One Man in His Time | Page 2

on past the bald outline of the restored and enlarged Capitol, this imaginary concert grew gradually fainter, until he heard above it presently the sudden closing of a window in the Governor's mansion--as the old gray house was called.
Pausing abruptly, the young man frowned as his eyes fell on the charming Georgian front, which presided like a serene and spacious memory over the modern utilitarian purpose that was devastating the Square. Alone in its separate plot, broad, low, and hospitable, the house stood there divided and withdrawn from the restless progress and the age of concrete--a modest reminder of the centuries when men had built well because they had time, before they built, to stop and think and remember. The arrested dignity of the past seemed to the young man to hover above the old mansion within its setting of box hedges and leafless lilac shrubs and snow-laden magnolia trees. He saw the house contrasted against the crude surroundings of the improved and disfigured Square, and against the house, attended by all its stately traditions, he saw the threatening figure of Gideon Vetch. "So it has come to this," he thought resentfully, with his gaze on the doorway where a round yellow globe was shining. Ragged frost-coated branches framed the sloping roof, and the white columns of the square side porches emerged from the black crags of magnolia trees. In the centre of the circular drive, invaded by concrete, a white heron poured a stream of melting ice from a distorted throat.
The shutters were not closed at the lower windows, and the firelight flickered between the short curtains of some brownish muslin. As Stephen passed the gate on his way down the hill, a figure crossed one of the windows, and his frown deepened as he recognized, or imagined that he recognized, the shadow of Gideon Vetch.
"Gideon Vetch!" At the sound of the name the young man threw back his head and laughed softly. A Gideon Vetch was Governor of Virginia! Here also, he told himself, half humorously, half bitterly, democracy had won. Here also the destroying idea had triumphed. In sight of the bronze Washington, this Gideon Vetch, one of "the poor white trash," born in a circus tent, so people said, the demagogue of demagogues in Stephen's opinion--this Gideon Vetch had become Governor of Virginia! Yet the placid course of Stephen's life flowed on precisely as it had flowed ever since he could remember, and the dramatic hand of Washington had not fallen. It was still so recent; it had come about so unexpectedly, that people--at least the people the young man knew and esteemed--were still trying to explain how it had happened. The old party had been sleeping, of course; it had grown too confident, some said too corpulent; and it had slept on peacefully, in spite of the stirring strength of the labour leaders, in spite of the threatening coalition of the new factions, in spite even of the swift revolt against the stubborn forces of habit, of tradition, of overweening authority. His mother, he knew, held the world war responsible; but then his mother was so constituted that she was obliged to blame somebody or something for whatever happened. Yet others, he admitted, as well as his mother, held the war responsible for Gideon Vetch--as if the great struggle had cast him out in some gigantic cataclysm, as if it had broken through the once solid ground of established order, and had released into the world all the explosive gases of disintegration, of destruction.
For himself, the young man reflected now, he had always thought otherwise. It was a period, he felt, of humbug radicalism, of windbag eloquence; yet he possessed both wit and discernment enough to see that, though ideas might explode in empty talk, still it took ideas to make the sort of explosion that was deafening one's ears. All the flat formula of the centuries could not produce a single Gideon Vetch. Such men were part of the changing world; they answered not to reasoned argument, but to the loud crash of breaking idols. Stephen hated Vetch with all his heart, but he acknowledged him. He did not try to evade the man's tremendous veracity, his integrity of being, his inevitableness. An inherent intellectual honesty compelled Stephen to admit that, "the demagogue", as he called him, had his appropriate place in the age that produced him--that he existed rather as an outlet for political tendencies than as the product of international violence. He was more than a theatrical attitude--a torrent of words. Even a free country--and Stephen thought sentimentally of America as "a free country"--must have its tyrannies of opinion, and consequently its rebels against current convictions. In the older countries he had imagined that it might be possible to hold with the