Читать книгу The 13th District - Brand Whitlock - Страница 5

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THE mother of the new candidate for Congress in the Thirteenth District expressed her pride in her son’s achievement by cooking for him that night, with her own hands, a supper of the things he most liked to eat, and while the candidate consumed the supper with a gusto that breathed its ultimate sigh in the comfortable sense of repletion with which he pushed back his chair, his appreciation ended there, and half an hour later he left his mother to the usual loneliness of her widowed life. Sangamon Avenue, where the self-elected better element of Grand Prairie had gathered to enjoy the envy of the lower classes, stretched away under its graceful shade-trees in aristocratic leisure. The darkness of a summer evening rolled under the elms and oaks, and blurred the outlines of the tall chimneys and peaked roofs which a new architect coming from the East had lately given to the houses of the prosperous. Here and there a strip of cool and open lawn, each blade of its carefully mown blue-grass threading beads of dew, sparkled in the white light of the arc lamps that hung at the street crossings. On the wide verandas which were shrouded in the common darkness, white forms could be seen indistinctly, rocking back and forth, and the murmur of voices could be heard, in bland and desultory interchange of the banalities [Pg 19]of village life. The avenue had been laid an inch deep in mud by the garden hose, which might have been seen in the last hours of the day, united in a common effort to subdue the dust that puffed in little white clouds as Grand Prairie’s horses stumbled along. Now and then some surrey, the spokes of its wheels glistening in the electric light, went squeaking leisurely by as some family solemnly enjoyed its evening drive; now and then some young man, his cigarette glowing into a spark of life and then dying away, loitered down town. The only other life was represented by the myriads of insects feverishly rising and falling in clouds about the arc lamps, or some silent bat describing vast circles in the darkness, and at intervals swinging into the light on membranous wings to snatch her evening meal, bite by bite, from that mass of strenuous, purposeless animal life.

As he strolled, slowly, for he wished to preserve his collar intact until he should present himself immaculate before the woman of his love, Garwood felt some of the peace of the sleepy town fall upon him. He gave himself up to the sensuous effect of it, inhaling the odors of a summer night, and when he turned into the yard of the Harkness home his heart leaped. A filmy figure in white slowly floated, as it seemed to his romantic vision, out of the darkness that lay thick under the veranda. Half way down the walk, under the oaks, they met.

“Jerome! I’m so proud!”

The pride she had felt in him still glowed in her eyes as they sat there in the wicker chairs, but now when she heard him sigh, she bent toward him, and her voice filled with a woman’s pity as she said:

“You’re tired, aren’t you—poor boy?”

“Yes, very tired,” he assented, with a man’s readiness to be coddled. “But then,” he added, “it’s rest just to be here.”

He laid his hand on hers and she drew closer, looking eagerly into his face. She needed no light other than the glow of the summer night to make his features plain to her. She looked long at him, and then she withdrew her hand, and sat erect, smoothing her skirts with an affected primness and folding her hands in her lap.

“Now you must tell me all about it,” she said. “The newspapers are so unsatisfactory, and you know I’ve only had the one little note you wrote me Wednesday night—when you thought you were beaten.”

They laughed, now that they could do so with impunity, at the danger he had been in so short a time before.

“Well,” he began, “it was a close shave, after all. If it hadn’t been for Jim Rankin I’d have come home to-night beaten, and there wouldn’t have been any band or any carriage or any crowd to greet me—as Rankin reminded me this afternoon when I was near bursting at the reception I did get.” He laughed, but the laugh had a tinge of bitterness.

“I would have been there,” she said simply.

“If I’d been beaten?”

“Yes.”

“I missed you this afternoon,” he said. “I looked for you everywhere.”

“There were enough there, weren’t there?”

“No, not quite,” he said; “the crowd lacked one, just one.” He spoke with a little injury in his tone. And the girl, with her quick apperception of it, said:

“I wanted you all to myself, dear. I can give you part of the time to the public—but I can’t share you.” She said this in the pride of a new conception of Garwood that had just come to her—a conception of him as a public man, sacrificing himself for the people. Garwood himself instantly shared the conception.

“Isn’t that better?” she added.

For answer he took her hand again, pressing it in his big palm.

“And now tell me,” she said.

So he told her the story of the Clinton convention; how the delegations from the seven counties that comprised the Thirteenth Congressional District, his district, as he was already careful to speak of it, had gone there and stubbornly balloted for one, two, three days without a change or a break, until a thousand ballots had been cast, and men were worn and spent with the long-drawn agony of those tense hours in the stifling opera house. He felt a touch of the old fear that had come over him when he heard on Thursday night that Tazewell County would go to Sprague the next day, and it looked as if, the deadlock thus broken, Sprague would be chosen.

“You see,” he explained, “Sprague had his own county, Moultrie, and Logan, and if he got Tazewell it would mean thirty votes more—almost a cinch.”

The girl’s attention flagged in her effort to penetrate the mysteries of ballots and delegations.

“That was the night I wrote you,” he went on, and her interest brightened with her understanding. “I was mighty blue that night.”

He made a pause, for the pity of it.

“And that was the night, too, when Jim Rankin came to the front. I never knew him to rise to such heights of political ability before. I tell you, Emily, we must be good to Jim Rankin—he’s the best friend we’ve got. He went out after supper, and was out all the night. When he came in at four o’clock in the morning—I had just thrown myself on the bed in my clothes to snatch a wink of sleep—he came into our room and said, ‘Well, Jerry, my boy, we’ve got him skinned now—Piatt will go to you on the first ballot to-morrow, and McKimmon will swing Mason on the second—and that’ll settle it.’”

Garwood paused. She sat with her chin on her hand. The lace of her sleeve fell back, exposing her round forearm, white like marble in the moonlight that was spilling through the purple shadows of the trees and trickling on her dress. But a soberness had clouded her eyes.

“How do you suppose he did it, Jerome?” she asked presently.

“I don’t know,” Garwood answered, “and what’s more,” he added with a dry little laugh, “I don’t want to.”

The girl’s soberness deepened as the silence in which she received his last words lengthened. Garwood glanced at her in some concern, and then he hurried on.

“Well, it came out just as he said. The next morning Piatt County threw her vote to me on the first ballot, and by the time it got down to Tazewell it was all over with Sprague; his man Simp Lewis—you’ve heard me speak of him—moved to make it unanimous, and the noise began.”

He laughed again, this time in sheer joy as he lived those hours once more.

“It lasted all morning, when we weren’t making speeches telling how we loved each other, and the party, and the dear old flag; it lasted all the way over here on the train, until I got home and saw everybody but the one woman I’d done it all for.”

“But you saw me in the crowd while you were speaking from the hotel balcony, didn’t you?”

The scene in the square flashed back to him. The sea of faces turned up to his, the halting vehicles, the heads at windows, the raveling edges of the common crowd—he saw it all.

“I had never heard you make a speech before, you know,” she went on, “and I had always wished to—it was a splendid speech.”

“Yes,” he mused, and strangely for him, seemed not to have heard her praise, “yes, I saw you—I saw nothing but you. I thought of nothing but you!”

“Oh, Jerome,” she said, “I was happy and proud that minute to think——”

Suddenly he seized her, crushing her to him as if in some sudden access of fear.

“Dearest!” he said, “all this is nothing to me beside you and your love. Do you really love me so very much?”

“Oh, you know!” he heard her whisper.

“And will—always?”

“Always.”

“No matter what I did—or have done?”

“No matter,” she said; “you are—you. You are—mine.”

“Are you sure,” he persisted, somehow growing fierce, “sure—do you know what you are saying? No matter what I did, how unworthy I became, to what depths I sank”—even in that instant he was conscious of a dramatic quality in the situation, conscious of the eloquence, as it seemed to him, of his words—“to what depths of shame, of dishonor?”

“Why—Jerome!” the girl raised her face, half frightened, “what do you——”

“Tell me,” he demanded, and he fairly shook her, “how do you know?”

She raised her face, and he saw that it was moistened with tears. She withdrew from his embrace, and sat erect. He let his arms fall to his side. Then she took his face in her two hands, she looked into his eyes, and she gave a scornful little laugh.

“How do I know?” she said. “Ah, Jerome, because I know you; because I know that you could do nothing dishonorable!”

He hung his head, helpless, and the impulse to tell her passed with the moment that made it impossible.

Late in the evening, when he was going, as he stood below her on the steps of the veranda, she said to him:

“Jerome, do you know what Mr. Rankin did to get those delegations to—swing to you, did you say?”

“Why, no,” he laughed, “why?”

“You are sure there was no—no—money?” She said the word as if she were afraid of it.

“Money!” he exclaimed. “Money!” and he laughed the same laugh of protestation she had laughed a while before, though he laughed the big laugh of a man. “Why, my precious little girl, money would be the last thing in the world with me—I guess it always will be!” he observed in rueful parenthesis. “Don’t you believe me when I tell you that my law practice, and God knows it was small enough as it was, has gone to pieces in this campaign, that I’m insolvent, that I’m a pauper, that I’d have to be buried in the potter’s field if I were to die to-night?”

“Don’t, don’t! Jerome, please,” she held her hand to his lips to hush him, “don’t talk of dying! I’m frightened to-night.” She shuddered once again into his arms.

“Frightened?” he scoffed. “What at?”

“Oh, I don’t know; it’s foolish. I guess it’s just because I’m so happy—and I’m afraid of too much happiness.”

He could only fold her closely in his arms again. He, too, was filled with a fear he dare not name.

It was late when Garwood walked homeward under the maples that poured their thick shadows along the sidewalks of Sangamon Avenue. The carriages which in the early evening had squeaked leisurely by in the sprinkled street had taken their occupants home. The houses of Grand Prairie’s aristocrats were closed for the night and loomed now dark and still. Here and there, on a dusky lawn, he could see some counterfeit fountain, improvised of the garden hose, left to run all night, tossing its sparkling drops into the mellow light of the moon. The only sounds beyond the tinkle of these fountains were the sounds of a wide summer night, the crickets, the katydids, far away the booming of bullfrogs, farther away still the baying of some lonesome dog. It was all peace without, the peace of brooding night; but within, fear lay cold and heavy on his heart; not alone the fear which, with its remorse and regret, he had felt keen as knives at his heart an hour before when the woman he loved lay passive in his arms, but a new fear, though born in the same brood. Under its stress, his imagination tortured him with scenes in the forthcoming campaign, black headlines in opposition newspapers, a voice bawling a question at him from the crowd he was addressing, until the cumulative force of their disclosures should drive him from the stump.

But presently he put forth his will. “Pshaw!” he said, almost aloud, “how foolish! I am young, I am strong, I have the love of the best woman on earth; she would not believe if they told her! I can win, and I will win!”

He laughed aloud, because the street was still, and the night was deep. He flung up his arms and spread them wide, taking a long, deep breath of the sweet air. “I will win, win it all—her and everything besides—Congress, Governor, the Senate—all!” He strode along erect and calm, full of a vast faith in his own lusty powers, full of the sublime confidence of youth.