One Man in His Time Part 25

"Have you spoken to Patty?"

"I started to, but she made fun of the idea--you know the way she has.

She asked me if I had ever heard of any one falling in love with a plaster saint?"

Corinna smiled. "So she called Stephen a plaster saint?"

"She was chaffing, of course."

"Well, I don't see that there is anything you can do unless you send Patty away."

"She wouldn't go," he responded simply; then after a moment of embarra.s.sed hesitation, he blurted out nervously, "Is this young Culpeper what you would call a marrying man?"

This time it was impossible for Corinna to suppress her amus.e.m.e.nt, and it broke out in a laugh that was like the chiming of silver bells. Oh, if only Cousin Harriet could hear him! Then observing the gravity of Vetch's expression, she checked her untimely mirth with an effort.

"That depends, I suppose. At his age how can any one tell?" In her heart she did not believe that Stephen would marry Patty; she was not sure even that she, Corinna, should wish him to do so. There was too much at stake, and though her philosophy was fearless, her conduct had never been anything but conventional. While in theory she despised discretion, she realized that the virtue she despised, not the theory she admired, had dominated her life. The great trouble with acts of reckless n.o.bility was that the recklessness was only for a moment, but the n.o.bility was obliged to last a lifetime. It was not difficult, she knew, for persons like Stephen or herself to be heroic in appropriate circ.u.mstances; the difficulty began when one was compelled to sustain the heroic role long after the appropriate circ.u.mstances had pa.s.sed away. Yet, in spite of the cynical lucidity of her judgment, the romantic in her heart longed to have Stephen, by one generous act of devotion, prove her theory fallacious. Her strongest impulse, the impulse to create happiness, to repair, as her father had once described it, crippled destinies; this impulse urged her now to help Patty's pathetic romance in every way in her power. It would be very fine if Stephen cared enough to forget what he was losing. It would be magnificent, she felt, but it would not be masculine. For she had had great experience; and though men might vary in a mult.i.tude of particulars, she had found that the solidarity of s.e.x was preserved in some general code of emotional expediency.

"Do you think," Vetch was making another attempt to explain his meaning, "that he is seriously interested?"

"I am perfectly sure," she replied, "that he is more than half in love with her."

"Is he the kind, then, to let himself go the rest of the way?"

She shook her head. "That I cannot answer. From my knowledge of the restraining force of the Culpeper fibre, I should say that he is not."

"You mean he wouldn't think it a suitable marriage?"

She blushed for his crudeness. "I mean his mother wouldn't think it a suitable marriage. Patty is very attractive, but they know nothing about her except that. You see they have had the disadvantage of knowing everything about every one who has married, or who has even wished to marry, into the family for the last two hundred years. It is a disadvantage, as I've said, for the strain is so highly bred that each generation becomes mentally more and more like the fish in caves that have lost their eyes because they stopped trying to see. Stephen is different in a way--and yet not different enough. It would be his salvation if he could care enough for Patty to take a risk for her sake; but his mother, of course, would fight against it with every particle of her influence, and her influence is enormous." Then she met his eyes boldly: "Wouldn't you fight against it in her place?" she asked.

"I? Oh, I shouldn't care a hang what anybody thought if I liked the girl," he retorted. His smile shone out warmly. "Would you?" he demanded in his turn.

For an instant his blunt question disconcerted her, and while she hesitated she felt his blue eyes on her downcast face. "You can't judge by me," she answered presently. "Only those who have been in chains know the meaning of freedom."

"Are you free now?"

"Not entirely. Who is?"

He was looking at her more closely; and when at last she raised her eyelashes and met his gaze, the lovely glow which gave her beauty its look of October splendour suffused her features. Anger seized her in the very moment that the colour rushed to her cheeks. Why should she blush like a schoolgirl because of the way this man--or any man--looked at her?

"Are you going to marry Benham?" he asked; and there was a note in his voice which disturbed her in spite of herself. Though she denied pa.s.sionately his right to question her, she answered simply enough: "Yes, I am going to marry him."

"Do you care for him?"

With an effort she turned her eyes away and looked beyond the green stems and the white flowers of the narcissi in the window to the street outside, where the shadows of the young leaves lay like gauze over the brick pavement.

"If I didn't care do you think that I would marry him?" she asked in a low voice. Through the open window a breeze came, honey-sweet with the scent of narcissi, and she realized, with a start, that this early spring was poignantly lovely and sad.

"Well, I wish I'd known you twenty years ago," said Vetch presently. "If I'd had a woman like you to help me, I might have been almost anything.

n.o.body knows better than I how much help a woman can be when she's the right sort."

She tore her gaze from the sunshine beyond, from the beauty and the wistfulness of April. What was there in this man that convinced her in spite of everything that Benham had told her?

"Your wife has been dead a long time?" She spoke gently, for his tone more than his words had touched her sympathy.

As soon as she asked the question, she realized that it was a mistake.

An expressionless mask closed over his face, and she received the impression that he had withdrawn to a distance.

"A long time," was all he answered. His voice had become so impersonal that it was toneless.

"Well, it hasn't kept you back--not having help," she hastened to reply as naturally as she could. "You are almost everything you wished to be in the world, aren't you?" It was a foolish speech, she felt, but the change in his manner had surprised and bewildered her.

He laughed shortly without merriment. "I?" he replied, and she noticed for the first time that he looked tired and worried beneath his exuberant optimism. "I am the loneliest man on earth. The loneliest man on earth is the one who stands between two extremes." As she made no reply, he continued after a moment, "You think, of course, that I stand with one extreme, not in the centre, but you are mistaken. I am in the middle. When I try to bring the two millstones together they will grind me to powder."

She had never heard him speak despondently before; and while she listened to the sound of his expressive voice, so full, for the hour at least, of discouragement, she felt drawn to him in a new and personal way. It was as if, by showing her a side of his nature the public had never seen, he had taken her into his confidence.

"But surely your influence is as great as ever," she said presently. A trite remark, but the only one that occurred to her.

"I brought the crowd with me as far as I thought safe," he answered, "and now it is beginning to turn against me because I won't lead it over the precipice into the sea. That's the way it always is, I reckon.

That's the way it's been, anyhow, ever since Moses tried to lead the Children of Israel out of bondage. Take these strikers, for instance. I believe in the right to strike. I believe that they ought to have every possible protection. I believe that their families ought to be provided for in order to take the weapon of starvation out of the hands of the capitalists. I'd give them as fair a field as it is in my power to provide, and anybody would think that they would be satisfied with simple fairness. But, no, what they are trying to do is not to strike _for_ themselves, but to strike _at_ somebody else. They are not satisfied with protection from starvation unless that protection involves the right to starve somebody else. They want to tie up the markets and stop the dairy trains, and they won't wink an eyelash if all the babies that don't belong to them are without milk. That's war, they tell me; and I answer that I'd treat war just as I'd treat a strike, if I had the power. As soon as an army began to prey on the helpless, I'd raise a bigger army if I could and throw the first one out into the jungle where it belonged. But people don't see things like that now, though they may in the next five hundred years. The trouble is that all human nature, including capitalist and labourer, is tarred with the same brush and tarred with selfishness. What the oppressed want is not freedom from oppression, but the opportunity to become oppressors."

Was this only a mood, she wondered, or was it the expression of a profound disappointment? Sympathy such as John Benham had never awakened overflowed from her heart, and she was conscious suddenly of some deep intuitive understanding of Vetch's nature. All that had been alien or ambiguous became as close and true and simple as the thoughts in her own mind. What she saw in Vetch, she perceived now, was that resemblance to herself which the Judge had once turned into a jest. She discerned his point of view not by looking outside of herself, but by looking within.

"I know," she responded in her rich voice. "I think I know."

He gazed at her with a smile which had grown as tired as the rest of him. "Then if you know why don't you help--you others?" he asked. "Don't you see that by standing aside, by keeping apart, you are doing all the harm that you can? If democracy doesn't seem good enough for you, then get down into the midst of it and make it better. That's the only way--the only way on earth to make a better democracy--by putting the best we've got into it. You can't make bread rise from the outside.

You've got to mix the yeast with the dough, if you want it to leaven the whole lump."

She had been standing with her hands clasped before her and her eyes on the sky beyond the window; and when he paused, with a husky tone in his voice, she spoke almost as if she were in a dream. "I believe in you,"

she said, and then again, as he did not speak she repeated very slowly: "I believe in you."

"That helps," he answered gravely. "I don't suppose you will ever realize how much that will help me." As he finished he turned toward the door; and a minute afterward, without another word or look, he went out into the street, and she saw his figure cross the flowers and the sunlight in the window.

When he had gone Corinna opened the door and stood watching the long black shadows of the cedars creep over the walk of broken flagstones.

Always when she was alone her thoughts would return like homing birds to John Benham; but this afternoon, though she spoke his name in her reflections, she was conscious of an inner detachment from the vital interests of her personal life. For a little while, so strong was the mental impression Vetch had made on her, she saw his image even while she thought the name of John Benham. Then, with an effort of will, she put the Governor and all that he had said out of her mind. After all, how little would she ever see of him now--how seldom would their paths cross in the future! A strange and interesting man, a man who had, in one instant of mental sympathy, stirred something within her heart that no one, not even Kent Page, had ever awakened before. For that one instant a ripple, nothing more, had moved on the face of the deep--of the deep which was so ancient that it was older even than the blood of her race. Then the ripple pa.s.sed and the sunny stillness settled again on her spirit.

She thought of John Benham easily now; and while she stood there a quiet happiness shone in her eyes. After the storm and stress of twenty years, life in this Indian summer of the emotions was like an enclosed garden of sweetness and bloom. She had had enough of hunger and rapture and disappointment. Never again would she take up the old search for perfection, for the starry flower of the heights. Something that she could worship! So often in the past it had seemed to her that she missed it by the turn of a corner, the stop on the roadside, by the choice of a path that led down into the valley instead of up into the hills. So often her G.o.d had revealed the feet of clay just as she was preparing to scatter marigolds on his altar. It appeared to her as she looked back on the past, that life had been merely a succession of great opportunities that one did not grasp, of high adventures that one never followed.

The sound of a motor horn interrupted her reverie, and she saw that a big open car, with a green body, had turned the corner and was about to stop at her door. An instant later anger burned in her heart, for she saw that the car was driven by Rose Stribling. Even a glimpse of that flaunting pink hollyhock of a woman was sufficient to ruffle the placid current of Corinna's thoughts. Could she never forget? Must she, who had long ago ceased to love the man, still be enslaved to resentment against the woman?

With an ample grace, Mrs. Stribling descended from the car, and crossed the pavement to the flagged walk which led to the white door of the old print shop. In her trimly fitting dress of blue serge, with her small straw hat ornamented by stiff black quills, she looked fresher, harder, more durably glazed than ever. A slight excess, too deep a carmine in her smooth cheeks, too high a polish on her pale gold hair, too thick a dusk on her lashes; this was the only flaw that one could detect in her appearance. If men liked that sort of thing, and they apparently did, Corinna reflected, then they could scarcely complain of an emphasis on perfection.

"I've just got back," began Rose Stribling in a tone as soft as her metallic voice could produce. "It's been an age since I've seen you--not since the night of that stupid dinner at the Berkeleys', and I'm so much interested in the news I have heard."

For a minute Corinna stared at her. "Yes, my shop has been very successful," she answered, after a pause in which she tried and failed to think of a reply that would sound more disdainful. "If you are looking for prints, I can show you some very good ones."

"Oh, I don't mean that." Mrs. Stribling appeared genuinely amused by the mistake. "I am not looking for prints--to tell the truth I shouldn't know one if I saw it. I mean your engagement, of course. There isn't anybody in the world who admires John Benham more than I do. I always say of him that he is the only man I know who will sacrifice himself for a principle. All his splendid record in the army--when he was over age too--and then the way he behaved about that corporation! I never understood just why he did it--I'm sure I could never bring myself to refuse so much money,--but that doesn't keep me from admiring him." For a minute she looked at Corinna with a smile which seemed as permanent as the rest of her surface, while she discreetly sharpened her wits for the stab which was about to be dealt. "I can't tell you how surprised I was to hear you had announced your engagement. You know we were so sure that he was going to marry Alice Rokeby after she got her divorce. Of course n.o.body knew. It was just gossip, and you and I both know how absurd gossip can be."

So this was why she had stopped! Corinna flinched from the thrust even while she told herself that there was no shadow of truth in the old rumour, that malice alone had prompted Rose Stribling to repeat it. In a woman like that, an incorrigible coquette, every relation with her own s.e.x would be edged with malice.

"Well, I just stopped to wish you happiness. I must go now, but I'll come again, when I have time, and look at your shop. Such a funny idea--a shop, with all the money you've got! But no idea seems too funny for people to-day. And that reminds me of the Governor. Have you seen the Governor again since the evening we dined with him?"