CHAPTER XX—A NEW LESSON IN LOVE

McLEOD returned home to find his plans of political success in perfect order. The programme went through without a hitch. In spite of the most desperate efforts of the Democrats, he carried the state by a large majority and made, for the Republican party and its strange allies, the first breach in the solid phalanx of Democratic supremacy since Le-gree left his legacy of corruption and terror.

The Legislature elected two Senators. To the amazement of the world, the day before the caucus of the Republicans met, McLeod withdrew. He had no opposition so far as anybody knew, but a curious thing had happened. The Rev. John Durham discovered the fact that McLeod kept a still and had established his mother as an illicit distiller years before. One of his deputies who had become an inebriate, confessed this to the doctor who had informed the Preacher.

The Preacher put this important piece of information into the hands of a daring young Republican who had always been one from principle. He went to Raleigh and interviewed McLeod. At first McLeod denied, and blustered, and swore. When he produced the proofs, he gave up, and asked sullenly, “What do you want?”

“Get out of the race.”

“All right. Is that all? You’re on top.”

“No, give me the nomination.”

“Never!” he yelled with an oath.

“Then I ’ll expose you in to-morrow morning’s paper, and that’s the end of you.”

McLeod hesitated a moment, and then said, “I ’ll agree. You’ve got me. But I ’ll make one little condition. You must give me the name of your informant.”

“The Rev. John Durham.”

“I thought as much.”

To the amazement of everyone McLeod waived the crown aside and placed it on the head of one of his lieutenants. He returned to Hambright from this dramatic event with an unruffled front. To his cronies he said, “Bah! I was joking. Never had any idea of taking the office for myself. I’m playing for larger stakes. I make these puppets, and pull the strings.”

He devoted himself assiduously in the leisure which followed to Mrs. Durham. He never intimated to Durham that he knew anything about the part he had taken in his withdrawal from the Senatorship. Nor had the Preacher told his wife of his discovery. They had quarrelled several times about McLeod. His wife seemed determined to remain loyal to the boy she had taught.

McLeod in his talk with her intimated that he had withdrawn from a desire vaguely forming in his mind to get out of the filth of politics altogether, sooner or later, influenced by her voice alone.

With subtle skill he played upon her vanity and jealousy, and at last felt that he had entangled her so far he could dare a declaration of his feelings. There was one element only in her mental make-up he feared. She held tenaciously the old-fashioned romantic ideals of love. To her it seemed a divine mystery linking the souls that felt it to the infinite. If he could only destroy this divine mystery idea, he felt sure that her sense of isolation, and her proud rebellion against the disappointments of life would make her an easy prey to his blandishments.

He searched his library over for a book that could scientifically demonstrate the purely physical basis of love. He knew that somewhere in his studies at a medical college in New York he had read it.

At last he discovered it among a lot of old magazines. It was a brief study by a great physician of Paris, entitled “The Natural History of Love.” He gave it to her, and asked her to read it and give him her candid opinion of its philosophy.

He waited a week and on a Saturday when the Preacher was absent at one of his county mission stations he called at the hotel for a long afternoon’s talk. He determined to press his suit.

“Do you know, Mrs. Durham, what gives a preacher his boasted power of the spirit over his audiences?” he inquired with a curious laugh in the midst of which he changed his tone of voice.

“No, you are an expert on the diseases of preachers, what is it?”

“Very simple. Religion is founded on love, there never was a magnetic preacher who was not a resistless magnet for scores of magnetic women. If you don’t believe it, watch how resistless is the impulse of all these good-looking women to shake hands with their preacher, and how fondly they look at him across the pews if the crowd is too dense to reach his hand.”

A frown passed over her face, and she winced at the thrust, yet her answer was a surprising question to him.

“Do you really believe in anything, Allan?”

“You ask that?” he said leaning closer. “You whose great dark eyes look through a man’s very soul?”

“I begin to think I have never seen yours. I doubt if you have a soul.”

“Well, what’s the use of a soul? I can’t satisfy the wants of my body.”

“Answer my question. Do you believe in anything?”

“Yes,” he replied, his voice sinking to a tense whisper, “I believe in Woman,—in love.”

“In Woman?”

“Yes, Woman.”

“You mean women,” she sneered.

He started at her answer, looked intently at her, and said deliberately, “I mean you, the One Woman, the only woman in the world to me.”

“I do not believe one word you have uttered, yet, I confess with shame, you have always fascinated me.”

“Why with shame? You have but one life to live. The years pass. Even beauty so rare as yours fades at last. The end is the grave and worms. Why dash from your beautiful lips the cup of life when it is full to the brim?”

“How skillfully you echo the dark thoughts that flit on devil wings through the soul, when we feel the bitterness of life’s failure, its contradictions and mysteries!” she exclaimed, closing her eyes for a moment and leaning back in her chair.

“You’ve often talked to me about the necessity of some sort of slavery for the Negro if he remain in America. I begin to believe that slavery is a necessity for all women.”

“I fail to see it, sir.”

“All women are born slaves and choose to remain so through life. It is curious to see you, a proud imperious woman, born of a race of unconquerable men, staggering to-day under the chains of four thousand years of conventional laws made by the brute strength of men. And you, if you struggle at all, beat your wings against the bars that the slaveholding male brute has built about your soul, fall back at last and give up to the will of your master. This too, when you hold in your simple will the key that would unlock your prison door and make you free. It’s a pitiful sight.”

“How shrewd a tempter!”

“There you are again. He who dares to tell you that you are of yourself a living human being, divinely free, is a tempter from the devil. You are thinking about eternity. Well, now is eternity. Live, stand erect, take a deep breath, and dare to be yourself and do what you please. That is what I do. The future is a myth.”

“Yes, I know the freedom of which you boast,” she quietly observed, “it is the freedom of lust. The return to nature you dream of is simply the fall downward into the dirt out of which a rational and spiritual manhood has grown. I feel and know this in spite of your handsome face and the fine ring of your voice.”

“Dirt. Dirt!” he mused. “Yes, I was in the dirt once, was born in it, the dirt of poverty and superstition and fears of laws here and hereafter. But I awoke at last, and shook it off, washed myself in knowledge and stood erect. I am a man now, with the eye of a king, conscious of my power. I look a lying hypocritical world in the face. I have made up my mind to live my own life in spite of fools, and in spite of the laws and conventions of fools.”

“And yet I believe you carry a horse-chestnut in your pocket, and will not undertake an important work on Friday?” she returned.

“But I never strangle a normal impulse of my nature that I can satisfy. I am not that big a fool, at least.”

She was silent, and then said, “I can never thank you enough for the book you sent me.”

McLeod sighed in relief at her change of tone. After all she was just tantalising him!

“Then you liked it?” he cried with glittering eyes.

“I devoured every word of it with a greed you can not understand. A great man wrote it.”

“Then we can understand each other better from today,” he interrupted smilingly.

“Yes, far better. You gave me this book hoping that it might influence my character by destroying my ideal of love, didn’t you, now frankly?”

“Honestly, I did hope it would emancipate you from superstitions.”

“It has,” she declared, but with a curious curve of her lip that chilled him.

“What are you driving at?” he asked suspiciously.

“This book has given me the key that unlocked for me, for the first time, the riddle of my physical being. It has shown me the physical basis of love, just as I knew before there was a physical basis of the soul.”

“What did you understand the book to teach?” he asked.

“Simply that love is based in its material life, on the lobe of the brain which develops at the base of a child’s head near the age of thirteen. That this lobe of the brain is the sex centre, and love is impossible until it develops. That this centre of new powers at the base of the skull is a physical magnet. That when a man and woman approach each other, who are by nature mates, these magnetic centres are disturbed by action and reaction, and that this disturbance develops the second elemental passion called love. The first elemental passion, hunger, has for its end the preservation of the individual; while love finds its fulfillment in the preservation of the species. Love finds its satisfaction in the child, its ardour cools, and it dies, unless kept alive by the social conventions of the family, which are not based merely on this violent emotion, but also on unity of tastes, which produce the sense of comradeship. For these reasons it is possible to fall violently in love more than once, and there are dozens of people who possess this magnetic power over us and would respond to it violently if we only came in social contact with them. That the romantic bombast about the possibility of but one love in life, and that of supernatural origin, is twaddle, and leads to false ideals. Have I given the argument?”

“Exactly. But what do you deduce from it?”

“Freedom!”

“Good!” he cried, licking his lips.

“Freedom from superstitions about love,” she answered, “and positive knowledge of its elemental beauty which Nature reveals. In short, I no longer wonder and brood over your charm for me. I know exactly what it means, and how it might occur again and again with another and another. I have simply throttled it in a moment by an act of my will, based on this knowledge.”

“You amaze me.”

“No doubt. One’s character centres in the soul, or the appetites. Mine is in the soul, yours in the appetites. I see you to-day as you really are, and I loathe you with an unspeakable loathing. You have opened my eyes with this beautiful little book of Nature. I thank you. Your scientist has convinced me that there are possibly a hundred men in the world who would affect me as you do, were we to meet. And when I looked back into the sweet face of my dead boy, I learned another truth, that in the union of my first great love I was bound in marriage, not simply by a social convention, or a state contract, but for life by Nature’s eternal law. The period of infancy of one child extends over twenty-one years, covering the whole maternal life of the woman who marries at the proper age of twenty-four. This union of one man and one woman never seemed so sacred to me as now. It is Nature’s law, it is God’s law.”

McLeod’s anger was fast rising.

“Don’t fool yourself,” he sneered, “You may overwork your maternal intuitions. You remember the kiss you gave me when a boy just fifteen? Well, you fooled yourself then about its maternal quality. The magnet of my red head drew your coal black one down to it with irresistible power.”

“Perhaps so, Allan. Your work is done. There is the door. I say a last good-bye, with pity for your shallow nature, and the bitter revelation you have given me of your worthlessness.”

Without another word he left, but with a dark resolution of slander with which he would tarnish her name, and wring the Preacher’s heart with anguish.