The Plum Tree Part 26

"They did _your_ work, James," said I. "I guarantee that in no case will the unpleasant consequences to you be more than a few disagreeable but soon forgotten newspaper articles. You haggle over these trifles, and--why, look at your cabinet list! There are two names on it--two of the four Goodrich men--that will cost you blasts of public anger--perhaps the renomination."

"Is _this_ my friend Harvey Sayler?" he exclaimed, grief and pain in that face which had been used by him for thirty years as the sculptor uses the molding clay.

"It is," I answered calmly. "And never more your friend than now, when you have ceased to be a friend to him--and to yourself."

"Then do not ask me to share the infamy of those wretches," he pleaded.

"They are our allies and helpers," I said, "wretches only as I and all of us in practical politics are wretches. Difference of degree, perhaps; but not of kind. And, James, if our promises to these invaluable fellow workers of ours are not kept, kept to the uttermost, you will compel me and my group of Senators to oppose and defeat your most important nominations. And I shall myself, publicly, from the floor of the Senate, show up these Goodrich nominees of yours as creatures of corrupt corporations and monopolies." I said this without heat; every word of it fell cold as arctic ice upon his pa.s.sion.

A long pause, then: "Your promises shall be kept," he a.s.sented with great dignity of manner; "not because you threaten, Harvey, but because I value your friends.h.i.+p beyond anything and everything. And I may add I am sorry, profoundly sorry, my selections for the important places do not please you."

"I think of your future," I said. "You _talk_ of friends.h.i.+p--"

"No, no, Harvey," he protested, with a vehemence of rea.s.surance that struck me as amusing.

"And," I went on, "it is in friends.h.i.+p, James, that I warn you not to fill all your crucial places with creatures of the Goodrich crowd. They will rule your administration, they will drive you, in spite of yourself, on and on, from excess to excess. You will put the middle West irrevocably against you. You will make even the East doubtful. You are paying, paying with your whole future, for that which is already yours.

If you lose your hold on the people, the money-crowd will have none of you. If you keep the people, the money-crowd will be your very humble servant."

I happened just then to glance past him at a picture on the wall over his chair. It was a crayon portrait of his wife, made from an enlarged photograph--a poor piece of work, almost ludicrous in its distortions of proportion and perspective. But it touched me the more because it was such a humble thing, reminiscent of her and his and my lowly beginnings.

And an appeal seemed to go straight to my heart from those eyes that had so often been raised from the sewing in sympathetic understanding of the things I was struggling to make her husband see.

I pointed to the picture; he slowly turned round in his chair until he too was looking at it. "What would _she_ say, Burbank," I asked, "if she were with us now?"

And then I went on to a.n.a.lyze his outlined administration, to show him in detail why I thought it would ruin him, to suggest men who were as good party men as the Goodrich crowd and would be a credit to him and a help. And he listened with his old-time expression, looking up at his dead wife's picture all the while. "You must be _popular_, at any cost,"

I ended. "The industrial crowd will stay with the party, no matter what we do. As long as Scarborough is in control on the other side, we are their only hope. And so, we are free to seek popularity--and we must regain it or we're done for. Money won't save us when we've lost our grip on the rank and file. The presidency can't be bought again for _you_. If it must be bought next time, another figure-head will have to be used."

"I can't tell you how grateful I am," was his conclusion after I had put my whole mind before him and he and I had discussed it. "But there are certain pledges to Goodrich--"

"Break them," said I. "To keep them is catastrophe."

I knew the pledges he had in the foreground of his thoughts--a St. Louis understrapper of the New York financial crowd for Secretary of the Treasury; for Attorney General a lawyer who knew nothing of politics or public sentiment or indeed of anything but how to instruct corporations in law-breaking and law-dodging.

He thought a long time. When he answered it was with a shake of the head. "Too late, I'm afraid, Harvey. I've asked the men and they've accepted. That was a most untimely illness of yours. I'll see what can be done. It's a grave step to offend several of the most conspicuous men in the party."

"Not so serious as to offend the party itself," I replied. "Money is a great power in politics, but partizans.h.i.+p is a greater."

"I'll think it over," was the most he had the courage to concede. "I must look at all sides, you know. But, whatever I decide, I thank you for your candor."

We separated, the best friends in the world, I trying to recover some few of the high hopes of him that had filled me on election night. "He's weak and timid," I said to myself, "but at bottom he must have a longing to be President in fact as well as in name. Even the meanest slave longs to be a man."

I should have excepted the self-enslaved slaves of ambition. Of all bondmen, they alone, I believe, not only do not wish freedom, but also are ever plotting how they may add to their chains.

XXIX

A LETTER FROM THE DEAD

I was living alone at the Willard.

Soon after the death of Burbank's wife, his sister and brother-in-law, the Gracies, had come with their three children to live with him and to look after his boy and girl. Trouble between his family and mine, originating in some impertinences of the oldest Gracie girl, spread from the children to the grown people until, when he went into the White House, he and I were the only two on speaking terms. I see now that this situation had large influence on me in holding aloof and waiting always for overtures from him. At the time I thought, as no doubt he thought also, that the quarrel was beneath the notice of men.

At any rate my family decided not to come to Was.h.i.+ngton during his first winter in the White House. I lived alone at the Willard. One afternoon toward the end of February I returned there from the Senate and found Woodruff, bad news in his face. "What is it?" I asked indifferently, for I a.s.sumed it was some political tangle.

"Your wife--was taken--very ill--very suddenly," he said. His eyes told me the rest.

If I had ever asked myself how this news would affect me, I should have answered that it would give me a sensation of relief. But, instead of relief, I felt the stunning blow of a wave of sorrow which has never wholly receded. Not because I loved her--that I never did. Not because she was the mother of my children--my likes and dislikes are direct and personal. Not because she was my wife--that bond had been galling. Not because I was fond of her--she had one of those cold, angry natures that forbid affection. No; I was overwhelmed because she and I had been intimates, with all the closest interests of life in common, with the whole world, even my children whom I loved pa.s.sionately, outside that circle which fate had drawn around us two. I imagine this is not uncommon among married people,--this unhealable break in their routine of a.s.sociation when one departs. No doubt it often pa.s.ses with the unthinking for love belatedly discovered.

"She did not suffer," said Woodruff gently. "It was heart disease. She had just come in from a ride with your oldest daughter. They were resting and talking in high spirits by the library fire. And then--the end came--like putting out the light."

Heart disease! Often I had noted the irregular beat of her heart--a throb, a long pause, a flutter, a short pause, a throb. And I could remember that more than once the sound had been followed by the shadowy appearance, in the door of my mind, of one of those black thoughts which try to tempt hope but only make it hide in shame and dread. Now, the memory of those occasions tormented me into accusing myself of having wished her gone. But it was not so.

She had told me she had heart trouble; but she had confided to no one that she knew it might bring on the end at any moment. She left a letter, sealed and addressed to me:

Harvey--

I shall never have the courage to tell you, yet I feel you ought to know. I think every one attributes to every one else less shrewdness than he possesses. I know you have never given me the credit of seeing that you did not love me. And you were so kind and considerate and so patient with my moods that no doubt I should have been deceived had I not known what love is. I think, to have loved and to have been loved develops in a woman a sort of sixth sense--sensitiveness to love. And that had been developed in me, and when it never responded to your efforts to deceive me, I knew you did not love me.

Well, neither did I love you, though I was able to hide it from you. And it has often irritated me that you were so un.o.bservant.

You know now the cause of many of my difficult moods, which have seemed causeless.

I admired you from the first time we met. I have liked you, I have been proud of you, I would not have been the wife of any other man in the world, I would not have had any other father for my children. But I have kept on loving the man I loved before I met you.

Why? I don't know. I despised him for his weaknesses. I should never have married him, though mother and Ed both feared I would. I think I loved him because I knew he loved me. That is the way it is with women--they seldom love independently. Men like to love; women like to be loved. And, poor, unworthy creature that he was, still he would have died for me, though G.o.d had denied him the strength to live for me. But all that G.o.d gave him--the power to love--he gave me. And so he was different in my eyes from what he was in any one's else in the world. And I loved him.

I don't tell you this because I feel regret or remorse. I don't; there never was a wife truer than I, for I put him completely aside. I tell you, because I want you to remember me right after I'm gone, Harvey dear. You may remember how I was silly and jealous of you, and think I am mistaken about my own feelings. But jealousy doesn't mean love. When people really love, I think it's seldom that they're jealous. What makes people jealous usually is suspecting the other person of having the same sort of secret they have themselves. It hurt my vanity that you didn't love me; and it stung me to think you cared for some one else, just as I did.

I want you to remember me gently. And somehow I think that, after you've read this, you will, even if you did love some one else. If you ever see this at all, Harvey--and I may tear it up some day on impulse--but if you ever do see it, I shall be dead, and we shall both be free. And I want you to come to me and look at me and--

It ended thus abruptly. No doubt she had intended to open the envelope and finish it--but, what more was there to say?

I think she must have been content with the thoughts that were in my mind as I looked down at her lying in death's inscrutable calm. I had one of my secretaries hunt out the man she had loved--a sad, stranded wreck of a man he had become; but since that day he has been sheltered at least from the worst of the bufferings to which his incapacity for life exposed him.

There was a time when I despised incapables; then I pitied them; but latterly I have felt for them the sympathetic sense of brotherhood. Are we not all incapables? Differing only in degree, and how slightly there, if we look at ourselves without vanity; like practice-sketches put upon the slate by Nature's learning hand and impatiently sponged away.

x.x.x

A PHILOSOPHER RUDELY INTERRUPTED

After the funeral I lingered at our Fredonia place. There was the estate to settle; my two daughters had now no one to look after them; Junior must be started right at learning the business of which he would soon be the head, as his uncle had shown himself far too easy-going for large executive responsibility. So, I stayed on, doing just enough to keep a face of plausibility upon my pretexts for not returning to Was.h.i.+ngton.

The fact was that Carlotta's death had deepened my mood of distaste into disgust. It had set me to brooding over the futility and pettiness of my activities in politics, of all activities of whatever kind. I watched Ed and my children resuming the routine of their lives, swiftly adjusting themselves to the loss of one who had been so dear to them and apparently so necessary to their happiness. The cry of "man overboard,"

a few ripples, a few tears; the sailing on, with the surface of the water smooth again and the faces keen and bright.