THE COST

A dinner at the Metropolitan Club—Old friends and enemies—A conservative Senator—Pleasant speeches—A favor for Henry I—I plan a gift for a tried friend—I find that I have nothing to give—Slocum's confession—Aims in life—The Supreme Bench—What money can't buy—Slocum pays for both

A number of men gave me a dinner that evening at the Metropolitan Club. Steele, Lardner, Morrison (of the New York and Chicago Railway Company), Joe Strauss, Jenks, Carmichael, and Bates were there, among others—all leaders in the community in various enterprises. Not all these gentlemen had looked with favor on my political aspirations; but, when they saw that I could win this trick as I had others, they sidled up to me. After all, no matter what they might think of me personally, or of my methods, they felt that I belonged to their crowd and would be a safe enough man to have in the Senate.

Just as we sat down, Slocum, who had been called to the telephone, came up to me, a smile on his wrinkled face, and said, raising his right hand:—

"Gentlemen, the legislature at Springfield has elected Mr. Harrington to fill the unexpired term of the late Senator Parkinson. Gentlemen, three cheers for Senator Harrington!"

As the men raised their champagne glasses to drink to me, Slocum shook me warmly by the hand, a smile broadening over his face. Although, as I told them, it had never been my part to talk, I said a few words, thanking them for their good-will, and promising them that I should do my best to serve the interests of the country we all believed was the greatest nation that had ever been. My old friend Orlando Bates, the president of the Tenth National, replied to my talk, expressing the confidence my associates had in me. In the course of his graceful speech he said, "Mr. Harrington is so closely identified with the conservative interests of the country that we can feel assured he will stand as a bulwark against the populistic clamor so rife in the nation at the present time." And young Harvey Sturm, also a bank president, who followed him with a glowing speech, made flattering references to the work I had done "in upbuilding our glorious commonwealth." After deprecating the growth of socialistic sentiments and condemning the unrestricted criticism of the press in regard to capital, he closed with a special tribute: "Such men as Edward Harrington are the brains and the will of the nation. On their strong shoulders rests the progress of America. Were it not for their God-given energy, their will, their genius for organization, our broad prairies, our great forests, our vast mines, would cease to give forth their wealth!"

There was more of the same sort of talk before we broke up. Afterward, as the theatres and the opera closed, men dropped in to hear the news, and many of them came up to congratulate me. Among others old Dround wandered into the club in the course of the evening, and, some one having told him that I had been elected Senator, he came up to the corner where I was standing with a group of men, and hovered around for a time, trying to get a word with me. After a while I stepped out and shook hands with him.

"I am very glad to hear this, Mr. Harrington," he said slowly, pressing my hand in his trembling fist. "I have always believed that our best men should take an interest in the government of their country."

His eyes had a wandering expression, as if he were trying in vain to remember something out of the past, and he continued to deliver his little speech, drawing me to one side out of hearing of the men who were standing there. "I thought once to enter public life myself," he said, "but heavy business responsibilities demanded all my attention. I wonder," he lowered his voice confidentially, "if you will not find it possible to further the claims of my old friend Paxton's son. He desires to secure a diplomatic post. I have urged his merits on the President, and secured assurance of his good-will; but nothing has yet been done. I cannot understand it."

Eri Paxton was a dissipated, no-account sort of fellow, but I assured Henry I. Dround that I would do my best for him. That was the least that the past demanded of me!

So it went on until past midnight, and the club began to empty, and I was left with a few friends about me. When they went I took Slocum up to my room for a last cigar before bed. We had some private matters to settle in connection with the election.

"You pulled out all right, Van," he said when we were alone. "But there wasn't much margin."

"I trusted Carmichael—I knew John wouldn't go back on me."

We sat and smoked awhile in silence. Now that I had picked the plum, the feeling came over me that Slocum ought to have had it. With that idea I burst out at last:—

"I've been thinking of one thing all along, Slo—and that is: What can I do for you when I am Senator? Name what you want, man, and if it's in my power to get it, it shall be yours. Without you I'd never have been here, and that's sure."

"I never cared much for politics," he replied thoughtfully. "I guess there isn't anything I want, which is more than most of your friends can say!"

"Something in the diplomatic service?" I suggested. He shook his head.

"How about a Federal judgeship—you can afford to go out of practice."

"Yes, I can afford to go on the bench!" he replied dryly. "But it's no use to talk of it."

"What do you mean?"

"You ought to know, Van, that that is one thing that can't be bought in this country, not yet. I could no more get an appointment on the Federal bench than you could!"

"You mean on account of that old story? That's outlawed years ago!"

"You think so? The public forgets, but lawyers remember, and so do politicians. The President may make rotten appointments anywhere else, but if he should nominate me for the Circuit bench there would be such a howl go up all over that he would have to withdraw me. And he knows too much to try any such proposition."

It was no use to argue the question, for the lawyer had evidently been over the whole matter and knew the facts.

"It isn't that bribery matter, Van, alone; I have been hand and glove with you fellows too long to be above suspicion. My record is against me all through. It isn't worth talking about.... I have had my pay: I am a rich man, richer than I ever expected to be when I put foot in Chicago. I have no right to complain."

But I felt that, in spite of all he said, that wasn't enough—somehow the money did not make it square for him. As the night passed, he warmed up more than I had ever known him to in all the years we had worked together, and he let me see some way inside him. I remember he said something like this:—

"There were three things I promised myself I would do with my life. That was back in my senior year at Bowdoin College. I was a poor boy—had borrowed from a relative a few hundred dollars to go through college with, and felt the burden of that debt pretty hard. Well, of those three purposes, one was for myself. First, I promised myself I would pay back my uncle's loan. That was a simple matter of decency. He was not a rich man, and his children felt rather sore at his letting me have those six hundred dollars to spend on a college education. I managed to do that out of what I earned as a law clerk the first years we were together at Ma Pierson's. The next thing I had promised myself was to buy back our old brick house in the aristocratic part of Portland—the house my father had been obliged to part with after the panic of '76. I meant to put my mother and sisters in it. The only sister I have living is there now with her children. My mother died in her old home, and that has always been a comfort to me.... You may think it was my desire to do this that made me stick by you when we had that difference about the Chicago and London bonds, but you are mistaken. I went with you, Van, because I wanted to—just that. I saw then what it meant, and I am not kicking now.

"Well, the third aim I set myself when I was speculating, as college boys do about such things, was the hardest of all. The others, with reasonable success, I could hope to accomplish. And I did fulfil them sooner than I had any reason to hope I should. The third was a more difficult matter, and that was my ambition to sit some day on the Supreme Bench. There were two members of our family who had been distinguished judges, one of the Supreme Court of Maine, and another of the Federal Supreme Court, back in the early forties. I had always heard these two men referred to with the greatest respect in our family, especially my great-uncle, Judge Lambert Cushing. Although by the time I came to college our family had reached a pretty low ebb, it was natural that I should secretly cherish the ambition to rise to the high-water mark.

"And," he concluded, "after thirty years of contact with the world, I haven't seen much that is more worthy of a man's ambition in our country than a seat on our Supreme Bench. I have no reason to be ashamed of my three aims in life. Two of them I made—the third I might never have come near to, anyway; but I chucked away my chance a good many years ago. However, I have done pretty well by myself as it is. So you see there is nothing, Van, that you can give me that I should want to take."

He reached for another cigar, and stretched his long legs. It was the first time he had ever spoken to me from the bottom of his heart, and now that he had revealed the truth about himself, there was nothing to be said. He was not just the ordinary corporation lawyer, who sells his learning and his shrewdness for a fat fee. I had run up against that kind often enough. They are an indispensable article to the modern man of affairs; for the strategy of our warfare is largely directed by them. But Jaffrey Slocum was much more than such a trained prostitute: he was a man of learning and a lover of the law for its own sake. I suspect that if he had ever sat on the bench he would have been a tough nut for the corporations....

"There's no better proverb, my friend, than the old one about the way you make your bed," Slocum summed up, rising to go. "It don't trouble you, perhaps, because you are made different. You are made to fit the world as it is to-day."

With that he bade me good night and went away. I sat on by myself for some time afterward, thinking, thinking of it all! Very likely if Slocum could have had his desire, and gone on the Supreme Bench, he would not have found it all he had painted it as a boy. But whether it was foolish or not for him to set such store by that prize, it was beyond his reach, and the man who had done most to put him out of the race was I. I had needed him, and I had taken him—that was all there was to that. He had sold himself to me, not just for money, but for friendship and admiration,—for what men of his kind sell themselves. For in all the world there was not enough money to pay him for selling himself—he had as much as said so to-night. Now, when I wanted to give him the gift that he had earned by years of devotion, there was nothing in my hands that was worth his taking!

Thinking of this, I forgot for the time being that I was Senator from the state of Illinois.