One Man in His Time | Page 3

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 hare and run with the hounds; but in the land
of opportunity for all there was less reason to be astonished when the
hunted turned at last into the hunter. Where every boy was taught that

he might some day be President, why should one stand amazed when
the ambitious son of a circus rider became Governor of Virginia? After
all, a fair field and no favours was the best that the most conservative of
politicians--the best that even John Benham could ask.
Yes, there was a cause, there was a reason for the miracle of disorder,
or it would not have happened. The hour had called forth the man; but
the man had been there awaiting the strokes, listening, listening, with
his ear to the wind. It had been a triumph of personality, one of those
rare dramatic occasions when the right man and the appointed time
come together. This the young man admitted candidly in the very
moment when he told himself that he detested the demagogue and all
his works. A man who consistently made his bid for the support of the
radical element! Who stirred up the forces of discontent because he
could harness them to his chariot! A man who was born in a circus tent,
and who still performed in public the tricks of a mountebank! That this
man had power, Stephen granted ungrudgingly; but it was power over
the undisciplined, the half-educated, the mentally untrained. It was
power, as John Benham had once remarked with a touch of hyperbole,
over empty stomachs.
There were persons in Stephen's intimate circle (there are such persons
even in the most conservative communities) who contended that Vetch
was in his way a rude genius. Judge Horatio Lancaster Page, for
instance, insisted that the Governor had a charm of his own, that, "he
wasn't half bad to look at if you caught him smiling," that he could
even reason "like one of us," if you granted him his premise. After the
open debate between Vetch and Benham--the great John Benham, hero
of war and peace, and tireless labourer in the vineyard of public
service--after this memorable discussion, Judge Horatio Lancaster Page
had remarked, in his mild, unpolemical tone, that "though John had
undoubtedly carried off the flowers of rhetoric, there was a good deal
of wholesome green stuff about that fellow Vetch." But everybody
knew that a man with a comical habit of mind could not be right.
Again the figure crossed the firelight between the muslin curtains, and
to Stephen Culpeper, standing alone in the snow outside, that large

impending presence embodied all that he and his kind had hated and
feared for generations. It embodied among other disturbances the law
of change; and to Stephen and his race of pleasant livers the two
sinister forces in the universe were change and death. After all, they
had made the world, these pleasant livers; and what were those other
people--the people represented by that ominous shadow--except the
ragged prophets of disorder and destruction?
Turning away, Stephen descended the wide brick walk which fell
gradually, past the steps of the library and the gaunt railing round a
motionless fountain, to the broad white slope of the Square with its
smoky veil of twilight. Farther away he saw the high iron fence and
heard the clanging of passing street cars. On his left the ugly shape of
the library resembled some crude architectural design sketched on
parchment.
As he approached the fountain, a small figure in a red cape detached
itself suddenly from the mesh of shadows, and he recognized Patty
Vetch, the irrepressible young daughter of the Governor. He had seen
her the evening before at a charity ball, where she had been politely
snubbed by what he thought of complacently as "our set." From the
moment when he had first looked at her across the whirling tulle and
satin skirts in the ballroom, he had decided that she embodied as
obviously as her father, though in a different fashion, the qualities
which were most offensive both to his personal preferences and his
inherited standards of taste. The girl in her scarlet dress, with her dark
bobbed hair curling in on her neck, her candid ivory forehead, her
provoking blunt nose, her bright red lips, and the inquiring arch of her
black eyebrows over her gray-green eyes, had appeared to him absurdly
like a picture on the cover of some cheap magazine. He had heartily
disapproved of