The 13th District: A Story of a Candidate

by Brand Whitlock

Her heart beat with a new fierce joy. A revelation had come to her, a revelation that had solved her problem in an instant, a thing her reason had not been able to do in long months. She loved him still! There was the solution to her riddle of life! And this, this was the auspicious, the psychological moment, come at last! She waited in agony for him to speak, she leaned forward expectantly, and he half turned his head. Her eyes widened, almost flamed forth, as she felt, to meet his there in the darkness that had suddenly become all light for her. And then he laughed, a little laugh, that came harsh on the stillness, and he said:

“Why of course you do.”

Her eyes fell. He took it then, quite in the old matter of course way! She turned her face aside, sick with disappointment.

But the revelation of that passionate moment had not been lost. It was to her, sure and certain. She could not doubt it. That Jerome had taken it all as he had could make no difference now to her. For the revelation had solved her problem, made her duty clear, and that was enough. The results of the solution had not been those of her heart’s desire, but she could wait for that, for now she beheld the light of a new theory, a new ideal, that quickly glowed into an incandescence that illumined her whole soul. Loving Jerome still, she must live for him still, and this without any regard to what attitude he might take.

Her own happiness was of no importance; it must come, if at all, as a secondary and indirect result. The old ideal and the old ambition had been, after all, but selfish, and so had failed not only of realization, but of that nobler success that comes through failure in the high endeavors of life. She saw it all clearly now; when they had together dreamed of a career, it was not with the idea of being of real help to those about them, but merely of lifting themselves to some place that would distinguish them artificially from those about them. And in time, pondering on her relations to others in the world besides Jerome, she found that what was true of her relation to him was true of her relations to them; that her duty was to live for them as well as for him.

Here was at last a worthy plan of existence, an ideal, not of self, but service. It was simple when she put it to herself in this literal way, so very simple that it was almost trite, yet she had a conviction that it was none the less mightily true. She would not judge Jerome, but love him; she would not expose his faults, but cover them with a mantle of charity; a mantle so wide that it would cover as well all others groping through the world with their sins and their sufferings, their pitiable failures and their lamentable mistakes, and if, even by the slow and loving work of years, she could win Jerome in time to this new ideal that had arisen out of her darkness as the light of an autumn morning without clouds after long days of rain, then, indeed, could his talents worthily be devoted to the people he already thought he loved. Now she had found the faith in life so necessary to her existence. It was a new and better faith, and she could wait long and patiently, if need be, for its complete fulfilment.

Under the stimulus of this new-found faith in life, in an almost pathetic determination to be practical—since the sentimental seemed to be denied her—she decided first that their affairs be placed at once on a secure foundation. So with a touch of her father’s own uncompromising rigor in business matters, she relentlessly cast up all their accounts, and if she winced when the amount of Jerome’s debts stared her in the face, she nevertheless bravely set about paying them off, devoting to the purpose all her own income, now grown small with the periodical return of hard times. And then, last heroism of all, she resolved that they must give up their old home. Jerome demurred a little, but presently acquiesced.

He was interested anew in affairs, he had perhaps had revelations of his own, and if he did not have resolutions, he nevertheless had hopes. The campaign was on again, and, in a spirit of what he called party loyalty—as one who, winning or losing, honorably lives up to all the rules of the game—he was stumping the district, and making speeches for the ticket with as much of his old fire as if he had been on the ticket himself. Long before election his old self-satisfaction had returned, he was as full of splendid schemes as a bumblebee, and if his disinterestedness was not so apparent after election, when he felt that his chances of being appointed to a territorial judgeship were increasing more and more as the short session of Congress drew near, it may have been discovered in the fact that, as an alternative, he had revived his old project of going to Chicago to practise law. If he got the territorial judgeship, they would have to move West; in either event, he said, it did not matter much where they lived for the time being. He thought that if they went to Chicago he might go to Congress from some of the Chicago districts—it was not hard to get into politics there. But Emily only smiled.

She found through Morton, a tenant for the old home. She sent away the maids, even the nurse, for whom the children cried, and Jasper, who cried himself, until his very despair drove him to refuse to accept the discharge at all. And then she found a smaller house.

The last load of furniture had rumbled away in a covered van that afternoon; as the early twilight came she gave a final look into the empty corners of the old home, picking up little things that had been overlooked, and then, with an ache at the heart for its emptiness and loneliness, she bade it farewell. The moving had been an ordeal. She had had all the care of it, though Jerome’s mother had helped, but beyond this was the spiritual agony of coming across old things she had not seen for years, things of her childhood, things of her girlhood; the dress she had worn when first she met Jerome—he had told her to preserve it, though he did not know where it was—things, too, of her mother’s—a trying time for a soul already so heavily laden.