One Man in His Time Part 28

"Oh, I don't mind," replied Patty, with gay indifference.

"I'll see you very soon," said Stephen; and it seemed to the girl as she watched him walking toward the Was.h.i.+ngton monument that he looked as old and as tired as his mother.

Of course he was obliged to go. There wasn't anything else that he could do, and yet--and yet--as Patty gazed after the three slowly moving figures, she felt that a cold hand had reached out of the suns.h.i.+ne and clutched her heart.

CHAPTER XVI

THE FEAR OF LIFE

Stephen had intended to go back as soon as he had put his mother into the car; but she clung so tightly to his arm, and there was something so appealing in her fragile dependence, that, almost without realizing it, he found that he was sitting in front of her, and that she was taking him down to his office.

"We will leave you and go back, Stephen," she said, while a look of faintness spread over her features. "I feel as if one of my heart attacks might be coming on."

"Wouldn't you rather I went home with you?" he inquired solicitously.

His mother shook her head and reached feebly for Margaret's hand.

"Margaret will take care of me," she replied in the weak voice before which her husband and her children had learned to tremble.

As he sat there uneasily in the stuffy car, which smelt of camphor and reminded him of a hea.r.s.e, he was threatened by that familiar sensation of oppression, of closing walls. Would he ever again be free from this impalpable terror, from this dread of being shut within a s.p.a.ce so small that he must smother if he did not escape? And not only places but persons, as he had found long ago, persons with closed souls, with narrow minds, produced in him this feeling of physical suffocation.

Margaret, with her serenity, her changeless sweetness, affected him precisely as he was affected by the stained gla.s.s windows of a church.

He felt that he should stifle unless he could break away into a place where there were winds and blown shadows and pure suns.h.i.+ne. He admired her; he might have loved her; but she smothered him like that rich and heavy wave of the past from which he was still struggling to free himself. For he knew now that it was not the past he wanted; it was the future. Above all things he needed release, he needed deliverance; and yet he knew, more surely at this moment than ever before, that he was not free, that he was still in chains, still the servant, not the master, of tradition. He lacked the courage of life, the will to feel and to live. Only through emotion, only through some courageous adventure of the spirit, only through daring to be human, could he reach liberation; and yet he could not dare; he could not let himself go; he could not lose his life in order that he might find it. Corinna was right, he felt, when she called him a prig. She was right though he hated priggishness, though he longed to be natural and human, to let himself be swept away on the tide of some irresistible impulse. He longed to dare, and yet he had never dared. He longed to take risks, and yet he studied every step of the road. He longed to be unconventional, and yet he would have died rather than wear a red flower in his b.u.t.tonhole. The thought of Patty rushed over him like the wind at dawn or the light of the sunrise. There was deliverance; there was freedom of spirit! She was the impulse he dared not follow, the risk he dared not take, the red flower he dared not wear.

"What lovely eyes Miss Vetch has," Margaret was saying. "Don't you think so, Cousin Harriet?"

Mrs. Culpeper sniffed at her bottle of smelling-salts. "She seemed to me very ordinary," she answered stiffly. "How could Gideon Vetch's daughter be anything else?"

"Yes, it's a pity about her father," admitted Margaret placidly. "If what Mr. Benham thinks is true, I suppose the Governor has agreed not to interfere in this dreadful strike."

Again Mrs. Culpeper sniffed. "Every one knows he is merely a tool in the hands of those people," she said.

In the weeks that followed Stephen heard his mother's opinion repeated wherever he went. Everywhere the strike was discussed, and everywhere, in the Culpeper's circle, Gideon Vetch and his policies were repudiated.

It was generally believed that the strike would be called, and that the Governor had been, as old General Plummer neatly put it, "bought off by the riff-raff." There were those, and the General was among them, who thought that Vetch had been definitely threatened by the labour leaders.

There were open charges of "shady dealings" in the newspapers; hints that he had got the office of Governor "by striking a bargain" with the faction whose tool he had become. "Don't tell me, sir, that they didn't put him there because they knew they could count on him!" roared old Powhatan, with the acc.u.mulated truculence of eighty quarrelsome years.

Of course the General was intemperate; but, as the Judge observed facetiously, "it was refres.h.i.+ng, in these days when there was nothing for decent people to drink, to find that intemperance was still possible. With the General fuming over corruption and Benham preaching morality, there is no need," he added, "for us to despair of virtue."

For the people who condemned Vetch were quite as emphatic in praise of John Benham; and in these weeks of unrest and anxiety, Corinna's face was glowing with pride and pleasure. That Benham, in his unselfish service, was leading the way, no one doubted. Tireless, unrewarded,--for it was admitted by those who esteemed him most that he was never really in touch with the crowd, that his zeal awakened no human response,--he had sacrificed his private practice in order to devote himself day and night to averting the strike. Stephen, inspired to hero wors.h.i.+p, asked himself again what the difference was, beyond simple personal rect.i.tude, between Vetch and Benham? Vetch, lacking, so far as the young man knew, every public virtue except the human touch which enkindles either the souls or the imaginations of men, could overturn Benham's argument with a dramatic gesture, an emotional phrase. Why was it that Benham, possessing both the character of the patriot and the graces of the orator, should fall short in the one indefinable attribute which makes a man the natural leader of men?

"People admire him, but they won't follow him," Stephen thought in perplexity. "Vetch has something that Benham lacks; and it is this something that makes people believe in him in spite of themselves."

This idea was in his mind when he met Benham one day on the steps of his club, and stopped to congratulate him on the great speech he had made the evening before.

"By Jove, it makes me want to throw my hat into the ring!" he exclaimed, half in jest, half in earnest.

"I wish you would," replied the other gravely. "We need young men. It is youth that turns the world."

Never, Stephen thought, had Benham, appeared more impressive, more perfectly finished and turned out; never had he appeared so near to his tailor and so far from his audience. He was a handsome man in his rather colourless fas.h.i.+on, a man who would look any part with distinction from policeman to President. His sleek iron-gray hair had as usual the rich sheen of velvet; his thin, sharp profile was like the face on a Roman coin. A man of power, of intellect, of character; and yet a man who had missed, in some inexplicable way, greatness, achievement. On the whole Stephen was glad that Corinna had announced her engagement. She and Benham seemed so perfectly suited to each other--and, of course, there was nothing in that old story about Alice Rokeby. A friends.h.i.+p, nothing more! Only the other day Benham had spoken casually of his "friends.h.i.+p"

for Mrs. Rokeby; he always called her "Mrs. Rokeby"; and Stephen had accepted the phrase as a satisfactory explanation of their past a.s.sociation.

"I'd like to go into some public work," said the young man. "To tell the truth I can't settle down."

"I know," Benham responded sympathetically. "I went through it all myself; but there is nothing like throwing oneself into some outside work. I wish you would come into this fight. If we can avert this strike it will be worth any sacrifice."

That Benham was making tremendous personal sacrifices, Stephen knew, and the young man's voice was tinged with emotion as he answered, "I'm afraid I'm not much of a speaker."

"Oh, you would be, if you would only let yourself go." There it was again! Even Benham recognized his weakness; even Benham knew that he was afraid of life.

"Besides we need men of every type," Benham was saying smoothly. "We need especially good organizers. The fight won't be over to-morrow. Even if we win this time, we must organize against Vetch and defeat him once and for all in the next elections."

"Then you think he is really as dangerous as the papers are trying to make him appear?"

"I think," Benham replied shortly, "that he is in it for what he can get out of it."

"Well, call on me when I can help you," said Stephen, as they parted; and a minute later when he reached the pavement, he found occasion to repeat his impulsive offer to Judge Horatio Lancaster Page.

"I've promised Benham that I'll do all I can to help him defeat Vetch."

"You're right," returned the Judge, with his smile of discerning irony.

"I suppose we're obliged to fight him."

"If we don't what will happen?"

"That's what I'd like to see, my boy. I'd give ten years full measure and running over to see exactly what would happen."

"Benham is afraid his crowd may send him to the Senate."

"Perhaps, but there is always a chance of their sending him to Jericho instead."

Stephen nodded. "Yes, there's trouble already, I believe, over this strike."

The Judge laughed with a note of cynical humour. "I can understand why he should feel that the chief obstacle to loving humanity is human nature."

"He's dead right, too. It is so easy to be a philosopher--or a philanthropist--in a desert. I've felt like that ever since I came home."

But the Judge had grown serious, and there was no merriment in his voice when he answered: "I may be wrong, of course, and, thank G.o.d, my mind hasn't yet got too stiff with age to change; but I've a reluctant belief deep down in me that this fellow Vetch has got hold of something that is going to count. I don't pretend to know what it is; an idea, a feeling, merely an undeveloped instinct for truth, or expediency, if you like it better. Of course it is all crude and raw. It needs cultivation and direction; but it's there--the vital principle, even if we don't recognize it when we see it. All the same," he concluded in a lighter tone, "I'm glad you are going into the fight. We can't hurt a principle by fighting it, you know."

Then he pa.s.sed on his way; and the transient enthusiasm which had illuminated Stephen's mind drifted away like clouds of blown smoke. How could he fight with any heart when there seemed to him nothing on either side that was worth fighting for--nothing except the unselfish patriotism of John Benham? He remembered the fervour, the exaltation with which he had gone to France that first year of the war. The belief in a righteous cause which would bring peace on earth and good will toward men; the belief in a human fellows.h.i.+p which would grow out of sacrifice; the belief in a fairer social order which would flower from the bloodstained memories of the battlefields,--what was there left of these romantic illusions to-day? Was it true, as Vetch had once said, that organized killing, even in a just cause, must bring its spiritual punishment? Could the l.u.s.t of blood be changed by a doc.u.ment into the love of one's brother? "I gave my youth in that war," he thought, "and I won from it--what? Disillusionment." With the reflection he felt again the exhaustion of the nerves, the infirmity of purpose against which he had struggled ever since his return. "If there were only something worth fighting for, worth believing in! If I could only believe earnestly, or desire pa.s.sionately--anything!"

Just as Corinna had longed for perfection, for something to wors.h.i.+p, he found himself longing now for a cause, for any cause, even a lost one, to which he could give himself. He wanted facts, deeds, certainties. He was suffocated by shams and insincerities--and phrases.

Then suddenly, this was one of the symptoms of his nervous malady, the reaction swept over him in a wave of energy which receded almost immediately. If he could only find deliverance from himself and his own subjective processes! If he could only be borne away by the pa.s.sion he felt and yet could not feel completely! He wanted Patty, he knew, but did he want her enough to justify the effort that he must make to win her? Would she be worth to him the break with his mother, with his traditions, with his inherited ideals? He saw her small, slight figure in the dappled sunlight under the budding trees. He saw her vivid flower-like face, her romantic eyes, and the arch and charming smile with which she watched his approach. Yes, he wanted her, he wanted her, and she was the only thing on G.o.d's earth, he told himself rhetorically, that he did want with the whole of his nature!

Quickening his steps, he turned in the direction of the Capitol Square, which stretched, like the painted curtain of a theatre, across the end of the street. A singular intuition, a presentiment, had come to him that if he could sustain this impulse, this tide of energy until he saw Patty, he should be cured--he should find freedom of spirit. Only through love, he had discovered, could there be resurrection from this spiritual death of the last two or three years. Only through some tremendous rush of desire could he overcome the partial paralysis of his will. His instinct, he knew, was right, but would his resolution last until he had found Patty?

It was early afternoon, and the faintly tinted shadows, as smooth as silk, were falling straight across the bright green gra.s.s on the hillside. The Square was almost deserted at this hour, except for the old men on the benches and the squirrels that were preparing to return to their nests in the trees. The breath of spring was over all, roving, fragrant, provocative.