The Plum Tree
by David Graham Phillips · English · Gutenberg #20449 · 419,510 chars · public domain (US)
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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
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20449
Credits: Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
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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
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