The Kingmakers

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

“I HOPE to find love some day!”

Those words were in Selden’s mind when he went to sleep that night and when he awoke next morning, and he lay for a long time thinking of the woman who had uttered them and of the story she had told him. To find love some day—there was a fit ambition for every human heart! But how often it was pushed aside by greed, by cynicism, by selfishness, by fear—by any number of cold and worldly things!

As it had been with himself. He could not but admit it. Perhaps in some thin and far-off fashion, he still hoped to find love some day; there had been moments haunted by a vision of himself seated cosily before a glowing hearth, and not alone; but somehow, as the years passed, that figure sitting there in slippered ease had grown older and older, grey haired, even a little stiff in the joints from long campaigning. It had remained himself, indeed, but always himself thirty years hence.

For it is not only true that a rolling stone gathers no moss, but wishes to gather none; as time goes on, even grows to fear moss, or anything else that mars the hard smoothness which enables it to keep on rolling.

Selden had been rolling, now, for many years. It was his first assignment to foreign work, to cover one of the Balkan wars, which had enabled him to cast loose his anchors, and he had never been seriously tempted to pick them up again. He had come to love rolling for its own sake. The wandering life of the special writer was congenial to his blood. It was of intense interest, for it enabled him to get past the fire-lines at every holocaust, and it gave him a prestige, a sense of power, impossible to any sedentary job. The thought of being chained to a desk—of being chained even to a house—revolted him. He wanted always to be able to throw his things into a bag and take the road at a moment’s notice, without the necessity of explanations to any one, or anything to hold him back.

For a long time he had told himself that it was his career he was jealous of—that nothing should touch that. It should be his task to interpret Europe to America and America to Europe—to labour night and day to bring the peoples of the old and the new worlds to a mutual comprehension and a common interest. But of late, questionings had crept in, whispered doubts. Was he really accomplishing anything, was he really going ahead?

As he lay there that morning thinking it over, taking such inventory of himself as he could, he realized that it was no longer any thought for his career which drove him on, but merely the force of habit. He had reverted to type. The stone had been rolling so long that rolling had become a second nature.

For in spite of the convention which women sedulously foster and even sometimes believe, man is not by nature a domestic animal. He has been partially tamed by centuries of restraint, his spirit has been broken by the manifold burdens laid upon him; for generation after generation, all the pillars of society have struggled to convince him that the greatest blessings he can hope to win in this world are a wife and children and that his highest privilege is to labour to support them; all the forces of law, of civilization, of public opinion, have conspired to hobble, shackle and coerce him. And yet, in spite of everything, he sometimes manages to break loose; while few women suspect what moments of desperation often overwhelm even the meekest father of a family.

Selden had broken loose. Now, at last, he was beginning to wonder whether freedom was worth the price.

As for his career, he had reached its apex. He could go on writing specials, yes; he could go on casting a feeble light into the dark corners of the earth, dissecting the motives of public men, perhaps influencing public opinion a little—a very little; but he would never be any more powerful, any better known, than he was at that moment. Indeed, his influence and his fame must both diminish—imperceptibly for a while perhaps, but none the less surely, for he could not hope that the future would by any possibility bring such opportunities as the past six years had brought. From this point onward his career could be only a descent.