In the early autumn of that last year of his as governor, Burbank's wife
died--a grim and unexpected fulfilment of their pretended anxieties of
six months before.
It was, in some respects, as great a loss to me as to him--how great to
us both I did not--indeed, could not--measure until several years
passed. She was what I regard as a typical American wife--devoted to her
husband, jealously guarding his interests, yet as keen to see his
shortcomings as she was to see her own. And how much more persistent and
intelligent in correcting her faults than he in correcting his! Like
most men, he was vain--that is, while he would probably have admitted in
a large, vague way that he wasn't perfect, when it came to details he
would defend his worst fault against any and all criticism. Like most
women, she, too, was vain--but an intelligent woman's vanity, instead of
making her self-complacent, somehow spurs her on to hide her weak
points and to show her best points in the best light. For example, Mrs.
Burbank, a pretty woman and proud of it, was yet conscious of her
deficiencies in dress and in manners through her plain and rural early
surroundings. It was interesting, and instructive, too, to watch her
studying and cleverly copying, or rather, adapting Carlotta; for she
took from Carlotta only that which could be fitted without visible joint
into her own pattern.
Latterly, whenever I was urging upon Burbank a line of action requiring
courage or a sacrifice of some one of his many insidious forms of
personal vanity, I always arranged for her to be present at our
conferences. And she would sit there, apparently absorbed in her sewing;
but in reality she was seeing not only the surface reasons I gave him,
but also those underlying and more powerful reasons which we do not
utter, sometimes because we like to play the hypocrite to ourselves,
again because we must give the other person a chance to play the
hypocrite before himself--and us. And often I left him reluctant and
trying to muster courage to refuse or finesse to evade, only to find
him the next day consenting, perhaps enthusiastic. Many's the time she
spared me the disagreeable necessity of being peremptory--doubly
disagreeable because show of authority has ever been distasteful to me
and because an order can never be so heartily executed as is an
assimilated suggestion.
When I went to him a month after her death, I expected he would still be
crushed as he was at the funeral. I listened with a feeling of revulsion
to his stilted and, as it seemed to me, perfunctory platitudes on his
"irreparable loss"--stale rhetoric about _her_, and to her most intimate
friend and his! I had thought he would be imagining himself done with
ambition for ever; I had feared his strongly religious nature would lead
him to see a "judgment" upon him and her for having exaggerated her
indisposition to gain a political point. And I had mapped out what I
would say to induce him to go on. Instead, after a few of those
stereotyped mortuary sentences, he shifted to politics and was presently
showing me that her death had hardly interrupted his plannings for the
presidential nomination. As for the "judgment," I had forgotten that in
his religion his deity was always on his side, and his misfortunes were
always of the evil one. These deities of men of action! Man with his god
a ventriloquist puppet in his pocket, and with his conscience an old dog
Tray at his heels, needing no leading string!
However, it gave me a shock, this vivid reminder from Burbank of the
slavery of ambition--ambition, the vice of vices. For it takes its
victims' all--moral, mental, physical. And, while other vices rarely
wreck any but small men or injure more than what is within their small
circles of influence, ambition seizes only the superior and sets them on
to use their superior powers to blast communities, states, nations,
continents. Yet it is called a virtue. And men who have sold themselves
to it and for it to the last shred of manhood are esteemed and, mystery
of mysteries, esteem themselves!
I had come to Burbank to manufacture him into a President. His wife and
I had together produced an excellent raw material. Now, to make it up
into the finished product!
He pointed to the filing-cases that covered the west wall of his library
from floor to ceiling, from north window to south. "I base my hope on
those--next to you, of course," said he. Then with his "woeful widower"
pose, he added: "They were _her_ suggestions."