All this formed no part of the preoccupations of the whistling one. He was waiting for his companion and for the fifteenth time the tune of "Bill Bailey" came softly from his lips. The companion appeared, a crestfallen young man of twenty-three, Hugh Keegan by name. An idiotic wistfulness marked the blond vacuity of his face. They said nothing and walked to the street car track.
Here they must wait. There was no car in sight. Basine employed the wait, jumping out from the curbing and peering with a great show of interest down the deserted tracks. The night's dissipation had left him perversely elate. His vanity demanded that he confound the scenes of his recent moral collapse by exhibitions of undiminished vigor of body and gayety of mind. So he capered back and forth between the curb and the deserted tracks, ostentatiously unbuttoning his coat to the chill of the dawn and addressing brisk, cheerful sallies to his penitent friend.
It was this way with Basine. He had spent the night in sin. Now he must act as if he had not spent the night in sin. It was a matter of deceiving his conscience, and Basine's conscience did not live in Basine. It was, to the contrary, a mysterious external force, something quite outside him.
He eyed the virtuous hallelujahs of the sunrise with a somewhat over-emphasized aplomb. Dimly he felt that a God was articulating in dawns and sunbeams. As long as he had continued his whistling, these facts had remained concealed. But now he had grown tired of "Bill Bailey" and at once God, peering out of his beautiful rosy heaven was saying, "Shame on you." Everything seemed to be waiting to repeat this banal reproof.
This was the conscience of George Basine—a reproof that came from without. He felt an inclination to defiance before this reproof.... He was young and given to evil. This was only natural, considering the time in which he lived and the biological impulses of youth.
But to do evil was one thing. To defend it after it was done was another. Thus Basine, having sinned lustily through the night, avoided the more unspeakable sin of defending his action. The reproof arrived, he faced it with candor and intelligence, prepared to admit that he had done wrong.
He did not want God mumbling around inside him as was the case with his friend Keegan. God mumbled around inside of Keegan and made him feel like the devil. But Basine—there was no occasion for God to argue His point. He, Basine, surrendered gracefully and forthwith. That was the way to handle situations of the soul.
To Basine, situations of the soul were a species of external discomforts he identified as God. They were the regulations and taboos of a civilization to which he was prepared at all times to submit, providing such submission did not compromise him. One got rid of taboos by looking them squarely in the eye and simulating respect or remorse. Taboos were good manners. One had to be polite to good manners. Basine laughed, not defiantly. He had already made his apologies to the dawn. The dawn was God's good manners. It entered the world as precisely and as perfectly as the saintly wife of a great financier might enter her grandmother's drawing room.
Waiting beside the car track, Basine was already a reformed and forgiven man. The sun was like a huge Salvation Army marching through the highways of Evil, beating great drums and singing, "Are you washed, are you washed in the Blood of the Lamb?" He was glad of it. He was glad to be once more a part of a virtuous world, a citizen of an ideal republic given to the great causes of progress.
This adjustment completed, memories of the night came to him as they waited for the car. These memories failed, naturally, to conflict with his character as a citizen of virtue. For they were memories which he was prepared at any moment to repudiate and denounce. Thus prepared he could of course enjoy them.