“You’ll have to give it to ’em, Jerry, ’fore they’ll let you go.”
And he led the way up the stairs toward the parlor. Garwood went after him, with the mayor and a self-appointed committee following, and in another minute he had stepped out on the balcony, and bared his head to the breeze that was blowing warm off the prairie. As he stood there, erect and calm, with the little wind loosening the locks over his forehead, his lips compressed and white, his right hand in the breast of his coat, after the fashion of all our orators, many in the crowd for the first time were conscious of how like a congressman this young fellow really looked. They began to celebrate the discovery by another cheer, but Garwood drew his hand from the bosom of his coat and raised it toward them. Instantly a warning “Sh!” ran through the whole concourse, the few wagons rattling by halted suddenly, and a hush fell. Garwood’s eye swept the old familiar square, his face flushed, his heart beat high, but outwardly he was calm, as he affected the impressive pause that adds so much to oratory. And then he began with studied simplicity.
“My friends,” he said, in a voice that seemed low, but which carried in the evening air across the square, “and fellow citizens: I am profoundly touched by this welcome. Words are inadequate to express, fittingly, how much it means to me. For thirty years I have gone in and out among you, as a boy and as a man, and it has always seemed to me that the highest honor I could achieve in life would be found in your respect, your confidence, if possible, your love. Your wishes and your welfare have ever been my first and highest thought. I know not what responsibilities may await me in the future, but whether they be small and light or great and heavy, still my wish and purpose shall remain the same—to serve you, well and faithfully; whatever they may be, I know that nothing can ever bring to my heart the deep gratitude or fill me with the sweet satisfaction this magnificent welcome affords.
“You must not expect a speech from me this evening. At a later day and at some more convenient and appropriate season, I shall address you upon the issues of the approaching campaign, but I would not, even if I were physically able to do so, intrude partisan considerations upon you in this hour. But I can not let you go away without the assurance that I am deeply sensible of the great honor you do me. With a sincerity wholly unfeigned I thank you for it. May God bless you all, may you prosper in your basket and your store and—” the speaker’s eye wandered far away to the ragged edges of the crowd—“thanking you again and again, I bid you good night.”
A cheer promptly arose, and Garwood bowed himself backward through the window. Rankin, standing near him, laid his hand on the shoulder of the mayor.
“John,” he said to that executive, “he’ll do.”
Then the hand-shaking and the congratulations began again. Garwood stood there, at times passing over his brow the handkerchief he held in his left hand, while he gave to the men who passed by him a right hand that was red and swollen and beginning to ache. And outside, the crowd, feeling, when its American passion for speech-making was satisfied, that it had had its due, went away, leaving the square deserted.
II
THE mother of the new candidate for Congress in the Thirteenth District expressed her pride in her son’s achievement by cooking for him that night, with her own hands, a supper of the things he most liked to eat, and while the candidate consumed the supper with a gusto that breathed its ultimate sigh in the comfortable sense of repletion with which he pushed back his chair, his appreciation ended there, and half an hour later he left his mother to the usual loneliness of her widowed life. Sangamon Avenue, where the self-elected better element of Grand Prairie had gathered to enjoy the envy of the lower classes, stretched away under its graceful shade-trees in aristocratic leisure. The darkness of a summer evening rolled under the elms and oaks, and blurred the outlines of the tall chimneys and peaked roofs which a new architect coming from the East had lately given to the houses of the prosperous. Here and there a strip of cool and open lawn, each blade of its carefully mown blue-grass threading beads of dew, sparkled in the white light of the arc lamps that hung at the street crossings. On the wide verandas which were shrouded in the common darkness, white forms could be seen indistinctly, rocking back and forth, and the murmur of voices could be heard, in bland and desultory interchange of the banalities [Pg 19]of village life. The avenue had been laid an inch deep in mud by the garden hose, which might have been seen in the last hours of the day, united in a common effort to subdue the dust that puffed in little white clouds as Grand Prairie’s horses stumbled along. Now and then some surrey, the spokes of its wheels glistening in the electric light, went squeaking leisurely by as some family solemnly enjoyed its evening drive; now and then some young man, his cigarette glowing into a spark of life and then dying away, loitered down town. The only other life was represented by the myriads of insects feverishly rising and falling in clouds about the arc lamps, or some silent bat describing vast circles in the darkness, and at intervals swinging into the light on membranous wings to snatch her evening meal, bite by bite, from that mass of strenuous, purposeless animal life.