The Plum Tree Part 15

"Let him in," said I.

As the door-man disappeared Doc Woodruff glanced at his watch, then said with a smile: "You've been here seven minutes and a half--just time for a lookout down stairs to telephone to the Auditorium and for the messenger to drive from there here. Goodrich is on the anxious-seat, all right."

The messenger was Goodrich's handy-man, Judge Dufour. I myself have always frowned on these public exhibitions of the intimacy of judges in practical politics; but Goodrich had many small vanities--he liked his judges to hold his coat and his governors to carry his satchel. One would say that such petty weaknesses would be the undoing of a man.

Fortunately, we are not as weak as our weakness but as strong as our strength; and while the universal weaknesses are shared by the strong, their strength is peculiar and rare. After Dufour had introduced himself and we had exchanged commonplaces he said: "Senator, there's a little conference of some of the leaders at headquarters and it isn't complete without you. So, Senator Goodrich has sent me over to escort you."

"Thank you--very courteous of you and of him," said I without hesitation, for I knew what was coming as soon as his name had been brought in, and my course was laid out. "But I can't leave just now.

Please ask him if he won't come over--any time within the next four hours." This blandly and without a sign that I was conscious of Dufour's stupefaction--for his vanity made him believe that the G.o.d the great Dufour knelt to must be the G.o.d of G.o.ds.

There is no more important branch of the art of successful dealing with men than the etiquette of who shall call upon whom. Many a man has in his very hour of triumph ruined his cause with a blunder there--by going to see some one whom he should have compelled to come to him, or by compelling some one to come to him when he should have made the concession of going. I had two reasons for thus humiliating Goodrich, neither of them the reason he doubtless attributed to me, the desire to feed my vanity. My first reason was his temperament; I knew his having to come to me would make him bow before me in spirit, as he was a tyrant, and tyrants are always cringers. My second reason was that I thought myself near enough to control of the convention to be able to win control by creating the atmosphere of impending success. There is always a lot of fellows who wait to see who is likely to win, so that they may be on the side of the man in the plum tree; often there are enough of these to gain the victory for him who can lure them over at just the right moment.

As soon as Dufour had taken his huge body away I said to Woodruff: "Go out with your men and gather in the office down stairs as many members of the doubtful delegations as you can. Keep them where they'll be bound to see Goodrich come in and go out."

He rushed away, and I waited--working with the leaders of three far-western states. At the end of two hours, I won them by the spectacle of the arriving Goodrich. He came in, serene, smiling, giving me the joyously s.h.i.+ning eyes and joyously firm hand-clasp of the politician's greeting; not an outward sign that he would like to see me tortured to death by some slow process then and there. Hypocritical preliminaries were not merely unnecessary but even highly ridiculous; yet, so great was his anger and confusion that he began with the "prospects for an old-time convention, with old-time enthusiasm and that generous rivalry which is the best sign of party health."

"I hope not, Senator," said I pleasantly. "Here, we think the fight is over--and won."

He lifted his eyebrows; but I saw his maxillary muscles twitching. "We don't figure it out just that way at headquarters," he replied oilily.

"But, there's no doubt about it, your man has developed strength in the West."

"And South," said I, with deliberate intent to inflame, for I knew how he must feel about those delegates we had bought away from him.

There were teeth enough in his smile--but little else. "I think Burbank and Cromwell will be about even on the first ballot," said he. "May the best man win! We're all working for the good of the party and the country. But--I came, rather, to get your ideas about platform."

I opened a drawer in the table at which I was sitting and took out a paper. "We've embodied our ideas in this," said I, holding the paper toward him. "There's a complete platform, but we only insist on the five paragraphs immediately after the preamble."

He seemed to age as he read. "Impossible!" he finally exclaimed.

"Preposterous! It would be difficult enough to get any money for _Cromwell_ on such a platform, well as our conservative men know they can trust him. But for _Burbank_--you couldn't get a cent--not a d.a.m.n cent! A rickety candidate on a rickety platform--that's what they'd say."

I made no answer.

"May I ask," he presently went on, "has ex-Governor Burbank seen this--this astonis.h.i.+ng doc.u.ment?"

Burbank had written it. I confess when he first showed it to me, it had affected me somewhat as it was now affecting Goodrich. For, a dealer with business men as well as with public sentiment, I appreciated instantly the shock some of the phrases would give the large interests.

But Burbank had not talked to me five minutes before I saw he was in the main right and that his phrases only needed a little "toning down" so that they wouldn't rasp too harshly on "conservative" ears, "Yes, Mr.

Burbank has seen it," said I. "He approves it--though, of course, it does not represent his _personal_ views, or his _intentions_."

"If Mr. Burbank approves _this_," exclaimed Goodrich, red and tossing the paper on the table, "then my gravest doubts about him are confirmed.

He is an utterly unsafe man. He could not carry a single state in the East where there are any large centerings of capital or of enterprise--not even our yellow-dog states."

"He can and will carry them all," said I. "They _must_ go for him, because after the opposition have nominated, and have announced their platform, your people will regard him as, at any rate, much the less of two evils. We have decided on that platform because we wish to make it possible for him to carry the necessary Western states. We can't hold our rank and file out here unless we have a popular platform. The people must have their way _before_ election, Senator, if the interests are to continue to have their way _after_ election."

"I'll never consent to that platform," said he, rising.

"Very well," said I with a mild show of regret, rising also as if I had no wish to prolong the interview.

He brought his hand down violently upon the paper. "This," he exclaimed, "is a timely uncovering of a most amazing plot--a plot to turn our party over to demagoguery."

"To rescue it from the combination of demagoguery and plutagoguery that is wrecking it," said I without heat, "and make it again an instrument of at least sanity, perhaps of patriotism."

"We control the platform committee," he went on, "and I can tell you now, Senator Sayler, that that there platform, nor nothing like it, will never be reported." In his agitation he went back to the grammar of his youthful surroundings.

"I regret that you will force us to a fight on the floor of the convention," I returned. "It can't but make a bad impression on the country to see two factions in the party--one for the people, the other against them."

Goodrich sat down.

"But," I went on, "at least, such a fight will insure Burbank all the delegates except perhaps the two or three hundred you directly control.

You are courageous, Senator, to insist upon a count of noses on the issues we raise there."

He took up the platform again, and began to pick it to pieces phrase by phrase. That was what I wanted. Some phrases I defended, some I conceded might be altered to advantage, others I cheerfully agreed to discard altogether. Presently he had a pencil in his hand and was going over the crucial paragraphs, was making interlineations. And he grew more and more reasonable. At last I suggested that he take the platform away with him, make the changes agreed upon and such others as he might think wise, and send it back for my criticism and suggestions. He a.s.sented, and we parted on excellent terms--"harmony" in the convention was a.s.sured.

When the amended platform came back late in the afternoon, I detained Goodrich's messenger, the faithful Dufour again. It was still the Burbank platform, with no changes we could not concede. I had a copy made and gave it to Dufour, saying: "Tell the Senator I think this admirable, a great improvement. But I'll try to see him to-night and thank him."

I did not try to see him, however. I took no risk of lessening the effect created by his having to come to me. He had entered through groups of delegates from all parts of the country. He had pa.s.sed out through a crowd, so well did my men employ the time his long stay with me gave them.

On the next day the platform was adopted. On the following day, amid delirious enthusiasm in the packed galleries and not a little agitation among the delegates--who, even to the "knowing ones," were as ignorant of what was really going on as private soldiers are of the general's plan of battle--amid waving of banners and crash of band and shriek of crowd Burbank was nominated on the first ballot. Our press hailed the nomination as a "splendid victory of the honest common sense of the entire party over the ultra conservatism of a faction a.s.sociated in the popular mind with segregated wealth and undue enjoyment of the favors of laws and law-makers."

When I saw Burbank he took me graciously by the hand. "I thank you, Harvey," he said, "for your aid in this glorious victory of the people."

I did not realize then that his vanity was of the kind which can in an instant spring into a Redwood colossus from the shriveled stalk to which the last glare of truth has wilted it. Still his words and manner jarred on me. As our eyes met, something in mine--perhaps something he imagined he saw--made him frown in the majesty of offended pose. Then his timidity took fright and he said apologetically, "How can I repay you?

After all, it is your victory."

I protested.

"Then _ours_," said he. "Yours, for us."

XVII

SCARBOROUGH

Now came _the_ problem--to elect.

We hear much of many wonders of combination and concentration of _industrial_ power which railway and telegraph have wrought. But nothing is said about what seems to me the greatest wonder of them all--how these forces have resulted in the concentration of the _political_ power of upwards of twelve millions of our fifteen million voters; how the few can impose their ideas and their will upon widening circles, out and out, until all are included. The people are scattered; the powers confer, man to man, day by day. The people are divided by partizan and other prejudices; the powers are bound together by the one self-interest. The people must accept such political organizations as are provided for them; the powers pay for, and their agents make and direct, those organizations. The people are poor; the powers are rich.

The people have not even offices to bestow; the powers have offices to give and lucrative employment of all kinds, and material and social advancement,--everything that the vanity or the appet.i.te of man craves.

The people punish but feebly--usually the wrong persons--and soon forget; the powers relentlessly and surely pursue those who oppose them, forgive only after the offender has surrendered unconditionally, and they never forget where it is to their interest to remember. The powers know both what they want and how to get it; the people know neither.

Back in March, when Goodrich first suspected that I had outgeneraled him, he opened negotiations with the national machine of the opposition party. He decided that, if I should succeed in nominating Burbank, he would save his masters and himself by nominating as the opposition candidate a man under their and his control, and by electing him with an enormous campaign fund.

Beckett, the subtlest and most influential of the managers of the national machine of the opposition party, submitted several names to him. He selected Henry J. Simpson, Justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio--a slow, shy, ultra-conservative man, his brain spun full in every cell with the cobwebs of legal technicality. He was, in his way, almost as satisfactory a candidate for the interests as Cromwell would have been. For, while he was honest, of what value is honesty when combined with credulity and lack of knowledge of affairs? They knew what advisers he would select, men trained in their service and taken from their legal staffs. They knew he would shrink from anything "radical" or "disturbing"--that is, would not molest the two packs of wolves, the business and the political, at their feast upon the public. He came of a line of bigoted adherents of his party; he led a simple, retired life among sheep and cows and books asleep in the skins of sheep and cows. He wore old-fas.h.i.+oned rural whiskers, thickest in the throat, thinning toward the jawbone, scant about the lower lip, absent from the upper.

These evidences of unfitness to cope with up-to-date corruption seemed to endear him to the ma.s.ses.

As soon as those big organs of the opposition that were in the control of the powers began to talk of Simpson as an ideal candidate, I suspected what was in the wind. But I had my hands full; the most I could then do was to supply my local "left-bower," Silliman, with funds and set him to work for a candidate for his party more to my taste. It was fortunate for me that I had cured myself of the habit of worrying.

For it was plain that, if Goodrich and Beckett succeeded in getting Simpson nominated by the opposition, I should have a hard fight to raise the necessary campaign money. The large interests either would finance Simpson or, should I convince them that Burbank was as good for their purposes as Simpson, would be indifferent which won.