Dennison Grant Part 35

"But when you told me you were engaged what could I honorably do?"

"More--very much more--than you can do now. You could have shown me my mistake. How much better to have learned it then, from you, than later, by my own experience! You could have swept me off my feet, just as Frank did. You did nothing. If I had sought evidence to prove how impractical you are, as compared with my super-practical husband, I would have found it in the way you handled, or rather failed to handle, that situation."

"What would your super-practical husband do now if he were in my position?" he said, drawing her hands into his.

"I don't know."

"You do! He says that any man worth his salt takes what he wants in this world. Am I worth my salt?"

"There are different standards of value.... Goodness! how late it is!

You must go now, and don't come back before, let us say, Wednesday."

CHAPTER XX

Whatever may have been Grant's philosophy about the unwisdom of creating a situation which had no way out he found himself looking forward impatiently to Wednesday evening. An hour or two at Zen's fireside provided the social atmosphere which his bachelor life lacked, and as Transley seemed unappreciative of his domestic privileges, remaining in town unless his business brought him out to the summer home, it seemed only a just arrangement that they should be shared by one who valued them at their worth.

The Wednesday evening conversation developed further the understanding that was gradually evolving between them, but it afforded no solution of the problem which confronted them. Zen made no secret of the error she had made in the selection of her husband, but had no suggestions to offer as to what should be done about it. She seemed quite satisfied to enjoy Grant's conversation and company, and let it go at that--an impossible situation, as the young man a.s.sured himself. She dismissed him again at a quite respectable hour with some reference to Sat.u.r.day evening, which Grant interpreted as an invitation to call again at that time.

When he entered Sat.u.r.day night it was evident that she had been expecting him. A cool wind was again blowing down from the mountains, laden with the soft smell of melting snow, and the fire in the grate was built ready for the match.

"I am my own maid to-night," she said, as she stooped to light it.

"Sarah usually goes to town Sat.u.r.day evening. Now we shall see if someone is in good humor."

The fire curled up pleasantly about the wood. "There!" she exclaimed, clapping her hands. "All is well. You see how economical I am; if we must spend on fires we save on light. I love a wood fire; I suppose it is something which reaches back to the original savage in all of us."

"To the days when our great ancestors roasted their victims while they danced about the coals," said Grant, completing the picture. "And yet they say that human nature doesn't change."

"Does it? I think our methods change with our environments, but that is all. Wasn't it you who propounded a theory about an age when men took what they wanted by force giving way to an age in which they took what they wanted by subtlety? Now, I believe, you want society to restrain the man of clever wits just as it has learned to restrain the man of big biceps. And when that is done will not man discover some other means of taking what he wants?"

She had seated herself beside him on a divanette and the joy of her nearness fired Grant with a very happy intoxication. It recalled that night on the hillside when, as she had since said, she felt safe in his protection.

"I am really very interested," she continued. "I followed the argument at the table on Sunday with as much concern as if it had been my pet hobby, not yours, that was under discussion. If I said little it was because I did not wish to appear too interested."

Her amazing frankness brought Grant, figuratively, to his feet at every turn. She seemed to have no desire to conceal her interest in him, her attachment for him. Hers was such candor as might well be born of the vast hillsides, the great valleys, the brooding silences of her girlhood. Yet it seemed obvious that she must be less candid with Transley....

"I am glad you were interested," he answered. "I was afraid I was rather boring the company, but it was MY scheme and I had to stand up for it. I fear I made few converts."

"You were dealing with practical men," she returned, "and practical men are never converted to a new idea. That is one of the things I have learned in my years of married life, Dennison. Practical men find many ways of turning an old idea to advantage, but they never evolve new ones. New ideas come from dreamers--theoretical fellows like you."

"The dreamer is always a lap ahead of the rest of civilization, and the funny thing is that the rest always thinks itself much more sane than the dreamer, out there blazing the way."

"That's not remarkable," she replied. "That's logical. The dreamer blazes the way--proves the possibilities of his dream--and the practical man follows it up and makes money out of it. To a practical man there is nothing more practical than making money."

"Did I convert you?" he pursued.

"I was not in need of conversion. I have been a follower of the new faith--an imperfect and limping follower, it is true--ever since you first announced it."

"I believe you are laughing at me."

"Certainly not! I have been brought up in an environment where there is no standard higher than the money standard. Not that my father or husband are dishonest; they are rigidly honest according to their ideas of honesty. But to say that a man must give actual service for every dollar he gets or it isn't his--that is a conception of honesty so far beyond them as to be an absurdity. But I have wanted to ask you how you are going to enforce this new idealism."

"Idealism is not enforced. We aspire to it; we may not attain to it.

Christianity itself is idealism--the idealism of unselfishness. That ideal has never been attained by any considerable number of people, and yet it has drawn all humanity on to somewhat higher levels as surely as the moon draws the tide. Superficial persons in these days are drawing pictures of the failure of Christianity, which has failed in part; but they could find a much more depressing subject by painting a world from which all Christian idealism had been removed."

"But surely you have some plan for putting your theories to the test--some plan which will force those to whom idealism appeals in vain.

We do not trust to a man's idealism to keep him from stealing; we put him in jail."

"All that will come in time, but the question for the seeker after truth is not 'Will it work?' but 'Is it true?' I fancy I can see the practical men of Moses' time leaning over his shoulder as he inscribed the Ten Commandments and remarking 'No use of putting that down, Moses; you can never enforce it.' But Moses put it down and left the enforcement to natural law and the growing intelligence of the generations which have followed him. We are too much disposed to think it possible to evade a law; to violate it, and escape punishment; but if a law is true, punishment follows violation as implacably as the stars follow their courses. And if society has failed to recognize the law that service, and service only, should be able to command service in return, society must suffer the penalty. We have only to look about us to see that society is paying in full for its violations.

"Yes, I have plans, and I think they would work, but the first thing is the ideal--the new moral sense--that value must not be accepted without giving equal value in return. Society, of course, will have to set up the standards of value. That is a matter of detail--a matter for the practical men who come in the wake of the idealist. But of this I am certain--and I hark back to my old theme--that just as society has found a means of preventing the man who is physically superior from taking wealth without giving service in return, so must society find a means to prevent men who are mentally superior from taking wealth without giving service in return. The superior person, mark you, will still have an advantage, in that his superiority will enable him to EARN more; we shall merely stop him taking what he does not earn. That must come. I think it will come soon. It is the next step in the social evolution of the race."

She had drunk in his argument as one who hangs on every word, and her wrapt face turned toward his seemed to glow and thrill him in return with a sense of their spiritual oneness. She did not need to tell him that Transley never talked to her like this. Transley loved her, if he loved her at all, for the glory she reflected upon him; he was proud of her beauty, of her daring, of her physical charm and self-reliance. The deeper side of her mental life was to Transley a field unexplored; a field of the very existence of which he was probably unaware. Grant looked into her eyes, now close and responsive, and found within their depths something which sent him to his feet.

"Zen!" he exclaimed. "The mystery of life is too much for me. Surely there must be an answer somewhere! Surely the puzzle has a system to it--a key which may some day be found! Or can it be just chaos--just blind, driveling, senseless chaos? In our own lives, why should we be stranded, helpless, wrecked, with the happiness which might have been ours hung just beyond our reach? Is there no answer to this?"

"I suppose we disobeyed the law, back in those old days. We heard it clearly enough, and we disobeyed. I allowed myself to be guided by motives which were not the highest; you seemed to lack the enterprise which would have won you its own reward. And as you have said, those who violate the law must suffer for it. I have suffered."

She drew up her chin; he could see the firm muscles set beneath the pink bloom of her flesh.... He had not thought of Zen suffering; all his thought of her had been very grateful to his vanity, but he had not thought of her suffering. He extended his hands and took hers within them.

"I have sometimes wondered," he said, "why there is no second chance; why one cannot wipe the slate clear of everything that has been and start anew. What a world this might be!"

"Would it be any better? Or would we go on making our mistakes over again? That seems to be the only way we learn."

"But a second chance; the idea seems so fair, so plausible. Suppose you are shooting on the ranges, for instance; you are allowed a shot or two to find your nerve, to get your distance, to settle yourself to the business in hand. But in this business of life you fire, and if some distraction, some momentary influence or folly sends your aim wild, the shot is gone and you are left with all the years that follow to think about it. You can do nothing but think about it--the most profitless of all occupations."

"For you there is a second chance," she reminded him. "You must have thought of that."

"No--no second chance."

She drew herself up slightly and away from him. "I have been very frank with you, Dennison," she said. "Suppose you try being frank with me?"

In her eyes was still the fire of Zen of the Y.D., a woman unconquered and unconquerable. She gave the impression that she accepted the buffetings of life, but no one forced them upon her. She had erred; she would suffer. That was fair; she accepted that. But as Grant gazed on her face, tilted still in some of its old-time recklessness and defiance, he knew that the day would come when she would say that her cup was full, and, throwing it to the winds, would start life over, if there can be such a thing as starting life over. And something in her manner told him that day was very, very near.

"All right," he said, "I will be frank. Fate HAS brought within my orbit a second chance, or what would have been a second chance had my heart not been so full of you. She was a girl well worth thinking about. When an employee introduces herself to you with a declaration of independence you may know that you have met with someone out of the ordinary. I am not speaking of these days of labor scarcity; it takes no great moral quality to be independent when you have the whip-hand. But in the days before the war, with two applicants for every position, a girl who valued her freedom of spirit more than her job--more than even a very good job--was a girl to think about."

"And you thought about her?"

"I did. I was sick of the cringing and fawning of which my wealth made me the object; I loathed the deference paid me, because I knew it was paid, not to me, but to my money--I was homesick to hear someone tell me to go to h.e.l.l. I wanted to brush up against that spirit which says it is as good as anybody else--against the manliness which stands its ground and hits back. I found that spirit in Phyllis Bruce."

"Phyllis Bruce--rather a nice name. But are the men and women of the East so--so servile as you suggest?"

"No! That is where I was mistaken. Generations of environment had merely trained them into docility of habit. Underneath they are red-blooded through and through. The war showed us that. Zen--the proudest moment of my life--except one--was when a kid in the office who couldn't come into my room without trembling jumped up and said 'We WILL win!'--and called me Grant! Think of that! Poor chap.... What was I saying? Oh, yes; Phyllis. I grew to like her--very much--but I couldn't marry her. You know why."

Zen was looking into the fire with unseeing eyes. "I am not sure that I know why," she said at length. "You couldn't marry me. It was your second chance. You should have taken it."

"Would that be playing the game fairly--with her?"