Читать книгу The 13th District - Brand Whitlock - Страница 4

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JUST as the train with a salute of the engine’s whistle careened into full view of the smoke-blackened shed that is known in Grand Prairie as the depot, the sound of cheering came to Garwood’s ears. He was lounging in the smoking car, his long legs stretched to the seat before him, his face begrimed with soot and glistening with perspiration, his whole body heavy with fatigue. But the cheers, coming to him in a vast crescendo that even the noise of the car-wheels as they hammered the Wabash crossing could not drown, brought back to his eyes the excitement that had been burning in them for days; a smile soothed his tired visage, and instinctively he flexed in every fiber. For a moment he tried to hide the smile, but Rankin, who had so successfully managed his canvass for him, and executed that great manœuver on the last day of the Clinton convention, which, after one thousand two hundred and nine ballots had nominated Garwood for Congress, heaved his bulk from the hot, cindery, plush cushion, slapped his candidate on the shoulder and said:

“There’s nothing like it, is there?”

So Garwood let human feelings have their way and the smile fully illumined his haggard face. It was a strong face, clean-shaven after the old ideal of American statesmen, that grew darker and stronger in the shadow of the slouch hat which he now clapped upon his long black hair. Rankin had succeeded in raising himself to his feet, and stood upright in the aisle, shaking himself like a Newfoundland. He drew off the linen duster he wore, and draped it over his arm, then seizing his little traveling-bag, which in contrast to his huge body looked like a mere reticule, he waved it toward the station and said, as if he had just conjured the presence of the crowd:

“There they are, Jerry, there they are!”

Garwood had risen, and through the windows of the swaying coach he could see the faces of the crowd. The men on board the train, most of them members of the Polk County delegation which had stood by him with solid, unbroken ranks, had been yelling all the way from Clinton, and now, though it seemed impossible that they should have any voices left in their hoarse and swollen throats, they raised a shout that swelled above the cheers outside and pressing to the windows and the doors of the coaches, they challenged their neighbors with the exulting cry:

“What’s the matter with Garwood?”

Outside there rose an answering roar:

“He’s all right!”

But the Polk County delegation, as if it demanded confirmation, yelled again:

“Who’s all right?”

And then the crowd rose to its tip-toes, and the answering cry was of such immense unanimity that it made the very platform shake:

“G-a-r-wood!”

The train had stopped, and Garwood was being hustled toward the door. Some impatient fellows from the platform outside who had mounted the steps of the car, now pressed in, and stretched their bodies incredible distances across the backs of seats to grasp Garwood’s hand, to seize him by the coat, and to call in his face:

“Good boy, Jerry!”

“You’re the stuff!”

He was oblivious of the progress he was making, if he was making any at all, and the conductor, although he had caught the contagious spirit of the triumphant Polk County delegation soon after the train left Clinton, and had shown Garwood the deference due to a successful candidate, began to be concerned for the time he was losing, and said with smiling indulgence:

“Gentlemen, gentlemen!”

Big Rankin then squeezed himself in front of Garwood, and waving his little bag dangerously before him, crushed his way out, drawing the others after him in his turbulent wake. Meanwhile the passengers in the train looked on with the good-humored toleration an American crowd always excites in those not participants in its moving enthusiasms, and mildly inquired what town that was.

When Garwood gained the platform of the car and the people at last caught sight of him, the cheering suddenly attained a new pitch of intensity, and a band, clustered near the rotting log where the hacks made their stand, spontaneously crashed into “Hail to the Chief!” The band played the piece in furious time, and the man who performed on the tuba seemed to have taken upon himself the responsibility of voicing the whole enthusiasm of Polk County; but to Garwood, to whom the strains came across that tossing mass of heads and hats and faces, the music was sweet. He felt himself suddenly choking; his eyes filled with tears. He could not have trusted himself to speak just then, though the cheers were being more and more punctuated by cries of “Speech! Speech!” Luckily, the man behind him, urged by the brakeman, for the conductor, watch in hand, was scowling, began to push, the crowd in front held out a hundred arms to seize him, and Garwood was swallowed up in that stifling press of men.

Somewhere in the depths of the multitude Garwood was conscious of meeting the mayor, who took his hand, when he could reclaim it from a score of other hands thrust forth all about him, and then in a zigzag path of glory, he was dragged through the throng, Rankin and the delegates following, moving like a current in the sea. Garwood laughed as he was pulled this way and that, and tried to answer each one of the thousand greetings poured in on him from every side. The perspiration streamed from his face. His waistcoat had been torn open and when some one saw this and shouted “Look out for your watch, Jerry!” the whole crowd laughed delightedly at the witticism, and Garwood himself laughed with them.

The crowd had been a first surprise to Garwood, the band had been another, now a third was added by the sight of an open carriage drawn by two white horses. He had not expected an ovation, which made it all the more grateful when it came, and as he was being helped into the carriage with a solicitude that was a new thing in men’s treatment of him, he expressed something of this to Rankin. But Rankin, who had been in politics all his days and could view the varying moods of the populace with a politician’s cynicism, replied:

“Well, if we’d been skinned, they wouldn’t ’a’ been here when you needed sympathy.”

The truth flashed upon Garwood at once, and if it embittered for an instant his triumph when it was at its sweetest, it seemed to give him a better control, so that as he settled himself in the back seat of the carriage, with the mayor beside him, and Rankin filling the whole front seat, he rearranged his rumpled garments, readjusted his hat, and then looked calmly around on the crowd that swarmed up to the carriage wheels as if they had never seen him before. His face was calm and composed, almost stern. It was the face he hoped to leave to history.

As the band, to whom the leader had been distributing the precious leaves of its most classical number, was forming in the street, Garwood for the first time saw many carriages, filled with men and women who waved hats and fluttered handkerchiefs, now that they thought he could see and recognize them. Garwood smiled, though reservedly, and lifted his hat with a sudden consciousness that he, himself, at last, was the one who was lifting the hat from the open carriage in the street, and not some other man. He did not neglect to smile, nor to raise his hat gallantly to each carriage load as he swept his eye along the line of vehicles, but he was not thinking of their occupants, nor of himself, wholly. He was thinking of a certain surrey he knew well, from which a pair of eyes would smile as his did, perhaps be moistened by tears as his had been a few minutes before,—the eyes of one to whom all this would be as sweet as it was to him. But the surrey was not there. He was surprised, though in a way different from that in which the crowd and the band and the open carriage had surprised him. He was disappointed, and felt himself entitled to a little shade of resentment, to a little secret hurt at the heart. It was the hour in the afternoon when she would be driving down to the bank for her father. He could not see why she had not come. Perhaps she felt a delicacy about the publicity of it, though he did not see why she should.

But the band had swung into the middle of the street. The drum-major, in his hot bear-skin and tall leggings, was facing them with his baton held horizontally before him in his two hands. He blew the shrill whistle, clenched in his teeth, and then, wheeling, pointed up Kaskaskia Street and strode away for the public square. The leader trilled two little notes on his cornet, the snare drums rattled a long roll, and the band burst into “See, the Conquering Hero Comes!” The carriage moved, the crowd cheered again, and the little procession began his triumphal entry for him.

“Look mad, Jerry,” advised Rankin, in humorous appreciation of the whole demonstration. The remark did not exactly please Garwood, and for an instant he did look mad, but he smiled again and composed his features to the dignity required of him in that hour. Some of the private carriages followed in his train and the crowd streamed along the sidewalks on each side of the street. A number of small boys trudged in the deep white dust, mingled with the band, or crowded after Garwood’s carriage, breaking into a trot now and then in their determination to keep up with the procession. Two or three of them, in order to identify themselves more closely with the affair, laid their dirty little hands on the panels of the carriage. Garwood felt an inward resentment at this, and when Rankin lolled over in his seat and snatched the cap from the matted head of one of the boys, and the crowd on the sidewalk laughed uproariously, Garwood felt like rebuking him. He had a moral conviction that at least two other boys were swinging on the springs behind the carriage, and he would have liked to dislodge them, but he knew he dare not. In the last ten minutes imperial ambitions had stirred within him. He began already to dream of triumphal marches amid wider scenes, with troops or at least policemen lining the curb, and yet his politician’s sense reminded him of the quickness with which American voters resent any little assumption of undemocratic airs, however much they may like it on a larger scale. And so when Rankin, to appease the frightened lad whose cap he had snatched, took the youngster by the collar and dragged him into the carriage, Garwood felt it would be better to laugh with him and with the crowd.

The procession turned into Main Street, and so on down to the square, with its old brown court house and its monument inscribed to the soldiers and sailors of Polk County, though Polk County had never had any sailors. The procession ended at the Cassell House, though why can hardly be told. Garwood did not live there, but all processions of that kind in Grand Prairie end at the Cassell House. The band stopped in front of the hotel, and the musicians seized off their caps, mopped their brows and looked around toward Rankin furtively, thinking of beer. But Rankin, again swinging his dangerous little bag, was making a way through the crowd toward the wide door. Garwood was almost lifted from his carriage, and felt himself helplessly swept into the hotel office on the great human breaker that rolled in that way. When his feet touched the floor again, the loud cry went up:

“Speech! Speech!”

Rankin turned toward him.

“You’ll have to give it to ’em, Jerry, ’fore they’ll let you go.”

And he led the way up the stairs toward the parlor. Garwood went after him, with the mayor and a self-appointed committee following, and in another minute he had stepped out on the balcony, and bared his head to the breeze that was blowing warm off the prairie. As he stood there, erect and calm, with the little wind loosening the locks over his forehead, his lips compressed and white, his right hand in the breast of his coat, after the fashion of all our orators, many in the crowd for the first time were conscious of how like a congressman this young fellow really looked. They began to celebrate the discovery by another cheer, but Garwood drew his hand from the bosom of his coat and raised it toward them. Instantly a warning “Sh!” ran through the whole concourse, the few wagons rattling by halted suddenly, and a hush fell. Garwood’s eye swept the old familiar square, his face flushed, his heart beat high, but outwardly he was calm, as he affected the impressive pause that adds so much to oratory. And then he began with studied simplicity.

“My friends,” he said, in a voice that seemed low, but which carried in the evening air across the square, “and fellow citizens: I am profoundly touched by this welcome. Words are inadequate to express, fittingly, how much it means to me. For thirty years I have gone in and out among you, as a boy and as a man, and it has always seemed to me that the highest honor I could achieve in life would be found in your respect, your confidence, if possible, your love. Your wishes and your welfare have ever been my first and highest thought. I know not what responsibilities may await me in the future, but whether they be small and light or great and heavy, still my wish and purpose shall remain the same—to serve you, well and faithfully; whatever they may be, I know that nothing can ever bring to my heart the deep gratitude or fill me with the sweet satisfaction this magnificent welcome affords.

“You must not expect a speech from me this evening. At a later day and at some more convenient and appropriate season, I shall address you upon the issues of the approaching campaign, but I would not, even if I were physically able to do so, intrude partisan considerations upon you in this hour. But I can not let you go away without the assurance that I am deeply sensible of the great honor you do me. With a sincerity wholly unfeigned I thank you for it. May God bless you all, may you prosper in your basket and your store and—” the speaker’s eye wandered far away to the ragged edges of the crowd—“thanking you again and again, I bid you good night.”

A cheer promptly arose, and Garwood bowed himself backward through the window. Rankin, standing near him, laid his hand on the shoulder of the mayor.

“John,” he said to that executive, “he’ll do.”

Then the hand-shaking and the congratulations began again. Garwood stood there, at times passing over his brow the handkerchief he held in his left hand, while he gave to the men who passed by him a right hand that was red and swollen and beginning to ache. And outside, the crowd, feeling, when its American passion for speech-making was satisfied, that it had had its due, went away, leaving the square deserted.