calling out rather sharply:—
“Oliver, why do you suppose the children don’t come?” Almost in the
same breath she sprang to her feet and, pulling aside the curtain,
cried:—
“Oh! Oh! Oliver, what’s that?” And an instant later, “Oh! Oh! Oh! How
dreadful! Thank God! Thank God! Oh, thank God, it’s not the children!”
“Of course not!” soothed Oliver, with his arm about her shoulder. “Of
course not. What was it? Tell us about it.”
We ourselves had heard, not indistinctly,—the apartment is on
the second floor,—the prolonged steady screech of an automobile
horn, and, in response to Cornelia’s cry, had rushed to her side,
expecting, I suppose, to see the fire department clearing its right
of way up the avenue.
“Oh, there’s been a dreadful accident,” cried Cornelia. “That
poor little boy—Oh, that poor little boy! They were driving like
mad—to the hospital, I suppose. I saw two policemen standing on
the running-board of an open car coming up the street, and another
sitting on the front seat by the driver. Then, for just an instant,
as it flashed into the bright light under the windows, I could
see that the policeman in front was holding in his arms a little
boy—seven or eight years old—with his head, face upward, hanging over
the edge of the car—bright red with blood—absolutely one bright red
disc of blood—and streaming. Oh, it was horrible! You have no idea
how horrible! And then, as it went past, I could see that there was a
woman crumpled over in the rear seat, and an old man trying to hold
her up.”
“It must have been a shock,” Willys offered; and I added something
equally helpful, as one does on such occasions.
“Well, my dear,” said Oliver, as we returned to the fireplace,
“accidents, you know, do happen. Are you calmer now?”
“Yes,” said Cornelia, “yes, I guess so. I’m trembling still. You’ve
simply no idea how it shook me.”
She sank into a chair, then recovered herself sharply, and said with
a smile: “I’m sorry. Forgive me for making such a fuss over it. I’m
all right now. I suppose it’s horrid to be so selfish—but, oh,
Oliver, aren’t you glad it wasn’t the children? Aren’t you?”
“Certainly, my dear!” said Oliver, in such a droll matter-of-fact
tone that we all laughed quite spontaneously. “And now shall we talk
of something else? Or do you wish me to telephone to the Infant that
their mother has been anxiously expecting them for at least five
minutes?”
“No, don’t telephone,” Cornelia protested. “It’s really only
just after one. I’m sure they will be here in plenty of time for
the train. And please don’t change the subject. I heard what you
were saying. You were talking about automobiles and automobile
accidents. That is what made me so ‘jumpy,’ I suppose. I’ll not be
silly any more. What were you going to say about automobiles when I
interrupted?”
“It would be hard,” I said, “to avoid ‘improving the occasion’ a
little. Heaven knows I didn’t get up the accident to illustrate my
argument—and there’s no reason to suppose that it does illustrate my
argument exactly. These people may all have been perfectly sober.
But if this thing, just now, had happened in a story, like that, we
should have felt that it was contrived and artificial—I don’t recall
just where I stopped, but what I was about to say was—the gist of
it was, that you can make a live argument based on our automobiling
civilization, with almost anybody in the United States, because
almost everybody in the United States has some sort of vital interest
in a car; and so the argument, as we say, comes home to him.”
“That is sound enough,” said Oliver.
“Yes,” I said, “the things that people have in common are the things
that hold them together and enable them to act together. Cars are a
much more expensive cultural and social amalgam than, say, abstract
fraternity, or a belief in the Apostolic Church, or even than an
old family Bible. But the fact remains that cars are at present
far more widely diffused and almost infinitely more used among our
fellow countrymen than any of the older and less expensive amalgams.
I doubt whether there is any other subject whatever upon which our
people possess so large a fund of common knowledge and experience.
Consider: we have fifteen million cars. That means that perhaps one
out of every six or seven men, women, children, and babies in this
country actually drives a car. That’s what I call practical belief in
an article of the popular religion. And you see—if you think—that
it’s the garage and the filling-station that crowd out the saloon,
at every few blocks in the city, in every town and village, at every
crossroads from Florida to Montana. It’s one—just one, mind you—of
the expensive new clubs of the plain people, of the average man.”
“Yes,” said Oliver, “there’s something in that.”
“There’s a good deal in that,” I persisted, “both for economic
necessitarians like you and me, and for religious enthusiasts like
Willys. For Willys, you remember, the essence of religion is a kind
of dangerous and exciting Bacchic escape from humdrum into a few
hours of heightened consciousness and mystical fellowship—through the
national drink. Well, Willys, when the half gods go, the true gods
arrive. The national car does everything that _you_ ask of the Holy
Grail: it provides the average American with an emotional discharge;
it provides him with danger, excitement, the intoxication of speed,
heightened consciousness, and a mystical sense of fellowship with
the owner of both the Rolls-Royce and the Ford roadster; and it
provides these things not on Saturday night only but every day in the
year. As you will concede, there is a ‘kick’, the possibility of a
kick—especially in our national car—for every day in the year. And
there’s one more thing about the religion and ritual of the car.”
“Oh at least that!” said Oliver. “But what is it, Professor?”
“It’s a thing,” I said, “that knocks into a cocked hat His
Excellency’s private argument for privately nullifying the Eighteenth
Amendment. Of course His Excellency didn’t invent the argument—I mean
that hoary old bore about personal liberty and private conscience
and so forth. All the ‘wet’ newspapers pull it out of the Pyramid
of Cheops seven times a week. All the ‘wet’ city newspapers count
the German and Italian and Slavic noses in their constituencies and
then get off that tedious drip about the ‘puritan minority’ and its
attempt to bully these honest European consciences, which, being
European, are free from sanctimonious scruples against befuddling
their wits with liquor.”
“_Quo me rapis, tui plenum_—where, O Mid-Western Bacchus,” cried
Oliver, “where dost thou drag me at the tail of thy car? I feel the
thong going through my heels and the rope running up to the axle of
your Ford. Crank up! Drag on!”
“Why, don’t you see, Excellency,” I persisted, “that the car hauls
the whole argument clean out of the gumbo of ‘personal liberty’—clean
out of the slough of ‘private conscience’? We don’t know how this
accident out here in the street took place; but in our Mid-Western
metropolis we killed some seven hundred people last year with cars,
and, according to the papers, there was more than one such accident
as this one from drivers who were drunk. With one out of every seven
men, women, children, and babies in the United States driving a car
at from twenty to forty miles an hour, along crowded streets and
thoroughfares from Maine to California, we have simply got to prevent
drivers from being drunk. It’s in the necessity of the situation. We
are all private engineers nowadays. That’s what we want. Very well.
If we all want to be private engineers, we’ve got to submit to the
same regulations as governed—long since—engineers on the railways.
Our job is not less hazardous than theirs, but more so. A railway
engineer who drinks is fired by the railroad, and I understand by his
own union.”
“I’m stiff on that,” said His Excellency. “A man who drives his car
when he’s drunk should be strung up to the nearest telegraph pole.”
“Oh no,” said Willys, “you’re a little hard on him. You can’t stop a
man drinking because he occasionally drives his car, drunk. Give him
a good fine and take away his license. Or, if he is very drunk, put
him where he can sober up.”
“That wouldn’t,” I said, “quite straighten things out—would it—for
the occupants of the car that went by here?”
“Oh, but Professor, you are so unrealistic,” said Willys, as he rose
and clapped a hand over his mouth in order to eject a yawn which he
could not swallow. “You are hopelessly unrealistic. If a man doesn’t
drive when he’s drunk, now and then, how in the dickens is he going
to get home? What time is it?”
“It’s half-past one,” said Cornelia, who had also risen at the
first opportunity. “And there’s the telephone. See what it is,
Oliver—quickly, quickly! But nothing could have happened to them—my
son is such a careful driver.”
VII
THE VENGEANCE OF DIONYSUS
Oliver stepped to his desk and removed the receiver. There was an
inevitable moment of suspense. Then tossing to us with a smile: “It’s
the Infant—they’re all right,” he turned again to the telephone
and listened for nearly five minutes, during which he said “yes”
several times, “What’s that?” once, and concluded with “I’ll come
immediately.”
Then he faced us with a curious smile, meant to be reassuring, and,
with that promptitude of thought and action which idle Americans in
Europe are understood to exhibit on the outbreak of war, said swiftly
and decisively:—
“Oliver has been arrested for speeding. I’ll have to go and bail him
out. They are letting the girls come home. They will be here any
minute. Willys, will you go downstairs to the office and tell them
to send a taxi here at once? Professor, you go, too, and meet the
girls downstairs. I want to have a word with Cornelia. If Dorothy
comes before I join you, keep her there a minute. Yes, put on your
coats—we’ll not come back. Willys and I will look after this
business; the Professor will go on, to his train.”
In the face of a real little emergency Cornelia’s nerves never betray
her. As soon as Oliver began to give orders, she became the source
instead of the recipient of reassurances, as if her only anxiety had
been for a gracious leave-taking. She did it extraordinarily well.
* * * * *
The rest of my impressions of that night I shall drastically
telescope because this is not a story, but a conversation, and my
impressions relate merely to the incident which had intruded with
such coincidental force upon the conversation.
I recall that the first moment in which my imagination began to
link the talk and events of the evening vividly together was in the
elevator, descending to the ground floor, when Willys, casually
thrusting his hands into the pockets of his overcoat, and muttering
something about His Excellency’s being a little fussed, fished out
his copy of the _Bacchae_. As I transferred the book to my own coat,
somehow association shot a link from the Greek tragedy and its gory
scene in the hills to the red face that Cornelia had seen under the
city lamps.
While Willys occupied himself with accelerating the arrival of
a taxi, I went out on the street and stood on the curb, waiting
reflectively enough for the appearance of Dorothy and her girl
friend. Five minutes later they were driven up. With the notion
that my function was to shut off a “scene” of any sort, I instantly
remarked, in the quiet tone of a man who understands all about the
situation, that Dorothy’s father was explaining the thing to her
mother, who was a little agitated, and that he desired them to wait
downstairs till he came down. Both girls looked as if they had been
crying, but they were calm now, and seemed indisposed to talk to me.
When I had drawn them aside out of observation from the office, and
saw no hysterical signs, I ventured to ask why they had been driving
so fast. The other girl, whose name I did not catch, said that they
had not been driving fast but had skidded. Before I could utter my
natural question, Dorothy turned on her young friend, and said:—
“That is not so. You know it is not so.” Then she did a queer thing.
She asked me if I was leaving town that night, and when I said I was,
she slipped from under her fur coat a small, light oblong parcel
wrapped in a man’s handkerchief, thrust it into my hands, and
whispered with singular intensity: “Take it with you, please! Take it
away and pitch it—pitch it where no one will ever find it!” I dropped
it discreetly into my overcoat pocket. Then Oliver entered from the
elevator, questioned Dorothy for a minute, and sent the two girls up
to Cornelia.
Oliver, Willys, and I then entered the waiting taxi and drove
away. Oliver sat with his back to the driver, facing us two. I
itched to ask him why the other girl had told me that their car
had skidded, and why Dorothy had denied it. But it seemed a good
time to let Oliver speak first. He sat for a few moments in a
frowning concentration, almost as if we had not been there. Then he
ejaculated, still as if we had not been there, “My God, what a mess!
My God, what a mess!” Willys rallied him on making such an ado over a
fine. Then Oliver hurled the whole thing between our eyes, just as he
himself had got it, standing there so gaily in the library, smiling
histrionically back at us from the telephone. The Infant—he still
referred to him as “the Infant”— had been arrested on the charge of
manslaughter and driving a car while drunk. He wasn’t drunk, but he
had been drinking a little at the party, as the other boys had. He
had somehow lost control and hit some people, a woman and a little
boy, he thought, just a few blocks from home.
Well, that is the gist of the incident.
As I look back now on that trip to the police-station, I am shocked
to remember how self-centred we were, all three. I can’t recall
that it occurred to any one of us to be concerned about the load of
broken humanity that had gone, an hour earlier, to the hospital. Our
sole concern seemed to be lest a couple of physically uninjured boys
should spend a few hours of the night in jail. And just before the
taxi stopped at the police-station to let His Excellency and Willys
out, I know that I myself was actually wondering about this remote
point: how it would affect Cornelia, and whether she would not suffer
more in the injury which her son had inflicted upon others than if he
had himself been injured. But what I was actually saying was, that I
thought young Oliver did not drink; Cornelia seemed so sure of him.
Oliver Senior exclaimed “Oh rot!” And then he added:—
“Why, the Infant and the furnace-man made a keg of raisin wine in the
basement of our own apartment last Easter. He told me about it just
yesterday. I asked him why he hadn’t told me at the time, since we
two were on the square with each other. He said that he was afraid of
setting me a bad example! Oh, the poor little devil! The poor little
devil!”
Willys said it was “a damn shame” and they must see what they could
do to get the charge of driving while drunk withdrawn and the charge
of exceeding the speed limit substituted. Then we shook hands. Oliver
and Willys got out, and I went on to the railway station. I hated not
to stand by and see the thing through. But Oliver had assured me that
I couldn’t really do anything _but_ stand by; and as I had a speaking
engagement in Ohio on the next day, and my college work began the day
after, I surrendered to the necessity of the situation. My holiday
was over.
I started westward with little eagerness—with an odd sensation of
repletion and fatigue mixed with cerebral excitement. “The starved
silkworm,” I muttered to myself, “has had his feast of mulberry
leaves.” I was not sleepy and didn’t wish to spend the small hours of
the morning tossing in my berth. I went into the empty dressing-room
for a smoke. As I hung up my overcoat, I thought of the parcel
that Dorothy had entreated me to “pitch—pitch where no one will
ever find it.” Poor pathetic, distracted little Dorothy! It was
only an empty silver flask, wrapped in her brother’s handkerchief
and neatly engraved with his monogram. Poor little distracted
Bacchante—apparently it hadn’t occurred to her that the breath of
whiskey still strong in the silver flask was doubtless giving even
stronger evidence elsewhere.
The thing hurt me, and I put it away. Everything that I tried
to think of, however, hurt me. I wanted to escape from too much
sensation. But my mind was in that state of fatigue-intoxication in
which one seems to be simply an observer of a succession of pictures
which form spontaneously there. I was conscious of wishing to reflect
consecutively on a certain idea, namely, whether Willys was right in
declaring that one can’t kill a god. But the moment that I began to
grip the idea, and ask myself whether in the course of history many
terrible old gods and dynasties of gods had not utterly passed away
under the pressure of that Necessity which encompasses the gods and
is stronger than they—pictures began to form: Bacchanalian women
dancing in the hills; Willys’s humorous torn limbs of Pentheus
strewn “all over the place”; Cornelia’s terrified picture of the
gory head hanging over the car; and—the young Bacchus at the police
station.
Sometimes one manages to escape from the persecution of such pictures
by reading a book. I had nothing available but the copy of the
_Bacchae_ that Willys had lent me. When I found it impossible to
escape from its suggestions, I decided to face them. I read till the
gray morning crept into the car and extinguished the lights. The
last lines of the tragedy moved me deeply, with a kind of strange
solemnity, a haunting beauty.
O the works of the Gods—in manifold wise they reveal them:
Manifold things unhoped-for the Gods to accomplishment bring,
And the things that we looked for, the Gods deign not to fulfill them;
And the paths undiscerned of our eyes, the Gods unseal them.
I looked out at the window. Another day had come. We were thundering
through wintry cornfields—a hint of snow on the withered brown
stalks. I rose, and passing through the silent sleepers to the
deserted observation-car at the rear, I went out on the platform
and pitched the empty silver flask as far as I could pitch it into
the wind. I seemed to hear from the corn a remembered godlike voice
crying: “O celestial Bacchus, drive them mad!”
BOOK FIVE
APPROACHING RELIGION AND OTHER GRAVE MATTERS
I
WE MEET IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
It is not my intention to make public, in any detail, what I know
of the means by which His Excellency got young Oliver out of his
New Year’s scrape in New York. In recording my conversations with
Cornelia and her family, I have been animated throughout by a desire
to increase popular respect for the members of our upper class as the
suitable persons to give tone to the democracy; and this particular
incident happens not to be altogether creditable to the ethical sense
of His Excellency—if one uses as a criterion the ethical austerity of
Jeanie Deans or George Washington of blessed memory. I am not sure
that almost any other man in the same circumstances—even a member of
our very moral middle-class—would not have strained a point to keep
his own son from public punishment and disgrace. I mean only that we
all talk about “equality before the law,” until we find ourselves in
personal need of special privileges; and that when His Excellency’s
withers were wrung, he took it as a matter of course that he should
use his money and his persuasive tongue, his acquaintance with the
police captain, his relationship with Judge Black, and his influence
with the newspapers to smooth things over. The matter was adjusted
out of court and without publicity, chiefly by the prepayment,
while the recovery of the principal victim was in doubt, of the
moderate sum which disinterested persons estimated the life of an
eight-year-old boy of the laboring class to be worth. His Excellency
himself wrote to me, in the latter part of March, as I remember, that
everything had been “fixed up—_Gott sei Dank_; so that’s over.”
What immediate effect the accident and the reparation of it had upon
the internal harmony of Cornelia’s household, I did not know. In the
occasional letters which I had received from her early in the year,
she expressed considerable anxiety about the health of her son.
She said that the accident was preying on his mind and making him
nervous and listless about his school work—and perhaps she should
have to take him out of school. In one letter, which she asked me to
burn, I thought that I detected a hint of bitterness toward Oliver
for concealing from her his knowledge that Oliver Junior had been
less innocent of the tastes and follies of his age than she had
imagined him to be. But in all the years of our acquaintance, both
she and her husband had maintained a proud and—I had supposed—happy
reticence regarding their more intimate relations; and except in the
essentially comic incident, last summer, of Dorothy’s bobbed hair, I
had never been admitted to so much as a glimpse of anything like a
domestic “difference.” Being, myself, an old bachelor with perhaps
somewhat idealistic notions of family life, it was quite beyond me
to conceive that a serious misfortune, like the automobile accident,
could have any other influence than to cement more closely the family
unity.
I was even so guileless as to suspect nothing, when, in the middle
of April, I received a letter from Cornelia, saying that Oliver had
gone to Paris for some months to get material for his war book,
_Lying Abroad for One’s Country_; that she was taking the children
to southern California for an indefinite sojourn; and that she hoped
I might visit them when my college work was over—there was something
which she wished very much to talk about. I searched through
the letter to see if I could discover what it was. To my obtuse
perceptions, the point of interest appeared not to be in the main
news but in the incidental reference to Cornelia’s religious bias,
contained in the following paragraph:—
“Don’t be afraid,” she wrote, “of going to southern California in
July. The climate is delightfully right, if only one stays near
enough to the coast. I have been hoping for years to spend a summer
there, but have always had to give it up because my cousin Ethelwyn
lives there! Such a pity: she has a charming Spanish house—Spanish
with American improvements—in a walnut grove, with a ‘kitchen garden’
of orange and fig trees, near a little village ten or fifteen miles
north of San Diego. But she—I have told you something about her,
haven’t I?—she is a Theosophist or a Bahaist or one of those dreadful
things that Boston Unitarians become infected with when they live
long in California. And the people she has around her—well, fond as I
am of her, I myself find them impossible; and Oliver always used to
say that he would ‘rather be d——d to all eternity with Voltaire than
spend ten minutes in Heaven with Ethelwyn.’ Well, poor dear Ethelwyn
has just had a chance to join a pilgrim ship, which is going by way
of China and India to visit some ‘saint’ in—I think—Arabia; and she
has offered me the place, together with all the servants, for a
year. My sister Alice will go with me for company. We shall fumigate
and air the place thoroughly! I have engaged an excellent tutor for
the children—a young man from St. Luke’s School; and we shall see
what can be done to get them back again to their right minds before
they go to college in the fall. So do come and help us!”