth no longer. It
came roaring from him in a great coarse torrent, shaking his vast bulk
and the chair that sustained it, swelling the veins in his face,
resounding through the silent room while the waiters literally stood
aghast. At last he found breath to ejaculate: "Well, I'll be good
and--damned!"
This gale ripped from the others and whirled away their cloaks of
surface-composure. Naked, they suggested a lot of rats in a
trap--Dominick jeering at them and anticipating the pleasure of watching
me torment them. I choked back the surge of repulsion and said to
Roebuck: "Then where _shall_ I sit?"
Roebuck looked, almost wildly, toward the foot of the table. He longed
to have me as far from him as possible. Partridge, at the foot of the
table, cried out--in alarm: "Make room for the Senator between you and
Mr. Dominick, Roebuck! He ought to be as near the head of the table as
possible."
"No matter where Senator Sayler sits, it's the head of the table," said
Roebuck. His commonplace of courtesy indicated, not recovered
self-control, but the cunning of his rampant instinct of
self-preservation--that cunning which men so often exhibit in desperate
straits, thereby winning credit for cool courage.
"We're a merry company," said I, as we sat. This, with a glance at
Dominick heaving in the subsiding storm of his mirth. My remark set him
off again. I glanced at his place to see if he had abandoned his former
inflexible rule of total abstinence. There stood his invariable pot of
tea. Clearly, it was not drink that enabled him to enjoy a situation
which, as it seemed to me, was fully as unattractive for him as for his
fellows.
Soon the door opened and in strode Croffut; handsome, picturesque, with
his pose of dashing, brave manhood, which always got the crowds into the
mood for the frenzy his oratory conjured. Croffut seemed to me to put
the climax upon this despicable company--Croffut, one of the great
orators of the party, so adored by the people that, but for our
overwhelming superiority in the state, I should never have dared eject
him from office. Since I ejected him he had not spoken to me. Dominick
looked at him, said in a voice that would have flared even the warm
ashes of manhood into a furious blaze: "Go and shake hands with Senator
Sayler, Croffut, and sit down."
Croffut advanced, smiling. "I am fit for my company," thought I as I let
him clasp my hand.
"Better tilt Granby's ghost out of that chair, Croffut," said Dominick,
as the ex-Senator was seating himself. And in his animal exuberance of
delight at his joke and at the whole situation he clapped Roebuck on the
shoulder.
Roebuck shrank and winced. Moral humiliation he could shed as an
armor-plated turret sheds musket-balls. But a physical humiliation,
especially with spectators, sank in and sank deep. Instantly, alarmed
lest Dominick had seen and understood, he smiled and said: "That's a
vigorous arm of yours, Mr. Dominick."
"Not bad for a man of sixty," said Dominick.
I ate because to eat was a necessary part of my pose of absolute
calmness; but I had to force down the food. It seemed to me to embody
the banquet there set before my mental appetite. I found I had no
stomach for that banquet. It takes the coarse palate of youth or the
depraved palate of a more debauched manhood than mine to enjoy such a
feast. Yet, less than a year before, I had enjoyed, had delighted in, a
far less strenuous contest with these mutineers. As I sat holding down
my gorge and acting as if I were at ease, I suddenly wondered what
Elizabeth Crosby would think of me if she could see. And then I saw her,
with a reality of imagining that startled me--it was as if she were in
the doorway; and her eyes lifted to mine in that slow, steady, searching
gaze of hers.
I suppose, if a soldier thrusting his saber into the bowels of his enemy
on the battle-field were suddenly to see before him his mother or the
good and gentle wife or daughter he loved, he would drop the saber and
fly to hide himself like a murderer. So, I, overwhelmed, said to myself:
"I can not go on! Let these wretches wallow in their own vileness. I
shall not wallow with them. I am no swineherd!"
As I was debating how to escape and what one of the many other ways of
saving my friends and lieutenants I should adopt, Dominick touched me on
the arm. "A word with you, Senator," said he.
He glanced at the others as if he were debating whether he should order
them from the table while he talked with me. If he had ordered it, they
would have gone. But restrained, perhaps by his crude though reverent
sense of convention, he rose and led the way over to a corner.
"I want to tell you, Senator, that as soon as I got on to what this here
push was plottin', I wired you askin' an appointment. You'll find the
telegram at your house when you go home. I don't stand for no foulin'. I
play the game straight. I came because I thought you'd want the party to
be represented at such a getherin'."
I saw that he had come to the dinner, doubtful whether any enterprise
against me, promising enough for him to risk embarking, could be
launched; as soon as I entered the room he, like the rat when the cat
interrupted the rat-and-mouse convention to discuss belling it,
unceremoniously led the way to safety. But this was not one of those few
occasions on which it is wise to show a man that his lies do not fool
you. "I am glad to hear you say these things, Dominick," said I. "I am
glad you are loyal to the party."
"You can trust me, Senator," said he earnestly.
"I can trust your common sense," said I. And I proceeded to grasp this
lucky chance to get away. "I am leaving," I went on, "as soon as the
coffee is served. I shall look to you to send these gentlemen home in a
proper frame of mind toward the party."
His eyes glistened. Except his growing fortune, nothing delighted him so
much as a chance to "rough-house" his eminently respectable "pals." He
felt toward them that quaint mixture of envy, contempt and a desire to
fight which fills a gamin at sight of a fashionably dressed boy. He put
out his big hand and dampened mine with it. "You can count on me,
Senator," he said gratefully. "I'll trim 'em, comb and tail-feathers."
"Don't overlook their spurs," said I.
"They ain't got none," said he, "except those you lend 'em."
We returned to a table palled by sullen dread--dread of me, anger
against Dominick who, in the courage of his ignorance of the
conventionalities which restrained them, had taken the short, straight
cut to me and peace. And, as veterans in the no-quarter warfare of
ambition, they knew I had granted him peace on no less terms than their
heads.
They had all, even Roebuck, been drinking freely in the effort to
counteract the depression. But the champagne seemed only to aggravate
their gloom except in the case of young Jamieson. He had just succeeded,
through the death of his father, to the privilege of levying upon the
people of eleven counties by means of trolley franchises which the
legislature had granted his father in perpetuity in return for financial
services to "the party." It is, by the way, an interesting illustration
of the human being's lack of thinking power that a legislature could not
give away a small gold-mine belonging to the public to any man for even
a brief term of years without causing a revolution, but could and does
give away far more valuable privileges to plunder and to tax, and give
them away for ever, without causing any real stir. However--young
Jamieson's liquor, acting upon a mind that had not had enough experience
to appreciate the meaning of the situation, drove him on to insolent
taunts and boasts, addressed to his neighbors but intended for me. I
ignored him and, when the coffee was served, rose to depart.
Roebuck urged me to stay, followed me to the coat-room, took my coat
away from the servant and helped me with it. "I want to see you the
first thing in the morning, Harvey," said he.
"I'll call you up, if I have time," said I.
We came out of the cloak-room, his arm linked in mine, and crossed the
corner of the dining-room toward the outside door. Jamieson threw up his
arm and fluttered his hand in an impertinent gesture of farewell. "So
long, Senator Swollenhead," he cried in a thick voice. "We'll teach you
a lesson in how to treat gentlemen."
The last word--gentlemen--was just clearing his mouth when Dominick's
tea-pot, flung with all the force of the ex-prize-fighter's big muscles
and big body, landed in the midst of his broad white shirt-bosom. And
with the tea-pot Dominick hurled his favorite epithet from his garbage
barrel of language. With a yell Jamieson crashed over backward; his
flying legs, caught by the table, tilted it; his convulsive kicks sent
it over, and half the diners, including Dominick, were floored under it.
All this in a snap of the fingers. And with the disappearance of the
physical semblance of a company of civilized men engaged in dining in
civilized fashion, the last thin veneer over hate and fury was scraped
away. Curses and growling roars made a repulsive mess of sound over that
repulsive mess of unmasked, half-drunken, wholly infuriated brutes.
There is shrewd, sly wisdom snugly tucked away under the fable of the
cat changed into a queen and how she sprang from her throne at sight of
a mouse to pursue it on all fours. The best of us are, after all,
animals changed into men by the spell of reason; and in some
circumstances, it doesn't take much of a blow to dissolve that spell.
For those men in those circumstances, that blow proved sufficient.
Partridge extricated himself, ran round the table and kicked Jamieson in
the head--partly in punishment, perhaps, and because he needed just that
vent for his rage, but chiefly to get credit with me, for he glanced
toward me as he did it. Men, sprawling and squirming side by side on the
floor, lashed out with feet and fists, striking each other and adding to
the wild dishevelment. The candles set fire to the table-cloth and
before the blaze was extinguished burned several in the hair and
mustaches.
Dominick, roaring with laughter, came to Roebuck and me standing at the
door, both dazed at this magic shift of a "gentlemen's" dinner into a
bear-pit. "Granby's ghost is raisin' hell," said he.
But I had no impulse to laugh or to gloat. "Good night," said I to
Roebuck and hastened away.
It was the end of the attempt to mine the foundations of my power. But I
did not neglect its plain warning. As soon as the legislature assembled,
I publicly and strongly advocated the appointment of a joint committee
impartially to investigate all the cities of the state, those ruled by
my own party no less than those ruled by the opposition. The committee
was appointed and did its work so thoroughly that there was a popular
clamor for the taking away of the charters of the cities and for ruling
them from the state capital. It is hardly necessary to say that my
legislature and governor yielded to this clamor. And so the
semi-independent petty princes, the urban bosses, lost their
independence and passed under my control; and the "collections" which
had gone directly to them reached them by way of Woodruff as grants from
my machine, instead of as revenues of their own right.
Before this securing of my home power was complete, I had my
counter-attack upon the Burbank-Goodrich combine well under way.
Immediately on my return to Fredonia from the disastrous dinner, I sent
for the attorney general of the state, Ferguson. He was an ideal
combination of man and politician. He held to the standards of private
morality as nearly as it is possible for a man in active public life to
hold to them--far more nearly than most men dare or, after they have
become inured, care, to hold. He always maintained with me a firm but
tactful independence; he saw the necessity for the sordid side of
politics, but he was careful personally to keep clear of smutched or
besmutching work. He had as keen an instinct for popularity as a bee has
for blossoms; he knew how to do or to direct unpopular things on dark
nights with a dark lantern, how to do or to direct popular things in
full uniform on a white horse. I have never ordered any man to a task
that was not morally congenial; and I was careful to respect Ferguson's
notion of self-respect. I sent for him now, and outlined my plan--to
bring suits, both civil and criminal, in the Federal courts in the name
of the state, against Roebuck and his associates of the Power Trust.
When he had heard, he said: "Yes, Mr. Sayler, we can break up the Power
Trust, can cause the indictment and conviction of Mr. Roebuck. I can
prevent the United States Attorney General from playing any of the usual
tricks and defending the men whom the people think he is vigorously
prosecuting. But--"
"But?" said I encouragingly.
"Is this on the level? If I undertake these prosecutions, shall I be
allowed to push them _honestly_? Or will there be a private settlement
as soon as Roebuck and his crowd see their danger?"
"No matter what happens," I replied, "you shall prosecute at least the
civil suits to the end. I give you my word for that."
He thanked me warmly, for he appreciated that I was bestowing upon him
an enormous opportunity for national fame.
"And you?" said I. "If you succeed in this prosecution, will you remain
in the public service or will you accept the offers the interests will
make, and remove to New York and become a rich corporation lawyer?"
He reflected before answering. "That depends," said he. "If _you_ are
going to stay on in control in this state, I shall stick to public life,
for I believe you will let me have what I call a career. But, if you are
going to get out and leave me at the mercy of those fellows, I certainly
shan't stay where they can fool the people into turning on me."
"I shall stay on," said I; "and after me, there will be
Woodruff--unless, of course, there's some sort of cataclysm."
"A man must take chances," he answered. "I'll take that chance."
We called Woodruff into the consultation. Although he was not a lawyer,
he had a talent for taking a situation by the head and tail and
stretching it out and holding it so that every crease and wrinkle in it
could be seen. And this made him valuable at any conference.
In January we had our big battery loaded, aimed and primed. We unmasked
it, and Ferguson fired. I had expected the other side to act stupidly,
but I had not hoped for such stupidity as they exhibited. Burbank's year
of bathing in presidential flatteries and of fawning on and cringing to
the multi-millionaires and their agents hedging him around, had so
wrought upon him that he had wholly lost his point of view. And he let
his Attorney General pooh-pooh the proceedings,--this in face of the
great popular excitement and enthusiasm. It was not until Roebuck's
lawyers got far enough into the case against him to see his danger that
the administration stopped flying in the teeth of the cyclone of public
sentiment and began to pretend enthusiasm, while secretly plotting the
mistrial of Ferguson's cases. And not until the United States Attorney
General--a vain Goodrich creature whose talents were crippled by his
contempt for "the rabble" and "demagoguery"--not until he had it forced
upon him that Ferguson could not be counter-mined, did they begin to
treat with me for peace.
I shall not retail the negotiations. The upshot was that I let the
administration drop the criminal cases against Roebuck in return for the
restoration of my power in the national committee of the party to the
smallest ejected postmaster in the farthest state. The civil action was
pressed by Ferguson with all his skill as a lawyer and a
popularity-seeking politician; and he won triumphantly in the Supreme
Court--the lower Federal Court with its Power Trust judge had added to
his triumph by deciding against him.
Roebuck was, therefore, under the necessity of going through the
customary forms of outward obedience to the Supreme Court's order to him
to dissolve. He had to get at huge expense, and to carry out at huger, a
plan of reorganization. Though he was glad enough to escape thus
lightly, he dissembled his content and grumbled so loudly that Burbank's
fears were roused and arrangements were made to placate him. The scheme
adopted was, I believe, suggested by Vice-President Howard, as shrewd
and cynical a rascal as ever lived in the mire without getting smutch or
splash upon his fine linen of respectability.
For several years there had been a strong popular demand for a revision
of the tariff. The party had promised to yield, but had put off
redeeming its promise. Now, there arose a necessity for revising the
tariff in the interest of "the interests." Some of the schedules were
too low; others protected articles which the interests wanted as free
raw materials; a few could be abolished without offending any large
interests and with the effect of punishing some small ones that had been
niggard in contributing to the "campaign fund" which maintains the
standing army of political workers and augments it whenever a battle is
on. Accordingly, a revision of the tariff was in progress. To soothe
Roebuck, they gave him a tariff schedule that would enable him to
collect each year more than the total of the extraordinary expenses to
which I had put him. Roebuck "forgave" me; and I really forgave Burbank.
But I washed my hands of his administration. Not only did I actually
stand aloof but also I disassociated myself from it in the public mind.
When the crash should come, as come it must with such men at the helm, I
wished to be in a position successfully to take full charge for the work
of repair.
XXXII
A GLANCE BEHIND THE MASK OF GRANDEUR
Not until late in the spring of his second year did Burbank find a trace
of gall in his wine.
From the night of his election parasites and plunderers and agents of
plunderers had imprisoned him in the usual presidential fool's paradise.
The organs of the interests and their Congressional henchmen praised
everything he did; I and my group of Congressmen and my newspapers, as
loyal partizans, bent first of all upon regularity, were silent where we
did not praise also. But the second year of a President's first term is
the beginning of frank, if guarded, criticism of him from his own side.
For it is practically his last year of venturing to exercise any real
official power. The selection of delegates to the party's national
convention, to which a President must submit himself for leave to
re-submit himself to the people, is well under way before the end of
his third year; and direct and active preparations for it must begin
long in advance.
Late in that second spring Burbank made a tour of the country, to give
the people the pleasure of seeing their great man, to give himself the
pleasure of their admiration, and to help on the Congressional campaign,
the result of which would be the preliminary popular verdict upon his
administration. The thinness of the crowds, the feebleness of the
enthusiasm, the newspaper sneers and flings at that oratory once hailed
as a model of dignity and eloquence--even he could not accept the smooth
explanations of his flatterers. And in November came the party's
memorable overwhelming defeat--reducing our majority in the Senate from
twenty to six, and substituting for our majority of ninety-three in the
House an opposition majority of sixty-seven.
I talked with him early in January and was amazed that, while he
appreciated the public anger against the party, he still believed
himself personally popular. "There is a lull in prosperity," said he,
"and the people are peevish." Soon, however, by a sort of endosmosis to
which the densest vanity is somewhat subject, the truth began to seep
through and to penetrate into him.
He became friendlier to me, solicitous toward spring--but he clung none
the less tightly to Goodrich. The full awakening came in his third
summer when the press and the politicians of the party began openly to
discuss the next year's nomination and to speak of him as if he were out
of the running. He was spending the hot months on the Jersey coast, the
flatterers still swarming about him and still assiduous, but their
flatteries falling upon ever deafer ears as his mind rivetted upon the
hair-suspended sword. In early September he invited me to visit him--my
first invitation of that kind in two years and a half. We had three
interviews before he could nerve himself to brush aside the barriers
between him and me.
"I am about to get together my friends with a view to next year," said
he through an uneasy smile. "What do you think of the prospects?"
"What do your friends say?" I asked.
"Oh, of course, I am assured of a renomination--" He paused, and his
look at me made the confident affirmation a dubious question.
"Yes?" said I.
"And--don't you think my record has made me strong?" he went on
nervously.
"Strong--with whom?" said I.
He was silent. Finally he laid his hand on my knee--we were taking the
air on the ocean drive. "Harvey," he said, "I can count on you?"
I shook my head. "I shall take no part in the next campaign," I said. "I
shall resign the chairmanship."
"But I have selected you as my chairman. I have insisted on you. I can't
trust any one else. I need others, I use others, but I trust only you."
I shook my head. "I shall resign," I repeated. "What's the matter--won't
Goodrich take the place?"
He looked away. "I have not seriously thought of any one but you," he
said reproachfully.
I happened to know that the place had been offered to Goodrich and that
he had declined it, protesting that I, a Western man, must not be
disturbed when the West was vital to the party's success. "My resolution
is fixed," said I.
A long silence, then: "Sayler, have you heard anything of an attempt to
defeat me for the nomination?"
"Goodrich has decided to nominate Governor Ridgeway of Illinois," said
I.
He blanched and had to moisten his dry, wrinkled lips several times
before he could speak. "A report of that nature reached me last
Thursday," he went on. "For some time I have been perplexed by the
Ridgeway talk in many of our organs. I have questioned Goodrich about
it--and--I must say--his explanations are not--not wholly satisfactory."
I glanced at him and had instantly to glance away, so plainly was I
showing my pity. He was not hiding himself from me now. He looked old
and tired and sick--not mere sickness of body, but that mortal sickness
of the mind and heart which kills a man, often years before his body
dies.
"I have come to the conclusion that you were right about Goodrich,
Sayler. I am glad that I took your advice and never trusted him. I think
you and I together will be too strong for him."
"You are going to seek a renomination?" I asked.
He looked at me in genuine astonishment. "It is impossible that the
party should refuse me," he said.
I was silent.
"Be frank with me, Sayler," he exclaimed at last. "Be frank. Be my
friend, your own old self."
"As frank and as friendly as you have been?" said I, rather to remind
myself than to reproach him. For I was afraid of the reviving feeling of
former years--the liking for his personal charms and virtues, the
forbearance toward that weakness which he could no more change than he
could change the color of his eyes. His moral descent had put no clear
markings upon his pose. On the contrary, he had grown in dignity through
the custom of deference. The people passing us looked admiration at him,
had a new sense of the elevation of the presidential office. Often it
takes the trained and searching eye to detect in the majestic façade the
evidences that the palace has degenerated into a rookery for pariahs.
"I have done what I thought for the best," he answered, never more
direct and manly in manner. "I have always been afraid, been on guard,
lest my personal fondness for you should betray me into yielding to you
when I ought not. Perhaps I have erred at times, have leaned backward in
my anxiety to be fair. But I had and have no fear of your not
understanding. Our friendship is too long established, too
well-founded." And I do not doubt that he believed himself; the capacity
for self-deception is rarely short of the demands upon it.
"It's unfortunate--" I began. I was going to say it was unfortunate that
no such anxieties had ever restrained him from yielding to Goodrich. But
I hadn't the heart. Instead, I finished my sentence with: "However, it's
idle to hold a post-mortem on this case. The cause of death is
unimportant. The fact of it is sufficient. No doubt you did the best you
could, Mr. President."
My manner was that of finality. It forbade further discussion. He
abandoned the finesse of negotiation.
"Harvey, I ask you, as a personal favor, to help me through this
crisis," he said. "I ask you, my friend and my dead wife's friend."
No depth too low, no sentiment too sacred! Anger whirled up in me
against this miserable, short-sighted self-seeker who had brought to a
climax of spoliation my plans to guide the strong in developing the
resources of the country. And I turned upon him, intending to overwhelm
him with the truth about his treachery, about his attempts to destroy
me. For I was now safe from his and Goodrich's vengeance--they had
destroyed themselves with the people and with the party. But a glance at
him and--how could I strike a man stretched in agony upon his deathbed?
"If I could help you, I would," said I.
"You--you and I together can get a convention that will nominate me," he
urged, hope and fear jostling each other to look pleadingly at me from
his eyes.
"Possibly," I said. "But--of what use would that be?"
He sank back in the carriage, yellow-white and with trembling hands and
eyelids. "Then you don't think I could be elected?" he asked in a
broken, breathless way.
For answer I could only shake my head. "No matter who is the nominee," I
went on after a moment, "our party can't win." I half-yielded to the
impulse of sentimentality and turned to him appealingly. "James," said
I, "why don't you--right away--before the country sees you are to be
denied a renomination--publicly announce that you won't take it in any
circumstances? Why don't you devote the rest of your term to regaining
your lost--popularity? Every day has its throngs of opportunities for
the man in the White House. Break boldly and openly with Goodrich and
his crowd."
I saw and read the change in his face. My advice about the nomination
straightway closed his mind against me; at the mention of Goodrich, his
old notion of my jealousy revived. And I saw, too, that contact with and
use of and subservience to corruption had so corrupted him that he no
longer had any faith in any method not corrupt. All in an instant I
realized the full folly of what I was doing. I felt confident that by
pursuing the line I had indicated he could so change the situation in
the next few months that he would make it impossible for them to refuse
to renominate him, might make it possible for him to be elected. But
even if he had the wisdom to listen, where would he get the courage and
the steadfastness to act? I gave him up finally and for ever.
A man may lose his own character and still survive, and even go far. But
if he lose belief in character as a force, he is damned. He could not
survive in a community of scoundrels.
Burbank sat motionless and with closed eyes, for a long time. I watched
the people in the throng of carriages--hundreds of faces all turned
toward him, all showing that mingled admiration, envy and awe which
humanity gives its exalted great. "The President! The President!" I
heard every few yards in excited undertones. And hats were lifting, and
once a crowd of enthusiastic partizans raised a cheer.
"The President!" I thought, with mournful irony. And I glanced at him.
Suddenly he was transformed by an expression the most frightful I have
ever seen. It was the look of a despairing, weak, vicious thing,
cornered, giving battle for its life--like a fox at bay before a pack of
huge dogs. It was not Burbank--no, _he_ was wholly unlike that. It was
Burbank's ambition, interrupted at its meal by the relentless,
sure-aiming hunter, Fate.
"For God's sake, Burbank!" I exclaimed. "All these people are watching
us."
"To hell with them!" he ground out. "I tell you, Sayler, I _will_ be
nominated! And elected too, by God! I will not be thrown aside like an
emptied orange-skin. I will show them that I am President."
Those words, said by some men, in some tones, would have thrilled me.
Said by him and in that tone and with that look, they made me shudder
and shrink. Neither of us spoke again. When he dropped me at my hotel we
touched hands and smiled formally for appearances before the gaping,
peeping, peering crowd. And as he drove away, how they cheered him--the
man risen high above eighty millions, alone on the mountain-peak, in the
glorious sunshine of success. The President!
The next seven months were months of turmoil in the party and in the
country--a turmoil of which I was a silent spectator, conspicuous by my
silence. Burbank, the deepest passions of his nature rampant, had burst
through the meshes of partizanship and the meshes of social and personal
intimacies in which he, as a "good party man" and as the father of
children with social aspirations and as the worshiper of wealth and
respectability, was entangled and bound down; with the desperate courage
that comes from fear of destruction, he was trying to save himself.
But his only available instruments were all either Goodrich men or other
kinds of machine-men; they owed nothing to him, they had nothing to fear
from him--a falling king is a fallen king. Every project he devised for
striking down his traitor friends and making himself popular was subtly
turned by his Cabinet or by the Senate or by the press or by all three
into something futile and ridiculous or contemptible. It was a complete
demonstration of the silliness of the fiction that the President could
be an autocrat if he chose. Even had Burbank seen through the fawnings
and the flatteries of the traitors round him, and dismissed his Cabinet,
whatever men he might have put into it would not have attached
themselves to his lost cause, but would have used their positions to
ingratiate themselves with the power that had used and exhausted and
discarded him.
He had the wisdom, or the timidity, to proceed always with caution and
safe legality and so to avoid impeachment and degradation. His chief
attempts were, naturally, upon monopoly; they were slyly balked by his
sly Attorney General, and their failure was called by the press, and was
believed by the people, the cause of the hard times which were just
beginning to be acute. What made him such an easy victim to his
lieutenants was not their craft, but the fact that he had lost his
sense of right and wrong. A man of affairs may not, indeed will not,
always steer by that compass; but he must have it aboard. Without it he
can not know how far off the course he is, or how to get back to it. No
ship ever reached any port except that of failure and disgrace, unless
it, in spite of all its tackings before the cross-winds of practical
life, kept in the main to the compass and to the course.
His last stagger was--or seemed to be--an attempt to involve us in a war
with Germany. I say "seemed to be" because I hesitate to ascribe a
project as infamous to him, even when unbalanced by despair. The first
ugly despatch he ordered his Goodrich Secretary of State to send,
_somehow_ leaked to the newspapers before it could be put into cipher
for transmission. It was not sent--for from the press of the entire
country rose a clamor against "deliberate provocation of a nation with
which we are, and wish to remain, at peace." He repudiated the despatch
and dismissed the Secretary of State in disgrace to disgrace--the one
stroke in his fight against Goodrich in which he got the advantage. But
that advantage was too small, too doubtful and too late.
His name was not presented to the convention.
XXXIII
A "SPASM OF VIRTUE"
I forced upon Goodrich my place as chairman of the national committee
and went abroad with my daughters. We stayed there until Scarborough was
inaugurated. He had got his nomination from a convention of men who
hated and feared him, but who dared not flout the people and fling away
victory; he had got his election because the defections from our ranks
in the doubtful states far outbalanced Goodrich's extensive purchases
there with the huge campaign-fund of the interests. The wheel-horse,
Partizanship, had broken down, and the leader, Plutocracy, could not
draw the chariot to victory alone.
As soon as the election was over, our people began to cable me to come
home and take charge. But I waited until Woodruff and my other faithful
lieutenants had thoroughly convinced all the officers of the machine how
desperate its plight was, and that I alone could repair and restore,
and that I could do it only if absolute control were given me. When the
ship reached quarantine Woodruff came aboard; and, not having seen him
in many months, I was able to see, and was startled by, the contrast
between the Doc Woodruff I had met on the train more years before than I
cared to cast up, and the United States Senator Woodruff, high in the
councils of the party and high in the esteem of its partizans among the
people. He was saying: "You can have anything you want, Senator," and so
on. But I was thinking of him, of the vicissitudes of politics, of the
unending struggle of the foul stream to purify itself, to sink or to
saturate its mud. For we ought not to forget that if the clear water is
saturated with mud, also the mud is saturated with clear water.
A week or so after I resumed the chairmanship, Scarborough invited me to
lunch alone with him at the White House. When I had seen him, four years
before, just after his defeat, he was in high spirits and looked a
youth. Now it depressed me, but gave me no surprise, to find him worn,
and overcast by that tragic sadness which canopies every one of the
seats of the mighty. "I fear, Mr. President," said I, "you are finding
the men who will help you to carry out your ideas as rare as I once
warned you they were."
"Not rare," was his answer, "but hard to get at through the throngs of
Baal-worshipers that have descended upon me and are trying to hedge me
in."
"Fortunately, you are free from political and social entanglements,"
said I, with ironic intent.
He laughed with only a slightly concealed bitterness. "From political
entanglements--yes," said he. "But not from social toils. Ever since I
have been in national life, my wife and I have held ourselves socially
aloof, because those with whom we would naturally and even inevitably
associate would be precisely those who would some day beset me for
immunities and favors. And how can one hold to a course of any sort of
justice, if doing so means assailing all one's friends and their friends
and relatives? For who are the offenders? They are of the rich, of the
successful, of the clever, of the socially agreeable and charming. And
how can one enforce justice against one's dinner companions--and in
favor of whom? Of the people, voiceless, distant, unknown to one.
Personal friendship on the one side; on the other, an abstraction."
"I should not class you among those likely to yield many inches to the
social bribe," said I.
"That is pleasant, but not candid," replied he with his simple
directness. "No man of your experience could fail to know that the
social bribe is the arch-corrupter, the one briber whom it is not in
human nature to resist. But, as I was saying, to my amazement, in spite
of my wife's precautions and mine, I find myself beset--and with what
devilish insidiousness! When I refuse, simply to save myself from
flagrant treachery to my obligations of duty, I find myself seeming,
even to my wife and to myself, churlish and priggish; Pharisaical, in
the loathsome attitude of a moral _poseur_. Common honesty, in presence
of this social bribe, takes on the sneaking seeming of rottenest
hypocrisy. It is indeed hard to get through and to get at the men I want
and need, and must and will have."
"Impossible," said I. "And if you could get at them, and if the Senate
would let you put them where they seem to you to belong, the temptation
would be too much for them. They too would soon become Baal-worshipers,
the more assiduous for their long abstinence."
"Some," he admitted, "perhaps most. But at least a few would stand the
test--and just one such would repay and justify all the labor of all the
search. The trouble with you pessimists is that you don't take our
ancestry into account. Man isn't a falling angel, but a rising animal.
So, every impulse toward the decent, every gleam of light, is a
tremendous gain. The wonder isn't the bad but the good, isn't that we
are so imperfect, but that in such a few thousand years we've got so
far--so far _up_. I know you and I have in the main the same
purpose--where is there a man who'd like to think the world the worse
for his having lived? But we work by different means. You believe the
best results can be got through that in man which he has inherited from
the past--by balancing passion against passion, by offsetting appetite
with appetite. I hope for results from that in the man of to-day which
is the seed, the prophecy, of the man who is to be."
"Your method has had one recent and very striking _apparent_ success,"
said I. "But--the spasm of virtue will pass."
"Certainly," he replied, "and so too will the succeeding spasm of
reaction. Also, your party must improve itself--and mine too--as the
result of this spasm of virtue."
"For a time," I admitted. "I envy you your courage and hope. But I can't
share in them. You will serve four stormy years; you will retire with
friends less devoted and enemies more bitter; you will be misunderstood,
maligned; and there's only a remote possibility that your vindication
will come before you are too old to be offered a second term. And the
harvest from the best you sow will be ruined in some flood of reaction."
"No," he answered. "It will be reaped. The evil I do, all evil, passes.
The good will be reaped. Nothing good is lost."
"And if it is reaped," I rejoined, "the reaping will not come until
long, long after you are a mere name in history."
Even as I spoke my doubts I was wishing I had kept them to myself; for,
thought I, there's no poorer business than shooting at the beautiful
soaring bird of illusion. But he was looking at me without seeing me.
His expression suggested the throwing open of the blinds hiding a man's
inmost self.
"If a man," said he absently, "fixes his mind not on making friends or
defeating enemies, not on elections or on history, but just on avoiding
from day to day, from act to act, the condemnation of his own
self-respect--" The blinds closed as suddenly as they had opened--he had
become conscious that some one was looking in. And I was wishing again
that I had kept my doubts to myself; for I now saw that what I had
thought a bright bird of illusion was in fact the lost star which
lighted my own youth.
Happy the man who, through strength or through luck, guides his whole
life by the star of his youth. Happy, but how rare!
XXXIV
"LET US HELP EACH OTHER"
In the following September I took my daughters to Elizabeth. She looked
earnestly, first at Frances, tall and slim and fancying herself a woman
grown, then at Ellen, short and round and struggling with the giggling
age. "We shall like each other, I'm sure," was her verdict. "We'll get
on well together." And Frances smiled, and Ellen nodded. They evidently
thought so, too.
"I want you to teach them your art," said I, when they were gone to
settle themselves and she and I were alone.
"My art?"
"The art of being one's self. I am sick of men and women who hide their
real selves behind a pose of what they want others to think them."
"Most of our troubles come from that, don't they?"
"All mine did," said I. "I am at the age when the very word age begins
to jar on the ear, and the net result of my years of effort is--I have
convinced other people that I am somebody at the cost of convincing
myself that I am nobody."
"No, you are master," she said.
"As a lion-tamer is master of his lions. He gives all his thought to
them, who think only of their appetites. And his whole reward is that
with his life in his hand he can sometimes cow them through a few
worthless little tricks." I looked round the attractive reception-room
of the school. "I wish you'd take _me_ in, too," I ended.
She flushed a little, then shook her head, her eyes twinkling. "This is
not a reformatory," said she. And we both laughed.
As I did not speak or look away, but continued to smile at her, she
became uneasy, glanced round as if seeking an avenue of retreat.
"Yes--I mean just that, Elizabeth," I admitted, and my tone explained
the words.
She clasped her hands and started up.
"In me--in every one," I went on, "there's a beast and a man. Just
now--with me--the man is uppermost. And he wants to stay uppermost.
Elizabeth--will you--help him?"
She lowered her head until I could see only the splendor of her thick
hair, sparkling like black quartz.
"Will you--dear? Won't you--dear?"
Suddenly she gave me both her hands. "Let us help each other," she said.
And slowly she lifted her glance to mine; and never before had I felt
the full glory of those eyes, the full melody of that deep voice.
* * * * *
And so, I end as I began, as life begins and ends--with a woman. In a
woman's arms we enter life; in a woman's arms we get the courage and
strength to bear it; in a woman's arms we leave it. And as for the span
between--the business, profession, career--how colorless, how
meaningless it would be but for her!
THE END
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
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