Chapter V: Book I: Of the People (5)

Emily celebrated the evening of the meeting by asking Mrs. Garwood with Dade and her mother to supper, after which they were to be driven to the opera house early enough to obtain good seats for the speaking. Emily had hoped to have Garwood himself there, but at the last moment a telegram came from him at Mt. Pulaski saying that his train was late and he would have to go directly from the station to the opera house to be in time for his speech. Dade came and brought her mother's excuses, though not their querulousness, and by her affectations troubled Mrs. Garwood, already constrained by the embarrassment of a meal too elaborate for her comfort.

The supper was hardly over when the preliminary pounding of a bass drum came to their ears, and Emily and Dade fluttered out on the veranda as excitedly as the little boys who raced up and down the avenue shouting that the parade was coming, and saluting it with premature fanfaronades on their tin horns. Sangamon Avenue did not twinkle with Japanese lanterns this night as it had on the night of the Bromley meeting, for Garwood's social position was not that of Bromley's, and the rich therefore did not so readily identify themselves with his cause, but the boys were bipartisan and now and then the big flags that swung over the lawns all summer were illumined by the red fire which some youngster, unable to restrain his impatience, had set off. Occasionally a line of torches would undulate across the avenue several blocks away, and then the wild announcements of the boys would arouse even their waiting elders on the porches; but there were many of these false alarms, so many, that Dade declared that the parade was a failure and would not pass that way.

But at last it came. They heard the strains of a band swelling loud as some distant corner was turned, then, in the darkness of the November night, far away through the trees, they caught the lick of a torch's flame, then another and another, until they made a river of yellow fire that poured itself down the street from curb to curb, rising and falling as the marchers' feet kept time to the punctuated rolling of the drums. Along the sidewalks streamed a crowd of boys, and men like boys, the same that had trudged through the dust beside Garwood's carriage that hot day in August, the same that had flanked the Bromley parade a few weeks before.

The girls had been followed to the veranda by Mr. Harkness and Mrs. Garwood, and as the old man and the old woman pressed forward in an interest they disliked to own, the two girls clutching each other at last in a definite embrace teetered on the very edge of the steps, their teeth chattering with nervousness. Jasper had driven the carriage around and stood at the heads of the horses, who pricked their ears towards the oncoming mass of men and fire, and gazed at it with startled eyes, jerking their heads now and then and blowing through their soft sensitive nostrils.

The procession had drawn so near that it was possible to distinguish the details that made the mass, the four policemen, in double-breasted sack coats who had been announced as a platoon; the grand marshal of the parade, decked out bravely in rosettes and patriotic bunting, trying to sit his buggy-horse with the military seat; the flag bearer, with bent back, straining under his load; the faces of the marchers themselves red and unfamiliar in the glare that lit them up, like faces transfigured in the glamour that saves a tableau from contempt.

There were clubs from each ward, uniformed in the oil-cloth capes and caps of that day, with wide intervals between their sets of fours, and eked out by small boys in the rear ranks; there was a company of railroad men--at least their transparencies said they were railroad men--wearing overalls, and swinging lighted lanterns, and these were vouchsafed most patronizing applause from the lawns and verandas, as if they were nobly sacrificing themselves for the salvation of their nation. The lines were well formed, and marched with an effect of military precision, though the procession had to stop now and then to mark time and dress its intervals.

When the marching hosts saw the Harkness house all ablaze from top to bottom they recognized their candidate's relation to the first quality of the town by venting a sentimental cheer, waving their torches above their heads, and throwing the flames into the air. Then the grand marshal, holding on to pommel and cantle, twisted his huge haunches in the saddle, and shouted some mighty order, which, though wholly unintelligible to everybody, and to the marchers more than anybody, at once created a vast commotion down the fiery line. His hoarse words, or some hoarse words, were repeated, tossed as it were from one throat to another, the marshal's aides galloped wildly up and down until at last the torches began to dance in varying directions as the column executed some complex manoeuver that wrought a change in its formation. And then the marshal, in a way that no doubt reminded himself of a Napoleon, or a Grant, turned about in his saddle, squeezed his plodding horse's ribs with his spurless heels, and, under his slouch hat, glanced from left to right like Stonewall Jackson.

At the same moment a drum-major shrilled his whistle, and twirled his baton, a cornet trilled and the band began to play:

"When Johnny comes marching home again,
Hurrah, hurrah!"

The two girls emotionally trod a dancing measure, and then, because of the smell of saltpeter, the snorts of horses, the shouts of men, the red and white ripple of the flags that went careering by in smoke and flame, some strange suggestion of the war our political contests typify, in spirit and symbol at least, was borne to them, until they felt what they conceived to be patriotic thrills coursing up and down their spines.

"Don't you love the dear old flag, after all, Dade?" cried Emily, above the noise. The girl pressed her companion's waist in response.

"Yes, but it's a rebel tune they're playing," said old Mrs. Garwood, dubiously wagging her head in its bonnet.

"Oh, we're all one now!" said Mr. Harkness, and then blew his nose in chagrin at this show of feeling.

They stood and shivered in the cold night air and watched the parade go by, read the transparencies with their boasting inscriptions, praised the various regalia of the marchers, kept time to the singing of the bugles and the going of the drums, and cheered when fifty men from Cotton Wood township, wearing coon-skin caps and followed by dogs, trotted by on their heavy plow horses. Finally a rabble of boys and negroes brought up the rear, snatching extinguished torches, half-burned roman candles or sticks of red fire to make a little celebration, and the parade had passed.

When Emily and her party reached the opera house, the sidewalk was cumbered with the loafers who always gathered there when the place of amusement was opened, and people were streaming up the wide stairway into the hall. Mr. Harkness led the women to seats toward the front of the house, where they joined the scattered folk already sitting there, fanning themselves in the air that was overheated by the blazing gas jets, talking, laughing, whiling away the long time they had to wait for their entertainment to begin. Up in the dim and dusty gallery boys were improving an opportunity of liberty by clattering over the wooden benches, calling to one another, whistling, dinning the night with the noises boys love.

The stage was furnished with a table, and on it were the white pitcher and the waiting glass from which orators quench their ever-raging thirst. The table's legs were hidden by a flag, in the folds of which was a picture of the candidate for president. The stage had been set with the theater's gray-walled drawing-room scene--the one with the frescoed curtains and tassels--and an effort had been made to warm the cold and cheerless setting of so many domestic comedies and kingly tragedies by a further use of flags and bunting and a few pictures. Among them was one of Garwood, which Emily recognized after study, and resented, because of the fierce cast in the eye, and the aged droop to the mouth. They left old Mrs. Garwood in the dark as to the identity of that portrait.

The stage was filled with wooden chairs, ashen-white in their unpainted newness. The vice-presidents, for whom these chairs were intended, had not arrived, but presently they began to tiptoe awkwardly across the stage, and then seat themselves, troubled about the disposition of their feet before the unaccustomed footlights. They coughed into their hands from time to time, and were obviously glad when some black-garbed companion came to share their misery and let them pretend the ease they sought by talking to him. The stage filled, and some began looking at their watches. At eight o'clock the hall was full; the meeting was certain to be a success anyway. Ten minutes more passed by. The committee arrived and seated itself on the stage. The Glee Club came and cleared its four throats. Outside the noise of the disbanding parade could be heard and then the rush of the marchers to get indoors. The band clambered up to the gallery, ousted a whole section to make a fitting place for itself down by the railing, then at half-past eight began to play a medley of national airs, and though the strains of America, Columbia, The Red, White and Blue, Dixie, Marching Through Georgia and Yankee Doodle filled the theater, the atmosphere was charged with the suspense of long waiting.

Suddenly, while the band was playing, a wave of excitement swept over the audience; there was a commotion at the door, a shuffle of feet, a scraping of chairs. The vice-presidents craned their necks to peer over the black-coated shoulders in front of them, people ceased their fanning and twisted about in their seats to look, a rattle of clapping hands broke forth, a cheer arose, the floor began to tremble and vibrate beneath stamping feet, and then the building shook with heavy applause.

And all at once Emily saw Jim Rankin, rubicund, his curls sticking to his wet forehead, smiling always, leading the way up a side aisle, and behind him Garwood, his hat in his hand, his overcoat on his arm. She saw him run his free hand through his hair to loosen it, then shake it back with that royal toss of the head she knew so well, and stride on, his face white, his eyes dark, his mouth firmly closed on the level line of his lips.

The house rocked with the storm of cheers, with cries of his name, but he marched straight on, behind his smiling Rankin, who responded to the greetings of men who rose from chairs or pressed themselves flat against the walls to give room in the aisle. The little party disappeared behind the scenes, and the ovation lulled.

Emily felt her throat close and feared the tears that already moistened her eyes. She tried to compose her features, she crushed Dade's arm in her fingers, then she stole a glance at those about her. Everybody was looking at Garwood, everybody save one, her father; he was looking at her, while Mrs. Garwood, having found her handkerchief, held it in her work-worn hands just as it had come from the iron that afternoon, fresh and clean, keeping her eyes fixed on the stage, watching for her boy to appear again, while tears rolled unchecked down her cheeks.

And then Emily heard Dade whisper:

"Wondah why they didn't come in by the stage entrance?"

Rankin and Garwood had stepped on the stage, and the applause had broken forth again. Garwood had taken out a big white handkerchief and was wiping his brow. He was smiling now, and greeting the vice-presidents of the meeting, who stretched their bodies across their neighbors' knees to shake his hand. Rankin, too, was mopping his forehead, and he had his watch out. As soon as he saw that Garwood was seated, he stepped to the front of the stage, his red face round with smiles. Then suddenly his smile died, his face blanched, and he tapped the decorated table with the gavel that lay on it. He took a swallow of the water he supposed was in the glass, and at last his voice came:

"Friends an' fellow citizens," he said, though not many could hear him, "will you come to order, an' I now have the honor of interducin' to you Judge Bickerstaff, who will preside at this meetin' as permanent chairman."

Rankin retired amid a volley of hand-claps, which the rotund judge, advancing to the front of the stage, buttoning his frock coat about him, thought were meant for him. He bowed ponderously, and then, with one hand on the table beside him, began the platitudinous speech of the permanent chairman. The people bore with him in that divine patience to which the American public has schooled itself under this oft-recurring ordeal, and even gave him some perfunctory applause. But the quality of the applause was spontaneous only when he reached the place where he said:

"I now have the very great honor and the very great pleasure of introducing to you your next congressman, the Honorable Jerome B. Garwood." Jerry arose at the sound of his own name and, advancing to the front of the stage, stood there calm and composed until the applause died away; stood there calm and composed until the silence came and deepened. He looked over the whole audience, at the galleries even, and then his eye traveled unerringly to the spot where his own sat. He looked at his mother, gazing up at him through her dim spectacles, at Dade who smiled, at Mr. Harkness who was stern, at last at Emily. Their eyes met, and as Emily's fell she heard his voice in low, musical modulation:

"Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen."

And his last speech of the campaign began.

Whenever in Grand Prairie they discuss Jerry Garwood's oratory, they shake their heads and say that he made the speech of his life that last night before election.

XIX

It was election night in Chicago and already a great crowd thronged the Webster House, a crowd, as was perhaps fitting in a land where the avocation of every man is governing, composed wholly of men, although in one corner of the balcony that ran around the rotunda of the old hotel there were several women. The splendor that had been produced in their dress by the competition of a public dining-room, proclaimed them as regular boarders, and as an additional evidence of their lot in life, they had that air of detachment from their husbands which most hotel ladies soon or late come to wear. As they leaned over the balcony, their jewels and teeth and white hands flashed nervously, as if they shared the excitement of the crowd below. For them, as it might for any one, the great crowd possessed a never failing interest. Looking down they saw it continually in uneasy motion like a herd of milling cattle. Here and there were nucleated groups of men engaged in belated political argument or in hedging political bets, here and there some tired outcast glad of the temporary warmth and light, shivered in ragged summer garments that the long day's rain had drenched, here and there some messenger boy dodged along, here and there some reporter elbowed his way through the crowd, and here and there a wide track was marked by the more important progress of some politician. Over the head of the crowd hung a stratus of tobacco smoke, and all the while arose a multitudinous voice, laughing, swearing, cheering. Constantly arms were flung into the air, and sometimes a hat went spinning up to the dark skylight on which a November rain endlessly drummed.

Up the wide staircase and down the hall, carpeted with canvas ever since the campaign opened, men trailed their dripping umbrellas, passing in and out of the suite of parlors where the state central committee had its headquarters. The outer rooms were crowded with men, their garments steaming from the rain, their faces dripping with perspiration, their dirty fingers holding chewed cigars. Some of them were drunk and quarrelsome, and now and then the policeman who leaned against the doors spoke confidentially to these, deprecating the trouble he could so easily bring upon them. The desk of the secretary was closed and wore an air of having been closed finally. On the floor were piles of blank nominating petitions that never would be used, bundles of newspapers that never would be read, and heaps of campaign literature that never would be distributed. In a corner where three or four sample torches stood was a pile of lithographs, and from them the faces of candidates, as if they still posed before the people, looked out with the same solemn expressions they had worn for the campaign. Outside, from a wire that was stretched to the building on the opposite side of the street, the big campaign banner could be heard booming in the wind.

In the innermost of the committee's apartments only a few men had been admitted, men who that year, at least, were the managers of the party's policies in the state. In this room was Garwood. He had voted early that morning and had then taken a train for Chicago, in order to be in the very center of the night's excitement.

As he sat there in a deep leather chair he could hear the ring of cab-horses' hoofs on the glistening cobble stones of the street below; the shouts of election night, now and then the blare of a tin horn. From Washington Street, two blocks away, a cheer, mellowed pleasantly by the distance, came from the crowd before the newspaper offices, where the returns were being flashed upon screens, and from below always ascended that endless roar. From the entresol a deep voice was reading the bulletins to the multitude in the rotunda. Garwood caught snatches of what the voice was reading:

"Four hundred and twenty-nine precincts in Brooklyn and Kings County show net gains--"

Once he heard the inevitable news that Mississippi had gone overwhelmingly Democratic, and Vermont overwhelmingly Republican, and then the quadrennial laugh with which these foregone conclusions are received and the quadrennial cheers with which partisanship dutifully celebrates them. But, though he heard, he was scarcely conscious of it all; it sounded far away to him and strange. His thoughts lay too deep for these objective manifestations. The crisis of his life, he felt, had come. He was with men who like himself were candidates, or else the managers of candidates, and yet he felt that the result of the election meant more to him than it did to them.

He had risked all on this campaign; he had abandoned his practice, staked his reputation, spent all his money, gone in debt, all he was or had was involved--Emily with the rest. He felt that if he were defeated she would be lost to him. He looked at Colonel Warfield, the chairman of the state executive committee, sitting at the table in the center of the room, a pad of paper before him, idly turning a pencil over and over in his fingers as he considered the import of the latest returns. Garwood wondered if he were really as calm as he appeared. He looked at the others in the room, laughing and joking as they were--no, it could not matter to them as it did to him; they had position, money, influence; politics was to them a kind of recreation. They lolled in chairs, smoking at their ease, not caring to anticipate the strain of the long, uncertain hours of the night, but content to sit in silence with their heads thrown back, trying to blow rings of smoke to the ceiling. Once Parrish said:

"It's like waiting for a jury, ain't it?"

"Yes," said some one else, "but, thank God, this is a jury that can't hang."

"Maybe not," said old General Williams, who had been in Congress for twenty years, representing a safe district that he considered his by divine right, "but it can stay out a long time. I remember, once--"

The danger of Williams's reminiscence was averted by the click of the telegraph instrument. The operator seized his stylus and began to write rapidly. Warfield took the new bulletin from the telegrapher's outstretched hand and studied it with knitted brows. He read it aloud finally, and then commented:

"If that gain keeps up in New York he'll come down to Harlem bridge with less than seventy thousand. It'll give us the state and the presidency."

He laid his pencil down and lighted a cigar, but he did not relax his interest.

"Here's something," he said a moment later, spreading a piece of yellow flimsy over a white sheet, "here's one from Springfield; says returns from thirty counties show net gains over two years ago of eleven per cent. Let's see--'In these counties,' he read, 'Chatham polls forty-three thousand one hundred and seventy-nine. Norton, for state treasurer, carried the same counties two years ago by seventeen thousand two hundred and thirty-six.'"

The men in the room stirred with a pleasing excitement. Several of them began to talk again, but the colonel said rather peremptorily:

"Wait! Here's some West Side news,"--Newman, who was standing for the Fourth Congressional District, arose as the chairman read:

"Three of the five wards comprising the Fourth Congressional District, the Eighth, the Ninth, and the Nineteenth, give Newman eleven thousand nine hundred and thirty-eight, Kenyon five thousand six hundred and forty-seven."

Newman drew a long, full breath, and smiled complacently.

"How will the other wards go, John?" asked Parrish.

"Oh, they're all right. I carried the Eleventh by a hundred and fifty-six two years ago," said Newman, speaking with the accuracy with which a man remembers his own majorities, "and lost the Twelfth by sixteen ninety-four, but I can give him both of them and beat him out."

Garwood envied him keenly.

The operator was writing furiously now, and kept his left arm, with a despatch dangling in his fingers, almost continually stretched over the back of his chair toward Warfield. The colonel made his calculations rapidly.

"Here you are, General," he said to Williams after awhile, and the white-bearded old man took a despatch from him and carefully adjusted his glasses. Then he hitched his chair up to the table, cleared a place for his elbows, took some paper and began to make figures of his own.

"Gentlemen," he said presently, "I claim my election by a majority of four thousand votes."

"What was your majority two years ago?" asked Milton.

"Why, sir," said the old man, looking at Milton as if he were betraying a culpable ignorance, "three thousand two hundred and ninety-six. Don't you remember?"

"Oh yes," lied Milton.

"Seems popular in his district, doesn't he?" whispered Garwood.

"Popular! No one can beat the old blatherskite. Wish he had to run in my district once!" Milton spoke out of the bitterness the fierce contests of a close district had worked in him. Just then a number of reporters, moving in a body like a committee, came to interview Colonel Warfield.

The colonel was thoughtful for a moment, and then, smiling, he said: "You probably know more than I about it, but you can say for me that at eleven o'clock"--he looked at his watch--"basing my calculations on incomplete returns from seventy-five counties in the state, I claim the election of Governor Chatham and the entire state ticket by thirty-three thousand majority."

"These others have scored already," said Anthony, the secretary of the committee, waving at General Williams, at Milton and at Newman the corn-cob pipe for which he was famous all over the state, "all except Garwood there; he'll be in after while."

Outside the noise was growing louder. They could hear cheering from the rotunda, and in the streets the crowds pouring out of the theater added to the din. The noise had a new quality of wildness in it that comes with the approach of midnight. Schreiber, who had been put on the state ticket for auditor because of his German name, had long ago claimed his own election by a safe majority, and had made many trips down to the bar. He was a fat man, plainly a connoisseur of Rhine wines; and you might almost have said he was humid, so moist was his rosy skin. He did not emit a German "Hoch!" as would have befitted his personality, but he continually boomed forth pleasantries, congratulating the other successful candidates. But from these general felicitations Garwood was excluded. For an hour his hopes had been sinking. Rankin had promised to telegraph as soon as he had anything definite, but no word had come from him. Though the returns from down the state were coming in rapidly those from his own district had been meager, and from what he already knew he was convinced that he was running behind the head of the ticket, both national and state. It seemed to be well established by midnight that his party had swept both the state and the nation, and he seemed to be the only one thus far left out. He pitied himself, he began to feel that the open triumph of the successful ones about him was indelicate and in bad taste; he felt that they should show him more consideration. But they seemed to have forgotten him in the realization of their own joy, and Garwood could only smile grimly at the irony of it all.

At midnight whistles blew all over the city, as if it were New Year's, and just then Larry O'Neil came in, crying:

"We've got 'em, Cook County's ours by fifty thousand. Beats hell, don't it?"

"How are they feeling down at the Grand?" asked Anthony. The headquarters of the other committee were at the Grand.

"Oh, they've shut up down there," said the man, "and gone home. They seen it 'as no use."

"Yes," said Warfield, laying down his pencil as if he had no further need for it, "it's a landslide."

At one o'clock the telegraph instrument ceased its chatter and the telegraph operator began to unroll his little package of lunch. As the odor of the buttered bread and the cold meat he spread on a clean sheet of paper before him became perceptible in the room, the men there felt for the first time that night the pangs of hunger, and Colonel Warfield said:

"What do you say to our going down to the café and having a bite to eat?"

Down in the café, the men grouped themselves about two tables which Warfield told the head waiter to place end to end, and the meal he ordered soon became a banquet. As they sat there talking in excited tones, laughing at old stories of by-gone campaigns, laughing even at the defeats of by-gone campaigns, as they could afford to now, many men passing through stopped to congratulate Warfield, to slap him on the shoulder, and call him "Good boy!" as if he had done it all. And as he thought of the four years of that influence at Springfield his position as the chairman who had directed the campaign would give him, his inscrutable smile expanded into one of great content. They were happy at that table, all of them looking forward to days of power, all save Garwood, who sat gloomy and silent, drinking more than he ate, and drinking more than he felt he ought. Once Warfield noticed his despondency, and whispered to him in his kind-hearted way:

"Don't give up, old man. You'll pull through. And if you don't, I'll see that you're taken care of."

The sympathy of the chairman's tone, more than the promise he made, touched Garwood, but down in his heart he felt a soreness. It was hard to see them all successful and be alone doomed to defeat. A place in the state administration, on some board, even on the board of railroad and warehouse commissioners, would hardly satisfy him now. He had longed to go to Congress, and then, the vindication he looked for meant more than all the rest. And Emily--he thought of her and could have wept. He felt himself more and more detached from the scene. The table, the mirrors, the lights of the café, the laughing men, the rushing waiters, the shuffle of the crowd in the lobby above, the cries in the street outside, the toots of tin horns, the companies of crazy men marching aimlessly around and around, howling the names of candidates, all sounded as remote and strange as if he had no more a part in it.

The night waned, the noise changed, but did not cease. It told of a decrease in the numbers in the lobby, but the sounds were wilder. Men were making a night of it. As in a dream Garwood heard some one say:

"There's a little woman down in Rock Island who'd like to hear from me. I must wire my wife."

And Garwood thought of a telegram he might have sent, had things gone differently. He thought of a girl down in Grand Prairie, but now--it was all so changed!

He stole away and sought his room. He went to the window, pulled back the curtain and looked down into Randolph Street. The rain had ceased, but still the big campaign banner flapped clumsily. The chill of dawn was in the air, a cold wind blew in from the lake. Across the way the court house and city hall loomed in the fog; in their shadow he saw the jaded horses at the cab stand drooping their noses to their crooked knees; the cable began to buzz in its slot; far over the gloomy roofs the sky was tinged with the pallor of coming day--then suddenly a long shaft of brilliant light striking across the sky startled him with a nameless terror. The shaft rose slowly until it pointed straight upward, then three times it swept a vast arc down to the eastern horizon. And Garwood remembered--it was the search-light which the _Courier_ had announced would signal the success of Garwood's party. He recalled the day at Lincoln. The great man and all the rest, as they went to bed in the dawn of that November morning, were safe in triumphant victory, while he alone--

He heard the heavy, mature voice of some early newsboy:

"Extry! Toimes, Tribune, Her'ld, an' Courier! 'Lection!"

XX

When Garwood awoke, he opened his eyes in darkness. The room was cold. He heard the harsh Nottingham curtains stirring in the breeze that came in at the windows, an autumnal breeze that had only the chill of autumn and none of the crispness and woodland odors that he would have found in it down in Grand Prairie. Instead, it was laden with the soot and dirt of the city, and it could not dissipate the heavy quality taken on by the air of a room that had long been slept in. He could hear the jolting of trucks on the cobble stones, the trudge and shuffle of thousands of feet on the sidewalk, the clank of the cable cars scraping around the loop, and, punctuating the roar of the city, the cries of the newsboys. Garwood slowly regathered his senses, and lay in the moment that comes before memory brings back individuality and life, trying to fathom a deep sense of something wrong. Then it all came back to him with a rush--the campaign, the election, the defeat. He rose and drew his watch from his waistcoat, lying on the floor. It was too dark to see its face. He switched on the electricity--the watch had stopped. Then he went to the window and looked down into the street. The lights were blazing, and thereby, and by the throngs hurrying along and by the crowded cars, he knew that it must be evening. How long he had slept he did not know. He could not remember how or when he had got to bed. His sleep had hardly refreshed him. It had been too deep, too heavy; he was feverish and his muscles were sore. But he dressed and went downstairs. Somehow, instinctively, without giving himself any reason he stopped at the headquarters of the state committee, but the rooms were dark, deserted. The dead odor of stale tobacco smoke hung heavy in the air.

At the desk in the rotunda below, the clerk gave him his mail, with some pleasantry about the great victory. Garwood stared at him blankly, with the dumb ache at his heart, with some resentment too, that the clerk should not have known what a dash of bitterness that cup of victory held for him. Mechanically he began to thumb his letters over as he stood there, and presently laid them aside that he might open several telegrams he found among them, with that sense of precedence which telegrams always take over every other missive. With the first one his eyes widened in astonishment, and then suddenly he was aware that Warfield was shaking his hand and saying:

"Well, old man, congratulations. It's all the sweeter now, isn't it? Why! You look surprised, what's the--"

Garwood looked up at Warfield and said:

"I never knew till just this minute, when I read Rankin's telegram. I just got up."

"I knew you'd pull through all the time," said Warfield, with as much truth as retroactive prophecy can ever hold. "I thought last night they were holding out down there, and that when the whole vote got in, you'd be found to have won out."

Garwood's soreness had gone, and he took a long breath as if to draw into his very being this glad new sense of victory. In an instant a new glory had been added to life. He took Warfield by the arm.

"Come on," he said, "let's get the evening papers, and then go and have a little drink."

They strolled toward the news stand, and Garwood's eye ran down the pages as he waited for his change.

"Why, I carried Bromley's home county! I thought I'd lose that anyway."

"Oh, the story helped out over there," said Warfield. "Bromley got the Sunday-school vote, and that drove the rest to you."

"My! Wasn't it a landslide though!" said Garwood. "Keep the change," he called to the young man behind the news stand. "Well, I was glad the party won even when I thought I had lost," he went on. "Look here!" Garwood was reading, as he walked, the paper he had opened wide. "Logan County gives me a majority of eighteen hundred; what do you think of that?"

They were at the bar by this time.

"What will it be?" said Garwood, still devouring his papers.

"Oh, a little bourbon," said Warfield.

"Nonsense!" said Garwood, crumpling the papers under his arm. "I want to drink Jim Rankin's health, bless his old heart! He gets the post-office, he does! Give us a bottle of champagne!"

"You haven't had your dinner yet, have you?" Warfield asked.

"No, nor my breakfast, either," laughed Garwood. But then Garwood was not as well informed as Warfield as to the relation in time of liquors to dinner. Warfield had been longer in politics.

XXI

Three weeks after election there fell a night when carriage lamps twinkled among the black tree-trunks in the yard of the Harkness home. The drivers of these vehicles in liveried coats of varied shades that had faded through all the tones of green and blue and brown and violet, with top hats that marked every style for two decades, lounged on their high seats flinging each other coarse jokes, and cracking their whips softly at the few brown leaves that clung so tenaciously to the oaken boughs above them.

Within the house, there was the white desolation of canvas-covered carpets, and the furniture had been pushed back against the wall in anticipation of a later crush of people whose bodies would supply a heat now sadly lacking in the rooms. Ethan Harkness sat in his library, uncomfortable in his evening clothes, eying dubiously and with occasional dark uprisings of rebellion, the white gloves his daughter had decreed that he should wear. The caterer, from Chicago, had driven him to bay, and now chased his shining black men through the old man's apartments as though he owned them. In the dining-room and hall, little tables were being laid, and little camp-chairs unfolded, for the destructive supper of salads and ices, which, having displaced the more substantial evening meal of the establishment, would not now be served until a late hour, when its inadequacy would be more noticeable. In the front hall, an orchestra had assembled. Now and then the strings of the instruments would twang in tuning. On all the chill atmosphere hung the funereal odor of cut flowers.

Upstairs, in her own room, Emily stood before a long pier glass arrayed finally in the white bridal gown on which the feminine interest of that house and town had centered for many days. Before her a dressmaker, enacting for this evening the rôle of maid, squatted on her heels, her mouth full of pins; behind her, another dressmaker enacting a similar rôle was carefully, almost reverently, unfolding the long tulle veil; about her were clustered the bridesmaids, all robed in their new gowns. They had been chattering and laughing, but now, in the supreme moment, a silence had fallen--they stood with clasped hands and held their breath. In the center of the room, Dade Emerson stood in her superior office of maid of honor, her head sidewise inclined, her eyes half closed that through the haze of their long black lashes she might estimate with more artistic vision the whole bridal effect. Presently she nodded to the dressmaker, and the patient woman, her own pinched bosom under its black alpaca bodice thrilling strangely with the emotions of a moment that had been denied her, lifted the veil on her extended fingers, and proceeded to the coronation. She piled the white cloud upon the brown coils of Emily's hair; she deftly coaxed it into a shimmering cataract down the silken train of the gown, and then took a step backward, while all the women there raised their clasped hands to their chins in an ecstatic, unisonant sigh.

Emily turned her eyes, brilliant with the excitement of this night, toward Dade, who still stood with her head critically poised. Dade nodded.

"_C'est bien_," she said.

The spell was broken, the chattering began again, and the girls swarmed about for gloves and bouquets, at last seating themselves impatiently to let the maids fasten their furred opera boots.

Emily still stood before the long pier glass, looking at her bridal reflection.

"Are you all fixed?" said Dade, "with

"'Something old and something new, Something borrowed and something blue?'"

The bridesmaids looked up with lips apart, awaiting the answer to this all-important question.

"My handkerchief is old," said Emily, holding in her fingers a bit of point lace that had been her mother's, "and--let's see--well, I'm pretty much all new to-night." She glanced down at her gown. "Something borrowed--I have nothing borrowed." She looked up soberly, her eyes wide.

"Something blue?" one of the girls asked, though the first question had not been disposed of.

"Yes, if you'd bean me, running all that blue baby-ribbon in her chemise, you'd think so," said Dade.

The bride blushed.

"But something borrowed," one of the others insisted.

"Yes, something borrowed," assented Emily. "What can I borrow, I wonder?" She looked about helplessly.

"Oh say, girls!" one of the bridesmaids exclaimed, "she must have a coin in her slipper!" And the whole bevy chorused its happy acquiescence. Emily, with the sudden air of a queen, unaccustomed to waiting on herself, commanded Dade:

"Look in that box on my dressing-table."

Dade picked her way through the disorder of the room to the little dressing-table, with its candles lighted, adding their heat to the room. She looked, and found nothing. Then she flew from the room, crossed the hall, and returning, gave Emily a silver dime.

"I'll lend it to you," she said, "it'll be something borrowed, too."

It was all arranged. The bride glanced again in her mirror, turned about, inspected her train, preened herself like some white bird, ready for final flight. The old maid scanned the bride's face critically. It was radiant, but--

"I'm red as a beet!" Emily pouted.

"It's hot as pepper in here anyway," one of the bridesmaids panted.

The old maid took a powder puff and touched the bride's face, touched the cheeks, and at last the forehead, where tiny drops of perspiration sparkled.

"There now," she said, with her last dab.

Emily turned to her with a final glance of questioning. The old dressmaker's eye lighted at the sight of the young girl in her bridal dress. She took a step toward her, her thin, withered lips trembling. "May I--kiss you?" she asked, timidly.

And then, carefully, reverently, as she had crowned her with the veil, she approached, and kissed her. The eyes of the bridesmaids, in the emotion that weddings excite in girls, became moist with tears.

There were, of course, further feminine delays, but at last, gathering their rustling skirts about their ankles, the bride and her retinue made a dazzling white procession down the staircase.

Her father awaited her. The caterer and his black men, the cook and old Jasper, the men of the orchestra, all had gathered in the parlor to see her. Emily paused at the foot of the stairs, blocking the procession that was but half descended. She looked at her father with smiling eyes. The old man glanced at her a moment, and then solemnly drew near. When he had taken her fresh and radiant face between the hands that were still ungloved, he kissed her, and then turned suddenly and went back to his library scrubbing his face with his handkerchief. So the sadness that weddings inspire, possibly because the estate of matrimony is entered into by all lightly and with merry confidence in a future that shall be miraculously exempt from the griefs and woes of life, fell upon the little company.

Meanwhile all the closed carriages the livery-stables of Grand Prairie could muster were rolling along Sangamon Avenue, stretching frostily white under a November moon. Their rendezvous was St. James Church, over the stony tower of which some native ivy had kindly grown to give the English effect so much desired. An awning was stretched from the curb to the Gothic doorway, and about it were already gathered ragged children and truant servant girls, willing to shiver in the night air for a mere glimpse of the bride, and perhaps of the groom, who, so short a time before acclaimed as the popular champion of equal rights, was now to be identified with that fashionable exclusiveness which is separated by satin ribbons and striped awnings from the mass of mankind. Inside, the church lights were blazing; at the door, two policemen, in new white cotton gloves, stood guard.

Garwood, dressed for the first time in his life in evening clothes, was restlessly pacing the musty sacristy of the church. With him were Dr. Abercrombie, the rector of the parish, in his white surplice and stole, and Colonel Warfield, his best man. Garwood had found difficulty in selecting a man for this affair. When, in discussing the plans for the wedding, he had learned from Emily that it devolved upon him to choose not only a best man but groomsmen and ushers, he had found, in casting over his acquaintances, that he had none who were intimate enough and at the same time fashionable enough to fill these social offices.

But he had thought of Colonel Warfield, and as he considered how peculiarly fitting it was that a man of Colonel Warfield's social and political position in the state should attend him at a wedding which would attract the attention his was sure to attract, he assumed an intimacy that did not exist, and boldly invited the colonel to serve him in this delicate capacity. He could not, for public reasons, have made a better selection. The old bachelor, with as many social as political campaigns to his credit, was too polite to decline, and so came down to Grand Prairie, giving, by his position, a new importance to Garwood in the eyes of the politicians of Illinois, and by his white hair and military bearing, a distinction to the wedding that made it complete.

As they paced the floor of the sacristy on this evening, awaiting the signal of the bridal party's coming, the colonel chatted at his ease with the rector, while Garwood paused now and then to look through the peep hole that long ago had been whittled in the panel of the door that opened into the church. He could see, as in a haze, the flowers and faces and fluttering fans of society. He could detect, here and there, one of the numerous politicians he had invited in order to make his list of guests equal to the one Emily had written out. Far down at the front he could see Jim Rankin, scorning evening dress, with his little wife beside him in a hat she had retrimmed that very evening, and finally, within the space marked by the bows of white ribbon for the family, he saw his mother, in the new black silk gown he had bought for her when he found his credit immeasurably strengthened by his success in politics and love. She was fanning herself complacently, yet through big spectacles that fortunately lent benignity to an otherwise disapproving gaze, looking with an eye he knew was hostile at the trappings of this high church. And yet her face was not without its trace of pride that she was the mother of a son who could lead out of this stronghold of fashion and exclusiveness one of its reigning peeresses.

The organist had been improvising, while the people gathered. Now that they were all there and a hush disturbed only by the rustle of fans had fallen upon the sanctuary, his improvisations were subjected to a keener criticism, and his inspiration failed him, so that his work lagged and degenerated into minor chords. The hour for the wedding had passed, and those who had been reviving the gossip that Emily had made Garwood's election a condition precedent to her marrying him, began to discuss with keen excitement the possibility of his or her failing at the last minute.

The gossip had entered grooves that led to certain passages in Garwood's early life, when some electrical contrivance buzzed. The music ceased, a hush fell within the church. The priest and Colonel Warfield straightened up and took their places as if for a procession. Garwood saw the ushers, chosen by Emily from the number of young men who once had so ineffectually called upon her, pace slowly down the aisles, unrolling white satin ribbons along the backs of the pews. Then the rector entered the church, and Garwood found himself with Colonel Warfield by his side, standing before that flowered and fanning multitude.

The organ had begun the strains of the bridal chorus from Lohengrin, women were twisting their heads, and far down the aisle he saw Dade with her huge bouquet of chrysanthemums moving with stately, measured tread toward the altar. And behind her, he saw Mr. Harkness, looking older than he had ever known him, and on his arm, her eyes downcast behind her veil, was Emily, kicking her silken white bridal gown with her little satin-slippered toes. When she saw him a light that made his heart leap came into her eyes, and he became suddenly, dramatically bold, so that he left the colonel and strode forward to meet her. He led her to the altar, and the priest began his solemn words. Garwood stood there, conscious of the beautiful woman beside him, her hand in his, conscious of Warfield picking the ring with experienced fingers from the palm of his gloved hand, conscious of Dade near by holding Emily's bouquet, conscious of the priest's flowing surplice before him, of the flowers and palms around him, of the crowd behind fanning the perfume of toilets into the heated air.

Then he was kneeling stiffly upon a satin pillow, the soles of his new shoes showing to the congregation, the organ was softly playing, giving a theatrical effect to the impressively modulated words of the clergyman, and then they were on their feet again; Dade had parted Emily's veil, and he saw her looking up at him, her pale face aglow, in her deep eyes a light that showed the influence of sacerdotal rite. Then as it was borne upon his soul that she was his, wholly his at last, with the male's joy of absolute possession, he set his lips upon hers and kissed her before them all.

The organ swelled into the wedding march that has become a tradition, and he was striding down the aisle with Emily on his arm. He saw his mother's tears, he saw Rankin, the big fellow furtively knuckling his eyes, and then winking drolly at him, he saw Mr. Harkness, who, he suddenly remembered, was now his father-in-law, pale and stern. And so they left the church and passed out under the canopy to the waiting carriage.

Garwood, like a king come from his crowning, felt a kindness for all the world, even for the poor folk gathered on the sidewalk striving for a glimpse of the bride's gown. He felt his heart leap toward them, so that like a king, he longed to fling a golden largess to them.

The carriage door slammed. Josh Bowers, from the livery-stable that had provided the carriages, shouted some big order to the driver, and they whirled away. Once more he saw the gleam in Emily's eyes, liquid in the cold light that found its way from the moonlit night into the carriage, and, regardless of her dress, though he thought of it, he crushed her in his arms, and said:

"At last--my wife!"