One Man in His Time by Ellen Glasgow

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ONE MAN IN HIS TIME

by

ELLEN GLASGOW

1922

"One man in his time plays many parts."

NOTE

No character in this book was drawn from any actual person past or
present.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. THE SHADOW

II. GIDEON VETCH

III. CORINNA OF THE OLD PRINT SHOP

IV. THE TRIBAL INSTINCT

V. MARGARET

VI. MAGIC

VII. CORINNA GOES TO WAR

VIII. THE WORLD AND PATTY

IX. SEPTEMBER ROSES

X. PATTY AND CORINNA

XI. THE OLD WALLS AND THE RISING TIDE

XII. A JOURNEY INTO MEAN STREETS

XIII. CORINNA WONDERS

XIV. A LITTLE LIGHT ON HUMAN NATURE

XV. CORINNA OBSERVES

XVI. THE FEAR OF LIFE

XVII. MRS. GREEN

XVIII. MYSTIFICATION

XIX. THE SIXTH SENSE

XX. CORINNA FACES LIFE

XXI. DANCE MUSIC

XXII. THE NIGHT

XXIII. THE DAWN

XXIV. THE VICTORY OF GIDEON VETCH

CHAPTER I

THE SHADOW

The winter's twilight, as thick as blown smoke, was drifting through the
Capitol Square. Already the snow covered walks and the frozen fountains
were in shadow; but beyond the irregular black boughs of the trees the
sky was still suffused with the burning light of the sunset. Over the
head of the great bronze Washington a single last gleam of sunshine shot
suddenly before it vanished amid the spires and chimneys of the city,
which looked as visionary and insubstantial as the glowing horizon.

Stopping midway of the road, Stephen Culpeper glanced back over the
vague streets and the clearer distance, where the approaching dusk spun
mauve and silver cobwebs of air. From that city, it seemed to him, a new
and inscrutable force--the force of an idea--had risen within the last
few months to engulf the Square and all that the Square had ever meant
in his life. Though he was only twenty-six, he felt that he had watched
the decay and dissolution of a hundred years. Nothing of the past
remained untouched. Not the old buildings, not the old trees, not even
the old memories. Clustering traditions had fled in the white blaze of
electricity; the quaint brick walks, with their rich colour in the
sunlight, were beginning to disappear beneath the expressionless mask of
concrete. It was all changed since his father's or his grandfather's
day; it was all obvious and cheap, he thought; it was all ugly and naked
and undistinguished--yet the tide of the new ideas was still rising.
Democracy, relentless, disorderly, and strewn with the wreckage of finer
things, had overwhelmed the world of established customs in which he
lived.

As he lifted his face to the sky, his grave young features revealed a
subtle kinship to the statues beneath the mounted Washington in the
drive, as if both flesh and bronze had been moulded by the dominant
spirit of race. Like the heroes of the Revolution, he appeared a
stranger in an age which had degraded manners and enthroned commerce;
and like them also he seemed to survey the present from some
inaccessible height of the past. Dignity he had in abundance, and a
certain mellow, old-fashioned quality; yet, in spite of his
well-favoured youth, he was singularly lacking in sympathetic appeal.
Already people were beginning to say that they "admired Culpeper; but he
was a bit of a prig, and they couldn't get really in touch with him."
His attitude of mind, which was passive but critical, had developed the
faculties of observation rather than the habits of action. As a member
of the community he was indifferent and amiable, gay and ironic. Only
the few who had seen his reserve break down before the rush of an
uncontrollable impulse suspected that there were rich veins of feeling
buried beneath his conventional surface, and that he cherished an
inarticulate longing for heroic and splendid deeds. The war had left
him with a nervous malady which he had never entirely overcome; and this
increased both his romantic dissatisfaction with his life and his
inability to make a sustained effort to change it.

The sky had faded swiftly to pale orange; the distant buildings appeared
to swim toward him in the silver air; and the naked trees barred the
white slopes with violet shadows. In the topmost branches of an old
sycamore the thinnest fragment of a new moon hung trembling like a
luminous thread. The twilight was intensely still, and the noises of the
city fell with a metallic sound on his ears, as if a multitude of bells
were ringing about him. While he walked on past the bald outline of the
restored and enlarged Capitol, this imaginary concert grew gradually
fainter, until he heard above it presently the sudden closing of a
window in the Governor's mansion--as the old gray house was called.

Pausing abruptly, the young man frowned as his eyes fell on the charming
Georgian front, which presided like a serene and spacious memory over
the modern utilitarian purpose that was devastating the Square. Alone in
its separate plot, broad, low, and hospitable, the house stood there
divided and withdrawn from the restless progress and the age of
concrete--a modest reminder of the centuries when men had built well
because they had time, before they built, to stop and think and
remember. The arrested dignity of the past seemed to the young man to
hover above the old mansion within its setting of box hedges and
leafless lilac shrubs and snow-laden magnolia trees. He saw the house
contrasted against the crude surroundings of the improved and disfigured
Square, and against the house, attended by all its stately traditions,
he saw the threatening figure of Gideon Vetch. "So it has come to this,"
he thought resentfully, with his gaze on the doorway where a round
yellow globe was shining. Ragged frost-coated branches framed the
sloping roof, and the white columns of the square side porches emerged
from the black crags of magnolia trees. In the centre of the circular
drive, invaded by concrete, a white heron poured a stream of melting ice
from a distorted throat.

The shutters were not closed at the lower windows, and the firelight
flickered between the short curtains of some brownish muslin. As Stephen
passed the gate on his way down the hill, a figure crossed one of the
windows, and his frown deepened as he recognized, or imagined that he
recognized, the shadow of Gideon Vetch.

"Gideon Vetch!" At the sound of the name the young man threw back his
head and laughed softly. A Gideon Vetch was Governor of Virginia! Here
also, he told himself, half humorously, half bitterly, democracy had
won. Here also the destroying idea had triumphed. In sight of the bronze
Washington, this Gideon Vetch, one of "the poor white trash," born in a
circus tent, so people said, the demagogue of demagogues in Stephen's
opinion--this Gideon Vetch had become Governor of Virginia! Yet the
placid course of Stephen's life flowed on precisely as it had flowed
ever since he could remember, and the dramatic hand of Washington had
not fallen. It was still so recent; it had come about so unexpectedly,
that people--at least the people the young man knew and esteemed--were
still trying to explain how it had happened. The old party had been
sleeping, of course; it had grown too confident, some said too
corpulent; and it had slept on peacefully, in spite of the stirring
strength of the labour leaders, in spite of the threatening coalition of
the new factions, in spite even of the swift revolt against the stubborn
forces of habit, of tradition, of overweening authority. His mother, he
knew, held the world war responsible; but then his mother was so
constituted that she was obliged to blame somebody or something for
whatever happened. Yet others, he admitted, as well as his mother, held
the war responsible for Gideon Vetch--as if the great struggle had cast
him out in some gigantic cataclysm, as if it had broken through the once
solid ground of established order, and had released into the world all
the explosive gases of disintegration, of destruction.

For himself, the young man reflected now, he had always thought
otherwise. It was a period, he felt, of humbug radicalism, of windbag
eloquence; yet he possessed both wit and discernment enough to see that,
though ideas might explode in empty talk, still it took ideas to make
the sort of explosion that was deafening one's ears. All the flat
formula of the centuries could not produce a single Gideon Vetch. Such
men were part of the changing world; they answered not to reasoned
argument, but to the loud crash of breaking idols. Stephen hated Vetch
with all his heart, but he acknowledged him. He did not try to evade the
man's tremendous veracity, his integrity of being, his inevitableness.
An inherent intellectual honesty compelled Stephen to admit that, "the
demagogue", as he called him, had his appropriate place in the age that
produced him--that he existed rather as an outlet for political
tendencies than as the product of international violence. He was more
than a theatrical attitude--a torrent of words. Even a free country--and
Stephen thought sentimentally of America as "a free country"--must have
its tyrannies of opinion, and consequently its rebels against current
convictions. In the older countries he had imagined that it might be
possible to hold with the hare and run with the hounds; but in the land
of opportunity for all there was less reason to be astonished when the
hunted turned at last into the hunter. Where every boy was taught that
he might some day be President, why should one stand amazed when the
ambitious son of a circus rider became Governor of Virginia? After all,
a fair field and no favours was the best that the most conservative of
politicians--the best that even John Benham could ask.

Yes, there was a cause, there was a reason for the miracle of disorder,
or it would not have happened. The hour had called forth the man; but
the man had been there awaiting the strokes, listening, listening, with
his ear to the wind. It had been a triumph of personality, one of those
rare dramatic occasions when the right man and the appointed time come
together. This the young man admitted candidly in the very moment when
he told himself that he detested the demagogue and all his works. A man
who consistently made his bid for the support of the radical element!
Who stirred up the forces of discontent because he could harness them
to his chariot! A man who was born in a circus tent, and who still
performed in public the tricks of a mountebank! That this man had power,
Stephen granted ungrudgingly; but it was power over the undisciplined,
the half-educated, the mentally untrained. It was power, as John Benham
had once remarked with a touch of hyperbole, over empty stomachs.

There were persons in Stephen's intimate circle (there are such persons
even in the most conservative communities) who contended that Vetch was
in his way a rude genius. Judge Horatio Lancaster Page, for instance,
insisted that the Governor had a charm of his own, that, "he wasn't half
bad to look at if you caught him smiling," that he could even reason
"like one of us," if you granted him his premise. After the open debate
between Vetch and Benham--the great John Benham, hero of war and peace,
and tireless labourer in the vineyard of public service--after this
memorable discussion, Judge Horatio Lancaster Page had remarked, in his
mild, unpolemical tone, that "though John had undoubtedly carried off
the flowers of rhetoric, there was a good deal of wholesome green stuff
about that fellow Vetch." But everybody knew that a man with a comical
habit of mind could not be right.

Again the figure crossed the firelight between the muslin curtains, and
to Stephen Culpeper, standing alone in the snow outside, that large
impending presence embodied all that he and his kind had hated and
feared for generations. It embodied among other disturbances the law of
change; and to Stephen and his race of pleasant livers the two sinister
forces in the universe were change and death. After all, they had made
the world, these pleasant livers; and what were those other people--the
people represented by that ominous shadow--except the ragged prophets of
disorder and destruction?

Turning away, Stephen descended the wide brick walk which fell
gradually, past the steps of the library and the gaunt railing round a
motionless fountain, to the broad white slope of the Square with its
smoky veil of twilight. Farther away he saw the high iron fence and
heard the clanging of passing street cars. On his left the ugly shape
of the library resembled some crude architectural design sketched on
parchment.

As he approached the fountain, a small figure in a red cape detached
itself suddenly from the mesh of shadows, and he recognized Patty Vetch,
the irrepressible young daughter of the Governor. He had seen her the
evening before at a charity ball, where she had been politely snubbed by
what he thought of complacently as "our set." From the moment when he
had first looked at her across the whirling tulle and satin skirts in
the ballroom, he had decided that she embodied as obviously as her
father, though in a different fashion, the qualities which were most
offensive both to his personal preferences and his inherited standards
of taste. The girl in her scarlet dress, with her dark bobbed hair
curling in on her neck, her candid ivory forehead, her provoking blunt
nose, her bright red lips, and the inquiring arch of her black eyebrows
over her gray-green eyes, had appeared to him absurdly like a picture on
the cover of some cheap magazine. He had heartily disapproved of her,
but he couldn't help looking at her. If she had been on the cover of a
magazine, he had told himself sternly, he should never have bought it.
He had correct ideas of what a lady should be (they were inherited from
the early eighties and his mother had implanted them), and he would
have known anywhere that Patty Vetch was not exactly a lady. Though he
was broad enough in his views to realize that types repeat themselves
only in variations, and that girls of to-day are not all that they were
in the happy eighties--that one might make up flashily like Geraldine
St. John, or dance outrageously like Bertha Underwood, and yet remain
in all essential social values "a lady"--still he was aware that the
external decorations of a chorus girl could not turn the shining
daughter of the St. Johns for an imitation of paste, and, though the
nimble Bertha could perform every Jazz motion ever invented, one would
never dream of associating her with a circus ring. It was not the things
one did that made one appear unrefined, he had concluded at last, but
the way that one did them; and Patty Vetch's way was not the prescribed
way of his world. Small as she was there was too much of her. She
contrived always to be where one was looking. She was too loud, too
vivid, too highly charged with vitality; she was too obviously
different. If a redbird had flown into the heated glare of the ballroom
Stephen's gaze would have followed it with the same startled and
fascinated attention.

As the girl approached him now on the snow-covered slope, he was
conscious again of that swift recoil from chill disapproval to reluctant
attraction. Though she was not beautiful, though she was not even pretty
according to the standards with which he was familiar, she possessed
what he felt to be a dangerous allurement. He had never imagined that
anything so small could be so much alive. The electric light under which
she passed revealed the few golden freckles over her childish nose, the
gray-green colour of her eyes beneath the black eyelashes, and the
sensitive red mouth which looked as soft and sweet as a carnation. It
revealed also the absurd shoes of gray suede, with French toes and high
and narrow heels, in which she flitted, regardless alike of danger and
of common sense, over the slippery ground. The son of a strong-minded
though purely feminine mother, he had been trained to esteem discretion
in dress almost as highly as rectitude of character in a woman; and by
no charitable stretch of the imagination could he endow his first
impression of Patty Vetch with either of these attributes.

"It would serve her right if she fell and broke her leg," he thought
severely; and the idea of such merited punishment was still in his mind
when he heard a sharp gasp of surprise, and saw the girl slip, with a
frantic clutch at the air, and fall at full length on the shining
ground. When he sprang forward and bent over her, she rose quickly to
her knees and held out what he thought at first was some queer small
muff of feathers.

"Please hold this pigeon," she said, "I saw it this afternoon, and I
came out to look for it. Somebody has broken its wings."

"If you came out to walk on ice," he replied with a smile, "why, in
Heaven's name, didn't you wear skates or rubbers?"

She gave a short little laugh which was entirely without merriment. "I
don't skate, and I never wear rubbers."

He glanced down at her feet in candid disapproval. "Then you mustn't be
surprised if you get a sprained ankle."

"I am not surprised," she retorted calmly. "Nothing surprises me. Only
my ankle isn't sprained. I am just getting my breath."

She had rested her knee on a bench, and she looked up at him now with
bright, enigmatical eyes. "You don't mind waiting a moment, do you?"
she asked. To his secret resentment she appeared to be deliberately
appraising either his abilities or his attractions--he wasn't sure which
engaged her bold and perfectly unembarrassed regard.

"No, I don't mind in the least," he replied, "but I'd like to get you
home if you have really hurt yourself. Of course it was your own fault
that you fell," he added truthfully but indiscreetly.

For an instant she seemed to be holding her breath, while he stood there
in what he felt to be a foolish attitude, with the pigeon (for all
symbolical purposes it might as well have been a dove) clasped to his
breast.

"Oh, I know," she responded presently in a voice which was full of
suppressed anger. "Everything is my fault--even the fact that I was
born!"

Shocked out of his conventional manner, he stared at her in silence, and
the pigeon, feeling the strain of his grasp, fluttered softly against
his overcoat. What was there indeed for him to do except stare at a lack
of reticence, of good-breeding, which he felt to be deplorable? His fine
young face, with its characteristic note of reserve, hardened into
sternness as he remembered having heard somewhere that the girl's mother
had been killed or injured when she was performing some dangerous act at
a country fair. Well, one might expect anything, he supposed, from such
an inheritance.

"May I help you?" he asked with distant and chilly politeness.

"Oh, can't you wait a minute?" She impatiently thrust aside his offer.
"I _must_ get my breath again."

It was plain that she was very angry, that she was in the clutch of a
smothered yet violent resentment, which, he inferred with reason, was
directed less against himself than against some abstract and impersonal
law of life. Her rage was not merely temper against a single human
being; it was, he realized, a passionate rebellion against Fate or
Nature, or whatever she personified as the instrument of the injustice
from which she suffered. Her eyes were gleaming through the web of light
and shadow; her mouth was trembling; and there was the moisture of
tears--or was it only the glitter of ice?--on her round young cheek. And
while he looked, chilled, disapproving, unsympathetic, at the vivid
flower-like bloom of her face, there seemed to flow from her and envelop
him the spirit of youth itself--of youth adventurous, intrepid, and
defiant; of youth rejecting the expedient and demanding the impossible;
of youth eternally desirable, enchanting, and elusive. It was as if his
orderly, complacent, and tranquil soul had plunged suddenly into a bath
of golden air. Vaguely disturbed, he drew back and tried to appear
dignified in spite of the fluttering pigeon. He had no inclination for
a flirtation with the Governor's daughter--intuitively he felt that such
an adventure would not be a safe one; but if a flirtation were what she
wanted, he told himself, with a sense of impending doom, "there might be
trouble." He didn't know what she meant, but whatever it was, she
evidently meant it with determination. Already she had impressed him
with the quality which, for want of a better word, he thought of as
"wildness." It was a quality which he had found strangely, if secretly,
alluring, and he acknowledged now that this note of "wildness," of
unexpectedness, of "something different" in her personality, had held
his gaze chained to the airy flutter of her scarlet skirt. He felt
vaguely troubled. Something as intricate and bewildering as impulse was
winding through the smoothly beaten road of his habit of thought. The
noises of the city came to him as if they floated over an immeasurable
distance of empty space. Through the spectral boughs of the sycamores
the golden sky had faded to the colour of ashes. And both the empty
space and the ashen sky seemed to be not outside of himself, but a part
of the hidden country within his mind.

"You were at the ball," she burst out suddenly, as if she had been
holding back the charge from the beginning.

"At the ball?" he repeated, and the words were spoken with his lips
merely in that objective world of routine and habit. "Yes, I was there.
It was a dull business."

She laughed again with the lack of merriment he had noticed before.
Though her face was made for laughter, there was an oddly conflicting
note of tragedy in her voice. "Was it dull? I didn't notice."

"Then you must have enjoyed it?"

"But you were there. You saw what happened. Every one must have seen."
Her savage candour brushed away the flimsy amenities. He knew now that
she would say whatever she pleased, and, with the pigeon clasped tightly
in his arms, he waited for anything that might come.

"You pretend that you don't know, that you didn't see!" she asked
indignantly.

As she looked at him he thought--or it may have been the effect of the
shifting light--that her eyes diffused soft green rays beneath her black
eyelashes. Was there really the mist of tears in her sparkling glance?

"I am sorry," he said simply, being a young man of few words when the
need of speech was obvious. The last thing he wanted, he told himself,
was to receive the confidences of the Governor's daughter.

At this declaration, so characteristic of his amiable temperament, her
anger flashed over him. "You were not sorry. You know you were not, or
you would have made them kinder!"

"Kinder? But how could I?" He felt that her rage was making her
unreasonable. "I didn't know you. I hadn't even been introduced to you."
It was on the tip of his tongue to add, "and I haven't been yet--" but
he checked himself in fear of unchaining the lightning. It was all
perfectly true. He had not even been introduced to the girl, and here
she was, as crude as life and as intemperate, accusing him of
indifference and falsehood. And after all, what had they done to her? No
one had been openly rude. Nothing had been said, he was sure, absolutely
nothing. It had been a "charity entertainment," and the young people of
his set had merely left her alone, that was all. The affair had been far
from exclusive--for the enterprising ladies of the Beech Tree Day
Nursery had prudently preferred a long subscription list to a limited
social circle--and in a gathering so obscurely "mixed" there were,
without doubt, a number of Gideon Vetch's admirers. Was it maliciously
arranged by Fate that Patty Vetch's social success should depend upon
the people who had elected her father to office?

"As if that mattered!"

Her scorn of his subterfuge, her mocking defiance of the sacred formula
to which he deferred, awoke in him an unfamiliar and pleasantly piquant
sensation. Through it all he was conscious of the inner prick and sting
of his disapprobation, as if the swift attraction had passed into a
mental aversion.

"As if that mattered!" he echoed gaily, "as if that mattered at all!"

Her face changed in the twilight, and it seemed to him that he saw her
for the first time with the peculiar vividness that came only in dreams
or in the hidden country within his mind. The sombre arch of the sky,
the glimmer of lights far away, the clustering shadows against the white
field of snow, the vague ghostly shapes of the sycamores--all these
things endowed her with the potency of romantic adventure. In the winter
night she seemed to him to exhale the roving sweetness of spring. Then
she spoke, and the sharp brightness of his vision was clouded by the old
sense of unreality.

"They treated me as if I were a piece of bunting or a flower in a pot,"
she said. "They left me alone in the dressing-room. No one spoke to me,
though they must have known who I was. They know, all of them, that I am
the Governor's daughter."

With a start he brought himself back from the secret places. "But I
thought you carried your head very high," he answered, "and you did not
appear to lack partners." Some small ironic demon that seemed to dwell
in his brain and yet to have no part in his real thought, moved him to
add indiscreetly: "I thought you danced every dance with Julius Gershom.
That's the name of that dark fellow who's a politician of doubtful cast,
isn't it?"

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