Jerry Alsop had come to New York straight out of college several years before. Monk knew that he was there, and one day he ran into him. Neither seemed disposed to remember Monk’s apostasy of college days: in fact, Jerry greeted his former protege like a long lost brother and invited him around to his place. Monk went, and later went again, and for a time their relationship was reestablished, on the surface at least, on something of its former footing.
Alsop lived in the same part of town, on a cross street between Broadway and the river, and not far from Columbia University. He had two basement rooms and a dilapidated kitchenette. The place was dark, and he had collected a congeries of broken-down furniture—an old green sofa, a few chairs, a couple of tables, a folding couch or daybed, covered with a dirty cloth, for visitors, another larger bed for himself and a dirty old carpet. He thought it was wonderful, and because he communicated this sense of wonder to all his friends, they thought so, too. What it really represented to him was freedom—the glorious, intoxicating freedom that the city gave to him, to everyone. So seen and so considered, his apartment was not just a couple of dirty, dark, old rooms, filled with a hodgepodge of nondescript furniture, down in the basement of a dismal house. It was a domain, an estate, a private castle, a citadel. Jerry conveyed this magic sense to everyone who came there.
When Monk first saw him there in all the strangeness of New York, the changes in Alsop’s vision and belief appeared astonishing. Only, however, at first sight. The younger man’s sense of shock, the result of the blinding clarity of his first impression after the years of absence, was only momentary. For Alsop had gathered around him now a new coterie, the descendants of the clique at old Pine Rock: he was their mentor and their guiding star, and his two dark basement rooms had become their club. And so Monk saw that Alsop had not really changed at all, that below all the confusion of outer change his soul was still the same.
One of the chief objects of his hatred at this time was Mr. H. L. Mencken. He had become for Alsop the Beast of the Apocalypse. Mencken’s open ridicule of pedagogy, of Mother-idolatry, of the whole civilization which he called the Bible Belt and which referred to that part of life of which Alsop was himself a member, and, most of all, perhaps, the critic’s open and ungodly mockery of “the greatest man since Jesus Christ,” to whom he referred variously as “the late Doctor Wilson,” or “the martyred Woodrow”—all of this struck with an assassin’s dirk at the heart of all that was near and dear to Alsop, and, it seemed to him, at the heart of civilization itself, at religion, at morality, at “all that men hold sacred.” The result was that this smashing but essentially conservative critic, Mencken, became in Alsop’s eyes the figure of the Antichrist. Month after month he would read the latest blast of the Baltimore sage with the passionate devotion of pure hate. It was really alarming just to watch him as he went about his venomous perusal: his fat and usually rather pale face would become livid and convulsed as if he were in imminent peril of an apoplectic stroke, his eyes would narrow into reptilian slits, from time to time he would burst out into infuriated laughter, the whole proceeding being punctuated by such comment as:
“Well, I’ll be God-damned!…Of all the!…Why, he’s just a damned ass…yes suh!…That’s the only name for him!…A plain damned ass. For God’s sake now, listen to this!” Here his voice would mount to a choking scream. “Why, he hasn’t got the brains of a louse!”—the whole winding up inevitably with the final recommendation for vindictive punishment: “You know what they ought to do with a man like that? They ought to take him out and——.”
He mentioned this act of mutilation with a hearty relish. It seemed to be the first act of vengeance and reprisal that popped into his head whenever anyone said or wrote or did something that aroused his hatred and antagonism. And it was as if Mr. H. L. Mencken, whom Alsop had never seen, had been a personal enemy, a malignant threat in his own life, a deadly peril not only to himself but to his friends and to the world he had shaped about him.
And yet, all the time Alsop himself was changing. His adaptive powers were remarkable. Like a certain famous Bishop, “he had a large and easy swallow.” And really, what mattered most to him was not the inner substance but the outer show. He would, with no difficulty whatever, have agreed that black was white, or that two and two make four and three quarters, if the prevailing order of society had swung to the belief.