GARGOYLES

_GARGOYLES_

_By_

BEN HECHT

[Illustration]

BONI AND LIVERIGHT

Publishers New York

Copyright, 1922, by

Boni and Liveright, Inc.

New York

To My Friend

the

Chicago Daily News

1

The calendars said--1900. It was growing warm. George Cornelius Basine

emerged from Madam Minnie's house of ill fame at five o'clock on a

Sabbath May morning. He was twenty-five years old, neatly dressed, a bit

unshaven and whistling valiantly, "Won't you come home, Bill Bailey,

won't you come home?"

Considering the high estate which was to be his, as the estimable

Senator Basine, the introduction savors of malice. But, it must be

remembered, this was twenty-two years ago, and moreover, in a day before

the forces of decency had triumphed. The soul of man was still

unregenerate. Prostitutes, saloons, hell-holes still flourished

unchallenged in the city's heart. And Basine even at twenty-five was not

one of those aggravating anomalies who pride themselves upon being ahead

of their time; or behind their time. Basine was of his time.

And on this day which witnessed him whistling on the doorstep of Madam

Minnie's, the Devil was still a gentlemen, albeit a gentleman in bad

standing. But, being a gentleman, he was tolerated. Tradition, in a

manner, still clothed him in the guise of a Rabelaisian clown, high born

but fallen. He walked abroad in his true character, flaunting his red

tights, his cloven hoof, his spiked tail and his mysterious horns. A

Mid-Victorian Devil innocent of further disguise, his face still

undisfigured by the Kaiser's mustachio or the Bolshevist's whiskers. A

naive, unctuous lout of a Devil with straightforward Tempter's

proclivities. An antagonist not for Dr. Wilsons and M. Clemenceaus and

the Societies for the Spread of True Americanization, but an

unpolitical, highly orthodox, leering, pitchfork-brandishing _vis a vis_

for simple men of God. In short, the Devil was still a Devil and not a

Complex.

It was growing warm and the calendars said--a new century ... a new

century. And the great men of the day pointed with stern, pregnant

fingers at the calendars and proclaimed--a new century ... a new

century.

Beautiful phrase. The soul of man, in its struggle toward God knows

what, paused elatedly to contemplate the new milestone. Elated as all

youth is elated for no other reason than that there is a tomorrow, a

tomorrow of unknown and multiple milestones. Elated with the knowledge

of progress--that sage and flattering word by which the soul of man

explains the baffling phenomenon of its survival.

The great men of the day stood staring through half-closed eyes at the

calendars. To anticipate by a single day! But the future no less than

the past remains a current mystery. And the great men--the

prophets--confined themselves with stentorian caution to the prophecy--a

new century has dawned.

Basine, whistling and waiting for his companion to emerge on Madam

Minnie's doorstep, regarded the scene about him with the hardened moral

indifference of youth. It was growing warm. The May sun was striding, an

incongruous, provincial virgin, through a litter of blowzy streets.

Under its mocking light the rows of bawdy-houses and saloons suffered

an architectural collapse. Walls, windows, roofs and chimneys leered

tiredly at each other. The district seemed indeed an illustration for a

parable of Vice and Virtue drawn by the venomously partial pen of some

unusually half-witted cleric--dirty-faced brothels, tousled cafe signs,

bleery sidewalks, toothless storefronts all cowering before the rebuke

of God's sun.

A few mysterious solitaries lent a vague life to the scene. The figure

of a drunk, unchastened, zigzagging humorously down the pavement like

some nocturnal clown prowling after a vanished Bacchanal. A hastily

dressed prostitute carrying her night's earnings as an offering to early

devotion. A few unseasoned revellers overcome with a nostalgia for clean

bathrooms and Sunday morning waffles at the family board, sleepily

fleeing the scenes of their carouse.

All this formed no part of the preoccupations of the whistling one. He

was waiting for his companion and for the fifteenth time the tune of

"Bill Bailey" came softly from his lips. The companion appeared, a

crestfallen young man of twenty-three, Hugh Keegan by name. An idiotic

wistfulness marked the blond vacuity of his face. They said nothing and

walked to the street car track.

Here they must wait. There was no car in sight. Basine employed the

wait, jumping out from the curbing and peering with a great show of

interest down the deserted tracks. The night's dissipation had left him

perversely elate. His vanity demanded that he confound the scenes of his

recent moral collapse by exhibitions of undiminished vigor of body and

gayety of mind. So he capered back and forth between the curb and the

deserted tracks, ostentatiously unbuttoning his coat to the chill of the

dawn and addressing brisk, cheerful sallies to his penitent friend.

It was this way with Basine. He had spent the night in sin. Now he must

act as if he had not spent the night in sin. It was a matter of

deceiving his conscience, and Basine's conscience did not live in

Basine. It was, to the contrary, a mysterious external force, something

quite outside him.

He eyed the virtuous hallelujahs of the sunrise with a somewhat

over-emphasized aplomb. Dimly he felt that a God was articulating in

dawns and sunbeams. As long as he had continued his whistling, these

facts had remained concealed. But now he had grown tired of "Bill

Bailey" and at once God, peering out of his beautiful rosy heaven was

saying, "Shame on you." Everything seemed to be waiting to repeat this

banal reproof.

This was the conscience of George Basine--a reproof that came from

without. He felt an inclination to defiance before this reproof.... He

was young and given to evil. This was only natural, considering the time

in which he lived and the biological impulses of youth.

But to do evil was one thing. To defend it after it was done was

another. Thus Basine, having sinned lustily through the night, avoided

the more unspeakable sin of defending his action. The reproof arrived,

he faced it with candor and intelligence, prepared to admit that he had

done wrong.

He did not want God mumbling around inside him as was the case with his

friend Keegan. God mumbled around inside of Keegan and made him feel

like the devil. But Basine--there was no occasion for God to argue His

point. He, Basine, surrendered gracefully and forthwith. That was the

way to handle situations of the soul.

To Basine, situations of the soul were a species of external discomforts

he identified as God. They were the regulations and taboos of a

civilization to which he was prepared at all times to submit, providing

such submission did not compromise him. One got rid of taboos by looking

them squarely in the eye and simulating respect or remorse. Taboos were

good manners. One had to be polite to good manners. Basine laughed, not

defiantly. He had already made his apologies to the dawn. The dawn was

God's good manners. It entered the world as precisely and as perfectly

as the saintly wife of a great financier might enter her grandmother's

drawing room.

Waiting beside the car track, Basine was already a reformed and forgiven

man. The sun was like a huge Salvation Army marching through the

highways of Evil, beating great drums and singing, "Are you washed, are

you washed in the Blood of the Lamb?" He was glad of it. He was glad to

be once more a part of a virtuous world, a citizen of an ideal republic

given to the great causes of progress.

This adjustment completed, memories of the night came to him as they

waited for the car. These memories failed, naturally, to conflict with

his character as a citizen of virtue. For they were memories which he

was prepared at any moment to repudiate and denounce. Thus prepared he

could of course enjoy them.

The memories brought an elation, the elation which usually fills the

healthy male of twenty-five upon discovering or rediscovering that the

Devil is as alluring as he is painted and that the wages of sin are

neither death nor disillusion. He had enjoyed himself. Sin was wrong.

But if one knew it was wrong one could go ahead and enjoy it. The great

thing was to know it was wrong, to admit it frankly and share in the

general indignation of it and not to go around like a vicious-minded

freak defending it, like some people he knew were in the habit of doing.

Thus on this May morning Basine was able to grasp the enormity of his

offense and to apologize whole-heartedly for its commission and

simultaneously to enjoy the memory of it. He had come away from Madam

Minnie's with an egoistic impression of his prowess and with the

self-satisfaction which comes of the knowledge of having cheated the

devil out of his due by his careful method. He remembered with a warmth

in his throat as if he were recalling something beautiful how the

creature had looked at the first moment she stood before him.

He had spent the earlier part of the night getting creditably drunk.

Lured into a brothel by a woman with a hard, childish face, he had

devoted himself for several hours to the despicable business of sin. The

sordid make-believe of passion had pleased him vastly. He had managed in

fact to achieve an observation on life. As the night waned he had grown

philosophical and thought, how with good women one began with personal

talk, with an exchange of confidences. One began with emotions, with

gentle lacerations, wistfulness, sadness. And one progressed from these

toward the intimacy of physical contact. But with bad women one began

with the intimacy of physical contact. Only the abrupt matter-of-fact

tone of the thing robbed the contact of all intimacy. And one progressed

from this contact toward a wistfulness, a gentle shyness and finally an

exchange of confidences and personal talk. This last contained in it the

thrill of intimacy. A good woman surrendered her body and inspired

thereby a sense of possession. A bad woman surrendered the secret of her

birthplace and of her real name and inspired a similar sense. There was

also obvious the fact that the same sense of dramatic coquetry,

idealism, modesty or whatever it was that induced the good woman to

withhold her body induced the bad woman to withhold her confidence.

Under the influence of this knowledge, Basine had pursued the usual

tactics of the predatory male and, as a fillip to the unimaginative

excitements of the night, obtained from his accomplice in sin the story

of her life.

"The mystery of a bad woman is that she was once virtuous," he thought

as he fell asleep. "Just as the mystery of a virtuous woman is that she

could be bad."

An hour later he awoke and with a thrill of quixotic honesty placed five

dollars in the moist hand of the sleeping houri, gathered his friend

Keegan out of an adjoining room and emerged once more into the world

with a clear head, a body full of elated memories and a laudable

conviction that he had done wrong, but that what happened yesterday was

not a part of today and that a man can grant himself absolution from

sin as easily as he can lay aside virtue.

As for Keegan, he stared with mild eyes at the dawn, at the beggarly

alleys and the negro porter dreamily sweeping cigar stubs out of a

lopsided doorway. He listened patiently to his friend's enthusiasms. To

Keegan there was something inexplicable about Basine's morning-after

pose. Keegan had not found a place for God. Platitudes were not a

background against which he might posture to his convenience. Instead

they were terrible intimates. They operated his thought for him.

After committing a sin one should be repentent. The commission of sin

was, of course, an outrage. But somehow the platitudes did not quite

reach into the bedroom of evil. They remained hovering outside the door

marking time, as it were, and whispering through the keyhole, "just wait

... just wait...."

And as soon as he had emerged from the room, in fact even before that,

they had taken possession of him again. They demanded now repentance,

thorough repentance which included thorough repudiation of all joyous

memories, all pleasurable moments. And Keegan, surrendering himself as a

matter of necessity to their demands presented the exterior of a

sorrowing victim to the dawn. He offered a nod or a surprised stare as

punctuation for his friend's discourse, chewing the while on an

unsuccessfully lighted cigar which tasted sour.

"There was something different about her from the usual girl of that

kind," Basine was explaining. "Wouldn't talk for a while but finally got

confidential and began to cry a bit."

This was a lie, reflecting credit, however, on the youth's dramatic

sense and vanity. The knowledge that the creature under discussion had

been actually no different from the six other ladies of her profession

with whom he had experienced moral collapses since leaving the

university in no way interfered with his opinion of the recent episode.

It was his opinion that things he touched were somehow different from

things other young men dallied with; that events which befell him were

of a certain mysterious fiber lacking in the events which befell others.

Thus he was reduced to the necessity of continual lying in order to

vindicate this conviction, more powerful than reality. Lying to himself

as much as to anyone else. By his lies Basine accomplished the dual

purpose of adjusting inferior incidents to the superiority of his nature

and of impressing this superiority upon his friends. A way of rewriting

life so as to fit himself with the heroic part, as yet denied him in the

manuscript and which he sincerely felt was his due.

"Yes, she cried a bit. They usually do, you know."

Keegan was innocent of this phenomenon, but nodded. He felt mysteriously

saddened by the fact that they never wept for him. Life denied him many

things. The creature he had spent the night with had treated him

somewhat brutally. She had laughed several times. He sought, however, to

make up for the indifference with which he felt himself treated by

heightening his contempt for her as a sinner. This necessitated an

increase of his contempt for himself as having been a partner in evil.

But that was a spiritual gesture made bearable by the wave of remorse

it aroused and by the knowledge that remorse was a laudable emotion.

Nevertheless, despite the remorse and the rehabilitation it offered his

vanity, he continued to feel--life denied him many things.

Basine continued, "You could take a girl like that and make something of

her. Give her a month." By which he meant give George Cornelius Basine a

month and see the miracle he would work.

Keegan sighed. He admired George, and his admiration of others always

depressed him. He was intelligent enough to know that he admired things

he lacked. And yet, he assured himself, he would despise the things in

himself that he admired in others. Therefore, it was very probable that

he despised them in others, or would at some later day, unless he

managed to conceal the fact or lose track of it in the confusion of

platitudes which served him for a brain. He looked enviously at his

friend, before whom hardened trollops dissolved in tears.

"She's only been in the game a little while, you know, Hugh. A convent

girl, too. She told me her story. How she got started, you know. A love

affair with a Spaniard. A highly connected fellow."

Basine prattled on, improvising a melodrama of virtue led astray,

editing the vaguely worded generalities of the creature he had left

asleep. Eventually he tired of the game and announced abruptly.

"Not a car in sight. What do you say we walk, Hugh?"

The idea of walking four miles home after a wild night engaged his

vanity. Things by which he proved the dubious superiority of his body

pleased him.

"I think I'll run along," said Keegan.

"Nothing doing, Hughie. You come with me. We'll have breakfast at my

house."

Keegan frowned. There were two sisters and a mother in Basine's home.

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"Oh, because."

Basine persisted, gently malicious. It amused him to inconvenience his

friend's scruples. It also gave him a feeling of moral supremacy. Keegan

was ashamed to go to his home with him. He pitied him for this and yet

enjoyed the fact. It was because Keegan didn't feel sure of himself, of

his being a man of virtue. And he, Basine, did. There was no question

about it in his mind.

"Ashamed?" he asked with a smile.

"No," Keegan grunted.

"Well, you haven't done anything worse than me," by which he meant "We

do things differently and I am above things that knock you out."

Keegan stared at his friend furtively. There were things inexplicable in

George Basine. He must admire them. There was nothing inexplicable in

himself.

He hesitated about going, however. A combination of platitudes was

involved. He felt the necessity of repentance. And then he felt the

necessity of hiding his shame. And finally platitude cautioned him

indignantly against affronting three good women--a mother and two

daughters--with the presence of one lately come from the flesh pots of

Satan. This was a superior platitude because it came also under the

index of good manners.

But Basine, taking him by the elbow, swept him along, platitudes and

all. An inexplicable Basine whom he admired, envied, despised, and who

was his best friend and his model. They walked together, Basine briskly

to hide the sudden heaviness of his legs; Keegan yielding to the less

pronounced physical drain he had undergone and falling into a weary,

protesting gait.

2

The death of Howard Basine had precipitated a creditable outburst of

grief on the part of his widow and two daughters. The event had brought

his son George home from college.

They had shared a bed for twenty-six years, Basine _pere_ and Basine

_mere_, achieving an utter disregard of each other which both took pride

in identifying as domestic happiness. In their youth love had brought

them together while comparative strangers. And after twenty-six years

death had parted them still strangers. But now complete and total

strangers--Siamese twins who had never been introduced to each other.

Each had grown old by the side of the other, subscribing to the same

thoughts, worries, ambitions. It was as if a thin shell had grown around

each of them. This shell was their home, their mutual interest in bank

balances, diversions and tomorrows. It was the product of their

practical energies--their standing in the eyes of their friends, their

success and their solidity as a social unit. It was their pride in new

rugs, in invitations to functions, in their children.

There were two shells. One was Basine _pere_. One was Basine _mere_.

For twenty-six years these two shells cohabited together. But inside

each of them there had been a world of things that had never connected

and that remained forever part of a mutually preserved secret. Little

daydreams, absurdities, the swaggering, pensive, impractical rigmarole

of thought-life to which the world of reality--the shell-world--had

remained almost to the last no more than a vaguely sensed exterior.

Each of them had lived almost continually apart from this shell. They

had given but a fraction of their energies toward its creation. It had

required only a little part of themselves to become two placidly

successful conventionally happy people with a home and family. The rest

of themselves they had allowed to evaporate.

A pleasing process--evaporation. Dreams, ambitions, longings--all these

had evaporated slowly and secretively during the twenty-six years,

vanished into thin air. And each had been preoccupied with this process

of evaporation. It had been their real life--the life which diverted

them and which they mutually concealed from each other as they sat

together reading of evenings, or rode in cars or waited in offices or

lay in bed.

Here in this real life were success and beauty and marvelous activities.

Here Basine _pere_ planned Herculean enterprise and triumphed with

magnificent gestures, became a leader of finance, of armies; became a

lover of queens and odalisques. Caressing from day to day phantasms

which had no existence, it was in them that he chiefly existed. He

confined himself not only to illusions of grandeur. There were also

little things, charming minor victories which delighted his ego almost

as much as the greater ones. He was able to trick out the minor

victories with the illusion of reality. They were things that might

happen, that one could dream about almost as actually happening. Things

that he fancied people might be saying about him; admissions that he

fancied people might make to him; dreams that he fancied he inspired in

women who passed him and whom he never saw again.

This illusory existence preoccupying Basine had fitted him ideally for

the companionship of orderly, placid-minded folk preoccupied like

himself with similar processes of evaporation. These folk were his

friends with whom he went to the theater, played cards, transacted

business, discussed issues. They were known as normal, practical

persons. The vast, illusory worlds in which they lived during the

greater part of their hours in no way encroached upon the realities of

their day.

They were proud of having a grip on themselves, by which they meant of

being able to allow their energies to evaporate secretively instead of

feeling inspired to harness them to realities and run the risk of being

hoisted body and soul out of their shells into a maelstrom of

uncertainties and hullabaloos. In order to rationalize the disparity

between their actual estates and the fantastic estates of their illusory

lives, they devoted a part of their energies to the practical business

of glorifying their shells. They subscribed with indignation, sometimes

with fanaticism, to all social, spiritual and political ideas which had

for their objective the glorification of their shells. They became

champions of systems of thought and conduct which excused on one hand

and deified on the other their devitalized modes of existence.

In fact as they grew older they developed a curious egoism which took

the form of a pride in their suppressions. They thought of themselves as

men who had achieved a superior sanity. This sanity lay in being able to

recognize the real from the unreal. The real was their shell. The unreal

consisted of the fantasies produced by the process of evaporation. This

sanity, too, enabled them to regard their imaginings and dreamings with

an amused condescension and to mature into unruffled

effigies--practical, hard-headed business men.

The evaporation, however, influenced them in one vital respect. It

effected what they called their taste in the arts. They desired things

they read or listened to in the theater to be authentic interpretations

not of the realities about them but of the illusions in which they

secretly exhausted themselves. They desired the heroes and heroines of

literature and drama to be like the creatures and excitements of the

soap-bubble worlds bursting conveniently about their hard heads. And so

in their reading and theater going they enjoyed only those things which

afforded a few hours of vicarious reality to the grotesqueries, to the

fairy tale expansions of their departing dreams.

During the last years of his life Basine had experienced the fullest

rewards of a virtuous, practical life. At fifty he had become empty. The

rigmarole of day dreams grew vaguer and finally ceased. He had become

bored with his grandiose and illusory selves. Don Juan, Napoleon,

Croesus, no longer wore the features of Basine. There was no longer any

thrill in idly decorating his tomorrows with kaleidoscopic

make-believes.

There was no great tragedy in this. He was bored with his imagination

because he had run through the repertoire of his fancies too often and

so, slowly, his days grew more and more void of unrealities. Slowly also

he turned to the tangible things around him. He contemplated proudly the

details of his shell. It was a comforting shell. It fitted him snugly.

It consisted of his friends, his home, his children, his borrowed ideas,

his wife.

No outward change was to be noticed in Basine _pere_ when this happened.

There was nothing to say that the process of evaporation had ended and

that there was left an animate husk called Howard Basine; a husk that

did not mourn at the knowledge of its emptiness but that accepted

instead with piety and gratitude the presence of other husks, pleased

and warmed to move among their empty companionships.

It was at this time that Basine proudly felt himself a worthwhile member

of society and grew to smile with tolerant disdain upon all persons who

busied themselves with the illusions he had overcome by the simple

process of denying them life. He called them fools, scoundrels, lunatics

and dreamers and he agreed with his friends that they were creatures

engaged in filling the world with discomfort and error. His dislike for

them did not make him unhappy for he was content in the flattering

knowledge that most people, everybody he knew and whose opinion he

valued, were like himself. His thoughts were nearly everybody's thoughts

and his life was like everybody's life. There was a sense of strength,

even satisfaction in this. He relapsed gracefully into a quiet emptiness

out of which he was able to derive final embalming fluid for his vanity

by pitying the distractions and unrest of others.

Then he died. The sight of her husband lying under the glass of the

coffin had reminded Mrs. Basine of the curious fact that in their youth

love had brought them together. A memory burrowed its way from under the

debris of twenty-six years and confronted her. A memory of wild nights,

flushed cheeks, shining eyes, hope and careless words. And the dim

yesterday, the long-forgotten yesterday that lay in the coffin with the

paunchy figure of the bald-headed silk-merchant became suddenly real

again.

When she was alone that night Mrs. Basine wept miserably for a love that

had died twenty-five years ago and lain buried and unmourned under the

debris of these years. A tardy exhibition of grief, sincere but

enfeebled by its own age, it spent itself in a few hours. The tears for

the memory of vanished youth and vanished love of which the body waiting

in the coffin had become for a space of grotesque symbol, were followed

by the inarticulate sense of an anti-climax.

Howard Basine's dying was somehow not a tragedy to the woman who had

lived with him for twenty-six years. When she had wept at first, the

idea of death came like a panic to her heart. Things had died. Days,

nights, hopes had died. But she had been unaware of their dying. The

figure of her husband leaving for his day's work, returning from his

day's work, sitting at the head of the table, retiring to bed with

her--this had been a mask behind which the dying of things remained

concealed.

Now that he had closed his eyes and vanished it was as if a mask had

been removed. One could see all at once all the things that had died.

And she saw not only Howard lying dead, but most of herself. In her mind

she had no memory of the illusory selves she had lived, like her

husband, alone. These illusory selves whose successes and romances she

had caressed in secret had of late abandoned her. Like her husband she

had turned to the shells they had created about themselves as the

comforting reward of her life's negation.

Now it struck her that these shells were full of dead things. While he

lived they had seemed alive. The fact that the man with whom she had

survived twenty-six years continued to talk and to move had given her

the vague feeling that these years were also still alive, still existent

somewhere. Now the man was dead and the years were dead with him. They

had been dead all the while but they had not lain in a coffin for one to

look at like this.

Dead years. And she, a survivor. Her sense of contact with the past

deserted her. She was alone. Everything that had been was no more and it

seemed during her grief as if it had never existed.

She lay and wept, feeling that something had been terribly wasted. Once

there had been youth. Now there was age. She had already lived but how,

where? Look, she was already old but how had it happened? She who could

remember so many things about youth--her pretty face, her careless

hopes, bright, happy excitements; and most of all, the feeling that

things lay ahead--that a store of mysterious things waited for her--she

who could remember it so plainly was an old woman. It had seemed natural

before he died but now it seemed unnatural. She would die soon, too. Her

youth--something she thought of as youth, arose and stretched out

far-away arms to her. It came to her in the night and stood smiling at

her like a ghost of herself. Yes, she was already dead and she could lie

in bed weeping for her husband and staring with tired eyes at memories.

Thoughts did not disturb her. Her emotions, grown too involved for the

shallows of her mind, gave her the consciousness merely of a panic.

But the panic left. It receded slowly and the death of her husband

stirred in her during the first weeks of mourning a gentle affection for

the man. She closeted herself with the memories that had terrified

her--sensual memories of an impetuous lover, an idealization of a

long-forgotten Howard. And her sorrow became like a vague honeymoon

shared with slowly dissolving erotic shadows.

This too went. As it went away the widow became curiously younger in her

features, her black clothes, her mannerisms. She grew to find the

loneliness of her bed desirable. She would snuggle kittenishly between

the empty sheets, an unintelligible sense of immorality--as if it were

immoral to sleep alone--lending a luxury to her weariness.

Yes, it was somehow nicer to sleep alone, to have the bedroom all to

herself. In her mind things that were different from the routine of her

life and that belonged to the secret imaginings that had once filled her

days were immoral. And this was different--being alone. So her living

on without her husband became an odd sort of infidelity, pleasant,

diverting.

The year and a half passed bringing a rejuvenation to her body. Her

youth and its decline were buried in a coffin. Now at fifty-two she was

living again and creating out of the remains of her figure, coiffure and

complexion a new youth--at least a new exterior.

The dreams of her earlier days returned to her and she no longer found

it necessary to deny them all reality. It had been necessary before in

order to keep herself fitted into the shell. And as a result her dreams,

denied any possibility of realization, had become like his, more and

more fantastic, more and more warmly improbable. Now there was no need

for a shell. There was no need to preserve an easily recognizable and

never failing characterization. She had done that before so as to avoid

confusing her husband and herself and she had been rewarded by a similar

ruse employed by him.

Now that he was gone she found herself changing. She found herself

approaching the romantic conception of herself. And since she was able

to carry into reality her rejuvenated fancies, to devote herself to

looking stunning, to making a somewhat exotic impression upon people, to

arousing interest--her imaginings did not expand as before into

distorted and improbable pictures. She began to busy herself, to

actively give them outlet, to have time or surplus energies for the

evolution of fancies beyond her.

She had no plans for the future and she was not interested in any. An

amazing fact had come into her life--the present. She abandoned herself

to it. She had harnessed what was left of the energies allowed so long

to evaporate and the process of evaporation was at an end. She would

become, if there was time, a keenly alive, egoistic woman gorging

herself upon the desserts remaining at the banquet board before which

she had sat for twenty-six years with closed eyes and listless hands.

She felt these things only dimly. There was a freedom to life, like a

new taste in her senses. Of this she was confusedly aware. And her

sorrow for her dead husband became a pleasant thing, a thing inseparable

from the gratitude she unknowingly felt for the new existence his death

had given her.

She referred to him with a pensively magnanimous air, inventing

perfections in his character and endowing his departed intelligence with

a wisdom far beyond her own. This enabled her to utilize his memory in

an odd way. When she argued with her friends or children, when she was

doubtful concerning the extravagance or selfishness of her actions, or

the newly born radicalism of her views, she would quote mercilessly from

her dead husband. The fact that he was dead lent a sanctity to whatever

views he may have held. Not in her own eyes but, as she shrewdly sensed,

in the eyes of others. And she grew to play unscrupulously upon this

thing she perceived in her children and friends--that they respected the

words and opinions of a dead man infinitely more than those of one

alive.

Thus she was able to indulge herself in ways which would have astounded

and perhaps horrified the departed Basine and to bring her immediate

circle to accept these ways as conventionally desirable by making her

dead husband their spiritual sponsor. Her friends chafed under this

ruse, but felt themselves powerless to combat it. They were men and

women who lived on the opinions of the dead, who subscribed fanatically

to all ideas sanctified by the length of their interment. Themselves,

they practised the ruse of editing the wisdoms of the past as well as

prophecies of the future into vindications of the present. They felt

indignant but powerless before the treachery of Mrs. Basine, who raided

the mausoleum for private articles of faith.

Mrs. Basine was aware at first of lying but this feeling gave way to a

conviction that if her husband had not thought and said the things she

attributed to him while he was alive he would have done so had he

continued to live.

"Because," she said to herself, "we were always alike and thought and

said the same things always."

Her son George was proud of his mother but inclined to be dubious about

the change that had come over her. He was irritated particularly one

evening to hear his mother advocate equal suffrage rights for women to a

group of surprised friends gathered at their home.

"I think such ideas foolish and dangerous," George explained politely.

"Why?" his mother inquired.

Basine shook his head. He had given the subject no thought. But a

militant defense of the status quo inspired him always with a

comfortable feeling of rectitude.

"I see no reason," pursued Mrs. Basine, "why women shouldn't vote as

well as men. I remember your father was very much interested in the

issue of women's suffrage. He said the day would come when women voted

shoulder to shoulder with men and that the country would be improved by

it."

Basine stared at his mother. He had grown to realize that she had

discovered the trick of lending weight and irrefutable wisdoms to her

own notions by surrounding them with the sanctity of death. For it was

almost impossible to fly in the face of a quotation from his father. The

fact that the man was dead seemed to make contradiction of any ideas or

prophecies attributed to him a sacrilege. There was also the fact

becoming daily more obvious that his mother was turning into an

unscrupulous administrator of the dead man's opinions.

"I never heard father say anything of the kind," he exclaimed suddenly.

And then feeling that a loss of temper was the only way in which he

could cover the affront he had offered his mother, he added with

indignation, "You keep backing up your arguments by dragging dad's

corpse into them all the time."

Mrs. Basine looked at him in amazement, and he reddened. He apologized

quickly. Mrs. Basine, shocked by her son's unexpected penetration, bit

her lip and became silent. She let the argument pass, not without

observing that her friends present appeared for a moment to rally around

her son's expose--as if he had given words to their own attitude. She

decided when she was alone again to be more careful. She loved her son

and felt a dread of sacrificing his respect. There was a dread also of

sacrificing the respect of these others who had looked at her for a

moment with an accusing understanding.

There had been present a Mrs. Gilchrist, an old creature of oracular

senilities whom she had grown secretly to detest. But the detestation

she felt was accompanied by a vivid desire to keep in with the woman.

Mrs. Gilchrist was a person of position, decided position. Her son

Aubrey was a novelist. This alone endowed the Gilchrist tribe with an

aura of culture. They lived in Evanston and were active, mother and son,

in the social life of the town.

Mrs. Basine was unable as yet to determine the reasons that made her

dislike her. In her secret mind she called Mrs. Gilchrist a domineering

old fool. But she stopped with that. There was the Gilchrist social

position.

Society had always interested Mrs. Basine. But since her widowhood this

interest had become active. She had read the society columns of the

newspapers regularly and through the twenty-six years of her married

life retained the singular idea that the people whose names appeared in

these columns belonged to a closely knit organization similar to the

Masons--only of course, infinitely superior.

The appearance of a new name among the list of socially known always

stirred an indignation in her. She was not a bounder herself. The

closely knit organization whose members poured tea, gave bazaars,

occupied boxes at the theater had been, in her mind, a fixed and

invulnerable institution neither to be taken by storm nor won by

strategy. Thus she had excused her lack of social ambition and success

by investing Society with an almost magical aloofness, a sort of

superhuman cotorie of tea pourers and benefit givers that kept itself

intact and beyond intrusion by the exercise of incredible diligence.

Among her day dreams during these years had been those of magnificent

social successes, of long newspaper articles describing with awe her

splendor and prestige. But in reality she would as soon have thought of

breaking into society as of attacking twelve policemen with a carving

knife. She resented therefore the appearance of new names in the society

columns.

"Bounders," she would murmur to herself, half expecting that the

Organization into which they had bounded would issue some outraged and

withering excommunication upon the new tea pourer. But the name would

appear again and again and after such innumerable appearances Mrs.

Basine would automatically accept its presence within the Organization

and rally quixotically to its defense against the other bounders

struggling to invade the sanctity it had achieved.

And although during this period of her life Mrs. Basine had felt none of

the low instincts which inspired the bounders to bound, she had

endeavored to the best of her abilities to mimic as much as a humble

outsider could the spiritual elegancies which distinguished the

Organization. She succeeded in creating a formal atmosphere about her

home, a dignity about her table of which she was modestly proud. She had

felt in secret that any member of the Organization entering her

house--an event of which she dreamed as a waveringly sophisticated child

might dream of a fairy's visit--would have experienced no dismay.

Now this attitude which had characterized her married life was changing.

Society was no longer an impregnable Organization. Mrs. Basine was, in

fact, engaged determinedly upon its conquest and her attitude toward

the detestable Mrs. Gilchrist was colored by that fact. An

acquaintanceship with the Gilchrists had been achieved through

manoeuverings of her daughters as workers in charity bazaars managed

by the woman.

Until the death of her husband Mrs. Basine had ignored her two

daughters. A proprietory feeling in them which exhausted itself in

dictating the surface details of their lives had been the extent of her

interest. She had presumed during their childhood and adolescence that

they were Basines--and nothing else. This had guided her parenthood.

Being Basines, they must conform to Basinism which meant that they must

be like their mother or their father and she struggled carelessly to see

that their youth did not assert itself in ways inimical to her own

characterization. Doris the younger was inclined to be beautiful. Fanny,

however, had always seemed to her a more substantial person.

But her widowhood had brought a belated curiosity concerning these young

women. She wondered at times what their dreams were. She understood that

they were strangers and this began to interest her. She was proud of

them and although undemonstrative would sometimes put her arms around

both of them as they walked to a neighbor's after dinner.

They did not inspire the pride in her, however, that her son did. George

had finished his law and she felt as she listened to him talk or watched

his face at the table that he was somebody. There was an assurance and

health about him. His keen-featured face, the straight black hair parted

in the center, the movements of his lithe body, always quick and

definite--and particularly his hands--these made her think of him

vaguely as an artist, somebody different. She knew in her heart that

although he seemed to differ in his ideas from none of their friends, he

was not like other young men.

3

It was Sunday morning. Mrs Basine and her two daughters were sitting

down to breakfast. Hugh Keegan followed Basine embarrassedly into the

dining room. The two young men had been renovating themselves for an

hour in the bathroom.

The meal started casually. Fanny Basine studied their guest with what

was meant to be a provoking carelessness. She was a facile virgin who

wooed men persistently and slapped their faces for misunderstanding her.

"You've been quite a stranger, Mr. Keegan," she said. Her eyes smiled.

Keegan felt wretched. He was conscious of being unclean. The fresh,

virginal face of the girl smiling at him filled him with rage. He

accepted a waffle from Mrs. Basine with exaggerated formality.

He was not enraged with himself. This was too difficult. It was easier,

simpler to be repentant. His repentance did not accuse him as a man who

had sinned but denounced the things which had caused him to sin and made

him unclean. To himself he was essentially perfect. There were forces,

however, which infringed upon his perfection, which soiled his fine

qualities.

Eating his waffle, he thought of the creature with whom he had spent

the night, of the dismal bedroom, the frowsy smelling hallway, the

coarse talk and viciousness of the entire business. And he began to feel

a rage against them. He would like to wipe such things out of the world.

He managed to answer Miss Basine politely.

"I've been out of town a great deal," he said.

"George always said you were a gadfly," Fanny replied.

Mrs. Basine spoke.

"You look rather tired, George." She gazed pensively at her son. "I

don't like you to stay out all night like that."

Basine frowned. What did his mother mean by that? Did she suppose he had

spent the night in debauchery? It sounded that way from the way she

looked and talked. Basine grew angry. He did not want his mother to

accuse him.

"You don't expect a man to remain cooped up night and day, do you?"

"Oh, I don't mind your going out. But not the way you did last night."

She looked at him and then, as if realizing for the first time the

presence of her daughters, changed her manner.

"Won't you have some syrup, Mr. Keegan."

Keegan thanked her and lowered his eyes. He had understood her

accusation and accepted it as authentic. He had no mother of his own and

this inspired in him a curious sense of obedience toward all mothers he

encountered. Mrs. Basine's accusation embarrassed him. The embarrassment

increased his disgust for the memory of the night. He would like to

wipe out such obscene and vulgar things. He would like to burn them up,

forbid them. Someday he would.

Basine, however regarded his mother with a sense of outrage. The fact

that her surmise of what he had done during the night was correct was a

matter of minor importance. She didn't know what he had done and

therefore she had no right to guess. He answered her angrily.

"I did nothing at all last night that I wouldn't have my sisters do."

His mother looked at him in surprise. Keegan blushed.

"You're always hinting around, mother, about things and you're

absolutely wrong. Absolutely," he added for a clincher. His eyes

remained unflinchingly on his mother.

There was a convincing air of virtue about him and a doubt entered her

mind. Perhaps she had suspected him unjustly. But he had been away all

night. She had heard him come in around six. Where could he have been if

not--in such places? Yet she felt like apologizing.

Basine fiddled with his food. He was acting out the part of injured

innocence. He was an unprotesting martyr to the low suspicions of his

family. The fact that he was guilty in no way interfered with the

sincerity of his injured feelings. His mother's accusation had sincerely

hurt him, even more than it would had he been actually innocent of wrong

doing. He transferred whatever emotional guilt he had into indignation

toward his accuser.

This was an old trick of his, developed early in childhood--a faculty

of committing crimes without becoming a criminal. More than Keegan, he

was above self-accusation. But unlike Keegan the doing of a thing he

knew to be wrong did not inspire him with the adroit remorse which took

the form of hating the thing he had done instead of himself.

The crimes Basine committed--usually no greater than normal violations

of the ethical code to which he subscribed--were things that had nothing

to do with the real Basine. The real Basine was the Basine whom people

knew. The real Basine was a characterization he maintained for the

benefit of others. The crimes were his own secret. People didn't know

them. Therefor they did not exist. They remained locked away. He did not

say to himself, "Hypocrite! Liar!"

When he denied his mother's accusation he did not of course forget the

things he had done during the night. In fact even while he spoke there

came to him a vivid memory of the prostitute.

In disproving the existence of this memory he was not disproving it for

himself but for his mother. His energy as usual was bent toward

presenting a certain Basine for the admiration of another. The Basine he

sought to create for the admiration of his family was a moral and honest

man. When they seemed inclined to challenge this creation, their

suspicions angered him.

His attitude was that of a creator toward a hostile critic. He

frequently lost his temper and denounced their suspicions as unjust,

unfair. And in his mind, conveniently clouded by indignation, they were.

Not to himself as he was, but to the self he insisted upon pretending at

the moment he was.

This self was the Basine he was continually creating--a Basine that was

not based upon deeds or truths or facts but upon ideals. It was an ideal

Basine--a nobly edited version of his character. He believed in this

ideal Basine with a curious passion. This ideal Basine was a mixture of

lies, shams, perversions of fact. But that was only when you considered

him in relation to his creator--to its original. In his own mind it was

as absurd to consider this ideal Basine in relation to its creator as it

would have been for a critic of aesthetics to consider the merits of

Oscar Wilde's poetry in relation to the degeneracy of the man.

Considered by himself, the ideal Basine was a person of inspiring

virtues. He was proud of the things he pretended to be, vicious in their

defense, unswerving in his efforts to inspire others with an

appreciation of these pretenses.

His anger toward his mother ebbed as he noticed the doubt come into her

manner. She had hesitated for a moment in face of significant facts, in

accepting the ideal Basine. But her son's sincerity had convinced her as

it convinced most people who knew him. The sincerity with which he

defended the idealization of himself was easily to be mistaken for a

sincerity inspired by an innocence of actual wrong-doing.

As soon as he felt certain he had re-established the ideal Basine in his

mother's eyes, all thoughts of the facts passed from him. The admiring

opinion of others was what his nature desired and what his energies

worked for. Once obtained this admiration was a mirror in which he saw

himself only as he had argued others into seeing him.

He looked at his friend Keegan with a smile. Keegan was still blushing.

Keegan knew that he had lied and that the entire pose was a sham. But

this only added another thrill to the fleeting self-satisfaction of

having re-established himself in his family's eyes. He enjoyed the

knowledge that Keegan was able to see what a successful liar he was and

how adroitly he managed to deceive people. This enjoyment was not a part

of the emotion of the ideal Basine. It was a purely human sensation felt

by Basine, the creator.

There was a single flaw in his little triumph. This was, as usual, the

attitude of his sister Doris. While the others were chattering Doris

kept silent. She had dark eyes and black hair. She was entirely unlike

anybody in the Basine family. Fanny was blonde and vivacious with a pout

and full red lips. Before the death of her husband Mrs. Basine had

summed up her daughter Doris as being aristocratic.

At fifteen Doris had been painfully shy. People smiled encouragingly at

her because she seemed afraid of them. Four years later people ceased to

smile at her. They looked at her out of the corners of their eyes and

wondered what she was thinking about. Her silence was like a confusing

argument. Had it not been for her beauty her silence could easily have

been dismissed. But her dark eyes and dark hair, the slightly lowered

pose of her oval face and the unvarying line of her fresh lips with the

little sensual bulges at their corners, drew the attention of people.

And their attention drawn, they waited to be told something. So merely

because she told nothing they fancied she had a great deal to tell. They

attributed to her silence all the doubts they had concerning

themselves. Silence was to them always accusation.

Her brother's attitude toward Doris was typical. He detested her and yet

was more pleased when she nodded at something he said than when others

were loud with acclaim. He detested her because she made him feel she

was his superior. In what way she was superior he didn't know and why he

felt it he couldn't understand. But he sensed she was someone who had no

respect for the ideal Basine and no particular love for his creator.

She had also a way of deflating him. He felt sometimes as a toy balloon

might feel in the presence of a child with a pin. He never ignored her.

He watched her always and studied her carefully. He did not desire to

please her but he felt that until he had perfected the ideal Basine to a

point where he would be acceptable to Doris, admired by Doris, his

creation would be lacking in something vital.

As the breakfast came to an end her brother focused upon Doris. This was

invariably the effect of her silence. She was as yet unconscious of it.

Had you asked her why she spoke so little and why she neither smiled nor

frowned at people she would have thought a while and then with a shrug

replied, "Why, I hadn't noticed." Later when she was alone she would

have continued thinking of the question and perhaps said to herself, "It

must be because they don't interest me. They seem so silly and unreal."

"What are you doing today?" Basine asked her.

She answered, "Nothing." He noticed she failed to add, "Why?" He

resented her lack of curiosity. Fanny would have said, "Nothing. Why do

you ask?" But Fanny was a good fellow, a lively, amusing child.

"Mrs. Gilchrist and Aubrey are coming over later," Mrs. Basine

announced.

"She makes me tired," Fanny smiled. "And somebody ought to pull dear

Aubrey's nose just to see if he's really alive. He's too dignified."

Her brother nodded.

"Do you know him?" Fanny asked Keegan.

"Slightly," said Keegan. "I've read one or two of his books. They're

very interesting." He paused, hoping that everyone agreed with him.

Everyone did except Doris.

"What's the matter, Dorie? Don't you like Aubrey's works?" her brother

asked. Doris smiled vaguely.

"I've never read anything he's written," she said. "I don't know."

Keegan looked at her uncomfortably. He felt he disliked her and he would

have been pleased to ignore her. But the fact that she seemed to have

anticipated him in this respect and to have ignored him first, piqued

him.

"I think Judge Smith and Henrietta will be over later," Basine addressed

his mother. Judge Smith was the august and senior partner of the law

firm that had taken young Basine into its office.

"Yes, Aubrey told me," Mrs. Basine said casually. "I think they're

engaged."

"Who, Henrietta?" from Fanny.

Her mother nodded. She stood up and the group sauntered into the living

room. Keegan approached Fanny. Her freshness made him feel sad.

"Let's sit here," Fanny whispered as he drew near her. She employed the

whisper frequently. It usually brought a gleam into the eyes of her _vis

a vis_ as if she had promised something.

To appear to promise something was Fanny's chief object in life. It was

the basis of her growing popularity. The two sat down in a corner of the

room secluded from the others. Keegan had interested her. At least his

far-away, unappraising look had interested her. She preferred men more

appraising and less far-away. Her object now was to reduce her brother's

friend to an admirer. Admirers bored her. But the process of converting

strangers, particularly far-away and unappraising strangers, into

admirers was diverting.

Keegan had other plans. A desire to repent aloud had been growing in

Keegan. The girl's bright face and virginal air had been inspiring him.

He wanted to tell her how unclean he was and how ashamed of the things

he had done. He wanted to denounce sin.

He felt tired. Fanny talked and he listened. He wanted to weep. He

thought her fingers were beautiful and white. He would have liked to

kneel beside her weeping, his head against her and her cool white

fingers running over his face. It would be a sort of absolution--a

maternal absolution. In the meantime his silence piqued her.

"You don't seem very interested in what I'm saying," she interrupted

herself. She looked at him and instinct supplied her with a new attack.

"Where were you and George last night?" she asked. "Mother was furious

about it."

Keegan looked sad. His blond face collapsed.

"Men are awful rotters," he answered, lowering his voice.

"Oh I don't know. Not all men."

"Yes. All men." Savagely.

"Why do you say that?"

"Because--" Keegan hesitated. Mysterious impulses were operating behind

his talk. The night's debauch had sickened him. He was experiencing that

depressing type of virtue which usually comes as a reaction from an

orgy. His indignation at the bestiality of the male and the moral

rotteness of life was a vindication of the temporary weakened state the

night had induced in him. By denouncing sex he excused the disturbing

absence of it in himself.

He was however not content to vindicate the absence in himself of

sensual excitement. He would also make use of his lassitude by

translating the enervation it produced into self-ennobling emotions,

into purity, innate and triumphant. He experienced high-minded ideas and

an exaltation of spirit.

"Because," he repeated, finding it difficult to choose words

sufficiently emasculated to reflect the phenomenal purity of his mind,

"well, if women knew, they would never talk to men. But women are so

good, that is, decent women, that they simply don't understand and can't

understand ... what it is."

"About bad men?" Fanny whispered. Keegan nodded.

"And are all men bad?" she asked.

Again Keegan nodded, this time more sadly. It was a nod of confession

and purity. In it he felt his obscene past and his pious future embrace

each other, one whispering "forgive" and the other whispering "yes,

yes. All is forgiven."

Tears warmed his throat. Fanny's eyes looked at him with an odd

excitement. Her mind was as always conveniently blank of thought.

Thoughts would have served only to embarrass and handicap her. She was

able to enjoy herself more easily without thinking. It was a ruse which

enabled her to regard herself as a clean-minded girl.

Young men had frequently taken advantage of her kindness and grown bold.

They would during a tender embrace sometimes take liberties or draw her

close and press themselves against her. It was at this point that her

mind would awake like a burglar alarm suddenly set off. It rang and

clanged--an outraged and intimidating ding-dong of virtuous platitudes

which she had incongruously rigged up in the sensual warmth of her

nature. But lately the mechanism by which she routed her would-be

seducers did not quite satisfy her.

At twenty she had grown fearful. When she was younger the men she led on

were no more than boys. The mechanism had sufficed for them. But the

last two years had witnessed a change in her would-be seducers. They had

grown up, these males. She remembered always uncomfortably a young man

who had burst into laughter during her outraged denunciation of him. He

had said to her.

"Listen, girl. If I wanted you, all I would have to do is tell you to

shut up and slap your face. And you would. Your 'how dare you?' don't go

with me. I've known too many girls like you. But I don't want you. Not

after this. If it'll do you any good I'll tell you now that I won't

forget you for a long time. Whenever I want a good laugh I'll think of

you. There's a name for your kind...."

And he had used a phrase that nauseated her. The incident had occurred

on a Sunday evening in the hallway. He had reached up, taken his hat

from the rack and without further comment walked out.

Fanny had spent the night weeping with shame. The memory of the young

man's words made spooning impossible for a month. She was essentially an

honest person and unable to do a thing she knew was wrong. Her only hope

of pleasing herself and indulging her growing sensuality lay in

remaining sincerely oblivious to what she was doing. As long as the

man's words stuck in her memory it was impossible to remain oblivious.

They had awakened no line of reasoning or self-accusation in her mind.

Her mind was still conveniently blank. The youth's denunciation lay like

a foreign substance in it, a substance which fortunately time was able

to dissolve.

After a month of embittered virtue Fanny returned warily to her former

tactics. She was cautious enough to begin with men as young as herself.

One night in April she gave her lips again. They had been making candy

in the kitchen. She turned the light out as they were leaving. The young

man stood in front of her in the dark. His arms went shyly around her.

With a satisfied thrill, she shut her eyes and allowed the boy to kiss

her. A languor overcame her. She ran her fingers through his hair and

gently pressed closer to him.

The warning sounded sooner than usual, and in a surprising way. It came

from within this time. The boy had not grown bold. He was enjoying her

lips shyly and his embrace was almost that of a dancing partner.

Nevertheless the burglar alarm clang-clanged. Her body had grown hot.

The impulse to crush herself against the boy, to open her mouth, to

embrace him fiercely, throbbed in her, and bewildering sensations were

bursting unsatisfactory warmths in her blood.

She hesitated. She might secretly yield to these demands. He would

remain unaware of it and there would be no danger. But the alarm finally

penetrated the fog of her senses. She was unable this time to shut off

the current of her passion by the burst of sudden virtuous anger. The

mechanism of her retreat had always been simple--a trick of turning her

sensual excitement into indignation, of energizing the virtuous

platitudes rigged up in her mind by the passion the caresses had

stirred. The greater this passion, the more violently her pulse beat,

the more violently the platitudes would clang and the more outraged her

"how dare you?" would sound.

But it was impossible to say anything this time. Her hands pushed

suddenly at the politely amorous youth. His embrace skipped from her as

if it had been waiting for such a remonstrance. She stood with her head

whirling. She felt limp and ill at ease.

"Don't you love me?" the young man whispered. The lameness of his voice

would ordinarily have made her smile. But now the words seemed to draw

her. She wanted to answer them, to say, "yes." For the moment it seemed

as if she must confess she loved this impossible young man. She walked

quickly out of the dark hallway. In the lighted room she was ashamed of

herself. Her body tingled with unaccountable pains. She managed to

survive the evening without revealing herself. She was grateful for the

youth's stupidity.

When she lay in bed she closed her eyes firmly and tried to sleep. But

her body disturbed her. Sensations that lured and frightened played

furtively throughout it. She lay stretching and sighing. Later, overcome

with a nervous weariness, she fell asleep.

On awaking she remembered her triumph and felt proud. In retrospect the

sensations she had felt and the temptations that had urged her seemed

distasteful.

Years before she had rationalized her behavior toward young men by

inventing a code. The code was based on the fact that hugging and

kissing and the pleasure these inspired were in no way connected with

"the other." When she thought of more intimate relations it was always

in some such phrase. She was completely ignorant of the physiological

mechanics of marriage. But her ignorance inspired no curiosity. She did

not think of it as a logical culmination of the feeling embraces gave

her. She had a definite attitude toward "the other." It was a thing

separated from her numerous experiences by a gulf. There was only one

bridge across--marriage.

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 heard her 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 sitting on 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 was merely 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...."

4

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--a gentleman 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 disgusting ideas 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 and fresh 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 and most 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 his brain 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 gave them 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 was this 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.

5