him, his lips twitching in his involuntary smile. Now and then he
took a turn in the long, dark, softly carpeted hall, to smoke a
cigarette. At times some politician would come with a scared face and
inquire about the colonel, and the doctor always demanded news of the
battle, before he answered the questions. The reports brought by the
politicians were not encouraging, and they hurried outside again. Their
visits, as the afternoon waned, became fewer. Even Mosely and Garwood
had been glad of the exciting excuse offered by the First District
convention in Italia Hall down Clark Street to escape from the shadowed
headquarters. At six o’clock no one had been there for an hour, save
some sympathetic bell-boys and porters from down-stairs, and Carroll,
of course--he came every half-hour from the convention, disheveled,
bathed in perspiration, his eyes burning with excitement and suspense.
Foerder would not allow him to see the colonel, who lay behind the
white door, his eyes half closed, too weak any longer to whisper.
At seven o’clock the reporters came, and Doctor Foerder, as they put
it, issued a bulletin.
“He’s alive,” the doctor said, “pulse 120 to 124, respiration 22 to 26,
temperature 98. His remarkable nerve alone sustains him. He’s making
the most magnificent fight I ever saw in all my life--have you heard
anything from the convention?”
“They’re all over but the one in the First District,” one of the
reporters said, while they scribbled down the physician’s figures. “It
all depends now upon what that does. It’s the worst fight ever known in
Chicago. They say Warren has spent twenty-five thousand to-day.”
“Does it look as if he could be elected there--in the First, you know?”
The reporters smiled and winked one at another.
The colonel lay like one asleep, until far along in the evening. Once
or twice he opened his eyes and looked an inquiry into the doctor’s
eyes, but Foerder could only shake his head. And once or twice he
muttered something about Baldwin, and was troubled that they could not
understand. Then he sank into a state of coma, and the news for which
all were waiting would not come.
Doctor Foerder was for ever glancing at his watch and asking Lambert
how he thought the First District convention would turn out. Lambert
had no idea.
“I hope we’ll win,” Foerder would say. Finally he sent Lambert down
for news. Lambert hurried back. They had taken forty-six ballots, he
said, and the vote was tied. At ten o’clock Doctor Foerder examined
the colonel again, examined his eyes, his finger-nails, drummed on his
chest, listened to his heart.
“You’re magnificent!” he could not refrain from whispering, but his
patient did not answer or look, or even smile this time. He was growing
very weak. His breathing was faint, he inhaled the air through livid
lips. He did not arouse from his stupor.
Doctor Foerder got very impatient. “We can’t wait much longer,” he said.
“It’s all we can do, now,” said Lambert.
Foerder went outside. The anteroom was deserted. The politicians came
no more. He would sit down, then instantly get up, walk back and
forth; his eyebrows knitting in his scowl, his lips twitching in that
mirthless smile. And he smoked cigarette after cigarette. He did this
for an hour.
Along toward midnight he heard a step. Flying to the door, he saw
Carroll, dragging down the hall with the step of defeat and exhaustion.
The boy’s hair was matted under his hat, his eyes were dull, sunken,
black as night.
“Licked,” he said, waving his hands with a gesture of despair, as if
the world had come to an end. Foerder went inside, leaving Carroll to
sink into the first chair. But a moment later the physician opened the
white door, and beckoned with his head. The motion was conclusive,
final. He held the door ajar, and Carroll entered. The useless drugs
had been pushed aside. The room was filled with the strange silence,
the odor of death. Lambert stood at the window, looking out into the
darkness. The nurse stood by the bed, waiting to perform her last
office for the dying man.
Carroll timidly approached and looked down at the long form, scarcely
outlined by the sheet, at the rigid head, at the great, waxen brow,
at the little blue spheres formed by the closed eyelids, at the mouth
slightly open beneath the white mustache with its tinge of yellow.
Doctor Foerder was pressing his fingers to the colonel’s wrist. The
breathing had lost all human quality, it was but a series of automatic
gasps, which, it seemed, would never end. Finally they grew shorter, at
last they ceased, there was one faint inspiration, and Doctor Foerder,
laying the thin old hand down upon the colonel’s breast, said:
“It’s all over.”
There was silence for a whole minute. Then Doctor Lambert tossed up the
window, and Carroll heard, in the street below, a crowd shuffling over
the sidewalk, a crowd coming, as he knew, from the convention in Italia
Hall. And suddenly from the crowd arose a raucous, drunken yell:
“Hurrah for Warren!”
REFORM IN THE FIRST
The senatorial convention in the First District was to convene at
ten o’clock, in a dingy little hall in lower Clark Street, lighted
by windows so long unwashed that they looked like ground glass. From
the chandeliers, black and sticky with dead flies, shreds of tissue
paper fluttered, relics of some boisterous fête an Italian society had
given there long ago. The floor was damp in arabesque wrought by a
sprinkling-can, for the janitor had sprayed water there to lay the dust
he was too indifferent to remove. Perhaps a hundred chairs were set in
amphitheatrical order, and before them stood a kitchen table, on which
was a white water pitcher, flanked by a glass, thickened by various
sedimentary deposits within.
In the saloon below, at nine o’clock, scores of delegates were already
shuffling in the sawdust that covered the floor, holding huge schooners
of beer in their hairy fists, gorging grossly at the free lunch table,
with bologna, rank onions and rye bread. The foam of the beer clung to
their mustaches, which, after each sip, they sucked between their lips.
Most of them managed, at the same time they were eating and drinking,
by a dexterous sleight-of-hand, to smoke cheap domestic cigars, and a
cloud of white smoke rolled along the low ceiling. Each new arrival
was greeted with some obscene but endearing epithet, and the room rang
with laughter and profanity. A keg of beer had been provided by one
of Conway’s managers, and the bartender, wiping his hands on a dirty
towel, was rid, so long as the keg lasted, of the responsibility of
keeping account of drinks, and of ringing up the change on the cash
register. At eleven o’clock the keg was empty, the free lunch table
abandoned to the flies, and the delegates scuffled up the dingy stairs
to the hall. Half an hour later the chairman of the senatorial district
committee pounded the kitchen table with a leg of a broken chair, and
shouted:
“The convention will be in order.”
This declaration made no impression upon the babel of voices, the
laughter, the profanity, the noise of shuffling feet and scraping
chairs. The delegates were scrambling to their places, seating
themselves by wards. Reporters flung themselves into seats at a second
table and gazed about the room, noting who were there. The political
men of the morning papers did not trouble themselves to take seats.
They loafed among the politicians in a way superior to the reporters
for the afternoon papers, as if they were politicians themselves,
making history instead of recording it.
Meanwhile the noise did not abate, and the committeeman was growing red
in the face. The morning was warm, and the room, already cloudy with
tobacco smoke, was filling with a noisome human odor. The atmosphere
was feculent. Delegates removed their coats, hanging them over the
backs of their chairs. Finally the chairman of the committee, growing
impatient, split the table with his club and yelled:
“Damn it all, boys, come to order!”
And then, eager to resign such a difficult command, he hastened to
announce:
“The committee has named Honorable John P. Muldoon to act as temp’ry
chairman.”
He handed the chair leg to John P. Muldoon, who, stroking back his
curly hair from his brow, began to beat the table impartially.
All this while Underwood stood against the wall, looking on. The
question that had been agitating him for weeks was about to be decided,
but now that the ordeal was actually upon him, the consciousness beat
numbly against his brain, so that the whole scene lacked reality,
almost interest. He was dazed. He was about to take his baptism of
political fire, and he trembled like a white novitiate.
Underwood belonged to one of the oldest families of Chicago--the name
had been known there before the fire. His father, who had lately
taken him into his law firm, continued to cling in his conservatism
to an old stone house in Michigan Avenue long after his neighbors had
abandoned their mansions to uncertain boarders, and either retreated
farther south or advanced to the North Side. John Underwood had come
out of Harvard with a young lawyer’s ambition in politics, an ambition
that had the United States senate merely as a beginning of its home
stretch, and when the year rolled around in which state senators were
to be elected in the odd numbered districts he decided that it was time
to begin.
The newspapers had scented the sensation that lurked in the candidature
of a young man like Underwood in a district like the First, and because
he was rich, because he wore good clothes, because he went into what
is called society, promptly dubbed him a reformer, and thus weighted
he had set out upon his race for the nomination. He liked to see his
name in the newspapers, liked to think of himself as a reformer, though
he was embarrassed in this attitude by the fascinating figure of the
political boss he had hoped to become--a well-dressed, gentlemanly
boss, of course, who, while at home in those saloons where he permitted
the convivial familiarity of the boys, nevertheless took his luncheons
at his club. He fell into a way of speaking of the First as “my
district,” spoke of it, in fact, as if he, instead of Malachi Nolan
and “Cinch” Conway, owned it, and when certain ward politicians in the
first days of the campaign called upon him, Underwood was pleased to
lend them money, just as he was pleased to comply with the requests of
certain others who organized the John W. Underwood First Ward Campaign
Club, and sent a committee to inform him that they were assembled in
the club rooms ready to transact business, and beer only four dollars a
keg. He winked confidentially at himself in the mirror that night as he
gave a final touch to his white cravat and surveyed his fine young form
arrayed in evening clothes for the reform banquet at the Palmer House.
His speech was _The Tendencies of Modern Politics_. The newspapers said
it was a very brilliant speech, breathing lofty political sentiments
that were bound to make John W. Underwood votes. Also, the Reform Club
indorsed his candidature.
As Underwood leaned against the greasy wall of the little hall on lower
Clark Street this morning, the whole campaign flashed before him, just
as the events of a lifetime are said in books to flash before the mind
of a drowning man. He recalled every vivid detail of the call Baldwin
had made upon him, how he entered his private office without troubling
the pale, pimpled office boy to announce him, how he lifted from his
carefully parted hair his straw hat with its youthful band of blue,
and laughed out, “John, my boy, how are you? Hot, isn’t it?” He could
see Baldwin as he sat in the solid oak chair that stood intimately
beside his roll-top desk, fanning his ruddy face with the hat, which
had impressed a broad red band on his forehead. Underwood had been glad
enough to close _Cooley on Taxation_ and revolve his chair to face
Baldwin, just as if he had been a client, for Baldwin was the most
important politician who had ever called upon him professionally.
Underwood remembered clearly how Baldwin’s excellent teeth glistened
when he smiled, how he lighted a Turkish cigarette and, tilting up his
chin, blew a long, airy stream of blue smoke through the thick hairs of
his mustache. He could even remember how carefully Baldwin sheltered
the flame of the match for Underwood’s cigarette, in that curious
spirit of economy men always practice with regard to matches, much as
if there were only one match left in the whole world. And then he could
recall almost word for word their conversation. Baldwin had frankly
told him that Conway had him handicapped, because he had the city hall
with him and controlled the Fifth Ward. Simmons, Baldwin had said,
didn’t cut much ice; he had some labor leaders with him, and would get
a bunch of delegates from his own ward, but that was about all. In
fact, said Baldwin, concluding his judicial summing up, Conway could
win out, hands down, if it were not for his recent quarrel with Malachi
Nolan. Underwood remembered that during all this frankness he had
reflectively drawn rude little geometrical figures on an envelope and
had been somehow afraid to look up at Baldwin, for the noted lobbyist
had sat there transfixing him with an eye that could read the mind of a
man when it was impinged on politics--that is, practical politics--as
easily as it could a poker hand across a table stacked with blue chips.
He knew Baldwin had come with some practical proposition, and when
the lobbyist suggested that he was too respectable, and would run
better in some residence district, that the boys looked upon him as
a reformer, and that the silk stockings were not practical enough to
help him, Underwood had felt that at last it was coming. It was simple
enough. Baldwin had been talking that very morning about Underwood’s
candidature to Mr. Weed of the Metropolitan Motor System, and to Mr.
Peabody, president of the Gas Company, and they had been very much
interested. They had an anxiety to see good men nominated that year,
for they had large business interests that were more or less affected
by legislation, and had feared they would have to settle on Conway.
Conway had experience in legislative matters, and had been friendly
enough in the city council, yet they felt they could hardly trust
him--he was such a grafter, and in such things, Baldwin blandly assured
Underwood, they had to depend upon a man’s honor alone, and so they had
sent Baldwin to suggest that Underwood meet them at luncheon, and talk
matters over. Baldwin, with his love of ease and luxury, had preferred
a dinner over at the Cardinal’s in the evening, but Mr. Peabody had
something on hand with the trustees of his church and couldn’t meet
them then. Baldwin had taken out his watch at this point, with the air
of a man who suddenly remembers some important engagement--the details
all came back with a fidelity that was painful--and stood awaiting
Underwood’s reply, with the open watch ticking impatiently in his palm.
Of course, Underwood had understood--and he wished ardently to be
nominated and elected. He could see himself swinging idly in a big
chair behind a walnut desk in the senate chamber, just as an actor sees
himself, with an artist’s ecstatic, half-frightened gasp, in some new
part he is about to study. The position would give him much importance,
he would be riding back and forth between Chicago and Springfield on
a pass, it would be so pleasant to be addressed as senator, to be
consulted, to head delegations in state conventions and cast the solid
vote for any one he pleased; besides, it would be a good training for
Washington, he could practise in oratory and parliamentary law just
as he practised on friendless paupers over in the criminal court when
his father influenced some judge to appoint him to defend an indigent
prisoner. It meant only one little word, he could be wary of promises.
His heart had expanded, he had turned half around in his chair to face
Baldwin, when suddenly the reformer within him rose to object, pointed
to his ideals, rehearsed the speech on _The Tendencies of Modern
Politics_, recalled all the good words the independent papers had
spoken of him, urged the beauty of great sacrifices for principle. At
the idea of self-sacrifice, Underwood had felt a melting self-pity, he
admired himself in this new rôle of a self-sacrificing reformer. And so
he flung the cigarette out of the window, watched it whirl down to the
melting tar of the roofs below and said firmly:
“I have an engagement this morning, Mr. Baldwin. I’m sorry, but I guess
I can’t come.”
Once more Underwood saw the pleasantness leave Baldwin’s face, saw him
fleck a flake of ash from the white waistcoat he wore with his summer
suit of blue, and snapping the lid of his watch shut, he once more
heard him say in a final and reproachful tone:
“Well, all right; sorry, my boy.”
Underwood wondered that morning in the noisy convention hall, whether,
if he had the decision to make over again, he would decline such
influence. It had been the cause of much doubt and some regret at the
time. The boss within him had protested--surely it was a political
mistake--and the boss was louder than the reformer, and more plausible.
He came forward with a brilliant scheme. He recalled Baldwin’s
reference to the rivalry between Nolan and Conway. Underwood remembered
that when he suggested the possibility of Nolan’s running for the
nomination himself, Baldwin had shaken his head--there wasn’t enough in
it, he said. Nolan could do very much better in the council, where he
was. Besides, Mr. Weed and Mr. Peabody disliked him.
Underwood thought out his scheme that afternoon, while hunting in
the digest for cases in point to be cited in a case his father was
preparing for the appellate court. The work of looking up cases in
point, while its results are impressive and seem to smell of the lamp,
had in reality grown quite automatic to Underwood, and as he loafed
over digests and reports and jotted down his notes, he elaborated
the scheme, just what he would say and do, how he would appear, and
so forth. And so, when he entered Malachi Nolan’s place in Dearborn
Street, early that evening, he was fully prepared. The details of this
incident came back just as the details of Baldwin’s visit had done--the
empty saloon, the alderman himself leaning over his bar, his white
apron rolled into a big girth about his middle, the cigar in the round
hole at the corner of his mouth gone out, denoting that it was time for
him to go down the alley to Billy Boyle’s and get his porterhouse and
baked potato.
Underwood watched Malachi Nolan mix his Martini cocktail, splash it
picturesquely into a sparkling glass and bejewel it with a Maraschino
cherry, then gravely take a cigar for himself and stow it away in his
ample waistcoat. Then, as Nolan mopped the bar with professional sweep
of his white-sleeved, muscular arm, Underwood unfolded his brilliant
scheme, skirting carefully the acute suspicions of an old politician.
But Nolan mopped, blinking inscrutably, at last putting the damp cloth
away in some mysterious place under the counter. The fat Maltese cat,
waiting until the moisture on the bar had evaporated, stretched herself
again beside the silver urn that held the crackers and the little cubes
of cheese. Still Nolan blinked in silence, like a hostile jury with its
mind made up, until at last, in desperation, Underwood blurted out his
proposition. Nolan blinked some more, then, half opening his blue Irish
eyes, grunted:
“Well, I like your gall.”
Underwood’s spirits fell, yet he was not disappointed. It was,
after all, just what he had expected. It served him right for his
presumption, if nothing more--though the subdued reformer within had
hinted at other reasons. He hung his head, twirling his empty glass
disconsolately. He did not see the light that twinkled in the blue
eyes, he had not then known how very ready Nolan was to form any
combination that would beat Conway and Baldwin, especially with a
reformer like himself who had money to spend on his ambitions. He had
not discerned how badly the man whom the newspapers always cartooned
with the First Ward sticking out of his vest pocket, needed a reformer
in his business, as the saying is. Hence his glad surprise when Nolan
wiped his big hand on his apron like a washer-woman and held it out,
saying:
“But I’m wit’ ye.”
Then the campaign, under Nolan’s management, in the most wonderful
legislative district--a cosmopolitan district, bristling with
sociological problems, a district that has fewer homes and more
saloons, more commerce and more sloth, more millionaires and more
paupers, and while it confines within its boundaries the skyscrapers,
clubs, theaters and hundred churches of a metropolis, still boasts a
police station with more arrests on its blotter than any other in the
world. Night after night, with Nolan’s two candidates for the house,
he spent in saloons where a candidate must treat and distribute his
cards that the boys may size him up; lodging houses and barrel houses
in lower Clark Street, where sweating negroes and frowsy whites drank
five-cent whisky with him; blazing saloons along the levee, where
even the poor, painted girls at the tables lifted their glasses when
he ordered the drinks for the house; crap games and policy shops in
lower Clark Street, the Syrian, Arabic, Chinese and Italian quarters
down by the squalid Bad Lands, and at last a happier evening along the
Archey Road. Underwood had three weeks of this, and as he stood in the
convention hall that morning, unwashed, unshaven, his linen soiled,
his shoes muddy, his own friends would not have known him, though he
cared little enough for this now--they had all forgotten to go to the
primaries the day before, and those for whom he had sent carriages had
been too busy, or too respectable, to respond. The taste of bad beer
and the scorch of cheap cigars still smacked in his mouth--indeed, he
did not get them entirely out until he came back from Mt. Clemens two
weeks after the nomination.
But they were balloting for permanent chairman now. It would be a test
vote; it would disclose his own strength and the strength of Conway.
He looked over the red faces before him. He saw Conway himself moving
among the delegates, snarling, cursing, quarreling with the friends
of years; he saw Conway’s candidate for the house, McGlone, over in
the Second Ward delegation, his coat off, a handkerchief about his
fat neck, a fuming cigar between his chubby fingers, turning on his
heavy haunches to revile some man who was numbered with Nolan’s crowd;
he saw in the First Ward delegation, Malachi Nolan, clean-shaven, in
black coat and cravat, his iron gray hair cropped short, calm alone
of all the others. He would have looked the priest more than the
saloon-keeper, had he smoked his cigar differently. Now and then he
solemnly raised his hand, with almost the benediction of a father, to
still the clamor of his delegation, which, with its twenty-one votes,
was safe at all events for Underwood.
Muldoon was Conway’s man--they would try to make the temporary
organization permanent. D’Ormand was Underwood’s candidate. And Muldoon
won. Underwood had lost the first round.
The candidates for senator were to be placed in nomination first.
Underwood stood in the crowded doorway and heard Conway’s name
presented. Then, in the cheering, with his heart in his sanded throat,
he heard the chairman say:
“Are there any other nominations?”
There was a momentary stillness, and then he heard a thick, strong
voice:
“Misther Chairman!”
“The gentleman from the First Ward.”
“Misther Chairman,” the thick, strong voice said, “I roise to place in
nomynation the name of wan--”