The usual end was well, however: the redemptive physiognomies of the Mother or the Chosen Girl usually intervened fortuitously at the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour—and all was saved. As for Jerry, his final benediction to this triumph of virtue was simply beautiful to watch and hear:
“I knew you would! Yes, suh!” Here he would shake his head and chuckle tenderly. “You’re too fine a pusson evah to be taken in by anything like that!…And if you had, think how you’d feel now! You wouldn’t be able to hold yoah haid up and look me in the eye! You know you wouldn’t! And every time you thought of your Mothah”—(it is impossible to convey within the comparatively simple vocabulary of the English language just quite what Jerry managed to put into that one word “Mothah” however, it can be said without exaggeration that it represented the final and masterly conquest of the vocal chords, beside which such efforts, say, as those of the late Senor Caruso striking the high C seem fairly paltry by comparison)—“Every time you thought of your Mothah,—you’d have felt lowah than a snake’s belly. Yes, suh! You know you would! And if you’d gone ahead and married that girl—” he pronounced it “gul,” with a vocal unction only slightly inferior to this pronunciation of the sainted name of “Mothah”—“you’d have felt like a louse every time you’d look at her! Yes, suh, you’d have been livin’ a lie that would have wrecked yoah whole life!…Besides that, boy…you look a-heah, you scannel! You don’t know how lucky you are! You keep away hereafter from that stuff! Yes, suh! I know what I’m talkin’ about!” Here he shook his big jowled head again, and laughed with a kind of foreboding ominousness. “You might have gone and got yourself all ruined for life!”
He was preparing himself eventually, he thought, although he later gave up the idea, for the practice of medicine, in which he had already done considerable isolated reading of his own; the chief effects of which, apparently, were now to warn guileless freshmen of the awful consequences of carnal indulgence. He fairly reveled in this form of grisly description. His descriptions of disease, death, and madness which resulted from stray encounters with unknown females in the corridors of hotels were so graphic and compelling that he had the hair standing up on their young pates “like quills upon the fretful porpen-tine.”
In Gerald’s picture of things as they were, there was no escape, no pardon for the erring. The wages of sin were not only always and inevitably death, but the wages of seduction were inevitably fatherhood, man’s guilty doom, and the utter ruination of another “pure, sweet girl.”
Thus, early, Gerald had formed a picture of the world that was pontifical in its absolute and unquestioning acceptance of all forms of established and respectable authority—not only as they affected man’s civic and political conduct, but as they affected his inner and personal life as well. In this scheme of things—call it rather, this mythology—the saintly figure of The Mother was supreme. A female, by virtue of the fact that in the process of lawful matrimony she had created progeny, became, in some divinely mysterious way, not only the author of all wisdom, but the spotless custodian of all morality as well. To have suggested that a woman was not necessarily an incorruptible divinity because she had given birth to a child was a dangerous heresy; to have argued this point doggedly to more far-reaching conclusions would have branded one in Jerry’s sight as a dissolute or irresponsible member of society. From that time on, Jerry’s hand and his heart would be set stubbornly against the infidel.