Gargoyles. Ben Hecht

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СКАЧАТЬ drunk, unchastened, zigzagging humorously down the pavement like some nocturnal clown prowling after a vanished Bacchanal. A hastily dressed prostitute carrying her night's earnings as an offering to early devotion. A few unseasoned revellers overcome with a nostalgia for clean bathrooms and Sunday morning waffles at the family board, sleepily fleeing the scenes of their carouse.

      All this formed no part of the preoccupations of the whistling one. He was waiting for his companion and for the fifteenth time the tune of "Bill Bailey" came softly from his lips. The companion appeared, a crestfallen young man of twenty-three, Hugh Keegan by name. An idiotic wistfulness marked the blond vacuity of his face. They said nothing and walked to the street car track.

      Here they must wait. There was no car in sight. Basine employed the wait, jumping out from the curbing and peering with a great show of interest down the deserted tracks. The night's dissipation had left him perversely elate. His vanity demanded that he confound the scenes of his recent moral collapse by exhibitions of undiminished vigor of body and gayety of mind. So he capered back and forth between the curb and the deserted tracks, ostentatiously unbuttoning his coat to the chill of the dawn and addressing brisk, cheerful sallies to his penitent friend.

      It was this way with Basine. He had spent the night in sin. Now he must act as if he had not spent the night in sin. It was a matter of deceiving his conscience, and Basine's conscience did not live in Basine. It was, to the contrary, a mysterious external force, something quite outside him.

      He eyed the virtuous hallelujahs of the sunrise with a somewhat over-emphasized aplomb. Dimly he felt that a God was articulating in dawns and sunbeams. As long as he had continued his whistling, these facts had remained concealed. But now he had grown tired of "Bill Bailey" and at once God, peering out of his beautiful rosy heaven was saying, "Shame on you." Everything seemed to be waiting to repeat this banal reproof.

      This was the conscience of George Basine—a reproof that came from without. He felt an inclination to defiance before this reproof.... He was young and given to evil. This was only natural, considering the time in which he lived and the biological impulses of youth.

      But to do evil was one thing. To defend it after it was done was another. Thus Basine, having sinned lustily through the night, avoided the more unspeakable sin of defending his action. The reproof arrived, he faced it with candor and intelligence, prepared to admit that he had done wrong.

      He did not want God mumbling around inside him as was the case with his friend Keegan. God mumbled around inside of Keegan and made him feel like the devil. But Basine—there was no occasion for God to argue His point. He, Basine, surrendered gracefully and forthwith. That was the way to handle situations of the soul.

      To Basine, situations of the soul were a species of external discomforts he identified as God. They were the regulations and taboos of a civilization to which he was prepared at all times to submit, providing such submission did not compromise him. One got rid of taboos by looking them squarely in the eye and simulating respect or remorse. Taboos were good manners. One had to be polite to good manners. Basine laughed, not defiantly. He had already made his apologies to the dawn. The dawn was God's good manners. It entered the world as precisely and as perfectly as the saintly wife of a great financier might enter her grandmother's drawing room.

      Waiting beside the car track, Basine was already a reformed and forgiven man. The sun was like a huge Salvation Army marching through the highways of Evil, beating great drums and singing, "Are you washed, are you washed in the Blood of the Lamb?" He was glad of it. He was glad to be once more a part of a virtuous world, a citizen of an ideal republic given to the great causes of progress.

      This adjustment completed, memories of the night came to him as they waited for the car. These memories failed, naturally, to conflict with his character as a citizen of virtue. For they were memories which he was prepared at any moment to repudiate and denounce. Thus prepared he could of course enjoy them.

      The memories brought an elation, the elation which usually fills the healthy male of twenty-five upon discovering or rediscovering that the Devil is as alluring as he is painted and that the wages of sin are neither death nor disillusion. He had enjoyed himself. Sin was wrong. But if one knew it was wrong one could go ahead and enjoy it. The great thing was to know it was wrong, to admit it frankly and share in the general indignation of it and not to go around like a vicious-minded freak defending it, like some people he knew were in the habit of doing.

      Thus on this May morning Basine was able to grasp the enormity of his offense and to apologize whole-heartedly for its commission and simultaneously to enjoy the memory of it. He had come away from Madam Minnie's with an egoistic impression of his prowess and with the self-satisfaction which comes of the knowledge of having cheated the devil out of his due by his careful method. He remembered with a warmth in his throat as if he were recalling something beautiful how the creature had looked at the first moment she stood before him.

      He had spent the earlier part of the night getting creditably drunk. Lured into a brothel by a woman with a hard, childish face, he had devoted himself for several hours to the despicable business of sin. The sordid make-believe of passion had pleased him vastly. He had managed in fact to achieve an observation on life. As the night waned he had grown philosophical and thought, how with good women one began with personal talk, with an exchange of confidences. One began with emotions, with gentle lacerations, wistfulness, sadness. And one progressed from these toward the intimacy of physical contact. But with bad women one began with the intimacy of physical contact. Only the abrupt matter-of-fact tone of the thing robbed the contact of all intimacy. And one progressed from this contact toward a wistfulness, a gentle shyness and finally an exchange of confidences and personal talk. This last contained in it the thrill of intimacy. A good woman surrendered her body and inspired thereby a sense of possession. A bad woman surrendered the secret of her birthplace and of her real name and inspired a similar sense. There was also obvious the fact that the same sense of dramatic coquetry, idealism, modesty or whatever it was that induced the good woman to withhold her body induced the bad woman to withhold her confidence.

      Under the influence of this knowledge, Basine had pursued the usual tactics of the predatory male and, as a fillip to the unimaginative excitements of the night, obtained from his accomplice in sin the story of her life.

      "The mystery of a bad woman is that she was once virtuous," he thought as he fell asleep. "Just as the mystery of a virtuous woman is that she could be bad."

      An hour later he awoke and with a thrill of quixotic honesty placed five dollars in the moist hand of the sleeping houri, gathered his friend Keegan out of an adjoining room and emerged once more into the world with a clear head, a body full of elated memories and a laudable conviction that he had done wrong, but that what happened yesterday was not a part of today and that a man can grant himself absolution from sin as easily as he can lay aside virtue.

      As for Keegan, he stared with mild eyes at the dawn, at the beggarly alleys and the negro porter dreamily sweeping cigar stubs out of a lopsided doorway. He listened patiently to his friend's enthusiasms. To Keegan there was something inexplicable about Basine's morning-after pose. Keegan had not found a place for God. Platitudes were not a background against which he might posture to his convenience. Instead they were terrible intimates. They operated his thought for him.

      After committing a sin one should be repentent. The commission of sin was, of course, an outrage. But somehow the platitudes did not quite reach into the bedroom of evil. They remained hovering outside the door marking time, as it were, and whispering through the keyhole, "just wait ... just wait...."

      And as soon as he had emerged from the room, in fact even before that, they had taken possession of him again. They demanded now repentance, thorough repentance which included thorough repudiation of all joyous memories, all pleasurable moments. And Keegan, surrendering himself СКАЧАТЬ