Keegan stared at his friend furtively. There were things inexplicable in George Basine. He must admire them. There was nothing inexplicable in himself.
He hesitated about going, however. A combination of platitudes was involved. He felt the necessity of repentance. And then he felt the necessity of hiding his shame. And finally platitude cautioned him indignantly against affronting three good women—a mother and two daughters—with the presence of one lately come from the flesh pots of Satan. This was a superior platitude because it came also under the index of good manners.
But Basine, taking him by the elbow, swept him along, platitudes and all. An inexplicable Basine whom he admired, envied, despised, and who was his best friend and his model. They walked together, Basine briskly to hide the sudden heaviness of his legs; Keegan yielding to the less pronounced physical drain he had undergone and falling into a weary, protesting gait.
2
The death of Howard Basine had precipitated a creditable outburst of grief on the part of his widow and two daughters. The event had brought his son George home from college.
They had shared a bed for twenty-six years, Basine père and Basine mère, achieving an utter disregard of each other which both took pride in identifying as domestic happiness. In their youth love had brought them together while comparative strangers. And after twenty-six years death had parted them still strangers. But now complete and total strangers—Siamese twins who had never been introduced to each other.
Each had grown old by the side of the other, subscribing to the same thoughts, worries, ambitions. It was as if a thin shell had grown around each of them. This shell was their home, their mutual interest in bank balances, diversions and tomorrows. It was the product of their practical energies—their standing in the eyes of their friends, their success and their solidity as a social unit. It was their pride in new rugs, in invitations to functions, in their children.
There were two shells. One was Basine père. One was Basine mère. For twenty-six years these two shells cohabited together. But inside each of them there had been a world of things that had never connected and that remained forever part of a mutually preserved secret. Little daydreams, absurdities, the swaggering, pensive, impractical rigmarole of thought-life to which the world of reality—the shell-world—had remained almost to the last no more than a vaguely sensed exterior.
Each of them had lived almost continually apart from this shell. They had given but a fraction of their energies toward its creation. It had required only a little part of themselves to become two placidly successful conventionally happy people with a home and family. The rest of themselves they had allowed to evaporate.