Chapter VI: Book FOUR: Cornelia and Dionysus (2)

“No, Excellency,” I said, “you don’t see. Mine is not exactly your position. I take the middle position according to a precept of Pascal: I seize upon both extremes and occupy all the ground between. But my extremes are not yours. The extremes which I have in mind are your economic necessitarianism and Willys’s religion—his theory of the necessity of religious excitement. I lay hold of both those positions as firmly as you and Willys; but I reconcile them, instead of making them mutually destructive. Starting from the same premises, I reach a different conclusion.”

“Of course,” said Oliver, “of course. But what is it?”

“Before I state it,” I said, “may I, since I am on the defensive, take a minute to rebut your fallacies and to present, as you and Willys have done, my more intimate personal feeling and private point of view?”

“Oh, yes,” murmured Willys, rather sleepily, “that will be very proper.”

“It will be good for you, Willys,” I said. “I shall not hurt you more than is necessary. And I shall not be half so tedious as I might be if I were not leaving town on the 2.37. Relief is in sight; my taxi will be here at one.”

“At one?” said Cornelia. “The children promised to be home by one, or earlier. Oliver, couldn’t you all—”

“Why certainly,” Oliver said. “Send away your taxi, Professor. When the Infant comes in with the car, we’ll drive you to the station, and then I’ll take Willys to his hostelry. But go ahead now, Professor, with your personal narrative of the great drouth in the Mojave Desert.”

“It’s the first forty years without water that’s hardest,” I said. “After that, one gets on nicely. Do you know that, far from being keen for this argument, the entire subject bored me terribly, till you and Willys drenched it again in—in reality. Since my student days a generation ago, I have hardly even seen liquor enough of all sorts to float an old-fashioned alumni reunion for a single evening. A resident during the latter half of my life in a bone-dry district, I, like most of my neighbors, view the annual extension of the dry lands with the aloofest academic interest.”

“Of course!” said Oliver, smiling, “of course! But you can abridge that; we all know the quality of a professor’s interest in any matter of first-rate importance.”

“It was not till bootleggers were commonly reported to be as ubiquitous as German spies in wartime,” I resumed, “and men began to attribute all the evils of the hour to prohibition, and seriously to argue that the Volstead Act was forcing drunkenness and criminality upon numberless respectable citizens who thitherto had led lives of unblemished virtue—it was not till then that I began to feel a certain curiosity about the facts, and especially about the mental condition of intelligent and responsible people resident in territory which is still subterraneously wet.”

“Their mental condition, Professor?” Oliver inquired. “Why, pray, their mental condition?”

“Because I couldn’t understand, Excellency,” I replied, “how intelligent men like you and Willys, who have lived abroad, could permit yourselves to attribute the sexually hectic flush of recent literature and life in America to the Volstead Act. All these evils, says Willys, followed prohibition, and he wags his head and mutters, ‘Vengeance of Dionysus.’ Suppose, now, I seize the same absurd _post-hoc-propter-hoc_ principles and attribute the virginal chastity of French, Italian, and English fiction and private life to the free use of intoxicating beverages?”

“I smell irony, Professor, somewhere,” said Oliver, “but I grant you that Willys’s logic slipped a cog there. We’ll have to grant you that America dry is no more sex-obsessed than Europe wet.”

“And then,” I went on, “I was a little troubled by Willys’s plea that, with the general decline of drinking in America, something of real poetic beauty is passing out of our lives. I honestly can’t feel that he speaks realistically about that. I know the Anacreontic tradition, the literary romance of nut-brown ale and blood-red wine, perhaps as well as Willys does, and in the bookish imagination of youth used myself to revel with those that ‘gloried and drank deep.’ Used to spout, you know, about ‘Bairam, that great hunter,’ and the ‘sons of Ben’ at the Mermaid, and so on. But when I had an opportunity to compare the Bacchic frenzy of an ancient Greek or Persian or Elizabethan, as represented by the poets, with the Bacchic frenzy of an American citizen howling drunk—I declare, it was one of the major disillusions of my life. The actual beauty of the real thing has come at last to impress me as very nebulous, like the amours of Thomas the Rhymer with the queen of the fairies. The lover is too often left ‘alone and palely loitering,’ with a crumpled shirt-front, with his hat in the gutter, by a green lamp-post—‘where no birds sing.’”

“Oh, green grapes!” stuttered Willys. “What can you make of green grapes! What can you know about it, Professor? On your own showing it’s twenty years since—”

“True, Willys,” I replied, “true. But the pathos of distance ought to lend a glamour to one’s memories. One has, you know, one’s memories. Even a Mid-Western professor has his memories; and in the deep interval of twenty years all that is ugly in them should have faded out, should have been gathered into the blue mist of oblivion, leaving the soft contours of the Bacchic landscape bathed in pure beauty. I don’t find it so. I see—”

I hesitated. In a company like this, it is a bit awkward to talk on the killjoy side of a question. But Oliver rallied me forward.

“Tell us what you see. Professor,” he said. “Life or death, give us only reality. Show us the sad pictures in the prohibitionist gallery of disillusion. We’ll try to look interested.”

“Well,” I said, “Willys’s praise of this beautiful old custom of getting drunk now and then did press a button in my gallery of memories and light up a few old pictures. They are relevant only because I did have, in my earlier years, about the average American’s chance to feel the æsthetic value of this vanishing phase of our popular culture. I see pictures. As Whitman says, ‘The shapes arise.’”

“Whitman was a priest of Dionysus,” said Willys.

“So was Emerson,” I said, “and so, according to my lights, am I. The shapes arise. I see a strayed reveler, with no vine leaves in his hair,—only a shirt, trousers, and suspenders,—lying on his back, and shouting children towing him by a rope attached to his foot, through the main streets of an Arizona town; the reveler grins and plucks feebly at the rope and says, ‘Now, boys!’ This picture is thirty years old. I see a driveling swaying figure in a crowd at a street corner in Los Angeles, trying to give away the contents of his pocketbook. I see a Vermont farmer in his haymow, surly and maudlin with the unfreezable alcoholic element of frozen apple-cider; he jabs his cow with the tines of his hayfork. Returning from a mountain camp at midnight to a Massachusetts village, I see in the road before me a dim mass reeling through the moonlight and entering a cottage in the outskirts, and two minutes later I hear a woman’s voice shrieking, ‘Murder! murder! murder!’”

“Yes,” yawned His Excellency, “I have always insisted that the peasantry and the proletariat were nasty in their liquor—serves them right to lose it.”

“Don’t interrupt my vision,” I said. “The shapes arise. I see in a New England city a trolley car full of sick college students scrambling for the rear platform—one of them lies at full length in the passage; he is a little trampled. I see a fellow student regularly soaking his shredded-wheat biscuit in whiskey; he carries his flask to morning chapel. I see another, stepping—without vine leaves—into the open shaft of an elevator; no god bears him up. I see other youths of the better sort in large numbers in a smoke-heavy place of midnight refreshment, after a football victory, treating to hot whiskey weary-looking painted girls in black—Stephen Phillips’s ‘disillusioned women sipping fire.’ I see five professional men on a moral holiday, seriously approaching the task of consuming three quarts of Scotch and Bourbon before morning. I see groggy alumni embracing one another in tears, hugely pleased to be drunk with men to whom they never speak when they are sober. I see derelict artists and novelists and lawyers, quietly slipping away from professional life to settle down in a rustic hermitage to drink themselves to death. I see a group of permanent class-secretaries in secret session, running through the long list of alumni in every college who never report and never turn up; the secretaries know why, but they publish no report.”

“Good heavens, Professor,” groaned Willys, “His Excellency and I were not born yesterday, and doubtless even our hostess knows there are some casualties. Whiskey isn’t buttermilk. Knives have edges, and are dangerous. Everything that’s good for anything is dangerous. But really now, what is the point of all this?”

“It has a point,” I replied; “it has a point at both ends. It bristles with points; and all of them are dangerous to you and your remedy for our discontents—your moderate drinking. The first point is this: that customary drinking in America, whatever it may be in Greece, has been and is, on the whole, not beautiful but ugly, disgusting, and destructive. The second point is this: that customary drinking in America is so inveterately intemperate that your proposal to institute a custom of temperate drinking is really far more visionary and impractical than prohibition. Your remedy is not conceived with an eye to the essential facts in the case.”

“And these are—” prompted His Excellency.

“These are,” I said, “that Americans of both upper and lower classes are temperamentally hard to stop when they are started. Ninety out of every hundred Americans feel a curious pride in ‘seeing the whole show’; in ‘going the whole hog’; in ‘sticking the thing out’; in ‘going the limit’; in ‘getting results’; and in ‘getting there first.’ This temperament shows in their drinking as in everything else. They care nothing for taste or ‘bouquet.’ They value their liquor in proportion to the quickness of the ‘kick.’ ‘I can let the stuff alone,’ they say, ‘but when it speaks to me, I want it to speak with some authority.’”

“The first really sensible thing you’ve said this evening,” said the novelist.

I was tempted to mention his perfectly callous consumption of Oliver’s choice Spanish wine as a case in point; but I restrained myself and said:—

“A Frenchman sits down at a table on the boulevard with a single small glass of light wine; and sips, and rolls it under his tongue; and sips, and studies a cloud in the sky; and sips, and holds the glass up to the light; and sips, and looks at the river, and quotes a couple of verses of Ronsard; and sips, and considers what he was doing in April a year ago; and lifts the glass, and puts it down, and counts his change; and so on for half an hour or an hour; while the Yankee traveler at the next table selects a bottle of the most expensive wine on the list, gulps it down like ice-water, and sighs for a good American cocktail. We were born whiskey-drinkers, high and low, men and women.”

“I adore wine, but I abominate the taste of whiskey,” said Cornelia.

His Excellency relieved me of the obvious duty of saying that her taste in that, as in all things, is exceptional.

“The Professor,” he continued, “overdraws it a little; but there is much in what he says. Historically considered, we have, as a people, rather taken to extremes: George III or pure democracy; abolition or a thousand niggers; the book of Genesis or Robert Ingersoll; for better, for worse till death do us part, or Brigham Young and his twenty-eight wives; the town wide-open or the town bone-dry; milk-shake or whiskey neat. It hangs together. You’ll have to admit, Willys, that moderate as you and I are, as a people we insist on going in for a kick. It’s rooted in what you yourself called the primitive and profound necessities of our national temper.”

“It’s rooted,” said Willys, “in the artificial necessities created by our national puritanism. It’s rooted in the artificial necessity of being ashamed to drink at home, and having to live, like a false little Sunday-School god, in the eyes of a sanctified wife and puritanized children.”

“Really, Mr. Willys!” Cornelia exclaimed.

“It’s the truth,” insisted the novelist. “It is rooted in the necessity thrust upon a poor devil by the surrender of public opinion to the prohibition bullies—the necessity of carrying a portable kick in his hip pocket, or, in the old days, of standing up with his foot on the rail and taking it quick and getting out before his neighbor—came in for his.”

“No, cynic,” I said, “it is rooted in a deeper necessity than that—and a real one, which can’t be essentially changed. I mean, that our national custom of whiskey-drinking was rooted, like all bad things,—according to His Excellency,—in the Mid-West, rooted through a thousand miles of the richest corn-land in the world. Do you know that if the Atlantic Ocean were pumped dry and we Mid-Westerners applied our resources to it, we could fill the basin with corn whiskey every year? That is the real reason why a kick-loving people would, in America, always be a whiskey-drinking people. And that is one of the reasons why we Mid-Westerners have maturely decided to feed our corn to hogs.”

“A-ha!” cried Oliver. “Striking into your argument at last! Economic theory of morals! My argument! I ‘get’ you, as you Midlanders say.”

“Yes, Excellency,” I assented, “you get me very well. As a ‘friend of the plain people,’ you get me very well. I accept the whole of your economic argument for the necessity of prohibition. I accept every word that you say on the expensiveness of the reconstructed workman’s club, on the expensiveness of his wife’s post-bellum tastes, of the long future in which we may expect high wages, of the continued necessity for maximum production. But you hardly scratched the surface of the argument. You have hardly glimpsed the expanding expensiveness which the average life in America is soon going to exhibit. We are headed straight and hard for an era of broad, inclusive, expensive popular culture. The plain people, whom we’ve been feeding for a hundred years on the skim-milk and fragments of old morality and religion, are developing an appetite for comfort, for health, for knowledge, for recreation, for variegated pleasure, for style, for art, and for beauty, which is the most expensive thing in the world. Prohibition—and the average man knows this, even the moderately intelligent workman knows this—prohibition has its tap root of necessity in the imperative choice of our entire society between ‘booze’ on the one hand, and, on the other, beauty, art, style, pleasure, knowledge, health, and comfort—which he knows, and you know, are the real tangible substance of modern upper-class religion.”

“Oho!” cried Willys. “Getting around to my argument at last. But it doesn’t sound much like what I mean by religion.”

“Religion!” cried Cornelia. “Why, it isn’t religion at all!”

“What is religion, my dear Cornelia?” I asked.

“Why, religion,” she replied, “is what the bishops agree are the fundamental teachings of the Church.”

“It is not!” I retorted, with the intimate discourtesy and dogmatism of an old friend who is also an old puritan. “My dear Cornelia,” I hastened to add, “that is theology—not religion.”

“Tell Cornelia,” said Oliver,—whom the high Anglican tendencies of his wife rather amuse,—“tell Cornelia, Professor, what religion is.”

“Your religion,” I responded, “is what you actually believe in, whatever that is. My religion is what I actually believe in, whatever it is. The religion of the average American is what he actually believes in, whatever it is. What do you actually believe in, Cornelia?”

“I believe,” she replied firmly, “in the Apostolic Church, in the communion of saints—”

“His Excellency, for example, among them?” suggested Willys, saucily enough.

“Really, Mr. Willys!” said Cornelia. I felt the air cold on my cheek. I doubt if it lowered the temperature of Willys. He merely said, “I am a realist,” and lapsed again.

Cornelia repeated, “I believe in the Apostolic Church—,” and this time I interrupted.

“The average American,” I said, “does not—at least, he does not believe in it with any such fullness of faith as he accords to baseball.”

“The tone of this conversation is becoming decidedly distasteful to me,” said Cornelia. She picked up a copy of _Vogue_ and buried herself in it, pretending to lose all her interest in our discussion.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I too, like Willys, am a realist. I have learned much from the master realists of my time—I mean the salesmen. I have learned, when I wish to make a religious appeal to man, to appeal to him on the basis of the things in which he really believes. If a man’s real belief is small and mean, you’ve got to begin mean and small. If he believes only in his pocketbook, I must appeal to his pocketbook. If he believes in his children, I can appeal to him through his children.”

“Excuse me,” said Cornelia, rising, “it’s nearly time for the children to come home. I will telephone down to the office to have them send away your taxi.” When she returned from giving the message at Oliver’s desk-telephone, she picked up her _Vogue_ again, and seated herself outside our circle, near the tall windows looking on the street. We readjusted our positions by the fire so that our backs should not be turned to her, and I continued:—

“The real business of religion is to reconcile us to our necessities. According to the powerful drive of Oliver’s economic argument, the outstanding necessity to which the average American has now got to be reconciled, is prohibition. That is a rather hard selling-proposition. I don’t think it can be put over except under pressure of some sustained religious emotion, or as Willys calls it, ‘excitement.’ Now don’t you see how important it is to know what the average American sustains a religious emotion about—what he really does believe in?”

“Yes, that’s all right,” said His Excellency. “What next?”

“Well,” I said, “if the average American registers no emotion about the Apostolic Church, we can’t use that in a case like this, can we? We’ve got to fall back on our really common bonds of union—like our common belief in modern plumbing, health, youth, the athletic life, education, publicity, automobiling.”

“Popular elements, anyway,” said Willys. “Automobiling as a substitute for which of the Thirty-nine Articles, Professor?” I glanced to see if Cornelia were listening; but she was plucking at a holly wreath in the window and seemed intent on the street.

“It is a vital element of our popular religion,” I insisted, “and by no means so absurd a substitute as you suppose. One has got to take together, you see, this whole group of genuine popular beliefs. Next one asks every honest average man if he doesn’t agree that these things are what he wants and believes in, and that the group of them expresses what our modern civilization wants and believes in. Then one turns on the average man and says: ‘This, sir, is your effective Shorter Catechism; and you’ve got to junk whiskey as your national drink, because it is just flatly incompatible with the general distribution of the objects of your religion.’ That’s the way his religion reconciles him to his necessity.”

“I had a hunch, Professor,” said Willys, who had long since grown weary of serious argument, “that automobiling and drinking went together.”

“They have hitherto,” I said, “but—”

VI

I DISCUSS THE ETHICS OF AN AUTOMOBILING CIVILIZATION

My speech was cut short at that point by Cornelia at the window, calling out rather sharply:—

“Oliver, why do you suppose the children don’t come?” Almost in the same breath she sprang to her feet and, pulling aside the curtain, cried:—

“Oh! Oh! Oliver, what’s that?” And an instant later, “Oh! Oh! Oh! How dreadful! Thank God! Thank God! Oh, thank God, it’s not the children!”

“Of course not!” soothed Oliver, with his arm about her shoulder. “Of course not. What was it? Tell us about it.”

We ourselves had heard, not indistinctly,—the apartment is on the second floor,—the prolonged steady screech of an automobile horn, and, in response to Cornelia’s cry, had rushed to her side, expecting, I suppose, to see the fire department clearing its right of way up the avenue.

“Oh, there’s been a dreadful accident,” cried Cornelia. “That poor little boy—Oh, that poor little boy! They were driving like mad—to the hospital, I suppose. I saw two policemen standing on the running-board of an open car coming up the street, and another sitting on the front seat by the driver. Then, for just an instant, as it flashed into the bright light under the windows, I could see that the policeman in front was holding in his arms a little boy—seven or eight years old—with his head, face upward, hanging over the edge of the car—bright red with blood—absolutely one bright red disc of blood—and streaming. Oh, it was horrible! You have no idea how horrible! And then, as it went past, I could see that there was a woman crumpled over in the rear seat, and an old man trying to hold her up.”

“It must have been a shock,” Willys offered; and I added something equally helpful, as one does on such occasions.

“Well, my dear,” said Oliver, as we returned to the fireplace, “accidents, you know, do happen. Are you calmer now?”

“Yes,” said Cornelia, “yes, I guess so. I’m trembling still. You’ve simply no idea how it shook me.”

She sank into a chair, then recovered herself sharply, and said with a smile: “I’m sorry. Forgive me for making such a fuss over it. I’m all right now. I suppose it’s horrid to be so selfish—but, oh, Oliver, aren’t you glad it wasn’t the children? Aren’t you?”

“Certainly, my dear!” said Oliver, in such a droll matter-of-fact tone that we all laughed quite spontaneously. “And now shall we talk of something else? Or do you wish me to telephone to the Infant that their mother has been anxiously expecting them for at least five minutes?”

“No, don’t telephone,” Cornelia protested. “It’s really only just after one. I’m sure they will be here in plenty of time for the train. And please don’t change the subject. I heard what you were saying. You were talking about automobiles and automobile accidents. That is what made me so ‘jumpy,’ I suppose. I’ll not be silly any more. What were you going to say about automobiles when I interrupted?”

“It would be hard,” I said, “to avoid ‘improving the occasion’ a little. Heaven knows I didn’t get up the accident to illustrate my argument—and there’s no reason to suppose that it does illustrate my argument exactly. These people may all have been perfectly sober. But if this thing, just now, had happened in a story, like that, we should have felt that it was contrived and artificial—I don’t recall just where I stopped, but what I was about to say was—the gist of it was, that you can make a live argument based on our automobiling civilization, with almost anybody in the United States, because almost everybody in the United States has some sort of vital interest in a car; and so the argument, as we say, comes home to him.”

“That is sound enough,” said Oliver.

“Yes,” I said, “the things that people have in common are the things that hold them together and enable them to act together. Cars are a much more expensive cultural and social amalgam than, say, abstract fraternity, or a belief in the Apostolic Church, or even than an old family Bible. But the fact remains that cars are at present far more widely diffused and almost infinitely more used among our fellow countrymen than any of the older and less expensive amalgams. I doubt whether there is any other subject whatever upon which our people possess so large a fund of common knowledge and experience. Consider: we have fifteen million cars. That means that perhaps one out of every six or seven men, women, children, and babies in this country actually drives a car. That’s what I call practical belief in an article of the popular religion. And you see—if you think—that it’s the garage and the filling-station that crowd out the saloon, at every few blocks in the city, in every town and village, at every crossroads from Florida to Montana. It’s one—just one, mind you—of the expensive new clubs of the plain people, of the average man.”

“Yes,” said Oliver, “there’s something in that.”

“There’s a good deal in that,” I persisted, “both for economic necessitarians like you and me, and for religious enthusiasts like Willys. For Willys, you remember, the essence of religion is a kind of dangerous and exciting Bacchic escape from humdrum into a few hours of heightened consciousness and mystical fellowship—through the national drink. Well, Willys, when the half gods go, the true gods arrive. The national car does everything that _you_ ask of the Holy Grail: it provides the average American with an emotional discharge; it provides him with danger, excitement, the intoxication of speed, heightened consciousness, and a mystical sense of fellowship with the owner of both the Rolls-Royce and the Ford roadster; and it provides these things not on Saturday night only but every day in the year. As you will concede, there is a ‘kick’, the possibility of a kick—especially in our national car—for every day in the year. And there’s one more thing about the religion and ritual of the car.”

“Oh at least that!” said Oliver. “But what is it, Professor?”

“It’s a thing,” I said, “that knocks into a cocked hat His Excellency’s private argument for privately nullifying the Eighteenth Amendment. Of course His Excellency didn’t invent the argument—I mean that hoary old bore about personal liberty and private conscience and so forth. All the ‘wet’ newspapers pull it out of the Pyramid of Cheops seven times a week. All the ‘wet’ city newspapers count the German and Italian and Slavic noses in their constituencies and then get off that tedious drip about the ‘puritan minority’ and its attempt to bully these honest European consciences, which, being European, are free from sanctimonious scruples against befuddling their wits with liquor.”

“_Quo me rapis, tui plenum_—where, O Mid-Western Bacchus,” cried Oliver, “where dost thou drag me at the tail of thy car? I feel the thong going through my heels and the rope running up to the axle of your Ford. Crank up! Drag on!”

“Why, don’t you see, Excellency,” I persisted, “that the car hauls the whole argument clean out of the gumbo of ‘personal liberty’—clean out of the slough of ‘private conscience’? We don’t know how this accident out here in the street took place; but in our Mid-Western metropolis we killed some seven hundred people last year with cars, and, according to the papers, there was more than one such accident as this one from drivers who were drunk. With one out of every seven men, women, children, and babies in the United States driving a car at from twenty to forty miles an hour, along crowded streets and thoroughfares from Maine to California, we have simply got to prevent drivers from being drunk. It’s in the necessity of the situation. We are all private engineers nowadays. That’s what we want. Very well. If we all want to be private engineers, we’ve got to submit to the same regulations as governed—long since—engineers on the railways. Our job is not less hazardous than theirs, but more so. A railway engineer who drinks is fired by the railroad, and I understand by his own union.”

“I’m stiff on that,” said His Excellency. “A man who drives his car when he’s drunk should be strung up to the nearest telegraph pole.”

“Oh no,” said Willys, “you’re a little hard on him. You can’t stop a man drinking because he occasionally drives his car, drunk. Give him a good fine and take away his license. Or, if he is very drunk, put him where he can sober up.”

“That wouldn’t,” I said, “quite straighten things out—would it—for the occupants of the car that went by here?”

“Oh, but Professor, you are so unrealistic,” said Willys, as he rose and clapped a hand over his mouth in order to eject a yawn which he could not swallow. “You are hopelessly unrealistic. If a man doesn’t drive when he’s drunk, now and then, how in the dickens is he going to get home? What time is it?”

“It’s half-past one,” said Cornelia, who had also risen at the first opportunity. “And there’s the telephone. See what it is, Oliver—quickly, quickly! But nothing could have happened to them—my son is such a careful driver.”

VII

THE VENGEANCE OF DIONYSUS

Oliver stepped to his desk and removed the receiver. There was an inevitable moment of suspense. Then tossing to us with a smile: “It’s the Infant—they’re all right,” he turned again to the telephone and listened for nearly five minutes, during which he said “yes” several times, “What’s that?” once, and concluded with “I’ll come immediately.”

Then he faced us with a curious smile, meant to be reassuring, and, with that promptitude of thought and action which idle Americans in Europe are understood to exhibit on the outbreak of war, said swiftly and decisively:—

“Oliver has been arrested for speeding. I’ll have to go and bail him out. They are letting the girls come home. They will be here any minute. Willys, will you go downstairs to the office and tell them to send a taxi here at once? Professor, you go, too, and meet the girls downstairs. I want to have a word with Cornelia. If Dorothy comes before I join you, keep her there a minute. Yes, put on your coats—we’ll not come back. Willys and I will look after this business; the Professor will go on, to his train.”

In the face of a real little emergency Cornelia’s nerves never betray her. As soon as Oliver began to give orders, she became the source instead of the recipient of reassurances, as if her only anxiety had been for a gracious leave-taking. She did it extraordinarily well.

* * * * *

The rest of my impressions of that night I shall drastically telescope because this is not a story, but a conversation, and my impressions relate merely to the incident which had intruded with such coincidental force upon the conversation.

I recall that the first moment in which my imagination began to link the talk and events of the evening vividly together was in the elevator, descending to the ground floor, when Willys, casually thrusting his hands into the pockets of his overcoat, and muttering something about His Excellency’s being a little fussed, fished out his copy of the _Bacchae_. As I transferred the book to my own coat, somehow association shot a link from the Greek tragedy and its gory scene in the hills to the red face that Cornelia had seen under the city lamps.

While Willys occupied himself with accelerating the arrival of a taxi, I went out on the street and stood on the curb, waiting reflectively enough for the appearance of Dorothy and her girl friend. Five minutes later they were driven up. With the notion that my function was to shut off a “scene” of any sort, I instantly remarked, in the quiet tone of a man who understands all about the situation, that Dorothy’s father was explaining the thing to her mother, who was a little agitated, and that he desired them to wait downstairs till he came down. Both girls looked as if they had been crying, but they were calm now, and seemed indisposed to talk to me. When I had drawn them aside out of observation from the office, and saw no hysterical signs, I ventured to ask why they had been driving so fast. The other girl, whose name I did not catch, said that they had not been driving fast but had skidded. Before I could utter my natural question, Dorothy turned on her young friend, and said:—

“That is not so. You know it is not so.” Then she did a queer thing. She asked me if I was leaving town that night, and when I said I was, she slipped from under her fur coat a small, light oblong parcel wrapped in a man’s handkerchief, thrust it into my hands, and whispered with singular intensity: “Take it with you, please! Take it away and pitch it—pitch it where no one will ever find it!” I dropped it discreetly into my overcoat pocket. Then Oliver entered from the elevator, questioned Dorothy for a minute, and sent the two girls up to Cornelia.

Oliver, Willys, and I then entered the waiting taxi and drove away. Oliver sat with his back to the driver, facing us two. I itched to ask him why the other girl had told me that their car had skidded, and why Dorothy had denied it. But it seemed a good time to let Oliver speak first. He sat for a few moments in a frowning concentration, almost as if we had not been there. Then he ejaculated, still as if we had not been there, “My God, what a mess! My God, what a mess!” Willys rallied him on making such an ado over a fine. Then Oliver hurled the whole thing between our eyes, just as he himself had got it, standing there so gaily in the library, smiling histrionically back at us from the telephone. The Infant—he still referred to him as “the Infant”— had been arrested on the charge of manslaughter and driving a car while drunk. He wasn’t drunk, but he had been drinking a little at the party, as the other boys had. He had somehow lost control and hit some people, a woman and a little boy, he thought, just a few blocks from home.

Well, that is the gist of the incident.

As I look back now on that trip to the police-station, I am shocked to remember how self-centred we were, all three. I can’t recall that it occurred to any one of us to be concerned about the load of broken humanity that had gone, an hour earlier, to the hospital. Our sole concern seemed to be lest a couple of physically uninjured boys should spend a few hours of the night in jail. And just before the taxi stopped at the police-station to let His Excellency and Willys out, I know that I myself was actually wondering about this remote point: how it would affect Cornelia, and whether she would not suffer more in the injury which her son had inflicted upon others than if he had himself been injured. But what I was actually saying was, that I thought young Oliver did not drink; Cornelia seemed so sure of him. Oliver Senior exclaimed “Oh rot!” And then he added:—

“Why, the Infant and the furnace-man made a keg of raisin wine in the basement of our own apartment last Easter. He told me about it just yesterday. I asked him why he hadn’t told me at the time, since we two were on the square with each other. He said that he was afraid of setting me a bad example! Oh, the poor little devil! The poor little devil!”

Willys said it was “a damn shame” and they must see what they could do to get the charge of driving while drunk withdrawn and the charge of exceeding the speed limit substituted. Then we shook hands. Oliver and Willys got out, and I went on to the railway station. I hated not to stand by and see the thing through. But Oliver had assured me that I couldn’t really do anything _but_ stand by; and as I had a speaking engagement in Ohio on the next day, and my college work began the day after, I surrendered to the necessity of the situation. My holiday was over.

I started westward with little eagerness—with an odd sensation of repletion and fatigue mixed with cerebral excitement. “The starved silkworm,” I muttered to myself, “has had his feast of mulberry leaves.” I was not sleepy and didn’t wish to spend the small hours of the morning tossing in my berth. I went into the empty dressing-room for a smoke. As I hung up my overcoat, I thought of the parcel that Dorothy had entreated me to “pitch—pitch where no one will ever find it.” Poor pathetic, distracted little Dorothy! It was only an empty silver flask, wrapped in her brother’s handkerchief and neatly engraved with his monogram. Poor little distracted Bacchante—apparently it hadn’t occurred to her that the breath of whiskey still strong in the silver flask was doubtless giving even stronger evidence elsewhere.

The thing hurt me, and I put it away. Everything that I tried to think of, however, hurt me. I wanted to escape from too much sensation. But my mind was in that state of fatigue-intoxication in which one seems to be simply an observer of a succession of pictures which form spontaneously there. I was conscious of wishing to reflect consecutively on a certain idea, namely, whether Willys was right in declaring that one can’t kill a god. But the moment that I began to grip the idea, and ask myself whether in the course of history many terrible old gods and dynasties of gods had not utterly passed away under the pressure of that Necessity which encompasses the gods and is stronger than they—pictures began to form: Bacchanalian women dancing in the hills; Willys’s humorous torn limbs of Pentheus strewn “all over the place”; Cornelia’s terrified picture of the gory head hanging over the car; and—the young Bacchus at the police station.

Sometimes one manages to escape from the persecution of such pictures by reading a book. I had nothing available but the copy of the _Bacchae_ that Willys had lent me. When I found it impossible to escape from its suggestions, I decided to face them. I read till the gray morning crept into the car and extinguished the lights. The last lines of the tragedy moved me deeply, with a kind of strange solemnity, a haunting beauty.

O the works of the Gods—in manifold wise they reveal them:
Manifold things unhoped-for the Gods to accomplishment bring,
And the things that we looked for, the Gods deign not to fulfill them;
And the paths undiscerned of our eyes, the Gods unseal them.

I looked out at the window. Another day had come. We were thundering through wintry cornfields—a hint of snow on the withered brown stalks. I rose, and passing through the silent sleepers to the deserted observation-car at the rear, I went out on the platform and pitched the empty silver flask as far as I could pitch it into the wind. I seemed to hear from the corn a remembered godlike voice crying: “O celestial Bacchus, drive them mad!”