He was the type of author who gets dozens of letters a week from solicitors, aged men and enthusiastic young women who tell him that he is “prostituting his art” and “wasting golden literary opportunities.” As a matter of fact he wasn’t. It was very conceivable that he might have written better despite his unpleasant range of subject, but what he had written had a huge vogue that, strangely enough, consisted not of the usual devotees of prostitute art, the eager shopgirls and sentimental salesmen to whom he was accused of pandering, but of the academic and literary circles of the country. His shrewd tenderness with nature (that is, everything but the white race), his well-drawn men and the particularly cynical sting to his wit gave him many adherents. He was ranked in the most staid and severe of reviews as a coming man. Long psychopathic stories and dull germanized novels were predicted of him by optimistic critics. At one time he was the Thomas Hardy of America, and he was several times heralded as the Balzac of his century. He was accused of having the great American novel in his coat pocket, trying to peddle it from publisher to publisher. But somehow neither matter nor style had improved; people accused him of not “living.” His unmarried sister and he had an apartment where she sat greying year by year with one furtive hand on the bromo-seltzer and the other on the telephone receiver of frantic feminine telephone calls. For George Rombert grew violently involved at least once a year. He filled columns in the journals of society gossip. Oddly enough most of his affairs were with debutantes—a fact which was considered particularly annoying by sheltering mothers. It seemed as though he had the most serious way of talking the most outrageous nonsense, and as he was most desirable from an economic point of view, many essayed the perilous quest.
Though we had lived in the East since I had been a baby, it was always understood that home meant the prosperous Western city that still supported the roots of our family tree. When I was twenty I went back for the first time and made my only acquaintance with Uncle George.
I had dinner in the apartment with my aunt, a very brave, gentle old lady who told me, rather proudly, I thought, that I looked like George. I was shown his pictures from babyhood, in every attitude: George at Andover, on the Y.M.C.A. committee, strange anatomy; George at Williams in the center of the Literary Magazine Picture; George as head of his fraternity. Then she handed me a scrapbook containing accounts of his exploits and all favorable criticism of his work.
“He cares nothing at all about all this,” she explained. I admired and questioned, and remember thinking, as I left the apartment to seek Uncle George at his club, that between my family’s depressed opinion of him and my aunt’s elated one my idea of him was muddled to say the least. At the Iroquois Club I was directed to the grill, and there, standing in the doorway, I picked one out of the crowd, who, I was immediately sure, was he. Here is the way he looked at the time. He was tall with magnificent iron grey hair and the pale soft skin of a boy, most remarkable in a man of his mode of life. Drooping green eyes and a sneering mouth complete my picture of his physical self. He was rather drunk, for he had been at the club all afternoon and for dinner, but he was perfectly conscious of himself, and the dulling of faculties was only perceivable in a very cautious walk and a crack in his voice that sank it occasionally to a hoarse whisper. He was talking to a table of men, all in various stages of inebriation, and holding them by a most peculiar and magnetic series of gestures. Right here I want to remark that this influence was not dependent so much upon a vivid physical personality but on a series of perfectly artificial mental tricks, his gestures, the peculiar range of his speaking voice, the suddenness and terseness of his remarks.
I watched him intently while my hall boy whispered to him, and he walked slowly and consciously over to me to shake hands gravely and escort me to a small table. For an hour we talked of family things, of healths and deaths and births. I could not take my eyes off him. The blood-shot streakedness of his green eyes made me think of weird color combinations in a child’s paint-box. He had been looking bored for about ten minutes, and my talk had been dwindling despondently down, when suddenly he waved his hand as if to brush away a veil, and began to question me.
“Is that damn father of yours still defending me against your mother’s tongue?”
I started, but, strangely, felt no resentment.
“Because,” he went on, “it’s the only thing he ever did for me all his life. He’s a terrible prig. I’d think it would drive you wild to have him in the house.”
“Father feels very kindly toward you, sir,” I said rather stiffly.
“Don’t,” he protested smiling. “Stick to veracity in your own family and don’t bother to lie to me. I’m a totally black figure in your mind, I’m well aware. Am I not?”
“Well—you’ve—you’ve had a twenty years’ history.”
“Twenty years—hell—” said Uncle George. “Three years’ history and fifteen years’ aftermath.”
“But your books—and all.”
“Just aftermath, nothing but aftermath. My life stopped at twenty-one one night in October at sixteen minutes after ten. Do you want to hear about it? First I’ll show you the heifer and then I’ll take you upstairs and present you to the altar.”
“I, you—if you—” I demurred feebly, for I was on fire to hear the story.
“Oh,—no trouble. I’ve done the story several times in books and life and around many a littered table. I have no delicacy anymore—I lost that in the first smoke. This is the totally blackened heifer whom you’re talking to now.”
So he told me the story.
“You see it began sophomore year—began most directly and most vividly in Christmas vacation of sophomore year. Before that she’d always gone with a younger crowd—set, you young people call it now,”—he paused and clutched with mental fingers for tangible figures to express himself. “Her dancing, I guess, and beauty and the most direct, unprincipled personality I’ve ever come in contact with. When she wanted a boy there was no preliminary scouting among other girls for information, no sending out of tentative approaches meant to be retailed to him. There was the most direct attack by every faculty and gift that she possessed. She had no divergence of method—she just made you conscious to the highest degree that she was a girl”—he turned his eyes on me suddenly and asked:
“Is that enough—do you want a description of her eyes and hair and what she said?”
“No,” I answered, “go on.”
“Well, I went back to college an idealist. I built up a system of psychology in which dark ladies with alto voices and infinite possibilities floated through my days and nights. Of course we had the most frantic correspondence—each wrote ridiculous letters and sent ridiculous telegrams, told all our acquaintances about our flaming affair and—well you’ve been to college. All this is banal, I know. Here’s an odd thing. All the time I was idealizing her to the last possibility, I was perfectly conscious that she was about the faultiest girl I’d ever met. She was selfish, conceited and uncontrolled and since these were my own faults I was doubly aware of them. Yet I never wanted to change her. Each fault was knit up with a sort of passionate energy that transcended it. Her selfishness made her play the game harder, her lack of control put me rather in awe of her, and her conceit was punctuated by such delicious moments of remorse and self-denunciation that it was almost—almost dear to me—Isn’t this getting ridiculous? She had the strongest effect on me. She made me want to do something for her, to get something to show her.