The Builders

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"Then things must go on, as they are, to the—end?"

"I cannot stop them by talking. If it rests with me, they must go on."

"At the cost of your career? Of your power for usefulness? Of your obligations to your country?"

Turning his head, Blackburn looked away from him to the window, which had been left open. From the outside there floated suddenly the faint, provocative scent of spring—of nature which was renewing itself in the earth and the trees. "A career isn't as big a thing at forty-three as it is at twenty," he answered, with a touch of irony. "My power for usefulness must stand on its merits alone, and my chief obligation to my country, as I see it, is to preserve the integrity of my honour. We hear a great deal to-day about the personal not counting any longer; yet the fact remains that the one enduring corner-stone of the State is the personal rectitude of its citizens. You cannot build upon any other foundation, and build soundly. I may be wrong—I often am—but I must do what I believe to be right, let the consequences be what they will."

Now that he had left the emotional issue behind him, the immobility had passed from his manner, and his thoughts were beginning to come with the abundance and richness that the Colonel associated with his public speeches. Already he had put the question of his marriage aside, as a fact which had been accepted and dismissed from his mind.

"In these last few years—or months rather—I have begun to see things differently," he resumed, with an animation and intensity that contrasted strangely with his former constraint and dumbness. "I can't explain how it is, but this war has knocked a big hole in reality. We can look deeper into things than any generation before us, and the deeper we look, the more we become aware of the outer darkness in which we have been groping. I am groping now, I confess it, but I am groping for light."

"It will leave a changed world when it is over," assented the Colonel, and he spoke the platitude with an accent of relief, as if he had just turned away from a sight that distressed him. "More changed, I believe, for us older ones than for the young who have done the actual fighting. I should like to write a book about that—the effect of the war on the minds of the non-combatants. The fighters have been too busy to think, and it is thought, after all, not action, that leaves the more permanent record. Life will spring again over the battle-fields, but the ideas born of the war will control the future destinies of mankind."

"I am beginning to see," pursued Blackburn, as if he had not heard him, "that there is something far bigger than the beliefs we were working for. Because we had got beyond the sections to the country, you and I, we thought we were emancipated from the bondage of prejudice. The chief end of the citizen appeared to us to be the glory of the nation, but I see now—I am just beginning to see—that there is a greater spirit than the spirit of nationality. You can't live through a world war, even with an ocean between—and distance, by the way, may give us all the better perspective, and enable Americans to take a wider view than is possible to those who are directly in the path of the hurricane—you can't live through a world war, and continue to think in terms of geographical boundaries. To think about it at all, one must think in universal relations."

He hesitated an instant, and then went on more rapidly, "After all, we cannot beat Germany by armies alone, we must beat her by thought. For two generations she has thought wrong, and it is only by thinking right—by forcing her to think right—that we can conquer her. The victory belongs to the nation that engraves its ideas indelibly upon the civilization of the future."

Leaning back in the shadows, Colonel Ashburton gazed at him with a perplexed and questioning look. Was it possible that he had never understood him—that he did not understand him to-day? He had come to speak of an open scandal, of a name that might be irretrievably tarnished—and Blackburn had turned it aside by talking about universal relations!