The Plum Tree Part 13

And now the stage had been reached at which my ten mutinous clients could be, and must be, disciplined.

As a first step, I resigned the chairmans.h.i.+p of the state committee and ordered the election of Woodruff to the vacancy. I should soon have subst.i.tuted Woodruff for myself, in any event. I had never wanted the place, and had taken it only because to refuse it would have been to throw away the golden opportunity Dunkirk so unexpectedly thrust at me.

Holding that position, or any other officially connecting me with my party's machine, made me a target; and I wished to be completely hidden, for I wished the people of my state to think me merely one of the party servants, in sympathy with the rank and file rather than with the machine. Yet, in the chairmans.h.i.+p, in the targets.h.i.+p, I must have a man whom I could trust through and through; and, save Woodruff, who was there for the place?

When my resignation was announced, the independent and the opposition press congratulated me on my high principle in refusing to have any official connection with the machine responsible for such infamies. When Woodruff's election was announced it came as a complete surprise. Such of the newspapers as dared, and they were few, denounced it as infamy's crown of infamy; and the rank and file of the party was shocked,--as I had known it would be. He made not a murmur, but I knew what must be in his mind. I said nothing until six weeks or two months had pa.s.sed; then I went straight at him.

"You are feeling bitter against me," said I. "You think I dropped out when there was danger of heavy firing, and put you up to take it."

"No, indeed, Senator," he protested, "nothing like that. Honestly, I have not had a bitter thought against you. I'm depressed simply because, just as I had a chance to get on my feet again, they won't let me."

"But," I rejoined, "I did resign and put you in my place because I didn't want to take the fire and thought you could."

"And so I can," said he. "I haven't any reputation to lose. I'm no worse off than I was before. Let 'em do their d.a.m.nedest."

"Your first campaign will probably be a failure," I went on, "and, the day after election, there'll be a shout for your head."

He shrugged his shoulders. "I'm enlisted for the war," said he. "You're my general. I go where you order."

I hope the feelings that surged up in me showed in my face, as I stretched out my hand. "Thank you, Doc," said I. "And--there's another side to it. It isn't all black."

"It isn't black at all," he replied stoutly.

I explained: "I've wanted you to have the place from the outset. But I shouldn't dare give it to you except at a time like this, when our party has done so many unpopular things that one more won't count; and there's so much to be said against us, so much worse things than they can possibly make out your election to be, that it'll soon be almost neglected."

"They're beginning to drop me already and go back to harrying those poor devils of ours in the legislature," said Woodruff.

"A few weeks more," I went on, "and you'll be safe and you are to stay chairman, no matter what happens. When they have leisure to attack you, there'll be nothing to attack. The people will have dismissed the matter from their minds. They don't care to watch the thres.h.i.+ng of old straw."

I saw that I had lifted a weight from him, though he said nothing.

So much for my first move toward the chastening of my clients. Further and even more effective in the same direction, I cut down our campaign fund for the legislative ticket to one-fifth what it usually was; and, without even Woodruff's knowing it, I heavily subsidized the opposition machine. Wherever it could be done with safety I arranged for the trading off of our legislative ticket for our candidate for governor.

"The legislature is hopelessly lost," I told Woodruff; "we must concentrate on the governors.h.i.+p. We must save what we can." In fact, so overwhelmingly was our party in the majority, and so loyal were its rank and file, that it was only by the most careful arrangement of weak candidates and of insufficient campaign funds that I was able to throw the legislature to the opposition. Our candidate for governor, Walbrook--Burbank was ineligible to a second successive term--was elected by a comfortable plurality. And, by the way, I saw to it that the party organs gave Woodruff enthusiastic praise for rescuing so much from what had looked like utter ruin.

My clients had been uneasy ever since the furious popular outburst which had followed their breaking away from my direction and restraint. When they saw an opposition legislature, they readily believed what they read in the newspapers about the "impending reign of radicalism." Silliman, the opposition leader, had accepted John Markham's offer of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for Croffut's seat in the Senate; but I directed him to send Veerhoft, one of the wildest and cleverest of the opposition radicals. He dared not disobey me. Veerhoft went, and Markham never saw again the seventy-five thousand he had paid Silliman as a "retainer."

Veerhoft in the United States Senate gave my clients the chills; but I was preparing the fever for them also. I had Silliman introduce bills in both houses of the legislature that reached for the privileges of the big corporations and initiated proceedings to expose their corruption. I had Woodruff suggest to Governor Walbrook that, in view of the popular clamor, he ought to recommend measures for equalizing taxation and readjusting the prices of franchises. As my clients were bonded and capitalized on the basis of no expense either for taxes or for franchises, the governor's suggestion, eagerly adopted by Silliman's "horde," foreshadowed ruin. If the measures should be pa.s.sed, all the dividends and interest they were paying on "water" would go into the public treasury.

My clients came to me, singly and in pairs, to grovel and to implore. An interesting study these arrogant gentlemen made as they cringed, utterly indifferent to the appearance of self-respect, in their agony for their imperiled millions. A mother would shrink from abasing herself to save the life of her child as these men abased themselves in the hope of saving their dollars. How they fawned and flattered! They begged my pardon for having disregarded my advice; they a.s.sured me that, if I would only exert that same genius of mine which had conceived the combine, I could devise some way of saving them from this tidal wave of popular clamor,--for they hadn't a suspicion of my part in making that tidal wave.

Reluctantly I consented to "see what I can do."

The instant change in the atmosphere of the capital, the instant outcry from the organs of both parties that "the people had voted for reform, not for confiscatory revolution," completed my demonstration. My clients realized who was master of the machines. The threatening storm rapidly scattered; the people, relieved that the Silliman program of upheaval was not to be carried out, were glad enough to see the old "conservative" order restored,--our people always reason that it is better to rot slowly by corruption than to be frightened to death by revolution.

"Hereafter, we must trust to your judgment in these political matters, Harvey," said Roebuck. "The manager must be permitted to manage."

I smiled at the ingenuousness of this speech. It did not ruffle me.

Roebuck was one of those men who say their prayers in a patronizing tone.

Yes, I was master. But it is only now, in the retrospect of years, that I have any sense of triumph; for I had won the supremacy with small effort, comparatively,--with the small effort required of him who sees the conditions of a situation clearly, and, instead of trying to combat or to change them, intelligently uses them to his ends. Nor do I now regard my achievement as marvelous. Everything was in my favor; against me, there was nothing,--no organization, no plan, no knowledge of my aim. I wonder how much of their supernal glory would be left to the world's men of action, from its Alexanders and Napoleons down to its successful bandits and ward-bosses, if mankind were in the habit of looking at what the winner had opposed to him,--Alexander faced only by flocks of sheep-like Asiatic slaves; Napoleon routing the badly trained, wretchedly officered soldiers of decadent monarchies; and the bandit or ward-boss overcoming peaceful and unprepared and unorganized citizens.

Who would erect statues or write eulogies to a man for mowing a field of corn-stalks with a scythe? Mankind is never more amusing than in its hero-wors.h.i.+p.

No, I should simply have been stupid had I failed.

But--even had I been disposed to rein in and congratulate myself at the quarter-stretch, I could not have done it. A man has, perhaps, some choice as to his mount before he enters the race for success. But once in the saddle and off, he must let the reins go; his control is confined to whip and spur.

XIV

A "BOOM-FACTORY"

In the early autumn of that last year of his as governor, Burbank's wife died--a grim and unexpected fulfilment of their pretended anxieties of six months before.

It was, in some respects, as great a loss to me as to him--how great to us both I did not--indeed, could not--measure until several years pa.s.sed. She was what I regard as a typical American wife--devoted to her husband, jealously guarding his interests, yet as keen to see his shortcomings as she was to see her own. And how much more persistent and intelligent in correcting her faults than he in correcting his! Like most men, he was vain--that is, while he would probably have admitted in a large, vague way that he wasn't perfect, when it came to details he would defend his worst fault against any and all criticism. Like most women, she, too, was vain--but an intelligent woman's vanity, instead of making her self-complacent, somehow spurs her on to hide her weak points and to show her best points in the best light. For example, Mrs.

Burbank, a pretty woman and proud of it, was yet conscious of her deficiencies in dress and in manners through her plain and rural early surroundings. It was interesting, and instructive, too, to watch her studying and cleverly copying, or rather, adapting Carlotta; for she took from Carlotta only that which could be fitted without visible joint into her own pattern.

Latterly, whenever I was urging upon Burbank a line of action requiring courage or a sacrifice of some one of his many insidious forms of personal vanity, I always arranged for her to be present at our conferences. And she would sit there, apparently absorbed in her sewing; but in reality she was seeing not only the surface reasons I gave him, but also those underlying and more powerful reasons which we do not utter, sometimes because we like to play the hypocrite to ourselves, again because we must give the other person a chance to play the hypocrite before himself--and us. And often I left him reluctant and trying to muster courage to refuse or finesse to evade, only to find him the next day consenting, perhaps enthusiastic. Many's the time she spared me the disagreeable necessity of being peremptory--doubly disagreeable because show of authority has ever been distasteful to me and because an order can never be so heartily executed as is an a.s.similated suggestion.

When I went to him a month after her death, I expected he would still be crushed as he was at the funeral. I listened with a feeling of revulsion to his stilted and, as it seemed to me, perfunctory plat.i.tudes on his "irreparable loss"--stale rhetoric about _her_, and to her most intimate friend and his! I had thought he would be imagining himself done with ambition for ever; I had feared his strongly religious nature would lead him to see a "judgment" upon him and her for having exaggerated her indisposition to gain a political point. And I had mapped out what I would say to induce him to go on. Instead, after a few of those stereotyped mortuary sentences, he s.h.i.+fted to politics and was presently showing me that her death had hardly interrupted his plannings for the presidential nomination. As for the "judgment," I had forgotten that in his religion his deity was always on his side, and his misfortunes were always of the evil one. These deities of men of action! Man with his G.o.d a ventriloquist puppet in his pocket, and with his conscience an old dog Tray at his heels, needing no leading string!

However, it gave me a shock, this vivid reminder from Burbank of the slavery of ambition--ambition, the vice of vices. For it takes its victims' all--moral, mental, physical. And, while other vices rarely wreck any but small men or injure more than what is within their small circles of influence, ambition seizes only the superior and sets them on to use their superior powers to blast communities, states, nations, continents. Yet it is called a virtue. And men who have sold themselves to it and for it to the last shred of manhood are esteemed and, mystery of mysteries, esteem themselves!

I had come to Burbank to manufacture him into a President. His wife and I had together produced an excellent raw material. Now, to make it up into the finished product!

He pointed to the filing-cases that covered the west wall of his library from floor to ceiling, from north window to south. "I base my hope on those--next to you, of course," said he. Then with his "woeful widower"

pose, he added: "They were _her_ suggestions."

I looked at the filing-cases and waited for him to explain.

"When we were first married," he went on presently, "she said, 'It seems to me, if I were a public man, I should keep everything relating to myself--every speech, all that the newspapers said, every meeting and the lists of the important people who were there, notes of _all_ the people I ever met anywhere, every letter or telegram or note I received.

If you do, you may find after a few years that you have an enormous list of acquaintances. You've forgotten them because you meet so many, but they will not have forgotten you, who were one of the princ.i.p.al figures at the meeting or reception.' That's in substance what she said. And so, we began and kept it up"--he paused in his deliberate manner, compressed his lips, then added--"together."

I opened one of the filing-cases, glanced at him for permission, took out a slip of paper under the M's. It was covered with notes, in Mrs.

Burbank's writing, of a reception given to him at the Manufacturers'

Club in St. Louis three years before. A lot of names, after each some reminders of the standing and the personal appearance of the man.

Another slip, taken at random from the same box, contained similar notes of a trip through Montana eight years before.

"Wonderful!" I exclaimed, as the full value of these acc.u.mulations loomed in my mind. "I knew she was an extraordinary woman. Now I see that she had genius for politics."

His expression--a peering through that eternal pose of his--made me revise my first judgment of his mourning. For I caught a glimpse of a real human being, one who had loved and lost, looking grief and pride and grat.i.tude. "If she had left me two or three years earlier," he said in that solemn, posing tone, "I doubt if I should have got one step further. As it is, I may be able to go on, though--I have lost--my staff."

What fantastic envelopes does man, after he has been finished by Nature, wrap about himself in his efforts to improve her handiwork!

Physically, even when most dressed, we are naked in comparison with the enswathings that hide our real mental and moral selves from one another--and from ourselves.

My campaign was based on the contents of those filing-cases. I learned all the places throughout the West--cities, towns, centrally-located villages--where he had been and had made an impression; and by simple and obvious means we were able to convert them into centers of "the Burbank boom." I could afterward trace to the use we made of those memoranda the direct getting of no less than one hundred and seven delegates to the national convention--and that takes no account of the vaster indirect value of so much easily worked-up, genuine, unpurchased and unpurchasable "Burbank sentiment." The man of only local prominence, whom Burbank remembered perfectly after a chance meeting years before, could have no doubt who ought to be the party's nominee for President.

The national machine of our party was then in the custody, and supposedly in the control, of Senator Goodrich of New Jersey. He had a reputation for Machiavellian dexterity, but I found that he was an accident rather than an actuality.