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One Man in His Time by Ellen Glasgow

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




"I know Benham," Gershom was saying eagerly. "I've worked with him.
Smart chap, don't you think? Ever heard him speak?"

"No, I hate speeches."

"Did he and the Governor have any words?"

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

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

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

As she fled upward she heard Gershom follow Vetch into the library, and
she knew that they would sit talking there until long after midnight.
These discussions had become frequent of late; and she surmised vaguely,
though Vetch never mentioned Gershom's name to her, that the two men
were no longer upon the friendly terms of the old days. Ever since
Vetch's election, it had seemed to her that the pack of hungry
politicians had closed in about him; and only the day before, when she
had gone over to the Governor's office in the Capitol building, she had
run away from what she merrily described as "the famished wolves"
waiting outside his door. It was clear even to her that the political
leaders who had supported Vetch were beginning already to distrust him.
They had sought, she realized, to use his popularity, his eloquence, his
earnestness, for their own ends; and they were making the historic
discovery that the man who possesses these affirmative qualities is
seldom without the will to preserve them. In their superficial ploughing
of the soil, Vetch's adherents had at last struck against the rock of
resistance. A man of ambition, or a man of prejudice, they might have
controlled; but, as Patty had learned long ago, Vetch was that most
difficult of political problems--the man of an idea.

Sitting before her dressing-table she glanced over the room, which was
hung with the gaily decorated chintz she had bought after months of
secret longing for roses and hollyhocks in her bedroom. Now she felt
that it looked cheap and flimsy because she had sacrificed material to
colour. She wanted something different to-night; she wanted something
better. Turning to the mirror she gazed back at her vivid face, with the
large deep eyes, so full of poignant expectancy, and the soft dimpled
chin. From her expression she might have been dreaming of happiness; but
the thought in her mind was simply, "The powder I use is too white.
Those women to-night used powder that did not show. I must get some
to-morrow." She was pretty,--even Stephen thought she was pretty. She
could see it in his eyes when he looked at her; but her prettiness was
merely the bloom of youth, nothing more. It was not that changeless
beauty of structure--that beauty, as she recognized, of the very bone,
which made Mrs. Page perennially lovely. "In ten, fifteen, at the most
in twenty years, I shall have lost it all," she thought. "Then I shall
get fat and common looking; and everything will be over for me because a
little youthful colour and sparkle was all that I had. I have nothing to
hold on to--nothing that will last. I don't know anything--and yet how
could I be expected to know anything after the dull life I've had? In my
whole life I've never known a woman that could help me. I've had to find
out everything for myself--"

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

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

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

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

At this the woman laughed shrilly, lifting the soaking clothes with her
capable red hands, and then plunging them down into the soapsuds."
Well, I reckon that's more than the Lord Almighty would expect of him!"
she replied emphatically but ambiguously.

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

The woman looked at her darkly. "There are some places that children
don't go to."

"How long ago did she die?"

Patty waited patiently for an answer; but when at last the neighbour
raised her head again from the tub, it appeared that her reticence had
extended from her speech to her expression which looked as if it had
closed over something. "You'll have to ask your father that," she
returned in a phrase as cryptic as the preceding one. "I ain't here to
tell you things."

After this the child set her lips firmly together, and asked no more
questions. Her father had become not one parent, but both to her; and it
seemed that whereever she looked he was always there, overshadowing like
a mountain everything else on her horizon. In the beginning they had
been very poor; but he had never let her suffer for things, although for
weeks at a time she knew that he had gone without his tobacco in order
to buy her toys. Until she went to the little village school, she had
always had an old woman to look after her, and later on, when their
circumstances appeared miraculously to improve, he employed the slim,
gray, uninteresting spinster who slept now a few doors away from her.
There were hours when it seemed to her that she had never learned the
meaning of tediousness until the plain but hopeful Miss Spencer came to
live with her.

Rising from her chair, she moved away from the mirror, and wandered
restlessly to the pile of fashion magazines and festively decorated
"books on etiquette" that littered the table beside the chintz-covered
couch. "They don't know everything!" she thought contemptuously. How
hard she had tried to learn, and yet how confused, how hopeless, it all
seemed to her to-night! All the hours that she had spent in futile study
appeared to her wasted! At her first dinner she had felt as bewildered
and unhappy as if she had never opened one of those thick gaudy volumes
that had cost so much--as much as a box of chocolates every day for a
week. "I don't care," she said aloud, with sullen resolution. "I am
going to let them see that I don't want any favours."

The next afternoon she went out early in order to escape Gershom; but
when she came in, after a restless wandering in shops and a short drive,
she met him just as he was turning away from the door.

"Something told me I'd find you at this hour," he remarked with
unfailing good humour. "Come out and walk about in the Square. It will
do you good."

She shook her head impatiently. "I'm tired. I don't like walking."

"Well, I reckon it's easier to sit anyway. We'll go inside."

"No, if I've got to talk to you I'd rather do it out of doors," she
replied, turning back toward the gate.

"That's right. The air's fine. I shouldn't wonder if the bad weather
ain't all over."

"I don't mind the bad weather," she retorted pettishly because it was
the only remark she could think of that sounded disagreeable.

They passed through the gate, and walked rapidly in the direction of the
Washington monument, which lifted a splendid silhouette against a deep
blue background of sky. It was one of those soft, opal-tinted February
days which fall like a lyric interlude in the gray procession of winter.
The sunshine lay like flowing gold on the pavement; and the breeze that
stirred now and then in the leafless boughs of the trees was as roving
and provocative as the air of spring. In the winding brick walks of the
Square children were at play with the squirrels and pigeons; and old
men, with gnarled hands and patient hopeless faces, sat warming
themselves in the sunshine on the benches. "Life!" she thought. "That's
life. You can't get away from it." Then one of the old men broke into a
cackle of cheerful laughter, and she added: "After all nobody is ever
pathetic to himself."

"I believe I'll go in," she said, turning to Gershom. "I want to take
off my hat."

He laughed. "Your hat's all right, ain't it? It looks pretty good to
me."

A shiver of aversion ran through her. If only he wouldn't try to be
funny! If only he had been born without that dreadful sense of humour,
she felt that she might have been able to tolerate him.

"Please don't," she replied fretfully.

"Well, I won't, if you'll walk a little slower. I told you I had
something to say to you."

"I don't want to hear it. There's no use talking about it. I'll say the
same thing if you ask me for a hundred years."

A chuckle broke from him while he stood jauntily fingering the diamond
in his tie, as if it were some talisman which imparted fresh confidence.
Oh, it was useless to try to put a man like that in his place--for his
place seemed to be everywhere!

"Well, it won't do any harm," he said at last. "As long as I like to
listen to it."

"I wish you would leave me alone."

"But suppose I can't?" He was still chaffing. He would continue to
chaff, she was convinced, if he were dying. "Suppose I ain't made that
way?"

"I don't care how you're made. You may talk to Father if you like; but
I'm going upstairs to take off my hat."

His chuckle swelled into a roar of laughter. "Talk to Father! Haven't I
been talking to Father over at the Capitol for the last three hours?"

They had reached the gate beyond the monument, and swinging suddenly
round, she started back toward the house. As she passed him he touched
the end of her fur stole with a gesture that was almost imperative. His
eyes had dropped their veil of pleasantry, and she was aware, with a
troubled mind, that he was holding back something as a last resource if
she continued to prove intractable. Again and again she had this feeling
when she was with him--an uneasy intuition that his good humour was not
entirely unassumed, that he was concealing a dangerous weapon beneath
his offensive familiarity.

"After all I may be going to surprise you," he said lightly enough, yet
with this disturbing implication of some meaning that she could not
discern. "What if I tell you that I've no intention of making love to
you?"

"You mean there is something else you want to see me about?" She
breathed a sigh of relief, and her light steps fell gradually into the
measure of his. Her conscience pricked her unpleasantly when she
remembered that there had been a time when she would have spoken less
curtly. Well, what of that? It was characteristic of her energetic mind
that past mistakes were dismissed as soon as they were discovered. When
one started out in life knowing nothing, one had to learn as best one
could, that was all! Every day was a new one, so why bother about
yesterday? There was trouble enough in the world as it was, without
dragging back what was over.

"Please tell me what it is," she said impatiently.

He looked at her with curious intentness. "It is about an aunt of
yours--Mrs. Green. I met her when I was in California."

Her surprise was so complete that he must have been gratified.

"An aunt of mine? I haven't any aunt."

For a minute he hesitated. Now that he had come to practical matters his
careless jocularity had given place to a manner of serious deliberation.
"Then your father hasn't told you?" he asked.

"Is she his sister?" Her distrust of Gershom was so strong that she
could not bring herself to a direct reply.

"So he hasn't?" After all she might as well have answered his question.
"No, she isn't his sister." His smile was full of meaning.

"Then she must be"--there was a change in her voice which he was quick
to detect--"she must be the sister of my mother."

"Didn't you know that she had one?" he enquired. "Don't you remember
seeing her when you were a child?"

She shook her head. "No, I don't remember her, and Father has never
spoken of her."

At this he glanced at her sharply, and then looked away over the tops of
the trees to the political mausoleum of the City Hall. "We take that as
a sort of joke now," he remarked irrelevantly, "but the time was--and
not so long ago either--when we boasted of it more than of the Lee
monument. Cost a lot too, they say! Queer, ain't it, the way we spend a
million dollars or more on a thing one year, and the next want to kick
it out on the junk heap? I reckon it's the same way about behaviour too.
It ain't so much what you do as the time you do it in that seems to make
the difference." As she showed no inclination to follow this train of
moralizing, he asked suddenly, "Do you remember your mother?"

"Only once. I remember seeing her once." He had not imagined that her
voice could become so gentle.

"Did they ever tell you what became of her?"

"Yes, I know that. She lost her mind. They told me that she died in the
asylum."

He was still watching her closely, as if he were observing the effect on
her nerves of each word he uttered. "Did they tell you the cause of it?"

She shook her head. "That was all they ever told me."

"You mean your father never mentioned it to you? Are you sure he never
spoke of Mrs. Green?"

"I shouldn't have forgotten. But, if she is my mother's sister, why has
she never written to me?"

"Ah, that's just it! She was afraid your father wouldn't like it. There
was a difference of some kind. I don't know what it was about--but they
didn't get on--and--and--"

"I am sure Father was right. He is always right," she said loyally.

"Well, he may have been. I'm not denying that; but it's an old story
now, and I wouldn't bring it up again, if I were you. He has enough
things to carry without that."

She hesitated a moment before replying. "Yes, I suppose it's better not
to speak of it. He has too many worries."

"I knew you'd see it that way; you're a girl of sense. And if Mrs. Green
should ever come here, must I tell her that you would like to see her?"

"Does she think of coming here? California is so far away."

"Well, people do come, don't they? And I know she'd like to see you. She
was very fond of your mother. I used to know both of 'em in the old days
when I was a boy."

"Of course I'd like to see her if she could tell me about my mother. I
want to ask questions about her--only it makes Father so unhappy when I
bring up the past."

"It would, I reckon. Things like that are better forgotten." Then,
dismissing the subject abruptly, he remarked in the old tone of
facetious familiarity, "I never saw you looking better. What have you
done to yourself? You are always imitating some new person every time I
see you."

"I am not!" Her temper flashed out. "I never imitate anybody." Yet, even
as she passionately denied the charge, she knew that it was true. For a
week, ever since her first visit to the old print shop, she had tried to
copy Corinna's voice, the carriage of her head, her smile, her gestures.

"Well, you needn't," he assured her with admiring pleasantry. "As far as
looks go--and that's a long way--I haven't seen any one that was better
than you!"




CHAPTER IX

SEPTEMBER ROSES


The afternoon sunshine streamed through the dull gold curtains into the
old print shop where Corinna sat in her tapestry-covered chair between
the tea-table and the log fire. She was alone for the moment; and lying
back in the warmth and fragrance of the room, she let her gaze rest
lovingly on one of the English mezzotints over which a stray sunbeam
quivered. The flames made a pleasant whispering sound over the cedar
logs; her favourite wide-open creamy roses with golden hearts scented
the air; and the delicate China tea in her cup was drawn to perfection.
As she lay back in the big chair but one thing disturbed her
serenity--and that one thing was within. She had everything that she
wanted, and for the hour, at least, she was tired of it all. The mood
was transient, she knew. It would pass because it was alien to the clear
bracing air of her mind; but while it lasted she told herself that the
present had palled on her because she had looked beneath the vivid
surface of illusion to the bare structure of life. Men had ceased to
interest her because she knew them too well. She knew by heart the very
machinery of their existence, the secret mental springs which moved them
so mechanically; and she felt to-day that if they had been watches, she
could have taken them apart and put them together again without
suspending for a minute the monotonous regularity of their works. Even
Gideon Vetch, who might have held a surprise for her, had differed from
the rest in one thing only: he had not seen that she was beautiful! And
it wasn't that she was breaking. To-day because of her mood of
depression, she appeared drooping and faded; but that night, a week ago,
in her velvet gown and her pearls, she had looked as handsome as ever.
The truth was simply that Vetch had glanced at her without seeing her,
as he might have glanced at the gilded sheaves of wheat on a picture
frame. He had been so profoundly absorbed in his own ideas that she had
been nothing more individual than one of an audience. If he were to meet
her in the street he would probably not recognize her. And this was a
man who had never before seen a woman whose beauty had passed into
history, a man who had risen to his place through what the Judge had
described with charitable euphemism, as "unusual methods." "The odd part
about Vetch," the Judge had added meditatively on the drive home, "is
that he doesn't attempt to disguise the kind of thing that we of the old
school would call--well, to say the least--extraordinary. He is as
outspoken as Mirabeau. I can't make it out. It may be, of course, that
he has a better reading of human nature than we have, and that he knows
such gestures catch the eye, like long hair or a red necktie. It is very
much as if he said--'Yes, I'll steal if I'm driven to it, but--confound
it!--I won't lie!'"

After all, the sting to her vanity had been too slight to leave an
impression. There must be another cause for the shadow that had fallen
over her spirits. Even a reigning beauty of thirty years could scarcely
expect to be invincible; and she had known too much homage in the past
to resent what was obviously a lack of discrimination. Her
disappointment went deeper than this, for it had its source in the
stories she had heard of Vetch that sounded original and dramatic. She
had imagined a personality that was striking, spectacular, or at least
interesting; and the actual Gideon Vetch had seemed to her merely
unimpressive and ordinary. Beside John Benham (as the thought of Benham
returned to her, her spirit rose on wings out of the shadow), beside
John Benham, in the drawing-room after dinner, Vetch had appeared at a
disadvantage that was almost ridiculous; and, as Stephen Culpeper had
hastened to point out, this was merely a striking illustration of the
damning contrast between the Governor's chequered political career and
Benham's stainless record of service.

A smile curved her lips as she gazed at the quivering sunbeams. Was that
deep instinct for perfection, the romantic vision of things as they
ought to be, awaking again? Did the starry flower bloom not in the
dream, but in reality? The passion to create beauty, to bring happiness,
which had been extinguished for years, burned afresh in her heart. Yes,
as long as there was beauty, as long as there was nobility of spirit,
she could fight on as one who believed in the future.

A shadow darkened the window, and a moment afterward there was a fall of
the old silver knocker on her door. She thought at first--the shadow had
seemed so young--that it was Stephen; but when she opened the door, she
saw, with a lovely flush, that it was John Benham.

"You expected me?" he asked, raising her hand to his lips.

"Yes, I knew that you would come," she answered, and the flush died
away slowly as she turned back to the fire. In the moment of recognition
all the despondency had vanished so utterly that it had not left even a
memory. He had brought not only peace, but youth and happiness back to
her eyes.

He came in as impressively as he presented himself to an audience; and
with the glow of pleasure still in her heart, she found her keen and
observant mind watching him almost as if he were a stranger. This had
been her misfortune always, the ardent heart joined to the critical
judgment, the spectator chained eternally to the protagonist. She
received a swift impression that he had prepared his words and even his
gestures, the kiss on her fingers. Yet, in spite of this suggestion of
the actor, or because of it, he possessed, she felt, great distinction.
The straight backward sweep of his hair; the sharp clearness of his
profile; the steady serenity of his gray eyes; the ease and suppleness
and indolent strength of his tall thin figure--all these physical
details expressed the reserves and inhibitions of generations. The only
flaw that she could detect was that dryness of soul that she had noticed
before, as of soil that has been too heavily drained. She knew that he
excelled in all the virtues that are monumental and public, that he was
an honourable opponent, a scrupulous defender of established rules and
precedents. He would always reach the goal, but his race would never
carry him beyond the end of the course; he would always fulfil the law,
but he would never give more than the exact measure; he would always
fight for the risen Christ, but he would never have followed the humble
bearer of the Cross. His strength and weakness were the kind which had
profoundly influenced her life. He represented in her world the
conservative principle, the accepted standard, the acknowledged
authority, custom, stability, reason, and moderation.

As he sat down in front of the fire, he looked at her with a gentle
possessive gaze.

"Of course you have never sold a print," he remarked in a laughing tone,
and she responded as flippantly.

"Of course!"

"Why didn't you call it a collection?"

"Because people wouldn't come."

"Then why didn't you keep them at home where you have so much that is
fine?"

She laughed. "Because people couldn't come. I mean the people I don't
know. I have a fancy for the people I have never met."

"On the principle that the unknown is the desirable."

She nodded. "And that the desirable is the unattainable."

His gray eyes were warmed by a fugitive glow. "I shouldn't have put it
that way in your case. You appear to have everything."

"Do I? Well, that twists the sentence backward. Shall we say that the
attainable is the undesirable?"

"Surely not. Can you have ceased already to desire these lovely things?
Could that piece of tapestry lose its charm for you, or that Spanish
desk, or those English prints, or the old morocco of that binding? Do
you feel that the colours in that brocade at your back could ever become
meaningless?"

"I am not sure. Wouldn't it be possible to look at it while you were
seeing something else, something so drab that it would take the colour
out of all beauty?" She was looking at him over the tea-table, and while
she asked the question she raised a lump of sugar in the quaint old
sugar tongs she had brought home from Florence.

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