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Gargoyles

<h2>13</h2> George Basine was going to see his sister Doris. In the nine years since she had left her mother's home she had become a strange woman to Basine. She had always been strange to him. But now it was as if she were entirely unhuman. He could talk to her without shame of things that were shameful. But there was something more tangible in her presence than the joy of being able to confess things to her. She was practical in her ideas. She gave him hunches for his speeches sometimes and what she said about people and how to make an impression on them was always of value. She understood such things. How, he couldn't determine. It was probably an instinct with her. Basine walked along in the spring afternoon. It was Sunday and he should have stayed home. Henrietta had been angry when he left. Sunday was his day for her and the two children. There were two children now—one a boy of seven, and a girl of five. But he said, "I want to see Doris. She's been feeling rather off lately. And if you don't believe I'm going there, why just call up in an hour. And keep on calling every hour if you want to keep check on me." He was always angry with his wife when he left her. She made him feel that he was doing wrong, although she seldom said anything. But to go away and leave her on Sunday was wrong. But not for the reasons she sometimes hinted at. He knew that she suspected his frequent absences from the house. He accused her of hounding him with her jealousy, and the knowledge of his innocence—he had never been unfaithful during the eight years of their marriage—made him angry. The elation of righteous anger in which he indulged himself on all occasions involving Henrietta, was a ruse which obscured for both himself and his wife the actual reasons of his absences. She bored him to a point of fury. His children and their endless noises and questionings set his nerves on edge. He fled in order to escape his home. But Henrietta hinted that he left her for someone else. And he denied this hotly. And in the excitement which accusation and denial aroused both of them managed to avoid facing the fact that he stayed away for no other reason than to escape the boredom of her presence and discomfort of his home. Basine was careful to avoid this fact. It was incompatable with his ideas. He had become a man of belligerent righteousness. He was slowly emerging as a public figure. As an assistant in the state's attorney's office his political activities were attracting more attention than his legal work. He was in demand as a campaign orator. And the candidates in whose behalf he addressed the public were men, he pointed out with an air of fearlessness, who believed first of all that the home was the cornerstone of civilization. "He is a man worth while," he would declaim, "a capable administrator. But first of all our candidate is like you and me. His heart is centered in his home. The greatest rewards life holds for him are not the offices we are able to bestow on him but the love of his wife and children." Since his marriage which from the first had irritated him and then set his teeth on edge, he had devoted himself seemingly to a public idealization of his own predicament. Nine years had brought changes in Basine. He had grown leaner. His face had sharpened into hawk lines. There was about him at thirty-four, an aristocratic pugnaciousness. Fearlessness was a word which was gradually attaching itself to his name. He was fearless, people said. His lean body and unphysical air contributed to their decision. When he appeared publicly people saw a wiry-bodied man past thirty with an amazing determination about him. His words snapped out, his eyes flashed as he talked. And his talk was usually alive with denunciations. He denounced enemies of the people and ideas that were enemies. During the minor campaigns for aldermen, state's attorney and the judiciary elections in which he had been employed by his party leaders, he had created a slight newspaper stir. The public had quickly sensed in him an interesting character. And then, although he was years working toward this end, he had suddenly leaped forward as a champion of their rights. He had become one of the select group of indomitable Davids striding fearlessly forth to do battle with the Goliaths that threatened. And there were always Goliaths threatening. Insidious Goliaths; shrewd, merciless Goliaths continually on the verge of opening their terrible maws and devouring the rights of the public. Basine was coming forward as a champion consecrated to the slaying of Goliaths. Not only during campaigns, which, of course, was the open season for Goliath-slaying, but between campaigns, behind closed doors where nobody saw, in the bosom of his family. He never removed his armor or rather, never laid aside his holy slingshot. He was always locked in a death struggle with new and unsuspected Goliaths—this wiry, fearless man who was beginning to cry out in the newspapers ... "The enemies of the public must be overthrown. It matters not who they are or in what camp they are. The city must be cleaned up." Following the failure of several private banks in the cosmopolitan district of the city, Basine had leaped forward against this new Goliath. This had been his first major offensive. Private banks were threatening the peace of the public. He had made several speeches before business men's associations denouncing private banks and private bankers. He had declared with utter disregard of personal or political consequences that they were a menace—that they were sharks swimming in the waters of finance—and that he would not rest until the public had been made safe against their predatory, merciless jaws. He was on this Sunday morning in the midst of the fight against private banks. The excitement had started with the failure of a small banking institution on the west side. The newspapers had carried the usual stories of weeping depositors and heartbroken working people whose life-time savings had been swept away in the crash. Basine had overlooked the stories in the papers. Doris had called them to his attention. He had been sitting in her studio.... Here was something worth while. Why didn't he start a campaign against private banks. There was always agitation, but as yet not a big campaign. When he left her the thing had already matured in his mind. He wondered why she had laughed during the discussion of the possibilities of such a campaign. He remembered her saying with a sneer, "That's the sort of thing the crowd eats up. The trouble with you George, is that you haven't learned the trick of frightening the mob. You can't be a leader unless you frighten them first and then leap out to defend them. The menace of private banks is something to frighten them with. Start a crusade." That was it—a crusade. Movements and reforms were all very well. But they were slow work. In order to advance one had to attach oneself to tidal waves. Doris was right about frightening them. Within a week he had launched his attack. He had developed a technique in his public utterances which was becoming more and more unconscious and so more and more convincing. Once determined that a crusade against private banks would be a step in his upward climb, his cynicism in the matter vanished. He investigated the subject thoroughly, filling his mind with statistics. Events played into his hands. A second private bank collapsed at the end of the week and Basine knew that the ground was ready for his crusade. He began not with an attack against the institution of private banks, but shelving the statistics he had carefully mastered, he concentrated upon creating a sense of terror in the public mind. In statements given out to the press and in speeches before business men's associations which were also reported in the newspapers, he pounded on the note of menace. They were a menace. They were something to be afraid of. They jeopardized stability. They were wildcat institutions. It was his first crusade and he waited nervously for the response. The response came after a pause of a week like an answering shout. Down with private banks! A conflagration of headlines flared up. The people were against private banks. Editorials heralded the fact. The newspapers were against private banks. A week ago private banks had been the furthest topic from the public conversation. Now it became a matter of violent discussion. Citizens committees were being formed for the purpose of fighting private banks. Feeling began to run high. Very high. A neighborhood Polish financier who for years had conducted a small banking institution was mobbed on his way to work and rescued from the violence of the crowd, which threatened his life by the arrival of police. This incident was reported by the newspapers as revealing the determination of the men seeking to wipe out the menace of the private bank and also as revealing the unscrupulous power of the men engaged in the private banking business. The growing clamor against the institution resulted naturally in the collapse of two more small banks whose depositors, terrified by reports they themselves were circulating, rushed to withdraw their savings. Basine contemplating the extent of the public indignation felt a pride and a misgiving. He glowed with the thought that he, Basine, had started the thing. His name had from the beginning figured prominently in connection with the growing crusade.... "Basine Denounces Private Banks...." had started it. And then a flood of headlines, "Banking Sharks Prey on poor, says Basine."... And then "Basine Flays Private Bankers at Mass Meeting...." "Private Bank Menace Growing...." He had kept his head during the publicity and, unaccountably, his thought had turned to his sister as the crusade gathered momentum, as the "menace grew." Although alive with a powerful indignation against the enemy, Basine remained mentally aloof in contemplating the situation. His aloofness was not a cynicism but a guide. He studied the fact that the clamor was in the main artificial. The menace of the private bank was a thing that touched less than one per-cent of the population. There were no more than thirty such minor institutions in the city and more than two-thirds of these were as sound as the banks under government supervision. His statistics had revealed this. Nevertheless in some mysterious way the phrase "private bank" had become synonymous with ogre, villainy, menace, calamity. His original denunciations published rather casually by the press had been a species of newspaper feelers. The public had responded. Realizing then that the subject was a live one, the papers had cut loose. The idea of a trusted public institution being a danger and a menace to the community was quick in awaking a sense of alarm. A sense of fear inspired by no facts but by the reiterative rhetoric of the press swept the city. Basine for several days sought futilely to understand the phenomenon of this fear. It seemed almost as if people were filled with constant though innate fear of the things they trusted. A man named Levine whom he had met at Doris' explained it that way. He had listened to the man talk: ... "The reason people turn on their trusted institutions with such fury is simple. When a platitude they have blindly upheld seems about to betray them they fall on it and tear it to pieces. This is because a platitude is kept alive blindly and it must be destroyed blindly. When a platitude commits the offense of becoming obviously, too obviously, a lie or an incipient danger, people are of course overcome with the horrible doubt that all platitudes are lies and dangers. This general suspicion which overcomes them, this wholesale fear or panic which sweeps over them, they let out, of course, on the one platitude. By viciously denouncing the one platitude they manage to assure themselves that all the others are all right. They sort of lose their general terror in an unnatural but specific hysteria. And they always turn themselves into an overfed elephant jumping furiously up and down and trumpeting terribly—at a mouse." Basine carried this explanation away. He allowed it to linger in his mind without thinking of it. He knew that the fear was unwarranted and yet the excitement had taken on the proportions of a public uprising. The editorials of the press became couched more and more in grandiloquent languages, reminiscent of Biblical passages. In fact a religious fervor had entered the clamor. The overthrow of the private bank was a mission of righteousness—an integral part of the higher Christianity of the nation—to say nothing of the dreams of its forefathers. With this growing and exalted anger, a new phenomenon struck Basine. It was the strange myth that had sprung up seemingly overnight of the power of the private banks. He knew from his study of the facts that the private bankers of the city were a handful of haphazard, third rate financiers without prestige in the courts or pull in the politics of the state. Their total holdings represented a slight fraction of the money tied up in the banking business of the city. They had no standing comparable with the standing of the supervised banks. The big interests including the men of power in the city were against them and they were, as a matter of fact, a puny by-product of the city's intricate finance. Yet now they had become an insidiously entrenched monster. Public men of affairs vied with each other in revealing the mysterious power of the private bank. And Basine was left to marvel in silence over the fact that the wilder the public frenzy against private bankers became, the huger and more difficult to overthrow were the private bankers made out to be. His pride as author of the crusade began however to be colored with misgivings. Others had risen to challenge him for the leadership of the movement. Stern, fearless men, as stern and fearless as himself, were offering to sacrifice themselves on the altars of freedom. The altars of freedom, the press explained, were the battleground of the fight against private banks. 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. "You've told me that before," he murmured. "Please calm down." An ecstatic light slowly left her. "Oh yes. Sense," she whispered. "Well, the sense of it is for you to become a symbol of their holiness. Be a leader. Isn't that it. But the private bank crusade has fizzled. I've read the papers closely and outside of the two attacks on the private bankers last week, there've been no great gestures of righteousness. If they'd hamstrung a few hundred private bankers, cut off their heads and burned down their houses, I'd advise you to stick. That's sense isn't it?" Basine, listening to the uncomfortable distortions of his sister, made up his mind. He translated her vicious suggestions into the less inconveniencing idea.... "The biggest part of the work in the fight against the banks has been done already, Doris. And the rest anybody can do." "Yes," she smiled, "if you're going to be of service to the public you must be careful to devote yourself to worthwhile reforms. You always had a clearer way of putting things, George." She despised him. He could feel it now. He looked at her and wondered again. She was beautiful. A complete change had come over her since he'd come in. She seemed warm with emotion, alive, human. But she smiled in an offensive way. He preferred her viciousness. That was impersonal—something queer in her head. This other was a condescension that angered him. He sat thinking; she was playing with him. It would be better if he never saw her. "How is Henrietta?" she asked. The question had long ago became an invitation to confession. He avoided her eyes. "Fanny and Aubrey were over," he answered. She interrupted. "Please don't talk about them." "Oh, nothing in particular," he hastened. "Henrietta is the same as ever." Doris laughed. "An ideal wife for a future public hero," she exclaimed. Basine frowned. "I'd rather you didn't make a joke about such things, Doris." "I'm not joking. But to be a great leader a man must have only one love—the love of being a great leader." "That's wrong," Basine blurted out. "A woman can help a man forward if he loves her and she's clever and loves him." "She can't," Doris said softly. "Because she doesn't want to. If she loves him, she doesn't want him to be great. She may inspire him but just as soon as she sees his inspiration takes him away from her, she turns around and tries to ruin him. So she can have him to herself." Basine listened impatiently. This was a child prattling. Doris was laughing. He looked at her questioningly. Her laughter continued and grew harsh. "You fool," she sighed, controlling herself. "Oh you fool." Basine shook his head. He was serious. There were hidden facts in his mind. He knew something about what a woman might do to help a man forward. These facts seemed to him allies—secret allies, as he contradicted his sister. "I insist you're wrong," he said. He was determined to prove her wrong. But she went on, ignoring his intensity. "Your wife is ideal, George. Colorless, stupid. Dead. Without desires or egoism. An ideal wife for a man of ambition. The kind that will let you alone." "Nonsense. You're utterly wrong," he cried. He must prove to her how utterly wrong she was. There was Ruth. "Men owe most of their success to the impulse the right woman can give them. Henrietta's all right. But she's so damn dead. She's interested in nothing. Just a child with a child's mind and outlook. And she gets more so every year. Good God, if I had somebody with life in her. Keen and ... who loved me. So that I wanted to be great in her eyes. It would be easier. Somebody ... like you, Doris." He paused, confused. "I mean," he added, "your type. The intellectual and female combined." He had long ago told her of his courtship, of the curious way he had tricked himself into matrimony and she had always laughed at his unhappiness and said this—only a fool tricked himself as he had done. Nevertheless his marriage was ideal. "Men instinctively pick out what they need," she would say. "And a man like you needs a nonentity like Henrietta. You wait and see. Your happiness isn't coming from emotion inside but from emotion outside—the noise of praise the public will someday give you." But there were facts now hidden in his head to disprove this. He started as Doris announced casually, "Ruth Davis may drop in this afternoon." They finished their tea. A knock on the door frightened him. The girl! No. Doris called, "Come in," and Levine entered. Basine nodded to him. "I'll have to be going," he said as Levine sat down. He disliked the man. Doris nodded. She appeared to have lost interest in him and, her tea finished, she was sitting back in her chair with her eyes half shut and her hands listless in her lap. Levine was talking quietly.... "You look tired, Doris. Like to go hear Lindstrum lecture tonight? No? Very well. I just dropped in to see if you would. Come on." "No," she frowned at him. "I'm sorry." "Why?" "I think it would be better for you to...." Her eyes shut him off. They were blazing. "Please," she cried. Then with a sigh she turned toward the window. Basine stood up. He pretended a leisureliness, opening a few books and staring with apparent interest at passages in them. Levine and his sister were a strange pair. Doris queer and moody and going into impossible tantrums. And this man with brown negro eyes and a loose-lipped mouth that reeked with sarcasms. There were secrets between them. Nothing wrong, but secrets. He remembered the girl was coming and grew frightened. "Well, good-bye," he said aloud. "And calm down, Doris." He waited uncomfortably for her to say something. But she was silent. He looked at his watch and exclaimed in a surprised, matter-of-fact voice, "Oh my! It's almost four. Good-bye. I must run." He hurried away as if some logical necessity were spurring him on. The make-believe had been unnecessary for Doris had paid no attention to the manner of his departure. Outside he paused and looked up and down the street. He felt relieved. He had left in time. Crossing from an opposite corner was Ruth Davis. He would pretend he hadn't seen her and walk on in an opposite direction. He knew she was watching him as she approached. He was frightened. A sense of suffocation. He desired to run away. She was young. Her eyes had a way of remaining in his thought. When he talked to people, her eyes came before him and looked at him. They asked questions. The last time he had sat with her in his sister's studio he had gone away with a feeling of panic. He was used to women. Invariably he disliked them. They seemed to him variants of his wife. They reminded him of Henrietta and he was able to say to himself, "They look attractive and mysterious. But underneath, they're all alike." He meant they were all like Henrietta. In this way his distaste for his wife had kept him faithful to her because his imagination balked at the idea of embracing another Henrietta. But Ruth Davis after he had met her a few times, always in his sister's presence, had impressed him differently. Perhaps it was because he had always seen her with his sister. In many ways she reminded him of Doris. She was dark like Doris and had many of her mannerisms. He had not thought of her as a variant of Henrietta. Rather as a variant of Doris. He had never tested his immunity to her by imagining an embrace. When he talked to her he grew eager to impress her. He wanted her to understand him, not quite as Doris understood him. She was cynical but not in the way Doris was. Her mind was kindlier. Because he felt frightened now at her approach and a desire to run away without speaking to her, he held himself to the spot. He would get the better of this thing, he told himself quickly, by facing whatever it was and fighting it down. He would overcome the curious effect she had on him by confronting her. In this way, a very high-minded way, he persuaded himself to wait for her and to talk to her. Which was what he wanted to do above everything else. She was pleased. They shook hands. The confusion left him. He was quite master of himself. Her dark eyes were not dangerous like his sister's. She was a bright, pretty girl. "I'm sorry I can't visit with you and Doris," he said. "But I have an engagement." "Oh." She seemed disappointed. Her eyes betrayed almost a hurt. This made him even more master of himself. He had been foolishly worried about the girl. Just a bright, pretty girl and a friend of his sister. "By the way," he said, "you were saying the other day that you'd like a job in the state attorney's office. My secretary's quit. Would you like that?" "Oh, Mr. Basine. That's awfully kind of you. But I ... I don't know shorthand and I suppose that...." "That makes no difference," he smiled tolerantly. "I need somebody able to look after things in general. If you want the job, why come down and see me tomorrow morning about ten and we'll start work." "I'd be delighted," she answered. She was about to say more but he grew curt. "You'll excuse me, won't you. I have to run," he said. "See you at ten tomorrow, eh?" He wanted to make the thing certain because otherwise he would have to hire someone else. "At ten then," he repeated. "If you really want me." "I think you'll get along all right. And I need somebody at once." He walked away with a feeling of mastery. He had overcome the confusion the sight of her had started in him. He was sincerely glad of that. He disliked the idea of entanglements. Politics was a glass house and entanglements were dangerous. Then besides, there was Henrietta. His fidelity to his wife was a habit that had become almost an obsession. His distaste and frequent revulsion toward her made him concentrate excitedly upon the idea of fidelity. By assuring himself of the nobility of faithfulness and of its necessity as a matter of high decency, he vindicated in a measure the fact that he seemed too cowardly to philander. He had felt this cowardliness and was continually trying to distort it into more self-ennobling emotions. This was what made him so excited a champion of domestic felicity, marital fidelity and kindred ideas. He was able to convert himself into a man whose ideals prevented him from succumbing to his lower instincts. Thus instead of feeling ashamed of the cowardliness which kept him from doing what he desired, he felt on the contrary, proud of his capacity for living up to his high ideals, which meant—of doing what he didn't want to do. This cowardliness was an involved emotion. It was inspired by a fear of detection, if he philandered, a fear of physical and social consequences. But more than that and too curious for his thought to unravel, it was inspired by a fear of hurting Henrietta. This fear was the predominant factor in his life. He sought at times to understand it but its understanding eluded him. He had been tempted at times to talk to Doris about it. But as yet it was a confession withheld. The greater his distaste for his wife became and the more the thought of her grew obnoxious, the deeper did this fear of hurting her take form in him. Often when driven to anger by her increasing stupidity he would lie awake at night by her side thinking of her in accidents which might kill her. He would lie awake picturing her brought home dying—and going over in his fancy the details of her death scene. And then as if the thing were too sweet to relinquish, he would go over in his mind the details of the funeral, picturing himself beside the grave weeping, picturing her father and the numerous mourners; giving them words to say and assigning them little parts in the drama of the burial. The thing would become a completely worked out scene—like a careful description in a novel. Then he would picture himself returning home with his children. He would close his eyes and play with the fancy impersonally, as if he were dictating it for writing. Back from the grave with his children.... The house empty of Henrietta. The chair in which she always sat and sewed, empty. And she would never sit there again. The chair would always be empty. At this point his fancy would grow sad. At first the sadness would be as if it were part of the make-believe—as if this fiction figure of himself were mourning the death of his wife. But gradually the sadness would change and become real. It would become a sadness inspired by the thought of her dying ... sometime. Someday she would be dead and he would be alone. And this idea would grow unbearable. Just as it had been deliciously desirable a few minutes before. The sadness that came to him then was no more than a remorse he felt for having in his fancy planned and executed her death. A remorse inspired by his feeling of guilt. But to Basine it seemed a sadness inspired by some inner love for his wife. It would surprise him, that there was an inner love, and he would lie and think, "Oh, I don't want her dead. I love her. Poor, dear Henrietta." And he would reach over and caress her tenderly, tears filling his eyes. It was at such moments while doing penance for the imaginative murder of his wife, that a physical passion for her would come to him. His caresses would grow warmer and in the possession of her which followed, he would be able to blot out of his memory the unbearable self-accusation aroused by his desire for her death. Thus his fear of hurting her, even of contradicting her in any way which would make her unhappy, was a device which guarded him against contemplating the impulse concealed in him—to get rid of her even by murdering her. His fidelity to his wife, inspired more by this fear of hurting her than by the social cowardice which involved the idea of detection, had become a fetish with him. The less he desired her and the more repugnant she grew for him, the more desperately he defended to himself and to others the virtues of marital faithfulness. He had advanced in eight years into an intolerant champion of morality. Even his political orations bristled with panegyrics on the sanctity of the home and the high duty men owed their wives. The thing repeated itself over and over in his day, haunted his night and filtered through all his public and private actions. It had formed the basis of a new Basine—the moral champion. It had colored his ambitions and determined his direction of thought. It hammered—a hidden psychological refrain through the fibers of his thought.... In order to reconcile himself to the distasteful role he had foisted upon himself by accidentally embracing Henrietta in his mother's kitchen nine years ago, he must eulogize his predicament and convince himself and others that all deviations were a vicious and dishonorable matter. Held by neither love nor desire to the side of a woman he had tricked himself into marrying, he managed to bind himself to her by the stern worship of a code which proclaimed fidelity the highest manifestation of the soul. As he walked toward a street car he was proud of his self-conquest. He was thinking about the girl, Ruth. He had taken himself in hand and overcome the dangerous confusion that the sight of her started. His sense of honor preened itself on the victory. That was the way to handle oneself—always face the facts. It was better than hiding one's head in the sand. Look, it had happened this way. By being matter-of-fact, by converting the girl from a luring, enigmatic figure into an employee, he had established an immunity in himself. Was he certain of this? Yes, she would be merely another of the young women employed in his office. And he was in love with none of them. Or even interested. So their relation would be that of employee and employer. Which was harmless and honorable. He walked along, piling up assurances. As he entered the car he was going over in his mind with an imaginative eagerness the details of the situation he had created. He would be very stern, aloof. He would acquaint her with his secret files and gradually educate her into an efficient assistant. She was a university girl. Of course her running around with freaks, the way she did—artists and talky women, was a handicap. But she would get over that and become entirely sensible. It was a pleasant day dream that wiled away the tedium of the ride home. An unaccountable happiness played around the fancies in his mind. He gave himself to its warmth with a certain defiance—as if he were denying unbidden doubts underlying his dreams. He had hired Ruth Davis in order that he might be near her. And underlying the enthusiastic assurances which he crowded into his mind as a stop gap for the elation this fact inspired, was the knowledge that, as his secretary, she would come to perceive what a great man he was. His files, his secret memoranda, his intricate activities all of which she would come to know as his private secretary—would be a boast. Yes, his very curtness, sternness, preoccupation would all be part of this boast. She would see him as a man of importance, a man of rising power. He would have to ignore her in order to confer with well-known men-politicians, police officials, party leaders. And this ignoring of her would be a boast—all a boast of his prestige and of the fact that he was a man of fascinating activities and that these activities made it impossible for him to devote himself as other lesser men might, to paying her any attention. Yes, the thought of her being in his office where he might look at her, but more especially where she might look at him—for he did not intend to pay any attention to her—thrilled him. And gradually the cause of his elation protruded and he was forced to face it. He alighted from the car thinking as he walked toward his apartment. "I'll have to be careful though. I don't want her to fall in love. That would be embarassing. Girls are susceptible. I'll not encourage her in anything like that. Be businesslike and aloof. Treat her absolutely as a stranger." This idea thrilled him further. It would be sweet to ignore her, even to be strict with her and carping at times, to scold for some error. Yes, that was the right way to handle the situation. And he walked on with a childish smile over his face. He had determined upon a high-minded course which absolved him from all blame in anything that might happen. Aloofness, sternness. Now that they were going to be together every day, he already looked upon her position as his secretary as an inevitable predicament not brought on by any action of his; now that they were to be that close, he would rigorously observe all the conventions. At the same time he was inwardly aware that such a course as he had mapped for himself would unquestionably have a certain effect upon the girl. It must. It would cause her to respect and admire him and finally to fall in love with him. Tremendously in love since there would be no outlet for her passion. Oh yes, that would certainly happen. But it wouldn't be his fault and nothing would come of it. Because he would remain sternly aloof. The thought of being worshipped from afar, of being looked upon all day by eyes that adored him, brought an excitement into his step. And he ran up the stairs to his apartment. He was eager to enter his home and greet his wife. She had become suddenly a tolerable person, one whose presence he might even enjoy. He felt happy and he wanted her to share his happiness. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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