He had realized this in time and without conscious effort adjusted himself toward the perfections demanded of a personage worthy of receiving the masochistic and self-ennobling salute of the mob. These perfections were simply and easily achieved. One had only to acquiesce, to accept the acclaim of outsiders as a part of one's self and to live one's inner life in a roseate contemplation of this acclaim. One had only to "remember one's public" as he put it himself, and not to disappoint them or antagonize them.
In his own family he was regarded with awe. His father always felt bewildered when he spoke to him. And even Mrs. Gilchrist revealed a slightly human nervousness in her contacts with her son.
Concerning Mrs. Gilchrist there was not much to be said, even by such incipient iconoclasts as Mrs. Basine. She was too defined an exterior.
One was conscious in her presence not so much of a woman as of an invincible battle-front of ideas. Nobody had ever heard Mrs. Gilchrist give expression to anything which could remotely be identified as an idea. Nevertheless she was a battle-front.
She was a woman with an intimidating coldness of manner. This manner spoke without words of an incorruptible intolerance toward all deviations from her code. Backsliders, moral culprits, unmannerly persons and, in fact, everyone not actively under her domination were, to Mrs. Gilchrist, suspect. She managed to give the impression that people whom she did not know were creatures whose virtues as well as social prestige were matters of sinister doubt. They were outside the pale.
The secret of her domination was a psychological phenomenon that eluded her antagonists and so left them powerless to combat it. The strength Mrs. Gilchrist felt within her was the product of a complete repression.
She had managed since her youth to shut herself successfully within the narrow limits of her consciousness, successfully divorcing all her thoughts, desires and actions from any dictates of an inner self. She had formed an ideal, basing it upon her social ambitions and her childish prejudices of good and bad, desirable and undesirable. And she had been able to perfect this ideal. Her mind was a tiny fortress against which her own emotions and hence the emotions of others battled in vain. It could neither think nor understand and this was its strength.
The doubts which thinking sometimes stirred in the minds of her antagonists, the knowledge of secret impulses and obscene imaginings which they were able only imperfectly to keep from themselves and which made it possible for them to appreciate dimly the sinners and iconoclasts in the world--such knowledge never intruded upon Mrs.
Gilchrist.
Her indignation toward backsliders and moral culprits was not a projected censure of similar weakness in herself. There were no windows in the tiny fortress in which she lived. Protected from all human disturbances of her spirit, she spent her days closeted within her little fortress in grim contemplation of her rectitude.
Friendship was impossible to her. She was, however, a duchy, a corporation in which one could buy stock. By subscribing unquestionably to her rectitude, admitting its existence publicly and succumbing to its strength, one earned the dividends of her social approval. One became to her a very nice person in whose submission she grudgingly saw, as in an imperfect mirror, the image of her own virtues.
Curiously enough, Mrs. Gilchrist was renowned for her activity as a philanthropist and charity worker. Her social prestige, aside from her strength of character, was based upon this. She was a perennial patroness, a member of hospital boards, a chairman of bazaars, special matinees, charity balls and money-raising campaigns. All these activities were in the interest of the poor. The money raised by them went toward bringing comfort to creatures whose moral obliquity and human weaknesses Mrs. Gilchrist authentically despised. Yet she was indefatigable in her work, darting in her unvarying black dress from meeting to meeting, bristling with magnificent plans for further philanthropies.
Her husband occasionally wondered. He was unable to reconcile the coldness he knew in his wife with the character of her labors. At times he dimly felt that it was her way of saying something--perhaps a way of showing a hidden warmth toward people.
But in Mrs. Gilchrist's thought there was no such explanation.
To have admitted to herself a concern for the creatures in whose behalf she devoted her energies would have been to open a door in the tiny fortress, or at least to create a loophole out of which she might look with sympathy upon the confusions and torments of her fellows.
Her inner humanism, divorced from the narrow limits of her consciousness, was finding its outlet, as her husband suspected, in her work. But during this work never for a moment did Mrs. Gilchrist think of the creatures she was benefiting. She had rationalized her activities and made them a part of the emotionless content of her mind.
All relation between the things she did and the people she did them for was divorced in her thought. In bazaars she superintended, in balls, fetes, campaigns, auctions she energized with her presence, she saw only bazaars, balls, fetes, campaigns and auctions. She worked for their success with an invulnerable preoccupation in the details which went to make them socially proper and financially triumphant.
The altruism of her work inspired no altruism in her. She did not allow herself to sympathise with the weakness and poverties she was aiding or even to contemplate them for an instant. Yet her work accomplished, the charity a success, she experienced the stern elation of "having done good." This elation was inspired in no way by the thought of the solace she had brought to others. It was entirely egoistic--a moment in which her rectitude congratulated itself upon--its rectitude.
7
Fanny Basine smiled timidly at Aubrey. He was paying little attention to her. He was listening to Judge Smith airing his views on the annexation of the Philippines.
The judge was forcibly declaring that the thing was essential and that no gentleman with his country's future at heart could possibly believe otherwise. Aubrey, to the judge's secret discomfiture, somehow managed to convey an assent to these views, but an assent based upon superior motives. What these motives were Judge Smith was unable to fathom.
Aubrey, when it came his turn to expound, further irritated the judge by revealing them. He, Aubrey, was for the annexation of the Philippines but only because he was convinced such an annexation would be of supreme benefit to the natives of the islands.
Mrs. Gilchrist nodded sternly in agreement with her son. The rest of the company listening with vacuous attentiveness waited for the debaters to continue talking for them. Basine who had been silent came to the judge's rescue. He explained that the judge and Aubrey meant practically the same thing but that they had chosen different ways to express themselves.
"Judge Smith," Basine smiled, "sees in the annexation something which will benefit his country. He knows as well as any of us that it will not benefit it financially. It will be a source of expenditure and strife.
Then how will it benefit us? Because it will give us an opportunity to aid a pack of uncivilized and benighted heathen and despite them to bring peace and prosperity to their own country--not ours. Which is exactly what you mean, Aubrey."
The judge beamed approval and Aubrey contented himself with a stare of dignity. He did not relish psychological interpretations of his words.
As an author, he felt annoyed. But Basine continued to talk undeterred by his stare. He disliked Aubrey. Not so much as Doris. And in a somewhat different way. Further, the presence of Henrietta was a curious inspiration. The girl's wide-eyed tenderness had irritated and frightened him after the incident in the kitchen when they had gone searching for the thingumabob. Now he had no interest in the Philippine controversy. But he had entered the discussion in order to rid himself of the uncomfortable memory the episode with Henrietta had left him. As he talked the memory played hide and seek in his words.... "She thinks I'm going to marry her ... but she's engaged to him ... she's crazy ...
what the Hell did I do it for?... Damn it ... damn it...."
Instinctively he took the judge's part, as if he must establish himself firmly in the father's good graces in order to make premature amends for the jilting of his daughter. The position he had taken pleased him because it also involved an opposition to Aubrey.
Fanny continued to smile at the novelist. Keegan bored her. They had been walking together and she had lost interest in the sensual game she had been playing with him. Alone, she might have tried to repeat the experience of the morning with Keegan. But her physical curiosity partially gratified for the moment by the surreptitious excitement she had derived from him, her interest transferred itself to Aubrey.
The man amused and impressed her. Her thought separated him into two people. She resented his persistent dignity. Her perceptions, sharpened by the practical sensuality of her nature, saw through the little ruses by which Aubrey converted his slight deformities into a dignified whole.
As she listened to him she said to herself, "... he thinks it's smart to wear a ribbon on his glasses ... he sticks his chest out ... he's got skinny arms ... he looks funny...."
After a half hour she lost her resentment and the thing that had inspired it came to amuse her. She could see through his funny manner so it didn't anger her. But although now she smiled with amusement at the man's impressiveness, a feeling of awe penetrated her. Aubrey was a great man. People spoke his name everywhere. He was known.
A delicious tremble passed through her. She was careful not to translate it into words. Had she inspected the tremble and its causes, it would have outraged her. She was content always to accept her emotions blindly for fear of having to forego them if she knew their causes. She kept herself intact in her own mind as a good girl not by belligerently repressing her impulses but by enjoying them secretly outside her mind.
She had thought of Aubrey as a great man and with it had come the inner impulse to be embraced passionately by him. Not because he was Aubrey, but because he was the famous Aubrey Gilchrist, whose name was known. To be embraced by a famous man would be like being embraced somehow by all the people who knew his name. She would be able to think while satisfying her desire, "Everybody knows him. They know all about him.
It's almost as if they knew he was doing this ... I was doing this."
Then, too, there would be a feeling of intense secrecy about it, a sort of blasphemous secrecy. When an ordinary man kissed her, that was of course, a secret. But if a famous man should kiss her, a man like Aubrey, that would be a super-secret. A violation of something remarkable. It would be a thing concealed not merely from her family and from the vague circle of friends who might be interested, but from millions of people who knew Aubrey and who would be tremendously interested in everything he did. She would be giving herself to a public figure and yet the thing she was doing would be marvelously concealed from the public. And so she would be able to enjoy the thrill of demonstromania--of being taken by someone who was not an individual like Keegan but a man who was part of other people's minds--and at the same time she would be able to enjoy the thrill of defiant intimacy; the knowledge that the people in whose minds the name Aubrey Gilchrist was alive would be ignorant of what she was doing to the man they admired.
All this would be a sharpening of pleasure by the consciousness of wholesale deceit, wholesale intimacy.
These intuitions whose articulation would have been entirely unintelligable to Fanny sent the delicious tremble through her body.
Immediately the two separate Aubreys of her mind focussed into one and she lost both her amusement and her awe of him. She sat regarding him with a timid smile designed to arouse his curiosity. As yet he had ignored her, his eyes seeking out Henrietta when the annexation debate waned.
Basine had diverted the talk into literary channels by inquiring, apropos of nothing, whether anyone had read a book by a man named Meredith. He had found it in Doris' room one evening and glanced through it. Seeking now for further material with which to discomfit Aubrey he had remembered the volume. He took it for granted that since his sister Doris had been reading it, the book was a very worthwhile book--the kind he cared nothing about reading himself. This did not interfere with his utilizing an exposition of its merits as a weapon against Aubrey.
"I was quite surprised," he explained. Doris listened with a frown. She was certain her brother had not read the book and the knowledge he was lying aggravated her. She knew he lied continually but was indifferent.
But to have him lie about something she admired, even in its defense, made her uncomfortable as if he were trying to establish false claims upon her regard.
"The book is altogether unlike most books," he went on, generalizing carefully. His mind, totally ignorant of the subject he was discussing, was shrewdly inventing a book diametrically opposite in style and content to the books Aubrey wrote. By praising such a book he would manage without reference to his antagonist to disparage his entire literary output.
He was not clear in his mind why Aubrey had become an antagonist. The memory reiterating itself behind his words "... she thinks I'm going to marry her ... damn it...." was mysteriously finding outlet in an indignation neither against himself nor Henrietta, but against the unsuspecting Aubrey.
Fanny listened to the new conversation, but Meredith was soon dropped.
The sight of Mrs. Gilchrist grimly poised opposite her mother, became a part of the lure Aubrey exercised over her. He was the son of this hard-faced, domineering woman. To do something with him that was intimate would be a deliciously concealed violation of the mother's propriety. Fanny had always been intimidated by Mrs. Gilchrist's propriety. Embracing her son would be a sort of revenge.
Without wasting time looking for reasons, Fanny felt Aubrey as an attraction. Her attitude toward him grew more intimate. She did not try to enter the talk but adjusted herself in the chair, placing her body so that the curve of her hip and leg were effectively visible to Aubrey.
And while the others talked she assured herself of the plausibility of her ambitions. Aubrey was a great man and very famous and distinguished.
But he was after all entirely human. He had written books and Fanny fell to thinking about them, about the descriptions of love-making which crowded the pages of his books. Aubrey was famous and therefore aloof.
But the things that had made him famous--the love passages in his books, were not intimidating. She remembered them with gratitude. They were love descriptions and Aubrey had written them.
Love passages were in fact all that Fanny usually remembered of her reading. Plots and characters escaped her. After she had closed a book there remained in her mind merely the scenes in which men had placed their arms around women and whispered after a succession of exciting adjectives, "I love you."
This was due to the manner in which Fanny read. As a girl she had ploughed laboriously through a set of Shakespeare in quest of obscene passages. Her girl's eyes would skip with irritation the speeches that seemed to her extraneous until, caught by some "nasty" word, she would become eagerly interested and carefully digest the sentences preceding and following it. At fourteen she had discovered that the dictionary, stuck away in a dusty corner of the book case, was filled with many such words. Whenever occasion permitted she opened the big volume and poured intently over its contents, digesting with excitement the definitions of what she called to herself, the nasty words.
The result of this curious reading technique had gradually shown itself as she matured. Literature became to her a secretly immoral and indecent thing. She would blush when people mentioned _Shakespeare_ or any of the books in which she had eagerly browsed. Observing that her blushes gave people an impression of her sensitive chastity, she developed a habit of seeming offended at the mention of any volume she suspected of containing such words and passages as she was continually searching for in secret.
She would say, "Oh, I don't like that kind of a book. I don't think people should write like that--about such things. There are so many nice things to write about I don't see why people must write about the others."