THE CHALLENGE
Looking back upon that day, Sevier was often to wonder whether indeed
he had missed Fate's purpose, and blinded by a personal ambition, had
set its plan at naught. For that instant's decision was to prove the
key to a series of fateful doings which bore him on, irresistibly, into
a line of action from which, deliberately, he must have shrunk.
But having set his hand, it was characteristic of him that he did not
falter. It had required resolution to put Echo and his relations with
her into the background, but he accomplished even this, and he allowed
no thought of possible complications to affect his mental serenity.
His face was composed and determined as he descended from the train, at
dusk of the sixteenth, at the familiar city station, to find--as Brent
had arranged--his motor waiting for him, with Bob, his chauffeur,
wearing a broad grin of welcome, at its door. So pleasantly habitual
it all seemed, so sharply remembered was each sight and sound as the
car sped through the glimmering traffic, that almost he could have
believed the past year, full as it had been of pain, a vacuous dream
and that no hideous hiatus had lain between the then and now.
He was sensible for the first time of the intense mental strain he had
been labouring under since his sluggish prison routine had opened into
this dubious freedom--the tension of his struggle, the instinct of
impending catastrophe, and the ghastly doubt of himself where Echo was
concerned. The lassitude and inaction of the Bungalow had added to
this strain. The relief now of movement and action brought surcease,
and a feeling of present confidence, if not of definite security.
Before he reached his apartment, he was sufficiently himself to give
the welcome he received from Aunt Judy and from Suzuki a feeling of
usualness. Brent, with two or three others who saw eye to eye with
him, so far as the exigencies of the political situation were
concerned, spent a part of the later evening with him and the talk
furnished the final tonic--if any had been needed--to brace him for the
task that awaited. That night, for the first time in many months, he
slept the deep, fortifying sleep of utter and dreamless unconsciousness.
With the morning he felt no misgiving or shadow of self-doubt. His
mind temporarily was clear and untroubled, all of the vexing problem
was pushed, by the singleness of his purpose, into the unknown future.
By his express wish, his arrival had not been published, and, except
for a few of its leaders with whom Brent had conferred, the circles of
the convention, then in session in the biggest auditorium the city
boasted, were no more aware than were the hosts of his friends, of his
coming. He spent the morning alone in his room, sitting movelessly
hour after hour, marshalling his ideas, assembling his forces, stirred
as he had never before been stirred by the quick suggestion of a living
issue and an unrivalled opportunity.
He lunched quietly alone with Brent in a private room at the club, and
immediately afterward drove with him to the hall. Throughout the
morning the platform had been under discussion; the debate was now
about finished. It was the psychological moment for his effort.
As Harry stood silent before the sea of faces, in the instant that
followed his recognition and introduction, he was conscious of a tense
and vital concentration that swept from him the last vestige of
self-consciousness. With his first measured words, too, the outline
which he had pondered during the morning vanished utterly from his
brain. He remembered nothing save the one thing he had come to do, saw
with his mind's eye only the monstrous evil against which he stood.
Words came to him in a flood--words magically compelling, that burned
and quivered in their intense appeal. For an hour he held the interest
of the great assembly as no orator had done, sketching with hard and
pitiless directness the ramifications of the grim traffic that blasted
whatsoever it touched, that knew no social bar, before which the
magnate's mansion and the labourer's tenement were as one, against
which no bolt or chain--save it be one wrought by the law of a
Sovereign Commonwealth--might avail.
In his words was no tang of the study, none of the didactic methods of
the arm-chair student, no array of statistics. What he expressed had
been seared upon his soul, in inextinguishable letters and as he spoke
shooting pictures etched themselves as if on some quivering panorama in
his brain: he saw the black bottle in the wall-cabinet of his inner
office--the hidden sanctuary where he had signed away his talent and
linked his years to the demon of remorse: he saw the representative of
the great Corporation, whose power flowed from that traffic, holding in
his merciless hand the happiness of a woman that had been dearer than
his own life: he saw the cringing hatred in the eyes of Paddy the
Brick, the furtive drink-lined faces of the jail corridors. And in his
passionate denunciation, he called upon those who heard him to do their
part to rid the state of its Master and to set it free. Lastly, in a
peroration which carried all before it, he pictured a community from
which the unendurable stain had been forever wiped away, the pitfalls
of its youth filled up, the shame of its prisons lightened--a community
ruled no longer by King Alcohol, but by the Genius of the Home, to
which freedom no longer stood for ribald license and self-harm, but for
the Common Good.
He stopped amid a dense silence--the truest tribute to real
oratory--then with a great burst, the storm of approval came.
It filled the hall with electric feeling, surging in waves that
overtopped all decorum and made the hour significant and momentous.
Near him Harry saw the party leaders, among them Judge Allen,
newly-elected President of the Civic Club; they showed a singular
self-assurance overlaid by vivid excitement. In the galleries were
banks of feminine faces, tier on tier, merged in a tumultuous
hand-clapping like silver rain. Below, the house was on its feet, a
sea of waving flags and handkerchiefs.
The tumult swelled, then died away to pulsing band-music and in the
subsidence, Brent leaned over Harry's shoulder to give him the quick
pressure of a hand--words could not have said so much.
It was not until the convention had adjourned for an hour's recess that
Harry could escape from the congratulations that poured upon him where
he sat. While he spoke, the sense of mastery and domination had
possessed him; now he was feeling the inevitable revulsion, and with it
came the fading of his confidence and the relifting of the old
sickening question.
It had surged back before the applause had died away, the moment he had
released his mind from the clamping resolution of his purpose,
springing upon him like a cunning enemy who had dogged him in the
shadow. His roseate speculations of the Bungalow seemed now but hollow
wraiths that had mocked him with an unrealisable promise. Could he
ever for a moment have cheated himself into forgetfulness of the
_impasse_ that lay there?
With Brent beside him, he pushed his way to the foyer. There the press
was thickened and they were blocked in a corner by the stream of people
pouring from the galleries, from which position Harry found himself
nodding across to enthusiastic greetings of old acquaintances.
"Good heavens!" fumed Brent, impatiently. "We'll never get out at this
rate. Let's try the other door." Harry turned with him, seeking a way
through the diminishing crowd. Then, abruptly he stopped. Near at
hand, her side-face turned toward him, was Echo. Her delicate colour
was heightened by an unwonted flush and her eyes shone softly under the
curling golden waves of her hair.
Gazing in a confusion that was almost panic, Harry felt, with a burning
sense of helplessness and cowardice, the impossibility of his position.
The sight of her was like a cooling stream to a famished wanderer in
the desert. It called to him with a thousand voices, lifting before
him every sweet reminder of vanished things. She had not yet seen him,
and as the crowd swept her slowly closer, he felt to the full his own
blindness and egregious self-assurance that had made this plunge into
the old current seem possible. He watched her with a fascinated
intensity. She was speaking to some one beside her, her glance
wandering. It shifted, then was raised, as if by very attraction, to
his face.
He saw recognition spring across it like a shaft of sunlight, as with a
quick impulse she started forward--then her arm caught itself, as it
were, half extended. He felt himself chill in every nerve, the air was
breathless. Mechanically his hand touched hers.
"You have been gone a year," she said, in a low, uneven voice.
Harry's very thought seemed suspended. "Is it--so long?" he answered.
He scarcely knew what he said: the reply was a mere involuntary
expression of habit, a conventional phrase to fill the moment's need.
He could not know that the very repression with which he was holding
himself against the quick thrill of her touch made the words lifeless
and inconsequential.
To Echo, however, in the tremulous gladness that had filled her at the
knowledge of his return, and the exaltation of the hour, the reply,
deserved as at heart she felt it to be, was like a blow in the face. A
startled paleness swept up her cheeks like a wave, blotting their hue
and misting the clear April of her eyes. She turned half-away, toward
her companion, and the next moment the eddying crowd had come between.
On the hurrying pavement Brent dropped his hand on Sevier's shoulder.
"I'm not going to congratulate you," he said. "I'm going to
congratulate the new party. I'm off to the sanctum to write my
editorial while it's red hot. You'll come back for the other session,
I suppose. They're liable to nominate to-night."
"No," replied Harry. "I must get away from the crowd somewhere."
Brent caught the lassitude of his tone. "Better walk yourself tired,"
he counselled, "and then turn in. You'll be all right to-morrow."
They clasped hands and parted.
For a time Sevier walked aimlessly, choosing the less frequented
thoroughfares, alone at last to think. He had done his best. Whether
or not it would accomplish what Brent had hoped, he had made the
strongest effort of which he was capable. The meeting with Echo had
shaken him by its very unexpectedness, and had shown him how bitterly
hard was to be his struggle with himself. In that instant of their
encounter he had realised his own weakness.
Through the long, fading afternoon he walked on and on, past the
outskirts of the city, on into the peaceful willow-green quiet of the
country, where paved streets gave place to meandering red roads and the
air was sweet with the delicate fragrance of blossoming fruit-trees.
He sat an hour on the violet-blurred grass above the silver-looping
river where he had often fished as a boy. All his life he had loved
that gold-tinted, dream-shadowed valley. But now the soft wild clamour
of birds, the multifold perfume of the fields, the errant plum-petals
swimming in the breeze, the long-armed trees reaching out over the
darkling water, called to him in vain. He scarcely saw the far, blue,
hill-brushed horizon unfurl its pageant cloud-clusters to hide the sun,
where it hastened, in purple toga, to greet the soft-eyed night.
What Spartan career had he been planning for himself? He loved her,
desired her, still. He realised it with a stab of self-contempt. And
loving her, could he see her day by day, meet her, talk with her--cold
and empty words meaning less than nothing--with his heart crying to
hers: "Thus far but no further! Because I loved you once I wear a
shameful brand on my forehead, but my arms may never enfold you, your
lips never lie on my lips, your heart beat against mine!--Never, never,
never!"--could flesh and blood be capable of this? Better to go, while
there was yet time, somewhere, anywhere, so it be out of her world.
Under the deep evening sky, a gulf of gold, he turned city-ward again,
still painfully absorbed with his thoughts--a dark tangle of anguish
and doubt and longing.
As he neared his house speeding urchins were crying newspaper extras,
and more than once he heard his name in the shouted, dislocated
phrases. His speech! The swan's-song of Harry Sevier!
He let himself into his apartment with his latch-key and wearily
switched on the lights. He suddenly remembered that he had eaten
nothing since noon and realised that he was wretchedly tired and spent.
A pencilled note, with the superscription in Brent's jerky hand, lay on
the table. He took it up and opened it.
Then suddenly he gave an inarticulate cry of amaze--of actual fright.
He was staring at this message, written an hour before:
_Anti-liquor plank adopted. You were nominated for Governor on the
first ballot at eight o'clock._