TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

In the plain text version text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).

A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used has been kept.

Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.

The modified book cover by the transcriber for this eBook is granted to the public domain.

MESSIAH

THE NOVELS OF GORE VIDAL

WILLIWAW 1946 · IN A YELLOW WOOD 1947 · THE CITY AND THE
PILLAR 1948 · THE SEASON OF COMFORT 1949 · A SEARCH FOR THE
KING 1950 · DARK GREEN, BRIGHT RED 1950 · THE JUDGMENT OF
PARIS 1952 · MESSIAH 1954.

MESSIAH

BY

GORE VIDAL

E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC.
NEW YORK 1954

Copyright, 1954, by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.
All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

FIRST EDITION

No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form without permission in writing
from the publisher, except by a reviewer
who wishes to quote brief passages in connection
with a review written for inclusion in
magazine or newspaper or radio broadcast.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 54-5053

FOR

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

I sometimes think the day will come when all the modern nations will adore a sort of American god, a god who will have been a man that lived on earth and about whom much will have been written in the popular press; and images of this god will be set up in the churches, not as the imagination of each painter may fancy him, not floating on a Veronica kerchief, but established, fixed once and for all by photography. Yes, I foresee a photographed god, wearing spectacles.

On that day civilization will have reached its peak and there will be steam-propelled gondolas in Venice.

November, 1861: The Goncourt Journals

MESSIAH

1

I envy those chroniclers who assert with reckless but sincere abandon: “I was there. I saw it happen. It happened thus.” Now I too, in every sense, was there, yet I cannot trust myself to identify with any accuracy the various events of my own life, no matter how vividly they may seem to survive in recollection ... if only because we are all, I think, betrayed by those eyes of memory which are as mutable and particular as the ones with which we regard the material world, the vision altering, as it so often does, from near in youth to far in age. And that I am by a devious and unexpected route arrived at a great old age is to me a source of some complacency, even on those bleak occasions when I find myself attending inadvertently the body’s dissolution, a process as imperceptible yet sure as one of those faint, persistent winds which shift the dunes of sand in that desert of dry Libya which burns, white and desolate, beyond the mountains I see from the window of my room, a window facing, aptly enough, the west where all the kings lie buried in their pride.

I am also conscious that I lack the passion for the business of familiar life which is the central preoccupation of our race while, worse still, I have never acquired the habit of judging the usual deeds of men ... two inconvenient characteristics which render me uncertain whenever I attempt to recall the past, confounding me sadly with the knowledge that my recollections are, after all, tentative and private and only true in part.

Then, finally, I have never found it easy to tell the truth, a temperamental infirmity due not so much to any wish or compulsion to distort reality that I might be reckoned virtuous but, rather, to a conception of the inconsequence of human activity which is ever in conflict with a profound love of those essential powers which result in human action, a paradox certainly, a dual vision which restrains me from easy judgments.

I am tempted to affirm that historic truth is quite impossible, although I am willing to accept the philosophic notion that it may exist abstractly, perfect and remote in the imagination. A windy attic filled with lovely objects has always been my personal image of those absolutes Aristotle conceived with such mellifluous optimism ... and I have always liked the conceits of philosophy, the more extravagant the better. I am especially devoted to Parmenides who was so strenuously obsessed with the idea of totality that he was capable, finally, of declaring that nothing ever changed, that what has been must still exist if it is yet remembered and named, a metaphysical conception which will, I suspect, be of some use to me as I journey in memory back to that original crisis from which I have for so long traveled and to which, despite the peril, I must return.

I do not say, then, that what I remember is all true but I can declare that what I shall recall is a relative truth as opposed to that monstrous testament the one-half world believes, entrenching deep thereby a mission at whose birth I officiated and one whose polished legend has since become the substantial illusion of a desperate race. That both mission and illusion were false, I alone can say with certainty, with sorrow, such being the unsuspected and terrible resolution of brave days. Only the crisis, which I shall record, was real.

I have said I am not given to making judgments. That is not precise. It is true that in most “wicked” acts I have been able, with a little effort, to perceive the possibilities for good either in actual intention or (and to me more important) in uncalculated result; yet, ultimately, problems in ethics have never much concerned me: possibly because they have been the vital interest of so many others who, through custom, rule society, more agreeably than not. On that useful moral level I have been seldom, if ever, seriously engaged but once on another, more arduous plane I was forced to make a choice, to judge, to act: and act I did in such a way that I am still startled by the implications of my choice, of my life’s one judgment.

I chose the light in preference to the dreamless dark, destroying my own place in the world, and then, more painful still, I chose the light in preference to that twilight region of indeterminate visions and ambiguities which most suited my nature, a realm where decision was impossible and where the potentialities of choice were endless and exquisite to contemplate. To desert these beloved ghosts and incalculable powers was the greater pain, but I have lived on, observing with ever-increasing intensity that blazing disk of fire which is the symbol as well as material source of the reality I have accepted entirely, despite the sure dominion in eternity of the dark other.

But now, as my private day begins to fade, as the wind in the desert gathers in intensity, smoothing out the patterns in the sand, I shall attempt to evoke the true image of one who assumed with plausibility in an age of science the long-discarded robes of prophecy, prevailing at last through ritual death and becoming, to those who see the universe in man, that solemn idea which is yet called by its resonant and antique name, god.

2

Stars fell to earth in a blaze of light and, where they fell, monsters were born, hideous and blind.

The first dozen years after the second of the modern wars were indeed “a time of divination,” as one religious writer unctuously described them. Not a day passed but that some omen or portent was remarked by an anxious race, suspecting war. At first, the newspapers delightedly reported these marvels, getting the details all wrong but communicating that sense of awfulness which was to increase as the years of peace uneasily lengthened until a frightened people demanded government action, the ultimate recourse in those innocent times.

Yet these omens, obsessive and ubiquitous as they were, would not yield their secret order to any known system. For instance, much of the luminous crockery which was seen in the sky was never entirely explained. And explanation, in the end, was all that the people required. It made no difference how extraordinary the explanation was, if only they could know what was happening: that the shining globes which raced in formation over Sioux Falls, South Dakota, were mere residents of the Andromeda Galaxy, at home in space, omnipotent and eternal in design, on a cultural visit to our planet ... if only this much could definitely be stated, the readers of newspapers would have felt secure, able in a few weeks’ time to turn their attention to other problems, the visitors from farther space forgotten. It made little difference whether these mysterious blobs of light were hallucinations, inter-galactic visitors or military weapons, the important thing was to explain them.

To behold the inexplicable was perhaps the most unpleasant experience a human being of that age could know, and during that gaudy decade many wild phenomena were sighted and recorded.

In daylight, glittering objects of bright silver maneuvered at unearthly speed over Washington, D. C., observed by hundreds, some few reliable. The government, with an air of spurious calm, mentioned weather balloons, atmospheric reflections, tricks-of-eye, hinting, to, as broadly as it dared, that a sizable minority of its citizens were probably subject to delusions and mass hysteria. This cynical view was prevalent inside the administration though it could not of course propound such a theory publicly since its own tenure was based, more or less solidly, on the franchise of those same hysterics and irresponsibles.

Shortly after the mid-point of the century, the wonders increased, becoming daily more bizarre. The recent advance in atomic research and in jet-propulsion had made the Western world disagreeably aware of other planets and galaxies and the thought that we would soon be making expeditions into space was disquieting, if splendid, giving rise to the not illogical thought that life might be developing on other worlds somewhat more brilliantly than here at home and, further, that it was quite conceivable that we ourselves might receive visitors long before our own adventuring had begun in the starry blackness which contains our life, like a speck of phosphorus in a quiet sea. And since our people were (and no doubt still are) barbarous and drenched in superstition, like the dripping “Saved” at an old-time Texas baptism, it was generally felt that these odd creatures whose shining cars flashed through our poor heavens at such speed must, of necessity, be hostile and cruel and bent on world dominion, just like ourselves or at least our geographic neighbors.

The evidence was horrific and plentiful:

In Berlin a flying object of unfamiliar design was seen to land by an old farmer who was so close to it that he could make out several little men twinkling behind an arc of windows. He fled, however, before they could eat him. Shortly after his breathless announcement to the newspapers, he was absorbed by an Asiatic government whose destiny it was at that time to regularize the part of humanity fortunate enough to live within its curiously elastic boundaries, both temporal and spiritual.

In West Virginia, a creature ten feet tall, green with a red face and exuding a ghastly odor, was seen to stagger out of a luminous globe, temporarily grounded. He was observed by a woman and four boys, all of unquestionable probity; they fled before he could eat them. Later, in the company of sheriff and well-armed posse, they returned to the scene of horror only to find both monster and conveyance gone: but even the skeptical sheriff and his men could detect, quite plainly, an unfamiliar odor, sharp and sickening among the clean pines.

This particular story was unique because it was the first to describe a visitor as being larger instead of smaller than a man, a significant proof of the growing anxiety: we could handle even the cleverest little creature but something huge, and green, with an awful odor ... it was too much.

I myself, late one night in July of the mid-century, saw quite plainly from the eastern bank of the Hudson River where I lived, two red globes flickering in a cloudless sky. As I watched, one moved to a higher point at a forty-five-degree angle above the original plane which had contained them both. For several nights I watched these eccentric twins but then, carried away by enthusiasm, I began to confuse Mars and Saturn with my magic lights until at last I thought it wise to remain indoors, except for those brief days at summer’s end when I watched, as I always used to do, the lovely sudden silver arcs meteors plunging make.

In later years, I learned that, concurrently with the celestial marvels, farm communities were reporting an unusual number of calves born two-headed, chickens hatched three-legged, and lambs born with human faces; but since the somewhat vague laws of mutation were more or less well understood by the farmers these curiosities did not alarm them: an earlier generation, however, would have known, instinctively, that so many irregularities forecast an ill future, full of spite.

Eventually, all was satisfactorily explained or, quite as good, forgotten. Yet the real significance of these portents was not so much in the fact of their mysterious reality as in the profound effect they had upon a people who, despite their emphatic materialism, were as easily shattered by the unexpected as their ancestors who had, on other occasions, beheld eagles circling Capitoline Hill, observed the sky grow leaden on Golgotha, shivered in loud storms when the rain was red as blood and the wind full of toads, while in our own century, attended by a statesman-Pope, the sun did a dance over Portugal.

Considering the unmistakable nature of these signs, it is curious how few suspected the truth: that a new mission had been conceived out of the race’s need, the hour of its birth already determined by a conjunction of terrible new stars.

It is true of course that the established churches duly noted these spectacular happenings and, rather slyly, used them to enhance that abstract power from which their own mystical but vigorous authority was descended. The more secular, if no less mystical, dogmas ... descended variously from an ill-tempered social philosopher of the nineteenth century and an energetic, unreasonably confident mental therapist, also a product of that century’s decline ... maintained, in the one case, that fireworks had been set off by vindictive employers to bedazzle the poor workers for undefined but patently wicked ends, and, in the other case, that the fiery objects represented a kind of atavistic recessional to the childish world of marvels; a theory which was developed even further in a widely quoted paper by an ingenious disciple of the dead therapist. According to this worthy, the universe was the womb in symbol and the blazing lights which many people thought they saw were only a form of hallucination, hearking back to some prenatal memory of ovaries bursting with a hostile potential life which would, in time, become sibling rivals. The writer demanded that the government place all who had seen flying objects under three years’ close observation to determine to what extent sibling rivalry, or the absence of it (the proposition worked equally well either way) had affected them in life. Although this bold synthesis was universally admired and subsequently read into the Congressional Record by a lady Representative who had herself undergone nine years’ analysis with striking results, the government refused to act.

3

But although nearly every human institution took cognizance of these signs and auguries, none guessed the truth, and those few individuals who had begun to suspect what might be happening preferred not to speak out; if only because, despite much private analysis and self-questioning, it was not a time in which to circulate ideas which might prove disagreeable to any minority, no matter how lunatic. The body politic was more than usually upset by signs of non-conformity. The atmosphere was not unlike that of Britain during the mad hour of Titus Oates.

Precisely why my countrymen behaved so frantically is a problem for those historians used to the grand, eternal view of human events. I have often thought, though, that much of our national irritability was closely related to the unexpected and reluctant custody of the world the second war had pressed upon the confused grandchildren of a proud, agrarian, isolated people, both indifferent and strange to the ways of other cultures.

More to the point, however, was the attitude of our intellectuals who constituted at this time a small, militantly undistinguished minority, directly descended in spirit if not in fact from that rhetorical eighteenth-century Swiss whose romantic and mystical love for humanity was magically achieved through a somewhat obsessive preoccupation with himself. His passion for self-analysis flourished in our mid-century, at least among the articulate few who were capable of analysis and who, in time, like their great ancestor, chose the ear of the world for their confessional.

Men of letters lugubriously described their own deviations (usually apolitical or sexual, seldom aesthetic), while painters worked devotedly at depicting unique inner worlds which were not accessible to others except in a state of purest empathy hardly to be achieved without a little fakery in a selfish world. It was, finally, the accepted criterion that art’s single function was the fullest expression of a private vision ... which was true enough though the visions of men lacking genius are not without a certain gloom. Genius, in this time, was quite as rare as in any other and, to its credit, it was not a self-admiring age ... critics found merit only in criticism, a singular approach which was to amuse the serious for several decades.

Led by artists, the intellectuals voiced their guilt at innumerable cocktail parties where it was accepted as an article of faith that each had a burden of guilt which could, once recognized, be exorcised; the means of recognition were expensive but rewarding: a trained and sympathetic listener would give the malaise a name and reveal its genesis; then, through confession (and occasionally “reliving”) the guilt would vanish along with asthma, impotence and eczema. The process, of course, was not easy. To facilitate therapy, it became the custom among the cleverer people to set aside all the traditional artifices of society so that both friends and strangers could confess to one another their worst deeds, their most squalid fantasies in a series of competitive monologues conducted with arduous sincerity and surprisingly successful on every level but that of communication.

I am sure that this sort of catharsis was not entirely valueless: many of the self-obsessed undoubtedly experienced relief when dispensing secrets ... it was certainly an instructive shock for them to find that even their most repellent aberrations were accepted quite perfunctorily by strangers too intent on their own problems to be outraged, or even very interested. This discovery was not always cheering. There is a certain dignity and excitement in possessing a dangerous secret life. To lose it in maturity is hard ... and once promiscuously shared, it does become ordinary, no more troublesome than obvious dentures.

Many cherished private hells were forever lost in those garrulous years and the vacuum each left was invariably filled with a boredom which, in its turn, could only be dispelled by faith. As a result, the pursuit of the absolute, in one guise or another, became the main preoccupation of these romanticists who professed with some pride a mistrust of the reason, derived quite legitimately from their own stunning incapacity to assimilate the social changes created by machinery, their particular Lucifer. They rejected the idea of the reflective mind, arguing that since both logic and science had failed to establish the first cause of the universe or (more important) humanity’s significance, only the emotions could reveal to us the nature of reality, the key to meaning. That it was actually no real concern of this race why or when or how the universe came into being was an attitude never, so far as I can recall, expressed by the serious-minded of the day. Their searching, however, was not simply the result of curiosity; it was more than that: it was an emotional, senseless plunging into the void, into the unknowable and the irrelevant. It became, finally, the burden of life, the blight among the flowers: the mystery which must be revealed, even at the expense of life. It was a terrible crisis, made doubly hard since the eschewal of logic left only one path clear to the heart of the dilemma: the way of the mystic, and even to the least sensible it was sadly apparent that, lacking a superior and dedicated organization, one man’s revelation is not apt to be of much use to another.

Quantities of venerable attitudes were abandoned and much of the preceding century’s “eternal truths and verities” which had cast, rock-like, so formidable and dense a shadow, were found, upon examination, to be so much sand, suitable for the construction of fantastic edifices but not durable, nor safe from the sea’s tide.

But the issue was joined: dubious art was fashioned, authorities were invoked, dreams given countenance and systems constructed on the evidence of private illumination.

For a time, political and social action seemed to offer a way out, or in. Foreign civil wars, foreign social experiments were served with a ferocity difficult to comprehend; but later, when the wars and experiments went wrong, revealing, after such high hopes, the perennial human inability to order society, a disillusion resulted, bitterly resolved in numerous cases by the assumption of some mystical dogma, preferably one so quaintly rich with history, so sweeping and unreasonable in its claims as to be thoroughly acceptable to the saddened romanticist who wanted, above all else, to feel, to know without reasoning.

So in these portentous times, only the scientists were content as they constructed ever more fabulous machines with which to split the invisible kernels of life while the anti-scientifics leaped nervously from one absolute to another ... now rushing to the old for grace, now to the new for salvation, no two of them really agreeing on anything except the need for agreement, for the last knowledge ... and that, finally, was the prevailing note of the age; since reason had been declared insufficient, only a mystic could provide the answer, only he could mark the boundaries of life with a final authority, inscrutably revealed. It was so perfectly clear. All that was lacking was the man.

One

1

The garden was at its best that first week in the month of June. The peonies were more opulent than usual and I walked slowly through the green light on the terrace above the white river, enjoying the heavy odor of peonies and of new roses rambling in hedges.

The Hudson was calm, no ripple revealed that slow tide which even here, miles to the north of the sea, rises brackishly at the moon’s disposition. Across the river the Catskills, water-blue, emerged sharply from the summer’s green as though the earth in one vivid thrust had attempted sky, fusing the two elements into yet another, richer blue ... but the sky was only framed, not really touched, and the blue of hills was darker than the pale sky with its protean clouds all shaped by wind, like the stuff of auguries and human dreaming.

The sky that day was like an idiot’s mind, wild with odd clouds, but lovely too, guileless, natural, allusive.

I did not want to go in to lunch, although there was no choice in the matter. I had arrived at one o’clock; I was expected at one-thirty. Meanwhile, avoiding the house until the last possible moment, I had taken a neighbor’s privilege of strolling alone about the garden; the house behind me was gray and austere, granitic, more English than Hudson Valley. The grounds swept softly down toward the river nearly a mile away. A vista had been cleared from the central terrace, a little like the one at Versailles but more rustic, less royal. Dark green trees covered the hills to left and right of the sweep of lawn and meadow. No other house could be seen. Even the railroad between the terrace and the water was invisible, hidden by a bluff ... only its sound and an occasional blur of smoke upon the blue marked that machine’s essential passage.

I breathed the air of early summer gladly, voluptuously. I lived my life in seasonal concert with this river and, after grim March and confusing sharp April, the knowledge that at last the leaves were foliaged and the days warm was quite enough to create in me a mood of euphoria, of marvelous serenity. I contemplated love affairs. I prepared to meet strangers. The summer and I would celebrate our triumph soon; but, until the proper moment, I was a spectator: the summer love as yet unknown to me, the last dark blooming of peonies amid the wreckage of white lilacs still some weeks away, held in the future with my love. I could only anticipate; I savored my disengagement in this garden.

But then it was time to go in and I turned my back resolutely on the river and ascended the wide stone steps to the brick terrace which fronted the house on the river side, pausing only to break the stem of a white and pink peony, regretting immediately what I had done: brutally, I had wished to possess the summer, to fix the instant, to bear with me into the house a fragment of the day. It was wrong; and I stood for a moment at the French door holding the great peony in my hand, its odor like a dozen roses, like all the summers I had ever known. But it was impractical. I could not stuff it into my buttonhole for it was as large as a baby’s head while I was fairly certain that my hostess would be less than pleased to receive at my hands one of her best peonies, cut too short even to place in water. Obscurely displeased with myself and the day, I plunged the flower deep into a hedge of boxwood until not even a glimmer of white showed through the dense dark green to betray me: then, like a murderer, the assaulted day part-spoiling, I went inside.

2

“You have been malingering in the garden,” she said, offering me her face like a painted plate to kiss. “I saw you from the window.”

“Saw me ravage the flowers?”

“They all do,” she said obscurely, and led me after her into the drawing room, an oblong full of light from French windows opening upon the terrace. I was surprised to see that she was alone.

“She’ll be along presently. She’s upstairs changing.”

“Who?”

“Iris Mortimer ... didn’t I tell you? It’s the whole reason.”

Clarissa nodded slyly from the chair opposite me. A warm wind crossed the room and the white curtains billowed like spinnakers in a regatta. I breathed the warm odor of flowers, of burned ash remnants from the fireplace: the room shone with silver and porcelain. Clarissa was rich despite the wars and crises that had marked our days, leaving the usual scars upon us, like trees whose cross-sections bear a familial resemblance of concentric rings, recalling in detail the weather of past years ... at least those few rings we shared in common, or Clarissa, by her own admission, was twenty-two hundred years old with an uncommonly good memory. None of us had ever questioned her too closely about her past. There is no reason to suspect, however, that she was insincere. Since she felt she had lived that great length of time and since her recollections were remarkably interesting and plausible she was much in demand as a conversationalist and adviser, especially useful in those plots which require great shrewdness and daring. It was perfectly apparent that she was involved in some such plot at the moment.

I looked at her thoughtfully before I casually rose to take the bait of mystery she had trailed so perfunctorily before me. She knew her man. She knew I would not be difficult in the early stages of any adventure.

“Whole reason?” I repeated.

“I can say no more!” said Clarissa with a melodramatic emphasis which my deliberately casual tone did not entirely justify. “You’ll love Iris, though.”

I wondered whether loving Iris, or pretending to love Iris, was to be the summer’s game. But before I could inquire further, Clarissa, secure in her mystery, asked me idly about my work and, as idly, I answered her, the exchange perfunctory yet easy, for we were used to one another.

“I am tracking him down,” I said. “There is so little to go on, but what there is is quite fascinating, especially Ammianus.”

“Fairly reliable, as military men go,” said Clarissa, suddenly emerging from her polite indifference: any reference to the past she had known always interested her, only the present seemed to bore her, at least that ordinary unusable present which did not contain promising material for one of her elaborate human games.

“Did you know him?” I never accepted, literally, Clarissa’s unique age: two thousand years is an unlikely span of life even for a woman of her sturdy unimaginativeness; yet there was no ignoring the fact that she seemed to have lived that long, and that her references to obscure episodes, where ascertainable, were nearly always right and, more convincing still, where they differed from history’s records, differed on the side of plausibility ... the work of a memory or a mind completely unsuperstitious and unenthusiastic: (she was literal; she was, excepting always her central fantasy, matter-of-fact. To her the death or Caesar was the logical outcome of a system of taxation which has not been preserved for us except in quaintly obscure references; while the virtue of the Roman republic and the ambitions of celebrated politicians, she set aside as being of only minor importance: currency and taxation were her forte and she managed to reduce all the martial splendor of ancient days to an economic level).

She had one other obsession, however, and my reference to Ammianus reminded her of it.

“The Christians!” she exclaimed significantly; then she paused; I waited. Her conversation at times resembled chapter-headings chosen haphazardly from an assortment of Victorial novels. “They hated him.”

“Ammianus?”

“No, your man Julian. It is the Emperor Julian you are writing about.”

“Reading about.”

“Ah, you will write about him,” she said with an abstracted pythoness stare which suggested that I was indefatigable in my eccentric purpose which, for some years, had been the study of history in a minor key.

“Of course they hated him. As well they should have ... that’s the whole point to my work.”

“Unreliable, the lot of them. There is no decent history from the time they came to Rome up until that fat little Englishman ... you know, the one who lived in Switzerland ... with rather staring eyes.”

“Gibbon.”

“Yes, that one. Of course he got all the facts wrong, poor man, but at least he tried. The facts of course were all gone by then. They saw to that ... burning things, rewriting things ... not that I really ever read them ... you know how I am about reading: I prefer a mystery novel any day. But at least Gibbon got the tone right.”

“Yet....”

“Of course Julian was something of a prig, you know. He posed continually and he wasn’t ... what do they call him now? an apostate. He never renounced Christianity.”

“He what ...”

Clarissa in her queer way took pleasure in rearranging all accepted information. I shall never know whether she did it deliberately to mystify or whether her versions were, in fact, the forgotten reality.

“He was a perfectly good Christian au fond despite his peculiar diet. He was a vegetarian for some years but wouldn’t eat beans, as I recall, because he thought they contained the souls of the dead, an old orphic notion.”

“Which is hardly Christian.”

“Isn’t that part of it? No? Well in any case the first proclamation of Paris was intended ...” but I was never to hear Julian’s intent for Iris was in the doorway, slender, dressed in white, her hair dark and drawn back in a classical line from her calm face: she was handsome and not at all what I had expected, but then Clarissa had, as usual, not given me much lead. Iris Mortimer was my own age, I guessed, about thirty, and although hardly a beauty she moved with such ease, spoke with such softness, created such an air of serenity that one gave her perhaps more credit for the possession of beauty than an American devoted to regular features ought, in all accuracy, to have done: the impression was one of lightness, of this month of June in fact ... I linger over her description a little worriedly, conscious that I am not really getting her right (at least as she appeared to me that afternoon) for the simple reason that our lives were to become so desperately involved in the next few years and my memories of her are now encrusted with so much emotion that any attempt to evoke her as she actually was when I first saw her in that drawing room some fifty years ago is not unlike the work of a restorer of paintings removing layers of glaze and grime in an attempt to reveal an original pattern in all its freshness somewhere beneath ... except that a restorer of course is a workman who has presumably no prejudice and, too, he did not create the original image only to attend its subsequent distortion, as the passionate do in life; for the Iris of that day was, I suppose, no less and no more than what she was to become; it was merely that I could not suspect the bizarre course our future was to take. I had no premonition of our mythic roles, though the temptation is almost overpowering to assert, darkly, that even on the occasion of our first meeting I knew. The truth is that we met; we became friends; we lunched amiably and the future cast not one shadow across the mahogany table around which we sat, listening to Clarissa and eating fresh shad caught in the river that morning.

“Eugene here is interested in Julian,” said our hostess, lifting a spring asparagus to her mouth with her fingers.

“Julian who?”

“The Emperor of Rome. I forget his family name but he was a nephew, I think, of Constantius, who was dreary too though not such a bore as Julian. Iris, try the asparagus. We get them from the garden.”

Iris tried an asparagus and Clarissa recalled that the Emperor Augustus’s favorite saying was: “Quick as boiled asparagus.” It developed that he had been something of a bore, too. “Hopelessly involved in office work. Of course it’s all terribly important, no doubt of that ... after all the entire Empire was based on a first-rate filing system; yet, all in all, it’s hardly glamorous.”

“Whom did you prefer?” asked Iris, smiling at me: she too was aware of our hostess’s obsession; whether or not she believed is a different matter. I assumed not; yet the assumption of truth is perhaps, for human purposes, the same as truth itself, at least to the obsessed.

“None of the obvious ones,” said Clarissa, squinting near-sightedly at the window through which a pair of yellow-spangled birds were mating on the wing like eccentric comets against the green of box. “But of course, I didn’t know everyone, darling. Only a few. Not all of them were accessible. Some never dined out. Some that did go out were impossible and then of course I traveled a good deal. I loved Alexandria and wintered there for over two hundred years, missing a great deal of the unpleasantness at Rome, the unstability of those tiresome generals ... although Vitellius was great fun, at least as a young man. I never saw him when he was Emperor that time, for five minutes wasn’t it? Died of greed. Such an appetite! On one occasion as a young man he ate an entire side of beef at my place in Baiae. Ah, Baiae, I do miss it. Much nicer than Bath or Biarritz and certainly more interesting than Newport was. I had several houses there over the years. Once when Senator Tullius Cicero was traveling with that poisonous daughter of his, they stopped....”

We listened attentively as one always did to Clarissa ... does? I wonder if she is still alive: if she is, then perhaps the miracle has indeed taken place and one human being has finally avoided the usual fate. It is an amiable miracle to contemplate.

Lunch ended without any signs of that revelation which Clarissa had led me to expect. Nothing was said which seemed to possess even a secret significance. Wondering idly whether or not Clarissa might, after all, be entirely mad, I followed the two women back into the drawing room where we had our coffee in a warm mood of satiety made only faintly disagreeable for me by that mild nausea which I always used to experience when I drank too much wine at lunch: now of course I never see wine, only the Arabs’ mint tea and their sandy bitter coffee which I have come to like.

A warm breeze fluttered the curtains: the noise of insects responding to the sun’s increasing heat droned all upon the same note, dry and insistent, a bass to the coloratura of birds, while the scent of flowers filled the airy room and I detected lilies as well as peonies, their odor almost too sweet, quite drowning the more delicate rose, the pale Hudson lilac.

Clarissa reminisced idly. She possessed a passion for minor detail which was often a good deal more interesting than her usual talks on currency devaluation.

Neither Iris nor I spoke much; it was as if we were both awaiting some word from Clarissa which would throw into immediate relief this luncheon, this day, this meeting of strangers. But Clarissa only gossiped on; at last, when I was beginning to go over in my mind the various formulae which make departure easy, our hostess, as though aware that she had drawn out too long the overture, said abruptly, “Eugene, show Iris the garden. She has never seen it before.” And then, heartily firing fragments of sentences at us as though in explanation of this move of hers, she left the room, indicating that the rest was up to us.

Puzzled, we both went onto the terrace and into the yellow afternoon. We walked slowly down the steps towards the rose arbors, a long series of trellis arches forming a tunnel of green, bright with new flowers and ending in a cement fountain of ugly tile with a bench beside it, shaded by elms.

We got to facts. By the time we had burrowed through the roses to the bench, we had exchanged those basic bits of information which usually make the rest fall (often incorrectly) into some pattern, a foundation for those various architectures people together are pleased to build to celebrate friendship or enmity or love or, on very special occasions, in the case of a grand affair, one of those fine palaces with rooms for all three, and much else besides.

Iris was from the Middle West, from a rich suburb of Detroit. This interested me in many ways, for there still existed in those days a real disaffection between East and Midwest and Far West which is hard to conceive nowadays in that gray homogeneity which currently passes for a civilized nation. I was an Easterner, a New Yorker from the valley with Southern roots, and I felt instinctively that the outlanders were perhaps not entirely civilized. Needless to say, at the time, I would indignantly have denied this prejudice had someone attributed it to me, for those were the days of tolerance in which all prejudice had been banished, from conversation at least ... though of course to banish prejudice is a contradiction in terms since, by definition, prejudice means prejudgment, and though time and experience usually explode for us all the prejudgments of our first years, they exist, nevertheless, as part of our subconscious, a sabotaging, irrational force, causing us to commit strange crimes indeed, made so much worse because they are often secret even to ourselves. I was, then, prejudiced against the Midwesterner ... against the Californians too. I felt that the former especially was curiously hostile to freedom, to the interplay of that rational Western culture which I had so lovingly embraced in my boyhood and grown up with, always conscious of my citizenship in the world, of my role as a humble but appreciative voice in the long conversation. I resented the automobile manufacturers who thought only of manufacturing objects, who distrusted ideas, who feared the fine with the primitive intensity of implacable ignorance. Could this cool girl be from Detroit? From that same rich suburb which had provided me with a number of handsome vital classmates at school? Boys who had combined physical vigor with a resistance to all ideas but those of their suburb which could only be described as heroic considering the power of New England schools to crack even the toughest prejudices, at least on the rational level. That these boys did not possess a rational level had often occurred to me, though I did, grudgingly, admire, even in my scorn, their grace and strength as well as their confidence in that assembly line which had provided their parents with large suburban homes and themselves with a classical New England education which, unlike the rest of us, they’d managed to resist ... the whole main current of Western civilization eddying helplessly about these youths who stood, pleasantly firm, like so many rocks in a desperate channel.

Iris Mortimer was one of them. Having learned this there was nothing to do but find sufficient names between us to establish the beginnings of the rapport of class which, even in that late year of the mid-century, still existed: the dowdy aristocracy to which we belonged by virtue of financial security, at least in childhood, of education, of self-esteem and of houses where servants had been in some quantity before the second of the wars; all this we shared and of course those names in common of schoolmates, some from her region, others from mine, names which established us as being of an age. We avoided for some time any comment upon the names, withholding our true selves during the period of identification. I discovered too that she, like me, had remained unmarried, an exceptional state of affairs, for all the names we had mentioned represented two people now instead of one. Ours had been a reactionary generation which had attempted to combat the time of wars and disasters by a scrupulous observance of its grandparents’ customs, a direct reaction to the linking generation whose lives had been so entertainingly ornamented with self-conscious, untidy alliances, well-fortified by suspect gin. The result was no doubt classic but, at the same time; it was a little shocking: their children were decorous, subdued; they married early, conceived glumly, surrendered to the will of their own children in the interests of enlightened psychology; their lives enriched by the best gin in the better suburbs, safe among their own kind. Yet, miraculously, I had escaped and so apparently had Iris. Both, simultaneously, were aware of this: that sort of swift, unstated communication which briefly makes human relationships seem more potential, more meaningful than actually they are: it is the promise perhaps of a perfect harmony never to be achieved in life’s estate.

“You live here alone?” She indicated the wrong direction though taking in, correctly, the river on whose east bank I did live, a few miles to the north of Clarissa.

I nodded. “Entirely alone ... in an old house.”

She sighed. “No family?”

“None here. Not much anywhere else. A few in New Orleans, my family’s original base.” I waited for her to ask if I never got lonely living in a house on the river, remote from others; but she saw nothing extraordinary in this.

“It must be fine,” she said slowly. She broke a leaf off a flowering bush whose branch, heavy with blooming, quivered above our heads as we sat on the garden bench and watched the dim flash of goldfish in the muddy waters of the pond.

“I like it,” I said, a little disappointed that there was now no opportunity for me to construct one of my familiar defenses of a life alone: I had, in the five years since my days of travel had temporarily ended, many occasions on which to defend and glorify the solitary life I had chosen for myself beside this river. I had an ever-changing repertoire of feints and thrusts: for instance, with the hearty, I invariably questioned, gently of course, the virtue of a life in the city, confined to a small apartment with uninhibited babies and breathing daily large quantities of soot; or then I sometimes enjoyed assuming the prince of darkness pose, alone with his crimes in an ancient house, a figure which could, if necessary, be quickly altered to the more engaging one of remote observer of the ways of men, a stoic among his books, sustained by the recorded fragments of forgotten bloody days, evoking solemnly the pure essences of nobler times a chaste intelligence beyond the combat, a priest celebrating the cool memory of his race. My theater was extensive and I almost regretted that with Iris there was no need for even a brief curtain raiser, much less one of my exuberant galas.

Not accustomed to the neutral response, I stammered something about the pleasures of gardens; Iris’s calm indifference saved me from what might have been a truly mawkish outburst calculated to interest her at any cost (mawkish because, I am confident, that none of our deepest wishes or deeds is, finally, when honestly declared, very wonderful or mysterious: simplicity not complexity is at the center of our being; fortunately the trembling “I” is seldom revealed, even to paid listeners, for, conscious of the appalling directness of our needs, we wisely disguise their nature with a legerdemain of peculiar cunning). Much of Iris’s attraction for me ... and at the beginning that attraction did exist ... was that one did not need to discuss so many things: of course the better charades were not called into being which, creatively speaking, was a pity; but then it was a relief not to pretend and, better still, a relief not to begin the business of plumbing shallows under the illusion that a treasure chest of truth might be found on the mind’s sea floor ... a grim ritual which was popular in those years, especially in the suburbs and housing projects where the mental therapists were ubiquitous and busy.

With Iris, one did not suspend, even at a cocktail party, the usual artifices of society. All was understood, or seemed to be, which is exactly the same thing. We talked about ourselves as though of absent strangers. Then: “Have you known Clarissa long?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I met her only last winter.”

“Then this is your first visit here? to the valley?”

“The first,” she smiled, “but it’s a little like home, you know. I don’t mean Detroit, but a memory of home, got from books.”

I thought so too. Then she added that she did not read any longer and I was a little relieved; somehow with Iris one wanted not to talk about books or the past. So much of her charm was that she was entirely in the present. It was her gift, perhaps her finest quality, to invest the moment with a significance which in recollection did not exist except as a blurred impression of excitement. She created this merely by existing. I was never to learn the trick, for her conversation was not, in itself, interesting and her actions were usually calculable in advance, making all the more unusual her peculiar effect. She asked me politely about my work, giving me then the useful knowledge that, though she was interested in what I was doing, she was not much interested in the life of the Emperor Julian.

I made it short. “I want to do a biography of him. I’ve always liked history and so, when I settled down in the house, I chose Julian as my work.”

“A life’s work?”

“Hardly. But another few years. It’s the reading which I most enjoy, and that’s treacherous. There is so much of interest to read that it seems a waste of time and energy to write anything ... especially if it’s to be only a reflection of reflections.”

“Then why do it?”

“Something to say, I suppose; or at least the desire to define and illuminate ... from one’s own point of view, of course.”

“Then why ... Julian?”

Something in the way she said the name convinced me she had forgotten who he was if she had ever known.

“The apostasy; the last stand of paganism against Christianity.”

She looked truly interested, for the first time. “They killed him, didn’t they?”

“No, he died in battle. Had he lived longer he might at least have kept the Empire divided between the old gods and the new messiah. Unfortunately his early death was their death, the end of the gods.”

“Except they returned as saints.”

“Yes, a few found a place in Christianity, assuming new names.”

“Mother of God,” she murmured thoughtfully.

“An unchristian concept, one would have thought,” I added, though the beautiful illogic had been explained to me again and again by Catholics: how God could and could not at the same time possess a mother, that gleaming queen of heaven, entirely regnant in those days.

“I have often thought about these things,” she said, diffidently. “I’m afraid I’m not much of a student but it fascinates me. I’ve been out in California for the past few years, working. I was on a fashion magazine.” The note was exactly right: she knew precisely what that world meant and she was neither apologetic nor pleased. We both resisted the impulse to begin the names again, threading our way through the maze of fashion, through that frantic world of the peripheral arts.

“You kept away from Vedanta?” A group of transplanted English writers at this time had taken to oriental mysticism with great eagerness, an atonement no doubt for their careers as movie writers. Swamis and temples abounded among the billboards and orange trees; but since it was the way for some it was, for those few at least, honorable.

“I came close.” She laughed. “But there was too much to read and even then I always felt that it didn’t work for us, for Americans, I mean. It’s probably quite logical and familiar to Asiatics, but we come from a different line, with a different history; their responses aren’t ours. But I did feel it was possible for others, which is a great deal.”

“Because so much is really not possible?”

“Exactly. But then I know very little about these things.” She was direct: no implication that what she did not know either did not exist or was not worth the knowing, the traditional response in the fashionable world.

“Are you working now?”

She shook her head. “No, I gave it up. The magazine sent somebody to take my place out there (I didn’t have the 'personality’ they wanted) and so I came on to New York where I’ve never really been, except for week ends from school. The magazine had some idea that I might work into the New York office, but I was through. I have worked.”

“And had enough?”

“For that sort of thing, yes. So I’ve gone out a lot in New York, met many people; thought a little....” She twisted the leaf that she still held in her fingers, her eyes vague as though focused on the leaf’s faint shadow which fell in depth upon her dress, part upon her dress and more on a tree’s branch ending finally in a tiny fragment of shadow on the ground, like the bottom step of a frail staircase of air.

“And here you are, at Clarissa’s.”

“What an extraordinary woman she is!” The eyes were turned upon me, hazel eyes, very clear, the whites luminous with youth.

“She collects people, but not according to any of the usual criteria. She makes them all fit, somehow, but what it is they fit, what design, no one knows. I don’t know, that is.”

“I suppose I was collected. Though it might have been the other way around, since I am sure she interests me more than I do her.”

“There is no way of telling.”

“Anyway, I’m pleased she asked me here.”

We talked of Clarissa with some interest, getting nowhere. Clarissa was truly enigmatic. She had lived for twenty years on the Hudson. She was not married but it was thought she had been. She entertained with great skill. She was in demand in New York and also in Europe where she often traveled. But no one knew anything of her origin or of the source of her wealth and, oddly enough, although everyone observed her remarkable idée fixe, no one ever discussed it, as though in tactful obedience to some obscure sense of form. In the half-dozen years that I had known her not once had I discussed with anyone her eccentricity. We accepted in her presence the reality of her mania, and there it ended. Some were more interested by it than others. I was fascinated, and having suspended both belief and doubt found her richly knowing in matters which interested me. Her accounts of various meetings with Labianus in Antioch were quite brilliant, all told most literally, as though she had no faculty for invention which perhaps, terrifying thought, she truly lacked, in which case ... but we chose not to speculate. Iris spoke of plans.

“I’m going back to California.”

“Tired of New York?”

“No, hardly. But I met someone quite extraordinary out there, someone I think I should like to see again.” Her candor made it perfectly clear that her interest was not romantic. “It’s rather in line too with what we were talking about. I mean your Julian and all that. He’s a kind of preacher.”

“That doesn’t sound promising.” A goldfish made a popping sound as it captured a dragonfly on the pond’s surface.

“But he isn’t the usual sort of thing at all. He’s completely different but I’m not sure just how.”

“An evangelist?” In those days loud men and women were still able to collect enormous crowds by ranging up and down the country roaring about that salvation which might be found in the bosom of the Lamb.

“No, his own sort of thing entirely. A little like the Vedanta teachers, only he’s American, and young.”

“What does he teach?”

“I ... I’m not sure. No, don’t laugh. I only met him once. At a friend’s house in Santa Monica. He talked very little but one had the feeling that, well, that it was something unusual.”

“It must have been if you can’t recall what he said.” I revised my first estimate: it was romantic after all; a man who was young, fascinating ... I was almost jealous as a matter of principle.

“I’m afraid I don’t make much sense.” She gestured and the leaf fell into its own shadow on the grass. “Perhaps it was the effect he had on the others that impressed me. They were clever people, worldly people yet they listened to him like children.”

“What does he do? does he preach? work?”

“I don’t know that either. I met him the night before I left California and I haven’t seen anyone who was there that evening since.”

“But now you think you want to go back to find out?”

“Yes. I’ve thought about him a great deal these last few weeks. You’d think one would forget such a thing, but I haven’t.”

“What was his name?”

“Cave, I think. John Cave.”

“A pair of initials calculated to amaze the innocent.” Yet even while I invoked irony, I felt with a certain chill in the heat that this was to be Clarissa’s plot, and for many days afterwards that name echoed in my memory, long after I had temporarily forgotten Iris’s own name, had forgotten, as one does, the whole day, the peony in the boxwood, the leaf’s fall and the catch of the goldfish; instants which now live again in the act of recreation, details which were to fade into a yellow-green blur of June and of the girl beside me in a garden and of that name spoken in my hearing for the first time, becoming in my imagination like some bare monolith awaiting the sculptor’s chisel.

Two

1

I did not see Iris again for some months. Nor, for that matter, did I see Clarissa who, the day after our lunch, disappeared on one of her mysterious trips ... this time to London, I think, since she usually got there for the season. Clarissa’s comings and goings doubtless followed some pattern though I could never make much sense of them. I was very disappointed not to see her before she left because I had wanted to ask her about Iris and also ...

It has been a difficult day. Shortly after I wrote the lines above, this morning, I heard the sound of an American voice on the street-side of the hotel; the first American voice I’ve heard in some years for, excepting me, none has been allowed in Upper Egypt for twenty years. The division of the world has been quite thorough, religiously and politically, and had not some official long ago guessed my identity it is doubtful that I should have been granted asylum even in this remote region.

I tried to continue with my writing but it was impossible: I could recall nothing. My attention would not focus on the past, on those wraiths which have lately begun to assume again such startling reality as I go about the work of memory ... but the past was lost to me this morning. The doors shut and I was marooned in the meager present.

Who was this American who had come to Luxor? and why?

For a moment the serenity which I have so long practiced failed me and I feared for my life. The long-awaited assassins had finally come. But then that animal within who undoes us all with his fierce will to live, grew quiet, accepting again the discipline I have so long maintained over him, his obedience due less perhaps to my strong will than to his fatigue, for he is no longer given to those rages and terrors and exultations which once dominated me as the moon does the tide: his defeat being my old age’s single victory, and a bitter one.

I took the pages that I had written and hid them in a wide crack in the marble-topped Victorian washstand. I then put on a tie and linen jacket and, cane in hand, my most bemused and guileless expression upon my face, I left the room and walked down the tall dim corridor to the lobby, limping perhaps a little more than was necessary, exaggerating my quiet genuine debility to suggest, if possible, an even greater helplessness. If they had come at last to kill me, I thought it best to go to them while I still held in check the creature terror. As I approached the lobby, I recalled Cicero’s death and took courage from his example. He too had been old and tired, too exasperated at the last even to flee.

My assassin (if such he is and I still do not know) looks perfectly harmless: a red-faced American in a white suit crumpled from heat and travel. In atrocious Arabic he was addressing the manager who, though he speaks no English, is competent in French, is accustomed to speaking French to Occidentals. My compatriot, however, was obstinate and smothered with a loud voice the polite European cadences of the manager.

I moved slowly to the desk, tapping emphatically with my cane on the tile floor. Both turned; it was the moment which I have so long dreaded: the eyes of an American were turned upon me once again. Would he know? Does he know? I felt all the blood leave my head. With a great effort, I remained on my feet; steadying my voice which has nowadays a tendency to quaver even when I am at ease, I said to the American, in our own language, the language I had not once spoken in nearly twenty years, “Can I be of assistance, sir?” The words sounded strange on my lips and I was aware that I had given them an ornateness which was quite unlike my usual speech. His look of surprise was, I think, perfectly genuine. I felt a cowardly relief: not yet, not yet.

“Oh!” the American stared at me stupidly for a moment (his face is able to suggest a marvelous range of incomprehension, as I have since discovered).

“My name is Richard Hudson,” I said, pronouncing carefully the name by which I am known in Egypt, the name with which I have lived so long that it sometimes seems as if all my life before was only a dream, a fantasy of a time which never was except in reveries, in those curious waking-dreams which I often have these days when I am tired, at sundown usually, when my mind often loses all control over itself and the memory grows confused with imaginings, and I behold worlds and splendors which I have never known yet which are vivid enough to haunt me even in the lucid mornings: I am dying, of course, and my brain is only letting up, releasing its images with a royal abandon, confusing everything like those surrealist works of art which had some vogue in my youth.

“Oh,” said the American again and then, having accepted my reality, he pushed a fat red hand toward me. “The name is Butler, Bill Butler. Glad to meet you. Didn’t expect to find another white ... didn’t expect to meet up with an American in these parts.” I shook the hand.

“Let me help you,” I said, letting go the hand quickly. “The manager speaks no English.”

“I been studying Arabic,” said Butler with a certain sullenness. “Just finished a year’s course at Ottawa Center for this job. They don’t speak it here like we studied it.”

“It takes time,” I said soothingly. “You’ll catch the tone.”

“Oh, I’m sure of that. Tell them I got a reservation.” Butler mopped his full glistening cheeks with a handkerchief.

“You have a reservation for William Butler?” I asked the manager in French.

He shook his head, looking at the register in front of him. “Is he an American?” He looked surprised when I said that he was. “But it didn’t sound like English.”

“He was trying to speak Arabic.”

The manager sighed. “Would you ask him to show me his passport and authorizations?”

I communicated this to Butler who pulled a bulky envelope from his pocket and handed it to the manager. As well as I could, without appearing inquisitive, I looked at the papers. I could tell nothing. The passport was evidently in order. The numerous authorizations from the Egyptian Government in the Pan-Arabic League, however, seemed to interest the manager intensely.

“Perhaps ...” I began, but he was already telephoning the police. Though I speak Arabic with difficulty, I can understand it easily. The manager was inquiring at length about Mr. Butler and about his status in Egypt. The police chief evidently knew all about him and the conversation was short.

“Would you ask him to sign the register?” The manager’s expression was puzzled. I wondered what on earth it was all about.

“Don’t know why,” said Butler, carving his name into the register with the ancient pen, “there’s all this confusion. I wired for a room last week from Cairo.”

“Communications have not been perfected in the Arab countries,” I said (fortunately for me, I thought to myself).

When he had done registering, a boy came and took his bags and the key to his room.

“Much obliged to you, Mr. Hudson.”

“Not at all.”

“Like to see something of you, if you don’t mind. Wonder if you could give me an idea of the lay of the land.”

I said I should be delighted and we made a date to meet for tea in the cool of the late afternoon, on the terrace.

When he had gone, I asked the manager about him but he, old friend that he was (he has been manager for twelve years and looks up to me as an elder statesman, in the hotel at least, since I have lived there longer), merely shrugged and said, “It’s too much for me, sir.” And I could get no more out of him.

2

The terrace was nearly cool when we met at six o’clock, at the hour when the Egyptian sun has just lost its unbearable gold, falling, a scarlet disc, into the white stone hills across the dull river which, at this season, winds narrowly among the mud-flats, a third of its usual size, diminished by heat.

“Don’t suppose we could order a drink ... not that I’m much of a drinking man, you know. Get quite a thirst, though, on a day like this.”

I told him that since foreigners had ceased to come here, the bar had been closed down: Moslems for religious reasons did not use alcohol.

“I know, I know,” he said. “Studied all about them, even read the Koran. Frightful stuff, too.”

“No worse than most documents revealed by heaven,” I said gently, not wanting to get on to that subject. “But tell me what brings you to these parts?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” said Butler genially, taking the cup of mint tea which the servant had brought him. On the river a boat with a red sail tacked slowly in the hot breeze. “The manager tells me you’ve been up here for twenty years.”

“You must have found a language in common.”

Butler chuckled. “These devils understand you well enough if they want to. But you....”

“I was an archaeologist at one time,” I said and I told him the familiar story which I have repeated so many times now that I have almost come to believe it. “I was from Boston originally. Do you know Boston? I often think of those cold winters with a certain longing. Too much light can be as trying as too little. Some twenty years ago, I decided to retire, to write a book of memoirs.” This was a new, plausible touch, “Egypt was always my single passion and so I came to Luxor, to this hotel where I’ve been quite content, though hardly industrious.”

“How come they let you in? I mean there was all that trouble along around when the Pan-Arabic League shut itself off from civilization.”

“I was very lucky, I suppose. I had many friends in the academic world of Cairo and they were able to grant me a special dispensation.”

“Old hand, then, with the natives?”

“But a little out of practice. All my Egyptian friends have seen fit to die and I live now as though I were already dead myself.”

This had the desired effect of chilling him. Though he was still young, hardly fifty, the immediacy of death, even when manifested in the person of a chance acquaintance, did inspire a certain gravity.

He mumbled something which I did not catch. I think my hearing has begun to go: not that I am deaf but I have, at times, a monotonous buzzing in my ears which makes conversation difficult, though not impossible. According to the local doctor my arteries have hardened and at any moment one is apt to burst among the convolutions of the brain, drowning my life. But I do not dwell on this, at least not in conversation.

“There’s been a big shake-up in the Atlantic community. Don’t suppose you’d hear much about it around here since from the newspapers I’ve seen in Egypt they have a pretty tight censorship.”

I said I knew nothing about recent activities in the Atlantic community or anywhere else, other than Egypt.

“Well they’ve worked out an alliance with Pan-Arabia which will open the whole area to us. Of course no oil exploitation is allowed but there’ll still be a lot of legitimate business between our sphere and these people.”

I listened to him patiently while he explained the state of the world to me; it seemed unchanged: the only difference was that there were now new and unfamiliar names in high places. He finished with a patriotic harangue about the necessity of the civilized to work in harmony together for the good of mankind: “And this opening up of Egypt has given us the chance we’ve been waiting for for years, and we mean to take it.”

“You mean to extend trade?”

“No, I mean the Word.”

“The Word?” I repeated numbly, the old fear returning.

“Why sure; I’m a Cavite Communicator.” He rapped perfunctorily on the table twice. I tapped feebly with my cane on the tile: in the days of the Spanish persecution such signals were a means of secret communication (not that the persecution had really been so great but it had been our decision to dramatize it in order that our people might become more conscious of their splendid if temporary isolation and high destiny); it had not occurred to me that, triumphant, the Cavites should still cling to those bits of fraternal ritual which I’d conceived with a certain levity in the early days. But of course the love of ritual, of symbol is peculiar to our race and I reflected bleakly on this as I returned the solemn signal which identified us as brother Cavites.

“The world must have changed indeed,” I said at last. “It was a Moslem law that no foreign missionaries be allowed in the Arab League.”

“Pressure!” Butler looked very pleased. “Nothing obvious of course; had to be done though.”

“For economic reasons?”

“No, for Cavesword. That’s what we’re selling because that’s the one thing we’ve got.” And he blinked seriously at the remnant of scarlet sun; his voice had grown husky, like a man selling some commodity on television in the old days. Yet the note of sincerity, whether simulated or genuine, was unmistakably resolute.

“You may have a difficult time,” I said, not wanting to go on with this conversation but unable to direct it short of walking away. “The Moslems are very stubborn in their faith.”

Butler laughed confidently. “We’ll change all that. It may not be easy at first because we’ve got to go slow, feel our way, but once we know the lay of the land, you might say, we’ll be able to produce some big backing, some real backing.”

His meaning was unmistakable. Already I could imagine those Squads of the Word in action throughout this last terrestrial refuge. Long ago they had begun as eager instruction teams; after the first victories, however, they had become adept at demoralization, at brain-washing and auto-hypnosis, using all the psychological weapons which our race in its ingenuity had fashioned in the mid-century, becoming so perfect with the passage of time that imprisonment or execution for unorthodoxy was no longer necessary: even the most recalcitrant, the most virtuous man, could be reduced to a sincere and useful orthodoxy, no different in quality from his former antagonists, his moment of rebellion forgotten, his reason anchored securely at last in the general truth. I was also quite confident that their methods had improved even since my enlightened time.

“I hope you’ll be able to save these poor people,” I said, detesting myself for this hypocrisy.

“Not a doubt in the world,” he clapped his hands. “They don’t know what happiness we’ll bring them.” Difficult as it was to accept such hyperbole, I believed in his sincerity: he is one of those zealots without whose offices no large work in the world can be successfully propagated. I did not feel more than a passing pity for the Moslems: they were doomed but their fate would not unduly distress them for my companion was perfectly right when he spoke of the happiness which would be theirs: a blithe mindlessness which would in no way affect their usefulness as citizens. We had long since determined that for the mass this was the only humane way of ridding them of superstition in the interest of Cavesword and the better life.

“It’s strange, though, that they should let you in,” I said, quite aware that he might be my assassin after all, permitted by the Egyptian government to destroy me and, with me, the last true memory of the mission. I had not completely got over my first impression that Butler was an accomplished actor, sounding me out before the final victory of the Cavites, the necessary death and total obliteration of the person and the memory of Eugene Luther, now grown old with a false name in a burning land.

If he was an actor, he was a master. He thumped on interminably about America, John Cave and the necessity of spreading his word throughout the world. I listened patiently as the sun went abruptly behind the hills and all the stars appeared in the moonless waste of sky. Fires appeared in the hovels on the far shore of the Nile, yellow points of light like fireflies hovering by that other river which I shall never see again.

“Must be nearly suppertime.”

“Not quite,” I said, relieved that Butler’s face was now invisible. I was not used to great red faces after my years in Luxor among the lean, the delicate and the dark. Now only his voice was a dissonance in the evening.

“Hope the food’s edible.”

“It isn’t bad, though it may take some getting used to.”

“Well, I’ve a strong stomach. Guess that’s why they chose me for this job.”

This job? could it mean...? but I refused to let myself be panicked. I have lived too long with terror to be much moved now; especially since my life of its own generation has brought me to dissolution’s edge. “Are there many of you?” I asked politely. The day was ending and I was growing weary, all senses blunted and some confused. “Many Communicators?”

“Quite a few,” said Butler. “They’ve been training us for the last year in Canada for the big job of opening up Pan-Arabia. Of course we’ve known for years that it was just a matter of time before the government got us in here.”

“Then you’ve been thoroughly grounded in the Arab culture? and disposition?”

“Oh, sure. May have to come to you every now and then, though, if you don’t mind.” He chuckled to show that his patronage would be genial.

“I should be honored to assist.”

“We anticipate trouble at first. We have to go slow. Pretend we’re just available for instruction while we get to know the local big shots. Then, when the time comes....” He left the ominous sentence unfinished. I could imagine the rest, however. Fortunately, nature by then, with or without Mr. Butler’s assistance, would have removed me as a witness.

Inside the hotel the noise of plates being moved provided a familiar reference. I was conscious of being hungry: as the body’s mechanism jolts to a halt, it wants more fuel than it ever did at its optimum. I wanted to go in but before I could gracefully extricate myself Butler asked me a question. “You the only American in these parts?”

I said that I was.

“Funny nothing was said about there being any American up here. I guess they didn’t know you were here.”

“Perhaps they were counting me among the American colony at Cairo,” I said smoothly. “I suppose, officially, I am a resident of that city. I was on the Advisory Board of the Museum.” This was not remotely true but since, to my knowledge, there is no Advisory Board it would be difficult for anyone to establish my absence from it.

“That must be it.” Butler seemed easily satisfied, perhaps too easily. “Certainly makes things a lot easier for us, having somebody like you up here, another Cavite, who knows the lingo.”

“I’ll help in any way I can; though I’m afraid I have passed the age of usefulness. Like the British king, I can only advise.”

“Well, that’s enough. I’m the active one anyway. My partner takes care of the other things.”

“Partner? I thought you were alone.”

“No. I’m to get my heels in first; then my colleague comes on in a few weeks. That’s standard procedure. He’s a psychologist and an authority on Cavesword. We all are, of course—authorities, that is—but he’s gone into the early history and so on a little more thoroughly than us field men usually do.”

So there was to be another one, a cleverer one. I found myself both dreading and looking forward to the arrival of this dangerous person: it would be interesting to communicate with a good mind again, or at least an instructed one: though Butler has not given me much confidence in the new Cavite Communicators. Nevertheless, I am intensely curious about the Western world since my flight from it. I have been effectively cut off from any real communion with the West for two decades. Rumors, stray bits of information sometimes penetrate as far as Luxor but I can make little sense of them, for the Cavites are, as I well know, not given to candor while the Egyptian newspapers exist in a fantasy world of Pan-Arabic dominion. There was so much I wished to know that I hesitated to ask Butler, not for fear of giving myself away but because I felt that any serious conversation with him would be pointless: I rather doubted if he knew what he was supposed to know, much less all the details which I wished to know and which even a moderately intelligent man, if not hopelessly zealous, might be able to supply me with.

I had a sudden idea. “You don’t happen to have a recent edition of the Testament, do you? Mine’s quite old and out of date.”

“What date?” This was unexpected.

“The year? I don’t recall. About thirty years old, I should say.”

There was a silence. “Of course yours is a special case, being marooned like this. There’s a ruling about it which I think will protect you fully since you’ve had no contact with the outside; anyway, as a Communicator, I must ask you for your old copy.”

“Why certainly but ...”

“I’ll give you a new one, of course. You see it is against the law to have any Testament which predates the second Cavite Council.”

I was beginning to understand: after the schism a second Council had been inevitable even though no reference to it has ever appeared in the Egyptian press. “The censorship here is thorough,” I said. “I had no idea there had been a new Council.”

“What a bunch of savages!” Butler groaned with disgust. “That’s going to be one of our main jobs, you know, education, freeing the press. There has been almost no communication between the two spheres of influence....”

“Spheres of influence.” How easily the phrase came to his lips! All the jargon of the journalists of fifty years ago has, I gather, gone into the language, providing the inarticulate with a number of made-up phrases calculated to blur even their none too clear meanings. I assume of course that Butler is as inarticulate as he seems, that he is typical of the first post-Cavite generation.

“You must give me a clear picture of what has been happening in America since my retirement.” But I rose to prevent him from giving me, at that moment at least, any further observations on “spheres of influence.”

I stood for a moment, resting on my cane: I had stood up too quickly and as usual suffered a spell of dizziness; I was also ravenously hungry. Butler stamped out a cigarette on the tile.

“Be glad to tell you anything you want to know. That’s my business.” He laughed shortly. “Well, time for chow. I’ve got some anti-bacteria tablets they gave us before we came out, supposed to keep the food from poisoning us.”

“I’m sure you won’t need them here.”

He kept pace with my slow shuffle. “Well, it increases eating pleasure, too.” Inadvertently, I shuddered as I recognized yet another glib phrase from the past; it had seemed such a good idea to exploit the vulgar language of the advertisers. I suffered a brief spasm of guilt.

3

We dined together in the airy salon which was nearly empty at this season except for a handful of government officials and businessmen who eyed us without much interest even though Americans are not a common sight in Egypt. They were of course used to me although, as a rule, I keep out of sight, taking my meals in my own room and frequenting those walks along the river bank which avoid altogether the town of Luxor.

I found, after I had dined, that physically I was somewhat restored, better able to cope with Butler. In fact, inadvertently, I actually found myself, in the madness of my great age, enjoying his company, a sure proof of loneliness if not of senility. He too, after taking pills calculated to fill him “chock full of vim and vigor” (that is indeed the phrase he used), relaxed considerably and spoke of his life in the United States. He had no talent for evoking what he would doubtlessly call “the large picture” but in a casual, disordered way he was able to give me a number of details about his own life and work which did suggest the proportions of the world from which he had so recently come and which I had, in my folly, helped create.

On religious matters he was unimaginative and doctrinaire, concerned with the letter of the commands and revelations rather than with the spirit such as it was, or is. I could not resist the dangerous maneuver of asking him, at the correct moment of course (we were speaking of the time of the schisms), what had become of Eugene Luther.

“Who?”

The coffee cup trembled in my hand. I set it carefully on the table. I wondered if his hearing was sound. I repeated my own name, long lost to me, but mine still in the secret dimness of memory.

“I don’t place the name. Was he a friend of the Liberator?”

“Why, yes. I even used to know him slightly but that was many years ago, before your time. I’m curious to know what might have become of him. I suppose he’s dead.”

“I’m sorry but I don’t place the name.” He looked at me with some interest. “I guess you must be almost old enough to have seen him.”

I nodded, lowering my lids with a studied reverence, as though dazzled at the recollection of great light. “I saw him several times.”

“Boy, I envy you! There aren’t many left who have seen him with their own eyes. What was he like?”

“Just like his photographs,” I said, shifting the line of inquiry: there is always the danger that a trap is being prepared for me. I was noncommittal, preferring to hear Butler talk of himself. Fortunately, he preferred this too and for nearly an hour I learned as much as I shall ever need to know about the life of at least one Communicator of Cavesword. While he talked, I watched him furtively for some sign of intention but there was none that I could detect; yet I was suspicious. He had not known my name and I could not understand what obscure motive might cause him to pretend ignorance unless of course he does know who I am and wishes to confuse me, preparatory to some trap.

I excused myself soon afterwards and went to my room, after first accepting a copy of the newest Testament handsomely bound in Plasticon (it looks like leather) and promising to give him my old proscribed copy the next day.

The first thing that I did, after locking the door to my room, was to take the book over to my desk and open it to the index. My eye traveled down that column of familiar names until it came to the L’s.

At first I thought that my eyes were playing a trick upon me. I held the page close to the light, wondering if I might not have begun to suffer delusions, the not unfamiliar concomitant of solitude and old age. But my eyes were adequate and the hallucination, if real, was vastly convincing: my name was no longer there. Eugene Luther no longer existed in that Testament which was largely his own composition.

I let the book shut of itself, as new books will. I sat down at the desk, understanding at last the extraordinary ignorance of Butler: I had been obliterated from history; my place in time erased. It was as if I had never lived.

Three

1

I have had in the last few days some difficulty in avoiding the company of Mr. Butler. Fortunately, he is now very much involved with the local functionaries and I am again able to return to my narrative. I don’t think Butler has been sent here to assassinate me but, on the other hand, from certain things he has said and not said, I am by no means secure in his ignorance; however, one must go on. At best, it will be a race between him and those hardened arteries which span the lobes of my brain. My only curiosity concerns the arrival next week of his colleague who is, I gather, of the second generation and of a somewhat bookish turn according to Butler who would not, I fear, be much of a judge. Certain things, though, which I have learned during the last few days about Iris Mortimer make me more than ever wish to recall our common years as precisely as possible for what I feared might happen has indeed, if Butler is to be believed, come to pass, and it is now with a full burden of hindsight that I revisit the scenes of a half century ago.

2

I had got almost nowhere with my life of Julian. I had become discouraged with his personality though his actual writings continued to delight me. As it so often happens in history I had found it difficult really to get at him: the human attractive part of Julian was undone for me by those bleak errors in deed and in judgment which depressed me even though they derived most logically from the man and his time: that fatal wedding which finally walls off figures of earlier ages from the present, keeping them strange despite the most intense and imaginative recreation. They are not we. We are not they. And I refused to resort to the low trick of fashioning Julian in my own image of him. I respected his integrity in time and deplored the division of centuries. My work at last came to a halt and, somewhat relieved, I closed my house in the autumn of the year and traveled west to California.

I had a small income which made modest living and careful travel easy for me ... a fortunate state of affairs since, in my youth, I was of an intense disposition, capable of the passions and violence of a Rimbaud without, fortunately, the will to translate them into reality; had I had more money, or none, I might have died young, leaving behind the brief memory of a minor romanticist. As it was, I had a different role to play in the comedy; one for which I was, after some years of reading beside my natal river, peculiarly fitted to play.

I journeyed to southern California where I had not been since my service in one of the wars. I had never really explored that exotic land and I was curious about it, more curious than I have ever been before or since about any single part of the world. Egypt one knows without visiting it, and China the same; but that one area of sandy beaches and orange groves which circles the city of Los Angeles, an artificial place created from desert and sure to lapse back again into dust the moment some national disaster breaks its line of life and the waters no longer flow, has always fascinated me.

I was of course interested in the movies, though they no longer had the same hold over the public imagination that they had had in earlier decades when a process of film before light could project, larger than life, not only on vast screens but also upon the impressionable minds of an enormous audience made homogeneous by a common passion, shadowy figures which, like the filmy envelopes of the stoic deities, floated to earth in public dreams, suggesting a braver more perfect world where love reigned and only the wicked died. But then time passed and the new deities lost their worshipers: there were too many gods and the devotees got too used to them, realizing finally that they were only mortals, involved not in magical rites but in a sordid business. Television (the home altar) succeeded the movies and their once populous and ornate temples, modeled tastefully on baroque and Byzantine themes, fell empty, the old gods moving to join the new hierarchies, becoming the domesticated godlings of television which, although it held the attention of the majority of the population, did not enrapture, did not possess dreams or shape days with longing and with secret imaginings the way the classic figures of an earlier time had. Though I was of an age to recall the gallant days of the movies, the nearly mythical power which they had held for millions of people, not all simple, I was not really interested in that aspect of California. I was more intrigued by the manners, by the cults, by the works of this coastal people so unlike the older world of the East and so antipathetic to our race’s first home in Europe. Needless to say, I found them much like everyone else, except for minor differences of no real consequence.

I stayed at a large hotel not too happily balanced in design between the marble-and-potted-palm décor of the Continental Hotel in Paris and the chrome and glass of an observation car on a newer train.

I unpacked, telephoned friends most of whom were not home. The one whom at last I found in was the one I knew the least, a minor film writer who had married money with great success and had, most altruistically, given up the composition of films for which the remaining movie-goers were no doubt thankful. He devoted his time to assisting his wife in becoming the first hostess of Beverly Hills. She had, I recalled from one earlier meeting, the mind of a child of twelve, but an extremely active child and a good one.

Hastings, such was the writer’s name (her name was either Ethel or Valerie, two names which I always confuse due to a particularly revolutionary course I once took in mnemonics), invited me immediately to a party. I went.

It seemed like spring though it was autumn, and it seemed like an assortment of guests brought together in a ship’s dining room to celebrate New Year’s Eve though, in fact, the gathering was largely made up of close acquaintances. Since I knew almost no one, I had a splendid time.

My hostess, beyond a brilliant greeting, a gold figure all in green with gold dust in her hair, left me alone. Hastings was more solicitous, a nervous gray man with a speech impediment which took the form of a rather charming sign before any word which began with an aspirate.

“We, ah, have a better place coming up. Farther up the mountains with a marvelous view of the, ah, whole city. You will love it, Gene. Ah, haven’t signed a lease yet, but soon.” While we talked he steered me through the crowds of handsome and bizarre people (none of them was from California I discovered: most were Central Europeans or British; those who were not pretended to be one or the other; some sounded like both). I was introduced to magnificent girls exactly like their movie selves but since they all tended to look a great deal alike, the effect was somehow spoiled. But I was a tourist and not critical. I told a striking blonde that she would indeed be excellent in a musical extravaganza based upon The Sea Gull. She thought so too and my host and I moved on to the patio.

Beside a jade-green pool illuminated from beneath (and a little dirty, I noticed, with leaves floating upon the water: the décor was becoming tarnished, the sets had been used too long and needed striking. Hollywood was becoming old without distinction), a few of the quieter guests sat in white iron chairs while paper lanterns glowed prettily on the palms and everywhere, untidily, grew roses, jasmine and lilac: it was a fantastic garden, all out of season and out of place. The guests beside the pool were much the same; except for one: Clarissa.

“You know each other?” Hastings’ voice, faintly pleased, was drowned by our greetings and I was pulled into a chair by Clarissa who had elected to dress herself like an odalisque which made her look, consequently, more indigenous than any of the other guests; this was perhaps her genius: her marvelous adaptiveness.

“We’ll be quite happy here,” said Clarissa, waving our host away. “Go and abuse your other guests.”

Hastings trotted off; those who had been talking to Clarissa talked to themselves and beneath a flickering lantern the lights of Los Angeles, revealed in a wedge between two hills, added the proper note of lunacy, for at the angle from which I viewed those lights they seemed to form a monster Christmas tree, poised crazily in the darkness.

Clarissa and I exchanged notes on the months that had intervened since our luncheon.

“And you gave up Julian, too?”

“Yes ... but why 'too’?” I was irritated by the implication that I gave up all things before they were properly done.

“I feel you don’t finish things, Eugene. Not that you should; but I do worry about you.”

“It’s good of you,” I said, discovering that at a certain angle the Christmas tree could be made to resemble a rocket’s flare arrested in space.

“Now don’t take that tone with me. I have your interest at heart.” She expressed herself with every sign of sincerity in that curious flat language which she spoke so fluently yet which struck upon the ear untruly, as though it were, in its homeliness, the highest artifice.

“But I’ve taken care of everything, you know. Wait and see. If you hadn’t come out here on your own I should have sent for you....”

“And I would have come?”

“Naturally.” She smiled.

“But for what?”

“For ... she’s here. In Los Angeles.”

“You mean that girl who came to lunch?” I disguised my interest, but Clarissa, ignoring me, went on talking as energetically and as obliquely as ever.

“She’s asked for you several times, which is a good sign. I told her I suspected you’d be along but that one never could tell, especially if you were still tied up with Julian, unlikely as that prospect was.”

“But I do finish some things.”

“I’m sure you do. In any case, the girl has been here over a month and you must see her as soon as possible.”

“I’d like to.”

“Of course you would. I still have my plot, you know. Oh, you may think I forget things but I don’t: my mind is a perfect filing system.”

“Could you tell me just what you are talking about?”

She chuckled and wagged a finger at me. “Soon you’ll know. I know I meddle a good deal, more than I should, but after all this time it would be simply impossible for me not to interfere. I see it coming, one of those really exciting moments and I want just to give it a tickle here, a push there to set it rolling. Oh, what fun it will be!”

Hastings crept back among us, diffidently pushing a star and a producer in our direction. “I think you all ought to know each other, Clarissa ... and, ah, Gene too. This is Miss ... and Mr ... and here in Hollywood ... when you get to New York ... house on the river, wonderful, old ... new film to cost five million ... runner-up for the Academy Award.” He did it all very well, I thought. Smiles gleamed in the patio’s half-light. The star’s paste jewels, borrowed from her studio, glimmered like an airliner’s lighted windows. I moved toward the house, but Clarissa’s high voice restrained me at the door: “You’ll call Iris tomorrow, won’t you?” and she shouted an exchange and a number. I waved to show that I’d heard her then, vowing I would never telephone Iris, I rejoined the party and watched with fascination as the various performers performed in the living room to the accompaniment of a grand piano just barely out of tune.

3

I waited several days before I telephoned Iris. Days of considerable activity, of visiting friends and acquaintances, of attending parties where the guests were precisely the same as the ones I had met at Hastings’ house: every one of them bent upon combating boredom with boredom, creating a desert in a dry land. But I was capable of evoking mirages which decorated for me their desert, made unusual (for myself at least) what, with familiarity, might become impossible.

I met Iris at the house where she was staying near the main beach of Santa Monica: a fairly decorous Spanish house, quiet among palms and close to the sea. The day was vivid; the sea made noise; the wind was gentle, smelling of salt and far countries.

I parked my rented car and walked around to the sea side of the house. Iris came forward to meet me, smiling, hand outstretched, her face which I had remembered as being remarkably pale was flushed with sunlight.

“I hoped you’d come,” she said, and she slipped her arm in mine as though we’d been old friends and led me to a deck chair adjoining the one where she’d been seated, reading. We sat down. “Friends let me have this place. They went to Mexico for two months and lent me the house.”

“Useful friends.”

“Aren’t they? I’ve already put down roots here in the sand and I’ll hate to give it back.”

“Don’t.”

“Ah, wouldn’t it be wonderful.” She smiled vaguely and looked beyond me at the flash of sea in the flat distance. An automobile horn sounded through the palms; a mother called her child: we were a part of the world, even here.

“Clarissa told me you’ve been out several months.”

Iris nodded. “I came back. I think I told you I was going to.”

“To see the man?”

“Would you like something to drink?” She changed the subject with a disconcerting shift of her gaze from the ocean to me, her eyes still dazzled with the brilliance of light on water. I looked away and shook my head.

“Too early in the day. But I want to take you to dinner tonight, if I may. Somewhere along the coast.”

“I’d like it very much.”

“Do you know of a place?”

She suggested several. Then we went inside and she showed me a room where I might change into my bathing suit; we were to swim.

We walked through the trees to the main road on the other side of which the beach glowed white in the sun. It was deserted at this point although, in the distance, other bathers could be seen, tiny figures black against the startling white, moving about like insects on a white cloth.

For a time we swam contentedly, not speaking, not thinking, our various urgencies (or their lack) no longer imposed upon the moment. At such times, in those days, I was able through the body’s strenuous use to reduce the miserable demands of the yearning self to a complacent harmony, with all things in proper proportion: a part of the whole and not the whole itself, though, metaphorically speaking, perhaps that which conceives reality is reality itself. But such nice divisions and distinctions were of no concern to me that afternoon in the sun, swimming with Iris, the mechanism which spoils time with questioning switched off by the body’s euphoria.

And yet, for all this, no closer to one another, no wiser about one another in any precise sense, we drove that evening in silence to a restaurant of her choosing on the beach to the north: a ramshackle place filled with candlelight, the smell of tar, old nets: “atmosphere” which was nearly authentic. After wine and fish and coffee, we talked.

“Clarissa is bringing us together.”

I nodded, accepting the plain statement as a fact. “The matchmaking instinct is, I suppose....”

“Not that at all.” Her face was in a half-light and looked as it had when we first met: pale, withdrawn, all the day’s color drained out of it. Above the sea, Orion’s belt dipped in the deep sky. The evening star all silver set. We were early and had this place to ourselves.

“Then what? Clarissa’s motives are always clear, at least to herself. She never does anything that doesn’t contribute to some private design ... though what she’s up to half the time I don’t dare guess.”

Iris smiled. “Nor I. But she is at least up to something which concerns us both and I’m not sure that she may not be right, about the two of us, I mean ... though of course it’s too soon to say.”

I was conventional enough at first to assume that Iris was speaking of ourselves, most boldly, in terms of some emotional attachment and I wondered nervously how I might indicate without embarrassment to her that I was effectively withdrawn from all sexuality and that, while my emotions were in no way impaired, I had been forced to accept a physical limitation to any act of affection which I might direct at another; consequently, I avoided as well as I could those situations which might betray me, and distress another. Though I have never been unduly grieved by this incompletion, I had come to realize only too well from several disquieting episodes in my youth that this flaw in me possessed the unanticipated power of shattering others who, unwarily, had moved to join with me in the traditional duet only to find an implacable surface where they had anticipated a creature of flesh like themselves, as eager as they, as governed by the blood’s solemn tide: I had caused pain against my will and I did not want Iris hurt.

Fortunately, Iris had begun to move into a different, an unexpected conjunction with me, one which had in it nothing of the familiar or even of the human: it was in that hour beneath Orion’s glitter that we were, without warning, together volatilized onto that archetypal plane where we were to play with such ferocity at being gods, a flawed Mercury and a dark queen of heaven, met at the sea’s edge, disguised as human beings but conscious of one another’s true identity for though our speeches, our arias were all prose, beneath the usual talk recognition had occurred, sounding with the deep resonance of a major chord struck among dissonances.

We crossed the first division easily. She was, in her way, as removed as I from the flesh’s wild need to repeat itself in pleasure. There was no need for us ever to discuss my first apprehension. We were able to forget ourselves, to ignore the mortal carriage. The ritual began simply enough.

“Clarissa knows what is happening here. That’s why she has come West, though she can’t bear California. She wants to be in on it the way she’s in on everything else, or thinks she is.”

“You mean John Cave, your magus?” It was the first time I had ever said that name: the sword was between us now, both edges sharp.

“You guessed? or did she tell you that was why I came back?”

“I assumed it. I remembered what you said to me last spring.”

“He is more than ... magus, Eugene.” And this was the first time she had said my name: closer, closer. I waited. “You will see him.” I could not tell if this was intended as a question or a prophecy. I nodded. She continued to talk, her eyes on mine, intense and shining. Over her shoulder the night was black and all the stars flared twice, once in the sky and again upon the whispering smooth ocean at our feet, one real and one illusion: both light.

“It is really happening,” she said and then, deliberately, she lightened her voice. “You’ll see when you meet him. I know of course that there have been thousands of these prophets, these saviors in every country and in every time. I also know that this part of America is particularly known for religious maniacs. I started with every prejudice, just like you.”

“Not prejudice ... skepticism: perhaps indifference. Even if he should be an effective one, one of the chosen gods and wonder-workers, should I care? I must warn you, Iris, that I’m not a believer. And though I’m sure that the revelations of other men must be a source of infinite satisfaction to them, individually, I shouldn’t for one second be so presumptuous as to make a choice among the many thousands of recorded revelations of truth, accepting one at the expense of all the others: I might so easily choose wrong and get into eternal trouble. And you must admit that the selection is wide, and dangerous to the amateur.”

“You’re making fun of me,” said Iris, but she seemed to realize that I was approaching the object in my own way. “He’s not like that at all.”

“But obviously if he is to be useful he must be accepted and he can’t be accepted without extending his revelation or whatever he calls it and I fail to see how he can communicate, short of hypnotism or drugs, the sense of his vision to someone like myself who, in a sloppy but devoted way, has wandered through history and religion, acquiring with a collector’s delight the more colorful and obscure manifestations of divine guidance, revealed to us through the inspired systems of philosophers and divines, not to mention such certified prophets as the custodians of the Sibylline books. 'Illo die hostem Romanorum esse periturum’ was the instruction given poor Maxentius when he marched against Constantine: needless to say he perished and consequently fulfilled the prophecy by himself becoming the enemy of Rome, to his surprise I suspect. My point, though, in honoring you with the only complete Latin sentence which I can ever recall is that at no time can we escape the relativity of our judgments. Truth for us, whether inspired by messianic frenzy or merely illuminated by reason, is, after all, inconstant and subject to change with the hour. You believe now whatever it is this man says. Splendid. But will the belief be true to you at another hour of your life? I wonder. For even if you wish to remain consistent and choose to ignore inconvenient evidence in the style of the truly devoted, the truly pious, will not your prophet himself have changed with time’s passage? for no human being can remain the same, despite the repetition of....”

“Enough, enough!” she laughed aloud and put her hand between us as though to stop the words in air. “You’re talking such nonsense.”

“Perhaps. It’s not at all easy to say what one thinks when it comes to these problems or, for that matter, to any problem which demands articulation. Sometimes one is undone by the flow of words assuming its own direction, carrying one, protesting, away from the anticipated shore to terra incognita. Other times, at the climax of a particularly telling analogy, one is aware that in the success of words the meaning has got lost. Put it this way, finally, accurately: I accept no man’s authority in that realm where we are all equally ignorant. The beginning and the end of creation are not our concern. The eventual disposition of the human personality which we treasure in our conceit as being among the more poignant ornaments of an envious universe is unknown to us and shall so remain until we learn the trick of raising the dead. God, or what have you, will not be found at the far end of a syllogism, no matter how brilliantly phrased and conceived. We are prisoners in our flesh, dullards in divinity as the Greeks would say. No man can alter this though of course human beings can be made to believe anything. You can teach that fire is cold and ice is hot but nothing changes except the words. So what can your magus do? What can he celebrate except that which is visible and apparent to all eyes? What can he offer me that I should accept his authority, and its source?”

She sighed, “I’m not sure he wants anything for himself; acceptance, authority ... one doesn’t think of such things, at least not now. As for his speaking with the voice of some new or old deity, he denies the reality of any power other than the human....”

“A strange sort of messiah.”

“I’ve been trying to tell you this.” She smiled. “He sounds at times not unlike you just now ... not so glib perhaps.”

“Now you mock me.”

“No more than you deserve for assuming facts without evidence.”

“If he throws over all the mystical baggage what is left? an ethical system?”

“In time, I suppose, that will come. So far there is no system. You’ll see for yourself soon enough.”

“You’ve yet to answer any direct question I have put to you.”

She laughed. “Perhaps there is a significance in that; perhaps you ask the wrong questions....”

“And perhaps you have no answers.”

“Wait.”

“For how long?”

She looked at her watch by the candles’ uncertain light. “For an hour.”

“You mean we’re to see him tonight?”

“Unless you’d rather not.”

“Oh, I want to see him, very much.”

“He’ll want to see you too, I think.” She looked at me thoughtfully but I could not guess her intention; it was enough that two lines had crossed, both moving inexorably toward a third, toward a temporary terminus at the progression’s heart.

4

It is difficult now to recall just what I expected. Iris deliberately chose not to give me any clear idea of either the man or of his teachings or even of the meeting which we were to attend; we talked of other things as we drove in the starlight north along the ocean road, the sound of waves striking sand loud in our ears.

It was nearly an hour’s drive from the restaurant to the place where the meeting was to be held. Iris directed me accurately and we soon turned from the main highway into a neon-lighted street; then off into a suburban area of comfortable-looking middle-class houses with gardens. Trees lined the streets; dogs barked; yellow light gleamed at downstairs windows. Silent families were gathered in after-dinner solemnity before television sets, absorbed by the spectacle of figures singing, dancing and telling jokes.

As we drove down the empty streets, I saw ruins and dust where houses were and, among the powdery debris of stucco all in mounds, the rusted antennae of television sets like the bones of awful beasts whose vague but terrible proportions will alone survive to attract the unborn stranger’s eye. But the loathing of one’s own time is a sign of innocence, of faith. I have come since to realize the wholeness of man in time. That year, perhaps that ride down a deserted evening street of a California suburb, was my last conscious moment of particular disgust: television, the Blues and the Greens, the perfidy of Carthage, the efficacy of rites to the moon ... all were at last the same.

“That house over there, with the light in front, with the clock.”

The house, to my surprise, was a large neo-Georgian funeral parlor with a lighted clock in front crowned by a legend discreetly fashioned in Gothic gold on black: Whittaker and Dormer, Funeral Directors. A dozen cars had been parked closely together in the street and I was forced to park nearly a block away.

We walked along the sidewalk, street lamps behind trees cast shadows thick and intricate upon the pavement. “Is there any particular significance?” I asked. “I mean in the choice of meeting place?”

She shook her head. “Not really, no. We meet wherever it’s convenient. Mr Dormer is one of us and has kindly offered his chapel for the meetings.”

“Is there any sort of ritual I should observe?”

She laughed. “Of course not. This isn’t at all what you think.”

“I think nothing.”

“Then you are prepared. I should tell you, though, that until this year when a number of patrons made it possible for him” (already I could identify the “him” whenever it fell from her lips, round with reverence and implication) “to devote all his time to teaching, he was for ten years an undertaker’s assistant in Oregon and Washington.”

I said nothing. It was just as well to get past this first obstacle all at once. There was no reason of course to scorn that necessary if overwrought profession; yet somehow the thought of a savior emerging from those unctuous formaldehyde-smelling ranks seemed ludicrous. I reminded myself that one of the more successful messiahs had been a carpenter and that another had been a politician ... but an embalmer! My anticipation of great news was chilled; I prepared myself for grim comedy.

Iris would tell me nothing more about the meeting or about him as we crossed the lawn. She opened the door to the house and we stepped into a softly lighted anteroom. A policeman and a civilian, the one gloomy and the other cheerful, greeted us.

“Ah, Miss Mortimer!” said the civilian, a gray, plump pigeon of a man. “And a friend, how good to see you both.” No this was not he. I was introduced to Mr. Dormer who chirped on until he was interrupted by the policeman.

“Come on, you two, in here. Got to get the prints and the oath.”

Iris motioned me to follow the policeman into a sideroom, an office. I’d heard of this national precaution but until now I had had no direct experience of it. Since the attempt of the communists to control our society had, with the collapse of Russian foreign policy, quite failed, our government in its collective wisdom had decided that never again would any sect or party, other than the traditional ones, be allowed to interrupt the rich flow of the nation’s life. As a result, all deviationist societies were carefully watched by the police who fingerprinted and photographed those who attended meetings, simultaneously exacting an oath of allegiance to the Constitution and the Flag which ended with that powerful invocation which a recent president’s speech writer had, in a moment of inspiration, struck off to the delight of his employer and nation: “In a true democracy there is no place for any disagreement on truly great issues.” It is a comment on those years, now happily become history, that only a few ever considered the meaning of this resolution, proving of course that words are never a familiar province to the great mass which prefers recognizable pictures to even the most apposite prose.

Iris and I repeated dutifully in the presence of the policeman and an American flag, the various national sentiments. We were then allowed to go back to the anteroom and to Mr. Dormer who himself led us into the chapel.

Several dozen people were already there, perfectly ordinary-looking men and women, better dressed perhaps than the average. The chapel was a nonsectarian one which managed to combine a number of decorative influences with a blandness quite remarkable in its success at not really representing anything while suggesting, at the same time, everything. The presence of a dead body, a man carefully painted and wearing a blue serge suit, gently smiling in an ebony casket behind a bank of flowers at the chapel’s end, did not detract as much as one might have supposed from the occasion’s importance. After the first uneasiness, it was quite possible to accept the anonymous dead man as a part of the décor. There was even, in later years, an attempt made by a group of Cavite enthusiasts to insist upon the presence of an embalmed corpse at every service but fortunately the more practical elements among the Cavites prevailed, though not without an ugly quarrel and harsh words.

John Cave’s entrance followed our own by a few minutes and it is with difficulty that I recall what it was that I felt on seeing him for the first time. Though my recollections are well-known to all (at least they were well-known, although now I am less certain, having seen Butler’s Testament so strangely altered), I must record here that I cannot, after so many years, so much history, recall in any emotional detail my first reaction to this man who was to be the world’s, as well as my own, peculiar nemesis.

But, concentrating fiercely, emptying my mind of later knowledge, I can still see him as he walked down the aisle of the chapel, a small man who moved with some grace. He was younger than I’d expected or, rather, younger-looking, with short straight hair, light brown in color, a lean regular face which would not have been noticed in a crowd unless one had got close enough to see the expression of the eyes: the large diver eyes with black lashes like a thick line drawn on the pale skin, focusing attention to them, to the congenitally small pupils which glittered like the points of black needles, betraying the will and the ambition which the impassive, gentle face belied ... but I am speaking with future knowledge now: I did not that evening think of ambition or will in terms of John Cave. I was merely curious, intrigued by the situation, by the intensity of Iris, by the serene corpse behind the banks of hothouse flowers, by the thirty or forty men and women who sat close to the front of the chapel, listening intently to Cave as he talked.

At first I paid little attention to what was being said, more interested in observing the audience, the room and the appearance of the speaker. Immediately after his undramatic entrance he had moved to the front of the chapel and sat down on a gilt chair to the right of the coffin; there was a faint whisper of interest at his appearance: newcomers like myself were being given last-minute instruction by the habitués who had brought them there. Cave sat easily on the gilt chair, his eyes upon the floor, his small hands, bony and white, folded in his lap, a smile on his narrow lips: he could not have looked more ineffectual, more ordinary. His opening words by no means altered this first impression.

The voice, as he spoke, was good, though he tended to mumble at the beginning, his eyes still on the floor, his hands in his lap, motionless. So quietly did he begin that he had spoken for several seconds before many of the audience were aware that he had begun. His accent was the national one, learned doubtless from the radio and the movies: a neutral pronunciation without any strong regional overtone. The popular if short-lived legend of the next decade that he had begun his mission as a backwoods revivalist was certainly untrue.

Not until he had talked for several minutes, did I begin to listen to the sense rather than to the tone of his voice. I cannot render precisely what he said but the message that night was not much different from the subsequent ones which are known to all. It was, finally, the manner which created the response, not the words themselves, though the words were interesting enough, especially when heard for the first time. His voice, as I have said, faltered unsurely at the beginning and he left sentences unfinished, a trick which I later discovered was deliberate for he had been born a remarkable actor, an instinctive rhetorician. What most struck me that first evening was the purest artifice of his performance. The voice, especially when he came to his climax, was sharp and clear while his hands stirred like separate living creatures and the eyes, those splendid unique eyes, were abruptly revealed to us in the faint light, displayed at that crucial moment which had been as carefully constructed as any work of architecture or of music: the instant of communication.

Against my will and judgment and inclination, I found myself absorbed by the man, not able to move or to react. The same magic which was always to affect me, even when later I knew him only too well, held me fixed to my chair as the words, supported by the clear voice, came in a resonant line from him to me alone, to each of us alone, separate from the others ... and both restless mass and fast-breathing particular were together his.

The moment itself lasted only a second in actual time; it came suddenly, without warning: one was riven; then it was over and he left the chapel, left us chilled and weak, staring foolishly at the gilt chair where he had been.

It was some minutes before we were able to take up our usual selves again.

Iris looked at me. I smiled weakly and cleared my throat: I was conscious that I ached all over. I glanced at my watch and saw that he had spoken to us for an hour and a half during which time I had not moved. I stretched painfully and stood up. Others did the same: we had shared an experience and it was the first time in my life that I knew what it was like to be the same as others, my heart’s beat no longer individual, erratic, but held for at least this one interval of time in concert with those of strangers. It was a new, disquieting experience: to be no longer an observer, a remote intelligence ... for ninety minutes to have been a part of the whole.

Iris walked with me to the anteroom where we stood for a moment watching the others who had also gathered here to talk in low voices, their expressions bewildered.

She did not have to ask me what I thought. I told her immediately, in my own way, impressed but less than reverent. “I see what you mean. I see what it is that holds you, fascinates you but I still wonder what it is really all about.”

“You saw. You heard.”

“I saw an ordinary man. I heard a sermon which was interesting, although I might be less impressed if I read it to myself....” Deliberately I tried to throw it all away, that instant of belief, that paralysis of will, that sense of mysteries revealed in a dazzle of light. But as I talked, I realized that I was not really dismissing it, that I could not alter the experience even though I might dismiss the man and mock the text: something had happened and I told her what I thought it was.

“It is not truth, Iris, but hypnosis.”

She nodded. “I’ve often thought that. Especially at first when I was conscious of his mannerisms, when I could see, as only a woman can perhaps, that this was just a man; yet something does happen when you listen to him, when you get to know him. You must find that out for yourself; and you will. It may not prove to be anything which has to do with him. There’s something in oneself which stirs and comes alive at his touch, through his agency.” She spoke quickly, excitedly.

I felt the passion with which she was charged. But suddenly it was too much for me. I was bewildered and annoyed; I wanted to get away.

“Don’t you want to meet him?”

I shook my head. “Another time maybe, but not now. Shall I take you back?”

“No. I’ll get a ride in to Santa Monica. I may even stay over for the night. He’ll be here a week.”

I wondered again if she might have a personal interest in Cave: though I doubted it, anything was possible.

She walked me back to the car, past the lighted chapel, over the summery lawn, down the dark street whose solid prosaicness helped to dispel somewhat the madness of the hour before.

We made a date to meet later on in the week. She would tell Cave about me and I would meet him. I interrupted her then. “What did he say, Iris? What did he say tonight?”

Her answer was as direct and as plain as my question. “That it is good to die.”

Four

1

This morning I reread the last section, trying to see it objectively, to match what I have put down with the memory I still bear of that first encounter with John Cave. I have not, I fear, got it. But this is as close as I can come to recalling long-vanished emotions and events.

I was impressed by the man and I was shaken by his purpose. My first impression was, I think, correct: he was a born hypnotist and the text of that extraordinary message was, in the early days at least, thin, illogical and depressing if one had not heard it spoken. Later of course I, among others, composed the words which bear his name and we gave them, I fancy, a polish and an authority which, with his limited education and disregard for the works of the past, he could not have accomplished on his own, even had he wanted to.

I spent the intervening days between my first and second encounters with this strange man in a state of extreme tension and irritability. Clarissa called me several times but I refused to see her, excusing myself from proposed entertainments and hinted tête-à-têtes, with an abruptness which anyone but the iron-cast Clarissa would have found appallingly rude. She said she understood, however, and she let me off without explaining what it was she understood, or thought she did. I avoided a number of parties and all acquaintances, keeping to my hotel room where I contemplated a quick return to the Hudson and to the darkening autumn.

Iris telephoned me twice and, when she fixed a day at last for me to meet John Cave, I accepted her invitation, a little to my own surprise.

We met in the late afternoon at her house. Only the three of us were present on that occasion. In the set of dialogues which I composed and published in later years I took considerable liberties with our actual conversations, especially this first one: in fact, as hostile critics were quick to suggest, the dialogues were created by me with very little of Cave in them and a good deal of Plato, rearranged to fit the occasion. In time, though, my version was accepted implicitly, if only because there were no longer any hostile critics.

Iris served us tea in the patio. She spoke seldom and, when she did, her voice was low and curiously diffident as she asked Cave some question or instructed me.

Cave himself was relaxed, quite different from my first view of him. In fact, I might not even have recognized his face had I seen him in a group.

He rose promptly when I came out onto the patio; he shook my hand vigorously but briefly and sat down again, indicating that I sit next to him while Iris went for tea. He was smaller and more compact than I’d thought measuring him against myself as one does, unconsciously, with an interesting stranger. He wore a plain brown suit and a white shirt open at the collar, a modified Lord Byron collar which became him. The eyes, which at first I did not dare look at, were, I soon noticed, sheathed ... an odd word which was always to occur to me when I saw him at his ease, his eyes half-shut, ordinary, not in the least unusual. Except for a restless folding and unfolding of his hands (suggesting a recently reformed cigarette smoker) he was without physical idiosyncrasy.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you” were the first words, I fear, John Cave ever spoke to me; so unlike the dialogue on the spirit which I later composed to celebrate this initial encounter between master and disciple-to-be. “Iris has told me a lot about you.” His voice was light, without resonance now. He sat far back in his deck chair. Inside the house I could hear Iris moving plates. The late afternoon sun had just that moment gone behind trees and the remaining light was warmly gold.

“And I have followed your ... career with interest too,” I said, knowing that “career” was precisely the word he would not care to hear used but, at that moment, neither of us had got the range of the other. We fired at random.

“Iris told me you write history.”

I shook my head. “No, I only read it. I think it’s all been written anyway.” I was allowed to develop this novel conceit for some moments, attended by a respectful silence from my companion who finally dispatched my faintly hysterical proposition with a vague “Maybe so”; and then we got to him.

“I haven’t been East you know,” he frowned at the palm trees. “I was born up in Washington state and I’ve spent all my life in the Northwest, until last year.” He paused as though he expected me to ask him about that year. I did not. I waited for him to do it in his own way. He suddenly turned about in his chair and faced me; those disconcerting eyes suddenly trained upon my own. “You were there the other night, weren’t you?”

“Why, yes.”

“Did you feel it too? Am I right?”

The quick passion with which he said this, exploding all at once the afternoon’s serenity, took me off guard. I stammered, “I don’t think I know what you mean. I ...”

“You know exactly what I mean, what I meant.” He leaned closer to me and I wondered insanely if his deck chair might not collapse under him. It teetered dangerously. My mind went blank, absorbed by the image of deck chair and prophet together collapsing at my feet. Then, as suddenly, satisfied perhaps with my confusion, he settled back, resumed his earlier ease, exactly as if I had answered him, as though we had come to a crisis and together fashioned an agreement: it was most alarming.

“I want to see New York especially. I’ve always thought it must look like a cemetery with all those tall gray buildings you see in photographs.” He sighed conventionally: “So many interesting places in the world. Do you like the West?”

Nervously, I said that I did. I still feared a possible repetition of that brief outburst.

“I like the openness,” said Cave, as though he had thought long about this problem. “I don’t think I’d like confinement I couldn’t live in Seattle because of those fogs they used to have; San Francisco’s the same. I don’t like too many walls, too much fog.” If he’d intended to speak allegorically he could not have found a better audience for I was, even at this early stage, completely receptive to the most obscure histrionics but, in conversation, Cave was perfectly literal. Except when he spoke before a large group, he was quite simple and prosaic and, though conscious always of his dignity and singular destiny, not in the least portentous.

I probably did not put him at his ease for I stammered a good deal and made no sense, but he was gracious, supporting me with his own poise and equanimity.

He talked mostly of places until Iris came back with tea. Then, as the sky became florid with evening and the teacups gradually grew cold, he talked of his work and I listened intently.

“I can talk to you straight,” he said. “This just happened to me. I didn’t start out to do this. No sir, I never would have believed ten years ago that I’d be traveling about, talking to people like one of those crackpot fanatics you’ve got so many in California.” I took a sip of the black, fast-cooling tea, hoping he was not sufficiently intuitive to guess that I had originally put him down, provisionally of course, as precisely that.

“I don’t know how much Iris may have told you or how much you might have heard but it’s pretty easy to pass the whole thing off as another joke: a guy coming out of the backwoods with a message.” He cracked his knuckles hard and I winced at the sound. “Well, I didn’t quite come out of the woods. I had a year back at State University and I had a pretty good job in my field with the best firm of funeral directors in Washington state. Then I started on this. I just knew one day and so I began to talk to people and they knew too and I quit my job and started talking to bigger and bigger crowds all along the coast. There wasn’t any of this revelation stuff. I just knew one day, that was all; and when I told other people what I knew they seemed to get it. And that’s the strange part. Everybody gets ideas about things which he thinks are wonderful but usually nothing happens to the people he tries to tell them to. With me, it’s been different from the beginning. People have all listened, and agreed: what I know they know. Isn’t that a funny thing? Though most of them probably would never have thought it out until they heard me and it was all clear.” His eyes dropped to his hands; he added softly: “So since it’s been like this, I’ve gone on. I’ve made this my life. This is it. I shall come to the people.”

There was silence. The sentence had been spoken which I was later to construct the first dialogue upon: “I shall come to the people,” the six words which were to change our lives were spoken softly over tea.

Iris looked at me challengingly over Cave’s bowed head.

I remember little else about that evening. We dined, I think, in the house and Cave was most agreeable, most undemanding. There was no more talk of the mission. He asked me many questions about New York, about Harvard where I had gone to school, about Roman history. He appeared to be interested in paganism and my own somewhat ambiguous approach to Julian. I was to learn later that though he seldom read he had a startling memory for any fact which seemed relevant. I am neither immodest nor inaccurate when I say that he listened to me attentively for some years and many of his later views were a result of our conversations.

I should mention, though, one significant omission in his conversation during those first crucial years: he never discussed ethical questions; that was to come much later. At the beginning he had but one vision and it was, in its terrible truth, quite inhuman and anarchic: man dies, consciousness dies with him: it is good to die, good not to be. On this the Cavite system was constructed and what came after in the moral and ethical spheres was largely the work of others in his name. Much of this I anticipated in that first conversation with him, so unlike, actually, the dialogue which I composed ending, I still think complacently despite the irony with which time has tarnished all those bright toys for me, with the essential line: “Death is neither hard nor bad; only the dying hurts.” With that firmly postulated the rest was inevitable.

Cave talked that evening about California and Oregon and Washington (geography, places were always to fascinate and engage him while people, especially after the early years, ceased to be remarkable to him; he tended to get confused those myriad faces which passed before him like successive ripples in a huge sea). He talked of the cities he had visited on the seaboard, new cities to him, all of them. He compared their climates and various attractions like a truly devoted tourist, eager to get the best of each place, to encounter the genius loci and possess it.

“But I don’t like staying in any place long.” He looked at me then and again I felt that sense of a power being focused on me ... it was not unlike what one experiences during an X-ray treatment when the humming noise indicates that potent rays are penetrating one’s tissue and, though there is actually no sensation, something is experienced, power is felt. And so it invariably was that, right until the end, Cave, whenever he chose, could turn those wide bleak eyes upon me and I would experience his force anew.

“I want to keep moving, new places, that’s what I like. You get a kind or charge traveling. At least I do. I always thought I’d travel but I never figured it would be like this; but then of course I never thought of all this until just awhile ago.

“Can you remember when it was? how it was exactly you got ... started?” I wanted a sign obviously: Constantine’s labarum occurred to me: in hoc signo vinces. Already ambition was stirring, and the little beast fed ravenously on every scrap that came its way for I was, in that patio, experiencing my own revelation, the compass needle no longer spinning wildly but coming to settle at last, with many hesitancies and demurs, upon a direction, drawn to a far pole’s attraction.

He smiled for the first time. I suppose, if I wanted, I could recall each occasion over the years when, in my presence at least, John Cave smiled. His usual expression was one of calm resolve, of that authority which feels secure in itself, a fortunate expression which lent dignity even to his casual conversation: the fact that this serene mask hid a nearly total intellectual vacuity, I suspected as early in my dealings with him as this first meeting; yet I did not mind for I had experienced his unique magic and already I saw the possibilities of channeling that power, of using that force, or turning it like a flame here, there, creating and destroying, shaping and shattering ... so much for the spontaneous nature of my ambition at its least responsible, and at its most exquisite! I could have set the one-half world aflame for the sheer splendor and glory of the deed. For this my expiation has been long and my once exuberant pride is now only an ashen phoenix consumed by flames but not yet tumbled to dust, not yet recreated in the millennial egg ... only a gray shadow in the heart which the touch of a finger of windy fear will turn to air and dust.

Yet the creature was aborning that day: one seed had touched another and a monster began to live.

“The first day? The first time?” The smile faded. “Sure, I remember it. I’d just finished painting the face of a big dead fellow killed in an automobile accident. I didn’t usually do make-up but I like to help out and I used to do odd jobs when somebody had too much to do and asked me to help; the painting isn’t hard either and I always like it, though the faces are cold like ... like....” He thought of no simile; he went on: “Anyway I looked at this guy’s face and I remembered I’d seen him play basketball in high school. He was in a class or two behind me. Big athlete. Ringer, we called them ... full of life ... and here he was, with me powdering his face and combing his eyebrows. Usually you don’t think much about the stiff (that’s our professional word) one way or the other: it’s just a job. But I thought about this one suddenly. I started to feel sorry for him, dead like that, so sudden, so young, so good-looking with all sorts of prospects; then I felt it.” The voice grew low and precise. Iris and I listened intently, even the sun froze in the wild sky above the sea; the young night stumbled in the darkening east.

His eyes on the sun, he described his sudden knowledge that it was the dead man who was right, who was a part of the whole, that the living were the sufferers from whom, temporarily, the beautiful darkness and nonbeing had been withdrawn and, in his crude way, Cave struck chord after chord of meaning and, though the notes were not in themselves new, the effect was all its own ... and not entirely because of the voice, the cogency of this magician. No, the effect was achieved only in part through his ability to make one experience with him an occasion of light, of absolute knowing.

“And I knew it was the dying which was the better part,” he finished. The sun, released, drowned in the Pacific.

In the darkness I asked, “But you, you still live?”

“Not because I want to,” came the voice, soft as the night “I must tell the others first. There’ll be time for myself.”

I shuddered in the warmth of the patio. My companions were only dim presences in the failing light. “Who told you to tell this to everyone?”

The answer came back, strong and unexpected: “I told myself. The responsibility is mine.”

That was the sign for me. He had broken with his predecessors. He was on his own. He knew ... and so did we.

2

I have lingered over that first meeting for, in it, was finally all that there was to come. Later details were the work of others, the exotic periphery to a simple but powerful center. Not until late that night did I leave the house near the beach. When I left, Cave stayed on and I wondered again, idly, if perhaps he was living there with Iris, if perhaps her interest in him might not be more complex than I had suspected.

We parted casually and Iris walked me to the door while Cave remained inside, gazing in his intent way at nothing at all: daydreaming, doubtless, of what was to come.

“You’ll help?” Iris stood by the car’s open door, her features indistinct in the moonless night.

“I think so. I’m not sure, though, about the scale.”

“What do you mean?”

“Must everyone know? Can’t it just be kept to ourselves? for the few who do know him?”

“No. We must let them all hear him. Everyone.” And her voice assumed that zealous tone which I was to hear so often again and again upon her lips and on those of others.

I made my first and last objection: “I don’t see that quantity has much to do with it. If this thing spreads it will become organized. If it becomes organized, secondary considerations will obscure the point. The truth is no truer because only a few have experienced it.”

“You’re wrong. Even for purely selfish reasons, ruling out all altruistic considerations, there’s an excellent reason for allowing this to spread: a society which knows what we know, which believes in Cave and what he says, will be a pleasanter place in which to live, less anxious, more tolerant.” And she spoke of the new Jerusalem in our sallow land and I was nearly convinced.

The next day I went to Hastings’ house for lunch. He was there alone; his wife apparently had a life of her own which required his company only occasionally. Clarissa, sensible in tweed and dark glasses, was the only other guest. We lunched on an iron-wrought table beside the gloomy pool in which, among the occasional leaves, I saw, quite clearly, a cigarette butt delicately unfolding like an ocean flower.

“Good to, ah, have you, Eugene. Just a bit of potluck. Clarissa’s going back to civilization today and wanted to see you ... I did too, of course. The bride’s gone out. Told me to convey her....”

Clarissa turned her bright eyes on me and, without acknowledging the presence of our host, said right off: “You’ve met him at last.”

I nodded. The plot was finally clear to me: the main design at least. “We had dinner together last night.”

“I know. Iris told me. You’re going to help out of course.”

“I’d like to but I don’t know what there is I might do. I don’t think I’d be much use with a tambourine on street corners, preaching the word.”

“Don’t be silly!” Clarissa chuckled. “We’re going to handle this quite, quite differently.”

“We?”

“Oh, I’ve been involved for over a year now. It’s going to be the greatest fun ... you wait and see.”

“But....”

“I was the one who got Iris herself involved. I thought she looked a little peaked, a little bored. I had no idea of course she’d get in so deep, but it will probably turn out all right I think she’s in love with him.”

“Don’t be such a gossip,” said Hastings sharply. “You always reduce everything to ... to biology. Cave isn’t that sort of man.”

“You know him too?” How fast it was growing, I thought.

“Certainly. Biggest thing I’ve done since....”

“Since you married that brassy blonde,” said Clarissa with her irrepressible rudeness. “Anyway, my dear, Iris took to the whole thing like a born proselyte, if that’s the word I mean ... the other’s a little boy, isn’t it? and it seems, from what she’s told me, that you have too.”

“I wouldn’t say that.” I was a little put out at both Iris and Clarissa taking me so much for granted.

“Say anything you like. It’s still the best thing that’s ever happened to you. Oh God, not avocado again!” The offending salad was waved away while Hastings muttered apologies. “Nasty, pointless things, all texture and no taste.” She made a face. “But I suppose that we must live off the fruits of the country and this is the only thing which will grow in California.” She moved without pause from Western flora to the problem of John Cave. “As for your own contribution, Eugene, it will depend largely upon what you choose to do. As I said, I never suspected that Iris would get in so deep and you may prove to be quite as surprising. This is the ground floor of course ... wonderful expression, isn’t it? the spirit of America: the slogan which broke the plains ... in any case, the way is clear. Cave liked you. You can write things for them, rather solid articles based on your inimitable misreadings of history. You can educate Cave, though this might be unwise since so much of his force derives from his eloquent ignorance; or you might become a part of the organization which is getting under way. I suppose Iris will explain that to you: it’s rather her department at the moment. All those years in the Junior League gave her a touching faith in the power of committees, which is just as well when handling Americans. As for the tambourines and cries of 'Come and Be Saved’ you are some twenty years behind the times. We ... or to be exact I ought to say 'they’ ... have more up-to-date plans.”

“Committees? What committees?”

Clarissa unfolded her mushroom omelet with a secret smile. “You’ll meet our number-one committee member after lunch. He’s coming, isn’t he?” She looked at Hastings as though suspecting him of a treacherous ineptitude.

“Certainly, certainly, at least he said he was.” Hastings motioned for the serving-woman to clean away the luncheon dishes and we moved to other chairs beside the pool for coffee.

Clarissa was in fine form, aggressive, positive, serenely indifferent to the effect she was having on Hastings and me. “Of course I’m just meddling,” she said in answer to an inquiry of mine. “I don’t really give two cents for Mr Cave and his message.”

“Clarissa!” Hastings was genuinely shocked.

“I mean it. Not that I don’t find him fascinating and of course the whole situation is delicious ... what we shall do! or you shall do!” she looked at me maliciously. “I can foresee no limits to this.”

“It no doubt reminds you of the period shortly after Mohammed married Khadija.” My own malice, however, could not pierce Clarissa’s mad equanimity.

“Vile man, sweet woman. But no, this is all going to be different although the intellectual climate (I think intellectual is perhaps optimistic but you know what I mean) is quite similar. I can’t wait for the first public response.”

“There’s already been some,” said Hastings, crossing his legs which were encased in pale multicolor slacks with rawhide sandals on his feet. “There was a piece yesterday in the News about the meetings they’ve been having up near Laguna or wherever it is he’s been speaking this time.”

“What did they say?” Clarissa scattered tiny saccharine tablets into her coffee like a grain goddess preparing harvest.

“Oh, just one of those short suburban notes about how a Mr Joseph Cave, they got the name wrong, was giving a series of lectures at a funeral parlor which have been surprisingly well attended.”

“They didn’t mention what the lectures were about?”

“No, just a comment: the first one so far in Los Angeles.”

“There’ll be others soon but I shouldn’t think it’s such a good idea to have too many items like that before things are really under way.”

“And the gentleman who is coming here will be responsible for getting them under way?” I asked.

“Pretty much, yes. It’s been decided that the practical details are to be left to him. Cave will continue to speak in and around Los Angeles until the way has been prepared. Then, when the publicity begins, he will be booked all over the country, all over the world!” Clarissa rocked silently for a moment in her chair, creating a disagreeable effect of noiseless laughter which disconcerted both Hastings and me.

“I don’t like your attitude,” said Hastings, looking at her gloomily. “You aren’t serious.”

“Oh I am, my darling, I am. You’ll never know how serious.” And on that high note of Clarissa’s, Paul Himmell stepped out onto the patio, blinking in the light of noon.

He was a slender man in his fortieth and most successful year, with hair only just begun to gray and a lined but firmly modeled face, bright with ambition. The initial impression was one of neatly contained energy, of a passionate temperament beautifully, usefully channeled. The twist to his bow tie was the work of a master craftsman.

The handshake was agreeable; the smile was quick and engaging; the effect on me was alarming: I had detested this sort of man all my life and here at last, wearing a repellently distinguished sports coat was the archetype of all such creatures, loading with a steady hand that cigarette holder without which he might at least have seemed to me still human. He was identified by Hastings who, with a few excited snorts and gasps, told me beneath the conversation that this was the most successful young publicist in Hollywood, which meant the world.

“I’m happy to meet you, Gene,” he said as soon as Hastings had introduced us. He was perfectly aware that he had been identified while the first greetings with Clarissa had been exchanged: he had the common gift of the busy worldling of being able to attend two conversations simultaneously, profiting from both. I hate of course being called by my first name by strangers but in his world there were of course no strangers: the freemasonry of self-interest made all men equal in their desperation. He treated me like a buddy. He knew (he was, after all, clever) that I detested him on sight and on principle and that presented him with a challenge to which he rose with confidence ... and continued to rise through the years, despite the enduring nature of my disaffection. But then to be liked was his business and I suspect that his attentions had less to do with me, with a sense of failure in himself for not having won me, than with a kind of automatic charm, a response to a situation which was produced quite inhumanly, mechanically: the smile, the warm voice, the delicate flattery ... or not so delicate, depending on the case.

“Iris and Cave both told me about you and I’m particularly glad to get a chance to meet you ... to see you too, Clarissa ... will you be long in the East?” Conscious perhaps that I would need more work than a perfunctory prelude, he shifted his attention to Clarissa, saving me for later.

“I never have plans, Paul, but I’ve got one or two chores I’ve got to do. Anyway I’ve decided that Eugene is just the one to give the enterprise its tone ... a quality concerning which you, dear Paul, so often have so much to say.”

“Why yes,” said the publicist genially, obviously not understanding. “Always use more tone. You’re quite right.”

Clarissa’s eyes met mine for a brief amused instant. She was on to everything ... doubtless on to me too in that way one can never be about oneself; I always felt at a disadvantage with her.

“What we’re going to need for the big New York opening is a firm historical and intellectual base. Cave hasn’t got it and of course doesn’t need it. We are going to need commentary and explanation and though you happen to be a genius in publicity you must admit that that group which has been characterized as intellectual, the literate few who, in their weakness, often exert enormous influence, are not apt to be much moved by your publicity: in fact, they will be put off by it.”

“Well, now I’m not so sure my methods are that crude. Of course I never....”

“They are superbly, triumphantly, providentially crude and you know it. Eugene must lend dignity to the enterprise. He has a solemn and highly respectable misunderstanding of philosophy which will appeal to his fellow intellectuals. He and they are quite alike: liberal, ineffectual, scrupulous, unsuperstitious, irresolute and lonely. When he addresses them they will get immediately his range, you might say, pick up his frequency, realizing he is one of them, a man to be trusted. Once they are reached the game is over, or begun.” Clarissa paused and looked at me expectantly, the exuberant malice veiled by excitement.

I didn’t answer immediately. Hastings, as a former writer, felt that he too had been addressed and he worried the subject of “tone” while Paul gravely added a comment or two. Clarissa watched me, however, conscious perhaps of the wound she had dealt.

Was it all really so simple? was I so simple? so typical? Vanity said not, but self-doubt, the shadow which darkens even those triumphs held at noon, prevailed for a sick moment or two: I was no different from the others, from the little pedagogues and analysts, the self-obsessed and spiritless company who endured shame and a sense of alienation without even that conviction of virtue which can dispel guilt and apathy for the simple, for all those who have accepted without question one of the systems of absolutes which it has amused both mystics and tyrants to construct for man’s guidance.

I had less baggage to rid myself of than the others: I was confident of that. Neither Christianity nor Marxism nor the ugly certainties of the mental therapists had ever engaged my loyalty or suspended my judgment. I had looked at them all, deploring their admirers and servants, interested though by their separate views of society and of the potentialities of a heaven on earth (the medieval conception of a world beyond life was always interesting to contemplate even if the evidence in its favor was whimsical at best ... conceived either as a system of rewards and punishments to control living man or else as lovely visions of what might be were man indeed consubstantial with a creation which so often resembled the personal aspirations of gifted divines rather more closely than that universe the rest of us can only observe with mortal eyes). No, I had had to dispose of relatively little baggage and, I like to think, less than my more thoughtful contemporaries who were forever analyzing themselves, offering their psyches to doctors for analysis or, worse, giving their immortal souls into the hands of priests who would then assume much of their weltschmerz, providing them with a set of grown-up games every bit as appealing as the ones of childhood which had involved make-believe or, finally, worst of all, the soft acceptance of the idea of man the mass, of man the citizen, of society the organic whole for whose greater good all individuality must be surrendered.

My sense then of all that I had not been, negative as it was, saved my self-esteem: I was, in this, unlike my contemporaries. I had, in youth, lost all respect for the authority of men and since there is no other discernible (the “laws” of nature are only relative and one cannot say for certain that there is a beautiful logic to everything in the universe as long as first principles remain unrevealed ... except of course to the religious who know everything, having faith), I was unencumbered by belief, by reverence for any man or groups of men, living or dead, though their wit and genius often made my days bearable since my capacity for admiration, for aesthetic response was, I think, highly developed even though with Terence I did not know, did not need to know through what wild centuries roves the rose.

Yet Clarissa’s including me among the little Hamlets was irritating, and when I joined in the discussion again I was careful to give her no satisfaction; it would have been a partial victory for her if I had denied my generic similarity to my own contemporaries.

Paul spoke of practical matters, explaining to us the way he intended to operate in the coming months; and I was given a glimpse of the organization which had spontaneously come into being only a few weeks before.

“Hope we can have lunch tomorrow, Gene. I’ll give you a better picture then, the overall picture: and your part in it. Briefly, for now, the organization has been set up as a company under California law with Cave as president and myself, Iris and Clarissa as directors. I’m also secretary-treasurer but only for now. We’re going to need a first-rate financial man to head our campaign fund and I’m working on several possibilities right now.”

“What’s the ... company called?” I asked.

“Cavites, Inc. We didn’t want to call it anything but that’s the law here and since we intended to raise money we had to have a legal setup.”

“Got a nice sound, ah, Cavite,” said Hastings, nodding.

“What on earth should we have done if he’d had your name, Paul?” exclaimed Clarissa, to the indignation of both Hastings and Paul. They shut her up quickly.

Paul went on in his smooth deep voice, “I’ve had a lot of experience, of course, but this is something completely new for me, a real challenge and one which I’m glad to meet head-on.”

“How did you get into it?” I asked.

Paul pointed dramatically to Hastings. “Him! He took me to a meeting in Laguna last year. I was sold the first time. I got the message.”

There was a hush as we were allowed to contemplate this awesome information. Then, smiling in a fashion which he doubtless would have called “wry,” the publicist continued: “I knew this was it. I contacted Cave immediately and found we talked the same language. He was all for the idea and so we incorporated. He said he wasn’t interested in the organizational end and left that to us with Iris sort of representing him, though of course we all do since we’re all Cavites. This thing is big and we’re part of it.” He almost smacked his lips. I listened, fascinated. “Anyway he’s going to do the preaching part and we’re going to handle the sales end, if you get what I mean. We’re selling something which nobody else ever sold before and you know what that is?” He paused dramatically and we stared at him, a little stupidly. “Truth!” His voice was triumphant. “We’re selling the truth about life and that’s something that nobody, but nobody, has got.”

Clarissa broke the silence which had absorbed his last words. “You’re simply out of this world, Paul! If I hadn’t heard you, I’d never have believed it. But you don’t have to sell us, dear; we’re in on it too. Besides, I have to catch a plane.” She looked at her watch. She stood up and we did too. She thanked Hastings for lunch and then, before she left the patio on his arm, she said: “Now you boys get on together and remember what I’ve told you. Gene must be used, and right away. Get him to write something dignified, for a magazine.” We murmured assent. Clarissa said good-by and left the patio with Hastings. Her voice, shrill and hard, could be heard even after she left. “The truth about life! Oh, it’s going to be priceless!”

I looked quickly at Paul to see if he had heard but, if he had, he didn’t betray the fact. He was looking at me intently, speculatively. “I think we’re going to get along fine, Gene, just fine.” Leaving me only a fumbled word or two of polite corroboration with which to express my sincere antipathy; then we went our separate ways.

3

I met Paul the next day at his office for a drink and not for lunch since, at the last minute, his secretary called me to say he was tied up and could I possibly come at five. I said that I could. I did.

His offices occupied an entire floor of a small sky-scraper on the edge of Beverly Hills. I was shown through a series of rooms done in natural wood and beige with indirect lighting and the soft sound of Strauss waltzes piped in from all directions: the employees responded best to three-four time according to the current efficiency reports.

Beneath an expensive but standard mobile, Paul stood, waiting for me in his office. His desk, a tiny affair of white marble on slender iron legs had been rolled off to one side and the office gave, as had been intended, the impression of being a small drawing room rather than a place of intense business. I was greeted warmly. My hand was shaken firmly. My eyes were met squarely for the regulation-length of time. Then we sat down on a couch which was like the open furry mouth of some great soft beast and his secretary rolled a portable bar toward us.

“Name your poison,” said the publicist genially. We agreed on a cocktail which he mixed with the usual comments one expects from a regular fellow.

Lulled by the alcohol, by the room, disarmed by the familiar patter in which one made all the correct responses, our conversation as ritualistic as that of a French dinner party, I was not prepared for the abrupt: “You don’t like me, do you, Gene?”

Only once or twice before had anyone ever said this to me and each time that it happened I had vowed grimly that the next time, no matter where or with whom, I should answer with perfect candor, with merciless accuracy: “No, I don’t.” But since I am neither quick nor courageous, I murmured a pale denial.

“It’s all right, Gene. I know how you probably feel.” And the monster was magnanimous; he treated me with pity. “We’ve got two different points of view. That’s all. I have to make my way in this rat-race and you don’t. You don’t have to do anything, so you can afford to patronize us poor hustlers.”

“Patronize isn’t quite the word.” I was beginning to recover from the first shock. A crushing phrase or two occurred to me but the publicist knew his business and he changed course before I could begin my work of demolition.

“Well, I just wanted you to know that there are no hard feelings. In my business you get used to this sort of thing: occupational hazard, you might say. I’ve had to fight my way every inch and I know that a lot of people are going to be jostled in the process, which is just too bad for them.” He smiled suddenly, drawing the sting. “But I have a hunch we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other so we ought to start on a perfectly plain basis of understanding. You’re on to me and I’m on to you.” The man was diabolic in the way he could enrage yet not allow his adversary sufficient grounds for even a perfunctory defense. He moved rapidly, with a show of spurious reason which quite dazzled me. His was what, presently, he called “the common-sense view.”

I told him I had no objection to working with him; that everything I had heard about him impressed me; that he was wrong to suspect me of disdaining methods whose efficacy was so well-known. I perjured myself for several impassioned minutes and, on a rising note of coziness, we passed on to the problem in hand, congenial enemies for all time: the first round clearly his.

“Clarissa got you into this?” He looked at me over his glass.

“More or less. Clarissa to Iris to Cave was the precise play.”

“She got me to Cave last summer, or rather to Hastings first. I was sold right off. I think I told you that yesterday. This guy’s got everything. Even aside from the message, he’s the most remarkable salesman I’ve ever seen and believe me when I tell you there isn’t anything I don’t know about salesmen.”

I agreed that he was doubtless expert in these matters.

“I went to about a dozen of those early meetings and I could see he was having the same effect on everyone, even on Catholics, people like that. Of course I don’t know what happens when they get home but while they’re there they’re sold and that’s all that matters because, in the next year, we’re going to have him there, everywhere, and all the time.”

I told him I didn’t exactly follow this metaphysic flight.

“I mean we’re going to have him on television, on movie screens, in the papers, so that everybody can feel the effect of his personality, just like he was there in person. This prayer-meeting stuff he’s been doing is just a warming up. That’s all. That kind of thing is outmoded: can’t reach enough people even if you spoke at Madison Square every night for a year, but it’s good practice, and it’s got him started. Now the next move is a TV half-hour show once a week and when that gets started we’re in.”

“Who’s going to pay for all this?”

“We’ve got more money than you can shake a stick at.” He smiled briefly and refilled our glasses with a flourish. “I haven’t been resting on my laurels and neither has Clarissa. We’ve got three of the richest men in L.A. drooling at the mouth for an opportunity to come in with us. They’re sold; they’ve talked to him; they’ve heard him. That’s been enough.”

“Will you sell soap on television at the same time?”

“Come off it, Gene. Cave is the product.”

“Then in what way will you, or his sponsors, profit from selling him?”

“In the first place what he says is the truth and it’s meant a lot to me and also to them, to the tycoons: they’re willing to do anything to put him across.”

“I should think that the possession of the truth and its attendant sense of virtue is in itself enough, easily spoiled by popularization,” I said with chilling pomp.

“Now that’s a mighty selfish attitude to take. Sure it makes me happy to know at last nothing matters a hell of a lot since I’m apt to die any time and that’s the end of yours truly; a nice quiet nothing, like sleeping pills after a busy day: all that’s swell but it means a lot more to me to see the truth belong to everybody and also, let’s face it, I’m ambitious. I like my work. I want to see this thing get big, and with me part of it. Life doesn’t mean a thing and death is the only reality, like he says, but while we’re living we’ve got to keep busy and get ahead and the best thing for me, I figured about six months ago, was to put Cave over on the public, which is just what I’m going to do. Anything wrong with that?”

Since right and wrong had not yet been reformulated and codified, I gave him the comfort he hardly needed. “I see what you mean. I suppose you’re right. Perhaps the motive is the same in every case, mine as well as yours: yet we’ve all experienced Cave and that should be enough.”

“No, we should all get behind it and push, bring it to the world.”

“That, of course, is where we’re different: not that I don’t intend to 'propagate the truth,’ rather I shall do it for something to do, knowing that nothing matters, not even this knowledge matters.” In my unction, I had stumbled upon the first of a series of paradoxes which were to amuse and obsess our philosophers for a generation. Paul gave me no opportunity to elaborate, however; his was the practical way and I followed. We spoke of means and ends.

“Cave likes the idea of the half-hour show and as soon as we get all the wrinkles ironed out, buying good time, not just dead air, we’ll make the first big announcement, along around January, I think. Until then we’re trying to keep this out of the papers. Slow but sure; then fast and hard.”

“What sort of man is Cave?” I wanted very much to hear Paul’s reaction to him: this was the practical man, the unobsessed.

He was candid; he did not know. “How can you figure a guy like that out? At times he seems a little feeble-minded, this is between us by the way, and other times when he’s talking to people, giving with the message, there’s nothing like him.”

“What about his early life?”

“Nobody knows very much. I’ve had a detective agency prepare a dossier on him. Does that surprise you? Well, I’m going far out on a limb for him and so are our rich friends. We had to be sure we weren’t buying an ax-murderer or a bigamist or something.”

“Would that have made any difference to the message?”

“No, I don’t think so but it sure would have made it impossible for us to sell him on a big scale.”

“And what did they find?”

“Not much. I’ll let you read it. Take it home with you. Confidential of course and, as an officer of the company, I must ask you not to use any of it without clearing first with me.”

I agreed and his secretary was sent for. The dossier was a thin bound manuscript.

“It’s a carbon but I want it back. You won’t find anything very striking but you ought to read it for the background. Never been married, no girl friends that anybody remembers ... no boy friends either (what a headache that problem is in Hollywood, for a firm like ours). No police record. No tickets for double parking, even. A beautiful, beautiful record on which to build.”

“Perhaps a little negative.”

“That’s what we like. As for the guy’s character, his I.Q., your guess is as good as mine, probably better. When I’m with him alone, we talk about the campaign and he’s very relaxed, very sensible, businesslike: doesn’t preach or carry on. He seems to understand all the problems of our end. He’s cooperative.”

“Can you look him straight in the eye?”

Paul laughed. “Gives you the creeps, doesn’t it? No, I guess I don’t look at him very much. I’m glad you mentioned that because I’ve a hunch he’s a hypnotist of some kind though there’s no record of his ever having studied it. I think I’ll get a psychologist to take a look at him.”

“Do you think he’ll like that?”

“Oh, he’ll never know unless he’s a mind reader. Somebody to sort of observe him at work. I’ve already had him checked out physically.”

“You’re very thorough.”

“Have to be. He’s got a duodenal ulcer and there’s a danger of high blood pressure when he’s older; otherwise he’s in fine shape.”

“What do you want me to do first?”

He became serious. “A pamphlet. You might make a highbrow magazine article out of it for the Readers’ Digest or something first. We’ll want a clear, simple statement of the Cavite philosophy.”

“Why don’t you get him to write it?”

“I’ve tried. He says he can’t write anything. In fact he even hates to have his sermons taken down by a recorder. God knows why. But, in a way, it’s all to the good because it means we can get all the talent we like to do the writing for us and that way, sooner or later, we can appeal to just about everybody.”

“Whom am I supposed to appeal to in this first pamphlet?”

“The ordinary person, but make it as foolproof as you can; leave plenty of doors open so you can get out fast in case we switch the party line along the way.”

I laughed. “You’re extraordinarily cynical.”

“Just practical. I had to learn everything the hard way. I was kicked around by some mighty expert kickers in my day.”

I checked his flow of reminiscence. “Tell me about Cave and Iris.” This was the secondary mystery which had occupied my mind for several days. But Paul did not know or, if he did, would not say. “I think they’re just good friends, like we say in these parts. Except that I doubt if anything is going on ... they don’t seem the type and she’s so completely gone on what he has to say....”

A long-legged girl secretary in discreet black entered the room unbidden and whispered something to the publicist Paul started as though she had given him an electric shock from the thick carpeting. He spoke quickly: “Get Furlow. Tell him to stand bail. Also get a writ. I’ll be right down there.”

She ran from the room. He pushed the bar away from him and it rolled aimlessly across the floor, its bottles and glasses chattering. Paul looked at me distractedly. “He’s in jail. Cave’s in jail.”

Five

1

Last night the noise of my heart’s beating kept me awake until nearly dawn. Then, as the gray warm light of the morning patterned the floor, I fell asleep and dreamed uneasily of disaster, my dreams disturbed by the noise of jackals, by that jackal-headed god who hovers over me as these last days unfold confusedly before my eyes: it will end in heat and terror, alone beside a muddy river, all time as one and that soon gone. I awakened, breathless and cold, with a terror of the dying still ahead.

After coffee and pills, those assorted pellets which seem to restore me for moments at a time to a false serenity, I put aside the nightmare world of the previous restless hours and idly examined the pages which I had written with an eye to rereading them straight through, to relive again for a time the old drama which is already, as I write, separating itself from my memory and becoming real only in the prose: I think now of these events as I have told them and not as they occur to me in memory. For the memory now is of pages and not of scenes or of actual human beings still existing in that baleful, tenebrous region of the imagination where fancy and fact together confuse even the most confident of narrators. I have, thus far at least, exorcised demons, and to have lost certain memories to my narrative relieves my system, like a cancer cut whole from a failing organism.

The boy brought me my morning coffee and the local newspaper whose Arabic text pleases my eye though the sense, when I do translate it, is less than strange. I asked the boy if Mr. Butler was awake and he said he had gone out already: these last few days I have kept to my room even for the evening meal, delaying the inevitable revelation as long as possible.

After the boy left and while I drank coffee and looked out upon the river and the western hills, I was conscious of a sense of well-being which I have not often experienced in recent years. Perhaps the work of evoking the past has, in a sense, enhanced the present for me. I thought of the work done as life preserved, as part of me which will remain.

Then, idly, I riffled the pages of John Cave’s Testament for the first time since I had discovered my name had been expunged.

The opening was the familiar one which I had composed so many years before in Cave’s name. The time of divination: a straightforward account of the apparent wonders which had preceded the mission. No credence was given the supernatural but a good case was made (borrowed a little from the mental therapists) for the race’s need of phenomena as a symptom of unease and boredom and anticipation. I flicked through the pages. An entire new part had been added which I did not recognize: still written as though by Cave but, obviously, it could not have been composed until at least a decade after his death.

I read the new section carefully. Whoever had written it had been strongly under the influence of the pragmatic philosophers, though the style was somewhat inspirational: a combination of a guide to popularity crossed with the Koran. A whole system of ideal behavior was sketched broadly for the devout, so broadly as to be fairly useless though the commentary and the interpretive analysis of such lines as: “Property really belongs to the world though individuals may have temporary liens on certain sections,” must be already prodigious.

I was well into the metaphysics of the Cavites when there was a knock on my door. It was Butler, looking red and uncomfortable from the heat, a spotted red bandana tied, for some inscrutable reason, about his head in place of a hat.

“Hope you don’t mind my barging in like this but I finished a visit with the mayor earlier than I thought.” He crumpled, on invitation, into a chair opposite me. He sighed gloomily. “This is going to be tough, tougher than I ever imagined back home.”

“I told you it would be. The Moslems are very obstinate.”

“I’ll say! and the old devil of a mayor practically told me point-blank that if he caught me proselyting he’d send me back to Cairo. Imagine the nerve!”

“Well, it is their country,” I said, reasonably, experiencing my first real hope: might the Cavites not get themselves expelled from Islam? I knew the mayor of Luxor, a genial merchant who still enjoyed the obsolete title of Pasha. The possibilities of a daring plot occurred to me. All I needed was another year or two by which time nature would have done its work in any case and the conquest of humanity by the Cavites could then continue its progress without my bitter presence.

I looked at Butler speculatively. He was such a fool. I could, I was sure, undo him, for a time at least; unless of course he was, as I first expected, an agent come to finish me in fact as absolutely as I have been finished in effect by those revisionists who have taken my place among the Cavites, arranging history.... I’d experienced, briefly, while studying Butler’s copy of the Testament, the unnerving sense of having never lived, of having dreamed the past entire.

“Maybe it is their country but we got the truth, and like Paul Himmell said: 'A truth known to only half the world is but half a truth.’”

“Did he say that?”

“Of course he did. Don’t you....” he paused. His eye taking in at last the book in my hand. His expression softened somewhat, like a parent in anger noticing suddenly an endearing resemblance to himself in the offending child. “But I forget how isolated you’ve been up here. If I’ve interrupted your studies, I’ll go away.”

“Oh no. I was finished when you came. I’ve been studying for several hours which is too long for an old man.”

“If a contemplation of Cavesword can ever be too long,” said Butler reverently. “Yes, Himmell wrote that even before Cavesword, in the month of March, I believe, though we’ll have to ask my colleague when he comes. He knows all the dates, all the facts. Remarkable guy. He has the brains of the team.” And Butler laughed to show that he was not entirely serious.

“I think they might respond to pressure,” I said, treacherously. “One thing the Arabs respect is force.”

“You may be right. But our instructions are to go slow. Still, I didn’t think it would be as slow as this. Why we haven’t been able to get a building yet. They’ve all been told by the Pasha fellow not to rent to us.”

“Perhaps I could talk to him.”

“Do you know him well?”

“We used to play cards quite regularly. I haven’t seen much of him in the past few years but, if you’d like, I’ll go and pay him a call.”

“He’s known all along you’re a Cavite, hasn’t he?”

“We have kept off the subject of religion entirely. As you probably discovered, since the division of the world, there’s been little communication between East and West. I don’t think he knows much about the Cavites except that they’re undesirable.”

“Poor creature,” said Butler, compassionately.

“Outer darkness,” I agreed.

“But mark my words before ten years have passed they will have the truth.”

“I have no doubt of that, Communicator, none at all. If the others who come out have even a tenth of your devotion the work will go fast.” The easy words of praise came back to me mechanically from those decades when a large part of my work was organizational, spurring the mediocre on to great deeds ... and the truth of the matter has been, traditionally, that the unimaginative are the stuff from which heroes and martyrs are invariably made.

“Thanks for those kind words,” said Butler, flushed now with pleasure as well as heat. “Which reminds me, I was going to ask you if you’d like to help us with our work once we get going?”

“I’d like nothing better but I’m afraid my years of useful service are over. Any advice, however, or perhaps influence that I may have in Luxor....” There was a warm moment of mutual esteem and amiability, broken only by a reference to the Squad of Belief.

“Of course we’ll have one here in time; though we can say, thankfully, that the need for them in the Atlantic states is nearly over. Naturally, there are always a few malcontents but we have worked out a statistical ratio of nonconformists in the population which is surprisingly accurate. Knowing their incidence, we are able to check them early. In general, however, the truth is happily ascendant everywhere in the really civilized world.”

“What are their methods now?”

“The Squad of Belief’s? Psychological indoctrination. We now have methods of converting even the most obstinate lutherist. Of course where usual methods fail (and once in every fifteen hundred they do), the Squad is authorized to remove a section of brain which effectively does the trick of making the lutherist conform, though his usefulness in a number of other spheres is somewhat impaired: I’m told he has to learn all over again how to talk and to move around.”

“Lutherist? I don’t recognize the word.”

“You certainly have been cut off from the world.” Butler looked at me curiously, almost suspiciously. “I thought even in your day that was a common expression. It means anybody who refuses willfully to know the truth.”

“What does it come from?”

“Come from?” Semantics were either no longer taught or else Butler had never been interested in them. “Why it just means, well, a lutherist.”

“I wonder, though, what the derivation of it was.” I was excited: this was the only sign that I had ever existed, a word of obscure origin connoting nonconformist.

“I’m afraid we’ll have to ask my side-kick when he comes. I don’t suppose it came from one of those Christian sects ... you know the German one which broke with Rome.”

“That must be it,” I said. “I don’t suppose in recent years there have been as many lutherists as there once were.”

“Very, very few. As I say, we’ve got it down to a calculable minority and our psychologists are trying to work out some method whereby we can spot potential lutherists in childhood and indoctrinate them before it’s too late ... but of course the problem is a negligible one in the Atlantic states. We’ve had no serious trouble for forty years.”

“Forty years ... that was the time of all the trouble,” I said.

“Not so much trouble,” said Butler, undoing the bandana and mopping his face with it. “The last flare-up, I gather, of the old Christians ... history makes very little of it though I suppose at the time it must have seemed important. Now that we have more perspective we can view things in their proper light. I was only a kid in those days and, frankly, I don’t think I paid any attention to the papers. Of course you remember it.” He looked at me suddenly, his great vacuous eyes focused. My heart missed one of its precarious beats: was this the beginning? had the inquisition begun?

“Not well,” I said. “I was seldom in the United States. I’d been digging in Central America, in and around the Peten. I missed most of the trouble.”

“You seem to have missed a good deal.” His voice was equable, without a trace of secondary meaning.

“I’ve had a quiet life. I’m grateful though for your coming here; otherwise. I should have died without any contact with America, without ever knowing what was happening outside the Arab League.”

“Well, we’ll shake things up around here.”

“Shake well before using,” I quoted absently.

“What did you say?”

“I said I hoped all would be well.”

“I’m sure it will. By the way, I brought you the new edition of Cave’s prison dialogues.” He pulled a small booklet from his back pocket and handed it to me.

“Thank you.” I took the booklet: dialogues between Cave and Iris Mortimer. I had never before heard of this particular work. “Is this a recent discovery?” I asked.

“Recent? Why no. It’s the newest edition but of course the text goes right back to the early days when Cave was in prison.”

“Oh, yes, in California.”

“Sure; it was the beginning of the persecutions. Well, I’ve got to be on my way.” He got heavily to his feet and arranged the bandana about his head. “Somebody stole my hat. Persecuting me, I’ll bet my bottom dollar ... little ways. Well, I’m prepared for them. They can’t stop us. Sooner or later the whole world will be Cavite.”

“Amen,” I said.

“What?” He looked at me with shock.

“I’m an old man,” I said hastily. “You must recall I was brought up in the old Christianity. Such expressions still linger on, you know.”

“It’s a good thing there’s no Squad of Belief in Luxor,” said Butler cheerily. “They’d have you up for indoctrination in a second.”

“I doubt if it’d be worth their trouble. Soon I shall be withdrawing from the world altogether.”

“I suppose so. You haven’t thought of taking Cavesway have you?”

“Of course, many times, but since my health has been good I’ve been in no great hurry to leave my contemplation of those hills.” I pointed to the western window. “Now I should hesitate to die until the very last moment, out of curiosity. I’m eager to learn, to help as much as possible in your work here.”

“Well, that of course is good news but should you ever want to take his way let me know. We have some marvellous methods now, extremely pleasant to take and, as he said, 'It’s not death which is hard but dying.’ We’ve finally made dying simply swell.”

“Will wonders never cease?”

“In that department, never! It is the firm basis of our truth. Now I must be off.”

“Is your colleague due here soon?”

“Haven’t heard recently. I don’t suppose the plans have been changed, though. You’ll like him.”

“I’m sure I shall.”

2

And so John Cave’s period in jail was now known as the time of persecution, with a pious prison dialogue attributed to Iris. Before I returned to my work of recollection, I glanced at the dialogue whose style was enough like Iris’s to have been her work. But of course her style was not one which could ever have been called inimitable since it was based on the most insistent of twentieth-century advertising techniques. I assumed the book was the work of others, of those anonymous counterfeiters who had created, according to a list of publications on the back of the booklet, a wealth of Cavite doctrine.

The conversation with Cave in prison was lofty in tone and seemed to deal with moral problems. It was apparent that since the task of governing is largely one of keeping order, it had become, with the passage of time, necessary for the Cavite rulers to compose in Cave’s name different works of ethical instruction to be used for the guidance and control of the population. I assume that since they now control all records, all original sources, it is an easy matter for them to “discover” some relevant text which gives clear answer to any moral or political problem which has not been anticipated in previous commentaries. The work of falsifying records, expunging names is, I should think, somewhat more tricky but they seem to have accomplished it in Cave’s Testament, brazenly assuming that those who recall the earlier versions will die off in time, leaving a generation which knows only what they wish it to know, excepting of course the “calculable minority” of nonconformists, of base Lutherists.

Cave’s term in prison was far less dramatic than official legend, though more serious. He was jailed for hit-and-run driving on the highway from Santa Monica into Los Angeles.

I went to see him that evening with Paul. When we arrived at the jail, we were not allowed near him though Paul’s lawyers had been permitted to go inside a few minutes before our arrival.

Iris was sitting in the outer office, pale and shaken. A bored policeman in uniform sat fatly at a desk at the other end of the office, ignoring us.

“They’re the best lawyers in L.A.,” said Paul quickly. “They’ll get him out in no time.”

Iris looked at him bleakly.

“What happened?” I asked, sitting down beside her on the bench. “How did it happen?”

“I wasn’t with him.” She shook her head several times as though to dispel a profound daydream. “He called me and I called you. They are the best, Paul?”

“I can vouch that....”

“Did he kill anybody?”

“We ... we don’t know yet. He hit an old man and went on driving. I don’t know why; I mean why he didn’t stop. He just went on and the police car caught him. The man’s in the hospital now. They say it’s bad; he’s unconscious, an old man ...”

“Any reporters here?” asked Paul. “Anybody else know besides us?”

“Nobody. You’re the only person I called.”

“This could wreck everything.” Paul was frightened.

But Cave was rescued, at considerable expense to the company. The old man chose not to die immediately while the police and the courts of Los Angeles, at that time well known for their accessibility to free-spending reason, proved more than obliging. After a day and a night in prison. Cave was released on bail and when the case came to court, it was handled discreetly by the magistrate.

The newspapers, however, had discovered John Cave at last and there were photographs of “Present-Day Messiah in Court.” As ill luck would have it, the undertakers of Laguna had come to the aid of their prophet with banners which proclaimed his message. This picketing of the court was photographed and exhibited in the tabloids. Paul was in a frenzy. Publicist though he was, in his first rage he expressed to me the novel sentiment that not all publicity was good.

“But we’ll get back at those bastards,” he said grimly, not identifying which ones he meant but waving toward the city hidden by the Venetian blinds of his office window.

I asked for instructions. Cave had, the day before, gone back to Washington to lie low until the time was right for a triumphant reappearance. Iris had gone with him; on a separate plane, however, to avoid scandal. Clarissa had sent various heartening if confused messages from New York while Paul and I were left alone to gather up the pieces and begin again. Our close association during those difficult days impressed me with his talents and though, fundamentally, I still found him appalling, I couldn’t help but admire his superb operativeness.

“I’m going ahead with the original plan ... just like none of this happened. The stockholders are willing and we’ve got enough money, though not as much as I’d like, for the publicity build-up. I expect Cave’ll pick up some more cash in Seattle. He always does, wherever he goes.”

“Millionaires just flock to him?”

“Strange to tell, yes. But then nearly everybody does.”

“It’s funny since the truth he offers is all there is to it. Once experienced, there’s no longer much need for Cave or for an organization.” This of course was the paradox which time and the unscrupulous were bloodily to resolve.

Paul’s answer was reasonable. “That’s true but there’s the problem of sharing it. If millions felt the same way about death the whole world would be happier and, if it’s happier, why, it’ll be a better place to live in.”

“Do you really believe this?”

“Still think of me as a hundred percent phony?” Paul chuckled good-naturedly. “Well, it so happens, I do believe that. It also so happens that if this thing clicks we’ll have a world organization and if we have that there’ll be a big place for number one in it. It’s all mixed up, Gene. I’d like to hear your motives, straight from the shoulder.”

I was not prepared to answer him, or myself. In fact, to this day, my own motives are a puzzle to which there is no single key, no easy definition. One is not, after all, like those classic or neo-classic figures who wore with such splendid mono-maniacal consistency the scarlet of lust or the purple of dominion, or the bright yellow of madness, existing not at all beneath their identifying robes. Power appealed to me in my youth but only as a minor pleasure and not as an end in itself or even as a means to any private or public end. I enjoyed the idea of guiding and dominating others, preferably in the mass; yet, at the same time, I did not like the boredom of power achieved, or the silly publicness of a great life. But there was something which, often against my will and judgment, precipitated me into deeds and attitudes where the logic of the moment controlled me to such an extent that I could not lessen, if I chose, the momentum of my own wild passage, or chart its course.

I would not have confided this to Paul even had I in those days thought any of it out, which I had not. Though I was conscious of some fundamental ambivalence in myself, I always felt that should I pause for a few moments and question myself, I could easily find answers to these problems. But I did not pause. I never asked myself a single question concerning motive. I acted like a man sleeping who was only barely made conscious by certain odd incongruities that he dreams. The secret which later I was to discover was still unrevealed to me as I faced the efficient vulgarity of Paul Himmell across the portable bar which reflected so brightly in its crystal his competence.

“My motives are perfectly simple,” I said, half-believing what I said. In those days the more sweeping the statement the more apt I was to give it my fickle allegiance: motives are simple, splendid! simple they are. “I want something to do. I’m fascinated by Cave and I believe what he says ... not that it is so supremely earthshaking. It’s been advanced as a theory off and on for two thousand years. Kant wrote that he anticipated with delight the luxurious sleep of the grave and the Gnostics came close to saying the same thing when they promised a glad liberation from life. The Eastern religions, about which I know very little, maintain ...”

“That’s it!” Paul interrupted me eagerly. “That’s what we want. You just keep on like that. We’ll call it 'An Introduction to John Cave.’ Make a small book out of it. Get it published in New York; then the company will buy up copies and we’ll pass it out free.”

“I’m not so sure that I know enough formal philosophy to ...”

“To hell with that stuff. You just root around and show how the old writers were really Cavites at heart and then you come to him and put down what he says. Why we’ll be half-there even before he’s on TV!” Paul lapsed for a moment into a reverie of promotion. I had another drink and felt quite good myself although I had serious doubts about my competence to compose philosophy in the popular key. But Paul’s faith was infectious and I felt that, all in all, with a bit of judicious hedging and recourse to various explicit summaries and definitions, I might put together a respectable ancestry for Cave whose message, essentially, ignored all philosophy, empiric and orphic, moving with hypnotic effectiveness to the main proposition: death and man’s acceptance of it. The problems of life were always quite secondary to Cave, if not to the rest of us.

“When will you want this piece done?”

“The sooner the better. Here,” he scribbled an address on a pad of paper. “This is Cave’s address. He’s on a farm outside Spokane. It belongs to one of his undertaker friends.”

“Iris is with him?”

“Yes. Now you ...”

“I wonder if that’s wise, Iris seeing so much of him. You know he’s going to have a good many enemies before very long and they’ll dig around for any scandal they can find.”

“Oh, it’s perfectly innocent, I’m sure. Even if it isn’t, I can’t see how it can do much harm.”

“For a public relations man you don’t seem to grasp the possibilities for bad publicity in this situation.”

“All pub ...”

“Is good. But Cave, it appears is a genuine ascetic.” And the word “genuine” as I spoke it was like a knife-blade in my heart. “And, since he is, you have a tremendous advantage in building him up. There’s no use in allowing him, quite innocently, to appear to philander.”

Paul looked at me curiously. “You wouldn’t by chance be interested in Iris yourself?”

And of course that was it. I had become attached to Iris in precisely the same sort of way a complete man might have been but of course for me there was no hope, nothing. The enormity of that nothing shook me, despite the alcohol we had drunk. I was sufficiently collected, though, not to make the mistake of vehemence. “I like her very much but I’m more attached to the idea of Cave than I am to her. I don’t want to see the business get out of hand. That’s all. I’m surprised you, of all people involved, aren’t more concerned.”

“You may have a point. I suppose I’ve got to adjust my views to this thing ... it’s different from my usual work building up crooners and movie stars. In that line the romance angle is swell, just as long as there’re no bigamies or abortions involved. I see your point, though. With Cave we have to think in sort of Legion of Decency terms. No rough stuff. No nightclub pictures or posing with blondes. You’re absolutely right. Put that in your piece: doesn’t drink, doesn’t go out with dames....”

I laughed at this seriousness. “Maybe we won’t have to go that far. The negative virtues usually shine through all on their own. The minute you draw attention to them you create suspicion: people are generally pleased to suspect the opposite of every avowal.”

“You talk just like my analyst.” And I felt that I had won, briefly, Paul’s admiration. “Anyway, you go to Spokane; talk to Iris; tell her to lay off ... in a tactful way of course. I wouldn’t mention it to him: you never can tell how he’ll react. She’ll be reasonable even though I suspect she’s stuck on the man. Try and get your piece done by the first of December. I’d like to have it in print for the first of the New Year, Cave’s year.”

“I’ll try.”

“By the way, we’re getting an office ... same building as this. The directors okayed it and we’ll take over as soon as there’s some furniture in it.”

“Cavites, Inc.?”

“We could hardly call it the Church of the Golden Rule,” said Paul with one of the few shows of irritability I was ever to observe in his equable disposition. “Now, on behalf of the directors, I’m authorized to advance you whatever money you might feel you need for this project; that is, within ...”

“I won’t need anything except, perhaps, a directorship in the company.” My own boldness startled me. Paul laughed.

“That’s a good boy. Eye on the main chance. Well, we’ll see what we can do about that. There aren’t any more shares available right now but that doesn’t mean.... I’ll let you know when you get back from Spokane.”

Our meeting was ended by the appearance of his secretary who called him away to other business. As we parted in the outer office, he said, quite seriously, “I don’t think Iris likes him the way you think but if she does be careful. We can’t upset Cave now. This is a tricky time for everyone. Don’t show that you suspect anything when you’re with him. Later, when we’re under way, and there’s less pressure, I’ll handle it. Agreed?”

I agreed, secretly pleased at being thought in love ... “in love,” to this moment the phrase has a strangely foreign sound to me, like a classical allusion not entirely understood in some decorous, scholarly text. “In love,” I whispered to myself in the elevator as I left Paul that evening: in love with Iris.

3

We met at the Spokane railroad station and Iris drove me through the wide, clear, characterless streets to a country road which wound east into the hills, in the direction of a town with the lovely name of Coeur d’Alene.

She was relaxed. Her ordinarily pale face was faintly burned from the sun while her hair, which I recalled as darkly waving, was now streaked with light and worn loosely bound at the nape of her neck. She wore no cosmetics and her dress was simple cotton beneath the sweater she wore against the autumn’s chill. She looked young, younger than either of us actually was.

At first we talked of Spokane. She identified mountains and indicated hidden villages with an emphasis on places which sharply recalled Cave. Not until we had turned off the main highway into a country road, dark with fir and spruce, did she ask me about Paul.

“He’s very busy getting the New Year’s debut ready. He’s also got a set of offices for the company in Los Angeles and he’s engaged me to write an introduction to Cave ... but I suppose you knew that when he wired you I was coming.”

“It was my idea.”

“My coming? or the introduction?”

“Both. I talked to him about it just before we came up here.”

“And I thought he picked it out of the air while listening to me majestically place Cave among the philosophers.”

Iris smiled. “Paul’s not obvious. He enjoys laying traps and, as long as they’re for one’s own good, he’s very useful.”

“Implying he could be destructive?”

“Immensely. So be on your guard even though I don’t think he’ll harm any of us.”

“How is Cave?”

“I’m worried, Gene. He hasn’t got over that accident. He talks about it continually.”

“But the man didn’t die.”

“It would be better if he did ... as it is there’s a chance of a lawsuit against Cave for damages.”

“But he has no money.”

“That doesn’t prevent them from suing. Worst of all, though, would be the publicity. The whole thing has depressed John terribly. It was all I could do to keep him from announcing to the press that he had almost done the old man a favor.”

“You mean by killing him?”

Iris nodded, quite seriously. “That’s actually what he believes and the reason why he drove on.”

“I’m glad he said nothing like that to the papers.”

“But it’s true; his point of view is exactly right.”

“Except that the old man might regard the situation in a different light and, in any case, he was badly hurt and did not receive Cave’s gift of death.”

“Now you’re making fun of John.” She frowned and drove fast on the empty road.

“I’m doing no such thing. I’m absolutely serious. There’s a moral problem involved which is extremely important and if a precedent is set too early, a bad one like this, there’s no predicting how things will turn out.”

“You mean the ... the gift as you call it should only be given voluntarily?”

“Exactly ... if then, and only in extreme cases. Think what might happen if those who listened to Cave decided to make all their friends and enemies content by killing them.”

“Well, I wish you’d talk to him.” She smiled sadly. “I’m afraid I don’t always see things clearly when I’m with him. You know how he is ... how he convinces.”

“I’ll talk to him tactfully. I’ve also got to get a statement of belief from him.”

“But you have it already. We all have it.”

“Then I’ll want some moral application of it. We have so much ground to cover yet.”

“There’s the farm, up there on the hill.” A white frame building stood shining among elms on a low hill at the foot of blue sharp mountains. She turned up a dirt road and, in silence, we arrived at the house.

An old woman, the cook, greeted us familiarly and told Iris that he could be found in the study.

In a small warm room, sitting beside a stone fireplace empty of fire, Cave sat, a scrapbook on his knees, his expression vague, unfocused. Our arrival recalled him from some dense reverie. He got to his feet quickly and shook hands; “I’m glad you came,” he said.

“I wanted to see you,” I said awkwardly: it was Cave’s particular gift to strike a note of penetrating sincerity at all times, even in his greetings which became, as a result, disconcertingly like benedictions. Iris excused herself and I sat beside him in front of the fireplace.

“Have you seen these?” he asked, pushing the scrapbook toward me.

I took it and nodded when I saw, neatly pasted and labeled, the various newspaper stories concerning the accident. It had got a surprisingly large amount of space as though, instinctively, the editors had anticipated a coming celebrity for “Hit-and-Run Prophet.”

“Look what they say about me.”

“I’ve read them all,” I said, handing the scrapbook back to him, a little surprised that, considering his unworldliness, he had bothered to keep such careful track of his appearance in the press. It showed a new, rather touching side to him: he was like an actor hoarding his notices, good and bad. “I don’t think it’s serious: after all you were let off by the court, and the man didn’t die.”

“It was an accident of course yet that old man nearly received the greatest gift a man can have, a quick death. I wanted to tell the court that. I could’ve convinced them, I’m sure, but Paul said no. It was the first time I’ve ever gone against my own instinct and I don’t like it.” Emphatically, he shut the book.

We watched the cook who came into the room and lit the fire. When the first crackling filled the room and the pine had caught, she left, observing that we were to eat in an hour.

“You want to wash up?” asked Cave mechanically, his eyes on the fire, his hands clasped in his lap like those dingy marble replicas of hands which decorate medieval tombs: that night there was an unhuman look to Cave: pale, withdrawn, inert ... his lips barely moving when he spoke, as though another’s voice spoke through senseless flesh.

“No thanks,” I said, a little chilled by his tone, by his remoteness. I got him off the subject of the accident as quickly as possible and we talked until dinner of the introduction I was to write. It was most enlightening. As I suspected, Cave had read only the Bible and that superficially, just enough to be able, at crucial moments, to affect the seventeenth-century prose of the translators and to confound thereby simple listeners with the familiar authority of his manner. His knowledge of philosophy did not even encompass the names of the principals. Plato and Aristotle rang faint, unrelated bells and with them the meager carillon ended.

“I don’t know why you want to drag in those people,” he said, after I had suggested Zoroaster as a possible point of beginning. “Most people have never heard of them either. And what I have to say is all my own. It doesn’t tie in with any of them or, if it does, it’s a coincidence because I never picked it up anywhere.”

“I think, though, that it would help matters if we did provide a sort of family tree for you, to show....”

“I don’t.” He gestured with his effigy-hands. “Let them argue about it later. For now, act like this is a new beginning, which it is. I have only one thing to give people and that is the way to die without fear, gladly ... to accept nothing for what it is, a long and dreamless sleep.”

I had to fight against that voice, those eyes which as always, when he chose, could dominate any listener. Despite my close association with him, despite the thousands of times I heard him speak, I was never, even in moments of lucid disenchantment, quite able to resist his power. He was a magician in the great line of Simon Magus and the Faust of legend. That much, even now, I will acknowledge ... his divinity, however, was and is the work of others, shaped and directed by the race’s recurrent need.

I surrendered in the name of philosophy with a certain relief, and he spoke in specific terms of what he believed and what I should write in his name.

It was not until after dinner that we got around, all three of us, to a problem which was soon to absorb us all, with near-disastrous results.

We had been talking amiably of neutral things and Cave had emerged somewhat from his earlier despondency. He got on to the subject of the farm where we were, of its attractiveness and remoteness, of its owner who lived in Spokane.

“I always liked old Smathers. You’d like him too. He’s got one of the biggest funeral parlors in the state. I used to work for him and then, when I started on all this, he backed me up to the hilt. Lent me money to get as far as San Francisco. After that of course it was easy. I paid him back every cent.”

“Does he get here often?”

Cave shook his head. “No, he lets me use the farm but he keeps away. He says he doesn’t approve of what I’m doing. You see he’s Catholic.”

“But he still likes John,” said Iris who had been stroking a particularly ugly yellow cat beside the fire. So it was John now, I thought. Iris was the only person ever to call him by his first name.

“Yes. He’s a good friend.”

“There’ll be a lot of trouble, you know,” I said.

“From Smathers?”

“No, from the Catholics, from the Christians.”

“You really think so?” Cave looked at me curiously. I believe that until that moment he had never realized the inevitable collision of his point of view with that of the established religions.

“Of course I do. They’ve constructed an entire ethical system upon a supernatural foundation whose main strength is the promise of a continuation of human personality after death. You are rejecting grace, heaven, hell, the Trinity ...”

“I’ve never said anything about the Trinity or about Christianity.”

“But you’ll have to say something about it sooner or later. If—or rather when—the people begin to accept you, the churches will fight back and the greater the impression you make the more fierce their attack.”

“I suspect John is the anti-Christ,” said Iris and I saw from her expression that she was perfectly serious. “He’s come to undo all the wickedness of the Christians.”

“Though not, I hope, of Christ,” I said. “There’s some virtue in his legend, even as corrupted at Nicea three centuries after the fact.”

“I’ll have to think about it,” said Cave. “I don’t know that I’ve ever given it much thought before. I’ve spoken always what I knew was true and there’s never been any opposition, at least that I’ve been aware of, to my face. It never occurred to me that people who like to think of themselves as Christians couldn’t accept both me and Christ at the same time. I know I don’t promise the kingdom of heaven but I do promise oblivion and the loss of self, of pain....”

“Gene is right,” said Iris. “They’ll fight you hard. You must get ready now while you still have time to think it out, before Paul puts you to work and you’ll never have a moment’s peace again.”

“As bad as that, you think?” Cave sighed wistfully. “But how to get ready? What shall I do? I never think things out, you know. Everything occurs to me on the spot. I can never tell what may occur to me next. It happens only when I speak to people. When I’m alone, I seldom think of the ... the main things; yet, when I’m in a group talking to them I hear ... no, not hear, I feel voices telling me what I should say. That’s why I never prepare a talk, why I don’t really like to have them taken down: they’re something which are meant only for the instant they are conceived ... a child, if you like, made for just a moment’s life by the people listening and myself speaking. I don’t mean to sound touched,” he added, with a sudden smile. “I’m not really hearing things but I do get something from those people, something besides the thing I tell them. I seem to become a part of them, as though what goes on in their minds also goes on in me, at the same time, two lobes to a single brain.”

“We know that, John,” said Iris softly. “We’ve felt it.”

“I suppose, then, that’s the key,” said Cave. “Though it isn’t much to write about; you can’t put it across without me to say it.”

“You may be wrong there,” I said. “Of course in the beginning you will say the word but I think in time, properly managed, everyone will accept it on the strength of evidence and statement, responding to the chain of forces you have set in motion.” Yet for all the glibness with which I spoke, I did not really believe that Cave would prove to be more than an interesting momentary phenomenon whose “truth” about death might, at best, contribute in a small way to the final abolition of those old warring superstitions which had mystified and troubled men for twenty dark centuries. A doubt which displayed my basic misunderstanding of our race’s will to death and, worse, to a death in life made radiant by false dreams, by desperate adjurations.

But that evening we spoke only of a bright future: “To begin again is the important thing,” I said. “Christianity, though strong as an organization in this country, is weak as a force because, finally, the essential doctrine is not accepted by most of the people: the idea of a man-like God dispensing merits and demerits at time’s exotic end.”

“We are small,” said Cave. “In space, on this tiny planet, we are nothing. Death brings us back to the whole. We lose this instant of awareness, of suffering, like spray in the ocean: there it forms ... there it goes, back to the sea.”

“I think people will listen to you because they realize now that order, if there is any, has never been revealed, that death is the end of personality even for those passionate, self-important 'I’s’ who insist upon a universal deity like themselves, carefully presented backwards in order not to give the game away.”

“How dark, how fine the grave must be! only sleep and an end of days, an end of fear: the end of fear in the grave as the 'I’ goes back to nothing....”

“How wonderful life will be when men no longer fear dying! When the last superstitions are thrown out and we meet death with the same equanimity that we have met life. No longer will children’s minds be twisted by evil, demanding, moralizing gods whose fantastic origin is in those barbaric tribes who feared death and lightning, who feared life. That’s it: life is the villain to those maniacs who preach reward in death: grace and eternal bliss ... or dark revenge....”

“Neither revenge nor reward, only the not-knowing in the grave which is the same for all....”

“And without those inhuman laws, what societies we might build! Take the morality of Christ. Begin there, or even earlier with Plato or earlier yet with Zoroaster ... take the best ideas of the best men and should there be any disagreement as to what is best, use life as the definition, life as the measure: what contributes most to the living is the best.”

“But the living is soon done and the sooner done the better. I envy those who have already gone....”

“If they listen to you, Cave, it will be like the unlocking of a prison. At first they may go wild but then, on their own, they will find ways to life. Fear and punishment in death has seldom stopped the murderer’s hand. The only two things which hold him from his purpose are, at the worst, fear of reprisal from society and, at the best, a feeling for life, a love for all that lives ... and not the wide-smiling idiot’s love but a sense of the community of the living, of life’s marvelous regency ... even the most ignorant has felt this. Life is all while death is only the irrelevant shadow at the end, the counterpart to that instant before the seed lives.”

Yes, I believed all that, all that and more too, and I felt Cave was the same as I; by removing fear with that magic of his, he would fulfill certain hopes of my own and (I flatter myself perhaps) of the long line of others, nobler than I, who had been equally engaged in attempting to use life more fully. And so that evening it welled up suddenly: the hidden conviction behind a desultory life broke through that chill hard surface of disappointment and disgust which had formed a brittle carapace about my heart. I had, after all, my truth too, and Cave had got to it, broken the shell ... and for that I shall remain grateful ... until we are at last the same, both taken by dust.

Excitedly, we talked ... I talked mostly, I think. Cave was the theme and I the counterpoint or so I thought. He had stated it and I built on it, built outward from what I conceived to be the luminosity of his vision. Our dialogue was one of communion, I believed and he believed too. Only Iris guessed, even then, that it was not. She saw the difference; she was conscious of the division which that moment had, unknown to either of us, separated me from Cave. Each time I said “life,” he said “death.” In true amity but false concord war began.

Iris, more practical than we, deflated our visions by pulling the dialogue gently back to reality, to ways and dull means.

It was agreed that we had agreed on fundamentals, that the end of fear was desirable; that superstition should be exorcised from human affairs; that the ethical systems expressed by the major religious figures from Zoroaster to Mohammed all contained useful and applicable ideas of societal behavior which need not be entirely discarded.

At Iris’s suggestion, we left the problem of Christianity itself completely alone. Cave’s truth was sufficient cause for battle. There was no reason, she felt, for antagonizing the ultimate enemy at the very beginning.

“Let them attack you, John. You must be above quarreling; you must act as if they are too much in error even to notice.”

“I reckon I am above it,” said Cave and he sounded almost cheerful for the first time since my arrival. “I want no trouble, but if trouble comes I don’t intend to back down. I’ll just go on saying what I know.”

At midnight, Cave excused himself and went to bed.

Iris and I sat silently before the last red embers on the hearth. I sensed that something had gone wrong but I could not tell then what it was.

When she spoke, her manner was abrupt: “Do you really want to go on with this?”

“What an odd time to ask me that. Of course I do. Tonight’s the first time I really saw what it was Cave meant, what it was I’d always felt but never before known, consciously, that is. I couldn’t be more enthusiastic.”

“I hope you don’t change.”

“Why so glum? What are you trying to say? After all you got me into this.”

“I know I did and I think I was right. It’s only that this evening I felt ... well, I don’t know. Perhaps I’m getting a bit on edge.” She smiled and, through all the youth and health, I saw that she was anxious and ill-at-ease.

“That business about the accident?”

“Mainly, yes. The lawyers say that now that the old man’s all right he’ll try to collect damages. He’ll sue Cave.”

“Nasty publicity.”

“The worst. It’s upset John terribly ... he almost feels it’s an omen.”

“I thought we were dispensing with all that, with miracles and omens.” I smiled but she did not.

“Speak for yourself.” She got up and pushed at the coals with the fire shovel. “Paul says he’ll handle everything but I don’t see how. There’s no way he can stop a lawsuit.”

But I was tired of this one problem which was, all things considered, out of our hands in any case. I asked her about herself and Cave.

“Is it wise my being up here with John, alone? No, I’m afraid not but that’s the way it is.” Her voice was hard and her back which was turned to me grew stiff, her movements with the fire shovel angry and abrupt.

“People will use it against both of you. It may hurt him, and all of us.”

She turned suddenly, her face flushed. “I can’t help it, Gene. I swear I can’t. I’ve tried to keep away. I almost flew East with Clarissa but when he asked me to join him here, I did. I couldn’t leave him.”

“Will marriage be a part of the new order?”

“Don’t joke.” She sat down angrily in a noise of skirts crumpling. “Cave must never marry. Besides it’s ... it isn’t like that.”

“Really? I must confess I ...”

“Thought we were having an affair? Well, it’s not true.” The rigidity left her as suddenly as it had possessed her. She grew visibly passive, even helpless, in the worn upholstered chair, her eyes on me, the anger gone and only weakness left. “What can I do?” It was a cry from the heart ... all the more touching because, obviously, she had not intended to tell me this. She’d turned to me because there was no one else to whom she could talk.

“You ... love him?” That word which whenever I spoke it in those days always stuck in my throat like a diminutive sob.

“More, more,” she said distractedly. “But I can’t do anything or be anything. He’s complete. He doesn’t need anyone. He doesn’t want me except as ... a companion, and advisor like you or Paul ... it’s all the same to him.”

“I don’t see that it’s hopeless.”

“Hopeless!” The word snot from her like a desperate deed. She buried her face in her hands but she did not weep. I sat awkwardly, inadequately watching her. The noise of a clock alone separated us: its dry ticking kept the silence from falling in about our heads.

Finally, she dropped her hands and turned toward me with her usual grace, “You mustn’t take me too seriously,” she said. “Or I mustn’t take myself too seriously which is more to the point. Cave doesn’t really need me or anyone and we ... I, perhaps you, certainly others, need him. It’s best no one try to claim him all as a woman would do, as I might, given the chance.” She rose. “It’s late and you must be tired. Don’t ever mention to anyone what I’ve told you tonight ... especially to John. If he knew the way I felt....” She left it at that. I gave my promise and we went to our rooms.

I stayed two days at the farm, listening to Cave who continually referred to the accident: he was almost petulant, as though the whole business were an irrelevant, gratuitous trick played on him by a malicious old man.

His days were spent reading his mail (there was quite a bit of it even then), composing answers which Iris typed out for him, and walking in the wooded hills which surrounded the farm on two sides.

The weather was sharp and bright and the wind, when it blew, tasted of ice from the glaciers in the vivid mountains: winter was nearly with us and red leaves decorated the wind, so many ribbons for so much summer color. Only the firs remained unchanged, warm and dark in the bright chill days.

Cave and I would walk together while Iris remained indoors, working. He was a good walker, calm, unhurried, sure-footed, and he knew all the trails beneath the yellow and red leaves fallen.

Cave agreed with me on most of my ideas concerning the introduction; and I promised to send him my first draft as soon as I’d got it done. He was genuinely indifferent to the philosophic aspect of what he preached. He acted almost as if he did not want to hear of those others who had approached the great matter in a similar way. When I talked to him of the fourth-century Donatists who detested life and loved heaven so much that they would request strangers to kill them, magistrates to execute them for no crime, he stopped me: “I don’t want to hear all that. That’s finished. All that’s over. We want new things now.”

Iris, too, seemed uninterested in any formalizing of Cave’s thought though she saw its necessity and wished me well, suggesting that I not ever intimate derivation since, in fact, there had been none: what he was, he had become on his own, uninstructed.

During our walks, I got to know Cave as well as I was ever to know him. He was indifferent, I think, to everyone. He gave one his private time in precise ratio to one’s belief in him and importance to his work. With groups, with the masses, he was another creature: warm, intoxicating, human, yet transcendent ... a part of each human being who beheld him at such times, the longed-for complement to the common soul.

Yet though I found him, as a human being, without much warmth or intellectual interest I nevertheless identified him with the release I’d known in his presence and, for this new certainty of life’s value and of death’s irrelevance, I loved him.

On the third day I made up my mind to go back East and do the necessary writing in New York, away from Paul’s hectic influence and Cave’s advice. Cave asked me to stay with him for the rest of the week but I could see that Iris regarded me now as a potential danger, a keeper of secrets who might, despite promises, prove to be disloyal; and so, to set her mind at ease as well as to suit my own new plans, I told her after lunch on the third day, when we were for a moment alone in the study, that I had said nothing to Cave, that I was ready to go back that evening if she would drive me to Spokane.

“You’re a good friend,” she said. “I made a fool of myself the other night. I wish you’d forget it ... forget everything I said.”

“I’ll never mention it. Now, the problem is how I can leave here gracefully. Cave just asked me this morning to stay on and ...”

But I was given a perfect means of escape. Cave came running into the room, his eyes shining. “Paul! I’ve just talked to Paul in L.A. It’s all over! No heirs, nothing, no lawsuit. No damages to pay.”

“What’s happened?” Iris stopped him in his excitement.

“The old man’s dead!”

“Oh Lord!” Iris went gray. “That means a manslaughter charge!”

“No, no ... not because of the accident. He was in another accident. A truck hit him the day after he left the hospital. Yesterday. He was killed instantly ... lucky devil: and of course we’re in luck too.”

“Did they find who hit him?” I asked, suddenly suspicious. Iris looked at me fiercely. She had got it too.

“No. Paul said it was a hit-and-run. He said this time the police didn’t find who did it. Paul said his analyst calls it 'a will to disaster’ ... he wanted to be run over. Of course that’s hardly a disaster but the analyst thinks the old way.”

I left that afternoon for New York, leaving Cave jubilantly making plans for the New Year: everything was again possible. Neither Iris nor I mentioned what we both knew ... each of us, in our different way, accommodating the first of many crimes, as we drove across the smoky hills to Spokane.

Six

1

“The tone, dear Gene, has all the unction, all the earnest turgidity of a theologian. You are perfect.” Clarissa beamed at me wickedly over lunch in the Plaza Hotel. We sat at a table beside a great plate-glass window through which we could see the frosted bleak expanse of Central Park, dingy in city snow, ringed by buildings like so many mountain peaks, monotonous in their sharp symmetry. The sky was sullen, gray with more snow to fall. The year was nearly over.

“I thought it really quite to the point,” I said loftily but with an anxious look at the thin black volume between us which was that day to be published. The hasty work of one hectic month released in record time by a connection of Paul Himmell’s.

“It’s pure nonsense, your historical part. I know, though I confess I was never one for the philosophers in those days ... dreary egotistical men, worse than the actors and not half so lovely. Waiter, I will have a melon: out of season I hope. I suggest you have it too. It’s light.”

I ordered pot-de-crême, the heaviest dessert on the menu.

“I’ve made you angry,” Clarissa pretended contrition. “I was only trying to compliment you. What I meant was that the sort of thing you’re doing I think is nonsense only because action is what counts, action on any level ... not theorizing.”

“There’s a certain action to thinking, you know, even to writing about the thoughts of others.”

“Oh, darling, don’t sound so stuffy. Your dessert, by the way, poisons the liver. Oh, isn’t that Bishop Winston over there by the door, in tweed? In mufti, eh, Bishop?”

The Bishop, who was passing our table in the company of a handsomely pale youth whose contemplation of orders shone in his face like some cherished sin, stopped and, with a smile, shook Clarissa’s hand.

“Ah, how are you? I missed you the other night at Agnes’s. She told me you’ve been engaged in social work.”

“A euphemism, Bishop.” Clarissa introduced me and the prelate moved on to his table, a robust gray-haired man with good coloring and a look of ease.

“Catholic?”

“No, Episcopal. I like them the best, I think. They adore society and good works ... spiritual Whigs you might call them, a civilizing influence. Best of all, so few of them believe in God, unlike the Catholics or those terrible Calvinist peasants who are forever saving themselves and damning others.”

“I think, Clarissa, you’re much too hard on the Episcopalians. I’m sure they must believe what they preach. At least the clergy do.”

“Well, we shall probably never know. Social work! I knew Agnes would come up with something altogether wrong. Still, I’m just as glad it’s not out yet. Not until the big debut tomorrow afternoon. I hope you’ve made arrangements to be near a television set. No? Then come to my place and we’ll see it together. Cave’s asked us both to the station, by the way, but I think it better if we not distract him.”

“Iris came East with him?”

“Indeed she did. They both arrived last night. I thought you’d talked to her.”

“No. I haven’t been in touch with either of them since I got back to New York. Paul’s the only one I ever see.”

“He keeps the whole thing going, I must say. One of those born organizers. Now! what about you and Iris?”

This came so suddenly, without preparation, that it took me a suspiciously long time to answer, weakly: “I don’t know what you mean. What about Iris and me?”

“Darling, I know everything.” She looked at me in her eager, predatory way: I was secretly pleased that, in this particular case at least, she knew nothing.

“Then tell me.”

“You’re in love with her and she’s classically involved with Cave.”

“Classical seems to be the wrong word. Nothing has happened and nothing will happen.”

“I suppose she told you this herself.”

I was trapped for a moment. Clarissa, even in error, was shrewd and if one was not on guard she would quickly cease to be in error, at one’s expense.

“No, not exactly; but Paul who does, I think, know everything about our affairs assures me that nothing has happened, that Cave is not interested in women.”

“In men?”

“I thought you were all-knowing. No, not in men nor in wild animals nor, does it seem, from the evidence Paul’s collected, in anything except John Cave. Sex does not happen for him.”

“Oh,” said Clarissa, exhaling slowly, significantly, inscrutably. She abandoned her first line of attack to ask: “But you are crazy about Iris, aren’t you? That’s what I’d intended, you know, when I brought you two together.”

“I thought it was to bring me into Cave’s orbit.”

“That, too, but somehow I saw you and Iris ... well, you’re obviously going to give me no satisfaction so I shall be forced to investigate on my own.”

“Not to sound too auctorial, too worried, do you think it will get Cave across? the introduction here?”

“I see no reason why not. Look at the enormous success of those books with tides like 'Eternal Bliss Can Be Yours for the Asking’ or 'Happiness at Your Beck-and-Call.’”

“I’m a little more ambitious.”

“Not in the least. But the end served is the same. You got down the main line of Cave’s thinking, if it can be called thinking. And your book, along with his presence, should have an extraordinary effect.”

“Do you really think so? I’ve begun to doubt.”

“Indeed I do. They are waiting ... all those sad millions who want to believe will find him exactly right for their purposes. He exists only to be believed in. He’s a natural idol ... did you know that when Constantine moved his court to the East, his heirs were trained by Eastern courtiers to behave like idols and when his son came in triumph back to Rome (what a day that was! hot, but exciting) he rode for hours through the crowded streets without once moving a finger or changing expression, a perfectly trained god. We were all so impressed ...”

I cut this short. “Has it occurred to you that they might not want to believe anything, just like you and me.”

“Nonsense ... and it’s rude to interrupt, dear, even a garrulous relic like myself ... yet after all, in a way, we do believe what Cave says. Death is there and he makes it seem perfectly all right, oblivion and the rest of it. And dying does rather upset a lot of people. Have you noticed one thing that the devoutly superstitious can never understand is the fact that though we do not accept the fairy tale of reward or punishment beyond the grave we still are reluctant to 'pass on,’ as the nuts say? As though the prospect of nothing isn’t really, in a way, without friend Cave to push one into acceptance, perfectly ghastly, much worse than toasting on a grid like that poor saint up north. But now I must fly. Come to the apartment at seven and I’ll give you dinner. He’s on at eight. Afterwards they’ll all join us.” Clarissa flew.

I spent the afternoon gloomily walking up and down Fifth Avenue filled with doubt and foreboding, wishing now that I had never lent myself to the conspiracy, confident of its failure and of the rude laughter or, worse, the tactful silence of friends who would be astonished to find that after so many years of promise and reflection my first book should prove to be an apologia for an obscure evangelist whose only eminence was that of having mesmerized myself and an energetic publicist, among a number of others more likely perhaps than we, to take to a crank.

The day did nothing to improve my mood and it was in a most depressed state that I went finally to Clarissa’s baroque apartment on one of the better streets and dined with her quietly, infecting her, I was darkly pleased to note, with my own grim mood. By the time Cave was announced on the vast television screen, I had reduced Clarissa, for one of the few times in our acquaintance, to silence.

Yet as the lights in the room mechanically dimmed, as the screen grew bright with color and an announcer came into focus, I was conscious of a quickening of my pulse, of a certain excitement. Here it was at last, the result of nearly a year’s careful planning. Soon, in a matter of minutes, we would know.

To my surprise Paul Himmell was introduced by the announcer who identified him perfunctorily, saying that the following half hour had been bought by Cavite, Inc.

Paul spoke briefly, earnestly. He was nervous, I could see, and his eyes moved from left to right disconcertingly as he read his introduction from cards out of view of the camera. He described Cave briefly as a teacher, as a highly regarded figure in the West. He implied it was as a public service, the rarest of philanthrophies, that a group of industrialists and businessmen were sponsoring Cave this evening.

Then Paul walked out of range of the camera leaving, briefly, a view of a chair and a table behind which a handsome blue velvet curtain fell in rich graceful folds from the invisible ceiling to an imitation marble floor. An instant later, Cave walked into view.

Both Clarissa and I leaned forward in our chairs tensely, eagerly, anxiously: we were there as well as he. This was our moment too. My hands grew cold and my throat dry.

Cave was equal to the moment. He looked tall: the scale of the table, the chair was exactly right. He wore a dark suit and a dark unfigured tie with a white shirt that gave him an austereness which, in person, he lacked. I saw Paul’s stage-managing in this.

He moved easily into range, his eyes cast down. Not until he had placed himself in front of the table and the camera had squarely centered him, did he look up, look directly into the lens. Clarissa gasped and I felt suddenly pierced: the camera, the lights had magnified rather than diminished his power. It made no difference now what he said. The magic was working.

Clarissa and I sat in the twilight of her drawing room, entirely concentrated on that vivid screen, on the dark figure upon rich blue, on the pale eyes and the hands which seldom moved. It was like some fascinating scene in a skillful play which, quite against one’s wish and aesthetic judgment, pulled one to it, became, at least for that short time beyond real time, a part of one’s own private drama of existence, all sharpened by artifice, by calculated magic.

Not until Cave was nearly finished did those first words of his, spoken so easily, so quietly, begin to come back to me as he repeated them in his coda. His voice increasing a little in volume, yet still not hurrying, not forcing, not breaking the mood which his first glance had created and which voice and eyes together maintained without once letting go. The burden of his words was, as always, the same. Yet this time it seemed more awesome, more final, undeniable ... in short, the truth. Though I’d always accepted his first premise, I had never been much impressed by the ways he found of stating it, even though I always responded to his particular power. This night, before the camera and in the sight of millions, he perfected his singular art of communication and the world was his.

When he finished, Clarissa and I sat for a moment in complete silence, the chirping of a commercial the only sound in the room. At last she said: “The brandy is over there on the console. Get me some.” Then she switched off the screen from her chair and the lights of the room brightened again.

“I feel dragged through a wringer,” she said after her first mouthful of brandy.

“I had no idea it would work so well, like this, on television.” I felt strangely empty, let down. There was hardly any doubt now of Cave’s effectiveness yet I felt joyless and depleted, as though part of my life had gone, leaving an ache.

“What a time we’re going to have.” Clarissa was beginning to recover. “I’ll bet there are a million letters by morning and Paul will be doing a jig.”

“I hope this is the right thing, Clarissa. It would be terrible if it weren’t.”

“Of course it’s right ... whatever that means: if it works it’s right ... perfectly simple. Such conceptions are all a matter of fashion anyway. One year women expose only their ankle; the next year their derrière. What’s right one year is wrong the next. If Cave captures the popular imagination, he’ll be right until someone better comes along.”

“A little cynical.” But Clarissa was only repeating my own usual line. I was, or had been until that night on the Washington farm, a contented relativist. Cave, however, had jolted me into new ways and I was bewildered by the change, by the prospect ahead.

2

That evening was a time of triumph, at least for Cave’s companions. They arrived noisily. Paul seemed drunk, manically exhilarated, while Iris glowed in a formal gown of green shot with gold. Two men accompanied them, one a doctor whose name I didn’t catch at first and the other a man from the television network who looked wonderfully sleek and pleased and kept patting Cave on the arm every now and then, as if to assure himself he’d not vanished in smoke and fire.

Cave, still dressed in his dark suit, was mute. He sat answering questions and replying to compliments with grave nods of his head. He sat in a high brocaded chair beside the fire and drank tea which Clarissa, knowing his habits, had ordered in advance for him.

After our first burst of greetings at the door I did not speak to Cave again and soon the others left him alone and talked around him, about him yet through him, as though he had become invisible ... which seemed the case when he was not speaking, when those extraordinary eyes were veiled or cast down, as they were now, moodily studying the teacup, the pattern in the Aubusson rug at his feet.

I crossed the room to where Iris sat on the wide couch. The doctor, in the chair close to her, snuffled brandy and said, as I joined them: “Your little book, sir, is written in a complete ignorance of Jung and all those who have come after him.”

This was sudden but I answered, as graciously as possible, that I had not intended a treatise on psychoanalysis.

“Not the point, sir, if you’ll excuse me.... I am a psychiatrist, a friend of Mr Himmell’s” (so this was the analyst to whom Paul so often referred) “and I think it impossible for anyone today to write about the big things without a complete understanding of post-Jungian development....”

Iris interrupted as politely as possible. “Doctor Stokharin is a zealot, Gene. You must listen to him but, first, did you see John tonight?”

“I did, here with Clarissa: he was remarkable, even more so than in person.”

“It is the isolation,” said Stokharin, nodding. Dandruff fell lightly like dry snow from his thick brows to his dark blue lapels. “The camera separates him from everyone else. He is projected like a dream into....”

“He was so afraid at first,” said Iris, glancing across the room at the silent Cave who sat, very small and still in the brocaded chair, the teacup still balanced on one knee. “I’ve never seen him disturbed by anything before. They tried to get him to do a rehearsal but he refused. He can’t do rehearsals ... only the actual thing.”

“Fear is natural when ...” but Stokharin was in the presence of a master drawing-room tactician: Iris was, I saw at that moment, a born hostess. For all her ease and simplicity she was ruthlessly concerned with keeping order, establishing a rightness of tone which Doctor Stokharin, in his professional madness, would have completely undone, reducing the drawing room to a seminar in mental therapy, receiving public confessions judiciously, and generalizing to a captive audience. I admired Iris’s firmness, her devotion to the civilized.

“At first we hardly knew what to do.” Iris’s voice rose serenely over the East European rumblings of the doctor. “He’d always made such a point of the audience. He needed actual people to excite him. Paul wanted to fill the studio with a friendly audience but John said no. He’d try it without. When the talk began there were only a half dozen of us there: Paul, myself, and the technicians. No one else.”

“How did he manage?”

“It was the camera. He said when he walked out there he had no idea if anything would happen or not, if he could speak. Paul was nearly out of his mind with terror; we all were. Then John saw the lens of the camera. He said looking into it gave him a sudden shock, like a current of electricity passing through him, for there, in front of him, was the eye of the world and the microphone above his head was the ear into which at last he could speak. When he finished, he was transfigured. I’ve never seen him so excited. He couldn’t recall what he had said but the elation remained until....”

“Until he got here.”

“Well, nearly.” Iris smiled. “He’s been under a terrible strain these last two weeks.”

“It’ll be nothing like the traumatizing shocks in store for him during the next few days,” said Stokharin, rubbing the bole of a rich dark pipe against his nose to bring out its luster (the pipe’s luster, for the nose, straight, thick, proud, already shone like a gross baroque pearl). “Mark my words, everyone will be eager to see this phenomenon. When Paul first told me about him, I said, ah, my friend, you have found that father image for which you’ve searched since your own father was run over by a bus in your ninth (the crucial) year. Poor Paul, I said, you will be doomed to disappointment. The wish for the father is the sign of your immaturity. For a time you find him here, there ... in analysis you transfer to me. Now you meet a spellbinder and you turn to him, but it will not last. Exactly like that I talked to him. Believe me, I hold back nothing. Then I met this Cave. I watched him. Ah, what an analyst he would have made! What a manner, what power of communication: a natural healer. If only we could train him. Miss Mortimer, to you I appeal. Get him to study. The best people, the post-Jungians are all here in New York. They will train him. He would become only a lay analyst but, even so, what miracles he could perform, what therapy! We must not waste this native genius.”

“I’m afraid, Doctor, that he’s going to be too busy wasting himself to study your ... procedures,” Iris smiled, engagingly, dislike apparent in her radiant eyes. Stokharin, however, was not sensitive to hostility ... no doubt attributing such emotions to some sad deficiency in the other’s adjustment.

Iris turned to me. “Will you be in the city the whole time?”

“The whole time Cave’s here? Yes. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

“I’m glad. I’ve so much I want to talk to you about. So many things are beginning to happen. Call me tomorrow. I’ll be staying at my old place. It’s in the book.”

“Cave?”

“Is staying with Paul, out on Long Island at someone’s house. We want to keep him away from pests as much as possible.”

“Manic depression, I should say,” said Stokharin thoughtfully, his pipe now clenched between his teeth and his attention on Cave’s still figure. “With latent schizoid tendencies which ... Miss Mortimer, you must have an affair with him. You must marry him if necessary. Have children. Let him see what it is to give life to others, to live in a balanced....”

“Doctor, you are quite mad,” said Iris and she crossed the room, cool in her anger. I too got away from the doctor as quickly as I could: “False modesty, inhibited behavior, too early bowel training,” and similar phrases ringing in my ears.

Paul caught me at the door. I’d intended to slip away without saying good night, confident that Clarissa would understand, that the others would not notice. “Not going so soon, are you?” He was a little drunk, his face scarlet with excitement. “But you ought to stay and celebrate.” I murmured something about having an early appointment the next day.

“Well, see me tomorrow. We’ve taken temporary offices in the Empire State Building. The money has begun to roll in. If this thing tonight turns out the way I think it has, I’m going to be able to quit my other racket for good and devote all my time to Cave.” Already the name Cave had begun to sound more like that of an institution than of a man.

“By the way, I want to tell you what I think of the Introduction: superior piece of work. Tried it out on several highbrow friends of mine and they liked it.”

“I’m afraid....”

“That, together with the talks on television, should put this thing over with the biggest bang in years. We’ll probably need some more stuff from you, historical background, rules and regulations, that kind of thing, but Cave will tell you what he wants. We’ve hired a dozen people already to take care of the mail and inquiries. There’s also a lecture tour being prepared, all the main cities, while....”

“Paul, you’re not trying to make a religion of this, are you?” I could hold it back no longer even though both time and occasion were all wrong for such an outburst.

“Religion? Hell, no ... but we’ve got to organize. We’ve got to get this to as many people as we can. People have started looking to us (to him, that is) for guidance. We can’t let them down.”

Clarissa’s maid ushered in a Western Union messenger, laden with telegrams. “Over three hundred,” said the boy. “The station said to send them here.”

Paul paid him jubilantly and, in the excitement, I slipped away.

3

The results of the broadcast were formidable. My small book which until then had enjoyed the obscurity of being briefly noted among the recent books was taken up by excited editors who used it as a basis for hurried but exuberant accounts of the new marvel.

One night a week for the rest of that winter Cave appeared before the shining glass eye of the world and on each occasion new millions in all parts of the country listened and saw and pondered this unexpected phenomenon, the creation of their own secret anxieties and doubts, a central man.

The reactions were too numerous for me to recollect in any order or with any precise detail; but I do recall the first few months vividly: after that of course the work moved swiftly of its own and one lost track of events which tended to blur, the way casualties late in a large war do, not wringing the wearied heart as the death of one or a particular few might earlier have done.

A few days after the first broadcast, I went to see Paul at the offices which he had taken in the Empire State Building ... as high up as possible, I noted with amusement: always the maximum, the optimum.

Halfway down a corridor, between lawyers and exporters, Cavite, Inc. was discreetly identified in black upon a frosted-glass door. I went inside.

It appeared to me the way I’d always thought a newspaper office during a crisis might look. Four rooms opening in a row off one another, all with doors open, all crowded with harassed secretaries and clean-looking young men in blue serge suits carrying papers, talking in loud voices which together made the room sound like a hive at swarming time.

Though none of them knew me, no one made any attempt to ask my business or to stop me as I moved from room to room in search of Paul. Everywhere there were placards with Cave’s picture on them, calm and gloomy-looking, dressed in what was to be his official costume: a dark suit, an unfigured tie, a white shirt. I tried to overhear conversations as I passed the busy desks and groups of excited debaters, but their noise was too loud. Only one word was identifiable, sounding regularly, richly emphatic like a cello note: Cave, Cave, Cave.

In each room I saw piles of my Introduction which pleased me even though I had come already to dislike it.

The last room contained Paul, seated behind a desk with a dictaphone in one hand, three telephones on his desk (none fortunately ringing at this moment) and four male and female attendants with notebooks and pencils eagerly poised. Paul sprang from his chair when he saw me. The attendants fell back. “Here he is!” He grabbed my hand and clung to it vise-like: I could almost feel the energy pulsing in his fingertips, vibrating through his body ... his heartbeat was obviously two to my every one.

“Team, this is Eugene Luther.”

The team was properly impressed and one of the girls, slovenly but intelligent-looking, said: “It was you who brought me here. First you I mean ... and then of course Cave.”

I murmured vaguely and the others told me how clear I had made all philosophy in the light of Cavesword. (I believe it was that day, certainly that week, Cavesword was coined by Paul to denote the entire message of John Cave to the world).

Paul then shooed the team out with instructions he was not to be bothered. The door, however, was left open.

“Well, what do you think of them?” He leaned back, beaming at me from his chair.

“They seem very ... earnest,” I said, wondering not only what I was supposed to think but, more to the point, what I did think of the whole business.

“I’ll say they are! I tell you, Gene, I’ve never seen anything like it. The thing’s bigger even than that damned crooner I handled ... you may remember the one. Everyone has been calling up and, look!” He pointed to several bushel baskets containing telegrams and letters. “This is only a fraction of the response since the telecast. From all over the world. I tell you, Gene, we’re in.”

“What about Cave? Where is he?”

“He’s out on Long Island. The press is on my tail trying to interview him but I say no, no go, fellows, not yet; and does that excite them! We’ve had to hire guards at the place on Long Island just to keep them away.”

“How is Cave taking it all?”

“In his stride, absolute model of coolness which is more than I am. He agrees that it’s better to keep him under wraps while the telecasts are going on. It means that curiosity about him will increase like nobody’s business. Look at this.” He showed me a proof sheet of a tabloid story: “Mystery Prophet Wows TV Audience,” with a photograph of Cave taken from the telecast and another one showing Cave ducking into a taxi, his face turned away from the camera. The story seemed most provocative and, for that complacent tabloid, a little bewildered.

“Coming out Sunday,” said Paul with satisfaction. “There’s also going to be coverage from the big circulation media. They’re going to cover the next broadcast even though we said nobody’d be allowed on the set while Cave was speaking.” He handed me a bundle of manuscript pages bearing the title “Who Is Cave?” “That’s the story I planted in one of the slick magazines. Hired a name-writer, as you can see, to do it.” The name-writer’s name was not known to me but, presumably, it would be familiar to the mass audience.

“And, biggest of all, we got a sponsor. We had eleven offers already and we’ve taken Dumaine Chemicals. They’re paying us enough money to underwrite this whole setup here, and pay for Cave and me as well. It’s terrific but dignified. Just a simple 'through the courtesy of’ at the beginning and another at the end of each telecast. What do you think of that?”

“Unprecedented!” I had chosen my word some minutes before ... one which would have a cooling effect.

“I’ll say. By the way, we’re getting a lot of stuff on that book of yours.” He reached in a drawer and pulled out a manila folder which he pushed toward me. “Take them home if you like. Go over them carefully ... might give you some ideas for the next one; you know: ground which needs covering.”

“Is there to be a next one?”

“Man, a flock of next ones! We’ve got a lot to do, to explain. People want to know all kinds of things. I’m having the kids out in the front office do a breakdown on all the letters we’ve got: to get the general reaction ... what it is people most want to hear, and, believe me, we’ve been getting more damned questions, and not just the main thing but family problems too, things like that: 'Please, Mr. Cave, I’m married to two men and feel maybe it’s a mistake since I have to work nights anyway.’ Lord, some of them are crazier than that.”

“Are you answering all of them?”

“Oh, yes, but in my name. All except a few of the most interesting which go to Cave for personal attention. I’ve been toying with the idea of setting up a counselor-service for people with problems.”

“But what can you tell them?” I was more and more appalled.

“Everything in the light of Cavesword. You have no idea how many questions that does answer. Think about it and you’ll see what I mean. But of course we follow standard psychiatric procedure only it’s speeded up so that after a couple of visits there can be a practical and inspirational answer to their problems. Stokharin said he’d be happy to give it a try, but we haven’t yet worked out all the details.”

I didn’t want to hear anything more about this; I changed the subject. “What did you have in mind for me to do?”

“Cavesword applied to everyday life.” He spoke without hesitation; he had thought of everything. “We’ll know more what people want to hear after a few more telecasts, after more letters and so on. Then supply Cavesword where you can and, where you can’t, just use common sense and standard psychiatric procedure.”

“Even when they don’t always coincide?”

Paul roared with laughter. “Always the big knocker, Gene. That’s what I like about you ... the disapproving air ... it’s wonderful and I’m quite serious. People like myself ... visionaries, you might say, continually get their feet off the ground and it’s people like you who pull us back ... make us think. Anyway, I hope you’ll be able to get to it soon. We’ll have our end taken care of by the time the telecasts are over.”

“Will you show Cave to the world then? I mean in person?”

“I don’t know. By the way, we’re having a directors’ meeting Friday morning. You’ll get a notice in the mail. One of the things we’re going to take up is just that problem, so you be thinking about it in the meantime. I have a hunch it may be smart to keep him away from interviewers for good.”

“That’s impossible.”

“I’m not so sure. He’s pretty retiring except when he speaks. I don’t think he’d mind the isolation one bit. You see how dull he gets in company when he’s not performing.”

“Would he consent, do you think?”

“I think so. We could persuade him, I’m sure. Anyway, for now he’s a mystery man. Millions see him once a week but no one knows him except ourselves. A perfect state of affairs, if you ask me.”

“You mean there’s always a chance he might make a fool of himself if a tough interviewer got hold of him?”

“Exactly, and believe me there’s going to be a lot of them after his scalp.”

“Have they begun already?”

“Not yet. We have you to thank for that, too, making it so clear that though what we said certainly conflicts with all the churches we’re really not competing with them, that people listening to Cavesword can go right on being Baptists and so on.”