A LITTLE LIGHT ON HUMAN NATURE
Corinna had not expected to see the Governor until luncheon next day;
but, to her surprise, he came to the shop just as she was about to lock
the door and go home for the afternoon. At first she thought that the
visit was merely a casual one--it was not unusual for him to drop in as
he was going by--but he had no sooner glanced about the room to see if
they were alone than he broke out with his characteristic directness.
"There is something I want to ask you. Will you answer me frankly?"
"That depends. Tell me what it is and then I will answer your question."
"It is about Patty. You've seen a great deal of her, haven't you?"
"A great deal. I am very fond of her."
"Then perhaps you can tell me if she is interested in this young
Culpeper?"
For a minute Corinna struggled against a burst of hysterical laughter.
Oh, if Cousin Harriet had only met him here, she thought, what a comedy
they would have made!
"Surely if any one has an opinion about that, it must be you," she
rejoined as gravely as she could.
"I haven't; not the shadow of one." He was plainly puzzled. "I thought
you might help me. You have a way of seeing things."
"Have I?" The spontaneous tribute touched her. "I wish I could see
this, but I can't. Frankly, since you ask me, I may say that I have been
troubled about it. There are things that Patty hides, even from me, and
I think I have her confidence."
"I dare say you wonder why I have come to you to-day," he said. "I can
handle most situations; but I have never had to handle the love affairs
of a girl, and I'm perfectly capable of making a mess of them. Things
like that are outside of my job."
He seemed to her a pathetic figure as he stood there, in his boyish
embarrassment and his redundant vitality, confessing an inability to
surmount the obstacle in his way. She had never known any one, man or
woman, who was so obviously lacking in subtlety of perception, in all
those delicate intuitions on which she relied more completely than on
judgment for an accurate impression of life. Was he, with his bigness,
his earnestness, his luminous candour, only an overgrown child? Even his
physical magnetism, and she felt this in the very moment when she was
trying to analyse it, even his physical magnetism might be nothing more
than the spell exercised by primitive impulse over the too complex
problems of civilization. She had heard that he was unscrupulous--vague
charges that he had never been able to repel--yet she was conscious now
of a secret wish to protect him from the consequences of his duplicity,
as she might have wished to protect an irresponsible child. Some
mysterious sense perception made her aware that beneath what appeared to
be discreditable public actions there was the simple bed-rock of
honesty. For the quality she felt in Vetch was a profound moral
integrity, an integrity which was bred by nature in the innermost fibre
of the man.
"If you will tell me--" she began, and checked herself with a sensation
of helplessness. After all, what could he tell her that she did not
know?
"I want to do what is right for her," he said abruptly. "I should hate
for her to be hurt."
While he talked it seemed to Corinna that she was living in some absurd
comedy, which mimicked life but was only acting, not reality. In her
world of reserves and implications no man would have dared to make
himself ridiculous by a visit like this.
"Do you believe that she cares for Stephen?" she asked bluntly.
"It didn't start with me. Miss Spencer, that's the lady who lives with
us you know, is afraid that Patty sees too much of him. He is at the
house every day--"
"Well?" Corinna waited patiently. She was not in the least afraid of
what Stephen might do. She knew that she could trust him to be a
gentleman; but being a gentleman, she reflected, did not necessarily
keep one from breaking a woman's heart. And Patty had a wild, free heart
that might be broken.
"I don't know what to do about it," Vetch was saying while she pondered
the problem. "As I told you a minute ago this is all outside my job."
"Have you spoken to Patty?"
"I started to, but she made fun of the idea--you know the way she has.
She asked me if I had ever heard of any one falling in love with a
plaster saint?"
Corinna smiled. "So she called Stephen a plaster saint?"
"She was chaffing, of course."
"Well, I don't see that there is anything you can do unless you send
Patty away."
"She wouldn't go," he responded simply; then after a moment of
embarrassed hesitation, he blurted out nervously, "Is this young
Culpeper what you would call a marrying man?"
This time it was impossible for Corinna to suppress her amusement, and
it broke out in a laugh that was like the chiming of silver bells. Oh,
if only Cousin Harriet could hear him! Then observing the gravity of
Vetch's expression, she checked her untimely mirth with an effort.
"That depends, I suppose. At his age how can any one tell?" In her heart
she did not believe that Stephen would marry Patty; she was not sure
even that she, Corinna, should wish him to do so. There was too much at
stake, and though her philosophy was fearless, her conduct had never
been anything but conventional. While in theory she despised discretion,
she realized that the virtue she despised, not the theory she admired,
had dominated her life. The great trouble with acts of reckless nobility
was that the recklessness was only for a moment, but the nobility was
obliged to last a lifetime. It was not difficult, she knew, for persons
like Stephen or herself to be heroic in appropriate circumstances; the
difficulty began when one was compelled to sustain the heroic rôle long
after the appropriate circumstances had passed away. Yet, in spite of
the cynical lucidity of her judgment, the romantic in her heart longed
to have Stephen, by one generous act of devotion, prove her theory
fallacious. Her strongest impulse, the impulse to create happiness, to
repair, as her father had once described it, crippled destinies; this
impulse urged her now to help Patty's pathetic romance in every way in
her power. It would be very fine if Stephen cared enough to forget what
he was losing. It would be magnificent, she felt, but it would not be
masculine. For she had had great experience; and though men might vary
in a multitude of particulars, she had found that the solidarity of sex
was preserved in some general code of emotional expediency.
"Do you think," Vetch was making another attempt to explain his meaning,
"that he is seriously interested?"
"I am perfectly sure," she replied, "that he is more than half in love
with her."
"Is he the kind, then, to let himself go the rest of the way?"
She shook her head. "That I cannot answer. From my knowledge of the
restraining force of the Culpeper fibre, I should say that he is not."
"You mean he wouldn't think it a suitable marriage?"
She blushed for his crudeness. "I mean his mother wouldn't think it a
suitable marriage. Patty is very attractive, but they know nothing about
her except that. You see they have had the disadvantage of knowing
everything about every one who has married, or who has even wished to
marry, into the family for the last two hundred years. It is a
disadvantage, as I've said, for the strain is so highly bred that each
generation becomes mentally more and more like the fish in caves that
have lost their eyes because they stopped trying to see. Stephen is
different in a way--and yet not different enough. It would be his
salvation if he could care enough for Patty to take a risk for her sake;
but his mother, of course, would fight against it with every particle
of her influence, and her influence is enormous." Then she met his eyes
boldly: "Wouldn't you fight against it in her place?" she asked.
"I? Oh, I shouldn't care a hang what anybody thought if I liked the
girl," he retorted. His smile shone out warmly. "Would you?" he demanded
in his turn.
For an instant his blunt question disconcerted her, and while she
hesitated she felt his blue eyes on her downcast face. "You can't judge
by me," she answered presently. "Only those who have been in chains know
the meaning of freedom."
"Are you free now?"
"Not entirely. Who is?"
He was looking at her more closely; and when at last she raised her
eyelashes and met his gaze, the lovely glow which gave her beauty its
look of October splendour suffused her features. Anger seized her in the
very moment that the colour rushed to her cheeks. Why should she blush
like a schoolgirl because of the way this man--or any man--looked at
her?
"Are you going to marry Benham?" he asked; and there was a note in his
voice which disturbed her in spite of herself. Though she denied
passionately his right to question her, she answered simply enough:
"Yes, I am going to marry him."
"Do you care for him?"
With an effort she turned her eyes away and looked beyond the green
stems and the white flowers of the narcissi in the window to the street
outside, where the shadows of the young leaves lay like gauze over the
brick pavement.
"If I didn't care do you think that I would marry him?" she asked in a
low voice. Through the open window a breeze came, honey-sweet with the
scent of narcissi, and she realized, with a start, that this early
spring was poignantly lovely and sad.
"Well, I wish I'd known you twenty years ago," said Vetch presently. "If
I'd had a woman like you to help me, I might have been almost anything.
Nobody knows better than I how much help a woman can be when she's the
right sort."
She tore her gaze from the sunshine beyond, from the beauty and the
wistfulness of April. What was there in this man that convinced her in
spite of everything that Benham had told her?
"Your wife has been dead a long time?" She spoke gently, for his tone
more than his words had touched her sympathy.
As soon as she asked the question, she realized that it was a mistake.
An expressionless mask closed over his face, and she received the
impression that he had withdrawn to a distance.
"A long time," was all he answered. His voice had become so impersonal
that it was toneless.
"Well, it hasn't kept you back--not having help," she hastened to reply
as naturally as she could. "You are almost everything you wished to be
in the world, aren't you?" It was a foolish speech, she felt, but the
change in his manner had surprised and bewildered her.
He laughed shortly without merriment. "I?" he replied, and she noticed
for the first time that he looked tired and worried beneath his
exuberant optimism. "I am the loneliest man on earth. The loneliest man
on earth is the one who stands between two extremes." As she made no
reply, he continued after a moment, "You think, of course, that I stand
with one extreme, not in the centre, but you are mistaken. I am in the
middle. When I try to bring the two millstones together they will grind
me to powder."
She had never heard him speak despondently before; and while she
listened to the sound of his expressive voice, so full, for the hour at
least, of discouragement, she felt drawn to him in a new and personal
way. It was as if, by showing her a side of his nature the public had
never seen, he had taken her into his confidence.
"But surely your influence is as great as ever," she said presently. A
trite remark, but the only one that occurred to her.
"I brought the crowd with me as far as I thought safe," he answered,
"and now it is beginning to turn against me because I won't lead it over
the precipice into the sea. That's the way it always is, I reckon.
That's the way it's been, anyhow, ever since Moses tried to lead the
Children of Israel out of bondage. Take these strikers, for instance. I
believe in the right to strike. I believe that they ought to have every
possible protection. I believe that their families ought to be provided
for in order to take the weapon of starvation out of the hands of the
capitalists. I'd give them as fair a field as it is in my power to
provide, and anybody would think that they would be satisfied with
simple fairness. But, no, what they are trying to do is not to strike
_for_ themselves, but to strike _at_ somebody else. They are not
satisfied with protection from starvation unless that protection
involves the right to starve somebody else. They want to tie up the
markets and stop the dairy trains, and they won't wink an eyelash if all
the babies that don't belong to them are without milk. That's war, they
tell me; and I answer that I'd treat war just as I'd treat a strike, if
I had the power. As soon as an army began to prey on the helpless, I'd
raise a bigger army if I could and throw the first one out into the
jungle where it belonged. But people don't see things like that now,
though they may in the next five hundred years. The trouble is that all
human nature, including capitalist and labourer, is tarred with the same
brush and tarred with selfishness. What the oppressed want is not
freedom from oppression, but the opportunity to become oppressors."
Was this only a mood, she wondered, or was it the expression of a
profound disappointment? Sympathy such as John Benham had never awakened
overflowed from her heart, and she was conscious suddenly of some deep
intuitive understanding of Vetch's nature. All that had been alien or
ambiguous became as close and true and simple as the thoughts in her own
mind. What she saw in Vetch, she perceived now, was that resemblance to
herself which the Judge had once turned into a jest. She discerned his
point of view not by looking outside of herself, but by looking within.
"I know," she responded in her rich voice. "I think I know."
He gazed at her with a smile which had grown as tired as the rest of
him. "Then if you know why don't you help--you others?" he asked. "Don't
you see that by standing aside, by keeping apart, you are doing all the
harm that you can? If democracy doesn't seem good enough for you, then
get down into the midst of it and make it better. That's the only
way--the only way on earth to make a better democracy--by putting the
best we've got into it. You can't make bread rise from the outside.
You've got to mix the yeast with the dough, if you want it to leaven the
whole lump."
She had been standing with her hands clasped before her and her eyes on
the sky beyond the window; and when he paused, with a husky tone in his
voice, she spoke almost as if she were in a dream. "I believe in you,"
she said, and then again, as he did not speak she repeated very slowly:
"I believe in you."
"That helps," he answered gravely. "I don't suppose you will ever
realize how much that will help me." As he finished he turned toward the
door; and a minute afterward, without another word or look, he went out
into the street, and she saw his figure cross the flowers and the
sunlight in the window.
When he had gone Corinna opened the door and stood watching the long
black shadows of the cedars creep over the walk of broken flagstones.
Always when she was alone her thoughts would return like homing birds to
John Benham; but this afternoon, though she spoke his name in her
reflections, she was conscious of an inner detachment from the vital
interests of her personal life. For a little while, so strong was the
mental impression Vetch had made on her, she saw his image even while
she thought the name of John Benham. Then, with an effort of will, she
put the Governor and all that he had said out of her mind. After all,
how little would she ever see of him now--how seldom would their paths
cross in the future! A strange and interesting man, a man who had, in
one instant of mental sympathy, stirred something within her heart that
no one, not even Kent Page, had ever awakened before. For that one
instant a ripple, nothing more, had moved on the face of the deep--of
the deep which was so ancient that it was older even than the blood of
her race. Then the ripple passed and the sunny stillness settled again
on her spirit.
She thought of John Benham easily now; and while she stood there a quiet
happiness shone in her eyes. After the storm and stress of twenty years,
life in this Indian summer of the emotions was like an enclosed garden
of sweetness and bloom. She had had enough of hunger and rapture and
disappointment. Never again would she take up the old search for
perfection, for the starry flower of the heights. Something that she
could worship! So often in the past it had seemed to her that she missed
it by the turn of a corner, the stop on the roadside, by the choice of a
path that led down into the valley instead of up into the hills. So
often her god had revealed the feet of clay just as she was preparing to
scatter marigolds on his altar. It appeared to her as she looked back on
the past, that life had been merely a succession of great opportunities
that one did not grasp, of high adventures that one never followed.
The sound of a motor horn interrupted her reverie, and she saw that a
big open car, with a green body, had turned the corner and was about to
stop at her door. An instant later anger burned in her heart, for she
saw that the car was driven by Rose Stribling. Even a glimpse of that
flaunting pink hollyhock of a woman was sufficient to ruffle the placid
current of Corinna's thoughts. Could she never forget? Must she, who
had long ago ceased to love the man, still be enslaved to resentment
against the woman?
With an ample grace, Mrs. Stribling descended from the car, and crossed
the pavement to the flagged walk which led to the white door of the old
print shop. In her trimly fitting dress of blue serge, with her small
straw hat ornamented by stiff black quills, she looked fresher, harder,
more durably glazed than ever. A slight excess, too deep a carmine in
her smooth cheeks, too high a polish on her pale gold hair, too thick a
dusk on her lashes; this was the only flaw that one could detect in her
appearance. If men liked that sort of thing, and they apparently did,
Corinna reflected, then they could scarcely complain of an emphasis on
perfection.
"I've just got back," began Rose Stribling in a tone as soft as her
metallic voice could produce. "It's been an age since I've seen you--not
since the night of that stupid dinner at the Berkeleys', and I'm so much
interested in the news I have heard."
For a minute Corinna stared at her. "Yes, my shop has been very
successful," she answered, after a pause in which she tried and failed
to think of a reply that would sound more disdainful. "If you are
looking for prints, I can show you some very good ones."
"Oh, I don't mean that." Mrs. Stribling appeared genuinely amused by the
mistake. "I am not looking for prints--to tell the truth I shouldn't
know one if I saw it. I mean your engagement, of course. There isn't
anybody in the world who admires John Benham more than I do. I always
say of him that he is the only man I know who will sacrifice himself
for a principle. All his splendid record in the army--when he was over
age too--and then the way he behaved about that corporation! I never
understood just why he did it--I'm sure I could never bring myself to
refuse so much money,--but that doesn't keep me from admiring him." For
a minute she looked at Corinna with a smile which seemed as permanent as
the rest of her surface, while she discreetly sharpened her wits for the
stab which was about to be dealt. "I can't tell you how surprised I was
to hear you had announced your engagement. You know we were so sure that
he was going to marry Alice Rokeby after she got her divorce. Of course
nobody knew. It was just gossip, and you and I both know how absurd
gossip can be."
So this was why she had stopped! Corinna flinched from the thrust even
while she told herself that there was no shadow of truth in the old
rumour, that malice alone had prompted Rose Stribling to repeat it. In a
woman like that, an incorrigible coquette, every relation with her own
sex would be edged with malice.
"Well, I just stopped to wish you happiness. I must go now, but I'll
come again, when I have time, and look at your shop. Such a funny
idea--a shop, with all the money you've got! But no idea seems too funny
for people to-day. And that reminds me of the Governor. Have you seen
the Governor again since the evening we dined with him?"
Her turn had come, and Corinna, for she was very human, planted the
sting without mercy. "Oh, very often. He was here a few minutes ago."
"Then it's true? Somebody told me he admired you so much."
Corinna smiled blandly. "I hope he does. We are great friends." Would
there always be women like that in the world, she asked herself--women
whose horizon ended with the beginning of sex? It was a feminine type
that seemed to her as archaic as some reptilian bird of the primeval
forests. How long would it be, she wondered, before it would survive
only in the dry bones of genealogical scandals? As she looked after Rose
Stribling's bright green car, darting like some gigantic dragon-fly up
the street, her lips quivered with scorn and disgust. "I wonder if she
thought I believed her?" she said to herself in a whisper. "I wonder if
she thought she could hurt me?"
The sunshine was in her eyes, and she was about to turn and go back into
the shop, when she saw that Alice Rokeby was coming toward her with a
slow dragging step, as if she were mentally and bodily tired. The
lace-work of shadows fell over her like a veil; and high above her head
the early buds of a tulip tree made a mosaic of green and yellow lotus
cups against the Egyptian blue of the sky. Framed in the vivid colours
of spring she had the look of a flower that has been blighted by frost.
"How ill, how very ill she looks," thought Corinna, with an impulse of
sympathy. "I wish she would come in and rest. I wish she would let me
help her."
For an instant the violet eyes, with their vague wistfulness, their mute
appeal, looked straight into Corinna's; and in that instant an
inscrutable expression quivered in Alice Rokeby's face, as if a wan
light had flickered up and died down in an empty room.
"The heat is too much for you," said Corinna gently. "It is like
summer."
"Yes, I have never known so early a spring. It has come and gone in a
week."
"You look tired, and your furs are too heavy. Won't you come in and rest
until my car comes?"
The other woman shook her head. She was still pretty, for hers was a
face to which pallor lent the delicate sweetness of a white rose-leaf.
"It is only a block or two farther. I am going home," she answered in a
low voice.
"Won't you come to my shop sometimes? I have missed seeing you this
winter." The words were spoken sincerely, for Corinna's heart was open
to all the world but Rose Stribling.
"Thank you. How lovely your cedars are!" The wan light shone again in
Alice Rokeby's face. Then she threw her fur stole from her shoulders as
if she were fainting under the weight of it, and passed on, with her
dragging step, through the lengthening shadows on the pavement.