he, the most cautiously Caledonian of career-builders, estimated his
reputation at less than it was. But he had the true man of the people’s
instinct for the feeling of the people. His crusading spirit was not
either academic or fanatic. It was the sensible indignation of the
man who discovers that a certain evil has gone far enough and must be
put down. He felt that, if he could manage his career sensibly, he
could make it all he wished. The pressing problem was how to increase
this reputation into fame of the kind useful to his purposes as a
public man, and how to transform that increased reputation into a
cleanly-acquired independence.
“And it seems to me, Bill,” said he, “that the best available plan is
a lecture tour--through the towns, villages, crossroads hamlets of the
whole State.”
“Talking politics? Nobody’ll listen to politics except round election
time. That’s why robbing the people’s the easiest and the favorite way
to make money.”
“Everything’s politics,” said Helm. “Religion’s politics, and
education’s politics, and farming and mining and factories and doctors
and storekeeping--everything! What’s politics but settling how the
proceeds of everybody’s labor are to be distributed--whether the
man who works is to get what he works for or somebody else is to get
it? And that question means everything that affects any human being,
morally, mentally, physically. I’m going to talk politics, but they’ll
not know it.”
“Where do _I_ come in?”
“You’re to be my manager--arrange the dates and so on. It’s got to be
arranged while I’m busy in the Legislature, in January and February.
I’ll do what I can there to make myself talked about. You’ll correspond
with culture clubs and literary circles and churches that want debts
raised and public schools and trade schools with lecture courses.”
Desbrough looked willing but helpless. “Is there much chance to lecture
in this State?” said he. “I thought that sort of thing had died out.”
“If it had, we’d raise it from the dead,” said Helm. “But it hasn’t.”
He took from the drawer of his table a bundle of papers. He waved them
triumphantly at his friend, saying:
“Here it is, Bill--all down in black and white. A hundred and
eighty-six chances to lecture--if it’s worked right.”
Desbrough, the lazy man, groaned. “Why didn’t you pick out somebody
else, damn you!” he cried.
“You offered,” said Helm.
“You hypnotized me,” retorted Desbrough. “Lord, what a pile of work!”
“Yes,” said Helm. “You’ll have to begin right away. I calculate to
make twenty-five hundred dollars by the first of June. I want to build
this thing up in a couple of years into a steady income of five to ten
thousand--an income nobody can touch so long as people’ll come out to
hear me.” The handsome blue-gray eyes looked anxiously from the homely
face. “Bill, am I deceiving myself? Do you think they’ll _pay_ to hear
_me_?”
“You can’t expect ’em to pay much--at first.”
“I was thinking it’d be about right to ask ten dollars for the little
places, and fifteen to thirty for the bigger ones.”
“I’ll have to feel that out,” said Bill. “Leave something for the
manager to do.”
“Put the prices low, Bill,” said George. “It’s safer. Also, we want
to reach _all_ the people. And I’m going to write some lectures
that’ll educate ’em in what’s going on under their noses. About these
lectures--they’re to be a mixture of humorous and serious. I’ve got a
lot of good stories I can work in. The first lecture’s pretty nearly
ready.”
“What’s it about?”
“The American Home--as it was--as it is--as it should be.”
“Wit, wisdom and weeps?”
Helm nodded.
“That sounds good. I begin to feel that there’s something in it....
Look here, Helm--that tour’s going to be a frightful strain on your
health.”
George looked down at his long lean figure in the baggy blue suit.
“There isn’t anything about me to get sick, Bill,” said he. “Back where
I come from they dry ’em out like an oak board before they send ’em
away from home. All the germs get when they tackle us folks is broken
teeth.”
* * * * *
Why does the world insist on believing that luck is the deciding
factor in human affairs? Why is the successful man forced to pretend
that he is “fortune’s favorite,” under penalty of being despised as a
plodding or scheming fellow, if he does not? Because most men either
cannot or will not plan. They “trust to luck”--and lose, except in
romances and equally fictitious biographies. Without exception, all
success is the result of plan. If a man has success thrust into his
hands, it is immediately snatched away unless he plans wisely to keep
it. If a successful man is wholly or partly ruined by chance, his
habit of successful planning soon restores all that has been lost.
Luck is an element for which every wise man makes allowance in his
planning--for the good luck that will enable him to shorten his journey
along the road he would have traveled in any event, for the bad luck
that may lengthen the journey. Good and bad luck affect rate, not
direction--among the men who attain to and persist in the triumphant
class, from the successful grocer to the successful poet or composer.
That winter luck favored George Helm. He did not have to break with the
machine.
Senator Sayler, the representative of the plutocracy, quarreled with
some of his largest clients--his bosses, they fancied themselves, until
he, as astute as he was bold and cynical, showed them that he had made
himself indispensable to them. He, the rich man as well as the expert
and most intelligent politician; they, merely rich men, crudely buying
of politicians the coveted robbers’ licenses. The quarrel grew out of
the idiotic greediness of his clients. They wished to rob to the point
where the goose begins to squawk--and forthwith changes from goose
into a creature of a wholly different kind, fighting with ferocity for
life. Sayler proceeded to teach them a lesson. He, ostensibly head of
the Republican machine and hostile to everything connected with the
Democratic party, ordered his faithful ally-lieutenant, the Democratic
State boss, Hazelrigg, to make a vigorous unsparing campaign against
the plutocracy.
“Give ’em hell,” said Sayler. “Don’t turn loose a lot of long-eared
cranks. They frighten sensible people and make the plutocracy stronger.
Dig up some earnest, conscientious young fellows--if there are any such
that haven’t been brought up for these stupid brutes we’re going to
teach a lesson.”
Hazelrigg had heard of Helm. Pat Branagan had given Helm a letter to
him, but Helm had not presented it and had been keeping out of sight
until he should have spied out the new land of the State capital. He
sent for Helm to look him over. Hazelrigg was a college man who had
made up his mind to be rich. Discovering, after a few years of effort
by honest ways, that if he succeeded at all it would be when he was too
old to enjoy, he had taken the short cut--with notable success. Being
the minority boss, he could maintain a pose of virtue that deceived all
but shrewd eyes. He understood Helm in the main at a glance--asked him
to speak against a rotten bill then pending. Helm spoke.
Hazelrigg listened with mingled feelings of joy and fear. “We must keep
him poor,” he said to himself. “Then he can’t make trouble for us.”
Before the first month was over, Hazelrigg had made George Helm the
chief spokesman of the party in its campaign against the rapacities
of the plutocracy. The old wheel-horse orators, familiar and more or
less discredited slobberers of virtuous sentiments from mouths raw
and ragged with corruption, were angered and made futile attempts
to “haze” the new favorite. Hazelrigg soon quelled that mutiny. Of
all the understrappers at the beck and call of a machine boss, the
orators--they upon whose lips the people hang spellbound--are the
lowest, the most despised by their fellow slaves and the most brutally
worked and the most meagerly paid.
As Sayler had taken the muzzle from the press of the State to make his
“object lesson” thoroughly effective, in a few weeks George Helm became
famous--newspaper famous--the beanstalk variety of fame, showy but
perishable. Bill Desbrough came up to see him.
“The lecture scheme’s off--isn’t it?” said he.
“By no means,” replied Helm. “I’ll let you into my secret, Bill. You’re
close-mouthed--closer mouthed than I am.”
“I doubt it,” said Desbrough.
“Yes, for _I’m_ telling you my secret--and _you’ll_ not tell anybody.
Here’s the secret! By those lecture tours I’m going to build up in
every part of this State a machine of my own--groups of people I can
trust and who feel they can trust me. There’s some skullduggery back of
this spasm of party virtue. It won’t last. We must hurry and make all
we can out of it.”
Most men cannot see the obvious, even when it is pointed out to them.
The occasional rare man--the man of genius of one kind or another--is
he who sees the obvious without assistance. In between these two
classes lies a third class, not small like that of genius--yet not huge
like the other. To this third class--those able to see the obvious if
and when it is pointed out to them--belonged William Desbrough. He
reflected on what George Helm had said; and up went his admiration a
considerable number of notches. Said he:
“George, what a run you’ll give ’em!”
Helm clapped him on the shoulder with his loud, joyous, boyish laugh.
“Put all your money on that, Bill!” cried he.
Helm’s successes wrought in him the usual swift change. The temperament
of success, the ability to throw one’s whole concentrated self into an
enterprise, involves a highly organized nervous system--hence, extreme
sensitiveness, torments from anxiety and from self-doubt. Only an iron
constitution could have borne the fatigues of that first campaign of
his--the now famous “buggy” campaign--with its nerve strain of the
man fighting again desperate odds to save himself from ruin under
avalanches of ridicule. And when he finally “made good” in his home
district, the question at once arose, “But can I make good at the
capital?” This question was in the way to be answered with an emphatic
yes.
The respect with which he was treated by other men--men of consequence!
The serious attention the papers gave his utterances! The huge piles
of letters praising his courage, his logic, his freedom from crude
abuse, his clearness of statement--letters from all parts of the State,
from all parts of the Union! Those letters made his heart burn with
new energy and high hope. He had indeed guessed right. The people--his
people--the long-suffering masses were certainly on the alert for a
leader. Yes, he was in the way to accomplish something of what he had
resolved when he left the farm, because he was intelligent enough to
discover that the big monopolies headed by the railway trusts had
reduced the nominally independent farmer to the slavery of the poorly
paid wage-earner of the cities and towns. He was in the way to be of
use in the gigantic task of restoring democracy and opportunity to the
republic.
This man, planted upon this rock-founded confidence, could not but show
in his exterior the external change. But where the small fellow reveals
his fleeting or trivial success in an access of swagger, the large,
simple nature reveals it in the deeper absorption in the career, the
lessened consciousness of self. And as George Helm’s self-consciousness
had been the sole cause of his awkwardness and the chief cause of his
extreme plainness, the change was most striking. He was no longer
awkward. His long, spare figure revealed--as it always had on the
platform after the first embarrassed moment--the innate grace that is
in every natural, self-conscious creature. As for the homeliness--how
can a strong face be homely when in place of the unattractive
expression of shy greenness there come the dignity and beauty of a
large intelligence fittingly occupied? “There goes a man who amounts to
something,” they now said about Helm. And when you hear that said of a
man, you may be sure he will not turn to you a homely face.
Senator Sayler had come on from Washington and had taken a house in
the suburbs for the session because of the importance of the curious
program he was putting through. He went to hear Helm speak against one
of the grab bills his refractory clients were insisting upon. Sayler,
as you knew, was a cynic; and when you find cynicism in a man, you
may be sure you are at the cover for a lively and annoying secret
self-contempt. He listened with his most cynical smile to the simple,
sensible eloquence of the young farmer-looking lawyer. But, as he
listened, he was saying to himself, “We must attack this fellow, but
it will not be easy.” Afterward he had Hazelrigg bring Helm to the
Lieutenant Governor’s private room and talked with him for an hour. He
would have talked much longer, had there not been a gentle knock at the
door.
He disregarded it. The door opened and in came his wife--and Eleanor
Clearwater. Mrs. Sayler--the trained wife of the public man--smiled
engagingly at Helm and said to her husband:
“We simply can’t wait any longer, Harvey. We were wondering how you
dared keep us waiting. But if we had known whom you had with you----”
She put out her hand to Helm. “That was a splendid speech, Mr. Helm. I
don’t know you, but it made me feel as if I did. I detest politics but
not the kind _you_ talk.”
Helm lapsed toward, but not into, his former awkwardness. He might have
done better had not Eleanor been standing there, not all dignity and
ice, but all merry smiles and impatience to speak.
“How do you do, Mr. Helm?” said she, as soon as Mrs. Sayler finished.
“Father and I came to stop with Mrs. Sayler only this morning--and here
you are. Really, it’s--it’s--what shall I call it--our always running
across each other?”
Helm had no woman-talk. He stood--not too awkwardly--and silently gazed
at the lovely and radiant young lady so unaccountably transformed
from her former cold reserve. And, as the astute Sayler did not
fail to note, he looked at her hungrily. Even Carlotta Sayler, the
self-absorbed, saw in Helm’s tell-tale face that there was “something
or other between those two--though how could it possibly be!”
“I was about to ask Mr. Helm to dine with us to-morrow night,” said
Sayler.
“Yes, do,” cried Carlotta, who never missed a cue. “It’s to be early
and most informal--no evening clothes or such nonsense. Won’t it be
delightful, Eleanor? Your father will be so pleased to meet one of
_our_ coming men.”
Poor Helm was framing a refusal when he caught in Eleanor’s eyes a look
of appeal--a pleading request that he accept. Nor had he the excuse
that Sayler was of the enemy. Sayler had shown him that he harbored no
such petty notions of obligation as possess the average man who fancies
that his foe ought to become his friend if he does him the honor of
giving him a free cigar, or a free dinner, or a free drink. Also, he
wished to talk with Sayler again. Sayler, expert at the political game,
had in their hour’s talk taught him more than he had learned of all
the other men with whom he had discussed politics. And Sayler was--for
some mysterious reason--eager to give him the ammunition of facts about
the doings of the plutocracy which he most needed.
“Thank you, ma’am, I’ll be glad to come,” said Helm. He added, “I’ve
heard you’re very dressy out at your place. You’re _sure_ you won’t
mind my clothes? I haven’t any dress suits.”
“A _man_ can go where he pleases in what he pleases,” said Sayler. “But
there’s no truth in that report about us. The women at our place are
dressy, of course. They always are everywhere. If they’re not that,
they think they’re not anything--and perhaps they’re right. But it’s
go-as-you-please with the men.”
Sayler discovered that he wished to look at the west wing of the
capitol, walked with his wife, thus forcing Helm to walk with
Eleanor--and to walk ahead where he could observe. There was plenty to
see.
A serious young woman is never in any circumstances so interesting to a
man as a light and gay, pretty woman, whatever men may pretend. It is
inborn in the male to regard the female as the representative of the
lighter side of life; and _so long as he is not married to her_, light
she should be if she would please him--light and full of coquetry of
the kind he happens to regard as “womanly.” George Helm had cherished
deep in his heart a peculiar feeling for Eleanor Clearwater since
that first long talk he had with her, the only woman he had met who
possessed worldly knowledge and beauty, refined and glorified by the
highest civilized arts of manner and dress. Not love--not possibility
of love, though he fancied it was love! Rather, a feeling that here at
last was a representative of the best in womankind--and George Helm,
like all the ambitious, was born with the passion for the best of
everything.
But this Eleanor was no longer the empedestaled goddess, the passive
recipient of the homage due her beauty and her taste and her station.
She had come to life; she had descended from her pedestal; she had
placed herself--no, not within reach of men, but most tantalizingly
less out of reach. And she spent that half hour or so in deliberately
trying to captivate him, in putting him at ease, in making him feel
that she was almost if not quite within reach. She did not herself
realize--but Harvey Sayler did--how far she was going. But neither did
she realize how much she had been affected by the fact that each time
she saw this man he had made a stride forward as with seven league
boots away from the crudeness of the bucolic and toward his certain
goal of power with vast masses of men. If she had not heard the speech
before she saw him, if she had not found her own opinion confirmed by
Sayler’s manner toward him, she probably would not have gone so far.
Not because she was calculating, you reader ever ready to discover
your own deepest failings, however slightly manifested in another;
but because she was human--delightfully human, since George Helm had
dropped her abruptly down from the perch to which she had been raised
by lifelong flatteries and extravagant compliment.
However, it was not until after dinner the following night that she
really “laid siege.” She was alone with poor Helm in the library--how
cleverly the sly Sayler had maneuvered that!
You have seen a large fish moving in ease and grace through the water?
You have seen that same fish flopping and floundering and flapping
about on land to which the angler has drawn it? That visualizes George
Helm, at home among men, among politicians, or making a speech, and
George Helm in a drawing-room among a lot of women in dresses cut as
he had seen them cut only in illustrations. And the most ludicrous
part of it all was that he fancied himself perfectly at ease. Eleanor
Clearwater had hypnotized him into imagining his flounderings were like
his motions in his native element.
Said she at length--any woman and almost any man can supply the
preliminary or leading-up conversation:
“What a fascinating career you will have! Oh, I know you haven’t told
me about it. You simply won’t talk about yourself, and have made me
tell you everything about myself from bibs up. But I can guess your
career.”
“We had only got you as far as short dresses,” said he. “When you left
that boarding school----”
“Nothing since,” interrupted she. “I’ve simply been sitting round
waiting for a husband. What else is there for a woman? Still, I never
wish I’d been a man.”
“Why not?” asked George. He was twisted into one of his strange
poses--legs wound round each other, body bent forward, supported by
his elbows. He had never been so blissfully, airily happy as watching
this beautiful girl, with the most wonderful light he had ever beheld
reflecting from her fair shoulders.
She looked at him with eyes suddenly grave. “Because as a woman I
have the chance to be some day loved by a man. As a man”--her eyes
danced--“I’d have had nothing to look forward to but just a woman.”
“What kind of a man do you want?” asked he--and his honest, rugged face
showed in its frank innocence how impersonal the question was.
“A man like you,” said she audaciously, her face merry.
He laughed loudly--a contagious outburst of joyous good humor that made
the luxurious, conventional room seem a poor sort of place. Such a
laugh is a very different matter from one that seems a poor, noisy sort
of clamor in a room.
“You have courage--strength. You don’t pose.” All this she said with
the lightness that made it in good taste--and none the less sincere.
“You are on the side all these other men have deserted as soon as they
became prosperous.”
“Perhaps I shall, too,” said he.
“I suppose it must be the wrong side, or surely all of them wouldn’t
have left it. But--somehow, I think you won’t.”
“I can’t,” said he. And _he_--his real self--began to look from his
eyes--and to look at her.
In spite of herself, she became serious. “No--you can’t,” assented she,
absently. “You’ve changed--every time I’ve seen you. But not in that
one respect. Whenever I look at you, I still see--as I did that first
time--farms and factories--and thousands of men and women at work----”
“And children,” he interrupted, a strange, somehow ferocious note in
his quiet voice.
“I don’t forget them,” said she. “I try to, but I don’t.... No, you’ll
not change sides. And you’ll marry some woman on that side, and
she’ll----”
“I’ll marry the woman I want--when I can afford to marry,” said he.
“Women aren’t on one side or the other. This is a man’s fight. A
woman--she goes with the man who takes her.”
She smiled with some raillery. “Be careful to select the woman of that
sort,” said she, “or you may have to change your mind--suddenly and
rather disagreeably--about women.”
He made a large gesture of indifference.
“You don’t care about women?” she asked.
A look of melancholy came into his face. He said with a quaint smile,
“They began it. They don’t care about me.”
“Why not?”
“What a foolish question!”
“You’re mistaken,” said she. “Any woman would _like_ you, and if a
woman fell in love with you she’d be crazy about you.”
He laughed boyishly as at a huge joke.
“You’re a peculiar sort of man--a sort not many women would
appreciate. If you find one who does, you’ll see that I was right.
She’ll be a peculiar sort of woman and she’ll belong to you.”
There was pathos in his expression of gratitude. She saw it, understood
it--and the tears welled into her eyes. What a lonely, fascinating
figure of a man--so different from all other men--so modest about
himself--and with such incredibly luminous eyes, tender yet strong.
She was looking directly at him. The changing expression of his eyes
terrified her--fascinated her. He stood up, and his gesture compelled
her to stand also--and to look at him. He stretched out his powerful
arm. She tried to draw back; she could not.
“I believe,” said he in an awed, hushed voice, his eyes looking at her
wonderingly, “I believe _you_ are the woman.”
He had misunderstood, she said to herself. Then-- “No,” she thought,
“I’ve been leading him on. What a foolish, bad thing to do! And he
thinks I was in earnest--when nothing could induce me----”
He interrupted her thoughts with, “Yes--you _are_ the woman!”
He had her shoulders in his grasp now and was looking down at her with
an expression of sheer amazement, mingled with a tenderness that sent a
thrill and a hot wave of--yes, of delight--through her. This man-- She,
Eleanor Clearwater, tolerate the touch of this man and--_delight_ in it!
“That is absurd!” she cried hysterically. She looked at him with
pleading eyes. “Let me go--please.”
He lifted his hands from her shoulders. Then--how it happened she never
could understand--she, trying to draw back, was drawn forward--into
his arms--had been kissed by him--was in a whirl of joy, of terror,
of wonder, of disbelief in the reality of what was happening. She,
who prided herself on never having allowed any man to be in the least
familiar with her--she in the arms of this bucolic person whom she
hardly knew. It was impossible--it was insane.
“Please let me go,” she said feebly. “I don’t know what’s the matter
with me!”
He was holding her at arm’s length again--this powerful man, with
the compelling eyes-- If only he would not look at her so, she might
recover herself. He was saying in the sweetest, tenderest voice she had
ever heard:
“_You_--for _me_! It simply can’t be, Miss Clearwater.”
“Some woman will care for you--as I told you,” she said in a breathless
way. “But not I. You told me once you wouldn’t have me.”
“But I didn’t know you then,” replied he. “Now--I’ve _got_ to have you!”
She gave a cry of dismay. “Oh--don’t say that--please!” she pleaded.
“I’m sure you don’t want me.”