“Well,” he says, “then you must of been to plays and maybe behind the scenes and you know that a play can be true as a play and yet it don’t have to be true in other ways. For instance suppose your mother is playing the part of a young girl well she makes up that way and she pretends to be happy and the audience is all delighted and they get a truth out of that play. But it may be that really your mother is older and has got children at home and one of them has got the croup—I believe you told me one of them had—and your mother is not feeling happy that night at all yet she has got to play that she is happy because that is the play-truth but if she was to act the real truth and cry on the stage why she would spoil the show and the audience would not get the truth of the play at all and they would go home sore.”
Of course I can see that. But I says, “This that we are talking about is real life—”
“But are you sure?” he says. “Suppose you was to get behind the scenes and discover that this game of politics is another kind of a play and that everybody in it has got to pretend that they are different from their real selves.”
Well of course I am kind of stunned and he can see it in my face and he says, “Does that shock you so much?” he says. “Don’t you see that the people have got to have ideals they have got to believe in great men?”
“Yes,” I says, “but aren’t there no real great men?”
“There is now and then a great man,” he says, “but he is very scarce and most generally you will find that he is not available for Spokesman. There can be a thousand different reasons maybe he is not acceptable to the Knights of Columbus or maybe he was born in Kishineff or maybe he believes in evolution or maybe his wife has divorced him or maybe none of the big bankers is ever met him. So you have got to take somebody that has been careful and not made no enemies and then when you have got him you have got to do the best you can by him and the daughter of a famous actress should ought to understand how much a skillful make-up and the right costumes can do to say nothing of a highly skilled press agent and a good lady assistant,” he says with a bow.
But his little compliment don’t help him for I says, “Then you are all the time fooling the plain people!” I says.
“Miss Riggs,” he says, “you are a serious young lady and I want you to stop and think what would happen to this country if the people was to lose their reverence for the Spokesman that lives up in the big white house and tells them what to think and what to do?”
Well of course I cant think what would happen but Mr. Edgerton he says, “Look here I have got a piece out of a paper from a town in the middle west and there was a man from that town that come to Washington and he shook the hand of the Spokesman and then he went back home and when the word got out that he had actually shook the hand of the Spokesman the members of his lodge passed a resolution and they stood him up by the door and every one of the seventy-five men in the lodge filed by him and shook the hand that had shook the hand of the Spokesman. And that is what you call Faith Miss Riggs that is having an ideal and if all them seventy-five men was to lose it what would happen to them the whole seventy-five would get drunk and go home and beat their wives.”
And he goes on, “Yes Miss Riggs,” he says, “it would mean riot and red revolution. You can go and ask any of them Bolshivikis if there is anything they would like better than to have the American people get the idea that the Man they have got for Spokesman is a poor little Feller with carroty hair and a sallow skin that suffers from constitutional timidity and has got where He is by always waiting for His mind to be made up for Him—just you ask them Bolshivikis and hear them whoop with delight.”