Chapter 21

She had acquired a superficial knowledge of business--enough to enable her to understand what the various items in the long, long schedule of her holdings meant. Symbols of her importance, of her power. She had studied the "great ladies" she had met in her travels and visitings. She had been impressed by the charm of the artistic, carefully cultivated air of simplicity and equality affected by the greatest of these great ladies as those born to wealth and position. To be gentle and natural, to be gracious--that was the "proper thing." So, she now adopted a manner that was if anything too kindly. Her pose, her mask, behind which she was concealing her swollen and still swelling pride and sense of superiority, as yet fitted badly. She "overacted," as youth is apt to do. She would have given a shrewd observer--one not dazzled by her wealth beyond the power of clear sight--the impression that she was pitying the rest of mankind, much as we all pity and forbear with a hopeless cripple.

But the average observer would simply have said: "What a sweet, natural girl, so unspoiled by her wealth!"--just as the hopeless cripple says, "What a polite person," as he gets the benefit of effusive good manners that would, if he were shrewd, painfully remind him that he was an unfortunate creature.

Of all the weeds that infest the human garden snobbishness, the commonest, is the most prolific, and it is a mighty cross breeder, too--modifying every flower in the garden, changing colors from rich to glaring, changing odors from perfumes to sickening-sweet or to stenches. The dead hands of Martin Hastings scattered showers of shining gold upon his daughter's garden; and from these seeds was springing a heavy crop of that most prolific of weeds.

She was beginning to resent Charlton's manner--bluff, unceremonious, candid, at times rude. He treated women exactly as he treated men, and he treated all men as intimates, free and easy fellow travelers afoot upon a dusty, vulgar highway. She had found charm in that manner, so natural to the man of no pretense, of splendid physical proportions, of the health of a fine tree. She was beginning to get into the state of mind at which practically all very rich people in a civilized society sooner or later arrive--a state of mind that makes it impossible for any to live with or near them except hirelings and dependents. The habit of power of any kind breeds intolerance of equality of level intercourse. This is held in check, often held entirely in check, where the power is based upon mental superiority; for the very superiority of the mind keeps alive the sense of humor and the sense of proportion. Not so the habit of money power. For money power is brutal, mindless. And as it is the only real power in any and all aristocracies, aristocracies are inevitably brutal and brutalizing.

If Jane had been poor, or had remained a few years longer--until her character was better set--under the restraining influence of her unfrilled and unfrillable father, her passion for power, for superiority would probably have impelled her to develop her mind into a source of power and position. Fate abruptly gave her the speediest and easiest means to power known in our plutocratic civilization. She would have had to be superhuman in beauty of character or a genius in mind to have rejected the short and easy way to her goal and struggled on in the long and hard--and doubtful--way.

She did not herself appreciate the change within herself. She fancied she was still what she had been two weeks before. For as yet nothing had occurred to enable her to realize her changed direction, her changed view of life. Thus, she was still thinking of Victor Dorn as she had thought of him; and she was impatient to see him. She was now free FREE! She could, without consulting anybody, have what she wanted. And she wanted Victor Dorn.

She had dropped from her horse and with her arm through the bridle was strolling along one of the quieter roads which Victor often took in his rambles. It was a tonic October day, with floods of sunshine upon the gorgeous autumnal foliage, never more gorgeous than in that fall of the happiest alternations of frost and warmth. She heard the pleasant rustle of quick steps in the fallen leaves that carpeted the byroad. She knew it was he before she glanced; and his first view of her face was of its beauty enhanced by a color as delicate and charming as that in the leaves about them.

She looked at his hands in which he was holding something half concealed. "What is it?" she said, to cover her agitation.

He opened his hands a little wider. "A bird," said he. "Some hunter has broken its wing. I'm taking it to Charlton for repairs and a fair start for its winter down South."

His eyes noted for an instant significantly her sombre riding costume, then sought her eyes with an expression of simple and friendly sympathy. The tears came to her eyes, and she turned her face away. She for the first time had a sense of loss, a moving memory of her father's goodness to her, of an element of tenderness that had passed out of her life forever. And she felt abjectly ashamed--ashamed of her relief at the lifting of the burden of his long struggle against death, ashamed of her miserable wranglings with Martha and Billy's wife, ashamed of her forgetfulness of her father in the exultation over her wealth, ashamed of the elaborately fashionable mourning she was wearing--and of the black horse she had bought to match. She hoped he would not observe these last flauntings of the purely formal character of a grief that was being utilized to make a display of fashionableness.

"You always bring out the best there is in me," said she.

He stood silently before her--not in embarrassment, for he was rarely self-conscious enough to be embarrassed, but refraining from speech simply because there was nothing to say.

"I haven't heard any of the details of the election," she went on. "Did you come out as well as you hoped?"

"Better," said he. "As a result of the election the membership of the League has already a little more than doubled. We could have quadrupled it, but we are somewhat strict in our requirements. We want only those who will stay members as long as they stay citizens of Remsen City. But I must go on to Charlton or he'll be out on his rounds."

She caught his glance, which was inclined to avoid hers. She gave him a pleading look. "I'll walk with you part of the way," she said.

He seemed to be searching for an excuse to get away. Whether because he failed to find it or because he changed his mind, he said: "You'll not mind going at a good gait?"

"I'll ride," said she. "It's not comfortable, walking fast in these boots."

He stood by to help her, but let her get into the saddle alone. She smiled down at him with a little coquetry. "Are you afraid to touch me--to-day?" she asked.

He laughed: "The bird IS merely an excuse," he admitted. "I've got back my self-control, and I purpose to keep it."

She flushed angrily. His frankness now seemed to her to be flavored with impertinent assurance. "That's amusing," said she, with an unpleasant smile. "You have an extraordinary opinion of yourself, haven't you?"

He shrugged his shoulders as if the subject did not interest him and set off at a gait that compelled her horse to a rapid walk. She said presently:

"I'm going to live at the old place alone for the present. You'll come to see me?"

He looked at her. "No," he said. "As I told you a moment ago, that's over. You'll have to find some one else to amuse you--for, I understand perfectly, Jane, that you were only doing what's called flirting. That sort of thing is a waste of time--for me. I'm not competent to judge whether it's a waste for you."

She looked coldly down at him. "You have changed since I last saw you," she said. "I don't mean the change in your manner toward me. I mean something deeper. I've often heard that politics makes a man deteriorate. You must be careful, Victor."

"I must think about that," said he. "Thank you for warning me."

His prompt acceptance of her insincere criticism made her straightway repentant. "No, it's I that have changed," she said. "Oh, I'm horrid!--simply horrid. I'm in despair about myself."

"Any one who thinks about himself is bound to be," said he philosophically. "That's why one has to keep busy in order to keep contented." He halted. "I can save a mile and half an hour by crossing these fields." He held the wounded bird in one hand very carefully while he lifted his hat.

She colored deeply. "Victor," she said, "isn't there any way that you and I can be friends?"

"Yes," replied he. "As I told you before, by becoming one of us. Those are impossible terms, of course. But that's the only way by which we could be of use to each other. Jane, if I, professing what I do profess, offered to be friends with you on any other terms, you'd be very foolish not to reject my offer. For, it would mean that I was a fraud. Don't you see that?"

"Yes," she admitted. "But when I am with you I see everything exactly as you represent it."

"It's fortunate for you that I'm not disposed to take advantage of that--isn't it?" said he, with good-humored irony.

"You don't believe me!"

"Not altogether," he confessed. "To be quite candid, I think that for some reason or other I rouse in you an irresistible desire to pose. I doubt if you realize it--wholly. But you'd be hard pressed just where to draw the line between the sincere and the insincere, wouldn't you--honestly?"

She sat moodily combing at her horse's mane.

"I know it's cruel," he went on lightly, "to deny anything, however small, to a young lady who has always had her own way. But in self-defense I must do it."

"Why DO I take these things from you?" she cried, in sudden exasperation. And touching her horse with her stick, she was off at a gallop.

IX

From anger against Victor Dorn, Jane passed to anger against herself. This was soon followed by a mood of self-denunciation, by astonishment at the follies of which she had been guilty, by shame for them. She could not scoff or scorn herself out of the infatuation. But at least she could control herself against yielding to it. Recalling and reviewing all he had said, she--that is, her vanity--decided that the most important remark, the only really important remark, was his declaration of disbelief in her sincerity. "The reason he has repulsed me--and a very good reason it is--is that he thinks I am simply amusing myself. If he thought I was in earnest, he would act very differently. Very shrewd of him!"

Did she believe this? Certainly not. But she convinced herself that she believed it, and so saved her pride. From this point she proceeded by easy stages to doubting whether, if Victor had taken her at her word, she would have married him. And soon she had convinced herself that she had gone so far only through her passion for conquest, that at the first sign of his yielding her good sense would have asserted itself and she could have retreated.

"He knew me better than I knew myself," said she--not so thoroughly convinced as her pride would have liked, but far better content with herself than in those unhappy hours of humiliation after her last talk with him.

From the beginning of her infatuation there had been only a few days, hardly more than a few hours, when the voice of prudence and good sense had been silenced. Yes, he was right; they were not suited to each other, and a marriage between them would have been absurd. He did belong to a different, to a lower class, and he could never have understood her. Refinement, taste, the things of the life of luxury and leisure were incomprehensible to him. It might be unjust that the many had to toil in squalor and sordidness while the few were privileged to cultivate and to enjoy the graces and the beauties; but, unjust or in some mysterious way just, there was the fact. Her life was marked out for her; she was of the elect. She would do well to accept her good fortune and live as the gods had ordained for her.

If Victor had been different in that one respect! ... The infatuation, too, was a fact. The wise course was flight--and she fled.

That winter, in Chicago and in New York, Jane amused herself--in the ways devised by latter day impatience with the folly of wasting a precious part of the one brief life in useless grief or pretense of grief. In Remsen City she would have had to be very quiet indeed, under penalty of horrifying public sentiment. But Chicago and New York knew nothing of her grief, cared nothing about grief of any kind. People in deep mourning were found in the theaters, in the gay restaurants, wherever any enjoyment was to be had; and very sensible it was of them, and proof of the sincerity of their sorrow--for sincere sorrow seeks consolation lest it go mad and commit suicide--does it not?

Jane, young, beautiful, rich, clever, had a very good time indeed--so good that in the spring, instead of going back to Remsen City to rest, she went abroad. More enjoyment--or, at least, more of the things that fill in the time and spare one the necessity of thinking.

In August she suddenly left her friends at St. Moritz and journeyed back to Remsen City as fast as train and boat and train could take her. And on the front veranda of the old house she sat herself down and looked out over the familiar landscape and listened to the katydids lulling the woods and the fields, and was bored and wondered why she had come.

In a reckless mood she went down to see Victor Dorn. "I am cured," she said to herself. "I must be cured. I simply can't be small and silly enough to care for a country town labor agitator after all I've been through--after the attentions I've had and the men of the world I've met. I'm cured, and I must prove it to myself ."

In the side yard Alice Sherrill and her children and several neighbor girls were putting up pears and peaches, blackberries and plums. The air was heavy with delicious odors of ripe and perfect fruit, and the laughter, the bright healthy faces, the strong graceful bodies in all manner of poses at the work required made a scene that brought tears to Jane's eyes. Why tears she could not have explained, but there they were. At far end of the arbor, looking exactly as he had in the same place the year before, sat Victor Dorn, writing. He glanced up, saw her! Into his face came a look of welcome that warmed her chilled heart.

"Hel-LO!" he cried, starting up. "I AM glad to see you."

"I'm mighty glad to be back," said she, lapsing with keen pleasure into her native dialect.

He took both her hands and shook them cordially, then looked at her from head to foot admiringly. "The latest from the Rue de la Paix, I suppose?" said he.

They seated themselves with the table between them. She, under cover of commonplaces about her travels, examined him with the utmost calmness. She saw every point wherein he fell short of the men of her class--the sort of men she ought to like and admire. But, oh, how dull and stale and narrow and petty they were, beside this man. She knew now why she had fled. She didn't want to love Victor Dorn, or to marry him--or his sort of man. But he, his intense aliveness, his keen, supple mind, had spoiled her for those others. One of them she could not marry. "I should go mad with boredom. One can no more live intimately with fashion than one can eat gold and drink diamonds. And, oh, but I am hungry and thirsty!"

"So you've had a good time?" he was saying.

"Superb," replied she. "Such scenery--such variety of people. I love Europe. But--I'm glad to be home again."

"I don't see how you can stand it," said Victor.

"Why?" inquired she in surprise.

"Unless I had an intense personal interest in the most active kind of life in a place like this, I should either fly or take to drink," replied he. "In this world you've either got to invent occupation for yourself or else keep where amusements and distractions are thrust at you from rising till bed-time. And no amusements are thrust at you in Remsen City."

"But I've been trying the life of being amused," said Jane, "and I've got enough."

"For the moment," said Victor, laughing. "You'll go back. You've got to. What else is there for you?"

Her eyes abruptly became serious. "That's what I've come home to find out," said she. Hesitatingly, "That's why I've come here to-day."

He became curiously quiet--stared at the writing before him on the table. After a while he said:

"Jane, I was entirely too glad to see you to-day. I had----"

"Don't say that," she pleaded. "Victor, it isn't a weakness----"

His hand resting upon the table clenched into a fist and his brows drew down. "There can be no question but that it is a weakness and a folly," he pushed on. "I will not spoil your life and mine. You are not for me, and I am not for you. The reason we hang on to this is because each of us has a streak of tenacity. We don't want each other, but we are so made that we can't let go of an idea once it has gotten into our heads."

"There is another reason," she said gently. "We are, both of us, alone--and lonesome, Victor."

"But I'm not alone. I'm not lonesome----" And there he abruptly halted, to gaze at her with the expression of awakening and astonishment. "I believe I'm wrong. I believe you're right," he exclaimed. "I had never thought of that before."

"You've been imagining your work, your cause was enough," she went on in a quiet rational way that was a revelation--and a self-revelation--of the real Jane Hastings. "But it isn't. There's a whole other side of your nature--the--the--the private side--that's the expression--the private side. And you've been denying to it its rights."

He reflected, nodded slowly. "I believe that's the truth," he said. "It explains a curious feeling I've had--a sort of shriveling sensation." He gazed thoughtfully at her, his face gradually relaxing into a merry smile.

"What is it?" asked she, smiling in turn.

"We've both got to fall in love and marry," said he. "Not with each other, of course--for we're not in any way mated. But love and marriage and the rest of it--that's the solution. I don't need it quite as much as you do, for I've got my work. But I need it. Now that I see things in the right light I wonder that I've been so stupidly blind. Why do we human beings always overlook the obvious?"

"It isn't easy to marry," said Jane, rather drearily. "It isn't easy to find some one with whom one would be willing to pass one's life. I've had several chances--one or two of them not entirely mercenary, I think. But not one that I could bring myself to accept."

"Vanity--vanity," said Victor. "Almost any human being is interesting and attractive if one will stop thinking about oneself and concentrate on him or her."

She smiled. "It's evident you've never tried to fall in love."

"The nearest I ever came to it was with you," replied he. "But that was, of course, out of the question."

"I don't admit that," said she, with an amusing kind of timid obstinacy.

"Let's be honest and natural with each other," urged he. "Now, Jane, admit that in your heart of hearts you feel you ought not to marry me."

Her glance avoided his.

"Come--own up!" cried he.

"I have thought of that side of it," she conceded.

"And if I hadn't piqued you by thinking of it, too, you'd never have lingered on any other side of it," said he. "Well! Now that we've cleared the ground--there's Davy. He's to be nominated by the Republicans for Governor next week."

"Davy? I had almost forgotten him. I'll think of Davy--and let you know ... And you? Who is there for you?"

"Oh--no one you know. My sister has recommended several girls from time to time. I'll see."

Jane gave the freest and heartiest laugh that had passed her lips in more than a year. It was thus free and unrestrained because he had not said what she was fearing he would say--had not suggested the woman nearest him, the obvious woman. So eager was she to discover what he thought of Selma, that she could hardly restrain herself from suggesting her. Before they could say anything more, two men came to talk with him. Jane could not but leave.

She dined that night at Mrs. Sherlock's--Mrs. Sherlock was Davy's oldest sister. Davy took her in, they talked--about his career--through dinner, and he walked home with her in the moonlight. He was full of his approaching nomination. He had been making what is known as a good record, as mayor. That is, he had struck out boldly at sundry petty abuses practised by a low and comparatively uninfluential class of exploiters of the people. He had been so busy with these showy trifles that there had been no time for the large abuses. True, he had publicly warned the gas company about its poor gas, and the water company about its unwholesome water for the low-lying tenement districts, and the traction company about the fewness and filthiness of its cars. The gas company had talked of putting in improved machinery; the water company had invited estimates on a filtration plant; the traction company had said a vague something about new cars as soon as car manufacturers could make definite promises as to delivery. But nothing had been done--as yet. Obviously a corporation, a large investment of capital, must be treated with consideration. It would not do for a conservative, fair minded mayor to rush into demagogery. So, Davy was content to point proudly to his record of having "made the big corporations awaken to a sense of their duty." An excellent record, as good as a reform politician, with a larger career in prospect, could be expected to make. People spoke well of Mayor Hull and the three daily papers eulogized him. Davy no longer had qualms of conscience. He read the eulogies, he listened to the flatteries of the conservative leading citizens he met at the Lincoln and at the University, and he felt that he was all that he in young enthusiasm had set out to be.

When he went to other cities and towns and to county fairs to make addresses he was introduced as the man who had redeemed Remsen City, as a shining example of the honest SANE man in politics, as a man the bosses were afraid of, yet dared not try to down. "You can't fool the people." And were not the people, notably those who didn't live in Remsen City and had only read in their newspapers about the reform Republican mayor--weren't they clamorous for Mayor Hull for governor! Thus, Davy was high in his own esteem, was in that mood of profound responsibility to righteousness and to the people wherein a man can get the enthusiastic endorsement of his conscience for any act he deems it expedient to commit in safeguarding and advancing his career. His person had become valuable to his country. His opponents were therefore anathema maranatha.

As he and Jane walked side by side in the tender moonlight, Jane said:

"What's become of Selma Gordon?"

A painful pause; then Davy, in a tone that secretly amused Jane: "Selma? I see her occasionally--at a distance. She still writes for Victor Dorn's sheet, I believe. I never see it."

Jane felt she could easily guess why. "Yes--it is irritating to read criticisms of oneself," said she sweetly. Davy's self-complacence had been most trying to her nerves.

Another long silence, then he said: "About--Miss Gordon. I suppose you were thinking of the things I confided to you last year?"

"Yes, I was," confessed Jane.

"That's all over," said Mayor and prospective Governor Hull. "I found I was mistaken in her."

"Didn't you tell me that she refused you?" pressed Jane, most unkindly.