THIS IS NOT A BOON.
Othello; iii.--3.
If the old-time opinion that a woman whose name is a jest with men has
lost her claims to respect, Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson might be supposed
to have little ground for the inner anger she felt at the scantness of
the courtesy with which she was treated by Mr. Irons. That gentleman
was calling upon her in her tiny suite of rooms at the top of one of
those apartment hotels which stand upon the debatable ground between
the select regions of Back Bay and the scorned precincts of the South
End, and he was apparently as much at home as if the sofa upon which he
lounged were in his own dwelling.
The apartment of Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson gave to the experienced eye
evidences of a pathetic struggle to make scanty resources furnish at
least an appearance of luxury. The walls were adorned with amateur
china painting in the shape of dreadful placques and plates in livid
hues; there was abundance of embroidery that should have been
impossible, in garish tints and uneven stitches; much shift had been
made to produce an imposing appearance by means of cheap Japanese fans
and the inexpensive wares of which the potteries at Kioto, corrupted by
foreign influence, turn out such vast quantities for the foreign
market. Against the wall stood an upright piano--if a piano could be
called upright which habitually destroyed the peace of the entire
neighborhood--and over it was placed a scarf upon which apparently some
boarding-school miss had taken her first lesson in painting wild
flowers.
The room was small, and so well filled with furniture that there seemed
little space for the long limbs of Alfred Irons, who, however, had
contrived to make himself comfortable by the aid of various cushions
covered with bright-colored sateens. He had lighted a cigar without
thinking it necessary to ask leave, and had even made himself more easy
by putting one leg across a low chair.
Mrs. Sampson was fully aware that in her struggles with life she had
sometimes provoked laughter, often disapproval, and now and then given
rise to positive scandal, yet she was still accustomed to at least a
fair semblance of respect from the men who came to see her; women, it
is to be noted, being not often seen within her walls, since those who
were willing to come she did not care to receive, and those whom she
invited seldom set her name down on their calling lists. Among
themselves, at the clubs or elsewhere, the men speculated more or less
coarsely and unfeelingly upon the foundations of the numerous scandals
which had from time to time blossomed like brilliant and life-sapping
parasites upon the tree of Mrs. Sampson's reputation. Her name, either
spoken boldly or too broadly hinted at to be misunderstood, adorned
many a racy tale told in smoking-rooms after good dinners, or when the
hours had grown small in more senses than one; and her career was made
to point more than one moral drawn for the benefit of the sisters and
daughters of the men who joked and sneered concerning her.
Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson was born of a good old Boston family, to
which she clung with a desperate clutch which her relatives ignored so
far as with dignity they were able. Her father had been a lawyer of
reputation, and his portrait was still displayed prominently in the
daughter's parlor, a circumstance which had given Chauncy Wilson
opportunity for a jest rather clever than elegant concerning Judge
Welsh's well-known fondness in life for watching the progress of
criminal cases. Of her husband, the late Mr. Sampson, there was very
little said, and not much was known beyond the fact that having run
away from school to marry him, Amanda had shared a shady and it was
whispered rather disreputable existence for three years, at the end of
which she was fortunately relieved from the matrimonial net by his
timely decease; an event of which she sometimes spoke to her more
intimate male friends with undisguised satisfaction.
It might not have been easy to tell how far Mrs. Sampson's subsequent
career was forced upon her by circumstances, and how far it was the
result of her own choice. She always represented herself as the victim
of a hard fate: but her relatives, one of whom was Mr. Staggchase,
declared that Amanda had no capabilities of respectability in her
composition. Mrs. Staggchase, upon whom marriage had conferred the
privilege of expressing her mind with the freedom of one of the family,
while it happily spared her from the responsibility of an actual
relative, declared that everything had been done to keep Mrs. Sampson
within the bounds of propriety, but all in vain. The income from the
estate of the late Judge Welsh was not large, and as Mrs. Sampson's
tastes, especially in dress, were somewhat expensive, it followed that
she was often reduced to devices for increasing her bank account which
were generally adroit and curious, but often not of a character to be
openly boasted of. She had had some business transactions already with
Irons, who was at this moment laying out the plan of work in a fresh
operation where she might make herself useful.
"Of course," he said, "all the men from Wachusett way are on our side,
and the men from the other part of the county will be against us."
"What other part of the county?" Mrs. Sampson inquired.
She had laid down her sewing and was listening intently, with a look of
keen intelligence, the tips of her long and rather large fingers
pressed closely together. She hated Irons devoutly, but his scheme
meant financial profit to her, and various bills were troublesomely
overdue.
"That's what we have to discover. When we find out, I'll let you know.
The other syndicate have been deucedly close-mouthed about their plans,
but of course they can't keep dark a great while longer; and in any
case I am on the track of the information."
"And what," Mrs. Sampson asked, with an air of innocence too obviously
artificial, "am I expected to do?"
Irons glanced at her with a wink, taking in her plain, vivacious face
with its sparkling eyes, her fine figure, and stylish, if somewhat too
pronounced, presence.
"The old game," he said. "Show a tender and sisterly interest in a few
of the country members. There are one or two men from the western part
of the state that we want to capture at once before the thing is
started. Do you know anybody in that region?"
"My father, Judge Welsh," she answered with an amusing touch amid her
frankness of the air with which she always mentioned her ancestors in
society, "had numerous connections there."
"Ah, that is good," the visitor responded, with evident satisfaction.
He knocked the ashes from his cigar into a tiny bronze which Mrs.
Sampson had put within his reach when he showed signs of throwing them
upon the carpet, and then plunged into a discussion of the members of
the State Legislature with whom it was possible for Mrs. Sampson to
establish an acquaintance, and whom she was likely to be able to
influence. He drew from his pocket a list of men, and with quite as
business-like an air his hostess produced a similar document from her
desk; the pair being soon deep in consultation over the schedules.
Lobbying in Massachusetts is not by the public recognized as a
well-organized business, and yet any one who desires to secure personal
influence to aid or to hinder legislation is seldom at a loss to find
people well experienced in such work. The lobby to the eyes of the
public, moreover, consists entirely of men, if one excepts the group of
foolish intriguers in favor of the vagaries of proposed law-making by
which it is supposed the distinctions of sex may be abolished. There
are in the city, however, women who by no means lack experience in
manipulating the votes of country members, and who are but too willing
to sell their services to whoever can make it to their pecuniary
interest to favor a bill.
Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson was extremely adroit and careful in
concealing her connection with the law-making of the State. She was in
evidence in most public places; at the theatres, the concert halls, the
County Club races, and at every fashionable entertainment to which her
cleverness could procure her admission, her conspicuous figure, made
more prominent by a certain indefinable loudness of style, a marked
dash of manner, and gowns in a taste rather daring than refined, was
too conspicuous to be overlooked. Yet it is doubtful if she had ever
been up the steps leading to the gilded-domed capitol in her life. She
went about much; and the unchaperoned life which in virtue of her
widowhood and her love of freedom she chose to lead, the width of the
circle over which her acquaintance extended, allowed her to carry on
her work unobserved; so that while a great variety of stories of one
sort of queerness or another were told of Mrs. Sampson, this particular
side of her career was almost unknown.
"There is Mr. Greenfield," Mrs. Sampson observed, tapping her teeth
with her pencil. "His wife was a cousin of my husband. I don't know
them at all, but I could easily ask him to come and see me. It would be
only proper to offer him the hospitality of the town, you know."
"Good!" cried Mr. Irons, slapping his open palm down on his knee.
"Greenfield's the hardest nut we've got to crack in the whole business.
He's the sort of man you can't talk to on a square business basis.
You've got to mince things damned fine with him, and he's chairman of
the Railroad Committee, you know. He'd have a tremendous amount of
influence, anyway."
"He's a little tin god at Fentonville, I've heard," Mrs. Sampson
responded, laughing in the mechanical way which was her habit. "When
he's at home they say the sun doesn't rise there till he's given his
permission."
Irons in his excitement took his leg down from its supporting chair and
sat up straight, dropping his list of members to the floor and clasping
his knees with his heavy hands.
"Now look here, old lady," he said, "here's a chance to show your
mettle. If you'll manage Greenfield, I'll run the rest of the hayseed
crowd, and I'll make it something handsomer than you ever had in your
life."
The woman smiled a smile of greed and cunning.
"I'll take care of him," she said. "And he shall never know he has been
taken care of either."
Irons laughed with coarse jocoseness.
"A man has very little chance that falls into your clutches," he
observed, "but in this particular case you've got a heavy contract on
hand. Greenfield's got his price, of course, like everybody else, but
I'm hanged if I know what it is. If you offered him tin he'd simply fly
out on the whole thing and nobody could hold him. There isn't any
particular pull in politics on him. This new-fashioned independence has
knocked all that to pieces; and Greenfield is an Independent from the
word go. I don't know what you're to bait your hook with, unless it's
your lovely self."
Mrs. Sampson began a laugh, and then recovering herself, she frowned.
"Don't be personal," she said. "I won't stand it."
She began to feel that the circumstances were such as to make her
important to her caller's schemes, and her air by insensible degrees
became more assured and less subservient. She knew her man, and she was
prepared for his becoming proportionately more respectful. He dusted a
little heap of ashes from the small table beside him and scattered them
with his foot, in a well-meant attempt to cover the traces of his
previous untidiness. She watched him with a covert sneer.
"Even so difficult a problem as that," she said, with a slight toss of
the head, a bit of antique coquetry which impressed him with a new
sense of her thorough self-possession, and imposed itself upon his
untrained mind as the air of a true woman of the world; "I fancy I can
solve. Leave him to me. I'll find out what can be done with him."
"If he can be got hold of," Irons remarked, reflectively, "he will
carry the whole thing through. They'd believe him up at Feltonville if
he told them it was right to walk backward and vote to give their
incomes to the temperance cranks."
He rose to go as he spoke, unconsciously assuming with the overcoat he
put on that air of stiffness and immaculate propriety which he wore
always in public. He seldom allowed himself the undignified freedom
which marked his intercourse with Mrs. Sampson, and he liked the rest
he found in being for a time his vulgar, ill-bred self with no
restraints of artificial manner.
"Well, good afternoon," he said, extending his large hand, into which
she laid hers with a certain faint air of condescension. "I've got to
go to a meeting of the committee on the new statue. They've got a new
fellow they are trying to push in, a young unlicked cub that Peter
Calvin's running. I'll let you know anything that's for our advantage."
When he was gone, Mrs. Sampson produced a brush and a dustpan from
behind the books on a whatnot and carefully collected the scattered
ashes of his cigar.
"Vulgar old brute!" she muttered. "To think of my having to clean up
after him; his mother was my grandmother's laundress."