One Man in His Time Part 12

"Have I?" she mimicked gaily. "Wouldn't you remember me? Or are all gray-haired women alike to you?"

His gaze travelled to her hair. "I didn't mean it that way. Of course I should have remembered." He spoiled this by adding: "I never forget a face," and continued before she could answer, "I don't know whether your hair is gray or only powdered a little; but you are as young as--as summer."

"Or as your political party."

"That's good. I like a nimble wit." He was plainly amused. "But my party isn't young, you know. It is as old as Esau and Jacob. Oh, yes, I've read my Bible. I was brought up on it."

"That is why your speech is so direct," she said when he paused, concluding slowly after a minute, "and so sincere."

"You feel that I am sincere?"

She met his eyes gravely. "Doesn't every one?"

He laughed shortly. "Ah, you know better than that!"

"Well, my father does. He says that it is your sincerity that makes you resemble me."

To her surprise he did not laugh at this. "Do I resemble you?" he asked simply.

"Father thinks so. He says that people won't take us seriously because we tell them the truth."

An impression drifted like smoke across the blue of his eyes. Who was it, she wondered, who had said that his eyes were gray? "Don't they take you seriously?" he asked.

"As a woman, yes. As a human being, no."

He smiled. "You are too deep. I can't follow. I understand only the plain bright ideas of the half educated, you know."

Her brilliant glance shone on him steadily. "I shan't try to explain.

What one doesn't understand without an explanation isn't worth knowing.

But somebody must take you seriously, or you wouldn't be where you are."

"Do you know where I am?" he demanded impulsively.

"I know that you are Governor of Virginia."

"Oh, that! I thought you meant something more than that," he returned with a note of disappointment in his voice.

"What could I mean more than that? Isn't it the first step upward in a political career?"

"Perhaps. But I was thinking of something else. The chief thing seems to me to be to work a way out of the muddle. Anybody may be Governor or even President if he tries hard enough--but it is a different matter to bring some kind of order out of this confusion. I've got an idea that I've been hammering at for the last twenty years. Not a great one, perhaps, though I think it is; and I'd like to get a chance to put it into practice before I die. I want to wake up people and tell them the truth."

Was he, for all his matter-of-fact appearance, simply another political dreamer, another visionary without a definite vision?

"And will they listen when you tell them?" she asked.

He laughed. "Who knows what may happen? When I was a kid in the circus--you have heard, of course, that I spent my childhood in a travelling circus"--how simply he brought this out!--"the fat woman, we called her 'the fat lady' in those days, had a favourite proverb: 'When the skies fall we shall catch larks'. I reckon when the skies fall the people will learn wisdom."

"But you have caught your larks, haven't you?"

"No, I used to set snares by the hundred, but I never caught anything better than a sparrow."

A wistful look crossed her face, and for an instant the youth seemed to droop and fade in her eyes. "Isn't that life?--sparrows for larks always?"

His sanguine spirit rejected this as she had known that it would. "Life is all right," he replied, "as long as there's a fighting chance left to you. That is the only thing that makes it worth while, fighting to win."

She gazed meditatively at the points of flame on the white candles. "I suppose it would be so with you; for you fit into the age. You are a part of this variable uncertain quant.i.ty called democracy, which some of us old-fas.h.i.+oned folk look upon as a boomerang."

"Yes, I am a part of it," he answered slowly. "I see it as it is, I think. It is pure buncombe, of course, to say that it hasn't its ugly side; but I believe, if I have a chance, that I can make something of it." He paused a moment while he hesitated over the silver beside his plate; but there was no uncertainty in his voice when he went on again, after deliberately picking up the fork he preferred. It was a little thing to remember a man by--the merest trifle--but she never forgot it.

Only a big man could be as natural as that, she reflected. "I reasoned it all out before I went into politics," he was saying. "I didn't get it out of books either--unless you count the Bible and 'Robinson Crusoe,'

which are the only two I ever read as a boy. But the way I worked it out at last was that democracy, like life, isn't anything that's already finished. It is raw stuff. We are making it every minute of the time; and it depends on us whether we put it through as a straight job or a failure. Democracy, as I see it, isn't a word or a phrase out of a book, or a formula, or anything that has frozen into a fixed shape or pattern.

It is warm and fluid, and it is teeming with living forms. It is as much alive as the earth or air or water, and it can be used to develop as many varying energies. That is why it is all so amazingly interesting.

As long as you don't fall away from that thought you have your feet planted on solid ground--you can face things squarely--"

"You preach a kind of political pragmatism," she said as he paused.

"Pragmatism? That's a muscular word, but I don't know it. I wonder if Robinson Crusoe discovered it."

"If Robinson Crusoe didn't discover it, he lived it," she rejoined gaily; and then, as the voice of Mrs. Berkeley was heard purring softly on Vetch's other side, Corinna turned to the bewhiskered General, whose only sense, she had already ascertained, was the historic sense.

While she leaned back, with her head bent in the direction of his husky voice, she was visited by a piercing realization of the emptiness, the artificiality of her life. Futility--weariness--disenchantment--a gray lane without a turning that stretched on into nothingness! Many thoughts were blown through her mind like leaves in a high wind. She saw herself from the beginning--striving without rest--searching--searching--for what? For happiness--for perfection--for the starry flower that she had never found. All was tawdry, all was tarnished, all was unreal. In looking back she saw that the festival of her life was an affair of tinselled splendour and glittering dust. Was this only the impression of Vetch on her mood? Did he possess some magic gift of personality which caused the artificial, the counterfeit, to wither in his presence?

Conversation was not animated; and while she listened with a smile to dreary anecdotes of the War Between the States, she allowed her gaze to wander slowly down the table to where Alice Rokeby sat, with her large soft eyes, so vague and wistful, asking of life, "Why have you pa.s.sed me by?" Now and then these eyes, which reminded Corinna of the eyes in a dream, would turn timidly to John Benham, and then there would steal into them that strange look of hunger, of desperation. What did it mean?

Corinna wondered. Surely there was no truth in the old gossip that she had heard long ago and forgotten?

John Benham had put a question to the Governor across the table; and he sat now, leaning a little forward, while he waited for an answer. The light from the tall white candles, in branched candelabra of the Queen Anne pattern, fell directly on his handsome austere face, so full of delicate reserves and fine intentions; and all the disturbing questions fled from Corinna's mind while she looked at him. Surely, she repeated to herself, with a triumphant emphasis, surely there was no truth in that old ugly gossip! The backward sweep of his iron-gray hair accentuated the height of his forehead, and produced at first sight an impression of intellectual superiority. His nose was long and slightly aquiline; his mouth firm and clear-cut, with thin lips that closed tightly; his chin jutted a little forward, giving a hatchet-like severity to his profile. It was the face of a fair fighter, of a man who could be trusted absolutely beyond personal limitations, of a man who would always keep the vision of the end through any enterprise, who would always put the curb of expediency on emotional impulses, who would invariably judge a theory not by its underlying principle, but by its practical application. A charming face, too, complex and imaginative, a face which made the rugged and open countenance of the Governor appear primitive and undeveloped. Corinna admired Benham; she respected him; she liked--was it even possible, she asked herself, that she loved him?

Yet here again she was conscious of that baffled feeling of inadequacy, of something wanting, as if an essential faculty of soul had been either left out by Nature, or refined away by the subtle impersonal processes of his mind.

Clearly there had been an error of judgment in placing him beside Mrs.

Stribling. His taste was too fastidious to respond to her palpable allurements. She would have had a better chance with Vetch, for the flippant pleasantry with which Benham responded to the beaming enchantress was clothed in the very tone and look he had used with Patty Vetch in the drawing-room. Yes, it was futile to stray too far from one's type. Rose Stribling had failed to interest Benham, mused Corinna, for the same reason that she herself had been unable to arouse the admiration of Gideon Vetch. The lesson it taught, she repeated cynically, was simply that it was futile to stray too far from one's type. Vetch had talked to her as he might have talked to her father or to the husky warrior on her right; but he had never once looked at her.

His attention would be arrested by large, sudden, bright things like the rosy curve of Mrs. Stribling's shoulders or the s.h.i.+ning ropes of her hair.

"How absurd it was to imagine that I could compare with that!" thought Corinna with amus.e.m.e.nt. Her sense of defeat was humorous rather than resentful; yet she realized that it contained a disagreeable sting. Was her long day over at last? Had the sun set on her conquests? Had her adventurous return to power been merely a prelude to the ultimate Waterloo? Lifting her eyes suddenly from her plate she met the deep meditative gaze of John Benham across the marigolds on the table; and the faint flush that kindled her face made her eyes glow like embers.

Had he read the thought in her mind? Was the tenderness in his glance only an ironical comment on the ignominious end of her Hundred Days?

She glanced away quickly, and as she did so she looked straight into the eyes of Alice Rokeby--those eyes that asked perpetually of life, "Why have you pa.s.sed me by?"

CHAPTER VIII

THE WORLD AND PATTY

On the way home, leaning against her father who had not spoken since the car started, Patty shut her eyes and went over, one by one, the incidents of the dinner. What had she done that was right? What had she done that was wrong? Was her dress just what it ought to have been? Had she talked to Stephen Culpeper about the things people are supposed to discuss at a dinner? Had he seen how embarra.s.sed she was beneath her pretence of gaiety? Would she be better looking if she were to let her hair grow long again? What had Mrs. Page, who looked as if she had stepped down from one of those old prints, thought of her?

Beneath the hard brightness of her manner there was a pa.s.sionate groping toward some dimly seen but intensely felt ideal. She longed to learn if she could only learn without confessing her ignorance. Her pride was the obstinate, unreasonable pride of a child.

"If I could only find out things without asking!" The image of Stephen rose in her mind, which worked by flashes of insight rather than orderly processes. She saw his earnest young face, with the sleek dark hair, which swept in a point back from his forehead, his sombre smoke-coloured eyes, and the firm, slightly priggish line of his mouth. He seemed miles away from her, separated by some imponderable yet impa.s.sable barrier.