A Spoil of Office Part 24

Six or eight men came into the larger room talking loudly and excitedly about the market, and Cargill's attention was drawn off by the resonant reports of the Chicago market.

"The market shows great elasticity. Western advices contribute to the Bull feeling."

"Do you know Miss Wilbur?" Bradley asked when Cargill came back, being afraid Cargill might forget the topic of conversation.

"Yes, I meet her occasionally. I meet her at the Square Table Club, where we fight on literature. They call it the Square Table Club, because they disagree with the opinions of the most of us real literary people of the town."

Bradley managed to say, in a comparatively firm tone of voice, that he had heard of Miss Wilbur as a Grange lecturer, and that he would like to know more about her.

"Well, I'll introduce you. She aint very easy to understand. She is one of these infernal advanced women. Now, I like thinkers, but what right has a woman to think? To think is our manly prerogative. I'm free to admit that we don't exercise it to much better advantage than we do our prerogative to vote; but then, d.a.m.n it, how could we stand wives that think?"

Bradley had given up trying to understand when Cargill was joking and when he was in earnest. He knew this was either merciless sarcasm or the most pig-headed bigotry. Anyhow he did not care to say anything for fear of drawing him off into a discussion of an impersonal subject, just when he seemed likely to tell something about Ida's early life.

It was a singular place to receive this information. He sat there with his elbow on the desk, leaning his head on his palm, studying Cargill's face as he talked. Over at the other end of the room, the operator was feeding himself on a pickle with his left hand, and receiving the telegrams from the far-off, roaring, tumultuous wheat exchange, every repeated message being a sort of distant echo of the ocean of cries and the tumult of feet in the city. They were as much alone and talking in private as if they were in Cargill's own room at the hotel. Cargill talked on, unmindful of the telephone, the telegraphic ticking, and the brisk, business-like action of his partner.

"Yes, I have known her ever since she was a girl. Her father was a queer old seed of a farmer, just out of town here, cranky on religion--a Universalist, I believe. Had the largest library of his town; I don't know but the largest private library outside of a city in the State. His house was literally walled with books. How he got 'em I don't know. It was currently believed that he was full of information, but I never heard of any one who was able to get very much out of him.

His wife had been a beauty; that was her dowry to her daughter.

"The girl went to school here at sixteen. I was a student then, six or seven years older than she, and I remember there were about six of us who used to stand around the schoolhouse door to carry her books for her; but she just walked past us all without a turn of the head. She didn't seem to know what ailed us. She was one of these girls born all brains, some way. I never saw her face flushed in my life, and her big eyes always made me shiver when she turned them on me."

"Wheat falls to ninety-three and a fourth. There is a break in the market. New York is still hammering," called the operator, his mouth full of pie.

Cargill was distinctly talking to himself, almost as much as to Bradley. The hardness had gone out of his eyes, and his voice had a touch of unconscious sadness in it.

"Does Miss Wilbur live here?" Bradley asked, to start him off again.

"Yes, she went into the Grange when she was eighteen, just after she graduated from our university here. Had a good deal of your enthusiasm, I should judge. Expected to revolutionize things some way. I don't take very much interest in her public work, but I thoroughly appreciate her literary perception." He had got back to his usual humor.

"Chris, when does the club meet next?"

"Friday night, I believe."

"All right. I'll take you up, and introduce you into the charmed circle. They pride themselves on being modern up there, though I don't see much glory in being modern."

Bradley stood for a moment at the door, looking at this strange scene.

It appealed to him with its strangeness, and its suggestion of the great battles on the street which he had read of in the papers. The telegraph machine clicked out every important movement in Chicago and New York. The manager called up his customers, and bawled into the telephone the condition of the market and the significant gossip of the far-off exchange halls. It was so strange, and yet so familiar, that he went away with his head full of those cabalistic sentences--

"New York still hammering away. Partridge quietly buying to cover on the decline."

XX.

AT THE STATE HOUSE.

That the invitation to attend the Square Table Club over-shadowed the importance and significance of Bradley's entrance into public life, was an excellent commentary upon his real character. The State House, however, appealed to his imagination very strongly as he walked up its unfinished lawn, amid the heaps of huge limestone blocks, his eyes upon the looming facade of the west front. He walked the echoing rotunda with a timid air; and the beautiful soaring vault was so majestic in his eyes, he wondered if Washington could be finer. There were a few other greenhorns, like himself, looking the building over with the same minute scrutiny. He entered all of the rooms into which it was possible to penetrate, and at last into the library, a cheerful, rectangular room, into which the sun streamed plenteously.

There was hardly any one in either the Senate or the Representative Halls except farmer-like groups of people, sometimes a family group of four or five, including the grandmother or grandfather. They were mainly in rough best suits of gray, or ostentatiously striped ca.s.simere. The young men wore wide hats, pushed back, in some cases, to display a smooth, curling wave of hair, carefully combed down over their foreheads. He was able to catalogue them by reference to his old companions, Ed Blackler, Shep Watson, Sever Anderson, and others.

Soon the crowds thickened, and groups of men entered, talking and laughing loudly. They were wholly at their ease, being plainly old and experienced members. They greeted each other with boisterous cries and powerful handshaking.

"h.e.l.lo, Stineberg, I hoped you'd git snowed under. Back again, eh?"

"Well, I'll be d.a.m.ned! Aint your county got any more sense than to send such a specimen as you back? Why weren't you around to the caucus?"

Bradley stood around awkwardly alone, not knowing just what to do.

Perhaps some of these men would be glad to see him if they knew him, but he could not think of going to introduce himself. Being new in politics, there was not a man there whose face he recognized. The few that he had met at the hotel were not in sight. He felt as if he had been thrust into this jovial company, and was unwelcome.

The House was called to order by one of the members of the capital county, and prayer was offered. He sat quietly in his seat as things went on. The session adjourned after electing temporary speaker, clerk, etc. Bradley felt so alien to it all that he scarcely took the trouble to vote; and when the committee on credentials was appointed, he felt nervously in his pocket to see that his papers were safe. He felt very much as he used to when, as a boy, he went to have his hair cut, and sat in torture during the whole operation, in the fear that his quarter (all he had with him) might be lost, and trembling to think what would happen in such a case.

That night he moved to a new boarding-place. He secured a room near the Capitol, and went to supper in a small private house near by, which had a most astonishing amplitude of dining-room. He felt quite at home there, for the food was put on the table in the good old way, and pa.s.sed around from hand to hand. The mashed potato tasted better, piled high, with a lump of b.u.t.ter in the top of it; and the slices of roast beef, outspread on the platter, enabled him to get the crisp outside, if it happened to start from his end of the table. There were judges and generals and senators and legislators of various ranks all about him. Crude, rough, wholesome fellows, most of them, with big, brawny hands like his own, and loud, hearty voices. It was impossible to stand in awe of a judge who handled his knife more deftly than his fork, and spooned the potato out of the big, earthen-ware dish with a resounding slap. He began to see that these men were exactly like the people he had been with all his life. He argued, however, that they were perhaps the poorer and the more honorable part of the legislature.

He wrote a note to Judge Brown, telling him that he was settled, but was taking very little part in the organizing of the House. He did not say that he was disappointed in his reception, but he was; his vanity had been hurt. His canva.s.s had attracted considerable attention from the Democratic press of the country, and he expected to be received with great favor by them. He had come out of Republicanism for their sake, and they ought to recognize him. He did not consider that no one knew him by sight, and that recognition was impossible.

He was at the Capitol again early the next morning, and found the same scene being re-enacted. Straggling groups of roughly-dressed farmers loitered timidly along the corridors, brisk clerks dashed to and fro, and streams of men poured in and out the doors of the legislative halls. Bradley entered un.o.bserved, and took a seat at the rear of the hall on a sofa. He did not feel safe in taking a seat.

It was a solemn moment to the new legislator as he stood before the clerk, and, with lifted hand, listened to the oath of office read in the clerk's sounding voice. He swore solemnly, with the help of G.o.d, to support the Const.i.tution, and serve his people to the best of his ability; and he meant it. It did not occur to him that this oath was a shuffling and indefinite obligation. The room seemed to grow a little dimmer as he stood there; the lofty ceiling, rich in its colors, grand and s.p.a.cious to him, seemed to gather new majesty, just as his office as lawmaker gathered a vast and sacred significance.

But as he came back to his seat, he heard a couple of old members laugh. "Comin' down to save their country. They'll learn to save their bacon before their term is up. That young feller looks like one of those retrenchment and reform cusses, one of the fellers who never want to adjourn--down here for business, ye know."

Their laughter made Bradley turn hot with indignation.

The selection of seats was the next great feature. The names of all the members were written upon slips of paper and shaken together in a box, while the members stood laughing and talking in the back part of the house. A blind-folded messenger boy selected the slips; and as the clerk read, in a sounding voice, the name on each slip, the representative so called went forward and selected his seat.

Bradley's name was called about the tenth, and he went forward timidly, and took a seat directly in the centre of the House. He did not care to seem anxious for a front seat. The Democratic members looked at him closely, and he stepped out of his obscurity as he went forward.

A young man of about his own age, a stalwart fellow, reached about and shook hands. "My name is Nelson Floyd. I wanted to see you."

Floyd took the first opportunity to introduce him to two or three of the Democratic members, but he sat quietly in his seat during the whole session, and took very little interest in the speakership contest, which seemed to go off very smoothly. He believed the speaker implicitly, when he stated the usual lie about having no pledges to redeem, and that he was free to choose his committee with regard only to superior fitness, etc., and was shocked when Floyd told him that a written contract had been drawn up and signed, before the legislature met, wherein the princ.i.p.al clerkships had been disposed of to party advantage. It was his second introduction to the hypocrisy of officialism.

If he had been neglected before, he was not now; all sorts of people came about him with axes to grind.

"Is this Mr. Talcott? Ah, yes! I have heard of your splendid canva.s.s--splendid canva.s.s! Now--ahem!--I'd like you to speak a good word for my girl, for the a.s.sistant clerkship of the Ways and Means"; while another wanted his son, Mr. John Smith, for page.

He told them that he had nothing to say about those things. "I am counted with the Democrats, anyhow; I haven't any influence."

They patted him on the shoulder, and winked slyly. "Oh, we know all about that! But every word helps, you know."

Going out at the close of the session, he met Cargill.

"Well, legislator, how goes it?"

"Oh, I don't know; smoothly, I guess. I've kept pretty quiet."

"That's right. The Republicans have everything in their hands this session."