face when I mentioned her son. He is her religion—the substance of
it. Her husband is the church which she attends from old habit,
repeating her belief in him with her lips, like the phrases of an
ancient creed. But what she really believes in, with a fervor of
prayer and faith, is her son. I suspected that Willys and Oliver
would think me guilty of bad taste for bringing into the conversation
a subject, as a Restoration hero remarks of his wife, “so foreign
and yet so domestic.” Somehow children seem out of place when one
is celebrating a moral holiday! But if one wishes to break down the
guard of a woman who says, “My point of view? I—oh, I am Oliver’s
wife!” one must risk bad taste. Cornelia’s voice glided softly from
gay to grave as she answered:—
“I kissed the glass for auld lang syne. I set it down untasted for
the sake of the new times and the children. I used to enjoy it, as I
used to enjoy being twenty years old. It isn’t much to relinquish, is
it?—compared with what one has to relinquish.”
When Cornelia talks in this vein about age, she seems to me—well,
just ravishingly young; and I murmured, for our angle of the table
only, “You’ve relinquished nothing!” But she completely ignored me
and continued:—
“As my son’s mother, I am very happy, under present conditions, to
know that he doesn’t drink or even feel any temptation to drink. We
refrain, my son and I, more as a matter of taste than as a matter of
conscience. Besides, he is too young. In my own home the boys had a
glass of wine on their twenty-first birthday as a part of the family
celebration. And the girls—I can’t remember that I tasted wine,
except in Italy, till after I was married. Oliver is only nineteen.
If, when he is of age, he is at Oxford, as I hope he may be, or
if he were able at home to have his wine in a natural atmosphere,
simply and innocently, with gentlemen, I should not wish to deprive
him of what I was brought up to regard as a proper element of social
festivity.”
“Bravo!” cried Willys.
“But, alas,” she concluded, “all that is gone now. And it’s all so
furtive and mean that I have a horrid feeling. And one hears so many
hateful stories about the secret drinking of mere boys and girls,
at school and at their parties, treating one another in their cars
by the roadside,—and the consequences of it,—that it’s odious, just
odious. And I—I just sigh a bit for the age of innocence, and bid it
all adieu.”
“Admirable speech!” cried the novelist, as the Caribbean
attendant refilled his glasses. “Beautiful speech: full of sweet
reasonableness—all but the conclusion. But why adieu? Why turn down
the empty glass? You fill me with lyrical melancholy. ‘Too quick
despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?’ You look too steadily on the
small dark side of the question. There is a soul of goodness in
things evil. Watch and wait! I maintain that the prohibitionists
builded better than they knew: they have driven drinking out of the
barroom and are bringing it back to the home, where it belongs, and
where as Burke says—doesn’t he?—it loses all its evil by losing
all its grossness, or something like that. You and His Excellency
are performing a service to posterity by preserving through this
destructive period the purity of a fine old tradition.”
III
HIS EXCELLENCY ON ECONOMIC NECESSITY
I turned to Oliver. “Oliver,” I said, “you have been shielded by your
wife. Now Willys is apologizing for you. Really, you know, this won’t
do. You will have to come into the open and speak for yourself. When
I go home, my friends will expect me to give them some intelligent
account of what is going on here beneath the surface of things. We
sit out there among the cornfields with our radio sets and listen to
Washington uttering austere words about enforcing the law, and the
next morning we read in the papers that there has been a party under
the shadow of the Capitol, and that there is no one to see that the
law is enforced, because all the responsible people are busy putting
away their private stocks. Slanderous, no doubt. But in the ethical
sense, how—actually—do you get away with it? Janus, explain yourself.”
“Oh, very well, Calpurnia,” said Oliver, “yours to command,
remembering only that, as Judge Black informs me, what a man entrusts
to the wife of his bosom ‘in the sweet confidences of the midnight
hour’ she is not permitted to bring into court against him. But shall
I explain myself as a friend of the government, or as the master of
my private life? As an ornamental pillar of the administration, or as
the captain of my own soul? Which shall it be?”
“Both, by all means!” Willys exclaimed. “First one and then the
other. First the marble bust and then the man. First the friend of
the aspiring people and then the friend of the downtrodden artist.
Discuss your public betrayal of your own class and then your private
loyalty to the good old cause. But tell us first why you passed the
Eighteenth Amendment. I can’t write my next chapter of _Senator
Jones_ till I have an authentic hunch, the _vraie vérité_, about
the fashion in which you and the Professor and the Puritans and
the Mid-West and the Anti-Saloon League—in short the Anglo-Saxon
minority—downed the great hearty Teutonic, Celtic, Italic, Slavic,
Hebraic majority, the glad, gay, sinful, eating-and-drinking
majority, and put it over on us.”
“My dear man,” said His Excellency in his quietly impressive
diplomatic manner, “don’t tell me that you accept that fable. You
call yourself a realist! Neither the Anti-Saloon League nor the
Puritans nor the Professor nor I had any more to do with passing
the Eighteenth Amendment than a butterfly on a steam-roller has
to do with building the Lincoln highway, or than a catfish in the
Mississippi has to do with irrigating the rice-fields of Louisiana.”
His Excellency held the point by pausing to light a cigarette.
“Well, we are waiting,” someone prompted, after duly respecting his
technique.
“_Mes enfants_,” he continued, and then blew a ring of white smoke
spinning towards the tip of one of the candles, where it hung for a
moment like a nimbus and then dissolved upward. “My children, let me
disclose to you the fundamental axiom of political philosophy—not
the orthodox but the esoteric philosophy. Distrust the press and
ignore the palaver of the man in the street. The press tells you
what it thinks will be popular. The last man in the street tells you
what he has heard said by the next to the last man in the street.
I tell you this: You may scold yourself red in the face; you may
bleed yourself white; you may shout yourself blue with pietistic,
reformatory, and patriotic fervor; nothing of any importance, of any
public consequence, is ever accomplished in this world except by
Necessity—by a succession of linked necessities.”
“The theory isn’t entirely novel, Excellency,” I said. “And now the
application.”
“The necessity which put through the Volstead Act was the war; the
necessity behind that was the sky-vaulting of wages; the necessity
behind that was maximum production; the necessity behind that was a
workman sober seven days in the week; the necessity behind that I
could make concrete to you by naming the hundred leading corporations
of the country that were in the belly of the wooden horse, making
his feet track, when the Anti-Saloon League rode on his back into
Jerusalem—or, if the figure offends you, into Washington.”
“The figure seems a little mixed at the best,” said Willys, “but call
it Jerusalem—whither the tribesmen go up to liquidate the burden of
laying taxes on us. As for your chain of necessities, now that the
war is over, that chain is falling apart. The workingman sees the Big
Brother in the wooden horse, who bullied him into working six days
in the week and into doing, according to Union standards, two days’
work in one. He doesn’t like that. Besides, he knows that his Big
Brother’s own throat isn’t dry, hasn’t been dry. The injustice rasps
him. He wants his beer again. He wants the ‘poor man’s club’ again.
And he has a jolly good right to have them. What do you say to that?”
“Oh, he has rights enough,” Oliver assented; “but the poor man’s club
has passed into the hands of a receiver—a mighty capable one. The
poor man’s club is now in the hands of his wife. She is in charge
now of the Saturday afternoons and evenings. Do you think, when her
vote is as good as his, she will let him pour his wages into the
sink? Rather not. She has spent them, spent them in advance, for a
generation to come.”
“Yes,” said Cornelia. “Isn’t it a pity! Workwomen are the most
wasteful creatures. Why, when Margaret—”
“You don’t quite get the idea, my dear,” Oliver resumed. “As I was
saying—in war time, while her old man was sober, with money bulging
his pockets and nowhere to go, she made him buy her a house and a
Ford and a Victrola and savings stamps and baby bonds. Now she’s
buying a municipal playground along the line of the old grog-shops
and a new schoolhouse and a hospital and a couple of movie theatres
and a municipal stadium and a municipal swimming-pool and God Himself
alone knows how many hundred thousand miles of the finest and most
expensive roads in the world.”
“Why, Oliver dear,” cried Cornelia, “what do you mean?” I don’t know
anything more painful than to report the occasional fatuity of a
woman whom one almost unreservedly admires. But dear Cornelia has
not meditated very deeply on the problems of the working classes.
And returning to her point, she insisted: “I’m sure Margaret hasn’t
bought any swimming pools or hospitals.”
“No, my dear,” said Oliver calmly, “I doubt if she has. But as I
was saying, she has her own ideas of a club—that woman. She is a
Progressive. As a big employer in Pittsburgh said to me yesterday,
‘She has tasted blood.’ She has dug in, and is going to extend her
works. Wages won’t go down; they’ll be higher to-morrow morning.
Why? Do you suppose that new outfit of hers is paid for? Rather
not. Do you suppose that the business men are going to continue in
business and collect their bills? Do you suppose they know what
kind of plain people pay their bills and have money to spend? I
fancy they do. Well! The Big Brother is still in the wooden horse.
Maximum production and high wages till the Judgment Day. And
Prohibition! The only ticket on which any party will hold office.
That’s my forecast—as a servant of the government and a friend of the
workingman.”
“Heaven help the poor workingman,” cried Willys, “and spare us a few
noble specimens of the idle rich. But now, Excellency, you must cheer
our fainting spirits by explaining your point of view as the master
of your private life.”
“As the master of my private life,” said Oliver promptly, “I deny
that I am any such Janus as the Professor here tries to make me out.
As a private citizen, I still believe that prohibition cannot be
repealed. Within this belief I merely include, as a private citizen,
my philosophic certainty that it will never be enforced, except
where it is economically necessary. In my case it is not necessary;
therefore, it will not be enforced. Its enforcement helps the
business of the plain people; it would hinder mine. It adds, on the
whole, very greatly to the comfort of their lives. It would detract
from mine. The whole case against liquor grew out of the plain
people’s abuse of it. The whole case of liquor will be improved by
my right use of it. There is no ‘rasping injustice,’ but a beautiful
poetic justice in their losing theirs and in my keeping mine. That
doesn’t express adequately my generosity in lending my hand to
riveting the workingman’s benefits firmly upon him. Many of the most
decorative and not the least substantial pillars of prohibition
are men of excellent and experienced palate. The most sincere and
the most competent advocates of the cause are the nonconforming
prohibitionists. I simply cannot understand the Senator who refers
to the Volstead Act as an idiotic measure and a failure. It was
absolutely necessary: nothing which is necessary is idiotic. And
every economist will tell you that it has been a marvelous economic
success. It wonderfully accomplishes what had to be done, and it
leaves undone what it ought not to do. And there you are.”
“And there _you_ are!” retorted Willys, “you and your economic
argument. But where are the rest of us? I’m sorry to say that, for
economic reasons, I can’t follow you. My bootlegger is devouring my
royalties. Therefore, as you would say, I have strong conscientious
objections to illicit liquor.”
“I had rather overlooked that possibility,” said Oliver. “But lean on
me—at least till you have finished _Senator Jones_.”
“Thank you,” said Willys, “I’ll do so. But seriously speaking—”
“Forgive me!” Cornelia interposed, with a delightful wave of her hand
flagging the onrush of the novelist’s volubility. “Before Mr. Willys
begins to speak seriously, suppose we adjourn to the library. You
remember that Oliver is likely to lose his temper if I keep him too
long at the table fiddling with cigarettes.”
IV
VERNON WILLYS ON BACCHIC ECSTASY
I have never had leisure to examine the books in the library which
range from floor to ceiling. Sargent’s portrait of Cornelia at
twenty-five hangs above the fireplace. When we had relaxed in
Oliver’s wonderful library chairs before a real log fire, and had
been equipped with an ambassadorial type of cigar, which the elder
Carib lighted for us, and had been fortified by the highest potency
of a private stock of real Java coffee, we men, at least, were in a
position to contemplate the approaching midnight with equanimity. As
soon as this change of base had been fully effected, Cornelia, who
seldom loses the connection of things, irradiated the novelist with
her most hospitable smile. (I sometimes think my feeling for her is
pure intellectual respect for her skill in keeping a good topic alive
and not letting conversation die out in small talk.) She smiled and
said:—
“Mr. Willys, you were just about to speak seriously, when I
interrupted. Please speak seriously, Mr. Willys. We are all most
anxious to have you.”
“Oh, my point of view, you mean?” said Willys. I admired his ability
to find it again so quickly. “Speaking seriously, I can’t—for more
or less obvious reasons—take as calmly as His Excellency does the
poor man’s loss of pleasures. I appeal from the tyranny of our
recent moral legislation to my constitutional guaranties of liberty
and the right to pursue my happiness where I can find it. I agree
with the Senator that the whole business is idiotic. It is idiotic
impertinence to dictate what I shall eat and drink at my own table,
or what I shall brew in my own cellar.”
“If you had a cellar?” suggested Cornelia, rather spitefully
reminding us of Willys’s arrangements to leave his house in New
Jersey to his wife, and his wife to his house. But, as I have said,
she is firm on such points.
“Spare the wormwood, Cornelia darling,” Oliver blandly interceded.
“But, Willys, if you have a better remedy for our present discontents
than mine, don’t conceal it from the country. Everyone is clamoring
for it. Only be sure it is a remedy. Be sure it rests firmly on the
necessities of the situation. There is no use in talking of anything
else.”
“I’ll tell you my remedy,” said Willys, “when I get done telling
you my troubles. I object to governmental regulation of my diet.
But I object even more to governmental corruption of my conscience.
God knows I need what little I’ve got left, and I’d like to keep it
pure. I protest against the creation of crime by Act of Congress. My
conscience tells me that moderate drinking is not a crime, but one of
the few certain solaces in this chaotic world.”
“I had always fancied,” said Cornelia, “that those who find drink a
‘certain solace’ are seldom very moderate.”
But the cork, so to speak, was out of Willys’s bottle. He flowed on
unchecked.
“I protest against the legislative destruction of old customs
which every civilized nation under heaven but ours respects.
Your Excellency has seen the vintage in Greece, Italy, France,
Germany—Persia, too, haven’t you, not to speak of our Gulf Islands?
Consider merely the picturesqueness of it! The romance of it! Blood
of the grape! Bottled sunshine! We had a bit of it ourselves, here
and there—in the green vineyards of northern California, wild grapes
on the Sangamon, moonshine in the Kentucky mountains, mint-julep
on the old Southern plantations. Even the cocktail, you know,
our own national contribution, had begun to be humanized and to
have its tender local associations, as every club of distinction
modified its ingredients and christened it with some lovely name: The
Chrysanthemum, The Chrysostom, The Golden Girl, and so forth. Doesn’t
it really stir your imagination a little?”
“Yes, yes,” said Oliver, first smacking his lips and then pursing
them with mock severity. “Yes, we grant you all that. But what
is the necessity of it? We are talking of necessities, not of
sentiments. We, we Midlanders—the Professor and myself—want to know
what necessity requires the tolerance of a mere beverage which is so
liable to become a beastly nuisance.”
“Exactly so,” I said.
“I’ll tell you the necessity,” replied Willys. “And I’ll tell you,
too, that it goes far deeper than your economic theory. I return to
the Saturday nights of the workingman. You know, I know, everyone
with two grains of sense knows, that there is something desirous
in the inside of a man which even hard roads and baby bonds don’t
satisfy. That something is a primitive and profound need of our
elemental nature for excitement and every now and then for something
like intoxication. Why, my wife says,—excuse me, a lady with whom
I was formerly acquainted used to say,—‘No woman can get along on
less than a thrill a day,’ of one sort or another. It’s rooted in
the human organism—this hunger for occasional escape from humdrum.
‘Tedium’—what was it you said the other day, Professor? Rather
good, you know—‘tedium is three fourths of life.’ I agree with you
there, Professor; only I figure the tedious fraction is larger than
that, even for moderately contented and comfortable people. And
for the multitude, for the masses, the fraction that is not tedium
is almost negligible, when it is not positive pain. But—_but_, in
that microscopic fraction there must be a few moments or hours of
heightened consciousness, a burst of hilarity, a breath of freedom, a
little dream, a little edge of ecstasy—or a man will cut his throat
in order to feel that he is alive.”
“It is not done among the sort of people we associate with,” said
Cornelia, whom the argument impressed as rather silly.
“Perhaps not,” said Willys, “perhaps not. Perhaps you ‘escape’ in
some other fashion. But I say His Excellency is wrong in making light
of the poor man’s club. It’s his safety valve. Take the poor devil
to whom Saturday night has been the only bright spot in a black week.
Deny him beer, he drinks whiskey; deny him whiskey, he drinks vanilla
extract; if he can’t get vanilla extract, he takes to methyl alcohol;
or he falls back on drugs, and takes to theft and burglary, and
crimes of violence.”
“Aren’t you leaning rather heavily, Willys,” I said, “on what you
allege prohibition has done to the criminal classes? You can’t expect
repeal of prohibition in behalf of thieves and thugs.”
“As for the upper classes,” said Willys, “I won’t offend our hostess
by knowing anything that simply ‘isn’t done.’ But just consider what
every one knows: the Capuan character of the New York roof-garden;
the Corinthian style of current dancing; nice young girls at
petting-parties indistinguishable, actually indistinguishable in
costume and paint and manner from courtesans; the high spots that
can’t be kept out of movies; the chief interest in the novels we’re
reading and writing; and then the general domestic smash-up that is
following prohibition. There are worse things than a liquor license,
Professor, and we’ve got the whole pack of them on our backs by
putting in prohibition.”
I quoted my favorite passage from King Lear: “We make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains
of necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, drunkards, liars, and
adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all
that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.”
“Quite pat, Professor,” exclaimed Willys, whose wits are quick
enough. “And there is, by George, a divinity in it. I maintain it’s
the vengeance of Dionysus! We’ve tried to bind a god, and, by George,
he’s getting back at us. See what I mean? Have you read Euripides,
Excellency?”
“Once on a time,” Oliver said, “not lately. Tell us about it.”
“A great work—his _Bacchae_. Everybody ought to read it. You see,
there’s a reformer in Athens, called Pentheus, a straitlaced,
stiff-necked Puritan, an out-and-out prohibitionist, a—a regular
Mid-Western professor. Well, the young god—Dionysus, you know—comes
over into Greece from Asia with his choruses, singing and dancing
and swinging the ivy-wreathed thyrsus—and all that beautiful joyous
stuff, you know. But this Pentheus makes up his mind that Dionysus
is a bad lot, and he locks the god up in the stable—passes a sort
of Volstead Act on him, you understand. But he gets out—the god
gets out. Of course, he gets out; on the q.t. He escapes into the
hills—classical moonshine, classical bootlegging, you see. The women
get hold of the stuff and, up there in the hills, begin celebrating
‘mysteries’—all on the q.t. Attorney-General Pentheus says this must
be stopped—law must be enforced. He sleuths up into the hills to
spy them out. But the women, his own mother among them, catch him,
and literally pull him to pieces, tear him limb from limb and strew
the bloody fragments all over the place. That’s the vengeance of
Dionysus.”
“How perfectly horrid!” exclaimed Cornelia.
“You know the play, Professor,” said Willys, of course.
“Oh yes,” I replied, as if I had been intimate with it from infancy.
As a matter of fact, Oliver’s telegraphic reference to Bacchus had
prompted me to chuck Gilbert Murray’s little book on Euripides into
my traveling bag for train reading. That accident enabled me to
sustain my bluff by a bit of critical wisdom. “The play is curious,”
I said, “coming from Euripides. He passes for a progressive, an
intellectual radical. You would have expected him to sympathize with
Pentheus, of course. But I notice that Gilbert Murray doesn’t accept
the old theory that Euripides recanted and went back to the ancestral
gods.”
“Well,” replied Willys, “in that case, I think Gilbert Murray is
wrong—who is this Gilbert Murray? I’ve got the play here—in my
overcoat pocket—somebody or other’s translation, of course. You take
it with you, Professor, when you go. Read it again and tell me if you
don’t think I’m right.”
I had to laugh; and then we both explained how we happened to be
reading, or reading about, the _Bacchae_. Then Willys returned to his
argument.
“When I read this play, you know, it hit me in the eye that this
thing is as old as history. This prohibition idiocy is as old as the
race. If drinking could be rooted out, it would have been rooted out
long ago. All the arguments against it were cheesy in the days of
Noah. It sticks because, as His Excellency and I are pointing out, it
is rooted in necessity. You reformers, as you call yourselves, don’t
know what you are about. You’ve bit off what can’t be chewed. You are
attacking religion; and it’s dangerous business. You are trying to
kill a god, and it can’t be done.”
“But my dear Mr. Willys,” cried Cornelia, “it isn’t _our_ God. The
Church hasn’t really defined its position, and of course some of the
bishops are very liberal. But don’t the dissenters in this country
take a very firm stand in favor of prohibition? Most Americans are
dissenters, aren’t they? If so, then I should think you would call
prohibition itself a religious movement.”
“It has long been identified with the popular evangelical churches,”
I said.