University of Virginia Library

15. CHAPTER XV.

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

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.”

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

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 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 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

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.

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 over-tempted
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.

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

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.