The Plum Tree Part 30

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 circ.u.mstances? Why don't you devote the rest of your term to regaining your lost--popularity? Every day has its throngs of opportunities for the man in the White House. Break boldly and openly with Goodrich and his crowd."

I saw and read the change in his face. My advice about the nomination straightway closed his mind against me; at the mention of Goodrich, his old notion of my jealousy revived. And I saw, too, that contact with and use of and subservience to corruption had so corrupted him that he no longer had any faith in any method not corrupt. All in an instant I realized the full folly of what I was doing. I felt confident that by pursuing the line I had indicated he could so change the situation in the next few months that he would make it impossible for them to refuse to renominate him, might make it possible for him to be elected. But even if he had the wisdom to listen, where would he get the courage and the steadfastness to act? I gave him up finally and for ever.

A man may lose his own character and still survive, and even go far. But if he lose belief in character as a force, he is d.a.m.ned. He could not survive in a community of scoundrels.

Burbank sat motionless and with closed eyes, for a long time. I watched the people in the throng of carriages--hundreds of faces all turned toward him, all showing that mingled admiration, envy and awe which humanity gives its exalted great. "The President! The President!" I heard every few yards in excited undertones. And hats were lifting, and once a crowd of enthusiastic partizans raised a cheer.

"The President!" I thought, with mournful irony. And I glanced at him.

Suddenly he was transformed by an expression the most frightful I have ever seen. It was the look of a despairing, weak, vicious thing, cornered, giving battle for its life--like a fox at bay before a pack of huge dogs. It was not Burbank--no, _he_ was wholly unlike that. It was Burbank's ambition, interrupted at its meal by the relentless, sure-aiming hunter, Fate.

"For G.o.d's sake, Burbank!" I exclaimed. "All these people are watching us."

"To h.e.l.l with them!" he ground out. "I tell you, Sayler, I _will_ be nominated! And elected too, by G.o.d! 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 pa.s.sions of his nature rampant, had burst through the meshes of partizanship and the meshes of social and personal intimacies in which he, as a "good party man" and as the father of children with social aspirations and as the worshiper of wealth and respectability, was entangled and bound down; with the desperate courage that comes from fear of destruction, he was trying to save himself.

But his only available instruments were all either Goodrich men or other kinds of machine-men; they owed nothing to him, they had nothing to fear from him--a falling king is a fallen king. Every project he devised for striking down his traitor friends and making himself popular was subtly turned by his Cabinet or by the Senate or by the press or by all three into something futile and ridiculous or contemptible. It was a complete demonstration of the silliness of the fiction that the President could be an autocrat if he chose. Even had Burbank seen through the fawnings and the flatteries of the traitors round him, and dismissed his Cabinet, whatever men he might have put into it would not have attached themselves to his lost cause, but would have used their positions to ingratiate themselves with the power that had used and exhausted and discarded him.

He had the wisdom, or the timidity, to proceed always with caution and safe legality and so to avoid impeachment and degradation. His chief attempts were, naturally, upon monopoly; they were slyly balked by his sly Attorney General, and their failure was called by the press, and was believed by the people, the cause of the hard times which were just beginning to be acute. What made him such an easy victim to his lieutenants was not their craft, but the fact that he had lost his sense of right and wrong. A man of affairs may not, indeed will not, always steer by that compa.s.s; 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 compa.s.s and to the course.

His last stagger was--or seemed to be--an attempt to involve us in a war with Germany. I say "seemed to be" because I hesitate to ascribe a project as infamous to him, even when unbalanced by despair. The first ugly despatch he ordered his Goodrich Secretary of State to send, _somehow_ leaked to the newspapers before it could be put into cipher for transmission. It was not sent--for from the press of the entire country rose a clamor against "deliberate provocation of a nation with which we are, and wish to remain, at peace." He repudiated the despatch and dismissed the Secretary of State in disgrace to disgrace--the one stroke in his fight against Goodrich in which he got the advantage. But that advantage was too small, too doubtful and too late.

His name was not presented to the convention.

x.x.xIII

A "SPASM OF VIRTUE"

I forced upon Goodrich my place as chairman of the national committee and went abroad with my daughters. We stayed there until Scarborough was inaugurated. He had got his nomination from a convention of men who hated and feared him, but who dared not flout the people and fling away victory; he had got his election because the defections from our ranks in the doubtful states far outbalanced Goodrich's extensive purchases there with the huge campaign-fund of the interests. The wheel-horse, Partizanship, had broken down, and the leader, Plutocracy, could not draw the chariot to victory alone.

As soon as the election was over, our people began to cable me to come home and take charge. But I waited until Woodruff and my other faithful lieutenants had thoroughly convinced all the officers of the machine how desperate its plight was, and that I alone could repair and restore, and that I could do it only if absolute control were given me. When the ship reached quarantine Woodruff came aboard; and, not having seen him in many months, I was able to see, and was startled by, the contrast between the Doc Woodruff I had met on the train more years before than I cared to cast up, and the United States Senator Woodruff, high in the councils of the party and high in the esteem of its partizans among the people. He was saying: "You can have anything you want, Senator," and so on. But I was thinking of him, of the vicissitudes of politics, of the unending struggle of the foul stream to purify itself, to sink or to saturate its mud. For we ought not to forget that if the clear water is saturated with mud, also the mud is saturated with clear water.

A week or so after I resumed the chairmanship, Scarborough invited me to lunch alone with him at the White House. When I had seen him, four years before, just after his defeat, he was in high spirits and looked a youth. Now it depressed me, but gave me no surprise, to find him worn, and overcast by that tragic sadness which canopies every one of the seats of the mighty. "I fear, Mr. President," said I, "you are finding the men who will help you to carry out your ideas as rare as I once warned you they were."

"Not rare," was his answer, "but hard to get at through the throngs of Baal-worshipers that have descended upon me and are trying to hedge me in."

"Fortunately, you are free from political and social entanglements,"

said I, with ironic intent.

He laughed with only a slightly concealed bitterness. "From political entanglements--yes," said he. "But not from social toils. Ever since I have been in national life, my wife and I have held ourselves socially aloof, because those with whom we would naturally and even inevitably a.s.sociate 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 a.s.sailing all one's friends and their friends and relatives? For who are the offenders? They are of the rich, of the successful, of the clever, of the socially agreeable and charming. And how can one enforce justice against one's dinner companions--and in favor of whom? Of the people, voiceless, distant, unknown to one.

Personal friendship on the one side; on the other, an abstraction."

"I should not cla.s.s 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 att.i.tude of a moral _poseur_. Common honesty, in presence of this social bribe, takes on the sneaking seeming of rottenest hypocrisy. It is indeed hard to get through and to get at the men I want and need, and must and will have."

"Impossible," said I. "And if you could get at them, and if the Senate would let you put them where they seem to you to belong, the temptation would be too much for them. They too would soon become Baal-worshipers, the more a.s.siduous for their long abstinence."

"Some," he admitted, "perhaps most. But at least a few would stand the test--and just one such would repay and justify all the labor of all the search. The trouble with you pessimists is that you don't take our ancestry into account. Man isn't a falling angel, but a rising animal.

So, every impulse toward the decent, every gleam of light, is a tremendous gain. The wonder isn't the bad but the good, isn't that we are so imperfect, but that in such a few thousand years we've got so far--so far _up_. I know you and I have in the main the same purpose--where is there a man who'd like to think the world the worse for his having lived? But we work by different means. You believe the best results can be got through that in man which he has inherited from the past--by balancing pa.s.sion against pa.s.sion, by offsetting appet.i.te with appet.i.te. I hope for results from that in the man of to-day which is the seed, the prophecy, of the man who is to be."

"Your method has had one recent and very striking _apparent_ success,"

said I. "But--the spasm of virtue will pa.s.s."

"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, pa.s.ses.

The good will be reaped. Nothing good is lost."

"And if it is reaped," I rejoined, "the reaping will not come until long, long after you are a mere name in history."

Even as I spoke my doubts I was wishing I had kept them to myself; for, thought I, there's no poorer business than shooting at the beautiful soaring bird of illusion. But he was looking at me without seeing me.

His expression suggested the throwing open of the blinds hiding a man's inmost self.

"If a man," said he absently, "fixes his mind not on making friends or defeating enemies, not on elections or on history, but just on avoiding from day to day, from act to act, the condemnation of his own self-respect--" The blinds closed as suddenly as they had opened--he had become conscious that some one was looking in. And I was wishing again that I had kept my doubts to myself; for I now saw that what I had thought a bright bird of illusion was in fact the lost star which lighted my own youth.

Happy the man who, through strength or through luck, guides his whole life by the star of his youth. Happy, but how rare!

x.x.xIV

"LET US HELP EACH OTHER"

In the following September I took my daughters to Elizabeth. She looked earnestly, first at Frances, tall and slim and fancying herself a woman grown, then at Ellen, short and round and struggling with the giggling age. "We shall like each other, I'm sure," was her verdict. "We'll get on well together." And Frances smiled, and Ellen nodded. They evidently thought so, too.

"I want you to teach them your art," said I, when they were gone to settle themselves and she and I were alone.

"My art?"

"The art of being one's self. I am sick of men and women who hide their real selves behind a pose of what they want others to think them."

"Most of our troubles come from that, don't they?"

"All mine did," said I. "I am at the age when the very word age begins to jar on the ear, and the net result of my years of effort is--I have convinced other people that I am somebody at the cost of convincing myself that I am n.o.body."

"No, you are master," she said.