My Dear Cornelia/Book 4/Chapter 7
Oliver stepped to his desk and removed the receiver. There was an inevitable moment of suspense. Then tossing to us with a smile: "It's the Infant—they're all right," he turned again to the telephone and listened for nearly five minutes, during which he said "yes" several times, "What's that?" once, and concluded with "I'll come immediately."
Then he faced us with a curious smile, meant to be reassuring, and, with that promptitude of thought and action which idle Americans in Europe are understood to exhibit on the outbreak of war, said swiftly and decisively:—
"Oliver has been arrested for speeding. I'll have to go and bail him out. They are letting the girls come home. They will be here any minute. Willys, will you go downstairs to the office and tell them to send a taxi here at once? Professor, you go, too, and meet the girls downstairs. I want to have a word with Cornelia. If Dorothy comes before I join you, keep her there a minute. Yes, put on your coats—we'll not come back. Willys and I will look after this business; the Professor will go on, to his train."
In the face of a real little emergency Cornelia's nerves never betray her. As soon as Oliver began to give orders, she became the source instead of the recipient of reassurances, as if her only anxiety had been for a gracious leave-taking. She did it extraordinarily well.
The rest of my impressions of that night I shall drastically telescope because this is not a story, but a conversation, and my impressions relate merely to the incident which had intruded with such coincidental force upon the conversation.
I recall that the first moment in which my imagination began to link the talk and events of the evening vividly together was in the elevator, descending to the ground floor, when Willys, casually thrusting his hands into the pockets of his overcoat, and muttering something about His Excellency's being a little fussed, fished out his copy of the Bacchae. As I transferred the book to my own coat, somehow association shot a link from the Greek tragedy and its gory scene in the hills to the red face that Cornelia had seen under the city lamps.
While Willys occupied himself with accelerating the arrival of a taxi, I went out on the street and stood on the curb, waiting reflectively enough for the appearance of Dorothy and her girl friend. Five minutes later they were driven up. With the notion that my function was to shut off a "scene" of any sort, I instantly remarked, in the quiet tone of a man who understands all about the situation, that Dorothy's father was explaining the thing to her mother, who was a little agitated, and that he desired them to wait downstairs till he came down. Both girls looked as if they had been crying, but they were calm now, and seemed indisposed to talk to me. When I had drawn them aside out of observation from the office, and saw no hysterical signs, I ventured to ask why they had been driving so fast. The other girl, whose name I did not catch, said that they had not been driving fast but had skidded. Before I could utter my natural question, Dorothy turned on her young friend, and said:—
"That is not so. You know it is not so." Then she did a queer thing. She asked me if I was leaving town that night, and when I said I was, she slipped from under her fur coat a small, light oblong parcel wrapped in a man's handkerchief, thrust it into my hands, and whispered with singular intensity: "Take it with you, please! Take it away and pitch it—pitch it where no one will ever find it!" I dropped it discreetly into my overcoat pocket. Then Oliver entered from the elevator, questioned Dorothy for a minute, and sent the two girls up to Cornelia.
Oliver, Willys, and I then entered the waiting taxi and drove away. Oliver sat with his back to the driver, facing us two. I itched to ask him why the other girl had told me that their car had skidded, and why Dorothy had denied it. But it seemed a good time to let Oliver speak first. He sat for a few moments in a frowning concentration, almost as if we had not been there. Then he ejaculated, still as if we had not been there, "My God, what a mess! My God, what a mess!" Willys rallied him on making such an ado over a fine. Then Oliver hurled the whole thing between our eyes, just as he himself had got it, standing there so gaily in the library, smiling histrionically back at us from the telephone. The Infant—he still referred to him as "the Infant"— had been arrested on the charge of manslaughter and driving a car while drunk. He wasn't drunk, but he had been drinking a little at the party, as the other boys had. He had somehow lost control and hit some people, a woman and a little boy, he thought, just a few blocks from home.
Well, that is the gist of the incident.
As I look back now on that trip to the police-station, I am shocked to remember how self-centred we were, all three. I can't recall that it occurred to any one of us to be concerned about the load of broken humanity that had gone, an hour earlier, to the hospital. Our sole concern seemed to be lest a couple of physically uninjured boys should spend a few hours of the night in jail. And just before the taxi stopped at the police-station to let His Excellency and Willys out, I know that I myself was actually wondering about this remote point: how it would affect Cornelia, and whether she would not suffer more in the injury which her son had inflicted upon others than if he had himself been injured. But what I was actually saying was, that I thought young Oliver did not drink; Cornelia seemed so sure of him. Oliver Senior exclaimed "Oh rot!" And then he added:—
"Why, the Infant and the furnace-man made a keg of raisin wine in the basement of our own apartment last Easter. He told me about it just yesterday. I asked him why he hadn't told me at the time, since we two were on the square with each other. He said that he was afraid of setting me a bad example! Oh, the poor little devil! The poor little devil!"
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.
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!"