A log, charred through the middle, broke suddenly, scattering a shower of sparks. The multitudinous impressions of his boyhood had gathered into these two memories of summer, and of that earlier generation which had sacrificed all for a belief. It was like a mosaic in his mind, a mosaic in which heroic figures waited, amid a jewelled landscape, for the leader whom God had appointed.
The room darkened while he sat there, and from outside he heard the crackling of frost and the ceaseless rustle of wind in the junipers. On the hearthrug, across the glimmering circle of the fire, he watched those old years flock back again, in all the fantastic motley of half-forgotten recollections. He saw the long frozen winters of his childhood, when he had waked at dawn to do the day's work of the farm before he started out to trudge five miles to the little country school, where the stove always smoked and the windows were never opened. Before this his mother had taught him his lessons, and his happiest memories were those of the hours when he sat by her side, with an antiquated geography on his knees, and watched her long slender fingers point the way to countries of absurd boundaries and unpronounceable names. She had taught him all he knew—knowledge weak in science, but rich in the invisible graces of mind and heart—and afterwards, in the uninspired method of the little school, he had first learned to distrust the kind of education with which the modern man begins the battle of life. Homespun in place of velvet, stark facts instead of the texture of romance! The mornings when, swinging his hoe, he had led his chattering band of little negroes into the cornfields, had been closer to the throbbing pulse of experience.
When he was fourteen the break had come, and his life had divided. His mother had died suddenly; the old place had been sold for a song; and the boy had come up to Richmond to make his way in a world which was too indifferent to be actually hostile. At first he had gone to work in a tobacco factory, reading after hours as long as the impoverished widow with whom he lived would let the gas burn in his room. Always he had meant to "get on"; always he had felt the controlling hand of his destiny. Even in those years of unformed motives and misdirected energies, he had been searching—searching. The present had never been more than a brief approach to the future. He had looked always for something truer, sounder, deeper, than the actuality that enmeshed him.
Suddenly, while he sat there confronting the phantom he had once called himself, he was visited by a rush of thought which seemed to sweep on wings through his brain. Yet the moment afterwards, when he tried to seize and hold the vision that darted so gloriously out of the shining distance, he found that it had already dissolved into a sensation, an apprehension, too finely spun of light and shadow to be imprisoned in words. It was as if some incalculable discovery, some luminous revelation, had brushed him for an instant as it sped onward into the world. Once or twice in the past such a gleaming moment had just touched him, leaving him with this vague sense of loss, of something missing, of an infinitely precious opportunity which had escaped him. Yet invariably it had been followed by some imperative call to action.
"I wonder what it means now," he thought, "I suppose the truth is that I have missed things again." The inspiration no longer seemed to exist outside of his own mind; but under the clustering memories, he felt presently a harder and firmer consciousness of his own purpose, just as in his boyhood, he would sometimes, in ploughing, strike a rock half buried beneath the frail bloom of the meadows. It was the sense of reality so strong, so solid, that it brought him up, almost with a jerk of pain, from the iridescent cobwebs of his fancy; and this reality, he understood after a minute, was an acute perception of the great war that men were fighting on the other side of the world. His knowledge of these terrible and splendid issues had broken through the perishable surface of thought. The illusion vanished like the bloom of the meadows; what remained was the bare rocky structure of truth. He had not meant to think of this now. He had left the evening free for his work—for the decision which must be made sooner or later; yet, through some mysterious trend of thought, every personal choice of his life seemed to become a part of the impersonal choice of humanity. The infinite issues had absorbed the finite intentions. Every decision was a ripple in the world battle between the powers of good and evil, of light and darkness. And he understood suddenly that the great abstractions for which men lay down their lives are one and indivisible—that there was not a corner of the earth where this fight for liberty could not be fought.
"I can fight here as well as over there," he thought, "if I am only big enough."
Now that his mind had got down to solid facts, to steady thinking, it worked quickly and clearly. It would be a hard fight, with all the odds against him, and yet the very difficulties appealed to him. Out of the dense fog of political theories, out of the noise and confusion of the Babel of many tongues, he could discern the dim framework of a purer social order. The foundation of the Republic was sound, he believed, only the eyes of the builders had failed, the hands of the builders had trembled. That the ideal democracy was not a dream, but an unattained reality, he had never doubted. The failure lay not in the plan, but in the achievement. There was obliquity of vision, there was even blindness, for the human mind was still afflicted by the ancient error which had brought the autocracies of the past to destruction. Men and nations had still to learn that in order to preserve liberty it must first be surrendered—that there is no spiritual growth except through sacrifice. But it must be surrendered only to a broader, an ever-growing conception of what liberty means.
As in the sun-warmed grass on those Sunday afternoons, he still dreamed of America leading the nations. The great Virginians of the past had been Virginians first; the great Virginians of the future would be Americans. The urgent need in America, as he saw it, was for unity; and the first step toward this unity, the obliteration of sectional boundaries. In this, he felt, Virginia must lead the states. As she had once yielded her land to the nation, she must now yield her spirit. She must point the way by act, not by theory; she must vote right as well as think right.
"And to vote right," he said presently, thinking aloud, "we must first live right. People speak of a man's vote as if it were an act apart from the other acts of his life—as if they could detach it from his universal conceptions. There was a grain of truth in Uncle Carter's saying that he could tell by the way a man voted whether or not he believed in the immortality of the soul." It was Uncle Carter, he remembered, who had described the chronic malady of American life as a disease of manner that had passed from the skin into the body politic. "Take my word for it," the old soldier had said, "there is no such thing as sound morals without sound manners, for manners are only the outer coating—the skin, if you like—of morals. Without unselfish consideration for others there can be no morality, and if you have unselfish consideration in your heart, you will have good manners though you haven't a coat on your back. Order and sanity and precision, and all the other qualities we need most in this Republic, are only the outward forms of unselfish consideration for others, and patriotism, in spite of its plumed attire, is only that on a larger scale. After all, your country is merely a tremendous abstraction of your neighbour." Well, perhaps the old chap had been talking sense half the time when people smiled at his words!
Rising from his chair, he pushed back the last waning ember, and stood gazing down on the ashes.