Keegan interested her. Since the incident of the embarrassed young man with whom she had made candy in the kitchen, she had been secretly on the lookout for someone like him. She wanted someone with whom she could repeat the startling experience of that other evening without letting herself into danger. Someone who would remain oblivious to the passion his caresses aroused and so allow her to enjoy slyly the sensations whose memory had never left her.
She looked around the room. Doris had gone upstairs and George was not to be seen. Her mother was reading behind a large table.
"Tell me, why are men bad?" she asked in a whisper. Her blue eyes were wide. An air of altruistic sorrow surrounded her. She grieved for men. The question appealed to Keegan. His eyes grew moist. He was unable to understand this impulse to weep. But somehow it was pleasant.
"They're not bad," he answered softly. "It's only that they don't realize till too late. If all women were like you, there would be no bad men."
"Oh, then it's the woman's fault?"
Keegan nodded but said, "Not exactly. It's like figuring which came first into the world, the egg or the chicken that laid it. It's hard telling whether women are bad because men have made them so or whether men are bad because women give them chances to be. That is, that kind of women, you know."
He felt elated at his tolerance. A few minutes ago he had been denouncing bad women in his mind. But now it pleased him to be broader. Fanny was looking at him with cheeks flushed. Her mother had risen.
"I think I'll go to church," Mrs. Basine said. "Do you want to come along."
"Not today, mother dear," Fanny answered. Keegan was on his feet.
"If you want to," he offered gallantly to the girl.
"I usually love to," Fanny sighed. "But I don't feel quite like it today. You go along, mother."
Mrs. Basine smiled and left the room. Fanny heardher brother talking in the hall.... "I think I'll go with you, mother." She listened to Keegan in silence, waiting for the outer door to close. Now they were alone except for Doris, upstairs.
"I know how you must feel about it," she said. "But I don't understand how a man like you or George can do such things. It must be awful." She paused, blushing and added in a whisper, "Horrible!"
Keegan nodded and felt overcome as he watched her shudder and draw her shoulders nervously together. He covered his face with his hands. This was, he felt, being almost too dramatic—to hide his face. But his virtue demanded dramatics. He wanted to talk facts now, confess facts. By denouncing what he had done during the night he would increase his present emotion of chastity.
"Don't," he said, "lets talk of it."
His eyes grew wet again. He was tired. If only life were as clean as this girl he was talking to.... If only life were beautiful and chaste. And there were no sex. No sin. Men and women just sweet friends. But life was different. It was full of unclean things. He couldn't help it, what he did. He didn't want to do it. But life surrounded him that way with things unclean. He wept.
Fanny hesitated. Her face had grown colored and her nerves were alive. She must do something. Her fingers desired to caress Keegan's hair and she thought how nice it would be to be kissed by him. But she resolutely barred further thoughts from her mind. It was wrong to think about such things. Fanny's code would allow her to do nothing wrong—if she knew it. She leaned forward impulsively. He was sittingon a window seat. Her hands touched his covered face.
"You mustn't," she said.
He was sorry for life, for its uncleanliness. He would like to go somewhere far away where clean clouds and a beautiful sea were just as God had made them. And there he would like to sit with this girl, their hearts beautifully sad.
She stroked his hair shyly with maternal fingers. He felt the caress and his heart melted. Its sin poured out leaving him exaltedly cleansed. Yes, she understood him, the ache of repentance in his soul, the nostalgia for cleanliness that hurt him so. She understood and she was telling him so with her fingers.
"Poor boy," she whispered because he was weeping. "I'm so sorry. You won't, again? Ever? Will you?"
"No," Keegan mumbled tremulously.
It was easy and exalting to confess and promise in this way, without mentioning anything by name. Just by sound.
"I'm so glad," she whispered, as if they were in church, "if I have done that for you...."
"You have," he agreed. "I feel like a ... like a dog."
"Don't...."
Her fingers were playing over his cheek. She could be bold. A man in tears was harmless. She stood up with determination and sat down close beside him. She took his head in her hands and looking with clear understanding eyes into his, shook her head sadly.
"You need a rest," she whispered. "Here ... rest like this."
She placed his head as if he were a child on her shoulder. Keegan's heart contracted with remorse at the innocence of the gesture. Her purity was something poignant. He closed his eyes and drifted into an innocuous satisfaction. This was a realization of his hopes for purity. He recalled with bitterness the filthy embraces of the night. How superior this was, how much cleaner.
"Wait a minute," Fanny murmured, a wholesome matter-of-fact maternalism in her voice, "you lie down and rest ... like this."
She assumed the proprietory gestures remembered from her childhood when she had "played house" with little boys and girls, and guided Keegan to stretch his legs on the window seat. He grinned apologetically. Fanny sat down and placed his head in her lap, her hands gently caressing his hair.
"Now sleep," she murmured. "There's nobody in the house and you can get a good long rest."
Keegan shut his eyes. A blissful enervation stole over him. His heart felt grateful. She was like a mother might be. Everyone had a mother except him.
"You're so kind," he sighed.
He had known Fanny for several months only and had never talked to her alone before. But now it seemed to him she was his oldest and most intimate friend. Because she understood. He thought of her as a companion of his better self. The warmth of her lap soothed him. Unaware, he dropped into a half doze.
The man's head lying heavily against her body began to stir her senses. She made certain first that he was not pressing himself against her. No, he wasmerely lying naturally. A tenderness grew in her heart. She murmured to herself, "Poor boy, poor boy."
This wasn't quite as it had been in the kitchen that evening. The murmur continued as her face grew flushed and she breathed unevenly. She wanted to stretch and sigh.
Keegan stirred. A fear came that he realized her sensations. He was playing possum. No. She watched his eyes open and noted their stare of filmy tenderness.
"You're so sweet," he whispered.
She smiled pitifully at him and said, "Rest. Just rest. I feel so sorry for you."
In fact, imposed upon the excitement which the pressure of his head against her aroused, was a feeling of Samaritan pity. However, she wondered without displacing this emotion of altruistic concern for the young man, how far she dared go. She wished that his hands would touch her but they would have to stand up for that.
"Oh!"
She moved Keegan's head gently away.
"I thought I heard someone."
Slipping to her feet she stared eagerly toward the door. Keegan straightened himself. He looked at her drowsily.
"It's no one," she smiled. Her eyes covered him with tender interest. He thought of some picture of a saint—Saint Cecelia or someone like that.
"Why don't you go up in George's room?" she asked.
She gave him her hand as if to assist him in a comradely way to rise. He stood up slowly.
"You don't know what you've done for me," he began, "you're so different ... so good."
She smiled and made a pretense of assisting him further by passing her arm gently around him.
"I don't know what it is," he murmured. He stopped. His heart was hurting him with longing. He was unclean. But this beautiful saint would cleanse him, purify him. She was a part of life he desired—the clean things. But he was afraid. How could he after last night, how could he dare? She would certainly misunderstand if he touched her. She would think he was a scoundrel.
"Fanny," he whispered.
She looked at him with intensely tender eyes as a mother might regard a forgiven child. He embraced her, his hands resting only lightly on her back.
"Forgive me," he mumbled. "But everything's so rotten. I feel like such a cad after what I've done. You ... you make me almost happy again."
His mind was pleasantly fogged. He was thinking of himself as a despicable sinner receiving mysterious absolution.
She said nothing but let herself come closer. She was adroit and he remained unaware that she had pressed herself tautly against him. He was concerned entirely with the purity of his caress. He read in her eyes and flushed face a forgiveness, an absolution. Her grip on him that had grown firm was the grip of a woman raising him out of the Hell in which he had wallowed. His senses, deadened by debauch, failed to detect the pressure of her clinging.
She could dare. An intensity came slowly into her nerves. She would like to move, to crush herself against him. But she managed to restrain herself. She began to weep.
"Don't," he whispered. "You mustn't. I'm ... I'm not as bad as all that."
She managed to say, "Oh ... I feel so sorry for you. It just hurts me to ... to think of you like that. Promise me you'll never again.... Please.... Promise me.... Promise me...."
Her words, despite her, grew wild. She raised her eyes feverishly and, tightening her arms, pressed herself to him. The man's harmlessness had betrayed her. She continued to weep, "Promise me ... you'll never ... be bad like that again...."
Her emotion reaching its depth sent a delicious sense through her. She embraced him for a moment. In the receding fog of her satisfied impulse she heard him answering, tears in his voice.
"You're so sweet.... So wonderful. Oh, forgive me.... I'll never be bad again.... Forgive me...."
Judge Percival Smith was a fastidious gentleman who boasted of his age as a contrast to his virility.
"Sixty-two," he pronounced impressively. And he would wait for people to look at him in amazement, fortunately unaware of the fact that they had thought him at least seventy.
His wife had died when he was forty-six. She had never managed to understand him, chiefly because he had remained polite to her through eighteen years of marriage. She had grown to regard him with awe.
Her friends always referred to him as a gentleman—agentleman of the old school. This was because he had a deep voice and enunciated clearly and professed a consistent preference for the days when men were men and women were women.
His friends mistook the clarity of his enunciation for a clarity of thought—an error which found social vindication in the fact that he had been on the bench nine years. Aside from his consistent preference, his views on current issues were also those of a gentleman. Why, it was difficult to determine. But he supplied their identity himself by clinching his arguments with the question, "I don't see, sir, how a gentleman can think otherwise."
He was often considered old fashioned. But he was admired for this. In discussing religion he would say:
"I am not one to quibble with my Maker or with any of His holy decisions. I believe absolutely in the gospel of infant damnation. A religion with loopholes is not a religion. Either there is a God or there isn't. If there is and you accept Him then you accept Him. You do not argue with Him. I don't see, sir, how a gentleman can think otherwise."
Concerning women he would say:
"Women represent the finer things of life. Not for them the turmoil and strife of economic battle. Their function in the scheme of things is obvious, sir. They were placed in the world by a wise Maker in order to bring sweetness, purity and light to bear upon the strivings of man. A woman's hearthstone is her altar. No, they are not the equal of man. They are his complement. Man is gross. Woman is fine and sweet. I do not believe in any of these disgustingideas which seek to lower her from the altar she now occupies in the eyes of all gentlemen."
When he delivered himself of these utterances he managed always to give to them the certainty of a man who was pronouncing judgments. He was admired for this certainty. People who felt doubts in their minds were always pleased to hear the Judge make pronouncements. They felt that it was impossible that a man who spoke so clearly, whose eye looked so unflinchingly at one and whose manners were so perfect, could be wrong.
He might not be quite as modern as some folks but he knew what he was talking about. He was the stentorian and impressive interpreter to them of a world they understood. The ideas which flourished in this world were in the main dead or dying. But this fact only lent a further impressiveness to them and to him.
People who sought to argue with Judge Smith usually ended by stuttering and growing red-faced. They felt as they talked and watched his blue eyes narrowing and his lips tightening, that they were talking themselves outside of the pale. His silence became an excommunication. They read ostracism in his frown and began to fumble for words, trying to propitiate him in one breath while presenting their side of the case to him in another. But he was not to be deceived by this ruse. He would sit poised and grimly attentive like a man judiciously enduring the presence of blasphemy but under great emotional strain. When they concluded, it was frequently unnecessary for him to offer counter arguments. His opponents felt their defeat in the knowledge of his superiority,not as a thinker, but his superiority as a man of inviolable standards, his superiority as a gentleman.
In eighteen years of close contact his wife had never penetrated the shell of certitude and personal elegance within which the judge moved. During their hours of intimacy he revealed himself as a man of normal passions. But even during these he was solicitous, unbending and a gentleman.
In the morning, dressed, his white napkin tucked under his ruddy face he would be again—Judge Smith.
She had tried several times early in their marriage to carry the intimacy of the bedroom to the breakfast table. He had listened to her endearments and furtive reminiscences at such moments with eyes seemingly incapable of comprehending and she had felt each time that her talk was obscene, and grown frightened.
Her death brought no perceptible change in Judge Smith's life. He continued a gentleman. His name appeared at intervals in the newspapers as having gone to Washington to argue a case before the Supreme Court. His friends felt on reading this that the Supreme Court was an institution perfectly fitted to him. It was hard to imagine anybody but a man who looked and acted like Judge Smith arguing a case in the Supreme Court.
The Smith home, a brownstone house in Prairie Avenue, was occupied by the Judge, his daughter Henrietta and a housekeeper. Henrietta had finished boarding school at nineteen. She had since then busied herself as an assistant housekeeper. At twenty-one she impressed people with being as naive andfresh as a girl of seventeen. It was hard to think of her as in her twenties.
She was a round-eyed, round-faced child with fluffy blonde hair, a small-boned body and a general air of juvenile fragility. She talked very little but bubbled with exclamations of delight, excitement, enthusiasm, astonishment. These she was continually employing, regardless of their incongruity. She greeted people with delight, saying.
"Oh! I'm so glad to see you! Isn't it wonderful?" And managed to scatter a dozen exclamation marks through the sentences. If one said to her, "Did you see Sothern and Marlowe last week?" she replied excitedly, "Oh no! I missed them! I'm so sorry! Aren't they wonderful?"
Asked for an opinion of a new hat she would exude the same exclamation marks in, "Oh! It's simply too adorable for words! I'm just mad about it!"
And to such a remark as, "I read in the paper the other day that President Roosevelt went fishing," she would offer a wide-eyed stare and exclaim, overcome with astonishment, "Why! Gracious! Is that so! Isn't that awfully funny!" And incomprehensibly, she would laugh as if overcome with mirth.
People regarded her as a charmingly vivacious, well-mannered girl. Her exclamations pleased them by lending an importance to their small talk—a small talk which constituted nearly the whole of their conversational lives. Her explosive banalities invigorated them. They said of her:
"Judge Smith's daughter is so alive. She's so fresh and young and so enthusiastic."
Henrietta thought her father the greatest andmost important man in the world. She called him "FATHer," stressing the first syllable in a manner that distinguished him from all other fathers. Her admiration satisfied the judge. He demanded of her only obedience, respect and chastity. Since she gave him these he looked upon her as a shining example of true womanhood.
To have searched for an inner life in Henrietta would have been difficult. She was unaware of any other Henrietta than the surface she presented. There was no secret calculation behind her manner. Her body at twenty-one was still as undisturbed by desires as her mind was by thought.
She was physically and mentally vacuous and the words that sometimes ran in her mind were parrotings of things she had heard. Her days passed in a pleasant maze of trifles in which she exhausted her energies. Her manner of enthusiasm and astonishment was sincere. In her exaggerated exclamations the energies of her youth merely found a necessary and utterly respectable outlet. Her banalities were too vigorous to be aught but authentic and original. They were the enviably correct flower of her personality.
The judge, however, had a side to his nature generally unsuspected among his friends. He was a drinker. He owed the resonant slowness of his speech, in fact, to the ravages of drink. His poise, his intimidating deliberateness were likewise the result of drink. His mind had been somewhat enervated and the spontaneity of his nerves somewhat impaired by thirty years of intensive drinking.
His words followed his thoughts slowly and his gestures were moments behind the commands of hisbrain centers. This general slowing up, the result of nerve exhaustion induced by his orgies, was readily accepted by his friends as an impressiveness of manner.
In arguments he found himself frequently unable to follow the nimble phrases of an opponent. His resort to silence—a silence made seemingly pregnant by certain mannerisms such as a tightening of his lips, a drawing down of his nose, and a narrowing of his eyes, which were actually an effort to ward off a sleepiness continually hovering over him—this silence was a successful substitute.
Mainly the judge kept his orgies to himself. During his married life he had adroitly covered them up as business trips—cases in other cities. His habit was to start off at his club, to sit among a half dozen men whose type he found agreeable and drink slowly during the early part of the evening. The talk would gradually veer from politics and legal discussions to women and anecdotes. In these the judge excelled. His fund of obscene stories was amazing. He related them with relish and was proud of an ability to talk several dialects such as German, Irish, Yiddish, Scotch and Swedish.
Among his club cronies his drinking and alcoholic waggery in no way reflected upon his status as a gentleman of absolute respectability and discretion. In fact they enhanced it. Among the judge's friends were lawyers of repute, financiers, and owners of large manufacturing plants. They were men usually past fifty. Their comradeship was based chiefly on their recognition of each other's prestige.
The publicity that had attended their lives gavethem all an identical stamp, a self-consciousness. They felt themselves instinct with power, and bent the greater part of their social energies to appearing democratic. They desired, as much as they desired anything, the flattery which lay in the comment, "Oh, he's very democratic. Just plain ordinary folks." They felt an exciting inference in this criticism. The inference was that, considering their power and superiority, one had to marvel at the fact of their dissimulation—their democracy. Thus they relished always lending themselves to projects, to situations which earned for them the awed avowal of inferiors that they were "just folks."
A certain shrewdness as well as flattery which inspired them. They were aware that people often preferred confessing the superiority of their betters by admitting in awe that "after all, he's just like us, in many respects."
On occasions when a group of them gathered at their club they stepped partly out of the characterizations of great men which they affected during most of their day. Drinking, taking their turns telling stories or pointing up incidents by the "did you ever hear the one about the Swede who went to a picnic with his best girl" method, they always welcomed Judge Smith. They were inclined to overlook a few things in his favor. If he did seem to have an unnecessary fund of smutty tales, there was on the other hand the fact that he was a judge and therefore above the anecdotes he told. Like the judge, they too were men with firmly rooted convictions on the subject of morality and if they laughed at stories over their highballs that flouted decency and made a mock of virtue there wasthis exonerating factor to be considered. Men sure of themselves and subscribing unflinchingly to the uncompromising standards of conduct necessary to maintain the morale of the community, such men could without danger unbend among themselves. For morality was in its deepest sense, the protection of others and not of one's self.
As the group thinned out on such occasions Judge Smith would rise and in the manner of a man returning to the higher and more important duties of life bid his fellows good-night.
"A very pleasant evening, gentlemen," he would pronounce, "but duty calls."
He would bow stiffly. Long drinking had made him master to an astonishing point of his physical being while under the influence of drink. Bowing, he would walk with dignity from the room, emerge into the street and enter one of the cabs.
A half-hour later would find him disporting himself in one of his favorite disorderly houses. Here with the aid of further drink the judge became a curious spectacle. He was generally hailed in the places that knew him as "the wild old boy". And his arrival although greeted with enthusiasm was a matter of secret chagrin to the landladies of his acquaintance.
It was his habit to indulge in filthy insults, hurling astounding obscenities at the half-drunken inmates. He would frequently become violent and throw bottles around, break mirrors and electric bulbs and smash chairs. It was difficult to grow angry with him at such times because he covered his violences and insults with a continuous roar of laughter as if they were actually the product of a vast Rabelaisian good humor.
His insults, the obscene invective he hurled at the partners in his orgy, were a curious phase. They were the product of a process of projection. His normal mind, still alive under the paralysis of alcohol, pronounced these outraged denunciations of his behavior against himself. His virtue and decency cried a savage disgust and he must rid himself of these cries, find an outlet for his self-revulsions, if he desired to continue the debauch which was also an outlet for things inside him—things that slept too violently under the repressions of his shell.
Thus he rationalized his two selves by giving voice to the terrific protests of his virtue. Simultaneously he hid himself from their object by fastening the insults that poured into his thought upon those around him. The women explained among each other in their own words that he was a filthy old man and ought to be ashamed of himself.
It was afternoon. Mrs. Basine listened to Judge Smith explaining the new moving pictures that were being shown at the vaudeville theaters.
"It's all part of the craze for new things," he was saying, "and these awful pictures are merely a fad. There is nothing of basic appeal for Americans in them and they'll die out in a year or so."
Mrs. Basine was always impressed by the judge. He had three days before been on one of his debauches. His manner as a result was heavier and his words slower. After one of his wild nights the judge sought to efface the memory of the uncleanliness by heightening his personal appearance. He would indulgehimself in Turkish baths, facial massages, hair shampoos, manicures and changes of linen during the day.
The sight of himself immaculately dressed, spotless, his face, collar, nails and shoes shining, gave him a feeling of reassurance. Clothes and appearance had more and more become a fetish with him until he had developed into a fop. There was a certain passion in his demand for cleanliness. A disordered tie would mysteriously depress him. A spot on his trousers or shoes would preoccupy him until its removal. Once while on his way from the theater he had been splashed by a horse. Unaware of the accident at the time he had gone to a restaurant. There he had noticed the condition of his clothes. The mud had reached as high as his shoulder. A nausea overcome him. He hurried to the lavatory and cleaned his clothes.
His daughter admired her father for his fastidiousness. She looked upon all other men as somewhat sloppy in comparison.
"It isn't just that father dresses well," she said, "but he's so particular about everything. About his plates and forks, and his bedroom must be bright as a new pin. Oh, it's just wonderful for a man to be thoroughly clean like that."
Although the judge had spoken to Mrs. Basine it was her son who answered.
"I saw the pictures at the vaudeville the other evening," he said, "and I quite agree with you, Judge."
The judge nodded pleasantly. He liked Basine and had already prophesied a future for him. Henrietta was informing Doris of the trouble they were having with the church choir.
"Dr. Blossom," she was saying, "is just absolutely at his wits' end. We can't get anybody ... anybody at all that's at all suitable."
"Mrs. Gilchrist and Aubrey are coming over," Mrs. Basine remarked to the judge. She was unable to keep a sound of pride out of her voice.
"A very fine woman. An exceptionally fine woman," he answered. Mrs. Basine nodded.
Basine sat down beside his sister Doris. He was interested in Henrietta. The news of her approaching engagement had exhilarated this interest. He had been a half-hearted wooer himself when he first came out of college. As she rattled on he was thinking, "She has nice eyes. She probably doesn't love Aubrey." He thought of Aubrey. A putty-faced, swell-headed fool. He could put it all over him, even as a writer, if he wanted to.
"I hear," he said aloud, "that you and Aubrey are engaged or almost engaged."
"Why the idea! Gracious!" A disturbed giggle. "Where on earth did you hear that! Father hasn't announced it yet."
"A little bird," smiled Basine. Doris looked at him and frowned.
"What do you say we pop some corn," he announced.
One of Basine's most engaging facilities was an ability to reflect in his own words and actions the character of those to whom he talked. Judge Smith regarded him as a young man of stable ideas and profound seriousness. Henrietta looked upon him as a charming, light-hearted youth who was able "to play." There were others to whom he appealed separatelyas a young man of culture, modern to his finger tips; as a man of pious kindliness; as a man interested exclusively in politics, in economics, in literature, in women. His pose was seemingly at the mercy of his audience. He did not deliberately seek to make himself agreeable by presenting exteriors acceptable to his friends. His proteanism was in the main unconscious. It was the result of an underlying desire to impress men and women he knew with his superiority.
He had found instinctively that a short cut to such impression was not contradictions but agreement. But he would not merely say "yes" and please his listener by subscribing whole-heartedly to the ideas or points of view under discussion. He would take these ideas and points of view and develop them, show with a sincere creative enthusiasm why they were correct and how astoundingly correct they were.
He was usually cleverer than the people with whom he agreed. This made it possible for him to develop their ideas, to add to them, supply them with nuances and far-reaching overtones of which their originators had had no inkling. When he had finished they would find themselves warmly applauding what he had said, admiring his sanity and intelligence.
It was no longer Basine who agreed with them. They agreed with Basine and each of them went away saying, "A remarkable young man. Full of very fine, worthwhile ideas and able to express himself."
They were conscious while praising him that they were also praising themselves. Although they were unaware of the adroit theft committed by Basine and unable to follow the way in which he filched their little prejudices and inflated them to noble proportionswith his cleverness, they felt a kinship with the young man. Their inferior egoism did not demand recognition as collaborator. They were warmed with the emotion of beingen rapportwith someone whom they admired. So often clever people were people with whom, somehow, one had little or nothing in common. But Basine was a clever person with whom everyone seemingly had everything in common. And they were delighted to have things in common with a clever man.
There were occasions on which Basine's cleverness was put to a difficult test. These came when a number of people, each of whom knew him differently, to each of whom he had identified himself as a champion of divergent opinions, assembled in his presence. Basine, it usually happened, was the friend in common and therefore the pivot of the vague debates which sometimes started—the awkward exchange of half-remembered arguments which constituted the intellectual life of his friends, as the make-believe of "playing house" had constituted their adult life when they were children.
But at such times Basine revealed his interesting talents as a compromiser, fence straddler, pacifier. Without espousing any of the sides presented, without denial or affirmation, he managed to convince the assembledge that he was a champion of all and detractor of none. He pretended a worldly tolerance, saying such things as:
"Well now, there are always two sides to a question. And a man who closes his mind to either side is likely as not to find himself in the dark. What Henning says is interesting. I can entirely understand it andsee the reasons for it. He sees the thing in a clear, definite manner. Yet what Stoefel says is also interesting and, of course, entertaining. I don't mean that I believe two sides to a question can both be the right sides. But it's my experience that there's an element of truth as well as of error in both sides. And I'm not so convinced that Henning and Stoefel actually differ. Often people meaning the same thing get into violent arguments because they misunderstand each other."
In this way he would convince both his friends that they were both men of intelligence, which is more flattering than being merely men of intelligent views. And, what was more important, he would give the listeners the impression of a calm, deliberative Basine, not to be taken in by the tricks of prejudice and speech which caused men to knock their heads together in endless argument.
Henrietta accompanied him into the kitchen in quest of corn to pop. Doris remained behind, staring disinterestedly at the judge who was talking to her mother. She had noticed something about the man that displeased her. She kept it, however, to herself. When he shook hands with her he assumed a paternal manner. He said to her:
"Well, my dear child, and how are you today? Serious as ever, I see. I understand that you and my little girl had quite an interesting time at the choir practice Saturday evening. Dear me, you will both soon be grown up and young ladies before I'm aware of it."
He talked with a kittenish banter in his voice as if he were patting a child of five on the head. But heheld her hand during his entire speech and his soft finger tips pressed moistly into her palm. It was hard at first to detect but after a long time Doris understood. Fanny had told her in an unsolicited confession that young men did that when they wanted to be familiar with a girl. It was a familiarity which only bad girls understood. Fanny added that a number of nice men whom she never would have suspected of such a low thing had done that to her hand but that the way to get the better of them was merely to pretend you didn't know anything about it.
Doris, disgusted by her sister's chatter, had remembered Judge Smith. The judge always did that, ... moving his finger tips as if he were unaware of the fact. This afternoon he had done it again. She had never been able to see the judge as her mother and brother saw him. To Doris there was something intangibly repulsive about his flabby, smooth-shaven face, about his shining linen and deliberate manner that impressed everybody. She did not resent the things he said. To these she was, in fact, indifferent. But the man's personality awakened a revulsion in her. She did not explain it to herself. She was aware only that she felt uncomfortable when he looked at her and that when he beamed his kindliest or boomed most virtuously, she felt like sinking lower in her chair and contorting her face with shame, not for herself but for him.
Basine and Henrietta had returned to the room. A grate fire was burning wanly. Basine, squatting down like an elated boy, arranged a cushion for her.
"Oh, we've forgotten the thingumabob," he exclaimed, "come help me find that."
Henrietta skipped excitedly after him. Moments like this were dear to Henrietta. Looking for thingumabobs, planning popcorn feasts, having lots of fun and in a way that was intelligent. In the kitchen Basine searched for a minute and then turned to the girl with a laugh.
"I wanted to ask you something," he said. "That's why I lured you out again."
"For heaven's sake! Gracious! Aren't you ashamed of yourself, George Basine!"
She laughed with him. The thought had secured to him that it would be interesting to take Henrietta away from Aubrey. He didn't want her himself for any particular purpose. She was not a girl one could seduce, or even desired to seduce. And marriage was miles from his head.
Yet he had once held her hand while sitting on her father's porch and whispered idiotic things to her. He had made love to her, said to her, "Henny dear, I'm wild about you." It annoyed him to think that Aubrey Gilchrist would marry her, would appropriate her as if the things he, Basine, had said and done were of no possible consequence. In addition he had always disliked Aubrey.
"Henny," he said quickly, he had called her Henny two years before, "are you really in love with Aubrey?"
Henrietta made a face and swung her shoulders like a child embarrassed.
Like Keegan, he was physically tired from his night's debauch. But in Basine there was no impulse to repent. As he stood looking at the girl he grew curiously sensual in his thought.
The consciousness of his deadened nerves was an irritant to his vanity. He was always doing things he felt disinclined to do, as a result of his constant work of idealization. Also, to follow one's impulse and act logically was what everyone did in a way. If Hugh Keegan was tired he sighed and said so. But Basine, if he was tired, would laugh and suggest adventures. If Keegan or the others he knew were elated over something, they announced it, naively, like children. But Basine edited his elation and often pretended to be bored. And when he was actually bored he often pretended enthusiasm.
Such odd perversions had become a habit with Basine. Behind the confusion of purpose that inspired them was a certainty that in acting the way he did he distinguished himself from other people. Often no one was aware, of course, that he was acting, that his enthusiasm was the heroic mask of weariness. But Basine was enough of an egoist to enjoy secretly the emotion of superiority.
Because he was tired and because he would have preferred ignoring the trim figure laughing beside him, he deliberately took her hand and allowed his smile to grow serious. Now as he looked at her and saw her eyes soften, his vanity clamored for satisfaction. It was one of the moments in his life when his vanity most desired satisfaction, proof of the high opinions he held of himself. He was tired, bored and without impulses.
To dominate others, to possess himself of their regard and homage was the goal toward which he always built. Now the desire to possess himself of theregard and homage of the girl whose hand he was holding came acutely into his thought.
"Henny," he whispered, "I'm sorry about you and Aubrey."
"Why?"
This was the sort of boy and girl scene at which she was almost adept. People held hands and even kissed without altering the correct social tone or content of their talk.
"Because," said Basine, "Oh well, because I love you."
The phrase stirred, as it always did, a faint emotion in his heart. He had used it frequently, even with prostitutes, and it had always given him a fugitive sense of exaltation. Walking alone in the street at night he would sometimes whisper aloud, "I love you, George. Oh, I love you so." He would have no one in mind whom he might be quoting at the moment. The words would come and utter themselves and give him a sudden lift of spirit. It was like his other self-conversation when walking along swiftly in the street he would begin exclaiming under his breath, "Wonderful ... wonderful ... wonderful...." The word like his mysterious, "I love you, George" came without cause or relation to his thoughts and repeated itself on his lips.
Henrietta was staring at him. It was chiefly because she was surprised. She remembered that they had been friends once and held hands and that he had said things. But all that had been a part of a pretty game one played with boys, because they liked it and because it was rather likable in itself. She was surprised now because he looked sad. Sadness in hermind was synonymous with seriousness. People were never serious unless they were sad. When she wanted to be serious she would always lower her eyes and arrange her expression as if she were going to weep. Then people understood that what she said was really truly serious and not just part of the game people were always playing among themselves. A game in which nothing was serious or funny or anything—but just was. Because that was the way it should be.
Basine was pulling her slowly toward him.
"Don't you love me?" he asked. "Don't you love me at all?"
He was talking aloud to conceal the fact that he had drawn her to him and was placing his arms around her. To do anything like that in silence would have frightened Henrietta. But to talk while one was doing it, that made it seem less definite. One could ignore what one was doing, ignore the hands pressing one's shoulders and the touching of bodies by pretending to interest one's self entirely in the conversation.
Basine knew this because he had made love to girls and taken liberties. As long as he kept talking and asking questions the girl would pretend she was so occupied in answering the questions and keeping up socially her end of the talk that she was oblivious to the liberties that were being taken with her.
Henrietta answered, "Why do you ask that? Do you really think you ought to ask me questions like that, George Basine?"
"Yes I do," he said, "why shouldn't I?"
"Oh because. Because you're engaged to Marion."
"Who told you that?"
"I know. Anybody could know that. Aren't you?"
"No more than you are to Aubrey."
"Gracious! Aren't you the clever boy. I declare! Engaged to Aubrey! Heavens, I'd like to know where you heard that."
"A little bird told me."
"It did not."
"Yes it did."
"You know better than that, George Basine. I wish you'd tell me really."
"Why should I."
"I'd like to know, that's why. I think I have a right to know."
"Oh but I did tell you something. I told you I love you."
"Why, George Basine!"
During the talk Basine had moved her closer to him. His arms were tightly around her and he had kissed her eyes and cheeks between his questions and answers. The embrace had aroused no physical desire in him. He was irritated by the coolness of his nerves. He was irritated at his being unable to feel anything with his arms around a pretty girl. Usually the incident would have reached its climax with the half kiss he placed on her mouth. That was as far as good girls went. At this point they ordinarily said something like, "Listen, I want to tell you something. I almost forgot." And gently detaching themselves from one's arms, continued to talk in the same tone they had used during the embrace about some event that had occurred during the week.
And then one returned to the sitting room and went on talking casually as if nothing had happened. Itwas the height of bad taste to remind a good girl today that one had kissed her yesterday or to presume upon it in any way. It was the height of bad taste also to resist when they gently pushed one away and said, "Listen, I want to tell you something. I almost forgot."
Basine knew the simple technique of these virginal intrigues. Henrietta's hands were pressing him. This was the signal to release her and pretend that nothing had happened. Ordinarily Basine would have complied. He had no interest in the girl. His original impulse to take her from Aubrey had slipped from his mind.
But he had grown sad. The mild sensual moment he would usually have experienced in the embrace had been missing. His tired nerves had not responded. Unable to exhilarate his senses he sought to make up for the failure by treating his vanity to an exhilaration. This exhilaration would come if the girl he was holding grew suddenly sad, raised wide eyes to him and in a shamed voice murmured, "I love you, George. Oh, I love you so."
He would make her do this.
"Oh, Henny. Why don't you love me? I want you so much all the time."
"Why George Basine!"
She had suspected something different about the game when it started. And this was different. Even with Aubrey it had not been as different as this. Aubrey's mother and her father had decided upon the engagement after Aubrey had been fussing her for a few weeks.
But this was different. George Basine was in lovewith her! She had always liked him because her father said he was a fine, promising young man and because he knew how to play, and was really like herself in many ways. She wondered what she should do. She felt worried because she was afraid she would say something that wasn't right.
She couldn't ask him to let her go because he was only holding her lightly and she could move away if she wanted to. She thought his eyes were sad and she felt suddenly sorry for him. He had stopped talking and his eyes were sad. They were looking at her and they made her feel sad, too. Things were so different when one felt sad. Everything seemed to go away then and nothing remained. Everything went away and left one a little frightened. As if the world were unreal and everybody was unreal and nothing really was.
She was frightened like that now. Or at least she thought it was fear. Then she saw it was something else. Her heart had started to pound hard and her throat fluttered inside. No one had ever looked at her like this. So seriously. As if she were somebody very serious. It made her feel strange. She grew dizzy and her arms felt weak. She whispered his name and his hands crept over her cheeks. This thrilled her as if there were electricity in his fingers. And frightened her again. But it was nice. Like being a little girl, almost a baby, and falling into an older man's arms—her father's arms. She could almost remember being a little girl and lying in her father's arms.
"Do you love me?"
She would answer this time.
"Yes," she said. "Oh George."
She hid her face against his coat. Basine was careful not to embrace her. Her "yes" had given him an inexplicable moment. He had felt himself expand under it. In her unexpected submission—he had never dreamed of such a thing ten minutes ago—she became suddenly someone who was very rare and sweet. He was still utterly oblivious of her and had it turned out to be Marion in his arms instead of Henrietta the difference would have made no change in him. The thing that was rare and sweet was the exhilaration in his senses—a purely spiritual exhilaration. He enjoyed it as one might enjoy some unforeseen and startling gift.
He grew tender. He wanted to kiss the eyes and hair of her who had given this gift to him—the thing which felt so warm in his heart and tingled so pleasantly in his thought. He must reward her somehow for having stirred in him this delicious excitement, reward her for the sweet surfeit her surrender had given his vanity. For a moment bewildered by this inner desire to express the gratitude he felt, he stood trembling.
"Oh, I love you so, my darling," he whispered. "You're so beautiful."
It was her reward for having surrendered to his unspoken demand. It was an expression of the overwhelming generosity that choked him. He found in the saying of the words a sweetness almost as keen as her surrender had afforded him. To hear himself say to someone, "I love you," was mysteriously exhilarating. The thrill that accompanied his bestowal of largesse excited him to further experiment. He was not carried away but he relished the emotions betweenthem, the sense of having triumphed and the provoking sense of bestowing grandiose reward.
"Darling, tell me ... please tell me—will you marry me?"
"Oh George!"
"Tell me ... tell me...."
He was acting now, making his voice dramatic, pretending uncontrollable longings. She must say "Yes." He wanted her to and she must. He did not want to marry her. The thought had never occured to him. But it would be unbearable now unless she said "Yes." He must pretend and act and make the thing end by her saying "Yes."
"Oh, I can't tell you, George dear."
"You must, please...."
He had decided now finally to make her. A contest of wills. If he wanted a yes there must be a yes. Because he wanted it. His arms crushed her. He fastened against her. He felt her resisting. There was still no desire in him. His arms were still dead. But he could brook no resistance. The fact of resistance was unimportant but the idea of being resisted fired him with a passion entirely cerebral. He would warm her into saying yes, stir her senses, make her yield and her head swim until she said yes.
"I love you. Please say it. Say yes."
Yes to what? Henrietta for an instant awoke from the confusions of the past few minutes. Her morality, training, code of life and all sat up like a wary censor and surveyed the scene. The censor nodded an affirmation. It was all right. Go ahead. With this affirmation her body took fire. The weakness she had been struggling against became a beautiful enervation—alassitude that swept her unresistingly forward.
She had never done this before. She struggled for a moment to recall the censor—the thing that had always directed her. But she seemed to have been deserted. She was alone with sensations.
Her virginal mind was unable to identify the excitement rising in her. She waited while his caresses grew bolder. Then in a panic, born of a dim realization, she flung her arms passionately around Basine and sobbed.
"Yes.... Yes.... Oh George.... I will...."
She felt at once that she had said it just in time—that it would have been sinful to continue another moment without promising she would marry him.
Basine released her slowly. The incident abruptly was over. He had in fact lost interest in it immediately before she had spoken. The thrill had come, developed and gone—a spiritual exaltation which he had enjoyed to the utmost.
But now it was over. His vanity, surfeited, had withdrawn from the situation. He was surprised to find himself looking at the girl with utter dispassion, as if nothing had happened.
Inwardly he was amused. Such things were amusing, in a way. Moments in which one saw oneself as an outrageous actor, doing something ridiculous. It was like that now. Absurd. But it had been pleasant. Curious, how pleasant. However, that was over. Henrietta would of course forget about it. And he, he was prepared to return to the library and go on popping corn as if nothing had happened, absolutely nothing.
But Henrietta leaned weakly against his arm.
"Oh George, darling. Do you really love me?"
He answered out of a social respect for consistency and nothing else. He thought the question rather tactless. Of course he didn't love her and she should have known better than to ask it. It had just been a game they had played while looking for the thingumabob.
"Yes, Henny, of course."
Her eyes were wide and her lips quivered. She was looking at him as if he were doing something remarkable and she overcome with astonishment. For an instant Basine wondered why the deuce she looked that way. Then he felt an unexpected chill that he dismissed promptly with an inwardly reassuring smile as he heard her saying.
"Oh, we'll be so happy together when we're married. Isn't it wonderful, just too wonderful for words to be married—together. Oh George! I'm so happy.... I love you so much. And father will be so...."
They had not expected Mr. Gilchrist to come. Mr. Gilchrist was an undersized, mild little man with greying sideburns. When he was alone he read a great deal.
He had made money in the selling of expensive furniture. He was part owner of a store in Wabash Avenue. It was generally understood that people with taste patronized the Gilchrist-Warren establishment.
He arrived at the Basines' with his wife and his son Aubrey. Keegan and Fanny had returned from a long walk. They and the judge, Henrietta, Basine and his mother and sister Doris all expressed surprise at seeingMr. Gilchrist. There was always about Mr. Gilchrist the air of a museum piece—a quaint museum piece such as a keen but sentimental collector might delight in.
The exclamations of surprise embarrassed the little man and he stood fingering his sideburns and trying to smile in just the correct way. Mr. Gilchrist's arrival anywhere always precipitated this air of surprise. People said, "Why, Mr. Gilchrist! Awfully glad to see you! Haven't seen you for an age. Well! How are you?"
This was as if they were extremely surprised. But they weren't. They were merely annoyed, upset, vaguely hostile and condescending. And these emotions inspired by the innocent Mr. Gilchrist could be best concealed by the feigning of a correct social astonishment.
To the queries shot at him Mr. Gilchrist answered, "Very well, thank you. Thank you. Very well, thank you."
After greeting him with these exclamation points, people immediately forgot he was present. Mr. Gilchrist would sit the rest of the evening ignored by everybody and trying to the end to smile in just the correct way.
Inside Mr. Gilchrist were many little lonelinesses. His head was full of things he had read, of plots, of great characters, even of epigrams and biting iconoclasms. When people talked he did his best to be attentive. And if they talked about things that interested him—the Kings of France, the Italian wars of the fifteenth century, the topography of early Londonand kindred subjects—his face would tremble with enthusiasms.
He would listen, his eyes questing eagerly for epigrams, for illuminating sentences he might contribute. But his unegoistic love for the subject would make him inarticulate. His eyes that had seemed about to speak of themselves, that had seemed laden with excited informations would close and a chuckle would come from his lips. The Caesars, the Borgias, the Medicis, the Bourbons, the Valois, Savonarola, Richelieu, the various Charles, Phillips, Williams, Henrys, the plumed headliners of history around whom had centered the hurdy-gurdy intrigues, the circus romances and wars of vanished centuries—these were the hail-fellows of his imagination.
But people seldom talked of these names. People were more interested in contemporary topics. He did his best to be attentive. But his thought played truant and before he knew it he would be going over secretly certain things in his head. Villon, Marlowe, Balzac, Dumas, Gautier, Suetonius—there was a rabble of them continually arguing and declaiming in Mr. Gilchrist's head.
He liked to half close his eyes and imagine what the great names used to have for breakfast, what the great names would say if he were to enter their presence or if they were to come into this room. He liked to bring up in his mind pictures of old Paris, London, Florence, Avignon, Vienna with their lopsided roofs, winding alleys, night watchmen and king's guards. He could sit a whole evening this way thinking, "then he came to an old Inn and there were lights inside. People drinking inside, telling stories andlaughing. The inn-keeper was a man named Simon. The curious stranger looked about him with an imperious eye...."
These words murmuring in his head would conjure up the picture and there would be no further need for words. He was content to sit in the old inn, noticing its quaint decorations, its quaint but romantic inmates. Adventures would follow, strange episodes, denouements, climaxes—all without words as if he were watching a cinemategraph. His attempted smile would remain—a smile that concealed the fact he was neither smiling at those around him nor aware of what they were saying. For he would only half hear the chatter of the room and now and then nod his head vaguely at some question that people were answering—as if he too were answering it.
He was almost sixty, and lonely because he knew of no one to whom he could talk. His wife in particular was a person to whom he never dreamed of talking. He had only a dim idea of what he wanted to say to someone. But all his life he had been hoping to meet this one who would be like himself. This someone would be a friend whom he could take with him into places like the old inn and the crazily twisting streets of old London or Paris.
His days and years passed however without bringing him this companion. And outwardly he remained a mild little figure with sideburns, kindly tolerant toward everyone.
When his dreams left him long enough to enable him to notice closely those about him, a feeling of sadness would come. He would feel sorry for the men and women he saw gesturing and heard talkingand laughing. He thought they must be like himself—looking for something. His faded eyes would peer caressingly from behind his glasses and he would make simple little remarks in an apologetic voice. He would ask what they had been doing and when they answered in their careless, matter-of-fact ways he would nod hopefully and appear pleased.
To see Mr. Gilchrist in the midst of his family was to be convinced of the plausibility of immaculate conception. It was difficult imagining Mr. Gilchrist ever having done anything which might have resulted in fatherhood. But more than that, it was impossible even suggesting to oneself that his wife had ever received the embraces of a man, had ever so far forgotten the proprieties as to permit herself to be trapped alone with a man.
Thus the presence of Aubrey, their son, became incongruous. And Aubrey himself helped this illusion. He was a young man who looked incongruous. He seemed like a hoax or at least a caricature. He had enormous feet and ungainly legs, large hands and pipe-stem arms, hips like a woman and a face capriciously modeled out of soft putty. His ugliness by itself would have been whimsical—his protruding eyes, long pointed nose, uneven cheeks and bulbous chin hinted at something waggish.
But Aubrey had triumphed over his physical self. He had with the aid of a pair of large glasses from which dangled a black silk cord, and by holding his head thrown back as if there were a crick in his neck, acquired an air of dignity. It was his habit to glower with dignity, to stare with dignity and to preserve a dignified inanimation when he was silent. He waspigeon breasted and this helped. In fact his many slight deformities seemed all to contribute somehow toward making him a man of inspiring dignity.
People had little use for Mr. Gilchrist, his father. He was, of course, wealthy but not wealthy enough to earn the regard of the poor. They discussed him, saying, "He's not so simple as he pretends he is. Any man who's made a pile like old Gilchrist in the furniture business has a pretty smart head."
And they added that they wouldn't be surprised if something eventually were found out about old man Gilchrist. He had a past. Of this people were convinced. It was his wife's position and the fear of her personality that protected Mr. Gilchrist from the downright attacks of rumor. Any man who pretended to be as kindly as Mr. Gilchrist and who talked so tolerantly about everybody and everything was, you could bank on it, a sly rogue afraid to say what he thought because he himself was guilty of worse sins than those under discussion.
Mr. Gilchrist, by seeming above the social agitations surrounding him came to appear as one who looked down tolerantly upon inferiors—and this annoyed people. Who was Mr. Gilchrist and what had he done that he should be giving himself airs? Of course—there was Aubrey and....
Aubrey was aloof and dignified. But that was to be expected of a man who worked with his brain all the time, inventing plots and characters—his friends explained. In fact Aubrey's silences thrilled them even more than his talk. They felt, when he sat silent, that they were witnessing the birth in his head of some great idea which they would later read in abook. Aubrey was a man of superior qualities and to bask in the presence of a superior was to partake of his superiority.
Aubrey's superiority consisted, so far as Aubrey was concerned, of wearing the proper kind of eye-glasses, keeping his neck stiff, refraining from giving utterance to all the asininities which crowded his tongue and writing romances containing heroes with whom a half-million women readers had imaginary affairs every night and heroines whom another half-million men ravished in their dreams. For Aubrey was a celebrated popular fiction writer. To conceal the horrible reasons which made for the celebrity of Aubrey's fiction, the army of literary morons who succumbed to its influence grew louder and louder in their protestations that Aubrey was a great moral writer. They pointed out that here was a man whose heroines were pure, whose heroes were noble and virtuous—neglecting to add that these were the only kind of phantoms which could penetrate the guard of their own puritanism and stir the erotic impulses beneath.
Aubrey's superiority was, for the most part, a state of mind that existed among the people who knew him or had heard of him or read of him. And this attitude toward him became part of Aubrey. He adopted it as the major side of his character and lived chiefly in the opinions of others. His introspection consisted of reading press notices about himself and thinking of what other people thought of him. Thus to understand Aubrey it was necessary to go outside him and to investigate this external state of mind, the ready-made robes of purple in which his little thoughts strutted through the day.
The people in whose acclaim Aubrey robed himself were varied and many but they inhabited an identical psychological stratum. They believed firmly that all artists and writers were poor, starving, unhappy creatures.
This belief was borne out in their minds by history—such history as they permitted themselves to know. History was continually telling of geniuses who died in garrets, of great minds that could not make enough money to feed or clothe their bodies. In fact one of the shrewdest ways to tell whether a man was a genius—that is, had been a genius—was to determine whether he had been neglected during his life and died of malnutrition and disappointment.
The people who acclaimed Aubrey found a compensation in this. They liked to assure themselves that geniuses starved to death. This compensated them for the fact that they themselves were not geniuses. It made them feel that it was actually a vital misfortune to be gifted, since being gifted meant to suffer the neglect of one's fellows and the pangs of hunger.
But the knowledge that genius was neglected and hungry in no way inspired them to remedy the situation by recognizing its presence and feeding it. To the contrary they were determined to see that it remained neglected and hungry. The idea of struggling long-haired poets dressed in rags pleased them. The idea of long-haired painters living on crumbs in attics gave them peculiar satisfaction.
Geniuses were people different from themselves. They believed in different things and pretended to be excited by different emotions and lived different lives.And the people who acclaimed Aubrey were pleased to know that there was a penalty attached to being different from themselves and they were interested in seeing that this penalty was not removed. By penalizing the different ones whom they sensed as superiors, they increased the value of their own inferiorities.
Yet they acclaimed Aubrey and there was no malice in their acclaim. This was a phenomenon that had once startled Aubrey. Long ago, when he had first started to write, his family's friends had said, "Poor boy, he'll starve to death. There's no money in being an author and you lead a terrible life."
But Aubrey had gone ahead and remained an author. He had written, at the beginning, rather biting if sophomoric things, inspired by the malice he sensed toward his profession. But the inspiration had not been sufficiently strong to handicap him. When success had come and his name was emerging, the people who knew him and who had talked maliciously about his trying to be an author, were the first to acclaim him. This thing had confused Aubrey. He had felt that the public was a curious institution and he had for a few months wondered about it.
People sneered at struggling writers and referred with withering humor to art as "all bunk" and indignantly denounced its immorality. Then when one put oneself over despite their sneers they turned around and congratulated one as if one had done something of which they heartily approved. It was as if they tried to make up for their previous attitude, and for a few months Aubrey cherished a cynical image of the public. It was a great bully that spat and snarled atgenius, refusing to recognize it and making it a laughing stock wherever it could. But as soon as genius came through, this same bully of a public turned around and prostrated itself and worshipped blindly at its feet.
Then Aubrey had spent the few months wondering why this was so. But he had become too busy to do much thinking. His publishers were demanding more work—so he let other matters drop. His curiosity had carried him to the brink of an idea and he had somewhat impatiently turned his back on it. He had felt that to think as he was thinking about people who were praising him and buying his books, was to play the part of an ungrateful cad.
The idea that had come dangerously close to Aubrey's consciousness was the curious notion that people resented acclaiming anybody like themselves. The lucky ones who secured their hurrah became in their eyes no longer normal humans but super-persons about whom they were prepared to believe all manner of mythical grandeurs. The more remarkable and more superior people could make out their heroes to be, the less humility they felt in worshipping them. And since their heroes were creatures in whom they recognized a glorification of their own virtues, the more self-flattering it was to increase this glorification. They were able to worship themselves with abandon in the splendors they attributed to their chosen superiors.
Thus when they started they went the limit, heaping honors and honors upon a man until he became a glittering God-like person. The country at the time of Aubrey's ascent was full of such glittering God-likecreatures whose names were continually in people's mouths and in their newspapers. The instinct of inferiority demanding, as always, an outlet in the invention of gods, had found a tireless medium for this hocus-pocus in the press. Great reputations were continually springing up—the newspapers like the half-cynical, half-superstitious priests of the totem era busying themselves with creating towering effigies in clay and smearing them with vermillion paints. These gods whom people busily erected and before whom they busily prostrated themselves were, as always, the awesome deities created in their own image.
There had been a crisis in Aubrey's life when he was caught between a desire to be himself and the desire to be a great clay figure with mysterious totems splashed over it. To be himself he had only to write as he vaguely thought he wanted to write. And to be one of the great figures he had merely to write what he definitely knew would win him the respect of others.