From the beginning Thomas Patrick had realised that there is more in a
political campaign than meets the eye. Therefore he was neither
surprised nor suspicious when one morning the Chief told him to hire a
deposit box at the Republic Trust in his own name.
“And give me the keys,” he said. “Certain amount of confidential stuff
oughtn’t to be floating around.”
So Thomas Patrick rented a box, and rather proudly signed his name on
the card. Some of these days he and Mary would have such a box. He often
felt now that the deed for their house should be in a safer place than
under the paper in the bureau drawer. And later on, when he occasionally
took a sealed manila envelope to the Trust Company he enjoyed going into
the basement of the bank, where uniformed attendants swung open the
enormous door to the vaults, and he was able to gain an access
impossible to the shrewdest cracksmen in the business.
Next to being great oneself was being attached to greatness.
Greatly to his relief the Elliot matter seemed to have gone no further.
The campaign was in full swing now, and successfully so. Now and then he
went with the Chief here and there, and from the back of a hall listened
with swelling pride to the speeches he himself had helped to prepare. He
would treasure the pleasant things he heard and tell the Chief on the
way back.
“Surely had them going to-night, sir,” he would say.
“Think so?”
“It was sticking out all over them. One fellow near me, he said: ‘Talks
like a Senator, and by God, he _looks_ like one!’”
“Humph!” the Chief would say, and perhaps straighten his tie.
There were no more evenings at the house now, and Thomas Patrick missed
them. But the Chief seemed happier, in the thick of things as he was
now, and to miss his wife less. He was fairly confident, too.
“Mary like the idea of Washington?” he asked once.
“She’s crazy about it.”
“You’ll have to have more money there,” he said, in his large way. “It
costs a lot to live there.”
It seemed impossible for a human being to be happier than Thomas Patrick
Finnerty was, in those days. Nor less suspicious.
If he had felt no distrust at the renting of the safe deposit box, he
felt even less when he learned one day that the Chief felt the need of
private quarters of his own. Thomas Patrick was becoming an old
campaigner, and he began to see that it was sometimes necessary to give
the people what was good for them rather than what they wanted, and even
to conceal the fact that they were being done good. Also the opposition
was growing bitter, and there was talk of a leak in the office.
“I have to see a lot of fellows,” the Chief explained, “that I don’t
want to take to the house. And with reporters hanging about all the
time, I can’t see them here.”
“Yes, sir,” said Thomas Patrick, enormously flattered at this
confidence.
“What I think you’d better do,” said the Chief, considering, “is to rent
me an apartment somewhere. In your own name. You might try the Burleigh.
I understand they have some.”
“They’re pretty expensive.”
“Well, we’ll charge it to campaign expenses!” said the Chief.
Thomas Patrick was very busy the next few days. He took the apartment,
and equipped it with various things evidently necessary to a political
campaign, cigars in quantity, a poker table and chips, and the Chief’s
particular brand of cigarettes, but without his monogram, of course. And
he paid the first month’s rent in advance out of a checking account of
his own, established for the purpose.
Thomas Patrick had a curious feeling of being a secret and powerful
figure in national affairs. The only drawback was that Mary could not
share this inner knowledge with him.
“All set, sir!” he announced to the Chief one afternoon, as he handed
over the keys.
“Fine,” said the Chief.
He drew his check book toward him and made out a check. Then he tore it
out and passed it over; it was to Thomas Patrick Finnerty, for five
hundred dollars. Thomas Patrick coloured to the roots of his nondescript
hair.
“I didn’t do it for money,” he stammered.
“Campaign expenses, Pat!” said the Chief. And then he did an unusual
thing. He got up and put his hand on Thomas Patrick’s shoulder. “You’ve
stuck by me, Pat,” he said, “and I don’t forget those things.”
Never, save when Mary agreed to marry him, had Thomas Patrick been so
happy. And the Chief’s touch on his shoulder meant more than the money
in his hand.
“I guess I won’t thank you,” he said huskily. “I guess you know I’ll go
on sticking, sir. I guess I’m that kind.”
The Chief was touched. He knew devotion when he saw it, and he knew too
that there wasn’t too much of it floating about. Also, his own
generosity exalted him; he was, so to speak, carried on the wave of it a
bit further than perhaps he had meant to go.
“How about taking that ‘campaign’ check,” he suggested, “and buying
fifty shares of B. T. & P. on a ten dollar margin? I understand there’s
something doing there.”
“But suppose it goes down?”
“Oh, I could carry you all right. But I don’t think it will.”
The total result of which was that three days later on Thomas Patrick
Finnerty cashed in a seven hundred dollar profit, making twelve hundred
in all, and bought himself immediately a pair of new shoes, not before
they were badly needed.
He had not told Mary. She feared and hated speculation, for one thing.
Not, of course, that he was going to speculate any more. He was through.
And the second reason was that their wedding anniversary was due on the
fourth of the next month. He was going to give it all to her then, as a
present.
At first he meant to give it to her in a check. Then—oh, he was
cunning—he thought of a better way. He would cash it, and first of all
he would hand her a ten-dollar bill.
“Thought you might prefer buying your own present,” he would say.
“Oh, Pat! You’re a darling. I’ll get—” Well, maybe she would say silk
stockings. She was crazy about silk stockings.
“Then you might want to spend this, too,” he would say, airily. And lay
another bill in her lap.
And so on, through the whole amount. She would grow silent after awhile,
and just sit staring. And then perhaps her throat would work a little
and she would cry. Laughing, too, of course. She had a funny way of
doing both together sometimes.
“Kinda set us up in Washington, eh what?” he would say. And she would
hold onto him as if she would never let go.
He was sublimely happy. He held his head higher now as he walked home
from the office, and often he came in whistling.
“You’d think you were going to be a Senator yourself,” Mary said
sometimes.
“Maybe I will.”
“Two new neckties, too!” she said. “Some night I’m going to call up the
Chief’s house and see if you’re really there. Maybe you have a girl
somewhere.”
“Maybe I have!” said Thomas Patrick, strutting about with his secret.
But, as it happened, he did not carry out his plan entirely. Nobody can
say exactly why some small patch of apparently extraneous material
sometimes creeps into the fabric of a life, and entirely alters the
whole thing. But it happened now.
One night he saw Mary reading a newspaper advertisement of fur coats,
poring over it in her absorbed fashion, and he had his brilliant idea.
“Look pretty good, don’t they?” he said, over her shoulder.
“They’re half price.” But she added, for fear of hurting him, “I don’t
want one, you know. My suit’s as good as ever.”
“Well, we’re not in the fur coat class. Not yet,” he said craftily.
“Some of these days—”
“—when you’re President!” said Mary.
On the evening of their anniversary he staggered up the street with a
huge box, and set it carefully inside the hall door. Then he wandered
back. Mary was dressed with unusual care, and he could see flowers on
the dining room table.
“Going to have company?” he inquired nonchalantly.
“Company?”
“All dressed up, aren’t you?”
“Why, Pat!” she said, with a little quiver of her full throat. “You
don’t mean to say—!”
“Great Scott!” he said. “Who’d ever believe I’d go and forget it?”
He tried to take her in his arms, but she evaded him.
“You forgot it!” she said. “You’re tired of me. I’ve been seeing it for
some time. I’m not pretty—oh, no, I’m not—and you’re going up in the
world and I’m standing still.”
“Why, Mary!”
“Oh, it’s true. Everybody sees the difference. Mrs. Tufts was here
to-day, giving me a talk about holding a husband. ‘They’re a slippery
lot,’ she said. ‘The minute you sit back and let go your hold, they’re
off.’ That’s what she said.”
“I was only fooling, honey.”
“Oh, you say that now.”
“If you don’t believe me, come out in the hall.”
Just a fur coat, and not a very grand one at that, but how it changed
the whole atmosphere of the little house that night! With Mary crying
and laughing—wouldn’t one know she would do that?—and Thomas Patrick
standing her up in it and turning her around. Showing her the hidden
pockets, and the depth of the fur, and even the quality of the lining,
and then fastening the storm collar up over her throat and fetching down
a hat, any old hat, to get the complete effect.
And later on Mary—she _was_ clever, he thought—covering an old coat
hanger with cotton and muslin, so no wear should come to it from the
hanging away. Even the final depositing of it in a special closet, and
locking it up, and finding a place to hide the key—all of it more or
less sacramental.
She had accepted his explanation of it without question. The Chief had
given him a check for the extra work, and who should he spend it on if
not on her?
“You needed a new overcoat,” she said.
“Oh, I’ll get that, all right,” he said in that strange new lordly
manner of his. “We’re on the up curve, old lady. I’m telling you.”
But after they had gone to bed, he lay for some time staring at the
darkness. What had Mrs. Tufts meant, that afternoon? Had Tufts by any
chance seen him at the theatre?
V
It was about a week after that that events began to move with fatal
rapidity.
Thomas Patrick had been out of the office all the afternoon, and when he
got home that evening it was to find Mary with a curious set look about
her mouth, and dinner not ready.
“His wife’s been here,” she said.
“The Chief’s? When did she get back?”
“To-day. She’d had a bill for a fur coat sent to her by mistake. I guess
that brought her.”
“A fur coat!” said Thomas Patrick, with the pulses beating in his neck.
“That’s what I said. And when she went to the office and asked him about
it he said he’d told you to get one for me and charge it to him.”
He was trembling now with fear and anger.
“She had her nerve, coming to _you_!”
“It’s her husband.”
“What did you tell her?”
“What could I say? Tell her he was buying fur coats for another woman?”
“How do you know that? How do you know that wasn’t your fur coat on his
bill?”
“Was it?”
He hesitated. Only once before had he lied to Mary.
“Yes,” he said shortly, and went upstairs.
Dinner was very silent. Mary’s eyes seldom met his and she ate very
little, but it was not until she was carrying out the plates that she
came out with what was in her mind.
“I’m just wondering,” she said, “how often you’ve lied to me before.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I saw the bill for that coat. It wasn’t bought where mine came from.”
She deposited her plates in the kitchen and came back. “What sort of a
hold has he got on you, anyhow?” she demanded. “You’d lie for him. I
believe you’d steal or kill for him.”
“You lied to save her, didn’t you?”
“That’s different,” said Mary shortly. “_She_ hadn’t done anything. But
he’s as crooked about women as a dog’s hind leg, and you’d lie to
protect him.”
She went into the kitchen and closed the door.
Had he been less inarticulate he might have explained to her; that a
great man may have his weaknesses, and yet be great; that he must be
protected from those weaknesses in order to remain great; and his own
feeling that the Chief’s wife might be virtuous, and yet be as guilty as
the Chief.
But he could not talk. He never had any words for great moments.
He got out his papers and spread them on the dining room table, but he
did not work much. His mind kept running back to that phrase of Mary’s:
“What sort of a hold has he got on you anyhow?” And beyond the closed
door, where Mary was working in sombre silence, he knew she was thinking
of that, too. Suspecting him, of God knows what. Perhaps even putting
her fur coat in what she had once scornfully termed a “conscience fund.”
He heard Mary finish her work, and braced himself for her entrance. But
she did not come in. Instead, he heard the back door open and shut, and
knew she had gone to the Tufts’.
He felt strangely oppressed and anxious, and very alone. He had always
been alone until the Chief and Mary had come into his life, and on them
he had lavished all he had. Now Mary seemed miles away. And the
Chief—if only the election was over and the Chief was busy with great
affairs! Out of temptation, so to speak. A Senator could not travel in
shady by-paths. He must stand in the sunlight.
He got his hat and went out. Somehow he dreaded seeing Mary again after
she had been at the Tufts’. He would let her sleep on the situation, and
in the morning things would look different.
He walked endless miles. He had no particular physique, and when he grew
very tired he found a bench in a public square and sat down. Once he lit
a match and looked at his watch. It was only eleven o’clock. Then—he
was very tired—he dozed off, and it was one when he roused himself and
hurried home.
There was a light in the dining room and it frightened him. Mary was
sitting there, waiting for him. Waiting with what she had heard from Mr.
Tufts, to confront him with it. She would never believe that he had only
carried a message to the Elliot girl. She would be sitting there, her
poor throat working, imagining all sorts of terrible things.
He opened the door and slipped into the house, quite white with anxiety
and excitement.
Mary was at the table, leaning her elbows on it. She had been crying,
and as he moved along the little hall he heard her say:
“Here he is now.”