Ceremony of the Innocent

  Kitty Wilder affected to be overwhelmed by the “honor” bestowed on her and her husband on being godparents of the baby. “Oh, how adorable!” she would croon over the infant’s crib. “How beautiful he is, Ellen, just like you! Imagine you choosing us for this darling’s godparents! You know I don’t like children much, but I am simply mad over this precious little one!” She would regard the child with secret detestation. How ugly he was, resembling his mother. He had none of Jeremy’s handsomeness, Kitty would think. And what an awful name—Christian, which Ellen had chosen.

  Ellen and Jeremy, remembering Kitty’s forced helpfulness at the birth of the child, had given Kitty a bright diamond lavaliere in gratitude, and Kitty’s little eyes had actually glowed, for she was not only rich but avaricious. “Ellen selected it,” said Jeremy. Kitty did not believe it; it was so very tasteful—and expensive. She kissed Ellen rapturously. She looked at Jeremy with an almost abject adoration, and he smiled in himself.

  The weeks on Long Island were blissful for Ellen, though she saw Jeremy only at the weekend, for it was too far and too long on the train from the city. She walked over the lawns and on the beach, and helped in the garden, and regained her vitality. She slept happily every night, waiting for Saturday and Sunday. Her hair took on its brilliant sheen again, and her blue eyes were radiant with light and joy. She ran like a child, and played tennis with neighbors, and cuddled her son. Watching her, and hearing her free and melodious laughter, Annie would feel old and battered by life, despite her own youth. Sometimes the girls would throw a ball to each other and shout and laugh, and Annie became rosier. She could not, however, rid herself of a portent of disaster.

  The neighbors became fond of Ellen, and indulgent, but it was a fond indulgence which inevitably became wryly amused and somewhat ironic and touched with disbelief at her ingenuousness. Seeing this, Annie once said to Ellen, “Mrs. Porter, dear, don’t be so outspoken and kind and affectionate to these people. They don’t understand you. They think you are a little—foolish.”

  “No,” said Ellen, with her own indulgence, “they are only very good and pleasant to me, and why should I distrust them or think nasty things about them?”

  Annie shrugged. “People are all the same. These neighbors of yours are no better than the Mrs. Eccles you told me about, or Miss Ember, or even Mr. Porter’s father and mother. I know, believe me!”

  Agnes and Edgar Porter had come to the christening in the nearby Episcopal church, and so had Walter Porter. Ellen tried to please Jeremy’s parents, and had been overcome with shyness and awkwardness, and a deep old sense of inferiority, for they treated her with offended superciliousness and Agnes remarked on the lack of resemblance between the child and his father. So Ellen felt guilty in some manner, and Jeremy said, “He is beautiful, like his mother, and not an ugly monster like me.”

  The meeting had been constrained, to Ellen’s suffering. She was glad when her guests departed. She said to Jeremy, “I don’t think Mr. and Mrs. Porter care for me much, even now. Perhaps they are right. I am really nothing, you know.”

  “You are all the world,” said Jeremy with some impatience. “At least, to me. Now then, smile like the silly angel you are.”

  His fear for Ellen was increasing. He was not alone. He had the company of his uncle, Walter Porter, and Annie Burton and Cuthbert. They circled the girl with protectiveness and hoped that time would make her less trusting, more cautious, and less intense in devotion to anyone who showed her the slightest acceptance and kindness. To Ellen the world now was a place of joy and delight and love, filled with friends and honor and spontaneous affection.

  She was forgetting to be afraid of her child, in her happiness. She would rock him on the wide white porches and look at the sea, marveling over its changefulness. There were sunsets when the water resembled hammered gold under the golden light, or it would be running brass or whitely flowing beneath a white sky. Even the storms entranced her. She wanted to cry in ecstasy. She would sing, and her marvelous voice would echo in the wide and tranquil evening silence, and Annie would listen and tears would smart her eyes. Dear God—if there is a God—the older girl would pray—don’t let her know. Never let her know what the world really is.

  For Ellen had almost forgotten her wretched childhood and girlhood. She was even forgetting Mrs. Eccles and Wheatfield. If she remembered Mrs. Eccles at all it was with pity, for Mrs. Eccles, Ellen would think, had lacked all joyousness. In her way, she had been kind, Ellen would force herself to believe. This was Ellen’s method of coming to terms with the years of her persecution and labor and hunger and despair: If people really “understood” they would love and trust each other. It was sad if circumstances forced them to be wary and malicious and greedy, and even cruel.

  Ellen, who had never had a childhood, became a child. May complained to Miss Ember: “I think Ellen’s lost her wits, I really do.”

  C H A P T E R 16

  “WELL, HOW DOES IT FEEL to be a Congressman?” Walter Porter asked his nephew.

  “You ask me that every time you see me, Uncle Walter. Do you expect a different answer each time?”

  “Of course,” said Walter. “Who can stand Washington? Terrible city. White sepulcher of rotting bones, stinking with liars and thieves and charlatans and the endlessly exigent. Does Ellen still dislike it?”

  “Yes. She’s never complained, but I know, even though she professes to be delighted with our house in Georgetown. I think it’s the commuting between New York and Washington that really bothers her. She never had a home until she married me, as you know, and so New York, her first home, is the place where she lives, and Washington is only intangible and temporary. There’s something she seemed to be afraid of there, too.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder,” said Walter Porter. “It scares the hell even out of me whenever I visit you there. Ellen’s very sensitive; she doesn’t know what is going on, but she senses it, intuitively. I sense it from observation and objective knowledge; Ellen knows the presence of evil subjectively, and it frightens her, as it would any other innocent. Is she getting along any more comfortably with your colleagues and their wives?”

  Jeremy hesitated. “Well, yes and no. The men admire her, but are amused by her lack of sophistication. Most of them are kind to her, though, as one is kind to a child who is also beautiful and unaffected. But—their wives! When they’re not snubbing her they arc covertly ridiculing her, out of envy or malevolence, or patronizing her. The poor girl still hasn’t learned why, and so she shrinks or hides or says nothing. I’ve never seen anyone so lacking in self-esteem, and I worry about it more and more. I’ve done my best, and I’ve had hopes, for under all that gentleness and genuine magnanimity there is a core of iron. I’ve seen it glitter a few times. But the hell of it is that she’s always so confoundedly contrite afterwards and makes a fool of herself trying to conciliate and placate.”

  “Her grandmother, Amy Widdimer, was exactly like that, so you can’t blame Ellen’s childhood for her shyness and timidity. They’re aristocratic traits, sadly lacking among American women, especially the suffragettes and the ‘new women.’ We’re a plebeian country. Ellen’s a lady, and what’s a lady doing down there in Washington?”

  Jeremy laughed. The two men were sitting in Jeremy’s office in New York on this bleak and brown autumn afternoon. The sky was a sullen saffron, the streets were sepia crevices, and a dull ocher light lay over everything. The street traffic had a somber flat note, subdued and cheerless (like the Panic which had overwhelmed America this year), sometimes rising to a frenzied clatter, then subsiding again to a listless monotone, as if resigned. Jeremy found it very depressing, even more depressing than Washington. He said, “I wonder why the people keep sending such clowns to Congress and the Senate, and even to the White House. If they’re not naive and as mindless as puddings, though usually hysterical, too, they’re vicious and corrupt scoundrels. Present company excepted, of course.” He smiled. “They bore me to death,” and now he was n
ot smiling. “Especially since I’ve found out what is going on among the ‘quiet men,’ nationally and internationally.” He paused. “I can’t understand the general public, which is comparatively intelligent and decent and hard-working, with a sense of honor and patriotism.”

  “It’s because the rascals, and the fools, are such good actors, so earnest with their constituents, echoing what their constituents say and demand. Then behind the backs of those constituents they do whatever their foolish or black hearts prompt them, out of exigency. I wonder if we’ll ever again have the kind of government we had following the Revolution. I doubt it.”

  “So do I.” Jeremy drank deeply of his whiskey and soda. Walter said, “Any regrets?”

  Jeremy hesitated. “Well, no. I know damned well I can’t do anything about what is going on down there, and now I know that if I should open my mouth and shout it from the Capitol I’d either be kicked out of Washington or murdered. Or, worse yet, laughed at. I’ve tried to hint it to a few newspaper correspondents, and they just stare at me incredulously. Well, I shouldn’t blame them. No politician is ever honest with the newspapers. He’s either afraid, or prudent, or just a liar. No, you can’t blame the newspapers. But a lot of the newspapers have good fun lampooning many politicians, and I’d like to tell their editors that they’d better make the most of the freedom they have now. It won’t be long before they’re regimented and threatened or browbeaten into submission to politicians, and government.”

  Walter pondered, then shook his head. “I’m counting on editors to insist on freedom of the press, one of our most important freedoms, and to fight every blackguard who intrudes on it in the name of ‘public virtue’ or ‘national safety.’”

  “Editors,” said Jeremy, “are men, and men are human flesh and blood, and men have families, and men need to eat and have shelter and clothing. Their very humanity makes them vulnerable to mountebanks and malefactors. Also, many newspaper mortgages are owned by politicians and their very potent friends.”

  “We need a few heroes,” said Walter, and then both men laughed cynically. After a moment or two Walter said, “Frank’s never forgiven you for beating him twice in your mutual race for Congress. Candidly, I think he’d be delirious with happiness to be in Washington. He’s made for Congress, born for it. They’d love him down there, and he’d love it, too. Of course, some would call him a dangerous radical—and some would call him a fool, and I think both designations are correct.” His square and manly face became bitter. “Of course, he’s an hysteric, but the whole damned town is hysterical, led by Teddy himself.”

  “And the whole country’s hysterical, and terrified, with this Panic, and that’s understandable. But how many of us know what caused that Panic?”

  “Quite a lot of us. But who’d believe us? And the deadly men know that, and they laugh at us and know how impotent we really are. We don’t have the money, we don’t have the importance, we don’t have the power to be heard by the country. When a few of us speak here and there, or write about it, we’re called insane or crackpots, for our voices are puny. It’s not that the people are apathetic. It’s just that they would not believe there is a certain terrible destiny planned for them; they just don’t believe in that much evil. We’re still a trusting and simpleminded country, and the politicians, and those who control the politicians, intend to keep us that way as long as possible. What would the people say, if they really listened, when the true cause of this Panic, which is starving them to death and terrifying them, was explained to them, and they believed it?”

  “There’d be another Revolution,” said Jeremy. “But the malefactors aren’t worrying. The people will never believe it, until it is too late.”

  “Well,” said Walter, in a somewhat hopeless tone, “so long as we are able to keep Washington weak and small, and we have strong local governments in the jealous states, we’ll have decentralized government, and so a measure of our freedom. But God help us if Washington ever becomes big and overpowering, with a swarm of harassing and arrogant bureaucrats who would rule by fiat and not by law. Then will come the man on horseback, attended by the bureaucratic vultures and hyenas, and that will be the end of America as it was the end of Athens and Rome, and God only knows how many other civilizations now lost to history.”

  “Washington was able to put through its antitrust laws, which will destroy productive advance and efficiency, in order to ‘protect’ the backward and hidebound smaller industries, and all in the name, too, of ‘promoting competition,’ which our politicians detest, being weaklings themselves—and ‘fair practices.’ We can shout to heaven that government protection of the inefficient and weak will destroy the strong, who are the builders of a nation, and it will do no good, for our enemies know that the coddling of the inferior will eventually eliminate the strong and bold and the way will be open to absolute uncontested slavery of all our people. So, the ‘elite’ use men like your son Frank, who are vociferous and hysterical and emotional, to inform the public that punitive measures used against the strong are all in the name of ‘justice’ and humanitarianism. Not that,” added Jeremy with some ruefulness, “that I trust what we are calling the ‘oil trust.’ I’ve had the pleasure, if you can call it that, of meeting John L. Bellows, at a meeting of the Committee for Foreign Studies.”

  Walter sat up alertly, his white hair glinting with red shadows from the fire. “It would seem, then, that they are confident you are with them.”

  Jeremy frowned. “I don’t know. Maybe they just like to have me with them to keep an eye on me, though I’ve been very circumspect as you know. Very potent fellers. I knew all about them before, but just having knowledge is an impotent thing. You have to be in the actual presence of these men, and listen to them when they speak in confidence, to get the full impact of what they are up to. Cool and smooth as cream, and as lethal as cyanide.”

  “Did they say, during their last meeting, about the coming war?”

  “I think they’ve moved up the date. I doubt it will now be 1917, ‘19, ‘20. I think it is imminent, perhaps in the next few years, and no later than 1915. Their timetable for Russia has been moved up, too. They are very confident, now, of instigating a Communist revolution in Russia, with practically no opposition. They are showing fierce concern because Russia is getting more and more prosperous, and the Czar has abdicated much of his absolute monarchy, and the Duma is gaining in influence and is insisting on more and more freedom for the Russian people. If they let Russia alone for too long she will become a constitutional monarchy, like England, and there will go their long-laid plots to invade every country with Communism, or its sister, Socialism, and then seize power for themselves. There are constant meetings with bankers, including the Bellows clan, and other enormous financiers and industrialists and ‘intellectuals’ and high-placed politicians all over the world.”

  Walter closed his eyes wearily. “Yes. I’ve heard rumors, too, but nothing as definite as what you have just told me. Again, thank God, I won’t live long enough to see the destruction of my country. I’m sorry for men your age, and your families. You’ll have nowhere to turn; you’ll have no hope, no refuge, no new continent to which to run and set up a new nation. Our last frontiers are vanishing, literally and figuratively. Where will men go, say, forty or fifty years from now, if they wish to be free? Religious oppression was bad enough in old Europe, but they had a young open land to flee to and make a fresh life for themselves. But the coming oppression will be universal and there will be no place for a man to hide and draw a free breath.”

  Jeremy saw the profound depression on his uncle’s face, and he knew there was just reason for that depression. But he tried for cheerfulness. “Well, let’s not be too pessimistic. Remember, we are not alone. There will be millions of men, being born now and in the future, who will fight for the right to live in freedom and in peace.”

  “Yes,” said Walter with heaviness, “but the chaos first, and the wars, and the tyranny and the death! The four ho
rsemen of the Apocalypse. Why do men wait for total ruin and destruction before they act?”

  “Why don’t you ask God?” said Jeremy. “He’s seen this happen scores of times for millennia. If He has any angels, why aren’t they whispering to mankind now?”

  “Maybe they are, maybe they are,” said Walter. “Who knows? Yes, I am glad I am old. I may see the beginning of the end, but I won’t be around when the end comes.”

  “And you won’t see men like your son Frank holding enormous power over his abject countrymen. That should really cheer you up, Uncle Walter.”

  Walter grimaced. “I should never have let him go, for that year, to England, to listen to the Fabians, and come back all trembling with intensity and with shrill, savage, and vindictive hatred for manly men, men of patriotism and strength and honor. Not that I sent him to the Fabians, of course. He just wandered into their company. They’re always recruiting men like my son, all over the world. Yet, he wouldn’t have been so attracted to them if the disease wasn’t waiting for a catalyst to explode in his mind. He was born that way. He’s a born zealot, and you know what Talleyrand said about zealots.”

  Jeremy said, “I suppose millions of fathers look later at their adult children, and wonder how in hell they ever begat such sons, and what they had done to deserve them.”

  “I hope that won’t happen to you, Jeremy, concerning your own children. How are Christian and Gabrielle? Has Ellen fully recovered from the birth of the little girl?”

  Jeremy’s face subtly became somber. “Yes. But she’ll never be able to have any more children. It seems that her early poverty and deprivation and heavy work did something—She’s healthy enough now, of course, but there’s a malformation of her pelvic bones, the doctors say. As you know, she almost died this time. Considering everything, myself and Ellen and what’s waiting for us, I’m really glad there’ll be no further additions to the family.”