"Yes, Henny, of course."
Her eyes were wide and her lips quivered. She was looking at him as if he were doing something remarkable and she overcome with astonishment.
For an instant Basine wondered why the deuce she looked that way. Then he felt an unexpected chill that he dismissed promptly with an inwardly reassuring smile as he heard her saying.
"Oh, we'll be so happy together when we're married. Isn't it wonderful, just too wonderful for words to be married--together. Oh George! I'm so happy.... I love you so much. And father will be so...."
6
They had not expected Mr. Gilchrist to come. Mr. Gilchrist was an undersized, mild little man with greying sideburns. When he was alone he read a great deal.
He had made money in the selling of expensive furniture. He was part owner of a store in Wabash Avenue. It was generally understood that people with taste patronized the Gilchrist-Warren establishment.
He arrived at the Basines' with his wife and his son Aubrey. Keegan and Fanny had returned from a long walk. They and the judge, Henrietta, Basine and his mother and sister Doris all expressed surprise at seeing Mr. Gilchrist. There was always about Mr. Gilchrist the air of a museum piece--a quaint museum piece such as a keen but sentimental collector might delight in.
The exclamations of surprise embarrassed the little man and he stood fingering his sideburns and trying to smile in just the correct way. Mr.
Gilchrist's arrival anywhere always precipitated this air of surprise.
People said, "Why, Mr. Gilchrist! Awfully glad to see you! Haven't seen you for an age. Well! How are you?"
This was as if they were extremely surprised. But they weren't. They were merely annoyed, upset, vaguely hostile and condescending. And these emotions inspired by the innocent Mr. Gilchrist could be best concealed by the feigning of a correct social astonishment.
To the queries shot at him Mr. Gilchrist answered, "Very well, thank you. Thank you. Very well, thank you."
After greeting him with these exclamation points, people immediately forgot he was present. Mr. Gilchrist would sit the rest of the evening ignored by everybody and trying to the end to smile in just the correct way.
Inside Mr. Gilchrist were many little lonelinesses. His head was full of things he had read, of plots, of great characters, even of epigrams and biting iconoclasms. When people talked he did his best to be attentive.
And if they talked about things that interested him--the Kings of France, the Italian wars of the fifteenth century, the topography of early London and kindred subjects--his face would tremble with enthusiasms.
He would listen, his eyes questing eagerly for epigrams, for illuminating sentences he might contribute. But his unegoistic love for the subject would make him inarticulate. His eyes that had seemed about to speak of themselves, that had seemed laden with excited informations would close and a chuckle would come from his lips. The Caesars, the Borgias, the Medicis, the Bourbons, the Valois, Savonarola, Richelieu, the various Charles, Phillips, Williams, Henrys, the plumed headliners of history around whom had centered the hurdy-gurdy intrigues, the circus romances and wars of vanished centuries--these were the hail-fellows of his imagination.
But people seldom talked of these names. People were more interested in contemporary topics. He did his best to be attentive. But his thought played truant and before he knew it he would be going over secretly certain things in his head. Villon, Marlowe, Balzac, Dumas, Gautier, Suetonius--there was a rabble of them continually arguing and declaiming in Mr. Gilchrist's head.
He liked to half close his eyes and imagine what the great names used to have for breakfast, what the great names would say if he were to enter their presence or if they were to come into this room. He liked to bring up in his mind pictures of old Paris, London, Florence, Avignon, Vienna with their lopsided roofs, winding alleys, night watchmen and king's guards. He could sit a whole evening this way thinking, "then he came to an old Inn and there were lights inside. People drinking inside, telling stories and laughing. The inn-keeper was a man named Simon. The curious stranger looked about him with an imperious eye...."
These words murmuring in his head would conjure up the picture and there would be no further need for words. He was content to sit in the old inn, noticing its quaint decorations, its quaint but romantic inmates.
Adventures would follow, strange episodes, denouements, climaxes--all without words as if he were watching a cinemategraph. His attempted smile would remain--a smile that concealed the fact he was neither smiling at those around him nor aware of what they were saying. For he would only half hear the chatter of the room and now and then nod his head vaguely at some question that people were answering--as if he too were answering it.
He was almost sixty, and lonely because he knew of no one to whom he could talk. His wife in particular was a person to whom he never dreamed of talking. He had only a dim idea of what he wanted to say to someone.
But all his life he had been hoping to meet this one who would be like himself. This someone would be a friend whom he could take with him into places like the old inn and the crazily twisting streets of old London or Paris.
His days and years passed however without bringing him this companion.
And outwardly he remained a mild little figure with sideburns, kindly tolerant toward everyone.
When his dreams left him long enough to enable him to notice closely those about him, a feeling of sadness would come. He would feel sorry for the men and women he saw gesturing and heard talking and laughing.
He thought they must be like himself--looking for something. His faded eyes would peer caressingly from behind his glasses and he would make simple little remarks in an apologetic voice. He would ask what they had been doing and when they answered in their careless, matter-of-fact ways he would nod hopefully and appear pleased.
To see Mr. Gilchrist in the midst of his family was to be convinced of the plausibility of immaculate conception. It was difficult imagining Mr. Gilchrist ever having done anything which might have resulted in fatherhood. But more than that, it was impossible even suggesting to oneself that his wife had ever received the embraces of a man, had ever so far forgotten the proprieties as to permit herself to be trapped alone with a man.
Thus the presence of Aubrey, their son, became incongruous. And Aubrey himself helped this illusion. He was a young man who looked incongruous.
He seemed like a hoax or at least a caricature. He had enormous feet and ungainly legs, large hands and pipe-stem arms, hips like a woman and a face capriciously modeled out of soft putty. His ugliness by itself would have been whimsical--his protruding eyes, long pointed nose, uneven cheeks and bulbous chin hinted at something waggish.
But Aubrey had triumphed over his physical self. He had with the aid of a pair of large glasses from which dangled a black silk cord, and by holding his head thrown back as if there were a crick in his neck, acquired an air of dignity. It was his habit to glower with dignity, to stare with dignity and to preserve a dignified inanimation when he was silent. He was pigeon breasted and this helped. In fact his many slight deformities seemed all to contribute somehow toward making him a man of inspiring dignity.
People had little use for Mr. Gilchrist, his father. He was, of course, wealthy but not wealthy enough to earn the regard of the poor. They discussed him, saying, "He's not so simple as he pretends he is. Any man who's made a pile like old Gilchrist in the furniture business has a pretty smart head."
And they added that they wouldn't be surprised if something eventually were found out about old man Gilchrist. He had a past. Of this people were convinced. It was his wife's position and the fear of her personality that protected Mr. Gilchrist from the downright attacks of rumor. Any man who pretended to be as kindly as Mr. Gilchrist and who talked so tolerantly about everybody and everything was, you could bank on it, a sly rogue afraid to say what he thought because he himself was guilty of worse sins than those under discussion.
Mr. Gilchrist, by seeming above the social agitations surrounding him came to appear as one who looked down tolerantly upon inferiors--and this annoyed people. Who was Mr. Gilchrist and what had he done that he should be giving himself airs? Of course--there was Aubrey and....
Aubrey was aloof and dignified. But that was to be expected of a man who worked with his brain all the time, inventing plots and characters--his friends explained. In fact Aubrey's silences thrilled them even more than his talk. They felt, when he sat silent, that they were witnessing the birth in his head of some great idea which they would later read in a book. Aubrey was a man of superior qualities and to bask in the presence of a superior was to partake of his superiority.
Aubrey's superiority consisted, so far as Aubrey was concerned, of wearing the proper kind of eye-glasses, keeping his neck stiff, refraining from giving utterance to all the asininities which crowded his tongue and writing romances containing heroes with whom a half-million women readers had imaginary affairs every night and heroines whom another half-million men ravished in their dreams. For Aubrey was a celebrated popular fiction writer. To conceal the horrible reasons which made for the celebrity of Aubrey's fiction, the army of literary morons who succumbed to its influence grew louder and louder in their protestations that Aubrey was a great moral writer. They pointed out that here was a man whose heroines were pure, whose heroes were noble and virtuous--neglecting to add that these were the only kind of phantoms which could penetrate the guard of their own puritanism and stir the erotic impulses beneath.
Aubrey's superiority was, for the most part, a state of mind that existed among the people who knew him or had heard of him or read of him. And this attitude toward him became part of Aubrey. He adopted it as the major side of his character and lived chiefly in the opinions of others. His introspection consisted of reading press notices about himself and thinking of what other people thought of him. Thus to understand Aubrey it was necessary to go outside him and to investigate this external state of mind, the ready-made robes of purple in which his little thoughts strutted through the day.
The people in whose acclaim Aubrey robed himself were varied and many but they inhabited an identical psychological stratum. They believed firmly that all artists and writers were poor, starving, unhappy creatures.
This belief was borne out in their minds by history--such history as they permitted themselves to know. History was continually telling of geniuses who died in garrets, of great minds that could not make enough money to feed or clothe their bodies. In fact one of the shrewdest ways to tell whether a man was a genius--that is, had been a genius--was to determine whether he had been neglected during his life and died of malnutrition and disappointment.
The people who acclaimed Aubrey found a compensation in this. They liked to assure themselves that geniuses starved to death. This compensated them for the fact that they themselves were not geniuses. It made them feel that it was actually a vital misfortune to be gifted, since being gifted meant to suffer the neglect of one's fellows and the pangs of hunger.
But the knowledge that genius was neglected and hungry in no way inspired them to remedy the situation by recognizing its presence and feeding it. To the contrary they were determined to see that it remained neglected and hungry. The idea of struggling long-haired poets dressed in rags pleased them. The idea of long-haired painters living on crumbs in attics gave them peculiar satisfaction.
Geniuses were people different from themselves. They believed in different things and pretended to be excited by different emotions and lived different lives. And the people who acclaimed Aubrey were pleased to know that there was a penalty attached to being different from themselves and they were interested in seeing that this penalty was not removed. By penalizing the different ones whom they sensed as superiors, they increased the value of their own inferiorities.
Yet they acclaimed Aubrey and there was no malice in their acclaim. This was a phenomenon that had once startled Aubrey. Long ago, when he had first started to write, his family's friends had said, "Poor boy, he'll starve to death. There's no money in being an author and you lead a terrible life."
But Aubrey had gone ahead and remained an author. He had written, at the beginning, rather biting if sophomoric things, inspired by the malice he sensed toward his profession. But the inspiration had not been sufficiently strong to handicap him. When success had come and his name was emerging, the people who knew him and who had talked maliciously about his trying to be an author, were the first to acclaim him. This thing had confused Aubrey. He had felt that the public was a curious institution and he had for a few months wondered about it.
People sneered at struggling writers and referred with withering humor to art as "all bunk" and indignantly denounced its immorality. Then when one put oneself over despite their sneers they turned around and congratulated one as if one had done something of which they heartily approved. It was as if they tried to make up for their previous attitude, and for a few months Aubrey cherished a cynical image of the public. It was a great bully that spat and snarled at genius, refusing to recognize it and making it a laughing stock wherever it could. But as soon as genius came through, this same bully of a public turned around and prostrated itself and worshipped blindly at its feet.
Then Aubrey had spent the few months wondering why this was so. But he had become too busy to do much thinking. His publishers were demanding more work--so he let other matters drop. His curiosity had carried him to the brink of an idea and he had somewhat impatiently turned his back on it. He had felt that to think as he was thinking about people who were praising him and buying his books, was to play the part of an ungrateful cad.
The idea that had come dangerously close to Aubrey's consciousness was the curious notion that people resented acclaiming anybody like themselves. The lucky ones who secured their hurrah became in their eyes no longer normal humans but super-persons about whom they were prepared to believe all manner of mythical grandeurs. The more remarkable and more superior people could make out their heroes to be, the less humility they felt in worshipping them. And since their heroes were creatures in whom they recognized a glorification of their own virtues, the more self-flattering it was to increase this glorification. They were able to worship themselves with abandon in the splendors they attributed to their chosen superiors.
Thus when they started they went the limit, heaping honors and honors upon a man until he became a glittering God-like person. The country at the time of Aubrey's ascent was full of such glittering God-like creatures whose names were continually in people's mouths and in their newspapers. The instinct of inferiority demanding, as always, an outlet in the invention of gods, had found a tireless medium for this hocus-pocus in the press. Great reputations were continually springing up--the newspapers like the half-cynical, half-superstitious priests of the totem era busying themselves with creating towering effigies in clay and smearing them with vermillion paints. These gods whom people busily erected and before whom they busily prostrated themselves were, as always, the awesome deities created in their own image.
There had been a crisis in Aubrey's life when he was caught between a desire to be himself and the desire to be a great clay figure with mysterious totems splashed over it. To be himself he had only to write as he vaguely thought he wanted to write. And to be one of the great figures he had merely to write what he definitely knew would win him the respect of others.
The decision, however, had been taken out of his hands. Aubrey's talent had not been of the sort that has for its parents a hatred of society and a derision of its surfaces. He had, indeed, fancied himself for a short time as desiring to adventure among the doubts and iconoclasms which distinguished the literature he had encountered during his college days. But the fancy had proved no more than an egoistic perversion of the true impulse in him. This, it soon developed, was a desire to impress himself upon people as their superior, not their antithesis.
As a result he fell to writing books which carefully avoided the revolt which the dubious spectacle of manners and morality had stirred in him.
He concentrated upon crystalizing his day dreams. He turned out tales of deftly virtuous Cinderellas who provokingly withheld their kisses for three hundred pages; of debonnaire Galahads with hearts of gold who, utilizing the current platitudes as an armor and a weapon, emerged in grandiose triumphs with the stubborn virgins thawing deliriously around their necks. Aubrey's tales were popular at once. They were the technically arranged versions of the rigmarole of secret make-believes that went on in his own as well as other people's heads. People read them and quivered with delight. They were tales which like their own daydreams served as an antidote for the puny, unimpressive realities of their lives. Also they were moral, high-minded tales and thus they served as a vindication of the codes, fears, taboos which contributed the puniness to the realities of their lives.
Aubrey's success increased rapidly as he abandoned altogether the pretence of plumbing souls and gave himself whole-heartedly to the creative pleasantries of plumbing the soap-bubble worlds in whose irridescence people found their compensations. At twenty-nine Aubrey was becoming one of the glittering God-like personages in whose worship the public finds outlet for its inferiority mania and simultaneous concealment therefrom.