They both saw it at once, staring out at them from a beautiful subdued in velvet display window: a print of Grover Cleveland—a beautiful, vaguely yellowed, microscopically perfect one. It was quite large, evidently quite old. With one accord, silent, Matty and Grover went into the shop, where the clerk, in his own good time, greeted them.
He was tired without being worn. “Yes, sir, it is an 1872 print. Yes, it is by—” Matty and Grover fell silent in true awe at the name of the engraver. “No, madam, there are only three copies exactly like this. One is in the capitol, the other at the Metropolitan. Truly a rare piece. The price? One thousand dollars, sir.”
They nodded and thanked him and went outside to look again. Was that a half smile on the noble, sensitive face? Matty and Grover looked at each other. He knew she wanted it, and she knew he wanted it, and each made a firm and silent resolution. Next Monday was Grover Cleveland’s birthday, and Grover MacDonald’s, and Matty and Grover’s anniversary.
The next day, Wednesday, Grover came home from work ten minutes later than usual, with a small flat package. While Matty was in the kitchen, Grover went into the living room, took down Uncle Howard’s shaggy portrait from the place of honor over the mantel, and instead hung a tiny engraving of Grover Cleveland. It was much smaller than the one they had seen in the window, but it was every bit as precise. The aristocratic face looked out from a small oval in white cardboard, about an inch and a half high, an inch and a quarter wide. A tiny, perfect little thing … Grover MacDonald had a quiet but powerful dramatic sense.
“Oh!” cried Matty when she saw it later. “It’s lovely, but it’s so little.” It was, too, in that great expanse of creamy wall.
“It’ll do,” said Grover gravely, “until we can get a better one.” And he smiled.
All too slowly the great day came. Grover couldn’t wait to get home; Matty couldn’t wait until he did. She was standing by the door when he came in. He kissed her, and she took his arm and half dragged him into the living room. There it was, over the mantel—the print from the shop on the avenue.
They stood speechless, staring at it; Matty in the same delighted amazement she had felt when she hung it there, amazement that it was so perfectly fitted to the room; Grover in amazement even greater.
“Oh, Matty … Matty it’s— I can’t tell you!” After another moment, “Darling, what did you do with the little one?”
She sniffed. “After seeing the big one hanging there I knew there was no place in this house for the other. I threw it in the furnace.”
“You” Grover sat down heavily and gazed at the exquisite print. Should he tell her? Should he tell her that he had determined to buy the big print—that he had drawn a thousand dollars out of the bank, never suspecting that she would draw out her own money for this? And should he tell her that, because of his hours, he couldn’t get to the shop, and so had put the—the small print up until Tuesday? No, he couldn’t tell her. He had wanted to pay a thousand for this print; well, he had. The one she’d thrown away—the little one—was a folded piece of paper with Grover Cleveland’s head showing through the oval hole … Grover Cleveland’s head, engraved on a thousand dollar bill!
The Ultimate Egoist
SO I WAS holding forth as usual, finding highly audible reasons for my opinion of myself. I could do that with Judith. She was in love with me, and women in love are funny that way. You can tell them anything about yourself, and as long as it’s a buildup they’ll believe it. If they can’t they’ll try.
We were walking down to the lake for a swim. What got me started in this vein—should I say “vain”?—was the fact that Judith looked so wonderful. She was a brunette who was a redhead when she was close by, which she usually was, and turned blonde when the sun hit her. Lovely. Her transparent skin seemed proof that her flesh was rose-ivory all the way through, and she had long green eyes. She moved like a hawk tilting against the wind and she loved me. Wonderful. Since I was thinking about wonderful things I just naturally began talking about myself, and Judith held my hand and skipped along beside me and agreed with everything I said, which was as it should be.
“Let me put it this way,” I declaimed. “The world and the universe are strictly as I see them. I see no fallacy in the supposition that if I disbelieve in any given object, theory, or principle, it does not exist.”
“You’ve never seen Siam, darling,” said Judith. “Does that mean that Siam does not exist?” She was not disagreeing with me, but she knew how to keep me talking. That was all right because we enjoyed hearing me talk.
“Oh, Siam can exist if it wants,” I said generously, “providing I have no reason to doubt its existence.”
“Ah,” she said. She hadn’t exactly heard all this before because I expressed myself with a high degree of originality. There were so many ins and outs to my faceted personality that I found my ego quite inexhaustible. Judith giggled.
“Suppose you really and truly doubted Siam, Woodie.”
“That would be tough on the Siamese.”
She laughed outright, and I joined her, because if I had not she would have been laughing at me, and that would have been unthinkable.
“Darling,” she said, pulling my head down so she could bite my ear, “you’re marvelous. Do you mean to tell me in so many words that you created all this—these old trees, that sprouted so many years before you were born; the stars and that nice, warm old sun, and the flow of sap, and life itself—wasn’t that quite a job, honey?”
I looked at her blankly. “Not at all. Truly, darling. I have never seen nor heard nor read anything to disprove my conviction that this universe is my product, and mine alone. Look—I exist. I can take that as a basic fact. I observe that I have a particular form; hence there must be a physical environment to suit it.”
“How about the possibility that your exquisite form might be the result of your physical environment?”
“Don’t interrupt,” I said patiently. “Don’t be sarcastic and above all don’t be heretical. Now.
“Since my existence requires a certain set of circumstances, those circumstances must necessarily exist to care for me. The fact that part of these circumstances are century-old trees and ageless heavenly bodies is a matter of little importance except insofar as it is a credit to the powers of my fertile imagination.”
“Whew!” She let go of my hand. “You’re strong.”
“Thank you, darling. Do you see my point?”
“In theory, O best beloved. My, my, how you do go on. But—what’s to prevent my thinking that the universe is a figment of my imagination?”
“Nothing. It would be a bit fantastic, of course, in the face of my certain knowledge that it’s my creation.”
“I’ll be damned,” she said. She could say things like that—and worse—because she looked so young and sweet that most people simply wouldn’t believe it was she who spoke. “I’ll be very be-damned,” she said, and added under her breath a sentence containing the word “insufferable.” I imagine she was talking about the weather.
We walked along, and she plucked a leaf of sassafras and chewed on it. The leaf was the kind of green against her lips that showed how red her lips were against her cheeks. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” she said after a bit, “if all that nonsense you drool were true, and things just stopped being when you doubted them?”
“Please!” I said sharply, changing my bathing trunks from my right hand to my left so I could raise a more admonitory forefinger at her. “Nonsense? Drool? Explain yourself, Judith!”
“Oh, stop it!” she shouted, quite taking me aback. “I love you, Woodie,” she went on more quietly, “but I think you’re a conceited ass. Also, you talk too much. Let’s sing songs or something.”
“I do not feel like singing songs or something,” I said coldly, “while you are so hysterically unfair. You can’t disprove a thing I’ve said.”
“And you can’t prove it. Please. Woodie—I don’t want to fight. This is a summer vacation a
nd we’re going swimming today and I love you and I agree with everything you say. I think you’re marvelous. Now for Heaven’s sake will you talk about something else for a change?”
“I can’t prove it, hm-m-m?” I said darkly.
She clapped two slim hands to her head and said in a monotone, “The moon is made of green cheese. It isn’t but if it did happen to be and you found out, it certainly would be. I am going out of my mind. I am going to gnash my teeth and paw the air and froth at the mouth and you make me SICK!”
“Your reasoning is typically feminine,” I told her, “spectacular but highly inaccurate. My point is this.” I ignored her moans. “Since I am the creator of all things”—I made an inclusive gesture—“I can also be their destroyer. A case in point—we’ll take that noble old spruce over there. I don’t believe in it. It does not exist. It is but another figment of my imagination, one without a rational explanation. I do not see it any more because it is not there. It could not be there: it’s a physical and psychic impossibility. It—” At last I yielded to her persistent yanking on my elbow.
“Woodie! Oh— Woodie … it’s gone! Th-that tree; it’s … oh, Woodie! I’m scared! What happened?”
She pointed wordlessly at the new clearing in the copse.
“I dunno. I—” I wet my lips and tried again. “My God,” I said quietly. “Oh, my God.” I was shaking and stone-cold, there in the sun, and my throat was tight. Judith had bruised my arm with her nails; I felt it sharply when she let me go and stood back from me. It wasn’t the disappearance of a thousand board feet of good spruce that bothered me particularly. After all, it wasn’t my tree. But—oh, my God!
I looked at Judith and was suddenly conscious that she was about to run away from me. I put out my arms, and she ran into them instead. She cried then. We both knew then who—what—I was; neither of us could admit it. But anyway, she cried … you know, I was quite a fellow. The miracle of growth was my invention, and the air was warm and the sky blue for me, and the moon was silver and the sun golden, all for me alone. The earth would quake beneath my feet if I so chose, and a supernova was but a flash in my brainpan. And yet when Judith cried in my arms I just did not know what to do. We sat together on a rock beside the road and she cried because she was scared and I patted her shoulder and felt perfectly rotten. I was scared too.
What was real? I dropped my fingers to the stone and stroked its mossy coolth. Something that was all legs scuttled out from under my fingertips. I glanced down at it. It was red-brown and shiny and rather horrible. What peculiar ideas I did have at times!
The stone, for instance. It didn’t have to be there. It wasn’t necessary to me, save as a minor element in a pretty bit of scenery that I appreciated. I might just as well not—
“Uff,” said Judith, and bit her lip as she plumped down on the bare earth where that stone had been.
“Judith,” I said weakly as I climbed to my feet and helped her up. “That was a—a trick.”
“I didn’t like it,” she said furiously. “Ooooh.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said plaintively. “I just … It just …”
She rubbed her lip. “I know, I know. Let’s see you put it back, smart man. Go ahead! Don’t look so helpless! Go on!”
I tried. I tried with everything I had, and you know, I couldn’t put it back? Truly. It wasn’t there, that’s all. You’ve got to have some belief in a thing before you can so much as imagine it; you have to allow for its possibility. That stone was gone, and gone for good. It was terrifying. It was something more inevitable, more completely final, than death.
Afterward we walked along together. Judith clung to my hand all the way down to the lake. She was considerably shaken. Oddly, I wasn’t. This thing was like a birthmark with me. I hadn’t quite realized I was this way until that day; and then I just had the feeling, “I’ll be damned, it’s true after all.”
It was true, and as time went on I realized more and more what was going to happen because of it. I was so certain that I couldn’t even worry about it. For your own peace of mind, I’d try not to get into the same frame of mind, if I were you. I know what I am talking about, because I am you, being as to how you are all figments of my imagination …
So there we were down at the lake, and as long as I was with Judith I was all right. She kept me from thinking about anything but her own magnificent self, and that was what was required to maintain the status quo. Anything I doubted had no chance to exist. I couldn’t doubt Judith. Not then I couldn’t. Ah, what a beauty she was! … too bad about Judith.
I stood there watching her dive. She was a wonder. Only girl I ever knew personally who could do a two-and-a-half off a twelve-foot board. Maybe she could fly like that because she was half-angel. I noticed Monte Carleau looking at her too, through his expensive polarized sunglasses. I went over to him and took the glasses away from him.
I didn’t like Monte. I guess I envied him that long brown chassis of his, and his blue-black hair. I can admit things like that now.
“Hey!” he barked, grabbing for the specs. “What’s the huge idea?”
I put on the glasses and watched Judith, who was poised for a cutaway, up there on the twelve-foot, and I talked to Monte over my shoulder. “I don’t like you,” I told him. “I don’t like your staring at Judith. And I don’t like to see you wearing glasses on account of I feel like poking you every time I see you and I’d hate to hit a guy with glasses on.”
Judith did her cutaway and it was perfect. Then Monte grabbed me and twisted me around. He was thirty pounds heavier than I and one of those guys who takes credit to himself for being what he was born. “Gettin’ big, hey?” he barked. “Little ol’ Woodie, a tough guy after all these years! What’s that twist see in you anyway? She sure shows bad taste.”
“—and I don’t like a guy that fights with his mouth,” I said as if I hadn’t been interrupted. I could just see Monte Carleau lying flat on his back with a busted jaw.
As a matter of fact I did see Monte Carleau lying flat on his back with a busted jaw. I shrugged and walked over to where Judith was climbing out of the water.
“What happened to the glamour-boy?” she asked, seeing the crowd gathering around the writhing figure on the bank.
“Oh—he just overlooked a possibility.”
“Woodie—you didn’t hit him?”
“Nup.”
“Another—trick, Woodie?”
I didn’t answer. She watched me for a moment, standing near, smelling of wet wool and wonder. She looked down at her nails, drew a deep breath and shrugged. She saw the glasses and reached for them.
She put them on and looked out across the lake, and gasped at the way the polarized glass killed the glare. “That is something. How does it work?” she asked in the tone that women in love use, and which signifies, “You know this as well as everything else, you great, big, clever brute, you.”
I said vaguely, “Oh, it’s something about making the lightwaves all vibrate in one plane. I dunno.”
“It hardly seems possible.”
“No,” I said. I’m pretty simple about things like that, anyway. As far as I was concerned it wasn’t possible …
“Ouch!” she said. “Ouch. I was looking at that patch on the lake where all that sun glare is, and the glasses killed it, and all of a sudden it was there, just as if I hadn’t had the glasses on at all … Woodie! Did you—?” She snatched off the glasses and stared at me with her eyes very wide.
I didn’t say anything. Just tried to think about something else.
“You’ve ruined a good pair of sunglasses,” she said.
“I’ve ruined an industry, I’m afraid.”
She twitched the glasses into the lake and crinkled up the smoothness over her eyes. “Woodie—this was funny for a while. I—think … oh darling, I’m so scared.”
I spread my hands. “I can’t—help it, honey. Honestly. It’s just that—uh—since I figured something out up the trail there, any
thing I don’t believe just … isn’t. Just can’t be!”
She looked at me while she shook her head, so that her long green eyes slid back and forth. “I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all, Woodie.”
“Can’t be helped.”
“Let’s go back,” she said suddenly, and went to the dressing cabins.
I didn’t worry much about Judith for a while after that. There were too many other things to worry about.
I was looking at some pictures in a magazine one day, and ran across the picture of an albino catfish which had a profile like a shrimp and a complexion like a four-color cosmetic ad. Weirdest thing I ever saw, and I couldn’t be expected to believe it. A week later I read in the paper that the genus Clariidae had disappeared from the earth, simultaneously and with no apparent explanation—not only from its natural habitat, but from aquaria all over the world. I got quite a shock from that. You can imagine.
Good thing I’ve got a matter-of-fact sort of mind. Suppose I had been highly imaginative, now, like those characters who write for magazines. I might have believed in any old thing! “Ghosties and ghoulies and lang-leggedy beasties, and things that go boomp i’ th’ nicht—” as they put it in Scotland. People who believe in those things do see them, come to think of it. Maybe everybody’s like me, only they don’t realize it. I hoped, at the time, that nobody ever would. Another like me could certainly complicate things. I’ve made enough of a hash of it. A nice, churned-up, illimitably negative hash.
It didn’t matter what the circumstances were in those next days, I drove a hard bargain with the fates. I could accept things—anything—unless something gave me cause to doubt. For quite a while I didn’t realize where this was leading me; then I saw that every recognized fact must wind up in incredulity. Take a fact; reason from it; sooner or later you’ll run up against something a little hard to take. My particular egocentricity led me to disbelieve, completely, anything I could not fully understand. For a lightweight like me that made my skepticism pretty inclusive after a while!
The Ultimate Egoist Page 31