“But the third floor blazed with electric lights, and the big dome was full of noisy echoes. The senate kept its coat on—you know how they mimic decorum over there—but the house was in its shirt-sleeves, huddled like a pack of wolves around the speaker’s dais, with faces ripe with whisky, shaking its fists under the umbrella of cigar smoke. Every fellow was trying to get his bill passed in the last hour of the session—you know what it is, Hank?”
“Oah, yes,” replied Jennings, “but ’tain’t nothin’ to what ’t used to be under the ol’ constitution. We’d stack a pile o’ them ’ere private acts up on the clerk’s desk, an’ pass ’em all t’ oncet ’ith a whoop. Them ’as the days—but that ’as ’fore your time.”
“Those must have been good old days,” assented the lobbyist, “for the gang.”
“I reckon! A feller could ’a’ done business in them days! Ol’ John M.’d better left the ol’ constitution alone—it ’as good enough. But there ’as a passion fer change right after the war.”
The lobbyist politely nodded concurrence in this view and continued:
“Some of the members clambered on to their desks, filling the air with oaths, ink bottles, and hurtling books with rattling leaves. Sometimes an iron weight sheathed in paper whizzed by on a vindictive mission, and one man made an Egyptian nigger-killer with rubber bands. Some even hurled their copies of the revised statutes—it was the first use they had ever found for them. Once in a while some one would toss a batch of printed bills to the ceiling, where they set the glass prisms of the chandeliers jingling, and then fell like autumn leaves, a shower of dead pledges and withered hopes. And out of all the hubbub rose a steady roar—”
“Like at a lynchin’ bee,” assisted Jennings.
“Exactly,” assented Baldwin, who had never seen a lynching. “There were drunken howls and vacuous laughs, and yet we could hear through it all the hoarse voice of the clerk, his throat so heated that you could see the vapor of his breath, as you can an orator’s, or a wood-chopper’s in winter, rapidly intoning senate bills on third reading. The pages were growing heedless and impertinent. The newspaper correspondents, their despatches on the wires, puffed their cigarettes in professional unconcern, and awaited happenings worthy of late bulletins. The older members, who had been through the mill many times before, lounged low in their seats. One could see, above their desks, only their heads and heels. The speaker, old ’Zeke himself, was in the chair, suave as ever, but growing caustic. He had splintered his sounding-board early in the evening, and had taken to tapping perfunctorily his walnut desk with his little inadequate gavel. And yet he and the older members and the newspaper men would cast occasionally an anxious glance at the clock, and an expectant one at the big doors.
“As I sat there on the old, red lounge under the speaker’s flag-draped canopy, I noticed Henderson of Greene, standing away back under the galleries on the Democratic side, eying the proceedings with the same mysterious stare that had never left him since he had been sworn in. As I have said, I had never spoken to the fellow, but I had always felt a pity for him—he impressed me as a man who had been stunned by repeated raps of bad luck. Along toward the end of the session he had brought his wife up from Greene County to the capital. She had that tired look that country women have. Her face was seamed, her cheeks hollow; her back was bent in a bow, and she walked hurriedly, anxiously along in her flapping skirts beside her tall and somber husband. She had never been away from home before, and the boys had many a laugh over her wonder at the trolley-cars purring along under the maple trees, and her fear of the elevators in the state house—though, for my part, I could see nothing ludicrous in it all. She stayed three or four days and they went everywhere, out to Oak Ridge to see Lincoln’s tomb, over to Eighth Street to visit his old homestead, up to the Geological Museum where the moth-eaten stuffed animals are, and out to Camp Lincoln. They took many trolley rides, and even climbed to the top of the state house dome, whence, they say, you can see Rochester and the prairies for thirty miles around. He brought her over to the house one or two mornings, but not on to the floor as other members did their over-dressed wives; he sent her up to the gallery, where she sat peering down over the railing at the gang—and her husband, who took no part in all that was going on.
“The old woman’s interest in all these new things that had come into her starved life, her ill-concealed pride in her husband’s membership in such a distinguished body of law-givers, were touching to me, and as I looked at him that last night of the session, and thought of her, the wish to do something to lighten their lives came into my heart, but just then, suddenly, old ’Zeke started from his chair, grasped his gavel firmly, and leaned expectantly over his desk. At the same instant the older members dragged their feet down from their desks and sat bolt upright. The newspaper men flung away their cigarettes and adjusted their eye-glasses. The assistant clerk, who had been reading, looked up from the bill then under what I suppose they would have called consideration, and hurriedly gave his place at the reading-desk to the clerk of the house. I knew what was coming. I knew that the Bailey bill was on its way over from the senate. And I heard Bill Hill call: