"Thank you—very courteous of you and of him," said I without hesitation, for I knew what was coming as soon as his name had been brought in, and my course was laid out. "But I can't leave just now. Please ask him if he won't come over—any time within the next four hours." This blandly and without a sign that I was conscious of Dufour's stupefaction—for his vanity made him believe that the god the great Dufour knelt to must be the god of gods.
There is no more important branch of the art of successful dealing with men than the etiquette of who shall call upon whom. Many a man has in his very hour of triumph ruined his cause with a blunder there—by going to see some one whom he should have compelled to come to him, or by compelling some one to come to him when he should have made the concession of going. I had two reasons for thus humiliating Goodrich, neither of them the reason he doubtless attributed to me, the desire to feed my vanity. My first reason was his temperament; I knew his having to come to me would make him bow before me in spirit, as he was a tyrant, and tyrants are always cringers. My second reason was that I thought myself near enough to control of the convention to be able to win control by creating the atmosphere of impending success. There is always a lot of fellows who wait to see who is likely to win, so that they may be on the side of the man in the plum tree; often there are enough of these to gain the victory for him who can lure them over at just the right moment.
As soon as Dufour had taken his huge body away I said to Woodruff: "Go out with your men and gather in the office down stairs as many members of the doubtful delegations as you can. Keep them where they'll be bound to see Goodrich come in and go out."
He rushed away, and I waited—working with the leaders of three far-western states. At the end of two hours, I won them by the spectacle of the arriving Goodrich. He came in, serene, smiling, giving me the joyously shining eyes and joyously firm hand-clasp of the politician's greeting; not an outward sign that he would like to see me tortured to death by some slow process then and there. Hypocritical preliminaries were not merely unnecessary but even highly ridiculous; yet, so great was his anger and confusion that he began with the "prospects for an old-time convention, with old-time enthusiasm and that generous rivalry which is the best sign of party health."
"I hope not, Senator," said I pleasantly. "Here, we think the fight is over—and won."
He lifted his eyebrows; but I saw his maxillary muscles twitching. "We don't figure it out just that way at headquarters," he replied oilily. "But, there's no doubt about it, your man has developed strength in the West."
"And South," said I, with deliberate intent to inflame, for I knew how he must feel about those delegates we had bought away from him.
There were teeth enough in his smile—but little else. "I think Burbank and Cromwell will be about even on the first ballot," said he. "May the best man win! We're all working for the good of the party and the country. But—I came, rather, to get your ideas about platform."
I opened a drawer in the table at which I was sitting and took out a paper. "We've embodied our ideas in this," said I, holding the paper toward him. "There's a complete platform, but we only insist on the five paragraphs immediately after the preamble."
He seemed to age as he read. "Impossible!" he finally exclaimed. "Preposterous! It would be difficult enough to get any money for Cromwell on such a platform, well as our conservative men know they can trust him. But for Burbank—you couldn't get a cent—not a damn cent! A rickety candidate on a rickety platform—that's what they'd say."