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—”