Gargoyles.
by Ben Hecht.
To My Friend the Chicago Daily News
1
The calendars said--1900. It was growing warm. George Cornelius Basine emerged from Madam Minnie's house of ill fame at five o'clock on a Sabbath May morning. He was twenty-five years old, neatly dressed, a bit unshaven and whistling valiantly, "Won't you come home, Bill Bailey, won't you come home?"
Considering the high estate which was to be his, as the estimable Senator Basine, the introduction savors of malice. But, it must be remembered, this was twenty-two years ago, and moreover, in a day before the forces of decency had triumphed. The soul of man was still unregenerate. Prostitutes, saloons, hell-holes still flourished unchallenged in the city's heart. And Basine even at twenty-five was not one of those aggravating anomalies who pride themselves upon being ahead of their time; or behind their time. Basine was of his time.
And on this day which witnessed him whistling on the doorstep of Madam Minnie's, the Devil was still a gentlemen, albeit a gentleman in bad standing. But, being a gentleman, he was tolerated. Tradition, in a manner, still clothed him in the guise of a Rabelaisian clown, high born but fallen. He walked abroad in his true character, flaunting his red tights, his cloven hoof, his spiked tail and his mysterious horns. A Mid-Victorian Devil innocent of further disguise, his face still undisfigured by the Kaiser's mustachio or the Bolshevist's whiskers. A naive, unctuous lout of a Devil with straightforward Tempter's proclivities. An antagonist not for Dr. Wilsons and M. Clemenceaus and the Societies for the Spread of True Americanization, but an unpolitical, highly orthodox, leering, pitchfork-brandishing _vis a vis_ for simple men of God. In short, the Devil was still a Devil and not a Complex.
It was growing warm and the calendars said--a new century ... a new century. And the great men of the day pointed with stern, pregnant fingers at the calendars and proclaimed--a new century ... a new century.
Beautiful phrase. The soul of man, in its struggle toward God knows what, paused elatedly to contemplate the new milestone. Elated as all youth is elated for no other reason than that there is a tomorrow, a tomorrow of unknown and multiple milestones. Elated with the knowledge of progress--that sage and flattering word by which the soul of man explains the baffling phenomenon of its survival.
The great men of the day stood staring through half-closed eyes at the calendars. To anticipate by a single day! But the future no less than the past remains a current mystery. And the great men--the prophets--confined themselves with stentorian caution to the prophecy--a new century has dawned.
Basine, whistling and waiting for his companion to emerge on Madam Minnie's doorstep, regarded the scene about him with the hardened moral indifference of youth. It was growing warm. The May sun was striding, an incongruous, provincial virgin, through a litter of blowzy streets.
Under its mocking light the rows of bawdy-houses and saloons suffered an architectural collapse. Walls, windows, roofs and chimneys leered tiredly at each other. The district seemed indeed an illustration for a parable of Vice and Virtue drawn by the venomously partial pen of some unusually half-witted cleric--dirty-faced brothels, tousled cafe signs, bleery sidewalks, toothless storefronts all cowering before the rebuke of God's sun.
A few mysterious solitaries lent a vague life to the scene. The figure of a drunk, unchastened, zigzagging humorously down the pavement like some nocturnal clown prowling after a vanished Bacchanal. A hastily dressed prostitute carrying her night's earnings as an offering to early devotion. A few unseasoned revellers overcome with a nostalgia for clean bathrooms and Sunday morning waffles at the family board, sleepily fleeing the scenes of their carouse.
All this formed no part of the preoccupations of the whistling one. He was waiting for his companion and for the fifteenth time the tune of "Bill Bailey" came softly from his lips. The companion appeared, a crestfallen young man of twenty-three, Hugh Keegan by name. An idiotic wistfulness marked the blond vacuity of his face. They said nothing and walked to the street car track.
Here they must wait. There was no car in sight. Basine employed the wait, jumping out from the curbing and peering with a great show of interest down the deserted tracks. The night's dissipation had left him perversely elate. His vanity demanded that he confound the scenes of his recent moral collapse by exhibitions of undiminished vigor of body and gayety of mind. So he capered back and forth between the curb and the deserted tracks, ostentatiously unbuttoning his coat to the chill of the dawn and addressing brisk, cheerful sallies to his penitent friend.
It was this way with Basine. He had spent the night in sin. Now he must act as if he had not spent the night in sin. It was a matter of deceiving his conscience, and Basine's conscience did not live in Basine. It was, to the contrary, a mysterious external force, something quite outside him.
He eyed the virtuous hallelujahs of the sunrise with a somewhat over-emphasized aplomb. Dimly he felt that a God was articulating in dawns and sunbeams. As long as he had continued his whistling, these facts had remained concealed. But now he had grown tired of "Bill Bailey" and at once God, peering out of his beautiful rosy heaven was saying, "Shame on you." Everything seemed to be waiting to repeat this banal reproof.
This was the conscience of George Basine--a reproof that came from without. He felt an inclination to defiance before this reproof.... He was young and given to evil. This was only natural, considering the time in which he lived and the biological impulses of youth.
But to do evil was one thing. To defend it after it was done was another. Thus Basine, having sinned lustily through the night, avoided the more unspeakable sin of defending his action. The reproof arrived, he faced it with candor and intelligence, prepared to admit that he had done wrong.
He did not want God mumbling around inside him as was the case with his friend Keegan. God mumbled around inside of Keegan and made him feel like the devil. But Basine--there was no occasion for God to argue His point. He, Basine, surrendered gracefully and forthwith. That was the way to handle situations of the soul.
To Basine, situations of the soul were a species of external discomforts he identified as God. They were the regulations and taboos of a civilization to which he was prepared at all times to submit, providing such submission did not compromise him. One got rid of taboos by looking them squarely in the eye and simulating respect or remorse. Taboos were good manners. One had to be polite to good manners. Basine laughed, not defiantly. He had already made his apologies to the dawn. The dawn was God's good manners. It entered the world as precisely and as perfectly as the saintly wife of a great financier might enter her grandmother's drawing room.
Waiting beside the car track, Basine was already a reformed and forgiven man. The sun was like a huge Salvation Army marching through the highways of Evil, beating great drums and singing, "Are you washed, are you washed in the Blood of the Lamb?" He was glad of it. He was glad to be once more a part of a virtuous world, a citizen of an ideal republic given to the great causes of progress.
This adjustment completed, memories of the night came to him as they waited for the car. These memories failed, naturally, to conflict with his character as a citizen of virtue. For they were memories which he was prepared at any moment to repudiate and denounce. Thus prepared he could of course enjoy them.
The memories brought an elation, the elation which usually fills the healthy male of twenty-five upon discovering or rediscovering that the Devil is as alluring as he is painted and that the wages of sin are neither death nor disillusion. He had enjoyed himself. Sin was wrong.
But if one knew it was wrong one could go ahead and enjoy it. The great thing was to know it was wrong, to admit it frankly and share in the general indignation of it and not to go around like a vicious-minded freak defending it, like some people he knew were in the habit of doing.
Thus on this May morning Basine was able to grasp the enormity of his offense and to apologize whole-heartedly for its commission and simultaneously to enjoy the memory of it. He had come away from Madam Minnie's with an egoistic impression of his prowess and with the self-satisfaction which comes of the knowledge of having cheated the devil out of his due by his careful method. He remembered with a warmth in his throat as if he were recalling something beautiful how the creature had looked at the first moment she stood before him.
He had spent the earlier part of the night getting creditably drunk.
Lured into a brothel by a woman with a hard, childish face, he had devoted himself for several hours to the despicable business of sin. The sordid make-believe of passion had pleased him vastly. He had managed in fact to achieve an observation on life. As the night waned he had grown philosophical and thought, how with good women one began with personal talk, with an exchange of confidences. One began with emotions, with gentle lacerations, wistfulness, sadness. And one progressed from these toward the intimacy of physical contact. But with bad women one began with the intimacy of physical contact. Only the abrupt matter-of-fact tone of the thing robbed the contact of all intimacy. And one progressed from this contact toward a wistfulness, a gentle shyness and finally an exchange of confidences and personal talk. This last contained in it the thrill of intimacy. A good woman surrendered her body and inspired thereby a sense of possession. A bad woman surrendered the secret of her birthplace and of her real name and inspired a similar sense. There was also obvious the fact that the same sense of dramatic coquetry, idealism, modesty or whatever it was that induced the good woman to withhold her body induced the bad woman to withhold her confidence.
Under the influence of this knowledge, Basine had pursued the usual tactics of the predatory male and, as a fillip to the unimaginative excitements of the night, obtained from his accomplice in sin the story of her life.
"The mystery of a bad woman is that she was once virtuous," he thought as he fell asleep. "Just as the mystery of a virtuous woman is that she could be bad."
An hour later he awoke and with a thrill of quixotic honesty placed five dollars in the moist hand of the sleeping houri, gathered his friend Keegan out of an adjoining room and emerged once more into the world with a clear head, a body full of elated memories and a laudable conviction that he had done wrong, but that what happened yesterday was not a part of today and that a man can grant himself absolution from sin as easily as he can lay aside virtue.
As for Keegan, he stared with mild eyes at the dawn, at the beggarly alleys and the negro porter dreamily sweeping cigar stubs out of a lopsided doorway. He listened patiently to his friend's enthusiasms. To Keegan there was something inexplicable about Basine's morning-after pose. Keegan had not found a place for God. Platitudes were not a background against which he might posture to his convenience. Instead they were terrible intimates. They operated his thought for him.
After committing a sin one should be repentent. The commission of sin was, of course, an outrage. But somehow the platitudes did not quite reach into the bedroom of evil. They remained hovering outside the door marking time, as it were, and whispering through the keyhole, "just wait ... just wait...."
And as soon as he had emerged from the room, in fact even before that, they had taken possession of him again. They demanded now repentance, thorough repentance which included thorough repudiation of all joyous memories, all pleasurable moments. And Keegan, surrendering himself as a matter of necessity to their demands presented the exterior of a sorrowing victim to the dawn. He offered a nod or a surprised stare as punctuation for his friend's discourse, chewing the while on an unsuccessfully lighted cigar which tasted sour.
"There was something different about her from the usual girl of that kind," Basine was explaining. "Wouldn't talk for a while but finally got confidential and began to cry a bit."
This was a lie, reflecting credit, however, on the youth's dramatic sense and vanity. The knowledge that the creature under discussion had been actually no different from the six other ladies of her profession with whom he had experienced moral collapses since leaving the university in no way interfered with his opinion of the recent episode.
It was his opinion that things he touched were somehow different from things other young men dallied with; that events which befell him were of a certain mysterious fiber lacking in the events which befell others.
Thus he was reduced to the necessity of continual lying in order to vindicate this conviction, more powerful than reality. Lying to himself as much as to anyone else. By his lies Basine accomplished the dual purpose of adjusting inferior incidents to the superiority of his nature and of impressing this superiority upon his friends. A way of rewriting life so as to fit himself with the heroic part, as yet denied him in the manuscript and which he sincerely felt was his due.
"Yes, she cried a bit. They usually do, you know."
Keegan was innocent of this phenomenon, but nodded. He felt mysteriously saddened by the fact that they never wept for him. Life denied him many things. The creature he had spent the night with had treated him somewhat brutally. She had laughed several times. He sought, however, to make up for the indifference with which he felt himself treated by heightening his contempt for her as a sinner. This necessitated an increase of his contempt for himself as having been a partner in evil.
But that was a spiritual gesture made bearable by the wave of remorse it aroused and by the knowledge that remorse was a laudable emotion.
Nevertheless, despite the remorse and the rehabilitation it offered his vanity, he continued to feel--life denied him many things.
Basine continued, "You could take a girl like that and make something of her. Give her a month." By which he meant give George Cornelius Basine a month and see the miracle he would work.
Keegan sighed. He admired George, and his admiration of others always depressed him. He was intelligent enough to know that he admired things he lacked. And yet, he assured himself, he would despise the things in himself that he admired in others. Therefore, it was very probable that he despised them in others, or would at some later day, unless he managed to conceal the fact or lose track of it in the confusion of platitudes which served him for a brain. He looked enviously at his friend, before whom hardened trollops dissolved in tears.
"She's only been in the game a little while, you know, Hugh. A convent girl, too. She told me her story. How she got started, you know. A love affair with a Spaniard. A highly connected fellow."
Basine prattled on, improvising a melodrama of virtue led astray, editing the vaguely worded generalities of the creature he had left asleep. Eventually he tired of the game and announced abruptly.
"Not a car in sight. What do you say we walk, Hugh?"
The idea of walking four miles home after a wild night engaged his vanity. Things by which he proved the dubious superiority of his body pleased him.
"I think I'll run along," said Keegan.
"Nothing doing, Hughie. You come with me. We'll have breakfast at my house."
Keegan frowned. There were two sisters and a mother in Basine's home.