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One Man in His Time by Ellen Glasgow

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"He could never care again like that for any one else," replied Alice,
reaching out her hand as if she were pushing away an object she feared.
"Whatever he thinks now, he could never care that much again."

Whatever he thinks now! A smile tinged with bitter knowledge flickered
on Corinna's lips for an instant. After all, how little, how very little
she knew of John Benham. She had seen the face he turned to the world;
she had seen the crude outside armour of his public conscience. A laugh
broke from her at the phrase because she remembered that Vetch had first
used it. This other woman had entered into the secret chamber, the
hidden places, of John Benham's life; she had been a part of the light
and darkness of his soul. To Corinna, remembering his reserve, his
dignity, his moderation in thought and feeling, there was a shock in the
discovery that the perfect balance, the equilibrium of his temperament,
had been overthrown. Certainly in their serene and sentimental
association she had stumbled on no hidden fires, no reddening embers of
that earlier passion. Yet she understood that even in her girlhood, even
in the April freshness of her beauty, she had never touched the depths
of his nature. It was Alice Rokeby--frightened, shallow, desperate,
deserted, whom he had loved.

"What do you want?" she asked quietly. "What do you wish me to do?"

"Oh, I don't know!" replied Alice. "I don't know. I haven't thought--but
there ought to be something. There ought to be something more permanent
than love for one to live by."

In her anguish she had wrung a profound truth from experience; and as
soon as she had uttered it, she lifted her pale face and stared with
that mournful interrogation into the twilight. Something permanent to
live by! In the mute desperation of her look she appeared to be
searching the garden, the world, and the immense darkness of the sky,
for an answer. The afterglow had faded slowly into the blue dusk of
night; only a faint thread of gold still lingered beyond the cedars on
the western horizon. Something permanent and indestructible! Was this
what humanity had struggled for--had lived and fought and died
for--since man first came up out of the primeval jungle? Where could one
find unalterable peace if it were not high above the ebb and flow of
desire? She herself might break away from codes and customs; but she
could not break away from the strain of honour, of simple rectitude,
which was in her blood and had made her what she was.

"Yes, there ought to be something. There is something," she said slowly.
Though her hand still clasped Alice Rokeby's, she was gazing beyond her
across the terrace into the garden. She thought of many things while she
sat there, with that look of clairvoyance, of radiant vision, in her
eyes. Of Alice Rokeby as a little girl in a white dress, with a blue
hair ribbon that would never stay tied; of John Benham when she had
played ball with him in her childhood; of Kent Page and that young love,
so poignant while it lasted, so utterly dead when it was over; of her
long, long search for perfection, for something that would not pass
away; of the brief pleasures and the vain expectations of life; of the
gray deserted road filled with dead leaves and the sound of voices far
off--Nothing but dead leaves and distant voices that went by! In spite
of her beauty, her brilliance, her gallant heart, this was what life had
brought to her at the end. Only loneliness and the courage of those who
have given always and never received.

"There is something else," she said again. "There is courage." Then, as
the other woman made no reply, she went on more rapidly: "I will do what
I can. It is very little. I cannot change him. I cannot make him feel
again. But you can trust me. You are safe with me."

"I know that," answered Alice in a voice that sounded muffled and husky.
"I have always known that." She rose and readjusted her veil. "That
means a great deal," she added. "Oh, I think it means that the world
has grown better!"

Corinna stooped and kissed her. "No, it only means that some of us have
learned to live without happiness."

She went with Alice to the door, and then stood watching her descend the
steps and enter the small closed car in the drive. There was a touching
grace in the slight, shrinking figure, as if it embodied in a single
image all the women in the world who had lost hope. "Yet it is the weak,
the passive, who get what they want in the end," thought Corinna, as
dispassionately as if she were merely a spectator. "I suppose it is
because they need it more. They have never learned to do without. They
do not know how to carry a broken heart." Then she smiled as she turned
back into the house. "It is very late, and the only certain rules are
that one must dine and one must dress for dinner."

A little later, when John Benham was announced and she came down to the
drawing-room, her first glance at his face told her that she must be
looking her best. She was wearing black, and beneath the white lock in
her dark hair, her face was flushed with the colour of happiness. Only
her eyes, velvet soft and as deep as a forest pool, had a haunted look.

"I have never," he said, "seen you look better."

She laughed. After all, one might permit a touch of coquetry in the
final renouncement! "Perhaps you have never really seen me before."

Though he looked puzzled, he responded gaily: "On the contrary, I have
seen little else for the last two or three months."

There was an edge of irony to her smile. "Were you looking at me or my
shadow?"

He shook his head. "Are shadows ever as brilliant as that?"

Then before she could answer the Judge came in with his cordial
outstretched hand and his air of humorous urbanity, as if he were too
much interested in the world to censure it, and yet too little
interested to take it seriously. His face, with its thin austere
features and its kindly expression, showed the dryness that comes less
from age than from quality. Benham, looking at him closely, thought, "He
must be well over eighty, but he hasn't changed so much as a hair of his
head in the last twenty years."

At dinner Corinna was very gay; and her father, whose habit it was not
to inquire too deeply, observed only that she was looking remarkably
well. The dining-room was lighted by candles which flickered gently in
the breeze that rose and fell on the terrace. In this wavering
illumination innumerable little shadows, like ghosts of butterflies,
played over the faces of the two men, whose features were so much alike
and whose expressions differed so perversely. In both Nature had bred a
type; custom and tradition had moulded the plastic substance and refined
the edges; but, stronger than either custom or tradition, the individual
temperament, the inner spirit of each man, had cast the transforming
flame and shadow over the outward form. And now they were alike only in
their long, graceful figures, in their thin Roman features, in their
general air of urbane distinction.

"We were talking at the club of the strike," said the Judge, who had
finished his soup with a manner of detachment, and sat now gazing
thoughtfully at his glass of sherry. "The opinion seems to be that it
depends upon Vetch."

Benham's voice sounded slightly sardonical. "How can anything depend
upon a weathercock?"

"Well, there's a chance, isn't there, that the weather may decide it?"

"Perhaps. In the way that the Governor will find to his advantage."
Benham had leaned slightly forward, and his face looked very attractive
by the shimmering flame of the candles.

"Isn't that the way most of us decide things," asked Corinna, "if we
know what is really to our advantage?"

As Benham looked up he met her eyes. "In this case," he answered, with a
note of austerity, as if he were impatient of contradiction, "the
advantage to the public would seem to be the only one worth
considering."

For an instant a wild impulse, born of suffering nerves, passed through
Corinna's mind. She longed to cry out in the tone of Julius Gershom,
"Oh, damn the public!"--but instead she remarked in the formal accents
her grandmother had employed to smooth over awkward impulses, "Isn't it
ridiculous that we can never get away from Gideon Vetch?"

The Judge laughed softly. "He has a pushing manner," he returned; and
then, still curiously pursuing the subject: "Perhaps, he may get his
revenge at the meeting Thursday night."

"Is there to be a meeting?" retorted Corinna indifferently. She was
thinking, "When John is eighty he will look like Father. I shall be
seventy-eight when he is eighty. All those years to live, and nothing
in them but little pleasures, little kindnesses, little plans and
ambitions. Charity boards and committee meetings and bridge. That is
what life is--just pretending that little things are important."

"That's the strikers' meeting," the Judge was saying over his glass of
sherry. "The next one is John's idea. We hope to arbitrate. If we can
get Vetch interested there may be a settlement of some sort."

"So it's Vetch again! Oh, I am getting so tired of the name of Gideon
Vetch!" laughed Corinna. And she thought, "If only I didn't have to play
on the flute all my life. If I could only stop playing dance music for a
little while, and break out into a funeral march!"

"He has already agreed to come," said Benham, "but I expect nothing from
him. I have formed the habit of expecting nothing from Vetch."

"Well, I don't know," replied the Judge. "We may persuade him to stand
firm, if there hasn't been an understanding between him and those
people." The old gentleman always used the expression "those people" for
persons of whose opinions he disapproved.

"You know what I think of Vetch," rejoined Benham, with a shrug.

It seemed to Corinna, watching Benham with her thoughtful gaze,
that the subject would never change, that they would argue all
night over their foolish strike and their tiresome meeting, and
over what this Gideon Vetch might or might not do in some problematic
situation. What sentimentalists men were! They couldn't understand,
after the experience of a million years, that the only things
that really counted in life were human relations. They were obliged
to go on playing a game of bluff with their consecrated
superstitions--playing--playing--playing--and yet hiding behind some
graven image of authority which they had built out of stone.
Sentimental, yes, and pathetic too, when one thought of it with
patience.

When dinner was over, and the Judge had gone to a concert in town,
Corinna's mockery fell from her, and she sat in a long silence watching
Benham's enjoyment of his cigar. It occurred to her that if he were
stripped of everything else, of love, of power, of ambition, he could
still find satisfaction in the masculine habit of living--in the simple
pleasures of which nothing except physical infirmity or extreme poverty
can ever deprive one. Moderate in all things, he was capable of taking a
serious pleasure in his meals, in his cigar, in a dip in a swimming
pool, or a game of cards at the club. Whatever happened, he would have
these things to fall back upon; and they would mean to him, she knew,
far more than they could ever, even in direst necessity, mean to a
woman.

The long drawing-room, lighted with an amber glow and drenched with the
sweetness of honeysuckle, had grown very still. Outside in the garden
the twilight was powdered with silver, and above the tops of the cedars
a few stars were shining. A breeze came in softly, touching her cheek
like the wing of a moth and stirring the iris in a bowl by the window.
The flowers in the room were all white and purple, she observed with a
tremulous smile, as if the vivid colours had been drained from both her
life and her surroundings. "What a foolish fancy," she added, with a
nervous force that sent a current of energy through her veins. "My
heart isn't broken, and it will never be until I am dead!"

And then, with that natural aptitude for facing facts, for looking at
life steadily and fearlessly, which had been born in a recoil from the
sentimental habit of mind, she said quietly, "John, Alice Rokeby came to
see me this afternoon."

He started, and the ashes dropped from his cigar; but there was no
embarrassment in the level glance he raised to her eyes. Surprise there
was, and a puzzled interrogation, but of confusion or disquietude she
could find no trace.

"Well?" he responded inquiringly, and that was all.

"You used to care for her a great deal--once?"

He appeared to ponder the question. "We were great friends," he
answered.

Friends! The single word seemed to her to express not only his attitude
to Alice Rokeby, but his temperamental inability to call things by their
right names, to face facts, to follow a straight line of thought. Here
was the epitome of that evasive idealism which preferred shams to
realities.

"Are you still friends?"

He shook his head. "No, we've drifted apart in the last year or so. I
used," he said slowly, "to go there a great deal; but I've had so many
responsibilities of late that I've fallen into the habit of letting
other interests go in a measure."

It was harder even than she had imagined it would be--harder because she
realized now that they did not speak the same language. She felt that
she had struck against something as dry and cold and impersonal as an
abstract principle. A ludicrous premonition assailed her that in a
little while he would begin to talk about his public duty. This lack of
genuine emotion, which had at first appeared to contradict his
sentimental point of view, was revealed to her suddenly as its supreme
justification. Because he felt nothing deeply he could afford to play
brilliantly with the names of emotions; because he had never suffered
his duty would always lie, as Gideon Vetch had once said of him, "in the
direction of things he could not hurt."

"It is a pity," she said gently, "for she still cares for you."

The hand that held his cigar trembled. She had penetrated his reserve at
last, and she saw a shadow which was not the shadow of the wind-blown
flowers, cross his features.

"Did she tell you that?" he asked as gently as she had spoken.

"There was no need to tell me. I saw it as soon as I looked at her."

For a moment he was silent; then he said very quietly, as one whose
controlling motive was a hatred of excess, of unnecessary fussiness or
frankness: "I am sorry."

"Have you stopped caring for her?"

The shadow on his face changed into a look of perplexity. When he spoke,
she realized that he had mistaken her meaning; and for an instant her
heart beat wildly with resentment or apprehension.

"I am fond of her. I shall always be fond of her," he said. "Does it
make any difference to you, my dear?"

Yes, he had mistaken her meaning. He was judging her in the dim light of
an immemorial tradition; and he had seen in her anxious probing for
truth merely a personal jealousy. Women were like that, he would have
said, applying, in accordance with his mental custom, the general law to
the particular instance. After all, where could they meet? They were as
far divided in their outlook on life as if they had inhabited different
spiritual hemispheres. A curiosity seized her to know what was in his
mind, to sound the depths of that unfathomable reserve.

"That is over so completely that I thought it would make no difference
to you," he added almost reproachfully, as if she, not he, were to be
blamed for dragging a disagreeable subject into the light.

Fear stabbed Corinna's heart like a knife. "But she still loves you!"
she cried sharply.

He flinched from the sharpness of her tone. "I am sorry," he said again;
but the words glided, with a perfunctory grace, on the surface of
emotion. Suppose that what he said was true, she told herself; suppose
that it was really "over"; suppose that she also recognized only the
egoist's view of duty--of the paramount duty to one's own inclinations;
suppose--"Oh, am I so different from him?" she thought, "why cannot I
also mistake the urging of desire for the command of conscience--or at
least call it that in my mind?" For a minute she struggled desperately
with the temptation; and in that minute it seemed to her that the face
of Alice Rokeby, with its look of wistful expectancy, of hungry
yearning, drifted past her in the twilight.

"But is it obliged to be over?" she asked aloud. "I could never care as
she does. I have always been like that, and I can't change. I have
always been able to feel just so much and no more--to give just so much
and no more."

He looked at her attentively, a little troubled, she could see, but not
deeply hurt, not hurt enough to break down the wall which protected the
secret--or was it the emptiness?--of his nature.

"Has the knowledge of my--my old friendship for Mrs. Rokeby come between
us?" he asked slowly and earnestly.

While he spoke it seemed to her that all that had been obscure in her
view of him rolled away like the mist in the garden, leaving the
structure of his being bare and stark to her critical gaze. Nothing
confused her now; nothing perplexed her in her knowledge of him. The old
sense of incompleteness, of inadequacy, returned; but she understood the
cause of it now; she saw with perfect clearness the defect from which it
had arisen. He had missed the best because, with every virtue of the
mind, he lacked the single one of the heart. Possessing every grace of
character except humanity, he had failed in life because this one gift
was absent.

"All my life," she said brokenly, "I have tried to find something that I
could believe in--that I could keep faith with to the end. But what can
one build a world on except human relations--except relations between
men and women?"

"You mean," he responded gravely, "that you think I have not kept faith
with Mrs. Rokeby?"

"Oh, can't you see? If you would only try, you must surely see!" she
pleaded, with outstretched hands.

He shook his head not in denial, but in bewilderment. "I realized that I
had made a mistake," he said slowly, "but I believed that I had put it
out of my life--that we had both put it out of our lives. There were so
many more important things--the war and coming face to face with death
in so many forms. Oh, I confess that what is important to you, appears
to me to be merely on the surface of life. I have been trying to fulfil
other responsibilities--to live up to the demands on me--I had got down
to realities--"

A laugh broke from her lips, which had grown so stiff that they hurt her
when she tried to smile. "Realities!" she exclaimed, "and yet you must
have seen her face as I saw it to-day."

For the third time, in that expressionless tone which covered a nervous
irritation, he repeated gravely, "I am sorry."

"There is nothing more real," she went on presently, "there is nothing
more real than that look in the face of a living thing."

For the first time her words seemed to reach him. He was trying with all
his might, she perceived, he was spiritually fumbling over the effort to
feel and to think what she expected of him. With his natural fairness he
was honestly struggling to see her point of view.

"If it is really like that," he said, "What can I do?"

All her life, it seemed to Corinna, she had been adjusting the
difficulties and smoothing out the destinies of other persons. All her
life she had been arranging some happiness that was not hers. To-night
it was the happiness of Alice Rokeby, an acquaintance merely, a woman to
whom she was profoundly indifferent, which lay in her hands.

"There is something that you can do," she said lightly, obeying now that
instinct for things as they ought to be, for surface pleasantness, which
warred in her mind with her passion for truth. "You can go to see her
again."




CHAPTER XX

CORINNA FACES LIFE


AT nine o'clock the next morning Corinna came through the sunshine on
the flagged walk and got into her car. She was wearing her smartest
dress of blue serge and her gayest hat of a deep old red. Never had she
looked more radiant; never had she carried her glorious head with a more
triumphant air.

"Stop first at Mrs. Rokeby's, William," she said to the chauffeur, "and
while I am there you may take this list to market."

As the car rolled off, her eyes turned back lovingly to the serene
brightness of the garden into which she had infused her passion for
beauty and order and gracious living. Rain had fallen in the night, and
the glowing borders beyond the house shone like jewels in a casket.
Beneath the silvery blue of the sky each separate blade of grass
glistened as if an enchanter's wand had turned it to crystal. The birds
were busily searching for worms on the lawn; as the car passed a flash
of scarlet darted across the road; and above a clear shining puddle
clouds of yellow butterflies drifted like blown rose-leaves.

"How beautiful everything is," thought Corinna. "Why isn't beauty
enough? Why does beauty without love turn to sadness?" Her head, which
had drooped for a moment, was lifted gallantly. "It ought to be enough
just to be alive and not hungry on a morning like this."

The house in which Mrs. Rokeby lived appeared to Corinna, as she
entered it presently, to have given up hope as utterly as its mistress
had done. Though it was nearly ten o'clock, the front pavement had not
been swept, the hall was still dark, and a surprised coloured maid, in a
soiled apron, answered the doorbell.

"Poor thing," thought, Corinna. "I always heard that she was a good
housekeeper. It is queer how soon one's state of mind passes into one's
surroundings. I wonder if unhappiness could ever make me so indifferent
to appearances?" To the maid, who knew her, she said, "I think Mrs.
Rokeby will see me if she is awake. It is only for a minute or two."

Then she went into the drawing-room, where the shades were still down,
and stood looking at the furniture and the curtains which were powdered
with dust. On the table, where the books and photographs were
disarranged and a fancy box of chocolates lay with the top off, there
was a crystal vase of flowers; but the flowers were withered, and the
water smelt as if it had not been changed for a week. Over the
mantelpiece the long gilt-framed mirror reflected, through a gray film,
the darkened room with its forlorn disarrangement. The whole place had
the vague depressing smell of closed rooms, or of dead flowers, the very
odour of unhappiness.

"Poor thing!" thought Corinna again. "That a man should have the power
to make anybody suffer like this!" And beneath her sense of fruitless
endeavour and wasted romance, there awoke and stirred in her the
dominant instinct of her nature, the instinct to bring order out of
confusion, to make the crooked straight, to change discord into
harmony, that irresistible instinct for things as they ought to be. She
longed to fling up the shades, to let in the sunshine, to drive out the
dust and cobwebs, to put fresh flowers in the place of the dead ones.
She longed, as she said to herself with a smile, "to get her hands on
the room." If she could only change all this hopelessness into
happiness! If she could only restore pleasure here, or at least the
semblance of peace! "It is just as well that all of us can't feel things
this much," she reflected.

"Mrs. Rokeby ain't dressed, but she says would you mind coming up?" The
maid, having attired herself in a clean apron and a crooked cap, stood
in the doorway. As Corinna followed her, she led the way up the narrow
stairs into the bedroom where Alice was waiting.

"I thought you wouldn't be dressed," began Corinna cheerfully, "but it's
the only time I have free, and I wanted to see you this morning."

"It is so good of you," responded Alice, putting out her hand.
"Everything looks dreadful, I know; but I haven't been well, and one of
the servants has gone to a funeral in the country."

"It doesn't matter," Corinna hesitated an instant, "only I wish you
would make some one throw out those dead flowers downstairs."

"I haven't been in the room for a week," replied Alice, dropping back on
the couch as if her strength had failed her. "I don't seem to care about
the house or anything else."

As soon as her surprise at Corinna's visit had faded, she sank again
into a listless attitude. Her figure grew relaxed; the faint animation
died in her face; and she gazed at her visitor with a look of passive
tragedy, which made Corinna, who was never passive, feel that she should
like to shake her. Her soft brown hair, as fine as spun silk, was tucked
under a cap of old lace, and beneath the drooping frill her melancholy
features reminded Corinna of a Byzantine saint. Over her nightgown, she
had thrown on a Japanese kimono of ashen blue, embroidered in plum
blossoms which looked wilted. Everything about her, Corinna thought,
looked wilted, as if each inanimate object that surrounded her had been
stricken by the hopelessness of her spirit. To Corinna's energetic
temperament, there was something positively immoral in this languid
resignation. "Un-happiness like this is contagious," she thought. "And
all because one man has ceased to love her! What utter folly!" Aloud she
said only, "I came to ask you to go with me to the Harrisons' dance."

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