Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/1023

Rh with the working out of that thing which is called destiny.

He was lost to the speaker now, lost to everything save this great thought which was burning through and through him, and to the sobbing minor of the world without. Was this chasm—this whole idea—but a wild creation of his fancy? With one of those great sweeps which the human mind can make in moments of white heat, he went back from the struggles of a primitive world up to the law-bounded philanthropy of his own time, and it seemed to him then—he could read it through the teachings of good and great men, and through the policies of good and great kings—that the aloofness, the self-centredness, the complacency of the good—

It was the shrill coughing of one of the three hundred which brought him sharply back to the concrete. He scanned the three hundred faces of the auditors, and then he looked into the faces of those few men who had been set up as embodying the other side of things. And the world of concrete things to which he had returned but moved him to a new sense of the absurdity of that man-made chasm, which was so real to him now that the chill from its depths seemed to blow over him and make him cold. Were they not of the same clay—the three hundred and the three? Had they not the same fights to make, and the same sorrows to know? If there was a difference, it was only that the three had fought their fight, had known their sorrow, and should it be that they were among those for whom the battle of self was an easy battle, then out of an easy victory should have been born a greater tolerance.

With what arrogance they had flaunted their virtue—their position! How condescendingly they had spoken of the home which we, the good, prepare for you, the bad, and what namby-pambyness there was, after all, in that sentiment which all of them had voiced—and now you must pay us back by being good!

Oh for a man of flesh and blood to stand up and tell how he himself had sinned and suffered! For a man who could bridge that damning chasm with strong, broad, human understanding and human sympathies—a man who could stand among them pulse-beat to pulse-beat and cry out, "I know! I understand! I fought it, and I'll help you fight it too!"

The sound of his own name broke the passionate, exalted spell that was upon him. He looked to the centre of the stage and saw that the professor from the State University had seated himself and that the superintendent of the institution was occupying the place of the speaker. And the superintendent was saying:

"We may esteem ourselves especially fortunate in having him with us this afternoon. He is one of the great men of the State, one of the men who by high living, by integrity and industry, has raised himself to a position of great honor among his fellow men. A great party—may I say the greatest of all parties?—has shown its unbounded confidence in him by giving him the nomination for the Governorship of the State. No man in the State is held in higher esteem to-day than he. And so it is with special pleasure that I introduce to you that man of the future—Philip Grayson."

The superintendent sat down then, and he himself—Philip Grayson—was standing in the place where the other speakers had stood. It was with a mighty rush which almost swept away his outward show of calm that it came to him that he—candidate for the Governorship—was well fitted to be that man of flesh and blood for whom in his dreamy exaltation he had sighed. That he—even he—was within grasp of an opportunity to get beneath the jackets and into the very hearts and souls of those boys, and make them feel that a man of sins and virtues, of weaknesses and strength, a man who had had much to conquer, and for whom the fight would never be quite done, was standing before them stripped of his coat of conventions and platitudes, and in nakedness of soul and sincerity of heart was talking to them as a man who understood.

Almost with the inception of the idea was born the consciousness of what it might cost. And as in answer to the silent, blunt question, Is it worth it? there looked up at him three hundred pairs of eyes—eyes behind which there was good as well as bad—eyes which had burned with the fatal rush of passion, and had burned, too, with the hot tears