"An analogy. I see. Thanks."
He stood up. Ware reached out his hand.
"I don't think you quite understand me," he murmured.
"Perfectly," Basine answered. "And I've given my word that whatever I understood would be forgotten."
Words welled into Basine's mind. An almost uncontrollable impulse to confound his host with a violent denunciation struggled in him. He would tell this traction baron what manner of man he, Basine, was. And what the dignity of his position as judge was. He would throw the bribe back into the man's teeth. He would declaim. Virtue. Outrage. Creatures who sought to use their power to influence justice. Who thought themselves able to drag men of honor to their level by the promise of favors.
Basine remained silent. His eyes, grown lustrous, stared at Ware.
Careful, he must be careful not to protest too violently. That would sound as if he were uncertain. No protest at all. A contemptuous silence. That was more effective. The sort of thing Ware would understand, too. And remember. With a deep breath that sent a tremor through his body, he nodded.
"Good day," he said and turning his back abruptly, walked out of the club. He frowned at the unctuous bell boys and doorman.
Still raining. Basine walked swiftly, unaware of destination. His mind was filled with emotions. Indignation grew in him. Ware had offered a bribe. There was something in the thing that slowly infuriated him. It was an affront, an attempt at domination. The man had said, "I'm better than you. I can bribe you to do what I want." His spirit revolted. So that was the way to power, eh? Listening to reason when the big wigs spoke? Well, they could go on speaking till doomsday. But they couldn't talk to him like that ... and get away with it.
The anger slipped from him. He had refused. An elation halted him. He was an honest man! The fact surprised him. He stared with pride at the street. The street held an honest man, a man able to say "no" to temptation.
A tardy appreciation of his righteousness overpowered him. He had something inside him now like a new strength. He could look at men anywhere, anytime, and let his eyes tell them who he was and what sort of man he was. Because he was sure of it himself. He was an honest man, and sure of it.
It was not only inside him, this certainty, but he felt it like a mantle over his shoulders. He walked on with a vigorous step. An unshaven face paused before him and a beggar mumbled for a coin. Basine stopped full.
He stopped with deliberation and stared at the unshaven face, at the shifty eyes and dirty linen. The beggar repeated his furtive mumble.
"No," Basine answered clearly. His voice was sharp. The man appeared to wince. He slid away in the rain, his head down.
Basine walked on with an increased elation. He had never been able to do that before, say "no" decisively to a beggar. He had usually said "no", but hurriedly, furtively. That was because he was uncertain of himself.
Now he could say "no" or "yes" to anyone with decision. He had refused a bribe and was an honest man and did not have to concern himself with what others might think of what he said, because of this conviction in him and because of this mantle in which he was wrapped.
He walked in the direction of the County Building. The rain felt fresh.
It was a moral rain, a virtuous comrade.
The incident in the club had, in fact, given Basine a character. He had been unaware of his motives from the moment a sense of impending events had come to him in the traction official's automobile. He had, when the bribe came, acted as if following a lifelong code of ethics. Yet he had surprised himself. His anger, his violent emotion of righteousness had been inexplicable to him. He had never felt anything like that before.
Basine, in the car, had become aware vaguely of what awaited him. He had recalled and repressed the recollection instantly, the Hill case pending trial before him. And under the surface of his thought the entire drama of the bribe had enacted itself in advance. Ware would offer him something. Yes, and Ware was a man to know, one who could be of vital use in his climb. If Ware asked him to do something it would be wise to do it. He had been eager for the interview and a part of his eagerness had been a desire to grant the traction baron the favor he was going to ask.
But the incident had come during a curious crisis in Basine's life, a crisis that had piled up since his youth. A consciousness had been growing in him of his duplicity. He had been aware of it, but in a different way, during his youth and the early years of his marriage. It had not made him uncomfortable then. He had been able to lie with a clear conscience. Ruses by which he established himself in the eyes of others, not as he was but as he desired them to think him, had seemed to him then the product of a practical, superior nature.
Slowly, however, his poise in the face of his own duplicities had begun to crumble. He had begun to feel himself filled with the uncertainties of a man forced to conceal too many things from himself. Fitting his hypocricies and lies into worthy necessities had become too complex a business, demanding too much of his energies.
The inner situation in which Basine found himself as he matured had in no way changed his nature. He had gone ahead as always, stumbling finally into a climax of deceits in his relation with the young woman he had hired as his secretary.
In the five months she had worked for him he had been in love with her but had managed to withhold the fact from both of them. He had invented exhaustless explanations for his interest in her, for his desire to be near her, for the increased aversion that had grown in him toward Henrietta and his home.
The crisis had accumulated and reached a head during the services in the Gilchrist home. Here his pent-up self-repugnance, his growing impulse to expurgate the duplicities of his life, had found a minor outlet in the sudden religious faith that had possessed him after his half-hour of doubts. Ware's bribe had come opportunely. Basine's inexplicable anger on sensing the impending bribe, had been his self answer to the eager desire to comply that had struggled to assert itself in him.
And when the man had begun the actual words that meant bribe, he had seized on the situation as a vindication. Opportunity to rehabilitate himself, to wipe out with a single gesture the clutter of dishonesties which were beginning to inconvenience him. He had embraced it and emerged from the club a man, remade. No longer an inwardly shifty Basine able to rise to righteousness only by avoiding his memories. But a Basine with a platform inside him on which he might stand fearlessly.
The platform--I am honest. I refused a bribe--had erected itself over the complex memories of himself. They were obliterated now.
He entered his chambers with a serious happiness in his heart. A miracle had happened and he had been given absolution--by himself.
16
Ruth Davis was at her desk. She looked up eagerly as he entered. Basine, hanging up his coat and hat, felt a businesslike desire to explain matters to her. He was an honest man, done with subterfuges.
He would explain to her that it was no longer possible for her to continue in his employ. Use correct but kindly words. He was an honest man. He wanted to impress himself and everybody else with this fact.
Even Ruth. He had no thought of impressing it on Henrietta. Henrietta would only be surprised to hear he was an honest man. Because she had always believed it anyway.
But he would like to tell Ruth, because it would raise her opinion of him; fill her with a great pride. A sad pride, of course, since it meant their separation. But she would go away loving him even more because of his honesty that had put an end to his love for her.
The course, however, was impossible. It involved a ludicrous situation.
Because he had never said he loved her and she had been as silent as he.
And so telling her all these very fine things would make it necessary for him to say first, "I have loved you." And then to add, "But I don't love you any more. I can't."
It was two o'clock. Time for the Judge to take his place on the bench.
Basine arose from behind his table with a sense of anti-climax. Nothing had happened. He was going back to his place on the bench again. Poor Gilchrist lay hidden forever and Ware had tried to bribe him and he had proven himself a man of astounding integrity. And he had overcome a growing infatuation for Ruth Davis. Yet nothing had happened.
"Shall I retype the Friday speech, Judge?" Ruth inquired as he hesitated before her desk. He looked at her as if it were difficult to focus his attention on her. He was preoccupied. A man of many preoccupations who found it hard to notice little things around him.
"Oh yes, the speech," he agreed. "Type it. And if there are any mistakes change them to suit yourself."
He walked out of chambers. Ruth turned to her typewriter and prepared to set to work. But as the door closed behind Basine she stopped. She removed a small mirror from a drawer and studied her face in it. She leaned back in her seat and sighed. She felt too restless to work.
With her white brows frowning, she sat looking at the keys of her machine. A miserable restlessness, this was, that never went away. At night she lay awake in the room she had chosen since becoming financially independent of her family. And a loneliness gnawed in her heart. It was because she loved him.
"Yes, I love him," she repeated to the keys of her machine.
He was not like other men. There was something intimidating about him.
He had never spoken to her in a friendly tone. His eyes had never become intimate.
During the five months she had been his secretary he had kept aloof. A strange, unbending man consumed with ambition. His ambition was an awesome thing. There was a directness to it. He worked day and night, always planning for something. His engagements crowded each other. She hardly knew the man. She knew only an ambition that kept pushing tirelessly forward.
There had been no talk between them except business talk. And yet, somehow he had given himself to her. Despite his aloofness and the sternness of his manner, she had felt herself coming close to him, closer than to anybody else she had ever known. And men were no exciting novelty to her. They had held her hand and fumbled around with ambiguous words. They talked art, politics, women, not because they were interested in these things but because they wanted you to be interested in what they thought of them. She had kept her virginity without difficulty. The half-world of art and jobs enthused her. But it did not stampede. A practical side of her remained dubious about the groping ones she met in the studios. It was hard to pick out the real ones from the fourflushers. She had discovered this. Because the real ones didn't know they were real. Any more than the fourflushers knew they were spurious. They all gabbled and wrote, painted and gabbled, and there was no difference to them.
About the men she had noticed one thing. Their egoism was the egoism of ideas. They were better than others, they thought, because of the ideas in their heads. They were excitedly snobbish about these ideas as people are snobbish about clothes. But they weren't better than others because they were they. They were always leaning on things to make them feel superior. Radicalism was a series of ideas that they picked up because they felt a superior intellectualism in them.
Ruth had started thinking in this direction after listening to Levine, Doris' friend. She had felt something of the sort before. But Levine, with his almost oily pessimism, who talked always as if he were selling something, had made it clear.
"The women who go in for revolt," Levine had said, "Hm, that's another story. They're not interested in egoism. Because as yet there isn't a highly developed caste system among women. They still kind of herd together as a sex and they try to impress each other only with their superior artificialities--as to who has the most doting husband, the nicest times, the most accomplished servants.
"But men--there you have something else, don't you think? And the men we know--the hangers-on around here, comical, eh? You can almost see them bargain hunting for ideas. They don't stand up on their own feet and let out yaps. They keep crawling inside of new ideas. They keep using ideas as megaphones to proclaim their own superiorities. Little men playing hide and seek inside of big ideas. Using ideas about art and life as kids use pumpkin heads on Hallowe'en. To frighten and impress the neighbors. Another simile--borrowed finery, eh? Ah, they're all fools.
It's hard to be much interested in people unless you're a poet. If you're a poet then what you do is ignore people and go down like a deep-sea diver to the bottoms of life. Down there it's interesting. Yes, growths like on the ocean floor."
As a contrast to these men, gabbling in her ear and fumbling with her hands, Basine had interested her at once. At first she had accepted the way he ignored her as a natural attitude. Later, he would become friendly and she looked forward to his friendship. It would be interesting to know what an egoist like Basine thought about things. His ideas were obviously rather stupid, but then--there was something else.
Strength, determination. He wasn't like the intellectuals, continually losing themselves in new ideas and parading around like kids in their big brothers' pants. She disliked that kind of men. The longer you knew them the more unreal they became. Until finally, when you knew them through and through it was like knowing an inferior edition of an encyclopedia through and through. Everything was inside but it made no sense. It had no direction. A jumble of ideas and informations--but they formed no plot, no man. They weren't really egoists--the intellectuals.
Men like Basine were.