I laid my hand on his arm. "Doc, why do you do—that sort of thing?"
The scar came up into his face to put agony into the reckless despair that looked from his eyes. For an instant I stood on the threshold of his Chamber of Remorse and Vain Regret,—and well I knew where I was. "Why not?" he asked bitterly. "There's always a—sort of horror—inside me. And it grows until I can't bear it. And then—I drown it—why shouldn't I?"
"That's very stupid for a man of your brains," said I. "There's nothing—nothing in the world, except death—that can not be wiped out or set right. Play the game, Doc. Play it with me for five years. Play it for all there is in it. Then—go back, if you want to."
He thought a long time, and I did not try to hurry him. At length he said, in his old off-hand manner: "Well, I'll go you, Senator; I'll not touch a drop."
And he didn't. Whenever I thought I saw signs of the savage internal battle against the weakness, I gave him something important and absorbing to do, and I kept him busy until I knew the temptation had lost its power for the time.
This is the proper place to put it on the record that he was the most scrupulously honest man I have ever known. He dealt with the shadiest and least scrupulous of men—those who train their consciences to be the eager servants of their appetites; he handled hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions, first and last, all of it money for which he could never have been forced to account. He has had at one time as much as half a million dollars in checks payable to bearer. I am not confiding by nature or training, but I am confident that he kept not a penny for himself beyond his salary and his fixed commission. I put his salary at the outset, at ten thousand a year; afterward, at fifteen; finally, at twenty. His commissions, perhaps, doubled it.
There are many kinds of honesty nowadays. There is "corporate honesty," not unlike that proverbial "honor among thieves," which secures a fair or fairly fair division of the spoils. Then there is "personal honesty," which subdivides into three kinds—legal, moral, and instinctive. Legal honesty needs no definition. Moral honesty defies definition—how untangle its intertwinings of motives of fear, pride, insufficient temptation, sacrifice of the smaller chance in the hope of a larger? Finally, there is instinctive honesty—the rarest, the only bed-rock, unassailable kind. Give me the man who is honest simply because it never occurs to him, and never could occur to him, to be anything else. That is Woodruff.
There is, to be sure, another kind of instinctively honest man—he who disregards loyalty as well as self-interest in his uprightness. But there are so few of these in practical life that they may be disregarded.
Perhaps I should say something here as to the finances of my combine, though it was managed in the main precisely like all these political-commercial machines that control both parties in all the states, except a few in the South.
My assessments upon the various members of my combine were sent, for several years, to me, afterward to Woodruff directly, in one thousand, five thousand, and ten thousand dollar checks, sometimes by mail, and at other times by express or messenger.