The Candidate Part 45

They conferred a little, leaving Jimmy Grayson alone in his chair, where he remained silent and with inexpressive face. Harley still stood by the window. He had never spoken, but nothing escaped his attention. More than once he was hot with anger, but none of the committeemen ever looked at him.

"If you insist, and as you say you will, we yield this little point,"

said Mr. Goodnight, "but we only do so because Waterville is such a small place. Even then we are not sure that it is not an indiscretion, to call it by a mild name, and if anything should come of it you would have to bear the full responsibility, Mr. Grayson."

"That is true," said Jimmy Grayson, cheerfully, "but as you have said, Waterville is a small, a very small place; one could hardly find a smaller on the map."

"In that event it will doubtless do no harm," said Mr. Goodnight, relaxing a little, and Mr. Crayon, stroking his smoothly shaven chin, said after him: "No harm; no harm, perhaps, in so small a place!"

Harley had never moved from the window, and again he studied Jimmy Grayson's face with the keenest attention. Harley was a fine judge of character, but he could read nothing there, save gravity. As for himself, he felt often those hot thrills of anger at the words of these men; would nothing stir them from their complacency? He had, too, a sense of pain at Jimmy Grayson's lack of resentment. It was true that their support was a necessity, but after all they were a minority within the party, and one might remind them of the fact. Yet Jimmy Grayson probably knew best; he understood politics, and perhaps his course was the wiser. But Harley sighed.

After the victory, although it had not been a difficult one to win, the members of the committee were disposed to condescend a little. They sent to their private car for champagne and other luxuries which the candidate and Harley touched but lightly, and they treated even Harley, the newspaper-man, with graciousness.

Mr. Crayon felt the flame of humor sparkling in his veins, and he jested lightly on the little speech at Waterville. "Just think of our candidate wasting sweetness on desert air," he said, "for Waterville is in desert, and, as I am reliably informed, has less than forty inhabitants."

Jimmy Grayson showed no resentment, but smiled gravely.

"Of course Mr. Harley understands that all this is _sub rosa_," said Mr.

Goodnight, looking severely at the correspondent.

"Mr. Harley knows it, and he is to be trusted entirely," said Jimmy Grayson. "Otherwise I should not have brought him with me. I vouch for the fact that he will say nothing of this meeting until we give him permission."

Mr. Grayson presently excused himself, on the plea that he needed sleep, a plea which was admitted by everybody, and Harley also withdrew, while the members of the committee went to their private car pleased with the evening's work. Thus the Great Philipsburg Conference came to an end.

The candidate and Harley walked together to their rooms through a rather dim hall, but it was not too dim to hide from Harley a singular expression that pa.s.sed over the face of the candidate. It was gone like a flash, but it seemed to Harley to be a compound of anger and antic.i.p.ation. Wisely he kept silent, and Jimmy Grayson, stopping a moment at his own door, said, in the grave but otherwise expressionless tone that he had used throughout the discussion:

"Good-night, Harley; I don't think we shall forget this evening, shall we?"

"No," replied Harley, and he tried to decipher a meaning in Jimmy Grayson's tone, but he could not.

When Harley turned away, he found Hobart, Blaisdell, Churchill, and all the other correspondents waiting for him at the end of the hall to get the news of the conference.

"There is nothing, not a line," said Harley.

They looked at him incredulously.

"It is the truth, I a.s.sure you," continued Harley. "I am not sending a word to my own paper. I am going straight to my bed."

"If you say so, Harley, I believe you," said Churchill. "Besides, it's past one o'clock now, and that's past four o'clock in New York and past three in Chicago; all the papers have gone to press, and we couldn't send anything if we wanted to do so."

"There is nothing to tell you," said Harley, "except that Mr. Grayson will allude to the tariff in his speech to-morrow, or, rather, this morning, at Waterville. He has promised the committee not to do so again--they were not very willing to grant him even so little--but it is a sort of sop to Cerberus; later on, if any one twits him with avoiding the revision, he can say, and say truthfully, that he has spoken on it."

"I see," said Churchill.

And before they could ask him anything more Harley had entered his own room and was going to bed.

The morning dawned badly. The sun shone dimly through a ma.s.s of dirty brown clouds, and the mountains were hidden in mist. A slow and provoking cold rain was falling. It was also a start at the first daylight, and, forced to rise too early from their beds, all were in a bad humor. Even Sylvia was hid in a heavy cloak, and she did not smile.

Harley had told her that he could make nothing of the conference the night before.

They reached Waterville an hour later, and they found it even smaller and bleaker than they expected. Although the usual body of citizens was on hand to meet them at the train, the attendance was less than at any point hitherto. The shed under which Jimmy Grayson was to speak would easily hold them.

But the members of the committee, when they came from their private car, showed satisfaction. They had enjoyed a good breakfast, their _chef_, as Harley could testify, was one of the best, and they were not averse to hearing the candidate make his record good. Hence they were all comfortably arranged on the platform in their usual solid semicircle when Mr. Grayson appeared. The candidate himself was a bit later than usual, but he gave them a cheerful good-morning when he appeared, and then proceeded at once to the matter of the speech.

The audience, though small, greeted Mr. Grayson with the heartiest applause, and he soon had them under his spell. He talked a while on the customary issues, and then he said:

"Gentlemen, there is one question which seemed in previous campaigns to be of paramount importance, but in this it has been suffered a long time to rest. Lately, however, it has been rising into prominence again. In the great centres of population to the eastward it has become a question first in the minds of the people, and before the campaign closes it is bound to become as momentous here."

Harley, in a seat at the corner of the stage, glanced at the committee, and he noticed a slight shade of disapproval on all their faces. The candidate was a little too strong in his preamble, but they smiled again when they noticed his face which wore an expression so gentle and innocent.

"It has been but recently that the matter came to my attention,"

continued the candidate, in an easy, conversational tone, "but in the time since then I have been thinking about it a great deal. This question I need scarcely tell you is the revision of the tariff, and I am going to speak to you about it this morning."

There was a sudden cheer from the audience, and the people seemed to draw closer around the speaker's stand. Their faces glowed with interest. Sylvia sat up straight and her eyes sparkled. The committee looked a warning at Jimmy Grayson, but he did not see it.

"This question has come up late," he said, "and perhaps it could have been put aside. I have been told that it would be for the good of our party, particularly in this campaign, to do so, and many have advised me to keep silence, saying that I could consistently and honorably follow such a course, as our platform does not declare itself on the question; but there are some things that trouble me. This is an issue, I feel sure, which must be threshed out sooner or later, and as it is now so importantly before the country I think that I, as the standard-bearer of our party, should have an opinion upon it."

The audience cheered again, and longer and louder than ever. Sylvia's eyes not only sparkled, they flashed. Mr. Goodnight half rose in his seat and said something in a loud whisper to the candidate, but Mr.

Grayson did not hear it and went on with his speech.

"It did not take me long to make up my mind," he continued. "I have decided opinions upon the subject, and what they are I shall tell you before I leave this stage; but first I want to tell you a story."

Mr. Grayson did not tell stories often; he did so only when they were thoroughly relevant, and Hobart, Blaisdell, and the other correspondents leaned forward with sudden interest. Sylvia's face glowed.

"I think I'll sharpen my lead-pencils," said Hobart.

"I would if I were you," said Harley.

"This story," continued the candidate, in an easy, confidential manner, "is about a man who was in a position much like mine. He was the nominee of his party for a most important office, and towards the close of his campaign a great issue came up again, just as in my case. He did not think that he ought to keep silent about it, but when he was thinking over what he ought to say a committee of men, representing a minority in his party, arrived from the great centres of population, industry, and finance--he was then far away in a thinly settled and somewhat isolated region."

Again the committee stirred, and they whispered loudly both to one another and to Mr. Grayson, but he paid no heed to them and spoke on.

All the correspondents were writing rapidly, eagerly, and with rapt attention, while Sylvia's eyes still sparkled and flashed.

"Well, the members of this committee and the man met," continued the candidate, "and from the first they treated him as one who might have an opinion of his own but who must not be allowed to express it. They were not bad men, perhaps, but a long course of exclusive attention to their own personal interests had, we will say, narrowed them. That personal advantage was always dangling before them; they could see nothing else.

The sun rose and set in its interest, and such an affair as the government of a mighty nation like the United States must be regulated with sole regard to it. They thought they knew everything in the world when they knew only one thing in it. Their ignorance was equalled only by their presumption."

The rolling cheer came once more from the audience, but Harley saw that the faces of the committee had turned red. They whispered no more, but stared angrily and uneasily at Jimmy Grayson, who did not notice them.

"How glad I am that I sharpened all my lead-pencils!" said Hobart, in a low tone to Harley.

But Harley never stopped writing.

"They did not even have the tact to treat this candidate with courtesy and consideration," continued Mr. Grayson. "They lectured him on his comparative youth and his ignorance of the world, when it was they who were ignorant. They told him, without hesitation, regardless of his own opinion and the fact that he was a free man among free men, that he must not speak on this issue. They threatened him."

"Did he take the bluff?" shouted a big man in the audience.

"Wait and we shall see," said Jimmy Grayson, sweetly. "They were ent.i.tled to their opinion, and he would have heard their advice, but their manner was intolerable; they undertook to treat him as a child.

They called him to a conference, and there they laid down the law to him as a school-master would order a sulking child to be good."

"Did he take the bluff?" again shouted the big man in the crowd.