The Voice of the People Part 43

As he looked at her he held out his arms.

"Eugie--poor girl! dear girl!"

In the desolation of her life he stood to her as the hearth of home to a wanderer in the frozen North.

For an instant she held back, and then, with a sob, she yielded.

"I must be loved," she said. "I must be loved or I shall die."

Around them the winter landscape reddened as the sunset broke, and above their heads the crows flew, cawing, across the snow.

BOOK IV

THE MAN AND THE TIMES

I

The Democratic State Convention had taken an hour's recess. From the doors of the opera house of Powhatan City the a.s.sembled delegates emerged, heated, clamorous, out of breath. The morning session, despite its noise, had not been interesting--awaiting the report of the Committee on Credentials, the panting body had fumed away the opening hours. Of the fifteen hundred representatives of absent voters, the favoured few who had held the floor had been needlessly discursive and undeniably dull. There had been overmuch of the party platform, and an absence of the wit which is the soul of political speaking; and, though the average Virginia Convention is able to breast triumphantly the most encompa.s.sing wave of oratory, the present one had shown unmistakable signs of suffocation. At the end of the third speech, metaphor had failed to move it, and alliteration had ceased to evoke applause. It had heard without emotion similes that concerned the colour of Cleopatra's hair, and had yawned through perorations that ranged from Socrates to the Senior Senator, who sat upon the stage. Attacks upon the "cormorants and harpies that roost in Wall Street" had roused no thrill in the mind of the majority that knew not rhetoric. The most patient of the silent members had observed that "after all, their business was to nominate a candidate for governor," while the unruly spirits, as they brandished palm-leaf fans, had wished "that blamed committee would come on."

Now, after hours of restless waiting, they emerged, stiff-kneed and perspiring, into the blazing sunshine that filled the little street.

Once outside, they opened their lungs to the warm air in an attempt to banish the tainted atmosphere of the interior; but the original motive of expansion was lost in a flow of words. On the sidewalk the crowd divided into streams, pulsing in opposite directions. Heated, noisy, pervasive, it surged to dinners in hotels and boarding-houses, and overflowed where Moloney's restaurant displayed its bill of fare. It came out talking, it divided talking; still talking, it swept, a roaring sea of flesh, into the far-off buzz of the distance. In a group of three men pa.s.sing into the lobby of the largest hotel, there was a slender man of fifty years, with a well-knit figure, half closed, indifferent eyes, and an emphatic mouth. In the insistent hum of words about him, his voice sounded in a brisk utterance that carried a hint of important issues.

"Oh, I don't think Hartley's much account," he was saying. "I'd bet on a close shave between Webb and Crutchfield, with Webb in the lead. Small will get the lieutenant-governorship, of course. Davis ought to be attorney-general, but he'll be beaten by Wray. It's the party reward.

Davis is the better lawyer, by long odds, but Wray has stuck to the party like a burr--I don't mean a pun, if you please."

The younger of his two companions, a spirited youth with high-standing auburn hair, laughed uproariously.

"The trouble is they're afraid Burr won't stick to the party," he protested. "Major Simms, who is marshalling Crutchfield's forces, you know, said to me last night--'Oh, Burr's all right when you let him lead, but he's d.a.m.ned mulish if you begin to pull the other way.'"

The third man, a sunburned farmer, with a dogged mouth overhung by a tobacco-stained mustache, a.s.sented with a nod.

"There's not a better Democrat in Virginia than Nick Burr," he said. "If the party's got anything against him it had better out with it at once.

He made the most successful chairman the State ever had--and he's honest--there's not a more honest man in politics or out."

"Oh, I know all that," broke in the auburn-haired young fellow, whose name was d.i.c.kson; "I'd back Burr against any candidate in the field, and I'm sorry he kept out of it. I hoped he'd come forward with you to manage his campaign, Mr. Galt," he said to the first speaker.

Galt waived the remark.

"Perhaps he thought his chances too slim for a walkover," he said in non-committal fashion, as Burr's best friend. "I hear, by the way, that the delegation from his old home is instructed to vote for him on the first ballot, whether or not."

"He has a great name down in my parts," put in the farmer. "The people think he has the agricultural interests at heart. They wanted to send him to Congress in Webb's place, you know."

"Yes, I know," said Galt. "h.e.l.lo, Ba.s.sett," as Tom Ba.s.sett joined him.

"Where've you been? Lost sight of you this morning."

"Oh, I was out with the Committee on Credentials. A member? I should say not. I wanted to hear that Madison County case, so I got made sergeant-at-arms. By the way, d.i.c.k," to d.i.c.kson, "I hear you held the floor for five minutes this morning and got off five distinct stories that landed with Columbus."

"Nonsense. I didn't open my mouth--except to call 'time' on the men who did. There's our orator now."

He bowed to an elderly gentleman with a sharply pointed chin beard and the type of face that was once called clerical.

"Some one defined oratory the other day," said Galt, "as the fringe with which the inhabitants of the Southern States still delighted to trim their politics--so I should call the gentleman of to-day 'a political ta.s.sel.' He's ornamental and he hangs by a thread."

And he pa.s.sed into the lobby arm-in-arm with Tom Ba.s.sett.

The place was swarming with delegates: delegates from country districts, red-faced farmers in flapping linen coats and wide-brimmed hats; delegates from the cities, dapper, well-groomed, cordial-voiced; delegates of the true political type, shaven, obsequious, alert; delegates of the cast that belongs at home, outspoken, honest-eyed, remote; stout delegates, with half-bursting waistbands, thin delegates, with shrunken chests. In the animated throng there was but one condition held in common--they were all heated delegates. In one corner a stout gentleman in a thin coat, with a scarlet neck showing above his wilted collar, held a half-dozen listeners with his eyes, while he plied them with emphatic sentences in which the name of Crutchfield sounded like a refrain. Moving from group to group, portly, unctuous, insinuating, a man with an oily voice was doing battle in the cause of Webb.

The throng that pa.s.sed in and out of the lobby was continually shifting place and principles. One instant it would seem that Crutchfield triumphed in a majority sufficient to overwhelm the platform; a moment more and the Webb men were vociferously in the ascendant. At the time it resolved itself into a question of tongues.

"This is thick," said Ben Galt, dodging the straw hat with which a perspiring politician was fanning himself and gently withdrawing himself from the arms of a scarlet individual in a wet collar to collide with his double. "Let's go to dinner. Ah! there's the Lion of Democracy--how are you, Judge?"

The Lion, a striking figure, with a graceful, snow-white mane and a colossal memory, held out a tireless hand. "Well met, Ben," he exclaimed in effusive tones. "I've been on the outlook for you all day. One moment--your pardon--one moment--Ah, my dear sir! my dear sir!" to a countryman who approached him with outstretched hand, "I am delighted.

Remember you? Why, of course--of course! Your name has escaped me this instant; but I was speaking of you only yesterday. No, don't tell me!

don't tell me. I remember. Ah, now I have it--one moment, please--it was after the battle of Seven Pines. You lent me a horse after the battle of Seven Pines. Thank you--thank you, sir. And your charming lady, who made me the delicious coffee. My best regards to her."

The great man was surrounded, and Galt and Ba.s.sett, leaving him to his a.s.sailants, pa.s.sed into the dining-room.

Glancing hastily down the long room filled with small, overcrowded tables, they joined several men who were seated near an open window.

"h.e.l.lo, Major. Glad to see you, Mr. Slate! How are things down your way, Colonel?"

A tired negro waiter, with a napkin slung over his arm, drew back the chairs and deposited two plates of lukewarm soup before the newcomers, after which he lifted a brush of variegated tissue paper and made valiant a.s.sault upon the flies which overran the tables. Stale odours of over-cooked food weighted the atmosphere, and waiters bearing enormous trays above their heads jostled one another as they threaded their difficult ways. Occasionally the clamour of voices was lost in the clatter of breaking dishes. Tom Ba.s.sett pushed his plate away and mopped his large forehead. He appeared to have developed without aging in the last fifteen years--still presenting an aspect of invincible respectability.

"It's ninety-two degrees in the shade, if it's anything," he declared, adding, "Has anybody seen Webb to-day?"

The colonel, whose name was Diggs, nodded with his mouth full, and, having swallowed at his leisure, proceeded to reply, holding his knife and fork poised for service. He was fair to the point of insipidity, and his weak blue eyes bulged with joviality.

"Shook hands with him at the train last night," he said. "Hall was a day ahead of time. Great politician, Hall. Working for Webb like a beaver.

Here, waiter! More potatoes."

"I went to sleep last night to the music of Webb's men," said Galt, "and I awoke to the tune of Crutchfield. I don't believe either side went to bed. My wonder is whom they found to work on."

Slate, a muscular little man, with a nervous affection about the mouth that gave him an appearance of being continually on the point of a surprising utterance, hesitated over, caught, and finally landed his speech. "They're dead against Webb down my way," he said. "Our delegation is instructed to vote for anybody that favours retrenchment, unless it's Webb--they won't have Webb if he moves to run the State on the two-cent system. If we'd cast a quarter of a vote for him they'd drum us out of the district. It's all because he voted for that railroad bill in Washington last winter. We hate a railroad as a bull hates a red flag."

Major Baylor, a courtly gentleman, with a face that bore traces of a survival of the old Virginian legal type, spoke for the first time.

"Fauquier stands to a man for Dudley Webb," he said. "He has a large following in my section, and I understand, by the way, that if Hartley withdraws after the first ballot, it will mean a clear gain for Webb in the eighth district. He's safe, I think."

"Oh, we're Crutchfield strong," laughed the colonel good-humouredly, reaching for a toothpick from the gla.s.s stand in the centre of the table. "We think a man deserves something who hasn't missed a convention for fourteen years."

There was a spirit of ridicule tempered with good-humour about the group, which showed it to be, in the main, indifferent to the result--an att.i.tude in vivid contrast to the effervescent partisanship of the leaders. With the exception of the colonel, whose heart was in his dinner, they appeared to be unconcerned spectators of the events of the day.