Democracy, an American Novel

Chapter II

On the first of December, Mrs. Lee took the train for Washington, and before five o’clock that evening she was entering her newly hired house on Lafayette Square.  She shrugged her shoulders with a mingled expression of contempt and grief at the curious barbarism of the curtains and the wall-papers, and her next two days were occupied with a life-and-death struggle to get the mastery over her surroundings.  In this awful contest the interior of the doomed house suffered as though a demon were in it; not a chair, not a mirror, not a carpet, was left untouched, and in the midst of the worst confusion the new mistress sat, calm as the statue of Andrew Jackson in the square under her eyes, and issued her orders with as much decision as that hero had ever shown.  Towards the close of the second day, victory crowned her forehead.  A new era, a nobler conception of duty and existence, had dawned upon that benighted and heathen residence.  The wealth of Syria and Persia was poured out upon the melancholy Wilton carpets; embroidered comets and woven gold from Japan and Teheran depended from and covered over every sad stuff-curtain; a strange medley of sketches, paintings, fans, embroideries, and porcelain was hung, nailed, pinned, or stuck against the wall; finally the domestic altarpiece, the mystical Corot landscape, was hoisted to its place over the parlour fire, and then all was over.  The setting sun streamed softly in at the windows, and peace reigned in that redeemed house and in the heart of its mistress.

“I think it will do now, Sybil,” said she, surveying the scene.

“It must,” replied Sybil.  “You haven’t a plate or a fan or coloured scarf left.  You must send out and buy some of these old negro-women’s bandannas if you are going to cover anything else.  What is the use?  Do you suppose any human being in Washington will like it?  They will think you demented.”

“There is such a thing as self-respect,” replied her sister, calmly.

Sybil—­Miss Sybil Ross—­was Madeleine Lee’s sister.  The keenest psychologist could not have detected a single feature quality which they had in common, and for that reason they were devoted friends.  Madeleine was thirty, Sybil twenty-four.  Madeleine was indescribable; Sybil was transparent.  Madeleine was of medium height with a graceful figure, a well-set head, and enough golden-brown hair to frame a face full of varying expression.  Her eyes were never for two consecutive hours of the same shade, but were more often blue than grey.  People who envied her smile said that she cultivated a sense of humour in order to show her teeth.  Perhaps they were right; but there was no doubt that her habit of talking with gesticulation would never have grown upon her unless she had known that her hands were not only beautiful but expressive.  She dressed as skilfully as New York women do, but in growing older she began to show symptoms of dangerous unconventionality.  She had been heard to express a low opinion of her countrywomen who blindly fell down before the golden calf of Mr. Worth, and she had even fought a battle of great severity, while it lasted, with one of her best-dressed friends who had been invited—­and had gone—­to Mr. Worth’s afternoon tea-parties.  The secret was that Mrs. Lee had artistic tendencies, and unless they were checked in time, there was no knowing what might be the consequence.  But as yet they had done no harm; indeed, they rather helped to give her that sort of atmosphere which belongs only to certain women; as indescribable as the afterglow; as impalpable as an Indian summer mist; and non-existent except to people who feel rather than reason.  Sybil had none of it.  The imagination gave up all attempts to soar where she came.  A more straightforward, downright, gay, sympathetic, shallow, warm-hearted, sternly practical young woman has rarely touched this planet.  Her mind had room for neither grave-stones nor guide-books; she could not have lived in the past or the future if she had spent her days in churches and her nights in tombs.  “She was not clever, like Madeleine, thank Heaven.”  Madeleine was not an orthodox member of the church; sermons bored her, and clergymen never failed to irritate every nerve in her excitable system.  Sybil was a simple and devout worshipper at the ritualistic altar; she bent humbly before the Paulist fathers.  When she went to a ball she always had the best partner in the room, and took it as a matter of course; but then, she always prayed for one; somehow it strengthened her faith.  Her sister took care never to laugh at her on this score, or to shock her religious opinions.  “Time enough,” said she, “for her to forget religion when religion fails her.”  As for regular attendance at church, Madeleine was able to reconcile their habits without trouble.  She herself had not entered a church for years; she said it gave her unchristian feelings; but Sybil had a voice of excellent quality, well trained and cultivated:  Madeleine insisted that she should sing in the choir, and by this little manoeuvre, the divergence of their paths was made less evident.  Madeleine did not sing, and therefore could not go to church with Sybil.  This outrageous fallacy seemed perfectly to answer its purpose, and Sybil accepted it, in good faith, as a fair working principle which explained itself.

Madeleine was sober in her tastes.  She wasted no money.  She made no display.

She walked rather than drove, and wore neither diamonds nor brocades.  But the general impression she made was nevertheless one of luxury.  On the other hand, her sister had her dresses from Paris, and wore them and her ornaments according to all the formulas; she was good-naturedly correct, and bent her round white shoulders to whatever burden the Parisian autocrat chose to put upon them.  Madeleine never interfered, and always paid the bills.

Before they had been ten days in Washington, they fell gently into their place and were carried along without an effort on the stream of social life.

Society was kind; there was no reason for its being otherwise.  Mrs. Lee and her sister had no enemies, held no offices, and did their best to make themselves popular.  Sybil had not passed summers at Newport and winters in New York in vain; and neither her face nor her figure, her voice nor her dancing, needed apology.  Politics were not her strong point.  She was induced to go once to the Capitol and to sit ten minutes in the gallery of the Senate.  No one ever knew what her impressions were; with feminine tact she managed not to betray herself But, in truth, her notion of legislative bodies was vague, floating between her experience at church and at the opera, so that the idea of a performance of some kind was never out of her head.  To her mind the Senate was a place where people went to recite speeches, and she naively assumed that the speeches were useful and had a purpose, but as they did not interest her she never went again.  This is a very common conception of Congress; many Congressmen share it.

Her sister was more patient and bolder.  She went to the Capitol nearly every day for at least two weeks.  At the end of that time her interest began to flag, and she thought it better to read the debates every morning in the Congressional Record.  Finding this a laborious and not always an instructive task, she began to skip the dull parts; and in the absence of any exciting question, she at last resigned herself to skipping the whole.  Nevertheless she still had energy to visit the Senate gallery occasionally when she was told that a splendid orator was about to speak on a question of deep interest to his country.  She listened with a little disposition to admire, if she could; and, whenever she could, she did admire.  She said nothing, but she listened sharply.  She wanted to learn how the machinery of government worked, and what was the quality of the men who controlled it.  One by one, she passed them through her crucibles, and tested them by acids and by fire.

A few survived her tests and came out alive, though more or less disfigured, where she had found impurities.  Of the whole number, only one retained under this process enough character to interest her.

In these early visits to Congress, Mrs. Lee sometimes had the company of John Carrington, a Washington lawyer about forty years old, who, by virtue of being a Virginian and a distant connection of her husband, called himself a cousin, and took a tone of semi-intimacy, which Mrs. Lee accepted because Carrington was a man whom she liked, and because he was one whom life had treated hardly.  He was of that unfortunate generation in the south which began existence with civil war, and he was perhaps the more unfortunate because, like most educated Virginians of the old Washington school, he had seen from the first that, whatever issue the war took, Virginia and he must be ruined.  At twenty-two he had gone into the rebel army as a private and carried his musket modestly through a campaign or two, after which he slowly rose to the rank of senior captain in his regiment, and closed his services on the staff of a major-general, always doing scrupulously enough what he conceived to be his duty, and never doing it with enthusiasm.  When the rebel armies surrendered, he rode away to his family plantation—­not a difficult thing to do, for it was only a few miles from Appomatox—­and at once began to study law; then, leaving his mother and sisters to do what they could with the worn-out plantation, he began the practice of law in Washington, hoping thus to support himself and them.  He had succeeded after a fashion, and for the first time the future seemed not absolutely dark.  Mrs. Lee’s house was an oasis to him, and he found himself, to his surprise, aimost gay in her company.  The gaiety was of a very qulet kind, and Sybil, while friendly with him, averred that he was certainly dull; but this dulness had a fascination for Madeleine, who, having tasted many more kinds of the wine of life than Sybil, had learned to value certain delicacies of age and flavour that were lost upon younger and coarser palates.  He talked rather slowly and almost with effort, but he had something of the dignity—­others call it stiffness—­of the old Virginia school, and twenty years of constant responsibility and deferred hope had added a touch of care that bordered closely on sadness.  His great attraction was that he never talked or seemed to think of himself.  Mrs. Lee trusted in him by instinct.  “He is a type!” said she; “he is my idea of George Washington at thirty.”

One morning in December, Carrington entered Mrs. Lee’s parlour towards noon, and asked if she cared to visit the Capitol.

“You will have a chance of hearing to-day what may be the last great speech of our greatest statesman,” said he; “you should come.”

“A splendid sample of our na-tive raw material, sir?” asked she, fresh from a reading of Dickens, and his famous picture of American statesmanship.

“Precisely so,” said Carrington; “the Prairie Giant of Peonia, the Favourite Son of Illinois; the man who came within three votes of getting the party nomination for the Presidency last spring, and was only defeated because ten small intriguers are sharper than one big one.  The Honourable Silas P.

Ratcliffe, Senator from Illinois; he will be run for the Presidency yet.”

“What does the P. stand for?” asked Sybil.

“I don’t remember ever to have heard his middle name,” said Carrington.

“Perhaps it is Peonia or Prairie; I can’t say.”

“He is the man whose appearance struck me so much when we were in the Senate last week, is he not?  A great, ponderous man, over six feet high, very senatorial and dignified, with a large head and rather good features?” inquired Mrs. Lee.

“The same,” replied Carrington.  “By all means hear him speak.  He is the stumbling-block of the new President, who is to be allowed no peace unless he makes terms with Ratcliffe; and so every one thinks that the Prairie Giant of Peonia will have the choice of the State or Treasury Department.  If he takes either it will be the Treasury, for he is a desperate political manager, and will want the patronage for the next national convention.”

Mrs. Lee was delighted to hear the debate, and Carrington was delighted to sit through it by her side, and to exchange running comments with her on the speeches and the speakers.

“Have you ever met the Senator?” asked she.

“I have acted several times as counsel before his committees.  He is an excellent chairman, always attentive and generally civil.”

“Where was he born?”

“The family is a New England one, and I believe respectable.  He came, I think, from some place in the Connecticut Valley, but whether Vermont, New Hampshire, or Massachusetts, I don’t know.”

“Is he an educated man?”

“He got a kind of classical education at one of the country colleges there.

I suspect he has as much education as is good for him.  But he went West very soon after leaving college, and being then young and fresh from that hot-bed of abolition, he threw himself into the anti-slavery movement m Illinois, and after a long struggle he rose with the wave.  He would not do the same thing now.”

“Why not?”

“He is older, more experienced, and not so wise.  Besides, he has no longer the time to wait.  Can you see his eyes from here?  I call them Yankee eyes.”

“Don’t abuse the Yankees,” said Mrs. Lee; “I am half Yankee myself.”

“Is that abuse?  Do you mean to deny that they have eyes?”

“I concede that there may be eyes among them; but Virginians are not fair judges of their expression.”

“Cold eyes,” he continued; “steel grey, rather small, not unpleasant in good-humour, diabolic in a passion, but worst when a little suspicious; then they watch you as though you were a young rattle-snake, to be killed when convenient.”

“Does he not look you in the face?”

“Yes; but not as though he liked you.  His eyes only seem to ask the possible uses you might be put to.  Ah, the vice-president has given him the floor; now we shall have it.  Hard voice, is it not? like his eyes.  Hard manner, like his voice.  Hard all through.”

“What a pity he is so dreadfully senatorial!” said Mrs. Lee; “otherwise I rather admire him.”

“Now he is settling down to his work,” continued Carrington.  “See how he dodges all the sharp issues.  What a thing it is to be a Yankee!  What a genius the fellow has for leading a party!  Do you see how well it is all done?  The new President flattered and conciliated, the party united and given a strong lead.  And now we shall see how the President will deal with him.  Ten to one on Ratcliffe.  Come, there is that stupid ass from Missouri getting up.  Let us go.”

As they passed down the steps and out into the Avenue, Mrs. Lee turned to Carrington as though she had been reflecting deeply and had at length reached a decision.

“Mr. Carrington,” said she, “I want to know Senator Ratcliffe.”

“You will meet him to-morrow evening,” replied Carrington, “at your senatorial dinner.”

The Senator from New York, the Honourable Schuyler Clinton, was an old admirer of Mrs. Lee, and his wife was a cousin of hers, more or less distant.  They had lost no time in honouring the letter of credit she thus had upon them, and invited her and her sister to a solemn dinner, as imposing as political dignity could make it.  Mr. Carrington, as a connection of hers, was one of the party, and almost the only one among the twenty persons at table who had neither an office, nor a title, nor a constituency.

Senator Clinton received Mrs. Lee and her sister with tender enthusiasm, for they were attractive specimens of his constituents.  He pressed their hands and evidently restrained himself only by an effort from embracing them, for the Senator had a marked regard for pretty women, and had made love to every girl with any pretensions to beauty that had appeared in the State of New York for fully half a century.  At the same time he whispered an apology in her ear; he regretted so much that he was obliged to forego the pleasure of taking her to dinner; Washington was the only city in America where this could have happened, but it was a fact that ladies here were very great stickiers for etiquette; on the other hand he had the sad consolation that she would be the gainer, for he had allotted to her Lord Skye, the British Minister, “a most agreeable man and not married, as I have the misfortune to be;” and on the other side “I have ventured to place Senator Ratcliffe, of Illinois, whose admirable speech I saw you listening to with such rapt attention yesterday.  I thought you might like to know him.  Did I do right?”

Madeleine assured him that he had divined her inmost wishes, and he turned with even more warmth of affection to her sister:  “As for you, my dear—­dear Sybil, what can I do to make your dinner agreeable?  If I give your sister a coronet, I am only sorry not to have a diadem for you.  But I have done everything in my power.  The first Secretary of the Russian Legation, Count Popoff, will take you in; a charming young man, my dear Sybil; and on your other side I have placed the Assistant Secretary of State, whom you know.”

And so, after the due delay, the party settled themselves at the dinner-table, and Mrs. Lee found Senator Ratcliffe’s grey eyes resting on her face for a moment as they sat down.

Lord Skye was very agreeable, and, at almost any other moment of her life, Mrs. Lee would have liked nothing better than to talk with him from the beginning to the end of her dinner.  Tall, slender, bald-headed, awkward, and stammering with his elaborate British stammer whenever it suited his convenience to do so; a sharp observer who had wit which he commonly concealed; a humourist who was satisfied to laugh silently at his own humour; a diplomatist who used the mask of frankness with great effect; Lord Skye was one of the most popular men in Washington.  Every one knew that he was a ruthless critic of American manners, but he had the art to combine ridicule with good-humour, and he was all the more popular accordingly.  He was an outspoken admirer of American women in everything except their voices, and he did not even shrink from occasionally quizzing a little the national peculiarities of his own countrywomen; a sure piece of flattery to their American cousins.  He would gladly have devoted himself to Mrs. Lee, but decent civility required that he should pay some attention to his hostess, and he was too good a diplomatist not to be attentive to a hostess who was the wife of a Senator, and that Senator the chairman of the committee of foreign relations.

The moment his head was turned, Mrs. Lee dashed at her Peonia Giant, who was then consuming his fish, and wishing he understood why the British Minister had worn no gloves, while he himself had sacrificed his convictions by wearing the largest and whitest pair of French kids that could be bought for money on Pennsylvania Avenue.  There was a little touch of mortification in the idea that he was not quite at home among fashionable people, and at this instant he felt that true happiness was only to be found among the simple and honest sons and daughters of toil.  A certain secret jealousy of the British Minister is always lurking in the breast of every American Senator, if he is truly democratic; for democracy, rightly understood, is the government of the people, by the people, for the benefit of Senators, and there is always a danger that the British Minister may not understand this political principle as he should.  Lord Skye had run the risk of making two blunders; of offending the Senator from New York by neglecting his wife, and the Senator from Illinois by engrossing the attention of Mrs. Lee.  A young Englishman would have done both, but Lord Skye had studied the American constitution.  The wife of the Senator from New York now thought him most agreeable, and at the same moment the Senator from Illinois awoke to the conviction that after all, even in frivolous and fashionable circles, true dignity is in no danger of neglect; an American Senator represents a sovereign state; the great state of Illinois is as big as England—­with the convenient omission of Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, India, Australia, and a few other continents and islands; and in short, it was perfectly clear that Lord Skye was not formidable to him, even in light society; had not Mrs. Lee herself as good as said that no position equaHed that of an American Senator?

In ten minutes Mrs. Lee had this devoted statesman at her feet.  She had not studied the Senate without a purpose.  She had read with unerring instinct one general characteristic of all Senators, a boundless and guileless thirst for flattery, engendered by daily draughts from political friends or dependents, then becoming a necessity like a dram, and swallowed with a heavy smile of ineffable content.  A single glance at Mr. Ratcliffe’s face showed Madeleine that she need not be afraid of flattering too grossly; her own self-respect, not his, was the only restraint upon her use of this feminine bait.

She opened upon him with an apparent simplicity and gravity, a quiet repose of manner, and an evident consciousness of her own strength, which meant that she was most dangerous.

“I heard your speech yesterday, Mr. Ratcliffe.  I am glad to have a chance of telling you how much I was impressed by it.  It seemed to me masterly.  Do you not find that it has had a great effect?”

“I thank you, madam.  I hope it will help to unite the party, but as yet we have had no time to measure its results.  That will require several days more.”  The Senator spoke in his senatorial manner, elaborate, condescending, and a little on his guard.

“Do you know,” said Mrs. Lee, turning towards him as though he were a valued friend, and looking deep into his eyes, “Do you know that every one told me I should be shocked by the falling off in political ability at Washington?  I did not believe them, and since hearing your speech I am sure they are mistaken.  Do you yourself think there is less ability in Congress than there used to be?”

“Well, madam, it is difficult to answer that question.  Government is not so easy now as it was formerly.  There are different customs.  There are many men of fair abilities in public life; many more than there used to be; and there is sharper criticism and more of it.”

“Was I right in thinking that you have a strong resemblance to Daniel Webster in your way of speaking?  You come from the same neighbourhood, do you not?”

Mrs. Lee here hit on Ratcliffe’s weak point; the outline of his head had, in fact, a certain resemblance to that of Webster, and he prided himself upon it, and on a distant relationship to the Expounder of the Constitution; he began to think that Mrs. Lee was a very intelligent person.  His modest admission of the resemblance gave her the opportunity to talk of Webster ’s oratory, and the conversation soon spread to a discussion of the merits of Clay and Calhoun.  The Senator found that his neighbour—­a fashionable New York woman, exquisitely dressed, and with a voice and manner seductively soft and gentle—­had read the speeches of Webster and Calhoun.  She did not think it necessary to tell him that she had persuaded the honest Carrington to bring her the volumes and to mark such passages as were worth her reading; but she took care to lead the conversation, and she criticised with some skill and more humour the weak points in Websterian oratory, saying with a little laugh and a glance into his delighted eyes: 

“My judgment may not be worth much, Mr. Senator, but it does seem to me that our fathers thought too much of themselves, and till you teach me better I shall continue to think that the passage in your speech of yesterday which began with, ’Our strength lies in this twisted and tangled mass of isolated principles, the hair of the half-sleeping giant of Party,’ is both for language and imagery quite equal to anything of Webster’s.”

The Senator from Illinois rose to this gaudy fly like a huge, two-hundred-pound salmon; his white waistcoat gave out a mild silver reflection as he slowly came to the surface and gorged the hook.  He made not even a plunge, not one perceptible effort to tear out the barbed weapon, but, floating gently to her feet, allowed himself to be landed as though it were a pleasure.  Only miserable casuists will ask whether this was fair play on Madeleine’s part; whether flattery so gross cost her conscience no twinge, and whether any woman can without self-abasement be guilty of such shameless falsehood.  She, however, scorned the idea of falsehood.  She would have defended herself by saying that she had not so much praised Ratcliffe as depreciated Webster, and that she was honest in her opinion of the old-fashioned American oratory.  But she could not deny that she had wilfully allowed the Senator to draw conclusions very different from any she actually held.  She could not deny that she had intended to flatter him to the extent necessary for her purpose, and that she was pleased at her success.  Before they rose from table the Senator had quite unbent himself; he was talking naturally, shrewdly, and with some humour; he had told her Illinois stories; spoken with extraordinary freedom about his political situation; and expressed the wish to call upon Mrs. Lee, if he could ever hope to find her at home.

“I am always at home on Sunday evenings,” said she.

To her eyes he was the high-priest of American politics; he was charged with the meaning of the mysteries, the clue to political hieroglyphics.  Through him she hoped to sound the depths of statesmanship and to bring up from its oozy bed that pearl of which she was in search; the mysterious gem which must lie hidden somewhere in politics.  She wanted to understand this man; to turn him inside out; to experiment on him and use him as young physiologists use frogs and kittens.  If there was good or bad in him, she meant to find its meaning.

And he was a western widower of fifty; his quarters in Washington were in gaunt boarding-house rooms, furnished only with public documents and enlivened by western politicians and office-seekers.  In the summer he retired to a solitary, white framehouse with green blinds, surrounded by a few feet of uncared-for grass and a white fence; its interior more dreary still, with iron stoves, oil-cloth carpets, cold white walls, and one large engraving of Abraham Lincoln in the parlour; all in Peonia, Illinois!  What equality was there between these two combatants? what hope for him? what risk for her?  And yet Madeleine Lee had fully her match in Mr. Silas P. Ratcliffe.