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.