XVIII
THE August sun was ripening the corn, and in some of the more fertile fields the slender stalks already nodded their young plumes in the mid-summer heat that quivered over the prairies. It was too much to expect of politicians that they work in such weather, and they were loath to begin the campaign, yet it was necessary to make the first lazy preparations for the heavy work that would be upon them when the frost should begin to hint of coming fall.
Garwood was understood to be resting at home, and it was rumored that he would go away for a while and recuperate in the East, where, as it appears to men in the West, there is rest for the weary. He had in reality the natural reluctance to beginning a long contemplated and difficult task that the lesser politicians felt, though he had so much more at stake than they. Yet he would not have liked the boys to be as apathetic as he, and in a dim recognition of this fact he bestirred himself one day and went down to see Pusey. Thereupon Pusey began to write in his paper of the dangers of apathy and over-confidence, rallying the party by sternly telling it that the mere fact of its dominance in the Thirteenth District did not justify its lay members in staying at home and trusting to others to pull it through. This effort satisfied Garwood for a time, and he loafed on through August and then said to Rankin:
“Oh, wait till the middle of September, and then give them six weeks of a rattling fire all along the line.”
“Yes,” said Rankin, “we don’t want to tap our enthusi’sm too soon, an’ have it give out on us the way ol’ Bromley’s bar’l did. Gosh! Didn’t he freeze up them last two weeks, though!”
They laughed at the pleasing memories of it.
“Damned if I didn’t like that campaign,” Rankin went on. “Never enjoyed one more’n my life, though I’ve had some hot ones in my time. That story, now, that Pusey printed ’bout you—’member how skeered we was? An’ you ’member them things o’ Bromley’s—what was they?—kind o’ night shirts, now—heh?—oh, yes! Well, sir, you’d ought to heerd the kids I’d planted in the gallery that night when Bromley come on to the stage.” And Rankin reared back, and roared and slapped his thigh. “By the way, what’s come o’ Bromley? I never hear o’ him any more, do you?”
“Oh, yes,” said Garwood, with his large air of a knowledge of affairs, and then, too, with the pride of a man who doesn’t wish his opponent belittled, especially after he has defeated that opponent. “I hear of him frequently. He’s general counsel for his road now, and lives in Chicago.”
“Oh, yes, believe I did hear somethin’ o’ that,” said Rankin, nodding his head. “He went up there same’s all the rest o’ the judges from the country does. They get elected to the County Court down here, which gives them the title o’ judge, then when they come off, an’ have to go to work again, they go up to Chicago an’ practise on the title. After they’ve been there ’bout two years people begin to b’lieve they ’as judges o’ the Supreme Court.” Rankin paused in his philosophizing, and then resumed, quite seriously: “Don’t know but what Bromley give you a better run at that than this here young Wetherby ’ill do.”
“Do you know him?”
“Oh, I’ve seen him onct or twict over’t Sullivan. He’s just a young lawyer, an’ he knows ’at if the’ ’as any chanct o’ his winnin’ he’d never been nominated.”
September came, but the weather remained as hot as ever. Rankin declared that the mere prospect of cool weather held out by the almanac made him feel better, though he believed that the almanac ought to be revised, for he was certain the seasons were changing in Illinois. As a boy he had always gone skating on Thanksgiving, he said, but now the cold weather never came until after New Year’s. And he remembered, too, that the girls always wore white dresses and gave a May-pole dance on the first day of May. “But nowadays,” he explained, “they’ll have to hop roun’ in Galway overcoats if they wanted to celebrate that day, an’ as fer summer—well, it keeps hotter’n the hinges o’ hell right up to November, But politics is politics, an’ I must be gettin’ a move on me.”
Rankin roused at last, and called a meeting of the congressional committee. The members, newly chosen at the Pekin convention, came to Grand Prairie and met in the office of the county treasurer, and there, under the blazing gas jets and with the blinds closed, they began to organize Garwood’s campaign.
Rankin and Pusey had long ago shaken hands, Garwood standing by with the beatific glow of the peacemaker, though all the while the look in Rankin’s eyes was hard as ever, and Pusey’s smirk was unchanged. Pusey attended the meeting of the congressional committee, even if he was not a member, and the others were pleasantly stimulated by the prospect of a disagreement between him and Rankin. But the editor maintained a perfect silence the whole evening, never vouchsafing one suggestion, but acquiescing in all that was done, if not by voting, which would have been impertinent, at least by respectfully nodding his head.
And if, later, when the county central committee, of which Pusey was now the chairman, met, Rankin did not return his call, as it were, by reciprocally attending the meeting, he at least found business that took him out of town, over to Mason County, and thereby deprived the alert editor of the Advertiser of the ground work of a story that would have served him for every dull hour of an unusually dull campaign. It was perhaps well for Garwood, considering the strained relations between his two chief supporters, that this was a dull campaign. He found it much less trying than the first. There was not so much for him to do, and what there was he could enjoy in a more leisurely manner. It was the off year, in which the people, unable to work themselves up to the pitch of excitement required of them in presidential years, leave politics to the politicians even more than they ordinarily do. The stripling from Moultrie County who was running against Garwood seemed far beneath his notice, except when he chose in his speeches to patronize him. His own acquaintance had grown wider, there were many to welcome him everywhere he went, and they liked the distinction of knowing their congressman and of calling him “Jerry.” Garwood loved to bask in their smiles, to revel in the sensation of personal popularity, and it became more and more easy to convince himself that he was a genuine man of the people. There was another new feature in this campaign that he enjoyed. He was enabled in his speeches to speak familiarly of Washington, of things that were done and said in the House, and to relate personal anecdotes of noted men, to whom it was apparent he could talk in a free colloquial way, that were almost as delightful to his auditors as to himself.
“I suppose, now that it is all over,” he would say, “that I betray no confidence in telling you that one afternoon when I had gone over to the White House and was waiting there in the ante-chamber to see our great president, that he spied me among the others—Senator Ames was there with me—and, coming over to where we stood, said: ‘Jerry, you’re just the fellow I wanted to see—’”
It was not necessary that year for him to defend his own record. He could submerge his political individuality into that of the responsible administration and make his speeches, like all the other speeches delivered that fall, or any fall, by men striving to retain seats in Congress, mere efforts to explain why Congress had not done what the platform of two years before promised it would do.
As a congressman, too, he could enjoy the importance of giving his time to the state committee, and of delivering speeches in other districts in Illinois, and once he even went beyond the borders of his own state, and journeyed over into Ohio, where he spoke in the Dayton District for his friend Whiteside, who sat beside him in the House. This experience he relished more than all the others, for the Dayton people, not sure of his exact position among public men, determined to make no mistake, and so accorded him all the honors a prophet may expect away from his own country.
On election night he found that he had been reëlected, though the returns from Moultrie County showed a falling off in his majority, as did those from his own county. But then, as Rankin said in congratulating Emily, after they had sat up until midnight in Harkness’s parlors receiving the returns:
“A reduced majority draws the salary just as well as any.”