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One Man in His Time by Ellen Glasgow

E >> Ellen Glasgow >> One Man in His Time




She made a petulant gesture, and the red wings in her hat vibrated like
the wings of a bird in flight. There flashed though his mind while he
watched her the memory of a cardinal he had seen in a cedar tree against
the snow-covered landscape. Strange that he could never get away from
the thought of a bird when he looked at her.

"Oh, Julius Gershom! I despise him!"

She shivered, and he asked with a sympathy he had not displayed for
mental discomforts: "Aren't you dreadfully chilled? This kind of thing
is a risk, you know. You might catch influenza--or anything."

"Yes, I might, if there is any about," she replied tartly, and he saw
with relief that her petulance had faded to dull indifference. "I was
obliged to dance with somebody," she resumed after a minute, "I couldn't
sit against the wall the whole evening, could I? And nobody else asked
me,--but I don't like him any the better for that."

"And your father? Does he dislike him also?" he asked.

"How can one tell? He says he is useful." There was a playful tenderness
in her voice.

"Useful? You mean in politics?"

She laughed. "How else in the world can any one be useful to Father? It
must be freezing."

"No, it is melting; but it is too cold to play about out of doors."

"Your teeth are chattering!" she rejoined with scornful merriment.

"They are not," he retorted indignantly. "I am as comfortable as you
are."

"Well, I'm not comfortable at all. Something--I don't know what it
was--happened to my ankle. I think I twisted it when I fell."

"And all this time you haven't said a word. We've talked about nothing
while you must have been in pain."

She shook her head as if his new solicitude irritated her, and a quiver
of pain--or was it amusement?--crossed her lips. "It isn't the first
time I've had to grit my teeth and bear things--but it's getting worse
instead of better all the time, and I'm afraid I shall have to ask you
to help me up the hill. I was waiting until I thought I could manage it
by myself."

So that was why she had kept him! She had hoped all the time that she
could go on presently without his aid, and she realized now that it was
impossible. Insensibly his judgment of her softened, as if his romantic
imagination had spun iridescent cobwebs about her. By Jove, what pluck
she had shown, what endurance! There came to him suddenly the
realization that if she had learned to treat a sprained ankle so
lightly, it could mean only that her short life had been full of
misadventures beside which a sprained ankle appeared trivial. She could
"play the game" so perfectly, he grasped, because she had been obliged
either to play it or go under ever since she had been big enough to read
the cards in her hand. To be "a good sport" was perhaps the best lesson
that the world had yet taught her. Though she could not be, he decided,
more than eighteen, she had acquired already the gay bravado of the
experienced gambler with life.

"Let me help you," he said eagerly, "I am sure that I can carry you, you
are so small. If you will only let me throw away this confounded bird, I
can manage it easily."

"No, give it to me. It would die of cold if we left it." She stretched
out her hand, and in silence he gave her the wounded pigeon. Her
tenderness for the bird, conflicting as it did with his earlier
impression of her, both amused and perplexed him. He couldn't reconcile
her quick compassion with her resentful and mocking attitude toward
himself.

At his impulsive offer of help the quiver shook her lips again, and
stooping over she did something which appeared to him quite unnecessary
to one gray suede shoe. "No, it isn't as bad as that. I don't need to be
carried," she said. "That sort of thing went out of fashion ages ago. If
you'll just let me lean on you until I get up the hill."

She put her hand through his arm; and while he walked slowly up the
hill, he decided that, taken all in all, the present moment was the most
embarrassing one through which he had ever lived. The fugitive gleam,
the romantic glamour, had vanished now. He wondered what it was about
her that he had at first found attractive. It was the spirit of the
place, he decided, nothing more. With every step of the way there closed
over him again his natural reserve, his unconquerable diffidence, his
instinctive recoil from the eccentric in behaviour. Conventions were the
breath of his young nostrils, and yet he was passing through an
atmosphere, without, thank Heaven, his connivance or inclination, where
it seemed to him the hardiest convention could not possibly survive.
When the lights of the mansion shone nearer through the bared boughs, he
heaved a sigh of relief.

"Have I tired you?" asked the girl in response, and the curious lilting
note in her voice made him turn his head and glance at her in sudden
suspicion. Had she really hurt herself, or was she merely indulging some
hereditary streak of buffoonery at his expense? It struck him that she
would be capable of such a performance, or of anything else that invited
her amazing vivacity. His one hope was that he might leave her in some
obscure corner of the house, and slip away before anybody capable of
making a club joke had discovered his presence. The hidden country was
lost now, and with it the perilous thrill of enchantment.

He rang the bell, and the door was opened by an old coloured butler who
had been one of the family servants of the Culpepers. How on earth,
Stephen wondered, could the Governor tolerate the venerable Abijah, the
chosen companion of Culpeper children for two generations? While he
wondered he recalled something his mother had said a few weeks ago about
Abijah's having been lured away by the offer of absurd wages. "You
needn't worry," she had added shrewdly, "he will return as soon as he
gets tired of working."

"I hurt my ankle, Abijah," said the girl.

"You ain't, is you, Miss Patty?" replied Abijah, in an indulgent tone
which conveyed to Stephen's delicate ears every shade of difference
between the Vetchs' and the Culpepers' social standing.

"How are you, Abijah?" remarked the young man with the air of lordly
pleasantry he used to all servants who were not white. Beyond the fine
old hall he saw the formal drawing-room and the modern octagonal
dining-room at the back of the house.

"Howdy, Marse Stephen," responded the negro, "I seed yo' ma yestiddy en
she sutney wuz lookin well an' peart."

He opened the door of the library, and while Stephen entered the room
with the girl's hand on his arm, a man rose from a chair by the fire and
came forward.

"Father, this is Mr. Culpeper," remarked Patty calmly, as she sank on a
sofa and stretched out her frivolous shoes.

In the midst of his embarrassment Stephen wondered resentfully how she
had discovered his name.




CHAPTER II

GIDEON VETCH


"Your daughter slipped on the ice," explained the young man, while the
thought flashed through his mind that Patty's father was accepting it
all, with ironical humour, as some queer masquerade.

It was the first time that Stephen had come within range of the
Governor's personal influence, and he found himself waiting curiously
for the response of his sympathies or his nerves. Once or twice he had
heard Vetch speak--a storm of words which had played freely from the
lightning flash of humorous invective to the rolling thunder of
passionate denunciation. Such sound and fury had left Stephen the one
unmoved man in the audience. He had been brought up on the sonorous
rhetoric and the gorgeous purple periods of the classic orations; and
the mere undraped sincerity--the raw head and bloody bones eloquence, as
he put it, of Vetch's speech had been as offensive to his taste as it
had been unconvincing to his intelligence. The man was a mountebank,
nothing more, Stephen had decided, and his strange power was simply the
reaction of mob hysteria to the stage tricks of the political clown.

Yes, the man was a mountebank--but was he nothing more than a
mountebank? Like most men of his age, Stephen Culpeper was inclined to
swift impressions rather than hasty judgments of people; and he was
conscious, while he listened in silence to the murmuring explanations
of the girl, that the immediate effect was a sensation, not an idea. At
first sight, the Governor appeared merely ordinary--a tall, rugged
figure, built of good bone and muscle and sound to the core, with the
look of arrested energy which was doubtless an inheritance from the
circus ring. There was nothing impressive about him; nothing that would
cause one to turn and look back in a crowd. What struck one most was his
air of extraordinary freshness and health, of sanguine vitality. His
face was well-coloured and irregular in outline, with a high bulging
forehead and thick sandy hair which was already gray on the temples. In
the shadow his eyes did not appear remarkably fine; they seemed at the
first glance to be of an indeterminate colour--was it blue or gray?--and
there was nothing striking in their deep setting under the beetling
sandy eyebrows. All this was true; and yet while Stephen looked into
them over the Governor's outstretched hand, he told himself that they
were the most human eyes he had ever seen. Afterward, when he groped
through his vocabulary for a more accurate description, he could not
find one. There was shrewdness in Gideon Vetch's eyes; there was
friendliness; there was the blue sparkle of contagious humour--a ripple
of light that was like visible laughter--but above all there was
humanity. Though Stephen did not try to grasp the vivid impressions that
passed through his mind, he felt intuitively that he had learned to know
Gideon Vetch through his look and manner as well as he should have known
another man after weeks or months of daily intercourse. Whatever the
man's private life, whatever his political faults may have been, there
was magic in the clasp of his hand and the cordial glow of his smile.
He was always responsive; he stood always on the same level, high or
low, with his companion of the moment: he was as incapable of looking up
as he was of looking down; he was equally without reverence and without
condescension. It was the law of his nature that he should give himself
emphatically to the just and the unjust alike.

"He came home with me because I hurt my foot," Patty was saying.

Had she forgotten already, Stephen asked himself cynically, that it was
not her foot but her ankle? His suspicions returned while he looked at
her blooming face, and he hoped earnestly that she would not feel
impelled to relate any irrelevant details of the adventure. Like Gideon
Vetch on the platform she seemed incapable of withholding the smallest
fragment of a fact; and the young man wondered if it were characteristic
either of "the plain people," as he called them, or of circus riders as
a class, that their minds should go habitually unclothed yet unashamed.

"Thank you, sir," said the Governor without effusion; and he asked: "Did
you hurt yourself, Patty?" while he bent over and laid his hand on her
ankle.

A note of tenderness passed into his voice as he turned to the girl; and
when she answered after a minute, Stephen recognized the same tone of
affectionate playfulness that she used when she spoke of him.

"Not much," she replied carelessly. Then she held out the drooping
pigeon. "I found this bird. Is there anything we can do for it?"

The Governor took the bird from her, and examined it under the light
with the manner of brisk confidence which directed his slightest action.
The man, for all his restless activity, appeared to be without excess or
exaggeration when it was a matter of practical detail. He apparently
employed his whole efficient and enterprising mind on the incident of
the bird.

"The wings aren't broken," he said presently, lifting his head, "but it
is weak from hunger and exhaustion," and he rang the bell for Abijah.
"Rice and water and a warm basket," he ordered when the old negro
appeared. "You had better keep it in the house until it recovers." Then
dismissing the subject, he turned back to Stephen.

"Well, I am glad to see you, Mr. Culpeper," he said. "You had a hard
beginning, but, as they used to tell me when I was a kid, a hard
beginning makes a good ending."

For the first time a smile softened his face, and the roving blue gleam
danced blithely in his eyes. A moment before the young man had thought
the Governor's face harsh and ugly. Now he remembered that the Judge had
said "the man was not half bad to look at if you caught him smiling."
Yes, he had a charm of his own, and that charm had swept him forward
over every obstacle to the place he had reached. A single gift,
indefinable yet unerring--the ability to make men believe absurdities,
as John Benham had once said--and the material disadvantages of poverty
and ignorance were brushed aside like trivial impediments. A strange
power, and a dangerous one in unscrupulous hands, the young man
reflected.

"I remember your face," pursued the Governor, while his smile faded--was
brevity, after all, the secret of its magic? "You were at one of my
speeches last autumn, and you sat in the front row, I think. I recall
you because you were the only person in the audience who looked bored."

"I was." Frankness called for frankness. "I am not keen about speeches."

"Not even when Benham speaks?" The voice was gay, but through it all
there rang the unmistakable tone of authority, of conscious power. There
was one person, Stephen inferred, who had never from the beginning
disparaged or ridiculed Gideon Vetch, and that person was Gideon Vetch
himself. John Benham had once said that the man was a mere posturer--but
John Benham was wrong.

"Oh, well, you see, Benham is different," replied the young man as
delicately as he could. "He is apt to say only what I think, you know."

So far there had been no breach of good taste in the Governor's manner,
no warning reminder of an origin that was certainly obscure and
presumably low, no stale, dust-laden odours of the circus ring. He had
looked and spoken as any man of Stephen's acquaintance might have done,
facetiously, it is true, but without ostentation or vulgarity. When the
break came, therefore, it was the more shocking to the younger man
because he had been so imperfectly prepared for it.

"And because he is different, of course you think he'd make a better
Governor than I shall," said Gideon Vetch abruptly. "That is the way
with you fellows who have ossified in the old political parties. You
never see a change in time to make ready for it. You wait until it
knocks you in the head, and then you wake up and grumble. Now, I've been
on the way for the last thirty years or so, but you never once so much
as got wind of me. You think I've just happened because of too much
electricity in the air, like a thunderbolt or something; but you haven't
even looked back to find out whether you are right or wrong. Talk about
public spirit! Why, there isn't an ounce of live public spirit left
among you, in spite of all the moonshine your man Benham talks about the
healing virtues of tradition and the sacred taboo of your political
Pharisees. There wasn't one of you that didn't hate like the devil to
see me Governor of Virginia--and yet how many of you took the trouble to
find out what I am made of, or to understand what I mean? Did you even
take the trouble to go to the polls and vote against me?"

Though Stephen flushed scarlet, he held his ground bravely. It was true
that he had not voted--he hated the whole sordid business of
politics--but then, who had ever suspected for a minute that Gideon
Vetch would be elected? His brief liking for the man had changed
suddenly to exasperation. It seemed incredible to him that any Governor
of Virginia should display so open a disregard of the ordinary rules of
courtesy and hospitality. To drag in their political differences at such
a time, when he had come beneath the other's roof merely to render him
an unavoidable service! To stoop to the pettifogging sophistry of the
agitator simply because his opponent had reluctantly yielded him an
opportunity!

"Well, I heard you speak, but that didn't change me!" he retorted with a
smile.

The Governor laughed, and the sincerity of his amusement was evident
even to Stephen. "Could anything short of a blasting operation change
you traditional Virginians?" he inquired.

His face was turned to the fire, and the young man felt while he
watched him that a piercing light was shed on his character. It was as
if Stephen saw his opponent from an entirely fresh point of view, as if
he beheld him for the first time with the sharp clearness which the
flash of his anger produced. The very absence of all sense of dignity
impressed him suddenly as the most tremendous dignity a human being
could attain--the unconscious dignity of natural forces--of storms and
fire and war and pestilence. Because the man never thought of how he
appeared, he appeared always impregnable.

"I shall not argue," said the young man, with a smile which he
endeavoured to make easy and natural. "The time for argument is over.
You played trumps."

Vetch laughed. "And it wasn't my last card," he answered bluntly.

"The game isn't finished." Though Stephen's voice was light it held a
quiver of irritation. "He laughs best who laughs last." The other had
started the row, and, by Jove, he would give him as much as he wanted!
He recalled suddenly the charges that there was more than the customary
political log-rolling--that there were mysterious "discreditable
dealings" in the Governor's election to office.

But it appeared in a minute that Gideon Vetch was adequate to any demand
which the occasion might develop. Already Stephen was beginning to
regard him less as a man than as an energetic idea, as activity
incarnate.

"If you mean to imply that the laugh may be on me at the last," he
returned, while the points of blue light seemed to pierce Stephen like
arrows--no, like gimlets, "well, you're wrong about one part of it--for
if that ever happens, I'll laugh with you because of the sheer rotten
irony."

For the first time the other noticed how the Governor was dressed--in a
suit of some heavy brown stuff which looked as if it had been sprinkled
and needed pressing. He wore a green tie and a striped shirt of the
conspicuous kind that Stephen hated. Though the younger man was keenly
critical of clothes, and perseveringly informed himself regarding the
smallest details of fashion, he acknowledged now that he had at last met
a man who appeared to wear his errors of dress as naturally as he wore
his errors of opinion. The fuzzy brown stuff, the green tie with red
spots, the striped shirt--was it blue or purple?--all became as much a
part of Gideon Vetch as the storm-ruffled plumage was part of an eagle.
If the misguided man had attired himself in a toga, he would have
carried the Mantle without dignity perhaps, but certainly with
picturesqueness.

"I'll hold you to your promise--or threat," said Stephen lightly, as he
turned from the Governor to his daughter. Why, in thunder, he asked
himself, had he stayed so long? What was there about the fellow that
held one in spite of oneself? "I hope you will be all right again in a
few days," he said formally as his eyes met Patty's upraised glance. In
the warm room all the glamour of the twilight--and of that hidden
country within his mind--had faded from her. She looked fresh and
blooming and merely commonplace, he thought. A brief half hour ago he
had felt that he was in danger of losing his head; now his rational part
was in the ascendant, and his future appeared pleasantly tranquil. Then
the girl smiled that faint inscrutable smile of hers, and the
disturbing green rays shot from her eyes. A thrill of interest stirred
his pulses while something held him there against his will and his
better judgment, as if he were caught fast in the steel spring of a
trap.

"Oh, that's nothing," replied Patty, with her air of mockery. "If there
were no worse things than that!"

He did not hold out his hand, though there was a flutter toward him of
her fingers--pretty fingers they were for a girl with no blood that one
could mention in public. There was a faint hope in his mind that he
might still vanish unthanked and undetained. The one quality in father
and daughter which had arrested his favourable attention--the quality of
"a good sport"--would probably aid in his escape.

"Drop in some evening, and we'll have a talk," said the Governor in his
slightly theatrical but extremely confident manner, "there are things
I'd like to say to you. You are a lawyer, if I remember, in Judge
Horatio Page's firm, and you were in the war from the beginning."

Stephen smiled. "Not quite." They were at the front door, and all hope
of escaping into the desirable obscurity from which he had sprung fled
from his mind.

"He is a great old boy, the Judge," resumed Gideon Vetch blandly, "I had
a talk with him one day before the elections, when you other fellows
were sitting back like a lot of lunatics and waiting for the Democratic
primaries to put things over. He is the only one in the whole bunch of
you who stopped shouting long enough to hear what I had to say. I like
him, sir, and if there is one thing you will never find me doing it is
liking the wrong man. I may not know Greek, but I can read men."

The front door was open, and the blast of cold air dispersed all the
foolish fancies that had gathered in Stephen's brain. Beyond the
fountain and the gate he could see the broad road through the Square and
the dark majestic figure of Washington on horseback. The electric signs
were blazing on the roofs of the shops and hotels which had driven the
original dwelling houses out of the neighbouring streets.

Turning as he was descending the steps, the young man looked into the
Governor's face. "Are you sure that you read Julius Gershom correctly?"
he inquired.

For a minute--it could not have been longer--the Governor did not reply.
Was he surprised for once into open discomfiture, or was his nimble wit
engaged in framing a plausible answer? Within the house, where so much
was disappointing and incongruous, Stephen had not felt the lack of
harmony between Gideon Vetch and his surroundings; but against the fine
proportions and the serene stateliness of the exterior, the Governor's
figure appeared aggressively modern.

"Julius Gershom!" repeated Vetch. "Well, yes, I think I know my Julius.
May I ask if you do?" The ironical humour which flashed like a sharp
light over his countenance played with the idea.

"Not by choice." Stephen looked back laughing. There was one thing to be
said in the Governor's favour--he invited honesty and he knew how to
receive it. "But I read of him in the newspapers when I cannot avoid it.
He does some dirty work, doesn't he?"

Again the Governor paused before replying. There was a curious gravity
about his consideration of Gershom in spite of the satirical tone of his
responses. Was it possible that he was the one man in town who did not
treat the fellow as a ridiculous farce?

"If by dirty work you mean the clearing away of obstacles--well,
somebody has to do it, hasn't he?" asked Gideon Vetch. "If you want a
clean street to walk on, you must hire somebody to shovel away the
slush. It is true that we put Gershom to shovelling slush--and you
complain of his methods! Well, I admit that he may have been a trifle
too zealous about it; he may have spattered things a bit more than was
necessary, but after all, he got some of the mud out of the way, didn't
he? There are people," he added, "who believe that the wind he raised
swept me into office."

"I object to his methods," insisted Stephen, "because they seem to me
dishonest."

"Perhaps." The blue eyes--how could he have thought them gray?--had
grown quizzical. "But he wasn't moving in the best company, you know. He
who sups with the Devil must fish with a long spoon."

"You mean that you defend that sort of thing--that you openly stand for
it?"

"I stand for nothing, sir," replied Gideon Vetch sharply, "except
justice. I stand for a square deal all round, and I stand against the
exploitation or oppression of any class. This is what I stand for, and I
have stood for it ever since I was a small, gray, scared rabbit of a
creature dodging under hedgerows."

It was the bombastic sophistry again, Stephen told himself, but he met
it without subterfuge or evasion. "And you believe that such people as
Gershom can serve the cause of justice through dishonest means?" he
demanded.

"I'll answer that some day; but it's a long answer, and I can't speak it
out here in the cold," responded the Governor, while his blustering
manner grew sober. "Gershom is a politician, you see, and I am not. You
may laugh, but it is the Gospel truth. I am a reformer, and all I care
about is pushing on the idea. I use any tools that I find; and one of
the greatest of reformers has said that he was sometimes obliged to use
bad ones. If I find good ones, so much the better; if bad--well, it is
all in the day's job. But the cause is what matters--the thing you are
making, not the implements with which it is made. You dislike my methods
of work, but you must admit that by the only test that counts, the test
of achievement, they have proved to be sound. I have got somewhere; not
all the way; but still somewhere. Without advertisement, without
patronage, without a cent I could call my own, I put my wares on the
market. I became Governor of Virginia in spite of everything you did, or
did not do, to prevent it." There was a strange effectiveness in the
simplicity of the man's speech. It was natural; it was racy; it was like
nothing that Stephen had ever heard before. He wondered if it could be
traced back to the phraseology of the circus? "Of course you think I am
an extremist," concluded Gideon Vetch abruptly, "but before you are as
old as I am you will have learned that the only way to get half a loaf
is to ask for a whole one. Come again, and I'll talk to you."

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