A Hoosier Chronicle Part 33

In the middle of the hall a delegate now drew attention to himself by rising upon a chair; he held a piece of paper in his hand and waved it; and the chairman promptly took cognizance of him. The chairman referred to him as the gentleman from Pulaski, but he might have been the gentleman from Vallombrosa for all that any one cared. The convention was annoyed that a gentleman from Pulaski County should have dared to flourish ma.n.u.script when there were innumerable orators present fully prepared to speak extempore on any subject. For all that any one knew the gentleman from Pulaski might be primed with a speech on the chinch bug or the Jewish kritarchy; a man with a sheet of paper in his hand was a formidable person, if not indeed a foe of mankind, and he was certainly not to be countenaced or encouraged in a hot hall on a day of June. Yet all other human beings save the gentleman from Pulaski were as nothing, it seemed, to the chairman. The Tallest Delegate, around whose lean form a frock coat hung like a fold of night, and who flung back from a white brow an immense quant.i.ty of raven hair, sought to relieve the convention of the sight and sound of the person from Pulaski. The Tallest Delegate was called smartly to order; he rebelled, but when threatened with the sergeant-at-arms subsided amid jeers. The gentleman from Pulaski was indulged to the fullest extent by the chairman, to whom it had occurred suddenly that the aisles must be cleared. The aisles were cleared and delegates were obliged to find their seats before the unknown gentleman from Pulaski was allowed to proceed. Even the War Eagle had received no such consideration. The gentleman from Pulaski calmly waited for a completer silence than the day had known. Ten men in the hall knew what was coming--not more; Miss Rose Farrell had typed ten copies of the memorandum which Harwood held in his hand!

The gentleman from Pulaski did not after all refer to his ma.n.u.script; he spoke in a high, penetrating voice that reached the farthest corner of the hall, reciting from memory:--

"Be it resolved by this convention that, whereas two years hence it will be the privilege and duty of the Indiana Democracy to elect a United States Senator to fill the seat now occupied by a Republican, we, the delegates here a.s.sembled, do hereby pledge the party's support for the office of Senator in Congress to the Honorable Edward G. Thatcher, of Marion County."

There was a moment's awed calm before the storm broke; Thatcher rose in his seat to look at the strange gentleman from Pulaski who had thus flung his name into the arena. Thatcher men rose and clamored blindly for recognition, without the faintest idea of what they should do if haply the cold eye of the chairman fell upon them. The galleries joined in the uproar; the band began to play "On the Banks of the Wabash" and was with difficulty stopped; a few voices cried "Ba.s.sett," but cries of "Thatcher" rose in a mighty roar and drowned them. The chairman hammered monotonously for order; Mr. Daniel Harwood might have been seen to thrust his memorandum into his trousers pocket; he bent forward in his seat with his eye upon the chairman. The Honorable Isaac Pett.i.t had been for a moment nonplussed; he was unacquainted with the gentleman from Pulaski, nor had he known that an effort was to be made to commit the convention to Thatcher's candidacy; still the tone of the resolution was friendly. Thatcher, rising to his feet, was noisily cheered; his face was red and his manner betokened anger; but after glancing helplessly over the hall he sank into his seat. The chairman thumped with his gavel; it seemed for a moment that he had lost control of the convention; and now the Honorable Isaac Pett.i.t was observed demanding to be heard. The chairman lifted his hand and the noise died away. It lay in his power to ignore the resolution wholly or to rule it out of order; the chairman was apparently in no haste to do anything.

"Good old Uncle Ike," howled some one encouragingly, and there was laughter and applause. With superb dignity Mr. Pett.i.t appealed for silence with gestures that expressed self-depreciation, humility, and latent power in one who would, in due course, explain everything. A group of delegates in the rear began chanting stridently, "Order!

Order!" and it was flung back antiphonally from a dozen other delegations.

Mr. Harwood became active and climbed upon his chair. Gentlemen in every part of the hall seemed at once anxious to speak, but the chairman was apparently oblivious of all but the delegate from Marion. The delegate from Marion, like the mysterious person from Pulaski, was a stranger to state conventions. The ladies were at once interested in the young gentleman with the red carnation in his b.u.t.tonhole--a trim young fellow, in a blue serge suit, with a blue four-in-hand knotted under a white winged collar. As he waited with his eye on the chairman he put his hand to his head and smoothed his hair.

"Is Daniel going to speak?" asked Mrs. Owen. "He ought to have asked me if he's going to back Edward Thatcher for Senator."

"I always think his cowlick's so funny. He's certainly the cool one,"

said Marian.

"I don't know what they're talking about a Senator for," said Mrs.

Ba.s.sett. "It's very unusual. If I'd known they were going to talk about that I shouldn't have come. There's sure to be a row."

The chairman seemed anxious that the delegate from Marion should be honored with the same close attention that had been secured for the stranger from Pulaski.

"I hope he'll wait till they all sit down," said Sylvia; "I want to hear him speak."

"You'll hear him, all right," said Marian. "You know at Yale they called him 'Foghorn' Harwood, and they put him in front to lead the cheering at all the big games."

Apparently something was expected of Mr. Harwood of Marion. Thatcher had left his seat and was moving toward the corridors to find his lieutenants. Half a dozen men accosted him as he moved through the aisle, but he shook them off angrily. An effort to start another demonstration in his honor was not wholly fruitless. It resulted at least in a good deal of confusion of which the chair was briefly tolerant; then he resumed his pounding, while Harwood stood stubbornly on his chair.

The Tallest Delegate, known to be a recent convert to Thatcher, was thoroughly aroused, and advanced toward the platform shouting; but the chairman leveled his gavel at him and bade him sit down. The moment was critical; the veriest tyro felt the storm-spirit brooding over the hall.

The voice of the chairman was now audible.

"The chair recognizes the delegate from Marion."

"Out of order! What's his name!" howled many voices.

The chairman graciously availed himself of the opportunity to announce the name of the gentleman he had recognized.

"Mr. Harwood, of Marion, has the floor. The convention will be in order.

The gentleman will proceed."

"Mr. Chairman, I rise to a point of order."

Dan's voice rose sonorously; the convention was relieved to find that the gentleman in blue serge could be heard; he was audible even to Mr.

Thatcher's excited counsellors in the corridors.

"The delegate will kindly state his point of order."

The chairman was quietly courteous. His right hand rested on his gavel, he thrust his left into the side pocket of his long alpaca coat. He was an old and tried hand in the chair, and his own deep absorption in the remarks of Mr. Harwood communicated itself to the delegates.

Dan uttered rapidly the speech he had committed to memory for this occasion a week earlier. Every sentence had been carefully pondered; both Ba.s.sett and Atwill had blue penciled it until it expressed concisely and pointedly exactly what Ba.s.sett wished to be said at this point in the convention's proceedings. Interruptions, of applause or derision, were to be reckoned with; but the speaker did not once drop his voice or pause long enough for any one to drive in a wedge of protest. He might have been swamped by an uprising of the whole convention, but strange to say the convention was intent upon hearing him. Once the horde of candidates and distinguished visitors on the platform had been won to attention, Harwood turned slowly until he faced the greater crowd behind him. Several times he lifted his right hand and struck out with it, shaking his head with the vigor of his utterance.

("His voice," said the "Advertiser's" report, "rumbles and bangs like a bowling-alley on Sat.u.r.day night. There was a big b.u.mp every time a sentence rumbled down the hall and struck the rear wall of the building.")

"Sir, I make the obvious point of order that there are no vacancies to fill in the office of United States Senator, and that it does not lie within the province of the delegates chosen to this convention to pledge the party to any man. I do not question the motive of the delegate from Pulaski County, who is my personal friend; and I am animated by no feelings of animosity in demanding that the convention proceed to the discharge of its obligations without touching upon matters clearly beyond its powers. I confidently hope and sincerely believe that our party in Indiana is soon to receive a new commission of trust and confidence from the people of the old Hoosier State. But our immediate business is the choice of a ticket behind which the Hoosier Democracy will move on to victory in November like an army with banners. (Cheers.) There have been intimations in the camp of our enemy that the party is threatened with schism and menaced by factional wars; but I declare my conviction that the party is more harmonious and more truly devoted to high ideals to-day than at any time since the grand old name of Democrat became potent upon Hoosier soil. And what have we to do with leaders?

Men come and men go, but principles alone are eternal and live forever.

The great task of our party must be to bring the government back to the people. (Scattering applause.) But the choice of an invulnerable state ticket at this convention is our business and our only business. As for Indiana's two seats in the national Senate which we shall soon wrest from our adversaries, in due season we shall fill them with tried men and true. Sir, let us remember that whosoever maketh himself a king speaketh against Caesar. Stop, Look, Listen!"

Hardly a man in the hall so dull that this did not penetrate! Dan had given to his last words a weird, mournful intonation whose effect was startling. He jumped lightly to the floor and was in his seat before the deep boom of his voice had ceased reverberating. Then instantly it seemed that the seventeen hundred delegates had been multiplied by ten, and that every man had become a raving lunatic. This was Ba.s.sett's defiance--Ba.s.sett, who had gone fis.h.i.+ng, but not before planting this mine for the confusion of Thatcher. A hundred men who had already committed themselves to Thatcher sought to rescue their new leader; they rose upon chairs and demanded to be heard. "Stop, Look, Listen" had suggested the idea of a locomotive bearing down upon a dangerous crossing, and Ba.s.sett's men began to whistle. The whistling increased in volume until it drowned the shouts, the cheers, and the laughter. Ladies in the galleries stopped their ears while the whistling convention earned its name. It now occurred to the chairman, who had wasted no energy in futile efforts to stay the storm, that he had a duty to perform. Even to his practiced hand the restoration of order was not easy; but by dint of much bawling and pounding he subdued the uproar.

Then after impressive deliberation he said:--

"A point of order has been raised against the resolution offered by the gentleman from Pulaski. It is the ruling of the chair that the point is well taken. The resolution is out of order."

This was greeted with great applause; but the chair checked it promptly.

The ten gentlemen who had copies of the Ba.s.sett programme in their pockets were not surprised by the decision. Thatcher stood at a side door and two of his men were pus.h.i.+ng their way through the aisles to reach Pett.i.t; for the Honorable Isaac Pett.i.t was on his feet demanding recognition while Thatcher's delegates shouted to him to sit down; humiliation must go no farther, and if the Fraser County editor did not realize that his new chief was the victim of a vile trick, the gentleman from Fraser must be throttled, if necessary, to prevent a further affront to Thatcher's dignity. Thatcher was purple with rage; it was enough to have been made the plaything of an unscrupulous enemy once, without having one's ambitions repeatedly kicked up and down a convention hall.

The chairman, fully rehea.r.s.ed in his part, showed a malevolent disposition to continue toward the friends of Thatcher an att.i.tude at once benevolent and just. So many were demanding recognition amid cat-calling and whistling that the fairest and least partial of presiding officers might well have hesitated before singling out one gentleman when so many were eagerly, even furiously, desirous of enlightening the convention. But the presiding officer was obeying the orders communicated to him by a gentleman who was even at this moment skimming across the cool waters of Lake Waupegan. It would more fully have satisfied the chairman's sense of humor to have recognized the Honorable Isaac Pett.i.t and have suffered an appeal from the ruling of the chair, which presumably the editor wished to demand. By this means the weakness of Thatcher might have expressed itself in figures that would have deepened Thatcher's abas.e.m.e.nt in the eyes of his fellow partisans; but this idea had been discussed with Ba.s.sett, who had sharply vetoed it, and the chairman was not a man lightly to disobey orders even to make a Hoosier holiday. He failed to see the editor of the "Fraser County Democrat" and peremptorily closed the incident. There was no mistaking his temper as he announced:--

"The chair announces that the next business in order is the call of the roll of counties for nominations for the office of secretary of state.

What is the pleasure of the convention?"

Colonel Ramsay had repaired to the gallery to enjoy the proceedings with Mrs. Ba.s.sett's party. In spite of his support of the Palmer and Buckner ticket (how long ago that seems!), the Colonel had never lost touch with the main body of his party, and he carried several Indiana counties in his pocket. His relations with Ba.s.sett had never been in the least intimate, though always outwardly cordial, and there were those who looked to him to eliminate the Fraser County chief from politics. He was quite as rich as Ba.s.sett, and a successful lawyer, who had become a colonel by grace of a staff appointment in the Spanish War. He had a weakness for the poets, and his speeches were informed with that grace and sentiment which, we are fond of saying, is peculiar to Southern oratory. The Colonel, at all fitting occasions in our commonwealth, responded to "the ladies" in tender and moving phrases. He was a bachelor, and the ladies in the gallery saw in him their true champion.

"Please tell _us_--we don't understand a bit of it," pleaded Marian--"what it's all about, Colonel Ramsay."

"Oh, it's just a little joke of your father's; nothing funnier ever happened in a state convention." Colonel Ramsay grinned. "The key to the situation is right there: that Pulaski County delegate offered his resolution just to make trouble; it was a fake resolution. Of course the chairman is in the joke. This young fellow down here--yes, Harwood--made his speech to add to the gayety of nations. He had no right to make it, of course, but the word had been pa.s.sed along the line to let him go through. Amazing vocal powers, that boy,--you couldn't have stopped him!"

Sylvia was aware that Colonel Ramsay's explanation had not pleased Mrs.

Ba.s.sett; but Mrs. Owen evinced no feeling. Marian was enjoying Colonel Ramsay's praise of her father's adroitness. Near Sylvia were other women who had much at stake in the result of the convention. The wife of a candidate for secretary of state had invited herself to a seat beside Mrs. Ba.s.sett; the wife of a Congressman who wished to be governor, sat near, publis.h.i.+ng to the world her intimate acquaintance with Morton Ba.s.sett's family. The appearance and conduct of these women during the day interested Sylvia almost as much as the incidents occurring on the floor; it was a new idea that politics had a bearing upon the domestic life of the men who engaged in the eternal contest for place and power.

The convention as a spectacle was immensely diverting, but she had her misgivings about it as a transaction in history. Colonel Ramsay asked her politics and she confessed that she had none. She had inherited Republican prejudices from her grandfather, and most of the girls she had known in college were of Republican antecedents; but she liked to call herself an independent.

"You'd better not be a Democrat, Sylvia," Mrs. Owen warned her. "I suffered a good deal in my husband's lifetime from being one. There are still people in this town who think a Democrat's the same as a Rebel or a Copperhead. It ain't hardly respectable yet, being a Democrat, and if they don't all of 'em shut up about the 'fathers' and the Const.i.tution, I'm going to move to Mexico where it's all run by n.i.g.g.e.rs."

Sylvia had singled out several figures in the drama enacting below for special attention. The chairman had interested her by reason of his att.i.tude of scrupulous fairness, in which she now saw the transparent irony; the ba.n.a.lities of the temporary chairman had touched her humor; she watched him for the rest of the morning with a kind of awe that any one could he so dull, so timorous, and yet be chosen to address nearly two thousand American citizens on an occasion of importance. She was unable to reconcile Thatcher's bald head, ruddy neck, and heavy shoulders with Marian's description of the rich man's son, who dreamed of heroes and played at carpentry. Dan's speech had not been without its thrill for her, and she now realized its significance. It had been a part of a trick, and in spite of herself she could not share the admiration Colonel Ramsay was expressing for Harwood's share in it. He was immeasurably superior to the majority of those about him in the crowded hall; he was a man of education, a college man, and she had just experienced in her own life that consecration, as by an apostolic laying-on of hands, by which a college confers its honors and imposes its obligations upon those who have enjoyed its ministry. Yet Harwood, who had not struck her as weak or frivolous, had lent himself to-day to a bit of cheap claptrap merely to humble one man for the glorification of another. Ba.s.sett she had sincerely liked in their one meeting at Waupegan; and yet this was of his plotting and Harwood was his mouthpiece and tool. It did not seem fair to take advantage of such supreme stupidity as Thatcher's supporters had manifested. Her disappointment in Harwood--and it was quite that--was part of her general disappointment in the methods by which men transacted the serious business of governing themselves.

Harwood was conscious that he was one of the chief figures in the convention; every one knew him now; he was called here and there on the floor, by men anxious to impress themselves upon Ba.s.sett's authorized spokesman. It is a fine thing at twenty-seven to find the doors of opportunity flung wide--and had he not crossed the threshold and pa.s.sed within the portal? He was Ba.s.sett's man; every one knew that now; but why should he not be Ba.s.sett's man? He would go higher and farther than Ba.s.sett: Ba.s.sett had merely supplied the ladder on which he would climb.

He was happier than he had ever been before in his life; he had experienced the intoxication of applause, and he was not averse to the glances of the women in the gallery above him.

The nomination of candidates now went forward rather tamely, though relieved by occasional sharp contests. The ten gentlemen who had been favored with copies of the Ba.s.sett programme were not surprised that so many of Thatcher's friends were nominated; they themselves voted for most of them. It seemed remarkable to the uninitiated that Ba.s.sett should have slapped Thatcher and then have allowed him to score in the choice of the ticket. The "Advertiser," anxious to show Ba.s.sett as strong and malignant as possible, expressed the opinion that the Fraserville boss had not after all appreciated the full force of the Thatcher movement.

On the veranda of his Waupegan cottage Ba.s.sett and Fitch enjoyed the wholesome airs of the country. Late in the afternoon the fussy little steamer that traversed the lake paused at the Ba.s.sett dock to deliver a telegram, which Ba.s.sett read without emotion. He pa.s.sed the yellow slip of paper to Fitch, who read it and handed it back.

"Harwood's a clever fellow; but you oughtn't to push him into politics.

He's better than that."

"I suppose he is," said Ba.s.sett; "but I need him."