Part 11

The colonel, for some reason, preferred not to get up the next morning, but opened his mail, read his papers, ate his breakfast, and finally held his morning levee, the last of the campaign, in bed. The politicians who had been waiting outside for an hour, grumbled at such indolence, and, when they were finally admitted to their leader’s presence, suspected him of imitating the undemocratic luxuriousness of Senator Warren, who received his callers in bed every morning. But by nine o’clock they had received their final instructions and scattered to the conventions, and when Mosely and Garwood sauntered in from the breakfast-room, they found only a few stragglers, who lingered on in the hope of beer money, at least, for their imaginary services on this decisive day. Malachi Nolan, in black garments and white cravat, came presently, his big diamond flashing, his face shining and red from his dull razor, and then Carroll, at the sound of whose young step and fresh laugh the colonel succeeded in evoking a wan, tired smile.

“Just lazy, that’s all,” he declared reassuringly, seeing Carroll halt in surprise. He reared himself on his elbow, and as he raised his head, its white hair all tangled, Carroll saw how haggard he was. He never had seen him look so old, so white, so worn, before.

“I was waiting for you,” said the colonel, indicating Nolan with a finger that was like a claw. “I’ve fixed everything but the First District.” He paused for breath. “The First Ward’s solid, isn’t it? Well, all right. But watch Donahue. I’m sorry we ever let him get on the delegation. And then, let’s see”--he pressed his brow in a troubled effort to steady his senses--“oh, yes. See McGlynn and have him lay down on Hardy, and tell Reinhold that if he wants that job from the South Park board he’d better get in line, and as to Wright--his brother’s a conductor on the Cottage Grove line, and you can get at him through Harlow. Tell him I sent you. That’ll give you thirty-five votes on the first ballot, and--”

Carroll, who had turned to reply to some jest of Mosely’s, heard a groan. Instantly he looked back at the colonel. The old politician, his face livid, was struggling as if he wished to get out of bed. He writhed a moment, then his head nodded, his chin dropped to his breast, and he collapsed in a heap, among the tumbled bedclothes. Carroll paled with a sudden sickness.

“He’s fainted,” said Garwood, fumbling at the throat of the colonel’s shirt. Malachi Nolan brought a cup of water, Mosely hunted impatiently for a flask of whisky, and when they had straightened him out upon his pillows, Carroll ran for the hotel physician. The colonel recovered consciousness before the physician came and glanced around with an expression of embarrassment.

“Damn such a heart, anyway,” he said. Then young Doctor Lambert came with his new stethoscope. When the doctor had finished his auscultation, the colonel said:

“Malachi, vote your delegation solid every time--don’t give complimentary votes--it’s dangerous. And remember--I don’t care what happens so long as Carroll’s nominated, trade anything, everything for that, and send me word--”

But they hushed him.

At noon Doctor Foerder, the specialist, arrived.

“Ah, Lambert,” he said, scowling about him as he put down his tremendous leather valise, big with the mysterious contrivances of modern surgery, pulled off his gloves, and with his quick, professional tread, stepped to the bedside. He exposed the colonel’s big chest, and began a delicate percussion with his white fingers. When he had done tapping, he laid his ear over the colonel’s heart, and listened silently a long time to the cardiac murmurs, he rolled under his fingers the superficial vessels of the temples, the forearms, the wrists, the knees, he counted the pulse; and he looked long at the old man’s finger-nails. When he paused, the colonel said:

“Well?”

Doctor Foerder had retreated from the bedside and was writing his directions precisely, logically, as an official draws up a report, beginning each paragraph with a Roman numeral. He did not answer the colonel.

Foerder briefly consulted with Lambert, that is, repeated the directions he had already written out, and began to buckle his big valise.

“And as to a nurse?” asked Doctor Lambert.

“I’ll send one of my own,” said Foerder, hastily lighting a Russian cigarette. He could not remain long in one place. He had patients to see and a lecture to deliver over at Rush Medical College and his man was waiting with his high-hooded phaeton down in Jackson Boulevard.

The nurse, diffusing a faint odor of antiseptics, came from Doctor Foerder’s private hospital, laid aside her bonnet and veil and pausing an instant to give a woman’s touch to her hair, quietly and deftly set the room in order.

All that afternoon the colonel lay in his darkened bedroom, fighting the battle of his life. He lay so still that the nurse almost fancied him asleep, so regular was his breathing. Once he broke the silence by asking the time.

“Twenty minutes after three,” the nurse responded, glancing at her little watch.

“Some of the conventions, then,” the colonel said, “are over. I wonder why they don’t send me word.”

The nurse did not notice his speech, and he added:

“Pardon me, you doubtless are not interested in politics.”

The talking brought on a spasm of dyspnœa, and the colonel struggled so painfully for his breath that the nurse had to prop him up with pillows in a sitting posture, as those who are afflicted with asthma pass their nights, finding it easier thus to breathe. The colonel begged the nurse’s pardon, as if he had committed some indelicacy.

About this time news was brought from the Fifth District convention in Arlington Hall and from the Sixth in Jung’s Hall, that the Warren men had carried both districts. The colonel, hearing the hoarse whispering between the messengers and Mosely in the room outside, demanded information, and Doctor Lambert had to tell him. The colonel wished to see Mosely, he had some new plan for the West Side to offset their loss; and he saw Mosely and the plan was put in execution. Then the colonel seemed once more to sleep. When he opened his eyes he asked if he could not have a cigar--“seegar,” he pronounced it--assuring the nurse that he felt much better, but she said, as one might say to the whim of a child to whom explanations are not vouchsafed:

“Not just now.”

And there was silence again, and the ticking of the nurse’s little watch.

By four o’clock the colonel became restless once more, and asked if there were any news. When the nurse said no, he insisted that there must be some message, some letter, some telegram. He did not know that his followers, vindicating all history, were now standing afar off. He worried and grew incoherent. He seemed to confuse Carroll with the boy who was sleeping under the stars far away in Arizona.

Doctor Foerder returned at four o’clock. He had not been expected before evening, but he was interested in the case. He had mentioned it in his lecture that day. He had commented on the wonderful display of vitality on the patient’s part, and spoken of the value in such cases of moral treatment, of encouraging words and a confident manner. He read the nurse’s chart, counted the colonel’s pulse for fifteen seconds and calculated the rate by multiplication, drew down the old man’s eyelids, noting the senile arc that was whitening the periphery of the cornea, and he examined the finger-nails; then the percussion and the auscultation. When he raised his black head, the colonel said:

“Any news?”

“You’re doing well.”

“Aw!” said the colonel impatiently, “I don’t mean that--any news from the conventions?”

Foerder hesitated, as if half reluctant to display interest in anything so human, but said:

“Yes.”

“What?” said the colonel eagerly, his eyes brightening with a light that alarmed the doctor.

“They say you’ve carried some districts on the North Side.”

“Which ones?” asked the colonel.

“Don’t remember.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, they say Warner has carried some North Side districts, too--and some West Side districts.”

“Warner?”

“Well, whatever his name is.”

Then Foerder was silent, and the colonel lay a long time thinking.

“Did you learn how it’s going in the Ninth, or the Second, or the Seventeenth?”

“They say it’s about an even break everywhere.”

“And how’s the First?” The colonel put this question in a whisper, as if he feared the answer. The doctor did not know. Then the silence again, and the colonel’s labored breathing, and the ticking of the nurse’s little gold watch.

“What district do you live in, Doctor?” the colonel asked later.

“I?” replied the medical man in some surprise.

“Yes.”

“I--why, I don’t know,” he said.

The colonel faintly smiled. “Where do you live, then?”

“In Drexel Boulevard.”

“That’s the Fifth,” the colonel said. “Warren carried that.”

“Did he?” The doctor looked as if he were ashamed. “We mustn’t talk any more just now.”

Foerder remained until evening, pacing the anteroom, his hands behind him, his lips twitching in his involuntary smile. Now and then he took a turn in the long, dark, softly carpeted hall, to smoke a cigarette. At times some politician would come with a scared face and inquire about the colonel, and the doctor always demanded news of the battle, before he answered the questions. The reports brought by the politicians were not encouraging, and they hurried outside again. Their visits, as the afternoon waned, became fewer. Even Mosely and Garwood had been glad of the exciting excuse offered by the First District convention in Italia Hall down Clark Street to escape from the shadowed headquarters. At six o’clock no one had been there for an hour, save some sympathetic bell-boys and porters from down-stairs, and Carroll, of course--he came every half-hour from the convention, disheveled, bathed in perspiration, his eyes burning with excitement and suspense. Foerder would not allow him to see the colonel, who lay behind the white door, his eyes half closed, too weak any longer to whisper.

At seven o’clock the reporters came, and Doctor Foerder, as they put it, issued a bulletin.

“He’s alive,” the doctor said, “pulse 120 to 124, respiration 22 to 26, temperature 98. His remarkable nerve alone sustains him. He’s making the most magnificent fight I ever saw in all my life--have you heard anything from the convention?”

“They’re all over but the one in the First District,” one of the reporters said, while they scribbled down the physician’s figures. “It all depends now upon what that does. It’s the worst fight ever known in Chicago. They say Warren has spent twenty-five thousand to-day.”

“Does it look as if he could be elected there--in the First, you know?”

The reporters smiled and winked one at another.

The colonel lay like one asleep, until far along in the evening. Once or twice he opened his eyes and looked an inquiry into the doctor’s eyes, but Foerder could only shake his head. And once or twice he muttered something about Baldwin, and was troubled that they could not understand. Then he sank into a state of coma, and the news for which all were waiting would not come.

Doctor Foerder was for ever glancing at his watch and asking Lambert how he thought the First District convention would turn out. Lambert had no idea.

“I hope we’ll win,” Foerder would say. Finally he sent Lambert down for news. Lambert hurried back. They had taken forty-six ballots, he said, and the vote was tied. At ten o’clock Doctor Foerder examined the colonel again, examined his eyes, his finger-nails, drummed on his chest, listened to his heart.

“You’re magnificent!” he could not refrain from whispering, but his patient did not answer or look, or even smile this time. He was growing very weak. His breathing was faint, he inhaled the air through livid lips. He did not arouse from his stupor.

Doctor Foerder got very impatient. “We can’t wait much longer,” he said.

“It’s all we can do, now,” said Lambert.

Foerder went outside. The anteroom was deserted. The politicians came no more. He would sit down, then instantly get up, walk back and forth; his eyebrows knitting in his scowl, his lips twitching in that mirthless smile. And he smoked cigarette after cigarette. He did this for an hour.

Along toward midnight he heard a step. Flying to the door, he saw Carroll, dragging down the hall with the step of defeat and exhaustion. The boy’s hair was matted under his hat, his eyes were dull, sunken, black as night.

“Licked,” he said, waving his hands with a gesture of despair, as if the world had come to an end. Foerder went inside, leaving Carroll to sink into the first chair. But a moment later the physician opened the white door, and beckoned with his head. The motion was conclusive, final. He held the door ajar, and Carroll entered. The useless drugs had been pushed aside. The room was filled with the strange silence, the odor of death. Lambert stood at the window, looking out into the darkness. The nurse stood by the bed, waiting to perform her last office for the dying man.

Carroll timidly approached and looked down at the long form, scarcely outlined by the sheet, at the rigid head, at the great, waxen brow, at the little blue spheres formed by the closed eyelids, at the mouth slightly open beneath the white mustache with its tinge of yellow. Doctor Foerder was pressing his fingers to the colonel’s wrist. The breathing had lost all human quality, it was but a series of automatic gasps, which, it seemed, would never end. Finally they grew shorter, at last they ceased, there was one faint inspiration, and Doctor Foerder, laying the thin old hand down upon the colonel’s breast, said:

“It’s all over.”

There was silence for a whole minute. Then Doctor Lambert tossed up the window, and Carroll heard, in the street below, a crowd shuffling over the sidewalk, a crowd coming, as he knew, from the convention in Italia Hall. And suddenly from the crowd arose a raucous, drunken yell:

“Hurrah for Warren!”

REFORM IN THE FIRST

The senatorial convention in the First District was to convene at ten o’clock, in a dingy little hall in lower Clark Street, lighted by windows so long unwashed that they looked like ground glass. From the chandeliers, black and sticky with dead flies, shreds of tissue paper fluttered, relics of some boisterous fête an Italian society had given there long ago. The floor was damp in arabesque wrought by a sprinkling-can, for the janitor had sprayed water there to lay the dust he was too indifferent to remove. Perhaps a hundred chairs were set in amphitheatrical order, and before them stood a kitchen table, on which was a white water pitcher, flanked by a glass, thickened by various sedimentary deposits within.

In the saloon below, at nine o’clock, scores of delegates were already shuffling in the sawdust that covered the floor, holding huge schooners of beer in their hairy fists, gorging grossly at the free lunch table, with bologna, rank onions and rye bread. The foam of the beer clung to their mustaches, which, after each sip, they sucked between their lips. Most of them managed, at the same time they were eating and drinking, by a dexterous sleight-of-hand, to smoke cheap domestic cigars, and a cloud of white smoke rolled along the low ceiling. Each new arrival was greeted with some obscene but endearing epithet, and the room rang with laughter and profanity. A keg of beer had been provided by one of Conway’s managers, and the bartender, wiping his hands on a dirty towel, was rid, so long as the keg lasted, of the responsibility of keeping account of drinks, and of ringing up the change on the cash register. At eleven o’clock the keg was empty, the free lunch table abandoned to the flies, and the delegates scuffled up the dingy stairs to the hall. Half an hour later the chairman of the senatorial district committee pounded the kitchen table with a leg of a broken chair, and shouted:

“The convention will be in order.”

This declaration made no impression upon the babel of voices, the laughter, the profanity, the noise of shuffling feet and scraping chairs. The delegates were scrambling to their places, seating themselves by wards. Reporters flung themselves into seats at a second table and gazed about the room, noting who were there. The political men of the morning papers did not trouble themselves to take seats. They loafed among the politicians in a way superior to the reporters for the afternoon papers, as if they were politicians themselves, making history instead of recording it.

Meanwhile the noise did not abate, and the committeeman was growing red in the face. The morning was warm, and the room, already cloudy with tobacco smoke, was filling with a noisome human odor. The atmosphere was feculent. Delegates removed their coats, hanging them over the backs of their chairs. Finally the chairman of the committee, growing impatient, split the table with his club and yelled:

“Damn it all, boys, come to order!”

And then, eager to resign such a difficult command, he hastened to announce:

“The committee has named Honorable John P. Muldoon to act as temp’ry chairman.”

He handed the chair leg to John P. Muldoon, who, stroking back his curly hair from his brow, began to beat the table impartially.

All this while Underwood stood against the wall, looking on. The question that had been agitating him for weeks was about to be decided, but now that the ordeal was actually upon him, the consciousness beat numbly against his brain, so that the whole scene lacked reality, almost interest. He was dazed. He was about to take his baptism of political fire, and he trembled like a white novitiate.

Underwood belonged to one of the oldest families of Chicago--the name had been known there before the fire. His father, who had lately taken him into his law firm, continued to cling in his conservatism to an old stone house in Michigan Avenue long after his neighbors had abandoned their mansions to uncertain boarders, and either retreated farther south or advanced to the North Side. John Underwood had come out of Harvard with a young lawyer’s ambition in politics, an ambition that had the United States senate merely as a beginning of its home stretch, and when the year rolled around in which state senators were to be elected in the odd numbered districts he decided that it was time to begin.

The newspapers had scented the sensation that lurked in the candidature of a young man like Underwood in a district like the First, and because he was rich, because he wore good clothes, because he went into what is called society, promptly dubbed him a reformer, and thus weighted he had set out upon his race for the nomination. He liked to see his name in the newspapers, liked to think of himself as a reformer, though he was embarrassed in this attitude by the fascinating figure of the political boss he had hoped to become--a well-dressed, gentlemanly boss, of course, who, while at home in those saloons where he permitted the convivial familiarity of the boys, nevertheless took his luncheons at his club. He fell into a way of speaking of the First as “my district,” spoke of it, in fact, as if he, instead of Malachi Nolan and “Cinch” Conway, owned it, and when certain ward politicians in the first days of the campaign called upon him, Underwood was pleased to lend them money, just as he was pleased to comply with the requests of certain others who organized the John W. Underwood First Ward Campaign Club, and sent a committee to inform him that they were assembled in the club rooms ready to transact business, and beer only four dollars a keg. He winked confidentially at himself in the mirror that night as he gave a final touch to his white cravat and surveyed his fine young form arrayed in evening clothes for the reform banquet at the Palmer House. His speech was _The Tendencies of Modern Politics_. The newspapers said it was a very brilliant speech, breathing lofty political sentiments that were bound to make John W. Underwood votes. Also, the Reform Club indorsed his candidature.

As Underwood leaned against the greasy wall of the little hall on lower Clark Street this morning, the whole campaign flashed before him, just as the events of a lifetime are said in books to flash before the mind of a drowning man. He recalled every vivid detail of the call Baldwin had made upon him, how he entered his private office without troubling the pale, pimpled office boy to announce him, how he lifted from his carefully parted hair his straw hat with its youthful band of blue, and laughed out, “John, my boy, how are you? Hot, isn’t it?” He could see Baldwin as he sat in the solid oak chair that stood intimately beside his roll-top desk, fanning his ruddy face with the hat, which had impressed a broad red band on his forehead. Underwood had been glad enough to close _Cooley on Taxation_ and revolve his chair to face Baldwin, just as if he had been a client, for Baldwin was the most important politician who had ever called upon him professionally.

Underwood remembered clearly how Baldwin’s excellent teeth glistened when he smiled, how he lighted a Turkish cigarette and, tilting up his chin, blew a long, airy stream of blue smoke through the thick hairs of his mustache. He could even remember how carefully Baldwin sheltered the flame of the match for Underwood’s cigarette, in that curious spirit of economy men always practice with regard to matches, much as if there were only one match left in the whole world. And then he could recall almost word for word their conversation. Baldwin had frankly told him that Conway had him handicapped, because he had the city hall with him and controlled the Fifth Ward. Simmons, Baldwin had said, didn’t cut much ice; he had some labor leaders with him, and would get a bunch of delegates from his own ward, but that was about all. In fact, said Baldwin, concluding his judicial summing up, Conway could win out, hands down, if it were not for his recent quarrel with Malachi Nolan. Underwood remembered that during all this frankness he had reflectively drawn rude little geometrical figures on an envelope and had been somehow afraid to look up at Baldwin, for the noted lobbyist had sat there transfixing him with an eye that could read the mind of a man when it was impinged on politics--that is, practical politics--as easily as it could a poker hand across a table stacked with blue chips.