The Plum Tree Part 9

"I want to tell you, Harvey," said he, "that the--boy or girl--whichever it is--is to be my heir."

"I shan't hold you to that," I replied with a laugh.

"No,--I'll never marry," he went on. "There was an--an angel. You know the Shaker settlement?--well, out there."

I looked at him in wonder. If ever there was a man who seemed unromantic, it was he, heavy and prosaic and so shy that he was visibly agitated even in bowing to a woman acquaintance.

"I met her," he was saying, "when I was driving that way,--the horse ran, I was thrown out, and her parents had to take me in and let her nurse me. You've seen her face,--or faces like it. Most of those Madonnas over on the other side in all the galleries suggest her.

Well,--her parents were furious,--wouldn't hear of it,--you know Shakers think marriage and love and all those things are wicked. And she thought so, too. How she used to suffer! It wore her to a shadow. She wouldn't marry me,--wouldn't let me so much as touch her hand. But we used to meet and--then she caught a cold--waiting hours for me, one winter night, when there'd been a misunderstanding about the place--I was in one place, she in another. And the cold,--you see, she couldn't fight against it. And--and--there won't be another, Harvey. All women are sacred to me for her sake, but I couldn't any more marry than I could--could stop feeling her sitting beside me, just a little way off, wrapped in her drab shawl, with her face--like a glimpse through the gates of Heaven."

Within me up-started the memories that I kept battened down.

"Your children are mine, too, Harvey," he ended.

I took from Carlotta's work-basket an unfinished bit of baby clothing. I went to him and held it up and pointed to the monogram she had embroidered on it.

"E. R. S.," he read aloud. Then he looked at me with a queer expression beginning to form in his eyes.

"Edward Ramsay Sayler, if it's a boy," said I. "Edwina Ramsay Sayler, if it's a girl."

He s.n.a.t.c.hed the bit of linen from me and buried his face in it.

The baby was a boy,--fortunately, for I don't admire the name Edwina, and I shouldn't have liked to handicap a child with it. Carlotta and Ed were delighted, but I felt a momentary keen disappointment. I had wanted a girl. Girls never leave their parents completely, as boys do. Also I should rather have looked forward to my child's having a sheltered life, one in which the fine and beautiful ideals do not have to be molded into the gross, ugly forms of the practical. I may say, in pa.s.sing, that I deplore the entrance of women into the world of struggle. Women are the natural and only custodians of the ideals. We men are compelled to wander, often to wander far, from the ideal. Unless our women remain aloof from action, how are the ideals to be preserved? Man for action; woman to purify man, when he returns stained with the blood and sin of battle.

But--with the birth of the first child I began to appreciate how profoundly right my mother had been about marriage and its source of happiness. There are other flowers than the rose,--other flowers, and beautiful, the more beautiful for its absence.

IX

TO THE SEATS OF THE MIGHTY

We, our party, carried the state, as usual. Our legislative majority was increased by eleven, to thirty-seven on joint ballot. It was certain that Dunkirk's successor would be of the same political faith; but would he be Dunkirk? At first that venerable custodian of the plum tree hadn't a doubt. He had come to look on it as his personal property. But, after he had talked to legislators-elect from various parts of the state, he became uneasy. He found that the party's members were dangerously evenly divided between himself and the "Dominick-Croffut" faction. And soon he was at me to declare for him.

I evaded as long as I could,--which did not decrease his nervousness.

When he put it to me point-blank, I said: "I can't do it, Senator. I will not mix in quarrels within the party."

"But they are saying you are against me," he pleaded.

"And your people are saying I am for you," I retorted.

"But surely you are not against _me_ and for Schoolcraft? What has he done for you?"

"And what have _you_ done for me?" I replied,--a mere interrogation, without any feeling in it. "Tell me. I try to pay my debts."

His eyes s.h.i.+fted. "Nothing, Sayler, nothing," he said. "I didn't mean to insinuate that you owed me anything. Still, I thought--you wouldn't have been state chairman, except--"

As he halted, I said, "Except that you needed me. And you will recall that I took it only on condition that I should be free."

"Then you are opposed to me," he said. "n.o.body can be on the fence in this fight."

"I do not think you can be elected," I replied.

As he sat silent, the puffs under his eyes swelled into bags and the pallor of his skin changed to the gray which makes the face look as if a haze or a cloud lay upon it. I pitied him so profoundly that, had I ventured to speak, I should have uttered impulsive generosities that would have cost me dear. How rarely are our impulses of generosity anything but impulses to folly, injustice, and wrong!

"We shall see," was all he said, and he rose and shambled away.

They told me he made a pitiful sight, wheedling and whining among the legislators. But he degraded himself to some purpose. He succeeded in rallying round him enough members to deadlock the party caucus for a month,--members from the purely rural districts, where the sentiment of loyalty is strongest, where his piety and unselfish devotion to the party were believed in, and his significance as a "statesman." I let this deadlock continue--forty-one for Dunkirk, forty-one for Schoolcraft--until I felt that the party throughout the state was heartily sick of the struggle. Then Woodruff bought, at twelve thousand dollars apiece, two Dunkirk men to vote to transfer the contest to the floor of a joint session of the two houses.

After four days of balloting there, seven Dominick-Croffut men voted for me--my first appearance as a candidate. On the seventy-seventh ballot Schoolcraft withdrew, and all the Dominick-Croffut men voted for me. On the seventy-ninth ballot I got, in addition, two opposition votes Woodruff had bought for me at eight hundred dollars apiece. The ballot was: Dunkirk, forty-one; Gra.s.smere, (who was receiving the opposition's complimentary vote) thirty-six; Sayler, forty-three. I was a Senator of the United States.

There was a wild scene. Threats, insults, blows even, were exchanged.

And down at the Capital City Hotel Dunkirk crawled upon a table and denounced me as an infamous ingrate, a traitor, a serpent he had warmed in his bosom. But the people of the state accepted it as natural and satisfactory that "the vigorous and fearless young chairman of the party's state committee" should be agreed on as a compromise. An hour after that last ballot, he hadn't a friend left except some galling sympathizers from whom he hid himself. Those who had been his firmest supporters were paying court to the new custodian of the plum tree.

The governor was mine, and the legislature. Mine was the Federal patronage, also--all of it, if I chose, for Croffut was my dependent, though he did not realize it; mine also were the indefinitely vast resources of the members of my combine. Without my consent no man could get office anywhere in my state, from governors.h.i.+p and judges.h.i.+p down as far as I cared to reach. Subject only to the check of public sentiment,--so easily defeated if it be not defied,--I was master of the making and execution of laws. Why? Not because I was leader of the dominant party. Not because I was a Senator of the United States. Solely because I controlled the sources of the money that maintained the political machinery of both parties. The hand that holds the purse strings is the hand that rules,--if it knows how to rule; for rule is power _plus_ ability.

I was not master because I had the plum tree. I had the plum tree because I was master.

The legislature attended to such of the demands of my combine and such of the demands of the public as I thought it expedient to grant, and then adjourned. Woodruff asked a three months' leave. I did not hear from or of him until midsummer, when he sent me a cablegram from London. He was in a hospital there, out of money and out of health. I cabled him a thousand dollars and asked him to come home as soon as he could. It was my first personal experience with that far from uncommon American type, the periodic drunkard. I had to cable him money three times before he started.

When he came to me at Was.h.i.+ngton, in December, he looked just as before,--calm, robust, cool, cynical, and dressed in the very extreme of the extreme fas.h.i.+on. I received him as if nothing had happened. It was not until the current of mutual liking was again flowing freely between us that I said: "Doc, may I impose on your friends.h.i.+p to the extent of an intrusion into your private affairs?"

He started, and gave me a quick look, his color mounting. "Yes," he said after a moment.

"When I heard from you," I went on, "I made some inquiries. I owe you no apology. You had given me a shock,--one of the severest of my life. But they told me that you never let--that--that peculiarity of yours interfere with business."

His head was hanging. "I always go away," he said. "n.o.body that knows me ever sees me when--at that time."

I laid my hand on his arm. "Doc, why do you do--that sort of thing?"

The scar came up into his face to put agony into the reckless despair that looked from his eyes. For an instant I stood on the threshold of _his_ Chamber of Remorse and Vain Regret,--and well I knew where I was.

"Why not?" he asked bitterly. "There's always a--sort of horror--inside me. And it grows until I can't bear it. And then--I drown it--why shouldn't I?"

"That's very stupid for a man of your brains," said I. "There's nothing--nothing in the world, except death--that can not be wiped out or set right. Play the game, Doc. Play it with me for five years. Play it for all there is in it. Then--go back, if you want to."

He thought a long time, and I did not try to hurry him. At length he said, in his old off-hand manner: "Well, I'll go you, Senator; I'll not touch a drop."

And he didn't. Whenever I thought I saw signs of the savage internal battle against the weakness, I gave him something important and absorbing to do, and I kept him busy until I knew the temptation had lost its power for the time.

This is the proper place to put it on the record that he was the most scrupulously honest man I have ever known. He dealt with the shadiest and least scrupulous of men--those who train their consciences to be the eager servants of their appet.i.tes; he handled hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions, first and last, all of it money for which he could never have been forced to account. He has had at one time as much as half a million dollars in checks payable to bearer. I am not confiding by nature or training, but I am confident that he kept not a penny for himself beyond his salary and his fixed commission. I put his salary at the outset, at ten thousand a year; afterward, at fifteen; finally, at twenty. His commissions, perhaps, doubled it.

There are many kinds of honesty nowadays. There is "corporate honesty,"

not unlike that proverbial "honor among thieves," which secures a fair or fairly fair division of the spoils. Then there is "personal honesty," which subdivides into three kinds--legal, moral, and instinctive. Legal honesty needs no definition. Moral honesty defies definition--how untangle its intertwinings of motives of fear, pride, insufficient temptation, sacrifice of the smaller chance in the hope of a larger? Finally, there is instinctive honesty--the rarest, the only bed-rock, una.s.sailable kind. Give me the man who is honest simply because it never occurs to him, and never could occur to him, to be anything else. That is Woodruff.