Part 4

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

It was afternoon. Mrs. Basine listened to Judge Smith explaining the new moving pictures that were being shown at the vaudeville theaters.

"It's all part of the craze for new things," he was saying, "and these awful pictures are merely a fad. There is nothing of basic appeal for Americans in them and they'll die out in a year or so."

Mrs. Basine was always impressed by the judge. He had three days before been on one of his debauches. His manner as a result was heavier and his words slower. After one of his wild nights the judge sought to efface the memory of the uncleanliness by heightening his personal appearance. He would indulge himself in Turkish baths, facial massages, hair shampoos, manicures and changes of linen during the day.

The sight of himself immaculately dressed, spotless, his face, collar, nails and shoes shining, gave him a feeling of reassurance. Clothes and appearance had more and more become a fetish with him until he had developed into a fop. There was a certain passion in his demand for cleanliness. A disordered tie would mysteriously depress him. A spot on his trousers or shoes would preoccupy him until its removal. Once while on his way from the theater he had been splashed by a horse. Unaware of the accident at the time he had gone to a restaurant. There he had noticed the condition of his clothes. The mud had reached as high as his shoulder. A nausea overcome him. He hurried to the lavatory and cleaned his clothes.

His daughter admired her father for his fastidiousness. She looked upon all other men as somewhat sloppy in comparison.

"It isn't just that father dresses well," she said, "but he's so particular about everything. About his plates and forks, and his bedroom must be bright as a new pin. Oh, it's just wonderful for a man to be thoroughly clean like that."

Although the judge had spoken to Mrs. Basine it was her son who answered.

"I saw the pictures at the vaudeville the other evening," he said, "and I quite agree with you, Judge."

The judge nodded pleasantly. He liked Basine and had already prophesied a future for him. Henrietta was informing Doris of the trouble they were having with the church choir.

"Dr. Blossom," she was saying, "is just absolutely at his wits' end. We can't get anybody ... anybody at all that's at all suitable."

"Mrs. Gilchrist and Aubrey are coming over," Mrs. Basine remarked to the judge. She was unable to keep a sound of pride out of her voice.

"A very fine woman. An exceptionally fine woman," he answered. Mrs. Basine nodded.

Basine sat down beside his sister Doris. He was interested in Henrietta. The news of her approaching engagement had exhilarated this interest. He had been a half-hearted wooer himself when he first came out of college. As she rattled on he was thinking, "She has nice eyes. She probably doesn't love Aubrey." He thought of Aubrey. A putty-faced, swell-headed fool. He could put it all over him, even as a writer, if he wanted to.

"I hear," he said aloud, "that you and Aubrey are engaged or almost engaged."

"Why the idea! Gracious!" A disturbed giggle. "Where on earth did you hear that! Father hasn't announced it yet."

"A little bird," smiled Basine. Doris looked at him and frowned.

"What do you say we pop some corn," he announced.

One of Basine's most engaging facilities was an ability to reflect in his own words and actions the character of those to whom he talked. Judge Smith regarded him as a young man of stable ideas and profound seriousness. Henrietta looked upon him as a charming, light-hearted youth who was able "to play." There were others to whom he appealed separately as a young man of culture, modern to his finger tips; as a man of pious kindliness; as a man interested exclusively in politics, in economics, in literature, in women. His pose was seemingly at the mercy of his audience. He did not deliberately seek to make himself agreeable by presenting exteriors acceptable to his friends. His proteanism was in the main unconscious. It was the result of an underlying desire to impress men and women he knew with his superiority.

He had found instinctively that a short cut to such impression was not contradictions but agreement. But he would not merely say "yes" and please his listener by subscribing whole-heartedly to the ideas or points of view under discussion. He would take these ideas and points of view and develop them, show with a sincere creative enthusiasm why they were correct and how astoundingly correct they were.

He was usually cleverer than the people with whom he agreed. This made it possible for him to develop their ideas, to add to them, supply them with nuances and far-reaching overtones of which their originators had had no inkling. When he had finished they would find themselves warmly applauding what he had said, admiring his sanity and intelligence.

It was no longer Basine who agreed with them. They agreed with Basine and each of them went away saying, "A remarkable young man. Full of very fine, worthwhile ideas and able to express himself."

They were conscious while praising him that they were also praising themselves. Although they were unaware of the adroit theft committed by Basine and unable to follow the way in which he filched their little prejudices and inflated them to noble proportions with his cleverness, they felt a kinship with the young man. Their inferior egoism did not demand recognition as collaborator. They were warmed with the emotion of being _en rapport_ with someone whom they admired. So often clever people were people with whom, somehow, one had little or nothing in common. But Basine was a clever person with whom everyone seemingly had everything in common. And they were delighted to have things in common with a clever man.

There were occasions on which Basine's cleverness was put to a difficult test. These came when a number of people, each of whom knew him differently, to each of whom he had identified himself as a champion of divergent opinions, assembled in his presence. Basine, it usually happened, was the friend in common and therefore the pivot of the vague debates which sometimes started--the awkward exchange of half-remembered arguments which constituted the intellectual life of his friends, as the make-believe of "playing house" had constituted their adult life when they were children.

But at such times Basine revealed his interesting talents as a compromiser, fence straddler, pacifier. Without espousing any of the sides presented, without denial or affirmation, he managed to convince the assembledge that he was a champion of all and detractor of none. He pretended a worldly tolerance, saying such things as:

"Well now, there are always two sides to a question. And a man who closes his mind to either side is likely as not to find himself in the dark. What Henning says is interesting. I can entirely understand it and see the reasons for it. He sees the thing in a clear, definite manner. Yet what Stoefel says is also interesting and, of course, entertaining. I don't mean that I believe two sides to a question can both be the right sides. But it's my experience that there's an element of truth as well as of error in both sides. And I'm not so convinced that Henning and Stoefel actually differ. Often people meaning the same thing get into violent arguments because they misunderstand each other."

In this way he would convince both his friends that they were both men of intelligence, which is more flattering than being merely men of intelligent views. And, what was more important, he would give the listeners the impression of a calm, deliberative Basine, not to be taken in by the tricks of prejudice and speech which caused men to knock their heads together in endless argument.

Henrietta accompanied him into the kitchen in quest of corn to pop. Doris remained behind, staring disinterestedly at the judge who was talking to her mother. She had noticed something about the man that displeased her. She kept it, however, to herself. When he shook hands with her he assumed a paternal manner. He said to her:

"Well, my dear child, and how are you today? Serious as ever, I see. I understand that you and my little girl had quite an interesting time at the choir practice Saturday evening. Dear me, you will both soon be grown up and young ladies before I'm aware of it."