The Conflict [108]
``No, you don't,'' replied Charlton, tossing away the end of his cigarette. ``And so much the worse for you. Good-night, lady.''
And away he strode into the darkness, leaving her amused, yet with a peculiar sense of her own insignificance.
Charlton was back again early the next morning and spent that day--and a large part of many days there- after--in working at the wreck, Martin Hastings, inspecting known weak spots, searching for unknown ones, patching here and there, trying all the schemes teeming in his ingenious and supremely sensible mind in the hope of setting the wreck afloat again. He could not comprehend why the old man remained alive. He had seen many a human being go who was in health, in comparison with this conglomerate of diseases and frailties; yet life there was, and a most tenacious life. He worked and watched, and from day to day put off suggesting that they telegraph for the son. The coming of his son might shake Martin's conviction that he would get well; it seemed to Charlton that that conviction was the one thread holding his patient from the abyss where darkness and silence reign supreme.
Jane could not leave the grounds. If she had she would have seen Victor Dorn either not at all or at a distance. For the campaign was now approaching its climax.
The public man is always two wholly different personalities. There is the man the public sees--and fancies it knows. There is the man known only to his intimates, known imperfectly to them, perhaps an unknown quantity even to himself until the necessity for decisive action reveals him to himself and to those in a position to see what he really did. Unfortunately, it is not the man the public sees but the hidden man who is elected to the office. Nothing could be falser than the old saw that sooner or later a man stands revealed. Sometimes, as we well know, history has not found out a man after a thousand years of studying him. And the most familiar, the most constantly observed men in public life often round out a long career without ever having aroused in the public more than a faint and formless suspicion as to the truth about them.
The chief reason for this is that, in studying a character, no one is content with the plain and easy way of reaching an understanding of it--the way of looking only at its ACTS. We all love to dabble in the metaphysical, to examine and weigh motives and intentions, to compare ourselves and make wildly erroneous judgment inevitable by listening to the man's WORDS--his professions, always more or less dishonest, though perhaps not always deliberately so.
In that Remsen City campaign the one party that could profit by the full and clear truth, and therefore was eager for the truth as to everything and everybody, was the Workingmen's League. The Kelly crowd, the House gang, the Citizens' Alliance, all had their ugly secrets, their secret intentions different from their public professions. All these were seeking office and power with a view to increasing or perpetuating or protecting various abuses, however ardently they might attack, might perhaps honestly intend to end, certain other and much smaller abuses. The Workingmen's League said that it would end every abuse existing law did not securely protect, and it meant what it said.
Its campaign fund was the dues paid in by its members and the profits from the New Day. Its financial books were open for free inspection. Not so the others--and that in itself was proof enough of sinister intentions.
Under Victor Dorn's shrewd direction, the League candidates published, each man in a sworn statement, a complete description of all the property owned by himself and by his wife. ``The character of a man's property,'' said the New Day, ``is an indication of how that man will act in public affairs. Therefore, every candidate for public trust owes it to the people to tell them just what his property interests are. The League candidates do this--and an effective answer the schedules make to the charge that the League's candidates are men who