University of Virginia Library

11. CHAPTER XI.

In short, honest John Vane was so abundantly
tempted and harassed by the lobbyists and
their Congressional allies, as to remind us of that
hardly bested saint whom we have all seen in
ecclesiastical picture-land, surrounded by greater
and lesser goblins and grotesque manifestations
of Satan.

Virtue was the harder for him to follow after,
because he perceived that the vicious were not
only enviably prosperous, but walked in their evil
ways undiscovered. The skinny leanness of his
own honest poricmonnaie was all the more obvious
to him when he contrasted it with the
portly pocket-books of the slaves of the ring.
While he foresaw that it would be difficult for
him to bring the year around on his salary,
there was Potiphar of New Sodom taking in one
hundred thousand dollars for “putting through”

a single bill. While his brilliant Olympia was
sitting solitary and sorrowful in her two dingy
rooms, plain Mrs. Job Poor, the wife of a member
who supported the iron interest, kept open
house in a freestone block, and rolled in her
carriage. It seemed to him at times that, if
there was a city on earth where integrity got all
the kicks, and knavery all the half-pence, that
city was the capital of this model Republic.

Nevertheless, he held fast by his righteousness
and remained worthy of his reputation. Give
a dog a bad name and he will deserve it, says
one of the wisest of proverbs. It is equally true
that if you give a dog a good name, he will strive
to deserve that. In these days, when temptation
sought to bow Vane into the dirt, it was a greatly
supporting circumstance to him that he had received
the title of Honest. Now and then he
was cheered and strengthened by seeing himself
eulogized in the newspapers under this Catonian
epithet. Occasionally, too, the organ of a ring
would boast (falsely) that honest John Vane had

decided to vote for its particular swindle,—a fact
which showed that the name had become a synonyme
for respectability and was reckoned able to
carry weight. He was a better man for this honorable
“handle”; it had the elevating influence
of a commission as “an officer and a gentleman”;
it inspired him to exemplify the motto, Noblesse
oblige. In spite of recurring enticements, he
struggled on through the session, without letting
his hands be soiled by the first dirty dollar.

In the meantime, his dear Olympia had been a
greater trial and stumbling block to him than the
lobby. Not that she consciously meant to trip
up his integrity; on the contrary, she hardly gave
a serious thought to it. Her desire was that
her husband should take the political leadership
which belonged to him, and, what was of course
much more important, should give her the fashionable
eminence which belonged to her. She
had early discovered, to her amazement and disappointment
and vexation, that a Congressman was
not necessarily a social magnate in Washington.

If he was rich or potent, he was reverenced; if
he was poor and uninfluential, he was neglected:
his mere office had little to do with the matter.
There were members whom the legislative world
and the stylish world did not make obeisance to;
and of these members, her John, whom she had
partly selected because of his supposed greatness,
was one. She soon found that the wives of
Cabinet secretaries and of senators and of the
chiefs of the great committees regarded her as
their inferior. Many of them did not ask her to
their receptions, and only returned her calls by
sending cards. Spurred by her eager desire to
commune with the ultra genteel, she committed
the imprudence of attending one senatorial party
without an invitation, and was treated with such
undisguised hauteur by the hostess that she went
bedridden with mortification for three days.

Even her beauty, which had secured her so
many university beaux in Slowburgh, seemed
to have no charm here. Few noted gentlemen
called on her, and not many of these called twice.

Whenever by good luck she got to a reception,
there was no swarming of fascinated male creatures
about her, and she was free to pass the
entire evening on the arm of her husband. She
had anticipated romantic attentions from foreign
secretaries, and perhaps ambassadors; but at the
end of the session she did not know a single
member of any one of the diplomatic corps; the
only alien individuals who came with music to
her windows were monkeys and their masters.
For a time this neglect was a puzzle to her, and
personally a most humiliating one. Her beauty
and graces were so obviously ineffective that she
began to doubt whether she possessed beauty or
grace, and to feel in consequence that she was of
no worth, and even contemptible.

Eventually, however, she obtained light on this
subject; she perceived that her husband was
right in affirming that everybody in Washington
“had an axe to grind”; the natural result being,
that gentlemen would not spend their time in
paying court to ladies whose male relatives had

no favors to confer. At first it was a dismaying
discovery, and she very nearly wept with vexation
over it, and tried to despise the world for its sordid
selfishness. But before long, moved by her
habitual reverence for society, she drifted into a
disposition to take it as she found it, and would
fain have won its homage by a show of that
wealth and power which it demanded. The first
step to this end, of course, was to get out of her
commonplace lodgings and ascend to a grander
style of living.

“O, I do hate these dirty, poverty-stricken
barracks!” she moaned, more bitterly than ever.
“I see plainly that we shall never be anybody in
Washington as long as we pen ourselves up in
two little vile rooms. You ought to take a house,
John, and give receptions and dinners, for the
sake of your own career. You would get a great
deal more influence that way than by fussing
over papers in committees and making speeches.”

Then followed the old, stale discussion over
the expense of such a route to glory, the husband

ending with his usual meek but firm declaration
that he dared not risk it. Thereupon Olympia
cried harassingly for an hour or more, and sulked
in silence for a day or two. It seemed as if
some alien and naughty soul had migrated into
her since the engaged days when she rayed forth
graciousness and amiability. The broad fact is
that, so far as the masculine outsider can discover,
most girls have no character until marriage.
Then for the first time they enter openly
upon the struggle for life, and then the strong
traits which have hitherto remained invisible
come out boldly, like certain chemical inks when
exposed to the fire.

The result of this severest of Olympia's many
sulkings was a compromise. John Vane held on
in his frugal or semi-frugal lodgings, but he allowed
his wife to give frequent dinners, and also
evenings with ice-cream. But such a lame, halt,
and beggarly lot as appeared at these cheap, cold-water
festivities! It seemed as if the host must
have gone out deliberately into the highways and

hedges of political life and forced them to come
in. There were Congressmen who were just like
John himself,—mere tyros and nobodies in the
great world of statesmanship, members of the little
committees or of no committee at all. There
were members from carpetbagdom who had not
yet secured their seats, and delegates from the
territories who looked as though they might represent
the Digger Indians. Occasionally there was
a sharp wire-puller or a sturdy log-roller from
Slowburgh, and more rarely a respectable citizen
of that place, who had come on to stare around
Washington. One evening Olympia was nearly
driven into hysterics of mortification by discovering
that her husband had brought in a Mormon.
She treated the venerable representative from
Utah as she had herself been treated at Senator
Knickerbocker's, and subsequently informed
Honest John several dozen times that he had
ruined their position in society.

“I thought the old fellow would be a curiosity
and amuse you,” pleaded the husband. “You
are always saying you want amusement.”

“Not that kind,” tossed Olympia, utterly out
of patience with his stupidity, and thinking that
by this time he ought to have comprehended her
better. “Low people may amuse you, and I
know they do. It is really one of the great
faults of your character, John. But to me they
are simply strange and odious bores. Can't you
understand, once for all, that I want such amusements
as other ladies want,—good society and
genteel surroundings and—and nice things?”

“O, yes; and you want to dine with the British
Ambassador, and ride in a coach with liveries,”
grumbled John, restive under this pestering, because
he was yet sore with preceding ones.

“Well, what woman in Washington does n't?”
retorted Olympia, justifying herself in her own
eyes with lamentable facility.

“I suppose you don't think there's anything
fine in having an honest man who does his duty
and nothing but his duty,” groaned Vane, referring
with pardonable pride to himself, but fretting
under the knowledge that his wife did not share
that pride.

“O, there are so many honest people,” sniffed
Olympia, eager to “take him down.”—“They are
as common as chips.”

“Not in Washington,” returned this unappreciated
Aristides, with a bitterness which was
only in part patriotic.

Such little tiffs as this, I regret to avow, soon
became frequent. Olympia, having discovered
that potentiality in politics was necessary as a
basis for social eminence, began to interest herself
disagreeably in her husband's Congressional
doings, and to rub peppery remarks into him concerning
his obligation to be eloquent, able, managing,
and, in short, successful. She informed
herself as to what committees were the important
ones, and demanded of him why he was not on
any of them.

“Because I am a young member, I suppose,”
answered John, a little sulkily; for the fact in
itself was an irritating one, let alone being “talked
to” about it.

“But here you are on the Committee for Revolutionary

Pensions,” persisted the ambitious lady.
“It is almost an insult. There are only three or
four Revolutionary pensioners left. Of course
there is nothing to do.”

“Well, we do nothing,” granted John, ungraciously.
“Somebody must do it.”

“You ought to try to get on the Committee of
Ways and Means, Mrs. Bullion says,” continued
Olympia. “That is the great committee, she
says. Why don't you?”

“Why don't I try to be President?” exclaimed
Vane. “I am trying, I am doing what work
comes in my way as thoroughly and honestly as
I can. If I stay here long enough, I suppose I
shall get higher,” continued the poor catechised
man, who really had in him some industry, perseverance,
and common sense,—materials of character
which might in time be worked up into a
fair lawgiver.

“Why don't you push your bill about that—
that privilege?” was the next question of this
stateswoman. “That would make a sensation.”

“They smothered it in committee,” confessed
the husband. “What could I do after that?”

“There! now you see!” exclaimed Olympia.
“You see the need of being on the leading committees.
If you had been a member of that
committee, you could have stopped their smothering
it.”

“No, I could n't,” contradicted John, naturally
indignant at being blamed for everything, both
what he did and what others did. “If I had
been on it, I should have been a minority of one,
and the bill would have been smashed all the
same. The fact is, that Congressmen in general
are determined to hold on to the franking privilege.”

“Didn't I tell you?” cried Olympia, remembering
that she had once counselled him not to
urge unpopular measures,—“did n't I tell you so
before we were engaged, and ever so many times
since? I told you to give up that old thing and
plan something that could pass. O, I wish I was
a man!”

Remembering that if she had been one, he
should not have fallen in love with her, Vane was
tempted to reply, “I second the motion.” But
he restrained himself, for he had a magnanimous
streak in him, and he was really very fond of his
wife.