HOW RICHARD GAINED IN KNOWLEDGE
Congress came together at noon upon the first Monday in December, and
obedient to the mandate of the caucus Mr. Frost was made Speaker Frost.
The eruptive Mr. Hawke wore an injured air, and when the drawing for
seats took place, selected one in a far back row, as though retiring
from public life. Mr. Hawke subsequently refused to serve as chairman of
the triangular committee named to notify the President that the House
had convened, and his declination was accepted by Speaker Frost, who
calmly filled the place with a member whom Mr. Hawke despised. Then the
House swung into the channel, and went plowing ahead upon the business
of the session, and in forty-eight hours, Mr. Hawke, forgotten, had
ceased to be important to any save himself. The whole of that first
Monday night Speaker Frost put in with Senator Hanway, in the latter's
study, revising committee lists and settling chairmanships with the
purpose of advancing the White House chances of Senator Hanway and
destroying those of Governor Obstinate.
Although Congress had begun its session, no change was made in those
morning calls of Richard, who came religiously at eleven to listen to
Senator Hanway and look at Dorothy. The latter young lady was never
absent from these interviews; she had conceived a wonderful interest in
politics, and gave her "Uncle Pat" no peace. Richard's call commonly
lasted but a half-hour, for Senator Hanway must be in the Senate chamber
at noon. Thirty heavenly minutes they were; Dorothy and Richard promised
and again promised undying love to one another with their eyes. Senator
Hanway never suspected this love-making, never intercepted one soft
glance; for your politician is like a horse wearing blinders, seeing
only the road before him, thinking of nothing but himself. One morning
after Senator Hanway had departed, Dorothy took Richard across to meet
the blonde pythoness. Dorothy said she wanted Richard to see Bess. This
was fiction; she wanted Bess to see Richard, of whom she was privily
proud.
The Marklins lived across the street from the Harley house. Mother
Marklin was an invalid and seldom out of her own room. Father Marklin
was dead, and had been these five years. When the situation promoted her
to be the head of the Marklin household, Bess had taken on a quiet,
grave atmosphere of authority that was ten years older than her age.
The Marklins were fair rich. Father Marklin had been a physician whose
patients were women of fashion; and that makes a practice wherein your
doctor may know less medicine and make more money than in any other walk
of drugs. A woman likes big bills from a physician if the malady be her
own; she draws importance from the size of the bills. When one reflects
that there is nothing to some women except their aches and their
ailments, it all seems rational enough. These be dangerous digressions;
one might better return to the drug-dealing parent of Bess, who visited
the fair sufferers in a Brewster brougham and measured out his calls by
minutes, watch in hand. He heaped up a fortune for Bess and her mother,
and then at one and the same moment quit both his practice and the
world.
When Dorothy came in with Richard, they found Bess entertaining a
caller. The caller was a helpless person named Mr. Fopling.
"Mr. Storms, permit me to make you acquainted with Mr. Fopling,"
observed Bess, after Dorothy had presented Richard.
When Bess named Richard to Mr. Fopling, she did so with a
master-of-ceremony flourish that was protecting and mannish. Richard
grinned in friendship upon Mr. Fopling, who shook hands flabbily and
seemed uncertain of his mental direction. Richard said nothing through
fear of overwhelming Mr. Fopling. Mr. Fopling was equally silent through
fear of overwhelming himself. Released from Richard, Mr. Fopling found
refuge in the chair he had quitted, and maintained himself without sound
or motion, bolt upright, staring straight ahead. Mr. Fopling had a
vacant expression, and his face was not an advantageous face. It was
round, pudgy, weak, with shadows of petulance about the mouth, and the
forehead sloped away at an angle which house-builders, speaking of
roofs, call a quarter-pitch. His chin, acting on the hint offered by the
forehead, was likewise in full retreat. Altogether, one might have said
of Mr. Fopling that if he were not a delightful, at worst he would never
become a dangerous companion. Richard surveyed him with a deal of
curiosity; then he questioned Dorothy with a glance.
"Bess is to marry him," whispered Dorothy.
"What for?" whispered Richard, off his guard. Then, pulling himself
together in confusion: "Of course, he loves her, I dare say. Your friend
Bess is a beautiful girl!"
Richard brought forth the last with hurried unction. It was a cunning
remark to make; it drew Dorothy's attention off Mr. Fopling, whom she
was preparing to defend with spirit, and centered it upon herself. At
Richard's observation, so flattering to Bess, she tossed her head.
"Is she?" said Dorothy, with a falling inflection, vastly severe.
The two were near a window and quite alone, for Bess had stepped into
the hall to give directions to a servant. Mr. Fopling sat the length of
the room away, wrapped in meditation. Richard looked tenderly
apologetic, and Dorothy, after sparkling for a jealous moment, softened
to be in sympathy with Richard.
And the strange thing was that neither had ever said one word of love to
the other. They had begun to love at sight, taking each other for
granted, worshiping frankly, sweetly, with the candid, innocent
informality of barbarians to whom the conventional was the unknown.
After all, why not? Isn't word of eye as sacred as word of mouth?
Bess returned to them from the hall.
"I say, Bess!" bleated Mr. Fopling anxiously.
"In a moment, child!" returned Bess, in maternal tones.
Mr. Fopling relapsed, while Richard was amused. Some corner of Richard's
amusement must have stuck out to attract the notice of Bess. She met it
finely, undisturbed.
"Some day, Mr. Storms," beamed Bess, as though replying to a question,
"I shall talk to you on marriage and husbands."
"Why not on marriage and wives?"
"Because I would not speak of the philosopher and the experiment, but of
the experiment and the result. Marriage is a cause; the husband an
effect. Husbands are artificial and made by marriage. Wives, like poets,
are born, not made. I shall talk to you on marriage and husbands; I have
some original ideas, I assure you."
"Now I can well believe that!" declared Richard, much tumbled about in
his mind. Bess's harangue left him wondering whether she might not be
possessed of a mild mania on wedlock and husbands.
"You need have no misgivings," returned Bess, as though reading his
thoughts; "you will find me sane to the verge of commonplace."
Richard's stare was the mate to Mr. Fopling's; he could not decide just
how to lay hold on the sibyl of the golden locks. Perceiving him
wandering in his wits, Dorothy took him up warmly.
"Can't you see Bess is laughing at you?" she cried.
"You know her so much better than I," argued Richard, in extenuation of
his dullness. "Some day I hope to be so well acquainted with Miss
Marklin as to know when she laughs."
"You are to know her as well as I do," returned Dorothy, with decision,
"for Bess is my dearest friend."
"And that, I'm sure," observed Richard, craftily measuring forth a
two-edged compliment, "is the highest possible word that could be spoken
of either."
At this speech Dorothy was visibly disarmed; whereat Richard
congratulated himself.
"To be earnest with you, Mr. Storms," said Bess, with just a flash of
teasing wickedness towards Dorothy, "I go about, even now, carrying the
impression of knowing you extremely well. Dorothy reads me your letters
from the _Daily Tory_; she has elevated literary tastes, you know. No,
it is not what you write, it is the way you write it, that charms her;
and, that I may the better appreciate, she obligingly accompanies her
readings with remarks descriptive of the author."
"Bess, do you think that fair?" and Dorothy's face put on a reproachful
red.
"At least it's true," returned Bess composedly.
That morning Richard had been flattered with a letter from the editor of
a magazine, asking for a five-thousand word article on a leading
personality of the Cabinet. This helped him bear the raillery of Bess;
and the raillery, per incident, told him how much and deeply he was in
the thoughts of Dorothy, which information made the world extremely
beautiful. Richard had waited until his thirtieth year to begin to live!
He was brought back from a dream of Dorothy by the unexpected projection
of Mr. Fopling into the conversation.
"The _Daily Tory_!" repeated Mr. Fopling, in feeble disgust. "I hate
newspapahs; they inflame the mawsses."
"Inflame what?" asked Richard.
"Inflame the mawsses! the common fellahs!"
Mr. Fopling was emphatic; and when Mr. Fopling was emphatic he squeaked.
Mr. Fopling's father had been a beef contractor. Likewise he had seen
trouble with investigating committees, being convicted of bad beef. This
may or may not have had to do with the younger Fopling's aversion to the
press.
"Certainly," coincided Bess, again assuming the maternal, "the
newspapers are exceedingly inflammatory."
"Your friend Bess," said Richard to Dorothy, later, "is a bit of a
blue-stocking, isn't she?--one of those girls who give themselves to the
dangerous practice of thinking?"
"I love her from my heart!" returned Dorothy, with a splendid
irrelevance wholly feminine; "she is a girl of gold!"
"Mr. Fopling: he's of gold, too, I take it."
"Mr. Fopling is very wealthy."
"Well, I'm glad he's something," observed Richard.
"You hate him because he spoke ill of newspapers," said Dorothy
teasingly.
"Naturally, when a giant hand is stretched forth against the tree by
which one lives, one's alarm runs away into hate," laughed Richard.
Richard, now that the _Daily Tory_ letters were winning praise, that is
to say, were being greatly applauded and condemned, began to have in
them a mightier pride than ever. Educated those years abroad, he felt
the want of an American knowledge, and started in to study government at
pointblank range. Nights he read history, mostly political, and days he
went about like a Diogenes without the lamp. He put himself in the way
of Cabinet men; and talked with Senators and Representatives concerning
congressional movements of the day.
Being quick, he made discoveries; some of them personal to himself. As
correspondent of a New York daily, those Cabinet folk and men of
Congress encountered him affably; when he was not present they spoke
ferociously of him and his craft, as convicts curse a guard behind his
back, and for much a convict's reason.
It was the same at the club without the affability. Present or absent,
there they turned unsparing back upon him. Richard's status as a
newspaper man had been explained and fixed, and they of the club liked
him less than before. The Fopling feeling towards the press predominated
at the club, and although Richard was never openly snubbed--his
shoulders were too wide for that--besides, some sigh of those hand-grips
with Storri had gone about--the feeling was manifest. This cool distance
pleased Richard rather than otherwise, and he went often to the club to
enjoy it. It was parcel of his affected cynicism to like an enemy.
When Richard came to Washington it is more than a chance that he was a
patriot. But as he went about he saw much to blunt the sentiment. A
statesman is one who helps his country; a politician is one who helps
himself. Richard found shoals of the latter and none of the other class.
One day he asked Speaker Frost, whom he met in Senator Hanway's study,
his definition of a statesman.
"A statesman," said that epigrammatist, "is a dead politician."
Richard frequented House and Senate galleries; it was interesting to
watch the notables transacting their fame. The debates were a cross-fire
of deceit. Not a member gave his true reasons for the votes he cast; he
gave what he wanted the world to think were his reasons. Finance was on
the carpet in that hour, and bimetallism and monometallism, silver
versus gold, were in everyone's mouth. Richard saw that the goldbugs
hailed from money--lending constituencies, while the silverbugs were
invariably from either money-borrowing constituencies or constituencies
that had silver to sell. And every man legislated for his district and
never for the country; which Richard regarded as an extremely narrow
course. Every man talked of the people's interest; every man was
thinking of his own interest and striving only to locate the butter on
his political bread.
There was a third class, made up of those who were neither goldbugs nor
silverbugs; they were straddlebugs, and, like the two sides of the
shield, would be gold when looked at by one contingent and silver when
viewed by the other. Senator Hanway, whose monk's face seemed to mark
him as private secretary of the Genius of Patriotism, was an eminent
straddlebug. He was thinking on those delegations that would make up the
convention and choose a candidate for the Presidency. The prudent
Senator Hanway would be in line with all opinions, and occupied both
sides of the money question without becoming the open champion of
either.
Not alone did Richard, gazing from the galleries, lose faith in the
patriotism of House and Senate men, but he began to doubt the verity of
their partisanship. Considering what they did, rather than what they
said, he discovered that the true difference between the two great
political parties was the difference between cat owls and horned owls,
and lay mainly in the noises they made. When it came to deeds, both
killed chickens, and both appeared equally ready to pillage the hen
roosts of government. As for government--that is to say, the thing
controlling and not the thing controlled: it was made up of the
President, the Speaker, and a dozen more in Cabinet and Congress; and
that was government.
The picture nourished Richard's failing of cynicism, and served to dull
that edge of native patriotism which it was assumed he owned when first
he came. He got an impression of government that left him nothing to
fight and bleed and die for should the thick mutter of the war-drums
call folk to the field. Good politics, as the term is practiced, means
bad patriotism, and Washington was a nest of politics and nothing else
besides. It made decisively a situation, so Richard was driven to
conclude, wherein that man should be the best patriot who knew least of
his own government; he should fight harder and suffer more cheerfully
and die more blithely in its defense in exact proportion to his
ignorance of whom and what he was fighting and suffering and dying for.
It was a sullen conclusion surely; but, forced home upon Richard, it
taught him a vitriolic harshness that, getting into his letters to
flavor all he wrote, gave him national vogue, and added to that mixture
of hatred and admiration with which official Washington was already
beginning to regard him.
Neither did he escape forming certain estimates of Senator Hanway, and
the white purity of what motives underlay his public career. For all
that, Richard was quite as sedulous as ever to advance our statesman's
fortunes; loyalty is abstract, love concrete, and in a last analysis
Richard was thinking on Dorothy and not upon the country. Richard, you
may have observed, was no whit better, no less selfish, than were those
about him; and it is as well to know our faulty young gentleman for what
he really was.
Richard not only considered the politics of men, but he studied men
themselves. The narrowest of these came from parts of the country where
region was important, and where you would have been more thought of for
the deeds of your grandfather than for anything that you yourself might
do. This was peculiarly true of men from New England, whose intelligence
as well as interest seemed continually walking a tight-rope. The New
Englander was always and ever the sublimation of a blind, ineffable
vanity that went about proposing him as an example to the race. And so
consciously self-perfect was he that, while coming to opinions touching
others, generally to their disadvantage, he never once bethought him
that others might be forming opinions of him. Another New England
weakness was to believe in the measure more than in the man, and there
was not one from that section who did not think that if you but
introduced among negroes or Indians the New England town meeting, those
negroes or Indians, thus blessed, would all and instantly become
Yankees.
Another sublime provincial whom Richard uncovered was the Southern man.
He, like the New Englander, was so busy thinking on and revering a past
that was dead, that he owned little space for anything else. There was,
however, one characteristic, common to Southern men, which was wanting
in folk from other corners of the country. Richard never met a Southern
man who remembered, assuming such to be his official station, that he
was in Cabinet or Congress, while he never met a Northern or a Western
or a New England man who for a moment forgot it.
This amiable democracy on the Southern part, like other good things, has
its explanation. Your Southern man, like a squab pigeon, is biggest when
he is born. The one first great fact of his nativity is an honor beyond
any other which the world can confer. It is as though he were cradled on
a peak; and thereafter, wherever his wanderings may take him, and
whether into Congress, Cabinet, or White House, he travels always
downhill. It is this to account for that benignant urbanity, the
inevitable mark of a Southern man, which teaches him faith in you as
corollary of completest confidence in himself. It is a beautiful, even
though an unreasonable trait, and as such the admiration of Richard
recorded it.
Those others, not Southern, educated to a notion of office as a
pedestal, were inclined to play the turkey cock and spread their tails a
trifle. Since that sort of self-conceit never fails to transact itself
at the expense of the spectator, Richard looked upon it with no favor,
and it drew from him opinions, not of compliment, concerning those by
whom it was exhibited. It set him to comparisons which ran much in
Southern favor.
After Congressmen and Cabinet men, Richard studied Washington itself.
The common condition--speaking now of residents, and not of those who
were mere sojourners within the city's walls--he found to be one of
idleness, the common trait an insatiable bent for gossip. Government was
the sole product of the place, the one grist ground at those mills. No
one was made to labor more than six hours of the twenty-four. And the
term labor meant no more than one-tenth its definition in any other
town. Wherefore, even those most engaged of the citizenry had leisure to
settle the world's most perplexing concerns, and they generously devoted
it to that purpose.
Nor were they abashed by any insignificance of their personal estate.
Familiarity does not breed contempt, it breeds conceit. Those who dwell
close to the hub of government, even though they build departmental
fires, sweep departmental floors, and empty departmental waste baskets,
from nearness of contact and a daily perusal of your truly great, come
at last to look upon themselves as beings of tremendous importance--and
all after the self-gratulatory example of the thoughtful fly on the
chariot wheel in the fable. The least of them beholds a picture of the
government in every looking-glass into which he peers.
Storri talked with Mr. Harley; Mr. Harley talked with Senator Hanway.
These conferences were of Credit Magellan; in particular they had
concern with the overthrow of Northern Consolidated. Congress had been
in session ten days when Senator Hanway, one morning, asked Richard to
call that evening at nine.
"There is something which your paper should print," said Senator Hanway.
Richard was with Senator Hanway in the latter's study sharp upon the
hour set. Dorothy was not there; her mother had carried her and the
yellow-haired sorceress, Bess, to the theater. It is to be doubted, even
if she were free, whether Dorothy's interest in her political studies
would have carried her through a night session. Besides, the preoccupied
Senator Hanway had begun to observe that Richard looked at Dorothy more
than he listened to him, and while he suffered no disturbance by virtue
of this discovery, the present was an occasion when he wanted Richard's
undivided attention. Once seated, Senator Hanway went to the heart of
the affair; he made himself clear, for years of debate had educated him
to lucidity. What he desired was a plain, sequential rehearsal in the
_Daily Tory_ of those claims and charges against Northern Consolidated.
"Nor will I," observed Senator Hanway, flatteringly confidential,
"conceal my reasons. In the first place the charges have been made, and
their effect is to injure Northern Consolidated. You will not state that
you know these charges to be true; you will say--if you will be so
good--that they are of common report. Once in print, I can make them the
basis of an investigation. I've no doubt--though you will please say
nothing on that point--but what an investigation will disclose how
groundless the charges are."
"You are an owner in Northern Consolidated?" asked Richard.
Richard felt no interest beyond a willingness to be of service to
Senator Hanway, and only put the question to show attention to his
eminent friend.
"No, no owner," replied Senator Hanway; "but to be frank, since I know
my confidence is safe, it will assist me in a certain political matter
the name of which I think you can guess."
Senator Hanway's smooth face wore a smile which he intended should prove
that he looked upon Richard as one possessing a rightful as well as an
intimate knowledge of those White House plans which he cherished.
Richard did not require the assurance; he was ready without it to come
to the aid of Senator Hanway, whom he liked if he did not revere.
The next evening Richard's letter carried the story against Northern
Consolidated. The afternoon of the day on which it was published,
Senator Hanway arose in his place and requested that the article be read
by the clerk. That done, he said he was pained and surprised by the
publication of such a story, and asked for a committee of three to look
into the truth of what was set forth.
"For," observed Senator Hanway, after paying a tribute to Richard and
the _Daily Tory_, in which he extolled the honesty and intelligent
conservatism of both the paper and its correspondent, "for it is only
justice that the charges be sifted. The _Daily Tory_ does not make them
on its own behalf; it finds them in the mouths of others. They should be
taken up and weighed. If there be aught due the government, we have a
right to know and measure it. If the charges are without support--and I
have reason to believe that such is the situation--then Northern
Consolidated is entitled to the refutation of a calumny that, whispered
in some quarters and talked aloud in others, has borne heavily upon its
interests."
No one opposed, and Senator Hanway, with Senators Price and Loot, were
selected to be a special committee. They were to send for men and
papers, be open or secret in their sessions, and report to the Senate
whenever they finished the inquiry. The affair excited no comment, and
was forgotten within the hour by all except Storri and Mr. Harley and
those others of the osprey pool.
After Richard left Senator Hanway upon the Northern Consolidated
evening, he ran plump upon an incident that was to have a last profound
effect upon this history. No one not a prophet would have guessed this
from the incident's character, for on its ignoble face it was nothing
better than just a drunken clash between a Caucasian, and an African
triumvirate that had locked horns with him in the street. The Caucasian,
moved of liquor and pride of skin, had demanded the entire sidewalk. He
enforced his demands by shoving the obstructing Africans into the
gutter. The latter, recalling amendments to the organic law of the land
favorable to folk of color, objected. In the war that ensued, owing to
an inequality of forces, the Caucasian--albeit a gallant soul--was given
the bitter side of the argument. Richard came upon them as he rounded a
corner; the quartette at the time made a struggling, scrambling, cursing
tangle, rolling about the sidewalk.
Being one in whom the race instinct ran powerfully, and who was not
untainted of antipathies to red men and yellow men and black men and all
men not wholly white, Richard did not pause to inquire the rights and
the wrongs of the altercation. He seized upon the topmost person of
color and pitched him into the street. Then he pitched another after
him. The third, getting some alarming notions of what was going on,
arose and fled. None of the three came back; for discretion is not
absent from the African, and those whom Richard personally disposed of
felt as might ones who had escaped from some malignant providence which
they did not think it wise or fitting to further tempt. As for number
three, he was pleased to find himself a block away, and did all he might
to add to it, like a miser to his hoard.
Negroes gone, Richard set the white man on his feet, and asked him how
he fared. That gentleman shook himself and announced that he was
uninjured. Then he said that he was drunk, which was an unnecessary
confidence. It developed that he followed the trade of printer; also
that he had just come to town. He had no money, he had no place to
sleep; and, what was wonderful to Richard, he appeared in no whit cast
down by his bankrupt and bedless state. He had had money; but like many
pleasant optimistic members of his mystery of types, he had preferred to
spend it in liquor, leaving humdrum questions, such as bed and board, to
solve themselves.
"For," said the bedless one, "I'm a tramp printer!" And he flung forth
the adjective as though it were a title of respect.
Having invested some little exertion in the affairs of the stranger,
Richard thought he might as well go forward and invest a little money.
With that he went out of his way to lead the drunken one to a cheap
hotel, where the porter took him in charge under contract to put him to
bed. The consideration for the latter attention was a quarter paid in
hand to the porter; with the proprietor Richard left ten dollars, and
orders to give the devious one the change in the morning after deducting
for his entertainment.
The rescued printer, clothed and in his right mind, called upon Richard
the next afternoon to thank him for his generosity and say that his name
was Sands. Mr. Sands, being sober and shaven, with clothes brushed, was
in no sense a spectacle of shame. Indeed, there were worse-looking
people passing laws for the nation. Richard was pleased, and said so.
"If I had a job, I'd go to work," said Mr. Sands, having had, as he
expressed it, "his drunk out."
The habit of charity grows upon one like the liquor habit; moreover, if
once you help a man, you ever after feel compelled to help him to the
end of time. Richard was no exception to these philanthropic laws, and
when Mr. Sands declared an eagerness to go to work, brought him to
Senator Hanway, who promptly berthed him upon the Government printing
office, where he was given a "case," and commenced tossing up types
after the manner of a master.
If Senator Hanway had been able to probe the future, instead of setting
Mr. Sands to work that December afternoon, he would have paid his way to
London, had a trans-Atlantic trip been made the price of being rid of
him. But a Senator is not a soothsayer, and no impression of the kind
once touched him. He got Mr. Sands his billet, and said it gave him
pleasure to comply with the request of his young friend, Mr. Storms. To
Richard, the hereafter was as opaque as it was to Senator Hanway, and,
having seen his protégé installed, he walked away unconscious of a morn
to dawn when Mr. Sands would recur as an instance of that bread upon the
waters which returns after many days.