HE WAS SITTING, one evening, in the library of the club, when Mr. Wilson entered. Jimmie was certain that Audrey’s father saw and recognized him, but Mr. Wilson did not stamp out of the room, as some of the members had. Instead, he leaned on one of the periodical tables, his long arms stretched crutch-stiff, and he seemed to glance, covertly, at Jimmie in the corner with his book. To Jimmie—who could not help watching, because he believed he was being watched—it seemed as if the old man’s lantern jaw wobbled a little, as if his skin was whiter, as if his falcon eyes were only pretending to read the headlines scattered along the table. Because such behavior was surely foreign to Mr. Wilson, and because Jimmie himself was blue and lonely in this exile, he tried to look accessible. He lighted a cigarette and crossed his legs casually and nodded when the old man glanced at him again. Mr. Wilson immediately came over to the corner and sat down. He said, not too truculently, “Hi, there, Jimmie.”
“Good evening, Mr. Wilson.”
“Your dad was pretty rough on you the other day.”
Jimmie remembered that Audrey had said she lived under the same duress, that she, too, might be thrown out of her home—for an even smaller cause. For merely being seen alone with him. He looked at the other man with ironic eyes. “I’m surprised to hear you say so!”
Mr. Wilson did not, of course, appreciate the innuendo. He thought that the younger man merely referred to the argument about war which had split apart so many close ties in the town. “You made quite a ringing speech,” he answered. “Mind if I smoke with you?”
“Not a bit. Have a cigarette?”
“Thanks. No.” Mr. Wilson took from his pocket a cigar in a metal container. He uncapped it, bit the cigar, and struck a match. By its light, bright in the gloomy recess, Jimmie could see that he was trembling. “I mean—” he puffed—“I agree with a lot you said. I’m a practical man, though. I don’t believe you can ever sell your bill of goods to the American people. If I did I’d be on your side of this. Whip Hitler—and then take over the world’s business! Nice project!”
“It isn’t exactly—”
Mr. Wilson waved. “I know. You have a more idealistic notion. It would amount to that practically, though, if it came to be. Which it won’t. And I liked what you said about courage. One thing I admire. That’s the only disadvantage of some of my friends on the America Forever Committee. They’re there because they’re scared. I hate that.”
“It’s a point.” A silence fell. “Jimmie, how’d you get that scar?” The younger man fidgeted. “I didn’t mean to be theatrical.”
“Darned effective, anyway. How’d it happen?”
Jimmie peered out over the night-hung golf course. “Hunk of flying glass. Bomb.”
Mr. Wilson grunted. He seemed eager for the whole story. He leaned forward, to ask again. But his pride or some other factor restrained him. He sat back and smoked for a long time. Once, he looked directly at Jimmie and smiled, amiably, unsurely.
“You underrate your father,” he said suddenly.
“Do I?” Jimmie was not displeased.
“He’s a good banker.”
“Everybody says so.”
“I mean good, Jimmie. Not just technically. Good—inside. Shrewd, but not a widow-and-orphan squeezer. Tough, maybe, on people who can stand it. Not on the rest.
When they had that bank holiday your dad got his bank open before I did mine-and I was racing the old son-of-a-gun. Smart. I suppose in his personal safe he’s got a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of paper he’s taken over in the last thirty years. Loans people made that they couldn’t pay. He’s proud of the condition of that bank. And I wonder—I wonder if you ever heard that there were maybe a couple of hundred men in business in this town who would be out of business if your old man hadn’t taken some pretty wildcat chances on them—especially in the depression? Did you know that?”
“No,” said Jimmie. “Probably never thought a man could have loyalty to a bank.”
“I never thought much about his bank at all. I was never interested in it.”
“A man can get to a bank the way he can to an idea—or a woman. Or a religion, even. Then, if something crosses up his bank, he thinks whatever crossed it up is criminal, depraved, and illegal.”
Jimmie sighed. “I wish he’d loosened up more, then! He never showed me any sentimental side. I heard he had one—from Biff—once. But I never saw it.”
“You just said you weren’t interested.”
Jimmie grinned sadly. “That’s right. I did.”
There was another stillness. A man in a distant corner rattled a newspaper.
Billiard balls clicked in the next room. Jimmie looked with curiosity at the big, gaunt man. Mr. Corinth had said, once, that he ought to meet Mr. Wilson. But the picture of her father Audrey had painted was one of absolutist bigotry. Nothing like this. The man in the opposite chair seemed mellow; he was striking a chord in Jimmie’s nature that Jimmie would not have believed him able to comprehend.
Mr. Wilson reacted to the silent appraisal. “Don’t know exactly why I came over this way. I admire a tough adversary. Maybe I was trying to soften you up.”
“You did. Quite a lot.”
The older man mused. “You’re smart, too, Jimmie. You know, I almost wish—sometimes—that I were young again. Free of all my standard opinions. Free of belief.
Free of responsibility.” He laughed at himself. “Damn it, I’d probably be in the RAF—or some other crazy thing!”
It was easy to warm Jimmie’s heart. Mr. Wilson’s words had done that. Jimmie leaned forward eagerly and said, “I’ll bet you would!”
“What’s it like?”
“Like? What’s what like?”
“Why, the RAF.”
“Oh.” Jimmie momentarily suspected this was blood lust, like his mother’s—and knew it was not and unbent. “Like nothing you ever saw on earth before! Remember Churchill—the lines about: Never have so many owed so much to so few? It’s like that. In a quiet way. It’s holy—if you know what I mean. Without seeming so. Seeming, on the contrary, to be unholy. They have religion, too.”
“A lot of ’em die.”
“They all die,” Jimmie answered. Mr. Wilson fumbled his cigar, grabbed at it, showered sparks on himself, and beat them out. Jimmie waited. “That is—in two different ways, they do. They die every day, in their minds. You can say a brave man dies only once, but it’s more the other way around. A man with imagination, facing death repeatedly, seeing people die, dies with them every time. And it takes a lot of imagination to fly a battle plane.”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“Intelligence. Spirit. Quick, inventive brains. They skim the best—the very best—off the population. They give them the best they can make, in the labs and shops. Those boys—they know what they’re doing. They have to. They see each other go down in streaks of fire—alive. They fly each other back home—wounded—in bombers. Their chore is appalling—for a sensitive man. Maybe it’s the very unthinkableness of it that makes it possible for the sensitive, bright ones to do it. Sort of a challenge. The hardest challenge you can put to a person. So—they take it up, and lick it, and kid about it afterward.
Rather—in between. That’s the other way they die.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”
“I mean, not one of them is alive—the way you and I are right here now. Not one can be—till the war’s over. The day it is over, those who happen to remain alive will find it out. That’s all.”
“I see. You know a lot about the RAF.”
“Everybody—in England—thinks about them a lot. Everybody owes ’em—whatever they happen to have.”
“Know any?”
Jimmie smiled. “Yeah. There was a field not very far from our lab. We made some special stuff for them to drop on Germany—now and then. Trial stuff. I used to—I got to be pals with a bunch of them.”
“I see.”
“They could tell you things!”
Jimmie began to tell those things. For half an hour—because of the ardent attention of his listener, because of his unexpected proffer of something very much like friendliness—Jimmie talked. He hadn’t told any of those tales in America. It did him good to unburden himself. For half an hour, in that corner of a clubroom, flack broke, machine guns stuttered, bombs screamed, motors droned and coughed, men died, men lived to tell of death, planes made their runs across the black and ruined ribs of cities embossed upon their incandescent streets, and the old man hung on the words of the young one.
When Jimmie stopped, apologetically, Mr. Wilson said, “You sound as if you’d seen it.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean—personally.”
“Yeah.”
A pause. “You can’t be saying—!”
Jimmie chuckled. “A few times. After all, they had to have an expert along occasionally to observe the effect of that ‘special stuff’ I talked about. Don’t get me wrong! I never had any of that night-after-night, week-in-and-out grind. That’s the killer.
Just a few—oh, hell! A few junkets. As passenger. Deluxe trips. I wish—”
The older man leaned forward. His face was strange. “That—that wound on your leg!”
Jimmie reddened. He was going to lie again, but he changed his mind. Sooner or later they’d all know, anyway. The people in England did. His friends. Whatnot. The hell with it. He said, casually, “Not window glass, no. But what the deuce! What’s the dif? A scratch—that’s all. Somebody who gets clipped with a splinter from the leg of a—a billiard table is clipped as bad as somebody that gets it out of a muzzle on a Messerschmitt, isn’t he?”
Without answering, Mr. Wilson rose and walked away. Jimmie watched him—hurt, again—until he realized he was corning back. He brought a magazine. He spread it out on Jimmie’s knees. He switched on a bridge lamp. It was a picture magazine, and he had turned to a spread of photographs of night fighters getting ready for action somewhere in England. He put his long forefinger on one of the pictures. “These birds are Canadians. See that chap—fourth from the left? The one with the bum haircomb? In the caption it says his name is Lawrence Wilton. My son—ran away—when he was fifteen. That’s—my son.”