The Plum Tree | Page 8

dark on our little front porch. She was silent, and presently I thought I

heard her suppressing a sigh. "You don't like it, mother?" said I.
"No, Harvey, but--I see no light ahead in any other direction, and I
guess one should always steer toward what light there is." She stood
behind my chair, put her hands on my shoulders, and rested her chin
lightly on the top of my head. "Besides, I can trust you. Whatever
direction you take, you're sure to win in the end."
I was glad it was dark. An hour after I went to bed I heard some one
stirring in the house,--it seemed to me there was a voice, too. I rose and
went into the hall, and so, softly to my mother's room. Her door was
ajar. She was near the window, kneeling there in the moonlight,
praying--for me.
* * * * *
I had not been long in the legislature before I saw that my position was
even more contemptible than I anticipated. So contemptible, indeed,
was it that, had I not been away from home and among those as basely
situated as myself, it would have been intolerable,--a convict infinitely
prefers the penitentiary to the chain gang. Then, too, there was
consolation in the fact that the people, my fellow citizens, in their
stupidity and ignorance about political conditions, did not realize what
public office had come to mean. At home they believed what the
machine-controlled newspapers said of me--that I was a "manly,
independent young man," that I was "making a vigorous stand for what
was honest in public affairs," that I was the "honorable and
distinguished son of an honorable and distinguished father." How often
I read those and similar eulogies of young men just starting in public
life! And is it not really amazing that the people believe, that they never
say to themselves: "But, if he were actually what he so loudly professes
to be, how could he have got public office from a boss and a machine?"
I soon gave up trying to fool myself into imagining I was the servant of
the people by introducing or speaking for petty little popular measures.
I saw clearly that graft was the backbone, the whole skeleton of
legislative business, and that its fleshly cover of pretended public
service could be seen only by the blind. I saw, also, that no one in the

machine of either party had any real power. The state boss of our party,
United States Senator Dunkirk, was a creature and servant of
corporations. Silliman, the state boss of the opposition party, was the
same, but got less for his services because his party was hopelessly in
the minority and its machine could be useful only as a sort of
supplement and scapegoat.
With the men at the top, Dunkirk and Silliman, mere lackeys, I saw my
own future plainly enough. I saw myself crawling on year after
year,--crawling one of two roads. Either I should become a political
scullion, a wretched party hack, despising myself and despised by those
who used me, or I should develop into a lackey's lackey or a plain
lackey, lieutenant of a boss or a boss, so-called--a derisive name, really,
when the only kind of boss-ship open was head political procurer to
one or more rich corporations or groups of corporations. I felt I should
probably become a scullion, as I thought I had no taste or instinct for
business, and as I was developing some talent for "mixing," and for
dispensing "hot air" from the stump.
I turned these things over and over in my mind with an energy that
sprang from shame, from the knowledge of what my mother would
think if she knew the truth about her son, and from a realization that I
was no nearer marrying Betty Crosby than before. At last I wrought
myself into a sullen fury beneath a calm surface. The lessons in
self-restraint and self-hiding I learned in that first of my two years as
assemblyman have been invaluable.
When I entered upon my second and last winter, I was outwardly as
serene as--as a volcano on the verge of eruption.

III
SAYLER "DRAWS THE LINE"
In February the railways traversing our state sent to the capitol a bill
that had been drawn by our ablest lawyers and reviewed by the craftiest

of the great corporation lawyers of New York City. Its purpose, most
shrewdly and slyly concealed, was to exempt the railways from
practically all taxation. It was so subtly worded that this would be
disclosed only when the companies should be brought to court for
refusing to pay their usual share of the taxes. Such measures are usually
"straddled" through a legislature,--that is, neither party takes the
responsibility,