p539-126 CHAPTER XII.

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IN these days, Olympia was both sore and
prickly with a consciousness of her husband's
incapacity; she was as uncomfortable and as
discomforting as a porcupine might be whose
quills should be sharp at both ends.

She was always comparing him disparagingly
with somebody,—with that well-descended gentleman
of the old school, Senator Knickerbocker;
or that opulent gentleman of a new school, Senator
Ironman; with the Speaker and the chairman
of the Finance Committee, and that elegant
Potiphar who had taken the hundred thousand
dollar fee; with the noted orators who had the
ear of the House, such as General Boum and
General Splurge.

She still liked John—in lonely moments; when
they were by themselves of an evening, she often
clung to him with a sense that it was sweet to

[figure description] Page 120.[end figure description]

be loved and protected; but all day she wished
that he were more respected than he was, and
greater than he could be. At times she had an
idea, or perhaps I should say a feeling, that he
had palmed himself off on her by false pretences.
Had he not married her in the guise of a political
giant, and was he not an indisputable political
dwarf? Other men made great speeches which
stormed the admiration of Washington, or “engineered
something through Congress” which
had the effect of putting their wives into freestone
mansions. Not so with her husband; he
was a nobody, politically, socially, and financially;
and it was all his fault, too, for she wanted it
different.

But, at last, and as if by a mere freak of
fortune, a beam of prosperity lighted her path.
Senator Ironman, who was worth two millions at
least, encountered her by chance at a reception,
paid her some flattering attentions, called upon
her a few days later, and cajoled his wife into
calling. Glad and proud indeed was Olympia

[figure description] Page 121.[end figure description]

over the acquisition of this patrician intimacy,
the pass to all the selectest dress circles and
most exclusive private boxes of that complex
theatre, the social life of Washington. Finally
her beauty had availed her somewhat; it had
brought her in an hour more that was of value
in her eyes than she had derived in many months
from her husband's public services and reputable
name; and, as beauty triumphant will do, it
bloomed out with increased splendor.

John Vane thought that he had never seen his
wife so handsome as she was on the evening in
which he took her to Ironman's great party, the
grandest crush of the season It was even very
delightful to the honest, unsuspecting soul to
note how the rich and arrogant senator evidently
admired her, and how much he walked and
waltzed with her. And, if Mr. Vane liked it
well, you may be sure that Mrs. Vane liked it
better. She was throbbingly happy, whether on
the great man's arm in the promenade, or on his
shoulder in the dance. The deep flush of her

[figure description] Page 122.[end figure description]

brunette cheeks and the liquid sparkle of her
dark eyes revealed a stronger agitation than had
possessed her for many a day. People stared at
her a good deal; they called her “a stunner,”
and thought her a little venturesome; various
gentlemen, who knew Ironman well, exchanged
queer glances; certain ladies, who were equally
informed, gazed sidelong at Mrs. Ironman. None
of these disquieting circumstances, however, were
visible to our two innocents from Puritanic Slowburgh.
They passed an entirely delightful evening,
and then walked economically but contentedly
home, telling each other how nice it had all
been.

Thenceforward Mrs. Vane led a cheerier life of
it. She was invited everywhere, and Mr. Ironman
was always delightfully attentive, and consequently
other people paid court. She no longer
found the Washington receptions unsocial, heartless,
and stupid,—mere elbowings of selfish people
who either did not know each other, or only
wanted to use each other,—the dreariest social

[figure description] Page 123.[end figure description]

gatherings perhaps that ever gas-light shone upon.
The favor of the rich senator and of his adherents
and parasites irradiated these doleful caucusses
to her eyes with interest and gayety.
Moreover, Mr. Ironman did not restrict his courtesies
to occasions of festivity. His carriage
(not his wife's, but his own special turnout) was
frequently seen at Vane's humble door. He took
Olympia in it all over the surrounding landscapes,
to the reservoir hill back of Georgetown, to the
soldiers' cemetery at Arlington, and to other
similarly inspiring eminences whence one can see
a great ways, though not into the future. Furthermore
he gallanted her to the Capitol, to the
Smithsonian, to the theatre, and to concerts.
Likewise he sent her bouquets, and after a time
finer presents. In fact, his assiduity gradually
verged into such an appearance of courtship that
there would have been talk about it, if Washington
society had not been charitable even beyond
Christianity in its judgments, and also absorbingly
intent upon affairs which were more profitable
than gossip.

[figure description] Page 124.[end figure description]

It was, however, a perilous business for Olympia,
this daily communion with Ironman. The
senator was one of those infrequent and yet discoverable
statesmen who value distinction among
men mainly because it helps them to captivate
women. Although he was, to speak with considerate
vagueness, not under forty, he had that
restless passion for “conquests” which we scarcely
pardon in the novice of twenty, eager to secure
acknowledgments of the puissance of his individuality,
or, in other words, to show that he is “irresistible.”
There was not a session during which
his proud, calm, mature Juno of a wife did not
have occasion to wonder what sort of common
mortal her Jove would run after next. This
patient or indifferent lady, by the way, had taken
very kindly to Olympia, considering her a young
person whom it would be respectable for Ironman
to drive about with, and who would keep him
from making himself ridiculous by sending bouquets
to treasury girls.

But absurd as the senator was in the eyes of

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his spouse, he could not seem absurd to Mrs.
Vane, at least not immediately. His very rage
for gallantry made him attractive to a woman who
knew by experience the sweetness of flirtation,
and who, for months past, had been confined to
very short browsings of it. As for his shining
state on the alps of society, and the entirely solvent,
redeemable, coinable wreaths and vapors of
opulence which hung about him, not only were
they circumstances such as she had always looked
up to with admiration, but they seemed more dazzling
than ever, viewed through the atmosphere
of Washington. It is true that this wealth was
mainly the result of special enactments, not beneficial
to the masses; that the rich statesman had
enormously increased his riches by operations
which he had himself helped to legalize; and that
he had sometimes voted for a brother patriot's
pet measure in consideration of a similar service
rendered to his own. But Olympia did not concede
much respect to political disinterestedness;
she had had a surfeit of that poorly paying virtue

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in her own cheap and dingy home. Moreover,
Ironman had always been so prosperous that he
could afford to despise the direct lucre of the
lobby, and thus had deserved, in the opinion of a
closely sheared, patient public, the repute of being
a singularly upright lawgiver.

Nor was this the end of his enchantments; he
possessed talismans of a more personal nature.
He was not so plain a man but that, by dint of
careful grooming and fine caparisons, he could
pass for handsome. True, he was too lean, too
hollow in the chest, too narrow in the shoulders,
and too knobby in the arms and legs, to inspire
the most realistic sculptor with a desire to perpetuate
his model in marble, except for the bare
emoluments of the job. But like many tall and
long-limbed men, he was graceful when under
way, and had a specially good gait in dancing.
As for the shiny circle on the top of his blonde
head, it, at first sight, appeared a decided disadvantage.
To conceal it he bowed rarely and at a
very obtuse angle, which caused unobservant and

[figure description] Page 127.[end figure description]

unreflecting people to pronounce him haughty, if
not discourteous. But, on the other hand, it led
him to carry himself with erectness, and thus
gave him a port which was generally admitted to
be distingué. His long, aquiline, pinkish face
had an expression akin to the immortal perplexity
of Lord Dundreary, but for that very reason,
perhaps, was considered patrician by numerous
Washington ladies. On the whole, he was a cavalier
whose proffered arm might well thrill an ambitious
woman's heart with pride.

Such was the partially respectable statesman
and almost entirely ludicrous man who lifted the
Vanes into the highest circles of the society of
our capital. As we have said, his favor was a
perilous boon to Olympia, considering her breeding
and aspirations. Even as a girl, even while
living thriftily in staid Slowburgh, she had been
eager after pomps and prodigalities. In Washington,
she had become still more demoralized, if
we may apply that ugly epithet to a longing for
finery and admiration,—a longing so common

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among our “guardian angels.” The splendors of
women whose husbands had got fortunes by engineering
schemes through Congress had completely
dazzled her imagination and made her mad
with envy.

It would seem that special legislation and its
attendant snares of bribery were set for the downfall,
not only of our Federal heads in Congress,
but also of their Eves.

p539-136 CHAPTER XIII.

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By good fortune the intimacy between Senator
Ironman and Olympia had budded so late in
the session that it did not have time to ripen into
such bloom as would irresistibly attract the eye of
scandal.

John Vane went home quite content with his
wife, and she rather more than content with herself.
A diversified existence—Delectable Mountains
mingled with Vales of Tears—awaited their
feet in Slowburgh. It was delightful to our member
to have his praises sung night and morning
by the enamoured troubadours of the party journals,
and to receive salaams, which were obviously
tokens of respect for his proved uprightness, from
men of acknowledged position and character,—
men who had not previously deigned to know
him, or had blandly kept him at a distance. On
the other hand, it was disagreeable to listen to the

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grumblings of unrewarded wirepullers of low degree,
and to feel obliged to pacify them by dint of
promises, apologies, and wheedlings, which now
for the first time seemed to him demeaning.

As for Olympia, she could at last enjoy a consciousness
of peculiar distinction; for, whereas
in Washington she had been only one of many
Congresswomen, she was the sole and solitary one
extant in Slowburgh,—a fact which gave her preeminence
among her acquaintance. Unfortunately,
it could not exalt her to the social zenith
of Saltonstall Avenue, where political notoriety
had long been considered a disqualification rather
than an introduction, owing to its frequent connection
with such low “jobbers” as Mr. James
Bummer. Furthermore there was a scant supply
in the family locker of money. During Vane's
absence the refrigerator business had not done
well; a costly patent in the same had proved unremunerative;
the dividends were pitifully meagre.
All the summer was spent in economizing at the
maternal boarding-house or at a cheap resort by

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the seaside. It was impossible to meet the Ironmans
at Saratoga, as Olympia had confidently
agreed to do. You can imagine her general discontent
and how frequently her husband suffered
therefrom, and what a poorish season they had
of it. But the summer and fall wore away at
last, and they returned to Washington with a fair
sense of satisfaction, though indifferently furnished
in pocket.

“We must live mighty close this winter,” said
Vane to his wife, hoping she would take it well.

“Yes, we must keep house,” replied Olympia,
with cheerful firmness. “This lodging and boarding
is awfully expensive, and you get nothing for
your money,—a horrid table and vile furniture.
It is just being swindled.”

“I know it is being swindled,” groaned John,
gazing over the edge of the frying-pan into the
fire. “But it is cheaper than housekeeping;
everybody says so. We can't afford a house any
more than we can afford a pyramid.”

“Yes, we can,” insisted Olympia. And

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thereupon she skipped lightly through a calculation of
the cost of housekeeping: the rent would be so
much, the food not much more, the service about
half as much; the result a clear saving of many
dollars a month.

It looked reasonable, when held up in that offhand
way; it seemed as if economy might evolve
such a consummation.

“But how about furniture, carpets, and so on?”
reflected Vane.

“Why, take a furnished house, you muddled
creature.”

“Ah! but that doubles the rent, or comes closer
to trebling it.”

But still Olympia stuck to her project of saving;
and at last (oh, the perseverance of wives!)
she conquered. A house was taken, at first only
for a month, for the rent scared Vane, and he
would not sign a longer lease.

“It seems to me that you are just trying to
clean me out,” was his rather coarse response
when Mrs. Vane pleaded for tenure by the

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session. “If we were only married for the season,
I could understand it. Can't you remember that
when my pocket is drained” (dreaned, he pronounces
it) “yours is empty too?”

“And it seems to me that you are just trying
to make me miserable,” was Olympia's illogical
but telling retort. “I don't want to be lectured,
sir, as if I were in short dresses.”

Nor was she singularly unreasonable. At that
very time and perhaps in that very moment many
other wives of Congressmen were inciting their
husbands to spend more than their salaries. She
had got into a lofty position, and she wanted to
live conformably to it. That she should thus live
seemed so rational to her, that she could not see
how her husband could sanely object to it. As
for the lack of sufficient income for the purpose,
that surely was his lookout, and not hers. I ask
triumphantly how many feminine intellects can
discover a flaw in this logic?

Still, John showed no relenting; he had got his
back up, as the tom-cats put it to each other; he

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even looked as though he did not care if she were
miserable. So Olympia resorted to argument
once more, as feeble humanity does when it finds
grumbling useless. She recited the cases of half
a dozen other members who had nothing but
their salaries, yet took houses by the session; the
inference being that her member could do likewise,
and would if he were not a curmudgeon.

“Yes, and every one of them is head over heels
in debt, or drawing bribes from every ring in the
lobby,” alleged Vane. “Do you suppose that
being ruined in a crowd makes it any finer? Do
you suppose that the drove of porkers who rushed
down steep places into the sea found drowning
any more comfortable because there were ten
thousand of them?”

“Porkers! I should like to know whom you apply
that name to,” retorted Olympia, reddening
with anger. “I am your wife, sir, and a born
lady.”

“I was speaking of Congress,” answered Vane,
with a smile, for he had grown tough under

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pecking. “Well, I see that there is no use in arguing
this matter. I have signed the lease for one
month, and I shall not change it.”

So, on this occasion Olympia had to give in,
although it almost cost her her life, to use a common
exaggeration. But if a wife wants to punish
her husband for his tyrannies, there are always
ways enough to do it, thank gracious. Mrs. Vane
signalized her first week of housekeeping by
giving a costly dinner, inviting Senator Ironman
thereto, and flirting with him so openly that
henceforward John carried a fresh prickle in his
hymeneal crown of roses. Other extravagances
followed, not all of them indeed meant as castigations,
for Olympia had a curious felicity at
spending money, and did it literally without thinking.
Instead of “saving on the table,” as she
had promised to do and really meant to do, she
so managed matters as to make the family nourishment
a synonyme in Vane's mind for being eaten
out of house and home. Her cook did the marketing;
for how could a born lady do it? And

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this cook was a Washington colored sister,—a
fact which speaks volumes to naturalists acquainted
with that primitive development of “help,”—a
fact which suggests waste, mousing relations, a
hungry host of visitors in the kitchen, and perhaps
pilfering. Vane asserted that, instead of
feeding four people, as he had expected to do, he
fed nearer fourteen. Mrs. Vane replied, sometimes
tearfully and sometimes pettishly, that no
mortal could rule “those creatures,” and that no
lady ought to be expected to do it.

Two months, however, had passed away before
this state of things became obvious; the house
being taken for a second month because “it
seemed absurd to break up in such a hurry.”
Then, all of a sudden, our member found himself
unable to pay his honest debts, or at least a portion
of them. It was a terrible thing to him;
never before had he been driven to send away a
tradesman uncontent; and it took all his Congressmanhood
to keep him from weeping over the
novel humiliation. His distress was heightened

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by a daybreak dialogue which he chanced to overhear
between his milkman and his butcher's
driver.

“Say! what kind o' folks is these Vanes, anyway?”
demanded the milk-man, who was a Down-Easter
settled in the District.

“Dunno,” responded the driver, who was a
colored man, and so cared for nobody and nothing.

“Waal, they've been gettin' milk from me for
abeout nine weeks, an' don't seem to allude to no
keind o' peay,” continued the milkman, with a
piteous, inquiring accent.

“Specs likely,” admitted the negro, who would
have thought strange of anybody offering to pay
for anything.

The unmeant satire of these remarks stung
Vane like a blister. All day he was saying to
himself and of himself: “Don't seem to allude to
no keind o' peay. Specs likely.” He could not
stand it; he must confide his troubles and ask
advice; he must get strength, wisdom, and cheer

[figure description] Page 138.[end figure description]

out of somebody. The person whom he was
finally moved to open his bosom to was not a
brother legislator, but a person who was much
scoffed at in Congress as a poetical enthusiast
and a political idealist, because he was engaged in
a noble plan for renovating a wofully decayed
branch of the government. Mr. Frank Cavendish
had met Vane in committee-rooms, and the two
had been somewhat attracted to each other by
their common unpopularity, both being reckoned
stumbling-blocks to legislation as it is. To Cavendish
our member now repaired, saying to himself
in a pathetically meek spirit, that, if the man
knew how to reform an entire system of official
business, he might, perhaps, be able to reform a
foolish Congressman.

“I don't want a loan,” he explained, after he
had stated his case. “That wouldn't get me out
of debt; it would only change the debtor. Besides,
it would n't stop the sinking process. What
I want is to learn how to live on my salary, and
still keep a decent position before the world. It

[figure description] Page 139.[end figure description]

wouldn't be a matter of much account if it was
my case alone. But there are loads of us members
in the same fix, getting deeper and deeper in
debt every year, and seeing only one way out of
it,—special legislation, you know.”

This last phrase he added with a ready, commonplace
wink which was habitual with him, and
suggestive of character. It revealed that, while
he disapproved of the briberies and corruptions
of the lobby, he did not recoil from them with the
disgust of a morally refined soul, and saw in them
as much that was humorous as hideous.

“And that is sheer ruin,” interjected Cavendish,
with the haste of one who puts out his hand to
save a man from falling.

“Yes, I suppose it is,” responded Vane; remembering
that if he should take bribes and be exposed
in it, he would lose his prized and useful
title of “honest.”

“It is moral ruin to Congressmen and financial
ruin to the country,” continued Cavendish, wishing
to impress his lesson clearly on this evidently
doughy nature.

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“You're right,” admitted John, his conscience
vitalized and his intellect cleared by the remark.
“If things go on ten years as they are going now,
the lobby will be the real legislative power of the
land. Well, to come back to my own case, here
I am living beyond my salary, and not very blamable
for it either. I am not extravagant in my
fancies,” he affirmed positively, and, as we know,
with truth; “and my wife don't want more than
other women generally do,” he added, giving Olympia
what credit he might, and perhaps more than
was her due. “But living here is really dear,—
you can't make it otherwise. I've tried it, and
you can't! I don't see but one salvation for us.
Do you think it would do to make a move to raise
our salaries?”

“Why not first make a move to lessen expenses?”
suggested Cavendish.

“How?” asked Vane, thinking solely of giving
up housekeeping and going into very cheap lodgings,
and thinking at the same time of the strenuous
fight which Olympia would wage against
such a plan.

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“Congress is largely to blame for the present
enormous cost of living,” continued Cavendish.
“It devised and it still keeps in force the very
laws which diminish by one half the purchasing
power of the dollar. Congressmen vote to give
themselves five thousand dollars a year, and then
vote to make that sum equivalent to only twenty-five
hundred. Of course you understand this matter,”
he added, politely imputing to Vane more
political economy than was in him. “But allow
me to explain myself, if only to relieve my own
feelings. Here you legislative gentlemen refuse
to hasten the resumption of specie payments.
The consequence is, that you draw your salary in
dollars which are worth only about ninety cents
apiece. Next, and what is much more important,
you keep up a system of taxation which benefits
certain producers enormously, at an enormous expense
to the collective body of consumers, the
great majority of your constituents. Again, and
this too is very important, you lay these taxes less
on the luxuries of the rich than on the necessaries

[figure description] Page 142.[end figure description]

of the poor. You have made tea and coffee free,
they being really luxuries and not needful to existence,
although our extravagant working classes
use them abundantly. Meanwhile you tax heavily
all materials of labor and all articles of common
comfort. There is hardly a substance or a tool
which the American uses in his work but pays a
heavy duty. His coal and lumber, his food and
the salt which cures it, his clothing and so on, all
are taxed. The result is that labor must get high
wages or starve. The result to you is, that your
apparently liberal salaries are insufficient to support
a moderate style of living.”

“O—I see—you are a free-trader,” drawled
John Vane, his countenance falling.

“No, I am an advocate of a revenue tariff; of
a system of taxation which bears mainly on people
in easy circumstances; of a system like that
of England and Belgium. The entire public income
of those two countries is paid by luxuries.”

“O, I dare say you are right,” sighed our member;
“I have n't looked into it much,—I ain't on

[figure description] Page 143.[end figure description]

those committees, you know,—but I dare say you
are right. However, it can't be helped.” And
he shook his law-giving head sadly. “If we
should so much as whisper revenue tariff, all the
monopolists, all the vested interests, would be after
us. You don't know, perhaps, how sharp-eyed
and prompt and powerful those fellows are. They
are always on hand with their cash, and if you
don't want that you do want re-election. They are
as greedy, and I don't know but they are as strong,
as the relief bill and subsidy chaps. It's a mean
thing to own up to, but Congress daren't fight'
em. This country, Mr. Cavendish, this great
Republic which brags so of its freedom, is tyrannized
over by a few thousand capitalists and jobbers.
No, sir, it's no sort of use; we can't have
a revenue tariff.”

“Then there is nothing for an honest legislator
to do but to live on the tough steaks and cold hominy
of cheap boarding-houses,” observed Cavendish.

“That's the only ticket,” mumbled Vane; and
the two patriots parted in low spirits.

p539-151 CHAPTER XIV.

[figure description] Page 144.[end figure description]

AS honest John walked homeward, eschewing
the minute expense of the street-cars, he
swore that he would live like a pauper, and so
keep his integrity.

But he reckoned without his host,—meaning
thereby the partner of his bosom, who was certainly
a host in herself, particularly when it came
to crying.

“Go back to boarding!” tearfully exclaimed
Olympia, who just then had a reception in view.
“Then why did you commence housekeeping?
The idea of giving me a house only to take it
away again! You don't love me as other men
love their wives. You delight in plaguing me.”
And so on, and over again, with much sobbing.

In a day or two she actually impressed Vane
with a feeling that, in wishing to “take her house
from her,” he was guilty of a purpose akin to

[figure description] Page 145.[end figure description]

robbery, and, of course, entirely unworthy of a
just husband. He had to concede that, from one
point of view, Olympia did not demand overmuch;
even to his business-like and arithmetical imagination,
five thousand dollars seemed a large income;
even he could not yet believe it insufficient to cover
housekeeping. Partly because he was deluded by
this ante-tax idea, and partly because he was a
compassionate man and loving husband, he deferred
the humble and lenten pilgrimage through
boarding-house deserts back to solvency, and, of
course, went more and more laden with the bondage
of debt.

At last, sad to relate, he began to admit to himself,
like so many other hardly bested men, that
“something or other must be done,” meaning
something which would bring money, to matter
how. One evening as he sat alone in his parlor,
now staring in dull discontent at the shaky furniture
for which he paid such a high rent, now
recalling the fact that Olympia was away at a reception
with that opulently dazzling Ironman, he

[figure description] Page 146.[end figure description]

once more thought over his wilderness of troubles
and tried to devise a way out of them. He was
harassed, degraded, and enfeebled by the daily
urgency of debt. His matrimonial happiness had
been half wrecked by the mere lack of filthy lucre.
If he wanted to recover his wife's respect and
affection, he must positively provide her with gracious
surroundings, and stop bullying her about
expenditures. How could he get money, with
honesty, or, alas! without it?

While he was puzzling amid the brambles of
this wretched question, he was surprised by a visit
from his former friend and wire-puller, Darius
Dorman. Vane and Dorman had not seen much
of each other since the former had denounced the
Great Subfluvial Tunnel as little better than a
trick for defrauding the government and the public
of small investors. The lobbyist had judged
that it would not be wise to “keep at” Honest
John, and had expended his time, breath, and
funds on members of a less Catonian type.

Meanwhile the bill had prospered as bills do

[figure description] Page 147.[end figure description]

which “have money in them.” Although Vane
had voted against it, the tunnel had obtained a
charter from Congress and likewise a loan of forty
millions from the United States treasury, the same
being only a dollar a head from every inhabitant
of this free country, including women, children,
negroes, and Indians not taxed. Two or three
times as many more millions had come in from
financiers who saw forty per cent. profit in an early
purchase, and from a simple public which believed
that it could safely follow the lead of the wise men
of the capital. Furthermore, the directors and
managers of the Great Subfluvial had contrived
what might be called a Sub-Tunnel for their own
peculiar emolument, which fulfilled its purpose
admirably. This was a most wonderful invention,
and deserves our intensest study. It was a corporation
inside of the original corporation. Its
ostensible object was the construction of the Subfluvial,
but its real object was the division of the
capital into profits. For instance, it built a mile
of tunnel at a cost of, say ten thousand dollars,

[figure description] Page 148.[end figure description]

and then delivered the same to the outside company
for say fifty thousand dollars, and then
shared the difference of forty thousand dollars
among its own stockholders. Of course this was
a better bargain for the inside company than for
the outside one; but all chance of quarrelling
between the two was evaded by a very effective
device; they had the same men for directors, or
the same men's partners.

O, it was a beautiful business idea,—this Floating
Credit, or Syndicate, or whatever its inventors
christened it. It reminds one of that ingenious
machine called the Hen Persuader, which
was so constructed that when placed under a hen's
nest, it would withdraw every egg the moment it
was laid, whereupon biddy would infer that her
sensations had deceived her with regard to the
fact of laying, and would immediately deposit
another egg, and so continue to do until she died
of exhaustion. In some respects, also, this internal
corporation resembled that hungry creature
known as a tape-worm, which devours a man's

[figure description] Page 149.[end figure description]

dinner as fast as he swallows it, and leaves him hungrier
than ever.

Of course the gentlemen who held shares in
the Hen Persuader did a profitable business, and
filled their private wallets with golden eggs in
abundance. But still they were not quite content;
the old fowl above them, that is to say,
Uncle Sam's eagle, occasionally cackled angrily;
and it was extremely desirable to put a stop to his
alarming demand for chickens. Darius Dorman
had an anxious look on his crisped and smutted
physiognomy as he seated himself opposite his
representative.

“Vane, we must have another lift, or let the
whole thing drop,' he said abruptly.

“What! have n't you bled the treasury enough?”
grumbled Honest John, angrily contrasting his
own shrunken porte monnaie with the plethoric
pocket-books and overrunning safes of the great
corporation.

“We want time,” answered Dorman, really meaning
thereby that he wanted an eternity of it.

[figure description] Page 150.[end figure description]

“Here is this Secretary of the Treasury making
a raid on us. He asks for interest on his loan.
How in the name of all the witches of Salem does
he suppose the Subfluvial can pay three millions
of interest per year, in addition to meeting its
running expenses? We understood that the interest
was to wait until the termination of the loan,
thirty years from now.”

“Pay it out of the principal,” suggested Vane
sulkily. “Do as other roads do.”

“But we want the principal for dividends. We
can't keep on selling stock, unless we show a dividend
now and then.”

“Ain't there any profits?” asked Vane, with a
keen look. “Have n't your managers and inside
passengers laid away enough to spare a little for
profits?”

Dorman had such a spasm that he fairly writhed
in his chair. It seemed as if every swindling dollar
that he had got out of the Hen Persuader were
that moment burning into his already cicatrized
cuticle.

[figure description] Page 151.[end figure description]

“O, they will fall in later,” he smiled, recovering
his self possession. “They will come when
the tunnel is clean through, and has had time to
make travel. But until that time arrives we must
have favor shown us. Give us a lift, John, and
we'll give you one.”

Honest John Vane hesitated, querying whether
he should take one solitary step to meet temptation,
and see at least what it was like.

“Well,” he at last said, in the surly tone of a
man who feels that he is on the verge of making
a diabolically bad bargain,—“well, what do you
want now?”

p539-159 CHAPTER XV.

[figure description] Page 152.[end figure description]

The very faint promise of aid which seemed
to exhale from Vane's question cheered up
Dorman a little.

There was a strange brightening in his dusky
eyes, followed by a momentary obscuration and
haziness, as though a few sparks had risen to
their surface from some heated abyss, and had
gone out there in a trifle of smoke. He started
up and paced the room briskly for some seconds,
meanwhile tightly clasping his dried-up, blackened
claws across his coat-skirts, perhaps to keep his
long tail from wagging too conspicuously inside
his trousers,—that is supposing he possessed such
an unearthly embellishment.

“I'll tell you what we want,” he at last chuckled,
with the air of a man who is about to utter a
devilish good joke. “We want, first, a bill to
stop the collection of interest until the loan falls

[figure description] Page 153.[end figure description]

due, when we will pay the one hundred and thirty
millions at once, if we can. Second, we want a
bill to change the government lien from a first to
a second mortgage, so that we can issue a batch
of first-mortgage bonds and raise money for current
expenses. That's all we want now, Vane,
and I'm sure it's moderate.”

“O, ain't it, though?” grinned Honest John,
half indignant and half amused at this impudent
rapacity. “I'm sure it's very kind of you not to
ask Uncle Sam to throw in the whole loan as a
present. I dare say you might get it.”

“O, we're not a bit greedy,” Dorman continued
to chuckle. “Well, now, to go back to business,
we must have good men to help us. We want
the very best. The fellows who have pushed us
through so far are mainly such notorious deadbeats
in point of character that they would throw
discredit on a recruiting agency. We want a fresh
lot, and a respectable lot. We want such fellows
as Christian and Faithful in the Senate, and you
and Greatheart and Hopeful in the House.”

[figure description] Page 154.[end figure description]

Honest John Vane pondered; he thought of
his good fame, and then he thought of his debts;
he thought of his insufficient salary, and of
the abounding millions of the Great Subfluvial.
Finally he came to the risky decision that he
would just ask the way to the bottomless pit, reserving
for further consideration the question of
leaping into its seething corruption.

“How are you going to get us?” he inquired,
in a choked and almost inaudible voice, the voice
of a man who is up to his lips in a quicksand.

The eyes of the Mephistopheles of the lobby
glowed with a lurid excitement which bore an infernal
resemblance to joy. He had a detestable
hope that at last he was about to strike a bargain
with his simple Faust. There was more than the
greed of lucre in his murky countenance; there
was seemingly a longing to buy up honesty, character,
and self-respect; there was eagerness to
purchase a soul.

“We can make things just as pleasant as a
financier could want,” he answered, coming at

[figure description] Page 155.[end figure description]

once to the point of remuneration. “You don't
want stock in the Subfluvial, of course. If you
held shares in that and then gave it a lift, the opposition
lobby would bawl about it, and the public
might impute selfish motives. But we have got
up an inside machine, which is all the same with
the Subfluvial, and yet isn't the same. It works
under a separate charter, and yet has the same
engineers. It builds the tunnel, handles the
capital once or twice, and keeps what sticks to its
fingers. It's a construction committee, in short,
which fixes its own compensation. It's a sure,
quiet, rich thing for dividends. I don't know a
safer or more profitable investment. We can let
you into that, and you can draw your hundred and
fifty per cent a year, and all the while be as snug
as a bug in a rug. Will you come inside the rug?
Will you stand by the great, sublime, beneficent,
liberal Subfluvial? Say you will, John! It's a
noble national enterprise. Say you'll see it out.”

As Honest John Vane stared at his grimy
tempter, striving to decide whether he would

[figure description] Page 156.[end figure description]

accept or spurn that tempter's degrading proffer, he
had the air of a man who is uncomfortably ill, and
his appearance was matched by his sensations.
There was a woful sickness in his heart; and, to
use a common phrase more easily understood than
explained, it struck to his stomach; and that
fleshly-minded organ, taking its own physical view
of the matter, electrified every nerve with the depressing
thrills of bodily indisposition. He was
as ill at ease and as pale as the unseaworthy landsman
whom Neptune has just begun to toss in his
great blanket. Moreover, he felt that he was
pale; he knew that he did not present the healthy
countenance of stalwart innocence; and this
knowledge increased his discomposure, and made
him look fairly abject.

It would be impossible, short of reiterating all
the circumstances of our story, to give a complete
idea of his thoughts and emotions. But we must
specify that he sorrowfully blamed his wife for
those follies of hers which had driven him into
debt; that he cursed the widespread social

[figure description] Page 157.[end figure description]

extravagance which had made of that wife a pitiless,
or at least an uncomprehending extortioner and
spendthrift; and that he cursed even more bitterly
that whole system of subsidies and special
legislation which was now drawing around him
its gilded nets of bribery. There were stinging
reminiscences, too, of his worthy glorying in the
title of Honest; of his loud and sincere promises
to acclaiming fellow-citizens that he would labor
tirelessly at the task of congressional reform; of
his noble trust that he might establish a broad
and permanent fame on the basis of official uprightness.
All these things went through him at
once like a charge of small shot. No wonder
that his moral nature bled exhaustively, and that
he had the visage of a man stricken with mortal
wounds.

It must be observed, however, that his grief
and compunction were not of the highest character,
such as would doubtless accompany the downfall
of a truly noble nature. There is a rabble in
morals as well as in manners, and to this spiritual

[figure description] Page 158.[end figure description]

mobocracy Vane belonged by birth. The fibre
of his soul was coarse, and it had never been refined
or purified by good breeding, and very likely
it was not capable of taking a finish. No such
“self-made man” was he as Abraham Lincoln,
or many another who has shed honor on lowly
beginnings, and made the phrase “self-made”
dear to millions. On the contrary, he was one of
those whose mission it is to show the millions
that they are disposed to over-estimate the qualities
implied by this absurdly popular epithet. He
had his good fruits; but they sprang from feeble
or selfish motives, and so were not likely to bear
abundantly. He did not prize virtue for its own
sake, but because the name of it had brought him
honor. In truth, his far-famed honesty had thus
far stood on a basis of decent egotism and respectable
vanity. When his self-conceit was
sapped by debt and by the sense of legislative
failure, the superstructure sagged, leaned, gaped
in rifts, and was ready to sink under the first
deluge of temptation.

[figure description] Page 159.[end figure description]

In the expression with which he looked at Dorman,
you could see how much his vanity was
hurt. He had a stare of dislike and anger which
would have caused a human being of ordinary
sensibilities either to quit the room or roll up his
sleeves for a fight. Like many another overtempted
person, he hated his tempter while submitting
to him, and because he submitted to him.
His soul, indeed, was in a confounding turmoil of
contradictions, and did not work at all as the
souls of accountable creatures are meant to
work. Had he retained full presence of mind, he
would have held back his concession to wrong
until he could make a bargain, and sell his soul
for at least what little it was worth. But his very
first words of sin were at once an apology for it
and a confession that he was not in circumstances
to dictate his own price for it.

“Darius, I am awfully hard up,” he said, with
an abject pathos which ought to have drawn a
bonus from the most griping and illiberal of the
Lords of Hell.

[figure description] Page 160.[end figure description]

But an utterance of weakness or suffering was
the last thing in the world which could draw
generosity from the nondescript sinner who had
come to entice him. It may be that Dorman was
only a fiend in embryo, who was still awaiting
diabolical regeneration, and had not even commenced
his growth in the true infernal graces;
but if so, he was a chrysalis or tadpole of truly
abominable promise, whose evolution would be
likely to fill all Gehenna with gladness, and cause
it to welcome his coming with strewings of its
most sulphurous palm-branches. No doubt his
anthropological experience had been an advantage
to him; he had absorbed all the evil that he could
find in business, politics, and lobbying; he had
developed to the utmost the selfish, pitiless instincts
of traffic and chicane. All the law and
the prophets that he knew were comprised in the
single Mammomite commandment, Thou shalt buy
cheap and sell dear.

The consequence was that he listened to John
Vane's avowal of bankruptcy without a throb of

[figure description] Page 161.[end figure description]

compassion. Indeed, his only emotion on hearing
that cry of a stumbling soul was a huckstering
joy in the hope of getting a good thing at a bargain.
The cheaper the better, the more of a
trading triumph, and therefore the nobler. Whoever
has read the stories of those diabolical temptations
which were so common in the “ages of
faith,” knows that Satan is anxious to purchase
immortal spirits on the shabbiest possible terms.
The reason is plain: a beggarly price not only
“bears” the market, but throws contempt on the
“line of merchandise” traded for; it exposes to
the scorn of chaos the spiritual and, therefore,
most perfect work of the Creator.

p539-169 CHAPTER XVI.

[figure description] Page 162.[end figure description]

DORMAN possessed in full measure the Luciferian
humor of higgling.

Discovering that Vane was in financial extremities,
he inferred that he would “sell out at a low
figure.” He had come empowered to offer five
thousand dollars for the respectability which lay
in Honest John's character; but he now decided
that he would throw out only the bait with which
he was accustomed to angle for the ordinary fry
of Congressmen. If one thousand dollars' worth
of stock sufficed to land his fish, there would remain
four thousand dollars for himself, a very fair
commission.

“You ought not to miss this chance, Vane,” he
said, with the calmness of a horsedealer. “We
will guarantee you ten per cent, and it is pretty
certain to pay fifty, and may pay twice as much.”

“Of course it will pay anything that you inside

[figure description] Page 163.[end figure description]

fellows choose to make it pay,” answered the Congressman,
with a bluntness which revealed his
moral inflammation. He was in the condition of
a man who is having a tooth pulled, and who cannot
but desire to make a bite at his dentist's
fingers.

“Well, that's so, of course,” admitted Dorman,
with the smile of a trickster who decides to make
a merit of enforced frankness. “But it wouldn't
do for us to cut the profits too fat, you know.
We can't divide up the whole Subfluvial stock and
government loan among the construction ring.
We've got to draw a line somewhere. Say a
hundred per cent, now.”

“Say so, if you like,” returned John Vane, sullenly,
meanwhile searching in vain for some pecuniary
escape from this bargain, so full of risk for
his good name and of humiliation to his vanity.

“Well, I say so; that's agreed on,” winked Dorman.

There was a silence now which endured through
several eternal seconds. The statesman who was

[figure description] Page 164.[end figure description]

for sale and the lobbyist who wanted to buy him
were both alike unwilling to name a price, the former
through shame and the latter through niggardliness.

“There isn't much of this left,” Dorman at last
resumed. “Stands at one or two hundred per
cent. above par. It's such a safe and paying thing
that there's been a loud call for it.”

Vane made no response. He had an appearance
even of not listening to the agent of the abysses
of corruption. The truth is that he was beginning
to recover his self-possession, and with it his faculty
for dickering.

“I could let you have five hundred of it, though,”
continued the lobbyist, still bent upon getting his
soul for a song.

“Do you mean to insult me?” demanded Vane,
with a glare which might mean either huckstering
anger at the meanness of the bribe or virtuous
indignation at being offered a bribe at all.

“Say a thousand, then,” added Dorman, with a
spasmodic start, as if the offer had been jerked

[figure description] Page 165.[end figure description]

out of him by red-hot pincers, or as if the breath
in which he uttered it had been a scalding steam
of brimstone. “Senators Christian and Faithful
took a thousand each, and were glad to get it.
Let me see; we've had to go as high as that on
some of the House fellows, too,—such men as
Greatheart and Hopeful, for instance. Well, I
ought not to mention names.”

“Why, those are our biggest figure-heads!”
Vane almost shouted, springing up and pacing the
room in amazement.

“Of course they are,” grinned Dorman. The
very highest sign-boards in Congress, the saints
and the advocates of reform, and the watch-dogs
of the Treasury! There are no men of better
reputation inside politics.”

“I would n't have thought it—of them,” pursued
Vane. “I knew there was a raft of fellows who
took investments in things that they voted for.
But I supposed there were some exceptions.”

The lobbyist knew that there were exceptions;
he had learned by dint of rebuffs that

[figure description] Page 166.[end figure description]

Congressmen existed who were either pure enough or rich
enough to be above pecuniary temptation; but he
was careful not to mention this fact to his proposed
victim.

“Well, you see how it is, at last,” he resumed.
You see that the candle of fame only lights up a
game for money, and now what's the use of your
holding different notions from everybody else?
You have n't been practical, John Vane; you 've
been eccentric and highfalutin. I put it to you,
as one fair-minded business man to another, is it
generous or just for a capitalist to ask a member
to work for him gratis? I say not. If I see an
honest chance to make five thousand dollars, and
you give me a lift which enables me to use that
chance, I ought to allow you a share in the
investment. And that 's what I do. I 've got
five thousand dollars of this inside stock—”

Here he had another spasmodic start, which
ended in a prolonged fit of coughing, as though
the brimstone fumes which we have imputed to
his breath were unusually dense and stifling. Of

[figure description] Page 167.[end figure description]

course it could not have been remorse or shame
which interfered with his breathing, although the
five thousand dollars which he talked of had been
given him to transfer to Vane, and although his
own private share of the “Hen Persuader” stock
already amounted to fifty thousand. Of remorse
or shame he must have been fundamentally incapable.
If he felt any human passion at this moment,
it must have been a peanut peddler's gladness.

“And I offer you twenty per cent of it,” he
continued, when he had recovered his utterance.
“That 's about fair, I think, for I 've only this one
investment on hand, and can't possibly at end to
more, while you can dip into all the national enterprises
that are going. And don't you make Puritanic
faces over it. It is n't money, you see. So
help me Lucifer! I would n't think of offering
money to you. It 's just a business chance. Is
there anything low in a Congressman's putting
his money where his constituents put theirs?
Is n't he thereby joining his fortunes with theirs?

[figure description] Page 168.[end figure description]

That 's what I said to Greatheart and he could n't
get round it, and he took the stock.

“I 'll—I 'll take it, too,” was John Vane's response,—
a mere choked gasp of a response, but
heard, perhaps, all through Pandemonium.

“All right!” laughed Dorman, leaping up and
giving his member's back a slap, which ought to
have left the imprint of a fiery hand. “Well, I 'll
hold the stock for you,” he promptly added, with
a sly sparkle in his smoky eyes. “Just to keep
your name off the books and out of the newspapers,
you understand.”

Our Congressman pondered a full minute before
he replied. He was no longer Honest John
Vane, but he desired to remain such in the eyes
of the public, and consequently he did not want
the stock in his own name. At the same time he
shrewdly doubted whether it would be worth much
to him, if it stood to the credit of Dorman. His
countenance was at this moment a study for a
painter of character. There were two phases in
it, the one growing and the other waning, like the

[figure description] Page 169.[end figure description]

new moon encroaching upon the old. In a
moment you might say that it had undergone a
transfiguration, though not such a one as apostles
would desire to honor with tabernacles. All the
guile in his soul—that slow, loutish guile which
lies at the bottom of so many low-bred and seemingly
simple natures—rose to the surface of his
usually genial and hearty expression, like oily
scum to the surface of water. His visage actually
took a physical lubricity from it, and shone like
the fraudful superficies of a shaved and greased
pig.

“I won't trouble you to hold my property for
me, Darius,” he said. I 'll hold it in my own
name. Honesty is the best policy.”

This last phrase was a noteworthy one. It
showed that he had already entered upon the life
of a hypocrite. A little before he had been a
living body of honesty; now he was a vampire,
but he still retained his decent carcass.

“Now,—look here, John,—would you?” hesitated
the lobbyist, who had hoped to make the
shares stick to his own fingers. “Christian and

[figure description] Page 170.[end figure description]

Greatheart and those fellows have n't. You see,
if there should be an exposure, and this stock
should be found in your name, you would n't be
on the investigating committee.”

“Never mind, I 'll do the square thing,” replied
Vane, to whom it had suddenly occurred that the
Great Subfluvial and its “Hen Persuader” worked
under separate charters, so that a man who held
property in one might plausibly claim a right to
vote on the other.

“O, well, if you insist upon it,” assented Dorman,
much chagrined. “If you choose to risk it,
why, of course—Well, now about paying for the
stock; as you are hard up, suppose we let the dividends
go towards that.”

“Suppose we don't,” promptly returned Vane,
remembering how direly he needed ready cash.
“Suppose you hand me the certificates at once,
and the dividends as fast as they fall in.”

The lobyist looked at his victim with an air of
spite qualified by admiration. Maelzel might have
had a similar expression (though not by any

[figure description] Page 171.[end figure description]

possibility so vicious and diabolical) when he was
beaten at chess by his own automaton.

“I have caught a Tartar,” he grinned. “When
you turn your attention to finance, John, you show
your business training. Your game is n't the
safest, though. All the sly old hands,—all the
fellows who have graduated in the lobbies of the
State Legislatures, and bribed their way from
there into Congress,—all those shysters have had
the shares sold for them and taken nothing but
the plain greenbacks. I see what your false bosom
is made of, John,—the fair front of honest simplicity
and ignorance. It may do you, and it may
not. The faster a hog swims the more he cuts his
throat with his own hoofs,” he added, with a spite
which made him coarse. “You 'd better let me
keep the stock for you.”

“Well,” sighed the imp, who had not bought a
soul as cheaply as he had hoped, “have it your
own way, then. I'll bring the certificate to-morrow.”

p539-179 CHAPTER XVII.

[figure description] Page 172.[end figure description]

AND now Honest John Vane had become Dishonest
John Vane, and justified Dorman's
contemptuous nickname of Weathercock John.

He had accepted stock in a financial enterprise,
which might fairly be called a Juggernaut
of swindling, on the understanding that he would
grease its rusted wheels with fresh legislation,
and help roll it once more through the public
treasury and over the purses of the people.

In so doing, he had trampled on such simian
instincts of good as had been born in him, on
such development of conscience as he had been
favored with during his sojourn in this christianly
human cycle, on resolutions which he knew to be
noble, because everybody had told him so, and
on promises whereby he had secured power. He
had proved that, so far as he could be a moral
anything, he was a moral failure. In all the

[figure description] Page 173.[end figure description]

miscellaneous “depravity of inanimate things,”
he most resembled a weak-jointed pair of tongs,
such as pusillanimously cross their legs, let their
burdens drop back into the coals, and pinch the
hand which trusts them.

In short, he had easily fallen into the loose
horde of Congressional foragers or “bummers,”
who never do one stroke of fighting in the battle
of real statesmanship, but prowl after plunder in
the trail of the guerillas of the lobby. Their
usual history, as the well-informed Darius Dorman
has already hinted to us, was this: they had
acquired a mastery of log-rolling and bribery and
stealing in the halls or the lobbies of the State
Legislatures; and, having there gained sufficient
wealth or influence, had bribed their way to Congress,
with the sole object of plundering more
abundantly. John Vane, on the contrary, had
been elected by a hopeful people, going about
with a lantern to look for an honest politician.
He had meant to be honest; he had, so to speak,
taken upon himself the vows of honesty; and

[figure description] Page 174.[end figure description]

now, for a thousand or two of dollars, he had
broken them. He differed from a majority of
his brethren in piratical legislation just as a
backslider and hypocrite differs from a consistent
sinner.

Can we palliate his guilt? We repeat here,—
for the moral importance of the fact will justify
iteration,—that he came of a low genus. It was
a saying of the oldest inhabitant of Slowburgh,
that “up to John's time there never had been a
magnificent Vane.” No more was there one now.
Although some blessed mixture had clarified the
family soul in him a little, he still retained much
sediment deposited by the muddy instincts of
his ancestors, and a very little shaking stirred it
all through his conduct. Proper breeding and
education might have made him a permanently
worthy soul; but of those purifying elements he
had been favored with only a few drops. He
had risen somewhat above his starting-point, but
he still remained below the highest tide-water
mark of vice, and got no foothold on the dry

[figure description] Page 175.[end figure description]

land of the loftier moral motives. Sidling crablike
about in these low grounds, the daily flood
rolled in and submerged him.

It is impossible to insist too strongly upon the
fact that he had no sound self-respect and lofty
sense of honor. Of that noble pride which renders
unassailable the integrity of a Washington,
a Calhoun, an Adams, or a Sumner, he had not
laid the lowest foundation, and perhaps could not.
In place of this fortress, he possessed only the
little, combustible block-house of vanity. All, or
nearly all, his uprightness had sprung from a
desire to win the hurrahs of men who were no
better than himself, or who were his inferiors.
The title of Honest John (knocked down to him
at such a shamefully low price as must have
given him but a slight idea of its value) had
merely tickled his conceit, as red housings tickle
that of a horse. It was a fine ornament, which
distinguished him from the mass of John Vanes,
some of whom were in jail. It was a nom de
guerre, by aid of which he could rally voters

[figure description] Page 176.[end figure description]

around him, and perhaps win further glories at
the polls. Mainly for these trivial and merely
external reasons had he striven to hold on to it,
and not because he believed that reputation, self-respect,
and sense of honor were precious, far
more precious than happiness or even life.

Such a motive force is of course no force at
all, but a mere weathercock, which obeys the
wind of public opinion, instead of directing it.
Vane had now been exposed for some time to a
moral breath which differed greatly from that of
his hard-working, precise, exact, and generally
upright constituents. In the first place, he had
found, as he thought, that in Washington his
title of Honest brought him no influence and
little respect. He suspected that it was chiefly
his unwillingness to have a finger in the fat pies
of special legislation which had caused him to be
kept on the minor committees. He saw other
members, who were as new, as untrained, and
as comically ignorant as himself,—but who had
the fame among the lobbyists of being “good

[figure description] Page 177.[end figure description]

workers,” and able to “put things through,”—
he saw them called to positions of distinguished
responsibility, far higher on the roll of honor
than himself. He learned, or supposed he had
learned, that many Congressmen kept Uncle
Sam's eagle setting on then own financial eggs.
He knew members who had come to Washington
poor, and who now owned square miles on
the lines of great railroads, and rode in their
carriages, while he and his wife walked. For
a time, the prosperity of these knaves had not
punctured his soap-bubble honesty, because he
still believed that there was a Congressional public
which condemned them and respected him.
Classing himself with Senators Christian and
Faithful, and with those almost equally venerated
images, Representatives Greatheart and Hopeful,
he continued for a time to stand proudly in
his honored niche, and to despise the rabble of
money-changers below.

But at last Dorman had told him, and his
necessities easily led him to believe, that he

[figure description] Page 178.[end figure description]

was alone in his virtuous poverty; Christian,
Greatheart, and the other reputed temples of
righteousness, were nothing but whited sepulchres,
full of railroad bonds and all uncleanness.
This illumination from the secrets of the pit
bewildered him, and caused him to topple from
the narrow footing of his probity. He resolved
that he would not be the only case of honest
indigence and suffering in the whole political
world. Besides, what risk did he run of losing
his home popularity by accepting a few golden
eggs from the manipulators of the Hen Persuader?
The fact might become current news in
Hell, but it would never reach Slowburgh. Was
it likely that Congress would expose the interior
of a thieving machine on which so many of its
members had left their finger-marks? Even if
an investigation should be forced, there was such
a trick as doing it with closed doors, and there
was such a material as committee-room white-wash.

There was still a momentous question before

[figure description] Page 179.[end figure description]

Vane,—the question whether he would continue
to walk with the Mammonite crew, or make use
of his deliverance from debt to resume his former
respectable courses. The manner in which he
decided it furnishes another proof of the jellyfish
flabbiness which characterized his rudimentary
nature. Many a cultivated spirit tumbles
once down the declivity of guilt, and then climbs
back remorsefully to the difficult steeps of well-doing.
But our self-manufactured and self-instructed
hero continued to stick in the mud where
he had drifted, like any other mollusk, and absorbed
and fattened and filled his shell, a model
of stolid and immoral content.

Just in one direction—the only direction in
which he had been thoroughly educated—he
showed energy. At business he had worked
hard and made himself what is called a good
business man, sharp-sighted in detecting his own
interest, and vigorous in delving for it. If in
the present case he had not made a particularly
fine bargain for himself, it had been because he

[figure description] Page 180.[end figure description]

was new to that thieves' brokerage, the lobby,
and bewildered at finding himself hustled into
it. But, although he had sold his virtue at a
low figure, he was now determined to get the
full price agreed upon. As Dorman did not
bring him the promised certificate of stock, he
sought him out and secured it. Next he heard
that a dividend had fallen due on the day of his
purchase; hence another call on his fellow-sinner,
and a resolute demand for the sum total of
said dividend.

“But the transfer is dated the day after the
dividend,” objected Dorman, who like the rest of
his subterranean kind, did not want to pay a cent
more for a soul than he could help.

“Yes, I know it is,” answered Dishonest John
Vane, angrily. “And that's a pretty trick to
play on a man whose help you ask for. Now I
want you to make that transfer over again, and
date it the day on which I took the stock, and
pay me the dividend due on it.”

Dorman, wizened with disappointed greed and

[figure description] Page 181.[end figure description]

slyness, looked less like a triumphant goblin than
usual, and more like a scorched monkey. His
wilted visage twitched, his small, quick, vicious
eyes glanced here and there anxiously, and he
had an air of being ready to drop on all fours
and scramble under a table. Nevertheless, as
there was no resisting a lawgiver of the United
States, he corrected the certificate and paid the
dividend.

“I don't see how I came to make this blunder,”
he chattered, arching his eyebrows as apologetical
monkeys do.

“You don't pronounce it right; it wasn't blunder,
but plunder,” smiled Vane, with a satirical
severity, suggestive of Satan rebuking Sin.

p539-189 CHAPTER XVIII.

[figure description] Page 182.[end figure description]

IN an amazingly short time after these solvent
providences had befallen Weathercock John,
all the lobbyists out of Gehenna seemed to have
learned that he was “approachable.”

These turkey buzzards have a marvelous aptitude
at scenting a moral carcass, and Vane, who
did not so much as suspect that he was dead,
must have been already in need of burial, and
pungently attractive to their abominable olfactories.
They gathered around him and settled
upon him, until he might be described as fairly
black with them. Gentlemen who, to be in character,
ought to have had raw necks and a soretoed
gait, croaked into his ears every imaginable
scheme for pilfering, not only the fatness and the
life-blood, but the very bones out of Uncle Sam.
It is arithmetically certain that, had every one of
these pick-purse plans been carried out

[figure description] Page 183.[end figure description]

successfully, the Secretary of the Treasury would have
had to suspend all manner of payments.

Among so many golden bows of promise,
Weathercock John was able to make a judicious
pick, and to find lots of full purses at the ends
of them. He would have nothing to do with
“national highways,” because he was already
highwaying it on the line of the Great Subfluvial,
and did not want to become known as one of the
“railroad ring.”

He selected the congenial case of a deceased
horse, who had been killed by our troops in
Western New York during the war of 1812, and
who had already drawn his ghostly claim for
damages through five Congresses, the amount
thereof quadrupling with every successive journey,
so that it had risen from $125 to $32,000.

Also he pitched upon the case of certain plantation
buildings in Florida, which had been destroyed
by the same indiscreet soldiery while
striving to defend them from the Seminoles,
or by the Seminoles while struggling to take

[figure description] Page 184.[end figure description]

them from the soldiery; and which, by dint of
repeated “settlements and adjustments on principles
of justice and equity,” every settlement
being made the pretext of a new adjustment,
and every adjustment the pretext of a new settlement,
had grown in worth from about $8,000 to
about $134,000,—one of the most remarkable
instances of the rise of property ever witnessed
in a thinly settled country.

Likewise he hit upon the grievance of a mail
contractor, who, having failed to carry his mails
and so forfeited his contract, now demanded
(through his heirs) $10,000 in damages; also
$15,000 for mail services, in addition to those
not rendered; also $20,000 of increased compensation
for the mail services not rendered, together
with interest and costs to the amount of $15,000
more.

These and some dozen other similar swindles,
our member took under his legislative protection,
proposing to put them through as such little
jokers usually are put through; that is, by

[figure description] Page 185.[end figure description]

tacking them on to appropriation bills at the very
end of the session. As for remuneration, he
was fair minded enough to be content with ten
per cent. on each successful claim, whereas some
unscrupulous statesmen extorted as much as fifteen
or twenty. It is needless to say that, in
view of this conscientious moderation, the lobby
itself was stricken with a sense of unholy gratitude,
and began to shout through its organs,
“Hurrah for Honest John Vane!” You may
imagine how it delighted and strengthened him
to find that, no matter what villainous trick he
played upon the public, he could not lose his
glorious nickname. So cheered was he by this
incongruous good fortune that he ventured to
introduce a little bill of his own into Congress,
appropriating $50,000 for a new cemetery for
“the heroic dead of the late war,” the contract
for the coffins to be awarded to one Elnathan
Sly, who was his own man of straw or alter ego.

Meantime he would have nothing to do with
those visionary projects which “had no money in

[figure description] Page 186.[end figure description]

them.” His motto was, “No Irish need apply,”
meaning thereby indigent applicants for legislation,
or applicants who would not offer to go
snacks. When an author urged him to introduce
an international copyright bill, he cut short his
visitor's prosing about the interests of literature
by saying brusquely, “Sir, I may as well tell you
at once that I don't care anything about this
subject, and I don't believe anybody can make
me care about it.” When some simple college
professors wanted him to propose an appropriation
for the observation of an eclipse, he got rid of
the venerable Dryasdusts by a stroke of rare
humor, telling them that his specially was Revolutionary
pensions. When a wooden-legged captain
of volunteers applied to him for the Slowburgh
Post-Office, he treated him with promises,
which sent him home promptly in high spirits,
and then secured the position for one of his own
wire-pullers, a man who had enlisted for the war
in the Home Guards.

A great change, you will say; an unnaturally

[figure description] Page 187.[end figure description]

sudden eclipse; an improbably complete decadence.
Not so; in his inmost being Vane had
not altered; only in the incrustations of life
deposited by surroundings. Barring the molluscous
characteristics of easy good nature, and that
sort of companionable generosity which amounts
to give and take, he had never been beneficent
and unselfish. He had not moral sympathy
enough to feel the beauty of virtue in the individual,
nor intellect enough to discover the necessity
of virtue to the prosperity of society, nor
culture enough to value any educational instrument
finer than a common school. Considering
the bare poverty of his spiritual part, indeed, our
Congressman was merely a beggar on horseback;
and it was no wonder that, once temptation got
him faced hellwards, he rode to the devil with
astonishing rapidity.

Well, John Vane fell from respectable indigence
into degradingly thrifty circumstances.
He paid all the debts which he had incurred
during his abnormal, or at least accidental, course

[figure description] Page 188.[end figure description]

of honesty, and knew no more what it was to be
without a comforting roll of pilfered greenbacks
in his pocket. He hired a fine carriage for his
wife, and gave her all the funds that she needed
for entertainments and shopping, thereby arousing
in her fresh respect and affection. Indeed,
he so far satisfied the pecuniary expectations of
Olympia that she no longer found the wealthy
Ironman necessary to her happiness, and fell into
a prudent way of discouraging his attentions.
Once more our member's home was tranquil, and
he happy and glorious in the midst of it. A
man who can dazzle and fascinate his own wedded
Danäe with showers of gold is nothing less
than a Jove of a husband.

It is worth nothing that Olympia had no scruples
about using these unaccustomed riches, and never
once asked where they came from. Had she
learned that they were filched from the public
treasury, would she have accepted and spent them
the less freely? A venerable Congressman,
thoroughly versed in all the male and female

[figure description] Page 189.[end figure description]

wickedness of Washington, assures me that women
are conscienceless plunderers of public property,
and will steal any official article which they
can lay hands on, from a paper-folder upward.

At last came the end of the session. As is
always the case, it was a season of wild turmoil
and uproar, by no means resembling one's idea of
legislation, but more like a dam breaking away.
The House was as frantic with excitement and
as noisy with dissonant speaking as was the tower
of Babel after the confusion of tongues. Honorable
members who had special bills to push
were particularly active and sonorous. They
spouted; they tacked on amendments; they electioneered
among their brother lawgivers; they
were incredibly greedy and shameless. An imaginative
observer might have fancied himself in
a huge mock-auction shop, with two or three
score of impudent Peter Funks hammering away
at once, while dead horses were knocked down at
a hundred times the price of live ones, and burnt
barns, empty cotton bags, rotten steamers, and

[figure description] Page 190.[end figure description]

unbuilt railroads went at similar swindling prices,
the victimized purchaser in every case being a
rich simpleton called Uncle Sam. The time,
talents, and parliamentary skill of the honest
members were nearly all used up in detecting and
beading off the immortal steeds which were
turned into the national pastures by the dishonest
ones. Many measures of justice, of governmental
reform, and even of departmental necessity
were, perforce, overlooked and left untouched.
It seemed as though the only thing which Congress
was not under obligation to attend to was
the making of laws for the benefit of the whole
people.

In this raid of special legislation upon real
legislation John Vane was one of the most active
and adroit guerillas. His “genial” smile simpered
from desk to desk, like Hector's shield
blazing along the ranks of Trojan war. He had
never smiled so before; he very nearly smiled
himself sick; he proved himself the smiler of
smilers. There was no resisting such an

[figure description] Page 191.[end figure description]

obviously warm-hearted fellow, especially as he was
generous, too, offering to vote as he would be
voted for. And everything prospered with him;
the taxes gathered from his countrymen melted
on his schemes like butter on hot pancakes; and
when he left the House at midnight he was a man
in “respectable circumstances.”

He now had funds enough to carry the next
nominating caucus in his district, and thus, with
Dorman's potent aid, to make fairly sure of a return
to Congress. As he had once swept the
ballot-boxes as Honest John Vane, so he purposed
to sweep them again as Dishonest John Vane.
But is the golden calf of lobbydom to be the directing
deity of our politics forever? Is no axe
to be laid to the root of this green bay tree of
Slowburgh? We shall see.

p539-199 CHAPTER XIX.

[figure description] Page 192.[end figure description]

WHAT were the prospects of Weathercock
John in the face of that terrible scrutiny of
political character, a new election?

He had now served two years in the honorable
Congress of the United States, after such a
fashion that, could he have had his deserts, he
would have served ten more in jail.

But—as the mountain brigands of Greece and
the municipal highwaymen of New York can
both testify—it is not the custom of some communities
to execute justice upon criminals, so
long as injustice is procurable for love or money.
Moreover, our ignominious member had thus far
been able to keep that cardinal eleventh commandment,
“Thou shalt not be found out.” He
was still worshiped by the simple and lowly
masses of his district as Honest John Vane;
and, furthermore, he had store of that golden oil

[figure description] Page 193.[end figure description]

which is one of the best of all lubricators for the
wheels of political fortune.

Thus, instead of going to the tread-mill and
becoming an object of reverential pity to sentimental
philanthropists, he went into a canvass for
re-election at the head of a faithful flock of baaing
adherents, who did not see how he had led them
through the brambles of needless taxation, and
who were so bewitched with the instinct of following
a bellwether that, had they discovered all
of Vane's ignorance and rascality, they would not
have deserted him. Not that he bought the
popular suffrage with money, or could do it.
Thanks be to the remaining mercy of Heaven,
few freemen as yet sell their votes in Slowburgh.
Having no feculent system of special legislation
to rot them with its drippings, they are for the
most part of sounder morals than the adventurers
who contrive to represent them. But there were
wirepullers to be conciliated, oratorical forums to
be hired, posters and ballots to be printed, votedistributers
to be paid. Vane's tithes from his

[figure description] Page 194.[end figure description]

relief and subsidy bills covered these expenses
nicely, and to the entire satisfaction of an enlightened
and moral constituency, fond of economy
in national legislation, and boastful of the honesty
which a republic is supposed to generate.

Of course he found the franking privilege as
useful as if he had never denounced it. He was
almost grateful in these campaigning days for the
congressional insignificance which had disenabled
him from reforming that abuse. A so-called secretary,
whom he had left in Washington with
several thousand “franks,” sold one half of those
autographs as his own perquisite, and deluged
Vane's field of labor with the other half. Every
mechanic in Slowburgh got a report on agriculture,
and every farmer got a report on manufactures.
The speeches which the so-called secretary
had written, and which our member had obtained
leave to print in the Congressional Globe without
preliminary delivery, fell in such abundant showers
throughout the district that it was a wonder they
had not been foretold in the almanac. The

[figure description] Page 195.[end figure description]

Washingtonian assistant, by the way, must have been
a fellow of some ability; he managed this system
of political irrigation not only with vigor, but
with judgment. For example, among all the
public documents with which he fructified Slowburgh,
there was not a single copy of the Report
on the Corruption of Members of Congress. It
was judicious, certainly; for had we been brought
to remember the infamy of Matteson, we might
not have been so happy in voting for Vane.

There was, indeed, one ugly week, when it
seemed as if the torches of our nocturnal processions
burned blue, and we almost feared to look at
our candidate lest we should see signs of unworthiness
in his face. Certain lobbyists, who had not
been able to get what they thought their allowance
of eggs out of the Hen Persuader, set afloat
vindictive stories to the effect that that wonderful
financial machine was nothing but a contrivance
to corrupt Congressmen into voting favors to the
Great Subfluvial, and that its retaining fees had
been pocketed by some of the most famous

[figure description] Page 196.[end figure description]

champions of our party, such as Christian, Greatheart,
and Honest John Vane.

These charges were picked up and used for
ammunition by a brazen opposition which was as
deep in the mud as we were in the mire. Every
shot spread consternation through our array.
There was danger lest we should set up the Gaulish
war-cry of Nous sommes trahis, and either
flinch from the polls or vote a split ticket. Even
the political priesthood of wirepullers, who stood
about Vane as the Scotch Presbyterian elders
encompassed Leslie, began to doubt whether it
would not be well to make another nomination.
But in the end this select and tried synagogue (of
Satan?) decided to stick to their candidate and to
patch up the rents in his ephod. They began by
denying flatly that he owned any Hen Persuader
stock, or any other property connected with the
Great Subfluvial. Next they set a committee
over him to prevent him from avowing such ownership.
This committee guarded him all day and
put him to bed at night; it went before him like

[figure description] Page 197.[end figure description]

a cloud and behind him like a darkness, keeping
him constantly shrouded in non-committalism; it
held interviewing reporters at a distance, or whispered
evasive answers to their questions. Never
was a Grand Lama or a Roi Fainéant more completely
secluded. Only a deaf-mute, with all his
fingers amputated, could be laid under such a conversational
embargo.

This inspired discretion had its reward; various
providences arrived to favor it. Good and true
men perceived that the whole air was full of
“campaign lies,” and naturally inferred that this
story about the Hen Persuader briberies was one
of them. Moreover, it was soon “nailed to the
counter” by positive and public letters of denial
from Christian, Greatheart, and other implicated
seraphim. Of course such men would not prevaricate,
we argued, and considered the charges
entirely refuted. And now we justified Weathercock
John; we imputed his silence to the conscious
rectitude of a worthy soul; we said that he
had done rightly in treating slander with

[figure description] Page 198.[end figure description]

unresponsive scorn. Thus reassured, we went in a
solid phalanx to the polls, and triumphantly sent
our special legislator back to Congress.

Nobody was better pleased with the victory
than Darius Dorman. It was, by the way, somewhat
of a satire upon our human joy that such a
“burnt eyed nigger” of the pit, such a mere fieldhand
in the earthly plantation of Lucifer, should
have shared it. The moment he heard the result
he looked up Vane and congratulated him in forms
and liturgies of profanity not often heard above
ground.

“It is a triumph of the good cause,” he continued,
with so sarcastic a grin that our heavy-witted
member thought him either impertinent or crazy;
“and, by the infernal hoofs and horns, the good
cause needed it. If we had been beaten, the
Great Subfluvial would have been smashed to
make way for some other national enterprise. As
it is, I think we can keep things white-washed,
and perhaps head off an investigation altogether.”

“An investigation!” exclaimed Vane, his genial

[figure description] Page 199.[end figure description]

smile falling agape with dismay. “Do you think
there will be an investigation?”

“You may bet what soul you have on it,” declared
the lobbyist. “Just as sure as the party
believes those charges to be false, it will demand
an overhauling of them of course, to confound the
opposition.”

Our Congressman saw the point, and seemed
to feel it in his marrow. “If they look this thing
up,” he gasped, “what 's to become of me?”

“I don't know and I don't care,” responded
Dorman, with a frank brutality which made Vane
resolve not to quarrel with him; “what I want to
know is, what 's to become of me? Here I have
all my results and my materials of labor in those
two companies. If the Hen Persuader is called
on to refund to the Subfluvial, or if the Subfluvial
is foreclosed on by the government, I am a poor
devil for certain. Well, we are in the same boat;
we must pull together. if you won't expose my
fashion of doing business, I won't expose your
share in the profits of it.”

[figure description] Page 200.[end figure description]

Vane answered in his non-committal fashion;
he said nothing, and he did not even look at his
guide and ruler in sin; but he gently nodded
his assent.

“I always meant to pay you for that stock,” he
continued, for he was very anxious now to make
friends with this Mammon of unrighteousness.
“I 'll settle with you for it some day, Darius; I 'm
a little short now. This election, you know.”

“O, yes, I know,” Dorman grinned epileptically.
“It has cost us both a good bit of money. Well,
take your time about it; pay me when it comes
handy. I can trust your honesty, John, under the
circumstances.”

The Congressman turned away, full of an
inward wrath, but placid, meek, and sleek on the
surface, for his tallowy nature did not come easily
to an open boil. He was angry at the lobbyist
for his sarcasm; he perfectly hated him for that
avarice and hardness which would not give a
receipt for payment on those shares, without the
money; but he must not and would not quarrel
with him, so brotherly is the communion of Satan!

p539-208 CHAPTER XX.

[figure description] Page 201.[end figure description]

FOR once Dorman was correct in a prophecy.
The recollection of the “Great Subfluvial
slanders” rankled in the soul of an honest and
truth-loving nation.

After the election had been carried and the
country duly saved from its quadrennial crisis, it
seemed just and necessary to put calumny to open
shame, and thus rob it of influence in the future.
Virtuous constituencies and a press which at least
spoke the words of virtue clamored for an investigation
which should vindicate the innocence of
Christian, Greatheart, and Company, and put their
lying accusers in the pillory. “We want justice
done you,” cheerfully shouted a believing party to
its demi-gods, streaming piteously with the rotten
eggs of the Hen Persuader.

It was in vain that these revered fetishes whispered
to their confidants that justice was

[figure description] Page 202.[end figure description]

precisely what they were afraid of, and interceded
with such divinities as they believed in to save
them from their friends. In vain did a sadly wise
Congress endeavor to amuse and pacify the country
by throwing overboard that precious tub of
abuses, the franking privilege. In vain did
Weathercock John set his daily organ to celebrating
and imputing to himself a reform which
he had so long promised and which he now so
unwillingly conceded. The popular whale took
no notice of a plaything which at any other time
might have diverted it for years, and continued to
thrash the political ocean into foam with its rushings
and plungings after investigations.

Amid this commotion John Vane rowed about
in his cockle-shell of a character with all the agility
that terror can give. He was so accustomed
to value himself on being honest that the thought
of being publicly condemned as dishonest was
almost as dreadful to him as it would have been
to an upright soul. So oppressive was his wretchedness
that he craved not only help but also

[figure description] Page 203.[end figure description]

sympathy, that favorite consolation of the sorrowful
feeble. He was in the spiritual state of certain
weak-minded murderers, who cannot sleep of
nights until they have told some friend the particulars
of their crime. So entirely had the backbone
been taken out of him that he could not
hold himself erect in the presence of his wife, but
wilted upon her slight shoulder for support. It
was an abject confession of decrepitude; for he
had learned to consider her as totally lacking in
practical sense, and there were impatient moments
when he thought of her as merely a lively dunce.
But now he must have pity, though it came from
a peacock.

“I'm afraid there's trouble a brewing for us,”
he said, one evening, shaking that perplexed head
of his which had been the admiration of his constituents,
and which certainly looked large enough
to hold all the problems of state.

“What's the matter now?” asked Olympia.

She did not think of trouble to the nation, nor
of trouble to her husband. The only idea which

[figure description] Page 204.[end figure description]

occurred to her was that perhaps there was a
scarcity of money, and she might be called on to
give up the honors of house keeping and put on
the disgusting humility of lodgings. It was also
a little disagreeable to her, this way that John
sometimes got into of coming to her with his
grievances, and trying to ease his own mind by
burdening hers. It was hardly more pleasant
than having a dog make a bed for himself on the
skirts of one's lilac silk. She possessed in large
measure that unsympathy, alleged by some writers
to amount to hostility, which certainly does exist
to some extent between the sexes. Her world
was very different from her husband's world, and
she did not much care to have him take an interest
in hers, nor did she want at all to worry
about his. That the two spheres had any intimate
connection she could rarely perceive, except
when the masculine one ceased to radiate gold
upon the feminine one.

“Well, the matter is this stupid outcry for investigations,”
sighed John, loosening the cravat

[figure description] Page 205.[end figure description]

about his somewhat pulpy throat, as if fearful lest
it should make a hangman's circle there.

“What investigations? Who is to be investigated?”
demanded Olympia, who was as ignorant
of the whole matter as if she were an inhabitant
of some celestial world where investigations were
not needed, or of some infernal one where they
were of no use.

“Well, it's a secret,” the special legislator continued
to drawl, talking about his misdeed unwillingly,
but unable to stop talking about it. “However,
I suppose it 'll all be out before long. I
thought I might as well prepare your mind for it,”
he concluded, feebly hoping that she would say
something to prepare his mind.

“Well, what is it?” asked the wife, distinctly
foreseeing trouble for herself, and becoming therefore
deeply interested.

“O, I thought I told you,” answered John, whose
scared conscience had been babbling at such a
rate that it seemed to him as if he had made
audible confession of his whole iniquity. “Well,

[figure description] Page 206.[end figure description]

it's something about this Great Subfluvial Tunnel
under the Mississippi, from the Lakes to New
Orleans,—great national enterprise, you know.
You see, it was a pretty heavy thing for Simon
Sharp and the other boss stockholders to carry,
and they had to get some additional assistance
from Congress, and to do that they gave some of
the members stock,—or rather sold it to them,”
he added, doubting whether he could trust even
his wife with all the truth. “Well, some of the
newspapers are charging that this is bribery and
corruption, and are bawling for an investigation
and making a row generally, as though it was anything
new, by George!”

“Have you got any of the stock?” inquired
Olympia. She saw that the subject was a sore
one to her husband, but she was not much in the
habit of sparing his feelings, and so was able to
come promptly and squarely to the point.

“Not much,” replied John, loosening his cravat
once more. “Only a thousand.”

“That isn't much,” said the wife, rather scorn

[figure description] Page 207.[end figure description]

ing him for not having received more. “Why
don't you sell it and get it off your hands?”

Vane made no answer. Of course, selling the
stock would not hide the fact that he had owned
it, nor shield him from ugly questions as to how
he came to be possessed of it. But it seemed useless
to try to explain this to Olympia, women were
so irretrievably dark-minded in business matters.

“Does it pay anything?” she asked, merely
guessing from his silence that the property was
profitable, and that therefore he did not wish to
part with it.

“About fifteen hundred a year,” confessed the
husband, with a sheepish air; “or maybe two
thousand.”

“Two thousand!” exclaimed the modern Portia,
who, as a legislator, was even more “self-taught”
than her husband, and consequently more unscrupulous.
“Why, you must n't think of selling
it.”

The statesman gazed at his privy counsellor in
despair. She could not grasp the situation, and

[figure description] Page 208.[end figure description]

he might have known that she could not. To appeal
to such a woman for advice and consolation
in great trouble was much as if a drowning man
should trust to a raft made of millinery.

“It's all very well to talk that way, as though it
was as easy as A B C,” he answered, quite out of
patience with the straw which he had clutched at
to so little purpose. “But supposing this costs
me my seat? Supposing I get expelled for it?
Then you'll understand, I reckon, that it is of
some consequence, and not so very handy to
manage.”

Olympia perceived that dulness was imputed
unto her, and she felt very angry at the injustice.
She knew that she was not dull; nobody ever
hinted such an idea but her husband; other men
complimented her for her cleverness, her social
powers, etc.

“Then what did you get yourself in such a
scrape for?” she retorted sharply. “You needn't
blame me for it; I didn't do it.”

“Yes, you did,” insisted John, and with much

[figure description] Page 209.[end figure description]

truth. “I got into this very scrape to raise money
for your house keeping and receptions and carriages
and all those other confounded ruinous
things that you could have got along just as well
without. And, by George, the whole fol-de-rol
nonsense has got to stop!” he exclaimed, his longcontinued
excitement over the threatened investigation
bursting up in an explosion of domestic
wrath. “We don't keep house this session. And
we don't stay here at the Arlington, neither. We
go back to a boarding-house; and we go to parties
afoot, too. The omnibus ain't running this session,”
he added, with a bitterly jocose allusion to
“omnibus bills,” and their profitable loads of
special enactments. “Shoe-leather will have to
do our traveling. It's all the turn-out that I can
pay for.”

Of course there was a scene. Of course Olympia
did not surrender her woman's right to luxury
without a tearful and little less than hysterical
struggle. But John Vane, rendered pitiless by
terror concerning his political future, was for once

[figure description] Page 210.[end figure description]

master over his own household. He made arrangements
that very day for leaving his fine
rooms in the Arlington and going into lodgings.
At first sight, his economy seems unnecessarily
hard, in view of the fact that he still had several
thousand dollars left out of the illegal gleanings
of the last session, and thus was a richer man
than when he first came to Washington. But
this money had gone into the purchase of a new
patent in refrigerators, and he could not realize
on it without sacrificing a very promising business
chance. Moreover, he saw that in the present
public excitement about “jobbing” legislation,
he must forego its emoluments for a time,
and thus diminish his income. Finally, it seemed
to be absolutely necessary to put on the guise of
poverty, if he cared to preserve his repute for
honesty. All these things he explained to Olympia,
in a discreetly vague way, remembering the
while that she might be just goose enough to go
and cackle it abroad, but anxious, nevertheless, to
make her contented with him.

[figure description] Page 211.[end figure description]

“You see, we have been going it rather strong
on style,” he added. “Ten thousand dollars a
year is a pretty tall figure for four persons, two of'
em children. I suppose we got into that way because
other people set the example,” he concluded,
not wishing to be hard on his wife.

“If we could only have the rooms on the first
floor, I could stand it—for a while,” was the
response of the insatiable Olympia, a pathetic
tear fringing her long and really lovely eyelashes.
“They are only fifteen dollars a month more, and
then we would have a nice parlor, or at least a
decent one.”

“That means dinners, I s'pose,” grinned Vane,
testily. “Big dinners and little receptions.”

“Do you want to shut me out of the world
altogether?” was the desperate cry of this persecuted
wife.

“Now look here: I would do it,—I would if I
could,” groaned the weak monster of a husband.
“If I had a thousand dollars of capital loose, I'd
spend it that way, or any way to please you.”

[figure description] Page 212.[end figure description]

“Why don't you borrow?” was the suggestion
of a helpmeet whose ideas of a loan did not extend
so far as the repayment. “I'm sure I have
gentlemen friends who would be willing to lend
you something.”

Although she said “friends,” she was thinking
of Senator Ironman, and her husband easily
divined it. Should he be angry at the suggestion
and reject it with self-respectful scorn? Well,
he was not so sensitive as he had been when he
came to Washington; somehow or other he did
not care so much about the look of things and
the name of things; on the whole, he could not
feel indignation, or at least none to speak of.
Indeed, his disintegration of moral sentiments
had gone farther than that stage of indifference
which simply allows things to take their own
course. After meditating for some time over his
wife's advice to borrow of her friends, he decided
to follow it.

“It would be better to let Ironman lend me
the money than to run the chance of his lending

[figure description] Page 213.[end figure description]

it to her,” he reasoned. “And then I can tell
him that I am hard up, and give him a hint to
let other people know it. By George, it's a queer
position for an old business man to be in,” he
added with a mixture of chagrin and amusement;
“I never thought once that I should come to
want to be considered bankrupt.”

p539-221 CHAPTER XXI.

[figure description] Page 214.[end figure description]

WHEN the Honorable Mr. Vane was shown
into Senator Ironman's library, his usually
pink face wore that pallor which anxieties will
bring, especially when they are accompanied by
discontent with one's self.

The equally pink, though bony and narrow
visage of the senator also lost some of its natural
color as he advanced to welcome his visitor.
It was, by Jove, very queer, he thought, that
Vane should drop in at that time of day, just
after a fellow's breakfast, as though he were an
intimate friend. The two men, we must understand,
were not fundamentally fond of each other,
as is often the case with two men who admire
the same lady.

“I don't altogether fancy Vane,” the senator
had confessed to his familiars. “Now Mrs. Vane
is a magnificent creature, thoroughly well bred

[figure description] Page 215.[end figure description]

and well educated—that is, enough so for society,
you understand,—a whole-souled, splendid, dazzling
woman, and—and as jolly as possible. She
is a woman that shows well in a dance or anywhere.
By Jove, she's a stunner, that woman is.
I don't know another lady in Washington that
could wear crimson roses in her hair without
looking faded. She becomes a bouquet superbly,
and, by Jove, I love to give them to her,—she
shows one off so! But Vane is another sort of
animal altogether. He is rather—rather—in fact,
rather dull,” judged the great man, hitting on the
right word at last. “And just a little low, too,”
he added. “Don't always speak the best grammar.
One of your heavy, self-taught men,” he
explained, forgetting that his own father had
begun life as an hostler. “Low man on the
whole; in some points, very low—and dull.”

So you perceive he did not admire his visitor,
not as much as Slowburgh would have expected.
But there were other causes for the Dundreary
perplexity which now winked from his pale eyes

[figure description] Page 216.[end figure description]

and crisped his limited forehead. He had noted
Vane's unusual ghastliness, and the circumstance
alarmed him. What had the man got on his low
and dull mind? Was he going to say anything
disagreeable about the Ironman bouquets and carriage-drives
and other marks of esteem accorded
to Mrs. Vane. The senator was so eager and
hurried in his expressions of amity and welcome
that he fairly stuttered.

“Mr. Ironman, I just dropped in to talk about
this Great Subfluvial row,” commenced our member
in a slightly paralytic voice, for he was at
least as much agitated as his host.

“O,—O, indeed!” answered the relieved dignitary
of the upper house. “Sit down, sit down,”
he went on, smiling as cheerily as if the subject
were an entirely delightful one. “Had your
breakfast? Just as lieve order you up something
as not. Say a devilled kidney, now. Well, take
a glass of sauterne, then, or a cigar,” he urged,
forgetting that John was a tee-totaler and a nonsmoker.

[figure description] Page 217.[end figure description]

“I don't use either, thank you,” said Vane,
holding on to what habits of virtue he had left,
though he wanted a glass of wine sadly. “Well,—
about this affair, now: do you think there'll be
an investigation?”

“Yes, O, yes; such a row about it, you know;
can't help coming to one; bad for those fellows
that are in it,” prattled the senator, either forgetting
that the bulk of his own fortune had come
out of the lobby, or remembering with satisfaction
that it had been harvested years ago.

“With closed doors, I s'pose,” hoped Dishonest
John.

“Don't know about that, by Jove!” and Ironman
shook his statesmanlike head. “You see
we don't want them open; but now and then
we have to give in to the newspaper fellows;
there's such a row about it, you know! I'm
afraid some fellows have got to go overboard,”
he added, much consoled by the thought that
the fellows in question would be out of his way.
“You see, when a man is found out, it's bad for
him.”

[figure description] Page 218.[end figure description]

“Well,” sighed Vane, after a long silence, “I
may have to quit Washington, then.”

The senator opened his eyes. So Honest
John Vane was “in it,” was he? It was curious,
by Jove! and he wondered he had n't thought of
it before, and then wondered how it was that all
those honest fellows ended so badly. But these
ideas were almost immediately chased out of the
confined boundaries of his mind by the reflection
that, if Vane left Washington, his wife would go
too.

“By Jove, that's bad,” he broke out. By Jove,
that won't do. We can't spare you and Mrs.
Vane. My wife won't know what to do,” he
explained, “if she loses Mrs. Vane.”

The heart of Mrs. Vane's husband grew a
little lighter under these acknowledgments of
her importance to the Ironmans.

“Look here! something might be done, you
know,” continued the senator, thinking harder
than he had been accustomed to think since he
left school. “I'll run around, myself, among the

[figure description] Page 219.[end figure description]

House fellows, by Jove! I'll ask 'em if something
can't be done.”

In another instant he had an inspiration.
“Look here! Put you on the investigating committee!
You needn't investigate your own case,
you know. That's it; I'll try to get you put on
the investigating committee. It'll help you with
the people,—clear up your record; don't you
see? And then, if the doors can be kept shut,
why, you do that, you know. Just the very
idea!” he concluded, quite happy over his unexpected
attack of shrewdness.

“I'm afraid,” confessed John Vane, still retaining
a little grain of conscience, and rendered
timorous by it, “it's a leetle too bold for me,—
with this stock on my hands.”

“I don't see why that should hinder,” stared the
experienced senator. “Of course you bought the
stock, (it 's the inside stock, is n't it?) without
knowing that it was hitched on to the Great Subfluvial.”

“But I have n't paid for it,” sighed Vane.

[figure description] Page 220.[end figure description]

“That 's the awkward part of the business. And
that is partly what I dropped in to see you about,”
he concluded, his face turning crimson with
shame.

“How much?” asked Ironman instantly. He
understood that a loan was wanted, and he was
willing to make a moderate one; in fact, glad to
do it.

“A thousand par,” explained our fallen great
man.

“O, that 's nothing!” laughed the millionnaire,
highly amused that Vane should have sold his
honesty for so little. “Let me lend you enough
to cover it. How much will you have? Say fifteen
hundred, now. Here,” he continued to laugh,
as he went to his safe for the money to hide a
bribe, “this trap is always open to a friend. I 've
had too many good dinners and pleasant evenings
at your house not to call you by that name.”

“I hope you 'll call often,” mumbled John Vane
in a stifled voice, as he pocketed the greenbacks.
We shall always be delighted to see you.”

[figure description] Page 221.[end figure description]

He felt driven to utter these commonplaces,
but he could not return thanks for the
loan. He had a bitter feeling or suspicion that
he was not under obligations to Ironman, and he
was so far from being grateful to him that he positively
hated him. It was a satisfaction to him,
after he had got into the street, to look back at
the house menacingly, and mutter, “You won't
see your funds again in one while, old fellow, if
you ever do.”

This speech of his, by the way, is one of the
circumstances of his life from which we can most
accurately take his measure in regard to delicacy
of feeling and sensitiveness to dishonor.

His next business was to hurry to Dorman's
office, and announce that he had come to settle
for “that stock.”

“What 's the damage?” he asked, not at all
alluding to the damage which his soul had
received.

“How much do you propose to pay?” replied
the lobbyist, his smoky eyes giving forth sparks
of commingled satire and greed.

[figure description] Page 222.[end figure description]

“Why, par, of course,” said John Vane, a little
alarmed. “That 's the figure we talked of when
I took it.”

Dorman skipped about the room and rubbed
himself violently, much like a man who discovers
that he has a hornet inside his clothes.

“It 's been worth three hundred all the while,”
he exclaimed. “I could have sold it for three
hundred the day you got it.”

Now Vane could not pay three hundred, nor
two hundred, without great inconvenience. Moreover,
he was a bargainer born; a bargainer, too, by
life-long habit, and valued himself on it. He was
as proud of his instinctive, functional, and inevitable
dexterity in a dicker as a crab is said to be
of walking sideways. So, although he was afraid
of Dorman, he resolved to show what he called
the spirit of a man, and to resist this low attempt
at extortion.

“Look here, Darius, that won't go down,” he
remonstrated. “The stock may have been worth
three hundred once, but it ain't worth it now.

[figure description] Page 223.[end figure description]

People don't want it any more than they want
shares in a broken bank with stockholders liable.
I 'll bet a cookey” (John Vane was not a sporting
man, and did not mean to bet anything), “I 'll bet a
cookey that you can't sell my share, nor anybody's
share, for a hundred. But I 'll give that for it,
because I agreed to and like to stand by my
word,” he concluded nobly.

“O, very well, anything you like!” grumbled
the corruptionist, who saw that he must relinquish
his plan for getting back a part of the price which
he had paid for a soul.

“And I want a receipt dated back to day of
transfer,” continued Vane.

“Of course you do,” grinned Dorman. “You
want it very much indeed. Well, if we give you
one, what can you do for us?”

“O, well, I don't know,” drawled John, who by
this time had caught that easy jog-trot of manner
which was his bargaining gait. “You 'll need a
good deal done for you before the thing is over,”
he added, picking up the morning Chronicle and

[figure description] Page 224.[end figure description]

pretending to read it. “If I was in the right
place,” he continued, after a little, “of course I
could help you more or less.” After a further
perusal of the Chronicle, he resumed, “By the
way, I met Ironman just now, and he gave me an
idea which might work well for you, providing it
would work at all.”

“Nice fellow, Ironman,” smirked Dorman. He
guessed immediately that Vane had been drawing
on the rich senator for money to pay for the stock;
and he wanted to stop him from making use of
that resource, for he wanted him poor and in his
own power. “Eccentric person in some respects,”
he went on; “but genial, generous fellow.”

Either because there was offence in these
remarks, or because this black little creature's
breath had some pungent quality, Vane suddenly
turned away his head and had a slight spasm of
coughing, like a man who had caught a whiff from
a lucifer match.

“Yes,” he assented presently, looking rather
glum. “Well, what was I saying? O, I know

[figure description] Page 225.[end figure description]

(and by the way, this is between us), he suggested
putting me on the committee of investigation!”

Dorman laughed so violently that Vane could
not help joining him. The peach-blow face of
the Congressman turned crimson, and the sombre
visage of the lobbyist turned almost black, so
apoplectic was their merriment. There was also
a sound of other hilarity, not so distinct and therefore
all the more singular, about the office. There
were faint but audible chuckles in the walls, along
the lofty ceiling, and under the floor.

“What's that?” asked Vane, looking about him
with a merely earthly and rather stolid suspicion
of eaves-droppers.

“O, nothing that need interrupt us!” smiled
Dorman. “This used to be a dwelling-house, and
had the name of being haunted. Curious noises
about it, you observe; perhaps from subterranean
passages to the devil knows where; perhaps nothing
but echoes. Well, John. I like your plan.
Here is your receipt for payment, dated back to
the day of transfer. Give me one thousand; no

[figure description] Page 226.[end figure description]

interest from you. We are friends, John, forever,”
he concluded, with a peculiar accent on the last
word.

“I hope so,” answered Vane mechanically, and
not as much alarmed as he ought to have been.
“O, by the way, where is Sharp? I want to see
him about this.”

“Yes, you 'd better see him,” said Dorman, who
was counting his bills, all miser again. “You 'll
find him at home.”

p539-234 CHAPTER XXII.

[figure description] Page 227.[end figure description]

MR. JABEZ SHARP, the member from the
old Whetstone State, was, it must be understood,
the real head of the Great Subfluvial corporation,
and also of that interior manifestation
of it which we have called the Hen Persuader.

As Vane hurried toward this honorable's house,
he met that eminent and venerated, but just now
grievously slandered statesman, Mr. Greatheart.
The two could not pass each other without a
moment's discourse. By the way, there was a
vast deal of mysterious, muttered conversation
going on just now among Congressmen. They
had a subject in common, a subject of terrifying
interest to only too many of them, the subject of
this approaching, unavoidable investigation. You
could scarcely turn a corner without discovering
a couple of broad-backed, thick-necked, and bigheaded
gentlemen leaning solemnly toward each

[figure description] Page 228.[end figure description]

other and engaged in such cautious, inaudible communion
that it seemed as if they were speaking
only through their staring eyes, or by means of
some twitching of their noses. The number of
these duos, the noiseless gravity with which they
were conducted, the usually swollen configuration
of the performers in them, and the stupefied
astonishment which was depicted in their faces,
all reminded one of those numerous solemn meetings
of toads which may be seen after a shower.

Mr. Greatheart was not physically such a man
as you might have expected from his heroic name.
There was not a line about him, either in the way
of muscle or expression, which could suggest descent
from that stalwart knight who guided
Christiana through the Dark Valley. He was
short and squab in build, with a spacious, cleanshaved,
shining face, huge red wattles of cheeks
hanging down over his jaws, and a meek, noncombatant
semi-clerical mien. A bacchanalian
cardinal, who should lately have turned Quaker,
but lacked time to get the Burgundy out of his

[figure description] Page 229.[end figure description]

complexion, might wear a similar physiognomy.
There was conscience in this visage, but there
was also spiritual pride and animal propensity,
and perhaps other evidences of a nature not yet
made perfect. Good people who believed in him
knew him as a man whose public career was
famed for spotless, and whose private life had
been smirched here and there by inuendo.

Just now the Honorable Greatheart was evidently
in low spirits, not to say in a bewildering
funk. Recalling our batrachian simile, we might
describe him as a toad who looked as if he had
eaten too many ants and got the dyspepsia. In
real truth he was ready to call on mushrooms to
hide him, and on molchills to cover him. His
condition was a sorry one, much sorrier than John
Vane's. He had pocketed Hen Persuader stock,
and then had publicly and positively denied the
fact, either to save his own reputation from the
charge of bribery, or to lighten the party ship
over the breakers of the election. Now there
was to be an investigation, and the ownership of

[figure description] Page 230.[end figure description]

this malodorous property would be traced to him,
and he would be convicted of lying. Is it any
wonder that under such circumstances a reputed
saint should have somewhat the air of a reptile?

“Glad to see you, Vane,” he murmured, shaking
our member's hand fervently, for he was a
cordial man when in adversity. “What do you
judge to be the prospects about an investigation?”

“Sure to come on, I hear,” answered John, who
was much cheered by the results of his interviews
with Ironman and Dorman, and remembered that
he might yet sit in judgment on Greatheart.

“So I understand,” sighed that stumbled worthy,
his wattles drooping still lower and taking a yellowish
tint. “Ah well! we may suffer severely
for this error. I conceive now, Mr. Vane, that it
was an error. Yes, it was a really terrible mistake,”
he went on conceding, for he was in that
mood of confession which gripes unaccustomed
misdoers under the threatenings of punishment.
“A blunder is sometimes worse than a crime,—
that is, worse in its consequences. And

[figure description] Page 231.[end figure description]

circumstances are such in Washington that the best-intentioned
of us are occasionally beguiled into
very sad blunders.”

“In spite of everything that we can do,” eagerly
affirmed Vane, classing himself of course among
the “best-intentioned.”

“Very few men are really fit for Congress,”
pursued Mr. Greatheart, in a certain preaching
tone which was natural to him, he having once
been a clergyman. “I sometimes feel that I myself
ought never to have come here. I had
neither the pecuniary means nor the stoical character
to grapple with the protean life of Washington.
It is too full of exigencies and temptations
for any human nature which is not quite
extraordinary. The legislative system alone is
enough to kill us. As long as these subsidy bills
and relief bills are allowed, no man ought to run
for Congress who is not a Crœsus or a Cato. A
poor fellow will get into debt, and then the lobby
offers to help him out, and it is very hard to

[figure description] Page 232.[end figure description]

refuse. The whole arrangement is terribly severe
on men of small means.”

“Just so,” feelingly assented Vane, who heard
his own decline and fall narrated, and was moved
to compassion by the tale. “It's too bad on us.
Either the whole system of special legislation
ought to be done away with, or else we ought to
be allowed a regular percentage on the appropriations
we vote, and the thing made business-like.”

“That—that is a bold idea,” smiled Greatheart,
apparently not disapproving it. “Are you thinking
of proposing it?”

“O, no!” exclaimed John, drawing back bodily
in the earnestness of his negation. “I suppose
it would cost a fellow his re-election.”

“I suppose it would, unless he represented a
very staunch district,” said Greatheart. “I don't
know but one man who would dare advocate such
a plan. I think—if you have no objection—that
I'll mention it to General Boum.”

And so these two penitents, who were ready to
resume thievery as soon as they could get free

[figure description] Page 233.[end figure description]

from their crosses, bade each other a sad good
morning and parted.

Next John found Mr. Sharp, and was received
by him with razor-strop smoothness, as that well-oiled
gentleman received everybody who could
vote on his schemes.

“Do take a seat, Mr. Vane,—take a seat without
ceremony,” he begged, meanwhile softly
handling his visitor by the arms, much as though
they were glass ones. “Let me offer you this
easy-chair. You honor me by accepting it. I
thank you kindly.”

Vane had an instinctive desire to look at the
sleeves of his overcoat. It always seemed to him,
after Mr. Sharp had fingered him, as if he must
be greasy.

“I am exceedingly glad to see you here,” continued
the Whetstone representative, gazing as
genially as he could at our member through his
cold, vitreous eyes. “I had begun to fear that I
was under such a cloud of misrepresentation and
obloquy that my old friends would not come to

[figure description] Page 234.[end figure description]

call on me. This great enterprise, which I have
had the honor to foster a little, according to my
poor measure of financial ability, has been terribly
abused and maligned. A national enterprise,
too! a thing not only beneficial, but absolutely
necessary to the country! The noblest scheme
ever indorsed by the wisdom of Congress! What
do people mean? What does the press mean?
What is this investigation for? I am completely
bewildered.”

“It's giving the stock to Congressmen that has
made the row,” answered Vane, who judged that
they might as well come to the point at once.

“O, that is it?” grinned Mr. Sharp, with an air
of getting light in the midst of really discouraging
darkness. “I am glad you have explained it
to me. I should have expected it from a man of
your clearness of vision. I thank you kindly.
Well—as to that matter—why, that is simple. I
put the stock where it would do the most good to
a good thing.”

“Just so,” nodded Vane, meanwhile thinking

[figure description] Page 235.[end figure description]

what nonsense it was for Sharp to be talking
gammon to him. “But you see— Well, never
mind about that now; we may as well get to business.
There is sure to be an investigation.”

“Exactly,” answered the Whetstone member,
sloughing off his coating of “soft sawder,” and
coming out as hard and bright as a new silver
dollar.

“And I have a smart chance of being put on
the House committee,” continued John.

Mr. Sharp opened the dark-lantern of his Puritanic
visage, and let out a smile which contained
all the guile of all the peddlers that ever sold
wooden nutmegs.

“Mr. Vane,” said he, “are your arrangements
about that stock of yours completed to your entire
satisfaction?”

“I have paid Dorman for it and got a receipt
that will do me.”

“Mr. Vane, do let me hand that money back,”
pursued Sharp, fumbling in his desk and producing
a package of bills. “It was a trifling mark

[figure description] Page 236.[end figure description]

of private amity and sincere esteem. I never
meant it should be paid for. Dorman is an able
business man, but hasn't an idea beyond trading.
I insist, Mr. Vane, on your taking back your
money.”

“Well—from that point of view—since you
will have it so,” smiled Dishonest John, pocketing
the bills.

“Want any more of the stock?” inquired
Sharp, with a cunning twinkle in his half-shut
eyes, as if he saw a way to recover his thousand
dollars.

“No!” answered Vane, not less promptly and
positively than if he had been offered a ladleful
of pitch from the infernal caldron.

“My dear sir, we are at your service,” bowed
the financier. “Anything that we can do for
you, call on us. Of course you will have all our
influence towards putting you on that committee.
Must you go? So obliged for this call! Let me
open the door for you. Thank you kindly.”

p539-244 CHAPTER XXIII.

[figure description] Page 237.[end figure description]

THANKS to the labors of solemn Mr. Sharp
and of worldly Mr. Ironman, our member
soon had a fair prospect of getting on the investigating
committee, supposing always that there
should be such a nuisance.

But the nearer he came to this post of responsibility
and honor, the more it looked to him as
though it might turn out a whipping-post, at
which he would stand with exposed shoulders
and bleeding cuticle. If he as a judge should be
able to close the court-room doors, and keep out
not only spectators but also the witnesses in the
case, all might go famously well, at least from
the Satanic point of view. But if, while pretending
to examine into the little games of others,
the same kind of cards should be found up his
own sleeves, he would be ruined beyond a hope

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of re-election. The sad state of a boy whose
pockets are full of fire-crackers in a state of
crackling and scorching ignition, would be but a
feeble image of such a disaster. In these days
he vacillated as rapidly and disagreeably as if he
were astride some monstrous shuttlecock, or were
being seesawed by all the giants of fairy-tale
land. His pulpy pink face wore an air of abiding
perplexity which rivalled that of his Dundrearyish
friend, Ironman. At times it seemed
as if its large watery features would decompose
entirely with irresolution, and come to resemble
an image of strawberry ice which has been exposed
to too high a temperature.

Meantime, the spectre of investigation advanced,
and its pointing finger renewed his
sense of guilt. The approach of punishment
always enlightens a sinner marvellously as to
the heinous nature of his sin. Even the Devil,
when visited by the hand of sickness, perceived
that he had led an evil life, and hungered to
withdraw from a world of temptation and

[figure description] Page 239.[end figure description]

thirsted to take holy orders. Just so John Vane now
discovered plainly once more that he had been
pocketing bribes and swindling the public treasury,
and that these were very wrong actions. If
he had never truly had a conscience before, but
had regulated his conduct by the consciences
of others, he at last possessed one of his
own. Indeed, it appeared to him a very large
one because it was sore, precisely as a man's
nose seems large to him while yet tender from
a fisticuff. From one point of view, he was
an honester John Vane than he had ever been,
inasmuch as terror and remorse made him intelligently
honest with himself.

Before he could decide to accept a position on
the committee, he must be sure that Sharp &
Co. would conceal his ownership of their stock,
and he called on Dorman to obtain a positive
promise to that effect. It is wonderful, by the
way, how rogues in distress will trust each other's
word, even when each knows by experience that
the other is a confirmed liar.

[figure description] Page 240.[end figure description]

“Look here, Darius, the more I stir up this
business, the worse it looks to me,” he groaned
from the summit of a state of mind which almost
raised him to the moral altitude of a penitent
thief.

Dorman responded by groaning over his end
of the burden, which naturally seemed to him
much heavier than Vane's; each of these invalids,
like the majority of commonplace sick people,
wanted to talk of his own malady and symptoms.
Still, there was a sort of fellow-feeling
between them, such as even small-pox patients
have for each other. Dorman no longer purposed
financial vengeance upon Vane for getting his
stock at par and paying no commission. Nor
was Vane sensibly embittered against Dorman,
although the latter had made a large fortune
out of the Subfluvial, while he himself had only
pocketed a beggarly thousand or two.

“It's the cursed unfairness of the thing that
yerks me,” the lobbyist complained. “Now isn't
it too bad that the public should want to haul

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our job over the hottest kind of coals, when ever
so many other jobs just like it ain't spoken of?”

We must remark here, what the reader has
doubtless already noticed, that there was something
disappointing in this creature's conversation.
While his person and demeanor reminded
one of the supernatural castaways of the lake
of fire, his discourse was insignificantly human
and even smacked of a very low down sort of
humanity.

“And here I am in it, for almost nothing,”
sighed Vane, returning instinctively to his own
case. “What sort of a story are you going to
tell, Darius, if they put you on the stand?” he
presently inquired.

“O, I would say anything that would do the
most good,” grimaced the lobbyist. “But Sharp
means to let out a few facts; that is, if they
crowd him. You see, Sharp unluckily has a
character to nurse. I dare say, too, he thinks
he can stop questions by showing that he means
to answer them,” added Dorman, who always
imputed the lowest motives.

[figure description] Page 242.[end figure description]

Thoroughly scared by this information, Vane
resolved to keep off the committee. He went
home in the dumps, wished he had never gone
into politics, and meditated resigning his seat.
Perhaps he would have taken this wholesome
step, but he was moved first to consult Olympia
about it, and she flatly refused to resign.

“I won't agree to it,—no, never!” she exclaimed,
rustling in all her silks with indignation.
“Why, I have just fairly got into the best society,
and there are all the receptions to come, and the
inauguration ball! and the winter is going to be
so gay!”

“O—well,” stared John, who had not thought
to look at this side of the medal; “but we must
stick to boarding, if we do stay,” he capitulated
on conditions. “I tell you the winter ain't going
to be gay in Congress, and there won't be much
money lying around loose, and we must skimp.”

Before many days he found cause to pluck up
his courage a little. He learned that Slowburgh
considered him innocent of evil, meaning, of

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course, that half of Slowburgh which had voted
for him. The committee of a certain association
sent him an invitation to lecture before it, and
promised that “the appearance of his honest face
on their platform would be the signal of frantic
applause.” Furthermore, certain newspapers remarked
that, although John Vane was suspected
of owning Hen Persuader stock, he had at least
not denied such ownership, and commented upon
the fact as an unusual exhibition of uprightness
and manliness—in a Congressman. These
things revived his confidence so much that his
mind was able to work. He saw his game clear
before him; he must get in a “long suit” of
frankness. There was a little trick, which, if
skilfully and luckily played, would give him such
a repute for veracity and for just intentions that
all the caverns of the Great Subfluvial could not
swallow it. What this happy thought was we
shall learn presently.

Meantime the excitement of the men outside
politics increased. That vast, industrious, decent

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American public, which wire-pullers usually regard
as having no more intelligence or moral
principle than one of the forces of nature, showed
unmistakably that it possessed much political
virtue and some political sense. The discovery
that the so-called slanders against its favorites
were, in all probability, verities, only made it
more determined that those slanders should be
investigated. The steady tempest of its righteous
indignation scattered good seed through
Congress, and produced on that upland of statesmanship
a promising nubbin or two of conscience.
An investigation was ordered, at first
under hermetically sealed conditions, but the
popular storm soon blew the doors open.

The rest we manly know; the whole alien
world of monarchies, empires, and despotisms
knows it; the capacity of republicanism for honest
government is everywhere being judged by it.
In every civilized land on this planet, thoughtful
souls are seeking to divine, by the light of these
and other similar dolorous revelations, whether it

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is possible for a democracy to save itself from
the corrupting tyranny of capital. Within our
own borders sadder spirits are asking which is the
most alluring spectacle,—a free America falling
into squandering and bribery, or a monarchial
Prussia ruled by economy and honesty.

We know how it fared with Christian and Faithful
and Hopeful and Greatheart and other venerated
statesmen who had turned more or less into
the ways of Achan and Ananias. Anxious to
clear themselves of an ugly charge, and trusting
that the chief manipulator of the Hen Persuader
would be willing to bear their sins in return for
their services, they had flatly denied having taken
any golden eggs out of his abstracting machine.
But this disclaimer left Mr. Simon Sharp under
the imputation of putting said eggs into his own
pocket, and so plundering his partners in the enterprise
of making the national hen lay on indefinitely.
Being a man of exact arithmetical instincts,
and of inveterate, ingrained business habits, he
revolted from such an unfair allotment of the

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dividends of dishonor, and insisted that every one
should take his own share and no more. To the
astonishment of everybody, he told a story as
straight and searching as a ploughman's furrow;
and we will venture to say that no American was
proud of the unexpected skeletons which it turned
up. There was a time when every fair political
reputation reminded us of the Arabian oil-jars,
each one of which held a robber; when it seemed
as if we should have to concede that our legislative
temple was but a den of thieves, sadly given to
lying. It was a new and perversely reversed
and altogether bedevilled rendering of the Pilgrim's
Progress into American politics; it was
much as if Bunyan had at the last pitched his
Christian and Hopeful into the little lurid hole
which led from the gate of Zion to the pit. Nothing
could well be more subverting and confounding
and debilitating to the moral sense, unless it might
be to see silver Demas and filthy Muckrake welcomed
by the shining ones into the Holy City.

And something similar to this last marvel was
not wanting.

p539-254 CHAPTER XXIV.

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WEATHERCOCK John carried out his plan
for getting up a new and revised edition of
his character as Honest John Vane.

He let Sharp and Ironman go on working for
him, declaring that he was the most upright creature
on this footstool, and recommending him as
fit to investigate the very claims of saints to their
crowns. But when his name was read as a member
of the committee, he rose and requested to be
excused from serving.

“My reason is simply this,” he said, calmly
turning his honest face and dignified abdomen
towards every quarter of the house; “I own stock—
to the amount of one thousand dollars—in the
corporation in question. I will offer no explanations
here and now as to my motives in taking it,
because those motives will doubtless be demanded
of me by the committee of investigation. I shall

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be happy to appear before it, but I cannot conscientiously
be a member of it. I trust that the
House, and you, Mr. Speaker, will excuse me.”

The Honorable Sharp looked icicles from his
arm-chair, and Dorman looked coals of fire from
his rear corner. But as our member sat down
there was a general murmur of perfunctory applause,
and by next morning he was newspapered
all over as “Honest John Vane.”

Still, he was not out of danger. As the rain of
fire and brimstone into the Congressional Sodom
continued, and especially when the blazing flames
of investigation began to light on his own combustible
garments, he was in a state of mind to
flee into the mountains and dwell in a cave.
When he appeared before the committee, he did
not look much like one of those just men whose
mere presence can save a wicked city. Moreover,
Sharp and Dorman testified against him to the
full extent of their naughty knowledge. Nevertheless,
Vane came out of his furnace without
much of a singeing. He exhibited Dorman's

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receipt of payment for the stock, and triumphantly
remarked that “the document spoke for itself.”
As for the thousand dollars which Sharp had refunded
to him, he said that he had always regarded
it as a loan, and stood ready to repay it. As for
the singular profitableness of the investment,—
well, he had expected it would bring him in something
handsome; it was his habit as a business
man to invest for a profit.

He tried to raise a smile here, turning his genial
visage from one to another of the committee,
with an almost pathetic effort at humor. But the
sad synagogue of investigators did not smile back;
it had been engaged that morning in digging
graves for some of the fairest reputations in politics;
for once a body of Congressional Yoricks
could not appreciate a poor joke.

“What we mainly wish to know,” hummed and
hawed the worried chairman, “is whether you
were aware, at the time of purchase, that the Hen
Persuader was a branch of the Great Subfluvial
corporation.”

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Weathercock John was in dire trouble; if he
said “Yes,” his character and career were ruined;
if he said “No,” he was a perjurer. It cost him
many seconds of penal meditation to hit upon that
happy dodge known as the non mi ricordo.

“Gentlemen, I will frankly confess that I did
not inquire so closely as I perhaps should have
done into that point,” he answered, remembering
distinctly that he had not inquired into it at all,
but had been told all about it by Dorman. “I
did, however, know that the two companies were
acting under different and independent charters.
It seemed fair to infer that investing in one was
not the same thing as investing in the other.”

It was done. Congressman Vane had found
his own way out of his entanglements. The committee-men
were ready to rise and salute his
escape with benevolent cheers. How in the name
of political human nature could they want to find
guilty their brother lawgiver, brother worker in
the party traces, and, perhaps, brother sinner in
special legislation? They bowed him away from

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their operating table with a look which said
plainly, We rejoice that we shall not be obliged
to amputate your able and honored head, Mr.
Vane.

Only a few people remarked on the shallowness
of this show of innocence. Here was stock sold
at par which was worth three hundred, which on
the day after purchase paid a dividend of sixty
per cent., and, only a few weeks later, forty more.
How could a legislator and business man doubt
that it was a swindle? How could he fail to
divine that Mr. Sharp's Hen Persuader was but
an adjunct of Mr. Sharp's Great Subfluvial?

But the public,—the great, soft-hearted American
public,—that public which has compassion on
every species of scoundrel,—which tries murderers
under jury restrictions warranted to save four-fifths
of them,—which cannot see one condemned
to death without pleading with tears for his noxious
life,—that forgiving, milk-and-water public
was as mild in its judgment as the committee.
It magnified our dishonorable member for not

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lying, and exalted his name for not committing
perjury. What a pity, said this lamblike public
which was so bent on getting itself fleeced to the
skin,—what a pity that our other shepherds could
not have used the shears with a steadier hand and
avoided snipping off their own fingers! In contrast
to these unlucky and somewhat ridiculous
bunglers, what a straightforward, workmanlike,
admirable creature was “Honest John Vane.”

And so he escaped all exposure that could injure
him in the eyes of a community of humanitarians,
and all punishment that could hurt a
man whose conscience lay solely in the opinions
of others. Even the Subfluvial people did not
follow him up vindictively; they admired him so
much for his ability in sneaking that they could
not hate him; moreover, they considered that
he might still be useful. Not long after Vane's
escape from the committee, he held with Dorman
one of those friendly colloquies which rogues are
capable of when it no longer pays to quarrel.

“What a horrid scrape Christian and

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Greatheart have got themselves into!” observed John,
with cheerful self-complacency. “Why couldn't
those fellows have told a straight story?”

“Half-honesty is cursed poor policy,” smirked
the lobbyist. “After all, those chaps are the
cleanest-handed of the whole gang. They wanted
to make an actual investment,—something
that would show like a fair business transaction,—
just to ease their consciences. The real sharpers
took greenbacks and kept their names off
paper. Do you suppose that the committee is
raking up the Subfluvial to the bottom? Why,
our very first move, the mere getting our charter
through, cost us half a million. We have paid
out hundreds of thousands to men against whom
we haven't a particle of proof beyond our verbal
statements.”

“Exactly,” nodded Vane, who had long since
heard as much. “Well, do you mean to swear in
these things?”

“Of course we don't,” Dorman chuckled.
“We know enough not to kill the goose that lays
our golden eggs.”

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“So much the worse for the Greatheart lot,”
inferred Weathercock John. “They will have to
go out, I suppose.”

“Don't you believe it,” scoffed the lobbyist.
“I can tell you exactly how this thing is sure to
come out. There will be a one-legged report,—
somebody giving bribes, but none of the takers
guilty of being bribed,—like a gambling case in
which only one of the players is a gambler.
Then, if the public excitement keeps up, a couple
or so will be picked out as scapegoats, to bear
off the sins of the congregation. This report
will be so manifestly unfair that it can't help
rousing opposition. As soon as it appears, a
debate will be arranged. All the old war-horses
will gallop up and down among charges, countercharges,
precedents, and points of law, raising
such a dust that the public won't be able to see
what is going on. When the dust clears away, it
will be found that nobody is expelled. The two
scapegoats will be almost expelled, but not quite.
It will be like the pig going through the crooked

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hollow log and always coming out on his own side
of the fence. Then the wire-pullers at home will
take a hand in the job. All the convicted chaps
will have receptions got up for them in their
districts, and be whitewashed all over with resolutions
expressing unshaken confidence. You
won't have any reception, John. You are not
far gone enough to need such vigorous treatment.
Your case is lobby varioloid, instead of lobby
small-pox.”

Vane felt somewhat offended at this plain
speaking, for it is a curious fact that he had not
lost his self-esteem; but, looking at matters in
his habitual profit-and-loss way, he decided that
wrath would bring him in nothing.

“Take care of yourself, Dorman,” he said, with
a tranquil good nature which did him dishonor.
“If I owned a million of your style of property,
I shouldn't feel rich. There'll be suits against
your inside corporation.”

“I'm out of it,” replied the lobbyist, flashes of
cunning dancing about his sooty eyes, as sparks

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run over the back of a foul fireplace. “I have
failed.”

For the life of him, and notwithstanding the
long-faced decorum which sham honesty requires,
John Vane could not help laughing. The fact
that a financier should declare himself bankrupt
the moment he saw himself in danger of being
called on to refund his swindlings, did not strike
our self-taught legislator as a very disgusting
exhibition of rascality, but as a very amusing bit
of cleverness.

“But you're going to hang around here, I
hope,” he added, unwilling to lose a trickster who
had been helpful, and might be so again.

“No, I am going back,” said Dorman, in a tone
which would have been significant of forebodings
and horrors to any soul less carnal than a sparerib.
His face, too, was strange; it had an unusually
seared, cindered, and smoke-stained look;
one would have said that the cuticle was drying
up with inward heat. If that scorched envelope
had cracked open, and the creature within had

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bounced forth in some different hide, or in a
raw-head-and-bloody-bones state of nudity, there
would have been no great cause of wonderment.
But Congressman Vane saw nothing remarkable;
he simply inquired, with calm, oleaginous interest,
“Going back where?”

“Where I came from,” grimaced Dorman, and
disappeared abruptly, either by stepping briskly
around a corner, or by slipping under a flagstone.

Not in the least disturbed by this singular
circumstance, and, indeed, altogether failing to
perceive anything noteworthy in it, Weathercock
John marched on majestically to the Capitol, and
commenced his day's work of statesmanship.

Well, there he is still, a lawgiver to this tax-burdened
people, and ex-officio a director of its
finances. As soon as he has recovered from his
present slight scare, he will resume his labor
(the only legislative labor which he knows much
about) of enacting the national revenue into the
safes of huge corporations and into the hats of
individual mendicants, for the sake of a small

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percentage thereof to himself. Can nothing be
done to stop him, or at least to shackle and limit
him, in his damaging industry? Can we not
wrest from him and from his brother knaves or
dunces this fearfully abused privilege of voting
the public money for other objects than the
carrying on of the departments of the government?
Can we not withdraw altogether from
Congress the power of aiding corporations and
schemers out of an income which is contributed
by all for the equal benefit of all? Can we not
provide, for instance, that, if a man has a claim
for injuries to property against the United States,
he shall prosecute that claim in the courts?

Such men as John Vane will inevitably find
their way in numbers to the desks of the Capitol.
Better and wiser men than he will be corrupted
by a lobby which has thoroughly learned the
easy trick of paying a hundred thousand out of
every stolen million. Nothing in the future is
more certain than that, if this huge “special

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legislation” machine for bribery is not broken
up, our Congress will surely and quickly become,
what some sad souls claim that it already is, a
den of thieves.