The Eagles Gather

  Though appallingly sentimental and affected, she unconsciously recognized the fact that she was a mediocrity, and her real affection for her father had in it an element of gratitude that his existence made it unnecessary for her to prove that she was an intellectual. With reason, she was proud of this emaciated, stooping, absent, and fiery man. His theories were her Bible, his ethics her Ten Commandments. Lacking real discernment, never having crashed against reality even in the Settlement House, she would have faithfully swallowed anything her father had told her. He was a radical, a hater of pretense and foolishness and injustice and greed, and she was all this, also, without the faintest idea of what they really were. Had he been the silliest patriot, the most chauvinistic of fools, she would have followed him also, believed all he said implicitly.

  Marion had many well-bred poses, chief among them being an indulgent tolerance, an air of sprightly and sensitive sympathy, a clear English accent, a personal fastidiousness that did not extend beyond her person, and which certainly did not object to grimy bathtubs and dusty areas under beds and powder-strewn dressers and dingy furniture and gritty floors. Certain flower-scents made her “quite ill,” especially when embodied in perfumes worn by people she disliked; she was quite a martyr, she admitted, to “odors.” However, her sensitiveness became oddly blunt in her own home, where the smell of untended drains and grimey and unaired bedrooms was quite palpable, and the stench of the Bay, when the wind was coming from it, quite overpowering to less patrician noses.

  She had two classes of friends, which she was careful never to try to fuse together: the Greenwich Village class, and the carefully refined, aristocratic and slightly pinkish Bohemians with which Lucy Van Eyck filled her Fifth Avenue house. These Bohemians were all people of wealth, family, background, or of the more substantial professions, impeccable people, who dabbled in radicalism with the tips of curious white fingers, and liked to discuss forbidden subjects with great tolerance, scientific interest and comprehension. They all disliked “stuffiness” and the middle-class “virtues,” but were very careful to adhere to both stuffiness and virtue in their private lives, for all their “reasonable” talk’. At their perfectly appointed parties they seriously discussed modern “tendencies in art and poetry,” admired the newer and more tawdry young writers with solemnity, dissected sexual abnormalities, affected to despise the Victorian poets and authors, jeered at a suetty Government, all in well-bred and cultivated voices. Occasionally, but very, very occasionally, they invited one of the “new-art” poets or painters or writers or theorists to a party, and found his presence so stimulating, so breath-taking, so utterly confusing, that it was a long time before another invitation was extended to him, or his kind. They could conduct countless parties and discussions upon him, months after, and it was only when his fruity personality began to grow dim that they held their breaths, took the plunge, and invited another young man to disorganize them. They served a good purpose, however; buying, as they did, numerous impressionistic and cubist paintings and statuary and portraits, and hiding these fearfully and hurriedly away in their attics, they kept the perpetrators from city charities or from making public many of their individual atrocities.

  Professor Fitts had been an old friend of Percival Van Eyck, and Lucy had become fond of Marion. She had wanted her son, Thomas, to marry her, in spite of the Professor’s obvious lack of worldly sustenance. Ladies, she said, were becoming rarer every day, and whatever else Marion was, she was a lady. Lucy, it can be discerned, was not at all deluded as to Marion’s real intellectualism, nor deceived by her poses. In fact, the girl touched her; mediocrity trying to grow wings but unable to fly because of heavy mud feet, seemed very pathetic to Lucy.

  It was at one of Lucy’s parties that Marion met Lucy’s second cousin, Georges Bouchard. Of the same type, the same nervous, apprehensive Bohemianism, the same class, the same traditions, they fell in love immediately. Georges’ brilliance and truly splendid mind, however, did not detect Marion’s innocent affectations; the inability of the masculine nature to judge the feminine nature protected her. He believed her to have “a fine mind,” and to possess an extraordinary intellect. Moreover, though he would have denied this himself, the fact that she was a lady, the daughter of a professor at Columbia University, particularly the daughter of the illustrious Professor Fitts, and a friend of Lucy’s, were all factors in her favor. He got himself invited to her home, where he met the shy, elusive but passionate old man, the Professor, and was much impressed by his thin but cogent diatribes against his family and what his family represented. The old man was very cautious and distant at first, suspecting and disliking, but he finally came to like Georges and to consider him his friend. He was dimly pleased when Marion told him of her engagement to the young editor.

  Once, during a discussion with Georges, he said; “There is a great deal of excitement nowadays about the ‘new psychology,’ an urge, on the part of educators and psychiatrists and psychologists generally, to cure grave social problems by suggestion, education and comprehensive patience, and by the light of a knowledge of human behavior. The educators and psychiatrists and psychologists are all a-dither over the prospects, quite starry-eyed over it, as if it were something new, this influencing mankind by subtle and understanding methods. Poor innocents! They don’t know that politicians, priests and rascals generally have used these methods with magnificent success ever since society first became organized; they didn’t call it ‘psychology,’ however, but they practised it just the same, with lies, propaganda, emotionalism and chicanery. In these days, particularly, the war makers, the armaments manufacturers, are employing it very nicely. If nothing is done to stop them, we shall be hypnotized into entering the European war.” Without a change in his calm, dispassionate voice, but with the fire beginning to sparkle in his eye, he added: “I am to write a series of articles against your family, Georges. Of course, you know they are wholesale murderers. Murder on a large scale gets into the history books, but murder on a small scale ends only in a sordid little note in wardens’ records. Your family and their kind have added luster to mass-murders.”

  When he was dismissed from the University, a sort of blank incredulity fell on him, a stunned state. Georges then saw how really innocent the man was. Only an innocent man could possibly have believed that attacking the unscrupulous strong would not turn apparently honest men against him. Like all idealists, he believed in the fundamental love of mankind for justice; he believed that it was only necessary to show it the truth, and it would inevitably follow it. He was the curious, idealistic schoolmaster type, a quaint and unbelievable combination of sophistication and naïveté, intellect and childish simplicity, having a theoretical knowledge of human nature but unable to recognize it when seen, believing firmly that ills and vices and discrepancies and monstrosities of all kinds could be educated from the minds of men, and revealing at one time both cynicism and credulity, gentle tolerance and the bitterest sort of intolerance. He lived the true academic life, seeing the world in huge and distorted colors, a grotesque and vivid place that existed only in a mind removed from reality. More than he loved his daughter, he loved justice; a lie was the most vicious of all things to him.

  (He had met Jules Bouchard once or twice. He told Georges that Jules reminded him of a hooded cobra. Georges had laughed a little, then stared. His respect for Professor Fitts sank a trifle.)

  His dismissal seemed to uproot him; he was like a plant that had grown its roots deeply into the soil. Now he was torn up, thrown in the glaring sun; he lay there, withering, parched, dying, his roots in the air. Worse than the loss of his position was the murder of his lifelong beliefs. He would have survived the loss of position, but the destruction of the beliefs was fatal to him. When he was re-instated, he went about in a subdued hushed state; when spoken to suddenly, he would lift bemused and dimly clouded eyes. He wrote nothing more. The plant restored to the soil could not regain its old vitality; its leaves drooped, and its roots had lost their pow
er to extract nourishment from the earth. Georges had no need to exert pressure on the old man, as Jules had suggested. Two years after Georges married his daughter, Marion, Professor Fitts resigned from the University. Georges, who had believed that the Professor was inherently militant, that nothing could stop his angered tongue, was amazed at this swift decay of the idealist who had not been able to face reality.

  Georges, soon after his marriage, had assigned the work of editing his Windsor newspaper to his associate, and had bought a partnership in a third-class New York newspaper. This paper had seen distinctly better days and was on the definite downgrade when Georges became associated with it. He began a series of articles about the causes of the War, economic, political and ethnic. Brilliant, conservative and sardonic, he wrote with irony and wryness, and newly interested readers tried to discover when he was being serious and when contemptuous. He had a laconic but colorful style, a rapid and pungent style, that constantly titillated and challenged, amused and provoked. Within two years the newspaper moved up to second class and was ambitiously negotiating for an opening in the first ranks. Rivals disdainfully said that it was his profanity, his lack of “reverence,” his skirting of blasphemy, that caught the attention of impotent fools. More discerning people recognized the solid bourgeois, conservative but tolerant, entrenched but reasonable, under the sharp and bitter bubbles of his style.

  Marion found it no hardship to leave her “amusing” neighbors and her dirty old house, and accustom herself to the luxury of her fourteen-room apartment overlooking the park. It is true she mentioned to her friends, with amusement, that she was now among the “Philistines,” but Marion and the Philistines seemed to like each other at the very start. Though she had been as violent a suffragette as her well-bred and snobbish temperament would allow, she became less and less an exponent of women’s rights, and incidentally of the rights of oppressed and minority groups. Eventually, and still tolerantly, of course, she could speak seriously of the “menace” to American life of “indigestible groups,” with “alien ideals, religions and ways of life, inimical to American national health.” But always tolerantly, gravely, if a trifle menacingly. A year after her marriage she became an important officer in The Patriotic League for Freedom, which had for its object “the promulgation of American ideals, traditions and ways of life, and the elimination of subversive forces which tend to destroy and undermine the foundations on which the Republic was built.” It was probably accidental, but no Jews, Catholics, first or second generation Europeans, with the exception of a few of recent British origin, were admitted to membership. This League, begun in precociously grave innocence, was, twenty years later, to be a dangerous source of Fascism, enriched by funds donated by the Bouchards and similar groups; the American ideals of tolerance, justice and freedom, which it had elected to cherish and disseminate, became the fasces of stupidity and reaction, intolerance and hatred. It proved thoroughly to the intelligent that noble ideals could also wear two coats, and words, fine in themselves, were the mercenaries of any man able to pay. Democracies, it was proved, were, after all, but bought women.

  Georges and Marion had gone to England and France and their allies in 1917, and upon his return Georges began another series of articles, entitled: “—and Now?” Brilliant and discerning though he was, his articles were full of elevated nonsense. He apparently realized this himself, for once in a while the reader had the impression that he had written with one eye closed.

  The couple had just returned, and when Jules came to New York on a private mission, he decided to visit his nephew and the latter’s wife. He liked Georges better than he did any of the other younger members of the family, his own sons included. A consummate hypocrite himself, Jules liked people who were not hypocrites, though he frequently found them tedious, it being his observation that only hypocrites had color. Georges, who was only infrequently a hypocrite, was an agreeable exception. Jules, however, detested though he tolerated Marion. He was always highly edified by her “being clear-eyed all over the place.” Despite her attempts at uniqueness and originality and intellect, she irritated her husband’s uncle to the point where he desired to slap her thoroughly. Tall, “rangy,” long-legged and thin-hipped and boyish of figure, with lambent serious gray eyes, pale smooth face and humorless mouth, clean scrubbed hands and trim head, she went about with what she believed to be an American air of feminine competence and health. She liked to ride horseback, astride, in breeches that set off her slim boyish legs and trim waist, and her game of tennis, she admitted, was exceptional. She used the phrase “American health-ideal” very frequently, and if she thought at all of her smoky evenings in the fetid atmosphere of Greenwich Village restaurants, it was with a shudder. Firmer than ever in the belief that she was an intellectual, she was chairman or president of several cultural clubs; this, however, did not prevent her from becoming a leader in the Girl Scouts. Totally without humor of any kind, she liked to think of herself as possessing “a gallant and humorous spirit.” She had echoed her radical and palely fiery old father; married to a Bouchard, now, she echoed the conservatism, the caution, the aloofness of the family. Her letters to Antoinette had long ago mollified her mother-in-law and won her affection, and though Leon privately thought his son’s wife a serious affected fool, he had nothing worse against her.

  She was not insensible to the fact that the formidable Jules Bouchard, the head of the mighty clan, regarded her with indifferent amusement, though she did not know the reason. She had been respectful enough to him, when they had met, and had gazed at him worshipfully with her shining gray eyes, and it had hurt her extremely when he had ignored her after bestowing a faint smile upon her. Consequently, the mere mention of his name was enough to disconcert and frighten her. So when Georges announced that he had received a letter from his uncle, who expected to visit them for a day or two, she was paralyzed for several moments with joy, apprehension and terror. In a fever, she began to plan a dinner party in honor of Uncle Jules, and burst into tears when Georges insisted that Jules had expressly requested that his visit be quiet, as he was in New York “unofficially.” “Do you want the damned place swarming with reporters and mayors and senators and smelly politicians of all kinds?” he demanded irately. And Marion, who had wanted exactly that, replied “Of course not, Georges.”

  Her father, the retired Professor, was living with them now, broken in health and spirit. Marion, worried, confided to her husband that “Dad was a problem,” and certainly no asset even to a family dinner. Should she dispose of him while Jules was there, by shipping him “to the country,” or ask friends to take him off her hands? Old people (though Dad was hardly more than sixty-five) were so tiresome, and Uncle Jules might be so bored. This consultation took place in Georges’ and Marion’s elaborate Queen Anne bedroom, and Georges, without replying, went to the living room where his father-in-law was sitting reading the evening paper prior to dinner. Unseen by Professor Fitts, Georges stood at a distance and studied him. He sat there, his long emaciated figure slumped bonelessly in the satin damask depths of a chair, his glasses with their black ribbon fallen upon his sunken chest. Evidently he had become engrossed in a maze of vague and heavy thoughts, for the newspaper had slipped from his hand and lay in a heap by the chair. His pointed gray beard, sparse and ashen-colored, mingled with the ribbon of his glasses, for his chin had dropped; his bony knees were on a level with his mouth, which, having fallen open, was a dry dark cavern in his beard.

  For a long time, unseen, Georges stood there and looked at his father-in-law. He saw the web of tangled and vaguely tormented thoughts that clouded that gray sunken face, the fixed dull eyes that stared emptily at nothing, the limp lax hand, so beautiful of line and shape and length but so impotent and dead. This was the Professor Fitts who hardly more than three years ago had visited President Wilson and had thereafter poured into the press vitriolic, passionate and loathing diatribes against the “internal enemies!” This weary, beaten, desolate old man, this bewil
dered and anguished old man, this already dead old man! When Georges returned to his wife, she was surprised to see how pale he was and what a glint there was in his eye.

  “I don’t think Uncle Jules will object to your father,” he said quietly. “In fact, I’d like him to see him!”

  He met Jules at the station the next day in his own magnificent Pierce-Arrow, which was decorated by a liveried chauffeur. Jules had taken an inconspicuous drawing room instead of the ornate private car in which members of the family usually travelled. Georges was shocked by the change in his uncle’s appearance. Jules’ hair was now entirely white, a startling contrast to the dark skull-like face beneath it. The smiling puckered mouth gave him a mummified appearance, and though he moved briskly as usual, there was a sort of tremor about him. To Georges’ disturbed comments, he replied jocosely and affectionately that he supposed he was on his last legs, but he had been given to understand that that damned Spanish flu frequently left its victims feeling so. As they drove through the streets, the aspects of a great city gone mad with the ecstasy of war engrossed and amused him.

  “War,” he remarked, “may have its nastier moments, but it can’t be denied that it gives the people something to live for as well as die for. Peace, or monotony, is merely oxen hitched to yokes. If the idealists really want to abolish war, they ought to stop fighting the dragons of armaments makers, ignorance, greed and racial hate, and get after the real enemy, the emasculated dove of peace. What the idealists fail to realize is that people like war, for it is adventure and gaiety and excitement, as well as death and iron and blood.