II
THE Emersons had arrived in Washington at the beginning of February. Their trunks, scuffed with constant travel but given a cosmopolitan air of distinction by the etiquettes with which they were plastered, were ranged around the room in which the Emersons had quartered themselves at the Arlington, and stood with yawning lids, ready for Dade to dive into them after some new toilet with which to astound the guests when she swept into the dining-room.
Her mother, spent by the long winter voyage, had collapsed upon arrival, and had taken her meals in her room, vowing that if she could reach Grand Prairie alive, she would never leave there again. She was anxious now, to have Doctor Larkin undertake her cure. No one, she assured Dade, had ever understood her case as well as he, and no one had ever helped her as he had helped her. She longed to start for home immediately; but she did not feel equal to the trip just then; it would be necessary for her to remain in Washington awhile and gather strength for the journey.
Meanwhile, as she lingered, Dade gloried in the Washington spring. She had become enthusiastically American. She visited all the guide-book places about Washington; she said she was making a study of American history. In a week during which she had met several unreconstructed rebels, though the bloody shirt was then happily passing as an issue in politics, she had become intensely Southern in her sympathies. She bemoaned the lost cause as bitterly as a widow of a Confederate brigadier; she longed for a return of the golden days of Southern chivalry, and she yearned ineffably as she pictured herself on some old Virginia plantation attended by a retinue of black slaves whom she would have patronized so graciously and kept so busy.
Each morning she bought a huge bunch of violets from an old white-headed negro, in order to hear his “Lawd bless you, Missy!” It seemed to put her in touch with the days she never had known, and never could know.
She importuned her mother, too, for details of her ancestry, a subject in which she had never displayed an interest before, and, though her mother pleaded headache, she was at last enabled to recall and body forth, though vaguely, a long dead grandmother whom tradition pictured as a Virginia lady, an F. F. V., in fact.
And then Dade’s English accent became a Southern dialect, and it was with a delight that had its own regret, that she heard some one in the hotel parlor ask her one evening what part of the South she came from. An experienced ear would have detected Dade’s little deception through its inability to localize her dialect, for if she had heard a Virginian speak, she straightway spoke like a Virginian, if a Kentuckian, like a Kentuckian, if a Georgian, then like a Georgian, and the result was that she mimicked all and mastered the tongue of none.
Yet her honesty compelled her to disclaim Southern birth, though she qualified her denial and regained the place she had momentarily lost in the estimation of her interlocutor by telling him that her family, or part of them, had come from Virginia. Those evenings in the hotel parlor were unsatisfying, however, and she tired of the limits its walls set to her social evolutions.
It was, therefore, with a joy that lent a heightened color to her face, and showed her white teeth in a genuine smile of welcome, that she saw approaching her one evening across the dining-room a young man whose stride and carriage marked him for an officer in the regular army. His waist was as slender and his body as correctly bent as when he had been a shavetail just out of West Point, though that he had seen some sort of service was shown by his face, burned to an Apache bronze by the sun of New Mexico.
He wore his civilian clothes, somewhat old in style, with the unaccustomed air that sits on the army officer when he is out of uniform. Dade did not restrain the look of pleasure that comes to any girl’s eyes at the sight of a soldier, especially a soldier with whom she may claim acquaintance, and as his friendly face broke into smiles, she said:
“Why, Mistuh Beck, who would have thought of meeting yo’ all heah! Ah thought yo’ weh aout fighting Indians somewheah.”
“I’m stationed here now,” the young lieutenant explained, and then: “The world is very small!” he marveled, making that trite remark with the self-evident pleasure that showed he considered it original. “May I?” He laid a hand tentatively on the back of a chair at her table, and bowed low in his pantomime of asking if he might sit with her.
“Ce’tainly,” she said.
“And Mrs. Emerson is well?”
“She takes heh meals in heh room. We ah only waiting heah fo’ heh to recovah sufficiently to unde’take the journey aout to Illinois.”
They were so much together after that that the ladies of the hotel, who could not have known that the young people had become acquainted long ago in St. Louis, reveled in a new subject for gossip and pitied the poor woman lying ill in her room and neglected by a daughter who spent her time flirting with an army officer. Dade, by some spiritual divination, apprehended all they were saying, and took a delight of her own in shocking them. So the flirtation raged furiously, and Dade, by delicate pathological suggestions, developed her mother’s present indisposition into the disease that was her Washington doctor’s specialty.
Beck and Dade had gone to the Capitol one day, and, when Dade expressed a wish to see how the laws were made, had gone into the gallery of the House. Below them the members were lolling in their seats, their feet on their desks, reading newspapers, yawning or chatting, while the business of the nation, or of the party then in power in the nation, was being listlessly transacted.
The Speaker, sitting in his solemn chair, looked small in the distance, the clerks below him bowed over their work. Now and then the Speaker’s voice could be heard, now and then the sharp fall of the gavel startled the common drone of voices. Some member far across the House, beyond the littered sea of desks, was speaking. His voice came to them scarcely at all. He held a bundle of notes in one trembling hand, with the other he now and then pushed his spectacles up on his sweating nose.
A cup of water stood on his desk, and he drank from it frequently in the agony of getting through the ordeal that was necessary to supply the voters in his far-away Ohio district with copies of that speech. By the time it got into the Congressional Record, it would be well parenthesized with applause, and thus paint for his constituents a scene of a decorous, black-coated House, hanging rapt upon his words, and breaking occasionally into cheers that could not be controlled. The members lolled and read, and all about this speaker seats were empty, standing there in wooden patience as if waiting for him to end. At last the Speaker of the House turned from the man to whom he had been whispering, and his gavel fell.
“The gentleman’s time has expired,” he said.
The Ohioan stopped, and when he asked leave to extend his remarks in the Record, it was granted with the only enthusiasm his effort had produced.
“It’s stupid,” said Dade, turning to her lieutenant. “Let’s go ovah to the Senate.”
“It’s worse there,” Beck answered. “This seems to be an unexciting day.”
“What ah they talking abaout?”
“Goodness knows, I don’t.”
“Do they?”
“Hardly. But—wait a minute!” The soldier leaned over the railing. A laugh had rung below him. Sharp words had been spoken. A question had been flung across the House. On both sides, Republican and Democratic, members had sprung to their feet. The Speaker had arisen, and stood with his gavel alertly poised. There were several nervous cries of,
“Mr. Speaker! Mr. Speaker!”
Beck saw one member who had arisen with the rest, and who now stood with one hand raised, his finger leveled at the speaker.
“Mr. Speaker,” said the member confidently.
The Speaker nodded in his direction.
“The gentleman from Illinois,” he said.
The member began to speak, talking in a low tone for several moments. Something he said provoked a laugh around him. Then the House was still. He was a tall man, and his long black coat hung from heavy shoulders. As he warmed to his subject, and his coat tails swung away from his loins, they revealed a protuberant abdomen; as he warmed still more, the perspiration rolled down his cheeks and on to the neck that lay in folds of fat over his rapidly softening collar. His voice increased in volume. He became excited, he turned around in a vehement outbreak, to address directly some member who, with head bent respectfully to the fictions of parliamentary etiquette, had crept in creaking boots to a desk near the speaker, and there he now sat, a palm nursing his deaf ear. The orator turned yet more directly about, and—
“Why!” Dade cried, “that’s Jerry Gahwood! He’s ouah congressman!”
She craned her pretty chin forward, and leaned her elbows on the wide marble rail to hear the better.
“Do you know him?” Beck asked.
“Why, he’s ouah congressman! He mah’ied Emily Ha’kness—don’t yo’ remembuh? The gyrl who was with me that wintah at the Van Stohn’s in St. Louis?”
“Oh!” said Beck.
She turned in the more immediate personal interest his tone had awakened in her.
“Do yo’ know him?” she asked.
“I? No, not exactly.”
Garwood’s voice was ringing loud and clear. Members came in from the lobby, from the cloak rooms, from the committee rooms. Men gathered in the seats near Garwood to hear him the better. Now and then there was the sharp rattle of clapping hands.
Dade’s eyes were glowing.
“Isn’t he fahn?” she said. “He’s handsome, too. Ah heahd him make his great speech the night befo’ he was elected—yo’ heahd of it, didn’t yo’?”
Beck only smiled. She turned again to listen, but her attention was not steadfast. Beck had hardly been listening at all.
“Don’t yo’ think him fahn?” she inquired.
“He is really a good speaker,” the lieutenant admitted. Dade looked at him, fixing her brown eyes steadily in his blue ones.
“What do yo’ all know abaout him?” she asked suddenly.
“Why do you ask?” he parried.
“Yo’ speak so strangely—yo’ ah so queah abaout him.”
“Am I? I know nothing. I have been told that he came here two or three years ago with extraordinary prospects—”
“And he has not—justifahd or fulfilled them?”
“That’s about it.”
“Well, if that’s all!” Dade said loyally, tossing her head, and then she turned once more to watch Garwood.
His speech was brief. He finished in a fine burst of eloquence, with a hand uplifted, and his black locks shaking, and then sat down, amid a volley of applause, taking the hands of those who pressed about him, and smiling at each congratulatory word, though disparagingly, as if his achievement had been a small thing for him.
“Ah must meet him!” Dade announced, suddenly arising. “We’ll go. Yo’ must send in yo’ cahd. Can yo’? Will they let yo’?”
“Yes,” the lieutenant hesitated, “but—”
“But what?” Dade stood at her full height.
“I think you’d rather not see him—here.”
“Nonsense!” She stamped her foot petulantly, and her eyes flashed dangerously. “Ah mean to take him to task fo’ not calling on mamma and me. Ah’ve known him all my life!”
The officer shrugged his shoulders. He felt that he had already said too much, more, certainly, than was prudent for an officer in the army, where feudal notions of propriety still exist.
Garwood came out of the House in response to the lieutenant’s card. The air of serious and official demeanor with which he had prepared to listen to importunities about some of the army’s constant appropriation bills or reorganization bills, relaxed into one of surprise and friendliness when he saw Dade standing by the side of the young officer, and it expanded into a smile of much insinuation as he bowed low and took the girl’s hand.
“I’m delighted, I’m sure,” he said.
She presented the lieutenant, and the men bowed.
“I’ve met Lieutenant Beck before,” Garwood said. “Glad to meet him again—always glad to meet the officers of our little army, aren’t we, Miss Dade?”
He was red and perspiring, and stretched his neck now and then, that he might press his handkerchief below his collar.
“We have been listening to yo’ speech, Mistuh Gahwood,” Dade said. “Ah hadn’t heahd yo’ speak since that night befo’ the election. Do yo’ remembuh?”
“Oh, yes,” the congressman replied, and he laughed. “That seems years ago, doesn’t it?”
“Not to me,” she corrected him.
Garwood bowed, intensely.
“Pardon me, Miss Dade, you are the only one who hasn’t aged since then.”
Garwood had drawn a cigarette from his pocket, and as they strolled out into the rotunda, he offered the case to Beck.
“No, thanks,” said Beck.
Garwood continued pinching the cigarette.
“Emil—Mrs. Gahwood is not with yo’, is she?”
“No, poor girl,” said Garwood. “She stayed at home this winter. It has been lonely for me, too, without her. I had hoped to have her with me, but she is not well—and then her father’s death you know—”
Garwood allowed the sentence to complete in the girl’s mind its own impression of the lonely wife left at home.
“She must be lonesome,” Dade said.
“Yes—think of having to spend a winter in that beastly little place!” Garwood said, and then he hastened to add with an apologetic smile: “We wouldn’t talk that way in Grand Prairie, Lieutenant; would we, Miss Dade?”
The two men walked with her between them, and Garwood walked close to the girl. His eyes took in her fresh face, glowing under the dotted veil, and her athletic figure, which she carried as erectly as the soldier by her side did his.
“We were going over into the Senate.”
“Ah?” Garwood responded. “I’m headed in that general direction, not to hear the old men certainly, but down to the restaurant. This business of saving the nation twice a day is exhausting. Perhaps you’d—”
“No, thank yo’,” said Dade, withdrawing herself subtly.
“I shall do myself the honor of calling upon you, Miss Dade,” Garwood said.
She looked at him. Her eyes were cold.
“Mothuh will be glad to see yo’, no doubt,” she answered, and then she bowed.
Garwood stood looking after her, watching the delicate play of the muscles of her back as she walked. Then he placed the cigarette between his lips, and started for the elevators.
“He’s grown fat!” Dade was saying to the army officer. “He’s hoh’id! Po’ little Emily!”