The public's attention was being distracted from Basine. Men of greater prestige than he had hurled themselves into the death struggle. These great ones were more qualified than Basine for leadership. They were older and of deeper experience in the slaying of Goliaths. Now it seemed that perhaps one of them and not George Basine was the hero who would be able to overthrow this latest menace to the public weal.
Basine's misgivings took the form of an irritation. He sensed the fickleness of the public and understood that it could turn from him who had started the whole thing and give its adulation to some other leader who had jumped on the band-wagon and crowded Basine off the driver's seat. His cynicism returned as he read the denunciations his rivals were hurling at private banks.
"A pack of fools and fourflushers," he muttered to himself and their words--paraphrases of his original denunciations for the most part--nauseated him. The word "bunk" crept into his thought as he read their speeches and interviews. He would like to stop the whole thing, to stand up and say it was all a tempest in a teapot and that there was no menace or ogre or Goliath; that the whole thing was made out of whole cloth. Then the entire business would collapse and the men threatening him for the leadership would be left high and dry.
... Doris looked up as he entered. She was a silent-looking woman. Her face wore its pallor like a mask. She greeted her brother without expression. Her luxurious body seemed without life, her hands gesturing as if they were weighted. The sensuous outlines of her which brought to mind the odalisques of Titian found a startling contrast in the immobility of her manners. She was thirty and in the half-lighted room she seemed like a beautiful, burning-eyed paralytic.
"Tired?" her brother asked as he sat down.
This was of late his usual greeting. She looked tired always, and until she began to talk, she looked as if she were dumb or blind. But when she talked her eyes lighted.
She shook her head to his question. He had come filled with troubles and confessions but her black eyes, centered on him, disturbed him. He had become used to the sardonic weariness of her face. But there were times when he felt as if something were happening to her that he couldn't understand. Her eyes would burn and seem to shut him out as if she could look at him without seeing him.
Her complete inanimation startled him. He knew he could sit talking all night and she would never move nor ask a question. Long ago she had been a little like that. Never asking questions but sitting among others as if she were alone. But now it was more marked. There was something wrong with Doris. What she needed was to go out more. She was getting too self-centered, brooding too much.
Basine, as he sat studying the window and the profile of his sister, kept remembering how she used to be. That was years ago when they had all lived at home. And this poet Lindstrum whom everybody was talking about, used to call on her. She had been in love with him. But that was long ago--eight, nine, ten years ago. It couldn't be that. And it couldn't be that she was "in trouble," because she had been like this for years now. He remembered her youth. Her silence then had been different. It had been alive. And now she sat around like a corpse and if it wasn't for her eyes moving occasionally you might think her actually dead. Sometimes this thought did frighten him as he sat watching her. She was dead! He would restrain himself from jumping up to see and sit listening to hear her breathe.
He felt sorry for her. When he had married Henrietta she had been the only one who had understood. He could always remember what she had said at the wedding. It was the only thing he could recall of the event--what Doris had said to him....
"You'll never be a great man if you let yourself get trapped like this too often."
Surprising that she should know enough to say that. Because anyone who could say that to him must know him thoroughly and understand him thoroughly. It was what he had been saying to himself for months before the wedding.
He felt sorry for his sister. They were good friends in a way. A curious way because he felt she detested him somehow. Yet she understood him and could help him. And she liked him to come to see her. He wondered why.
She had no love for him but there was something about him that appealed to her and interested her. He had noticed how she acted toward others.
Their talk left her dead. Even when Levine talked she often remained unaware he was around. Her eyes never opened to people. Even her mother.
And Fanny had said, "Doris is getting more and more of a pill. I think she's going crazy. She doesn't even look at a person anymore."
He watched her and thought, "Poor girl. Something wrong. I wish I could help her."
He kept remembering how beautiful and alive she had been and his heart felt an odd laceration as if something he loved were dying. Was he so fond of Doris, then? He said, "no." Yet he could never remember having felt such sympathy as this toward anyone. It was because she was an intimate. He felt toward her as he felt toward himself--forgiving, appreciative, and a sense of pity. Why had he thought that? Pity. Did he pity himself, he, George Basine, who was just beginning to ascend?
Henrietta and the kids--that was it. A man had to accumulate troubles if he was to amount to anything.
The feeling of sympathy slipped from his thought. Doris had turned her eyes to him. Basine was aware of her coming to life. The symmetrical mask of her face became features and expressions.
"Will you stay for tea?" she asked.
He would. Doris stood up and regarded him with a malicious smile.
"The crusade seems to be running away from you," she said.
He nodded. The public-spirited leader in him did not relish the ironic tilt of her words. But he was able to assume a dual attitude toward her cynical intellectualism. He could frown on it with a sense of outrage.
And he could listen to it with an appreciative shrewdness. He could despise her iconoclasm and still utilize its intelligence to aid him in his climb.
He had always understood that to his sister his aspirations were contemptible. And yet despite her sneering she seemed anxious to help him realize them. He understood, too, that in his sister's mind there was something queer about people. When she talked about people her eyes lighted. There was about her talk of people a clarity of idea that contrasted strangely with the passion one could feel behind her words.
Basine usually tried to dismiss the impression she made on him by thinking, "Oh, she's a fanatic on the subject, that's all." But a mystery worried him. Why should she be interested in his career? And why should she try to help him if she despised him and his type of ambition?
And, moreover, despised people and politics in general?
It was a paradox and it made him uncomfortable. But he sought her out all the more for this. Because there was something practical about her fanaticism. Yes, and because she understood about him.
He had already told her secrets about himself, particularly about himself in relation to Henrietta. That formed a bond between them. He sometimes grew frightened at the thought of the things Doris knew about him--things she might tell to anyone and ruin him; wreck his home and his career. But always after worrying about such fears he would hurry to his sister and unburden himself still further. As if by feeding her further secrets he could make certain of her loyalty and reticence.
He watched her less openly as she poured tea. A bitterness filled him.
If Henrietta were only a woman like this instead of a stick. If only he could sit home and talk things over with her, marriage would have some sense to it. He frowned. He did not like to think this way.
Doris began to talk smoothly, her dark eyes growing more alive. He listened nervously, wincing under the contempt of her phrases and fascinated by the startling interpretations they offered him of his own thoughts.
"If I were you," she said as she arranged the teacups, "I would let myself be squeezed out of the crusade. It's served its purpose for you.
You've frightened about a million feeble-minded creatures into a fury against private banks. You've done quite well. That's the secret, you know. And you must always remember it. Create bogeymen to frighten people with. The more unreal the bogeymen, the more terrified the public. If you don't believe this figure out for yourself--of what are people the most afraid? God, of course. The greatest of the bogeymen.
And remember too, George that people like to be terrified. There's a reason for that. People like to be preoccupied by false terrors in order not to have to face real frightening facts--facts such as death and age and their own souls."
She sat down and looked at Basine with a pitying smile.
"What a fool you are, George. You don't believe a word I say, do you?"
"What you say and how you say it are two different things," he answered.
The thought was in his mind that Fanny was right. Doris was going crazy.
Her talk had an edge to it as if her voice were being carefully repressed. He almost preferred her when she was silent, when her eyes slept. Because now there was a hidden wildness to her. She was suffering! The thought startled him. But that was it. The hate that filled her voice came from a suffering inside. He wanted to reach over and take her hand and whisper to her to be calm, but he continued to listen without moving. There were things in what she said that always held him. It was like learning secrets. She was still talking.
"Well, today they're shrieking and vomiting invective and you'd like nothing better than to be the heroic leader of this pack of filthy cowards. Would you? Well, it's not worth while this time. The whole thing'll blow over. In a few weeks people will have forgotten about private banks. And by the time you get the bill into the state legislature the papers will be ignoring the whole business. Do you see?
There's nothing so tragic as the spectacle of a mob leader stranded high and dry with a yesterday's crusade. And his mob off in another direction. Remember, George, you're not dealing with people, with reasoning men and women. You always forget this and you'll never get ahead if you keep forgetting it. You're dealing with a single creature--the crowd. A huge bellowing savage."
"I know, I know," Basine muttered. She was crazy. Something queer in her head about people. "All people aren't like that, of course. But I understand."
"You don't," she interrupted angrily. "All people are like that. Alone people are one thing. They're alive and they reason a little. But when they come together to overthrow governments or defend governments or make laws or worship Gods, they vanish. A single creature takes their place. And this single creature is a mysterious savage who howls and spits and vomits and tears its hair and has orgasms of terror and befouls itself."
Her eyes glared at Basine. With an effort she controlled her voice. She continued in a passionate whisper.
"Don't you understand that yet? After all I've shown you. If you want to get ahead, I can make you anything. Do you hear that? Anything.... I can make you a leader ... a king. All you must learn is the way of turning people into swine...."
"Please Doris, you get too excited. Please...."
"Into swine and swine crusades. We'll find ways of bringing them together and the more swinish you can make people become, yes, the more you can make them spew and shriek, the holier will become the cause of this spewing and shrieking. These are elementals and you must trust me.
Do you hear?"
Her fingers were cold. They had closed on his hand. He shuddered. Crazy ... poor Doris. Gone queer with something. Yet he found himself listening, her chill fingers startling his flesh. Out of her ravings there might issue at any minute the thing he was always looking for ...
a way to get ahead.
"Little crusades like this," she went on, "are all right. But private banks are only a detail. And besides the idea is too concrete to terrify people and bring out the full hysteria of their cowardice. What we need is something vague--that has no facts to handicap it. Something you can lie about wildly and frighten them with so that their bowels weaken.
Please, drop the thing now. You must...."
"Doris, you get too excited. Let's talk sense instead of getting excited like this."
He patted her hand and returned her stare uncomfortably. He wanted to ask her why she was interested in his getting ahead, in making him a leader. She had paused. Basine felt himself nauseated by the intensity of her words that continued to ring in his ears. Her anger and the viciousness of her phrases brought her too close to him. He could almost see something behind the glare of her dark eyes.
"Oh, you're not interested in progress and civilization," she resumed mockingly. Her words seemed more controlled. He noticed that she jerked her hand away. "Because if you were you would see that progress and civilization are the results of the terror of the mob. It's when they get frightened of something and throw themselves at it with their eyes shut and their hair on end, that institutions are born ... that new platitudes are set up in heaven. And the secret is this--the worse swine you can turn them into, the holier will be the things they do. Listen, I'll tell you.... You must do as I say.... You must believe me...."
She had risen. Her hand was on his shoulder and her eyes burned over him. He felt a bit fearful and impatient. To a point, her talk was interesting. But after that it became like raving.