The Plum Tree

Chapter 18

A DANGEROUS PAUSE

I took train for my friend Sandys' country place near Cleveland, forbidding Woodruff or Burbank or my secretaries to communicate with me. Sandys had no interest in politics--his fortune was in real estate and, therefore, did not tempt or force him into relations with political machines.

Early in the morning after my arrival I got away from the others and, with a stag-hound who remembered me with favor from my last visit, struck into woods that had never been despoiled by man. As I tramped on and on, my mind seemed to revive, and I tried to take up the plots and schemes that had been all-important yesterday. But I could not. Instead, as any sane man must when he and nature are alone and face to face, I fell to marveling that I could burn up myself, the best of me, the best years of my one life, in such a fever of folly and fraud as this political career of mine. I seemed to be in a lucid interval between paroxysms of insanity. I reviewed the men and things of my world as one recalls the absurd and repellent visions of a nightmare. I shrank from passing from this mood of wakefulness and reason back into the unreal reality of what had for years been my all-in-all. I wandered hour after hour, sometimes imagining that I was flying from the life I loathed, again that somewhere in those cool, green, golden-lighted mazes I should find--my lost youth, and her. For, how could I think of it without thinking of her also? It had been lighted by her; it had gone with her; it lived in memory, illumined by her.

The beautiful, beautiful world-that-ought-to-be! The hideous, the horrible world-that-is!

I did not return to the house until almost dinner-time. "I have to go away to-morrow morning," I announced after dinner. For I felt that, if I did not fly at once, I should lose all heart for the task which must be finished.

"Why," protested Sandys, "you came to stay until we all started with you for St. Louis."

"I must go," I repeated. I did not care to invent an excuse; I could not give the reason. Had I followed my impulse, I should have gone at once, that night.

By noon the next day I had again flung myself into the vexed political ocean whose incessant buffetings give the swimmers small chance to think of anything beyond the next oncoming wave.