University of Virginia Library

17. CHAPTER XVII.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.