Читать книгу Ten Years in Washington: Inside Life and Scenes in Our National Capital as a Woman Sees Them - Mary Clemmer - Страница 15

Table of Contents

The Senate Reception Room—The People Who Haunt It—Republican “Ladies in Waiting”—“Women with Claims”—Their Heroic Persistency—A Widow and Children in Distress—Claim Agents—The Committee of Claims—A Kind-hearted Senator’s Troubles—Buttonholing a Senator—A Lady of Energy—Resolved to Win—An “Office Brokeress”—A Dragon of a Woman—A Lady who is Feared if not Respected—Her Unfortunate Victims—Carrying “Her Measure”—The Beautiful Petitioner—The Cloudy Side of her Character—Her Subtle Dealings—Her Successes—How Government Prizes are Won.

The room itself means only grace, beauty and silence. The moment had not come for dis-illusion, thus I went forth without a word regarding its human aspect.

To-day, dear friends, we will go in and face that. We sit down in the shadow of this Corinthian pillar, and, looking out see the most noticeable fact is that this lofty apartment is thronged with women. A number are conversing with senators; others are gazing toward the doors which lead into the Senate. Some seem to be waiting with eager eyes and anxious faces; others are leaning back upon the sofas in attitudes of luxurious listlessness. Do you ask why they are here? Are they studying the stately proportions and exquisite finesse of the ante-room? Not at all. It is not devotion to the aesthetic arts nor the inspiration of patriotism, which brings these women thither. They are a few, only a very few, of the women—with “claims,” who, through the sessions of Congress haunt the departments, the White House and the Capitol.

THE LADIES’ RECEPTION ROOM.

INSIDE THE CAPITOL.—WASHINGTON.

The dejected looking woman on the sofa opposite is a widow, with numerous small children. You may be certain by the unhopeful expression of her face that it is her own claim which, almost unaided and alone, she is trying to “work through” Congress. Her home is far distant. She borrowed money to come here, she borrows money to support her children, money to pay her own board; borrows money to pay the exorbitant fees of the claim-agent, who, constantly fanning the flame of “great expectations,” assures her every day that Congress will pay her the thousands which she demands for her losses—will pay her this very session. Meantime the session is almost ended, and the widow’s claim, on which hangs such a heavy load of debt and fear, lies hidden and forgotten in the pigeon-hole of the Committee of Claims. While it lies there, gathering dust, she a cheaply clad, care-faced woman, no longer young, and never pretty, has grown to be most burdensome to Senator ——, especially to the chairman of that committee. Irksome, not to be desired, is the importunate presence of this forlorn woman. No less irksome to these functionaries is the sight of her hundred sisters in distress—more or less; poor widows, with small children, with personal claims upon the Government. The chairman dreads the sight of this woman and of her like. He dreads it the more that he is perfectly certain that her case is not reached, and will not be this session. A kind-hearted man, he is unwilling to set the seal of despair on her face by telling her the truth. She finds it out at last, and then remembering all his evasions, in her disappointment and hopeless poverty, she denounces him as “deceitful and heartless,” whereas the honorable gentleman was only trying to be kind. Meanwhile the Senate is too much interested in immense claims involving millions, to be paid out of the National Treasury, too much absorbed in the discussion of the universal, to be able to come down to the small particular of a poor widow, with hungry children, whose only heritage was lost in the war. In time, whose cycles may be as long as those of the Circumlocution Office and the Court of Chancery—but some time, when the widow has borrowed and spent more money than the whole claim is worth, it may be investigated, and full or partial justice done. In either case, it will take more than she receives to pay the many expenses which she has incurred during her long years of waiting. Do you wonder that her face looks doleful while she waits for Senator —— to come in to answer her card, sent into the Senate Chamber. Here he is and we can hear what he says, “I am very sorry, Madame; but it has grown to be too late. I fear that your case can not be reached this session.” Poor woman. It would have been better for you to have staid at home, kept out of debt, worked with your hands to have supported your children. That would have been a hard life, but not so hard as the mortification, suspense, and defeat of this, and the long years of labor after all.

See that sharp-faced woman, with darting, prying eyes. She rushes in one door and out of another. She hurries back. She meets a senator, and “button-holes him,” after the fashion of men, and begins conversing in the most importunate manner. He makes a retreat. Lo! in a moment she attacks another, leading him triumphantly to a sofa, where we witness a teté-a-tetéteté-a-teté, on the feminine side, carried on with marked emphasis and much gesticulation. This woman not only has one claim in Congress, she has many, and not one her own. She is a claim-agent, an office-brokeress. She buys claims, and speculates in them as so much stock. She takes claims on commission, deluding many a poor victim into the belief that “my influence” and “my friends,” Senator So-and-So and Secretary P. Policy, will insure it a triumphant passage and a remunerative end, “without fail.” It is not strange, through sheer pertinacity and by dint of endless worrying, she often succeeds. She is purely feline in her tactics—ever alert, watchful, wary, cunning, and so she worries her victims and wins. She is one of the world’s disappointed, dissatisfied ones; so, more than all else, we will be sorry for her. What God meant to be a fair life has been striven away in one weary struggle for the worldly honor and conventional prestige lying just above her reach. And to her the most pleasurable excitement in all the claim profession is the delusion that it affords her of personal power and of association with the great!

Pardon me, good friends, for calling a name. I must call it, for it is true. Here comes a very dragon of a woman. I am as afraid of her as if she had horns. I was going to say that she was a man-woman, which is the greatest monstrosity of the genus feminine. But I honor my brethren too much for such a comparison, and so will simply say-in manners, she is a dragon. The men whom she seizes must think so; they give her her way, because they are afraid of her. Too well they know that, if they do not yield her point—if they do not at least promise her their influence—if they do not assure her that they will do all in their power to carry “her measure”—that she will attack them in the street, in the legislative lobbies, in the quiet of their lodgings, everywhere, anywhere, till they do. She is no covert power. She proclaims aloud that she has come to Washington to carry a measure through Congress to establish some man in power. And she does it because her tongue is a scourge and her presence a fear.

Leaning back in a chair, no one near her, you see a fair woman, whose beautiful presence seems at variance with the many anxious and angular and the few coarse women around her. The calmness of assured position, the serene satisfaction of conscious beauty, envelop her and float from her like an atmosphere. We feel it even here. Plumes droop above her forehead, velvet draperies fall about her form. We catch a glimpse of laces, the gleam of jewels. Look long into her face; its splendor of tint and perfection of outline can bear the closest scrutiny. Look long, and then say if a soul saintly as well as serene looks out from under those penciled arches, through the dilating irises of those beguiling eyes. Look, and the unveiled gaze which meets yours will tell you, as plainly as a gaze can tell, that adulation is the life of its life, and seduction the secret of its spell. This beauty would not blanch before the profanest sight; it is the beauty of one who tunes her tongue to honeyed accents, and lifts up her eyelids to lead men down to death. She comes and goes in a showy carriage. She glides through the corridors, haunts the galleries and the ante-rooms of the Capitol—everywhere conspicuous in her beauty. All who behold her inquire, Who is that beautiful woman? Nobody seems quite sure. Doubt and mystery envelop her like a cloud. “She is a rich and beautiful widow,” “She is unmarried,” “She is visiting the city with her husband.” Every gazer has a different answer. There are a few, deep in the secrets of diplomacy, of legislative venality, of governmental prostitution, who can tell you she is one of the most subtle and most dangerous of lobbyists. She is but one of a class always beautiful and always successful. She plays for large stakes, but she always wins. The man who says to her, “Secure my appointment, make sure my promotion, and I will pay you so many thousands,” usually gets his appointment, and she her thousands. Does she wait like a suppliant? Not at all. She sits like an empress waiting to give audience. Will she receive her subjects in promiscuous assemblage? No; if you wait long enough you will see her glide over these tessellated floors, but not alone. Far from the ears of the crowd, in rooms sumptuous enough for the Sybarites, this woman will dazzle the sight of a half-demented and wholly bewildered magnate, and then tell him what prize she wants. With alluring eyes and beguiling voice she will besiege his will through the outworks of his senses, and so charm him on to do her bidding. He promises her his influence; he promises her his power; her favorite shall have the boon he demands, whether it be of emolument or power.

Thus some of the highest prizes in the Government are won. Unscrupulous men pay wily women to touch the subtlest and surest springs of influence, and thus open a secret way to their public success. No longer the question is: Shall women participate in politics? shall they form a controlling element in the Government? But, as there are women who will and do exert this power, shall it remain abject, covert, equivocal, demoralizing, base? Or shall it be brave and pure and open as the sun?