“It’s all we can do, now,” said Lambert.
Foerder went outside. The anteroom was deserted. The politicians came no more. He would sit down, then instantly get up, walk back and forth; his eyebrows knitting in his scowl, his lips twitching in that mirthless smile. And he smoked cigarette after cigarette. He did this for an hour.
Along toward midnight he heard a step. Flying to the door, he saw Carroll, dragging down the hall with the step of defeat and exhaustion. The boy’s hair was matted under his hat, his eyes were dull, sunken, black as night.
“Licked,” he said, waving his hands with a gesture of despair, as if the world had come to an end. Foerder went inside, leaving Carroll to sink into the first chair. But a moment later the physician opened the white door, and beckoned with his head. The motion was conclusive, final. He held the door ajar, and Carroll entered. The useless drugs had been pushed aside. The room was filled with the strange silence, the odor of death. Lambert stood at the window, looking out into the darkness. The nurse stood by the bed, waiting to perform her last office for the dying man.
Carroll timidly approached and looked down at the long form, scarcely outlined by the sheet, at the rigid head, at the great, waxen brow, at the little blue spheres formed by the closed eyelids, at the mouth slightly open beneath the white mustache with its tinge of yellow. Doctor Foerder was pressing his fingers to the colonel’s wrist. The breathing had lost all human quality, it was but a series of automatic gasps, which, it seemed, would never end. Finally they grew shorter, at last they ceased, there was one faint inspiration, and Doctor Foerder, laying the thin old hand down upon the colonel’s breast, said:
“It’s all over.”
There was silence for a whole minute. Then Doctor Lambert tossed up the window, and Carroll heard, in the street below, a crowd shuffling over the sidewalk, a crowd coming, as he knew, from the convention in Italia Hall. And suddenly from the crowd arose a raucous, drunken yell:
“Hurrah for Warren!”
REFORM IN THE FIRST
THE senatorial convention in the First District was to convene at ten o’clock, in a dingy little hall in lower Clark Street, lighted by windows so long unwashed that they looked like ground glass. From the chandeliers, black and sticky with dead flies, shreds of tissue paper fluttered, relics of some boisterous fête an Italian society had given there long ago. The floor was damp in arabesque wrought by a sprinkling-can, for the janitor had sprayed water there to lay the dust he was too indifferent to remove. Perhaps a hundred chairs were set in amphitheatrical order, and before them stood a kitchen table, on which was a white water pitcher, flanked by a glass, thickened by various sedimentary deposits within.