University of Virginia Library

20. CHAPTER XX.

FOR once Dorman was correct in a prophecy.
The recollection of the “Great Subfluvial
slanders” rankled in the soul of an honest and
truth-loving nation.

After the election had been carried and the
country duly saved from its quadrennial crisis, it
seemed just and necessary to put calumny to open
shame, and thus rob it of influence in the future.
Virtuous constituencies and a press which at least
spoke the words of virtue clamored for an investigation
which should vindicate the innocence of
Christian, Greatheart, and Company, and put their
lying accusers in the pillory. “We want justice
done you,” cheerfully shouted a believing party to
its demi-gods, streaming piteously with the rotten
eggs of the Hen Persuader.

It was in vain that these revered fetishes whispered
to their confidants that justice was precisely

what they were afraid of, and interceded
with such divinities as they believed in to save
them from their friends. In vain did a sadly wise
Congress endeavor to amuse and pacify the country
by throwing overboard that precious tub of
abuses, the franking privilege. In vain did
Weathercock John set his daily organ to celebrating
and imputing to himself a reform which
he had so long promised and which he now so
unwillingly conceded. The popular whale took
no notice of a plaything which at any other time
might have diverted it for years, and continued to
thrash the political ocean into foam with its rushings
and plungings after investigations.

Amid this commotion John Vane rowed about
in his cockle-shell of a character with all the agility
that terror can give. He was so accustomed
to value himself on being honest that the thought
of being publicly condemned as dishonest was
almost as dreadful to him as it would have been
to an upright soul. So oppressive was his wretchedness
that he craved not only help but also sympathy,

that favorite consolation of the sorrowful
feeble. He was in the spiritual state of certain
weak-minded murderers, who cannot sleep of
nights until they have told some friend the particulars
of their crime. So entirely had the backbone
been taken out of him that he could not
hold himself erect in the presence of his wife, but
wilted upon her slight shoulder for support. It
was an abject confession of decrepitude; for he
had learned to consider her as totally lacking in
practical sense, and there were impatient moments
when he thought of her as merely a lively dunce.
But now he must have pity, though it came from
a peacock.

“I'm afraid there's trouble a brewing for us,”
he said, one evening, shaking that perplexed head
of his which had been the admiration of his constituents,
and which certainly looked large enough
to hold all the problems of state.

“What's the matter now?” asked Olympia.

She did not think of trouble to the nation, nor
of trouble to her husband. The only idea which

occurred to her was that perhaps there was a
scarcity of money, and she might be called on to
give up the honors of house keeping and put on
the disgusting humility of lodgings. It was also
a little disagreeable to her, this way that John
sometimes got into of coming to her with his
grievances, and trying to ease his own mind by
burdening hers. It was hardly more pleasant
than having a dog make a bed for himself on the
skirts of one's lilac silk. She possessed in large
measure that unsympathy, alleged by some writers
to amount to hostility, which certainly does exist
to some extent between the sexes. Her world
was very different from her husband's world, and
she did not much care to have him take an interest
in hers, nor did she want at all to worry
about his. That the two spheres had any intimate
connection she could rarely perceive, except
when the masculine one ceased to radiate gold
upon the feminine one.

“Well, the matter is this stupid outcry for investigations,”
sighed John, loosening the cravat

about his somewhat pulpy throat, as if fearful lest
it should make a hangman's circle there.

“What investigations? Who is to be investigated?”
demanded Olympia, who was as ignorant
of the whole matter as if she were an inhabitant
of some celestial world where investigations were
not needed, or of some infernal one where they
were of no use.

“Well, it's a secret,” the special legislator continued
to drawl, talking about his misdeed unwillingly,
but unable to stop talking about it. “However,
I suppose it 'll all be out before long. I
thought I might as well prepare your mind for it,”
he concluded, feebly hoping that she would say
something to prepare his mind.

“Well, what is it?” asked the wife, distinctly
foreseeing trouble for herself, and becoming therefore
deeply interested.

“O, I thought I told you,” answered John, whose
scared conscience had been babbling at such a
rate that it seemed to him as if he had made
audible confession of his whole iniquity. “Well,

it's something about this Great Subfluvial Tunnel
under the Mississippi, from the Lakes to New
Orleans,—great national enterprise, you know.
You see, it was a pretty heavy thing for Simon
Sharp and the other boss stockholders to carry,
and they had to get some additional assistance
from Congress, and to do that they gave some of
the members stock,—or rather sold it to them,”
he added, doubting whether he could trust even
his wife with all the truth. “Well, some of the
newspapers are charging that this is bribery and
corruption, and are bawling for an investigation
and making a row generally, as though it was anything
new, by George!”

“Have you got any of the stock?” inquired
Olympia. She saw that the subject was a sore
one to her husband, but she was not much in the
habit of sparing his feelings, and so was able to
come promptly and squarely to the point.

“Not much,” replied John, loosening his cravat
once more. “Only a thousand.”

“That isn't much,” said the wife, rather scorn

ing him for not having received more. “Why
don't you sell it and get it off your hands?”

Vane made no answer. Of course, selling the
stock would not hide the fact that he had owned
it, nor shield him from ugly questions as to how
he came to be possessed of it. But it seemed useless
to try to explain this to Olympia, women were
so irretrievably dark-minded in business matters.

“Does it pay anything?” she asked, merely
guessing from his silence that the property was
profitable, and that therefore he did not wish to
part with it.

“About fifteen hundred a year,” confessed the
husband, with a sheepish air; “or maybe two
thousand.”

“Two thousand!” exclaimed the modern Portia,
who, as a legislator, was even more “self-taught”
than her husband, and consequently more unscrupulous.
“Why, you must n't think of selling
it.”

The statesman gazed at his privy counsellor in
despair. She could not grasp the situation, and

he might have known that she could not. To appeal
to such a woman for advice and consolation
in great trouble was much as if a drowning man
should trust to a raft made of millinery.

“It's all very well to talk that way, as though it
was as easy as A B C,” he answered, quite out of
patience with the straw which he had clutched at
to so little purpose. “But supposing this costs
me my seat? Supposing I get expelled for it?
Then you'll understand, I reckon, that it is of
some consequence, and not so very handy to
manage.”

Olympia perceived that dulness was imputed
unto her, and she felt very angry at the injustice.
She knew that she was not dull; nobody ever
hinted such an idea but her husband; other men
complimented her for her cleverness, her social
powers, etc.

“Then what did you get yourself in such a
scrape for?” she retorted sharply. “You needn't
blame me for it; I didn't do it.”

“Yes, you did,” insisted John, and with much

truth. “I got into this very scrape to raise money
for your house keeping and receptions and carriages
and all those other confounded ruinous
things that you could have got along just as well
without. And, by George, the whole fol-de-rol
nonsense has got to stop!” he exclaimed, his long-continued
excitement over the threatened investigation
bursting up in an explosion of domestic
wrath. “We don't keep house this session. And
we don't stay here at the Arlington, neither. We
go back to a boarding-house; and we go to parties
afoot, too. The omnibus ain't running this session,”
he added, with a bitterly jocose allusion to
“omnibus bills,” and their profitable loads of
special enactments. “Shoe-leather will have to
do our traveling. It's all the turn-out that I can
pay for.”

Of course there was a scene. Of course Olympia
did not surrender her woman's right to luxury
without a tearful and little less than hysterical
struggle. But John Vane, rendered pitiless by
terror concerning his political future, was for once

master over his own household. He made arrangements
that very day for leaving his fine
rooms in the Arlington and going into lodgings.
At first sight, his economy seems unnecessarily
hard, in view of the fact that he still had several
thousand dollars left out of the illegal gleanings
of the last session, and thus was a richer man
than when he first came to Washington. But
this money had gone into the purchase of a new
patent in refrigerators, and he could not realize
on it without sacrificing a very promising business
chance. Moreover, he saw that in the present
public excitement about “jobbing” legislation,
he must forego its emoluments for a time,
and thus diminish his income. Finally, it seemed
to be absolutely necessary to put on the guise of
poverty, if he cared to preserve his repute for
honesty. All these things he explained to Olympia,
in a discreetly vague way, remembering the
while that she might be just goose enough to go
and cackle it abroad, but anxious, nevertheless, to
make her contented with him.

“You see, we have been going it rather strong
on style,” he added. “Ten thousand dollars a
year is a pretty tall figure for four persons, two of
'em children. I suppose we got into that way because
other people set the example,” he concluded,
not wishing to be hard on his wife.

“If we could only have the rooms on the first
floor, I could stand it—for a while,” was the
response of the insatiable Olympia, a pathetic
tear fringing her long and really lovely eyelashes.
“They are only fifteen dollars a month more, and
then we would have a nice parlor, or at least a
decent one.”

“That means dinners, I s'pose,” grinned Vane,
testily. “Big dinners and little receptions.”

“Do you want to shut me out of the world
altogether?” was the desperate cry of this persecuted
wife.

“Now look here: I would do it,—I would if I
could,” groaned the weak monster of a husband.
“If I had a thousand dollars of capital loose, I'd
spend it that way, or any way to please you.”

“Why don't you borrow?” was the suggestion
of a helpmeet whose ideas of a loan did not extend
so far as the repayment. “I'm sure I have
gentlemen friends who would be willing to lend
you something.”

Although she said “friends,” she was thinking
of Senator Ironman, and her husband easily
divined it. Should he be angry at the suggestion
and reject it with self-respectful scorn? Well,
he was not so sensitive as he had been when he
came to Washington; somehow or other he did
not care so much about the look of things and
the name of things; on the whole, he could not
feel indignation, or at least none to speak of.
Indeed, his disintegration of moral sentiments
had gone farther than that stage of indifference
which simply allows things to take their own
course. After meditating for some time over his
wife's advice to borrow of her friends, he decided
to follow it.

“It would be better to let Ironman lend me
the money than to run the chance of his lending

it to her,” he reasoned. “And then I can tell
him that I am hard up, and give him a hint to
let other people know it. By George, it's a queer
position for an old business man to be in,” he
added with a mixture of chagrin and amusement;
“I never thought once that I should come to
want to be considered bankrupt.”