JIMMIE RODE to his home in the front seat of a pick-up truck, with a driver who chewed a toothpick and talked with enthusiasm and detail about State’s chances in the Conference. It was a long time—an age, an era—back to the days when Jimmie had thought about football. He did not know the names of the State players any more; he did not understand the rules by which the game was now played. But he made the seedy youth’s eyes bug out by saying, “I’ll have to see some games. I played for State once.
Won my letter. At end. My brother too. Biff Bailey.”
The man said, “My Lord, you aren’t Biff Bailey’s brother!” Jimmie laughed and pointed out the house. The truck stopped and he loped up the walk. Westcott was sweeping the porch. The front door yawned. So Jimmie went through it, in long, silent bounds, and up the stairs to his room. He threw the door open.
Sarah was lying on his bed, reading. Reading a gilt-edged, leather-bound book.
There were two piles of such books—equal-sized piles—on the counterpane beside her.
The bolster propped her head. She had kicked off her pumps. Her feet were lifted in the air and twisting. Her cheeks had a high, red sheen and her eyes glittered. She did not even look up when the door opened. She said, tensely, “Come in, Mother. I’ve found something priceless! ”
Jimmie felt his face blanch, as if his blood were heavy and the weight of it had dropped down into his belly and turned into iron.
“Come in! It’s—!” Sarah looked.
Jimmie went in and turned and closed the door.
The swift-changing complexion of her thoughts was in her eyes. Shock, fear, a search for an alibi, and the discovery of one. Then a short struggle for self-mastery. “I was cleaning out the closets! I found these! You can’t expect a girl to resist such a temptation.”
He said nothing.
“How did you get them?” Her blue eyes were certain, now. She interpreted his silence as guilty panic.
“What else did you find?”
“Oh, when I snoop I’m thorough! I found a picture of an English girl. You could tell she was English a mile away—by her bad clothes. Sloppy. I made the obvious mental note that she resembled our Audrey—the author, here. Quite a bit. She’s like a dowdy, spiritual Audrey. Who is she?”
“And what else?”
“Nothing. I found these and I started reading. I don’t think any novel I ever read was half as—as absorbing. Of course, I know a good many of the characters. That makes a difference. In fact, one or two of them were courting me—in a nice way—when they were courting Audrey, or vice versa—in a way that isn’t quite so nice. It’s all very interesting—and disillusioning. I rather thought I knew my stuff in this village. I begin to realize, though, that I’m a piddling amateur!”
“How long have you been reading?”
“All morning.”
Jimmie sat down in a chair beside his bed. He looked out of his window at the street. The truck driver was lolling in his seat with his feet propped on the windshield.
Jimmie kept his voice calm. “I assume that you have concluded Audrey is rather a—well—”
Sarah smiled. “She is—rather!”
“I see.”
“On the other hand—” Sarah sat up, after folding over the corner of a page in the diary—“well, a psychiatrist would be interested in her. She’s ruthless. She’s unconventional—to put it meagerly. She does as she pleases. She isn’t mean, exactly, although she’s hurt a lot of people in a big way. She seems to be sort of trying to find out something. That is, she seemed to be when she was eighteen and up through now—when she’s twenty. She doesn’t mind how hard she has to try, or what trying involves, or even being hurt, herself. She’s got nerve. Boy! What a nerve!”
“The search for happiness,” Jimmie said remotely.
“Happiness? I wouldn’t interpret it that way. I don’t think she gives a damn about being happy. Not in the cake and candy and comfort sense. She wants to be what she calls, ‘in the groove,’ doesn’t she? The times when she said she was weren’t necessarily comfortable times for her, were they? Don’t tell me you haven’t read these things!”
“No. I haven’t read them.”
“But they must have been here last night—”
“They’ve been here for a week or more.”
“And you haven’t read them!” Sarah laughed and stopped herself. “That’s a new high in something! What’d you do—steal ’em?”
“She sent them to me.”
“Sent—” The girl’s voice broke. “Sent them to you!”
“Unh.”
“She sent them to you? She must be crazier than writing all this even would indicate.”
Jimmie sighed lightly. “I dunno. Naturally.”
“But why? Why? Some kind of advertisement? Some way of showing you that—but any man with half a pair of eyes could see that gilded fireball was—! I don’t get it!”
“I’m sorry you found those books.”
“I’m not. Not by a long way! I’ll remember this morning as about tops in my eighteen years!” Sarah’s eyes narrowed. “Jimmie, tell me. You aren’t one of those—well—I was a kid when you left here. I worshiped you, and you never noticed—and all that. But I never knew anything about you, really. You aren’t one of those fabulous, innocent people, are you?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Innocent?”
“Oh, don’t sit there being English with me! You make me awfully impatient about less important things than this! You might as well tell me a little truth, for once. After all—” Sarah’s expression was cunning—“I’ve got the goods on you, haven’t I?”
Jimmie did not stir. He felt his heart lunge. But his blood came out of his iron viscera again. He knew anger—the insatiable, endless kind of anger, righteous and implacable, the kind of anger that is the shield of the world. “I don’t get that, sis.”
“Don’t get it?” The girl was deeply apprehensive again. His color had changed and his face was different. His voice was the same. She had thought for a little while that she had found the key to Jimmie, that he was not just a silent and determined person but, underneath, a weak and uncertain one. She was suddenly less sure about that. Her own fear—her conscience and her anxiety—moved her to a jittery assertiveness. “Of course you do! If Audrey sent you this—this—case history, it means she’s been simply utterly stunned by you in some perverse way. That means, she’s in a position that’s simply too utterly vulnerable! And so are you, because you’re much too genteel to let her suffer from the fact that you left her intimate papers lying around!”
“How do you mean—suffer?”
“Don’t try to intimidate me with that chill! You know how! If I started to let out just even a few little paragraphs of what’s in these books—! Boy! The blast would go across Muskogewan like a hurricane! Houses would fall in. Families would scatter.
Strong men would take cover. Mothers and daughters would go barging around with their fingernails filed into hooks!”
“But, Sarah, you don’t propose to do that.”
“It all depends. All I said was, I had the goods on you. Now—and for all time! You understand that. I don’t know what I want. Not anything, especially, now. You might be nicer to a few of my friends. I don’t care about mothers and fathers, but the way you cut some of my crowd the one time you went to the club—well, it was humiliating to me.”
“Just an amiable little social blackmail, Sarah? Is that all?”
“No, it’s not all! ‘All’—is whatever I want. Whatever. And whenever. Since I have got the whiphand over you by a miracle—and it’s just plain justice, for once in my life—I might as well do a job of straightening you out! For one thing, it’s time you stopped telling Father what for. He’s a banker, and a business man, with a lot of knowledge a chemist simply couldn’t have. He’s widely read and he has powerful friends. You’ve just been sitting in some dingy English lab watching a bunch of clucks suffer under bombing—so you take a sentimental viewpoint about the whole world! I must say, it gets my goat!”
Jimmie’s lips twitched faintly. “That, too. You’re going to take away my freedom of speech.”
“I’ll do better. I’ll make you retract what you said.” Sarah walked over and half sat on the windowsill. She leaned toward her brother; her expression was a mixture of unholy rapture and plain savagery. “I think, for instance, that it would be terribly nice if you joined the America Forever Committee. I’d like to see you make a few speeches, even, against helping win this war. You surely must have seen some things, if you look back honestly, that make you realize that some people in England don’t like America and would enjoy seeing America crushed.”
“Oh, several. Several.”
“I take it, then, you’ll join?” Even Sarah’s voice showed a sort of incredulity over the apparently absolute collapse of her brother’s morale. “Mother will be so happy! I’ll be so—amused. I did look forward to your return, Jimmie—with a terrible longing. A pretty nearly crazy expectancy. When it turned out that you were just a—a snot, I couldn’t bear it. That’s what makes revenge so sweet.”
Jimmie had stood more than enough.
He had led his sister on by a quietness that had suggested subjugation. He had wanted to see how far and how deep her malice would go. Now that he knew, his rage was explicit. He had to stop Sarah, at any cost. Any. That was the one fact upon which he must act.
Audrey had put her whole life in his hands—against his will and without his knowledge—but he had accepted the trust by the mere retention of the diaries. He could have sent them back. He had not sent them back.
Sarah had read them—or some of them. Black-haired, blue, blistering-eyed Sarah.
And Sarah was going to use her stolen information as a bludgeon, a dagger, an eternal wellspring of power and black laughter. That was her scheme. To be so willing, so eager to torture, she must have been tortured herself, first. Jimmie did not know by whom or by what—and there was no time to find out. Sarah was dangerous as she sat there—crouched, almost—in front of him. The danger had to be met.
“I couldn’t persuade you,” Jimmie said, after a moment, and not looking at his sister, “that what you intend to do is pretty scurvy? It’s blackmail, you know. Besides, how can I tell that you won’t do what other blackmailers have done? How can I tell that you won’t, someday, just hint to Audrey, say—or Audrey’s mother—that you know all about these diaries? How can I be sure that you won’t go on clubbing people to gain small advantages for yourself?”
Sarah said, “You’re really weak, aren’t you, Jimmie? You can’t tell what I’m going to do! That’s your misfortune. All you can be sure of is—that you’ve got to knuckle under.”
“You wouldn’t do the decent thing? I mean, just forget you ever saw those books?
Erase it from your mind? Lock it all up? Never mention it to anybody? Never show a trace of the effect of what you have found out? You couldn’t feel ashamed you read ’em and do the sporting thing of—skipping it?”
“I suppose you would,” she said acidly.
“I think so. And I think you will, Sarah.”
She laughed shortly. “You do? Why?”
“Because I say so.”
She laughed again. “You say so and I just—obey. Is that it?”
“Yes. That’s it.” Jimmie stood up. He was pale again. He towered over his sister.
His lean shoulders stooped down. His eyes looked into hers. “You’re eighteen. You’re adult. I’m not going to lecture you about right and wrong, good and evil. Maybe you wouldn’t understand if I did. But you do seem to understand power and violence. So I’m just going to threaten you, Sarah. By threaten, I mean I am going to make a holy pledge to you that I’d follow to the end of time, at any cost and at all costs. My pledge is about you—in the event that you ever do in any way use the knowledge you now have.”
Sarah did not like what she saw in his eyes—a shadow, a gleam, roving together behind the steady pupils, implacable as death. Nevertheless, she managed to laugh again.
“You can’t scare me, Jimmie. Not now you can’t, and you know it!”
“I can scare you,” he answered. He took hold of her arm, halfway between her wrist and her elbow. She tried to twist away. His fingers came down like machinery. She gasped and bit her lip. He relaxed his grip and went on. “I am going to scare you now, Sarah, and you will stay scared—because you are going to know what I mean—and you are going to know that I am not bluffing. I have learned, by watching others learn, that nothing matters in this life except integrity. In this case, we can call it honor. That is the one precious thing. My work—what I am trying to do—is very important to the honor of the world. It is not any more important, however, than my own integrity to myself. That, in fact, comes first, because everything else in the world is founded on it.”
“Let go! You said you weren’t going to lecture me! You’re hurting!”
“I’ve seen a great many people die, Sarah. People of all ages. They died haphazardly—but all of them in the line of maintaining honor. In the same cause I am no longer afraid to take the same punishment—and I am not afraid to dish it out. Do you understand that?”
The girl blanched. “Jimmie! That’s insane! Let—go!”
“Have you forgotten you read those diaries, Sarah?”
She writhed and tugged. “Let go! You’ll make marks on me! Just because you can torture me this minute, doesn’t help you. When you let go, I’ll do it sooner—and worse!”
He forced her to her feet and pushed her back on the bed. She tried, suddenly, to rake his face. He slapped her with his free hand. Sarah shuddered but she did not cry. He held her on the edge of the bed; his fingers grew tighter and tighter, slowly, while he talked. “You have just made a perfect, small-scale example of the hideous thing that has come alive all over the world, Sarah. The corrupt use of force. And I can see what must be done to crush it. I can see now why decent people so passionately detested to take the step. And you will have to see that I have learned how to take it. I am ashamed of us all, that this is necessary.” He paused. His voice was solemn. “Sarah, if you breathe a word of this business, I will kill you.”
She began losing her nerve. She forgot the pain in her arm. She met his eye with unstable hostility. “You’d be hung for it!”
He shook his head slowly. “I’m a chemist, Sarah. In the business of killing. I could kill you any time, anywhere, a hundred ways—painfully or quickly—and no one could find me for it. I want you to know that I will do this. And I want you to know, also, that I would not hesitate, even if I knew I’d hang.”
Her chin sagged. “I believe—you would!” she whispered.
“For the purpose of spreading ruin, you’ll have to agree to die. Do you want to?”
“I don’t want to die.”
“Be very sure. It might be worth it. Is it?”
“You’re insane!”
“Maybe. I’m telling you what will happen.”
“All right.”
“Quit?”
“Yes, Jimmie.” Her chest heaved. Her voice was hoarse.
“You won’t forget?”
“No.”
“Or make a slip?”
“No. My arm is—pulp.”
He let go of her. She sat still, rubbing the place where he had held her. Her breathing was repressed, stertorous. Her pompadour had come apart and tumbled. A wetness that did not run as tears blurred the blue-black make-up around her eyes. Jimmie began to collect the diaries that lay around her on the bed. He stacked them neatly and in order—unconsciously noting the years imprinted on the back of each book.
Sarah began a hollow-voiced monologue. “It’ll be very strange, knowing we have a murderer in the house-a potential one, anyway! Maybe I can’t talk, but I will think! You won’t stop that! I’ve always been beaten. I should have known you’d beat me again. I was entitled to one moment of the upper hand—one little season when I had my say and my way in this town. But I don’t get that, now. I don’t get that! I don’t get even that.” Her lip quivered. Jimmie was facing the closed door, stuffing the books under his arm. “If I had gone away with Harry, when he wanted me to, and told them all to go to hell, I wouldn’t be in this prison now!”
She said, “My arm hurts.” She threw herself down sideways on the bed and commenced to sob.
Jimmie whirled around. “Who’s Harry?”
“Never you mind,” she answered brokenly.
“Why didn’t you go away with Harry—if you felt like it?”
“People don’t go away with clarinet players. Not people like us.”
“Where’s Harry now?”
“Chicago.”
“Married?”
She shook her head.
“Did you love him?”
She shook it the other way and cried harder.
“He love you?”
“Of course he did, you fool! He loved me until Mother talked to him, and Dad—on and on, day after day—and he went to Chicago.”
“When did all this happen?”
“It all ended—last spring. Go away, Jimmie. I don’t want to talk about it. Least of all—to you.”
“I think I’d like to look up Harry someday—if you ever want to see him again, and if you’ll tell me more about him.”
Sarah sat up and sniffled. “You mean you’d help me—against the whole family? ”
“Is he a nice guy, sis?”
“He’s wonderful!”
“If he is—if you’re serious, if he’s serious—I’ll certainly help you. Against the family. Against the world.” She was staring at him with widening eyes. He opened the door. “I don’t like people being pushed around,” he said. “Except as an extreme defense measure.”
When he walked into Mr. Corinth’s office he was busy with the reflection that it took intense misery to bring the truth up out of the hearts of most people. He set down the books and smiled at the old man. “Sorry I was gone so long. Your truckman had quite a nap. You see—I caught Sarah reading these things.” He kept smiling in spite of the startled look in the old man’s eyes. “Sarah’s first notion was that she could use her information as a sort of club. I had a hard time dissuading her.”
Mr. Corinth’s alarm did not abate. “She’ll betray you, Jimmie! That’s a terrible thing! The girl is unhappy—and bitter! I’ve seen her about a good deal—!”
“She won’t betray me—or Audrey.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I told her I’d kill her.” Jimmie stopped smiling. “I meant it.”
Mr. Corinth’s gaze faltered and fell. He plucked at a shabby necktie that bore, in a faded, fabulous print, pictures of cowboys and Indians. At last he said, softly, “Yes. Yes.
I can see what happened.
And why you—!” He sighed and smiled gently. “It’s a fine mess we’ve got our souls in! We wonderful Americans!”
“She’s in love with a guy named Harry,” Jimmie said, moving away from the old man’s desk. “And my folks do not love Harry at all.”
Mr. Corinth thought some more, and chuckled. “Worth it already, eh? You’ve got a lot of magic, boy. The slow, silent kind. Don’t ever belittle the quality—or abuse it.
Who’s Harry?”
“I dunno. I’ll find out.”
“Don’t bother. I will. My wife knows all these things. Her frontal lobes are filing cabinets, full of secrets and intrigue.”
Jimmie grinned. “I guess my lab’s clear now.”
“Yeah. I was just over there. Not a whiff. I had a lunch sent in for you. Keeping it hot with a bunsen burner.”