At a little after eight the following night, I was in Chicago, was
knocking at Suite L in the Auditorium Hotel; I was hearing sounds from
within that indicated that the dinner was under way. The door swung back
and there stood old Roebuck himself, napkin in hand, his shriveling old
face showing that his dollar sense was taking up the strength which his
other senses were losing. He was saying cordially, "Ah, Croffut, you are
late--"
Then his dim eyes saw me; he pulled himself up like a train when the
air-brakes are clapped on.
"They told me at the office that you were at dinner," said I in the tone
of one who has unintentionally blundered. "As I was looking for dinner,
I rather hoped you'd ask me to join you. But I see that--"
"Come right in," he said smoothly, but gray as a sheep. "You'll find
some old friends of yours. We're taking advantage of the convention of
western manufacturers to have a little reunion."
I now had a full view of the table. There was a silence that made the
creaking of starched evening shirt-bosoms noisy as those men drew long
stealthy breaths when breathing became imperative. All my "clients" and
Dominick--he at Roebuck's right. At Roebuck's left there was a vacant
chair. "Shall I sit here?" said I easily.
"That place was reserved--was for--but--" stammered Roebuck.
"For Granby's ghost?" said I pleasantly.
His big lips writhed. And as my glance of greeting to these old friends
of mine traveled down one side of the table and up the other, it might
have been setting those faces on fire, so brightly did they flare. It
was hard for me to keep my disgust beneath the surface. Those
"gentlemen" assembled there were among the "leading citizens" of my
state; and Roebuck was famous on both sides of the Atlantic as a king of
commerce and a philanthropist. Yet, every one of those brains was busy
most of its hours with assassin-like plottings--and for what purpose?
For ends so petty, so gross and stupid that it was inconceivable how
intelligence could waste life upon them, not to speak of the utter
depravity and lack of manliness. Liars cheats, bribers; and flaunting
the fruits of infamy as honors, as titles to respect, as gifts from
Almighty God! And here they were, assembled now for silly plottings
against the man whose only offense in their eyes was that he was saving
them from themselves--was preventing them from killing the goose that
would cheerfully keep on laying golden eggs for the privilege of
remaining alive. It was pitiful. It was nauseating. I felt my
degradation in stooping to such company.
I spoke to Dominick last. To my surprise he squarely returned my gaze.
His eyes were twinkling, as the eyes of a pig seem to be, if you look
straight into its face when it lifts its snout from a full trough.
Presently he could contain the huge volume of his mirth no longer. It
came roaring from him in a great coarse torrent, shaking his vast bulk
and the chair that sustained it, swelling the veins in his face,
resounding through the silent room while the waiters literally stood
aghast. At last he found breath to ejaculate: "Well, I'll be good
and--damned!"
This gale ripped from the others and whirled away their cloaks of
surface-composure. Naked, they suggested a lot of rats in a
trap--Dominick jeering at them and anticipating the pleasure of watching
me torment them. I choked back the surge of repulsion and said to
Roebuck: "Then where _shall_ I sit?"
Roebuck looked, almost wildly, toward the foot of the table. He longed
to have me as far from him as possible. Partridge, at the foot of the
table, cried out--in alarm: "Make room for the Senator between you and
Mr. Dominick, Roebuck! He ought to be as near the head of the table as
possible."
"No matter where Senator Sayler sits, it's the head of the table," said
Roebuck. His commonplace of courtesy indicated, not recovered
self-control, but the cunning of his rampant instinct of
self-preservation--that cunning which men so often exhibit in desperate
straits, thereby winning credit for cool courage.
"We're a merry company," said I, as we sat. This, with a glance at
Dominick heaving in the subsiding storm of his mirth. My remark set him
off again. I glanced at his place to see if he had abandoned his former
inflexible rule of total abstinence. There stood his invariable pot of
tea. Clearly, it was not drink that enabled him to enjoy a situation
which, as it seemed to me, was fully as unattractive for him as for his
fellows.
Soon the door opened and in strode Croffut; handsome, picturesque, with
his pose of dashing, brave manhood, which always got the crowds into the
mood for the frenzy his oratory conjured. Croffut seemed to me to put
the climax upon this despicable company--Croffut, one of the great
orators of the party, so adored by the people that, but for our
overwhelming superiority in the state, I should never have dared eject
him from office. Since I ejected him he had not spoken to me. Dominick
looked at him, said in a voice that would have flared even the warm
ashes of manhood into a furious blaze: "Go and shake hands with Senator
Sayler, Croffut, and sit down."
Croffut advanced, smiling. "I am fit for my company," thought I as I let
him clasp my hand.
"Better tilt Granby's ghost out of that chair, Croffut," said Dominick,
as the ex-Senator was seating himself. And in his animal exuberance of
delight at his joke and at the whole situation he clapped Roebuck on the
shoulder.
Roebuck shrank and winced. Moral humiliation he could shed as an
armor-plated turret sheds musket-balls. But a physical humiliation,
especially with spectators, sank in and sank deep. Instantly, alarmed
lest Dominick had seen and understood, he smiled and said: "That's a
vigorous arm of yours, Mr. Dominick."
"Not bad for a man of sixty," said Dominick.
I ate because to eat was a necessary part of my pose of absolute
calmness; but I had to force down the food. It seemed to me to embody
the banquet there set before my mental appetite. I found I had no
stomach for that banquet. It takes the coarse palate of youth or the
depraved palate of a more debauched manhood than mine to enjoy such a
feast. Yet, less than a year before, I had enjoyed, had delighted in, a
far less strenuous contest with these mutineers. As I sat holding down
my gorge and acting as if I were at ease, I suddenly wondered what
Elizabeth Crosby would think of me if she could see. And then I saw her,
with a reality of imagining that startled me--it was as if she were in
the doorway; and her eyes lifted to mine in that slow, steady, searching
gaze of hers.
I suppose, if a soldier thrusting his saber into the bowels of his enemy
on the battle-field were suddenly to see before him his mother or the
good and gentle wife or daughter he loved, he would drop the saber and
fly to hide himself like a murderer. So, I, overwhelmed, said to myself:
"I can not go on! Let these wretches wallow in their own vileness. I
shall not wallow with them. I am no swineherd!"
As I was debating how to escape and what one of the many other ways of
saving my friends and lieutenants I should adopt, Dominick touched me on
the arm. "A word with you, Senator," said he.
He glanced at the others as if he were debating whether he should order
them from the table while he talked with me. If he had ordered it, they
would have gone. But restrained, perhaps by his crude though reverent
sense of convention, he rose and led the way over to a corner.
"I want to tell you, Senator, that as soon as I got on to what this here
push was plottin', I wired you askin' an appointment. You'll find the
telegram at your house when you go home. I don't stand for no foulin'. I
play the game straight. I came because I thought you'd want the party to
be represented at such a getherin'."
I saw that he had come to the dinner, doubtful whether any enterprise
against me, promising enough for him to risk embarking, could be
launched; as soon as I entered the room he, like the rat when the cat
interrupted the rat-and-mouse convention to discuss belling it,
unceremoniously led the way to safety. But this was not one of those few
occasions on which it is wise to show a man that his lies do not fool
you. "I am glad to hear you say these things, Dominick," said I. "I am
glad you are loyal to the party."
"You can trust me, Senator," said he earnestly.
"I can trust your common sense," said I. And I proceeded to grasp this
lucky chance to get away. "I am leaving," I went on, "as soon as the
coffee is served. I shall look to you to send these gentlemen home in a
proper frame of mind toward the party."
His eyes glistened. Except his growing fortune, nothing delighted him so
much as a chance to "rough-house" his eminently respectable "pals." He
felt toward them that quaint mixture of envy, contempt and a desire to
fight which fills a gamin at sight of a fashionably dressed boy. He put
out his big hand and dampened mine with it. "You can count on me,
Senator," he said gratefully. "I'll trim 'em, comb and tail-feathers."
"Don't overlook their spurs," said I.
"They ain't got none," said he, "except those you lend 'em."
We returned to a table palled by sullen dread--dread of me, anger
against Dominick who, in the courage of his ignorance of the
conventionalities which restrained them, had taken the short, straight
cut to me and peace. And, as veterans in the no-quarter warfare of
ambition, they knew I had granted him peace on no less terms than their
heads.
They had all, even Roebuck, been drinking freely in the effort to
counteract the depression. But the champagne seemed only to aggravate
their gloom except in the case of young Jamieson. He had just succeeded,
through the death of his father, to the privilege of levying upon the
people of eleven counties by means of trolley franchises which the
legislature had granted his father in perpetuity in return for financial
services to "the party." It is, by the way, an interesting illustration
of the human being's lack of thinking power that a legislature could not
give away a small gold-mine belonging to the public to any man for even
a brief term of years without causing a revolution, but could and does
give away far more valuable privileges to plunder and to tax, and give
them away for ever, without causing any real stir. However--young
Jamieson's liquor, acting upon a mind that had not had enough experience
to appreciate the meaning of the situation, drove him on to insolent
taunts and boasts, addressed to his neighbors but intended for me. I
ignored him and, when the coffee was served, rose to depart.
Roebuck urged me to stay, followed me to the coat-room, took my coat
away from the servant and helped me with it. "I want to see you the
first thing in the morning, Harvey," said he.
"I'll call you up, if I have time," said I.
We came out of the cloak-room, his arm linked in mine, and crossed the
corner of the dining-room toward the outside door. Jamieson threw up his
arm and fluttered his hand in an impertinent gesture of farewell. "So
long, Senator Swollenhead," he cried in a thick voice. "We'll teach you
a lesson in how to treat gentlemen."
The last word--gentlemen--was just clearing his mouth when Dominick's
tea-pot, flung with all the force of the ex-prize-fighter's big muscles
and big body, landed in the midst of his broad white shirt-bosom. And
with the tea-pot Dominick hurled his favorite epithet from his garbage
barrel of language. With a yell Jamieson crashed over backward; his
flying legs, caught by the table, tilted it; his convulsive kicks sent
it over, and half the diners, including Dominick, were floored under it.
All this in a snap of the fingers. And with the disappearance of the
physical semblance of a company of civilized men engaged in dining in
civilized fashion, the last thin veneer over hate and fury was scraped
away. Curses and growling roars made a repulsive mess of sound over that
repulsive mess of unmasked, half-drunken, wholly infuriated brutes.
There is shrewd, sly wisdom snugly tucked away under the fable of the
cat changed into a queen and how she sprang from her throne at sight of
a mouse to pursue it on all fours. The best of us are, after all,
animals changed into men by the spell of reason; and in some
circumstances, it doesn't take much of a blow to dissolve that spell.
For those men in those circumstances, that blow proved sufficient.
Partridge extricated himself, ran round the table and kicked Jamieson in
the head--partly in punishment, perhaps, and because he needed just that
vent for his rage, but chiefly to get credit with me, for he glanced
toward me as he did it. Men, sprawling and squirming side by side on the
floor, lashed out with feet and fists, striking each other and adding to
the wild dishevelment. The candles set fire to the table-cloth and
before the blaze was extinguished burned several in the hair and
mustaches.
Dominick, roaring with laughter, came to Roebuck and me standing at the
door, both dazed at this magic shift of a "gentlemen's" dinner into a
bear-pit. "Granby's ghost is raisin' hell," said he.
But I had no impulse to laugh or to gloat. "Good night," said I to
Roebuck and hastened away.
It was the end of the attempt to mine the foundations of my power. But I
did not neglect its plain warning. As soon as the legislature assembled,
I publicly and strongly advocated the appointment of a joint committee
impartially to investigate all the cities of the state, those ruled by
my own party no less than those ruled by the opposition. The committee
was appointed and did its work so thoroughly that there was a popular
clamor for the taking away of the charters of the cities and for ruling
them from the state capital. It is hardly necessary to say that my
legislature and governor yielded to this clamor. And so the
semi-independent petty princes, the urban bosses, lost their
independence and passed under my control; and the "collections" which
had gone directly to them reached them by way of Woodruff as grants from
my machine, instead of as revenues of their own right.
Before this securing of my home power was complete, I had my
counter-attack upon the Burbank-Goodrich combine well under way.
Immediately on my return to Fredonia from the disastrous dinner, I sent
for the attorney general of the state, Ferguson. He was an ideal
combination of man and politician. He held to the standards of private
morality as nearly as it is possible for a man in active public life to
hold to them--far more nearly than most men dare or, after they have
become inured, care, to hold. He always maintained with me a firm but
tactful independence; he saw the necessity for the sordid side of
politics, but he was careful personally to keep clear of smutched or
besmutching work. He had as keen an instinct for popularity as a bee has
for blossoms; he knew how to do or to direct unpopular things on dark
nights with a dark lantern, how to do or to direct popular things in
full uniform on a white horse. I have never ordered any man to a task
that was not morally congenial; and I was careful to respect Ferguson's
notion of self-respect. I sent for him now, and outlined my plan--to
bring suits, both civil and criminal, in the Federal courts in the name
of the state, against Roebuck and his associates of the Power Trust.
When he had heard, he said: "Yes, Mr. Sayler, we can break up the Power
Trust, can cause the indictment and conviction of Mr. Roebuck. I can
prevent the United States Attorney General from playing any of the usual
tricks and defending the men whom the people think he is vigorously
prosecuting. But--"
"But?" said I encouragingly.
"Is this on the level? If I undertake these prosecutions, shall I be
allowed to push them _honestly_? Or will there be a private settlement
as soon as Roebuck and his crowd see their danger?"
"No matter what happens," I replied, "you shall prosecute at least the
civil suits to the end. I give you my word for that."
He thanked me warmly, for he appreciated that I was bestowing upon him
an enormous opportunity for national fame.
"And you?" said I. "If you succeed in this prosecution, will you remain
in the public service or will you accept the offers the interests will
make, and remove to New York and become a rich corporation lawyer?"
He reflected before answering. "That depends," said he. "If _you_ are
going to stay on in control in this state, I shall stick to public life,
for I believe you will let me have what I call a career. But, if you are
going to get out and leave me at the mercy of those fellows, I certainly
shan't stay where they can fool the people into turning on me."
"I shall stay on," said I; "and after me, there will be
Woodruff--unless, of course, there's some sort of cataclysm."
"A man must take chances," he answered. "I'll take that chance."
We called Woodruff into the consultation. Although he was not a lawyer,
he had a talent for taking a situation by the head and tail and
stretching it out and holding it so that every crease and wrinkle in it
could be seen. And this made him valuable at any conference.
In January we had our big battery loaded, aimed and primed. We unmasked
it, and Ferguson fired. I had expected the other side to act stupidly,
but I had not hoped for such stupidity as they exhibited. Burbank's year
of bathing in presidential flatteries and of fawning on and cringing to
the multi-millionaires and their agents hedging him around, had so
wrought upon him that he had wholly lost his point of view. And he let
his Attorney General pooh-pooh the proceedings,--this in face of the
great popular excitement and enthusiasm. It was not until Roebuck's
lawyers got far enough into the case against him to see his danger that
the administration stopped flying in the teeth of the cyclone of public
sentiment and began to pretend enthusiasm, while secretly plotting the
mistrial of Ferguson's cases. And not until the United States Attorney
General--a vain Goodrich creature whose talents were crippled by his
contempt for "the rabble" and "demagoguery"--not until he had it forced
upon him that Ferguson could not be counter-mined, did they begin to
treat with me for peace.
I shall not retail the negotiations. The upshot was that I let the
administration drop the criminal cases against Roebuck in return for the
restoration of my power in the national committee of the party to the
smallest ejected postmaster in the farthest state. The civil action was
pressed by Ferguson with all his skill as a lawyer and a
popularity-seeking politician; and he won triumphantly in the Supreme
Court--the lower Federal Court with its Power Trust judge had added to
his triumph by deciding against him.
Roebuck was, therefore, under the necessity of going through the
customary forms of outward obedience to the Supreme Court's order to him
to dissolve. He had to get at huge expense, and to carry out at huger, a
plan of reorganization. Though he was glad enough to escape thus
lightly, he dissembled his content and grumbled so loudly that Burbank's
fears were roused and arrangements were made to placate him. The scheme
adopted was, I believe, suggested by Vice-President Howard, as shrewd
and cynical a rascal as ever lived in the mire without getting smutch or
splash upon his fine linen of respectability.
For several years there had been a strong popular demand for a revision
of the tariff. The party had promised to yield, but had put off
redeeming its promise. Now, there arose a necessity for revising the
tariff in the interest of "the interests." Some of the schedules were
too low; others protected articles which the interests wanted as free
raw materials; a few could be abolished without offending any large
interests and with the effect of punishing some small ones that had been
niggard in contributing to the "campaign fund" which maintains the
standing army of political workers and augments it whenever a battle is
on. Accordingly, a revision of the tariff was in progress. To soothe
Roebuck, they gave him a tariff schedule that would enable him to
collect each year more than the total of the extraordinary expenses to
which I had put him. Roebuck "forgave" me; and I really forgave Burbank.
But I washed my hands of his administration. Not only did I actually
stand aloof but also I disassociated myself from it in the public mind.
When the crash should come, as come it must with such men at the helm, I
wished to be in a position successfully to take full charge for the work
of repair.