“Good-bye,” replied Constance, cheerfully.
The feeling that another woman’s husband or lover can be enlightened, encouraged, and comforted by her is a very awkward circumstance to a woman of sense.
Chapter Six
DEVILS AND ANGELS FIGHT FOR THE SOULS OF MEN
Crane went back to his rooms, wrote his letter to Governor Sanders, and awaited developments.
Nothing happened for more than a week concerning the senatorship. Meanwhile, he gave up his expensive rooms, and with the assistance of a note-broker managed to borrow enough money from Peter to pay Paul and to relieve himself from present obligations to one of the gentlemen who had so urgently invited him to commit political hari-kari. He secured quiet quarters in one of the suburbs of Washington and found that he was quite as comfortable as he had been at his high-priced hotel, at about one-fourth the cost.
The May days that followed were cool and bright and soft, as May days in Washington often are. The called session of Congress and the necessary presence of so many officials and diplomats made the gay town gayer than usual. The whole country was in a mood of exhilaration and self-gratulation, which was vividly reflected at Washington.
There could be no doubt that Crane’s success was real and substantial, and that he was already a person to be reckoned with.
Crane hugged himself with satisfaction when he reflected on his escape from being interned in the Senate, forced to remain quiescent during the time that he should have been most active, and finally enter the senatorial contest, two years ahead, with a reputation which would probably have dwindled as rapidly as it had developed. Instead of that he was in the centre of movement and interest, and even if he could not make a serious effort before the Legislature in January, he was in a good strategic position for the senatorial election two years in advance—and a great deal may happen in two years.
The Secretary of State, however, was disappointed in Crane. He proved to be quite as intractable as Thorndyke had been, and with less excuse—for Thorndyke had never been asked to little dinners at the Secretary’s house. The Secretary’s widowed daughter, Mrs. Hill-Smith, the beautiful, well-gowned, soft-voiced granddaughter of Cap’n Josh Slater, of Ohio River fame, murmured once or twice when Crane was under discussion that he was “so very Western,” and assumed a rather apologetic tone for having been seen at the play with him. The Secretary himself, despairing of making the chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs a handy tool for the State Department, returned to his legitimate business. This business consisted of labouring and slaving, in conjunction with foreign chancelleries, to make elaborate treaties, which the House and Senate treated as college football teams treat the pigskin on hard-fought fields. The Secretary felt peculiarly aggrieved over the Brazilian affair, in which the State Department made a ridiculously small figure, in spite of innumerable letters, memoranda, protocols, treaties, and what not. When the time came for action the Congress had quietly taken the whole matter in charge, and had not even censured the Secretary if it could not praise him. Could he have been attacked and denounced, as Mr. Balfour and M. Combes and Chancellor von Buelow, and the Prime Ministers of Europe were, it would have been a consolation. But even this was cruelly denied him. He had gone through all the strenuous forms of diplomacy which meant something a hundred years ago, when there was neither cable nor telegraph, and when diplomats were not merely clerks and auditors of their respective foreign offices. The Secretary had practised all the diplomatic expedients he knew. When he had not made up his mind what to say to an ambassador, he had gone to bed with lumbago. When he wished to impress one of the great Powers of Europe with the notion that it had in him a Bismarck to deal with, he had lighted a cigar in the presence of five full-fledged ambassadors. Remembering how eagerly the world always waited for the speech of the Prime Minister of England at the annual Lord Mayor’s banquet, the Secretary had spent a whole month composing and revising his remarks at a great banquet in New York on Decoration Day, and the reporters had got his speech all wrong, and a disrespectful New York newspaper had made game of his trousers, had compared them to Uncle Josh Whitcomb’s in “The Old Homestead,” and had asked pertinently—or impertinently—where the Secretary had hired them. In Congress he fared little better. The Senate had taken some small notice of him. In the House he had been practically ignored, except once when a member alluded to having “an interview with the Secretary of State.” A member of his own party, the same Honourable Mark Antony Hudgins, of Texas, who had guyed Crane, had sternly rebuked his colleague for his phraseology, and declared that what he should have said was “an audience with the Prime Minister”—and the House laughed at the unseemly joke. The Secretary had in secret a low opinion of the collective wisdom of Congress, and in this he was at one with the whole diplomatic body in Washington.
Crane, like everybody else, had really forgotten the Secretary in the press of affairs. He was amazed at not receiving an answer to his letter to Governor Sanders, and so told Thorndyke one night a few days after their meeting at Constance Maitland’s house. Crane had a great esteem for Thorndyke’s sincerity, which was justified, and Thorndyke, in his heart, was forced to admire Crane’s force and to expect great things of him. He did not entertain any doubt of Crane’s loyalty, but he watched curiously the development of the character of a man exposed to Crane’s peculiar temptations. That Crane had both good and bad qualities in great vigour he saw easily enough, but he could not tell which were the fundamentals. Crane was desperately poor, was foolishly proud, was rash and vainglorious, and was destined to shine brilliantly in the world of politics. What was to become of such a man? What usually became of such men? It was with these thoughts that Thorndyke, at his lodgings, on a warm May night, listened to Crane’s account of what had happened to him in the last few days.