XVI
SATURDAY evening Emily had a telegram from Garwood announcing his nomination. The message might have come to her Saturday noon, but Garwood had found the delegates for the most part in mood for celebration, while he himself in the reaction of his spirit, was not disinclined that way. He held a levee in his rooms reveling in felicitations and when this was done, he suddenly thought of the Sprague men, smarting under defeat. They must not be allowed to depart for home nursing their sores, and Garwood made it a point to see them, or to have Rankin see them, and check in its incipiency a contagion that might plague him in the fall. So it was evening before he thought to wire his wife, and it was late in the night before he took the train for Lincoln, where he was to change cars for home, leaving the little old German town to settle to its normal quiet for Sunday morning.
Emily, with the knowledge of politics that politicians’ wives acquire, had watched from day to day the development of the contest at Pekin. Jerome had not written at all, but Emily chose to consider his failure as an exercise of one of the privileges of matrimony to which lovers look forward as they labor over their love letters. But she added a second reason which betrayed the specious quality of the first, when she explained to her father that in these days of newspapers, letter writing had become a lost art, belonging to a lavender scented past like the embroidery of tapestries. She told her baby, as she rolled his round little body in her lap, that she was jealous of politics, and promised him that when the convention was over, his father would be—and here she gasped and dropped the pretense that the child could understand. She could not bear to voice, even to herself, the feeling that her husband was any less the lover that he once had been. She realized to the utmost his position, she had felt it in little sacrifices she had been compelled to make, and she knew of his utter dependence on reëlection. Here, too, was another fact that she could hardly face squarely and honestly. She clung to her old ideal of her husband as a statesman no less ardently than she clung to her old ideal of him as a lover, and she disliked to feel that he was in Congress merely as a means of livelihood. A vague discontent floated nebulously within her, but with all the adroitness of her mind she would not allow it to concrete.
“When he comes home!” she cooed to the baby, “when he comes home!”
By Saturday, the strain upon her nerves had increased, like all anxieties, in a ratio equal to the square of the distance from its moving cause. All day long she waited for news, hoping for the best, but fortifying herself by trying to believe that if the worst came, it might in the end be beneficial, because it must in time, at least, force them to some more secure temporal foundation, where they could not be disturbed by every whim of politics. She remembered that Jerome had often reminded her, though that was in moments of security and elation, that all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. Her father himself suffered a sympathetic suspense and in the afternoon he journeyed down town to see if he could learn anything of what was going on at Pekin. Late in the day the Citizen hung out a bulletin saying that Garwood had been nominated on the twelve hundred and sixty-first ballot, and he hastened home, with the importance of an idle old man, longing to be the first to announce to Emily the news. But she waved her telegram gaily at him from the veranda as he hurried up the walk, and cried:
“He’s won, father! He’s won! He’s just been nominated!”
The old man, cheated of a herald’s distinction, could not resist the impulse to say:
“Why, he was nominated this morning!”
She felt a pang at these tidings of her husband’s tardiness, but she put that away in the habit she had acquired, and said:
“Oh, I know—but these telegraph companies are so slow!”
She was happy all that evening, though she denied that her own relief as to their position had aught to do with that happiness.
“He will be much more useful this term than he was before,” she told her father at supper. “Jerome always said, you know, that it took one term for a congressman to learn the ropes at Washington.”
Garwood reached home Sunday morning, and when he saw Emily waiting in the doorway something like pity for her smote him, and out of the flush of his new success he yearned toward her, so that, there in the old darkened hallway where the tender scene had been enacted so many times in other days, he folded her in his arms, and kissed her lips and her brow and her hair, and called her once more “Sweetheart.” And the happy little woman purred in his embrace, and as she hid her face against his breast, she said:
“My Jerome—my big Jerome!”
And it was all as it had been two years before. Only now, lifting her eyes to his, her face reddened with a blush as she said:
“You must come up and tell baby—he is dying to hear all about it.”
Emily vowed to Garwood that now the convention was over he must take a rest, and he was content for days to loll at home. He slept late in the morning and she bore his breakfast to him with his mail, or he stretched himself on the divan in the parlor in the afternoon while she read the newspapers to him until he would sink into slumber with the assurance that the room would be darkened and the house hushed until he chose to wake.
Pusey had nailed the party banner to his masthead as it were, and Emily read to Garwood with a laugh that could not conceal her pride the big types at the head of his editorial page:
“For Congress, Jerome B. Garwood.”
There day after day it remained, and she read it over and over, finding a certain joy in it. Pusey had printed a long editorial announcing his determination to support Garwood, and explaining with the conviction of the editorial page—where the argument is all one way, with no chance for rejoinder—his own action in voting for the candidate he had originally opposed.
“He isn’t really consistent, is he, Jerome?” Emily said after she had read the editorial aloud to her husband.
“Oh, well,” he laughed, knocking the ashes from the cigarette he was smoking, in a security he could find nowhere else in Grand Prairie, for he did not wish the town to know that he smoked cigarettes, “you know what Emerson says: ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.’”
“Yes, I remember,” the wife replied. “We used to read Emerson, didn’t we?” Her words breathed regret. “We never read any more. We seem to have no time for anything but newspapers.” And she looked askance at the disordered pile of them on the floor, and out of a sense of guilt reduced them to smaller compass.
“I wonder how Mr. Rankin did it?” she mused a moment after.
“Did what?”
“Why, induced Mr. Pusey to vote for you.”
“Rankin?” said Garwood.
“Why, yes. He did, didn’t he? I thought he did everything for you.”
Garwood sneered.
“Rankin did nothing!” he said, “Rankin’s what the boys in Chicago call a selling plater.”
“Why, I thought he did everything!” Emily repeated. “Who did then?”
“I reckon I had as much as anybody to do with it.”
“You?”
“Yes. Why not?”
“But how?”
“Oh—I took him for a walk one night—the night it stormed. Did it storm here?”
“Oh, fearfully; in the early morning—awfully! But tell me—how did you do it?”
Garwood laughed.
“Oh, I just talked to him.”
“Did you persuade him—convince him?”
“Evidently.”
Emily was silent for a moment, and her brows were knit.
“I hope—” she began, but checked herself. “I’ve often thought,” she said, beginning over, “that we ought to have Mr. Rankin and his poor little wife here to dinner. I feel guilty about them. You—we—will be good to them, won’t we?”
Garwood laughed again.
“You needn’t worry about Jim Rankin,” he said, “though I don’t know that I owe him much after his letting the delegation here in Polk get away from me. I had a hard time licking it back into line.”
It was several days after that Cowley published an article in the Chicago Courier which told of the tremendous promises that had been made at Pekin in exchange for votes. He said that Garwood had shown himself a clever politician, for he had not only been able to hold up most of the appointments in his district until after his second nomination, but he had had the help of the administration’s influence at Pekin. Cowley then proceeded to schedule the distribution of patronage that would be made; Hale for the post-office at Pekin, Bailey for Speaker of the House, and Rankin, of course, for the post-office at Grand Prairie. He could not dispose of Pusey as definitely, but it was not to be supposed that Pusey had gone to Garwood and saved him from political oblivion for nothing at all.
Emily read the article aloud to Jerome. He knew by her silence when she had finished that questions were forming in her mind. She set her lips and began shaking her head, until she produced a low “No, I don’t like that.”
“That New England conscience of yours troubling you again?” asked Garwood.
“I wish we had more New England conscience in our politics!” she replied with a wife’s severity.
“We’ve got enough of New England in our politics now!” Garwood said, with a flare of the western animosity to New England’s long domination of public affairs.
“Well,” she persisted, and he saw that her lips were growing rigid, “I think we need conscience in our politics, whether it’s New England or not.”
Garwood laughed, but it was a bitter laugh. “I’m afraid it wouldn’t win. A conscience, Emily, is about as great an impediment to a practical politician in these days as it is to a successful lawyer.”
“Don’t be cynical, Jerome,” she pleaded. And she thought again.
“Did you promise Hale the post-office for getting you those Tazewell County votes?”
“Of course I did,” said Garwood, “what of it?”
“I don’t like it,” said Emily.
“You don’t?”
“No, dear, I don’t.”
“What would you have me do? Give it to some fellow over there who was against me?”
“N-n-n-no,” she said, “but—”
“But what?” he went on. “You liked it when I told you I was going to—take care of Rankin, didn’t you?”
“That’s different,” she said.
“Oh, a woman’s logic!” he laughed.
“You don’t believe in buying votes, do you, Jerome?” she asked, with her lips still tense so that they showed a little line of white at the edges of their red.
“No.”
“But you do believe in buying them with offices. What’s the post-office at Pekin worth?”
“Oh, eighteen hundred, I reckon.”
“Eighteen hundred—for four years; let’s see—four eights—thirty-two; hum-m-m, four ones—three—seven; seven—thousand, isn’t it?”
“Well, you’re not very good at figures, but you’ve nearly hit it—within two hundred.”
“I never could multiply in my mind,” Emily confessed. “But you wouldn’t think it right to give a man seven thousand dollars in money for a delegation from the county, would you?”
“No,” Garwood answered, “that’s too high. You’re getting into senatorial figures now.” He laughed again.
“Do be serious, Jerome. I don’t see the difference myself.”
“No, a woman couldn’t—women never could understand politics, anyhow.”
“Well, I understand this—that I have learned a good deal about politics, and my ideas have been changed. I used to think that in this country the people arose and elected their best man to represent them, but it seems that the representative elects himself, and then the people—”
“Don’t you think the people out here elected their best man when I went in?” Garwood asked, with an honest laugh in his eyes.
She bent over impulsively and kissed him.
“Yes, I do,” she said, “but I’m speaking generally now.”
“No, you’re not,” Garwood insisted, “women can’t speak generally. It’s always a personal, concrete question with them.”
“Well, you know, Jerome, I’ve had my ideals—in politics, too, since you interested me in politics.”
“You weren’t interested in politics, you were interested in one politician, and that politician was—me.”
“Well, you—you were my ideal, and I thought of you as I thought of Patrick Henry, in the old Virginia House of Burgesses, and—”
“Oh, you haven’t thought deeply enough, my dear. Patrick had his own troubles, believe me, though they didn’t get into history. Did you ever stop to inquire how Patrick got to the House of Burgesses? It was easy enough to make speeches after he was there—that was the easiest part of it—but the getting there, it wasn’t all plain sailing then. First he had the devil’s own time getting on the delegation himself, then after he’d made himself solid, by supporting other men awhile, he had another time rounding up delegations that would support him, and there was many a man in Virginia that day, whose name is lost in darkness, who was ag’in him, and many another who went out and saw the boys and set up the pins and got the right ones on the delegation, who was thinking of some fat job in that same House of Burgesses. And take any other of the white statuesque figures of those heroic times—”
“Oh, no, Jerome, don’t—you’re too much of an iconoclast. Leave me my ideals. There’s the baby!”
She arose at the premonitory whimper that a mother’s ear detected.