Marley had taken no part in the campaign, though Wade Powell wished him to, and suggested every now and then that he speak at some of the meetings that were being held in the country schoolhouses. Powell said it would be good practice for him in a profession where so much talking has to be done, and he found other reasons why Marley should do this, as that it would extend his acquaintance, and give him a standing with the party; but, though Marley was always promising, he was always postponing; the thought of standing up and speaking to the vast audiences his imagination was able to crowd into a little school-room filled him with fear, and he never could bring himself to consent to any definite time. Besides this, he could not find an evening he was willing to spend away from Lavinia.
When election was over, he expected that he would hear from Carman, but he had no word from him. Several times he was on the point of mentioning the subject to Wade Powell, but somehow, with a reticence for which he reproached himself, he could not bring himself to do it. He watched the papers closely, but he found it quite as hard to find in them any information about Carman as on any other subject, except, possibly, the banal personalities of the town as they related themselves to the coming and going of the trains.
But at last, on the day it had occurred to the reporter to chronicle the fact that Carman had been inducted into office, the little item struck Marley sadly; he felt a sense of detachment from Carman; he could not altogether realize that intimate relationship to Carman in his new official position that he felt belonged to one who was to be Carman’s deputy. In his imagination he saw Carman shambling about in the dingy room where the county clerk kept the records of the court, his knees unhinging loosely at each step, his shoulders bent, his hands in his trousers pockets, his right eye squinting here and there observantly, the left fixed, impervious to light and shadow, to all that was going on in the world. He wondered if Carman, as he looked about, had been thinking in any wise of him or had seen him as a part of the place where his life was to be lived for the next three years.
Marley read the paper at supper time; in the evening he went to see Lavinia. She too had read the paper.
“I know,” she said simply, and he was grateful for her quick intuition. “Have you seen him?”
“No.”
“Are you going to?”
“Would you?”
“Why, certainly, at once.”
Marley went to the Court House the first thing in the morning. He feared he might have arrived too early, but Carman had the virtue that goes farther perhaps than any other in the affections and approval of men, he rose early. He had been at his office since long before seven o’clock.