Читать книгу The 13th District - Brand Whitlock - Страница 9

Table of Contents

THE crowd began its cheering as the engine slid on past the weather-beaten station and stopped, puffing importantly as if it knew how big a load it had hauled. And then the candidate appeared, and midway in a cheer the crowd ceased, stricken into silence by the sight of him. He stood for an instant, pale and distinguished, a smile on his cleanly chiseled face, an impersonal smile, almost the smile of a child, as if he were unaccustomed to all about him, crowd, committees, even the steps of the railway carriage, for three men helped him down these as if he could not know how such things were done and might injure himself. Looking carefully to his right and to his left, still with that impersonal smile on his face, the candidate set his patent leather boots to the splintered platform, and then sighing “Ah!” looked around over the crowd.

It was all confusion where they stood, but Rankin was already beside the candidate, calling him “Mr. President” as he introduced to him promiscuously men who had pressed forward grinning in a not altogether hopeless embarrassment. All this time the chairman of the Logan County committee was fluttering about, striving to recall the orderly scheme of arrangement he had devised for the occasion. He had written it all out on a slip of paper the night before, having the carriages numbered, and, in a bracket set against each number, the names of those who were to ride in that carriage, just as he had seen the thing done at a funeral. But now he found that he had left his slip of paper at home, and he found that he had forgotten the arrangement as well, just as a man in the cold hour of delivery forgets a speech he has written out and burdened his memory with. As the chairman turned this way and that, several of his townsmen noticing the indecision and perplexity written on his face, with the pitiless American sense of humor, mockingly proposed:

“Three cheers for McBain!”

As the crowd gave the cheers, the chairman became redder than ever and entreated the driver of the first carriage to come closer. The driver drew his horses, whose tails he had been crimping for two weeks, nearer the curb, and then the chairman turned toward the candidate and said:

“This way, Mr. President!”

The candidate had been standing there smiling and giving both his hands to men and women and children that closed upon him, and as the chairman looked toward him he saw Garwood standing by his side. The chairman had forgotten Garwood. In fact he had not expected him until evening, and he had no place for him in his scheme. Rankin saw McBain’s predicament and promptly assuming an official relation to the affair, gently urged their presidential candidate toward the waiting carriage. Before the candidate would move, however, he looked about and said:

“Where’s the colonel?”

Then the small man in the modish blue clothes appeared from behind him, and the candidate sighed as if in relief. They all helped him into the carriage, and he smiled his gratitude. The colonel climbed into the front seat facing his chief. Then another traveling companion of the candidate, a man who was slated for a cabinet position, followed him. Garwood seemed about to withdraw and had raised his hand to lift his hat, when Rankin said:

“Get right in, Mr. Garwood, there’s plenty of room!”

Garwood felt called upon to demur, knowing that no place had been reserved for him, but Rankin began to shove from behind, and Garwood found himself sitting in the same carriage with the presidential candidate. The chairman, who had expected to ride with the great guest himself, scanned the line of carriages drawn up for the others in the party, and then slamming the door shut on them, said to the driver:

“All right, Billy.”

The drums rolled again, and the band began to play. The captains of the marching clubs shouted their military orders, and the carriage moved. The crowd cheered, and the candidate turning, became suddenly grave. His pale face flushed slightly as with an easy, distinguished air he lifted his high hat.

Garwood saw that Rankin had secured a seat in one of the carriages farther back in the line, and that half a dozen newspaper men, whom the local chairman had failed to take into account, were standing, with bored, insouciant expressions, waiting to be assigned to vehicles, realizing that the affair depended, for all beyond a mere local success, upon their presence. At the last minute they were crowded into a hack in which some of the local leaders of the party had hoped to display their importance before their neighbors. The slight seemed a little thing at the time, but it eventually created a factional fight in that county. The local chairman himself was compelled to mount beside the driver of one of the vehicles.

Amid a crash of brass, the throb of drums, and a great roar from human throats the procession wound up the crowded street. All the way the sidewalks were lined with people, and all the way the candidate lifted his high hat with that distinguished gesture.

The whole county had come in from the country, and farmers’ muddy wagons were hitched to every rack, their owners clinging to the bridles of horses that reared and plunged as the bands went by. One township had sent a club of mounted farmers, who wore big hats and rode horses on whose hides were imprinted the marks of harness, and whose caparisons were of all descriptions from the yellow pelts of sheep to Mexican saddles, denoting a terrible scouring of the township before daylight that morning. These men were stern and fierce and formed a sort of rude cavalry escort for the great man whom they cheered so hoarsely. The procession did not go directly to the court house, for that was only two blocks away, but made a slow and jolting progress along those streets that were decorated for the occasion. There were flags and bunting everywhere and numerous pictures of the candidate himself, of varying degrees of likeness to him, and pictures, too, of his “running mate,” the candidate for vice-president, who at that minute was enjoying a similar ovation in some far off Eastern village. Some of the householders, galled by the bitterness of partisanship, flaunted in their windows pictures of the candidate’s rival, but the great man lifted his hat and bowed to them, clustered in silence before their residences, as impartially as he did to those of his own party.

In the last two blocks before the procession reached the court house square they could hear a man speaking, and Garwood knew that the voice was the voice of General Stager. The old court house standing in its ancient dignity in a park of oak trees, lifting its plastered columns with a suggestion of the calm of classic beauty, broke on their sight, and the music of the bands, as they brayed into the square, filled the whole area with their triumphant strains and cheer on cheer leaped toward them. The music and the cheers drowned the voice of General Stager, and his audience suddenly left him and surged toward the approaching procession. The cheering was continuous, the candidate’s white head was bare most of the time, and when the carriage stopped and he was assisted up the steps into the speaker’s stand, the bands exultantly played “Union Forever, Hurrah, Boys, Hurrah!” the horns fairly singing the words of the song.

General Stager, red and drenched with perspiration, advanced to shake the hand of the presidential candidate, and the spectacle set the crowd yelling again. The candidate began his speech immediately. It was the same speech he had delivered all along his itinerary, though his allusions to the splendid agricultural community in which he found himself, the good crops that had been yielded to the hand of the husbandman, gave a fictitious local color, and his touching reference to his old friend, General Bancroft, by whose side he had sat at Washington through so many stirring years fraught with deeds and occasions of such vast import to the national life, and his glowing tribute to the Bloody Ninety-third, brought the applause rolling up to him in great waves. He spoke for nearly an hour, standing at the railing with the big flag hanging down before him and a big, white water pitcher standing close beside; behind him were the vice-presidents sitting with studied gravity; near by, the reporters writing hurriedly; before him and around him, under the green and motionless trees, a vast multitude, heads many of them bared, faces upturned, with brows knit to aid in concentration, jaws working as they chewed on their eternal tobacco.

Out at the edges of the crowd, a continual movement shifted the masses and groups of men, along the curb were lines of wagons, with horses stamping and switching their tails, across the street on the three-storied brick blocks, the flutter of flags and bunting. The old court house, frowning somehow with the majesty of the law, formed a stately, solemn background for it all; overhead was the sky, piling rapidly now with clouds. The whole square gave an effect of strange stillness, even with the voice of the speaker ringing through it; the crowd was silent, treasuring his words for future repetition, treasuring perhaps the sight of him, the sensation of being in his actual presence, for the tale of future years.

But suddenly, in a second, when the crowd was held in the magic spell of his oratory, when men were least thinking of such a thing, he ceased to talk, the speech was over, the event was closed, and the great man, not pausing even long enough to let the vice-presidents of the meeting shake hands with him, or to hear the Lincoln Glee Club sing a campaign song, looked about for the colonel, climbed out of the stand into his carriage and was whirled away, lifting his hat, still with that distinguished air, amid cheers that would not let the campaign song begin, and with little boys swarming like outrunners at his glistening wheels.

When the meeting was over, Garwood went to the hotel to wait for Rankin, who had a mysterious, but always purposeful way of disappearing at times of such political excitement as had been rocking Lincoln all that day. Garwood had long since learned, when Rankin thus went under the political waters, to await calmly his reappearance at the surface, and so he wrote Rankin’s name and his own name on the blotted register of the hotel, and asked for a room. He had scarcely laid down the corroded pen the landlord found in a drawer, when a voice beside him said:

“Did you see it yet, Jerry?”

Garwood turned to look in the grinning face of Julius Vogt, who had come over with the Grand Prairie “excursion” that morning.

“See what?” asked Garwood.

“Why,” said Vogt, drawing something from his pocket, “Pusey’s article about you—there,” and he opened the copy of the News and gave it to Garwood.

“Oh!” said Garwood, “that!—I saw part of it.” And he smiled on Vogt, whom he felt like striking.

“Well,” said Vogt, still grinning, though his grin was losing something, “I jus’ thought, maybe,—”

“Thanks,” said Garwood. Several others of the Grand Prairie boys, as any one, considering them in their political capacity, would have called them, had drawn near, attracted by their candidate for Congress, whose wide hat rode above all the heads in the crowd. Doubtless they expected Garwood to open the paper, but he was too good a politician for that. As he stood there he idly picked at the ragged edges of the sheets, and when he spoke seemed to have forgotten it, for he said:

“Well, how’d you like the speech?”

“Great,” said Billy Feek.

“You bet,” said Doris Fox.

“Didn’t he lam into ’em?” said Burr Rippleman.

Still their eyes were on the paper which Garwood seemed to be in danger of picking to pieces.

“Yes, it was as fine an effort as I ever heard under such circumstances,” said Garwood. “He’s a great campaigner.” He carelessly thrust the paper into the side pocket of the black alpaca coat he wore. The boys were sober faced again.

“Goin’ back with us to-night, Jerry?” said Elam Kirk. “We’re goin’ to hold the train till after your speech.”

“Reckon not,” Garwood replied. “I’m going over to Pekin in the morning.” He looked at his watch. “Well!” he exclaimed, “it’s nearly supper time, and I haven’t given a thought to what I’m going to say to-night. Will you come have a little drink before supper?”

The boys grinned again, saying they didn’t care if they did, and followed Garwood towards the dingy bar-room, making old jokes about drinking, in the manner of the small town, the citizens of which, because of their stricter moral environment, or perhaps of more officious neighbors, can never indulge in tippling with the freedom of city-bred fellows. Garwood could not escape without a joke at his expense, attempted by some one of the party whose appreciation of hospitality was not refined, and though it made him shudder he had to join in the laugh it provoked. But when he could get away from them at last, he went to the room he had taken, and there, seated on the edge of the bed, he opened the paper and held it in the window to catch the fading light. It had been issued at noon that day, and given an added importance by the word “Extra!” printed in black and urgent type at the head of its page. But below, Garwood read another word, a word that needed no bold type to make it black—“Boodler!”—and then—his own name.

Pusey had adroitly chosen that day as the one most likely to aid the effect of his sensation, and the opposing committee had gladly undertaken to circulate hundreds of copies at the Lincoln rally. The article was obviously done by Pusey himself, and he had taken a keen delight in the work. He had written it in the strain of one who performs a painful public duty, the strain in which a judge, gladdened more and more by his own utterance, sentences a convicted criminal, though without the apology a judge always makes to the subject of his discourse, in carefully differentiating his official duty from his individual inclination.

Garwood forced himself remorselessly to read it through, to the very end, and then abstractedly, sitting there in the fading light that straggled in from the dirty street outside, he picked the paper into little pieces, and sprinkled them on the floor. The letters of the headline were printed on his mind, and as he sat there in the darkness and viewed the litter he had made, seeing it all as the ruin of his life and hopes, he flung his great body headlong on the bed and buried his face in his hands.

Half an hour later Rankin thrust his head in at the door and called into the darkness that filled the room:

“Oh, Jerry!”

He haltingly entered, piercing the gloom, and dimly outlining the long form of his candidate stretched on the frail bed.

“Jerry! Jerry!” he said.

Garwood’s form was tall when it stood erect in the daylight, it was immense when it lay prone in the dark. There was something in the sight to strike a kind of superstitious terror to the heart, and Rankin’s elemental nature sensed something of this, but when Garwood heaved and gave a very human grunt, Rankin cried in an approach to anger:

“Aw, git up out o’ that! Don’t you hear the band tunin’ up outside?”

The crowd in town had been gradually decreasing all through the waning afternoon; the multitude that had come to hear a candidate for the presidency would not stay to listen to a candidate for Congress. With the falling of the night there had been a gathering of gray clouds, and at the threatening of a storm the crowd thinned more and more. Gradually the weary ones withdrew, the howls of tipsy countrymen on the sides of the square subsided, the rural cavalry galloped out of town with parting yells for their candidate, the square in the falling rain glistened under the electric light that bathed the ancient pediment of the court house with a modern radiance. At nine o’clock Garwood finished his speech, ceremoniously thanking and bidding good night a little mass of men who huddled with loyal partisanship around the band-stand, with a few extinguished torches reeking under his nose, with the running colors of the flags and bunting staining the pine boards on which he rested his hands, and with a few boys chasing each other with sharp cries about the edges of the gathering.