It became, too, but a part of her routine to follow political developments through the newspapers, trying to supply the omissions in Jerome’s infrequent letters from the broad columns of the Congressional Record, where, for the benefit of posterity, the national politicians keep a carefully revised record of the things they wish they had said.
If she found Jerome’s name, she read eagerly, and then, dropping the paper in her lap, began once more as in the past, to body forth in imagination the whole scene—Jerome in the full flush of his oratorical excitement, his face red, his eyes blazing, his brow damp with perspiration, his black hair tumbled in the picturesque way she knew, his arm uplifted, perhaps one white cuff a little disarranged.
And then, the other congressmen crowding into the seats about him, at last the “long-continued applause,” which is the only thing never expurgated from that daily magazine of fiction. In this poor way she tried to bear herself nearer to him, to remain by him, but it was not satisfying, and many times after such hopeless fancy, she wept in despair, and hugged her boy to her hungry breast, finding in his warm little body the only actual and substantial comfort her life now knew.
Emily had allowed herself to believe that serious opposition to Jerome’s renomination had disappeared after his victory in his second campaign, but when with other harbingers of spring Sprague came forth in his perennial candidacy, and announcement was made that with the solid delegation of Moultrie at his disposal he would contest with Garwood for the nomination, she realized with a certain sickening at her heart that the same old trial was upon them once more.
A few days later she read that Judge Bailey of Mason—now Speaker of the House at Springfield—was also an avowed candidate for Congress, and she tried to convince herself that Jerome’s chances were thereby favored because of the consequent division of the forces against him, though there were disquieting articles in the Advertiser that would not let her conviction rest.
The Advertiser, as is customary with the opposition organ in a man’s own town, exhibited a meanness in its treatment of Garwood to which it would not have descended in any cause less sacred than that of party-ism, and it now began to speak of Bailey in fulsome praise as if he were the savior of his times, though all its readers knew, and especially did Emily know, for she, doubtless, alone of all those readers, looked so far ahead, that if Bailey were successful before the convention, he would, when the campaign came on, get all the abuse her husband had been receiving.
But Emily had learned that editors, though they appeared at least ordinarily honorable in other ways, could become mendacious when they took up political questions; she had often wondered why it was that, simply because they happened to own newspapers to print them in, they could deliberately write and publish lies they would have scorned to use in discussing men in any of their relations other than political, and, while she could find no explanation except that partisanship inculcates hypocrisy, she tried to be practical and not credit anything she read in the newspapers, especially if it were disagreeable.
Pusey had loyally begun the campaign for Garwood’s reëlection by writing daily editorials in his praise, and these, printed in the Citizen, which the postmaster continued to edit, gave Emily a welcome antidote for the Advertiser’s venom. Pusey published all of Garwood’s speeches in full, and the Advertiser, with the relish of one who discloses state secrets, described the little postmaster as darkly setting up the pins for a county convention which should select a delegation to the congressional convention instructed to use all honorable means to bring about the renomination of Jerome B. Garwood.
The Advertiser’s editor, with a wit that sometimes illumined the recesses of his mind, printed the word “honorable” in quotation marks. This account of Pusey’s secret doings was varied at times by a description of the conferences that were nightly held in the back room of the post-office. The Advertiser pretended to lay bare all the ramifications of the little man’s designs, and as if its duty lay in the direction of its joy, did all it could to confound his politics and frustrate his knavish tricks.
But amid all this confusion, Emily was sure of one thing, that there was another contest, with all its nervous strain, before her; that the months to come, the beautiful months of the spring and summer she had longed for as ardently as an invalid longs for the days when he can be wheeled out into the sun, would bring more abuse and recrimination, more hatred and strife, and she had grown so weary of it all. If Jerome could have become a candidate for some other office it would at least relieve the monotony, but this everlasting repetition of the unchanging sordid struggle to stay in Congress—she wished that he would leave politics altogether; she almost wished in her bitterness, that he would be defeated, if it would bring him home, and make him himself once more.