THE VICTORY OF GIDEON VETCH
That evening, when Corinna got out of her car before the Governor's
house, Stephen Culpeper opened the door, and came down the steps.
"I waited for you," he said; and then as the car moved away, he took her
hand and turned back to the porch.
"I couldn't come before," explained Corinna. "I had a headache all day,
and it kept me in bed. Have you seen Patty?"
"I have seen her, but that is all. I can do nothing with her."
"But she cares for you."
"She doesn't deny it. That's not the trouble. Something about Vetch
stands in the way. I can't make out what she means."
"Let me talk to her," responded Corinna reassuringly. "Is the Governor
here?"
"No, he has gone to the strikers' meeting. They must reach some decision
to-night it appears. I have talked with him, and I believe he will stand
firm whatever happens. It means, I think, that his career is over."
"It is too late for him to win over the conservative forces?"
"It was always too late. In a battle of extremes the most dangerous
position is in the centre."
"He told me something like that once. The trouble with him is that he
hasn't a point of view, but a vision. He sees the whole, and politics is
only a little part of it."
"Yes, he sees a human fight, while they are trying to make a political
squabble. He may win them over to-night, but this is only the beginning.
The real fight is against individual self-interest." He laughed in an
undertone. "I remember he told me once that the only trouble with
Christianity was the Christians. 'You can't have Christianity', he said,
'until Christians are different'. That's just as true, of course, of
politics. The only trouble with politics is the politicians."
"Well, it's a muddle," she responded impatiently. "However you look at
it. Come back in an hour or two, and I may be able to help you." Her
cheerful smile shone on him for an instant; then she entered the house
and closed the door after her.
In one of the worn leather chairs in the library, Patty was sitting
perfectly still, with her eyes fixed on the orderly row of papers on the
Governor's desk. She wore a white dress with a black ribbon at her
waist, and in the dim light, with her pale face and her cloudy hair, she
had a ghostly look as if she would turn to mist at a touch. When Corinna
entered, she rose and held out her hands. "You are so good," she said.
"I never dreamed that any body could be so good and so beautiful too!"
"My dear," began Corinna brightly, and while she spoke she drew the girl
to the leather-covered couch by the window, and sat down still holding
the cold hands in her warm ones. "So you are going to marry Stephen."
"I can't," replied Patty, and she turned her face slightly away as if
she shrank from meeting Corinna's eyes. "I can't after what I know. I
can't do it because of Father."
"Because of your father?" repeated Corinna. "But surely your father
wishes you to be happy?"
"Oh, I know he does. It isn't that. But this will all come out. That is
what Julius Gershom meant when he threatened. They are trying to do him
some harm--Father, I mean--"
"I understand that, but still how in the world--"
Before she could finish her sentence Patty interrupted in an hysterical
voice--the voice of youth that is always dramatic: "Nobody will ever
mean as much to me as Father does," she cried. "I know that now. I've
known it ever since I found out that he began it just out of
kindness--that I had no claim on him of any kind--"
"That is natural, dear, but still I don't understand."
Rising from the couch, Patty moved to a chair in front of Corinna, and
sinking into it, began nervously plaiting and unplaiting a fold of her
white dress. "I can do anything with Julius Gershom if I am nice to
him," she murmured. "If he stands by Father most of the others will
also."
With a gasp Corinna sat up very straight and tried to see Patty's eyes
in the obscurity. What sordid horror was the child facing now? What
unspeakable degradation? "You can't think of marrying Gershom, Patty!"
she exclaimed, with a gesture of loathing. "You must be out of your mind
even to dream of it!"
"I can make him do anything I want if I will promise to marry him," she
answered in a steady voice, though a shiver of aversion passed over her.
Corinna drew her breath sharply, restraining at the same time an impulse
to laugh. Oh, the mock heroics of youth! Of youth with its fantastic
heroism and its dauntless inexperience! "If you only knew," she breathed
indignantly, "if you only knew what marriage means!"
Patty turned and gave her a long look. "I could do more than that for
Father," she answered.
So this was the other side of Gideon Vetch--of that man of ignoble
circumstances and infinite magnanimity! How could any one understand
him? How, above all, could any one judge him? How could one fathom his
power for good or for evil? She beheld him suddenly as a man who was
inspired by an exalted illusion--the illusion of human perfectibility.
In the changing world about her, the breaking up and the renewing, the
dissolution and readjustment of ideals; in the modern conflict between
the spirit that accepts and the spirit that rejects; in this age of
destiny--was not an unconquerable optimism, an invincible belief in
life, the one secure hope for the future? It is the human touch that
creates hope, she thought; and the power of Gideon Vetch was revealed to
her as simply the human touch magnified into a force.
She became aware after a minute that Patty was speaking. "I can never
tell you--I can never tell any one what he used to be to me when I was a
little girl, and he was very poor. Sometimes--for a long time--I
couldn't have a nurse, and he would dress and undress me, and leave me
with the neighbours when he went away to work. I can see him now heating
milk for me over an old oil lamp. Once when I was ill he sat up night
after night with me. Oh, I don't mean that he was perfect, but that he
was kind--always. I know the quarrels he had--that he has still with the
people who won't go his way. The one thing he can't forgive in people is
that they never forget themselves, that they never think of anything
except what they want. That angers him, and he flies out. I know that.
But there's no use trying I can't make anybody, I can't make even you,
know all that he did for me--" The words ended in tears; and she sat
there, lost in memory, while the dim light seemed to absorb her white
dress and her pale features and the small hand that lay on the fringe of
her black sash.
"My dear, my dear," murmured Corinna because she could think of no words
that sounded less ineffectual.
There was a ring at the doorbell while she spoke and after a pause
which appeared to her interminable, she heard the shuffling tread of old
Abijah, and then the clear tone of Stephen's voice, followed immediately
by another speaker who sounded vaguely familiar, though she could not
recall now where she had listened to him before. It was not Julius
Gershom, she knew, though it might be some man that she had heard at a
meeting.
"Let me speak to Mrs. Page first," said Stephen. "Ask her if she will
come into the drawing-room."
For an instant Corinna hung back, with the chill of dread at her heart;
and in that instant Patty flew past her like a startled spirit, while
the ends of her black sash streamed behind her. With the penetrating
insight of love the girl had surmised, had seen, had understood, before
a word of explanation had reached her, before even the door had swung
open, and she had met the blanched faces of the men in the hall. "It is
Father," she said quietly. "They have hurt him. Oh, I knew all the time
that they were going to hurt him!"
Corinna, standing close at her side without touching her, for some
intuition told her that the girl did not wish any support, was aware of
the faces of these men, flickering slowly, like glimmering ashen lights,
out of the shadows in the hall--first Stephen's face, with its shocked
compassionate eyes; then the face of old Darrow, rock-hewn, relentless;
then the face of her father, which even tragedy could not startle out of
its ceremonious reserve; and beyond these familiar faces, it seemed to
her that the collective face of the crowd gazed back at her with an
expression which was one neither of surprise nor terror, but of the
stony fortitude of the ages. Beyond this there was the open door and the
glamour of the spring night, and in the night another group with its
dark burden.
"I met them just outside, and they told me," said Stephen. "Gershom
thinks it was an accident, but we shall never know probably. Two
opposing sides were fighting it out. A question had come up--nobody can
remember what it was--nothing important, I think--but two men came to
blows and he got in between them--he stood in the way--and somebody shot
him--"
He was talking, Corinna realized, in an effort to hold Patty's gaze, to
divert her eyes by the force of his look from the burden which the men
were bringing slowly up the steps outside and into the hall.
"Nobody meant to harm him," said Gershom suddenly, speaking from the
edge of the group. "The pistol went off by mistake. He got in the way
before any one saw him--" But from his look, Corinna knew that it was
not an accident, that they had shot him because he came between them and
the thing that they wanted.
The slow steps crossed the hall into the library, and above the measured
beat and pause of the sound, Corinna heard the voice of Vetch as
distinctly as if he were standing there before her in the centre of the
group. "The loneliest man on earth is the one who stands between two
extremes." Yes, at the end as well as at the beginning, he had stood
between two extremes! Then Patty's cry of anguish floated to her from
the room across the hall into which they had taken him. "Father!
Father!" Only that one word over and over again. "Father! Father!" Only
that one word uttered steadily and softly in a tone of imploring
helplessness like the wail of a frightened child. It never ceased, this
piteous sobbing, until at last the doctor went out, and left Corinna
alone with the girl and Gideon Vetch. Then Patty fell on her knees
beside the couch where he lay, and a silence that was almost suffocating
closed over the room.
The house had become very still. While Corinna waited there at Patty's
side, the only noise came from the restless movement of the city, which
sounded far off and vaguely ominous, like the disturbance in a nightmare
from which one has just awakened. She had turned off the unshaded
electric light; and for a few minutes Patty knelt alone in a merciful
dimness, which left her white dress and the composed features of the
dead man the only luminous spots in the room. It was as if these two
pallid spaces were living things in the midst of inanimate darkness. For
a moment only this impression lasted, for overcome by the pathos of it,
Corinna crossed the room with noiseless footsteps and lighted the wax
candles on the mantelpiece.
Death had come so suddenly that, lying there in the trembling light of
the candles, Vetch appeared to be merely resting a moment in his
energetic career. His rugged features still wore their look of exuberant
vitality, of triumphant faith. There was about him even in death the
radiance of his indestructible illusion. As Corinna looked down on him,
it seemed incredible to her that he should not stretch himself in a
moment, and rise and go out again into the struggle of living. It seemed
incredible that his work should be finished for ever when he was still
so unspent, so full of tireless activity. Was death always like this--a
victory of material and mechanical forces? An accident, an automatic
gesture, and the complex power which stood for the soul of Gideon Vetch
was dissolved--or released. The crumbling of a rock, the falling of a
leaf! Her eyes left the face of the dead man, left Patty's bowed head at
her side, and travelled beyond the open window into the glamour and
mystery of the night, and beyond the night into the sky--
There was a knock at the door, and she turned away and went out to join
the men in the hall. What had it meant to them, she wondered. How much
had they understood? How much had they ever understood of that symbol of
a changing world which they had loved and hated under the name of Gideon
Vetch?
"Give her a few minutes more," she said. "Leave her alone with him."
There were four men waiting--her father, Stephen, old Darrow, and
Julius Gershom--and these four, she felt, were the men who had known
Vetch best, and who, with the exception of Darrow, had perhaps
understood least what he meant. No one had understood him, least of all,
she saw now, had she herself understood him--
Gershom spoke first. "He was the biggest man we've ever had," he said,
"and we never doubted it--" Yet he had never for an instant, Corinna
knew, seen Vetch as he really was, or recognized the end for which he
was fighting.
"He was the only one who could have held us together," sighed old
Darrow, and his face looked as if a searing iron had passed over it.
"This will put us back at least fifty years--"
The Judge was gazing through the open door out into the night, where
lamps shone in the Square and a luminous cloud hung over the city, that
city which was outgrowing its youth, outgrowing the barriers of
tradition, outgrowing alike the forces of reaction and the forces of
progress.
"A few months," he said slowly, "and nothing accomplished that one can
point out and say that we owe directly to him. Yet I doubt if a single
one of us will ever forget him. I doubt if a single one of us will ever
be exactly, in every little way, just what we should have been if we had
never known Vetch, or spoken to him. The merest ripple of change,
perhaps, but it counts--it counts because in touching him we touched a
humanity that is as rare as genius itself." Yet they had killed him,
Corinna knew, because they could not understand him!
For a moment there was silence, and then Stephen spoke in a whisper:
"There are some things that you can't see until you stand far enough
away from them. I doubt if any of us really saw him until to-night.
To-morrow he will begin to live." As he lifted his eyes to Corinna's
face, she saw in them a fidelity that pledged itself to the future.
"Go to Patty," she whispered. "Go to her and repeat what you have said
to us." Putting her hand on his arm, she led him into the room where the
girl was kneeling, and then drew back while he went quickly forward.
Watching from the threshold, she saw Patty look up uncertainly, and rise
slowly from the floor where she had been kneeling; she saw Stephen put
out his arms with a movement of love and pity; and she saw the girl
hesitate for an instant, and then turn to his clasp as a hurt child
turns for comfort. That was youth, that was the future, thought Corinna,
and closing the door softly, she left them together. Yes, youth was for
the future, and for herself, _she_ realized with a pang, were the things
that she had never had in the past. Only the things that she had never
had were really hers! Only the unfulfilled, she saw in that moment of
illuminating insight, is the permanent.
Passing the group in the hall, she went out on the porch, and looked
with swimming eyes over the fountain into the Square. Beyond the white
streams of electricity and the black patterns of the shadows, she saw
the sharp outlines of the city, and beyond that the immense blue field
of the sky sown thickly with stars. Life was there--life that embraced
success and failure, illusion and disillusion, birth and death. In the
morning she would go back to it--she would begin again--in the morning
she would will herself to pick up the threads of middle age as lightly
as Stephen and Patty would pick up the threads of youth. To-morrow she
would start living again--but to-night for a few hours she would rest
from life; she would look back now, as she had looked back that morning,
to where a man was standing in the bright grass with the sunrise above
his head.
BOOKS BY ELLEN GLASGOW
LIFE AND GABRIELLA
ONE MAN IN HIS TIME
PHASES OF AN INFERIOR PLANET
THE ANCIENT LAW
THE BATTLE-GROUND
THE BUILDERS
THE DELIVERANCE
THE DESCENDANT
THE FREEMAN AND OTHER POEMS
THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH
THE ROMANCE OF A PLAIN MAN
THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE
THE WHEEL OF LIFE
VIRGINIA