One Man in His Time Part 22

"The question," replied Darrow, with an energy that shook the little car, "goes as deep as h.e.l.l!"

They were driving rapidly up Grace Street; and as they shot past the club on the corner, Stephen noticed the serene aristocratic profile of Peyton at one of the brilliantly lighted windows. A little farther on, when they turned into Franklin Street, he saw that the old print shop was in darkness, except for the lights in the rooms of the caretaker and the lodgers in the upper storey. Corinna had gone home, he supposed, and he wondered idly if she were with Benham? As they went on they pa.s.sed the house of the Blairs, where he caught a glimpse of Margaret on the porch, parting from the handsome young clergyman. The sight stirred him strangely, as if the memory of his dead life had been awakened by a scent or a faded flower in a book. How different he was from the boy Margaret had known in that primitive period which people defined as "before the war"! It was as if he had belonged then to some primary emotional stratum of life. All the complex forces, the play and interplay of desire and repulsion, of energy and la.s.situde, had developed in the last two or three years.

On either side, softly shaded lights were s.h.i.+ning from the windows, and women, in rich furs, were getting out of luxurious cars. It was the world that Stephen knew; life moulded in sculptural forms and encrusted with the delicate patina of tradition. Here was all that he had once loved; yet he realized suddenly, with a sensation of loneliness, that here, not in the mean streets, he felt, as Vetch would have said, "stranger than Robinson Crusoe." Something was missing. Something was lost that he could never recover. Was it Vetch, after all, who had shown him the way out, who had knocked a hole in the wall?

When Darrow stopped the car before the Culpeper gate, Stephen turned and held out his hand. "Thank you," he said simply. "I shall see you again."

Crossing the pavement with a rapid step, he entered the gate and ran up the steps to the porch between the white columns. As he pa.s.sed into the richly tempered glow of the hall, it seemed to him that an invisible force, an aroma of the past, drifted out of the old house and enveloped him like the sweetness of flowers. He was caught again, he was submerged, in the spirit of race.

A little later, when he was pa.s.sing his mother's door, he glanced in and saw her standing before the mirror in her evening gown of gray silk, with the foam-like ruffles of rose-point on her bosom and at her elbows, which were still round and young looking.

Catching his reflection in the gla.s.s, she called out in her crisp tones, "My dear boy, where on earth have you been? You know we promised to dine with Julia, and then to go to those tableaux for the benefit of the children in Vienna. She has worked so hard to make them a success that she would never forgive us if we stayed away."

"Yes, I know. I had forgotten," he replied. Why was he always forgetting? Then he asked impulsively, while pity burned at white heat within him, "Is Father here? I want to speak to him before we go out."

"He came in an hour ago," said Mrs. Culpeper; and as she spoke the mild leonine countenance of Mr. Culpeper, vaguely resembling some playful and domesticated king of beasts, appeared at the door of his dressing-room.

"Do you wish to see me, my boy?" he asked affectionately. "We were just wondering if you had forgotten and stayed at the club."

"No, I wasn't at the club. I've been looking over the Culpeper estate--a part of it." Stephen's voice trembled in spite of the effort he made to keep it impersonal and indifferent. "Father, do you know anything about those old houses beyond Marshall Street?"

It was the peculiar distinction of Mr. Culpeper that, in a community where everybody talked all the time, he had been able to form the habit of silence. While his acquaintances continually vociferated opinions, scandals, experiences, or anecdotes, he remained imperturbably reticent and subdued. All that he responded now to Stephen's outburst was, "Has anybody offered to buy them?"

"Why, what in the world!" exclaimed Mrs. Culpeper, who was neither reticent nor subdued. From the depths of the mirror her bright brown eyes gazed back at her husband, while she fastened a cameo pin, containing the head of Minerva framed in pearls, in the rose-point on her bosom.

"To buy them?" repeated Stephen. "Why, they are horrors, Father, to live in--crumbling, insanitary horrors! And yet the rent has been doubled in the last two or three years."

From the mirror his mother's face looked back at him, so small and clear and delicately tinted that it seemed to him merely an exaggerated copy of the cameo on her bosom, "I hope that means we shall have a little more to live on next year," she said reflectively, while the expression that Mary Byrd impertinently called her "economic look"

appeared in her eyes. "What with the high cost of everything, and the low interest on Liberty Bonds, and the innumerable relief organizations to which one is simply forced to contribute, it has been almost impossible to make two ends meet. Poor Mary Byrd hasn't been able to give a single party this winter."

Before Stephen's gaze there pa.s.sed a vision of the dingy bas.e.m.e.nt room, the embittered face of the woman, the sickly tow-headed children, the man who could not lift his eyes from the hole in the carpet, and the baby with that look of having been born not young, but old, the look of pre-natal experience and disillusionment. And he heard Darrow's dry voice complaining because the well-to-do cla.s.ses still gave to starving orphans across the world. After all, what was there to choose between the near-sighted and the far-sighted social vision? How narrow they both appeared and how crooked! Darrow would let all the children of Europe starve as long as their crying did not interfere with the aims of his Federation of Labour; Stephen's sister Julia, with her instinct for imitation and her remote sense of responsibility, would step over the poverty at her door, while she held out her hands, in the latest fas.h.i.+onable gesture of philanthropy, to the orphans in France or Vienna.

And beside them both his mother, who because of her const.i.tutional inability to see anything beyond the family, perceived merely the fact that her own child would be disappointed if the tableaux for the benefit of starving children somewhere did not go off well. The question, he realized, was not which one of the three points of view was the most admirable, but simply which one served best the ultimate purpose of the race. Selfishness seemed to have as little as altruism to do with the problem. Was Corinna, who had failed in philanthropy and chosen beauty, the only wise one among them?

"But children are living in these houses," he said, "and not only living--they are forced to move out because the rent has become so high that they must find a worse place. I've just seen it with my own eyes.

Three sickly little children and a dreadful baby--a baby that knows everything already."

A quiver of pain crossed Mr. Culpeper's handsome features; but he said only, "I will speak to the agent."

"Won't you look into it yourself?" asked Stephen hopelessly. "The agent is only the agent--but the responsibility is yours--ours. Of course the agent doesn't want to make expensive repairs when he can get as high rent without doing so. He knows that people are obliged to have a roof over them; and if the roofs are too bad for white people, he can always find negroes to pay anything that he asks. Can't you see what it is in reality--that we are preying on the helpless?"

Turning suddenly from the mirror, Mrs. Culpeper crossed the floor hastily and put her arms about her son's shoulders. Her face was very motherly and there was a compa.s.sionate light in her eyes, "My dear, dear boy," she murmured in the soothing tone that one uses to the ill or the mentally unbalanced. "My dear boy, you must really go and dress. Julia will never forgive us." In her heart she was sincerely grieved by what he had told her. She would have helped cheerfully if it had been possible to her nature; but stronger than compa.s.sion, stronger even than reason, was the instinct of evasive idealism which the generations had bred. He understood, while he looked down on her white hair and unlined face, that even if he took her with him to that bas.e.m.e.nt room, she would see it not as it actually was, but as she wished it to be. Her romanticism was invulnerable because it had no contact, even through imagination, with the edge of reality.

And he knew also, while she held him in her motherly arms, that something had broken down within his soul--some barrier between himself and humanity. The wall of tradition and sentiment no longer divided him from Darrow, or Gideon Vetch, or the man who could not look at anything but the hole in the carpet. Never again could he take his inherited place in the world of which he had once been a part. For an instant a nervous impulse to protest, to startle by some violent gesture that look of gentle self-esteem from the faces before him, jerked over him like a spasm. Then the last habit that he would ever break in his life, the very law of his being, which was the law of order, of manners, of self-control, the inbred horror, older than himself or his parents, of giving himself away, of making a scene of his own emotions, this ancestral custom of good breeding closed over him like the lid of a coffin.

With a smile he looked into the anxious face of his father. "Isn't there some way out of it, Dad?"

The muscles about Mr. Culpeper's mouth contracted as if he were going to cry; but when he spoke his voice was completely under control. "I can't interfere, son, with the way the agent manages the property," he answered, "but, of course, if you have discovered a peculiarly distressing case--if it is an object of charity--"

He paused abruptly in amazement, for Stephen was laughing, laughing in a way, as Mrs. Culpeper remarked afterward, that n.o.body had ever even thought of laughing before the whole world had become demoralized.

"d.a.m.n charity!" he exclaimed hilariously. "I beg your pardon, Mother, but if you only knew how inexpressibly funny it is!" Then the laughter stopped, and a wistful look came into his eyes, for beyond the broken walls he saw Patty Vetch in her red cape, and around her stretched the wind-swept roads of that hidden country.

A minute later, as he left the room, his mother's eyes followed him anxiously. "Poor boy, we must bear with him," she said in melting maternal accents.

CHAPTER XIII

CORINNA WONDERS

After a winter of Italian skies spring had come in a night. It was a morning in April, blue and soft as a cloud, with a roving fragrance of lilacs and hyacinths in the air. Already the early bloom of the orchard had dropped, and the freshly ploughed fields, with splashes of henna in the dun-coloured soil, were surrounded by the budding green of the woods.

As Mrs. Culpeper knocked at the door of Corinna's shop, she noticed that the pine bough in the window had been replaced by bowls of growing narcissi. For a moment her stern expression relaxed, and her face, framed in a bonnet of black straw with velvet strings, became soft and anxious. Beneath the veil of white illusion which reached only to the tip of her small sharp nose, her eyes were suddenly touched with spring.

"How delicious the flowers smell," she remarked when Corinna opened the door; and then, as she entered the room and glanced curiously round her, she asked incredulously, "Do people really pay money for these old ill.u.s.trations, Corinna?"

"Not here, Cousin Harriet. I bought these in London."

"And they cost you something?"

"Some of these, of course, cost more than others. That," Corinna pointed to a mezzotint of the Ladies Waldegrave by Valentine Green, "cost a little less than ten thousand dollars."

"Ten thousand dollars!" Mrs. Culpeper gazed at the print as disapprovingly as if it were an open violation of the Eighteenth Amendment. "We didn't pay anything like that for our largest copy of a Murillo. Well, I may not be artistic, but, for my part, I could never understand why any one should want an old book or an old picture."

Sitting rigidly upright in one of the tapestry-covered chairs, she added condescendingly: "Stephen admires this room very much."

"Stephen," remarked Corinna pleasantly, "is a dear boy."

"Just now," returned Stephen's mother, with her accustomed air of duty unflinchingly performed, "he is giving us a great deal of anxiety. Never before, not even when he was in the war, have I spent so many sleepless nights over him."

"I am sorry. Poor Stephen, what has he done?"

"I have always hoped," observed Mrs. Culpeper firmly, "that Stephen would marry Margaret."

"I am aware of that." A flicker of amus.e.m.e.nt brightened Corinna's eyes.

"So, I think, is Stephen."

"I have tried to be honest. It seems to me that a mother's wish should carry a great deal of weight in such matters."

"It ought to," a.s.sented Corinna, "but I've never heard of its doing so."

"Everything would have been satisfactory if he had not allowed himself to be carried away by a foolish fancy."

"I cannot imagine," said Corinna primly, "that Stephen could ever be foolish. It gives me hope of him."

Impaling her, as if she had been a b.u.t.terfly, with a glance as sharp as a needle, Mrs. Culpeper demanded sternly, "How much do you know of this affair, my dear?"