The Plum Tree Part 24

"I always knew he was one of those chaps you have to keep scared to keep straight," said Woodruff. "They think your politeness indicates fear and your friends.h.i.+p fright. Besides, he's got a delusion that his popularity carried the West for him and that you and I did him only damage."

Woodruff interrupted himself to laugh. "A friend of mine," he resumed, "was on the train with Scarborough when he went East to the meeting of Congress last month. He tells me it was like a President-elect on the way to be inaugurated. The people turned out at every cross-roads, even beyond the Alleghanies. And Burbank knows it. If he wasn't clean daft about himself he'd realize that if it hadn't been for you--well, I'd hate to say how badly he'd have got left. But then, if it hadn't been for you, he'd never have been governor. He was a dead one, and you hauled him out of the tomb."

True enough. But what did it matter now?

"He's going to get a horrible jolt before many months," Woodruff went on. "I can see you after him."

"You forget. He's President," I answered. "He's beyond our reach."

"Not when he wants a renomination," insisted Woodruff.

"He can get that without us--_if_," I said. "You must remember we've made him a fetish with our rank and file. And he's something of a fetish with the country, now that he's President. No, we can't destroy him--can't even injure him. He'll have to do that himself, if it's done.

Besides--"

I did not finish. I did not care to confess that since Frances and I saw Granby swinging from that tree in my grounds I had neither heart nor stomach for the relentless side of the game. Indeed, whether from calculation or from sentimentality or from both--or, from a certain sympathy and fellow feeling for all kinds of weakness--I have never pursued those who have played me false, except when exemplary punishment was imperative.

"Well--" Woodruff looked bitterly disappointed. "I guess you're right."

He brightened. "I forgot Goodrich for a minute. Burbank'll do himself up through that--I'd have to be in a saloon to feel free to use the language that describes him."

"I fear he will," I said. And it was not a hypocrisy--for I did not, and could not, feel anger toward him. Had I not cut this staff deliberately because it was crooked? What more natural than that it should give way under me as soon as I leaned upon it?

"Your sickness certainly couldn't have come at an unluckier time,"

Woodruff observed just before he left.

"I'm not sure of that," was my reply. "It would have been useless to have found him out sooner. And if he had hidden himself until later, he might have done us some serious mischief."

As he was the President-elect, to go to him uninvited would have been infringement of his dignity as well as of my pride. A few days later I wrote him, thanking him for his messages and inquiries during my illness and saying that I was once more taking part in affairs. He did not reply by calling me up on the telephone, as he would have done in the cordial, intimate years preceding his grandeur. Instead he sent a telegram of congratulation, following it with a note. He urged me to go South, as I had planned, and to stay until I was fully restored. "I shall deny myself the pleasure of seeing you until you return." That sentence put off our meeting indefinitely--I could see him smiling at its adroitness as he wrote it.

But he made his state of mind even clearer. His custom had been to begin his notes "Dear Harvey," or "Dear Sayler," and to end them "James" or "Burbank." This note began "My dear Senator"; it ended, "Yours sincerely, James E. Burbank." As I stared at these phrases my blood steamed in my brain. Had he spat in my face my fury would have been less, far less. "So!" I thought in the first gush of anger, "you feel that you have been using me, that you have no further use for me. You have decided to take the advice of those idiotic independent newspapers and 'wash your hands of the corruptionist who almost defeated you'."

To make war upon him was in wisdom impossible--even had I wished. And when anger flowed away and pity and contempt succeeded, I really did not wish to war upon him. But there was Goodrich--the real corruptionist, the wrecker of my plans and hopes, the menace to the future of the party. I sent for Woodruff and together we mapped out a campaign against the senior senator from New Jersey in all the newspapers we could control or influence. I gave him a free hand to use--with his unfailing discretion, of course--all the facts we had acc.u.mulated to Goodrich's discredit. I put at his disposal a hundred thousand dollars. As every available dollar of the party funds had been used in the campaign, I advanced this money from my own pocket.

And I went cheerfully away to Palm Beach, there to watch at my ease the rain of shot and sh.e.l.l upon my enemy.

XXVII

A DOMESTIC DISCORD

After a month in the South, I was well again--younger in feeling, and in looks, than I had been for ten years. Carlotta and the children, except "Junior" who was in college, had gone to Was.h.i.+ngton when I went to Florida. I found her abed with a nervous attack from the double strain of the knowledge that Junior had eloped with an "impossible" woman he had met, I shall not say where, and of the effort of keeping the calamity from me until she was sure he had really entangled himself hopelessly.

She was now sitting among her pillows, telling the whole story. "If he only hadn't married her!" she ended.

This struck me as ludicrous--a good woman citing to her son's discredit the fact that he had goodness' own ideals of honor.

"What are you laughing at?" she demanded.

I was about to tell her I was hopeful of the boy chiefly because he had thus shown the splendid courage that more than redeems folly. But I refrained. I had never been able to make Carlotta understand me or my ideas, and I had long been weary of the resentful silences or angry tirades which mental and temperamental misunderstandings produce.

"Courage never gets into a man unless it's born there," said I. "Folly is born into us all and can be weeded out."

"What can be expected?" she went on after trying in vain to connect my remark with our conversation. "A boy needs a father. You've been so busy with your infamous politics that you've given him scarcely a thought."

Painfully true, throughout; but it was one of those criticisms we can hardly endure even when we make it upon ourselves. I was silent.

"I've no patience with men!" she went on. "They're always meddling with things that would get along better without them, and letting their own patch run to weeds."

Unanswerable. I held my peace.

"What are you going to do about it, Harvey? How _can_ you be so calm?

Isn't there _anything_ that would rouse you?"

"I'm too busy thinking what to do to waste any energy in blowing off steam," was my answer in my conciliatory tone.

"But there's nothing we _can_ do," she retorted, with increasing anger, which vented itself toward me because the true culprit, fate, was not within reach.

"Precisely," I agreed. "Nothing."

"That creature won't let him come to see me."

"And you musn't see him when he sends for you," said I. "He'll come as soon as his money gives out. She'll see that he does."

"But you aren't going to cut him off!"

"Just that," said I.

A long silence, then I added in answer to her expression: "And _you_ must not let him have a cent, either."

In a gust of anger, probably at my having read her thoughts, she blurted out: "One would think it was _your_ money."

I had seen that thought in her eyes, had watched her hold it back behind her set teeth, many times in our married years. And I now thanked my stars I had had the prudence to get ready for the inevitable moment when she would speak it. But at the same time I could not restrain a flush of shame. "It _is_ my money," I forced myself to say. "Ask your brother.

He'll tell you what I've forbidden him to tell before--that I have twice rescued you and him from bankruptcy."

"With our own money," she retorted, hating herself for saying it, but goaded on by a devil that lived in her temper and had got control many a time, though never before when I happened to be the one with whom she was at outs.

"No--with my own," I replied tranquilly.

"_Your_ own!" she sneered. "Every dollar you have has come through what you got by marrying me--through what you married me for. Where would you be if you hadn't married me? You know very well. You'd still be fighting poverty as a small lawyer in Pulaski, married to Betty Crosby or whatever her name was." And she burst into hysterical tears. At last she was showing me the secrets that had been tearing at her, was showing me her heart where they had torn it.

"Probably," said I in my usual tone, when she was calm enough to hear me. "So, that's what you brood over?"

"Yes," she sobbed. "I've hated you and myself. Why don't you tell me it isn't so? I'll believe it--I don't want to hear the truth. I know you don't love me, Harvey. But just say you don't love _her_."

"What kind of middle-aged, maudlin moons.h.i.+ne is this, anyway?" said I.

"Let's go back to Junior. We've pa.s.sed the time of life when people can talk sentimentality without being ridiculous."