One Man in His Time

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"Well, it hasn't kept you back—not having help," she hastened to reply as naturally as she could. "You are almost everything you wished to be in the world, aren't you?" It was a foolish speech, she felt, but the change in his manner had surprised and bewildered her.

He laughed shortly without merriment. "I?" he replied, and she noticed for the first time that he looked tired and worried beneath his exuberant optimism. "I am the loneliest man on earth. The loneliest man on earth is the one who stands between two extremes." As she made no reply, he continued after a moment, "You think, of course, that I stand with one extreme, not in the centre, but you are mistaken. I am in the middle. When I try to bring the two millstones together they will grind me to powder."

She had never heard him speak despondently before; and while she listened to the sound of his expressive voice, so full, for the hour at least, of discouragement, she felt drawn to him in a new and personal way. It was as if, by showing her a side of his nature the public had never seen, he had taken her into his confidence.

"But surely your influence is as great as ever," she said presently. A trite remark, but the only one that occurred to her.

"I brought the crowd with me as far as I thought safe," he answered, "and now it is beginning to turn against me because I won't lead it over the precipice into the sea. That's the way it always is, I reckon. That's the way it's been, anyhow, ever since Moses tried to lead the Children of Israel out of bondage. Take these strikers, for instance. I believe in the right to strike. I believe that they ought to have every possible protection. I believe that their families ought to be provided for in order to take the weapon of starvation out of the hands of the capitalists. I'd give them as fair a field as it is in my power to provide, and anybody would think that they would be satisfied with simple fairness. But, no, what they are trying to do is not to strike for themselves, but to strike at somebody else. They are not satisfied with protection from starvation unless that protection involves the right to starve somebody else. They want to tie up the markets and stop the dairy trains, and they won't wink an eyelash if all the babies that don't belong to them are without milk. That's war, they tell me; and I answer that I'd treat war just as I'd treat a strike, if I had the power. As soon as an army began to prey on the helpless, I'd raise a bigger army if I could and throw the first one out into the jungle where it belonged. But people don't see things like that now, though they may in the next five hundred years. The trouble is that all human nature, including capitalist and labourer, is tarred with the same brush and tarred with selfishness. What the oppressed want is not freedom from oppression, but the opportunity to become oppressors."

Was this only a mood, she wondered, or was it the expression of a profound disappointment? Sympathy such as John Benham had never awakened overflowed from her heart, and she was conscious suddenly of some deep intuitive understanding of Vetch's nature. All that had been alien or ambiguous became as close and true and simple as the thoughts in her own mind. What she saw in Vetch, she perceived now, was that resemblance to herself which the Judge had once turned into a jest. She discerned his point of view not by looking outside of herself, but by looking within.

"I know," she responded in her rich voice. "I think I know."

He gazed at her with a smile which had grown as tired as the rest of him. "Then if you know why don't you help—you others?" he asked. "Don't you see that by standing aside, by keeping apart, you are doing all the harm that you can? If democracy doesn't seem good enough for you, then get down into the midst of it and make it better. That's the only way—the only way on earth to make a better democracy—by putting the best we've got into it. You can't make bread rise from the outside. You've got to mix the yeast with the dough, if you want it to leaven the whole lump."

She had been standing with her hands clasped before her and her eyes on the sky beyond the window; and when he paused, with a husky tone in his voice, she spoke almost as if she were in a dream. "I believe in you," she said, and then again, as he did not speak she repeated very slowly: "I believe in you."

"That helps," he answered gravely. "I don't suppose you will ever realize how much that will help me." As he finished he turned toward the door; and a minute afterward, without another word or look, he went out into the street, and she saw his figure cross the flowers and the sunlight in the window.