Overhead, the slight sounds coming down to us through the ceiling had dwindled and at last stopped altogether; he had settled himself in his room.
My father rose to his feet. “Shall we go up now?” he said.
I saw Eileen looking at me, looking at my apparel, and suddenly she said to me, “Not that way.”
She beckoned me inside after her, into her diminutive bedroom, and gently eased the fur scarf from my shoulders and dropped it onto the bed. Then she detached a diamond clip my father had given me, from the neck of my dress, and put it into my hand, and I in turn opened my handbag and dropped it in there, out of sight. I saw her hands make a hesitant half start toward my hat, so I removed that of my own accord and placed it on the bed.
She opened a cupboard door and took down a drab coat of her own, and offered it to me. “Put this on instead. He—he’ll be more at ease with you.” She handed me a shapeless, worn beret. “And this.” Again she gestured helplessly. “And—and—” I drew a tissue from my bag and passed it across my lips and paled them.
We went back to the front room again, and my father glanced at me with raised brows. I heard him murmur something half inaudibly that sounded like “class consciousness” with a question mark after it.
We opened the door and the three of us went out to the stairs, one after the other, she in the lead.
Going up he turned his head and said to me surreptitiously out of the corner of his mouth, “There’s a contradiction in this somewhere. He’s all-seeing, but we can fool him by putting on a different pair of overcoats.”
We came to his door, on the floor above. It was quiet behind it: you would not have thought anyone was in there. When you looked close, though, at the bottom seam, there was a hairline of livid yellow lurking back of it.
We had stopped, stood huddled there in a small group now. Eileen was suffocating with fright. I felt a certain breathless tension that was akin to fear. I couldn’t tell what my father felt. He stood there staring intently at the door, as though trying to read something on it or by it, in itself.
I touched her, for encouragement, and her hand went up in answer as though I had pulled a guide string controlling a puppet.
She knocked, and a man’s voice said on the inside, “Come in.”
It was deep and slow. It suggested a huge, heavily bearded, patriarchal man.
And then she had swung the door back and we saw him.
He was thin and scrawny, almost to the point of emaciation. His cheeks were gaunt, his neck was like a gnarled stem supporting his head, his bared arms were bony and whipcorded by their own leanness.
I looked at his face. It was commonplace, flat with lack of any strong characteristic, whether for good or ill. His eyes were blue, and dull. There was no drama in them, no piercing quality whatever. They expressed mildness, that was their main attribute. Over them were sandy brows, incapable of etching any very great expression upon his face, perhaps because of their coloring. They might frown, but it would not be a very dark frown. They could not express derision or disdain. They could crook querulously, perhaps, that was the most. Bland eyes, and meek brows.
His hair was a reddish gold, and very fine, and growing thin. The scalp was showing through at the crown of his head, with only a light glint still masking it. Only at the sides was there enough of it for its protective coloring still to be emphasized in full tones.
His mouth and chin were good, they were the best part of his face. They were not weak or slack. They were not strong in a brutal, overbearing sense of aggressive determination, but rather, taut and stubborn, wiry, as if resistant under some inner compulsion fortified by knowledge of self-righteousness.
He sat in a soiled shirt, with patches of damp at the arm-holes, and his braces over his shoulders. He had taken his shoes off, and his white, blue-veined feet were thrust into shapeless carpet slippers. He sat at a table, under the light, with the parts of a pipe strewn on a newspaper spread before him. He was cleaning the inner stem with a piece of rag, and from time to time I saw him wipe it on the thigh of his trouser.
And thus, for the first time, we saw him.
It was like a curtain rising upon a stage, after a great fanfare and flourish and expectant tempering of lights, to reveal— nothing; a barren scene, an overlooked stage carpenter tinkering with a nail or piece of wood.
The drama had exploded into vacuity after its long buildup.
He had looked up at us for a moment. Now he was looking down at his pipe once more.
Eileen faltered, “Jerry, I—I wanted you to meet two friends of mine.”
He didn’t answer; the pipe stem had his attention.
“This is Mr. Reid, and this is his daughter, Miss Reid.”
He looked up at her, rather than at us.
“Are these the people you used to work for?”
She completed the introduction, almost in desperation. “This is Mr. Tompkins, an old friend of ours.”
Somebody had to say something. I did, at last. “May we sit down?”
He took his time. He looked up first, then down at his task again. “Help yourselves,” he said grudgingly.
Eileen said, “I—I think I hear my mother calling me. I’d better see what she wants. I—I’ll be right back.” And fled from the room.
We were left alone with him. I opened my mouth to speak. I caught my father’s eye. I checked myself. He wanted Tompkins to be compelled to speak first. We were in his room, after all. He wanted to gain that gossamer psychological advantage, for what it was worth.
There was silence for long minutes, while Tompkins put the pipe together again. Then when he did speak, it was with almost shattering abruptness, though without any heightening of his voice.
“Have you your fill of looking at me?”
I took a quickly concealed breath. “I didn’t mean to stare.”
“Have you come in friendliness, or have you come out of unhealthy curiosity? If I had a withered arm, or a clubfoot, would you stare?”
“I apologize if we seemed to stare,” my father said with manly dignity.
“We’ve come here to thank you—” I murmured tactfully.
He continued addressing my father. “You’ve come here to laugh at me. You’ve come here to show me up, to teach your daughter a lesson. So that she’ll stop thinking on it.”
“I can assure you that my father has no such—” I began plaintively.
“He hasn’t said a word to you, maybe. But it’s in his mind.” My father colored with a sudden violence. There was the answer there.
He went ahead looking stonily at my father. “You think you’ll put me to a little test. Well, I refuse your test. I’ll match no wits with you. I’m not on trial.”
“No one said you were,” my father murmured deprecatingly.
“They sent an agent to me once. He said he’d heard about me from someone. He was all excited. He offered me money, a fat living, if I’d go on the stage. Just sit down on a chair three times a day in front of an audience and tell people what they had in their pockets. He wanted to test me too, like you do now, and I let him. I wanted to be rid of him, and it was the quickest way. He held up a cigarette case in front of me and asked me how many cigarettes were in it. I could have told him there were none, that he used it to carry around aspirin tablets, but I told him there were three. Then he opened it and showed me there were aspirin tablets. He asked me what the inscription on the inside of the lid of his pocket watch said. I could have told him there was no inscription, only a horseshoe traced with diamond chips, with the end one on the left missing. I told him it said, ‘To So-and-so, from his loving wife,’ and used the name he’d already given me, which wasn’t his own rightful one, incidentally. He opened it and showed me there was no inscription at all, only a horseshoe traced with diamond chips and with the end one on the left missing.
“He asked me who the letter was from, in the envelope he carried in his inside coat pocket, and showed me the edge of it, with the red stamp and
the cancellation mark. I could have told him there was no letter in the envelope at all, he was using it to hold betting slips on a horse race. I told him the letter was from a woman. He took out the envelope and showed me, and there was no letter in it at all, he was using the discarded envelope to hold betting slips on a horse race. And even the address on the outside, he pointed out, originally had been written in a man’s hand.
“He muttered something about getting even with someone, and he went out curling his lip at me, and that was the way I wanted it.”
We didn’t say anything, either one of us.
Then suddenly he brought his fist down on the table in unmistakable rage, and the area of his mouth paled and tautened with it.
“But you’re a cleverer man than he was by far!” he shouted bitterly. “And you’ve turned the thing around on me so that now you’ve just got me to tell you out of my own mouth the very thing I didn’t want to tell you!”
I looked at my father quickly, in innocent surprise, and I saw the tiny quotation marks of a smirk at each corner of his mouth. And there was the answer there.
“I didn’t put the words into your mouth,” he said gently.
“Well, make the most of it. Go back now and tell all your friends, so that they’ll come over here in droves and torment me. I’ve been tormented before.” His stress and emotion seemed genuine. He was trying to light his pipe, and his hand shook so with the match that he barely could succeed.
“Go now, if you please,” he said thickly. “You’ve seen your freak. You’ve had your curiosity satisfied. There’s nothing to keep you.”
My father stood up abruptly, as though the barbed insult had caught him off his guard, had jabbed him instinctively to his feet before he could command himself. But then he moved quietly aside, and stood for a moment as if in deep thought beside a rickety chest of drawers, with his back to our host, and I saw him idly fingering a tobacco jar and a number of other articles, as if contemplating what to say next.
He turned to him at last. “I’m sorry if we’ve trodden on your toes,” he said mildly. “We didn’t come here to test you nor to tease you. We came here to show you our appreciation, to offer our thanks.”
“You’re not beholden to me,” Tompkins said sullenly. “I’ve done nothing.” He smoked his pipe and kept his eyes surlily fixed along its hypothetical trajectory, away from the two of us.
“We feel we are,” my father said. “And as for telling our friends, I can assure you, if that’s your wish, we won’t say a word about this to anybody. I know I can speak for my daughter as well as myself, in that respect.”
He came over close to him and offered him his hand.
“If there’s anything I can do for you, if I can be of help in any way—”
“There’s nothing,” Tompkins said stolidly. “There’s nothing I want from anybody. There’s nothing I ask of anybody, only to be left alone.”
I wondered if he was going to take the offered hand. He did finally, but in a rather grudging, graceless way, and was quick to release it again.
It occurred to me for an instant, as I watched, that he must be innately small in spirit, petty in spirit, no matter what powers he had or had not; it showed itself in this trifling incident. Better not to have taken that hand at all, than to have taken it in such a miserly way. Just a farm boy, a lifelong misfit, embittered by the burden of something he wasn’t equipped to cope with.
I saw him look at my father’s hand for a minute, as he released it, and I recalled what he’d once told Eileen’s mother, as a boy, and that she’d repeated to us downstairs just now: “Every time you think of anything, there’s a picture comes before you of what you’re thinking about.”
“We have nothing in common, you and I,” he said caustically. “I didn’t ask you to come here in the first place. But now that you have, let well enough alone, make that the last of it. You’ll only be getting me in a lot of trouble some day, if you come here any more. Go back now. Go back to your own kind of life, and leave me to mine. Go back to your fine house, and your dinner guests with diamond watches at their knees, and your broker, and your buying of shares. And try not to run down any little girls getting there.”
“Come on, Jean,” my father said briefly, and held the door back for me.
I saw him turn and look in at Tompkins before closing it. I couldn’t see what was in the look, for his face was from me, but I could tell by the stiff way in which his head was held that it conveyed unspoken rebuke for his gratuitous discourtesy.
I had one last glimpse of the man we had come to see, centered in a narrowing panel as the door swung around. Sitting there behind the table, pipe held to mouth, head sloped downward, mild blue eyes fixed upon us from under those sandy brows. Drab, he seemed, in the tawny electric light, inconsequential, commonplace. There was no grandeur anywhere about him, outwardly nor within. Just a lump of figure in a tawdry room. And I almost wondered what we had been doing there.
Then the door came around, and he was gone, and my father was ushering me down the stairs.
We didn’t speak. We passed the McGuires’ door by with common consent, and went on down to the street, and got into the car.
“I’ll take the wheel,” he murmured. “You must be tired.”
It was the first thing we had said since we had come out of there.
The air felt good against my face, and I lit a cigarette, and that felt good too.
I knew we’d have to speak of it sooner or later, and I thought, We may as well begin here, before too much of the impression is erased. So I began.
“You don’t believe?”
“That was a pretty good act. A perfect act.” I thought he said it a little uneasily. I wasn’t sure.
I thought of the plane. Of the telegram. I wanted so hard not to believe, myself. I wanted him to help me not believe. I was fiercely glad he didn’t believe. I only wished that he didn’t believe more tenaciously. I wanted to stay out in the sun with him. The sun of skepticism. My marrow was still chilled from the gloom.
“It set our intelligence high,” he went on. “And it shot up at it. No superstitious little Irish housemaid now.”
“In what way? The whole burden of his contention seemed to be to deny—”
“Exactly. But the denial was the affirmation. Don’t you see how he worked it? A trick within a trick within a trick. Like those labels they used to have on cans of baking powder. A circle, with a picture of another can within it. And on that, a circle with picture of another can within it. And on that, a circle with a picture of another can within it. Until it becomes too small for the eye to follow. He said I was clever, and turned the thing inside out, so that he told me out of his own mouth the very thing he didn’t want to. But maybe he was cleverer still than I, and within the inside-out, turned it outside-in again, so that what seemed to be the thing he didn’t want to tell me, was after all the thing he wanted to tell me most.”
“You can’t follow it. The thing becomes a maze.”
“You tire, and drop off, and he has remained safely one convolution ahead of you.”
“But then what has he got to gain, by letting us seem to have convinced ourselves against his own opposition?”
“What has anyone got to gain in this world? What is gain? What is the meaning of the word itself?”
“Money? But then you asked him if there was anything you could do for him.”
“I expected him to refuse or ignore that. I knew he would before I’d ever set eyes on him.”
“How?”
“When she arrayed you in her threadbare coat, before she took us up there to see him. I knew then. The technique became typically that of the holy man to whom emoluments are anathema—”
I glanced down at myself in sudden discovery. “I’m still wearing it. I left my own things back there!”
He slowed the car a little, questioningly.
“Not tonight,” I said. “I couldn’t.”
“Meaning you’ll have to
go back again some other time for them. Though he ordered us not to come near him again. More of that inverted technique. Perhaps that was the whole idea in getting you to change in the first place.”
“But that’s insane, to hold up every little thing and look on the reverse side!” I protested, shielding my eyes. “How could they know ahead of time that I’d forget?”
“You did, didn’t you?” was all he answered.
I dropped my hand again, limply.
“To get back to what I was saying just then,” he went on. “I set a trap for him. He doesn’t want to be helped. He doesn’t want anything from us. Did you see that tobacco jar, standing there on a chest by the wall?”
“I think I noticed one.”
“I left five hundred dollars in cash under there.”
I turned and looked at him. “And if he tacitly accepts it—?”
He shrugged slightly. “You asked me before what he hoped to gain by letting us, shall I say, convince ourselves of his powers.”
“But if he refuses it, that will make you more willing to believe—”
He shook his head. “I don’t believe, either way,” he said flatly. “He can see pictures in his mind, by thinking of a thing. But he couldn’t see that five hundred dollars under that tobacco jar, two or three yards away from him.”
“Perhaps because he didn’t happen to be thinking of the tobacco jar, while we were in the room with him.”
He gave a sarcastic snicker.
He isn’t detached about it, I said to myself. He must be fighting off belief hard. He’s emotionally involved. Or is he doing it just for me? Am I the one he wants to convince against believing, and not himself?
“Aren’t you dealing them to him from a cold deck, though, in doing that?” I remarked after a moment. “Five hundred dollars isn’t carfare. I saw a newspaper there in the room with him, with the help wanted columns folded outward.”
“I saw that too,” he said gruffly. “And perhaps it was left just that way, intended for us to see.”
Every last thing had two sides to it. And there was never any hard and fast label to say “This is the right side” and “This is the wrong.” I sighed a little, and mourned for the old two-dimensional world before this.
Night Has a Thousand Eyes Page 11