XXXA PHILOSOPHER RUDELY INTERRUPTED
After the funeral I lingered at our Fredonia place. There was the estate to settle; my two daughters had now no one to look after them; Junior must be started right at learning the business of which he would soon be the head, as his uncle had shown himself far too easy-going for large executive responsibility. So, I stayed on, doing just enough to keep a face of plausibility upon my pretexts for not returning to Washington. The fact was that Carlotta's death had deepened my mood of distaste into disgust. It had set me to brooding over the futility and pettiness of my activities in politics, of all activities of whatever kind. I watched Ed and my children resuming the routine of their lives, swiftly adjusting themselves to the loss of one who had been so dear to them and apparently so necessary to their happiness. The cry of "man overboard," a few ripples, a few tears; the sailing on, with the surfaceof the water smooth again and the faces keen and bright.
Woodruff wrote, urging; then he sent telegram after telegram. Still I procrastinated; for all the effect his letters and telegrams had upon me, I might as well have left them unopened. My final answer was: "Act as you would if I were dead."
Probably, what had given my pessimism its somberest tone was the attitude of the public toward Burbank's high appointments. I had confidently predicted that filling all the high offices with men who had no interest but "the interests," men who were notoriously the agents and servants of the great "campaign contributors," would cause a public outcry that could not be ignored. The opposition press did make perfunctory criticisms; but nowhere was there a sign that the people were really angered.
I got the clue to this mystery from my gardener, who prided himself on being strenuously of the opposition party. "What do you think of the new administration?" said I when I came upon him one morning at the rhododendron beds.
"Much better than I allowed," said he. "Burbank's got good men around him."
"You approve of his Cabinet?"
"Of course, they're all strong party men. I like a good party man. I like a man that has convictions and principles, and stands up for 'em."
"Your newspapers say some pretty severe things about those men."
"So I read," said he, "but you know how that is, Mr. Sayler. They've got to pound 'em to please the party. But nobody believes much he sees in the newspapers. Whenever I read an item about things I happen to know, it's all wrong. And I guess they don't get it any nearer right about the things I don't happen to know. Now, all this here talk of there being so many millionaires—I don't take no kind of stock in it."
"No?" said I.
"Of course, some's poor and some's rich—that's got to be. But I think it's all newspaper lies about these here big fortunes and about all the leading men in politics being corrupt. I know it ain't so about the leading men inmyparty, and Ireckon there ain't no more truth in it about the leading men of your'n. I was saying to my wife last night, 'It's all newspaper lies,' says I, 'just like the story they printed about Mrs. Timmins eloping with Maria Wilmerding's husband, when she had only went over to Rabbit Forks to visit her married daughter.' No, they can't fool me—them papers."
"That's one way of looking at it," said I.
"It's horse sense," said he.
And I have no doubt that to the average citizen, leading a small, quiet life and dealing with affairs in corner-grocery retail, the stupendous facts of accumulations of wealth and wholesale, far-and-wide purchases of the politicians, the vast system of bribery, with bribes adapted to every taste and conscience, seem impossibilities, romancings of partizanship and envy and sensationalism. Nor can he understand the way superior men play the great games, the heartlessness of ambition, the cynicism of political and commercial prostitution, the sense of superiority to the legal and moral codes which comes to most men with success.
Your average citizen is a hero-worshiper too.He knows his own and his neighbor's weaknesses, but he gapes up at the great with glamoured eyes, and listens to their smooth plausibilities as to the reading of the Gospel from the pulpit. He belongs to the large mass of those who believe, not to the small class of those who question. But for the rivalries and jealousies of superior men which have kept them always divided into two parties, the ins and the outs, I imagine the masses would have remained for ever sunk in the most hopeless, if the most delightful, slavery—that in which the slave accepts his lowliness as a divine ordinance and looks up to his oppressors and plunderers as hero-leaders. And no doubt, so long as the exuberant riches of our country enable the triumphant class to "take care of" all the hungry who have intellect enough to make themselves dangerous, we shall have no change—except occasional spasms whenever a large number of unplaced intelligent hungry are forcing the full and fat to make room for them. How long will this be?
If our education did not merely feed prejudices instead of removing them, I should say not long. As it is, I expect to "leave the world as wickedand as foolish as I found it." At any rate, until the millenium, I shall continue to play the game under the rules of human nature—instead of under the rules of human ideals, as does my esteemed friend Scarborough. And I claim that we practical men are as true and useful servants of our country and of our fellow men as he. If men like him are the light, men like us are the lantern that shields it from the alternating winds of rapacity and resentment.
But, in running on about myself, I have got away from my point, which was how slight and even flimsy a pretense of fairness will shelter a man in high place—and therefore a Burbank. "He will fool the people as easily as he fools himself," said I. And more than ever it seemed to me that I must keep out of the game of his administration. My necessity of party regularity made it impossible for me to oppose him; my equal necessity of not outraging my sense of the wise, not to speak of the decent, made it impossible for me to abet him.
At last Woodruff came in person. When his name was brought to me, I regretted that I couldnot follow my strong impulse to refuse to see him. But at sight of his big strong body and big strong face, with its typically American careless good humor—the cool head, the warm heart, the amused eyes and lips that could also harden into sternness of resolution—at sight of this old friend and companion-in-arms, my mood began to lift and I felt him stirring in it like sunshine attacking a fog. "I know what you've come to say," I began, "but don't say it. I shall keep to my tent for the present."
"Then you won't have a tent to keep to," retorted he.
"Very well," said I. "My private affairs will give me all the occupation I need."
He laughed. "The general resigns from the command of the army to play with a box of lead soldiers."
"That sounds well," said I. "But the better the analogy, the worse the logic. I am going out of the business of making and working off gold bricks and green goods—and that's no analogy."
"Then you must be going to kill yourself," he replied. "For that's life."
"Public life—active life," said I. "Here, there are other things." And I looked toward my two daughters, whose laughter reached us from their pony-cart just rounding a distant curve in the drive.
His gaze followed mine and he watched the two children until they were out of sight, watched them with the saddest, hungriest look in his eyes. "Guess you're right," he said gruffly.
After a silence I asked: "What's the news?"
A quizzical smile just curled his lips, and it broadened into a laugh as he saw my own rather shamefaced smile of understanding. "Seems to me," said he, "that I read somewhere once how a king, perhaps it was an emperor, so hankered for the quiet joys that he got off the throne and retired to a monastery—and then established lines of post-horses from his old capital to bring him the news every half-hour or so. I reckon he'd have taken his job back if he could have got it."
"I reckon," said I.
"Well," said he, "the news is that they're about to oust you from the chairmanship of the national committee and from control in this state."
"Really?" said I, in an indifferent tone—though I felt anything but indifferent.
"Really," said he. "Burbank is throwing out our people throughout the country and is putting Goodrich men in place of 'em—wherever our fellows won't turn traitor. And they've got hold of Roebuck. He's giving a dinner at the Auditorium to-morrow night. It's a dinner of eleven covers. I think you can guess who ten of 'em are for. The eleventh is for Dominick!"
That was enough. I grasped the situation instantly. The one weak spot in my control of my state was my having left the city bosses their local power, instead of myself ruling the cities from the state capital. Why had I done this? Perhaps the bottom reason was that I shrank from permitting any part of the machine for which I was directly responsible to be financed by collections from vice and crime. I admit that the distinction between corporate privilege and plunder and the pickings and stealings and prostitutions of individuals is more apparent than real. I admit that the kinds of vice and crime I tolerated are far more harmful than the other sortswhich are petty and make loathed outcasts of their wretched practitioners. Still, I was snob or Pharisee or Puritan enough to feel and to act upon the imaginary distinction. And so, I had left the city bosses locally independent—for, without the revenues and other aids from vice and crime, what city political machine could be kept up?
"Dominick!" I exclaimed.
"Exactly!" said Woodruff. "Now, Mr. Sayler, the point is just here. I don't blame you for wanting to get out. If I had any other game, I'd get out myself. But what's to become of us—of all your friends, not only in this state but throughout the country? Are you going to stand by and see them slaughtered and not lift a finger to help 'em?"
There was no answering him. Yet the spur of vanity, which clipped into me at thought of myself thrown down and out by these cheap ingrates and scoundrels, had almost instantly ceased to sting; and my sense of weary disgust had returned. If I went into the battle again, what work faced me? The same old monotonousround. To outflank Burbank and Goodrich by tricks as old as war and politics, and effective only because human stupidity is infinite and unteachable. To beat down and whip back into the ranks again these bandits of commerce disguised as respectable, church-going, law-upholding men of property—and to do this by the same old methods of terror and force.
"You can't leave us in the lurch," said Doc. "And the game promises to be interesting once more. I don't like racing on the flat. It's the hurdles that make the fun."
I pictured myself again a circus horse, going round and round the ring, jumping the same old hurdles at the same old intervals. "Take my place, Doc," said I.
He shook his head. "I'm a good second," said he, "but a rotten bad first."
It was true enough. He mysteriously lacked that mysterious something which, when a man happens to have been born with it, makes other men yield him the command—give it to him, force it on him, if he hangs back.
"What do you want me to do?" I asked.
"That dinner to-morrow night is in Suite L. Go to it—that's the shortest way to put Roebuck and Dominick out of business. Face 'em and they'll skulk."
"It's a risk," said I. I saw at once that he was right, but I was in a reluctant humor.
"Not a bit of it," was his confident reply. "I had a horse that wascrazy—would run away on any old provocation. But no matter how busy he was at kicking up the dust and the dashboard, you could always halt him by ringing a bell once. He'd been in the street-car service. That's the way it is with men, especially strong men, that have been broken to the bell. They hear it ring and they can't resist. Go up and ring the bell."
"Go ring it yourself," said I.
"You're the bell," said he.
XXXIHARVEY SAYLER, SWINEHERD
At a little after eight the following night, I was in Chicago, was knocking at Suite L in the Auditorium Hotel; I was hearing sounds from within that indicated that the dinner was under way. The door swung back and there stood old Roebuck himself, napkin in hand, his shriveling old face showing that his dollar sense was taking up the strength which his other senses were losing. He was saying cordially, "Ah, Croffut, you are late—"
Then his dim eyes saw me; he pulled himself up like a train when the air-brakes are clapped on.
"They told me at the office that you were at dinner," said I in the tone of one who has unintentionally blundered. "As I was looking for dinner, I rather hoped you'd ask me to join you. But I see that—"
"Come right in," he said smoothly, but grayas a sheep. "You'll find some old friends of yours. We're taking advantage of the convention of western manufacturers to have a little reunion."
I now had a full view of the table. There was a silence that made the creaking of starched evening shirt-bosoms noisy as those men drew long stealthy breaths when breathing became imperative. All my "clients" and Dominick—he at Roebuck's right. At Roebuck's left there was a vacant chair. "Shall I sit here?" said I easily.
"That place was reserved—was for—but—" stammered Roebuck.
"For Granby's ghost?" said I pleasantly.
His big lips writhed. And as my glance of greeting to these old friends of mine traveled down one side of the table and up the other, it might have been setting those faces on fire, so brightly did they flare. It was hard for me to keep my disgust beneath the surface. Those "gentlemen" assembled there were among the "leading citizens" of my state; and Roebuck was famous on both sides of the Atlantic as a king of commerce and a philanthropist. Yet, everyone of those brains was busy most of its hours with assassin-like plottings—and for what purpose? For ends so petty, so gross and stupid that it was inconceivable how intelligence could waste life upon them, not to speak of the utter depravity and lack of manliness. Liars cheats, bribers; and flaunting the fruits of infamy as honors, as titles to respect, as gifts from Almighty God! And here they were, assembled now for silly plottings against the man whose only offense in their eyes was that he was saving them from themselves—was preventing them from killing the goose that would cheerfully keep on laying golden eggs for the privilege of remaining alive. It was pitiful. It was nauseating. I felt my degradation in stooping to such company.
I spoke to Dominick last. To my surprise he squarely returned my gaze. His eyes were twinkling, as the eyes of a pig seem to be, if you look straight into its face when it lifts its snout from a full trough. Presently he could contain the huge volume of his mirth no longer. It came roaring from him in a great coarse torrent, shakinghis vast bulk and the chair that sustained it, swelling the veins in his face, resounding through the silent room while the waiters literally stood aghast. At last he found breath to ejaculate: "Well, I'll be good and—damned!"
This gale ripped from the others and whirled away their cloaks of surface-composure. Naked, they suggested a lot of rats in a trap—Dominick jeering at them and anticipating the pleasure of watching me torment them. I choked back the surge of repulsion and said to Roebuck: "Then whereshallI sit?"
Roebuck looked, almost wildly, toward the foot of the table. He longed to have me as far from him as possible. Partridge, at the foot of the table, cried out—in alarm: "Make room for the Senator between you and Mr. Dominick, Roebuck! He ought to be as near the head of the table as possible."
"No matter where Senator Sayler sits, it's the head of the table," said Roebuck. His commonplace of courtesy indicated, not recovered self-control, but the cunning of his rampant instinct of self-preservation—that cunning which menso often exhibit in desperate straits, thereby winning credit for cool courage.
"We're a merry company," said I, as we sat. This, with a glance at Dominick heaving in the subsiding storm of his mirth. My remark set him off again. I glanced at his place to see if he had abandoned his former inflexible rule of total abstinence. There stood his invariable pot of tea. Clearly, it was not drink that enabled him to enjoy a situation which, as it seemed to me, was fully as unattractive for him as for his fellows.
Soon the door opened and in strode Croffut; handsome, picturesque, with his pose of dashing, brave manhood, which always got the crowds into the mood for the frenzy his oratory conjured. Croffut seemed to me to put the climax upon this despicable company—Croffut, one of the great orators of the party, so adored by the people that, but for our overwhelming superiority in the state, I should never have dared eject him from office. Since I ejected him he had not spoken to me. Dominick looked at him, said in a voice that would have flared even the warm ashes of manhood into a furious blaze: "Goand shake hands with Senator Sayler, Croffut, and sit down."
Croffut advanced, smiling. "I am fit for my company," thought I as I let him clasp my hand.
"Better tilt Granby's ghost out of that chair, Croffut," said Dominick, as the ex-Senator was seating himself. And in his animal exuberance of delight at his joke and at the whole situation he clapped Roebuck on the shoulder.
Roebuck shrank and winced. Moral humiliation he could shed as an armor-plated turret sheds musket-balls. But a physical humiliation, especially with spectators, sank in and sank deep. Instantly, alarmed lest Dominick had seen and understood, he smiled and said: "That's a vigorous arm of yours, Mr. Dominick."
"Not bad for a man of sixty," said Dominick.
I ate because to eat was a necessary part of my pose of absolute calmness; but I had to force down the food. It seemed to me to embody the banquet there set before my mental appetite. I found I had no stomach for that banquet. It takes the coarse palate of youth or the depraved palate of a more debauched manhood than mineto enjoy such a feast. Yet, less than a year before, I had enjoyed, had delighted in, a far less strenuous contest with these mutineers. As I sat holding down my gorge and acting as if I were at ease, I suddenly wondered what Elizabeth Crosby would think of me if she could see. And then I saw her, with a reality of imagining that startled me—it was as if she were in the doorway; and her eyes lifted to mine in that slow, steady, searching gaze of hers.
I suppose, if a soldier thrusting his saber into the bowels of his enemy on the battle-field were suddenly to see before him his mother or the good and gentle wife or daughter he loved, he would drop the saber and fly to hide himself like a murderer. So, I, overwhelmed, said to myself: "I can not go on! Let these wretches wallow in their own vileness. I shall not wallow with them. I am no swineherd!"
As I was debating how to escape and what one of the many other ways of saving my friends and lieutenants I should adopt, Dominick touched me on the arm. "A word with you, Senator," said he.
He glanced at the others as if he were debating whether he should order them from the table while he talked with me. If he had ordered it, they would have gone. But restrained, perhaps by his crude though reverent sense of convention, he rose and led the way over to a corner.
"I want to tell you, Senator, that as soon as I got on to what this here push was plottin', I wired you askin' an appointment. You'll find the telegram at your house when you go home. I don't stand for no foulin'. I play the game straight. I came because I thought you'd want the party to be represented at such a getherin'."
I saw that he had come to the dinner, doubtful whether any enterprise against me, promising enough for him to risk embarking, could be launched; as soon as I entered the room he, like the rat when the cat interrupted the rat-and-mouse convention to discuss belling it, unceremoniously led the way to safety. But this was not one of those few occasions on which it is wise to show a man that his lies do not fool you. "I am glad to hear you say these things, Dominick," said I. "I am glad you are loyal to the party."
"You can trust me, Senator," said he earnestly.
"I can trust your common sense," said I. And I proceeded to grasp this lucky chance to get away. "I am leaving," I went on, "as soon as the coffee is served. I shall look to you to send these gentlemen home in a proper frame of mind toward the party."
His eyes glistened. Except his growing fortune, nothing delighted him so much as a chance to "rough-house" his eminently respectable "pals." He felt toward them that quaint mixture of envy, contempt and a desire to fight which fills a gamin at sight of a fashionably dressed boy. He put out his big hand and dampened mine with it. "You can count on me, Senator," he said gratefully. "I'll trim 'em, comb and tail-feathers."
"Don't overlook their spurs," said I.
"They ain't got none," said he, "except those you lend 'em."
We returned to a table palled by sullen dread—dread of me, anger against Dominick who, in the courage of his ignorance of the conventionalities which restrained them, had taken theshort, straight cut to me and peace. And, as veterans in the no-quarter warfare of ambition, they knew I had granted him peace on no less terms than their heads.
They had all, even Roebuck, been drinking freely in the effort to counteract the depression. But the champagne seemed only to aggravate their gloom except in the case of young Jamieson. He had just succeeded, through the death of his father, to the privilege of levying upon the people of eleven counties by means of trolley franchises which the legislature had granted his father in perpetuity in return for financial services to "the party." It is, by the way, an interesting illustration of the human being's lack of thinking power that a legislature could not give away a small gold-mine belonging to the public to any man for even a brief term of years without causing a revolution, but could and does give away far more valuable privileges to plunder and to tax, and give them away for ever, without causing any real stir. However—young Jamieson's liquor, acting upon a mind that had not had enough experience to appreciate the meaning ofthe situation, drove him on to insolent taunts and boasts, addressed to his neighbors but intended for me. I ignored him and, when the coffee was served, rose to depart.
Roebuck urged me to stay, followed me to the coat-room, took my coat away from the servant and helped me with it. "I want to see you the first thing in the morning, Harvey," said he.
"I'll call you up, if I have time," said I.
We came out of the cloak-room, his arm linked in mine, and crossed the corner of the dining-room toward the outside door. Jamieson threw up his arm and fluttered his hand in an impertinent gesture of farewell. "So long, Senator Swollenhead," he cried in a thick voice. "We'll teach you a lesson in how to treat gentlemen."
The last word—gentlemen—was just clearing his mouth when Dominick's tea-pot, flung with all the force of the ex-prize-fighter's big muscles and big body, landed in the midst of his broad white shirt-bosom. And with the tea-pot Dominick hurled his favorite epithet from his garbage barrel of language. With a yell Jamieson crashed over backward; his flying legs, caught by thetable, tilted it; his convulsive kicks sent it over, and half the diners, including Dominick, were floored under it.
All this in a snap of the fingers. And with the disappearance of the physical semblance of a company of civilized men engaged in dining in civilized fashion, the last thin veneer over hate and fury was scraped away. Curses and growling roars made a repulsive mess of sound over that repulsive mess of unmasked, half-drunken, wholly infuriated brutes. There is shrewd, sly wisdom snugly tucked away under the fable of the cat changed into a queen and how she sprang from her throne at sight of a mouse to pursue it on all fours. The best of us are, after all, animals changed into men by the spell of reason; and in some circumstances, it doesn't take much of a blow to dissolve that spell.
For those men in those circumstances, that blow proved sufficient. Partridge extricated himself, ran round the table and kicked Jamieson in the head—partly in punishment, perhaps, and because he needed just that vent for his rage, but chiefly to get credit with me, for he glancedtoward me as he did it. Men, sprawling and squirming side by side on the floor, lashed out with feet and fists, striking each other and adding to the wild dishevelment. The candles set fire to the table-cloth and before the blaze was extinguished burned several in the hair and mustaches.
Dominick, roaring with laughter, came to Roebuck and me standing at the door, both dazed at this magic shift of a "gentlemen's" dinner into a bear-pit. "Granby's ghost is raisin' hell," said he.
But I had no impulse to laugh or to gloat. "Good night," said I to Roebuck and hastened away.
It was the end of the attempt to mine the foundations of my power. But I did not neglect its plain warning. As soon as the legislature assembled, I publicly and strongly advocated the appointment of a joint committee impartially to investigate all the cities of the state, those ruled by my own party no less than those ruled by the opposition. The committee was appointed and did its work so thoroughly that there was a popularclamor for the taking away of the charters of the cities and for ruling them from the state capital. It is hardly necessary to say that my legislature and governor yielded to this clamor. And so the semi-independent petty princes, the urban bosses, lost their independence and passed under my control; and the "collections" which had gone directly to them reached them by way of Woodruff as grants from my machine, instead of as revenues of their own right.
Before this securing of my home power was complete, I had my counter-attack upon the Burbank-Goodrich combine well under way. Immediately on my return to Fredonia from the disastrous dinner, I sent for the attorney general of the state, Ferguson. He was an ideal combination of man and politician. He held to the standards of private morality as nearly as it is possible for a man in active public life to hold to them—far more nearly than most men dare or, after they have become inured, care, to hold. He always maintained with me a firm but tactful independence; he saw the necessity for the sordid side of politics, but he was careful personally tokeep clear of smutched or besmutching work. He had as keen an instinct for popularity as a bee has for blossoms; he knew how to do or to direct unpopular things on dark nights with a dark lantern, how to do or to direct popular things in full uniform on a white horse. I have never ordered any man to a task that was not morally congenial; and I was careful to respect Ferguson's notion of self-respect. I sent for him now, and outlined my plan—to bring suits, both civil and criminal, in the Federal courts in the name of the state, against Roebuck and his associates of the Power Trust.
When he had heard, he said: "Yes, Mr. Sayler, we can break up the Power Trust, can cause the indictment and conviction of Mr. Roebuck. I can prevent the United States Attorney General from playing any of the usual tricks and defending the men whom the people think he is vigorously prosecuting. But—"
"But?" said I encouragingly.
"Is this on the level? If I undertake these prosecutions, shall I be allowed to push themhonestly? Or will there be a private settlementas soon as Roebuck and his crowd see their danger?"
"No matter what happens," I replied, "you shall prosecute at least the civil suits to the end. I give you my word for that."
He thanked me warmly, for he appreciated that I was bestowing upon him an enormous opportunity for national fame.
"And you?" said I. "If you succeed in this prosecution, will you remain in the public service or will you accept the offers the interests will make, and remove to New York and become a rich corporation lawyer?"
He reflected before answering. "That depends," said he. "Ifyouare going to stay on in control in this state, I shall stick to public life, for I believe you will let me have what I call a career. But, if you are going to get out and leave me at the mercy of those fellows, I certainly shan't stay where they can fool the people into turning on me."
"I shall stay on," said I; "and after me, there will be Woodruff—unless, of course, there's some sort of cataclysm."
"A man must take chances," he answered. "I'll take that chance."
We called Woodruff into the consultation. Although he was not a lawyer, he had a talent for taking a situation by the head and tail and stretching it out and holding it so that every crease and wrinkle in it could be seen. And this made him valuable at any conference.
In January we had our big battery loaded, aimed and primed. We unmasked it, and Ferguson fired. I had expected the other side to act stupidly, but I had not hoped for such stupidity as they exhibited. Burbank's year of bathing in presidential flatteries and of fawning on and cringing to the multi-millionaires and their agents hedging him around, had so wrought upon him that he had wholly lost his point of view. And he let his Attorney General pooh-pooh the proceedings,—this in face of the great popular excitement and enthusiasm. It was not until Roebuck's lawyers got far enough into the case against him to see his danger that the administration stopped flying in the teeth of the cyclone of public sentiment and began to pretend enthusiasm,while secretly plotting the mistrial of Ferguson's cases. And not until the United States Attorney General—a vain Goodrich creature whose talents were crippled by his contempt for "the rabble" and "demagoguery"—not until he had it forced upon him that Ferguson could not be counter-mined, did they begin to treat with me for peace.
I shall not retail the negotiations. The upshot was that I let the administration drop the criminal cases against Roebuck in return for the restoration of my power in the national committee of the party to the smallest ejected postmaster in the farthest state. The civil action was pressed by Ferguson with all his skill as a lawyer and a popularity-seeking politician; and he won triumphantly in the Supreme Court—the lower Federal Court with its Power Trust judge had added to his triumph by deciding against him.
Roebuck was, therefore, under the necessity of going through the customary forms of outward obedience to the Supreme Court's order to him to dissolve. He had to get at huge expense, and to carry out at huger, a plan of reorganization.Though he was glad enough to escape thus lightly, he dissembled his content and grumbled so loudly that Burbank's fears were roused and arrangements were made to placate him. The scheme adopted was, I believe, suggested by Vice-President Howard, as shrewd and cynical a rascal as ever lived in the mire without getting smutch or splash upon his fine linen of respectability.
For several years there had been a strong popular demand for a revision of the tariff. The party had promised to yield, but had put off redeeming its promise. Now, there arose a necessity for revising the tariff in the interest of "the interests." Some of the schedules were too low; others protected articles which the interests wanted as free raw materials; a few could be abolished without offending any large interests and with the effect of punishing some small ones that had been niggard in contributing to the "campaign fund" which maintains the standing army of political workers and augments it whenever a battle is on. Accordingly, a revision of the tariff was in progress. To soothe Roebuck,they gave him a tariff schedule that would enable him to collect each year more than the total of the extraordinary expenses to which I had put him. Roebuck "forgave" me; and I really forgave Burbank.
But I washed my hands of his administration. Not only did I actually stand aloof but also I disassociated myself from it in the public mind. When the crash should come, as come it must with such men at the helm, I wished to be in a position successfully to take full charge for the work of repair.
XXXIIA GLANCE BEHIND THE MASK OF GRANDEUR
Not until late in the spring of his second year did Burbank find a trace of gall in his wine.
From the night of his election parasites and plunderers and agents of plunderers had imprisoned him in the usual presidential fool's paradise. The organs of the interests and their Congressional henchmen praised everything he did; I and my group of Congressmen and my newspapers, as loyal partizans, bent first of all upon regularity, were silent where we did not praise also. But the second year of a President's first term is the beginning of frank, if guarded, criticism of him from his own side. For it is practically his last year of venturing to exercise any real official power. The selection of delegates to the party's national convention, to which a President must submit himself for leave to re-submit himself to the people, is well under way before the end ofhis third year; and direct and active preparations for it must begin long in advance.
Late in that second spring Burbank made a tour of the country, to give the people the pleasure of seeing their great man, to give himself the pleasure of their admiration, and to help on the Congressional campaign, the result of which would be the preliminary popular verdict upon his administration. The thinness of the crowds, the feebleness of the enthusiasm, the newspaper sneers and flings at that oratory once hailed as a model of dignity and eloquence—even he could not accept the smooth explanations of his flatterers. And in November came the party's memorable overwhelming defeat—reducing our majority in the Senate from twenty to six, and substituting for our majority of ninety-three in the House an opposition majority of sixty-seven.
I talked with him early in January and was amazed that, while he appreciated the public anger against the party, he still believed himself personally popular. "There is a lull in prosperity," said he, "and the people are peevish."Soon, however, by a sort of endosmosis to which the densest vanity is somewhat subject, the truth began to seep through and to penetrate into him.
He became friendlier to me, solicitous toward spring—but he clung none the less tightly to Goodrich. The full awakening came in his third summer when the press and the politicians of the party began openly to discuss the next year's nomination and to speak of him as if he were out of the running. He was spending the hot months on the Jersey coast, the flatterers still swarming about him and still assiduous, but their flatteries falling upon ever deafer ears as his mind rivetted upon the hair-suspended sword. In early September he invited me to visit him—my first invitation of that kind in two years and a half. We had three interviews before he could nerve himself to brush aside the barriers between him and me.
"I am about to get together my friends with a view to next year," said he through an uneasy smile. "What do you think of the prospects?"
"What do your friends say?" I asked.
"Oh, of course, I am assured of a renomination—" He paused, and his look at me made the confident affirmation a dubious question.
"Yes?" said I.
"And—don't you think my record has made me strong?" he went on nervously.
"Strong—with whom?" said I.
He was silent. Finally he laid his hand on my knee—we were taking the air on the ocean drive. "Harvey," he said, "I can count on you?"
I shook my head. "I shall take no part in the next campaign," I said. "I shall resign the chairmanship."
"But I have selected you as my chairman. I have insisted on you. I can't trust any one else. I need others, I use others, but I trust only you."
I shook my head. "I shall resign," I repeated. "What's the matter—won't Goodrich take the place?"
He looked away. "I have not seriously thought of any one but you," he said reproachfully.
I happened to know that the place had been offered to Goodrich and that he had declined it,protesting that I, a Western man, must not be disturbed when the West was vital to the party's success. "My resolution is fixed," said I.
A long silence, then: "Sayler, have you heard anything of an attempt to defeat me for the nomination?"
"Goodrich has decided to nominate Governor Ridgeway of Illinois," said I.
He blanched and had to moisten his dry, wrinkled lips several times before he could speak. "A report of that nature reached me last Thursday," he went on. "For some time I have been perplexed by the Ridgeway talk in many of our organs. I have questioned Goodrich about it—and—I must say—his explanations are not—not wholly satisfactory."
I glanced at him and had instantly to glance away, so plainly was I showing my pity. He was not hiding himself from me now. He looked old and tired and sick—not mere sickness of body, but that mortal sickness of the mind and heart which kills a man, often years before his body dies.
"I have come to the conclusion that you wereright about Goodrich, Sayler. I am glad that I took your advice and never trusted him. I think you and I together will be too strong for him."
"You are going to seek a renomination?" I asked.
He looked at me in genuine astonishment. "It is impossible that the party should refuse me," he said.
I was silent.
"Be frank with me, Sayler," he exclaimed at last. "Be frank. Be my friend, your own old self."
"As frank and as friendly as you have been?" said I, rather to remind myself than to reproach him. For I was afraid of the reviving feeling of former years—the liking for his personal charms and virtues, the forbearance toward that weakness which he could no more change than he could change the color of his eyes. His moral descent had put no clear markings upon his pose. On the contrary, he had grown in dignity through the custom of deference. The people passing us looked admiration at him, had a new sense of the elevation of the presidential office.Often it takes the trained and searching eye to detect in the majestic façade the evidences that the palace has degenerated into a rookery for pariahs.
"I have done what I thought for the best," he answered, never more direct and manly in manner. "I have always been afraid, been on guard, lest my personal fondness for you should betray me into yielding to you when I ought not. Perhaps I have erred at times, have leaned backward in my anxiety to be fair. But I had and have no fear of your not understanding. Our friendship is too long established, too well-founded." And I do not doubt that he believed himself; the capacity for self-deception is rarely short of the demands upon it.
"It's unfortunate—" I began. I was going to say it was unfortunate that no such anxieties had ever restrained him from yielding to Goodrich. But I hadn't the heart. Instead, I finished my sentence with: "However, it's idle to hold a post-mortem on this case. The cause of death is unimportant. The fact of it is sufficient. No doubt you did the best you could, Mr. President."
My manner was that of finality. It forbadefurther discussion. He abandoned the finesse of negotiation.
"Harvey, I ask you, as a personal favor, to help me through this crisis," he said. "I ask you, my friend and my dead wife's friend."
No depth too low, no sentiment too sacred! Anger whirled up in me against this miserable, short-sighted self-seeker who had brought to a climax of spoliation my plans to guide the strong in developing the resources of the country. And I turned upon him, intending to overwhelm him with the truth about his treachery, about his attempts to destroy me. For I was now safe from his and Goodrich's vengeance—they had destroyed themselves with the people and with the party. But a glance at him and—how could I strike a man stretched in agony upon his deathbed? "If I could help you, I would," said I.
"You—you and I together can get a convention that will nominate me," he urged, hope and fear jostling each other to look pleadingly at me from his eyes.
"Possibly," I said. "But—of what use would that be?"
He sank back in the carriage, yellow-white and with trembling hands and eyelids. "Then you don't think I could be elected?" he asked in a broken, breathless way.
For answer I could only shake my head. "No matter who is the nominee," I went on after a moment, "our party can't win." I half-yielded to the impulse of sentimentality and turned to him appealingly. "James," said I, "why don't you—right away—before the country sees you are to be denied a renomination—publicly announce that you won't take it in any circumstances? Why don't you devote the rest of your term to regaining your lost—popularity? Every day has its throngs of opportunities for the man in the White House. Break boldly and openly with Goodrich and his crowd."
I saw and read the change in his face. My advice about the nomination straightway closed his mind against me; at the mention of Goodrich, his old notion of my jealousy revived. And I saw, too, that contact with and use of and subservience to corruption had so corrupted him that he no longer had any faith in any method notcorrupt. All in an instant I realized the full folly of what I was doing. I felt confident that by pursuing the line I had indicated he could so change the situation in the next few months that he would make it impossible for them to refuse to renominate him, might make it possible for him to be elected. But even if he had the wisdom to listen, where would he get the courage and the steadfastness to act? I gave him up finally and for ever.
A man may lose his own character and still survive, and even go far. But if he lose belief in character as a force, he is damned. He could not survive in a community of scoundrels.
Burbank sat motionless and with closed eyes, for a long time. I watched the people in the throng of carriages—hundreds of faces all turned toward him, all showing that mingled admiration, envy and awe which humanity gives its exalted great. "The President! The President!" I heard every few yards in excited undertones. And hats were lifting, and once a crowd of enthusiastic partizans raised a cheer.
"The President!" I thought, with mournful irony. And I glanced at him.
Suddenly he was transformed by an expression the most frightful I have ever seen. It was the look of a despairing, weak, vicious thing, cornered, giving battle for its life—like a fox at bay before a pack of huge dogs. It was not Burbank—no,hewas wholly unlike that. It was Burbank's ambition, interrupted at its meal by the relentless, sure-aiming hunter, Fate.
"For God's sake, Burbank!" I exclaimed. "All these people are watching us."
"To hell with them!" he ground out. "I tell you, Sayler, Iwillbe nominated! And elected too, by God! I will not be thrown aside like an emptied orange-skin. I will show them that I am President."
Those words, said by some men, in some tones, would have thrilled me. Said by him and in that tone and with that look, they made me shudder and shrink. Neither of us spoke again. When he dropped me at my hotel we touched hands and smiled formally for appearances before the gaping,peeping, peering crowd. And as he drove away, how they cheered him—the man risen high above eighty millions, alone on the mountain-peak, in the glorious sunshine of success. The President!
The next seven months were months of turmoil in the party and in the country—a turmoil of which I was a silent spectator, conspicuous by my silence. Burbank, the deepest passions of his nature rampant, had burst through the meshes of partizanship and the meshes of social and personal intimacies in which he, as a "good party man" and as the father of children with social aspirations and as the worshiper of wealth and respectability, was entangled and bound down; with the desperate courage that comes from fear of destruction, he was trying to save himself.
But his only available instruments were all either Goodrich men or other kinds of machine-men; they owed nothing to him, they had nothing to fear from him—a falling king is a fallen king. Every project he devised for striking down his traitor friends and makinghimself popular was subtly turned by his Cabinet or by the Senate or by the press or by all three into something futile and ridiculous or contemptible. It was a complete demonstration of the silliness of the fiction that the President could be an autocrat if he chose. Even had Burbank seen through the fawnings and the flatteries of the traitors round him, and dismissed his Cabinet, whatever men he might have put into it would not have attached themselves to his lost cause, but would have used their positions to ingratiate themselves with the power that had used and exhausted and discarded him.
He had the wisdom, or the timidity, to proceed always with caution and safe legality and so to avoid impeachment and degradation. His chief attempts were, naturally, upon monopoly; they were slyly balked by his sly Attorney General, and their failure was called by the press, and was believed by the people, the cause of the hard times which were just beginning to be acute. What made him such an easy victim to his lieutenants was not their craft, but the factthat he had lost his sense of right and wrong. A man of affairs may not, indeed will not, always steer by that compass; but he must have it aboard. Without it he can not know how far off the course he is, or how to get back to it. No ship ever reached any port except that of failure and disgrace, unless it, in spite of all its tackings before the cross-winds of practical life, kept in the main to the compass and to the course.
His last stagger was—or seemed to be—an attempt to involve us in a war with Germany. I say "seemed to be" because I hesitate to ascribe a project as infamous to him, even when unbalanced by despair. The first ugly despatch he ordered his Goodrich Secretary of State to send,somehowleaked to the newspapers before it could be put into cipher for transmission. It was not sent—for from the press of the entire country rose a clamor against "deliberate provocation of a nation with which we are, and wish to remain, at peace." He repudiated the despatch and dismissed the Secretary of State in disgrace to disgrace—the one stroke in his fight againstGoodrich in which he got the advantage. But that advantage was too small, too doubtful and too late.
His name was not presented to the convention.