Читать книгу Gargoyles - Ben Hecht - Страница 4

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The death of Howard Basine had precipitated a creditable outburst of grief on the part of his widow and two daughters. The event had brought his son George home from college.

They had shared a bed for twenty-six years, Basine père and Basine mère, achieving an utter disregard of each other which both took pride in identifying as domestic happiness. In their youth love had brought them together while comparative strangers. And after twenty-six years death had parted them still strangers. But now complete and total strangers—Siamese twins who had never been introduced to each other.

Each had grown old by the side of the other, subscribing to the same thoughts, worries, ambitions. It was as if a thin shell had grown around each of them. This shell was their home, their mutual interest in bank balances, diversions and tomorrows. It was the product of their practical energies—their standing in the eyes of their friends, their success and their solidity as a social unit. It was their pride in new rugs, in invitations to functions, in their children.

There were two shells. One was Basine père. One was Basine mère. For twenty-six years these two shells cohabited together. But inside each of them there had been a world of things that had never connected and that remained forever part of a mutually preserved secret. Little daydreams, absurdities, the swaggering, pensive, impractical rigmarole of thought-life to which the world of reality—the shell-world—had remained almost to the last no more than a vaguely sensed exterior.

Each of them had lived almost continually apart from this shell. They had given but a fraction of their energies toward its creation. It had required only a little part of themselves to become two placidly successful conventionally happy people with a home and family. The rest of themselves they had allowed to evaporate.

A pleasing process—evaporation. Dreams, ambitions, longings—all these had evaporated slowly and secretively during the twenty-six years, vanished into thin air. And each had been preoccupied with this process of evaporation. It had been their real life—the life which diverted them and which they mutually concealed from each other as they sat together reading of evenings, or rode in cars or waited in offices or lay in bed.

Here in this real life were success and beauty and marvelous activities. Here Basine père planned Herculean enterprise and triumphed with magnificent gestures, became a leader of finance, of armies; became a lover of queens and odalisques. Caressing from day to day phantasms which had no existence, it was in them that he chiefly existed. He confined himself not only to illusions of grandeur. There were also little things, charming minor victories which delighted his ego almost as much as the greater ones. He was able to trick out the minor victories with the illusion of reality. They were things that might happen, that one could dream about almost as actually happening. Things that he fancied people might be saying about him; admissions that he fancied people might make to him; dreams that he fancied he inspired in women who passed him and whom he never saw again.

This illusory existence preoccupying Basine had fitted him ideally for the companionship of orderly, placid-minded folk preoccupied like himself with similar processes of evaporation. These folk were his friends with whom he went to the theater, played cards, transacted business, discussed issues. They were known as normal, practical persons. The vast, illusory worlds in which they lived during the greater part of their hours in no way encroached upon the realities of their day.

They were proud of having a grip on themselves, by which they meant of being able to allow their energies to evaporate secretively instead of feeling inspired to harness them to realities and run the risk of being hoisted body and soul out of their shells into a maelstrom of uncertainties and hullabaloos. In order to rationalize the disparity between their actual estates and the fantastic estates of their illusory lives, they devoted a part of their energies to the practical business of glorifying their shells. They subscribed with indignation, sometimes with fanaticism, to all social, spiritual and political ideas which had for their objective the glorification of their shells. They became champions of systems of thought and conduct which excused on one hand and deified on the other their devitalized modes of existence.

In fact as they grew older they developed a curious egoism which took the form of a pride in their suppressions. They thought of themselves as men who had achieved a superior sanity. This sanity lay in being able to recognize the real from the unreal. The real was their shell. The unreal consisted of the fantasies produced by the process of evaporation. This sanity, too, enabled them to regard their imaginings and dreamings with an amused condescension and to mature into unruffled effigies—practical, hard-headed business men.

The evaporation, however, influenced them in one vital respect. It effected what they called their taste in the arts. They desired things they read or listened to in the theater to be authentic interpretations not of the realities about them but of the illusions in which they secretly exhausted themselves. They desired the heroes and heroines of literature and drama to be like the creatures and excitements of the soap-bubble worlds bursting conveniently about their hard heads. And so in their reading and theater going they enjoyed only those things which afforded a few hours of vicarious reality to the grotesqueries, to the fairy tale expansions of their departing dreams.

During the last years of his life Basine had experienced the fullest rewards of a virtuous, practical life. At fifty he had become empty. The rigmarole of day dreams grew vaguer and finally ceased. He had become bored with his grandiose and illusory selves. Don Juan, Napoleon, Croesus, no longer wore the features of Basine. There was no longer any thrill in idly decorating his tomorrows with kaleidoscopic make-believes.

There was no great tragedy in this. He was bored with his imagination because he had run through the repertoire of his fancies too often and so, slowly, his days grew more and more void of unrealities. Slowly also he turned to the tangible things around him. He contemplated proudly the details of his shell. It was a comforting shell. It fitted him snugly. It consisted of his friends, his home, his children, his borrowed ideas, his wife.

No outward change was to be noticed in Basine père when this happened. There was nothing to say that the process of evaporation had ended and that there was left an animate husk called Howard Basine; a husk that did not mourn at the knowledge of its emptiness but that accepted instead with piety and gratitude the presence of other husks, pleased and warmed to move among their empty companionships.

It was at this time that Basine proudly felt himself a worthwhile member of society and grew to smile with tolerant disdain upon all persons who busied themselves with the illusions he had overcome by the simple process of denying them life. He called them fools, scoundrels, lunatics and dreamers and he agreed with his friends that they were creatures engaged in filling the world with discomfort and error. His dislike for them did not make him unhappy for he was content in the flattering knowledge that most people, everybody he knew and whose opinion he valued, were like himself. His thoughts were nearly everybody's thoughts and his life was like everybody's life. There was a sense of strength, even satisfaction in this. He relapsed gracefully into a quiet emptiness out of which he was able to derive final embalming fluid for his vanity by pitying the distractions and unrest of others.

Then he died. The sight of her husband lying under the glass of the coffin had reminded Mrs. Basine of the curious fact that in their youth love had brought them together. A memory burrowed its way from under the débris of twenty-six years and confronted her. A memory of wild nights, flushed cheeks, shining eyes, hope and careless words. And the dim yesterday, the long-forgotten yesterday that lay in the coffin with the paunchy figure of the bald-headed silk-merchant became suddenly real again.

When she was alone that night Mrs. Basine wept miserably for a love that had died twenty-five years ago and lain buried and unmourned under the débris of these years. A tardy exhibition of grief, sincere but enfeebled by its own age, it spent itself in a few hours. The tears for the memory of vanished youth and vanished love of which the body waiting in the coffin had become for a space of grotesque symbol, were followed by the inarticulate sense of an anti-climax.

Howard Basine's dying was somehow not a tragedy to the woman who had lived with him for twenty-six years. When she had wept at first, the idea of death came like a panic to her heart. Things had died. Days, nights, hopes had died. But she had been unaware of their dying. The figure of her husband leaving for his day's work, returning from his day's work, sitting at the head of the table, retiring to bed with her—this had been a mask behind which the dying of things remained concealed.

Now that he had closed his eyes and vanished it was as if a mask had been removed. One could see all at once all the things that had died. And she saw not only Howard lying dead, but most of herself. In her mind she had no memory of the illusory selves she had lived, like her husband, alone. These illusory selves whose successes and romances she had caressed in secret had of late abandoned her. Like her husband she had turned to the shells they had created about themselves as the comforting reward of her life's negation.

Now it struck her that these shells were full of dead things. While he lived they had seemed alive. The fact that the man with whom she had survived twenty-six years continued to talk and to move had given her the vague feeling that these years were also still alive, still existent somewhere. Now the man was dead and the years were dead with him. They had been dead all the while but they had not lain in a coffin for one to look at like this.

Dead years. And she, a survivor. Her sense of contact with the past deserted her. She was alone. Everything that had been was no more and it seemed during her grief as if it had never existed.

She lay and wept, feeling that something had been terribly wasted. Once there had been youth. Now there was age. She had already lived but how, where? Look, she was already old but how had it happened? She who could remember so many things about youth—her pretty face, her careless hopes, bright, happy excitements; and most of all, the feeling that things lay ahead—that a store of mysterious things waited for her—she who could remember it so plainly was an old woman. It had seemed natural before he died but now it seemed unnatural. She would die soon, too. Her youth—something she thought of as youth, arose and stretched out far-away arms to her. It came to her in the night and stood smiling at her like a ghost of herself. Yes, she was already dead and she could lie in bed weeping for her husband and staring with tired eyes at memories. Thoughts did not disturb her. Her emotions, grown too involved for the shallows of her mind, gave her the consciousness merely of a panic.

But the panic left. It receded slowly and the death of her husband stirred in her during the first weeks of mourning a gentle affection for the man. She closeted herself with the memories that had terrified her—sensual memories of an impetuous lover, an idealization of a long-forgotten Howard. And her sorrow became like a vague honeymoon shared with slowly dissolving erotic shadows.

This too went. As it went away the widow became curiously younger in her features, her black clothes, her mannerisms. She grew to find the loneliness of her bed desirable. She would snuggle kittenishly between the empty sheets, an unintelligible sense of immorality—as if it were immoral to sleep alone—lending a luxury to her weariness.

Yes, it was somehow nicer to sleep alone, to have the bedroom all to herself. In her mind things that were different from the routine of her life and that belonged to the secret imaginings that had once filled her days were immoral. And this was different—being alone. So her living on without her husband became an odd sort of infidelity, pleasant, diverting.

The year and a half passed bringing a rejuvenation to her body. Her youth and its decline were buried in a coffin. Now at fifty-two she was living again and creating out of the remains of her figure, coiffure and complexion a new youth—at least a new exterior.

The dreams of her earlier days returned to her and she no longer found it necessary to deny them all reality. It had been necessary before in order to keep herself fitted into the shell. And as a result her dreams, denied any possibility of realization, had become like his, more and more fantastic, more and more warmly improbable. Now there was no need for a shell. There was no need to preserve an easily recognizable and never failing characterization. She had done that before so as to avoid confusing her husband and herself and she had been rewarded by a similar ruse employed by him.

Now that he was gone she found herself changing. She found herself approaching the romantic conception of herself. And since she was able to carry into reality her rejuvenated fancies, to devote herself to looking stunning, to making a somewhat exotic impression upon people, to arousing interest—her imaginings did not expand as before into distorted and improbable pictures. She began to busy herself, to actively give them outlet, to have time or surplus energies for the evolution of fancies beyond her.

She had no plans for the future and she was not interested in any. An amazing fact had come into her life—the present. She abandoned herself to it. She had harnessed what was left of the energies allowed so long to evaporate and the process of evaporation was at an end. She would become, if there was time, a keenly alive, egoistic woman gorging herself upon the desserts remaining at the banquet board before which she had sat for twenty-six years with closed eyes and listless hands.

She felt these things only dimly. There was a freedom to life, like a new taste in her senses. Of this she was confusedly aware. And her sorrow for her dead husband became a pleasant thing, a thing inseparable from the gratitude she unknowingly felt for the new existence his death had given her.

She referred to him with a pensively magnanimous air, inventing perfections in his character and endowing his departed intelligence with a wisdom far beyond her own. This enabled her to utilize his memory in an odd way. When she argued with her friends or children, when she was doubtful concerning the extravagance or selfishness of her actions, or the newly born radicalism of her views, she would quote mercilessly from her dead husband. The fact that he was dead lent a sanctity to whatever views he may have held. Not in her own eyes but, as she shrewdly sensed, in the eyes of others. And she grew to play unscrupulously upon this thing she perceived in her children and friends—that they respected the words and opinions of a dead man infinitely more than those of one alive.

Thus she was able to indulge herself in ways which would have astounded and perhaps horrified the departed Basine and to bring her immediate circle to accept these ways as conventionally desirable by making her dead husband their spiritual sponsor. Her friends chafed under this ruse, but felt themselves powerless to combat it. They were men and women who lived on the opinions of the dead, who subscribed fanatically to all ideas sanctified by the length of their interment. Themselves, they practised the ruse of editing the wisdoms of the past as well as prophecies of the future into vindications of the present. They felt indignant but powerless before the treachery of Mrs. Basine, who raided the mausoleum for private articles of faith.

Mrs. Basine was aware at first of lying but this feeling gave way to a conviction that if her husband had not thought and said the things she attributed to him while he was alive he would have done so had he continued to live.

"Because," she said to herself, "we were always alike and thought and said the same things always."

Her son George was proud of his mother but inclined to be dubious about the change that had come over her. He was irritated particularly one evening to hear his mother advocate equal suffrage rights for women to a group of surprised friends gathered at their home.

"I think such ideas foolish and dangerous," George explained politely.

"Why?" his mother inquired.

Basine shook his head. He had given the subject no thought. But a militant defense of the status quo inspired him always with a comfortable feeling of rectitude.

"I see no reason," pursued Mrs. Basine, "why women shouldn't vote as well as men. I remember your father was very much interested in the issue of women's suffrage. He said the day would come when women voted shoulder to shoulder with men and that the country would be improved by it."

Basine stared at his mother. He had grown to realize that she had discovered the trick of lending weight and irrefutable wisdoms to her own notions by surrounding them with the sanctity of death. For it was almost impossible to fly in the face of a quotation from his father. The fact that the man was dead seemed to make contradiction of any ideas or prophecies attributed to him a sacrilege. There was also the fact becoming daily more obvious that his mother was turning into an unscrupulous administrator of the dead man's opinions.

"I never heard father say anything of the kind," he exclaimed suddenly. And then feeling that a loss of temper was the only way in which he could cover the affront he had offered his mother, he added with indignation, "You keep backing up your arguments by dragging dad's corpse into them all the time."

Mrs. Basine looked at him in amazement, and he reddened. He apologized quickly. Mrs. Basine, shocked by her son's unexpected penetration, bit her lip and became silent. She let the argument pass, not without observing that her friends present appeared for a moment to rally around her son's exposè—as if he had given words to their own attitude. She decided when she was alone again to be more careful. She loved her son and felt a dread of sacrificing his respect. There was a dread also of sacrificing the respect of these others who had looked at her for a moment with an accusing understanding.

There had been present a Mrs. Gilchrist, an old creature of oracular senilities whom she had grown secretly to detest. But the detestation she felt was accompanied by a vivid desire to keep in with the woman. Mrs. Gilchrist was a person of position, decided position. Her son Aubrey was a novelist. This alone endowed the Gilchrist tribe with an aura of culture. They lived in Evanston and were active, mother and son, in the social life of the town.

Mrs. Basine was unable as yet to determine the reasons that made her dislike her. In her secret mind she called Mrs. Gilchrist a domineering old fool. But she stopped with that. There was the Gilchrist social position.

Society had always interested Mrs. Basine. But since her widowhood this interest had become active. She had read the society columns of the newspapers regularly and through the twenty-six years of her married life retained the singular idea that the people whose names appeared in these columns belonged to a closely knit organization similar to the Masons—only of course, infinitely superior.

The appearance of a new name among the list of socially known always stirred an indignation in her. She was not a bounder herself. The closely knit organization whose members poured tea, gave bazaars, occupied boxes at the theater had been, in her mind, a fixed and invulnerable institution neither to be taken by storm nor won by strategy. Thus she had excused her lack of social ambition and success by investing Society with an almost magical aloofness, a sort of superhuman cotorie of tea pourers and benefit givers that kept itself intact and beyond intrusion by the exercise of incredible diligence.

Among her day dreams during these years had been those of magnificent social successes, of long newspaper articles describing with awe her splendor and prestige. But in reality she would as soon have thought of breaking into society as of attacking twelve policemen with a carving knife. She resented therefore the appearance of new names in the society columns.

"Bounders," she would murmur to herself, half expecting that the Organization into which they had bounded would issue some outraged and withering excommunication upon the new tea pourer. But the name would appear again and again and after such innumerable appearances Mrs. Basine would automatically accept its presence within the Organization and rally quixotically to its defense against the other bounders struggling to invade the sanctity it had achieved.

And although during this period of her life Mrs. Basine had felt none of the low instincts which inspired the bounders to bound, she had endeavored to the best of her abilities to mimic as much as a humble outsider could the spiritual elegancies which distinguished the Organization. She succeeded in creating a formal atmosphere about her home, a dignity about her table of which she was modestly proud. She had felt in secret that any member of the Organization entering her house—an event of which she dreamed as a waveringly sophisticated child might dream of a fairy's visit—would have experienced no dismay.

Now this attitude which had characterized her married life was changing. Society was no longer an impregnable Organization. Mrs. Basine was, in fact, engaged determinedly upon its conquest and her attitude toward the detestable Mrs. Gilchrist was colored by that fact. An acquaintanceship with the Gilchrists had been achieved through manœuverings of her daughters as workers in charity bazaars managed by the woman.

Until the death of her husband Mrs. Basine had ignored her two daughters. A proprietory feeling in them which exhausted itself in dictating the surface details of their lives had been the extent of her interest. She had presumed during their childhood and adolescence that they were Basines—and nothing else. This had guided her parenthood. Being Basines, they must conform to Basinism which meant that they must be like their mother or their father and she struggled carelessly to see that their youth did not assert itself in ways inimical to her own characterization. Doris the younger was inclined to be beautiful. Fanny, however, had always seemed to her a more substantial person.

But her widowhood had brought a belated curiosity concerning these young women. She wondered at times what their dreams were. She understood that they were strangers and this began to interest her. She was proud of them and although undemonstrative would sometimes put her arms around both of them as they walked to a neighbor's after dinner.

They did not inspire the pride in her, however, that her son did. George had finished his law and she felt as she listened to him talk or watched his face at the table that he was somebody. There was an assurance and health about him. His keen-featured face, the straight black hair parted in the center, the movements of his lithe body, always quick and definite—and particularly his hands—these made her think of him vaguely as an artist, somebody different. She knew in her heart that although he seemed to differ in his ideas from none of their friends, he was not like other young men.