Willys said it was “a damn shame” and they must see what they could do to get the charge of driving while drunk withdrawn and the charge of exceeding the speed limit substituted. Then we shook hands. Oliver and Willys got out, and I went on to the railway station. I hated not to stand by and see the thing through. But Oliver had assured me that I couldn’t really do anything but stand by; and as I had a speaking engagement in Ohio on the next day, and my college work began the day after, I surrendered to the necessity of the situation. My holiday was over.
I started westward with little eagerness—with an odd sensation of repletion and fatigue mixed with cerebral excitement. “The starved silkworm,” I muttered to myself, “has had his feast of mulberry leaves.” I was not sleepy and didn’t wish to spend the small hours of the morning tossing in my berth. I went into the empty dressing-room for a smoke. As I hung up my overcoat, I thought of the parcel that Dorothy had entreated me to “pitch—pitch where no one will ever find it.” Poor pathetic, distracted little Dorothy! It was only an empty silver flask, wrapped in her brother’s handkerchief and neatly engraved with his monogram. Poor little distracted Bacchante—apparently it hadn’t occurred to her that the breath of whiskey still strong in the silver flask was doubtless giving even stronger evidence elsewhere.
The thing hurt me, and I put it away. Everything that I tried to think of, however, hurt me. I wanted to escape from too much sensation. But my mind was in that state of fatigue-intoxication in which one seems to be simply an observer of a succession of pictures which form spontaneously there. I was conscious of wishing to reflect consecutively on a certain idea, namely, whether Willys was right in declaring that one can’t kill a god. But the moment that I began to grip the idea, and ask myself whether in the course of history many terrible old gods and dynasties of gods had not utterly passed away under the pressure of that Necessity which encompasses the gods and is stronger than they—pictures began to form: Bacchanalian women dancing in the hills; Willys’s humorous torn limbs of Pentheus strewn “all over the place”; Cornelia’s terrified picture of the gory head hanging over the car; and—the young Bacchus at the police station.
Sometimes one manages to escape from the persecution of such pictures by reading a book. I had nothing available but the copy of the Bacchae that Willys had lent me. When I found it impossible to escape from its suggestions, I decided to face them. I read till the gray morning crept into the car and extinguished the lights. The last lines of the tragedy moved me deeply, with a kind of strange solemnity, a haunting beauty.
O the works of the Gods—in manifold wise they reveal them:
Manifold things unhoped-for the Gods to accomplishment bring,
And the things that we looked for, the Gods deign not to fulfill them;
And the paths undiscerned of our eyes, the Gods unseal them.
I looked out at the window. Another day had come. We were thundering through wintry cornfields—a hint of snow on the withered brown stalks. I rose, and passing through the silent sleepers to the deserted observation-car at the rear, I went out on the platform and pitched the empty silver flask as far as I could pitch it into the wind. I seemed to hear from the corn a remembered godlike voice crying: “O celestial Bacchus, drive them mad!”
BOOK FIVE
APPROACHING RELIGION AND OTHER GRAVE MATTERS
I
WE MEET IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
It is not my intention to make public, in any detail, what I know of the means by which His Excellency got young Oliver out of his New Year’s scrape in New York. In recording my conversations with Cornelia and her family, I have been animated throughout by a desire to increase popular respect for the members of our upper class as the suitable persons to give tone to the democracy; and this particular incident happens not to be altogether creditable to the ethical sense of His Excellency—if one uses as a criterion the ethical austerity of Jeanie Deans or George Washington of blessed memory. I am not sure that almost any other man in the same circumstances—even a member of our very moral middle-class—would not have strained a point to keep his own son from public punishment and disgrace. I mean only that we all talk about “equality before the law,” until we find ourselves in personal need of special privileges; and that when His Excellency’s withers were wrung, he took it as a matter of course that he should use his money and his persuasive tongue, his acquaintance with the police captain, his relationship with Judge Black, and his influence with the newspapers to smooth things over. The matter was adjusted out of court and without publicity, chiefly by the prepayment, while the recovery of the principal victim was in doubt, of the moderate sum which disinterested persons estimated the life of an eight-year-old boy of the laboring class to be worth. His Excellency himself wrote to me, in the latter part of March, as I remember, that everything had been “fixed up—Gott sei Dank; so that’s over.”
What immediate effect the accident and the reparation of it had upon the internal harmony of Cornelia’s household, I did not know. In the occasional letters which I had received from her early in the year, she expressed considerable anxiety about the health of her son. She said that the accident was preying on his mind and making him nervous and listless about his school work—and perhaps she should have to take him out of school. In one letter, which she asked me to burn, I thought that I detected a hint of bitterness toward Oliver for concealing from her his knowledge that Oliver Junior had been less innocent of the tastes and follies of his age than she had imagined him to be. But in all the years of our acquaintance, both she and her husband had maintained a proud and—I had supposed—happy reticence regarding their more intimate relations; and except in the essentially comic incident, last summer, of Dorothy’s bobbed hair, I had never been admitted to so much as a glimpse of anything like a domestic “difference.” Being, myself, an old bachelor with perhaps somewhat idealistic notions of family life, it was quite beyond me to conceive that a serious misfortune, like the automobile accident, could have any other influence than to cement more closely the family unity.