"She knew it was going to happen," he murmured to himself, "and she wanted to see me again before it did." His heart felt heavy. Doris with her dead eyes weeping. Ah, a long sigh. Hard to remember things that had been.
"Knock 'em over," he whispered aloud. "Make something ... make something." Deep inside him were hands that pantomimed despair. People in the streets. War was coming to them. "Huh," he said slowly, "they tore her heart out." Everybody knew him. Everybody knew the name Lindstrum. It was the name of a great poet. When he was dead Lindstrum would stay alive. "Huh," he whispered, "I don't know.... Sing to them.
Yes...."
His teeth bit into the pipe stem. Tears came from his eyes. He walked along in the night snarling with his lips parted, and weeping.
24
The war was a noisy guest. People shook hands with it. It sat down in their little rooms. It's voice was a brass band that drowned their troubles. Basine found a curious friend in the war.
Changes had come to him in the days that followed the scene with Ruth.
He grew cold. His heart was indifferent. His victory in the election had sent him to bed without joy.
There was no longer an inner Basine and an outer Basine. He had fought his way into the current of events and he was content to let them move him. They made him Senator. They moved him to Washington, provided new scenes for him, new faces. He heard of his sister's collapse without sorrow. She had become crazy. To be expected, of course, to be expected, he said to himself one evening as he sat writing a letter of sympathy to his mother.
The thing that had happened to Basine had been the result of a confusion. He found himself at forty robbed of life. Despair, hatred, disgust--these things were left. He turned his back on them. They were a company of emotions too difficult to play with. It was no longer possible to lie. Ruth, Schroder, Henrietta, love, hope, intrigue grew mixed up. He emerged from himself and walked away from himself like an aggrieved and dignified guest.
He sometimes remembered himself--a distant Basine. A keen-faced one with the feel of leadership in his heart. A mind that was alive behind its words. He had done and thought many things. But now he had gone away. He was silent. The day was no longer a challenge. The change carried its reward. It seemed to bring him closer to people. At least he found a certain charm in talking and listening that had not existed before.
He gave himself no thought. He was successful and that was enough. At times he sat in his new quarters in Washington reading stray items in the newspapers and reciting to himself his achievements. He found pleasing identification in the honors he had achieved.
His political friends talked among themselves. They recalled that Basine had once been a man of promise, a man alive with energies. And now he was like the others in the party--an amiable fuddy-duddy. They recalled the sensational figure he had made a few years ago in the Vice Investigation. This seemed to have been the climax of Basine.
But the war arrived and the new Senator began to emerge. The country became filled with mediocrities struggling to utilize the war as a pedestal. The call had gone out for heroes and the elocutionists rushed forward.
The psychology of the day, however, was a bit too involved for these aspirants. The body politic of the nation found itself betrayed by its own platitudes. A moral frenzy began to animate the horizon. But it was the frenzy of an idea that had escaped control; an idea grown too huge and luminous to direct any longer. The idealization of itself before which the crowd had worshipped became now a Frankenstein. The virtues of America had gone to war. And the nation looked on, aghast and uncomprehending. The flattering and grandiose image of itself that the _bete populaire_ had been creating in its law books, text books, and hymnals had suddenly stepped from its complicated mirror and was marching like a Mad Hatter to the front. A swarm of guides and interpreters had leaped to its side. They danced around it chanting its nobilities, proclaiming its grandeur. The spirit of Democracy, the Rights of Man, the One and Only God--the Golden Rule, the Thou Shalt Nots, the Seven Virtues, the Mann Act, the Hatred for All Variants of Evil,--the mythical incarnation of these and kindred illusions--the Idealization--was off for the front.
The confusion arose when the nation found itself attached as if by some gruesome umbilical cord to this crazed Idealization, off with a Tin Sword on its shoulder. And it must follow this Virtue-snorting monster.
It must lie down in trenches in behalf of a Fairy Tale with which it had been shrewdly deceiving itself for a century.
But while the elocutionists fumbling for pedestals were exhorting the nation to hoist itself by its boot-straps, to become overnight a belligerent hierarchy around its God, there were others whose spirit raised an authentic battle shout. One of these was Basine.
He appeared to return to himself. The Basine he had walked away from raised itself amid the disgusts and hatreds in which it had lain abandoned. A rage gathered in his voice. Eloquence and flashing eyes were his. The amiable fuddy-duddy playing little politics in Washington became a gentleman of war.
The horizon bristled with gentlemen of war. But the terrified crowd casting about for leaders, as the draft shovelled it toward the trenches, eyed them with suspicion. There must be authentic gentlemen of war--men above suspicion. Men maddened with a desire to fight and destroy were wanted. Basine was one of these. His tirades against the enemy left nothing in doubt. They were not concerned with idealisms. The enemy must be destroyed, he began to cry, or else it would destroy civilization.
Huns, he cried, vandals and scoundrels. Gorillas, demons, soulless monsters. His phrases drew frightful caricatures of the enemy. His orations were among the few that stirred terror. The Germans were not enemies of an ideal--not a rabble of Nietzsches at theological grips with a rabble of Christs. They were Huns, said Basine, barbarians, fiends, hacking children to pieces, pillaging, raping, destroying.
This was a language the nation understood. It contained in it the inspiration to heroism and sacrifice. Out of it arose the grisly cartoon which awakened fear. Terrified by the possibilities of Hun domination and massacres, the crowd patriotically bared its bosom to the lesser horror--war. It marched forth behind its idiot Idealization not to defend that absurdity but to save itself from the clutches of massacring savages.
The energies which came to life abruptly in Basine focused into a strange passion against the Germans. He was vicious, intolerant, unscrupulous in his denunciations. This established him instantly as a leader.
The crowd, casting about for leaders, seized upon men more terrified than themselves. And upon these abject ones who raved and howled from the pulpit, stage and press, they heaped rewards and canonizations.
There was one phase of Basine's hatred that offered a curious explanation. From the beginning he devoted himself to describing the hideous immorality of the Huns. He loaned himself passionately to all rumors celebrating the wholesale rape of women committed by the invaders of Belgium. Deportations, well-poisonings, child-murders figured extensively in his eloquence. But gradually he appeared to concentrate upon what he called the ultimate horror--"fair Europe overrun by this horde of seducers and immoral blackguards." Schroder was a German.
The war rehabilitated Basine. It enabled him to destroy Schroder. The complicated underworld of hate, disgust, disillusion which his ludicrous renunciation of Ruth and her subsequent betrayal by Schroder had created in him, was the arsenal from which he armed himself for war.
He had lapsed into a sterile and amiable Basine in order to escape from emotions become too intolerable and too dangerous to utilize. The murder of Schroder would not have restored him. The return of the woman he still loved would have been equally futile. Life had become too intolerable for Basine to face and adjust. He had permitted himself convenient burial.
On the night he had gotten drunk with the newspaperman, Basine saw himself as he was--a creature misshapen and humorous--and he had buried the vision and fled from it. To sit contemplating an inner self become a grotesque cripple was intolerable. He sought for a brief space to transfer his self-loathing to Schroder but Schroder, the man, was too small to contain it. Schroder, the war, however, was another matter.
Basine unlocked himself, exhumed himself, and came forth with a yell in his throat. The German army was five million Schroders. He hurled himself at them. He was happy in his rage. A sincerity hypnotized him.
The Germans were not only five million Schroders. They were also the incarnated nauseas and despairs of Basine. Schroder, the man, had become for him, illogically but soothingly, the cause of everything that had become misshapen and humorous inside him. Schroder, the man, was the sand in which Basine, the ostrich, buried his head. Now Schroder, the Germans, Schroder, the World War, Schroder, the rape of Belgium, the devastation of France, offered a more hospitable grave for the misshapen and humorous image of himself. To destroy the Germans became for Basine synonymous with destroying the things inside himself from which he had fled helplessly. The destruction of these things consisted of giving them outlet, of giving them voice. His hatreds, despairs and disillusions arose and spat themselves upon the Germans. The process cleansed and invigorated him and launched him before the public as a leader to be trusted, a hero to venerate during its dark hour.
25
The company assembled in his mother's home greeted Basine with excitement. He had stopped over during a tour in behalf of the Liberty Loan. Mrs. Basine had persuaded him to attend a function in his honor.
He was late. They were waiting dinner for him.
When he entered, a sense of great affairs, of world disturbances came into the room with him. At the table the talk centered around him. He was the superior patriot. Questions were fired at him--when would the war end, what was the real secret of this and that and did he know what was behind the latest note from the President, and when was the German offensive due? He answered ambiguously, offering no information and exciting his audience by his reticence.
Aubrey Gilchrist, who had held the floor before the Senator's arrival, listened eagerly to his brother-in-law. Aubrey's patriotism was a bond between them. But it was of a different quality. Aubrey's patriotism was founded on the fact that America was the most virtuous nation in the world. He devoted himself to a campaign among his friends and had even spoken publicly a number of times. In his talk he grew eloquent over the moral grandeur of his country and hailed the altruism and honesty of his countrymen as a light that illumined the world.
Aubrey had overcome his impulse to publish his father's manuscript under his own name. His fears had finally triumphed. He had utilized his decision in a curious way. For months after determining not to commit the imposture he had discussed the decision among his friends.
"I worked a number of years on it," he explained simply, "but on reading it over I feel that it's not the thing to be given the public. It's a bit too Rabelaisian and unrestrained. Among gentlemen, yes. But when one thinks of young men and women reading such things one hesitates. I feel too that I can do better. Perhaps in another year or so I'll finish something more worthy."
This explanation had given him a pleasurable emotion. It had coincided with the inner Aubrey--the Isaiah who thundered in secret. He had gone about elated with the knowledge of his honesty--not only the honesty of refraining from the imposture but the honesty of sparing the public a work likely to undermine its morals. With the advent of the war Aubrey's elation had expanded miraculously. The nation became a collection of Aubrey Gilchrists. He found an outlet for his self admiration in boasting tirelessly of the virtues of his countrymen. His interest in the Germans was faint. He was chiefly concerned with having the moral grandeur of his nation recognized and triumphant.
Seated opposite him was Fanny. She smiled when he looked at her. The war had brought Fanny happiness. It had released her from the tormenting of Ramsey. She turned occasionally toward Ramsey a few seats removed at the table and spoke to him. He had changed. He sat flushed and elated and took his turn at denouncing the enemy, at avowing vengeance and prophesying terrible victories over the Hun. His anger rivalled Basine's. The curious game he had played with Fanny had lost its interest. He had emerged like Basine. Fanny was no longer necessary to his desire for a sense of power--a power which convinced him of his manliness and concealed from him the secret of his inferiority. He had transferred his game from Fanny to the Germans. He was now tormenting the Germans. The news of their defeats, the hope of their annihilation inflated him. In addition, his belligerent air, his gory threats enabled him to establish himself in his eyes and in the eyes of others as a thorough man.
There were others in the company--Judge Smith, red-faced and glowering; Aubrey's mother engaged in excommunicating the Germans as socially unfit and outside the pale of her sympathy or support; a number of prominent social and political lights. They discussed the war with animation, fired questions at the senator and ate heartily.
Dishes clattered. Servants appeared and disappeared. Mrs. Basine, sitting beside her son listened to him proudly and grew sad. Her son's prestige pleased her. But the war saddened her. She noticed that Mrs.
Gilchrist was growing old--too old to share the enthusiasms of the day.
Yet there was a comradeship in the room that stirred Mrs. Basine. She disliked most of the individuals around her. But when they came together there was something charming in the way they talked and smiled and exchanged confidences.
Mrs. Basine had secretly allied herself with a pacifist group of women who labelled their minor timidity as intellectualism and argued with violence against the major timidity identified as patriotism. She had a horror of war, her imagination seeing herself continually suffering with the soldiers of both sides. A similar sensitiveness had converted her into a vague socialist. The misery of what she called the masses was a mirror in which she saw a possible image of herself. She subscribed with enthusiasm to doctrines which promised to establish justice and tranquility in the world.
But now among the people in her home Mrs. Basine noticed an enviable optimism. Some of them were old friends, others new friends. But all of them were alike in one way. All of them seemed wonderfully excited over the fact that this war was going to put an end to all wars. She would have liked to share this optimism. But her intelligence deprived her of the solace. Yet she was able to feel kindly toward the ideals she sensed were false. They were somehow like her own ideals--inspired by similar things.
The camaraderie in the room heightened. This was a war that was going to put an end to all wars and everyone felt happy. They talked and laughed. Their manner seemed to hint that the war was not only going to put an end to all wars but to all troubles. Yes, the Germans vanquished, victory achieved, and the world would be beautifully straightened out.
They identified themselves avidly with the world--these old and new friends. The enemy who had dogged their monotonous little footsteps through the years--the veiled Nemesis who had harassed them and filled them with helpless, futile hatreds, tripped them up and robbed them at every turn--this enemy was at last unmasked. He was identified now. He was their troubles--their defeats. And they had him out in the open now where they could shout battle cries and leap upon him. He was the Germans.
Mrs. Basine, groping for an understanding of the elation among her guests and desiring to share it, thought of her grandchildren. She remembered George when he was no older than his son. This memory seemed to give the lie to the excitement in the room. She wondered why. She remembered Fanny when she was a girl. And Henrietta long ago. Henrietta was smiling quietly at her husband--a faded matron, scrawny, silent. And Doris was upstairs, weeping perhaps. She had taken Doris out of the sanitarium to care for her at home. The doctor said melancholia. She might be cured if something could be found to interest her. But there was nothing. She sat wide-eyed and morose through the day, her hands listless and waited till night came and sleep. Her skin was yellow and there were little glints in her eyes as if they were peering out of the dark.
Senator Basine laughed at the sally of a pretty woman. The table joined his laughter. The senator was an inspiration. His manner was forceful, his words direct. When he listened his head remained flung back. When he talked he lowered his head and raised his eyes. There was an anger in him that awed. It played behind his words.