XX
WHEN Garwood awoke, he opened his eyes in darkness. The room was cold. He heard the harsh Nottingham curtains stirring in the breeze that came in at the windows, an autumnal breeze that had only the chill of autumn and none of the crispness and woodland odors that he would have found in it down in Grand Prairie. Instead, it was laden with the soot and dirt of the city, and it could not dissipate the heavy quality taken on by the air of a room that had long been slept in. He could hear the jolting of trucks on the cobble stones, the trudge and shuffle of thousands of feet on the sidewalk, the clank of the cable cars scraping around the loop, and, punctuating the roar of the city, the cries of the newsboys. Garwood slowly regathered his senses, and lay in the moment that comes before memory brings back individuality and life, trying to fathom a deep sense of something wrong. Then it all came back to him with a rush—the campaign, the election, the defeat. He rose and drew his watch from his waistcoat, lying on the floor. It was too dark to see its face. He switched on the electricity—the watch had stopped. Then he went to the window and looked down into the street. The lights were blazing, and thereby, and by the throngs hurrying along and by the crowded cars,[Pg 179]he knew that it must be evening. How long he had slept he did not know. He could not remember how or when he had got to bed. His sleep had hardly refreshed him. It had been too deep, too heavy; he was feverish and his muscles were sore. But he dressed and went downstairs. Somehow, instinctively, without giving himself any reason he stopped at the headquarters of the state committee, but the rooms were dark, deserted. The dead odor of stale tobacco smoke hung heavy in the air.
At the desk in the rotunda below, the clerk gave him his mail, with some pleasantry about the great victory. Garwood stared at him blankly, with the dumb ache at his heart, with some resentment too, that the clerk should not have known what a dash of bitterness that cup of victory held for him. Mechanically he began to thumb his letters over as he stood there, and presently laid them aside that he might open several telegrams he found among them, with that sense of precedence which telegrams always take over every other missive. With the first one his eyes widened in astonishment, and then suddenly he was aware that Warfield was shaking his hand and saying:
“Well, old man, congratulations. It’s all the sweeter now, isn’t it? Why! You look surprised, what’s the—”
Garwood looked up at Warfield and said:
“I never knew till just this minute, when I read Rankin’s telegram. I just got up.”
“I knew you’d pull through all the time,” said Warfield, with as much truth as retroactive prophecycan ever hold. “I thought last night they were holding out down there, and that when the whole vote got in, you’d be found to have won out.”
Garwood’s soreness had gone, and he took a long breath as if to draw into his very being this glad new sense of victory. In an instant a new glory had been added to life. He took Warfield by the arm.
“Come on,” he said, “let’s get the evening papers, and then go and have a little drink.”
They strolled toward the news stand, and Garwood’s eye ran down the pages as he waited for his change.
“Why, I carried Bromley’s home county! I thought I’d lose that anyway.”
“Oh, the story helped out over there,” said Warfield. “Bromley got the Sunday-school vote, and that drove the rest to you.”
“My! Wasn’t it a landslide though!” said Garwood. “Keep the change,” he called to the young man behind the news stand. “Well, I was glad the party won even when I thought I had lost,” he went on. “Look here!” Garwood was reading, as he walked, the paper he had opened wide. “Logan County gives me a majority of eighteen hundred; what do you think of that?”
They were at the bar by this time.
“What will it be?” said Garwood, still devouring his papers.
“Oh, a little bourbon,” said Warfield.
“Nonsense!” said Garwood, crumpling the papers under his arm. “I want to drink Jim Rankin’shealth, bless his old heart! He gets the post-office, he does! Give us a bottle of champagne!”
“You haven’t had your dinner yet, have you?” Warfield asked.
“No, nor my breakfast, either,” laughed Garwood. But then Garwood was not as well informed as Warfield as to the relation in time of liquors to dinner. Warfield had been longer in politics.