That the invitation to attend the
Square Table Club over-shadowed the importance and
significance of Bradley’s entrance into public
life, was an excellent commentary upon his real character.
The State House, however, appealed to his imagination
very strongly as he walked up its unfinished lawn,
amid the heaps of huge limestone blocks, his eyes upon
the looming façade of the west front. He walked
the echoing rotunda with a timid air; and the beautiful
soaring vault was so majestic in his eyes, he wondered
if Washington could be finer. There were a few
other greenhorns, like himself, looking the building
over with the same minute scrutiny. He entered
all of the rooms into which it was possible to penetrate,
and at last into the library, a cheerful, rectangular
room, into which the sun streamed plenteously.
There was hardly any one in either
the Senate or the Representative Halls except farmer-like
groups of people, sometimes a family group of four
or five, including the grandmother or grandfather.
They were mainly in rough best suits of gray, or ostentatiously
striped cassimere. The young men wore wide hats,
pushed back, in some cases, to display a smooth, curling
wave of hair, carefully combed down over their foreheads.
He was able to catalogue them by reference to his old
companions, Ed Blackler, Shep Watson, Sever Anderson,
and others.
Soon the crowds thickened, and groups
of men entered, talking and laughing loudly.
They were wholly at their ease, being plainly old and
experienced members. They greeted each other with
boisterous cries and powerful handshaking.
“Hello, Stineberg, I hoped you’d
git snowed under. Back again, eh?”
“Well, I’ll be damned!
Aint your county got any more sense than to send such
a specimen as you back? Why weren’t you
around to the caucus?”
Bradley stood around awkwardly alone,
not knowing just what to do. Perhaps some of
these men would be glad to see him if they knew him,
but he could not think of going to introduce himself.
Being new in politics, there was not a man there whose
face he recognized. The few that he had met at
the hotel were not in sight. He felt as if he
had been thrust into this jovial company, and was
unwelcome.
The House was called to order by one
of the members of the capital county, and prayer was
offered. He sat quietly in his seat as things
went on. The session adjourned after electing
temporary speaker, clerk, etc. Bradley felt
so alien to it all that he scarcely took the trouble
to vote; and when the committee on credentials was
appointed, he felt nervously in his pocket to see
that his papers were safe. He felt very much
as he used to when, as a boy, he went to have his hair
cut, and sat in torture during the whole operation,
in the fear that his quarter (all he had with him)
might be lost, and trembling to think what would happen
in such a case.
That night he moved to a new boarding-place.
He secured a room near the Capitol, and went to supper
in a small private house near by, which had a most
astonishing amplitude of dining-room. He felt
quite at home there, for the food was put on the table
in the good old way, and passed around from hand to
hand. The mashed potato tasted better, piled
high, with a lump of butter in the top of it; and the
slices of roast beef, outspread on the platter, enabled
him to get the crisp outside, if it happened to start
from his end of the table. There were judges
and generals and senators and legislators of various
ranks all about him. Crude, rough, wholesome
fellows, most of them, with big, brawny hands like
his own, and loud, hearty voices. It was impossible
to stand in awe of a judge who handled his knife more
deftly than his fork, and spooned the potato out of
the big, earthen-ware dish with a resounding slap.
He began to see that these men were exactly like the
people he had been with all his life. He argued,
however, that they were perhaps the poorer and the
more honorable part of the legislature.
He wrote a note to Judge Brown, telling
him that he was settled, but was taking very little
part in the organizing of the House. He did not
say that he was disappointed in his reception, but
he was; his vanity had been hurt. His canvass
had attracted considerable attention from the Democratic
press of the country, and he expected to be received
with great favor by them. He had come out of Republicanism
for their sake, and they ought to recognize him.
He did not consider that no one knew him by sight,
and that recognition was impossible.
He was at the Capitol again early
the next morning, and found the same scene being re-enacted.
Straggling groups of roughly-dressed farmers loitered
timidly along the corridors, brisk clerks dashed to
and fro, and streams of men poured in and out the
doors of the legislative halls. Bradley entered
unobserved, and took a seat at the rear of the hall
on a sofa. He did not feel safe in taking a seat.
It was a solemn moment to the new
legislator as he stood before the clerk, and, with
lifted hand, listened to the oath of office read in
the clerk’s sounding voice. He swore solemnly,
with the help of God, to support the Constitution,
and serve his people to the best of his ability; and
he meant it. It did not occur to him that this
oath was a shuffling and indefinite obligation.
The room seemed to grow a little dimmer as he stood
there; the lofty ceiling, rich in its colors, grand
and spacious to him, seemed to gather new majesty,
just as his office as lawmaker gathered a vast and
sacred significance.
But as he came back to his seat, he
heard a couple of old members laugh. “Comin’
down to save their country. They’ll learn
to save their bacon before their term is up.
That young feller looks like one of those retrenchment
and reform cusses, one of the fellers who never want
to adjourn down here for business, ye know.”
Their laughter made Bradley turn hot with indignation.
The selection of seats was the next
great feature. The names of all the members were
written upon slips of paper and shaken together in
a box, while the members stood laughing and talking
in the back part of the house. A blind-folded
messenger boy selected the slips; and as the clerk
read, in a sounding voice, the name on each slip, the
representative so called went forward and selected
his seat.
Bradley’s name was called about
the tenth, and he went forward timidly, and took a
seat directly in the centre of the House. He did
not care to seem anxious for a front seat. The
Democratic members looked at him closely, and he stepped
out of his obscurity as he went forward.
A young man of about his own age,
a stalwart fellow, reached about and shook hands.
“My name is Nelson Floyd. I wanted to see
you.”
Floyd took the first opportunity to
introduce him to two or three of the Democratic members,
but he sat quietly in his seat during the whole session,
and took very little interest in the speakership contest,
which seemed to go off very smoothly. He believed
the speaker implicitly, when he stated the usual lie
about having no pledges to redeem, and that he was
free to choose his committee with regard only to superior
fitness, etc., and was shocked when Floyd told
him that a written contract had been drawn up and
signed, before the legislature met, wherein the principal
clerkships had been disposed of to party advantage.
It was his second introduction to the hypocrisy of
officialism.
If he had been neglected before, he
was not now; all sorts of people came about him with
axes to grind.
“Is this Mr. Talcott? Ah,
yes! I have heard of your splendid canvass splendid
canvass! Now ahem! I’d
like you to speak a good word for my girl, for the
assistant clerkship of the Ways and Means”;
while another wanted his son, Mr. John Smith, for page.
He told them that he had nothing to
say about those things. “I am counted with
the Democrats, anyhow; I haven’t any influence.”
They patted him on the shoulder, and
winked slyly. “Oh, we know all about that!
But every word helps, you know.”
Going out at the close of the session, he met Cargill.
“Well, legislator, how goes it?”
“Oh, I don’t know; smoothly, I guess.
I’ve kept pretty quiet.”
“That’s right. The
Republicans have everything in their hands this session.”
“Hello, Cargill!” called a smooth, jovial
voice.
“Ah, Barney! Talcott, this
is an excellent opportunity. This is Barney,
the great railway lobbyist. Barney, here is a
new victim for you Talcott, of Rock.”
“Glad to see you, Mr. Talcott.”
Bradley shook hands with moderate
enthusiasm, looking into Barney’s face with
great interest. The lobbyist was large and portly
and smiling. His moustache drooped over his mouth,
and his chin had a jolly-looking hollow in it.
His hazel eyes, once frank and honest, were a little
clouded with drink.
“Cargill is an infernal old
cynic,” he exclaimed, “and he is corporation
mad. Don’t size us up according to his estimate.”
It did not seem possible that this
man could be the great tool of the railway interest,
and yet that was his reputation.
Cargill moralized on the members,
as they walked on: “Barney’s on his
rounds getting hold of the new members. He scents
a corruptible man as the buzzard does carrion.
Every session young fellows like you come down here
with high and beautiful ideas of office, and start
in to reform everything, and end by becoming meat
for Barney and his like. There is something destructive
in the atmosphere of politics.”
Bradley listened to Cargill incredulously.
These things could not be true. These groups
of jovial, candid-looking men could not be the moral
wrecks they were represented. He had expected
to see men who looked villainous in some way, with
bloated faces disreputable, beery fellows.
He had not risen to the understanding that the successful
villain is always plausible.
When he left the Capitol and went
down the steps with Cargill, he felt that he had fairly
entered upon the work of his term.
“Now, young man,” said
Cargill, as they parted, “let me advise you.
The fight of this session is going to be the people
against the corporations. There are two positions
and only two. You take your choice. If you
side with the corporation, your success will be instantaneous.
You can rig out, and board at the Richwood, and be
dined out, and taken to see the town Saturday nights,
and retire with a nice little boost and a record to
apologize for when you go back to Rock River; that
is, you can go in for all that there is in it, or you
can take your chances with the people.”
“I will take the chances with the people.”
“Well, now, hold on! Don’t
deceive yourself. The people are a mob yet.
They are fickle as the flames o’ hell. They
don’t know what they do want, but in the end
the man that leads them and stands by them is sure
of success.”
The daily walk down from the Capitol
was very beautiful. As the sun sank low it struck
through the smoke of the city, and flooded the rotunda
of the building with a warm, red light, which lay along
the floor in great streams of gold, and warmed each
pillar till it glowed like burnished copper.
At such moments the muddy streets, the poor hovels,
the ugly bricks, lost to sight beneath the majesty
and mystery of the sun-transfigured smoke and the
purple deeps of the lower levels (out of which the
searching, pitiless light had gone), became a sombre
and engulfing flood of luminous darkness.
“Here, here!” Cargill
said one day, when Bradley called his attention to
the view, “a man can swear and get drunk and
be a politician; but when he likes flowers or speaks
of a sunset, his goose is cooked. It is political
death.”