Brand Whitlock

“ The spectacles, the gray in his hair, the wrinkles in his face, the looseness of the skin at his jaws and at his throat—where a fold of it hung between the points of his collar—all told that Wade Powell had passed the invisible line which marks life’s summit, and that his face was turned now toward the evening. There was the touch of sadness in the indistinct conception of him as a man who had not altogether realized the ambitions of his youth or the predictions of his friends, and the sadness came from the intuition that the failure or the half-failure was not of the heroic kind. ”

“ Through all that hotel that night, in lobby and in bar-room, on the stairs, in the side halls and up and down in the elevators, throbbed the fascination of politics, which men play not so much for its ends as for its means.
Vernon was of this crowd, moving from one group to another, smoking, laughing, talking. His heart may have been a little sore at the thought of Amelia’s strange neglect of him, but the soreness had subsided until now it was but a slight numbness which he could forget at times, and when he did think of it, it but gave him resolution to play the game more fiercely. ”

“ For a young citizen to whom society is yet an illusion, lying, in Emerson’s figure, before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men and institutions rooted like oak-trees to the center, round which all arrange themselves the best they can, to have one of those oak-trees torn violently up by the roots, is to experience a distinct shock. And by two words, and an expression that played for an instant in lowered eyes, and about lips that were more concerned just then with the flattened end of a fresh cigarette than the divulgence of great truths! ”

“ Lavinia cried.
“No,” Mrs. Blair whispered. “Can’t you tell mama now?”
And then with her mother’s arms about her Lavinia told her all. When she had finished she lay tranquilly. Mrs. Blair was relieved and yet her troubles had but grown the more complicated. She saw all the intricate elements with which she would have to deal, and she quailed before them, realizing what tact would be required of her.
“The coming of love should be a time of joy, dear,” she said presently. Even in the darkness, she could see the white blur of Lavinia’s face change its expression. A smile had touched it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As the campaign opened, as the city was swept with the excitement of it, with meetings at noon-day and at night, office-seekers flying about in automobiles, walls covered with pictures of candidates, hand-bills scattered in the streets to swirl in the wild March winds, and men quarreling over whether Clayton or Ellsworth should be mayor, Kittrell had to draw a political cartoon each day; and as he struggled with his work, less and less the old joy came to cheer and spur him on. ”

“ The sound of many voices, the ring of heavy laughter, the shuffle of feet over the tiles, the clang of the clerk’s gong, the incessant chitter of a telegraph instrument that sped news to Chicago over the Courier’s private wire, all these influences surcharged the heavy air with a nervous excitement that made men speak quickly and their eyes glitter under the brilliant lights of countless electric bulbs. ”

“ She still looked out upon the world with the wide eyes of her girlhood; while Emily, though immured in all the provincialism of her little prairie town, had known the daily heart-ache and the sleepless nights in which the soul sounds all the deeps of life. So it was that out of eyes from which the scales had fallen she looked upon Dade’s glowing and radiant face this May morning, and the smile that came to her was of a longing sympathy with the youth and girlhood that stood revealed before her. ”

“ The clock in the Court House tower boomed out the heavy hours. Sometimes the harmonies of the singing negroes were borne over the town.
And to Marley and Lavinia those days, and those evenings of purple shadows and soft brilliant stars, were but the setting of a dream that unfolded new wonders constantly. They were but a part of all life, a part of the glowing summer itself, innocent of the thousand artificial demands man has made on himself. Lavinia went about with a new expression, exalted, expectant; a new dignity had come to her and a new beauty ”

“ Main Street, when we turned into it presently, was deserted, and wore an unreal appearance, like the street of the dead town that was painted on the scene at the “opera-house.” Far to the south it stretched its interminable length in white dust, until its trees came together in that mysterious distance where the fairgrounds were, and to the north its vista was closed by the bronze figure of the cavalryman standing on his pedestal in the Square, his head bowed in sad meditation, one gauntleted hand resting on his hip, the other on his saber-hilt. ”

“ The organ swelled into the wedding march that has become a tradition, and he was striding down the aisle with Emily on his arm. He saw his mother’s tears, he saw Rankin, the big fellow furtively knuckling his eyes, and then winking drolly at him, he saw Mr. Harkness, who, he suddenly remembered, was now his father-in-law, pale and stern. And so they left the church and passed out under the canopy to the waiting carriage.
Garwood, like a king come from his crowning, felt a kindness for all the world, even for the poor folk gathered on the sidewalk striving for a glimpse of the bride’s gown. ”

“ In the freedom of the mind, the spontaneous outburst of ecstasy and delight, the new-born possibility of loveliness and harmony and joyous existence, they not only exalted life with art, but gained the courage to undertake sterner examinations of its mystery. And this same perennial spirit of humanism built, not only the proud and voluptuous cities of Tuscany and Lombardy, but the wealthy free cities of Flanders and Germany—and it discovered America, not the America of the senses alone, but the larger, nobler America of the mind. ”

“ The lake was in one of its most smiling and happy moods, though they were then at a point where storms easily lash its shallow depths into billows that might satisfy the rage of the North Atlantic. The lighthouse on the rocks at Marblehead had a fascination for Lavinia; it seemed waiting for her humor, and she watched it until the steamer had gone far on toward Kelly’s Island, and left the lighthouse behind, a white spot gleaming in the sun. ”

“ He was a young lawyer, smart, good-looking, a fellow every one liked. He had the gift of the gab; he could make a rattling speech, was strong on the stump and good before a jury. Everybody wanted to see him succeed. He was ambitious—ambitious as Lincoln, ambitious as the devil. His ambitions were not selfish—that is, not so damned selfish. He was no reformer, nothing like that; but he really wanted to help his people, wanted to do something to make life a little easier, a little better for the average fellow—like those he knew back home. ”

“ Tuesday evening the crowd, that grows larger as the session nears its close, filled the lobby of the Leland. The night was warm, and to the heat of politics was suddenly added the heat of summer. Doors and windows were flung wide to the night, and the tall Egyptians, used as they were to the sultry atmospheres of southern Illinois, strode lazily about under their wide slouch hats with waistcoats open and cravats loosened, delighting in a new cause for chaffing the Chicago men, who had resumed their customary complaints of the Springfield weather. ”

“ As it passed, yardmen in blue overalls straightened their backs painfully and scrutinized it with professional eye, sometimes they swung their caps; laborers, men and women, on their morning way to work, halted by the crossing-gates and united in a cheer, their futile little celebration being dissipated by the clamor of the alarm bells, as the train whirled by in its cloud of dust, and the gates lifted to let the flood-tide of city life set in again for the day’s work. ”

“ All the executions, all the imprisonments of the past are seen to have been mistakes made by savages; there is not one for which to-day a word is uttered in excuse. All the Golgothas of the world have become Calvaries, where men go in pity and in tears in the hope that their regret may somehow work a retroactive expiation of the guilt of their cruel ancestors—and they rise from their knees and go forth and acquiesce in brutalities that are to-day different only in the slightest of degrees from those they bemoan. ”

“ Even if calling on girls had not been such a serious business with him, he could not forget that he was just graduated from college and that a certain dignity befitted him. He wished Lawrence would not speak so loud; the girls might hear, and think he was afraid; he wished to keep the truth from them as long as possible. He had already caught a glimpse of the girls, or thought he had, but before he could make sure, the vague white figures on the veranda stirred; he heard a scurrying, and the loose bang of a screen door. Then it was still. Lawrence laughed—somehow, as Marley felt, derisively. ”

“ If Carroll had not conceived the idea of running for office, perhaps the colonel would have remained out of politics, but the boy, after a week of dreaming, dramatized himself as making a speech in the state senate chamber at Springfield. The colonel, as a man’s duty is, advised him to keep out of politics, and yet within an hour after Carroll shyly confessed his ambition, the fever awoke in the old fellow’s bones, his eyes flamed with the old fire, and he admitted that the experience might help a boy who was struggling in a pitiless city for a law practice. ”

“ The only pleasure he had had that afternoon had been on the way out; he had been alone with Lavinia, and the four miles of pleasant road that lay between the town and Greenwood Lake were too short for all the happiness Marley found in them. He could feel Lavinia again by his side, her hands folded on the thin old linen lap-robe. He could not recall a word they had said, but it seemed to him that the conversation had flowed on intimately and tranquilly; she had been so close and sympathetic; and he would always remember how her eyes had been raised to his. ”

“ Rankin had wearied of the formalities of the private car and, as the train began to fill with familiar forms, men with whom he had battled in conventions for years, he had fled to the easier society and the denser atmosphere of the smoking car, greeting countless friends from all over the district, and doing the campaign work Garwood felt he should be doing himself. But the magnetism of his great leader, the joy of being in a presence all men were courting in those days, perhaps, too, a desire to feel to the utmost the distinction of riding in a private car, kept him there. ”

“ The one thing that marred these contacts was not only that one was so powerless to help these men, but that one stood before them in an attitude that somehow suggested to them, inevitably, from long habit and the pretense of men who sought power for themselves, that one needed only to be placed in a certain official relation to them, and to be addressed by a certain title, to be able to help them. It was enough to make one ashamed, almost enough to cause one to prefer that they should vote for someone else, and relieve one from this dreadful self-consciousness, this dreadful responsibility. ”

“ He stood for an instant, pale and distinguished, a smile on his cleanly chiseled face, an impersonal smile, almost the smile of a child, as if he were unaccustomed to all about him, crowd, committees, even the steps of the railway carriage, for three men helped him down these as if he could not know how such things were done and might injure himself. Looking carefully to his right and to his left, still with that impersonal smile on his face, the candidate set his patent leather boots to the splintered platform, and then sighing “Ah!” looked around over the crowd. ”

“ And one sees a deal of life in a mayor’s office, and in it one may learn to envisage it as—just life. Then one can have a philosophy about it, though one cannot discover a panacea, some sort of sociological patent medicine to be administered to the community, like Socialism, or Prohibition, or absolute law enforcement, or the commission form of government. One indeed may open one’s eyes and look at one’s city and presently behold its vast antitheses, its boulevards and marble palaces at one end, and its slums, its tenements and tenderloins at the other. ”

“ The grass in the yard grew long, and the bushes languished in the heat. Judge Blair’s beans clambered up their poles and turned white; and Connie’s sweet peas grew lush and rank, running, as she complained, mostly to leaves. The house seemed to have withdrawn within itself; its green shutters were closed. In the evening dim figures could be seen on the veranda, and the drone of voices could be heard. At eleven o’clock, the deep siren of the Limited could be heard, as it rounded the curve a mile out of town. After that it was still, and night lay on Macochee, soft, vast, immeasurable. ”

“ The day of the primaries had marked the fall of the last of Emily’s ideals, and she felt, with her old habit of fixing a formal duty for every occasion that she must recognize the change by some definite, decisive act. But as she gradually revolved the problem life had set for her, and one after another weighed all the common solutions that men and women consider at such times—perhaps because of sheer inability to grapple with such monstrous spiritual difficulties—she shrank from them, finding them all so sordid, so squalid, so inadequate to a nature like hers. ”

“ There is nowhere in the world, so far as I know, or care to know, such an abominable manifestation of the meanness of nature; it is meaner than the meanness of human nature, entailing a constant struggle with winds, a perpetual bending to gusts of snow that is rain, or a rain that is hail, with an east wind that blows persistently off Lake Erie for two months, with little stinging barbs of ice on its breath—and then, suddenly, it is summer without any gentle airs at all to introduce its heat.
Jones was not very well that spring ”

“ When she had done so, she dropped her sewing suddenly into her lap, and looking up, said:
“He thinks everything of you, doesn’t he?”
“I believe he likes me,” Marley said, as modestly as he could put it.
“Who could help it?”
Lavinia looked at Marley, and he leaned over, and took her hands.
“I am glad you can’t, sweetheart,” he said.
“Do you know,” she went on, “I think it is because you have been kind and good to him—just as you are kind and good to every one. His life is lonely; he is an outcast, almost; no one cares for him, and he appreciates your goodness.” ”

“ Like all comers to Washington, she had no sooner set her foot to the pavement than she lifted her eyes to behold the Capitol, which symbols the might and majesty of the Republic to the stranger, who, when he once beholds it, ceases to be a stranger, and feels at home, for this city belongs to the nation and each citizen in it has an immediate revelation of his citizenship and of his common ownership in the things that make it interesting and great. ”