Part 5

It had spread from man to man throughout the State that there had arisen in Harrison a strange, plain youth of great sincerity as a man and of great power as a speaker. The Jews of ancient days are not the only people who have dreamed of a Messiah. The Messiah-dream, the Messiah-longing has been the dream and the longing of the whole human race, toiling away in obscurity, oppressed, exploited, fooled, despised. Hence, news of leaders springing up spreads fast and far among the people. The news about Helm was hardly more than a rumor. A hundred miles from Harrison, and they had his name wrong. A little further, and they hadn’t yet heard his name. But far and wide there was the rumor of a light in the direction of Harrison. Would it be a little star or a big? a fixed star or a mere comet?--would it prove to be nothing but a meteorite, flashing and fading out? Would it be a sun? These questions not definite, but simply the vague, faint suggestion of question.

The people!--how little we understand them--how much and how often we misunderstand them. The people, so ignorant, yet so quaintly wise--as they toil in the obscurity, building patiently, working and hoping--and waiting always for leaders. Deceived a thousand times, they wait on and hope on--since leaders they must have, and since leaders will surely come.

Helm did not exaggerate the public interest in himself. If anything 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.”