XVII
GARWOOD found Rankin sitting in the lobby of the Cassell House, stiff in the highly glossed linen his wife decreed for his Sunday wear, his face cleanly shaved and showing its pink under the powder the barber had left on it. He had had his hair cut, too, and his cropped curls, because they had been combed by the barber, gave him the appearance of having been trimmed and made over in another fashion. He had got some of the ashes of his cigar on his waistcoat, as he lay deep in a big chair with the Sunday papers piled in his lap, and when he noticed Garwood, he also noticed the ashes, and in his haste to brush them off, he could only wheeze out an inadequate greeting between the teeth that clenched his cigar.
Garwood did not feel the satisfaction he had anticipated for that moment, when he said:
“Well, Jim, you may rest easy, I can take care of that little matter we were talking of last night.”
Although Garwood spoke with a politician’s generality, Rankin, before he replied, glanced over his shoulders with a politician’s wariness which is like the wariness of a hunted savage.
“Well, that’s all right then,” Rankin answered, blinking his eyes because the smoke from his cigar had persisted in creeping into them. “Didn’t have any trouble about it, did you?”
“No, none to speak of,” said Garwood. He laughed, but it was a laugh with more of rue than mirth in it. “It only means a little more debt, that’s all.”
“Well,” said Rankin, nipping the wet and ragged end of his cigar with his teeth, “so long as you don’t have to mortgage the roof over your head you’re all right.”
The words of course struck a pain through Garwood’s heart, but he gave his laugh again as he answered:
“Well, I reckon it won’t come to that.”
“There’s one thing I’ve al’ays done, Jerry,” said Rankin, leaning over in a more confidential attitude, “and that’s this. I’ve al’ays drawed the line at the little woman and the kids; I’ve al’ays said I’d never compromise them or their future, and I say that so long’s a man don’t do that, he’s doin’ all right.”
For some reason that morning Rankin seemed to be in a soft and tender mood, and showed a desire to talk of his home and its interests. Perhaps it was because it was Sunday, and his wife had been dressing him for the day with as much maternal solicitude as she had dressed his children. Garwood would have preferred Rankin’s harsher and more careless note, and because it gave him a chance to get away, was glad when he remembered that he had promised his mother to go to church with her. He knew how gratifying this would be to her, for in her strict Sabbatarianism she had disliked his going down town at all that day; and then,too, he had felt that it would be a politic thing to do.
He went homeward, recalling, word by word, all of his conversation with Rankin, feeling a little hurt at what seemed to him Rankin’s coldness, troubled with suspicions and misgivings that he ascribed to the influence of Rankin’s strange manner, and without the peace of mind he thought he should feel, now that his election was assured.
He found his mother with her bonnet on, and her misshapen hands gloved and folded, in anxious waiting.
“What time does church begin?” he asked.
“Half-past ten, the last bell rings,” said Mrs. Garwood.
“My goodness!” her son exclaimed, as he hurriedly snapped his watch lid shut, “I thought it was at eleven o’clock.”
The old lady’s face winced with a jealous resentment.
“You’re thinkin’ of the ’piscopalian church,” she answered significantly; “they always does things different.”
They walked to church while the bells were ringing, the Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist churches tolling their bells one after another, a note at a time, each tolerantly waiting its turn, though the different keys in which their bells were pitched rang out in a sharp disharmony their doctrinal distinctions. Far away over on the East Side, Garwood heard the chimes of the Catholic church, holding aloof from all this dissonanceof the clamoring creeds, while the Episcopalians had no bell in their church, disdaining with a fine superior quality of respectability to enter into the brazen polemics.
The last bell had just stopped ringing, and its dying tones were still vibrating through the building when they reached the Methodist church, and were shown down the aisle to Mrs. Garwood’s pew, although there was a pretense of free pews in that church. Garwood could feel the glances of the congregation upon him as he took his seat, and he liked the little distinction, although he had grown used, in the last two months, to being the central figure of public gatherings. He recalled how carefully the Monday morning papers chronicled the church goings of the presidential candidates with the fact that the preacher had added something to his sermon that pledged a providential interest in the success of the nominee who had distinguished that preacher’s church with his presence, and Garwood tried to conduct himself as a great man should, or as he imagined he would appear when, a little later, he should become a great man. He bent his head during the prayer, not so low as his mother did, but at an angle that would express a dignified unworthiness to join in public prayer, though giving the assurance at the same time of his respect for it.
During the services, especially during the preaching, Garwood had much time for thought and meditation. His meditations were idle and incoherent, running on Emily, and the afternoon he wouldspend with her; on his campaign and its impending close. Through them all ran a certain minor chord of sadness and reproach, particularly when he looked at his mother sitting there beside him, her eyes raised behind their gold spectacles in the very acme of respectful attention as she tried to pierce the meaning the preacher sought to crowd into his sermon without making it too long to offend the Longworths, the rich family of the congregation, who, striving to wear the impressive aspect of prominence in the community, filled a whole pew. Garwood found his thoughts hardly tolerable so long as he allowed them to rest in the present. He could grasp at happiness and comfort only when they built on the surer, brighter future which soon would open to him. He found it hard, however, to keep them always building air castles; they persisted in returning to the present, to Emily, to Rankin, to the campaign, to the mortgage. He was depressed and longed for the services to end. They seemed to stretch themselves out interminably, with prayers and hymns and anthems, with announcements and collections, finally, after the sermon, with the baptism of a crying child. He felt as when a little boy he had squirmed during the long two hours, and as a boy was glad when service was over—he was particularly glad that it had not proved to be communion Sunday, for that would have made it necessary for him once more to face a moral problem; to decide on a course of action; and he was wearied with moral problems and decisions.
The heavy feeling that oppressed Garwood inchurch, the chill that checked the felicity he felt himself now entitled to, remained with him. At times he would forget and become happy, but as soon as he was conscious that he was happy, he would remember that there was some reason why he should not be happy, and then his memory would swiftly bring back to him the thing he had done. By afternoon this constant recurrence irritated him, and he half pitied himself, thinking it unjust that he should be thus annoyed when he was so anxious to be contented and at peace, especially after all the sacrifices he had made to his mother’s wishes during the last sixteen hours. And so when he set out in the clear, shining afternoon to go to Emily, he resolved to throw off this feeling; to cast it from him; to have done with it for all time. Physically he expressed this resolve by the fling of his head, and the way he set his shoulders back, holding them high with the will to be all he wished to be.
The house-maid was out for her Sunday afternoon holiday, and Emily herself swung back the door in answer to Garwood’s ring. The girl smiled radiantly when she saw him and, with a lover’s pretense about her spiritual prescience of all his movements, said she knew it was he at the door. He told her that she had never looked so beautiful before, and there was much of truth in this, for she wore, with an effect of having shown it at church for the first time that morning, a new fall suit, the skirt of which vouched for the jacket that had been laid aside for the greater comfort of a blue silk bodice, which billowed modestly at her youngbreast, giving her an air of slightness and accentuating the delicacy of her whole person. Her eyes and cheeks were bright with health and her lover’s coming, so that her natural color, which made the wearing of dark costumes an easy thing for her, was thereby heightened.
In the moment they lingered in the hall, she laid her soft hands on his shoulders, reaching up to him with a smile of propitiation to say:
“Dade’s here.”
She was pleased when he frowned his jealous disapproval.
“How long’s she going to stay?” he said bluntly.
“Not long,” she replied. “She won’t stay when she knows you’re here. Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?”
“I didn’t know it myself,” he said. “I came on a telegram from Rankin, and I ought to go right out again, only—I had to stay and see you.”
She purred an instant in the embrace into which he drew her and then quickly hushed him by pointing toward the drawing-room.
Garwood had never known Dade Emerson, though he had heard of her from Emily in those confidences with which they tried to atone for the years that had passed before love came to them, by recounting in detail, little by little, all their happenings and relations. Dade, to be sure, had impulsively declared that she remembered Garwood as a shock-headed boy whose short trousers came abjectly below his knees, and had identified him to Emily as the youth who had thrown a stone andhooted them as they were going homeward one day from the Misses Lewis’s school. Emily had gleefully told this to Garwood and though he had recognized the picture’s truth, he was ashamed of it, and had denied it altogether.
When they entered the drawing-room, and Emily had presented Garwood, there was an instant’s constraint, born of Garwood’s uneasiness in women’s society, an uneasiness he somehow contrived to make pass for a Byronic contempt of it, to which also contributed Emily’s solicitude that her lover should meet the approval of her friend.
Dade sat listlessly twirling a ring on her strong, white finger, a silver ring of curious, antique workmanship that helped the foreign effect she sought in her personality, but when, through her lashes she saw Emily gazing at Garwood with a sudden access of fondness, she rather coldly said:
“You ah standing for the borough, I believe, ah you not, Mistah Gahwood?”
“I’m running for Congress, if that’s what you mean,” replied Garwood with an uncontrollable bluntness that he regretted.
“Oh, yes; that is what you call it, isn’t it? How int’resting you must find it!”
Garwood laughed in an effort to find ease.
“I find it pretty hard work,” he sighed. Emily noted the sigh, and pressed the hand she somehow found between them.
“He’s all worn out, Dade,” she explained, and the sense of possession her tone implied put allthree on an easier footing. “You don’t know how hard our political leaders have to work.”
“To be elected?” asked Dade.
“Yes, to be elected,” said Garwood, yielding himself to the pillows that were piled near him. “And no sooner are we elected once than we have to begin fixing up our fences for a second term.”
“Fixing up yoah fences?” said Dade, wonderingly.
“It’s a political phrase,” explained Emily.
“You have so many of them,” said Dade, “and they ah all so unintelligible.”
“They must strike a foreigner as peculiar,” said Garwood. “I had never thought of that before.”
“But I’m not a fo’eigneh, you know,” the girl protested.
“Well, you’re pretty near it,” said Emily. “She’s lived abroad all her life, you know—nearly,” she explained aside to Garwood.
Garwood was pleased that the conversation had taken a turn which he could follow. With strange women he found small talk impossible as all men must who are not versed in the banalities of women’s intercourse, though they indulge themselves for hours in the trivialities of men’s gossip.
“I have never thought of it before,” said Garwood, “but most of our political phrases savor of our young agricultural life; perhaps I would better say our pioneer life. There’s ‘log-rolling,’ for instance, and ‘stump speaking,’ and—”
“And setting the prairies on fiah,” Dade added.“I saw in the papah the othah day that you weare doing that—on the stump, they said.”
Garwood laughed again, naturally.
“That was one of Rankin’s inspired tales, no doubt. Rather a mixture of figures, too, setting the prairies on fire from the stump, don’t you think? And you probably saw as well, that some of the Indians over in Moultrie have their knives out, and are after my scalp.”
“That is more than agricultural, or pioneerish,” said Emily; “that’s actually savage.”
“It’s quite deliciously American,” said Miss Emerson.
“And one of the few things the papers say of me that are true!” sighed Garwood.
“I’m not afraid of that,” said Emily loyally; “isn’t there just a little truth in the story about your setting the prairies on fire?”
Garwood laughed, the superior laugh of a man alone with women. He liked this political conversation which he could so easily dominate, quite as much as he liked Emily’s frank acquiescence before Miss Emerson in her position as his affianced bride. It gave him such a sweet assurance of security in one relation at least.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said; “a candidate never does know any more about his own campaign than a bridegroom does about the preparations for his own wedding. To him it all seems to be going one way; he sees nothing but friendly faces and hears nothing but friendly cheers, and he goes to bed the night before election almost hoping that his opponentmay get a few votes just to console him, though he doesn’t see where the votes are to come from. The morning after he wakes up to wonder where his own votes all went to. It’s always a shock of surprise to the defeated man.” He paused to enjoy the effect of his little speech upon the girls, and then resumed: “If you want to know how my campaign is really coming on you’ll have to ask Jim Rankin.”
“Who is this Mistah Rankin?” asked Dade.
“Oh,” said Emily, turning toward her companion with a superiority of her own, “you remember—I told you about him the other day. You really should see him, he’s the funniest man and the most interesting. He is managing the campaign for Jerome. He just worships Jerome; I believe he’d die for you, don’t you, Jerome?”
“I’ve heard him say he’d go through—ah—hell and high water for me,” said Garwood with the keen enjoyment that comes from vicarious profanity quoted in a presence where, stripped of its quotation marks, it would be inadmissible.
The two girls exclaimed, though they enjoyed the risk of it, and sat while Garwood celebrated Rankin’s virtues as a friend and as a politician. When he found room for more quotable profanity Emily laid her palm lightly over his mouth, and at this demonstration of affection Dade rose and said significantly:
“Well, I think it high time I was going and leaving you alone.”
There was a little show of protest, but she went,Garwood standing in the middle of the room wondering if the proprieties demanded that he accompany Emily as she escorted Dade to the door; but he withdrew into the security of that dignity which stood him in such good stead in all social crises, and bowed as if the retiring girl were an audience or a jury. The two girls lingered in the hall longer than Garwood thought necessary, though he lost his objection in the satisfaction of the conviction that they were discussing him.
Garwood, of course, stayed to that unclassified meal which is served on Sunday evenings. The repast which Emily in the absence of the servants laid herself, was without formality, and the girl artfully contrived to hide from him the extra preparation that was represented by the bowl of salad she brought forth and set in the midst of the white linen and all the glitter of the table service. Garwood and Mr. Harkness talked of men’s topics during the meal and Emily was silent with the silence of the woman in her serving, though her eyes gleamed at the comradeship she thought she recognized in the two men. She did not know how thoroughly the real thought of each man was with her, though Garwood from time to time reflected on the comparison that might be made between the plainness of his mother’s table on Sunday evenings and the elegance of the one at which he now expanded himself.
It was late when he went home that night. As he left he told Emily, in their lengthened farewells, that it had been the happiest Sunday he had ever known.