They mounted up until Dyketon had increased herself from a sprawled-out county-seat into a city of the second class. She had 100,000 inhabitants now—only 83,000 according to the notoriously inadequate federal census figures, but fully 100,000 by the most conservative estimates of the Board of Trade—and old inhabitants were deploring that whereas once they knew by name or face everybody they met, now a fellow could take a stroll on almost every street and about every other person he ran into would be a total stranger to him.
New blood was quick and rampant in Dyketon’s commercial arteries and new leaders had risen up in this quarter or that, but two outstanding figures of the former times still were outstanding. On all customary counts Mr. Jerome Bracken was the best man in town and old Queenie Sears the worst woman. He led all in eminence, she distanced the field in iniquity. By every standard he was at the very top. Nobody disputed her evil hold on the bottommost place of all. Between those heights of his gentility and those depths of her indecency there was a space of a million miles that seemed to any imagination unbridgeable; at least that seemed so to Dyketon’s moralists, provided they ever had coupled the honored president of the State Bankers’ Association and the abandoned strumpet of Front Street in the same thought, which was improbable.
A certain day was a great day for him who was used to great days. But this one, by reason of two things, was really a day above other great days. In the same issue of the Dyketon Morning Sun appeared, at the top of the social notes, an announcement of his daughter’s engagement to Mr. Thomas H. Scopes III, a distinguished member of one of the oldest families in town, and, on the front page, his own announcement as an aspirant for the Republican nomination for United States Senator.
Until now he had put by all active political ambitions. From time to time, tempting prospects of office-holding had come to him; he had waved them aside. But now, his private fortune having passed the mark of two millions, and his business being geared to run practically on its own momentum and smoothly, he felt, and his formal card to the voters so stated, that he might with possible profit to the commonwealth devote the energies of his seasoned years to public service as a public servant. Quote: If the people by the expression of their will at the approaching primaries indicated him as the choice of his party for this high position, then so be it; his opponent would find him ready for the issue. End quote.
All the morning and all the afternoon until he left his office he was receiving the congratulations of associates and well-wishers upon Miss Bracken’s engagement and likewise upon his own decision to run for Senator. His desk telephone was jingling constantly. He stopped in at his club on the way home—the Metropolis Club it was, and the most exclusive one in town—and there he held a sort of levee. Whole-hearted support was promised him by scores, literally. The most substantial men in the whole city gathered about him, endorsing him for the step he had taken and pledging themselves to work for him and predicting his easy nomination and his equally easy election. The state generally went Republican—not always, but three times out of four on an average. Under this barrage of applause he unbent somewhat, showing more warmth, more geniality, than he had shown anywhere for a good long while. He did not unbend too far, though, but just far enough.
The club cynic, an aged and petulant retired physician, watching the scene in the club library from his regular seat by the tall marble fireplace, remarked under his voice to the first deputy club cynic, who now bore him company and who would succeed him on his death:
“Haughty as hell, even now, ain’t he? Notice this, Ike—he’s not acknowledging the enthusiasm of that flock of bootlickers that are swarming around him yonder, he’s merely accepting it as his proper due. What does the man think he is anyhow—God Almighty?”
“Humph!” answered the deputy. “You rate our budding statesman too low. Down in that Calvinistic soul of his he may sometimes question the workings of the Divine Scheme, but you bet he never has questioned his own omnipotence—the derned money-changing pouter pigeon. Look at him, all reared back there with one hand on his heart and the other under his coat-tails—like a steel engraving of Daniel Webster!”
“Not on his heart, Ike,” corrected the chief cynic grimly; “merely on the place where his heart would be if he had any heart. He had one once, I guess, but from disuse it’s withered up and been absorbed into the system. Remember, don’t you, how just here the other week he clamped down on poor old Hank Needham and squeezed the last cent out of him? He’ll win, though, mark my words on it. He always has had his way and he’ll keep on having it. Lord, Lord, and I can remember when we used to send real men to Washington from this state—human he-men, not glorified dollar-grabbers always looking for the main chance. Given half a show, Hank Needham could have come back; now he’s flat busted and he’ll be dead in six months, or I miss my guess.”
These isolated two—the official crab and his understudy—were the only men in the room, barring club servants, who remained aloof from the circle surrounding the candidate. They bided on where they were, eyeing him from under their drooped eyelids when, at the end of a happy hour, he passed out, a strong, erect, soldierly man in his ripening fifties. Then, together, they both grunted eloquently.