The Savage Gentleman

by Philip Wylie

  Whitney left the dining-room and walked into the library.

  A young man rose as he entered. He was tall and angular, bright-eyed and cheerful-voiced. He had a wide sensitive mouth, a long sharp nose. His clothes were faintly collegiate, his bearing quick and informal, like that of many of New York's innumerable clever young men.

  In answer to Whitney's, "Well?" he said:

  ' I'm Tom Collins. I've been a reporter on the Record for the last three years. I resigned today because I was up here this morning with all the thugs who interviewed Henry Stone and I didn't write the story about Stone that Voorhees wanted me to write. It occurred to me, as I walked brooding and jobless along the city pavements an hour ago, that Stone might be able to use somebody like me. He's new here. I'm not. I can take a duchess to dinner at the Ritz, or chase a child murderer through the Mott Street dives. I'm a stenographer and a good two-fisted drinker, and I have an idea that I'd be useful in all those capacities. Besides, if Stone is going to manage his publications at all he'll find me a complete index of who's who and what's what, of office politics and political chicanery.

  I liked his looks this morning and I didn't like the run-around his own papers were giving him. They're afraid of him. I also came up here, Mr. Whitney, to tell you privately that I know for a fact that if Stone interferes too much with Voorhees and Voorhees' gang there's nothing surer in the world than that he'll be taken for a ride. I mean just that. Put on the spot. Bumped off."

  A smile came and went on the face of the old lawyer. He sat down and lighted a cigar.

  "You seem to know a great deal, Mr.--"

  "Collins. Tom Collins."

  "Damned funny name. "

  "It was my father’s worst habit."

  Whitney nodded. "It might not be a bad idea. You'll have to see Stone himself, of course. He has taken his life pretty much into his own hands. He's difficult. By the way, just how am I to know that Voorhees didn't send you here?"

  "Marian will give me a passport. We were like that about two hours once."

  Collins grinned. "I shall remember them as the happiest two hours of my life. Seriously, though, Mr. Whitney, this bird Stone looks like the goods to me. He could be a big shot--

  "

  Whitney rose.

  "Perhaps so. You tell him about it. I told him, and he seemed to prefer the idea of roller-skating, or throwing cards into a hilt. I'll send him in."

  "Anyway put in a word for me. Understand I don't need this kind of job so much as I want it."

  Henry Stone shook hands with the young New Yorker very formally and said:

  "Mr. Whitney has just suggested that I hire you as a sort of personal assistant and general attaché. He has given you the very highest recommendation."

  Tom Collins smiled cheerfully. "I told him what to say."

  He sat down on the corner of a table and swung one leg while he talked.

  "Listen, Stone, no matter what you do or where you go for the next weeks, and maybe months, you're going to be a target for the curiosity boys and girls. You could stampede any theater in town by appearing there tonight. If you will look at the afternoon papers, which will be floating through the streets in an hour or so, you'll see that some of them still hold to the idea that you're a sort of hairy ape, and others maintain that doomsday has been sounded for the wicked old Stone Publications by the return of the founder's son. Every paper has you in wrong anyway. It's my opinion that you're in a tough spot in every department of the game, and because I've knocked around this town long enough to know it too well, I thought I'd barge up here and offer my services."

  Henry felt a considerable liking for this young man but, as in the case of Marian and her grandfather, he had no means of articulating his sentiment. He was unhappily compelled to adhere to the rigid social disciplines of his father.

  "I shall be very glad to make a trial of your services, Mr. Collins, and I appreciate their proffer."

  Collins hopped from the table and said:

  "You better call me Tom and the first thing we better do is to go out to a speakeasy this afternoon and have a few hookers together so that we can get each other straight."

  Marian, her father and her grandfather were once again waiting in the library. It was dark outside and in the vertical valleys winked the red and green jewels that guided traffic.

  For the third time Marian spoke to the butler: "We'll wait just a little longer."

  "That Collins probably got him drunk," Whitney said.

  "I hope he did," Marian answered.

  Sidney Whitney looked at his father and his daughter and chuckled:

  "From what you say, we've caught a Tartar. Here he is. Nobody else in New York City would ring a doorbell so politely."

  Henry walked into the room and spoke to them gravely. His eyes rested on each one as if he were seeing them in a new perspective. He made his apology for being late.

  "I am extremely sorry. I had no idea it was nine o'clock until Tom--that is to say, Mr. Collins--reminded me of the hour."

  "Perfectly all right, Henry," Whitney said. "We hoped you were getting drunk, but apparently not."

  "No. My father was very insistent on that point."

  Marian rose.

  "Let's have dinner now, anyway. What have you and Mr. Collins been doing?

  You seem more frigid than ever."

  Henry waited until they were seated at the dining table, then he said:

  "I have simply spent the whole afternoon listening to Mr. Collins. If a tenth of what he said is true--and he was able to demonstrate the truth of it--then these United States have fallen on such times as are intolerable--at least to me."

  Elihu Whitney's sudden tide of delight was checked by Henry's next words.

  "I have listened to accounts of scandals reaching even to the White House. I have listened to the whole story of that infamous man, Capone. And I was disgusted by every syllable of it. I have heard a great deal about the management and politics of our great cities and I have concluded that the less I traffic with this compound of greed and villainy the happier I shall most certainly be. Tomorrow I shall relieve you of my presence and take chambers somewhere in town until I find the most ideal way of avoiding and forgetting this scrofulous civilization."

  He looked first at the older Whitney and then at Marian's father. His eyes were furious, haughty and disgusted.

  "Gentlemen--I can scarcelyy see how that word can have meaning any more--if resistance to all this corruption and degradation is impossible, then I am not sure that I, myself, would choose to live in the midst of it all."

  For a moment Henry was possessed by a frantic excitement. Then, suddenly, bitterly he flung down his napkin and stalked from the room.

  "A damn quitter. God, how mawkish and self-righteous we must have been forty years ago, Sid."

  Elihu Whitney almost shuddered.

  Two hours later Henry stood looking over the light-studded silhouettes of Manhattan. He had left Tom Collins in almost the identical manner he had left the dinner table.

  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 pajama
s, 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 st
range 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.