Part 30 (2/2)
”That is pleasant, but not candid,” replied he with his simple directness. ”No man of your experience could fail to know that the social bribe is the arch-corrupter, the one briber whom it is not in human nature to resist. But, as I was saying, to my amazement, in spite of my wife's precautions and mine, I find myself beset--and with what devilish insidiousness! When I refuse, simply to save myself from flagrant treachery to my obligations of duty, I find myself seeming, even to my wife and to myself, churlish and priggish; Pharisaical, in the loathsome att.i.tude of a moral _poseur_. Common honesty, in presence of this social bribe, takes on the sneaking seeming of rottenest hypocrisy. It is indeed hard to get through and to get at the men I want and need, and must and will have.”
”Impossible,” said I. ”And if you could get at them, and if the Senate would let you put them where they seem to you to belong, the temptation would be too much for them. They too would soon become Baal-wors.h.i.+pers, the more a.s.siduous for their long abstinence.”
”Some,” he admitted, ”perhaps most. But at least a few would stand the test--and just one such would repay and justify all the labor of all the search. The trouble with you pessimists is that you don't take our ancestry into account. Man isn't a falling angel, but a rising animal.
So, every impulse toward the decent, every gleam of light, is a tremendous gain. The wonder isn't the bad but the good, isn't that we are so imperfect, but that in such a few thousand years we've got so far--so far _up_. I know you and I have in the main the same purpose--where is there a man who'd like to think the world the worse for his having lived? But we work by different means. You believe the best results can be got through that in man which he has inherited from the past--by balancing pa.s.sion against pa.s.sion, by offsetting appet.i.te with appet.i.te. I hope for results from that in the man of to-day which is the seed, the prophecy, of the man who is to be.”
”Your method has had one recent and very striking _apparent_ success,”
said I. ”But--the spasm of virtue will pa.s.s.”
”Certainly,” he replied, ”and so too will the succeeding spasm of reaction. Also, your party must improve itself--and mine too--as the result of this spasm of virtue.”
”For a time,” I admitted. ”I envy you your courage and hope. But I can't share in them. You will serve four stormy years; you will retire with friends less devoted and enemies more bitter; you will be misunderstood, maligned; and there's only a remote possibility that your vindication will come before you are too old to be offered a second term. And the harvest from the best you sow will be ruined in some flood of reaction.”
”No,” he answered. ”It will be reaped. The evil I do, all evil, pa.s.ses.
The good will be reaped. Nothing good is lost.”
”And if it is reaped,” I rejoined, ”the reaping will not come until long, long after you are a mere name in history.”
Even as I spoke my doubts I was wis.h.i.+ng I had kept them to myself; for, thought I, there's no poorer business than shooting at the beautiful soaring bird of illusion. But he was looking at me without seeing me.
His expression suggested the throwing open of the blinds hiding a man's inmost self.
”If a man,” said he absently, ”fixes his mind not on making friends or defeating enemies, not on elections or on history, but just on avoiding from day to day, from act to act, the condemnation of his own self-respect--” The blinds closed as suddenly as they had opened--he had become conscious that some one was looking in. And I was wis.h.i.+ng again that I had kept my doubts to myself; for I now saw that what I had thought a bright bird of illusion was in fact the lost star which lighted my own youth.
Happy the man who, through strength or through luck, guides his whole life by the star of his youth. Happy, but how rare!
x.x.xIV
”LET US HELP EACH OTHER”
In the following September I took my daughters to Elizabeth. She looked earnestly, first at Frances, tall and slim and fancying herself a woman grown, then at Ellen, short and round and struggling with the giggling age. ”We shall like each other, I'm sure,” was her verdict. ”We'll get on well together.” And Frances smiled, and Ellen nodded. They evidently thought so, too.
”I want you to teach them your art,” said I, when they were gone to settle themselves and she and I were alone.
”My art?”
”The art of being one's self. I am sick of men and women who hide their real selves behind a pose of what they want others to think them.”
”Most of our troubles come from that, don't they?”
”All mine did,” said I. ”I am at the age when the very word age begins to jar on the ear, and the net result of my years of effort is--I have convinced other people that I am somebody at the cost of convincing myself that I am n.o.body.”
”No, you are master,” she said.
<script>