Читать книгу The 13th District - Brand Whitlock - Страница 8

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WHEN the Alton’s early train drew out of the Canal Street station that morning, the last coach had its curtains drawn, with a touch of royal mystery. Though its polished panels were grimed from a long journey, though its roof lay deep in cinders, and though its gilt lettering was tarnished, still, as it moved onward with heavy dignity, it was plainly no ordinary car, for it rolled majestically at the end of that long train like some ship, to which clung the sentimental interest of a stormy voyage. As it passed, yardmen in blue overalls straightened their backs painfully and scrutinized it with professional eye, sometimes they swung their caps; laborers, men and women, on their morning way to work, halted by the crossing-gates and united in a cheer, their futile little celebration being dissipated by the clamor of the alarm bells, as the train whirled by in its cloud of dust, and the gates lifted to let the flood-tide of city life set in again for the day’s work.

The fireman in the engine cab sat erect as he clanged his brass bell; the engineer, knitting his brow as he studied his watch, stretched his hand to the throttle with a touch as delicate as a telegrapher’s. Within the train, the division superintendent whispered to the conductor. Plainly, it was no ordinary car.

It was bearing a candidate for the presidency, on his way west, swinging around the circle, as our phrase has been ever since Andrew Johnson made the first presidential stumping tour.

His itinerary had been so arranged as to give him an hour in Lincoln that afternoon. General Stager was to be there also and to speak before the presidential candidate arrived. The old wheel-horse’s part was to hold the crowd, and he was well cast, for he could talk on indefinitely, and yet round off his speech with an eloquent peroration at any moment and seem never to suffer any ill effects, either as to himself or to his speech. Then in the evening Garwood was to speak. He had looked forward to the day with eagerness, anticipating fondly his meeting with the great man who, as General Stager would put it, was running for the highest office within the gift of the American people.

He had gone up to Chicago with Rankin the night before, and when the private car was switched over from the Pennsylvania in the morning, they boarded it with one or two members of the state executive committee, and the member of the national committee for Illinois.

The great man slept late, as great men may, yielding to the conceit that their labors are heavier than those of common men, and as Garwood and Rankin sat in the forward compartment and whispered to each other, Rankin noted his impression by saying:

“The old man takes it easy, don’t he?”

Something of this impatience was expressed by the cries of the crowd that gathered in the station at Joliet, after the train had rolled by the high stone walls of the penitentiary, and Garwood, growing more accustomed to his position, allowed himself to enjoy, as he saw men peering curiously in at him, the distinction a man feels in riding in a private car.

But the day was fully awake now, and the national excitement that for a week had found its dynamic center in that car, began to impress itself upon its occupants; the newspaper correspondents who traveled with the candidate began to make notes now and then after they had learned the name of the town they were passing; while jacketed darkies began to slip about in their morning work, and at last the candidate himself came into the salon, clean and fresh, blinking his eyes in the sun, as he smiled in a courtly way and said, as if they were members of his suite traveling with a king:

“Gentlemen, good morning.”

And then he looked about him as if he had lost something.

“Is the colonel up yet?” he asked.

His secretary at that instant appeared, pursued by a black porter whisking at his blue clothes with a long, thin broom.

“Ah,” he said, “there you are. Did you rest well?”

“Fairly,” said the colonel. “Papers come yet?”

Before the candidate could reply, the chairman of the state central committee had taken Garwood by the sleeve and drawn him up before the candidate.

“This is Mr. Garwood, our candidate for Congress in the Thirteenth District.”

“Ah, Mr. Garwood,” the great man said, “very glad to meet you, I’m sure. You had rather a spirited contest in your district, did you not?”

Garwood smiled at the memory of it. He was about to reply when the colonel, who had gone for the train boy, returned with a bundle of newspapers that smelt pleasantly of the printer’s ink, and gave them all, save the one he had opened for himself, to the candidate. The candidate took them in his delicate hands, lifted his glasses, opened one of the papers, and as he did so observed, his eyes running up and down the columns:

“Such contests are always healthful indications, I fancy.”

Garwood hemmed and murmured a disappointed “Yes.” The great man was slowly sinking into a wicker chair, and beginning to read the reports of the speeches he had delivered through Indiana and Ohio the day before.

The whole party had got newspapers of the news agent and had settled down to read them. The newspaper men had bought with as much avidity as the rest, and were trembling with the mingled pain and pleasure of reading their own stuff, as, with a contempt perhaps not all pretended, they called it.

The news that the candidate had risen spread through the train by some mysterious agency, and almost before he had finished his breakfast, men began to venture back that way to see him. He received them all with his weary smile, shook their hands, and thanked them for whatever it was he seemed to think or wished them to think they were doing for him. It was the better dressed of the passengers in the forward coaches that were bold enough to enter a private car at first, but as the habit grew common, men from the day coaches, and at last the farmers from the smoking car who had got on to ride short distances between stations, began to shamble back. One of them, with his clothes and hat and whiskers all sun-burned to a neutral shade of brown, stood in an awkward attitude before the candidate crushing his white slender hand in his own harsh palm, and pumped it up and down, stammering through his tobacco that he had been voting the straight ticket for fifty years, and when the great man said he hoped that he would live to vote it for fifty years more, the little knot of admiring men laughed with exuberant mirth at the joke.

As the news that the candidate had risen spread through the train, so it sped onward before the train, and now as they reached and impatiently halted at little towns along the road, people were gathered at the stations, stretching their necks, and hastily glancing at all the windows of the train to catch a glimpse of the man who might soon be their president.

At each stop the candidate stepped out upon the platform, his stenographer following him with a note book, spoke a few words of greeting, and dropped a politic remark that had the epigrammatic ring of a political axiom.

Garwood was disappointed in not being called on to speak himself, and he had been disappointed, too, in not having the conversation with his great leader he had anticipated. He was beginning to realize the relativity of things, whereby a candidate for Congress is only great when he is drinking with a candidate for supervisor at some country bar, but when he is riding in a private car with a candidate for president he is small indeed, so small that he is not noticed in the press despatches, as Garwood was to learn when he faithfully read all the city papers the next day.

But down below Bloomington the great man gladdened him by taking a seat beside him, and beginning to ask questions, which is sometimes the mark of a great man.

“Let me see, you reside in Grand Prairie, do you not, Mr. Garwood? What is the condition of our party over there just now?”

Garwood told him it was very good; he thought there was much enthusiasm.

The great man said that he had discovered such conditions to be generally indicated.

“It will be only necessary to crystallize that enthusiasm in the ballot box,” he continued, with his Latin derivatives, “for us to win a splendid victory. Your organization is satisfactory, is it?”

Again Garwood answered “Yes.”

“Very good,” the great man said. “How large a town is Lincoln—we stop there this afternoon, do we not, Colonel?”

The colonel, too, said “Yes.”

“Agricultural community principally, I suppose? Are the farmers fairly prosperous in the county?”

“Oh, yes,” said Garwood, “they’ve had good crops this year.”

“Let me see, General Bancroft used to represent your district in Congress, did he not?”

“Yes, sir—some years ago. He’s dead now, you know.”

“Yes, I remember—I must—let me see—I was in the forty-third Congress with him, was I not, Colonel?”

“The forty-fourth,” corrected the colonel.

“To be sure, the forty-fourth. He was a very fine man. I formed a very high opinion of him.”

“Yes, he was a fine man,” said Garwood. “I read law in his office.”

“Did you, indeed? He was a very good lawyer, as I recall him. We sat on the judiciary committee together. Did he have a good practice?”

“Oh, yes, the best at the Grand Prairie bar. He was the best jury lawyer we ever had there.”

“Yes, he was a good speaker. Was the breach in the party created by his peculiarly strong character healed at his death?”

“Well, it’s pretty much healed now; for a long time it bothered us, but we never hear of it any more.”

“Pretty popular with the people, was he?”

“Very.”

“I would presume so.” The great man closed his eyes as if shutting in some impression.

“Yes,” Garwood went on, “the bare mention of his name will set them wild even now.”

“Ah, indeed,” said the candidate. “He raised a regiment about there, did he not?”

“Yes—the old ninety-third—the Bloody Ninety-third they called it. A number of his old soldiers will be at your meeting this afternoon.”

The candidate reflected that most communities like to think that their regiments have been known as “the Bloody,” but he did not say so to Garwood.

The train sped on, then Garwood heard it stop, heard the cheers and cries of the crowds outside, heard the rich voice of the candidate speaking, heard the restless bell as the train moved on again with quickly accelerated speed, while the little station and the crowd and the two shining tracks dissolved into one disappearing point of the perspective far behind. The cheers faded away, and he tried to imagine the sensation of the man for whom all this outcry was being made. The great man seemed to take it coolly enough. Either such things had grown common to him, or he had trained himself by a long course of public life to appear as if they had, for when he was not making speeches on the rear platform, or shaking hands with little delegations that boarded the train to go to the Lincoln meeting, he was resting in his stateroom. He was not well, Garwood heard the colonel explain to some one, and had to conserve his energies, though like some athlete in training he seemed able to rest and sleep between his exertions.

Rankin had wearied of the formalities of the private car and, as the train began to fill with familiar forms, men with whom he had battled in conventions for years, he had fled to the easier society and the denser atmosphere of the smoking car, greeting countless friends from all over the district, and doing the campaign work Garwood felt he should be doing himself. But the magnetism of his great leader, the joy of being in a presence all men were courting in those days, perhaps, too, a desire to feel to the utmost the distinction of riding in a private car, kept him there.

The train had reached Atlanta Hill, and now its noise subsided. The engine no longer vomited black masses of smoke, but seemed to hold its breath as, with wheels that spun so swiftly they seemed motionless, it coasted silently and swiftly down that steep grade. The spires and roofs of little Lawndale showed an instant above the trees, and then out on the level again the train sped on toward Lincoln.

Garwood arose and got the overcoat he carried to draw on after each speech, for its moral impressiveness as much as to keep him from catching cold, and as the engine began to puff heavily, and the train rolled into Lincoln, Rankin appeared, hot and perspiring.

“Come on,” he said to Garwood, “we’re there. The boys have all been askin’ fer you!”

“Have they?” asked Garwood, half guiltily. “What did you tell them?”

“I told ’em you was back here closeted with the old man; that he wouldn’t let you out of his sight, that’s what I told ’em.”

They heard the strains of a marching band, and then a cheer arose.