The Novel of Today

Preface

THERE IS a legend concerning John, the Prophet, to the effect that he lost in Ephesus, in the year 89 A.D., the first transcription of his Vision. This version was come upon by the Romans, from whom he had precipitately fled, and read by a certain Centurion before it was officially burned according to the Emperor’s orders. It is said to be a second version, written by the Prophet in hiding some twelve months later, that concludes the New Testament. Of the first and original account, only one fragment survives, John’s recollection of the “other horseman” which appears in a letter written either by, or for, the Centurion, to a poet named Marcus. The letter (if there was one) is supposed to have been lost during the persecutions of Diocletian. Thus the account was preserved only by word of mouth, although it is said to have been a favorite of Saint Leo the Great, as early as the middle of the fifth century. The Apocalyptic legend follows: After the breaking of the Fourth Seal, and after the emergence of the Pale Horseman, Death, John saw yet another horseman, now recorded as Hell, but originally given another name. This Fifth Rider went forward with the other Four, and, indeed, led them. War and Pestilence, Famine and Death scourged the world of men. These grim figures had somewhat different names in the lost Apocalypse: Conquest, Slaughter, Greed, and Universal Death, i.e., death by famine, by pestilence, by the sword, and by all human passions.

As mankind fell by a third and yet another third, and as the seas turned to blood and fiery glass, the Horseman in the Lead became nauseated by the deeds of his fellows.

He therefore pressed far ahead of them, entering every village and city with a great cry and a terrifying warning. To the rulers of each city he told of those who came hard behind him and he showed them the blood on his horse’s hooves. Then, always, he went on, for his urgency was great.

Behind him, men fell into profound arguments, some saying that he was a liar, some that the blood on the hooves was not of men but of goats, and some that he had not passed that way at all, but was only an imagining of the people. These arguments consumed much time and took many peculiar theological bents. In the end, the warning did not anywhere prevail. The Four Riders arrived and slew their three times tens of thousands.

Meanwhile, the Fifth Horseman had come to the outermost reaches of the earth and so turned about, well satisfied with his work. However, as he came upon first one and then another desolated city, anger mounted in him. When he questioned the survivors about the warning they had been given, he found them unrepentant. They did not say they had been fools to disobey the alarm. They did not say that the arrogant stupidity of their rulers had betrayed them and robbed them of their homes, their loved ones, and their birthright. Instead, in one voice, they blamed him who had carried the message. “He should have tarried longer with us and talked in a louder voice,” the weeping people cried. “He should have seen our helplessness and stayed with us to defend us,” they said.

And they said, “It is his fault; had he not come this way, the others would not have followed!”

So, because his wrath was very great, and because the truth was not in these people, the Fifth Horseman rejoined his companions. Together they slew all mankind and destroyed all their cities. And the name of him who led, and of him who warned, according to the legend, was Reality.

CHAPTER I

IN SPITE of the proverb, a lucky prophet is sometimes honored in his home town, Jimmie thought. The train rounded down a grade; shredded steam blew back from the locomotive. The scenery became minute by minute more cogent, and at last, altogether familiar. Too familiar for Jimmie in a way. His eyes stung and the sensation astonished him. He had thought he was past all that, young to be past it—twenty-eight—but past it, nonetheless. As far past as if he were ninety and the very ducts that carry tears had dried up. He grinned, sniffed in a breath, and yanked the back of his hand across the upper part of his face. Six years in England—and in two more minutes, home.

The train clanged out on the high iron bridge over the Muskogewan. He could see the skating house—white snow and ice, fast water, brightly dressed kids whizzing among the grownups—and that was gone; the Dairymeade barns flashed past—the fields, rolling, black, white, lithographic; home—after all these years! The red brick station was swinging into view around the curve. A warm flush pervaded him, as if he had stepped in front of a fireplace.

Jimmie grappled with the heaviest of his leather suitcases, the one most battered, deepest scratched, most raggedly shingled with European hotel labels. There was a big “V” pasted on its side. He was on the platform when the train slowed. There was his father-six years older, not looking it; his mother—red-cheeked, gray-haired, handsome; and there was his brother, Biff—he’d be twenty-one, now—Jimmie had already made the adjustment in his mind. He looked for his sister. Sarah had been twelve when he’d gone away on the Rhodes Scholarship. At first, he glanced past the pretty woman. He realized, while his eyes were in a nether focus, that the pretty woman was Sarah. The whole fam dambley. It was wonderful!

He hopped down while the train was still slowing and slid in the snow a little way and kissed his mother and his sister and shook hands twice, each, with his father and his brother. There were other people waiting to greet Jimmie, but those people let his family have the first crack; they simply stood around, grinning and happy.

Jimmie’s eyes were taking in the changes of six years and he was pleased with what he saw. Sarah, especially, was like a miracle. But the others weren’t quite pleased.

Their expressions showed it, inch-meal. Perhaps he had more of an accent than he’d thought.

“You’ve changed, son!” His father seemed truculent about it.

Jimmie chuckled. “A kid went to Oxford. This is what’s coming back.”

“Terribly thin,” his mother said. “It’s the rations, no doubt.”

Jimmie still laughed. “Oh, I got plenty to eat. Lord! Sarah! Hollywood’ll send for you if you show that face around much!”

All three men picked up bags. Jim put his down again to shake hands embarrassedly with a dozen people whose faces were familiar but whose names were lost in six weltering years. They supplied them and told him what businesses they were in or where they lived, and he remembered fragments. Then the Baileys started around the station, chattering about the unseasonable freeze and snowstorm. Biff got to the car first and opened the door; Jimmie stood outside for a minute, looking at it.

“A ’forty-two,” Biff said exultantly. “Like it?”

“Yeah.” Jimmie’s enthusiasm was not great. “It’s magnificent. Haven’t seen the new American models for a long time. It’s a peach. Drives itself, I’ll bet. Sees in the dark and plays records.”

They laughed, but not quite certainly. The car started. Jimmie peered from a window while his family partially recovered from some vague emotion he was beginning to feel in them—a sort of disappointment, probably. Jimmie filed it away and allowed himself to revel in remembered geography, in architecture recalled. Muskogewan’s highest structure—the Purvis Building, eleven stories—and the old Post Office, empty, across from a modernistic new one, the fire house, the Horkin Store, “A Block of Bargains,” and Dunley’s Drug Store. Ordinary stuff, dream-poignant for Jimmie.

They turned at the Athletic Club and went out Park Street. There were changes in the old home too. The gingerbread trimmed away, some glass brick windows in the walls, a glassed-in porch around at the side, and a real garage instead of the barn, which had served for so long. A four-car garage. They stopped in the place where the porte-cochere had been and bustled out, talking again. His mother mostly—gossip about people and places and the new differences—nothing that meant as much to Jimmie as observing for himself. And they wondered why he had stayed away so long. So did he—now. He’d been very busy. Very busy….

A manservant opened the door—a white man—and Jimmie remembered that his mother had been afraid of male servants, once. He cocked an internal eyebrow. The Baileys had gone a bit swank since his departure. Not very; just some. They could doubtless afford it. His father was an officer in one of the two biggest banks; Biff and Sarah had finished school. Nothing more logical than to spend a little on improving the manor house. It was still comparatively modest.

The furniture in the living room was modern. There was an electrical piano and a superautomatic phonograph-radio, but the fireplace was the same and so were the oak logs burning in it—another beloved recollection. His father offered him a cigar and he took it. Coats were handed to the servant. They sat down, Sarah and his mother and Biff with cigarettes. Jimmie drew on the cigar and looked at it and looked at them and smiled sleepily. That was, usually, his way of smiling—the long smile of a man with good nerves and a warm heart.

His mother said, “I’ve been rattling on, Jimmie! You haven’t had a chance! And we’re all dying to hear! So tell us everything about it!”

He had a sinking feeling; he thought he knew what she meant. “About what, Mother?”

“About what? The war, of course!”

He tried to go on smiling. “I’ve been on a slow boat from Lisbon for a whole lot of days. I was in New York for less than two hours. And last night and this morning on a train. You tell me.”

His father laughed. When he laughed, Jimmie could see he had aged considerably.

“Hannah doesn’t mean the situation today. Everybody knows that. She wants the personal experience angle, Jimmie. Especially the bombings. Your letters weren’t very frequent or very satisfying. Censorship, no doubt. But Hannah has a passion for bombing stories. Reads everything she can lay her hands on.”

“I think,” said his mother, “the British are positively thrilling. We’re all ears, Jimmie!”

He shrugged and shook his head, as if to himself. “I was working in a laboratory on the fringe of London. I was very busy. A bomb fell, once, within maybe six blocks of our place. It made quite a mess of a cow pasture.” He was lying.

“Don’t be a hold-out! You wrote you were in London summer before last—in the very worst of the blitz!”

“—and I stayed as far underground as I could!”

Biff leaned forward. “You must have seen places, though, soon after they’d been hit?”

Jimmie stuck his jaw out. “Yes.”

“He’s just trying to be dramatic,” Sarah said. “Building up suspense.”

The man just come from England looked at his sister. She had direct, diamond-shaped eyes, with dark fringes, like her mother’s. Dark hair that fell to the nape of her neck in a triumph of sumptuous grooming. She was wearing a blue dress. She was alive with interest and the presumption of understanding. “I’m not trying to build up any suspense, Sarah,” he answered slowly. “The bombs do that, without assistance. I’m just trying to say—without having to, but I guess I do—that I don’t want to talk about bombings. Really, I don’t. Nothing to say you haven’t read a hundred times, for one thing.

And not in the mood, for another. I’m glad to be back, hideously glad.” He looked at his wrist watch. “And if somebody’ll drive me—since I’m not positive I could get one of these new cars started, even—I’ll run over to see Corinth.”

His mother gasped. “But you can’t, dear! You simply can’t! It’s four, now—”

“I know. And old man Corinth may go home by five—”

She paid no attention. “—and at half-past the people will begin to stream in. Simply stream! They’re dying to see you!”

“People? What people?”

“Why, the people I invited for cocktails! I must have asked a hundred. Dinner isn’t till nine—on account of it. And we’ll have to change, because we’re going to the club for it. An intime little crowd. I promised you’d be here at four-thirty!”

Jimmie smiled again, differently. “Sorry I won’t then. I’ll duck back as fast as I can after I talk to Corinth, though. Ought not to take forever.”

Mrs. Bailey’s diamond-shaped eyes narrowed. A faint flush showed in her cheeks.

“Why, dear, it’s quite impossible for you to go over to the factory today. I’m sure Mr. Corinth doesn’t expect you, because Susie Corinth is coming here for cocktails and I told her to bring him.”

Jimmie raised his eyebrows. “Is he coming?”

“Later,” she said. “He’ll be kept at his office—”

“Then I’ll go over.”

“James!” There was a strident note in her voice. She started, twice, to speak imperatively, to demand that he stay. But she could not find the right words—or, if she found them, could not utter them—because he kept looking at her, waiting for anything she might have to say.

His father interrupted this silence. “It is pretty darned, well, selfish of you, son.

We’ve planned the whole weekend for you. Thought, even, you might not feel like starting at the paint works for a month or so. You wrote you’ve been going at it hard.”

Jimmie glanced from face to face, hunting for something he did not find. Then he walked toward the hall, passing close to his sister.

“Cad,” she said softly.

Biff rallied. “I’ll run you over—since you’re going.”

They were riding through the crystalline landscape again. “You’re kind of rough on them,” Biff said. “They’ve built up this homecoming into a fiesta. After all, you’re a legend around here. I suppose they expected something between an adoring undergraduate and a polished English earl.”

“But I wrote ’em why I was coming home!”

“Sure. To work for old man Corinth at the paint company. They were pleased as punch you got a job right here in town.”

“I mean, the Corinth plant can do certain things and I knew it, and the British agreed to lend me to the U. S. because I’m sort of a specialist on some lines—”

“Oh, that!” Biff grinned. “Mother and Father don’t know the difference between chemistry and astronomy.”

“Still, they know there’s a war going on—”

“Yeah,” said Biff. “And do they resent it! All except the dramatic part. Mom goes for that in a big way. She is to battles what an affecionado is to bulls.”

Jimmie winced.

The Corinth Paint and Dye Works loomed on the penumbral fringe of the town—a haphazard agglomeration of low buildings. Behind the buildings, chimneys poured smoke across the gray sky—black smoke and bright yellow smoke. There was a high fence around the plant and around the fence two uniformed guards, portly and important, paced back and forth, carrying revolvers on their fat stomachs. Biff and Jimmie were stopped at a gatehouse and allowed to pass after stating their errand. The office which received them was time-battered—a big place, full of ticking typewriters and people hurrying in and out with sheafs of papers. Biff said he’d wait there, but Jimmie insisted he’d take a cab home; so Biff went away, a little angered by his brother’s concentration on his errand and its importance.

Jimmie followed Mr. Corinth’s secretary between the rows of clattering desks into a small, dusty room. A man with vague gray eyes and a white mustache sat there, behind the ruins of a mahogany desk. He wore a suit of clothes a tramp would not have taken as a present. He frowned fustily at Jimmie and muttered, “Your name is somehow familiar, so I asked you in, but I’m in a hurry, young man, and I—” Suddenly he threw back his head and opened his mouth. He looked as if he were roaring with laughter, but he did not utter a sound. “Jimmie!” he exclaimed in a moment. “Lord! Am I glad you’re here! Been expecting you for weeks!”

Jimmie found himself resuming the smile he had worn on the train, coming home.

“Hello, Mr. Corinth. I’m glad to see you. I read in a journal something about what you’ve been doing here, and when Washington tapped my superiors for some chemists I said I’d go and I suggested going here. I didn’t want to leave much, though.”

Mr. Corinth’s eyes were less opaque. “Naturally.”

“I thought I ought to. London finally cabled the State Department. They talked to the moguls. I was in a plane for Lisbon a day later. What’s on the fire?”

The old man rubbed his face with both hands and looked through his fingers.

“You could be an agent, eh? Walking in cold. You could—Jimmie, if I didn’t remember the Hallowe’en you broke the windows in my chicken coop and I caught you redhanded! You still do look impish, in a conservative way.” He laughed silently again. “I was sure proud when you won the chemistry prize in Oxford! Almost tried to hire you then. Seems a long time ago, eh? And that paper you just wrote was a peach!” He paused and said quietly, “How are they doing, Jimmie?”

The young man answered, “All right.”

“No better than that?”

“Maybe, a little. It’s not easy—on just plain people.”

“Jimmie, who isn’t—just plain people?”

The homecoming smile became a shade rueful. “Well, I guess my folks aren’t—any more. We’ve put on the dog, Mr. Corinth. About Saint Bernard size, it looks like.”

“Willie,” the other man answered.

“Willie?”

“Call me Willie. My wife does. Half the chemists in America do. Anybody who can write about using isotopes the way you did can automatically call me Willie. You’re Jimmie—and I’m Willie. Mm. I can imagine your folks are—a shock.” He shrugged. “I’ll show you through the shop tomorrow. Meantime, what’s this I got in a letter practically dunked in sealing wax about you working on an incendiary that will stick to whatever it hits?”

Jimmie pulled his chair forward. They began to talk. Only a few thousand men in the whole of America would have understood everything that they said. The five-o’clock shift went home. The bright yellow smoke paled against the darkling sky. Lights came on—Willie Corinth impatiently jerked on his bluish one in the middle of something about a gas-driven torpedo motor that would stand being dropped from forty thousand feet onto the hard sea. At last Jimmie looked at his watch and flushed.

“It’s after seven!”

“So ’tis. I’ll run you home. I’ve got a jalopy that I keep just to see how long it can go without a visible reason. Your mother’ll be burnt to a crisp!”

People were leaving, when Jimmie climbed out of the jalopy—women in furs, men in chesterfields. He ran up the steps, bumping past them. There were guests in the house, scores of them, but they had a straggler look. Several had drunk too many cocktails. A woman with an overwarm, oversoft face, a maternal face belied by sharp, acquisitive eyes, filled the front room with a belting cry, “Here’s Jimmie, at last! My! Isn’t he handsome!”

They came from every side. He wanted to run. But Biff put a glass in his hand.

And Sarah whispered, “Well, you ducked this one and made us pretty ashamed! But you won’t escape Mother from now on—don’t think you will!”

Then his mother was near. Her voice hissed. “Jimmie! Your trouser leg!”

He looked down and grinned. “Nitric acid,” he said. “I was showing Willie something.”

“But—our guests!”

He looked at her and he looked at the room, packed with the dregs from all the rooms. “Mother, I’m not sure—and don’t look now—but I strongly believe that these people—don’t exist!”

Mrs. Bailey repeated the phrase to her husband while she was dressing for dinner.

“‘Don’t exist’! What does he mean by that? He must have gone mad!”

“He certainly is acting like a conceited, self-important ass!”

Jimmie, in a rather worn dinner jacket, leaned through the door of his mother’s boudoir. “If I throw a handful of salt in a pitcher of fresh water,” he said, causing both his parents to turn with a start, “the water at the bottom of the pitcher may go on thinking it’s fresh for several seconds. But it won’t be. The water at the bottom will also become salty very soon. That’s what I mean by saying that those guests of yours—don’t exist.” He waved his hand at them.

His mother said, “Good heavens!”

CHAPTER II

UNSEASONABLE weather has a stimulating effect on people. The cold spell, which had frozen the river and covered the rolling lands with snow, also caused the Bailey guests to arrive at the country club with extra zest. Their eyes sparkled; they lustily beat casual flakes from their furs and coats; they talked in loud voices. With a sense of distant indignation, Jimmie went through the ritual of arrival, of introductions, of a drink at the bar, and of sitting down at the table in a private dining room with his family and some twenty of their friends. He remembered a few of them. In time, his mother had said.

There were flowers and paper decorations. There was a girl for Jimmie. A Miss Somebody-or-other—a blonde edition of his sister, older but as streamlined—in a lamé dress. The glittering garment and the gleaming of her hair made him think, not of a person, but of a weapon in a sheath. No denying that she was beautiful. He looked at her closely as she turned toward him and his brain swam for a moment.

Waiters at the half-trot brought oysters on shimmering ice and poured wine.

Music came from nowhere that he could see. A woman said, “Jimmie, tell us about London.”

The heads came around like heads at a tennis match. Jimmie picked up his glass in fingers that threatened to snap its stem. “War going on,” he said rudely.

His mother glared and made herself smile. “Jimmie had us all promise not to ask any questions tonight.”

A man said candidly, “The devil he did! What does he think we came here for except to get the low-down on the British game? Prodigal home—fatted calf killed—and no memoirs! A sellout, I say!”

“I’m a poor prodigal,” Jimmie answered, “and due only a lean calf. You see, this is my first night home and I’m pretty happy to be here and, well, you people and this dinner and the whole town seem kind of fabulous. You’re the real prodigals! I’m so darned busy trying to get used to all this that I can’t think back to—that.”

The Miss Somebody at his side said, in a voice lowered so no one could hear, “Not very sporting of you, Jimmie! Life in Muskogewan’s on the dull side. You’re the most exciting thing that’s happened this fall! At least, I strongly suspect you could be.”

She looked at him with eyes like an electric shock.

“What should I have said?” He stared at her, unbelieving.

“Oh, anything. Tell ’em about being on the street in a fire. How it sounds when the guns are going. Anything with jive.”

His hands trembled slightly. “There was a child—one morning—four or five years old—blown up on a lamppost. Alive and conscious. Hanging—by its insides.”

The girl’s eyes became murky. She made her mouth firm. Her color ebbed and surged back. When, presently, she spoke, her voice was level again. “You go in for melodrama, Mr. Bailey.”

“Tossing bombs into people’s yards is ‘ melodramatic.’ The very point I wanted to avoid.”

She said, “Oh.”

They were all talking about the war, then. All but Jimmie. He supposed, at first, that they were trying to draw him out. For a while he didn’t listen. He ate slowly, enjoying the food, glancing sometimes at the lame girl, aware that she was pondering him when she thought she wouldn’t be detected. By and by he realized that they talked all the time about the war—as they were talking then. He began to listen.

“Napoleon,” his father was saying, “tried the same thing, on the same people, the same way, and for the same reasons. And Hitler will have to write off just as much as Napoleon did, in the end. History, I keep telling some of my inflammable neighbors, repeats itself. Russia—winter—and Waterloo.”

“Exactly.” A man who wore a pince-nez beamed sagaciously above his shirt front.

“The parallel is precise. Any first-rate dictator can conquer Europe. Europe needed a conquering. Needed central organization. Of course, Nazi methods will necessarily have to be followed up by sound business methods. No popinjay can run a big business like unified Europe. Not that I favor Hitler, but I never did like all those little separate nations and I do favor central authority.”

“Except,” a thin, dark woman said, “when it’s central in Washington.”

Everybody laughed. The man with the pince-nez laughed too. “Napoleon had, essentially, the same ideas as Hitler. Actually, I’m against Hitler.” He beamed at Jimmie for praise. Jimmie was unresponsive. “Yes, one hundred per cent against. Don’t like his looks, or his voice. Cheap dunce. I’d have been against Napoleon, too, I suppose. Pushing pigmy. All wars are purely economic, and I think we can safely leave this one to General Winter and General Scorch-the-Earth. If we could only plant that idea in Washington!”

He chuckled. “Emergency!” His voice was scornful. “Do you see any emergency here, Jimmie?”

Jimmie thought that he was going to leave the table. He found himself sitting still, however, and thinking. Finally he drew an uneven breath. “I—I’ve heard people, in England, talking about the parallel between Napoleon and Hitler. We all know a lot about Hitler. Not enough, but a lot. But is anybody here able to tick off Napoleon’s plans for Europe? I mean, the way we can tick off Hitler’s?”

Nobody said anything.

Jimmie looked at the tablecloth, nodding. “Can anybody here say, off-hand, how much time passed between the retreat from Moscow and Waterloo?”

There was silence.

“Was Napoleon exiled by the English the first time, or the second—and who beat him both times? And where?”

Jimmie’s father said, “What’s the idea of this ‘Information, Please’?”

The lean young man went on: “Who was Talleyrand? Certainly, someone—”

The dark woman at the other end of the table said, “Well, a premier. The premier of…” Her voice trailed off.

Jimmie grinned slightly. “I just meant to make it clear that you do a lot of learned talking. But you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about! My whole point.”

“Don’t be rude,” his mother said sharply. “We know perfectly well what we’re talking about!”

He looked from face to face. “You don’t know the peace aims of Napoleon, or where he fought, or when, or against whom, or for what. Except in the haziest way. But you conclude Napoleon was like Hitler. Napoleon took a horse and foot army into Russia more than a hundred years ago. Hitler went in last June, with tanks and planes. But you conclude the result is going to be the same! I just want you to realize—at least for a moment, if that’s all you can—that nothing you are saying tonight means anything real at all. It’s just—so much rubbish.”

There was another silence. They looked angrily at Jimmie. Mr. Bailey finally laughed. “Well, Jimmie, you may be able to show us up on a few details of history. But you don’t need to talk like the London propaganda office! We’re wise to propaganda, over here.”

People said, “We certainly are,” and, “I suppose he’s another, trying to drag us into Europe’s quarrels.” Things like that.

When a chance came, Jimmie hotly replied, “Napoleon was hardly a ‘detail’ of history, even if you don’t know about him! Hitler is no detail, either.” But he soon gave up.

The waiters were serving individual filets mignons. The room seemed even more giddily unreal. Full of shiny, hateful people, champing on their food and making a cackling unison of vocal nothing. They were even talking about Napoleon again, when he had made it dear that they had no intellectual right to discuss Napoleon until they read enough to understand what they were talking about. But they wouldn’t read. They’d just go on talking.

“Don’t you know,” said the girl at his side, “that it’s very poor form to show people their ignorance?”

“It’s the kind of ignorance,” he said, “that can rook them.”

“Do you think it will?”

“If they don’t think. It might.”

“Just what, then, is the German staff plan for conquering Muskogewan?”

“Shall I tell you some more about the bombs?”

“Airplanes,” she answered, “can’t cross the Atlantic and return.”

“That was last year.”

“And even if they can, Muskogewan is more than a thousand miles from any coast.”

“Shall we talk about something on which our information is relatively equal?”

“Our prejudices—you mean?”

He looked at her. “I said—information.”

The girl blushed.

Waiters rolled back a series of frosted-glass doors. The private dining room was thus included in the main salon of the club. More people—perhaps two hundred—were sitting at tables, over the middles and the ends of dinners, and over highballs, and planter’s punches, and even cocktails. The lights went down. A conical spot found the center of the dance floor and a master of ceremonies skidded into it, dragging a microphone. He began to make jokes.

Jimmie rose from the table, without apology, and walked through the smoke-tangled murk. There were men in the billiard room—talking about the war. From somewhere underneath the building he heard the roll and crash of bowling. He found an alcove off the foyer. It contained a few chairs and tables—and no people. He sat down and shut his eyes.

“You were pretty grim, you know,” a husky voice said.

He looked up. She was standing in front of him, deliberately close to him; her golden dress had been poured over her molten and dripped heavily from her hips and her arms. “I—I—oh, well. Sit down.” She sat down. Jimmie thought for a while. “Look. You can explain it, maybe, Miss—Whatever your name is.”

“Audrey.”

“Audrey. I thought, in England, that America had raised billions, and turned over its factories, and become the arsenal of democracy, and I thought there were a few dissenters. Lindbergh. Wheeler. I understood that we went into the last war as if it was fun. I knew people weren’t—ecstatic—about things now. But everybody goes at me as if I had a thriller to tell. South African big-game story. And whenever I seem to show that I’m about to speak out for England people start throwing words as if they were dishes, before they hear me.”

“You’ll get over it,” Audrey said. “You’ve obviously been too close to things. Lost your perspective. I could see that you despised them. After a while, though, you’ll like them. You’ll begin to understand our attitude. You’ll get your courage back.”

He sat up stiffly. “Get my courage back?”

“Certainly. Oh, I suppose you have plenty of the bravura kind left—for going outdoors in raids—all that. But I mean the courage to face the fact that the world is just going to change—and the sooner we Americans get used to the idea, the better.” She lifted one shoulder prettily. “I can read you, Jimmie. Put it this way. You’ll find out enough from these really sound people to be able to give up your loyalties to the old Europe. The rotten old Europe.”

“Will!?”

“Let’s not talk politics,” she said.

“No. By all means. I might start killing people.”

Audrey said, “You know, you’re pretty fascinating—in spite of your British bias.”

“Thanks.”

She surveyed him teasingly. “Tall, dark, and handsome. A glint of red in the retreating hair. Old enough to—well, old enough. I don’t mind telling you that when you walked into the bar, my not-too-maidenly heart skipped several beats.”

“I’m glad to know it’s beating, anyway.”

She pretended to be amused. “Are you in love?”

“No.”

“You don’t mind if a girl tries—?”

“I have a rule about that. It depends on the girl.”

“Me, then. I have your mother’s permission.”

“You’ll find my mother is uniformly generous—with things that don’t belong to her.”

Audrey paused. “Have you ever been in love? You don’t sound as if you had. You sound like the strictly cold-science type. But you look—well, amenable.”

“I’ve been in love,” Jimmie replied steadily.

Audrey laughed with a rich laughter. “That’s something, anyway. Tell me about it!”

“Rather not.”

“Please!” She wrinkled her nose. “Pretty please!”

Jimmie sank in his chair till his chin was on his chest. He looked savagely into the girl’s eyes. “She was English. Her name was Ellen. In some ways—ever so many—she reminds me of you. Rather, you remind me of her. It was a shock when I saw you. She was bright blonde, like you, and tall and slender and she had one of those stagey voices that can make a man shake all over with a single syllable. About your age. Twenty-three?

I thought so. I was very fond of Ellen, though I never did see enough of her. Yes. I’d say I was in love. We weren’t engaged—”

“Sissy! ”

“It didn’t seem worth being engaged until—this mess was over.”

“Oh.” Audrey pouted resentfully. Then she said, “And so—what happened to this great romance? Did some other more dashing faster-working lad barge onto the scene and steal her away?”

“Yeah,” Jimmie answered. “A German pilot.”

It was a brutal thing to do to anybody. Jimmie had thought it over for a fraction of a second before answering. And he had decided to say it as he had said it. Audrey deserved it for being so facetious about anything so private and unknown. His mood demanded it. He was brimful of disappointment. He loved his family. In all the years of his absence he had carried an awareness of them in his mind with a secret relish that had made every hour of his life pleasanter. His favorite fantasy—at Oxford and afterward—had to do with coming home and settling down near Muskogewan. But, now that he had come home, he found his family suspicious of him, estranged, bitter at his attitude, hectically opposed to everything for which he stood. In that mood he had struck back at the dreadful opening inadvertently made by the gleaming girl. He had not reckoned the consequence.

Audrey sat perfectly still. She had a pink-tan complexion, unusual in. a girl so blonde. The pink faded to pallor and the memory of a summer tan turned yellowish. Two tears formed in her eyes, filled them up, overflowed, and ran down her cheeks. Her shoulders contracted with the beginning of a sob, and contracted further, in an effort to stem the convulsion. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even try to touch the tears on her cheeks.

Jimmie rose nervously and walked three steps away and three steps back. He stared out at people pushing and babbling in the foyer and he looked at Audrey again.

“Sorry.”

She whispered, “I asked for it! Practically begged!”

“That doesn’t exuse me.”

“I think—I’ll leave. If you’ll go to the checkroom and get my wrap.” Her fingers fumbled shakily with a small gold evening bag.

He took the bag, opened it, and extracted a brass check. He flipped it, caught it, and looked at her. She was repairing the damage done by the tears. “I wish you wouldn’t go,” he said.

Audrey smiled unsteadily. “Only thing to do, I think.”

“No. No, it isn’t, Audrey. I hurt your feelings fearfully—and I’d like to make amends. You hurt mine—and you want to hide. I know how that is. But I’ll give you a challenge. If you, also, want to make amends you’ll stay here. We’ll sit in this little room and bicker for a while. Then I’ll take you back to those clowns, the guests of my family.

You and I will dance and have fun and that will help me infinitely to avoid the many mokes.”

She was still half smiling, but she shook her head. “It’s no good. We disagree so terribly about everything. And you must despise me—besides.”

“I couldn’t despise you, whatever you thought,” he answered. “Two reasons. You look so much like Ellen, for one. And the other is the way you cried when I—struck you—just now. It was as mean as a blow, anyway—”

“It wouldn’t do any good, honestly.”

“On the contrary. Lemme see.” He grinned charmingly. “I’ll appeal to you in an abstract way. You’re probably up to your ears in various kinds of social work. Bundles for Britain and whatnot?”

She nodded. “It’s so silly, so trivial—”

“Well, here I am, a civilian veteran. Home on a sort of pseudo furlough. In the case of veterans they usually turn out the town’s prettiest girls as dancing partners, companions, whatnot. Suppose we say that I requisition you? We’ll be—by all odds—the handsomest couple on the floor. You’d raise the index so much—”

Audrey was recovering. “You’re pretty sporting, Jimmie. You have nerve. I think I was mistaken about you. All right. You requisition me. I’ll do a little bundling for Britain—”

He chuckled and broke off, looking at her in a startled way. Then he chuckled again. “Jolly old reconciliation, ho! What? As I never heard an Englishman say!”

“Which reminds me to note that you don’t talk so awfully much like an Englishman, considering how long you lived there. A little. I mean, you’d know you’d been exposed to the accent—”

“Two reasons, Audrey. One, I was always proud of my native vernacular. My pronunciation was the bane of the dons. All Oxford shivered whenever I opened my mouth to speak. Two, it was a long trip home—grimy weather, no diversion on the boat-and I spent the time refreshing my memory of the provincial tongue. Listening to several Americans from Chicago—steel men—who shared the bar with me a good deal of the time.”

“We might stop by the bar, on the way back. The floor show’s still going on, that M. C. is practically inexhaustible.”

He offered his arm, with a mocking ultraelegance. “I’d imagine that it’s his audience that gets exhausted. M. C.—master of ceremonies, I presume. A new phrase, since my day.” They walked toward the club bar. “Audrey. Tell me something. Why did my handsome and all-pervading mother appoint you to pursue me?”

“You ought to be able to guess.”

“Ought I? Lemme see.” He helped her hike up on a bar stool. “Pounds, crowns, shillings?”

“On the nose! My father is president of the Second National. The other big bank here.”

“It was always the old man who talked about mergers. Habit’s catching, evidently.”

Audrey ordered a highball. He nodded for the same. She turned toward him. “And now, it’s quite out of the question. That’s funny. I mean, my mother and yours have been fiddling around with this meeting of you and me for months. I was pretty thrilled, myself.

I, well, do you mind if I say that I still am?”

“Nope. But it’s out of the question, is it? What’s the matter? Has the fact leaked out that the Baileys come from a long line of lunatics and pirates?”

“My mother,” she replied, “is local president of the America Forever Committee.

Dad’s treasurer.”

“What’s that?”

“You’ll find out. Your family’s on it, too.”

They went back to the table, finally. His mother was visibly relieved by his reappearance, and visibly surprised by his evident amiability in the company of Audrey.

Music began—a rhumba. Audrey whispered, “It’s the rage now. We’ll sit it out.”

Jimmie rose with dignity. “London,” he replied, “has not been wholly cut off from the rest of the planet! We shall dance.”

They began. Audrey looked up at him. “I’ll say London hasn’t been cut off! Who taught you?”

“Her name,” he began throbbingly, “was Conchita. She was a little thing with blue-black hair and eyes like the flames in a burning coal mine. Emotions of a tigress in the body of a child—a sepia child. Lovely! Conchita taught me the rhumba. Eight bob per lesson. That’s about a dollar fifty.”

Audrey laughed.

He took her home, late, in a taxi. She asked him to. While they rode through the quiet streets they were silent. The night was growing warmer. Roofs dripped, the snow along the sides of the walks was slushy, and there were patches showing in lawns that looked black under the outreaching lavender murk of arc lights. When they stopped in front of her house—a bigger, more imposing house than his family’s—Audrey said, “Will you kiss me good night, Jimmie? It would sort of finish erasing the mess I made at the start.”

He bent and kissed her perfunctorily.

“Is that all?” she whispered.

He kissed her again—not perfunctorily. And then again, as if to reassure himself about his first impression.

“You’ll forgive me—for Ellen?”

He nodded. “Yes. That all happened summer before last.” Suddenly he grinned.

“You’re not being fair to your mother, Audrey!” He reached past her and opened the cab door.

CHAPTER III

AT EIGHT O’CLOCK the Baileys—short of sleep and showing it—straggled into their dining room for breakfast. Mr. Bailey had to go to the bank. He was a punctual man.

He regarded the late arrival of executives at business offices as a bad example. Mrs.

Bailey joined her husband, out of custom. She had learned early in her marriage that, whenever she slept late, he found several ways to bring it to her attention publicly—ways that had the outward form of humor and the clear stigmata of a wife-husband friction. Mr.

Bailey had not been able to scare or scourge the second generation into early rising.

He was surprised, then, when Sarah showed up. “Have you been in bed? Or are you just going? I saw you leave the club with Francis Webster along about two.”

“I have an appointment for a fitting. Nine o’clock. Mrs. Gregg didn’t have any other time, worse luck. I’m dead! It’s the dress I’m going to wear tonight at the Wilsons’ party for Jimmie.”

Mr. Bailey chased a piece of bacon with his fork. “Anybody told Jimmie there’s another party for him tonight?” He looked accusingly at his wife.

“I hinted at it rather plainly. And he seems to like—”

Her husband cleared his throat. Biff came into the room, rubbing his eyes and yawning. “Coffee,” he said in a hollow tone. The swinging door banged and the butler came through. “Westcott, bring me a gallon of coffee.”

Mr. Bailey squinted at his son. “Huh! I should think so! I counted up to seven rum collinses last night. What you trying to do—drink yourself to death?”

Biff’s hands were trembling. A light perspiration shone on his face, here and there, in little clusters. “Anybody count yours? I have a hangover you could sell to an amusement park. Make the roller coaster feel like a lawn swing.”

“Who told you that crack?” Sarah asked.

Their father swallowed coffee. A big, square man, growing thinner as he came nearer to sixty. A man with a rectangular face and a chin that rode out beyond his necktie formidably. He wore rimless, angle-sided spectacles. The eyes behind them were china blue, but as bright as glass. His face was ruddy, and the almost unwrinkled skin on it was shaved so close it looked peeled. He wore his wavy gray hair long so that it would fall across his toupee-sized bald spot. He had a good voice, deep, resonant, and not loud unless he wanted it to be. He firmly believed that, in every hour of every day of his life, he had done the right thing—his duty—without consideration of his own pleasure or pain.

That such an attitude is psychologically—even physiologically—dangerous, cannot be denied. But it is the commonest attitude among successful men not just in America, but everywhere. Most people thought Kendrick Bailey was a brilliant man and a good man. In many ways, he was both. He looked, now, at his wife, and he said, “I repeat.

Does Jimmie know that there is another big party for him tonight?”

“Don’t be so hostile,” his wife replied. “I’ll ease him into the fact when he comes down—after he’s had some breakfast. No doubt he’ll sleep late. He must be very tired—going through submarine zones and all that. He certainly looked it when he got off the train.”

“He looked rotten,” Biff said comfortably. “The lousy interventionist!”

“Hannah,” said Mr. Bailey to his wife, “we made a mistake with that boy. Should never have allowed him to go to Oxford. He got the European taint.”

“It was the ‘V’ on his luggage,” Sarah said, “that was so darned corny! The very first thing I saw—even before I saw Jimmie—was that big suitcase Biff and I gave him for a going-away present, and that enormous red, white, and blue ‘V.’ He might at least have had the decency to find out that the better people in his own home town aren’t having any part of things like that!”

“I was kind of proud of that ‘V,’” Jimmie said.

Biff dropped his knife. Sarah flinched. Mr. Bailey spun in his chair. Hannah Bailey said, “James! You must quit sneaking up and listening in on what people are saying! That’s the second time you’ve been eavesdropping!”

Jimmie came into the dining room and looked cheerfully at his family and at the bright sun outside; he sat down in the empty place. “Oh, I eavesdrop all the time.” He was flushing a little, but his words did not show that he was in any way embarrassed. “It’s counterespionage that does it.”

“What?” said his mother.

Jimmie answered blandly, “Counterspying. In wartime England you get in the habit of slipping up quietly on every conversation. You know. The lovely old man in the walrus mustache taking tea with the beautiful young girl may well be a fifth columnist.

The bobby under Nelson’s statue ostensibly giving directions to the cockney errand boy may be Baron Hoffmann, chief of the Gestapo, telling a messenger the location of an AA battery—”

“He’s kidding, Mother,” Sarah said. The butler came in and looked inquisitively at Jimmie.

“Some bloaters, Westcott, and a bit of cold pork pie—” Jimmie chuckled at the man’s expression. “I want anything strictly American in the kitchen! Everything, in fact.”

Westcott smiled understandingly and hurried out.

Mr. Bailey scowled. “You know, son, I suppose, that there’s another party to be given for you tonight.”

“Is there?”

“The Wilsons’.”

Mrs. Bailey glanced indignantly at her husband and amiably at her elder son. “It’s really a ‘must,’ dear. I’m dreadfully sorry you got up so early. You must take a good, long nap this afternoon.”

“I had to get up,” Jimmie said pleasantly. “Work.”

“What is there so terrifically important about that work?” Sarah sounded honestly puzzled. “Me—if I were you—I’d take a month off, enjoy the food in a country that still has sense enough to stay out of war, go to the club, pick out a whole harem of women and indulge my more frivolous nature to the limit—”

“Sarah!” said Mr. Bailey.

“Sis is right!” Biff looked at his brother.

“You could, you know,” Sarah went on. “Ninety per cent of the gals in Muskogewan would be a pushover for you. Would be, that is, if you quit carrying the torch for the Empire. I could hear ’em panting last night, when you came into the club. I’ll arrange it for you. Some nice numbers—”

“Sarah!” said her mother, more loudly.

“Why deceive the man?” Sarah grinned wickedly. “He knows he’s sort of the Ronald Colman type—intellectually, and without the mustache—crossed with the Gary Cooper build. Honestly, Jimmie, when you got off the train I passionately wished I were pro-British—and not your sister! In a nice way,” she added, aware that her mother was reaching the point of explosion. “No fooling. Why the drudgery? You don’t look like a chemist. Last night, you didn’t even act like one.”

Jimmie said, airily, “Oh, social service. I work for some people that I want to get out of a jam.”

“Really—” said his mother.

“He means the English,” said Sarah.

“I mean,” Jimmie explained, “about a billion or so people. English, French, Poles, Czechs, Chinese, Malays, Russians—”

“We know geography,” Biff said irritatedly. “How’d you like Audrey?”

Jimmie’s face was expressionless. “She’s very attractive.”

“She didn’t—?” Sarah began.

Mrs. Bailey said, “Shh! It’s supposed to be a surprise! ”

“You better tell him then, Mother.” Mrs. Bailey considered. “Very well. Audrey didn’t say anything about the party for you tonight?”

“Not a word.”

“Well, it was going to be a surprise party—and you can pretend you’re surprised anyway—”

“ You’ll be surprised, Mother. I’m not going.” Mrs. Bailey was triumphant. “Oh, yes, you are! Audrey’s folks are giving it!”

“Oh?” Jimmie pondered. “Well, I’m still not going. ”

“But, Jimmie!” Mrs. Bailey’s voice was tearful. Mr. Bailey looked at her with an I-expected-as-much expression. “Jimmie, dear! This is really by far the most important of all the parties we’d planned for you! And you were so devoted to Audrey last night! I was extremely relieved by it.”

He felt, again, the weight of his first disappointment: the fact that his family was angry with him and the deep violence of their disagreement. It was not the shock it had been on the day before, but it still outraged him—as if he had come home to find them gleefully engaged in some lunatical act of arson or assault. “I liked Audrey all right. She has feelings—infantile and hard to reach—but there, anyhow. She reminds me of a much more real woman I knew once, too. And dancing exclusively with her saved me from hordes of those little numbers Sarah just described as pushovers. Lord! Parlor English has deteriorated!”

Mr. Bailey started to say something forceful. His wife gave him an imploring signal—a signal that promised to treat later with the situation.

Westcott came in with the papers on a tray. Mr. Bailey seized the Chicago paper vigorously, and his wife accepted the Muskogewan Times. She turned immediately to the Society page, without seeming to be aware that the Times had a front page at all.

But Mr. Bailey concentrated on the front page of the Chicago journal.

Jimmie, of course, had never watched his father read a newspaper in the latter years of the New Deal. He did so now. It was an extraordinary experience.

Mr. Bailey’s eyes ran along the banner headline with rapid interest. He said, “Huh!” in a moderate tone. He read the first few lines of double-column type. He said, “So. Two more freighters, eh?”

Sarah and Biff went on eating, scarcely noticing the one-man melodrama fomenting under their noses. But Jimmie watched, repressing a grin.

Presently his father said, “Ha!” bitterly. He pulled the paper closer to his eyes. He whispered between his teeth, “Rat!” There was a moment of absolute quiet. “The dirty rat!”

Mr. Bailey fumbled busily with the stubborn sheets as he tried to follow a news story over to page six. He finally found the continuation. He read. He exclaimed, “Communists! Communists, everyone!”

He went back to the front page. For some minutes he read quietly again. He said, “Well, they had another flood in Los Angeles. Killed three.”

This observation brought no response. His eye flicked over the type. Suddenly he made a noise. It was an animal noise. He kept reading, and he kept making animal noises.

Moans, growls, whinnies. Like the noises of something caught in a steel trap—past its first hysteria but not yet dulled to resignation. Presently he stared at nothing. “They put him in!” he whispered in a grisly tone. “They put him in again! They put him in for a third term! How could they do it?” He shook his head and bowed it, as if he were in the presence of some fantastic betrayal of himself by a dear friend.

The lowering of his head put his eye in range of still another heading. Instantly, his reverent despair was gone. He read—electrically. “Oh—God!” he whispered, as if it were one word. “They passed it! Forced it through!” He clapped his hand to his head. The newspaper fell from his other hand. Stricken, he nevertheless seized it again. He pored over the words. And a peculiar thing began to happen to him.

His face became empurpled. His body swelled like a frog’s. The great arteries in his temples beat rapidly. His breath went in and out, sharply. His fingers stiffened out, and closed, and straightened again. He looked like a boiler that is popping rivets immediately before bursting. He swore fluently, softly, using up the common expressions and repeating them in fresh combinations. With one fist he began to hammer in a steady rhythm on the edge of the table.

Only then did his wife take open cognizance of his condition. “Finish your breakfast, Kendrick,” she said pleasantly.

He stared at her glassily. Westcott brought the morning mail on a tray. Mr. Bailey continued to stare while the man distributed it. He said, “Well, Hannah, they passed it! That means there’s a ceiling on everything, now. No room for business to budge in! I’m not a banker any more! I’m just a teller! We’re Communist now—all of us! We might as well go out in the street and start saluting with fists! You wouldn’t think that one man, one solitary traitor to his class, one egomaniacal idiot, could steal from a hundred and thirty-two million people every right, every power, every privilege, every decent democratic principle—”

Suddenly he stopped. He quivered. He looked at Jimmie. “What’s the matter?”

It was some time before Jimmie could get his breath. Quite some time. He was choking—choking badly. But when he did recover he loosed the breath again in a tremendous roar of laughter. “Oh, Lord!” said. “Oh, my Lord, Dad! All these years I’ve thought of you as the most self-controlled, self-disciplined man I ever knew! And now!” He chortled again.

“It took Roosevelt to turn you into a thundering infant! No kidding!” He fought again for air. “No fooling! You’ll get apoplexy.”

His father came up standing. “Infant!” he bellowed. “Infant!”

Jimmie’s mirth was only partially quenched by his attempt to regain composure.

“You looked exactly like one. Ten months old. When you take away his rattle! Ye gods! Are many grown people going into spins like that, over the morning paper? Do it again, Dad! Do it some more!” A paroxysm of hilarity bent him double.

His father was still standing. He opened his mouth and closed it. His eyes were raging and his face was still violet. “Son—” he began.

Then Biff said, “Go on. Laugh.” His voice was so odd that even his father looked at him.

Biff was as white as chalk. Around the corners of his mouth was a slack sullenness. The perspiration that had made small damp areas on his upper lip and forehead was now pouring from his entire face. He had a letter in his hand. He looked, Jimmie thought, like a man who has just been hit. In the vivid vocabulary of Jimmie’s memory, that simile meant hit mortally, with a splinter of a bomb or a spear of flying glass. Jimmie seized his brother’s arm strongly and said, “Hey, fellow! What’s wrong?”

“Laugh some more,” Biff replied vacuously, insanely.

Jimmie seized the letter. He frowned perplexedly and looked around the table. His family seemed scared. “It just says,” Jimmie reported calmly, “that Biff, my proud young brother, has been drafted.”

“Just!” said Biff. “Just says!”

“What’s the matter with that?” Jimmie asked.

Mrs. Bailey was rising. A dewy light shone in her eyes and her face was working.

She ran to her son’s side. “Oh, Biff, Biff, Biff! I won’t let them take you away. My boy, my youngest boy!”

Her husband threw into the scene a tone of reasonableness. “Take it easy, Mother.

This whole thing’s preposterous, and you know it. There must be something we can do.

I’ll look into it—immediately.”

“Of course, you can do something,” Mrs. Bailey answered, sniffling, but comforted. “It’s such a waste! Biff was just getting ready to hunt for the right job!”

Jimmie glanced at his frantic mother, his frowning father, and his sister, who seemed to be undergoing mixed emotions. Then he brought his gaze “I’m not scared,” Biff said harshly. He met Jimmie’s eyes, and Jimmie knew that was the truth. “But I’ll be everlastingly damned if I’m going to spend a year of my life marching around with a lot of Boy Scouts, getting up at the crack of dawn, doing day labor, eating swill—just because Franklin Delano Roosevelt says there’s an emergency! And that’s flat!”

Mrs. Bailey added her explanation. “I told Biff he should do something when he wrote out the application—or whatever you call it. He was bound to get an ‘A’ rating.

Maybe we can do something about his physical examination.”

“I’m a football player,” Biff said coldly.

His mother answered, “Still, we must know the examining physician—whoever it is. Laddy Bedford got put way back because of his heart, though I never heard before about his having heart trouble. There must be some loophole, somewhere.” She seemed to see a stoniness in Jimmie’s stare. She added, “It isn’t as if we really needed an army! As if we’d been invaded, or anything! Besides, there still isn’t enough equipment to drill with for half the boys that they’ve already taken. They shouldn’t call any more until they have the things.

And even Congress almost had sense enough, last summer, to put a stop to it!”

Jimmie said, “That’s a devil of a mood to show a guy who’s about to join the army.”

She said, “Jimmie!”

Mr. Bailey pontificated. “Now, James, this is something that demands thought.

Thought—and possible action. A boy like Biff is too valuable to be put in the infantry.

And the time for raising a militia hasn’t come, even if the president does create it later.

You’re fresh from other people’s battles. You’ll have to Jet us work this out in the way most suitable to Americans in America.”

“Biff’s going,” Jimmie said bluntly.

Biff whirled. “Says who?”

“Says me, Biff.” Jimmie was very quiet.

“You think you can make me?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

Jimmie shrugged. He was still sitting at his place. He picked up the letter. “Here.

It tells you to report. You’ll pass the physical, because you have the constitution of a buffalo. So-you’ll go. If you”—he spoke still more quietly—“or Dad, or Mother, or anybody tries to weasel on this, I’ll go before the draft board or committee—or whatever it is—and report the whole unselfish and patriotic conversation we have just been having here! I promise you!”

He stopped there—because Biff slugged him. He hit from the floor, with all his might. Biff was also sitting. Otherwise the blow would have downed Jimmie. It caught him on the cheekbone. It made a nasty sound. Sarah screamed. Biff grabbed his fist and rubbed it. He said, “I’ll run this show! You interfere—and that’s just a sample! I’ll about kill you!” His voice was shaking.

Jimmie lowered his head a moment. The first fierce pain died away. The sparks stopped floating. He put his hand up to his cheek and rubbed hard. His palm was bloodied. He took out his handkerchief, dipped it in his tumbler, and pressed it against the cut bruise. “I didn’t see that one coming,” he said, finally. “You better always throw ’em without warning me. You’re a husky boy, Biff. But I’ve been training in the home guard for nearly two years. If you ever slug me again I’ll lay you cold. If you want to fight fair—come on outside. Do you?”

Biff said nothing.

Mrs. Bailey was weeping voluminously. Her husband was staring rabidly at his sons. Sarah sat still, shivering. The telephone rang. Westcott came in. He was astonished by the tableau. He showed it only slightly. “For you, Mrs. Bailey. It’s Mrs. Wilson.”

“I can’t possibly—” said Mrs. Bailey. Then she gulped. “Mrs. Wilson!” She rose.

While she was away no one said a word.

When she came back her face was pasty and her eyes were bleak. “The p-p-party tonight is off,” she said hollowly. “Off-because of Jimmie’s views. That’s the real truth.

Mrs. Wilson is telling people—except us, of course—that she’s been taken very ill, all of a sudden.” She sat down and burst into tears again. “Now, everything’s ruined.”

CHAPTER IV

JIMMIE WALKED to the paint works. His mother, emerging from her woebegone condition for a single, considerate moment, had offered a car for him to drive.

He had preferred to walk. It wasn’t much more than a mile to the plant; and Jimmie was used to walking. He hadn’t bothered to tell his mother that he was used to walking now.

He had felt too inert and too wounded—wantonly wounded—to take the trouble to remind her that he had just come from England, where there was a hideous war and people walked places whenever they could. No more use turning the screw, driving the barb.

Something had happened to his family in the six years of his absence. They’d lost something—heart, guts, reason, even great chunks of knowledge—and all they had left were glass brick walls, automobiles, cocktails, bad tempers.

He tramped through the pretty part of town, the hill part, squirting the slush vindictively; he entered the shabbier section with less spattering steps, as if the poorer people had more delicate sensibilities, or as if they were fellow sufferers rather than the authors of his fury. The ugliness of the rows of frame houses, painted in the most repugnant shades of yellow and green and brown, stung like a rebuke; nobody taught the poor people anything; they couldn’t learn for themselves; even if they learned, they couldn’t do much about their learning, because they were poor. His father would call these people—the women hanging out clothes in the back yards, the old men stealing kindling from the railroad right-of-way—by the single name of Labor. His father would call what was going on inside Jimmie’s mind Communistic. But Jimmie wasn’t thinking about economics—he wasn’t thinking at all; he was only feeling—and his feelings were raw as his right cheek, and as unpleasant to behold.

At the Corinth Works he was given a pass by the boss’s secretary, Miss Melrose, and shown to the lab that had been made ready for his coming. A big lab, a good lab, a fairly dramatic lab. Too intricate for the layman’s eyes it was like the insides of a great engine, made of glass. He kicked off his overshoes, hung his hat on the spout of a retort, put on a brand new rubber apron, and walked around, reading the labels on hundreds of bottles, cocking his eye, now and again, to note that the old man had so much imagination, and so much money for chemicals. The apparatus was magnificent. The layout could not be improved. Light poured from windows high overhead, all around the room—twenty or more, big and opaque, so no one could watch the alchemy in progress.

The place was air-conditioned.

Jimmie sighed and sat down on a stool. Here was one spot-one niche in the hostile Midwestern city, in the unfamiliar world of America—where he was going to be perfectly at home.

Old Cholmondeley, he thought, would give his right eye for this joint. Percy would give his other arm. Well, this was America. In America—they had everything. He wondered which of the pressing problems he would start on. His wonderment took his thoughts a long way—to the heart of the battle in Europe; he tried to weigh the relative strategic values of succeeding here, or succeeding there—if he should succeed at all.

Finally, grunting, he walked to a rack of test tubes, took one down, poured into it some powdered iron, looked at it for a full five minutes, set it back in the rack, picked up a pencil that had never been used, and commenced to write a prodigality of equations on long sheets of yellow paper.

He was studying these when his door pushed open. Because Miss Melrose had said no one would disturb him unless he rang, Jimmie knew who had opened his door.

“’Lo, Willie,” he said.

“How do you like it?”

“Don’t need to answer, do I? If my brain was as sound as your lab we’d have the war won in a week!”

Mr. Corinth chuckled soundlessly. He sat down on another stool and squinted for some time at his employee. “Who hit you?”

“My brother.” The response was complacent. “Uh-huh. Biff’s got a bad temper.

War, eh?”

“Domestic relations,” Jimmie answered, smiling ruefully, “seem to hinge on international relations.”

“Out here in the West they do, anyhow. They ought to draft that puppy pretty soon.”

“They did.”

Mr. Corinth pulled on his white mustache, apparently to hide a smile. “SO he hit you. Did you see it coming?”

Jimmie had been studying his equations again. He looked up, not with irritation, but in a way that showed his preoccupation. “No.”

“Thought not.” The old man yawned and stretched. “Jimmie, put the foolscap away. I want to talk.”

“Okay!” He smiled indulgently and tossed down the pencil.

“Plenty of time for chemistry. Time goes on forever, and chemistry’s part of it.

Not enough time for people on the other hand, no matter what. I like to feel the fellows working for me are in the proper mood. It’s my hunch that the mood you’re in is everything. You can come over to this glass maze week after week and figure out how to pick an atom off here and stick it on yonder; but if you’re in the wrong mood you never get any valuable answers. On the other hand, you can go out and lie pie-eyed drunk in the gutter for a month and come in here for one day, and if you feel hot you can discover more than ten men in ten lifetimes. Funny!”

“Still,” Jimmie said, “I don’t propose to try the inspirational method of the gutter.”

“Plenty sore, aren’t you?”

Jimmie was going to deny that. But he said, “Yes. Plenty.”

“Well, when people are sore it’s because they’re afraid. Every damn’ solitary time.

Maybe not afraid of exactly what they seem to be sore at—but afraid of something behind it. What do you think you’re afraid of, at this point?”

“Afraid?” He laughed unsympathetically. “Nothing.”

“Sure you are. Scared dizzy. You love your family, Jimmie. You’re that kind of an egg. As loyal as a darned dog. And you’ve blown ’em high as kites, I bet. Started scenes—Biff hit you at breakfast? I thought so. You’re scared—but I’ll let you figure out of what.

You know, Jimmie, you have a lot to catch up on.”

“Evidently.”

“Think about that—for one thing.”

Jimmie suddenly had a mental picture of his father, reading the morning paper. “If your psychology is sound—if rage is a sign of fear—then my old man must be about dead of fright these days!” He described the passionate perusal.

Mr. Corinth snorted. “Yes, there’s men doing that all over the country. Sore at the president because they’re scared of what he’ll do. But that’s not the main thing these days.

That’ll wash—one way or another—according to what the majority of the American people think they want. It’s what they think they want that matters. What their attitude is. Hitler’s propaganda fellows understand that. Jimmie, how many times do you believe you can change your mind and still keep believing in yourself?” The younger man cocked an eyebrow. “I don’t get it.”

“Well, suppose—” Mr. Corinth took out a large linen handkerchief. “Suppose I said this was black. You think it’s white. But suppose I finally convince you it’s black. All right. I’ve reversed your attitude once. Now. Suppose somebody else comes along and makes you realize it’s white again. That’s twice your opinion has changed.

“Now. You’re going along thinking it’s a white handkerchief. But suppose—just for the hell of it—that the underside of this darned thing really is black. And suppose you can see a reflection of that side in a mirror. And suppose, also, it happens to be a matter of life and death importance to you that the whole handkerchief should be black. And suppose I—who have already convinced you once that it was black—start to work on you again. You have a motive for thinking this whole thing is black. I tell you it is—and prove it, let’s say, by phoney physics. Let’s say, you’ve always pretended to know a lot about physics—though you don’t. Suppose, also, a lot of men who are leaders in your field—not all, but a lot—start saying this handkerchief of mine is all black. What do you do now?

“Naturally, you get convinced again that the darned thing is as black as the Ace of Spades on both sides. Why? Because you’ve made that mistake once. Because you have a dire personal need to think it’s all black. And because the big shots above you say it’s black. Jimmie—that’s the most important thing in the world today. That’s what’s the matter with your family. They can’t start all over again with the basic facts, line ’em up impartially, change their opinions for about the fifth time, and come up once more, finally and for all, with the true bill of goods!”

“That just states the problem. How do you solve it?”

The old man tipped his stool back against a high table and peered at Jimmie. “You know your family. You know your country—or, at least, what your country has stood for in the past. ‘We hold all men to be created free and equal.’ That sort of stuff. You solve their problem. I’ll help you out, though. For years I’ve been pasting up scrapbooks of things I thought were important. All sorts of things. Newspaper clippings and items from magazines. Pages from books—most whole books only do have a couple of worth-while pages in ’em. My scrapbooks aren’t perfect—they missed a lot—but I’ll lend ’em to you.

They’ll help you catch up on your American history.”

“I need to,” Jimmie said.

“Mmmm. I’ll send the books over to your house. Maybe your family’ll peek into ’em. They’ll remind them of a lot they’ve overlooked.”

Jimmie grinned. “I bet.”

Mr. Corinth took a cigar from his disreputable waistcoat pocket and struck a match. He puffed ruminatively. “Your people—most people—don’t realize what has happened to them. It’s so big, so abrupt, so demanding of enormous mental change, that they can’t realize. Takes more time than they’re willing to take to think. More intellectual honesty than your father or your mother are in the habit of using. I don’t believe either Roosevelt or Churchill ever understood exactly what’s happened to all of us on this planet. I mean about this isolation business. When folks do understand what has happened, this word ‘isolation’ just about won’t exist any more.”

Mr. Corinth stared at Jimmie. “In the case of crime or danger there is only one question important to a human. That isn’t—How big is the danger, or, How terrible? It’s—How faraway is it? Only, Jimmie, there’re two kinds of ‘faraway.’ One is—How far in distance? The other is—How far in time? The murder and rape of a few thousand Chinese is pretty faraway in distance. So is the German Army—in spite of the cruising range of bombers. That reassures people. But they aren’t any distance away in time! Even with the telegraph, distance in time was still distance. It took time to get the messages translated and printed in the newspapers. But with the radio that’s all gone. We’re isolated in distance, only a few hours, all over the world. And in time, not at all—any more, ever! ”

“I never thought of that,” Jimmie said. “Not that way.”

“Nope. People don’t. I pick up my radio. I hear the AA going in London. Shrapnel hitting the roof where the announcer stands. Fire crackling. Bombs screeching. I think— Well, that’s London and it’s faraway. But I can’t think—That’s something that happened. I know darn’ well it’s something happening right here and now! There’s the trouble. It isn’t history. It’s present tense. Therefore, my conscience won’t let me overlook it. My instinct is to do something about it because it’s going on now! If I still try to tell myself it’s faraway I feel I’m a hypocrite. I feel that I’m an accessory to the whole bloody affair. I am—in the sense that I haven’t the excuse of isolation in time any more. Particeps criminis, the law calls it. That is, if you’re going down the street and you see a robbery take place and you don’t try to do anything about it the law can punish you. You’re an accessory. That’s what radio makes the whole world: accessories before, during, and after the rotten crimes now going on. Not eyewitnesses, earwitnesses, which is just as damning.”

“Not to my family,” Jimmie answered grimly. “Not to them! They think we’re safe. They call the destruction of a continent a ‘European quarrel.’ They say I’m a ‘warmonger.’ I’m not, because I don’t plan in any way to profit by war—which IS what the word really means. They say I’m an interventionist. I’m not, because my reason for wanting to help is not to high-pressure somebody else’s war, but to do a long-range job of saving our own skin. They say I’m pro-British which I am—though the reason is, the English have changed. Before the war I was almost anti-English. Munich made me sick.

But England changed! My family says England betrayed France in the end. Actually—in the end—England offered France an even-Stephen union with the British Empire—a thing which would have caused every tory in the country to shoot himself, three years before! They made that offer, to keep France from betraying herself. Oh—the hell with my family!”

Mr. Corinth smoked. His eyes were as near to twinkling as their opacity permitted. “I know your family. Listening to their radios they feel like accessories to all the crimes. But to stop the crimes—means war, maybe. To go to war means—well, a terrible risk. Perhaps it means they’ll lose their money, their clothes, their cars, their house with the new glass brick panels, maybe Biff’s life, maybe yours. Maybe, even, their own. They will all tell you that Hitler can never touch America. They even say he cannot cross the English Channel—though he crossed it often enough in the air. They will say that Muskogewan can never be harmed. Then, when a little time has passed, and the discussion warms, they will recommend staying out of war tin order to save the lives of Muskogewan’s innocent women and children.’ Oh, they contradict themselves—people like your mother and father! But they talk very much and very loudly, because they are talking nonsense—and their consciences know it. They realize, at the very least, that they are refusing to answer a moral demand. Refusing, because they fear the cost will be high.

That means I hey are putting a money value on their own characters. To admit that out loud, would destroy them. So they deny it; inevitably, they contradict themselves.”

Jimmie stood and stretched. He paced his new laboratory for several moments.

“They make me so mad! Last night the whole crowd at the club said that an American declaration of war on Germany amounted to ‘pointing an empty gun’! Where do they get that kind of garbage? Is a world war the same thing as a stick-up? Is the biggest navy in the world—an empty gun? And what about declaring in the greatest economic plant on earth? Then my old man said that if England lost the whole of Europe would be Communist overnight. Does he believe that? Can’t he read? Hitler has never kept a promise. But hasn’t he carried out every threat he ever made—so far?

“Dad says Fascism is the same thing as Communism. Even if it was—exactly the same thing—what would we do with the whole world like that? I asked him, and he smiled like a sap and said, ‘What we’ve always done, son. Mind our own business.’ I asked him what business we’d have left to mind, and he said I didn’t understand world trade. Imagine! I understand world trade on Hitler’s terms, all right! But Dad doesn’t—and yet he runs a bank! He says, ‘Leave it up to the common people, and you’ll get the right answer every time.’ I say—a lot of things are too damned complicated for the common people! Even at that, I say, the polls of American sentiment show the majority feels a hell of a lot different from Father! So he says the polls are rigged. Are they?”

The old chemist shook his head. “No. They’re honest—and reliable. Only—time enters in, again. That’s why these polls drive people crazy. People overlook the fact that polls are always history. They represent what the nation thought yesterday, or last week, or even last month. Which, with the radio knocking time down to zero, means that the polls are not news, but reminiscence. They have no positive value in deciding what to do now. They only show what should have been done last month, when the poll was taken.

We’re able to live in the present everywhere, now. People ought to think what that means.

One reason the isolationists always talk about this war in historical terms is to try—subconsciously—to push it back into a less uncompromising focus. The kind of focus they grew up with. The focus in which the dying, and t he killing, are always over when you learn about them. That’s comfortable—because it does not make you an accessory. The radio does.”

Jimmie raised his foot onto the top of a stool. He relaxed his weight against his knee. His gray eyes were blazingly alive; his reddish brown hair was uncombed, so that it jostled when he spoke. “The bunch that Father and Mother work with is sure baffling! They take the word of a pilot as gospelon all things military and aerodynamic. They sit on platforms with a prominent Socialist—and you ought to hear what Dad thinks about Socialism! They listen to anybody on their side, no matter how obvious. No matter if he’s a manifest crackpot, or publicity-crazed, or an ax-grinder, or a professional Irishman, or a long-established baiter of Britain, or a discredited politician trying to make headlines—just anybody! No rhyme, no reason, no order—just rant! And big applause.”

“Sure. I’ll introduce you to a few ‘interventionists,’ though, Jimmie—to keep you sane. You’ll find that they’ve pretty much thought their way through all the changes of black and white—to the real answer. It’s funny. The interventionist attitude toward the isolationist is one of worry. Worry about how to convert him. Worry about the factors that made him the way he is. An earnest attempt to reason with him. But the isolationist’s attitude toward his interventionist friend is just—rage. Instead of reason the isolationist has been using slogans. ‘Don’t plow under our boys.’ Frantic, hysterical swill like that. Malicious stuff.” The old man sighed. “The difference in their attitudes toward each other is just about a definition of who’s doing the calm thinking and who’s doing the terrified yelling. Well, Jimmie, there’s a lot wrong with America—”

“You tell me,” Jimmie said. “I’m liking this. At home, they shut me up. At home, their slogans are truth. My facts are propaganda. Even Audrey Wilson called me Duff Cooper at one point last night.”

Mr. Corinth’s eyebrows lifted. “So you’ve met our Audrey?”

“Yeah. Mother’s idea—at the beginning.”

“Mmmm.” The old man slid from his stool. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with America—and the world—some other time, Jimmie. Did you like her?”

“Who? Audrey? She’s attractive.”

“A mild phrase. Too mild. It protests too much—in converse. Audrey is to attractiveness what a flying fortress is to a box kite. I know Audrey pretty well. She tried to get a job here, once. Tried hard.”

“Audrey did? Doing what?”

“Learning chemistry. She’d polished off finishing school and she had an idea she’d become another Eve Curie.”

“Why didn’t you let her learn?”

“Oh, I dunno. Maybe I was wrong. I looked at Audrey and I decided women already knew too darn’ much, anyhow. Teaching women the things men know hasn’t done one doggoned visible thing to improve human life yet. I half suspect it’s made the women skimp their natural business, besides. So I thought Audrey ought to have a chance to grow mellow by just being female.”

“Mellow. She’s hardly that.”

“No. I suppose not. She might be closer to it, though, than you think. You’re no wood-aged paragon of mellowness yourself, yet.” He reached out, rather impulsively, and put his hand on Jimmie’s shoulder. “You’re thinking, this morning—if I may be so clairvoyant as to say so—of taking a room, hunh?”

The younger man grinned again. “I was.”

“Don’t. Stick around your family. You aren’t anywhere near in the mood to work.

The mood I talked about when I butted in here. You won’t find out anything, anyway.

You might as well get over your mad—or push through it—or whatever you do when you see red. I can run the paint works—government orders and all. You just stay at home and mess around here when you want.”

“I’m used to working in any mood,” Jimmie answered seriously. “I’ve had some damned good practice!”

The venerable face was seamed with amusement and at the same time with a transcendent sympathy. “Yes, Jimmie. I can imagine. I can imagine a little. Twenty-three years ago—for a month—when I was in Chemical Warfare I had charge of a big ammunition dump—high explosive and gas. They shelled and bombed the thing constantly. I can make a stab at knowing what you mean. It’s not that mood I’m talking about. I have a sneaking idea you aren’t yellow—or a quitter. It’s the other mood.” He hesitated. “You’ll be seeing Audrey again soon, I suppose?”

“I don’t know. Her family canceled a party they’d set for me—when they found out I was a British agent, practically.”

“Well, when you see her do me a favor. Keep trying to think what she’d be like if she didn’t have those looks.”

Jimmie laughed. “Why?”

“I always wondered myself—that’s all. And another chore. Try it. Make believe you’ve been sold on every single item your mother and your father subscribe to. Empty gun—not our war—America can’t be invaded—Roosevelt is a Communist and a hysteric.

Believe all that, on purpose. Then see how you feel about life!” Mr. Corinth walked to the table where Jimmie had been working. He picked up the pages of equations and read through them rapidly. His white eyebrows waggled and he blinked at Jimmie once or twice.

“Solve your personal equations first,” he said, as he walked from the room.

Jimmie went back to work. In a vehement, though unappraised, determination to refute the opinion of the philosophical old man, he worked through the lunch hour and the afternoon. No satisfying thought came out of his labors. At five, a whistle blew. The shifts changed. Jimmie shook himself; he was stiff from concentration. He put on his overshoes and his hat and locked the door of his laboratory.

Outside, the air was warmer. The snow had gone and the damp ground smelled pungently of sun-cured vegetation spread on it by autumn. Men and women were walking toward exits in the high fence. Some turned at the corner and started home on foot; others crossed a muddy street to the big parking lot and started their cars. The low-slanting sunlight throbbed with revving engines. Jimmie had a hunch that a second, belated, Indian summer would follow the freak cold spell which had bound Muskogewan in snow.

Such a warm spell was typical of the climate of the region. It would be followed by the crisp weather that led into Thanksgiving. His hunch exhilarated Jimmie. English weather was tedious and small-scale. The changes in this part of northern United States were dramatic, stimulating.

A horn blew as Jimmie checked out at the gatehouse. He looked up. Audrey was sitting in a coupe parked in the space alongside a fireplug. Jimmie put his pass in his wallet and took off his hat and walked over to her car. “Up to now,” he said, “I’ve refused all offers of chaufferage. I’ll take yours, though.”

CHAPTER V

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!

CHAPTER VI

BIFF—HIS given name was Bedford—was darker than Jimmie. His hair was straight, a few shades from black, and he had large brownish eyes. The irises were not all brown but part greenish and part yellowish. His mother called them hazel. He was a huge, husky youngster with an overlarge head. He looked as if his basic design had been a pile of various-sized boxes. He was the archetype of a fullback—although he had played end for three years on the team of State University.

He lay on the table in the emergency room of the hospital, smoking a cigarette.

When Jimmie came in he was looking at the ceiling, blinking his eyes. The pupils of his eyes were contracted—he’d been given morphine—and his mouth had relaxed into an unaware, shadowy smile, as if he were immersed in a fantasy that had nothing to do with what was happening around him. Around him, in fact, there was no activity whatever. An intern stood against a glass cabinet with an expression of patient expectancy. Biff’s family was draped here and there in positions of anguish. Sarah and her mother, in the proper mien of horror, kept glancing down at the pool of blood on the tile floor. Mr.

Bailey was looking out the window at a wall, his shoulders high, with an admission of grief, and a proud proclamation of courage.

It was Biff’s smile, Jimmie knew, that corroborated his inner assurance. Jimmie didn’t like that smile—slick, catlike, pleased. They didn’t see Jimmie, at first. They didn’t see him because he wore soft-shod heels, and because they were not yet in the habit of expecting to see him, and because they had other things to hold their attention.

Biff’s eyes became conscious of something at their peripheral range, and the smile on Biff’s lips vanished even before he turned his head: Biff wiped it out. He substituted a small twist of pain. He said, weakly, “Hello, there, Jim.”

His older brother spoke quietly, too, but strongly. “Hello, Biff! How’d it happen?”

The other Baileys chimed in.

“It’s about time you arrived!”

“Where on earth have you been?”

“We called the plant! Twice!”

Jimmie ignored them. He bent over his brother. “What you got there?”

Biff breathed a little—to show breathing was difficult. “Oh, nothing much.”

“Nothing much!” his mother shrilled.

Mr. Bailey said sternly, “He’s broken some ribs, Jimmie. Both legs. Maybe hurt internally. The surgeon’s taking forever to get here! We arrived”—he looked at his watch—“twenty minutes ago!”

“Who’d you hit?” Jimmie asked.

“Another car. Hit me. Rolled me—twice, I think. I was going across Stetson.

Didn’t see it coming. His lights must have been off. The guy was doing about eighty. I didn’t have a chance! I’d already stopped, for the sign. It was my fault, partly, in a way. I should have seen him even if he had no lights, I suppose—”

“How’s the other guy?” Jimmie asked.

Biff looked startled.

Mr. Bailey said, “It was clearly a piece of reckless driving on the other man’s part.

Biff crept out of the side street—and was smashed into!”

Jimmie nodded. In his mind’s eye he could see his brother, at the end of a day of helpless rage at having to be in the army, driving along the dusky side street, slowing at some distance from the stop-line, and hearing the high whine of an approaching car. A car coming illegally fast. Jimmie could imagine his brother’s face. It would go slack and sullen—and then convulse with purpose. His brother’s car would not turn, cautiously, in the path of the oncoming car. It would shoot out, in high, the motor racing, and scarcely turn at all—making an unavoidable obstacle on the road. The other car-brakes grinding, wheels sliding—would strike at an angle. It wasn’t an attempt at suicide, exactly. It wasn’t, even, a conscious effort at self-mutilation. But some such thing, in a more shadowy form, had motivated Biff. He had entertained for one paroxysmal instant the thought, I’ll get hurt—and then they can’t take me! In the next instant he had been getting hurt.

Jimmie knew that such “accidents” were shockingly common. But deliberateness could not be proven. No jury would recognize escapism as a punishable motive.

Sometimes the author of such an accident would confess the impulse—long afterward.

Sometimes a psychiatrist would uncover such an impulse in a patient. Mostly, however, smashups like Biff’s were attributed to related factors, such as high speed, or to “pure accident”—a phrase which, excepting for coincidences in time, is a pure lie.

Such things had been in Jimmie’s mind as he had walked to the hospital. To review them, to confirm them by Biff’s appearance and behavior, took seconds only.

Jimmie let himself smile as if with a sudden thought.

“Anyway, Biff, you’re out of the army!”

The younger man’s eyes moved slowly toward Jimmie and held with faint surprise. “So I am. Funny. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“For a few weeks, anyhow,” Jimmie said, watching the eyes. They did what he had expected. They dilated with alarm and widened further with rage—for the time between fingers naps. Then they were blank again. They moved toward Mrs. Bailey.

Biff had said he “hadn’t thought” about being out of the army. That—and his eyes—were the final clinching proofs. If it had been an honest accident Biff would have thought of his delivery at once—and admitted it. Whooped about it. Crowed over it. But Biff had prepared that little disavowal—for the first person who reminded him that his misfortune was not untinged with good luck.

Mrs. Bailey, realizing that Biff’s gaze was resting on her and that he vaguely wanted something done or said, crossed the room to Jimmie’s side. “You mustn’t make him talk so much! He’s in agony!”

“I’m all right,” Biff protested. His voice grew weaker. There was a tremor in it.

“Jim, old kid. I’m sorry I socked you this morning.”

“It’s okay. Forget it.”

“I want you to know I’m sorry—that’s all. I’ll be getting the old whiffaroo pretty soon, and Doc Cather will be going over me, and if the works slip—anyhow, I want you to know.”

Jimmie nodded. He was looking straight at Biff. Biff looked away.

Mrs. Bailey was streaming tears.

Mr. Bailey blew his nose, sumptuously.

Sarah said shrilly, “Why isn’t the doctor here! Why isn’t anything being done! He may even be—right here before our eyes!”

Mr. Bailey said, “Quiet, Sarah. He’ll be along any minute. The intern says Biff’ll keep the way he is, a while.”

Sarah began to bawl.

Jimmie walked closer to his brother. His grin was amiable, only a little bit sardonic. “Your pretty puss is unscratched, anyhow!”

“I must have thrown my hands over my face at the time. A protective reflex. I dunno….”

Then the surgeon arrived. He was dressed in white and he walked fast, like a man entering from the wings, for an act. “Well!” he exclaimed. “What have we here?” Jimmie thought it was close to tops for asininity.

Mr. Bailey said, “My son’s pretty badly hurt, Doctor Cather. It goes without saying, of course, that no expense is to be spared. Specialists from Chicago, New York, by air—if they can help you in any way. Everything!”

The surgeon was grinning at his patient. Biff grinned back. His mother said, “Money doesn’t mean a thing, doctor!”

Then the surgeon said something that revised Jimmie’s opinion of him. It made Jimmie think that he was probably a whacking good surgeon. “Oh, I’ll send you a stiff bill, Mrs. Bailey. Never worry about that!” He took the hem of the blanket that covered Biff. “You folks better run along while I have a look. Come back after dinner. Say around nine, ten o’clock.”

Jimmie glanced at the intern. He had not in any way noticed the man until then.

The intern was stepping forward to help the surgeon. It ran through Jimmie’s mind that the intern was a shrewd-looking duck, with wide, apperceptive eyes, the pointed nose of the curious, and an air about him of knowledgableness. Jimmie also thought that he’d been standing there, watching everything, all that time. As the intern began a swift, technical explanation of his findings, he winked at Jimmie….

Supper began mordantly. For one thing, Mrs. Bailey was weeping steadily. For another, the food was overcooked-caked and dry. Mrs. Bailey kept apologizing for her tears.

“He’ll be all right,” Sarah said. “He’s tough. Tough as Jimmie—almost.” Her blue gaze met Jimmie’s violently—and he wondered why.

“We must eat,” Mr. Bailey said earnestly. “We’ll need our strength.”

Jimmie was eating right along. In fact, he found himself hungry. That surprised him. He had been through a lot that day. For a mere Midwestern town, Muskogewan was unreasonably productive of excitement.

“The poor boy!” said Biff’s mother. “The poor, poor boy!”

“Popinjay, that doctor,” said Mr. Bailey. “Wonder if he’s as good as his reputation?”

“Where were you?” Sarah asked bluntly of Jimmie.

“Me? Working.”

“They said you left the factory about five. They said a dame drove you away.”

“That was a British spy,” Jimmie answered calmly.

His mother raised her voice. “Don’t make jokes!”

“All right. It was a gal that works at the plant. She offered me a ride home.”

Sarah became alert. “But she didn’t drive you home!”

“Where did you go?”

“Guess!”

Sarah said, “Some roadhouse, I bet.”

“That’s exactly right. Olga—her name is Olga, and she’s a Hungarian spy, really—drove me to the Four Flamingoes. We had saki —that’s rice wine—with some cousins of the Emperor of Japan who work around here as butlers—” he looked up somberly—“Pardon the slur, Westcott, on an honorable profession—”

Mrs. Bailey said, “How can you two—? When—” Sarah said, “Is she pretty? And what’s her name?”

“Dinah,” said Jimmie. “She’s black. An Abyssinian spy—”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” said his father.

“Anyhow,” his sister observed, “you feel pretty good.”

Jimmie suddenly realized that he did feel pretty well. He could not, for the life of him, figure out why. Certainly he was not taking any excessive pleasure out of Biff’s revenge on himself. Certainly he had not grown so cold toward his family in two days that he enjoyed seeing them suffer. But he felt an unmistakable rise of his spirits.

He let them rise while his parents and his sister sank into a fresh morass of silence. Presently his mother whispered, “Right now, he might be—!”

“Steady!” said her husband.

Jimmie said, half reassuringly, half in protest of the morbid anticipations of his mother, “Oh, he’ll be all right. You could see that, by his face. That intern said so too.

He’s the kind who know their onions.”

“I suppose you”—his mother said hotly—“are a bit of a surgeon yourself! Along with all your other intellectual accomplishments! I suppose you could tell, from a glance, that Biff was perfectly all right!”

“Some,” Jimmie said quietly. “I’ve seen a lot of people hurt, you know.”

Nobody answered that. Sarah kept glancing at her brother with intentness. She was thinking. Her face slowly showed conclusion—illuminating conclusion; when it did, Jimmie said, “All right. What is it?”

“You think,” Sarah said, “that Biff brought on that accident on purpose, to skip being drafted! It amuses you—in a nice, fiendish way!”

Jimmie was startled. Her conclusion was accurate. Evidently, she had been wondering about his behavior at the hospital; and the selfsame theory had skipped through her own mind, and she had instantly fitted it upon him. The Baileys, he thought, were equipped with subtle minds—when they wanted to use them subtly. He wondered what he should say to Sarah—and he was staring at her lazily while he tried to make up his mind—when his father spoke for him.

“Sarah! I don’t want you to say anything like that again—ever! Jimmie was darned fine with Biff just now!”

Sarah said, “You’ve considered the possibility, too, Dad!”

“Sarah!!!” That was Mrs. Bailey.

Mr. Bailey, meanwhile, was facing his daughter and growing red. “What kind of a contemptible piece of perverted nonsense is this, daughter! Biff did no such thing.

Jimmie thought no such thing. No such foul idea ever touched my own mind! I’ve noticed several times recently that you have a taint of evil-thinking, though—like your mother’s mother. You watch that, Sarah!”

A fraction of Sarah’s black hair was immaculately made up in a flattened pompadour that stood out over her forehead like a segment of a fat, flat snake. The remainder billowed down her back in a Nubian cascade. When she swung her head about quickly, which she did often, her back hair flared like a dancer’s skirt, and her pompadour wobbled. It was alluring—under the proper hat. Au naturel, it was grotesque.

The rest of Sarah was handsome enough. An inexperienced young woman. A highly untamed young woman. That combination meant—she would get the experience, someday. Just as her mother had. And, like her mother, she would probably have an experience which was mostly confining and arbitrary, so her taming would consist of a shift of her libido to clubs, civic improvement, national affairs, and, no doubt, the rabid avoidance of international entanglements.

Jimmie smiled. “Withdraw the subject, Sarah. It’s out of bounds, anyhow. Biff’s hurt worse now than he’d ever have been in any training camp!”

That statement was not an argument. Nevertheless Mr. Bailey accepted it as conclusive. “Exactly!” he said, with a warm look at his son. It was the first warm look Jimmie had received from his father since the one that had been bent upon him at the station. Mr. Bailey was well disposed to people who helped him rationalize his way out of difficult situations.

The family drove down to the hospital promptly at nine. Jimmie walked. His insistence on walking was becoming a sort of insult to his family. But he went on insisting. “Only eight blocks or so,” he said. “I’ll make it—never fear.”

The family had gone in by the main entrance. But Jimmie, when he reached the hospital, went around to the emergency entrance, where the ambulances were unloaded.

He heard laughter down a corridor and he walked toward it. The intern who had been in the receiving room was kidding a nurse. On Jimmie’s appearance, the nurse smiled once, prettily, and hurried away.

“My name’s Bailey,” Jimmie said.

“Yes. I know. Mine’s Heiffler. Your brother’s fine.”

“I thought he would be. Were you there for the operation?”

Heiffler nodded. “I assisted the assistant. Cather’s good, you know. Damned good.

Too, good, for this burg. He likes it here. Why—I can’t imagine. I’m from Chicago.

Siddown.”

Jimmie sat. “Tell me the details.”

Heiffler reached for one of Jimmie’s cigarettes. “Compound fracture of both femurs. Set, now. Take traction. Three ribs busted. Both ankles more or less sprained.

Internal organs present and accounted for. No damage. Shaken up, bruised, contused, cut on knees. Shock—well, you can’t be sure. Some, anyway. Took ether perfectly. Asleep now. No lasting harm at all—to his body.” The intern’s brown eyes burned at Jimmie.

“Oh?”

“I rode the bus. Answered the call. Picked him off the street.”

“Was he conscious?”

“Semi.”

“Say anything?”

“He was laughing.”

“Laughing, eh.”

“Has your family talked to the cops?”

“No,” Jimmie said.

“I did. They left here a while ago. Kind of hard accident to explain. Clear road, good visibility, no traffic except your brother waiting on the stop street, and this dinge whizzing through on the boulevard.”

“Colored man, eh?”

“Yeah.”

“He hurt?”

“Killed. Deader’n hell. His car looked like an accordion.”

“Have his lights on?”

“You can’t ask him,” the intern answered petulantly. He regarded Jimmie a moment. “The sarge says the reflectors were warm, though. What he could find of ’em.”

He hesitated again. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? I noticed how you questioned him—”

Jimmie said, “Yeah.”

“Nice kids, this generation! Brave, dependable, responsible, calm, sane, intelligent—wonderful!”

“You belong to it. You ought to know.”

“I’m a poor kike who worked my way through medical school after working it through college! I like people—decent ones—and I like medicine! I don’t like people that murder other people just because somebody is going to take away their candy!”

Jimmie smiled a little. “Maybe I can chivvy that lad into the army, someday, yet.

Maybe—maybe— he’ll payoff.”

“He won’t get in the army!”

“He will if I make him,” Jimmie answered fiercely.

“No. There’ll be a report of all this. You know. Nothing that your family, or the draft board, will ever see. Something only the army will see. A couple of army doctors, anyhow. They’re trying hard to weed out the screwballs, this time, before they demand any hard work from ’em. Your brother’ll be sent to camp, maybe, by the local board. He’ll come back—without knowing why.”

Jimmie thought for a while. He smiled again. “That might do him a lot of good.”

“I doubt it. It might. You’re just back from London, I hear.”

“Yesterday.”

“Can they stand another blitz—all winter—if they get it?”

“I hope so.”

“I don’t give a damn what you hope. What do you think?”

“I hope so. Y ou ought to know something about people’s ability to take it where they live.”

Heiffler chuckled. “You’re a pretty sound egg, Bailey—considering your brother!”

“He could have been sound.”

“Mmm. Environment—”

“That colored man—have a family?”

“Five kids. A wife. She came here looking for him, about eight. The police don’t hurry to notify those people.”

“I’d like her name and address.”

The intern wrote it down, after searching in a file. “How much steam has Hitler got left?”

Jimmie shrugged. “Does it matter?”

There was a pause. “I see what you mean.”

“Still, it would be worth a lot to American character, I think, if every city and town in the country was bombed once. Just once. Be a big rebirth of fundamental qualities. Cheap—at the price. As I heard a woman say last night, ‘We kill more people with cars than the British lost to bombs—and we don’t get upset!’ It’s a happy thought, Heiffler—especially on this occasion. Good night.”

CHAPTER VII

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.”

CHAPTER VIII

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.”

CHAPTER IX

BIFF LOOKED Up from his book, when the doorstop squeaked on the polished linoleum floor. “Hi, Jimmie! Haven’t seen you in a dog’s age. Sit.”

It was Wednesday—and eight o’clock in the evening. The hospital was on the way to Dan and Adele’s house. Jimmie had decided to go there. He had an hour to kill between the end of dinner at home and the fateful stroke of nine. His visits to Biff had been perfunctory. He felt indifferent to his brother. His understanding of Biff’s psychology—deeply hidden from Biff himself—brought to Jimmie a sense of repugnance whenever he thought of the big youngster with the broken legs. Now, he pulled up an easy chair with a white slip-cover, glanced at the vases of flowers, the fruit, the pictures of pretty girls, and peered at Biff with a formal cheerfulness. “How you doing?”

“Okay. Swell. Healing like nobody they ever had here! Be staggering around on crutches in a while. I may even get to the football game a week from Saturday—in a wheelchair. Boy!”

Jimmie nodded comprehension of the mood. “I went—last week.”

“Yeah. Dad said so. How do the doggone old Bearcats look?”

“Pretty good.” Jimmie laughed. “You know, for the first quarter, I hardly recognized the old game. Looked more like basketball. And the subs kept running out like waves of infantry. But I caught on. That Ward—and Ellis—and Becker—they’re dynamite!”

Biff assented. “I’ll say. I ought to know. I was in there with all of ’em—this time last year.”

For fifteen minutes they held a lively discussion of football. When the topic lagged they reached one of the silences which so envelop a visitor and a hospital patient.

The discrepancy between the life of the one busy in the world, and the other lying continuously on his back, abruptly becomes apparent; both persons rack their brains for a rejuvenating subject; the painfulness of the moment rises to a locked, near-violence. On this occasion Jimmie sat with a sense of increasing embarrassment and frustration; it was Biff, oddly enough, who found a way to reopen the impasse—a perfectly conventional way—the weather.

“What sort of a night is it, old man?”

“Oh, nice. Moon up and almost full. Crisp. On the Hallowe’en side. Shadows sharp, and the air feels good to breathe.”

Biff listened solemnly to that. “You kind of like the weather, don’t you, Jimmie?”

“Yeah. Guess so.”

“I remember—from before. Six years ago. It used to make you moody as hell.”

“Did it?” Jimmie smiled.

“Yeah. I could never figure it out. Not moody like other people. Not because it interfered with your plans. Sometimes—on a bright, sunny, warm fall day—you’d be as sunk and as snappy as a dying turtle. And sometimes—on rainy days—you’d be full of hell and bejee. I used to try to figure it out, but I never could.”

Biff’s tone—its intimacy, its amiability, and especially its quality of sentimental reflection—was surprising to Jimmie. It was almost poetical. Something new, or hitherto unseen in Biff. “I guess I was just being adolescent—and perverse.”

“Maybe. Dad sure enjoyed going up to State with you.”

“Did he? We rode all the way up and he never said a word, and we both watched the game every minute and he was silent again, driving back.”

“He told me you hollered your head off and nearly knocked a man down—pushing on him—when they held the Bearcats in the second quarter. Said you were just like the old Jimmie.”

“Said that, eh? Funny! I had the idea, all the time, he’d rather have gone without me.”

“Hell, no! He was practically misty—talking about how you yelled.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Jimmie said.

“People are funny,” Biff suggested.

“Mighty funny. Well, son, I gotta go. Date.”

“Come back again—in a month or so.”

Jimmie smiled apologetically at the sarcasm. “I will. Tomorrow, maybe.”

“What’s happened to Sarah these days?”

“You tell me. I dunno.”

“She came in here with a lot of bounce the other day. Brought me some new pajamas. Shocking pink. Helleroos. Acted like she used to before—”

“Before what?”

“Oh, you weren’t here. And the family thought it’d be best not to tell you. She had a terrible case on a clarinet player. Guy in Sox Sykes’ band. Me—I thought he was oke.

College lad from the East. Good family. But bughouse on playing in a band and having a band of his own.”

“Anything wrong with that?”

Biff shrugged. “Ask Mom. She knows two thousand things wrong.” He opened his mouth to add more and closed it with decision.

Jimmie rose, uncomfortably. “Well, son, gotta go—”

“Yeah. Come back.” Biff seemed to be searching his mind for something that would hold his elder brother. “You do a lot of thinking, when you have this kind of time to lie around in. You know what was the trouble with me?”

Jimmie leaned on the rolling bed table. “No. What was?”

“Well, I didn’t like being forced. I’d have gone on my own hook, if I’d have thought there was a real need.”

“Hunh? Oh. The army. The draft.”

“Yeah. A guy hates to be hauled anywhere by the ears.”

“Sure.”

“Jimmie. Do you really think there really is a need?”

“Yeah.”

Biff’s eagerness diminished. “Well, I wish I did. I’d enlist, maybe, if I did. I mean—I would.”

The younger man was staring at his bedclothes. The older was looking into blank space, painfully. Biff meant what he was saying. When he recovered he might try to enlist. And if he did, sooner or later, his secret record would overtake him—and he’d be sent home. Psychotic. Then what would Biff do? What would he do if the best impulse he’d ever had was—tossed in his face? People said, “The Baileys are all big—and quick-tempered—but they’re good citizens.”

Maybe.

Jimmie spoke nonchalantly. “Well, you can decide that later. I—”

“Yeah. You gotta go. Say! How’s your cheek? Heal okay?”

“Cheek?”

“Where I socked you?” Biff’s solicitude was genuine this time, and not fatuous as it had been when he’d lain on the receiving-room table—many nights ago.

Jimmie chuckled. “I’d forgotten. Sure, it healed. Why, you conceited damn’ rat, I’ve had flies bite me worse!”

“Yeah. Well—so long, fellow.”

Jimmie went to the door. It was he who had the wish, then, to linger on, to probe more deeply into this unfurling aspect of his kid brother’s personality. “Well—want anything? Books? What you reading?”

Biff picked up the volume and showed the dust jacket. It was Shirer’s Berlin Diary. “ Hell of a thing,” he said. “Who do those Nazis think they are anyhow! You suppose this bird Shirer tells the truth?”

“Happen to know he does.”

“How do you know?”

Jimmie was more moved, more astonished and upset, than he wanted Biff to see.

He edged toward the door. “Oh, I know, Biff, because—well, when I step out of the house on a night like this—now, and next year, and for years to come—I get a sinking sensation in my guts. For a minute I won’t know why. It’ll just be there—cold and hard. I’ll look up and down the street to see what’s wrong, Biff, and then I’ll know. The moonlight.”

“Moonlight?”

“Yeah. My guts will be saying, ‘See it? See the moon! Bright! Good visibility! They’ll be over soon, now.’ The sirens’ll start. The motors will begin to throb like your own pulse. And then—” He whistled. “Wham! Whoom! All around! Stuff like that. That’s why I know Shirer’s not lying. ’Night, keed.”

The music teacher lived near the river. Jimmie walked slowly, humming to himself. He still had time to kill. Once he turned and started back to the hospital. He decided his errand would keep till morning. His feet clicked on the cold pavement. His shadow rippled lithely on lawns and hedges. The eight-thirty ship out of Muskogewan left the airport with far-off thunder and passed overhead at a few hundred feet, portlights bright, wings tipped in red and green, exhausts pale lavender. Jimmie stood stark still to look at it, with goose pimples washing up and down his back. He went on, humming songs that came over the radio which Sarah and his parents seemed to play incessantly. They were all sad songs—about refugees, and the last time somebody saw Paris, and what somebody’s sister would disremember.

Depressing songs. Popular songs. A nice, incisive index, Jimmie thought, of the defeatist ebb of spirit in a country that thought of itself as the Colossus of the West. Sick Colossus!

The river flashed inkily through the naked trees. Cars streamed over the Maple Street bridge, starting and stopping-a dancing river of taillights, a pale avalanche of dimmers. Dan and Adele lived in a white clapboard house with a white picket fence and wrist-thick vines winding up over the roof of the porch. The curtains were drawn in the front rooms—yellow blinds down across lace. Jimmie poked the bell. Somebody was playing the piano with a rippling dissonance, and so many handfuls of notes they seemed to be showering from the keys at a humanly impossible rate. The music stopped and the door opened.

“Hello, Jimmie.”

“Hello, Audrey.”

“Come in.”

He came in. There was no change in the huskiness of her voice—or its mood. He had expected that they would pick up the threads of their first, and only, afternoon together, through studied speeches, conventions, an exaggerated ritual of re-meeting. But that was not going to be so. It was as if he had interrupted a song by lifting the arm of a phonograph, and left it there for a long while, and then set it back at the same place in order to hear the rest of it. Audrey walked into the living room ahead of him and turned around. She stood quietly. Lamplight fell on her. She wore a gray silk dress that went round her in three climbing spirals and had turquoise trimming.