The Plum Tree Part 27

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 att.i.tude 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 n.o.body believes much he sees in the newspapers. Whenever I read an item about things I happen to know, it's all wrong. And I guess they don't get it any nearer right about the things I don't happen to know. Now, all this here talk of there being so many millionaires--I don't take no kind of stock in it."

"No?" said I.

"Of course, some's poor and some's rich--that's got to be. But I think it's all newspaper lies about these here big fortunes and about all the leading men in politics being corrupt. I know it ain't so about the leading men in _my_ party, and I reckon there ain't no more truth in it about the leading men of your'n. I was saying to my wife last night, 'It's all newspaper lies,' says I, 'just like the story they printed about Mrs. Timmins eloping with Maria Wilmerding's husband, when she had only went over to Rabbit Forks to visit her married daughter.' No, they can't fool me--them papers."

"That's one way of looking at it," said I.

"It's horse sense," said he.

And I have no doubt that to the average citizen, leading a small, quiet life and dealing with affairs in corner-grocery retail, the stupendous facts of acc.u.mulations 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 prost.i.tution, 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 ma.s.s of those who believe, not to the small cla.s.s 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 ma.s.ses 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 cla.s.s to "take care of" all the hungry who have intellect enough to make themselves dangerous, we shall have no change--except occasional spasms whenever a large number of unplaced intelligent hungry are forcing the full and fat to make room for them.

How long will this be?

If our education did not merely feed prejudices instead of removing them, I should say not long. As it is, I expect to "leave the world as wicked and as foolish as I found it." At any rate, until the millenium, I shall continue to play the game under the rules of human nature--instead of under the rules of human ideals, as does my esteemed friend Scarborough. And I claim that we practical men are as true and useful servants of our country and of our fellow men as he. If men like him are the light, men like us are the lantern that shields it from the alternating winds of rapacity and resentment.

But, in running on about myself, I have got away from my point, which was how slight and even flimsy a pretense of fairness will shelter a man in high place--and therefore a Burbank. "He will fool the people as easily as he fools himself," said I. And more than ever it seemed to me that I must keep out of the game of his administration. My necessity of party regularity made it impossible for me to oppose him; my equal necessity of not outraging my sense of the wise, not to speak of the decent, made it impossible for me to abet him.

At last Woodruff came in person. When his name was brought to me, I regretted that I could not follow my strong impulse to refuse to see him. But at sight of his big strong body and big strong face, with its typically American careless good humor--the cool head, the warm heart, the amused eyes and lips that could also harden into sternness of resolution--at sight of this old friend and companion-in-arms, my mood began to lift and I felt him stirring in it like sunshine attacking a fog. "I know what you've come to say," I began, "but don't say it. I shall keep to my tent for the present."

"Then you won't have a tent to keep to," retorted he.

"Very well," said I. "My private affairs will give me all the occupation I need."

He laughed. "The general resigns from the command of the army to play with a box of lead soldiers."

"That sounds well," said I. "But the better the a.n.a.logy, 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 a.n.a.logy."

"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 prost.i.tutions of individuals is more apparent than real. I admit that the kinds of vice and crime I tolerated are far more harmful than the other sorts which are petty and make loathed outcasts of their wretched pract.i.tioners. Still, I was sn.o.b or Pharisee or Puritan enough to feel and to act upon the imaginary distinction. And so, I had left the city bosses locally independent--for, without the revenues and other aids from vice and crime, what city political machine could be kept up?

"Dominick!" I exclaimed.

"Exactly!" said Woodruff. "Now, Mr. Sayler, the point is just here. I don't blame you for wanting to get out. If I had any other game, I'd get out myself. But what's to become of us--of all your friends, not only in this state but throughout the country? Are you going to stand by and see them slaughtered and not lift a finger to help 'em?"

There was no answering him. Yet the spur of vanity, which clipped into me at thought of myself thrown down and out by these cheap ingrates and scoundrels, had almost instantly ceased to sting; and my sense of weary disgust had returned. If I went into the battle again, what work faced me? The same old monotonous round. To outflank Burbank and Goodrich by tricks as old as war and politics, and effective only because human stupidity is infinite and unteachable. To beat down and whip back into the ranks again these bandits of commerce disguised as respectable, church-going, law-upholding men of property--and to do this by the same old methods of terror and force.

"You can't leave us in the lurch," said Doc. "And the game promises to be interesting once more. I don't like racing on the flat. It's the hurdles that make the fun."

I pictured myself again a circus horse, going round and round the ring, jumping the same old hurdles at the same old intervals. "Take my place, Doc," said I.

He shook his head. "I'm a good second," said he, "but a rotten bad first."

It was true enough. He mysteriously lacked that mysterious something which, when a man happens to have been born with it, makes other men yield him the command--give it to him, force it on him, if he hangs back.

"What do you want me to do?" I asked.

"That dinner to-morrow night is in Suite L. Go to it--that's the shortest way to put Roebuck and Dominick out of business. Face 'em and they'll skulk."

"It's a risk," said I. I saw at once that he was right, but I was in a reluctant humor.

"Not a bit of it," was his confident reply. "I had a horse that was _crazy_--would run away on any old provocation. But no matter how busy he was at kicking up the dust and the dashboard, you could always halt him by ringing a bell once. He'd been in the street-car service. That's the way it is with men, especially strong men, that have been broken to the bell. They hear it ring and they can't resist. Go up and ring the bell."

"Go ring it yourself," said I.

"You're the bell," said he.

x.x.xI

HARVEY SAYLER, SWINEHERD