O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 | Page 6

"you have given me the most delightful afternoon of my life." For
a moment Mrs. Denby's hand would linger on the bowed head; then Mr.
McCain would straighten up, smile, square his shoulders in their smart,
young-looking coat, and depart to his club, or the large, softly lit house
where he dwelt alone. At dinner he would drink two glasses of
champagne. Before he drained the last sip of the second pouring he
would hold the glass up to the fire, so that the bronze coruscations at
the heart of the wine glowed like fireflies in a gold dusk. One imagined
him saying to himself: "A perfect woman! A perfect woman--God bless
her!" Saying "God bless" any one, mind you, with a distinct warming
of the heart, but a thoroughly late-Victorian disbelief in any god to
bless.... At least, you thought as much.
And, of course, one had not the slightest notion whether he--old Mr.
Henry McCain--was aware that this twenty years of devotion on his
part to Mrs. Denby was the point upon which had come to focus the not
inconsiderable contempt and hatred for him of his nephew Adrian.

It was an obvious convergence, this devotion of all the traits which
composed, so Adrian imagined, the despicable soul that lay beneath his
uncle's unangled exterior: undeviating self-indulgence; secrecy; utter
selfishness--he was selfish even to the woman he was supposed to love;
that is, if he was capable of loving any one but himself--a bland
hypocrisy; an unthinking conformation to the dictates of an unthinking
world. The list could be multiplied. But to sum it up, here was
epitomized, beautifully, concretely, the main and minor vices of a
generation for which Adrian found little pity in his heart; a generation
brittle as ice; a generation of secret diplomacy; a generation that in its
youth had covered a lack of bathing by a vast amount of perfume. That
was it--! That expressed it perfectly! The just summation! Camellias,
and double intentions in speech, and unnecessary reticences, and
refusals to meet the truth, and a deliberate hiding of uglinesses!
Most of the time Adrian was too busy to think about his uncle at all--he
was a very busy man with his writing: journalistic writing; essays,
political reviews, propaganda--and because he was busy he was usually
well-content, and not uncharitable, except professionally; but once a
month it was his duty to dine with his uncle, and then, for the rest of the
night, he was disturbed, and awoke the next morning with the dusty
feeling in his head of a man who has been slightly drunk. Old wounds
were recalled, old scars inflamed; a childhood in which his uncle's
figure had represented to him the terrors of sarcasm and repression; a
youth in which, as his guardian, his uncle had deprecated all first fine
hot-bloodednesses and enthusiasms; a young manhood in which he had
been told cynically that the ways of society were good ways, and that
the object of life was material advancement; advice which had been
followed by the stimulus of an utter refusal to assist financially except
where absolutely necessary. There had been willingness, you
understand, to provide a gentleman's education, but no willingness to
provide beyond that any of a gentleman's perquisites. That much of his
early success had been due to this heroic upbringing, Adrian was too
honest not to admit, but then--by God, it had been hard! All the colour
of youth! No time to dream--except sorely! Some warping, some
perversion! A gasping, heart-breaking knowledge that you could not
possibly keep up with the people with whom, paradoxically enough,
you were supposed to spend your leisure hours. Here was the making of

a radical. And yet, despite all this, Adrian dined with his uncle once a
month.
The mere fact that this was so, that it could be so, enraged him. It
seemed a renunciation of all he affirmed; an implicit falsehood. He
would have liked very much to have got to his feet, standing firmly on
his two long, well-made legs, and have once and for all delivered
himself of a final philippic. The philippic would have ended something
like this:
"And this, sir, is the last time I sacrifice any of my good hours to you.
Not because you are old, and therefore think you are wise, when you
are not; not because you are blind and besotted and damned--a trunk of
a tree filled with dry rot that presently a clean wind will blow away; not
because your opinions, and the opinions of all like you, have long ago
been proven the lies and idiocies that they are; not even because you
haven't one single real right left to live--I haven't come to tell you these
things, although they are true; for you are past