“Good night, Gage.”
That was all. Towards morning Gage went to bed. He had been drinking other people’s whisky and he was ill enough to suspect it had not been good stuff.
II
He did not go to the great Auditorium until the next afternoon. It took some time to get himself into shape. The heat had begun, heat which settled thickly on the city for three days and played its own part in making possible agreements and compromises. By noon the smart look, the brisk look had gone from everything and everybody and the sticky battle with the weather had begun. Gage had met some men from his own part of the country and they entered the great hall where the banners hung limp from the ceiling and the delegates were already coming back to their places after the noon recess. Gage did not look for his wife but after a while he saw her—as usual looking the mistress of herself. His head was hot and thick and he hated her for the fine mastery of her health and beauty. He wanted to see her in tears—prostrate—and because he knew his desire was ugly he slipped down in his own self-respect, which already was becoming such a frail reed to cling to.
All that day he did not go near her. He watched her furtively sometimes while he was in the auditorium but most of the time he spent with other men in hotel rooms which grew hotter in spite of the efforts of electric fans and all the time the whisky which he drank made his brain hot and seething with misconceptions and desires and hatreds.
By the afternoon of the second day it had settled down to an endurance meeting.
Watching the restless, heated crowd, going through the same old formalities, Gage wondered whether Helen was aware now what kind of game this was she had chosen to sit in—whether the farce of it was clear. He did not wonder clearly. It was a kind of vindictive spite which pricked a muddled brain.
He had not intend to be there when she spoke but in the end he stayed. He heard the round commonplace phrases of the man who was nominating the candidate she was working for—a good man, as Gage admitted—better caliber than most, but without a ghost of a show for nomination. He listened with irritation to the outburst of applause. Then he saw his wife before the great crowd. It seemed quite unreal.
He had not guessed her voice would carry like that. He had not known she would show up like that. She came like a breath of cool air into that heated place. In her blue linen gown and white feather hat she looked cool, fresh, immaculate. When she spoke they listened to her and for a few minutes Gage caught himself listening eagerly. She was talking well. No nonsense. It was to the point. Just then he heard a man behind him.
“Some looker, isn’t she? That’s the kind of dames we ought to have in politics all right.”