At the thought of Mrs. Sluss—her hard, cold, blue eyes—Mr. Sluss arose, tall and distrait, and ran his hand through his hair. He walked to the window, snapping his thumb and middle finger and looking eagerly at the floor. He thought of the telephone switchboard just outside his private office, and wondered whether his secretary, a handsome young Presbyterian girl, had been listening, as usual. Oh, this sad, sad world! If the North Side ever learned of this—Hand, the newspapers, young MacDonald—would they protect him? They would not. Would they run him for mayor again? Never! Could the public be induced to vote for him with all the churches fulminating against private immorality, hypocrites, and whited sepulchers? Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord! And he was so very, very much respected and looked up to—that was the worst of it all. This terrible demon Cowperwood had descended on him, and he had thought himself so secure. He had not even been civil to Cowperwood. What if the latter chose to avenge the discourtesy?
Mr. Sluss went back to his chair, but he could not sit in it. He went for his coat, took it down, hung it up again, took it down, announced over the ’phone that he could not see any one for several hours, and went out by a private door. Wearily he walked along North Clark Street, looking at the hurly-burly of traffic, looking at the dirty, crowded river, looking at the sky and smoke and gray buildings, and wondering what he should do. The world was so hard at times; it was so cruel. His wife, his family, his political career. He could not conscientiously sign any ordinances for Mr. Cowperwood—that would be immoral, dishonest, a scandal to the city. Mr. Cowperwood was a notorious traitor to the public welfare. At the same time he could not very well refuse, for here was Mrs. Brandon, the charming and unscrupulous creature, playing into the hands of Cowperwood. If he could only meet her, beg of her, plead; but where was she? He had not seen her for months and months. Could he go to Hand and confess all? But Hand was a hard, cold, moral man also. Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord! He wondered and thought, and sighed and pondered—all without avail.
Pity the poor earthling caught in the toils of the moral law. In another country, perhaps, in another day, another age, such a situation would have been capable of a solution, one not utterly destructive to Mr. Sluss, and not entirely favorable to a man like Cowperwood. But here in the United States, here in Chicago, the ethical verities would all, as he knew, be lined up against him. What Lake View would think, what his pastor would think, what Hand and all his moral associates would think—ah, these were the terrible, the incontrovertible consequences of his lapse from virtue.
At four o’clock, after Mr. Sluss had wandered for hours in the snow and cold, belaboring himself for a fool and a knave, and while Cowperwood was sitting at his desk signing papers, contemplating a glowing fire, and wondering whether the mayor would deem it advisable to put in an appearance, his office door opened and one of his trim stenographers entered announcing Mr. Chaffee Thayer Sluss. Enter Mayor Sluss, sad, heavy, subdued, shrunken, a very different gentleman from the one who had talked so cavalierly over the wires some five and a half hours before. Gray weather, severe cold, and much contemplation of seemingly irreconcilable facts had reduced his spirits greatly. He was a little pale and a little restless. Mental distress has a reducing, congealing effect, and Mayor Sluss seemed somewhat less than his usual self in height, weight, and thickness. Cowperwood had seen him more than once on various political platforms, but he had never met him. When the troubled mayor entered he arose courteously and waved him to a chair.
“Sit down, Mr. Sluss,” he said, genially. “It’s a disagreeable day out, isn’t it? I suppose you have come in regard to the matter we were discussing this morning?”
Nor was this cordiality wholly assumed. One of the primal instincts of Cowperwood’s nature—for all his chicane and subtlety—was to take no rough advantage of a beaten enemy. In the hour of victory he was always courteous, bland, gentle, and even sympathetic; he was so to-day, and quite honestly, too.
Mayor Sluss put down the high sugar-loaf hat he wore and said, grandiosely, as was his manner even in the direst extremity: “Well, you see, I am here, Mr. Cowperwood. What is it you wish me to do, exactly?”
“Nothing unreasonable, I assure you, Mr. Sluss,” replied Cowperwood. “Your manner to me this morning was a little brusque, and, as I have always wanted to have a sensible private talk with you, I took this way of getting it. I should like you to dismiss from your mind at once the thought that I am going to take an unfair advantage of you in any way. I have no present intention of publishing your correspondence with Mrs. Brandon.” (As he said this he took from his drawer a bundle of letters which Mayor Sluss recognized at once as the enthusiastic missives which he had sometime before penned to the fair Claudia. Mr. Sluss groaned as he beheld this incriminating evidence.) “I am not trying,” continued Cowperwood, “to wreck your career, nor to make you do anything which you do not feel that you can conscientiously undertake. The letters that I have here, let me say, have come to me quite by accident. I did not seek them. But, since I do have them, I thought I might as well mention them as a basis for a possible talk and compromise between us.”
Cowperwood did not smile. He merely looked thoughtfully at Sluss; then, by way of testifying to the truthfulness of what he had been saying, thumped the letters up and down, just to show that they were real.
“Yes,” said Mr. Sluss, heavily, “I see.”
He studied the bundle—a small, solid affair—while Cowperwood looked discreetly elsewhere. He contemplated his own shoes, the floor. He rubbed his hands and then his knees.
Cowperwood saw how completely he had collapsed. It was ridiculous, pitiable.
“Come, Mr. Sluss,” said Cowperwood, amiably, “cheer up. Things are not nearly as desperate as you think. I give you my word right now that nothing which you yourself, on mature thought, could say was unfair will be done. You are the mayor of Chicago. I am a citizen. I merely wish fair play from you. I merely ask you to give me your word of honor that from now on you will take no part in this fight which is one of pure spite against me. If you cannot conscientiously aid me in what I consider to be a perfectly legitimate demand for additional franchises, you will, at least, not go out of your way to publicly attack me. I will put these letters in my safe, and there they will stay until the next campaign is over, when I will take them out and destroy them. I have no personal feeling against you—none in the world. I do not ask you to sign any ordinance which the council may pass giving me elevated-road rights. What I do wish you to do at this time is to refrain from stirring up public sentiment against me, especially if the council should see fit to pass an ordinance over your veto. Is that satisfactory?”
“But my friends? The public? The Republican party? Don’t you see it is expected of me that I should wage some form of campaign against you?” queried Sluss, nervously.
“No, I don’t,” replied Cowperwood, succinctly, “and, anyhow, there are ways and ways of waging a public campaign. Go through the motions, if you wish, but don’t put too much heart in it. And, anyhow, see some one of my lawyers from time to time when they call on you. Judge Dickensheets is an able and fair man. So is General Van Sickle. Why not confer with them occasionally?—not publicly, of course, but in some less conspicuous way. You will find both of them most helpful.”
Cowperwood smiled encouragingly, quite beneficently, and Chaffee Thayer Sluss, his political hopes gone glimmering, sat and mused for a few moments in a sad and helpless quandary.
“Very well,” he said, at last, rubbing his hands feverishly. “It is what I might have expected. I should have known. There is no other way, but—” Hardly able to repress the hot tears now burning beneath his eyelids, the Hon. Mr. Sluss picked up his hat and left the room. Needless to add that his preachings against Cowperwood were permanently silenced.