Despotism and Democracy: A Study in Washington Society and Politics

by Molly Elliot Seawell

Mr. Baldwin’s English valet and Eleanor’s French maid were doing everything possible for the comfort of their master and mistress and with perfect intelligence. Thorndyke smilingly indicated it, but Constance shook her head.

“I am always hearing complaints about French and English servants in this country, but we who are accustomed to negro servants never complain of them.”

“Because you never require anything of them; however,” added Thorndyke, “I’ll admit there seems to be a comfortable sort of arrangement between you. It would drive any but Southern people mad, but you don’t seem to mind it.”

Then Constance, turning to Annette, said she would be so glad if she and Mr. Crane would pay her a visit during the summer. Annette’s eyes sparkled; it was a distinct triumph for her, because she knew, and knew that Crane knew, that he never would have been asked but for her. She thanked Constance warmly, but said she was afraid it was impossible—she never went away from Circleville in summer; and Constance, seeing longing in Thorndyke’s eye, repeated her invitation to him, and made his middle-aged heart beat fast by doing it; and then it was time to go, and the train pulled out, and Constance was gone.

Thorndyke put Annette on her suburban car, and walked back to his lodgings, through the hot, bright streets—hot and bright in spite of the lush greenness of the shade. But the day had turned lead coloured to him; and although there were still plenty of persons in town, and the capital was seething, for it was yet some days before adjournment, Thorndyke felt as if the whole town were silent and deserted.

The presence of Constance Maitland made any place full for Geoffrey Thorndyke, and her absence made a desert to him. He contrasted in his own mind his feelings of to-day and of a year ago. Then, he had reached a kind of dull acquiescence in fate, or thought he had. Despairing of forgetting Constance, he had learned to endure quietly the poignant pain of remembering her, and in default of all else in life to interest him he had thrown his whole soul and being into politics. Now, the sound of Constance Maitland’s voice, the touch of her hand, was always with him, and had turned an otherwise dull and prosaic world into a region of splendid tumult and delicious agitations, for he would not have gone back to his past state for anything on earth. Constance had a deep regard for him—of that there could be no doubt. She commanded his society whenever she could; she exerted herself to please and flatter him; and he accepted it as a man drinks water in the desert, not analysing it, but exulting in it. Even those frequent seasons when he called himself a blankety-blank fool were not devoid of enjoyment—at least, it was not stagnation. He yearned after a million or so of money, that he might lay at Constance’s feet, and ask her to throw away the fortune that stood between them, but he was too sound and sane a man to imagine that he would ever be a rich man. Politics had by no means lost its interest for him, but rather had it gained—that at least was something to give him value in Constance’s eyes. As for that bare possibility of the senatorship two years hence, in the event that Senator Standiford should retire, Thorndyke regarded it as an iridescent dream. He did not believe that Senator Standiford would retire. He heard no more of Letty Standiford’s delicate health, or the Senator’s, either. Letty was rushing about Washington in an automobile, helloing at young gentlemen on the street, and doing many loud, unnecessary, and innocent things which require much nervous energy and lung-power. The Senator himself gave no indications of ill-health and fatigue. In Washington he led a life as regular and temperate as that of a boarding-school miss, but when local elections were impending, or a national convention was on hand, Thorndyke had known the old gentleman to go for a fortnight at a time almost without eating or sleeping, and then come out looking as fresh as a daisy. So Thorndyke was a little sceptical about his boss’s possible retirement from the field, and took it that the Senator had been trying some sort of an intellectual bunco game upon him.

When the adjournment of Congress was reached, Thorndyke took the first train to his northern home. It was a comfortable old place, on the skirts of an old colonial town left high and dry among more progressive places; but shady, serene, and comfortable in the extreme. Here, in the house where he and his father and his grandfather and great-grandfather were born, Thorndyke’s summers were spent with his sister Elizabeth, a gentle, sweet-faced creature, who had not walked for many years, but whose mind and hands were busy doing such good as lay in their reach.

Down in the town before a wooden one-story office with a porch, hung a battered tin sign, which had been repaired and repainted twenty times since first, in Geoffrey Thorndyke’s grandfather’s time, it had borne the legend, “Geoffrey Thorndyke, Counsellor at Law.” Thorndyke still kept the dingy little office which had been his grandfather’s and his father’s before him. He had given up the best of his law practice at the time that he had been thrown down and securely roped for Congress by Senator Standiford and his trusty cowboys, the State Committeemen, but had always clung to the old law-office as a refuge in case Senator Standiford should relegate him to private life. Although he had been compelled to abandon the active and continuous practice of his profession—for according to the old axiom, “The law is a jealous mistress”—Thorndyke remained a student of law. He was by nature and training a very considerable lawyer, and his legal acquirements had helped to win for him the high and steady position he held in the House of Representatives. He was not a leader of men, but rather a thinker and adviser, and was proud of the somewhat scornful appellation of “the scholar in politics.”

In his quiet summer home, among his few shabby books—which, unlike Mr. James Brentwood Baldwin, he read diligently, and never thought to mention that he lived among them—Thorndyke spent his placid summers. He read much, and observed a great deal. He was close to the border of Crane’s State, and their congressional districts were contiguous, and naturally Thorndyke knew the political happenings across the border.

In all his experience of men, Thorndyke had never watched with the same interest the development of a man in his public and private life as he watched Julian Crane’s. He saw the good and the evil struggling together in Crane, and had not yet found out which was fundamental.