13.
George Basine was going to see his sister Doris. In the nine years since
she had left her mother's home she had become a strange woman to Basine.
She had always been strange to him. But now it was as if she were
entirely unhuman.
He could talk to her without shame of things that were shameful. But
there was something more tangible in her presence than the joy of being
able to confess things to her. She was practical in her ideas. She gave
him hunches for his speeches sometimes and what she said about people
and how to make an impression on them was always of value. She
understood such things. How, he couldn't determine. It was probably an
instinct with her.
Basine walked along in the spring afternoon. It was Sunday and he should
have stayed home. Henrietta had been angry when he left. Sunday was his
day for her and the two children. There were two children now--one a boy
of seven, and a girl of five.
But he said, "I want to see Doris. She's been feeling rather off lately.
And if you don't believe I'm going there, why just call up in an hour.
And keep on calling every hour if you want to keep check on me."
He was always angry with his wife when he left her. She made him feel
that he was doing wrong, although she seldom said anything. But to go
away and leave her on Sunday was wrong. But not for the reasons she
sometimes hinted at.
He knew that she suspected his frequent absences from the house. He
accused her of hounding him with her jealousy, and the knowledge of his
innocence--he had never been unfaithful during the eight years of their
marriage--made him angry. The elation of righteous anger in which he
indulged himself on all occasions involving Henrietta, was a ruse which
obscured for both himself and his wife the actual reasons of his
absences. She bored him to a point of fury. His children and their
endless noises and questionings set his nerves on edge. He fled in order
to escape his home. But Henrietta hinted that he left her for someone
else. And he denied this hotly. And in the excitement which accusation
and denial aroused both of them managed to avoid facing the fact that he
stayed away for no other reason than to escape the boredom of her
presence and discomfort of his home.
Basine was careful to avoid this fact. It was incompatable with his
ideas. He had become a man of belligerent righteousness. He was slowly
emerging as a public figure. As an assistant in the state's attorney's
office his political activities were attracting more attention than his
legal work. He was in demand as a campaign orator. And the candidates in
whose behalf he addressed the public were men, he pointed out with an
air of fearlessness, who believed first of all that the home was the
cornerstone of civilization.
"He is a man worth while," he would declaim, "a capable administrator.
But first of all our candidate is like you and me. His heart is centered
in his home. The greatest rewards life holds for him are not the offices
we are able to bestow on him but the love of his wife and children."
Since his marriage which from the first had irritated him and then set
his teeth on edge, he had devoted himself seemingly to a public
idealization of his own predicament.
Nine years had brought changes in Basine. He had grown leaner. His face
had sharpened into hawk lines. There was about him at thirty-four, an
aristocratic pugnaciousness. Fearlessness was a word which was gradually
attaching itself to his name. He was fearless, people said. His lean
body and unphysical air contributed to their decision.
When he appeared publicly people saw a wiry-bodied man past thirty with
an amazing determination about him. His words snapped out, his eyes
flashed as he talked. And his talk was usually alive with denunciations.
He denounced enemies of the people and ideas that were enemies.
During the minor campaigns for aldermen, state's attorney and the
judiciary elections in which he had been employed by his party leaders,
he had created a slight newspaper stir. The public had quickly sensed in
him an interesting character.
And then, although he was years working toward this end, he had suddenly
leaped forward as a champion of their rights. He had become one of the
select group of indomitable Davids striding fearlessly forth to do
battle with the Goliaths that threatened. And there were always Goliaths
threatening. Insidious Goliaths; shrewd, merciless Goliaths continually
on the verge of opening their terrible maws and devouring the rights of
the public.
Basine was coming forward as a champion consecrated to the slaying of
Goliaths. Not only during campaigns, which, of course, was the open
season for Goliath-slaying, but between campaigns, behind closed doors
where nobody saw, in the bosom of his family. He never removed his armor
or rather, never laid aside his holy slingshot. He was always locked in
a death struggle with new and unsuspected Goliaths--this wiry, fearless
man who was beginning to cry out in the newspapers ... "The enemies of
the public must be overthrown. It matters not who they are or in what
camp they are. The city must be cleaned up."
Following the failure of several private banks in the cosmopolitan
district of the city, Basine had leaped forward against this new
Goliath. This had been his first major offensive.
Private banks were threatening the peace of the public. He had made
several speeches before business men's associations denouncing private
banks and private bankers. He had declared with utter disregard of
personal or political consequences that they were a menace--that they
were sharks swimming in the waters of finance--and that he would not
rest until the public had been made safe against their predatory,
merciless jaws.
He was on this Sunday morning in the midst of the fight against private
banks. The excitement had started with the failure of a small banking
institution on the west side. The newspapers had carried the usual
stories of weeping depositors and heartbroken working people whose
life-time savings had been swept away in the crash. Basine had
overlooked the stories in the papers. Doris had called them to his
attention. He had been sitting in her studio.... Here was something
worth while. Why didn't he start a campaign against private banks.
There was always agitation, but as yet not a big campaign.
When he left her the thing had already matured in his mind. He wondered
why she had laughed during the discussion of the possibilities of such a
campaign. He remembered her saying with a sneer, "That's the sort of
thing the crowd eats up. The trouble with you George, is that you
haven't learned the trick of frightening the mob. You can't be a leader
unless you frighten them first and then leap out to defend them. The
menace of private banks is something to frighten them with. Start a
crusade."
That was it--a crusade. Movements and reforms were all very well. But
they were slow work. In order to advance one had to attach oneself to
tidal waves. Doris was right about frightening them.
Within a week he had launched his attack. He had developed a technique
in his public utterances which was becoming more and more unconscious
and so more and more convincing. Once determined that a crusade against
private banks would be a step in his upward climb, his cynicism in the
matter vanished. He investigated the subject thoroughly, filling his
mind with statistics. Events played into his hands. A second private
bank collapsed at the end of the week and Basine knew that the ground
was ready for his crusade.
He began not with an attack against the institution of private banks,
but shelving the statistics he had carefully mastered, he concentrated
upon creating a sense of terror in the public mind. In statements given
out to the press and in speeches before business men's associations
which were also reported in the newspapers, he pounded on the note of
menace. They were a menace. They were something to be afraid of. They
jeopardized stability. They were wildcat institutions.
It was his first crusade and he waited nervously for the response. The
response came after a pause of a week like an answering shout. Down with
private banks! A conflagration of headlines flared up. The people were
against private banks. Editorials heralded the fact. The newspapers were
against private banks. A week ago private banks had been the furthest
topic from the public conversation. Now it became a matter of violent
discussion. Citizens committees were being formed for the purpose of
fighting private banks.
Feeling began to run high. Very high. A neighborhood Polish financier
who for years had conducted a small banking institution was mobbed on
his way to work and rescued from the violence of the crowd, which
threatened his life by the arrival of police. This incident was reported
by the newspapers as revealing the determination of the men seeking to
wipe out the menace of the private bank and also as revealing the
unscrupulous power of the men engaged in the private banking business.
The growing clamor against the institution resulted naturally in the
collapse of two more small banks whose depositors, terrified by reports
they themselves were circulating, rushed to withdraw their savings.
Basine contemplating the extent of the public indignation felt a pride
and a misgiving. He glowed with the thought that he, Basine, had started
the thing. His name had from the beginning figured prominently in
connection with the growing crusade.... "Basine Denounces Private
Banks...." had started it. And then a flood of headlines, "Banking
Sharks Prey on poor, says Basine."... And then "Basine Flays Private
Bankers at Mass Meeting...." "Private Bank Menace Growing...."
He had kept his head during the publicity and, unaccountably, his
thought had turned to his sister as the crusade gathered momentum, as
the "menace grew." Although alive with a powerful indignation against
the enemy, Basine remained mentally aloof in contemplating the
situation. His aloofness was not a cynicism but a guide.
He studied the fact that the clamor was in the main artificial. The
menace of the private bank was a thing that touched less than one
per-cent of the population. There were no more than thirty such minor
institutions in the city and more than two-thirds of these were as sound
as the banks under government supervision. His statistics had revealed
this.
Nevertheless in some mysterious way the phrase "private bank" had become
synonymous with ogre, villainy, menace, calamity. His original
denunciations published rather casually by the press had been a species
of newspaper feelers. The public had responded. Realizing then that the
subject was a live one, the papers had cut loose. The idea of a trusted
public institution being a danger and a menace to the community was
quick in awaking a sense of alarm. A sense of fear inspired by no facts
but by the reiterative rhetoric of the press swept the city.
Basine for several days sought futilely to understand the phenomenon of
this fear. It seemed almost as if people were filled with constant
though innate fear of the things they trusted. A man named Levine whom
he had met at Doris' explained it that way. He had listened to the man
talk: ... "The reason people turn on their trusted institutions with
such fury is simple. When a platitude they have blindly upheld seems
about to betray them they fall on it and tear it to pieces. This is
because a platitude is kept alive blindly and it must be destroyed
blindly. When a platitude commits the offense of becoming obviously, too
obviously, a lie or an incipient danger, people are of course overcome
with the horrible doubt that all platitudes are lies and dangers. This
general suspicion which overcomes them, this wholesale fear or panic
which sweeps over them, they let out, of course, on the one platitude.
By viciously denouncing the one platitude they manage to assure
themselves that all the others are all right. They sort of lose their
general terror in an unnatural but specific hysteria. And they always
turn themselves into an overfed elephant jumping furiously up and down
and trumpeting terribly--at a mouse."
Basine carried this explanation away. He allowed it to linger in his
mind without thinking of it. He knew that the fear was unwarranted and
yet the excitement had taken on the proportions of a public uprising.
The editorials of the press became couched more and more in
grandiloquent languages, reminiscent of Biblical passages. In fact a
religious fervor had entered the clamor. The overthrow of the private
bank was a mission of righteousness--an integral part of the higher
Christianity of the nation--to say nothing of the dreams of its
forefathers.
With this growing and exalted anger, a new phenomenon struck Basine. It
was the strange myth that had sprung up seemingly overnight of the power
of the private banks. He knew from his study of the facts that the
private bankers of the city were a handful of haphazard, third rate
financiers without prestige in the courts or pull in the politics of the
state. Their total holdings represented a slight fraction of the money
tied up in the banking business of the city. They had no standing
comparable with the standing of the supervised banks. The big interests
including the men of power in the city were against them and they were,
as a matter of fact, a puny by-product of the city's intricate finance.
Yet now they had become an insidiously entrenched monster. Public men of
affairs vied with each other in revealing the mysterious power of the
private bank. And Basine was left to marvel in silence over the fact
that the wilder the public frenzy against private bankers became, the
huger and more difficult to overthrow were the private bankers made out
to be.
His pride as author of the crusade began however to be colored with
misgivings. Others had risen to challenge him for the leadership of the
movement. Stern, fearless men, as stern and fearless as himself, were
offering to sacrifice themselves on the altars of freedom. The altars of
freedom, the press explained, were the battleground of the fight against
private banks.
The public's attention was being distracted from Basine. Men of greater
prestige than he had hurled themselves into the death struggle. These
great ones were more qualified than Basine for leadership. They were
older and of deeper experience in the slaying of Goliaths. Now it seemed
that perhaps one of them and not George Basine was the hero who would
be able to overthrow this latest menace to the public weal.
Basine's misgivings took the form of an irritation. He sensed the
fickleness of the public and understood that it could turn from him who
had started the whole thing and give its adulation to some other leader
who had jumped on the band-wagon and crowded Basine off the driver's
seat. His cynicism returned as he read the denunciations his rivals were
hurling at private banks.
"A pack of fools and fourflushers," he muttered to himself and their
words--paraphrases of his original denunciations for the most
part--nauseated him. The word "bunk" crept into his thought as he read
their speeches and interviews. He would like to stop the whole thing, to
stand up and say it was all a tempest in a teapot and that there was no
menace or ogre or Goliath; that the whole thing was made out of whole
cloth. Then the entire business would collapse and the men threatening
him for the leadership would be left high and dry.
... Doris looked up as he entered. She was a silent-looking woman. Her
face wore its pallor like a mask. She greeted her brother without
expression. Her luxurious body seemed without life, her hands gesturing
as if they were weighted. The sensuous outlines of her which brought to
mind the odalisques of Titian found a startling contrast in the
immobility of her manners. She was thirty and in the half-lighted room
she seemed like a beautiful, burning-eyed paralytic.
"Tired?" her brother asked as he sat down.
This was of late his usual greeting. She looked tired always, and until
she began to talk, she looked as if she were dumb or blind. But when she
talked her eyes lighted.
She shook her head to his question. He had come filled with troubles and
confessions but her black eyes, centered on him, disturbed him. He had
become used to the sardonic weariness of her face. But there were times
when he felt as if something were happening to her that he couldn't
understand. Her eyes would burn and seem to shut him out as if she could
look at him without seeing him.
Her complete inanimation startled him. He knew he could sit talking all
night and she would never move nor ask a question. Long ago she had been
a little like that. Never asking questions but sitting among others as
if she were alone. But now it was more marked. There was something wrong
with Doris. What she needed was to go out more. She was getting too
self-centered, brooding too much.
Basine, as he sat studying the window and the profile of his sister,
kept remembering how she used to be. That was years ago when they had
all lived at home. And this poet Lindstrum whom everybody was talking
about, used to call on her. She had been in love with him. But that was
long ago--eight, nine, ten years ago. It couldn't be that. And it
couldn't be that she was "in trouble," because she had been like this
for years now. He remembered her youth. Her silence then had been
different. It had been alive. And now she sat around like a corpse and
if it wasn't for her eyes moving occasionally you might think her
actually dead. Sometimes this thought did frighten him as he sat
watching her. She was dead! He would restrain himself from jumping up
to see and sit listening to hear her breathe.
He felt sorry for her. When he had married Henrietta she had been the
only one who had understood. He could always remember what she had said
at the wedding. It was the only thing he could recall of the event--what
Doris had said to him....
"You'll never be a great man if you let yourself get trapped like this
too often."
Surprising that she should know enough to say that. Because anyone who
could say that to him must know him thoroughly and understand him
thoroughly. It was what he had been saying to himself for months before
the wedding.
He felt sorry for his sister. They were good friends in a way. A curious
way because he felt she detested him somehow. Yet she understood him and
could help him. And she liked him to come to see her. He wondered why.
She had no love for him but there was something about him that appealed
to her and interested her. He had noticed how she acted toward others.
Their talk left her dead. Even when Levine talked she often remained
unaware he was around. Her eyes never opened to people. Even her mother.
And Fanny had said, "Doris is getting more and more of a pill. I think
she's going crazy. She doesn't even look at a person anymore."
He watched her and thought, "Poor girl. Something wrong. I wish I could
help her."
He kept remembering how beautiful and alive she had been and his heart
felt an odd laceration as if something he loved were dying. Was he so
fond of Doris, then? He said, "no." Yet he could never remember having
felt such sympathy as this toward anyone. It was because she was an
intimate. He felt toward her as he felt toward himself--forgiving,
appreciative, and a sense of pity. Why had he thought that? Pity. Did he
pity himself, he, George Basine, who was just beginning to ascend?
Henrietta and the kids--that was it. A man had to accumulate troubles if
he was to amount to anything.
The feeling of sympathy slipped from his thought. Doris had turned her
eyes to him. Basine was aware of her coming to life. The symmetrical
mask of her face became features and expressions.
"Will you stay for tea?" she asked.
He would. Doris stood up and regarded him with a malicious smile.
"The crusade seems to be running away from you," she said.
He nodded. The public-spirited leader in him did not relish the ironic
tilt of her words. But he was able to assume a dual attitude toward her
cynical intellectualism. He could frown on it with a sense of outrage.
And he could listen to it with an appreciative shrewdness. He could
despise her iconoclasm and still utilize its intelligence to aid him in
his climb.
He had always understood that to his sister his aspirations were
contemptible. And yet despite her sneering she seemed anxious to help
him realize them. He understood, too, that in his sister's mind there
was something queer about people. When she talked about people her eyes
lighted. There was about her talk of people a clarity of idea that
contrasted strangely with the passion one could feel behind her words.
Basine usually tried to dismiss the impression she made on him by
thinking, "Oh, she's a fanatic on the subject, that's all." But a
mystery worried him. Why should she be interested in his career? And why
should she try to help him if she despised him and his type of ambition?
And, moreover, despised people and politics in general?
It was a paradox and it made him uncomfortable. But he sought her out
all the more for this. Because there was something practical about her
fanaticism. Yes, and because she understood about him.
He had already told her secrets about himself, particularly about
himself in relation to Henrietta. That formed a bond between them. He
sometimes grew frightened at the thought of the things Doris knew about
him--things she might tell to anyone and ruin him; wreck his home and
his career. But always after worrying about such fears he would hurry to
his sister and unburden himself still further. As if by feeding her
further secrets he could make certain of her loyalty and reticence.
He watched her less openly as she poured tea. A bitterness filled him.
If Henrietta were only a woman like this instead of a stick. If only he
could sit home and talk things over with her, marriage would have some
sense to it. He frowned. He did not like to think this way.
Doris began to talk smoothly, her dark eyes growing more alive. He
listened nervously, wincing under the contempt of her phrases and
fascinated by the startling interpretations they offered him of his own
thoughts.
"If I were you," she said as she arranged the teacups, "I would let
myself be squeezed out of the crusade. It's served its purpose for you.
You've frightened about a million feeble-minded creatures into a fury
against private banks. You've done quite well. That's the secret, you
know. And you must always remember it. Create bogeymen to frighten
people with. The more unreal the bogeymen, the more terrified the
public. If you don't believe this figure out for yourself--of what are
people the most afraid? God, of course. The greatest of the bogeymen.
And remember too, George that people like to be terrified. There's a
reason for that. People like to be preoccupied by false terrors in order
not to have to face real frightening facts--facts such as death and age
and their own souls."
She sat down and looked at Basine with a pitying smile.
"What a fool you are, George. You don't believe a word I say, do you?"
"What you say and how you say it are two different things," he answered.
The thought was in his mind that Fanny was right. Doris was going crazy.
Her talk had an edge to it as if her voice were being carefully
repressed. He almost preferred her when she was silent, when her eyes
slept. Because now there was a hidden wildness to her. She was
suffering! The thought startled him. But that was it. The hate that
filled her voice came from a suffering inside. He wanted to reach over
and take her hand and whisper to her to be calm, but he continued to
listen without moving. There were things in what she said that always
held him. It was like learning secrets. She was still talking.
"Well, today they're shrieking and vomiting invective and you'd like
nothing better than to be the heroic leader of this pack of filthy
cowards. Would you? Well, it's not worth while this time. The whole
thing'll blow over. In a few weeks people will have forgotten about
private banks. And by the time you get the bill into the state
legislature the papers will be ignoring the whole business. Do you see?
There's nothing so tragic as the spectacle of a mob leader stranded high
and dry with a yesterday's crusade. And his mob off in another
direction. Remember, George, you're not dealing with people, with
reasoning men and women. You always forget this and you'll never get
ahead if you keep forgetting it. You're dealing with a single
creature--the crowd. A huge bellowing savage."
"I know, I know," Basine muttered. She was crazy. Something queer in her
head about people. "All people aren't like that, of course. But I
understand."
"You don't," she interrupted angrily. "All people are like that. Alone
people are one thing. They're alive and they reason a little. But when
they come together to overthrow governments or defend governments or
make laws or worship Gods, they vanish. A single creature takes their
place. And this single creature is a mysterious savage who howls and
spits and vomits and tears its hair and has orgasms of terror and
befouls itself."
Her eyes glared at Basine. With an effort she controlled her voice. She
continued in a passionate whisper.
"Don't you understand that yet? After all I've shown you. If you want to
get ahead, I can make you anything. Do you hear that? Anything.... I
can make you a leader ... a king. All you must learn is the way of
turning people into swine...."
"Please Doris, you get too excited. Please...."
"Into swine and swine crusades. We'll find ways of bringing them
together and the more swinish you can make people become, yes, the more
you can make them spew and shriek, the holier will become the cause of
this spewing and shrieking. These are elementals and you must trust me.
Do you hear?"
Her fingers were cold. They had closed on his hand. He shuddered. Crazy
... poor Doris. Gone queer with something. Yet he found himself
listening, her chill fingers startling his flesh. Out of her ravings
there might issue at any minute the thing he was always looking for ...
a way to get ahead.
"Little crusades like this," she went on, "are all right. But private
banks are only a detail. And besides the idea is too concrete to terrify
people and bring out the full hysteria of their cowardice. What we need
is something vague--that has no facts to handicap it. Something you can
lie about wildly and frighten them with so that their bowels weaken.
Please, drop the thing now. You must...."
"Doris, you get too excited. Let's talk sense instead of getting excited
like this."
He patted her hand and returned her stare uncomfortably. He wanted to
ask her why she was interested in his getting ahead, in making him a
leader. She had paused. Basine felt himself nauseated by the intensity
of her words that continued to ring in his ears. Her anger and the
viciousness of her phrases brought her too close to him. He could
almost see something behind the glare of her dark eyes.
"Oh, you're not interested in progress and civilization," she resumed
mockingly. Her words seemed more controlled. He noticed that she jerked
her hand away. "Because if you were you would see that progress and
civilization are the results of the terror of the mob. It's when they
get frightened of something and throw themselves at it with their eyes
shut and their hair on end, that institutions are born ... that new
platitudes are set up in heaven. And the secret is this--the worse swine
you can turn them into, the holier will be the things they do. Listen,
I'll tell you.... You must do as I say.... You must believe me...."
She had risen. Her hand was on his shoulder and her eyes burned over
him. He felt a bit fearful and impatient. To a point, her talk was
interesting. But after that it became like raving.
"You've told me that before," he murmured. "Please calm down." An
ecstatic light slowly left her.
"Oh yes. Sense," she whispered. "Well, the sense of it is for you to
become a symbol of their holiness. Be a leader. Isn't that it. But the
private bank crusade has fizzled. I've read the papers closely and
outside of the two attacks on the private bankers last week, there've
been no great gestures of righteousness. If they'd hamstrung a few
hundred private bankers, cut off their heads and burned down their
houses, I'd advise you to stick. That's sense isn't it?"
Basine, listening to the uncomfortable distortions of his sister, made
up his mind. He translated her vicious suggestions into the less
inconveniencing idea.... "The biggest part of the work in the fight
against the banks has been done already, Doris. And the rest anybody can
do."
"Yes," she smiled, "if you're going to be of service to the public you
must be careful to devote yourself to worthwhile reforms. You always had
a clearer way of putting things, George."
She despised him. He could feel it now. He looked at her and wondered
again. She was beautiful. A complete change had come over her since he'd
come in. She seemed warm with emotion, alive, human. But she smiled in
an offensive way. He preferred her viciousness. That was
impersonal--something queer in her head. This other was a condescension
that angered him. He sat thinking; she was playing with him. It would be
better if he never saw her.
"How is Henrietta?" she asked.
The question had long ago became an invitation to confession. He avoided
her eyes.
"Fanny and Aubrey were over," he answered.