Chapter 9. September Roses

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_ CHAPTER IX. SEPTEMBER ROSES

The afternoon sunshine streamed through the dull gold curtains into the old print shop where Corinna sat in her tapestry-covered chair between the tea-table and the log fire. She was alone for the moment; and lying back in the warmth and fragrance of the room, she let her gaze rest lovingly on one of the English mezzotints over which a stray sunbeam quivered. The flames made a pleasant whispering sound over the cedar logs; her favourite wide-open creamy roses with golden hearts scented the air; and the delicate China tea in her cup was drawn to perfection. As she lay back in the big chair but one thing disturbed her serenity--and that one thing was within. She had everything that she wanted, and for the hour, at least, she was tired of it all. The mood was transient, she knew. It would pass because it was alien to the clear bracing air of her mind; but while it lasted she told herself that the present had palled on her because she had looked beneath the vivid surface of illusion to the bare structure of life. Men had ceased to interest her because she knew them too well. She knew by heart the very machinery of their existence, the secret mental springs which moved them so mechanically; and she felt to-day that if they had been watches, she could have taken them apart and put them together again without suspending for a minute the monotonous regularity of their works. Even Gideon Vetch, who might have held a surprise for her, had differed from the rest in one thing only: he had not seen that she was beautiful! And it wasn't that she was breaking. To-day because of her mood of depression, she appeared drooping and faded; but that night, a week ago, in her velvet gown and her pearls, she had looked as handsome as ever. The truth was simply that Vetch had glanced at her without seeing her, as he might have glanced at the gilded sheaves of wheat on a picture frame. He had been so profoundly absorbed in his own ideas that she had been nothing more individual than one of an audience. If he were to meet her in the street he would probably not recognize her. And this was a man who had never before seen a woman whose beauty had passed into history, a man who had risen to his place through what the Judge had described with charitable euphemism, as "unusual methods." "The odd part about Vetch," the Judge had added meditatively on the drive home, "is that he doesn't attempt to disguise the kind of thing that we of the old school would call--well, to say the least--extraordinary. He is as outspoken as Mirabeau. I can't make it out. It may be, of course, that he has a better reading of human nature than we have, and that he knows such gestures catch the eye, like long hair or a red necktie. It is very much as if he said--'Yes, I'll steal if I'm driven to it, but--confound it!--I won't lie!'"

After all, the sting to her vanity had been too slight to leave an impression. There must be another cause for the shadow that had fallen over her spirits. Even a reigning beauty of thirty years could scarcely expect to be invincible; and she had known too much homage in the past to resent what was obviously a lack of discrimination. Her disappointment went deeper than this, for it had its source in the stories she had heard of Vetch that sounded original and dramatic. She had imagined a personality that was striking, spectacular, or at least interesting; and the actual Gideon Vetch had seemed to her merely unimpressive and ordinary. Beside John Benham (as the thought of Benham returned to her, her spirit rose on wings out of the shadow), beside John Benham, in the drawing-room after dinner, Vetch had appeared at a disadvantage that was almost ridiculous; and, as Stephen Culpeper had hastened to point out, this was merely a striking illustration of the damning contrast between the Governor's chequered political career and Benham's stainless record of service.

A smile curved her lips as she gazed at the quivering sunbeams. Was that deep instinct for perfection, the romantic vision of things as they ought to be, awaking again? Did the starry flower bloom not in the dream, but in reality? The passion to create beauty, to bring happiness, which had been extinguished for years, burned afresh in her heart. Yes, as long as there was beauty, as long as there was nobility of spirit, she could fight on as one who believed in the future.

A shadow darkened the window, and a moment afterward there was a fall of the old silver knocker on her door. She thought at first--the shadow had seemed so young--that it was Stephen; but when she opened the door, she saw, with a lovely flush, that it was John Benham.

"You expected me?" he asked, raising her hand to his lips.

"Yes, I knew that you would come," she answered, and the flush died away slowly as she turned back to the fire. In the moment of recognition all the despondency had vanished so utterly that it had not left even a memory. He had brought not only peace, but youth and happiness back to her eyes.

He came in as impressively as he presented himself to an audience; and with the glow of pleasure still in her heart, she found her keen and observant mind watching him almost as if he were a stranger. This had been her misfortune always, the ardent heart joined to the critical judgment, the spectator chained eternally to the protagonist. She received a swift impression that he had prepared his words and even his gestures, the kiss on her fingers. Yet, in spite of this suggestion of the actor, or because of it, he possessed, she felt, great distinction. The straight backward sweep of his hair; the sharp clearness of his profile; the steady serenity of his gray eyes; the ease and suppleness and indolent strength of his tall thin figure--all these physical details expressed the reserves and inhibitions of generations. The only flaw that she could detect was that dryness of soul that she had noticed before, as of soil that has been too heavily drained. She knew that he excelled in all the virtues that are monumental and public, that he was an honourable opponent, a scrupulous defender of established rules and precedents. He would always reach the goal, but his race would never carry him beyond the end of the course; he would always fulfil the law, but he would never give more than the exact measure; he would always fight for the risen Christ, but he would never have followed the humble bearer of the Cross. His strength and weakness were the kind which had profoundly influenced her life. He represented in her world the conservative principle, the accepted standard, the acknowledged authority, custom, stability, reason, and moderation.

As he sat down in front of the fire, he looked at her with a gentle possessive gaze.

"Of course you have never sold a print," he remarked in a laughing tone, and she responded as flippantly.

"Of course!"

"Why didn't you call it a collection?"

"Because people wouldn't come."

"Then why didn't you keep them at home where you have so much that is fine?"

She laughed. "Because people couldn't come. I mean the people I don't know. I have a fancy for the people I have never met."

"On the principle that the unknown is the desirable."

She nodded. "And that the desirable is the unattainable."

His gray eyes were warmed by a fugitive glow. "I shouldn't have put it that way in your case. You appear to have everything."

"Do I? Well, that twists the sentence backward. Shall we say that the attainable is the undesirable?"

"Surely not. Can you have ceased already to desire these lovely things? Could that piece of tapestry lose its charm for you, or that Spanish desk, or those English prints, or the old morocco of that binding? Do you feel that the colours in that brocade at your back could ever become meaningless?"

"I am not sure. Wouldn't it be possible to look at it while you were seeing something else, something so drab that it would take the colour out of all beauty?" She was looking at him over the tea-table, and while she asked the question she raised a lump of sugar in the quaint old sugar tongs she had brought home from Florence.

He shook his head. "I am denied sugar. Has it ever occurred to you that middle age ought to be called the age of denial?" Then his tone changed. "But I wonder if you begin to realize how fortunate you are? You have the collector's instinct and the means to gratify it. To discover with you is to possess--don't you understand the blessing of that? You love beauty as a favoured daughter, not as one of the disinherited who can only peer through the windows of her palace."

"But you also--you love beauty as I do."

"But I can't own it--not as you do." He was speaking frankly. "I haven't the means. At least what I have I have made myself, and therefore I guard it more carefully. It is only those who have once been poor who are really under the curse of money, for that curse is the inability to understand that money is less valuable than anything else on earth that you happen to need or desire. Now to me the most terrible thing on earth is not to be without beauty, but to be without money--"

She smiled. "You are talking like Gideon Vetch."

He caught at the name quickly. "Like Gideon Vetch? You mean that I sound ignoble?"

The laughter in his eyes made him look almost boyish, and she felt that she had come suddenly close to him. After all he was very attractive.

"Is he ignoble?" she asked. "I have seen him only once, and that was at the dinner a week ago."

He looked at her intently. "I should like to know what you think."

"I hardly know--but--well, I must confess that I was disappointed."

"You expected something better?"

She hesitated over her answer. "I expected something different. I suppose I looked for the dash of purple--or at least of red--in his appearance."

"And he seemed ordinary?"

"In a way--yes. His features are not striking, and yet when he talks to you and gets interested in his own ideas, he sheds a kind of warmth that is like magnetism. I couldn't analyse it, but it is there."

"That, I suppose, is the charm of which they talk. Warmth, or perhaps heat, is a better word for it. Fortunately I'm proof against it because of what you might call an asbestos temperament; but I've seen it catch fire in a crowd, and it sweeps over an audience like a blaze over a prairie. It is a cheap kind of oratory; yet it is a power in unscrupulous hands--and Vetch is unscrupulous."

"You believe that?"

"I know it. It has been proved again and again that he will stoop to any means in order to advance his ideas, which mean of course his ambition. Oh, I'm not denying that in the main he is sincere, that he believes in his phrases. As a matter of fact one has only to look at his appointments, those that he is able to make by his own authority! There isn't a doubt in the world that he deliberately sold his office in exchange for his election--"

So this was one honest man's view of Gideon Vetch! John Benham believed this accusation, for some infallible intuition told her that Benham would never have repeated it, even as a rumour, if he had not believed it. Her father's genial defence of the Governor; his ironic aristocratic sympathy with the radical point of view appeared superficial and unconvincing beside Benham's moral repudiation. And yet what after all was the simple truth about Gideon Vetch? What was the true colour of that variable personality, which appeared to shift and alter according to the temperament or the convictions of each observer? She had never known two men who agreed about Vetch, except perhaps Benham and his disciple, Stephen Culpeper. Each man saw Vetch differently, and was this because each man saw in the great demagogue only the particular virtue or vice for which he was looking, the reflection of personal preferences or aversions? It seemed to her suddenly that the Governor, whom she had thought commonplace, towered an immense vague figure in a cloud of misinterpretation and misunderstanding. His followers believed in him; his opponents distrusted him; but was this not true of every political leader since the beginning of politics? The power to inspire equally devotion and hatred had been throughout history the authentic sign of the saviour and of the destroyer. Her curiosity, which had waned, flared up more strongly than ever.

"I should like to know," she said aloud, "what he is truthfully?"

Benham laughed as he rose to go. "Do you think he can be anything truthfully?"

"Oh, yes, even if it is only a demagogue."

"Only a demagogue! My dear Corinna, the demagogue is the one everlasting and unalterable American institution. He is the idol of the Senate chamber; the power behind the Constitution."

"But what does he really stand for--Vetch, I mean?"

"Ask him. He would enjoy telling you."

"Would he enjoy telling me the truth?"

With the laughter still in his eyes Benham drew nearer and stood looking down on her. "Oh, I don't mean that he is pure humbug. I haven't a doubt, as I told you, that he believes, sufficiently at least for election purposes, in the fallacies that he advocates, even in the old age pension, the minimum, or more accurately, the maximum wage, and of course in what doesn't sound so Utopian since we have experimented with it, that favourite dogma of the near-Socialists, the Government ownership of railroads. His main theory, however, appears to be some far-fetched abstraction which he calls the humanizing of industry--you've heard that before! Mere bombast, you see, but the kind of thing that is dangerous in a crowd. It is the catchpenny politics that has been the curse of our country."

"And of course he is not a gentleman." Corinna's voice was regretful. "I may be old-fashioned, but I can't help feeling that the Governor ought to be a gentleman. That sounds like General Plummer, I know," she concluded apologetically.

"The archaic cult of the gentleman? Well, I like to think that in Virginia it still has a few obscure followers. It is a prejudice that I dare to admit only when I am not on the platform, for the belief in the gentleman has become a kind of underground religion, like the worship in the Catacombs."

Her eyes had grown wistful when she answered: "It is the price we pay for democracy."

"The price we pay is the reign of social justice in theory, and in practice the rule of the Gideon Vetches of history. Oh, I admit that it may all work out in the end! That is my political creed, you know--that everything and anything may work out in the end. If I stood simply for tradition without progress, I should long ago have been driven to the wall."

"I feel as you do," she said after a moment, "and yet I am curious to see what will become of our experimental Governor."

"And I also. The man may have executive ability, and it is possible that he may give us an efficient administration. But, of course, it is merely a stepping-stone for his inordinate greed for power. His vanity has been inflamed by success, and he sees the Senate, it may be even the Presidency, ahead of him."

Though she smiled there was a note of earnestness in her voice. "Well, why not? There was once a rail splitter--"

"Oh, I know. But the rail splitter was born a president; and it is a far cry to a circus rider who was not born even a gentleman."

"Perhaps. Yet, right or wrong, hasn't the war stretched a little the safety net of our democracy? Isn't it just possible to-day that we might find a circus rider who was born a president too?" Then before he could toss back her questions she asked quickly, "After all, he didn't actually ride, did he?"

Benham shrugged his shoulders, a gesture he had acquired in France. "I've heard so, but I don't know. They tell queer tales of his early years. That was before the golden age of the movies, you see; and I suspect that the movies rather than the war introduced the mock heroic into politics."

He was still standing at her side, looking down into her upraised eyes, which made him think of brown velvet. For a long pause after speaking he remained silent, drinking in the fragrance of the room, the whispering of the flames, and the dreamy loveliness of Corinna's expression. A change had come over her face. In the flushed light she looked young and elusive; and it seemed to him that, beneath the glowing tissue of flesh, he gazed upon an indestructible beauty of spirit.

"Do you know what I was thinking?" he asked presently. "I was thinking that I'd known all this before--that I'd been waiting for it always--the firelight on these splendid colours, the smell of the roses, the sound of the flames, and the way you looked up at me with that memory in your eyes. 'I have been here before'."

A quiver as faint as the shadow of a flower crossed her face. "Yes, I remember. It is an odd feeling. I suppose every one has felt it at times--only each one of us likes to think that he is the particular instance."

"It is trite, I know," he said with a smile, "but feeling is never very original, is it? Only thought is new."

"But I would rather have feeling, wouldn't you?" she asked in a low voice, and sat waiting in a lovely attitude, prepared without and within, for the moment that was approaching. There was no excitement in such things now, she had had too much experience; but there was an unending interest.

"Then it isn't too late?" he asked quickly; and again after a pause in which she did not answer: "Corinna, is it too late?"

For a minute longer she looked up at him in silence. The glow was still in her eyes; the smile was still on her lips; and it seemed to him that she was wrapped in some enchantment which wrought not in actual life but in allegory--that the light in which she moved belonged less to earth than to Botticelli's springtime. Was romance, after all, he thought sharply, the only reality? Could one never escape it?

While he looked down on her she had stirred, as if she were awaking from a dream, or a memory, and stretched out her hand.

"Is it ever too late," she responded, "as long as there is any happiness left in the world?"

She smiled as she answered him; but suddenly her smile faded and that faint shadow passed again over her face. In the very moment when he had bent toward her, there had drifted before her gaze the soft anxious eyes of Alice Rokeby, and the look in them as they followed John Benham that evening a week ago.

"Oh, my dear," said Benham softly. Then his voice broke and he drew back hurriedly, for a figure had darkened the low window, and a minute afterward the door opened and Patty Vetch entered the room.

"The latch was not fastened, so I came in," she began, and stopped as her look fell on Benham. "I--I hope you don't mind," she added in confusion. _

Read next: Chapter 10. Patty And Corinna

Read previous: Chapter 8. The World And Patty

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