"Take a good look at him. He's the man that steers Livingstone."
"I thought it was John Everard."
"John doesn't even steer himself," said Grahame savagely. "But take a view of the bishop."
Arthur saw a face whose fine features were shaded by melancholy, tinged with jaundice, gloomy in expression; the mouth drooped at the corners, and the eyes were heavy; one could hardly picture that face lighted by humor or fancy.
"We refuse to discuss certain things in political circles here," Grahame continued. "One of them is the muddle made of politics every little while by dragging in religion. The bishop, Bishop Bradford is his name, never loses a chance to make a mud pie. The independent ticket is his pie this year. He secured Livingstone to bake it, for he's no baker himself. He believes in God, but still more does he believe that the Catholics of this city should be kept in the backyard of society. If they eat his pie, their only ambition will be to live in an American backyard. No word of this ever finds its way into the journals, but it is the secret element in New York politics."
"I thought everything got into the newspapers," Arthur complained. "Blamed if I can get hold of the thing."
"You're right, everything goes into the sewers, but not in a formal way. What's the reason for the independent ticket? Printed: revolt against a domineering boss. Private: to shake the Irish in politics. Do you see? Now, here is a campaign going on. It began last week. It ends in November. But the other campaign has neither beginning nor end. I'll give you object-lessons. There's where the fun comes in."
The first object-lesson brought Arthur to the gospel-hall managed by a gentleman whom he had not seen or thought of since the pleasant celebration of St. Patrick's day. Rev. Mr. McMeeter, evangelist of the expansive countenance, was warming up his gathering of sinners that night with a twofold theme: hell for sinners, and the same, embroidered intensely, for Rome.
"He handles it as Laocoon did the serpents," whispered Grahame.
In a very clerical costume, on a small platform, the earnest man writhed, twisted, and sweated, with every muscle in strain, his face working in convulsions, his lungs beating heaven with sound. He outdid the Trojan hero in the leaps across the platform, the sinuous gestures, the rendings of the enemy; until that moment when he drew the bars of hell for the unrepentant, and flung Rome into the abyss. This effective performance, inartistic and almost grotesque, never fell to the level of the ridiculous, for native power was strong in the man. The peroration raised Livingstone to the skies, chained Sullivan in the lowest depths of the Inferno, and introduced as a terrible example a brand just rescued from the burning.