Chapter IV

From the beginning Thomas Patrick had realised that there is more in a political campaign than meets the eye. Therefore he was neither surprised nor suspicious when one morning the Chief told him to hire a deposit box at the Republic Trust in his own name.

“And give me the keys,” he said. “Certain amount of confidential stuff oughtn’t to be floating around.”

So Thomas Patrick rented a box, and rather proudly signed his name on the card. Some of these days he and Mary would have such a box. He often felt now that the deed for their house should be in a safer place than under the paper in the bureau drawer. And later on, when he occasionally took a sealed manila envelope to the Trust Company he enjoyed going into the basement of the bank, where uniformed attendants swung open the enormous door to the vaults, and he was able to gain an access impossible to the shrewdest cracksmen in the business.

Next to being great oneself was being attached to greatness.

Greatly to his relief the Elliot matter seemed to have gone no further. The campaign was in full swing now, and successfully so. Now and then he went with the Chief here and there, and from the back of a hall listened with swelling pride to the speeches he himself had helped to prepare. He would treasure the pleasant things he heard and tell the Chief on the way back.

“Surely had them going to-night, sir,” he would say.

“Think so?”

“It was sticking out all over them. One fellow near me, he said: ‘Talks like a Senator, and by God, he _looks_ like one!’”

“Humph!” the Chief would say, and perhaps straighten his tie.

There were no more evenings at the house now, and Thomas Patrick missed them. But the Chief seemed happier, in the thick of things as he was now, and to miss his wife less. He was fairly confident, too.

“Mary like the idea of Washington?” he asked once.

“She’s crazy about it.”

“You’ll have to have more money there,” he said, in his large way. “It costs a lot to live there.”

It seemed impossible for a human being to be happier than Thomas Patrick Finnerty was, in those days. Nor less suspicious.

If he had felt no distrust at the renting of the safe deposit box, he felt even less when he learned one day that the Chief felt the need of private quarters of his own. Thomas Patrick was becoming an old campaigner, and he began to see that it was sometimes necessary to give the people what was good for them rather than what they wanted, and even to conceal the fact that they were being done good. Also the opposition was growing bitter, and there was talk of a leak in the office.

“I have to see a lot of fellows,” the Chief explained, “that I don’t want to take to the house. And with reporters hanging about all the time, I can’t see them here.”

“Yes, sir,” said Thomas Patrick, enormously flattered at this confidence.

“What I think you’d better do,” said the Chief, considering, “is to rent me an apartment somewhere. In your own name. You might try the Burleigh. I understand they have some.”

“They’re pretty expensive.”

“Well, we’ll charge it to campaign expenses!” said the Chief.

Thomas Patrick was very busy the next few days. He took the apartment, and equipped it with various things evidently necessary to a political campaign, cigars in quantity, a poker table and chips, and the Chief’s particular brand of cigarettes, but without his monogram, of course. And he paid the first month’s rent in advance out of a checking account of his own, established for the purpose.

Thomas Patrick had a curious feeling of being a secret and powerful figure in national affairs. The only drawback was that Mary could not share this inner knowledge with him.

“All set, sir!” he announced to the Chief one afternoon, as he handed over the keys.

“Fine,” said the Chief.

He drew his check book toward him and made out a check. Then he tore it out and passed it over; it was to Thomas Patrick Finnerty, for five hundred dollars. Thomas Patrick coloured to the roots of his nondescript hair.

“I didn’t do it for money,” he stammered.

“Campaign expenses, Pat!” said the Chief. And then he did an unusual thing. He got up and put his hand on Thomas Patrick’s shoulder. “You’ve stuck by me, Pat,” he said, “and I don’t forget those things.”

Never, save when Mary agreed to marry him, had Thomas Patrick been so happy. And the Chief’s touch on his shoulder meant more than the money in his hand.

“I guess I won’t thank you,” he said huskily. “I guess you know I’ll go on sticking, sir. I guess I’m that kind.”

The Chief was touched. He knew devotion when he saw it, and he knew too that there wasn’t too much of it floating about. Also, his own generosity exalted him; he was, so to speak, carried on the wave of it a bit further than perhaps he had meant to go.

“How about taking that ‘campaign’ check,” he suggested, “and buying fifty shares of B. T. & P. on a ten dollar margin? I understand there’s something doing there.”

“But suppose it goes down?”

“Oh, I could carry you all right. But I don’t think it will.”

The total result of which was that three days later on Thomas Patrick Finnerty cashed in a seven hundred dollar profit, making twelve hundred in all, and bought himself immediately a pair of new shoes, not before they were badly needed.

He had not told Mary. She feared and hated speculation, for one thing. Not, of course, that he was going to speculate any more. He was through. And the second reason was that their wedding anniversary was due on the fourth of the next month. He was going to give it all to her then, as a present.

At first he meant to give it to her in a check. Then—oh, he was cunning—he thought of a better way. He would cash it, and first of all he would hand her a ten-dollar bill.

“Thought you might prefer buying your own present,” he would say.

“Oh, Pat! You’re a darling. I’ll get—” Well, maybe she would say silk stockings. She was crazy about silk stockings.

“Then you might want to spend this, too,” he would say, airily. And lay another bill in her lap.

And so on, through the whole amount. She would grow silent after awhile, and just sit staring. And then perhaps her throat would work a little and she would cry. Laughing, too, of course. She had a funny way of doing both together sometimes.

“Kinda set us up in Washington, eh what?” he would say. And she would hold onto him as if she would never let go.

He was sublimely happy. He held his head higher now as he walked home from the office, and often he came in whistling.

“You’d think you were going to be a Senator yourself,” Mary said sometimes.

“Maybe I will.”

“Two new neckties, too!” she said. “Some night I’m going to call up the Chief’s house and see if you’re really there. Maybe you have a girl somewhere.”

“Maybe I have!” said Thomas Patrick, strutting about with his secret.

But, as it happened, he did not carry out his plan entirely. Nobody can say exactly why some small patch of apparently extraneous material sometimes creeps into the fabric of a life, and entirely alters the whole thing. But it happened now.

One night he saw Mary reading a newspaper advertisement of fur coats, poring over it in her absorbed fashion, and he had his brilliant idea.

“Look pretty good, don’t they?” he said, over her shoulder.

“They’re half price.” But she added, for fear of hurting him, “I don’t want one, you know. My suit’s as good as ever.”

“Well, we’re not in the fur coat class. Not yet,” he said craftily. “Some of these days—”

“—when you’re President!” said Mary.

On the evening of their anniversary he staggered up the street with a huge box, and set it carefully inside the hall door. Then he wandered back. Mary was dressed with unusual care, and he could see flowers on the dining room table.

“Going to have company?” he inquired nonchalantly.

“Company?”

“All dressed up, aren’t you?”

“Why, Pat!” she said, with a little quiver of her full throat. “You don’t mean to say—!”

“Great Scott!” he said. “Who’d ever believe I’d go and forget it?”

He tried to take her in his arms, but she evaded him.

“You forgot it!” she said. “You’re tired of me. I’ve been seeing it for some time. I’m not pretty—oh, no, I’m not—and you’re going up in the world and I’m standing still.”

“Why, Mary!”

“Oh, it’s true. Everybody sees the difference. Mrs. Tufts was here to-day, giving me a talk about holding a husband. ‘They’re a slippery lot,’ she said. ‘The minute you sit back and let go your hold, they’re off.’ That’s what she said.”

“I was only fooling, honey.”

“Oh, you say that now.”

“If you don’t believe me, come out in the hall.”

Just a fur coat, and not a very grand one at that, but how it changed the whole atmosphere of the little house that night! With Mary crying and laughing—wouldn’t one know she would do that?—and Thomas Patrick standing her up in it and turning her around. Showing her the hidden pockets, and the depth of the fur, and even the quality of the lining, and then fastening the storm collar up over her throat and fetching down a hat, any old hat, to get the complete effect.

And later on Mary—she _was_ clever, he thought—covering an old coat hanger with cotton and muslin, so no wear should come to it from the hanging away. Even the final depositing of it in a special closet, and locking it up, and finding a place to hide the key—all of it more or less sacramental.

She had accepted his explanation of it without question. The Chief had given him a check for the extra work, and who should he spend it on if not on her?

“You needed a new overcoat,” she said.

“Oh, I’ll get that, all right,” he said in that strange new lordly manner of his. “We’re on the up curve, old lady. I’m telling you.”

But after they had gone to bed, he lay for some time staring at the darkness. What had Mrs. Tufts meant, that afternoon? Had Tufts by any chance seen him at the theatre?