One Man in His Time Part 13

The first time her gaze had rested on him at the charity ball she had thought impetuously, "Any girl could fall in love with a man like that!"

and she had carelessly asked his name of the a.s.siduous Gershom, who appeared to her to exist in innumerable reflections of himself. The next day when she had seen Stephen approaching her in the Square, she had obeyed the same erratic impulse, half in jest and half from the gambler's instinct to grasp at reluctant opportunity. After all, had not experience taught her that one must venture in order to win, that nothing came to those who dared not stake the whole of life on the next turn of fortune? She had been startled out of her composure by the sight of Stephen at the dinner; and yet she had not been conscious of any particular wish to see him again, or to sit at his side through two hours of embarra.s.sment and uncertainty. Now, on the way home, she was suffering acutely from the burden of failure, from the smarting realization of her own ignorance and awkwardness. Her one bitter-sweet consolation was the knowledge that she had been "a good loser," that she had carried off her humiliation with a scornful pride which must have blighted like frost any tenderly budding shoots of compa.s.sion. "I'll show them that they mustn't pity me!" she thought, while her eyes blazed in the darkness. "I'll prove to them that I think myself every bit as good as they are!" She knew that her manner had been ungracious; but she knew also that something stronger than her will, some instinct which was rooted deep in the secret places of her nature, had made it impossible for her to appear otherwise. Impa.s.sioned, undisciplined, and capable of fierce imaginative loyalties and aversions, the strongest force in her character was this bitter ineradicable pride. To accept no benefits that she could not return; to fall under no obligation that would involve a feeling of grat.i.tude; to pay the piper to the utmost penny whenever she called the tune--these were the only laws that she acknowledged. Though she longed ardently for the admiration of Stephen Culpeper, she would have died rather than relinquish the elfin mockery of her challenge.

"Well, did you enjoy it, Patty?" Her father turned to her with sudden tenderness, though the frown produced by some engrossing train of thought still gathered his heavy brows.

She caught his hand while her small face relaxed from its expression of rigid disdain. "I had simply the time of my life," she responded with convincing animation. "That Mrs. Page is the most beautiful woman I ever saw--but she can't be very young. I wonder what she was like when she was my age?"

Vetch laughed. "Not like a short-haired imp with green eyes anyway," he replied. "Mrs. Stribling looked very handsome, too, I thought."

"Oh, she's handsome enough," admitted Patty. "But she hasn't any sense.

I listened to what she was saying, and she just asked questions all the time. Mrs. Page is different. You can tell that she has been all over the world. She knows things."

"Yes, I suppose she does," said Vetch. "What did you think of Benham?"

"He is good looking," answered the girl deliberately, "but I don't like him. He is making fun of you."

"Is he?" returned Vetch curiously. "Now, I wonder if you're right about that. At any rate he asked me a question to-night that I should like a chance to answer on the platform."

"He was in the army," said Patty, "and every one says he was a hero. The women were talking about him while you were smoking. They all admire him so. It seems that he went into an officer's training camp as soon as war was declared though he was over age; and then just recently he has done something that every one thinks splendid. He refused a tremendous fee from some corporation--what did they mean by a corporation?--because he thought the money was made dishonestly. Mrs. Page says he has as many public virtues as a civic forum. What is a forum, Father?"

Vetch laughed without replying directly to her question. "Did she say that?" he responded. "And what did she mean by it, I wonder?"

"It sounded clever," said Patty, "but I didn't understand. What is a forum, Father?"

Vetch thought a moment. "Mrs. Page would probably tell you," he replied, "that it is the temple of the improbable."

Patty stirred impatiently. "Now you are trying to talk like Mrs. Page,"

she rejoined. "I wish I knew what things meant."

"When you find out what they mean, Patty, they will cease to interest you."

"Well, I'd rather be less interested and more comfortable," said Patty, with a trace of exasperation in her voice. "To-night, for instance, I hadn't the faintest idea how to behave. Look at all those books I've read, too, when I might just as well have been enjoying myself. I've found out to-night, Father, that books can't tell you everything--not even books on etiquette."

Vetch broke into a laugh of boisterous amus.e.m.e.nt. "So that is how you have been spending your time!" he exclaimed. "You'd better trust to your common sense, my dear; it will carry you straighter."

"Oh, no, it doesn't. It doesn't carry me anywhere except into trouble.

When I think of all the pains I've taken to learn how to talk like the dictionary! Why, n.o.body talks like the dictionary any longer! They all talk slang, every one of them--only they don't talk the kind that Julius Gershom and all these politicians do. If you could have seen Mrs.

Berkeley's face when I told her I'd had a 'grand' time to-night--she looked exactly like a frozen fish--though just the moment before Mr.

Culpeper had called somebody a 'rotter'. I heard him."

The Governor dismissed it all with a wave of his hand. "Trifles, trifles," was his only comment.

The car had entered the Square, and in a moment it was pa.s.sing the Washington statue and the Capitol building. Until it stopped before the steps of the mansion, Patty did not reply; then springing up with a flutter of her scarlet skirt, she exclaimed airily, "But I am a trifle, too, Father!"

As he held out his hand from the ground, Vetch looked at her with an expression in which pride and pity were strangely mingled. "Then you are one of the trifles that make life worth living," he replied.

He had taken out his latch-key and was about to insert it in the lock, when the door opened and Gershom stood before them.

"I waited for you," he said to Vetch. "There's a matter I must see you about to-night." His ruddy face was tinged with purple, and he had the look of a man who has just been aroused from a nap.

"Well, I'm sleepy, and I'm going to bed," retorted Patty in reply to his glance rather than his words, and her tone was bitterly hostile.

"Then I'll see you to-morrow." He had followed her into the wide hall while the Governor closed the door and stopped to take off his overcoat.

"Did you have a good time?"

She responded with a disdainful movement of her shoulders which might have been a shrug if she had had French instead of Irish blood in her veins. In her evening cloak of green velvet trimmed with gray fox she had the look of a small wild creature of the forest. Beneath her thick eyelashes her eyes shone through a greenish mist; and at the moment there was something frightened and furtive in their brightness.

"Of course," she replied defiantly, moving away from him in the direction of the staircase. "I had a wonderful time--perfectly wonderful. The people were all so interesting." Her p.r.o.nunciation was as deliberately correct as if she were reading from a dictionary. It was the air of superiority that she always a.s.sumed with Gershom, for in no other way, she had learned from experience, could she irritate him so intensely.

His jovial manner gave place to a crestfallen look. "Who was there? I reckon I know the names anyway."

He affected a true republican scorn of appearances; and standing there, in his dishevelled business clothes beside Patty's ethereal youth, he looked as hopelessly battered by reality as a political theory, or as old General Powhatan Plummer of aristocratic descent.

Patty had often wondered what it was about the man that aroused in her so unconquerable an aversion. He was not ugly compared to many of the men her father had brought to the house; and ten years ago, when she first met him in the little country town where they were living, his curling black hair and sharp black eyes had seemed to her rather attractive than otherwise. If he had been merely untidy and unashamed in dress, she might have tolerated the failing as the outward sign of a distinguished social philosophy; but, even in those early days, his Jeffersonian simplicity had yielded to an outbreak of vanity. Though his clothes were unbrushed and his boots were unpolished, he wore a sparkling pin in his tie and several sparkling rings on his fingers.

There was something else, too, some easy tone of patronage, some familiar inflexion, which as a child she had hated. Now, after the evening with Stephen Culpeper, she shrank from him with a disgust which was made all the keener by contrast. A pitiless light had fallen over Gershom while he stood there beside her, as if his bad taste and his pathetic ambition to appear something that he was not, had become exaggerated into positive vices. She was too young to perceive the essential pathos of all wasted effort, of all misdirected attempts to overcome the disadvantages of ignorance; and while she looked at him now, she saw only the vulgarity. Like all those who have suffered from insufficient opportunities and wounded pride, Patty Vetch was without mercy for the very weaknesses that she had risen above. After the evening at the Berkeleys' she felt that she should be less ashamed of a drunkard than of a man who wore diamonds because he thought that it was the correct thing to do. She remembered suddenly that on her fourteenth birthday she had bought a pair of paste earrings with ten dollars her father had given her; and for the sting of this reminder she knew that she should never forgive Gershom. Oh, she had no patience with a man who couldn't find out things and learn without asking questions! Hadn't she tried and tried, and made mistakes and tried again, and still gone on trying by hook or by crook; as her father would say, to find out the thousand and one things she oughtn't to do? If she, even as a child, had struggled so hard to improve herself and change in the right way, not the wrong way--then why shouldn't he? Her father, of course, wasn't polished, but he was as unlike Gershom as if they had been born as far apart as the poles. Even to her untrained eyes it was evident that Vetch possessed the authority of personality--a sanction that was not social but moral. Some inherent dislike for anything that was not solid, that was not genuine, had served Vetch as a kind of aesthetic discrimination.

"I know Benham," Gershom was saying eagerly. "I've worked with him.

Smart chap, don't you think? Ever heard him speak?"

"No, I hate speeches."

"Did he and the Governor have any words?"

"Of course they didn't--not at dinner," she replied with a crushing manner. "Father is waiting for you."

"Then you'll see me to-morrow? I've got a lot I want to say to you. And I'll tell you this right now, Patty, my dear, you may run round with these high-faluting chaps like Culpeper as much as you please; but how many dinner parties do you think you'd be invited to if I hadn't put the old man where he is?"

At this she turned on him furiously, her eyes blazing through their greenish mist. "I don't owe you anything, and you know it!" she retorted defiantly. Then before he could detain her she broke away from him and ran up the stairs. How dared he pretend that he had placed her under an obligation! As if it made any difference to her whether her father were Governor or not!

As she fled upward she heard Gershom follow Vetch into the library, and she knew that they would sit talking there until long after midnight.

These discussions had become frequent of late; and she surmised vaguely, though Vetch never mentioned Gershom's name to her, that the two men were no longer upon the friendly terms of the old days. Ever since Vetch's election, it had seemed to her that the pack of hungry politicians had closed in about him; and only the day before, when she had gone over to the Governor's office in the Capitol building, she had run away from what she merrily described as "the famished wolves"

waiting outside his door. It was clear even to her that the political leaders who had supported Vetch were beginning already to distrust him.

They had sought, she realized, to use his popularity, his eloquence, his earnestness, for their own ends; and they were making the historic discovery that the man who possesses these affirmative qualities is seldom without the will to preserve them. In their superficial ploughing of the soil, Vetch's adherents had at last struck against the rock of resistance. A man of ambition, or a man of prejudice, they might have controlled; but, as Patty had learned long ago, Vetch was that most difficult of political problems--the man of an idea.

Sitting before her dressing-table she glanced over the room, which was hung with the gaily decorated chintz she had bought after months of secret longing for roses and hollyhocks in her bedroom. Now she felt that it looked cheap and flimsy because she had sacrificed material to colour. She wanted something different to-night; she wanted something better. Turning to the mirror she gazed back at her vivid face, with the large deep eyes, so full of poignant expectancy, and the soft dimpled chin. From her expression she might have been dreaming of happiness; but the thought in her mind was simply, "The powder I use is too white.

Those women to-night used powder that did not show. I must get some to-morrow." She was pretty,--even Stephen thought she was pretty. She could see it in his eyes when he looked at her; but her prettiness was merely the bloom of youth, nothing more. It was not that changeless beauty of structure--that beauty, as she recognized, of the very bone, which made Mrs. Page perennially lovely. "In ten, fifteen, at the most in twenty years, I shall have lost it all," she thought. "Then I shall get fat and common looking; and everything will be over for me because a little youthful colour and sparkle was all that I had. I have nothing to hold on to--nothing that will last. I don't know anything--and yet how could I be expected to know anything after the dull life I've had? In my whole life I've never known a woman that could help me. I've had to find out everything for myself--"

With her gaze still on the mirror, she laid the brush on its back of pink celluloid--how much she had admired it when she bought it!--and leaned forward with her hands clasped on the cover of the dressing-table. Her hair still flying out from the strokes of the brush surrounded her small eager face like a cloud. From the open neck of her kimono, embroidered in a pattern of cranes and wistaria, the thin girlish lines of her throat rose with an appealing fragility, like the stem of some delicate flower.

"I wonder if Mother could have helped me if she had lived?" she asked presently of her reflection. "I wonder if she was different from all the other women I've known?" Through her mind there pa.s.sed swiftly a hundred memories of her childhood. First there came the one vivid recollection of her mother, a flashing, graceful figure, as light as thistle-down, in a skirt of spangled tulle that stood out from her knees. The face Patty could not remember, but the spangles were indelibly impressed on her mind, the spangles and a short silver wand, with a star on the end of it, which that fairy-like figure had held over her cradle. Of her mother this was all she had left, just this one unforgettable picture, and then a long terrible night when she had not seen her, but had heard her sobbing, sobbing, sobbing, somewhere in the darkness. The next day, when she cried for her, they had said that she was gone, and the child had never seen her again. In the place of her pretty mother there had been a big, rugged man, whom she had never seen before, and when she cried this man had taken her in his arms, and tried to quiet her. Afterward, when she grew bigger and asked questions, one of the neighbours had told her that her mother had lost her mind from a fall in the circus, that they had taken her away to an asylum, and that now she was dead.

"And wherever she is, she ought to go down on her knees and thank Gideon Vetch for the way he's looked after you," said the woman.

"But didn't he look after her too?" asked the child.

At this the woman laughed shrilly, lifting the soaking clothes with her capable red hands, and then plunging them down into the soapsuds."

Well, I reckon that's more than the Lord Almighty would expect of him!"

she replied emphatically but ambiguously.

"I wonder why Father never took me to see her. I'm sure I'd have remembered it."