When I went to him a month after her death, I expected he would still be crushed as he was at the funeral. I listened with a feeling of revulsion to his stilted and, as it seemed to me, perfunctory platitudes on his "irreparable loss"—stale rhetoric about her, and to her most intimate friend and his! I had thought he would be imagining himself done with ambition for ever; I had feared his strongly religious nature would lead him to see a "judgment" upon him and her for having exaggerated her indisposition to gain a political point. And I had mapped out what I would say to induce him to go on. Instead, after a few of those stereotyped mortuary sentences, he shifted to politics and was presently showing me that her death had hardly interrupted his plannings for the presidential nomination. As for the "judgment," I had forgotten that in his religion his deity was always on his side, and his misfortunes were always of the evil one. These deities of men of action! Man with his god a ventriloquist puppet in his pocket, and with his conscience an old dog Tray at his heels, needing no leading string!
However, it gave me a shock, this vivid reminder from Burbank of the slavery of ambition—ambition, the vice of vices. For it takes its victims' all—moral, mental, physical. And, while other vices rarely wreck any but small men or injure more than what is within their small circles of influence, ambition seizes only the superior and sets them on to use their superior powers to blast communities, states, nations, continents. Yet it is called a virtue. And men who have sold themselves to it and for it to the last shred of manhood are esteemed and, mystery of mysteries, esteem themselves!
I had come to Burbank to manufacture him into a President. His wife and I had together produced an excellent raw material. Now, to make it up into the finished product!
He pointed to the filing-cases that covered the west wall of his library from floor to ceiling, from north window to south. "I base my hope on those—next to you, of course," said he. Then with his "woeful widower" pose, he added: "They were her suggestions."
I looked at the filing-cases and waited for him to explain.
"When we were first married," he went on presently, "she said, 'It seems to me, if I were a public man, I should keep everything relating to myself—every speech, all that the newspapers said, every meeting and the lists of the important people who were there, notes of all the people I ever met anywhere, every letter or telegram or note I received. If you do, you may find after a few years that you have an enormous list of acquaintances. You've forgotten them because you meet so many, but they will not have forgotten you, who were one of the principal figures at the meeting or reception.' That's in substance what she said. And so, we began and kept it up"—he paused in his deliberate manner, compressed his lips, then added—"together."
I opened one of the filing-cases, glanced at him for permission, took out a slip of paper under the M's. It was covered with notes, in Mrs. Burbank's writing, of a reception given to him at the Manufacturers' Club in St. Louis three years before. A lot of names, after each some reminders of the standing and the personal appearance of the man. Another slip, taken at random from the same box, contained similar notes of a trip through Montana eight years before.
"Wonderful!" I exclaimed, as the full value of these accumulations loomed in my mind. "I knew she was an extraordinary woman. Now I see that she had genius for politics."
His expression—a peering through that eternal pose of his—made me revise my first judgment of his mourning. For I caught a glimpse of a real human being, one who had loved and lost, looking grief and pride and gratitude. "If she had left me two or three years earlier," he said in that solemn, posing tone, "I doubt if I should have got one step further. As it is, I may be able to go on, though—I have lost—my staff."
What fantastic envelopes does man, after he has been finished by Nature, wrap about himself in his efforts to improve her handiwork! Physically, even when most dressed, we are naked in comparison with the enswathings that hide our real mental and moral selves from one another—and from ourselves.