WEDNESDAY PASSED—and a Friday.
Jimmie knew he was going to count the weeks in that fashion. He would keep doing it, at least until he was sure beyond all doubt that Audrey was not going to the home of Dan, the music teacher, two nights in every seven, or until he was sure that she had stopped going there.
His family was preoccupied with Biff. Biff was better. He’d written two very amusing letters for the Daily Dispatch. One was about having your legs broken. The other was about pretty nurses.
Jimmie was relieved by his family’s absorption in his brother, because he was very busy with himself.
Two things had arrived at the Bailey home on the day after Biff’s accident.
Audrey’s diaries—by registered post—mailed, ingeniously, in a small carton that bore the name of the Corinth Works. That stratagem would cause his family to think, if they noticed the package, that it contained business matters. Mr. Corinth’s scrapbooks had also come—by truck. Into them, Jimmie had plunged. He had read every evening—from dinner to bedtime, and afterward. But he had hidden the diaries in his closet.
The big scrapbooks, thick with pastings, were like the other tangibles in the old man’s life: they showed imagination and resourcefulness, a keen ability to anticipate the future, a steady, critical awareness of present values. In the scrapbooks were editorials and articles and speeches, pronunciamentos by politicians and world leaders, maps and pictures, reviews of movies and reviews of plays, scraps of laymen’s opinions, predictions, interpretations, headlines—and personal letters, letters from people unknown to Jimmie and letters from people known to everybody in the nation.
As he read, hour by hour and night by night, the saga of the six years he had missed at home-edited and interpreted through the selections of the venerable chemist—Jimmie began to understand what had happened to America, to his own family, to Muskogewan, to everyplace and everybody. He began to guess, also, the tenor of the old man’s thoughts and hopes anent America’s future—after the war. That Mr. Corinth had such a catholic knowledge of world affairs was not remarkable.
Many other scientists had the same knowledge; and of them, many lived and worked not in the great cities, not in the gigantic factories, but in towns like Muskogewan and factories like the paint and dye works. It was, on first glimpse, somewhat remarkable that a man in a town in the center of a continent had such broad, important and intimate contacts. But, on reflection, Jimmie remembered that many Americans, in many villages, had stayed on their own doorsteps and made their mousetraps—and the world had built cement highways right up to their porches.
The realization that Mr. Corinth was a great man had come to Jimmie immediately, upon their first meeting as grown men—the meeting on the afternoon of Jimmie’s return. The realization that Mr. Corinth was a great American, and would always be known and remembered as such, came more slowly. Certainly Muskogewan had little inkling of the impressive qualities of its white-haired citizen. Muskogewan regarded him as an eccentric old duck who had a million dollars, made paint, and who knew a lot of important people, for some odd reason. Social Muskogewan felt that a good many of Mr. Corinth’s guests would have been happier with them at the country club than they were in the rather ugly Corinth home, eating the plain vittles cooked by black Rarietta, and sitting all afternoon in a drizzling rain with a .22 rifle, waiting for a groundhog to appear in a pasture—which the beast never did. A cabinet member had done that, once, with Mr. Corinth. There was even an editorial about it, snipped from the Muskogewan Dispatch, in the old man’s books. It said that, “our up-to-date and handsome city affords far better entertainment for personages of note than host Corinth seems to understand—or care about, for that matter.”
Jimmie learned from the bulky ledgers.
But in every moment of his reading, and during every hour of his day-long labors at the laboratory, the awareness of the other parcel of reading matter burned in the back of his mind. At night, as he lay in his bed, listening to the slick crackle of tires on the avenue and the pattering scratch of bare twigs on the walls, he envisioned Audrey’s diaries as if they had a penetrating radiance which he could see shining through his closet door. In the daytime, wherever he was, he was as conscious of them as if they had a musical tone that he alone could hear but that he could not escape.
He had every sort of thought about them. His principal idea was that to read such diaries was to eavesdrop. The fact that Audrey had voluntarily sent them to him made no difference. At least, for several days, he assured himself that it made no difference. It then occurred to him that there might be nothing in the package but blankbooks—that the maneuver was a practical joke. A psychological joke. To satisfy that suspicion, he unwrapped the bundle. A dozen leather-covered books were disclosed. He flipped the leaves. They were solid with neat, tall, ink-written words put down in a circular backhand. So it was the diaries, all right. He put them back.
He knew that, in a sense, the sending of the diaries did represent a psychological trick. Audrey expected that he would resist reading them. His training, his instincts, his nature, were calculated to make any such intimate process undesirable. She knew, also, that the temptation would obsess him. It would have that effect on anybody. The fact that Jimmie was intellectual and detached, moral in the deepest sense, and also chivalrous, would not diminish his emotional struggle about the matter.
By this strange, unconventional step she had said, Here, read this; this is my history and my confessional; when you have finished with it you can do as you please; but, at least, you will know as much about me and my inward self as I do. She had also, doubtless, filled the books with references to other people—references of a private nature.
That fact weighed heavily against prying into the gilt-edged books. On the other hand, Jimmie could imagine her saying, “Wouldn’t you rather know —than have to guess by interpreting gossip? There’s not a syllable in there about other people that isn’t the common coin of Muskogewan’s underground chatter; it is better to have the unvarnished facts than the heavily painted suspicions.”
She would say that, because that was the sort of girl Audrey was, or thought she was, or pretended to be.
Jimmie couldn’t make up his mind.
One afternoon while he was hard at work Mr. Corinth pushed into his laboratory so abruptly that the door flew back and hit the wall with a crash. The sound, coming in the still concentration of the air-conditioned room, gave Jimmie a monstrous start. The beaker in his hand slipped. He squeezed to recapture it and the pressure of his fingers shot it against an elaboration of glass tubes and fused quartz flasks. There was a shattering tinkle and a greenish brown vapor snaked up from a bubbling leak in the apparatus. The cloud rolled under the hood and out at one side. Jimmie instantly leaped back. He threw a switch that turned up the full suction of the hood. Then he spun around and virtually shoved Mr. Corinth out of the laboratory.
He slammed the door. He was shaking a little.
“It’ll take about an hour,” he said, “to clean the air in there. Even then I’ll have to spray the spot where I was working. That was mighty damned clumsy of me—not to say dangerous!”
“What was it?”
Jimmie chuckled uneasily. He walked close to the old man and separated his eyelids. “Didn’t get a whiff, did you?”
“Hell, no. I was a mile away. How about you?”
Jimmie bent his knees to bring his face level with that of the other man. “I don’t think so. Just take a look at the whites of my eyes. Still white?”
“Still white.”
“No greenish tinge?”
“No greenish tinge, Jimmie.”
“Thank God for that. On the rats it showed in their eyeballs in about twenty seconds. Maybe twenty-five. Made ’em greenish. In fifty seconds—no more rat. Just—rat carcass.”
“The devil!”
“If it proves to be stable enough, and portable, we’ll call it Corinthite.”
“We will not! No lousy poison gas is going to wear my name!”
“It won’t be a gas,” Jimmie answered, grinning. “Not when you drop it. It’ll be a liquid. A sort of a shower bath. It’ll turn into a gas later on—quite a bit later. At first it’ll be harmless. When it dries a bit—well, I wouldn’t send my worst enemy in that lab now.”
“You come over to my office,” the old man said, “and sit out the hour. Haven’t had a talk with you for ten days. I read your reports, of course, and I see by them that—for a man having fits—you’re doing pretty swell. Better than I figured. Much. That blitz training is red-hot! Wish I could send some more of my men abroad for a spell of it!” He chuckled and led the way into the shambles he called his office.
“You destroy my reports, don’t you?”
“I commit ’em to memory and I burn ’em on the floor here and I poke the ashes to dust. Except the ones Ben runs to Washington, naturally.”
“Mmmmm.”
“Jimmie. How goes the battle?”
“Oh, so-so. Dad and Mother haven’t had time to argue with me lately. They’re always thinking up some new fun for Biff, for one thing. For another, I’ve been reading your one-man history of the world every night.”
“Like it?”
“Lots.”
The old man grunted. “Whenever I think about what’s wrong with America, I think about how are the American people going to fix it. I don’t mean I think about that as a problem. I think about it as if I were reading the history of the future. Because they darned well will fix things! They’re that kind of folks—even if they do get mighty reluctant spells!”
“Guess you’re right.”
“Like this. Americans know darned well they’ve got to elect better people to the big jobs. Better senators and congressmen and governors and so on. They’re sure—positive, already, they’re doing wrong to put in a lot of nitwits, banjo players, grafters, good-humored poops, and so on. Americans understand that the problems of their government are too darned complicated, too scientific, too obscure, too numerous, for every darned citizen to comprehend. In the days of George Washington civilization was something pretty much every man knew pretty much all about. The fellow that made cart wheels understood the fellow that built schooners. And so on. But today, Americans realize, even a smart guy in Connecticut can’t say, offhand, what ought to be done about irrigation, soil erosion, and hydroelectric installations in New Mexico. Right?”
“Plenty right.”
“So—we know we gotta elect better people. Not just a pleasant guy with a loud mouth from the next county! So what? We’re sending more college men into politics.
That’s good. And more professional men. That’s good too. We’re electing more chaps like that. Someday the American people will get together and change the constitutional rules about the qualifications of public servants. Yes, sir, Jimmie. Someday you won’t even be allowed to run for the Senate, if you think New Guinea is in South America, or if you think a billion dollars is so much money nobody can imagine it, or if you believe that carrying a potato in your pocket cures rheumatism. Of course, a lot of college graduates regress fast, and a lot of ’em are saps, but passing a political-suitability examination will cut down the ratio of saps. The American people are going to demand basic information and sanity in their representatives, someday, just as they make people take exams for civil service or a medical license.”
Jimmie grinned. “I hope so. It would sure cut a swath in the politicians at work now!”
“Wouldn’t it just!” Mr. Corinth chuckled. “Then, another thing. You know why capitalists get so darned hot about Communism?”
Jimmie just laughed.
The older man shook his head. “That’s not why—not wholly. Not just because they’re afraid they’ll be ruined by it. They get frightened because, Jimmie, there’s something in it. Something to it.”
Jimmie nodded. “Everybody realizes that. People shouldn’t be jobless in a rich country like this, if they want jobs. People shouldn’t be undernourished at times when we have food surpluses. People shouldn’t have to work for marbles, long hours—”
“I don’t mean that. I mean, there’re two kinds of capital in this world. There’s the kind that comes from work. From labor. From manufacturing, and from invention, and from management, and from services, and from salesmanship. That kind. It’s earned. Competition is the driving force behind it; without competition, in my opinion, a man isn’t living. He’s a dead soul in a zombie body. Competition isn’t sociological or economic, Jimmie. It’s biological. It runs right straight through the whole history of evolution—and it’s the thing that made evolution. Not you, nor the Fascists, nor the Commies can outlaw it. If they try they get a zombie population. If the Germans aren’t zombies—and the Russkies—I’d like to know! Nope. Competition—fair and square, open and hard—is the heart of progress. And the money earned under it—is real money!
“But there’s another kind of capital in the world, Jimmie. The Commies have attacked it—and they make sense attacking it, I say. It’s what you’d call ‘luck’ capital. Money people get by luck, by chance, outside of creative competition. Money made by the usurious employment of money. Money made by gambling. Money made on long-range, irresponsible deals. Buckets of money, inherited. Money made by a man who buys a piece of land to farm, and then has oil spout up on it. The American people are starting, right now, to discriminate between earned money and lucky money. That’s what the SEC rules governing stock markets are really all about. That’s why we’ve got these whacking inheritance taxes.
“An American laborer doesn’t begrudge the money a man makes by producing something worth-while or doing a valuable service. But he sure does begrudge the money a man swipes, or wins by a market bet, or has handed to him by his daddy for nothing, or finds on the ground because he happened to buy the Jones farm instead of the Smith acreage. The Commies try to confuse the two. They want no Capitalism. But I can see what the Americans really want. They want everybody paid, and paid as much as the traffic will bear, for what he, personally, contributes to America. And they want nobody to be able to get rich from doing nothing. Seems fair to me.”
“You think,” Jimmie asked, “they’re really figuring the future out like that?”
“I know it! Americans, Jimmie, are the coming people. They’re born squabblers—but they’re also hell-bent to get things right. Worst crime here is to be wrong, or to be a wrong guy. Right now, they know what the issue is, but they haven’t got the words for it. Neither have I. That is, not a slogan. People—wide-awake ones, a few business men included—go around saying that the country has taken a ‘social’ slant, and will never let go of it. Then they look scared because they think you’ll assume they’re Communists. But that’s all they mean. The kind of capital that keeps men on their toes can never be abolished. If some nitwitted mob of Reds puts an end to it, then the generations that come afterward will have to invent it all over. If Hitler wins, and we get the super race, state socialism, long-range planning by which the Germans will live on the fat, and those of us who haven’t got the guts to die will work away our lives for a slum bed and soup kitchen food, why—it’ll have to be invented again for the Germans.”
“After the Tausand Yahr Reich,” Jimmie said bitterly.
The old man’s eyes shone. “Thousand years? Horse manure! And God everlastingly damn the Germans, the Reds, the New Dealers, and every and any other group or individual that has gone solid-headed with the idea that you can plan a system for the generations to come! Seems to me the last twenty years have been spent in discussing the long-range ideas of self-appointed intellectuals and leaders. It’s a dumb American habit, by now. The Germans think they have a social system that’ll last for ten centuries. The Reds think they have something that’ll go on unchanged forever. But look how Fascism and Communism have changed already! The New Dealers are busy trying to figure out a perpetual system of their own. The Catholics and Protestants are trying, as they have tried for ages, to lay down an unchangeable gambit of religious law and moral code for the aeons ahead. Everybody, these days, is busy to pieces trying to impose his notions, his will, and his prejudices on the future. What a thing! Men pick their kids’ colleges before they’re born—and enter ’em there. People leave wills with instructions that presume to carry down to the forth and fifth generation! Every legislative body in the country is trying to decide, not what to do now, but what people as yet unborn ought to do! The political cockroaches won’t change themselves, but, boy! will they legislate for the people ahead! Remember what I said about time? It’s another time problem. The present is. Nobody knows what the future will be. Trying to estimate it and arrange it is not only dodging the screaming present, it’s a psychological statement of failure. Every son of Adam and daughter of Eve, who doesn’t like the way things are going these days, wants to set up some kind of pet new machinery that will change them in the days to come!”
“Some of those efforts are expressions of ideals, hopes—”
“Oh, sure.” Mr. Corinth ruffled his hair. “Look. About economic systems, debts, prejudices, religions, people’s wills—the whole kaboodle of orders which we intend to hand the future! The future always has ignored them and always will ignore them! Which any ass can see if he stops daydreaming. But that’s exactly what democracy was built to take care of! People think democracy is a system. An economic-social-political system. A thing that has books you can go back over and check. A thing with a code and a creed and laws. So that when a Hitler pops up, people go back to Jefferson or Washington to see what to do. God A’mighty! Did Washington or Jefferson ever run across Hitler? I lave we any direct information from those birds on what to do in case of a world-Fascism threat?
We have not! Quoting them today is pure medicine-man stuff—at least it can be, because they didn’t foresee these days and these problems. What they did foresee was that the people ought to have a continuing say-so in their government—and that’s all, so help me.”
Jimmie grinned. “Wish you’d tell that to my old man.”
“I did,” Mr. Corinth said. “I made a speech a few weeks ago at a meeting of a bunch of gabby women and earnest men. I told ’em what democracy is. Not a form of government—but a way of maintaining almost any damned form of government. A fair way. An enlightened way. A way that gives the most people a chance, and government the most chance to do for the people. The wise men who founded this democracy fixed it up at the start so that nearly any solitary principle or law could be changed in any way. Excepting, you might say, the main principle that, in whatever is done, the majority should be the ones to pick the doers. That is absolutely all democracy is—and a hell of a lot, even so!
“It’s—to put it another way—the only fair and fluid system by which people can evolve together. Change and grow. Washington’s eyes would pop if he could see what we call democracy today. No slavery. Women voting. The central government stronger than the squabbling states—and able to assert its strength, thank God. Drink prohibited and restored. A war to keep together the union behind us. An industrial civilization, with a thing called Labor, that Washington never heard of. All those things weren’t here when he died; but he helped set up a constitution by which, one way or another, they could be.
“Democracy is a way of governing, designed to promote and encourage change. It’s not static. That’s the reason people who lose it always fight back to it. It’s the only possible permanent system. Naturally, it’s no better than people are. And people aren’t so good. I wish I could show everybody in every spot—high and low—the great simple, self-evident, unavoidable, natural fact that there never will be a gang, a group, a government, a state, or anything that is one solitary damned bit better than the people in it! Communism is no better than the Russians—a statement of fairly low degree in many departments. Fascism is no better than the Germans—a compelling argument to demonstrate its future possibilities—and lack of ’em. Muskogewan is no better than its citizens—impress upon it what economic and social systems and ideas you may. <…>
wrong end of the stick. Everybody’s trying to improve the rules and neglecting the character of the players. That, Jimmie, is all backwards. And you can only switch it around rightwise again, in a democracy—where every individual’s character counts, and if things get too sour it shows, and people have to do something to save themselves—something they have the set-up to do! In any other kind of government they have to stick to some damn’ plan—even in an opportunistic one like Hitler’s. And whenever a new, present fact shows a past plan is in error, a Fascist, a Commie, a bigot, a standpatter suddenly becomes a fool and a liar for all to see. So does his drop-forged form of government. Only a democracy, in other words, can go right on changing its mind, without collapsing. As soon as we Americans remember that what we’ve got is a way to live together and do things—instead of a hard and fast system we can’! tinker with—we’ll go to work on the changes that lie ahead and we’ll put ’em in effect. Changes, I mean, like earned capital versus lucky capital. Those businessmen who are going around bellowing that you can’t do this and you gotta do that because of the Constitution, are nuts. If they wanted alterations in their favor, they wouldn’t hesitate to hack at the law! That’s what the Constitution is essentially—a blank order for changing itself. That’s about all it is. That—and a starting point—is all! A democratic constitution is merely a springboard.”
Jimmie thought about the people of England—the easy, corrupt, short-sighted ways into which they had fallen. He thought of the prewar schism between the classes, of the sympathy the ruling class had entertained for Fascism, in the belief that Fascism and Naziism were strong dams against Bolshevism. They’d had a dread of Bolshevism—a just dread—but no less just than the dread of Fascism, which they had been too property—panicked to feel. He thought about the grim, grinning game they were playing now, as democrats, as men and women devoted to the clear purpose of saving the sum of those things that were most important to them. He thought about the changes that would have to come in England out of this new association of all the people. He wondered how much tumult, how much wanton greed, how much reasserted selfishness would rise in England after the war, when the settlement came. Not as much, he was sure—not a hundredth as much—as there was before the war. Not a tenth as much as there was now in America.
England had fallen in a coma. America was still in a coma. Dead, was Hitler’s diagnosis.
But England was not dead and, Jimmie thought, it would take half the men in Germany to kill England. America, though, was still asleep, still deep in a half-dream, half-recollection—a backward-looking fuguelike memory of “good times” that were good only because history had retained a solitary aspect of them. He considered that last, great “good time”—the reckless spree of the 1920’s—when so many men alive today had assisted at the drunk debauch—and suffered in the subsequent hangover—and were now busy with the single wish that they could get drunk again, regardless of the consequences.
Mr. Corinth yawned. “The English,” Jimmie said, “are learning about democracy.”
“The hard way. People learn best—the hard way. Sometimes I catch myself passionately hoping that the war will go on long enough so that the bombers will sweep over some American cities and give them the-the lesson of the hard way. We need it. Material luxury doesn’t postulate eternal, world-wide luxury for the human spirit—even if the advertisers and the popular psychologists try to persuade us of it. I could do without the philosophy of looking on the bright side. Too damned blinding. You can’t see the reaching shadows till the claws they stem from have you by the throat—if you’re a ‘bright-side looker,’ a ‘keep smiling’ idiot, a self-pronounced optimist. No attitude means anything unless it jells with the facts. Or unless it is transmitted into action that changes facts. We try to maintain attitudes without action, and irrespective of fact. What we need is the critical attitude. A reverence for skilled iconoclasm, a recognition of the values on the dark side. Yeah, Jimmie, I sometimes wish the bombs would drop.”
Jimmie shrugged. “I remember one morning, in a little mess of rubble, in London. There was a kid—a girl about ten—with her mother, ambling about meaninglessly and looking at everything. The child’s mother was out on her feet. But not the youngster. She talked to me—about the scene. She said, ‘The trouble with death is, it’s so— soiling.’”
Mr. Corinth winced slightly. “Mmm. And life is soiling, too, Jimmie. You’ve got to keep scrubbing your brains and your soul. One bath doesn’t cleanse a man for a lifetime. That’s the trouble with conversion.” The old man smiled gently and changed the subject without altering his expression or his tone: “How’s Audrey?”
Jimmie jumped. “I dunno. Haven’t seen her since day after I arrived.”
The corners of the old man’s eyes crinkled. “She sure must have made a big impression, anyhow, to be avoided for so long!”
“Funny way to figure.”
“Is it? I’ll tell you how to figure. First, figure out how you feel. Then, what you think. Next, figure the opposite of both. Finally, integrate the whole business. At that point you get an answer. There’s not an idea that hasn’t a true opposite. There’s not a human feeling that doesn’t set up the possibility· of its opposite. There’s not an act you can perform without instituting the potentiality of performing an opposite act. Newton’s law of action and reaction applies in the brain and in the soul. It applies to history as much as shotguns. Who you are in the end is entirely a matter of what choices you make between constant opposites. Applying the law, I guess that if you haven’t seen Audrey she is important to you. I could be wrong if I didn’t know she was important, the first time.”
Jimmie considered. “She mailed me all her diaries,” he said, finally, in an uncertain tone.
Mr. Corinth looked at him for a moment, and he threw back his head in a spasm of his soundless laughter. “What a woman! Have you read ’em yet?”
“Of course not!”
“I accept the ‘not’ and reject the ‘of course.’ I asked you to examine the lady without reference to her dazzling exterior. Impressed by your exterior—or something—she has tendered you an unparalleled opportunity to do that very thing. You, however, have ignored the chance, and probably hidden the diaries someplace.”
Jimmie grinned. “I’ll read ’em tonight.”
“Nope. You’ll bring them here, and I’ll read them.”
Jimmie shook his head. “That wasn’t in the contract.”
“I have her permission.”
“You have!”
“Yeah. She phones me every day.”
“Phones you!”
“To ask how you are.”
“Good Lord!”
The old man laughed again. “There’s one thing I now discern about Audrey. She is determined. She is as mulish and persevering as her father—a man you ought to meet, incidentally. One can only hope, in the case of an overweaning spirit like Audrey’s, that it will be oriented towards good causes.”
Jimmie shook his head helplessly.
Mr. Corinth looked at his watch—a monstrous contraption that stuffed his pocket like a goose egg. “I’ll have one of my truck drivers run you up to your house for the diaries. By the time you get back your lab ought to be habitable again.”