A Spoil of Office: A Story of the Modern West

Radbourn introduced him to a few of the members the next day. It was evident that nobody cared very much whether he had been elected or not. Each man had his own affairs to look after, and greeted him with a flabby hand-shake and looked at him with cold and wandering eyes. It was all very depressing.

He grew nervous over the expenses which he was incurring, although he constantly referred himself back to the fact that he was a Congressman, at a salary of six thousand dollars. His economy was too deeply ingrained to be easily wiped out. He seldom got into a street-car that he did not hold a mental debate with himself to justify the extravagance.

He went about a good deal during the next two or three days, but he continued at the cheap hotel, where he was obliged to keep his overcoat on in order to write a letter or read a newspaper. He went twice to the theatre. He bought a dollar seat the first time, which worried him all through the play, and he did penance the following evening by walking the twenty blocks (both ways), and by taking a fifty-cent seat. He figured it a clear saving of sixty cents. He really enjoyed the play more than he would have done in a dollar seat and consoled himself with the reflection that no one knew he was a Congressman, anyway.

He told Radbourn at the station that he had enjoyed every moment of his stay. As the train drew out he looked back upon the city, and the great dome its centre, with a deep feeling of admiration, almost love. It had seized upon him mightily. He had only to shut his eyes to see again that majestic pile with its vast rotundas, its bewildering corridors and its tumultuous representative hall. Life there would be worth while. He began to calculate how long it would be before he should return. It seemed a long while to wait.

XXV.

IDA COMES INTO HIS LIFE AGAIN

After his return home he accepted every invitation to speak, because that relieved the tedium of his life in Rock River. He took an active part in the fall campaign in county politics, and he delivered the Fourth of July address at the celebration at Rock River amid the usual blare of bands and bray of fakirs and ice-cream vendors, while the small boys fired off crackers in perfect oblivion of anybody but themselves.

It was magnificent to occupy a covered carriage in the parade and to sit on the platform as the centre of interest, and to rise amid cheers, to address the citizens of the United States, to point to cloud-capped towering peaks, to plant the stars and stripes upon battlements of ancient wrong, and other equally patriotic things.

No occasion was complete now without him. The strawberry festival that secured his presence felicitated itself upon the fact and always insisted on "just a few words, Mr. Congressman."

The summer passed rather better than he had anticipated. About a month before his return to Washington he received a letter from Ida asking him to be present at a suffrage meeting in Des Moines, and he accepted the invitation with great pleasure. He had been wondering how he could see her again without making the journey for that purpose, which he could not bring himself to do.

It was a soft, hazy October day and the ride to Des Moines was very beautiful. The landscape seemed to be in drowse, half-sleeping and half-waking. The jays flew from amber and orange-colored coverts of maples and oaks across the blue haze of the open, and quails piped from the hazel-thickets. Crows flapped lazily across the fields where the ploughmen were at work. The threshing machines hummed and clattered with a lower, quieter note, and as Bradley looked upon it all, the wonder of his release from the toil of reaping and threshing and ploughing came upon him again.

Ida was glad to see him. She gave him her hand in a frank, strong clasp.

"You'll stay to tea with us, of course," she said. "There is no one here but mother and I, and we can talk things all over. This is my mother," she said, presenting an elderly lady with a broad, placid face. She said nothing whatever during his stay, but listened to all that was said with unchanging gravity. It was plain she worshipped her daughter, and never questioned what she said.

They sat down at the table.

"Mr. Talcott, this is Christine," said Ida, introducing a comely Norwegian girl who came in with the tea. "Christine takes care of mother while I'm away."

"Ay tank sometime she take care of me," Christine smilingly replied.

Avoiding family matters, Ida talked on general subjects while the rest listened. She over-estimated Bradley's education, his reading, but he was profoundly thankful for it. He had never heard such talk. It was literature to him. She spoke with such fine deliberation and such choice of words. He felt its grace and power without understanding it. It seemed to him wonderful.

"I should like to be a novelist," she said. "I'd like to treat of this woman's movement."

"Why can't you do it?" he asked.

"I lack the time, the freedom from other interests. But if I could be a novelist, it would be a novelist of life."

He never remembered all that she said, but she made an impression that was almost despair upon him by her incidental mention of books that he had never read, and of authors of whom he had never even heard.

They walked to the church together along the side-walks littered with fallen leaves, and when they entered the side door she began to introduce him to the ladies who swarmed about her the moment they caught sight of her. Bradley felt embarrassed by their multiple presence, but was proud to be introduced by Ida. They moved to the platform. He had never spoken at such a meeting before and he was nervous. He spoke first and spoke well, but he would have done better with Ida's face before him. When she spoke he sat looking up at the beautiful head and feeling rather than seeing the splendid lines of her broad, powerful and unconfined waist. The perfume of her dress and its soft rustle as she moved to and fro before him made him forget her words.

Cargill came up to the platform after the speaking and said jocosely, "Well, Legislator, you're getting ahead. You're laying a foundation for post-mortem fame, anyway. I hear you've been on to Congress."

"Yes, I went on and stayed a few days."

"How'd you like it?"

"How do you do, Mr. Cargill," said Ida at his elbow. "Aren't you out of place here?"

"Not more than usual," replied Cargill. "I'm always out of place."

"Do you know Mr. Birdsell?" she asked, presenting a powerful young man with a singularly handsome face. He had clear brown eyes and a big, graceful mustache. For just a moment as he stood beside Ida, Bradley shivered with a sudden suspicion that they were lovers.

"Mr. Birdsell happens to be on from Muscatene," Ida explained, "and happened in to see a suffrage meeting. He's trying to reconcile himself to the idea of woman's emancipation."

"He'll find a sympathizer in me," put in Cargill.

Bradley studied Birdsell with round-eyed steady stare. He was a superb type of man. It gave Bradley a feeling of awkwardness to stand beside him and a consciousness of stupidity to listen to their banter, but Ida dismissed Cargill and Birdsell summarily and walked home with Bradley. He was not keenly perceptive enough to see that Ida put Birdsell off with a brusqueness that argued a perfect understanding.

They walked home by the risen moon side by side. He had not the courage to take her arm and she did not offer it. He referred again to Washington and she asked him to remember the women in his legislation.

"I don't know what I'm going to do next, but I must reach the farmer's wives again as I did in the days of the grange. I feel for them. They are to-day the most terrible proofs of man's inhumanity. My heart aches for them. There is a new farmer's movement struggling forward, the Alliance. I'm thinking of going into that as a lecturer. Do you know anything about it?"

"No, not much."

They had reached the gate, and they stood there like lovers in the cold, clear moonlight just an instant, but in that lingering action of the woman there was something tender which Bradley seized upon. He asked again —

"You'll let me write to you again, won't you?"

"Certainly. I shall follow your career with the deepest interest. I wish you'd think of this alliance movement and advise me what to do. Good-by." She extended her hand.

"Good-by," he said, and his voice choked. When he turned and walked away Washington was very far away indeed and political honors cheap as dust.

XXVI.

CONGRESSIONAL LIFE

He found Washington less lonely for him on his return. There were many new members, and they sought each other socially and soon managed to have a good deal of talk among themselves, notwithstanding the studied slights of the old members. One member, Clancy, who grew profane at times, said, "These old seeds think they're hell's captains, but I guess we can live if they don't shake hands."

Most of the members were married and lived with their families in rented houses, but others, who were too poor to bring their families or who were bachelors like Bradley, lived in boarding houses. Bradley secured a room and board in a house near the capitol, because he seemed to be nearer the centre of things when he could look out upon the dome.

It surprised him to learn how humbly most of the congressmen lived. They were quite ordinary humans in all ways. Of course some of the senators of great wealth lived in fine houses, but they were the exception, and the poorer members did not conceal their suspicion of these great men.

"It aint a question of how much a man's got," Clancy of Iowa said, "but how he got it. I've simmered the thing down to this: Living in a hash-house aint a guarantee of honesty any more than living in a four-story brown-stone is a sure sign of robbery, but it's a tolerably safe inference."

These rich senators and representatives, owners of vast coal tracts, or iron mines, or factories, rode up to the capitol with glittering turn-outs, their horses' clanking bits and jingling chains, warning pedestrians like Clancy and Talcott, to get out of the way. For the first time in his life Bradley met great wealth with all of its power. It shocked him and made him bitter.

He took little interest in the organizing of the house. His experience in Des Moines taught him to sit quietly outside the governing circle. He accepted a place on one of the minor committees and waited to see what would develop.

His life was very quiet. Nothing was done before the holidays but organize, and he found a great deal of time to study. Radbourn came back during the early weeks of the session and resumed his work.

Clancy went to the theatre very often and attended all manner of shows, especially all that were free or that came to him as a courtesy.

"I've lived where I couldn't get these things," he said, "and I propose to improve each shining hour."

Attending Congress was quite like attending the legislature. Every morning the members went up to the great building, which they soon came to ignore, except as a place to do business in. They trooped there quite like boys going to school. It was the state legislature aggrandized – noisier, more tumultuous and confusing.

In a little while, Bradley ceased to notice the difference in gilding and jim-crackery between the senate and representative ends of the corridors. He no longer noticed the distances, the pictures, or the statues in the vaulted dome, but passed through the vast rotundas with no thought of them. The magnificence of it all grew common with familiarity.

The vast mass, and roar, and motion of the hall itself soon ceased to confuse or abase him. In proportion to membership, he doubted whether there were more able men there than in the State legislature. They were more acute politicians; they were wilier, and talked in larger terms, manipulating states instead of counties – that was all. The routine of the day was of the same general character, and gave him no trouble.

Some of the more famous of the leaders he absolutely loathed – great, bloated, swaggering, unscrupulous, treacherous tricksters. "I'll lend you my support," they said, as if it were something that could be loaned like a horse. He often talked them over with Radbourn, whose experience in and about Congress as a newspaper correspondent had given him an intimate knowledge of men, and had rendered him contemptuous, if not rebellious.

"The men counted party leaders are manipulators, as a matter of fact. They subordinate everything to party success. We've got to have another great political revolution to – to de-centralize and de-machinize the whole of our political method. Our system will break of its own weight; it can't go on. It is supposed to be popular, when in fact, it is getting farther and farther away from the people every year. Just see the departments. Do you know anything about them?"

"No, I don't," Bradley admitted.

"You're like all the rest. Every year the army of useless clerks increases; every year the numbers of useless buildings increases. The whole thing is appalling, and yet the people are getting apparently more helpless to reform it. Laws pile upon laws, when the real reform is to abolish laws. Wipe out grants and special privileges. We ought to be legislating toward equality of opportunity in the world, and here we go with McKinley bills, and the devil knows what else. By the way, to change the subject, what has become of Milton Jennings? He started out to be a great Republican politician."

"Well, he lives there yet; he's still in politics, but doesn't seem to get higher than a county office."

"He was a brilliant fellow, but he started in on the wrong side; there is no hope for him on that side in the West."

"He's married, lives just opposite the Seminary, seems to be reasonably contented."

Radbourn turned suddenly. "You are not married?"

Bradley colored. "No, I'm not."

Radbourn mused a little. "Seems to me, I remember some talk about your marrying that little – Russell girl?"

"Well, I didn't." Bradley had just a moment's temptation to tell Radbourn his whole secret, but he gave it up as preposterous.

Legislation was incredibly slow.

"Beats the devil how little we fellows amount to here," Clancy said one night after they had been sitting all day in their seats, while Brown of Georgia, Dixon of Maine, and others of their like had wasted hour after hour in all sorts of tedious discussions upon mere technicalities. "We can't even vote, by thunder! I'm going to make a great break one of these days and make a motion to adjourn."

Bradley laughed dutifully, for this was the ancient joke.

"It's an outrage," Clancy fumed. The speaker had refused to recognize him and he was furious. "The speaker's got everything in his hands. Say, do you know that it's all made up the day before who's goin' to be recognized?"

"Yes, I found that out some time ago," said Bradley quietly.

"Well, I feel like making a great big kick."

"It wouldn't do any good."

"Yes, it would, it would relieve my feelings. It's a pretty how de do, to send a man here to represent his constituents and then put the whole power of the house into the hands of the speaker and the committee on rules."

Bradley's seat came between two of the old members, Samuels of Mississippi and Col. Maxwell of South Carolina, and they were constantly talking across Bradley's back or before his face, ignoring him completely. It wore on him so that he fell into the habit of sitting over beside the profane Clancy in Bidwell's seat. Bidwell occupied the leather-covered lounge behind the screen so industriously that no one else felt privileged to throw himself down there.

The drinking disgusted Bradley, and the obscene talk which he heard in snatches as he went past sickened him. The same sort of attitude toward the female clerks was expressed by a certain class of the legislators. He began to wonder if he were not abnormal in some way by reason of his repugnance to all this desolating derision of really holy things. He found that while he had less religion than these men, they had infinitely less reverence for the things which he considered sacred.

Some of the better class of members invited him to their houses and he went occasionally, and if he found them uncongenial he never went again. He could not make calls out of duty. It seemed to him that they took very little interest in the higher side of politics and some of them he found were unaware of any higher side of life.

He could not help noticing that Washington was a city full of beautiful girls. His idolatry of Miss Wilbur could not prevent him from admiring them as they streamed along the walk to church. He sometimes looked wistfully at this flood of sunny laughing life that moved by him so near and yet so completely out of his reach. He knew at such times that he had missed something sweet out of his own lonely life.

But these moments were few. He realized that there was no place in the social life of the city for him, and the librarian knew him better than the butlers in the houses of rich senators. He attended one or two public receptions and was thoroughly disgusted with the crush, and felt the essential vulgarity of the whole thing.

His life at the capital was not entirely that of the politician. He had in him capabilities for appreciating art and literature, which most of his colleagues had not. He studied upon economic problems, rather than upon partisan politics, and tried to grasp the meaning of social change and social condition, and to comprehend economic causes and tendencies. He spent many hours upon problems which were unconsciously unfitting him for partisan success.

His life was very full and happy, save for the dull hunger at his heart whenever he thought of Ida. He wrote to her still, but her replies still kept their calm, impersonal tone. One night, when he returned from the capitol, he found a letter from her enclosing some clippings.

"I have joined the Farmers' Alliance," she wrote. "I begin to believe that another great wave of thought is about to sweep over the farmers. The spirit of the grange did not die. It has passed on into this new organization. The difference is going to be that this new alliance of the farmers will be deeper in thought and broader in sympathy. I never believed the grange a failure. It taught people by its failure. I'm going to Kansas to speak for them there. The alliance is very strong there. This order will become political. Its leaders are very enthusiastic."

She passed on to write of other things, but Bradley was deeply affected by this news. He had heard of the alliance obscurely, but had felt that it was only an attempt to revive the old grange movement, and that it could not succeed. But her letter set him thinking.

He wrote away on a speech till nine o'clock, and then went out for his usual walk about the capitol and its grounds, which had never lost their charm, as the city itself had. He had grown into the habit of going out whenever he wished to escape the paltry decoration, the hot colors, the vitiated air, of his boarding-place and the importunities of his fellow-boarders. He went out whenever he wanted to think great and refreshing thoughts, or whenever he felt the need of beauty or the presence of life.

XXVII.

BRADLEY'S LONG-CHERISHED HOPE VANISHES

It had been snowing all the afternoon, and the shrubbery hung heavy and silent with heaped, clinging, feathery snow, dazzling white by contrast with the dark sustaining branches, and the yellow lamps flamed warmly amid the all-surrounding steely blue and glistening white. The damp pavements, where the snow had melted, were banded with gold and crimson from the reflected light of the lamps and the warning glare of car and carriage lights.

As Bradley breathed the pure air and walked soundlessly along the narrow paths and looked across the unflecked, untrodden snow up to the vast and silent dome, he shuddered in wordless delight. He hungered to share it with Ida. It was like fairy-land – so far removed from daylight reality; and yet the sound of sleigh-bells, the occasional shouts of coasters, and the laughter of girls added a familiar human quality to it all, and added an ache to the mysterious shuddering delight of it all. It was so evanescent; it would decay so quickly. The wind, the morning sun, would destroy it.

He walked up to the lonely esplanade, and saw the city's lights shine below him like rubies and amethysts, and saw far beyond the snow-heaped highlands, above which Jupiter hung poised, serene and lone, the king of the western sky.

How far away all this seemed from the brazen declamation, the monotonous reiterations of the reading-clerk, and from the sharp clank of the speaker's gavel! His ear wearied, his heart sick of the whole life of the farcical legislature, with its flood of corrupt bills, got back serenity and youth and repose in the presence of the snows, the silences, and the stars.

Again the impulse seized him to write to Ida and show her his whole soul; to dare and end once for all his ache of suspense. He went back to his room, and seized pen and paper. Everything he wrote seemed too formal or too presumptuous. At last he finished a short letter —

Dear Miss Wilbur: —

I do not know how to begin to say what I want to say. I am afraid of losing you out of my life by not writing, and I'm afraid if I write, I will lose you. It is impossible for me to say what you've done for me. I never would have been anything more than a poor farmer, only for you. I don't want to apologize to you for telling you how much you are to me. I want to appeal to you to give me a chance to work for you; that's all. I want you to give me some hope, if you can.

I know I am asking a great deal even in that. I realize how unreasonable it is. You've only seen me a few times; and yet I'm not going to apologize for it. I must have it over with; I can't go on in this way. Won't you write to me and tell me that I can look forward to the future with hope? Yours sincerely,

Bradley Talcott.

For the next ten days he was of little service to his country except the day he made his speech on the tariff question. It was his first set speech, and he had twenty minutes yielded to him by the gentleman from Missouri, who had charge of the bill. He had the close attention of the House, not only for his thoughts, which were fresh and direct, but also for the natural manner in which he spoke. He had lost a good deal of his "oratory," but had gained a powerful, flexible and colloquial style which made most of the orators around him seem absurd. The fine shadings of emotion and of thought in his voice struck upon the ear wearied with rancous yells and monotonous brazen declamations, with a cool and restful effect. At the close, the members crowded about to congratulate him upon his efforts, and for the moment he felt quite satisfied with himself.

It gave him a shock to see Ida's fateful letter lying upon the hat-rack in his boarding-house, where it had been pawed over by the whole household. He hastened to his room, and dropped into a chair with that familiar terrible numbness in his limbs, and with his heart beating so hard it shortened his breathing. He was like a man breathless with running. When his eyes fell on the writing, his hands ceased to shake, and his quick breathing fell away into a long, shuddering inspiration. He read the first page twice without moving a muscle. Then he turned the page, and finished it. It was not long, and it was very direct.

Dear Mr. Talcott: —

Your letter has moved me deeply, very deeply. I would have prevented its being written if I could. It is the greatest tribute – save one – that has ever come to me; and yet I wish I had not read it. I'm not free to make you any promise. I'm not free to correspond with you any more – now. I've been trying to find a way to tell you so indirectly, but your letter makes it necessary for me to do so directly.

The rest of the letter was an attempt to soften the blow, but it fell upon him very hard.

The possibility which he had always feared had become a fact, the hope which he had kept in the obscure processes of his thought and which had filled a vital place in his action, dropped out and left him purposeless. This hope of somehow, someway having her near to him had been the mainspring of his action and it could not be withdrawn without leaving him disabled.