Chapter IV: Book I: Of the People (4)

Sprague did not rise when Rankin entered, nor even remove his feet from his desk. But he did lay his paper in his long lap, then slowly taking the black-rimmed eye-glasses from his nose, and dangling them at the end of their tangled and knotted cord, he said:

"Howdy, Jim; where'd you come from?"

"Just landed in," replied Rankin, pulling up a cane-seated chair and dropping his heavy body into it.

"Come on business?"

"Yes, I did," said Rankin, rocking back and forth, "damned important business."

"That so?"

"Yes, that's so."

Sprague, moved by the snapping tone, twisted his body and looked squarely at Rankin. He made a movement of his legs as if he would take his feet down.

"Yes, that's it," Rankin went on, "and you're the man I come to see."

Sprague dropped his feet to the floor, swung his chair half around on one of its legs, and as it came down he brought it into a position directly facing Rankin. He looked at his caller almost angrily for an instant, but adopting the more peaceful tone in which he would have addressed a new client, he said:

"Well, what can I do for you?"

"I'll tell you," said Rankin, "since that's what I come fer. You can get out and do something to help land Garwood."

Sprague puckered his lips, turned his head away and whistled reflectively. The whistle was a series of low, tuneless notes, and was irritating to Rankin, who, though a fat man, developed nerves at times.

"Well, Jim," said Sprague at last, "you know that I haven't been taking any active interest in this campaign."

"No, that's just the trouble," said Rankin, "you haven't. But some o' your fellers has, an' I want you to call 'em off."

Sprague stopped whistling and looked at Rankin.

"Of course, Jim," he said, "what some of my friends may be doing I don't know. They seem to think, some of them, that they have cause for dissatisfaction in the way I was treated at the Clinton convention."

"Oh, come off, now," said Rankin. "You know that won't go 'ith me, Con. You know how much chance you ever had at the Clinton convention, and you know jus' what I told you there in the Gleason House that night before we met. So don't try to come any o' that old gag on me, 'cause I won't stand fer it."

"Well--" Sprague began, in a voice that indicated a want of conviction on his part, lifting his brows to add to the effect of the tone. He ended by spitting at his convenient cuspidor.

"But I don't care 'bout me," said Rankin; "go in an' abuse me all you want. Ther' ain't nobody'll believe you, anyhow. Everybody knows't I never broke a promise in my life, an' that I al'ays stood pat fer my friends--which you wasn't one o' them, so long's I can remember--but that don't cut any figur' here ner there."

"I always supposed we were friends, Jim," Sprague complained.

"Oh, that's all right--in politics, I mean. I hain't nothin' ag'in you pers'nally, course, but in politics we've al'ays been ag'in each other, an' ther' ain't no use tryin' to ignore that now. You've been sore ever since the convention, of course, an' I don't know's I blame you fer it, but we beat you fair an' square, an' I come over here to tell you that we expect you to get out an' support the ticket."

"Oh, you did, did you?" said Sprague, with half a smile.

"Yes, I did," said Rankin.

"Well," said Sprague, deliberately stopping to spit again, "I supposed that after the Clinton convention I might consider myself out of politics."

"Yes, you _might_," Rankin rejoined, "but the trouble is, you _don't_, an' your fellers right here in Moultrie County is out with the'r knives fer Jerry."

"Well, if they are," said Sprague, "I'm sure I didn't know it."

"Oh, hell, now, Con," expostulated Rankin, disgustedly, "don't fer God's sake use that 'ith me. Maybe it goes down to Washin'ton, I don' know, but it don't go here, not 'ith me, 't any rate. You know what they're doin', an' so do I. An' I'll just tell you this," Rankin leaned over and laid his hand on the edge of Sprague's desk, while Sprague eyed him with disfavour, "that if you expect to be in politics any more they've got to stop it, an' stop it now, an' if they don't----"

"Well, if they don't?" Sprague interrupted in an ugly, defiant note.

"If they don't, why, don't ever dare stick your head up out o' your crab-hole ag'in; an' what's more----"

"What's more?" repeated Sprague, nodding.

"This is a game two can play at. We've got a few knives over in Polk County, and, while they're a little rusty an' out o' use, they're long, an' they're deadly, an' we'll get 'em out at once an' run 'em into that brother-'n-law o' yourn about that fur----"

Rankin measured off the sickening distance on his left arm, with his right hand at the elbow.

"An' turn 'em round," and Rankin twisted his fist savagely. In illustrating the vengeful deed he had allowed some of his excitement to master him, and he rose now and stood hanging over Sprague with a menace in the droop of his shoulders and the stretch of his neck.

"Now you know the business that brought me here, Con Sprague," Rankin went on. "I come over to tell this to Wilson, but I thought it 'uld be fair to tell you first. I'm goin' over to tell him, an' then I'm goin' back home. Now, if your brother-'n-law wants to go to the Legislature, just you get out an' make a few speeches fer Garwood, an' declare y'urself, an' you an' him put y'ur fellers over here to work, an' you do it in two days. I'll watch you an' if you don't do it, I'll say 'plunk,'"--Rankin used the word which the Illinois politicians, doubtless in their distrust of anything British, have substituted for the Englishman's "plump"--"an' the boys'll plunk--an' fer the first time in our history we'll send a minority representative to Springfield, an' it won't be your brother-'n-law, either."

Sprague's face blackened. He knew that dangerous possibility in cumulative voting, but he said nothing.

"I don't ask you fer any answer," said Rankin. "But I've served notice on you. You can do just as you damn please."

And then Rankin went away. He made his call on Wilson, By night he was back in Grand Prairie.

XV

In the early twilight of a Saturday afternoon late in October Garwood walked up Kaskaskia Street from the station in a cold, sullen rain, conscious of but one sensation--he was glad that only one more week of the campaign remained. He walked with long, deliberate strides, indifferent to the rain, which had beaten down his wide hat brim and trickled off it, before and behind, in little streams. His face, under those drooping eaves, was long and serious; it brightened, automatically, only when he met some pedestrian to whom in his capacity as a candidate, he involuntarily spoke a greeting.

Garwood had come home in response to a telegram from Rankin, a telegram which had concentrated such an urgency into its economically chosen ten words that he had traveled many miles since daylight over country roads and by rail to reach Grand Prairie at night. Now, just as the twilight was darkening and the lights were beginning to show in the stores along Main Street, he turned into the Lawrence Block and climbed to his office. The office was dark; young Enright, who was reading law under him, had gone into the country to make one of the political speeches he was proud of having been asked to deliver that fall; the typewriter had closed her desk and gone, and her little clock was ticking lonesomely beside her little vase of flowers. But in his private room, Garwood found Rankin sitting with his feet on the window-sill looking abstractedly down into the street where the lights from the store-windows wriggled in many lines across the canal of mud.

Garwood took off his hat, lashed it back and forth to get the water off, and slapped it down on the top of his desk. And then he said, in a voice that was rough and hoarse:

"Well, what's the matter? Everything's gone to hell, I suppose--heh?"

"No, it's all right. I just want a talk with you," said Rankin. "Have a good meetin' last night?"

"Oh, first-rate; made a poor speech, though. Truth is, I'm about done up. Thank God it'll be over in another week, whichever way it goes. Don't know that I care"--his sentence was broken by a cough that shook him.

Rankin turned and tried to distinguish his features.

"Look'e here, Jerry," said the big fellow, "you've got a cold--you'll best go down and have Chris mix you a hot tod."

"Oh, I'm all right," said Garwood, scraping his throat. "Go on with your tale of woe."

"Well," began Rankin with evident reluctance, "I hate to tell you, but the truth is, we've got to have some money, an' I don't know where it's comin' from. I've spent all we had, an' more, too, an' I've held up everybody here in town till I've squeezed 'em dry. They don't like to give to us anyway; most of 'em has already contributed to the county fund, an' they think that's enough. I can't use all the county funds fer you; the candidates is kickin' already; they say I've been neglectin' 'em fer you, an' it won't do to git 'em sore on us--'taint hardly square nohow. Damned if I like it. We've got along so fur, but now we're up to the limit."

"Wouldn't the Hutchinsons give?"

"Well, they put all theirn in the county fund, so's to elect Sanford; they say anyhow a congressman can't help 'em; they're lookin' fer the treas'rer only--all they care fer is the bank."

"That's the way with those bankers," said Garwood. "Hogs, all of them. That's what we get for giving them Sanford. If we'd nominated a fellow of our own for treasurer we might have forced him to lay down on them."

"Yes, you're right, but that time's gone by now, no use cryin' over spilt milk. We've got to face the present. We owe a good many bills, some fer printin', an'--"

"Can't they wait till after election?"

"Oh, maybe they might, but I hate to ask 'em; it wouldn't help us any. The postage--well, I've paid all that out o' my own pocket."

"You know how I appreciate that, Jim, don't you?"

"Oh, that's all right," said Rankin, waving his gratitude aside. "Then there's the _Citizen_ an' some other papers over the district, they're beginning to clamor fer the'r money."

"It's a regular hold-up, isn't it?" said Garwood.

"That's what you've got to expect in politics," said Rankin. "But if that 'as all we might take care of it. The situation has taken a curious turn this last week."

"How's that?" asked Garwood, who had suffered from a candidate's myopia, and could not note the numerous turns a situation takes during a campaign.

"Well, it's this way. The committees is all kickin' because your assessments hasn't been paid. I've been tryin' to make a poor man's campaign fer you, an' I've succeeded pretty well so fur, if I do say it myself. But the boys needs money everywhere; they want to finish up the'r poll, and over in Moultrie, where we had to deal with the Sprague kickers, a little money has just _got_ to be used, that's all."

"I thought you'd fixed Sprague?"

"Well, I made him come down, o' course, but I wouldn't trust the dirty whelp out o' my sight on'y when I could see him, as the old widow woman said of her grandson, an' I think we ought to pay the assessment over there anyway."

"How much is it?" asked Garwood, with the pain an unrendered bill can give one.

"Two hundred," said Rankin. "The boys over there say--shall I tell you what they say?"

"Yes; go on, I can stand anything nowadays."

"Well, they say that now you're goin' to marry ol' man Harkness's daughter, you'd ought to get him to put up fer you."

Garwood, in his hoarse voice, swore an oath.

"Well, I'm just tellin' you what they say. They're sayin' that right here to home, an' they're sayin' it pretty much all over the district. They think Harkness is made o' money, an' that it 'uld be easy fer him to put up some."

"Have they ever known him to put up any for a campaign?" asked Garwood with a sardonic smile that Rankin could not see in the gloom.

"No, reckon not; but they look to you to loosen him up. But let me tell you," Rankin hastened on, as if he had pleasanter information, "you know Bromley, when he got good an' goin', let loose a lot of his money--just sowed it 'round freely fer two or three weeks, an' it kind o' made up fer the mistakes he was makin' on the stump. But now he's done just what I knowed he'd do--here with election a week off, he's got skeered an' froze up stiff an' cold, tighter'n a mill race in January--not a red cent 'ill he bleed now, an' the whole push is sore on 'im. But I knowed he'd do it, I knowed it, from the very first." Rankin chuckled at his own prophetic instinct. "So you see, we'd ought to take advantage of the situation. If I had a little money to use judiciously, I'd have 'em licked to a stand-still a week from to-night."

Rankin rubbed his palms in the enthusiasm he would have felt in such a triumphant finish to his campaign, while Garwood's heart beat a little higher as he thought of the security he would feel in the possession of a campaign fund. The little wave of excitement brought on a return of his cough.

"An' now, Jerry," Rankin resumed, "I'll tell you why I sent fer you." He drew his chair closer to Garwood, and laid his hand on Garwood's knee. "My God, man!" he exclaimed, suddenly. "You been sittin' here in clothes as wet as that?"

"Oh, go on," said Garwood. "Let's hear what you have to say. Don't mind me, I'm all right."

"Well, I'll make it short," said Rankin. "An' then we'll go down to Chris's. What I want to suggest is this--I hate to do it, but it's a groun'hog case, an' you an' me's ol' friends"--

"Go on," urged Garwood.

"Well," Rankin continued, with a reluctance, "I don't like to--but here goes. We've got to have money--an' I thought--well, that you might jus' go to old man Harkness an' make a little touch--fer a thousand, say--"

Garwood had already begun shaking his head vigorously.

"No, Jim, no," he said; "not for all the world. It's impossible; I can't think of it. You can understand my position--I just can't do it, that's all. We've got to find some other way."

"Well," said Rankin, flinging up his hands as if he were flinging up the problem, "all right; you find the other way. I've been here rackin' what few brains I've got fer a week, an' I can't think of any other way. God knows I've spent all I've got as it is." He settled back in his chair and plunged his hands deep in his empty pockets.

"Yes, I know, Jim, and I appreciate it--but--I'll tell you."

Garwood sat and thought intently an instant, knitting his strong brows.

"No, I won't tell you either, but I think I can raise it--I'll see you to-morrow morning. I think I know of a place."

"All right, Jerry," said Rankin, getting up; "I don't care where you get it--jus' so's you get it. I only want to see you landed high an' dry out of the wet, my boy, that's all." And he hit Garwood on the shoulder.

"Here, let me hold it fer you," he said a minute later, when Garwood had picked up his overcoat, heavy with its soaking in the rain.

Down in Chris Steisfloss's saloon as they stood at the bar, and just as Garwood was ordering a drink, Rankin pushed him aside and said:

"No, you wait. Now Chris," he went on, addressing the stolid man in the white apron, "you take a whisky glass an' fill it with beer, mostly foam--same as all your beers--an' then put a spoonful o' that quinine on the foam."

The man did as Rankin bade him, and when the white powder was floating on the sparkling foam, Rankin gave it to Garwood and said:

"Now you swallow that, quick; you can't taste it. Then you can have your whisky."

XVI

When Garwood turned into the gate of his home that night a weird feeling of detachment came over him. As he looked around the familiar yard every black bush, every tree tossing its thinned boughs hopelessly in the wind that blew the rain in sheets against the front of the house, seemed to belong to some past toward which he yearned, as an exiled identity. Half way to the low stoop, the light in the sitting room moved, the shadow of the drenched syringa bush under the window wheeled across the yard, and then the light disappeared, leaving the window black. He knew his mother had heard his step, for in another moment the hall transom leaped bright, the door opened, a great golden beam streamed out on the walk and he saw his mother's gaunt figure standing in the doorway. She held the lamp over her head and bent forward, shading her old eyes to peer out into the darkness, and in another instant he was beside her, and she was slamming the door behind him, shutting out the rain and the night.

"My, you're drenched to the skin, Jerome!" she exclaimed. "Run right up and change your clothes!"

"Whew!" he said, "what a night!" He whisked out his handkerchief and wiped his face, wet with the rain and moist with perspiration, for the whisky and the rapid walk had heated him.

"And how hoarse you are!" the mother said, wheeling his big body about and pushing him toward the stairs. "You've got your death of cold! Haven't you been doing anything for it?"

"I took a little quinine and whisky a while ago."

"Yes, I smelt it on your breath, Jerome," his mother said rather severely. She was "temperance," as she would have put it.

Garwood risked an uneasy laugh. He had never been able, grown man that he was, to overcome what he considered a boyish fear of his mother's knowing he drank.

"But don't stand there!" the mother said. "Go right upstairs and take those wet duds off this minute! Have you had any supper?"

"No; is supper over?" he replied.

"Yes, I just got the table cleared and the dishes washed. But I'll get you something, by the time you're into dry clothes."

"Oh, don't bother to get anything, mother," he said.

She gave the lamp to her son, and as he went up the stairs he heard her raking up the coals in the kitchen stove.

"Mother!" he called, peremptorily. "Don't make any fire; just something cold--that'll do for me."

"You go get your clothes off as I tell you!" his mother called in the tone of command mothers love to use with children for whom they are continually making sacrifices. When she had revived the dying fire, she hastened upstairs and laid out clean under-garments for her son, and dry hose, and then, forever busy, left him with an injunction "just to dress comfortable and not fix up."

Garwood, warm, dry and refreshed, felt a glow of comfort as he went downstairs in his slippers. His mother had the fire crackling, and the tea-kettle rocking briskly on the stove, puffing its little spouts of steam importantly. Beside it stood a pan, with water almost boiling, and she had a skillet heating. She was in the dining-room; Garwood could hear the clatter of plates, and when she came bustling with her tireless, wiry energy out into the kitchen, he remained there, walking up and down, gossiping with her in a way which, while she was always undemonstrative, she entirely loved. As the fire grew hotter and the kettle began to sing, the kitchen became warm and cozy, and the man and the mother felt a confidential charm in their surroundings that they never found so much anywhere as in the kitchen.

Garwood told his mother of his meetings during the week, of the meals he had been compelled to endure at the little country hotels, of his long rides by night. But he did not talk to her of Emily, and the old woman warily avoided the girl's name and all topics that even by the remotest association might suggest her. Mrs. Garwood was proud of Emily, and while she gloried in that pride before the women of her acquaintance she never let her son see it; she rather distrusted her own footing in the presence of the girl or of her name. More than all she longed that night to keep her son at home with her, and she strained every nerve to do so.

The fragrance of the steaming coffee was filling the room. She put some slices of bacon in the skillet to fry--broiling did not form any part of her culinary accomplishments--and after she had dropped two eggs into the tin pan where the water had long been bubbling, she commanded him to hold his watch on them, as if they were about to run a race. She cut the bread in great white slices; she opened a glass of her jelly, a concession she seldom made before winter, and she even found for his dessert the half of an apple pie. When she had poured her coffee off, she whisked the supper on to the table; and before Garwood could stop her she had run bareheaded out of the kitchen door and was grinding up a pitcher of fresh water from the old chain-pump in the yard. He called to her to let him get it, though he made no move to deter her, and as she rinsed out the pitcher and whirled the rattling crank of the pump again, she called out of the rainy darkness:

"Don't you come out here! You've got your slippers on."

He scolded her as she came stamping back into the kitchen, the rain drops showing on her gray hair, but she stilled his scoldings by reproaches of her own for standing in the open door on such a night and with such a cold.

The son repaid his mother's efforts by declaring that he did not know how hungry he was until he smelled her cooking again, and he made the eyes that looked fondly across the table glisten with a brightness that seldom glowed in their dim depths, by eating all the bacon she had fried, and both the eggs, and then by sending her to cut more bread. He urged her to share his meal, though he warned her that if she did she would have to cook him more bacon and boil him another egg. She refused, though she implored him to let her fry more bacon and boil the other egg, but she did consent finally to drink a cup of coffee, in the readiness American women always evince for their national beverage. She said it did her good to see him eat. "Feed a cold and starve a fever," she quoted. When he had eaten, he threatened to help her wash the dishes, as he used to do when he was a boy, but she declined this assistance also, saying she was going to leave them for the hired girl to do up in the morning. She had fears of his escaping when he had eaten, but he pacifically lighted a cigar and she allowed him to stroll out of her sight into the sitting room.

Though she had said she was not going to wash the dishes he heard her scrape the skillet and a moment later, knock the coffee pot on the sink outside the kitchen door, and he called to upbraid her for breaking her promise to him. Under his admonitions she hastened through her work, and when she joined him in the sitting room she glanced at his feet, as she entered, to reassure herself by finding him still in slippers. He gave her a pang of fear by observing, in the moment when their conversation lagged, that he supposed he ought to go over and see Emily, but she said, appealing to his affection by speaking of herself in the third person:

"Oh, stay with mother to-night; it's been so long since you were at home."

She got out her sewing basket for her never idle hands and as Garwood stretched himself in the wooden rocking-chair his father had loved, he said:

"Oh, well, all right; she doesn't know I'm here anyhow."

Then she was content to sit and darn his socks and look at him in the great silence of a mother's love.

They sat there for a long time. She did not know how to make conversation, and, remembering the dislike for questions he had inherited from his silent father, she feared to disturb him by asking any. She was satisfied to have him with her.

Garwood remained silent until he had finished his cigar, disliking to interrupt his own pleasure in it by opening the subject that then was on his heart. But at length he began to talk to her about his campaign, and it was a stimulant to her pride to hear his confidences. She was more pleased than distressed when he spoke in a discouraged tone of his prospects. She knew he was of a desponding temperament, another heritage from his father, and it pleased her to try to cheer him.

"Oh, you'll be 'lected," she insisted. "Your mother's prayin', my son, and she has faith in her prayers."

Garwood laughed, with a touch of the harsh skepticism she was always combating in him.

"I'm afraid we need money just now, as much as prayers," he said.

"Money?" she asked, pausing in her darning, and looking up at him inquiringly.

"Yes," he said. "There are legitimate expenses in a campaign you know, that a candidate has to meet." And then he told her what the legitimate expenses were.

"Some of the boys--Jim Rankin and some others--suggested that I ought to go to Mr. Harkness," he said, when he had finished. He had adroitly calculated the effect this suggestion would have upon her, and he was certain of her reply.

"Go to Mr. Harkness, would they? Humph!" Her eyes blazed as she almost snorted this. "I'd have them know if we are poor we're not goin' to be beholden to the Harknesses in any such way as that!"

"That's just what I told them," said the son, quietly.

"An' you told 'em just right!" she added. She returned to her darning, holding up the sock, stretched over her extended fingers, before the lamp.

"But I don't know whom to go to," Garwood said presently, "and I've got to go to somebody."

"Can't you possibly get along somehow?" she asked. "Tell 'em you just ain't got any money to give 'em."

Garwood gave a contemptuous "Humph!" and then, made impatient by her utter failure to comprehend the grim necessity of a candidate's position with election but a week away, he said:

"Didn't I just say I'd got to have some?"

"Well, mother don't pretend to know about politics. Your pa never had anything to do with 'em, you know." She hastened to say this in her mild voice, to conciliate his petulance with her.

"Oh, I know, mother," he rejoined; "but it's a ground-hog case with me. I've got to meet my assessments some way. It wouldn't be honourable not to."

He stretched out his long legs and gazed into the grate.

"I'll have to borrow of some one, I don't know who."

He slid farther down into his chair and crowded his hands into his trousers' pockets, a physical posture at one with his mental attitude.

"I don't know what I'm going to do."

He was scowling, his face was long, and he said this with the deep tone of a final and absolute despair.

"Some one will lend it to you," the mother said. "You mustn't get so down-hearted."

"Well, I'd like to know who!" he said, casting a challenge at her from his eyes.

"Why, some o' the banks--they loan money."

He laughed aloud, harshly, angrily.

"The banks!" he said, mocking her tone. "The banks! They'd be likely to lend me any without security, wouldn't they?"

"Well, Jerome, don't get mad with mother," she said. "She'd help you if she could."

He was silent; silent for a long time. She looked up at him now and then, cautiously, but she understood his humor, and she thought by the knitting of his brows that he was deep in thought. Out of his cogitations he came after a time, and then to say, with a mild, hesitating approach to their result:

"I can think of only one thing, mother, I might do."

"What's that?" she asked.

"I might borrow a little from the bank--and we give a mortgage on the house."

His mother did not move. Her gray head was bent over her sewing. The light of the lamp made her hair glisten; he heard the sound of her thread as she pulled her darning-needle regularly out to arm's length. Presently, as he ventured to look at her, he thought of how his father had toiled to put this little roof over her head before the disease which he knew was hastening his end should bear him away; he thought of the comfort she had always taken, during the long years she had worked to keep him in school, in the thought that whatever else came, she had a home, an asylum for every stress and storm of life. She sewed on in the silence, and he did not speak again, but waited for her. And after awhile she spoke, without raising her head:

"You know, dear"--he could not remember when she had permitted herself the tender word before--"what I promised your father before he went away."

Garwood leaned toward her with his elbows on his knees.

"I know, mother," he said, "but this really isn't serious, not that serious; it would be a small one, and I'm sure to be elected, and then I'll have a good salary as congressman--five thousand a year--just think! Why, it would only be for a couple of months; I'd get a sixty-day loan. I could easily pay it off then; you'd never know the difference." He smiled in his own hopefulness. "It seems a pity to lose such a good chance as I've got now for a little thing like that."

She did not raise her eyes.

"But your father said, Jerome," she faltered, and then he saw a tear fall on the pile of hose in her lap, and, strangely enough, in such a moment, he saw a pair of their servant girl's stockings--he knew them because their splendor of color told that they never belonged to his mother. "And I," she went on, "I--promised."

"But, mother, just look here a minute--I wouldn't ask anything out of the way of you, would I?"

"You've always been a good son to me, Jerome, and a good provider."

"Well, it isn't as if you were going to get a big sum on it, or as if we had no chance of paying it off right away. It won't be breaking your promise, don't you see?"

He went on with his smiling, specious reasoning, reassuring himself every minute, and finally seeming to make an impression upon her, for she said at last:

"Well, Jerome, you're a man now, and you know best about such things. You'll have to take care of your old mother before long, anyway, till she--"

She took off her spectacles and wiped away their moisture on the stocking she was darning, and then she raised her eyes, their pale depths dim with tears, and through them she smiled at him. He got up and kissed her, and she held him to her, pressing his cheek close to her withered one, patting his hands clumsily, awkwardly, for she had never had time to cultivate the luxurious graces of affection.

She did not, however, give way long to her emotion. She urged him to go to bed, because of his cold, and in the new burst of affection the evening had developed in his heart, he obeyed. She tucked him in his bed as if he had been a little boy again, and said good night.

He lay there a long time, warm, perspiring, comfortable, his election as he felt at last assured. But he could not get to sleep. For from his mother's room there came to him the sound of her quavering, aged voice, in hoarse whispers, and he knew that she was kneeling by her bed, praying.

XVII

Garwood found Rankin sitting in the lobby of the Cassell House, stiff in the highly glossed linen his wife decreed for his Sunday wear, his face cleanly shaved and showing its pink under the powder the barber had left on it. He had had his hair cut, too, and his cropped curls, because they had been combed by the barber, gave him the appearance of having been trimmed and made over in another fashion. He had got some of the ashes of his cigar on his waistcoat, as he lay deep in a big chair with the Sunday papers piled in his lap, and when he noticed Garwood, he also noticed the ashes, and in his haste to brush them off, he could only wheeze out an inadequate greeting between the teeth that clenched his cigar.

Garwood did not feel the satisfaction he had anticipated for that moment, when he said:

"Well, Jim, you may rest easy, I can take care of that little matter we were talking of last night."

Although Garwood spoke with a politician's generality, Rankin, before he replied, glanced over his shoulders with a politician's wariness which is like the wariness of a hunted savage.

"Well, that's all right then," Rankin answered, blinking his eyes because the smoke from his cigar had persisted in creeping into them. "Didn't have any trouble about it, did you?"

"No, none to speak of," said Garwood. He laughed, but it was a laugh with more of rue than mirth in it. "It only means a little more debt, that's all."

"Well," said Rankin, nipping the wet and ragged end of his cigar with his teeth, "so long as you don't have to mortgage the roof over your head you're all right."

The words of course struck a pain through Garwood's heart, but he gave his laugh again as he answered:

"Well, I reckon it won't come to that."

"There's one thing I've al'ays done, Jerry," said Rankin, leaning over in a more confidential attitude, "and that's this. I've al'ays drawed the line at the little woman and the kids; I've al'ays said I'd never compromise them or their future, and I say that so long's a man don't do that, he's doin' all right."

For some reason that morning Rankin seemed to be in a soft and tender mood, and showed a desire to talk of his home and its interests. Perhaps it was because it was Sunday, and his wife had been dressing him for the day with as much maternal solicitude as she had dressed his children. Garwood would have preferred Rankin's harsher and more careless note, and because it gave him a chance to get away, was glad when he remembered that he had promised his mother to go to church with her. He knew how gratifying this would be to her, for in her strict Sabbatarianism she had disliked his going down town at all that day; and then, too, he had felt that it would be a politic thing to do.

He went homeward, recalling, word by word, all of his conversation with Rankin, feeling a little hurt at what seemed to him Rankin's coldness, troubled with suspicions and misgivings that he ascribed to the influence of Rankin's strange manner, and without the peace of mind he thought he should feel, now that his election was assured.

He found his mother with her bonnet on, and her misshapen hands gloved and folded, in anxious waiting.

"What time does church begin?" he asked.

"Half-past ten, the last bell rings," said Mrs. Garwood.

"My goodness!" her son exclaimed, as he hurriedly snapped his watch lid shut, "I thought it was at eleven o'clock."

The old lady's face winced with a jealous resentment.

"You're thinkin' of the 'piscopalian church," she answered significantly; "they always does things different."

They walked to church while the bells were ringing, the Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist churches tolling their bells one after another, a note at a time, each tolerantly waiting its turn, though the different keys in which their bells were pitched rang out in a sharp disharmony their doctrinal distinctions. Far away over on the East Side, Garwood heard the chimes of the Catholic church, holding aloof from all this dissonance of the clamoring creeds, while the Episcopalians had no bell in their church, disdaining with a fine superior quality of respectability to enter into the brazen polemics.

The last bell had just stopped ringing, and its dying tones were still vibrating through the building when they reached the Methodist church, and were shown down the aisle to Mrs. Garwood's pew, although there was a pretense of free pews in that church. Garwood could feel the glances of the congregation upon him as he took his seat, and he liked the little distinction, although he had grown used, in the last two months, to being the central figure of public gatherings. He recalled how carefully the Monday morning papers chronicled the church goings of the presidential candidates with the fact that the preacher had added something to his sermon that pledged a providential interest in the success of the nominee who had distinguished that preacher's church with his presence, and Garwood tried to conduct himself as a great man should, or as he imagined he would appear when, a little later, he should become a great man. He bent his head during the prayer, not so low as his mother did, but at an angle that would express a dignified unworthiness to join in public prayer, though giving the assurance at the same time of his respect for it.

During the services, especially during the preaching, Garwood had much time for thought and meditation. His meditations were idle and incoherent, running on Emily, and the afternoon he would spend with her; on his campaign and its impending close. Through them all ran a certain minor chord of sadness and reproach, particularly when he looked at his mother sitting there beside him, her eyes raised behind their gold spectacles in the very acme of respectful attention as she tried to pierce the meaning the preacher sought to crowd into his sermon without making it too long to offend the Longworths, the rich family of the congregation, who, striving to wear the impressive aspect of prominence in the community, filled a whole pew. Garwood found his thoughts hardly tolerable so long as he allowed them to rest in the present. He could grasp at happiness and comfort only when they built on the surer, brighter future which soon would open to him. He found it hard, however, to keep them always building air castles; they persisted in returning to the present, to Emily, to Rankin, to the campaign, to the mortgage. He was depressed and longed for the services to end. They seemed to stretch themselves out interminably, with prayers and hymns and anthems, with announcements and collections, finally, after the sermon, with the baptism of a crying child. He felt as when a little boy he had squirmed during the long two hours, and as a boy was glad when service was over--he was particularly glad that it had not proved to be communion Sunday, for that would have made it necessary for him once more to face a moral problem; to decide on a course of action; and he was wearied with moral problems and decisions.

The heavy feeling that oppressed Garwood in church, the chill that checked the felicity he felt himself now entitled to, remained with him. At times he would forget and become happy, but as soon as he was conscious that he was happy, he would remember that there was some reason why he should not be happy, and then his memory would swiftly bring back to him the thing he had done. By afternoon this constant recurrence irritated him, and he half pitied himself, thinking it unjust that he should be thus annoyed when he was so anxious to be contented and at peace, especially after all the sacrifices he had made to his mother's wishes during the last sixteen hours. And so when he set out in the clear, shining afternoon to go to Emily, he resolved to throw off this feeling; to cast it from him; to have done with it for all time. Physically he expressed this resolve by the fling of his head, and the way he set his shoulders back, holding them high with the will to be all he wished to be.

The house-maid was out for her Sunday afternoon holiday, and Emily herself swung back the door in answer to Garwood's ring. The girl smiled radiantly when she saw him and, with a lover's pretense about her spiritual prescience of all his movements, said she knew it was he at the door. He told her that she had never looked so beautiful before, and there was much of truth in this, for she wore, with an effect of having shown it at church for the first time that morning, a new fall suit, the skirt of which vouched for the jacket that had been laid aside for the greater comfort of a blue silk bodice, which billowed modestly at her young breast, giving her an air of slightness and accentuating the delicacy of her whole person. Her eyes and cheeks were bright with health and her lover's coming, so that her natural color, which made the wearing of dark costumes an easy thing for her, was thereby heightened.

In the moment they lingered in the hall, she laid her soft hands on his shoulders, reaching up to him with a smile of propitiation to say:

"Dade's here."

She was pleased when he frowned his jealous disapproval.

"How long's she going to stay?" he said bluntly.

"Not long," she replied. "She won't stay when she knows you're here. Why didn't you let me know you were coming?"

"I didn't know it myself," he said. "I came on a telegram from Rankin, and I ought to go right out again, only--I had to stay and see you."

She purred an instant in the embrace into which he drew her and then quickly hushed him by pointing toward the drawing-room.

Garwood had never known Dade Emerson, though he had heard of her from Emily in those confidences with which they tried to atone for the years that had passed before love came to them, by recounting in detail, little by little, all their happenings and relations. Dade, to be sure, had impulsively declared that she remembered Garwood as a shock-headed boy whose short trousers came abjectly below his knees, and had identified him to Emily as the youth who had thrown a stone and hooted them as they were going homeward one day from the Misses Lewis's school. Emily had gleefully told this to Garwood and though he had recognized the picture's truth, he was ashamed of it, and had denied it altogether.

When they entered the drawing-room, and Emily had presented Garwood, there was an instant's constraint, born of Garwood's uneasiness in women's society, an uneasiness he somehow contrived to make pass for a Byronic contempt of it, to which also contributed Emily's solicitude that her lover should meet the approval of her friend.

Dade sat listlessly twirling a ring on her strong, white finger, a silver ring of curious, antique workmanship that helped the foreign effect she sought in her personality, but when, through her lashes she saw Emily gazing at Garwood with a sudden access of fondness, she rather coldly said:

"You ah standing for the borough, I believe, ah you not, Mistah Gahwood?"

"I'm running for Congress, if that's what you mean," replied Garwood with an uncontrollable bluntness that he regretted.

"Oh, yes; that is what you call it, isn't it? How int'resting you must find it!"

Garwood laughed in an effort to find ease.

"I find it pretty hard work," he sighed. Emily noted the sigh, and pressed the hand she somehow found between them.

"He's all worn out, Dade," she explained, and the sense of possession her tone implied put all three on an easier footing. "You don't know how hard our political leaders have to work."

"To be elected?" asked Dade.

"Yes, to be elected," said Garwood, yielding himself to the pillows that were piled near him. "And no sooner are we elected once than we have to begin fixing up our fences for a second term."

"Fixing up yoah fences?" said Dade, wonderingly.

"It's a political phrase," explained Emily.

"You have so many of them," said Dade, "and they ah all so unintelligible."

"They must strike a foreigner as peculiar," said Garwood. "I had never thought of that before."

"But I'm not a fo'eigneh, you know," the girl protested.

"Well, you're pretty near it," said Emily. "She's lived abroad all her life, you know--nearly," she explained aside to Garwood.

Garwood was pleased that the conversation had taken a turn which he could follow. With strange women he found small talk impossible as all men must who are not versed in the banalities of women's intercourse, though they indulge themselves for hours in the trivialities of men's gossip.

"I have never thought of it before," said Garwood, "but most of our political phrases savor of our young agricultural life; perhaps I would better say our pioneer life. There's 'log-rolling,' for instance, and 'stump speaking,' and--"

"And setting the prairies on fiah," Dade added. "I saw in the papah the othah day that you weare doing that--on the stump, they said."

Garwood laughed again, naturally.

"That was one of Rankin's inspired tales, no doubt. Rather a mixture of figures, too, setting the prairies on fire from the stump, don't you think? And you probably saw as well, that some of the Indians over in Moultrie have their knives out, and are after my scalp."

"That is more than agricultural, or pioneerish," said Emily; "that's actually savage."

"It's quite deliciously American," said Miss Emerson.

"And one of the few things the papers say of me that are true!" sighed Garwood.

"I'm not afraid of that," said Emily loyally; "isn't there just a little truth in the story about your setting the prairies on fire?"

Garwood laughed, the superior laugh of a man alone with women. He liked this political conversation which he could so easily dominate, quite as much as he liked Emily's frank acquiescence before Miss Emerson in her position as his affianced bride. It gave him such a sweet assurance of security in one relation at least.

"Oh, I don't know," he said; "a candidate never does know any more about his own campaign than a bridegroom does about the preparations for his own wedding. To him it all seems to be going one way; he sees nothing but friendly faces and hears nothing but friendly cheers, and he goes to bed the night before election almost hoping that his opponent may get a few votes just to console him, though he doesn't see where the votes are to come from. The morning after he wakes up to wonder where his own votes all went to. It's always a shock of surprise to the defeated man." He paused to enjoy the effect of his little speech upon the girls, and then resumed: "If you want to know how my campaign is really coming on you'll have to ask Jim Rankin."

"Who is this Mistah Rankin?" asked Dade.

"Oh," said Emily, turning toward her companion with a superiority of her own, "you remember--I told you about him the other day. You really should see him, he's the funniest man and the most interesting. He is managing the campaign for Jerome. He just worships Jerome; I believe he'd die for you, don't you, Jerome?"

"I've heard him say he'd go through--ah--hell and high water for me," said Garwood with the keen enjoyment that comes from vicarious profanity quoted in a presence where, stripped of its quotation marks, it would be inadmissible.

The two girls exclaimed, though they enjoyed the risk of it, and sat while Garwood celebrated Rankin's virtues as a friend and as a politician. When he found room for more quotable profanity Emily laid her palm lightly over his mouth, and at this demonstration of affection Dade rose and said significantly:

"Well, I think it high time I was going and leaving you alone."

There was a little show of protest, but she went, Garwood standing in the middle of the room wondering if the proprieties demanded that he accompany Emily as she escorted Dade to the door; but he withdrew into the security of that dignity which stood him in such good stead in all social crises, and bowed as if the retiring girl were an audience or a jury. The two girls lingered in the hall longer than Garwood thought necessary, though he lost his objection in the satisfaction of the conviction that they were discussing him.

Garwood, of course, stayed to that unclassified meal which is served on Sunday evenings. The repast which Emily in the absence of the servants laid herself, was without formality, and the girl artfully contrived to hide from him the extra preparation that was represented by the bowl of salad she brought forth and set in the midst of the white linen and all the glitter of the table service. Garwood and Mr. Harkness talked of men's topics during the meal and Emily was silent with the silence of the woman in her serving, though her eyes gleamed at the comradeship she thought she recognized in the two men. She did not know how thoroughly the real thought of each man was with her, though Garwood from time to time reflected on the comparison that might be made between the plainness of his mother's table on Sunday evenings and the elegance of the one at which he now expanded himself.

It was late when he went home that night. As he left he told Emily, in their lengthened farewells, that it had been the happiest Sunday he had ever known.

XVIII

Everywhere the campaign was closing, as the newspapers said, in a blaze of glory.

From their headquarters in New York the managers of the two great parties were issuing their last impossible claims, their last careful instructions, their last solemn warnings. Partisan hatred raged in every hamlet in the land, and the whole nation was given over to the last passion of its quadrennial tragedy of personal ambitions.

Down in the Thirteenth Congressional District of Illinois, Garwood was making his final tour of the seven counties, speaking many times daily. He was disheveled and bedraggled, he went without shaving, without sleeping, much of the time without food. He had turned into a mere smiling automaton, that could drink, talk in a husky voice, and go on and on. Insensible to bodily fatigue and discomfort, his only physical sensation was a constant longing for tobacco, and he smoked all the time.

At home, Rankin had finished all his plans. He had completed a second poll, which he had had taken by school districts, and the thousand dollars Garwood had given him on the Monday morning before starting on his final campaigning tour he was hoarding for election day. His own confidence was such that, when Mr. Harkness, in the interest he could not conceal, one day asked about the outlook, he was able to say:

"We're all right if they don't buy us."

Rankin had determined that Garwood's campaign should close with a splendid spectacle of fire in his home town. He had roused the county committee to a frenzy of action, he had compelled the candidates on the county ticket to make one final contribution to the campaign fund, and as Garwood's share of the great meeting Rankin engaged a band, and kept this action so constantly before his fellow-committeemen that their own efforts seemed paltry and puny in comparison with his. When the last Sunday night came, and but one more day remained, he said to his sleepy wife as he came home far in the chill hours of the morning:

"Well, mamma, we've got 'em licked--but they don't know it."