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Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson
The Builders

CHAPTER X
The Light on the Road

WHEN Caroline entered the house, the sound of clinking plates and rattling knives told her that the boarders had already assembled at supper; and it surprised her to discover that she was hungry for the first time in months. Happiness had made everything different, even her appetite for the commonplace fare Mrs. Dandridge provided. It was just as if an intense physical pain had suddenly ceased to throb, and the relief exhilarated her nerves, and made her eager for the ordinary details which had been so irksome a few hours before. Life was no longer distorted and abnormal. Her pride and courage had come back to her; and she understood at last that it was not the unfulfilment of love, but the doubt of its reality, that had poisoned her thoughts. Since she knew that it was real, she could bear any absence, any pain. The knowledge that genuine love had been hers for an hour, that she had not been cheated out of her heritage, that she had not given gold for sand, as she had done as a girl – the knowledge of these things was the chain of light that would bind together all the dull years before her. Already, though her pulses were still beating rapturously, she found that the personal values were gradually assuming their right position and importance in her outlook. There were greater matters, there were more significant facts in the world to-day than her own particular joy or sorrow. She must meet life, and she must meet it with serenity and fortitude. She must help where the immediate need was, without thought of the sacrifice, without thought even of her own suffering. How often in the past eight years had she told herself, "Love is the greatest good in the world, but it is not the only good. There are lives filled to overflowing in which love has no place." Now she realized that her love must be kept like some jewel in a secret casket, which was always there, always hidden and guarded, yet seldom brought out into the daylight and opened. "I must think of it only for a few minutes of the day," she said, "only when I am off duty, and it will not interfere with my work." And she resolved that she would keep this pledge with all the strength of her will. She would live life whole, not in parts.

Without taking off her hat, she went into the dining-room, and tried to slip unnoticed into her chair at a small table in one corner. The other seats were already occupied, and a pretty, vivacious girl she had known at the hospital, looked up and remarked, "You look so well, Miss Meade. Have you been for a walk?"

"Yes, I've been for a walk. That is why I am late."

Down the centre of the room, beneath the flickering gas chandelier and the fly-specked ceiling, there was a long, narrow table, and at the head of it, Mrs. Dandridge presided with an air as royal as if she were gracing a banquet. She was a stately, white-haired woman, who had once been beautiful and was still impressive – for adversity, which had reduced her circumstances and destroyed her comfort, had failed to penetrate the majestic armour of her manner. In the midst of drudgery and turmoil and disaster, she had preserved her mental poise as some persons are able to preserve their equilibrium in a rocking boat. Nothing disturbed her; she was as superior to accidents as she was to inefficiency or incompetence. Her meals were never served at the hour; the food was badly cooked; the table was seldom tidy; and yet her house was always crowded, and there was an unimpeachable tradition that she had never received a complaint from a boarder.

As she sat now at the head of her unappetizing table, eating her lukewarm potato soup as if it were terrapin, she appeared gracious, charming, supported by the romantic legends of her beauty and her aristocratic descent. If life had defeated her, it was one of those defeats which the philosopher has pronounced more triumphant than victories.

"I spent the afternoon at the Red Cross rooms," she remarked, regal, serene, and impoverished. "That is why supper was a little late to-night. Since I can give nothing else, I feel that it is my duty to give my time. I even ask myself sometimes if I have a moral right to anything we can send over to France?"

Inadvertently, or through some instinct of tact which was either divine or diabolical, she had touched a responsive cord in the heart of every man or woman at the table. There was no motive beyond impulsive sympathy in the words, for she was as incapable of deliberate design as she was of systematic economy; but her natural kindliness appeared to serve her now more effectively than any Machiavellian subtlety could have done. The discontented and dejected look vanished from the faces about her; the distinguished widow, with two sons in the army, stopped frowning at the potato soup; the hungry but polite young man, who travelled for a clothing house, put down the war bread he was in the act of passing; and the studious-looking teacher across the table lost the critical air with which she had been regarding the coloured waitress. As Caroline watched the change, she asked herself if the war, which was only a phrase to these people a few months ago, had become at last a reality? "We are in it now, body and soul," she thought, "we are in it just as France and England have been in it from the beginning. It is our war as much as theirs because it has touched our hearts. It has done what nothing has been able to do before – it has made us one people."

Into these different faces at Mrs. Dandridge's table, a single idea had passed suddenly, vitalizing and ennobling both the bright and the dull features – the idea of willing sacrifice. Something greater than selfish needs or desires had swept them out of themselves on a wave of moral passion that, for the moment, exalted them like a religious conversion. What had happened, Caroline knew, was that the patriotism in one of the most patriotic nations on earth had been stirred to the depths.

The talk she heard was the kind that was going on everywhere. She had listened to it day after day, as it echoed and re-echoed from the boarding-houses, the hospitals, and the streets – and through the long, bitter months, when coal was scarce and heatless and meatless days kept the blood down, she was aware of it, as of a persistent undercurrent of cheerful noise. There were no complaints, but there were many jests, and the characteristic Virginian habit of meeting a difficult situation with a joke, covered the fuel administration with ridicule. For weeks ice lay on the pavements, a famine in coal threatened; and as the winter went by, bread, instead of growing better, became steadily worse. But, after all, people said, these discomforts and denials were so small compared to the colossal sacrifices of Europe. Things were done badly, but what really counted was that they were done. Beneath the waste and extravagance and incompetence, a tremendous spirit was moving; and out of the general aspect of bureaucratic shiftlessness, America was gathering her strength. In the future, as inevitably as history develops from a fact into a fable, the waste would be exalted into liberality, the shiftlessness into efficiency. For it is the law of our life that the means pass, and the end remains, that the act decays, but the spirit has immortality.

For the next six months, when the calls were many and nurses were few, Caroline kept her jewel in the secret casket. She did not think of herself, because to think of herself was the beginning of weakness, and she had resolved long ago to be strong. When all was said, the final result of her life depended simply on whether she overcame obstacles or succumbed to them. It was not the event, she knew, that coloured one's mental atmosphere; it was the point of view from which one approached it. "It is just as easy to grow narrow and bitter over an unfulfilled love as it is to be happy and cheerful," she thought, "and whether it is easy or not, I am not going to let myself grow narrow and bitter. Of course, I might have had more, but, then, I might have had so much less – I might not have had that one hour – or his friendship. I am going to be thankful that I have had so much, and I am going to stop thinking about it at all. I may feel all I want to deep down in my soul, but I must stop thinking. When the whole country is giving up something, I can at least give up selfish regret."

The winter passed, filled with work, and not unhappily, for time that is filled with work is seldom unhappy. From Blackburn she had heard nothing, though in April a paragraph in the newspaper told her that Angelica was about to sue for a divorce in some Western state; and Daisy Colfax, whom she met one day in the waiting-room of the hospital, breezily confirmed the vague announcement.

"There really wasn't anything else that she could do, you know. We were all expecting it. Poor Angelica, she must have had to overcome all her feelings before she could make up her mind to take a step that was so public. Her delicacy is the most beautiful thing about her – except, as Robert always insists, the wonderful way she has of bringing out the best in people."

As the irony of this was obviously unconscious, Caroline responded merely with a smile; but that same afternoon, when Mrs. Timberlake paid one of her rare visits, she repeated Daisy's remark.

"Do you suppose she really believes what she says?"

"Of course she doesn't. Things don't stop long enough in her mind to get either believed or disbelieved. They just sift straight through without her knowing that they are there."

They were in the ugly little green-papered room at the hospital, and Caroline was holding Letty tight in her arms, while she interpolated cryptic phrases into the animated talk.

"Oh, Miss Meade, if you would only come back! Do you think you will come back when mother and father get home again? I wrote to father the other day, but I had to write in pencil, and I'm so afraid it will all fade out when it goes over the ocean. Will it get wet, do you think?"

"I am sure it won't, dear, and he will be so glad to hear from you. What did you tell him?"

"I told him how cold it was last winter, and that I couldn't write before because doing all the doctor told me took up every single minute, and I had had to leave off my lessons, and that the new nurse made them very dull, anyhow. Then I said that I wanted you to come back, and that I hadn't been nearly so strong since you went away."

She was looking pale, and after a few moments, Caroline sent her, with a pot of flowers, into an adjoining room.

"I don't like Letty's colour," she said anxiously to the housekeeper, in the child's absence.

"She is looking very badly. It is the hard winter, I reckon, but I am not a bit easy about her. She hasn't picked up after the last cold, and we don't seem able to keep her interested. Children are so easily bored when they are kept indoors, and Letty more easily than most, for she has such a quick mind. I declare I never lived through such a winter – at least not since I was a child in the Civil War, and of course that was a thousand times worse. But we couldn't keep Briarlay warm, even the few rooms that we lived in. It was just like being in prison – and a cold one at that! I can't help wishing that David would come home, for I feel all the time as if anything might happen. I reckon the winter put my nerves on edge; but the war seems to drag on so slowly, and everybody has begun to talk in such a pessimistic way. It may sound un-Christian, but I sometimes feel as if I could hardly keep my hands off the Germans. I get so impatient of the way things are going, I'd like to get over in France, and kill a few of them myself. It does look, somehow, as if the Lord had forgotten that vengeance belongs to Him."

"Doctor Boland told me yesterday that he thought it would last at least five years longer."

"Then it will outlast us, that's all I've got to say." She cleared her throat, and added with tart irrelevancy, "I had a letter from Angelica a few weeks ago."

"Is it true? What the paper said?"

"There wasn't a word about it in the letter. She wrote because she wanted me to send her some summer clothes she had left here, and then she asked me to let her know about Letty. She said she had been operated on in Chicago a month ago, and that she was just out of the hospital, and feeling like the wreck of herself. Everybody told her, she added, how badly she looked, and the letter sounded as if she were very much depressed and out of sorts."

"Do you think she may really have cared for Mr. Wythe?"

Mrs. Timberlake shook her head. "It wasn't that, my dear. She just couldn't bear to think of Mary's having more than she had. If she had ever liked David, it might have been easier for her to stand it, but she never liked him even when she married him; and though a marriage may sometimes manage very well without love, I've yet to see one that could get along without liking."

She rose as Letty came back from her errand, and a minute or two later, Caroline tucked the child in the car, and stood watching while it started for Briarlay.

The air was mild and fragrant, for after the hard, cold winter, spring had returned with a profusion of flowers. In the earth, on the trees, and in the hearts of men and women, April was bringing warmth, hope, and a restoration of life. The will to be, to live, and to struggle, was released, with the flowing sap, from the long imprisonment of winter. In the city yards the very grass appeared to shoot up joyously into the light, and the scent of hyacinths was like the perfume of happiness. The afternoon was as soft as a day in summer, and this softness was reflected in the faces of the people who walked slowly, filled with an unknown hope, through the warm sunshine.

"Love is the greatest good in the world, but it is not the only good," repeated Caroline, wondering who had first said the words.

It was then, as she turned back to enter the hospital, that the postman put some letters into her hand, and looking down, she saw that one was from Blackburn.

CHAPTER XI
The Letter

FOR the rest of the afternoon she carried the letter hidden in her uniform, where, from time to time, she could pause in her task, and put her hand reassuringly on the edge of the envelope. Not until evening, when she had left her patient and was back in her room, did she unfold the pages, and begin slowly to read what he had written. The first sentences, as she had expected, were stiff and constrained – she had known that until he could speak freely he would speak no word of love to her – but, as soon as he had passed from the note of feeling to the discussion of impersonal issues, he wrote as earnestly and spontaneously as he had talked to Sloane on that October afternoon at Briarlay. Another woman, she realized, might have been disappointed; but the ironic past had taught her that emotion, far from being the only bond with a man like Blackburn, was perhaps the least enduring of the ties that held them together. His love, if it ever came to her, would be the flower, not of transient passion, but of the profound intellectual sympathy which had first drawn their minds, not their hearts, to each other. Both had passed through the earlier fires of racial impulse; both had been scorched, not warmed by the flames; and both had learned that the only permanent love is the love that is rooted as deeply in thought as in desire.

In France.

MY DEAR CAROLINE:

I have tried to write to you many times, but always something has held me back – some obscure feeling that words would not help things or make them easier, and that your friendship could be trusted to understand all that I was obliged to leave to the silence. You will see how badly I have put this, even though I have rewritten the beginning of this letter several times. But it is just as if I were mentally tongue-tied. I can think of nothing to say that it does not seem better to leave unsaid. Then I remembered that when we parted I told you I should write of what I thought, not of what I felt, and this makes it simpler. When I relax my mental grip, the drift of things whirls like a snow-storm across my mind, and I grow confused and bewildered —

In the last year I have thought a great deal about the questions before us. I have tried to look at them from a distance and on the outside, as well as from a closer point of view. I have done my best to winnow my convictions from the ephemeral chaff of opinions; and though I am groping still, I am beginning to see more clearly the road we must travel, if we are ever to come out of the jungle of speculation into the open field of political certainty. Behind us – behind America, for it is of my own country that I am thinking – the way is strewn with experiments that have met failure, with the bones of political adventurers who have died tilting at the windmill of opportunity. For myself, I see now that, though some of my theories have survived, many of them have been modified or annulled by the war. Two years ago you heard me tell Sloane that our most urgent need was of unity – the obliteration of sectional lines. I still feel this need, but I feel it now as a necessary part of a far greater unity, of the obliteration of world boundaries of understanding and sympathy. This brings us to the vital question before us as a people – the development of the individual citizen within the democracy, of the national life within the international. Here is the problem that America must solve for the nations, for only America, with her larger views and opportunities, can solve it. For the next generation or two this will be our work, and our chance of lasting service. Our Republic must stand as the great example of the future, as the morning star that heralds the coming of a new day. It is the cause for which our young men have died. With their lives they have secured our democracy, and the only reward that is worthy of them is a social order as fair as their loyalty and their sacrifice.

And so we approach our great problem – individuality within democracy, the national order within the world order. Already the sectional lines, which once constituted an almost insurmountable obstacle, have been partly dissolved in the common service and sacrifice. Already America is changing from a mass of divergent groups, from a gathering of alien races, into a single people, one and indivisible in form and spirit. The war has forged us into a positive entity, and this entity we must preserve as far as may be compatible with the development of individual purpose and character. Here, I confess, lies the danger; here is the political precipice over which the governments of the past have almost inevitably plunged to destruction. And it is just here, I see now, in the weakest spot of the body politic, that the South, and the individualism of the South, may become, not a national incubus, but the salvation of our Republic. The spirit that fought to the death fifty years ago for the sovereignty of the States, may act to-day as a needed check upon the opposing principle of centralization in government, the abnormal growth of Federal power; and in the end may become, like the stone which the builders rejected, the very head of the corner. As I look forward to-day, the great hope for America appears to be the interfusion of the Northern belief in solidarity with the ardent Southern faith in personal independence and responsibility. In this blending of ideals alone, I see the larger spirit that may redeem nationality from despotism.

I am writing as the thoughts rush through my mind, with no effort to clarify or co-ordinate my ideas. From childhood my country has been both an ideal and a passion with me; and at this hour, when it is facing new dangers, new temptations, and new occasions for sacrifice, I feel that it is the duty of every man who is born with the love of a soil in his heart and brain, to cast his will and his vision into the general plan of the future. To see America avoid alike the pitfall of arbitrary power and the morass of visionary socialism; to see her lead the nations, not in the path of selfish conquest, but, with sanity and prudence, toward the promised land of justice and liberty – this is a dream worth living for, and worth dying for, God knows, if the need should ever arise.

The form of government which will yield us this ideal union of individualism with nationalism, I confess, lies still uninvented or undiscovered. Autocracies have failed, and democracies have been merely uncompleted experiments. The republics of the past have served mainly as stepping-stones to firmer autocracies or oligarchies. Socialism as a state of mind, as a rule of conduct, as an expression of pity for the disinherited of the earth – Socialism as the embodiment of the humane idea, is wholly admirable. So far as it is an attempt to establish the reign of moral ideas, to apply to the community the command of Christ, 'Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them;' so far as it expresses the obscure longing in the human heart for justice and right in the relations of mankind – so far as it embodies the instincts of compassion and sympathy, it must win the approval of every man who has looked deeply into human affairs. The evil of Socialism lies not in these things; nor does it rest in the impracticability of its theory – in the generous injustice of "robbing the rich to pay the poor." The evil of it consists in the fact that it would lend itself in practice even more readily than democracy, to the formation of that outer crust of officialism which destroys the blood and fibre of a nation. Socialism obeying the law of Christ might be a perfect system – but, then, so would despotism, or democracy, or any other form of government man has invented.

But all theories, however exalted, must filter down, in application, through the brackish stream of average human nature. The State cannot rest upon a theory, any more than it can derive its true life from the empty husks of authority. The Republic of man, like the Kingdom of God, is within, or it is nowhere.

To-day, alone among the nations, the American Republic stands as the solitary example of a State that came into being, not through the predatory impulse of mankind, but, like its Constitution, as an act of intellectual creation. In this sense alone it did not grow, it was made; in this sense it was founded, not upon force, but upon moral ideas, upon everlasting and unchanging principles. It sprang to life in the sunrise of liberty, with its gaze on the future – on the long day of promise. It is the heir of all the ages of political experiment; and yet from the past, it has learned little except the things that it must avoid.

There was never a people that began so gloriously, that started with such high hearts and clear eyes toward an ideal social contract. Since then we have wandered far into the desert. We have followed mirage after mirage. We have listened to the voice of the false prophet and the demagogue. Yet our Republic is still firm, embedded, as in a rock, in the moral sense of its citizens. For a democracy, my reason tells me, there can be no other basis. When the State seeks other authority than the conscience of its citizens, it ceases to be a democracy, and becomes either an oligarchy or a bureaucracy. Then the empty forms of hereditary right, or established officialdom, usurp the sovereignty of moral ideas, and the State decays gradually because the reservoir of its life has run dry.

For our Republic, standing as it does between hidden precipices, the immediate future is full of darkness. We have shown the giant's strength, and we must resist the temptation to use it like a giant. When the war is won, we shall face the vital and imminent danger, the danger that is not material, but spiritual – for what shall it profit a nation, if it shall gain the whole world, and lose its own soul? In a time of danger arbitrary power wears always a benevolent aspect; and since man first went of his own will into bondage, there has never been absolutism on earth that has not masqueraded in the doctrine of divine origin – whether it be by the custom of kingship, or by the voice of the people. War, which is an abnormal growth on the commonwealth, may require abnormal treatment; but history shows that it is easier to surrender rights in war than it is to recover them in peace, and a temporary good has too often developed into a permanent evil. The freedom of the seas will be a poor substitute for the inalienable rights of the individual American. A League of Nations cannot insure these; it is doubtful even if it can insure peace on earth and good will toward men. Men can hate as bitterly and fight as fiercely within a league as outside of one.

We shall go forth, when victory is won, to enlighten the world with liberty and with far-seeing statesmanship; but just as the far-sighted physical vision perceives distant objects more clearly than near ones, there is, also, a world vision of duty which overlooks immediate obligations while it discerns universal responsibilities. In this mental view the present is invariably sacrificed to the future, the personal rights to the general security. Yet to the more normal faculty of vision, it would appear that the perfect whole must result from the perfect parts; and that only by preserving our individual liberties can we make a League of Free Nations. International treaties are important, but national morality is vital – for the treaty that is not confirmed by the national honour is only a document.

And now, after a year's thinking, I have come back to the conviction from which I started – that the only substantial groundwork of a republic is the conscience of its citizens. The future of our democracy rests not in the Halls of Congress, but in the cradle; and to build for permanency, we must build, not on theory, but on personal rectitude. We hear a great deal said now, and said unthinkingly, about the personal values not counting in a war that is fought for world freedom. Yet there was never an age, and I say this with certainty, in which personality was of such supreme significance as it is to-day. For this, after all, is the end to which my thinking has brought me – nationalism is nothing, internationalism is nothing, unless it is an expression of individual aspirations and ideals – for the end of both nationalism and internationalism is the ultimate return to racial character. Cultivate the personal will to righteousness, teach the citizen that he is the State, and the general good may take care of itself.

And so our first duty appears to be, not national expansion, but the development of moral fibre. Before we teach other nations to stand alone, we must learn to walk straight; before we sow the seeds of the future, we must prepare our own ground for planting. National greatness is a flower that has often flourished over a sewer of class oppression and official corruption; and the past teaches us that republics, as well as autocracies, may be founded on slavery and buttressed by inequalities. As I look ahead now, I see that we may win freedom for smaller nations, and yet lose our own liberties to a Federal power that is supported by a civilian army of office-holders. For power is never more relentless in exercise than when it has transformed the oppressed of yesterday into the oppressors of to-day; and it is well to remember that democracy means not merely the tyranny of the many instead of the few; it means equal obligations and responsibilities as well as equal rights and opportunities. If we have failed to reach this ideal, it has been because the individual American has grasped at opportunity while he evaded responsibility; and the remedy for the failure lies not in a change of institutions, but in a change of heart. We must realize that America is a faith as well as a fact – that it is, for many, a divine hypothesis. We must realize that it means the forward-looking spirit, the fearless attitude of mind, the belief in the future, the romantic optimism of youth, the will to dare and the nerve to achieve the improbable. This is America, and this is our best and greatest gift to the world – and to the League of Free Nations.

With the end of the war the danger will be threatening; and we must meet it as we met the feebler menace of Prussian militarism – but we must meet it and conquer it with intangible weapons. No nation has ever fought for a greater cause; no nation has ever fought more unselfishly; and no nation has ever drawn its sword in so idealistic a spirit. We have entered this war while our hearts were full, while the high and solemn mood was upon us. If we keep to this mood, if we seek in victory the immaterial, not the material advantage, if our only reward is the opportunity for world service, and our only conquered territory the provinces of the free spirit – if we keep fast to this ideal, and embody its meaning in our national life and actions, then we may save the smaller nations because we have first saved our Republic. For, if it is a day of peril, it is also a day of glory. The seal of blood is upon us, but it is the prophetic mark of the future, and it has sealed us for the union of justice with liberty. We have given our dead as a pledge of the greater America – the America of invisible boundaries. There is but one monument that we can build in remembrance, and that monument is a nobler Republic. If we lose the inspiration of the ideal, if we turn aside from the steady light of democracy to pursue the ignis fatuus of imperialistic enterprise or aggression, then our dead will have died in vain, and we shall leave our building unfinished. For those who build on the dead must build for immortality. Physical boundaries cannot contain them; but in the soul of the people, if we make room for them, they will live on forever, and in the spirit we may still have part and place with them.