HE Senator was kidnapped. I wonder if you'll believe this yarn? I don't know as I care. It's true. Four years ago you would have shrugged and winked your eye. To-day, quite likely, you'll say: “Well, why not? This war has certainly moved us along.”
I promised to go cautiously; so I can reasonably defy anybody to identify the Senator under the attendant camouflage. (There I go! I swore I'd never use that word again.) Beyond his height and black string tie, I shall give you no description of the Senator.
Queer old gassers, our politicians. They hypnotize themselves into the belief that part of the world rests upon their shoulders, when, as a matter of fact, they are in Washington for two very simple reasons, greatness or fitness having nothing to do with it. Either they have “put up” for several mayoralty campaigns and have to be squared, or they are putting the local boss on the anxious seat and he considers them safer in Washington than back home.
For years now the Senator had worn the toga solemnly and with circumspection. He had reached that point—and a good many Senators reach it—where he considered it was a life job and that nobody back home had the slightest interest in his political shoes. It follows naturally that the shadow he cast on Pennsylvania Avenue wasn't nearly so big as he thought it was. He was on a committee of sorts because he had been in the Senate just a little while longer than somebody else, and because he was a good party man.
Now I come to a little phase in his character of which he was totally unaware. He honestly believed that he was democratic, whereas he was autocratic, both in public and private life. When the Senator got an idea in his head, it stuck; if it began to show signs of falling off, he restuck it. He believed it a mark of moral weakness to recant. Know him? Probably you do. He's a type.
Like many Americans in public life, when in doubt he twisted the tail of the British lion. It never failed to fill the gap and to bring profit in the form of encomiums. He was anti-British, and nothing less than a ton of dynamite would have succeeded in dislodging him from his archaic stand. He was eventually dislodged, however, but by an Idea. It is the Idea I'm going to tell you about.
When Germany invaded Belgium the Senator was quoted as saving that it was none of our affair. When the Lusitania went down, he recalled that the German Embassy had particularly warned the passengers. So, when we declared war upon Germany, he found himself on the wrong side of the fence. And there he stuck, on what he honestly thought to be principle when it was only force of habit. Then some editor dubbed him “The Thirteenth Senator,” and the thing was done. Bang he went, right into the middle of the national spot-light. But he was no fool; he recognized that this wasn't the old white calcium, that there was something balefully ultra-violet about it.
Heretofore the Senator had looked upon newspapers tolerantly. as necessary evils. Back home they interviewed him once a year, and in Washington the reporters for the Congressional Record never failed to report his speeches in full. In truth, he ran with the field, doing the party will obediently; innocuous. hard-working, a fairly good speaker, but outside of Washington and the home town, unknown and unsung.
Being a highbrow, I confess I don't know what “blooey”” means; but I suspect it's Reichstag for “busted dream.” Anyhow, the newspaper correspondents in Washington said that the Senator had gone “blooey”; and when any one of them called for an interview, he carried his gas-mask, his liquid-fire shield and his first-aid pack.
There is a quality of pathos in all this. The Senator was a kindly, honest man, he meant to do right; but he loved the sound of his voice not wisely but too well; and when he finally awoke, he was knee-deep in barb-wire entanglements.
OU can't very well twist the tail of a lion that's standing between you and a few millions of howling hyenas. He saw his one reliable standby go to pot. He was as lonesome as a cactus in the desert. It takes genius to do the right thing at the right moment, and the Senator was an every-day sort of politician, whose idea of genius brought to mind some long-haired poet or fiddler. Boldness would have extricated him: but he possessed only a dogged courage. He had followed precedent so long that he had lost all initiative. He thought not in a groove but in a gully.