by Philip Wylie
Since Mr. Wilson had immediately dissolved the connection, Jimmie could only conclude that he was parasitical, that he deftly extracted from other human beings the nutriment for his own concealed emotions and discarded the people as soon as they had no further usefulness. That opinion of the father blindly transferred itself to the daughter.
Because she was bored, Jimmie decided, because she was fed up with Muskogewan, and no doubt justly annoyed at her family, she had invented an emotional stage--set, with all the props of a wicked father and a little white cottage for night rendezvous; and she had stepped out in front of that scenery to sing her siren song--her torch song--or whatever it was.
An act.
So Jimmie had nobody for company.
He could have had the pick of many people.
Mr. Corinth had "made him acquainted" with numerous citizens who did not agree with the ruling caste on the matter of war. Their shades of opinion, however, were very complex, and Jimmie tired of arguing over trifles. Besides, when a person cannot have the friendship of those with whom he wishes to be friends, alternatives are seldom acceptable. The same principle held in the matter of female companionship. As Sarah had said, there were countless girls who would have rescued Jimmie from any doldrum at the slightest sign of a chance, girls, even, who were the daughters of isolationists but who considered matrimony more important than war, girls who were, as Audrey had said,
"dashing daughters," easily relished.
To them, he was polite and no more.
The glassed-in porch, one windy night, was occupied by a dozen people who had ranged themselves haphazardly around Mr. Corinth. Conversation flowed from him, sparked occasionally by a question or a phrase of disagreement. Jimmie listened, with the rest. His attention stiffened when Mr. Wilson idly sat down on the fringe of the group.
"I know it isn't fashionable," said Mr. Corinth, "but a woman is a man's opposite.
Women are the opposite of men. Everything has an opposite that's as real as it is. The very fashion itself--the fashion of thinking men and women are alike--will change too.
Because fashions are attitudes, and every social attitude that doesn't take into consideration the law of opposites is bound to get turned upside down, sooner or later."
"I don't understand that," said a Mrs. Clevebright.
Mr. Corinth turned amiably. "The people of this country understand the reconciliation of opposites better than most people. That's because we recognize so many oppositions. We have a certain constitutional tolerance for them. The beginnings of wisdom. I mean this: oppositeness is a concept that is a lot broader than what we usually imply by it. It means more than left and right, up and down, day and night, zero and infinity, freedom and slavery. No activity follows from anything but opposition. You can't get anywhere, fanning air. A bulge of steam has to have a resisting piston. Life itself is a struggle of opposites. And opposition means--complementariness. It means black and white--but also blue and orange. It's the source of power--and it's the way to learning how to regulate the flow and direction of power. The one abiding discovery, in the democratic theory, was the recognition of the validity of opposites. Without an opposition a government is a one-way job. Going one way only is always--going nowhere. You've got always to recognize both opposing truths. Take freedom and slavery, for instance--"
"Yeah," said a voice. "Justify that!"
"I'm not justifying anything! I'm explaining it! Most of you people know by instinct anyway. That's why we fight so hard for freedom of speech here--to maintain the necessary operation of opposing forces. All right. Take slavery and freedom. Every slave is freed of a vast responsibility. Every free man has to assume great duties. There go those opposites--working together. A lot of free Americans, these days, want to have also the slave's irresponsibility. Can't be. If they do abandon their obligations they'll enslave themselves automatically to whatever they got in trade for the abdication: money—
power—position--an absolute government--whatever."
"He's right, you know," someone else said.
The old man grinned. "Not me. Us! We all know it. Take a thing like Hitler. He is an opposite. The world around him was trying to struggle toward ideals of liberty, individualism, morality, restraint of force, decency, democracy, and so on. Hitler attacked with all the opposites to those ideals. He was able to, because the people under him had not yet understood the ideals; and also because they were willing to exchange freedom for the irresponsibility of slaves; and still more, because their circumstances did not seem suitable to their egos. But--they didn't want to do a lot of hard, moral work. They're still, so to speak, social infants. Or social ignoramuses. All right. Hitler took every single opposite. Force, torture, suppression of individual rights, conquest, amorality, autocracy.
He got going in a big way for the main and simple reason that we--on the other side--
instead of recognizing the valid power of Hitler's theorems assumed we had legislated
'em out of existence. Believing that, we ignored the contrary evidence. Hitler pushed ahead. We kept saying he'd collapse, because we believed we'd predisqualified him. As long as we felt that way our own feelings gave his opposite practices the power they proved to have."
Even Mr. Wilson cocked an eyebrow. "Never thought of that," he said slowly.
Jimmie's boss turned. "Take you, Wilson. You and your crowd. You've been against war and in favor of peace. I've been on the opposite side of the fence. In my opinion, you've shut your eyes to my side of the picture. You won't believe that this awful, negative pole of human energy can ever roll across U. S. and Muskogewan, and swamp the works. Not believing that you think I'm a wanton ass. I don't think that about you though. Your love of peace and prosperity is also a love of mine. I don't happen to believe it's possible at the moment. But I do believe it holds the seeds of the future. I do believe it is the one powerful opposite we Americans mustn't lose sight of, even if we eventually bomb the damned Rhine dry and march up it clear to Switzerland. It is a well-known fact that Satan gives the Lord his due, in a constant, respectful fear. But I see mighty few Christians around these days who understand how to give the devil his due!"
Mr. Wilson cleared his throat uncomfortably.
"To go back to women," said the old man, grinning archly, as everyone--and especially the women--listened harder, "she's the opposite of man and the complement of man, the inspiring flame and the devouring mother, the object out of which his awareness is born and the object that gives him his first intimations of mortality. In still another sense, she is his immortality. Insofar as the present attempt of women to look and be like men represents an honest effort to integrate and to reconcile oppositeness--it's sound and it's honest. That is--it's truth. But insofar as it represents an attempt by women to become men, it obeys the law I'm discussing."
"Meaning what?" Mr. Wilson asked.
"Meaning," Mr. Corinth replied blandly, "the young men act like hysterical girls."
He looked at Jimmie. "Won't help, refuse to serve, duck the draft, rage and yell around about their rights. And the old men"--his eyes wandered to Mr. Wilson--"are just--old women."
Audrey's father, spare and towering, looked down at the rumpled chemist. "You're talking nonsense."
"Nope. You're thinking nonsense. You and all who think like you. Looka here, Wilson. You wouldn't do business the way you conduct your politics and nationalism. I mean to say, when a business proposition came up you'd be hell-bent for facts--existing and long-range. You wouldn't close a deal until you were mortally sure nothing could rise out of the present that would ruin future chances to make money. To ascertain that, you'd be what you call 'hard-headed,' 'factual,' 'forward-looking,' 'skeptical,' and 'strictly from Missouri.' If there was a spot on the proposition, a little threat that might grow into a ruinous cloud, you wouldn't proceed till you'd eliminated the spot, or arranged a bulwark against the cloud. You're a good business man."
"Thanks."
"No compliment. Y
ou're a stinking thinker--outside the field of return on invested capital. There's a spot on America's future called Hitler. People like Jimmie and I won't rest until we've done all we can to eliminate it--or get ready for it--and we mean all. I repeat. We interventionists can easily understand you isolationists. But you can't understand us--you get into a holy purple froth over us--because you won't stop to examine the single, solitary belief we warmongers have in common. We believe Hitler might lick America. By bombers already talked about and soon to be in the air. By economic strangulation. By propaganda and internal division. By other methods we may not be smart enough to guess. Grant that one belief, and everything we do and say makes sense. Aiding Britain, aiding Russia, aiding any bloody damned raging rascals who will fight Hitler. Lending money, breaking the nation, if necessary, to manufacture arms, conscripting the boys, teaching the people of Muskogewan how to wear gas masks and put out fire bombs, giving our lives, arming ships, declaring war, seizing the Azores--
anything! We're all-out guys--because we are absolutely certain in our heads and in our hearts that no American can sleep a safe night until the Nazis have been wiped off the slate and stamped into the grave of time. I won't repeat the names of the nations Hitler has. I won't talk about how a few armed terrorists with Wilhelmstrasse training can hold whole nations in slavery. I don't need to go through the many flagrant reasons for our opinion--"
"Then don't!" said Mr. Wilson.
"--but I will say this. You and your crowd have had two years--two long and terrible years--in which to prove that the thing we are getting ready for is a myth. You've had more than eighteen months since the blitz to convince us Hitler isn't coming. You have money and brains, orators and a free press. You have congressmen and senators and leaders. You have radio time and you can print books. You've done all of it. And, day by day, more and more Americans have come over to our way of thinking--because, by God, you can't make a case for your side! Not a convincing case! You can't offer a guarantee that Germany won't attack America someday. You can't offer a guarantee that America can lick a Germany that may have licked everybody else on earth. All you've got to offer is your scorn, your negative hopes, and your fear of what preparedness and aid will cost.
None of those is worth a concrete damn! And as long as your crowd can't prove--prove absolutely and beyond cavil--that we Americans are safe going along as we were, you might as well not try to talk. Because as long as there is a threat, a possibility, a chance, that the Huns are damn' well after us--or will be--every man, woman, and child in America would be a sap if he was not exerting his utmost effort to whip them. Right?"
"There's another position," Mr. Wilson said hotly. "The position that Germany will exhaust herself before she gets to America."
"Sure. And can you prove that she will? Mr. Wilson, what you can prove is that the Germans are bending every effort to make us Americans think they will be exhausted.
They want us to believe that the Russian campaign destroyed divisions, and hordes of tanks, and whatnot. It did, no doubt. But it also has left them with a couple of hundred or more divisions of the best-trained big-country invasion troops in history! The Germans wouldn't like us to dwell on that angle! Our own army has a number of strategists who claim you can't defend America--once an enemy has established bases inside the nation, and good supply lines. And if the German troops who trained in Russia landed here, they might blitz from Atlanta to Seattle!"
"But the general staff--" said one of the women.
Mr. Corinth looked at her.
"Unfortunately, the brass heads in the army and the navy think the way Wilson does. With their wishes. It's natural. We brought them up in a 'tradition.' We thought that officers should have imagination beaten out of them; we sacrificed it for discipline, automatonism, excellence in as-is operation. Being patriotic, and being the victims of an ironclad environment, they--for the most part--can do nothing original to win our wars.
They don't understand how the wars will be fought--only how they were fought. So that they must use up their energies wishing that the Germans were coming in '43 just as they came in '14 because that is the only way they learned to use their energies. That's why an American admiral can strut smugly about on the deck of a battleship that has inadequate anti-air defenses. That's why a general can conduct war games, and keep 'score,' without taking the possibility of air power into consideration at all. He does what he can do because he is a patriot--and he doesn't do what he can't do. That's impossible."
"But our boys have the spirit to whip anybody. We're training 'em right now,"
retorted Mr. Wilson.
"We may get enough new officers in time," Mr. Corinth replied. "But whenever I hear an army man saying, 'Give me the boys, and give the boys Springfield rifles, and I'll show the old Boche what for!' I get sick at the pit of my stomach. Because that poor devil will someday possibly be facing Boche--who are destroying himself and his men and the terrain and towns around them, from a point beyond Springfield range. Or from behind armor plate a Springfield and a Garand and a .37 millimeter gun can't pierce! I get quite sore at veterans and old soldiers and the reminiscing legionnaires, sometimes. All they have is the right spirit. What they lack is the basic realization that, in twenty-odd years, one military machine--the German--has figured out how to make the World War lessons meaningless.
"Last fall, Mr. Wilson, the British were almost ready to quit. If the air blitz had gone on another ten days they probably would have quit. The government even had appointed the officials to treat with the Germans after the surrender. Whole towns, whole cities, counties, were so shell-shocked that they were unmanageable. Millions of people were stunned, numb, out of their heads. The end was at hand. The British knew it. And then--the Germans gave up the effort. That's twice they've quit too soon. The third time--
they may not quit. It's all different, and it would be better for us if we didn't have so many old soldiers around the land--good men--who are trying to get us ready to fight the war of 1914.
"The military wiseacres will tell you that there's a defense discovered for every new weapon of offense. And so there is! I used to be more or less lulled by that theory.
Then I skimmed through the history of war to investigate it. And the sad truth is, that most of the great new steps forward in new weapons for offensive war--or new ways of using old weapons--have been immediately followed by the disastrous defeat of nations and whole continents! You can follow the story, from the phalanx and the catapult, through the Swiss bowmen and the use of gunpowder, right down to the tank and the bomber! There's always a time lag before defense catches up with offense. It may be that an adequate defense will someday be invented against air bombing--as the old truism says it must be--but history leads me to suspect that the invention may very well come after the whole damned world has been subjugated, and the defense will be useful only in wars that lie centuries away from us now."
Mr. Corinth stopped. Jimmie, who had been watching the faces, saw anxiety on many--anxiety that changed slowly to a hard, resentful determination. It was if a bigotry froze on the people, froze in stolid rejection of anything so adamantine as the old man's words implied. They sat on the porch, uniting their wills anew to ward off bombs and torpedoes, rape and blood.
One woman, however, who had listened with a sorrowful expression, now said,
"If you're right, Willie, what's to become of us all? I've always thought that war was shameful and sinful and a waste. I've believed that you should turn the other cheek. I'm a pacifist--a real one, I trust."
"I know you are, Mollie," Mr. Corinth replied. "And if everyone were like you, there wouldn't be war. But--everyone isn't. War is still a collective expression of individual irresponsibility, as I've said, and of individual greed and avarice. Comes out of a natural instinct. War is nature, Mollie. It's only man--in the last few thousand years--
who has begun to see that he can someday evolve his nature up to a high enough plane to quit making war. All the
carnivorous animals kill the little, weaker ones for food. They kill each other when pressures get unbearable. And even the grasseaters kill grass, which no doubt feels it has a right to live also. The instinct of self-preservation embraces the will to preserve yourself in an environment most advantageous to you. As a human being, whatever you may happen to think of as an advantage--money, power, a bigger nation, raw materials, anything--can consequently become a motive for going to war. Living is a struggle; that is the very meaning of the word. It's a struggle for individuals, and consequently a struggle for groups.
"When groups translate their instinct to struggle into a fight, they're doing a natural thing. Not necessarily a useful or a necessary one--but a normal one. It's much more abnormal for you, Mollie, to believe that people--as dishonest and prejudiced and ill-willed as you know they are--can institute a permanent peace, than it is abnormal for them to start killing each other. Being a 'pacifist'--in the face of human nature as of this date--is about as sensible as insisting that all men ought to be immediately made millionaires, or that every ditchdigger should become a scholar. We just aren't good enough for peace, yet. We've got to make ourselves that good, someday--but the day isn't here! We still think we can make other people behave, without first establishing an integrity of our own--and we still think that will bring peace. It won't. Peace isn't a legislative, an economic, a legal, or a political accomplishment. It's strictly a matter of total human nature--and human nature is still in the slums, mostly. Every human woe stems back to the individual's unwillingness to face truth, understand and accept it, and to be responsible for his acts in the light of that acceptance. We're in kindergarten at that sort of behavior--as I was explaining to Jimmie on the business of morals the other day."