"Jeff!" said the colonel. Esther's coming seemed so portentous that he
could not brook imperfect knowledge of it. "Jeff, did Esther come to--"
He paused there. What could Esther, in the circumstances, do? Make
advances? Ask to be forgiven?
But Jeff was meeting the half question comprehensively.
"I don't quite know what she came for."
"Couldn't you have persuaded her," said the colonel, hesitating, "to
stay?"
"No," said Jeff. "Esther doesn't want to stay. We mustn't think of
that."
"I am sorry," said the colonel, and Lydia understood him perfectly. He
was not sorry Esther had gone. But he was sorry the whole business had
been so muddled from the start, and that Jeff's life could not have
moved on like Addington lives in general: placid, all of a piece. Lydia
thought this yearning of his for the complete and perfect was because he
was old. She felt quite capable of taking Jeff's life as it was, and
fitting it together in a striking pattern.
"Come in, Farvie," she said. "You haven't corrected Mary Nellen's
translation."
Jeff was being left alone for his own good, and he smiled after the kind
little schemer, before he took his hat and went down town to find Weedon
Moore. As he went, withdrawn into a solitariness of his own, so that he
only absently answered the bows of those he met, he thought curiously
about his own life. And he was thinking as his father had: his life was
not of a pattern. It was a succession of disjointed happenings. There
was the first wild frothing of the yeast of youth. There was the nemesis
who didn't like youth to make such a fool of itself. She had to throw
him into prison. While he was there he had actually seemed to do things
that affected prison discipline. He was mentioned outside. He was even,
because he could write, absurdly pardoned. It had seemed to him then
desirable to write the life of a gentleman criminal, but in that he had
quite lost interest. Then he had had his great idea of liberty: the
freedom of the will that saved men from being prisoners. But the squalid
tasks remained to him even while he bragged of being free: to warn Moore
away from meddling with women's names, no matter how Madame Beattie
might invite him to do her malicious will, to warn Madame Beattie even,
in some fashion, and to protect Lydia. Of Esther he could not think,
save in a tiring, bewildered way. She seemed, from the old habit of
possession justified by a social tie, somehow a part of him, a burden of
which he could never rid himself and therefore to be borne patiently,
since he could not know whether the burden were actually his or not. And
he began to be conscious after that morning when Esther had looked at
him with primitive woman's summons to the protecting male that Esther
was calling him. Sometimes it actually tired him as if he were running
in answer to the call, whether toward it or away from it he could not
tell. All the paths were mazes and the lines of them bewildering to his
eyes. He would wake in the night and wish there were one straight path.
If he could have known that at this time Reardon and Alston Choate had
also, in differing ways, this same consciousness of Esther's calling it
could not have surprised him. He would not have known, in his own
turmoil, whether to urge them to go or not to go. Esther did not seem
to him a disturbing force, only a disconcerting one. You might have to
meet it to have done with it.
But now at Weedon's office door he paused a moment, hearing a voice, the
little man's own, slightly declamatory, even in private, and went in.
And he wished he had not gone, for Miss Amabel sat at the table, signing
papers, and he instantly guessed the signatures were not in the
pursuance of her business but to the advantage of Weedon Moore. Whatever
she might be doing, she was not confused at seeing him. Her designs
could be shouted on the housetops. But Moore gave him a foolishly
cordial greeting mingled with a confused blotting of signatures and a
hasty shuffling of the papers.
"Sit down, sit down," he said. "You haven't looked me up before, not
since--"
"No," said Jeff. "Not since I came back. I don't think I ever did. I've
come now in reference to a rather scandalous business."
Miss Amabel moved her chair back. She was about to rise.
"No, please," said Jeff. "Don't go. I'd rather like you to know that I'm
making certain threats to Moore here, in case I have to carry them out.
I'd rather you'd know I have some grounds. I never want you to think the
worst of me."
"I always think the best of you," said Miss Amabel, with dignity yet
helplessly. She sat there in an attitude of waiting, her grave glance
going from one to the other, as she tried to understand.
"Madame Beattie," said Jeff curtly to Moore, "is likely to give you some
personal details of her life. If you print them you'll settle with me
afterward."
"O Jeffrey!" said Miss Amabel. "Why put it so unpleasantly? Mr. Moore
would never print anything which could annoy you or any one. We mustn't
assume he would."
Moore, standing, one fat and not overclean hand on the table, looked a
passionate gratitude to her. He seemed about to gush into protest. Of
course he wouldn't. Of course he would publish only what was of the
highest character and also what everybody wanted him to.
"That's all," said Jeff. He, too, was standing and he now turned to go.
"I wish--" said Miss Amabel impulsively. She got on her feet and stood
there a minute, a stately figure in spite of her blurred lines. "I wish
we could have your cooperation, Jeff. Mr. Moore is going to run for
mayor."
"So I hear," said Jeff, and his mind added, "And you are financing his
campaign, you old dear, and only a minute ago you were signing over
securities."
"It means so much," said Miss Amabel, "to have a man who is a friend of
labour. We ought to combine on that. It's enough to heal our
differences."
"Pardon me," said Jeff. "I have to go. But mayn't I take you home?"
"No," said Amabel; "I've another bit of business to settle. But think it
over, Jeff. We can't afford to let personal issues influence us when the
interest of the town is at stake."
"Surely not," said Jeff. "Addington forever!"
As he went down the stairs he smiled a little, remembering Weedie had
not spoken a word after his first greeting. But Jeff didn't waste much
thought on Weedie. He believed, at the crisis, Weedie could be managed.
Miss Amabel had startled his mind broad awake to what she called the
great issues and what he felt were vital ones. He went on over the
bridge, and up the stairs of the old Choate Building to Alston's
office, and, from some sudden hesitancy, tapped on the door.
"Come in," called Alston, and he went.
Alston sat at the table, not reading a novel as Lydia and too many of
his clients had found him, but idle, with not even a book at hand. There
were packets of papers, in a methodical sequence, but everything on the
table bore the aspect of an order not akin to work. Choate looked pale
and harassed. "You?" said his upward glance. "You, of all the people
I've been thinking of? What are you here for?"
There was though, in the look, a faint relief. Perhaps he thought
something connected with the harassing appeal of Esther, the brutalising
stir of her in the air, could be cleared up. Jeff was to surprise him.
"Choate," said he, "have you been asked to run for mayor?"
Choate frowned. He wasn't thinking of public office.
"I've been--approached," he said, as if the word made it the more
remote.
"What did you say?"
"Said I wouldn't. Jeff, I believe you started the confounded thing."
"I've talked a lot," said Jeff. "But any fool knows you've got to do it.
Choate, you're about the only hope of tradition and decency here in
Addington. Don't you know that?"
"I'm a weak man," said Alston, looking up at him unhappily. "I don't
half care for these things. I like the decent thing done, but, Jeff, I
don't want to pitch into the dirty business and call names and be called
names and uncover smells. I'd rather quit the whole business and go to
Europe."
"And let Addington go to pot? Why, we'd all rather go to Europe, if
Addington could be kept on her pins without us. But she can't. We've got
to see the old girl through."
"She's gone to pot anyway," said Choate. "So's the country. There aren't
any Americans now. They're blasted aliens."
"Ain't you an American?" asked Jeff, forgetting his grammar. "I am. And
I'm going to die in my tracks before I'm downed."
"You will be downed."
"I don't care. I don't care whether in a hundred years' time it's stated
in the history books that there was once a little tribe called New
Englanders and if you want to learn about 'em the philologists send you
to the inscriptions of Mary Wilkins and Robert Frost."
(This was before Robert Frost had come into his fame, but New England
had printed a verse or two and then forgotten them.)
"I didn't know you were such a fellow," said Choate, really interested,
in an impersonal way. "You go to my head."
"Sometimes I think," said Jeff, not half noticing him, "that what really
was doing in me in jail was country--country--patriotism, a kind of
irrational thing--sort of mother love applied to the soil--the thing men
die for. Call it liberty, if you want to, but it's all boiled down now
to Addington. Choate, don't you see Addington took hold on eternal
things? Don't you know how deep her roots go? She was settled by
English. You and I are English. We aren't going to let east of Europe or
south of Europe or middle Europe come over here and turn old Addington
into something that's not Anglo-Saxon. O Choate, wake up. Come alive.
Stop being temperate. Run for mayor and beat Weedie out of his skin."
"Dear fellow," said Choate, looking at him as if for an instant he too
were willing to speak out, "you live in a country where the majority
rules. And the majority has a perfect right to the government it wants.
And you will be voted down by ten aliens this year and a hundred next,
and so on, because the beastly capitalist wants more and more aliens
imported to do his work and the beastly politician wants them all thrown
into citizenship neck and heels, so he can have more votes. You're
defeated, Jeff, before you begin. You're defeated by sheer numbers."
"Then, for God's sake," said Jeff, "take your alien and make an American
of him."
"You can't. Could I take you to Italy and make an Italian of you, or to
Germany and make a German? You might do something with their children."
"They talk about the melting-pot," said Jeff rather helplessly.
"They do. It's a part of our rank sentimentalism. You can pour your
nationalities in but they'll no more combine than Tarquin's and
Lucretia's blood. No, Jeff. America's gone, the vision, as she was in
the beginning. They've throttled her among them."
Jeff stood looking at him, flushed, dogged, defiant. He had a vivid
beauty at the moment, and Alston woke to a startled sense of what the
young Jeff used to be. But this was better. There was something beaten
into this face finer far than youth.
Jeff seemed to be meeting him as if their minds were at grapples.
"The handful of us, old New England, the sprinkling of us that's left,
we've got to repel invasion. The aliens are upon us."
"They've even brought their insect pests," put in Alston.
"Folks," said Jeff, "that know no more about the passions and
faithfulnesses this government was founded on than a Hottentot going
into his neighbour's territory."
"Oh, come," said Alston, "give 'em a fair show. They've come for
liberty. You've got to take their word for it."
"Some of 'em have come to avoid being skinned alive, by Islam, some to
get money enough to go back with and be _rentiers_. The Germans have
come to show us the beatitude of their specially anointed way of life."
"Well," said Alston curtly, "we've got 'em. And they've got us. You
can't leaven the whole lump."
"I can't look much beyond Addington," said Jeff. "I believe I'm dotty
over the old girl. I don't want her to go back to being Victorian, but I
want her to be right--honest, you know, and standing for decent things.
That's why you're going to be mayor."
Alston made no answer, but when, in a few weeks' time, some citizens of
weight came to ask him again if he would accept the nomination, he said,
without parley, that he would. And it was not Jeff that had constrained
him; it was the look in his mother's eyes.