One Man in His Time Part 1

One Man in His Time.

by Ellen Glasgow.

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 Was.h.i.+ngton a single last gleam of suns.h.i.+ne 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. Cl.u.s.tering 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 kins.h.i.+p to the statues beneath the mounted Was.h.i.+ngton 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 att.i.tude of mind, which was pa.s.sive 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 mult.i.tude 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 s.p.a.cious 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 s.h.i.+ning. 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 pa.s.sed 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 const.i.tuted 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 att.i.tude--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 pa.s.sing 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 flas.h.i.+ly 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 a.s.sociating 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 pa.s.sed 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 rect.i.tude 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 m.u.f.f 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 unembarra.s.sed 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 att.i.tude, 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 pa.s.sionate 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 s.p.a.ce. Through the spectral boughs of the sycamores the golden sky had faded to the colour of ashes. And both the empty s.p.a.ce 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 s.h.i.+fting 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!"