XXXIIIA "SPASM OF VIRTUE"
I forced upon Goodrich my place as chairman of the national committee and went abroad with my daughters. We stayed there until Scarborough was inaugurated. He had got his nomination from a convention of men who hated and feared him, but who dared not flout the people and fling away victory; he had got his election because the defections from our ranks in the doubtful states far outbalanced Goodrich's extensive purchases there with the huge campaign-fund of the interests. The wheel-horse, Partizanship, had broken down, and the leader, Plutocracy, could not draw the chariot to victory alone.
As soon as the election was over, our people began to cable me to come home and take charge. But I waited until Woodruff and my other faithful lieutenants had thoroughly convinced all the officers of the machine how desperate its plight was, and that I alone could repair and restore,and that I could do it only if absolute control were given me. When the ship reached quarantine Woodruff came aboard; and, not having seen him in many months, I was able to see, and was startled by, the contrast between the Doc Woodruff I had met on the train more years before than I cared to cast up, and the United States Senator Woodruff, high in the councils of the party and high in the esteem of its partizans among the people. He was saying: "You can have anything you want, Senator," and so on. But I was thinking of him, of the vicissitudes of politics, of the unending struggle of the foul stream to purify itself, to sink or to saturate its mud. For we ought not to forget that if the clear water is saturated with mud, also the mud is saturated with clear water.
A week or so after I resumed the chairmanship, Scarborough invited me to lunch alone with him at the White House. When I had seen him, four years before, just after his defeat, he was in high spirits and looked a youth. Now it depressed me, but gave me no surprise, to find him worn, and overcast by that tragic sadness whichcanopies every one of the seats of the mighty. "I fear, Mr. President," said I, "you are finding the men who will help you to carry out your ideas as rare as I once warned you they were."
"Not rare," was his answer, "but hard to get at through the throngs of Baal-worshipers that have descended upon me and are trying to hedge me in."
"Fortunately, you are free from political and social entanglements," said I, with ironic intent.
He laughed with only a slightly concealed bitterness. "From political entanglements—yes," said he. "But not from social toils. Ever since I have been in national life, my wife and I have held ourselves socially aloof, because those with whom we would naturally and even inevitably associate would be precisely those who would some day beset me for immunities and favors. And how can one hold to a course of any sort of justice, if doing so means assailing all one's friends and their friends and relatives? For who are the offenders? They are of the rich, of the successful, of the clever, of the socially agreeable and charming. And how can one enforce justiceagainst one's dinner companions—and in favor of whom? Of the people, voiceless, distant, unknown to one. Personal friendship on the one side; on the other, an abstraction."
"I should not class you among those likely to yield many inches to the social bribe," said I.
"That is pleasant, but not candid," replied he with his simple directness. "No man of your experience could fail to know that the social bribe is the arch-corrupter, the one briber whom it is not in human nature to resist. But, as I was saying, to my amazement, in spite of my wife's precautions and mine, I find myself beset—and with what devilish insidiousness! When I refuse, simply to save myself from flagrant treachery to my obligations of duty, I find myself seeming, even to my wife and to myself, churlish and priggish; Pharisaical, in the loathsome attitude of a moralposeur. Common honesty, in presence of this social bribe, takes on the sneaking seeming of rottenest hypocrisy. It is indeed hard to get through and to get at the men I want and need, and must and will have."
"Impossible," said I. "And if you could getat them, and if the Senate would let you put them where they seem to you to belong, the temptation would be too much for them. They too would soon become Baal-worshipers, the more assiduous for their long abstinence."
"Some," he admitted, "perhaps most. But at least a few would stand the test—and just one such would repay and justify all the labor of all the search. The trouble with you pessimists is that you don't take our ancestry into account. Man isn't a falling angel, but a rising animal. So, every impulse toward the decent, every gleam of light, is a tremendous gain. The wonder isn't the bad but the good, isn't that we are so imperfect, but that in such a few thousand years we've got so far—so farup. I know you and I have in the main the same purpose—where is there a man who'd like to think the world the worse for his having lived? But we work by different means. You believe the best results can be got through that in man which he has inherited from the past—by balancing passion against passion, by offsetting appetite with appetite. I hope for results from that in the man of to-day whichis the seed, the prophecy, of the man who is to be."
"Your method has had one recent and very strikingapparentsuccess," said I. "But—the spasm of virtue will pass."
"Certainly," he replied, "and so too will the succeeding spasm of reaction. Also, your party must improve itself—and mine too—as the result of this spasm of virtue."
"For a time," I admitted. "I envy you your courage and hope. But I can't share in them. You will serve four stormy years; you will retire with friends less devoted and enemies more bitter; you will be misunderstood, maligned; and there's only a remote possibility that your vindication will come before you are too old to be offered a second term. And the harvest from the best you sow will be ruined in some flood of reaction."
"No," he answered. "It will be reaped. The evil I do, all evil, passes. The good will be reaped. Nothing good is lost."
"And if it is reaped," I rejoined, "the reapingwill not come until long, long after you are a mere name in history."
Even as I spoke my doubts I was wishing I had kept them to myself; for, thought I, there's no poorer business than shooting at the beautiful soaring bird of illusion. But he was looking at me without seeing me. His expression suggested the throwing open of the blinds hiding a man's inmost self.
"If a man," said he absently, "fixes his mind not on making friends or defeating enemies, not on elections or on history, but just on avoiding from day to day, from act to act, the condemnation of his own self-respect—" The blinds closed as suddenly as they had opened—he had become conscious that some one was looking in. And I was wishing again that I had kept my doubts to myself; for I now saw that what I had thought a bright bird of illusion was in fact the lost star which lighted my own youth.
Happy the man who, through strength or through luck, guides his whole life by the star of his youth. Happy, but how rare!
XXXIV"LET US HELP EACH OTHER"
In the following September I took my daughters to Elizabeth. She looked earnestly, first at Frances, tall and slim and fancying herself a woman grown, then at Ellen, short and round and struggling with the giggling age. "We shall like each other, I'm sure," was her verdict. "We'll get on well together." And Frances smiled, and Ellen nodded. They evidently thought so, too.
"I want you to teach them your art," said I, when they were gone to settle themselves and she and I were alone.
"My art?"
"The art of being one's self. I am sick of men and women who hide their real selves behind a pose of what they want others to think them."
"Most of our troubles come from that, don't they?"
"All mine did," said I. "I am at the age when the very word age begins to jar on the ear, andthe net result of my years of effort is—I have convinced other people that I am somebody at the cost of convincing myself that I am nobody."
"No, you are master," she said.
"As a lion-tamer is master of his lions. He gives all his thought to them, who think only of their appetites. And his whole reward is that with his life in his hand he can sometimes cow them through a few worthless little tricks." I looked round the attractive reception-room of the school. "I wish you'd takemein, too," I ended.
She flushed a little, then shook her head, her eyes twinkling. "This is not a reformatory," said she. And we both laughed.
As I did not speak or look away, but continued to smile at her, she became uneasy, glanced round as if seeking an avenue of retreat.
"Yes—I mean just that, Elizabeth," I admitted, and my tone explained the words.
She clasped her hands and started up.
"In me—in every one," I went on, "there's a beast and a man. Just now—with me—the manis uppermost. And he wants to stay uppermost. Elizabeth—will you—help him?"
She lowered her head until I could see only the splendor of her thick hair, sparkling like black quartz.
"Will you—dear? Won't you—dear?"
Suddenly she gave me both her hands. "Let us help each other," she said. And slowly she lifted her glance to mine; and never before had I felt the full glory of those eyes, the full melody of that deep voice.
And so, I end as I began, as life begins and ends—with a woman. In a woman's arms we enter life; in a woman's arms we get the courage and strength to bear it; in a woman's arms we leave it. And as for the span between—the business, profession, career—how colorless, how meaningless it would be but for her!
THE END
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BREWSTER'S MILLIONS
Mr. Montgomery Brewster is required to spend a million dollars in one year in order to inherit seven millions. He must be absolutely penniless at that time, and yet have spent the million in a way that will commend him as fit to inherit the larger sum. How he does it forms the basis for one of the most crisp and breezy romances of recent years.
CASTLE CRANEYCROW
The story revolves around the abduction of a young American woman and the adventures created through her rescue. The title is taken from the name of an old castle on the Continent, the scene of her imprisonment.
GRAUSTARK: A Story of a Love Behind a Throne.
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THE SHERRODS. With illustrations by C. D. Williams
A novel quite unlike Mr. McCutcheon's previous works in the field of romantic fiction and yet possessing the charm inseparable from anything he writes. The scene is laid in Indiana and the theme is best described in the words, "Whom God hath joined, let no man put asunder."
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BYGEORGE BARR McCUTCHEON
The hero is a young New Yorker of good parts who, to save an inheritance of seven millions, starts out to spend a fortune of one million within a year. An eccentric uncle, ignorant of the earlier legacy, leaves him seven millions to be delivered at the expiration of a year, on the condition that at that time he is penniless, and has proven himself a capable business man, able to manage his own affairs. The problem that confronts Brewster is to spend his legacy without proving himself either reckless or dissipated. He has ideas about the disposition of the seven millions which are not those of the uncle when he tried to supply an alternative in case the nephew failed him. His adventures in pursuit of poverty are decidedly of an unusual kind, and his disappointments are funny in quite a new way. The situation is developed with an immense amount of humor.
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