She dropped her head and she did not raise it again; she seemed indifferent even to the answer she was seeking.
“Katie,” he said softly, reproachfully, “Katie darling.”
She waited silently.
“Do you really want me to tell you the answer?” She nodded. “Because, you know, you’ve given the answer yourself, in the things you said.” She lifted her eyes blankly. “What have you been talking about? What have you been complaining about? About the fact that you are unhappy. About Katie Halsey and nothing else. It was the most egotistical speech I’ve ever heard in my life.”
She blinked attentively, like a schoolchild disturbed by a difficult lesson.
“Don’t you see how selfish you have been? You chose a noble career, not for the good you could accomplish, but for the personal happiness you expected to find in it.”
“But I really wanted to help people.”
“Because you thought you’d be good and virtuous doing it.”
“Why–yes. Because I thought it was right. Is it vicious to want to do right?”
“Yes, if it’s your chief concern. Don’t you see how egotistical it is? To hell with everybody so long as I’m virtuous.”
“But if you have no…no self-respect, how can you be anything?”
“Why must you be anything?”
She spread her hands out, bewildered.
“If your first concern is for what you are or think or feel or have or haven’t got–you’re still a common egotist.”
“But I can’t jump out of my own body.”
“No. But you can jump out of your narrow soul.”
“You mean, I must want to be unhappy?”
“No. You must stop wanting anything. You must forget how important Miss Catherine Halsey is. Because, you see, she isn’t. Men are important only in relation to other men, in their usefulness, in the service they render. Unless you understand that completely, you can expect nothing but one form of misery or another. Why make such a cosmic tragedy out of the fact that you’ve found yourself feeling cruel toward people? So what? It’s just growing pains. One can’t jump from a state of animal brutality into a state of spiritual living without certain transitions. And some of them may seem evil. A beautiful woman is usually a gawky adolescent first. All growth demands destruction. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. You must be willing to suffer, to be cruel, to be dishonest, to be unclean–anything, my dear, anything to kill the most stubborn of roots, the ego. And only when it is dead, when you care no longer, when you have lost your identity and forgotten the name of your soul–only then will you know the kind of happiness I spoke about, and the gates of spiritual grandeur will fall open before you.”
“But, Uncle Ellsworth,” she whispered, “when the gates fall open, who is it that’s going to enter?”
He laughed aloud, crisply. It sounded like a laugh of appreciation. “My dear,” he said, “I never thought you could surprise me.”
Then his face became earnest again.
“It was a smart crack, Katie, but you know, I hope, that it was only a smart crack?”
“Yes,” she said uncertainly, “I suppose so. Still…”
“We can’t be too literal when we deal in abstractions. Of course it’s you who’ll enter. You won’t have lost your identity–you will merely have acquired a broader one, an identity that will be part of everybody else and of the whole universe.”
“How? In what way? Part of what?”
“Now you see how difficult it is to discuss these things when our entire language is the language of individualism, with all its terms and superstitions. ‘Identity’–it’s an illusion, you know. But you can’t build a new house out of crumbling old bricks. You can’t expect to understand me completely through the medium of present-day conceptions. We are poisoned by the superstition of the ego. We cannot know what will be right or wrong in a selfless society, nor what we’ll feel, nor in what manner. We must destroy the ego first. That is why the mind is so unreliable. We must not think. We must believe. Believe, Katie, even if your mind objects. Don’t think. Believe. Trust your heart, not your brain. Don’t think. Feel. Believe.”
She sat still, composed, but somehow she looked like something run over by a tank. She whispered obediently:
“Yes, Uncle Ellsworth…I…I didn’t think of it that way. I mean I always thought that I must think…But you’re right, that is, if right is the word I mean, if there is a word…Yes, I will believe….I’ll try to understand….No, not to understand. To feel. To believe, I mean….Only I’m so weak….I always feel so small after talking to you….I suppose I was right in a way–I am worthless…but it doesn’t matter…it doesn’t matter….”
When the doorbell rang on the following evening Toohey went to open the door himself.
He smiled when he admitted Peter Keating. After the trial he had expected Keating to come to him; he knew that Keating would need to come. But he had expected him sooner.
Keating walked in uncertainly. His hands seemed too heavy for his wrists. His eyes were puffed, and the skin of his face looked slack.
“Hello, Peter,” said Toohey brightly. “Want to see me? Come right in. Just your luck. I have the whole evening free.”
“No,” said Keating. “I want to see Katie.”
He was not looking at Toohey and he did not see the expression behind Toohey’s glasses.
“Katie? But of course!” said Toohey gaily. “You know, you’ve never come here to call on Katie, so it didn’t occur to me, but…Go right in, I believe she’s home. This way–you don’t know her room?–second door.”
Keating shuffled heavily down the hall, knocked on Catherine’s door and went in when she answered. Toohey stood looking after him, his face thoughtful.
Catherine jumped to her feet when she saw her guest. She stood stupidly, incredulously for a moment, then she dashed to her bed to snatch a girdle she had left lying there and stuff it hurriedly under the pillow. Then she jerked off her glasses, closed her whole fist over them, and slipped them into her pocket. She wondered which would be worse: to remain as she was or to sit down at her dressing table and make up her face in his presence.
She had not seen Keating for six months. In the last three years, they had met occasionally, at long intervals, they had had a few luncheons together, a few dinners, they had gone to the movies twice. They had always met in a public place. Since the beginning of his acquaintance with Toohey, Keating would not come to see her at her home. When they met, they talked as if nothing had changed. But they had not spoken of marriage for a long time. “Hello, Katie,” said Keating softly. “I didn’t know you wore glasses now.”
“It’s just…it’s only for reading….I…Hello, Peter….I guess I look terrible tonight….I’m glad to see you, Peter….”
He sat down heavily, his hat in his hand, his overcoat on. She stood smiling helplessly. Then she made a vague, circular motion with her hands and asked:
“Is it just for a little while or…or do you want to take your coat off?”
“No, it’s not just for a little while.” He got up, threw his coat and hat on the bed, then he smiled for the first time and asked: “Or are you busy and want to throw me out?”
She pressed the heels of her hands against her eye sockets, and dropped her hands again quickly; she had to meet him as she had always met him, she had to sound light and normal: “No, no, Fin not busy at all.”
He sat down and stretched out his arm in silent invitation. She came to him promptly, she put her hand in his, and he pulled her down to the arm of his chair.
The lamplight fell on him, and she had recovered enough to notice the appearance of his face.
“Peter,” she gasped, “what have you been doing to yourself? You look awful.”
“Drinking.”
“Not…like that!”
“Like that. But it’s over now.”
“What was it?”
“I wanted to see you, Katie. I wanted to see you.”
“Darling…what have they done to you?”
“Nobody’s done anything to me. I’m all right now. I’m all right. Because I came here…Katie, have you ever heard of Hopton Stoddard?”
“Stoddard?…I don’t know. I’ve seen the name somewhere.”
“Well, never mind, it doesn’t matter. I was only thinking how strange it is. You see, Stoddard’s an old bastard who just couldn’t take his own rottenness any more, so to make up for it he built a big present to the city. But when I…when I couldn’t take any more, I felt that the only way I could make up for it was by doing the thing I really wanted to do most–by coming here.”
“When you couldn’t take–what, Peter?”