Chapter V: Book FOUR: Cornelia and Dionysus (1)

I

ENNUI IN THE PROVINCES

The smooth order of Cornelia’s life was interrupted on New Year’s Eve by a distressing occurrence which I—which all of us who possess a rudimentary sense of tact—insist on calling an accident. It was not the sort of thing that I had ever thought of as likely to intrude upon the felicity of that household. My own convulsive unuttered response to the shock was: “That it should have happened to them!” But as it, or something very like it, actually happens every day,—once, twice, three times a day all through the year in every big city,—there was really no reason for assuming that they would remain indefinitely immune. The circumstance which seemed at the moment to point the accident with a piercing significance, a chilling personal meaning for us, was, I suppose, the mere coincidence that we were arguing in the abstract about just such occurrences when the brutal reality of the thing burst in among us with the effrontery of a bandit in a Pullman car. Of course it admits of the natural explanation which I shall give, leading up to the mishap in the order of my own approach.

Cornelia spends the winter months in the city, in a desirable apartment near the lower end of the Park—an apartment so spacious and so desirable that an old New Yorker once amused himself at my small-town ideas by asking me to guess the annual rental. As her children, Dorothy and Oliver Junior,—the centre of her summer solicitude,—are at their preparatory schools except during the holidays, she devotes this season to her women friends, to her husband, and to her husband’s friends. I group in this way the people whom she entertains, first, because she has no men friends who are not her husband’s friends, and, second, because her husband has an endless string of interesting official and unofficial personages whom he gets up—or brings up—from Washington for conferences or for exhibitionary or other mysterious diplomatic purposes.

As an ancient admirer—to put it discreetly—who has sunk through the incalculable accidents of life to the level of an educational counselor or referee, I confess that I find Cornelia just a shade more perfectly herself in the country, where she is comparatively alone with the children and nature and her books, than in the city, where, on my occasional expeditions, I see her but seldom and then usually so beset with husband, friends, and personages that there is little opportunity for the long educational tête-à-têtes of the summer. Of these conversations, be it admitted once for all, the secret excitement is in listening for the occasional lilt of Cornelia’s lyric youth amid the finished certainty and assurance of her later manner. Her own mature authoritativeness I can deal with in a fashion and even relish; but in the winter, in the daily proximity of her husband, she has an intolerable habit of throwing out flying buttresses, of quoting Oliver—“Oliver says,” and so forth—as if she were referring a country lawyer to a decision of the Supreme Court. It is a little painful.

Still, in the winter holidays I like to call on the two of them in their own characteristic setting, for a variety of reasons which will be obvious enough to all those provincials who spend the gray season quietly sitting in silent, snowbound prairie towns and villages, dreaming, like waifs in a Scandinavian fairy tale, of the bright commotion of crowded streets and thronged foyers and Duse and Pavlowa and grand opera and Conrad and Lloyd George and Swinnerton and windows full of new books and golden gowns and cut flowers. I remember once remarking to them, after they had taken me into one of their theatre parties in the grand style: “Art for the upper classes; morality for men of moderate incomes; religion for the poor.” “No”; retorted Oliver, with his instantaneous eye for the weak spot in my armor: “Art for the cities; morality for the towns; religion for the villages.”

We provincials are, it is true, fairly well disciplined to the stoic “apathy”—a kind of cultivated hardening of the heart towards everything beyond the reach of our hands and the range of our eyes. Through month after month the rosy knuckles of temptation may knock on our hardened hearts in vain. But recent investigation proves that under constant percussion and strain the hardest substances yield: steel girders buckle, flywheels burst, and bridges wear out and give way to a malady known to science as “the fatigue of metals.” An analogous malady, attacking even the most firmly tempered of hearts, accounts for the popularity of Charles Lamb’s “moral holiday,” that excursion from the moral macadam which nowadays we call a detour. It explains, too, in my own case, the sharp nostalgia for the city which afflicts me annually on the depressing morning after Christmas. On that spiritless day-after, I feel like a camel that has ruminated on its last cud and can no longer batten on the desert and the west wind. I feel like a wretched silkworm in a glass jar, which will swiftly perish of inanition if not supplied with fresh mulberry leaves. That explains why I pack my bag and, by the first Limited train, creep to the city, under the pretext of reading a paper before one of the learned associations.

What I am coming to is the rather curious fact that the attraction of Cornelia’s winter establishment is perhaps due less directly to her than to her husband, and to the refreshing and—for me—delightfully relaxing air of worldliness which circulates around him. Cornelia wonderfully incarnates the Eternal Feminine, which is supposed to draw us upward. But in the interim between Christmas and the New Year’s Resolutions one doesn’t desire to be drawn upward. All one wants is to escape from ennui and suffocation. In the colloquial idiom of our section, one “wants out.” And Oliver, in the negligee of old acquaintance, is a most agreeable, realistic, and sometimes rather witty Mephistopheles, letting one out of conventional and cloistral habits of thought, and leading one by sharp detours into the heart of things as they are. Clearly, I don’t dislike Oliver: I envy him, and, like his other familiars, call him “Excellency,” a title which I believe few persons except the Governor of Massachusetts have any right to use officially. Nor do I think that Oliver really dislikes me: he pities me, and calls me “Professor,” a title which he has also conferred, in my presence, upon the learned Greek who polishes his shoes. I tell him that both the Greek and I have a better right to our titles than he, for Oliver is now writing his reminiscences of the war, and has at present no official Washington connection whatever, busy as he seems to be there.

I envy him the variety of his life, the interest and importance of his personal relations, his position inside the façade of public affairs, his understanding of the huge subterranean dynamos which operate the puppet-show of politics, his familiarity with the little hairsprings which govern the dynamos, his chatter of Wall Street and the Departments and the Legations, and his inexhaustible stock of unpublished anecdote. In public he has had the reputation of a strong team-worker, a sound administrative man; and in the newspapers he passes as a champion of the common people, friend of the farmer and the laboring man, and the rest.

But twenty-five years of more or less public life have not stereotyped his mind. In private, indiscretions bubble from him like water from a spring. He utters the most profane and contemptuous condemnation of major enterprises of his party. In a friendly circle he will even repudiate, with perfect recklessness, the “asininities” to which he has been constrained by various public considerations to subscribe. I twit him on the essential duplicity of the official character. I call him what he seems to my academic sense to be—“a tough little Yankee crab apple, coated with the wax of European diplomacy”; “a hard-shelled individualist steeped in Nietzschean philosophy and merely dipped in democratic shellac.” I insist that there is no more milk in him than there is in a billiard ball; and that he values the plain people as a professional golf-player values his caddies.

In revenge, Oliver blandly replies: “The only trouble with you professors is that you know absolutely nothing about life”—a charge which I always admit; and then pump him for information. He responds with the—I think—sincere conviction, shared by many Eastern statesmen, that we Mid-Westerners are of an unsubjugated alien race, ominously multiplying within the borders of the otherwise United States, and mainly occupied with the propagation of miscellaneous fanaticisms. He has not yet forgiven me “the pacifism of the Mississippi Valley when the seaboard was aflame.” He ascribes to me the “bolshevism” of North Dakota, and is always inquiring solicitously: “By the way, how did you come out with your investments in the Dakota bonds?” Sometimes he pretends that, as I am from “Puritan Kansas,” I may have scruples against breakfasting with them “on the Sabbath”; if I accept, he turns to Cornelia and gravely warns her not to forget “the Nebraskan’s grape-juice.” Or he will ask my permission to light a cigarette, remarking, “As you are from Utah, I feared it might be offensive to you.” His mocking compassion is often excited by my provincial residence and by my profession. I don’t mind his designating me as “Pascal,” nor his reference to my correspondence with Cornelia as _Les lettres provinciales_. But, in one of his sharper moods, I remember his saluting me as “Calpurnia.” I asked him to enlarge a little on the idea. “Oh, it’s nothing,” he replied, “only I hear that nowadays they are dismissing all the men from university faculties and manning them with Cæsar’s wives—with persons ‘above suspicion.’ I always think of you professors as Cæsar’s wives.”

Cæsar’s wives? Oliver’s immediate implication, I suppose, was merely that the public expects on the part of instructors of youth a quasi-priestly character, a many-sided and inhuman exemplariness of opinion and conduct such as neither the youth in our charge nor their parents require of themselves. But Oliver meant more than that. He meant to suggest the absurdity to the realistic mind—the practical invalidity—of the entire professional and schoolmasterly point of view, and the Utopian insubstantiality of our ethical and social vision. Cæsar’s wives! The sting of that quip, which he planted in me last summer, was still rankling a bit on a gray hungry morning a few days after Christmas, the poison of it being its truth; and a doubt was stealing insidiously into my mind, like the snake into the Garden of Eden, whether perhaps the influence of the secular priesthood over the democracy might not be greater if the priesthood abandoned its attempts to appear so supremely untouched by the gross human infirmities of the democracy, when I received a note from Cornelia, and, half an hour later, a telegram from Oliver. Like all government officials and even private citizens who have much breathed the air of official Washington, Oliver scorns the post office, even for personal correspondence. For brevity’s sake, I give the telegram:—

CORNELIA NOTICES YOU SPEAK HERE SATURDAY STOP DINE WITH US MONDAY
AT EIGHT THIRTY STOP NOBODY ELSE BUT YOUR NOVELIST FRIEND VERNON
WILLYS STOP WATCH THE YEAR OUT DISCUSS FUNDAMENTALISM AND BURY
BACCHUS STOP SEMIOFFICIAL STOP WE WANT MIDWESTERN POINT OF VIEW
STOP REGARD AS IMPERATIVE

I packed my old suit into my old suit-case, slipped into my inside pocket the old club-paper which was to pay my expenses, snatched a book of Gilbert Murray’s to read on the train, and crept slowly eastward on the Limited. My diary shows that my occupations during my first forty-eight hours in the city were about as follows:—

Read my paper, “A Much Higher Education,” before the Saturday Afternoon Club. Cornelia was present and I spoke with her for two minutes afterward. Saw _Cyrano_ Saturday night and college friends in the stockbroking business for three hours following. Slept Sunday morning till cathedral service. Lunched with a poet in the baking-powder business who read me his free verse on an affair between a Jewess and a Chinese laundryman. Spent the afternoon looking at the pseudo-Rembrandts in the Metropolitan, and the evening at a concert. Saw journalistic friends downtown Monday morning. Afternoon; at rehearsal of a Little Theatre play called “Self-Realization”—lively. Publishing friend at his club till six: showed me manuscript of “Petronius Enamored” and put his collection of suppressed novels at my disposal. Walked in Riverside Park till seven, then went to hotel and dressed for dinner. As I was leaving for the West on the 2.37 in the morning, I packed my bag, and checked out. Oliver and Willys might want to talk till daybreak.

II

NEW YEAR’S EVE IN NEW YORK

Mulberry leaves! These details I include in order to indicate briefly how I reduced the unmannerliness of my provincial appetite before I put in my appearance at Oliver’s, and, leaving my bag at the office, went up one flight to their apartment. I don’t like to seem too eager.

As I stepped into the clear soft blueness of the candlelit apartment, Cornelia rose, a silvery shimmer, from the settee where she had been chatting with Oliver Junior, and, approaching with Artemisian stride, greeted me with her finished graciousness. The artistic perfection of it might subtly pain a sensitive heart, were it not for the intimate reassurance imparted by the rippling overtones of her voice, which resolves art into intoxication and curiously persuades a man in evening dress, in the heart of the city, that he is standing in the midst of a garden full of flowers. I muse.

Cornelia swiftly explained that Oliver Junior, though festively attired, would not dine with us. That spirited and well-groomed youth would, in a few minutes, drive his sister and two of their friends to a young people’s party in Scarborough. After I had asked him a few banal questions about his school, a topic which did not appear greatly to “intrigue” him, he edged into the adjoining room and diddled with the piano till his sister Dorothy skipped in, looking like an adolescent Bacchante,—she is a little over seventeen,—and they disappeared together.

Cornelia in the meantime had also explained that Oliver Senior was in the library with Vernon Willys. “I don’t like him much,” she added, “in fact, I think him rather horrid. He is very happy to-night over his separation from his wife. He could hardly wait to get inside the door to tell us about it. But I believe you have discovered something precious in his books, and Oliver seems infatuated with him. They have been running around together all the fall. He is doing a political novel now, and I accuse Oliver of sitting for the portrait of the hero. But here they are.”

The two men came in from the library with red buds in their buttonholes. Oliver as usual saluted me with a volley of questions, which he gave me no time to answer, and with an animating smile, in which I always feel a slightly satirical edge. Willys, whom I had met once or twice before, nipped my arm, smacked his lips, and murmured with a communicative flicker in his eyes that I must be sure to see His Excellency’s library before I left. As we moved toward the dining-room, Oliver’s quick fire continued: “Did you get my telegram? Get the point about Bacchus? I’m feeling the pulse of the country on this prohibition business. Willys here has convictions, I find—just as many convictions as you have, but different. I got you two together in the hope of hearing you beat each other’s brains out. I hope you’ll do it in good style. Give him the Mid-Western gospel. I’ll hold the coats. I’ve arranged the proper setting. But be human, Professor! Be human—just for to-night!”

It is not my intention to describe the dinner in detail. The excellence of a dinner _à quatre_, for any but a quartet of gourmands, is merely to provide a soft-footed ministration of successive felicities to the appetitive nature while the higher faculties, stimulated by the æsthetic accessories of the feast, nimbly engage in the discourse of reason. Of the material details, my memory is as indistinct as an impressionist poet’s. I recall only the tall silver of candlesticks on an immaculate whiteness which was doubtless linen; and a soothing greenness which may have been holly; and a dark rich redness which was certainly roses; and a fragrance, mingled, various, which was partly roses and partly, well, I sat at Cornelia’s right hand, and in that dazzling proximity—she carries her head so proudly that Time has hardly ventured to touch a wisp of her bronze-gold hair or to breathe near her shoulder—in that proximity I did not notice, honestly did not notice till some seconds after we were seated, that in front of each plate was a half-moon formed of three delicate glasses, glowing with candlelight reflected from the varicolored souls of old vineyards.

Vernon Willys quite audibly drew in his breath, which after the visit to His Excellency’s library was a discreet enough thing to do with it. Oliver, glancing at me, repeated: “Remember, Professor—be human.” Then he raised his ruby-colored glass toward the novelist and said: “Let us drink to the death of Bacchus.” The two men clinked and instantly drained their glasses. Cornelia lifted hers in my direction, just touched it with her lips, and then replaced it in the semicircle. I was thinking of Ben Jonson’s old song, that Anacreontic thing about the thirst that rises from the soul. But what I did with my glass, since whatever I did would grievously offend many persons’ notion of the right thing to have done, I absolutely refuse to disclose. That point is of quite subsidiary relevance.

The thing which engaged my attention as a Mid-Western ethicist and one of “Cæsar’s wives” was not the content of the glasses nor the number of times they were filled by the chocolate-colored Caribbean cupbearer. A person of my long practice in the ascetic philosophy actually doesn’t much attend to these matters. I merely—let us say—became aware of Oliver’s Machiavellian plot to seduce me. Then what leaped to my sense as worthy of exploration was just the personal feeling, the intimate private attitude of my friends, of precisely this sort of people, toward the ethical question, or complex group of questions, which the alleged death of Dionysus and his active posthumous life have forced into the foreground of our consciousness. In my own circle at home no one ever says anything of the faintest interest on the subject. When it is mentioned, there may be some talk of law-enforcement; but the heart of the matter is regarded as perfectly dead. Here, there was willingness and desire to discuss the original question.

His Excellency, I knew, had publicly advocated the passage of the obnoxious measure, and had recently given to the press a “strong” statement on the necessity of enforcing the law. In the intimacy of friendship, however, and in the circumstances which he himself had arranged, that was only a provocation to my remarking, as he set down his glass:—

“It is obvious that you support the Eighteenth Amendment with reservations.”

“With a diplomatic reserve,” he corrected, chuckling. Willys, who had penetrated the “reserve,” laughed. And Cornelia, crushing a smile between her lips, entered into a rather needless explanation, of which the intention, I perceived, was to dissipate any uneasiness which a Mid-Western Puritan might be conceived to feel on his abrupt introduction to a wet New Year’s Eve.

“Monsieur”—meaning Oliver—“is a little naughty,” she said, “and he likes to make himself appear worse than he is. You must remember that he is practically a European.”

“Oh, nonsense!” I exclaimed. “Oliver a European! Then so was Andy Jackson.”

“Yes,” Cornelia insisted, “his tastes and habits were formed in the earlier part of his life, when he was almost constantly abroad. His best friends in Washington are men in the legations who aren’t obliged to adopt our reforms. Naturally, when he entertains them here, he doesn’t wish to seem inhospitable or absurd, like poor dear Mr. Bryan. We don’t ordinarily have wine on the table for our own guests—I mean outside the semiofficial connection. But just for to-night, as it’s a holiday, and one of you is a pilgrim from the Mid-West, Oliver thought—we thought—that you would appreciate it if ambassadorial privileges were extended to you.”

“I get the point perfectly,” I said; “that’s Oliver’s point of view—or one of his points of view. But please let Janus defend himself. He will need practice before we Puritans are done with him. But now that the theme is before us, Cornelia, won’t you give us the benefit of your own point of view?”

“My point of view?” Cornelia smiled her Mona Lisa smile. “I—oh, I am Oliver’s wife!”

“I have often regretted that,” I replied with a consciously provincial affectation of urban daring; “but knowing your strict old-fashioned convictions about marriage, I stifle my regrets. I can’t quite reconcile your indulgent humor this evening with your rigorously prohibitive principles regarding—well, the moral fluidity of such novels as Willys writes. I had hoped that your conservatism, your Puritanism, as they call it, on the marriage question would bring you around to our position on prohibition, and so, in that respect at least, detach you from Oliver.”

“You are dead wrong, Professor,” Willys interjected, “you are muddled. Prohibition isn’t conservatism. It is radical innovation. It isn’t Puritanism. As you yourself have admirably demonstrated, the Puritans drank like fishes. I am a Puritan. So is His Excellency. We are Conservatives. So is our hostess.”

“Your don’t read my articles, Willys,” I said, “as carefully as I read your novels. What I demonstrated was, that the Puritan is a radical innovator. The Puritan of our day says, ‘Let the dry land appear.’ You are not a Puritan; you are a Fundamentalist. You wish to return to the Flood. You are a Diluvian.”

“Now you are at it!” cried Oliver gleefully. “Go to it!”

“Excuse me,” I objected; “we haven’t heard Cornelia’s point of view yet. I was about to say, when Willys broke in, that we educators don’t attach any great importance to the opinions of disillusioned politicians and satirical novelists—cynics like you and Willys. The national culture is in process of fundamental change and regeneration; and you belong to an order that will soon be obsolete, with none to mourn its extinction. The future of the country is in the hands of the young people and such of the rest of us as keep up with them. I am totally indifferent, Cornelia, to what you think of prohibition as His Excellency’s wife. In that capacity I doubt if you think at all; you merely accept the situation. I am curious only about your attitude as a parent of the new order, as Oliver Junior’s mother. Won’t you, for example, psychologize—analyze your feelings and tell us just why you kissed the glass and set it down untasted?”

A hint of rose—pride or some deeper emotion—appeared in Cornelia’s face when I mentioned her son. He is her religion—the substance of it. Her husband is the church which she attends from old habit, repeating her belief in him with her lips, like the phrases of an ancient creed. But what she really believes in, with a fervor of prayer and faith, is her son. I suspected that Willys and Oliver would think me guilty of bad taste for bringing into the conversation a subject, as a Restoration hero remarks of his wife, “so foreign and yet so domestic.” Somehow children seem out of place when one is celebrating a moral holiday! But if one wishes to break down the guard of a woman who says, “My point of view? I—oh, I am Oliver’s wife!” one must risk bad taste. Cornelia’s voice glided softly from gay to grave as she answered:—

“I kissed the glass for auld lang syne. I set it down untasted for the sake of the new times and the children. I used to enjoy it, as I used to enjoy being twenty years old. It isn’t much to relinquish, is it?—compared with what one has to relinquish.”

When Cornelia talks in this vein about age, she seems to me—well, just ravishingly young; and I murmured, for our angle of the table only, “You’ve relinquished nothing!” But she completely ignored me and continued:—

“As my son’s mother, I am very happy, under present conditions, to know that he doesn’t drink or even feel any temptation to drink. We refrain, my son and I, more as a matter of taste than as a matter of conscience. Besides, he is too young. In my own home the boys had a glass of wine on their twenty-first birthday as a part of the family celebration. And the girls—I can’t remember that I tasted wine, except in Italy, till after I was married. Oliver is only nineteen. If, when he is of age, he is at Oxford, as I hope he may be, or if he were able at home to have his wine in a natural atmosphere, simply and innocently, with gentlemen, I should not wish to deprive him of what I was brought up to regard as a proper element of social festivity.”

“Bravo!” cried Willys.

“But, alas,” she concluded, “all that is gone now. And it’s all so furtive and mean that I have a horrid feeling. And one hears so many hateful stories about the secret drinking of mere boys and girls, at school and at their parties, treating one another in their cars by the roadside,—and the consequences of it,—that it’s odious, just odious. And I—I just sigh a bit for the age of innocence, and bid it all adieu.”

“Admirable speech!” cried the novelist, as the Caribbean attendant refilled his glasses. “Beautiful speech: full of sweet reasonableness—all but the conclusion. But why adieu? Why turn down the empty glass? You fill me with lyrical melancholy. ‘Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?’ You look too steadily on the small dark side of the question. There is a soul of goodness in things evil. Watch and wait! I maintain that the prohibitionists builded better than they knew: they have driven drinking out of the barroom and are bringing it back to the home, where it belongs, and where as Burke says—doesn’t he?—it loses all its evil by losing all its grossness, or something like that. You and His Excellency are performing a service to posterity by preserving through this destructive period the purity of a fine old tradition.”

III

HIS EXCELLENCY ON ECONOMIC NECESSITY

I turned to Oliver. “Oliver,” I said, “you have been shielded by your wife. Now Willys is apologizing for you. Really, you know, this won’t do. You will have to come into the open and speak for yourself. When I go home, my friends will expect me to give them some intelligent account of what is going on here beneath the surface of things. We sit out there among the cornfields with our radio sets and listen to Washington uttering austere words about enforcing the law, and the next morning we read in the papers that there has been a party under the shadow of the Capitol, and that there is no one to see that the law is enforced, because all the responsible people are busy putting away their private stocks. Slanderous, no doubt. But in the ethical sense, how—actually—do you get away with it? Janus, explain yourself.”

“Oh, very well, Calpurnia,” said Oliver, “yours to command, remembering only that, as Judge Black informs me, what a man entrusts to the wife of his bosom ‘in the sweet confidences of the midnight hour’ she is not permitted to bring into court against him. But shall I explain myself as a friend of the government, or as the master of my private life? As an ornamental pillar of the administration, or as the captain of my own soul? Which shall it be?”

“Both, by all means!” Willys exclaimed. “First one and then the other. First the marble bust and then the man. First the friend of the aspiring people and then the friend of the downtrodden artist. Discuss your public betrayal of your own class and then your private loyalty to the good old cause. But tell us first why you passed the Eighteenth Amendment. I can’t write my next chapter of _Senator Jones_ till I have an authentic hunch, the _vraie vérité_, about the fashion in which you and the Professor and the Puritans and the Mid-West and the Anti-Saloon League—in short the Anglo-Saxon minority—downed the great hearty Teutonic, Celtic, Italic, Slavic, Hebraic majority, the glad, gay, sinful, eating-and-drinking majority, and put it over on us.”

“My dear man,” said His Excellency in his quietly impressive diplomatic manner, “don’t tell me that you accept that fable. You call yourself a realist! Neither the Anti-Saloon League nor the Puritans nor the Professor nor I had any more to do with passing the Eighteenth Amendment than a butterfly on a steam-roller has to do with building the Lincoln highway, or than a catfish in the Mississippi has to do with irrigating the rice-fields of Louisiana.”

His Excellency held the point by pausing to light a cigarette.

“Well, we are waiting,” someone prompted, after duly respecting his technique.

“_Mes enfants_,” he continued, and then blew a ring of white smoke spinning towards the tip of one of the candles, where it hung for a moment like a nimbus and then dissolved upward. “My children, let me disclose to you the fundamental axiom of political philosophy—not the orthodox but the esoteric philosophy. Distrust the press and ignore the palaver of the man in the street. The press tells you what it thinks will be popular. The last man in the street tells you what he has heard said by the next to the last man in the street. I tell you this: You may scold yourself red in the face; you may bleed yourself white; you may shout yourself blue with pietistic, reformatory, and patriotic fervor; nothing of any importance, of any public consequence, is ever accomplished in this world except by Necessity—by a succession of linked necessities.”

“The theory isn’t entirely novel, Excellency,” I said. “And now the application.”

“The necessity which put through the Volstead Act was the war; the necessity behind that was the sky-vaulting of wages; the necessity behind that was maximum production; the necessity behind that was a workman sober seven days in the week; the necessity behind that I could make concrete to you by naming the hundred leading corporations of the country that were in the belly of the wooden horse, making his feet track, when the Anti-Saloon League rode on his back into Jerusalem—or, if the figure offends you, into Washington.”

“The figure seems a little mixed at the best,” said Willys, “but call it Jerusalem—whither the tribesmen go up to liquidate the burden of laying taxes on us. As for your chain of necessities, now that the war is over, that chain is falling apart. The workingman sees the Big Brother in the wooden horse, who bullied him into working six days in the week and into doing, according to Union standards, two days’ work in one. He doesn’t like that. Besides, he knows that his Big Brother’s own throat isn’t dry, hasn’t been dry. The injustice rasps him. He wants his beer again. He wants the ‘poor man’s club’ again. And he has a jolly good right to have them. What do you say to that?”

“Oh, he has rights enough,” Oliver assented; “but the poor man’s club has passed into the hands of a receiver—a mighty capable one. The poor man’s club is now in the hands of his wife. She is in charge now of the Saturday afternoons and evenings. Do you think, when her vote is as good as his, she will let him pour his wages into the sink? Rather not. She has spent them, spent them in advance, for a generation to come.”

“Yes,” said Cornelia. “Isn’t it a pity! Workwomen are the most wasteful creatures. Why, when Margaret—”

“You don’t quite get the idea, my dear,” Oliver resumed. “As I was saying—in war time, while her old man was sober, with money bulging his pockets and nowhere to go, she made him buy her a house and a Ford and a Victrola and savings stamps and baby bonds. Now she’s buying a municipal playground along the line of the old grog-shops and a new schoolhouse and a hospital and a couple of movie theatres and a municipal stadium and a municipal swimming-pool and God Himself alone knows how many hundred thousand miles of the finest and most expensive roads in the world.”

“Why, Oliver dear,” cried Cornelia, “what do you mean?” I don’t know anything more painful than to report the occasional fatuity of a woman whom one almost unreservedly admires. But dear Cornelia has not meditated very deeply on the problems of the working classes. And returning to her point, she insisted: “I’m sure Margaret hasn’t bought any swimming pools or hospitals.”

“No, my dear,” said Oliver calmly, “I doubt if she has. But as I was saying, she has her own ideas of a club—that woman. She is a Progressive. As a big employer in Pittsburgh said to me yesterday, ‘She has tasted blood.’ She has dug in, and is going to extend her works. Wages won’t go down; they’ll be higher to-morrow morning. Why? Do you suppose that new outfit of hers is paid for? Rather not. Do you suppose that the business men are going to continue in business and collect their bills? Do you suppose they know what kind of plain people pay their bills and have money to spend? I fancy they do. Well! The Big Brother is still in the wooden horse. Maximum production and high wages till the Judgment Day. And Prohibition! The only ticket on which any party will hold office. That’s my forecast—as a servant of the government and a friend of the workingman.”

“Heaven help the poor workingman,” cried Willys, “and spare us a few noble specimens of the idle rich. But now, Excellency, you must cheer our fainting spirits by explaining your point of view as the master of your private life.”

“As the master of my private life,” said Oliver promptly, “I deny that I am any such Janus as the Professor here tries to make me out. As a private citizen, I still believe that prohibition cannot be repealed. Within this belief I merely include, as a private citizen, my philosophic certainty that it will never be enforced, except where it is economically necessary. In my case it is not necessary; therefore, it will not be enforced. Its enforcement helps the business of the plain people; it would hinder mine. It adds, on the whole, very greatly to the comfort of their lives. It would detract from mine. The whole case against liquor grew out of the plain people’s abuse of it. The whole case of liquor will be improved by my right use of it. There is no ‘rasping injustice,’ but a beautiful poetic justice in their losing theirs and in my keeping mine. That doesn’t express adequately my generosity in lending my hand to riveting the workingman’s benefits firmly upon him. Many of the most decorative and not the least substantial pillars of prohibition are men of excellent and experienced palate. The most sincere and the most competent advocates of the cause are the nonconforming prohibitionists. I simply cannot understand the Senator who refers to the Volstead Act as an idiotic measure and a failure. It was absolutely necessary: nothing which is necessary is idiotic. And every economist will tell you that it has been a marvelous economic success. It wonderfully accomplishes what had to be done, and it leaves undone what it ought not to do. And there you are.”

“And there _you_ are!” retorted Willys, “you and your economic argument. But where are the rest of us? I’m sorry to say that, for economic reasons, I can’t follow you. My bootlegger is devouring my royalties. Therefore, as you would say, I have strong conscientious objections to illicit liquor.”

“I had rather overlooked that possibility,” said Oliver. “But lean on me—at least till you have finished _Senator Jones_.”

“Thank you,” said Willys, “I’ll do so. But seriously speaking—”

“Forgive me!” Cornelia interposed, with a delightful wave of her hand flagging the onrush of the novelist’s volubility. “Before Mr. Willys begins to speak seriously, suppose we adjourn to the library. You remember that Oliver is likely to lose his temper if I keep him too long at the table fiddling with cigarettes.”

IV

VERNON WILLYS ON BACCHIC ECSTASY

I have never had leisure to examine the books in the library which range from floor to ceiling. Sargent’s portrait of Cornelia at twenty-five hangs above the fireplace. When we had relaxed in Oliver’s wonderful library chairs before a real log fire, and had been equipped with an ambassadorial type of cigar, which the elder Carib lighted for us, and had been fortified by the highest potency of a private stock of real Java coffee, we men, at least, were in a position to contemplate the approaching midnight with equanimity. As soon as this change of base had been fully effected, Cornelia, who seldom loses the connection of things, irradiated the novelist with her most hospitable smile. (I sometimes think my feeling for her is pure intellectual respect for her skill in keeping a good topic alive and not letting conversation die out in small talk.) She smiled and said:—

“Mr. Willys, you were just about to speak seriously, when I interrupted. Please speak seriously, Mr. Willys. We are all most anxious to have you.”

“Oh, my point of view, you mean?” said Willys. I admired his ability to find it again so quickly. “Speaking seriously, I can’t—for more or less obvious reasons—take as calmly as His Excellency does the poor man’s loss of pleasures. I appeal from the tyranny of our recent moral legislation to my constitutional guaranties of liberty and the right to pursue my happiness where I can find it. I agree with the Senator that the whole business is idiotic. It is idiotic impertinence to dictate what I shall eat and drink at my own table, or what I shall brew in my own cellar.”

“If you had a cellar?” suggested Cornelia, rather spitefully reminding us of Willys’s arrangements to leave his house in New Jersey to his wife, and his wife to his house. But, as I have said, she is firm on such points.

“Spare the wormwood, Cornelia darling,” Oliver blandly interceded. “But, Willys, if you have a better remedy for our present discontents than mine, don’t conceal it from the country. Everyone is clamoring for it. Only be sure it is a remedy. Be sure it rests firmly on the necessities of the situation. There is no use in talking of anything else.”

“I’ll tell you my remedy,” said Willys, “when I get done telling you my troubles. I object to governmental regulation of my diet. But I object even more to governmental corruption of my conscience. God knows I need what little I’ve got left, and I’d like to keep it pure. I protest against the creation of crime by Act of Congress. My conscience tells me that moderate drinking is not a crime, but one of the few certain solaces in this chaotic world.”

“I had always fancied,” said Cornelia, “that those who find drink a ‘certain solace’ are seldom very moderate.”

But the cork, so to speak, was out of Willys’s bottle. He flowed on unchecked.

“I protest against the legislative destruction of old customs which every civilized nation under heaven but ours respects. Your Excellency has seen the vintage in Greece, Italy, France, Germany—Persia, too, haven’t you, not to speak of our Gulf Islands? Consider merely the picturesqueness of it! The romance of it! Blood of the grape! Bottled sunshine! We had a bit of it ourselves, here and there—in the green vineyards of northern California, wild grapes on the Sangamon, moonshine in the Kentucky mountains, mint-julep on the old Southern plantations. Even the cocktail, you know, our own national contribution, had begun to be humanized and to have its tender local associations, as every club of distinction modified its ingredients and christened it with some lovely name: The Chrysanthemum, The Chrysostom, The Golden Girl, and so forth. Doesn’t it really stir your imagination a little?”

“Yes, yes,” said Oliver, first smacking his lips and then pursing them with mock severity. “Yes, we grant you all that. But what is the necessity of it? We are talking of necessities, not of sentiments. We, we Midlanders—the Professor and myself—want to know what necessity requires the tolerance of a mere beverage which is so liable to become a beastly nuisance.”

“Exactly so,” I said.

“I’ll tell you the necessity,” replied Willys. “And I’ll tell you, too, that it goes far deeper than your economic theory. I return to the Saturday nights of the workingman. You know, I know, everyone with two grains of sense knows, that there is something desirous in the inside of a man which even hard roads and baby bonds don’t satisfy. That something is a primitive and profound need of our elemental nature for excitement and every now and then for something like intoxication. Why, my wife says,—excuse me, a lady with whom I was formerly acquainted used to say,—‘No woman can get along on less than a thrill a day,’ of one sort or another. It’s rooted in the human organism—this hunger for occasional escape from humdrum. ‘Tedium’—what was it you said the other day, Professor? Rather good, you know—‘tedium is three fourths of life.’ I agree with you there, Professor; only I figure the tedious fraction is larger than that, even for moderately contented and comfortable people. And for the multitude, for the masses, the fraction that is not tedium is almost negligible, when it is not positive pain. But—_but_, in that microscopic fraction there must be a few moments or hours of heightened consciousness, a burst of hilarity, a breath of freedom, a little dream, a little edge of ecstasy—or a man will cut his throat in order to feel that he is alive.”

“It is not done among the sort of people we associate with,” said Cornelia, whom the argument impressed as rather silly.

“Perhaps not,” said Willys, “perhaps not. Perhaps you ‘escape’ in some other fashion. But I say His Excellency is wrong in making light of the poor man’s club. It’s his safety valve. Take the poor devil to whom Saturday night has been the only bright spot in a black week. Deny him beer, he drinks whiskey; deny him whiskey, he drinks vanilla extract; if he can’t get vanilla extract, he takes to methyl alcohol; or he falls back on drugs, and takes to theft and burglary, and crimes of violence.”

“Aren’t you leaning rather heavily, Willys,” I said, “on what you allege prohibition has done to the criminal classes? You can’t expect repeal of prohibition in behalf of thieves and thugs.”

“As for the upper classes,” said Willys, “I won’t offend our hostess by knowing anything that simply ‘isn’t done.’ But just consider what every one knows: the Capuan character of the New York roof-garden; the Corinthian style of current dancing; nice young girls at petting-parties indistinguishable, actually indistinguishable in costume and paint and manner from courtesans; the high spots that can’t be kept out of movies; the chief interest in the novels we’re reading and writing; and then the general domestic smash-up that is following prohibition. There are worse things than a liquor license, Professor, and we’ve got the whole pack of them on our backs by putting in prohibition.”

I quoted my favorite passage from King Lear: “We make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains of necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.”

“Quite pat, Professor,” exclaimed Willys, whose wits are quick enough. “And there is, by George, a divinity in it. I maintain it’s the vengeance of Dionysus! We’ve tried to bind a god, and, by George, he’s getting back at us. See what I mean? Have you read Euripides, Excellency?”

“Once on a time,” Oliver said, “not lately. Tell us about it.”

“A great work—his _Bacchae_. Everybody ought to read it. You see, there’s a reformer in Athens, called Pentheus, a straitlaced, stiff-necked Puritan, an out-and-out prohibitionist, a—a regular Mid-Western professor. Well, the young god—Dionysus, you know—comes over into Greece from Asia with his choruses, singing and dancing and swinging the ivy-wreathed thyrsus—and all that beautiful joyous stuff, you know. But this Pentheus makes up his mind that Dionysus is a bad lot, and he locks the god up in the stable—passes a sort of Volstead Act on him, you understand. But he gets out—the god gets out. Of course, he gets out; on the q.t. He escapes into the hills—classical moonshine, classical bootlegging, you see. The women get hold of the stuff and, up there in the hills, begin celebrating ‘mysteries’—all on the q.t. Attorney-General Pentheus says this must be stopped—law must be enforced. He sleuths up into the hills to spy them out. But the women, his own mother among them, catch him, and literally pull him to pieces, tear him limb from limb and strew the bloody fragments all over the place. That’s the vengeance of Dionysus.”

“How perfectly horrid!” exclaimed Cornelia.

“You know the play, Professor,” said Willys, of course.

“Oh yes,” I replied, as if I had been intimate with it from infancy. As a matter of fact, Oliver’s telegraphic reference to Bacchus had prompted me to chuck Gilbert Murray’s little book on Euripides into my traveling bag for train reading. That accident enabled me to sustain my bluff by a bit of critical wisdom. “The play is curious,” I said, “coming from Euripides. He passes for a progressive, an intellectual radical. You would have expected him to sympathize with Pentheus, of course. But I notice that Gilbert Murray doesn’t accept the old theory that Euripides recanted and went back to the ancestral gods.”

“Well,” replied Willys, “in that case, I think Gilbert Murray is wrong—who is this Gilbert Murray? I’ve got the play here—in my overcoat pocket—somebody or other’s translation, of course. You take it with you, Professor, when you go. Read it again and tell me if you don’t think I’m right.”

I had to laugh; and then we both explained how we happened to be reading, or reading about, the _Bacchae_. Then Willys returned to his argument.

“When I read this play, you know, it hit me in the eye that this thing is as old as history. This prohibition idiocy is as old as the race. If drinking could be rooted out, it would have been rooted out long ago. All the arguments against it were cheesy in the days of Noah. It sticks because, as His Excellency and I are pointing out, it is rooted in necessity. You reformers, as you call yourselves, don’t know what you are about. You’ve bit off what can’t be chewed. You are attacking religion; and it’s dangerous business. You are trying to kill a god, and it can’t be done.”

“But my dear Mr. Willys,” cried Cornelia, “it isn’t _our_ God. The Church hasn’t really defined its position, and of course some of the bishops are very liberal. But don’t the dissenters in this country take a very firm stand in favor of prohibition? Most Americans are dissenters, aren’t they? If so, then I should think you would call prohibition itself a religious movement.”

“It has long been identified with the popular evangelical churches,” I said.

“Don’t talk to me about the evangelical churches,” cried Willys. “The ‘uplift’ has hit the churches till they are nothing but community-improvement societies, with no more religion in them than the municipal waterworks. There is no more real relation between religion and prohibition than there is between signing the pledge and seeing the Beatific Vision. Wine is as much a part of our traditional religion as it was of the Greek religion. The Jews still drink their Passover wine. Why shouldn’t they? What do you make of that passage in the Old Testament about the winecup in the hand of God? What do you make of the wine at the marriage feast in the New Testament? Or the wine in the Holy Grail? Or the sacramental wine, drunk by all the faithful, till the spirit of mystical fellowship evaporated in the grape-juice of that paradox, the individual communion cup?”

“But it’s much more sanitary that way,” said Cornelia firmly, “really much nicer. And since everyone knows that it’s only a beautiful old form—”

“Oh, you formalists!” Willys ejaculated. “You formalists are the real atheists. Till the days of frank atheism, we wished our friends Godspeed, we pledged their healths, and we launched our ships with a libation of wine. The central act of religious worship for two thousand years was a kind of sacred intoxication in the blood of the living God. Omit the central act, and religion disappears; and all you’ve got left is a lot of unedifying bishops wrangling over ‘the higher criticism’ of fifty years ago. It’s the vengeance of the Dionysiac element in Christianity overtaking them. I repeat what I said before—It’s just as true of bishops as it is of workingmen: human life can’t be sustained without a little edge of ecstasy. If we try it, something will burst. That’s my forecast!”

“And your remedial measure—” said Oliver, “your remedy, rooted in the necessities of the situation?”

“Why, moderate drinking, of course,” replied the novelist, lapsing into the wide arms of the chair, like one from whom all the virtue has departed. “Teach Americans to drink as the Greeks drink to-day: wine everywhere, no one drunk.”

“Not a bad idea,” chuckled His Excellency.

“An idea of quite startling originality,” I added.

“Our ‘dry battery’ is crackling with suppressed thunderbolts,” said Oliver. “But”—he glanced at his watch—“it lacks only ten minutes of midnight and the dawn of a better era for the world. While the inhabitants of this borough of Manhattan are meditating on their sins of the past year, and signifying repentance by various acts of atonement, it is fitting that we should not let the hour pass without some appropriate ceremony. Professor, you haven’t seen my new set of Casanova—a Christmas gift from the wittiest of my French friends. Let me show it to you. Willys admires it immensely.”

Willys and I followed our host to his bookshelves, while Cornelia idly turned the pages of the new _American Mercury_. But why go into details? Oliver’s edition of the _Mémoires_, handsomely bound in full morocco and locked in a glass case, proved to be the mask of His Excellency’s “diplomatic reserve.” From the ingredients of two or three “volumes” he compounded something which he told us was known in Washington as the “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” because it agreed with gentlemen.

As the clock and the bells and the whistles sounded the knell of 1923, Oliver exclaimed, “Why, Cornelia, where’s the Professor’s buttermilk,” and he and Willys clinked glasses, and drank “To the vengeance of Dionysus!”

V

I EXPLAIN THE POSITION OF CÆSAR’S WIVES

“And now,” said His Excellency, stroking his silvered brown beard and turning upon me the raillery of his dynamic dark eyes, “it’s up to you, Professor. You’ve been sitting here like one of Uncle Sam’s ‘observers’ at a peace conference—a chiel a-takin’ notes, an’ sayin’ nuthin’. Don’t you know that henceforth there shall be no more neutrals? You are our only representative of the great drouthy forward-looking West. Don’t you know that the business of a representative is to represent? The wife of my bosom is on the fence—a friendly noncombatant, as is proper to her sex. But Willys and I have got you backed into a corner. I’ve shown the economic necessity of prohibition. Willys has shown the religious necessity of drink. What is the Mid-West going to do about it? Which way are you going to break? Break, Professor! But stick, as we have done, to the necessities of the case.”

“I am as much a necessitarian as you are, Excellency,” I said.

“You’d better be,” chuckled Oliver. “Cæsar’s wives, I suspect, had better be necessitarians.”

“But I am as religious as Willys,” I added.

“That’s very right,” said Willys.

“And so,” I continued, “I shall take a middle ground.”

“I see,” said Oliver, “the golden mean, or temperance. Too little temperance is chronic inebriety. Too much temperance is teetotalism. Prohibition may and must be defended as the only known means to insure moderate drinking among the better sort of people. Exactly my position!”