In their several echoes the secretary and staff conveyed that they too had known alarm.
"Fact is, we bank on you to mesmerize the rural vote," put in Handsome
Ludlow, jocosely. "You'll work your passage all right, all right."
The jest carried a covert truth. They did count on Shelby, and Shelby did work his passage in sober earnest. The governor who sought reëlection was a mediocrity of means—a barrel, as the phrase goes—whose function in campaigning was to draw checks, shed radiance on cheering crowds, and make way for speakers who had something to utter besides hems and haws. No one could be less fitted for the five-minute give-and-take talks from the rear platform than this amiable figurehead, and no one of his company was so much at home in it as Shelby, on whom the brunt swiftly fell. The senator, the staff officials, and even the poor governor were passable in the deliberate evening meetings for which they were billed in this town and that—though here, too, Shelby frequently snatched the honors; but the heady victory over the chaffing, brawling, even missile-throwing packs surging round the car wheels and up the steps, was always his and his alone. Suggested to fill an unexpected vacancy, he was quick to appreciate that chance, and the Boss had given him the opportunity of his life; and with an eye on another campaign two years hence, and with the heartening thought that by now the State Committee's dollars were implanting convictions throughout the Demijohn District's fertile soil, he put forth the impetuous best that was in him.
Nor was Shelby's best contemptible. The charge up the canal counties had not measured half its course before the increasing crowds, the space given his doings by the correspondents whose good graces he seduously [Transcriber's note: sedulously?] cultivated, the deference of his Excellency and his chameleon staff, all told him that the glory of what the party organs courteously styled the "governor's brilliant dash" was his and not the governor's.
"What we didn't count on," observed Handsome Ludlow, with a touch of envy, "was campaigning with a whirlwind."
CHAPTER XI
So Shelby came in triumph to his own people, the governor at his chariot wheel, and fought the last stubborn week of his campaign. His mail was now burdened with invitations to speak, but he made few speeches.
"The voter a speech will influence has made up his mind," he said to Bowers. "The heart-to-heart talk is the trump card of the eleventh hour."
To play this card required a prodigious amount of travelling about the district; and between these activities and the speaking engagements he was in promise bound to fulfil, Shelby saw little or nothing of New Babylon till midnight of Saturday, which was the virtual end of the canvass. Seen again, as he viewed it now, the town would look raw and provincial despite patriotic throes of self-deception. On moonlit nights the New Babylon Electric Light and Power Company hoarded its energies, and an inky pall accordingly lay over the muddy streets which the pale melon rind in the clouded zenith did nothing to dissipate. The contrast between this niggardliness and the midnight brilliance of up-town Broadway was inevitable, and the jolting Tuscarora House free 'bus came readily into unflattering comparison with a certain rubber-tired hansom cab. Naturally midnight, a jaded body, and the Tuscarora House free 'bus might well jaundice any scene; but the returning native recognized these as accidents merely in the phenomenon of his changed vision.
The hotel bar-room was boisterous with the usual Saturday night gathering of the set which in its innocence supposed itself fast, and the maturer poker crowd, Shelby's own cronies, was in protracted session elsewhere in the building; but he managed to evade them all and lock himself in his ugly room. For some sophisticated weeks he had suspected the household gods here assembled to have feet of clay. Now he knew it; but with the feeling that the place was a temporary husk at best, he avoided a too particular inventory of the pseudo-marble clock, the vases of pampas grass, the album, and the garish pictures against their background of pink roses blushing in a terra-cotta field, and ran drowsily over the little pile of accumulated mail.