CHAPTER 2
“I’m afraid,” Haynerd was saying, as he and Father Waite were wending their way to the Beaubien home a few evenings later, “that this Carmen is the kind of girl you read about in sentimental novels; the kind who are always just ready to step into heaven, but who count for little in the warfare and struggle of actual mundane existence. You get me? She isn’t quite true to life, you know, as a book critic would say of an impossible heroine.”
“You mistake, my friend,” replied Father Waite warmly. “She is the very kind we would see oftener, were it not for the belief that years bring wisdom, and so, as a consequence, the little child is crushed beneath a load of false beliefs and human laws that make it reflect its mortal parents, rather than its heavenly one.”
“But I’d like to see her under stress––”
“Under stress! Good heavens, man! You haven’t the slightest conception of the stress she’s been under most of her life! But your criticism unconsciously pays her the highest tribute, for her kind never show by word, deed, or look what they are enduring. That frail-appearing girl has stood up under loads that would have flattened you and me out like gold leaf!”
“Well, she doesn’t look it!” protested Haynerd tenaciously.
“Of course she doesn’t! Her kind never do! She’s so far and away ahead of mortals like you and me that she doesn’t admit the reality and power of evil––and, believe me, she’s got her reasons for not admitting it, too! Don’t presume to judge her yet. Only try humbly to attain a little of her understanding and faith; and try to avoid making yourself ridiculous by criticising what you do not comprehend. That, indeed, has been mankind’s age-long blunder––and they have thereby made asses of themselves!”
Edward Haynerd, or “Ned,” as he was invariably known, 16 prided himself on being something of a philosopher. And in the name of philosophy he chose to be quixotic. That one who hated the dissimulations and shams of our class aristocracy so cordially should have earned his livelihood––and a good one, too––as publisher of the Social Era, a sprightly weekly chronicle of happenings in fashionable society, would have appeared anomalous in any but a man gifted in the Greek sophistries and their modern innumerable and arid offshoots. Haynerd was a laughing Democritus, an easy-going, even-tempered fellow, doomed to be loved, and by the same graces thoroughly cheated by the world in general. He had in his rapid career of some thirty-five years dipped deeply into things mundane, and had come to the surface, sputtering and blowing, with his face well smeared with mud from the shallow depths. Whereupon he remarked that such an existence was a poor way of serving the Lord, and turned cynic. His wit was his saving grace. It was likewise his capital and stock-in-trade. By it he won a place for himself in the newspaper world, and later, as a credit asset, had employed it successfully in negotiating for the Social Era. It taking over the publication of this sheet he had remarked that life was altogether too short to permit of attempting anything worth while; and so he forthwith made no further assaults upon fame––assuming that he had ever done so––but settled comfortably down to the enjoyment of his sinecure. He had never married. And as justification for his self-imposed celibacy he pompously quoted Kant: “I am a bachelor, and I could not cease to be a bachelor without a disturbance that would be intolerable to me.” Yet he was not a misogynist. He simply shirked responsibility and ease-threatening risk.
“You see,” he remarked, explaining himself later to Carmen, “I’m a pseudo-littérateur––I conduct a ‘Who’s It?’ for the quidnunces of this blasé old burg. And I really meet a need by furnishing an easy method of suicide, for my little vanity sheet is a sort of social mirror, that all who look therein may die of laughter. By the way, I had to run those base squibs about you; but, by George! I’m going to make a retraction in next Saturday’s issue. I’ll put a crimp in friend Ames that’ll make him squeal. I’ll say he has ten wives, and eight of ’em Zulus, at that!”