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Mark
Twain - The Gilded Age
CHAPTER XXIV.
The capital of the Great Republic was a new world to country-bred
Washington Hawkins. St. Louis was a greater city, but its floating.
population did not hail from great distances, and so it had the general
family aspect of the permanent population; but Washington gathered
its people from the four winds of heaven, and so the manners, the
faces and the fashions there, presented a variety that was infinite.
Washington had never been in "society" in St. Louis, and
he knew nothing of the ways of its wealthier citizens and had never
inspected one of their dwellings. Consequently, everything in the
nature of modern fashion and grandeur was a new and wonderful revelation
to him.
Washington is an interesting city to any of us. It seems to become
more and more interesting the oftener we visit it. Perhaps the reader
has never been there? Very well. You arrive either at night, rather
too late to do anything or see anything until morning, or you arrive
so early in the morning that you consider it best to go to your hotel
and sleep an hour or two while the sun bothers along over the Atlantic.
You cannot well arrive at a pleasant intermediate hour, because the
railway corporation that keeps the keys of the only door that leads
into the town or out of it take care of that. You arrive in tolerably
good spirits, because it is only thirty-eight miles from Baltimore
to the capital, and so you have only been insulted three times (provided
you are not in a sleeping car--the average is higher there): once
when you renewed your ticket after stopping over in Baltimore, once
when you were about to enter the "ladies' car" without knowing
it was a lady's car, and once When you asked the conductor at what
hour you would reach Washington.
You are assailed by a long rank of hackmen who shake their whips
in your face as you step out upon the sidewalk; you enter what they
regard as a "carriage," in the capital, and you wonder why
they do not take it out of service and put it in the museum: we have
few enough antiquities, and it is little to our credit that we make
scarcely any effort to preserve the few we have.
You reach your hotel, presently--and here let us draw the curtain
of charity--because of course you have gone to the wrong one. You
being a stranger, how could you do otherwise? There are a hundred
and eighteen bad hotels, and only one good one. The most renowned
and popular hotel of them all is perhaps the worst one known to history.
It is winter, and night. When you arrived, it was snowing. When you
reached the hotel, it was sleeting. When you went to bed, it was raining.
During the night it froze hard, and the wind blew some chimneys down.
When you got up in the morning, it was foggy. When you finished your
breakfast at ten o'clock and went out, the sunshine was brilliant,
the weather balmy and delicious, and the mud and slush deep and all-
pervading. You will like the climate when you get used to it.
You naturally wish to view the city; so you take an umbrella, an
overcoat, and a fan, and go forth. The prominent features you soon
locate and get familiar with; first you glimpse the ornamental upper
works of a long, snowy palace projecting above a grove of trees, and
a tall, graceful white dome with a statue on it surmounting the palace
and pleasantly contrasting with the background of blue sky. That building
is the capitol; gossips will tell you that by the original estimates
it was to cost $12,000,000, and that the government did come within
$21,200,000 of building it for that sum.
You stand at the back of the capitol to treat yourself to a view,
and it is a very noble one. You understand, the capitol stands upon
the verge of a high piece of table land, a fine commanding position,
and its front looks out over this noble situation for a city--but
it don't see it, for the reason that when the capitol extension was
decided upon, the property owners at once advanced their prices to
such inhuman figures that the people went down and built the city
in the muddy low marsh behind the temple of liberty; so now the lordly
front of the building, with, its imposing colonades, its, projecting,
graceful wings, its, picturesque groups of statuary, and its long
terraced ranges of steps, flowing down in white marble waves to the
ground, merely looks out upon a sorrowful little desert of cheap boarding
houses.
So you observe, that you take your view from the back of the capitol.
And yet not from the airy outlooks of the dome, by the way, because
to get there you must pass through the great rotunda: and to do that,
you would have to see the marvelous Historical Paintings that hang
there, and the bas-reliefs--and what have you done that you should
suffer thus? And besides, you might have to pass through the old part
of the building, and you could not help seeing Mr. Lincoln, as petrified
by a young lady artist for $10,000--and you might take his marble
emancipation proclamation, which he holds out in his hand and contemplates,
for a folded napkin; and you might conceive from his expression and
his attitude, that he is finding fault with the washing. Which is
not the case. Nobody knows what is the matter with him; but everybody
feels for him. Well, you ought not to go into the dome anyhow, because
it would be utterly impossible to go up there without seeing the frescoes
in it--and why should you be interested in the delirium tremens of
art?
The capitol is a very noble and a very beautiful building, both within
and without, but you need not examine it now. Still, if you greatly
prefer going into the dome, go. Now your general glance gives you
picturesque stretches of gleaming water, on your left, with a sail
here and there and a lunatic asylum on shore; over beyond the water,
on a distant elevation, you see a squat yellow temple which your eye
dwells upon lovingly through a blur of unmanly moisture, for it recalls
your lost boyhood and the Parthenons done in molasses candy which
made it blest and beautiful. Still in the distance, but on this side
of the water and close to its edge, the Monument to the Father of
his Country towers out of the mud--sacred soil is the, customary term.
It has the aspect of a factory chimney with the top broken off. The
skeleton of a decaying scaffolding lingers about its summit, and tradition
says that the spirit of Washington often comes down and sits on those
rafters to enjoy this tribute of respect which the nation has reared
as the symbol of its unappeasable gratitude.
The Monument is to be finished, some day, and at that time our Washington
will have risen still higher in the nation's veneration, and will
be known as the Great-Great-Grandfather of his Country. The memorial
Chimney stands in a quiet pastoral locality that is full of reposeful
expression. With a glass you can see the cow- sheds about its base,
and the contented sheep nimbling pebbles in the desert solitudes that
surround it, and the tired pigs dozing in the holy calm of its protecting
shadow.
Now you wrench your gaze loose, and you look down in front of you
and see the broad Pennsylvania Avenue stretching straight ahead for
a mile or more till it brings up against the iron fence in front of
a pillared granite pile, the Treasury building-an edifice that would
command respect in any capital. The stores and hotels that wall in
this broad avenue are mean, and cheap, and dingy, and are better left
without comment. Beyond the Treasury is a fine large white barn, with
wide unhandsome grounds about it. The President lives there. It is
ugly enough outside, but that is nothing to what it is inside. Dreariness,
flimsiness, bad taste reduced to mathematical completeness is what
the inside offers to the eye, if it remains yet what it always has
been.
The front and right hand views give you the city at large. It is
a wide stretch of cheap little brick houses, with here and there a
noble architectural pile lifting itself out of the midst-government
buildings, these. If the thaw is still going on when you come down
and go about town, you will wonder at the short-sightedness of the
city fathers, when you come to inspect the streets, in that they do
not dilute the mud a little more and use them for canals.
If you inquire around a little, you will find that there are more
boardinghouses to the square acre in Washington than there are in
any other city in the land, perhaps. If you apply for a home in one
of them, it will seem odd to you to have the landlady inspect you
with a severe eye and then ask you if you are a member of Congress.
Perhaps, just as a pleasantry, you will say yes. And then she will
tell you that she is "full." Then you show her her advertisement
in the morning paper, and there she stands, convicted and ashamed.
She will try to blush, and it will be only polite in you to take the
effort for the deed. She shows you her rooms, now, and lets yon take
one--but she makes you pay in advance for it. That is what you will
get for pretending to be a member of Congress. If you had been content
to be merely a private citizen, your trunk would have been sufficient
security for your board. If you are curious and inquire into this
thing, the chances are that your landlady will be ill-natured enough
to say that the person and property of a Congressman are exempt from
arrest or detention, and that with the tears in her eyes she has seen
several of the people's representatives walk off to their several
States and Territories carrying her unreceipted board bills in their
pockets for keepsakes. And before you have been in Washington many
weeks you will be mean enough to believe her, too.
Of course you contrive to see everything and find out everything.
And one of the first and most startling things you find out is, that
every individual you encounter in the City of Washington almost--and
certainly every separate and distinct individual in the public employment,
from the highest bureau chief, clear down to the maid who scrubs Department
halls, the night watchmen of the public buildings and the darkey boy
who purifies the Department spittoons--represents Political Influence.
Unless you can get the ear of a Senator, or a Congressman, or a Chief
of a Bureau or Department, and persuade him to use his "influence"
in your behalf, you cannot get an employment of the most trivial nature
in Washington. Mere merit, fitness and capability, are useless baggage
to you without "influence." The population of Washington
consists pretty much entirely of government employee and the people
who board them. There are thousands of these employees, and they have
gathered there from every corner of the Union and got their berths
through the intercession (command is nearer the word) of the Senators
and Representatives of their respective States. It would be an odd
circumstance to see a girl get employment at three or four dollars
a week in one of the great public cribs without any political grandee
to back her, but merely because she was worthy, and competent, and
a good citizen of a free country that "treats all persons alike."
Washington would be mildly thunderstruck at such a thing as that.
If you are a member of Congress, (no offence,) and one of your constituents
who doesn't know anything, and does not want to go into the bother
of learning something, and has no money, and no employment, and can't
earn a living, comes besieging you for help, do you say, "Come,
my friend, if your services were valuable you could get employment
elsewhere--don't want you here? "Oh, no: You take him to a Department
and say, "Here, give this person something to pass away the time
at--and a salary"--and the thing is done. You throw him on his
country. He is his country's child, let his country support him. There
is something good and motherly about Washington, the grand old benevolent
National Asylum for the Helpless.
The wages received by this great hive of employees are placed at
the liberal figure meet and just for skilled and competent labor.
Such of them as are immediately employed about the two Houses of Congress,
are not only liberally paid also, but are remembered in the customary
Extra Compensation bill which slides neatly through, annually, with
the general grab that signalizes the last night of a session, and
thus twenty per cent. is added to their wages, for--for fun, no doubt.
Washington Hawkins' new life was an unceasing delight to him. Senator
Dilworthy lived sumptuously, and Washington's quarters were charming--
gas; running water, hot and cold; bath-room, coal-fires, rich carpets,
beautiful pictures on the walls; books on religion, temperance, public
charities and financial schemes; trim colored servants, dainty food--
everything a body could wish for. And as for stationery, there was
no end to it; the government furnished it; postage stamps were not
needed-- the Senator's frank could convey a horse through the mails,
if necessary.
And then he saw such dazzling company. Renowned generals and admirals
who had seemed but colossal myths when he was in the far west, went
in and out before him or sat at the Senator's table, solidified into
palpable flesh and blood; famous statesmen crossed his path daily;
that once rare and awe-inspiring being, a Congressman, was become
a common spectacle--a spectacle so common, indeed, that he could contemplate
it without excitement, even without embarrassment; foreign ministers
were visible to the naked eye at happy intervals; he had looked upon
the President himself, and lived. And more; this world of enchantment
teemed with speculation--the whole atmosphere was thick with hand
that indeed was Washington Hawkins' native air; none other refreshed
his lungs so gratefully. He had found paradise at last.
The more he saw of his chief the Senator, the more he honored him,
and the more conspicuously the moral grandeur of his character appeared
to stand out. To possess the friendship and the kindly interest of
such a man, Washington said in a letter to Louise, was a happy fortune
for a young man whose career had been so impeded and so clouded as
his.
The weeks drifted by;--Harry Brierly flirted, danced, added lustre
to the brilliant Senatorial receptions, and diligently "buzzed"
and "button- holed" Congressmen in the interest of the Columbus
River scheme; meantime Senator Dilworthy labored hard in the same
interest--and in others of equal national importance. Harry wrote
frequently to Sellers, and always encouragingly; and from these letters
it was easy to see that Harry was a pet with all Washington, and was
likely to carry the thing through; that the assistance rendered him
by "old Dilworthy" was pretty fair--pretty fair; "and
every little helps, you know," said Harry.
Washington wrote Sellers officially, now and then. In one of his
letters it appeared that whereas no member of the House committee
favored the scheme at first, there was now needed but one more vote
to compass a majority report. Closing sentence:
"Providence seems to further our efforts."
(Signed,) "ABNER DILWORTHY, U. S. S.,
per WASHINGTON HAWKINS, P. S."
At the end of a week, Washington was able to send the happy news,
officially, as usual,--that the needed vote had been added and the
bill favorably reported from the Committee. Other letters recorded
its perils in Committee of the whole, and by and by its victory, by
just the skin of its teeth, on third reading and final passage. Then
came letters telling of Mr. Dilworthy's struggles with a stubborn
majority in his own Committee in the Senate; of how these gentlemen
succumbed, one by one, till a majority was secured.
Then there was a hiatus. Washington watched every move on the board,
and he was in a good position to do this, for he was clerk of this
committee, and also one other. He received no salary as private secretary,
but these two clerkships, procured by his benefactor, paid him an
aggregate of twelve dollars a day, without counting the twenty percent
extra compensation which would of course be voted to him on the last
night of the session.
He saw the bill go into Committee of the whole and struggle for its
life again, and finally worry through. In the fullness of time he
noted its second reading, and by and by the day arrived when the grand
ordeal came, and it was put upon its final passage. Washington listened
with bated breath to the "Aye!" "No!" "No!"
"Aye!" of the voters, for a few dread minutes, and then
could bear the suspense no longer. He ran down from the gallery and
hurried home to wait.
At the end of two or three hours the Senator arrived in the bosom
of his family, and dinner was waiting. Washington sprang forward,
with the eager question on his lips, and the Senator said:
"We may rejoice freely, now, my son--Providence has crowned
our efforts with success."
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