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!