AGAIN, THE WEEKS ground. Jimmie felt like a hard lump in a dull-edged mill.
No word from Audrey. He had taken to chasing her, failed to catch up, and decided that this was a new act. Flight. Dan and Adele were always polite, on the phone or at the door.
She’d gone out—they didn’t know where. She’d run up to Chicago for the week end. Out.
Away. He hunted for her among her friends without success. He wrote a note to her. No answer. So he quit. The kind of game she played was too intensive, too unfunny, too exhausting. He heard that she had flown East, finally. Visiting somebody in the Carolinas.
Biff came home. Jimmie heard all about that, too, from the rant and waggle of Muskogewan tongues. Biff was healed—even could drive a car. But he was not well. The accident must have injured his head, or something, they said. Jimmie was worried about that—until he heard the rest of the story. Biff couldn’t sleep, had terrible headaches, demanded constant care. And so—he’d brought home a special nurse.
Genevieve, of course.
Jimmie smiled wryly inside himself. Outwardly, he shook his head and said it was too bad. He wondered what his father and mother would do if they found out the reason for Biff’s malingering. Dalliance. The moron!
The one bright spot in all that creep of time was a mere flash: Sarah’s call, with Harry—to introduce a new husband and rapturously to thank an older brother. Sarah’s good looks were that day organized into meaning. All the meaning was focused on Harry.
He was a nice chap, Jimmie thought. Humorous, clever, and violently but adroitly in love with his wife. They stopped at the club for a quarter of an hour and hurried away—in the midst of laughter. Honeymoon on the West Coast. From the rice-dripping new roadster, Sarah yelled to Jimmie, “Tell Audrey we love her to pieces! We couldn’t reach her or we’d have had her at the wedding!” Gears meshing. Tires slipping. Old shoes kicking on the gravel.
That was all. His work was going badly. Three weeks to learn that a process was misconceived. Another three, before that, spent only to be beaten to the same objective by a Czech chemist in New York.
Then the letter came.
A letter opened by the Censor. A letter from Froggie, in the lab, in London.
Jimmie snatched it from the desk clerk and vaulted up to his room, where the chintz curtains stood bright and stiff against a backdrop of muddy fairways, snow blotches, and the hanging smoke of far-off freight car locomotives.
“DEAR JIMMIE: “We discovered last night that not one of us had written you yet. Covered the whole staff with humiliation. Now we’ve set up a routine. Drew lots—I’m first on the list—drank you a ripping toast, the gist of which I will not tell you because, I understand, the censors are sometimes ladies—and you ought to get word from the Smythe Lab regularly now. “I was about to say that there wasn’t much news and no change to speak of. But I looked at the calendar—back over the time between the party we threw for your going-away at the Ritz, and now—and there’s quite a packet of news, after all. It’s a long time, these days. Binnie got it. Went over with some new—” the next line was missing from the letter—“and the flack caught him over a town you have seen, which the Russians would have called H in their dispatches. The bomb load blew—so it was quick and painless. “Sommes is minus the left pinkie—very proud of it—thinks they ought to decorate him. He stirred up one of those fabulous messes he is famous for—the kind you used to call ‘blue sky’ chemistry—and it didn’t precisely explode, but it got hot and spattery and a chunk of it burned away the pinkie neatly at the second joint. We gave him a little dinner at Gigli’s last week, and had the dessert served with ladyfingers Gigli himself baked, the replica of the missing digit—very realistic—said patisserie requiring no end of food coupons. Great success. Pinkie made a speech about the Empire and so on after the sixth double brandy—the last, incidentally. Very fine oration—and cribbed, in toto, it later proved, from an early treatise by the PM. Serious little blighter, but a lot of chemist. Girls dancing attendance at the affair: Maude, Ginger, Tess, Evelyn, Daisy, Rochelle, and Therese. Missed you—had an empty chair with a stuffed chimp in it for your proxy. ‘That’s all our casualties. Over at the field, there’s—” more words were missing—’and the list, since your time, is this: Gone—Waite, Petherbey, Pondonce, Bruntie, Tavis, Evans. Prisoners of war—Cochrane, Simms, Bort, Crummin. In the hosp. and slated to pull out in decent shape—Tedwell and Melby. In the hosp, and not to pull out much—Coates, with burns, and Timmens, all broken up like matchsticks. “Guess you knew most of them. It’s depressing and maybe you’d rather not have the list, but we all decided you’d prefer to know. We’ve been giving the Jerries raw hell, in stepped-up doses, for a long while now, and the hell comes at a high price, both ways—which you’re aware of anyhow and I’m an idiot for saying. “Cullen had an argument with Betsy Pell in the tea garden the other day. She poured a whole tray of dishes over his bean. Sommes went under the table like a fancy diver—thought the clatter was some new present from Jerry. Cullen brushed off the crockery and caught Betsy with a siphon—full on. They’re apart, now. Evelyn got Cullen on the rebound. And Betsy got Evelyn’s Edgar. Which will calm down life in the university set here for the winter, as you can imagine. “Davis hasn’t come out of his cubicle for a week and a half—they sent in a cot and food goes through the door, regularly. So we’re all expecting something big any minute. You know what he was working on, and there’s about ten quid up, all told, on whether he gets it or not. If the answer is yes, and if I were a Berliner, I’d leave the city for the Christmas holidays—and stay away for the next year or two. “Meanwhile 500 kgs. of Jerry’s best caught the west wing of the old lab last Thursday night. Nobody in it, thank God. Just a stray ship with one big bomb—and a lucky hit, I think, though the head insists it was the result of a fifth column steer. Nothing undone we can’t do over. If you find time, drop us a note about America. Any little thing you think of—how it feels not to have a war going on and a blitz around the corner every second. Send a snapshot of your ugly phiz. We haven’t one, we find, to our dismay. There are forty-odd million of us on this not-so-right and certainly not-tight-little-isle, who get misty these days thinking about your America. If there was a song called ‘God Bless the Yankees’ it would damned near replace ‘God Save the King’—certainly rival it. I know you don’t like tosh, but can’t restrain a note of it. I saw one of your convoys come in at—you may guess where—a fortnight ago, and I jolly well cheered myself into a laryngitis. Well, God help the Boche—and Merry Christmas, for when it rolls around. “Yours, “FROGGIE WILLIAMSON.”
Jimmie read the letter six or seven times. Each time he stopped at the lists of names and eyed them, individually. The lowering dark came down. He sat by his window, dry-eyed, until past dinnertime—alone, overwhelmed with recollections, nostalgia, affection.
Toward ten o’clock he went downstairs and sat at a table in the cellar bar. He had a sandwich and some beer and coffee. Upstairs in the main dining room an orchestra was playing and the Saturday crowd danced tirelessly. The long brown beams that supported the floor seemed to bend perceptibly with each accent of the music and the feet of the people making an incessant, treading sound. The effect was maddening. After Jimmie had finished his coffee he went back up the stairs. To reach his rooms he had to pass through the foyer. On an impulse he looked into the salon. He was going to write an answer to Froggie’s letter and he wondered what the fellows at Smythe’s Laboratories would think if they could be hanging over his shoulder, watching these people enjoy themselves—well clad, stuffed with food, at peace, and not wanting war so fiercely they could not see the witless willfulness of this war.
Jimmie decided the fellows would be scared by the sight. It would make them bitter. Then they’d try to laugh it off. Try to apologize for the mood and the attitude of the people on this dance floor, because these people, alone, sustained them.
He was vaguely surprised to see his brother at one of the side tables. Jimmie looked for Genevieve, but she was not with Biff. Not there at all, evidently. Biff had another girl. He was holding her hand under the table and the girl was nodding. Girls would always be holding Biff’s hand under tables—and nodding, Jimmie thought. This was a young girl. Seventeen, maybe only sixteen. She had dazzling blue eyes and yellow hair, and her thrill at possessing such an escort was rendered by vehement effort into an almost tangible determination to look sophisticated, to act sophisticated, to be sophisticated—no matter what.
Jimmie went away from the door.
The radiator in his room was clanking. He fussed with it for a while and managed to exchange the clank for a hiss-and-dribble. Then he sat down to instruct his mind in the exact mood required for the writing of a letter to the fellows. It took a long time to choose a mood. Afterward he moved to the wicker desk and made a score of false starts.
He had barely got into a proper swing when there was a sharp knock on his door.
“Come in!” he called.
It was one of the club stewards. “There’s a fire!” he said, excitedly. “Mr. Gleason sent me up to tell you! They think it’s the paint works!”
Jimmie streaked from his room and down the corridor. He turned right in its “L” and came to the window at the end. He yanked up the blind. He saw a glow in the night-pinkish orange-lighting distant houses and the groomed contours of the golf course. One of the buildings—he did not know which—had caught fire. He whirled and made for his room. He seized his coat and hat. On the way down the main staircase he realized that he would have to call a cab. He had thought of swiping a car. But he remembered that he was unfamiliar with the new models. He would spend more time fiddling with gadgets than a taxi would need to get there.
He raced past the dining room and slid to a stop. Biff was inside. Biff could drive.
He went back. They were dancing; the lights had been lowered. Jimmie forced his way through the warm, perfumed resentment. He spotted the yellow-haired girl first, cheek to cheek with Biff, standing almost motionless. He grabbed his brother’s arm.
“Hey! There’s a fire at the plant! Run me down, will you?”
Biff emerged from a trance. “Oh, hello, Jimmie. What? I will like hell! This is my first real night out.”
“Come on. I can’t drive. Take a half hour to get a local cab. I need help.”
The girl said, “Don’t go, Biff!” so passionately that Jimmie’s brother scowled. She had been too possessive, too demanding, for his taste. “Okay, Jimmie,” he said. “Lead the way.” He wiped the girl’s face with his hand-downward. “Be back soon, Gracie. Wait for papa.”
Like a man who hears that a friend is hurt, without being told the details of the injury, Jimmie concentrated on the flickering glow that shone against the horizon. Was it the warehouse? The laboratories? The chemical storage tanks? The factory proper? The office building? He thought of Mr. Corinth and wondered if he were on the scene, or if he even knew about the fire; he considered telling Biff to stop so he could phone the old man at home. But the car went on. Jimmie felt, in some taut, impatient periphery of his brain, that Biff was driving at—only a moderate speed. That same dimension of his mind decided that Biff’s accident had made him yellow about driving.
“Hurry up!” he said, without knowing that he had spoken.
Biff turned a corner, slowed for an intersection, and turned again, onto the boulevard that led out to the plant. It was not far. From the wide road Jimmie could descry the outline of the buildings in a black cutout against the blood-orange flame. Other cars were passing them, blowing horns. As they approached the property the night brightened—the lurid backdrop expanded—their ears were assaulted. Something had blown up.
There was no guard at the gate, which stood open. Already a file of cars waited their turn to enter. This circumstance filled Jimmie with a cruel rage—but there was nothing he could do about it. All Muskogewan was piling into family sedans and coupes and roaring out to the paint works to see the fun. Biff slowed to a crawl.
“Pull out of line!” Jimmie said. “Go around the fence, to the back!”
The scene was plain now. The fire, a great, incandescent glow, rose from the laboratories behind the mixing plant. In front of the long low building, on the weedy lawn, people parked their cars helter-skelter, jumped out, shouting to each other, and ran forward. From somewhere down the crammed road a fire engine wailed. Biff drove bumpily along the fence. The engine wailed again and a bell banged. Jimmie’s flesh crept.
For one maniacal second he thought that he was not in Muskogewan, but in London, and this was where a bomb had fallen—that siren, the alert, and the bell, the fire engines that everlastingly ran through the raids.
Then it was plain again. He looked back. An in—pouring of cars was ripping down the wire fence, section by section. The people were coming to the holocaust as if to a game.
But the engines were nearer. The thought that he and Biff had beaten the fire apparatus gave him another moment of disgust. Then he realized that they’d doubtless seen the fire almost as soon as the alarm had been turned in, and also that Biff had been driving fast, after all.
“Pull away from the fence!” Jimmie commanded. Biff obeyed. “Now—head her toward the fence and ram through!”
“What’s the good of going in? The two of us can’t put it out! And the trucks are here.” Biff said that—but he pulled away. He glanced at Jimmie’s face, grinned tightly, wound up his window, and stepped on the gas. The car shifted its gears.
“Hold on!” he said sharply. They hit the fence. It shuddered, slowed them, and peeled back. Then they were inside. “Over there,” Jimmie directed. “Okay! Stop!”
Jimmie leaped from the car. They were alone, at one end of the cluster of buildings. The heat was painfully perceptible; the light was blinding. Now, from time to time, minor explosions threw into the air showers of colored flame, and, with each blast, the crowd roared as if the spectacle were deliberate. Jimmie walked toward the heat. Biff followed, keeping the car at his brother’s side. He opened the window again and yelled, “Better not go closer! You’re going to make me spoil the finish on this boiler!”
Jimmie ignored him. He shaded his eyes with his hand as he proceeded for a few more steps. Then he whipped off his jacket and held it in front of his head.
“Come back!” Biff yelled again. “You can fry an egg on the damn’ windshield!”
Now, Jimmie came over to the car. He, too, shouted, for the night was alive with noise. “Just wanted to get the lay of things! To see what’s burning! They can save most of it—if they know their stuff. But if it ever gets in the turps or the benzine—! I’ll tell the firemen what to do.”
“ You’ll tell ’em!” Biff’s voice was sarcastic.
“Sure! Jackass! I know what’s where—and how it’ll burn! Come on!”
They drove past the blinding light and through the heat, fast. When they approached the nearest of the red trucks a fireman waved them back. Jimmie hopped out and asked for the chief. The man said that it was the chief’s night off.
“Whoever is in charge, then!” The man turned. “Hey! Kelly! Here’s a volunteer.”
Kelly walked up in his fire helmet. He had been bellowing orders about the attachment of hose. “Get out of here!”
“I work here. One of the—the bosses. I’ll show you what to do—”
“ You’ll show me what to do!”
“Listen! The place is jammed with chemicals. Inflammables.” He saw the man’s contempt. “Gunpowder. Dynamite. Damn it, man, with poison gas! Get that crowd back, first. Don’t use water on the center of the fire now! If the shed behind catches—stand clear. You won’t be able to—!”
The man reached out and shoved Jimmie, not with much anger, but almost playfully. “Listen, son. I’m running this fire.”
“Listen yourself, you thick Irish moron! You’re running this fire! Do you want to be responsible for getting half the people in Muskogewan blown off the map?”
“Thick Irish—! Why, you—!” Kelly thought of fighting. Then he was a little scared. He turned to the men near by. “Hey, you! Get the people outside the fence! Everyone of them! Never mind the cars. Tell ’em it’s dynamite that’s about to blow! And have your men stand back. Use chemicals on the main blaze!”
“That’s better!” Jimmie nodded.
“Now. Clear out!”
“If you’ll just let me get in there and tell ’em which chemicals to use—”
“I said—clear out!”
“But, man, I’m a chemist!”
“I don’t care if you’re a damn’ emperor! I’m in charge. I say—get out!” He saw that Jimmie was not getting out. He turned. “Hey! Some of you men! We’ve a bit of bouncing to do.”
“Come on, Biff,” Jimmie said dully.
They were in the car again. “I’ll drive. Just leave the motor running. Okay, Biff?”
Biff nodded. “Sure makes a wonderful blaze!”
Jimmie drove slowly, inside the fence, around the buildings. The flames spread to the shed. Jimmie stepped on the accelerator and the car raced to the far end of the property. He stalled the motor and sat with hunched shoulders, looking out of the window. As if the earth were a bass drum and the drumstick some celestial body, the first explosion swept upon them. Afterward came four others almost as tremendous at intervals. The flaming contents of both buildings ascended toward the red sky, turning over and over, halting, falling back. A wave of heat oppressed them.
The people vented a great, collective scream. He looked. They were out of danger. Only fragments and sparks fell into the crowd. Some, who had been knocked down, rose and ran—dolls against the hot backdrop. A vast, slowly turning column of black smoke rose in the center of the fire. At its summit a sphere of flame-licked darkness formed. This monstrous object also blew up, with a lush detonation, and it rained down everywhere ten thousand drops of burning liquid.
“That’s that!” Jimmie said. “The rest of it will be more normal! Unless the gas escapes—and I don’t think it will.”
Biff was cursing slowly, gravidly.
Jimmie started the car, aided by his speechless brother. He went back around the buildings, looking at them.
Then he stopped and jumped out.
There was something so electrical in this movement that Biff, also, leaped to the ground and ran to his brother’s side. A big building shielded them from the worst of the inferno. Jimmie was staring at it, staring with all his might. “I thought—?” he said.
“There’s a man in there!”
The building was on fire all along the ground floor. Flames licked through it horizontally. Flames sent the windows tinkling and reached out into the night, embracing the structure with yellow horror. Upstairs, revealed by the wan glow of a lantern, a human figure ran past window after window.
“It’s Mr. Corinth!” Jimmie said slowly. “He must have been working tonight.”
“He’s caught!”
“I dunno. He’s going in his office. Where the records are.”
The light, with the man in front, vanished and reappeared at another window. Biff grabbed Jimmie by the sleeve. “The old man’s trapped! I can’t help much! But if you take the ladder up that tank you could hop over to the roof and get down a skylight! Toss him out the window. I’ll break his fall. Then come back through the roof—or jump, yourself.”
Jimmie pulled his sleeve away. “There’s going to be a blast there—in a minute.”
“Then work fast—you ape!”
Jimmie said, “Chances are it would get both of us.”
“A chance worth taking! Come on!”
To Biff’s dismay his brother stood still, keeping his eyes on the window. The light retreated. It wavered and stood still. “He’s opening the safe,” Jimmie said. “So the stuff in it will burn! God! I wonder if I’d have—” Suddenly he cupped his hands and yelled with all his force. “Mr. Corinth! It’s me! Jimmie! Jump!”
Biff pawed at his brother. “He can’t hear you! Get going!”
“I’m not going,” Jimmie said.
“Not going! You—!” Biff pushed Jimmie toward the tank.
“Leggo. In the old man’s safe is the story of what he was working on. He knows the story, and I do. No other people. If the wrong guy got those papers—even a reporter—! That’s what he’s thinking!”
Biff’s voice was frantic. “You gotta get him out. He’s a nice old guy, Jimmie! You can’t stand and argue! He’ll burn!!”
“I gotta let him take—his own chance.” Jimmie turned toward Biff.
Jimmie’s face was pale as death. Beads of perspiration stood on it, beads that merged and dropped unnoticed down his cheeks. His mouth had split back from his teeth.
His eyes were as bleak as if there were nothing but blackness in their places. It was an expression of incalculable agony. Biff had never dreamed of such pain. He was sure—during one terrible moment of hatred—that his brother had turned into an abysmal coward. But as he looked at that unbearable expression he knew he was wrong. Jimmie was standing like that because he had to. Because it was more important—somehow—for him to stand still, in a safe place, than to go to the aid of the old man.
Biff began to sob, without knowing it.
But Jimmie did not budge.
He waited, bareheaded. He watched small flames rise up in the room where the dim light was. The light moved to another room. Then the old man showed at the window with his lantern. He was fumbling with the catch when the blast downstairs dropped him, and the floor, into a sea of fire. The entire building caught. Its roof split. Its pent heat towered in the air.
Biff also stood still, staring at the building that was the pyre of his town’s greatest man. Then, numbly, he looked down. His brother had fallen.
Jimmie lay still. His fists were doubled. They beat the earth. His face was flat-pressed upon it. His shoulders stirred with the torment of strong muscles. For a long time the two men stayed that way—together and alone, behind the blistering extravaganza. Biff slowly stirred into himself an understanding of what he had seen. A man, he thought crazily, does have a greater love than to lay down his life for a friend. Jimmie had a greater love—even than that.
So Biff waited till Jimmie was through with it, till he went slack and silent. The fire was jumping less prodigiously and the engines were moving around the ends of it.
Biff bent over and tapped Jimmie. “Cigarette, old man?”
Jimmie sat up. He gave his kid brother a long look. “Thanks!”