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The Project Gutenberg eBook, One Man in His Time, by Ellen Glasgow
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: One Man in His Time
Author: Ellen Glasgow
Release Date: April 11, 2005 [eBook #15603]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ONE MAN IN HIS TIME***
E-text prepared by David Garcia, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team
ONE MAN IN HIS TIME
by
ELLEN GLASGOW
1922
"One man in his time plays many parts."
NOTE
No character in this book was drawn from any actual person past or
present.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. THE SHADOW
II. GIDEON VETCH
III. CORINNA OF THE OLD PRINT SHOP
IV. THE TRIBAL INSTINCT
V. MARGARET
VI. MAGIC
VII. CORINNA GOES TO WAR
VIII. THE WORLD AND PATTY
IX. SEPTEMBER ROSES
X. PATTY AND CORINNA
XI. THE OLD WALLS AND THE RISING TIDE
XII. A JOURNEY INTO MEAN STREETS
XIII. CORINNA WONDERS
XIV. A LITTLE LIGHT ON HUMAN NATURE
XV. CORINNA OBSERVES
XVI. THE FEAR OF LIFE
XVII. MRS. GREEN
XVIII. MYSTIFICATION
XIX. THE SIXTH SENSE
XX. CORINNA FACES LIFE
XXI. DANCE MUSIC
XXII. THE NIGHT
XXIII. THE DAWN
XXIV. THE VICTORY OF GIDEON VETCH
CHAPTER I
THE SHADOW
The winter's twilight, as thick as blown smoke, was drifting through the
Capitol Square. Already the snow covered walks and the frozen fountains
were in shadow; but beyond the irregular black boughs of the trees the
sky was still suffused with the burning light of the sunset. Over the
head of the great bronze Washington a single last gleam of sunshine shot
suddenly before it vanished amid the spires and chimneys of the city,
which looked as visionary and insubstantial as the glowing horizon.
Stopping midway of the road, Stephen Culpeper glanced back over the
vague streets and the clearer distance, where the approaching dusk spun
mauve and silver cobwebs of air. From that city, it seemed to him, a new
and inscrutable force--the force of an idea--had risen within the last
few months to engulf the Square and all that the Square had ever meant
in his life. Though he was only twenty-six, he felt that he had watched
the decay and dissolution of a hundred years. Nothing of the past
remained untouched. Not the old buildings, not the old trees, not even
the old memories. Clustering traditions had fled in the white blaze of
electricity; the quaint brick walks, with their rich colour in the
sunlight, were beginning to disappear beneath the expressionless mask of
concrete. It was all changed since his father's or his grandfather's
day; it was all obvious and cheap, he thought; it was all ugly and naked
and undistinguished--yet the tide of the new ideas was still rising.
Democracy, relentless, disorderly, and strewn with the wreckage of finer
things, had overwhelmed the world of established customs in which he
lived.
As he lifted his face to the sky, his grave young features revealed a
subtle kinship to the statues beneath the mounted Washington in the
drive, as if both flesh and bronze had been moulded by the dominant
spirit of race. Like the heroes of the Revolution, he appeared a
stranger in an age which had degraded manners and enthroned commerce;
and like them also he seemed to survey the present from some
inaccessible height of the past. Dignity he had in abundance, and a
certain mellow, old-fashioned quality; yet, in spite of his
well-favoured youth, he was singularly lacking in sympathetic appeal.
Already people were beginning to say that they "admired Culpeper; but he
was a bit of a prig, and they couldn't get really in touch with him."
His attitude of mind, which was passive but critical, had developed the
faculties of observation rather than the habits of action. As a member
of the community he was indifferent and amiable, gay and ironic. Only
the few who had seen his reserve break down before the rush of an
uncontrollable impulse suspected that there were rich veins of feeling
buried beneath his conventional surface, and that he cherished an
inarticulate longing for heroic and splendid deeds. The war had left
him with a nervous malady which he had never entirely overcome; and this
increased both his romantic dissatisfaction with his life and his
inability to make a sustained effort to change it.
The sky had faded swiftly to pale orange; the distant buildings appeared
to swim toward him in the silver air; and the naked trees barred the
white slopes with violet shadows. In the topmost branches of an old
sycamore the thinnest fragment of a new moon hung trembling like a
luminous thread. The twilight was intensely still, and the noises of the
city fell with a metallic sound on his ears, as if a multitude of bells
were ringing about him. While he walked on past the bald outline of the
restored and enlarged Capitol, this imaginary concert grew gradually
fainter, until he heard above it presently the sudden closing of a
window in the Governor's mansion--as the old gray house was called.
Pausing abruptly, the young man frowned as his eyes fell on the charming
Georgian front, which presided like a serene and spacious memory over
the modern utilitarian purpose that was devastating the Square. Alone in
its separate plot, broad, low, and hospitable, the house stood there
divided and withdrawn from the restless progress and the age of
concrete--a modest reminder of the centuries when men had built well
because they had time, before they built, to stop and think and
remember. The arrested dignity of the past seemed to the young man to
hover above the old mansion within its setting of box hedges and
leafless lilac shrubs and snow-laden magnolia trees. He saw the house
contrasted against the crude surroundings of the improved and disfigured
Square, and against the house, attended by all its stately traditions,
he saw the threatening figure of Gideon Vetch. "So it has come to this,"
he thought resentfully, with his gaze on the doorway where a round
yellow globe was shining. Ragged frost-coated branches framed the
sloping roof, and the white columns of the square side porches emerged
from the black crags of magnolia trees. In the centre of the circular
drive, invaded by concrete, a white heron poured a stream of melting ice
from a distorted throat.
The shutters were not closed at the lower windows, and the firelight
flickered between the short curtains of some brownish muslin. As Stephen
passed the gate on his way down the hill, a figure crossed one of the
windows, and his frown deepened as he recognized, or imagined that he
recognized, the shadow of Gideon Vetch.
"Gideon Vetch!" At the sound of the name the young man threw back his
head and laughed softly. A Gideon Vetch was Governor of Virginia! Here
also, he told himself, half humorously, half bitterly, democracy had
won. Here also the destroying idea had triumphed. In sight of the bronze
Washington, this Gideon Vetch, one of "the poor white trash," born in a
circus tent, so people said, the demagogue of demagogues in Stephen's
opinion--this Gideon Vetch had become Governor of Virginia! Yet the
placid course of Stephen's life flowed on precisely as it had flowed
ever since he could remember, and the dramatic hand of Washington had
not fallen. It was still so recent; it had come about so unexpectedly,
that people--at least the people the young man knew and esteemed--were
still trying to explain how it had happened. The old party had been
sleeping, of course; it had grown too confident, some said too
corpulent; and it had slept on peacefully, in spite of the stirring
strength of the labour leaders, in spite of the threatening coalition of
the new factions, in spite even of the swift revolt against the stubborn
forces of habit, of tradition, of overweening authority. His mother, he
knew, held the world war responsible; but then his mother was so
constituted that she was obliged to blame somebody or something for
whatever happened. Yet others, he admitted, as well as his mother, held
the war responsible for Gideon Vetch--as if the great struggle had cast
him out in some gigantic cataclysm, as if it had broken through the once
solid ground of established order, and had released into the world all
the explosive gases of disintegration, of destruction.
For himself, the young man reflected now, he had always thought
otherwise. It was a period, he felt, of humbug radicalism, of windbag
eloquence; yet he possessed both wit and discernment enough to see that,
though ideas might explode in empty talk, still it took ideas to make
the sort of explosion that was deafening one's ears. All the flat
formula of the centuries could not produce a single Gideon Vetch. Such
men were part of the changing world; they answered not to reasoned
argument, but to the loud crash of breaking idols. Stephen hated Vetch
with all his heart, but he acknowledged him. He did not try to evade the
man's tremendous veracity, his integrity of being, his inevitableness.
An inherent intellectual honesty compelled Stephen to admit that, "the
demagogue", as he called him, had his appropriate place in the age that
produced him--that he existed rather as an outlet for political
tendencies than as the product of international violence. He was more
than a theatrical attitude--a torrent of words. Even a free country--and
Stephen thought sentimentally of America as "a free country"--must have
its tyrannies of opinion, and consequently its rebels against current
convictions. In the older countries he had imagined that it might be
possible to hold with the hare and run with the hounds; but in the land
of opportunity for all there was less reason to be astonished when the
hunted turned at last into the hunter. Where every boy was taught that
he might some day be President, why should one stand amazed when the
ambitious son of a circus rider became Governor of Virginia? After all,
a fair field and no favours was the best that the most conservative of
politicians--the best that even John Benham could ask.
Yes, there was a cause, there was a reason for the miracle of disorder,
or it would not have happened. The hour had called forth the man; but
the man had been there awaiting the strokes, listening, listening, with
his ear to the wind. It had been a triumph of personality, one of those
rare dramatic occasions when the right man and the appointed time come
together. This the young man admitted candidly in the very moment when
he told himself that he detested the demagogue and all his works. A man
who consistently made his bid for the support of the radical element!
Who stirred up the forces of discontent because he could harness them
to his chariot! A man who was born in a circus tent, and who still
performed in public the tricks of a mountebank! That this man had power,
Stephen granted ungrudgingly; but it was power over the undisciplined,
the half-educated, the mentally untrained. It was power, as John Benham
had once remarked with a touch of hyperbole, over empty stomachs.
There were persons in Stephen's intimate circle (there are such persons
even in the most conservative communities) who contended that Vetch was
in his way a rude genius. Judge Horatio Lancaster Page, for instance,
insisted that the Governor had a charm of his own, that, "he wasn't half
bad to look at if you caught him smiling," that he could even reason
"like one of us," if you granted him his premise. After the open debate
between Vetch and Benham--the great John Benham, hero of war and peace,
and tireless labourer in the vineyard of public service--after this
memorable discussion, Judge Horatio Lancaster Page had remarked, in his
mild, unpolemical tone, that "though John had undoubtedly carried off
the flowers of rhetoric, there was a good deal of wholesome green stuff
about that fellow Vetch." But everybody knew that a man with a comical
habit of mind could not be right.
Again the figure crossed the firelight between the muslin curtains, and
to Stephen Culpeper, standing alone in the snow outside, that large
impending presence embodied all that he and his kind had hated and
feared for generations. It embodied among other disturbances the law of
change; and to Stephen and his race of pleasant livers the two sinister
forces in the universe were change and death. After all, they had made
the world, these pleasant livers; and what were those other people--the
people represented by that ominous shadow--except the ragged prophets of
disorder and destruction?
Turning away, Stephen descended the wide brick walk which fell
gradually, past the steps of the library and the gaunt railing round a
motionless fountain, to the broad white slope of the Square with its
smoky veil of twilight. Farther away he saw the high iron fence and
heard the clanging of passing street cars. On his left the ugly shape
of the library resembled some crude architectural design sketched on
parchment.
As he approached the fountain, a small figure in a red cape detached
itself suddenly from the mesh of shadows, and he recognized Patty Vetch,
the irrepressible young daughter of the Governor. He had seen her the
evening before at a charity ball, where she had been politely snubbed by
what he thought of complacently as "our set." From the moment when he
had first looked at her across the whirling tulle and satin skirts in
the ballroom, he had decided that she embodied as obviously as her
father, though in a different fashion, the qualities which were most
offensive both to his personal preferences and his inherited standards
of taste. The girl in her scarlet dress, with her dark bobbed hair
curling in on her neck, her candid ivory forehead, her provoking blunt
nose, her bright red lips, and the inquiring arch of her black eyebrows
over her gray-green eyes, had appeared to him absurdly like a picture on
the cover of some cheap magazine. He had heartily disapproved of her,
but he couldn't help looking at her. If she had been on the cover of a
magazine, he had told himself sternly, he should never have bought it.
He had correct ideas of what a lady should be (they were inherited from
the early eighties and his mother had implanted them), and he would
have known anywhere that Patty Vetch was not exactly a lady. Though he
was broad enough in his views to realize that types repeat themselves
only in variations, and that girls of to-day are not all that they were
in the happy eighties--that one might make up flashily like Geraldine
St. John, or dance outrageously like Bertha Underwood, and yet remain
in all essential social values "a lady"--still he was aware that the
external decorations of a chorus girl could not turn the shining
daughter of the St. Johns for an imitation of paste, and, though the
nimble Bertha could perform every Jazz motion ever invented, one would
never dream of associating her with a circus ring. It was not the things
one did that made one appear unrefined, he had concluded at last, but
the way that one did them; and Patty Vetch's way was not the prescribed
way of his world. Small as she was there was too much of her. She
contrived always to be where one was looking. She was too loud, too
vivid, too highly charged with vitality; she was too obviously
different. If a redbird had flown into the heated glare of the ballroom
Stephen's gaze would have followed it with the same startled and
fascinated attention.
As the girl approached him now on the snow-covered slope, he was
conscious again of that swift recoil from chill disapproval to reluctant
attraction. Though she was not beautiful, though she was not even pretty
according to the standards with which he was familiar, she possessed
what he felt to be a dangerous allurement. He had never imagined that
anything so small could be so much alive. The electric light under which
she passed revealed the few golden freckles over her childish nose, the
gray-green colour of her eyes beneath the black eyelashes, and the
sensitive red mouth which looked as soft and sweet as a carnation. It
revealed also the absurd shoes of gray suede, with French toes and high
and narrow heels, in which she flitted, regardless alike of danger and
of common sense, over the slippery ground. The son of a strong-minded
though purely feminine mother, he had been trained to esteem discretion
in dress almost as highly as rectitude of character in a woman; and by
no charitable stretch of the imagination could he endow his first
impression of Patty Vetch with either of these attributes.
"It would serve her right if she fell and broke her leg," he thought
severely; and the idea of such merited punishment was still in his mind
when he heard a sharp gasp of surprise, and saw the girl slip, with a
frantic clutch at the air, and fall at full length on the shining
ground. When he sprang forward and bent over her, she rose quickly to
her knees and held out what he thought at first was some queer small
muff of feathers.
"Please hold this pigeon," she said, "I saw it this afternoon, and I
came out to look for it. Somebody has broken its wings."
"If you came out to walk on ice," he replied with a smile, "why, in
Heaven's name, didn't you wear skates or rubbers?"
She gave a short little laugh which was entirely without merriment. "I
don't skate, and I never wear rubbers."
He glanced down at her feet in candid disapproval. "Then you mustn't be
surprised if you get a sprained ankle."
"I am not surprised," she retorted calmly. "Nothing surprises me. Only
my ankle isn't sprained. I am just getting my breath."
She had rested her knee on a bench, and she looked up at him now with
bright, enigmatical eyes. "You don't mind waiting a moment, do you?"
she asked. To his secret resentment she appeared to be deliberately
appraising either his abilities or his attractions--he wasn't sure which
engaged her bold and perfectly unembarrassed regard.
"No, I don't mind in the least," he replied, "but I'd like to get you
home if you have really hurt yourself. Of course it was your own fault
that you fell," he added truthfully but indiscreetly.
For an instant she seemed to be holding her breath, while he stood there
in what he felt to be a foolish attitude, with the pigeon (for all
symbolical purposes it might as well have been a dove) clasped to his
breast.
"Oh, I know," she responded presently in a voice which was full of
suppressed anger. "Everything is my fault--even the fact that I was
born!"
Shocked out of his conventional manner, he stared at her in silence, and
the pigeon, feeling the strain of his grasp, fluttered softly against
his overcoat. What was there indeed for him to do except stare at a lack
of reticence, of good-breeding, which he felt to be deplorable? His fine
young face, with its characteristic note of reserve, hardened into
sternness as he remembered having heard somewhere that the girl's mother
had been killed or injured when she was performing some dangerous act at
a country fair. Well, one might expect anything, he supposed, from such
an inheritance.
"May I help you?" he asked with distant and chilly politeness.
"Oh, can't you wait a minute?" She impatiently thrust aside his offer.
"I _must_ get my breath again."
It was plain that she was very angry, that she was in the clutch of a
smothered yet violent resentment, which, he inferred with reason, was
directed less against himself than against some abstract and impersonal
law of life. Her rage was not merely temper against a single human
being; it was, he realized, a passionate rebellion against Fate or
Nature, or whatever she personified as the instrument of the injustice
from which she suffered. Her eyes were gleaming through the web of light
and shadow; her mouth was trembling; and there was the moisture of
tears--or was it only the glitter of ice?--on her round young cheek. And
while he looked, chilled, disapproving, unsympathetic, at the vivid
flower-like bloom of her face, there seemed to flow from her and envelop
him the spirit of youth itself--of youth adventurous, intrepid, and
defiant; of youth rejecting the expedient and demanding the impossible;
of youth eternally desirable, enchanting, and elusive. It was as if his
orderly, complacent, and tranquil soul had plunged suddenly into a bath
of golden air. Vaguely disturbed, he drew back and tried to appear
dignified in spite of the fluttering pigeon. He had no inclination for
a flirtation with the Governor's daughter--intuitively he felt that such
an adventure would not be a safe one; but if a flirtation were what she
wanted, he told himself, with a sense of impending doom, "there might be
trouble." He didn't know what she meant, but whatever it was, she
evidently meant it with determination. Already she had impressed him
with the quality which, for want of a better word, he thought of as
"wildness." It was a quality which he had found strangely, if secretly,
alluring, and he acknowledged now that this note of "wildness," of
unexpectedness, of "something different" in her personality, had held
his gaze chained to the airy flutter of her scarlet skirt. He felt
vaguely troubled. Something as intricate and bewildering as impulse was
winding through the smoothly beaten road of his habit of thought. The
noises of the city came to him as if they floated over an immeasurable
distance of empty space. Through the spectral boughs of the sycamores
the golden sky had faded to the colour of ashes. And both the empty
space and the ashen sky seemed to be not outside of himself, but a part
of the hidden country within his mind.
"You were at the ball," she burst out suddenly, as if she had been
holding back the charge from the beginning.
"At the ball?" he repeated, and the words were spoken with his lips
merely in that objective world of routine and habit. "Yes, I was there.
It was a dull business."
She laughed again with the lack of merriment he had noticed before.
Though her face was made for laughter, there was an oddly conflicting
note of tragedy in her voice. "Was it dull? I didn't notice."
"Then you must have enjoyed it?"
"But you were there. You saw what happened. Every one must have seen."
Her savage candour brushed away the flimsy amenities. He knew now that
she would say whatever she pleased, and, with the pigeon clasped tightly
in his arms, he waited for anything that might come.
"You pretend that you don't know, that you didn't see!" she asked
indignantly.
As she looked at him he thought--or it may have been the effect of the
shifting light--that her eyes diffused soft green rays beneath her black
eyelashes. Was there really the mist of tears in her sparkling glance?
"I am sorry," he said simply, being a young man of few words when the
need of speech was obvious. The last thing he wanted, he told himself,
was to receive the confidences of the Governor's daughter.
At this declaration, so characteristic of his amiable temperament, her
anger flashed over him. "You were not sorry. You know you were not, or
you would have made them kinder!"
"Kinder? But how could I?" He felt that her rage was making her
unreasonable. "I didn't know you. I hadn't even been introduced to you."
It was on the tip of his tongue to add, "and I haven't been yet--" but
he checked himself in fear of unchaining the lightning. It was all
perfectly true. He had not even been introduced to the girl, and here
she was, as crude as life and as intemperate, accusing him of
indifference and falsehood. And after all, what had they done to her? No
one had been openly rude. Nothing had been said, he was sure, absolutely
nothing. It had been a "charity entertainment," and the young people of
his set had merely left her alone, that was all. The affair had been far
from exclusive--for the enterprising ladies of the Beech Tree Day
Nursery had prudently preferred a long subscription list to a limited
social circle--and in a gathering so obscurely "mixed" there were,
without doubt, a number of Gideon Vetch's admirers. Was it maliciously
arranged by Fate that Patty Vetch's social success should depend upon
the people who had elected her father to office?
"As if that mattered!"
Her scorn of his subterfuge, her mocking defiance of the sacred formula
to which he deferred, awoke in him an unfamiliar and pleasantly piquant
sensation. Through it all he was conscious of the inner prick and sting
of his disapprobation, as if the swift attraction had passed into a
mental aversion.
"As if that mattered!" he echoed gaily, "as if that mattered at all!"
Her face changed in the twilight, and it seemed to him that he saw her
for the first time with the peculiar vividness that came only in dreams
or in the hidden country within his mind. The sombre arch of the sky,
the glimmer of lights far away, the clustering shadows against the white
field of snow, the vague ghostly shapes of the sycamores--all these
things endowed her with the potency of romantic adventure. In the winter
night she seemed to him to exhale the roving sweetness of spring. Then
she spoke, and the sharp brightness of his vision was clouded by the old
sense of unreality.
"They treated me as if I were a piece of bunting or a flower in a pot,"
she said. "They left me alone in the dressing-room. No one spoke to me,
though they must have known who I was. They know, all of them, that I am
the Governor's daughter."
With a start he brought himself back from the secret places. "But I
thought you carried your head very high," he answered, "and you did not
appear to lack partners." Some small ironic demon that seemed to dwell
in his brain and yet to have no part in his real thought, moved him to
add indiscreetly: "I thought you danced every dance with Julius Gershom.
That's the name of that dark fellow who's a politician of doubtful cast,
isn't it?"
She made a petulant gesture, and the red wings in her hat vibrated like
the wings of a bird in flight. There flashed though his mind while he
watched her the memory of a cardinal he had seen in a cedar tree against
the snow-covered landscape. Strange that he could never get away from
the thought of a bird when he looked at her.
"Oh, Julius Gershom! I despise him!"
She shivered, and he asked with a sympathy he had not displayed for
mental discomforts: "Aren't you dreadfully chilled? This kind of thing
is a risk, you know. You might catch influenza--or anything."
"Yes, I might, if there is any about," she replied tartly, and he saw
with relief that her petulance had faded to dull indifference. "I was
obliged to dance with somebody," she resumed after a minute, "I couldn't
sit against the wall the whole evening, could I? And nobody else asked
me,--but I don't like him any the better for that."
"And your father? Does he dislike him also?" he asked.
"How can one tell? He says he is useful." There was a playful tenderness
in her voice.
"Useful? You mean in politics?"
She laughed. "How else in the world can any one be useful to Father? It
must be freezing."
"No, it is melting; but it is too cold to play about out of doors."
"Your teeth are chattering!" she rejoined with scornful merriment.
"They are not," he retorted indignantly. "I am as comfortable as you
are."
"Well, I'm not comfortable at all. Something--I don't know what it
was--happened to my ankle. I think I twisted it when I fell."
"And all this time you haven't said a word. We've talked about nothing
while you must have been in pain."
She shook her head as if his new solicitude irritated her, and a quiver
of pain--or was it amusement?--crossed her lips. "It isn't the first
time I've had to grit my teeth and bear things--but it's getting worse
instead of better all the time, and I'm afraid I shall have to ask you
to help me up the hill. I was waiting until I thought I could manage it
by myself."
So that was why she had kept him! She had hoped all the time that she
could go on presently without his aid, and she realized now that it was
impossible. Insensibly his judgment of her softened, as if his romantic
imagination had spun iridescent cobwebs about her. By Jove, what pluck
she had shown, what endurance! There came to him suddenly the
realization that if she had learned to treat a sprained ankle so
lightly, it could mean only that her short life had been full of
misadventures beside which a sprained ankle appeared trivial. She could
"play the game" so perfectly, he grasped, because she had been obliged
either to play it or go under ever since she had been big enough to read
the cards in her hand. To be "a good sport" was perhaps the best lesson
that the world had yet taught her. Though she could not be, he decided,
more than eighteen, she had acquired already the gay bravado of the
experienced gambler with life.
"Let me help you," he said eagerly, "I am sure that I can carry you, you
are so small. If you will only let me throw away this confounded bird, I
can manage it easily."
"No, give it to me. It would die of cold if we left it." She stretched
out her hand, and in silence he gave her the wounded pigeon. Her
tenderness for the bird, conflicting as it did with his earlier
impression of her, both amused and perplexed him. He couldn't reconcile
her quick compassion with her resentful and mocking attitude toward
himself.
At his impulsive offer of help the quiver shook her lips again, and
stooping over she did something which appeared to him quite unnecessary
to one gray suede shoe. "No, it isn't as bad as that. I don't need to be
carried," she said. "That sort of thing went out of fashion ages ago. If
you'll just let me lean on you until I get up the hill."
She put her hand through his arm; and while he walked slowly up the
hill, he decided that, taken all in all, the present moment was the most
embarrassing one through which he had ever lived. The fugitive gleam,
the romantic glamour, had vanished now. He wondered what it was about
her that he had at first found attractive. It was the spirit of the
place, he decided, nothing more. With every step of the way there closed
over him again his natural reserve, his unconquerable diffidence, his
instinctive recoil from the eccentric in behaviour. Conventions were the
breath of his young nostrils, and yet he was passing through an
atmosphere, without, thank Heaven, his connivance or inclination, where
it seemed to him the hardiest convention could not possibly survive.
When the lights of the mansion shone nearer through the bared boughs, he
heaved a sigh of relief.
"Have I tired you?" asked the girl in response, and the curious lilting
note in her voice made him turn his head and glance at her in sudden
suspicion. Had she really hurt herself, or was she merely indulging some
hereditary streak of buffoonery at his expense? It struck him that she
would be capable of such a performance, or of anything else that invited
her amazing vivacity. His one hope was that he might leave her in some
obscure corner of the house, and slip away before anybody capable of
making a club joke had discovered his presence. The hidden country was
lost now, and with it the perilous thrill of enchantment.
He rang the bell, and the door was opened by an old coloured butler who
had been one of the family servants of the Culpepers. How on earth,
Stephen wondered, could the Governor tolerate the venerable Abijah, the
chosen companion of Culpeper children for two generations? While he
wondered he recalled something his mother had said a few weeks ago about
Abijah's having been lured away by the offer of absurd wages. "You
needn't worry," she had added shrewdly, "he will return as soon as he
gets tired of working."
"I hurt my ankle, Abijah," said the girl.
"You ain't, is you, Miss Patty?" replied Abijah, in an indulgent tone
which conveyed to Stephen's delicate ears every shade of difference
between the Vetchs' and the Culpepers' social standing.
"How are you, Abijah?" remarked the young man with the air of lordly
pleasantry he used to all servants who were not white. Beyond the fine
old hall he saw the formal drawing-room and the modern octagonal
dining-room at the back of the house.
"Howdy, Marse Stephen," responded the negro, "I seed yo' ma yestiddy en
she sutney wuz lookin well an' peart."
He opened the door of the library, and while Stephen entered the room
with the girl's hand on his arm, a man rose from a chair by the fire and
came forward.
"Father, this is Mr. Culpeper," remarked Patty calmly, as she sank on a
sofa and stretched out her frivolous shoes.
In the midst of his embarrassment Stephen wondered resentfully how she
had discovered his name.
CHAPTER II
GIDEON VETCH
"Your daughter slipped on the ice," explained the young man, while the
thought flashed through his mind that Patty's father was accepting it
all, with ironical humour, as some queer masquerade.
It was the first time that Stephen had come within range of the
Governor's personal influence, and he found himself waiting curiously
for the response of his sympathies or his nerves. Once or twice he had
heard Vetch speak--a storm of words which had played freely from the
lightning flash of humorous invective to the rolling thunder of
passionate denunciation. Such sound and fury had left Stephen the one
unmoved man in the audience. He had been brought up on the sonorous
rhetoric and the gorgeous purple periods of the classic orations; and
the mere undraped sincerity--the raw head and bloody bones eloquence, as
he put it, of Vetch's speech had been as offensive to his taste as it
had been unconvincing to his intelligence. The man was a mountebank,
nothing more, Stephen had decided, and his strange power was simply the
reaction of mob hysteria to the stage tricks of the political clown.
Yes, the man was a mountebank--but was he nothing more than a
mountebank? Like most men of his age, Stephen Culpeper was inclined to
swift impressions rather than hasty judgments of people; and he was
conscious, while he listened in silence to the murmuring explanations
of the girl, that the immediate effect was a sensation, not an idea. At
first sight, the Governor appeared merely ordinary--a tall, rugged
figure, built of good bone and muscle and sound to the core, with the
look of arrested energy which was doubtless an inheritance from the
circus ring. There was nothing impressive about him; nothing that would
cause one to turn and look back in a crowd. What struck one most was his
air of extraordinary freshness and health, of sanguine vitality. His
face was well-coloured and irregular in outline, with a high bulging
forehead and thick sandy hair which was already gray on the temples. In
the shadow his eyes did not appear remarkably fine; they seemed at the
first glance to be of an indeterminate colour--was it blue or gray?--and
there was nothing striking in their deep setting under the beetling
sandy eyebrows. All this was true; and yet while Stephen looked into
them over the Governor's outstretched hand, he told himself that they
were the most human eyes he had ever seen. Afterward, when he groped
through his vocabulary for a more accurate description, he could not
find one. There was shrewdness in Gideon Vetch's eyes; there was
friendliness; there was the blue sparkle of contagious humour--a ripple
of light that was like visible laughter--but above all there was
humanity. Though Stephen did not try to grasp the vivid impressions that
passed through his mind, he felt intuitively that he had learned to know
Gideon Vetch through his look and manner as well as he should have known
another man after weeks or months of daily intercourse. Whatever the
man's private life, whatever his political faults may have been, there
was magic in the clasp of his hand and the cordial glow of his smile.
He was always responsive; he stood always on the same level, high or
low, with his companion of the moment: he was as incapable of looking up
as he was of looking down; he was equally without reverence and without
condescension. It was the law of his nature that he should give himself
emphatically to the just and the unjust alike.
"He came home with me because I hurt my foot," Patty was saying.
Had she forgotten already, Stephen asked himself cynically, that it was
not her foot but her ankle? His suspicions returned while he looked at
her blooming face, and he hoped earnestly that she would not feel
impelled to relate any irrelevant details of the adventure. Like Gideon
Vetch on the platform she seemed incapable of withholding the smallest
fragment of a fact; and the young man wondered if it were characteristic
either of "the plain people," as he called them, or of circus riders as
a class, that their minds should go habitually unclothed yet unashamed.
"Thank you, sir," said the Governor without effusion; and he asked: "Did
you hurt yourself, Patty?" while he bent over and laid his hand on her
ankle.
A note of tenderness passed into his voice as he turned to the girl; and
when she answered after a minute, Stephen recognized the same tone of
affectionate playfulness that she used when she spoke of him.
"Not much," she replied carelessly. Then she held out the drooping
pigeon. "I found this bird. Is there anything we can do for it?"
The Governor took the bird from her, and examined it under the light
with the manner of brisk confidence which directed his slightest action.
The man, for all his restless activity, appeared to be without excess or
exaggeration when it was a matter of practical detail. He apparently
employed his whole efficient and enterprising mind on the incident of
the bird.
"The wings aren't broken," he said presently, lifting his head, "but it
is weak from hunger and exhaustion," and he rang the bell for Abijah.
"Rice and water and a warm basket," he ordered when the old negro
appeared. "You had better keep it in the house until it recovers." Then
dismissing the subject, he turned back to Stephen.
"Well, I am glad to see you, Mr. Culpeper," he said. "You had a hard
beginning, but, as they used to tell me when I was a kid, a hard
beginning makes a good ending."
For the first time a smile softened his face, and the roving blue gleam
danced blithely in his eyes. A moment before the young man had thought
the Governor's face harsh and ugly. Now he remembered that the Judge had
said "the man was not half bad to look at if you caught him smiling."
Yes, he had a charm of his own, and that charm had swept him forward
over every obstacle to the place he had reached. A single gift,
indefinable yet unerring--the ability to make men believe absurdities,
as John Benham had once said--and the material disadvantages of poverty
and ignorance were brushed aside like trivial impediments. A strange
power, and a dangerous one in unscrupulous hands, the young man
reflected.
"I remember your face," pursued the Governor, while his smile faded--was
brevity, after all, the secret of its magic? "You were at one of my
speeches last autumn, and you sat in the front row, I think. I recall
you because you were the only person in the audience who looked bored."
"I was." Frankness called for frankness. "I am not keen about speeches."
"Not even when Benham speaks?" The voice was gay, but through it all
there rang the unmistakable tone of authority, of conscious power. There
was one person, Stephen inferred, who had never from the beginning
disparaged or ridiculed Gideon Vetch, and that person was Gideon Vetch
himself. John Benham had once said that the man was a mere posturer--but
John Benham was wrong.
"Oh, well, you see, Benham is different," replied the young man as
delicately as he could. "He is apt to say only what I think, you know."
So far there had been no breach of good taste in the Governor's manner,
no warning reminder of an origin that was certainly obscure and
presumably low, no stale, dust-laden odours of the circus ring. He had
looked and spoken as any man of Stephen's acquaintance might have done,
facetiously, it is true, but without ostentation or vulgarity. When the
break came, therefore, it was the more shocking to the younger man
because he had been so imperfectly prepared for it.
"And because he is different, of course you think he'd make a better
Governor than I shall," said Gideon Vetch abruptly. "That is the way
with you fellows who have ossified in the old political parties. You
never see a change in time to make ready for it. You wait until it
knocks you in the head, and then you wake up and grumble. Now, I've been
on the way for the last thirty years or so, but you never once so much
as got wind of me. You think I've just happened because of too much
electricity in the air, like a thunderbolt or something; but you haven't
even looked back to find out whether you are right or wrong. Talk about
public spirit! Why, there isn't an ounce of live public spirit left
among you, in spite of all the moonshine your man Benham talks about the
healing virtues of tradition and the sacred taboo of your political
Pharisees. There wasn't one of you that didn't hate like the devil to
see me Governor of Virginia--and yet how many of you took the trouble to
find out what I am made of, or to understand what I mean? Did you even
take the trouble to go to the polls and vote against me?"
Though Stephen flushed scarlet, he held his ground bravely. It was true
that he had not voted--he hated the whole sordid business of
politics--but then, who had ever suspected for a minute that Gideon
Vetch would be elected? His brief liking for the man had changed
suddenly to exasperation. It seemed incredible to him that any Governor
of Virginia should display so open a disregard of the ordinary rules of
courtesy and hospitality. To drag in their political differences at such
a time, when he had come beneath the other's roof merely to render him
an unavoidable service! To stoop to the pettifogging sophistry of the
agitator simply because his opponent had reluctantly yielded him an
opportunity!
"Well, I heard you speak, but that didn't change me!" he retorted with a
smile.
The Governor laughed, and the sincerity of his amusement was evident
even to Stephen. "Could anything short of a blasting operation change
you traditional Virginians?" he inquired.
His face was turned to the fire, and the young man felt while he
watched him that a piercing light was shed on his character. It was as
if Stephen saw his opponent from an entirely fresh point of view, as if
he beheld him for the first time with the sharp clearness which the
flash of his anger produced. The very absence of all sense of dignity
impressed him suddenly as the most tremendous dignity a human being
could attain--the unconscious dignity of natural forces--of storms and
fire and war and pestilence. Because the man never thought of how he
appeared, he appeared always impregnable.
"I shall not argue," said the young man, with a smile which he
endeavoured to make easy and natural. "The time for argument is over.
You played trumps."
Vetch laughed. "And it wasn't my last card," he answered bluntly.
"The game isn't finished." Though Stephen's voice was light it held a
quiver of irritation. "He laughs best who laughs last." The other had
started the row, and, by Jove, he would give him as much as he wanted!
He recalled suddenly the charges that there was more than the customary
political log-rolling--that there were mysterious "discreditable
dealings" in the Governor's election to office.
But it appeared in a minute that Gideon Vetch was adequate to any demand
which the occasion might develop. Already Stephen was beginning to
regard him less as a man than as an energetic idea, as activity
incarnate.
"If you mean to imply that the laugh may be on me at the last," he
returned, while the points of blue light seemed to pierce Stephen like
arrows--no, like gimlets, "well, you're wrong about one part of it--for
if that ever happens, I'll laugh with you because of the sheer rotten
irony."
For the first time the other noticed how the Governor was dressed--in a
suit of some heavy brown stuff which looked as if it had been sprinkled
and needed pressing. He wore a green tie and a striped shirt of the
conspicuous kind that Stephen hated. Though the younger man was keenly
critical of clothes, and perseveringly informed himself regarding the
smallest details of fashion, he acknowledged now that he had at last met
a man who appeared to wear his errors of dress as naturally as he wore
his errors of opinion. The fuzzy brown stuff, the green tie with red
spots, the striped shirt--was it blue or purple?--all became as much a
part of Gideon Vetch as the storm-ruffled plumage was part of an eagle.
If the misguided man had attired himself in a toga, he would have
carried the Mantle without dignity perhaps, but certainly with
picturesqueness.
"I'll hold you to your promise--or threat," said Stephen lightly, as he
turned from the Governor to his daughter. Why, in thunder, he asked
himself, had he stayed so long? What was there about the fellow that
held one in spite of oneself? "I hope you will be all right again in a
few days," he said formally as his eyes met Patty's upraised glance. In
the warm room all the glamour of the twilight--and of that hidden
country within his mind--had faded from her. She looked fresh and
blooming and merely commonplace, he thought. A brief half hour ago he
had felt that he was in danger of losing his head; now his rational part
was in the ascendant, and his future appeared pleasantly tranquil. Then
the girl smiled that faint inscrutable smile of hers, and the
disturbing green rays shot from her eyes. A thrill of interest stirred
his pulses while something held him there against his will and his
better judgment, as if he were caught fast in the steel spring of a
trap.
"Oh, that's nothing," replied Patty, with her air of mockery. "If there
were no worse things than that!"
He did not hold out his hand, though there was a flutter toward him of
her fingers--pretty fingers they were for a girl with no blood that one
could mention in public. There was a faint hope in his mind that he
might still vanish unthanked and undetained. The one quality in father
and daughter which had arrested his favourable attention--the quality of
"a good sport"--would probably aid in his escape.
"Drop in some evening, and we'll have a talk," said the Governor in his
slightly theatrical but extremely confident manner, "there are things
I'd like to say to you. You are a lawyer, if I remember, in Judge
Horatio Page's firm, and you were in the war from the beginning."
Stephen smiled. "Not quite." They were at the front door, and all hope
of escaping into the desirable obscurity from which he had sprung fled
from his mind.
"He is a great old boy, the Judge," resumed Gideon Vetch blandly, "I had
a talk with him one day before the elections, when you other fellows
were sitting back like a lot of lunatics and waiting for the Democratic
primaries to put things over. He is the only one in the whole bunch of
you who stopped shouting long enough to hear what I had to say. I like
him, sir, and if there is one thing you will never find me doing it is
liking the wrong man. I may not know Greek, but I can read men."
The front door was open, and the blast of cold air dispersed all the
foolish fancies that had gathered in Stephen's brain. Beyond the
fountain and the gate he could see the broad road through the Square and
the dark majestic figure of Washington on horseback. The electric signs
were blazing on the roofs of the shops and hotels which had driven the
original dwelling houses out of the neighbouring streets.
Turning as he was descending the steps, the young man looked into the
Governor's face. "Are you sure that you read Julius Gershom correctly?"
he inquired.
For a minute--it could not have been longer--the Governor did not reply.
Was he surprised for once into open discomfiture, or was his nimble wit
engaged in framing a plausible answer? Within the house, where so much
was disappointing and incongruous, Stephen had not felt the lack of
harmony between Gideon Vetch and his surroundings; but against the fine
proportions and the serene stateliness of the exterior, the Governor's
figure appeared aggressively modern.
"Julius Gershom!" repeated Vetch. "Well, yes, I think I know my Julius.
May I ask if you do?" The ironical humour which flashed like a sharp
light over his countenance played with the idea.
"Not by choice." Stephen looked back laughing. There was one thing to be
said in the Governor's favour--he invited honesty and he knew how to
receive it. "But I read of him in the newspapers when I cannot avoid it.
He does some dirty work, doesn't he?"
Again the Governor paused before replying. There was a curious gravity
about his consideration of Gershom in spite of the satirical tone of his
responses. Was it possible that he was the one man in town who did not
treat the fellow as a ridiculous farce?
"If by dirty work you mean the clearing away of obstacles--well,
somebody has to do it, hasn't he?" asked Gideon Vetch. "If you want a
clean street to walk on, you must hire somebody to shovel away the
slush. It is true that we put Gershom to shovelling slush--and you
complain of his methods! Well, I admit that he may have been a trifle
too zealous about it; he may have spattered things a bit more than was
necessary, but after all, he got some of the mud out of the way, didn't
he? There are people," he added, "who believe that the wind he raised
swept me into office."
"I object to his methods," insisted Stephen, "because they seem to me
dishonest."
"Perhaps." The blue eyes--how could he have thought them gray?--had
grown quizzical. "But he wasn't moving in the best company, you know. He
who sups with the Devil must fish with a long spoon."
"You mean that you defend that sort of thing--that you openly stand for
it?"
"I stand for nothing, sir," replied Gideon Vetch sharply, "except
justice. I stand for a square deal all round, and I stand against the
exploitation or oppression of any class. This is what I stand for, and I
have stood for it ever since I was a small, gray, scared rabbit of a
creature dodging under hedgerows."
It was the bombastic sophistry again, Stephen told himself, but he met
it without subterfuge or evasion. "And you believe that such people as
Gershom can serve the cause of justice through dishonest means?" he
demanded.
"I'll answer that some day; but it's a long answer, and I can't speak it
out here in the cold," responded the Governor, while his blustering
manner grew sober. "Gershom is a politician, you see, and I am not. You