some forsaken parish, so ill-esteemed he had been forced to publish his
sermons himself, named George B Shaw, and I had been impressed by his
forceful style. I quoted him to Tyss, perhaps as much to preen myself
as to counter his argument.
“Nonsense. Ive seen the good parson’s book with its eighteenth-century
logic and its quaint rationalism, and know it for a waste of ink and
paper. Man does not think; he only thinks he thinks. An automaton, he
responds to external stimuli; he cannot order his thought.”
“You mean that there’s no free will? Not even a marginal minimum of
choice?”
“Exactly. The whole thing is an illusion. We do what we do because
someone else has done what he did; he did it because still another
someone did what he did. Every action is the rigid result of another
action.”
“But there must have been a beginning,” I objected. “And if there was a
beginning, choice existed if only for that split second. And if choice
exists once it can exist again.”
“You have the makings of a metaphysician, Hodgins,” he said
witheringly, for metaphysics was one of the most despised words in his
vocabulary. “The reasoning is infantile. Answering you and the Reverend
Shaw on your own level, I could say that time is a convention and that
all events occur simultaneously. Or if I grant its dimension I can ask,
What makes you think time is a simple straight line running flatly
through eternity? Why do you assume that time isnt curved? Can you
conceive of its end? Can you really imagine its beginning? Of course
not; then why arent both the same? The serpent with its tail in its
mouth?”
“You mean we not only play a prepared script but repeat the identical
lines over and over and over for infinity? There’s no heaven in your
cosmos, only an unimaginable, never-ending hell.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “That you should spout emotional apologetics
at me is part of what you call the script, Hodgins. You didnt select
the words nor speak them voluntarily. They were called into existence
by what I said, which in turn was mere response to what went before.”
Weakly I was forced back to a more elementary attack. “You don’t act in
accordance with your own conviction.”
He snorted. “A thoughtless remark, excusable only because automatic.
How could I act differently? Like you, I am a prisoner of stimuli.”
“How pointless to risk ruin and imprisonment as a member of the Grand
Army when no one can change what’s predestined.”
“Pointless or not, emotions and reflections are responses just as much
as actions. I can no more help engaging myself in the underground than
I can help breathing, or my heart beating, or dying when the time
comes. Nothing, they say, is certain but death and taxes; actually
everything is certain. Everything,” he repeated firmly.
I went back to sorting some pamphlets which were to be sold for
wastepaper, shaking my head. His theory was unassailable; every
attack was discounted by the very nature of the thesis. That it was
false I didnt doubt; its impregnability made its falseness still more
terrifying.
There were fully as many imaginary discussions with Tyss as real ones.
Yet even in these disembodied arguments I could gain no advantage. Why
do you look back on the War of Southron Independence with regret for
what might have been, if no might-have-been is possible? I asked him
mentally, knowing his answer, I cannot help myself, was no answer at
all.
The logical illogic of it was only one of the multitude of
contradictions in him. The Grand Army to which he was devoted was
a violent organization of violent men. He himself was an advocate
and implement of violence—one illegal paper, the _True American_,
came from his press and I often saw crumpled proofs of large type
warnings to “Get Out of Town you Conf. TRAITOR or the GA will HANG
YOU!” Yet cruelty, other than intellectually, was repugnant to him;
his vindictiveness toward the Whigs and Confederates rose from
commiseration for the condition into which they had plunged the country.
Pondible and the others who bore an indefinable resemblance to each
other, bearded or not, came to the store on Grand Army business, and I
was sure many of the errands I was sent on advanced or were supposed
to advance the Grand Army’s cause. Those who signed receipts with an
X—and in the beginning at least Tyss was strict about assurance of
delivery—seemed unlikely customers for the sort of merchandise we
handled.
I was relieved, but puzzled and perhaps a little piqued, that aside
from the very first conversation with Pondible, no attempt was made to
persuade me into the organization. Tyss must have perceived this, for
he explained obliquely.
“There’s the formative type, Hodgins, and the spectator type. One acts,
and the other is acted upon. One changes events, the other observes
them. Of course,” he went on hastily, “I’m not talking metaphysical
rubbish. When I say the formative type changes events I merely mean he
reacts to a given stimulus in a positive way while the spectator reacts
to the same circumstances negatively, both reactions being inevitable
and inescapable. Naturally, events are never changed.”
“Why can’t one be one type sometimes and the other at other times?
Ive certainly heard of men of action who have sat down to write their
memoirs.”
“You are confusing the after-effect of action with nonaction, the
dying ripples on a pond into which a stone has been tossed with the
still surface of one which has never been disturbed. No, Hodgins, the
two types are completely distinct and unchangeable. The Swiss police
chief, Carl Jung, has refined and improved the classifications of
Lombroso, showing how the formative type can always be detected.”
I felt he was talking pure nonsense, even though I had never read
Lombroso or heard of Chief Jung.
“To the formative type the spectator seems useless, to the spectator
the man of action is faintly absurd. A born observer would find the
earnest efforts of the Grand Army—the formation of skeleton companies,
the appointment of officers, the secret drills, the serious attempt to
become a real army—lacking in humor and repellent.”
“You think I’m the spectator type, Mr Tyss?”
“No doubt about it, Hodgins. Certain features might be deceptive at
first sight: the wide-spaced eyes, the restrained fleshiness of the
mouth, the elevation of the nostril; but they subordinate to more
subtle indicators. No question but that Chief Jung would put you down
as an observer.”
If his fantastic reasoning and curious manner of classifying
personalities as though they were zoological specimens could relieve me
of having to refuse pointblank to join the Grand Army I was content.
While this hardly alleviated my disturbance at being, no matter how
remotely, accessory to mayhem, kidnaping and murder I compromised with
my conscience by trying to believe I might after all be mistaken in
thinking I was being used. There were times when I felt I ought boldly
to declare myself and leave the store but when I faced the prospect
of having to find a way to eat and sleep, even if I put aside the
imperative necessity of books, I lacked the courage.
Spectator? Why not? Spectators had no difficult decisions to make.
_5._ _OF WHIGS AND POPULISTS_
A country defeated in a bitter war and divested of half its territory
loses its drive and spirit and suffers a shock which is communicated
to all its people. For generations its citizens brood over what has
happened, preoccupied with the past and dreaming of a miraculous
change, until time brings apathy or a reversal of history. The Grand
Army, with its crude and brutal philosophy and methods, was pride’s
answer to defeat.
It was not the only answer; the two major political parties had others.
The realistic Whigs wanted to fit the country and its economy into
actual world conditions, to subordinate it wholly and openly to the
great manufacturing nations and accept with gratitude foreign capital
and foreign protection. The immediate result would be more prosperity
for the propertied classes; they contended this would mean a gradual
raising of the standard of living since employers could hire more
hands, and indenture, faced by competition with wages, would dwindle
away.
This the Populists denied. The government, they insisted when they were
out of office, should create industries, forbid indenting, buy up the
indentures of skilled workers and offer high enough pay to create new
markets, and defy the world by building a new army and navy. That they
never put their program into effect they laid to the wily tricks of the
Whigs.
The presidential election of 1940 was as violent as if the office were
really a prize to be sought rather than a practically empty title,
with all real power now held by the Majority Leader of the House and
his cabinet of Committee Chairmen. As early as May one of the leading
contenders for the Populist nomination was shot and badly crippled; the
Cleveland hall where the Whig convention was being held was fired by an
arsonist.
I would not be old enough to vote for two years, yet I too had campaign
fever. Jennings Lewis, the Populist, was perhaps the ugliest candidate
ever offered, with a hairless, skeletonlike face; Dewey, the Whig
nominee, had a certain handsomeness, which might have been an asset if
the persistent advocates of woman suffrage had ever gotten their way.
Traditionally, candidates never ventured west of Chicago, concentrating
their appearances in New York and New England and leaving the campaign
in the sparsely settled trans-Mississippi to local politicians. This
year both office-seekers used every device to reach the greatest
number of voters. Dewey made a grand tour in his balloon-train; Lewis
was featured in a series of short phonotos which were shown free.
Dewey spoke several times daily to small groups; Lewis specialized in
enormous weekly rallies followed by torchlight parades.
One of these Populist rallies was held in Union Square early in
September; outgoing President George Norris spoke, and ex-President
Norman Thomas, the only Populist to serve two terms since the beloved
Bryan. Tyss indulgently gave me permission to leave the store a couple
of hours before the meeting was to commence so I might get a place from
which to see and hear all that was going on. Though he characterized
all elections as meaningless exercises devised to befuddle, he had been
active in this one in some mysterious and secretive way.
The square was already well filled when I arrived, with the more
acrobatic members of the audience perched on the statues of LaFayette
and Washington. Calliopes played patriotic airs, and a compressed
air machine shot up puffs of smoke which momentarily spelled out the
candidate’s name. Resigned to pantomime glimpses of what was going on,
I moved around the outside edge of the crowd, thinking I might just as
well leave altogether.
“Please don’t step on my foot so firmly. Or is that part of the
Populist tradition?”
“Excuse me, Miss; I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”
We were close enough to a light standard for me to see she was young
and well-dressed, hardly the sort of girl to be found at a political
meeting, few of which ever counted much of a feminine audience.
She rubbed her instep briefly. “It’s all right,” she conceded
grudgingly. “Serves me right for being curious about the mob.”
She was plump and pretty, with a small, discontented mouth and pale
hair worn long over her shoulders. “There’s not much to see from here,”
I said; “unless youre enthusiastic enough to be satisfied with a bare
look at the important people, perhaps you’d let me help you to the
streetcar. For my clumsiness.”
She looked at me thoughtfully. “I can manage by myself. But if you feel
you owe me something for trampling me, maybe you’ll explain why anyone
comes to these ridiculous gatherings.”
“Why ... to hear the speakers.”
“Hardly any of them can. Only those close up.”
“Well then, to show their support of the party, I guess.”
“That’s what I thought. It’s a custom or rite or something like that. A
stupid amusement.”
“But cheap,” I said. “And those who vote for Populists usually havent
much money.”
“Maybe that’s why,” she answered. “If they found more useful things to
do they’d earn money; then they wouldnt vote for Populists.”
“A virtuous circle. If everyone voted Whig we’d all be rich as Whigs.”
She shrugged her shoulders, a gesture I found pleasing. “It’s easy
enough to be envious of those who are better off; it’s a lot harder to
become better off yourself.”
“I can’t argue with you on that, Miss ... um ...?”
“Why Mister Populist, do ladies always tell you their names when you
step on their feet?”
“I’m not usually lucky enough to find feet to step on that have lovely
ladies attached,” I answered boldly. “I won’t deny Populist leanings,
but my name is really Hodge Backmaker.”
Hers was Tirzah Vame, and she was indentured to a family of wealthy
Whigs who owned a handsome modern castiron and concrete house near the
Reservoir at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue. She had used the
apt word “curious” in characterizing herself but it was, as I soon
found out, a cold and inflexible curiosity which explored only what
she thought might be useful or which impressed her as foolish. She
was interested in the nature of anything fashionable or popular or
much talked of, the idea of being concerned with anything even vaguely
abstract struck her as preposterous.
She had indented, not out of stark economic necessity, but
calculatedly, believing she could achieve economic security through
indenture. This seemed paradoxical to me, even when I contrasted my
“free” condition with her bound one. Certainly she seemed to have
minimum restriction on her time; soon after our introduction at the
rally she was meeting me almost every evening in Reservoir Square where
we sat for hours talking on a bench or walking briskly when the autumn
weather chilled our blood.
I did not long flatter myself that her interest—perhaps tolerance would
be a better word—was due to any strong attraction exerted by me. If
anything she was, I think, slightly repelled by my physical presence,
which carried to her some connotation of ordinary surroundings and
contrasted with the well-fed smooth surfaces of her employers and their
friends. The first time I kissed her she shuddered slightly; then,
closing her eyes, she allowed me to kiss her again.
She did not resist me when I pressed my lovemaking; she led me quietly
to her room in the big house on my transparent plea that the outdoors
was now too cold even for conversation. I was no accomplished seducer,
but even in my awkward eagerness I could see she had made up her mind I
was to succeed.
That her complaisance was not the result of passion was soon obvious;
there was not so much a failure on my part to arouse her as a refusal
on hers to be aroused beyond an inescapable degree. Even as she
permitted our intimacy she remained as virginal, aloof and critical as
before.
“It seems hardly worth the trouble. Imagine people talking and writing
and thinking about nothing else.”
“Tirzah dear—”
“And the liberties that seem to go with it. I don’t think of you as any
more dear than I did an hour ago. If people must indulge in this sort
of thing, and I suppose they must since it’s been going on for a long
time, I think it could be conducted with more dignity.”
As my infatuation increased her coolness did not lessen; curiosity
alone seemed to move her. She was amused at my pathetic search for
knowledge. “What good is your learning ever going to do you? It’ll
never get you a penny.”
I smoothed the long, pale hair and kissed her ear. “Suppose it doesnt?”
I argued lazily; “There are other things besides money.”
She drew away. “That’s what those who can’t get it always say.”
“And what do people who can get it say?”
“That it’s the most important thing of all,” she answered earnestly.
“That it will buy all the other things.”
“It will buy you free of your indenture,” I admitted, “but you have to
get it first.”
“Get it first? I never let it go. I still have the contract payment.”
“Then what was the point of indenting at all?”
She looked at me wonderingly. “Havent you ever thought about serious
things? Only books and politics and all that? How could I get
opportunities without indenting? I doubt if the Vames are much of a cut
above the Backmakers; well, youre a general drudge and I’m a governess
and tutor and even in a way a sort of distant friend to Mrs Smythe.”
“That sounds suspiciously like snobbery to me.”
“Does it? Well, I’m a snob; Ive never denied it. I want to live like a
lady, to have a good house with servants and carriages and minibiles,
to travel to civilized countries, with a place in Paris or Rome or
Vienna. You can love the poor and cheer for the Populists; I love the
rich and the Whigs.”
“That’s all very well,” I objected, “but even though you have your
indenting money and can buy back your freedom any moment you want it,
how does this help you get rich?”
“Do you think I keep my money in my pocket? It’s invested, every cent.
People who come to this house give me tips; not just money, though
there’s enough of that to add a bit to my original capital, but tips on
what to buy and sell. By the time I’m thirty I should be well off. Of
course I may marry a rich man sooner.”
“That’s an awfully cold-blooded way of looking at marriage,” I
remonstrated.
“Is it?” she asked indifferently. “Well, youve been telling me I’m
cold-blooded anyway. I may as well be cold-blooded profitably.”
“If that’s the way you feel I don’t understand what we’re doing here
at this moment. I’d have thought you’d have picked a more profitable
lover.”
She was unruffled. “You didnt think about it at all. If you had, you
would have seen I could hardly encourage any of the men from the class
into which I intend to marry. Great ladies can laugh at gossip, but the
faintest whisper about someone like me would be damaging. Scandal would
be unavoidable if I appeared to be anything in this house but a chilly
prude.”
An appearance not too deceitful, I considered, sickly jealous at
the thought of men who might have been in my place if they had been
as anonymous, as inconsequential as I. But this writhing jealousy
was little more painful than my frustration at having been made a
convenience, a trial experiment. Almost anyone of equal unimportance,
anyone who was not a fellow-servant or a familiar in the house would
have done as well as I, anyone unlikely ever to come face to face with
Mrs Smythe, much less talk to her.
Looking back, trying to recapture for a moment that vanished past,
I have a sad, quizzical welling of pity for the girl Tirzah and the
boy Hodge. How gravely we took our moral and political differences;
how lightly the flying moments of union. We said and did all the
wrong things, all the things which fostered the antagonism between
us and none of the things which might have softened our youthful
self-assurance. We wrangled and argued: Dewey and Lewis, Whig versus
Populist, materialist against idealist, reality opposing principle. It
all seems so futile now; it all appeared so vital then.
Added to the almost unanimous distrust and hatred of all foreigners
in the United States, we regarded the Confederates in particular as
the cause of all our misfortunes. We not only blamed and feared them,
but looked upon them as sinister, so Populist orators had a ready-made
response every time they referred to the Whigs as Southron tools.
Contrary to the accepted view in the United States, I was sure the
victors in the War of Southron Independence had been men of the highest
probity, and the noblest among them was their second president. Yet I
also knew that immediately after the Peace of Richmond less dedicated
individuals became increasingly powerful in the new nation. As Sir John
Dahlberg remarked, “Power tends to corrupt.”
From his first election in 1865 until his death ten years later,
President Lee had been the prisoner of an increasingly strong and
imperialistic congress. He had opposed the invasion and conquest of
Mexico by the Confederacy, undertaken on the pretext of restoring order
during the conflict between the republicans and the emperor. However he
had too profound a respect for the constitutional processes to continue
this opposition in the face of joint resolutions by the Confederate
House and Senate.
Lee remained a symbol, but as the generation which had fought for
independence died, the ideals he symbolized faded. Negro emancipation,
enacted largely because of pressure from men like Lee, soon revealed
itself as a device for obtaining the benefits of slavery without its
obligations. The freedmen on both sides of the new border were without
franchise, and for all practical purposes without civil rights. Yet
while the old Union first restricted and then abolished immigration,
the Confederacy encouraged it, making the newcomers subjects like
the Latin-Americans who made up so much of the Southron population
after the Confederacy expanded southward, limiting full citizenship to
posterity of enfranchised residents in the Confederate States on July
Fourth 1864.
The Populists claimed the Whigs were Confederate agents; the Whigs
retorted that the Populists were visionaries and demagogues who
tolerated if they did not actually encourage the activities of the
Grand Army. The Populists replied by pointing to their platform which
denounced illegal organizations and lawless methods. I was not too
impressed by this, knowing how busy Tyss, Pondible and their associates
had been ever since the campaign started.
On election night Tyss closed the store and we walked the few blocks
to Wanamaker & Stewarts drygoods store where a big screen showed the
returns between tinugraphs puffing the firm’s merchandise. From the
first it was apparent the unpredictable electorate preferred Dewey to
Lewis. State after state, hitherto staunchly Populist, turned to the
Whigs for the first time since William Hale Thompson defeated President
Thomas R Marshall back in 1920 and again Alfred E Smith in 1924, before
Smith gained the great popularity which gave him the presidency four
years later. Only Massachusetts, Connecticut, Dakotah and Oregon went
for Lewis; his own Minnesota along with twenty-one other states plumped
for Dewey.
Disappointed as I was, I could not but note Tyss’s cheerful air. When I
asked him what satisfaction he could find in so overwhelming a defeat
he smiled and said, “What defeat, Hodgins? Did you think we wanted the
Populists to win? To elect Jennings Lewis with his program of world
peace conferences? Really Hodgins, I’m afraid you learn nothing day by
day.”
“You mean the Grand Army wanted Dewey all along?”
“Dewey or another; we prefer a Whig administration which presents a
fixed target to a Populist one wavering all over the place.”
Of course it should have occurred to me that Tyss and Tirzah would wind
up on the same side. It was a measure of my innocence that it never
had.
_6._ _ENFANDIN_
Tirzah’s question, “What good is your learning ever going to do you?”
bothered me from time to time. Not that I was burdened by any vast
amount of knowledge, but presumably I would get more—and then what?
It was true I expected no rewards from reading except the pleasure
it gave me, but the future, to use a topheavy word, could not be
entirely disregarded. I could not see myself spending a lifetime in the
bookstore. I was grateful to Tyss, despite his disdain of this emotion,
for the opportunities he had given me, but not grateful enough to
reconcile myself to becoming another Tyss, especially one without his
vitalizing involvement with the Grand Army.