The last night or two I have been beading over what I have written up to now and I felt a sudden profound wave of discouragement and failure. I have been trying to set down everything and I have failed. It all seems curiously unsatisfactory for it seems to give the picture of a sullen, unpopular, morose introvert, yet that is only a part of the whole picture. There was another side, almost wholly contradictory, as if I were two persons. The Greeks had a saying that every man is three persons the person people thought he was, the person he thought he was, and the person he really was. It seems to me that up to now I have been writing only about the person I think I am and payiog no attention to the person other people think I am. And I am aware that somewhere along the line there must be a great difference, else the story would not be so complex and difficult. The person I really am no one can describe except God, but certainly it must be a very confused, changeable, and unstable creature... which indeed is probably true of all of us.
Tonight I decided to attempt seeing myself as I must appear to others, not only to the friends and the acquaintances back in Oakdale, but to strangers I might meet on the street or on a train. When I attempt it I begin to understand that a great many of my troubles come from a divided personality, that even many of the misconceptions shared by our friends concerning Enid and me and our life together arise from that fact. People have not seen the truth, not because they were unperceptive, but because it was only possible to judge from appearances.
I wonder how many men and women suffer from the same division of personality and the same outward deception. Perhaps in my own way I have been as great a fraud as Enid. It occurs to me that she is able to judge only from my outside personality because she has never been allowed to see or to share what might be called the inside personality which I seem to have been writing about.
Let's pretend that you met me in the club car on a streamlined train. You would think me at once to be a prosperous, conservative, contented businessman on the verge of middle age. What you would see would be a fairly good-looking fellow with a little gray in his hair and a few lines on his face, with a healthy skin, smooth-shaven with well-kept, rather beautiful hands neither the hands of a working man nor the long thin hand of the nervous, oversensitive type. You would see a man with a youthful figure, thickening only a little around the middle, dressed in a conservative plain or pin-striped blue suit. You would see a man who did not wear hand-painted ties or any of the vulgar imitations of them but a plain blue or maroon tie or one of foulard with tiny figures on it. There would be an expensive wrist watch and a clean good handkerchief tucked negligently into the breast pocket. Very likely you would say, "There is a successful and happy fellow, well adjusted, looking probably younger than his years a fellow who has been to one of the better colleges and already is on boards of directors and interested in the good of his community."
You might make some remark about the train being late or how badly things were going in Washington, and presently there would be a conversation punctuated by a drink or two and one or two stories, not the dirty bathroom jokes of the traveling salesman in the smoking room, but funny stories, a little strong but with a point. And presently the talk might turn to families and education and children, and the fellow (me) would tell you about his own family. It would come out that he was happily married and that his wife was very active in public affairs without neglecting her household, that his two children (a boy and a girl) were healthy and went to excellent schools. You would find out that the fellow lived in a nice suburb called Oakdale, and had a very prosperous insurance business which he hoped his boy would take over a little later so that he could ease off a bit and enjoy himself more. You would discover that the fellow played golf in the eighties and raised roses for a hobby. (That might be the only weak, betraying spot.) But when at last the train arrived or one of you went to bed, you parted thinking you had met a very fortunate and prosperous fellow. You had exchanged addresses and promised to let each other know if either of you ever visited the home town of the other. You might even, in your pleasure at making a new friend, think, "There's a sample of what America can produce. That's what you might call the average middle-class American. No country produces a finer product."
Or at home in Oakdale you would find that the man known as Wolcott Ferris living at 818 Bosquet Road was one of the finest fellows you had ever met. He played a good game of golf. He could drink with the best. He had plenty of brains and was a good businessman. He had one of the soundest wives in the community, good-looking and a good dresser and a good housekeeper who was active in the P.T.A., the League of Woman Voters, the Red Cross, and other social activities. He was a fellow who was generous with his contributions and knew how to have a good time when away with the boys at a convention nothing priggish about him. And he Tiad class" that meaning the neat well-cut clothes, the conservative ties, and the college education. Lately he had become perhaps a little less convivial, drinking less, going to the club less frequently, and sometimes absenting himself from the usual businessmen's lunches on the excuse of overwork. But there was nothing unusual about that. Anybody growing older was likely to slow down a little. A smart businessman too!
That I imagine is as I must seem to others, both strangers and friends. I am not sure how much the division of personality is my own doing and how much of it is the result of the pressures of early background and the kind of world and community in which I live. Certainly the division is a sharp one, painful at times and not in any sense healthy. It is the kind of thing which could lead to outright schizophrenia.
What satisfaction must be found in being a complete extrovert, in bellowing and shouting and showing off, in playing the fool, with never a thought of any depth, never a thought which could bite and sear until at last the tissue built up by fearful and cowardly men to conceal truth is burned or cut away and truth lies naked, blinding and sometimes bitter but beautiful. Only the strong can survive such a spectacle. Only the strong can understand truth and perhaps, armed with it, defend himself against the society in which he is forced to live and even to strike back with blows which, accumulated, may some day liberate all men, strong and weak alike.
Some extroverts, like the Sergeant, are simply born that way, with a set of glands operating furiously so that a kind of fierce physical activity leaves no time save for sleep which recharges the glands so that in the morning light they begin to operate furiously all over again. These are driven men and women, perhaps superficially happier than others but perpetually ignorant of any subtle or profound satisfaction. They are the clowns, the boisterous, whose emptiness echoes and re-echoes with a booming sound through a hollow cavern. And they contribute nothing. They bring nothing into the world. And they take nothing from it in experience. They are, I suppose, happy. They can suffer, but it is only a physical suffering like that of the Sergeant deprived for a long period not of the love of one woman but of the mechanical sensual satisfaction of women who become in time a kind of mechanical apparatus like that used in the artificial insemination of cattle.
And there are others, extroverts of a different sort, who become so out of fear and cowardice, who will not be alone out of terror of the thoughts that constantly creep up behind them and threaten them the ones who spend all their lives in turning away, in deceiving themselves. What happens to them in the still of the night when they waken and are alone? What happens must be horrible, so horrible that they remain incapable of ever revealing the experience.
It seems to me that the sickness of our society is that it has become a society either of stupid or of contrived and cowardly extrovert individuals who frequent the clubs, the pool parlors, the whorehouses, the night clubs, or the bars out of sheer terror. They give themselves over to talking pictures, to radio, to television, to comics, to sports because, inherently and instinctively, they are afraid. Of what?
One might try to take one of the polls which are an evil symptom of our times, but the pollster would not get one honest answer because an honest answer would be a shamed answer and because so many would not even know why they are afraid. It is a fear much worse and more desperate than the terror of warfare by disease or of great bombs that destroy whole cities. Those are merely physical fears and do not particularly terrify any healthy or decent person. But the fears which drive us to live in crowds, to pursue amusements and diversions beyond the ultimate limits of boredom, to contrive drinking parties and clubs and organizations and meetings in order not to be alone, not to think, and never to see ourselves, are fears infinitely worse. They possess at once the hair-raising nameless terror of ghosts and the ultimate terror of utter emptiness, which Poe might well have dissected. And so the victims mark time in a limbo of agitation, swirling round and round, until at last death releases them from the necessity of ever having a thought and from the perpetual flight from the pitiable spectacle of their own emptiness.
Such an extrovert society can create a great furor and hubbub; it can raise great anthills with the deadening and uninspired muddy efficiency and mediocrity of the Socialist; it can even amass and expand and devalue money in its self-deception, but it will never contribute much to civilization and in the end can create only a society of morons who work for themselves and others, like the workers of a hive, merely to keep alive without ever knowing quite why they are working or why they want to live at all.
All this creates more and more a society and a race of men who live only by some cosmic force which compels them to go on living and working, without plan, without ambition, without vision, without any of those gifts or potentialities which slowly, over millions of years, have raised man above the level of animals. Could it be that we are slipping backward while we seem to be surging forward? Could it be that all the things science has discovered to keep alive those who should have died are merely the cynical manifestation of wise and all-knowing God and nature slapping down the pretensions of insignificant and pompous little man, permitting him to destroy not only his "civilization" but eventually himself? Are we not, by emphasis on all material things, upon "security," upon the leveling upward and downward of all men to a single plane of mediocrity, merely destroying that element, that core, which has since the beginning lifted civilized man slowly and painfully upward from the level of barbarism?
An extrovert society which works only for material rewards and spends all its time at the games in the arena and whose only goal is a leveled mediocrity is a doomed society.
Perhaps all of us are in one degree or another schizophrenics. Only the simplest and most primitive of men living in a simple tribal community with a minumum of taboos escapes those pressures which split and divide us, which force us into suppressions and hypocrisies and snobberies and pretense. Sometimes sitting in the bar at the country club I have slipped out of the general conversation for a moment and across my glass have watched men whom I knew well and yet did not know at all and have wondered what was the other side of them. What was it they did not tell? What was it they refused to face? What was it, besides age and too many Bourbons, that brought the tired harsh lines into their middle-aged faces?
What would happen if I said suddenly to one of them, "Let's talk about ourselves. Let's abolish all rules and habits and just dig down inside and spill everything!"
If such a fantastic thing were possible. I know what would happen. There would be first a sudden astonished silence and then a suspicious glance such as one might give suddenly to a person who had been talking along normally and suddenly said, "Go and report to Marechal Ney. I am Napoleon," and then probably an exclamation of astonishment, "What the hell are you talking about?"
It occurs to me that there has been in my existence only one person who ever has seen the other, inward side of me and that was Mary Raeburn. She is probably the only one living to whom I have ever talked about myself. She might have saved me, but in the end she only brought disaster.
In order to understand many things it is necessary to go into Mary's background which wasn't at all the ordinary one. Indeed it was rather exceptional and even peculiar. Mary was the granddaughter of one of the first men to see the great possibilities of a place like Crescent City in the midst of a wild country that was rapidly being tamed. He spent all of his time trying to build up the community and in the process acquired a great deal of land in what is now the heart of a big industrial city. His own efforts and the efforts of other people in time brought an immense value to this land so that by the time he died he was many times a millionaire.
He left a rather fantastic will leaving all of the fortune to an only son but with every kind of restriction. The land was never to be sold until the third generation, which was as far ahead as he was able to tie up the fortune. He had never sold any land himself; he had only acquired more and more, and he did not want the fortune squandered or broken up. The whole of the properties were run in a kind of corporation with a board of directors which included his own son, whose judgment he apparently did not hold in great esteem. Already before he died he had seen fortunes made in the new country squandered and he had seen the inheritors leave Crescent City and go to live in New York or in Europe, drawing their incomes from Crescent City and spending them elsewhere. So he made another provision that the inheritors through the second generation could not have the income unless they spent at least six months of every year in residence in Crescent City itself. That is how Mary Eaeburn came to spend part of each year there.
The old man's distrust of the ability and interests of his only child, a son, may have been well founded for the son showed no interest whatever in business. With the passion of the pioneer's determination that his children should be well educated, the old man sent his son East to school and there something happened to him. After four years in Harvard and three summers in Europe, the son, who was Mary's father, returned a stranger to Crescent City, and when the old man died the son no longer made any effort to conceal his preference for the East and for Europe. He married a rather colorless New England woman, and from then on Europe was their home. They only came to Crescent City for the period necessary to keep the big income which increased every year, and even while they were residing officially in Crescent City they spent most of the six-month period traveling within the borders of the United States or visiting rich and somewhat fashionable friends in the East and the South.
Mary was born about three years after me in Europe. I never saw much of her until about a year before I came out here to this South Pacific island and I never really knew her until then. The society of a place like Crescent City is more complex than appears on the surface. Those of us who lived in Oakdale and belong to the country-club set appeared to many people, especially those who lived in less rich suburbs, to be what might be called Tiot stufP socially, yet there was a circle, very small and very unstandardized, which occupied a situation still higher.
The people in this set existed a little apart not because they were necessarily wealthier some of the Oakdale families were very rich indeed but because of something almost intangible which it was difficult to explain. They knew more and they took an interest in a great many things which were ignored or went unheeded and even unheard of in our Oakdale world. They did not believe the world ended at the borders of Oakdale or even Crescent City or even of the state itself. Whether they traveled or stayed at home, they lived everywhere. Some of them included businessmen important enough to be a part of the society of the whole nation, who came and went, with interests in Texas or California or South Carolina or where you will. None of them might have been called "Mr. Smith" or "Mr. Jones." Most of them were nice and kindly people, frequently very friendly and generous, but all of them were busy people. A few of them were almost like Frank Saunders' family. They were not snobbish. If they appeared infrequently at the country club or rarely played golf and seldom gave cocktail parties, it was only because they were too busy... busy with what? That too is difficult to answer.
There was old Mrs. Sidell who would rather sit at home in one of the finest of gardens and work on her needlepoint while she talked endlessly about things which Enid, even with her college education, would never have understood. Mrs. Sidell's needle-work was known to connoisseurs all over the states and all over the world. When she died most of what she had done would become museum material, for they were real works of art. She was a great lady, simple, kindly, and warm. There was Tom Worthington, one of the world's greatest chemists, and Alice Mackaye who had been a very fine actress and finally came back to live on a big farm with her sister and her sister's family. Her sister was a great horse and cattle breeder. And the Birdwells. Harry Birdwell had a share in a family factory in which he took some interest, but most of his time was spent with his wife in research concerning the lesser-known Elizabethan poets. Scholars in every part of the world knew them both and what they had accomplished and sometimes came to Crescent City to see the books and papers he had collected. And there was Ernest Lawton, as fine a lawyer as you could find anywhere.
These people did not live together in a small community like our own. They lived where they chose in Crescent City and they stayed in Crescent City because that is where their roots were and because they liked it Alice Mackaye and her sister on a big farm, the Birdwells in a rather gloomy big house in the center of town on a street which had long since gone to filling stations and faith-healer's offices and the churches of hysterical splinter religious sects. Tom Worthington and his wife lived in an apartment near the center of town.
There were many others who "belonged" to no set yet among themselves lived in a separate world. They were scattered and saw each other infrequently yet there was a surprising intimacy among them. None of them was perhaps busier than most of us in Oakdale, but their business had a purpose, a design, and a fire. They were not busy merely killing time. There was no "clubbiness," no groups and cliques who saw each other seven days a week. They were all about us and yet in no way a part of us. It was as if each one lived in a world of his own which was in some way related to all the other worlds. But all of us in Enid's circle were excluded from all those worlds.
It was among these people that Mary Raeburn belonged and among them that she had lived during all of the years in which she spent part of her time in Crescent City.
While we were growing up and until after Enid and I were married, Mary sometimes came to the parties when in Crescent City where the young people met, but she always seemed a little apart, which was possibly only natural since she did not spend enough time among us to know all the gossip and indulge in the somewhat feeble talk and giggling that passed among the girls of our world for conversation. I know that one year she went for a time to the Oakdale High School (it was new then and the teaching good and the children of all the better families went there without any thought of boarding school), but she did not have a happy time since she was always an outsider and "different." Her parents never attempted the experiment again after that first year.
She was never the flashy sort of girl that the boys ran after. At that time she was rather plain and too plump. Like many such girls, as she grew older and fined down a bit, her figure improved and the fine bone structure in her face became evident and she acquired a look of distinction that at times approached actual beauty. After the time she was twenty-two or -three we rarely saw her. Now and then she appeared at the country club to play golf with someone who was visiting her, or we encountered her at a charity ball or some other more or less public function. She was always pleasant and agreeable, but somehow she didn't fit in with the women of Enid's set, I think because neither side could find anything to talk about.
When she was twenty-two or -three her father died and Mary came into an immense income, predicated always upon the condition that she spend so much of every year in Crescent City. A year or two later she married a man from the East called Herbert Raeburn. I saw him once or twice and he seemed to be all right, dark, older than Mary, and rather handsome. But something went wrong with the marriage and after four years they were divorced. After that her contacts with the people of Oakdale and most of those in Crescent City became even more tenuous and broken. There were always visitors at her big strange house, but we rarely saw them, and she spent a good deal of time on week ends in the Kentucky horse country and, after planes came in, even as far away as Virginia.
The house in which she lived had been built in the Eighties by her grandfather and by the standards of a generation or two later it was considered ugly, although by now it has acquired a certain antique beauty which was always there unnoticed in the scale and proportion of the porches, the windows, and the doorways. It was built in the period when iron dogs and stags were familiar ornaments on the huge lawns beneath great elms and maples. The porches were enormous and wide and very high, with complicated columns supporting the roofs, and at one side there was a kind of tower, square in shape, with a magnificent view over the whole of the great river valley. Inside there was a huge hallway with a wide winding stairway. The ceilings were high, perhaps as high as fifteen feet, with windows on the ground floor, running from floor to ceiling, which opened outward onto the porches or directly into the garden. Behind the house there were big stables and a great carriage barn where the dogcarts and phaetons and victorias of the grandfather's time are still preserved.
There was a curious sadness about the house as if it had been built for a great family with children running about. But in two generations there were only two children to grow up in the big house Mary's father and then Mary herself. It was certainly in our time a very expensive house to run. Heating it alone must have cost a small fortune, and there was the endless problem of cleaning it and keeping it in repair. People were always saying they could not see why Mary spent so much money and took so much trouble to keep up such a vast old-fashioned house when she could have lived so much more pleasantly in a smaller more convenient one. But Mary had plenty of money no one but the trustees ever really knew how much, and until the times of huge taxes it is likely that she could not possibly spend her income and the money continued to pile up. Still, even money could not make the problems of servants and cleaning and repairs anything less than a trouble and a worry.
My grandfather, the German ironmonger, and Mary's father had been friends and they were both fond of music, and while my grandfather was still alive I went there a few times with him after supper in the evening. Usually I ran about the stables where there were five or six colored men in charge of the horses and carriages, but I did come to know as well the inside of the house.
It was what might have been called "richly furnished" with heavy dark furniture and heavy curtains of brocade or velvet running from floor to ceiling with carved and gilded baldachins at the tops of the windows. There were splendid gilt console tables with marble tops and huge fireplaces in which as a small boy I could stand upright without touching my head. The stair rail or banister of the great stairway was made of heavy dark wood, very broad and very slippery, and one of my childhood frustrations arose from the fact that there were no children there to play with who might have slid down it and I never had courage enough to attempt it on my own, Mary herself was three years younger than I, and even when she was at home there was no contact between us beyond a mere childish how-do-you-do. At that age the fact that she was a girl kept us apart and at that age three years difference in age makes an enormous obstacle even to communication. All I remember about her at that period was that she seemed shy and fat and rather overdressed and a little sad.
When my grandfather died I did not see the house again until I was nearly twenty when twice during the summer of that year Mary's mother made a rather listless effort to bring Mary more closely together with the young people of Crescent City and twice gave dinner parties which were much grander than anything most of us had ever seen, with a real English butler and two or three colored menservants wearing white cotton gloves and with wonderful silver and crystal on the table. After that summer the mother's health grew worse and she became what was known in an earlier generation as an invalid. When Mary was twenty-six, two years after the marriage which did not last, she died.
I have put all this down because it helps to explain why Mary and I did not get together when we were young. We might have married each other then. On my side I might have rescued her from the great sad house and the ailing mother and an unhappy marriage and on her side she might have opened up for me a world which she did open up many years later when we were both on the edge of middle age. It didn't happen. To the young men of Crescent City Mary seemed not to have much reality. She was somewhat like an enchanted princess in a tower, isolated not only by the different manners of a life she had known away from Crescent City but by the concrete fact of her great fortune, for everybody knew how rich she was and whenever any young man showed her any attention it was whispered at once that he was after her money.
I met her again at what for me was a dangerous time. I had been reading and reading and in a vicarious way I had been growing, as you might say, from the inside out, and the dreariness of my life with IJnid had become very nearly insupportable so insupportable that when I went to New Orleans along with some of the men from Crescent City on a convention I flung myself into what might be described as debauchery out of sheer despair.
Five of us went together. Their names are unimportant to all of this and I would not want them hurt if ever what I am writing came into the wrong hands. Let us call them Torn, Dick, Harry, and Ernest. Tom was a prosperous manufacturer with a wife and three children, about forty-five years old. Dick was a widower of fifty-five, a businessman who was one of our best drinkers. Harry held the agency for one of the most popular of automobiles which was a gold mine. He and his wife had no children and led a strange life of quarrels and reconciliations, now together, now apart. Ernest was the most conventional of all a very respected lawyer, conventionally and apparently happily married, the kind of man who appears almost ascetic, handsome, grayish, and even thin-lipped. All of them had worked hard for their money and were still working hard, save in the rare times when they took a few days off. Then they relaxed too violently, too desperately, as if to make up for lost time. Although I had made many a similar trip in similar company, I can remember very little concerning them. But this trip still remains clear as a brilliant photograph, perhaps because of Ernest's death and because it marked the end of something in my Me.
The train had scarcely left the station when Ernest began ordering old-fashioneds, and from then on the drinking rarely stopped until the tragic end of the trip. We had several before lunch and then ate a quick meal, and three of the five of us retired to the bedrooms to sleep off the first fine flush of intoxication. It was not so much, I think, that they were actually in need of sleep but that the drinking made it possible to sleep. It did many things for them... and indeed for myself... In the haze of alcohol the world seemed brighter and the constant small worries and unhappinesses and annoyance seemed to fade out or to take on their proper scale of importance in the business of living, becoming suddenly small and insignificant to the point where presently they were forgotten altogether in a warm sense of well-being which was physical as well as mental.
Ernest, who outwardly was the most respectable of us all, had a bad heart a heart which at fifty-three was merely tired as muscles become tired following some effort of immense and prolonged physical exertion. When he drank I think it actually improved for the time being not only his sense of physical well-being but released a brilliance and clarity of mind which always had been there but which long ago had become obscured simply through the weariness of the physical machine. Back in Crescent City, in his office or at home or at the country club, one had at times the impression of a man dragging his way along. At times in the very midst of a conversation his eyes would close suddenly and his thin nervous hand would go of itself to his forehead and for a little while he would not be there at all. And one could understand that He had worked very hard all his life with long hours and the immense concentration and detail, which go into the making of any brilliant, successful lawyer. And he had given money and what was vastly more important, much of his time and energy to the good works of the community. He was certainly a scholar and a gentleman, but there were times when, I think, he actually thirsted, with some of the agonies, almost physical, which accompany the slow persistent misery of thirst, for earthiness, for low and common things. In short there were times when, in order to restore himself, there came over him a physical urge to wallow, to debase himself and his somewhat ascetic ideals, to get back to earth, the earth from which all of us come and to which all of us return. In this it might be said that he resembled many a saint in ecclesiastical history.
Outwardly at least his marriage was a happy one, although his wife always seemed a bit rarefied for my taste. She was the daughter of a bishop of the Episcopal church, and there was an air of delicacy, even of fragility, about her, as if she had grown up in the rather damp stained-glass dusk of an Episcopal palace. She was extremely intelligent and cultivated, and on the intellectual side I am certain that she was a satisfactory partner.
I do not believe they quarreled or even had any serious disagreement. There was in both of them a gentleness and an intelligence which made quarreling seem vulgar and futile. Yet it was, I think, that very lack of violence together with his wife's fragility and delicacy which made all that was male in him cry out at times for the violence and earthiness and passion of a wholly different life. His own must at times have seemed made up wholly of wraiths and shadows and drifting mist. I think any man will know what I mean.
In his own life Ernest had a satisfaction which none of the others of us really knew. He liked his work. He liked being a lawyer. The history and the intricacies of the law fascinated him. The rest of us never knew these satisfactions. We were all doing something or other, however successfully, which had simply happened to fall in our paths. Everything seemed to be all right for Ernest but it wasn't. There were these times when he had to go away and plunge deeply into another kind of life, hard, physical, physiological, even, according to some standards, depraved. I had heard rumors of these excursions but had never come across him during one of them. Whether his wife knew of them I do not know, but I suspect that she had heard rumors. It was as if he had at times to cry out from the depths of an ordered, overcivilized life the violent, even the coarse words and expressions of brutal passion. These strange, wild excursions into the depths may have made a better man and a better husband of him, and it is not impossible that his ethereal wife knew and understood this.
But, with all of us, a trip like this brought a certain relaxation and refreshment. It made us feel young again, and physiologically at least such a trip was probably a good thing for us. The others, save perhaps Ernest, indulged themselves far more frequently than I did, and on the few occasions when I had taken part in what might be simply described as a three- or four-day orgy, I never went as far as the others. The odd thing is that, almost without knowing it, each one of us was always hoping that something marvelous would happen, that there would be a gleam of excitement or even of romance or of something which we had never known and very likely would never know. Only in the case of Ernest was the attitude perhaps a different one. In his intellectual aloofness I think these debauches were regarded by him actually as regenerative activities, as if in some way they recharged his batteries, as if wallowing for a time in the dregs cleared his mind and body and restored his perspective. I think that perhaps he entered them with a certain deliberateness and even calculation as one takes a purge when one feels a bilious attack coming on. In his case respectability itself in too large doses had given him periodically what might be described as a bilious attack of the spirit and the mind. As he took drink after drink something happened to the rather lean ascetic face. The rather tight look about the lips softened and at last disappeared. Into the rather cold but very clear blue eyes there came a twinkle. Not everybody noticed the change, and perhaps I flatter myself when I say that I think he credited me with understanding, that he looked upon me as a little above the others in intellect and comprehension. I only say this because now and then, on the occasion of some particularly commonplace or hypocritical observation made in our circle, he would give me a swift, concealed glance of understanding.
As for myself I had never enjoyed these outings much beyond the point where I had had enough to drink to make everything seem rosy and all that I said seem brilliant or humorous or witty. There were always women involved and now and then I experimented. But I had never found anything satisfactory for a great variety of reasons. Such women were usually stupid and all too often they were avaricious. I learned a few things from them but afterward I always felt the worse for such encounters, occasionally repentant and sometimes filled with a sense of sordidness, but usually with disappointment that the whole thing had been merely rather cheap and insignificant and transient and without meaning.
But on the occasion of this New Orleans excursion there was a difference. I think that perhaps I approached a little the feeling which affected Ernest that somehow in order to restore myself I must be washed free and clean, rather like a ship hauled up in dry dock to he cleared of the barnacles and seaweed which had accumulated in great quantities on the hul. I felt as do the members of some obscure religious sects that there can be no repentance without sin and that it is necessary periodically to sin violently in order to repent and be cleansed. I felt the need of being cleared of all the barnacles and seaweed of respectability, of hypocrisy, of monotony or falseness and boredom, of the particular sea in which I was sailing out my life without ever coming into any port. Perhaps if I could get clear I might arrive somewhere or at least have the force to go on sailing. I was prepared with coldness and calculation for any debauchery whatever, looking upon it as a good purge.
It would not have been so and perhaps I would never have gone on the trip at all but for the fact that two days earlier Enid and I had had a monumental quaprel, the greatest and perhaps the only genuinely violent quarrel we had had up until then.
Whenever I went away on a trip alone she was resentful for days in advance. It was the old thing, I believe that if I went off alone I was escaping her. I honestly do not believe that she would have minded any of the casual coarse infidelities, even if she had known of them, nearly so much as the fact that I was out of reach, that she could not for three or four days "share" everything with me. I doubt that suspicion or physical jealousy troubled her very much. She was jealous of my "freedom," although it was something she herself neither understood nor desired.
Immediately she scented that there was a possibility of my making a trip, she would begin finagling to arrange it so that she could go with me. In the beginning this worked, but presently I learned to devise reasons why it was impossible for her to go that the trip was too expensive or that I should be for the whole of the time engaged in business and would not even be free for lunch or for dinner. On the occasions when I did let her accompany me, I found that she became incapable of leading any life of her own even for a moment or two during the day. She would ride with me in the taxi to any appointment I had or she would plan to come and fetch me. The rest of the time she would sit in the hotel room, doing what I was never able to discover, for she was not a reader and she rarely knitted or sewed. The subtle and curious thing is that she did not do any of this to protect me from attack by other women or to thwart any secret rendezvous I might have had but because she did not want me to escape her. At times she became a great nuisance by insisting that she be as important as myself in any gathering where women were admitted. She would insist on attracting and holding the attention, of others and interrupt or correct what I was saying. She was one of those who habitually interrupt you in the midst of a story with some remark such as, "No, dear, it wasn't Monday. I remember it was Tuesday because it was the day the cook left us." If she had been a mistress or a wife passionately in love with me, all this might have been understandable, but this was not true. She behaved thus and indeed her behavior became exaggerated long after we had ceased to have any physical relationship.
She began this particular violent quarrel by saying, "I can't see why you have to go all the way to New Orleans at this time. It's nothing but a convention and you won't even go to the meetings."
Beginning on the old well-worn tack I said, "It will be good for business and good for me. You're always telling me that I don't pay enough attention to business and that you and the children are going to starve."
"You know perfectly well that the drunks you're going with already take out all their insurance with you and they'll go on doing it."
"Ernest is hardly a drunk. He's one of the finest lawyers in the whole country."
"I wouldn't trust Ernest Lawton from here to there."
This was one of the horrible remarks she used over and over again until they became threadbare. They meant nothing whatever, but whenever she could not find any answer she injected something like that which made no direct assertion but left a cloud of suspicions, insinuations, and implications.
I turned to her and said, "Isn't it enough that I simply want to get away for a while?" and added desperately, "Just for a change!"
"No," she said flatly. "It isn't. Change! Change! That's all I hear! All wives would like a change sometimes too!"
"Then why in hell don't you all go away and take a change on your own? There's nothing to stop you. The children are old enough to take care of themselves. It would probably do you all good."
She didn't answer this but as usual veered elsewhere. "Ah you do is go away and get drunk and God knows what else... and then come home sick and full of remorse."
"Okay!" I said. "Even that sometimes does a man good."
"I don't know what you do and I don't care. Only I'd like a change too sometimes. It might do me good."
We were getting into one of those hopeless snarls which at times made me feel that the inside of my head was like a clock in which the mainspring has suddenly broken loose and everything has begun to whirr about without sense, meaning, or discipline. What she meant by "a change" was that I should take her to New York and spend every minute of the twenty-four hours with her, going shopping, to the theater, to bars and restaurants she'd read about in the gossip columns and where she knew no one. We did do that occasionally, for I felt that she deserved it, but it was no change. Change, in essence, is not related to a difference in furniture, in background, or even climate. It is related to people as indeed are all situations of importance to people of any depth. For me, or indeed for her, there was no change. For me the whole thing was much worse because at home at least there were the hours when I was more or less alone at the office.
The whirring in my head got beyond endurance and I said, "Look, Enid, there's one thing you don't understand and never will because you won't let yourself understand it. It's a very simple fact, psychological and physiological, that men and women are different or should be if they're any way normal. A man gets fed up with the order which a woman loves. She wants security and solidity and everything going on every day just as it has the day before. She's got a man who's given her children and a home and pays the grocery bills and she doesn't want any change. A man isn't like that Every now and then he's got to cut loose. You can't fit him into a woman's pattern. The average man, until he's too old to care, always wants changes... Maybe it's fishing or hunting or conventions or..." She attempted to interrupt me but again I said, "Shut up! For just one moment." Then I continued, "I never made you any trouble with other women and I don't want to particularly, but by God now and then I've got to get away for a time."
"I don't know why it's the men who have to have all the change."
"You could go away any time you like and stay as long as you like. The children and I will get on very well. Why don't you? I'll tell you! Because you don't want to. You'd rather go every day to the country club and the garden clubs and yackety-yack with all the other women who don't want to go away unless it means their husbands are going with them."
I heard a door opening somewhere and Enid said, "Shit! I don't want the children to hear us quarreling."
"Christ!" I said. "I don't consider this a quarrel. I could really show you a quarrel if I wanted to let go."
She began to cry. "The trouble is you really hate me!"
Then the whirring in my head became unendurable. I heard myself shouting, "You're goddamn right I hate you and for only one reason that I can never get away from you for one minute of the day... not even when I go to bed at night." I shouted louder, "And I'll tell you something else. Beginning tonight I'm going to move into the guest room and I'm going to keep the door locked so at least for a little time in my own house I can get away and be myself without having a goddamn blood-drinking octopus devouring me, morning, noon, and night."
At that she gave a scream as if I had struck her (which I know now would probably have suited her better and even pleased her since it would have made her seem more important). Then she screamed a second time, crying out, "A goddamn blood-drinking octopus! Oh! Oh!" and dramatically struck her forehead with her hand.
I felt an overwhelming desire to laugh, loudly and hysterically, but checked it and then saw Esther standing in the doorway. On her child's face was no expression of horror or of terror. On the contrary, she looked perfectly calm and extremely interested, as if she were watching a stirring domestic drama taking place in a second-rate movie. There was no doubt whatever that Esther was enjoying the scene which she regarded as an exciting doublebill spectacle.
Then Enid spied her and, rushing toward her, sobbing loudly and gathering the child into her arms, "You poor, poor child!" she cried. "To hear your own father calling your mother such names."
In a perfectly flat voice the child said, "What's the matter?"
"I can't tell you now," sobbed Enid. I'll tell you some day. You must forgive your father, darling. Forgive him, you understand, he doesn't know what he's doing."
Esther looked at me with an expression of bewilderment and then suddenly, overcome by Enid's caterwauling and hysteria, opened her own mouth in cold blood and began to squawl.
That was enough. I went out of the house, slamming the door behind me, and as I went to the garage a decision came to me. I thought, I'm going to New Orleans and I'm going to wallow in the gutter. That's the only way I can feel clean again after this one."
Until then I hadn't much cared whether I went with the boys to the convention or not, but after that scene the trip became a necessity. It had to be done as much as if I had been told by a doctor that such treatment was the only thing which could save me.
And so there we were on the train bound for New Orleans, four prosperous middle-aged or near middle-aged men, respected as respectability goes nowadays. We were tired, and each one in his own way was suffering from bad nerves and the frustrations of lives which, in spite of every effort, seemed unsatisfactory when we were not engaged in drinking or in physical exercise. Youth was gone and with it hope, and none of us was as yet reconciled to inaction, to the business of sitting back and reflecting even if any of us save Ernest possessed the capacity for reflection. But the most fearsome thing was that all of us, again with the possible exception of Ernest, would have, when that time came, damned little to reflect upon. If any of us lived into old age, which seemed unlikely considering the strains and the premature weariness from which all of us suffered, we should simply be cantankerous and idle and unsatisfied old men.
What had wearied us? That is the thing I am trying to get at as I write all of this but fail continually to discover. We were wearied of many things of taxes and financial anxieties, of rushing about always at top speed, of being persecuted by the telephone and the automobile, of being unable to spend even a single evening at home doing nothing but sitting with our families and reading and talking. We were wearied by the politicians and wearied of constant regulations and of filling in forms for this and for that, of an almost total remoteness, even in the case of Ernest, from those enjoyments which derive from one's natural environment,... of that refreshment which comes of smelling the fresh still air of the early morning and noticing the aroma of freshly turned earth or sitting still to watch a sunset or the water of a stream flowing swiftly along its willow-bordered course. We were wearied of listening to radios interrupted by vulgar clamorous commercials, bored by the monotonous dull-witted movies in which we occasionally tried to lose ourselves. We were tired of keeping up with the next-door neighbor, of raising the money to send our children to the right schools, to pay for fur coats and the new bathroom, tired of seeing each other, of talking back and forth perpetually over the same ground. I think, very possibly, we were sick of middle-class American life which at the age of all of us had become merely a treadmill on which we ran endlessly day after day without ever arriving anywhere. And we were getting old. Although we tried never to think of it, the thought was always there. We were getting old, but the true horror lay in the fact that we were getting old without anything having ever happened to us. It would be over presently... and so what!
The sleep that followed quickly the heavy drinking was an escape. It was the kind of sleep, induced by alcohol, which was not interrupted by the fitful dreams and the wakefulness which we struggled desperately to escape, trying to drive ourselves back into unconsciousness because consciousness and reality had become for the time being unbearable to us. If you drank enough you were simply overcome and fell into a state of utter blankness and void which was next to death. I doubt that any of the group, save perhaps Ernest and myself, ever had such thoughts as these, but the same will was there the will from time to time to black out, to fall into that same intoxicated trance which was next to death.
Yet we were envied. We were successful. We had everything. Oh! Hell! What we had could be measured in terms of banknotes or automobiles or expensive radio sets or tiled bathrooms or fur coats. So what!
But we were on our way to New Orleans, the gayest city outside Paris, to a convention to raise hell! And death was riding with us!
About four in the afternoon the three who had blacked out wakened and, a little foggy-eyed, came into the drawing room I shared with Ernest. Tom, Dick, Harry, and myself started a rummy game with Ernest watching, and the drinking began again at once. Ernest, I noticed, drank more than any of us. He said it raised his low blood pressure and made him feel better, and it is true that I never saw him in a condition which could even vaguely be described as intoxication. It was as if he soaked it up after long periods of drought.
We were all drinking of course to set ourselves free and in the end to bring about that drunkenness which was near to death. The bad jokes and the great laughs at nothing continued and grew more and more noisy. We had dinner, and after dinner we settled down again to cards, playing poker this time with Ernest taking a hand together with an automobile agency man from Louisville with whom Harry had struck up an acquaintance in the club car. Now and then other acquaintances bound like ourselves for New Orleans looked in at the doorway and stood for a time kibitzing with drinks in their hands. God! It was all dreary!
