Shelby read, pondered, and finally roused from his preoccupation to
meet the bovine stare of his clerk.
"Railway guide, William," he ordered sharply.
"Yep."
"And call up the station agent. Have him wire for a lower berth on the
Lehigh to-night."
William Irons waited.
"Go on, go on," called the politician, crossly, glancing up from his
time-table. "Have you foundered halfway?"
"Nope. You didn't say where to."
"New York, New York."
"Yep," said William, placidly. "What train?"
Shelby left off staring at his blotter for an instant, to fling him the
information. William Irons rubbed one long leg against its fellow as
he leaned to the telephone and ruminated the mystery of this impending
flight into what was for him the great unknown. This air of suppressed
excitement had never attended Shelby's departures.
"Goin' to use it yourself?" he inquired.
"Is the station agent aching to know?"
"Nope," returned William, frankly. "He didn't ask."
"Then you needn't. Now get Mr. Bowers's residence, and ask if he is
there."
"Got him," announced the clerk presently, as if he had trapped a rat,
and stood expectantly aside. To his disappointment Shelby merely made
an immediate appointment at the Bowers's home. More bitter still, he
took the message with him.
"Lightning has struck," Shelby greeted the old man ten minutes later,
handing him the telegram. "I've been ordered down to the Boss. This
means make or break."
The Hon. Seneca Bowers unslung his glasses and slowly read the summons.
"I guess it had to come," he commented.
"Oh, yes. Things have reached lowest ebb. In fact, they're so low
that you must put up my car fare."
Bowers assented readily.
"Whatever you need you shall have, Ross. You must go in good style."
Shelby pocketed the sum which he thought would meet his travelling
expenses and listened to his friend's rather dolorous words of
encouragement.
"I think he'll do right by you," Bowers concluded feebly. "I think
he'll do right."
Shelby jerked a grim smile.
"The Boss always does right--when it pays."
In the smoking-room of the Pullman that night the traveller was
accosted by an unctuous person who looked like a race-track tout. He
would have described himself as a man "interested" in legislation; he
had been described by other people as a lobbyist, but that was in the
days before the machine absorbed the lobby.
"And how does the Hon. Calvin Ross Shelby find himself?" beamed the
new-comer, dropping into a seat alongside. "Busy days in Tuscarora,
eh?"
"Yes; busy days, Krantz," assented the harassed man, concealing his
annoyance under a cordial greeting. If ever he had needed a quiet hour
it was now, and he had sought the smoking-compartment because with a
carful of women and children it seemed to promise solitude.
"Shall miss you around Albany this winter," Krantz said feelingly,
exploring the pockets of his horsey waistcoat for a cigar. "We always
got along so well together."
Shelby was silent under this moving reminiscence.
"I'll have some of my Washington friends look you up," pursued the man.
"They're good fellows, all of 'em."
"Thanks," said Shelby, without enthusiasm. "Better wait till I'm
elected."
"My dear sir, can you doubt? Your resplendent gonfalon, if I may so
express myself, has ever been Victory's chosen perch."
"I've pulled a majority hitherto."
"And you will, you will. In fact"--his voice fell--"we think it such a
foregone conclusion that one of my friends who is looking over the
prospective House wants to make your acquaintance. You're sure to
jibe. He's interested in the unlucky River and Harbor scheme."
"Oh."
Krantz looked out at him from underneath his saurian lids, and blew a
smoke ring toward the rococo ceiling.
"Through an option or two I'm rather interested myself," he continued
smoothly. "I'd like to see every good man indorse a good thing. I
haven't been told what your opinion is." Getting no answer, he added:
"Of course we expect to pull the thing off in this winter's session.
If not, then the fight goes into your House. Between ourselves, just
where do you stand?"
"You don't need to be told that it's a gigantic job."
Krantz's benevolent features expressed blandest regret.
"Now isn't it a pity that misconception should be so widespread?" he
exclaimed, apparently to the writhing ornaments of the ceiling. "Isn't
it a pity? But it's so often true! Take that street railway bill of
yours last winter: how that enlightened measure was denounced!"
Shelby scowled.
"We're talking of Washington."
"They've a lot in common, Albany and Washington."
"I don't want them to have for me."
Krantz laughed.
"How reform does drop its gentle influence round! Has the fusion
movement in Tuscarora converted you?"
"No," Shelby answered. "I've grown."
Krantz looked bewildered, laughed a little, and asked point-blank,
"Shall you come out against us?"
"You'll know in Washington."
"If elected," qualified the man.
"Naturally."
Krantz rang up the porter to ask if his berth were ready, rose, yawned,
and shed a benevolent smile.
"From things they're beginning to say about Tuscarora down at
headquarters," he remarked impersonally, "I venture to predict that
we'll know within twenty-four hours. Good night."
The River and Harbor bogy wove the pattern of Shelby's troubled dreams.
In a way, he had grown, as he liked to think, and by this touchstone he
knew it best. Whatever his practice, his quickened ideals were loftier
than of old, and across the future's broader field, should it be his to
till, the man was honestly ambitious to trace a straighter furrow than
his ploughshare had ever turned. But his past and the insistent
present seemed to hamper every forward step. It was an open secret
that the disciplining of the man he hoped to succeed had issued
directly from his refusal to stand with his colleagues in this
question, and Shelby in his heart approved his course. He did not
anticipate that he should meet a like dilemma; the winter session of
the old House would doubtless settle the matter, as Krantz had said;
but Volney Sprague had harped upon his possible action so incessantly
that he could easily see why the organization might wonder at his
silence. Was the time for speech, then, so near as this creature
warned?
Yet he took a certain comfort in Krantz's companionship in the morning,
as from the crowded ferry he watched the city's sky line detach itself
from the mist. Notwithstanding his legislative career, New York was
almost an unknown country, and this battlemented mystery overawed him
like a frowning bastion. It challenged the alien to do and dare, but
it quenched his individuality. Krantz, obviously, was hardened to its
lesson. He elbowed the jostling pack in the ferry slip as one of them,
called the elevated road the "L," and was otherwise enviably
sophisticated. Shelby imitated at a distance, but the hall mark of the
outsider was too deep for ready erasure. He would persistently
apologize to people with whom he collided, and surrender his car seat
to standing women.
He had mentioned a Madison Square hotel as his destination, and on
Krantz's saying that he meant to stop there briefly, too, it fell out
that they approached the room clerk together, and that Krantz
registered for both. So it chanced that, unknown to himself, the
candidate was entered with a fine flourish as the Hon. Calvin Ross
Shelby. The two men breakfasted together, and Krantz presently went
about his business, leaving Shelby in some quandary how he should
employ the interval before the hour appointed by the great leader for
their meeting. For a time he loitered in a window overlooking the
restful oasis of the square, a place of fountains and pleasant leafage,
dominated by a graceful tower which served as footstool for a shining
goddess on tiptoe to greet the morning. His eyes were not long bent
upon the goddess,--he did not "live with the gods,"--nor yet upon the
greenness, since he had lived all his days with shrubs and trees; he
watched the commingling ride of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, watched till
it dizzied and saddened him. What did he count here?
Presently he returned to the desk with an inquiry concerning his room.
There had been a shift of clerks since his arrival, and the newcomer
asked his name, his impassive scrutiny travelling from the man to the
signature, and from the signature back to the man. A youngish person,
looking the successful broker or lawyer, who had been chatting with the
clerk, saw the movement and imitated it as Shelby walked away.
"And you said there were no celebrities," he bantered.
The clerk shrugged listlessly.
"The 'Hon. Calvin Ross Shelby,'" read the reporter. "There ought to be
a story in a man who has the nerve to subscribe himself like that in a
New York hotel. What do you know about his pathetic case?"
"Stranger to me," the bored one unbent to say.
The questioner spied a fellow-reporter whose specialty was politics.
"Billy," he demanded, pointing to the register, "who is the Hon. Calvin
Ross Shelby?"
"Candidate for Congress in the Demijohn District," returned the
political expert, promptly, smiling at the signature. "Rather
picturesque fight the honorable is having. He's bucking a fusion
opposition headed by the author of that popular poem about a statue.
Where is he? I want to see him. There's nothing else doing here."
They pursued the stranger down the corridor, overhauling him at the
entrance of the cafe.
"The Hon. Calvin Ross Shelby, I believe," said the political reporter,
lifting his hat, and naming the newspaper he represented. His
companion, who looked like a broker, but whose present mission was to
screw copy out of hotel arrivals, followed his example, and the group
was almost immediately increased by three more well-dressed
cosmopolitans with ingratiating manners and a scent for news.
Five New York reporters hanging on his words! To achieve this giddy
pinnacle on the heels of calling himself an atom seemed to Shelby
almost to pass belief. Somehow he rallied.
"Gentlemen," he beamed, "I'm glad to see you. Have a drink."
No liquor distilled could add to Shelby's intoxication. It was not
reporting, this swift interchange of trenchant thought between men of
the world; or if reporting, a sublimated sort, free of note-books and
the disconcerting trademarks of the guild as he had known it elsewhere.
"I can't understand the hostility felt by some public men for the
press," he remarked, thumbs in armholes, coat lapels thrown benignly
back. "Our relations, I take it, should be confidential."
Practice followed precept, and in that delightful atmosphere Shelby's
confidences flowered like young May. Tuscarora County was put through
its paces for a gaping world; Clinton's Ditch--"well-spring of New
York's commercial supremacy, gentlemen"--shown in rosiest apotheosis;
the Empire State pedestalled imperially among the nations. Nor could
his versatility be bounded by politics alone. The inevitable allusion
to Bernard Graves's poem involved literature, and to stand, as he did,
under the same roof with the nymphs who had long bodied forth his
pictorial ideal, was to invite a public avowal of his proposed
championship of free art. He was lured the farther into this quagmire
by the guileless questioning of one of his listeners, who lingered in
obvious fascination after his fellows had departed, and, in happy
ignorance that the cherubic youth was the son of an artist of
distinction, and himself no mean critic of things artistic, Shelby
voiced opinions more vigorous than discreet.
"There was a time," he confessed apropos of the nymphs, "when I thought
those ladies the best ever. Young eyes won't hesitate between a plump
Venus and a lean Madonna."
"And now?"
"Well, I haven't altogether renounced the world, the flesh, and the
devil, but my taste has changed. A good animal picture fetches
me,--something like Rosa What's-her-name's 'Horse Fair' you've got
up-town in Central Park. I call that big art."
"Big art; that's the word," agreed the cherub, shaking hands. "It
measures 197 x 93 1/2," he murmured to his cigarette.