FOR THE PEOPLE
I
Again the spring had come to Illinois, spilling the prairie flowers
over the pastures, and warming the pleasant smelling earth which the
mold-boards of the plows rolled back in rich loamy waves to make ready
for the corn. In the town the trees rustled their new leaves in the
wind that blows forever across the miles of prairie land, and the lawns
along Sangamon Avenue were of a tender green, as their blue grass
sprouted again under rake and roller. The birds were as busy as men,
and everywhere, under the high blue sky, were the sounds that come
with the awakening world, the glad sounds of preparation for every new
endeavor.
The windows of the Harkness home were open, their lace curtains blowing
white and cool in the young winds. Yet there, all was still. Upstairs,
on his bed, with his hands folded whitely under the sheet that was
smoothed across his breast, Ethan Harkness lay dead.
They buried him at Oakwood, just outside the town, beside the wife who
had gone there so many springs before; buried him by the bulky monument
he had raised, in his methodical business way, long ago. Its broad
base glimmered between the trees, and from afar, the raised letters of
his name could be read. The directors of the bank where he had spent
his life, the bank he had founded, testified a belated appreciation
of his virtues by adopting a long series of resolutions in which they
submissively ascribed to an all-wise and inscrutable Providence the
dispensation which they had done their part to hasten. They ordered,
too, that the curtains of the bank be pulled down on the day of his
funeral, and the door placarded "Closed," though old Morton was kept
there to collect the notes and interest falling due that day.
Then some ancient citizen, who was spending his declining years in
chronicling for his own satisfaction the insignificant happenings
of each day, chiefly the temperature and the times and local effect
of frost, reminded the city council that Harkness had once, long
years before, sat as a member of that body, and it likewise adopted
resolutions. The local lodge of Masons took charge of his funeral,
after Doctor Abercrombie of St. James had read the service in his
beautiful voice, and recited one of his little compositions.
And when Pusey had published an obituary in his best elegiac style, all
the conventions were considered as having been duly observed, and the
town turned from its tribute to the dead, to judge Harkness for his
deeds to the living who remained behind.
His will was proffered for probate in the County Court some days
after his funeral. It had been drawn ten years before, and as drawn
originally, left all his property to Emily, save a small bequest to a
sister who lived somewhere in far off New Hampshire. But a codicil,
drawn two years before his death, altered this original provision. To
Garwood, he directed that one thousand dollars in cash be paid by his
executors, and the rest and residue of his property of every kind,
nature and description, real, personal and mixed, he left in trust for
his beloved daughter Emily during her lifetime, and at her death, to
her children, heirs of her body, in equal shares. Garwood was not named
as one of the trustees.
The will, of course, was not satisfactory to any one in Grand Prairie.
There were many there who had pictured to themselves their young
congressman in the rôle of a lawyer without a practice, but with a
predilection for politics, and a young wife of independent means. They
knew how well he could cut this eminently respectable figure, and they
had some dim conception of the service he could render in theoretical
reform, if he only had money enough to place him above the vulgar
necessities of the common politician.
Garwood himself suffered keenly, though his pride was hardly touched
as much as Emily's. He had had dreams himself, but now--he closed his
memory to them. He even told Emily that he would not touch the thousand
dollars, but finally consented to do so in order to please her. And
then he suddenly remembered that the mortgage he had placed on his
mother's house was due once more that fall and he could think of no
more pious use than that to which to put the money. He was consoled,
however, when the inventory of the estate revealed the fact that
Harkness's property had either been vastly overestimated, or had lately
shrunk in values, and he learned in the court house gossip of the
lawyers, that certain unprofitable investments Harkness made during the
last years of his life, had excited the fears of the bank directors,
and led them to remove him from his wonted sphere of activity.
Emily, in the delicacy that embarrasses refined natures in money
matters, was glad when the business of settling the estate was so far
under way as to require her own attention no longer. She thought it
indeed concluded, though the executors, being old, and rich already,
relished the two per cent. commissions allowed them by law and scented
a possible extra allowance by the county judge as a reward for faithful
services. So they dragged the settlement along, picked out the choicest
notes from Harkness's tin box for themselves and dreaded the time when
they would have to turn over so meaty a carcass to the trustees, who
were itching to take hold.
Emily's grief at her father's death was deep, but placid, as grief
for the aged must always be. She and Jerome lived on at the old
house, though he often bemoaned the expense of keeping up so large an
establishment, and discussed taking a smaller place. But they stayed on
there, and the summer passed, quickly, as summers do in the intemperate
zone, where winter in one form or another rages nine months in the year.
And Emily tried to think of her husband in her old ideal of him,
because she was soon to become a mother again.
* * * * *
It was late October and old Mrs. Garwood, who spent much of her time
now with Emily, sat in the library with her. They had a fire in the
grate, the first of the season, and it cheered the somber room.
Outside the rain fell, and the wet leaves fluttering down from the
trees in the yard, brushed the window panes before settling into the
damp masses that choked the walks and the gutters. They had sat a long
time in the bliss of silent companionship, these two women, who, though
of such a different training and tradition, understood each other very
well. They had been talking of housekeeping and the increased expense
of living. Old Mrs. Garwood had sighed.
"I wouldn't mind nothing," she said, "if my mortgage was only--"
"If your mortgage--?" Emily let the garment in her fingers fall with
her hands into her lap, and looked up with the question written large
in her wide eyes.
"Yes, it's due, an' Mr. Dawson's pressin' me. Tschk, tschk, tschk! I
don't know, unless Jerome--but I don't like to bother him, poor boy."
"I thought--" but Emily checked herself. She took up the little dress
she had been working on. John Ethan, who had been writhing restlessly
at her feet, looked suddenly into his mother's face, and something
there silenced him, so that he was very quiet.
The next morning, after breakfast, she and Jerome were alone.
"Jerome," Emily said in the voice that made him lay down his paper, and
look up with serious eyes, "Jerome, I thought you were going to pay off
mother's mortgage for her."
"You did?"
"Yes."
"Why so?"
"Why, you said so, at the time, you remember."
"At what time?"
"Well, when you got your thousand dollars from--"
"Oh, am I never to hear the last of that thousand dollars!" Garwood
exclaimed, dashing his paper to the floor. "Must I always have that
thrown up to me! I wish I'd never seen it!"
"It isn't that, Jerome, you told me you had paid mother's mortgage with
it, that's all."
Garwood looked at her angrily a moment.
"You're mistaken there, I reckon, you must be mistaken. I said,
perhaps, that I would pay it off with that, but not that I had. I did
intend to, but I had to use the money in another place. I--" But he
could proceed no further then. He was thinking of the big poker game in
the Leland the night the state central committee met at Springfield.
Emily dropped the subject from her conversation, but she did not drop
it from her thoughts. It was with her all that day, and it was the
first thing in her mind the next morning, So incessantly did it recur
to her, that, in search of relief, she went finally to the bank. She
asked for old Morton, and when he shuffled up to the window, she made
him go with her back to the directors' room, haunted as it was with
memories of her father.
"They sell mortgages sometimes, don't they?" she asked as soon as they
were alone.
"Yes, yes," her father's old clerk replied, delighted at being
consulted confidentially in matters of finance.
"And could you get one for me, if I gave you the money, and told you
the one?"
He smiled, as he had seen his superiors smile. It would be a treat for
him to buy someone's mortgage. She told him, and he scratched his head
a moment. "I think," he said, "that's over't the Polk National; I ain't
sure now, but it seems to me--"
"Well, find out," said Emily, and the old man started.
"You spoke just like your father then," he said, in a mild, reminiscent
way that touched her.
He managed the matter for her in the end, and she bought the mortgage
by borrowing the money of one of her trustees, who said he was glad to
advance it to her, though he was careful to take out the interest for
himself in advance.
Emily had the mortgage canceled, and took it herself to her
mother-in-law that night.
"Here it is, mother," she said, "Jerome had forgotten it. You know how
neglectful he is!" And she smiled, as if she had named a virtue in the
man.
"Law, yes!" said Mrs. Garwood, folding the mortgage in her trembling
fingers. "Bless the boy! He always puts things off, but he never
forgets his poor old mother in the end!"
II
The Emersons had arrived in Washington at the beginning of February.
Their trunks, scuffed with constant travel but given a cosmopolitan air
of distinction by the _etiquettes_ with which they were plastered, were
ranged around the room in which the Emersons had quartered themselves
at the Arlington, and stood with yawning lids, ready for Dade to dive
into them after some new toilet with which to astound the guests when
she swept into the dining-room.
Her mother, spent by the long winter voyage, had collapsed upon
arrival, and had taken her meals in her room, vowing that if she could
reach Grand Prairie alive, she would never leave there again. She was
anxious now, to have Doctor Larkin undertake her cure. No one, she
assured Dade, had ever understood her case as well as he, and no one
had ever helped her as he had helped her. She longed to start for home
immediately; but she did not feel equal to the trip just then; it would
be necessary for her to remain in Washington awhile and gather strength
for the journey.
Meanwhile, as she lingered, Dade gloried in the Washington spring. She
had become enthusiastically American. She visited all the guide-book
places about Washington; she said she was making a study of American
history. In a week during which she had met several unreconstructed
rebels, though the bloody shirt was then happily passing as an issue
in politics, she had become intensely Southern in her sympathies.
She bemoaned the lost cause as bitterly as a widow of a Confederate
brigadier; she longed for a return of the golden days of Southern
chivalry, and she yearned ineffably as she pictured herself on some
old Virginia plantation attended by a retinue of black slaves whom she
would have patronized so graciously and kept so busy.
Each morning she bought a huge bunch of violets from an old
white-headed negro, in order to hear his "Lawd bless you, Missy!" It
seemed to put her in touch with the days she never had known, and never
could know.
She importuned her mother, too, for details of her ancestry, a subject
in which she had never displayed an interest before, and, though her
mother pleaded headache, she was at last enabled to recall and body
forth, though vaguely, a long dead grandmother whom tradition pictured
as a Virginia lady, an F. F. V., in fact.
And then Dade's English accent became a Southern dialect, and it was
with a delight that had its own regret, that she heard some one in the
hotel parlor ask her one evening what part of the South she came from.
An experienced ear would have detected Dade's little deception through
its inability to localize her dialect, for if she had heard a Virginian
speak, she straightway spoke like a Virginian, if a Kentuckian, like a
Kentuckian, if a Georgian, then like a Georgian, and the result was
that she mimicked all and mastered the tongue of none.
Yet her honesty compelled her to disclaim Southern birth, though she
qualified her denial and regained the place she had momentarily lost
in the estimation of her interlocutor by telling him that her family,
or part of them, had come from Virginia. Those evenings in the hotel
parlor were unsatisfying, however, and she tired of the limits its
walls set to her social evolutions.
It was, therefore, with a joy that lent a heightened color to her face,
and showed her white teeth in a genuine smile of welcome, that she saw
approaching her one evening across the dining-room a young man whose
stride and carriage marked him for an officer in the regular army. His
waist was as slender and his body as correctly bent as when he had been
a shavetail just out of West Point, though that he had seen some sort
of service was shown by his face, burned to an Apache bronze by the sun
of New Mexico.
He wore his civilian clothes, somewhat old in style, with the
unaccustomed air that sits on the army officer when he is out of
uniform. Dade did not restrain the look of pleasure that comes to any
girl's eyes at the sight of a soldier, especially a soldier with whom
she may claim acquaintance, and as his friendly face broke into smiles,
she said:
"Why, Mistuh Beck, who would have thought of meeting yo' all heah! Ah
thought yo' weh aout fighting Indians somewheah."
"I'm stationed here now," the young lieutenant explained, and then:
"The world is very small!" he marveled, making that trite remark with
the self-evident pleasure that showed he considered it original. "May
I?" He laid a hand tentatively on the back of a chair at her table, and
bowed low in his pantomime of asking if he might sit with her.
"Ce'tainly," she said.
"And Mrs. Emerson is well?"
"She takes heh meals in heh room. We ah only waiting heah fo' heh to
recovah sufficiently to unde'take the journey aout to Illinois."
They were so much together after that that the ladies of the hotel,
who could not have known that the young people had become acquainted
long ago in St. Louis, reveled in a new subject for gossip and pitied
the poor woman lying ill in her room and neglected by a daughter who
spent her time flirting with an army officer. Dade, by some spiritual
divination, apprehended all they were saying, and took a delight of
her own in shocking them. So the flirtation raged furiously, and Dade,
by delicate pathological suggestions, developed her mother's present
indisposition into the disease that was her Washington doctor's
specialty.
Beck and Dade had gone to the Capitol one day, and, when Dade expressed
a wish to see how the laws were made, had gone into the gallery of the
House. Below them the members were lolling in their seats, their feet
on their desks, reading newspapers, yawning or chatting, while the
business of the nation, or of the party then in power in the nation,
was being listlessly transacted.
The Speaker, sitting in his solemn chair, looked small in the distance,
the clerks below him bowed over their work. Now and then the Speaker's
voice could be heard, now and then the sharp fall of the gavel startled
the common drone of voices. Some member far across the House, beyond
the littered sea of desks, was speaking. His voice came to them
scarcely at all. He held a bundle of notes in one trembling hand, with
the other he now and then pushed his spectacles up on his sweating nose.
A cup of water stood on his desk, and he drank from it frequently in
the agony of getting through the ordeal that was necessary to supply
the voters in his far-away Ohio district with copies of that speech.
By the time it got into the _Congressional Record_, it would be well
parenthesized with applause, and thus paint for his constituents a
scene of a decorous, black-coated House, hanging rapt upon his words,
and breaking occasionally into cheers that could not be controlled. The
members lolled and read, and all about this speaker seats were empty,
standing there in wooden patience as if waiting for him to end. At
last the Speaker of the House turned from the man to whom he had been
whispering, and his gavel fell.
"The gentleman's time has expired," he said.
The Ohioan stopped, and when he asked leave to extend his remarks in
the _Record_, it was granted with the only enthusiasm his effort had
produced.
"It's stupid," said Dade, turning to her lieutenant. "Let's go ovah to
the Senate."
"It's worse there," Beck answered. "This seems to be an unexciting day."
"What ah they talking abaout?"
"Goodness knows, I don't."
"Do they?"
"Hardly. But--wait a minute!" The soldier leaned over the railing. A
laugh had rung below him. Sharp words had been spoken. A question had
been flung across the House. On both sides, Republican and Democratic,
members had sprung to their feet. The Speaker had arisen, and stood
with his gavel alertly poised. There were several nervous cries of,
"Mr. Speaker! Mr. Speaker!"
Beck saw one member who had arisen with the rest, and who now stood
with one hand raised, his finger leveled at the speaker.
"Mr. Speaker," said the member confidently.
The Speaker nodded in his direction.
"The gentleman from Illinois," he said.
The member began to speak, talking in a low tone for several moments.
Something he said provoked a laugh around him. Then the House was
still. He was a tall man, and his long black coat hung from heavy
shoulders. As he warmed to his subject, and his coat tails swung away
from his loins, they revealed a protuberant abdomen; as he warmed
still more, the perspiration rolled down his cheeks and on to the
neck that lay in folds of fat over his rapidly softening collar. His
voice increased in volume. He became excited, he turned around in a
vehement outbreak, to address directly some member who, with head bent
respectfully to the fictions of parliamentary etiquette, had crept in
creaking boots to a desk near the speaker, and there he now sat, a palm
nursing his deaf ear. The orator turned yet more directly about, and--
"Why!" Dade cried, "that's Jerry Gahwood! He's ouah congressman!"
She craned her pretty chin forward, and leaned her elbows on the wide
marble rail to hear the better.
"Do you know him?" Beck asked.
"Why, he's ouah congressman! He mah'ied Emily Ha'kness--don't yo'
remembuh? The gyrl who was with me that wintah at the Van Stohn's in
St. Louis?"
"Oh!" said Beck.
She turned in the more immediate personal interest his tone had
awakened in her.
"Do yo' know him?" she asked.
"I? No, not exactly."
Garwood's voice was ringing loud and clear. Members came in from the
lobby, from the cloak rooms, from the committee rooms. Men gathered in
the seats near Garwood to hear him the better. Now and then there was
the sharp rattle of clapping hands.
Dade's eyes were glowing.
"Isn't he fahn?" she said. "He's handsome, too. Ah heahd him make his
great speech the night befo' he was elected--yo' heahd of it, didn't
yo'?"
Beck only smiled. She turned again to listen, but her attention was not
steadfast. Beck had hardly been listening at all.
"Don't yo' think him fahn?" she inquired.
"He is really a good speaker," the lieutenant admitted. Dade looked at
him, fixing her brown eyes steadily in his blue ones.
"What do yo' all know abaout him?" she asked suddenly.
"Why do you ask?" he parried.
"Yo' speak so strangely--yo' ah so queah abaout him."
"Am I? I know nothing. I have been told that he came here two or three
years ago with extraordinary prospects--"
"And he has not--justifahd or fulfilled them?"
"That's about it."
"Well, if that's all!" Dade said loyally, tossing her head, and then
she turned once more to watch Garwood.
His speech was brief. He finished in a fine burst of eloquence, with a
hand uplifted, and his black locks shaking, and then sat down, amid a
volley of applause, taking the hands of those who pressed about him,
and smiling at each congratulatory word, though disparagingly, as if
his achievement had been a small thing for him.
"Ah must meet him!" Dade announced, suddenly arising. "We'll go. Yo'
must send in yo' cahd. Can yo'? Will they let yo'?"
"Yes," the lieutenant hesitated, "but--"
"But what?" Dade stood at her full height.
"I think you'd rather not see him--here."
"Nonsense!" She stamped her foot petulantly, and her eyes flashed
dangerously. "Ah mean to take him to task fo' not calling on mamma and
me. Ah've known him all my life!"
The officer shrugged his shoulders. He felt that he had already said
too much, more, certainly, than was prudent for an officer in the army,
where feudal notions of propriety still exist.
Garwood came out of the House in response to the lieutenant's card.
The air of serious and official demeanor with which he had prepared to
listen to importunities about some of the army's constant appropriation
bills or reorganization bills, relaxed into one of surprise and
friendliness when he saw Dade standing by the side of the young
officer, and it expanded into a smile of much insinuation as he bowed
low and took the girl's hand.
"I'm delighted, I'm sure," he said.
She presented the lieutenant, and the men bowed.
"I've met Lieutenant Beck before," Garwood said. "Glad to meet him
again--always glad to meet the officers of our little army, aren't we,
Miss Dade?"
He was red and perspiring, and stretched his neck now and then, that he
might press his handkerchief below his collar.
"We have been listening to yo' speech, Mistuh Gahwood," Dade said. "Ah
hadn't heahd yo' speak since that night befo' the election. Do yo'
remembuh?"
"Oh, yes," the congressman replied, and he laughed. "That seems years
ago, doesn't it?"
"Not to me," she corrected him.
Garwood bowed, intensely.
"Pardon me, Miss Dade, you are the only one who hasn't aged since then."
Garwood had drawn a cigarette from his pocket, and as they strolled out
into the rotunda, he offered the case to Beck.
"No, thanks," said Beck.
Garwood continued pinching the cigarette.
"Emil--Mrs. Gahwood is not with yo', is she?"
"No, poor girl," said Garwood. "She stayed at home this winter. It has
been lonely for me, too, without her. I had hoped to have her with me,
but she is not well--and then her father's death you know--"
Garwood allowed the sentence to complete in the girl's mind its own
impression of the lonely wife left at home.
"She must be lonesome," Dade said.
"Yes--think of having to spend a winter in that beastly little place!"
Garwood said, and then he hastened to add with an apologetic smile: "We
wouldn't talk that way in Grand Prairie, Lieutenant; would we, Miss
Dade?"
The two men walked with her between them, and Garwood walked close to
the girl. His eyes took in her fresh face, glowing under the dotted
veil, and her athletic figure, which she carried as erectly as the
soldier by her side did his.
"We were going over into the Senate."
"Ah?" Garwood responded. "I'm headed in that general direction, not to
hear the old men certainly, but down to the restaurant. This business
of saving the nation twice a day is exhausting. Perhaps you'd--"
"No, thank yo'," said Dade, withdrawing herself subtly.
"I shall do myself the honor of calling upon you, Miss Dade," Garwood
said.
She looked at him. Her eyes were cold.
"Mothuh will be glad to see yo', no doubt," she answered, and then she
bowed.
Garwood stood looking after her, watching the delicate play of the
muscles of her back as she walked. Then he placed the cigarette between
his lips, and started for the elevators.
"He's grown fat!" Dade was saying to the army officer. "He's hoh'id!
Po' little Emily!"
III
It had been a long and lonesome winter for Emily, shut up in the big
house emptied of all save its memories. She was still in mourning
for her father, and the conventionalities of a society that demands
steadfast grief in others prevented her from seeking any diversion,
even if she had had the strength or the inclination to do so. Her only
companion, besides the servants, was her child, now in his third year
and developing a curiosity that exhausted the little vitality that her
housewifely duties had not already demanded.
Mrs. Garwood found time, of course, to "run in," as she put it, every
day, though her run had to prolong itself for many blocks, and she
watched Emily with a motherly solicitude. But it was Emily's heart that
was lonely; she brooded constantly over her lengthened separations
from Jerome. She had borne them bravely as long as they seemed but
necessary postponements of the life she had wished to lead, but now it
was beginning to dawn upon her that there was a spiritual separation
between them, growing ever wider and wider, and the thought of this
wore away day by day faith and hope, and left her sick with despair.
For this her mother-in-law could give her little consolation. Not that
she lacked sympathy at heart, but the tenderness of her nature could
only express itself in material ways. The finer qualities of the
spirit's yearnings which, in the case of a nature like Emily's, became
real necessities, she could not appreciate. If at times she was haunted
by a crude intuition of Emily's subjective difficulties, she had not
the power to analyze them, and if she had, she would have found little
patience with them.
The life they had led did not of course meet the standards of her own
conscience, but she was disposed to blame Emily as much as, if not
more than, she did Jerome, and being a rigid old woman, who would have
burned at the stake for any one of her little elementary principles,
she would now, as she had done so many times before, consistently wag
her head with the wise disapproval her years and experience of common
life warranted her in expressing, and say:
"It ain't for the best, it ain't for the best. You're too young to
be apart; it ain't good for you, an' it ain't good for Jerome. Young
husban's should be kept at home, should be kept at home."
"But, you know, mother," Emily would argue, "I can't keep him at home,
and I can't be with him there in Washington--now."
And her head drooped over the white garment she was fashioning.
But old Mrs. Garwood inexorably shook her head.
"It won't do," she insisted, "a wife's place is by her husband, an' I
s'pose women becomes mothers in Washington same's anywhere else."
Emily had no strength for discussion then. It was all at one, anyway,
with the monotony of her life.
It became, too, but a part of her routine to follow political
developments through the newspapers, trying to supply the omissions
in Jerome's infrequent letters from the broad columns of the
_Congressional Record_, where, for the benefit of posterity, the
national politicians keep a carefully revised record of the things they
wish they had said.
If she found Jerome's name, she read eagerly, and then, dropping the
paper in her lap, began once more as in the past, to body forth in
imagination the whole scene--Jerome in the full flush of his oratorical
excitement, his face red, his eyes blazing, his brow damp with
perspiration, his black hair tumbled in the picturesque way she knew,
his arm uplifted, perhaps one white cuff a little disarranged.
And then, the other congressmen crowding into the seats about him,
at last the "long-continued applause," which is the only thing never
expurgated from that daily magazine of fiction. In this poor way she
tried to bear herself nearer to him, to remain by him, but it was not
satisfying, and many times after such hopeless fancy, she wept in
despair, and hugged her boy to her hungry breast, finding in his warm
little body the only actual and substantial comfort her life now knew.
Emily had allowed herself to believe that serious opposition to
Jerome's renomination had disappeared after his victory in his second
campaign, but when with other harbingers of spring Sprague came forth
in his perennial candidacy, and announcement was made that with the
solid delegation of Moultrie at his disposal he would contest with
Garwood for the nomination, she realized with a certain sickening at
her heart that the same old trial was upon them once more.
A few days later she read that Judge Bailey of Mason--now Speaker of
the House at Springfield--was also an avowed candidate for Congress,
and she tried to convince herself that Jerome's chances were thereby
favored because of the consequent division of the forces against him,
though there were disquieting articles in the _Advertiser_ that would
not let her conviction rest.
The _Advertiser_, as is customary with the opposition organ in a
man's own town, exhibited a meanness in its treatment of Garwood to
which it would not have descended in any cause less sacred than that
of party-ism, and it now began to speak of Bailey in fulsome praise
as if he were the savior of his times, though all its readers knew,
and especially did Emily know, for she, doubtless, alone of all those
readers, looked so far ahead, that if Bailey were successful before the
convention, he would, when the campaign came on, get all the abuse her
husband had been receiving.
But Emily had learned that editors, though they appeared at least
ordinarily honorable in other ways, could become mendacious when they
took up political questions; she had often wondered why it was that,
simply because they happened to own newspapers to print them in, they
could deliberately write and publish lies they would have scorned to
use in discussing men in any of their relations other than political,
and, while she could find no explanation except that partisanship
inculcates hypocrisy, she tried to be practical and not credit anything
she read in the newspapers, especially if it were disagreeable.
Pusey had loyally begun the campaign for Garwood's reëlection by
writing daily editorials in his praise, and these, printed in the
_Citizen_, which the postmaster continued to edit, gave Emily a
welcome antidote for the _Advertiser's_ venom. Pusey published all of
Garwood's speeches in full, and the _Advertiser_, with the relish of
one who discloses state secrets, described the little postmaster as
darkly setting up the pins for a county convention which should select
a delegation to the congressional convention instructed to use all
honorable means to bring about the renomination of Jerome B. Garwood.
The _Advertiser's_ editor, with a wit that sometimes illumined the
recesses of his mind, printed the word "honorable" in quotation
marks. This account of Pusey's secret doings was varied at times by a
description of the conferences that were nightly held in the back room
of the post-office. The _Advertiser_ pretended to lay bare all the
ramifications of the little man's designs, and as if its duty lay in
the direction of its joy, did all it could to confound his politics
and frustrate his knavish tricks.
But amid all this confusion, Emily was sure of one thing, that there
was another contest, with all its nervous strain, before her; that the
months to come, the beautiful months of the spring and summer she had
longed for as ardently as an invalid longs for the days when he can be
wheeled out into the sun, would bring more abuse and recrimination,
more hatred and strife, and she had grown so weary of it all. If Jerome
could have become a candidate for some other office it would at least
relieve the monotony, but this everlasting repetition of the unchanging
sordid struggle to stay in Congress--she wished that he would leave
politics altogether; she almost wished in her bitterness, that he would
be defeated, if it would bring him home, and make him himself once
more.
IV
Dade had provisionally accepted Beck's invitation to the Army and Navy
ball, but after Mrs. Emerson had showed her endurance in an Easter
service at one of the fashionable churches, there was no longer doubt
that she would postpone her return to Illinois and the resumption of
Doctor Larkin's treatment until that great event should have passed
into history. As the night of the ball drew near, Beck was in a
flutter almost feminine, and Dade's preparations went forward in such
excitement that the old lady herself finally awakened an interest and
determined to accompany Dade as chaperon.
Now that the night had come, she showed no regret for her decision,
for, with a robust floridity that may have been but the final flowering
of her carefully nurtured ailments, she sat and fanned herself all the
evening, basking in the smiles of the young officers Beck brought up in
reliefs to keep her from growing weary and impatient. These war-like
youths in the _esprit de corps_ that had been hazed into them at the
national nursery heroically stood at their posts, reminded, whenever
they caught a glimpse of the proud girl in the fine state of her black
chiffon gown, whirling by with their brother officer, that the honor of
the service was being upheld.
"They are charming, these young officers of our army!" the old lady
whispered to Dade as they were going out to supper. "So much more
sincere than foreign officers, such gentlemen!"
"Of cou'se," Dade replied, but more for Beck's benefit than for her
mother's, "they ah gentlemen bah Act of Congress."
The old lady fed recklessly on the salads and ices, and Dade foresaw
the loud alarms that would appal the nights for a week afterwards,
but Beck observed her gastronomic exploits with satisfaction, for it
all meant time to him. Dade had limited him to four dances, and in the
wide, wide intervals between them, he had moped in the smoking room,
just as if he were the love-sick hero of a novel. But now he pressed
his suit by urging more dishes on the mother, and she ate gaily and
carelessly on, and drank enough coffee to insure insomnia for the whole
summer. And then after supper, Dade went off with a mere civilian, and
left Beck and her mother to watch the brilliant stream of uniforms flow
by.
It was the male, who in a reversion to the barbaric type, made a
display of toilets that night, and not the female. There were uniforms
everywhere. The embowered Marine Band, itself cutting no mean figure
in its white breeches and scarlet coats, played the tunes that were
popular that spring, while the proud and happy men moved by in
glittering splendor--navy officers, with their gold-braided dress
coats and low waistcoats; army officers, in the white stripes of the
infantry, the yellow of the cavalry, or the red of the artillery;
the members of some local company of rifles in their cadet gray and
pipe-clayed cross-belts, now and then some foreign officer in the pride
of his own pulchritude, and the happy consciousness that he was serving
nobly in that hour because his uniform marked him out even in all that
distinction of gold-mounted clothes.
The members of the diplomatic corps, too, had come with their ribbons
and stars, to give the final touch of splendor; even the Japanese and
Chinese ministers with their silks and fans were there, gazing calmly
on from the far misty distance of their oriental lives. There were, to
be sure, some white-headed old infantry captains who had not a sign of
gold cord on their breasts, but they served to show how unequally the
real rewards of military service are apportioned.
Dade could see Beck, striding here and there over the ball room floor,
trampling the trains of gowns, with muttered apologies as angry as
the vengeful looks the ladies flung at him, but she did not cast one
glance in his direction to help him in his quest. Rather, with her
head inclined indolently, her long arms, in their black mousquetaire
gloves, stretched straight to her knees, her fingers knit together, she
sat and talked to the black-coated civilian, who, despite the eclipse
into which he and all his unnoticed kind were thrown by the blaze of
uniforms that night, had manfully striven to shine in his own proper
luster.
Yet from the corner of her dark eye, she followed Beck's frantic
evolutions as he dashed in and out among the promenading couples,
assuring herself again that she had never known how handsome the
young soldier was until she beheld him that night for the first time
in uniform. She had always longed to see him armed and equipped, and
had frankly told him so, not at all to his discomfort or displeasure,
but she pictured him at such times as a kind of animated Remington
figure in cavalry boots and spurs, a heavy saber hooked up at his
belt, and a six-shooter in its holster swinging ready to his right
hand; with gauntlets, too, a gray campaign hat to shade his eyes, and
a polka-dotted handkerchief knotted at his sun-burned throat. Then, in
the violet haze of the western prairies, a body of hardened troopers
standing by, some picketed horses, a grizzled officer with a field
glass, and perhaps some Indians on their ponies impudently galloping
in far off taunting circles, had completed the picture her young
imagination had made of him.
But he had presented himself before her that evening as the
apotheosis of the full-dress uniform, with his cavalry cape over his
shoulders--though it had one corner thrown back to give freedom to his
right arm, and possibly to show its own yellow lining--and his helmet
with its long yellow horse-hair plume hanging to his shoulders, and
adding at least a cubit to his stature, after the cubit of a man. When
they arrived at the armory, he had doffed the helmet and the cape, but
it was only to display himself in the more gorgeous magnificence of
his helmet cord, arranged on his breast with an intricacy that would
have bewildered a lady's maid, and his heavier aiguillettes, which his
detail as aide-de-camp now entitled him to wear, looped from his right
shoulder.
His shoulder knots gave him an effect of greater broadness, and when
he walked his long saber smote militantly against the wide yellow
stripe that ran down his leg. His face, tanned to a chronic brown by
the suns of the Southwest, where he had been chasing Apaches for three
years, was red to-night with the heat and the excitement of this social
expression of the civilization he was so glad to get back to, and his
yellow hair, cropped close in the military style, was twisting tightly
at his brow into the curls that he would have cultivated had he been
trained to some practical occupation.
The eclipsed civilian was glad enough when the band struck up a waltz,
and rescued him from Dade's comparative studies of uniforms, for if he
did not quite recover his individuality with his new partner, he could
at least forget it in the vertiginous mazes of the dance.
Dade, left alone, began to long for Beck's coming to save her from the
ignominy of a wallflower, and, under the stress of this apprehension,
she held herself more stiffly with the intention of acquiring thereby
a greater visibility, and of expressing that reproach site meant him
to feel in the moment when he should discover her thus deserted. She
could see him still dashing here and there on the outlook for her.
He had left the middle of the floor where the gyrating dancers made his
position absurd and even dangerous, and now, applying the tactics of
his arm of the service, was beating up the walls of the room, feeling
that there somewhere, his scout must end. When he saw her at last, his
perspiring face lit up, and he bore down upon her in triumph. He sank
into the chair beside her, and, drawing out a handkerchief, began to
pat his brow delicately with it, though he would have liked to give his
hot face a good scrubbing.
"Have yo' all been having a good tahm?" drawled Dade, with her eyes far
away to where the Chinese minister was cross-examining some woman on
the subject of her age and her maiden name.
"No," Beck said, bluntly.
"Ah should think yo' would," Dade replied, coldly.
Beck looked at her in alarm.
"Why?" he ventured.
"Yo' seemed to have difficulty in teahing yo'self away."
Beck's alarm became positive.
"I have been looking for you everywhere," he said in earnest defense.
"And then," she continued, as if to eliminate herself from
consideration as quickly as possible, "ah yo' not in unifohm?"
She turned toward him, and inclining her head over her white shoulder,
looked at him with an eye to sartorial effects.
"If you only knew how hot this dress uniform is!" He scoured his whole
visage with his handkerchief, and angrily pulled at the collar that was
binding his neck.
"But just think how remahkably well yo' all look in it," she said, her
lips parting in a mocking smile.
"Don't, please," he said, quite seriously. "Do you think we live only
for uniforms?"
"Don't yo'?" she asked. "Look at that red commodo'e theah. He comes
into the hotel pahlo' every night buhsting in that unifohm--he wouldn't
give it up fo' the wo'ld."
Beck smiled at the fat old sailor who was wheeling gravely around.
"If it weh not fo' the unifohms we all would have no ahmy at all," Dade
persisted; "it is the unifohm that keeps the institution of milita'ism
alive."
"You seem to be thinking deeply to-night," Beck replied.
"Ah nevah had such a good oppo'tunity befo' fo' studying the vanity of
man."
"If you could see us in the field, you wouldn't think so," Beck said,
and he managed to put the words in the tone of one who had suffered for
a great cause.
Dade glanced at him. She had a glimpse of her Remington picture again.
His tone had touched her. She recalled all she had read of the
hardships of soldiers' lives, and she softened.
"Ah would lahk to see yo' all theah," she confessed.
"Would you?" He spoke eagerly, leaning toward her, gathering his saber
into his lap. "You shall." His cheek flushed red under his brown
skin. He cast a glance about the armory, striving to hide its bare
walls under the flags of all nations that had been draped there. The
green plants standing stolidly in their tubs offered no place for a
tête-à-tête.
She cast one glance his way, and then dropped her eyes.
"Yo' swo'd theah, fo' instance, is an emblem of vanity," she went on
hurriedly, in a final effort to regain her lost note of banter, "why do
yo' weah it in a ball room? Ah yo' in dangeh? No, yo' me'ely wish to
show that yo' can handle it skilfully in a dance--which yo' can't----"
And she thrust a hand into a rent in her overskirt, and spread it over
her palm in proof. "And those things, what do yo' call them? That
helmet co'd, as Leftenant Wood so cahfully explained to me, that is to
hold yo' helmet on; but yo' haven't yo' helmet on now. And those othah
things, lak pencils, that knock in mah eyes in dancing, what good ah
they?"
She touched with the tip of her finger his dangling aiguillettes. The
touch thrilled him.
"Did you hear me?" he went on. All her mockery had not been heard. She
knew it had not been heard, and she tried to say more, but her mind
would not work; she caught her breath. They were alone on that side of
the great hall. He leaned closer.
"Did you hear me?" he went on. "You shall see me so if you will. I'll
take you there--will you go?"
She laughed softly.
"It would be a treat, wouldn't it," she said, "to see yo' on yo' native
heath?"
His face remained serious. His jaw set.
"Dade," he said, and she flushed crimson, "it's no use--I can't say it
right--only--I love you, that's all."
She hung her head.
"Do you hear, darling?" he continued, bending nearer. "Do you hear? You
must excuse the bluntness of a soldier--I love you, that's all there is
to it."
He clutched the scabbard of his saber in his nervousness. Her hand
had fallen to her side, and with his own he seized it, and crushed it
between them.
"Listen," he said, "I love you, love you, love you! Oh, if we were
somewhere else! You can't say 'No' now; you must not! You do love me,
you must--listen, do you hear?--you must love me! If we were elsewhere
I'd take you in my arms--I'll do it anyway, here and now--what do I
care? And you couldn't stop me!"
He leaned impulsively forward. She stirred, and turned her face
half-frightened toward him.
"Not here!"
"Tell me, then, do you love me?"
Her eyes looked full in his, and then, without dropping one of her
Western r's, she said:
"You know, Arthur."
He crushed her hand until she winced with the pain.
V
Emily and Dade had kept up a correspondence that gushed from their pens
with all the olden spontaneity of their girlhood, though in the latter
days this thin black-gowned matron who paused in her household duties
to sit down to epistolary labors found it an effort which caused her
rueful smiles to assume a character that was akin to her ancient self.
Dade in her letters from Washington had hinted darkly at a secret she
had to impart when they were, as she put it, heart to heart again,
though her constant and enthusiastic celebration of Lieutenant Beck
of the cavalry detracted somewhat from the mystery she was saving for
Emily's stupefaction.
When it was at last announced to her that the Emersons were about to
start for Grand Prairie, Emily welcomed the news with joy, and fondly
expected to renew in Dade that blithe girlhood which, as she sadly
realized, had gone from her. But when Dade appeared one morning at
the bottom of the broad steps that led to the veranda of Congressman
Garwood's place, as the old home of the Harknesses so soon had come to
be called, and mounted them with anything but continental stateliness,
Emily, standing in the doorway to meet her, saw in a flash, that
however ardent and however intimate their letters may have been, their
diverging lives could never meet again.
To Emily the recognition was prompter than to Dade, to whom, indeed,
it never came at all. Though she had roamed all over the world, Dade
had not grown in experience, unless a cosmopolite's knowledge of the
conveniences of travel, a guide-book acquaintance with art galleries,
and a smattering of gossip about, if not of, the fashionable courts
of Europe could be called experience. She still looked out upon the
world with the wide eyes of her girlhood; while Emily, though immured
in all the provincialism of her little prairie town, had known the
daily heart-ache and the sleepless nights in which the soul sounds all
the deeps of life. So it was that out of eyes from which the scales
had fallen she looked upon Dade's glowing and radiant face this May
morning, and the smile that came to her was of a longing sympathy with
the youth and girlhood that stood revealed before her.
Dade, swinging the jacket she had been carrying on her arm, caught
Emily about the waist and led her into the house at a livelier step
than she had known for many a day. Emily took her upstairs, where they
could be near the new baby, who was taking a morning nap, and once in
the old familiar room that Dade had known as Emily's in their girlhood,
she plumped Emily down on the box couch, then plumped herself down
beside her, and when the vibration of the springs had spent itself, and
she had ceased to bounce up and down, Dade impetuously turned, and
fixing her eyes on Emily under the brim of the mannish alpine hat she
wore, she seized the matron by both shoulders and said:
"Em, Ah'm engaged!"
"Again?" smiled Emily, with the indulgence of the elder woman to a girl.
"_Again!_" cried Dade, repeating Emily's word, and arching her
brows. She released her hold of Emily's shoulders, and throwing her
arms behind her, rested on them like two props, while she regarded
Emily with a mimicry of reproach. But her black eyebrows twitched
disobediently in the mirth that was turbulent that day in her whole
being.
"Again!" she repeated, trying to prolong the pose. "Yo' speak as if mah
husband was d'aid, and Ah'd been mah'ied the second tahm!"
Emily gave a little distant laugh.
"I'm glad, dear," she said.
Dade regarded her curiously, and then instantly voiced her thought.
"Yo' all talk lak some kind old auntie!" she said. "Why, gyrl, yo'
ahn't old's Ah am. Mah heaht's wohn to a frazzle. Ah've been engaged
befo', oh, a dozen tahms, Ah reckon--mo'n yo' all evah dreamed of!"
"A dozen times!" exclaimed Emily, in real amazement, and then with a
touch of the spirit of their old intimacy she said:
"But you never told me, Dade, only that once!"
"Co'se not," said Dade; "they really didn't count. Ah was on and off
with them so quick. Ah wanted to wait to see if--if--the'd _take_ befo'
writing yo', but they nevah did, only the one with the baron, po' ol'
soul!"
"Did that one take?" asked Emily, with a languid return to the
remoteness her own experience had drawn her to, and with a sigh, also,
that her heart so quickly lost the perfume of the youth that a moment
before had been wafted into it.
Dade was serious an instant.
"Well, yes. Ah thought it did, but yo' know, Em, those Eu'opeans ah
simply _im-possible_, that's all."
"And you were engaged to twelve of them! I thought the chaperon was an
institution in Europe. Yours couldn't have watched you very carefully."
"Oh, they're just to see that the gyrls _dew_ mah'y some one--that's
all--but----"
"You escaped?"
"Yes, it's different with an Ame'ican gyrl, yo' know; they won't be
watched, and Ah escaped."
Dade had raised her arms to her head, with a graceful preliminary
flourish to loosen her sleeves at the elbows, and was withdrawing the
pins that fastened her hat. Emily noticed that the pins were all headed
with army buttons, with the "C" on their bright little shields that
told of the despoilment of some cavalryman's forage cap. She connected
these with the buckle Dade wore on her belt, the plain buckle of the
West Point cadet's belt, though over the washed gold of this one was a
monogram of the initials of Dade's name, "D.E.," in silver.
"Ahthu' says----" Dade began, stabbing the pins back into the hat,
and flinging it beside her on the couch, "Oh, Em, he's the deahest
man--pe'fectly scrumptious! Ah must tell yo' abaout him."
And she began a celebration of the young soldier, setting him in what
was to her the picturesque atmosphere of a western army post, and
drawing once more, in all its details, the picture she had imagined of
him, booted and spurred and gauntleted, riding forth with his dusty
troopers clattering behind to do the ungentle deeds that somehow have
always filled the mind of the gentler sex with a sentimental pleasure.
"And oh," she said, "Ah must tell yo' abaout his being o'dehed to
proceed along the South Fo'k of the--something-oah-othah--Ah must write
to-day and get the name of that rivah--all hidden by cottonwoods along
its banks, just lak in the books, yo' know--and destroy all Piegan
Indians. He was a shavetail then, and didn't know a Piegan Indian from
a Sioux, and he nea'ly brought on a wah. If it hadn't been fo' his old
first se'geant--Oh, his men all love him, Ah know--eve'ybody does!"
And so she flowed on, while Emily sat and listened with the mellowed
smile of an indulgence almost motherly.
"And we ah going to live in Washington at first, he's
General--What's-his-name's aide now, yo' know. That's why he's allowed
to weah aiguillettes; Ah must show them to yo' in his photograph. But
when he's changed, we'll probably have to go to some weste'n post.
Think of mah living aout theah--an ahmy woman! Ah'll have an Indian
to cook fo' us, and yo' and Je--Mistuh Gahwood must come aout and
visit us. He can get himself appointed on a committee to inspect ahmy
posts, yo' know, yo' all can save lots of money that way. Ah've grown
economical since Ah'm going to mah'y an ahmy officeh. They get awfully
small salaries; it's a shame. But Mistuh Gahwood can have himself put
on the committee----"
"I'm afraid Washington has corrupted you, Dade," said Emily.
"Corrupted me?" the girl repeated. "Co'se it has, it corrupts
eve'ybody. That's what eve'ybody does down theah. It's all pull--that's
the way Ahthu' got his detail as aide."
Emily's face had lost its smile, and had sobered.
"Yes," she breathed with a sigh. "Did you see Jerome there?"
Dade looked at Emily questioningly an instant, and then she hastened to
say:
"How stupid of me! To sit heah and talk of Ahthu' when Ah ought to have
known that yo' all weh dying to heah abaout yoah husband. Oh, yes, Ah
saw him at a distance a numbah of times, and one day Ah met him in the
rotunda of the Capitol. We weh in the gallery, Ahthu' and Ah, and had
heahd him make a speech."
Emily had leaned forward a little; her lips were parted, and her teeth
showed in the first smile of real interest she had displayed. She laid
her hand lightly on Dade's arm, finding it a comfort to touch some one
who had been there in Washington, some one who had seen him in his
proper place, some one who had heard him speak, who had spoken to him
and touched his hand.
"What speech was it, Dade?" she asked, eagerly. "The one in the tariff
debate, or----"
"Oh, goodness me'cy me!" ejaculated Dade. "Ah don't know what it was
on--yo' can't tell a wo'd they say, they all make so much noise. Ahthu'
said it was lak a sun dance of the Ogallalla Sioux."
"Tell me, how did he look?" Emily's eyes were glistening.
"He looked splendid, Emily, splendid. He rose, yo' know, suddenly, and
began to speak befo' Ah knew it was he at all. And he grew excited, and
all the othahs crowded in to heah--it must have been a great speech."
Emily made Dade tell her all she could recall out of her scattered
memories of that scene, and the glow in her eyes mingled all the love
she had borne him, all the hopes she had cherished, and all the high
envy of Dade, to whom it had been given to be there and behold that
scene.
"And how is he looking, tell me that?" asked Emily when Dade had told
her at last that she could think of no more to tell.
Dade turned toward her as if she had an unpleasant revelation to make,
and said, hesitatingly:
"Well, Emily--he's grown fat!"
She thought of the trim, narrow-waisted figure of her own brown soldier
lover. But Emily only laughed.
"Yes," she observed, "Mother Garwood says his father filled out at his
age."
Then Dade resumed her celebration of Beck once more, and described for
Emily the glories of the Army and Navy ball. And when she had done, she
sat, her chin on her little white fist, and looked dreamily out of the
open window into the cool green foliage of the trees, where some robins
were building a nest. Emily likewise fell into reverie, and they sat
there a long time before the reverie was broken. It was Dade at last
who said:
"Emily, ah mah'ied people happieh than single people?"
The childishness of the question was lost upon Emily, whose thoughts
had been busy with the unpleasant task of contrasting her own
girlhood's dreams and their fulfilment with the dreams of Dade and
their promise.
"No," she said in reply. Her voice was a mere hollow note.
"Ah yo' all happy?" said Dade.
"Y-yes," Emily answered. Her voice was still pitched on that hollow
note.
Dade turned her head and looked at Emily. She saw her great eyes
blinking, the tears brimming to their long lashes. She looked and
wondered, looked as long as she dared. And the wide, wide distance
between them she did not try to span by any words, but together they
sat, and pondered on the great thing that had come into their lives, as
it comes into all lives, with its hope and its frustration of hope, its
joy and its death of joy, its peace and its tragedy.
VI
Though it was still early in May, though the business of the nation was
pressing for attention, though the reforms promised by the party in
power had not been brought to pass, and though two months must elapse
before the candidates for the presidency could be nominated, six before
a president could be elected, and nearly a year before he could be
inducted into office, the coming national conventions already wrought a
curious effect in the nation.
In the first place, that strange artificial thing which men call
business felt a peculiar numbing influence stealing over it. Men began
to move cautiously, to speak guardedly, to control their opinions.
They grew crafty and secretive, as if the trend of events depended on
what, in the next few months, they said or did. The great question,
of course, was not what should be done to make the people better and
happier, though there was abundant pretense that this was so, but who
should get hold of the offices, for only so far as the holding of
offices and the drawing of salaries could make men and those dependent
upon them happier, did this question of the joy of humanity enter into
the calculations of men.
Those already in office sighed as they thought of the rapidity with
which their terms had rolled around and wondered how they might stay
in. The greater army of those who had been out of office, and for
whom the time had dragged so slowly by, were wondering how to get in.
To succeed in either case it was not necessary that men should have
programs of reform and progress, or to have any real understanding of
the theories of government, it was only necessary for them to say that
they belonged to one or the other of two great parties into which the
people had arbitrarily divided themselves, and to be able to control,
somehow, other men in the casting of their votes.
There were, of course, two or three other parties, small and without
hope of success, so that the men who belonged to them could honestly
say what they thought, but it was not considered respectable or
dignified to belong to any of these smaller parties, and the men who
adhered to them were ridiculed and ostracized and made to feel ashamed.
Everywhere in Washington, where all depend in some way upon the
Government, in the cloak rooms of the two houses of Congress, in
the rotundas and lobbies of hotels, in the clubs and bar-rooms, in
drawing rooms and parlors, and in the secret chambers of the White
House itself, men talked of nothing but these national conventions. In
Congress business was dragging. The usual daily sessions were held, and
perfervid speeches were delivered, but there was no legislation, which
was perhaps just as well. Both parties feared just then the possible
effect legislation might have on the voters, and each sought to put the
other in an unpopular attitude before the people. In a word, as the
correspondents wrote in the lengthened specials they wired to their
newspapers each night, the politicians at Washington were playing
politics.
To Garwood, however, this life was full and satisfying. To saunter
over to the House at noon, to saunter back, to lean at the corner of
the little bar in the Arlington, one foot cocked over the other, his
broad hat on the back of his head, and the Havana cigar between his
teeth tilted at an angle parallel with the line of his hat brim, thus
preserving to the eye the symmetry of the whole striking picture he
knew he made--this was existence for him.
"You'll be on yoah state delegation to the national convention, I take
it, suh?" Colonel Bird would say to him.
"Well," Garwood would reply, "I don't know yet whether I'll go on at
large or not. It'll all depend on the situation when we get down to
Springfield. Unless the boys feel that I could do more good somewhere
else, I'll go on. Anyway, I'll go from the district."
"Well, you'll be theah, I'm suah, suh. Boy--make us anothah of those
mint juleps. And, boy!--if you will allow me, suh----" the colonel
bowed in his courtly old-school way to Garwood--"don't mash the mint
this time, just pinch the sprigs, oah twis' them, so as to avoid the
bittah flavah you othahwise impaht to yoah concoction. I find it ve'y
difficult, Colonel," the old gentleman continued, turning to Garwood,
"to get a julep made prope'ly out of Kentucky."
It pleased Garwood to be addressed as colonel, as it pleases any man,
and he was conscious of a momentary regret that he had not induced
Colonel Warfield to ask the governor of Illinois to appoint him as an
aide-de-camp on his staff, so that the title might be his. He resolved
to have that done if--but his mind darkened at the prospect of all he
must suffer and endure before his political fortunes could again be
considered secure. Another campaign with all its uncertainty lay before
him, and there was no Rankin any more to lean on. He preferred to close
his eyes to the future, and to live to the full the happy moments that
flew by so swiftly.
The colonel had insisted on their seating themselves at one of the two
or three small tables in the little bar-room, so that he might sip his
julep in the lazy deliberation so dear to his Southern nature, and
as they sat there, other members dropped in, and were invited by the
colonel with a hospitable wave of his white hand to join them.
They were all glad to do so, for Colonel Bird represented one of
those Kentucky districts dear to the congressional heart, which not
only afforded a romantic background for his own picturesque figure,
but possessed a higher attribute in this, that it always returned
the colonel to Washington without contest or question. He was never
troubled about renomination or reëlection. He had been speaking of
that district for years--ever since he had accepted the benefits of
the amnesty proclamation, which he affected to despise--with a calm
proprietary air that filled the souls of the men gathered about him in
the afternoon of this warm spring day, with a longing far above all the
other longings of spring.
The colonel had laid off his planter's hat, and with his paunch pressed
against the table, sat and tinkled the ice in his tall glass as if
he loved its cool music, and awaited the serving of the others whom
he had invited to become of his party. He sat erectly, as his paunch
forced him to do, and now and then, in a way that added to his dignity,
stroked the mustaches and imperial that were white as cotton against
his red face. But his relief was apparent when at last the bartender
brought the fragrant glasses with their cool crystal reflecting the
green of the little sprigs of mint, and then he bowed, as well as he
could, and formally awaited the pleasure of his guests.
"How!" said Ladd, of Colorado, in the big western voice that so
heartily expressed the amenity that all felt due the occasion.
"Suhs," replied the colonel, "yoah ve'y good health."
The colonel took a long pull at the straw, and then straightening
himself, sat, warm and red and pompous, the glossy bosom of his shirt
arching itself to meet his imperial as though it would do its best to
replace the starched frills that his antebellum personality lacked.
"Well, Colonel, whom are you Democrats going to nominate?" asked Van
Beek, of New York.
"Well, suh," the colonel began, speaking gravely and with much
consideration, as if he were indeed to deliver the judgment of his
party's convention. "Pehsonally, I'd like to see a Southe'n gentleman,
of cou'se. But that reminds me of an old friend of mine, who came down
to see me 'long in the spring of seventy-six to ask that same question,
suh. You all remembah that the' was a good deal of discussion goin' on
in ouah pahty that yeah about ouah p'ospective candidate. The friend to
whom I refeh was an old fellah who lived neah mah place, and he always
came ovah to see me whenevah I got home f'om Washington, in o'deh to
discuss the political issues of the day. I received him, and we sat
down on the po'ch, and aftah I'd called mah house niggah to make us
some juleps--I wish, suhs, we had those juleps heah to-day, though I do
not wish to dispa'age the liquah ouah landlo'd se'ves heah, not at all,
suhs." He inclined his head apologetically toward the bar. "I had known
this old man fo' a long pe'iod of tahm. He was a po' fahmah, but--he
rode in mah troop."
The colonel paused again, that the company might have time to
appreciate the paternal relation of officer and man who had ridden with
Morgan's Raiders, and then went on:
"I rehea'sed the names of seve'al of the distinguished gentlemen whose
names had been brought fo'wahd by theah friends fo' the high office.
The' was Tilden, and Seymoah, and Bayahd, and Thu'man, and othahs
you'll remembuh, but none of them seemed somehow to impress the ol'
fellah favo'ably. No, suh, none of the names seemed to impress the
ol' fellah favo'ably, till at las', I added: 'And then, theah's some
mention of Davis,' meaning the distinguished ju'ist of yoah state,
suh," the colonel explained, bowing to Garwood, who, as if expressly
deputed thereto by the governor of Illinois, bowed the acknowledgment
that seemed to be due the honor thus conferred upon that commonwealth.
"At the magic name of Davis, the po' ol' man's eyes lit up with
Promethean fiah," the colonel continued, his own little eyes sparkling,
"and, leaning fo'wahd, trembling like an aspen leaf, with the delight
he was almost afraid to indulge, he looked cahfully all about him,
and took his long seegah from his lips, and then he whispehed: 'But,
Colonel, ain't yo' all afeahed it's a _leetle_ airly?'
"And so, suhs," the colonel resumed, having bent his purple face to sip
his julep and to give his companions opportunity to pay his story the
tribute of the laugh he demanded, "I feah in this instance, suhs, it's
a _leetle airly_ fo' a Southron.
"But, se'iously, suhs," the colonel went on, after a proper pause,
"I'm goin' back to Kentucky the end of this month. I'll go ovah to
Frankfo't, and I'll go to the Capitol Hotel, and theah I'll meet the
friends of mah own state, and aftah that, I'll have some idea of whom I
shall suppoht when we all get up to Chicago."
"Like to get over to Frankfort, don't you, Colonel?" asked Conley of
Ohio, in the bald way that men had of inducing the colonel to talk
about Kentucky.
"Well, suh, yes, suh, in a ce'tain sense I dew. It's ve'y pleasant
to' a gentleman to meet all his old friends and comrades in ahms, as
I do theah, but I will say this, suhs, that theah is at Frankfo't
an aggregation of men who seemingly fo' ages have been hanging onto
the public teat theah, suhs, and who, if the good Lawd would see
fit to snatch them to his bosom, would be the subjects of a special
dispensation of divahn Providence in which I could acquiesce, suhs,
with an enthusiasm that would be tuhbulent and even riotous."
After this the colonel, feeling that politeness demanded the
elimination of himself from his conversation, temporarily at least,
turned to Garwood and said:
"Have you got a contes' on in yoah district this yeah, Colonel?"
"I always have had," said Garwood, and a sudden rueful expression
overspread his countenance, "and I know no reason to expect any change
in the ordinary routine this year."
"Well, suh. I wish I weh at liberty to go into yoah district this fall
and make some speeches fo' you," said the colonel, with that naïve
conceit of his which led him to feel that his presence would save the
day for Garwood.
"If you could go out there _now_, with your gun, and in approved
Kentucky style, kill off a few men I could name, I would like it
almost as well," Garwood replied.
The colonel made no answer to this. But he looked a stern rebuke at
Garwood, as at one who trifled with grave and serious matters.
They sat there and drank and listened to the colonel's stories until
the evening came, until the night itself had fallen. And then Garwood
received Pusey's telegram, and it smote him dumb in the middle of a
laugh. He had only time to ask Colonel Bird to request a leave of
absence for him, before he hurried away to pack his bag. The colonel
was delighted, of course, to have the opportunity to act for a friend
in any matter. In fact, nothing could please him more than to be
enabled to rise in his place in the House in all that morning dignity
which no dissipation of the previous night could impair, and address
the Speaker. And it may have been merely to show his appreciation
of the confidence thus reposed in him, that he went with Garwood to
see him safely aboard his train, on which he was to speed westward,
with troubled mind, through the mountains and over the plains, out to
Illinois.
VII
Garwood's train, like most trains that go through Grand Prairie, was
late that evening, and the white twilight upon which Emily had depended
for protection as she waited at the station, had deepened to a gloom
that almost absorbed her little figure, clad in the black of her
mourning garb, though the little toque and jacket she wore were of a
vernal fashion that lent a smartness to her attire. She had determined
to spend the half hour she had to wait beyond the moment scheduled for
the train's arrival, in fancying herself again in her husband's arms,
and in imagining his joy at being once more at home with her, but the
memories of her last visit to this station on that rainy December
night long ago, when she had reached home from her broken visit to
Washington, would crowd in upon her, and torture her, setting in train
thoughts that assailed her resolute cheerfulness.
The station agent had begun by energetically chalking on the blackboard
that was nailed under the wide eaves of the little chalet that did for
a station, the number of minutes the train was late. When that time
fled by, and the train did not come, he rubbed out his first figures
and chalked in others; when the minutes these inadequately symboled
had gone by like the rest, he gave over the effort and flatly told
Emily, with a helpless gesture that spoke his refusal to be any longer
responsible, that he did not know when the train would come. He glanced
at the lights on his semaphore, and then shut himself into his little
ticket office, where the telegraph instrument, ticking feverishly away,
indicated some remaining spark of life in the railroad's system.
Emily had been worrying for some time about all the possible things
that might happen to the baby during her absence. She had been worrying
about the dinner she had ordered in place of their usual supper, but
that, she was sure, had long ago grown cold, and was beyond reach even
of a woman's worry.
The train came at last, when every one about the station had collapsed
into an attitude of having given it up entirely, and Emily forgot her
long wait in the joy with which she rushed forth to greet her husband.
She saw his big figure emerging from the last coach on the train. His
hat was pulled down to his brows, and he looked out upon the desolate
scene that the little station presents to the traveler who enters
Grand Prairie by that road, with the crossness of a passenger whose
train with almost human perversity had been losing time ever since
it started. When he saw Emily he did not quicken his pace, though he
walked on in her direction, with a long face that told her he was
entitled to her pity and sympathy for all that he had to endure in
life. She ran toward him, and he bent his head that she might embrace
his neck and kiss him. She clung there an instant, and when she
released him his eyes were searching the barren platform.
"Nobody else here?" he asked.
"Why, no, dear--who would----"
"Isn't Pusey here?"
"Pusey?" she repeated, in surprise. But Garwood made no answer. He was
thinking of the old days when he was always met by Rankin, and usually
by half a dozen of Rankin's followers gathered together to give _éclat_
to the congressman's home-coming. But now there was no one to meet him
but Emily.
He insisted upon a carriage to be driven home in, saying the ride from
Olney in the common coach had nearly killed him, and when, above the
rattle of the old hack's windows, Emily said:
"I'm so glad to have you home again," her last words somehow expressed
the whole situation against which his nature was in revolt, and he
cried out:
"Yes, home again! Nice time to be called away from Washington! What are
they all trying to do here now, do you know?"
"They seem," Emily replied, "to be trying to defeat you for a third
term."
"Well, I sometimes wish they'd succeed," said Garwood; "sometimes I get
sick of this whole business of politics, and wish----"
Emily was sitting upright, her face turned away from him in her
disappointment.
"So do I," she acquiesced, in a low voice.
"Well," Garwood growled, as if she and not he himself had suggested the
very disaster which of all others he most feared, "they won't beat me
this time, I'll tell 'em that. I reckon Jim Rankin's at the bottom of
it all."
VIII
The curtains were drawn at the windows of Garwood's law office that
night, but the thin lip of light that outlined the casement told to
belated men in Grand Prairie that a conference was going on within. The
primaries were but two days off, and a vague uncertain quality in the
rays that straggled into the gloom and lightened the rusty gilt letters
of Garwood's sign, creaking as it had done for so many years in the
wind, might have hinted to the imaginative something of the straits in
which the little council gathered within found itself.
Had such a one been acquainted with politics in that prairie district,
and had seen Jim Rankin pass by at midnight under the trees that swayed
the thick black shadows of their foliage dizzily to and fro on the
wide stone sidewalk, and noted the curious smile that glimmered an
instant on Rankin's face, when from force of old habit he raised an
upward glance, he would have concluded that serious obstacles beset the
way of Jerome B. Garwood in that career to which as a man of destiny
he had believed himself ordained, and from which the inconstant and
ever-changing circle of his friends had expected so much.
Garwood had come home to find his political condition desperate. He
himself, out of the anger that showed black in his face during those
hot and trying days, described the situation as a revolt and, had he
been possessed of the power, would gladly have punished the rebels by
such stern repressive measures as autocratic governments employ in the
terror their inherent weakness inspires.
Amid the spring delights of Washington public life he had become
swollen with new ambitions. He not only wished to be renominated for
Congress, but he wished also to be placed at the head of the Polk
County delegation to the state convention called to meet in Springfield
early in June; and beyond this, he had the higher wish to be sent
as delegate to the national convention at Chicago. He would have
preferred, of course, to be named as one of the Big Four delegates at
large from Illinois, and when his imagination had been more warmly
stimulated by Colonel Bird's mint juleps, he had dramatized himself as
electrifying the national convention by some fine extemporaneous flight
of oratory, in which he should soar in an instant to the pinnacle of a
national fame, and from that rare altitude behold new and illimitable
possibilities of political future. It was, therefore, with a shock of
disappointment to which he had not the power to reconcile himself that
he had obeyed Pusey's urgent telegram and had come home to find his
very political existence at stake.
Sprague, reviled and reproached as a perennial candidate by those in
the district who were themselves perennial candidates, was once more
in the field seeking congressional honors. His county, Moultrie, had
held its convention, and once more instructed its fifteen delegates
for him. Over in Logan, General Barrett, having had a glimpse of the
promised land at the Pekin convention, had so far departed from the
reserve and dignity of his eminent respectability as to have himself
declared a candidate, and he had been indorsed by his county. These
candidatures did not seriously alarm Garwood, but a new complication
had been suddenly added to the situation of such grave portent that he
had summoned about him those who, having received government offices
of varying degrees of importance, still felt themselves bound to his
support.
This night, then, they were gathered in the office where Enright now
spent his days in the midst of a law practice so immature and modest
that it could not keep the dust off the books that were piled all
about. Pusey was there and Hale had hurried over from Pekin on receipt
of a telegram from Garwood. Beside these were Kellogg, whom Garwood
had succeeded in placing in the office of the secretary of state at
Springfield, and Crawford, his private secretary. They were ranged on
chairs uniformly tilted against the wall of the little private office,
and the air was streaked with the customary clouds of tobacco smoke
that indicate a political fire.
Hale lowered his chair to the floor, and bent over with his elbows on
his knees, his head hanging and his face hidden. The others in the
room, except Pusey, who was as indifferent as ever, had transfixed him
with accusing eyes, though any one could have told that their attitude
was feigned in order to keep in sympathy with the threatening mood of
Garwood, who sat at his desk, and glowered at the Pekin postmaster.
"Why don't you speak?" demanded Garwood presently, as if Hale had been
arraigned upon an indictment, and they were waiting for him to enter a
plea.
Hale stirred uneasily, but he did not speak.
"My God!" said Garwood, petulantly, "I don't see why you couldn't have
held Tazewell, anyhow!"
"Well, I'll tell you, Mr. Garwood," said Hale, at length, breaking
under the pressure of all those accusing stares, "you see, it's like
this. The people over our way are sore on the president, they're down
on the administration----"
"Oh, hell!" cried Garwood, striking his desk in disgust, "I don't
give a damn for what the people think about the president, or the
administration. I ain't the president, nor the administration, either."
"But they think you're supportin' the administration--course,"--Hale
hastened to disclaim any individual responsibility for so serious a
charge--"I'm only tellin' you what they say."
"Well, didn't any of them read my speech the other day? Does that look
as if I'm supporting the administration?"
Hale had no reply to make to this argument. He only heaved his heavy
shoulders in something that approximated a shrug.
"When was Bailey over there?" Garwood demanded.
"Oh, he's been over off an' on for a month."
"Then why in hell didn't you write me!" said Garwood, turning angrily
in his chair. His eyes blazed at Hale a moment, and then he tossed his
head and looked away in utter disgust.
Hale had thrown him a glance that in its turn had some of the anger
that was beginning to show in his reddening face, and he replied:
"Well, I didn't know it, that's why. You can't get on to Zeph Bailey;
he wades in the water, he does."
Hale breathed hard, and no one had an answer ready. They all knew
Bailey's mysterious habits, and Hale's explanation was sufficient to
acquit him in the forum of their minds. Hale sensed instantly a new and
defensive quality in the atmosphere; a current of sympathy seemed to
set in toward him, and he kept on, feeling his advantage.
"Why didn't any of the rest of you wise guys get on to him when he come
over and started to fix things right here in Polk County?"
And they had no answer for that. Garwood, sweeping the circle with a
glance, and fearing a division in his own ranks, forced a smile of
conciliation, and said:
"Oh, well, if Bailey's a candidate, we'll have to fight him, that's
all. It's only one more, anyway, and----"
But the menace of Bailey's candidacy had cast upon his spirits a shadow
too dense to be lightened by mere words, and his sentence died with
the confident air he had been able for a moment to command. Hale,
however, had been mollified, and took Garwood's manner from him, as he
straightened up to say:
"Course, we'll make a fight for it. You've got some friends left in
Tazewell, and so have I, and if we're licked, we'll die with our boots
on, that's all there is to that."
"He has his own county, of course. And you say he has men at work up in
DeWitt. Now, if he gets Tazewell and Polk--well----" Garwood flung out
his hands hopelessly, as if to surrender. "Great guns, what's the use?"
"And Sprague'll throw Moultrie to him--that's fixed. Sprague knows he
can't get it; he's just been acting as a stalking horse for Bailey,"
said Kellogg, anxious to bear his part in this conference, even if he
could bring nothing cheerful to it.
"How did he ever get on the blind side of Sprague?" queried Garwood,
peevishly.
"Oh, legislature," said Kellogg, proud to be able to show his knowledge
of affairs in the state house at Springfield; "he put some of Sprague's
fellows--Simp Lewis and some more of 'em--on the pay roll, and took
care of brother-in-law Wilson when he made up the committees."
"H-m-m-m," Garwood mused, "Mason and Moultrie, and DeWitt--if he gets
Tazewell or Polk now--I don't know what you gentlemen think about it,
but it looks to me as if he had us pretty nearly skinned."
What they thought of it was not apparent, for none of them spoke, and
silence settled over the little room, where Garwood's ambitions were
trembling in the fateful balance. At last Pusey spoke:
"He hasn't got Polk _yet_."
Something of the determination which the little man had put into
his tone affected the others, and they looked up with new smiles. A
reaction set in and Garwood glanced at Pusey gratefully.
"Yes," he said, trying to resume his congressional dignity, with a
smile that was intended to take from it its suggestion of distance,
"you remember what the devil said:
"'--let us
Consult how we may henceforth most offend
Our enemy; our own loss how repair;
How overcome this dire calamity;
What reinforcement we may gain from hope;
If not, what resolution from despair.'"
They stared at him in amazement, wondering how it was possible for
him to know what the devil had said, all except Pusey, who nodded
appreciatively, to show his own relation to the world of letters. And
then Hale drew a long breath and threw back his shoulders.
"Of course," he said, "if we can carry the primaries here in Polk, that
will help us to win out over in my county. Can you do it?"