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YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

From the Library of
JAMES S. PITKIN

THE WAR- WHIRL
IN WASHINGTON

I decided that the room had been used as a bar

THE WAR- WHIRL
IN WASHINGTON BY
FRANK WARD O'M ALLEY
OF THE NEW YORK SUN

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
BY TONY SARG

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1918

Copyright, 1918, by
The Centuet Co.

Published, May, 1918

TO
THE LADY WHO DOUBTLESS HAS BEEN
SOMEWHAT MISQUOTED HEREIN,
MY WIFE

FOKEWOED
" He does n't want gloom, he does want effi
ciency," — that is the way one who is daily in
closest touch with our war President described
Mr. Wilson's attitude toward trying days like
these. He golfs, he goes to tte theatre, he
motors. State dinners and similar social func
tions temporarily have been discontinued at the
capital, largely for economic reasons; in bring
ing the social gayeties to an end the frame of
Administrative thought was far from that kind
of early Puritan gloom which forbid bear bait
ing, " not because the sport gave pain to the
bear but because it gave pleasure to the spec
tators." The hardest of hard workers in the legions of
war toilers in Washington would be the last to
advise against moments of relaxation just now.
And if the lighter sides of life in the capital are
accented in the chapters that follow, the merrier
phases are not gone into because of a lack of
appreciation of the solemnities of the bldekest

FOEEWOED
of world tragedies, but solely with the hope that
at least a semblance of a smile will be brought
to the faces of a people who have so little time to
seek out the sources of smiles just now, even in
their moments of recreation.
The greater part of these pages was written
about the time of the big Teutonic (and there
fore fruitless) Spring drive of 1918, a military
offensive which was coincident with the real
beginning of a glorious speeding up of our own
war policies. Indeed the garrulous lady quoted
so frequently herein insists to-day that until
well into the present year she continued to hold
a mirror to the pale lips of our military pro
gramme without noting the faintest mist of
moisture on the glass. But although she re
mains firm in her belief, even at this late day,
that what she says in the following chapters
" still goes," it is worthy of note that as our
war-whirling Washington day by day whirls
faster and faster, just so steadily she approaches
a state of cheerfulness that is ecstatic. — F. W. O'M.
New York City,
May, 1918.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I Knock! — And It Shall be Opened,
Maybe  3
II Rooms, Rum and Ructions .... 34
III Water, Water Everywhere, but not
A Single Drink  63
IV "All's Riotous Along the Potomac!" 96
V The Town With the Trolley Off . 117
VI The Eagle Chirps  128
VII Sherman was Right  167
VIII All Bound Round -with a Red Wool
String  199
IX The War and the White House . . 230
X The Mutual Admibation Club . . 265

LIST OP ILLUSTRATIONS
I decided that the room had been used as a bar Frontispiece FACING PAGE
And I was off toward the little jBowershop before the
wife had scarcely begun her faint protests ... 16
I took him behind a pillar and gave him a tip ... 33
Laughed heartily when asked for a room and bath . 37
Thence behind a furnace . . . , and so, ever onward . . 44
And the coal magnate climbed into the only vacant
barber-chair  . . ... 49
So I firmly resolved, before I lost consciousness . . 64
Prom every waistcoat pocket were countless fountain pens 88
"Sir, I kinnot get you that numbah, being as the line is
busy" . . . 113
These are the happy days for the City of Gossip . . 128
The whole house had nothing on me for oratorical fire
works . . .  . . 161
"Oh, in one of our Indian wars out West," finally he ad
mitted ... .... . . 176
And then there is the other kind of "inventor" . . 225
"Second door to your left," directed the young man with
a thumb jerk . . . . 240
The extreme emptiness of that little black bag . 273
And the extravagance of her language left me crumpled
in my chair  288

THE WAR-WHIRL
IN WASHINGTON

THE WAR-WHIRL
IN WASHINGTON CHAPTER I
knock! — AND IT SHALL BE OPENED, MAYBE
RIBS torn free from the Granite State and
chiseled into fairy-like, but everlasting,
lace : clay-beds molded and baked to softest tones
of saffron and magenta, and piled high, brick on
brick, that sleepy old homes may nestle under
the tree-arches of sunflecked streets, oldish man
sions in a newish land, their walls seamed and
softened to a gentle loveliness as beautiful as
your old granny's wrinkled face; and effigies of
the brave, astride bronze chargers that rear from
pedestals of granite as solid as the hills and the
hearts of the wonder city itself; boulevards
stretching fanwise from the glorious dome, like
finger-tips that would reach over the hHIs and
3

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
far away to caress even the littlest of humble
hamlets — east and north, south and west, tow
ers and domes, fringes of columned marbles,
leafy slopes, and spires and minarets ; and twin
ing and wreathing, wreathing and twining it all
about, the ribbon river of silver slipping ever be
tween the Virginia and the Maryland hills, si
lently slipping down to the Southland sea.
In fact, some burg is Washington, soine burg.
I 'm in the wool-sponging business in lower
Broadway, New York, and I don't know much
about writing or art except that I knoW what I
like; and so I can't put all I think about Wash
ington into words. I and the wife just attend
strictly to our own business, 1 to the wool-spong
ing part and she to affairs around the flat.
When it comes, therefore, to putting all I think
about Washington into even a long paragraph,
the best I can turn out is to group a lot of the
fanciest things in the town, and then separate
the items with periods, which is one trick I
learned by reading only the best modern maga
zine stuff and books.
In fact, it takes a poet to sum up all that
Washington is, or all that the lovely old city
ever will be, and then sing the very soul of the
4

KNOCK! — AND IT SHALL BE OPENED
country's capital in three short lines of simple
native patois: Firs' 'n war!
Firs ' 'n peace I
'N' las' 'n the Amurican Lea^e!
" And we 're going down and take the old burg
in before the year is out, all the way from the
kaiser's statue of Friederick der Gross at the
War College up to, and including Joe Daniels."
Thus I to the wife across the breakfast scrapple
one chill morning in the autumn. " I want to
see Washington at war. Next spring — what?
— me for Washington, then, when the tulips are
out. That 's the time to take it in : all the Vir
ginia hills a misty green, and the crocuses blaz
ing in the circles all over town, and the generals
and admirals and everything wearing their white
uniforms, and the whole shebang all lit up with
sunlight — just like that time of the year Henry
Van Dyke wrote about in the piece he got printed
where he says, * And fountains leap in Madison
Square,' or something like that. That would be
a bad little trip, what? Answer yes or no."
" No," answered the wife. She held up a hand
for silence. " In the first place," she began,
5

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
" Washington is a southem city. Now, what 's
the sense in staying up here in the cold and
snow, so long as we 're going to make the trip at
all, when we could be going south to Washing
ton during our cold months? I want to see
Washington at war, too, but I want to see it in
the balmy winter-time."
" Oh, balmy my eye ! Why, I 've seen blizzards
busting along Pennsylvania Avenue in the win
ter months that — "
But there was no use shooting an unanswer
able argument toward an empty breakfast-room
chair. I quit. Again the next morning, and
the next and next, next, next, we discussed the
time of going. Autumn merged into an early
winter of peculiar cussedness, and the wife was
still wrapped up in that state of just plain stub
bornness which causes every reasonable man to
marvel more and more at the unreasonable, so-
called mind workings of woman the longer man
studies her " mental " processes. December was
waning, and still the wife was stubborn, and I
had very good reasons, which I explained to her
almost daily in detail, for not giving in to her
tantrums. " In the springtime, that 's when we 're going
6

KNOCK! — AND IT SHALL BE OPENED
to Washington," I was telling her for the thou
sandth time when we sat down, one day during
the Christmas holidays, for the regular breakfast
argument. "We're going when all the Vir
ginia hills are a misty green, and everything is
like what Doc Van Dyke wrote about the foun
tains leaping in Madison Square, and — "
" Oh, shut up, you and your Doc Van Dyke
leaping in Madison Square," broke in the wife,
taking her coffee into her dressing-room, her
stubbornness having at last goaded her to using
extreme language. "We're going to Washing
ton in — "
" The springtime ! " I shouted before she could
slam her door. I had thought the matter out
calmly and reasonably. I knew where I stood
on the subject, and my mind was made up to
stand there.
It was a bright, sunny day in the first week
in January when the last of our luggage had
been piled on top of the waiting taxicab, and we,
the wife and I, at last were headed toward the
New York end of a Washington-bound train.
Our intention was to take a train leaving late in
the forenoon, but we were delayed in getting
7

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
away from the flat because the record zero
weather, which in that particular week was grip
ping the Atlantic seaboard from the Carolinas
to Canada, had frozen the radiator or something
of the taxicab in front of our flat. Conse
quently we missed our train. It was just as
well, perhaps, inasmuch as the railroad company
had taken that particular Washington train off,
so we learned later, in order to help win the war.
Besides, the taxicab's differential, if that 's what
one calls it, also had got frost-bitten during an
extra last minute argument, which arose in our
elevator on our way down to the taxicab.
There would n't have been any argument if it
were not that I had remembered suddenly in the
elevator that Washington had gone dry on the
previous November 1. This thought came to me
as we were shooting downward past the fourth
floor; whereupon I suggested to the wife on the
instant that I hurry back to the buffet in our
dining-room with my little old black-leather
traveling-bag, open the top of the bag and the
bottom of the buffet, stock up quickly, and hurry
right down again and join the wife in the taxi-
cab. The whole process would have taken about
three, maybe four, minutes. It took the wife at
8

KNOCK! — AND IT SHALL BE OPENED
least a minute in the elevator, five minutes in
the apartment-house lobby, and at least three
minutes more outside in three degrees below
zero to ding-dong it into me that if I ran up to
our dining-room buffet again for one minute,
we 'd miss the train. And from the general
trend of the peroration which she delivered out
at the curb, the blue-nose bandit shivering at
the tiller of the taxicab doubtless got the notion
that my chief nourishment, .day and night, was
hard liquor, whereas my sole reason for going
back to the buffet was the sudden realization
that, with every bar and caf6 in Washington
closed by the Govemment and the keys thrown
away, there would be no place to turn to in case
the wife got a chill. Leave it to a woman to
twist a plea for reasonable medicinal precau
tions into the ravings of a dipsomaniac just to
win her battle. As a matter of record, it is only
fair to myself to say here that I can take a drink
or leave it alone whenever I want to, my choice
being merely to drink moderately each day.
" Oh, all right," I snapped flnally, letting her
have her own way for once, and dismissing the
matter of necessary stimulants for good and all.
" I '11 have time at the station, anyway, to dash
9

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
into the cafe there and grab off a flask, just sup
posing you get a chill or anything while we 're
away." Believe it or not, once the taxicab buccaneer
had thawed out his machinery sufficiently to get
going, the wife started right in, and kept it up
till we were at the ticket-window, on a line of
argument which had to do with the duty of every
citizen, especially in time of war, to obey the
law not only in spirit, but to the letter. Femi
nine mentality could not be made to grasp that
one small quart, say, could be carried to Wash
ington, and then, if we found out after we had
reached the capital that the law said we must
not even bring the hard stuff into town, I could
give the whole quart to the medical department
of some deserving hospital or home for the aged
or orphan asylum or something, in the District
of Columbia. No, " the law is the law ! " she
cried. " The law is the law ! The law is the
law ! " What kind of argument is that? By
way of relief I leaned wearily against the noise
of the clicking taximeter, and watched the dial
numbers jump upward with every jolt.
We missed the train, as I 've said, and we
should n't have been in time for it, anyway, had
10

KNOCK! — AND IT SHALL BE OPENED
we arrived on time, inasmuch as it had been
taken off the schedule two days before. The idea
in taking our train and a lot of others off, so it
was explained to us, was the patriotic one that
if a lot of passenger-trains, which never make
much money, anyway, were discontinued, the
company could haul just so much more Michigan
furniture to Brooklyn homes, and Persian rugs
from the North Philadelphia factories out to
the Middle-Western trade, in other words, could
expedite these and similar necessities and so
win the war in Europe. The change in train-
schedules, however, was not unwelcome; the de
lay round the station was reason enough for
me to suggest that we go up near the caf6 end of
the station and have some luncheon in the res
taurant. " No ! The law is the law ! The law is the
law ! " It was the wife off on her old singsong
again. " The Government has seen fit to rule
that Washington remain dry, and the law is the
law!" My idea of entering the station caf6 to get a
flask of stimulant, which we might flnd so nec
essary in case of illness (which, in an extremity,
might even save our very lives), really was a
11

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
minor reason for my suggestion that we stroll
toward the crowded, or cafe, end of the restau
rant. As I said before, and the wife knows it
well ; I can take a drink or leave it alone when
ever I want to. I do object to being placed in a
position where, supposing 1 want to leave it
alone, I could n't do so of my own volition.
But five minutes before our early afternoon
train finally did get away I had a thought. I
suggested to the wife that I run up to the little
flower-shop right next to the concourse caf6 and
get her some violets. It 's a theory of mine that
little attentions such as flowers and the like
should not end with courtship, if the wonder of
early love-days is to persist through wedded life.
And I was off toward the little fiower-shop be
fore the wife had scarcely begun her faint pro
tests, opening my little old traveling-bag as I
raced toward the fiower-shop next to the caf6.
Then, while the florist put the violet tinfoil and
other doodads around the posy corsage, I at
tended to some last purchases in the immediate
neighborhood, and charged back toward the
train-gate, resnapping the little old black travel
ing-bag on the way. A redcap from Senegambia,
who had been nursing our luggage up to the time
12

KNOCK! — AND IT SHALL BE OPENED
that I had cut the traveling-bag out of the rest
of our roundup of baggage when starting toward
the fiower-shop next to the caf6, again tried to
relieve me of my little old black traveling-bag as
I rejoined the wife. Amid the crush of other
patriots who were wedging their way toward the
train, all headed toward the capital to help save
the nation, too — amid the jam I drew the red
cap far enough to one side to whisper to him as
gently as possible that if he ever tried to get
that little old black traveling-bag out of my
hands again, even for a second, he would spend
the next three days clasping a lily in a darkened
room while being survived by a widow.
The train which the wife and I and the black
bag finally boarded was known as some kind of
" Express," the Congressional Zipper or the
Capital Catapult Express or some such federal
name. Once it had consisted almost entirely of
parlor-cars, but that was back in the days be
fore all Serbia and Belgium had got together
like a couple of big bullies and had pitched into
the kaiser until he was goaded into taking up
arms to defend a wife and seven children. Even
after America had succeeded in nagging Ger
many to the point where the fatherland had to
13

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
protect itself against our brutal and ruthless
reaching out for a port on the North Sea, there
were still many parlor-cars on our particular
train. But with the progress of the war, along
came freight and passenger congestion and other
organic troubles in the railroad's system, espe
cially in the freight-yard terminals around New
York. Wherefore the railroads took almost all
the parlor-cars off the trains and stored them
along whatever little strips of unoccupied track
age still remained in the terminal yards, thus re
lieving the yard congestion and helping to win
the war. It is said that one or two mighty rail
road men picked that whole plan right out of
their own heads.
I did n't complain about the lack of parlor-
cars, because I try to be reasonable and patri
otic and everything, and I spend most of my time
riding in the smoker day-coaches, anyway, even
when I have seat reservations. But once the
wife had compelled the parlor-car ticket person
to say for the eighth time that the few chairs
on the train had been sold out since some weeks
back in 1917, — here it was 1918 when he was
telling us this — the wife began an agonized
14

KNOCK! — AND IT SHALL BE OPENED
holler that must have lent a lot of aid and com
fort to the enemy.
" What proportion of the passengers going to
Washington on this train prefer parlor-car chairs
to day-coach seats? " asked the wife, fixing the
parlor-car man -with the same eye she levels at
our Amsterdam Avenue butcher while he 's
weighing the Sunday roast.
" Almost all. Madam," replied the ticket per
son, and some one not too far back in the wait
ing line to be beyond earshot asked the world
in general if women were n't the limit.
" And how much more track-room does a par
lor-car take up than a day -coach? " the wife de
manded. " None, Madam."
" Then why in time don't you run all par — "
Eudely I had to drag her away, protesting.
And we got a day-coach seat almost large enough
for her and our hand luggage before it was too
late to grab another seat in the smoking-car big
enough for me and my little old black bag.
This express train was an express because, so
we learned from the schedule, once it had pulled
out of New York around two o'clock in the after-
15

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
noon, it made no stops between New York and
Philadelphia except at Newark. We had been
told on high authority that the reason so many
trains had been taken off the line was the war
time necessity of keeping the road wide open be
tween New York and Washington, that stretch
being the most important bit of railroad track
age, at this particular time, in the world. And
so, with this in mind, the railroad men, by work
ing snappily all around the terminal, got our
train under way on the wide-open track in less
than half an hour after it was scheduled to leave.
By 3 :22 o'clock I was relieved to see, upon look
ing up from my paper, that we were well on our
way to the capital. I remember the exact time,
because just outside the smoker-window was a
station with a big clock, and a station sign read
ing " Elizabeth " ; and standing on the platform
was one of our own trainmen crying in tones of
finality, " Ex-press turain to Phildelfyahbaltee-
morenworshunton ! This turain does not stop
butween Nooark and Norrrrrthphildelfyah !
'Board! " I remembered vaguely having heard
the same person say the same thing about half an
hour earlier at Nooark, the trainman hating had
no way of knowing then, of course, that the en-
16

And I waa off toward the little flowershop before the wife had
scarcely begun her faint protests

KNOCK!— AND IT SHALL BE OPENED
gineer, owing to the war, was going to change
his mind and stop at Elizabeth.
Somebody many years earlier had forgotten to
make the train-shed at Philadelphia long enough
to hold a train of day-coaches of the length of our
particular string of cars. We had just passed
Trenton, where the express also was brought
to a stop long enough to take aboard two women
and a crate containing a Chow dog, when news
that the train was too big for the Philadelphia
train-shed began to permeate through our cars.
The conductor plainly was vexed. Finally he
stopped the train on the far side of the Delaware
Eiver and called the engineer out of his cab so
they could talk the matter over along the road
side. The afternoon was waning, and we were
fretting to get on ; so I suggested from the plat
form that the train, provided it kept to the pace
it had set for itself since 2 o'clock, could tempo
rarily be run by the fireman, thus permitting the
engineer and conductor to walk along beside it
while settling the knotty Philadelphia problem.
The best I got from the engineer for my sugges
tion was a request to mind my own darn busi
ness. "So you're running the railroads, too?" the
17

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
conductor asked me, I thought a bit sarcastically.
" Well, go to it, old top," he added ; " we might
as well make it unanimous."
I left them to wrestle with the problem with
out my help. They could n't master it unaided ;
wherefore they were compelled to decide finally
to run right by Philadelphia with a hearty laugh,
pausing only long enough out in West Philadel
phia to dump off whatever passengers for the cen
ter of the city might be aboard. Here was an
idea not altogether displeasing to the Philadel
phia passengers : they philosophically agreed that
by being permitted to quit the train out in West
Philadelphia those among them who had been
standing in the aisles since leaving New York,
which included most of them, could vary the
monotonous journey at least to the extent of get
ting a seat in a trolley-car all the way from the
West Philadelphia station to Broad street.
Thereafter they waited eagerly for their journey's
end, little realizing that while the engineer was
walking back along the train to hold his roadside
conference with the conductor he had noticed the
great throngs of khaki-clad lads in the coaches.
The sight of all the soldiers doubtless had con
vinced him that he was drawing a troop-train;
18

KNOCK!— AND IT SHALL BE OPENED
and as it is one of the newest articles of war —
as every soldier in the new army has learned dur
ing recent months — that all troop-trains must be
drawn just fast enough forward to keep the cars
from backing up, the afternoon had almost
perished before we came in sight of the first row
of two-ply brick houses in Philadelphia's farthest
Northeast. Dusk had begun to fall by the time we had ex
changed, at the West Philadelphia station, our
original load of Philadelphians for a new and
somewhat larger crop of Philadelphia folk head
ing from their own home town for Baltimore or
Washington, — mostly for Washington. By this
time I had become thoroughly smoked inside and
out, and I remembered the wife, who is rarely
far from my thoughts. Fearing that she was as
hungry as I was, I looked her up in her day-
coach, and suggested that we get a table in the
dining-car and hang on to it all the way into
Washington. She was keen for the idea, especially when it
came to her mind that we should cross the Mason
and Dixon Line a few miles farther on, and would
then, so she put it, " be in the sunny South, where
they fry chicken so deliciously." The dining-car
19

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
conductor agreed with the wife that we 'd still
be in the North until we had passed some place
named Iron Hill, wherever that is. Meanwhile,
by wedging a way into the aisle of the diner and
standing unostentatiously, but steadily, close to
the chair of the most nervous-looking man, and
his equally nervous wife, in the whole dining-car,
that particular couple couldn't help but hurry
through their meal. In a run of less than ten
miles flat we had secured their table and a menu.
Sure enough, chicken fried in " Southern
style" was listed on the dinner-card; but from
the waiter we learned that the dining-car manage
ment had sold the last of it up near Trenton to
a drummer in the shoe line from Brocton, Massa
chusetts. Also the car was " all sold out " in the
matter of roast beef and candied sweet potatoes
and corn fritters and corn muffins and steaks and
chops. The waiter assured us, on the other hand,
that the cold tongue was beautiful, also that there
was a sufficient quantity of potato salad left to
make a mess. The management, it seems, had
prepared so lavishly for luncheon that no time
had been left to think about dinner arrangements.
Also the unfortunate dining-car conductor had
had no way of finding out in advance that the
20

KNOCK!— AND IT SHALL BE OPENED
train was to be just as jammed with hungry pas
sengers on that day as it had been on preceding
days for several weeks, or that the train was go
ing to be as far behind time on that day as it
had been for days and weeks innumerable.
Nothing was left for us to do but to kill time —
and so hold our dining-car seats — by dawdling
over the cold tongue, potato salad, and a copy
of Baedeker that the wife had brought along to
bone up on the way down. The list of restau
rants on the first page of the Washington section
of the Baedeker was most appetizing.
" There 's a whole string of them, with the ad
dresses and everything! " the wife cried happily,
and she read aloud. " Listen : — ' Willard,
Shoreham, Ealeigh and other hotels on European
plan ; Capitol restaurants ; also Rathskeller, cor
ner Eighth and E Streets; Munich beer at Fritz
Eeuter's Rathskeller, Pennsylvania Avenue and
Second Street, much frequented by Germans;
Herman Steig — ' "
I interrupted to ask what year that particular
edition of Baedeker had been shot off the press.
" In 1909. But no matter, here are a lot of
others. And listen! It says here: 'CABS —
(Hacks and Hansoms). For 15 squares each
21

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
pers. 25c., each addit. [The wife is nothing if not
literal, always] 5 squares lOc, at night (12.30-5
A. M. ) 40 and 15c. ; per hour, 12 pers.' — no, I
guess Mr. Baedeker means one or two persons —
' per hour, 1 hyphen 2 pers., 75c.' Only 75 cents
fer two persons for a whole hour in a taxicab
Fancy that ! "
I could merely mumble in reply that there were
limits to my fancying powers. Even when I 'm
fully awake I 'm not over-imaginative, and now it
was getting past my usual bedtime; wherefore
the old bean was n't working even as freely as
usual along the imagination belt. I took no in
terest, but dozed off, even when our train began
to make a leisurely sort of sight-seeing trip
through Baltimore, stopping for a few minutes
at a time whenever we came abreast of any of the
more interesting industrial plants along the rail
way tracks.
With a start I was awakened by a sound like
nothing so much as the persistent patter of rain.
Yet the night was cloudless, cold, and clear. Our
train was reposing peacefully on a siding to per
mit the last section of the Night Liquor Local,
eastbound from Washington to Baltimore, to
pant impatiently by. Some one opened a ven-
22

KNOCK!— AND IT SHALL BE OPENED
tilator in the car, and as the dry roar of the
Baltimore-bound Liquor Local died away in the
night, the odd pattering noise of the " rain " grew
louder. Onward then our express jolted, and
with each foot of progress the " rain " patter
began to be threaded with a continuous tinkle of
tiny bells. We listened, puzzled, until the soft
patter had become a drum-fire of one long click
ing sound, now sharply punctuated with the dis
tinct tinkle of the tiny bells.
" I have it ! It 's typewriters. We 're in
Washington, Girlie, and the night shift is win
ning the war ! "
I had it. From a milky way of lighted office
windows came the " click-click-click bing !-click-
ety-ick-ick-ick • bing ¦ slam ¦ clinnnnng - etyclick-
ick- ick- ick- bing- clunnnnng- zowie !- bang." We
thrilled. We were there ! Close enough, anyway,
actually to hear this intellectual evidence of the
war at its worst. We thought it worth while, as
we inched our way near and nearer the outside
ends of the station platform, to kill time with
some simple arithmetic, if for no other reason
than to keep our record absolutely accurate. In
a measured space of time we counted 1,723,621,-
804,752,116 distinct clicks, thereby learning by a
23

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
bit of simple multiplication that in an average
hour even the night shift in Washington slams
the typewriter-keys 11,825,191,638,727,211,912,-
390,736,777,652,442,392,151 times to win the war.
The wife insists that 1 've got the hourly type
writing clicks all balled up in my Washington
notes with the war loan figures, and maybe she 's
right; but I feel sure that the 11,825,191,638,727,-
211,912,390,736,777,652,442,392,151 is the total of
clicks. As in Philadelphia our train was too long to
get all the way into Washington. Then when we
had walked along the tracks for several city
squares to the outside end of the platforms we
learned that the passengers who had seats in the
forward cars had corralled all the redcaps in
sight. Through the black railroad yard, happily,
came a man with a lantern, who explained to us
that the whole trouble was that Washington was
overcrowded. We thanked him.
" According to the cops," our kind informant
went on, " this town has jumped from 350,000 to
400,000. And as if that ain't bad enough, the
extra crowd includes Arthur Brisbane and Billy
Sunday, and they say Colonel Eoosevelt is threat
ening to come, too. It's something fierce ! "
24

KNOCK!— AND IT SHALL BE OPENED
" My good man," said the wife, after we had
thanked him for the additional information, " I
apologize for asking one of you proud Southern
ers to descend to manual labor, but could n't you
help us get our luggage from this spot closer into
town? "
The wife was right ; he was one of those proud
Southerners. Under cover of darkness I slipped
the catch loose on the little old black traveling-
bag and whispered to him, beyond earshot of the
wife, whether he had such a thing about him as a
corkscrew. He did n't have anything except a
corkscrew. Stifling his pride for the nonce, the
Southem gentleman not only grabbed up all the
wife's bags and boxes; he even tried to pry my
little old black traveling-bag away from my firm
grasp also.
Then somewhere on the fringe of the concourse
crowd we came upon a stray redcap. He was all
sewed up, he said, with engagements that would
keep him busy for half an hour. Standing just
beneath the redcap's visor I breathed ever so
gently, just once, and the redcap paused rigidly
in his flight, one foot suspended in mid-air, and
his eyes glued to the little black bag. He was
pointing like a bird dog. There was another
25

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
private conference on the side lines, during which
I learned that the redcap not only owned a cork
screw, but also one of these little folding-cups of
aluminum and a bad chill. As I took him behind
a pillar and gave him a tip that half filled the
folding-cup, — he had absolutely dismissed all his
previous engagements by now, — the fact flashed
upon me that right there in my own little black
bag I had a key to the city that would enable me
to go any place, enter everywhere, get anything !
A moment later the key failed to work when
we tried to get through the station crowd to meet
the open air. It seems that every train arriving
from any place, so the redcap explained, contains
at least one new member, often many, for each of
the war- work committees now in the making in
Washington. Envoys from all of the war-work
committees also are in waiting at the Union Sta
tion always to welcome the incoming committee
men ; wherefore we had to try to jimmy a passage
through envoys and old-time members of com
mittees welcoming new-comers to the Interde
partmental Advisory Committee of the Council
of National Defense, the Executive Committee of
the Committee Under the Advisory Committee,
the Committee on Eaw Materials, Minerals, and
26

KNOCK!— AND IT SHALL BE OPENED
Metals, the National Committee of Patriotic So
cieties' Committee to Prevent the Spread of Per
nicious Eumors, the Committee on Wire Com
munication of the Committee of Telegraphs and
Telephones, the Committee on Inland Water
Transportation of the Council of National De
fense, the Committee of Medical Service of For
eign Commissions, the Committee of the Aircraft
Production Board, the Automotive Transport
Committee, the Cooperative Committees of the
Chamber of Commerce of the United States, the
Committee of the Industrial Inventory Section,
the Friends of Irish Freedom Committee for Irish
Representation at the Peace Council of the Allied
Nations, the Committee on Storage Facilities,
the Executive Committee of the National Re
search Council, the Committee of the General
Medical Section Board and Medical Section of
the National Council, the American Committee
for Polish Independence, the Committee of the
National Council Section in Cooperation with
the States, the Committee on Transportation and
Communication, the Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics, the Alabama-Mississippi Emergency
Bureau, the Georgia-Florida Yellow Pine Emer
gency Bureau, the Copper Producers Committee,
27

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
the Executive Committee of the National Civil
Liberties Bureau, the Committee of the Ship
building Labor Adjustment Board, the Commit
tee of the Popular Government League, the Eail
road Executives Advisory Committees, the Com
mittee of the Southern Hardwood Emergency
Bureau, the National Committee of the Emer
gency Peace Federation, the Committee on Gas
and Electric Service, the Committee of the Wash
ington Business Service Bureau, the Committee
of the National Society for the Prevention of the
Importation of German-bred Police-dogs into the
United States, — and a few more. ' We were fortu
nate in arri-ving on a comparatively quiet night.
Some evenings the concourse is crowded.
They took every motor-car in sight. Nothing
was left to the wife and me except to stand on the
fringe of the committees, varying the monotony
as best we could by gazing in awe southward
toward the misty dome of the Capitol. There it
towered, white yet vague, above the vista of Dela
ware Avenue, the ghost of a great, bounding bal
loon wraith, tugging at its fastenings as the thou
sands of cubic feet of hot air therein urged it, the
father and mother of all gasbags, ever to fly to
the heavens. 28

KNOCK!— AND IT SHALL BE OPENED
We never did get a taxicab. In Washington
now there aren't any taxicabs. Close on the
heels of the flrst onrush of war patriots upon the
capital to save the nation had come taxicab
chauffeurs from Baltimore, Eichmond, Phila
delphia, Wilmington, Pittsburgh, everywhere,
their battered tin taxi-flivvers careening madly
through clouds of autumnal dust as they, too,
converged upon Washington to help win the war.
As each taxi-skipper crossed into the District he
first inquired his way toward the banks of the
Potomac, — known locally as the p'Tomk, — and
wrenched the taximeter off his car and fiung it far
out into the stream. Then, with the first cold
weather, ice-floes, which in former years had
floated onward calmly to the sea, began to hesi
tate. By the time the wife and I reached the
capital the oldest inhabitants were standing on
the banks of the p'Tomk at gaze, mystified, the
river clogged with ice-chunks as never before.
It was not until late in the winter that the city
authorities finally discovered that the ice-cakes
could not move because the entire channel was
filled up with taximeters from Pittsburgh and all
points east.
We corralled and roped some sort of car at last,
29

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
scarred a bit where the taximeter had been hast
ily jimmied off and thrown away ; decorated, like
all the other one-time taxicabs with a legend,
" Auto To Hire " ; manned by a direct descendant
of Captain Kidd; and finished off aft with a flap
ping piece of the torn lining of the car top, a sort
of black flag doubtless, being permitted by the
skipper of the cab to flutter there in lieu of a
Jolly Eoger. The wife had secured, by executing
a particularly prompt jump, the fifth seat inside
the four-seated taxicabin, and simultaneously I
had eased myself beside young Kidd outside on
the hurricane-deck. " To the Pelham," cried a
perfect stranger who was seated with the wife
inside. " To the Williams," I said simply, I in
my ignorance starting in away down the alphabet
at the W's, when, had I only known then, it would
have been perhaps as well and certainly no worse
had I started in first at the hotels beginning with
A, and systematically run through the list all the
way to the Zenoble Arms, whicli is in farthest
Georgetown. " Boss," whispered the chauffeur, blushing as
deeply as it is possible for a chauffeur to blush
and trying the while to hide his shame by pre
tending to search for a flivver pedal concealed at
30

KNOCK!— AND IT SHALL BE OPENED
the base of the luggage mountain piled to my hat-
brim — " Boss, if you know where the Pelham is,
and '11 show me how to take this gent there, I '11
take you and your missus to the Williams for only
one buck each. I seen the Williams this after
noon, and I can find it again ; but I ain't got the
lay of the rest of the town much yet because I
only got here with this old boat of mine from
Bristol, Pennsylvania, late last night."
All through that night we drove, and the final
fare was far from one buck. At the Williams,
the Pelham, and so on up the alphabet, 1 stood
before the room clerks just long enough to ask for
a room, listen a moment as the clerks broke out
into hearty laughs, and turned around and
walked right out to the waiting taxicab again.
From the Anacostia west and north we went all
the way up to the edge of the Georgetown timber-
line, and back and forward and back again.
Day broke. I awoke with a start. Inside the
taxicabin my wife slept, oblivious. At my elbow
the taximurderist was snoring steadily; and
steadily the car was running, around and around
and around Dupont Circle. It seems that the
chauffeur, finding that we both had succumbed
to weariness an hour before dawn, had artfully
31

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
set the steering-wheel so that the car would con
tinue to loop itself in slow rings around Admiral
Dupont until daylight should appear; and he had
fastened the steering-gear (after leaming by ex
periment just how far to the left it should be
twisted) by piling our luggage firmly around the
tiller. Then he had snuggled down into his
raccoon coat-collar and had turned in.
I awakened him.
" On one of these swings around the circle," I
suggested, " let 's take a chance and dart right
out into any of these streets and go to some other
part of town, what? We have much to do : we
have to check this baggage some place, put on the
breakfast nose-bag, and then start all over to
look for a room. Here 's a likely-looking avenue.
Shoot ! "
And in no time we had set ourselves back
twenty dollars, which the chauffeur concluded
was fair enough for having put us up for the
night, and in front of a great hotel 1 aroused the
wife. Out the hotel door at that moment came a
young ex-mayor of New York, who had just come
to Washington to get a majority commission as
an aviator. He was sleeping on a couch indoors.
he told us, at the foot of the bed of a friend, also
32

I took him behind a pillar and gave him a tip

KNOCK!— AND IT SHALL BE OPENED
from Manhattan, who had taken him in at a time
when nothing seemed left to the ex-mayor but a
park bench. The bedroom was a small one and
lacked a bath, the ex-mayor went on, but he
kindly insisted that there was still enough vacant
floor space upon which I might pile our luggage
temporarily, or until we had secured some sleep
ing-quarters. And after that the wife and I
had one of those simple old lovely Southern
breakfasts for |4.80, and we sat there and sipped
our coffee silently for a long, long time, thinking
thoughts of the day's campaign.

33

CHAPTEE II
EOOMS, RUM AND EUCTIONS
THEEE are only three ways of getting sleep
ing-quarters in the national capital when
one and one's wife start out on a trip to see the
war-whirl in Washington these days, especially
when one and the wife debark, unannounced,
round midnight from a train which, on the sol
emn promise of the compiler of the railway-
schedule, is due to reach the Union Station,
Washington, at the velvety, wistful, cocktail hour
of twilight. In the flrst place, one may spend
the flrst night snatching bits of sleep in the
meterless " taxicab " — rechristened an Auto-To-
Hire — between fruitless visits to all the hotels
there are, which was what the wife and I did;
secondly, one may start out bright and early
the next morning and begin by cruising back over
the hotel route again to find any sort of Wash
ington hotel room and bath, ending up, if one is
lucky, by finding them in Baltimore, which was
34

EOOMS, EUM AND EUCTIONS
what the wife did; and, finally, one may spend
the second night sleeping in a Washington bar
room, which was what I did.
It was the first time I had ever slept in a bar
room all night. Since the previous November 1,
or the date upon which Congress had spread a
big blue blotting-pad all over the District of
Columbia and had rubbed the district as good as
dry, the particular hotel bar-room in mind
had n't been a practical bar-room to the extent
of using it for alcoholic illuminating purposes.
Still, the clerk of the hotel, which is on a Four
teenth and K Street corner, continued to speak
of the room as a bar in a sentimental, fondly
reminiscent way, in tones one uses when speak
ing of " grandpa's room " long, long months
after the dear old gentleman has perished.
This clerk, like all Washington hotel clerks in
war-time, had laughed heartily when asked for
a room and bath; then a softer emotion seemed
to grip him, and he began to talk sentimentally
about " our bar." It was below-stairs, in the
basement, he said, and seven beds had been
placed therein only that very morning. For two
dollars, the clerk continued, I might sleep all
night in the bar. He added that I could take it
35

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
or leave it, and he contributed the additional in
formation that it would cost a great deal more
than two dollars to sleep all night in a bar-room
in any other town between New York and San
Francisco, which is doubtless true.
The wife, of course, could not sleep there.
Nevertheless, I decided to take an option on one
of the two-dollar bar beds, which the clerk said
I might do by paying something on account ; say,
two dollars on account. Then followed a weary
day of room-seeking, varied with real thrills
every time the flivver of a war contractor, headed
toward the Treasury to dig another scuttleful of
money out of the bins in the Treasury basement,
exploded past the eyelashes of another lineal
descendant of Captain Kidd who was navigating
our meterless "taxi." The hastening contract
ors hit us only twice that flrst day, and they were
good enough to scatter their shots so that one
contractor hit the wife's side of our Auto-To-
Hire, damaging her mud-guard, whereas the
other contractor slammed in on my side of our
car, thus avoiding all jealousy, and hit me back
of the Pension Office.
Too much was enough. Half a dozen squares
to the east of the Pension building loomed the
36

Laughed heartily wlicn asked for a room and bath

EOOMS, EUM AND EUCTIONS
Union Station. There we repaired forthwith,
and by telephone the wife got in touch with the
Baltimore Young Woman's Christian Associa
tion and a room. I had just time to grab off a
seat for her in an outgoing day-coach of one of
the late afternoon sections of the Washington-
Baltimore Liquor Local, which reaches Balti
more just before the dinner-hour, and is known,
I believe, to some of the district natives as the
Martini Flier, and by many more as the Bronx
Express, each according to taste. Anyway, this
particular aperitif section was ready to get under
way toward the dinner-hour; so the wife and I
parted regretfully, but cheered by the realiza
tion that temporarily, at least, we would have
comfortable sleeping-quarters; the wife in the
Baltimore Y. W. C. A. and I in the Washington
bar-room. Fair enough !
With no sleep so far on our little pleasure-
jaunt since leaving the old home in Manhattan
the day before save the occasional taxinaps on
the previous night's cruise of the city in search
of a room, I was keen for my bar-room bed the
minute the wife had departed on the Baltimore-
bound Liquor Local. But the uncertainty of
our future housing accommodations during our
37

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
prospective Washington visit caused me to spend
what was left of the day and evening searching
the widths and depths of Washington in a last
effort to flnd quarters. Betimes I broke the
monotony of my lone motor-ride by telephoning
to the houses of friends who had rented homes in
Washington in ante-bellum days, and were still
able to pay bellum rents. As I made my identity
known to said friends over the wire, the news
that I was in Washington was about as welcome
as a coal bill in father's Christmas mail. One
might have thought, to judge from the cordiality
of the voice without the smile at the other end
of the telephone line, that I was Billy Sunday
calling up a friend and accidentally getting in
touch with the Distillers' League.
One could n't, however, blame these Washing
ton friends : that thought, long ago struck off, to
the effect that " Pro-vidence provides us with our
relatives, but, thank Heaven! we can pick our
own friends," doesn't work out in Washington
as well as once it did. In times like these, for
instance, young Brother-in-law Horace, junior
at Yale if he had gone back the autumn after
the war declaration, decides to leave the dear old
col flat on its back in New Haven and go down
38

EOOMS, EUM AND EUCTIONS
to Washington and look around' for a govern
mental job, where he can grapple with some big
work that requires brains and untiring energy
and all that sort of thing. So in drops Horace,
accompanied by much luggage, and stays at
Brother-in-law Elmer's house, out Che-vy Chase
way, while looking for the best job in the army,
navy, or civil department which will enable him
to bring the kaiser to his knees, yelling for help,
in the shortest possible time. And Horace has
scarcely settled subacutely in the guest-room
when young Cousin Estelle, the celebrated
Philadelphia stenographer, comes to take the
room opposite the one Brother-in-law Horace has
commandeered, Estelle also in search of a job
where she can save the nation. When a brand-
new population about the size of a manufactur
ing city like South Bend drops in unexpectedly
upon a small-sized large town, already comfort
ably filled, such as Washington, there are bound
to be a few crates of relatives in the consignment.
Consequently the residential sections of the na
tional capital early in the war had become an
omnibus family reunion, wherein pop and mom
soon were all fed up with visitors.
" Oome up and see us one day while you 're
39

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
here," they said over the telephone to me, with all
the wai'mth of Charles Evans Hughes opening
his front door and finding a delegation of Cali
fornia voters on the front stoop. Now if they
had only asked me to come up even for one night
I might have given three rousing cheers. Not a
chance. Still, I hold no grudges ; they 're more
to be pitied than censured.
All that was left for me to do was to hang up
the receiver, climb into the old seagoing pirate
craft, Auto-To-Hire, and pull up the mud-hook
again. The later the hour, the more that bar
room bed invited ; but before giving up and turn
ing in I tacked around circles and squares and
in and out avenues and streets long enough to
learn that in a war-time Washington there are,
to wit: hall bedrooms (or if-you-can-get-'em hall
bedrooms) of an ante-bellum rental of ten dol
lars a month which suddenly have puffed up into
bellum if-you-can-get-'ems at forty and fifty dol
lars a month; that very swagger houses, which
recently were rented for ten thousand dollars a
year now bring twenty-five thousand dollars
yearly; that one lady, who had had an unfur
nished apartment for which she paid ninety dol
lars a month, had patriotically rented the rooms,
4,0

EOOMS, EUM AND EUCTIONS
furnished, during the flrst war winter at a rate
of only five hundred dollars a month, pocketing
three thousand dollars for six months as her slight
bit toward winning the war; that ante-bellum
fumished apartments in the hundred and fifty
dollars a month class bring very often three hun
dred and fifty dollars and more a month in
bellum days; that befo'-de-wah — ouh wah —
flats, unfurnished, at seventy-five dollars now
commonly are rented at two hundred and twenty-
flve and two hundred and fifty dollars furnished.
About the only government priority certificate
which a man of influence cannot get is a priority
certiflcate for a room and bath.
Just three persons came to notice on that flrst
day of cruising who seemed ecstatically happy
over the sudden swamping of their home town.
The three were young government clerks of
¦vision. With the flrst of the war-time onrush
the three had taken a running leap at the throat
of a renting agent, and had corralled three vacant
apartments, paying all of thirty-five dollars a
month for each of the flats. Then they had raced
into the nearest instalment house, and had
carted away to the three vacuous flats enough
bilious-looking yellow oak furniture to cause the
41

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
late William Morris to turn three times rapidly
in his grave. And as most government em
ployees round Washington seem to be able to
knock off work about noon each day and keep
absolutely out of the war until 2 :30 o'clock in
the afternoon, the three, within a luncheon
"hour," had so thoroughly rented their, in a
manner of speaking, furnished flats that there
after they have been splitting up almost flve hun
dred dollars rent profits monthly into three piles.
Now they stand in front of the Treasury daily
and laugh and laugh and laugh at it.
A late-arriving visitor can in a pinch, of course,
look up a Turkish bath; but what's the use?
There was the famous coal-baron magnate who
came to Washington in recent days to confer
with Fuel Administrator Garfield. When late
in the afternoon the conference was ended, the
coal magnate of millions decided to stroll toward
one of the large hotels and casually select a
pleasant room and bath, just like that! And
some time after midnight, still sleepily seeking
a room that was not, the magnate saw an electric
lighted " Turkish Bath " sign in G Street.
Down in the basement depths he came upon a
bath as full as three aces and a pair of kings.
42

EOOMS, EUM AND EUCTIONS
There was one barber-chair stUl vacant, how
ever; the other chairs in the tonsorial salon of
the baths had, hours earlier, been rented out for
sleeping-quarters. And the coal magnate of mil
lions, breathing a night prayer of tearful thank
fulness, peeled off his coat and collar and climbed
into the only vacant barber-chair berth and slept
whatever sleep of innocence still is permitted to
a coal-baron magnate. So far as can be learned,
Washington has n't yet begun to rent sleeping-
spaces on the bootblacks' -chairs, but the war is
young yet. Nor in dentists'-chairs. The chauf
feurs of the Auto-To-Hire cars, freshly arrived
from far scattered cities, to be in on the pickin's,
were sleeping nightly, however, in their one-time
taxicabs early in the war-days, even when the
taxibrigands could flnd nothing in the way of a
garage roof but the clear, cold skies of night.
When one stops to think that about the time
America jumped into the war-whirl there were,
all told, only about eighty-flve persons in the
offices of the Ordnance Department, including
everybody from the boss to the office boy, and
that before the following Christmas there were
in the same department in Washington about
thirty-flve hundred souls, which promises to be
43

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
closer to ten thousand by the time these lines
stagger into print, then one must see that this,
plus a like swelling of forces in innumerable
other governmental departments, early resulted
in a considerable hatful of new white folks
around town. A couple of Easter bonnet-boxes
would have housed the Ordnance Department,
even as late as two years after General Leonard
Wood had begun to say it was utterly impossible
for America to keep out of the war. Then
shortly after it began to dawn upon Washington
that General Wood not only was right, but could
produce the papers and prove it, more than a
dozen shed-like buildings, each a city square
long, had to be thrown together down round
Sixth and D streets, N. W., to house the ord
nance forces. The figures should n't be disturb
ing. Washington always was a glutton for
numerals of magnitude, and with the present
jump in population, and trifles such as the bil
lions voted every few minutes by Congress for
something or other urgently needed, figures are
flying in a war-time Washington which, at least
by comparison, make even the grand total of the
" Games Lost " column of the Washington base-
44

Thence behind a furnace. ... and so, ever onward

EOOMS, EUM AND EUCTIONS
ball team almost look positively paltry. By the
time I had finally headed toward my first, and
last, sleep in my semi-private bedroom and bar
in the little hotel in Fourteenth Street, it 's safe
to say that the only vacant thing to be found in
all Washington was the German embassy, which
is still respected as an embassy, although empty
— respected, one might say, a hodderned sight
more than when it was n't empty.
And so, when I had the taxitiller turned to
head me toward my bedroom bar or bar-room
bed, whatever the term is, the sum total of my
twenty-four-hour quest for a room was the exact
knowledge that the late Count von Bemstorff's
bed in the German embassy was vacant. Now,
as I 've intimated, my bedroom bar had ceased
functioning as a practical bar, having curled up
into a little dry wad and perished on the eve of
the previous November 1. When I told the
night clerk that a day clerk, in exchange for one
of those new two-dollar bills that fool one into
thinking it 's a hundred-dollar note, had given
me at least a promise that I might use one of the
seven beds in the bar, the night clerk first offered
his congratulations and then opened the hotel
45

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
safe and locked therein my watch and whatever
change the Auto-To-Hire bandit chief had let me
have back.
I had been leaning lightly against what I had
mistaken for a black-walnut newel-post upon
which, so 1 supposed, some one had thoughtlessly
hung an admiral's dress uniform for the night.
The clerk shook this entire upstanding arrange
ment into wakefulness while I still leaned
against it. Sure enough (or, "Yes, indeed," as
Washington would say it), it was a long, slim
half portion of smoked ham, garbed in the uni
form of a bell-boy. Him I followed warily down
a semi-dark stairway, thence behind a furnace,
or maybe it was in front of the furnace ; and so,
ever onward, past piles of baggage, crates of
empty milk bottles, a door pathetically labeled,
" Wine Eoom — No Admittance ! "
Finally, within a dark interior, the bell-hop,
now clearly planning to wake up, turned on a
lone electric bulb, which was just above the only
unoccupied bed in the bar-room. In addition to
the swaggerest-sized mirror I had ever slept in
front of, there were four little white iron beds
sticking out from one wall, with the bed I was
to sleep in and two more jutting into the room
46

EOOMS, EUM AND EUCTIONS
from the opposite wall. And from the scents
and sights and the all-penetrating tonal quality
of snore sounds generally, I decided that either
the room had been surreptitiously used as a bar
until a very recent moment, or that all six of
my unknown sleeping companions were a group
of little pals who had just got in on a homebound
excursion section — after an evening in the
Monument City — of the Washington-Baltimore-
Washington Night Liquor Local.
I had guessed right twice. The four in the
beds across the room were gone beyond recall;
I might have practised for an hour on my slip-
horn, which I do in our apartment-house in New
York nightly for at least an hour before turning
in, and they never would have come out of their
state of coma. But the two intellectuals on my
side of the room e-vidently were putting up a
better battle; in fact, one of them came to suffi
ciently to reach out for what remained of a quart
bottle beside his bed, once he had glimpsed a
stranger beginning to undress in his boudoir,
and hastily tucked the glassware under his pil
low. I got only a glimpse of the bottle, but I re
member being impressed with the fact that the
label of the bottle was decorated with either three
47

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
or flve stars,- and therefore probably was the
property of at least a general, perhaps a ranking
full admiral.
" They had n't ought ta done it ! "
The sudden words, their very pathos, coming
as they did from the dim corner occupied by the
third bed ,on my side of the room, caused me to
whirl round and peer sharply beyond the bed of
my full admiral neighbor. It was my neigh
bor's brother intellectual who was speaking, gaz
ing the while at a frained advertising lithograph
on the dim far wall, a picture representing the
late Christopher Columbus, all togged out in red
tights and things and quafflng a man's size
seidel of some sort of Columbus, Ohio, beer on
the sands of San Salvador. Long the man gazed
at the lithograph, and his head began to droop,
and gently he started to weep. He was crying,
he told us between sobs, because Christopher
Columbus, that greatest of Amurican admirals,
that dauntless genius among sea-captains, that
mighty discoverer who had given a world to the
world, had been sent back to Europe in chains.
"They hadn't ought ta done it, Billy," he
sobbed. " Billy, I leave it to you. As man to
man, am I right or am I wrong? "
48

And the coal magnate climbed into the only vacant barber-chair

EOOMS, EUM AND EUCTIONS
Then I knew I was in a bar-room. One may
be led, blindfolded, into a boiler factory, a
stamping-mill, a Broadway cabaret, or even a
Democratic convention, and perhaps be unable
to cry out while sightless the nature of the in
stitution; but let one be led, sightless, into a
gathering where one overhears the stock ques
tion, " I leave it to you. As man to man, am I
right or am I wrong? " then one is n't possibly or
probably in a bar-room. It is a bar-room. As
best we could we soothed him. His sobs over the
ill-treated Columbus grew fewer, and at last he
lay asleep, great tear-drops gemming his lashes
as he slept a sweet sleep as if of childhood,
tousled locks spreading in care-free fashion over
a tear-wet pillow just beneath another lithograph
entitled, " Learning Baby to Dance."
There 's the great trouble with these bone-dry
towns like Washington and Charleston and Ban
gor ; a lot of the folks take to drink.
For a long time I lay awake in the basement
darkness of the bedroom bar, thinking about the
new wonders of this war-born Washington. Too
long it had been merely the mecca of brides and
grooms and job-hunters. To the whole people,
for more than a century, it had been simply a
49

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
seat of government. And now in a day it had
become, now and forever, not a mere interesting
real-estate site upon which by chance had been
piled enough freestone and marble to house the
seat of government, but the capital of the whole
nation. And as I thought this wondrous new-born
capital over, I began to feel a bit sorry that I
had taken the wife with me to -view it. The
wife is so irreverent — and everything. She has
a pesky habit of knowing what she likes and
saying so out loud. Now I, like all the rest of
the hundred million except the wife, believe that
everybody running the war is a great statesman,
general, executive, even if he is n't, for that 's
patriotism; but the wife! Even the short
glimpse she had had that day, before starting for
Baltimore, of the. new Washington at war had
caused her to say things that made me blush for
her. Her caustic comments on the most trifling
things gave me deep distress. The weird and
unauthorized fur collars fastened to the sup
posed-to-be uniform overcoats of the newly
created officers of the very new army; glinting
spurs attached to the boots of right-off-the-shelf
lieutenants in the aviation service — she stormed
50

EOOMS, EUM AND EUCTIONS
because the very best that the foremost poster
draftsman of the whole country could turn out
were lithographs which in thought and composi
tion and general technic climbed to the sublime
intellectual heights of a peaches-and-creamy show
girl, garbed variously in the third-act clothes of
Columbia or in the uniform of a blue-jacket, who
seemed to be calling out coquettishly, above the
gun-throbs and the groans of the greatest of
world tragedies, "O Fellahs, Ain't You The
Mean Things! Enlist To-day, Dearie!"
Heavens! how I dreaded what she would say,
once we had penetrated further and had begun
to stumble into the tangles of red-tape, the petty
party politics and a general scheme of war pro
gram teeming with all that unity so noticeable
whenever a Kansas tornado hits a Saturday
night performance of the circus.
It 's impossible to convince the wife that the
truly patriotic should sit tight and say nothing
when, to take an example, the Government insists
upon saying, "Is this potential appointee the
best Democrat (or Eepublican, as the case may
be, and in former wars often was) to handle this
big war job?" instead of simply asking, "Is he
the best man to handle this big war job?"
51

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
Again and again I 've told the wife that the ap
pointment of a given Democrat, instead of a given
man, will at its worst merely result, say, in the
unnecessary deaths, perhaps, of a few thousand
young men in army camps or at the front. I
try to show her that if nobody tries to right
existing wrongs, the war may be prolonged, but
in the meantime everybody will enjoy the sub
lime ethical satisfaction of knowing that he and
all his compatriots have been intensely patri
otic. " Pooh ! " says the wife. " The trouble
with you and the rest of the patriots of Bro-
midia is that you confuse criticism of a stuffed
shirt in offlce with the offlce itself. If the people
of New York impeach a governor and kick him
out, how can such action be construed as even
remotely a reflection upon the great office of
Governor of New York? "
She 's hopeless. I don't go so far, of course, as
to carry these ideas of patriotic silence into my
wool-sponging business in lower Broadway;
none of my fellow-patriots does, because that 's
an entirely different matter, into which patriot
ism does n't enter. Or when I go to a ball-game
at the Polo Grounds in New York with the rest
of the fans on a Saturday afternoon. If I see
52

EOOMS, EUM AND EUCTIONS
the shortstop repeatedly come close to losing the
game by booting the ball all over the infleld, I
just climb right upon my hind legs back of third
base and start the yell, "Take him out! Kill
'im!" Doubtless, if the great managerial base-
ballist, Mr. John McGraw, should insist, day in
and day out, upon retaining a player who per
sistently impeded the pennant progress of my
beloved Giants by booting the ball from Satur
day to Monday to Saturday, I 'd be ready to head
a committee that would lock up Mr. McGraw
forever and then throw the key away. Such
extreme measures would undoubtedly bring
down upon my head accusations of a disgraceful
lack of loyalty toward the revered Giants, but
the measures would go a long way toward win
ning the pennant.
The wife not only agrees with me in such mat
ters as keeping office politics out of my wool-
sponging business, or in my outspoken criticism
around the house when we get a cook that can't
cook, in all these little ideas that have to do with
efficiency in our own small systems of domestic,
business, and social economics; but she also,
alas ! goes to the extreme of standing right up in
53

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
meeting and insisting that even the Govemment
of the United States, from the President down,
in war-time should cut out office politics, ineffi
ciency, red-tape. And I tell her, everybody we
know tells her (everybody, at least, among our
patriotic friends who still speaks to her) that
she 's no true American and ought to be ashamed
of herself.
The important matter of the price of prunes
in a Pennsylvania Avenue hotel restaurant,
where we breakfasted after our all-night Auto-
To-Hire search for a room, started the wife off
on one of her distressingly unpatriotic tantrums.
The hotel management, in a noble effort to help
win the war by conserving food, charged the wife
and me five cents a prune, five prunes in a saucer,
at twenty-five cents per prune order, or fifty
cents for our total of ten prunes. I was morti
fied to death the way she went on.
"Waiter," she said with cold finality, as if
the poor waiter were to blame, — "Waiter, I
have only this to say : You may report back to
your chief, with my compliments, that I said in
passing that even if Jess himself is the Willard
that owns this hotel, he couldn't CARRY fifty
cents' worth of prunes ! "
54

EOOMS, EUM AND EUCTIONS
Now as I lay awake in the darkness of my
bedroom bar and recalled all she had said at that
breakfast-table, I tried to excuse her on the
ground that a more or less sleepless night in the
good ship Auto-To-Hire had caused her to go to
irritating extremes. Whatever the cause, once
the wife had disposed of the prune incident, she
had rambled on, I remembered sleepily, with an
unpatriotic harangue that was most obnoxious.
The very head-lines on the Washington morning
papers, lying face-up beside our plates, had
seemed to goad her on. Why this? Why that?
I recalled that I had blushed crimson while she
raved. " Shucks ! Starting out to capture Berlin,
and the whole darn country can't dish up enough
unity of action in two weeks of effort to carry
one quart of coal three quarters of a mile across
the Hudson Eiver to our flat. Oh, hush your
self ! I could see the loaded coal -cars, I tell you,
on the Jersey side of the river from the windows
of pa's apartment on the drive. Lookit this
newspaper head-line here : ' Mrs. Macgilli-
cuddys-Eeeks, Sinn Fein Leader, Eeceived At
White House.' Sickening! This is a flne time
for the President to encourage German propa-
55

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
ganda by — o-o-o-o-oh, I — vpill — not — hush
— up ! This Sinn Fein person is violently pro-
German; says so in effect from platforms; so
are all her little group of co-workers. I 'd like
to see her and her crowd ring the door-bell down
at Oyster Bay, that 's all ! They have the impu
dence to stand up in halls paid for out of Ger
man funds, admission free, in New York, Mil
waukee, Chicago, everywhere, with a lot of Ger
mans fllling the front seats, and the whole crowd,
even while our boys are fighting Germany in
France, cheering wildly every time a speaker
tells of German victories. Less than a month
ago this same woman who was ' received at the
White House ' yesterday was the std,r speaker at
a pro-German meeting in Terrace Garden, back
home, where a country-woman of hers had girls
pass the hat through the aisles for ' silver bul
lets,' as she called the collection, to be fired
against our most powerful ally. They want our
biggest ally crushed, smashed by Germany,
which means that our American boys fighting
beside the Tommies would have to be smashed,
too; leaving us, with England gone, to fight it
out with Germany and her allies single-handed,
or be crushed and smashed ourselves."
56

ROOMS, EUM AND EUCTIONS
The wife was going on strenuously, even for
her. All that she said was true, for together we
had gone, out of curiosity, to their meetings.
Nevertheless, at the breakfast-table I had felt
that it was frightful taste to criticize the Presi
dent himself this way, for making a formal fuss
over the pro-German Sinn Fein leader. The
wife, being a mere woman, did n't stop to think
that the administration doubtless had had some
excellent reason for its semi-official recognition
of a dangerous enemy group which, backed by
Germany, constantly seeks to cripple our great
est ally. I had managed, I remember, to wedge
in a word to the effect that maybe the administra
tion, in its wisdom, had merely received the Sinn
Fein leader in order to proffer thereby a tiny bit
of flattery to a more or less imaginary vote,
which might help the party at the next congres
sional elections. The wife exploded.
" Votes ! Ugh again ! Flatter a crowd that
jumped up with cheers — you were there and
heard 'em, too — right in Carnegie Hall, weeks
after we had gone to war, at the mere mention
of German successes over England, and with a
Justice of the New York Supreme Court, born
in Middletown, New York, — greatest Irish
57

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
liberator ever born in Orange County, I call him,
— presiding on the stage as chairman and never
so much as reproving them. Let 'em work with
Germany and start their uprisings at home if
they think they 'd rather have a Prussian prince
ling as their lord lieutenant than a Britisher;
that 's their own affair. Whether they know it
or not, they 're striking the high spots in a Ger
man propaganda in America that was started
when Prince Henry of Prussia came right here
to plant a tree down at Mount Vernon, the prince
sticking round long enough to plant a whole lot
of other things also. The New York police had
to chase the whole caboodle of 'em off their soap
boxes in Herald Square months after we 'd gone
to war. Now their German backers will chuckle
out loud, and the whole troupe will start in with
new courage, on the strength of the fact that the
White House has made a fuss over their prima
donna. If I were President, I 'd tell the whole
impudent crew to skedaddle back to the country
they refuse to live in, but which evidently means
a whole lot more to them than America does —
that, or to stop kicking up a sentimental uproar
around here that doesn't concern us and only
impedes our own important war business.
58

EOOMS, EUM AND EUCTIONS
" ' Shortage In Motor-Trucks For Army.'
Lookit that head-line! And you know as well
as I do what happened in this very town of
Washington when our Cousin Ed came down
here months ago in the interest of the Mac Motor-
Truck, or whatever the name of the firm is he s
with now. Forgotten it? Well, you just listen.
Our Ed went to the general, or whatever you go
to here, and said his firm wanted to get the
merits of their truck before the army authorities.
And what did this general, or whoever the army
truck man was, tell him? That the army
could n't even consider Ed's truck. ' And why
not? ' our Ed asked, knowing that his truck ad
mittedly was one of the best on the market.
' Because your truck is n't listed with us, and
the department does n't permit flrms to bid on
truck contracts unless they 're on our list.'
'And how does a firm get its truck listed, Gen
eral? ' ' Why,' this General said to our Ed, ' you
have to take one of your stock trucks all the way
down to the testing-ground in Texas and run it
two thousand miles under certain specified con
ditions. Then if a test shows it 's up to the re
quirements, your truck will be listed.' ' Easy,
General,' our Ed says. ' My firm '11 have as
59

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
many stock trucks as the army wants shipped
right down to Texas for the try-out. We '11 run
'em to Texas under their own power, if you 'd
prefer.' ' But that would n't help any toward
getting your truck listed,' says the general to our
Ed. * And why not? ' our Ed asked. ' Because,'
answers the general, opening the door for our
Ed to pass out, — and listen to this answer,
dearie ; it 's epic, — ' Because — ' "
" Because," I interrupted, " regardless of
what Ed says, I happen to know there 's no
shortage of motor trucks, so why add Ed's to
the list? Eight now the army 's all fed up with
'em." But steadily she harangued, until I was
driven almost — but not quite — to the point of
calling her a pro-German carper. What was a
mere sufficiency of army trucks in compari
son to the sublime feeling (thus I thought
as I dozed off into the beginning of my bar-
bedroom slumbers) that had filled me, sit
ting there at the hotel breakfast-table, with the
realization that it is far more beautifully patri
otic to be without any trucks than to attempt, in
the bold way the wife has of doing, unpatrioti-
cally to goad the Govemment to the embarrass-
60

EOOMS, EUM AND EUCTIONS
ing position of buying trucks not needed. Of
course, if I positively had to have such things as
a lot of army trucks in my own business or close
up my wool-sponging plant ; and if this general,
whoever he was, while working for our firm
showed the door to anybody like the wife's
Cousin Ed at a time when a sudden business
rush had sent us hunting high and low for
trucks; and if one of our managers knew what
the general had done and did n't kick to the firm
about it, well, in a private case like that I
should n't do anything to the general and the
manager, once I had leamed the truth, but open
our office window and drop both of them eight
floors to the sidewalk of lower Broadway, pray
ing in the meantime that they 'd both land on
some vital anatomical spot and not on their
heads. Applying such principles to a war-
whirling Washington, however, is something else
again. Be loyal. I 'm with the crowd on that
slogan. And just before I tumbled all the way into
sleep I breathed a final prayer that we never
would find a room and bath in Washington.
Then, said I to myself, I can decently send the
wife back home, leaving me free to dig, patrioti-
61

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
cally and alone, through the cuticle of war-time
Washington, looking the whole works over in an
unprejudiced way without the distraction and
distress of the wife's daily harangue about things
as they are. I 'd willingly sleep every night in
the bar-room, sleep ten nights in a bar-room, if
thereby I 'd get a chance to look things over un
interruptedly. If the worst came to the worst, if it were pos
sible to get rooms in Washington for the -wife
and me, then (so I firmly resolved, just before I
lost consciousness) I 'd put in an entire day
showing the wife one phase of Washington life
of a dignity so sublime, so unselfishly patriotic,
and at the same time so efficient and intel
lectually high-minded and awe-inspiring, that
even she would come from the scene with eyes
alight and a voice resonantly emotional as she
spoke her acclaim. I 'd take her to see Congress !

62

CHAPTEE III
WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE, BUT NOT A
SINGLE DRINK
TAKE a fountain-pen, not any particular
kind of fountain-pen, but just one of these
ordinary first-class pens that leaks, — and thus
equipped, one will find that in any dry and un-
fermented city such as Washington is in war
times the pen can be adapted to new uses which
makes it one of the great life-saving engines of
modern war.
The possibilities of the fountain-pen in these
troublous days were demonstrated to me repeat
edly during a long forenoon and afternoon in
war-crowded Washington while I was awaiting
the return of the wife from Baltimore. I arose
after a night of more or less sleep in my pet
abandoned bar-room in the Fourteenth Street
hotel, and learned the astounding news that we
could have a room and bath in that same hotel
later in the day. An aged retired army offlcer,
63

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
it seems, who had lived in the hotel for years
and had tried to stick it out even after Wash
ington had gone dry, finally decided to give up
the fight against frightful odds. The last of his
own little private stock had begun to peter out,
and he was in his ninety-first year and rheu
matic, and therefore could not journey back and
forth on the Washington-Baltimore Liquor
Local to procure the stimulants so necessary to
one of his years, and he was afraid of the Wash
ington drinking water. In recent days his
thoughts had turned often and oftener to the old
homestead, which was in some place out on the
rolling prairies within sight and sound of the
quaint old church spires and distilleries of his
native Peoria; and so at last he had decided to
call an ambulance to the hotel door and start
back to Illinois to grow to an old age of full,
mellow beauty.
The room clerk had told me these details early,
so that I might have first grab at the vacant room.
While dressing I had decided that perhaps if a
Washington room clerk were approached in the
right way, he might be induced to accept a ten-
buck bill as a slight token of esteem. In a wide
range of travel over the country I never had un-
64

So I firmly resolved, before I lost consciousness

WATEE, WATEE EVEEYWHEEE
covered a hotel clerk who felt the need of a tip to
urge him on to take an interest in his art, but
perhaps, so I mused while dressing — perhaps
the phenomenal conditions of a war-time Wash
ington would cause a clerk to break the rule.
Said conditions, or something, would and did
not only in that hotel, but even back of the desks
of some of Washington's hostelries that have a
national reputation. There's a fact which
prospective visitors may well remember while
the big crush lasts.
Joyfully I set about the task of telephoning
the wife the glad news that the venerable army
offlcer was on his way to grow old beautifully
among his old home distilleries. A simple job
it seemed, this matter of merely entering a tele
phone-booth in the hotel lobby and asking to be
put through to the Baltimore Y. W. C. A. and
then telling the wife to hurry over to Washing
ton. So is raising the Titanic simple. For al
most half an hour I waited in the neighborhood
of the hotel telephone-booths, all of which hap
pened to be occupied, in the hope that at least one
of the patient folk trying to get a local number
would crack under the strain and quit. Then I
remembered that one man in Washington re-
65

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
cently had hung up a record by spending almost
three hours in a telephone-booth while trying to
get the more or less well-known War Depart
ment. I strolled down the street and prevailed
upon the hello girl in a Pennsylvania Avenue
hotel to begin the preliminaries of trying to get
the local exchange to call up Baltimore. And
then I sauntered forth to see the town, first
leaving my name and address and telephone num
ber with the hello girl in case anything ever
should come of the Baltimore call.
For, being temporarily a widower, here was a
splendid chance, perhaps the only one I should
have, to peer into the workings of the excise dry
laws in the new war capital of the world. And
so it was that I came upon the possibilities of
the fountain-pen, its moral and mental and phy
sical attributes as a war necessity.
He — the unconscious demonstrator of the
versatility of the fountain-pen — was in a man
ner of speaking standing against the worn, but
beautiful, mahogany of a bar-room celebrated
for generations in Washington song and story.
He was swaying gently, like a dew-gemmed lily
nodding impersonally in the glorious zephyrs of
a morning in the springtime. He was, in fact,
66

WATEE, WATEE EVEEYWHEEE

by way of being lightly stewed. A squat bottle
that decorated the mahogany in front of him
contained one of those non-alcoholic concoctions
which looks like beer, smells like beer, and tastes
like beer, but of which it has been truly said
that, once a thirsty soul has tucked even a
quart or two of it within him, it " lacks the au
thority." It is an amber mixture wearing a
collar of foam and called " Peevo " or some such
name. At a far end of what for generations had been
a practical bar now stood dreamily a weighty
bartender who seemed to have a great secret sor
row, his back to the myriad conglomeration of
ancient prints, dingy medals, and badges of his
toric interest that littered the wall, dusty relics
of great Washingtonians, all of a cobwebby dry
ness in keeping with the total absence of humid
ity that prevailed. His head was bowed, and
his mind was back, back, back amid the memories
of the great days that were. With the exception
of the swaying fountain-pen demonstrator, there
was no human impediment in a path leading
from the street door to any point along the bar,
whereas the last time I had been in that par
ticularly historic place I had been compelled to
67

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
bat my way through a transient population of
Washington which had come to town to see the
first inauguration of President Wilson. And on
that previous visit, so I now recalled, even after
I had kicked and punched a passage all the way
from the street curb indoors to the mahogany
and brass foot-rail, this same bartender had
utterly ignored my simple order, doubtless be
cause we had n't been properly introduced. But
now ! Well, now he all but kissed me ; and in a
manner that was pathos itself he arranged most
temptingly his little stock of Peevo and Wishee-
Washo and the rest of the fair, but false, bottled
goods which a theoretically dry Washington now
permits the totally dry bar-rooms to sell. On the
bar beside his pathetic little stock he placed bot
tles of catsup, Worcestershire sauce, paprika,
black pepper, horse-radish, rock salt, vinegar,
and the other ingredients which a desperate
Washington has been known to mix together of
late into a sort of non-explosive TNT and dump
into a glass of Wishee-Washo to give the bever
age some semblance of the old-time kick.
I had selected a bottle of the Wishee-Washo,
which wholly lacked authority, and was idly
sipping the amber inanity when the gentleman
68

WATEE, WATEE EVEEYWHEEE
of the fountain-pen or pens began to make a fuss
over me. Our friendship took a long leap for
ward as he confided to me that once upon a time,
back in the days of the Hudson-Fulton celebra
tion in New York, he had spent almost a whole
week in my home to-«Ti of Manhattan, during the
course of which, believe it or not, he had actually
been in the same street, Broadway, where my
wool-sponging business is located.
"Well, well, well, it's a small world, after
all ! " I cried in amazement. I had seized for
quotation upon the best line in Charles Hanson
Towne's " Ain't Nature Wonderful " because of
its appropriateness, intoning it with as much en
thusiasm as I might have done were the lines
my own instead of Mr. Towne's. It was quite
evident that the felicity of the line had impressed
my new friend, for in the midst of his pendulum
like swayings back and forth he watched his
chance until one of his sways brought his lips
close to my ear. And all this time, remember, I
was certain that the beverage he was quafflng was
non-alcoholic. Thereupon he buttonholed me
with the only hand he had left which was not
occupied with a tight grip on the bar, and he
whispered to me to come to the farthest end of
69

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
the bar, where the sadly ruminating barkeep'
could not hear him. He opened his coat then
cautiously. Jutting up row on row from every waistcoat
pocket were countless fountain-pens. From
cravat to belt-line he looked like a pipe-organ.
Each of the pens, I noticed, was fitted out with
one of those little nickel contrivances which,
when moved in one direction, sucks up enough.
ink immediately to fill the barrel of the pen, or,
when moved the other way, almost instantly
causes all the ink in the barrel to spurt back into
the ink-bottle.
" There 's no kick in this Peevo stuff, is there.
Friend? " he whispered. " Friend, I leave it to
you, as man to man, am I right or am I wrong?
Now gimme little 'tention. You pour out your
glass of Peevo or Wishee-Washo — so; then you
take out man's sized fountain-pen and work
metal thingamajig so, and out squirts whole pen-
ful of lovely pure alcohol into glass of Peevo.
What 's result. Friend? Eesult 's a glass of the
brew, real stuff, that 's got more kick in it than
all stuff Mr. Schlitz, Pabst, Lemp, 'n' Busch
could cook up working together. As man to
man, am I right or am I wrong? "
70

WATEE, WATEE EVEEYWHEEE
He was right. For a long time we talked
sadly of the mighty changes brought about by
the new order of things; of the vacuity of the
corner bar of the Ebbitt, where the army and
navy forever had been wont to fight all the bat
tles of all history across the mahogany, but now,
alas ! given over to rows of pop bottles aud alto
gether as festive and riotous as the octogenarian
reading-room of the Century Club in New York
on a rainy Tuesday moming; of the once delec
table Shoomaker's, down in " the avenue," where
pyramids of empty old wine-cases, kegs, barrels,
brave with printed legions of one-time contents,
but now a mass of lies, lies, lies, still line the
walls — kegs of air as useful as discarded pea
nut-husks, and as tempting, but persisting in lit
tering the floor of the ex-bar in a shameless dis
play that but adds insult to injury. A sorrow's
crown of sorrows, fond mem'ries bring to light,
— gone are the days, — banquet-hall deserted!
In the midst of life we are in drought.
Out of my reveries I was started by the voice
of my friend of the fountain-pens. He was
speaking in tones thick with emotion.
" Thazza las' penful ! " Carefully and
thoughtfully he was planning to turn himself a
71

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
shade more than ninety degrees and face the
street door a few feet away. Without the aid of
a rudder he made the distance, but as he reached
for the knob he paused and pressed his brow
against the door-post, and his frame began to
shake with sobs. "Injustice!" he apostro
phized. " Nuthin' so maddening 's injustice.
Betcha million dollars flrst thing I get home
she '11 say I been drinking ! " Then he crashed
out. It is well that a wise administration of district
excise matters has seen to it that (a) one must
have a prescription signed by a physician living
in Washington before any druggist in the capi
tal will so much as consider a request for a bit
of alcohol, and (b) that one cannot get the grain
alcohol even then, owing to the fact that the in
ternal revenue folk, for months following the
lowering of the Washington lid, held up the de
livery of alcohol to the druggists. I know these
things to be true, because once I had learned
from my friend of the fountain-pens how far
even one fountain-pen could go toward changing
the entire career of a glass of Wishee-Washo, I
rushed off to the nearest drug-shop and tried to
trap the druggist into selling me a gallon or so
72

WATEE, WATEE EVEEYWHEEE
of grain alcohol. I just wanted to trap one of
these smart Aleck druggist chaps, that 's all, and
then see to it that the scoundrel was punished to
the full extent of the law. But, so help me, from
one end of the town to the other I could n't find
a doggoned, dodgasted druggist who would sell
me enough to fill one pen, even though I pleaded
for almost an hour with one druggist who I
thought was a friend of mine, who was until he
refused to do me even so slight a favor as to sell
me a stingy little penful.
From time to time between visits to the drug-
shops I dropped in to ask the hotel hello girl oc
casionally whether or not the Washington tele
phone exchange persons had yet seen their way
clear to take up the matter of getting the wife
to come to a Baltimore end of the wire. On one
of these -visits, made shortly after the noon hour,
I received authoritative information that the
matter certainly would be taken up by the day
shift of operators during the afternoon, or by
the night shift at the latest. Thus reassured, I
wandered forth again to look into the drink evil
as influenced by the prohibition law. Just for
my own satisfaction I wanted to learn at flrst
hand whether the new excise law in Washington
73

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
was as effective, say, as I had found the same
sort of law to be when, one hot and thirst -pro
voking day the summer before, I had investigated
thoroughly the working of the dry law in the
prohibition town of Bangor, Maine. It was just
as effective.
I confess that I had arrived in Washington
fearful that my old friend and boon companion
of other days, the Eev. Billy Sunday, who had
come to the capital just ahead of me to save it,
would suffer the embarrassment of flnding Wash
ington so free of hard liquor that his work would
be half done before he could even start in to do it
himself. Knowing Bill as I do, I grieved to
think that he would have to suffer the humilia
tion of facing great throngs already largely re
formed. A flne situation that for Bill to find
himself in! And there were other things that
troubled me, too, deplorable results which it
seemed to me would inevitably fioat in the water
wake of the district's new prohibition measures.
There was the matter, for instance, of the sudden
compulsory lack of elbow exercise among the
offlcers of the Army and Navy Club and of the
mighty statesmen who gather in the one-time
wet-goods department of the Metropolitan Club.
74

WATEE, WATEE EVEEYWHEEE
The sudden surcease of cocktails, I feared, would
cause the serious muscular atrophy of arms right
and left, especially of good right arms now so
much needed to win the war. Also, how about
the social affairs that are a necessary part of a
national capital's interrelations with the or
dained representatives of the other peoples of
the' world? Had the new dry state of affairs
brought Washington social happenings to the
drab dreariness of the grape juice carousals
which once held sway every time William Jen
nings Bryan invited all the ambassadorial boys
and girls to gather round his merry board to
carry on and raise the deuce generally?
A short investigation showed that many of
my fears were groundless. For one thing, I was
relieved to find on page 59 of the admirable " Ee
port of Superintendent of Police," which Chief
of Po-lice Eaymond W. Pullman kindly let me
have, that whereas only thirty-four citizens had
fallen down-stairs (see statistics headed, "Casu
alties — Accidents " ) throughout the whole Dis
trict during the entire dry year of 1916, there
were forty-seven who tumbled down-stairs fol
lowing the enforcement of the general order of
1917 that a man's place to drink is in the home.
75

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
How faithfully and patriotically an outwardly
dry Washington is living up to the letter as well
as the spirit of an indoor and inwardly wet law
may be seen by glancing, on the same page of the
major's report, at the line of statistical figures
headed, " Accidents — Street Falls." Here one
learns that 117 Washingtonians fell flat on the
street and hurt themselves during the wet spell,
whereas, following the ruling that every one
must do one's falling down in one's home circle,
there were only 47 who hit the out-door street
pavements forcibly enough to need police help
after the al fresco dryness set in.
Major Pullman sees fit to point with pride to
the fact that although there were all of 1704
Districtites who had to be bundled into the
hurry-up police-wagon during the soggy months
of November and December of 1916, there were
only 507 drunk and dressed-up gentlemen
dragged before the local calif throughout the
corresponding dry months of 1917. But does the
major see fit to explain the patent fact that one
of his cops may not enter citizens' houses pro
miscuously to see what is happening round the
dining-room buffet? The major does not. Also
it would be interesting to hear some explanation
76

WATEE, WATEE EVEEYWHEEE
from Major Pullman regarding a final item on
his list of "Accidents." The major's statisti
cians say that during 1916, or before we went to
war, there were 55 Washingtonians " overcome
by gas," whereas the police report says that in
1917, regardless of the arrival of more crates of
orators in Washington than even the capital
ever dreamed existed, the escaping gas prostrated
only 45 innocent bystanders, supposing there are
any bystanders round Washington in these days
who are innocent. Before closing the major's
meaty report, it is worth noting that the order
which changed America's, the world's, greatest
indoor-outdoor sport entirely, so far as Wash
ington is concerned, into an indoor recreation,
also has had a pronounced effect upon the dusky
belt that stretches like a ribbon of black velvet
along the water-front wharves. For in the mat
ter of the major's list headed, " ASSAULTS —
In The Streets," one learns that in the last days
of the soggy season 207 swarthy gentlemen (see
subtitle, "Assaults with Eazors") settled 207 al
fresco arguments with the best beloved Afro-
American weapon, whereas only 124 street
lyceum debates were brought to a close with
razors during the corresponding months that
77

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
dryly wound up the silly old year of 1917.
A chief difficulty with the excise law which a
paternal Congress and commissioners wished
upon Washington is that the law itself is a bit
befuddled. About the only section in the statute
which is perfectly clear even to the police is the
fact that one can't buy a drink. Not even in
clubs can one get so much as a bottle of beer.
Not even, even, even, even, even in the National
Press Club ! In fact, the saddest sight to me of
the whole world war of sorrows presented itself
one evening in the Press Club a few months after
Washington had been blotted dry. It was
merely the solemnity of a tableau in which a
ruddy-faced young Congressman, his complexion
indicating that it was beginning to fade white
again in spots where a carefully acquired indoor
tan was bleaching off, sat listlessly splitting a
bottle of Peevo or Blabblo or some such kickless
concoction with a girthy newspaper correspond
ent throughout a terrifically thrilling game of
dominoes. What the two were doing out of
Baltimore so late I cannot explain. The con
gressman hailed from the arid regions of Maine,
the newspaper man from sun-parched South
Carolina; therefore even their own fond parents
78

WATEE, WATEE EVEEYWHEEE
back in their native States had no way of flxing
them up a little bottled snack of the old-time
home cheeriness and easing it along to their boys.
Already the representative and the reporter were
beginning to pick at the covers. Then, toward
nine o'clock at night, the congressman in wan
tones asked the correspondent if he wished the
thrill of a flnal game of dominoes. For a mo
ment the newspaper man mused dreamily, but
of a sudden his face lighted with the fires of in
spiration. " Sure ! " he cried, alertly seizing his hat and
coat and summoning an attendant to call an
Auto-To-Hire. " Let 's play it on the next train
to Baltimore." And they went out into the
night. The reassuring figures in Major Pullman's re
port conceming the steady increase in the num
ber of Washingtonians who fall down indoors
are undoubtedly accurate. In fact, the sta
tistics were backed up recently in a national pub
lication, published, I believe, in Chicago, and
called the Policeman's Monthly, in an article
that was beautifully set off with a " half-tone "
frontispiece entitled, "Washington Police Ser
geant Eesuscitating a Man Overcome by Water."
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THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
Looking at the subject from even its gloomiest
side, undoubtedly there was a sufficient amount
of encouragement in Major Pullman's lists of
figures to indicate that, after all, there was still
a lot of unregenerated raw material lying loose
round the capital, if it could only be coaxed from
the buffet into the outdoors, for Billy Sunday to
work upon. Besides, if everything else failed
Billy, always at hand was the wicked, shameless
young Uncle Joe Cannon, who still smokes two
cigars at a time, lighting them ends on ends,
who still says damn and everything, even for pub
lication, still does dance steps at all unholy
hours in the now solemn lounging-room of the
National Press Club, altogether dissipating his
youth in a manner so shocking that the regenera
tion of Uncle Joe Cannon alone would necessi
tate the building of a yellow-pine tabernacle
covering a city square and the concentrated ef
forts of Billy Sunday's entire repertory of ser
mons and all of Homer Eodeheaver's slip-horn
hymns combined. A hard citizen is Uncle Joe,
— he admits it, — but just so sure as there is a
dawning sun to light the homebound path of such
sun-dodging hawks of night, just so sure will the
wicked prodigality with which the Hon. Joe
80

WATEE, WATEE EVEEYWHEEE
Cannon wastes his best days get him in time, and
get him good.
Now, as to the matter of the atrophy of the
good right arms of the distinguished admirals,
generals, and statesmen, here again a kindly
pro-vidence that takes care of fools, drunken
men, and the United States of America has
stepped in with a substitute arm exercise. All
day, every day since war began, the right arms
of the generals, admirals, and colonels are work
ing overtime in the calisthenics of the military
salute. One cannot walk two consecutive feet
in a war-time Washington, through the streets,
in hotel lobbies, or the clubs, without stepping
upon salutable military folk, who range in rank
from the more or less soldierly looking Private
Jeb Hooper of Bird-In-Hand, Pennsylvania, all
the way up to the ecstatic -vision of a group of
ranking British artillery officers, seated in the
luncheon jam at the Shoreham and all dressed
up like a broken arm. That copy of Baedeker
from which the wife, on our trip from New York
to Washington, had dug up much accurate in
formation about a national capital of the vintage
of 1908 observes that the population of the Dis
trict "includes about 40,000 army and navy
81

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
officers." He 's a great little describer, is Bae
deker, but meticulous. Why, in Washington to
day there are seemingly fully that many brand-
new little second lieutenants running loose on
the range, all rigged out in the crinkly new uni
forms so recently off the shop shelves that an
irreverent Washington has descended to group
ing the new young army generically as " the
Sears-Eoebucks." And even if there was no oc
casion for this chronic saluting exercises among
aged army and navy elbows, the war-time prac
tice of always wearing one's uniform permits one
also to carry a pair of field-glasses these days —
at least to carry the case — without causing em
barrassing comment; and fleld-glass cases come
in half -pint, pint, quart, and even magnum sizes.
Then as to elbow exercises among the mighty
statesmen who, so I had foolishly feared, were
in danger of atrophy of the biceps when their pet
caf6 counters had ceased to function, all one has
to do in these days to dispel such idle fears is to
glance into the Senate or the House and see the
windmill arms swing wildly and always as the
great men daily take up their task of saving the
nation. One does not even have to go into the
Capitol to be reassured; all one has to do is to
82

WATEE, WATEE EVEEYWHEEE
stand out on a curbstone of Capitol Hill and
lean against the noise as the patriots bang their
oratorical fists on their desks while in the throes
of the great indoor sport of trying to bat in the
.350 class of the Patriotic League.
Finally, as regards the absence of liquid
tongue-looseners and the effect of the lack of
them upon social functions, it is only fair to state
that as a usual thing a social affair in Washing
ton is not nearly so dry as, to take a somewhat
extreme example for comparison, the Great
American Desert. Washington at war has suf
fered a tapering off on the social side, of course.
Great state dinners have been discontinued; the
" formal " dinner or dinner dance in the home
has almost quite perished, and there is a conse
quent weeping and wailing among gown-builders
and hair-wavers who are beginning to feel the
pangs of dwindling bank-account. The func
tions nowadays run largely to theater-parties, a
fashion for box-parties probably having been set
by a President who still makes a practice of go
ing to the theater at least onee or twice a week.
Nevertheless, the dining-rooms along Con
necticut and Massachusetts avenues have n't
been entirely scrapped, and since November 1,
83

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
1917, acceptances are much more easily obtained.
Not so many months ago a Washington host or
hostess often had difflculty in mobilizing enough
male eligibles between the social draft ages of
twenty and sixty to make a mess. The town was
fed up on the social side. But to-day let the
word go forth that a potential host has a well-
stocked cellar of liquid lightning, — and usually
he has, — and there will be a stampede of old
and young folk carrying lightning-rods and all
praying aloud to be struck. They may even ap
pear in business suits, a simplified war capital
for the first time in its history having recently
ruled that spiked-tailed coats and the rest of the
sartorial fiuffs and feathers are not absolutely
necessary. And so it still happens that a host or hostess
will stand right up and say, " Let 's give a
party ! " whereupon a new Washington that
came into being on that first black November
day begins to whisper delicately, " Do they serve
the hard stuff in that house? " And if the an
swer is, " You betcha they do," that particular
host is certain of a big mail filled with positive
replies to his E. S. V. P.'s, and on the night of
84

WATEE, WATEE EVEEYWHEEE
the great day the line forms in Connecticut Ave
nue, right resting on Massachusetts, and extends
far off into the dry night air.
All these and many more bits of sociological,
ethical, political, and scientific data of a like
international importance I came upon while
awaiting official word that the telephone ex
change had caught up with itself sufficiently to
consider the preliminaries of taking some action
on my telephone call to Baltimore. By mid-
afternoon, or within almost as few hours as it
takes to telephone the corner spaghetti dealer on
a government-owned line in Europe, I had begun
to get in touch telephonically with the wife, and
had broken to her the glad news about the vener
able retired army officer who had gone away to
grow old beautifully amid the rye-fields and
lovely old distilleries in and around his native
Peoria. Would it not be jolly — thus the wife over the
telephone from Baltimore — to engage a car and
motor over to Washington? It would not, I told
her. Nowadays, as I hastened to point out to
her, the Old Pike which connects Baltimore and
Washington is so cluttered up with broken bot-
85

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
ties that no rubber shoe or inner tube can live the
length of a city square upon that forty-odd mile
stretch of ground glass. That 's the road over
which John Wilkes Booth once fied to temporary
safety, but Booth used a horse. If he had tried
to skedaddle along it in an automobile while it
is in its present condition, John's life doubtless
would have lasted just twelve days less than it
did. It is an open question, when one adds up
the weekly cost of the high-priced inner tubes and
tires destroyed along the Old Pike in these days,
whether the patriots who dried up the capital
showed war-time wisdom in their honorable ef
forts to save the less costly inner tubing of hu
mans from becoming pickled. Maybe yes, maybe
no. Eubber is scarce, but one always can get
people. " Stick to the steam-cars, old dear," was my
advice to the wife over the telephone. Also I
was about to add something to the general effect
that if the wife did happen to decide to bring a
small flask of Baltimore's leading war export
with her in her hand-bag, she had better keep an
eye out for Major Pullman's souse sleuths as
the train crept into Washington. However, the
wife being the wife, I decided the advice would
86

WATEE, WATEE EVEEYWHEEE
be superfluous. Small chance ! Smallest chance
that the -wife would remember that the only thing
standing between us and a sudden chill or some
thing was my little, old, black traveling-bag.
That was now locked up and still partly intact in
the closet of our new room in the Fourteenth
Street hotel, but it was sadly dwindling; so many
persons settle in Washington in these days from
so many places that no visitor can walk two
squares without meeting a parched friend from
the old home town, especially if one gets there
with a little, old, black traveling-bag. It 's a
difficult thing to get farther than two squares,
three at the most, from one's hotel room. One is
always meeting up with somebody and being com
pelled to turn right round and bring the friend
back to the hotel room and telephone down to
the desk for a bit of cracked ice. Life is just one
friend after another.
But there wasn't a chance of help from the
wife. And, supposing the impossible, if she did
get in a little medicinal stock of liquid munitions
and stow it away in her hand-bag, I 'd bet the
whole British war loan against a high-wheel
bicycle that Major Pullman's sleuths, down at
the Union station, would grab that hand-bag
87

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
first. I know my own luck. The major does n't
raid the incoming railway-cars often for smug
gled life-saving liquids, even though the new law
at least is clear to the length of saying that no
one must bring or have shipped into the District
any of the bottled laughter of the peasant girls
of Peoria or Milwaukee unless a written or
printed notice on the outside of the hand-bag or
packing-case states the nature of the contents.
Throughout all the stretch of 1917 that was arid
the sleuths arrested and seized the hand luggage
of only fifty-eight incoming travelers from Bal
timore, and there was n't a woman in the
round-up. But if the wife had ever tried it —
well, I know my luck. Besides, one could n't ask
a lady, even one's own wife, ostentatiously to
label the fagade of her hand-bag with a legend
running, " This bag is full to the gUls." But
supposing I had dared to suggest such a thing,
and supposing the wife had even obeyed the label
law to the last letter, it 's a hundred to one shot
that some Washington sleuth would have got the
hand-bag before I did. I know my luck all right,
all right.
" Major," I asked the efficient young police
boss of Washington, " is n't it a bit ticklish to ar-
88

From every

waistcoat pocket were countless fountaiu pens

WATEE, WATEE EVEEYWHEEE
rest a new arrival and open his baggage on mere
suspicion? "
" Pooh ! " cried the major. " It 's a cinch to
tell if a man comes from Baltimore."
Just how the major's sleuths attempt to dam
the rapidly rising flood which steadily liquidates
into Washington via the cross-country electric
trolley-line known as the Washington, Baltimore
& Annapolis cannot here be clearly stated.
From all accounts the sleuths have to content
themselves merely with standing round and just
dam'ing it. Th"e directors of this W. B. & A.
line include Baltimorians who are among the na
tion's stanchest advocates of any prohibition
measures that are confined to Washington. Not
so long ago that same W. B. & A. trolley-line was
earning in the neighborhood of one half of one
per cent; and skating on ice so thin that some
of the unbloated bondholders were in a cold sweat
lest they break through. Their stock had been
a drag on the market round Baltimore and Cleve
land, sticking in the lower regions of six. Then
war and its horrors burst upon the stockholders.
Washington went dry. Baltimore stayed wet.
Washington began to take a new interest in Bal
timore. Dryly of a moming, any morning.
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THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
Washington began to jump aboard the W. B. &
A. cars, market-baskets and demijohns under
arm. Homeward that night sloshed Washington
agaia, still via the W. B. & A. The electric
line's earnings staggered from about one half of
one per cent, headlong to one, two, six, sixteen
per cent. Instead of sticking around six, the
stock burst from its cell with a terrible yell,
until, by the time the lid had been completely
nailed down upon Washington, the stock was ca
reening toward twenty. Two months later — in
January, 1918 — it was singing raucously and
hitting the high spots all the way up to 28%.
And at last accounts it was yelling with increas
ing abandon as it lurched onward and ever up
ward, and butting blue-dotted pink elephants off
the tracks so that more and more cars could whiz
by. Cars! All the world and its relatives
didn't have on sale new cars enough to handle
the business. Besides, to have new cars built
would cost about three times as much as the
same cars could have been turned out for just
before the world went mad. But so great was
the demand for more rolling stock on the cross
country electric line that a purchasing agent of
the W. B. & A. scouted high and low until flnally,
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WATEE, WATEE EVEEYWHEEE
hundreds of miles away in the yards of the Long
Island Eailroad Company, he stumbled upon
fifty-four old cars that the Long Island line had
as good as scrapped. At only a slight cost for
refitting them the old cars would be just the thing
for interurban traffic. Wherefore the W. B. &
A. snatched up the fifty-four cars at less than
|350 apiece, and before the ancient rolling stock
had been delivered to its new owners the W. B.
& A. bargain-sale purchasers could have sold fif
teen of the cars for |20,000, thus retaining thirty-
nine " new " cars which had cost them less than
nothing. And still there are fat-headed reform folk who
insist that booze is bad for business !
But despite the fast-flying electric-line whiz-
zers and the Eumhound Unlimited, the Cannon
High-Ball Express, the many sections of the
Liquor Local, and the rest of the steam, electric,
and gasolene traction between the dry belt and
the wet, the fact remains that it is a weighty
problem to flnd a spot in Washington where one
will be struck by even a casual flash of liquid
lightning. Even if one owns a flivver of the Tin
Lizzie model — and everybody in the capital
nowadays does — which one is n't afraid to sub-
91

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
mit to the terrors of the bottle-strewn old pike,
there 's the annoyance of having to buy a District
of Columbia automobile license as well as a
Maryland license number for Lizzie before one
can head eastward over the Pennsylvania Ave
nue bridge in the general direction of Baltimore
and booze, and both licenses are sold at a price
which would cause a New York or Chicago mo
torist deep, perhaps fatal, distress. The District
of Columbia permits a driver owning a license
issued by any State in the Union except Mary
land to come and go about the capital as he
pleases without taking out a district license.
The State of Maryland gives the right of way to
all licenses of the various States, but refuses to
admit a District car unless the skipper of the
car also sports a Maryland license even a flivver
length inside the State. This condition is the
outcome of an old, old battle between the Mary
land and the District of Columbia automobile
authorities, and now in these dryish days it is
breaking the brave, but thirst-ridden, souls and
hearts of some of nature's noblest gentlemen.
Then it must be remembered that although all
of Washington may visit Baltimore some of the
time, and some of Washington may hang round
92

WATEE, WATEE EVEEYWHEEE
Baltimore all the time, all of Washington cannot
be in Baltimore all the time. Washington's
bankers, brokers, teamsters, statesmen, and mo-
tormen have enough work to do in these days to
require their presence in their own bailiwick at
least a part of every week. Wherefore Major
Pullman points with pride to the fact that in the
two months of outdoor dry weather of 1917 there
was a decrease of seventy per cent, in squiffiness
and the general attendant cussedness which
causes ossified gentlemen to begin the day by
saying, " Good morning, Judge." Even Con
gressmen have to stay in Washington a bit and
do some congressing, and no more can they put
their feet on the brass rail in or around the Capi
tol. Until a day some years ago — it was during
the czardom of the Tom Eeed dynasty — a thirsty
statesman could submerge into the hard stuff
that liquidated the House restaurant and, right
under the Capitol roof, stay submerged and never
come up for air again until the end of the ses
sion if he so desired. And if he did seek the sur
face, he could immediately take a high dive again
to the depths of the alcohol floods in the restau
rant under the Senate section. But in the Eeed
regime the House closed its bar, knowing that
93

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
there was just as good stuff to be had, maybe
better, in the other restaurant on the Senate
side. And just for that the Senate, two or three
sessions later, locked up their bar and hid the
key, laughing heartily the while at the splendid
joke they were playing on the House. The next
instant the Senate, like the House, was wonder
ing whether or not the whole proceeding was such
an all-fired joke after all. Eight away the pa
triots began to spill out of both wings of the
Capitol, and they raced across the lawns and
over the asphalt and never stopped running until
they had fetched up at Engel's or at one of sev
eral hotel bars, or at all several eventually, in
the Capitol Hill neighborhood. But in time
Engel's was tom down, and with the fearsome
crash that landed upon Washington in the black
November of 1917 not even a congressman from
the State of Maine could find a place to get a
dram. And if a Maine man can't find a dram,
it 's because there ain't no such animal. I re
member one night while waiting between trains
in Bangor, just while waiting between trains, I
started out with a Bangor policeman as guide
to —
But one can't sit round a Washington hotel
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WATEE, WATEE EVEEYWHEEE
room in the gathering dusk of a late winter after
noon and recount the horrors of even one night
in bone-dry Bangor, can't even uncork the gen
eral outline of so sad and soggy a tale; not if
the raconteur ever expects to get down to the
Union Station in time to greet a wife arri-ving
on a section of the Baltimore- Washington Liquor
Local scheduled to reach Washington in time to
pick up its regular six o'clock eastbound load.

95

CHAPTEE IV
"all's riotous along the Potomac!"
"0|AY, young fellow," I said to myself as I hur-
w3 ried through the gathering gloom to meet
the wife, " do you know something? " " What? "
I asked myself, pausing for a moment in my
flight. " Just this," I replied. " You 're going
to get down to the Union Station just in time to
get smothered in the six o'clock rush hour on
the way back to the hotel. What do you know
about that, huh? " " Oh, ding ! " was all I could
say, and I hurried on.
And, sure enough, the wife came through the
Union Station gate and on to the concourse just
in time to miss the last Auto-To-Hire in line.
Wherefore nothing remained for us to do but to
try to work through a jam around the trolley-
tracks and await a chance to dynamite an open
ing into the heart of the mass play of strap
hangers. Every super-crowded car that came along the
96

ALONG THE POTOMAC
trolley-tracks bit off a piece of the large, round
edge of the particular mob of which we, the wife
and I, were a part. There were other mobs scat
tered along the pavement in front of the station,
each of the separate crowds hopeful, like our own
private mob, that along would come a car that
did n't bulge outward. And as in time we moved
an inch to the step from the sidewalk to a point
close to the car-tracks I saw that girthy men on
the fore line of standees were losing coat-buttons
every time a slow-mo-ving trolley-car got under
way and slid its length against the front eleva
tions of our vanguard. I feared for what might
happen when the wife, who was hopelessly
wedged in front of me, made that front line.
" Dearie," I cried in sudden alarm, " you
did n't by any chance bring anything from Bal
timore that — you haven't anything in your
hand-bag that 's breakable? If you have, no
glassware ever will withstand the — "
" No ; there 's no glassware from Baltimore in
my bag," snapped the wife directly into the ear
of the man wedged in front of her, the closeness
of the jam making it impossible for her to tum
her head and address me personally. " I 'd look
pretty, would n't I, going on such a disreputable
97

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
shopping expedition in Baltimore! Besides, as
I've told you before, the law is the law. We
must obey it."
And so we stood there in silence a long, long
time after that. It didn't make happier my
musings when I recalled that at least we might
have escaped the terrors of the rush-hour jam if
the local telephone company had only taken a
few less hours to put my telephone call through
to Baltimore. In time we worked at least close
enough to the passing trolley-cars to enable me
to take a bit of the curse off the delay by reading
the frieze of advertisements that stretched along
the inside of the cars just above the heads of the
strap-hangers. But even the car advertisements
would n't let me forget the Washington telephone
service, for on one of the cards in a passing car
was a printed appeal, phrased patriotically,
which said in effect that now was the time for all
good girls to come to the aid of the telephone
company to do their bit by accepting jobs as
hello-ladies. Maybe the telephone company had a lurking
notion that if such an appeal were plastered all
over the street-cars the public would stop grum
bling and in patriotic fashion con-vince itself that
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ALONG THE POTOMAC
the whol^ frazzled condition of the service was
due to war-time labor shortage. Maybe the com
pany had that thought in mind; I don't know.
But I did reflect, as we waited our chance to
board a car, that if ever a corporation ap
proached a big business increase with a sour
equipment with which to try to handle the new
rush, it was that same local exchange. Like our
army and na-py departments, the, Washington
telephone persons for years had mooched and
browsed and stumbled along with an equipment
that was the last word in unpreparedness, while
cuss words arose from the Anacostia to George
town and back again as subscribers and casual
users of the telephone called for numbers that
rarely came.
Then when the present big noise did begin to
detonate among a lot of official and civil nappers,
the telephone company, quite as much as the
newly aroused governmental departments, ran
up against a shiftlessness among minor em
ployees that is the outgrowth of a condition
which has been peculiar to Washington since the
city was young. For even the mightiest mili
tary-political-social-commercial upheaval of his
tory has not yet been able to down altogether
99

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
one phase of salaried service -which for genera
tions had been carefully fostered in the City of
Salaries. Throughout so many years that they
are uncountable Washington has been looked
upon by its largest section of salaried folk, the
government clerks, as a personal sort of very
rich and easy-going old Uncle Samuel, to whom
the governmental employee bears the relation of
an impecunious niece or nephew that Unk should
support " until something better turns up."
There you have it, that until-something-better-
turns-up attitude of rich old Unk's poor rela
tives, who look to him for a fair income, or even
fairer than that, and only enough work to satisfy
the conscience. There was a period when the
office hours of a clerk in the Pension Offlce, in
the War, State, Patent, any department, ran
from the time the youthful patriot decided to get
to his desk round mid-forenoon until he allowed
that he 'd put on his hat and go home, which was
usually a bit after mid-afternoon. Then into the
capital one day came a middle-aged ex-sheriff
from Buffalo named G. Cleveland, and one of the
first things ex-Sheriff Cleveland did, after select
ing a White House room with southem exposure,
was to start right in to hurt the tenderly nur-
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ALONG THE POTOMAC
tured feelings of a large part of the Government's
official younger set by suggesting that the only
way to be on the job was to be on the job. The
former Sheriff of Buffalo did n't quite go to the
extreme of instituting iu Washington the na
tional pastime of punching the time-clock — a
pastime common enough in all the nation's busi
ness houses except in the country's own main
works at Washington; but Mr. Cleveland did
crack the whip with sufflcient force to cause an
instant increase in the sale of ninety-eight-cent
alarm-clocks all over the boarding-house belt of
the capital.
Brute! Simon Legree! The wails of injured
innocence almost drowned out the grand munici
pal buzzing of the alarm-clocks. That growling
and grumbling of resentment against the curse
of being compelled to do at least some labor in
return for one's salary continued on through sub
sequent years of peace, and right on up to the
first war summer, and beyond. One might say
that the plaintive protest against actual work
never really reached its high C untU the flrst
summer of the country's participation in a world
war. Never before in a century of summers had
Washington been compelled to sweat its brow
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THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
during the hot months until the riotous summer
of 1917 ricochetted into town. Not only the
much abused government " workers," but the ele
vator-boys, waiters, the shop clerks in F Street,
even the barkeeps who looked gloomily toward
the fast-approaching surcease of the souse, all
Washington's permanent force of kid-glove hired
hands bitterly resented the indignity of suddenly
being called upon to do almost as much work in
a day as any of the business folk in lower Man
hattan does in an average morning. And just
as the Down-trod and Oppressed had begun, to
ward the end of the hot months, to grow some
what accustomed to working even in summer,
they began to realize that their labors were piling
up in direqt ratio to the progress and duration
of the World War ; and so they started in upon
an autumn and winter of discontent. They had
just about decided to rouse themselves almost
into wide awakeness — we are considering the
chronic Washington employee now, not the in
flux of men and women who came to town to do
war work — and to stay almost awake, when into
their hands fell more and more and more, the
downpour increasing daily, darn old war busi
ness to take care of. And with the increase in
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ALONG THE POTOMAC
work came also discontent among lady and gen
tlemen laborers in the governmental and com
mercial vineyards who had been fairly happy in
their jobs until they heard exaggerated tales of
the larger financial opportunities in the offices of
mushroom growth which war conditions had
brought about.
Honest, Maggie, I hope t' die if this old
switch-board ain't drivin' me to a livin' corpse.
Cripes, but this job sure is gettin' somethin'
flerce! And here we set, Maggie, lettiu' 'em
treat us like we was dirt under their feet instead
of — Yes, sir. I've told you twicet already,
sir, I kinnot get you that numbah, being as the
line is busy. Listen, Maggie! Ain't we the
dumb things lettin' 'em treat us like we was dirt
under their feet instead of pickin' off easy jobs
like Bertha Higgins and Tillie Hooper and all
them girls, over in the Eed Cross and war places
like that, for twicet as much as they got here.
Listen, Maggie. Last Sunday eve I seen Bertha
with a swell fellah at Poll's, and did n't she have
on a new fox set that was simply — Don't you
dast swear over the -wire at me, sir! Ain't I
givin' all my whole day tryin' to get your pahty?
I don't care who you are; that don't give a
103

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
gelmun absolutely no right to forget he 's a gel-
mun and try to get neAV with me. Listen, Mag
gie. He says, " I '11 reeport you to the mang-
munt and have you discharged ! " Ain't that a
riot? I should be annoyed with worryin' about
this old job! And listen. All Bertha Higgins
did was to go to a night course in the business
collidge every eve for a few weeks after flnishin'
up her work here every day. Of course her
workin' in the business collidge so late was the
reason she was always asleep at the switch here,
like all them other girls that 's goin' t' night
collidge ; but look how it 's bettered them in life !
And listen. Your pahty does not answah, sir.
Listen, Maggie. That 's what I 'm goin' t' do.
I 'm goin' to the business collidge just long
enough t' grab off one of these regular swell jobs
lyin' loose all over this burg since the war
started. I kinnot stand this work no longer and
live, Maggie. And so I 'm goin' t' study for a
stenographer or somethin', and just stall along
daytimes on this telephone job, like Bertha Hig
gins and all them girls, until they 've learned me
enough at the collidge to land somethin' big.
And there you are. Back in the dear dead
days of peace silly old Unk's nephews meandered
104

ALONG THE POTOMAC
along as government clerks during a few sunlit
hours each day, or just long enough to corral a
pay-envelop of sufficient fatness to pay the
boarding-house and clothes bills, and at night
they studied medicine or law in oue or another
of the night courses in the professional schools
of the local colleges. For generations they did
this, often studying until far into the night ; and
the next day they stalled on their jobs, accom
plishing nothing, slept at the governmental
switch, from exhaustion. A laudable ambition
theirs, this idea of working up to the ranks of the
professional men; but the program played hob
with efficiency.
Now that the Berthas and Tillies and all the
rest are coming back to tell their old-time asso
ciates glorious tales of war jobs, of double or
triple increase over their former wages, vast
crowds of the hello-ladies and their sister-work
ers in other lines are following in the selfsame
paths blazed long ago by their brothers in the
government clerical service. And add to the in
completeness of telephone equipment, with not
even enough sleepy, discontented hello-ladies to
man the ancient switch-boards, a sudden and
mighty flood of unexpected business that fllls
105

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
almost every telephone-booth in town during the
crowded hours of the day, and the result is chaos.
Many an impatient military man or civilian has
been compelled to hang up the receiver in dis
gust and deliver personally or by messenger —
if he be fortunate enough to get a messenger —
the information which he had hoped to give by
telephone. A government exchange which takes care of
department calls shows more efficiency, but even
here there is delay at times. And delay on the
government lines in days like these is cause for
concern far graver than the mere commercial
troubles of the district. For instance, in choos
ing a site for the War College some transcenden
tal genius had the brilliant idea that it should
be located about three miles southeast of the
War Department, — oh, on simply the cutest
water-front spot ever ! — on the same principle
that causes the field captain of a college foot-ball
team always to go off by himself throughout the
big game of the season to another foot-ball field
about three miles away, with the hope of finding
a telephone line over which he can give his sig
nals to the rest of his far-away team. Four of
the six committees into which the army's gen-
106

ALONG THE POTOMAC
eral staff—" the Brain of the Army "—is divided
are located in the War College. But the desk
of the captain of the whole team, the Chief of
Staff (who popularly is pictured in the public
mind as seated at a big desk while surrounded
by his staff, all working together on mighty war
problems), is three miles away in the War De
partment. And so a chief of staff has been
known to work steadily at a problem along cer
tain lines while his staff, unacquainted with the
chief's way of progressing, simultaneously are
tackling the knotty question along diametrically
different lines. The Chief and his Staff, it is
true, are bound together by three miles of tele
phone wire, but to be connected by telephone,
especially in days of war-whirling, is likely as
not to be separated by telephone.
" The people must economize in telephone mes
sages," publicly cries the telephone officials of
the capital. They do ; they have to. " Don't do
this, and don't do that," continue the harassed
telephone men, adding a list of economically de-
-vised " Don'ts " which fill half a column of local
newspapers. " Don'ts " that are not even hinted
at in the public proclamations might have been
added : " Don't, for heaven's sake ! call for ' In-
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THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
formation ' in the hope of having a wrong num
ber corrected. What 's the use, men? So many
numbers have been changed so often lately that
* Information ' has been sent to the booby-hatch
for psychopathic observation and a complete
mental rest." " Don't call a number and expect
to get it." " Don't add to the general delay by
following the dear old Southern fashion long in
vogue in Washington — the fashion which pre
scribed that one should drawl, ' Aoh, is this Cen
tral? Good mawnin', miss. Ah trust you-all
aw enjoyin' good health this mawnin'. Now if
Ah ain't troublin' you-all too much, may Ah ask
you-all, miss, to prepah to do me a favah in yo'
official capacity? Get ready, miss. Ah have a
numbah all ready fo' you-all.' "
Nope ! Speed ! more speed ! It is the estimate
of an official in the municipal government that
Washington " as a general thing is about three
times as active as it was before the war, and is
showing instances where business men not en
gaged in munitions enterprises or other acti-vities
directly connected with the war are doing four
times as much business as formerly." When it
comes to the telephone, that official is sadly
meticulous. The capital has become so busy, in
108

ALONG THE POTOMAC
fact, that the city's "Northwest," which from
days untold believed itself to be the whole city,
has been crowded to the point of making the
astounding discovery that there really is a
" Northeast," not to mention a " Southeast " and
even a " Southwest " in which white folks actu
ally live, expansive stretches long thought to be
as mythical as Crocker Land.
And the feminine shopper, who cries " darn
it " and other ladylike oaths when she finds that
the telephone service cannot get her in touch
with a given bargain sale until long after the
last of the marked-down shirtwaists or more inti
mate garments have been sold, often is tempted
to use real cuss words in these days when she
sets out to do her shopping at first hand. Early
in 1918 the department stores were driven to
calling loudly upon the district government pow
ers to help them out of the tangle in which the
big rush had tied the shopkeepers. And the Dis
trict Defense Council responded to the appeal by
establishing a set of rules which included, among
other things, orders that there must be only one
delivery of goods over a given route each day,
that the special delivery of parcels must cease,
that merchandise to be returned must be brought
109

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
back to the shops within three days, that a de
posit must be made on all C. O. D. purchases,
this last rule being designed to put a stop to the
feminine habit of ordering C. O. D. articles by
telephone. As the telephone service, so in a way is the
telegraph. On the day the wife and I started
out from New York to try to get to the capital
I sent a telegram from Manhattan to a Wash
ington address in the late forenoon. It was de
livered in Washington twenty-two hours and a
half later, and the address to which it was sent
is only three squares from the main office of the
company in Washington. When the telegram
finally caught up with me in Washington I took
it to a gentleman chewing a pen in an office of
the telegraph company and bleated loudly in
protest. " I can't understand it," he said with a sigh.
" Our delivery is now practically normal."
" Oh, you call twenty-two hours normal, eh ! "
I cried instantly, and I '11 bet that crushed him
all right, all right. What?
When it comes to the gentle art of real-estate
dealings, never has any class of business men
been driven to perplexity so great as these same
110

ALONG THE POTOMAC
Washington real-estate agents when it comes to
solving the great question as to whether, in the
matter of a definition of war, Sherman was right
or wrong. The real-estaters, once the whole land
began to try to live in Washington, could have
abandoned themselves to a perfect orgy of rent
ing if it were not for the sad fact that they soon
found themselves with nothing left to rent.
They still have some houses to sell, and all the
owners ask for them is your bank-book as a flrst
payment and then whatever gold-tooth crowns,
gold fillings, and any artificial jaws or knee-caps
of silver which your family surgeons, dental and
plain, may have stowed away in your anatomy
from time to time. Then, too, a paternal Gov
ernment has, since the war-time overcrowding
began, invented an unexpected vexation for the
real-estate brethren: just when the agent has
rented the last vacant apartment or offlce build
ing and settles down to rake off his commission
from the rents, along comes the Government with
a dispossession notice. " Pack up and git,
folks," commands the Government. " We 've de
cided to commandeer this entire building and
turn it into offlces and laboratories to an advis
ory committee of the Signal Corps that is cross-
Ill

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
ing parrots with carrier-pigeons so that the War
Department can keep in touch with the War Col
lege at all times without depending on the tele
phone. It's a little idea of the War Depart
ment's. Come, come, come, pack up ! This way
out ! " And bingo ! the real-estate man, so far
as that office building or apartment house is con
cerned, again is out of a job.
" Put up more buildings," say you. But the
builders can't get materials, what with priority
certiflcates of the gilt-edged Grade A making it
compulsory for the railroads running into Wash
ington to give flrst attention to delivering build
ing stuffs for the erection of far-spreading shacks
that the Government sticks up over night to
house its civil and military increase of family.
Furthermore, who 's going to try to get building
materials for new ediflces when the cost of the
material is about forty per cent, higher than
normal prices?
When a new hotel of flossy pretension was
being rushed to completion a stone's throw west
of the Willard, the owners and contractors were
on the verge of being bogged in the general
swamping of business conditions. Happily they
suddenly remembered the all pervading priority
112

'Sir, I kinnot yet you that numbah, being as the li:
busy"

ALONG THE POTOMAC
certiflcates issued by the priority committee of
the Council of National Defense. Now, here was
a necessary ediflce which ought to be flnished as
soon as possible, if for no other reason than that
it stands as close to the Treasury as it is possible
for a visiting munition-contractor to get, so close
that a contractor fortunate enough to get a room
and bath in that hotel can doze off with the sweet
realization that all the nation's money bins are
almost directly beneath the footboard of his bed.
And inasmuch as almost everything in the manu
facturing line is now listed, has got itself listed,
in the Class A of priorities, — from eighty to
eighty-flve per cent. ! — the contractors and own
ers did n't see why materials for a swagger new
hotel shouldn't get in on the preferred list.
Wherefore they asked for, and obtained, a pri
ority certiflcate which entitled them to the posi
tive delivery of two railway cars of steel and
sundries a day, and work on the new hotel went
on joyously. At the time I was in Washington
the priority committee, ha-ving got almost every
thing into Class A — which left affairs about
as they were before the class was invented, —
had begun all over again by thinking up a Class
AA for priority certificates, which means a right
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THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
of way over even the delivery of mail matter.
As more and more articles get into Class AA
it will be a simple matter to begin a third time
and designate a new and exclusive Class AAA,
and so on and on till the kaiser is licked and
we 're all back to normal again.
And sad to say, it was in the matter of issuing
priority certificates that the only slight instance
approaching a hint of graft (always excepting,
of course, the " honest graft " of the profiteer,
who in all wars and all ages jumps at a chance
to wring blood-money from the heart of a suffer
ing motherland) that came to my attention in
all Washington was revealed. A man secured
a priority certiflcate for a manufacturer whose
war contracts entitled him to the certificate, the
patriot who had got the certificate for the manu
facturer being one of those noble souls who had
closed his desk for the nonce back home largely
with the idea that he was impressing his neigh
bors by leaving his own desk in order "to go
down to Washington to help out the Govern
ment." " By the way," said the volunteer priority pa
triot to the manufacturer who had just received
a certiflcate, "have one of my business cards,
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ALONG THE POTOMAC
merely so you '11 know who I am back home when
I 'm not doing this work of helping out the Gov
ernment." And the manufacturer took the busi
ness card ; but a moment later, while passing out
of the building, he tore it up and angrily threw
the scraps away. For in plain United States
this particular priority man, in manner as well
as act, might just as well have said to the manu
facturer : " Here 's my name and business, son ;
and always remember that when you needed a
priority certiflcate, I 'm the little bright eyes that
got it for you. So when you 're passing my place
of business back home and need anything in my
line, you might show your appreciation by giving
me a call. Get me? "
There 's the only instance approaching ghoul-
ishness which I came across during wanderings
among all sorts and classes of the grand army
of war-workers which has suddenly descended
upon Washington, and the instance is listed here
in detail because it is so small. The incident
gives cause for three rousing cheers for the very
reason that it was the worst that could be un
covered in all that wonderful host of volunteers,
despite the temptations offered ; an army of civil
ian heroes that includes the best of brain and
115

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
energy the country has to offer, men who indi
vidually and in the aggregate daily are building
for a " dollar a year " a record of unselfish serv
ice and honorable devotion that will loom large
even among all the glories of this most stupen
dous moment of the world.

116

CHAPTEE V
the TOWN WITH THE TROLLEY OFF
EVEN in days of normality no one would
have gone so far as to say, at least during
the evening hour, when all the clerks of all the
department buildings were headed simultane
ously toward the suburban residential regions,
that an average Washington surface-car had as
many vacant seats as one will find, say, in Con
gress on any hot afternoon that Walter Johnson
is scheduled to pitch on the home grounds. But
nowadays! Well, nowadays in the rush hours
every car is as thoroughly stuffed as a Philadel
phia ballot-box on the Sunday before the Tues
day before the first Monday in November. It 's
an open question whether or not even a machine
election captain in Philadelphia could have
wedged a handful of phony ballots into the trol
ley-car which the wife and I finally boarded, espe
cially after we had merged ourselves into the
mass of standees. 117

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
It made us provincial New York folk home
sick for the comparative comforts of one of those
subway expresses due to stop near the Grand
Central Station a few minutes before the five-
fifteen commutation pulls out for New Eochelle
on Christmas eve. Also our conductor had an
irritating habit. Every time the car stopped to
permit still another nation-saver to horn his way
upon the back platform, the conductor, himself
wedged hopelessly among a solid bulge of pa
triots sardined into the forward end of the car,
would bellow back in maddening tones to ask us
whether or not a sufficient quantity of the new
est arrival's anatomy had been tucked aboard to
permit the conductor safely to give the starting
signal again.
"Howzit? Howzit? Howzit?" Thus the
conductor. "Howzit back there?"
" Awful ! " shrieked the wife at last in hysteric
soprano. " If you must know. Conductor, it 's
ab-so-lute-ly fierce ! "
But the conductor merely went on conducting.
As we inched along westward through F Street
he contented himself with steadily demonstrating
to the whole class that it must have been a silly
old soul who tried to make an axiom of physics
118

THE TOWN WITH THE TEOLLEY OFF
out of the absurd proposition that two bodies of
matter cannot occupy the same space in the same
Mount Pleasant trolley-car at the same time.
Moment by moment the wife informed me, whis
pering the while between a right ear and a left
side whisker belonging to two total strangers
jammed between us, that if the crush lasted just
a second longer she would die. Yea, verily, she
said, " This town is a City of Magnificent Dis
tances — if you don't have to travel the dis
tances." She lent variety to these outbursts
with loud-spoken protests against the incredible
time it was taking our car to get from the Union
Station to the general neighborhood of the
White House.
" But look, dearie, how long it took Bryan to
try to get over the same route, and him never
making it at that," I cried, with a hearty laugh.
Thus I tried to dispel her gloom with merry quip
and laughter. And the best I got for my efforts
was the distinct realization that if she could
have got her hands out of the human jam which.
pinned her arms and hands to her sides, she
would have reached between the strange ear and
side whisker that separated us and shaken my
short back hair into my eyes.
119

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
We managed to get out of the surface-car not
much more than half a mile beyond our little
hotel in Fourteenth Street. To debark had
merely been a matter of beginning a drive on
our sector of standing room in the car down near
Twelfth and F Streets. Then by battling our
way between the strange side whiskers, the un
familiar ears, and past and under wholly un
known elbows and shoulder-blades, we both
emerged through a second growth of whiskers at
some place near Dupont Circle, or just in time to
catch a passing Auto-To-Hire that landed us
back near Fourteenth and K Streets for a mere
dollar. One did n't have to move from the lobby of the
hotel after dinner that night to learn what every
one connected with the war was or was not, espe
cially was not, doing. For a national capital
that for generations has been the Grand Exalted
City of Gossip has, once the war-whirl began to
spin, laboriously set about the work of collecting
and tabulating the most extensive and intensive
knowledge of things that are not true to be found
at any place in the known world. Even in the
normal times of a past and peaceful generation
one could always pick up mighty secrets of state
120

THE TOWN WITH THE TEOLLEY OFF
for the mere trouble of stopping to chat with any
callow government clerk within range.
Say, listen! Eemember young Elmer Hoosis,
over in the Agricultural Department, Jim?
Well, speaking about that same senator you
just mentioned, this here Elmer Hoosis has
a desk right next to a feller that was walking
through Thomas Circle one night late, when what
does this feller see but that same Senator Baffing-
phone hisself and a lot of other swell ladies and
gents trying to climb up on the statue to give
General Thomas's horse a bottle of champagne
to drink. The whole bunch, so this feller who
works next to Elmer Hoosis says, was so lit that
even the senator's glass eye was bloodshot. And
along comes a cop and wades into the bunch and
pulls them off the statue and everything, and
what does Senator Bafflngphone do but up and
bite the cop in the leg. He ought to be run out
of the Senate, that guy. And he beats his wife
something awful, they say. Of course, Jim, none
of this stuff gets into the papers, because Elmer
and all the rest of us fellers connected with the
Gove'ment just keep it to ourselves.
Thus it was in the old days. But now, with
the onslaught of the present war hullabaloo,
121

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
these are the happy days for the City of Gossip.
One does n't have to move beyond earshot of the
nearest hotel lounge — the wife and I did n't —
to leam on the authority of none other than a
stoutish man who was bulging from the line of
beauty on a lounge in the lobby that this here
now Food Administrator, Henry Hoover, or
whatever his name is, has his own home packed
with barrels and shelves of food like he was a
whole farmer's exhibit at a county fair. Yep.
Eight at the crack of the first gun, muh friend,
what does this Herb Hoover, or whatever his
name is, do but pack his own cellar with a cuppla
carloads of wheat, another car of puttatahs, a
cuppla barrels of kippered herring, and every
thing ! This comes straight, friend, from a niece
of mine that 's been a stenographer in the Food
Administration ever since it was started. Say,
from what I hear that guy Hoover 's got his
libery shelves stacked with more custard pies
than Charley Chaplin could throw at Fatty Ar
buckle in a whole seven-reel fillum. Yes, in-
deedy. And this Fuel Administrator, Doc Gar
field ! Listen, friend. That Garfield guy 's got
a private stock of coal that fills his whole darn
cellar, spreads over half his kitchen, and spills
122

THE TOWN WITH THE TEOLLEY OFF
out of the bath-tub and every stationary wash-
tub in his house. Terrible, ain't it, when even
the White House didn't have enough coal the
other day to keep the place warm. Yep, I get it
straight that Doc Garfield's home looks like it
was a flash-light of the whole anthracite base
ment floor of Scranton, Pennsylvania. And
lemme tell you, friend, about these gents that
hollered and hollered for prohibition till they
got every saloon in the town closed. That
crowd 's got enough of the hard stuff hoarded
away to float a new Liberty Loan. I 'm told by
a man who had ought to know that the main
squeeze in that bunch ain't drew a sober breath
since Grant first began to hang around Eich
mond. One would fancy that the City of Gossip, out
of its rich store of experience, would know that
these and similar tales quite as silly are — well,
silly. But not the City of Gossip! It is on
record that shortly after this newest explosion
of yarns began to rip through the capital one
intellectual of saffron hue among Washington's
city editors assigned a yellow-nosed investigator,
shortly after the Food Administrator came to
town, to hang round the tradesman's entrance
123

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
leading to the Hoover household and peer into
the garbage-cans as they were carried out the
back door each day. And the bright young man
peered so long and unsuccessfully to try to find
some -evidence of wastefulness in Mr. Hoover's
glistening garbage-cans that the shiny glare of
the cans finally caused an eye strain, which, let
us hope, is nothing tri-vial.
Almost all of the gossipy yams floating the
length and width of the city are merely amusing,
but sometimes they are dangerous. "Ain't it
terrible about Joe Tumulty ! Yep, they 're say
ing 9II over town that they've just found out
he 's a German spy, and they whisked him off
to the prison in Leavenworth and they 're going
to line him up against a blank wall right away
and send him over the route ! And do you know
about the battle-ship Pennsylvania being sunk
abroad? The news just came straight from a
man who works in the State, War, and Na-vy
building. The loss of life was terrible, and the
hospital in the New York Na-vy Yard is all filled
up now with the wounded, and the na-vy won't
let even the mothers of the poor boys into the
yard to see their dying sons! "
124

THE TOWN WITH THE TEOLLEY OFF
Then out from Washington and across the con
tinent rips the " news," causing anguish to the
mother of every sailor-boy now in foreign waters.
The fact that the credulous, as likely as not, may
happen upon Mr. Tumulty on his way to lunch
eon half an hour after they had convinced them
selves that he was about to face a firing-squad
out in Kansas, does not keep them from believ
ing the next wild tale that floats their way. So
serious were the effects of the Tumulty story and
the yarn about the " sinking " of the Pennsyl
vania that the secretary to the President and the
secretary of the navy respectively were compelled
to issue public statements denying each rumor.
Just about an hour of this strictly confldential
sort of " news " being hawked the length of the
hotel lobby on the flrst evening we had been able
to spend beneath a Washington hotel roof re
sulted in the feeling that too much was plenty.
Wherefore toward the elevator I led the wife.
Who knows but that if we had sat round the
lobby long enough some one would have let slip
the information that the prexy and faculty of
the War College were shattering all the ethics
of amateur college sport by grabbing off every
125

THB WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
National League professional ball-player drafted
and playing them on the War College varsity
nine under fake names.
As the elevator took us roomward I evolved
a plan to get up early the next moming and buy
a pair of those good-dollar breakfasts now being
sold in Washington at prices ranging from two
to two and a half dollars each. Then we would
stroll toward the Capitol. Doubtless it would
be of much benefit to a wife, given overmuch to
carping criticism, to sit for an afternoon in the
impressive half-light of the house galleries; to
sit there and gaze down upon and listen to the
mighty, dignified statesmen on the fioor below;
listen and absorb, until the great throbbing of
patriotic emotion welling within her should send
her, panting uncontrollably, out into the twilit
evening air. And we did breakfast together as
planned, but perforce we began on our grape
fruit long, long after we had given our initial
breakfast order to a waiter who was transcenden-
tally the haughty personification of permanent
Washington's acute resentment to labor. One
could not blame him greatly, inasmuch as he had
four crowded breakfast-tables besides our own
to look after. But we did begin to feel unkindly
126

THE TOWN WITH THE TEOLLEY OFF
toward him when, after disappearing with our
list of breakfast dishes, he either enlisted or was
drafted. Finally we were able to fiag a captain
of waiters, also haughty, but not too proud to
take our order all over again and personally peel
the boiled eggs.
But as we hurried out to meet the air the
clock in the lobby showed that we had spent so
much time paging our waiter, our breakfast
had n't been served to us until it was almost time
for luncheon. All thought of strolling a mile
or so to the Capitol had to be put aside. Along
came an Auto-To-Hire, and we saw it first.
" To Congress, Jesse James," I said simply to
the taxibandit. And we were off toward the
House — a House divided against itself, but, so
I felt as we began to rattle helter-skelter down
Fourteenth Street, so brimful of patriotism that
the -wife, I knew, was about to experience the first
great thrill of her thoughtless young life.

127

CHAPTEE VI
THE EAGLE CHIRPS
OHE might have known that the taxibandit
at the tiller was one of those Philadelphia
brigands who had just driven his car 'cross-coun
try from Broad and Chestnut streets the day be
fore in order to be in on the Washington war
time pickin's, and therefore had n't the slightest
notion where Congress convened. He was all
that, also he was of a nature too sensitive, seem
ingly, to ask for directions; and so he lit right
out and slambanged down the Fourteenth Street
incline to " the avenue," crossed the town's great
aorta instead of turning east into it, and never
slowed up until he had zipped eastward for half
a dozen blocks along B Street, S. W. There he
stopped in front of a big brick building that
stretched the length of an ocean-liner of the first
class. Now I, even I, knew that Congress had always
128

These are the happy days for the City of Gossip

THE EAGLE CHIEPS
done its nation-saving in a spreading Capitol of
marble and much sandstone painted white.
Still, what with all the rest of the fast shiftings
about and fancy-footed shadow-boxing that now
make every day in Washington moving-day, per
haps the House and the Senate had called a
couple of moving-vans also, and had staked a
new claim within the hollows of the big brick
ediflce that Jesse James had taken us to. Then
came to mind then and there the authentic case
where one governmental bureau within the previ
ous six months had moved all its office forces and
furniture exactly six times, the directors of that
and similar bureaus, far-seeing though they were,
ha-ving moved each time into offices four feet
wider because no one had been decent enough to
tell them that the war might continue through
out the entire week to come, and therefore cause
a progressive expanding of business up to the
point of backing up the furniture van once again
the flrst of the folio-wing month. Who knows
but that Congress had outgrown the Capitol
also? " So this is where Congress hangs out now,
eh? " I remarked to Jesse James as he lined us
up beside the roadway and relieved me of the con-
129

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
tents of my wallet. And as we wandered toward
the entrance, Jesse nodded an affirmative in a
shamefaced way before stepping on his fli-wer
pedals and clacking off toward another hold-up.
Two lettered legends, one on each side of an
inner entrance, gave us pause. Evidently the
hands with index-fingers, one pointing east and
the other west, that decorated each sign, re
spectively, indicated which was the Senate wing
and which the House. In turn we inspected the
signs. The first one read :
SOUTH EAST EANGE
(Turn to Left)
Osteological Collection
"0-s-t-e-o — " I began. "Why, that means
bone and solid ivory and things like that," I
cried ; and as I hastened toward the more osten
tatious sign, which at first glance I had taken for
granted showed the way to the Senate, the wife
laughed right out loud. For only a moment I
was nonplussed by the wording on the second
sign-board : 130

THE EAGLE CHIEPS
SOUTH WEST RANGE
(Turn to Right)
American Stratigraphic Series
of Rocks and Fossils
Also Systematic Series of
Invertebrate Fossils
" Holy mackerel ! " The truth had dawned
upon me. "Here I ask that fat-headed chauf
feur to take us to the House and Senate, and
what does he do but dump us off at the National
Museum's collection of — "
" Bone, solid rock, spineless fish, concrete and
solid ivory," crooned the wife, happily. " Do
you know, dearie, there 's the first chauffeur I 've
ever seen who approaches genius. I trust you
tipped him accordingly. Come, let 's hurry into
the ' South West Eange ' first and give the Sen
ate the once over."
Now this was no slangy, flippant way to ap
proach the august presence of the nation's Con
gress ; but I took a firm grip on my temper, my
131

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
tongue, and my wife's arm, and silently I led
her eastward through the Mall for a mile, then
up a hill, and into the House wing of the Capitol.
Now the wife would see what she would see. I
would show her, or, to be more modest, I and
Congress would show her.
It so happened that we had struck a compara
tively dull day in the House, as days go now
round the Capitol. The final vote on the na
tional suffrage amendment to the Constitution
was the only idea on the congressional mind that
day, but, taking things by and large, it was a
fairish average day for the -wife to see. My
heart began to pump excitedly upon approach
ing this great body of representatives who, as I
explained to the wife as we crowded into one of
the Capitol elevators, for a salary not so very
much greater than they might be making back
home as country lawyers, had listened to the call
of the people and unselfishly had come to Wash
ington not only to labor day and night to save
the nation, but to submit gracefully also to the
stern mandate of the Federal law which stipu
lates that each congressman must accept sixty
copies of " The Congressional Eecord " every
day! 132

THE EAGLE CHIEPS
There was little to attract attention when the
wife and I arrived on a level with the corridor
entrances to the Family Circle tier of seats in
the House. Almost nothing was going on except
that Billy Sunday was opening the session with
prayer, and House stenographers were breaking
lead-pencils and finger-nails and fountain-pens
trying to keep abreast of Billy's prayer, and
women standees were bulging outward into the
corridors all the way round the string of Family
Circle entrances, and back of these was an over
flow of still more women clamoring to get in as
madly as if Doug' Fairbanks and Charley Chap
lin were chatting on the floor of the House with
Mary Pickford and Theda Bara, and Speaker
Champ Clark was flashing for the first time a
new pearl-gray suit decorated at the lapel with a
rose of saffron hue in honor of the occasion, and
outside House attendants had taken all the
beaded knitting-bags away from the women who
had arrived early enough in the earliest morning
to find seats inside, and the knitting-bags had
been heaped in piles waist-high in the corridors,
because it 's against the law to carry any bundles
or packages of bombs into the House during war
times, and Sculptor Gutson Borglum, after wan-
133

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
dering accidentally into the Statuary Hall of the
Capitol and getting one quick glimpse at the
Sculptural Chamber of Horrors, was fleeing with
wild screams of terror through the corridors, and
even louder than the Borglum yells arose distant
thunderings of oratorical impressiveness as vari
ous representatives hit the high spots of forensic
fervor, and a gavel was banging and banging
afar off, and somebody was intoning terrifically
about the " b-r-r-r-road and-ah beeounteous pa-
rairees, gen-tul-mun, of thee great- tuh and gu-
lorias State-tuh which I have thee honor to rep-
reesent-tuh in this-ah dis-ting-wished uh-sem-
bludge," and a reporter cub padding along behind
us hurriedly was balling a metaphor all up by
asking his companion, " Who 's the old goat bray
ing on the floor now, Larry? " and some one was
banging and hollering, " The Chair reck-ah-nizes
thee gnlmn from Mizzooree," and a large lady
whose back hair was undecided was shoving along
on tiptoe and panting, " I 'm suffickating, Emmy,
but I '11 go to my grave happy if I can only get
just a glimpse of Jeanette Eankin," and the
newspaper telegraph instruments, down the cor
ridor toward the Press Gallery, were sending the
news to the sistern in far-away States amid a
134

THE EAGLE CHIEPS
chorus of clickings like the seven-year plague of
crickets, and the gavel was banging again, and
some one was shouting dramatically in purest
South Bostonese, " This democracy cawnnot
exist hawf free awnd hawf female," and a woman
fainted in the crush and was laid out across one
of the piles of knitting-bags, and somebody ar
rived with ice- water for the fainting lady just as
we had biffed our way close enough to a door to
hear a logically intensive bit of debate that ran :
" Does the genelmn from Cuhnetcut object? "
" I ruh-zerve the right to objec'.''
" But does the genelmn from Cuhnetcut ob
ject?" " I ruh-peat, I ruh-zerve the right to objec'."
" But does the genelmn object or does he not
object? "
" I ruh-peat again, I ruh-zerve the right."
" Will the genelmn answer yes or no, does he
object? "
" I ruh-zerve the — "
" Does the genelmn — "
" I ruh-zerve — "
" Does the — "
" I ruh — "
" Does — " 135

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
*' I — " Et ceterah-rah-rah !
I tingled with the glory of it all, even with the
thrill of these far snatches of statesmanship
coming from the hearts and the souls and the
lungs of famous patriots whom so far I could not
so much as glimpse. At last I was where the
war actually was being won! Not a second of
the great crisis of world crises was being wasted
by these great statesmen, who persistently and
steadily were gripping Time himself by his hoary
old whiskers and swiftly with savage oratory
were winning the aT\^ul fight. Ah, if little
Freddy Harper and the other lads represented by
the four stars on the service fiag proutUy floating
in a window of our wool-sponging place in lower
Broadway were only here — thus my thoughts
ran as the mighty struggle to win the war went
on and on just beyond the massed mobs of women
flghting to get into the Family Circle ; if Freddy
and his bunkies could only step out of the ice-
water in which they were standing knee-deep in
the trenches of France, waiting, waiting, could
but look upon and listen to this splendid and un-
selflsh battle being waged on the floor of the
House to win the suffrage vote at the next con
gressional elections and thereby win the war!
136

THE EAGLE CHIEPS
To be here in the Capitol, if only for a moment,
would hearten Freddy Harper and his little band
of machine-gun lads with the thought that they
were ever in the mind of a great people's chosen
representatives. And, contented, they would go
back to their trenches, and the memory of this
wondrous scene as it came to them again during
the long, cold nights in France would make them
forget their loneliness and the heart chill and the
choke of homesickness for a sight again of the
bronze Liberty girl standing high on her pedestal
in good old New York Bay, torch held far into the
blackness, like another mother of the story-books,
who nightly puts a lamp in the window for her
boy who has been gone a long, long time, but
surely will come back to her again.
Every day those lads abroad, every one of them,
should receive a copy of " The Congressional
Eecord " in order that they might kill time, while
lolling around the trenches doing nothing, by
poring over its pages. Thus they would have
implanted in their minds each day a concrete un
derstanding of the constancy with which the
Congress was standing by them, shoulder to
shoulder, of the unselflsh zeal -with which the
chosen spokesmen of the people in the homeland
137

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
were fighting with them, inch by inch, always and
ever, toward victory. I think of this as I glance
through the pages of the copy of the " Eecord "
lying beside me as I write, with its half hundred
pages of closely printed type that preserve for all
time the burning words and sounding phrases
that were uttered on the historic day that the
wife and I leaned against the noise coming out
toward us. So great was my emotion that day
that I know I should not now be able to recall
with precision even the few bits and snatches we
were able to hear, were it not for the stenographic
report in the " Eecord " now before me.
Beat by beat come the heart-throbs of a nation
in anguish :
"Do I understand that the gentleman's request for
unanimous consent goes to the extent of ordering the
previous question on the rule, so as to eut out the
offering of the amendment to the rule ? " "It does. ' '
"Then I object." "The gentleman from Florida ob
jects." "I move the previous question on the reso
lution." "If the gentleman from Illinois controls
the time for the rule and the gentleman from Tennes
see controls the time against it, this side of the House
is without time." "May I ask if the gentleman will
yield some of his time to this side of the house?"
"Certainly; I had made promises for more time but
138

THE EAGLE CHIEPS
I will see that that side gets an equal division of the
time." "Will the gentleman yield ten minutes to
this side?" "Yes." "Mr. Speaker, I understand
that it is settled now that I have twenty minutes
under my control. Is that correct?" "I do not un
derstand that the proposition was that the gentleman
from Tennessee should have twenty minutes." "I
am entitled to that time under the general rule."
' ' For what purpose does the gentleman from Virginia
rise?" "To see what has become of my time." "It
has gone." "I had three minutes left." "I know
the gentleman would have three minutes left if it was
not for the clock." "Now, what does the gentleman
from Virginia want?" "I just wanted my time."
(Prolonged laughter.)
So for a long, long time they talked inspiringly
about how much time they would have to talk.
If I could but be down there with them on that
floor, fighting, fighting, side by side with them
as they gave their very life's breath to speed up
the war so that Freddy and all the Freddies early
could come home again ! Here was efficiency in
fighting, with no thought of self, surely with no
thought of infusing the pettiness of party politics
at so serious a moment in the nation's history;
no flippancy, but only the pure voice of a great
people clamoring for the swift victory for their
139

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
suffering boys in France. Shameful, I could see
now, were the stories going about that morning
to the effect that Democrats and Eepublicans at
a time like this intended to devote every precious
moment of that whole war-time day trying to
"put the other side in the hole" politically.
Creatures walked through those Capitol corridors
who were low enough even to say outright that
a delegation of party politicians only the day be
fore had, in their extremity, influenced a Presi
dent of the United States, by running to him and
pleading with him at the last moment, to shove
aside his tremendous war burdens so that he too
might play party politics by coming out with a
petty partizan plea for suffrage in order to in
fluence the voters to vote the Democratic ticket
in the November election to come. How sUly
were such insinuations, so I thought, against the
people and their representative leaders, my lead
ers, when long ago all the other flghting nations
of the world — Germany, Austria, England,
France, Belgium, Italy, all — had set aside party
politics as childish things that should not, could
not, intrude themselves at a moment when the
World War demanded the concentrated thought
140

THE EAGLE CHIEPS
of all that was best in all politics and statesman
ship if a nation were to prevail.
And so the gossip floating about was just silly ;
it could n't be possible that our wondrous nation,
of all the countries on earth, alone could be giv
ing thought to petty political advantages, alone
of all the world could be insane enough to try to
conduct the war from the point of view of miser
able party politics. It was time such stories
ceased. Why, I had even heard a white-haired
offlcer of the American Army, bronzed by a life
spent in the winds and sun of experience and
noted far and wide among military scientists as
one of the most thorough students of his calling
living to-day, heatedly make the accusation,
again and again, that " rotten party politics are
responsible for the thrusting aside of a soldier
who not only has the flnest mind in all our army,
but pretty close to the best mind we ever had in
our army." I had laughed, feeling sorry for him
and his fatuity even as I laughed.
" But it 's true," the officer had stormed.
"Out of a hundred million people he was the
only American who, within a few weeks after
Germany spilled into Belgium, did not content
141

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
himself with saying that the United States pos
sibly would get mixed up actively in the war in
Europe, who didn't even rest with saying that
probably we would get into it ; he said from the
first in a quiet, certain way to those who should
be told — and that includes the whole Washing
ton crowd — that we could not possibly keep out
of the war. They laughed at him. Then, when
no one else would do anything, he started in to
do all that an officer in the army dared initiate
in the way of preparedness. He evolved the
Plattsburg idea. He knew that Bryan's boast of
' a million men springing to arms between sun
rise and sunset ' was blithering bosh, and that if
such an army did arise miraculously, it would,
without officers to direct it, be a worthless mob.
And no one in all Washington would begin to
train the offlcers, so he took a first batch of raw
material to Plattsburg and taught them the rudi
ments of the game. Then as senior general in
the army he was influential enough to hammer
the lunkheads, who should have been helping his
work along, but were n't, into lending some gov
ernmental assistance, and he trained more and
more raw boys into the groundwork of soldier
ing. Members of his staff did a lot of the actual
142

THE EAGLE CHIEPS
work, but he was always personally on the job
at Plattsburg and at the other camps that arose
as a result of his Plattsburg idea.
" But all the time he was getting in bad by
indirectly criticizing the department ; not that he
ever criticized directly, but by preaching and
practising preparedness when the Government
was doing nothing he hurt a lot of feelings. If
it were not for him, we 'd have gone into this war
even worse off than we were and are. Did the
politicians show any appreciation? Shucks!
He happens to be a Eepublican. He was even
' prominently mentioned ' at the Chicago conven
tion of 1916 for a few minutes as a Presidential
possibility. If he ever came back from France
after ha-ring served his country there with the
ability that his political enemies knew he woiUd
display, he 'd be in danger of being nominated to
head the Eepublican nationed ticket at the sub
sequent Presidential election. Probably he
would be elected. And so when we went to war
and needed his great services as never before,
they put the rollers under him."
I had argued it out with the learned army man,
I remembered as the -wife and I stood in the
Capitol corridor trying to hear the House; had
143

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
insisted to the army man that he must be mis
taken, until he jumped from his chair angrily and
had left me. But whatever misgi-vings he may
have aroused within me that day, they were all
dispelled, blown away, by the noble vocables aris
ing from the floor of the House. Where the army
man had caused me uneasiness by his hard mar
shaling of incidents, the patriots of the Congress
caused me to gulp with patriotic emotion. Word
for word, thanks to the stenographic report of
the day's session printed in " The Congressional
Eecord " before me, I repeat here the sentences
and strings of sentences that came out to us as
the door near which we stood was opened and
closed, closed and opened. Now would come
refutation, so I whispered to the -wife, of the
stories of the low gossipers who could accuse even
the country's ordained representatives of forget
ting the war while they squabbled for partizan
place and power.
Again the door beyond the mob in front of us
was pushed open for some moments, held open
for at least a little while by the press of humans
against it. We cupped our ears and listened :
"Mr. Spealter, for five long months I gave the best
that was in me physically and mentally, and cheer-
144

THE EAGLE CHIEPS
fully gave several thousand dollars of my individual
funds, for Democratic victory in my State. I was
deeply grateful that Kentucky rolled up her biggest
majority in thirty years for the Democratic ticket.
1 — " [Door closed. Opened again.]
"The chair recognizes — "
"It was my privilege yesterday afternoon to be
one of a committee of twelve to ask the President for
advice and counsel (laughter) on this important
measure." (Prolonged laughter.)
"If this resolution is defeated to-day the country
will understand whom to hold responsible — one sec
tion of the country controlling the Democratic
Par—" "It was known by the committee that went to see
the President that the Republicans were going to
take this matter up and pass it in caucus, was it not ? ' '
"I want to say this: Without the votes of the
Democratic Members from California, the Speaker
would not be in the Chair. And I want to say fur
ther to the Members on the Democratic side that the
returns indicated two hours before we closed our polls
in the West that the President was defeated — "
"Mr. Speaker and Members of the House of Rep
resentatives, a little more than 400 years ago Colum
bus discovered America."
"What the State of Iowa needs worse than any
thing else is a lot of first class political funerals
among their Members of Congress and State legis
lature." (Prolonged laughter.) 145

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
Unsatisfactory as it was to stand there and
get only drabs of sentences and paragraphs, a
sentence or phrase or paragraph as the door was
opened or closed again, the wife and I realized —
I 'm sure, at least, that I did — from the very
fervency of the debate that some mighty issue of
a war-stricken land was at stake. Just what
they were debating about I could not, of course,
tell. Sometimes, so I noted between door-swing
ings, the question of who had discovered America
seemed to be at issue, but again they would swing
four hundred years forward and go into learned
and lengthy dissertations on the political history
of Kentucky, Iowa, or any of several States dur
ing the latest national campaign. Then there
was an instant hush in the hubbub coming from
the women standees massed around us as again
the door swung open long enough to enable us to
realize that still another speaker was dwelling
upon the many excellences of the lady from Mon
tana, Miss Eankin. Doubtless the speaker was
extoling some fine bit of statesmanship which
Miss Eankin had contributed to the all-im
portant, the only important, work of speeding up
the war. Unfortunately, the door remained open
only long enough to enable us to hear only one
146

THE EAGLE CHIEPS
sentence of the orator's appreciation of Miss
Eankin 's efforts to aid her warring America:
"The lady from Montana has introduced a joint
resolution in this House recognizing the right of Ire
land to home rule. ' '
The door was closed before I could readjust my
mind from Columbus's discovery to the political
situation in Iowa and then over to Ireland.
Then for a long time the sentences came dribbling
out to us as the door swung back and forth, all of
us waiting patiently during the rapidly recurring
intervals of comparative silence for the door to
open again long enough to permit us to hear a
paragraph more :
"I know there are a great many patriotic women
in the State of Ohio who are able to cast just as in
telligent a vote as any Member of this body, but our
party platform is against it. So until that barrier is
raised I shall vote against this amendment."
"It is passing strange, Mr. Speaker, that the Pres
ident should so suddenly change his mind on this
proposition. I will not say that he changed it because
he foresaw that this (Republican) side of the House
was going to vote almost unanimously for it and tried
to beat us to it, but it certainly is a rather funny pro
ceeding. Surely, if "Woodrow "Wilson can change his
mind over night and get by with it — "
147

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
"Mr. Speaker, I do not believe that the President
should be so severely arraigned and criticised as he
has been to-day for having yesterday afternoon by
means of his self -arranged newspaper publicity, got
ten aboard the bandwagon of national woman suf
frage, which, so evident to him at that time, was
being carried on to certain -victory by an overwhelm
ing majority of Republican votes. He should not be
censured because he may have a new idea once in a
while." "Mr. Speaker, I have heard it said that the Re
publicans are going to vote for this (suffrage) reso
lution almost solidly, and that it would be good poli
tics for the Democrats to line up solidly for it also,
else the Republicans would get credit for its passage,
and the Democrats would be swept from power in
the next elec — "
Enthralled though I was in the magniflcent
war-time evidences of history in the making that
were coming to my ears, I could not help but no
tice that the wife, who had become somewhat
separated from me in the milling around of the
crowd, was desperately trying to press her way
out of the mob. She seemed displeased, to put it
mildly, with something or other; what it was I
had no means, of course, of knowing. It was just
as the words, " It would be good politics for the
148

THE EAGLE CHIEPS
Democrats to line up solidly for it also," were
being intoned impressively from within that the
wife began to elbow her way toward the rear of
the crowd violently. Maybe the man standing
back of her had been drinking or the stout lady
beside her may have been shoving too hard.
Well, so far as I could see, the wife had suffered
no serious injury, and her face had suddenly
flushed to a shade so closely resembling a three-
alarm fire that I knew she had n't become faint
in the crowd. If she wanted to go back to our
hotel, well and good; she knew the way. I had
come too all-fired far from home to hear these
foremost statesmen of the land to pull out of the
crowd now just because the wife had taken of
fense at some imaginary trouble or other. The
unreasoning, pettish, emotional way the mind
of woman does work at times sure does keep me
winging. She was gone, and I had forgotten her the in
stant the sentences, or bunches of sentences, be
gan to filter out into the corridor again :
"Mr. Speaker, I was amused at my friend from
Oklahoma, Mr. Ferris, who wants us to stand by the
President. God knows I want to stand with him. I
149

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
am a Democrat, and I want to follow the leader of my
party, and I am a pretty good lightning-change artist
myself sometimes (prolonged laughter) ; but God
knows I cannot keep up with this performance."
(Prolonged laughter.)
"If the wife should disagree with the husband and
have her vote counted in opposition to his, then we
would find the husband and wife constantly engaged
in political disputation, which would grow more
heated and more acrimonious as a campaign advanced,
until finally a veritable conflagration of domestic in
felicity would be kindled, consuming the marital tie,
destroying the home, and sending the children or
phans out on the cold charity of the world to become
charges on the State. This picture is not over-
dra-wn. ' '
"God knows that factional politics is bad enough
even when — "
"Every man on this floor came into this world at
the peril of his mother's life."
"If the gentleman thinks that and acts accordingly
he -will go to jail some of these days." (Prolonged
laughter.) "Every novel in our youth told us of some young
feUow who told his girl that she should never soil
her lily-white hands with work; but the last chapter
showed her taking in washing to support an orphan
asylum for a drunkard's home, the children of a man
sleeping somewhere in a drunkard's grave."
"Mr. Speaker, Zobier Pasha, still living, I think,
150

THE EAGLE CHIEPS
in the Sudan, was the greatest slave king Africa ever
saw." Although the statesmen had been talking stead
ily for more than two hours, — they had assem
bled an hour earlier than usual that day because
of the unusual need for rapid, incisive action in
this and countless other critical matters at hand,
— I was still unable to piece out their different
arguments sufflciently to enable me to figure out
just what great war measure was engaging their
attention. Never was the thought so distress
ingly borne in upon me that I was but a humble
wool-man who had no part in the same intellect
ual world in which these leaders of the people
thought and moved. No son of mine, if a son
ever be borne to bless us, would go through life
without a college education as I had been com
pelled to do, that I resolved then and there as
the feeling crushed me that I had n't even the
mind training to enable me to sense even vaguely
what my mental superiors on the floor below were
laboring so mightily about.
Most wonderful of all to me, little as I under
stood it all, was the untiring energy of these
patriots in our great war crisis. They spoke on
151

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
and on and on as if it were a pleasure for them
to do so, whereas, even I could vaguely see that
they were voluntarily taking upon their unselflsh
shoulders a labor of patriotic love that would
have crushed us lesser men. And in their
anxiety to finish up this thing, whatever it was,
in the briefest possible time, so that instantly
they could grapple with the next stupendous war
problem awaiting them, they shot forth their
thoughts with machine gun rapidity, so that not
a golden moment be wasted.
Back and forth swung the door, and came to
me the splendid periods, remarkable for original
ity of thought, content, and expression, that
showed no war-time instant was being wasted :
"The gentleman from Alabama reminds me of the
man at the banquet in New York City. He and his,
friends had — " (Door was closed before the speaker
had got far into his funny story. Door was opened
as great burst of laughter followed the completion of
the story.)
"Something has been said about the control of this
House passing from the Democratic Party and the
South; we are more concerned in the South in con
trolling our own affairs than we are in controlling
the small amount of patronage of the gang of poli-
152

THE EAGLE CHIRPS
ticians that are coming to Congress merely for the
loaves and fishes."
"The Chair recognizes — "
' ' My mother, with my dear father, who has passed
away, crossed the prairie. It was my mother who,
when the hot winds blew and the grasshoppers came,
said, 'No, Jim, we -will not go back to Ohio.' My
mother," &c. [Door remained open long enough to
enable us to hear early history of the orator, his fa
ther and mother, but space limits forbid a reprint of
the engrossing history here.]
"No man, no woman, ever lowered a standard by
performing a duty."
' ' In the next Presidential campaign no Republican
can be elected without the vote of the States where
women are enfranchised. No Democrat can be de
feated if he can secure these votes. Fortunately for
us the Republicans wobbled on this issue in the last
campaign. They will not repeat the blunder, and if
the Democratic Party is to continue to rule this coun
try it must display a willingness to meet this issue. ' '
"Mr. Speaker, the world moves."
"Mr. Speaker, the life of Lucy Stone was as in
spired as that of Joan of Arc. Born in the little
farming to-wn of West Brookfleld, she," &c. [His
tory of Lucy Stone Blackwell's childhood, girlhood,
and womanhood. Again space limits, unfortunately,
do not permit reprint of the interesting details.
Those interested see "The Congressional Record,"
Vol. 56, No. 20, and read on and on.]
153

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
"Mr. Speaker, the people are made up of men and
women. ' '
"Why cannot women vote? Simply because they
are the one great part of the population to whom the
franchise has not been granted."
' ' Mr. Speaker, a change in the fundamental law of
the United States is a serious question."
Then for a longer interval than usual the door
remained closed. Just a faint blurring of the
shouts within came to us, now and again punc
tuated with personal banterings back and forth
as the patriots relaxed for a moment from the
great strain and indulged in merry quip and
lengthy laughter.
The long time 1 had been standing there in the
crush, the heated air, something, began to make
me feel depressed. As always these days when
depression sits upon me, my thoughts began to
dwell upon the war, our war. Also my war
thoughts always persist in centering upon our
Freddy Harper, who years before had come
to our office as errand boy, bright-eyed and
snappy as a young fox-terrier, and had steadily
worked his way into our hearts, and up and up
in our business firm. Then the war had come,
154

THE EAGLE CHIEPS
and Freddy, who loved life more than any young
ster I had ever seen, grew moody for days. One
morning he had come into my office and had had
a long talk with me, and then he had shaken
hands all around and had walked out of our busi
ness place. And a few days later we had put a
service flag in our window, not in silly boast-
fulness, but because it was the least we could do
in honor of Freddy Harper, whom we loved very
much. One by one we had added to the lone
star on our first flag until there were four stars in
all on the little silk banner that one of our office
windows framed. In turn the four lads had left
us, each of them dropping in for a few moments
later on to say good-by, bravely garbed in their
new khaki, and their eyes alight with the wonder
of the great adventure. The names of two of
them, humble wool-spongers, I could not even re
call. The name of the third, a red-haired Irish
lad, red-haired, white-souled and blue-eyed, I
might have forgotten forever, too, if it were not
that his old mother had come to our office one day
to tell us how he had walked up to death, a gen
tleman unafraid.
He was lying in a hos^iital in Lyons now, his
155

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
chin and much of his lower jaw shot away —
Eddie Murphy was his name, by the way — and
he never would be able to talk again ; he " never
would be any good again,'' as Eddie's sister, who
had accompanied her mother from their home in
Harlem to our office, had put it.
" If Eddie was only here," his mother had said,
" instead of suffering all alone among strangers
so far away, in this place I never before heard tell
of, — Lyons, isn't it they call it, Susan? — if I
only had the boy with me, it would n't be so hard.
But to lie in my bed at night thinking and think
ing as I do that it is only strangers that are car
ing for Eddie is tearing my heart till — till —
I know I promised you, Susan, that if you took
me here I 'd not bother these gentlemen by cry
ing, but, God help me ! I — I can't help myself."
And she had turned toward the wall and buried
her face in the cheap little muff she carried.
We had comforted her as best we could, and
when she had become calmer again we had told
her that immediately we would find a place for
Susan in our offlce or work-rooms and pay her
Eddie's wages besides. But she had sat there
unheeding, twisting her muff in her hands. And
it was only when we had begun to tell her that her
156

THE EAGLE CHIRPS
Eddie was not among strangers that her interest
had come again. All the hearts and the thoughts
and the dynamic energies of a greatest land, we
had assured her, solely were being concentrated
with helpful aid upon her Eddie, and upon all
the Eddies who formed that splendid flower of
young American manhood hurrying eastward to
Eddie's aid. Why look upon him as deserted,
neglected? we had asked her encouragingly, when
all Eddie's countrymen, each so far as lay in his
power, had thrust aside personal ambition, pri
vate gain, every selfish interest, that they might
labor, day and night, as one great united people,
led by brilliant statesmen, whose minds had
grown serious and sobered in a day as they
jumped forward to lead to swift victory.
The door just ahead of me that led to an aisle
in the House gallery suddenly was shoved open
again and from within came a great gale of
raucous laughter. And then as the merriment
died down a bit the voice of still another orator
came out to the mob in the entrance :
"Mr. Speaker, a certain Southem bachelor poet,
in a spirit of poetic fervor, exclaimed:
'Woman, woman, thou art divine!
Oh, that I had one I might call mine,
157

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
To soothe me in my worstest woes,
And cook my dinner and wash my clothes. ' ' '
(Tremendous applause and laughter.)
" God Almighty ! " I swung round as my wife
gripped my arm with a hand that trembled, her
voice, low and tense, coming to me in this sem
blance of a prayer; for it was a prayer, though
spoken through clenched teeth. Somehow she
had worked out of the crowd for a time, but later,
fascinated, had pushed a way close to me again.
" God in heaven ! " she cried again, once we
were free of the mob, " we 're at war ! Don't they
know it? At war! Mountebanks! High-school
commencement ' oratory ' ! Silly jokes ! Vil
lage politics! Eoaring like fools over doggerel
that rises to the heights of rhyming woes and
clothes! I don't demand long-faced solemnity,
— even at a funeral, for that matter, — but I do
demand at least dignified efficiency, decency, un
selfishness, unity, anything and everything
that '11 help in a terrible crisis like this. A hide
ous monster gripping the very throat of the coun
try, my country, shattering forever the lives of
that boy from your office and thousands like him,
ripping his chin off and tearing the heart out of
158

THE EAGLE CHIEPS
his mother, all their mothers! And this gang
here wastes hours and days on asinine antics!
For almost three hours I 've listened to them now,
each side trying to block the way of the other in
the scramble for votes next November. In all
this sickening day not a jackanapes on that floor,
not one, has given the slightest indication that
he was devoting a single thought to whether suf
frage was or was not a great national good. My
own America, everything that's decent in this
whole world, calling for help, and still they snarl
and squeal and squeak for votes, their own re-
elections, party power, down there in that hole
like a — a — like a pitf ul of vile rats ! "
And then I got mad, mad clean through, just as
mad as the wife was. I would n't stand for talk
like that, not from my wife or any one else. For
more than flfteen years we had struggled along
without exchanging billingsgate or bitterness;
but now, flrst and last, I opened up on the wife,
right there beyond earshot of the crowd, balled
her out and laced into her until the whole House
had nothing on me for oratorical flreworks.
Should these men be singled out for vile abuse,
I demanded, when every one else in the land, from
the highest leaders in the executive and legis-
159

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
lative branches of our Government down to the
lowest-browed, bull-necked captain of a gas-house
election precinct, had agreed that the written and
spoken idea is the flrst weapon of modern war?
Who was she, I thundered, to holler out abusively
her own private ideas when it had been decided by
the greatest leaders, as soon as these unspeakable
Huns had reached toward us with hands red with
the gore of girls and babes, that the thing to do
was to talk some sense and a feeling of shame into
the monsters ; raise an army, yes, but not neces
sarily so big and costly an army that its sheer
size and strength and equipment would throw the
fear of God into the savages. So great an army,
and its accompanying promise that we were pre
paring for ten years, fifteen years if necessary, of
fighting, might go far toward splitting the allies
of the Hun away from him, might even cause
within the Hun himself a revolutionary stomach
ache so sickening to him that he would have to
lie down and piteously call out, " Kamerade! "
But think of the cost of going so whole heartedly
into the battle — the cost in dollars ! And think
of the time such an army would take up in the
raising and training and equipping of it, hours
so long that little or no time would be left for the
160

1%^''/

^^/X'
•^/,,

The whole house had nothing on me for oratorical fireworks

THE EAGLE CHIEPS
pleasanter and less costly practice of sending out
an army just large enough to make a decent show
ing and then devoting the rest of our days to win
ning the war vocally. To let the savage know at
the outset that we were going into the war at the
fullest tilt might, quit« truly, as I pointed out
to the wife, end the whole hideous business
months or years earlier ; but I also reminded her
that wiser intellects than hers had throughout a
long stretch of war months agreed that " some
thing might turn up " which would end the mess
and so make unnecessary the tremendous cost in
time and money that would have to be used up
immediately if we were to prepare to charge into
the mfilee full tilt. Yes, the thing to do in the
meantime was to try by messages and oratory to
bring about the happy state of affairs where some
thing would " turn up " to help us — to write and
talk, talk and write, until the last talon had been
talked off the twin black eagles that perch on
the spiked helmet of the Sultan of Hell.
"Yes, singe the black -wings -with hot air!"
agreed the wife; but she said it in a way that
made me suspicious.
We had come out upon the topmost of the ter
races of withered turf that climb to meet the
161

\ \

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
white marble base of the Capitol, and the sharp,
fresh air was good to breathe again. All the
capital, our capital, stretched away in seeming
peacefulness, flat beneath the haze of a winter
afternoon that made the far Virginia hills vague
with mist. Up through the haze leaped to the
clouds the great granite shaft, simple in outline,
as all things in life and art and love and death
are simple — simple as the immortal Virginian
whose life the granite commemorated. On an
eye level, high in the Virginia hillside and haze,
nestled the one-time home of the great gray cap
tain who, though he fought on the erring side,
was the greatest soldier of his time. BetAveen
the shaft and the far colonial home shimmered
the marble impressiveness of the new memorial
to Lincoln, whose very name suggests anything
but marble impressiveness ; doubtless if the choice
were given him he would exchange — " swap,"
he probably would call the transaction — with
General Washington the impressive marble for
the general's simple white shaft. And spreading
near and far was the city that seemed to our eyes
lazy and sleepy, but really was all agog with a
new tumultuousness. As evidence of the new
tumult arose lengthy stretches of flimsy build-
162

THE EAGLE CHIEPS
ings, " shacks," that alined themselves amid the
leafless trees back of and beyond the White
House, mushroom shelters that in a night had
been reared to house gi-eat scientists, flnanciers,
creators from all the walks of science and com
merce, who at the flrst call, without waiting for
the call, had jumped forward, like Eddie Murphy,
to give the best that was in them for the common
good. Home life, great business dreams and
practices, everything, they had brushed aside so
that they might devote all their alert mentality
to a countiy in dire need of unselflsh service:
surgeons of world fame, merging their greatness
in simple fashion with the splendid legions of
khaki-clad lads who had come forth from every
office building, shop, factory, farm-house ; writers
who had flung aside their half-finished tales, per
haps forever, painters who had dropped their
brushes; venerable admirals, colonels, their
sparse hair long since grown white in a service
that well merited the peaceful retirement which
had been theirs when the call came, who had put
grandchildren from their knees and kicked aside
the carpet slippers, and once more had donned
a uniform that they had thought had been folded
away forever — all now a part of a grand army
163

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
that was putting to the test, once and for all, the
old new ideals of a young political federation of
colonies, the greatest on earth, which now the
first time was welding itself into a nation.
We talked of these things, the wife and I, as we
walked slowly down the terraces. Some of her
anger had gone. She even listened quietly
enough when I tried to make her see that the
House whose practices of the day she had re
sented was not made up quite of mountebanks.
I told her of a white-haired Jew, middle aged, but
with the manner and appearance of an ancient
patriarch of his race, who in that House repre
sented not only his constituents in California, but
all that the ideals of our country represented;
who, when we could bear the insults no longer,
had been chosen to present the war declaration
which said again that government of the people
and by the people and for the people shall not
perish from this earth. And I told her about the
young congressman from Massachusetts who,
years before the Hun broke loose, had suffered
ridicule while preaching in the same House we
had just left the doctrine of preparedness,
preached it alone and lonely ; who in his sincerity
had donned the khaki also the instant the call had
164

THE EAGLE CHIEPS
come, and had scarcely reached his training-camp
when he died of illness ; had ended his career in a
blaze of glory quite as radiant as if he had stum
bled among meshes of barbed wire with a bullet
through his brave heart.
" Any one, every one," I said gently to the wife
— our talk had made us friends again — " has a
bit of brain blurring, has to grope about mentally,
during the first half-awake hours in the early
morning. Every one, you yourself," I went on as
we stood near the Peace Monument at the foot
of the hill, waiting for our car, " needs the shock
of cold water on the face in the morning to rouse
the old bean into clear thought and action. And
listen, old girl : we may not be aroused yet, we
certainly are not as wide-awake as we should be ;
but when the big shock comes, and jolts us into
wide wakefulness — "
But our car had come.

165

CHAPTEE VII
SHERMAN WAS RIGHT
"Then I can write a washing-bill in Babylonic
cuneiform.
And tell you every detail of Caractacus's uniform.
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern major-gineral!"
ALTHOUGH the number of brand-new young
army and navy offlcers pa-ring the streets
and lobbies and peacock alleys of the hotels in
the capital in these days is almost as large as
Mr. Ingersoll's collection of dollar watches,
Washington is the last place in America to go to
get the best, the only correct, idea and appreci
ation of our new army. Despite the fact that
Mr. Heinz and Mr. IngersoU have fewer pickles
and watches combined than the capital has sol
diers and sailors in uniform, if one were to con
tent oneself with an idea of the army gained
merely by studying the display it offers at the
166

SHEEMAN WAS EIGHT
capital, one would be in danger of arriving at
wholly false, unfair conclusions.
When a great nation explosively takes up arms,
somebody, of course, has to hang round offices
and do desk work, while the mightier horde of
somebodies rushes to the glorious Field of the
Cloth of Khaki. And there, in the tented cities
of the training camps, not in Washington, is the
place to see, really to see, the new army, out un
der the open sky, in the sunshine or in the rain
or in the wind or in the cold and the blackness
of night. There, in the open field, are congre
gated the lads who do not merely want to " do
something for the country," who do not enter
into the great adventure with misty notions of
what that " something " is. Theirs' is the scheme
of life as simple as the call of the whip-poor-will :
they want to don a suit of soldier clothes and
train long enough, just long enough, to learn
which part of a rifle is the trigger, and then
race up the inclined gang-plank leading to the
gray sides of an outgoing transport, calling back
happily as they race along: " G'-by, folks!
Look me up in Berlin ! " These are the lads of
the new army who are training on sun-soaked,
rain-soaked, sun-hardened, ice-hardened drUl-
167

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
flelds in the East and the West. They are not
" paciflsts at heart," as some of the executives,
regardless of militant and grandiose messages
and speeches, far above them are. They are one
with Frank Swett Black, now dead, who, because
he was a master of the concrete, could say what
they can only think:
The fate of nations is still decided by their wars.
You may talk of orderly tribunals and learned
referees; you may sing in your schools the gentle
praises of the quiet life; you may strike from your
books the last note of every martial anthem, and yet
out in the smoke and thunder will always be the
tramp of horses and the silent, rigid, upturned face.
Men may prophesy and women pray, but peace -will
come here to abide forever on this earth only when the
dreams of childhood are the accepted charts to guide
the destinies of men.
They, the boys in the open, not the lads in
Washington, are the real new army. I knew one
of them, and he is a type. He was a young re
porter, within the draft age, when the war be
gan. Some one in Washington knew of his abil
ity. Washington did him the honor of sending
for him. He told me when he came back what
had happened there. 168,

SHEEMAN WAS EIGHT
" Nothiug doing," he said. " They wanted me
to do some kind of press-agent publicity to take
the curse off the knocks in the newspapers about
the mosquitos in Yaphank, Long Island, and the
raps against the other sites selected for canton
ments. They said they 'd give me sixty dollars
a week — pretty soft, what? — to write the stuff
they want to get before the public, and they said
they 'd see that I got a commission in a short
time. But I told them nothing doing."
"Why not?" I asked.
" Well," he said bashfully, fixing his glance on
his shoes, " I 'd only be a sort of clerk there. I
don't think a husky guy like me has any busi
ness sitting around a desk in Washington, or
just handing out tracts and warning the boys
about cigarettes in a Y. M. C. A. hut in France,
or ducking the real stuff the way a lot of these
rah-rah boys are doing. I ain't looking for trou
ble, but if I 've got to get it, I don't want it to be
from a type-writer falling on my foot or poison
ing myself to death by sucking an indelible-pen
cil. This is a good job they 're offering me, and
it 's darn nice of them ; but if I took it, I
would n't feel comfortable, and I know the folks,
my father and mother, would n't like it. They 'd
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THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
just keep fretting, like I would, over taking a
job that was just keeping me out of the draft.
Get me? I would n't feel comfortable."
So he enlisted as a private. I saw him only
once after that. It was round Thanksgiving day,
I remember. They had let him come home from
the training camp because daily drills on soggy
fields down on Long Island had been a bit too
much for him; six years spent largely pounding
a type-writer in a hot offlce had not fitted him
for sudden entry upon a life in the cold outdoors,
and temporarily he had lost his voice. But a few
days of vacation set him right again, and then
he went back to Long Island to resume his drills
again. And the last I heard about him was just
an item that he was over in France, taking things
easy, prone in a field, and comfortable at last,
" with a big blue mark on his forehead and the
back blown out of his head."
He was one of the new army. Doubtless there
are many like him among the soldier lads who
throng the capital now, but, unfortunately, one
constantly is falling over the kind of " officer "
who wants " to do something " up to, but not
quite including, a trip to a front-line trench,
where one stands waiting through the black night
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SHEEMAN WAS EIGHT
for the whispered order to go over the top with
the best of luck, and the deril take the foremost.
Threatening them had been that pesky draft ; and
if one is of draft age, one stands a chance, which
comes uncomfortably close to a certainty, that
one will have to go through that very experience
in a black trench some night.
" Not for me! " secretly says the youngster of
canniness. " Gee ! I 'm only twenty-seven and
perfectly healthy, so the draft is going to get me.
It 's me to see if father or Uncle Jim or some
body doesn't know some one in Washington.
Maybe I can get a job down there that won't be
so bad. Anyway, truck-drivers and chaps like
that can carry a gun and do the dirty work better
than I can ; but there are a lot of other things to
be done at Washington which a man like myself
can do, and a truck-driver can't." (Which is an
argument containing elements of logic. ) Where
upon father or uncle or a business associate or
close friend grasps an end of a wire and begins
to pull it. Then, when the wires have been
pulled hard enough, the youngster one day fiashes
forth in his brand-new khaki brooksbrothers or
searsroebucks, now a proud clerk dressed in the
uniform of a lieutenant, captain, or, if over
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THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
thirty, even a major. Thereafter in manner, if
not in actual words, he sighs to an admiring
world, " Yep, I just chucked everything and came
down here to do my bit."
Not that all the specimens of the new young
army which one stumbles upon steadily in Wash
ington are just like that lad. Not by a great
deal. Momentarily one meets up with young
novelists, brokers, brilliant newspaper and maga
zine writers, lawyers, actors, advertising exjierts,
all now in uniform, who are beyond the draft
age, but still young enough and game enough to
give up salaries, business incomes; they have
sublet the fiat or the little new house with its
trimmings of wooden lace in the suburbs —
" First and Second Mortgage Hall," as one of
them called his home — and come to an army or
navy desk in Washington at half, a third, or a
fifth of their regular incomes. One of them had
long been receiving a salary of two thousand dol
lars a week (real money, not stage) as a movie
hero, but gave it up to serve as a captain at about
one fortieth of his accustomed wage. And they
tackle their new jobs with the zeal of a convert
tackling his newest religion, with an emotional
energy that brings smiles, sometimes cynical
172

SHEEMAN WAS EIGHT
smiles, to the bronzed faces of West Point and
Annapolis alumni, to whom this war business is
— well, just a regular business. And it is good
that the emotional pep is in them: Newman,
Ignatius, St. Augustine, Orestes Browuson, Eose
Hawthorne Lathrop, all tackled a new job suc
cessfully because they went at it with a fervor of
which only a convert who has set aside physical
and mental comforts seems capable.
Mingling with these are the "regulars," to
whom the new excitement is merely a speeding
up in a trade that calls for no outburst of emo
tion. No American city hives harder workers
than this aggregate of regular soldiers and vol
unteers; but the whole military impression in
Washington is not edification unalloyed, for the
reason that the lad with a pull almost always
lands a Washington billet and is constantly bob
bing up before the risitor. Into the hotel rooms
of busy men of influence, into their offices, their
homes, stream the youngsters of draft age, all
presenting their "letters," all "anxious to do
something," so long as it will keep them in an
offlce that is tightly enough closed to prevent a
severe draft on the back of the neck. The hor
rors of war to them are centered in their inability
173

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
to get a room with bath at the Shoreham or
Willard while bothering everybody for a Wash
ington job that includes a commission. And the
quality of their brains and hearts retrogrades in
direct ratio to the length of the war. For as the
country saw our end of the Big Mix-up stretch
through a summer and autumn and winter and
on into earliest spring, the capital began to rain
bearers of letters of introduction who had held
out until the last, not having the gumption in
the earliest days to exchange home pleasures for
even the discomforts of Washingion, but all
waiting until a draft number was beginning to
reach right out and bite 'em. Among them were
countless youths who, fearing the shoulder blis
ters that might come from carrying a rifle, had
tried at least to get a commission in au offlcers'
training camp, but had been rejected because they
lacked the hearts and the brains and the guts that
an offlcer should have. Back they went to their
home towns then, and to inquisitive neighbors
they described their brain and soul ailments as
" eye strain," " slight physical defect," or, to
quote the commonest term for head and heart
hollowness, " flat feet '' ; whereas the chief trou
ble was that the army men who had probed into
174

SHEEMAN WAS RIGHT
their general mental make-up had early discov
ered in the training camps that any one of them
could comfortably wear a demi-tasse for a high
hat. And do\\'n they came to Washington next,
knowing that their draft number was still snap
ping at their heels, and began to look round for
an offlce desk with a Southem exposure and a
suit of working-clothes that included at least one
bar at the shoulder, leather puttees, and a pair
of third-act spurs warranted to play the very
dickens with the rugs on the Willard's Peacock
Alley or to gouge all the varnish off the Govern
ment's desk-chairs.
" This whole dam' town," drawled an admiral
of the navy, famous for his own efficiency and his
biting wit, as he talked one day, months after
we had entered the war, of the kind of Washing
ton " offlcer " whose uniform is common in the
hotel peacock alleys — "this whole dam' place
is a town choking to death with 'efflciency.'
Washington, if you want a brief description, is
a city composed of efficiency and flat feet.
They 're down here to ' do their bit,' too, every
one of these slickers. They 're down here to get
their bite, that 's what. ' Flat feet,' ' dropped
from offlcers' training camp because of slight
175

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
physical deflciency.' ' Slight physical deficiency,'
me eye! Listen, son: that slight physical defi
ciency almost always is in the head, or they'd
have got their commissions in the line. Did you
ever hear of a boy flunked out of Annapolis class
rooms who did n't have ' bad eyes ' by the time he
stepped off the train at home? Neither did I.
These kids down here have brains enough to
match pennies, haven't they? Well, matching
pennies and being a Vice-President of the United
States and shouldering a rifle have one thing in
common : none of them requires the slightest in
telligence. And if they have n't brains enough
to handle men in battle, they ought to shoulder a
rifle ; that or shut up about ' doing their bit ' up
and down the hotel lobbies of this town. It
doesn't take an intellectual giant to grasp the
thought in an offlcer's mind when he yells,
' For-r-r-d march ! ' or, ' Over the top, and the best
of luck, and give 'em hell ! '
" But they 're mama's boys, and their mamas
and papas are as much, or more, to blame than
they are. Instead of giring the young cub a good
whaling, papa moves heaven aud Washington to
get his own son a soft job here, and then runs
out on the front stoop to give three rousing
176

¦Oh, in one of our Indian wars out West," finally he admitted

/'J

SHEEMAN WAS EIGHT
cheers when a regiment of somebody else's sons
marches by. And mama buys a sweet little serv
ice-flag to stick in the parlor window while weep
ing to the card club about * poor Ethelbert, off
to the wars.' That serrice-flag is a memorial to
the fact that Ethelbert 's landed a good job here
which pays him about thirty iron men a week
more than he could earn in any place one door
beyond the old man's office.
" Some of these boys who 've got commissions
here are doing splendid work — in the Intelli
gence Department, or inspecting motor-engines
that they learned a lot about while running their
own cars or while puttering round papa's auto
mobile factory ; or they 've been on magazines or
newspapers or been turning out best sellers, and
so can do a lot of stuff here that a trained writer
can do a darn sight better than a regular army
or navy man can. But there 's a gosh-awful
bunch around this town who are just clerks and
ought to be considered as such. Even they are
needed here, but for heaven's sake let 'em get out
of the idea that they are making sacrifices, ' doing
their bit,' and all that monkey business. Give
'em the jobs that '11 exempt them from the draft
if they have n't the nerve to go into the line as
177

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
privates — and they haven't. But it gets my
dander up every time I see one of these clerks, all
decked out in uniforms and spurs and things, like
Astor's sorrel mare, and then see a big, two-fisted,
red-blooded private named Hymendinger or
Sweeney, who 's in this thing to see it through or
get his gizzard blown through his backbone while
trying, breeze along and have to bring his hand
up in respectful salute to a clerk who has n't got
moral fiber enough to make a pair of laces for
Private Hymendinger's bow-legged canvas leg
gings." He 's awful rough, this admiral is. Sometimes
he talks som'thin' terrible. I happened to catch
him when he was in a fairish humor, but when
he 's in real good form his talk would make those
mamas and papas who think other mamas and
papas should supply the boys for the trenches
quite certain that he is a mean old thing, so there !
His whole theory of the art and practice of war
he expresses in a motto of one line, " Kick 'em in
the slats ! " He is crude enough to think that
spies should be shot, on the principle that one
unshot spy will cause the deaths of innumerable
American boys. Wholly differing in ideas with
the good ladies who send flowers to murderers,
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SHEEMAN WAS EIGHT
and therefore differing with their prototypes in
trousers at Washington, his voice sounds lonely
in a land of sentimentalists administered by sen
timentalists as he advocates not only the shooting
of spying Teutons, but also the shooting of Amer
ican lads caught sleeping when on sentry duty,
inasmuch as sleeping sentries mean unnecessary
deaths to their brothers in the trenches. He
shares at least one idea with the great gray flght
ing machine that for years has beaten the whole
world to a standstill and will continue victorious
until we have sent a greater machine against it —
he shares the Hindenburg idea with the rest of
the " regulars " of the army and navy, who surely
know as much about their trade as the congenital
paciflst does, who believe that a nation has no
business in war unless it goes along with its work
on the theory that war necessitates vulgar things,
such as sticking a bayonet into a swine's belly
when the swine charges, and turning the steel
round half a dozen times without once pausing
to sigh, " Eeally, swine, this hurts me more than
it does you."
This same splendid naval officer is quickest to
praise the good work of the young and middle-
aged volunteer officers that one flnds at desks all
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THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
over the capital now, even though the emotional
ardor of the new desk offlcers at times causes him
to share the indulgent smiles of his unemotional
colleagues in the regular serrice. It was he who
told me of the over-anxious young man who gave
an unpleasant moment to the owner and pub
lisher of a New York daily newspaper published
in the German language.
In the course of his Washington duties the
arduous young man happened upon a paragraph
(in German, of course) printed on the front page
of the New York daily. The young man jumped
up with an indignant exclamation, made a broad
blue-pencil mark round the offending paragraph,
and then, knowing that the publisher of the
paper happened to be in Washington, summoned
him up on the carpet.
" What do you mean, sir, by printing that? "
cried the young man, tapping the marked para
graph angrily. The German-American newspa
per man adjusted his glasses, read the paragraph,
and looked upon his inquisitor in amazement.
"Why, my dear sir," cried the publisher,
" that is merely the British casualty list for the
past month, officially sent forth by the British
war authorities themselves. That list is first
180

SHEEMAN WAS EIGHT
submitted to the censor in London, then it is
handed to the Associated Press to be cabled to
this country, next it is passed upon by the naval
censorship office in Broad Street, New York, be
fore being released to the New York office of the
Associated Press. And then the cable is edited
in the Associated Press office, and finally sent
broadcast to the association's newspaper clients
in America, of whom my paper happens to be one,
for publication. You will find that cable des
patch, sir, in almost every paper in America this
morning, just as we have printed it, except that
one of my staff, of course, translated it literally
into German for our paper."
" That s it," stormed the young man, pacing
his office. " The thing looks so damnable
printed in German!"
There one has an example of the meticulous-
ness of the novice which at its worst is only amus
ing. More edifying is the fine zeal which one
sees at its best among the newly made officers,
just out of mufti, who compose an important
section of the Intelligence Department of the
army. The very secretiveness of their work en
courages mystery and whisperings even out
side of offlce hours. Many of them have desks
181

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
in the War College, which is one building in a
warring Washington into which, so far as I could
learn by actual experiment, the casual visitor
may not roam at will. In a way they do much
work popularly supposed to be done by our Se
cret Serrice operatives in war-time. And it is
well that so many of these new offlcers, who in a
recent cirilian state had been -writers, profes
sional men of parts, or engaged in other voca
tions that required brains, have been promptly
put, once they received their commissions, at the
intelligence work they are now doing. They
have immeasurably more intellect than the aver
age Secret Serrice operative for one thing, which
partly, not altogether, makes up for their lack
of "detective" training; and again, it is well
that somebody, anybody, at last has been put to
work at ferreting out the dangerous aliens and
their kind who are bold enough even to continue
right up to the present time to use our postal
serrice in their underground plottings.
Now it is popularly supposed that our Secret
Serrice, since our entry into the war and before,
was devoting its great machinery and its splen
did archives to the work of running down spies.
The Secret Serrice was not and is not doing any-
182

SHEEMAN WAS EIGHT
thing of the sort. Under a fool law passed by
Congress about ten years ago the Secret Serrice
must confine its actirities solely to running down
and arresting counterfeiters and protecting the
person of the President! We have one of the
best Secret Serrice organizations, considering its
inadequate size, in the world, and the serrice has
been, especially since the Ciril War, adding to
its archives until to-day its " rogues' gallery "
and kindred photographs and data are of vast
value, or would be if the laws of the United
States permitted the Secret Serrice to perform
the duties for which it was organized and devel
oped. But it is only by breaking the laws of
the United States that the Secret Serrice can
interest itself in spies or any other law-breakers,
unless the criminal be a counterfeiter or an as
sailant of the person of the President. Never
theless, citizens of the land almost to a man,
even trained " crime " reporters on the great
metropolitan newspapers, who pride themselves
on knowing about every New York police captain
by his first name, persist in beliering that when
a spy or German plotter is arrested his detection
was due to the Secret Serrice. The crime ex
perts of the newspapers always — not usually,
183

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
but always — are insisting in print that " an au
tomobile filled with Secret Service men dashed
up to the building and arrested Fritz von Frank-
ftirter and his entire offlce staff on the charge
that the Teutons had riolated the espionage act."
They are not " Secret Serrice men " who dash
up and grab Fritz and his brother felons. The
Secret Serrice men would like nothing so much
as an opportunity to devote their talents and
equipment to that very work of trailing Fritz
and putting him away for a long, long time ; but
the law says, " No, you must devote your whole
energies solely to running down counterfeiters
and supplying enough men to guard the Presi
dent when he takes the air."
During all the sickening months, years, that
bombs were bursting on our docks, in our muni
tions factories, aboard our outbound ships, there
were fewer Secret Serrice men engaged in trying
to "get" the perpetrators of these and like
crimes throughout the country than there are,
by actual count, chorus men in any good-sized
Broadway musical comedy; and it was only by
subterfuge, by " borrowing " Secret Serrice oper
atives from the Treasury Department, which con
trols the serrice, that even one Secret Serrice
184

SHEEMAN WAS EIGHT
man was engaged in spy work. From the days
of Boy-Ed and even earlier the Secret Serrice
implored the powers at Washington for permis
sion to swat the spies, but without success. No,
they were informed, the Department of Justice
would attend to the spies, this despite the fact
that the function of the Department of Justice
is primarily punitive, not preventive. Where
fore a great untrained body of volunteers in the
Department of Justice, thousands of amateur
sleuths, straightway began to sherlockholmes
and mess round in the muddle, while the very
efficient Secret Service men impatiently warmed
offlce-chairs in Washington and New York, pray
ing that the monotony would be varied by a swing
round the circle with the President, or that
Beppo would begin again to try to coin anemic
lead quarters in his cellar in Little Italy, any
thing that would give the operatives a bit of
fresh air. And the administration folk not only
told the Secret Serrice to obey the law that
makes it unserriceable, but also warned it to
keep secret the fact that it was not permitted to
search for spies, since the " public effect would
be bad if the people generally were permitted to
know that the Secret Serrice" was not secret-
185

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
serricing. But inasmuch as all Germany, any
one who cared to look up the law, knew the de
plorable conditions that hobble our Secret Serv
ice, why not let a general public that pays for
the Secret Serrice have an inkling of the new^s?
Why make a plea of " patriotism " in order to
retain on the Federal statutes a law so absurd
that the Government is ashamed to admit pub
licly that the fool statute exists? Why not kick
the law into the discard right out in front of
everybody? Congress enacted it during the sec
ond Eoosevelt Administration immediately after
it had become known that the Secret Serrice, for
good and sufflcient reasons of its own, had been
looking into certain actirities of a little group of
congressmen; and year in and year out, in ses
sion after session since the law was passed, for
years that number almost a dozen, the Secret
Service has tried to get Congress to untie the
dangerous hobbles that fasten the feet of the
splendid organization. Congress as steadily re
fuses. A month or so after we had entered the war
the Secret Service clamored so raucously that
the administration finally was influenced to find
a way round the law whereby a few, a very few,
186

SHEEMAN WAS EIGHT
of the operatives were granted an opportunity
to take up spy investigations after a fashion.
More recently there has been a slight increase in
the number of Secret Serrice men " borrowed "
from the serrice for this work. May the Gov
ernment continue to see the light. In the mean
time the Secret Serrice is deplorably hobbled.
The loyalty and energy of the Department of Jus
tice enthusiasts are not being questioned here,
unless one stops to question the loyal quality of
a petty jealousy among some of the Department
of Justice men, who resent all attempts of the
Secret Serrice operatives to have a part in the
spy investigations.
All of which has been gone into here at some
length with the hope that the fatuous man in the
street will remember, when he is proudly talking
of the radiant qualities of our Secret Service in
war-time, that under the law that radiance must
be hidden under a bushel-basket ; also to remem
ber that the total amount being spent by the
Government to maintain both the entire Secret
Serrice of the country and the investigating
branch of the Department of Justice for a whole
year is less than von Bernstorff dealt out gladly
in one month to pay for the operation of the Ger-
187

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
man Secret Service in New York City alone.
In -view of these things, therefore, it is well
that among the examples of the new army in
Washington are several brilliant men in their
thirties and just beyond, noted in their recent
mufti days for mental power that lifted them
above the herd, who now are giring their days
and nights to hard work in the Intelligence De
partment. As to the number, " several " is the
best one can say in trying to foot up the total;
the exact number cannot, of course, be told here.
Their zeal in their work is sometimes so intense,
on duty and off, that it would often be amusing
if it were not also so commendable. They don't
quite go to the extreme of wearing false whiskers,
but the very young among them come close to
doing so.
One of their number quite had me thinking
for a time that he was the last word in secretive
ness. Across his khaki-clad chest he sported a
bit of ribbon which indicated that he had seen
service in a campaign, but he would not say in
what campaign. "While the young campaigner
and a grizzled old Indian-fighter in the regular
army and I were settling world problems in the
lobby of a hotel one evening I made it a point to
188

SHEEMAN WAS EIGHT
try to find out just which war of the world he
had served through.
" Oh, in one of our Indian wars out West,"
finally he admitted lightly but would give no de
tails. Secretly I marveled. He was in his mid-
thirties, and therefore too young, I thought, to
have been a soldier when the redskins took to the
war-path, unless he had drawn his sword at about
the mature age of eight years at Wounded Knee,
which was the last Indian argument worth while
that I in my ignorance could recall. The hoary-
headed old West Pointer standing with us, who
had " flt the Injuns " from the Bad Lands to the
Eio Grande in his younger days, snorted with
extreme politeness, and then gazed blankly at the
" youngster." Evidently the grizzled veteran of
the plains marveled over the matter longer than
I, for I had forgotten the yeung captain and his
campaign ribbon when, a few days later, I ran
into the white-haired regular army officer again.
" That kid's Indian campaign kept me awake
nights," cried the old colonel ; " so yesterday I
decided to look up his record. He 's right ; he 's
one of these Indian-flghters all right. It seems
that a short time back there was a frowzy old
chief — he 's probably died since of the D. T.'s —
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THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
out in Wyoming who liked his liquor. One
Eound-Up day this chief. Pink Elephant and his
missus. Queen Alice-Sit-By-The-Fire-Water, or
whatever her name is, — the old girl doted on the
hard stuff, too, and at last accounts was ninety
years old and threatened with cirrhosis of the
liver, — floated into town and stole a small keg
of Cheyenne's best poison. So Pink Elephant
and Alice-Sit-By-The-Fire-Water rolled the keg
up the Big Lumps to a ledge where Pink Ele
phant's two sons and Alice's sister, old Aunt Liz-
zie-Kick-A-Hole-In-The-Sky, were awaiting the
return of the travelers.
" After the flrst long drink out of the keg Pink
Elephant and his two sons declared war on the
United States of North America. They took a
second swig and declared war also on Canada and
British Columbia, and after a third round they
delivered a final ultimatum which gave Mexico
only one hour to accept their terms. Then, with
all North America beaten to its knees. Pink Ele
phant, Alice, Aunt Lizzie, and the boys rolled
the remnants of the keg to the highest crag over
looking the reservation, and until far into the
night they defied Ireland and Japan also, punc
tuating their defles with rifle-shots that were
190

SHEEMAN WAS EIGHT
threatening to make fine cut out of the local In
dian agent's whole private stock of eating plug.
" They were too far up the crag to send a po
lice-patrol wagon to the high spot to get 'em, so
the agent telephoned into town for a squad of
National Guardsmen to ride out and end the
frightful conflict. Along came the squad, and
in the band was this bad Injun-flghter we met in
the lobby here the other night. By the time he
and the rest of the guardsmen had shinned up
the crag. Pink Elephant, Alice-Sit-By-The-Fire-
Water, old Aunt Lizzie-Kick-A-Hole-In-The-Sky,
and Pink's boys were sleeping the war off ; so the
guardsmen gathered up the Injuns one by one
and poured them all back into the keg. That
was the beginning and the end of the great Pink
Elephant Uprising, but it seems that this drunk
and disorderly case got into the records of the
War Department. Therefore it became an In
dian War, therefore this lad here is entitled to
his bit of baby ribbon across the chest. Yes, sir,
that young veteran 's got a perfect right to look
upon this war with Germany in that kindly way
that all old-time campaigners look upon every
new scrap that starts."
But let the old regulars of the army and navy
191

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
wax sarcastic, the youngsters at least are fran
tically eager to learn all about their new jobs,
which is more than can be said about some of the
venerable West-Pointers and Annapolis men who
are versed only in the art of war as practised
during the smaller scraps of the preceding gen
eration. For one thing, that young man with the
harmless bit of ribbon on his proud chest had had
during a recent cirilian life, like many of his
brother officers of the new army now in Wash
ington, a business training which regular officers
wholly lack, and the war work at the capital is
largely just plain business. The young men
from civil life respect the purely military knowl
edge of the regulars and work hard to absorb
some of it ; but the set old regular not only has no
regard for the volunteer officer as a soldier, but
shows no great anxiety to learn the rules of
modern business efficiency which many of the vol
unteers know backward. If the oldsters would
only permit the young veteran of the Pink Ele
phant Uprising and his kind to jump into the
work for which they are best fitted, they could
do much to relieve the gray-haired regular army
majors and colonels and the bald-heads among
the na-yy's departmental officers in Washington
192

SHEEMAN WAS EIGHT
of an immense amount of necessary, but unimpor
tant, detail that the older men still think they
must attend to. It is a difficult mater, seemingly
impossible, to make the bald-heads understand
in Washington that this is a war that necessi
tates the renunciation of lifelong professional
habits, motheaten methods that the older regu
lar officers had been cultivating assiduously from
the day they were graduated from West Point or
Annapolis up to and including the present war-
whirl in Washington.
The " old man " still thinks he must keep up
his practice of personally reading all contracts
from beginning to end, must read and answer all
official correspondence, no matter how tririal,
relating to his own particular offlce business.
And he tries to, even with the war-rush piling his
desk so high with " business " that if he sat up
all night every night, — and some of the regular
offlcers are doing that frequently, too, in their
mad efforts to handle personally office work
which months ago had passed far beyond the
limits of a one-man job, — he couldn't begin to
take care of a fraction of the new business
dumped daily upon his desk.
Perhaps it would not be a bad idea to derise
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THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
a new program of training at the capital of a
reciprocal nature: while the new offlcers fresh
from civil life are being taught at least the rudi
ments of purely military knowledge, maybe it
would be well to send the old West Point and
Annapolis men for an hour or so a day to one or
another of the recently created war offices in
Washington over which the " captains of indus
try" preside. There, in the presence of the
" dollar-a-year " men at the head of Eed Cross
or Council of National Defense work, the old
army and na-vy departmental heads might wax
wiser merely by sitting still for an hour or so
and closely obserring the way in which a Henry
P. Darison or a Bernard M. Baruch canters right
by detail without giring it a passing nod of rec
ognition. The brilliant masters of business tech
nic who have moved Wall Street to Washington
so thoroughly that at last America, like other
lands, owns a national capital which also has be
come the real business capital of the country,
would no more think of permitting petty detail to
interfere, as the military man still insists upon
doing, with the magnificent work they are doing
in Washington than Henry P. Darison, say,
would think of remarking as he entered his old
194

SHEEMAN WAS EIGHT
office in the house of Morgan at Broad and Wall
streets, " Boy, bring me all the mail that has been
delivered to the firm of J. P. Morgan & Co. dur
ing the past twenty-four hours."
It may be recalled that in the old days of a
peacefulness that now passeth understanding the
regular navy man under his breath always re
ferred to the Naval Eeserve militiamen as the
" Naval Preserves,'' and the regular army men
looked upon the National Guard as something
that was more to be pitied than censured. And
now when department offices in Washington are
clogged with volunteer officers who never had
even militia training, but could write books on
business efficiency, the old-time regular is more
than ever certain that he personally must do
everything, big and little, in his particular mili
tary shop. The regular, who for years had not
worn a uniform when he could get out of it,
whose secret sorrow it is now that he must wear
a uniform all the time, gazes scornfully at the
fancy fur collars on the new officers' overcoats,
at the Sam Brown belts running at a rakish di
agonal across swelling chests, at fierce new spurs
that never, perhaps, will dig into the flanks of
anything more spirited than the varnished oaken
195

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
output of Grand Eapids. And to the regular
officer these expensive fur collars and natty Sam
Brown belts which the new army exults in, — or
did until the Government finally stripped these
bits of personal vanity from the shoulders of all
the grand young army of type-writing dragoons
in Washington, — were only concrete evidence
that the wearers thereof never could rise to the
intellectual heights in the art of war where it
becomes necessary to dictate a mighty military
message that runs: . "
"Dear Sir:
"Yours of the 12th inst. regarding price on pint
of ink for this ofSce at hand. For the luvva Pete,
quit sending prices on pint bottles of ink — send the
ink." It goes without saying that the thought and
text of the sample communication just quoted is
pure hypothesis. Thoroughly as do the young
men wearing brand-new uniforms in Washington
know that the business house they have just left
undoubtedly would send out for a bottle of ink
quite as snappily as that, quite as well, and sadly,
do they know that Washington military bu
reaucracy never would venture upon such snap-
196

SHEEMAN WAS EIGHT
piness. The way one gets a new bottle of ink
in the War Department is first to salute and ask
one's immediate superior to salute and ask his
superior to salute and ask his superior to begin
to tune up the entire mass of machinery which
must be called into play when a government office
needs a fresh bottle of ink. Week by week the
campaign to capture the bottle of ink progresses ;
right arms salute with a whirring as of a great
fiock of -windmills, battery after battery of type
writers are wheeled into action. Then one day
a month or two later, as the bottle of ink, pant
ing from its long flight, but still leaping from
bough to bough and from crag to crag to escape
the lasso of bright crimson tape being flung at
its neck — about this time the new young officer
who a month before had asked for a bottle of ink
calls an office boy to his desk, reaches into his
private pay-envelop, and cries, " Jimmy, for
Gawd's sake run out and buy me a bottle of
ink ! " Meanwhile the red tape lasso continues
to —
But a mere mention of the crimson tape, the
red woolen yarn, and the various other ruddy-
hued skeins and spools of entanglements, all
piled high for instant use on the dusty depart-
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THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
mental shelves in Washington, gives one pause
before entering upon a dissertation of the tape
entanglements. One must stop and take a deep breath before
touching even lightly upon a few, very few, con
crete instances of the great indoor sport of un
tangling the tape.

198

CHAPTEE VIII
ALL BOUND ROUND WITH A RED WOOL STRING
So slow to start,
So fleet of foot — when far afield!
NOTHING is so impressive round the capital
in these days as the speed with which bu
reaucracy unties the surrounding entanglements
of crimson tape long enough to let a new idea
in — nothing, perhaps, except the speed with
which bureaucracy chucks the new idea right out
again. Take, for example, the case of Barney Flynn
of Kenosha, Wisconsin. We shall call him Bar
ney Flynn and say he is from Kenosha because
that 's his name and that 's where he is from.
Incidentally, Barney is a living proof that oc
casionally there is great good even in war con
tractors. Barney had an idea, which he brought
to Washington, and he continued to push his idea
through the portals of bureaucracy until he and
his idea soon were tangled up in one brand of
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THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
red-tape that Houdini himself might hesitate
about attempting to untie.
This worst brand of tape is the sort that has
stamped all along its length the legend, repeated
over and over again, " The department never did
anything like that before." Consequently, Bar
ney Flynn was licked before he started, for he
had had the audacity to come to town to try to
influence the War Department actually to do
something which it never had done before!
Barney's idea was simplicity itself. Listen.
The United States had just entered the World
War; it was about to draft an army of hundreds
of thousands of young men. Young men must
have something to sleep upon at night, especially
lads so utterly fagged out as these new soldier
boys were sure to be after the untold hours of
drill that would be their share in American and
European training camps; therefore the depart
ment would need hundreds of thousands of new
cots ; and Barney Flynn had come from Kenosha
to Washington to tell the War Department that
his firm, which happens to own the largest bed-
making plant in the world, could turn out ten
thousand of more light steel cots a day, rirtually
indestructible, at a price considerably less per
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ALL BOUND EOUND
cot than the department was paying for the
flimsy affairs of wood and canvas that probably
first came into use during the Second Punic War,
and which must be replaced every few weeks.
Keep in mind, please, that the army needed
cots in a tremendous hurry, that Barney Flynn
could guarantee to turn cots out in a tremendous
hurry, that he was offering the War Department
the best model of an article to be found in the
market for less money than the department wasf
paying for the worst, all of which seems perfectly
fair. Also be good enough to remember that
these simple facts were all thoroughly known to
the cot-buying officials of the War Department.
On the face of things it would seem to the average
two-legged man that if Barney Flynn were to
walk up to a large sorrel horse, blind with cata
racts and stone-deaf in both ears, and make such
a proposition, the old sorrel nag would still have
enough horse sense left to whinny its approval
instanter. Ah, little does the average two-
legged man realize the importance which bureau
cracy places on its unanswerable argument,
" We 've never done it before."
The War Department had no cots except a
very few of the canvas and wooden contraptions
201

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
of antiquity, for which it paid $3.75 apiece.
Barney Flynn's cot, made of old railroad steel
reroUed, as comfortable as a bed, attractive to
the eye and capable of supporting a dead weight
of more than three thousand pounds, — all of
which Barney demonstrated satisfactorily to the
department, — could be purchased from Barney
at the rate of ten thousand a day at a cost of
only 13.10 each. An order for, say, two hundred
thousand of the best cots would mean a saring
to the department of over |130,000 as compared
with an order for the same number of worst cots,
not to mention the immeasurable economy in
buying a cot that would have to be replaced every
few weeks.
Even before Barney had breezed into Washing
ton all these indisputable facts had been ham
mered at bureaucracy. The top-notch salesmen
of Barney's firm had bobbed up in the capital
immediately upon the outbreak of war, and
with confidence in their innocent hearts had told
the department all. If the salesmen had had
a bit more experience with the methods of what
has not inappropriately been called "Washing
ton, B. C," they would have known that if a thing
" never has been done before," it is next to im-
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ALL BOUND ROUND
possible to find a bureau chief who offhand will
do it. There ain't no such animal. The cot
salesmen should have remembered the experiences
of predecessors innumerable who vainly had
tried to offer the Government the first successful
Lewis gun, the first successful submarine, and
uncounted other first successful military ideas
which Americans of initiative sadly had to wrap
up again, and then successfully peddle to some
other Govemment. And so the crack salesmen
were compelled to decamp from Washington in
disgust and sadly break the news to Barney
Flynn that the directing military-supplies gentle
man of a cotless army, which was about to enter
the greatest war, had refused even to discuss the
self-erident fact that countless cots of some sort
would have to be purchased immediately. The
heap big chiefs at Washington, so the salesmen
reported, had listened blankly to all the details
offered, and then had solemnly tumed away and
resumed silently the chewing of the cud.
" Well, men," said Barney Flynn, " I 'm not
a regular salesman, but I think I '11 buy me a
one-way ticket to Washington and stick round
there for a spell.'' Whereupon into Washington
from Kenosha slid Barney across a rainbow of
203

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
hope. As proof that when an idea does get far
enough past the outer red-tape entanglements its
progress is rapid, one has only to be told that
very few Washington days and nights had passed
over the fair, but beaded, brow of Barney Flynn
before he had brought bureaucracy round to the
point where it was giring vent to spoken words.
Instead of listening blankly and then turning
away in silence to resume the cud-chewing, Bar
ney in time had progressed so far that a first lord
of the army bedchamber opened his mouth long
enough to say, " No ! "
Thus encouraged, Barney Flynn sat up most
of that night in his hotel room in Washington
arranging photographs, blue prints, a prospectus
describing his cot, and then sat round for an
other hour while trying to marshal a string of
effective arguments into line. But try and try
as he would, Barney could think of only one silly
old argument : that his idea of offering the best
article for less money than the prospective cus
tomer was paying for the worst had an element
of common sense concealed in it somewhere.
Barney stormed the portals of bureaucracy again
and again and again. He varied his daily strug
gles through the red-tape entanglements one aft-
204

ALL BOUND EOUND
ernoon by bringing along a little army he had
drafted himself — about a score of husky work
men of an average weight of 165 and a fraction
pounds. He set up one of his cots for the edifica
tion of bureaucracy, and then commanded eight
een units of his little army — a total weight of
2976 pounds of humanity, or all that could find a
foothold on the springs — to stand on the cot si
multaneously. And the eighteen stoop upon the
assembled cot, the human overhang of the grin
ning group clasping one another about the waist
to keep its balance; and the suspended cot-
springs held the great weight without a single
strand of steel wire showing any signs that the
cot had begun to rip, ravel, or run down at the
heel. Straightaway bureaucracy decided that this
persistent Barney person must be squelched. If
a thunderous " No " ! delivered each day -with in
creasing volume, would not rid the department
of his presence, it was time that the final step
was taken. Down from a dusty shelf bureau
cracy took a phonograph record of its pet argu
ment, all bound round with red-woolen string,
and after dusting it off began to let it squeak its
rusty -throated refrain : " Your idea has its mer-
205

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
its, but — it has never been done before." And
then one morning when Barney Flynn strolled
into the department to spend the day as usual,
listening to the record squeak and squeak, a first
lord of the army bedchamber greeted him with
brand-new animation. On the bureaucrat's face
was a smile that glows best on the face of a man
who realizes that for some time he has been
merely stubborn, but suddenly has hit upon an
argument that really is unanswerable.
"Flynn," cried Bureaucracy, triumphantly,
"your cot is impossible. We've leamed that
your cot would take up about twice as much
room in the hold of a freighter as the canvas cot.
Of course whatever cot we buy will have to be
shipped abroad in great quantities. In these
days of ship shortage lack of bulk is all impor
tant." And genius haring spoken, the office boy held
the door open wide for the final exit of Barney
Flynn. " Interesting, but unimportant," said Barney,
removing his overcoat and pulling up a chair.
" What 's the life of a canvas cot? "
" Ninety days."
" What 's the life of one of our steel cots? "
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ALL BOUND EOUND
" Er — years ; indefinite, I take it."
" Well, for once you take it right. Ships car
rying the canvas cots to France would have to
cross the ocean four times a year to keep the
initial shipment replenished. The same fleet of
freighters, loaded with steel cots, would make the
trip once, and never have to make it again for
the same purpose as long as the war lasted. So
that ends that argument. Come! come! come!
it 's your next shot." ,
" Well — er — as we 've told you, repeatedly,
Flynn, you are suggesting an idea which never
has been tried in the whole history of this de
partment." Which left the entire matter back
where it had been before God made iron and man
made steel. And in the meantime the patter of
thousands on thousands of the toddling feet of
the new young, grand young Army of the Eepub
lic could be heard as it began to approach from
afar off, and it had not a crib in which to lay its
head. Zowie! Suddenly upon Washington burst
Julius Eosenwald as head of the supplies
department of the Adrisory Commission of the
Council of National Defense.
" Cots ! " cried Julius. 207

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
" We make 'em," said Barney.
" What kind? " said Julius.
" Best for least," said Barney.
" How fast? " said Julius.
" Ten thousand a day," said Barney.
" Then why in the name of God and America
do you stand around here talking about them ? "
screamed Julius. " Make 'em ! dammit ! make
'em ! "
Barney Flynn's office equipment is his hat and
the handiest long-distance telephone operator.
He grabbed his hat, and in one jump landed feet
first in a telephone-booth. And as he is the only
person in the world who can squeeze compar
atively quick serrice out of the Washington tel
ephone company, it was not so indecently long
a time before he was talking to the home plant
in the middle West and telling the boss that he
had better begin to rout out the night shift, inas
much as the factory had just got a little order
that might take up a lot of the boys' spare mo
ments. As the result of a brief talk -with a
genius among merchants, who, throughout a ca
reer that had placed him in the forefront of a
nation of mighty commercial geniuses, never had
spurned goods because they happened to be the
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ALL BOUND EOUND
best for the least money, Barney Flynn had re
ceived an initial order for five hundred thousand
of his cots at $3.10 each, a saving of 65/;ents
on each cot for the War Department, or a total
saring, as compared with an order for the same
number of cots of the Second Punic War type,
of $325,000 on this first order alone. If the steel
cots had been sold at a dollar more apiece than
the old cots they would have been worth the
money to the army. Almost before Barney could
get the Washington exchange to put his second
long-distance call through to the home plant he
had sold the army |3,000,000 worth of cots, once
real business had taken bureaucracy by the
throat and had shaken some sense into it. Then
Barney evolved a hospital " bed " from the hum
ble framework of his cot, lengthened the legs of
the cot and ran a metal rod high above the
springs to support mosquito netting, and he
promptly sold the Government an initial con
signment of a quarter of a million of the hospital
cots also. And only a few additional weeks of
our war preparations had come and gone when
the light little steel cots were forming real beds
for weary soldier boys throughout the sixteen
national training camps, the sixteen National
209

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
Army cantonments, and steadily were, and still
are, being shipped to France. Doubtless of vast
importance is the fortune saved on each order for
the new cots, but of much more interest to all of
us is a comment from the front concerning these
cots which recently I happened upon. It means
more than mere fortunes, because it tells of
added rest and content which cots that bureau
cracy had spumed are bringing to our soldier
boys in France. The comment on the cots oc
curred in the opening sentences of a letter from
an American lad abroad which was published in
a New York newspaper^ during our first war
winter. "Dear Jo-Jo, Jo and Joe," the letter began,
" our present camp is far superior to our first [in
France]. We sleep in little iron beds, and I
tell you the boys feel mighty good at the idea
of going to bed for the first time in four
months ! "
In riew of which one might say that Barney
Flynn, who merely stood and waited, also served.
But, unfortunately, they are not all Barney
Flynns, these war-order folk who form a great
part of the boom-town element which clutters up
iNew York Evening Sun, January 2, 1918.
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ALL BOUND ROUND
the capital. Wearing through the crowds in
hungry fashion, in the hotel lobbies, the streets,
clamoring for audience before the seats of the
mighty, are the proflteers, in numbers so osten
tatious that their omnivorous omnipresence has
caused Washington to coin the excellent word
" patrioteer." And cheek by jowl with the pa-
trioteers, brothers in spirit, are unnumbered in
ventors of the claptrap class. These, too, jam
the corridors and entrances as they chatter of
the merits of their particular patented camp-kit,
belt buckle, or what not, which as a rule would
be useful to no one except the inventor. If
adopted by the Government, the knickknack in a
day would put the inventive promoter in the en-
riable state where annually he could swear off
his war taxes-.
And then there is the other kind of " inventor,"
he of the long hair and baggy clothes and moody
countenance, pathetic souls who, like most of the
rest of us, differ from the admittedly insane
chiefly in the matter of residence. Let a yelp
of excitement arise in any place in the land, and
straightway the half witted will flock toward the
uproar. Elijah Dowie had n't been in Manhat
tan a day when Carrie Nation, the gentleman
211

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
who knew himself as "John the Baptist the
Second," and all the rest of the grand army of
crackpates were coursing up and down Broad
way. And so the cordons of red-tape round the
bureaucracies have at least one merit : they keep
the half witted and their cracked ideas without
the portals ; if one of them got far enough indoors
he might have his " idea " adopted by some bu
reaucrat who, if he had a little more brains,
would be half witted himself. One wonders
where these poorly clad, underfed " inventors "
scraped together the car-fare to join the crowd
that forms the new capital ov how they live when
they get there. To these poor derils the devel
opment of a counter-irritant for the U-boat peril
seems chiefly to absorb their " thought." Nets
projecting round the water-line of transports, no
tions quite as absurd about "magnetizing" the
U-boats and so rendering them helpless^ these
and similar suggestions form by far the greater
part of the stock of intellectual contributions
which they seek to bring personally to the atten
tion of the Naval Consulting Board. It should
be said in passing that Eear-Admiral William
Strother Smith and his associates at the head of
the inventions section of the new Naval Con-
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ALL BOUND EOUND
suiting Board, and their co-workers in the inven
tions branch of the army, now are welcoming any
and all suggestions ; for tucked away in the silli
est notion sometimes may be found the germ of
a valuable idea.
One of the crackpates I met up with had blue
prints of a war-ship which was to revolutionize
narigation. Away with elaborate engines for
marine motive power; just rig up a powerful
pump in the ship, and the thing was done ! Be
low the water-line of the bow of the ship designed
by this particular genius was to be a big round
hole, with a similar hole below the water-line at
the stern. The bow hole and the opening at the
stern respectively were to form the entrance and
exit of a great steel pipe which was to run the
length of the hold. And attached to the pipe
line was to be a pump of tremendous suction
power, which would draw the water into the pipe
at the bow and send it out the stern opening, a
racing " cable "or " rope " of water which would
pull the ship along at incredible speed. It was
a cute little idea and extremely simple.
And then I got into conversation with still an
other who had a scheme for wiping out the whole
German navy in one quick moment, if the Gov-
213

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
ernment would but listen to him. All he wanted
the na-vy to do was to cut all the Atlantic cables
quietly, close to the European shore, and then
have the eastern ends of the cables picked up
and hurriedly towed westward vrith great speed
and secrecy. Next these loose ends of the cables
were to be fastened to some good strong West In
dian island capable of standing the strain, and
the cables were to be stretched tautly, learing
them in long strings just below the surface of the
ocean and not far out from and generally par
allel with the Atlantic coast of the United States.
Powerful mines were to be attached to the
strings of cables, so close together that no fleet
of ships could sail over the cables without some
rital part of each vessel being compelled to pass
directly above at least one of the mines. Then,
when all was set, and all the mines had been
connected up with electric wiring, a swift Amer
ican fleet was to cross the Atlantic and steam so
tantalizingly close to the German coast that the
whole German grand fleet would dash forth to
give battle. Instantly the American fleet was to
turn tail and flee for home harbors ; and just as
the pursuing German fleet was crossing above the
mine-laden cables — pop! pop! pop! and the
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ALL BOUND EOUND
whole German navy would — But the details
of the horribly bloody slaughter are too sicken
ing to go into here. The idea presented only
one possibility that prevented it from being per
fect: maybe the German fleet would not come
out! Now, here was a genius who had a suggestion
which had one thing in common with Barney
Flynn's idea — neither had " ever been done be
fore." Eed-tape, or the stupidity which always
is the concomitant of red-tape, had treated both
ideas the same and barred them. The insane
man and the man with the real idea were iden
tical in the eyes of bureaucracy. Therefore bu
reaucracy does not reason, therefore never is
right except by accident; and the present is the
last time in the history of the world to set any
store on accident.
How War Department bureaucracy can coddle
an unimportant bit of picayune official procedure
and exalt it to the high dignity of an unbreakable
norm is best illustrated by the recent experiences
in Washington of one of the country's foremost
authorities on the science of forestry, a science,
alas ! in which the nation is woefully deficient in
knowledge and worse in practice. The scientist
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THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
in mind was anxious to place his splendid stock
of special knowledge at the serrice of a warring
United States, wherefore he was overjoyed upon
receiring an urgent appeal from highest officers
on America's battle-line in France, who knew of
his remarkable mental equipment and energy, to
hurry through the formalities of getting a com
mission and then join them as quickly as possible
abroad. The American soldiers of very high
rank had seen as soon as they arrived within
earshot of the German guns in France that this
leader in the science of forestry could render the
American Army abroad a certain serrice they
had in mind in better fashion than any man in
all America.
The forestry expert, so the army men had ex
plained when sending for him, first would have to
get his commission before he would be able to
work properly with the army on the big job that
had been mapped out for him by the general offl
cers abroad. Immediately the scientist, who is
not old and is in perfect health, went before an
army surgeon in Boston for his physical examina
tion. The surgeon noted a defect in the scien
tist's left eye. Yes, admitted the potential major,
that left eye was n't of much use and had n't been
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ALL BOUND EOUND
since childhood ; nevertheless, it never had inter
fered, he added, with the quality and quantity
of his work, a fact self-evident from the high
place he had taken in his profession. And then
he told in detail who it was that had asked, al
most commanded him to come into the serrice,
the urgency of the need of his serrices in France,
and the additional detail that the circumstance
of the foggy left eye was known to the officers
abroad who had sent for him. And the army
surgeon in Boston, who figuratively was as far
from the War Department's red-tape counter and
its influences as the officers in France were, was
still a normal human being. He " passed '' the
scientist quickly, gave him a clean bill of health.
Promptly the forestry man wound up his affairs,
got his commission, and bought his khaki clothes
with the little gold leaf on the shoulders. And
then after kissing his young wife and two chil
dren good-by in Boston, he jumped into a taxicab
headed for the South Station, and immediately
made a serious blunder : he bought a ticket that
would take him to Washington.
He did n't want to go to Washington, he had
to go. Preliminary work on his new job kept
him there until the eve of the day he was to sail
217

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
for France, kept him there so close to his sailing-
time, in fact, that he had to bring his -wife and
children to the capital for the flnal farewell.
Then, just before he was to board the train that
was to take him to his point of embarkation for
France, he and a little group of brother-offlcers
who were to accompany him abroad went
through the military etiquette of calling at the
War Department to make a formal risit of brev
ity in the offlce of their immediate superiors be
fore learing for France. There was a pleasant
little function of a few minutes' duration, hand
shakes, a word of good luck and farewell from
the superiors, then the open door leading to
the avenue and the glories of fair France.
The new major was in the act of backing re
spectfully out the open door. Ah, little did he
know that on the instant one of those little
bearded Olooms that Tom Powers scatters about
his caricatures had, -vrith saturnine grimace,
stretched a tiny thread of red-woolen string
above the door-sill to trip him. And at the mo
ment he was beginning to feel the corridor air
currents on the back of his neck, just when
he was thinking that the superior offlcer had
played his last Victor record and was all fin-
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ished, the red string caught him in the back of
the legs, and he was hamstrung !
" One — mo-ment, Maj ah," cried the superior,
precisely as Columbus on another occasion had
blurted suddenly to the second mate, "Hist!
Can the chatter, mate! Damme! I see the ga
bles of a summer-resort hotel ! " " One — mo
ment! What 's wrong -with your left eye? "
It was foggy, explained the new Maj ah. Fur
thermore, it always had been foggy. Its foggi-
ness never had interfered in the slightest with
the Majah's work. A general officer whose name
is now a household w^ord in America knew that
left eye intimately, added the Maj ah, when
despatching word to him to hurry to France.
Wrong, all wrong; and with the feverishness
that is noticeable in our best bureaucratic circles
only when a real idea steps within range of the
trusty old blunderbuss, the boss dug into the dust
until he had brought to light the jolly old Eule
Book, Vol. I, No. 1, which had been celebrated
as a best seller in Government circles during the
War of 1812. No, siree! Lookit, Majah! It
says right here in print, at this here page, marked
with the faded, old red baby ribbon, that no man
with one defective eye may be sent into active
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THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
serrice, because if he were to lose the other eye
he would " become a charge on the Government."
And gosh! Majah, you had almost got out that
door ! Whew !
Is that the only reason. Boss, for not letting
a man with one defective eye tackle this job?
Yep, and it 's enough, sir. Any rule that is a
rule must be right or it would n't be a rule.
But listen. Fathead, — I mean Field Marshal ;
pardon me, — the rule does n't apply to me.
How so?
Because I am independently wealthy ; because
I am gladly giring up a large part of my in
come to perform this needed serrice; because,
if I lost my perfect eye, the loss would be of
financial benefit to me, inasmuch as for reasons
I have n't time to go into now. Boss, — I '11 miss
my train if I don't get out of here soon, — I can
make more money stone-blind at home here than
I can serring with at least one perfect eye in
France ; because — oh, dammit ! because you in
sult me when you say that I would make the
Government support me if I were injured in
France. Great heavens, Boss, do you mean to
stand there and insist that the War Department,
at a time like this, believes that a line of ancient
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type in that faded old almanac of 1812 is of more
importance than a big job well done for the boys
in France?
Ab-so-lute-ly, Majah ! Tear up your passport,
Majah ; you 're down — out — through.
But, Boss, let me have a final word : I 'm not
a " soldier " ; I don't make any pretense at being
a military man. My soldier clothes, even my
commission, are only mere technicalities, simply
a part of the formalism, all necessary, no doubt,
that must be gone through with before I can
begin to unload my stock of intellectual goods
at the point in the field where the army stands
most in need of my —
Hush, Majah! We executives have massive
work here to do, and you are delaying it. Majah,
this way out.
And so the great serrices of that particular
expert were lost to the lads in France, who
needed him then and need him immeasurably
more now. Bureaucracy would not permit him
to tackle his job then, and it has not changed
its "mind" since.
In justice to red-tape, it must be said that
nothing can show greater speed and efficiency
in accomplishing what it sets out to do than the
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THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
red-tape sections of the War Department. But
bureaucracy shows speed only when doing some
thing wrong — always. Solemnly certain that
fuss and feathers and stiff-necked observance of
" etiquette " is of far greater importance than
practical accomplishment, red-tape has been
known to keep army supplies — to take only one
instance of a number so vast that Washington
has come to look upon stupidity as the accepted
thing — lying at a railway freight-station at the
capital for a few days less than a month, at a
time when soldiers billeted in Washington were
in immediate need of those supplies. It so hap
pened that at about the time the supplies reached
the capital a certain officer in the department
who, according to the rules, would have to be
officially "notifled," with much saluting and
click of heels, that the goods had arrived before
they could be released from bondage, had had
himself thoroughly dusted off, and then had gone
away from there to attend to some business in
another city for a few weeks. The department
knew that the shipment had arrived, the soldiers
in crying need of the equipment knew it, every
body knew it. Doubtless the bureaucrat who
had left town must have known that the articles
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would arrive about the time he was leaving or
shortly after he had gone. But he had departed
without delegating any one to receive the proper
salutes in his absence ; wherefore for about four
weeks, or untU the officer had retumed and had
heard the heel-clicks with his o-wn long and
pointed and furry ears, the equipment lay idle
in a freight-yard. The salute and heel-clicks
were of flrst importance; the war and its needs
were secondary!
Nothing could be more impressive than the
speed with which bureaucracy (and bureau
cracy's blood kin, politics) put a shiny set of
well-greased skids under Major General Leonard
Wood in the flrst moments of the war, the skids
pointed toward a spot which the Administration
hoped fondly was the Land of Oblirion. In an
instant bureaucracy ran so joyfully and so far
forward to place the skids that it took the old
gentleman days to puff back to his starting-point.
When it came to ordering window-frames and
doors for the wooden cities about to be built on
cantonment sites, bureaucracy strained the
creaky old spinal column in hurrying to do
so simple a thing all wrong, once it had
arranged all the preliminary details incorrectly
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THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
down to the last botched detail. Old Man
Bureaucrat himself ordered 330,000 doors and
660,000 windows in a jiffy, quite overlooking
the fact that the -windows as ordered were
not of the necessary standard size. Also the
old boy, who daily was growing to look more
like a bottle in that all his development was
from the neck down, had ordered doors de
signed with, the perpendicular panels of other
days. Doors like that look lovely in the quaint
old colonial homes of Salem, but it so happened
that the mills which were to tum out the big
order of doors for the cantonment shacks were
equipped with machinery installed with the idea
of making doors designed along the lines of the
horizontal panels of modernity; and before the
order could be fllled the mill machinery would
have to be ripped out and replaced. Fortu
nately, some one with at least a teaspoonful of
gray matter woke up with a yawn at high noon
and corrected the door and window errors at the
last minute.
Even shipbuilding was delayed by red-tape en
tanglements long after bureaucracy, politics, and
everything else under heaven had ceased brawl
ing and chattering its monkey-language squabble
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And then there is the other kind of "inventor"

ALL BOUND EOUND
as to what material the ships were to be buUt of.
The preliminaries for the construction and op
eration of government shipyards at Bristol
Point, Hog Island, and Port Newark were at
tended to with commendable alacrity, and then
the contracts for building the yards where the
ships were to be fashioned were all drawn up
by General Goethals. Meanwhile, in that par
ticular week, and the next, and the week after
that, and then for a stretch of many more weeks,
the U-boats merrily were paring the floor of the
ocean with anything in the shipping line that
happened over the western horizon; and while
those weeks stretched on and on and on several
sweet old grandmothers in trousers sat in their
Washington offices with their tatting in their
laps, knitting skein after skein of bright-red yam
into cocoons that held the contracts splendidly
inactive. To strip enough red yam off those con
tracts to permit even the signing of the contracts
took four months.
Officers fresh from ciril life, whose whole
training, therefore, had been in another world,
where red-tape and sand in the cylinders are syn
onymous, were put to work by the surgical
branch of the army to select sites and complete
225

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
the preliminary arrangements for erecting re
ceiving hospitals for the wounded lads momen
tarily expected to arrive from France. Promptly
they decided upon the sites and finished their
work up to the actual first steps in building.
Then they stood round expectantly, eager for
grandma to make the next move. The autumn
of 1917 came and went. Grandma glanced up
from her tatting long enough to note that snow
had begun to fill the December air. In time she
had the withered old Christmas-tree taken out
in the back yard and burned. The new year was
growing from swaddling clothes to pinafores, to
knickers; and all along the sodden flelds of
France the guns were thundering, and the lads
from Painted Post and Louisrille and Valley
Stream were tumbling forward, their arms limp
or shattered, legs ripped off by shrapnel, their
jaws in bloody shreds. Dogs, even dogs, ran into
hell to help them; but the sleek old grandmas
tatted and tatted, deaf to the frantic appeals of
onetime physicians and laymen, now in uniform,
who ages before had selected the sites for receiv
ing hospitals that still were vacant lots, still just
blank real estate.
" The hospitals must be built some time,"
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ALL BOUND BOUND
pleaded the officers over the long-distance tel
ephones from far cities. " Why not now? Any
moment a shipload of the wounded will arrive ! "
"Don't speak out of your tum, boys,"
grandma replied sternly. "We shall take up
the matter you speak of, whatever it is, when the
proper time comes." What was promptness in
caring for the lads soon to come back to the
motherland, bent and broken forever, compared
with preserving intact the " system " of glorious
pomposity which to grandma is the begiiming
and end of things as they were!
No mere volume could begin even to list the
hospitals, the building materials, the ships, shoes
sealing-wax, and the lives that red-tape strangled
in the flrst weeks of the war, in the months that
followed, and is continidng to strangle at the
present time. That new major, whose necessary
knowledge of forestry had been so lightly
spurned parted from bureaucracy, I know, crest
fallen and almost ashamed of his own people,
So slow to start.
So fleet of foot — ^when far afield!
But as he went out the door, bureaucracy sighed
again easily, for had it not once more slipped
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THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
the rotting red-tape round the neck of common
sense and sprung the trap? and, bravo! the an
cient strands again had withstood the strain.
But some day soon — halleloojah ! it 's dawn
ing now — the noose and scaffold will disappear;
and Old Man Bureaucracy will be awakened at
gray dawn and learn, as he puts on the plain
black suit laid out for him, that the right leg of
the trousers has been slit from the ankle stitch
ing to a point just above the knee; and in the
half-light of the breaking day they will lead him,
¦with much chantings, through a little doorway
and seat him in a plain oaken chair equipped
with spiral wires, wet sponges, many straps, and
a dangling headpiece of thick leather. And then
while the chantings drone on, every one will step
back a safe pace to the surrounding mats of gray
rubber, and the blue-white juice will be tumed
on forever, and a curl of smoke will arise from
his short hair. I have seen the thing done in
all its sickening detail in the death house at Sing
Sing — done to murderers who had killed only
one man, who as a rule was of the murderer's
own vile kind. And before many more have been
added to the untold number of magnificent lads
who have already suffered, died, that pomposity
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might prevail, the thing will be done to a bu
reaucracy wherein a " system " of crass stupidity
and wretched stubbornness still continues to nur
ture these murderers of young American man
hood.

229

CHAPTEE IX
THE WAR AND THE WHITE HOUSE
NOBODY home — that is the feel in the air
in and about the White House in these days
of war. Gone is the hurly-burly of the Eoosevelt
days, of even the earlier ante-bellum days of the
Wilson regime; gone the risiting brides and
grooms who used to stroll along the now-deserted
winding walks. Whether one wanders indoors
among the semi-abandoned executive office fur
nishings or peers from afar through the iron
fence at the graceful white fagade, the feeling
persists that perhaps the white walls house a
crackly old parchment containing the Constitu
tion or some such abstraction ; but otherwise no
body home. To-day I saw a secretary's office and
the President's office adjoining, which once upon
a time were swarming with people, but are now
silent, deserted, a vast gloom. The very police
men stationed on the grounds — and in these war
days there are more than half a hundred of them
230

THE WAE AND THE WHITE HOUSE
partly concealed in and round the White House
— are carefully crated in lonely-looking sentry-
boxes that fit as tightly across the shoulders as
a thirty-five dollar Harlem flat.
To-night, here in the little hotel room for
which the wife and I had to keep up a drum-flre
for two nights and a day to get, I can't help but
make a mental contrast of things I have seen in
and around the White House to-day with some
thing else that happened on a night in recent
years in the same business end of the Executive
Mansion, or what was once the business end of
it. The incident of a few years ago which comes
to mind to-night was only one of many which
once made the large secretarial office in which
Mr. Tumulty now has his desk hum along hap
pily day by day. To-day that rectangular office,
and particularly the circular office adjoining
which the President now rarely uses, especially
drove home the feeling that one had sacrilegi
ously stepped into the sanctified cheerlessness of
the horror known in New England as the " spare
bedroom." On the night I have in mind — it
was during the second Eoosevelt administration
— a group of the Washington correspondents of
New York newspapers, their work finished for
231

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
the night, were sitting with the then President's
secretary in the rectangular offlce. Most of
them were sitting on their spines, chairs tilted
back, feet cocked ceilingward into the clouds of
tobacco smoke, while in hushed tones — it was
almost midnight — they talked of an editorial
which that morning had appeared in New York's
most brilliantly written newspaper. Dislike of
the President and all things Eooseveltian had
driven the editor man to the extreme of suggest
ing that the high-priced alienists who were look
ing into the sanity of a noted murderer then on
trial in New York might better be giring their
time and talents to inquiring into the sanity of
a noted personage in Washington.
" All day we 've been busy keeping that news
paper out of the President's way," whispered the
secretary. " The colonel is all run down and
jumpy from too much work, and if he ever read
that editorial he 'd come nearer going crazy than
even that editorial writer tries to make believe
he—" A loud laugh, coming from a corridor leading
to the interior of the White House, interrupted
the secretary. Hurried steps approached. The
door was pushed open with a rush, and into the
232

THE WAE AND THE WHITE HOUSE
tobacco smoke of the secretary's offlce burst an
excited personage with a copy of the New York
newspaper in his hand. It was the President of
the United States. Correspondents and the sec
retary jumped to their feet respectfully.
" I 've got under their skins ! I 've hurt 'em ! "
cried the Colonel, grinning beatiflcally, exult
ingly, smacking his hand on the newspaper.
" Look at this, boys ! I 've got 'em on the mat,
where the best they can do is yell that I 'm crazy.
By George ! that 's bully ! " And a President
who had been ordered to climb under the quilts
as early as possible every night during those days
of overworked and frazzled nerves sat down hap
pily amid the tobacco clouds and, himself quite
one of the boys, chatted -with Dick and Hank and
Sam and the rest of the lads in chummy fashion.
Doubtless if one of them had suggested that the
President jam on his slouch-hat and walk a part
of the way home with the correspondent before
turning in, he would have done it.
Fancy the present occupant of the "White
House bursting in upon a group of reporters at
midnight, or at noon, and sitting down to chat
in chummy fashion! Let some one else fancy
it ; I can't. There was only one day — March 5,
233

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
1913 — when, so far as can be recalled, anything
approaching chumminess enlivened the offices of
the present President and his secretary, those
rooms which in recent months have almost gone
into the silences. On that March day Mr. Wilson
put his feet for the first time under the Presiden
tial desk which now he rarely sees. Also it was
the flrst day on which Mr. Bryan attempted to be
a Secretary of State. Visiting delegations came
and went eveiy minute on the minute, each group
headed by a beaming charter member of the
Society of the First Man to Suggest Woodrow
Wilson's Name for President. The office of the
President and the Tumulty office connected with
it were aglow with cut flowers, potted plants, and
the Hon. J. Ham Lewis arrayed in the flossiest
of springtime creations. In and out through the
doorway that connected the two offices, patter
ing and chattering and beaming like a small boy
with a brand-new little red wagon to play with,
flitted the new Secretary of State, his freshly-var
nished three-quart high hat tilted far back from
his beaded brow, so that just a fringe of his
hea-vy-tragedian locks stuck out abaft the over
hang of the three-quart tUe. As the newest Sec
retary of State paused at times long enough to
234

THE WAE AND THE WHITE HOUSE
gather a fresh batch of the delegations about him,
one's thoughts persisted in going back to boy
hood scenes on a Saturday night in the old home
town up-State; the old horse-drawn victoria
standing close to the curb at the corner of Main
and Washington streets ; a smoky torch-light flar
ing above the driver's seat; cartons containing
dollar bottles of Kickapoo Indian Sawga Pain
Exterminator and Hair Eestorer piled high
about a gentleman wearing long black hair and
a three-quart polished hat. Step closer, men.
First a little song and banjo music, good pee-pul,
and then, men, I shull demunstrate the marvel
ous pain-kUling propaties of this great remedy
handed down to us, men, by the wise old med-
icune men of the great Kickapoo Indian tribe !
There was a human touch, back on that far
away March day in an era of now unbelievable
peacefulness, in those same "White House rooms,
a picnicy atmosphere, a twittering of happy ex
citement akin to commencement day in a boys'
boarding-school. There was a festiveness that
made even the sartorial outbursts of the Hon. J.
Ham Lewis seem as appropriate as the golds and
brocades on a circus elephant. One even caught
a glimpse of the new President's very coat-tails
235

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
as his exuberant Secretary of State darted in and
out through the connecting door — a door that
seemed to give the mere onlooker a sort of in
timate touch with greatness, but at the same time
suggested walled seclusion which held the pro
letariate a million miles away from the imme
diate person of the pee-pul's choice.
But now! Ah, now is something else again!
To-day as I approached the White House fence
I remembered haring been told that even the
grounds were closed to all but the chosen.
Hadn't risiting writing-folk said in print that
no one can get into government buildings in
Washington during these war-days, least of all
approach the White House doors, unless one
owns a pass decorated with the owner's photo
graph? I remembered haring read such articles,
decorated with half-tones showing Government
guards holding back the potential risitors while
scrutinizing the photographs on the passes.
True, only the day before I had walked boldly
into the north entrance of the State, War, and
Navy building without passes, photographs, in
fluence, letters, or even personal acquaintance
ship with a single soul inside the building, and
merely by asking permission to see a soldier in
236

THE WAE AND THE WHITE HOUSE
the War Department whose name I had once
heard mentioned, but who did not know that I so
much as existed, I had been permitted to wander,
unaccompanied, down a corridor and into an of
fice in the innermost recesses of the War Depart
ment. And half an hour later, in quite the same
care-free manner, I had penetrated to the desks
of men superrising the new war inventions in a
little building across the way that houses an over
flow of the consulting board of the navy.
StUl, the feeling was ingrained that I could n't
get into the White House grounds, not to men
tion the executive offices of the White House.
Perhaps the guards, however, — thus I mused to
day, or almost a year since our war declaration,
as I walked toward the White House, — will per
mit me to stand near enough to the north curb of
Pennsylvania Avenue to holler the news through
a megaphone that years ago, when I was a Jer
sey City commuter, I had become well-enough
acquainted with the Hon. Joseph Patrick Tu
multy to walk right up to him and cry, " Well,
bless us and save us, if here ain't Joe ! " And
maybe Joe would open a window or something
and wave to me, or even go so far as to step out
side for a moment and —
237

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
Heavens! I came out of my musings with a
jerk, and found myself standing inside the White
House grounds. With my head bowed and
dreaming, I had become so concentrated upon
all these weighty matters that thoughtlessly, me
chanically, I had walked through the wide-open
west gate leading to the President's offices, as
wide open as the gates on the north side were
carefully closed ; and I had pulled myself out of
my state of coma only upon finding myself stand
ing within a dozen feet of the door leading to the
executive offices in the west wing of the White
House. Horror of horrors ! a lone, but brawny,
Washington cop was sleepily propped on the
driveway, his back to me and seemingly in the
throes of gazing in fixed fashion into some large
land of nothingness lying back of nowhere. I
had come leagues inside the "White House
grounds without realizing it; unconsciously I
had passed behind the broad back of the police
man and now was closer to the door than the
officer was. Gosh! Suppose he should whirl
about, see me, and flre before asking questions !
" Uh-uh-uh-uh officer ! " I cried. Oh, I was
scared all right ! And hurriedly I started to ad
dress him, so that he would realize that it was
238

THE WAE AND THE WHITE HOUSE
only by accident that I had got so close to a
White House door. " Officer! " I called again,
and he turned round lazUy and regarded me
without showing any slight trace of absorbing in
terest in me or my travels. " Uh — officer, I —
I wish to find the President's offices. Uh —
Secretary Tumulty — he — ^"
"Well," broke in the bluecoat in withering
tones, "there's the door in front of you," — as
who would say: "Yuh got yur foot on the
' Welcome ' sign on the doormat. "Whatcha want
me to do, yuh poor flsh ? CARRY yuh in ? "
I backed away scared, and instantly brought
myself up sharply vrith another start. I was
inside. Seated in a sort of reception-lobby was
a middle-aged person who was quite as well ac
quainted with me as I am -with the Akhund of
Swat. But, so I decided the instant he fro-wned
upon me, he '11 know me in a minute, and never
wUl he permit me to pass beyond him into the
executive offices; for the secretary's office opens
into the President's office, which opens into a cor
ridor, which in tum leads into the liring-rooms
of the White House. He '11 list my pedigree for
three generations back ; he '11 make me unroll my
folded newspaper to make sure that it does n't
239

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
contain a length of gas-pipe plugged at each end ;
and finally he '11 hold me head downward by the
heels and shake me, following which he undoubt
edly will kick me riolently back into whatever
part of the Pennsylvania Avenue asphalt he
thinks I should be decorating. And I had no
pass, no card of introduction to save me; noth
ing. If he would only begin ! But he stared si
lently. " Er — I — I should like to see Secretary
Tumulty, sir."
" He 's out, I believe," remarked the gentleman
of the iron-gray hair. " Go through the doorway
back there and ask inside."
Through a wide-arched passageway I walked,
and came upon a young man standing in a small
corridor. He knew me as well as I knew him,
which was not at all. Again I asked to be ad
mitted to Secretary Tumulty's office.
" Second door to your left," directed the young
man, with a thumb-jerk. " I think he 's out.
Wait in his office till he comes in, if you care to."
"Wherefore within a few seconds I found that I
had sauntered -without interruption from the as
phalt of outdoors into the veloured and carpeted
and leather-bound elegancies, "rich, but not
240

"Second door to your left," directed the young man with a
thumb jerk

THE WAE AND THE WHITE HOUSE
gaudy," of the offlce of the secretary to the Presi
dent. There I sat, alone and unguarded, beside
the door which leads into the President's offlce,
which leads into a corridor, which leads into the
innermost quarters of the White House. Alone
and lonely. Now, on my risit to the War De
partment yesterday I at least wasn't lonely as
I sat beside the vacant desk of a major and
waited for him to come back from luncheon. I
had found three other strange majors seated at
three of the four desks in that little offlce, each
with a girl stenographer by his side. And after
one of the majors had looked up impersonally
and had told me to pull up a chair and kUl time
as best I could until the missing major returned,
all three majors had resumed their work of dic
tating letters in conversational tones to the girl
stenographers. How could one be lonely with
three unknown gentlemen unfolding the War
Department's correspondence aloud at one's el
bow in a room the size of a hotel bedroom?
But to-day as I sat in Mr. Tumulty's tem
porarily deserted offlce the only entertainment I
could think of was to sit there and debate -vrith
myself how many lashes of the knout I should
give to young Dave Lawrence and the rest of the
241

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
Washington writer lads who had given me the
scare of my life with their articles and pictures
illustrating the terrors awaiting a stranger like
myself who would dare to brave the suppositi
tious barbed-wire entanglements in front of
Washington govermental entrances. One hun
dred lashes, Ivan ; twenty-flve for the little scare
of yesterday in front of the jolly old State, War,
and Navy building, and thrice that many for the
greater scare at the White House to-day. Likely
as not, so I now naturally decided, foreign writ
ers had been misleading all of us about similar
conditions abroad. Likely as not, if a total
stranger, visiting Berlin in war-time, wanted to
get into the offlce immediately next to the one
containing the kaiser's work-bench, all the
stranger would have to do would be to walk along
Main street, Berlin, until the kaiser's street num
ber was reached and then stroll inside without
knocking, as in Washington, and wander round
the works until one happened upon the butler.
Ah, Looie, you 're growing thin. Is the boss
home, Looie? He's out? Well, I'll just me
ander on toward the private offlces, Looie, and
stick round there till the kaiser or somebody
242

THE WAE AND THE WHITE HOUSE
shows up. By the way, I 'm an American, Looie.
You forgot to ask me, you naughty, naughty but
ler, just as the doorman at the "White House for
got to ask me whether or not I was a German
the last time I strolled into our own national ex
ecutive offices at Washington. Now beat it,
Looie. I want to sit here alone in the anteroom
of the kaiser's quarters, because if he should
chance along I want to see him alone and quick
and first! Yes, that 's just what would happen
in Berlin. If here, why not there?
In my loneliness to-day I was tempted to turn
the knob an arm's-length away and kill time by
puttering round the President's desk in the office
adjoining. Or perhaps I could stroll on into the
corridor leading to the "White House liring-
rooms until I came upon some good snappy book
or magazine that would help me kill time till
some one showed up. Before I left I did go into
the adjoining office, properly escorted, and sat at
the desk and gazed upon vacuity. And if the
flowers and highly varnished solemnities of the
secretary's office suggested the death-chamber of
a Past Grand Exalted Euler of the Elks, then
the deserted room next to it surely made one feel
243

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
that the late lamented Elk or Eagle recently had
been removed to the dear old clubhouse for the
flnal obsequies.
Finally I heard a human voice, two of them.
I could n't see the humans, and they could n't see
me, but I could hear their type-writers begin to
click and, as they chatted across their desks or
answered the frequent ringing of a telephone bell,
the sound of their voices came to me from the
recesses of an arched passage out in the general
direction of the street door by which I had en
tered. They seemed to have no fear that the
President would wander at any moment from the
seclusion of his liring-rooms into his own office
end of the White House; no thought that he
would burst in among them excitedly, newspaper
in hand, and boom dee-lightedly, " By George !
boys, here 's something bully ! " The two unseen
clerks just went on clicking and telephoning ; and
from the nature of the telephone talks it was
erident that about every one in Washington and
the world was trying to " get into touch " with
one or another of the President's official family,
chiefly with the Secretary of the Treasury. On a
conservative guess, nine out of every ten persons
;who call up Secretary Tumulty's office are sure
244

THE WAE AND THB WHITE HOUSE
that the success of the war hangs largely upon
the speed with which they are " put in touch "
with Secretary McAdoo. It is a notable fact
that within ten days after Mr. McAdoo had been
placed in charge of the country's railways his
maU contained about ten thousand " personal "
letters, half of them telling him how to run his
job and the other half asking permission, for a
consideration, to share his job with him.
But if distant clicks and telephone bells were
the only indications of actirity round the White
House, it always should be borne in mind that
an appalling amount of work had been done
there since morning, especially by the distin
guished head of the house himself. Hours earlier
he had taken up the systemized tasks which are
the penalty of holding down so colossal a job as
the Presidency of the greatest country flghting,'
or finally getting ready to fight, in the world's
mightiest war. For with the possible exception
of the Eev. Billy Sunday, not a man in Washing
ton to-day, yesterday, every day, works harder to
earn the little yellow pay-envelop than the Hon.
Woodrow Wilson.
Take yesterday as an example, or go back to
the night before last. After a day as busy as all
245

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
the rest he had dined at seven, and then, in the
seclusion of his study in the heart of the White
House, he had labored until almost midnight
over the final draft of a momentous message
wherein were stated the only possible peace
terms which America would consider. In that
secluded study he keeps, especially since his rir
tual abandonment of the office which he and his
predecessors used to use, his books, papers, and
other printed and written matter which he must
have within arm's-length. And as he worked on
and on in his secluded exclusiveness two nights
ago, not even the wisest newspaper correspond
ent in Washington, certainly no member of
Congress, had any vague inkling that the next
day he would appear suddenly at the Capitol and
read his epoch-making message.
Then toward midnight he had decided to call
it a day and begin preparations to retire. At
7:15 o'clock yesterday morning he arose and
breakfasted. He spent a few moments over his
message again, and next, before starting off on
his regular morning trip to a golf-course for a
bit of fresh air, he telephoned to Secretary
Tumulty's house and broke the unexpected
news that he would address a joint session in
246

THE WAE AND THE WHITE HOUSE
the House at midday. Would Mr. Tumulty
kindly make arrangements at once for the
joint session? Mr. Tumulty would, pulling
on his helmet, rubber coat, and boots, and slid
ing down the brass pole to get at the job quickly.
Whereupon the President got into his hat and
overcoat. In the driveway was his White House
car, like any other town car of elegance except
for the ornate Federal shield, tea-cup-sized, on
the doors. And then, -vrith two fast-flying mo
torcycle policemen setting the pace and a whole
barrel of Secret Serrice men chugging along be
hind, the President was off for his bit of moming
golf out near the district-line.
Within two hours, as always, he was back in
the White House, had taken his regular after-
golf bath, and had put aside his golf-clothes for
the well-cut, carefully pressed raiment, so far
removed from the regulation baggy trousers
which college professors seem to think they are
sentenced to wear that the President WUson of
the knife-edge trousers probably never would
recognize the Professor Wilson who used to wear
mere pants. And now, not quite like the Hon.
J. Ham Lewis or the lilies of the field, but a
personage of unostentatious elegance, there is a
247

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
summons for a secretary, stenographer, for any
one needed from an office staff which, through
long years of experience has attained an effi
ciency to be marveled at; and, still secluded in
the heart of the White House liring-quarters, he
starts in to tackle his correspondence, an .amaz
ing part of which requires his personal attention.
Letter-writing of importance often takes up his
time until the luncheon hour. Yesterday, how
ever, with a portentous message to Congress to
be read at noon, he dictated somewhat earlier the
last letter beginning with the formula, " May I
not thank you for your recent letter and suggest
that," etc. Again the two speedy motorcycle
cops, the car, and the barrel of Secret Serrice
men began to chug eastward, and within a few
minutes the President was facing an expectant
Congress. " What 's he going to talk about. Senator? "
" Search me ! Never heard he was here till a
minute ago."
" Oh, I say, Hills, you newspaper lads know
everything. What 's the President got on his
chest?" " How 'd I know. Congressman? I just raced
down here from our news bureau when I got the
248

THE WAE AND THE WHITE HOUSE
flash over the telephone that the Big Chief was
headed this way. You Democrats on the ad
ministration side of the House ought to know
something about it. Cm on, spill the news."
" Nope. Sure as your name is Larry Hills,
not a soul of us heard he was coming till Joe
Tumulty began to get busy this morning. Gol-
lies ! can you beat it ! "
And that " Gollies ! " which the administration
Eepresentative ridded himself of yesterday noon
as he and the newspaper man raced along a Capi
tol corridor toward the House side was not near
so vehement as a lot of other exclamations which
Senators and Eepresentatives, from the Presi
dent's political camp as well as " the opposition "
sides of the House and Senate, let loose almost
any time that the matter of the President's ex
clusive secludedness enters into congressional
conversations. The innovation of a President
who rarely, almost never, takes indiridual mem
bers of Congress into his confldences causes pa
thetic bleatings on the part of his congressional
friends and admirers and positive brain-storms
on the other side of the middle aisle. As a far
thest Western representative, — who loomed
large in the exciting days of the war declaration,
249

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
put it to me months after we had entered the
war : " He is the first President in my experi
ence who never lets his extra right hand, which
is Congress, know what his private right or left
hand is doing. He never talks things over, as
his predecessors did, even big things, with a Mem
ber before he springs them on us ; never confers ;
never paves the way. He alone of all the Presi
dents brings or sends us wholly unexpected mes
sages and measures, and then expects us to go
ahead and act upon them without our haring the
slightest notion of how his mind is working on a
given measure. Nobody under heaven but him
self has any notion, so far as we know, certainly
nobody under the dome of the Capitol. He has
no confidants, no intimates; so there's no one
we can go to in order to get into working touch
with him, not even a third party."
There were tears in the voice of the Congress
man. Even louder are the private and person
ally conducted cries of anguish daily coming
from congressional lungs, the owners of which
had grown accustomed, sometimes throughout a
generation of Washington sessions, to seeking
the White House, or being sought by it, with
much frequency ; to sit there intimately for half
250

THE WAE AND THE WHITE HOUSE
an hour, sometimes longer, in close-up conversa
tion with the particular Great White Father that
graced the Executive Mansion during a given
term. But nowadays Congressmen, high and
low, have the feeling that if any particularly
important piece of statesmanship is going to be
cooked, a certain Personage will attend to the
cooking unaided and then serve the whole dish
himself. Hence pathetic bleats.
Not that Senators or Eepresentatives never get
indoors at the White House to see the President
in these days. If one of them is honored with
an audience, the preliminary arrangements are
made quickly, even to notifying a policeman at a
northem gate now closed to the general public
that Senator Sidewhiskers wUl arrive at that
gate at a given hour. But as a rule such audi
ences come after the message or measure has
been all cooked and served. Yesterday, for in
stance, after the President had read his notable
message to Congress and had lunched between
one and two o'clock with his famUy, callers be
gan to storm that north gate from a few minutes
after two o'clock in the afternoon until, with the
exception of time taken out for dinner, eleven
o'clock last night. Foreign Commissioners, Sen-
251

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
ators, Eepresentatives, members of his official
family, in and out they passed steadily in an ef
fort to unfold to the President riews and ideas
that had come to them after the President had
exploded his message in the joint session. After,
always after. And he saw all whom it was phy
sically possible to see, but they didn't sit and
chin and smoke for an hour, half an hour, even
for fifteen minutes, as in the good old days that
were. The President was affability itself as he
did most of the necessary talking, briefly, to the
point. Then a hand-shake, one of those hand
shakes that passes you onw^ard, with the extreme
of cordiality, toward the top of the greased chute
that leads to the Open Air Down And Out Club.
"We've come down here," remarked Darid
Belasco, proudly, to a Senator friend he met on
the avenue, " representing the theatrical man
agers. We're to go to the White House this
aftemoon for five minutes."
" Five minutes ! " cried the Senator. " What
in thunder are you going to do with the other
four minutes? " It is on record that Messrs.
Belasco, Marc Klaw, George Cohan, and the rest
of that delegation did n't know what to do with
at least a part of the four minutes. Down to
252

THE WAE AND THE WHITE HOUSE
Washington they had come all primed up with
speeches in which they were to show the Presi
dent that the great war revenue from the tax
on theater-tickets and the splendid part the stage
had played in raising funds for war-relief work
entitled the managers at least to ask that they
might be permitted to keep their show shops open
on the ten coalless Garfield Mondays then con
templated. But those speeches never were de
livered. The President received the managers
with his usual cordiality, shook hands, said a few
appropriate sentences in appreciation of the
stage profession's work along war-relief lines;
then another hand-shake, the greased chute, and
the managers came back to earth in the great out
doors, — it was round zero that day, too, in Wash
ington, — remembering suddenly as they came
out of their daze that not once had they thought
to step into the spot-light and unlimber the mod
ulated and sounding phrases carefully rehearsed
during their aU-night run from Manhattan to
the capital.
This morning there was not even a hand-shake
indoors rotmd the White House; just the clock
work regime of rising at seven, or seven-fifteen
at the latest, breakfast, then whatever golf can
253

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
be jammed inside of two hours, which also must
include the run to the golf-course and back, the
bath, and dressing which follows. And from
that time until luncheon was served there was
the attack upon the correspondence that reaches
to world without end. Each day on his sanctum
desk, and on the desk next to Mr. Tumulty's of
fice in case he should accidentally wander so far
afield, the President will find a " reminder " of
the different engagements and other work cut
out for him that day. Take the list as prepared
for to-day, type-written on a stiffish white card
about the size of this page, with the leg
end, " THE PEESIDENT'S ENGAGEMENTS,"
printed, not engraved or embossed, but in simple
type printed in dark-blue ink at the top of the
card thus:
THE PRESIDENT'S ENGAGEMENTS
Wednesday
12.00 noon THE "WHITE HOUSE:
The Governor General of Canada
LUNCHEON: The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire
3.00 p. m. THE WHITE HOUSE :
Senator Lewis 254

THE WAE AND THE WHITE HOUSE
3.30 p. m. THE "WHITE HOUSE :
Mr. Hoover
4.00 p. m. THE WHITE HOUSE :
The Attorney General, The Secretary
of the Navy and Senator Swanson
One should not get the notion from the day's
engagements as listed above that the Governor-
General of Canada and his duchess, after enter
ing the "White House at noon, sat round and
chatted with the President until luncheon was
served at one o'clock. Not in this administra
tion of the party of Andy Jackson and Jefferson
ian simplicity ! It is a social law nowadays that
if one is inrited to the White House for luncheon
the honored big wig is first received in audience
and then goes away from there for a brief while ;
tums round and walks right out and comes
right back again half an hour or so later for the
luncheon part of the ceremonial.
Also, in running over the list of the President's
engagements to-day, it should not be forgotten
that the Senator who did get fully half an hour of
audience, from three to three-thirty o'clock, had
all that time in the White House as his very own
because Senator Lewis is the administration's
representative in the Senate. Nor should an-
255

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
other engagement, scribbled hastily across the
bottom of one of the President's engagement
cards which lies before me as I write, be over
looked. " 5.00 p. M. THE WHITE HOUSE : De
legation of Western Congressmen." They also
had a few minutes in the presence, but their en
gagement eridently was a last-minute one, which
never had arisen to the dignity of being carefully
typed in advance with the other items listed.
All day every day the President manages to
sandwich in between the steady run of appoint
ments more and more dictation of correspond
ence. Steadily throughout the day also the sec
retary to the President, who in the earlier Wil
son days used to dart in and out of the circular
private office adjoining the secretarial desk to
confer with the President verbally, now is con
stantly dictating numberless notes and sugges
tions and shooting them into the White House
recesses at intervals in the hope that the Presi
dent will find in the brief notes some idea of in
terest, perhaps of real use. " Dear Governor,"
so the Tumulty notes begin early in the forenoon
and continue until late. And the marginal nota
tions, in the President's handwriting, which deco
rate the notes when they come back to the
256

THE WAE AND THE WHITE HOUSE
secretary's office again show that the President
finds time somehow to read and comment upon
all the suggestions that come to him from Mr.
Tumulty and his assistants. Here is an office
staff which has reason to feel sure, unlike the
bleating Congressmen, that it knows "how his
mind is working on a given measure." These
notes from Mr. Tumulty are now the President's
main bridge, his only bridge, that spans the vast
expanse which in late days separates him from
the public thought on a given measure. Now the
secretarial office is the sieve, the chief separator,
through which are sifted the thoughts or the per
sonalities which should or should not be pre
sented to the President. Newspaper clippings,
editorials, sometimes sheaves of editorials on a
given subject, are often included in the notes
which the secretary sends farther indoors to his
secluded chief. For even now in his unpre
cedented seclusion the chief presents the paradox
of a President who, perhaps more than any of
his predecessors, believes a leader should follow
the thought of the crowd, and this regardless of
the fact that a big part of that crowd still holds
to the old-fashioned theory that the only reason
one person out of the hundred million receives at
257

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
the polls their permission to enter the White
House is that their choice is intellectually head
and shoulders over the half-baked, scatter
brained " voice of the people " ; therefore is ex
pected to lead from the front rank, not the rear.
Inasmuch as popular music is bad music, popu
lar painting bad painting, popular —
But to return to the " delegation of Western
Congressmen." When they had been hand-
shaken out of the presence this evening the
President again called it a day and began to pre
pare for dinner. After dining he decided, as
frequently happens, to " take a night off." At
least once, sometimes twice, a week he goes to
the theater, preferably to a vauderille or a
" musical comedy " performance ; or he may de
vote the evening to reading until bedtime. And
again and again one notes on his list of daily
engagements advance notices to be ready at a
given minute to touch a button in the White
House and thereby illuminate the Main Building
at the opening of the National Crazy Quilt Ex
position in far off What Cheer, Iowa, or light
up the conference-hall where the Amalgamated
Pretzel Varnishers' Union or the Industrial As
sociation of Carriage Wheel and Zebra Stripers'
258

THE WAE AND THE WHITE HOUSE
Unions of America are in annual convention at
Blueduck, Illinois. He plays golf or goes to
ball-games not so much as an enthusiastic fan,
but as a part of a calculated, systematized pro
gram to get fresh air into his lungs and cobwebs
from his brain; but he goes to the theater be
cause he likes the stage and all things pertaining
to it. Even in these crowded days Eaymond
Hitchcock, DeWolf Hopper, Frank Tinney, any
noted Thespian, can get within hand-shaking dis
tance (they 've done so) and a two minute chat
with far greater ease than the average member of
Congress can.
But the promiscuous hand-shaking in the
White House now is a memory. The New
Year's receptions, stupid relics of a capital and
nation younger and smaller, and therefore more
pliable, have been dispensed with, chiefly because
they were boresome functions that kept the
President standing for three hours of countless
hand-shakes when his hand and mind might bet
ter be given to the stupendous tasks which con
front a chief executive in a world war. He
" does n't want solemnity these days, but he does
want efficiency," as it was put to me to-day at the
White House. Only on the "cabinet days,"
259

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
those Tuesday and Friday afternoons each week
which are now about the only times he sees what
officially is still his office, is there any of the off
hand greetings. On those two afternoons the
President comes from his study far inside the
White House about two-flfteen o'clock. Then,
and only then, for flfteen minutes there is a
semblance of the old-time ease of access to his
desk. Almost any one with or without a reason
for his greeting — usually with no better reason
than a chance "to shake hands with the Presi
dent " — may be escorted from Secretary Tu
multy's office to the President in the adjoining
room — any one, that is, who is worthy and is
known to his secretary or official family. But
promptly at 2 :30 o'clock the little party comes
to an end; the last of the hand-shakers is with
drawn to outer darkness, and the President and
his cabinet get down to business, and stick to it
until about 5 :45 o'clock that evening.
Saturdays are his free days, his " day out."
He plays golf on Saturday mornings, often mo
tors on Saturday afternoons, and rests on Sat
urday night. His Sundays are devoted to at
tending religious services and then to a vast
amount of reading, the reading being often a
260

THE WAE AND THE WHITE HOUSE
matter of work in a way, inasmuch as a great
deal of the Sunday reading these days is devoted
to poring over despatches, cable messages, and
other papers of an official or semi-official nature.
Thus it goes until late at night. By midnight,
or shortly before, the White House is a ghost of
a mansion, dark and silent, save for the measured
tread of soldier guards who in war-time take the
place of the policemen guards at nightfall, and
with loaded rifles on shoulders slowly pace back
and forth until the dawn of a new day.
To-day was not one of the cabinet days; if it
had been, I might have seen the President's of
fice in something of its old mood of human ac
tirity. I did not want to wander into that cir
cular office and so on into the White House
without first waiting until somebody or other
came along who would give me permission. Had
I done so, who knows but in the corridors I
might have bumped into one of the Major Eay
mond Pullman's fifty-eight varieties of White
House cops, some of whom stroll indoors all har
nessed up in swagger and statesmanlike morning-
coats and creased trousers, camouflaged sartori-
ally and quite as free from that air of haring
been suddenly all dressed up as one of those
261

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
vauderille acrobats who " open the bill " by com
ing upon the stage in evening clothes, his hair
nicely oiled, before he pulls off everything and
stands revealed in pink tights and spangles.
One never, never would mistake any of the ma
jor's ornate indoor cops for cops; one might
fancy, on the spur of the moment, that one had
stumbled upon an Italian barber from the South
Side of Chicago all garbed up on his bridal day,
but otherwise Major Pullman's gorgeous guard
ians would have an intruder completely fooled.
Fortunately, I didn't have to spend all my
aftemoon in solitude. By bits strange folk
wandered into Secretary Tumulty's office, per
haps a dozen in all, and stood waiting near the
open flreplace or sat round the room expectantly.
Then the secretary to the President waded
through whatever business had been keeping him
outdoors and entered. For many minutes there
after it was a joy to sit on the side lines and
watch the deftness, the easy certainty, with
which young Mr. Tumulty handled the sieve and
did the sifting. A clear -brained, alert, and very
efficient little diplomatic embassy is the Hon.
Joseph Patrick Tumulty all by himself.
And then came a greatest moment, never to be
262

THE WAE AND THE WHITE HOUSE
forgotten, which showed conclusively that the
inner corridor which led from the secretary's of
fice into the innermost private sanctum sanc
torum of the President also led from that far
study out to the very room in which I was sit
ting. Steps were heard approaching from those
inner recesses, footfalls of a dignity and a
strength of tread befitting a President of these
United States of America. Conversation in the
secretary's office came to an abrupt halt. One
almost heard the instant silence which fell upon
an awestruck room as the steps came near and
nearer. And then the door leading back to the
President's quarters opened portentously, and
every one stood up as the door formed a frame
for the graceful physique standing there in the
well-made morning-coat, trousers pressed to
knife-edge nicety. And there he stood, the Mag
nificent, the Honorable J. Ham Lewis, fresh
from his whole half -hour in the presence. Mauve
were his spats, mauve of the evening sky was
his cravat, pearl and mauve the kerchief that
drooped with care-free care from an upper pocket
of a coat as misty gray as a rare Whistler pic
ture, as free from seams or wrinkles as the silken
cheek of a sleeping babe. And the one-time Pink
263

THE WAH-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
Aurora Borealis, the Pride of the Mississippi
Valley, was the Pink Aurora Borealis no more:
side-whiskers which were a nation's red badge
of glory and pride back in the days when they
glowed as ardently as a dawning day in farthest
Ind, now had darkened to a rich khaki shade in
keeping with the soldierly spirit of these martial
days. " Gentlemen," he said graciously, bowed, and
passed his homeward way perhaps forever from
our sight. Tears of emotion sprang to my eyes,
and the beautiful figure which a great poet had
used to express his own emotions at the passing
onward of the lovely Evangeline involuntarily
came tO my lips.
Homeward serenely she walked with God's benedic
tion upon her.
When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of
exquisite music.
My day had not been in vain.

264

CHAPTEE X
THE MUTUAL ADMIRATION CLUB
STEVE, do you know something? "
The wife was speaking. I 'm afraid I
wasn't paying strict attention. A moment be
fore I had unlocked the door of our hotel-room
closet in which I had had secreted since our ar
rival in Washington the little old black traveling-
bag that railway-station redcaps had tried to
grab from my hand once they had heard the
glassy clink of the contents. I did not answer
the wife promptly, my thoughts being centered
ruefully upon the extreme emptiness of that little
black bag, which now yawned vacantly open in
my hand. Marvelous had been the way that the
news of the arrival of the little bag in Washing
ton had spread among my old friends and new
acquaintances throughout the capital. Day in
and day out they had honored me with risits,
their eyes glued upon that closet door. And the
key to the door, which had worked stiffly when we
265

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
first came to the city, now slid the bolt back with
the noiseless ease of an automobile engine headed
down-grade on its three-thousandth mile.
" Steve, I 'm talking to you ! Do you know
what I think? "
" No, Mr. Bones. What do you think? "
" Well, I was just thinking this : after looking
this town over for a spell I was just thinking
how deplorable it is that the best that can be
said of the dear old line which we all love to
spout so solemnly, ' The voice of the people is
the voice of God,' is that it is one of the worst
blasphemies ever uttered. I don't think 'the
pee-pul ' ever in history were — "
" Now wait a minute, old girl," I interrupted,
snapping the bag and chucking it down on the
closet fioor. " Eight in our own history, for in
stance, it was the people, was n't it, that first
rose against the fool policies of England toward
the colonies and wrote the Declaration of Inde
pendence? It was the people who carried the
American Eevolution to a successful conclusion,
' the common pee-pul,' and then struck off a
Constitution that 's never cracked under the
strain, was n't it? And again in 1812 it ^'as
the people who — " 266

THE MUTUAL ADMIEATION CLUB
" Oh hush, Steve ! ' The people ' never did any
of these things. They did resent being taxed
without representation, even to the point of
armed resistance, and they were quite right in
doing so. More power to their elbows. But it
was the trained thought of a little handful of
leaders, their Ben Franklins and Washingtons
and Jeffersons and the like, men who were what
they were merely because they had lifted them
selves far above the mob, who wrote the Declar
ation and risked their necks by signing it and
struck off the Constitution. If it hadn't been
for those same leaders, England would have
thrashed the colonies soundly. The people
did n't even fight the Eevolution to a successful
finish ; would n't have, at least, if it were left
solely to the people. Whole droves of them
would quit when they felt like it after a given
campaign, and go back amiably to their own
private pursuits, lots of 'em — what we 'd call
deserting now. Then their great leaders, who
never quit for a minute, would lambaste the quit
ters among them back into action again. And
while Washington and a few more of his kind
were making them keep everlastingly at it, an
other leader, who had educated himself miles
267

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
ahead of the people, went to Europe and induced
the wisest men in France to send the help which
went far toward crushing the English in the
colonies. If the Eevolution were left to the
tavern keepers along the Philadelphia water
front or the farmers and woodsmen up and down
the coast, the only result of the whole fuss would
have been the annual convention here of the
Daughters of the Eevolution.
" And as for the War of 1812, it was * the pee-
pul ' right in this City of Washington who scat
tered like silly sheep when a force of British
only about one fifth the size of the American
Army opposed to it wandered into sight. Every
body, from the President down, turned tail and
let the English walk into Washington and make
a bonfire of the White House. They did n't have
a real leader. Suppose one lone leader like Phil
Sheridan had clattered into town when they were
turning tail, something would have happened,
would n't it? And who should receive credit for
the repulse of the British that would have fol
lowed, the five or six American soldiers who
could not face a lone Britisher unless directed
by some one above the mental and moral level
of the dear people, or the leader who single-
268

THE MUTUAL ADMIEATION CLUB
handed had snatched rictory out of stupid bun
gling? As the same Phil Sheridan and his kind
have done and will do again so long as the world
lasts. The people played party politics in that
same War of 1812 as they never did before, and
botched it from beginning to end thereby, and
despite the brilliant work of a few sailor leaders
we probably would have lost in the end if Eng
land had n't been so terribly exhausted while try
ing to down a lone indiridual who happened to
be one of the great geniuses of history. ' The
pee-pul ' make me very weary."
" O, Mom, how can you ! It was the people,
was n't it, who, once we 'd gone into this present
war, immediately raised a big army in record
time?" " No ; in one sentence you 're wrong twice. A
very few leaders, such as they are, passed the
conscription law which made any sort of army
possible. And it is n't a big army. It 's a puny
army compared with the other armies in the pres
ent war. What there is of it is doing its work
beautifully, and in time, I hope, it will be as
good as the French, British, and other armies.
But how can you say we have a ' big ' army when,
as representative of the greatest nation in the
269

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
whole war, it is of less importance in a military
sense to-day than the army of little Belgium or
of tiny Serbia or even of Portugal? Think of
it, less important than the little Portuguese
Army ! And the people, as usual, go along flap
ping their wings, and screaming abut ' U-S, Us,'
and they don't even realize that Portugal is in
the war at all.
" What did ' the pee-pul ' have to do with rais
ing the present army, small as it is? Nothing.
I 'd like to see the conscription law referred to
a vote of ' the pee-pul,' that 's all. What is con
scription, anyway, but a legal method of forcing
the dear ' pee-pul ' to do something that they
would n't do properly unless compelled to? And
the people of this particular country have over
fed themselves for so many years on the notion
that business, big business, is everything that
they are still pointing with pride to the big busi
ness being done in this town as if business were
winning the war. Soldiers and sailors and big
guns are going to win the war, not big business.
If—" " But listen ! We 've just started. Mom.
Wait at least until — "
"'Wait! wait! wait!' Wait nothing. The
270

THE MUTUAL ADMIEATION CLUB
instant that Germany jumped into war little Bel
gium, or a King who is a real leader, had an
army against the Germans which was efficient
enough to stop the greatest army in the world
at least long enough to enable the French Army
to race to the firing-line in taxicabs and anything
else on wheels that could be commandeered.
And here, almost four years later, almost a year
after we entered the war ourselves, we 're still at
the point where even now it is somewhat of a
shock to us to read accounts in the newspapers
which show that our men actually are being
killed and injured on the battle-lines in France.
Months after the first draft was called out, or
theoretically called out, there were still about
two hundred thousand of that first draft, all sup
posed to be at least in uniform, toasting their
shins round their home flreplaces. Think of it !
Declaring war in April, and in the following
January two hundred thousand of the flrst men
' called ' still waiting round their homes without
even deflnite news as to when their preliminary
training is to be begun. And the dear ' pee-pul '
have been spending so much time asking, ' When
will the war be over? ' that they don't even know
that the two hundred thousand are still warming
271

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
chairs in their home towns. That's about all
' the pee-pul ' have done since the war started —
stand round and ask, ' When will the war end? '
A fine way, that, to go up against a mixed-ale
brawler, looking back over one's shoulder all the
time in the hope that something '11 come along
that will stop the scrap. Shucks ! ' The pee-
pul ' are a lot of fussfusses."
" Outside of that, though, we 're all right,
aren't we, old Mother Grumble?"
" We are not, and we never shall be all right
unless real leaders who are not pacifists at heart
jump above the ' pee-pul ' and make us stop our
monkeyshines — that or a pummeling of ' the
pee-pul ' by the Germans themselves which will
make this crowd over here, even the ' leaders,' so
mad they '11 quit asking when the war is going to
end and jump in full speed and end it. But there
isn't one red-blooded man in high place to-day
who in his heart believes even in universal mili
tary tiaining — not a single cirilian in high
executive place, I mean; not one. The whole
Mutual Admiration Society is made up of dear
souls who inwardly, no matter what they say
in print, believe even now that ' diplomatic ' ef
forts to demoralize the Teutonic allies are more
272

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THE MUTUAL ADMIEATION CLUB
important than pumping lead and steel into the
beasts. " And just wait until ' the pee-pul ' begin to feel
the real pinch of war a bit ! Wait till pa and ma
leam that gasoline is needed so much abroad that
they '11 have to experience the horror of sitting
round the house on a pleasant Sunday afternoon
instead of taking their customary spin of sixty
miles over Long Island or Illinois roads ! While
the boys abroad are trying magnificently to get
over the top, ' the pee-pul ' back home, once the
pinch comes, will only hamper the real sufferers
with their whines about ; ' When is it going to
end? When can we ride in our flivver? ' Bah!
I wish we had one real forceful leader back here
at home who never heard about ' over there ' or
' over the top,' but would stand right up on his
hind legs and scream, ' Over the Ehine ! ' loud
enough to make the whole shebang of us jump to
his banner and do it. Heaven knows the episto
lary and oratorical efforts .to make Austria fall
out with Germany and all the rest of these intel
lectual efforts to win the war have their good
points; everything helps, and I hope the letter-
writers accomplish what they 're after. But the
intellectual flghting is secondary, or twenty-sec-
273

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
ondary, to the need right now of real leaders who
can holler ' Over the Ehine ' in a way that will
make the people see red. As somebody or other
once said, ' The great trouble with Ireland is the
Irish,' and the chief trouble with the people in
this democratic republic is the Democrats and
the Eepublicans and the people. Heavens! I
wish Napoleon had been born on the East Side of
New York a generation ago, and early had gone
into Bowery politics! He would have jumped
right out of the thick of the people long ago and
landed here in Washington, and we 'd go over the
Ehine. But in the whole crowd running things
here he has n't a third-rate representative."
The chief trouble with any argument the
Missus advances is that, being a woman, she does
not use her reasoning powers as we business men
do, but lets her emotion sway her ideas, which a
man never does. The first thing I knew she was
criticizing the Secretary of War himself because
he wasn't Napoleon! And the wife never had
seen the secretary, so far as I knew; certainly
never had talked things over with him, as I had.
While the wife was opening up on the common
people I was thinking how differently she would
have spoken had she been with me only the day
274

THE MUTUAL ADMIEATION CLUB.
before while I was talking the war situation over
with Secretary Baker himself.
" Mr. Secretary," I had said, " what sort of
provision in the way of anti-aircraft guns has
been made for New York City, if any? "
" I don't care to discuss that," the secretary
had answered. Then Secretary Baker had begun
to talk with some one else, and before I could
think of any other question to ask him somebody
threw me out.
That 's the only way to get a proper appreci
ation of a man — have a good heart-to-heart talk
with him. Wherefore, just to prove to the wife
that the Secretary of War was a splendid chap
and a born leader of men, I took the trouble to
interrupt her long enough to relate in detail
some of the incidents that attended the initiation
of Mr. Baker into his momentous job of Secre
tary of War. The incidents, I know, endeared
him to me tremendously.
It was a day in March, 1916, 1 remember, when
Mr. Baker first entered upon his new duties in
the State, War and Navy building at Washing
ton. Also it was the day, so I now reminded the
wife, that the news burst upon Washington and
the country that Villa and his gang had crossed
275

THB WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
the Mexican border, and at Columbus, New
Mexico, had killed nineteen American citizens,
including soldiers of the Thirteenth Cavalry, and
had wounded at least a score of other Americans.
And the flght had waged until more than fifty
Mexicans had been killed in the Columbus neigh
borhood and seventy-five others shot dead on
Mexican soil.
Only two days before all these happenings on
the border a famous New York newspaper had
printed the spreading head-line,
N. D. BAKEE, PACIFIST, TO BE WAE
SECEETAEY
And thus it was that the country was acquainted
with the fact that the President at last had found
a successor to the able Lindley M. Garrison. It
may be remembered incidentally that Mr. Gar
rison while Secretary of War never had had his
name put up for membership in the Mutual Ad
miration Society mentioned by the wife in her
tirade, and one thing had led to another until
finally Mr. Garrison had quit.
Under the head-line above the country was
told who he was and how the genial young man
had got his job : 276

THE MUTUAL ADMIEATION CLUB
Newton D. Baker, ex-Mayor of Cleveland, has been
selected by President Wilson for the office of Secre
tary of "War. Mr. Baker is a member of a number of
peace societies.
The President and Mr. Baker are warm personal
friends. The President tendered the Secretaryship of
War to Mr. Baker in accordance with his decision
to choose a lawyer from the Middle "West [ !] for the
post. Mr. Baker is a Demoerat and was a conspicuous
figure in the Baltimore convention that nominated
Mr. Wilson for the Presidency. He was the original
Wilson man in his State, voting the Cuyahoga dele
gation to the Baltimore convention for "Wilson instead
of Harmon.
Mr. Baker's riews on national defense have ex
cited great interest here in "Washington. He has
been classified as a pacifist. As a member of peace
societies he has taken an active part against national
defense measures. He is a member of the Cleveland
Peace Society and of several other kindred organiza
tions, but says he sees no incongruity in remaining a
member and being Secretary of War.
Mr. Baker first attracted attention through his
eloquence as an after-dinner talker.
I remember how pleased we had all been when
reading this glowing tribute to the new Secretary
of War, and how it had thrilled me personally
upon learning that at last we were to have a Sec-
277

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
retary of War who was a good after-dinner
speaker. And one could see in every line of the
tribute that here was a great, red-blooded, fight
ing leader of peace-society movements " against
national defense measures," just the sort of man
to select to head our War Department at the mo
ment that our country was trying to balance
itself on the brink of the greatest war of the
world. It so happened that I was in Washing
ton on that March day when the new Secretary of
War came to the capital to take personal charge
of whipping our " national defense measures "
into shape, and I remember now how I had hoped,
even prayed fervently, that day that some way
could be found to keep from our new young sec
retary the distressing news that our soldiers had
just had a vulgar fight with a lot of horrid Mexi
cans, some of whom had actually so far forgotten
themselves as to shoot our people dead.
Some one, I was glad to see, did delay the
sending of the shocking news at least long enough
to permit the new Secretary of War to make a
care-free, pleasant little call of formality at the
White House during the early hours of his first
day in office. As he came forth from that short
visit, gently smiling, he was asked what he was
278

THE MUTUAL ADMIEATION CLUB
going to do with his ne^y job, now that he had it.
" Well, being a greenhorn," the Secretary of
War answered in his delightfully diffident man
ner, " I can't say that I have any policy of my
own." Whereupon he started westward out of the
White House grounds, and in a few minutes was
seated for the first time at his new desk in the
War Department. And there, lying among the
beautiful flowers that decorated his desk, was a
communication which some thoughtless person
had cruelly placed where the eye of the Secretary
of War could not help but see it. He picked it
up and read the news that seven United States
troopers of the Thirteenth and twelve civilians,
one of them a woman, were lying dead, killed by
foreigners on American soil, the intimation being
gathered from the communication that details of
further casualties were to follow. Bad as the
news was to the rest of us, it must have been
trebly distressing to a Secretary of War chiefly
noted as an ardent worker " against national de
fense measures."
Scarcely had the secretary read the communi
cation when into his offlce spilled a group of ex
cited newspaper correspondents representing the
279

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
news associations and the great dailies of the
country at Washington. If any of them had
grown blas^ in his work, that reporter showed no
sign of boredom on the March day when he and
his colleagues approached the new offlcer of the
Cabinet. Here was " news," a new Secretary of
War not only taking up the direction of our mUi
tary affairs at a time when a world war was try
ing to shatter cirilization, but also stepping into
office at a moment when the bodies of our own
dead, lying prone on American soil, were still
warm to the touch. "Now we shall get an in
terriew worth while ! " that was the attitude
with which the Washington correspondents
crowded into the office of the suave, smiling Sec
retary of War to greet him. "Now for a good
old, red-hot, sizzling — "
"Ah," remarked the secretary, after the first
formal bows and hand-shakes, the exclamation
having escaped the secretary's lips as he noted
that one of the reporters happened to be gazing
in the general direction of a bunch of flowers
prettily arranged just in front of Mr. Baker's
revolring-chair — " ah, I see that you love flow
ers, too. These were sent to me by an admirer;
I should say a friend." 280

THE MUTUAL ADMIEATION CLUB
Some one tried impatiently to get some sort of
start on the all-absorbing subject of the bloody
raid that had just been made on American soil
by the Mexicans, of the American girl hideously
butchered, the soldiers and civilians lying dead
and dying, and all the murder and rape and black
ruin. But the secretary had not flnished his dis
course on the beauties of the flowers, and it would
not do, of course, to interrupt him.
It was a natural thing for admirers of a new
official to decorate his desk with flowers on his
first day in office. It was quite as natural for a
gentleman with so laudable a trait as a liking for
pansies (even the bull-necked von Hindenburg
finds his chief home joy in his garden) to discuss
his hobby. But the reporters, true to their call
ing, wanted war talk, bloody war.
Wherefore correspondents came forth from
that interview chiefly concerned about the fact
that the new secretary had talked only of his
interest in pansies that bloomed back in the old
home town of Cleveland.
In their misery they staggered into the nearest
drug-store to calm themselves with ice-cream
sodas. Sadly they drank their syrupy tipple ; the new
secretary, they decided promptly, would not " do."
281

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
One brilliant correspondent, however, took the
new secretary's part. No mere man, cried the
champion of the War Department's new boss,
could be expected instantly to formulate and de
scribe in detail a complete plan for handling so
sudden and so serious an international compli
cation. Mr. Baker, concluded the secretary's
journalistic friend, was the greatest war secre
tary that ever had led a peace movement.
Now this tribute was voiced by a brilliant
newspaper man, one noted for his keen, analyt
ical mind and his fund of rare judgment, in
which I have always placed special confidence.
What were the emotional tirades of the wife
compared with this thoughtful analysis by the
clever newspaper correspondent I have now in
mind? And this newspaper man of brains, a
trained observer of men and affairs, had given his
unqualified approval of young Mr. Baker as the
right man in the right place, once he had got up
steam. That was and is enough for me. Let
the wife rave, say I, and that's just what I
did say to her, once I had told her all about the
new Secretary of War's flrst day in office and
had quoted for her beneflt the appreciation of the
secretary as voiced by the brilliant correspond
ent while he was staggering out of the ice-cream-
282

THE MUTUAL ADMIEATION CLUB
soda salon. And what had his wife to say? She
just threw back her head and laughed in what
one might almost call a very vulgar manner, re
fusing even to reply when I asked the cause of
her sudden merriment.
" Steve," she said at last, wiping her eyes,
"how old are you, really?" And immediately
she seemed not to hear my answer, but suddenly
had grown moody and thoughtful again.
A queer race, women. What the deuce had my
exact age to do, even remotely, with the serious
matters under discussion? I shall not go so far
as to say that woman in general is irrational,
but there are times when I cannot help feeling
that it is almost as close to impossible for a
woman to think connectedly as it is for the mildly
insane. For instance, I had come home to our
hotel room somewhat late only a few nights be
fore the day the wife abused the common people,
and in the darkness I awakened her to tell her en
thusiastically about a beautifully printed volume
I had picked up during the day for only two
dollars. I was about to snap on the electric
light to show her my purchase when she woke
up sufficiently to explain that during the evening
the electric circuit supplying our floor had blown
283

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
a fuse or something and was out of commission.
"What is this wonderful book you bought?"
she asked.
" It 's called ' The Life and Addresses of the
Hon. Josephus Daniels,' " I told her.
"Well, don't light the gas now to show it to
me, dearie. You might blow it out," she said.
Now here 's my point : The Missus was per
fectly aware of the fact when she made this re
mark that all my life I have been accustomed to
the use of illuminating gas, that I thoroughly
understood, quite as well as she did, that to blow
out the light and thus permit the gas to flood the
room would seriously injure, doubtless kill, us.
Therefore by what " reasoning " power had her
woman's " mind " swung all the way from
thoughts concerning a purchase I had made that
day to the sudden and wholly irrelevant idea,
notion, rather, that we were in danger of gas
poisoning? I ask the world fair, can you beat
it? And yet in affairs of the home, in conducting
the war, in the selection of national leaders, in
anything and everything, it is always woman who
figuratively jumps aboard the passenger-train of
life and tries to tell mere man where he gets off !
And a moment after she had asked me my exact
284

THE MUTUAL ADMIEATION CLUB
age that day she seemed to have forgotten that
she had asked me; for in the next breath, with
out waiting for me to reply, she was again on the
subject of the fighting abilities of the head of
our War Department.
" Now that you mention Secretary Baker's
first day in office," thus mused the wife out loud,
her brows knitted in thought, " I half remember
the first statement the War Department made
that day regarding the Villa raid into New
Mexico. As I recall it, instead of coming out
with a smashing, strong announcement that the
murder of our people by the Mexicans must stop
and would be stopped, the very first sentence was
a sort of apologetic statement, assuring us that
the administration was not going to show resent
ment against Villa and his cutthroats to any
forceful extent. The whole statement, the very
first ' official ' sentence pronounced by the new
Secretary of War, has stuck more or less in my
memory because the ideas it expressed were so
thoroughly in character with the Administra
tion's permanent war policy of just 'making a
showing.' "
There was no use in standing there and try
ing to correct the wife's erroneous thinking by
285

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
mere noise. I was in no position to give battle
because, I must confess, the gist of that flrst
statement of the secretary's had long ago escaped
my memory. But the more I thought the thing
over, the more I realized that whatever the sec
retary did say that day was the official thought
of the whole administration and not the mere
personal ideas of the Secretary of War, then the
more sure I felt that the wife must be wholly
mistaken in saying that the statement was not a
forceful expression of the intense action about to
be begun to stop the raids.
I don't like to let the wife get away with these
arguments of hers without at least letting her
know that she has been in a battle. Wherefore
when, later on that forenoon, I was strolling
along Pennsylvania Avenue I slipped into a
local newspaper office and asked a clerk to let
me see a bound file of their paper for March,
1916. And simply to prove to the wife that the
Secretary of War, speaking for his Commander-
in-Chief, had not made his initial bow to the
people by giving forth a half-hearted and apolo
getic promise merely to "make a decent show
ing " in retaliating against the Villa butchers, I
286

THE MUTUAL ADMIEATION CLUB
copied the opening paragraph of that statement
and brought it home to the wife exactly as
printed in the newspapers the day after Secretary
of War Baker took office. Secretary Baker had
begun, I found, as follows :
There is no intention of entering Mexico in force.
A sufficient body of mobile troops will be sent in to
locate and dispose of the band or bands that attacked
Columbus. So soon as the forces of the defacto Gov
ernment can take control of the situation any forces of
the United States then remaining in Mexico will, of
course, be withdrawn.
Triumphantly, there in the Washington news
paper office, I underscored heavily the words,
" locate and dispose of," with a double line be
neath the word dispose. And half an hour later,
while we were lunching up-stairs in our hotel
room, I grinned maliciously and handed the wife
the copy of the secretary's first official words in
office. " So that 's what you call typical of ' this whole
administration's permanent war policy of just
making a showing,' eh?" I cried with gusto.
The wife's eyes ran over the lines, and in turn
287

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
she underscored the first sentence twice and drew
a line under every other word in the paragraph
also. " Yes, that 's typical," she said, handing me
back the paper with a smile that lacked merri
ment. " ' There is no intention of entering Mex
ico in force.' I distinctly remember those open
ing words now, and I recall that I 've heard them
in slightly different form every few days since
then." " Well," I exclaimed in astonishment, "did n't
the administration send an armed force into
Mexico? "
" Yes," the vrife jagreed listlessly. " It retali
ated against the Mexicans with comparatively
the same ' force ' it finally decided to send against
the Germans. It sent into Mexico a 'force'
just big enough to enable another group of
American boys to give up their lives, but not
big enough to locate anything, dispose of any
thing. In these days of the wireless the splendid
little band of fighters who did go in could not,
unfortunately, ' cut the cable,' as Dewey did at
Manila, and so be free of Washington interfer
ence. And, you may remember, they just had
about time to bury their dead when word came
288

And the extravagance of her language left me crumpled in my
chair

THE MUTUAL ADMIEATION CLUB
from Washington to come home. And nothing
came of anything."
"But listen, old girl — look at the way we
waded into them when one of their old savages
refused to salute the Stars and Stripes after in
sulting the flag. In next to no time this admin
istration had war-ships and marines and sailors
and—" "Yes," intermpted the wife, stUl listlessly
sipping her tea. "I've been thinking of Vera
Cruz, too. We went down there, I remember,
and went into Mexico a sufficient number of city
squares from the water-front to have another
batch of our boys shot. And that 's all that ever
happened. At the flrst sight of blood Washing
ton hurriedly called the whole thing off. As we
had gone there to ' make them salute the flag '
with only a pretense of a force, the only thing
that came out of the entire fiasco was an impres
sive line of about twenty gun-caissons moving up
through lower New York one morning with a flag
covered coffin on each caisson. Nothing else had
happened; nobody had been forced to salute the
flag. After the Columbus affair Villa laughed
at us, and the raids were n't stopped, have n't
been even yet. And after Vera Cruz old Huerta
289

THE WAE-WHIEL IN WASHINGTON
laughed at us and still refused to salute the flag.
And Mexico told the lads sent in to ' locate and
dispose of Villa to get out of Mexico, and
Washington humbly obeyed. Whereupon our
splendid little ' army,' or what the Mexicans had
spared of it, had to come home again in shame
faced fashion because it had been ordered to do
so by a group of executive superiors who never in
their lives have shown as much real gumption
and fighting spirit as you '11 find in any class elec
tion in a young ladies' seminary."
"Now wait, Mrs. Grumble. Do you think
that 's a loyal way to — "
"Oh, dammit, shut up with this everlasting
parrot talk of ' loyalty ! loyalty ! loyalty ' ! " cried
the wife, springing up from the table. The ex
travagance of her language left me crumpled in
my chair, jaw sagging and too shocked to speak.
" Great heavens ! " she stormed on, pacing the
floor as she talked, " as somebody or other said
lately, 'Whose war is this, anyway?' Is it the
private property of estimable after-dinner speak
ers from the Middle West, or the personal prop
erty of learned pedagogues who preached against
even decent preparedness when our own people
were being shelled and drowned, and then kept
290

THE MUTUAL ADMIEATION CLUB
on preaching sheer insanity until enough of the
' disloyal ' had got together to shake some sem
blance of common sense into the whole crowd of
mollycoddles — does this war belong solely to
the people's servants or to the people? This is
my war, your war, our war !
" ' Loyalty ! ' That word in every meaning but
the right one has been hammered into the people
day in and day out during the last few months as
it never before was jammed down the country's
throat in the whole history of the nation. Day
and night on the floor of the Senate and every
where else round here the petty-politics spokes
men of the Mutual Admiration Society, the thou
sands of flatterers all over this city who have
been suddenly thrust into a sort of prominence
by appointment to jobs which in turn flatters the
flatterers, correspondents of Democratic news
papers, special writers for magazines who have
been coddled and made much of — all day every
day the whole crowd bends to the task of con
rincing the people that it is 'loyalty' to sub
scribe to anything and everything the Mutual
Admiration Society sanctions, but ' sedition ' to
say one word that might ' embarrass ' the dear
old Democratic party. As if the most important
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movement the world has ever undertaken and
the rapid and successful execution of that move
ment were of secondary importance to the per
sonal advancement and fame of politicians small
enough to put their own miserable little personal
ambitions above a generous and unpartizan and
united effort to bring the great movement to
success ! Bah ! For three of the most humili
ating years that a soft-headed people ever experi
enced the whole Mutual Admiration Society
tried, on the plea of ' loyalty ! loyalty ! ' to silence
every decent protest against submitting to the
rile insults of that big bully abroad. Day and
night the self-appointed owners of this w'ar stood
round with a frown, shaking their collective
flngers severely and crying : ' Be loyal, good
people ! Stand by the President ! ' until almost
the entire land had become conrinced that the
heavenly height of pure loyalty was to sit in the
house and watch a drunken beast attack your
mother and then applaud your father for not re
senting the beast's attack."
I broke in for a minute, or tried to, and asked
the wife to calm herself and forget it.
" I '11 not forget it," she exploded. " I 've had
this ' loyalty ' stuff crammed into me so much re-
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THE MUTUAL ADMIEATION CLUB
cently that I 'm going to get the whole thing out
of my system. It makes me sick, sore, and tired
to think that when at last we were dragged into
this fight by the scruff of our necks the whole Mu
tual Admiration Society instantly swung all the
way round, once they found themselves forced at
least — and at last — into starting toward doing
the things that, during the three years preceding
they had tried to stop any one even from advo
cating under pain of being ' disloyal.'
" And the minute they had been kicked into an
upright position, where they at last were shoul
der to shoulder with the decent peoples of
Europe, they began right away to head their
whole tribe of press agents here in a wholly dif
ferent direction. Three cheers for everything!
Hurray ! we 're going to strangle the kaiser to
death — on paper. The press agents of cabinet
officers came out with statements so extravagant
and absurd that assistant secretaries that I could
name hung their heads in shame when they heard
the impossible claims made by their chiefs. ' We
shall have twenty thousand airplanes ready for
active work in Europe by the summer of 1918,'
that was one of the examples of bosh given out
solely to hoodwink the public into believing that
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mollycoddles had suddenly become fire-eating
warriors. ' We shall build six million tons of
shipping in the same time.' Bosh ! I took the
trouble here in the hotel the other day to look
through one copy of the Government organ
known as the ' Official Bulletin,' which, theoreti
cally, the Government has a right to print solely
that the public might have some idea of wh9,t
really is being done by the Administration in the
conduct of the war. And I gathered from the
' Official Bulletin ' that the compilers of the pub
lication also perforce must take part in Wash
ington's greatest indoor sport, the same just now
being to spread broadcast verbatim reports of all
the kind words which those who wear the coro
nets are constantly saying about themselves.
Anybody with common sense knows that we shall
be lucky, at the present rate, if we have even ten
airplanes by summer instead of the twenty thou
sand promised so grandiloquently. One man
who never joined the Mutual Admiration Society,
but does know all about our airplanes, for the
reason he is one of the big bosses actually mak
ing them, put it this way to me right here in
Washington only a few days ago :
" I suppose the powers round here will accuse
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me of ' lending aid to the enemy ' when I say out
loud we sha'n't have anything like a small frac
tion of twenty thousand airplanes ready; but as
Germany knows all about our aircraft shortcom
ings, I can't see how we give aid to Germany by
letting our own people get an inkling of a condi
tion that is ancient history to the German peo
ple.' " And when it comes to six million tons of ship
ping by tfie summer of 1918, bah again! To
make the ships we haven't even taken the first
steps toward conserving the labor that is to build
them. We play with wheatless days and meat
less days, and not a genius in all this capital ever
stops to realize that a product more important
than wheat or meat or anything else, the most
important product in the whole conduct of the
war — labor — is still altogether unregulated,
not mobilized, still hopelessly in a state of
scramble. And if any ' seditious ' person does
step forward to suggest that we at least try to
approach what Great Britain has done in
mobilizing labor, instantly the small-town poli
ticians who call themselves ' leaders of the peo
ple ' begin to think first of the dear labor vote
next election day and, secondly, of the war.
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Lord Northcliffe was one of these ' disloyal ' per
sons, too, ' lending aid to the enemy,' a ' paid
agent of Germany,' and all that sort of thing in
the days when England was passing through the
' loyalty ' spasm which is now epidemic over here
or epizoodic over here. And finally England
awoke to the fact that Northcliffe's contribution
of ' aid to the enemy ' was to take the supremacy
of the air away from Germany and kick a fat-
headed bureaucracy generally into action. And
the tirades in England against Northcliffe-had n't
died down before England had suddenly begun to
reward him by making him the supreme head of
a force of ten thousand specialists working night
and day for England and the Allies in the office
buildings and on the plains of America."
"Have you finished. Mom?"
" No, I have n't started. But that 's all I 'm
going to say to-day. I 'm going to put on my
hat, and you 're going to put on yours, and we 're
going to take a run down to Mount Vernon this
afternoon. And to-night we 're going to pack
up and we 're going back home to New York,
where I shall continue to be ' disloyal ' from the
Mutual Admiration Society's point of riew, even
at the risk of costing the dear old Democracy, or
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Eepublicanism, as the case may be, a couple of
votes. Come, let 's get out of this before some
body hears me and interns me with the other dan
gerous enemies of the Mutual Admiration So
ciety." I was glad the wife had decided upon that re
freshing motor-trip down among the withered
Virginia fields of winter. The bracing winter
air and, above all, the gentle peace and quie
tude in and round the lovely old colonial man
sion that once had been General Washington's
was a tonic that would go far toward reliering
her of whatever it was that was the matter with
her. And so we strolled about the Mount Ver
non rooms, and talked with the dignified old
gardener in the greenhouse on the estate, and
entered upon a learned discussion with an aged
darky on the grounds about the more or less eri
dent good points of his hound-ketchin' dawg.
" Why let yourself get all flustered, old girl,"
I said as we strolled back toward the waiting
car to return to Washington, " about what is or is
not being done in the war? What good does it
do? You and I can be as peaceful, at least in
our own hearts, as the peace and quiet we've
found here to-day on this spot, which is the heart
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of all America. Is there any suggestion of war
worry here at Mount Vemon? Can you, by any
wildest stretch of imagination, fancy even one
hint of all this world worry penetrating into the
calmness of this old estate, even when — "
Boom! The roar of a great gun came from the
testing-grounds far down the river at Indian
Head. The chattering sparrows on the leafless
trees listened with heads cocked to one side.
Bang! Bonk! Boom! Boom! Up the ice-
locked Potomac came the roar of salvos of great
guns, the echoes rolling back in softer thunders
from the Maryland and Virginia hills.
" No," said the -wife, softly, as the roar of the
big guns throbbed on and on. " There is n't any
place in all this world where even the selfish can
' forget ' — not until we have finished it all for
ever. Come on. Let 's go home."

THE END

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