University of Virginia Library

13. CHAPTER XIII.

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

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

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 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 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

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 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

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

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

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

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.

“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.

“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

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

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.