Gargoyles

by Ben Hecht

"If I hadn't given my consent she would have done it anyway. This way I've saved her from being disobedient."

Doris took up her life in a two-room apartment on the near north side of the city. The district was alive with rooming-houses, little stores, lovers who walked hand in hand at night, artists who tried to paint, writers who worked as clerks and tried to write, workingmen, artisans, derelicts. Everyone seemed alone in this district and on warm evenings groups of strangers sat stiffly on the stone steps of the houses and stared at the sky.

Doris was able to live on her salary. She made friends and her evenings were devoted to conversations. But they were a curious type of friends. They were men and women one got to know only by their ideas. One became acquainted with their ideas, then familiar with them, then on terms of intimacy with them.

It had been different at home. At home she knew men and women as they were. They sat around and talked and if you listened to what they said you came close to them. You understood them and when they said good-night you knew where they were going. You knew all about them, where they worked, their family, their homes. They grew into familiars as uninteresting and unmysterious as your own relatives.

But here where Doris had come to live were men and women about whom you never learned anything. They talked and talked but all the while you wondered where they worked, what things were in their hearts. You wondered how they lived and what they did all the time. But you never found out. Such informations were not a part of the talk that went on. It was all talk about outside things, about politics and women and art. Everybody in the circle Doris entered became familiar in a short time. But after they had become familiar there remained this mystery about them. What sort of people were they under their poses and behind their words?

The most curious change her freedom brought Doris was a garrulity that surprised even herself. She became adept in arguments vindicating the emancipation of her sex and proving that the ideals and standards by which women lived were the rose-covered chains forged for their enslavement by man.

But her garrulity did not deceive Doris. She grew more clearly aware of herself. She knew that her entire upheaval, her taking up new ideas, her repudiating conventions had been inspired by a single factor. She wanted to live alone in a room so there would be no difficulty in giving herself to Lindstrum when the opportunity came.

With this in mind she had deliberately converted herself into a "new woman," since an expression of the new womanhood was independence of family and since independence of family meant a room to herself. Of this subterfuge Doris became tolerantly aware. Her hypocricies did not concern her. In her desire for the man she loved the surfaces of her life disappeared like straws in flame.

Lindstrum had visited her in her new quarters with misgivings. When he was alone he often sat thinking of her and repeating her ardent phrases. This helped him to make love to himself, to seduce the strange companion who lived in the depths of his soul into embracing him. Out of this embrace came words. Out of the ecstacy these hypnotisms induced, he was able to create gigantic phrases, mystic sequences of words whose reading often inspired people with an excitement similar to the emotion that had produced them. Women in particular grew emotional at the contact of his written words. When he read his poetry to some of them who were his friends they closed their eyes and thought he was making love to them.

Lindstrum utilizing the adoration Doris gave him as a means of self-seduction, remained aware of the danger this offered. The danger was summed up in the word "marriage." At twenty-six his sexual impulses found sublimated outlet in the orgies of self-seduction which he called his creative work. Thus his physical nature clamored for no other mate than his own genius, and the lure of marriage as a legalized debauch failed to touch him. His egoism likewise found a more perfect surfeit in his own self-admiration than in that of others. He saw in marriage merely a forfeit of his privacy and an intruder upon his self-love.