HOW RICHARD WAS TAUGHT MANY THINGS
Richard went every day at eleven for a brief conference with Senator Hanway. The latter was no wise backward in his use of the columns of the Daily Tory. There are so many things concerning both men and measures that statesmen want said, and which, because of their modesty, they themselves hesitate to say, that Senator Hanway, when now through Richard he might tell this story of politics or declare that proposal of state, and still keep his own name under cover, discovered in the Daily Tory a source of relief. So much, in truth, did Senator Hanway, by way of Richard and the Daily Tory, contribute to the gayety of the times, that the editor-in-chief was duly scandalized. He aroused himself on the third evening, killed Richard's dispatch, and rebuked that earnest journalist with the following:
"Send news; nothing but news. No one wants your notion of the motives of representatives in fight over Speakership."
This led to a word or two between Richard and Mr. Gwynn, the upcome being a wire from Mr. Gwynn to the editor desiring him on all occasions and without alteration or addition to print Richard's dispatches. The editor in retort reminded Mr. Gwynn that the Daily Tory had a reputation and a policy: also there were laws of libel. Mr. Gwynn declined to be moved by these high considerations, and reiterated his first command. After that Richard in each issue gave way to an unchecked column letter, which was run sullenly by the editor and never a word displaced.
This daily letter, signed "R. S.," brought Richard mighty comfort; he read it fresh and new each morning with mounting satisfaction. Richard, like other authors, found no literature so good to his palate as his own; and while his stories looked well enough when he wrote them, the types never failed in uncovering charms that had escaped his ken. These were complacent days for Richard the defective; ones to nourish his self-love.
Being his first work, and performed under his own tolerant mastery, with none to molest him or make him editorially afraid, it stood scant wonder that he went about the subject of his own sleepless self-congratulations. What Richard needed—and never knew it—was dismissal in rapid succession from at least four newspapers; such a course of journalistic sprouts would have set his feet in proper paths. Under the circumstances, however, this improving experience was impossible; missing the benefits thereof, Richard must struggle on as best he might without a bridle.
It was fortunate, when one remembers his blinded ignorance, a condition aggravated by his own acute approval of himself, that Richard had a no more radical guide than was the cautious Senator Hanway. While that designing gentleman—the Daily Tory turning the stone—grinded many a personal ax—note bene, never once without exciting the sophisticated wrath of the editor-in-chief—he was no such headlong temper of a man as to invite the paper into foolish extravagancies, whether of statement or of style. As the bug under the chip of the Daily Tory's Washington correspondence, Senator Hanway was neither a vindictive nor yet a reckless bug; and the paper, while it became the organ of his ambitions, made some reputational profit by the very melody of those guarded tunes he ground.
Richard, you are not to suppose, went unaware of those employments to which Senator Hanway put him in the vineyard of his policies. He realized the situation and walked therein with wide and willing eyes. It served his tender purpose; it would take him to the Harley house and throw him, perchance, into the society of Dorothy without that dulcet privilege being identified as the true purpose of his call.
One cannot but marvel that Richard should be at the trouble of so much difficult chicane. It is strange that he should so entangle what might have been the simplest of love stories; for you may as well know here as further on that, had Richard laid bare the truth of himself, Mrs. Hanway-Harley, far from fencing her daughter against him and his addresses, would have taken the door off its hinges to let him in. But Richard, as was heretofore suggested, had been most ignorantly brought up, or rather had been granted no bringing up at all. Moreover, in the sensitive cynicism of his nature, which made a laugh its armor and was harsh for fear of being hurt, our young Democritus had long ago bound himself with vows that he would accept no friendship, win no love, that did not come to him upon his mere and unsupported merits as a man. In his own fashion, so far from being the philosopher he thought, Richard was a knight errant—one as mad and as romantic as the most feather-headed Amadis that ever came out of Gaul; and so he is to make himself a deal of trouble and have himself much laughed at before ever he succeeds in slipping through the fingers of this history to seek obscurity with Dorothy by his side. For all that, it is Richard's due to say that his "R. S." letters attracted polite as well as political attention, and got him much respected and condemned. Also they lodged him high in the esteem of Senator Hanway, who discovered daily new excellencies in him; and this came somewhat to the rescue of Richard one day.
Senator Hanway had a room in a wing of the Harley house which Mrs. Hanway-Harley called his study. It was a sumptuous apartment, furnished in mahogany and leather, and a bookcase, filled with Congressional Records which nobody ever looked at, stood against the wall. Here it was that Senator Hanway held his conferences; it was here he laid his plans and brooded them. When Senator Hanway desired to meet a gentleman and preferred to keep the meeting dark, this study was the scene of that secrecy. In such event, the blinds were drawn to baffle what prying or casual eye might come marching up the street; for in Washington, to see two men conversing, is to know nine times in ten precisely what the conversation is about. Commonly, however, the blinds were thrown wide, as though the study's pure proprietor courted a world's scrutiny.
It was in this study that Richard was received by Senator Hanway. There was an outside door; a caller might be admitted from the veranda without troubling the main portals of the Harley house. To save the patience of that journalist, Senator Hanway called Richard's attention to the veranda door, and commissioned him to make use of it. Senator Hanway said that he did not wish to subject one whom he valued so highly, and who was on such near terms with his good friend, Mr. Gwynn, to the slow ceremony which attended a regular invasion of the premises.
Richard thanked Senator Hanway, although he could have liked it better had he been less thoughtfully polite. Richard would have preferred the main floor, with whatever delay and formal clatter such entrance made imperative. The more delay and the more clatter, the more chance of seeing Dorothy. It struck him with a dubious chill when Senator Hanway suddenly distinguished him with the freedom of that veranda door—a franchise upon which your statesman laid flattering emphasis, saying that not ten others had been granted it.
This episode of the veranda door befell upon the earliest visit which Richard made in his quality of correspondent of the Daily Tory. On that day, being admitted by way of the Harley front door, Richard had the felicity of coming in with the before-mentioned daily sheaf of roses. Richard and the blossom-bearing colored youth entered together, the door making the one opening to admit both; and by this fortunate chance—which Richard the wily had waited around the corner to secure—he was given the joy of seeing and hearing the beautiful Dorothy gurgle over the flowers.
"And to think," cried Dorothy, her nose in the bosom of a rose, "no one knows from whom they come! Mamma thinks Count Storri sends them. It's so good of him, if he does!"
Dorothy's head was bowed over the flowers. As she spoke, however, her blue eye, full of mischief, watched Richard through a silken lock of hair that had fallen forward.
"But you don't think it's Storri?" cried Richard dolorously.
"Oh, no!" returned Dorothy, shaking her head with wise decision, "I don't think it's Count Storri. But of course I wouldn't tell mamma so; she doesn't like to be contradicted. Still," and here Dorothy looked quite wistful, "I wish I knew who did send them."
Before Richard could take up the delicate question of the roses and their origin, there arrived the word of Senator Hanway that he be shown into the study.
"Now that I'm a working journalist, Miss Harley," said Richard, "I shall be obliged to see your uncle every day."
"Oh, dear!" exclaimed Dorothy, with a fine sympathy; "how hard they drive you poor newspaper people!"
"Still, we go not without our rewards," returned Richard.
Then observing that Senator Hanway's messenger—who had not those reasons for loitering which made slow the feet of Richard—was already halfway down the hall, Richard took Dorothy's small hand in his, and, before she knew her peril or might make an effort to avoid it, rapturously kissed the fingers, not once, not twice, but five times. The very fingers themselves burned with the scandal of it! Following this deed of rapine, Richard went his vandal way; Dorothy's face turned a twin red with the roses.
Dorothy said nothing in rebuke of Richard, and it is to be assumed that, so flagrant an outrage left her without breath to voice her condemnation. That she was disturbed to the heart is sure, for she went instantly to her friend, the sibyl of the golden locks, for conference, confidence, and consolation.
"Wasn't he wretchedly bold, Bess?" said Dorothy in an awe-stricken whisper.
"Absolutely abandoned!" said Bess.
Then the two sat in silence for ten impressive seconds.
"Bess," remarked Dorothy tentatively, "suppose mamma were to forbid me loving one whom I loved——" Here she broke down, aghast.
"My dear Dorothy," cried the other, surprised into deepest concern, "your mother didn't see him kissing your fingers, did she?"
"Oh, no, Bess," said Dorothy hurriedly, "we were quite alone."
"You foolish girl," returned Bess. "You alarmed me!"
"But really, Bess," persisted Dorothy, "to put it this way: if your mamma insisted, would you give way and marry a man you didn't love?"
"You mean Count Storri," replied Bess. "Now, Dorothy, listen to me. In the first place, you are an arrant hypocrite. You pretend to be soft and powerless and yielding, and to appeal to me for counsel. And all the time you are twice as obstinate as I am, and much less likely to accept a man you don't love, or give up one whom you love."
"Well, Bess," said Dorothy defensively, a bit stricken of these truths, "really, I want your opinions on marriage."
"Oh, that is it! Then snap your fingers in the teeth of command, and marry no man whom you do not love!"
"But the man you love might not want you!" sighed Dorothy.
"The man you love will always want you," declared Bess with firmness.
"How sweet you are!"
"And as for parents making matches for their daughters," continued Bess, unmoved of the tribute, and speaking as one who for long had made a study of the world's domestic affairs, "it is sure to lead to trouble and divorce."
"Is it?" asked Dorothy, appalled.
"It is!" returned Bess with a sepulchral air, as though pronouncing doom. Then, mocking Dorothy's serious face with a little tumult of laughter, she went on: "There; it's all decided now the way you wished. You are to refuse Count Storri and marry Mr. Storms without bestowing either care or thought on what Mamma Harley or Papa Harley or Uncle Pat may say or do about it."
"Really, Bess, how much better you have made me feel. After all, there's nobody like a wise, dear, true friend!"
"The value of such a friend is beyond conjecture," returned the mocking Bess, reassuming her tones of the oracle.
The memory of Richard's kisses on her fingers never left Dorothy all that day and all that night. Those fortunate little fingers seemed translated into something rosily better and apart from herself. And brow and ears and eyes and cheeks and lips went envying those lucky fingers; and in the end the lips crept upon them and kissed them for having been kissed; perhaps with vague thoughts of robbing them of some portion of the blissful wealth wherewith they had been invested. Richard, being male, for his part thought the less about it, and went simply meditating future sweet aggressions. And that shows the difference between a man and a maid.
Richard, feeding his love with thoughts of Dorothy and his vanity with ink, and thereby gaining two mighty reasons for living, began to keep earlier hours. He turned out at nine o'clock instead of eleven and twelve, hours which had formerly matched his languid fancy. These energetic doings bred alarm in both Matzai and Mr. Pickwick, evoking snappish protests from the latter, who, being of a nocturnal turn, held that the day was meant for sleep. On the morning after he had been honored with the privilege of the veranda door, Richard was borne upon by something akin to gloom. This feeling went with him from bed to bath, and from bath to breakfast, and finally walked with him all the way to the Harley house. He was willing to sacrifice the Daily Tory and yoke himself personally to the mills of Senator Hanway's designs; but he must see Dorothy. That brightness was the bribe, unspoken and unknown to all save himself, that had brought him into Washington and these sundry and divers plots and counterplots of state. And now to be cheated through the polite blunderings of a gentleman who was so engaged in considering himself that he had neither time nor eyes for any other! Richard swore roundly in mental fashion at his contrary fate. And yet he saw no way to better the situation; and perforce, for this morning at least, he was driven to push the bell of the veranda door. He might have gone about the ceremony with more cheer had he known how he was to gain an ally in his troubles; one, moreover, whose aid was sure to prove effective.
As Senator Hanway's black messenger ushered Richard into that statesman's study, the radiant Dorothy, perched at the end of Senator Hanway's table, was the picture that greeted his eyes. Our radiant one sought to stifle her effulgence beneath a look severe and practical. This expression of practical severity was a failure, and served to render her more dazzling.
"I have made up my mind," quoth Dorothy, the moment Richard was inside the door, and speaking in the loud, dead-level monotone which she conceived to be the voice for business conversations as against the giggling, gurgling ups and downs of conversations purely social, "I have made up my mind to come in every morning and help Uncle Pat. I'm tired of being a useless encumbrance."
Delivering which, Dorothy wore the resolved manner of a new Joan of Arc who had come seeking fields of politics rather than those of war.
"And I have been of use to you, haven't I, Uncle Pat?" demanded Dorothy.
"Of measureless use, dear," said Senator Hanway. Then, turning to his secretary, who had taken a score of letters shorthand and was about to seek his own quarters and run them off upon the typewriter: "Have those copied by three o'clock and bring them here for signature."
Senator Hanway had no more than given Richard good-morning when Senator Loot was announced.
"He won't stay long," said Senator Hanway; "but while he's here, dear, won't you take Mr. Storms into the library?" This request was preferred to Dorothy.
"Yes," began Dorothy, when she and Richard found themselves in the library, and nothing to interrupt them but the distant slumbrous rumble of Senator Loot. "Yes, I'm going to help Uncle Pat. And I'm going to learn how to be a newspaper woman, too. I think every girl should be capable of earning her own living. Not that I expect to be obliged to do so; but it is best to be prepared." Dorothy's face was funereal, as though disasters, clawed and fanged, were roaming the thickets of the future to spring upon her. "So I shall learn the newspaper trade; go in and be a writer as you are—only not so brilliant—and then, if it were necessary, I could earn my own way."
Now Richard knew these industrious resolutions to be the veriest webs of subterfuge. Their duplicity was apparent, and they were spun for him. Dorothy owned no thought of missing his morning calls, and had met Senator Hanway's courtesies of the veranda door with a move in flank. The news cocked up the spirits of Richard excessively, and gave to his Farnese shoulders an insolent swing as he strutted up and down the library. He had expected Dorothy to reproach him for the soft violence done her fingers; but she made no mention of it. Whereupon—in such manner do unchecked iniquities multiply upon themselves—Richard turned towards her with a purpose of again outraging those little fingers with the burden of a fresh caress. The little fingers, grown wary, however, were in discreet retirement behind Dorothy, as, with her back to the window, she stood facing him. Defeated in his campaign against the fingers before it had begun, Richard was driven to discuss Dorothy's work-a-day resolves.
"Newspaper work? Do society, I suppose?"
Richard had gotten hold of the idioms of the craft, and spoke of "doing society" as though reared among the types.
"No, not society," and Dorothy shook her head. "I'd pick 'em to pieces, the minxes; and the papers don't want that. No, I'm going to learn about politics with Uncle Pat. I shall write politics. You must teach me."
Richard said he would.
"Only you should know," said he, "that I need a deal of teaching myself."
"But you can write!" cried Dorothy, her hands emerging from their retreat to clasp each other in a glow of admiration. "I've read your letters. They remind me of Carlyle's 'French Revolution.'"
This staggered Richard; was his idol laughing at him? A glance into her eyes showed only a darkened enthusiasm; whereat Richard puffed and swelled. Perhaps his Daily Tory letters did have the rhetorical tread of the Scotchman's masterpiece. In any event it was pleasant to have Dorothy think so. Before he could frame his modesty to fit reply, the cumbrous retreat of Senator Loot was overheard.
"Now we must go back," said Dorothy.
"May I have a rose?" asked Richard, pointing to his blushing consignment of that day, where they luxuriated in a giant vase.
"Don't touch my hands!" cried Dorothy fiercely, whipping them behind her.
Richard gave his humble parole that he would not touch her hands. Being reassured, Dorothy pinned a bud in his lapel. The little fingers were so fondly confident of safety that they made no haste in these labors of the bud. Their confidence went unabused; Richard adhered to his parole and never touched them.
"I'm glad you can keep your promise!" said Dorothy, pouting from pure delight.
Later, the pair made love to one another with their eyes across the dignified desk of Senator Hanway, while that statesman told Richard matters to the detriment of Mr. Hawke's canvass for a Speakership and Governor Obstinate's claims upon a Presidency, of which, through the medium of the Daily Tory, he believed the public should be informed.
"My dear Dorothy," observed the sibyl of the golden locks, when the other related how faithfully Richard had kept his compact concerning her fingers, "you ought never to make a man promise the thing you do not want. They are such dullards; besides, they have a passion for keeping their word."
The President and General Attorney and thirty-two underling attorneys of the Anaconda Airline, in accord with Mr. Gwynn's request, descended upon Washington. The thirty-two underling attorneys, coming to town by twos and threes, were amazed when they found a gathering of the Anaconda Airline clans. They collected in groups and clots at the Shorcham, the Arlington, and Willard's to discuss their amazement.
The President and General Attorney, if they were smitten of wonder, concealed it, and within the hour after their arrival rang the doorbell of Mr. Gwynn. They were ushered into a room the tamed splendors of which told the thorough taste that had conceived it. Then their cards went up to Mr. Gwynn.
Word came back that Mr. Gwynn was deeply engaged. Would the President and the General Attorney of the Anaconda Airline call again in an hour? The President and General Attorney had for long harbored a theory that Mr. Gwynn was the greatest man on earth. Now they knew it; the fact was displayed beyond dispute by his failure to instantly see them. The President and General Attorney withdrew, silent in their awe, and Mr. Gwynn dispatched Matzai to find Richard.
On the hour's even stroke, the President and General Attorney were again at Mr. Gwynn's. That personage was still unable to meet them; however, he sent Richard with written excuses for his absence and the suggestion that Richard, speaking in his place, would put them in possession of his wishes.
"Mr. Gwynn desired to say," observed Richard, "that Anaconda Airline interests deeply depend upon Mr. Frost for Speaker."
"What we've said from the beginning!" remarked the President to the General Attorney.
"Precisely what we've said!" observed the General Attorney.
They had said nothing on that point; but they were too well drilled in their own interests to fail of complete coincidence with a gentleman who could call a special shareholders' meeting, elect a new directory, and revise the entire official family of the Anaconda Airline within any given thirty days.
"Mr. Gwynn asks you, then," said Richard, "since you and he agree on the propriety of Mr. Frost for Speaker, to consult with Senator Hanway."
And now the Anaconda Airline was in the war for the House gavel. Under the supervision of Senator Hanway, it brought its whole smothering weight to bear upon the Hawke twenty of those twenty-three whose districts it dominated. The Hawke twenty wriggled and writhed, but in the end gave way—all save a rock-ribbed quartette. They must stay by the standards of Mr. Hawke.
"Our constituents will destroy us if we don't," said they.
"The Anaconda will destroy you if you do," was the blunt retort of the General Attorney.
The four stood firm, and were blacklisted for slaughter at the polls a year away, at which time they were faithfully knocked on the head. Sixteen of the twenty went over to Mr. Frost; the President of the Anaconda Airline came out in an interview in the Daily Tory and said that the shift of the excellent sixteen was a popular victory.
It was two days before the caucus. The line-up of forces, Frost against Hawke, Hanway against Obstinate, under able captains went vigorously forward. It pleased Senator Hanway to hear that the Frost fortunes were being unexpectedly served by the volcanic Mr. Hawke himself. That gentleman had fallen into a state of indignant eruption; his best friends could not approach him because of the smoke and flame and lava which his rage cast up.
"The most scoundrel thing I ever saw in Washington is that I am made to fight for the Speakership!" cried the eruptive Mr. Hawke; and this fashion of outburst does not help any man's cause.
To steal a simile from a dead gentleman who stole from others in his day, Mr. Hawke went into the final battle of the caucus much after the manner wherewith a horse approaches a drum, that is, with a deal of prance and but little progress, and, for the most part, wrong end foremost. Even then the count of Senator Hanway—a cold-blooded computation—gave that gavel to the violent Mr. Hawke. So much for being a House leader, a tariff monger, and a friend of Governor Obstinate.
On the afternoon before the caucus, Senator Hanway took a last look at the array. Besides Mr. Hawke and Mr. Frost, there were two other candidates, Mr. Patch and Mr. Swinger. These latter had been sent into the lists by the diplomacy of Senator Hanway to hold the delegations from their States, a majority whereof, if released, would fly to Mr. Hawke. With all four names before the caucus, Mr. Frost would lead Mr. Hawke by two, without having a majority. Eliminate Mr. Patch and Mr. Swinger, however, and Mr. Hawke would be chosen by a majority of seven. And, while the battle might be made to stagger on through forty ballots, in the end Mr. Patch and Mr. Swinger must perforce withdraw. They could give no excuse for holding on forever in a fight shown to be hopeless. Some method must be devised to break the Hawke alignment or in a last solution of the situation Mr. Frost would lose.
Senator Hanway made ready to play his last card—a card to which nothing short of the desperate turn of events would have caused him to resort. He made a list of eighteen of Mr. Hawke's supporters; he picked them out because they were nervous, hysterical souls whom one might hope to stampede. Senator Hanway then got the names, with the home addresses, of a score of the principal constituents of each of these aspen, hysterical gentlemen.
A telegraph operator, one close-mouthed and of a virtuous taciturnity, sat up all night with Senator Hanway in his study—the night before the caucus. There was none present but Senator Hanway and the wordless telegraphic one; the former, deeming the occasion one proper for that cautious rite, drew the blinds closely.
At Senator Hanway's dictation, the taciturn one who had been so forethoughtful as to bring with him envelopes and blanks, wrote messages to each of the hysterical eighteen, about twenty to a man, signing them with the names of those influential constituents. The messages were letter-perfect; in each instance, the message for signature bore the name of one upon whom the member who would receive it leaned in his destinies of politics. No two were worded alike, albeit each commanded and demanded the Speakership for Mr. Frost. When they were done, nearly four hundred of them, the taciturn one endowed them with those quirleyques and symbols and hieroglyphics which belong with genuine messages, and finished by sealing each in an envelope properly numbered and addressed. Then the taciturn one made a delivery book to match the messages.
"There!" exclaimed Senator Hanway, when at four in the morning the taciturn one tossed the last forged message upon the pile and said that all were done; "that's finished. Now at two o'clock put on a messenger's uniform and come to the Capitol. It's 4 a. m. now, and this is Saturday; the caucus convenes at two o'clock sharp. It will be held in the House chamber. There will be ten ballots; I have arranged for that, and Patch and Swinger will not withdraw before. The ten ballots will consume two hours and a half—fifteen minutes to a roll call. After they have gone through four roll calls, begin to send in these messages; the caucus officer on the door will sign for them. Send first one to each member; then two; then four; then five; then all you have. Give about fifteen minutes between consignments. Have you got my plan?"
The taciturn one nodded.
"Here is a one-hundred-dollar bill," observed Senator Hanway, "for your night's work. Four more wait for you when Mr. Frost is declared the caucus nominee."
Saturday afternoon; and the caucus met behind locked doors. It was a mighty struggle; now and then some waifword reached the outside world of what Titan deeds were being done. There were speeches, and roll calls; men lost their heads and then their reputations. The sixteen threatened of the Anaconda Airline, with the fear of political death upon them, voted for Mr. Frost. Messrs. Patch and Swinger held fast through ballot after ballot, keeping their delegations together, while the Hawke captains pleaded and begged and promised and threatened in their efforts to make them withdraw and release their followings to the main battle. Through roll call after roll call the tally never varied. With two hundred and ten members voting, the count stood: Frost, ninety-two; Hawke, ninety; Swinger, fifteen; Patch, thirteen. Of the twenty-eight who voted for Messrs. Patch and Swinger, it was understood that Mr. Hawke would take three-fourths upon a breakaway. For this reason the Hawke captains labored and moiled with Messrs. Patch and Swinger to withdraw and cast those twenty-eight votes into the general caldron.
