Opus 21 / Descriptive Music for the Lower Kinsey Epoch of the Atomic Age, a Concerto for a One-man Band, Six Arias for Soap Operas, Fugues, Anthems & Barrelhouse

Opus 21

BOOKS BY Philip Wylie

HEAVY LADEN · BABES AND SUCKLINGS · GLADIATOR
FOOTPRINT OF CINDERELLA · THE SAVAGE GENTLEMAN
FINNLEY WREN: HIS NOTIONS AND OPINIONS
AS THEY REVELED · AN APRIL AFTERNOON
THE BIG ONES GET AWAY · SALT WATER DAFFY
THE OTHER HORSEMAN · GENERATION OF VIPERS
CORPSES AT INDIAN STONES
FISH AND TIN FISH · NIGHT UNTO NIGHT
AN ESSAY ON MORALS · TOO MUCH OF EVERYTHING
CRUNCH AND DES: STORIES OF FLORIDA FISHING
OPUS 21

By Philip Wylie and William W. Muir
THE ARMY WAY

OPUS 21

Descriptive Music

FOR THE LOWER KINSEY EPOCH
OF THE ATOMIC AGE

a Concerto for a One-Man Band

SIX ARIAS FOR SOAP OPERAS

Fugues, Anthems, & Barrelhouse

BY

PHILIP WYLIE

RINEHART & COMPANY, INC.

New York and Toronto

First Printing, April 1949
Second Printing, June 1949
Third Printing, September 1949
Fourth Printing, November 1951
Fifth Printing, October 1953
Sixth Printing, September 1956
Seventh Printing, October 1959

COPYRIGHT, 1949, BY PHILIP WYLIE

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

TO MY WIFE
Ricky
AND MY DAUGHTER
Karen
I LOVINGLY DEDICATE
THIS ROMANCE

WARNING

Most of the characters in this book are unreal—and that is particularly true of the author.... Few of the events recorded here ever took place—exactly.... Even the time is somewhat out of joint, so purists are advised not to bother to compare the meteorology with the obituaries.... I never had (for instance) an elder sister named Georgianna, that I know of.... The difference between what is Real (or Truth) and what is Illusion (or Fiction) is left to such judgment as the reader may own—just as it is in all the other experiences of life.

P.W.

[PART ONE]: Scherzo, 3
[PART TWO]: Tarantella, 79
[PART THREE]: Andante, 124
[PART FOUR]: Rondo 225
[PART FIVE]: Coda, 361

Opus 21

[PART ONE]

Scherzo

1

It happens to millions.

They sit in doctors' offices trying to hide nervousness in the pages of magazines. Wondering what germs their predecessors have deposited in Life and Harper's Bazaar or Action Comics.

The nurse calls:

Mr. So-and-so. Mrs. So-and-so. Miss So-and-so.

They go in.

"Doctor," they say, "just lately I've begun to notice...."

They have begun to notice Death.

And now the doctor notices, too.

Millions of us, in this century, find out before angina curls us like insects in flame. Before the stone is lodged in its screaming cavity. Before the final, involuntary issue of bowel or bladder or foamy lungs.

It is one of the marvels of science.

"Tom," I said, for the doctor is an old friend, "lately I've noticed a feeling of fullness in my nasal passages. And this morning, before I flew down from the country, I looked at the back of my throat. Up behind the uvula. Something is—growing there."

"Let's take a squint."

Tom was calm. He hadn't spent his forenoon staring from an airplane window at the landscapes of New York and New Jersey, but seeing only a reflection in a bathroom mirror. A reflection of his face, yawning unpleasantly in the lavender fluorescence, the vertical tubes of light, and there, on his throat's arch, a foreign tissue like a clot of paint scraped from a bright palette.

He had merely shaved, as the rest of us had shaved on thousands of mornings, thinking of this and that.

Now he switched on a light, tilted the circular reflector above his forehead and removed his gold spectacles. I yawned.

He said, "Hunh."

So I knew.

We'd been friends, after all, for thirty-four years; by the inflection of a syllable, we could make lucid assertions. He thought—what I thought.

"Phil," he said, "we better get a biopsy right away."

"It's in a bad spot."

His instruments gagged me for a minute or two, brought tears in my eyes, probed at revolted mucosae. "Yes, Phil. And there's a lot of it. You didn't notice—anything—?"

"Earlier? Nope. This morning. I was flying down anyhow. I have a serial to correct."

"Of course," Tom said, "I'm not sure. It could be one of those rank lymphoid things. Radium blots them out. X-ray. Radioactive cobalt, these days, perhaps. But—"

But.

We looked at each other for a while. He said a kind thing: "We're both—forty-six."

He meant that we shared the hazards of time together. He also intended to start me thinking of all I had been and done, seen and known, felt and expressed, in four and a half decades of life.

His clock ticked.

His phone rang.

The receiver brought to my age-dulled ears the emery of a woman's voice. And Tom, with the cultivated patience that masks a physician's irritation, told her to take the "pink medicine" every two hours instead of every four.

The elixir alurate, I thought.

That brickbat on the safety valve of America: barbital.

I would soon be on morphine myself....

"How long?" I asked, when Tom hung up.

His pale eyes peered affectionately from behind his spectacles. I felt sorry for him. "Let's get that biopsy, first."

"No fooling, Tom. You're nine-tenths convinced. The learned goons in your profession have told me my number was up, several times, before this. Sooner or later, one of you is bound to be right. And I don't feel lucky today. How long?"

He picked up a letter he had dictated, read it, and put it in a tray. He straightened his prescription pad so it was square with the tooled leather corner of his desk blotter. He glanced at the photograph of Aileen, his wife, Joy and Lee, his daughters. "If it's malignant—it's where you can't operate."

"How long will I be—able to write?"

"Month. Two. Three. Maybe more. No way to tell."

"Radiation—won't slow it down?"

"Can't use strong doses that near your brain, Phil." He grasped his telephone again. He told his nurse to arrange the biopsy. Immediately. He wrote an address.

"I'm busy tonight," he told me. "Can't get out of it. What about tomorrow—for dinner?"

I said, "Swell. When will I have the report?"

"Monday."

"Be quite a long weekend."

He commenced writing a prescription.

I had told him how well he seemed, when the nurse had ushered me in. He didn't seem well any more. The vestige of his White Mountain tan was saffron. In fifteen minutes, circles had come under his eyes. He handed me two little rectangles of paper. "No—pain?"

"Not yet." It was a cruelty.

He flinched minutely. "That's for pb. Quarters. If you spook yourself up. And sodium amytal. Grain and a half. Sleep. You can take the whole bottle, if you want to. Then the biopsy will surely be negative and you'll have thrown away your other six lives." He put his arm around my shoulder. "See you tomorrow—at your hotel—around seven."

I walked through the patients—through people who had nothing more serious than hypertension, or gastric ulcer, or diabetes. Or perhaps they did have fatal afflictions, though. Cancer, for example. You couldn't say what they had—sitting there, tremulously thumbing the magazines. They looked at me. They looked at the fat girl who rose because her turn was next.

I lit a cigarette when I got outdoors.

Coal tar, I thought.

Too late not to light a cigarette.

I stepped down in the gutter—in gum wrappers, glittering bits of cellophane, the blanched drift of horse manure, a swatch of blue cloth, a letter that had been rained on, fresh Pekinese sign, and a little dry mud. All around me midday, midtown Manhattan soaked up August in its brick pores, its limestone pores—flashed back August from glass, from polished granite, and from all its million metal fixtures. The sky was bluely vague. An air-liner shoved up through it from La Guardia—a grinding abnormality.

I hailed a cab.

For the ordeal of biopsy, whatever it might be, I summoned my meager contempt. A long experience of surgery is a poor indoctrination for each new need of it. Ringed about with sadists in white suits, with sterile techniques, with inquisitional steel, I have been too often the Exposed Nerve. I do not hope much, any more—and only defy so long as I am able. This artificial pose, garnished with calm and with smiling, is what some men call courage, and others dignity, but no man in his right mind evokes without cost: we are the hateful survivors of our sciences.

It was a little thing.

A needle's prick in an alabastrine clinic. A numb diddling above the tonsil. Some blood to spit out.

The one sharp experience was the slight widening of the surgeon's eyes when first he saw my throat.

Go on, I thought. Tell me that the cure of cancer depends upon its early recognition! Ask me if I haven't read the advertisements of the Society! And ask yourself, you smooth-faced blue-eyed son-of-a-bitch, if you have checked the area behind your own uvula lately!

What I said was, "Just noticed it today."

I came, I meant, as soon as I could. I wasn't a dumbbell. I didn't let that gob grow inside my neck, week after week, in secret fear. I did what you told me to do.

He said, "Well, well," and injected me and clipped off a hunk and told me to come back on Monday at twelve o'clock. I went onto the street again.

It wasn't bothering me any.

Nobody could catch it from me.

Another cab slid to a stop on another pile of metropolitan offal. I got in. The radio was talking about Babe Ruth, who had recently died of throat cancer. And metastases.

I thought of telling the driver to turn off the lush woe.

Life's ironies amuse cynical people—who are, after all, sentimentalists, for only sentimental people would bother themselves to beget so foolish a self-defense as cynicism.

"Terrible loss," the driver said, waiting for the Madison Avenue light.

I chose this better opportunity. "Loss, hell! A baseball player. A tough guy. Somebody with trick reflexes who could bat a ball farther than anybody else, oftener. And the whole damned United States gets choked up and goes into mourning. Double-page spreads in the newspapers. When a really great man dies, he's lucky to get one snapshot and a column." I looked quickly at his framed license. Saul Kaufman. "Will the American people go on a morbid spree when Einstein dies?" I asked.

It got him. He glanced back appreciatively. "You said it!"

If his name had been Angelo Utrillo, I would have suggested Fermi. He wouldn't have known who Fermi was, but my explanation would have filled him with pride. And if it had been Michael Riority, I would have tried De Valera.

"Babe Ruth," I repeated when I paid my fare. "Did the Mirror and the News give Freud a double-page spread? The greatest mind in the twentieth century. Greatest Jew since Jesus. We should be proud to live in the same age. But what are we proud of? Babe Ruth. Baseball's okay—but the way people act about it certainly shows what's wrong with people."

"You're right, Mac."

I tipped him a quarter. Money wasn't going to be useful to me much longer.

Then I felt sick.

The money I possessed—the insurance—the money that might come from my books and perhaps from the posthumous sale of a few stories to the movies—would be all there was

for my wife

daughter

my wife's mother

and some others.

I had two rooms—a bedroom and parlor. Sleep and reading in bed were thus kept separate from work, from the two hundred and eighteen pages of my serial which had to be cut sheet by sheet, line by line, to fit the precise requirements of a weekly magazine. This small suite was on the sixteenth floor. Here, the street sounds became boogie-woogie—set to rhythm by bouncing back and forth between the walls of Madison Avenue. Here the smell of the city was less toxic. And here the eye ranged over rooftops. My draperies, flowered and lined with sateen, moved now against the dark-green embrasures of the window—not in a breeze but in the upward eddy of diurnal heat. The yellow roses with which the management had greeted me dangled in their vase. I wondered whether to cut their stems or throw them out. If Ricky, my wife, had accompanied me, there would have been two dozen roses—and she would have known about the stems. I propped open the door to the hall with a book. Air sucked through the crack.

In a big mirror, over the mantel, over the chunks of topaz glass that represented coals in the artificial fireplace, I could see myself. Strained and pallid, sweat showing at the armpits of my dark-blue gabardine jacket.

I took it off.

My shirt was wet.

I took that off.

The man in the mirror was naked from the waist up. A man with a little fold of belly showing over his belt. A man whose back, when he turned, was well muscled at the shoulders and ridged with parallel sinews that made a valley of the spine. A man whose strength had come through effort and application, rather late. A man who stepped closer to the mirror and opened his mouth to study, inside it, a small, fresh wound.

He sat down on the divan, presently, and took a cigarette from the coffee table. Lighted it. Reached for the telephone.

And identified with himself again.

I wanted to call Ricky—in the country.

To call her from the vegetable garden, where she might be weeding, or from the rock garden, when she might be replanting the daffodil bulbs, to call her from a book, or from washing the cocker pups, or from painting shelves, or from anything that she was doing. I wanted, with overwhelming urgency to tell her to come down to New York and share this weekend. Carry it with me and for me.

She would. She has the grit and the amenability to Nature. Besides, she knows me.

But I sat there, my fingers growing slippery on the phone.

If it proved to be harmless—then the consummate hours, the pain, the anxiety, and the quiet planning would be a mere excess.

If it proved malignant—what purpose would be served by destroying her tranquillity, by adding her dread to my own, until the hour when the fact was established?

She would willingly, wantingly, accept the burden—to ease my share of it.

But why should she?

Monday would be soon enough—win, lose, or get some cursed clinical draw. Radiation. Surgery. Artificial larynx. Gueules cassées, I thought. I'd seen friends. Getting their throats cut inchmeal. Burping to make speech. Shedding their chins.

The hell with it! I called the bookstore, instead, and ordered a tome on carcinoma of the throat.

I put the phone back on the table.

Clean shirt. The jacket of a ribbed, cotton suit, blue and white. I hadn't sweated through my trousers—yet. They'd do as slacks.

I rang for the elevator.

2

One of the two restaurants in the Astolat Hotel, where we stay whenever we are in New York, is called the Knight's Bar. It has been extended and refurbished recently. King Arthur's retinue, armed, armored, gaudily caparisoned, and mounted on some of the most unlikely steeds in mural art, charge, joust and canter on the walls. The place has indirect lighting, banquettes and chairs upholstered in red leather, and air conditioning. The food is excellent.

A pre-chilled atmosphere enveloped me when I came in and I felt it without gratitude. I like hot weather.

Jay, the headwaiter, saw me, glanced about at the tables—which were by now less than a third occupied—and beckoned me toward a place near the bar with a definitiveness unwarranted by the wide choice. I wondered why as I came forward—obediently, and hardly aware of the trifling inquiry in my mind.

Then I saw, around to the right, a pretty girl, sitting alone, reading a book. On each side of her were empty tables. Did Jay, out of subconscious loyalty to my wife, intend to rush me past this pitfall? Or had the girl asked for solitude? She wasn't one of the Knight's Bar regulars—or one of the hotel residents. I knew all of them, at least by sight.

Ordinarily, I would have meekly followed Jay to the table he had selected. But now I thought—why should I? Rather, I thought, there is very little time left for me on this earth. Why shouldn't I use it as I please?

So I nodded at a table beside the girl. She would be something to look at besides my thoughts.

Jay is an American. But what he did now was European. He smiled slightly in understanding; he raised his eyebrows minutely in coappreciation of the young lady's good looks; and he shrugged one shoulder—in patient recognition of the fact that a male is a male and the firmest marriage vows are warrants of mere intent.

I grinned back—and sat on the bench beside the young lady as soon as Jay pulled out the table. She looked at me—turning her head slowly—and afterward went on reading her book. Her eyes were gray, stained with some unguessable, dark residue of emotion. Her hair was pale blonde, not quite ashen—parted in the middle and clipped at the back like a schoolgirl's—with a wide gold barrette. She had small, smooth hands. She wore a square engagement ring and a wedding ring set with many diamonds. From time to time, too, she sipped a Martini. Her dress was a gray and white print—not fancy but fitted by somebody who knew the tricks. Bonwit's, maybe, or Bergdorf's. Her shoulders were fairly broad, for a girl's. But she had large, firm breasts—or the synthetic equivalent thereof. I noticed, too, that the perfume she used was not right for her appearance—though perhaps it suited the self-estimate of her soul. It was one of the musky varieties—animal, nocturnal, full of erotic business.

In a restaurant where you have enjoyed a thousand meals, you look desultorily at the menu because, as a rule, you know what you are going to order. I took the fried sole, a boiled, parsley potato, and apple sauce.

Then, for a while, I forgot the girl.

I must plan, I thought.

First, the money.

Fifty thousand dollars' worth of insurance. Several thousand dollars in war bonds. I had about ten thousand in the bank. Ricky had a few thousand. We owed a steep mortgage on the house we were building in Florida—in the country south of Miami, among live oaks and cabbage palms. It would be too big a home for Ricky and her mother and Karen, by themselves. Too big—and too expensive to keep up, without my income. They could sell it as soon as it was finished, and undoubtedly make a small profit. Or they could rent it each year for a much larger sum than the interest, amortization and upkeep—thus bringing to my estate an income of one or two annual thousands.

I would be paid twenty-four thousand dollars for the serial upstairs, when I had cut it.

Unfortunately, half of that would be turned over to the government, as income tax. Most of the balance was ear-marked for furniture which Ricky now might or might not buy. I thought about the tax....

Business is the lone God of our Congress. Let a man open a pie factory or begin to mold cement blocks and he becomes Privileged. His property is taxed as a sacred, eternal entity. His costs are deductible. Only the profit he pockets is thought of by our Congress as income; his every barrel of flour or bag of cement is capital. But let a man create books or serials in his head and Congress sees him as a social inferior, a mere wage earner.

The accumulation of intellectual property for a book may require three-quarters of a life. Its sale, for a year or two, may be considerable. After that one book—or after two or three—an author may return to pittances. What he has written may become the mental and emotional capital of his countrymen, or of the world, for generations. Yet Congress does not deem it equal to pies or bricks and sometimes skims away in a year the whole capital of an author—as if it were but annual income. America bounteously provides for the makers of bricks and pies; it short-changes book-makers and the winners of Nobel Prizes. Indeed, such is the unconscious hostility of the mob toward the fruits of intelligence that, not long ago, a group of representatives, commercial he-whores and contumelious morons, endeavored to do away with copyright altogether on the grounds that what a man thought and wrote down, or what he felt and painted, belonged free of charge to the whole people: noneconomic, since it was Art. To such men as these, only junk fabricators, gadgeteers, tram operators, pop bottlers and the like are entitled to the best profit for their contribution to life. History will note the fact when history writes how American avarice held in open contempt all culture and all thought, decerebrated itself and so died headless.

As a man about to perish I could not but think bitterly of this. Had my labors, my work, my business, my investment of skill and thought and sweat been deemed equivalent, by my government, to the activities of a manufacturer of flea powder, I could have left the people I loved far better off.

A relative complaint, under the circumstances and in my case. But when I thought of the "successful" writers I knew who had been taxed into poverty for their genius, and when I thought of the potbellied yuts I'd met who turned up fortunes in sewer pipes, cemetery lots and toilet paper, my sentiments toward the people and their politicians were rude....

They would get along—Karen and Ricky and Ricky's mother and those who would now depend on them. My death might even accelerate the sale of my books for a while. There might be movie sales. Plays. Posthumous editions. Anthologies. If I had led Ricky to be careless and extravagant, she would nonetheless be capable, under necessity, of good management. The hundred-year-old house in the country would continue to fend off the winters and to doze through the summers in its great lawns. Karen would attend Swarthmore. If Ricky wished, she could work again; she was well enough now. Marry again.

The thought jarred and I considered that sensation. Marry? Of course she would. She should. What is wickeder than inhibiting sentiment, than memory turned prison?

I am not a jealous man and even my envies are of an obscure sort. The momentary shock came from the fact that, never before, had I thought of Ricky as married to another man. Romantic about another man—perhaps. (Hadn't I said, in fun and also meaning it, that if, in our seventies, she were to swear she had been faithful, I would regard it as sad? No man desires a wanton for a wife. But a great many men love their wives in such a fashion as to consider them people—human, curious, imaginative, subject to sensations of staleness, capable of discretion, and not intended to be—through every hour of all that is a life—belled, balled and chained, hobbled and kept like cattle. An academic point—now. We might never see those seventies—note the envisaged smiles—or hear the candlelit confidence.) She would marry again. Karen would marry. The bonds I'd bought, the real estate, the insurance I'd purchased down the years—flush or borrowing—would provide a measure of security.

Come war? Come vast inflation? Costly sickness?

There is no security on our planet. There is no way, by money, wills, investments, legal instruments, or other means, to carry even the smallest wish or the most minimal responsibility beyond crematory and urn. Such is the aching truth—the irony we try to avoid. No one understands it better than I—but I had done what I could to avoid it, too. Done it—in spite of a national tax philosophy that evaluates authorship as a meaner trade than pawnbroking.

In all America are only five thousand of us who make our whole livelihood by writing, anyway. To Congress—a scattered, inconsequential number—vote-voiceless and therefore impotent. It is a figure—five thousand in one hundred and fifty millions—which the aspiring writer should bear in mind. And some are communists, or leftists, besides—which, in the miserable eyes of Congress these days, no doubt makes our whole profession suspect. Freedom is sick. Freedom is dying.

Why not?

Everything is sick and doomed.

Including me—now, I thought jeeringly.

My plate came—the toast-brown fish, the green-speckled potato, a salad I hadn't ordered, tartar sauce in a dish, and the applesauce in another.

I pushed Congress out of my mind.

More accurately, the girl did.

She cleared her throat. A little sound, with faint annoyance clinging to it.

I had been sitting there, smoking two cigarettes, oblivious to her for ten minutes. She must have assumed that I had chosen to sit beside her because she was attractive—which was true. But now, owing to the absence of sidewise glances, of self-conscious bread-buttering, of any aura of awareness, she had irritatedly cleared her throat. If I had spoken to her forthwith she would, perhaps, have made a short, polite, but discouraging reply. Since, however, I had broken off even the peripheral touching of consciousness, she coughed vexedly, exploringly.

So I glanced at her book. I had already noticed the jacket. It was Ape and Essence by Aldous Huxley. She had been reading with a slight frown. But now I saw that the jacket did not fit the book, which was thicker than Mr. Huxley's post-atomic predictions. The jacket, then, was camouflage—for a larger book with maroon binding. What sort of reading, I wondered, would a glamorous young woman hide behind Aldous Huxley? And, abruptly, I knew: the Kinsey Report.

I leaned back and verified it.

This amused me.

The people of Miami Beach, where I had lived in the winter, and the people of New York, whom I had encountered in the spring, had been busy for both seasons with Dr. Kinsey's refreshing work.

It was, at least, refreshing to me....

I am interested in psychology. For a quarter of a century I have known, by way of Freud, Krafft-Ebing, Stekel, Ellis, and many others, the same facts, in comparable orders of magnitude as those which Dr. Kinsey elicited by his scientific cross-questioning of cross sections. My own experience of life, taken with the confidences of my associates, has merely confirmed what others have noted. I have published such data in my books, years before Kinsey. And all that time I have reflected with a hooting pique upon the unconquerable illusions of Americans. What I have long known to be true, and often written down, they have refused to consider as real. Until the first of the Kinsey Reports, all erotic activity except that mechanical minimum permitted by state legislatures has been regarded, even by most enlightened citizens, either as an accident carefully hidden in their own lives, or else as the perverted behavior of persons who, eventually, would land on the couches of psychiatrists—if not in prison. It is the most depraved truth about us.

Kinsey—with the august reputation of Rockefeller money to give his findings the one sort of credibility acceptable to Americans—had accomplished what hundreds of psychologists and scores of writers like myself had been unable to do: he had convinced multitudes that the sexual behavior of people is mammalian in every respect. He had shown, where we had failed, that erotic activity of some sort is universal, that the earlier and more vigorously such activities are commenced, the more potent and sexually capable its practitioners become—that use, not restraint (as the "pure" have decreed), develops the nerves, capillaries and muscles of the sexual organs precisely as it does those of other organs and that what we call sins and perversions are as ubiquitous as what we call normal sex acts. He had made an ass of the law and a fool of the church and held up an odious society in such a light that its heathen taboos and wholehearted hypocrisies were at long last more visible than the foul rags covering them.

I had seen, that winter, numbers of men relieved (and not always bothering to hide the fact) by the realization that some homosexual experience in their past was not a blot upon their lives without precedent or parallel. And I had seen other numbers of men—older men—stare back at the bereavement of their youth, hating themselves for that which barbaric fear (translated as noble character) had prevented them from doing, knowing, sensing, or enjoying. Often, these had turned their irreversible disappointment into a mockery of Kinsey, thus exposing the near-vacuum in which they had endured their decades—without being aware of the exposure. Americans are not mature enough, intelligent enough, discerning or well enough educated to learn from psychology; but it is evident they are, in many cases, of an adequate spiritual development to learn from a Rockefeller-endorsed zoologist.

It didn't matter to me where the facts came from—so long as people began to perceive they were facts—facts that made a far truer picture of man and sex than all the utterances of priests, preachers, legislators, and other sick-minded slobs put together.

We behave sexually like other mammals—apes, horses, dogs. Centuries of suppression alter us not a jot. It is a sterling proof that instinct, not vanity-calling-itself-reason, is our guide. It is the hardest blow yet struck against the bishops. In our time, they and their sickly minions will prevail. But after us, and them, some decent men may rise in the debris and put to a proper use what we all know and nearly all deny....

She was reading the Kinsey Report.

"What for?" I asked.

The question startled her, although the introduction itself did not. She was obliged to feign a social surprise. Her inward gray eyes met mine and moved away. She drew part of an annoyed breath. She shut the book. She made up her mind to say, "I beg your pardon. Were you speaking to me?"

She had a musical voice, pitched low but not husky.

"I wondered why you were reading the Kinsey Report so avidly—and my curiosity started talking. I usually do ask people things, when I want to know. It's discourteous. But sometimes they tell me."

That made her smile a little. "You might be asking quite a question."

"Any question is quite a question. If I merely asked you how to get to Fifth Avenue, you would be telling me, in answering, where to take my life. I might be run over, doing it. I might get into a street fight. Or meet a blonde. If I asked you why you've been crying so much—that would be quite a question, too. If I were a woman, I might ask, simply—what you wore under what, and where you bought it. The answer to that one would describe dozens of your attitudes toward dozens of important matters."

She didn't say anything. If she nodded, it was the smallest of her nods. She twirled her cocktail glass, sipped the last of the amber drink, and returned to her reading.

She wanted me to know that she didn't flirt. I expressed my apperception by ordering lemon pie, which I didn't want, and coffee, which I did—and further, by leaving my table and the restaurant while my place was being cleared and my dessert brought. I went across the hot street to the newsstand and bought Time magazine—which I used to read for information and read now to keep abreast of the Biases—and the Telegram. When I came back to the bar I found the girl had also ordered coffee—and brandy. That settled it.

"My name," I said immediately, "is Philip Wylie. I'm a writer. The waiters will vouch for me. I live here."

The strain left her eyes and they widened slightly. "I've read lots of things you've written! For heaven's sake!"

Most Americans who get around have read lots of the things I've written. This is a great instant advantage—though often a present handicap—in picking up strangers. They are at first agreeably surprised; but they generally expect writers to "be like" the characters in their books—from God alone knows what an abysmal lack of imagination—and are therefore eventually disappointed.

Since I said nothing, she went on, "You're the author who hates women!" There was shine in her eyes, then—challenge—amusement. Spite, too.

"Only moms," I answered. "And not 'hate'—deplore."

"And Cinderellas, too!"

"Oh, yes. I'd forgotten the Cinderellas. I deplore them, also."

"Maybe I'm one."

"A superior specimen—if true." I am semigallant.

"What made you hate women so violently? Did your mother beat you? And why do you blame everything that goes wrong on women?" Two hard lines showed the muscles around her teeth. "Don't you realize that for everything you've written against women—you could say the same—and a hundred times as much—against men?"

"Lookie," I said. "Many years ago, when I was younger and foolish, I wrote a book about a few of the more conspicuous and lethal flaws in our fair nation. The book was some three hundred and seventy pages long. I devoted all but about twenty pages to the calamitous follies of males. Men, as you call them. But I did, for some twenty pages of light blast, violate the ironclad altar of femininity and point out mom's big mouth and little brain, her puffed crop and shaky pins. A few things. I hardly thought I had loaded the dice—inasmuch as half the people are female and I gave females only about a fifteenth of my slightly caustic attention. But ever since that book came out, almost every woman I've met has accused me of outrageously laying the blame for a manifestly hell-bound society on females. In the first place, this is not true. In the second place, such statements—the hundreds I've collected—tend to show that American women positively refuse to take any blame for anything whatever. They have no conscience and no sense of responsibility. They believe themselves to be as spotless as United States senators say they are, in campaign orations. They lack the capacity for admitting guilt. They are nearly all—I have thus found—psychologically far, far, far more destitute than I claimed only certain kinds of them to be."

She laughed. "You're still mad! Someday you'll break down and write a wonderful novel about the woman who really poisoned you against them all."

"I'll break down," I agreed. "But I'll never write the novel! One reason is—there's no such novel. Women have always been good to me—with a few exceptions I can tolerate. Women have made love to me and they have been generous with me, and taught me, and they have been sensitive toward me. My daughter—who is sixteen—adores me. My first wife tried every combination she could think of to make me happy—and put up with me for ten years, when I was a drunkard. My second wife has gone even further. Past ten years—for one thing. And I quit drinking altogether, after we'd been married for a while. I—to repeat the most readily understandable expression—adore her. And I adore my daughter. I adore women, as a matter of fact. Such vexation as I have shown represented an aspect of that reverence: a good many women are fundamentally disappointing to anybody who cares much for women. And I resent the general damage such women do. A man"—I looked at her as loftily as I could—"has a curious faculty for resenting human sabotage even when he is not, himself, directly involved in the matter. A woman, as a rule, sees harm in the ruinous excursion of a nitwit only if she sees it as a real or potential menace to herself, loved ones, and assigns. It is a comfortingly personal outlook toward which I am hotly antipathetic."

"You talk like your books," she said.

"Why not? I wrote the damned things!"

She poured her brandy into her coffee and drank a little.

"Men," I went on, "in this century, are deeply imbued with just that personal, feminine attitude. They refuse to meddle with evils that do not immediately threaten them. They have sold out their duty toward the whole species, for local, temporal advantages. They no longer live lives but merely cadge existences. If a guy is successful and well fixed, the ordinary American does not and cannot see that he has the reason or the right—let alone the need!—to take a dim view of anything on earth." I picked up my copy of Time magazine and waved it at her. "Whenever one of my morally indignant volumes appears, this self-righteous periodical, for instance, usually begins its reviews by saying that I own a palatial residence in Florida, earn big money writing commendable hack stories for the magazines, fish all the time, and yet—blackguard!—I have the gall to gripe! The inference is that I am a lunatic. Indeed, it has become more than an inference. This carburetor of the news called my latest effort a 'whiff into midnight.' Who is nearer the witching hour—the well-heeled gent who still sees imperfections in the planet and says so or the editor who unconsciously imagines that prosperity and criticism are incongruent? That is the Ivy League philosophy—suitable to cover the ruins it soon will bring about."

"You're mad at Clare Luce," the girl said.

"There you go! Personal again! See here, ma'am. A man can get as intense feelings from statistical tables as a woman can from Sinatra's brow wave. Vital statistics give them to me. I had such sensations when, after the publication of the Smythe Report, I pensively ran over the Periodic Table. Many other charts and graphs deeply affect me. I hardly know Clare Luce. I had cocktails with her once—though. Very attractive. Very—not bright—ardent. That's the important thing in women, too. We disagreed about everything we discussed. But a woman who enters the field of ideas is obliged, naturally, to follow some man or men. Women have never left any ideas around for men or women to follow. Clare said she follows Monseigneur Fulton Sheen—another glitteringly ardent soul. I'm not mad at Clare Luce. In my situation I find it impossible to be mad at anybody on earth. And it was generally difficult for me, even before now."

"What's happened that made you change?"

"God has sent for me," I said sarcastically.

"You mean—you've been converted?"

"If I am ever converted—in the common sense—it will be the hard way: posthumously and in the Presence. No. The change in me, what little I have so far discovered, probably comes from atrophy. The peace and mellowness that men mistake for wisdom—that is in fact the result of calcium deposits, excess urea in the cells, and so on."

"You're forty!"

"And you're twenty—instead of twenty-six."

"You don't look it."

"You do. And as you well know, it's a damn good age for a woman to look."

She thought awhile. "You meet a lot of woman."

"I meet a few."

"Famous ones, I mean. What's your wife like? Blonde? Brunette?"

"You know a movie actress named Maureen O'Sullivan?"

She nodded.

"Ricky—my wife—gets mistaken for her. We go into night clubs and sometimes they give us a swell table and people begin asking each other who the hell I am—thinking they've identified Ricky."

"She's sweet—Miss O'Sullivan."

"Ricky is, too."

"Who's the most beautiful one you ever met?"

"The most beautiful one—I never met. Hedy Lamarr."

"You could, though. Celebrities can meet each other."

"I'm only about a Class D celebrity."

"Suppose—?" She eyed me speculatively. "Suppose some glamorous dame and you met. Suppose you got a yen for her? What would you do?"

"God knows."

"I'm serious. After all, you've written enough articles and books and stories about it. Do you mean what you say? Or are you just trying to be sensational?"

"Would I, in other words, after meeting the gorgeous Miss or Mrs. So-and-so, invite her to take a long drive in the country—or to picnic on a beach—to look at etchings? Would I, personally? I might. Sure."

"What would Mrs. Wylie say?" The gray eyes were troubled—perhaps afraid.

"Maybe nothing. She would never hear of it. Does marriage have to end privacy entirely—every hour of it in a life? If she did hear—she might still say nothing. She might laugh at me. She might be hurt. She might be angry. It would depend on her mood at the moment."

"Her mood just at the moment!"

"Sure."

"Isn't that—pretty"—she sought a term—"unstable?"

"Extremely stable. It would show that she regarded what we have been led to call infidelity a matter of so superficial a nature as to be colored by a superficial mood. This, in turn, would indicate that her more profound attitude toward me—and my feelings for her—was unshaken. Stable, as you would say. If, on the other hand, I knew she would have only one, single conceivable reaction—whether noncommittal or aggrieved—I could be certain that her feelings for me, and her deepest sense of my feelings, had become absolutist, rigid, probably dominating and demanding, certainly doctrinaire. I could deduce that she was in a most unstable situation—since people resort to the projection of absolutes on other people only when they are torn by uncertainty of themselves. Notice this in religions. The absolutes are defined to a hair—with different sorts of steeples, doorways, fonts and crucifixes marking infinitesimal splits over dogma—but with no commensurate variation in the effect on human conduct whatever. Is a Baptist nobler than a Methodist? Kinder? Wiser? No. So the different absolutes of both, seen detachedly, represent nothing more than the uncertainty, instability, self-doubt, inconfidence, distrust, and lack of magnanimity of both. Their passion to lay down the law, taken with the minuscule variants that ensue, is proof that Christians have no stability whatever. Sex follows the same rule—and so does everything else."

"I would have been furious, though."

She referred, still, to my hypothetical infidelity. And her reference was interesting. Without thinking, she had used the past perfect subjunctive. If, that is to say, her husband—the apparent supplier of the opulent rings—had trifled with a strange brunette at some lodge convention, this young lady's reaction would have been fury. It apparently would not be, now. The assured presumption was, therefore, a rift between herself and her spouse. Coupled with her way of drinking cocktails while eating a sandwich, the brandy in her coffee, her reading matter, and, particularly, the blur of suffering I had seen in her eyes, this presumption led to further inference: the rift was recent and she was in flight from it, while yet attempting to understand its causes.

She was, that is to say, no habitual Martini drinker; these do not mix their cocktails with their viands. She was reading Kinsey not from the starved cupidity of hundreds of thousands of other women (for if she had been even that uninhibited she would have read it sooner) but in the effort to discover something. She was drinking not to drown her sorrow but to take away its edge: she had mixed her latest drink with the antidote of coffee. And, inasmuch as I had never seen her with her husband at the Astolat, it was a good guess, at least, that she was here as part of an act of abandonment rather than as a result of being abandoned by him. Her accent was vaguely eastern—but eastern rubbed against, and somewhat eradicated by, the flatter tones of the West. Like numberless other such women, she had fled to New York for refuge—and from a considerable distance. Texas, perhaps, or Arizona. And probably she had lived in Manhattan before now: the Knight's Bar was unknown to tourists—with the exception of Europeans visiting America.

"You would have been furious," I finally said. "Think that over. Here we are, engaged in a favorite national pastime—imagining flirtations with handsome persons in the public eye. I often reflect that picture stars—male and female—are lucky to have so little imagination, on the average. If you can kill a person by sticking pins into a statue of him—which you cannot, unless he believes it—think of the possible result on a star of the lurid, lewd fantasies poured upon his photographs, or hers, by millions and millions of people. Grant any validity in the pin-sticking process and you have, in the photo-doting parallel, a curious possible explanation of what the press knows as Hollywood high jinks. Psychogenic. The effect, on the poor individual, of mass assault, mob lechery. But skip all that. The point I want to make is this: some ladies we have hypothesized are married. You can see yourself as enraged, if any husband of yours had his head turned—to continue the euphemisms—by one such. But it does not seem to occur to you that any possible husbands of the ladies also might feel themselves involved in the matter—and even experience traces of pain?"

"Men!" she said. "Why should anyone care what they feel?"

"O-h-h-h, because they're so plentiful."

She smiled a little—and poured plain coffee. "You haven't asked me my name."

"Naturally."

"Naturally?"

"You've been wondering when I would. In such a case, the obvious thing to do is to let a girl go on wondering. Besides—my inquisitiveness is never casual. It might be a convenience to know your name. But very little else. A clue, maybe, to the good taste of your parents—or lack of it—and to the national strain of your husband's paternal line."

"It's Yvonne Prentiss."

"See what I mean? A handy—but otherwise irrelevant fact."

She laughed. "Do you live here?"

"I'm staying here—on the sixteenth floor. For a few days."

"I am, too."

"You got mad at Mr. Prentiss," I said then, "and fled from your sprawling mansion out in the golden West to the sidewalks of New York—familiar to you in your girlhood. Your problem was not 'other women'—so what was it? Neglect? Brutality? Obsession? Bestiality? Stamp collecting? What?"

Her eyes filled with tears.

Just then, Fred came by. He's a waiter I know pretty well. "Look, Fred," I said, "I've made her cry. Bring another brandy."

She was struggling. "Shouldn't it be a beer?"

"If you go on crying."

"I really don't want another drink—"

"Then bring her some ice cream."

"—but I'll have one more." Fred nodded and went. "How did you know all that?"

I told her.

"It's Pasadena," she said. She shivered a little.

So I talked. "Pasadena. How well I know it! Caltech, where people think the troubles of the world began. The peeling eucalyptus trees and the long shadows on the long sidewalk. Way back in the dear, dead beryllium days—"

"I haven't the faintest idea what you mean!"

"Dr. Einstein," I said, "walking around under his hair. Thinking so hard he never noticed the earthquake. It was the spring of nineteen-thirty-three. Perhaps I should explain that, in those days, when they wanted to split an atom, they generally used beryllium. A common element—half as heavy as aluminum and twice as strong—but difficult to recover. Poor Dr. E! Like all the reasonable men, seemingly he cannot perceive that what he thinks of as irrational is the force that governs human destiny! He assumes it's just a matter of enlightening the politicians. The deification of reason—the worship of common logic—cuts off human personality from natural truth exactly as idolatry destroys the faculty of rational analysis. And for the same reason. The intellectual paragon is as blind as any pagan—in the opposite direction. But we were talking about Pasadena—"

"Vaguely," she said.

"I'll be more explicit, then. I was working for Paramount in that blessed era when nothing upset the world worse than a depression. A curable malady—that. Anyhow, I had a producer who lived in Pasadena. A big, reddish house on one of those irrigated buttocks that grow out of the lower mountains. Completely surrounded by thornbushes—except for the entrance gate. The first time I went there was Sunday—a nine A.M. conference—and my producer's butler served highballs right away to myself and the other writers. I shall never forget it—or ever recall a word that we said there that day. I was an animal-horror man, at the time—"

"A what?"

"Animal-horror man. That's what the studio boss called me. In fact, he said I was pretty young to be an animal-horror man, the first time we met."

She drank some of her brandy and then did a disturbing thing.

She took her pale, wavy hair in both hands and bent it back up over her head so that the curly ends fell everywhere around her face. When she did it, she looked at me in a certain way. We were both supposed to understand the gesture perfectly—and not to notice it at all. Wild horses weren't supposed to be able to drag out of us an admission of what it meant.

"Those were not only the beryllium days, but the days of animal pictures and horror pictures. Frank Buck and Osa Johnson and Tarzan. Frankenstein. Paramount was trying to combine the grisliest features of all of them. They were making Wells's Island of Dr. Moreau—for instance. And I was doing some of the writing. Hence I was an animal-horror man—and young for it, too. Precociously animalistic and horrible. Remember? Cobras fought mongooses? Tigers fought pythons and other unnatural antagonists? Zebus fought gnus? My producer wanted to throw a half dozen lions into a school of big sharks—and get some red-hot close shots of the fights that would then ensue. That—I stopped. Even we ogres draw the line somewhere—and I know a good deal about sharks. The lions, if you once got the sharks hitting them, would not be fighting, as my producer imagined, but dying by mouthfuls."

"How awful!"

"Pasadena, it was," I reminded her. "Another conference at that big house amongst the thorns. I know the place like a book. I know the spirit of the place. You lived there?"

She stared at the room, empty now of all but waiters and two or three pairs of murmuring people. Full, however, of Musak. Light operettas.

"Somehow it's easier to talk to strangers," she said, "than to people you've known all your life."

"Of course!" I replied in sober agreement—although I thought the idea was rubbish.

"And besides," she went on, immediately contradicting herself, "I've read your articles and books and I feel as if I knew you better than you knew yourself."

Unlikely, I figured. But this was important to her, so I nodded. "Maybe you do—in some ways."

She had shown a certain economy of speech—owing possibly to the fact that I had given her little opportunity to show anything else. But her biography was fairly terse:

"I was born in Boston—and the family moved here when I was a baby. My dad graduated from Princeton in 1921. He's a very intelligent, strong-willed, wonderful guy. My mother's a chronic invalid—of her own making. I have one sister—older—and no brothers. I'm very fond of my sister—but I was always jealous of her when I was young. Dad tried to make her a substitute for a son—took her everywhere, taught her sports and games—and I wanted to be the one. She's married and lives in Chicago. I went to school in Westchester—Rosehall—and came out here. At a mass début. Dad's in real estate. After I came out, I fiddled around awhile—Junior League, and Red Cross, and Bar Harbor in the summers—and then I met Rol."

She took a breath that quavered like a musical saw. "He's handsome. He has manners—buckets and barrels of manners. And money." She looked angrily at her rings. "I tried to make something out of him. To put ambition in him. I got him to work for dad—and he quit. He wanted to go to California because he likes flowers. My God, how he likes flowers! We had greenhouses full. He thought he could become a botanist—or hybridize something—and he dawdled away his time with paintbrushes and pollen. I persuaded him to go into real estate out there—and he made a lot more money—but he gave it up. He began collecting a library of old books on botany—and writing a history of botany—and I was bottled up in botany. It got so he would hardly even dress up. Or shave. Overalls all day. I'd want to go places and see people and do things—and we'd be home, instead, with some French professor, maybe, for dinner, complete with beard, accent, ribboned glasses, and knee-patting under the table. Half the time, these professors and Rol—for Roland—talked Latin. I flunked it, three straight semesters, myself. Well—I took to going out alone—and he didn't care. I even tried to make him jealous—and he positively seemed to approve. He told me I needed outside interests and that he was a dull fellow for me! I—" She bit her lip.

"—love the guy."

"Not now. I did. What finally happened was—"

"Should I get that beer ready?"

She shook her head. For a while she was silent. Then she touched the book. "I heard—I knew—I suppose I shouldn't even have been surprised—let alone driven out of my mind—but there's so much that's nice about him. Used to be, anyhow. Too nice—and that should have prepared me—"

I got it, then. "Not—other women, Yvonne. Men, huh?"

She shuddered. You don't see people shudder very often—in restaurants, anyway. She shuddered because that was how it made her feel. She couldn't help it. And when the spasm passed, her hands went on trembling—like glassware vibrating after a certain right note has been struck. "He hired an assistant—a young college graduate—that I liked, at first. Then—one day—I got so bored and lonely I went into the greenhouses, which I hated, looking for them. And I found them, all right."

She began to cry again—and to talk through the tears. "It was only—two weeks ago. Rol was dreadfully upset. He promised—everything on earth he could think of. And I stayed a week more—but it was simply too awful. I finally bought tickets. I—I don't like living at home—mother's such a sobby mess all the time. I wanted to see dad—and of course he was about ready to go out and kill Rol. Somebody—somebody—" her voice sank—"told me that if I read the Kinsey Report I'd see that what happened to Rol happened to maybe a third of the men like Rol. I guess it does. What difference does that make?"

Children, I thought. No. Not even children. Children is just what they weren't—just what they'd never been—or just what, if they'd ever been, they refused to let themselves remember. These angel-pusses, growing up everywhere in America, psychologically hamstrung or maybe wingstrung in their cribs. Turned into demons by their right-thinking, practical, realistic, common-sense, hard-headed fathers and mothers. Marrying, in no better condition for marriage than nuns and eunuchs. Phooie.

I slid my wrist in my cuff. It was after three. "Yvonne," I said, "are you busy tonight?"

"I was going to have dinner with dad—as usual. He bucks me up."

"Maybe you could do with a substitute bucker-upper, for a change."

"Dad told me I ought to go out—call up old friends—"

"The hell with what dad told you. And I haven't asked you, yet. I'm fussy, myself. Can you dance?"

She nodded.

"Rumba?"

"Rol was a swell dancer. And we used to have a teacher come to the house—in the days before he lost interest in—me."

"Well, I'll pick you up, around eight. The valet keeps my dinner things here—so put on a long dress."

"I don't need to be rescued, Mr. Wylie. It's sweet of you. But I'd detest to go out feeling as if I was the object of a missionary project."

"Then think of yourself as a missionary to me. I have no date. And I am very uninterested in spending this particular evening alone."

"Why?"

"Because I'm a writer. I put my heart and brain and libido into the composition of gay, mad, happy stories. Then I have to pay for it—in compensatory funk. Nothing psychological is free. The illusion that it is amounts merely to a passing human fancy—about fifty thousand years old. Surely you're familiar with the fact that humorous authors are melancholy babies, in the flesh? Well, I just miss being a humorous author—so I just miss being a one hundred per cent sourball."

"What are you going to do now?"

"That's a very possessive question," I said, "in view of the shortness of our acquaintance. However, I am going to cut a serial from two hundred and eighteen pages to one hundred and seventy-eight pages."

"Exactly?"

"Well—within a few lines. And not just this afternoon. It takes days. My wife is up in the country. We were having the house repapered and repainted. Every time I found a quiet corner and started to cut bleeding syllables from my precious prose, some damned craftsman with a mustache like a character in Midsummer Night's Dream spilled paste on my back. So, finally, I scrammed down here. If my wife had known I would have to put in more days on the serial—she'd have postponed the rural clowns. But, not knowing, and with artisans so touchy about their schedules—"

"Don't tell me!" she exclaimed. "We just had the house in Pasadena done over!" Her eyes faded. "For what?" She murked about inside herself briefly. "I'd like very much to go out with you—if you really want me to. On one condition."

"I know."

She turned quickly, unbelievingly. "You do not!"

"Bet?"

"Bet you flowers for me tonight."

"Generous wager, I must say. Indecently feminine! Okay. Promise to admit it—if I have the right answer? No hedging?"

"Promise."

"You'll go out—on condition I won't make a pass at you."

She flushed a faint peach color. "I thought you were going to guess I wanted to go Dutch."

"I know you did."

"How?"

"I know how women think, as they term it."

"You're right, though."

I picked up her check and signed it and signed my own and signed the two sets of bar checks and gave Fred—who was loitering about in the background with overt patience—a sound tip.

"Buy yourself," I said to her, "some dandy flowers. I like gardenias. I hate orchid-colored orchids. On second thought, if flowers remind you of Roland—"

"He never grew them to wear—or for bouquets. Just to breed."

"See you. And thanks for the indiscreet lunch."

3

It was, as they say, sweltering in my suite. Sweltering, like every term, is comparative and relative and also tentative. I like to swelter, as a rule. To work stripped and sweating, with a vasomotor system engaged in cooling me, rather than the opposite, which others prefer—a pumping system busy stoking the body against cold air. This—like most events and experiences—is more a matter of mental climate than physical. Such attitudes are self-taught, people-taught, or environment-taught.

One's frontal lobes are liable—unless trained in every particular at autocriticism—to hypnotize the rest of the brain into compliance with the ego's demand. Suggestion rises at some spot in the throbbing cerebral tissues, or from without, and is snatched up by the cortex to be delivered back as ultimate gospel to the whole human establishment: great balance of the brain and all the instincts in it, spinal cord, nerves, organs and muscles. These, then, like a converted Christian, are compelled by one fallible new layer of the organism to adjust to the command. When the whole man cannot, the cortex founders in neurosis or psychosis. Usually, however, the adjustment, farfetched or absurd though it may be, is sufficient so that the mechanism goes on with at least a semblance of effectiveness. Its nutty operator is allowed to live; people aren't very critical—or even observant.

Only in human aggregates is the effectiveness shown to be mere semblance. Men seen locally in time and space appear purposeful enough, reasonable, even charitable. Seen whole, they are clearly insane. And only one in a thousand sees that this collective madness is but the sum of little acts of hypnosis performed by his own cortex on his whole man.

Thus, in trifling example, where you might have been sweltering, I was sweating without psychic trauma. You may have taught yourself, been taught, or may have decided from observation that ninety degrees is an insufferable temperature. I have concluded it is pleasant. My constitution is no different from yours. The concept of thin blood is mythical—mine, indeed, is probably "thicker" than yours, for it contains a very high number of red cells. But the opinion my cortex holds of hot weather permits the rest of me to function in a hot room without the added burden of psychic pain. Your synthetic dread of hot weather may send you rushing to the seaside, where you then spend the day in a sun temperature of a hundred and twenty-five. You burn your skin. Or you exhaust yourself getting to the top of a mountain—where the unfamiliar and unseasonable coolness sets you sneezing with a cold.

I have observed that millions of people who are obliged to live in temperatures of ninety seem to do so with tranquillity and this is the message my cortex has delivered, not as gospel—not as the authority for a trance—but as submitted opinion. I have sent my brains the opposite message, in North Dakota, in the winter, with similarly good result.

The latitudes of tolerance are immense. The uses people make of them are meager. They pant too much on hot days, shiver too much on cold. About God and science, sex and business, they have hypnotized themselves to the great benefit, they think, of that bright, running dot of conscious vanity called "I." Even asleep, they finally hear little but the repetition of their own opinion. It becomes the one voice on earth—God's, of course.

The point here is—I liked the warm day.

But liking is another poor, irrelevant expression. What did it matter, now, whether I liked, disliked, or snored with apathy?

The elevator gnashed its teeth.

I entered the green-walled room and took off all my clothes but my shorts. I unpacked the typewriter-paper box that held the pages of my serial. I set up a card table and put my portable machine on a corner of it. I gathered up cigarettes, an ashtray, Kleenex for my spectacles, pencils, and my pen.

I had used the soft hair, high breasts and haunted eyes of—of what in hell was her name?—Yvonne Prentiss—as a barricade. Now, it dissipated. The sad look in her eyes was gone; her smile, like the Cheshire Cat's—that was gone. And the Ghoul came out from where it had been.

I had expected it would.

I said hello to the Ghoul.

I knew the bastard.

George T. Death.

The analgesia was absorbing, or it had been absorbed. My throat felt as if a tack were stuck in it. A stinging sensation—hardly noticeable (to the properly-hypnotizing cortex). One could scarcely expect a lavish use of clinical techniques for blocking off the mere prick of a biopsy. Still—it would be inconvenient to be reminded by my own flesh, prematurely, of what it had fallen heir to. There was stir enough in my gray matter on the topic, already; no additional goad was needed.

We death-dreaders—we victims of the marvels of science—souped up to the last ganglion by every advertisement, billboard, radio commercial, lecture, and editorial—by damned near every syllable we read or hear—to live to enjoy things (rather than to stand ready to die for the sake of ideas) are poorly prepared for carcinoma—for whatever your equivalent may be.

Or—was I afraid, not so much of dying as of the manner?

Get busy, I said to myself; you'll have plenty of time to savor these notions.

Or—was I even afraid? Shocked, rather?

Work.

There's the drug you need, boy.

I lay back on the divan, smoking.

George T. Death. I knew him of old.

In several guises.

I remembered the year I was ten, the year I had appendicitis, then peritonitis, then general blood poisoning. Sometimes, at night, the pain of my body, the pain of my tube-filled, pus-lathered guts will come back to me. And the smell. The fever. The thirst. They didn't believe in giving you liquids, then—not any—and I know what it's like to be on the Sahara without a drop to drink—and your viscera opened up, in the bargain.

I know.

Father came to the hospital during one of the spells of consciousness. His eyes were desperately gentle. "How's the fight, son?"

"Am I going to die?"

"You're pretty sick, son."

I laughed a little with my curdled belly. Too soon to answer, You're telling me. Nineteen-twelve. That was what I meant.

"But—will I die?"

His tender passion became tenderer still. "Would you be afraid to, son?"

"No."

"Do you believe in God?"

"Of course."

"Want to live—still?"

Still, he had said. He could see—what I could only feel.

"Yes."

"Then—fight."

That time I looked right smack into George T. Death's eye sockets and fought. But I was a kid then—and kids are brave if they have brave parents.

In some ways, my father is the bravest man I've ever known; in others, a coward. Who's different?

Who's different without being more coward?

There was the time in Warsaw.

My half brother Ted and I had finished our tour of Russia and come shaken across the Polish frontier—like two unconvinced readers of Dante who had gone there ourselves to be sure which part was poetry and which was accurate reporting. We found out. Our Dante was a good journalist.

In Tiflis, after too much vodka, in the biggest, best restaurant where the rats were so bold they would sit under your table and nibble your crumbs and run off a little way if you took the trouble to skid your feet at them—in Tiflis, where every kind of man goes by on the street, Negro and Turk, redhead and ash-blond, because every kind of man has poured through the Caucasus for thousands of years on the way to conquer Europe or the way back in conquest of Asia—in purple-walled Tiflis where the archeological strata are as clear as the story of the stones in a cross-cut syncline and bare human feet have drilled deep paths in the rock floor of the old Roman baths—in Tiflis where Persians still sit cross-legged on tables and play what Ted called snake-charmer music on bulbous pipes—we talked too much.

We drank too much and talked too much—to a dozen tourists who sat about the big table, waiting for their late dinner—waiting an hour or two, as you do in Russia. Tourists who, for the most part, had come from France, Germany, England, and the United States so pre-entranced with communism, so ignorant of farming and industrial process, so self-blinded to horror and despair as to imagine, even after seeing some of it, that the Soviet Experiment offered hope to any man. Not being blind—being noncommittal at the outset—we had seen better.

Wait till we get home, Ted and I told them.

We'll put the truth in America's magazines.

Police state. Prison. Human abattoir. Endless steppes of horror. Perversion of the mind. Destruction of the spirit. A factory of torture to keep the factories running. Hunger and helpless hatred. Dirt.

The old, old, old abomination in new clothes: tyranny.

We'll tell them.

It began, after that.

The GPU men everywhere we went—pretending they spoke no English and reddening when Ted and I blasphemed and insulted them in their hearing. The trip to the tea plantation in Batum—on a bus that deposited its other passengers and started up a series of hairpin turns—with a driver and Ted and myself on board. The slide—the driver jumping out. Ted and I jumped, too—but the bus didn't go over the cliff. It merely caught on the edge and hung there. (Was the driver chagrined because it failed to go over—or because we jumped also—or because he had steered so incompetently? How could you tell?)

Odessa.

The bartender offered us a bottle of Scotch—the first we'd seen in the long, grim way from Leningrad. We drank some and gave the rest away. And took the night train for Shepatovka, exulting in the thought that we would never see the UCCP again, come the morrow.

There was no water on the train.

All night, we turned on the hard boards.

In the blazing forenoon our car was shunted onto a siding and the Red Army soldiers—its only other occupants—marched away. Nothing was in sight but the sparse wheat of the Ukraine and its scalding mirages. We waited—with our thirst. Hung-over, desperate. Another train finally picked up our car and we went on—at the galling pace of communist transportation.

I found the carafe of water in the toilet—where no water had been before. Recklessly, tremblingly, we drank it—equally dividing the thankful drops. And late that day, without further ado, we crossed the border to the relaxation, the seeming luxury, the comparative freedom of Poland.

It was some days later, in the Palace Polonia Hotel, in Warsaw, when I woke with the cramps in my belly and legs. With a climbing fever.

Time spun—hours commingled in the familiar wastes of pain. I knew belly-fire. I did not know my legs could hurt so hideously or curl up against my will. I lay vomiting, fainting, crawling to the bathroom and there, too weak to lift myself, pouring out rice water. Areas of my skin turned purple.

Ted, untouched by an affliction neither of us recognized, took care of me. On the fourth day he brought a doctor and a nurse. On the fifth, I was briefly better.

That evening, on my insistence, he left me for the first time since I'd fallen sick.

He came back to the hotel alone, late, and sober—for he talked awhile with the concierge. He went to his room—beside the one where I lay ill—and opened the French windows, apparently to stare at Warsaw in the vermilion dawn. They found him on the sidewalk five floors below—dead.

When the consul came to see me, and the pleasant young men from the embassy, we were unable to make out what had happened. Had he stepped too far out? Climbed up on the roof for a better view? Had the concierge mistaken his condition and had he lost his balance? Jumped? Or had he been pushed—in the fashion of political assassins who pursue their foes into other nations so as to conceal their bloody reach?

We can never know.

The embassy and the consulate thought he was murdered.

And when I told Tom, my friend and doctor, the step-by-step progress of the first phase of my sudden sickness—when I remembered the thirst and the miraculous appearance of a carafe of water—Tom said, "I think you had cholera. It could have been in the water. Some people are immune to it. Maybe Ted was."

Maybe.

He was not immune to a five-story fall onto a cement sidewalk.

What matter?

Ted was dead.

I sent the cables.

And the second phase of my illness began. The swelling joints, the atrophy of muscles, the inflammation of nerves, the—why go into it? They sent to the largest institute for the best specialist in whatever this sequel might be.

And there was G.T. Death again.

The specialist seemed seven feet tall—a skinny man—who wore such a mustache as only the Poles can grow. He sat on my bed after the torturesome examination and told me about it, in French.

"I am afraid, my American friend, that I have bad news for you. You are a man. You will want the truth. It is a progressive malady. Your foot—your arm—already crippled. When it reaches the heart—"

He went away.

My nurse wept.

Ted was the one we counted on to be the great man. The strong, the good-humored, the precocious, the gifted, the good, the young Paul Bunyan of the family. Dead.

And now I had a turn at it.

I, the elder brother.

I, who had taken Ted on his first trip abroad.

I, who had led him to miserable accident, to foul execution, or to horrible impulse—bred, perhaps, in the vile durances of the vast nation we had traversed.

Abrupt hate of life.

I lay in that hotel bedroom—they had told me that a Warsaw hospital was to be avoided—and rehearsed the placid, polite syllables of the specialist.

He had been interested, as one foreigner inspecting another, to observe reactions.

I had therefore been careful to exhibit none.

Alone, I could react.

As now, I thought of my wife and my daughter and the insurance and the banks.

And having finished with that, I turned to rue.

Feeble fool. Wretched clot!

How little of what you felt and thought did you take the trouble to express!

When your corpse follows your brother's to the crematory in Gdynia, what epitaph?

Here lies a minor author—an excessive curiosity and a penchant for investigation—who never bothered to write up his reports.

So every artist and would-be artist makes this same phrase.

I knew: I never got it said.

Isn't it true of you, also?

Didn't you know—and weren't you always on the verge of saying so—when you had to go to the movies, lunch, the bathroom, bed, or the jute mill in quest of new shoes for baby?

Yanh-yanh.

Each generation learns enough too late to pass it to the next, for when the learning's accomplished the newcomers have always been educated ahead of the achievement—in ignorance.

So when will cradles be rocked by wise men and good women?

They never know it will take a thousand years, and perhaps a thousand times a thousand years; they think it will be tomorrow; that is the trouble with them—it is the trouble with them all.

I lay in the Palace Polonia, with the European cars blatting in the sacrificial street and the trains hooting across the moribund way and it vividly occurred to me that in a few more years Hitler's men would blow down these corridors and blow up those cobblestones. I lay in Jericho.

I thought, finally, about a palm frond.

There was a day in Florida when, in a mood of black despair, I stretched out beside the sea with all the cabanas of the Roney Plaza and all the dollars lying round about, reciting to myself the abhorrent antics of my compatriots and my own repulsive participation. The beach boys laughed; the handsome harlots splashed; and the purple sea came meaninglessly ashore. My eye, tired of the drenched blue firmament, came to rest on the frond of a coconut. It was a young leaf, very green, and it glistened in the sun like lacquered metal.

While I regarded it, the leaf had a sudden meaning—the meaning of life and growth and Evolution. Not the idea—but the felt significance. (You would say, doctor, that some biochemical process completed itself in that instant—a change came in the endocrines. Or you, doctor, that the individual unit shares with the group the Toynbean shift-to-the-opposite—the yin-yang—and hence, sometimes, joy-through-funk.) Anyhow, I looked at the damned palm frond and a great peace came over me, followed by an excitement. I decided to leave the American scene and make a personal inquiry of Hitler's Germany and Mr. Stalin's Russia and to take my brother along.

I got up and said so. The purple sea also took back its meaning, then, and all its other meanings. And that was that.

I flew with gulls once more, skittered with flying fish, and bathed in the limpid, tepid surf with every sand flea.

That is what I remembered, exactly, in Warsaw where I lay dying, as usual.

Remembering, I determined to go back to that sea.

My shoulder was disjointed and full of slime. Certainly. My left leg was also paralyzed. I was ankylosed and calcified and atrophied. But of course. Agony—sic. What was left of me might be a stumblebum but the outside part could somewhat swim still and the inside part could fly.

My brother was dead.

There was work to do.

To hell with Dr. Jerkski, great man of the Institute.

I would frustrate every specialist in Poland.

Take up your bed and totter, Wylie.

It required a year for the doing—in Warsaw and Paris, Manhattan, Connecticut, and California.

Then I had entirely recovered.

Trauma excepted.

Now that is what I thought of in the space of time it took to smoke a cigarette on my divan at the Astolat—that, and several thousand more items.

That is why, so to speak, I had nodded courteously at the Ghoul.

He is always hanging around.

One has only to turn one's head fast enough—and there he is.

Most people, by the cortico-schizoid mechanism I have described a few pages back, partition him off.

He is not behind me, they convince themselves.

But he is.

There are always exactly enough Ghouls to go round. Billions of people apply the blindfold technique in another way:

He is not a Ghoul, they say, but the God of Heaven.

The Eternal Grocer, who will dole out milk and honey forever.

The Great Conductor whose baton will direct my Everlasting Harp.

The Keeper on the Inexhaustible Preserves who will set infinite game before my arrow in the Happy Hunting.

Chairman of the Greens Committee of the Elysian Fields.

The Sublime Pander who will fit an houri to me on the hour, each hour, and I shall be the Paramour of Paradise.

The Universal Usher who will take the stub of my ticket and lead me to my seat in the Reserved Section at the Right Hand.

What asinine measurements of man are furnished by his Heavens!

My own opinion of the Functions of the Ghoul is different, as I am gradually trying to imply here. And I am certain, furthermore, no one really believes, in his heart, that such heavens be. His mouth says it, his cortex confirms it, and his heart gives him the lie; so he has his Hell.

For how could Nature come to as tawdry an end as Heaven?

Even human nature?

I told the Ghoul, after this sweating, to get behind me, like Satan, while I cut my serial.

4

This is the way of it.

You take out an adjective here, an adverb there, a prepositional phrase yonder—and so gain a line.

You make the first mark on a tally sheet. When you have four marks set parallel, you cross them with the fifth. When you have a row of twenty-eight marks, you have removed one page. When you have forty of these, you have completed the task—provided they are distributed through the installments in such a fashion that each part will be tailored to the desired length.

It was a story of manners—a light thing, with a plot.

I had enjoyed writing it.

I did not enjoy the cutting.

Every syllable scratched out is likely to take away some quality of a character upon which a subsequent event will turn. It is necessary to remember to the last detail what is removed and what remains. The elimination of a noun in the first installment may reduce the impact of a scene in the last. The contraction of a scenic description may ruin the comprehensibility of the hero's actions later on in the tale. And, when the most careful economy has been achieved, the goal of decimation may still be at a distance so that the writer is obliged to select this situation, that dialogue, yonder tender scene, and recast the whole in briefer compass, the while omitting no cogent phrase or fact, however trifling.

It is a big puzzle and a hard job.

It took me, I should think, another quarter of an hour to stow away my Ghoul completely, divert attention from the prick in my throat, and become immersed in the running words.

My editors say I am a good professional.

And that, my liberal-intellectual critics add, is all: a capable hack.

O liberals.

O cognoscenti.

O critics.

I give you my death-wish—and the atom bomb for its consummation.

Why didn't you study it sooner?

You copied into your literature whatever you saw on washroom walls—and little else—while brighter boys copied Bohr's equations from blackboards.

Both were true.

Both were real.

One was old.

The other new.

And where are you tomorrow?

Anyway, as I was suggesting, I write for money, usually.

I enjoy it—the writing and the dough. If writing isn't fun, I give it up. And I spend the money.

Here today and marlin fishing tomorrow.

Here today and at the couturiers with Ricky tomorrow.

Night club today and novelette tomorrow.

Serial today, book, movie, play.

Sarcophagous tomorrow.

I am at least one two-billion-three-hundred-millionth responsible for the contemporary world and bear the burden gamely. Why not take up my burden and follow me as I, too, follow? The burden of Light.

Or why not take up, better than I have, the same burden and improve upon my shambling progress?

I am the occasionally somewhat rich man who finds the Kingdom of Heaven at hand this day—and the next, discovers in his private concerns and small affluence that the door has narrowed down and his camel is balked by its load. The little acre I have dedicated stays where it is but wants, sometimes, for cultivation. I have sinned; that is why I understand sin. Men have made enough things for me to last fifty lifetimes; I have given them away for newer, more expedient things. Enough substance has been dug out of the earth and grown upon it and sold to me to support a tenementful of more intent philosophers. And I cannot compare myself favorably with other men: perhaps they lacked my environmental opportunities—a Princeton education, for instance—or a youth's experience of Montclair, New Jersey. (What grim lessons!). If, furthermore, my assigns perish with the yuts and their barbarous impedimenta, they will have no reason to remember me kindly.

But these are my problems.

And these are your problems, too.

Do you repent at all?

Or ever act?

Or merely join another lunch club and boost your voice loose? What fagins brought you up?

Old Bob Durfree, editor of the magazine for which I'd written so many yarns about Cynthia Davis and Cynthia's silly mother and Cynthia's patient pop would welcome this one. My short stories, my serials, were a branded feature of Bob's magazine. Struggling years! A hundred serials—froth composed of my blood and sweat and tears—were written for nothing. And then, at last, Success. Chimes in the mercantile establishments! Fiesta for salesmen! Orgasms in banks! The Cynthia stories belonged more to Bob Durfree's magazine than to me—and nearly as much to the taste of millions as to my taste, although I sometimes put spices in the meringue that offended the flaccid palate of Mrs. America and the lovely abscess she rears as a daughter.

At any rate, I poured it out on Bob Durfree's yarn because of the dignities I have referred to—and in light scorn of those critics who can never tell if silver is alloyed in gold since they do not know what gold is. They will follow their wrong guesses into oblivion. Every time they cried Eureka another true prophet went flat on his face.

It was about five o'clock when my phone rang.

I was surprised it hadn't rung sooner.

People are always calling me up. They want me to talk to Lions, Elk, Moose, and other quadrupeds. I never do. They want me to go on Information Please, or Town Hall, or Breakfast at Sardis. I never go. They want to know what boat to charter for a day's fishing. I always tell them. They want to argue. Me, too.

I thought, friends, relatives. Max, maybe—my brother. I thought, We, the People, asking me to appear as a Voice.

"Sorry—I'm all booked up. Busy. Going to die in a few weeks. Yes—exactly. Keeps you jumping."

"Phil! This is Paul! I'm down in the lobby!"

"Well, come up." I gave him the room number.

Paul is the eldest of my nephews—twenty-five now, or perhaps only twenty-four. His last name's Wilson. He is my older sister's only son and he reminds me of myself at that age, sometimes. Gaunt and hectic—continually outraged by the course of human events and continually upset by his own doings as well as his failures to do. Erudite in many things. Phenomenally naïve, all but unteachable, in others. (Maybe I haven't changed as much as I think.) And there is a difference between us of great magnitude. Where I was an interested but lazy mathematician, Paul is a genius; where I was captivated by every discovery of every science and adept at none, Paul was captured in earliest childhood by physics. We are temperamentally alike, to some degree. But he concentrated and achieved where I dispersed my attention and mastered nothing. He has—as I have—the familial facility for expression; this is the common property of so many of my relations that when any of them turns out to be inarticulate he is regarded as a sport.

Paul's mother, Georgianna Wylie, was such. Born two years before me, still more years before my brother, sister, half brother and half sister, and dispatched to an aunt after the death of my mother—which occurred when I was small—she was always a nebulous member of the family. A cumbersome, religious woman who wore plain-colored dresses—brown, as a rule—and rolled her hair in tight coils, like rusty screendoor springs. An introvert. She sang in the choir somewhere and studied for the missionary field. She never made it. Some remote Wylie cousin fell ill and Georgianna was drafted to take care of her. The illness turned chronic and young Georgianna's assignment became penal servitude. She spent twenty years or so as a peon in a prairie village that straddled a State border. What was never bloom, faded gradually; but it did not quite die out. One night in Minnesota at a camp meeting she met a chemistry professor who had gone to the service for a lark. He had it. He got Georgianna pregnant on the spot—or within harmonium-shot of it—and she died giving birth to Paul.

Wilson, the professor, meantime had done the right thing by her; they were married by an uncle of mine.

"Georgianna," my aunt used to say, "was the most docile, uncomplaining human being on earth. A true Christian. If she hadn't met that vile seducer—that atheist, Willy Wilson—she'd be serving her Lord in some distant land to this very day. She expiated her sin, believe me. The night she died, she said so. 'I'm going, Effie,' she told me. 'Bring up the boy in the Master's steps.' I failed her! Willy Wilson insisted on taking the boy—and brought him up a nonbeliever, like himself. Poor Georgianna!

"'I know He has forgiven me!' Those were her last words—excepting for what she said after the delirium set in."

My aunt would frown and shake her head at that point. "Two more mortal hours she lay there, twisting and trying to sit up—with me holding her. And the whole time she cursed the name of Wylie with words you wouldn't believe a girl like that would know. Of course—she meant Wilson—it's a common befuddlement. But whenever I think of the language she heaped on that evil man, I know what human torture is!"

It was one of our favorite family stories.

And, needless to say, Georgianna didn't mean Wilson at all. He's still a good chemistry prof—a husky, redheaded guy whom everybody likes. Georgianna was cursing her own blood the way people curse the day they were born—and for sufficient reasons. She had glimpsed—all but too late—the hypocrisy implicit in Scotch Presbyterianism. The strong, lucid mind that burned in silence beneath her clumsy exterior had finally cut through that wall between reason and instinct which men call Faith. Just before her "delirium" Georgianna had realized that Willy, not Jesus, had forgiven her (or would forgive her) for deserting him after their marriage, for working as a farm cook, and (as the result of over-fatigue) for falling down a back stairs in the ninth month of her pregnancy, thus bringing about her own demise through stubbornness and vanity. She had figured out the family—and Willy too. She got at least one moment of transcendent understanding, and followed it with two sound hours of profanity—crowding into the racing moments as many repressed sensations of her life as she had time for. Not a bad job, on the whole.

After Willy had explained it to me, I'd always wished I'd investigated Georgianna more attentively.

There hadn't been much chance.

Paul—her son—came in. The one we were so proud of.

Pushed the door open, kicked the book away, and let the automatic closer snap the lock. He took off a seersucker jacket that had flapped around his slatty shoulders. He picked up the book and said, "Jesus Christ. I thought I explained quantum mechanics to you ten years ago!" He went through my bedroom to the bathroom. A firm, pounding stream. He kicked the toilet handle, missed, kicked again—and it flushed resentfully. His jacket had fallen to the floor. When he returned, he kicked that. It rose in the air and he caught it. He whipped off his shirt.

"Buy me a drink," he said.

"What?"

"Scotch and soda."

"Order it yourself—and order me a coffee."

He went to the phone. I cut one more line, and then tidied up the bridge table, stacking things so I could start in quickly where I had left off.

"I didn't know you were in town," I said.

"I didn't know you were. Took a chance. I had to see a gook who lives near here—so I stopped in. How's Ricky? Recovered now?"

"Swell."

"What you down for? Cheating?"

"Work."

He considered that, pinching the flared nostrils of a long nose, peering luminously over his fist, wrinkling his forehead. "It's possible, anyhow. You're getting pretty old."

"I'm not too old to take you on, Spare-ribs."

His dark eyes twinkled. "No. You're getting oaken, Phil. Late maturing and frost resistant. Someday, though, I'll be like that myself—and then you'll be a wizzled shard who goes around feeling young girls. I'll bring over a pretty one to bait you up, and when you reach for her, I'll wallop you till they have to put you in an iron lung."

"By God, I believe you will!" I was laughing. "How's physics?"

His face became taut. "Don't you know Congress will crucify you for merely asking?"

Paul worked for Johann Brink, at the Belleau Lab. For the Atomic Energy Commission. Brink had picked him from a prepared slate of geniuses at M.I.T., Caltech, and several other schools. Paul was that good.

I said, "Congress has got one of my arms pinned down already and a hole in my foot, besides. If you don't want to tell me how physics is—I'll tell you. Put it this way. There was an atmosphere at Eniwetok you didn't like—"

"What do you know about that?" he said swiftly.

"I just listen to what Truman says," I answered, "and then I extrapolate." I shook my head. "It's funny. As soon as anybody has a dose of military security, he gets the soldier's creed—assumes people stop thinking because certain thoughts are classified. Everything about atomic energy is secret, hunh? Well—who has Brink been seeing, lately? Who was he photographed with? Old man heavy water. So now you come in here—looking like an underfed caribou with the wind up—and what must I think? That your little cadre of nuclear physicists is fooling with the hydrogen-helium cycle and getting hotter than the rotor in a turbo-jet. You're scared you'll figure out that one-thousand-times-more-powerful-than-Nagasaki bomb. The atomic cloudmaker. The continental broom. The universal gene-mangler. Or crack light metals or separate isotopes by heat. Don't tell me if I've read your mind, doctor. I would rather be calm in my surmises than fearful I might say something in my sleep that could be checked. Do you guys really think it is smart to cause officials to go around positively announcing that the number of bombs we have in our beloved stockpile is smaller than anybody who knew the prewar radium production could figure out? When you discuss atomic 'weapons' in the press—without specifying—doesn't it seep into the dull heads of us laymen that, for instance, hot isotopes would make a nifty charge for ordinary high-explosive bombs—against warships, for example? And can't anybody make a pile, now—and start the isotopes flowing? Crop-dust cities? And don't you incessantly talk too much about how long it will be before you can do thisa and thata? Remember when your spokesmen were telling us of the inutility of thorium? Cannot we, the plain people, add and subtract neutrons in our heads? Aren't you protesting too much now about how long it will be before you can push a couple of hydrogen atoms into one helium, with great and beneficial new release of energy?"

Paul was unamused. "Someday G2 is going to walk in here and walk out with you."

"Thought control," I said. "Never worked. Never will. Whenever a nation uses it, you can know that nation's washed up." The coffee came in—and the highball. I signed the check and tipped Karl. "Danke schoen," I said, and turned to Paul again. "G2 came after me long ago. I wrote a story before the war about uranium bombs and how they would be made and what they'd do—and it wasn't accepted until 1945. It went to censorship automatically—and when the censors read it—they hit the ceiling. Thought there was a leak in the Manhattan District. The only leak was in their heads. They sent a major out after me—like the hounds on the tail of Uncle Tom—"

"I recall the escapade," Paul said wearily. "You lead such a harrowing life, Mr. Wylie. And tell about it over and over."

Nobody likes that one. I said, "Sorry," and carried Paul his drink. He was sitting in one of my chairs; he had his legs on another; his elbow rested on my coffee table. I saw in my mirror that I was flushing a little: I felt embarrassed.

But Paul had already forgotten chiding me. "Phil," he said, jiggling his glass to cool his psyche with the ice-clink, "it gets worse and worse. It is beyond horrible. Past hideous. More than unthinkable. And it surpasses the unbearable."

"How about—tiresome?"

He remembered again—and grinned. "Quid pro quo? Okay. What do you want to talk about?"

"It," I said. "You. Any damned thing you please."

Paul sipped his highball. And that was another difference. At his age, I hadn't sipped. I had guzzled. He appeared to be thinking over what he would like to discuss—as if it were a scientific problem. Finally he said, "Phil, what's the matter with us?"

"Us who?"

"Physicists."

"Religion," I said.

"The faith of skepticism?" He leered at me. "If all you've got on it is that old chapter about the law of opposites, never mind."

"Lack of skepticism," I answered.

Paul chuckled. "Goody! Go ahead."

"The religion of a physicist is his belief in pure reason. He has done so well with it that he regards it as the whole of consciousness. He is like a man who has discovered the shovel. It digs so much better than his hands that he never looks for—"

"—the steam shovel?"

"Dynamite."

"Ouch!"

I laughed. "Take the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. This journal has been coming to me ever since you guys got frightened by What-Hath-God-Wrought-Now. I've been reading it for so long that I maybe ought to carry a pocket radiation meter to be sure I don't read it too much. What is this noble publication? An inquiry, it claims, into the means for controlling atomic energy and assuring world peace."

"And a pretty complete, exhaustive inquiry, too."

"Is it? Is it even a scientific inquiry? The atomic bomb will never go to war by itself. Men will drop, toss, or convey it."

"Sure. And the Bulletin has taken up every known means by which people can be told what atomic energy is, and why it must be controlled, and how to do that. Every step of the debate in the House and the Senate—and the debates in the United Nations—has been followed. Every idea my fellow physicists could hit on has been aired—"

"With no result."

"No result, my eye! If we hadn't ganged up to make Congress see that atomic energy was more than a military matter—soldiers would control the whole business right now."

"Grant that. You did get the AEC appointed. The brass doesn't run the whole domestic show. But the world show is run entirely from the viewpoint of possible war."

"Do you expect the physicists to be able to do anything about Russia and the Iron Curtain—when all the statesmen of all the nations can't drive a pinhole in it?"

"Look. There are too many places where you lads aren't really scientific at all. You run a magazine to investigate ways for avoiding atomic war. Men make war. But never in your Bulletin did I once see an article about human motivations. An article by a top-notch psychologist. A digest, even, of the existing science of human personality—and how that might apply to war, to atomic bombs, to international relations."

"Psychology isn't our business. We're specialists."

I slightly sneered at him. "Son, when you are trying to stop wars, psychology is the only business you're in! You're in the business of trying to answer the questions about what makes men tick—including the tick they make these days that sounds so much like an infernal machine. But you think that's still the reason—business."

"A lot of big shots," Paul answered, "have called on the psychologists to contribute. Asked them to speed the work on their science and the science of sociology—so we'll have a solid technical basis for establishing peace."

"Yeah. They have. And not one God-damned super-brain in the barrel has stopped to note for a moment—so far as I'm aware—that the psychologists are 'way ahead of them. The science of personality—of behavior—of consciousness and instinct—is well along. The psychologists could tell them why men fight. They could tell them why—so far as present evidence indicates—men are going to go right ahead having wars—atomic bombs, germs, and all—into the far, foreseeable future."

"Why?" he asked mildly.

"Oh—because they exploit individualism and never take any responsibility for it. Their hostilities and aggressions, frustrations and fears—add up, inside their groups, and burst out, since they're never even noticed, let alone dealt with, on the personal and private level, where they originate."

"So you have written," he grinned. "So what? Should we pure scientists simply say that peace is hopeless? Quit cold? Or try for peace with what we do know?"

"You and your pure science! Pure is a word that should be forbidden all of you. What's pure in a science that deals exclusively with the object and rules out the subject doing the dealing?"

"Just," Paul answered, "the result. If we hadn't ruled man out of man's investigations, we'd still believe the earth was flat, the sky was a cup, and the stars were holes in it. We'd still be premedieval—"

"Yet—when you did establish the objective facts to a considerable degree—set up physics and chemistry and biology—did you boys then turn that knowledge and that method upon yourselves?"

"You claim," Paul answered airily, "that the psychologists have done so."

"Yes. And you needn't pretend I have no right to make the claim. You scientists, self-styled, let a few doctors—ridiculed by the public and unassisted by you—do the investigating of the consciousness you were applying to electrons and protons. They used your method—the empirical method. They have announced their results steadily for the past half century. You never even looked them over. So now what are you? Big cheeses in the high-tension labs. Mere mice, around the psychological clinics. Hunting in your Bulletin for a way to stop war when, really, you haven't a good kindergarten knowledge of what war is and how it comes about."

"If there were enough psychiatrists, then—we wouldn't have to worry?"

"Be sarcastic!" I said. "All you birds need a good psychiatrist." He winced at that, rather sharply, I thought. But I didn't let up on him. "Guys like you are aware enough to see that perhaps Hitler could have used a psychoanalysis. You are not aware enough to see that any president of any big engineering school could use it, too. Why? Because you think pretty much as he thinks. And neither of you can see that your thinking is largely emotion and only somewhat logic. The great blunder of science was to imagine that science could be indefinitely developed for the physical benefit of man and never concurrently applied to his subjective needs, states, motives."

"It was hard enough for the early scientists to get across the simple truth about objects. If they'd tampered with man's beliefs—they'd all have been burned to death."

"What about you later scientists, then? Would anybody burn old Johann Brink to death, today, say for studying Freud?"

Paul chuckled. "The picture is beyond imagining."

"Yeah. And I'm sick of it. All your eminent predecessors rushed ahead investigating stars and bugs and drugs and air currents and left any inquiry into man himself to philosophers—who were usually ignorant even of physical science—or to James and Wundt and a few trying, solitary people. You didn't ever really apply science. Not all science to all reality. You just promulgated pure science along exactly half of its possible lines—and called it a job. Looking forever at the light outside—and never at the interior dark. Justifiable in a sense. But not bright. And not really scientific at all."

"Hear, hear!"

"If the Greeks had worked out math and aerodynamics and built flyable air frames—without bothering to study the problem of engines, we would regard them as remarkably skillful imbeciles. They would have littered old Attica with the fusilages of Piper Cubs and maybe B-29's that couldn't get off the ground. In a sense, that's what they did do: they pushed knowledge ahead along certain lines a certain distance—and never followed through. You goons are still doing the same half-baked job."

"You want us to quit studying physics and start picking up stuff about the Oedipus complex and sibling rivalry?"

"It's too late. That's the assignment for the next civilization."

He just looked at me.

After a while, I went on. "You birds say that knowledge is power—yet all your knowledge turns into impotence when you want it used for human harmony and peace. What is the power, then?"

"Let me guess. Instinct. You see—as an old Wylie reader—"

I heaved a cushion at him and enjoyed a little of my second cup of coffee. "Instinct. You dumb bastards! If you were really dedicated to science, as you say, the last war would never have happened. And the next one wouldn't be forever imminent. You say you believe that scientific knowledge should be free to all. Freedom of knowledge, you say, to put it backwards, is essential to science. But every time the nations get miffed at each other—you lice lock yourselves up in the national labs and go to war against each other as much as any soldier. The old herd instinct. The old ego. Intellectual fealty to scientific principles? You have none!"

"I kind of resent that," Paul said slowly.

"You resent the accusation. We who are about to die of the fact resent your behavior. Or should. If you pure scientists were pure guys purely devoted to science, Hitler could never have hired a dozen of the lot of you in Germany, or Stalin coerced six. If you had insisted on keeping science free—the Wehrmacht could never have been armed. If you had been scientific men, not men practicing science—even granting you felt it necessary to wipe out the Axis—when the deed was done, you could simply have published all the atomic facts and be damned to the politicians and the so-called patriots. Left mankind to work out its destinies in a climate where knowledge was still free. As it is—Russia knows enough to wipe up America in a few more years—the patriots and politicians are living in a fool's paradise—your Bulletin sweats monthly to explain that sinister fact—and all you gained by assenting to the current lockup of freedom of knowledge is a bureaucratic sweatbox to do your work in—and a terrible endless case of jitters. You don't understand behavior well enough to predict the results of your own. Others do. And by far the most probable result of the failure of pure scientists to behave purely toward science will be the end of the possibility of further top-level scientific investigation for a century or two."

"You think I should sit down and write out all the atomic secrets I know and print them and scatter them from a plane?"

"I do not. I think you should sit down and face the fact that science is precisely as hypocritical as religion—essentially no different from it—hamstrung in the opposite tendon by the same egotistical means. Sinful—call it. Guilty. The scientist can see the lack of logic in religion—so he rules it out. He doesn't see the import of its universal existence. The religious man can see that physical science offers precisely nothing of value to his inner sensibilities—but fails to see the meaning of logic. So he neglects to learn science and applies logic only when it flushes his toilet or eradicates his foes. You're both apes."

Paul swallowed the last of his ice. For a moment he sat without speaking, the reflected sunlight softening his sharp features. Then he said, "I hate to think anybody understands anything I don't. And I strongly suspect you do."

"I strongly know I damned well do."

There was another pause. Paul pulled his nose. He drew a breath to speak—and gave up the impulse. His eyes turned inward. Little by little, his limbs sagged. An expression of the utmost melancholy passed like a shadow over his face and was followed by lines of resolution—lines I did not like because, visible in them, was conflict—unacknowledged discontent mixed with unknown resolve.

"I'm in a terrible mess, Phil."

"Aren't we—and so forth?"

"I want to quit."

"The Lab?"

He nodded. "There is something positively bestial—in the worst sense—about going any further with schemes to turn physical theory into mere implements of death."

"Instinct coming to your rescue. I thought you liked the work?"

"I did. As long as it was a series of problems. Now—it's getting to be a cold choice of means for engineering murder. That's no fun. It's like spending all your time figuring out how to destroy your own home—after you've already hit on half a dozen nifty ways."

"Why not quit, then?"

"Brink—for one. I like the old guy. I'm indispensable to him—I at least pretend. And I feel loyal."

"Talk it over with him."

"No use. He's got the idea that he's engaged in some sort of holy mission—a personal war against all tyranny, right or left. That he, and we, and guys like us, must keep out in front—from the weapons standpoint—until every tyrant's done for."

"Tyranny, Paul, isn't a gent. It's something inside everybody."

He drew a long, sighing breath and abandoned the subject. Soon, he grinned at me. "Phil, I came as near praying you'd be in town today as I get to prayer. When the telephone operator put me through—I like to fainted with gratitude."

"How much," I asked caustically, "do you want to borrow?" Then I wondered if I ought to lend anybody more money.

He laughed. "Money, a guy like me can always use. Someday, though, I'll take time out and invent a quicker way to make ice cubes, or a better zipper, and get rich and pay you back. I keep a record of the debt on a letter I got from Fermi—a cherished possession."

He would, too, I thought. Get rich and pay back—Ricky. "Hundred bucks?"

"That wasn't why I wanted to see you. But thanks." He fumbled in his mind for some sort of beginning. "Oh, hell," he finally said. "What I want to say can be put in two sentences. And they're the hardest two I ever had to speak. I haven't tried them on anybody yet. But I've got to—with someone. Meaning you. It goes like this." For a full minute he sat there saying nothing. Then he pushed back his rather long chestnut hair and looked at me squarely—with an expression in his eyes that I would remember for a long time, if I had a long time to remember in. "I'm in love. And the girl's a whore." He turned away from me, after that, and looked toward the window, toward afternoon blue sky into which the sun still pointed. His chin was shaking.

I thought of several responses and picked one carefully. "All right. It's said—the whole thing. It leaves me fairly undisturbed, Paul."

"I guess you don't understand—don't believe me. I mean it. The girl actually was—a professional tart. A call girl. What they hold to be a high-class one."

"So I gathered. I've known several cases."

"It—" He swallowed hard a time or two. "Mind if I have another Scotch?"

I shook my head.

He ordered and began once again. "I didn't know it—like a dope—for a long time. I can't even tell whether or not knowing it right off—would have made a difference. I suppose it would. I suppose I'd just have been bitter—because I couldn't afford her. The name's Marcia."

"Nice name."

"Yeah. Look, Phil. It was last winter—after I got back from Eniwetok. Some of the directors of a big corporation where I'd been called in for a conference asked me to a party. Marcia was there. I suppose that the other girls were the same." He looked at his knuckles. "Scratch that. I know they were—now. Nobody said anything about it. Just—big corporation hospitality for people like me, whose advice might make them a few more millions. I sat around drinking cocktails and having a swell time and thinking that the girls had got prettier while I was in the Pacific, working. I didn't know they were to take home—like candy—compliments of the management. And Marcia didn't mention the fact when I asked her if she'd care to ditch the binge and have supper just with me."

"No."

"She merely went. She went—and was charming. You see—she caught onto my naïve assumptions, and she was being paid, and it amused her to be thought of as just an ordinary girl—a debutante, or the like—for whom a smart young physicist was falling like a ton of bricks." He looked at me again. His explanation was coming more easily. "Do you get the picture?"

"She must be bright. As well as attractive."

He nodded. "She has a sense of drama. All I did—feeling suffused that evening with love—was to take her to her apartment and bid her a pleasant good night. She asked me in—sure. Even tried to argue me in. But I was thinking in terms of the long and sentimental pursuit. Or—at least—decorum. Not-the-first-night, baby. That's me. Gentleman of the old school. I extracted her phone number—it wasn't difficult—and escorted her home, and went out to Brooklyn to my flat—and dreamed into my pipesmoke. Happy me."

He was silent for so long that I said, "And then?"

"I called her up the next afternoon. She was busy." A muscle shaped itself in his temple, twitched, vanished. "So I made a date for another evening. We had dinner and danced around—at the Stork. On dough you lent me. And that evening I accepted the invitation to go into her apartment with her. You see—she wasn't merely diverted by a dope—but she felt she owed me something. Something that corporation had paid for. Only—"

"It was different for her."

He seemed surprised. "How'd you know?"

"I'm thinking of the difference that would understandably exist between a guy who was paying—and a guy in love with you."

"It upset her."

"So she tried to duck you."

He was still more surprised. "She told me she'd be out of town for a couple of weeks."

"And you waited—"

"—the all-time eager beaver. And phoned. She sounded—odd. She asked me if I'd like to come up to her place for dinner—said she didn't feel like going out. She cooked. I know now that she had planned to tell me—that night. Instead—well, she didn't. She said she worked some as a model—which she had done. She said she had an income—not said, just hinted. I asked her to marry me—around three A.M."

"Just what did she do about that?"

"She cried. Quietly. Told me that she'd taken a fall out of marriage—which was also true. Didn't want to risk it again—not without being sure of the guy. And said there weren't any such guys as—she needed."

"Pretty close to being pretty nice."

Paul answered the door, took the drink, and put his own dollar on Karl's tray. "It went that way for about two months. Then she told me." His ice clinked without his volition. "The whole story—straight out—beginning at dinner one evening in the Waldorf. The guy she married—a smug, sadistic twirp. Getting divorced. Coming to New York. Scrimping along on modeling jobs. Running into Hattie Blaine. Ever heard of her?"

Who hadn't? Hattie was madam to Manhattan's upper set. I gave a nod.

"Hattie sold her on the idea—after quite a campaign. Marcia went to work. That was about three years ago. I took her home that night—placidly enough—and went for the walk that lasts till they put out the sidewalks again. Then I phoned Johann I was sick—and got sick, drinking. For a month or so more, I tried the old Presbyterian anodyne: work. No use."

"Not when you're young."

"Later?"

"It comes with time. Go ahead."

"When I had all but burned out my main bearings, I phoned her. Maybe you won't believe it—but Marcia was going to phone me that evening. We talked it over. She moved to my flat and got a job."

"So?"

"We might get married."

"She want to?"

"She refuses—now. I'm not always certain I want to, myself." He stuck his forefinger into his shoe and tugged at the counter. "And I don't know why. Why I want to marry her. Why I'm uncertain."

"How do your—?" I broke that off.

But he got it. "My friends think she's swell. You gathered she was good-looking. She's a tall, slender gal with light-brown hair and blue eyes. Quiet. You'd never think—! But I went into that, didn't I? She attended college, in Iowa, for a year—and she likes to read. By that I mean—"

"Nobody else—?"

"Christ, no. They think she's a working gal—which she is, now: a nice friend of mine."

"Someday—" I stopped there—again.

"Yes." His face whitened. "A putty-chinned, overweight lodge brother from Keokuk, just tight enough to miss the stony stare and come up with the big hello. It's happened."

"I see."

"She went home and had hysterics."

"Bring her over."

Paul looked at me thoughtfully. "You are upset."

"Sure. Now. You are. So bring her over. Not tonight—or tomorrow night. I'm busy."

"What about lunch tomorrow? She's not working and I can slide out."

"Lunch, then. Come around one."

The family's very fond of Paul and a good many of us have tried to spoil him. He was one of those irresistible kids—the kind that wears glasses, has braces on his teeth, raises bizarre pets, looks up everything in the encyclopedia, and is always engaged in a project about five years ahead of his current age—so that he is always in deep water and needs help. Everybody helped Paul. When he grew up—through one of the most gangling and precocious adolescences in the history of youth—the aunts, sisters, and female cousins used to argue constantly about his looks. Was he genuinely handsome, did he merely have character in his face, or was he plain ugly but friendly-looking? The argument was never decided. But, at least, he looked better when his eyesight was corrected, the spectacles were abandoned, and the braces had come off his teeth.

I walked Paul to the door and pulled out my bill-clip. There were a couple of fifties in it and I gave them to him. Not much else—so—when he'd gone, I wrote a check to cash and phoned for Bill the bellman. He came up and took my check and brought the money back in a few minutes. I gave him fifty cents—knowing it was too much—knowing I had always tipped too much—knowing that I had never cared because I'd been brought up amidst nickel pinchers and because I like to please the people around me—and realizing all of a sudden that I would go right on being extravagant till the day I died which, luckily for my estate, probably wouldn't be far off.

In this connection, one trifle should be mentioned which on looking over these minutes, I see I haven't got to.

It crossed my mind at this point, as it had earlier in the day.

I walked over and sat on the arm of a wing chair, staring out at the hot evening. New York often has a marine sky to which, being a seaport, it is entitled. That night the clouds were low and small—evenly spaced and of a size. When the sun hit them, it turned them several different colors—a dappled effect, like a peacock's tail in which orange, not iridescent blue-green, was the predominating tinge. It was getting on toward seven.

I thought about my dollar-strewing habits and the fact that I probably wouldn't much reduce what funds I'd stored up myself and reluctantly but methodically amassed in the coffers of the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company.

Tom-the-doctor had said the damned excrescence in my craw, if mortal, wouldn't be operable. That meant I wouldn't be lying around in some hospital, like so many of them, at umpteen bucks a day, while they slowly took out my neck. It meant, so far as I was concerned, that a day would come along when I would make up my mind the books no longer balanced. A day, that is, when pain or mechanical difficulties made it impossible to proceed with the prose. When I couldn't write any more.

That day, I would have completed my best effort to get my affairs in order. I'd have seen the people I loved—and seen them before it was an ordeal for them to see me. I do not have a horror—but a kind of intellectual rage—over meaningless, agonizing, nonproductive, lingering existence. In my life, I've seen a great deal of it. I have seen people who were a stinking nursing problem twenty-four hours a day—who were afflicted with fantastic agony besides—and who implored their relatives, friends, and physicians to put them out of their misery—but who lived in that state for a couple of years.

By taking a reasonable amount of thought, and through a certain amount of luck, I have avoided several of the pitfalls into which man persistently topples. Into others, I've all but pitched myself. But this was one I intended to skip. In the kit I carry for boat trips is a hypodermic syringe and a thin little bottle of morphine tablets. I've never had to use them on the broken leg, the gasoline burn, the leader-wire cut, for which they are always ready. But, when the day came which, in my judgment, would turn the balance of life, I knew precisely what I would do. I had always known, even before I had owned such gentle means.

You dissolve all the tablets—five grains—and fill the barrel of the hypo. You jab yourself and push.

Simple.

The reader of these notes may therefore spare himself—as I spared myself—as all human beings should be spared—the anticipation of death dragged out excruciatingly by the miracles of science.

That is one of the items on the gigantic ledger in which are gathered those details that prove modern man is mad.

Too many people, for one thing,
when they get to dying,
want to top Jesus.
Wanting that,
inevitably,
they want to kill as many others as possible
by Christlike torture—
forgetting that even He
had his legs broken
as a method of mercy killing.

My apologies, then, for not entering this note sooner.

I sat at the window and I could have pulled out my own hair, or wept, (or roared with laughter) on account of Paul.

I knew Paul pretty well, and loved him.

And I did not believe he was enough of a realist or a humorist to marry a harlot and prosper in his soul.

Whoever she was, she would eat him away altogether, or eat away years of him. When he found himself out—that he could not accept himself with her—it might be too late. He was stubborn. The ordeal would continue—brave front and eroding guts. What should a man do?

I am not my brother's keeper.

How often that wretched phrase has been used as the alibi for vicious neglect!

How rarely has it served in the intended sense. It is but a warning to Peeping Toms, to Meddlesome Matties and Interfering In-Laws, Overweening Do-gooders, Paul Prys, the Rabble of the Self-righteous.

Would God the Peepul understood the Words of Jesus had one meaning, always, and often the opposite of the convenient, accepted interpretation; that their Christ appreciated how nothing can be truly said of the Father that does not make a suitable apothegm for Beelzebub!

Who asked them to interpret, anyway?

He told them to act.

I am not my brother's keeper.

The Holy Writ that John Sumner never comprehended, or Anthony Comstock, old Cotton Mather, and a dozen billion more.

What man, seeing even a pig caught under a fence, does not pull it out, although it might be the Sabbath?

Which is germane to the circumstance?

What of the Good Samaritan?

I left the sunset hanging over the gray composite of the roofs—the willow trees in penthouse gardens, the chimneypots that twirled with supper cooking, and the fly-eyed walls, the thousand-lenses, the bloodshot windows staring at New Jersey—staring from the square sides of skyscrapers that towered around me in stiff, unplanned attention, waiting for night, waiting with God knew what stony thoughts and brickish resignation—doubtless for Soviet rockets.

I pushed down my shorts, kicked them onto a bed as Paul had kicked his jacket, and turned on the water in the tub.

I lay down there, donning the warm garment gradually, the wet, the clean, the only other that fits as perfectly as the grave. I turned off the tap with my foot. I looked at my skin, which was still fairly smooth, for all the long time I'd worn it, weathered it, and given it unnatural chores of excretion.

Good-bye to All That. Good-bye Mr. Chips. And Miss Chippies.

Yak-yak.
This is the cup.
And
take this cup from me.
Nyanh-nyanh.
I soaped the person.
The phone rang.
It does.

You get out of the bathtub. You wrap a towel around your midriff and make footprints on your rug. You sit and drip.

The operator says, "One moment, please. Rushford calling."

If her boy friend had too many beers on the night before, she hurts your ear.

This mug must have been rolling.

"Hello, dear."

Rickey's voice was as clear as heaven's door-chimes.

I could feel my heart jumping around inside me, trying to straighten things up in a hurry.

"Hello, Tud." It rhymes with "good" and doesn't mean anything to anybody but us.

"How are you—you sound—worried?"

My banging heart must have left a chair out of place somewhere. I took a good breath and pushed whatever it was back into the regular design. "Naw. Maybe tired. Been working. Paul was here. I'm worried about him—if that's what you mean."

"I guess so. I called up because I thought maybe you were planning to call me this evening."

"Was."

"Mother and I are going up to Brookses to play bridge. So we'd have been out, if you'd have called. What about Paul?"

"He's living in sin with a dame he's nuts about—and he found out after he went overboard that she's an old understudy from Hattie Blaine's finishing school for young ladies."

"Oh, dear." Rickey can put all her compassion into two syllables—and it's compassion enough for a saint.

"I was dawdling around here cogitating ways and means—"

She giggled. "In the tub, I bet."

"Think what Socrates accomplished in a tub. Not to mention Archimedes."

"The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker," she replied amiably. "Then there was that show-girl who bathed in champagne. Her tub landed her in jail. Any number of people have opened their arteries in tubs. They put tubs under guillotines—north end. A tub cuts both ways, dear—"

"What should I do, then? Maybe you take dust baths. Maybe that makes people brighter. The genius is a quaking mass of emotional mincemeat. Hasn't told a soul but me. Dumped it in my lap. Regarded it as an Act of God that I happened to be here when the confessional mood came over him. Typical physicist—solve any equation but the human."

Rickey said, "Did you see her?"

"Tomorrow. Lunch."

"It just won't work—for him."

"Yeah."

"Is he—terribly—?"

"The works. Head-over-heels."

"Oh, dear! Has it been long?"

"Six-seven months."

"Then—it could take him six or seven years to—"

"Some kind of female arithmetic. But probably solid."

"You could call up Hattie and talk to her and find out—"

"I've considered that. What do I ask Hattie? Is Marcia sincere—like sincere in a Freddie Wakeman character?"

"Marcia?"

"M'm'm'm."

"If it was only Dolores! Or Fern or Pearl!"

"More woman-palaver. And it's Marcia. And she was in college for a while. She reads books."

"You could ask if she's sweet. You know what to ask, dope."

"I will pull a low-brimmed hat over my eyes, slip a roscoe into my pocket, print up a few dozen private-eye calling cards, and fare forth—"

"It would help to know something more about her than Paul's feelings. Then call me up. How's the work?"

"Oh—a needle in every haystack."

"You ought to have a little fun."

"I'm enjoying every paragraph."

"Why don't you call up Murray's and take some more lessons? Maybe if you put in enough roadwork and a few more thousand dollars—you could finally learn to tango."

"Damn your pretty eyes! Why don't you study how to follow?"

Ricky laughed. "No fooling! You work too much. If you don't play some, you'll burn yourself out in another forty-six years. You've been getting stale around here."

"Tell me about the birds and the flowers and Popcorn."

Popcorn is one of the cocker pups—all white. Quite a dog. Popcorn had got into the garbage pit and trapped himself for two hours. There had been a squall. The wind had blown over the delphiniums. The 2-4-D I'd sprayed around was already wilting weeds that had defied generations of her forebears. She was going to dig up and separate the crocuses in the rock garden. She had decided I wouldn't finish building the water lily pool for another year and she was planning to use the excavation for composting. There were two young downy woodpeckers and an oriole at the bird feeding station that afternoon.

"Don't work too hard," she repeated. "And have some fun."

"I'm weary and I'm bored and I'm lonely." God knew I was lonely, anyhow.

"It's good for you."

"I hope you starve emotionally."

"It is a big bridge party and I am going to sit beside Mr. Teel."

Mr. Teel is an aging squire who lives in the lush Genesee bottom land and can't keep his hands off. I was laughing. I was also biting back the desire to tell her to drive to Buffalo and grab the night plane.

"The trouble," I said, "with ladies and Mr. Teel is that they fidget and flush, squirm and put up with it. Personally, I think they like it."

"Should I scream?"

"Lord, no. Worst possible technique. When you bid six spades and start playing it and you notice something on your knee of about the weight of a man's hand, there are three good possibilities. Relax and enjoy it. This is what I recommend. However, you can also idly lower the tip of your cigarette and apply it. The third, very good, move is to lean forward as if staring myopically at the dummy—reach under the table yourself—and grab back in a way Mr. Teel will never forget."

"You know everything, don't you?"

"Need you ask?"

"Except that we're wasting a lot of money on Long Distance. Are you sure you're all right?"

Women's ears! "Yeah."

"Then good night."

"Night, darling."

What dripped now was not eau de Croton Reservoir. It came from Wylie's pores.

Almost—I called her back about the plane.

She had sounded fine—thank God!

It was not always so.

We had been married, Ricky and I, for two years (was it three?) and built a candy-box house on an island in Biscayne Bay (before the sixty sewers of Greater Miami belched the water sludge-thick) when she fell sick. Brucellosis, they called it, or undulant fever. In cattle, Bang's disease. The cows abort. They told us it was common everywhere in our fair land and caught from unpasteurized milk, or cheese, ice cream, or meat improperly inspected. The pasteurization laws in those days, they said, were altogether inadequate; inspection was bad; and cattle owners—they said further—were loath to lose their stricken animals. For a small bribe, we were told, they might be warned of impending inspection. Thereupon, they could drive the afflicted members of their herds into hiding while the government agent went by. They were in business (after all) and a buck is sacred; so are American sacred cattle sacred; let the public look after itself. Some of the cowmen don't believe the germ theory, anyhow; they think hygiene is one more racket like their own. And some, of course, like a certain proportion of the men in every business, would sell you leper's dung (neatly packaged—nationally advertised) if there were money in it.

They sold the milk.

We drank it.

Some get brucellosis—some not. Some hundreds of thousands of free American citizens. It is one of the marvels of our Age.

Some die.

Some heal themselves, in due time.

Others, like my Ricky, drag out the years in pain, debility, and sorrow. Fits of fever seize them. They take to their beds for days, for weeks, for months—racked and suffering and exhausted, sick at their stomachs, sick in their heads. The gram-negative bacterium is (they say) neurotoxic. It inflames the ganglia of the brain. The patient may expect not merely fever and pains, but constant anxiety, causeless fears, a collapse of the calmest temper, hysterias, heebie-jeebies, screaming meemies, spasms, and incomprehensible alarms.

You must try to ignore it, Mrs. Wylie. Personality changes occur owing merely to the nature of your disease. Devote your (changed) self to a consideration of the change as physical phenomenology. You are lucky to get your trouble diagnosed. Hundreds of thousands of undulant fever sufferers spend their lives running from one doctor to another without avail. They're told they have tuberculosis, intestinal poisoning, brain tumor, neurasthenia, and bad dispositions. Medicine is—though the fact's not medicine's fault—very laggard about recognizing this common malady. Consider yourself lucky.

Ricky threw into the tormented years her fortitude. She said she was fortunate. They knew the name of her ailment and they were doing all they could.

Hospitals and clinics, X rays and tests, sulfas and antibiotics, vaccines and sterile sores—a little improvement, a red-hot localization and the hospital again. Coming fine! Another year or two and you should feel—pretty much your old self. Patience. Courage.

Well. She had plenty.

The doctors—the dozens, the scores, mauled and mangled and encouraged.

We have great hope for this new immunizing serum.

She took it.

Stubborn case, Mrs. Wylie. You seem to be especially sensitive to brucella.

Streptomycin holds out hope.

We find it, in a chronic case like yours—ineffectual.

Some new mold is what we are searching for.

The years—two—three—five—continued with their hopes and horror.

It may be, Mrs. Wylie, that brucella sterilizes women in the same way it causes cattle to abort. Not all the sufferers—but a percentage. Of course, we aren't sure. But I wouldn't set my heart on having children, now. You're not in condition now, anyway; and when you've recovered, you may find it is impossible.

She is a game girl, Ricky.

Two years ago, she began to get well.

We have had our fingers crossed—

crossed—and held tightly in the clamp of one more hope.

I thought about her.

These things—and how she was still that same calm girl.

And how could I tell her, that perhaps it was my turn?

Gradually I got myself into the tub again.

I shaved, then.

We are all afraid of Five O'clock Shadow. Such fears, indeed, have become paramount for most of us.

Yuts.

What was Paul's idiom?

Cipher-faces—standing around waiting for somebody to put a minus one in front of them. Hitler, Stalin, or Huey Long. Zero-pusses, he called them. Zed-mugs. Neck-heads. Neonightmares. Two-legged negatives.

I shaved, thinking I was positive, anyhow. Wait till they focused their bright peepers on that biopsy!

I wished I had a little music to cheer up the joint. All I could hear was passing cargo on Madison Avenue, the elevator ruminating in its shaft, and some dame in the bathroom above me talking to a little kid with the motherly tones of a cement mixer. The sweet child was answering in words I could not distinguish, but it knew how to mix concrete, too.

Ricky and I haven't owned a radio for years—except one that sneaked into the house in a record-player and we didn't even notice we had that, for eight months. A man in this world encounters more than he can bear of the sort of thing that radio purveys; it is Heaven's own mercy if he can avoid a part of it. The printed ads and the billboards get you willy-nilly; and second-class mail is always fooling you. You are eternally exposed to entertainment by chumps in the flesh.

But when I want a cerebral clyster I want something that won't wash my brain out. And while I can eat with my mouth I propose to get along without the nutrient enema. Every orifice to its rightful function, I say.

But now I wanted music.

So I called Bill-the-bellman again. To think (as you are beginning to see) is to act, with me. Sometimes. And the Astolat doesn't have what is correctly called piped radio in its rooms. Bill brought up a machine with knobs like the eyes of dead fish and an illuminated grin for a dial—such a grin as may be seen on any alligator lamp.

I spun through about eighteen of my fellow citizens who were uniformly engaged in lying to the public and finally hit a girl with too much rosin on her voice, which was what I wanted.

"When a Broadway baby goes to bed
It's early in the morning—"

I did a feather and a few more Peabody steps and a couple of advance left turns.

The dame put a mute on the bridge of her nose.

Broadway dreamed off to her lullaby.

She began, "Say it with music—"

I thought of Palmer Gymnasium on the Princeton Campus in about 1922—the June, the quiet trees, the cigarettes like cherry-colored fireflies, the flappers, a cicada competing with strings and woodwinds, and me outside because I didn't have the spondulix and the tux. My throat thickened with something sharper than carcinoma.

If only I had known then what I know now.

And suddenly I remembered that I had known.

In that musky dark, in the dark of a thousand other disappointed evenings, in the beam and blister of every day, I had been tightening the spring for the run. The anticipated journey—the slatting of my choo-choo train around its silver track.

I knew then because I was doing it.

And I knew now, but differently, because it was done.

That poignancy was not this.

Beneath the fragrant maples and beyond the envious desuetude had burned the gathering assurance.

The response to challenge.

Spondulix, tux, and young girls' tongues, and stingers, too.

Incidents.

Repressions, Mr. Wylie. Inferiority, Phil.

What had kept me so steadfast despite my passions of despair? Despite all music—despite the Weltschmerz of underprivileged sophomores?

I looked at my old friend, The Typewriter.

"Somehow they'd rather be kissed To the strains of Chopin or Liszt—"

The more we succeed the more we fail.

When I am gone, who'll write on you and say the same things better?

Plenty of them, Philip.

You never put the bar up where even you could jump.

Who ever did?

It was damned near eight o'clock.

I got dressed fast.

[PART TWO]

Tarantella

1

The desk clerk told me that Mrs. Prentiss had Room 1603—the apartment, not only next to mine but accessible from mine by a set of doors—now partly locked: I'd turned the key in the door on my side and tried the other, when I'd arrived.

"I thought," I said, "that she was a few floors down—"

"She moved this afternoon, Mr. Wylie. To get out of the heat, where there was more air."

Or more something.

I hung up and looked at the doors.

The promise not to make a pass at her naturally crossed my mind. It was, evidently, a one-sided commitment. At this season there weren't many guests in the hotel so she'd had no difficulty in moving near me. I wondered whether she would admit it or pretend it was a coincidence; and bet the latter way. Honi soit qui mal n'y pense pas.

I checked myself in the mirror. Then I knocked on her door. The proper hall one.

She wore the gardenias in her hair—a white dress with a gold border stenciled around the hem—and her shoes and pocketbook were gold, too. The big diamond had evidently been sent down to the safe-deposit boxes, or left on her bureau—depending on which sort of person she was. Her hair was done up—with the curls among the flowers. She looked as attractive as she intended. Cool, too.

"Am I stunning?"

I nodded. "But not ravishing. If the Hindus had untouchables at the top of the caste system—white priestesses, say—you'd qualify."

"You obviously don't know much about priestesses."

I rang for the elevator.

"That," I pointed, "is my demesne, abode, diggings—"

"I know. I asked. And moved."

"Why, exactly?"

I suppose she wanted her eyes to be interesting. They were just—disturbed. "To tease you."

"Tease whom?"

She blushed the peach tinge I'd noticed before. "Me." Then she shook her head at herself. "Because I'm lonely, maybe. Because I have a kind of phobia about hotels. I don't know."

I took her to the Crépuscule—the steps down and the moonlit air conditioning—the blue leather benches—the violin, cello, and piano accordion—the little dance floor in the corner with mirrors on two sides—and the French cuisine. The trio there has rhythm and the cellist plays maracas when he feels like it, so you can rumba.

She had a dry Martini and I had tomato juice. Then I asked her and we danced a couple of fox trots. She was a little bit nervous for a minute or so and presently she wasn't. I asked the trio for a bolero; the two other couples quit; and we danced alone. Afterward we danced to a piece called "Cu-Gu-Tu-Ru" which is also known as "Jack-Jack." She understood, technically, about dancing the rumba and she gave some indication of feelings for the part that is more instinctive than planned. Once or twice she tried to lead me—without being aware of it.

If you know a good deal about dancing, you can tell a good deal about girls that you'd be a long time in learning by any other means. People are animals—and dancing among animals is several hundred million years older than the species that calls itself Homo sapiens. There was rhythm on the planet long before there were ballrooms. So you can expect vestiges, at least, in woman-the-animal, of impulses which belong to the skeleton, muscles, and nerves and not to society—vestiges specifically interpreted, disciplined or repressed by the individual in your arms. The woman's dancing says, This is what the world has done to me—or hasn't. And it is the same for men—which is why women, who live closer to their instincts, like to dance.

This circumstance, alas, has for so long been repudiated by our forebears that the dancing of most American males is rude and boorish and clumsy, at once self-assertive and self-conscious, unimaginative, disrhythmic, unsubtle—paranoid. It is what the world has done to them.

You can talk to a woman all night and persuade her of nothing.

You can hold her hand and a chemical change will take place in her.

You can kiss her in certain ways and the Old Memories will do what rhetoric cannot.

And you can dance with her.

If you can dance.

You can dance by fox trot, the American way, the integration of surfaces. We know the same steps, the same skills, the same beat. We look well together. We make a matched pair. The thresholds of our sentiments mesh, dovetail, tongue-and-groove. We are, indeed, in the groove.

You can use the dance of conquest and gradual assent, the tango.

Or the rumba.

Which is African. Studied teleology, stylized candor, libido embedded in the music, suspended in cadences, arrested, sustained—beyond intellect, this side of ecstasy. It is a sophistication that northern countries never knew of—a primitive deliberation, a hot-blooded coolness. For not knowing, they are punished by going without—and in other, obscure fashions. Very few northern women and fewer men, excepting among the young, are able to discover the essence.

They rumba—they say.

They wave their tails like pennants, the oscillating flesh corrupt in Christian purity.

Yvonne was one of the few.

She came honestly by the name, I thought.

"Huguenots," she said when we sat down. "On mother's side."

How can the Americans ever cleanse themselves?

I ordered our dinner.

Again, she tried to lead—to change her mind—to demur—to say she wasn't hungry—then to consider the cold roast beef.

"You'll like it," I said. If she had insisted, I'd have let her order for herself. But she didn't want anything in particular to eat. She wanted to see what happened to her slight, vain whims. So I ignored them.

"You can have another Martini."

"I guess I must?"

"Sure. Must. Dinner will take a few minutes and we won't dance again till after."

"You're terribly positive."

"Nonsense," I said. "You're used to men who have been beaten to death by women before you got hold of them."

Her eyes fixed on me, dilated, and she laughed. "Rol."

"Among all the others. Maleness has just about disappeared in your native land, sister. The boys are all brought up by women, and taught by women in school, and then they go to work to support women by manufacturing and distributing the things women think they want. It's called civilization—and actually it's only the highest form barbarism has yet reached. Trinket-and-gadget society. Domestic convenience society. A society that holds a handkerchief to one end and sets the other on a flush toilet—a society that aims to make the linen germicidal and the toilet silent, colored, and perfumed."

"And men? What do they do? Use fingers and squat?"

"You're learning too fast. Live outdoors, avoid neurosis, and so escape the common cold. I think they could stand for the flush toilet—but they would be more concerned in getting the nitrogen back to the topsoil than they would in the orchid rims. First things first and a conscious sense of responsibility for the future—that's us boys."

"Phooie!"

"Who do you like—to go on from lunch? Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, George Raft, Rudolph Valentino, Gregory Peck, or some of the new boy friends of the bobby-soxers I'm too old to remember the names of?"

"None of them. And I never saw Valentino in a picture."

"Meaning him."

"At least—he acted as if he had manners."

"On the contrary. He did, in a mannerly way, several things banned by the book of etiquette."

"Isn't that the same?"

"From the woman's viewpoint."

"Don't you ever get tired finding imaginary inferiorities in women?"

"Did I say it was inferior? It isn't. More realistic, in fact. Don't you, on the other hand, prefer to be appreciated for differences—rather than to worry over the need of proving identities?"

"Modern Woman—the Lost Sex. You got it out of the book."

"It's a pretty good book."

Yvonne watched the waiter exchange a filled glass for the empty one. She seemed to want to defer talking while she caught up with something in her mind. She sipped, and stared at the people eating dinner in the azure haze the place calls light, and sipped again. She had a good-sized mouth with a pretty shape: the lipstick went where the lips were, and nowhere else.

"I wanted to talk to you. I was ready to pester you. That's why I moved next door. I was going to let you find it out when we came back this evening. I was going to ask you in. I'm not afraid of you."

"Smallest achievement in the history of courage."

"I want to figure out what to do about Rol. You see—I'm still crazy about him."

"Send him to a good psychiatrist."

She exhaled with gentle violence. "Try it!"

"You said he was very upset—promised you anything. That was your chance to make him promise psychiatry. You seem to have read books about it—"

She shook her head. "Not many, really. You don't understand. Rol wasn't in the least bit upset because of what he'd done. He was upset about my attitude over it. He said it was a 'trivial incident'—and told me he loved me—and said I was frigid and what did I expect. He said he didn't consider he'd been unfaithful to me—and talked on and on about being 'human.' Imagine!"

"Are you?"

The blush came again. She spoke in a low voice, "Mostly."

"People," I said, "don't want to know about people, nowadays."

"Did they ever?"

"Here and there—by fits and starts. They had a short spell of wanting to find out about themselves through reason—a couple of centuries ago. Innumerable spells of trying to figure themselves out through religions."

"But not now?" She was sarcastic. "Nobody knows anything now?"

"The average college graduate doesn't even know where he is in relation to other objects. Couldn't point to the ecliptic. Or explain the changing seasons. Couldn't point toward the sun, at night. Friends of mine, well-known writers, belong to a society that believes the earth is flat. There's another buddyship of boobs who think the earth is hollow and we live inside. Till the government began financing research for war, America spent twice as much on astrology as on scientific investigation. The folks would rather, by twice, be fooled than find out the truth."

"We've made a lot of progress."

"Individuals have learned a lot. The people ignore it. They are interested in the applications of science—appalled by the implications. Our civilization is just one more swarm of low cheats. It won't last because cheats can't. Only inertia sustains the current shape of it, and that momentum is encountering more friction every day. A republic of crooked dumbbells can't safely use the instruments of clever men. People not only don't know how to behave, they don't even know they are ignorant. Yet in the main, people are thoroughly satisfied with themselves. In view of sure catastrophes that loom on every margin toward which they hurry—the very self-satisfaction of people is the statistical guarantor of their doom. Hence that crack about pride going before a fall."

"I think people behave rather well, on the whole."

"Sure. They'll even be decent about doomsday. Blame somebody else as they perish, like flies, but perish heroically. A pity."

"You can't depress me!"

I laughed. "Bear in mind that you brought up that word 'depress.' I'm not depressed. I've had to learn how to get along in the certainty that all I was taught to live for is either rubbish or a dream of a future that lies ages beyond the public expectation. People don't know—won't know—can't know, in their present frame of mind. Take your little problem, for example."

Her face changed. Interest replaced antagonism. "So all right. Take my problem. Kick that around awhile!"

"You believe in evolution?"

"A person can still believe in evolution—and in God!"

"Certainly. Something exists in men which they've given the name of all their gods. That's fact. And evolution is a fact, too—a simple reality. A minority of the educated people in our land have accepted the fact that man's body evolved from the bodies of other animals. A still smaller per cent realize that man's mind—personality—spirit—also must have evolved from animals and the animal equivalent: instinct. The question is, How? Most of such people believe that it is the supreme function of the conscious human mind to repress instinct. That's their answer."

"But not yours!"

"I believe it's the function of consciousness to rediscover instinct, understand it, and pursue it—in the ways that it has to go. That it does go—people by the billions to the contrary notwithstanding. So far, people have made only blind efforts in that direction. Unconscious efforts. Their religions—according to the soundest hypothesis I've encountered—are the results of such attempts: expressions of animal instinct, as it appears in men—and in men wholly unaware of what they are expressing."

"Is that Freud?"

"It's Jung. Freud never got that far. He merely demonstrated that instinct exists in man. The id—he called it. The raw cravings of the infant. To Freud—the id was pretty much what sin is to a preacher. A disgraceful bunch of bestial lusts and impulses. Society—through the parents, mostly—disciplined the id by disciplining the infant and the child; this produced the superego—or conscience, according to Freud. As far as Freud could see, man would always live amidst conflicts set up between his id and whatever superego, or culture, had been hammered around it—plus his own common sense, if any. Dismal view."

"And Jung?"

"Well—Freud showed that instinct exists as a basic motivation of mankind. Not that anybody but a few psychiatrists have ever paid attention to the discovery. But there it was—the beginning of a science of psychological evolution of people. Jung asked what instinct was and how it worked. Jung found out several things Freud only began to realize. For instance, Jung looked at animals and perceived that their instincts unfold in them, individually, as they mature."

"You mean, new-born beavers don't start building dams immediately?"

"Exactly. So the id of infancy is only part of instinct. More instinct appears as the person ages—which is in line with the nature of instinct in all other living beings. Next, Jung noticed that instinct in animals, and in primitive people who hardly ever use reason and logic abstractedly, takes care of the whole life cycle of every species. So it cannot be viewed as mere lawless, infantile lust. If it were only that, animals, and primitive men, would tear up each other and themselves; all life would commit suicide. From the animal viewpoint—instinct includes whatever animals do that men would call 'good,' 'virtuous,' 'unselfish,' 'self-sacrificing,' and so on. Do you follow?"

"I think so."

"There are—so to speak—checks and balances—compensations—counterinstincts. That's the idea embodied in Chinese philosophy. In Taoism, for example. That's the concept symbolized by the yin and the yang. It's the idea embodied in Toynbee's theory of history, too—right up till the present, when his own ego confuses its own description of instinct with history. At that point, Toynbee decided that the Church of England—his personal patternization of instinct—might salvage civilization. Which, of course, is pathetic. But let's drag this bundle a little bit further before we drop it and go back to you. If all animals have a proper pattern of instinct—man has. But man is to some extent conscious—and therefore to some degree able to separate out a personal identity of himself—an ego—from the older, more powerful compulsions and countercompulsions of his instinct. And he has used his consciousness—largely—not to maintain and enhance the liaison between his ego and the forces that drive him statistically forever—but to swell up his ego and to conceal from it those fundamental forces."

"I don't understand that."

"Well—man tries to deny he's an animal. Or to hide the fact. To call everything that is animal subhuman. To call every success he makes his own achievement. To call every disaster no fault of his own. Because he is conscious—he has slowly learned to extend the physical capacities of every kind of animal—for his own, immediate benefits. He has telescope-microscope-X-ray eyes. He has atomic energy muscles. Brighter light at night than the fireflies. He can fly faster than any bird—speed through the water faster than any fish—store food for decades when a ruminant or a pelican can store it only for days. He has even developed quite a few techniques that have no good animal correlative, though most of man's inventions were made ages before even apes appeared on the planet. Man has merely learned. But he tells himself he discovered and invented. It gives him a preposterous arrogance. And that's largely what he has used consciousness to swell up."

"We just skip his ideals—and philosophies—?"

"No. But we note that, to extend his physical capacities, he has used logic and reason. He has sometimes tried to employ them on his consciousness; but never—except intuitively, till recently—has it dawned on him that he is usually unconscious of his own real motives. That his cultures represent guesses—or trial and error. You take a creature that is governed by instinct—and doesn't realize it—one who confuses instinct with deity and identifies deity with himself—a creature who has made logic work in every dimension of the objective world and is extremely smug about himself in view of the results—and you have an animal cut off from its own nature and hence from Nature itself. Modern men can't tell whether anything they think or say or do is suitable to them, or merely the result of a tradition—as the semanticists claim—or whether, perhaps, their motives rise in a desire to hide instinct, to deny the animal, to inflate ego, or what not."

"I'm confused again."

"Put anybody through psychoanalysis—all the way, not just far enough to scare the wits out of him, and so make him hide his fear from himself by turning upon and ridiculing psychoanalysis—and that person will discover there is more instinct in him that he didn't know about than there is ego that he knew. Awful shock. Then put the same person through an analysis by a Jungian, and he will get numberless clues about the images and dreams and the feelings we have which are intended, by Nature, to make us conscious of the whole of human instinct as a pattern."

Yvonne shook her head. "Let's talk about me."

I wanted—I always want—to continue that line of explanation. It seems logical to me that man would have in his head the means to recover a consciousness of instinct—and to find, in that recovered awareness, not just the psychological history of the past, as man finds history in his body, but intimations of the future, which also exist in his body, as countless extrapolating anthropologists have shown. There must be some way, I have always thought, to shove aside the immature id and also the disguising images, taboos, compulsions, and descriptions of the modern superego, and to see what lies beyond them both—looking backward and looking forward. Having at long last followed Jung's inquiry into this process, having grasped his techniques and repeated, through idioms of my own personality, the same empirical experiences which Jung has demonstrated in hundreds of other human beings as well as in societies seen as wholes—I have been afflicted with an urge to bring the steps to wider attention and understanding.

And I suppose I shall try to do so, sporadically, all my life. But I realize now the futility of the effort as a "cause."

I am the man who wanted, from childhood's earliest dreams, to know what men would think in the future. And now that I believe I know I find that—save for individuals—present men cannot even reach toward such ideas and concepts. Could they, the better world would be at hand, and not a mere ignorant wish. It is a simple irony—an operation of the very law I learned—the law that I imagine all men will finally discover. And, while it supplies me with hope for my species, it condemns me to general incomprehensibility.

If you wished for the future—and were given it—you couldn't use it today. Because it is the future.

Physicists feel this way—and rightly—concerning their urgent, brilliant, all-but-fruitless efforts to explain ideas in comparatively familiar and acceptable fields—ideas such as Relativity or the Quantum Theory. How much more, then, will psychologists feel it! The wide world of their awareness has as yet not even a basic glossary among people; they do not yet even use the arithmetic of that science in their daily lives.

Indeed, the psychiatrist, the practitioner of certain known principles of human psychology, the physician, is still prone to dodge the central fact of his science. "Psychology," he says, dogmatically identifying his opinion with the science, "does not conflict or interfere with religion. There are areas in which the minister or priest is better equipped to deal than the psychologist. Psychiatry does not attempt to change a man's beliefs. And it is not 'all sex'—as is so often claimed. It is not concerned with sex morals, or any moral law."

So, in his time, the churches made old Galileo lie, too. Made him lie to live at all.

And so the same churches in our day cause comparably enlightened men to lie concerning their knowledge—in order that any people may benefit by it at all. In order, truly, to go on living. It is one more expedient dishonor of scientists.

For psychology—though a thousand Presbyterian and Roman Catholic practitioners of its minor branches may not admit it—and though ten thousand better psychologists lie their faces black—has already put a period to orthodox religion. The old astronomers did away with the old cosmology for all the churches. The new investigators of awareness have done away with the ancient theologies and "moral" systems as completely—whether it takes the people a generation or a thousand years to find it out. Psychology is the scientific investigation of what man calls awareness and of what prompts him that he is unaware of. As such, it inevitably must analyze and resolve all man's beliefs, religions, faiths and the mechanisms of them, as well as his politics, his economics, the motives of his arts, his morals, ethics and sex manners. Why should anybody be surprised that science, turned finally upon man's inner self, should disclose different shapes from those held real by Stone Age man, barbarians, and a few later millenniums of men who decree that they are Christian but act more viciously than any beast?

The disavowing psychiatrists, opportunist weaselers or men who do not see that their science has set philosophy aside, will be historically remembered. Their acts will prove the shocking superstitiousness of the twentieth century and—in some cases—represent the public persecutions, the subjective witchburnings, which show this era to be a continuum of the Dark Ages.

As I said earlier, a smug people cannot even find the motive for asking if a science of psychology exists, let alone what it has learned. And we Americans are probably the most self-satisfied people who ever appeared. The whole world starves, brawls, perishes around us. Our own philosophy of progress is leading us to swift, continental exhaustion—to the resourcelessness of our own progeny. Yet we believe we are doing right and thinking rightly—a great, good, wonderful, near-perfect nation.

It will take generations of disaster to crack the hull of such preposterous self-satisfaction. Only through despair and amidst ruins, in all likelihood, will men discover that humility which may lead to the honest assessment of man's vanities, his insane traditions, pompous faiths, patriotisms, and excesses. But there is not much use talking about it or trying to explain. Knowledge cannot fend where the people refuse to know.

"Did you ever raise dogs?" I asked Yvonne.

She had been quietly eating lobster bisque—glancing at me from time to time while I reflected and while I ate, too. She nodded. "Several."

"Then you've noticed that pups behave in every single way that would, in people, be called sinful, immoral, and perverse."

"That's the nastiest thing I ever heard in my life! How could animals be perverted!"

"Did I say they were? I merely said—or tried to—that dogs exhibit all the same curious activities your Professor Kinsey found abundant in human behavior."

"They do not!"

I grinned. "Perhaps yours didn't. Perhaps—whenever you saw in your pups a symptom of any sort of sex activity—you yelled at them. Pulled them apart. Swatted them with a switch—"

"I never used a thing but rolled newspapers!"

I laughed until she saw why. She flushed. I went on. "You imposed, by force, your sex manners—Episcopalian?—I thought so—on your dogs. If you left them alone—as I do mine—you'd see that pups are every bit as 'perverted' as people. Grown dogs, too, sometimes. So are wild animals. Put a bunch of male monkeys together—without females—"

"I detest monkeys!"

"They won't mind. Anyhow—segregate the males and they'll turn homosexual. My caustic acquaintance, Dr. Hooton, the anthropologist, has reported it. He says it is 'disgusting'—a curiously unscientific term. The monkeys weren't disgusted, after all. Just having fun, getting relief, being excited."