One Man in His Time Part 20

It was plausible; it sounded convincing and logical; and yet, even while Stephen responded to the Governor's personal touch, some obstinate fibre of race or inflexible bent of judgment, refused to surrender. Vetch was probably sincere--it was fairer to give him the benefit of the doubt--but on the surface at least he was parading a spectacular pose.

The role of the Friend of the People has seldom been absent from the drama of history.

With a glance at the window, where twilight was falling, Stephen rose, and held out his hand. "I shall remember your frankness," he said, "the next time I hear you speak. That, I hope, will be soon."

"And you will wait until then to be converted?"

"I shall wait until then to be wholly convinced."

"Well, Darrow may have better results. You go with Darrow?"

"If he will take me?" The deference with which the old man had inspired the Governor showed in Stephen's manner. "I shall be grateful for a lift on the way home."

Darrow had risen also; and after shaking hands with Vetch, he looked back at the younger man from the doorway. "I'll have my Ford round here in five minutes. Meet me at the nearest gate."

He went out hurriedly; and as Stephen followed him, after the delay of a few minutes, he found himself face to face with Patty, who was coming from "the blue room" on the opposite side of the hall.

"I hope you got what you came for," she said gaily.

"I came for nothing," he retorted lightly, "and I'm sure I got it."

"Well, that won't matter so much since it wasn't for yourself," she mocked. "n.o.body ever wants anything for himself in politics. Father could tell you that."

"He told me a good many things--but not that."

"Did he tell you," she inquired daringly, "why he is falling out with Julius Gershom?"

"Is he falling out with him?"

"Didn't you see it--and hear it--when you came in?"

"I suspected as much; but after all it was none of my business."

"And you confine your curiosity to your own business?"

"Not entirely," he answered, and wondered if she were experimenting with the letter "C". "For instance I am curious about you."

Her eyes challenged him with their old defiance. "And I am certainly not your business."

"I admit that you are not--but that does not decrease my curiosity."

For a moment her smile grew wistful. "And what, I wonder," she asked, with the faintest quiver of her cherry-coloured lips, "would you like to know?"

"Oh, everything!" he replied unhesitatingly. There was no longer in his mind the slightest wish to avoid the approaching flirtation. On the contrary, he felt he should welcome it, if she would only continue to look like this. She was not beautiful--yet he realized that she did not need beauty when she could play so easily with a look or a smile on the heartstrings. A rush of tenderness overwhelmed his reserve at the very instant when her lashes trembled and drooped, and she murmured in a whisper that enchanted him: "Oh, but everything is too little." Though it was only the old lure of youth and s.e.x, he felt that it was as divinely fresh and wonderful as first love.

"Is it too little?" he asked, and his voice sounded so far off that it was faint in his ears.

She raised her lashes and gave him a glance charged with meaning. "That depends," she answered, and suddenly, without warning, she pa.s.sed to the lightest and gayest of tones. "Everything depends on something else, doesn't it? Now Father is coming out, and I must run upstairs and dress."

It was a dismissal, he knew, and yet he hesitated. "May I come again soon?" he asked, and held out his hand.

To his surprise Patty greeted his question with a laugh. "Do you really like politics so much?" she retorted; and fled lightly toward the staircase beyond the library.

CHAPTER XII

A JOURNEY INTO MEAN STREETS

Darrow's little car was waiting before the entrance; and as soon as Stephen had taken his place by the old man's side, they shot forward into the smoky twilight. A policeman, standing in the circle of electric light at the corner, held up a warning hand; and then, as he recognized Darrow, he nodded with a smile, and there stole into his face the look of deference which Stephen had seen in the Governor's eyes.

Glancing up at the sombre ruggedness of the profile beside him, the younger man asked himself curiously from what source of character or Circ.u.mstance this old man had derived his strange impressiveness and his Authority over men. With his gaunt length, his wide curving nostrils, his thick majestic lips, he looked, as Stephen had first seen him, a rock-hewn Pharaoh of a man. An unusual type to survive in modern America--republican and imperial! Did he represent, this carpenter who was also a politician, the political despotism of the worker--the crook and scourge of the labourer's power?

Suddenly, while he wondered, Darrow turned toward him. "What do you think of the Governor?"

"I hardly know," answered Stephen thoughtfully. "It is too soon to ask; but I think he is honest."

"He is more than honest," rejoined the other quietly. "He is human. He understands. He belongs to us."

"Belongs?" Stephen repeated the word with a note of interrogation.

Very slowly the old man answered. "I mean that he is more than anything that he says or thinks. He is bigger than his message."

"I suppose he stands for a great deal?"

"A man stands only for what he is, not for an inch more, not for an inch less. The trouble with all the leaders we've had in the past was that their thought outstripped their characters. They believed more than they were and they broke down under it. I'm an old man now. I've watched them come and go."

"You think that Vetch is a great leader?"

"I think he is a great leader, but I don't mean that I think he will ever lead us anywhere."

"You feel that he is losing his grip on the crowd?"

Up from Main Street the workers were pouring out of the factories; and while they moved in a dark stream through the light and shadow on the pavement, the faces flowed past Stephen with a pallid intensity which made him think of dead flowers drifting on a river. In all those faces how little life there seemed, how little individuality and animation!

"When I was a small kid I used to live by the seash.o.r.e," said the old man presently in his dry, emphatic tones. "Many is the time I've stood and watched the tide coming in, and I never once saw it come in that it didn't go out again."

"Then you believe that the tide is turning against Vetch?"

For a minute, while they sped on in the obscurity of a side street, Darrow meditated.

"No, sir, I ain't saying that much--not yet. But the way I calculate is something like this. Vetch came in on a wave of popular emotion, and a wave of popular emotion is just about like the tide of the sea. It may rise a certain distance, but it can't stand still, and it can't go any farther. It's obliged to turn; and when it turns, it's pretty sure to bring back a good deal that it carried with it. A crowd impulse--as they call it in the pulpit and on the platform--is a dangerous thing. It's dangerous because you can't count on it."

"It looks to me as if Vetch counted upon it a little too much."

"That's his nature. He was born on the sunny side of the street. He thinks because he sees the way to help people that they want to be helped. I've been mixed up in politics now for fifty years, and in the labour movement, as they say, ever since it began to move in the South--and I've found out that people don't really want to be helped--they want to be fooled. Vetch offers 'em facts, and all the time it ain't facts they're wanting, but names."

"I see," a.s.sented Stephen. "Names that they can repeat over and over until they get at last to believe that they are things. Long reverberating names like Democratic or Republican--"