"Freddie here used to be a Professor of Philosophy back in Germany," Ringo said. "He was told to come West for his health." Ringo looked at Freddie in a kind of amazement. "Can you picture that?"
Freddie—who had come West to die—said merely, "Philology. Switzerland," and sipped his soda water.
"You should have him tell you about how we're all Supermen," Ringo said.
Freddie stiffened. "You are not Supermen," he said.
"You're the Superman, then," Ringo said, swaying. The drunken raillery smoothed the sad lines of his eyes.
"I am the Superman's prophet," Freddie said with careful dignity. "And the Superman will be among your children, I think—he will come from America."
"I suppose I'd better get busy and have some children, then," Ringo said.
Josie watched this byplay with interest. Her hair was raven black, Freddie saw, and worn long, streaming down her shoulders. Her nose was proudly arched. Her eyes were large and brown and heavy-lidded—the heavy lids gave her a sultry look. She leaned toward Freddie.
"Tell me some philology," she said.
He looked up at her. "You are the first American I have met who knows the word."
"I know a lot of words." With a laugh she pressed his wrist—it was all Freddie could do not to jump a foot at the unexpected touch. Instead he looked at her sternly.
"Do you know the Latin word bonus?" he demanded.
She shook her head. "It doesn't mean something extra?"
"In English, yes. In Latin, bonus means 'good.' Good as opposed to bad. But my question—the important question to a philologist—" He gave a nervous shrug of his shoulders. "The question is what the Romans meant by 'good,' you see? Because bonus is derived from duonus, or duen-lum, and from duen-lum is also derived duellum, thence bellum. Which means war."
Josie followed this with interest. "So war was good, to a Roman?"
Freddie shook his head. "Not quite. It was the warlike man, the bringer of strife, that was good, as we see also from bellus, which is clearly derived from bellum and means handsome—another way of saying good. You understand?"
He could see thoughts working their way across her face. She was drunk, of course, and that slowed things down. "So the Romans—the Roman warriors—thought of themselves as good? By definition, good?"
Freddie nodded. "All the aristocrats did—all aristocrats, all conquerors. The aristocratic political party in ancient Rome called themselves the boni—the good. They assumed their own values were universal virtues, that all goodness was embedded in themselves—and that the values which were not theirs were debased. Look at the words they use to describe the opposite of their bonus—plebeian, common, base. Even in English—'debased' means made common." He warmed to the subject, English words spilling out past his thick German tongue. "And in Greece the rulers of Megara used esthlos to describe themselves—'the true,' the real, as opposed to the ordinary, which for them did not have a real existence." He laughed. "To believe that you are the only real thing. That is an ego speaking! That is a ruler—very much like the Brahmins, who believe their egos are immortal but that all other reality is illusion . . . "
He paused, words frozen in his mouth, as he saw the identical, quizzical expression in the faces of both Ringo and Josie. They must think I'm crazy, he thought. He took a sip of soda water to relieve his nervousness. "Well," he said. "That is some philological thought for you."
"Don't stop," said Josie. "This is the most interesting thing I've heard all night."
Freddie only shook his head.
And suddenly there was gunfire, Freddie's nerves leaping with each thunderclap as he ducked beneath the level of the bar, his hand reaching for the pistol which, of course, he had left in his little room.
Ceiling lathes came spilling down, and there was a burst of coarse laughter. Freddie saw Curly Bill Brocius standing amid a grey cloud of gunsmoke. Unlike Freddie, Brocius had disregarded the town ordnance forbidding firearms in saloons or other public places, and in an excess of bonhomie had fanned his modified revolver at the ceiling.
Freddie slowly rose to his feet. His heart lurched in his chest, and a kind of sickness rose in his throat. He had to hold onto the bar for support.
Josie sat perfectly erect on the mahogany surface, face flushed, eyes wide and glittering, lips parted in frozen surprise. Then she shook her head and slipped to the floor amid a silken waterfall of skirts. She looked up at Freddie, then gave a sudden gay laugh. "These men of strife, these boni," she said, "are getting a little too good for my taste. Will you take me home, sir?"
"I—" Freddie felt heat rise beneath his collar. Gunsmoke stung his nostrils. "But Mr. Behan—?"
She cast a look over her shoulder at the new sheriff. "He won't want to leave his friends," she said. "And besides, I'd prefer an escort who's sober."
Freddie looked at Ringo for help, but Ringo was too drunk to walk ten feet without falling, and Freddie knew his abstemious habits had him trapped.
"Yes, miss," he said. "We shall walk, then."
He led Josie from the roistering crowd and walked with her down dusty Allen Street. Her arm in his felt very strange, like a half-forgotten memory. He wondered how long it had been since he had a woman on his arm—seven or eight years, probably, and the woman his sister.
In the darkness he sensed her looking up at him. "What's your last name, Freddie?" she asked.
"Nietzsche."
"Gesundheit!" she cried.
Freddie smiled in silence. She was not the first American to have made that joke.
"Don't you drink, Freddie?" Josie asked. "Is it against your principles?"
"It makes me ill," Freddie said. "I have to watch my diet, also."
"Johnny said you came West for your health."
It was phrased like a statement, but Freddie knew it was a question. He did not mind the intrusion: he had no secrets. "I volunteered for the war," he said, and at her look, clarified, "the war with France. I caught diphtheria and some kind of dysentery—typhus or cholera. I did not make a good recovery, and I could not work." He did not mention the other problems, the nervous complaints, the sudden attacks of migraine, the cold, sick dread of dying as his father had died, mad and screaming.
"We turn here," Josie said. They turned left on Fifth Street. On the far side of the street was the Oriental Saloon, where Wyatt Earp earned his living dealing faro. Freddie glanced at the windows, saw Earp himself bathed in yellow light, standing, smoking a cigar and engaged in conversation with Holliday. To judge by his look, the topic was a grim one.
"Look!" Freddie said in sudden scorn. "In that black coat of his, Earp looks like the Angel of Death come to claim his consumptive friend."
The light of the saloon gleamed on Josie's smile. "Wyatt Earp's a handsome man, don't you think?"
"I think he is too gloomy."
She turned to him. "You're the gloomy one."
He nodded as they paced along. "Yes," he admitted. "That is just."
"You are a sneeze," she said. "He is a belch."
Freddie smiled to himself as they crossed Fremont Street. "I will tell him this, when I see him next."
"Tell me about the Superman."
Freddie shook his head. "Not now."
"But you will tell me some other time?"
"If you wish." Politely, doubting he would speak a word to her after this night.
"Here's our house." It was a small place that she shared with Behan, frame, unpainted, like the rest of the town thrown up overnight.
"I will bid you good-night, then," he said formally.
She turned to face him, lifted her face toward his. "You can come in, if you like," she said. "Johnny won't be back for hours."
He looked into her eyes and saw Troy there, on fire in the night.
"Good-night, miss," he said, and touching his hat he turned away.
She is a Jewess! Freddie wrote in his journals. Run away from her family of good German bourgeois Jews—no doubt of the most insuffera
ble type—to become, here in Tombstone, a goddess among the barbarians.
Or so Brocius tells us. He says her name is Josephine Marcus, sometimes called Sadie.
I believe I understand this Helen now. She has sprung from the strangest people in all history, they who have endured a thousand persecutions, and so become wise-cunning. The world has tried with great energy to make the Jews base, by confining them to occupations that the world despises, and by depriving them of any hope of honor. Yet they themselves have never ceased to believe in their own high calling; and they are honored by the dignity with which they face their tormentors.
And how should we think them base? From the Jews sprang the most powerful book in history, the most effective moral law, Spinoza the most sublime philosopher, and Christ the last Christian. When Europe was sunk in barbarism, it was the Jewish philosophers who preserved for us the genius of the ancients.
Yet all people must have their self-respect, and self-respect demands that one repay both good and bad. Without the ability to occasionally revenge themselves upon their despisers, they could scarcely have held up their heads. The usury of which the Jews are accused is the least of it; it was the subtle, twisted, deceitful Jewish revolution in morals that truly destroyed the ancients—that took the natural, healthy joy of freedom, life, and power, that twisted and inverted that joy, that planted this fatal sickness among their enemies. Thus was the Jewish vengeance upon Rome.
And this is the tradition that our Helen has inherited. Her very existence here is a vengeance upon all that have tormented her people from the beginning of time. She is beautiful, she is gay . . . and what does she care if Troy burns? Or Rome? Or Tombstone?
When next Freddie encountered Josie, he was vomiting in the dust of Toughnut Street.
He had felt the migraine coming on earlier, but he was playing against a table of drunken stockmen who were celebrating the sale of their beeves and who were losing their money almost as fast as they could shove it across the table. Freddie was determined to fight on as long as the cards fell his way.
By the time he left the Occidental he was nearly blind with pain. The clink of the winnings in his pocket sounded in his ears like bronze bells. The Arizona sun flamed on his skull. He staggered two blocks—people turned their eyes from him, as if he were drunk—and then collapsed as the cramp seized his stomach. People hurried away from him as he emptied the contents of his stomach into the dust. The spasms wracked him long after he had nothing left to vomit.
Freddie heard footsteps, then felt the firm touch of a hand on his arm. "Freddie? Shall I get a doctor?"
Humiliation burned in his face. He had no wish that his helplessness should even be acknowledged—he could face those people who hurried away, there could be a pretense that they had seen nothing, but he couldn't bear that another person should see him in his weakness.
"It is normal," he gasped. "Migraine. I have medicine in my room."
"Can you get up? I'll help you."
He wiped his face with his handkerchief, and then her hand steadied him as he groped his way to his feet. His spectacles were hanging from one ear, and he adjusted them. It didn't help—his vision had narrowed to the point where it seemed he was looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope. He shuffled down Toughnut toward his room—he rented the back room of a house belonging to a mining engineer and his family, and paid the wife extra for meals that would not torment his digestion. He groped for the door, pushed it open, and stumbled toward the bed. He swiped off the pyramid of books that lay on the blanket and threw himself onto the mattress. A whirlwind spun through his head.
"Thank you," he muttered. "Please go now."
"Where is your medicine?"
He gestured vaguely to the wooden box by his wash basin. "There. Just bring me the box."
He heard her boot-heels booming like pistol-shots on the wooden floor, and fought down another attack of nausea. He heard her open the velvet-padded box and scrutinize the contents. "Chloral hydrate!" she said. "Veronal! Do you take this all the time?"
"Only when I am ill," he said. "Please—bring it."
She gasped in surprise as he drank the chloral right from the bottle, knowing from experience the amount necessary to cause unconsciousness. "Thank you," he said. "I will be all right now. You can go."
"Let me help you with your boots."
Freddie gave a weary laugh. "Oh yes, by all means. I should not die with my boots on."
The drug was already shimmering through his veins. Josie drew off his boots. His head was ringing like a great bell. Then the sound of the bell grew less and less, as if the clapper was being progressively swathed in wool, until it thudded no louder than a heartbeat.
Freddie woke after dark to discover that Josie had not left. He wiped away the gum that glued his eyelids shut and saw her curled in his only chair with her skirts tucked under her, reading by the light of his lamp.
"My God," he said. "What hour is it?"
She brushed away an insect that circled the lamp. "I don't know," she said. "Past midnight, anyway."
"What are you doing here? Shouldn't you be with Sheriff Behan?"
"He doesn't own me." Spoken tartly enough, though Freddie suspected that Behan might disagree.
"And besides," Josie said, "I wanted to make sure you didn't die of that medicine of yours."
Freddie raised a hand to his forehead. The migraine was gone, but the drug still enfolded his nerves in its smothering arms. He felt stupid, and stupidly ridiculous. "Well, I did not die," he said. "And I thank you—I will walk you home if you like."
She glanced at the book in her hands. "I would like to finish the chapter."
He could not see the title clearly in the dim light. "What are you reading?"
"The Adventures of Tom Sawyer."
Freddie gave a little laugh. "I borrowed that book from John Ringo. I think Twain is your finest American writer."
"Ringo reads?" Josie looked surprised. "I thought you were the only person in the whole Territory who ever cracked a book, Herr Professor."
"You would be surprised—there are many educated men here. John Holliday is of course a college graduate. John Ringo is a true autodidact—born poor but completely self-educated, a lover of books."
"And a lover of other men's cattle."
Freddie smiled. "That is a small flaw in this country, miss. His virtues surely outweigh it."
The drug had left his mouth dry. He rose from the bed and poured a glass of water from his pitcher. There was a strange singing in his head, the beginnings of the wild euphoria that often took him after a migraine. Usually he would write in his journals for hours during these fits, write until his hand was clawed with cramp.
He drank another glass of water and turned to Josie. "May I take you home?"
She regarded him, oval face gold in the glow of the lamp. "Johnny won't be home for hours yet," she said. "Are you often ill?"
"That depends on what you mean by 'often.'" He shuffled in his stocking feet to his bed—it was the only other place to sit. He saw his winnings gleaming on the blanket—little rivers of silver had spilled from his pockets. He bent to pick them up, stack them on his little shelf.
"How often is often?" Patiently.
"Once or twice a month. It used to be worse, much worse."
"Before you came West."
"Yes. Before I—before I 'lit out for the Territory,' as Mr. Mark Twain would say. And I was very ill the first years in America."
"Were you different then?" she asked. "Johnny tells me you have this wild reputation—but here you've never been in trouble, and—" Looking at the room stacked high with books and papers. "—you live like a monk."
"When I came to America, I was in very bad health," he said. "I thought I would die." He turned to Josie. "I believed that I would die at the age of thirty-five."
She looked at him curiously. "Why that number?"
"My father died at that age. They called it 'softening of the brain.'
He died mad." He turned, sat on the bed, touched his temples with his fingers. "Sometimes I could feel the madness there, pressing upon my mind. Waiting for the right moment to strike. I thought that anything was better than dying as my father had died." He laughed as memories swam through the euphoria that was flooding his brain. "So I lived a mad life!" he said. "A wild life, in hopes that it would kill me before the madness did! And then one day, I awoke—" He looked up at Josie, his face a mirror of the remembered surprise. "And I realized that I was no longer thirty-five, and that I was still alive."
"That must have been a kind of liberation."
"Oh yes! But in any case that life was at an end. The Texas Rangers came to drive the wild men from the state, and—to my great shame—we allowed ourselves to be driven. And now we are here—" He looked at her. "Wiser, I hope."
"You write to a lady," she said.
Freddie looked at her in surprise. "I beg your pardon?" he said.
"I'm sorry. You were working on a letter—I saw it when I sat down. Perhaps I shouldn't have looked, but—"
Mirth burst from Freddie. "My sister!" he laughed. "My sister Elisabeth!"
She seemed a little surprised. "You addressed her in such passionate terms—I thought she was perhaps—" She hesitated.
"A lover? No. I will rewrite the letter later, perhaps, to make it less strident." He laughed again. "I thought Elisabeth might understand my ideas, but she is too limited, she has not risen above the patronizing attitudes of that little small town where we grew up—" Anger began to build in his heart, rising to a red, scalding fury. "She rewrote my work. I sent her some of my notebooks to publish, and she changed my words, she added anti-Semitic nonsense to the manuscript. She has fallen under the influence of those who hate the Jews, and she is being courted by one, a professional anti-Semite named Förster, a man who distributes wretched tracts at meetings." He waved a fist in the air. "She said she was making my thoughts clearer." He realized his voice has risen to a shout, and he tried to calm himself, suddenly falling into a mumble. "As if she herself has ever had any clear thoughts!" he said. "God help me if she remains my only conduit to the publishers."
The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories Page 10