“To hell with order!” bawled some one from the First Ward delegation.
“On this ballot,” Muldoon was calling, “there were sixty-nine votes cast; necessary to a choice, thirty-five. James P. Conway has received forty votes; John W. Underwood, twenty-nine, and George W. Simmons”—he paused, as if to decipher the vote—“none. James P. Conway, having received the necessary number of votes, is therefore declared the nominee of this convention.”
Underwood was stunned. He staggered through the horrible uproar toward the door. He longed for the air outside, even the heavy air of lower Clark street, where the people surged along under the wild, dazzling lights, in two opposite, ever-passing processions. His head reeled. He lost the sense of things, the voices about him seemed far away and vague, he felt himself detached, as it were, from all that had gone before. But as he pressed his way through the crowd that blocked the entrance, and plunged toward the stairs, he saw Baldwin, mopping the red band on his white brow. Baldwin recognized him, and said, with his everlasting smile:
“Sorry, my boy—next time!”
MALACHI NOLAN
MALACHI NOLAN sat by the roll-top desk in the front window of his saloon. The desk was unopened, for Malachi seldom had occasion to use it. The only letters he ever wrote were to whisky houses in Peoria or Louisville, and then the process was a painful one. His mighty haunches completely filled the chair, which, in turn, completely filled the space railed off in front of the partition that screened the bar. The saloon was in a basement in Dearborn Street, and, to get to it, you had to go down four stone steps, hollowed by countless feet in the long years he had kept there. Outside, over the door, a long, black sign bore his simple device—M. Nolan.
Malachi Nolan sat with his back to the window. His cropped gray hair showed his red scalp, the hard red skin on his face was closely shaven and shone on the points of his heavy jaw. In the round hole at the corner of his broad mouth was one of the long succession of cigars that had worn away the hole, sending up its perpetual incense. He never removed the cigar and seldom puffed it. It seemed to smoke of its own volition, and lasted a long time. When it consumed itself, Malachi replaced it with another. No one had ever seen him without a cigar in that hole at the side of his mouth. When he moved his thin lips to speak the cigar would stand out rigidly between his teeth. He spoke with his teeth clenched. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and his shirt was clean and fresh, for he changed his linen daily, just as he shaved himself, relentlessly, every morning with a dull razor. On his glossy shirt front a great diamond, four carats in weight, sparkled leisurely as his enormous chest slowly rose and fell with his heavy breathing. This diamond was the central jewel of his alderman’s gold star, presented by constituents years before. The setting was so contrived that the stone could be unscrewed and made to serve as a stud. Malachi seldom wore the star, unless he went to a fire, or to a prize-fight across the Indiana line, or to the Olympic Theater, or got drunk.
As he sat there in his warm saloon on this raw March morning, Malachi read his paper, read it carefully and slowly, first the front page, column after column, then the second page, and so on, methodically, through all the pages, except the editorials, which he skipped. His lips moved slightly as he read, for he had to pronounce the words to himself in order to get their full meaning. He read his paper thus every morning of his life, and his paper was all he ever did read.
Malachi sat this morning, as on every other morning of the year, heavy, imponderable and solemn. The hour was ten o’clock. It was too early for business to begin in that saloon, so that the old bartender, who had been with Malachi for fifteen years, sat with his apron in his lap, against the whisky barrels that reached in rows from the slot machine back to the wooden stalls where many a campaign in the city council had been planned and its victory celebrated. The bartender was likewise reading a paper, the sporting news chiefly claiming his attention. By noon, aldermen and city hall employees would begin to drop in, and the place would liven up, but now the monotonous ticking of the Western Union clock on the wall could be heard all over the long room, and the big Maltese cat snoozed lazily at one end of the bar.
Malachi was not feeling as well as usual this morning, though his exterior was as clean and calm as ever. A fever burned beneath his great waistcoat, and on coming down he had drunk a bottle of mineral water. The truth is, that the night before, Malachi had so far departed from the habit of his methodical life as to drink much whisky, a thing he had not done for years, ever since the occasion, in fact, when celebrating a reëlection to the council, he had drunk so much that he was constrained to enter a barber shop in State Street, and terrorize the barbers by sticking all the razors in the floor, like a juggler he had seen playing with knives in a theater. The gang had been in the saloon until three o’clock that morning. They had just passed an ordinance granting a new franchise to the Metropolitan Motor Company, and in one of the walnut stalls the bundle had been cut, as the phrase is. The gang had grown so hilarious, as it always did on such occasions, that it had proposed a song by Malachi. Now, in his younger days, Malachi had been a great lad for song, and many a shindig in Bridgeport had he gladdened with his voice, but in the latter years it was seldom that he could be induced to exercise it. He would always plead his age and his flesh, and such was the solemnity of manner that had grown upon him with the years, that men in their sober hours never had the temerity to suggest anything so unbecoming his dignity. But on this night, heated by wine, and feeling, though they did not of course analyze the feeling, that so many improprieties had been committed that one more could not noticeably swell the score, they had been emboldened to demand a song. Malachi, standing by his own bar in his long frock coat and square-crowned stiff hat, twiddling his whisky glass just as if he were a casual visitor there, had resolutely shaken his head. But at two o’clock in the morning he had suddenly ordered the drinks for the house, and then, when the gang had given over all hope of his singing, save, perhaps, one or two who, deeper in their cups than the rest, had monotonously persisted in the invitation, he had spontaneously burst forth: