Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson
The Builders
The sunset had faded slowly, and while Caroline sat there in the big chair, gazing out on the wintry garden, it seemed to her that the advancing twilight had become so thick that it stifled her. Then immediately she realized that it was not the twilight, but the obscurity in her own mind, that oppressed and enveloped her with these heavy yet intangible shadows. Her last illusion had perished, and she could not breathe because the smoke of its destruction filled the air. At the moment it seemed to her that life could never be exactly what it was before – that the glow and magic of some mysterious enchantment had vanished. Even the garden, with its frozen vegetation and its forlorn skeletons of summer shrubs emerging from mounds of snow, appeared to have undergone a sinister transformation from the ideal back to the actuality. This was the way she had felt years ago, on that autumn day at The Cedars.
"And he never defended himself – never once," she said after a silence.
"He never will, that's not his way," rejoined Mrs. Timberlake. "She knows he never will, and I sometimes think that makes matters worse."
As Caroline brooded over this, her face cleared until the light and animation returned. "I know him better," she murmured presently, "but everything else has become suddenly crooked."
"I've thought that at times before I stopped trying to straighten out things." Mrs. Timberlake had put down the muffler, and while she spoke, she smoothed it slowly and carefully over her knee. In the wan light her face borrowed a remote and visionary look, like a face gazing down through the thin, cold air of the heights. She had passed beyond mutable things, this look seemed to say, and had attained at last the bleak security of mind that is never disappointed because it expects nothing. "I reckon that's why I got into the habit of keeping my mouth shut, just because I was worrying myself sick all the time thinking how different things ought to be." A chill and wintry cheerfulness flickered across the arid surface of her manner. "But I don't now. I know there isn't any use, and I get a good deal of pleasure just out of seeing what will happen. Now, you take David and Angelica. I'm wondering all the time how it will turn out. David is a big man, but even if Angelica isn't smart, she's quick enough about getting anything she wants, and I believe she is beginning to want something she hasn't got."
"When I came I didn't like Mr. Blackburn." Though the barriers of the old lady's reserve had fallen, Caroline was struggling still against an instinct of loyalty.
"Well, I didn't like him once." Mrs. Timberlake had risen, and was looking down with her pitiful, tormented smile. "It took me a long time to find out the truth, and I want to spare you all I suffered while I was finding it out. I sometimes think that nobody's experience is worth a row of pins to any one else, but all the same I am trying to help you by telling you what I know. David has his faults. I'm not saying that he is a saint; but he has been the best friend I ever had, and I'm going to stand up for him, Angelica or no Angelica. There are some men, my poor father used to say, that never really show what they are because they get caught by life and twisted out of shape, and I reckon David is one of these. Father said, though I don't like heathen terms, that it was the fate of a man like David always to appear in the wrong and yet always to be in the right. That's a queer way of putting it, but father was a great scholar – he translated the "Iliad" before he was thirty – and I reckon he knew what he was talking about. Life was against those men, he told me once, but God was for them, and they never failed to win in the end." With the last words she faltered and broke off abruptly. "I have been talking a great deal more than I ought to, but when once I begin I never know when to stop. Angelica must have come home long ago." Bending over she laid her cheek against Caroline's hair. "You won't think of going away now, will you?"
Surprised and touched by the awkward caress, Caroline looked up gratefully. "No, I shan't think of going away now."
BOOK SECOND
REALITIES
CHAPTER I
In Blackburn's Library
THE fire was burning low, and after Blackburn had thrown a fresh log on the andirons, he sat down in one of the big leather chairs by the hearth, and watched the flames as they leaped singing up the brick chimney. It was midnight – the clock in the hall was just striking – and a few minutes before, Angelica had gone languidly upstairs, after their belated return from a dinner in town. The drive home had been long and dreary, and he could still see the winter landscape, sketched in vivid outlines of black and white, under a pale moon that was riding high in the heavens. Road, fields, and houses, showed as clearly as a pen and ink drawing, and against this stark background his thoughts stood out with an abrupt and startling precision, as if they had detached themselves, one by one, from the naked forms on the horizon. There was no chance of sleep, for the sense of isolation, which had attacked him like physical pain while he drove home with Angelica, seemed to make his chaotic memories the only living things in a chill and colourless universe.
Though it was midnight, he had work to do before he went up to bed – for he had not yet given his final answer to Sloane. Already Blackburn had made his decision. Already he had worked out in his own mind the phrases of the letter; yet, before turning to his writing-table, he lingered a moment in order to weigh more carefully the cost of his resolve. It was not an age when political altruism was either mentally convincing or morally expedient, and the quality of his patriotism would be estimated in the public mind, he was aware, by the numbers of his majority. Sloane, he was sure, had been sounding him as a possible candidate in some future political venture – yet, while he sat there, it was not of Sloane that he was thinking. Slowly the depression and bitterness gathered to a single image, and looked out upon him from the pure reticence of Angelica's features. It was as if his adverse destiny – that destiny of splendid purpose and frustrated effort – had assumed for an instant the human form through which it had wrought its work of destruction.
"Well, after all, why should I decline? It is what I have always wanted to do, and I am right."
The room was very still, and in this stillness the light quivered in pools on the brown rugs and the brown walls and the old yellowed engravings. From the high bookshelves, which lined the walls, the friendly covers of books shone down on him, with the genial responsiveness that creeps into the aspect of familiar inanimate things. Over the mantelpiece hung the one oil painting in the room, a portrait of his mother as a girl, by an unknown painter, who drew badly, but had a genuine feeling for colour. The face was small and heart-shaped, like some delicately tinted flower that has only half opened. The hair lay in bands of twilight on either side of the grave forehead, and framed the large, wistful eyes, which had a flower-like softness that made him think of black pansies. Though the mouth was pink and faintly smiling, it seemed to him to express an infinite pathos. It was impossible for him to believe that his mother – the woman with the pallid cameo-like profile and the saintly brow under the thin dark hair – had ever faced life with that touching, expectant smile.
There had been a strong soul in that fragile body, but her courage, which was invincible, had never seemed to him the courage of happiness. She had accepted life with the fortitude of the Christian, not the joy of the Pagan; and her piety was associated in his mind with long summer Sundays, with old hymns played softly, with bare spotless rooms, and with many roses in scattered alabaster vases. Her intellect, like her character, he recalled as a curious blending of sweetness and strength. If the speculative side of her mind had ever existed, life had long ago hushed it, for her capacity for acquiescence – for unquestioning submission to the will of God – was like the glory of martyrdom. Yet, within her narrow field, the field in which religion reigned as a beneficent shade, she had thought deeply, and it seemed to Blackburn that she had never thought harshly. Her sympathy was as wide as her charity, and both covered the universe. So exquisitely balanced, so finely tempered, was her judgment of life, that after all these years, for she had died while he was still a boy, he remembered her as one whose understanding of the human heart approached the divine. "She always wanted me to do something like this," he thought, "to look forward – to stand for the future. I remember…"
From the light and warmth of the room there streamed the sunshine and fragrance of an old summer. After a hot day the sun was growing faint over the garden, and the long, slim shadows on the grass were so pale that they quivered between light and darkness, like the gauzy wings of gigantic dragon flies. Against a flushed sky a few bats were wheeling. Up from the sun-steeped lawn, which was never mown, drifted the mingled scents of sheepmint and box; and this unforgotten smell pervaded the garden and the lane and the porch at the back of the house, where he had stopped, before bringing home the cows, to exchange a word with his mother. The lattice door was open, and she stood there, in her black dress, with the cool, dim hall behind her.
"Mother," he said, "I have been reading about William Wallace. When I grow up, I want to fight kings."
She smiled, and her smile was like one of the slow, sad hymns they sang on Sunday afternoons. "When you grow up there may be no kings left to fight, dear."
"Will they be dead, mother?"
"They may be. One never knows, my son."
All the romance faded suddenly out of the world. "Well, if there are any left," he answered resolutely, "I am going to fight them."
He could still see her face, thin and sad, and like the closed white flowers he found sometimes growing in hollows where the sun never shone. Only her eyes, large and velvet black, seemed glowing with hope.
"There are only three things worth fighting for, my son," she said, "Your love, your faith, and your country. Nothing else matters."
"Father fought for his country, didn't he?"
"Your father fought for all three." She waited a moment, and then went on more slowly in a voice that sounded as if she were reciting a prayer, "This is what you must never forget, my boy, that you are your father's son, and that he gave his all for the cause he believed in, and counted it fair service."
The scene vanished like one of the dissolving views of a magic lantern, and there rose before him a later summer, and another imperishable memory of his boyhood…
It was an afternoon in September – one of those mellow afternoons when the light is spun like a golden web between earth and sky, and the grey dust of summer flowers rises as an incense to autumn. The harvest was gathered; the apples were reddening in the orchard; and along the rail fence by the roadside, sumach and Virginia creeper were burning slowly, like a flame that smoulders in the windless blue of the weather. Somewhere, very far away, a single partridge was calling, and nearer home, from the golden-rod and life-ever-lasting, rose the slow humming of bees.
He lay in the sun-warmed grass, with his bare feet buried in sheepmint. On the long benches, from which the green paint had rubbed off, some old men were sitting, and among them, a small coloured maid, in a dress of pink calico, was serving blackberry wine and plates of the pale yellow cake his mother made every Saturday. One of the men was his uncle, a crippled soldier, with long grey hair and shining eyes that held the rapt and consecrated vision of those who have looked through death to immortality. His crutch lay on the grass at his feet, and while he sipped his wine, he said gravely:
"A new generation is springing up, David's generation, and this must give, not the South alone, but the whole nation, a leader."
At the words the boy looked up quickly, his eyes gleaming, "What must the leader be like, uncle?"
The old soldier hesitated an instant. "He must, first of all, my boy, be predestined. No man whom God has not appointed can lead other men right."
"And how will he know if God has appointed him?"
"He will know by this – that he cannot swerve in his purpose. The man whom God has appointed sees his road straight before him, and he does not glance back or aside." His voice rose louder, over the murmur of the bees, as if it were chanting, "If the woods are filled with dangers, he does not know because he sees only his road. If the bridges have fallen, he does not know because he sees only his road. If the rivers are impassable, he does not know because he sees only his road. From the journey's beginning to its end, he sees only his road…"
A log, charred through the middle, broke suddenly, scattering a shower of sparks. The multitudinous impressions of his boyhood had gathered into these two memories of summer, and of that earlier generation which had sacrificed all for a belief. It was like a mosaic in his mind, a mosaic in which heroic figures waited, amid a jewelled landscape, for the leader whom God had appointed.
The room darkened while he sat there, and from outside he heard the crackling of frost and the ceaseless rustle of wind in the junipers. On the hearthrug, across the glimmering circle of the fire, he watched those old years flock back again, in all the fantastic motley of half-forgotten recollections. He saw the long frozen winters of his childhood, when he had waked at dawn to do the day's work of the farm before he started out to trudge five miles to the little country school, where the stove always smoked and the windows were never opened. Before this his mother had taught him his lessons, and his happiest memories were those of the hours when he sat by her side, with an antiquated geography on his knees, and watched her long slender fingers point the way to countries of absurd boundaries and unpronounceable names. She had taught him all he knew – knowledge weak in science, but rich in the invisible graces of mind and heart – and afterwards, in the uninspired method of the little school, he had first learned to distrust the kind of education with which the modern man begins the battle of life. Homespun in place of velvet, stark facts instead of the texture of romance! The mornings when, swinging his hoe, he had led his chattering band of little negroes into the cornfields, had been closer to the throbbing pulse of experience.
When he was fourteen the break had come, and his life had divided. His mother had died suddenly; the old place had been sold for a song; and the boy had come up to Richmond to make his way in a world which was too indifferent to be actually hostile. At first he had gone to work in a tobacco factory, reading after hours as long as the impoverished widow with whom he lived would let the gas burn in his room. Always he had meant to "get on"; always he had felt the controlling hand of his destiny. Even in those years of unformed motives and misdirected energies, he had been searching – searching. The present had never been more than a brief approach to the future. He had looked always for something truer, sounder, deeper, than the actuality that enmeshed him.
Suddenly, while he sat there confronting the phantom he had once called himself, he was visited by a rush of thought which seemed to sweep on wings through his brain. Yet the moment afterwards, when he tried to seize and hold the vision that darted so gloriously out of the shining distance, he found that it had already dissolved into a sensation, an apprehension, too finely spun of light and shadow to be imprisoned in words. It was as if some incalculable discovery, some luminous revelation, had brushed him for an instant as it sped onward into the world. Once or twice in the past such a gleaming moment had just touched him, leaving him with this vague sense of loss, of something missing, of an infinitely precious opportunity which had escaped him. Yet invariably it had been followed by some imperative call to action.
"I wonder what it means now," he thought, "I suppose the truth is that I have missed things again." The inspiration no longer seemed to exist outside of his own mind; but under the clustering memories, he felt presently a harder and firmer consciousness of his own purpose, just as in his boyhood, he would sometimes, in ploughing, strike a rock half buried beneath the frail bloom of the meadows. It was the sense of reality so strong, so solid, that it brought him up, almost with a jerk of pain, from the iridescent cobwebs of his fancy; and this reality, he understood after a minute, was an acute perception of the great war that men were fighting on the other side of the world. His knowledge of these terrible and splendid issues had broken through the perishable surface of thought. The illusion vanished like the bloom of the meadows; what remained was the bare rocky structure of truth. He had not meant to think of this now. He had left the evening free for his work – for the decision which must be made sooner or later; yet, through some mysterious trend of thought, every personal choice of his life seemed to become a part of the impersonal choice of humanity. The infinite issues had absorbed the finite intentions. Every decision was a ripple in the world battle between the powers of good and evil, of light and darkness. And he understood suddenly that the great abstractions for which men lay down their lives are one and indivisible – that there was not a corner of the earth where this fight for liberty could not be fought.
"I can fight here as well as over there," he thought, "if I am only big enough."
Now that his mind had got down to solid facts, to steady thinking, it worked quickly and clearly. It would be a hard fight, with all the odds against him, and yet the very difficulties appealed to him. Out of the dense fog of political theories, out of the noise and confusion of the Babel of many tongues, he could discern the dim framework of a purer social order. The foundation of the Republic was sound, he believed, only the eyes of the builders had failed, the hands of the builders had trembled. That the ideal democracy was not a dream, but an unattained reality, he had never doubted. The failure lay not in the plan, but in the achievement. There was obliquity of vision, there was even blindness, for the human mind was still afflicted by the ancient error which had brought the autocracies of the past to destruction. Men and nations had still to learn that in order to preserve liberty it must first be surrendered – that there is no spiritual growth except through sacrifice. But it must be surrendered only to a broader, an ever-growing conception of what liberty means.
As in the sun-warmed grass on those Sunday afternoons, he still dreamed of America leading the nations. The great Virginians of the past had been Virginians first; the great Virginians of the future would be Americans. The urgent need in America, as he saw it, was for unity; and the first step toward this unity, the obliteration of sectional boundaries. In this, he felt, Virginia must lead the states. As she had once yielded her land to the nation, she must now yield her spirit. She must point the way by act, not by theory; she must vote right as well as think right.
"And to vote right," he said presently, thinking aloud, "we must first live right. People speak of a man's vote as if it were an act apart from the other acts of his life – as if they could detach it from his universal conceptions. There was a grain of truth in Uncle Carter's saying that he could tell by the way a man voted whether or not he believed in the immortality of the soul." It was Uncle Carter, he remembered, who had described the chronic malady of American life as a disease of manner that had passed from the skin into the body politic. "Take my word for it," the old soldier had said, "there is no such thing as sound morals without sound manners, for manners are only the outer coating – the skin, if you like – of morals. Without unselfish consideration for others there can be no morality, and if you have unselfish consideration in your heart, you will have good manners though you haven't a coat on your back. Order and sanity and precision, and all the other qualities we need most in this Republic, are only the outward forms of unselfish consideration for others, and patriotism, in spite of its plumed attire, is only that on a larger scale. After all, your country is merely a tremendous abstraction of your neighbour." Well, perhaps the old chap had been talking sense half the time when people smiled at his words!
Rising from his chair, he pushed back the last waning ember, and stood gazing down on the ashes.
"I will do my best," he said slowly. "I will fight to the last ditch for the things I believe in – for cleaner politics, for constructive patriotism, and for a fairer democracy. These are the big issues, and the little ends will flow from them."
As he finished, the clock in the hall struck twice and stopped, and at the same instant the door of the library opened slowly, and, to his amazement, he saw Mary standing beyond the threshold. She carried a candle in her hand, and by the wavering light, he saw that she was very pale and that her eyes were red as if she had been weeping.
"The lights were out. I thought you had gone upstairs," she said, with a catch in her voice.
"Do you want anything?"
"No, I couldn't sleep, so I came for a book."
With a hurried movement, she came over to the table and caught up a book without glancing at the title.
"Are you ill?" he asked. "Is anything the matter?"
"No, nothing. I am well, only I couldn't sleep."
"There is no trouble about Alan, is there? Have you quarrelled?"
"Oh, no, we haven't quarrelled." She was plainly impatient at his questioning. "Alan is all right. Really, it is nothing."
Though his affection for her was deep and strong, they had never learned to be demonstrative with each other, perhaps because they had been separated so much in childhood and early youth. It was almost with a hesitating gesture that he put out his hand now and touched her hair.
"My dear, you know you can trust me."
"Yes, I know." The words broke from her with a sob, and turning hastily away, she ran out of the room and back up the stairs.
