The Novel of Today

Preface

THERE IS a legend concerning John, the Prophet, to the effect that he lost in Ephesus, in the year 89 A.D., the first transcription of his Vision. This version was come upon by the Romans, from whom he had precipitately fled, and read by a certain Centurion before it was officially burned according to the Emperor’s orders. It is said to be a second version, written by the Prophet in hiding some twelve months later, that concludes the New Testament. Of the first and original account, only one fragment survives, John’s recollection of the “other horseman” which appears in a letter written either by, or for, the Centurion, to a poet named Marcus. The letter (if there was one) is supposed to have been lost during the persecutions of Diocletian. Thus the account was preserved only by word of mouth, although it is said to have been a favorite of Saint Leo the Great, as early as the middle of the fifth century. The Apocalyptic legend follows: After the breaking of the Fourth Seal, and after the emergence of the Pale Horseman, Death, John saw yet another horseman, now recorded as Hell, but originally given another name. This Fifth Rider went forward with the other Four, and, indeed, led them. War and Pestilence, Famine and Death scourged the world of men. These grim figures had somewhat different names in the lost Apocalypse: Conquest, Slaughter, Greed, and Universal Death, i.e., death by famine, by pestilence, by the sword, and by all human passions.

As mankind fell by a third and yet another third, and as the seas turned to blood and fiery glass, the Horseman in the Lead became nauseated by the deeds of his fellows.

He therefore pressed far ahead of them, entering every village and city with a great cry and a terrifying warning. To the rulers of each city he told of those who came hard behind him and he showed them the blood on his horse’s hooves. Then, always, he went on, for his urgency was great.

Behind him, men fell into profound arguments, some saying that he was a liar, some that the blood on the hooves was not of men but of goats, and some that he had not passed that way at all, but was only an imagining of the people. These arguments consumed much time and took many peculiar theological bents. In the end, the warning did not anywhere prevail. The Four Riders arrived and slew their three times tens of thousands.

Meanwhile, the Fifth Horseman had come to the outermost reaches of the earth and so turned about, well satisfied with his work. However, as he came upon first one and then another desolated city, anger mounted in him. When he questioned the survivors about the warning they had been given, he found them unrepentant. They did not say they had been fools to disobey the alarm. They did not say that the arrogant stupidity of their rulers had betrayed them and robbed them of their homes, their loved ones, and their birthright. Instead, in one voice, they blamed him who had carried the message. “He should have tarried longer with us and talked in a louder voice,” the weeping people cried. “He should have seen our helplessness and stayed with us to defend us,” they said.

And they said, “It is his fault; had he not come this way, the others would not have followed!”

So, because his wrath was very great, and because the truth was not in these people, the Fifth Horseman rejoined his companions. Together they slew all mankind and destroyed all their cities. And the name of him who led, and of him who warned, according to the legend, was Reality.

CHAPTER I

IN SPITE of the proverb, a lucky prophet is sometimes honored in his home town, Jimmie thought. The train rounded down a grade; shredded steam blew back from the locomotive. The scenery became minute by minute more cogent, and at last, altogether familiar. Too familiar for Jimmie in a way. His eyes stung and the sensation astonished him. He had thought he was past all that, young to be past it—twenty-eight—but past it, nonetheless. As far past as if he were ninety and the very ducts that carry tears had dried up. He grinned, sniffed in a breath, and yanked the back of his hand across the upper part of his face. Six years in England—and in two more minutes, home.

The train clanged out on the high iron bridge over the Muskogewan. He could see the skating house—white snow and ice, fast water, brightly dressed kids whizzing among the grownups—and that was gone; the Dairymeade barns flashed past—the fields, rolling, black, white, lithographic; home—after all these years! The red brick station was swinging into view around the curve. A warm flush pervaded him, as if he had stepped in front of a fireplace.

Jimmie grappled with the heaviest of his leather suitcases, the one most battered, deepest scratched, most raggedly shingled with European hotel labels. There was a big “V” pasted on its side. He was on the platform when the train slowed. There was his father-six years older, not looking it; his mother—red-cheeked, gray-haired, handsome; and there was his brother, Biff—he’d be twenty-one, now—Jimmie had already made the adjustment in his mind. He looked for his sister. Sarah had been twelve when he’d gone away on the Rhodes Scholarship. At first, he glanced past the pretty woman. He realized, while his eyes were in a nether focus, that the pretty woman was Sarah. The whole fam dambley. It was wonderful!

He hopped down while the train was still slowing and slid in the snow a little way and kissed his mother and his sister and shook hands twice, each, with his father and his brother. There were other people waiting to greet Jimmie, but those people let his family have the first crack; they simply stood around, grinning and happy.

Jimmie’s eyes were taking in the changes of six years and he was pleased with what he saw. Sarah, especially, was like a miracle. But the others weren’t quite pleased.

Their expressions showed it, inch-meal. Perhaps he had more of an accent than he’d thought.

“You’ve changed, son!” His father seemed truculent about it.

Jimmie chuckled. “A kid went to Oxford. This is what’s coming back.”

“Terribly thin,” his mother said. “It’s the rations, no doubt.”

Jimmie still laughed. “Oh, I got plenty to eat. Lord! Sarah! Hollywood’ll send for you if you show that face around much!”

All three men picked up bags. Jim put his down again to shake hands embarrassedly with a dozen people whose faces were familiar but whose names were lost in six weltering years. They supplied them and told him what businesses they were in or where they lived, and he remembered fragments. Then the Baileys started around the station, chattering about the unseasonable freeze and snowstorm. Biff got to the car first and opened the door; Jimmie stood outside for a minute, looking at it.

“A ’forty-two,” Biff said exultantly. “Like it?”

“Yeah.” Jimmie’s enthusiasm was not great. “It’s magnificent. Haven’t seen the new American models for a long time. It’s a peach. Drives itself, I’ll bet. Sees in the dark and plays records.”

They laughed, but not quite certainly. The car started. Jimmie peered from a window while his family partially recovered from some vague emotion he was beginning to feel in them—a sort of disappointment, probably. Jimmie filed it away and allowed himself to revel in remembered geography, in architecture recalled. Muskogewan’s highest structure—the Purvis Building, eleven stories—and the old Post Office, empty, across from a modernistic new one, the fire house, the Horkin Store, “A Block of Bargains,” and Dunley’s Drug Store. Ordinary stuff, dream-poignant for Jimmie.

They turned at the Athletic Club and went out Park Street. There were changes in the old home too. The gingerbread trimmed away, some glass brick windows in the walls, a glassed-in porch around at the side, and a real garage instead of the barn, which had served for so long. A four-car garage. They stopped in the place where the porte-cochere had been and bustled out, talking again. His mother mostly—gossip about people and places and the new differences—nothing that meant as much to Jimmie as observing for himself. And they wondered why he had stayed away so long. So did he—now. He’d been very busy. Very busy….

A manservant opened the door—a white man—and Jimmie remembered that his mother had been afraid of male servants, once. He cocked an internal eyebrow. The Baileys had gone a bit swank since his departure. Not very; just some. They could doubtless afford it. His father was an officer in one of the two biggest banks; Biff and Sarah had finished school. Nothing more logical than to spend a little on improving the manor house. It was still comparatively modest.

The furniture in the living room was modern. There was an electrical piano and a superautomatic phonograph-radio, but the fireplace was the same and so were the oak logs burning in it—another beloved recollection. His father offered him a cigar and he took it. Coats were handed to the servant. They sat down, Sarah and his mother and Biff with cigarettes. Jimmie drew on the cigar and looked at it and looked at them and smiled sleepily. That was, usually, his way of smiling—the long smile of a man with good nerves and a warm heart.

His mother said, “I’ve been rattling on, Jimmie! You haven’t had a chance! And we’re all dying to hear! So tell us everything about it!”

He had a sinking feeling; he thought he knew what she meant. “About what, Mother?”

“About what? The war, of course!”

He tried to go on smiling. “I’ve been on a slow boat from Lisbon for a whole lot of days. I was in New York for less than two hours. And last night and this morning on a train. You tell me.”

His father laughed. When he laughed, Jimmie could see he had aged considerably.

“Hannah doesn’t mean the situation today. Everybody knows that. She wants the personal experience angle, Jimmie. Especially the bombings. Your letters weren’t very frequent or very satisfying. Censorship, no doubt. But Hannah has a passion for bombing stories. Reads everything she can lay her hands on.”

“I think,” said his mother, “the British are positively thrilling. We’re all ears, Jimmie!”

He shrugged and shook his head, as if to himself. “I was working in a laboratory on the fringe of London. I was very busy. A bomb fell, once, within maybe six blocks of our place. It made quite a mess of a cow pasture.” He was lying.

“Don’t be a hold-out! You wrote you were in London summer before last—in the very worst of the blitz!”

“—and I stayed as far underground as I could!”

Biff leaned forward. “You must have seen places, though, soon after they’d been hit?”

Jimmie stuck his jaw out. “Yes.”

“He’s just trying to be dramatic,” Sarah said. “Building up suspense.”

The man just come from England looked at his sister. She had direct, diamond-shaped eyes, with dark fringes, like her mother’s. Dark hair that fell to the nape of her neck in a triumph of sumptuous grooming. She was wearing a blue dress. She was alive with interest and the presumption of understanding. “I’m not trying to build up any suspense, Sarah,” he answered slowly. “The bombs do that, without assistance. I’m just trying to say—without having to, but I guess I do—that I don’t want to talk about bombings. Really, I don’t. Nothing to say you haven’t read a hundred times, for one thing.

And not in the mood, for another. I’m glad to be back, hideously glad.” He looked at his wrist watch. “And if somebody’ll drive me—since I’m not positive I could get one of these new cars started, even—I’ll run over to see Corinth.”

His mother gasped. “But you can’t, dear! You simply can’t! It’s four, now—”

“I know. And old man Corinth may go home by five—”

She paid no attention. “—and at half-past the people will begin to stream in. Simply stream! They’re dying to see you!”

“People? What people?”

“Why, the people I invited for cocktails! I must have asked a hundred. Dinner isn’t till nine—on account of it. And we’ll have to change, because we’re going to the club for it. An intime little crowd. I promised you’d be here at four-thirty!”

Jimmie smiled again, differently. “Sorry I won’t then. I’ll duck back as fast as I can after I talk to Corinth, though. Ought not to take forever.”

Mrs. Bailey’s diamond-shaped eyes narrowed. A faint flush showed in her cheeks.

“Why, dear, it’s quite impossible for you to go over to the factory today. I’m sure Mr. Corinth doesn’t expect you, because Susie Corinth is coming here for cocktails and I told her to bring him.”

Jimmie raised his eyebrows. “Is he coming?”

“Later,” she said. “He’ll be kept at his office—”

“Then I’ll go over.”

“James!” There was a strident note in her voice. She started, twice, to speak imperatively, to demand that he stay. But she could not find the right words—or, if she found them, could not utter them—because he kept looking at her, waiting for anything she might have to say.

His father interrupted this silence. “It is pretty darned, well, selfish of you, son.

We’ve planned the whole weekend for you. Thought, even, you might not feel like starting at the paint works for a month or so. You wrote you’ve been going at it hard.”

Jimmie glanced from face to face, hunting for something he did not find. Then he walked toward the hall, passing close to his sister.

“Cad,” she said softly.

Biff rallied. “I’ll run you over—since you’re going.”

They were riding through the crystalline landscape again. “You’re kind of rough on them,” Biff said. “They’ve built up this homecoming into a fiesta. After all, you’re a legend around here. I suppose they expected something between an adoring undergraduate and a polished English earl.”

“But I wrote ’em why I was coming home!”

“Sure. To work for old man Corinth at the paint company. They were pleased as punch you got a job right here in town.”

“I mean, the Corinth plant can do certain things and I knew it, and the British agreed to lend me to the U. S. because I’m sort of a specialist on some lines—”

“Oh, that!” Biff grinned. “Mother and Father don’t know the difference between chemistry and astronomy.”

“Still, they know there’s a war going on—”

“Yeah,” said Biff. “And do they resent it! All except the dramatic part. Mom goes for that in a big way. She is to battles what an affecionado is to bulls.”

Jimmie winced.

The Corinth Paint and Dye Works loomed on the penumbral fringe of the town—a haphazard agglomeration of low buildings. Behind the buildings, chimneys poured smoke across the gray sky—black smoke and bright yellow smoke. There was a high fence around the plant and around the fence two uniformed guards, portly and important, paced back and forth, carrying revolvers on their fat stomachs. Biff and Jimmie were stopped at a gatehouse and allowed to pass after stating their errand. The office which received them was time-battered—a big place, full of ticking typewriters and people hurrying in and out with sheafs of papers. Biff said he’d wait there, but Jimmie insisted he’d take a cab home; so Biff went away, a little angered by his brother’s concentration on his errand and its importance.

Jimmie followed Mr. Corinth’s secretary between the rows of clattering desks into a small, dusty room. A man with vague gray eyes and a white mustache sat there, behind the ruins of a mahogany desk. He wore a suit of clothes a tramp would not have taken as a present. He frowned fustily at Jimmie and muttered, “Your name is somehow familiar, so I asked you in, but I’m in a hurry, young man, and I—” Suddenly he threw back his head and opened his mouth. He looked as if he were roaring with laughter, but he did not utter a sound. “Jimmie!” he exclaimed in a moment. “Lord! Am I glad you’re here! Been expecting you for weeks!”

Jimmie found himself resuming the smile he had worn on the train, coming home.

“Hello, Mr. Corinth. I’m glad to see you. I read in a journal something about what you’ve been doing here, and when Washington tapped my superiors for some chemists I said I’d go and I suggested going here. I didn’t want to leave much, though.”

Mr. Corinth’s eyes were less opaque. “Naturally.”

“I thought I ought to. London finally cabled the State Department. They talked to the moguls. I was in a plane for Lisbon a day later. What’s on the fire?”

The old man rubbed his face with both hands and looked through his fingers.

“You could be an agent, eh? Walking in cold. You could—Jimmie, if I didn’t remember the Hallowe’en you broke the windows in my chicken coop and I caught you redhanded! You still do look impish, in a conservative way.” He laughed silently again. “I was sure proud when you won the chemistry prize in Oxford! Almost tried to hire you then. Seems a long time ago, eh? And that paper you just wrote was a peach!” He paused and said quietly, “How are they doing, Jimmie?”

The young man answered, “All right.”

“No better than that?”

“Maybe, a little. It’s not easy—on just plain people.”

“Jimmie, who isn’t—just plain people?”

The homecoming smile became a shade rueful. “Well, I guess my folks aren’t—any more. We’ve put on the dog, Mr. Corinth. About Saint Bernard size, it looks like.”

“Willie,” the other man answered.

“Willie?”

“Call me Willie. My wife does. Half the chemists in America do. Anybody who can write about using isotopes the way you did can automatically call me Willie. You’re Jimmie—and I’m Willie. Mm. I can imagine your folks are—a shock.” He shrugged. “I’ll show you through the shop tomorrow. Meantime, what’s this I got in a letter practically dunked in sealing wax about you working on an incendiary that will stick to whatever it hits?”

Jimmie pulled his chair forward. They began to talk. Only a few thousand men in the whole of America would have understood everything that they said. The five-o’clock shift went home. The bright yellow smoke paled against the darkling sky. Lights came on—Willie Corinth impatiently jerked on his bluish one in the middle of something about a gas-driven torpedo motor that would stand being dropped from forty thousand feet onto the hard sea. At last Jimmie looked at his watch and flushed.

“It’s after seven!”

“So ’tis. I’ll run you home. I’ve got a jalopy that I keep just to see how long it can go without a visible reason. Your mother’ll be burnt to a crisp!”

People were leaving, when Jimmie climbed out of the jalopy—women in furs, men in chesterfields. He ran up the steps, bumping past them. There were guests in the house, scores of them, but they had a straggler look. Several had drunk too many cocktails. A woman with an overwarm, oversoft face, a maternal face belied by sharp, acquisitive eyes, filled the front room with a belting cry, “Here’s Jimmie, at last! My! Isn’t he handsome!”

They came from every side. He wanted to run. But Biff put a glass in his hand.

And Sarah whispered, “Well, you ducked this one and made us pretty ashamed! But you won’t escape Mother from now on—don’t think you will!”

Then his mother was near. Her voice hissed. “Jimmie! Your trouser leg!”

He looked down and grinned. “Nitric acid,” he said. “I was showing Willie something.”

“But—our guests!”

He looked at her and he looked at the room, packed with the dregs from all the rooms. “Mother, I’m not sure—and don’t look now—but I strongly believe that these people—don’t exist!”

Mrs. Bailey repeated the phrase to her husband while she was dressing for dinner.

“‘Don’t exist’! What does he mean by that? He must have gone mad!”

“He certainly is acting like a conceited, self-important ass!”

Jimmie, in a rather worn dinner jacket, leaned through the door of his mother’s boudoir. “If I throw a handful of salt in a pitcher of fresh water,” he said, causing both his parents to turn with a start, “the water at the bottom of the pitcher may go on thinking it’s fresh for several seconds. But it won’t be. The water at the bottom will also become salty very soon. That’s what I mean by saying that those guests of yours—don’t exist.” He waved his hand at them.

His mother said, “Good heavens!”

CHAPTER II

UNSEASONABLE weather has a stimulating effect on people. The cold spell, which had frozen the river and covered the rolling lands with snow, also caused the Bailey guests to arrive at the country club with extra zest. Their eyes sparkled; they lustily beat casual flakes from their furs and coats; they talked in loud voices. With a sense of distant indignation, Jimmie went through the ritual of arrival, of introductions, of a drink at the bar, and of sitting down at the table in a private dining room with his family and some twenty of their friends. He remembered a few of them. In time, his mother had said.

There were flowers and paper decorations. There was a girl for Jimmie. A Miss Somebody-or-other—a blonde edition of his sister, older but as streamlined—in a lamé dress. The glittering garment and the gleaming of her hair made him think, not of a person, but of a weapon in a sheath. No denying that she was beautiful. He looked at her closely as she turned toward him and his brain swam for a moment.

Waiters at the half-trot brought oysters on shimmering ice and poured wine.

Music came from nowhere that he could see. A woman said, “Jimmie, tell us about London.”

The heads came around like heads at a tennis match. Jimmie picked up his glass in fingers that threatened to snap its stem. “War going on,” he said rudely.

His mother glared and made herself smile. “Jimmie had us all promise not to ask any questions tonight.”

A man said candidly, “The devil he did! What does he think we came here for except to get the low-down on the British game? Prodigal home—fatted calf killed—and no memoirs! A sellout, I say!”

“I’m a poor prodigal,” Jimmie answered, “and due only a lean calf. You see, this is my first night home and I’m pretty happy to be here and, well, you people and this dinner and the whole town seem kind of fabulous. You’re the real prodigals! I’m so darned busy trying to get used to all this that I can’t think back to—that.”

The Miss Somebody at his side said, in a voice lowered so no one could hear, “Not very sporting of you, Jimmie! Life in Muskogewan’s on the dull side. You’re the most exciting thing that’s happened this fall! At least, I strongly suspect you could be.”

She looked at him with eyes like an electric shock.

“What should I have said?” He stared at her, unbelieving.

“Oh, anything. Tell ’em about being on the street in a fire. How it sounds when the guns are going. Anything with jive.”

His hands trembled slightly. “There was a child—one morning—four or five years old—blown up on a lamppost. Alive and conscious. Hanging—by its insides.”

The girl’s eyes became murky. She made her mouth firm. Her color ebbed and surged back. When, presently, she spoke, her voice was level again. “You go in for melodrama, Mr. Bailey.”

“Tossing bombs into people’s yards is ‘ melodramatic.’ The very point I wanted to avoid.”

She said, “Oh.”

They were all talking about the war, then. All but Jimmie. He supposed, at first, that they were trying to draw him out. For a while he didn’t listen. He ate slowly, enjoying the food, glancing sometimes at the lame girl, aware that she was pondering him when she thought she wouldn’t be detected. By and by he realized that they talked all the time about the war—as they were talking then. He began to listen.

“Napoleon,” his father was saying, “tried the same thing, on the same people, the same way, and for the same reasons. And Hitler will have to write off just as much as Napoleon did, in the end. History, I keep telling some of my inflammable neighbors, repeats itself. Russia—winter—and Waterloo.”

“Exactly.” A man who wore a pince-nez beamed sagaciously above his shirt front.

“The parallel is precise. Any first-rate dictator can conquer Europe. Europe needed a conquering. Needed central organization. Of course, Nazi methods will necessarily have to be followed up by sound business methods. No popinjay can run a big business like unified Europe. Not that I favor Hitler, but I never did like all those little separate nations and I do favor central authority.”

“Except,” a thin, dark woman said, “when it’s central in Washington.”

Everybody laughed. The man with the pince-nez laughed too. “Napoleon had, essentially, the same ideas as Hitler. Actually, I’m against Hitler.” He beamed at Jimmie for praise. Jimmie was unresponsive. “Yes, one hundred per cent against. Don’t like his looks, or his voice. Cheap dunce. I’d have been against Napoleon, too, I suppose. Pushing pigmy. All wars are purely economic, and I think we can safely leave this one to General Winter and General Scorch-the-Earth. If we could only plant that idea in Washington!”

He chuckled. “Emergency!” His voice was scornful. “Do you see any emergency here, Jimmie?”

Jimmie thought that he was going to leave the table. He found himself sitting still, however, and thinking. Finally he drew an uneven breath. “I—I’ve heard people, in England, talking about the parallel between Napoleon and Hitler. We all know a lot about Hitler. Not enough, but a lot. But is anybody here able to tick off Napoleon’s plans for Europe? I mean, the way we can tick off Hitler’s?”

Nobody said anything.

Jimmie looked at the tablecloth, nodding. “Can anybody here say, off-hand, how much time passed between the retreat from Moscow and Waterloo?”

There was silence.

“Was Napoleon exiled by the English the first time, or the second—and who beat him both times? And where?”

Jimmie’s father said, “What’s the idea of this ‘Information, Please’?”

The lean young man went on: “Who was Talleyrand? Certainly, someone—”

The dark woman at the other end of the table said, “Well, a premier. The premier of…” Her voice trailed off.

Jimmie grinned slightly. “I just meant to make it clear that you do a lot of learned talking. But you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about! My whole point.”

“Don’t be rude,” his mother said sharply. “We know perfectly well what we’re talking about!”

He looked from face to face. “You don’t know the peace aims of Napoleon, or where he fought, or when, or against whom, or for what. Except in the haziest way. But you conclude Napoleon was like Hitler. Napoleon took a horse and foot army into Russia more than a hundred years ago. Hitler went in last June, with tanks and planes. But you conclude the result is going to be the same! I just want you to realize—at least for a moment, if that’s all you can—that nothing you are saying tonight means anything real at all. It’s just—so much rubbish.”

There was another silence. They looked angrily at Jimmie. Mr. Bailey finally laughed. “Well, Jimmie, you may be able to show us up on a few details of history. But you don’t need to talk like the London propaganda office! We’re wise to propaganda, over here.”

People said, “We certainly are,” and, “I suppose he’s another, trying to drag us into Europe’s quarrels.” Things like that.

When a chance came, Jimmie hotly replied, “Napoleon was hardly a ‘detail’ of history, even if you don’t know about him! Hitler is no detail, either.” But he soon gave up.

The waiters were serving individual filets mignons. The room seemed even more giddily unreal. Full of shiny, hateful people, champing on their food and making a cackling unison of vocal nothing. They were even talking about Napoleon again, when he had made it dear that they had no intellectual right to discuss Napoleon until they read enough to understand what they were talking about. But they wouldn’t read. They’d just go on talking.

“Don’t you know,” said the girl at his side, “that it’s very poor form to show people their ignorance?”

“It’s the kind of ignorance,” he said, “that can rook them.”

“Do you think it will?”

“If they don’t think. It might.”

“Just what, then, is the German staff plan for conquering Muskogewan?”

“Shall I tell you some more about the bombs?”

“Airplanes,” she answered, “can’t cross the Atlantic and return.”

“That was last year.”

“And even if they can, Muskogewan is more than a thousand miles from any coast.”

“Shall we talk about something on which our information is relatively equal?”

“Our prejudices—you mean?”

He looked at her. “I said—information.”

The girl blushed.

Waiters rolled back a series of frosted-glass doors. The private dining room was thus included in the main salon of the club. More people—perhaps two hundred—were sitting at tables, over the middles and the ends of dinners, and over highballs, and planter’s punches, and even cocktails. The lights went down. A conical spot found the center of the dance floor and a master of ceremonies skidded into it, dragging a microphone. He began to make jokes.

Jimmie rose from the table, without apology, and walked through the smoke-tangled murk. There were men in the billiard room—talking about the war. From somewhere underneath the building he heard the roll and crash of bowling. He found an alcove off the foyer. It contained a few chairs and tables—and no people. He sat down and shut his eyes.

“You were pretty grim, you know,” a husky voice said.

He looked up. She was standing in front of him, deliberately close to him; her golden dress had been poured over her molten and dripped heavily from her hips and her arms. “I—I—oh, well. Sit down.” She sat down. Jimmie thought for a while. “Look. You can explain it, maybe, Miss—Whatever your name is.”

“Audrey.”

“Audrey. I thought, in England, that America had raised billions, and turned over its factories, and become the arsenal of democracy, and I thought there were a few dissenters. Lindbergh. Wheeler. I understood that we went into the last war as if it was fun. I knew people weren’t—ecstatic—about things now. But everybody goes at me as if I had a thriller to tell. South African big-game story. And whenever I seem to show that I’m about to speak out for England people start throwing words as if they were dishes, before they hear me.”

“You’ll get over it,” Audrey said. “You’ve obviously been too close to things. Lost your perspective. I could see that you despised them. After a while, though, you’ll like them. You’ll begin to understand our attitude. You’ll get your courage back.”

He sat up stiffly. “Get my courage back?”

“Certainly. Oh, I suppose you have plenty of the bravura kind left—for going outdoors in raids—all that. But I mean the courage to face the fact that the world is just going to change—and the sooner we Americans get used to the idea, the better.” She lifted one shoulder prettily. “I can read you, Jimmie. Put it this way. You’ll find out enough from these really sound people to be able to give up your loyalties to the old Europe. The rotten old Europe.”

“Will!?”

“Let’s not talk politics,” she said.

“No. By all means. I might start killing people.”

Audrey said, “You know, you’re pretty fascinating—in spite of your British bias.”

“Thanks.”

She surveyed him teasingly. “Tall, dark, and handsome. A glint of red in the retreating hair. Old enough to—well, old enough. I don’t mind telling you that when you walked into the bar, my not-too-maidenly heart skipped several beats.”

“I’m glad to know it’s beating, anyway.”

She pretended to be amused. “Are you in love?”

“No.”

“You don’t mind if a girl tries—?”

“I have a rule about that. It depends on the girl.”

“Me, then. I have your mother’s permission.”

“You’ll find my mother is uniformly generous—with things that don’t belong to her.”

Audrey paused. “Have you ever been in love? You don’t sound as if you had. You sound like the strictly cold-science type. But you look—well, amenable.”

“I’ve been in love,” Jimmie replied steadily.

Audrey laughed with a rich laughter. “That’s something, anyway. Tell me about it!”

“Rather not.”

“Please!” She wrinkled her nose. “Pretty please!”

Jimmie sank in his chair till his chin was on his chest. He looked savagely into the girl’s eyes. “She was English. Her name was Ellen. In some ways—ever so many—she reminds me of you. Rather, you remind me of her. It was a shock when I saw you. She was bright blonde, like you, and tall and slender and she had one of those stagey voices that can make a man shake all over with a single syllable. About your age. Twenty-three?

I thought so. I was very fond of Ellen, though I never did see enough of her. Yes. I’d say I was in love. We weren’t engaged—”

“Sissy! ”

“It didn’t seem worth being engaged until—this mess was over.”

“Oh.” Audrey pouted resentfully. Then she said, “And so—what happened to this great romance? Did some other more dashing faster-working lad barge onto the scene and steal her away?”

“Yeah,” Jimmie answered. “A German pilot.”

It was a brutal thing to do to anybody. Jimmie had thought it over for a fraction of a second before answering. And he had decided to say it as he had said it. Audrey deserved it for being so facetious about anything so private and unknown. His mood demanded it. He was brimful of disappointment. He loved his family. In all the years of his absence he had carried an awareness of them in his mind with a secret relish that had made every hour of his life pleasanter. His favorite fantasy—at Oxford and afterward—had to do with coming home and settling down near Muskogewan. But, now that he had come home, he found his family suspicious of him, estranged, bitter at his attitude, hectically opposed to everything for which he stood. In that mood he had struck back at the dreadful opening inadvertently made by the gleaming girl. He had not reckoned the consequence.

Audrey sat perfectly still. She had a pink-tan complexion, unusual in. a girl so blonde. The pink faded to pallor and the memory of a summer tan turned yellowish. Two tears formed in her eyes, filled them up, overflowed, and ran down her cheeks. Her shoulders contracted with the beginning of a sob, and contracted further, in an effort to stem the convulsion. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even try to touch the tears on her cheeks.

Jimmie rose nervously and walked three steps away and three steps back. He stared out at people pushing and babbling in the foyer and he looked at Audrey again.

“Sorry.”

She whispered, “I asked for it! Practically begged!”

“That doesn’t exuse me.”

“I think—I’ll leave. If you’ll go to the checkroom and get my wrap.” Her fingers fumbled shakily with a small gold evening bag.

He took the bag, opened it, and extracted a brass check. He flipped it, caught it, and looked at her. She was repairing the damage done by the tears. “I wish you wouldn’t go,” he said.

Audrey smiled unsteadily. “Only thing to do, I think.”

“No. No, it isn’t, Audrey. I hurt your feelings fearfully—and I’d like to make amends. You hurt mine—and you want to hide. I know how that is. But I’ll give you a challenge. If you, also, want to make amends you’ll stay here. We’ll sit in this little room and bicker for a while. Then I’ll take you back to those clowns, the guests of my family.

You and I will dance and have fun and that will help me infinitely to avoid the many mokes.”

She was still half smiling, but she shook her head. “It’s no good. We disagree so terribly about everything. And you must despise me—besides.”

“I couldn’t despise you, whatever you thought,” he answered. “Two reasons. You look so much like Ellen, for one. And the other is the way you cried when I—struck you—just now. It was as mean as a blow, anyway—”

“It wouldn’t do any good, honestly.”

“On the contrary. Lemme see.” He grinned charmingly. “I’ll appeal to you in an abstract way. You’re probably up to your ears in various kinds of social work. Bundles for Britain and whatnot?”

She nodded. “It’s so silly, so trivial—”

“Well, here I am, a civilian veteran. Home on a sort of pseudo furlough. In the case of veterans they usually turn out the town’s prettiest girls as dancing partners, companions, whatnot. Suppose we say that I requisition you? We’ll be—by all odds—the handsomest couple on the floor. You’d raise the index so much—”

Audrey was recovering. “You’re pretty sporting, Jimmie. You have nerve. I think I was mistaken about you. All right. You requisition me. I’ll do a little bundling for Britain—”

He chuckled and broke off, looking at her in a startled way. Then he chuckled again. “Jolly old reconciliation, ho! What? As I never heard an Englishman say!”

“Which reminds me to note that you don’t talk so awfully much like an Englishman, considering how long you lived there. A little. I mean, you’d know you’d been exposed to the accent—”

“Two reasons, Audrey. One, I was always proud of my native vernacular. My pronunciation was the bane of the dons. All Oxford shivered whenever I opened my mouth to speak. Two, it was a long trip home—grimy weather, no diversion on the boat-and I spent the time refreshing my memory of the provincial tongue. Listening to several Americans from Chicago—steel men—who shared the bar with me a good deal of the time.”

“We might stop by the bar, on the way back. The floor show’s still going on, that M. C. is practically inexhaustible.”

He offered his arm, with a mocking ultraelegance. “I’d imagine that it’s his audience that gets exhausted. M. C.—master of ceremonies, I presume. A new phrase, since my day.” They walked toward the club bar. “Audrey. Tell me something. Why did my handsome and all-pervading mother appoint you to pursue me?”

“You ought to be able to guess.”

“Ought I? Lemme see.” He helped her hike up on a bar stool. “Pounds, crowns, shillings?”

“On the nose! My father is president of the Second National. The other big bank here.”

“It was always the old man who talked about mergers. Habit’s catching, evidently.”

Audrey ordered a highball. He nodded for the same. She turned toward him. “And now, it’s quite out of the question. That’s funny. I mean, my mother and yours have been fiddling around with this meeting of you and me for months. I was pretty thrilled, myself.

I, well, do you mind if I say that I still am?”

“Nope. But it’s out of the question, is it? What’s the matter? Has the fact leaked out that the Baileys come from a long line of lunatics and pirates?”

“My mother,” she replied, “is local president of the America Forever Committee.

Dad’s treasurer.”

“What’s that?”

“You’ll find out. Your family’s on it, too.”

They went back to the table, finally. His mother was visibly relieved by his reappearance, and visibly surprised by his evident amiability in the company of Audrey.

Music began—a rhumba. Audrey whispered, “It’s the rage now. We’ll sit it out.”

Jimmie rose with dignity. “London,” he replied, “has not been wholly cut off from the rest of the planet! We shall dance.”

They began. Audrey looked up at him. “I’ll say London hasn’t been cut off! Who taught you?”

“Her name,” he began throbbingly, “was Conchita. She was a little thing with blue-black hair and eyes like the flames in a burning coal mine. Emotions of a tigress in the body of a child—a sepia child. Lovely! Conchita taught me the rhumba. Eight bob per lesson. That’s about a dollar fifty.”

Audrey laughed.

He took her home, late, in a taxi. She asked him to. While they rode through the quiet streets they were silent. The night was growing warmer. Roofs dripped, the snow along the sides of the walks was slushy, and there were patches showing in lawns that looked black under the outreaching lavender murk of arc lights. When they stopped in front of her house—a bigger, more imposing house than his family’s—Audrey said, “Will you kiss me good night, Jimmie? It would sort of finish erasing the mess I made at the start.”

He bent and kissed her perfunctorily.

“Is that all?” she whispered.

He kissed her again—not perfunctorily. And then again, as if to reassure himself about his first impression.

“You’ll forgive me—for Ellen?”

He nodded. “Yes. That all happened summer before last.” Suddenly he grinned.

“You’re not being fair to your mother, Audrey!” He reached past her and opened the cab door.

CHAPTER III

AT EIGHT O’CLOCK the Baileys—short of sleep and showing it—straggled into their dining room for breakfast. Mr. Bailey had to go to the bank. He was a punctual man.

He regarded the late arrival of executives at business offices as a bad example. Mrs.

Bailey joined her husband, out of custom. She had learned early in her marriage that, whenever she slept late, he found several ways to bring it to her attention publicly—ways that had the outward form of humor and the clear stigmata of a wife-husband friction. Mr.

Bailey had not been able to scare or scourge the second generation into early rising.

He was surprised, then, when Sarah showed up. “Have you been in bed? Or are you just going? I saw you leave the club with Francis Webster along about two.”

“I have an appointment for a fitting. Nine o’clock. Mrs. Gregg didn’t have any other time, worse luck. I’m dead! It’s the dress I’m going to wear tonight at the Wilsons’ party for Jimmie.”

Mr. Bailey chased a piece of bacon with his fork. “Anybody told Jimmie there’s another party for him tonight?” He looked accusingly at his wife.

“I hinted at it rather plainly. And he seems to like—”

Her husband cleared his throat. Biff came into the room, rubbing his eyes and yawning. “Coffee,” he said in a hollow tone. The swinging door banged and the butler came through. “Westcott, bring me a gallon of coffee.”

Mr. Bailey squinted at his son. “Huh! I should think so! I counted up to seven rum collinses last night. What you trying to do—drink yourself to death?”

Biff’s hands were trembling. A light perspiration shone on his face, here and there, in little clusters. “Anybody count yours? I have a hangover you could sell to an amusement park. Make the roller coaster feel like a lawn swing.”

“Who told you that crack?” Sarah asked.

Their father swallowed coffee. A big, square man, growing thinner as he came nearer to sixty. A man with a rectangular face and a chin that rode out beyond his necktie formidably. He wore rimless, angle-sided spectacles. The eyes behind them were china blue, but as bright as glass. His face was ruddy, and the almost unwrinkled skin on it was shaved so close it looked peeled. He wore his wavy gray hair long so that it would fall across his toupee-sized bald spot. He had a good voice, deep, resonant, and not loud unless he wanted it to be. He firmly believed that, in every hour of every day of his life, he had done the right thing—his duty—without consideration of his own pleasure or pain.

That such an attitude is psychologically—even physiologically—dangerous, cannot be denied. But it is the commonest attitude among successful men not just in America, but everywhere. Most people thought Kendrick Bailey was a brilliant man and a good man. In many ways, he was both. He looked, now, at his wife, and he said, “I repeat.

Does Jimmie know that there is another big party for him tonight?”

“Don’t be so hostile,” his wife replied. “I’ll ease him into the fact when he comes down—after he’s had some breakfast. No doubt he’ll sleep late. He must be very tired—going through submarine zones and all that. He certainly looked it when he got off the train.”

“He looked rotten,” Biff said comfortably. “The lousy interventionist!”

“Hannah,” said Mr. Bailey to his wife, “we made a mistake with that boy. Should never have allowed him to go to Oxford. He got the European taint.”

“It was the ‘V’ on his luggage,” Sarah said, “that was so darned corny! The very first thing I saw—even before I saw Jimmie—was that big suitcase Biff and I gave him for a going-away present, and that enormous red, white, and blue ‘V.’ He might at least have had the decency to find out that the better people in his own home town aren’t having any part of things like that!”

“I was kind of proud of that ‘V,’” Jimmie said.

Biff dropped his knife. Sarah flinched. Mr. Bailey spun in his chair. Hannah Bailey said, “James! You must quit sneaking up and listening in on what people are saying! That’s the second time you’ve been eavesdropping!”

Jimmie came into the dining room and looked cheerfully at his family and at the bright sun outside; he sat down in the empty place. “Oh, I eavesdrop all the time.” He was flushing a little, but his words did not show that he was in any way embarrassed. “It’s counterespionage that does it.”

“What?” said his mother.

Jimmie answered blandly, “Counterspying. In wartime England you get in the habit of slipping up quietly on every conversation. You know. The lovely old man in the walrus mustache taking tea with the beautiful young girl may well be a fifth columnist.

The bobby under Nelson’s statue ostensibly giving directions to the cockney errand boy may be Baron Hoffmann, chief of the Gestapo, telling a messenger the location of an AA battery—”

“He’s kidding, Mother,” Sarah said. The butler came in and looked inquisitively at Jimmie.

“Some bloaters, Westcott, and a bit of cold pork pie—” Jimmie chuckled at the man’s expression. “I want anything strictly American in the kitchen! Everything, in fact.”

Westcott smiled understandingly and hurried out.

Mr. Bailey scowled. “You know, son, I suppose, that there’s another party to be given for you tonight.”

“Is there?”

“The Wilsons’.”

Mrs. Bailey glanced indignantly at her husband and amiably at her elder son. “It’s really a ‘must,’ dear. I’m dreadfully sorry you got up so early. You must take a good, long nap this afternoon.”

“I had to get up,” Jimmie said pleasantly. “Work.”

“What is there so terrifically important about that work?” Sarah sounded honestly puzzled. “Me—if I were you—I’d take a month off, enjoy the food in a country that still has sense enough to stay out of war, go to the club, pick out a whole harem of women and indulge my more frivolous nature to the limit—”

“Sarah!” said Mr. Bailey.

“Sis is right!” Biff looked at his brother.

“You could, you know,” Sarah went on. “Ninety per cent of the gals in Muskogewan would be a pushover for you. Would be, that is, if you quit carrying the torch for the Empire. I could hear ’em panting last night, when you came into the club. I’ll arrange it for you. Some nice numbers—”

“Sarah!” said her mother, more loudly.

“Why deceive the man?” Sarah grinned wickedly. “He knows he’s sort of the Ronald Colman type—intellectually, and without the mustache—crossed with the Gary Cooper build. Honestly, Jimmie, when you got off the train I passionately wished I were pro-British—and not your sister! In a nice way,” she added, aware that her mother was reaching the point of explosion. “No fooling. Why the drudgery? You don’t look like a chemist. Last night, you didn’t even act like one.”

Jimmie said, airily, “Oh, social service. I work for some people that I want to get out of a jam.”

“Really—” said his mother.

“He means the English,” said Sarah.

“I mean,” Jimmie explained, “about a billion or so people. English, French, Poles, Czechs, Chinese, Malays, Russians—”

“We know geography,” Biff said irritatedly. “How’d you like Audrey?”

Jimmie’s face was expressionless. “She’s very attractive.”

“She didn’t—?” Sarah began.

Mrs. Bailey said, “Shh! It’s supposed to be a surprise! ”

“You better tell him then, Mother.” Mrs. Bailey considered. “Very well. Audrey didn’t say anything about the party for you tonight?”

“Not a word.”

“Well, it was going to be a surprise party—and you can pretend you’re surprised anyway—”

“ You’ll be surprised, Mother. I’m not going.” Mrs. Bailey was triumphant. “Oh, yes, you are! Audrey’s folks are giving it!”

“Oh?” Jimmie pondered. “Well, I’m still not going. ”

“But, Jimmie!” Mrs. Bailey’s voice was tearful. Mr. Bailey looked at her with an I-expected-as-much expression. “Jimmie, dear! This is really by far the most important of all the parties we’d planned for you! And you were so devoted to Audrey last night! I was extremely relieved by it.”

He felt, again, the weight of his first disappointment: the fact that his family was angry with him and the deep violence of their disagreement. It was not the shock it had been on the day before, but it still outraged him—as if he had come home to find them gleefully engaged in some lunatical act of arson or assault. “I liked Audrey all right. She has feelings—infantile and hard to reach—but there, anyhow. She reminds me of a much more real woman I knew once, too. And dancing exclusively with her saved me from hordes of those little numbers Sarah just described as pushovers. Lord! Parlor English has deteriorated!”

Mr. Bailey started to say something forceful. His wife gave him an imploring signal—a signal that promised to treat later with the situation.

Westcott came in with the papers on a tray. Mr. Bailey seized the Chicago paper vigorously, and his wife accepted the Muskogewan Times. She turned immediately to the Society page, without seeming to be aware that the Times had a front page at all.

But Mr. Bailey concentrated on the front page of the Chicago journal.

Jimmie, of course, had never watched his father read a newspaper in the latter years of the New Deal. He did so now. It was an extraordinary experience.

Mr. Bailey’s eyes ran along the banner headline with rapid interest. He said, “Huh!” in a moderate tone. He read the first few lines of double-column type. He said, “So. Two more freighters, eh?”

Sarah and Biff went on eating, scarcely noticing the one-man melodrama fomenting under their noses. But Jimmie watched, repressing a grin.

Presently his father said, “Ha!” bitterly. He pulled the paper closer to his eyes. He whispered between his teeth, “Rat!” There was a moment of absolute quiet. “The dirty rat!”

Mr. Bailey fumbled busily with the stubborn sheets as he tried to follow a news story over to page six. He finally found the continuation. He read. He exclaimed, “Communists! Communists, everyone!”

He went back to the front page. For some minutes he read quietly again. He said, “Well, they had another flood in Los Angeles. Killed three.”

This observation brought no response. His eye flicked over the type. Suddenly he made a noise. It was an animal noise. He kept reading, and he kept making animal noises.

Moans, growls, whinnies. Like the noises of something caught in a steel trap—past its first hysteria but not yet dulled to resignation. Presently he stared at nothing. “They put him in!” he whispered in a grisly tone. “They put him in again! They put him in for a third term! How could they do it?” He shook his head and bowed it, as if he were in the presence of some fantastic betrayal of himself by a dear friend.

The lowering of his head put his eye in range of still another heading. Instantly, his reverent despair was gone. He read—electrically. “Oh—God!” he whispered, as if it were one word. “They passed it! Forced it through!” He clapped his hand to his head. The newspaper fell from his other hand. Stricken, he nevertheless seized it again. He pored over the words. And a peculiar thing began to happen to him.

His face became empurpled. His body swelled like a frog’s. The great arteries in his temples beat rapidly. His breath went in and out, sharply. His fingers stiffened out, and closed, and straightened again. He looked like a boiler that is popping rivets immediately before bursting. He swore fluently, softly, using up the common expressions and repeating them in fresh combinations. With one fist he began to hammer in a steady rhythm on the edge of the table.

Only then did his wife take open cognizance of his condition. “Finish your breakfast, Kendrick,” she said pleasantly.

He stared at her glassily. Westcott brought the morning mail on a tray. Mr. Bailey continued to stare while the man distributed it. He said, “Well, Hannah, they passed it! That means there’s a ceiling on everything, now. No room for business to budge in! I’m not a banker any more! I’m just a teller! We’re Communist now—all of us! We might as well go out in the street and start saluting with fists! You wouldn’t think that one man, one solitary traitor to his class, one egomaniacal idiot, could steal from a hundred and thirty-two million people every right, every power, every privilege, every decent democratic principle—”

Suddenly he stopped. He quivered. He looked at Jimmie. “What’s the matter?”

It was some time before Jimmie could get his breath. Quite some time. He was choking—choking badly. But when he did recover he loosed the breath again in a tremendous roar of laughter. “Oh, Lord!” said. “Oh, my Lord, Dad! All these years I’ve thought of you as the most self-controlled, self-disciplined man I ever knew! And now!” He chortled again.

“It took Roosevelt to turn you into a thundering infant! No kidding!” He fought again for air. “No fooling! You’ll get apoplexy.”

His father came up standing. “Infant!” he bellowed. “Infant!”

Jimmie’s mirth was only partially quenched by his attempt to regain composure.

“You looked exactly like one. Ten months old. When you take away his rattle! Ye gods! Are many grown people going into spins like that, over the morning paper? Do it again, Dad! Do it some more!” A paroxysm of hilarity bent him double.

His father was still standing. He opened his mouth and closed it. His eyes were raging and his face was still violet. “Son—” he began.

Then Biff said, “Go on. Laugh.” His voice was so odd that even his father looked at him.

Biff was as white as chalk. Around the corners of his mouth was a slack sullenness. The perspiration that had made small damp areas on his upper lip and forehead was now pouring from his entire face. He had a letter in his hand. He looked, Jimmie thought, like a man who has just been hit. In the vivid vocabulary of Jimmie’s memory, that simile meant hit mortally, with a splinter of a bomb or a spear of flying glass. Jimmie seized his brother’s arm strongly and said, “Hey, fellow! What’s wrong?”

“Laugh some more,” Biff replied vacuously, insanely.

Jimmie seized the letter. He frowned perplexedly and looked around the table. His family seemed scared. “It just says,” Jimmie reported calmly, “that Biff, my proud young brother, has been drafted.”

“Just!” said Biff. “Just says!”

“What’s the matter with that?” Jimmie asked.

Mrs. Bailey was rising. A dewy light shone in her eyes and her face was working.

She ran to her son’s side. “Oh, Biff, Biff, Biff! I won’t let them take you away. My boy, my youngest boy!”

Her husband threw into the scene a tone of reasonableness. “Take it easy, Mother.

This whole thing’s preposterous, and you know it. There must be something we can do.

I’ll look into it—immediately.”

“Of course, you can do something,” Mrs. Bailey answered, sniffling, but comforted. “It’s such a waste! Biff was just getting ready to hunt for the right job!”

Jimmie glanced at his frantic mother, his frowning father, and his sister, who seemed to be undergoing mixed emotions. Then he brought his gaze “I’m not scared,” Biff said harshly. He met Jimmie’s eyes, and Jimmie knew that was the truth. “But I’ll be everlastingly damned if I’m going to spend a year of my life marching around with a lot of Boy Scouts, getting up at the crack of dawn, doing day labor, eating swill—just because Franklin Delano Roosevelt says there’s an emergency! And that’s flat!”

Mrs. Bailey added her explanation. “I told Biff he should do something when he wrote out the application—or whatever you call it. He was bound to get an ‘A’ rating.

Maybe we can do something about his physical examination.”

“I’m a football player,” Biff said coldly.

His mother answered, “Still, we must know the examining physician—whoever it is. Laddy Bedford got put way back because of his heart, though I never heard before about his having heart trouble. There must be some loophole, somewhere.” She seemed to see a stoniness in Jimmie’s stare. She added, “It isn’t as if we really needed an army! As if we’d been invaded, or anything! Besides, there still isn’t enough equipment to drill with for half the boys that they’ve already taken. They shouldn’t call any more until they have the things.

And even Congress almost had sense enough, last summer, to put a stop to it!”

Jimmie said, “That’s a devil of a mood to show a guy who’s about to join the army.”

She said, “Jimmie!”

Mr. Bailey pontificated. “Now, James, this is something that demands thought.

Thought—and possible action. A boy like Biff is too valuable to be put in the infantry.

And the time for raising a militia hasn’t come, even if the president does create it later.

You’re fresh from other people’s battles. You’ll have to Jet us work this out in the way most suitable to Americans in America.”

“Biff’s going,” Jimmie said bluntly.

Biff whirled. “Says who?”

“Says me, Biff.” Jimmie was very quiet.

“You think you can make me?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

Jimmie shrugged. He was still sitting at his place. He picked up the letter. “Here.

It tells you to report. You’ll pass the physical, because you have the constitution of a buffalo. So-you’ll go. If you”—he spoke still more quietly—“or Dad, or Mother, or anybody tries to weasel on this, I’ll go before the draft board or committee—or whatever it is—and report the whole unselfish and patriotic conversation we have just been having here! I promise you!”

He stopped there—because Biff slugged him. He hit from the floor, with all his might. Biff was also sitting. Otherwise the blow would have downed Jimmie. It caught him on the cheekbone. It made a nasty sound. Sarah screamed. Biff grabbed his fist and rubbed it. He said, “I’ll run this show! You interfere—and that’s just a sample! I’ll about kill you!” His voice was shaking.

Jimmie lowered his head a moment. The first fierce pain died away. The sparks stopped floating. He put his hand up to his cheek and rubbed hard. His palm was bloodied. He took out his handkerchief, dipped it in his tumbler, and pressed it against the cut bruise. “I didn’t see that one coming,” he said, finally. “You better always throw ’em without warning me. You’re a husky boy, Biff. But I’ve been training in the home guard for nearly two years. If you ever slug me again I’ll lay you cold. If you want to fight fair—come on outside. Do you?”

Biff said nothing.

Mrs. Bailey was weeping voluminously. Her husband was staring rabidly at his sons. Sarah sat still, shivering. The telephone rang. Westcott came in. He was astonished by the tableau. He showed it only slightly. “For you, Mrs. Bailey. It’s Mrs. Wilson.”

“I can’t possibly—” said Mrs. Bailey. Then she gulped. “Mrs. Wilson!” She rose.

While she was away no one said a word.

When she came back her face was pasty and her eyes were bleak. “The p-p-party tonight is off,” she said hollowly. “Off-because of Jimmie’s views. That’s the real truth.

Mrs. Wilson is telling people—except us, of course—that she’s been taken very ill, all of a sudden.” She sat down and burst into tears again. “Now, everything’s ruined.”

CHAPTER IV

JIMMIE WALKED to the paint works. His mother, emerging from her woebegone condition for a single, considerate moment, had offered a car for him to drive.

He had preferred to walk. It wasn’t much more than a mile to the plant; and Jimmie was used to walking. He hadn’t bothered to tell his mother that he was used to walking now.

He had felt too inert and too wounded—wantonly wounded—to take the trouble to remind her that he had just come from England, where there was a hideous war and people walked places whenever they could. No more use turning the screw, driving the barb.

Something had happened to his family in the six years of his absence. They’d lost something—heart, guts, reason, even great chunks of knowledge—and all they had left were glass brick walls, automobiles, cocktails, bad tempers.

He tramped through the pretty part of town, the hill part, squirting the slush vindictively; he entered the shabbier section with less spattering steps, as if the poorer people had more delicate sensibilities, or as if they were fellow sufferers rather than the authors of his fury. The ugliness of the rows of frame houses, painted in the most repugnant shades of yellow and green and brown, stung like a rebuke; nobody taught the poor people anything; they couldn’t learn for themselves; even if they learned, they couldn’t do much about their learning, because they were poor. His father would call these people—the women hanging out clothes in the back yards, the old men stealing kindling from the railroad right-of-way—by the single name of Labor. His father would call what was going on inside Jimmie’s mind Communistic. But Jimmie wasn’t thinking about economics—he wasn’t thinking at all; he was only feeling—and his feelings were raw as his right cheek, and as unpleasant to behold.

At the Corinth Works he was given a pass by the boss’s secretary, Miss Melrose, and shown to the lab that had been made ready for his coming. A big lab, a good lab, a fairly dramatic lab. Too intricate for the layman’s eyes it was like the insides of a great engine, made of glass. He kicked off his overshoes, hung his hat on the spout of a retort, put on a brand new rubber apron, and walked around, reading the labels on hundreds of bottles, cocking his eye, now and again, to note that the old man had so much imagination, and so much money for chemicals. The apparatus was magnificent. The layout could not be improved. Light poured from windows high overhead, all around the room—twenty or more, big and opaque, so no one could watch the alchemy in progress.

The place was air-conditioned.

Jimmie sighed and sat down on a stool. Here was one spot-one niche in the hostile Midwestern city, in the unfamiliar world of America—where he was going to be perfectly at home.

Old Cholmondeley, he thought, would give his right eye for this joint. Percy would give his other arm. Well, this was America. In America—they had everything. He wondered which of the pressing problems he would start on. His wonderment took his thoughts a long way—to the heart of the battle in Europe; he tried to weigh the relative strategic values of succeeding here, or succeeding there—if he should succeed at all.

Finally, grunting, he walked to a rack of test tubes, took one down, poured into it some powdered iron, looked at it for a full five minutes, set it back in the rack, picked up a pencil that had never been used, and commenced to write a prodigality of equations on long sheets of yellow paper.

He was studying these when his door pushed open. Because Miss Melrose had said no one would disturb him unless he rang, Jimmie knew who had opened his door.

“’Lo, Willie,” he said.

“How do you like it?”

“Don’t need to answer, do I? If my brain was as sound as your lab we’d have the war won in a week!”

Mr. Corinth chuckled soundlessly. He sat down on another stool and squinted for some time at his employee. “Who hit you?”

“My brother.” The response was complacent. “Uh-huh. Biff’s got a bad temper.

War, eh?”

“Domestic relations,” Jimmie answered, smiling ruefully, “seem to hinge on international relations.”

“Out here in the West they do, anyhow. They ought to draft that puppy pretty soon.”

“They did.”

Mr. Corinth pulled on his white mustache, apparently to hide a smile. “SO he hit you. Did you see it coming?”

Jimmie had been studying his equations again. He looked up, not with irritation, but in a way that showed his preoccupation. “No.”

“Thought not.” The old man yawned and stretched. “Jimmie, put the foolscap away. I want to talk.”

“Okay!” He smiled indulgently and tossed down the pencil.

“Plenty of time for chemistry. Time goes on forever, and chemistry’s part of it.

Not enough time for people on the other hand, no matter what. I like to feel the fellows working for me are in the proper mood. It’s my hunch that the mood you’re in is everything. You can come over to this glass maze week after week and figure out how to pick an atom off here and stick it on yonder; but if you’re in the wrong mood you never get any valuable answers. On the other hand, you can go out and lie pie-eyed drunk in the gutter for a month and come in here for one day, and if you feel hot you can discover more than ten men in ten lifetimes. Funny!”

“Still,” Jimmie said, “I don’t propose to try the inspirational method of the gutter.”

“Plenty sore, aren’t you?”

Jimmie was going to deny that. But he said, “Yes. Plenty.”

“Well, when people are sore it’s because they’re afraid. Every damn’ solitary time.

Maybe not afraid of exactly what they seem to be sore at—but afraid of something behind it. What do you think you’re afraid of, at this point?”

“Afraid?” He laughed unsympathetically. “Nothing.”

“Sure you are. Scared dizzy. You love your family, Jimmie. You’re that kind of an egg. As loyal as a darned dog. And you’ve blown ’em high as kites, I bet. Started scenes—Biff hit you at breakfast? I thought so. You’re scared—but I’ll let you figure out of what.

You know, Jimmie, you have a lot to catch up on.”

“Evidently.”

“Think about that—for one thing.”

Jimmie suddenly had a mental picture of his father, reading the morning paper. “If your psychology is sound—if rage is a sign of fear—then my old man must be about dead of fright these days!” He described the passionate perusal.

Mr. Corinth snorted. “Yes, there’s men doing that all over the country. Sore at the president because they’re scared of what he’ll do. But that’s not the main thing these days.

That’ll wash—one way or another—according to what the majority of the American people think they want. It’s what they think they want that matters. What their attitude is. Hitler’s propaganda fellows understand that. Jimmie, how many times do you believe you can change your mind and still keep believing in yourself?” The younger man cocked an eyebrow. “I don’t get it.”

“Well, suppose—” Mr. Corinth took out a large linen handkerchief. “Suppose I said this was black. You think it’s white. But suppose I finally convince you it’s black. All right. I’ve reversed your attitude once. Now. Suppose somebody else comes along and makes you realize it’s white again. That’s twice your opinion has changed.

“Now. You’re going along thinking it’s a white handkerchief. But suppose—just for the hell of it—that the underside of this darned thing really is black. And suppose you can see a reflection of that side in a mirror. And suppose, also, it happens to be a matter of life and death importance to you that the whole handkerchief should be black. And suppose I—who have already convinced you once that it was black—start to work on you again. You have a motive for thinking this whole thing is black. I tell you it is—and prove it, let’s say, by phoney physics. Let’s say, you’ve always pretended to know a lot about physics—though you don’t. Suppose, also, a lot of men who are leaders in your field—not all, but a lot—start saying this handkerchief of mine is all black. What do you do now?

“Naturally, you get convinced again that the darned thing is as black as the Ace of Spades on both sides. Why? Because you’ve made that mistake once. Because you have a dire personal need to think it’s all black. And because the big shots above you say it’s black. Jimmie—that’s the most important thing in the world today. That’s what’s the matter with your family. They can’t start all over again with the basic facts, line ’em up impartially, change their opinions for about the fifth time, and come up once more, finally and for all, with the true bill of goods!”

“That just states the problem. How do you solve it?”

The old man tipped his stool back against a high table and peered at Jimmie. “You know your family. You know your country—or, at least, what your country has stood for in the past. ‘We hold all men to be created free and equal.’ That sort of stuff. You solve their problem. I’ll help you out, though. For years I’ve been pasting up scrapbooks of things I thought were important. All sorts of things. Newspaper clippings and items from magazines. Pages from books—most whole books only do have a couple of worth-while pages in ’em. My scrapbooks aren’t perfect—they missed a lot—but I’ll lend ’em to you.

They’ll help you catch up on your American history.”

“I need to,” Jimmie said.

“Mmmm. I’ll send the books over to your house. Maybe your family’ll peek into ’em. They’ll remind them of a lot they’ve overlooked.”

Jimmie grinned. “I bet.”

Mr. Corinth took a cigar from his disreputable waistcoat pocket and struck a match. He puffed ruminatively. “Your people—most people—don’t realize what has happened to them. It’s so big, so abrupt, so demanding of enormous mental change, that they can’t realize. Takes more time than they’re willing to take to think. More intellectual honesty than your father or your mother are in the habit of using. I don’t believe either Roosevelt or Churchill ever understood exactly what’s happened to all of us on this planet. I mean about this isolation business. When folks do understand what has happened, this word ‘isolation’ just about won’t exist any more.”

Mr. Corinth stared at Jimmie. “In the case of crime or danger there is only one question important to a human. That isn’t—How big is the danger, or, How terrible? It’s—How faraway is it? Only, Jimmie, there’re two kinds of ‘faraway.’ One is—How far in distance? The other is—How far in time? The murder and rape of a few thousand Chinese is pretty faraway in distance. So is the German Army—in spite of the cruising range of bombers. That reassures people. But they aren’t any distance away in time! Even with the telegraph, distance in time was still distance. It took time to get the messages translated and printed in the newspapers. But with the radio that’s all gone. We’re isolated in distance, only a few hours, all over the world. And in time, not at all—any more, ever! ”

“I never thought of that,” Jimmie said. “Not that way.”

“Nope. People don’t. I pick up my radio. I hear the AA going in London. Shrapnel hitting the roof where the announcer stands. Fire crackling. Bombs screeching. I think— Well, that’s London and it’s faraway. But I can’t think—That’s something that happened. I know darn’ well it’s something happening right here and now! There’s the trouble. It isn’t history. It’s present tense. Therefore, my conscience won’t let me overlook it. My instinct is to do something about it because it’s going on now! If I still try to tell myself it’s faraway I feel I’m a hypocrite. I feel that I’m an accessory to the whole bloody affair. I am—in the sense that I haven’t the excuse of isolation in time any more. Particeps criminis, the law calls it. That is, if you’re going down the street and you see a robbery take place and you don’t try to do anything about it the law can punish you. You’re an accessory. That’s what radio makes the whole world: accessories before, during, and after the rotten crimes now going on. Not eyewitnesses, earwitnesses, which is just as damning.”

“Not to my family,” Jimmie answered grimly. “Not to them! They think we’re safe. They call the destruction of a continent a ‘European quarrel.’ They say I’m a ‘warmonger.’ I’m not, because I don’t plan in any way to profit by war—which IS what the word really means. They say I’m an interventionist. I’m not, because my reason for wanting to help is not to high-pressure somebody else’s war, but to do a long-range job of saving our own skin. They say I’m pro-British which I am—though the reason is, the English have changed. Before the war I was almost anti-English. Munich made me sick.

But England changed! My family says England betrayed France in the end. Actually—in the end—England offered France an even-Stephen union with the British Empire—a thing which would have caused every tory in the country to shoot himself, three years before! They made that offer, to keep France from betraying herself. Oh—the hell with my family!”

Mr. Corinth smoked. His eyes were as near to twinkling as their opacity permitted. “I know your family. Listening to their radios they feel like accessories to all the crimes. But to stop the crimes—means war, maybe. To go to war means—well, a terrible risk. Perhaps it means they’ll lose their money, their clothes, their cars, their house with the new glass brick panels, maybe Biff’s life, maybe yours. Maybe, even, their own. They will all tell you that Hitler can never touch America. They even say he cannot cross the English Channel—though he crossed it often enough in the air. They will say that Muskogewan can never be harmed. Then, when a little time has passed, and the discussion warms, they will recommend staying out of war tin order to save the lives of Muskogewan’s innocent women and children.’ Oh, they contradict themselves—people like your mother and father! But they talk very much and very loudly, because they are talking nonsense—and their consciences know it. They realize, at the very least, that they are refusing to answer a moral demand. Refusing, because they fear the cost will be high.

That means I hey are putting a money value on their own characters. To admit that out loud, would destroy them. So they deny it; inevitably, they contradict themselves.”

Jimmie stood and stretched. He paced his new laboratory for several moments.

“They make me so mad! Last night the whole crowd at the club said that an American declaration of war on Germany amounted to ‘pointing an empty gun’! Where do they get that kind of garbage? Is a world war the same thing as a stick-up? Is the biggest navy in the world—an empty gun? And what about declaring in the greatest economic plant on earth? Then my old man said that if England lost the whole of Europe would be Communist overnight. Does he believe that? Can’t he read? Hitler has never kept a promise. But hasn’t he carried out every threat he ever made—so far?

“Dad says Fascism is the same thing as Communism. Even if it was—exactly the same thing—what would we do with the whole world like that? I asked him, and he smiled like a sap and said, ‘What we’ve always done, son. Mind our own business.’ I asked him what business we’d have left to mind, and he said I didn’t understand world trade. Imagine! I understand world trade on Hitler’s terms, all right! But Dad doesn’t—and yet he runs a bank! He says, ‘Leave it up to the common people, and you’ll get the right answer every time.’ I say—a lot of things are too damned complicated for the common people! Even at that, I say, the polls of American sentiment show the majority feels a hell of a lot different from Father! So he says the polls are rigged. Are they?”

The old chemist shook his head. “No. They’re honest—and reliable. Only—time enters in, again. That’s why these polls drive people crazy. People overlook the fact that polls are always history. They represent what the nation thought yesterday, or last week, or even last month. Which, with the radio knocking time down to zero, means that the polls are not news, but reminiscence. They have no positive value in deciding what to do now. They only show what should have been done last month, when the poll was taken.

We’re able to live in the present everywhere, now. People ought to think what that means.

One reason the isolationists always talk about this war in historical terms is to try—subconsciously—to push it back into a less uncompromising focus. The kind of focus they grew up with. The focus in which the dying, and t he killing, are always over when you learn about them. That’s comfortable—because it does not make you an accessory. The radio does.”

Jimmie raised his foot onto the top of a stool. He relaxed his weight against his knee. His gray eyes were blazingly alive; his reddish brown hair was uncombed, so that it jostled when he spoke. “The bunch that Father and Mother work with is sure baffling! They take the word of a pilot as gospelon all things military and aerodynamic. They sit on platforms with a prominent Socialist—and you ought to hear what Dad thinks about Socialism! They listen to anybody on their side, no matter how obvious. No matter if he’s a manifest crackpot, or publicity-crazed, or an ax-grinder, or a professional Irishman, or a long-established baiter of Britain, or a discredited politician trying to make headlines—just anybody! No rhyme, no reason, no order—just rant! And big applause.”

“Sure. I’ll introduce you to a few ‘interventionists,’ though, Jimmie—to keep you sane. You’ll find that they’ve pretty much thought their way through all the changes of black and white—to the real answer. It’s funny. The interventionist attitude toward the isolationist is one of worry. Worry about how to convert him. Worry about the factors that made him the way he is. An earnest attempt to reason with him. But the isolationist’s attitude toward his interventionist friend is just—rage. Instead of reason the isolationist has been using slogans. ‘Don’t plow under our boys.’ Frantic, hysterical swill like that. Malicious stuff.” The old man sighed. “The difference in their attitudes toward each other is just about a definition of who’s doing the calm thinking and who’s doing the terrified yelling. Well, Jimmie, there’s a lot wrong with America—”

“You tell me,” Jimmie said. “I’m liking this. At home, they shut me up. At home, their slogans are truth. My facts are propaganda. Even Audrey Wilson called me Duff Cooper at one point last night.”

Mr. Corinth’s eyebrows lifted. “So you’ve met our Audrey?”

“Yeah. Mother’s idea—at the beginning.”

“Mmmm.” The old man slid from his stool. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with America—and the world—some other time, Jimmie. Did you like her?”

“Who? Audrey? She’s attractive.”

“A mild phrase. Too mild. It protests too much—in converse. Audrey is to attractiveness what a flying fortress is to a box kite. I know Audrey pretty well. She tried to get a job here, once. Tried hard.”

“Audrey did? Doing what?”

“Learning chemistry. She’d polished off finishing school and she had an idea she’d become another Eve Curie.”

“Why didn’t you let her learn?”

“Oh, I dunno. Maybe I was wrong. I looked at Audrey and I decided women already knew too darn’ much, anyhow. Teaching women the things men know hasn’t done one doggoned visible thing to improve human life yet. I half suspect it’s made the women skimp their natural business, besides. So I thought Audrey ought to have a chance to grow mellow by just being female.”

“Mellow. She’s hardly that.”

“No. I suppose not. She might be closer to it, though, than you think. You’re no wood-aged paragon of mellowness yourself, yet.” He reached out, rather impulsively, and put his hand on Jimmie’s shoulder. “You’re thinking, this morning—if I may be so clairvoyant as to say so—of taking a room, hunh?”

The younger man grinned again. “I was.”

“Don’t. Stick around your family. You aren’t anywhere near in the mood to work.

The mood I talked about when I butted in here. You won’t find out anything, anyway.

You might as well get over your mad—or push through it—or whatever you do when you see red. I can run the paint works—government orders and all. You just stay at home and mess around here when you want.”

“I’m used to working in any mood,” Jimmie answered seriously. “I’ve had some damned good practice!”

The venerable face was seamed with amusement and at the same time with a transcendent sympathy. “Yes, Jimmie. I can imagine. I can imagine a little. Twenty-three years ago—for a month—when I was in Chemical Warfare I had charge of a big ammunition dump—high explosive and gas. They shelled and bombed the thing constantly. I can make a stab at knowing what you mean. It’s not that mood I’m talking about. I have a sneaking idea you aren’t yellow—or a quitter. It’s the other mood.” He hesitated. “You’ll be seeing Audrey again soon, I suppose?”

“I don’t know. Her family canceled a party they’d set for me—when they found out I was a British agent, practically.”

“Well, when you see her do me a favor. Keep trying to think what she’d be like if she didn’t have those looks.”

Jimmie laughed. “Why?”

“I always wondered myself—that’s all. And another chore. Try it. Make believe you’ve been sold on every single item your mother and your father subscribe to. Empty gun—not our war—America can’t be invaded—Roosevelt is a Communist and a hysteric.

Believe all that, on purpose. Then see how you feel about life!” Mr. Corinth walked to the table where Jimmie had been working. He picked up the pages of equations and read through them rapidly. His white eyebrows waggled and he blinked at Jimmie once or twice.

“Solve your personal equations first,” he said, as he walked from the room.

Jimmie went back to work. In a vehement, though unappraised, determination to refute the opinion of the philosophical old man, he worked through the lunch hour and the afternoon. No satisfying thought came out of his labors. At five, a whistle blew. The shifts changed. Jimmie shook himself; he was stiff from concentration. He put on his overshoes and his hat and locked the door of his laboratory.

Outside, the air was warmer. The snow had gone and the damp ground smelled pungently of sun-cured vegetation spread on it by autumn. Men and women were walking toward exits in the high fence. Some turned at the corner and started home on foot; others crossed a muddy street to the big parking lot and started their cars. The low-slanting sunlight throbbed with revving engines. Jimmie had a hunch that a second, belated, Indian summer would follow the freak cold spell which had bound Muskogewan in snow.

Such a warm spell was typical of the climate of the region. It would be followed by the crisp weather that led into Thanksgiving. His hunch exhilarated Jimmie. English weather was tedious and small-scale. The changes in this part of northern United States were dramatic, stimulating.

A horn blew as Jimmie checked out at the gatehouse. He looked up. Audrey was sitting in a coupe parked in the space alongside a fireplug. Jimmie put his pass in his wallet and took off his hat and walked over to her car. “Up to now,” he said, “I’ve refused all offers of chaufferage. I’ll take yours, though.”

CHAPTER V

AUDREY LOOKED like the afternoon. Her suit was greenish gray, the color of fall-faded vegetation. Her blouse and hat were brassy, like sunshine on yellow leaves—like her hair. Her hat swept up proudly from her face, framed it, insisted upon it. But she kept her head down, her face half averted, and she said impatiently, “Hop in!”

She drove away. When she reached one of the minor highways outside the town she slowed. “I was just going to bribe one of those guards to phone you. I waited quite a while. And I didn’t want to be caught.”

Jimmie laughed. “You won’t lose caste in this district. Not if you’re calling for me.

I assure you, I’ve been accepted by the very best upper sets—”

It’s not that. It’s my family. You knew they were giving you a big costume party tonight?”

“I knew it was a surpriser, but not a costumer.”

“Mother planned it for weeks. Of course, she had to keep open dates, because nobody knew till recently just when you would be here. You were late, as it was. I don’t know why everybody was so stupid, but we all thought you’d probably be on the other side. I mean—against war. You’ve never met Mother?”

He shook his head. “The Wilson immigration was after my time. I examined into that, to discover why I didn’t remember you. Even at seventeen—six years ago—you must have been definitely noticeable.”

“Mother has a pretty grim sense of humor. The party she planned was going to be a bomb party. With a lot of money-snatching side shows for the benefit of the America Forever Committee.”

“What’s a bomb party?”

Audrey bit her lip. “If you’d come up to our house now, you’d get the idea. It took a lot of carpenters and some scenery designers about a week to fix things for it. Mother’s idea was to make every room look—inside—as if it had been bombed. It’s her theory that if people only stopped to think what they were doing they’d stop doing it. She thought you’d be an admirable backer-upper of that theory—having just been on the grounds, so to speak. She was going to have you give a little talk.”

Jimmie stared at the girl with incredulity. “What were the costumes going to be? Bandages?”

“Something like it. You could come as any sort of a victim. Oh, it’s very breath-taking and all that—our house. There’s a big sign between the dining room and the living room that says, ‘It Must Never Happen Here.’” Audrey sighed… It’s all being removed—today. Of course, somebody or other did suggest that you might take the opposite viewpoint about things. But Mother isn’t the sort of person who admits there is an opposite viewpoint. She said, at the time, ‘If James Bailey turns out a traitor and advocates any more American hysteria, we will wither him!’ She’d have withered you, too, Jimmie.”

“My God.” He said it flatly, and thought for a while. “She couldn’t wither me, Audrey. I wish she’d tried. I wish she’d given the party. I’d have been happy to make a little talk. I would have arranged the guests in the artificial ruins in some dramatic postures—common to the London streets—and I would have keyed my address in a moderate tone—”

“I told her you would dump her applecart. I told her last night, when I came in. She was mad enough—from the rumors about you she’d already heard. She didn’t go to the dinner last night because she was putting on the finishing touches at home.”

“Painting on bloodstains, I trust,” Jimmie said.

“Something of the sort. Jimmie. The reason I came over to the factory and waited for you was this. Could you possibly swallow your pride and practice a little tact around here? I mean, could you pretend a little—just to make peace? It might be good strategy.

You have no idea how Muskogewan is torn apart by the war! How furious people get at each other! What mean things they do! After all, the people on my side of the argument aren’t altogether crazy. A lot of them are smart and nice and earnest and sincere, I can understand how you feel. I don’t agree with you a bit just because I understand. I think the warmongers are mistaken. I think they have come to believe that Hitler is a boogieman, invincible and superhuman. I think, if he ever did plan an attack on America, he’d give ample evidence beforehand—and I think that would be the time to train soldiers and make arms. I mean, for ourselves. It’s all right to help England, probably. Dangerous—but idealistic, and all that. But if you’d just even pretend to accept some such a view it would make everything—so much more convenient.”

“Everything?” His voice was a rejection.

“Don’t you know what a girl means when she says, ‘everything’ in that way? She means—herself. Her life.”

“Enough Americans,” Jimmie mused, “had enough foresight and guts to pass the Lease-Lend Bill. That was Hitler’s first defeat. It’ll take dozens more—as big, as costly—to whip Hitler. But there are sure an awful lot of you people still doing Hitler’s work—sincere or not—just as advertised, predicted, and counted upon, by handsome Adolf and his general staff.”

She flushed brightly. “We’re not pro-German. You can’t say that.”

“No. And Pilate wasn’t procrucifixion. He just washed his hands.”

“You’re going to make me sore!”

“What about me? I came here only yesterday—bursting with love. With memories. With anticipations. I was never as happy in my life. And I was so darned proud of America. I knew my country had been laggard and doubtful and not wholly united. But I knew America had saved the sum of things twice—already. Once after Dunkirk. Once again in the battle of the Atlantic. And then, we drove up on the hill and we went into my house—and I found myself in a swarm of Benedict Arnolds. Not conscious ones. Not willful ones. Frightened ones, who were trying to betray all humanity just to save something that existed once, and still exists for the moment as a sort of echo here, but will not and cannot endure anywhere—much longer.”

“You’re so sure about the future!”

He nodded. “Sure it’ll be difficult. Dad wants to set the clock back. Spin the whole damned planet back. Nail it at a place in space and time known to him as 1929. The big year. The banner year. I remember it. I was sixteen, then. World trade, protective taxes, prohibition, stock market graphs like geysers! The great engineers were in the saddle. Business was king. I remember the bust. But it isn’t that, Audrey. Not that—which is coming to all of us. It’s something much worse. The world out of which we drew trade and profit and in which we invested in 1929 is gone. The plant is gone. The property is wrecked. The people are killed or scattered. The governments are smashed. Those who are still alive are weakened by hunger, misled by propaganda, full of dread and hate. Peace—any peace—is going to liberate a whole new set of revenges. Merciful God, can’t they see that? The industry of the earth has been rebuilt to make arms. How are we Americans going to thrive in that shambles? What’s your dad and my dad going to do to pay the national debt, and change back the factories here, and keep wages high enough so we can still have decent standards—and not a black 1932 raised to the hundredth power? The worst peace would mean slavery. The best peace will mean that the whole earth faces the most terrifying mess in the history of mankind.”

“Don’t you think we’ll be better off at that time if we, too, aren’t wholly devoted to making arms?”

“I, personally, don’t think we’ll exist at all if we aren’t wholly devoted to making arms—right now.”

“But your attitude doesn’t give us any alternative whatever! Rather, it just gives us two perfectly ghastly alternatives.”

“Yeah.”

“That doesn’t make sense!”

“Why? Must Americans forever go on thinking that there have to be two paths in life—one that leads to the gravy, and one that leads to hunger? Is there a cosmic rule that you always have to have a happy out? Can’t it be that, sometimes, you only have a choice between a whipping and a hanging? It not only can be—it is!”

“I can’t believe it.”

“We could have prevented it. So could England. We—and England—could have stopped the invasion of Manchuria. Ethiopia. The reoccupation of the Rhine. Anything like that. We didn’t. They didn’t. So—we’re going to payoff.”

“But the price is so out of scale with the mistake!”

Jimmie smiled at her. “You sound like my father. He wants to administer fate, too. He can tell you, to an inch and a penny, what is fair and what is unfair in the way life treats him. The dope! If you happen to drink a glass of water that you suspect isn’t very pure but that you figure won’t hurt you, and there was a cholera germ in the water and you die, that’s a hell of a price to pay for drinking a glass of bad water. But the ‘unfair’ scale of the disaster doesn’t make you live a day longer.”

Audrey drove off the road and under some pine trees. She stopped at a place where the trees opened on a bend in the river. At the bend, ice was breaking up and floating away on a fast-running central current. Across the river was a farm with a big, white barn and a lot of small, white outbuildings. Guernsey cows moved slowly against the browns of a hillside. A light wind came from the farm, smelling sweetly of it.

Audrey turned off the motor with a gloved hand, swung in her seat, drew up one foot, stabbed the lighter into the dashboard, fumbled in her yellow handbag for a cigarette, and reached for the lighter just as it popped out.

“I fell in love with you,” she said suddenly, startlingly.

“Nobody can fall in love in a night.”

Audrey laughed. “Can’t they? I’d like to know what you call what’s going on inside me! I didn’t sleep all night! I shook! I have a feeling like being on fire! I’ve done ages of, not thinking, but knowing about you since last night. Since you were so decent about—Ellen. I know all about you, everything—what you’d say if you were really making love to me—how you’d act if you drank too much—how you’ll look when you’re an old man—what you dream about when you sleep—what you want and what you hate, and what you believe in your heart! I know all that, and I know I will never get over this! Never, never, never.”

Jimmie was aghast. He wanted not to look at her—but he looked. She made no pretense of being composed. She was, indeed, shaking. She still resembled Ellen a great deal; but Ellen had been tranquil and self-possessed. Ellen would never have made such a statement. Not even in years of intimacy. Audrey was like a wild Ellen, an Ellen mixed with violent forces, a berserker, pagan Ellen. A cannibal Ellen, he decided.

He pushed in the lighter, preparatory to smoking a cigarette of his own. “I’ve been in England a long time.” It was lame, and he knew it. “I’m not accustomed to—”

Audrey interrupted him. “Have I asked you for anything? I will—but I haven’t! I’m not a kid, Jimmie. I’ve been living in this town a good while, and going to Chicago and other places, in a big, social way. I have been very much excited about a great many men.

Don’t mistake that. You show me a beautiful woman and I’ll show you one that’s had a lot of men in her life, in one sense or another. I know about my looks, my pale-brown eyes—they aren’t blue, people just think they are—and my bucketful of gold hair, and my figure.

I intend to use them on you for all they’re worth. I dressed three times this afternoon before I started over here. I have good taste—which most people out here do not have. I’m not in the least virtuous—but I am a swell prospect for virtue. I’m not frigid—but I could be, if I were disappointed someday.”

Jimmie said, “Hey!”

She smiled, briefly, almost gently. “You can read my diaries, if you want. I’ll mail them to you. You must know all about me, personally. Right a way. Then we won’t get into any farcical scenes later on.”

He put his fingers between his lips and whistled. It made an ear-splitting sound in the coupe. Then he grinned.

Audrey laughed happily. “All right! I’ll shut up. I just want you to know.”

“Like Hitler! Where the blow will be struck—when and how.”

“Yes. Exactly. And you’ll be paralyzed into submission by the very fact that you do know. At first you’ll love me because I’m a nice dish. After all, hard work, long winter evenings, the need for relaxation, Muskogewan morals, coupled with the fact that the boys are all away and the town is loaded with dashing daughters who will bar no holds even to monopolize you for an evening. I mean, there’s bound to be somebody so it might as well be me—”

He raised his hands to whistle again.

“Don’t stop me. I am too concentrated to be jealous. You will find the daughters are delightful. I have only one problem.”

“I’m glad there’s just one. I suppose it’s—my acquiescence ?”

“No. That isn’t a problem. That’s a pleasant prospect. The thing is, my family has absolutely forbidden me to see you—ever. Except, of course, in public, when it’s unavoidable. And there is nothing whatever in the way I feel that will make seeing you in public of any use to me at all!”

He exhaled slowly. “Look, Audrey. I don’t know what you’re really trying to say to me. I don’t know how much of this is a game and how much is genuine. Or seems genuine to you now. I doubt if many guys have sat through a session like this—unless they’ve sat through it with you. If it’s a line—believe me, it is nonpareil! If you think you mean all this, then for heaven’s sake think some more! I kissed you last night. I enjoyed it. Any man who didn’t enjoy it should be exiled from human society! I have come here to work. Nothing about me matters except that work. Every hour I spend in Muskogewan makes my job harder to do. You’re hell-bent to add more than your share of difficulty—”

“I’m not. I’m hell-bent to see to it that you do your job—whatever that really is—to see that you realize yourself.”

“I’m a chemist. I am working on several secret formulas and ideas—all of which are calculated to get the United States deeper in the war, in an indirect sense, and to make America that much more formidable when she fights.”

“I know that. Everybody knows that.” She was half abstracted. “You go right ahead. I’m sure you must be very inventive. What do you think is the best way for me to cheat?”

“Cheat?”

“Cheat my family, you ape. About seeing you. We’ve got to have a system.”

“Do we?”

“I think—well, I think my best plan is to ‘take up’ something. I thought painting, at first. But that needs daylight. So I guess it’ll be music. We’ve got a pretty marvelous pianist over at the High School, and I can take two hours from him, evenings.

Wednesdays and Fridays. Starting at nine. He’s quite a love. He was very fond of me—the way a high school teacher can be of the banker’s daughter, which is a kind of distant and worrying way. I introduced him to Adele—because I knew Adele was just made for him—and they’ve been married for two years. Mother won’t think that’s especially odd, because I’ve been talking for ages about going on with my music. And Dan’s busy all day. That gives us two dates a week—not many, but we can stretch it from nine to midnight, or after. So you meet me at Dan and Adele’s next Wednesday. I’ll send the address along with the diaries—”

“What shall I wear?” he asked with irony.

“Gray slacks, and a reddish brown tweed coat—very woolly. You’ll look nicest in that. Brown shoes, and a greenish tie—maybe about the color of my skirt.”

“I see.”

“Then it’s a date? Wednesday?”

“You couldn’t just tell your family that you were going to see me, willy-nilly? I mean, granting that I give you permission to see me, which I have not yet done?”

“I could,” Audrey said. “Yes.”

“But you don’t want to?”

“I don’t want to have my allowance stopped, my housekey taken away, my car impounded, my bank account closed, my clothes locked up, and maybe my face slapped, besides. Father’s old-fashioned.”

Jimmie was startled. “He wouldn’t turn you out—just for going around with me?”

“Wouldn’t he?”

“But that’s—why, that’s so damned Victorian!”

“Dad is a Victorian—the worst kind. He is a deacon too. He knows all the definitions of right and wrong—has them down pat, like your father. He’s a sadist besides, because his marriage was always such a nagging bore to him. And he could never figure out how to put a stop to it. Not only that—I refused to marry the man he picked out for me. He won’t say so—and people don’t realize he’s like that—but he believes a daughter is a chattel. My brother ran away long ago. When he was fifteen. We’re one of those families that ‘hasn’t heard since.’ Dad thinks, of course, that Larry’s a gangster by now.

Probably dead. Or in prison. Dad forced an apple-cheeked ass on me—a blond boy from the top drawer of some Chicago bank—and I spit in his eye. He’s got that against me. And he’s got the war and Roosevelt. He has to spoon the foam out of his mouth every morning when he wakes up. He’s nuts. He hasn’t enough employees, and servants, and relatives, for whipping boys. And yet the good people of Muskogewan still go around believing that he is a very solid citizen.”

Audrey began to cry.

Jimmie said, “God almighty!”

Bluish shadows had been moving up the brown hill, hiding the half-camouflaged Guernsey cows and evaporating the sharp relief of the white barn and the little outbuildings. The wind still fanned the cold river sweetly and it brought the voices of the invisible cattle. The girl wept quietly. Jimmie sat still. In that pastoral, his mental pictures were a shocking contrast. Under the bland luxury of Audrey’s home—luxury displayed for the world to envy—was the harsh substance of human inhumanity. All over the earth inhumanity crept, lunged, flew screaming, with its assorted cargoes of malice—of malice crystallized in laboratories like his own, killing malice, flesh-ripping malice, malice that hurt worse than death. Surely, man had somehow perverted the laws of nature in the search for his selfish ends; surely nature was exacting an appalling payment—in homes where nature was scorned, and in lands where nature was denied its freedom.

The little tragedy of being an Audrey seemed great, in the coupe by the river, in that hour of beatitude. The great tragedy of being English, or German, or Czech, seemed faraway and small by that same criterion. Perhaps, where the little one was rooted, the big ones bloomed in poisoned proliferation. Perhaps, when men as individuals absconded from responsibility and insisted upon advantage, men as groups paid back the debt in bloody struggles of nihilism enforced, and nihilism rejected by force. There was a Hitler in Audrey’s home—and in his own. But Hitler was, after all, just a symbol of the mad determination of mankind to have its willful way. Only that—and absolutely nothing more.

He did not even notice that Audrey had stopped crying. He turned when she said, “What are you thinking about?”

“Audrey?”

“Yes, Jimmie.”

“I don’t want to start this crazy business of seeing you.”

“Neither do I. In a way. I just must.”

“But I mustn’t.”

“I haven’t asked for a thing—except for you to see me.”

“That’s all. Just that I make myself responsible for whatever might happen to you.

If, as you planned, I get tired and discouraged and perplexed and cannot resist your blandishments—then I’ll owe a debt to that. And if your family finds out you are seeing me and really puts in effect any such fantastic business as you describe—I’ll owe for that.

You will have suffered on account of me and I will have been a party to it. I don’t belong to myself. I belong to a fight for a hope. So—I’ve nothing to offer you. Nothing.”

“What hope? You didn’t say anything about your hopes.”

“No. And I won’t. They’re vague, so far. I fight because I am too proud to surrender without fighting. Any hope I have can express itself after the fight is won—if it ever is.”

“Why not begin hoping now, specifically? That will be something to help you fight, won’t it?”

“Pride’s enough. It’s all we had left—and there wasn’t much of that. I don’t mean vanity. I mean, I was proud to be a free man, proud that my ancestors and I wouldn’t accept any Hiders. Hiders are the easy way out, the expedient way, the lazy solution. But they never do lead out.”

“If you were just a bunch of ideas I wouldn’t have driven you here. You’ve got feelings, besides.”

“Yeah. I’m thinking of that.”

Audrey took a lipstick from her handbag. She was not shaking any more. She redid her lips—or started to—and laughed. “I didn’t think I’d got in the habit of repairing my lips whenever I parked with a boy.” She frowned. “And I haven’t! I just hoped—that I’d have to, with you. That was my hope! I can see what you mean, Jimmie. I wouldn’t want you to owe me anything. I’m sure of that. Maybe you were right. Maybe I was crazy. You’ve got a lot of glamour.”

“Glamour’s a commodity, now. That spoilt it.”

“Didn’t it!”

“Besides, glamour requires backgrounds. There aren’t any good ones left—much.

Except in United States.”

Audrey backed the car expertly, and turned into t he road. It was dusk. “I certainly tried hard to blitzkrieg you, Jimmie!”

He smiled in the murk. “I was nearly licked.”

“I’ll drop you a block from your house. I don’t want your family to tell my family that it took me about three hours to break the new commandment.”

“No. Neither do I. And they would.”

The car hummed under arc lights at corners. The houses grew in size and the distance between them increased. Lights were on in all of them and they glowed with the very essence of warm good will. “So far,” he said, at one point, “the American blackout’s still inside the people.”

She didn’t answer. A block from his home, she stopped. He stepped out. “You may be right,” she said softly. “I may be. Anyhow, Jimmie, I’m going to start my music.

Wednesdays and Fridays. At nine.” Her coupe budged forward, gathered speed, and swept down the luminous street, its gears shifting automatically. Jimmie walked along the cement sidewalk. Presently, he looked up. The same stars, in the same patterns, shone across the new evening. The unchangeability of those patterns was like a great scorn.

He entered his house with a sense of heavy fatigue. There was an aura of disturbance in the living room. Cocktails left half tasted. Chairs out of place. Something wrong. “Hey, people!” he called, trying to make his voice amiable and positive.

Westcott came from the dining room. “They’re all at the hospital, Mr. Bailey.

Your brother’s been hurt. Smashed his car up.”

“The devil he has! Bad?”

“I couldn’t say. They don’t know yet.”

Jimmie sat down slowly.

The slacker, he thought. The coward!

CHAPTER VI

BIFF—HIS given name was Bedford—was darker than Jimmie. His hair was straight, a few shades from black, and he had large brownish eyes. The irises were not all brown but part greenish and part yellowish. His mother called them hazel. He was a huge, husky youngster with an overlarge head. He looked as if his basic design had been a pile of various-sized boxes. He was the archetype of a fullback—although he had played end for three years on the team of State University.

He lay on the table in the emergency room of the hospital, smoking a cigarette.

When Jimmie came in he was looking at the ceiling, blinking his eyes. The pupils of his eyes were contracted—he’d been given morphine—and his mouth had relaxed into an unaware, shadowy smile, as if he were immersed in a fantasy that had nothing to do with what was happening around him. Around him, in fact, there was no activity whatever. An intern stood against a glass cabinet with an expression of patient expectancy. Biff’s family was draped here and there in positions of anguish. Sarah and her mother, in the proper mien of horror, kept glancing down at the pool of blood on the tile floor. Mr.

Bailey was looking out the window at a wall, his shoulders high, with an admission of grief, and a proud proclamation of courage.

It was Biff’s smile, Jimmie knew, that corroborated his inner assurance. Jimmie didn’t like that smile—slick, catlike, pleased. They didn’t see Jimmie, at first. They didn’t see him because he wore soft-shod heels, and because they were not yet in the habit of expecting to see him, and because they had other things to hold their attention.

Biff’s eyes became conscious of something at their peripheral range, and the smile on Biff’s lips vanished even before he turned his head: Biff wiped it out. He substituted a small twist of pain. He said, weakly, “Hello, there, Jim.”

His older brother spoke quietly, too, but strongly. “Hello, Biff! How’d it happen?”

The other Baileys chimed in.

“It’s about time you arrived!”

“Where on earth have you been?”

“We called the plant! Twice!”

Jimmie ignored them. He bent over his brother. “What you got there?”

Biff breathed a little—to show breathing was difficult. “Oh, nothing much.”

“Nothing much!” his mother shrilled.

Mr. Bailey said sternly, “He’s broken some ribs, Jimmie. Both legs. Maybe hurt internally. The surgeon’s taking forever to get here! We arrived”—he looked at his watch—“twenty minutes ago!”

“Who’d you hit?” Jimmie asked.

“Another car. Hit me. Rolled me—twice, I think. I was going across Stetson.

Didn’t see it coming. His lights must have been off. The guy was doing about eighty. I didn’t have a chance! I’d already stopped, for the sign. It was my fault, partly, in a way. I should have seen him even if he had no lights, I suppose—”

“How’s the other guy?” Jimmie asked.

Biff looked startled.

Mr. Bailey said, “It was clearly a piece of reckless driving on the other man’s part.

Biff crept out of the side street—and was smashed into!”

Jimmie nodded. In his mind’s eye he could see his brother, at the end of a day of helpless rage at having to be in the army, driving along the dusky side street, slowing at some distance from the stop-line, and hearing the high whine of an approaching car. A car coming illegally fast. Jimmie could imagine his brother’s face. It would go slack and sullen—and then convulse with purpose. His brother’s car would not turn, cautiously, in the path of the oncoming car. It would shoot out, in high, the motor racing, and scarcely turn at all—making an unavoidable obstacle on the road. The other car-brakes grinding, wheels sliding—would strike at an angle. It wasn’t an attempt at suicide, exactly. It wasn’t, even, a conscious effort at self-mutilation. But some such thing, in a more shadowy form, had motivated Biff. He had entertained for one paroxysmal instant the thought, I’ll get hurt—and then they can’t take me! In the next instant he had been getting hurt.

Jimmie knew that such “accidents” were shockingly common. But deliberateness could not be proven. No jury would recognize escapism as a punishable motive.

Sometimes the author of such an accident would confess the impulse—long afterward.

Sometimes a psychiatrist would uncover such an impulse in a patient. Mostly, however, smashups like Biff’s were attributed to related factors, such as high speed, or to “pure accident”—a phrase which, excepting for coincidences in time, is a pure lie.

Such things had been in Jimmie’s mind as he had walked to the hospital. To review them, to confirm them by Biff’s appearance and behavior, took seconds only.

Jimmie let himself smile as if with a sudden thought.

“Anyway, Biff, you’re out of the army!”

The younger man’s eyes moved slowly toward Jimmie and held with faint surprise. “So I am. Funny. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“For a few weeks, anyhow,” Jimmie said, watching the eyes. They did what he had expected. They dilated with alarm and widened further with rage—for the time between fingers naps. Then they were blank again. They moved toward Mrs. Bailey.

Biff had said he “hadn’t thought” about being out of the army. That—and his eyes—were the final clinching proofs. If it had been an honest accident Biff would have thought of his delivery at once—and admitted it. Whooped about it. Crowed over it. But Biff had prepared that little disavowal—for the first person who reminded him that his misfortune was not untinged with good luck.

Mrs. Bailey, realizing that Biff’s gaze was resting on her and that he vaguely wanted something done or said, crossed the room to Jimmie’s side. “You mustn’t make him talk so much! He’s in agony!”

“I’m all right,” Biff protested. His voice grew weaker. There was a tremor in it.

“Jim, old kid. I’m sorry I socked you this morning.”

“It’s okay. Forget it.”

“I want you to know I’m sorry—that’s all. I’ll be getting the old whiffaroo pretty soon, and Doc Cather will be going over me, and if the works slip—anyhow, I want you to know.”

Jimmie nodded. He was looking straight at Biff. Biff looked away.

Mrs. Bailey was streaming tears.

Mr. Bailey blew his nose, sumptuously.

Sarah said shrilly, “Why isn’t the doctor here! Why isn’t anything being done! He may even be—right here before our eyes!”

Mr. Bailey said, “Quiet, Sarah. He’ll be along any minute. The intern says Biff’ll keep the way he is, a while.”

Sarah began to bawl.

Jimmie walked closer to his brother. His grin was amiable, only a little bit sardonic. “Your pretty puss is unscratched, anyhow!”

“I must have thrown my hands over my face at the time. A protective reflex. I dunno….”

Then the surgeon arrived. He was dressed in white and he walked fast, like a man entering from the wings, for an act. “Well!” he exclaimed. “What have we here?” Jimmie thought it was close to tops for asininity.

Mr. Bailey said, “My son’s pretty badly hurt, Doctor Cather. It goes without saying, of course, that no expense is to be spared. Specialists from Chicago, New York, by air—if they can help you in any way. Everything!”

The surgeon was grinning at his patient. Biff grinned back. His mother said, “Money doesn’t mean a thing, doctor!”

Then the surgeon said something that revised Jimmie’s opinion of him. It made Jimmie think that he was probably a whacking good surgeon. “Oh, I’ll send you a stiff bill, Mrs. Bailey. Never worry about that!” He took the hem of the blanket that covered Biff. “You folks better run along while I have a look. Come back after dinner. Say around nine, ten o’clock.”

Jimmie glanced at the intern. He had not in any way noticed the man until then.

The intern was stepping forward to help the surgeon. It ran through Jimmie’s mind that the intern was a shrewd-looking duck, with wide, apperceptive eyes, the pointed nose of the curious, and an air about him of knowledgableness. Jimmie also thought that he’d been standing there, watching everything, all that time. As the intern began a swift, technical explanation of his findings, he winked at Jimmie….

Supper began mordantly. For one thing, Mrs. Bailey was weeping steadily. For another, the food was overcooked-caked and dry. Mrs. Bailey kept apologizing for her tears.

“He’ll be all right,” Sarah said. “He’s tough. Tough as Jimmie—almost.” Her blue gaze met Jimmie’s violently—and he wondered why.

“We must eat,” Mr. Bailey said earnestly. “We’ll need our strength.”

Jimmie was eating right along. In fact, he found himself hungry. That surprised him. He had been through a lot that day. For a mere Midwestern town, Muskogewan was unreasonably productive of excitement.

“The poor boy!” said Biff’s mother. “The poor, poor boy!”

“Popinjay, that doctor,” said Mr. Bailey. “Wonder if he’s as good as his reputation?”

“Where were you?” Sarah asked bluntly of Jimmie.

“Me? Working.”

“They said you left the factory about five. They said a dame drove you away.”

“That was a British spy,” Jimmie answered calmly.

His mother raised her voice. “Don’t make jokes!”

“All right. It was a gal that works at the plant. She offered me a ride home.”

Sarah became alert. “But she didn’t drive you home!”

“Where did you go?”

“Guess!”

Sarah said, “Some roadhouse, I bet.”

“That’s exactly right. Olga—her name is Olga, and she’s a Hungarian spy, really—drove me to the Four Flamingoes. We had saki —that’s rice wine—with some cousins of the Emperor of Japan who work around here as butlers—” he looked up somberly—“Pardon the slur, Westcott, on an honorable profession—”

Mrs. Bailey said, “How can you two—? When—” Sarah said, “Is she pretty? And what’s her name?”

“Dinah,” said Jimmie. “She’s black. An Abyssinian spy—”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” said his father.

“Anyhow,” his sister observed, “you feel pretty good.”

Jimmie suddenly realized that he did feel pretty well. He could not, for the life of him, figure out why. Certainly he was not taking any excessive pleasure out of Biff’s revenge on himself. Certainly he had not grown so cold toward his family in two days that he enjoyed seeing them suffer. But he felt an unmistakable rise of his spirits.

He let them rise while his parents and his sister sank into a fresh morass of silence. Presently his mother whispered, “Right now, he might be—!”

“Steady!” said her husband.

Jimmie said, half reassuringly, half in protest of the morbid anticipations of his mother, “Oh, he’ll be all right. You could see that, by his face. That intern said so too.

He’s the kind who know their onions.”

“I suppose you”—his mother said hotly—“are a bit of a surgeon yourself! Along with all your other intellectual accomplishments! I suppose you could tell, from a glance, that Biff was perfectly all right!”

“Some,” Jimmie said quietly. “I’ve seen a lot of people hurt, you know.”

Nobody answered that. Sarah kept glancing at her brother with intentness. She was thinking. Her face slowly showed conclusion—illuminating conclusion; when it did, Jimmie said, “All right. What is it?”

“You think,” Sarah said, “that Biff brought on that accident on purpose, to skip being drafted! It amuses you—in a nice, fiendish way!”

Jimmie was startled. Her conclusion was accurate. Evidently, she had been wondering about his behavior at the hospital; and the selfsame theory had skipped through her own mind, and she had instantly fitted it upon him. The Baileys, he thought, were equipped with subtle minds—when they wanted to use them subtly. He wondered what he should say to Sarah—and he was staring at her lazily while he tried to make up his mind—when his father spoke for him.

“Sarah! I don’t want you to say anything like that again—ever! Jimmie was darned fine with Biff just now!”

Sarah said, “You’ve considered the possibility, too, Dad!”

“Sarah!!!” That was Mrs. Bailey.

Mr. Bailey, meanwhile, was facing his daughter and growing red. “What kind of a contemptible piece of perverted nonsense is this, daughter! Biff did no such thing.

Jimmie thought no such thing. No such foul idea ever touched my own mind! I’ve noticed several times recently that you have a taint of evil-thinking, though—like your mother’s mother. You watch that, Sarah!”

A fraction of Sarah’s black hair was immaculately made up in a flattened pompadour that stood out over her forehead like a segment of a fat, flat snake. The remainder billowed down her back in a Nubian cascade. When she swung her head about quickly, which she did often, her back hair flared like a dancer’s skirt, and her pompadour wobbled. It was alluring—under the proper hat. Au naturel, it was grotesque.

The rest of Sarah was handsome enough. An inexperienced young woman. A highly untamed young woman. That combination meant—she would get the experience, someday. Just as her mother had. And, like her mother, she would probably have an experience which was mostly confining and arbitrary, so her taming would consist of a shift of her libido to clubs, civic improvement, national affairs, and, no doubt, the rabid avoidance of international entanglements.

Jimmie smiled. “Withdraw the subject, Sarah. It’s out of bounds, anyhow. Biff’s hurt worse now than he’d ever have been in any training camp!”

That statement was not an argument. Nevertheless Mr. Bailey accepted it as conclusive. “Exactly!” he said, with a warm look at his son. It was the first warm look Jimmie had received from his father since the one that had been bent upon him at the station. Mr. Bailey was well disposed to people who helped him rationalize his way out of difficult situations.

The family drove down to the hospital promptly at nine. Jimmie walked. His insistence on walking was becoming a sort of insult to his family. But he went on insisting. “Only eight blocks or so,” he said. “I’ll make it—never fear.”

The family had gone in by the main entrance. But Jimmie, when he reached the hospital, went around to the emergency entrance, where the ambulances were unloaded.

He heard laughter down a corridor and he walked toward it. The intern who had been in the receiving room was kidding a nurse. On Jimmie’s appearance, the nurse smiled once, prettily, and hurried away.

“My name’s Bailey,” Jimmie said.

“Yes. I know. Mine’s Heiffler. Your brother’s fine.”

“I thought he would be. Were you there for the operation?”

Heiffler nodded. “I assisted the assistant. Cather’s good, you know. Damned good.

Too, good, for this burg. He likes it here. Why—I can’t imagine. I’m from Chicago.

Siddown.”

Jimmie sat. “Tell me the details.”

Heiffler reached for one of Jimmie’s cigarettes. “Compound fracture of both femurs. Set, now. Take traction. Three ribs busted. Both ankles more or less sprained.

Internal organs present and accounted for. No damage. Shaken up, bruised, contused, cut on knees. Shock—well, you can’t be sure. Some, anyway. Took ether perfectly. Asleep now. No lasting harm at all—to his body.” The intern’s brown eyes burned at Jimmie.

“Oh?”

“I rode the bus. Answered the call. Picked him off the street.”

“Was he conscious?”

“Semi.”

“Say anything?”

“He was laughing.”

“Laughing, eh.”

“Has your family talked to the cops?”

“No,” Jimmie said.

“I did. They left here a while ago. Kind of hard accident to explain. Clear road, good visibility, no traffic except your brother waiting on the stop street, and this dinge whizzing through on the boulevard.”

“Colored man, eh?”

“Yeah.”

“He hurt?”

“Killed. Deader’n hell. His car looked like an accordion.”

“Have his lights on?”

“You can’t ask him,” the intern answered petulantly. He regarded Jimmie a moment. “The sarge says the reflectors were warm, though. What he could find of ’em.”

He hesitated again. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? I noticed how you questioned him—”

Jimmie said, “Yeah.”

“Nice kids, this generation! Brave, dependable, responsible, calm, sane, intelligent—wonderful!”

“You belong to it. You ought to know.”

“I’m a poor kike who worked my way through medical school after working it through college! I like people—decent ones—and I like medicine! I don’t like people that murder other people just because somebody is going to take away their candy!”

Jimmie smiled a little. “Maybe I can chivvy that lad into the army, someday, yet.

Maybe—maybe— he’ll payoff.”

“He won’t get in the army!”

“He will if I make him,” Jimmie answered fiercely.

“No. There’ll be a report of all this. You know. Nothing that your family, or the draft board, will ever see. Something only the army will see. A couple of army doctors, anyhow. They’re trying hard to weed out the screwballs, this time, before they demand any hard work from ’em. Your brother’ll be sent to camp, maybe, by the local board. He’ll come back—without knowing why.”

Jimmie thought for a while. He smiled again. “That might do him a lot of good.”

“I doubt it. It might. You’re just back from London, I hear.”

“Yesterday.”

“Can they stand another blitz—all winter—if they get it?”

“I hope so.”

“I don’t give a damn what you hope. What do you think?”

“I hope so. Y ou ought to know something about people’s ability to take it where they live.”

Heiffler chuckled. “You’re a pretty sound egg, Bailey—considering your brother!”

“He could have been sound.”

“Mmm. Environment—”

“That colored man—have a family?”

“Five kids. A wife. She came here looking for him, about eight. The police don’t hurry to notify those people.”

“I’d like her name and address.”

The intern wrote it down, after searching in a file. “How much steam has Hitler got left?”

Jimmie shrugged. “Does it matter?”

There was a pause. “I see what you mean.”

“Still, it would be worth a lot to American character, I think, if every city and town in the country was bombed once. Just once. Be a big rebirth of fundamental qualities. Cheap—at the price. As I heard a woman say last night, ‘We kill more people with cars than the British lost to bombs—and we don’t get upset!’ It’s a happy thought, Heiffler—especially on this occasion. Good night.”

CHAPTER VII

WEDNESDAY PASSED—and a Friday.

Jimmie knew he was going to count the weeks in that fashion. He would keep doing it, at least until he was sure beyond all doubt that Audrey was not going to the home of Dan, the music teacher, two nights in every seven, or until he was sure that she had stopped going there.

His family was preoccupied with Biff. Biff was better. He’d written two very amusing letters for the Daily Dispatch. One was about having your legs broken. The other was about pretty nurses.

Jimmie was relieved by his family’s absorption in his brother, because he was very busy with himself.

Two things had arrived at the Bailey home on the day after Biff’s accident.

Audrey’s diaries—by registered post—mailed, ingeniously, in a small carton that bore the name of the Corinth Works. That stratagem would cause his family to think, if they noticed the package, that it contained business matters. Mr. Corinth’s scrapbooks had also come—by truck. Into them, Jimmie had plunged. He had read every evening—from dinner to bedtime, and afterward. But he had hidden the diaries in his closet.

The big scrapbooks, thick with pastings, were like the other tangibles in the old man’s life: they showed imagination and resourcefulness, a keen ability to anticipate the future, a steady, critical awareness of present values. In the scrapbooks were editorials and articles and speeches, pronunciamentos by politicians and world leaders, maps and pictures, reviews of movies and reviews of plays, scraps of laymen’s opinions, predictions, interpretations, headlines—and personal letters, letters from people unknown to Jimmie and letters from people known to everybody in the nation.

As he read, hour by hour and night by night, the saga of the six years he had missed at home-edited and interpreted through the selections of the venerable chemist—Jimmie began to understand what had happened to America, to his own family, to Muskogewan, to everyplace and everybody. He began to guess, also, the tenor of the old man’s thoughts and hopes anent America’s future—after the war. That Mr. Corinth had such a catholic knowledge of world affairs was not remarkable.

Many other scientists had the same knowledge; and of them, many lived and worked not in the great cities, not in the gigantic factories, but in towns like Muskogewan and factories like the paint and dye works. It was, on first glimpse, somewhat remarkable that a man in a town in the center of a continent had such broad, important and intimate contacts. But, on reflection, Jimmie remembered that many Americans, in many villages, had stayed on their own doorsteps and made their mousetraps—and the world had built cement highways right up to their porches.

The realization that Mr. Corinth was a great man had come to Jimmie immediately, upon their first meeting as grown men—the meeting on the afternoon of Jimmie’s return. The realization that Mr. Corinth was a great American, and would always be known and remembered as such, came more slowly. Certainly Muskogewan had little inkling of the impressive qualities of its white-haired citizen. Muskogewan regarded him as an eccentric old duck who had a million dollars, made paint, and who knew a lot of important people, for some odd reason. Social Muskogewan felt that a good many of Mr. Corinth’s guests would have been happier with them at the country club than they were in the rather ugly Corinth home, eating the plain vittles cooked by black Rarietta, and sitting all afternoon in a drizzling rain with a .22 rifle, waiting for a groundhog to appear in a pasture—which the beast never did. A cabinet member had done that, once, with Mr. Corinth. There was even an editorial about it, snipped from the Muskogewan Dispatch, in the old man’s books. It said that, “our up-to-date and handsome city affords far better entertainment for personages of note than host Corinth seems to understand—or care about, for that matter.”

Jimmie learned from the bulky ledgers.

But in every moment of his reading, and during every hour of his day-long labors at the laboratory, the awareness of the other parcel of reading matter burned in the back of his mind. At night, as he lay in his bed, listening to the slick crackle of tires on the avenue and the pattering scratch of bare twigs on the walls, he envisioned Audrey’s diaries as if they had a penetrating radiance which he could see shining through his closet door. In the daytime, wherever he was, he was as conscious of them as if they had a musical tone that he alone could hear but that he could not escape.

He had every sort of thought about them. His principal idea was that to read such diaries was to eavesdrop. The fact that Audrey had voluntarily sent them to him made no difference. At least, for several days, he assured himself that it made no difference. It then occurred to him that there might be nothing in the package but blankbooks—that the maneuver was a practical joke. A psychological joke. To satisfy that suspicion, he unwrapped the bundle. A dozen leather-covered books were disclosed. He flipped the leaves. They were solid with neat, tall, ink-written words put down in a circular backhand. So it was the diaries, all right. He put them back.

He knew that, in a sense, the sending of the diaries did represent a psychological trick. Audrey expected that he would resist reading them. His training, his instincts, his nature, were calculated to make any such intimate process undesirable. She knew, also, that the temptation would obsess him. It would have that effect on anybody. The fact that Jimmie was intellectual and detached, moral in the deepest sense, and also chivalrous, would not diminish his emotional struggle about the matter.

By this strange, unconventional step she had said, Here, read this; this is my history and my confessional; when you have finished with it you can do as you please; but, at least, you will know as much about me and my inward self as I do. She had also, doubtless, filled the books with references to other people—references of a private nature.

That fact weighed heavily against prying into the gilt-edged books. On the other hand, Jimmie could imagine her saying, “Wouldn’t you rather know —than have to guess by interpreting gossip? There’s not a syllable in there about other people that isn’t the common coin of Muskogewan’s underground chatter; it is better to have the unvarnished facts than the heavily painted suspicions.”

She would say that, because that was the sort of girl Audrey was, or thought she was, or pretended to be.

Jimmie couldn’t make up his mind.

One afternoon while he was hard at work Mr. Corinth pushed into his laboratory so abruptly that the door flew back and hit the wall with a crash. The sound, coming in the still concentration of the air-conditioned room, gave Jimmie a monstrous start. The beaker in his hand slipped. He squeezed to recapture it and the pressure of his fingers shot it against an elaboration of glass tubes and fused quartz flasks. There was a shattering tinkle and a greenish brown vapor snaked up from a bubbling leak in the apparatus. The cloud rolled under the hood and out at one side. Jimmie instantly leaped back. He threw a switch that turned up the full suction of the hood. Then he spun around and virtually shoved Mr. Corinth out of the laboratory.

He slammed the door. He was shaking a little.

“It’ll take about an hour,” he said, “to clean the air in there. Even then I’ll have to spray the spot where I was working. That was mighty damned clumsy of me—not to say dangerous!”

“What was it?”

Jimmie chuckled uneasily. He walked close to the old man and separated his eyelids. “Didn’t get a whiff, did you?”

“Hell, no. I was a mile away. How about you?”

Jimmie bent his knees to bring his face level with that of the other man. “I don’t think so. Just take a look at the whites of my eyes. Still white?”

“Still white.”

“No greenish tinge?”

“No greenish tinge, Jimmie.”

“Thank God for that. On the rats it showed in their eyeballs in about twenty seconds. Maybe twenty-five. Made ’em greenish. In fifty seconds—no more rat. Just—rat carcass.”

“The devil!”

“If it proves to be stable enough, and portable, we’ll call it Corinthite.”

“We will not! No lousy poison gas is going to wear my name!”

“It won’t be a gas,” Jimmie answered, grinning. “Not when you drop it. It’ll be a liquid. A sort of a shower bath. It’ll turn into a gas later on—quite a bit later. At first it’ll be harmless. When it dries a bit—well, I wouldn’t send my worst enemy in that lab now.”

“You come over to my office,” the old man said, “and sit out the hour. Haven’t had a talk with you for ten days. I read your reports, of course, and I see by them that—for a man having fits—you’re doing pretty swell. Better than I figured. Much. That blitz training is red-hot! Wish I could send some more of my men abroad for a spell of it!” He chuckled and led the way into the shambles he called his office.

“You destroy my reports, don’t you?”

“I commit ’em to memory and I burn ’em on the floor here and I poke the ashes to dust. Except the ones Ben runs to Washington, naturally.”

“Mmmmm.”

“Jimmie. How goes the battle?”

“Oh, so-so. Dad and Mother haven’t had time to argue with me lately. They’re always thinking up some new fun for Biff, for one thing. For another, I’ve been reading your one-man history of the world every night.”

“Like it?”

“Lots.”

The old man grunted. “Whenever I think about what’s wrong with America, I think about how are the American people going to fix it. I don’t mean I think about that as a problem. I think about it as if I were reading the history of the future. Because they darned well will fix things! They’re that kind of folks—even if they do get mighty reluctant spells!”

“Guess you’re right.”

“Like this. Americans know darned well they’ve got to elect better people to the big jobs. Better senators and congressmen and governors and so on. They’re sure—positive, already, they’re doing wrong to put in a lot of nitwits, banjo players, grafters, good-humored poops, and so on. Americans understand that the problems of their government are too darned complicated, too scientific, too obscure, too numerous, for every darned citizen to comprehend. In the days of George Washington civilization was something pretty much every man knew pretty much all about. The fellow that made cart wheels understood the fellow that built schooners. And so on. But today, Americans realize, even a smart guy in Connecticut can’t say, offhand, what ought to be done about irrigation, soil erosion, and hydroelectric installations in New Mexico. Right?”

“Plenty right.”

“So—we know we gotta elect better people. Not just a pleasant guy with a loud mouth from the next county! So what? We’re sending more college men into politics.

That’s good. And more professional men. That’s good too. We’re electing more chaps like that. Someday the American people will get together and change the constitutional rules about the qualifications of public servants. Yes, sir, Jimmie. Someday you won’t even be allowed to run for the Senate, if you think New Guinea is in South America, or if you think a billion dollars is so much money nobody can imagine it, or if you believe that carrying a potato in your pocket cures rheumatism. Of course, a lot of college graduates regress fast, and a lot of ’em are saps, but passing a political-suitability examination will cut down the ratio of saps. The American people are going to demand basic information and sanity in their representatives, someday, just as they make people take exams for civil service or a medical license.”

Jimmie grinned. “I hope so. It would sure cut a swath in the politicians at work now!”

“Wouldn’t it just!” Mr. Corinth chuckled. “Then, another thing. You know why capitalists get so darned hot about Communism?”

Jimmie just laughed.

The older man shook his head. “That’s not why—not wholly. Not just because they’re afraid they’ll be ruined by it. They get frightened because, Jimmie, there’s something in it. Something to it.”

Jimmie nodded. “Everybody realizes that. People shouldn’t be jobless in a rich country like this, if they want jobs. People shouldn’t be undernourished at times when we have food surpluses. People shouldn’t have to work for marbles, long hours—”

“I don’t mean that. I mean, there’re two kinds of capital in this world. There’s the kind that comes from work. From labor. From manufacturing, and from invention, and from management, and from services, and from salesmanship. That kind. It’s earned. Competition is the driving force behind it; without competition, in my opinion, a man isn’t living. He’s a dead soul in a zombie body. Competition isn’t sociological or economic, Jimmie. It’s biological. It runs right straight through the whole history of evolution—and it’s the thing that made evolution. Not you, nor the Fascists, nor the Commies can outlaw it. If they try they get a zombie population. If the Germans aren’t zombies—and the Russkies—I’d like to know! Nope. Competition—fair and square, open and hard—is the heart of progress. And the money earned under it—is real money!

“But there’s another kind of capital in the world, Jimmie. The Commies have attacked it—and they make sense attacking it, I say. It’s what you’d call ‘luck’ capital. Money people get by luck, by chance, outside of creative competition. Money made by the usurious employment of money. Money made by gambling. Money made on long-range, irresponsible deals. Buckets of money, inherited. Money made by a man who buys a piece of land to farm, and then has oil spout up on it. The American people are starting, right now, to discriminate between earned money and lucky money. That’s what the SEC rules governing stock markets are really all about. That’s why we’ve got these whacking inheritance taxes.

“An American laborer doesn’t begrudge the money a man makes by producing something worth-while or doing a valuable service. But he sure does begrudge the money a man swipes, or wins by a market bet, or has handed to him by his daddy for nothing, or finds on the ground because he happened to buy the Jones farm instead of the Smith acreage. The Commies try to confuse the two. They want no Capitalism. But I can see what the Americans really want. They want everybody paid, and paid as much as the traffic will bear, for what he, personally, contributes to America. And they want nobody to be able to get rich from doing nothing. Seems fair to me.”

“You think,” Jimmie asked, “they’re really figuring the future out like that?”

“I know it! Americans, Jimmie, are the coming people. They’re born squabblers—but they’re also hell-bent to get things right. Worst crime here is to be wrong, or to be a wrong guy. Right now, they know what the issue is, but they haven’t got the words for it. Neither have I. That is, not a slogan. People—wide-awake ones, a few business men included—go around saying that the country has taken a ‘social’ slant, and will never let go of it. Then they look scared because they think you’ll assume they’re Communists. But that’s all they mean. The kind of capital that keeps men on their toes can never be abolished. If some nitwitted mob of Reds puts an end to it, then the generations that come afterward will have to invent it all over. If Hitler wins, and we get the super race, state socialism, long-range planning by which the Germans will live on the fat, and those of us who haven’t got the guts to die will work away our lives for a slum bed and soup kitchen food, why—it’ll have to be invented again for the Germans.”

“After the Tausand Yahr Reich,” Jimmie said bitterly.

The old man’s eyes shone. “Thousand years? Horse manure! And God everlastingly damn the Germans, the Reds, the New Dealers, and every and any other group or individual that has gone solid-headed with the idea that you can plan a system for the generations to come! Seems to me the last twenty years have been spent in discussing the long-range ideas of self-appointed intellectuals and leaders. It’s a dumb American habit, by now. The Germans think they have a social system that’ll last for ten centuries. The Reds think they have something that’ll go on unchanged forever. But look how Fascism and Communism have changed already! The New Dealers are busy trying to figure out a perpetual system of their own. The Catholics and Protestants are trying, as they have tried for ages, to lay down an unchangeable gambit of religious law and moral code for the aeons ahead. Everybody, these days, is busy to pieces trying to impose his notions, his will, and his prejudices on the future. What a thing! Men pick their kids’ colleges before they’re born—and enter ’em there. People leave wills with instructions that presume to carry down to the forth and fifth generation! Every legislative body in the country is trying to decide, not what to do now, but what people as yet unborn ought to do! The political cockroaches won’t change themselves, but, boy! will they legislate for the people ahead! Remember what I said about time? It’s another time problem. The present is. Nobody knows what the future will be. Trying to estimate it and arrange it is not only dodging the screaming present, it’s a psychological statement of failure. Every son of Adam and daughter of Eve, who doesn’t like the way things are going these days, wants to set up some kind of pet new machinery that will change them in the days to come!”

“Some of those efforts are expressions of ideals, hopes—”

“Oh, sure.” Mr. Corinth ruffled his hair. “Look. About economic systems, debts, prejudices, religions, people’s wills—the whole kaboodle of orders which we intend to hand the future! The future always has ignored them and always will ignore them! Which any ass can see if he stops daydreaming. But that’s exactly what democracy was built to take care of! People think democracy is a system. An economic-social-political system. A thing that has books you can go back over and check. A thing with a code and a creed and laws. So that when a Hitler pops up, people go back to Jefferson or Washington to see what to do. God A’mighty! Did Washington or Jefferson ever run across Hitler? I lave we any direct information from those birds on what to do in case of a world-Fascism threat?

We have not! Quoting them today is pure medicine-man stuff—at least it can be, because they didn’t foresee these days and these problems. What they did foresee was that the people ought to have a continuing say-so in their government—and that’s all, so help me.”

Jimmie grinned. “Wish you’d tell that to my old man.”

“I did,” Mr. Corinth said. “I made a speech a few weeks ago at a meeting of a bunch of gabby women and earnest men. I told ’em what democracy is. Not a form of government—but a way of maintaining almost any damned form of government. A fair way. An enlightened way. A way that gives the most people a chance, and government the most chance to do for the people. The wise men who founded this democracy fixed it up at the start so that nearly any solitary principle or law could be changed in any way. Excepting, you might say, the main principle that, in whatever is done, the majority should be the ones to pick the doers. That is absolutely all democracy is—and a hell of a lot, even so!

“It’s—to put it another way—the only fair and fluid system by which people can evolve together. Change and grow. Washington’s eyes would pop if he could see what we call democracy today. No slavery. Women voting. The central government stronger than the squabbling states—and able to assert its strength, thank God. Drink prohibited and restored. A war to keep together the union behind us. An industrial civilization, with a thing called Labor, that Washington never heard of. All those things weren’t here when he died; but he helped set up a constitution by which, one way or another, they could be.

“Democracy is a way of governing, designed to promote and encourage change. It’s not static. That’s the reason people who lose it always fight back to it. It’s the only possible permanent system. Naturally, it’s no better than people are. And people aren’t so good. I wish I could show everybody in every spot—high and low—the great simple, self-evident, unavoidable, natural fact that there never will be a gang, a group, a government, a state, or anything that is one solitary damned bit better than the people in it! Communism is no better than the Russians—a statement of fairly low degree in many departments. Fascism is no better than the Germans—a compelling argument to demonstrate its future possibilities—and lack of ’em. Muskogewan is no better than its citizens—impress upon it what economic and social systems and ideas you may. <…>

wrong end of the stick. Everybody’s trying to improve the rules and neglecting the character of the players. That, Jimmie, is all backwards. And you can only switch it around rightwise again, in a democracy—where every individual’s character counts, and if things get too sour it shows, and people have to do something to save themselves—something they have the set-up to do! In any other kind of government they have to stick to some damn’ plan—even in an opportunistic one like Hitler’s. And whenever a new, present fact shows a past plan is in error, a Fascist, a Commie, a bigot, a standpatter suddenly becomes a fool and a liar for all to see. So does his drop-forged form of government. Only a democracy, in other words, can go right on changing its mind, without collapsing. As soon as we Americans remember that what we’ve got is a way to live together and do things—instead of a hard and fast system we can’! tinker with—we’ll go to work on the changes that lie ahead and we’ll put ’em in effect. Changes, I mean, like earned capital versus lucky capital. Those businessmen who are going around bellowing that you can’t do this and you gotta do that because of the Constitution, are nuts. If they wanted alterations in their favor, they wouldn’t hesitate to hack at the law! That’s what the Constitution is essentially—a blank order for changing itself. That’s about all it is. That—and a starting point—is all! A democratic constitution is merely a springboard.”

Jimmie thought about the people of England—the easy, corrupt, short-sighted ways into which they had fallen. He thought of the prewar schism between the classes, of the sympathy the ruling class had entertained for Fascism, in the belief that Fascism and Naziism were strong dams against Bolshevism. They’d had a dread of Bolshevism—a just dread—but no less just than the dread of Fascism, which they had been too property—panicked to feel. He thought about the grim, grinning game they were playing now, as democrats, as men and women devoted to the clear purpose of saving the sum of those things that were most important to them. He thought about the changes that would have to come in England out of this new association of all the people. He wondered how much tumult, how much wanton greed, how much reasserted selfishness would rise in England after the war, when the settlement came. Not as much, he was sure—not a hundredth as much—as there was before the war. Not a tenth as much as there was now in America.

England had fallen in a coma. America was still in a coma. Dead, was Hitler’s diagnosis.

But England was not dead and, Jimmie thought, it would take half the men in Germany to kill England. America, though, was still asleep, still deep in a half-dream, half-recollection—a backward-looking fuguelike memory of “good times” that were good only because history had retained a solitary aspect of them. He considered that last, great “good time”—the reckless spree of the 1920’s—when so many men alive today had assisted at the drunk debauch—and suffered in the subsequent hangover—and were now busy with the single wish that they could get drunk again, regardless of the consequences.

Mr. Corinth yawned. “The English,” Jimmie said, “are learning about democracy.”

“The hard way. People learn best—the hard way. Sometimes I catch myself passionately hoping that the war will go on long enough so that the bombers will sweep over some American cities and give them the-the lesson of the hard way. We need it. Material luxury doesn’t postulate eternal, world-wide luxury for the human spirit—even if the advertisers and the popular psychologists try to persuade us of it. I could do without the philosophy of looking on the bright side. Too damned blinding. You can’t see the reaching shadows till the claws they stem from have you by the throat—if you’re a ‘bright-side looker,’ a ‘keep smiling’ idiot, a self-pronounced optimist. No attitude means anything unless it jells with the facts. Or unless it is transmitted into action that changes facts. We try to maintain attitudes without action, and irrespective of fact. What we need is the critical attitude. A reverence for skilled iconoclasm, a recognition of the values on the dark side. Yeah, Jimmie, I sometimes wish the bombs would drop.”

Jimmie shrugged. “I remember one morning, in a little mess of rubble, in London. There was a kid—a girl about ten—with her mother, ambling about meaninglessly and looking at everything. The child’s mother was out on her feet. But not the youngster. She talked to me—about the scene. She said, ‘The trouble with death is, it’s so— soiling.’”

Mr. Corinth winced slightly. “Mmm. And life is soiling, too, Jimmie. You’ve got to keep scrubbing your brains and your soul. One bath doesn’t cleanse a man for a lifetime. That’s the trouble with conversion.” The old man smiled gently and changed the subject without altering his expression or his tone: “How’s Audrey?”

Jimmie jumped. “I dunno. Haven’t seen her since day after I arrived.”

The corners of the old man’s eyes crinkled. “She sure must have made a big impression, anyhow, to be avoided for so long!”

“Funny way to figure.”

“Is it? I’ll tell you how to figure. First, figure out how you feel. Then, what you think. Next, figure the opposite of both. Finally, integrate the whole business. At that point you get an answer. There’s not an idea that hasn’t a true opposite. There’s not a human feeling that doesn’t set up the possibility· of its opposite. There’s not an act you can perform without instituting the potentiality of performing an opposite act. Newton’s law of action and reaction applies in the brain and in the soul. It applies to history as much as shotguns. Who you are in the end is entirely a matter of what choices you make between constant opposites. Applying the law, I guess that if you haven’t seen Audrey she is important to you. I could be wrong if I didn’t know she was important, the first time.”

Jimmie considered. “She mailed me all her diaries,” he said, finally, in an uncertain tone.

Mr. Corinth looked at him for a moment, and he threw back his head in a spasm of his soundless laughter. “What a woman! Have you read ’em yet?”

“Of course not!”

“I accept the ‘not’ and reject the ‘of course.’ I asked you to examine the lady without reference to her dazzling exterior. Impressed by your exterior—or something—she has tendered you an unparalleled opportunity to do that very thing. You, however, have ignored the chance, and probably hidden the diaries someplace.”

Jimmie grinned. “I’ll read ’em tonight.”

“Nope. You’ll bring them here, and I’ll read them.”

Jimmie shook his head. “That wasn’t in the contract.”

“I have her permission.”

“You have!”

“Yeah. She phones me every day.”

“Phones you!”

“To ask how you are.”

“Good Lord!”

The old man laughed again. “There’s one thing I now discern about Audrey. She is determined. She is as mulish and persevering as her father—a man you ought to meet, incidentally. One can only hope, in the case of an overweaning spirit like Audrey’s, that it will be oriented towards good causes.”

Jimmie shook his head helplessly.

Mr. Corinth looked at his watch—a monstrous contraption that stuffed his pocket like a goose egg. “I’ll have one of my truck drivers run you up to your house for the diaries. By the time you get back your lab ought to be habitable again.”

CHAPTER VIII

JIMMIE RODE to his home in the front seat of a pick-up truck, with a driver who chewed a toothpick and talked with enthusiasm and detail about State’s chances in the Conference. It was a long time—an age, an era—back to the days when Jimmie had thought about football. He did not know the names of the State players any more; he did not understand the rules by which the game was now played. But he made the seedy youth’s eyes bug out by saying, “I’ll have to see some games. I played for State once.

Won my letter. At end. My brother too. Biff Bailey.”

The man said, “My Lord, you aren’t Biff Bailey’s brother!” Jimmie laughed and pointed out the house. The truck stopped and he loped up the walk. Westcott was sweeping the porch. The front door yawned. So Jimmie went through it, in long, silent bounds, and up the stairs to his room. He threw the door open.

Sarah was lying on his bed, reading. Reading a gilt-edged, leather-bound book.

There were two piles of such books—equal-sized piles—on the counterpane beside her.

The bolster propped her head. She had kicked off her pumps. Her feet were lifted in the air and twisting. Her cheeks had a high, red sheen and her eyes glittered. She did not even look up when the door opened. She said, tensely, “Come in, Mother. I’ve found something priceless! ”

Jimmie felt his face blanch, as if his blood were heavy and the weight of it had dropped down into his belly and turned into iron.

“Come in! It’s—!” Sarah looked.

Jimmie went in and turned and closed the door.

The swift-changing complexion of her thoughts was in her eyes. Shock, fear, a search for an alibi, and the discovery of one. Then a short struggle for self-mastery. “I was cleaning out the closets! I found these! You can’t expect a girl to resist such a temptation.”

He said nothing.

“How did you get them?” Her blue eyes were certain, now. She interpreted his silence as guilty panic.

“What else did you find?”

“Oh, when I snoop I’m thorough! I found a picture of an English girl. You could tell she was English a mile away—by her bad clothes. Sloppy. I made the obvious mental note that she resembled our Audrey—the author, here. Quite a bit. She’s like a dowdy, spiritual Audrey. Who is she?”

“And what else?”

“Nothing. I found these and I started reading. I don’t think any novel I ever read was half as—as absorbing. Of course, I know a good many of the characters. That makes a difference. In fact, one or two of them were courting me—in a nice way—when they were courting Audrey, or vice versa—in a way that isn’t quite so nice. It’s all very interesting—and disillusioning. I rather thought I knew my stuff in this village. I begin to realize, though, that I’m a piddling amateur!”

“How long have you been reading?”

“All morning.”

Jimmie sat down in a chair beside his bed. He looked out of his window at the street. The truck driver was lolling in his seat with his feet propped on the windshield.

Jimmie kept his voice calm. “I assume that you have concluded Audrey is rather a—well—”

Sarah smiled. “She is—rather!”

“I see.”

“On the other hand—” Sarah sat up, after folding over the corner of a page in the diary—“well, a psychiatrist would be interested in her. She’s ruthless. She’s unconventional—to put it meagerly. She does as she pleases. She isn’t mean, exactly, although she’s hurt a lot of people in a big way. She seems to be sort of trying to find out something. That is, she seemed to be when she was eighteen and up through now—when she’s twenty. She doesn’t mind how hard she has to try, or what trying involves, or even being hurt, herself. She’s got nerve. Boy! What a nerve!”

“The search for happiness,” Jimmie said remotely.

“Happiness? I wouldn’t interpret it that way. I don’t think she gives a damn about being happy. Not in the cake and candy and comfort sense. She wants to be what she calls, ‘in the groove,’ doesn’t she? The times when she said she was weren’t necessarily comfortable times for her, were they? Don’t tell me you haven’t read these things!”

“No. I haven’t read them.”

“But they must have been here last night—”

“They’ve been here for a week or more.”

“And you haven’t read them!” Sarah laughed and stopped herself. “That’s a new high in something! What’d you do—steal ’em?”

“She sent them to me.”

“Sent—” The girl’s voice broke. “Sent them to you!”

“Unh.”

“She sent them to you? She must be crazier than writing all this even would indicate.”

Jimmie sighed lightly. “I dunno. Naturally.”

“But why? Why? Some kind of advertisement? Some way of showing you that—but any man with half a pair of eyes could see that gilded fireball was—! I don’t get it!”

“I’m sorry you found those books.”

“I’m not. Not by a long way! I’ll remember this morning as about tops in my eighteen years!” Sarah’s eyes narrowed. “Jimmie, tell me. You aren’t one of those—well—I was a kid when you left here. I worshiped you, and you never noticed—and all that. But I never knew anything about you, really. You aren’t one of those fabulous, innocent people, are you?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Innocent?”

“Oh, don’t sit there being English with me! You make me awfully impatient about less important things than this! You might as well tell me a little truth, for once. After all—” Sarah’s expression was cunning—“I’ve got the goods on you, haven’t I?”

Jimmie did not stir. He felt his heart lunge. But his blood came out of his iron viscera again. He knew anger—the insatiable, endless kind of anger, righteous and implacable, the kind of anger that is the shield of the world. “I don’t get that, sis.”

“Don’t get it?” The girl was deeply apprehensive again. His color had changed and his face was different. His voice was the same. She had thought for a little while that she had found the key to Jimmie, that he was not just a silent and determined person but, underneath, a weak and uncertain one. She was suddenly less sure about that. Her own fear—her conscience and her anxiety—moved her to a jittery assertiveness. “Of course you do! If Audrey sent you this—this—case history, it means she’s been simply utterly stunned by you in some perverse way. That means, she’s in a position that’s simply too utterly vulnerable! And so are you, because you’re much too genteel to let her suffer from the fact that you left her intimate papers lying around!”

“How do you mean—suffer?”

“Don’t try to intimidate me with that chill! You know how! If I started to let out just even a few little paragraphs of what’s in these books—! Boy! The blast would go across Muskogewan like a hurricane! Houses would fall in. Families would scatter.

Strong men would take cover. Mothers and daughters would go barging around with their fingernails filed into hooks!”

“But, Sarah, you don’t propose to do that.”

“It all depends. All I said was, I had the goods on you. Now—and for all time! You understand that. I don’t know what I want. Not anything, especially, now. You might be nicer to a few of my friends. I don’t care about mothers and fathers, but the way you cut some of my crowd the one time you went to the club—well, it was humiliating to me.”

“Just an amiable little social blackmail, Sarah? Is that all?”

“No, it’s not all! ‘All’—is whatever I want. Whatever. And whenever. Since I have got the whiphand over you by a miracle—and it’s just plain justice, for once in my life—I might as well do a job of straightening you out! For one thing, it’s time you stopped telling Father what for. He’s a banker, and a business man, with a lot of knowledge a chemist simply couldn’t have. He’s widely read and he has powerful friends. You’ve just been sitting in some dingy English lab watching a bunch of clucks suffer under bombing—so you take a sentimental viewpoint about the whole world! I must say, it gets my goat!”

Jimmie’s lips twitched faintly. “That, too. You’re going to take away my freedom of speech.”

“I’ll do better. I’ll make you retract what you said.” Sarah walked over and half sat on the windowsill. She leaned toward her brother; her expression was a mixture of unholy rapture and plain savagery. “I think, for instance, that it would be terribly nice if you joined the America Forever Committee. I’d like to see you make a few speeches, even, against helping win this war. You surely must have seen some things, if you look back honestly, that make you realize that some people in England don’t like America and would enjoy seeing America crushed.”

“Oh, several. Several.”

“I take it, then, you’ll join?” Even Sarah’s voice showed a sort of incredulity over the apparently absolute collapse of her brother’s morale. “Mother will be so happy! I’ll be so—amused. I did look forward to your return, Jimmie—with a terrible longing. A pretty nearly crazy expectancy. When it turned out that you were just a—a snot, I couldn’t bear it. That’s what makes revenge so sweet.”

Jimmie had stood more than enough.

He had led his sister on by a quietness that had suggested subjugation. He had wanted to see how far and how deep her malice would go. Now that he knew, his rage was explicit. He had to stop Sarah, at any cost. Any. That was the one fact upon which he must act.

Audrey had put her whole life in his hands—against his will and without his knowledge—but he had accepted the trust by the mere retention of the diaries. He could have sent them back. He had not sent them back.

Sarah had read them—or some of them. Black-haired, blue, blistering-eyed Sarah.

And Sarah was going to use her stolen information as a bludgeon, a dagger, an eternal wellspring of power and black laughter. That was her scheme. To be so willing, so eager to torture, she must have been tortured herself, first. Jimmie did not know by whom or by what—and there was no time to find out. Sarah was dangerous as she sat there—crouched, almost—in front of him. The danger had to be met.

“I couldn’t persuade you,” Jimmie said, after a moment, and not looking at his sister, “that what you intend to do is pretty scurvy? It’s blackmail, you know. Besides, how can I tell that you won’t do what other blackmailers have done? How can I tell that you won’t, someday, just hint to Audrey, say—or Audrey’s mother—that you know all about these diaries? How can I be sure that you won’t go on clubbing people to gain small advantages for yourself?”

Sarah said, “You’re really weak, aren’t you, Jimmie? You can’t tell what I’m going to do! That’s your misfortune. All you can be sure of is—that you’ve got to knuckle under.”

“You wouldn’t do the decent thing? I mean, just forget you ever saw those books?

Erase it from your mind? Lock it all up? Never mention it to anybody? Never show a trace of the effect of what you have found out? You couldn’t feel ashamed you read ’em and do the sporting thing of—skipping it?”

“I suppose you would,” she said acidly.

“I think so. And I think you will, Sarah.”

She laughed shortly. “You do? Why?”

“Because I say so.”

She laughed again. “You say so and I just—obey. Is that it?”

“Yes. That’s it.” Jimmie stood up. He was pale again. He towered over his sister.

His lean shoulders stooped down. His eyes looked into hers. “You’re eighteen. You’re adult. I’m not going to lecture you about right and wrong, good and evil. Maybe you wouldn’t understand if I did. But you do seem to understand power and violence. So I’m just going to threaten you, Sarah. By threaten, I mean I am going to make a holy pledge to you that I’d follow to the end of time, at any cost and at all costs. My pledge is about you—in the event that you ever do in any way use the knowledge you now have.”

Sarah did not like what she saw in his eyes—a shadow, a gleam, roving together behind the steady pupils, implacable as death. Nevertheless, she managed to laugh again.

“You can’t scare me, Jimmie. Not now you can’t, and you know it!”

“I can scare you,” he answered. He took hold of her arm, halfway between her wrist and her elbow. She tried to twist away. His fingers came down like machinery. She gasped and bit her lip. He relaxed his grip and went on. “I am going to scare you now, Sarah, and you will stay scared—because you are going to know what I mean—and you are going to know that I am not bluffing. I have learned, by watching others learn, that nothing matters in this life except integrity. In this case, we can call it honor. That is the one precious thing. My work—what I am trying to do—is very important to the honor of the world. It is not any more important, however, than my own integrity to myself. That, in fact, comes first, because everything else in the world is founded on it.”

“Let go! You said you weren’t going to lecture me! You’re hurting!”

“I’ve seen a great many people die, Sarah. People of all ages. They died haphazardly—but all of them in the line of maintaining honor. In the same cause I am no longer afraid to take the same punishment—and I am not afraid to dish it out. Do you understand that?”

The girl blanched. “Jimmie! That’s insane! Let—go!”

“Have you forgotten you read those diaries, Sarah?”

She writhed and tugged. “Let go! You’ll make marks on me! Just because you can torture me this minute, doesn’t help you. When you let go, I’ll do it sooner—and worse!”

He forced her to her feet and pushed her back on the bed. She tried, suddenly, to rake his face. He slapped her with his free hand. Sarah shuddered but she did not cry. He held her on the edge of the bed; his fingers grew tighter and tighter, slowly, while he talked. “You have just made a perfect, small-scale example of the hideous thing that has come alive all over the world, Sarah. The corrupt use of force. And I can see what must be done to crush it. I can see now why decent people so passionately detested to take the step. And you will have to see that I have learned how to take it. I am ashamed of us all, that this is necessary.” He paused. His voice was solemn. “Sarah, if you breathe a word of this business, I will kill you.”

She began losing her nerve. She forgot the pain in her arm. She met his eye with unstable hostility. “You’d be hung for it!”

He shook his head slowly. “I’m a chemist, Sarah. In the business of killing. I could kill you any time, anywhere, a hundred ways—painfully or quickly—and no one could find me for it. I want you to know that I will do this. And I want you to know, also, that I would not hesitate, even if I knew I’d hang.”

Her chin sagged. “I believe—you would!” she whispered.

“For the purpose of spreading ruin, you’ll have to agree to die. Do you want to?”

“I don’t want to die.”

“Be very sure. It might be worth it. Is it?”

“You’re insane!”

“Maybe. I’m telling you what will happen.”

“All right.”

“Quit?”

“Yes, Jimmie.” Her chest heaved. Her voice was hoarse.

“You won’t forget?”

“No.”

“Or make a slip?”

“No. My arm is—pulp.”

He let go of her. She sat still, rubbing the place where he had held her. Her breathing was repressed, stertorous. Her pompadour had come apart and tumbled. A wetness that did not run as tears blurred the blue-black make-up around her eyes. Jimmie began to collect the diaries that lay around her on the bed. He stacked them neatly and in order—unconsciously noting the years imprinted on the back of each book.

Sarah began a hollow-voiced monologue. “It’ll be very strange, knowing we have a murderer in the house-a potential one, anyway! Maybe I can’t talk, but I will think! You won’t stop that! I’ve always been beaten. I should have known you’d beat me again. I was entitled to one moment of the upper hand—one little season when I had my say and my way in this town. But I don’t get that, now. I don’t get that! I don’t get even that.” Her lip quivered. Jimmie was facing the closed door, stuffing the books under his arm. “If I had gone away with Harry, when he wanted me to, and told them all to go to hell, I wouldn’t be in this prison now!”

She said, “My arm hurts.” She threw herself down sideways on the bed and commenced to sob.

Jimmie whirled around. “Who’s Harry?”

“Never you mind,” she answered brokenly.

“Why didn’t you go away with Harry—if you felt like it?”

“People don’t go away with clarinet players. Not people like us.”

“Where’s Harry now?”

“Chicago.”

“Married?”

She shook her head.

“Did you love him?”

She shook it the other way and cried harder.

“He love you?”

“Of course he did, you fool! He loved me until Mother talked to him, and Dad—on and on, day after day—and he went to Chicago.”

“When did all this happen?”

“It all ended—last spring. Go away, Jimmie. I don’t want to talk about it. Least of all—to you.”

“I think I’d like to look up Harry someday—if you ever want to see him again, and if you’ll tell me more about him.”

Sarah sat up and sniffled. “You mean you’d help me—against the whole family? ”

“Is he a nice guy, sis?”

“He’s wonderful!”

“If he is—if you’re serious, if he’s serious—I’ll certainly help you. Against the family. Against the world.” She was staring at him with widening eyes. He opened the door. “I don’t like people being pushed around,” he said. “Except as an extreme defense measure.”

When he walked into Mr. Corinth’s office he was busy with the reflection that it took intense misery to bring the truth up out of the hearts of most people. He set down the books and smiled at the old man. “Sorry I was gone so long. Your truckman had quite a nap. You see—I caught Sarah reading these things.” He kept smiling in spite of the startled look in the old man’s eyes. “Sarah’s first notion was that she could use her information as a sort of club. I had a hard time dissuading her.”

Mr. Corinth’s alarm did not abate. “She’ll betray you, Jimmie! That’s a terrible thing! The girl is unhappy—and bitter! I’ve seen her about a good deal—!”

“She won’t betray me—or Audrey.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I told her I’d kill her.” Jimmie stopped smiling. “I meant it.”

Mr. Corinth’s gaze faltered and fell. He plucked at a shabby necktie that bore, in a faded, fabulous print, pictures of cowboys and Indians. At last he said, softly, “Yes. Yes.

I can see what happened.

And why you—!” He sighed and smiled gently. “It’s a fine mess we’ve got our souls in! We wonderful Americans!”

“She’s in love with a guy named Harry,” Jimmie said, moving away from the old man’s desk. “And my folks do not love Harry at all.”

Mr. Corinth thought some more, and chuckled. “Worth it already, eh? You’ve got a lot of magic, boy. The slow, silent kind. Don’t ever belittle the quality—or abuse it.

Who’s Harry?”

“I dunno. I’ll find out.”

“Don’t bother. I will. My wife knows all these things. Her frontal lobes are filing cabinets, full of secrets and intrigue.”

Jimmie grinned. “I guess my lab’s clear now.”

“Yeah. I was just over there. Not a whiff. I had a lunch sent in for you. Keeping it hot with a bunsen burner.”

CHAPTER IX

BIFF LOOKED Up from his book, when the doorstop squeaked on the polished linoleum floor. “Hi, Jimmie! Haven’t seen you in a dog’s age. Sit.”

It was Wednesday—and eight o’clock in the evening. The hospital was on the way to Dan and Adele’s house. Jimmie had decided to go there. He had an hour to kill between the end of dinner at home and the fateful stroke of nine. His visits to Biff had been perfunctory. He felt indifferent to his brother. His understanding of Biff’s psychology—deeply hidden from Biff himself—brought to Jimmie a sense of repugnance whenever he thought of the big youngster with the broken legs. Now, he pulled up an easy chair with a white slip-cover, glanced at the vases of flowers, the fruit, the pictures of pretty girls, and peered at Biff with a formal cheerfulness. “How you doing?”

“Okay. Swell. Healing like nobody they ever had here! Be staggering around on crutches in a while. I may even get to the football game a week from Saturday—in a wheelchair. Boy!”

Jimmie nodded comprehension of the mood. “I went—last week.”

“Yeah. Dad said so. How do the doggone old Bearcats look?”

“Pretty good.” Jimmie laughed. “You know, for the first quarter, I hardly recognized the old game. Looked more like basketball. And the subs kept running out like waves of infantry. But I caught on. That Ward—and Ellis—and Becker—they’re dynamite!”

Biff assented. “I’ll say. I ought to know. I was in there with all of ’em—this time last year.”

For fifteen minutes they held a lively discussion of football. When the topic lagged they reached one of the silences which so envelop a visitor and a hospital patient.

The discrepancy between the life of the one busy in the world, and the other lying continuously on his back, abruptly becomes apparent; both persons rack their brains for a rejuvenating subject; the painfulness of the moment rises to a locked, near-violence. On this occasion Jimmie sat with a sense of increasing embarrassment and frustration; it was Biff, oddly enough, who found a way to reopen the impasse—a perfectly conventional way—the weather.

“What sort of a night is it, old man?”

“Oh, nice. Moon up and almost full. Crisp. On the Hallowe’en side. Shadows sharp, and the air feels good to breathe.”

Biff listened solemnly to that. “You kind of like the weather, don’t you, Jimmie?”

“Yeah. Guess so.”

“I remember—from before. Six years ago. It used to make you moody as hell.”

“Did it?” Jimmie smiled.

“Yeah. I could never figure it out. Not moody like other people. Not because it interfered with your plans. Sometimes—on a bright, sunny, warm fall day—you’d be as sunk and as snappy as a dying turtle. And sometimes—on rainy days—you’d be full of hell and bejee. I used to try to figure it out, but I never could.”

Biff’s tone—its intimacy, its amiability, and especially its quality of sentimental reflection—was surprising to Jimmie. It was almost poetical. Something new, or hitherto unseen in Biff. “I guess I was just being adolescent—and perverse.”

“Maybe. Dad sure enjoyed going up to State with you.”

“Did he? We rode all the way up and he never said a word, and we both watched the game every minute and he was silent again, driving back.”

“He told me you hollered your head off and nearly knocked a man down—pushing on him—when they held the Bearcats in the second quarter. Said you were just like the old Jimmie.”

“Said that, eh? Funny! I had the idea, all the time, he’d rather have gone without me.”

“Hell, no! He was practically misty—talking about how you yelled.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Jimmie said.

“People are funny,” Biff suggested.

“Mighty funny. Well, son, I gotta go. Date.”

“Come back again—in a month or so.”

Jimmie smiled apologetically at the sarcasm. “I will. Tomorrow, maybe.”

“What’s happened to Sarah these days?”

“You tell me. I dunno.”

“She came in here with a lot of bounce the other day. Brought me some new pajamas. Shocking pink. Helleroos. Acted like she used to before—”

“Before what?”

“Oh, you weren’t here. And the family thought it’d be best not to tell you. She had a terrible case on a clarinet player. Guy in Sox Sykes’ band. Me—I thought he was oke.

College lad from the East. Good family. But bughouse on playing in a band and having a band of his own.”

“Anything wrong with that?”

Biff shrugged. “Ask Mom. She knows two thousand things wrong.” He opened his mouth to add more and closed it with decision.

Jimmie rose, uncomfortably. “Well, son, gotta go—”

“Yeah. Come back.” Biff seemed to be searching his mind for something that would hold his elder brother. “You do a lot of thinking, when you have this kind of time to lie around in. You know what was the trouble with me?”

Jimmie leaned on the rolling bed table. “No. What was?”

“Well, I didn’t like being forced. I’d have gone on my own hook, if I’d have thought there was a real need.”

“Hunh? Oh. The army. The draft.”

“Yeah. A guy hates to be hauled anywhere by the ears.”

“Sure.”

“Jimmie. Do you really think there really is a need?”

“Yeah.”

Biff’s eagerness diminished. “Well, I wish I did. I’d enlist, maybe, if I did. I mean—I would.”

The younger man was staring at his bedclothes. The older was looking into blank space, painfully. Biff meant what he was saying. When he recovered he might try to enlist. And if he did, sooner or later, his secret record would overtake him—and he’d be sent home. Psychotic. Then what would Biff do? What would he do if the best impulse he’d ever had was—tossed in his face? People said, “The Baileys are all big—and quick-tempered—but they’re good citizens.”

Maybe.

Jimmie spoke nonchalantly. “Well, you can decide that later. I—”

“Yeah. You gotta go. Say! How’s your cheek? Heal okay?”

“Cheek?”

“Where I socked you?” Biff’s solicitude was genuine this time, and not fatuous as it had been when he’d lain on the receiving-room table—many nights ago.

Jimmie chuckled. “I’d forgotten. Sure, it healed. Why, you conceited damn’ rat, I’ve had flies bite me worse!”

“Yeah. Well—so long, fellow.”

Jimmie went to the door. It was he who had the wish, then, to linger on, to probe more deeply into this unfurling aspect of his kid brother’s personality. “Well—want anything? Books? What you reading?”

Biff picked up the volume and showed the dust jacket. It was Shirer’s Berlin Diary. “ Hell of a thing,” he said. “Who do those Nazis think they are anyhow! You suppose this bird Shirer tells the truth?”

“Happen to know he does.”

“How do you know?”

Jimmie was more moved, more astonished and upset, than he wanted Biff to see.

He edged toward the door. “Oh, I know, Biff, because—well, when I step out of the house on a night like this—now, and next year, and for years to come—I get a sinking sensation in my guts. For a minute I won’t know why. It’ll just be there—cold and hard. I’ll look up and down the street to see what’s wrong, Biff, and then I’ll know. The moonlight.”

“Moonlight?”

“Yeah. My guts will be saying, ‘See it? See the moon! Bright! Good visibility! They’ll be over soon, now.’ The sirens’ll start. The motors will begin to throb like your own pulse. And then—” He whistled. “Wham! Whoom! All around! Stuff like that. That’s why I know Shirer’s not lying. ’Night, keed.”

The music teacher lived near the river. Jimmie walked slowly, humming to himself. He still had time to kill. Once he turned and started back to the hospital. He decided his errand would keep till morning. His feet clicked on the cold pavement. His shadow rippled lithely on lawns and hedges. The eight-thirty ship out of Muskogewan left the airport with far-off thunder and passed overhead at a few hundred feet, portlights bright, wings tipped in red and green, exhausts pale lavender. Jimmie stood stark still to look at it, with goose pimples washing up and down his back. He went on, humming songs that came over the radio which Sarah and his parents seemed to play incessantly. They were all sad songs—about refugees, and the last time somebody saw Paris, and what somebody’s sister would disremember.

Depressing songs. Popular songs. A nice, incisive index, Jimmie thought, of the defeatist ebb of spirit in a country that thought of itself as the Colossus of the West. Sick Colossus!

The river flashed inkily through the naked trees. Cars streamed over the Maple Street bridge, starting and stopping-a dancing river of taillights, a pale avalanche of dimmers. Dan and Adele lived in a white clapboard house with a white picket fence and wrist-thick vines winding up over the roof of the porch. The curtains were drawn in the front rooms—yellow blinds down across lace. Jimmie poked the bell. Somebody was playing the piano with a rippling dissonance, and so many handfuls of notes they seemed to be showering from the keys at a humanly impossible rate. The music stopped and the door opened.

“Hello, Jimmie.”

“Hello, Audrey.”

“Come in.”

He came in. There was no change in the huskiness of her voice—or its mood. He had expected that they would pick up the threads of their first, and only, afternoon together, through studied speeches, conventions, an exaggerated ritual of re-meeting. But that was not going to be so. It was as if he had interrupted a song by lifting the arm of a phonograph, and left it there for a long while, and then set it back at the same place in order to hear the rest of it. Audrey walked into the living room ahead of him and turned around. She stood quietly. Lamplight fell on her. She wore a gray silk dress that went round her in three climbing spirals and had turquoise trimming.

“I had to wait quite a long while,” she said.

“Yes.”

He stood there, holding his hat. She walked up close to him: and put her arms around his neck, kissed him slowly, took his hat, and put it on the piano. “I love you very much,” she said.

Jimmie sat down. It was a pretty room. There was a fire going—a quiet fire. He leaned toward it.

“Audrey, I don’t love you.”

“I know. It’s dreadful, isn’t it?”

He nodded absently, lighted a cigarette, sighed a little. “Golly. I’m tired tonight.”

She laughed.

He looked up. She was sitting on the piano stool. “I told you, dope, that you’d be tired, and world-beaten—what is it? full of weltschmerz—and one of us Muskogewan girls would catch you!”

“It’s not that.” He grinned. “Audrey, you’re a devil.”

“Yes, I am. Willie says you wouldn’t read my diaries.”

“But that he told you about them.”

“He’s my boss. He can talk to me about what he pleases. He likes to talk.”

“And you like to listen to him. So do I. I love to! It’s a good thing for a girl—to know one very wise man in this world.”

“Where are your pals? Dan and Adele?”

“At the movies.”

“Oh.”

“Willie said you’d probably come over tonight. He said you had the look. He said you’d been jumpy—every Wednesday and Friday. It isn’t very gallant flattery, Jimmie. But it did help.”

“Yeah. I came over. You know, if you were just some-well—”

“—some dazzling daughter of Muskogewan, with nice clothes and a kissable mouth? Yes. Jimmie, you have no idea how many times I’ve wished I were—and tried to be! But I’m not, and there it is.”

“There it is.”

“You’re capable of a higher brand of conversation, Jimmie.”

“Not with you.” “Shall I play the piano? It’s not what I want to do.”

“What in the world do you want to do?”

“Make love.”

He flushed. “I forgot. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“Why not? Now you know. Just keep that in mind. Adele left things in the kitchen for making fudge. Chocolate. I love it, and I make the kind that melts in your mouth. We can do that. I can play—anything. I can play Bach and boogie-woogie. Schubert, swing, and Chaminade. A polished amateur—on the juicy side-with a little inattention to technique in the hard spots. Nothing that the average concertgoer would protest too much.”

“Why didn’t you really learn? I mean, get good?”

“I was waiting around for you.”

A log slipped. Jimmie picked up the poker and adjusted it. “That’s going to be your answer to everything, hunh?”

“Yes, Jimmie.”

“Then I can’t drag over here twice a week, when our host and hostess are at the movies, and stand around like a cigar-store Indian while the”—he drew a breath against what seemed like resistance in his lungs—“while one of the most beautiful women I ever saw sits opposite me, using every sentence I pronounce as the spring board for a terrific pass.”

“No. That would be too difficult.”

“So—I better go home.”

Audrey spun on the piano stool so that her back was toward him. The turquoise trimming on her dress shivered infinitesimally. “Yes, Jimmie. If that’s how you really feel.”

“Great God! It’s not how I feel at all!”

She came around again. “Well?”

“But it’s what I think.”

“People do what they feel. Not what they think. If they really feel a way, they make themselves think it’s the right thought—in the end. That’s why I—well, it might be a short world, Jimmie. A short life. I never minded wasting time before, in mine. Now—that’s all that I mind.”

Jimmie stood up. “Audrey, you’d be awesomely easy to take advantage of.”

“If it was an advantage.”

“I assure you, it is. I haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re like. And the more I see of you the murkier that idea gets.”

She smiled a little. “I’m just a woman—like all women-and I am in love with you.”

“But how in God’s name do you know?”

“I’m a woman. I don’t like to listen to the gnash and clank of your moral nature, Jimmie. You come some other time.” She gave him his hat. He found himself at the door.

He stammered when he said good night.

But she was calm. “Good night, Jimmie.”

His feet recited his departure; their sound moved slowly from the white clapboard house, gathered speed and assurance, covered a block, and slowed to a laggard rhythm. A toe dragged; the sound stopped altogether. It was replaced by the thresh and whisper of a hedge as Jimmie angrily yanked at a branch. Soon, his footsteps turned around, started uncertainly back, and presently slapped on the sidewalk in rapid succession: Jimmie was running.

He jumped the white gate in front of the house as cleanly as a deer. He landed in the grass, lightly. Then he stopped. The house was dark. Surprised, uncomprehending, he tiptoed up on its porch. The wisteria vine that had been silhouetted by lamplight was now moon-etched whitely against the blinds. He raised his hand to knock, and lowered it.

From the inside of the unlighted house came a sound—a vague ululation, which might have been weeping or a delicately ominous laughter.

It was the latter thought, scalding and unshakable, which held the man there for a long time, listening, considering. It was possible that Audrey was peering at him from the invisible room and that she could not wholly repress a wanton impulse to chuckle over his return. Or, perhaps, she had not observed him and was amused by his callow departure.

More likely, she was crying. He came to that conclusion. But, in the meanwhile, his impulse withered. He became afraid that he had been trapped by her resemblance to Ellen, by her audacity, by the interested esteem in which Mr. Corinth held her. Those dissensions quickly undid the blind violence of his back-running steps. He slunk diagonally from the house and vaulted the fence. His feet went along the pavement in a dirge-slow, authentic. Jimmie said nothing about that adventure to Mr. Corinth.

He hoped Audrey would recount it. In that event his boss would probably discuss the affair. But the chemist—busy with research, busy with problems of production—did not mention it; so Jimmie assumed, after a few days, that Audrey had kept it secret. Mr.

Corinth, indeed, seemed hourly to be aging; his white hair yellowed; his face shrank; the willowware blue of his eyes washed out; it was as if the fearsome chemicals with which he worked had entered his body and attacked it at every point except the one where his energy originated. Age had done nothing to his brain and nothing to the vigor that energized his long, restless routines. Jimmie threw himself into the job of helping the old man.

Such understanding had sprung up between them that they worked in a manner which suggested their activities had been ordained, or rehearsed elsewhere. They were like backfield men in a ferocious game—Corinth carrying the ball—Jimmie throwing passes, blocking, tackling, running interference. He became familiar with the main outlines of the plant operation, with the war orders and their filling, with the holdovers from what the old man called “peacetime” business.

Often they worked among the low buildings till late at night. Occasionally they slept there, on two cots, in the room the factory employees used by day for smoking.

When they talked it was always about chemistry or business. Jimmie knew this absolution of endeavor was, on his part, honest in one sense alone: he was willing to give every minute he could to the war. But the spare moments, afternoons off, evenings at home, he filled with work merely as an escape, an anesthetic.

He felt impelled to get away from the obsessive quality of his thoughts about Audrey. What she had done to him was bad enough; what she could do was so much worse that he persuaded himself he should avoid it at all costs. He decided that she must be, intrinsically, a destructive person; otherwise she would not have been so quick to attempt his conquest. That decision gave him no peace, however, so he fell back on the doubtful anodyne of overwork. He had other motives, little ones, that kept adding themselves to the constant factor in his work-mania.

One day he spoke to his mother about Sarah’s blighted love affair. He waited until what he thought was the right moment, a rainy afternoon, when his father was at the club—country or athletic, Jimmie did not ask which—and his sister had gone to the movies.

There was no comfort between mother and son, tolerance only, but, with the fire going, the radio playing decent music, and Jimmie ensconced in the living room, in a deep chair, with a book, the time seemed fit enough. Mrs. Bailey was knitting. She, and most of the other women, had taken to knitting this or that for refugees, soldiers, whatnot—in spite of their convictions—out of a habit entrenched by the first world conflict: war, whatever its ideology, meant knitting, and, probably, no sugar. Those two, mainly.

“Mother?”

“Yes, dear?” She said it absently.

Jimmie was encouraged. “I want to ask you about something.”

“Go ahead.”

“I trust you won’t be disturbed.”

She looked at him with sudden rigidity. Her face, an older image of Sarah’s, seemed strong. Its strength came, however, from the adjustments she had forced upon her character, and it was, therefore, the mere strength of compulsion, not the strength of wisdom. “I do hope it’s nothing about the war!”

“No. It’s about Sarah.”

“What about Sarah?” She became querulous, defensive.

“About—some egg named Harry.”

That precipitated a long silence. The fingers stopped knitting, gripped the needles harder, and went on, digging their points. “That—I’d rather not discuss.”

He ignored her preference. “What was the matter with the guy?”

“The whole thing was utterly impossible! Sarah is a mere child. She was even younger when this—this slippery impostor swept her off her feet.”

Jimmie scratched his cheek. “You might as well come clean. I probed Willie Corinth on the subject, and he tapped his wife, Susie, and she didn’t have much. Just that you clipped off Harry like a flower. Pretty nearly everybody in the village liked the lug, at first.”

“I will not discuss it.”

Jimmie grinned. “Sarah’s still in the doghouse with herself about it. She evidently had the big torch in her hand. You know, in some ways, Sarah is pretty mature. And girls have been known to get married-successfully, even-at the age of nineteen, which my nonbenevolent sister is approaching.”

“It was something your father found out,” Mrs. Bailey said, at last. “We never mentioned it. We felt that part was up to Mr. Meade, if anyone. We were only glad that we did find out. We had both been dubious, naturally. The man is a clarinetist. He does have some talent, apparently. And his family is extremely well-to-do. However, what your father learned—”

He was not grinning. “Skeleton in the closet, eh? Was the cluck already married or something?”

She apparently felt that his mood of worry was the best one in which to reveal a matter that would undoubtedly be uncovered sooner or later. Jimmie had a persistence which came, she often said proudly, from her side of the family. She knitted a few stitches as a prologue. “Jimmie, this Mr. Harry Meade is—non-Aryan.”

“Huh!”

“He is one quarter Jewish. Your father found it out on a trip to New York. His family is well known in New York. But his grandmother was a Jewess.”

Jimmie did not say anything for a while. At last, in a quiet, thin voice, he began:

“I dimly remember, Mother, that when Elsie Mac-something—of this town—married Leonard Zimm you helped engineer the whole business. You were fond of Len—”

“The Zimms,” his mother answered, “have lived in this country for five generations. They came with the pioneers. We accepted them, in time, naturally. In those days.”

“What do you mean, “in those days’? Aren’t the Zimms still around?”

“No, James. They moved, more than a year ago. To Chicago.”

Jimmie hopped to his feet. “So that’s it! Sarah didn’t tell me, the louse! She gave him up—when she found out the truth!”

Mrs. Bailey looked at her tall son with eyes that gleamed oddly. “Sarah gave him up. Naturally.”

He slapped his book together. “Fine business! I think I’ll go down to the lab for the night. I don’t want to hear, Mother, about how the Jews, a little minority of them in every nation, have succeeded—although they are an admittedly inferior people!—in stealing all the money and the power from us big, bold, better gentiles, and making suckers out of us in business, and finally in so befuddling our mighty minds that they have destroyed the ninety-five per cent of us, sacked our civilization, and thrust us into war. Phooie, on you! I knew you and Dad were pretty nuts, Mother! This is the first intimation I’ve had, though, that you were feasting on the bloody knuckles of people who can’t protest, even, without causing a fresh hundred of their relatives to hang by their thumbs and their breasts. God damn it! I can’t stand it!” He went out.

Hard on the heels of that episode, came another—and then another. The first was minor, but it distressed Jimmie. The second was more bitter.

On the day after he had stalked away from his mother’s intolerance, with the hot belief that Sarah had been a traitor to her man, he called on Biff. He was beginning to like Biff, to feel that his brother had a soul. It was a young soul, wounded and arrogant, but susceptible of maturation. It needed care. Jimmie believed that Biff was caring for it, as he lay on his monotonous bed, thinking slow thoughts about his life, and reading long books about the realities around him.

Jimmie had formed the habit of cutting over to the hospital on his walk to work or his return from work, of rapping on his brother’s door and sitting in the easy chair for a few minutes. This time, remembering that Biff’s room was bare, like the rooms of most slow-healing invalids whose friends and relatives have grown inattentive, he stopped at a florist’s and bought a bunch of chrysanthemums. Because his arms were filled with the flowers Jimmie kicked open the door of the room.

He found Biff locked in an embrace with a nurse. The same pretty nurse who had been kidding with Dr. Heiffler on the night Jimmie had conferred with him. They broke apart. The nurse flushed—but not much; it was a defiant flush, a tantalizing flush, rather than the swift reddening one might have expected. She looked boldly at Jimmie, patted Biff’s cheek, and went out of the room.

Biff chuckled. “You’re the darnedest guy! Always popping into things!”

“Not that I want to! You people are always doing things. What’s the idea? She’s a poor working gal, Biff. You’re too irresistible to take advantage of her. Too much dough.

Too much family.”

Biff laughed harder. “Take advantage of Genevieve? Look. How many times does a girl have to be taken advantage of before she’s out of the minor league?”

Jimmie unwrapped the flowers. He was still fairly unruffled. “Not a nice thing to say.”

“All my pals have had dates with Genevieve. Can’t imagine how I overlooked her, myself. She’s pretty, eh?”

“Sure.” Jimmie sat down on the edge of the bed. “You’re pretty, too, Biff. Nice eyes—State football hero—whatnot. I suppose the gals in your gang won’t come in and neck with a pair of plaster casts. Still—a nurse! Tchk-tchk!”

“You take her out, Jimmie. She’s a nice dish. Do you good. You look like a cold baked potato—more every day. Too much work. And Genevieve knows all the answers.

Lives on the wrong side of the tracks, but with a face and a chassis like that a dame can cross ’em—”

“Aren’t you being just a shade-hard-boiled, Biff?”

“You sore?”

Jimmie walked over to the window. “Not exactly.”

Biff laughed sharply. “You know, sometimes the family is right about you. You’re a meddlesome cluck. And too darned high-and-mighty. If you’re trying to lecture me on personal behavior—quit! And the next time you come over here—knock.”

“All right.”

“I don’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

“You aren’t hurting ’em.” Jimmie smiled—but he was aware that his feelings were hurt.

“Y ou get your legs broken,” Biff said, with a tinge of self-pity. “Y ou try lying around in a hospital, week in and out. You see what you’d do if a sophisticated babe came in and offered to make the time go a lot faster.”

“All right, wise guy,” Jimmie said. “All right. I’ll go quietly.” He did go. He supposed that he had been meddlesome and toplofty. It wasn’t any of his business. Still, it wasn’t right, either. And Jimmie felt that not-right behavior was everybody’s business. So, he decided, maybe he was priggish. Maybe he was a blithering fool. He strode along the cold street toward the paint works and he thought of Audrey and his temples swelled. The world was cock-eyed—and doing itself no good by being that way.

Two days later, his father threw him out.

It was his fault.

After he had moved his things over to the country club, which was nearer the factory, anyway—after he had settled in a chintz-draped room that overlooked the golf course, he began to see that he had almost consciously precipitated the banishment, in the same righteous way in which he’d got himself into so many other fights….

A few days after his irritated criticism of Biff he had set up a slow distillation in his lab, left it in charge of one of the men, and gone home at four o’clock. Because he seldom reached home until seven—and because, in any case, his presence would have been egregious—nobody had told him about the meeting.

He saw a number of cars parked on the street and in the drive. He thought that his mother was having a female party. He planned to wave at her from the hall, go up to his room, and hide. In fact, he got up momentum to make the trip through the hall a fast one.

However, when he opened the door he smelled cigar smoke and he heard the mumble of men’s voices. That stopped him. Somebody in the living room caught sight of him and waved. Heads turned.

Someone else said, “There’s Jimmie!”

Several men laughed.

Still another man called, “Hello, Jimmie! Come on in and see how the last little band of Americans is clinging to the Faith!”

So Jimmie went in. He went, because he was interested. This was some subcommittee from the America Forever Committee. Jimmie looked at his father, who sat behind the big table, as chairman, evidently, and Jimmie’s eyes were bright with satire.

His father put on a stuffy expression and said, “Join us, James. That is, if you want, sincerely, to see the opposition at work. And if you can remember that opposition is one of the honest functions of democracy.”

Jimmie nodded meekly and sprawled in a leather chair. For a while the meeting amused him. An American ship had been fired on by a submarine, and it appeared that the Muskogewan members of America Forever had passed a resolution “suggesting” that the submarine had been English. Then the Germans had admitted it was their submarine.

The incident was two months old, but due to it, the America Forever Committee in Muskogewan had been grossly lampooned in a new issue of a monthly magazine. Their first agendum was to draw up a resolution informing the magazine that England had perfidiously drawn America into the war. They next framed a resolution to stay out of war.

After that a long telegram was read. It came from a gentleman of national importance. Its purport was that, even with a congressional declaration of war, the work of America Forever would go forward. Such a declaration, the message said, could only be regarded as the act of a body of rubberstamps who no longer represented the people, or held the power originally vested in them by the Constitution but now assumed by a band of thieves. In view of the fact that no act of Congress could be considered responsible, the wire said, the members of America Forever were urged to disregard all such acts. And so on.

Jimmie reflected that the “members” were, in effect, being urged to consider the future possibility of treason. The men did not seem to see it in that light. Jimmie grinned inwardly.

Money was voted for an advertisement in the local paper which would proclaim that American boys were about to die for the ideology of Red Russia. There were other matters, all heatedly executed and all steadfastly aimed at making it as hard as possible for the existing government to maintain its thesis that the United States was in terrible danger, not of its own making, but inescapable, nonetheless.

Jimmie was planning to slip out of the room, when his name was called. It was called after a whispered conversation at the long table.

A man with horn-rimmed glasses and a small, yellowish mustache said, “Jimmie!” overloudly. “Jimmie,” he repeated, “would you mind a couple of questions?”

Surprised, Jimmie rose awkwardly and said, “Why, no. Certainly not. Shoot!” He sat down again.

The man went on: “We—er—in this subcommittee—we keep an eye on things happening in this town. Feel it’s our duty. My name, incidentally, is Murton.” Jimmie ducked his head. Mr. Murton continued, “I don’t mean spying. Just—watching things.”

Jimmie bowed again. If they wanted to play spy, let them. The next words, however, alarmed Jimmie. “Things like your factory.”

Jimmie stood. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about that, Mr. Murton. We’re under secret orders—as you doubtless know.”

Everyone pivoted to look at the young man. Chairs creaked. Mr. Murton said, “Exactly. Nevertheless, we happen to know that you are manufacturing large quantities of poison gas in your factory.”

“Oh? You do?”

“Naturally, we don’t ask you to admit this. We know it. We also know that some of this—er—material goes to England. Via the Great Lakes and Canada. We have traced it.”

“Very enterprising,” Jimmie said unsympathetically.

Mr. Murton cleared his throat. “Mr. Bailey!” He was addressing the son. “We do not like the manufacture of poison gas anywhere.” There was a loud babble of agreement.

“And we will not tolerate it—in Muskogewan!”

Jimmie sucked in his cheeks and thought a moment. “Look,” he said presently.

“You gotta have poison gas! Plenty. In storage. On hand. Ready to use. And you gotta have soldiers and aviators trained to use it. Here’s why. If you’re all set—with plenty of it—your enemy will never try it on you. If you’re not, your enemy is bound to pour it on you. Make myself clear?”

A lean, enormously tall man with a cubical face and icy gray eyes that looked familiar to Jimmie—came to his feet. “I say—that statement is rationalized! Does this twirp believe Muskogewan is going to be gassed? Does he realize that, for a community like ours, making poison gas is intolerable! An affront! A crime! There was a time”—the hard face softened briefly—“when I respected Willie Corinth. Loved him, almost. That time is past. Willie’s a criminal.”

Jimmie interrupted. “Do you gentlemen imagine you can interrupt the activities of my firm?”

There was a silence, a muttering, and several of the twenty-odd men swore. “Tell him,” somebody said.

The very tall man was still standing. “My name is Wilson,” he said frigidly to Jimmie. “Yes, we do. I don’t think your knowing will stop us in any way. It happens, for one thing, through certain arrangements, that we can call a strike in your plant, at will.

That is, arrange to have one called. It also happens that certain buildings on the grounds were mortgaged to—various persons—by Willie Corinth during the depression. We have bought those mortgages. No doubt Willie could pay them off. We could make the reacquisition of the structures a long process, I believe. There are certain other moves we could make—local ordinances passed and enforced—which would automatically render this particular function of the factory impossible. Am I clear?”

“Yeah,” Jimmie said. He looked at the aggressive faces. “Very. I don’t know how much of this is true and how much is a crummy boast. I don’t know to what extent you can interfere with a plant working for the government. Some, no doubt. The right of people like you to make monkeys out of the majority is the very damn’ right that I’m busy defending! But let me remind you of something. You call yourselves ‘opposition.’ Gentlemen, sabotage is not—’opposition’.” Jimmie sat down.

Mr. Murton’s mustache wiggled. The men palavered, sotto voce. Mr. Wilson said, “Quiet!” He breathed hard and his eyes rocked in their sockets. “Do you recall the name of the man, Jimmie, who sold out to the British—as you have? The name was—Benedict Arnold.”

Jimmie was twenty-eight years old, not fifty or sixty, like most of the men in the room. He was tired. He was spiritually raw from a number of small injuries. He looked at the towering man who had insulted him; his brain leaped and flashed, as if fireworks were going off inside his skull. His eyes roved from the face of Audrey’s father to the other faces and back to the big man. He began to speak:

“The Wehrmacht,” he said unevenly, “the Hitler war machine, may indeed fall apart, somehow—someday. Next year. In five years. America may never hear or feel the fall of a bomb. In that case, America’s problem will be economic. Stuck with arms, the machines for making arms, the debt they cost—in a world that is a ruin. As you men say, it may never literally become our war. All we will face will be—shambles. But you are the people, or the heirs of the people, who pushed the oxcarts out here to Muskogewan. The people who settled the Eastern coasts, whipped the British, pushed on to the Mississippi basin—and the far West. The people who made, in a couple of centuries, the greatest, strongest, finest, most whistling damn’ civilization in the history of man! You fought every nation that tried to clear you out of the sea, or poach on your land, and you—some of you sitting right here—as little as twenty-five years ago took German slugs, to give Democracy a chance! You failed once. So you quit. Won’t try again! Is that—our heritage? To quit flat after one half-try?”

Someone said, loudly, but behind his hand, “Siddown!”

“Let me finish,” Jimmie answered. “I know, the most savage and scientific military machine of all time has got its eye, and its hate, glued on you and me. But that isn’t why I want to fight. I know we all love things, and have a lot of ’em; and I know we might lose ’em all, in a year—or two—or five. You sit here and think you know. But I do know! I’ve seen the other guys’ show. You haven’t.” Jimmie pulled up his pant-leg and raised his knee. From his kneecap to his sock ran a corded, scarlet scar. “I’ve even felt it a little. But that isn’t why I want to fight, either: not my own, personal hatred. It takes two to make a quarrel, gentlemen. But only one to launch a conquest. That’s what’s going on! My enemy isn’t an idea, or a nation, or an economic system. It’s the rottenest thing in man-in you-in me. It’s greed. Greed that reaches out with no mercy, no humanity, no law-for the purpose of feeding itself. Stuffing itself. I fight thai, wherever, whenever, and however I see it. I fight it in Hitler. I fight it in you.”

He lowered his voice. “You say, America should defend itself. Show me where there is a defense on earth left—except attack! You say, we should mind our own business. I say, we never did and never will! When the American people built up this continent from edge to edge, and even before, Americans went to every cockeyed end of the earth—Timbuktu and Samarkand—and sold the natives sewing machines and phonographs, built oil refineries for ’em, taught ’em to play baseball! And still more Americans were sent—by you—and still are—to teach the heathen to wear breeches and sing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers.’ Hundreds of thousands of Americans! Millions, over the decades—meddling with every man and woman and child on earth! Not meddling them into some bloody empire. Just meddling for trade and the right to teach. Isolation?

We’re the most interventionist damn’ people in the history of time! Only thing is—have we still got the guts to intervene in Hell?”

That was when his father rose, sweaty, shaking, and cleared his throat three times before he could speak, and said, “Son, you can leave my house, now. I won’t stand for any of that sort of corrupt talk any more. Nor your mother. She said so the other night.

Get going!”

Most of the men applauded Jimmie’s father. Not all—but most.

So Jimmie walked out of the living room, through the hall, out the front door, and down the street.

He rented a guest room at the club—and he sent for his things.

CHAPTER X

HE WAS SITTING, one evening, in the library of the club, when Mr. Wilson entered. Jimmie was certain that Audrey’s father saw and recognized him, but Mr. Wilson did not stamp out of the room, as some of the members had. Instead, he leaned on one of the periodical tables, his long arms stretched crutch-stiff, and he seemed to glance, covertly, at Jimmie in the corner with his book. To Jimmie—who could not help watching, because he believed he was being watched—it seemed as if the old man’s lantern jaw wobbled a little, as if his skin was whiter, as if his falcon eyes were only pretending to read the headlines scattered along the table. Because such behavior was surely foreign to Mr. Wilson, and because Jimmie himself was blue and lonely in this exile, he tried to look accessible. He lighted a cigarette and crossed his legs casually and nodded when the old man glanced at him again. Mr. Wilson immediately came over to the corner and sat down. He said, not too truculently, “Hi, there, Jimmie.”

“Good evening, Mr. Wilson.”

“Your dad was pretty rough on you the other day.”

Jimmie remembered that Audrey had said she lived under the same duress, that she, too, might be thrown out of her home—for an even smaller cause. For merely being seen alone with him. He looked at the other man with ironic eyes. “I’m surprised to hear you say so!”

Mr. Wilson did not, of course, appreciate the innuendo. He thought that the younger man merely referred to the argument about war which had split apart so many close ties in the town. “You made quite a ringing speech,” he answered. “Mind if I smoke with you?”

“Not a bit. Have a cigarette?”

“Thanks. No.” Mr. Wilson took from his pocket a cigar in a metal container. He uncapped it, bit the cigar, and struck a match. By its light, bright in the gloomy recess, Jimmie could see that he was trembling. “I mean—” he puffed—“I agree with a lot you said. I’m a practical man, though. I don’t believe you can ever sell your bill of goods to the American people. If I did I’d be on your side of this. Whip Hitler—and then take over the world’s business! Nice project!”

“It isn’t exactly—”

Mr. Wilson waved. “I know. You have a more idealistic notion. It would amount to that practically, though, if it came to be. Which it won’t. And I liked what you said about courage. One thing I admire. That’s the only disadvantage of some of my friends on the America Forever Committee. They’re there because they’re scared. I hate that.”

“It’s a point.” A silence fell. “Jimmie, how’d you get that scar?” The younger man fidgeted. “I didn’t mean to be theatrical.”

“Darned effective, anyway. How’d it happen?”

Jimmie peered out over the night-hung golf course. “Hunk of flying glass. Bomb.”

Mr. Wilson grunted. He seemed eager for the whole story. He leaned forward, to ask again. But his pride or some other factor restrained him. He sat back and smoked for a long time. Once, he looked directly at Jimmie and smiled, amiably, unsurely.

“You underrate your father,” he said suddenly.

“Do I?” Jimmie was not displeased.

“He’s a good banker.”

“Everybody says so.”

“I mean good, Jimmie. Not just technically. Good—inside. Shrewd, but not a widow-and-orphan squeezer. Tough, maybe, on people who can stand it. Not on the rest.

When they had that bank holiday your dad got his bank open before I did mine-and I was racing the old son-of-a-gun. Smart. I suppose in his personal safe he’s got a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of paper he’s taken over in the last thirty years. Loans people made that they couldn’t pay. He’s proud of the condition of that bank. And I wonder—I wonder if you ever heard that there were maybe a couple of hundred men in business in this town who would be out of business if your old man hadn’t taken some pretty wildcat chances on them—especially in the depression? Did you know that?”

“No,” said Jimmie. “Probably never thought a man could have loyalty to a bank.”

“I never thought much about his bank at all. I was never interested in it.”

“A man can get to a bank the way he can to an idea—or a woman. Or a religion, even. Then, if something crosses up his bank, he thinks whatever crossed it up is criminal, depraved, and illegal.”

Jimmie sighed. “I wish he’d loosened up more, then! He never showed me any sentimental side. I heard he had one—from Biff—once. But I never saw it.”

“You just said you weren’t interested.”

Jimmie grinned sadly. “That’s right. I did.”

There was another stillness. A man in a distant corner rattled a newspaper.

Billiard balls clicked in the next room. Jimmie looked with curiosity at the big, gaunt man. Mr. Corinth had said, once, that he ought to meet Mr. Wilson. But the picture of her father Audrey had painted was one of absolutist bigotry. Nothing like this. The man in the opposite chair seemed mellow; he was striking a chord in Jimmie’s nature that Jimmie would not have believed him able to comprehend.

Mr. Wilson reacted to the silent appraisal. “Don’t know exactly why I came over this way. I admire a tough adversary. Maybe I was trying to soften you up.”

“You did. Quite a lot.”

The older man mused. “You’re smart, too, Jimmie. You know, I almost wish—sometimes—that I were young again. Free of all my standard opinions. Free of belief.

Free of responsibility.” He laughed at himself. “Damn it, I’d probably be in the RAF—or some other crazy thing!”

It was easy to warm Jimmie’s heart. Mr. Wilson’s words had done that. Jimmie leaned forward eagerly and said, “I’ll bet you would!”

“What’s it like?”

“Like? What’s what like?”

“Why, the RAF.”

“Oh.” Jimmie momentarily suspected this was blood lust, like his mother’s—and knew it was not and unbent. “Like nothing you ever saw on earth before! Remember Churchill—the lines about: Never have so many owed so much to so few? It’s like that. In a quiet way. It’s holy—if you know what I mean. Without seeming so. Seeming, on the contrary, to be unholy. They have religion, too.”

“A lot of ’em die.”

“They all die,” Jimmie answered. Mr. Wilson fumbled his cigar, grabbed at it, showered sparks on himself, and beat them out. Jimmie waited. “That is—in two different ways, they do. They die every day, in their minds. You can say a brave man dies only once, but it’s more the other way around. A man with imagination, facing death repeatedly, seeing people die, dies with them every time. And it takes a lot of imagination to fly a battle plane.”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“Intelligence. Spirit. Quick, inventive brains. They skim the best—the very best—off the population. They give them the best they can make, in the labs and shops. Those boys—they know what they’re doing. They have to. They see each other go down in streaks of fire—alive. They fly each other back home—wounded—in bombers. Their chore is appalling—for a sensitive man. Maybe it’s the very unthinkableness of it that makes it possible for the sensitive, bright ones to do it. Sort of a challenge. The hardest challenge you can put to a person. So—they take it up, and lick it, and kid about it afterward.

Rather—in between. That’s the other way they die.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”

“I mean, not one of them is alive—the way you and I are right here now. Not one can be—till the war’s over. The day it is over, those who happen to remain alive will find it out. That’s all.”

“I see. You know a lot about the RAF.”

“Everybody—in England—thinks about them a lot. Everybody owes ’em—whatever they happen to have.”

“Know any?”

Jimmie smiled. “Yeah. There was a field not very far from our lab. We made some special stuff for them to drop on Germany—now and then. Trial stuff. I used to—I got to be pals with a bunch of them.”

“I see.”

“They could tell you things!”

Jimmie began to tell those things. For half an hour—because of the ardent attention of his listener, because of his unexpected proffer of something very much like friendliness—Jimmie talked. He hadn’t told any of those tales in America. It did him good to unburden himself. For half an hour, in that corner of a clubroom, flack broke, machine guns stuttered, bombs screamed, motors droned and coughed, men died, men lived to tell of death, planes made their runs across the black and ruined ribs of cities embossed upon their incandescent streets, and the old man hung on the words of the young one.

When Jimmie stopped, apologetically, Mr. Wilson said, “You sound as if you’d seen it.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean—personally.”

“Yeah.”

A pause. “You can’t be saying—!”

Jimmie chuckled. “A few times. After all, they had to have an expert along occasionally to observe the effect of that ‘special stuff’ I talked about. Don’t get me wrong! I never had any of that night-after-night, week-in-and-out grind. That’s the killer.

Just a few—oh, hell! A few junkets. As passenger. Deluxe trips. I wish—”

The older man leaned forward. His face was strange. “That—that wound on your leg!”

Jimmie reddened. He was going to lie again, but he changed his mind. Sooner or later they’d all know, anyway. The people in England did. His friends. Whatnot. The hell with it. He said, casually, “Not window glass, no. But what the deuce! What’s the dif? A scratch—that’s all. Somebody who gets clipped with a splinter from the leg of a—a billiard table is clipped as bad as somebody that gets it out of a muzzle on a Messerschmitt, isn’t he?”

Without answering, Mr. Wilson rose and walked away. Jimmie watched him—hurt, again—until he realized he was corning back. He brought a magazine. He spread it out on Jimmie’s knees. He switched on a bridge lamp. It was a picture magazine, and he had turned to a spread of photographs of night fighters getting ready for action somewhere in England. He put his long forefinger on one of the pictures. “These birds are Canadians. See that chap—fourth from the left? The one with the bum haircomb? In the caption it says his name is Lawrence Wilton. My son—ran away—when he was fifteen. That’s—my son.”

CHAPTER XI

MR. CORINTH HAD fallen into the habit of “barging over to the club” occasionally in the evenings, when he and Jimmie were not staying late at the laboratory.

He liked to sit in a wicker chair on the glassed—in sun porch—surrounded by Jimmie, and anybody else who cared to listen—and expound topics of the day, or the ages. He said that his resumption of “social life” was inevitable and a sign of senescence. Jimmie knew the real cause. Mr. Corinth came because he was worried about his colleague—about Jimmie.

And Jimmie was worried about himself. All the locks in all the doors of his life had been turned—if the one door of hard work could be excepted.

He did riot see his father and mother at all. They had sent word that his presence at the club prevented them from coming there, and they had made sure that the bearer of the news also conveyed their resentment. But Jimmie felt too numb to budge. He had not seen Audrey, nor talked to Mr. Corinth about her. In spite of their intimacy Audrey’s name had become mysteriously taboo. His criticism of Biff’s behavior with the pretty nurse had led to a rapid deterioration of their burgeoning relationship. He did not see his sister either, because he now regarded her with contempt. She had abandoned her beloved Harry when she had learned that he was a quarter “non-Aryan,” and yet she had gone on mourning him in a revolting indulgence of self-pity. Mr. Wilson’s friendship, if it had ever been proffered, had been withdrawn. He nodded to Jimmie when they encountered each other, or waved a finger, in a way that looked amiable enough but did not invite further intimacy.

He had at first taken a considerable lift from their talk. Mr. Wilson was, no doubt, all that Audrey had said-bigoted, cruel, a tyrant at home, a fanatic about the behavior of his son and daughter. But Mr. Wilson was more. He was very subtle in his dealings with human beings. He had brought Jimmie around to satisfying a hunger for knowledge about the RAF by flattery, and by a still better trick: by granting to Jimmie the recognition due a valorous antagonist. Jimmie had talked—it must have been brutal to some part of the old man; he’d fumbled his cigar once, but, as soon as Mr. Wilson’s curiosity had been satisfied, he had cast Jimmie aside. Because he was Audrey’s father, Jimmie thought that by understanding Mr. Wilson he might learn about Audrey. So, in spite of a disillusionment, Jimmie had hoped to see more of the father of the night fighter and of the audacious woman.

Since Mr. Wilson had immediately dissolved the connection, Jimmie could only conclude that he was parasitical, that he deftly extracted from other human beings the nutriment for his own concealed emotions and discarded the people as soon as they had no further usefulness. That opinion of the father blindly transferred itself to the daughter.

Because she was bored, Jimmie decided, because she was fed up with Muskogewan, and no doubt justly annoyed at her family, she had invented an emotional stage—set, with all the props of a wicked father and a little white cottage for night rendezvous; and she had stepped out in front of that scenery to sing her siren song—her torch song—or whatever it was.

An act.

So Jimmie had nobody for company.

He could have had the pick of many people.

Mr. Corinth had “made him acquainted” with numerous citizens who did not agree with the ruling caste on the matter of war. Their shades of opinion, however, were very complex, and Jimmie tired of arguing over trifles. Besides, when a person cannot have the friendship of those with whom he wishes to be friends, alternatives are seldom acceptable. The same principle held in the matter of female companionship. As Sarah had said, there were countless girls who would have rescued Jimmie from any doldrum at the slightest sign of a chance, girls, even, who were the daughters of isolationists but who considered matrimony more important than war, girls who were, as Audrey had said, “dashing daughters,” easily relished.

To them, he was polite and no more.

The glassed-in porch, one windy night, was occupied by a dozen people who had ranged themselves haphazardly around Mr. Corinth. Conversation flowed from him, sparked occasionally by a question or a phrase of disagreement. Jimmie listened, with the rest. His attention stiffened when Mr. Wilson idly sat down on the fringe of the group.

“I know it isn’t fashionable,” said Mr. Corinth, “but a woman is a man’s opposite.

Women are the opposite of men. Everything has an opposite that’s as real as it is. The very fashion itself—the fashion of thinking men and women are alike—will change too.

Because fashions are attitudes, and every social attitude that doesn’t take into consideration the law of opposites is bound to get turned upside down, sooner or later.”

“I don’t understand that,” said a Mrs. Clevebright.

Mr. Corinth turned amiably. “The people of this country understand the reconciliation of opposites better than most people. That’s because we recognize so many oppositions. We have a certain constitutional tolerance for them. The beginnings of wisdom. I mean this: oppositeness is a concept that is a lot broader than what we usually imply by it. It means more than left and right, up and down, day and night, zero and infinity, freedom and slavery. No activity follows from anything but opposition. You can’t get anywhere, fanning air. A bulge of steam has to have a resisting piston. Life itself is a struggle of opposites. And opposition means—complementariness. It means black and white—but also blue and orange. It’s the source of power—and it’s the way to learning how to regulate the flow and direction of power. The one abiding discovery, in the democratic theory, was the recognition of the validity of opposites. Without an opposition a government is a one-way job. Going one way only is always—going nowhere. You’ve got always to recognize both opposing truths. Take freedom and slavery, for instance—”

“Yeah,” said a voice. “Justify that!”

“I’m not justifying anything! I’m explaining it! Most of you people know by instinct anyway. That’s why we fight so hard for freedom of speech here—to maintain the necessary operation of opposing forces. All right. Take slavery and freedom. Every slave is freed of a vast responsibility. Every free man has to assume great duties. There go those opposites—working together. A lot of free Americans, these days, want to have also the slave’s irresponsibility. Can’t be. If they do abandon their obligations they’ll enslave themselves automatically to whatever they got in trade for the abdication: money—power—position—an absolute government—whatever.”

“He’s right, you know,” someone else said.

The old man grinned. “Not me. Us! We all know it. Take a thing like Hitler. He is an opposite. The world around him was trying to struggle toward ideals of liberty, individualism, morality, restraint of force, decency, democracy, and so on. Hitler attacked with all the opposites to those ideals. He was able to, because the people under him had not yet understood the ideals; and also because they were willing to exchange freedom for the irresponsibility of slaves; and still more, because their circumstances did not seem suitable to their egos. But—they didn’t want to do a lot of hard, moral work. They’re still, so to speak, social infants. Or social ignoramuses. All right. Hitler took every single opposite. Force, torture, suppression of individual rights, conquest, amorality, autocracy.

He got going in a big way for the main and simple reason that we—on the other side—instead of recognizing the valid power of Hitler’s theorems assumed we had legislated ’em out of existence. Believing that, we ignored the contrary evidence. Hitler pushed ahead. We kept saying he’d collapse, because we believed we’d predisqualified him. As long as we felt that way our own feelings gave his opposite practices the power they proved to have.”

Even Mr. Wilson cocked an eyebrow. “Never thought of that,” he said slowly.

Jimmie’s boss turned. “Take you, Wilson. You and your crowd. You’ve been against war and in favor of peace. I’ve been on the opposite side of the fence. In my opinion, you’ve shut your eyes to my side of the picture. You won’t believe that this awful, negative pole of human energy can ever roll across U.S. and Muskogewan, and swamp the works. Not believing that you think I’m a wanton ass. I don’t think that about you though. Your love of peace and prosperity is also a love of mine. I don’t happen to believe it’s possible at the moment. But I do believe it holds the seeds of the future. I do believe it is the one powerful opposite we Americans mustn’t lose sight of, even if we eventually bomb the damned Rhine dry and march up it clear to Switzerland. It is a well-known fact that Satan gives the Lord his due, in a constant, respectful fear. But I see mighty few Christians around these days who understand how to give the devil his due!”

Mr. Wilson cleared his throat uncomfortably.

“To go back to women,” said the old man, grinning archly, as everyone—and especially the women—listened harder, “she’s the opposite of man and the complement of man, the inspiring flame and the devouring mother, the object out of which his awareness is born and the object that gives him his first intimations of mortality. In still another sense, she is his immortality. Insofar as the present attempt of women to look and be like men represents an honest effort to integrate and to reconcile oppositeness—it’s sound and it’s honest. That is—it’s truth. But insofar as it represents an attempt by women to become men, it obeys the law I’m discussing.”

“Meaning what?” Mr. Wilson asked.

“Meaning,” Mr. Corinth replied blandly, “the young men act like hysterical girls.”

He looked at Jimmie. “Won’t help, refuse to serve, duck the draft, rage and yell around about their rights. And the old men”—his eyes wandered to Mr. Wilson—“are just—old women.”

Audrey’s father, spare and towering, looked down at the rumpled chemist. “You’re talking nonsense.”

“Nope. You’re thinking nonsense. You and all who think like you. Looka here, Wilson. You wouldn’t do business the way you conduct your politics and nationalism. I mean to say, when a business proposition came up you’d be hell-bent for facts—existing and long-range. You wouldn’t close a deal until you were mortally sure nothing could rise out of the present that would ruin future chances to make money. To ascertain that, you’d be what you call ‘hard-headed,’ ‘factual,’ ‘forward-looking,’ ‘skeptical,’ and ‘strictly from Missouri.’ If there was a spot on the proposition, a little threat that might grow into a ruinous cloud, you wouldn’t proceed till you’d eliminated the spot, or arranged a bulwark against the cloud. You’re a good business man.”

“Thanks.”

“No compliment. You’re a stinking thinker—outside the field of return on invested capital. There’s a spot on America’s future called Hitler. People like Jimmie and I won’t rest until we’ve done all we can to eliminate it—or get ready for it—and we mean all. I repeat. We interventionists can easily understand you isolationists. But you can’t understand us—you get into a holy purple froth over us—because you won’t stop to examine the single, solitary belief we warmongers have in common. We believe Hitler might lick America. By bombers already talked about and soon to be in the air. By economic strangulation. By propaganda and internal division. By other methods we may not be smart enough to guess. Grant that one belief, and everything we do and say makes sense. Aiding Britain, aiding Russia, aiding any bloody damned raging rascals who will fight Hitler. Lending money, breaking the nation, if necessary, to manufacture arms, conscripting the boys, teaching the people of Muskogewan how to wear gas masks and put out fire bombs, giving our lives, arming ships, declaring war, seizing the Azores—

anything! We’re all-out guys—because we are absolutely certain in our heads and in our hearts that no American can sleep a safe night until the Nazis have been wiped off the slate and stamped into the grave of time. I won’t repeat the names of the nations Hitler has. I won’t talk about how a few armed terrorists with Wilhelmstrasse training can hold whole nations in slavery. I don’t need to go through the many flagrant reasons for our opinion—”

“Then don’t!” said Mr. Wilson.

“—but I will say this. You and your crowd have had two years—two long and terrible years—in which to prove that the thing we are getting ready for is a myth. You’ve had more than eighteen months since the blitz to convince us Hitler isn’t coming. You have money and brains, orators and a free press. You have congressmen and senators and leaders. You have radio time and you can print books. You’ve done all of it. And, day by day, more and more Americans have come over to our way of thinking—because, by God, you can’t make a case for your side! Not a convincing case! You can’t offer a guarantee that Germany won’t attack America someday. You can’t offer a guarantee that America can lick a Germany that may have licked everybody else on earth. All you’ve got to offer is your scorn, your negative hopes, and your fear of what preparedness and aid will cost.

None of those is worth a concrete damn! And as long as your crowd can’t prove—prove absolutely and beyond cavil—that we Americans are safe going along as we were, you might as well not try to talk. Because as long as there is a threat, a possibility, a chance, that the Huns are damn’ well after us—or will be—every man, woman, and child in America would be a sap if he was not exerting his utmost effort to whip them. Right?”

“There’s another position,” Mr. Wilson said hotly. “The position that Germany will exhaust herself before she gets to America.”

“Sure. And can you prove that she will? Mr. Wilson, what you can prove is that the Germans are bending every effort to make us Americans think they will be exhausted.

They want us to believe that the Russian campaign destroyed divisions, and hordes of tanks, and whatnot. It did, no doubt. But it also has left them with a couple of hundred or more divisions of the best-trained big-country invasion troops in history! The Germans wouldn’t like us to dwell on that angle! Our own army has a number of strategists who claim you can’t defend America—once an enemy has established bases inside the nation, and good supply lines. And if the German troops who trained in Russia landed here, they might blitz from Atlanta to Seattle!”

“But the general staff—” said one of the women.

Mr. Corinth looked at her.

“Unfortunately, the brass heads in the army and the navy think the way Wilson does. With their wishes. It’s natural. We brought them up in a ‘tradition.’ We thought that officers should have imagination beaten out of them; we sacrificed it for discipline, automatonism, excellence in as-is operation. Being patriotic, and being the victims of an ironclad environment, they—for the most part—can do nothing original to win our wars.

They don’t understand how the wars will be fought—only how they were fought. So that they must use up their energies wishing that the Germans were coming in ’43 just as they came in ’14 because that is the only way they learned to use their energies. That’s why an American admiral can strut smugly about on the deck of a battleship that has inadequate anti-air defenses. That’s why a general can conduct war games, and keep ‘score,’ without taking the possibility of air power into consideration at all. He does what he can do because he is a patriot—and he doesn’t do what he can’t do. That’s impossible.”

“But our boys have the spirit to whip anybody. We’re training ’em right now,” retorted Mr. Wilson.

“We may get enough new officers in time,” Mr. Corinth replied. “But whenever I hear an army man saying, ‘Give me the boys, and give the boys Springfield rifles, and I’ll show the old Boche what for!’ I get sick at the pit of my stomach. Because that poor devil will someday possibly be facing Boche —who are destroying himself and his men and the terrain and towns around them, from a point beyond Springfield range. Or from behind armor plate a Springfield and a Garand and a .37 millimeter gun can’t pierce! I get quite sore at veterans and old soldiers and the reminiscing legionnaires, sometimes. All they have is the right spirit. What they lack is the basic realization that, in twenty-odd years, one military machine—the German—has figured out how to make the World War lessons meaningless.

“Last fall, Mr. Wilson, the British were almost ready to quit. If the air blitz had gone on another ten days they probably would have quit. The government even had appointed the officials to treat with the Germans after the surrender. Whole towns, whole cities, counties, were so shell-shocked that they were unmanageable. Millions of people were stunned, numb, out of their heads. The end was at hand. The British knew it. And then—the Germans gave up the effort. That’s twice they’ve quit too soon. The third time—they may not quit. It’s all different, and it would be better for us if we didn’t have so many old soldiers around the land—good men—who are trying to get us ready to fight the war of 1914.

“The military wiseacres will tell you that there’s a defense discovered for every new weapon of offense. And so there is! I used to be more or less lulled by that theory.

Then I skimmed through the history of war to investigate it. And the sad truth is, that most of the great new steps forward in new weapons for offensive war—or new ways of using old weapons—have been immediately followed by the disastrous defeat of nations and whole continents! You can follow the story, from the phalanx and the catapult, through the Swiss bowmen and the use of gunpowder, right down to the tank and the bomber! There’s always a time lag before defense catches up with offense. It may be that an adequate defense will someday be invented against air bombing—as the old truism says it must be—but history leads me to suspect that the invention may very well come after the whole damned world has been subjugated, and the defense will be useful only in wars that lie centuries away from us now.”

Mr. Corinth stopped. Jimmie, who had been watching the faces, saw anxiety on many—anxiety that changed slowly to a hard, resentful determination. It was if a bigotry froze on the people, froze in stolid rejection of anything so adamantine as the old man’s words implied. They sat on the porch, uniting their wills anew to ward off bombs and torpedoes, rape and blood.

One woman, however, who had listened with a sorrowful expression, now said, “If you’re right, Willie, what’s to become of us all? I’ve always thought that war was shameful and sinful and a waste. I’ve believed that you should turn the other cheek. I’m a pacifist—a real one, I trust.”

“I know you are, Mollie,” Mr. Corinth replied. “And if everyone were like you, there wouldn’t be war. But—everyone isn’t. War is still a collective expression of individual irresponsibility, as I’ve said, and of individual greed and avarice. Comes out of a natural instinct. War is nature, Mollie. It’s only man—in the last few thousand years—who has begun to see that he can someday evolve his nature up to a high enough plane to quit making war. All the carnivorous animals kill the little, weaker ones for food. They kill each other when pressures get unbearable. And even the grasseaters kill grass, which no doubt feels it has a right to live also. The instinct of self-preservation embraces the will to preserve yourself in an environment most advantageous to you. As a human being, whatever you may happen to think of as an advantage—money, power, a bigger nation, raw materials, anything—can consequently become a motive for going to war. Living is a struggle; that is the very meaning of the word. It’s a struggle for individuals, and consequently a struggle for groups.

“When groups translate their instinct to struggle into a fight, they’re doing a natural thing. Not necessarily a useful or a necessary one—but a normal one. It’s much more abnormal for you, Mollie, to believe that people—as dishonest and prejudiced and ill-willed as you know they are—can institute a permanent peace, than it is abnormal for them to start killing each other. Being a ‘pacifist’—in the face of human nature as of this date—is about as sensible as insisting that all men ought to be immediately made millionaires, or that every ditchdigger should become a scholar. We just aren’t good enough for peace, yet. We’ve got to make ourselves that good, someday—but the day isn’t here! We still think we can make other people behave, without first establishing an integrity of our own—and we still think that will bring peace. It won’t. Peace isn’t a legislative, an economic, a legal, or a political accomplishment. It’s strictly a matter of total human nature—and human nature is still in the slums, mostly. Every human woe stems back to the individual’s unwillingness to face truth, understand and accept it, and to be responsible for his acts in the light of that acceptance. We’re in kindergarten at that sort of behavior—as I was explaining to Jimmie on the business of morals the other day.”

Mollie sighed. “I know what you mean, Willie. Sometimes I get resigned. Like Anne Lindbergh. I just think this Nazi horror is the future—ugly and inescapable. ”

“What about that?” someone else said.

Mr. Corinth smiled. “The wave of future? It’s medieval! Barbaric! Every Nazi concept is one that has already been found wanting—and discarded. For instance, the ancient Hebrews tried conquest, city-smashing, salt-sowing, race snobbery, and race purity. The rest of the world never forgave them for it. The Nazis ape the old Jews in many ways. And the Germans will probably pay the same price for their egomania.

“Waves of the past keep rolling back, to threaten the precarious progress of mankind; the belief that such waves represent an inescapable future is the purest form of superstition. Superstition’s strong stuff. But it does not understand progress, and so, will not accept it. Nazism isn’t the wave of the future, Mollie. It’s that old black superstitious curse rolled up again. It may, indeed, roll over you and me. If it does, then men will have to emerge again from it and start all over. As they have had to do before. You see, we’re all superstitious.”

“ I’m not,” Mollie said. “Not a bit.”

“Oh, yes, you are. You’re not superstitious about cats and ladders, maybe. You know that water is hydrogen and oxygen, and whatnot. But you’re superstitious about—well, say, sex and love. Being a spinster. Mr. Wilson is superstitious about the New Deal.

Jimmie, here, a very enlightened guy, is superstitious about his personal, private behavior. You see, our ideals, as we call them, are apt to be prejudices, or mere notions.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Mollie said.

“Well, take an ideal. Take decency—since I’ve been haranguing Jimmie about it recently. We all want to be decent. Try to be. Well, for one thing, decency changes. What was decent in Elizabeth’s court is indecent now. What we print in advertisements would have been shameful in that court. Decency is a human notion that isn’t even stable. And truth pays no attention to it—ever. If you think a particular truth is indecent, and examine it, you will find either that your own attitude is inconsistent with fact, or else that a human fault was at the bottom of the indecent truth. So, you can change your attitude—if that was the error—or go to work on the fault—if that’s your inclination. But in the latter case you have to know it was a fault—which is a big order. Because what’s right for one person is wrong for another, and what’s decent in one situation is indecent in another.

“ Every fact, every truth, depends upon some broader truth beneath it; and you can chase back the whole concept of decency to the point where you see that its existence in our heads is a matter of expediency, entirely. Every ideal is an expedient, at bottom. The man with the noblest expedients has the noblest life. Even mathematics is an expedient system. Beneath each system is a truer math. Under the geometry of Euclid lies that of Einstein. Under that, still another, broader, truer system, which Einstein himself is trying to discover. The life of the human animal is a conflict. The life of the human soul is a search. For truth. That’s all evolution is—figures growing more aware, fighting forever toward still further awareness, with every means at their disposal. Are you really so surprised that the fight breaks out on the low levels of war, when so many people these days are so distracted from their fundamental purposes?”

Mr. Wilson said scornfully, “You preach a good sermon, Corinth.”

“And you’re a heretic,” the old man laughed. “I believe in people.”

“So do I. And if men like you would quit perplexing and inflaming them, we could get somewhere with America.”

The old man’s lips twitched a little. “Mmmm. You’re getting us well along toward the slave status of a second-rate nation governed by the Nazi supermen. They really intend to do it, you know. That—or ruin us. I just happen to prefer ruin. You can rebuild where the plant is wrecked. Getting the people out of chains is harder. After all, only those who have no self-respect are afraid to die.”

Mr. Wilson scowled. “Haven’t you got it backwards! Isn’t it easier to be an alarmist when there’s no grave danger than it is to keep your feet on the ground?”

“That’s an error all you plantigrade chaps make! It’s a hell of a lot easier to keep your feet on the ground and do nothing risky, Wilson, than it is to pull ’em out of the mud and start doing a job that involves—or may involve—blood and toil and tears and a God-awful sea of sweat.”

“You sound like Willkie,” Mr. Wilson said bitterly.

“What’s the matter with Willkie?”

“What was the matter with Benedict Arnold?”

“He was a traitor to his country,” Mr. Corinth said amiably.

“In my opinion, Willkie betrayed his party, his country, himself, and the dignity of being a man!”

“Because he was loyal to the truth?”

“Because he sold himself out to Roosevelt.”

Mr. Corinth scratched his head. “I don’t get it. I do remember, though, Wilson, the last election. I recall you out haranguing the state with your customary cold eloquence. I remember you in the parade—and I remember when Willkie stopped here. You were damned near as hoarse as he was, at the time! I must confess, I didn’t think much then of the frog-voiced prophet of your party. I believed he was going to undo the things that Roosevelt did for his countrymen because they had to be done. The expedient things.

There’s nothing wrong with expediency, as I was saying, as long as the underlying motive for it is okay. I thought Willkie lacked it. Anyway, Wilson, he wasn’t deceiving you about foreign policy at that time, was he? He said he was for aiding England, didn’t he? He told you he was against Hitler, didn’t he? And he hasn’t changed, has he? He went over there and saw for himself, in spite of the bombings, didn’t he? Have you been in England lately? Do you pretend to talk with authority about England? Well, Willkie does pretend to—and he has the right. He still disagrees with the New Deal, and says so with brilliance and violence, doesn’t he? Just what the devil has he betrayed?”

“He was supposed,” said Mr. Wilson acidly, “to be a Republican. The Republican party is the opposition party. Willkie’s thrown in with everything the Democrats are doing—every main thing.”

“The main thing they’re trying to do is beat Hitler. You think he should be against it?”

“I am sure of it.”

“F or Hitler?”

“Certainly not!”

“For what, then?”

“For America! A well-defended, independent, standing-alone America.”

“There you go!” Mr. Corinth shook his head. “Wendell Willkie decided—and Roosevelt decided, and about two thirds of the people of America have decided—that there’s no such thing. That there will be no such thing, until the last Nazi has been written off. We aren’t to blame for the Nazis, you say. I say we are, indirectly—but even that doesn’t matter. We aren’t to blame for microbes, but we fight ’em with the lives of our doctors and laboratory technicians. We aren’t to blame for hurricanes, but we get ready for ’em. We aren’t to blame for fires started by lightning, but we spend a lot on fire departments. If a gorilla was disemboweling the man next door and had his eye on me, I’d worry. I’d call the cops and get a hatchet, anyhow. I’d even set fire to my garage, if I thought it would drive the gorilla off. I think that Mr. Willkie is worried about the gorilla next door. As a matter of fact, from being very dubious about Mr. Willkie—due to some of the gentlemen in your political party, and not wishing to start here an argument about the gentlemen in my own—I have become a great admirer of Mr. Willkie. I like him. He warms me. I trust him. I believe he is bright. I doubt if Franklin Roosevelt runs for a fourth term, in spite of your little jokes, and I would like the opportunity to elect this Willkie fellow.”

“Politically,” said Mr. Wilson, “he has committed suicide.”

“Politically,” Mr. Corinth answered sharply, “ you have. You—and the professional ironheads you’ve carried around. The Republican party in these United Sates is a chain-jangling ghost, a crusty anachronism, a mold-worshiping luster after the grave. Willkie may find a new body for it. Me, I’m sick of inexpert management of business. I have as big a business as you have and I know what I’m talking about. I’m sick of loud-mouthed amateurs trying to regulate affairs they don’t understand. I don’t like the administration attitude toward labor. I don’t think the laboring men like it themselves. I don’t like John Lewis and I never did think Greene was worth the powder it would take to blow him away. I don’t believe great undemocratic organizations should be allowed to flourish within democratic countries. I think labor unions ought to have to turn in the same reports corporations do. I think churches should, too, for that matter. I think that the leaders of labor are mostly self-appointed, because the laws governing unions aren’t like the laws governing the rest of the affairs of the nation. I don’t like self-appointed leaders anywhere. As a matter of fact, I don’t even like men with too-bushy eyebrows. But I do like Willkie.”

“When this war is over,” Mr. Wilson answered, “you’ll see! You’ll see America turn once more against war and against Europe—”

“Damn it! There you are! Postulating the course of future events on the last World War! Can’t you numbskulls ever realize that this isn’t a repetition of the last war? It may be, in a sense, a continuation of that war. I think it is. But, as such, it’s continuing simply because it never was finished the last time. Roosevelt isn’t Wilson. You Republicans can’t count on this war ending in an armistice and an economically nude Germany and a virtually untouched, unharmed American public that is anxious to forget trouble and have fun. It won’t end that way. It can’t. You won’t be able to get up a national reaction that’ll slap a Harding into the White House and put the pork and the spoils in the hands of you, or anybody else. After Roosevelt’s third term there may be another war president. Willkie would be my reformed idea of a good one. After that president there might be still another war president. Might go on ten, fifteen years. Why don’t you fellows think of what might happen for once—instead of what you wish would happen? Instead of forcing yourself to believe that what’s coming will be a replica of events a quarter of a century ago? What’s going on, Wilson, is a world-wide attempt to shift those old events. The Germans are trying to go on to the win they barely missed then. The English are trying to lick a menace that came back stronger, after being knocked down once. The Americans are about to get into the same fracas. And it’s going to continue, this time, until somebody—us or them—gets whipped to zero. Zero. None of your business deal armistices. None of your negotiated truces. None of your international diplomatic maneuvers. You guys aren’t in the saddle any more—and you don’t know it. Wall Street isn’t running things. Money isn’t running things. The people are. Willkie’s got a lot of people for him—millions on millions—and, my friend, any man who has the millions he has is still in politics!”

“Suppose,” said Mr. Wilson, “you’re wrong? Suppose the war does peter out.

Suppose it has to end in a deal? I think it will.”

“No. As long as it was about money, living space, raw materials, empire-envy—things, in other words—it could end in a deal. It’s not, now. It’s about something you can’t make deals over. Something that’s a lot more forceful than political boundaries or money.”

“What?”

“It’s about—hate. Just hate, Wilson. The hate of millions upon millions for the eighty million who have undertaken to betray, kill, and enslave them. Every Pole who lost his woman, every Czech with a tortured relative or friend, every Italian whose Mussolini has brought him to shame and hunger, every red Russian, every tormented Dutchman, every bleeding Belgian, every indignant citizen inside the sickly failure that is France—every one of these millions hates, night and day, with a hatred that we in America don’t yet know anything about.

There are men by the million who have sworn on their lives that, when the time comes, they will take knives and firebrands and avenge the butchery they know with a butchery so appalling that the memory of it will instill centuries of dread for conquest in those who are left. These men mean this. They will not forget. They are living for this alone.

“The people of Germany can feel, burning all around them, the circle of fire which—if they lose—will close in upon them and scald even their children without mercy.

That is why they will carry on to inhuman length. Not to do so would be to face inhumanity. And the gravest part of this thing—this thing that had to come alive in men when the monster notion of force was expanded to its uttermost size—the most dire index of this cauterizing horror against horror is the hatred of the English.

“You can’t make deals with that thing, Wilson. It has to run its course, like an incurable disease. It isn’t good for mankind, but the thing that gave rise to it was worse, because it was wholly wanton. Hate is the natural reaction to wantonness, the ultimate distillation of the passions of responsible people for those who will be responsible for nothing. Now, lighting up in the world—in China for the mutilating laps, the yellow rapists, the sackers of Nanking, and elsewhere for the mud-faced Huns—like the yellow glow of a sun too hot to bear, is this hatred.

“The Germans under Hitler have done a frightful thing; they are Frankensteins and their monster grows against them, day by day. In ten years—or, if they succeed, in even a thousand—it will be big enough to consume all of them. You can’t buy hatred, Wilson. When it exists, you can’t buy it off, either. Real hatred—the elemental force these Nazis have created—is as sacred to the hater as love. It is the same thing as love, Wilson.”

The banker said nothing.

Mr. Corinth cleared his throat. “All over America, beginning many years ago, were the small, brave voices of alarm. We called them ‘militarists’ in the early days. ‘Jingoes.’ Get ready, they said. Stop the Japs in Manchuria. Stop Ethiopia. Don’t let the Germans reoccupy the Rhineland. On and on the voices went, repeating the warning—to a nation that was dedicated to peace, prosperity, and an undefined asinine thing they called ‘normalcy.’ The voices rose as the crimes increased. Bigger navy, they said. Put the boondoggle money in rearmament. They were right. We were wrong.

“We filled our magazines with wishful advertisements for peace. War, we said, was murder. War, we told ourselves, was a money game. An economic matter. And, while we insisted all war could be prevented by negotiation, we also refused to sit at a table for any negotiation—thereby exhibiting the essential flaw in our own lulling argument. On went the voices. Nations fell. At Munich, America relaxed, as did Britain, with an eloquent sigh. Peace was assured. Hitler was a barrier against Communism—and no more. In the sigh was a note of humiliation—a decent people had been ‘sold,’ but the price was worth the gain. Anyway—it cost America nothing. The Paul Reveres kept riding, though. Poland next, they said. The Balkans. And then France.”

Mr. Corinth looked around at the faces. A few conversations had started at the other end of the room. Jimmie was sitting with his eyes shut, frowning. Mr. Wilson lay back in his chair, staring scornfully down his nose. The others kept making little motions, as if they wished to interrupt the old man. But his voice plunged ahead of them before their arguments could crystallize; he spoke with such assurance that many of his listeners—even those who stopped a while and went away—were evidently persuaded of his point for the time they listened. They would go back, for the most part, to their convenient views, when the memory of what they had heard became dimmer. The old man paused as if he were trying to summon some sort of idea, some point or topic, which would rivet his attitude irrevocably onto their brains.

“When France fell—fell so fast—a lot of Americans were frightened. By a lot, I merely mean a relatively large number. Most Americans think France is a dirty, remote, semi-civilized country where a second-rate people converses mainly about sexual perversions in an incomprehensible language. Even the majority of veterans who have been there think that. So its fall didn’t impress the national opinion much. The common people still thought one marine could lick a panzer division.

“But history, if future history is to be written in English, will talk about the Paul Reveres of this recent age. At the head of them will be Roosevelt—who saw and understood. Next will come Willkie. And, after that, a few hundred men and women. A few hundred —if America survives the coming years-will be responsible! Maybe it’s always a few hundred—who save things. They were all sorts of people, these few.

Reporters who had watched the sinister crusade set fire to the sullen Germans. A statesman here and there—a very few statesmen—who, like Churchill, had seen the misshapen things to come. Some scientists and refugees, a handful of college presidents, a few Jews, a few editors and publishers, by God’s grace, and a number of writers. If you think I mean Walter Winchell among ’em—I mean Walter Winchell. His rabid memoranda may have a bigger place in history than you think. The realist often looks shabby to the reactionary—and always survives his social superior in the annals. William Allen White, and Pierre van Paassen, Van Loon, Sinclair Lewis, John Gunther, William Bullitt, Henry Luce, and so on. You could name ’em all, if you’ve read anything except the propaganda of your own crowd. Different sorts of people. Dorothy Thompson and Thomas Mann and his kids. Pearson and Allen and Clapper and Alsop and Kintner. They wrote. They published. They formed committees.

“Do you think that’s all they did, Wilson? Do you know what has opened the eyes of your fellow Americans? These people. They met in New York and Washington and Chicago and Miami and every big city. They formed, not two or three, but thousands of groups. And they were not interested in trying to sell the American people a notion—as you are. They were interested, very simply, in trying to put before their fellow citizens the facts of what was happening. They talked till dawn. They lectured; they begged the microphones. They beat their typewriters when they could barely sit up straight enough. They made their living somehow, ran up bills, raced across the nation at their own expense-and they did not preach, like you. They said to all the people that they could reach: Here’s what’s going on; make up your own mind.

“They had faith in the Americans. They believed that if the Americans understood what was roaring and clanking toward them out of Europe, the Americans could be trusted to act. Unlike you, Wilson, they didn’t try to skid over, and ignore, the hideous implications of thing. They didn’t advise that a comfortable course could lead to a comfortable future. They advised that the facts were such and such, and the future, whatever it was, would certainly be uncomfortable. These Minute Men of Truth—whose every fact you called an unholy lie and a trick to lead us into war—these unpopular people who yelled, ‘To Arms!’ received no compensation, got no orders, had no millionaires to back ’em, no political big shots in their pockets—nothing!

“The bill of goods they felt impelled to offer was most unpalatable. Their sales talk had no appeal for people who just wanted to be left alone. They fought their Lexingtons and Concords, and when, for instance, by a single vote in Congress, America kept its army, these were the men who passed out cold on their desks with relief. A spontaneous little army—without leaders—because every man jack in it was a leader. An army that Hitler’s wizards in the Munich geopolitik bureau had not foreseen. Volunteers who could not give their blood, because there was no tangible attack, but who lent to the psychological attack such fury that the ruinous Hun policy of division and destruction, which was already swinging through America, began to backfire.

“I think someday a psychological history of this war will be written. And when that is done, the early heroes, the first strategical geniuses, the original guarantors of ultimate victory, will be these writers, these editors, these statesmen—who licked Mein Kampf with its own weapon: the pen. One angry person, one Hitler, one John Brown, one Christ, one Joan of Arc, can change human history. A few hundred angry men and women have changed America right under your nose, Wilson! America can be grateful in the future—that these people rose up like the embattled farmers and did as brave a job on a subtler front.”

“America in what future?” Mr. Wilson asked sarcastically. “America with two or three hundred billions of debts? America in the middle of a wrecked world? America without trade, because no one has the wherewithal to buy? America with—if your private panic is right—a million dead sons and cities in ruins? America bankrupt in a depression that makes the last one look like a boom? America geared for war in a world that has at last quit fighting? That America, you mean?”

Mr. Corinth said, “Yes, I mean that America. That America—and you can multiply your picture by five, ten if you want. Because I don’t believe the heart and the guts and the brains of America are as destructible as you seem to. I don’t believe an American—a bricklayer, a doctor, a motorman, a factory worker, a farmer, or even a banker—is soft inside. We’ve started something here—barely started it. I don’t think we’ll quit. We’re not the type. I do not believe that my American, standing outside his house, which has burned down, in the presence of his dead brother, with no bank account, and his kids needing food, will simply fold up and say, ‘I’m through. What’s the use!’ I don’t see the end of things as they used to be as being the end of everything, the way you do.

“Maybe the age of big business exploitation of natural resources is ended. Maybe the age of titanic private fortunes is gone. Who did the exploiting? Who had the fortunes? All the Americans? No. A hundredth of one per cent. You probably have a million, Wilson. I have. You take it away—and I’ll make another. Stop me from collecting that much—and I’ll still make plenty, while I have my plant. Destroy the plant—and I’ll borrow money from you to build another. Take away my domestic market and I’ll sell my damned paint in Timbuktu. Take the money from the Timbuks and I’ll trade paint for ivory and sell the ivory for piano keys or beads. Make the beads and keys out of plastic and I’ll teach the natives how to crochet—and sell that.

“You know what I mean. When everything that science and ingenuity can discover and invent has been applied to human welfare and living in every nook and cranny of the earth, when the astronomers have proved that there isn’t a potential buying population on Mars, then I’ll be content to fold up and say that business is due for a collapse, that business thenceforward will consist of nothing but repair and replacement. Until then, I’ll be in business—or guys like me. Great God! We were born out of England, and England is old and growing tired. Asking her eldest son to take over the world trade and the family control. Talking about union. Begging the prodigal to care for her old age.

“The Americans are not listening yet. Americans are still worrying because there are no more empty places on the U. S. map to find gold in. No more frontiers. Americans are trying to sell themselves on a premature senescence. Why, we haven’t started our adolescence! The next frontier is the planet. We’ve somehow got to thinking that the national bank balance is the sum total of available money for all future time. How the hell did we build up that balance from zero when the Pilgrims landed? Work. Invention. Trade. More products to sell. Higher wages. Has that got to stop? We’re at the beginning of our time, Wilson. We can spread our culture, our ideals, and our business interests, after this shambles, clean across the globe! You make a few loans in the Dakotas. You buy into a business in Pennsylvania. After the war, Wilson, unless you lose your head, you’ll have bonds printed in Chinese—good bonds—and you’ll own a piece of a railroad in Tibet. You’ll be in on a good thing in the coal fields in the Antarctic and you’ll have a hunk of a toll bridge in Afghanistan. You and a British corporation will be making a mint with electric refrigeration in India, and I will be selling a cold-proofing material not yet invented to the mining and lumbering cities in Siberia.

“Money isn’t money, Wilson. Money is just a crystallized form of human energy. And human energy springs into existence from ideas. A depression isn’t a disappearance of wealth—it’s a mental and spiritual funk. If money is real, then there’s no such thing today as the Hitler war machine—because the Germans didn’t have a dime. Brother, we aren’t started! And I tell you, this fight—the last one, maybe, for aeons—is to clear away the old ego-national debris for the coming of a world working together. The Germans want to accomplish exactly that—by enslaving the world. We’ll do it, though, by paying good wages, putting in voting machines, and teaching ’em to drink sodas and root for the Dodgers. So help me Christ, Wilson, every time I get to thinking about you isolationist bastards in this particular sense, I get mad enough to spit!”

At that point in the discourse Jimmie noticed a figure in the foyer. His nerves lunged. He rose unostentatiously and slipped from the room.

Audrey was closing a wet umbrella, under which she had run from the parking yard to the club entrance. The doorman took the umbrella and helped her remove a transparent raincoat. She shook droplets from her hair, saw Jimmie, and smiled. “I came here looking for you!”

“Let’s go in the trophy room. Nobody there, as a rule. And your dad is on the porch.”

“Is he? All right.”

He followed her into the place. Cases of silver cups gleamed dully there. A sailfish on the wall forever held at sword’s point the august head of a moose. Jimmie pulled the two most comfortable chairs into the least conspicuous corner, and brought an ash stand, and they sat down. He was trembling unashamedly. For a minute they looked at each other.

Audrey spoke. “I got tired of waiting—again.”

She sounded genuine. She seemed thinner and paler, as if waiting had caused her severe strain. That was the trouble with her act. She believed it; consequently, its effects upon her were real. The fact that it was an act now seemed to Jimmie a very great tragedy. Tragic, because the sight of her made him realize how extraordinary she would be if only she were sincere and unselfish.

Jimmie ignored her words about waiting. “I got to know your dad—a little—hanging around here.”

“You did? You mean, he talked to you?” She thought for a moment. “What did he want? It must have been something.”

“Wanted to know about life—and death—in the RAF.”

He had expected that she would understand. Instead, she frowned. “He did? That’s odd! Indulging the more carnivorous side of his nature, I guess. Some people have no scruples!”

“He wasn’t carnivorous. He was charming.”

“Oh, he can be charming. He has a hideous facility for reading people. And, once read, he analyzes them—and uses their vanities and their avarices to manipulate them.

People usually mistake that process for charm.”

“Mmmm. He was upset though. On account of your brother.”

She drew a violent breath. “My—brother!”

Then Jimmie was startled. “You didn’t know?”

“What about my brother? Has Larry turned up? Have they—?”

Jimmie told her.

When he finished, she was crying. “I’m so glad,” she said. “So glad! Even if he—well, even if we don’t ever see him again. We’ll at least know. He would be a pilot! He would be a night fighter, too. The very most formidable thing he could find to do. He was a great kid, Jimmie. He was capricious and vain, in a way, and ferocious. But he had a will like the current in a magnet. Once he switched it on it never stopped or weakened and it snapped up everything that came near. That was why he—left—so young. I suppose he went on in school. He’d do that, too! I never thought he would—because he was young, and because my family assumed so automatically that he would go to hell. You know. It poisons you. And some people—most people—believe that everyone who turns from their chosen course is rotten and crazy. Father believes that, especially. Jimmie! You can imagine how glad I am!”

He could see how glad she was. False and theatrical though she might be about herself and about him, she was undeniably honest about her brother.

“I can see, Audrey. What I can’t understand is, why your father didn’t tell you what he had found out.”

“Jimmie. Go get me that magazine! I can’t bear not to know right now how he looks!”

He brought the magazine from the library. Audrey had removed the traces of her tears and moved their chairs arm to arm. For a long time she stared at the photograph of

“Lawrence Wilton.” It was not large, but the features were quite clear. “It is Larry, all right,” she said slowly. “Only—he’s changed. He looks—softer. Not in character, but in his feelings.”

“Why,” Jimmie repeated, “didn’t your father tell you? He was tremendously moved that night.”

“No doubt. One decent hour with his conscience—alone. Oh, he didn’t tell Mother, I suppose, because he can get a certain revenge on her that way. Revenge for her endless nagging and irritability. And, I suppose, he didn’t like his mental picture of the swoon she’d go into. Mother would probably try to get the governor to get the State Department to get Larry right straight out of the RAF.”

“I don’t know your mother.”

“She’s been ill. Not faking, I believe.” Audrey shrugged. “How is it with you, Jimmie?”

He told her. Told her about his father, and Biff, and Sarah. He found that telling her was like putting down a painfully heavy load and resting. She listened with such concentration, such changes of expression, and yet with such complete and uninterrupting attention, that Jimmie described his inward life, explored it, complained about it, for almost half an hour in a single stretch.

At the end she said, “No wonder you’re low!” She smiled. “I heard about the great toss-out-the night it happened. A man who was there came over to Dan and Adele’s—”

“It wasn’t on a Wednesday! Or a Friday, either!”

Audrey’s eyes shone briefly. “No. I’m over there a lot—now. Anyhow, this man repeated most of your eloquence. I didn’t know, Jimmie, that you’d been—wounded.”

“Let’s skip that part.”

“Can’t I even see?”

That was like the more familiar Audrey. “No.”

“All right.” She performed an exorbitant pout, and dissolved it. “You’ve made me very happy anyhow—about Larry. Very happy. It was worth all the weeks I’ve been through. Just that, alone. Let’s talk about something different. Biff, for example. He is a cad, you know.”

“I’m beginning to think so.”

Audrey nodded, slowly, up and down. “Yep. Cad. The very kind the lady novelists write about. A hero—also. The novelists seldom stop to think that, in the case of superheroism—” she barely glanced at him—“there is a compensatory caddishness.

Generated, at times, by doting women. At other times, by too much adrenaline in the pride.”

“Damn it, you sound like Willie!”

“Oh,” she responded equably. “Willie said that first.”

“You’ve seen him?”

“Frequently. I’d about die if I didn’t. He’s my second love—next to you.”

“He hasn’t said anything to me about seeing you.”

“Of course not, you thickhead! I forbade him.”

“Oh.”

There was a pause. Audrey ended it. “I hear your dad has squabbled with your mother. Things are messy at your house. Biff’ll be home in a day or two—in good condition. Sarah’s in the dumps again. Quite a little party. It shows, according to Willie, that your family regrets pushing you off the threshold.”

“I didn’t want to go—entirely. I was just beginning to hope that they were still human. Then—whammo!”

“I know. Biff’s a cad about women, but someday he’ll give his time to some noble, if flashy, cause. Your father is really a good egg. Bank-struck. It’s like being stage-struck—only, with different boards.”

“So your father said.”

She assented with a grim nod. “Oh, he can recognize homely virtue. Just—never achieve it. Too complex. Sarah—I dunno. She’s a gorgeous, miserable creature. She must have been terrific the day she read my diaries—”

Jimmie started. “Willie told you that! ”

“We have no secrets. He told me also you threatened the—the”—she was mocking—“extreme penalty to shut her up. Very chivalrous. Never had the male of my species offer to kill for me, before. I was positively touched. And greatly relieved, believe me!”

“I was out of my head with rage—”

“—and acted very—what we call ‘British,’ no doubt. I recall Sarah’s Harry. A merry-eyed, curly-haired youth with a fine figure, if a girl may say so, and a talent for staying violently alive all night long. What did Sarah have to say on the angle that he was part Jewish? News, incidentally, to me.”

“Sarah didn’t have anything to say. Never mentioned it. Mother told me.”

Audrey nodded again. “I remember, too, your mother, in the period when she was pouring ice water on that romance. Buckets of it. I thought, then, that she was going to unscrupulous lengths. She practically locked Sarah in the house, and she tore around Muskogewan grafting little abscesses on the reputation of the boy. At the time I presumed the tales were true. Musicians have a way of getting around—too much. Maybe they weren’t, though. He didn’t have that roving look. Or the sultry one, like Biff. Just—gay. I—” She broke off.

“You what?” Her manner changed, stepped up its intensity.

“Jimmie! Do you suppose it’s possible that—that Sarah never knew her passion was part non-Aryan? I mean to say—”

“Good God!” Jimmie studied the idea. “ He’d tell her.”

The girl shrugged. “Maybe not. Maybe he thought she knew. After all, in New York, where he lives, it’s no secret. His middle name’s Jewish, and the family he’s related to helped finance the Revolutionary War. I remember reading that in a publicity story about the band he plays in. Suppose your mother got hold of the fact—”

“She did. She said so. Dad went to New York and came back with the information.”

“—and never told Sarah. Just sabotaged the thing on other grounds. The evidence would support the theory. Damn it, Jimmie, that would be a dirty trick!”

“Still—Sarah gave him up.”

Audrey was sitting straight in her chair. Her eyes flashed. “Wait! Let’s think! Your mother finds out your sister’s boy friend is partly Jewish. Your sister doesn’t know. Your mother is positive that it would make no difference whatever to your sister. So—she improvises. She turns the town against the lad. She makes Sarah fear that, if she married Harry, everybody would hate her and that Harry would probably desert her. That sort of stuff. Besides which, your mother works personally on the poor gal, day and night, to make her sign off. The pressure gets unbearable and Sarah, who is not an iron woman, finally does sign off—against her will, nature, desire, hope, wish, et cetera.”

“It could be,” Jimmie said slowly. “Shall we phone her up?”

Audrey smiled. “Efficient business man! ‘Do it now!’ It’s a delicate topic, Jimmie. Lemme think. Maybe we ought to phone up Harry, first. See if he’s still carrying the torch, too. After all, he may have gone the way of all flesh.”

“A point.”

Fifteen minutes later, excited, feeling at the same time a benighted fool, Jimmie was in a phone booth waiting for Mr. Meade to be summoned. He could hear a dance band playing faintly in the Chicago hotel he had called. Not faint was the pressure of Audrey’s chin on his shoulder. She had crowded into the booth with him—and unscrewed the bulb there, for “privacy.”

In a moment Jimmie heard a man’s voice, young, worried, suspicious. “Yes? This is Harry Meade. Is Muskogewan calling me?”

Jimmie swallowed. “Yeah. Hello, Harry. Look. This is going to seem like a cockeyed call to you. My name is Jimmie Bailey. Sarah’s brother. I just got back from England—”

The voice rose in pitch. Audrey could hear the words and the alarm in them. “Is something the matter with Sarah?”

Jimmie laughed. “No!”

“Then—!”

“Listen, mug! I’m her brother and I’ve just found out she’s nuts about you.”

“So what,” said Harry bitterly.

“So your family sicks dogs on me.”

“I’m trying to call back the dogs, if you’ll give me a chance. Listen. I’m a right guy. Are you?”

“I try to be. Go on.”

“You sound like it. Harry, did you ever tell Sarah that you were partly Jewish?”

There was a long pause. Very long. A voice incredibly strained. “Didn’t she know that—all the time?”

“I dunno, Harry. I’m going to find out. Only I wanted to be sure first that you were still—interested in her.”

“Interested!” The youth yelled the word. “Look! I’m mixed up, now! If you mean what I think you do—I believe I get it! I never did have one of those long talks about what went wrong—with Sarah. I don’t like scenes, and she was so darn mean and icy the last time I saw her, I got hurt about it—and walked out. You think it would make any difference if she didn’t know—and then did?” Jimmie could hear him swallow on the end of that.

“I’ll see.”

“Will you call me back, then? Hell! How can a fellow go and toot a clarinet, wondering about a thing like that—after he’s tried to quit wondering for a whole, long lot of months!”

“I’ll call you, Harry.”

Jimmie hung up. “Now—Sarah,” he said to Audrey. “I like the way this Harry talks.”

“Jimmie! I—look. Can I call Sarah?”

“Why, sure!” He smiled quietly. “The woman’s gentler technique?”

“Not that. But I thought—if we’ve guessed right about this—then telling Sarah will be doing her a big favor.”

“What do you want to do her a favor for?”

“So she’ll know I’m not mad that she read my diaries.”

Audrey was dialing. Jimmie slid behind her, and for a moment weltered in the thought that this was the essence of generosity. Then there came another thought—another possible face to put on Audrey’s deed: this was also the essence of a smart tactic. If Sarah were overcome with the news, overcome with joy—then, all the secrets in Audrey’s diaries would be forever secure.

Audrey’s father worked people that way, apparently.

Jimmie tried to shake off the suspicion—and he could not; although Audrey’s words, and her behavior, seemed to deny the truth of such a construction.

“Hello? Miss Bailey, please… a friend… personal… Hello? Sarah?… This is Audrey Wilson… Hey! I know you don’t want to talk to me… But I want to talk to you

… No, not about Jimmie… about Harry.”

Then, in a clear and gentle tone, Audrey told all about Harry—and the notion she and Jimmie had discussed. After that Sarah talked for several minutes. Jimmie could not hear a word. He heard, only, the low, intense pitch of his sister’s voice. But he did see that Audrey began nodding. And she sniffled once.

At last she spoke again: “No, Sarah… I wouldn’t do it tonight… no train and you couldn’t pack… Just phone him at the hotel… Yes… He certainly is expecting a call! Good night, darling… I’m glad—you feel like that!”

Audrey hung up. She buried her face in her hands for a moment. “That,” she said presently, with a sigh, “is probably a new high of some sort in marriage proposals. Sarah didn’t know. Said she might have heard once—and forgotten. But I think she just didn’t know. She was going to start for Chicago tonight. I advised her not to. But I bet Harry will start, tonight, for Muskogewan! And there will be merry hell to pay around town tomorrow! Wow!” Audrey laughed delightedly. She turned in the booth, hugged Jimmie, and she kissed him, lightly. “We’ve done a good deed that’ll last quite a while. Two lifetimes, maybe.”

“You’re a nice woman, Audrey.”

“Yeah. In a peculiar way—I am. Glad you found it out.”

“I—I—went back—that night—to Dan’s house. Did you hear me?”

Silence. “Went—back?” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“Oh, Jimmie! But you didn’t knock!”

“No. The house was dark and I could hear you—either crying or laughing—I couldn’t be sure—”

“Laughing!”

“I couldn’t tell—”

“Jimmie Bailey, did you even think, for one second I was laughing? Is that what you thought? And you sneaked away again! Laughing!! Does a girl who yanks out the lights and throws herself on a divan and practically chokes to death on tears for two hours sound like she was laughing! No kidding, Jimmie! I’m disappointed in you—terribly. And a telephone booth is no place to have our first quarrel! What does a girl have to do to convince you she’s mad about you, anyhow?”

Audrey pushed the door open. Jimmie stepped out, shakily. She followed, disheveled and damp from the warmth of the booth, and the anxiety of the calls, and the intense if vicarious emotion. Several people turned to look at them. The conclave on the porch had come to an end. Among those people was Audrey’s father. He nodded to Jimmie. He deliberately cut his daughter.

“I want to leave,” Audrey said. “I’ve got Dan’s car. Oh, Jimmie, I wish you had knocked! I don’t know if I can ever forgive you for thinking I might have been—laughing.”

“You going to Dan’s still? It’s late.”

“I live there.”

“ Live there!”

She walked across the foyer. The doorman produced her raincoat and umbrella.

“Certainly. We’ve kept it quiet, but it’s bound to spread around, sometime. Didn’t you see the affectionate regard with which Dad greeted me? Didn’t I tell you he’d throw me out for seeing you? Well, I told him I was going to—and he did throw me out. So Dan and Adele have given me sanctuary. And Mother, I understand, has taken to her bed.”

Jimmie said, “Hey! Wait! You can’t leave now!”

She smiled and whispered, “Night, Jimmie.” The man opened the big front door.

Wind skirled like bagpipes. Her skirts rippled. A sheet of rain splashed across the porch.

The door closed with a solemn bang.

CHAPTER XII

AGAIN, THE WEEKS ground. Jimmie felt like a hard lump in a dull-edged mill.

No word from Audrey. He had taken to chasing her, failed to catch up, and decided that this was a new act. Flight. Dan and Adele were always polite, on the phone or at the door.

She’d gone out—they didn’t know where. She’d run up to Chicago for the week end. Out.

Away. He hunted for her among her friends without success. He wrote a note to her. No answer. So he quit. The kind of game she played was too intensive, too unfunny, too exhausting. He heard that she had flown East, finally. Visiting somebody in the Carolinas.

Biff came home. Jimmie heard all about that, too, from the rant and waggle of Muskogewan tongues. Biff was healed—even could drive a car. But he was not well. The accident must have injured his head, or something, they said. Jimmie was worried about that—until he heard the rest of the story. Biff couldn’t sleep, had terrible headaches, demanded constant care. And so—he’d brought home a special nurse.

Genevieve, of course.

Jimmie smiled wryly inside himself. Outwardly, he shook his head and said it was too bad. He wondered what his father and mother would do if they found out the reason for Biff’s malingering. Dalliance. The moron!

The one bright spot in all that creep of time was a mere flash: Sarah’s call, with Harry—to introduce a new husband and rapturously to thank an older brother. Sarah’s good looks were that day organized into meaning. All the meaning was focused on Harry.

He was a nice chap, Jimmie thought. Humorous, clever, and violently but adroitly in love with his wife. They stopped at the club for a quarter of an hour and hurried away—in the midst of laughter. Honeymoon on the West Coast. From the rice-dripping new roadster, Sarah yelled to Jimmie, “Tell Audrey we love her to pieces! We couldn’t reach her or we’d have had her at the wedding!” Gears meshing. Tires slipping. Old shoes kicking on the gravel.

That was all. His work was going badly. Three weeks to learn that a process was misconceived. Another three, before that, spent only to be beaten to the same objective by a Czech chemist in New York.

Then the letter came.

A letter opened by the Censor. A letter from Froggie, in the lab, in London.

Jimmie snatched it from the desk clerk and vaulted up to his room, where the chintz curtains stood bright and stiff against a backdrop of muddy fairways, snow blotches, and the hanging smoke of far-off freight car locomotives.

“DEAR JIMMIE: “We discovered last night that not one of us had written you yet. Covered the whole staff with humiliation. Now we’ve set up a routine. Drew lots—I’m first on the list—drank you a ripping toast, the gist of which I will not tell you because, I understand, the censors are sometimes ladies—and you ought to get word from the Smythe Lab regularly now. “I was about to say that there wasn’t much news and no change to speak of. But I looked at the calendar—back over the time between the party we threw for your going-away at the Ritz, and now—and there’s quite a packet of news, after all. It’s a long time, these days. Binnie got it. Went over with some new—” the next line was missing from the letter—“and the flack caught him over a town you have seen, which the Russians would have called H in their dispatches. The bomb load blew—so it was quick and painless. “Sommes is minus the left pinkie—very proud of it—thinks they ought to decorate him. He stirred up one of those fabulous messes he is famous for—the kind you used to call ‘blue sky’ chemistry—and it didn’t precisely explode, but it got hot and spattery and a chunk of it burned away the pinkie neatly at the second joint. We gave him a little dinner at Gigli’s last week, and had the dessert served with ladyfingers Gigli himself baked, the replica of the missing digit—very realistic—said patisserie requiring no end of food coupons. Great success. Pinkie made a speech about the Empire and so on after the sixth double brandy—the last, incidentally. Very fine oration—and cribbed, in toto, it later proved, from an early treatise by the PM. Serious little blighter, but a lot of chemist. Girls dancing attendance at the affair: Maude, Ginger, Tess, Evelyn, Daisy, Rochelle, and Therese. Missed you—had an empty chair with a stuffed chimp in it for your proxy. ‘That’s all our casualties. Over at the field, there’s—” more words were missing—’and the list, since your time, is this: Gone—Waite, Petherbey, Pondonce, Bruntie, Tavis, Evans. Prisoners of war—Cochrane, Simms, Bort, Crummin. In the hosp. and slated to pull out in decent shape—Tedwell and Melby. In the hosp, and not to pull out much—Coates, with burns, and Timmens, all broken up like matchsticks. “Guess you knew most of them. It’s depressing and maybe you’d rather not have the list, but we all decided you’d prefer to know. We’ve been giving the Jerries raw hell, in stepped-up doses, for a long while now, and the hell comes at a high price, both ways—which you’re aware of anyhow and I’m an idiot for saying. “Cullen had an argument with Betsy Pell in the tea garden the other day. She poured a whole tray of dishes over his bean. Sommes went under the table like a fancy diver—thought the clatter was some new present from Jerry. Cullen brushed off the crockery and caught Betsy with a siphon—full on. They’re apart, now. Evelyn got Cullen on the rebound. And Betsy got Evelyn’s Edgar. Which will calm down life in the university set here for the winter, as you can imagine. “Davis hasn’t come out of his cubicle for a week and a half—they sent in a cot and food goes through the door, regularly. So we’re all expecting something big any minute. You know what he was working on, and there’s about ten quid up, all told, on whether he gets it or not. If the answer is yes, and if I were a Berliner, I’d leave the city for the Christmas holidays—and stay away for the next year or two. “Meanwhile 500 kgs. of Jerry’s best caught the west wing of the old lab last Thursday night. Nobody in it, thank God. Just a stray ship with one big bomb—and a lucky hit, I think, though the head insists it was the result of a fifth column steer. Nothing undone we can’t do over. If you find time, drop us a note about America. Any little thing you think of—how it feels not to have a war going on and a blitz around the corner every second. Send a snapshot of your ugly phiz. We haven’t one, we find, to our dismay. There are forty-odd million of us on this not-so-right and certainly not-tight-little-isle, who get misty these days thinking about your America. If there was a song called ‘God Bless the Yankees’ it would damned near replace ‘God Save the King’—certainly rival it. I know you don’t like tosh, but can’t restrain a note of it. I saw one of your convoys come in at—you may guess where—a fortnight ago, and I jolly well cheered myself into a laryngitis. Well, God help the Boche—and Merry Christmas, for when it rolls around. “Yours, “FROGGIE WILLIAMSON.”

Jimmie read the letter six or seven times. Each time he stopped at the lists of names and eyed them, individually. The lowering dark came down. He sat by his window, dry-eyed, until past dinnertime—alone, overwhelmed with recollections, nostalgia, affection.

Toward ten o’clock he went downstairs and sat at a table in the cellar bar. He had a sandwich and some beer and coffee. Upstairs in the main dining room an orchestra was playing and the Saturday crowd danced tirelessly. The long brown beams that supported the floor seemed to bend perceptibly with each accent of the music and the feet of the people making an incessant, treading sound. The effect was maddening. After Jimmie had finished his coffee he went back up the stairs. To reach his rooms he had to pass through the foyer. On an impulse he looked into the salon. He was going to write an answer to Froggie’s letter and he wondered what the fellows at Smythe’s Laboratories would think if they could be hanging over his shoulder, watching these people enjoy themselves—well clad, stuffed with food, at peace, and not wanting war so fiercely they could not see the witless willfulness of this war.

Jimmie decided the fellows would be scared by the sight. It would make them bitter. Then they’d try to laugh it off. Try to apologize for the mood and the attitude of the people on this dance floor, because these people, alone, sustained them.

He was vaguely surprised to see his brother at one of the side tables. Jimmie looked for Genevieve, but she was not with Biff. Not there at all, evidently. Biff had another girl. He was holding her hand under the table and the girl was nodding. Girls would always be holding Biff’s hand under tables—and nodding, Jimmie thought. This was a young girl. Seventeen, maybe only sixteen. She had dazzling blue eyes and yellow hair, and her thrill at possessing such an escort was rendered by vehement effort into an almost tangible determination to look sophisticated, to act sophisticated, to be sophisticated—no matter what.

Jimmie went away from the door.

The radiator in his room was clanking. He fussed with it for a while and managed to exchange the clank for a hiss-and-dribble. Then he sat down to instruct his mind in the exact mood required for the writing of a letter to the fellows. It took a long time to choose a mood. Afterward he moved to the wicker desk and made a score of false starts.

He had barely got into a proper swing when there was a sharp knock on his door.

“Come in!” he called.

It was one of the club stewards. “There’s a fire!” he said, excitedly. “Mr. Gleason sent me up to tell you! They think it’s the paint works!”

Jimmie streaked from his room and down the corridor. He turned right in its “L” and came to the window at the end. He yanked up the blind. He saw a glow in the night-pinkish orange-lighting distant houses and the groomed contours of the golf course. One of the buildings—he did not know which—had caught fire. He whirled and made for his room. He seized his coat and hat. On the way down the main staircase he realized that he would have to call a cab. He had thought of swiping a car. But he remembered that he was unfamiliar with the new models. He would spend more time fiddling with gadgets than a taxi would need to get there.

He raced past the dining room and slid to a stop. Biff was inside. Biff could drive.

He went back. They were dancing; the lights had been lowered. Jimmie forced his way through the warm, perfumed resentment. He spotted the yellow-haired girl first, cheek to cheek with Biff, standing almost motionless. He grabbed his brother’s arm.

“Hey! There’s a fire at the plant! Run me down, will you?”

Biff emerged from a trance. “Oh, hello, Jimmie. What? I will like hell! This is my first real night out.”

“Come on. I can’t drive. Take a half hour to get a local cab. I need help.”

The girl said, “Don’t go, Biff!” so passionately that Jimmie’s brother scowled. She had been too possessive, too demanding, for his taste. “Okay, Jimmie,” he said. “Lead the way.” He wiped the girl’s face with his hand-downward. “Be back soon, Gracie. Wait for papa.”

Like a man who hears that a friend is hurt, without being told the details of the injury, Jimmie concentrated on the flickering glow that shone against the horizon. Was it the warehouse? The laboratories? The chemical storage tanks? The factory proper? The office building? He thought of Mr. Corinth and wondered if he were on the scene, or if he even knew about the fire; he considered telling Biff to stop so he could phone the old man at home. But the car went on. Jimmie felt, in some taut, impatient periphery of his brain, that Biff was driving at—only a moderate speed. That same dimension of his mind decided that Biff’s accident had made him yellow about driving.

“Hurry up!” he said, without knowing that he had spoken.

Biff turned a corner, slowed for an intersection, and turned again, onto the boulevard that led out to the plant. It was not far. From the wide road Jimmie could descry the outline of the buildings in a black cutout against the blood-orange flame. Other cars were passing them, blowing horns. As they approached the property the night brightened—the lurid backdrop expanded—their ears were assaulted. Something had blown up.

There was no guard at the gate, which stood open. Already a file of cars waited their turn to enter. This circumstance filled Jimmie with a cruel rage—but there was nothing he could do about it. All Muskogewan was piling into family sedans and coupes and roaring out to the paint works to see the fun. Biff slowed to a crawl.

“Pull out of line!” Jimmie said. “Go around the fence, to the back!”

The scene was plain now. The fire, a great, incandescent glow, rose from the laboratories behind the mixing plant. In front of the long low building, on the weedy lawn, people parked their cars helter-skelter, jumped out, shouting to each other, and ran forward. From somewhere down the crammed road a fire engine wailed. Biff drove bumpily along the fence. The engine wailed again and a bell banged. Jimmie’s flesh crept.

For one maniacal second he thought that he was not in Muskogewan, but in London, and this was where a bomb had fallen—that siren, the alert, and the bell, the fire engines that everlastingly ran through the raids.

Then it was plain again. He looked back. An in—pouring of cars was ripping down the wire fence, section by section. The people were coming to the holocaust as if to a game.

But the engines were nearer. The thought that he and Biff had beaten the fire apparatus gave him another moment of disgust. Then he realized that they’d doubtless seen the fire almost as soon as the alarm had been turned in, and also that Biff had been driving fast, after all.

“Pull away from the fence!” Jimmie commanded. Biff obeyed. “Now—head her toward the fence and ram through!”

“What’s the good of going in? The two of us can’t put it out! And the trucks are here.” Biff said that—but he pulled away. He glanced at Jimmie’s face, grinned tightly, wound up his window, and stepped on the gas. The car shifted its gears.

“Hold on!” he said sharply. They hit the fence. It shuddered, slowed them, and peeled back. Then they were inside. “Over there,” Jimmie directed. “Okay! Stop!”

Jimmie leaped from the car. They were alone, at one end of the cluster of buildings. The heat was painfully perceptible; the light was blinding. Now, from time to time, minor explosions threw into the air showers of colored flame, and, with each blast, the crowd roared as if the spectacle were deliberate. Jimmie walked toward the heat. Biff followed, keeping the car at his brother’s side. He opened the window again and yelled, “Better not go closer! You’re going to make me spoil the finish on this boiler!”

Jimmie ignored him. He shaded his eyes with his hand as he proceeded for a few more steps. Then he whipped off his jacket and held it in front of his head.

“Come back!” Biff yelled again. “You can fry an egg on the damn’ windshield!”

Now, Jimmie came over to the car. He, too, shouted, for the night was alive with noise. “Just wanted to get the lay of things! To see what’s burning! They can save most of it—if they know their stuff. But if it ever gets in the turps or the benzine—! I’ll tell the firemen what to do.”

“ You’ll tell ’em!” Biff’s voice was sarcastic.

“Sure! Jackass! I know what’s where—and how it’ll burn! Come on!”

They drove past the blinding light and through the heat, fast. When they approached the nearest of the red trucks a fireman waved them back. Jimmie hopped out and asked for the chief. The man said that it was the chief’s night off.

“Whoever is in charge, then!” The man turned. “Hey! Kelly! Here’s a volunteer.”

Kelly walked up in his fire helmet. He had been bellowing orders about the attachment of hose. “Get out of here!”

“I work here. One of the—the bosses. I’ll show you what to do—”

“ You’ll show me what to do!”

“Listen! The place is jammed with chemicals. Inflammables.” He saw the man’s contempt. “Gunpowder. Dynamite. Damn it, man, with poison gas! Get that crowd back, first. Don’t use water on the center of the fire now! If the shed behind catches—stand clear. You won’t be able to—!”

The man reached out and shoved Jimmie, not with much anger, but almost playfully. “Listen, son. I’m running this fire.”

“Listen yourself, you thick Irish moron! You’re running this fire! Do you want to be responsible for getting half the people in Muskogewan blown off the map?”

“Thick Irish—! Why, you—!” Kelly thought of fighting. Then he was a little scared. He turned to the men near by. “Hey, you! Get the people outside the fence! Everyone of them! Never mind the cars. Tell ’em it’s dynamite that’s about to blow! And have your men stand back. Use chemicals on the main blaze!”

“That’s better!” Jimmie nodded.

“Now. Clear out!”

“If you’ll just let me get in there and tell ’em which chemicals to use—”

“I said—clear out!”

“But, man, I’m a chemist!”

“I don’t care if you’re a damn’ emperor! I’m in charge. I say—get out!” He saw that Jimmie was not getting out. He turned. “Hey! Some of you men! We’ve a bit of bouncing to do.”

“Come on, Biff,” Jimmie said dully.

They were in the car again. “I’ll drive. Just leave the motor running. Okay, Biff?”

Biff nodded. “Sure makes a wonderful blaze!”

Jimmie drove slowly, inside the fence, around the buildings. The flames spread to the shed. Jimmie stepped on the accelerator and the car raced to the far end of the property. He stalled the motor and sat with hunched shoulders, looking out of the window. As if the earth were a bass drum and the drumstick some celestial body, the first explosion swept upon them. Afterward came four others almost as tremendous at intervals. The flaming contents of both buildings ascended toward the red sky, turning over and over, halting, falling back. A wave of heat oppressed them.

The people vented a great, collective scream. He looked. They were out of danger. Only fragments and sparks fell into the crowd. Some, who had been knocked down, rose and ran—dolls against the hot backdrop. A vast, slowly turning column of black smoke rose in the center of the fire. At its summit a sphere of flame-licked darkness formed. This monstrous object also blew up, with a lush detonation, and it rained down everywhere ten thousand drops of burning liquid.

“That’s that!” Jimmie said. “The rest of it will be more normal! Unless the gas escapes—and I don’t think it will.”

Biff was cursing slowly, gravidly.

Jimmie started the car, aided by his speechless brother. He went back around the buildings, looking at them.

Then he stopped and jumped out.

There was something so electrical in this movement that Biff, also, leaped to the ground and ran to his brother’s side. A big building shielded them from the worst of the inferno. Jimmie was staring at it, staring with all his might. “I thought—?” he said.

“There’s a man in there!”

The building was on fire all along the ground floor. Flames licked through it horizontally. Flames sent the windows tinkling and reached out into the night, embracing the structure with yellow horror. Upstairs, revealed by the wan glow of a lantern, a human figure ran past window after window.

“It’s Mr. Corinth!” Jimmie said slowly. “He must have been working tonight.”

“He’s caught!”

“I dunno. He’s going in his office. Where the records are.”

The light, with the man in front, vanished and reappeared at another window. Biff grabbed Jimmie by the sleeve. “The old man’s trapped! I can’t help much! But if you take the ladder up that tank you could hop over to the roof and get down a skylight! Toss him out the window. I’ll break his fall. Then come back through the roof—or jump, yourself.”

Jimmie pulled his sleeve away. “There’s going to be a blast there—in a minute.”

“Then work fast—you ape!”

Jimmie said, “Chances are it would get both of us.”

“A chance worth taking! Come on!”

To Biff’s dismay his brother stood still, keeping his eyes on the window. The light retreated. It wavered and stood still. “He’s opening the safe,” Jimmie said. “So the stuff in it will burn! God! I wonder if I’d have—” Suddenly he cupped his hands and yelled with all his force. “Mr. Corinth! It’s me! Jimmie! Jump!”

Biff pawed at his brother. “He can’t hear you! Get going!”

“I’m not going,” Jimmie said.

“Not going! You—!” Biff pushed Jimmie toward the tank.

“Leggo. In the old man’s safe is the story of what he was working on. He knows the story, and I do. No other people. If the wrong guy got those papers—even a reporter—! That’s what he’s thinking!”

Biff’s voice was frantic. “You gotta get him out. He’s a nice old guy, Jimmie! You can’t stand and argue! He’ll burn!!”

“I gotta let him take—his own chance.” Jimmie turned toward Biff.

Jimmie’s face was pale as death. Beads of perspiration stood on it, beads that merged and dropped unnoticed down his cheeks. His mouth had split back from his teeth.

His eyes were as bleak as if there were nothing but blackness in their places. It was an expression of incalculable agony. Biff had never dreamed of such pain. He was sure—during one terrible moment of hatred—that his brother had turned into an abysmal coward. But as he looked at that unbearable expression he knew he was wrong. Jimmie was standing like that because he had to. Because it was more important—somehow—for him to stand still, in a safe place, than to go to the aid of the old man.

Biff began to sob, without knowing it.

But Jimmie did not budge.

He waited, bareheaded. He watched small flames rise up in the room where the dim light was. The light moved to another room. Then the old man showed at the window with his lantern. He was fumbling with the catch when the blast downstairs dropped him, and the floor, into a sea of fire. The entire building caught. Its roof split. Its pent heat towered in the air.

Biff also stood still, staring at the building that was the pyre of his town’s greatest man. Then, numbly, he looked down. His brother had fallen.

Jimmie lay still. His fists were doubled. They beat the earth. His face was flat-pressed upon it. His shoulders stirred with the torment of strong muscles. For a long time the two men stayed that way—together and alone, behind the blistering extravaganza. Biff slowly stirred into himself an understanding of what he had seen. A man, he thought crazily, does have a greater love than to lay down his life for a friend. Jimmie had a greater love—even than that.

So Biff waited till Jimmie was through with it, till he went slack and silent. The fire was jumping less prodigiously and the engines were moving around the ends of it.

Biff bent over and tapped Jimmie. “Cigarette, old man?”

Jimmie sat up. He gave his kid brother a long look. “Thanks!”

CHAPTER XIII

MR. BAILEY PARKED his car and walked down to the bonfire burning at the river side. He pulled off his mittens and held out his hands so they would warm faster. He stamped his feet on the frozen ground and searched the skaters with eyes that were tired but alert. He didn’t see Jimmie at first. The people went whizzing around and back and forth and through each other, like confetti on a miscellaneous breeze. Then Jimmie came shooting along from way up the river, skating like a hockey player; he dodged men and women and children with bird-flight motions, turned, showered crystals, and started to walk up the wooden ramp.

“Hey, Jimmie!”

“Hello, Dad.”

“They, said over at the paint works I’d find you here.”

Jimmie smiled a little. “Yeah. Nothing more I could help with today. We’ve got everything we can, going again. It’ll be six months before they get the shops rebuilt. And eight, or ten, for a new lab.”

“I know. I—want to talk to you. D’you mind?”

“Not at all.” Jimmie picked up a wood bench, tucked it under his arm, walked clumsily closer to the fire, and put down the bench. The men sat side by side. “Going to snow—about tomorrow. Snow hard. For a long while. What’s on your mind?”

Mr. Bailey seemed hesitant about getting to the point. “A lot of things. A hell of a lot of ’em. You seen Biff?”

“Not lately. Not in the last few days.” HI didn’t know you were taking care of the family of the colored man that got killed in the wreck.”

Jimmie shrugged. His face was bright with color. Underneath were the gray tones of fatigue and the sharp lines of strain. “What of it? Who told you?”

“Heiffler. I’ll—take over—that family.”

“Heiffler? Who the hell is Heiffler?”

“That intern. Came to the bank. He told me a lot of things.” Mr. Bailey sighed heavily. “Explained all about the psychology of Biff’s accident. I must say, I had to admit that I’d thought of it. Remember that evening at dinner? When Sarah accused us both?”

He took out a cigar. “I can see you do. Well, that night I didn’t want to be branded for having such an idea—before the whole family. Made me mad. But Heiffler explained it.

Maybe he’s right. And he told me that you had kept him from sending in a report to the army that Biff was—er—”

“Psychotic. Yeah. I did. He isn’t—any more.”

Mr. Bailey felt for matches and found he had none. He picked a board from the fire and used the hot end. “You know, if I’d discovered, at the time, that you’d done something to spoil Biff’s chances of honorably staying out of the service—I’d have been wild!”

“Wouldn’t have been honorable.”

Mr. Bailey nodded. “I can see the point. You’re a terrific stickler for basic facts.

But you were right. Biff’s put in for training, and if he got blackballed now I don’t know what he’d do.”

“‘Put in’? What do you mean?”

“Oh, volunteered. Enlisted. In another month he’ll be in shape again. Maybe less.

He was dawdling around the house there, just the fool with that nurse. That—what’s-her-name.”

“Genevieve. What happened to her?” Mr. Bailey looked at his son with an air of remote amusement that surprised Jimmie. “What always happens—to those girls. Some other man. A new case, professionally—and romantically. She got sick of Biff when Biff got well.”

Jimmie frowned. “It’s a pity, Dad, you never talked like that around home.”

“I act like a prig? All right. I believe in it—when you have growing kids. Trouble is, I learned just recently you three were grown up. Sarah getting married. Biff going around corrupting morals, and enlisting to fight. Jimmie, it seems to me that you’ve done a whole lot for Biff and your sister.” He spoke wistfully.

“Nothing much. Played older brother. I am one, after all. They are nice kids—in their ways. Needed schooling, like animals.”

“Why don’t you ask me what Biff enlisted in? Seems as if you would.” Jimmie cleaned slush from the runner of a skate. “Oh, I knew. Air Force.”

“You knew! Did he tell you?”

“No. I haven’t seen him, as I said. But I know Biff. Even in his most extreme mood of heroism Biff would do his best to maintain a glamorous background. Something the ladies would like.”

“Is there anything wrong with that?”

Jimmie turned toward his father. “Well, it’s flashy. Still, he’d make a peach of a flier.”

“You’re just a damned puritan,” Mr. Bailey said. Jimmie looked at him and suddenly laughed. His laugh was almost merry. “Gee! That I should live to see the day you called me a puritan! Maybe I am, though.”

The older man grunted. “You damn’ well are. Say, Jimmie. What really happened—the night of the fire? That was the thing that changed Biff. He won’t ever be the same again. But he wouldn’t tell me. I asked him, and he said never to ask him again. He said you had more insides than a herd of elephants. But that’s all. I—I’m your father, Jimmie—sort of, after all.”

Jimmie felt the touch of compassion. Mercy, in Jimmie’s present state of mind, was cheap enough. He wanted only to avoid all signs of drama. “I’ll tell you—if you’ll never repeat it. Somehow I think you won’t. And I think you’ll understand too. Other people would fail to. You know, I loved old Willie Corinth like a father.” His eyes lifted gravely. “Sorry. Willie was the greatest man Muskogewan ever had—maybe ever will have. Biff and I were scouting around behind the fire and we saw the old boy trapped in there. He could have jumped out the window, and we could have run fast and grabbed him—and I was set to try that. But he spent a lot of time burning the stuff in his safe. Took him forever to open it. I suppose—it was hot in there.” Jimmie halted. “Never thought about that!”

He was grimmer when he went on. “There was a chance of hauling him out—a ladder on a vat, a short jump to the roof, a flock of skylights. Biff saw that chance—and tried to get me to go. He was too rocky or he’d have tried. I realized that. I wouldn’t.

“I knew that if I tried Willie and I might both be lost. I knew what was in the papers that Willie was burning. It was the beginning of a very great idea. A new idea.

Something that would go a long way toward winning the war. I knew that Willie was scared the fire might not cook the stuff in the safe; scared that the idea—the principle—might become public. It was one of those things that, once conceived, any good chemist can develop.”

Jimmie spat. “It’s a beastly business, Dad, to let a good man die to keep a secret that may kill thousands of other men. Or—not even to try to save him. That’s what I did.

You see, since Willie was in there I had to stay out. He was burning the papers. And I’m the only other one who knew the idea. Not now, though. It’s gone to Washington. We were crazy to take on so much responsibility—even for a few weeks.”

“In other words,” his father said softly, “you refused to try to save him—in order to save an idea.”

Jimmie didn’t answer. He did not even look at his father.

Mr. Bailey coughed several times. He blew his nose. “So that’s what Biff meant by ‘insides’! Good God!”

Jimmie’s voice was as cold as the gray afternoon. “I think there is no need saying I would rather have gone up on the roof. I have been in a lot of fires. I’m not—too—afraid of them. As it turned out—and I’ve thought this over a thousand times—I’d never have made it. And I know, if I had, Willie would never have forgiven me for risking it.”

“He was a tough old duck,” Mr. Bailey agreed. “I presume you know he made me the head of his plant?”

Jimmie turned incredulously. “You!”

His father grinned over his chewed cigar. “Does it shock you? I’m a darned good business man, Jimmie! His will puts me in full charge of the business end. A committee of his chemist friends is to pick the technical head—unless you’ll be it. The part about you is a codicil.”

“You got another cigar?” Jimmie asked. Mr. Bailey produced one and offered it as if it were an important gift—solemnly, silently.

“I’m going back to England,” Jimmie said, after a while. “This chapter is washed up. There won’t be a lab for me to work in—here—for a long while—”

“You could help in redesigning the plant, Jimmie! I’ve already started jamming through the priorities. We’ll get material—and right now!”

“Lots of men can do that. The redesigning. Nope. I’m going back.”

“Mmmm. I don’t need to say—we’ll miss you.”

“Thanks.”

After a pause his father said, “What is it, Jimmie? What have they got—we haven’t? The British?”

“I couldn’t tell you, Dad. Not—with you feeling the way you do.”

“You might try.”

Jimmie smiled. “I couldn’t even begin to try!” But he did. “They were stuffy—class-conscious, contemptuous of other people. All that has been boiled out of them.

They’ve got the beginnings of some new kind of living. Being there exhilarates you without making you feel fatuous, if you can understand that. You know you’re with a bunch of people who are in the groove, and you don’t care about anything else. Whether you die doesn’t matter at all. They’ve got the high symbol of living for all the people everywhere—right in their laps! At the moment the demand of that symbol is to kill Germans. That’s simple; that’s essential; and everything else has to wait. You just realize all the time—that there is ‘ everything else.’ It’s enough to realize. Leaving them is like leaving a sacred place.”

Jimmie shook his head. “Coming here—well, here, you people don’t know what you have been living for. You don’t know what you want to live for in the future. Who you are. What you stand for. You’re scared of every little step that leads you into the future. And yet—the future exists, and some kind of steps must forever be walking toward it. In England they have one job above all others and they are doing it at any cost, because it has hope in it. Here, people just argue day and night—as if the whole course of man’s freedom, the existence of his soul, the promise of his future was a debatable topic—like whether or not to put new traffic signs on Main Street. Oh, hell! You can’t say it.”

Mr. Bailey started to speak and decided to say nothing. He flung the ends of several boards into the fire.

Jimmie stood. “Well, Dad. I probably will be leaving in a few days. I’ll come by.”

“You—you wouldn’t care to spend that time—with us?”

“If you want me to. I’d like it.”

“So would Mother. I dunno. She and I might change, I suppose.” His eye flashed.

“Not that I have, remember! I still think—even if we go in the war, and win, and things are all right afterward—it is not our affair. But it’s damned lonely at the house, now. Biff going—Sarah gone—you. Wilson was over last night. He’s full of conundrums he can’t answer—and tries to. Corinth certainly worked him over before he died. If the old man had lived I’d have bet Wilson would have lost the argument, in the end.”

Jimmie said, “Well—”

“Bring your stuff over before supper, huh?”

“All right.”

Jimmie went into the skating house to change his shoes.

The next day he walked around on the property of the Corinth Paint and Dye Works in a delirious fall of snow. A gang of men were clearing the debris from the rectangles where buildings had burned. As fast as they pried open a fresh, black wound in the whiteness the flakes swirled down upon it, healingly. When the whistle blew for noon and the men quit, Jimmie stalked toward the gate. He was wearing high boots and breeches; under his arm was a roll of blueprints. He waved at the man in the guardhouse.

“Going to lunch, Mat. Be back in about an hour.”

“Okay, Jimmie.”

“Hello.”

There was Audrey parked at the hydrant again.

Parked at the brightly scratched hydrant. Audrey, gleaming and delicious, against the lithographic landscape. She was smiling, as she nearly always was, and her face was sun-tanned to a deeper buff-pink than ever. Jimmie stopped first and came toward her slowly, explaining to himself in an idiot way that she’d gotten the sunburn in the Carolinas. He didn’t climb into the coupe. He walked to the driver’s side. Audrey had opened the window. He leaned on it.

“I hear you’re going to England,” she said. “I stopped by your house.”

“Yeah. In a few days.”

She looked at him. “Running away to think it over didn’t do any good, Jimmie. I threw the whole book at myself—all the rules about what a girl should do when disappointed in love. I traveled. I flirted with other men. I took long walks and got interested in other things. And it was just as phoney for me as a thing could possibly be.

You’re the only man I can never pretend with. You’ve just about—! I don’t know what you’ve done to me.”

“And I don’t know what you’ve done to me, Audrey. Something. I’ve always thought you were a fraud. A complicated fraud, like your dad. Acting. Never real, never sincere, because acting was an obsession. I just about couldn’t stand it—but I always barely could. You see I don’t live just for loving a woman. Not now. Not—ever. Even if I loved you with all my heart and all my life. I still—”

Audrey said, “Goodness.” She wrinkled her nose. “What talk! I understand that! A man who felt any other way wouldn’t be more than a third of a man. One third of a man—two thirds of a ghost. What the hell do you imagine made me fall for you? Why do you suppose I’ve been chasing you like a—a—a little beagle?”

“I thought it was that obsession. You had to prove something.”

She nodded. “Sure. I still do. I have to prove I love you. I have to prove I always will. Now—you’re going to roar away again. To England. So I’ve got to go to England.”

“What!”

“It’ll be a terrible nuisance. I’m broke. I’ll have to volunteer for some kind of job. Borrow money from someone. Vamp the State Department. Get Dad’s friends to high-pressure people. I’ll probably wind up in the Land Army, dressed like you, pitching hay. Instead of—”

Jimmie’s smile was absent-minded. “You really mean that, don’t you? You’re really going to England!”

“If I have to. You ought not to make me though, Jimmie. The only two men I revere are going to be there. You. And Larry, if he still—exists. You say we go to England—so that’s where we go. When I heard about it I was sore for a minute. I thought it was quitting. I thought it was beneath you. After all, you were born an American citizen. If Americans are behaving as badly as you say I thought you ought to stick around and help straighten them out. But I was sore only for a second. If you decide it’s England—I start looking at the travel folders. No matter what I get in, I could see you—once in a while.”

Jimmie thought. “You mean, you believed I ought to stay here, and you nevertheless decided that because I was going there you would?”

“We Wilsons,” Audrey answered, “are a rapacious lot. And also, we never quit! Besides, this is my first experience with being right, and knowing it. I don’t intend to let go of it. Sure, I thought you ought to stay. But I think something else, a lot harder. You’ve heard the theme. ‘Whither thou goest—’ Something of that sort.”

“Well, I’ll be damned!”

“In which case, I will too.” Audrey began to cry.

Jimmie looked over his shoulder, ignoring her tears.

He stared at Willie Corinth’s plant, in the process of reconstruction. A huddle of buildings, melting to nothing behind the shifting curtain of snow. Buildings to house the dreams of men—dreams that could be destructive, and dreams that could be beautiful and creative. Opposites. A quiet hung over the scene, a lunch hour tranquility; at one o’clock the clamor would begin again, the energetic progress of rebuilding on the tomb of the unrecovered ashes of Willie Corinth.

Thinly, far away, a boy’s voice hawked the first edition of the day’s Dispatch.

Something about England. The sharp-angled, stagey scene blurred before Jimmie’s eyes.

This, too, was something about England. Something about all human living. His mind screwed down like a vise until it squeezed out every thought of himself and every feeling about Audrey—until it rigidly gripped one element alone: the symbol he’d named for his father! Man’s freedom, man’s soul, man’s future, man’s hope.

He looked back very slowly. Their eyes met. Across the cold air between them—air misty with his breath—they exchanged surrender and possession.

“All right, Audrey. We’ll stay.”

THE END