A People's Man

by E. Phillips Oppenheim

"I do appreciate it," he assured her, "perhaps more than you think."

There was a moment's silence. As he was taking his cup from her fingers, their eyes met, and she looked away again almost immediately.

"I wish," she said, "that you would tell me more about yourself—what you did in America, what your life has been? You are rather a mysterious person, aren't you?"

"In a sense, perhaps, I must seem so," he admitted. "You see, I was an orphan very early. There wasn't any one who cared how I grew up, and I wandered a good deal. The earlier part of my life I was over here—I was at Heidelberg University, bye the bye—and in Paris for two years studying art, of all things! Then something—I don't know what it was—called me to America, and I found it hard to come back. It's a big country, you know, Lady Elisabeth. It gets hold of you. If it hadn't driven me out, I doubt whether I should ever have left it."

"But what was it first inspired you with this—well, wouldn't you call it a passion—for championing the cause of the people?"

He shook his head.

"Born in me, I suppose. I have watched them, lived with them, and then I have been through the whole gamut of Socialistic literature. It is not worth reading, most of it. The essential facts are there to look at, half-a-dozen phrases, a single field of view. It's all very simple."

"Now I am going to ask you something else," she went on. "That first night when we talked together, you seemed so full of hope, so dauntless. Since then, is it my fancy—since you came back from Manchester—are you a little disappointed 'with life? Don't you know in your heart that you've done what's best?"

"I wish I did," he answered simply. "My common sense tells me that I have chosen well, and then sometimes, in the nights, or when I am alone, other thoughts come to me, and I feel almost as though I had been faithless, as though I had simply chosen the easier way. Look how pleasant it is all being made for me! I am no longer an outcast; I bask in the sun of your uncle's patronage; people ask me to dinner, seek my friendship, people whom I feel ought to hate me. I am not sure about it all."

"Listen," she said, "if you had indeed pulled down those pillars, don't you think that day by day and night by night you would have been haunted by the faces of those whom you had destroyed? Think of the children who would have died of starvation, the women who would have been torn from their husbands, the ruined homes, the sorrow and the misery all through the land. Yours would have been the hand which had dealt this blow. You would not have lived to have seen into the future. Would it have been enough for you to have believed that you had done it for the best—that that unborn generation of which you spoke would have unfitted? Oh, I do not think so! I believe that when you realise it, you must be glad."