The war rehabilitated Basine. It enabled him to destroy Schroder. The complicated underworld of hate, disgust, disillusion which his ludicrous renunciation of Ruth and her subsequent betrayal by Schroder had created in him, was the arsenal from which he armed himself for war.
He had lapsed into a sterile and amiable Basine in order to escape from emotions become too intolerable and too dangerous to utilize. The murder of Schroder would not have restored him. The return of the woman he still loved would have been equally futile. Life had become too intolerable for Basine to face and adjust. He had permitted himself convenient burial.
On the night he had gotten drunk with the newspaperman, Basine saw himself as he was—a creature misshapen and humorous—and he had buried the vision and fled from it. To sit contemplating an inner self become a grotesque cripple was intolerable. He sought for a brief space to transfer his self-loathing to Schroder but Schroder, the man, was too small to contain it. Schroder, the war, however, was another matter.
Basine unlocked himself, exhumed himself, and came forth with a yell in his throat. The German army was five million Schroders. He hurled himself at them. He was happy in his rage. A sincerity hypnotized him.
The Germans were not only five million Schroders. They were also the incarnated nauseas and despairs of Basine. Schroder, the man, had become for him, illogically but soothingly, the cause of everything that had become misshapen and humorous inside him. Schroder, the man, was the sand in which Basine, the ostrich, buried his head. Now Schroder, the Germans, Schroder, the World War, Schroder, the rape of Belgium, the devastation of France, offered a more hospitable grave for the misshapen and humorous image of himself. To destroy the Germans became for Basine synonymous with destroying the things inside himself from which he had fled helplessly. The destruction of these things consisted of giving them outlet, of giving them voice. His hatreds, despairs and disillusions arose and spat themselves upon the Germans. The process cleansed and invigorated him and launched him before the public as a leader to be trusted, a hero to venerate during its dark hour.
25
The company assembled in his mother's home greeted Basine with excitement. He had stopped over during a tour in behalf of the Liberty Loan. Mrs. Basine had persuaded him to attend a function in his honor. He was late. They were waiting dinner for him.
When he entered, a sense of great affairs, of world disturbances came into the room with him. At the table the talk centered around him. He was the superior patriot. Questions were fired at him—when would the war end, what was the real secret of this and that and did he know what was behind the latest note from the President, and when was the German offensive due? He answered ambiguously, offering no information and exciting his audience by his reticence.
Aubrey Gilchrist, who had held the floor before the Senator's arrival, listened eagerly to his brother-in-law. Aubrey's patriotism was a bond between them. But it was of a different quality. Aubrey's patriotism was founded on the fact that America was the most virtuous nation in the world. He devoted himself to a campaign among his friends and had even spoken publicly a number of times. In his talk he grew eloquent over the moral grandeur of his country and hailed the altruism and honesty of his countrymen as a light that illumined the world.