Whenever in Grand Prairie they discuss Jerry Garwood’s oratory, they shake their heads and say that he made the speech of his life that last night before election.
XIX
IT was election night in Chicago and already a great crowd thronged the Webster House, a crowd, as was perhaps fitting in a land where the avocation of every man is governing, composed wholly of men, although in one corner of the balcony that ran around the rotunda of the old hotel there were several women. The splendor that had been produced in their dress by the competition of a public dining-room, proclaimed them as regular boarders, and as an additional evidence of their lot in life, they had that air of detachment from their husbands which most hotel ladies soon or late come to wear. As they leaned over the balcony, their jewels and teeth and white hands flashed nervously, as if they shared the excitement of the crowd below. For them, as it might for any one, the great crowd possessed a never failing interest. Looking down they saw it continually in uneasy motion like a herd of milling cattle. Here and there were nucleated groups of men engaged in belated political argument or in hedging political bets, here and there some tired outcast glad of the temporary warmth and light, shivered in ragged summer garments that the long day’s rain had drenched, here and there some messenger boy dodged along, here and there some reporter elbowed his way through the crowd, and here and [Pg 168]there a wide track was marked by the more important progress of some politician. Over the head of the crowd hung a stratus of tobacco smoke, and all the while arose a multitudinous voice, laughing, swearing, cheering. Constantly arms were flung into the air, and sometimes a hat went spinning up to the dark skylight on which a November rain endlessly drummed.
Up the wide staircase and down the hall, carpeted with canvas ever since the campaign opened, men trailed their dripping umbrellas, passing in and out of the suite of parlors where the state central committee had its headquarters. The outer rooms were crowded with men, their garments steaming from the rain, their faces dripping with perspiration, their dirty fingers holding chewed cigars. Some of them were drunk and quarrelsome, and now and then the policeman who leaned against the doors spoke confidentially to these, deprecating the trouble he could so easily bring upon them. The desk of the secretary was closed and wore an air of having been closed finally. On the floor were piles of blank nominating petitions that never would be used, bundles of newspapers that never would be read, and heaps of campaign literature that never would be distributed. In a corner where three or four sample torches stood was a pile of lithographs, and from them the faces of candidates, as if they still posed before the people, looked out with the same solemn expressions they had worn for the campaign. Outside, from a wire that was stretched to the building on the opposite side of the street, the big campaign banner could be heard booming in the wind.
In the innermost of the committee’s apartments only a few men had been admitted, men who that year, at least, were the managers of the party’s policies in the state. In this room was Garwood. He had voted early that morning and had then taken a train for Chicago, in order to be in the very center of the night’s excitement.
As he sat there in a deep leather chair he could hear the ring of cab-horses’ hoofs on the glistening cobble stones of the street below; the shouts of election night, now and then the blare of a tin horn. From Washington Street, two blocks away, a cheer, mellowed pleasantly by the distance, came from the crowd before the newspaper offices, where the returns were being flashed upon screens, and from below always ascended that endless roar. From the entresol a deep voice was reading the bulletins to the multitude in the rotunda. Garwood caught snatches of what the voice was reading:
“Four hundred and twenty-nine precincts in Brooklyn and Kings County show net gains—”
Once he heard the inevitable news that Mississippi had gone overwhelmingly Democratic, and Vermont overwhelmingly Republican, and then the quadrennial laugh with which these foregone conclusions are received and the quadrennial cheers with which partisanship dutifully celebrates them. But, though he heard, he was scarcely conscious of it all; it sounded far away to him and strange. His thoughts lay too deep for these objective manifestations. The crisis of his life, he felt, had come. He was with men who like himself were candidates, or else the managers of candidates, and yet he felt that the result of the election meant more to him than it did to them.
He had risked all on this campaign; he had abandoned his practice, staked his reputation, spent all his money, gone in debt, all he was or had was involved—Emily with the rest. He felt that if he were defeated she would be lost to him. He looked at Colonel Warfield, the chairman of the state executive committee, sitting at the table in the center of the room, a pad of paper before him, idly turning a pencil over and over in his fingers as he considered the import of the latest returns. Garwood wondered if he were really as calm as he appeared. He looked at the others in the room, laughing and joking as they were—no, it could not matter to them as it did to him; they had position, money, influence; politics was to them a kind of recreation. They lolled in chairs, smoking at their ease, not caring to anticipate the strain of the long, uncertain hours of the night, but content to sit in silence with their heads thrown back, trying to blow rings of smoke to the ceiling. Once Parrish said: