The Plum Tree

by David Graham Phillips

"Oh, I never loved that way," protested Mrs. Sandys.

"Then," said my wife, rather sourly I thought, "you and Mr. Sandys have something to live for."

And so we talked no more politics. There may be American women who really like to talk politics, but I never happened to know one with so little sense. It's a pity we men do not imitate our women more closely in one respect. In season and out of season, they never talk anything but business—woman's one business. When other things are being discussed, they listen, or rather, pretend to listen; in reality, their minds are still on their business, and how they shall contrive to bring it back into the conversation with advantage to themselves.

Next day the convention adopted a wishy-washy platform much like Burbank's—if anything, weaker. I saw Goodrich's blight upon it. But the victory cost him dear. That night the delegates realized what a blunder they had made—or thought they realized it after Merriweather and his staff had circulated among them. Few of them had been trusted by Beckett with the secret that, with that platform and with Simpson as the nominee, their party would have the interests behind it, would almost certainly win. They only saw ahead a dull campaign, and no real issue between the parties, and their candidate, if he was Simpson, much the less attractive personality of the two.

The following morning the voting began; and after seven ballots Simpson had thirty-nine votes less than on the first ballot. "It was like a funeral," was the verdict of my disappointed guests that evening. A night of debate and gloom among the politicians and other delegates, and on the opening ballot Merriweather sprung his trap.

The first big doubtful state in the alphabetical list of states is Illinois. When the secretary of the convention called for Illinois' vote, it was cast solidly for Scarborough.

There was straightway pandemonium. It was half an hour before any one could get a hearing. Then Indiana was called, and Pierson, attorney general of that state and chairman of its delegation, cast its vote as in the other ballots, for Hitchens, its governor. From my box I was watching Scarborough and his immediate friends going from delegation to delegation, and I knew what he was about. When Iowa was called and cast its vote solidly for him I knew he had failed.

"How white he is!" said Mrs. Sandys, who was looking at him through opera-glasses.

I borrowed them and saw that his gaze was fixed on a box on the other side of the huge auditorium, on a woman in that box—I had only to look at her to see which woman. She was beautiful, of that type of charm which the French sum up in the phrase "the woman of thirty." I have heard crowds bellow too often to be moved by it—though the twenty or thirty thousand gathered under that roof were outdoing the cannonade of any thunderstorm. But that woman's look in response to Scarborough's—there was sympathy and understanding in it, and more, infinitely more. He had been crushed for the moment—and I understood enough of his situation to understand what a blow to all his plans this untimely apparent triumph was. She was showing that she too felt the blow, but she was also sending a message of courage to him—one of those messages that transcend words, like music, like the perfumes of flowers and fields, like that which fills us as we look straight up into a clear night sky. I lowered the glasses and looked away—I could not bear it. For the moment I hated him—hating myself for it.

I heard Carlotta asking a woman in the box next ours the name of "the woman with the white plume in the big black hat in the seventh box on the other side."