XIX
IT was election night in Chicago and already a great crowd thronged the Webster House, a crowd, as was perhaps fitting in a land where the avocation of every man is governing, composed wholly of men, although in one corner of the balcony that ran around the rotunda of the old hotel there were several women. The splendor that had been produced in their dress by the competition of a public dining-room, proclaimed them as regular boarders, and as an additional evidence of their lot in life, they had that air of detachment from their husbands which most hotel ladies soon or late come to wear. As they leaned over the balcony, their jewels and teeth and white hands flashed nervously, as if they shared the excitement of the crowd below. For them, as it might for any one, the great crowd possessed a never failing interest. Looking down they saw it continually in uneasy motion like a herd of milling cattle. Here and there were nucleated groups of men engaged in belated political argument or in hedging political bets, here and there some tired outcast glad of the temporary warmth and light, shivered in ragged summer garments that the long day’s rain had drenched, here and there some messenger boy dodged along, here and there some reporter elbowed his way through the crowd, and here and[Pg 168]there a wide track was marked by the more important progress of some politician. Over the head of the crowd hung a stratus of tobacco smoke, and all the while arose a multitudinous voice, laughing, swearing, cheering. Constantly arms were flung into the air, and sometimes a hat went spinning up to the dark skylight on which a November rain endlessly drummed.
Up the wide staircase and down the hall, carpeted with canvas ever since the campaign opened, men trailed their dripping umbrellas, passing in and out of the suite of parlors where the state central committee had its headquarters. The outer rooms were crowded with men, their garments steaming from the rain, their faces dripping with perspiration, their dirty fingers holding chewed cigars. Some of them were drunk and quarrelsome, and now and then the policeman who leaned against the doors spoke confidentially to these, deprecating the trouble he could so easily bring upon them. The desk of the secretary was closed and wore an air of having been closed finally. On the floor were piles of blank nominating petitions that never would be used, bundles of newspapers that never would be read, and heaps of campaign literature that never would be distributed. In a corner where three or four sample torches stood was a pile of lithographs, and from them the faces of candidates, as if they still posed before the people, looked out with the same solemn expressions they had worn for the campaign. Outside, from a wire that was stretched to the buildingon the opposite side of the street, the big campaign banner could be heard booming in the wind.
In the innermost of the committee’s apartments only a few men had been admitted, men who that year, at least, were the managers of the party’s policies in the state. In this room was Garwood. He had voted early that morning and had then taken a train for Chicago, in order to be in the very center of the night’s excitement.
As he sat there in a deep leather chair he could hear the ring of cab-horses’ hoofs on the glistening cobble stones of the street below; the shouts of election night, now and then the blare of a tin horn. From Washington Street, two blocks away, a cheer, mellowed pleasantly by the distance, came from the crowd before the newspaper offices, where the returns were being flashed upon screens, and from below always ascended that endless roar. From the entresol a deep voice was reading the bulletins to the multitude in the rotunda. Garwood caught snatches of what the voice was reading:
“Four hundred and twenty-nine precincts in Brooklyn and Kings County show net gains—”
Once he heard the inevitable news that Mississippi had gone overwhelmingly Democratic, and Vermont overwhelmingly Republican, and then the quadrennial laugh with which these foregone conclusions are received and the quadrennial cheers with which partisanship dutifully celebrates them. But, though he heard, he was scarcely conscious of it all; it sounded far away to him and strange. His thoughts lay too deep for these objective manifestations.The crisis of his life, he felt, had come. He was with men who like himself were candidates, or else the managers of candidates, and yet he felt that the result of the election meant more to him than it did to them.
He had risked all on this campaign; he had abandoned his practice, staked his reputation, spent all his money, gone in debt, all he was or had was involved—Emily with the rest. He felt that if he were defeated she would be lost to him. He looked at Colonel Warfield, the chairman of the state executive committee, sitting at the table in the center of the room, a pad of paper before him, idly turning a pencil over and over in his fingers as he considered the import of the latest returns. Garwood wondered if he were really as calm as he appeared. He looked at the others in the room, laughing and joking as they were—no, it could not matter to them as it did to him; they had position, money, influence; politics was to them a kind of recreation. They lolled in chairs, smoking at their ease, not caring to anticipate the strain of the long, uncertain hours of the night, but content to sit in silence with their heads thrown back, trying to blow rings of smoke to the ceiling. Once Parrish said:
“It’s like waiting for a jury, ain’t it?”
“Yes,” said some one else, “but, thank God, this is a jury that can’t hang.”
“Maybe not,” said old General Williams, who had been in Congress for twenty years, representing a safe district that he considered his by divineright, “but it can stay out a long time. I remember, once—”
The danger of Williams’s reminiscence was averted by the click of the telegraph instrument. The operator seized his stylus and began to write rapidly. Warfield took the new bulletin from the telegrapher’s outstretched hand and studied it with knitted brows. He read it aloud finally, and then commented:
“If that gain keeps up in New York he’ll come down to Harlem bridge with less than seventy thousand. It’ll give us the state and the presidency.”
He laid his pencil down and lighted a cigar, but he did not relax his interest.
“Here’s something,” he said a moment later, spreading a piece of yellow flimsy over a white sheet, “here’s one from Springfield; says returns from thirty counties show net gains over two years ago of eleven per cent. Let’s see—‘In these counties,’ he read, ‘Chatham polls forty-three thousand one hundred and seventy-nine. Norton, for state treasurer, carried the same counties two years ago by seventeen thousand two hundred and thirty-six.’”
The men in the room stirred with a pleasing excitement. Several of them began to talk again, but the colonel said rather peremptorily:
“Wait! Here’s some West Side news,”—Newman, who was standing for the Fourth Congressional District, arose as the chairman read:
“Three of the five wards comprising the FourthCongressional District, the Eighth, the Ninth, and the Nineteenth, give Newman eleven thousand nine hundred and thirty-eight, Kenyon five thousand six hundred and forty-seven.”
Newman drew a long, full breath, and smiled complacently.
“How will the other wards go, John?” asked Parrish.
“Oh, they’re all right. I carried the Eleventh by a hundred and fifty-six two years ago,” said Newman, speaking with the accuracy with which a man remembers his own majorities, “and lost the Twelfth by sixteen ninety-four, but I can give him both of them and beat him out.”
Garwood envied him keenly.
The operator was writing furiously now, and kept his left arm, with a despatch dangling in his fingers, almost continually stretched over the back of his chair toward Warfield. The colonel made his calculations rapidly.
“Here you are, General,” he said to Williams after awhile, and the white-bearded old man took a despatch from him and carefully adjusted his glasses. Then he hitched his chair up to the table, cleared a place for his elbows, took some paper and began to make figures of his own.
“Gentlemen,” he said presently, “I claim my election by a majority of four thousand votes.”
“What was your majority two years ago?” asked Milton.
“Why, sir,” said the old man, looking at Milton as if he were betraying a culpable ignorance,“three thousand two hundred and ninety-six. Don’t you remember?”
“Oh yes,” lied Milton.
“Seems popular in his district, doesn’t he?” whispered Garwood.
“Popular! No one can beat the old blatherskite. Wish he had to run in my district once!” Milton spoke out of the bitterness the fierce contests of a close district had worked in him. Just then a number of reporters, moving in a body like a committee, came to interview Colonel Warfield.
The colonel was thoughtful for a moment, and then, smiling, he said: “You probably know more than I about it, but you can say for me that at eleven o’clock”—he looked at his watch—“basing my calculations on incomplete returns from seventy-five counties in the state, I claim the election of Governor Chatham and the entire state ticket by thirty-three thousand majority.”
“These others have scored already,” said Anthony, the secretary of the committee, waving at General Williams, at Milton and at Newman the corn-cob pipe for which he was famous all over the state, “all except Garwood there; he’ll be in after while.”
Outside the noise was growing louder. They could hear cheering from the rotunda, and in the streets the crowds pouring out of the theater added to the din. The noise had a new quality of wildness in it that comes with the approach of midnight. Schreiber, who had been put on the state ticket for auditor because of his German name, had longago claimed his own election by a safe majority, and had made many trips down to the bar. He was a fat man, plainly a connoisseur of Rhine wines; and you might almost have said he was humid, so moist was his rosy skin. He did not emit a German “Hoch!” as would have befitted his personality, but he continually boomed forth pleasantries, congratulating the other successful candidates. But from these general felicitations Garwood was excluded. For an hour his hopes had been sinking. Rankin had promised to telegraph as soon as he had anything definite, but no word had come from him. Though the returns from down the state were coming in rapidly those from his own district had been meager, and from what he already knew he was convinced that he was running behind the head of the ticket, both national and state. It seemed to be well established by midnight that his party had swept both the state and the nation, and he seemed to be the only one thus far left out. He pitied himself, he began to feel that the open triumph of the successful ones about him was indelicate and in bad taste; he felt that they should show him more consideration. But they seemed to have forgotten him in the realization of their own joy, and Garwood could only smile grimly at the irony of it all.
At midnight whistles blew all over the city, as if it were New Year’s, and just then Larry O’Neil came in, crying:
“We’ve got ’em, Cook County’s ours by fifty thousand. Beats hell, don’t it?”
“How are they feeling down at the Grand?” asked Anthony. The headquarters of the other committee were at the Grand.
“Oh, they’ve shut up down there,” said the man, “and gone home. They seen it ’as no use.”
“Yes,” said Warfield, laying down his pencil as if he had no further need for it, “it’s a landslide.”
At one o’clock the telegraph instrument ceased its chatter and the telegraph operator began to unroll his little package of lunch. As the odor of the buttered bread and the cold meat he spread on a clean sheet of paper before him became perceptible in the room, the men there felt for the first time that night the pangs of hunger, and Colonel Warfield said:
“What do you say to our going down to the café and having a bite to eat?”
Down in the café, the men grouped themselves about two tables which Warfield told the head waiter to place end to end, and the meal he ordered soon became a banquet. As they sat there talking in excited tones, laughing at old stories of by-gone campaigns, laughing even at the defeats of by-gone campaigns, as they could afford to now, many men passing through stopped to congratulate Warfield, to slap him on the shoulder, and call him “Good boy!” as if he had done it all. And as he thought of the four years of that influence at Springfield his position as the chairman who had directed the campaign would give him, his inscrutable smile expanded into one of great content. They were happy at that table, all of them looking forwardto days of power, all save Garwood, who sat gloomy and silent, drinking more than he ate, and drinking more than he felt he ought. Once Warfield noticed his despondency, and whispered to him in his kind-hearted way:
“Don’t give up, old man. You’ll pull through. And if you don’t, I’ll see that you’re taken care of.”
The sympathy of the chairman’s tone, more than the promise he made, touched Garwood, but down in his heart he felt a soreness. It was hard to see them all successful and be alone doomed to defeat. A place in the state administration, on some board, even on the board of railroad and warehouse commissioners, would hardly satisfy him now. He had longed to go to Congress, and then, the vindication he looked for meant more than all the rest. And Emily—he thought of her and could have wept. He felt himself more and more detached from the scene. The table, the mirrors, the lights of the café, the laughing men, the rushing waiters, the shuffle of the crowd in the lobby above, the cries in the street outside, the toots of tin horns, the companies of crazy men marching aimlessly around and around, howling the names of candidates, all sounded as remote and strange as if he had no more a part in it.
The night waned, the noise changed, but did not cease. It told of a decrease in the numbers in the lobby, but the sounds were wilder. Men were making a night of it. As in a dream Garwood heard some one say:
“There’s a little woman down in Rock Islandwho’d like to hear from me. I must wire my wife.”
And Garwood thought of a telegram he might have sent, had things gone differently. He thought of a girl down in Grand Prairie, but now—it was all so changed!
He stole away and sought his room. He went to the window, pulled back the curtain and looked down into Randolph Street. The rain had ceased, but still the big campaign banner flapped clumsily. The chill of dawn was in the air, a cold wind blew in from the lake. Across the way the court house and city hall loomed in the fog; in their shadow he saw the jaded horses at the cab stand drooping their noses to their crooked knees; the cable began to buzz in its slot; far over the gloomy roofs the sky was tinged with the pallor of coming day—then suddenly a long shaft of brilliant light striking across the sky startled him with a nameless terror. The shaft rose slowly until it pointed straight upward, then three times it swept a vast arc down to the eastern horizon. And Garwood remembered—it was the search-light which theCourierhad announced would signal the success of Garwood’s party. He recalled the day at Lincoln. The great man and all the rest, as they went to bed in the dawn of that November morning, were safe in triumphant victory, while he alone—
He heard the heavy, mature voice of some early newsboy:
“Extry! Toimes, Tribune, Her’ld, an’ Courier! ’Lection!”