One Man in His Time | Page 2

the topmost branches of
an old sycamore the thinnest fragment of a new moon hung trembling
like a luminous thread. The twilight was intensely still, and the noises
of the city fell with a metallic sound on his ears, as if a multitude of
bells were ringing about him. While he walked 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stood there divided and withdrawn from the restless progress and the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