Despotism and Democracy: A Study in Washington Society and Politics

Next morning Crane rose with the intention of going to church—a thing he had not done for years. And in the practice of this virtue he committed an act of the greatest hypocrisy. He knew the very hour when Hardeman, the correspondent of his home paper, took his Sunday morning stroll on Connecticut Avenue. Crane timed his own appearance so that he met Hardeman directly in front of the Austrian Embassy.

In half a minute afterward Crane mentioned that he was on his way to church.

As he spoke Hardeman took a newspaper out of his pocket, and opening it, held it up before Crane. On the first page, with the most violent display-head, was the official announcement of his appointment by Governor Sanders to the unexpired time of the late Senator Brand’s term.

Crane turned pale. He was ready for the fight, but the fight had come unexpectedly soon. And that it was to be to the knife, and knife to the hilt, was now perfectly plain.

“Come with me,” said he to Hardeman, “and I’ll tell you all about it.”

They turned back to Dupont Circle, seated themselves on a bench left vacant by a coloured brother, and Crane told the whole story to Hardeman to be printed next day.

As he talked, his course of action, simple, above-board, and effective, at once took shape in his mind. He wrote out on a pocket-pad a letter to the Governor, saying as the Governor had thought fit to make the public aware of his action in the senatorship before communicating with Crane himself, that he, Crane, should do likewise and make a public declination of it. He then gave a brief statement of what had passed, inserted a copy of his first letter to the Governor, and reiterated his refusal to accept the senatorship. Hardeman, a keen-eyed man, was in the seventh heaven of delight. The letter would, of course, be sent to the Associated Press, but there was “a good story” for the home paper, and a specific mention that Representative Crane was on his way to church when the news was communicated to him.

Crane, still pale, rose and announced that he should keep on to church—a fact also certain to be chronicled. Church was a very good place to think out the problems which would come out of this extraordinary and far-reaching fight.

He went on, sat through a long sermon of which he heard not a word, listened to the musical gymnastics of a high-priced quartette, and gradually became himself, or, rather, more than himself, for the fight at hand brought out in him all the thews and sinews of courage, foresight, and judgment. At the very last, when the name of God was mentioned in the final prayer, Crane had one moment of sincere piety. Otherwise his thoughts were very far from pious, being absolutely those of self-seeking and revenge. Like other men, he promised himself that when Mammon had granted him all he wanted, then he would turn to God.

When he found himself on the street again it was a little past twelve o’clock. He turned into the side streets to escape the throng of people going home from church. As he walked under the arcade of the sweet-smelling tulip-trees with the May sunshine filtering through, he felt the ever-present longing for sympathy. He would have liked to go to Constance Maitland, but something in her tone and manner at their last meeting made him afraid.

On that former occasion he had scarcely been master of himself, he did not know when he was offending her; but now he was far more composed. Yet he dared not go.

While these thoughts were passing through his mind he looked up and saw Constance coming down the street under the dappled shadows of the tulip-trees. She was dressed simply in black, but Crane had never been more struck by the distinction of her appearance. With her was a fine-looking man whom Crane surmised was Cathcart, the naval man. Crane intended to pass the pair without stopping, but when he raised his hat Constance halted him. There was that ever-present feeling of pity for him, and she was conscious of having said some hard things to him in that last interview.

“I have glanced at the newspaper this morning,” she said, “and I fancy your friend, Governor Sanders, has treated you rather shabbily.”

“Very shabbily,” replied Crane, smiling; “he has driven me to the wall, but he will find me fighting with my back to the wall.”

Then Constance introduced her companion, and it was Cathcart, after all.

“You can’t expect much sympathy from me, Mr. Crane,” said Cathcart, smiling. “If it had not been for you and your colleagues I might have been in command of a ship at this moment, making a run for the Caribbean Sea. You did us naval men a bad turn by forcing those beggars to back down without striking a blow.”

Cathcart, like all naval men, was eager to play the great game of war with the new implements lately acquired, and did not welcome the exercise of peaceful power which had forced an amicable arrangement of a dangerous question.

Just then a handsome victoria drew up at the sidewalk. In it sat Mrs. Hill-Smith, the widowed daughter of the Secretary of State, and a beautifully dressed, high-bred-looking girl, Eleanor Baldwin. Baldwin, père, whose cards read, “Mr. James Brentwood Baldwin,” was the successful inventor of a machine for stitching shoes, which had brought him a great fortune early in life, and had enabled him to establish himself in Washington and adopt the rôle of a gentleman of leisure and of inherited fortune. His daughter looked like the younger sister of Lady Clara Vere de Vere, as Mrs. Hill-Smith, Cap’n Josh Slater’s granddaughter, looked like Lady Clara Vere de Vere herself.

Mrs. Hill-Smith beckoned to Constance, who approached, leaving the two men a little distance away talking together under the overhanging branches of the tulip-trees.

“My dear girl,” said Mrs. Hill-Smith, who had adopted the “dear girl” mode of addressing all women like herself over thirty-five, “you must come to the meeting of the Guild for Superannuated Governesses, which is to be organised at my house to-morrow. It is a branch of the one presided over in London by the Princess Christian”—and Mrs. Hill-Smith ran over glibly a number of names of ladies of the diplomatic corps in Washington who were interested in it, winding up with, “And we can’t get on without you.”

Constance Maitland’s full gaze had in it power over women as well as over men, and Mrs. Hill-Smith was not quite certain whether there was a laugh or not in Constance’s deep, dark eyes, as turning them on her she replied:

“Very well—but my first proposition will be revolutionary, I warn you. I shall suggest that we pay governesses enough to enable them to save something, and thus we can get hold of the economic problem by the head instead of by the tail.”

Was she really in earnest? Mrs. Hill-Smith did not know, but there was certainly a flippancy in Constance’s tone which shocked both Mrs. Hill-Smith and Miss Baldwin. The serious, hard-working women by whom they were mothered and grandmothered had given them a deadly soberness and energy in the pursuit of social schemes and pleasures, just as their forbears had industriously and seriously washed and baked and brewed.

Mrs. Hill-Smith was so annoyed by Constance’s manner of receiving her communication that if Constance had not been very intimate at the British Embassy Mrs. Hill-Smith would have made her displeasure felt. But she was constitutionally timid, like all social new-comers—timid in admitting people into her circle, and timid in turning them out—so she merely smiled brightly and said as they drove off:

“You’ll come like a dear, and be as revolutionary as you please. Good-bye.”

Constance, with her two men, lingered a minute, and then Crane left her. He yearned for his stenographer, and set out to seek him. Cathcart walked home with Constance and left her at the door. She was malicious enough to describe to him some of Mrs. Hill-Smith’s charities, at which Cathcart was in an ecstasy of amusement.

Meanwhile Mrs. Hill-Smith went home with Eleanor Baldwin to what they called breakfast, but most Americans call luncheon. On the way the two women had discussed Constance Maitland cautiously—each afraid to let on to the other what she really thought—because, after all, Constance was intimate at the British Embassy.

Arrived at the Baldwin house—an imposing white stone mansion, with twenty-five bedrooms for a family of four, of whom one was a boy at school, a family which never had a visitor overnight—Eleanor led the way to the library, where her father sat.

It was a great, high-ceiled, cool room, dark, in spite of many windows and a glass door opening on a balcony. At a library table near the glass door sat Mr. James Brentwood Baldwin, alias Jim Baldwin, and on the balcony outside, under the awning, sat Mrs. James Baldwin, née Hogan.

It was easy to see whence Eleanor Baldwin had got her beauty. Jim Baldwin was handsome, Nora Hogan Baldwin was handsomer.

From the days when Jim Baldwin had carried home parcels of tea and buckets of butter in his father-in-law’s corner grocery, he had cherished an honourable ambition to have a great big library full of books. In the course of time, through the operations of the shoe-stitching machine, he had been able to gratify this ambition and taste. He had all of those books which Charles Lamb declares “are no books—that is, all the books which no gentleman’s library should be without.” They were all bound sumptuously in calf, and éditions de luxe were as common as flies in a baker’s shop. The four vast walls were lined with these treasures, and from them Baldwin derived an excess of pleasure. This was not by reading them—he had never read a book in his life. Two Chicago newspapers, one from New York, and the Washington morning and evening papers satisfied his cravings for knowledge. But he got from the outside of his books all the pleasure that most people get from the inside. He justly felt that to be seen surrounded by the glorious company of the living who died a thousand years ago, and the conspicuous dead who live to-day, was to give him dignity and poise. Nobody but himself knew that he never read. His days were spent in his library—he always spoke of himself as “among my books”—and shrewd, sharp, and keen as he was and ever must remain, he had actually succeeded in bamboozling himself into the notion that he was a person of “literary tastes.”

Mrs. Baldwin was one of the handsomest women in Washington, and considered quite the proudest. Her abundant grey hair, setting off a face of Grecian beauty, gave her a look as of a queen in the days of powder and patches. She had a rarity of speech, a way of looking straight ahead of her, which was regal. But this exterior of pride was really a result of the sincerest bashfulness and reserve. When Nora Hogan, the grocer’s daughter, had married Jim Baldwin, the contractor’s son, Fortune was already smiling on Jim. Then suddenly she opened her apron and deluged him with gold. Mrs. Baldwin was frightened and stunned. She was afraid to say much for fear she might make mistakes—so she gradually came to saying nothing at all. She dreaded to look from side to side for fear she might find some one laughing at her. So she always looked straight ahead of her. By degrees she acquired a degree of coldness, of stiffness, that was perfectly well suited to the mother of Lady Clara Vere de Vere. She was, of course, an unhappy woman, being a misjudged one. Her chief solace lay in the practice of secret acts of charity among the poorest of the poor, not letting her left hand know what her right hand did. The promoters of fashionable charities complained that Mrs. Baldwin was so stately and so unsympathetic that they could not get on with her in charitable work. True it is, that at the meetings for fashionable charities Mrs. Baldwin would be more silent, more queenly than ever, but her heart would be crying aloud for the poor who are born to suffer and to die, and to have helped them she would cheerfully have given the very clothes off her back. But cowardice kept her silent, as it kept her silent in the presence of her servants, whom she feared inexpressibly.

If Mrs. Baldwin was constitutionally timid, not so Eleanor. All the courage of her father had gone into his willowy, beautiful, well-groomed daughter. Her first recollections were of the inland town where they lived secluded in their big house, because nobody was good enough for them to associate with after their fortune was made. Then she was taken to Europe and returned a finished product, with no more notion of what the word “American” meant than if she had been a daughter of the Hapsburgs. As a compromise between Europe and America, Baldwin had pitched upon Washington as a place of residence. His social status had been agreeably fixed by a lucky accident—he had been asked to be pall-bearer for a foreign Minister who died in Washington. Baldwin rightly considered the dead diplomat worth, to him, all the live ones going; for, having assisted in carrying the dead man from the Legation to the hearse, Baldwin was, in consequence, elected to the swell club, asked to the smart cotillion, and made more headway in a month in the smart set than he could have made otherwise in a year. He repaid his debt to the dead diplomat by buying some very ordinary pictures at the sale of the Minister’s effects, and paying the most extravagant price ever heard of for them.

To Eleanor their social rise was nothing surprising. She expected it, having been bred like a young princess, only with less of democracy than real princesses are bred. When she entered the room with Mrs. Hill-Smith, Baldwin rose and responded smilingly to Mrs. Hill-Smith’s remark:

“Here you are, as usual, among your books.”

“Yes—as usual, among my books. I daresay your father, the Secretary, spends a good deal of time among his books.”

“Oh, yes,” replied Mrs. Hill-Smith, airily, “but he has been dreadfully put out of late. Congress has been so troublesome. I don’t know exactly how, but it has annoyed papa extremely.”

“Very reprehensible,” said Baldwin, earnestly, who had the opinion of the average commercial man that Congress is a machine to create prosperity, or its reverse, and if prosperity is not created, Congressmen are blamed fools.

“I hate Congressmen—except a few from New York,” said Eleanor, drawing off her gloves daintily. “There was one talking to Miss Maitland when we stopped her on the street just now. The creature was introduced to me at one of those queer Southern houses where they introduce people without asking permission first, and ever since then the man has tried to talk to me whenever we meet. But I really couldn’t stand him. This morning I cut him dead. His name is Crane, and he’s from somewhere in the West.”

Now it happened that there was another Crane in the House from the West, and Baldwin had a business motive for wishing to cultivate this particular Crane—and business was business still with Jim Baldwin. So, at Eleanor’s words, he turned on her. His air of scholar-and-gentleman, man-of-the-world, and person-of-inherited-leisure suddenly dropped from him; he was once more Jim Baldwin, the shoe-stitching-machine man.

“Then let me tell you,” he said, authoritatively, “you made a big mistake. That man Crane is on the Committee on Manufactures, and we have been arguing with him, and sending the most expensive men we have to prove to him that we are entitled to the same rebate on the platinum used in our machines as the Oshkosh Shoe-Stitching-Machine people get—and I have reason to know that Crane is the man standing in the way. I wish you had snuggled right up to him.”

Eleanor surveyed her father with cold displeasure. Mrs. Hill-Smith was politely oblivious, especially of the word “snuggled.” Coming, as she did, of a very old family which dated back to 1860, she felt a certain degree of commiseration for brand-new people like the Baldwins, who had not appeared above the social horizon until 1880—twenty years later. But she really liked them, and with a diplomatic instinct inherited from her father she relieved the situation by rising and saying:

“I see dear Mrs. Baldwin on the balcony and must go and speak to her.”

And as she flitted through the glass door a deep masculine voice just behind Eleanor said:

“Good morning, Miss Baldwin.”

It was the Honourable Edward George Francis Castlestuart-Stuart, third secretary of the British Embassy, whom Eleanor had asked to breakfast that morning. She grew pale as she rose to greet him—suppose—suppose he had heard that remark about the shoe-stitching machine? And what was more likely? The shoe-stitching machine was the family skeleton, and was usually kept under lock and key. By some occult and malign impulse her father had hauled it out and rattled it in Mrs. Hill-Smith’s face, and perhaps it might be known at the British Embassy!

Baldwin himself realised the impropriety of his conduct, and tried to rectify it by saying, with great cordiality, to the Honourable Mr. Castlestuart-Stuart:

“Good morning—good morning. Very pleased to see you. You find me, as usual, among my books—my best and oldest friends.”

To this Castlestuart-Stuart replied simply, like the honest Briton that he was:

“I hate books.”

Baldwin was nearly paralysed at this, and still more so when the honest Briton quite eagerly went out on the balcony to speak to Mrs. Baldwin. Only the day before, in one of his rambles about town, he had come upon her getting out of a cab before a poor lodging-house in Southeast Washington, her arms loaded with bundles. A swarm of poor children had run forward to greet her—they evidently knew her well. Her usually cold, statuesque face had been warmed with the sweet light of charity, and a heavenly joy shone in her eyes in the process of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting the sick.

As Castlestuart-Stuart went out on the balcony and took Mrs. Baldwin’s hand cordially, she blushed, but not painfully. She, too, had seen him yesterday, and he had managed to convey with that peculiar art of a simple and candid nature that he admired her for what she was doing. Again did she feel this sincere and admiring approval, and was profoundly grateful for it. Castlestuart-Stuart knew the history of the family—all the diplomats in Washington know the family history of those who race and chase after them. He remembered hearing Constance Maitland say “Mrs. Baldwin redeems the whole family.” Goodness such as hers could redeem much worse people than the Baldwins, thought Castlestuart-Stuart, and he proceeded to be bored by Mrs. Hill-Smith and Eleanor with the best grace in the world. His chief had told him to take what was set before him in a social way, asking no questions for conscience’ sake. In the performance of his duty he had dined, breakfasted, and lunched with pork, dry-goods, whiskey, shoes, sewing-machines, and every other form of good, honest trade. But the word trade was never so much as mentioned among them—certainly not at the breakfast which was now served.