Helm had become acutely self-conscious and so awkward that a chair which was apparently not near his path became involved with his big feet and fell on its side with a crash. As Helm straightened from picking it up, he was extraordinarily red for the amount of exertion. Said he:
“Leave the women out of it. I’m not a marrying man.”
Desbrough laughed mockingly. “You’ll find out you’re mistaken—as soon as you’ve got money enough to make it worth a needy woman’s while to take after you. I thought I wasn’t a marrying man. Three months and four days after my uncle died and left me that money I was waiting at the altar.”
“I’m not a marrying man,” repeated Helm awkwardly.
“In some ways Miss Clearwater would be just the girl for you. She’d take an interest in your career. She has ideals—and they’re about as far removed from her father’s as a church from a speak-easy. I think she’s got money of her own. Yes, I’m sure she has. Her mother left her what the old man had settled on her.”
“If I did marry,” said Helm, abruptly self-possessed, “it’d be a woman that suited me—one I felt at home with. I want no grand rich ladies, Bill. Anyhow, I’ve thought of another way—one that’s practical.”
And he seated himself and proceeded to unfold the scheme upon which he had been seriously at work ever since the election. It was a simple scheme, wisely devoid of untried originality, but effective. His two campaigns, despite the silence of the plutocracy-controlled press, had got him a considerable reputation throughout the State. The press is not so necessary to the spread of intelligence as is latterly imagined. Long before there was a press, long before there was any written means of communication, news and knowledge of all kinds spread rapidly throughout the world, pausing only at the great desert stretches between peoples—and not often halted there for long. The old ways of communication have not been closed up. To this day the real and great reputations of the world are not press-made or press-sustained or even materially press-assisted. They are the work of mouth-to-mouth communication. And those reputations, by the way, are they against which the calumny and the innuendo of the press strive in vain.
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.