XXI

The Forrester house sat on the north side of Washington Square. Its high-ceiled walls and hand-carved woodwork, its air of mellowed age were all redolent of days when coaches-and-fours rolling easily through the Square sent flocks of broad-winged pigeons fluttering to safety on the huge, clumsy arch which took its name from the Square. Mimi loved the old-fashioned house it spoke to her in tender tones of the days of splendour it had seen. Jimmie had wanted to dispose of most of the furnishings and furniture but she had restrained him. A new piece or two added to the comfort of the house, new draperies and wallpaper restored the freshness, and they settled down to a comfortable, happy existence together.

Mimi luxuriated in the unaccustomed idleness, in the realization that she had to do nothing she did not want to do. For the first time she realized how long and how hard she had been working. She saw now how steady had been the grind of the past eight years at Francine’s⁠—she had loved it, but now that she saw it in perspective, it made her shudder to see how much of a machine she had become. It had needed the revivifying touch of love to make of her a human being again instead of a coldly inanimate object but little more human than one of the sewing-machines she so often had manipulated. So for months she did little but live the life of the affluent idle, sewing a bit or reading a bit more. She did nothing that could be called work other than supervising the work of her two maids or deciding with the cook what items of food should make up the evening dinner.

In the mornings, negligee-clad, she poured Jimmie’s coffee and commented with more or less interest on the things he read to her, between mouthfuls, from the morning paper. She rather wished he wouldn’t read to her, for it spoiled in a measure her own reading of the paper after he had gone. He liked to tell her what had happened, usually prefaced by the exclamation, “Oh, look here! Here’s a pretty how-to-do! Listen!” And dutifully she would hear him read how Harry Thaw was about to gain his freedom at last or how Babe Ruth had hit another home run, or learned that another woman had shot a man who had betrayed her. Such items together with the market pages ended Jimmie’s interest in the sheet, for he shunned all news from Washington or Europe as he would have dodged the plague⁠—“I leave such heavy stuff to the spectacled birds who like it!”

Jimmie dutifully kissed and sent to the office, Mimi did what household duties she wanted to do, went shopping or to a matinée, and then waited for Jimmie’s homecoming and dinner. In the evening they went to the theatre or to a supper club or cabaret or, occasionally, they dined at the Crosbys’ or with other friends or in turn entertained at dinner. Her placid existence was so restful, so different from the stormy life which had been hers that Mimi wished it could be forever the same simple one. When Jimmie had swept aside her attempts to tell him why she could not marry him, Mimi had resolutely set her will towards securing some of that happiness which had eluded her. Grimly she resolved that she would be happy, she would forget all that had gone before and by devoting her every energy towards making Jimmie content, she would achieve contentment for herself too. There were two or three times during the first year they were married that she fancied she saw a quizzical, indecisive look in Jimmie’s eyes, but some jovial remark had always followed, proving he had not been thinking, as she had suspected and feared, of the things she had wanted to tell him which he had stopped. He loved her with a devotion that made her the centre of all his thoughts, and he was never happier than when she showed her pleasure in some little way in which he had sought to please her. “Not only are you the most beautiful but you’re the most appreciative and most wonderful wife a man ever had,” he would tell her, and his voice would always indicate beyond any doubt the sincerity that lay beneath his not very subtle compliments.⁠ ⁠…

They had been married a little more than a year. Mimi glanced idly through the mail beside her plate at breakfast as Jimmie performed his usual rite of picking juicy morsels from the World.

“ ‘New Prohibition Shakeup Threatened’⁠—humph! the bootleggers must have started that⁠—they’ll shoot prices way up to the sky for liquor now⁠—reminds me, Mimi, how’s my stock? The gin must be getting kinda low⁠—I’ll telephone McCarthy today.⁠ ⁠… Say, here’s a rich bit⁠—about a Jew selling robes to the Ku Klux Klan. By the way, Mimi, have you seen my Shriner’s pin laying around anywhere? I must’ve left it in my grey suit when I sent it to the cleaners last week. Telephone them and see if I did, won’t you?⁠ ⁠… Here’s one from Georgia. Man asks native how much corn he expects to raise this year and the native answers: ‘Oh, ’bout a hundred gallons.’ Say, that’s rich, don’t you think so?⁠ ⁠… They’re talking about passing a law out in Iowa to keep schools from using textbooks that mention fermentation⁠—say it’s against the prohibition laws.⁠ ⁠… And here’s a story where a crowd of women down in Louisiana tarred and feathered another woman and run her out of town. Kinda rough on the gal but she must’ve been pretty rotten. And over in Texas they lynched another nigger. They’re really cleaning things up. This Klan’s stirring up things all over-little rough, maybe⁠—but these kikes and Catholics and niggers got to be kept under control.⁠ ⁠…”

Mimi listened only half-heartedly to Jimmie’s selection of the news which interested him⁠—in fact, did not hear him. She interrupted him as he paused.

“Here’s a note from Mrs. Crosby⁠—wants us to come to dinner Friday night⁠—they’re having a few people in to meet some Chinaman⁠—Wu Hseh-Chuan.”

“That’s the bird Horace met when he was in China⁠—official or something Horace had to deal with to get some concession he wanted. Guess we’ll have to go.”

“You go along, Jimmie, and let me stay at home, won’t you?” Mimi asked, “I’m fed up on dinners and parties⁠—you see the same people and hear the same things and drink the same liquors at all of them.”

“But Horace and the Holy Behemoth, Eulalia, will get sore if you don’t show up, Pet.”

“They’ll get over it. I really am sick of the same old routine, there’s never anything new and it all seems so futile, wasting so much time⁠—”

“That comes from reading these stories by fellows like Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis⁠—I told you they’d make you unhappy. That’s why I leave those birds alone they’re always picking flaws in the best civilization the world’s ever seen⁠—”

“Bathtubs and radio and big business, eh?” Mimi murmured softly, perhaps a shade too softly.

“Yes⁠—bathtubs⁠—and radio and all the other things you sneer at⁠—but just the same you’d be darned unhappy and uncomfortable if you didn’t have these same benefits this civilization’s brought you,” snapped Jimmie testily.

“Oh, well, if you’re going to get angry about it, I’ll go. Only, please don’t raise your voice so⁠—remember the maid is probably listening,” Mimi tried to calm him as he rose from the table.

“Who’s shouting?” Jimmie demanded. “And what if I do? This is my house, isn’t it, and haven’t I got a right to shout in my own house, if I want to?”

He kissed her almost angrily on the cheek. She raised her head, lips half parted, and looked at him, her eyes smiling. He kissed her again on her lips and their warm touch made him contrite, ashamed of his anger.

“Forgive me, Mimi dear⁠—I shouldn’t have spoken so hastily. But you know it’s good business for us to keep on good terms with the Crosbys⁠—she’s a nut and he’s cranky as the devil but I do make a lot of money out of him.”

When Jimmie had again begged forgiveness for his outburst and had left for his office, Mimi sat in the sunny breakfast room for a long time. She hadn’t intended that Jimmie should consider her jocular remark about bathtubs and radios to sound like a sneer. But since he had taken it that way, she wondered what mischievous imp had impelled her to say just those words. Their utterance had loosed within her a nebulous, embryonic discontent that at times worried her, at others made her furiously angry with herself. For more than a year she had been supremely content with the security of the love there was between them, had snuggled deep into the haven she had reached after years of buffeting and struggle and bitter disappointment. In the hectic, glamorous days that preceded their marriage and during the ecstatic happiness of the months after that event, Jimmie had been to her a composite of generosity and decency and comradeship. She had never deluded herself that he was handsome⁠—not even by a generous stretch of loving imagination could he be termed other than fairly good-looking. But that did not matter. She had long since learned to distrust men who were too obviously good-looking, they always knew it though she blamed her own sex for that, far more than she blamed the men themselves.

Her mind, she was now finding with some concomitant discomfort, had been active too long to content itself with the calm placidity of being a housewife. Jimmie was more set than ever that she should remain at home. Since they were married his brokerage business had prospered amazingly and he lavished clothes and jewellery and other luxuries upon her. “I’m just like a Jew,” he laughed one day when he brought her an especially handsome pair of earrings, an ornate blending of diamonds and rubies, “dressing up my wife to show that business is good.” So far as she could trace it definitely, her discontent was born one night at a gay party after the theatre at one of the very smart and very expensive night clubs. Tired of dancing, she sat and watched the dancers. Grimly they went about the task of acquiring pleasure, their faces set in hard, nervous lines as they executed or attempted to execute quick, jerky, ungraceful and intricate new steps. They are working at pleasure and happiness just as though it were a trade, she concluded. “They dance,” she told Jimmie when he had come back to the table puffing and blowing after dancing with Mrs. Shepherd, a young and rather pretty divorcee, “as though they were saying: ‘This night is costing me a couple of hundred dollars and I will get two hundred dollars’ worth of fun out of it!’ ” Jimmie had looked at her queerly but had said nothing.

After that night she watched the faces in the street, in the theatre, wherever she happened to be. There was always that strained, unhappy expression on the countenances of these people who, like scurrying insects, rushed madly here and there, each as though upon his efforts depended the future of civilization and life and everything else. Like cogs in a machine, she said of them one day, and thereafter she always thought of them as cogs. Here they have created a machine of which they are intensely proud and of which they think they are the masters. Instead, ironically enough, the machine has mastered them and they must do its bidding.

From that point she began to inquire more deeply into the manifestations which lay so abundantly at hand. At first she studied these things largely to furnish occupation, perhaps a certain bit of diversion, to her own mind, hoping thereby to fill it so full there would be no room for the vague discontent which was beginning to gnaw her. Out of the chaotic writhings of her growing restlessness she sought and vaguely began to see the dim path which would lead, she thought, to a broader view of the scene of which she was a part. Here and there she heard the voice of one crying out against the monotony, the tastelessness, the vulgarity, the rule by the mob, the lowering faces everywhere. She tried to talk once or twice with Jimmie when they sat at home on the occasional evenings they were not scheduled to dine or dance. She desisted when he laughed at her worries and jocularly remarked: “You cannot serve Rolls-Royce and Mammon!” He repeated the phrase with a satisfied smile, adding: “Not so bad, eh?” Thereafter, she never ventured to mention her thoughts to him again.

One night they invited a young professor, Henry Meekins, to dine with them. He had just returned from a lengthy visit to China and had had the extraordinary good sense to go to the Orient without very many preconceived notions regarding unquestioned perfectness of everything Western and particularly all things American. At dinner he ventured to express the opinion that China, though unblessed with modern plumbing, was more interesting, more filled with beauty and romance, than New York, which he found to be clean and with excellent plumbing but dull and blatant and ugly. Mimi, remembering the first quarrel she and Jimmie had had, and on this same point, looked somewhat doubtfully at Jimmie. But he was silently eating.

“Take one of the workmen in Ford’s factory,” Meekins was saying. “He stands or sits at a bench for eight hours a day doing one small job, tightening a bolt or inserting a plug over and over again, thousands of times a day. He knows nothing and cares less what part that bolt or that screw plays in the finished car⁠—it’s a dulling, deadening thing which saps every bit of individualism from him. But a Chinese coolie who hasn’t one-tenth or one-hundredth the advantages of the Ford workman, is still a craftsman and not a mere tender of a dehumanizing machine.”

Jimmie grunted contemptuously but Meekins was so absorbed in his subject he did not notice the unmistakable comment.

“And they’re on to us, too,” he cheerfully went on. “Before the war we had them fooled⁠—they believed everything we did or said was right because we said it, we who have built up this great industrial machine. But the war opened their eyes. They see us now for what we are an army waving banners of Christianity but with guns in our hands, the folds of the banner hiding traders and industrialists who see that missionaries are sent where there are rich resources to be found.”

Jimmie could restrain himself no longer, he had to put this visionary young whippersnapper in his place.

“But look what we do for them⁠—we clean up their filthy towns for them, teach them how to live like decent human beings, and bring them a real religion instead of the pagan, heathenish doctrines they’ve got!”

“Granted that we teach them sanitation, build them roads and railway lines,” Meekins cheerfully agreed. “But do we teach them or, better, prove to them that our religion is better than theirs? As I said, before the war we had them fooled⁠—they saw the advances we had made and there was reasonable ground for attributing that advance to our religion. But what did they see during the war? They saw white nations murdering white nations with all the hellish devices⁠—I beg your pardon, Mrs. Forrester⁠—that industrialism could devise. They began then to wake up and ask themselves: ‘What is this Christianity they’ve been forcing down our throats at the point of a gun?’ Now they’re realizing that we ourselves don’t know what Christianity is⁠—we’re divided up into different faiths and each one of those faiths is divided in turn into a thousand different denominations, Baptists and Methodists and Episcopalians and Holy Rollers, modernists and fundamentalists who spend most of their time arguing over what they believe and what the other fellow does not believe. Yet we go to the so-called heathens with guns in our hands and say, virtually: “Take our creeds and our civilization! Don’t ask us to prove they’re superior⁠—we know they are and if you dare question or refuse them we’ll shoot!’ ”

“I suppose next you’ll be saying there’s nothing good in the white man’s civilization⁠—that we all ought to start living in straw huts and growing rice and nice, fat mice for our food?” Jimmie challenged him, almost surlily.

But Meekins, young, eager, enthusiastic, was thoroughly aroused. His eyes shone behind his horn-rimmed spectacles and his blonde hair rose belligerently above his flushed fair face.

“No, I don’t mean anything of the kind,” he said, leaning towards Jimmie. “Our civilization has undoubted advantages⁠—we have developed the sciences and we have developed machinery and invention to a point the world’s never reached before. Our gods are steam and electricity and steel⁠—we have combated plagues and disease, we have greater material comfort, we can travel farther and faster than ever before. But when that’s granted⁠—”

“Seems to me,” Jimmie interrupted triumphantly, “you’ve granted about everything that’s worth considering.”

“No⁠—no, Mr. Forrester, I haven’t though. We’ve developed the printing-press and the telephone and telegraph and the radio, but what has been the result? We’ve made it possible to spread faster and more easily bigotry and hatred and intolerance and give more power to the mob, whether represented by the crowd that beats up a crowd of Jews or Germans or Russians or Negroes or whether it’s represented by nations fighting each other for spoils in some part of the world. And we call ourselves free men, boast of it. Such a notion is silly⁠—we are all of us petty little creatures who are slaves to the newspaper and the radio, to politicians and mouthy preachers, to our employers and the movies, to the telephone and every other regimented idea or thing.”

“But you forget our art, our literature, all the other things we’ve created beside the machine you hate so,” Jimmie, now thoroughly aroused and interested in spite of himself, challenged.

“Our art? Our literature? As if other civilizations didn’t have art and literature, ethics and philosophies of life and codes of conduct many of them much better than anything we, busy as we are with material things, have created. Through luck and abundant natural resources we’ve become immensely wealthy⁠—not through any particular effort on our part yet we pat ourselves on the back and think we’re God’s elect.”

Meekins was happy in finding an opponent who gave him opportunity to show the discovery he had made, even though the thing he had discovered had been in existence several thousands of years. Mimi had sat without speaking, glad to see Jimmie aroused from his habitual complacency, glad to hear Meekins confirm and make more concrete some of her own vague dissatisfaction.

“It seems to me you’ve both left out the worst thing of all in our civilization,” she remarked. They turned to her, apologetically. They had been so absorbed in the contest of opinions, they had almost forgotten her.

“All the things you’ve mentioned as faults of this civilization of ours aren’t so terrible in themselves. In time we might see them and take steps to rectify them. But the terrible thing to me is that though we’ve developed machines for giving us comfort we’ve devised at the same time machines for destruction in war, and that will wipe us all out and leave our civilization just an empty, deserted thing for them to discover a few thousand years from now⁠—just like we’re digging up Tutankhamen’s tomb now⁠—”

“I was reading a book by a man named Stoddard the other day⁠—” Jimmie interrupted her, but Meekins snorted him into silence.

“Stoddard⁠—a professional Cassandra⁠—taking fake biology and distorted history⁠—milking gullible buyers of books for fat royalties!” Meekins half-shouted, forgetting social amenities in his anger. Jimmie flushed a deep brick-red and relapsed into a moody silence. “But Mrs. Forrester’s right,” Meekins went on, “They are tearing down all they’ve built and they’re creating new instruments of destruction that’ll wipe out faster than industrialism can produce.”

“There was a story in the Times last week,” Mimi interjected, glad to find support for her statement, though she loyally resented Meekins’ abrupt discourtesy towards Jimmie, “telling of the invention of a new electric ray so powerful it can wipe out every living thing, even to blades of grass, within a radius of twenty miles. A man presses a little button⁠—zip!⁠—and everything’s dead. Soon they’ll make it fifty miles, then a hundred, then a thousand⁠—”

“Oh, come on,” Jimmie pleaded. “It’s too nice a night to be so doleful⁠—let’s go to a cabaret.”⁠ ⁠…

To Mimi’s surprise Meekins proved an excellent dancer and a jovial companion, even Jimmie laughing with reluctance at his witticisms. When they returned home and were preparing for bed, she commented on Meekins’ joviality. “Humph! About as funny as a baby breaking its leg,” was Jimmie’s comment. Mimi knew he was thinking of the way in which Meekins had stuck to his contentions, which, she was aware from experience, had not been altogether pleasing to Jimmie. All of us hate to hear unpleasant truths, she thought forgivingly. “He’s just the sort of damn fool who’d shout ‘Three cheers for the Ku Klux Klan!’ at a Knights of Columbus picnic!” was Jimmie’s final verdict as he turned out the light and climbed into bed.⁠ ⁠…