I was almost master of myself again when, a week later, I got aboard the
car in which Carlotta and I were taking our friends to look on at the
opposition's convention at St. Louis.
When we arrived, I went at once to confer with Merriweather in a room at
the Southern Hotel which no one knew he had. "Simpson has under, rather
than over, five hundred delegates," was his first item of good news. "It
takes six hundred and fifty to nominate. As his sort of boom always
musters its greatest strength on the first ballot, I'm putting my money
two to one against him."
"And Scarborough?" I asked, wondering at my indifference to this
foreshadowing of triumph.
"My men talk him to every incoming delegation. It's well known that he
don't want the nomination and has forbidden his friends to vote for him
and has pledged them to work against him. Then, too, the bosses and the
boys don't like him--to put it mildly. But I think we're making every
one feel he's the only man they can put up, with a chance to beat
Burbank."
[Illustration: "THAT," I REPLIED TO MRS. SANDYS, "IS SENATOR SCARBOROUGH
OF INDIANA" p. 226]
My wife and our friends and I dined at the Southern that night. As we
were about to leave, the streets began to fill. And presently through
the close-packed masses came at a walk an open carriage--the
storm-center of a roar that almost drowned the music of the four or five
bands. The electric lights made the scene bright as day.
"Who is he?" asked the woman at my side--Mrs. Sandys.
She was looking at _the_ man in that carriage--there were four, but
there was no mistaking him. He was seated, was giving not the slightest
heed to the cheering throngs. His soft black hat was pulled well down
over his brows; his handsome profile was stern, his face pale. If that
crowd had been hurling curses at him and preparing to tear him limb from
limb he would not have looked different. He was smooth-shaven, which
made him seem younger than I knew him to be. And over him was the
glamour of the world-that-ought-to-be in which he lived and had the
power to compel others to live as long as they were under the spell of
his personality.
"That," I replied to Mrs. Sandys, "is Senator Scarborough of Indiana."
"What's he so stern about?"
"I'm sure I don't know--perhaps to hide his joy," said I.
But I did know, and my remark was the impulsive fling of envy. He had
found out, several weeks before, what a strong undercurrent was running
toward him. He was faced by a dilemma--if he did not go to the
convention, it would be said that he had stayed away deliberately, and
he would be nominated; if he went, to try to prevent his nomination, the
enthusiasm of his admirers and followers would give the excuse for
forcing the nomination upon him. And as he sat there, with that ominous
tumult about him, he was realizing how hard his task was to be.
His companions pushed him a passage through the crowds on the sidewalk
and in the lobby, and he shut himself away in the upper part of the
hotel. When we left, half an hour later, the people were packed before
that face of the hotel which displayed the banner of the Indiana
delegation, were cheering Scarborough, were clamoring--in vain--for him
to show himself.
"But won't he offend them?" asked my wife.
"A crowd loves like a woman," said I. "Indifference only excites it."
"Oh, _I_ never loved that way," protested Mrs. Sandys.
"Then," said my wife, rather sourly I thought, "you and Mr. Sandys have
something to live for."
And so we talked no more politics. There may be American women who
_really_ like to talk politics, but I never happened to know one with so
little sense. It's a pity we men do not imitate our women more closely
in one respect. In season and out of season, they never talk anything
but business--woman's one business. When other things are being
discussed, they listen, or rather, pretend to listen; in reality, their
minds are still on their business, and how they shall contrive to bring
it back into the conversation with advantage to themselves.
Next day the convention adopted a wishy-washy platform much like
Burbank's--if anything, weaker. I saw Goodrich's blight upon it. But the
victory cost him dear. That night the delegates realized what a blunder
they had made--or thought they realized it after Merriweather and his
staff had circulated among them. Few of them had been trusted by Beckett
with the secret that, with that platform and with Simpson as the
nominee, their party would have the interests behind it, would almost
certainly win. They only saw ahead a dull campaign, and no real issue
between the parties, and their candidate, if he was Simpson, much the
less attractive personality of the two.
The following morning the voting began; and after seven ballots Simpson
had thirty-nine votes less than on the first ballot. "It was like a
funeral," was the verdict of my disappointed guests that evening. A
night of debate and gloom among the politicians and other delegates, and
on the opening ballot Merriweather sprung his trap.
The first big doubtful state in the alphabetical list of states is
Illinois. When the secretary of the convention called for Illinois'
vote, it was cast solidly for Scarborough.
There was straightway pandemonium. It was half an hour before any one
could get a hearing. Then Indiana was called, and Pierson, attorney
general of that state and chairman of its delegation, cast its vote as
in the other ballots, for Hitchens, its governor. From my box I was
watching Scarborough and his immediate friends going from delegation to
delegation, and I knew what he was about. When Iowa was called and cast
its vote solidly for him I knew he had failed.
"How white he is!" said Mrs. Sandys, who was looking at him through
opera-glasses.
I borrowed them and saw that his gaze was fixed on a box on the other
side of the huge auditorium, on a woman in that box--I had only to look
at her to see which woman. She was beautiful, of that type of charm
which the French sum up in the phrase "the woman of thirty." I have
heard crowds bellow too often to be moved by it--though the twenty or
thirty thousand gathered under that roof were outdoing the cannonade of
any thunderstorm. But that woman's look in response to
Scarborough's--there was sympathy and understanding in it, and more,
infinitely more. He had been crushed for the moment--and I understood
enough of his situation to understand what a blow to all his plans this
untimely apparent triumph was. She was showing that she too felt the
blow, but she was also sending a message of courage to him--one of those
messages that transcend words, like music, like the perfumes of flowers
and fields, like that which fills us as we look straight up into a clear
night sky. I lowered the glasses and looked away--I could not bear it.
For the moment I hated him--hating myself for it.
I heard Carlotta asking a woman in the box next ours the name of "the
woman with the white plume in the big black hat in the seventh box on
the other side."
"Mrs. Scarborough," was the answer.
"Oh, is that _she_?" exclaimed Mrs. Sandys, almost snatching her glasses
from me in her eagerness. "You know who she was--John Dumont's
widow--you remember him? She must be an unusual person to have attracted
two such men."
But Scarborough was nominated now. He waved aside those who tried to
take him up and bear him to the platform. He walked down the aisle alone
and ascended amid a tense silence; he stood looking calmly out. His face
had lost its whiteness of a few minutes before. As he stood there, big
and still, a sort of embodiment of fearlessness, I wondered--and I fancy
many others were wondering--whether he was about to refuse the
nomination. But an instant's thought drove the wild notion from my mind.
He could not strike that deadly blow at his party.
"Fellow delegates," said he--a clearer, more musical voice than his I
have never heard--"I thank you for this honor. As you know, I opposed
the platform you saw fit to adopt. I have nothing to retract. I do not
like it. But, after all, a candidate must be his own platform. And I
bring my public record as proof of my pledge--that--" he paused and the
silence was tremendous. He went on, each word distinct and by
itself--"if I am elected"--a long pause--"I shall obey the
Constitution"--another long pause--"I shall enforce the laws!"
He was descending to the aisle before the silence was broken--a feeble,
rippling applause, significant of disappointment at what seemed an
anti-climax. He had merely repeated in condensed form the oath of office
which a President takes at his inauguration. But somehow--no doubt, it
was the magic of his voice and his manner and superb presence--those
simple words kept on ringing; and all at once--full half a minute must
have elapsed, a long time in such circumstances--all at once the
enormous meaning of the two phrases boomed into the brains of those
thousands: If this man is elected, there will be a President without
fear or favor, and he will really obey the Constitution, will really
enforce the laws! That little speech, though only a repetition of an
oath embodied in our century-old supreme law, was a firebrand to light
the torch of revolution, of revolution back toward what the republic
used to be before differences of wealth divided its people into upper,
middle and lower classes, before enthroned corporate combinations made
equality before the law a mockery, before the development of our vast
material resources restored to the intelligent and energetic few their
power over the careless and purposeless many.
As the multitude realized his meaning,--I doubt if many times in all
history such a sight and sound has burst upon mortal ears and eyes. For
the moment I was daunted; it was impossible not to think that here was
the whole people, not to feel that Scarborough had been chosen President
and was about to fulfil his pledge. Daunted, yet thrilled too. For, at
bottom, are we not all passionate dreamers of abstract right and
justice?
Then I remembered; and I said to myself, "He has defied the interests.
David has gone out against Goliath--but the Davids do not win nowadays.
I can elect Burbank."
But where was the elation that thought would have set to swelling in the
_me_ of less than two weeks before? And then I began clearly to see
that, for me at least, the prize, to be prized, must be fairly won from
start to goal; and to be enjoyed, must gladden eyes that would in turn
gladden me with the approval and sympathy which only a woman can give
and without which a man is alone and indeed forlorn.