One Man in His Time

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"But you have caught your larks, haven't you?"

"No, I used to set snares by the hundred, but I never caught anything better than a sparrow."

A wistful look crossed her face, and for an instant the youth seemed to droop and fade in her eyes. "Isn't that life?—sparrows for larks always?"

His sanguine spirit rejected this as she had known that it would. "Life is all right," he replied, "as long as there's a fighting chance left to you. That is the only thing that makes it worth while, fighting to win."

She gazed meditatively at the points of flame on the white candles. "I suppose it would be so with you; for you fit into the age. You are a part of this variable uncertain quantity called democracy, which some of us old-fashioned folk look upon as a boomerang."

"Yes, I am a part of it," he answered slowly. "I see it as it is, I think. It is pure buncombe, of course, to say that it hasn't its ugly side; but I believe, if I have a chance, that I can make something of it." He paused a moment while he hesitated over the silver beside his plate; but there was no uncertainty in his voice when he went on again, after deliberately picking up the fork he preferred. It was a little thing to remember a man by—the merest trifle—but she never forgot it. Only a big man could be as natural as that, she reflected. "I reasoned it all out before I went into politics," he was saying. "I didn't get it out of books either—unless you count the Bible and 'Robinson Crusoe,' which are the only two I ever read as a boy. But the way I worked it out at last was that democracy, like life, isn't anything that's already finished. It is raw stuff. We are making it every minute of the time; and it depends on us whether we put it through as a straight job or a failure. Democracy, as I see it, isn't a word or a phrase out of a book, or a formula, or anything that has frozen into a fixed shape or pattern. It is warm and fluid, and it is teeming with living forms. It is as much alive as the earth or air or water, and it can be used to develop as many varying energies. That is why it is all so amazingly interesting. As long as you don't fall away from that thought you have your feet planted on solid ground—you can face things squarely—"

"You preach a kind of political pragmatism," she said as he paused.

"Pragmatism? That's a muscular word, but I don't know it. I wonder if Robinson Crusoe discovered it."

"If Robinson Crusoe didn't discover it, he lived it," she rejoined gaily; and then, as the voice of Mrs. Berkeley was heard purring softly on Vetch's other side, Corinna turned to the bewhiskered General, whose only sense, she had already ascertained, was the historic sense.

While she leaned back, with her head bent in the direction of his husky voice, she was visited by a piercing realization of the emptiness, the artificiality of her life. Futility—weariness—disenchantment—a gray lane without a turning that stretched on into nothingness! Many thoughts were blown through her mind like leaves in a high wind. She saw herself from the beginning—striving without rest—searching—searching—for what? For happiness—for perfection—for the starry flower that she had never found. All was tawdry, all was tarnished, all was unreal. In looking back she saw that the festival of her life was an affair of tinselled splendour and glittering dust. Was this only the impression of Vetch on her mood? Did he possess some magic gift of personality which caused the artificial, the counterfeit, to wither in his presence?