The Savage Gentleman (17 page)

All his father's teachings, had he known it, had been perverted and warped by a desire to make his son a perfect man seeking perfection. Their total effect, as it was exerted now, however, in the face of realities of a semi-civilized world, was merely revolution and despair.

Henry did not understand himself. He did not understand especially that the wild and arbitrary boiling of his emotions was partly a psychological escape from other emotions which had been still-born on the island, awakened faintly when Marian first came into the room on the night before, and which were now burning secretly and feverishly underneath his synthetic and yet passionately supported exterior.

When there was a knock on his door he whirled away from the window, yanked his fists out of his pockets and clamped his lips together.

The knock was repeated.

He stalked to the door and pulled it open.

Outside Marian stood.

She was dressed in blue-green satin pajamas, which clothed her in liquid lines, and which made a kindred background to her soft upturned eyes.

"I was sitting in my room for a long time," she said, "and the idea of having you here in the apartment, hungry and unhappy, was unendurable. So I came down. I wanted to talk to you, Henry."

He felt hollow and weak and small. He backed away from the door.

She came in and closed it.

"Sit down," she said.

She found a box of cigarettes on a table, handed one to him and bent forward while he held a match.

"You know, Henry, you're not just being a spoiled child because the world isn't heaven."

"If you wish to call an attitude of outrage and disdain being a spoiled child--"

She shook her head. "No, Henry. Although I must say those are the two principal results of being spoiled. It's something else. All this internal tumult of yours is real enough, I know. But by taking it out on poor grandfather and on Tom Collins you're just kidding and confusing yourself."

"I'd rather be left to my own opinions concerning myself."

"You always have been, haven't you, Henry ? So how can you know whether they're right or wrong? Now you stay right in that chair and listen to me. I know what's the matter with you. You're frightened. People never get mad and act the way you do unless they're frightened. But you're not frightened by the world's perfidy."

She locked her hands behind her head and caressed her temples with the inside of her arms.

"You're afraid of
me,
Henry."

"Am I?" His voice was sullen and retreating.

"You've been kept from being a man--from seeing a woman--for so long, Henry, that all your frustrations are crystallized into one dreadful fear. Not only of me, but of all women. You behaved badly today just out of primitive, simple spite. All this furor of yours is nothing but sour grapes."

She looked at him intently.

"Aren't you afraid of me, Henry, right now?"

He returned her gaze.

Once again he was seized by the same formidable contraction of his body and soul which had spellbound him on the previous night when Marian walked into the room.

He could not move or speak. He scarcely breathed. His ears roared and a welter of intolerable pain surged through him and concentrated itself in his throat.

Suddenly, and unwantedly, two tears gathered in his eyes and coursed down his cheeks. The proudest man in all the world, the man most open to its unkind cuts--began to cry.

In a moment he learned one sweet use of woman.

Marian went to where he sat with his head bowed. She put her arms slowly around his tremendous shoulders. She insinuated the liquid satin of her dress and herself into his lap. She kissed him slowly on the mouth.

A moment passed.

The tornado in Henry Stone broke its chain.

A longer time, much longer, and even for Marian a very strange time, went by before a temporary end was put to the delirium in his eyes.

Then afterward, sitting in the same chair, smoking another cigarette, looking at him quietly she said: "Poor Henry! Poor, poor Henry!"

He shuddered. There were upon his face a thousand signs of things half remembered, a thousand incredulities. She watched him struggle back to something he could never be again, to something he now tried to be with the most profound absurdity of all his many absurdities.

' I'm sorry. I'm ashamed. Of course I shall marry you as early as possible tomorrow."

The cigarette fell from her fingers and she picked it up. She wanted to laugh. She wanted to scream. She very nearly wept. Then she was angry. She countered this towering asininity with a single sentence:

"My dear Henry, I've loved so many men that it would be impossible to marry them all, and whether or not I could arrange it with you, depends on what you do in the future."

For one clock-tick he looked at her, as baffled and as bewildered as the sudden materialization of a grotesque apparition might have made him. He saw her anger. He saw that she had told the truth.

She kept him from plunging headlong through the window only by screaming so loudly that he was once again stripped of the power to act.

At nine o'clock on the next morning the telephone in Henry's hotel suite rang dispassionately.

Since midnight he had been walking back and forth in that hotel room, ingesting bit by bit the ingredients of his shame and remembering hour by hour each syllable of his father's hideously accurate diagnosis of womankind.

He stopped his endless marching and picked up the telephone. He believed that he was all dead but life stirred somewhere in him when he heard McCobb's voice.

"Hello, lad. I tried to get you at Whitney's house. What happened over there?

They spoke of you very strangely. I wanted to ask you if all was well with you and how you like the new world."

Henry picked random words. "Well enough."

' I've been reading the tripe they publish about you in the newspapers," McCobb continued. "It's a strange land we've returned to. I'd be lost myself, but a cousin of my wife's has come forward with a home in New Jersey. She's a dour little woman, being Scotch, and it was my money she heard of first, but she's taken me in."

"Is that so? I was meaning to see you." Henry's voice was toneless.

"Don't bother about me, lad. For an old man, I'm doing grand. They found all the little things I made of gold and they've started saying I'm a great artist. They're giving me an exhibition, mind you, and they've promised me another fortune besides the handsome sum your father left to me. I have to keep my feet off my wife's cousin's chairs and I'm not allowed to give presents to her bairns, or spill my pipe on the floor, but it's a rare treat to be taken in."

"Have you seen Jack?"

"I have that. He's the king of Harlem, I understand. They treat him like a lord and he bought today a yellow automobile and a purple suit."

Henry almost laughed. ''I'll see you both as soon as I'm straightened out about things."

"You can do it, being young. To me--it's a mad world. Well--good night to ye, lad."

"Good night, McCobb. And God bless you."

"Thank you."

Henry hung up. The sound of McCobb's voice had conjured up memories--

memories of a lazy blue bay and a quiet house, of warm sun and hard work. Of untarnished fun, real hunger, and deep sleep.

A world without unease. A world without women and the strange emotions and acts to which they gave rise. Henry could hear Jack's dinner gong banging and McCobb's cheerful whistle. He bowed his head on the vast book that held old newspapers.

Chapter Thirteen:
THE CHALLENGE

HENRY had been in New York for a month. He sat in his rooms in the Hotel Boulevard and thought about that month.

The expression on his face was melancholy and confounded. He stretched in a chair and smoked a cigarette.

His retrospect always began with Marian. He could not pry his imagination away from the paradox she presented--an aspect of freshness and candor worn over a disillusioned and betrayed heart. He thought of her in those terms. Every fact that emerged from his contact with her had served to fortify and embellish the definition of womankind which his father had pounded into him.

Being a gentleman, he had not violated the confidence imposed upon him by her anger. He had merely gone to Elihu Whitney that night and said that he could not presume on his hospitality any longer--that he felt he would be freer to do his work if he had his own establishment.

Whitney had guessed the source of Henry's sudden change of his plans. He had accepted it only after much protest, and with a feeling of wretchedness. He was old enough to know the futility of interfering with the quarrels of the young.

Henry had moved--hating himself for moving, dreaming secretly that Marian would at least ask him not to go, and piqued by the fact that she failed to appear at all.

His mind traveled away from Marian only when it became fatigued with following the same closed circuit of thought. The rest of the month had been strange and often--despite his unhappiness--exciting.

He had flown over New York. He had learned to drive a car. He had read twenty books about modern life--some technical, some speculative. He had seen the subways and the railroad stations, power houses, bridges, factories, steel mills, the departments of the municipal government, schools, theaters, a passenger steamship, a zeppelin, the interior of his newspaper plant, a modern hospital, laboratories, a dozen office buildings, hotels, night dubs, docks, slums, the houses of half a dozen millionaires, speakeasies, department stores, clubs, country houses on Long Island, Coney Island, the New Jersey suburbs, the Stock Exchange--everything that Collins could think of which he should see and observe.

He had kept Collins, whom he had liked from the first hour of their meeting.

Collins was two years his junior--but he sometimes seemed decades older than Henry.

By and large, Henry had not enjoyed what he saw.

Everything was a reflection of his first impressions, colored by his father's lessons and marred by his experience with Marian.

Anyone taken from the late nineteenth century and hurled into the present day without preparation would experience the same dismay and revulsion.

Those who lived through it witnessed a change so gradual that it seemed almost inappreciable--although thousands of the older generation are still perpetually raising their hands in horror. They saw the polka become ragtime and the ragtime war music and the war music jazz. They watched corsets disappear and skirts rise and rouge come slowly to the lips of the guileless. They were shocked by the flapper who drank from a flask until the flapper became so familiar that she was commonplace and until they perceived that the skies had not yet fallen.

Other things happened step by step to that generation. Prohibition came--and they assumed that their own drinking could continue and were resentful of any effort to check it. When rebellion became a fad, they marched in the van--and as that rebellion bred gangs and political corruption, they looked on calmly, because it was not they who felt they were to blame.

Meanwhile the newspapers, and the magazines, the cinema and the radio, and thousands of novels broadened their attitude toward morality. Things were said in print that had not been put in writing since the silver age of Rome. There were mutterings and censorships, but the movement toward tolerance and frank examination rolled over them.

Psychology developed a new sense of the reasons for human behavior which the public slowly and partially assimilated. Thirty years of education and change marked the twentieth century.

Henry had missed them all. He came untouched from the old era. His dilemma was not surprising.

Nevertheless, he learned. He read the books on psychology with feverish interest.

His mind understood what they said; but his emotions rebelled against it. Training is, unfortunately, almost always stronger than logic.

When he thought of the net totals of his experiences during the kaleidoscopic month, he foundered. He distrusted the new world, rather than the world for which his father had prepared him.

Sometimes he sat up until the night was spent, discussing it with Collins and, while their viewpoints were irreconcilable, they remained steady companions.

He was turning over the wealth of material he had garnered when Collins carne into the room.

"Hello, Henry."

"Hello, Tom."

"Still trying to judge your peers?"

"Still trying."

"How about a snack of supper? I thought of three things you haven't eaten yet.

Armenian pastry, doughnuts and hot chocolate."

"Not hungry."

"Well--later. Did you see what Voorhees wrote about you in the late edition today?"

"No. He called me up, though."

"Oh? It may be true, then. He says that you have decided not to make any changes in the
Record
staff and to permit the same directorate to operate it."

"That's what I told him. Only--I said--just for the time being."

Collins nodded. "So I thought. But Voorhees forgot to mention that you said just for the present. Your Tom--meaning myself--didn't believe the decision was final. With all your febrile distaste for things as they are, you'll want to get in there personally and break a leg for old Righteousness one of these days."

"I'm not so sure."

Collins lighted a cigarette.

"Let's see. That makes the three hundred and seventy-ninth time you've expressed that particular doubt. It's your next to favorite doubt. Your favorite doubt is relative to women. Your third favorite doubt--"

"Say!"

"I have already discarded the subject."

"It's a relief."

"Good. I've been about town. There's some nasty dirt on the subway situation.

Something like three million dollars has turned up unaccounted for. But Tom knows.

That three million--or, at least, one chunk of it--was spent on a girl named Phoebe--nice name--last winter at Miami and on the little horses that ran but not quite fast enough. Oh-

-I'm brimful of scandal today. They caught Toledo Scarsi last night redhanded and by that I mean with red hands and he was bailed out at dawn today for the immense sum of fifty dollars. You remember my telling you about Scarsi--the lad of baseball bat renown?"