Chapter 17

"That is not sincere!" cried he. "You may think it is, but it isn't. Look at me, Jane."

"I haven't been doing anything else since we met," laughed she.

"That's better," said he. "Let's not be solemn. Solemnity is pose, and when people are posing they get nowhere. You say I can make of you what I please. Do you mean that you are willing to become a woman of my class--to be that all your life--to bring up your children in that way--to give up your fashionable friends--and maid--and carriages--and Paris clothes--to be a woman who would not make my associates and their families uncomfortable and shy?"

She was silent. She tried to speak, but lifting her eyes before she began her glance encountered his and her words died upon her lips.

"You know you did not mean that," pursued he. "Now, I'll tell you what you did mean. You meant that after you and I were married--or engaged--perhaps you did not intend to go quite so far as marriage just yet."

The color crept into her averted face.

"Look at me!" he commanded laughingly.

With an effort she forced her eyes to meet his.

"Now--smile, Jane!"

His smile was contagious. The curve of her lips changed; her eyes gleamed.

"Am I not reading your thoughts?" said he.

"You are very clever, Victor," admitted she.

"Good. We are getting on. You believed that, once we were engaged, I would gradually begin to yield, to come round to your way of thinking. You had planned for me a career something like Davy Hull's--only freer and bolder. I would become a member of your class, but would pose as a representative of the class I had personally abandoned. Am I right?"

"Go on, Victor," she said.

"That's about all. Now, there are just two objections to your plan. The first is, it wouldn't work. My associates would be 'on to' me in a very short time. They are shrewd, practical, practically educated men--not at all the sort that follow Davy Hull or are wearing Kelly's and House's nose rings. In a few months I'd find myself a leader without a following--and what is more futile and ridiculous than that?"

"They worship you," said Jane. "They trust you implicitly. They know that whatever you did would be for their good."

He laughed heartily. "How little you know my friends," said he. "I am their leader only because I am working with them, doing what we all see must be done, doing it in the way in which we all see it must be done."

"But THAT is not power!" cried Jane.

"No," replied Victor. "But it is the career I wish--the only one I'd have. Power means that one's followers are weak or misled or ignorant. To be first among equals--that's worth while. The other thing is the poor tawdriness that kings and bosses crave and that shallow, snobbish people admire."

"I see that," said Jane. "At least, I begin to see it. How wonderful you are!"

Victor laughed. "Is it that I know so much, or is it that you know so little?"

"You don't like for me to tell you that I admire you?" said Jane, subtle and ostentatiously timid.

"I don't care much about it one way or the other," replied Victor, who had, when he chose, a rare ability to be blunt without being rude. "Years ago, for my own safety, I began to train myself to care little for any praise or blame but my own, and to make myself a very searching critic of myself. So, I am really flattered only when I win my own praise--and I don't often have that pleasure."

"Really, I don't see why you bother with me," said she with sly innocence--which was as far as she dared let her resentments go.

"For two reasons," replied he promptly. "It flatters me that you are interested in me. The second reason is that, when I lost control of myself yesterday, I involved myself in certain responsibilities to you. It has seemed to me that I owe it to myself and to you to make you see that there is neither present nor future in any relations between us."

She put out her hand, and before he knew what he was doing he had clasped it. With a gentle, triumphant smile she said: "THERE'S the answer to all your reasoning, Victor."

He released her hand. "AN answer," he said, "but not the correct answer." He eyed her thoughtfully. "You have done me a great service," he went on. "You have shown me an unsuspected, a dangerous weakness in myself. At another time--and coming in another way, I might have made a mess of my career--and of the things that have been entrusted to me." A long pause, then he added, to himself rather than to her, "I must look out for that. I must do something about it."

Jane turned toward him and settled herself in a resolute attitude and with a resolute expression. "Victor," she said, "I've listened to you very patiently. Now I want you to listen to me. What is the truth about us? Why, that we are as if we had been made for each other. I don't know as much as you do. I've led a much narrower life. I've been absurdly mis-educated. But as soon as I saw you I felt that I had found the man I was looking for. And I believe--I feel--I KNOW you were drawn to me in the same way. Isn't that so?"

"You--fascinated me," confessed he. "You--or your clothes--or your perfume."

"Explain it as you like," said she. "The fact remains that we were drawn together. Well--Victor, _I_ am not afraid to face the future, as fate maps it out for us. Are you?"

He did not answer.

"You--AFRAID," she went on. "No--you couldn't be afraid."

A long silence. Then he said abruptly: "IF we loved each other. But I know that we don't. I know that you would hate me when you realized that you couldn't move me. And I know that I should soon get over the infatuation for you. As soon as it became a question of sympathies--common tastes--congeniality--I'd find you hopelessly lacking."

She felt that he was contrasting her with some one else--with a certain some one. And she veiled her eyes to hide their blazing jealousy. A movement on his part made her raise them in sudden alarm. He had risen. His expression told her that the battle was lost--for the day. Never had she loved him as at that moment, and never had longing to possess him so dominated her willful, self-indulgent, spoiled nature. Yet she hated him, too; she longed to crush him, to make him suffer--to repay him with interest for the suffering he was inflicting upon her--the humiliation. But she dared not show her feelings. It would be idle to try upon this man any of the coquetries indicated for such cases--to dismiss him coldly, or to make an appeal through an exhibition of weakness or reckless passion.

"You will see the truth, for yourself, as you think things over," said he.

She rose, stood before him with downcast eyes, with mouth sad and sweet. "No," she said, "It's you who are hiding the truth from yourself. I hope--for both our sakes--that you'll see it before long. Good-by--dear." She stretched out her hand.

Hesitatingly he took it. As their hands met, her pulse beating against his, she lifted her eyes. And once more he was holding her close, was kissing her. And she was lying in his arms unresisting, with two large tears shining in the long lashes of her closed eyes.

"Oh, Jane--forgive me!" he cried, releasing her. "I must keep away from you. I will--I WILL!" And he was rushing down the steep slope--direct, swift, relentless. But she, looking after him with a tender, dreamy smile, murmured: "He loves me. He will come again. If not--I'll go and get him!"

To Jane Victor Dorn's analysis of his feeling toward her and of the reasons against yielding to it seemed of no importance whatever. Side by side with Selma's "One may not trifle with love" she would have put "In matters of love one does not reason," as equally axiomatic. Victor was simply talking; love would conquer him as it had conquered every man and every woman it had ever entered. Love--blind, unreasoning, irresistible--would have its will and its way.

And about most men she would have been right--about any man practically, of the preceding generation. But Victor represented a new type of human being--the type into whose life reason enters not merely as a theoretical force, to be consulted and disregarded, but as an authority, a powerful influence, dominant in all crucial matters. Only in our own time has science begun to make a notable impression upon the fog which formerly lay over the whole human mind, thicker here, thinner there, a mere haze yonder, but present everywhere. This fog made clear vision impossible, usually made seeing of any kind difficult; there was no such thing as finding a distinct line between truth and error as to any subject. And reason seemed almost as faulty a guide as feeling--was by many regarded as more faulty, not without justification.

But nowadays for some of us there are clear or almost clear horizons, and such fog banks as there are conceal from them nothing that is of importance in shaping a rational course of life. Victor Dorn was one of these emancipated few. All successful men form their lives upon a system of some kind. Even those who seem to live at haphazard, like the multitude, prove to have chart and compass and definite port in objective when their conduct is more attentively examined. Victor Dorn's system was as perfect as it was simple, and he held himself to it as rigidly as the father superior of a Trappist monastery holds his monks to their routine. Also, Victor had learned to know and to be on guard against those two arch-enemies of the man who wishes to "get somewhere"--self-excuse and optimism. He had got a good strong leash upon his vanity--and a muzzle, too. When things went wrong he instantly blamed HIMSELF, and did not rest until he had ferreted out the stupidity or folly of which HE had been guilty. He did not grieve over his failures; he held severely scientific post mortems upon them to discover the reason why--in order that there should not again be that particular kind of failure at least. Then, as to the other arch-enemy, optimism, he simply cut himself off from indulgence in it. He worked for success; he assumed failure. He taught himself to care nothing about success, but only about doing as intelligently and as thoroughly as he could the thing next at hand.

What has all this to do with his infatuation for Jane? It serves to show not only why the Workingmen's League was growing like a plague of gypsy moth, but also why Victor Dorn was not the man to be conquered by passion. Naturally, Jane, who had only the vaguest conception of the size and power of Victor Dorn's mind, could not comprehend wherein lay the difference between him and the men she read about in novels or met in her wanderings among the people of her own class in various parts of the earth. It is possible for even the humblest of us to understand genius, just as it is possible to view a mountain from all sides and get a clear idea of it bulk and its dominion. But the hasty traveler contents himself with a glance, a "How superb," and a quick passing on; and most of us are hasty travelers in the scenic land of intellectuality. Jane saw that he was a great man. But she was deceived by his frankness and his simplicity. She evoked in him only the emotional side of his nature, only one part of that.

Because it--the only phase of him she attentively examined--was so impressive, she assumed that it was the chief feature of the man.

Also, young and inexperienced women--and women not so young, and with opportunity to become less inexperienced but without the ability to learn by experience--always exaggerate the importance of passion. Almost without exception, it is by way of passion that a man and a woman approach each other. It is, of necessity, the exterior that first comes into view. Thus, all that youth and inexperience can know about love is its aspect of passion. Because Jane had again and again in her five grown-up years experienced men falling passionately in love with her, she fancied she was an expert in matters of love. In fact, she had still everything to learn.

On the way home she, assuming that the affair was as good as settled, that she and Victor Dorn were lovers, was busy with plans for the future. Victor Dorn had made a shrewd guess at the state of her mind. She had no intention of allowing him to pursue his present career. That was merely foundation. With the aid of her love and council, and of her father's money and influence, he--he and she--would mount to something really worth while--something more than the petty politics of a third rate city in the West. Washington was the proper arena for his talents; they would take the shortest route to Washington. No trouble about bringing him around; a man so able and so sensible as he would not refuse the opportunity to do good on a grand scale. Besides--he must be got away from his family, from these doubtless good and kind but certainly not very high class associates of his, and from Selma Gordon. The idea of his comparing HER with Selma Gordon! He had not done so aloud, but she knew what was in his mind. Yes, he must be taken far away from all these provincial and narrowing associations.

But all this was mere detail. The big problem was how to bring her father round. He couldn't realize what Victor Dorn would be after she had taken him in hand. He would see only Victor Dorn, the labor agitator of Remsen City, the nuisance who put mischievous motives into the heads of "the hands"--the man who made them think they had heads when they were intended by the Almighty to be simply hands. How reconcile him to the idea of accepting this nuisance, this poor, common member of the working class as a son-in-law, as the husband of the daughter he wished to see married to some one of the "best" families?

On the face of it, the thing was impossible. Why, then, did not Jane despair? For two reasons. In the first place, she was in love, and that made her an optimist. Somehow love would find the way. But the second reason--the one she hid from herself deep in the darkest sub-cellar of her mind, was the real reason. It is one matter to wish for a person's death. Only a villainous nature can harbor such a wish, can admit it except as a hastily and slyly in-crawling impulse, to be flung out the instant it is discovered. It is another matter to calculate--very secretly, very unconsciously--upon a death that seems inevitable anyhow. Jane had only to look at her father to feel that he would not be spared to her long. The mystery was how he had kept alive so long, how he continued to live from day to day. His stomach was gone; his whole digestive apparatus was in utter disorder. His body had shriveled until he weighed no more than a baby. His pulse was so feeble that even in the hot weather he complained of the cold and had to be wrapped in the heaviest winter garments. Yet he lived on, and his mind worked with undiminished vigor.

When Jane reached home, the old man was sitting on the veranda in the full sun. On his huge head was a fur cap pulled well down over his ears and intensifying the mortuary, skull-like appearance of his face. Over his ulster was an old-fashioned Scotch shawl such as men used to wear in the days before overcoats came into fashion. About his wasted legs was wrapped a carriage robe, and she knew that there was a hot-water bag under his feet. Beside him sat young Doctor Charlton, whom Jane had at last succeeded in inducing her father to try. Charlton did not look or smell like a doctor. He rather suggested a professional athlete, perhaps a better class prize fighter. The weazened old financier was gazing at him with a fascinated expression--admiring, envious, amused.

Charlton was saying:

"Yes, you do look like a dead one. But that's only another of your tricks for fooling people. You'll live a dozen years unless you commit suicide. A dozen years? Probably twenty."

"You ought to be ashamed to make sport of a poor old invalid," said Hastings with a grin.

"Any man who could stand a lunch of crackers and milk for ten years could outlive anything," retorted Charlton. "No, you belong to the old stock. You used to see 'em around when you were a boy. They usually coughed and wheezed, and every time they did it, the family used to get ready to send for the undertaker. But they lived on and on. When did your mother die?"

"Couple of years ago," said Hastings.

"And your father?"

"He was killed by a colt he was breaking at sixty-seven."

Charlton laughed uproariously. "If you took walks and rides instead of always sitting round, you never would die," said he. "But you're like lots of women I know. You'd rather die than take exercise. Still, I've got you to stop that eating that was keeping you on the verge all the time."

"You're trying to starve me to death," grumbled Hastings.

"Don't you feel better, now that you've got used to it and don't feel hungry?"

"But I'm not getting any nourishment."

"How would eating help you? You can't digest any more than what I'm allowing you. Do you think you were better off when you were full of rotting food? I guess not."

"Well--I'm doing as you say," said the old man resignedly.

"And if you keep it up for a year, I'll put you on a horse. If you don't keep it up, you'll find yourself in a hearse."

Jane stood silently by, listening with a feeling of depression which she could not have accounted for, if she would--and would not if she could. Not that she wished her father to die; simply that Charlton's confidence in his long life forced her to face the only alternative--bringing him round to accept Victor Dorn.

At her father's next remark she began to listen with a high beating heart. He said to Charlton:

"How about that there friend of yours--that young Dorn? You ain't talked about him to-day as much as usual."

"The last time we talked about him we quarreled," said Charlton. "It's irritating to see a man of your intelligence a slave to silly prejudices."

"I like Victor Dorn," replied Hastings in a most conciliatory tone. "I think he's a fine young man. Didn't I have him up here at my house not long ago? Jane'll tell you that I like him. She likes him, too. But the trouble with him--and with you, too--is that you're dreaming all the time. You don't recognize facts. And, so, you make a lot of trouble for us conservative men."

"Please don't use that word conservative," said Charlton. "It gags me to hear it. YOU'RE not a conservative. If you had been you'd still be a farm hand. You've been a radical all your life--changing things round and round, always according to your idea of what was to your advantage. The only difference between radicals like you robber financiers and radicals like Victor and me is that our ideas of what's to our advantage differ. To you life means money; to us it means health and comfort and happiness. You want the world changed--laws upset, liberty destroyed, wages lowered, and so on--so that you can get all the money. We want the world changed so that we can be healthy and comfortable and happy--securely so--which we can't be unless everybody is, or is in the way to being."

Jane was surprised to see that her father, instead of being offended, was amused and pleased. He liked his new doctor so well that he liked everything he said and did. Jane looked at Charlton in her friendliest way. Here might be an ally, and a valuable ally.

"Human nature doesn't change," said Hastings in the tone of a man who is stating that which cannot be disputed.

"The mischief it doesn't," said Charlton in prompt and vigorous dissent. "When conditions change, human nature has to change, has to adapt itself. What you mean is that human nature doesn't change itself. But conditions change it. They've been changing it very rapidly these last few years. Science--steam, electricity, a thousand inventions and discoveries, crowding one upon another--science has brought about entirely new and unprecedented conditions so rapidly that the changes in human nature now making and that must be made in the next few years are resulting in a series of convulsions. You old-fashioned fellows--and the political parties and the politicians--are in danger of being stranded. Leaders like Victor Dorn--movements like our Workingmen's League--they seem new and radical to-day. By to-morrow they'll be the commonplace thing, found everywhere--and administering the public affairs."

Jane was not surprised to see an expression of at least partial admission upon her father's face. Charlton's words were of the kind that set the imagination to work, that remind those who hear of a thousand and one familiar related facts bearing upon the same points. "Well," said Hastings, "I don't expect to see any radical changes in my time."

"Then you'll not live as long as I think," said Charlton. "We Americans advance very slowly because this is a big country and undeveloped, and because we shift about so much that no one stays in one place long enough to build up a citizenship and get an education in politics--which is nothing more or less than an education in the art of living. But slow though we are, we do advance. You'll soon see the last of Boss Kelly and Boss House--and of such gentle, amiable frauds as our friend Davy Hull."

Jane laughed merrily. "Why do you call him a fraud?" she asked.

"Because he is a fraud," said Charlton. "He is trying to confuse the issue. He says the whole trouble is petty dishonesty in public life. Bosh! The trouble is that the upper and middle classes are milking the lower class--both with and without the aid of the various governments, local, state and national. THAT'S the issue. And the reason it is being forced is because the lower class, the working class, is slowly awakening to the truth. When it completely awakens----" Charlton made a large gesture and laughed.

"What then?" said Hastings.

"The end of the upper and the middle classes. Everybody will have to work for a living."

"Who's going to be elected this fall?" asked Jane. "Your man?"

"Yes," said Doctor Charlton. "Victor Dorn thinks not. But he always takes the gloomy view. And he doesn't meet and talk with the fellows on the other side, as I do."

Hastings was looking out from under the vizor of his cap with a peculiar grin. It changed to a look of startled inquiry as Charlton went on to say:

"Yes, we'll win. But the Davy Hull gang will get the offices."

"Why do you think that?" asked old Hastings sharply.

Charlton eyed his patient with a mocking smile. "You didn't think any one knew but you and Kelly--did you?" laughed he.

"Knew what?" demanded Hastings, with a blank stare.

"No matter," said Charlton. "I know what you intend to do. Well, you'll get away with the goods. But you'll wish you hadn't. You old-fashioned fellows, as I've been telling you, don't realize that times have changed."

"Do you mean, Doctor, that the election is to be stolen away from you?" inquired Jane.

"Was that what I meant, Mr. Hastings?" said Charlton.

"The side that loses always shouts thief at the side that wins," said the old man indifferently. "I don't take any interest in politics."

"Why should you?" said the Doctor audaciously. "You own both sides. So, it's heads you win, tails I lose."

Hastings laughed heartily. "Them political fellows are a lot of blackmailers," said he.

"That's ungrateful," said Charlton. "Still, I don't blame you for liking the Davy Hull crowd better. From them you can get what you want just the same, only you don't have to pay for it."

He rose and stretched his big frame, with a disregard of conventional good manners so unconscious that it was inoffensive.

But Charlton had a code of manners of his own, and somehow it seemed to suit him where the conventional code would have made him seem cheap. "I didn't mean to look after your political welfare, too," said he. "But I'll make no charge for that."