"Be frank with me, Sayler," he exclaimed at last. "Be frank. Be my
friend, your own old self."
"As frank and as friendly as you have been?" said I, rather to remind
myself than to reproach him. For I was afraid of the reviving feeling of
former years--the liking for his personal charms and virtues, the
forbearance toward that weakness which he could no more change than he
could change the color of his eyes. His moral descent had put no clear
markings upon his pose. On the contrary, he had grown in dignity through
the custom of deference. The people passing us looked admiration at him,
had a new sense of the elevation of the presidential office. Often it
takes the trained and searching eye to detect in the majestic façade the
evidences that the palace has degenerated into a rookery for pariahs.
"I have done what I thought for the best," he answered, never more
direct and manly in manner. "I have always been afraid, been on guard,
lest my personal fondness for you should betray me into yielding to you
when I ought not. Perhaps I have erred at times, have leaned backward in
my anxiety to be fair. But I had and have no fear of your not
understanding. Our friendship is too long established, too
well-founded." And I do not doubt that he believed himself; the capacity
for self-deception is rarely short of the demands upon it.
"It's unfortunate--" I began. I was going to say it was unfortunate that
no such anxieties had ever restrained him from yielding to Goodrich. But
I hadn't the heart. Instead, I finished my sentence with: "However, it's
idle to hold a post-mortem on this case. The cause of death is
unimportant. The fact of it is sufficient. No doubt you did the best you
could, Mr. President."
My manner was that of finality. It forbade further discussion. He
abandoned the finesse of negotiation.
"Harvey, I ask you, as a personal favor, to help me through this
crisis," he said. "I ask you, my friend and my dead wife's friend."
No depth too low, no sentiment too sacred! Anger whirled up in me
against this miserable, short-sighted self-seeker who had brought to a
climax of spoliation my plans to guide the strong in developing the
resources of the country. And I turned upon him, intending to overwhelm
him with the truth about his treachery, about his attempts to destroy
me. For I was now safe from his and Goodrich's vengeance--they had
destroyed themselves with the people and with the party. But a glance at
him and--how could I strike a man stretched in agony upon his deathbed?
"If I could help you, I would," said I.
"You--you and I together can get a convention that will nominate me," he
urged, hope and fear jostling each other to look pleadingly at me from
his eyes.
"Possibly," I said. "But--of what use would that be?"
He sank back in the carriage, yellow-white and with trembling hands and
eyelids. "Then you don't think I could be elected?" he asked in a
broken, breathless way.
For answer I could only shake my head. "No matter who is the nominee," I
went on after a moment, "our party can't win." I half-yielded to the
impulse of sentimentality and turned to him appealingly. "James," said
I, "why don't you--right away--before the country sees you are to be
denied a renomination--publicly announce that you won't take it in any
circumstances? Why don't you devote the rest of your term to regaining
your lost--popularity? Every day has its throngs of opportunities for
the man in the White House. Break boldly and openly with Goodrich and
his crowd."
I saw and read the change in his face. My advice about the nomination
straightway closed his mind against me; at the mention of Goodrich, his
old notion of my jealousy revived. And I saw, too, that contact with and
use of and subservience to corruption had so corrupted him that he no
longer had any faith in any method not corrupt. All in an instant I
realized the full folly of what I was doing. I felt confident that by
pursuing the line I had indicated he could so change the situation in
the next few months that he would make it impossible for them to refuse
to renominate him, might make it possible for him to be elected. But
even if he had the wisdom to listen, where would he get the courage and
the steadfastness to act? I gave him up finally and for ever.
A man may lose his own character and still survive, and even go far. But
if he lose belief in character as a force, he is damned. He could not
survive in a community of scoundrels.
Burbank sat motionless and with closed eyes, for a long time. I watched
the people in the throng of carriages--hundreds of faces all turned
toward him, all showing that mingled admiration, envy and awe which
humanity gives its exalted great. "The President! The President!" I
heard every few yards in excited undertones. And hats were lifting, and
once a crowd of enthusiastic partizans raised a cheer.
"The President!" I thought, with mournful irony. And I glanced at him.
Suddenly he was transformed by an expression the most frightful I have
ever seen. It was the look of a despairing, weak, vicious thing,
cornered, giving battle for its life--like a fox at bay before a pack of
huge dogs. It was not Burbank--no, _he_ was wholly unlike that. It was
Burbank's ambition, interrupted at its meal by the relentless,
sure-aiming hunter, Fate.
"For God's sake, Burbank!" I exclaimed. "All these people are watching
us."
"To hell with them!" he ground out. "I tell you, Sayler, I _will_ be
nominated! And elected too, by God! I will not be thrown aside like an
emptied orange-skin. I will show them that I am President."
Those words, said by some men, in some tones, would have thrilled me.
Said by him and in that tone and with that look, they made me shudder
and shrink. Neither of us spoke again. When he dropped me at my hotel we
touched hands and smiled formally for appearances before the gaping,
peeping, peering crowd. And as he drove away, how they cheered him--the
man risen high above eighty millions, alone on the mountain-peak, in the
glorious sunshine of success. The President!
The next seven months were months of turmoil in the party and in the
country--a turmoil of which I was a silent spectator, conspicuous by my
silence. Burbank, the deepest passions of his nature rampant, had burst
through the meshes of partizanship and the meshes of social and personal
intimacies in which he, as a "good party man" and as the father of
children with social aspirations and as the worshiper of wealth and
respectability, was entangled and bound down; with the desperate courage
that comes from fear of destruction, he was trying to save himself.
But his only available instruments were all either Goodrich men or other
kinds of machine-men; they owed nothing to him, they had nothing to fear
from him--a falling king is a fallen king. Every project he devised for
striking down his traitor friends and making himself popular was subtly
turned by his Cabinet or by the Senate or by the press or by all three
into something futile and ridiculous or contemptible. It was a complete
demonstration of the silliness of the fiction that the President could
be an autocrat if he chose. Even had Burbank seen through the fawnings
and the flatteries of the traitors round him, and dismissed his Cabinet,
whatever men he might have put into it would not have attached
themselves to his lost cause, but would have used their positions to
ingratiate themselves with the power that had used and exhausted and
discarded him.
He had the wisdom, or the timidity, to proceed always with caution and
safe legality and so to avoid impeachment and degradation. His chief
attempts were, naturally, upon monopoly; they were slyly balked by his
sly Attorney General, and their failure was called by the press, and was
believed by the people, the cause of the hard times which were just
beginning to be acute. What made him such an easy victim to his
lieutenants was not their craft, but the fact that he had lost his
sense of right and wrong. A man of affairs may not, indeed will not,
always steer by that compass; but he must have it aboard. Without it he
can not know how far off the course he is, or how to get back to it. No
ship ever reached any port except that of failure and disgrace, unless
it, in spite of all its tackings before the cross-winds of practical
life, kept in the main to the compass and to the course.
His last stagger was--or seemed to be--an attempt to involve us in a war
with Germany. I say "seemed to be" because I hesitate to ascribe a
project as infamous to him, even when unbalanced by despair. The first
ugly despatch he ordered his Goodrich Secretary of State to send,
_somehow_ leaked to the newspapers before it could be put into cipher
for transmission. It was not sent--for from the press of the entire
country rose a clamor against "deliberate provocation of a nation with
which we are, and wish to remain, at peace." He repudiated the despatch
and dismissed the Secretary of State in disgrace to disgrace--the one
stroke in his fight against Goodrich in which he got the advantage. But
that advantage was too small, too doubtful and too late.
His name was not presented to the convention.