“It’s easy enough to steer that committee when everything is peaceful,” answered Thorndyke, meaning to take the new chairman down a peg. “And it’s a great deal easier when we get into a continental mess as we are now. Wait until you get on the Ways and Means, or Committee on Elections, or Banking and Currency, if you want to have a little Gehenna of your own on earth. Good-night.”
Thorndyke sat up smoking until after two o’clock. His thoughts were not concerned with Crane’s political future, nor with his own either, nor with the continental mess. He was thinking about that dead-and-gone time, and how far away it was; the moderns did not make love through the medium of sentimental songs to the guitar and to stanzas from Childe Harold. They preferred ragtime on the mandolin and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám; and they no longer seemed to fall in love in the painful and whole-souled manner which had befallen him; and then he wandered off into thinking how a man’s will could go so far and no farther, and how he should feel when he saw Constance Maitland, as he must eventually, and how she would look and speak. He concluded, before he went to bed, that he had experienced that unlucky accident, the breaking of heart, which would not mend, do what he could; for he was one of those rare and unfortunate men who can love but once.
Chapter Two
THE RISE OF A PREMIER AND SOMETHING ABOUT TWO HEARTS
On the fifteenth of April Congress met for one of the most exciting sessions in the history of the country. There was excitement both for the members and for the public. Usually, when great economic questions have to be disposed of, which rack the intelligence of the strongest men in the House and Senate, which make and unmake Presidents and policies, at which men work like slaves toiling at the oar, by night as well as by day, and of which the harvest of death is grimly reckoned beforehand, the people go on quietly, reading with calm indifference the proceedings of Congress in the newspapers or skipping them because of their dulness. When questions affecting the honour and prestige of the country arise, the American people, justly described as “strong, resolute, and ofttimes violent,” become deeply agitated, are swayed all one way by the same mighty impulse, and force Congress to act as the people wish. The Congress at these times is calm. There is nothing to do but comply with the mandates of the people. One party is as willing to vote supplies as another. All march together. The march would become a wild storming party but for a few cool heads and obstructives, who act as a brake, and keep the pace down to something reasonable and the policies in the middle of the road. But the brake is powerless to stop the march onward.
At this session, though, there were to be things to agitate both the people and the Congress. The question of peace or war had to be decided; and if it were peace, as the cooler heads foresaw, it would be peace on such stupendous terms of power and prestige to this country that it might be impossible to deal sanely with the great economic problems which were like the rumblings of an earthquake, and were liable to produce vast convulsions. For the present, however, economic questions were in the background, the Committee on Foreign Affairs was the most prominent one in the House.
It almost cured Crane of his infatuation for Washington society to see how little it was impressed by the large events waiting to burst from under the great white dome on the hill. Himself, in a fever heat of suppressed excitement, he felt aggrieved that dinners still went on unflaggingly, that the first long season of grand opera Washington had ever known was about to begin, and claimed much attention. None of these smart people seemed to care in the least that he was to present the report of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in an unprecedentedly short time—a report which might mean war or peace. He expressed his sense of personal injury to Thorndyke as the two sat hard at work in their committee-room one night a week after the meeting of Congress.
They were quite alone, and it might be said that the report was theirs alone. There were other strong men on the committee, but they had got used to the autocratic rule of Thorndyke, and rather liked it. He consulted them attentively, but he was always the man who acted. The new chairman recognised this, and being ambitious to rule as Thorndyke had ruled, he consulted his predecessor somewhat ostentatiously—at which his colleagues smiled and let him alone. Crane had just experienced an instance of Thorndyke’s goodwill, who was in the act of saving his chairman from making a ridiculous blunder which would have hindered his prospects very much as Oliver Goldsmith’s unlucky red coat did for him with the Bishop. The Secretary of State, a very long-headed person in a small way, had previously got the length of the Honourable Julian Crane’s foot, as the vulgar express it. He had asked Crane to play golf with him; he had invited the member from Circleville to little dinners with him. The Secretary’s wife had requested Crane as a great favour to assist her widowed daughter in chaperoning a party of débutantes and college youths to the theatre, and when a scurrilous journal had reflected grossly upon himself, a married man, and the young widow, Crane was in secret hugely flattered. To be linked, even remotely, in a scandal with the daughter of the Secretary of State was a social rise—although he happened to know that Cap’n Josh Slater, the father of the Secretary of State, had been engaged in steam-boating on the Ohio River in the wild forties with his own grandfather, Cap’n Ebenezer Crane. The Secretary’s father had made money, and his daughters were replicas of Lady Clara Vere de Vere. Of his sons, one, the present Secretary of State, had left the banks of the Ohio never to return, and by a steady evolution had passed from the Western Reserve College to Harvard, thence to Oxford for a post-graduate course, to Berlin as attaché to the then Legation, thence home to exercise a gift the politicians had found in him, viz., the power to form a silk-stocking contingent in the party to offset the silk stockings in the opposition. Being a man of some brains and much perseverance, he had reached the most highly ornamental position in the Government of the United States—the Secretaryship of State. He maintained it with dignity. He had, of course, long since, abjured the Methodist faith, in which he was reared, and was as uncompromising a Churchman as his brother, the Episcopal Bishop—for such had been the career of the steam-boat captain’s other son. Both had been brought up in an auriferous atmosphere totally denied the descendants of Cap’n Ebenezer Crane, who had lost his all in the steam-boat business, and spent his last years keeping the Circleville tavern. Crane knew all about this, one of his grandfather’s standing quarrels with Fate being that Josh Slater, a durned fool, and a rascal besides, in Cap’n Ebenezer’s opinion, had made so much, where a better man—that is, himself—couldn’t make a living. But Crane knew better than to refer to any of these matters before the Secretary, who was indeed only dimly acquainted with his father’s profession. The Secretary, a polished, scholarly man, was a very good imitation of a statesman. He liked to be called the Premier, prided himself on his resemblance to Lord Salisbury, and dressed the part to perfection. During Thorndyke’s chairmanship of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, when the present international complication had been brewing, the Secretary had been a good deal annoyed by being sent for to the Capitol on what he considered flimsy pretexts. He determined when Crane succeeded Thorndyke to make a bold stroke, and have the chairman come to him occasionally, on the sly, as it were. To this end he had written Crane a little note beginning, “My Dear Crane.” In it the Secretary spoke pathetically of his lumbago, also of his age—sixty-one—and would Crane, on the score of old friendship and the Secretary’s many infirmities, come to see him at a certain hour at the Department, and perhaps the necessity might be avoided of the Secretary taking a trip in the changeable weather to the Capitol, which otherwise would be inevitable.
Crane showed this note with ill-concealed pride, and was about to fall into the Secretary’s little trap through the telephone when Thorndyke hastily interposed:
“My dear fellow,” said he, grinning, “you had better wait until the Secretary’s lumbago gets better, rather than inaugurate the policy of running up to the State Department to see him, when it is his business to come here to see you. The old fellow tried that game on me, but, in return, I used to get the committee to invite him down here about once a week to give his views on something or other for which we didn’t give a tinker’s damn, as the Duke of Wellington used to say. But it cured him. He stopped inviting me cordially and informally to come to the State Department to see him.”
Crane’s face flushed.