Chapter IX: Book II: By the People (4)

The staid old court room with all its traditions of the dignity of judicial proceedings was in an uproar. The whole convention was on its feet, everybody was calling: "Mr. Chairman." From without, men to whom had been borne by some occult transmission of intelligence the news of that, the final moment, crowded breathlessly into the room. The belief that the morning was cool had been a delusion. Now that the peace induced by universal harmony had been marred, men began to perspire, to grow red in the face; the atmosphere in an instant had become stifling. The Garwood men had begun to cheer. The Sprague men and perhaps the little group of Barrett's supporters, foiled in whatever their original purpose had been, realized that they were defeated, and they raged impotently. Hale was hurriedly casting up his easy sum, and when he handed the slip to Bailey his heart leaped with the thought that at last the Pekin post-office was his.

The Singed Cat deliberately studied his figures, and his deliberation, with the power of the definite announcement that was pending, compelled a sudden quiet his gavel had theretofore been unable to invoke. And at last, in the suspense which was all fictitious, the product of the Anglo-Saxon mania for legal forms, he said:

"Upon this ballot. General William M. Barrett--has received--twenty-four votes," it was seen that he was reversing the order for its effect, "Conrad Sprague--forty-eight, and Jerome B. Garwood--ninety-three. Mr. Garwood--having received--the necessary number--and a majority--of all--the votes--cast--is therefore--declared--to be--the nominee--of the convention--for Representative--in Congress--for the Thirteenth District--of Illinois--for the term--beginning--the fourth day--of March--ensuing."

The strain was over, the long pent-up emotions of the seventy men who had stood solidly for Jerry Garwood, and now had won victory at last, broke forth, and they flung their hats into the air, tore off their coats to wave aloft, brandished chairs, and pounded one another on the back, yelling all the time. The followers of Sprague yelled no less excitedly, though their rage was that of defeat. Randolph strode to where Hale was sitting, his mouth stretched wide in a demented yell, and pounded the table with his fist, crying unceasingly:

"Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman!"

The Singed Cat stood leaning as he had leaned for days, with his eyes upon the desk he had scarred with his gavel. For ten minutes, and it seemed an hour, the men howled, until exhausted by the exertion and the excitement, their voices failed, and they collapsed into their chairs. But Randolph, in the approximate order which the exhaustion brought about, continued to cry, until at last the Singed Cat's voice pierced to all the corners of the court house.

"The convention--will be--in order! The convention--has not--yet adjourned. There is--still--work--to be done."

But Randolph continued to cry.

"Gentlemen--will resume--their seats," Bailey said, "before--they can--be recognized."

Randolph hesitated, though still he cried:

"Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman!"

But Bailey's eye forced him backward to his place, and when he had retreated to the midst of the Moultrie County delegation the chairman said:

"The gentleman--from Moultrie."

"Mr. Chairman," Randolph said, and the convention, supposing he was about to observe custom and move to make the nomination unanimous, listened. "Mr. Chairman," he said, "I challenge the vote of the Polk County delegation."

"The gentleman--from Moultrie--is out--of order," the Singed Cat promptly ruled. "None--but a member--of the Polk County delegation--can challenge--its vote."

The Sprague men seemed about to gather themselves for another noisy protest, but interest had suddenly veered to the Logan County delegation. There a consultation was in progress, hurried and eager, and out of it Knowlton arose, and his splendid bass voice boomed:

"Mr. Chairman!"

"The gentleman--from Logan."

"Mr. Chairman, I move you, sir, that the nomination of Jerome B. Garwood be made unanimous."

He had seized the only little chance that remained of identifying his delegation with the success of the nominee. The band wagon had taken them by surprise and rolled by too swiftly for them to climb in.

"The gentleman--from--Logan--moves--to make--the nomination--of the Honorable--Jerome B. Garwood--for candidate--for the office--of Representative--in Congress--unanimous," said the Singed Cat, yielding not a word of all his formula. "Those in favor--will say--'Aye.'"

The motion carried, of course, though not without a great shout of "Noes" from the little band of Sprague men, who had gathered about their leader, looking defiance out of their defeat. The Garwood men had wrung the moist hand of Pusey, but it was Rankin whom they selected for the center of their celebration. As they crowded about him, they pommeled him, pulled him, screamed in his ears; they would have liked to toss him to their shoulders, but he was too big to be moved. He could only sit in the midst of all their clamor, and stare in wonder and amaze at Pusey. He, to whom all the credit for the victory was ascribed could not understand it, that was all. But presently when he heard his name mentioned officially, he stirred. Knowlton had moved that a committee be appointed to wait on Garwood and inform him of his nomination, and what Rankin heard was the voice of Bailey saying:

"And the chair--appoints--as members--of the committee--Messrs. Knowlton of Logan--Randolph of Moultrie--and Rankin of Polk."

The committee found their nominee in his room at the hotel. He was sitting calmly by his open window looking into the green boughs of the elm trees that grew along that side of the old hostelry. An open book lay on his knee, and having calmly called "Come in!" in answer to the knock at the door, he looked up as they entered, as if they had interrupted the meditations of a statesman.

"Ah, gentlemen," he said, rising.

He laid his book aside and stepped softly toward them. Rankin saw at once the change that was on him. His hair was combed, his face shaven, his long coat brushed, and he had donned a fresh white waistcoat. As Rankin noted these details, a pain pinched his heart, for he deduced from them that there was no surprise in store for Garwood. Ordinarily he would have been the first to speak, he would have rushed forward, and seized the hand of his candidate, and exulted in his frank and open way, but now the words he had were checked on his lips, and he remained dumb, growing formal as the sensitive will. Thus it was left for Knowlton, for Randolph had no stomach for the job, to say, as he held forth his hand:

"Mr. Garwood, let me be the first to congratulate you on your nomination."

Garwood smiled, and took Knowlton's hand.

"Gentlemen, I thank you," he said. He gave his hand to Randolph, and last of all to Rankin.

"Ah, Jim, old fellow," he said.

But he did not meet Rankin's eye.

"The convention is waiting for you, Mr. Garwood," said Knowlton, and the nominee answered:

"Ah, indeed? I shall be glad to accompany you."

The citizens at the door of the court room for whom a representative in Congress had just been chosen, parted to let them pass, but they did not cheer. They accepted their character of mere spectators, and seemed to feel that they had no right to disturb the proceedings by any demonstration of their own. But the slight commotion they made had its effect within, and the waiting delegates turned their heads to catch a glimpse of their coming congressman. He walked down the aisle on the right arm of Knowlton; Randolph and Rankin came marching behind. The Garwood men began to clap their hands, they stamped their feet, and at last they lifted up a shout, and so, marching erect among them, his face white, his brows intent and his fixed eyes brilliant with excitement, Garwood walked the short way to the front. The Singed Cat met him at the steps of the rostrum, and having taken his hand, raised him to the judge's place, and said:

"Gentlemen of the convention, I have the honor--to present to you--your nominee--and next congressman--the Honorable--Jerome B. Garwood."

Bailey faded into the judge's chair, and Garwood, slowly buttoning his coat, stood and looked over the body of delegates. He began to bow. It was Hale now who led the applause, not Rankin, and he kept them at it by sheer force of the persistence with which he clapped his own hands, not giving in until he felt that the enthusiasm did justice to the candidate, to his victory, and to the occasion. The Sprague men sat silent, no sound came from their quarter.

Garwood bowed in his stateliest way to the Singed Cat as he said: "Mr. Chairman," and he bowed again to his audience as he added, "and gentlemen of the convention." And then he made his speech.

He would not detain them long at that time, he said, as if, at some future day, they might expect to be held indefinitely. But he detained them long enough to assure them how impossible it was for him to find words in which to express his thanks for the confidence they had reposed in him, and his warm appreciation of the honor they had conferred upon him. He referred to his past services in their behalf, and in behalf of the party, and he put the responsibility for his success upon them by saying that future victories could only come through their united efforts, as if he were making a sacrifice for their sake in consenting to be their candidate at all.

He spoke with the customary assumption that his nomination had come entirely unsought, but he made them feel his devotion by the willingness with which he assured them he would bear their banner that fall, and he graciously promised to give his entire time from then until November to the election of the whole ticket. Then in briefly reviewing the services and the sacrifices of the late Congress, he repeated, though with a fine extemporaneous effect, the best sentences of his speech at Washington, and quoted readily for them the most impressive statistics of imports and exports, which they did not at all understand, and as if these figures had fully vindicated the wisdom of their party's policy on the tariff question, he predicted that the scepter of commercial empire was even then passing into the hands of the United States.

He did not forget the old soldiers, nor their pensions, neither did he neglect to pay most generous tributes to the distinguished gentlemen whose names had been mentioned in connection with the high office to which he had been nominated. He seemed almost to regret that they had not been chosen in his place, such were their superior merits and nobler virtues. And thus by an easy oratorical circuit, he came around to where he had begun, and thanking his fellow countrymen again, bowed and smiled, and turned to receive the congratulatory hand of the Singed Cat.

When the applause which Hale had loyally started had ended, there were cries for Sprague, but as Sprague was not there, an awkward pause was prevented by a prompt change in the burden of the cry, which now became a demand for Barrett. From some immediate vantage point the general was conjured forth, and made his speech, thanking his friends, congratulating his opponents, and extolling the party they unitedly represented, as if he were as well satisfied with defeat as he would have been with victory. He smiled complacently behind his white beard, and he left the rostrum with his dignity and respectability unimpaired.

And the convention was over.

XVI

Saturday evening Emily had a telegram from Garwood announcing his nomination. The message might have come to her Saturday noon, but Garwood had found the delegates for the most part in mood for celebration, while he himself in the reaction of his spirit, was not disinclined that way. He held a levee in his rooms reveling in felicitations and when this was done, he suddenly thought of the Sprague men, smarting under defeat. They must not be allowed to depart for home nursing their sores, and Garwood made it a point to see them, or to have Rankin see them, and check in its incipiency a contagion that might plague him in the fall. So it was evening before he thought to wire his wife, and it was late in the night before he took the train for Lincoln, where he was to change cars for home, leaving the little old German town to settle to its normal quiet for Sunday morning.

Emily, with the knowledge of politics that politicians' wives acquire, had watched from day to day the development of the contest at Pekin. Jerome had not written at all, but Emily chose to consider his failure as an exercise of one of the privileges of matrimony to which lovers look forward as they labor over their love letters. But she added a second reason which betrayed the specious quality of the first, when she explained to her father that in these days of newspapers, letter writing had become a lost art, belonging to a lavender scented past like the embroidery of tapestries. She told her baby, as she rolled his round little body in her lap, that she was jealous of politics, and promised him that when the convention was over, his father would be--and here she gasped and dropped the pretense that the child could understand. She could not bear to voice, even to herself, the feeling that her husband was any less the lover that he once had been. She realized to the utmost his position, she had felt it in little sacrifices she had been compelled to make, and she knew of his utter dependence on reëlection. Here, too, was another fact that she could hardly face squarely and honestly. She clung to her old ideal of her husband as a statesman no less ardently than she clung to her old ideal of him as a lover, and she disliked to feel that he was in Congress merely as a means of livelihood. A vague discontent floated nebulously within her, but with all the adroitness of her mind she would not allow it to concrete.

"When he comes home!" she cooed to the baby, "when he comes home!"

By Saturday, the strain upon her nerves had increased, like all anxieties, in a ratio equal to the square of the distance from its moving cause. All day long she waited for news, hoping for the best, but fortifying herself by trying to believe that if the worst came, it might in the end be beneficial, because it must in time, at least, force them to some more secure temporal foundation, where they could not be disturbed by every whim of politics. She remembered that Jerome had often reminded her, though that was in moments of security and elation, that all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. Her father himself suffered a sympathetic suspense and in the afternoon he journeyed down town to see if he could learn anything of what was going on at Pekin. Late in the day the _Citizen_ hung out a bulletin saying that Garwood had been nominated on the twelve hundred and sixty-first ballot, and he hastened home, with the importance of an idle old man, longing to be the first to announce to Emily the news. But she waved her telegram gaily at him from the veranda as he hurried up the walk, and cried:

"He's won, father! He's won! He's just been nominated!"

The old man, cheated of a herald's distinction, could not resist the impulse to say:

"Why, he was nominated this morning!"

She felt a pang at these tidings of her husband's tardiness, but she put that away in the habit she had acquired, and said:

"Oh, I know--but these telegraph companies are so slow!"

She was happy all that evening, though she denied that her own relief as to their position had aught to do with that happiness.

"He will be much more useful this term than he was before," she told her father at supper. "Jerome always said, you know, that it took one term for a congressman to learn the ropes at Washington."

Garwood reached home Sunday morning, and when he saw Emily waiting in the doorway something like pity for her smote him, and out of the flush of his new success he yearned toward her, so that, there in the old darkened hallway where the tender scene had been enacted so many times in other days, he folded her in his arms, and kissed her lips and her brow and her hair, and called her once more "Sweetheart." And the happy little woman purred in his embrace, and as she hid her face against his breast, she said:

"My Jerome--my big Jerome!"

And it was all as it had been two years before. Only now, lifting her eyes to his, her face reddened with a blush as she said:

"You must come up and tell baby--he is dying to hear all about it."

Emily vowed to Garwood that now the convention was over he must take a rest, and he was content for days to loll at home. He slept late in the morning and she bore his breakfast to him with his mail, or he stretched himself on the divan in the parlor in the afternoon while she read the newspapers to him until he would sink into slumber with the assurance that the room would be darkened and the house hushed until he chose to wake.

Pusey had nailed the party banner to his masthead as it were, and Emily read to Garwood with a laugh that could not conceal her pride the big types at the head of his editorial page:

"For Congress, Jerome B. Garwood."

There day after day it remained, and she read it over and over, finding a certain joy in it. Pusey had printed a long editorial announcing his determination to support Garwood, and explaining with the conviction of the editorial page--where the argument is all one way, with no chance for rejoinder--his own action in voting for the candidate he had originally opposed.

"He isn't really consistent, is he, Jerome?" Emily said after she had read the editorial aloud to her husband.

"Oh, well," he laughed, knocking the ashes from the cigarette he was smoking, in a security he could find nowhere else in Grand Prairie, for he did not wish the town to know that he smoked cigarettes, "you know what Emerson says: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.'"

"Yes, I remember," the wife replied. "We used to read Emerson, didn't we?" Her words breathed regret. "We never read any more. We seem to have no time for anything but newspapers." And she looked askance at the disordered pile of them on the floor, and out of a sense of guilt reduced them to smaller compass.

"I wonder how Mr. Rankin did it?" she mused a moment after.

"Did what?"

"Why, induced Mr. Pusey to vote for you."

"Rankin?" said Garwood.

"Why, yes. He did, didn't he? I thought he did everything for you."

Garwood sneered.

"Rankin did nothing!" he said, "Rankin's what the boys in Chicago call a selling plater."

"Why, I thought he did everything!" Emily repeated. "Who did then?"

"I reckon I had as much as anybody to do with it."

"You?"

"Yes. Why not?"

"But how?"

"Oh--I took him for a walk one night--the night it stormed. Did it storm here?"

"Oh, fearfully; in the early morning--awfully! But tell me--how did _you_ do it?"

Garwood laughed.

"Oh, I just talked to him."

"Did you persuade him--convince him?"

"Evidently."

Emily was silent for a moment, and her brows were knit.

"I hope--" she began, but checked herself. "I've often thought," she said, beginning over, "that we ought to have Mr. Rankin and his poor little wife here to dinner. I feel guilty about them. You--we--will be good to them, won't we?"

Garwood laughed again.

"You needn't worry about Jim Rankin," he said, "though I don't know that I owe him much after his letting the delegation here in Polk get away from me. I had a hard time licking it back into line."

It was several days after that Cowley published an article in the Chicago _Courier_ which told of the tremendous promises that had been made at Pekin in exchange for votes. He said that Garwood had shown himself a clever politician, for he had not only been able to hold up most of the appointments in his district until after his second nomination, but he had had the help of the administration's influence at Pekin. Cowley then proceeded to schedule the distribution of patronage that would be made; Hale for the post-office at Pekin, Bailey for Speaker of the House, and Rankin, of course, for the post-office at Grand Prairie. He could not dispose of Pusey as definitely, but it was not to be supposed that Pusey had gone to Garwood and saved him from political oblivion for nothing at all.

Emily read the article aloud to Jerome. He knew by her silence when she had finished that questions were forming in her mind. She set her lips and began shaking her head, until she produced a low "No, I don't like that."

"That New England conscience of yours troubling you again?" asked Garwood.

"I wish we had more New England conscience in our politics!" she replied with a wife's severity.

"We've got enough of New England in our politics now!" Garwood said, with a flare of the western animosity to New England's long domination of public affairs.

"Well," she persisted, and he saw that her lips were growing rigid, "I think we need conscience in our politics, whether it's New England or not."

Garwood laughed, but it was a bitter laugh. "I'm afraid it wouldn't win. A conscience, Emily, is about as great an impediment to a practical politician in these days as it is to a successful lawyer."

"Don't be cynical, Jerome," she pleaded. And she thought again.

"Did you promise Hale the post-office for getting you those Tazewell County votes?"

"Of course I did," said Garwood, "what of it?"

"I don't like it," said Emily.

"You don't?"

"No, dear, I don't."

"What would you have me do? Give it to some fellow over there who was against me?"

"N-n-n-no," she said, "but--"

"But what?" he went on. "You liked it when I told you I was going to--take care of Rankin, didn't you?"

"That's different," she said.

"Oh, a woman's logic!" he laughed.

"You don't believe in buying votes, do you, Jerome?" she asked, with her lips still tense so that they showed a little line of white at the edges of their red.

"No."

"But you do believe in buying them with offices. What's the post-office at Pekin worth?"

"Oh, eighteen hundred, I reckon."

"Eighteen hundred--for four years; let's see--four eights--thirty-two; hum-m-m, four ones--three--seven; seven--thousand, isn't it?"

"Well, you're not very good at figures, but you've nearly hit it--within two hundred."

"I never could multiply in my mind," Emily confessed. "But you wouldn't think it right to give a man seven thousand dollars in money for a delegation from the county, would you?"

"No," Garwood answered, "that's too high. You're getting into senatorial figures now." He laughed again.

"Do be serious, Jerome. I don't see the difference myself."

"No, a woman couldn't--women never could understand politics, anyhow."

"Well, I understand this--that I have learned a good deal about politics, and my ideas have been changed. I used to think that in this country the people arose and elected their best man to represent them, but it seems that the representative elects himself, and then the people--"

"Don't you think the people out here elected their best man when I went in?" Garwood asked, with an honest laugh in his eyes.

She bent over impulsively and kissed him.

"Yes, I do," she said, "but I'm speaking generally now."

"No, you're not," Garwood insisted, "women can't speak generally. It's always a personal, concrete question with them."

"Well, you know, Jerome, I've had my ideals--in politics, too, since you interested me in politics."

"You weren't interested in politics, you were interested in one politician, and that politician was--me."

"Well, you--you were my ideal, and I thought of you as I thought of Patrick Henry, in the old Virginia House of Burgesses, and--"

"Oh, you haven't thought deeply enough, my dear. Patrick had his own troubles, believe me, though they didn't get into history. Did you ever stop to inquire how Patrick got to the House of Burgesses? It was easy enough to make speeches after he was there--that was the easiest part of it--but the getting there, it wasn't all plain sailing then. First he had the devil's own time getting on the delegation himself, then after he'd made himself solid, by supporting other men awhile, he had another time rounding up delegations that would support _him_, and there was many a man in Virginia that day, whose name is lost in darkness, who was ag'in him, and many another who went out and saw the boys and set up the pins and got the right ones on the delegation, who was thinking of some fat job in that same House of Burgesses. And take any other of the white statuesque figures of those heroic times--"

"Oh, no, Jerome, don't--you're too much of an iconoclast. Leave me my ideals. There's the baby!"

She arose at the premonitory whimper that a mother's ear detected.

XVII

Rankin returned to Grand Prairie, from the convention, in a state of mental numbness. The thing he had gone to Pekin to do had been done, and yet he did not know how it had been done. Every one greeted him as the author of Garwood's fortunes; his latest with the rest, and he was forced to accept congratulations to which he did not feel himself entitled. As the days went by and he saw Garwood's name at the head of Pusey's editorial column, and read Pusey's articles favoring Garwood's election, he was more than ever at a loss to account for the anomalous situation in which he found himself. Sometimes he had his doubts, for he was old enough in political ways to have acquired the politician's distrust, and what with the whisperings of friends and the articles he had read in other newspapers he suffered a torment of suspicions which were the more agonizing because of the wrong he subconsciously felt they did Garwood. At last he went to him.

With the small energy the morning could revive in him, Rankin mounted the stairs to Garwood's office. Garwood was opening a congressman's mail, always large, and he looked up from his pile of letters and greeted Rankin with a--

"Well, Jim?"

Rankin, as he sat down, was sensible of the change that had come over their relations, and he grieved for the old days when he had been able to enter this office with so much more assurance. But he was not the man to dally long in sentimentalities, and he said, when he had settled into the chair and mopped his brow:

"Jerry, I've come to have it out."

Garwood unfolded the letter he had just taken from its envelope. His face reddened as he bent over to read it, and he did not turn around.

"Have what out, Jim?" he asked, quietly.

"Why," Rankin went on, "this misunderstanding."

"What misunderstanding? I don't know what you mean. Explain yourself." Garwood kept on tearing open his letters.

"Oh, well," Rankin continued, "you know it hain't all like it used to be, that's all. I don't know how to say it--I just feel it, but it's there, an', damn it, I don't like it."

Rankin paused, and then when Garwood did not reply, he went on:

"I reckon it's 'cause o' my fallin' down in the county convention here 't home, an' that's all right; I don't blame you fer feelin' sore. Course, it come out all right over at Pekin--I don't know how it was done, an' I don't know as I want to know--I know I didn't have nothin' to do 'ith it, an' I don't claim none o' the credit, ner want it. I 'as glad you won out, glad as you was. I'd 'a' give my right arm clean up to the shoulder to've brought it 'bout fer you myself. I didn't do nothin', I know. I felt kind o' paralyzed all the time over there, after losin' the delegation here, an' I seemed to myself jus' to be standin' roun' like any other dub that 'as on the outside. I didn't feel _in_ it, somehow, an' I don't feel in it now, that's what's the matter. I've al'ays been with you, Jerry, an' you know it, an' I'm with you now, but they're tellin' strange stories 'roun', an' I don't like 'em, an'--I jus' want to know where I stand 'ith you, that's all."

Garwood wheeled about in his swivel chair. He looked at Rankin a moment and then he smiled. And when he had smiled, he leaned comfortably back in his chair and placed the tips of his fingers together over his white waistcoat, and then he spoke at last, in his softest voice:

"What is it, Jim, that worries you--the post-office?"

Rankin looked him straight in the eyes.

"No, Jerry," he said, "it ain't so much that. I want it, o' course, you know how I need it, an' I want it more'n ever jus' now, but I ain't worried so much about that. I've got your word, an' I know you never went back on it yet, to a friend, though you know, Jerry, that if it 'uld help you any, you could have your promise back, an' give the post-office where it 'uld do the mos' good. You know all you'd have to do 'uld be to say the word, don't you?"

Garwood smiled again and leaned forward in his chair and laid one of his white hands on Rankin's fat knee.

"Why, my boy," he said, "you've been giving yourself a great deal of unnecessary trouble. You know me, don't you?"

"Why, sure," assented Rankin.

"Well, you ought to," added Garwood, still smiling blandly, and a slight reproach was in his tone. "You should have known, Jim, that I realized you had done all in your power. I never for an instant blamed you; believe me when I say that. It only occurred to me that I could handle the little affair over at Pekin better than you could. I knew that you could never come at Pusey; I knew that you two never could agree in a thousand years, so I just took hold of it myself--not with very much hope, I confess, but I thought it worth trying. And luckily it came about all right in the end."

"It's all right, it's all right, Jerry," Rankin protested, waving his hand assuringly toward Garwood. "I only wanted to know that you felt all right about it, that's all." His great red face smiled on Garwood like a forgiven boy's. But suddenly it hardened again into the face of a man.

"You were right--I couldn't 'a' done nothin' 'ith Pusey, damn him. My way's different from yourn. Maybe yourn's right. You believe in conciliatin' 'em; I believe in killin' 'em off. An' your way won, that's all. What 'id you have to promise him?"

Garwood was leaning back again, and had pressed the tips of his fingers together.

"Jim," he said, beginning slowly, "I've learned a good deal about politics. I learned a good deal from you, and I picked up a good deal down at Washington during the session, and the chief thing I've learned is to go slow on promises. I told him, of course, that I'd take care of him. I told him that there was no use in our being enemies, none whatever; that we could just as well work together for the party's good, and accomplish more that way than by keeping up a bitter factional war here in the county, because the first thing we knew we'd wake up some cold morning in November to find that the other fellows were all in and we were all out."

Rankin's gaze was fixed afar. His brows had knitted themselves into a scowl.

"You had to tell him that, did you?"

"I did tell him that, yes. Why?"

"Well--I don't jus' like this thing o' gettin' thick 'ith him, so sudden, that's all. Who's goin' to run the campaign fer you this time?"

"Why, who would run it but you?"

"Me?" said Rankin, smiling again all over. "You want me? An' what's Pusey goin' to have to do?"

"Oh, we'll let him print editorials," laughed Garwood.

"That's all right," said Rankin, "jus' so's I don't have to see him, that's all."

Garwood scrutinized Rankin closely an instant, and once more he leaned over in his persuasive way and laid his hand on Rankin's knee.

"Look here, Jim," he said, "I want you and Pusey to be friends."

Rankin shrank from the thought.

"Yes, you must--now listen to me--I demand it. I want no mistakes made. I want you all to work harmoniously this fall, and a little ill-feeling right here in our camp may beat us. We've got a fight on our hands; I'm half afraid of those Sprague fellows. They'll have their knives out, and we've got to hold together; above all we've got to keep Pusey in line, for the Sprague fellows here don't feel any too good about his having come over to me, and Pusey has a following. More than that, he's got a newspaper, and he can make it tell. We've got to keep in with him, and I want you to patch up a truce with him. You must, do you hear?" Garwood gave Rankin's knee a shake. "Do you hear?"

"Well, if you say so, Jerry," he consented presently, "it'll have to be. Whatever you say goes, o' course, but the truce'll be a damned sight more out'ard than in'ard 'ith me, I tell you that."

"No, you mustn't feel that way, Jim; you mustn't."

"Well, my God, Jerry!" Rankin exclaimed, "it 'as fer your sake that I got to hatin' him like I do, though I never did like the little whelp. Gosh! It did gall me to have to sit in a convention beside him an' hear him announce the vote fer Polk County! I never thought I'd live to see the day when little Free Pusey could get on a Polk delegation, I didn't!"

And he shook his head as one who bewails the evil times on which he has fallen.

"Well, for my sake, then, make up with him. I don't cherish any ill-will towards him, Jim." Garwood said this with a swelling air of magnanimity as if he had attained to heights of charity known only to the early Christian martyrs.

"You never was a good hater, Jerry," said Rankin, as though it were a virtue to be as consistent and steadfast in hatreds as in friendships.

XVIII

The August sun was ripening the corn, and in some of the more fertile fields the slender stalks already nodded their young plumes in the mid-summer heat that quivered over the prairies. It was too much to expect of politicians that they work in such weather, and they were loath to begin the campaign, yet it was necessary to make the first lazy preparations for the heavy work that would be upon them when the frost should begin to hint of coming fall.

Garwood was understood to be resting at home, and it was rumored that he would go away for a while and recuperate in the East, where, as it appears to men in the West, there is rest for the weary. He had in reality the natural reluctance to beginning a long contemplated and difficult task that the lesser politicians felt, though he had so much more at stake than they. Yet he would not have liked the boys to be as apathetic as he, and in a dim recognition of this fact he bestirred himself one day and went down to see Pusey. Thereupon Pusey began to write in his paper of the dangers of apathy and over-confidence, rallying the party by sternly telling it that the mere fact of its dominance in the Thirteenth District did not justify its lay members in staying at home and trusting to others to pull it through. This effort satisfied Garwood for a time, and he loafed on through August and then said to Rankin:

"Oh, wait till the middle of September, and then give them six weeks of a rattling fire all along the line."

"Yes," said Rankin, "we don't want to tap our enthusi'sm too soon, an' have it give out on us the way ol' Bromley's bar'l did. Gosh! Didn't he freeze up them last two weeks, though!"

They laughed at the pleasing memories of it.

"Damned if I didn't like that campaign," Rankin went on. "Never enjoyed one more'n my life, though I've had some hot ones in my time. That story, now, that Pusey printed 'bout you--'member how skeered we was? An' you 'member them things o' Bromley's--what was they?--kind o' night shirts, now--heh?--oh, yes! Well, sir, you'd ought to heerd the kids I'd planted in the gallery that night when Bromley come on to the stage." And Rankin reared back, and roared and slapped his thigh. "By the way, what's come o' Bromley? I never hear o' him any more, do you?"

"Oh, yes," said Garwood, with his large air of a knowledge of affairs, and then, too, with the pride of a man who doesn't wish his opponent belittled, especially after he has defeated that opponent. "I hear of him frequently. He's general counsel for his road now, and lives in Chicago."

"Oh, yes, believe I did hear somethin' o' that," said Rankin, nodding his head. "He went up there same's all the rest o' the judges from the country does. They get elected to the County Court down here, which gives them the title o' judge, then when they come off, an' have to go to work again, they go up to Chicago an' practise on the title. After they've been there 'bout two years people begin to b'lieve they 'as judges o' the _Supreme_ Court." Rankin paused in his philosophizing, and then resumed, quite seriously: "Don't know but what Bromley give you a better run at that than this here young Wetherby 'ill do."

"Do you know him?"

"Oh, I've seen him onct or twict over't Sullivan. He's just a young lawyer, an' he knows 'at if the' 'as any chanct o' his winnin' he'd never been nominated."

September came, but the weather remained as hot as ever. Rankin declared that the mere prospect of cool weather held out by the almanac made him feel better, though he believed that the almanac ought to be revised, for he was certain the seasons were changing in Illinois. As a boy he had always gone skating on Thanksgiving, he said, but now the cold weather never came until after New Year's. And he remembered, too, that the girls always wore white dresses and gave a May-pole dance on the first day of May. "But nowadays," he explained, "they'll have to hop roun' in Galway overcoats if they wanted to celebrate that day, an' as fer summer--well, it keeps hotter'n the hinges o' hell right up to November, But politics is politics, an' I must be gettin' a move on me."

Rankin roused at last, and called a meeting of the congressional committee. The members, newly chosen at the Pekin convention, came to Grand Prairie and met in the office of the county treasurer, and there, under the blazing gas jets and with the blinds closed, they began to organize Garwood's campaign.

Rankin and Pusey had long ago shaken hands, Garwood standing by with the beatific glow of the peacemaker, though all the while the look in Rankin's eyes was hard as ever, and Pusey's smirk was unchanged. Pusey attended the meeting of the congressional committee, even if he was not a member, and the others were pleasantly stimulated by the prospect of a disagreement between him and Rankin. But the editor maintained a perfect silence the whole evening, never vouchsafing one suggestion, but acquiescing in all that was done, if not by voting, which would have been impertinent, at least by respectfully nodding his head.

And if, later, when the county central committee, of which Pusey was now the chairman, met, Rankin did not return his call, as it were, by reciprocally attending the meeting, he at least found business that took him out of town, over to Mason County, and thereby deprived the alert editor of the _Advertiser_ of the ground work of a story that would have served him for every dull hour of an unusually dull campaign. It was perhaps well for Garwood, considering the strained relations between his two chief supporters, that this was a dull campaign. He found it much less trying than the first. There was not so much for him to do, and what there was he could enjoy in a more leisurely manner. It was the off year, in which the people, unable to work themselves up to the pitch of excitement required of them in presidential years, leave politics to the politicians even more than they ordinarily do. The stripling from Moultrie County who was running against Garwood seemed far beneath his notice, except when he chose in his speeches to patronize him. His own acquaintance had grown wider, there were many to welcome him everywhere he went, and they liked the distinction of knowing their congressman and of calling him "Jerry." Garwood loved to bask in their smiles, to revel in the sensation of personal popularity, and it became more and more easy to convince himself that he was a genuine man of the people. There was another new feature in this campaign that he enjoyed. He was enabled in his speeches to speak familiarly of Washington, of things that were done and said in the House, and to relate personal anecdotes of noted men, to whom it was apparent he could talk in a free colloquial way, that were almost as delightful to his auditors as to himself.

"I suppose, now that it is all over," he would say, "that I betray no confidence in telling you that one afternoon when I had gone over to the White House and was waiting there in the ante-chamber to see our great president, that he spied me among the others--Senator Ames was there with me--and, coming over to where we stood, said: 'Jerry, you're just the fellow I wanted to see--'"

It was not necessary that year for him to defend his own record. He could submerge his political individuality into that of the responsible administration and make his speeches, like all the other speeches delivered that fall, or any fall, by men striving to retain seats in Congress, mere efforts to explain why Congress had not done what the platform of two years before promised it would do.

As a congressman, too, he could enjoy the importance of giving his time to the state committee, and of delivering speeches in other districts in Illinois, and once he even went beyond the borders of his own state, and journeyed over into Ohio, where he spoke in the Dayton District for his friend Whiteside, who sat beside him in the House. This experience he relished more than all the others, for the Dayton people, not sure of his exact position among public men, determined to make no mistake, and so accorded him all the honors a prophet may expect away from his own country.

On election night he found that he had been reëlected, though the returns from Moultrie County showed a falling off in his majority, as did those from his own county. But then, as Rankin said in congratulating Emily, after they had sat up until midnight in Harkness's parlors receiving the returns:

"A reduced majority draws the salary just as well as any."

XIX

Garwood led the way through the smoke and clangor of the B. & O. station, followed by his little family, Emily hurrying anxiously along, holding her skirts in one hand, her bag and umbrella in the other, and the nurse bearing the sleeping John Ethan in the rear. A fog was rolling up from the Potomac and settling thick over the city. The air, heavy as it was, was grateful to Emily, after her long night's nausea from the sickening curves, and she was glad that it was moist, for the dampness bathed her face and cooled her brow. Like all comers to Washington, she had no sooner set her foot to the pavement than she lifted her eyes to behold the Capitol, which symbols the might and majesty of the Republic to the stranger, who, when he once beholds it, ceases to be a stranger, and feels at home, for this city belongs to the nation and each citizen in it has an immediate revelation of his citizenship and of his common ownership in the things that make it interesting and great. Emily remembered the Capitol as she had seen it first, on the most memorable morning of their wedding trip, lifting its dome into the blue of an autumn sky, and in the gladness of those nuptial days, she had pleased her own fancy and delighted Jerome by fashioning an analogy between its coved apex and the life they were destined to lead under its shadow--rounded, symmetrical and complete.

But on this December morning, the fog obscured the Capitol, and though Emily's eye ranged everywhere, she could not find it. Jerome had nodded to one of the hackmen who thrust their whips at him in menacing invitation, and as he turned to assist Emily, he knew what she was looking for. So with the pleased superiority of one who has grown familiar with noted sights, Garwood pierced the gloom, and then, like a sailor sighting land, he pointed and said:

"There; there it is. See it?"

His little wife bent her head and her brows, while the cabman waited with a sneer, and at last she smiled and sighed an "Ah!" of recognition. For she had descried the massive dome, floating majestically in the gray mists as if it had detached itself from its base and had become a ghost of the fog, of a color and of an immensity with it. As she tried to trace its vague colossal proportions, it seemed to mount higher and higher on the heavy clouds, and there it hung and brooded over the capital of the nation, over the nation itself, and over its destiny. It soared far above the passions and partisanship of the little men who swarmed through its great porticos and in its huge rotunda, and it lifted her soul to lofty conceptions, so that she forgot all else and stood there with her foot on the step of the carriage, while the others, the misanthropic coachman, the hungry and accustomed husband, the heavy-eyed nurse, and the slumbering babe, waited.

"Well!" said Garwood at last, and she caught her breath and recalled herself to the earth with a sigh.

As they rolled over the asphalt streets, she pressed her face to the rattling panes of the carriage window, but she could find the great dome no more; it had floated away and vanished like a vision out of sight.

Emily saw the Capitol at other times. She saw it close at hand, on her way with Garwood across the park that spread its plots between the Capitol and the rising walls of the new congressional library, as she paused to rest a moment near the statue of Washington boxed up for the winter, and looked up, up, up the pillared front of the building to the dome shining in the afternoon sun. She saw it on dark nights, when its rows of little windows blinked out of the black wall of night; she saw it rising calm, pale and majestic in the luminous light of the moon; but it was not in any of these moods that she could remember it thereafter, nor as she had seen it for the first time on her wedding journey, but forevermore it appeared as she had seen it that morning, when her eyes pierced through the mists and caught that one glimpse of its mighty image, a gray specter of the life she once had pictured to herself.

They drove to the hotel where Garwood had lived during his first session, and where he still owed a bill, and took the rooms he had arranged for.

In the flush of his reëlection he had insisted upon his wife's going to Washington with him for the short session, and without much difficulty she had induced her father to consent to her departure. He had said he could get along without her during the three months the session would last, though the lengthened tone in which he drawled out the names of the three months, December, January and February, told of a prospect before him as long and dark as the winter itself. She had silenced the qualms she had felt by wringing from him half a promise to come on to Washington himself in February; he might, she insisted, anticipate the spring that way. And when her duty to her father seemed drawing her away from her resolution, she dwelt inwardly on her duty to her husband. She had thought through the long hours of wakeful nights of her separations from him; she had counted with a gasp of sudden fright the days into which those separations lengthened, and she had resolved that nevermore in the future would she let him be so long away without her. She had buttressed her soul in that regard on certain sage words of her Mother Garwood, who had shaken her head and said:

"It ain't good, it ain't good, Em'ly, fer young husban's to be away too much from their wives. It never was intended; no, it never was intended," she repeated, shaking her head with the satisfaction she found in her knowledge of the will of God in His personal dealings with His creatures on this earth, and her words had impressed Emily as if they were indeed a revelation.

During their first few days in Washington, it rained continually, and she stayed indoors, save for a trip down the street as far as the Treasury building, around which she walked in a little spirit of adventure, taking her eyes from its portico long enough to gaze down the wide sweep of Pennsylvania Avenue, with the Capitol rising at its end. And then she hurried back to the baby.

Garwood was too much occupied with what he called duties connected with the opening of Congress to be much with her. On the day the Congress convened he took her with him and left her in the gallery to look down on the assembling members, and she found her keenest interest in following him about as he moved to his seat, and in watching the members pause to shake his hand and to smile, and to join their laugh with his, so that she knew they were congratulating each other upon reëlection.

Garwood otherwise was most of the time out of her sight. She had observed in him a new interest in life the moment his feet touched the stones of Washington. He went about with a quick, elastic step, he was full of enthusiasm and laughter, and if he kept her waiting for him long at meal time, he returned to her with ample apologies and in a state of excitement that made him solicitously merry during the meal. At dinner he usually called for a bottle of wine, and, as his eyes fastened themselves upon the glass into which the wine bubbled as the negro tilted the bottle he had bound in a napkin, he said to her:

"Ah! This is life once more!"

And as she looked at him inquiringly, he said:

"After all, it's worth all a fellow has to go through out in that beastly mud hole to be back here where one can really live."

It was in one of these moods that he consented to make the trip over to Arlington, and Emily, who had already matured a feminine plot of reviving, thereby, some of the emotions of their wedding journey, felt a new resilience in her spirits that verified at last all the hopes she had held out to her heart for this sojourn in the Capital with her husband.