The Voice of the People Part 45

He spoke again, and they were silent.

"Men of Virginia, in the naming of your governor, let us have neither subterfuge nor slander. Better than the love of party is the love of honesty--and the Democracy of Jefferson cannot thrive upon falsehood.

Fair means are the only means, honest ends are the only ends. The party owes its right to existence to the people's will; when its life must be prolonged by artificial stimulants it is fit that it should die. It is not the people's master, but the people's servant; if it should usurp the oppressor's place, it must die the oppressor's death.

"For fifteen years I have worked a Democrat among you, and it is not needed that I should put in words my love for the party I have served; but I say to you to-day that if that party were doomed to annihilation and a lie could save it, I would not speak it."

He sat down and the uproar began again. Beyond the party were the people, and he had touched them. With the force of his personality upon it he had become suddenly the hero of the house. "Honest Nick! Honest Nick!" shouted the galleries, and the cry was echoed from the pit. When order was restored Major Baylor completed his speech; it was seconded by a sensible young congressman, and the oratory was cut short by a call for votes.

In a flash the chairmen of the different delegations were stung into action. A buzz like that of bees swarming rose from the pit and white slips of paper fluttered from row to row. The Webb leaders were whipping their faction into an enthusiasm that drowned the roll call. At last, with the reading of the ballot, there was silence, followed by applause. Webb led slightly in advance of Crutchfield; Burr came next, Hartley last. With the surprise of the third name, round which there had been a rally of uninstructed delegations, a cheer went up. In the clamour Burr had risen to ask that his name be withdrawn, but the chorus of his newly formed followers howled him down. Then Hartley was dropped from the race and a second ballot ordered. The excitement in the building could be felt like steam. The heat was rising and a nervous tension weighted the atmosphere. Through the clouds of tobacco smoke the records of changes sounded distinctly. The Hartley delegation that Webb had counted on divided and went two ways; the county of Albemarle pa.s.sed over to Burr; the city of Richmond broke its vote into three equal parts.

Each change was received with a roar by the opposing factions--while the clerks stumbled on, making alteration upon alteration. On the floor and the stage the chairmen thickened in the fight. Ben Galt had sprung suddenly into life as Burr's manager, and in the aisle Tom Ba.s.sett, in his shirt sleeves, with a tally sheet in his hand, was inciting his battalion to victory. About him the Webb men were summing up the votes needed to bring in their leader. The noise had a dull, baying sound, as if the general voice were growing hoa.r.s.e. The odour of good and bad tobacco was dense and stifling. In the midst of the clamour a drunken man rose to move that the convention consider the subject in prayer.

Upon the reading of the second ballot the confusion deepened. The name of Crutchfield went down, and Burr and Webb ran hotly neck to neck. Then the Crutchfield party, which had held bravely together, began to go over, and, as each change was made, a shout went up from the successful force. Hall and Galt had established themselves on opposite sides of the stage and were working with drawn breath. Galt, with a cigar in his mouth and a fan in his hand, was the only cool man in the house. He had caught the wave of popular enthusiasm before it had had time to break, and he was giving it no ground upon which to settle. Tom Ba.s.sett in the centre aisle was cheering on his workers. He was superb, but the Webb men were not behind him; it was still neck to neck. Then, at last, with the third ballot, Burr led off, and the voting was over.

There was a call upon the name of the successful candidate, but before he stood up the Honourable c.u.mberland Crutchfield rose to eulogise the wisdom of the convention in nominating the man he had tried to defeat.

The Caesar of Democracy was beaming, despite his disappointment--a persistent beam of the flesh.

"Gentlemen, you have made your decision, and it is for me to bow to its wisdom. In the Honourable Nick Burr your choice has fallen upon the man who will most incite to ardour each individual voter. His record is a glorious one,"--for an instant he wavered; then his imagination took a blinded leap. "He was born a Democrat, he lives a Democrat, he will die a Democrat. In the life of his revered and lamented father, the late Alexander P. Burr, he has a shining example of unshaken conviction and unswerving loyalty to principle. Gentlemen, you have chosen well, and I pledge myself to uphold your nominee and to be the foremost bearer of your banner when it waves in next November from the line of Tennessee to the Atlantic Ocean."

He sat down amid ecstatic cheers and Nicholas Burr came forward.

His face was grave, but there was the light of enthusiasm in his eyes and his head was uplifted.

"There's a man who has capitalised his conscience," sneered a Webb follower with a smile.

Across the hall Ben Galt was lighting a cigar, the tattered remains of his fan at his feet. "There's a statesman that came a century too late,"

he remarked to Tom Ba.s.sett. "He's a leader, pure and simple, but he's out of place in an age when every man's his own patriot."

III

The successful man was returning to Kingsborough. He had spent the week in Richmond, where he had lived for the past ten years, and he was now going back to receive the congratulations of the judge--as he would have gone twice the distance.

It was the ordinary car of a Southern railroad, and leaning his head against the harsh, bristly plush of the seat, he had before him the usual examples of Southern pa.s.sengers.

Across the aisle a slender mother was holding a crying baby, two small children huddling beside her. In the seat in front of him slouched a mulatto of the new era--the degenerate descendant of two races that mix only to decay. Further off there were several men returning from business trips, and across from them sat a pretty girl, asleep, her hand resting on a gilded cage containing a startled canary. At intervals she was aroused by the flitting figure of a small boy on the way to the cooler of iced water. From the rear of the car came the amiable drawl of the conductor as he discussed the affairs of the State with a local drummer, whose feet rested upon a square leathern case.

Nicholas Burr leaned back and closed his eyes, crossing his long legs which were cramped by the limited s.p.a.ce. He had already exchanged pleasantries with the conductor, and he had chatted for twenty minutes with a farmer, who had gone back at last to the smoking-car.

The low, irregular landscape was as familiar to him as his own face. He knew it so well that he could see it with closed eyes--could note each change of expression where the daylight shifted, could tell where the thin cornfields ended and the meadows rolled fresh and green, could smell the stretch of young pines above the smoke of the engine, and could follow to their ends the rain-washed roads that crawled with hidden heads into the blue blur of the distance. He knew it all, but he was not thinking of it now.

He was thinking of the day, fifteen years ago, when he had left Kingsborough to throw himself and his future into the service of his State. He had told himself then, fresh from the influence of Jefferson and the traditions of Kingsborough, that he had but one love remaining--the love of Virginia. Now, with the bitterer wisdom of experience, that youthful romance showed half foolish, half pathetic. To the man of twenty-three it had been at once the inspiration and the actuality. His personal life had turned to ashes in an hour, and he had told himself that his public one, at least, should remain vital. He had pledged himself to success, and it came to him now that the cause had been won by his single-heartedness--by the absolute oneness of his desire. There had been a sole divinity before him, and he had not wandered in the way of strange G.o.ds. He had given himself, and after fifteen years he was gaining his recompense--a recompense for more work than most men put into a lifetime.

He smiled slightly as he thought of the beginning. In the beginning his sincerity, had been laughed at, his ardour had met rebuff. He had gone to Richmond to meet an a.s.sembly of statesmen; he had found a body of well-intentioned, but unprofitable servants. They were men to be led, this he saw; and as soon as his vision was adjusted he had determined within himself to become their leader. The day when a legislator meant a statesman was done with; it meant merely a man like other men, to be juggled with by shrewder politicians or to be tricked by more dishonest ones. They plunged into errors, and lived to retrieve them; they walked blindfold into traps, and with open eyes struggled out again. For he found them honest and he found them faithful where their lights led them. He remembered, with a laugh, a New Englander who, after a fruitless winter spent in scenting the iniquities of the ruling party, had angrily exclaimed that "if politicians were made up of knaves and fools, Mason and Dixon's was the geographical line dividing the species." Nicholas had retorted, "If to be honest means to be a fool, we are fools!" and the New Englander had chuckled homeward.

That was his first winter and he had been n.o.body. Ah, it was hard work, that beginning. He had had to fight party plans and personal prejudices.

He had had to fight the recognised leaders of the legislature, and he had had to fight the men who pulled the strings--the men who stood outside and hoodwinked the consciences of the powers within. He had had to fight, and he had fought well and long.

He recalled the day of his first decisive victory--the day when he had stood alone and the people--the great, free people, the beginning and the end of all democracies--had rallied to his standard. He had won the people on that day, and he had never lost them.

But he was of the party first and last. In his youth he had believed in the divine inspiration of the Jeffersonian principles as he believed in G.o.d. On the Democratic leaders he had thought to find the mantle of Apostolic Succession. He had believed as the judge believed--with the pa.s.sionate credulity of an older political age. Time had tempered, but it had not dissipated, his fiery partisanship. He sat to-day with the honours of a party upon him--honours that a few months would see ratified by a voice nominally the people's. He laughed now as he remembered that Galt had said that in five years Dudley Webb would be the most popular man in the State. "When Senator Withers stops delivering orations, there'll be a call for an orator, and Webb will arise," he had prophesied. "They don't need him now because the senator gets off speeches like hot cakes; but mark my words, the first time Webb is asked to make an address at the unveiling of a Confederate statue, there won't be a man to stand up against him in Virginia. He's a better speaker than Withers--only the public doesn't know it, and there'll be hot times when it finds it out."

The train was slackening for a wayside station. Outside a man was driving a plough across a field where grain had been harvested. Nicholas followed with his eyes the walk of the horses, the purple-brown trail of the plough, the st.u.r.dy, independent figure of the driver as he pa.s.sed, whistling an air. Over the Virginian landscape--the landscape of a country where each ragged inch of ground wears its strange, distinctive charm, where each rotting "worm fence" guards a peculiar beauty for those who know it--lay the warm hush of full-blown summer.

The man at the plough aroused in Nicholas Burr a sudden exhilaration as of physical exertion. It brought back his boyhood which had brightened as he had pa.s.sed farther from it, and he felt that it would be good on such an afternoon to follow the horses across fields that were odorous of the upturned earth.

The train went on slowly, with the shiftless slouch of Southern trains, the man at the plough vanished, and Nicholas returned to his thoughts.

The years had been almost breathless in their flight. He had put himself to a purpose, and he had lost sight of all things save its fulfilment.

The success that men spoke of with astonished eyes--the transformation of the barefooted boy into the triumphant politician, had a firm foundation, he knew, though others did not. It was his capacity for toil that had made him--not his intellect, but his ability to persevere--the power which, in the old days, had successfully carried him through Jerry Pollard's store. As chairman of the Democratic Party, men had called his campaigns brilliant. He alone knew the tedious processes, the infinite patience from which these triumphs had evolved--he alone knew the secret and the security of his success.

The train stopped with a lurch.

"Kingsborough, sir!" said the conductor with a friendly touch upon his arm.

He started abruptly from his reverie, lifted his bag, and left the car.

On the platform outside a group of stragglers recognised him, and there was a hearty cheer followed by frantic handshakes. The incident pleased him, and he spoke to each man singly, calling him by name. The sheriff was one of them, and the clerk of the court, and the old negro s.e.xton of the church. There was a fervour in their congratulations which brought the warmth to his eyes. He was glad that the men who had known him in his poverty should rise so cordially to approve his success.

He left the station, walking rapidly to the judge's house. He had frequently returned to Kingsborough, but to-day the changes of the last fifteen years struck him with a sensation of surprise. The wide, white street, half in sunshine, half in shadow, trailed its drowsy length into the open country where the roads were filled with gra.s.s and dust. He noticed with a pang that the ivy had been torn from the church and that the glazed brick walls flaunted a nudity that was almost immodest. He had remembered it as a bower of shade--a gigantic bird's nest. He saw that ancient elms were rapidly decaying, and when he reached the judge's garden he found that the syringa and the lilacs had vanished. The garden had faced the destroyer in the plough, and trim vegetables thrived where gaudy blossoms had once rioted.

As he opened the gate he saw old Caesar bending above the mint bed, and he went over to him.

"Dar ain' nuttin better ter jedge er gent'mun by den his mint patch,"

the old negro was muttering, "an' dis yer one's done w'ar out all dose no 'count flow'rs, des' like de quality done w'ar out de trash. Hi!

Ma.r.s.e Nick, dat you?" he shook the proffered hand, his kindly black face wrinkling with hospitality. "Ma.r.s.e George hev got de swelled foot," he said in answer to a question, "an' he ain' tech his julep sence de day befo' yestiddy. Dis yer's fur you," he added, looking at the bunch in his hand.

"You're a trump, Caesar!" exclaimed Nicholas as he ascended the steps and entered the wide hall, through which a light breeze was blowing.

The library door was open and he went in softly, lightening instinctively his heavy tread. The judge was sitting in his great arm-chair, his white head resting against the cushioned back, his bandaged foot on a high footstool.

"Is it you, my boy?" he asked, without turning.

Nicholas crossed the room and gripped the outstretched hand which trembled slightly in the air, the usual rugged composure of his face giving place to frank tenderness.

"I'm sorry to see the gout's troubling you again," he said.

The judge laughed and motioned to a chair beside his desk. His fine dark eyes were as bright as ever, and there was a youthful ring in his voice.

"I'm paying for my pleasures like the rest of us," he responded. "The truth is, Caesar makes me live too high, the rascal--and I go on a bread-and-milk diet once in a while to spite him." Then his tone changed; he pushed aside a slender vase of "safrano" roses which shadowed Nicholas's face and regarded him with genuine delight. "It's good news you bring me," he exclaimed. "I haven't had such news since they told me the Democratic Party had wiped out Mahonism. And it was a surprise. We thought Dudley Webb was too secure for the chances of the 'dark horse.' Well, well, I'm sorry for Dudley, though I'm glad for you.

How did you do it?"

Nicholas laughed, but his face was grave. "Ben Galt says I worked up a political 'revival,'" he replied. "He declares my methods were for all the world the counterpart of those employed in a Methodist camp meeting, but he's joking, of course. It was a distinct surprise to me, as you know. I had declined to offer myself as a candidate for the nomination, because I believed Webb to be a.s.sured of victory. However, the Crutchfield party proved stronger than we supposed, and they came over to my side. I was the 'dark horse,' as you say."

"It's very good," commented the judge. "Very good."