It was such a warm impetuous tone it brought them almost too suddenly and too close together. Alston meant to kiss her, as he did almost every night, but he awkwardly could not. He went out of the room in a shy haste, and when he dropped off to sleep he was thinking, not of Esther, but of his mother. Even so he did not suspect that his mother knew he had come from Esther and how fast his blood was running.

XXVI

Jeff, writing hard on his book to tell men they were prisoners and had to get free, was tremendously happy. He thought he saw the whole game now, the big game these tiny issues reflected in a million mirrors. You were given life and incalculable opportunity. But you were allowed to go it blind. They never really interfered with you, the terrible They up there: for he could not help believing there was an Umpire of the game, though n.o.body, it seemed, was permitted to see the score until long afterward, when the trumpery rewards had been distributed. (Some of them were not trumpery; they were as big as the heavens and the sea.) He found a great many things to laugh over, sane, kind laughter, in the way the game was played there in Addington. Religion especially seemed to him the big absurd paradox. Here were ingenuous worshippers preserving a form of observance as primitive as the burnt-offerings before a G.o.d of bronze or wood. They went to church and placated their G.o.d, and swore they believed certain things the acts of their lives repudiated. They made a festival at Christmas time and worshipped at the manger and declared G.o.d had come to dwell among men. They honored Joseph who was the spouse of Mary, and who was a carpenter, and on the twenty-sixth of December they nodded with condescension to their own carpenter, if they met him in the street, or they failed to see him at all. And their carpenter, who was doing his level best to prevent them from grinding the face of labour, himself ground the face of his brother carpenter if his brother did not heartily co-operate in keeping hours down and prices up. And everybody was behaving from the prettiest of motives; that was the joke of it. They not only said their prayers before going out to trip up the compet.i.tor who was lying in wait to trip up them; they actually believed in the efficacy of the prayer. They glorified an arch apostle of impudence who p.r.i.c.ked bubbles for them--a modern literary light--but they went on blowing their bubbles just the same, and when the apostle of impudence p.r.i.c.ked them again they only said: "Oh, it's so amusing!" and blew more. And even the apostle of impudence wasn't so busy p.r.i.c.king bubbles that he didn't have time to blow bubbles of his own, and even he didn't know how thin and hollow his own bubbles were, which was the reason they could float so high. He saw the sun on them and thought they were the lanterns that lighted up the show. Jeff believed he had discovered the clever little trick at the bottom of the game, the trick that should give over to your grasp the right handle at last. This was that every man, once knowing he was a prisoner, should laugh at his fetters and break them by his own muscle.

"The trouble is," he said, at breakfast, when Mary Nellen was bringing in the waffles, "we're all such liars."

The colonel sat there in a mild peaceableness, quite another man under the tan of his honest intimacy with the sun. He had been up hoeing an hour before breakfast, and helped himself to waffles liberally, while Mary Nellen looked, with all her intellectual aspirations in her eyes, at Jeff.

"No, no," said the colonel. He was conscious of very kindly feelings within himself, and believed in nearly everybody but Esther. She, he thought, might have a chance of salvation if she could be reborn, physically hideous, into a world obtuse to her.

"Liars!" said Jeff mildly. "We're doing the things we're expected to do, righteous or not. And we're saying the things we don't believe."

"That's nothing but kindness," said the colonel. Mary Nellen made a pretence of business at the side table, and listened greedily. She would take what she had gathered to the kitchen and discuss it to rags. She found the atmosphere very stimulating. "If I asked Lydia here whether she found my hair thin, Lydia would say she thought it beautiful hair, wouldn't you, Lyddy? She couldn't in decency tell me I'm as bald as a rat."

"It is beautiful," said Lydia. "It doesn't need to be thick."

Jeff had refused waffles. He thrust his hands in his pockets and leaned back, regarding his father with a smile. The lines in his face, Lydia thought, fascinated, were smoothed out, all but the channels in the forehead and the cleft between his brows. That last would never go.

"I am simply," said Jeff, "so tickled I can hardly contain myself. I have discovered something."

"What?" said Lydia.

"The world," said Jeff. "Here it is. It's mine. I can have it to play with. It's yours. You can play, too. So can that black-eyed army Madame Beattie has mobilised. So can she."

Anne was looking at him in a serious anxiety.

"With conditions as they are--" said she, and Jeff interrupted her without scruple.

"That's the point. With conditions as they are, we've got to dig into things and mine out pleasures, and shake them in the faces of the mob and the mob will follow us."

The colonel had ceased eating waffles. His thin hand, not so delicate now that it had learned the touch of toil, trembled a little as it held his fork.

"Jeff," said he, "what do you want to do?"

"I want," said Jeff, "to keep this town out of the clutch of Weedie Moore."

"You can't do it. Not so long as Amabel is backing him. She's got unlimited cash, and she thinks he's G.o.d Almighty and she wants him to be mayor."

"It's a far cry," said Jeff, "from G.o.d Almighty to mayor. But Alston Choate is going to be nominated for mayor, and he's going to get it."

"He won't take it," said Anne impulsively, and bit her lip.

"How do you know?" asked Jeff.

"He hates politics."

"He hates Addington more as it is."

They got up and moved to the library, standing about for a moment, while Farvie held the morning paper for a cursory glance, before separating for their different deeds. When Farvie and Anne had gone Jeff took up the paper and Lydia lingered. Jeff felt the force of her silent waiting.

It seemed to bore a hole through the paper itself and knock at his brain to be let in. He threw the paper down.

"Well?" said he.

Lydia was all alive. Her small face seemed drawn to a point of eagerness. She spoke.

"Alston Choate isn't the man for mayor."

"Who is?"

"You."

Jeff slowly smiled at her.

"I?" he said. "How many votes do you think I'd get?"

"All the foreign vote. And the best streets wouldn't vote at all."

"Why?"

She bit her lip. She had not meant to say it.

"No," said Jeff, interpreting for her, "maybe they wouldn't. That's like Addington. It wouldn't stand for me, but it would be too well-bred to stand against me. No, Lyddy, I shouldn't get a show. And I don't want a show. All I want is to bust Weedon Moore."

Lydia looked the unmovable obstinacy she felt stiffening every fibre of her.

"You're all wrong," she said. "You could have anything you wanted."

"Who says so?"

"Madame Beattie."

"I wish," said Jeff, "that old harpy would go to Elba or Siberia or the devil. I'm not going to run for office."

"What are you going to do?" asked Lydia, in a small voice. She was resting a hand on the table, and the hand trembled.

"It's a question of what I won't do, at present. I won't go down there to the hall and make an a.s.s of myself talking history and be dished by that old marplot. But if I can get hold of the same men--having previously gagged Madame Beattie or deported her--I'll make them act some plays."

"What kind of plays?"

"Shakespeare, maybe."

"They can't do that. They don't know enough."